Friday, December 25, 2009

Watcher's Winners For A Holiday Weekend!

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It's that time again... the Council has spoken, choosing the winners of this week's competition. And there's some superb Christmas weekend reading in your stocking for you...No lumps of coal here!

In the Council category, the winner this week was Bookworm Room with an interesting essay on Communism's role in th eglobal warming controversy, The Communist Cat is out of the Climate Change Bag:
Since the beginning, climate change skeptics have said that the hysteria of the man-made global warming movement, aside from being based on manifestly shoddy and often dishonest science, was in fact a Leftist political gambit. The Communists, having failed to win the world over with a Cold War had regrouped and were seeking to win it over with a warm war. By targeting Western (that is, capitalist) nations as the evildoers in the world’s imminent boiling destruction, and then playing on the fear, guilt and ignorance of those same Western nations, the Communists . . . er, global warming saviors . . . announced a solution: the West should give up its wealth by transferring it en masse to poor nations. The West should also give up its lifestyle, by abandoning electricity, gas and even toilet paper. The West, in other words, should give true meaning to global warming by engaging in self-immolation.

The last month, though, has seen this Communist-inspired house of cards collapse as quickly as the Soviet bloc did back in 1989. First came ClimateGate, which revealed to the whole world the fact that the most ardent climate “scientists” were, in fact, ideologues who cared little about science, and a great deal about achieving a political goal. They lied about their data, destroyed their facts, and systematically set out to muzzle and destroy anyone who disagreed with them.

In the non-Council category the winner this week is the always scintillatingMichael Yon with a birdseye view of the ewar in Afghanistan entitled Arghandab & The Battle for Kandahar :
People are confused about the war. The situation is difficult to resolve even for those who are here. For most of us, the conflict remains out of focus, lacking reference of almost any sort. Vertigo leaves us seeking orientation from places like Vietnam—where most of us never have been. So sad are our motley pundits-cum-navigators that those who have never have been to Afghanistan or Vietnam shamelessly use one to reference the other. We saw this in Iraq.

The most we can do is pay attention, study hard, and try to bring something into focus that is always rolling, yawing, and seemingly changing course randomly, in more dimensions than even astronauts must consider. All while gauging dozens of factors, such as Afghan Opinion, Coalition Will, Enemy Will and Capacity, Resources, Regional Actors (and, of course, the Thoroughly Unexpected). Nobody will ever understand all these dynamic factors and track them at once and through time. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that a tiger doesn’t need to completely understand the jungle to survive, navigate, and then dominate. It is not necessary to know every anthropological and historical nuance of the people here. If that were the case, our Coalition of over forty nations would not exist. More important is to realize that they are humans like us. They get hungry, happy, sad, and angry; they make friends and enemies (to the Nth degree); they are neither supermen nor vermin. They’re just people.

But it always helps to know as much as you can. This will take much time, many dispatches, and hard, dangerous work. Let’s get started.

Council Notes: If you want to see your blog piece listed on the Watcher’s Council page as an honorable mention, our generous offer of link whorage remains open. Here's how you take advantage of it:
  • Simply make a post linking to this week’s Council winners

  • Send me an e-mail with the subject line ‘link whorage’ at rmill2k@msn.com before 5PM next Tuesday, December 22nd. Include a link to that post and a link to the piece you want to appear in next week's Honorable Mentions

  • The resulting fame, glory and increased traffic are yours for the taking.

  • Here's the complete rundown of this week's results. Only the Provocateur and Mere Rhetoric were unable to vote, but only Mere Rhetoric was affected by the mandatory 2/3 vote penalty.

    I can't wait to see next week's exciting entries, and as always, congratulations not only to the winners but to all the participants.

    Have a great Christmas weekend!

    Council Submissions



    Non-Council Submissions






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