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This course covers the entire photographic workflow in Apple Aperture, from import to enhancement to output. Author Derrick Story covers organizing image collections with star ratings, labels, and Smart Albums, and using the image editing tools to adjust exposure, retouch flaws, and correct color balance issues. And one of the most noteworthy features in Aperture is explored in detail: its ability to store video clips alongside the stills from digital cameras, then combine them to create stunning multimedia slideshows.
This course was updated on 10/03/12. Updated movies cover the features added through version 3.3, including Retina display support, iCloud photo sharing, streamlined integration with iPhoto, and much more.
I am going to pick up where I left off with this image. In the previous movie, we adjusted the exposure in the Exposure brick, and now we are going to do a little enhancement in the Enhance brick. Now these changes that we are going to make in this brick using these four sliders: Contrast, Definition, Saturation, and Vibrancy - those will be global changes. In other words, they will affect the whole image at once. Now Enhance, however, is the first brick going from top to bottom in the Adjustments pane here that has also has brushing tools available, and in the upcoming movies, I am going to show you how to use those brushing tools, and that will allow us to work locally also.
But for now we are going to stick with global adjustments in this brick. We'll start with Contrast. The interesting thing about Contrast is that it pushes our histogram out to the ends. So, it increases both highlights, the intensity of highlights and shadows at the same time. Now generally speaking, I don't use the Contrast slider because I prefer to work on those areas individually in the Exposure brick. But contrast is handy sometimes if you have a very dull image and you just want to bump it up quickly, it comes in handy.
In this case, we are going to leave our exposure where it is, and we are going to move on to Definition. Definition is interesting in the sense that what it does is it bumps up contrast and increases sharpness in the midtones. It's almost like it adds clarity to the shot, like you are wiping away a dirty window or something like that. The thing to keep in mind with Definition, however, is that a little goes a long ways. If you go too far over, the image will start to fall apart. So, keep your Definition pointer down here at the lower end of the scale.
I am going to move on to Saturation. Saturation is what I consider more of an old-school adjustment. It's very heavy-handed. And what I mean by that, when I increase Saturation, it increases the intensity of colors across the board, and it doesn't protect the skin tones at all. So, yes, I have increased the saturation here in the background and the sweater, but look what happens to her skin tones. It's just terrible. They fall apart. So, I tend not use Saturation very much at all, and I especially don't use it if I have people in the shot.
Vibrancy, on the other hand, is much more intelligent. It will increase the saturation in colors that aren't as saturated, such as her sweater and the background, but look; her skin tones stay protected. They are not destructed by using the slider. So, if you want to bump up the color in the shot, especially in things like clothing and background and you want to protect those skin tones, then I would use Vibrancy. In fact, I find myself using Vibrancy more often then not, and I rarely use Saturation these days.
So, these four sliders, and especially these three, are very handy for adding further enhancement to your image after you've made the basic White Balance and Exposure adjustments. You can check your work by unchecking the box, and you can see how it looked when we started working on this in the Enhance brick, and we did just little bit of enhancement. And sometimes a little bit is exactly what a picture needs.
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Influenced by Bauhaus principles of "form follows function" design, German company Holtkoetter is dedicated to providing highly sophisticated yet streamlined lighting with both strong engineering and a smooth, modern aesthetic. Holtkoetter lighting fixtures have been assembled for U.S. market in St. Paul, Minnesota since 1983.
The Voila Wall Sconce No. 8502-8503 is available with the following:
- Handmade glass shade
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- UL Listed
- Made in Germany; assembled in the USA
Shade Color: Black, White
Size: Small, Large
- Large option utilizes two 60 Watt 120 Volt Type G9 Halogen lamps (included).
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- Large Option Fixture: Height 4.75", Width 13.5", Depth 6"
Ratings: Based on 1 reviews, this product is rated 5.0 out of 5.
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AEM Performance Cold Air Intake System Honda Civic 1.6L L4 1992
Model: 21-5009C
Sale: $213.99
Product Info
Go To Product
So you;ve swapped K20 into your EG Civic, now what do you do about getting an air intake that fits? Do you order one for the chassis, or for the engine? Will a chassis system fit, or will it sacrifice performance, or both? Relax, AEM has done the R&D for you!
AEM Hybrid intakes are direct-fit intakes for Hondas and Acuras with engine swaps, and eliminate the need to buy a system that doesn;t fit and have to cut it up, which may void the warranty. Hybrid intakes install using standard tools with no additional modifications. AEM designed their hybrid intakes for high-output engines with internal engine modifications like cams and porting, and manufacture them using three-inch mandrel bent aircraft aluminum for maximum flow.
Because the Hybrid Intakes are designed for cars with engine swaps, they are intended for off-road use only and are not 50-state legal.
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text: On Mon, Oct 03, 2005 at 07:56:18AM +0200, Marc Espie wrote: > On Sun, Oct 02, 2005 at 07:03:48PM -0700, Jacob Meuser wrote: > > but that's probably a dangerous patch. some qt applications do > > use ~/.qt for storing user configuration files. > Of course it's a dangerous patch! that's not what I meant. No, it would mean > really tweaking the code, so that the .qt creation doesn't happen unless > there's really some file you need to store there... which is a tad bit more > interesting. I tested the patch, and AFAICS, it has no ill effects. it just removes ~/.qt creation from the QSettings constructor. the directory will be created (and a config file written) in the destructor if any settings have changed. IMHO, this is correct behaviour: only make the directory if it needs to be written to, not just because something _might_ be done with the settings. > > might it not be better to just set $HOME to somewhere that is OK to > > write to? > > Well, to me, it's a bug in qt. I don't see how a toolkit has a business > mucking with prefs files if you just run uic3/moc3... uic is calling QSettings::writeEntry() (thus modifying the settings) when it creates .cpp files, but it doesn't call the function when creating .h files. but I cannot figure out where in uic writeEntry() is getting called. maybe this will give someone some clues though. -- <jakemsr_(_at_)_jakemsr_(_dot_)_com>


text: Healthy Recipes Orange-Date-Pumpkin Bread Recipe E-mail recipe Print recipe To save this recipe, register now! Quick Info: Servings Contains Nuts Contains Wheat/Gluten Vegetarian Most Popular Nutritional Info (Per serving): Calories: 129, Sodium: 87mg, Dietary Fiber: 2g, Total Fat: 4g, Carbs: 22g, Cholesterol: 0mg Carb Choices: 1.5 Recipe Source: More Diabetic Recipes Prep Time: 10 mins Cook Time: 1 h Total Time: 1 h 10 mins Ingredients cooking spray 2 cup(s) flour, all-purpose 1 1/3 cup(s) flour, whole-wheat 2 teaspoon baking powder 1 teaspoon nutmeg, ground 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon baking soda 1 cup(s) egg substitute 1 can(s) pumpkin 3/4 cup(s) sugar 1/2 cup(s) honey 1/3 cup(s) oil, cooking 1 teaspoon orange peel 1/3 cup(s) orange juice 1/2 cup(s) nuts, pecans 1/2 cup(s) dates, dried, snipped, or raisins Recipe Tip: Sugar Substitutes: Choose from Splenda Sugar Blend for Baking or Equal Sugar Lite. Follow the package directions to use the product amount equvalent 3/4 cup sugar. Make-Ahead Directions: Prepare as directed. Place bread in a freezer container or bag. Seal, label, and freeze for up to 3 months. To serve, thaw the wrapped bread at room temperature. Preparation 1. Preheat oven to 350°F. Coat the bottom and 1/2 inch up the sides of two 8x4x2-inch loaf pans with cooking spray; set aside 2. In a large bowl, stir together all-purpose flour, whole wheat flour, baking powder, nutmeg, salt, and baking soda; set aside. 3. In a medium bowl, beat eggs slightly; stir in pumpkin, sugar, honey, oil, orange peel, and orange juice. 4. Using a wooden spoon, stir pumpkin mixture into flour mixture just until combined. Stir in nuts and dates. Divide mixture between the prepared pans. 5. Bake about 50 minutes or until a wooden toothpick inserted near centers comes out clean. 6. Cool in pans on wire racks for 10 minutes. Remove from pans. Cool completely on wire racks. Makes 2 loaves (32 slices). E-mail recipe Print recipe To save this recipe, register now!


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Jersey Shore
How Does Deena Stay So Skinny? The Jersey Shore Star Reveals Her Tricks (VIDEO)
Jersey Shore's Deena Nicole may still be a "meatball" at heart, but on the outside she's svelte as can be. Celebuzz recently caught up with the newly-skinny guidette, and she dished about how she shed the pounds and her strategy for keeping them off during the holidays.
"I have to be honest, I indulged," Deena admitted when asked about holidays past. "And I still indulge. I just have to watch what I eat. I try not to eat after a certain time. I just try and keep it steady. That's all I can do."
As for how she lost the weight in the first place, Deena swears by the basics: Diet and exercise. "Most of it was dieting and just running, like, for 30 minutes a day."
For more from Deena, watch the whole video below.


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Pepero (빼빼로) is a cookie stick, dipped in compound chocolate, manufactured by Lotte Confectionery in South Korea since 1983.[1]
Pepero is involved in a controversy with the Japanese product Pocky.
As of 2014, it is sold in 9 different flavors:
- Regular or Chocolate
- Strawberry-flavored
- Almond Chocolate
- Peanut Chocolate
- Nude (chocolate in the center)(DISCONTINUED)
- Nude Lemon Cheese
- Business Nude
- White Cookie Chocolate
- Hami Melon
- Tiramisu Cheese
Pepero is similar to the Japanese snack Pocky which is manufactured by a Japanese confectionery company Glico since 1966.[2][3] When Pepero was introduced in 1983, Glico considered taking action against what it considered a copycat snack but found it would be difficult, because Pocky was not sold in Korea.[4] As such Pepero has been claimed to be a Korean version of Pocky,[5] Lotte denies that it was inspired by the product.[4]
In 2014, Glico sued Lotte which allegedly copied packaging box design of Glico's Baton d'or exclusive series of Pocky and Pretz for Lotte's new product Premier Pepero.[6]
Pepero Day[edit]
Pepero Day is an observance in South Korea similar to Valentine's Day, but held on November 11. The original purpose of the Pepero Day was to exchange peperos with each other in hopes of becoming taller and thinner.[7] The current purpose is to exchange peperos to show affection for friends and loved-ones.[4]
The exact origins of this day are unknown. [8] The origins are usually traced to a news story set in 1983. In the story, two female middle school students in the Yeongnam region exchanged peperos wishing that they would both become tall and thin.[7] There is some doubt about this story.[4] Some argue that the origin was due to the shape of 1's in the date (November 11 – 11/11) resembling peperos.[8] While some attribute the similarity of shapes as factors that attributed to the popularity but not its origin.[7][4]
The fad spread with the idea that, for maximum effectiveness for height and thinness, one must eat 11 packets of Pepero on November 11, 11:11am and 11.11pm at 11 seconds exactly. From 1997, Lotte started to use the aforementioned school story to successfully promote Pepero Day. The trend led to other companies creating similar-shaped snacks to participate on Pepero Day.[7] As of 2012, Lotte was making 50% of its annual sales on Pepero Day.[4] As of 2013, several department stores including Hyundai Department Store, Shinsegae, and Lotte Department Store were benefiting for people celebrating the day while stores such as E-mart and Homeplus were specially displaying and selling peperos on the day.[9]
Pepero Day has been criticized for being a business tool of certain companies and for having high calories which is contradictory to its original meaning. Alternatives include "Garaetteok Day", which promotes Farmer's Day through exchanges of garaetteok (sticks of white tteok).[7]
- ^ (Korean) Pepero Type
- ^ 製品の歴史 ポッキー編 [Product history - Pocky] (in Japanese). Ezaki Glico.
- ^ Park, Tae-Hee (November 7, 2013). "Glico finds partner for Korean market". Korea Joongang Daily (JoongAng Ilbo). Retrieved December 27, 2013.
- ^ a b c d e f Gale, Alastair (November 11, 2013). "On Pepero Day, a Japanese Rival Lurks". Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Retrieved November 11, 2013.
- ^ グリコの「本家」ポッキー、韓国上陸へ ロッテに対抗 [Glico's original, Pocky to land Korea competing against Lotte] (in Japanese). The Asahi Shimbun. May 15, 2013. Archived from the original on 17 May 2013.
- ^ "EZAKI GLICO : Glico sues S. Korea's Lotte over "copied" packaging design". 4-traders.com. 26 December 2014. Archived from the original on 26 December 2014.
- ^ a b c d e 빼빼로데이 [Pepero Day] (in Korean). Parkmungak. Retrieved November 11, 2013.
- ^ a b Imatome-Yun, Naomi. "November 11th is Pepero Day". About.com. Retrieved November 11, 2013.
- ^ "[SS현장] '빼빼로 데이' 일부 소비자 "과소비 조장"…롯데마트 "안 사면 그만"". Sportsseoul.com. November 11, 2013. Retrieved November 11, 2013.
External links[edit]
|Wikimedia Commons has media related to Pepero.
- Official Pepero Site (Korean)
- The Pepero Song+ flash
- Pepero Day sweet for food retailers (English)
- Sth Korea calendar laden with love (English)
- Big bucks in a youthful craze (English)
- Abundant `Special' Days Fatten Sales (English)


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Olivia Wilde recently stepped out of her comfort zone and revealed a very private detail about who gets to share her bed, admitting that her only boyfriend these days was her dog, Paco.
"Is it sad, that my dog is essentially the man in my life?" she told PEOPLE at the Los Angeles premiere of The Change-Up on Monday. "He's a great dog, but it's funny because ever since I mentioned that he was my boyfriend, he gets way more swag than I ever have. I mean, truckloads arrive at the house for him. When he hears a car pull up, he just waits, like he knows it's for him!"
Paco, a 9-year-old rescue, is by now so familiar with the swag routine that he's even showing some demanding tendencies. When packages show up for him, "he is basically like, 'You can just put that in my room,'" Wilde said.
It's a far cry from his former life as a starving stray. "I found him through Much Love Animal Rescue, and he had been found in the back of a U-Haul truck with his five other brothers and sisters, and they hadn't eaten for a week," Wilde said. "I'm just really lucky to have found him, because he's my absolute favorite, favorite dog in the world."
Olivia Wilde: My Dog Gets More Swag Than I Do
National Photo Group


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CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. – The Holy Cross women's swimming and diving team traveled to Boston College on Friday and Saturday to take part in the New England Catholic Invitational. The 400 freestyle relay team consisting of sophomore Mary Kate Schulte (Des Moines, Iowa) and seniors Katelyn Desrosiers (Gorham, Maine), Laura Webber (Hampden, Mass.) and Kristen Desrosiers (Gorham, Maine) led the Crusaders with a sixth place finish and time of 3:52.01.
Kristen Desrosiers added an eighth place finish in the 200 individual medley with a time of 2:18.13 while sophomore diver Alicia LiCalzi (New Canaan, Conn.) finished the three meter event in ninth place with a score of 144.40. In the 400 individual medley, Schulte finished in 10th place touching the wall at 4:58.85.
The women's swimming and diving team will return to action on Wednesday, Oct. 24, traveling to a dual meet at Siena at 7:00 p.m.


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This is a story about success and failure. It is a story about Iraq, and of something much bigger than Iraq. It is, perhaps, a small look into what makes victory, and defeat. It is a tale of infantrymen, of brave soldiers in dusty alleys a world away. It is a story of generals and strategies, too.
But to understand our newfound success there, to know a little of how we achieved it and most importantly, how to keep it, we need to move away from that Mesopotamian desert and those boots on the ground, and back to a different desert on the other side of the world a half century ago. For there, a vision was vouchsafed to a most unlikely warrior priest… the kind of insight that comes once or twice in all of human history.
There are some diverse threads to connect here. But if you have the patience to take a walk with me, you may perhaps see things in a way you have not seen them before.
About a hundred miles north of Las Vegas there is a clump of wild grass and cottonwood trees called "The Green Spot." Not much to look at from the ground, but from thirty thousand feet above the brown Nevada desert it stands out for a hundred miles.
In the mid to late fifties, a fighter pilot could earn himself a quick forty bucks and perhaps a nice steak dinner in Vegas – not to mention everlasting renown, which is to fighter pilots what oxygen is to us lesser beings – by meeting over the Green Spot at thirty thousand feet and taking position just 500 feet behind an arrogant and unpleasant man with precisely zero air-to-air victories to his credit. From that perfect kill position, you would yell "Fight's on!" and if that sitting duck in front of you was not on your tail with you in his gunsight in forty seconds flat then you would win the money, the dinner and best of all, the fame.
Tank commanders may be charging cavalrymen at heart; sub skippers may be deer hunters using patience and stealth. But fighter pilots are Musketeers. They are swordsmen whose survival depends on remaining on the offensive… that is to say, they are men who survive because they can (and have) initiated 16-to-1 fights because they possess the confidence – actually, the untrammeled ego – to know they will win.
To be challenged in such a manner is an irresistible red flag to men like this, and certainly no less of one because the challenger was a rude, loud, irreverent braggart who had never been victorious in actual air-to-air combat. And yet that forty dollars went uncollected, uncollected for many years against scores of the best fighter pilots in the world.
That is more than luck. That is more than skill. That is more than tactics. That level of supremacy is the result of the ability to see things in an entirely new way. It is the difference between escaping from a maze you are embedded in, versus finding the way out from one that you look down upon from above.
Having your ass handed to you in such a spectacular and repeated fashion causes some men to curse and mutter about 'one trick ponies' and so on. But for others, for those who are more invested in victory than in ego, it reveals a level of skill that instantly removes all swagger and competition and puts one in the place of a willing supplicant, eager for knowledge.
Taking a few moments to understand what this odd man learned about airplanes and aerial combat will pay rich dividends later. Because John Boyd – Pope John, The High Priest of the Fighter Mafia, the Mad Major, the Ghetto Colonel – Forty Second Boyd not only wrote the revolutionary tactics manuals that gave American pilots the keys to air-to-air victory… and with it the essential and undisputed control of the battlespace. Nor was his achievement limited to the design of the phenomenally successful F-15 and F-16 fighters. Nor was it merely the codifying of physics and thermodynamics to make a science out of an art form. That John Boyd saw all of these things for the first time would have made him a legend. But this was quite the lesser of his two great achievements. For Boyd not only saw how to perfect the sword. He saw too how to perfect the swordsman.
And for that, Forty Second Boyd may turn out to be one of the most important men of the Twenty-First Century. And he has lain at rest in Arlington National Cemetery since 1997.
To understand Boyd's first breakthrough (and how it impacts the much larger and more relevant second one that runs the battlefield of today), a very short history lesson is in order.
The first jet combat took place in the skies over Korea in the early 1950's. American pilots, flying the F-86 Sabre, are credited with at least a 10:1 kill ratio over the Soviet-designed MiG-15. It may have been as high as 14:1.
That is not a trivial success ratio, especially for two aircraft that appear virtually identical:
Now it didn't take much to convince Pentagon procurement officers to assume that a good part of this edge was due to the 'obvious' American advantage in aeronautics. So it came as quite a surprise – not to say an embarrassment and a hell of shock – when it became known that in many important aspects the MiG-15 was the superior airplane. Much lighter, and with greater thrust to boot, it could climb far faster than the Sabre and fly higher – high enough to avoid a fight altogether, if the pilot so chose. And at most airspeeds and altitudes, the MiG had the great single fighter advantage: it could out-turn the F-86.
Certainly, the Sabre was nothing like ten times better than the MiG. The difference had to be in the pilots, in the flying skill and tactical superiority of the Americans.
This certainly was the case. Most of them were combat-hardened, experienced fighter pilots recalled to service after cutting their teeth in the skies over Germany and the Pacific a mere five years before. There too, American pilots flying Navy F4F Wildcats were horribly outmatched by the Japanese A6M Zero – which, like the Mig-15 was a light, maneuverable Katana in the hands of an experienced pilot. (Indeed, in the early months of the Pacific War, the Wildcats were so badly outclassed that it was only the tactical brilliance of another American fighter pilot, John S. Thach, who kept us in the fight by implementing the famous "Thach Weave.")
But in the cold high air over Korea, the Americans had, in the F-86 Sabre, a weapon worthy of their skill.
This sadly did not last. For in the years following the Korean War, with the ascension of Curtis LeMay's Strategic Air Command and the "Bomber Generals" in control of the Air Force, American fighter planes flew straight in the face of all of the painful experience won in WWII and Korea. The Pentagon started to procure "fighters" that got ever heavier, more sluggish and more expensive. Believing them to be little better than missile launching platforms, by the time Vietnam rolled around they no longer even carried guns… dogfights being considered a thing of the past by Whiz-Kid non-pilots like Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
So by the mid sixties, the two primary American fighter-bombers were the F-105 Thunderchief and the F-4 Phantom II, aircraft whose performance is best summed up by the nicknames given them by their own pilots: The Lead Sled or the Thud for the F-105 and The Smoking Thunderhog for the F-4.
And so, with appalling air-to-air missile performance and no dogfighting training (or the guns to use in one), the American air-to-air kill ratio fell from 10:1 in Korea down to nearly 1:1 – parity! -- in Vietnam.
So much for the history.
Now: Imagine you are John Boyd, former Fighter Weapons School Instructor and now an Air Force desk jockey. You are watching good friends die in the skies over Southeast Asia because they are being sent into combat armed primarily with unreliable long-range missiles but under orders not to fire until they made visual contact! Visual contact with closure rates of 1,000 mph and more means you are in a close-range knife fight before you can see the red stars on the wings and tails. You lose a lot of sleep knowing good men are dying because of American tactical doctrine so convinced of its own technical superiority that it simply flat-out refused to see that our pilots were being shot down by light, agile, gunfighters which – despite the Pentagon line – are in just about every meaningful way superior to those of the USAF, USN and USMC.
Those old fighter jocks in nimble little rapiers like the Mustang, the Corsair and the Sabre are long gone. Now Bomber Generals are sending fighter pilots off to die in Lead Sleds with no guns, no training and useless missiles, and to Forty Second Boyd this looks perilously close to flat-out treason.
And so Boyd went back to college, and bootstrapped himself from Fighter Jock to Aeronautical Engineer to try and find a theory that would show exactly at which airspeeds and altitudes enemy planes were superior.
The result was a series of briefing slides that showed, on an aircraft-by-aircraft basis, where the Soviet fighters were superior (in red) and conversely, at which airspeeds and altitudes the American designs (in blue) had the advantage.
Practically every slide was almost pure red. It was only in very narrow speed ranges, at specific altitudes, that American fighters had the advantage.
Boyd called these Energy-Maneuverability graphs, and in the process of producing them, Boyd developed the first of his two Earth-shattering breakthroughs: E-M Theory.
Boyd realized – through years of intense and lonely study on his own time and often in direct contravention of orders – that the key to the Perfect Sword lay not in speed, or service ceiling, or rate of climb, or even turning ability. All of these were red herrings that had been chased for decades.
Boyd's first breakthrough was that the perfect fighter plane's key characteristic was agility.
Agility. The ability to change its energy state rapidly. To turn, or climb, or accelerate faster than its opponent. And most importantly, to keep up that high energy state in the grueling, high-G turns that rapidly bled out speed and options.
Let's say two aircraft are in a turning fight, each trying to get behind the other for a gun or missile shot. Due to many design differences between the two adversaries (but primarily due to wing loading) one aircraft may have its best rate of turn at 250 kts, while its opponent's best turn is at 400 kts. Boyd realized that the ideal fighter was one that could accelerate, climb or turn the quickest, to move the fight into the airspeed (and altitude) where it has the advantage.
Quickness in the roll was one element. Lots of thrust to get up to best speed and stay there in a high-drag turn was another. Low weight meant that it could accelerate and decelerate faster, and above all, because a banked aircraft is essentially 'climbing' into its turn, the perfect fighter needed a big wing with lots of reserve lift. This big wing area meant that it would own the turning fight in just about every regime.
Believe it or not, Boyd's Energy-Maneuverability Theory was the first to give aircraft designers a real victory target: an aircraft that would own the skies; the light, swift and deadly rapier that would be unbeatable in air-to-air combat. And remember: he who wins in air-to-air owns the skies. He who owns the skies owns the battlefield. Air Supremacy is the one great, single, essential requirement for victory on the modern battlefield. You can still lose if you have it, but you have no chance to win if you do not.
The Pentagon Brass – with precious few exceptions – fought him tooth and nail. The only reason Boyd was able to gain the credibility to force his ideas upon the next generation of fighters was because he was getting results. Boyd's E-M Theory showed American pilots how to move the fight into those narrow and rare regimens where E-M numbers showed an American advantage, and to avoid like the plague those vast red swatches where dogfights were likely to be fatal. And it gave him that above-the-maze perspective to produce a fighter design the likes of which the world had never seen before.
Boyd's E-M theory – this being the lesser of his two breakthrough ideas – would eventually lead, through many pitched bureaucratic battles, to the design of the F-15 Eagle – which, depending on your source, has exceeded the Vietnam era fighters 1:1 kill ratio somewhat spectacularly, it's current record being in the vicinity of 105 wins against zero air-to-air losses. Boyd demanded a big wing on the F-15, a wing big enough to provide the lift it needed to win in the turning fight at any airspeed or altitude. In this he succeeded rather more than he could have imagined. He gave the F-15 Eagle so much reserve lift that after a mid-air collision an Israeli pilot flew an Eagle home and landed it with one entire wing torn off!
But Boyd found even the F-15 compromised. His fondest achievement was the F-16 Falcon, a nimble little beauty bearing more than a passing resemblance to the P-51 Mustang, and like it, fast, agile and lethal. It had the additional advantage of being relatively cheap, which means you can buy a lot of them. The Soviets listened to Stalin when he said "quantity has a quality all its own."
Boyd listened too.
Pope John and his Fighter Mafia saw that the ultimate weapon was not a bludgeon or an iron mace, not the Lead Sled at all, but in fact just the opposite: light, fast, precise, agile and deadly.
Now you hold that thought! You hold that thought because Boyd held it for many, many years. He held it and worked it and then began to realize that what worked for fighter aircraft may work for entire armies as well.
And here is where things get really interesting, because out of Boyd's quest for the perfect Sword came his understanding of the perfect Swordsman.
Agility. Agility. The ability to inflict damage and get out of the way of the counterstroke. But the light, strong, sharp weapon is only as good as the arm that wields it. In more or less even airplanes, the USAF outscored the North Korean, Chinese and Russian pilots by at least ten to one. Why? What had they learned in those deadly laboratories over Germany and the Pacific? And could it be taught?
Now the fighter jock who had trained himself to become an engineer spent his entire pay – pay that did not go to his long-suffering family and instead earned him the title of The Ghetto Colonel – on books. And not technical books either, but history books, philosophy, tactics… he devoured entire disciplines with the same brutal efficiency that caused him to finish his meal before his companions had placed their napkins on their laps. This loud, self-aggrandizing man, lost in his own time and place, the man who chewed his fingers to pulps and wiped his nose on the blue sleeve of his Air Force tunic went on a journey as profound and transformational as any trek through the Himalayas.
He walked with the Spartan army at Thermopylae, and stood on a hilltop as Hannibal crushed the Romans at Cannae. Boyd rode with Grant down the Mississippi to capture Vicksburg and followed Guderian and Rommel in Panzer attacks across France and Africa, where he learned concepts like Fingerspitzengefuhl – "fingertip feel" – the subtle control of the point of the rapier. Boyd read Homer and Machiavelli, he read von Clausewitz and found to his amazement that he could see where he was right and where he was wrong. And most of all, he read – and understood on a level that surpasses mere mastery – the Chinese military genius Sun Tzu.
Boyd studied war because he was in the war business. Boyd studied war because he loved America and wanted to see her prevail on the battlefield. Boyd studied war in a way that surpassed in depth and breadth everything being learned or taught in every military academy in the world.
Here is what Boyd learned:
Let's start with what he knew best. Picture two pilots in identical airplanes: two physically identical swordsmen wielding physically identical swords.
Picture the Red Pilot closing head-to-head with the Blue Pilot, over the desert at 30,000 feet and each at 500 miles an hour. The aircraft blow past each other in a blur.
Fight's on!
Both pilots nearly snap their necks on the break, literally turning in their chairs under the G-load of the initial turn. Each must keep sight of the other. To lose visual on the opponent almost certainly is to lose your life, and this is the only life you've been issued. Each pilot observes the other. That's step one.
Now, Red breaks one way and Blue the other. Their relative positions allow some options and remove others. Each pilot must assess where he is, where the other man is, where he is heading and at what speed, and likewise where the other guy is heading and how fast. From this he builds a mental picture of the three-dimensional battle. Pilots call this Situational Awareness, or SA. SA is powerful Kung-Fu. Good SA will keep you alive. Bad SA is rapidly fatal. So each pilot must orient himself. That's step two.
Next, each pilot must make a near instantaneous decision as to what he will do next. Will their relative positions allow an offensive move, or is the situation so desperate that he is forced into the defensive? Each has observed, each has oriented…now each must decide what to do next. That's three.
Once that decision has been made, there is nothing left to do but carry out that decision. Each of the pilots must act. Action in this case may mean a climbing roll – the high-G yo-yo – to increase the separation for the shot. Perhaps the only answer is a Split-S out of the fight to recover lost airspeed, or a desperate Break in the opposite direction to avoid the gunsights.
Whatever the action is, whether thrust or parry, Boyd realized that it is only here, in the fourth step – Observe-Orient-Decide-Act – that physical combat occurs. Being "a good stick" will help you here, yes. But Boyd's breakthrough was to realize that there are three mental steps that precede the physical application of a warrior's skill, and that these mental steps are not as important as the physical talent. They are far, far more important.
Then Observe.
Then Observe…
It's a cycle. It's a loop. It's called by its inelegant acronym: The OODA loop.
Now here's what blew my mind, as I am sure it blew John Boyd's mind on a level I can not and will never fully comprehend:
The winner of these battles is not necessarily the fellow who makes the best decisions. More often than not, it's the guy who makes the fastest decisions.
Agility. Speed. Precision. Lethality. Fingerspitzengefuhl: fingertip control.
It seems counter-intuitive. So let's first go back to the Green Spot.
Red and Blue are closing at 1000 miles an hour. Fight's on!
Blue breaks left. Red does too. Both pilots observe, orient, decide, act. But Blue is faster. While Red is still orienting himself, building the situational awareness he needs to decide and plan his action, Blue has already chosen a maneuver and executed it. This renders Red's previous orientation useless: Blue is no longer where he was a moment before.
Red must re-orient so he can make a new decision. Blue sees the confusion and delay. He's already oriented. He decides and acts again. His advantage increases.
Now Red is confused and at 500kts he is flying pretty God-damned quickly into full-on fear. This confusion and fear cause him more hesitation. Out of rising panic he commits to an action that may have been appropriate two Blue cycles ago, but which is now – no other word for it – obsolete. Blue is now cycling so fast that he maneuvers for a position where any course of action Red may take will result in his fiery demise. He's below and behind him – out of sight – not anywhere near where Red expected him because he has been observing, orienting, deciding and acting at a much faster pace.
Should Blue make a mistake he will observe it before Red can, re-orient himself, make a decision to correct the mistake and commit to the new action all before Red is even aware that Blue has blundered. Red, on the other hand, may be making superior judgments… hell, Red may be making a string of perfect judgments, but that won't save him because his perfect moves are in response to a situation that no longer exists. He's doomed.
Blue is cycling faster, correcting any errors before they cost him anything, re-adjusting and re-calculating at a much higher tempo than Red. And every second he gets further ahead.
Boyd would say, "he's inside Red's decision loop."
Think about that for a second! Inside his decision loop. To Red, Blue appears psychic, magical, demonic: able to read his mind, anticipate his every move. Blue owns the initiative, and he will never give it back. The more this goes on the more rattled, confused and demoralized Red becomes. This slows his ability to orient, it clouds his decisions with fear, it paralyzes his actions with second-guessing and ultimately reduces Red from being a deadly man in a deadly machine to a floating tumbleweed with no SA: out of airspeed, out of altitude and out of ideas.
And out of the fight too, because that fight is over.
The OODA loop works. And not just if you happen to be a supersonic fighter pilot battling for your life. OODA works if you are a businessman who wants to corner the market from his competition. OODA works in the same way science works, because it is nothing more or less than a superior way of thinking about a problem.
Now let's get out of the air and back on the ground.
In the days leading up to the ground war in Operation Desert Storm, Gen. Schwarzkopf had planned his attack using conventional Army wisdom: a frontal attack against the enemy's strong point, where the traditional American strength of overwhelming firepower could be brought to bear.
Firepower. Got a nice ring to it! Certainly sounds more American than Fingerspitzengefuhl. You put our guys and their guys toe-to-toe and slug it out.
Boyd had been preaching to largely deaf ears all his professional life. It was a fight to get E-M Theory accepted because no general in the Pentagon wanted to face the fact that all of the expensive American aircraft up until that point were – as dogfighters, anyway – actually inferior to the widely disdained Soviet models. Boyd and his Acolytes (men like Thomas Christie, Ray Leopold, Chuck Spinney, James Burton and Pierre Sprey – brilliant patriots all) fought tooth and nail, for years, against almost unbelievable bureaucratic resistance to bring war-winning aircraft like the F-15, F-16 and Sprey's A-10 Warthog to the battlefield.
But this was a fight over weapons. The real war was over doctrine. Top Brass had – with good reason – been raised on the idea of overwhelming firepower as a way to win war, and to be fair, the original plan would have resulted in victory.
It just would have been a much bloodier one.
But Boyd and his reformers had an ace in their pocket in the person of then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, who read and believed in Boyd's ideas of maneuver rather than attrition. How would OODA perform, not in air-to-air combat but rather in a clash of entire armies on the battlefield?
Conventional wisdom called for massive force applied to key areas of the enemy front line. But Boyd had read of Patton and Guderian, of armored thrusts that moved so quickly that counterattacks converged on a vacuum. Boyd saw how speed and agility might sow so much confusion in the enemy – who had, after all, a very sclerotic command structure – that they would be swinging at shadows. Boyd summoned Sun Tzu and his idea of water flowing downhill, forces taking the paths of least resistance, hitting the enemy not where he was strongest, or even where he was weakest, but rather hitting him where he least expected it.
Surprise would substitute for firepower, and speed and the enemy's confusion would be the defense. They would get inside Saddam's decision loop. Each cycle would find him more out of touch, more reacting to obsolete intelligence, more demoralized, more desperate.
And so a new plan was devised. Using the Marines as a feint, Schwarzkopf swung his entire army off the map, to reappear like a mirage in the enemy's rear, a resurrected Stonewall Jackson: unexpected, brutal, deadly… and then gone.
They would have bagged the entire lot, too: the whole Republican Guard, likely, if they had not stopped to protect their flanks, Old Army style, against an enemy that no more expected them to be in that desert as to be on the moon.
Still, it worked. It worked spectacularly. It worked even better in 2003, where, without warning or aerial assault, US armored columns moved with exquisite Fingerspitzengefuhl, bypassing pockets of resistance, moving around and past them like water flowing downhill.
Tanks are fatally vulnerable in cities. It's suicide to place them there. Ask anyone.
But that's what US commanders did. They marched an entire armored column right through the heart of Baghdad so quickly and unexpectedly that their guns could be heard over Baghdad Bob's televised assurances that the Americans had been held at the border hundreds of miles away. To the Iraqi command American armor seemed to materialize out of thin air, and to disappear as quickly. That is a terrifying quality for such a deadly foe.
They went where they were least expected, where their presence threw the enemy commanders into a paralysis of confusion and fear. Gen. Tommy Franks, that old-school artilleryman who had taken in firepower and attrition with his mother's milk, put on a show of precision fingertip control that will be studied throughout history. He got inside their decision loop. And the worst-case – 10,000 casualties we feared we might lose taking Baghdad – evaporated away in the mist of the following morning.
No one will ever know how many American lives John Boyd has saved in Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom. But it is a large number. And it is perhaps the most fitting monument to a man who is all but unknown among the nations whose children – on both sides – were saved from attrition warfare.
Well, now you're loaded. Now you're briefed. That was preamble. Let's get to the point.
(Part 2 continues below, or may be found here:)
I bow to no one in my respect for the courage and integrity of the American soldier. From Bunker Hill to Missionary Ridge, from the stinking black sand of Iwo Jima to the jungles of Vietnam, these men have shown a tenacity, decency and valor unmatched in history. My respect and admiration for them all is boundless.
But with that said, there have never been soldiers like the ones we have deployed today. Never.
These men and women have been asked not only to be warriors, but also policemen, judges, marriage counselors, businessmen, administrators, referees, bodyguards, traffic cops, teachers and ambassadors. They deserve the very best that we as a nation can provide. That means not only material and spiritual support. It means they deserve the best leadership this country can possibly deliver.
Agility is not just something that a fighter plane or even an armored column can possess. Agility in this day and age can and should mean many things that may not seem obvious but which are more crucial to victory than any weapon system.
We've seen the spectacular success of Boyd's ideas on major battlefields with massive armies. My point in writing this essay is simply this: these qualities of agility, speed, precision, lethality… "fingertip control," and "water flowing downhill" can and recently have been applied to the post-war insurgency, where indications are they can also meet with great success. The problem seems not to be whether or not we know how to do this. The problem seems to be whether or not we want to.
Why is it, do you think, that the United States was able to win a war in Afghanistan in five months, with far, far smaller forces than the Soviets used in the nine years leading up to their ultimate failure?
It's a complex issue, obviously, but I maintain that it is essentially that the Soviets relied on firepower and attrition – the iron mace – while the US focused tremendous force delicately and lightly and with great precision – the rapier. If the Soviet failure was due to entire armored divisions flattening villages wholesale, the US achieved victory with one or two Special Forces men on horseback calling in precision air strikes that with few notable tragic exceptions hit only what they meant to hit.
In those early days in Afghanistan – long before I read or even heard about John Boyd – I recall hearing a story that caused me some concern. I read of a small unit of American Special Forces troops who had gone into a village, lived there, made friends with the tribal leaders, shared local food and traditions with gusto and yet with humility, ate with local families in their own homes, showed respect for their women and gave their men the honor and deference and the means and the money to provide for their own people.
And then, the next day, soldiers from a regular Army unit entered these houses, kicked the doors down looking for weapons, terrified the women and children, and then left all of those hard-won relationships in ruins.
Now, I don't blame those soldiers one bit. They are warriors and that is what they are trained to do. They are under fire in a strange land and did not have the benefit of time and training that the Special Forces men had. But from where I sit I see many more opportunities for conflicts like our present one, and not as many for those requiring all of our Air Wings and Carrier Battle Groups (although clearly we need these, and at peak readiness, as well).
My motivation is simple: if the US goes to war, I want her to win. I want to win with as few American casualties as possible, and then, second, with as little collateral damage as we can possibly manage. And that, it seems, will require less mace swinging and more Fingerspitzengefuhl.
What do we have to do to achieve this goal? Well, this seems sensible to me:
Bureaucracy should be agile. Yes, yes – I know: An irreconcilable contradiction in terms. Bureaucracies are dinosaurs defined.
I'm sorry, but I don't think we can much longer afford that luxury. An agile bureaucracy is a Pentagon that actively predicts – within the limits of human ability – what weapons, tactics and countermeasures an insurgency will apply against us as thoroughly as they did with the Soviet Red Army Order of Battle in the past.
During the crisis on Apollo 13 a group of very smart men were given the small assortment of socks, clipboards, tape and plastic bags available aboard the crippled spacecraft and told to fashion a CO2 scrubber. They did it.
It seems to me that we need more of this type of gaming. Some of our Special Forces guys should be given the ramshackle tools available to an insurgency and proceed to make every possible weapon out of them that they can think of. It shouldn't take too much convincing to put these guys to work finding new and unusual ways to blow things up. They need to do it before the bad guys do so we can observe, orient, decide and act to protect our men and women. I refuse to believe that barely educated, seventh-century murdering fanatics can do this faster and better then the men we field in the SEALS, Delta Force, and so on. We need to get inside the insurgents' decision loop. We need, whenever possible, to anticipate their weapons and tactics so that we have our best countermeasures in place as quickly as possible. Certainly our troops in the field can cycle, innovate and evolve faster than these insurgents. The Pentagon will have to keep up. This is a tail that is going to have to wag a very large and overweight dog. There's nothing else for it.
I have noticed that a simple, cheap, metal mesh has been welded to the outside of Stryker vehicles:
I assume this is used to pre-detonate incoming RPG rounds that would otherwise penetrate the actual armor. Did we find this out the hard way? I don't know. But I for one would rather see a few of our own guys shooting RPG's at empty Strykers out on some test range all day and all night than learn this lesson with real people. When Pierre Sprey and others demanded real-world testing on the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, what they got were tests on vehicles whose gas tanks were filled with water. It was only after almost Herculean efforts that defects were corrected and niceties such as anti-spalling Kevlar inner linings were installed. How many lives has Pierre Sprey and others saved? These are not anti-war imbeciles trying to kill a weapons program. These are brilliant engineers and American patriots who want American soldiers to survive their battles.
Blocking or falsifying these kinds of tests should be a court-martial offense. Further, an agile Pentagon should have the power to streamline the delivery of what we need when we need it without delay, infighting or red tape.
The most shocking thing about Boyd's battles with the Pentagon was that it revealed a general officer class that more often seemed more concerned with seniority and protection of one's own posterior than with winning battles or protecting the lives of our soldiers. I do not want to be mistaken on this: these officers are, I believe to a man, patriots who love their country and cannot conceive of willfully doing her harm. But all isolated cultures suffer from a lack of perspective, from a lack of flexibility and from a self-reinforcing groupthink that protects the status quo at the expense of the pain of innovation. In the name of the country and the soldiers under their command, this needs to change.
It can be changed. To give only the one example I am most familiar with:
There was a time when being a Jet Airline Captain was about as close as a mortal could come to being God. All flight crews were taught – and most sincerely believed – that this absolute authority in the hands of great experience provided the greatest safety.
And then a jet crashed, and many people were killed. And the jet crashed because it ran out of fuel. And it ran out of fuel because the Captain thought he could make it, and the First Officer was too cowed to tell him he was wrong. That young pilot was, sadly in the most literal sense of the word, scared to death to tell the truth.
Since then, a new idea – Cockpit Resource Management – has made decision-making much more shared. The Captain still has the final say, and that is appropriate. But now First Officers are encouraged – required even – to disagree vocally and forcefully with actions they feel to be unsafe. The Captain is now required to brief the First Officer on the instrument approach he plans to fly. This has dramatically reduced minor errors that can cascade into catastrophes. At all flight critical phases a "sterile cockpit" is strictly enforced, which means that all conversation will be limited to the task at hand and no one gets distracted over who is eating what where after they land.
CRM has been hugely successful. In fact, a pilot/surgeon was so impressed with the results that he has taken many of aviation's best ideas – written checklists, sterile conversation and actively-shared decision-making and briefing – into the operating room where many shockingly preventable mistakes continue to be made. Here too Gods have to be challenged. But the results speak for themselves… and even the most arrogant Captain would rather learn some new tricks than take two hundred people, himself included, into the ground.
I do not know for certain, but I'd be willing to bet that today's Pentagon is considerably less rigid than the one Boyd faced in the sixties and seventies. But it took three years of observing a steadily deteriorating situation on the ground in Iraq before a new orientation-decision-action was initiated. That's way too much observation and way too slow a response. Obviously the political leadership bears a great deal of this responsibility as well. We can do better. These are our men and women out there. I do not think there is a serving officer alive who fully and consciously would let their troops die to save their stars. But it is often very, very hard to get this signal across in a way it will be heard. CRM-like techniques can and should be made mandatory so that top decision makers get accurate and honest information from the people at the tip of the spear, and those who give it should be able to do so without fear of jeopardizing their careers. The faster we can do that – the faster we get and act on information and re-stock the train with what we need now and not two years ago – the more successful we will be.
Oh. And parenthetically, I would give a significant pay raise to every man and woman in the armed services. We need the best people we can get and we need more of them. They have been underpaid for far too long, and it's a disgrace.
The Political Leadership should be agile. I know, it's nice to dream, huh? But surely, approaching the five year mark in Iraq, we must realize that the only hope these insurgents have or ever did have is to sow enough despair and hopelessness among the American people that we walk away.
Why is it that the fielded military can adopt Boyd's concept of agility and maneuverability, but the political leadership remains absolutely blind to the fact that this battle may or may not be won on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah and Ramadi, but it absolutely can be lost on the CBS Evening News? One would think the insurgents would need a multi-billion dollar, worldwide high-tech satellite network to spread their propaganda. But, being the generous people that we are, we have gallantly lent them ours.
This is an example of Swordlessness: using the enemy's weapon against him. Two can play at that game, as we will see in a moment. But let's just take it as read that the Main Stream Media no longer even seriously pretends to report facts. They have made an editorial decision that this conflict is a mistake and we should have stopped looking to them for fairness or balance a long time ago.
This is the battleground. Why – why – is the administration unable or unwilling to commit resources to this theater of operations?
A friend of mine has two brothers serving both in Iraq and Afghanistan. Together, they have been deployed seven times to these war zones. Jake Rademacher is a documentary filmmaker of real talent who had the guts to go to Iraq and live with his brothers outside the Green Zone for several weeks. His film, Brothers at War, is an actual documentary: that is to say, he did not script it and he does not push a viewpoint. What he does do is show his two brothers living in a country that is by turns violent and gentle, with people good and bad, brave and cowardly, and through it all you get to see why his two brothers chose to go back there and risk their lives again and again.
If this film were shown to the American people, support for the war would go up thirty points; not because it has a point to make but simply because it doesn't. You just see what goes on and you make your own decision.
Brothers at War, and the writings of Michael Yon, Michel Totten and precious few others, are worth entire divisions. They have allowed us a perspective of what is really going on over there. They have lived there for years, long enough to know the people and what makes good news or bad. They have earned my trust and deepest respect for unblinking and courageous reporting that has put the MSM to shame. I suspect Michael Yon has spent more time within the sound of gunfire than any other MSM reporter has total time in country. And he and Mike Totten and a few others have allowed that signal – that small, pure signal – to escape into the ether. Or rather, into the Ethernet.
We have held this line – barely – with the efforts of men like that and a few private citizens writing in their pajamas. The political leadership needs to get in this fight. Now.
And now, finally, to the Surge, and a new warrior-scholar.
We've spent a lot of time with John Boyd, because I and others believe his theories not only won the war, but if properly applied they might do the nearly impossible and win the peace as well.
If I understand this enigmatic and complex man correctly, he came to the conclusion that there was something beyond the Perfect Sword; something beyond even the Perfect Swordsman. Because as Sun Tzu pointed out, there is a level of warrior satori beyond even that. Beyond them both lay Swordlessness.
Swordlessness is not peace and it is certainly not surrender. Swordlessness uses nothing but the enemy's sword against him. Perfect Swordlessness is a sublime victory so complete that there is no fight at all. It is over before it begins.
General Petraeus – just perhaps – is in the process of winning such a victory in Iraq. By brilliant diplomacy, deep understanding of the culture and the judicious use of gunpowder and money, it appears he has severed most of the Sunni tribes from al Qaeda and used them as "Awakening" peacekeeping militias against their former allies. General Petraeus is not fighting the last war; he is fighting the next one. He did not arrive there and just hope for the best. He observed. He oriented. He decided. And he acted. And then he observed again to see what effect he had. And again. And again.
This is not firepower. This is not attrition. This is, rather, an intelligent, delicate, sophisticated, maneuver-based strategy. A light, but sometimes deadly touch. Fingertip control. Water flowing downhill, into the cracks which our enemy cannot fill.
And while you can criticize the President for not taking a relatively unknown, low-ranking general and giving him the whole ball of wax sooner, you might also note that Gen. Creighton Abrams' radical change of strategy in Vietnam was implemented only after it was well and truly too late.
If this continues, Gen. Petraeus will have walked into the camp of the enemy and used his own sword against him. That is a profound species of victory.
You can not put a value on the power an idea such as the one that drives Gen. Petraeus' "Awakening" strategy. A man's ultimate motivation is to provide for his family. A man, when all is said and done, is powered by nothing more or less then the desire to make his family safe and proud of him.
If Americans pay such a man to walk the streets of his own neighborhood, keeping the peace by cooperating with a foreign army, will he take a coin so offered? I suppose it depends on whether or not he can do so with honor. No one wants foreign troops in their towns or streets. But we have been there long enough for the essential American decency and sincerity to be revealed, and spare me please any mention of Abu Graib or Haditha which were atrocities that were investigated and punished by an army that had no force to compel it to do so short of its own decency. These people are not blind. They know what is in a few diseased hearts and what is policy. The United States Army did something they have not ever seen in that country. Power policed itself.
"Awakening" is working because most Iraqis now have come to the conclusion that we are not there to steal their oil or their land and that the average man may cooperate with us without compromising his honor or the respect of his family. As our side of the scale rises, they are confronted with an ever more desperate al Qaeda whose decision loop lags further behind us every day. Desperate, they become more cruel. For American infidels to sail halfway across the world and win the hearts and minds of Muslims when they themselves cannot, is a tremendous shock to them. Why, I suppose someone like Katie Couric might even call it a Grim Milestone.
We have lost some of our best people in Iraq, and they are irreplaceable. But morale is a two-edged sword. We have lost a very small percentage of the force we deployed. They have lost almost all of all they had to send. These are people too. They get tired of fighting just like we do. I suppose the only difference is that if one of them urges surrender on their own people they are taken out and beheaded, while if some of our own people do so to us, they are given an Academy Award and big sack of cash.
When Osama bin Laden launched the terror attacks of September 11th, 2001, he explained in a video to his own followers that it was because America was a paper tiger too afraid to take casualties, and that defeating The Great Satan would be even easier than defeating the Soviets. "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse," he said.
I wonder if our illegal, immoral, unilateral cowboy adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq may have tempered this view somewhat. This Great Saladin is now reduced to living in a cave, calling for the end of Global Warming and begging for recruits to fight in Iraq. In doing so he is admitting that it is he, not us, who is the weak horse to a people with ears very, very finely tuned to such frequencies.
Look at this picture of the aftermath of an IED explosion. Who do you think this Iraqi child considers the 'strong horse?' Can you fake this kind of reaction, this instantaneous bolt to safety in the middle of fire and death?
I don't think you can. I don't think you can fake this either:
Or this:
And as for the Surge, I am struck by one thought, and that is this: It seems clear now that we needed more troops in theater from Day One. But I think the spectacular success of the Surge is due less to the number of boots on the ground than it is to something far more important.
Looking back on the rise of the insurgency, it seems as if the average Iraqi did not know what to make of America. I suspect that many would have been far more supportive a long time ago, if it were not for the image of a helicopter atop a building in 1975 and a line of desperate people running for their lives. To work with Americans may have been what many wanted to do much, much sooner.
When Michael Moore makes a hugely successful film praising Saddam's paradise and calling these people who bomb women and children in marketplaces "freedom fighters," and when an election turns and places into Congressional power a political party dedicated to reproducing that helicopter tableau as soon as possible... what would you do? Because if you guess wrong and the Americans leave, you will be taken out into the street in front of your family and have your head sawed off.
I think the Surge has had spectacular success not because of the additional troops so much as for the fact that when the media and the Democrats demanded we cut and run… we did not cut and run. We doubled down. When the calls for defeat and dishonor were at their loudest – sad to say a not unwarranted street rep we had made for ourselves – somehow, somehow we simply just hung on and gave them not a retreat but a charge.
Jesus Christ, but that must have gotten someone's attention. Yes, the Surge is working. But I believe it is not a surge of boots that is doing the work so much as it is a surge of hope.
And hope… well, hope is a dangerous thing. For every day that Iraq returns not only to normal but to free normal is a day remembered. It is a day to which other, darker days may be compared.
Every day of success, every newly opened shop, every school and soccer game free of secret police and each and every night devoid of the terror of arbitrary arrest and execution is something to lose. It is something the murdering bastards of al Qaeda cannot give but can only take away. We have taken their sword from them. They wield it now only against themselves. They will do it, too: more pain and more death are coming, for that is all they know how to do. But hope walks the streets of Baghdad now, hope in the form of decent and brave young men and women who have held a line against all odds and perhaps bought with their courage and their blood the time we need for that hope to spread.
Hope can spread here, too. A few weeks ago, a remarkable story may have passed under your radar: in an extremely unusual move, General Petraeus was asked to briefly return to "the Building" (the five-sided one) from his command in Iraq to help select the next 40 or so Brigadier General candidates from a pool of about 1,000 colonels. These forty officers are the new Golden Boys: fast-tracked rising stars who will be determining how, if not when or where or why we will fight in the new century.
This is a very unusual move, and it appears to be universally recognized as a major shift on the part of the Pentagon to make sure that talent, rather than seniority, will be the benchmark for promotion. To call back from Iraq the General with the PhD in International Relations, the man whose light, agile, fingertip control of the situation on the ground has yielded such remarkable success, is a strong indication that the High Priests with the stars on their shoulders are determined to see us succeed with new tactics and new doctrine for the new challenges we face.
It's a good sign. A hopeful sign.
And if hope catches hold and finds a way to grow in that arid and distant land, then I would like to live long enough to see David Petraeus, Michael Yon and Michael Totten standing on a podium in the Rose Garden under an administration I could then afford not to care too much about, and watch as they lower their heads and the President of the United States – whoever that may be – puts the Medal of Freedom around their necks.
For win or lose, they have earned it.
(Everything I learned about John Boyd I discovered through BOYD: THE FIGHTER PILOT WHO CHANGED THE ART OF WAR by Robert Coram, available here.
And if you missed it earlier and can spare seven minutes to improve your life, I think you will be as deeply impressed as I was when I saw the trailer for my friend Jake Rademacher's Brothers at War located here.
Finally, if you'd like to support these essays, you can purchase a copy of SILENT AMERICA: ESSAYS FROM A DEMOCRACY AT WAR by clicking here.)


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Store anything and everything for your next practice or swim meet in the spacious and durable Speedo Medium 25L Teamster Backpack, designed to hold all your swimming essentials to and from the pool.
NEW!Now you can comment & reply on customer reviews. Simply click "comment" below any review.
Perfect size for all ages. My daughter is a tall 9yr old and it's plenty big!!! The large would be huge! Love the color and get many compliments. The bonus "butt pad" my daughter found hysterical and yet useful!
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Great Bag...for practice, maybe not meets. Needs to be a tad larger
Great bag for practice, maybe just not meets. Can only fit one large towel and swim suit in the main part. Other pockets are great for goggles and caps or other things needed.
Kaylee's Mom
Fit: Feels too small
Perfect size for my children
I bought two of these backpacks for my children, (7 & 10) for school. It is the perfect size for them. Lots of good pockets to keep various things separate from each other. They carry their iPads back and forth and I feel confident they are fairly protected in the tablet section. I like the added dirt bag. This was not a feature on the old line of Speedo Pro backpacks. Our old backpack was purchased mid-school year, and it has held up. I am hoping these are durable enough to last all year long, with normal wear and tear.
Shelley A.
Fit: Feels true to size
Too small
This product is way to small, my son purchased it and when we recieved it it would only fit maybe his clothes to change into and that was it. It was super small and not good for full-time competitive swimmers.
Anissa C.
Lozano, TX
Great for younger kids!
My 7 year old daughter is using this to lug her stuff around for swim practices and loves it. The size is perfect for her smaller frame relative to the ones the big kids use. It has lots of places to stash stuff (which she really loves). The only complaint is that some of the zippers occassionally get stuck
Anne C.
Dayton, OH
Good for young swim-teamer
Gave the light blue pack as a gift to my 7 (going on 8) y/o grandson who recently joined a swim team. He loves having the specialized pockets for all his gear. Especially likes the "dirt bag" sack-within-the-sack. Fit is right for now, and looks as though it will continue to be good for another couple of years as well. Pack appears -- and feels -- well-made.
Port Angeles, WA
Swim backpack is great!
It arrived on time and with plenty of room and pockets for all her stuff.
Perfect Size
This is a great backpack from smaller kids. My 9 year old loves it and it has multiple pockets for him to store everything. The "Dirty Bag" that clips to the inside is a lifesaver for wet suits when leaving swim meets. We both love this backpack!
Tucson, AZ
very small
While it looked very nice, it was far too small for our petite 8 year old daughter. One towel and it is full. We sent it back and purchased the 35L and are very happy with that.
Nice bag, but smaller than I expected
This is a great bag in general; nice color, nice material and so on. I bought it for my 6 year old who recently joined a swim team. Since he's 6, I thought the 35L would be too big and from all the other reviews, this 25L one seemed like the best option. However, it's way too small. There are a couple of pockets which I can fit his goggles, shampoo, snacks in, but the main compartment barely fits one medium sized towel, his shower sandals and clean underwear/socks. Once at practice, there is no room to put the clothes and shoes he takes off in the bag, I have to keep it out on the bleachers. There is no way it would also fit fins, buoy, paddles, etc. So, while I'm not going to return it (he loves the colors), I would definitely recommend a bigger bag to others who wish to put more than a towel and a few personal items in their bag.
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The world's leading swimwear brand, Speedo is passionate about life in and around the water. The brand's heritage of innovation derives from its leadership in competitive swimming, where more Olympic Gold Medals have been won in Speedo than any other brand. Using the pioneering technology created for the planet's top swimmers, Speedo brings performance, comfort and style to all who enter the water, whether racing for a record finish, swimming laps for better health or making memories at the beach.
Our Performance Collection includes the competition and training suits that remain the number one choice of the world's fastest swimmers; our Fitness and Active Recreation Collections feature men's and women's swimwear, men's water shorts, and kids swimwear in fashion-forward styles that are designed to perform. And with Speedo's expanded range of Footwear, Packs, Aquatic Fitness and Swim Training Equipment, our Accessories Collection is unmatched in performance, fit and feel. No matter why you dive in – training, fitness or fun – those moments in the water are always better with Speedo.


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/ / / Huawei E5331 Value MiFi.
Huawei E5331 Value MiFi support.
Here you'll find handy 'How to' guides from Three to help you get started with your Huawei E5331 Value MiFi, from setting up and using features to updating and staying secure.
This device won't work in North America, some parts of South America and the Caribbean.
Quick links.
Key documents.


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Newberry, SC Restaurants
Find the best restaurants in Newberry, SC
Results 1-10 of 27
Sort: All by Rating Filter: Restaurant Name Cuisine Neighbourhood
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- Pub Food
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Ronnie's Restaurant
Ronnie's has a great buffet. Good place for down home cooking
Debra Shealy
The Palms Grill & Bar
We were in Newberry SC today (02-16-10) picking up some furniture and...
4.0 stars
- Cuisines: Bar & Grill
- (803) 276-4688
- 612 Wilson Rd, Newberry, SC, 29108
- Neighbourhoods:
Delamater's Restaurant
The restaurant is quite cozy with nice decor. The seating was quick...
Steven W's Downtown Bistro
everything was fresh, well prepared , and delicious service was...
The Flying Pie
The dill pickle soup is the best soup I have ever had. Didn't think I...
La Fogata Mexican Restuarant
Good Food Good Service. Will recommend to friends and family.
Ms. Boyd
Cabana Cafe
Beware!!!! Was given a gift certificate for this place SIGNED BY THE...
Captain D'S Seafood Restaurants
I'd only recommend this place when they send out coupons. Otherwise...
Chinatown Restaurant
Bill & Fran's Restaurant
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- TXU's $32 Billion Sale to KKR, TPG Is Completed, Paving Way for Breakup — they said they wouldn't split it up and sell it, but — surprise, surprise — analysts and other experts already are predicting the piecemeal selloff of TXU.
- Detroit's Other Legacy Burden ($)
- Regulators want executive salaries spelled out clearly
- 6 Things Star Wars Teaches Us About Our Money
- Classy Real Estate Names — Lou Minatti makes a goode pointe.
- Study Says Wal-Mart Often Fights Local Taxes
- Passing Gas (tax) — Brent Clanton thinks something doesn't smell right in the proposed cap-and-trade plan.
- Man Bites Dog: A Genuine Shareholder Rights Group
- One For the Moral Hazard Brigade — subprime lessons the industry hasn't learned
- Subprime Lending Must Continue, Says Fed's Rosengren ($)
- One in Five Working Families Struggling
- Sharp Rise in Winter Heating Bills Is Forecast — pick you're fuel; they're all going up.
- Lazy-Ass Nation — using our ingenuity for sloth
- The Worst Recession in 25 Years?
- Did Katrina Hide the Real Peak in World Oil Production- and Other Oil Supply Insights
Loren Steffy
A business blog
BizLinks | 10.10.07 (Updated)
One Response
That last one is quite a collection of scribblings from the loonie bin, Loren.


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Register now for free, or sign in with any of these services:
Thank you, Michael Brown, for your caring and support in overseeing to the eternal care of Mr. Berardinelli. I'm sure he will be at rest, grateful for your tenderness and affection.
To: Army Pfc. Liber Berardinelli:
Thank you for your service to our country so that we could grow up and remain free. Bless you and may you find eternal peace at rest. I feel so sad that you had many relatives living nearby that did not care to share my gratitude for your service. By coming to the United States at such a young and tender age from Italy, you showed your hopefulness for the United States and served her well. I'm sorry your life (evidently) took a turn for the worse after the loss of your wife in 2003, but may you meet up with her in heaven and share your eternal peace together. May those family members who turned away from you at your time of need, feel remorse for their misgivings. And may they remember how they, as your children, inlaws, brothers, grandchildren, nieces and nephews, ignored your neediness whether financial or healthwise. May they always remember your dedication in military service so that they remain live and well in free country.
In memory my deceased father, a fellow WWII comrade, I send you love and gratitude. A little late, but sincere.
From an unknown friend in Zanesville, Ohio


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Learn the techniques I used to make over $4,000,000 in affiliate commissions! Check out my Free Affiliate Marketing Guide and learn the "how to" for Facebook Ads, PPC Affiliate Marketing, PPV / CPV Affiliate Marketing, And Media Buying!
This week in review covers the disadvantages of having an office, an update for affiliates using MailChimp, a guide on how to write dating ad copy and much more!
- "Why You Shouldn't Rent An Office" – Working from home was the original appeal of affiliate life for most, but it seems like a rented office space is the new qualification for success. Do you really need one to be productive though? Maybe not.
- "Revealed: A Goldmine Of Inspiration For Niche Markets" – Finch has found an unlikely resource for those looking to target niche markets. Don't waste time searching for ideas when there are free community portals like this available.
- "MailChimp Blocks Affiliates" – The MailChimp team has gone bananas! Get it? Hah. On Friday night, they decided to ban a number of marketers from using their email newsletter service. Get the full details here.
- "6 Landing Page Tricks – REVEALED" – Great graphics aren't enough for a killer landing page. Increase your ROI with these simple tricks! They'll help your landing page stand out from the competition and pull in conversions.
- "How To Write a Dating Ad 101" – Have you been struggling to create the perfect dating ad? Dating ad copy doesn't have to be tough anymore. Just follow this step-by-step guide and you'll be well on your way to rocking the dating world.
- "Headline Case Study Results – Tasty Conversion Data" – What type of headline makes the biggest impact with viewers? Mr. Green has set out on a mission to answer that very question. Check out this awesome case study.
- "How Sleeping More Can Improve Your Blogging" – Everyone hates when writer's block kicks in. The question is: are you really stuck or are you just sleepy? This post will explain why your lack of sleep is costing you subscribers.


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American Dietetic Association
Choosing a Safe and Successful Weight-loss Program
Weight-control Information Network
Canada's Food Guide
Dietitians of Canada
Fish, levels of mercury and omega-3 fatty acids. American Heart Association website. Available at:
http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=3013797. Accessed June 29, 2007.
Greene B.
The Best Life Diet. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster; 2006.
This content is reviewed regularly and is updated when new and relevant evidence is made available. This information is neither intended nor implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider prior to starting any new treatment or with questions regarding a medical condition.
Copyright ©
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Go Back : New Search
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Disease & Condition Topics
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Hospital Website Design by Brown Parker & DeMarinis Advertising


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U.S. Open
Must Haves From The Merchandise Tent
June 2012
Golf Digest's Mr. Style, Marty Hackel, picks his favorites from the merchandise tent
Tumbler ($14) and magnet ($6)
Memorabilia is great, but the kind that you can actually use is the best of all. These unbreakable tumblers and magnets for your kitchen are no-brainers.
- Keywords:
- U.S. Open,
- golf,
- merchandise,
- Mr. Style,
- Marty Hackel


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Bob the Avon Guy, who died Tuesday, loved Corpus Christi life, his family said
CORPUS CHRISTI - Robert G. Bettiga, known to many as Bob the Avon Guy and who was the nation's oldest active male Avon representative, died Tuesday after battling cancer. He was 83.
Bettiga, a Norway native and graduate of University of Michigan, was a retired career naval officer who served during World War II as well as the Korean and Vietnam wars and the Cuban conflict. He was a retired United Way director and financial planner who partnered seven years ago with his wife, Jeanette Bettiga, after a broken arm slowed her Avon sales.
"Bob enjoyed his life, this community and the people in it as long as he could," she said.
Bob helped triple her sales in three months and became a force among Avon sales representatives.
The couple recently achieved the President's Council level for sales for a fifth consecutive year, having increased their sales in 2010 by 33 percent, to about $130,000. Bob also won the Spirit of Avon award three of the past six years. The award is given to a representative each year who embodies the values of the company.
Despite illnesses, surgeries, cancer treatments — and an unending desire to fish along the marina jetty as he had for more than 30 years — Bettiga never let his customers down, his family said.
Helping someone achieve outer beauty is satisfying, he said in a February interview with the Caller-Times, but the thrill comes when enriching people's lives.
"I learned real quick not to approach a woman and ask if she wants to make a little money on the side," Bettiga said then, with his signature chuckle. "I had quite a few angry husbands asking over the phone why I was calling their wives."
He is survived by his wife; three sons, Robert, John and David; a daughter, Anita Bettiga-Langbecker; three stepchildren, six siblings, numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Services will be at 9 a.m. Saturday at Saxet Funeral Home, followed at 10 a.m. with a celebration of his life at the barge dock alongside the bay across from American Bank Center, where he spent time daily watching ship traffic and fishermen.
Subscribe to the Caller-Times
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CCSD Among State Leaders for Board Certified Teachers - January 14, 2013
The Charleston County School District (CCSD) is among the top five districts statewide for total number of National Board Certified Teachers (NBCTs), with 18 new certifications added in 2012, bringing the total to 487. Data suggests that NBCT teachers strengthen student achievement and outperform their peers with the same level of experience.
"I want to congratulate our newest NBCT certified teachers for their hard work and commitment to professional development through the certification process," says CCSD Superintendent Dr. Nancy McGinley. "I encourage all of our teachers to consider this opportunity for reflection and evaluation. Increased certification can help us get yet another step closer to achieving our Vision 2016 goals."
The 18 newly-certified CCSD teachers are:
Abigail West, Charles Pinckney Elementary
Allie Tronoski, Daniel Jenkins Creative Learning Center
Amy Coleman, Ladson Elementary
Barbara Smith, Laurel Hill Primary
Heather Butt, A.C. Corcoran Elementary
Jennifer Cutchins-Nimocks, North Charleston Creative Arts Elementary
Jessica Nackel, Pepperhill Elementary
Kathleen Thomas, St James-Santee Elementary
Kimberly Mason, R.B. Stall High
Lisa Laughlin, St Andrews Math and Science
Lori Carroll, Wando High
Margaret Houk, Moultrie Middle
Michelle Martin , Mitchell Math and Science
Nancy Dabit, Moultrie Middle
Rachele Box, Lambs Elementary
Sara Buckley, St Andrew's Middle
Sarah Buxton, Laurel Hill Primary
Sharon Herring, Laurel Hill Primary
South Carolina remains third in the nation for the total number of National Board Certified Teachers (NBCTs) after 291 South Carolina educators representing 39 school districts earned National Board Certification (NBC) in 2012, according to data released last week by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS).
There are now over 100,000 NBCTs in the United States. With the addition of this new group of NBCTs, South Carolina increases its total to 8,436, trailing only North Carolina and Florida.
Teachers seeking National Board Certification undertake a two-part process that takes from one to three years to complete. The process requires candidates to reflect on their classroom practices, assess their understanding of subject material and examine their preparation techniques. In addition to preparing a portfolio with videotapes of classroom teaching, lesson plans, student work samples and reflective essays, teachers must complete assessment center exercises based on content knowledge that prove they have mastered the subjects they teach and also possess the skills to teach them.
Teachers interested in pursuing the certification for the 2013-14 National Board cycle can access further information on the South Carolina Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention and Advancement (CERRA) Website at www.cerra.org.


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Oakland, CA (SportsNetwork.com) - L.J. Hoes' homer in the 12th inning boosted the Houston Astros to a 3-2 win over the Oakland Athletics in the opener of a three-game set on Tuesday.
Oakland threatened to end things in the 11th by putting two men on with two outs. Pinch-hitter John Jaso singled before Jed Lowrie walked and Houston opted for Darin Downs (2-1) to escape the jam. The left-handed specialist was called upon to take care of Brandon Moss, who grounded out softly on the first pitch he saw to end the inning.
Hoes then stepped in with one out in the 12th and slugged a homer off Fernando Abad (2-4) just over the yellow border above the out-of-town scoreboard in left.
"That's a big hit there," Astros manager Bo Porter said. "Our bullpen did a tremendous job of keeping it (tied). That's a gutsy team win."
Chad Qualls came on in the home half and set the A's down in order to record his 11th save of the season.
In the third, Marwin Gonzalez singled, then moved to third on Jose Altuve's single and subsequent throwing error by Josh Donaldson. Oakland starter Scott Kazmir got Enrique Hernandez to ground out, but Chris Carter tagged the lefty for a two-run single a batter later to stake the visitors to a 2-0 lead.
Although Donaldson aided in the Astros two-run third, he made amends in the home half with an RBI groundout. Craig Gentry singled to begin the inning, stole second and third around a Yoenis Cespedes walk and scored on Donaldson's groundout to cut the deficit in half.
Donaldson then doubled with one out in the sixth and scored later in the inning on Lowrie's sacrifice fly to right that tied the game.
"We were in a game, one big swing could have decided it for us," A's manager Bob Melvin said. "It's easy to look back and say we had a couple of opportunities in the game to score some runs. You never know how it plays out after that."
Hoes' home run was his first since May 13 ... Astros starter Brett Oberholtzer
allowed two runs on six hits and two walks over seven innings ... Kazmir went
seven frames, yielding two runs -- one earned -- on seven hits with six
strikeouts. He has given up two or fewer runs in 11 of his last 13 outings ...
Altuve snapped a string of 28 consecutive stolen bases, an Astros record, when
he was caught stealing second with one out in the 10th inning ... Houston went
1-for-5 with runners in scoring position, while Oakland went 1-for-9 in those


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Accounting for change: Transparency in the midst of turmoil
The turmoil in the credit markets over the last year has raised many questions as to the effectiveness of the current accounting and disclosure frameworks. In our second Banking survey, we have investigated the extent to which the current model has delivered consistency and transparency in financial reporting in the banking industry.
This survey reviewed over 20 banks' financial statements around fair value, structured finance and risk management, analysing how well the current accounting and disclosure guidance stood up to the challenges of the recent market conditions. The survey also suggests how banks could improve certain disclosures in order to increase the level of transparency and consistency in their financial reporting.
For more information please click on the link below:


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Instruction and Training for children with no previous swim team experience. This team meets two days per week. Children must be able to perform the basic four strokes. Swimmer needs to have passed through our Youth Swim Lessons, or attended a tryout to be placed on this team.
Little Seals averages around 1,000 yards during their practice time. They focus on starts & turns as well as general sets.
Sample of a day on the Little Seals team:
Warm Up 100 free, 50 Kick, 50 Stroke, 50 Pull (250 yds)
Flip turns 5 minutes
4 x 50 free focus on approach to wall and streamline after flip (200)
Series of 25's of whatever stroke is being emphasized which includes drills (250)
Bringing all the strokes together with an IM (200)
Some quicker 25's free / choice (100)
Starts 5 minutes
Practice Times
Tuesday & Thursday 4:00 - 5:00 pm (ongoing throughout the year)
Month: $66/month
You need to pay for your monthly membership *in person* at the Koret Center. There is no online option for payment at this time. Additional child:
Month: $33
If you would like to tryout for the team click here You will need to create an online account, first for the person paying then you will add your swimmer at the end.
Questions or concerns?Clare Rudd- Aquatics Director email@example.com


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Live from World Cafe Live
4:28 pm
Wed August 6, 2014
JD McPherson Live from World Cafe Live 08/08 @ Noon
Rockabilly specialist J.D. McPherson will grace the stage for this week's edition of Live from World Cafe Live, making
for a swinging midday dance party! The Oklahoma native released his album Signs and Signifiers in 2012 and is currently on tour, gearing up for the release of his sophomore album next year.
Recent Release: Signs & Signifiers
Release Date: April 17, 2012
Label: Rounder
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Potter's House for Women
P.O. Box 1401Jackson, GA 30233ph: 770-229-4633alt: email@example.com
Dr. Stephen Durham, DDS
Barbara Maddox, Preston's Salon in Stockbridge
Kathleen Gardner, our personal trainer
We have two doctors, two dentists, a personal trainer, and a very talented hairstylist. All of these professionals give our ladies complete make-overs free of charge. We get many clothes, shoes, purses, and jewelry donations. This is important because it causes our ladies to want to look nice and makes them feel better about themselves. It is our desire to minister to the whole person. We teach our ladies that they are women of God; therefore they look, act, dress, talk and carry themselves as who they are: representatives of the Most High God.
Doctor Steve Taunton, Ph.D.
Dr. Abner Moore DDS
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A triumph of the right [1]
Europe - The paradox of France's stunning No vote is that, while it leaves Chirac a lame duck, it da
Europe - The paradox of France's stunning No vote is that, while it leaves Chirac a lame duck, it da
by David Lawday [2] Published
You have to hand it to the French left. Its voters are no fainthearts. They led their country in jumping off Europe's cliff without knowing how high it was or what lay at the bottom. Short of a death wish, that calls for foolhardiness of the most extreme kind.
Their act, as we are already tired of hearing, landed Europe in a grave crisis. It also did grave injury, of course, to President Jacques Chirac and his bemused conservative government, which was swiftly reshuffled from prime minister down. But the great paradox of France's prodigious "no" to the European constitution is that the harm it has done the Socialist opposition looks graver still. While indeed helping the left to cripple Chirac, it threatens to hold back the left's chances of regaining the French presidency for as many long years as it will delay Europe.
That the left could be the voting vanguard of France's winning No, and at the same time self-destruct, just about sums up the political contradictions that made France's referendum such a risky game in the first place. For what is most audible through the shriek of anguish it produced is a new voice, broad and coherent. It is not the strains of the anti-Europe gang of ultra-nationalists, anti-capitalists and communists; it comes from the little people in general, those feeling most vulnerable at the onset of Europe's difficult 21st century: blue-collar and public service workers, clerks, small farmers, shop assistants, and this time the young - in sum, mostly those who tend to vote Socialist.
All along, the Socialist leadership had urged them to vote Yes in the interests of a better-organised Europe. Had they listened, the referendum would have been won easily, because Chirac's mainstream right was bound to support the constitution, as it did. Yet a power rift on the left wrecked those hopes. As long ago as last autumn Laurent Fabius, a former prime minister restlessly positioned as number two in the Socialist leadership, behind the striving Francois Hollande, shocked his colleagues by suddenly changing his tune and calling for a No vote.
Hollande and other Socialist elephants, including Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a former finance minister, and Martine Aubry, mother of the 35-hour week, thought Fabius had taken leave of his senses, though his motive was pretty clear: he aimed to distinguish himself from the others so as to give himself a chance to run for president in 2007, when Chirac's second term ends. Fabius is not the only one sniffing around for the left's candidacy - Lionel Jospin, another former prime minister, and a popular one, hasn't quite reconciled himself to life in the monk's cell - but Hollande believes the spot is his as party leader.
To head off the heavier-hitting Fabius, Hollande called a special Socialist congress to confirm the Yes line on the referendum, and secured a 60 per cent majority of party members against his rival. Chastised, Fabius went quiet, appearing to bow to the demands of party unity. Plainly, however, his case had been made with the public at large, catching on with voters fearful of France's high unemployment and worried about having ever less to spend: the EU constitution on offer, he had argued, was too low on social protection and too high on shameful Anglo-Saxon economic liberalism.
As these arguments gained ground, Fabius further infuriated the PS chief by coming out of his shell and returning to the attack against a Yes vote. This was an open breach of rules on party unity, but by that time it was too late for Hollande to remove him from the party leadership team. On referendum day, nearly 60 per cent of Socialist voters said "No", precisely reversing the vote of the party congress. The sequel to this unexpected turnaround has been painful. Fabius was nowhere to be seen on referendum night, which was unusual for a man who tends to seek the TV arc lamps. He was the one Socialist elephant to shun the cameras altogether, recognising that an appearance could only be taken as crowing. He had no contact in person or by phone with the white-faced Hollande, who let him know the following morning what he thought of his claim to be the PS's candidate for president. "Give up my place to those who haven't respected our party's rules? To those who messed up our campaign? Those who split the party so deeply? My answer, frankly, is no."
Fabius, enjoying his new-found role as champion of the people, eventually popped up before the nation with a wolfish smile 24 hours after the event, seeking to lend gravitas to his parallel role as EU constitution-spoiler. There had to be a change in the way Europe operates, but not, he stressed, a halt to European integration. No one was more European than he ("I'm a European to the marrow"). If "two or three important points" in the constitution were modified, he suggested - deaf to flat EU insistence that there can be no renegotiation of the treaty - then that would do it. His party's task was to listen to what French voters had said.
It seems likely that the Socialists will now shift the left's policy on Europe towards the more regulated economy the French in any event prefer. But can a mere bow to protectionist instincts and greater welfare guarantees both appeal to a confused electorate and rescue the left? Hollande emerges wretchedly disabled from the referendum, while Fabius is despised by his own party. Their harsh split can only undermine any chances the left had of regaining the presidency in two years' time.
Moreover, the crowning paradox of the Socialist voters' leap off the cliff is that, in effect, it has shifted power to the redoubtable Nicolas Sarkozy. "Sarko", head of the dominant conservative UMP party and irrepressible centre-right rival of the president, re-enters government as number two to Dominique de Villepin, once Chirac's determined mouthpiece in opposing George W Bush's war on Iraq. But Sarkozy is the power behind the scenes; he takes the post of interior minister on condition only that his party's policies - that is, his own policies - be pursued from now on.
Sarko, too, parades as the people's champion. He made no secret before the referendum of aiming to replace Chirac, still less so now that Chirac is crippled. But for his overt rivalry with the president, the premiership was his for the taking. By appointing Villepin, an elegant mandarin who has never held elective office, Chirac clings to a semblance of power by his presidential fingertips.
The Sarkozy response to the No vote, however, is quite the opposite of the Fabius push on the social side. Yes, Europe must be more attentive to the little people, or go bust. But reinforcing French-style regulated policy won't help, given that even in its current form it has let them down. The way to meet their fears is to give them something that works, he says, hailing Blairism's free-market success thus far in keeping unemployment down and economic growth up. Given Sarko's astral popularity rating, he is runaway favourite to become France's next president. Did the left's bravehearts jump for nothing?