Different River

”You can never step in the same river twice.” –Heraclitus

Part of the reason for the increase in the price of gas is increased demand from China and India, and supply problems in Nigeria, Venezuela, and Mexico. But the demand increases have developed over many years, and the supply problems over several months — so why the rapid increases on a week-to-week basis?

One reason is the falling value of the U.S. dollar relative to other currencies. Bryan Caplan wrote this up very succinctly, with some good back-of-the-envelope calculations:

Oil is sold on world markets, and the dollar is now very weak. What would the dollar price of gas be today, if the dollar were as strong as it was back in 2002? Here’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation (gas price data are here; exchange rate data are here):

Today a dollar buys you .6451 Euros, and it takes $4.134 to buy a gallon of gas. Suppose the dollar were still at parity with the Euro, as it was on 11/23/2002 (actually 1.0030, but who’s counting?). In that case, a dollar would buy you (1/.6451)=1.55 times as much. So a gallon of gas would be only $2.667.

The actual price of gas back in the third week of November, 2002 was $1.451. So to a first approximation, if the dollar had been stable, gas prices would have risen by about 80%, instead of 280%.

Admittedly, the U.S. is a big player in world oil markets; if the dollar had been stronger, it would have partly raised the world price of oil, and thereby the domestic price of gas. So maybe a stable dollar would have left gas prices 100% higher rather than 80%. If you adjust for the fact that some costs of gasoline (refining, taxes) are purely domestic, maybe gas would have been 150% more expensive even given a stable dollar.

Note that this has nothing to do with “price-gouging” or even with the oil companies at all. Granted, oil companies that own their own oilfields are making a lot of money now — but those that buy oil on the open market and then refine it into gasoline are not necessarily making money at all.

Two Democrats in the Senate have now found our why gas prices are so high: It’s Enron’s fault!

The article is here. The claim is that:

what lawmakers have called the “Enron loophole,” which was created in 2000 largely at the request of Enron Corp[,] … exempted electronic markets for large traders from government oversight.

The energy trading provision gives the Commodity Futures Trading Commission enhanced authority to detect and prevent manipulation in the electronic energy markets, create audit trails, require more
transparency in transactions and increase financial penalties for cases of market manipulation.

This of course, has nothing to do with why oil prices are high. And it will not cause oil prices to fall. It will just create a bunch of extra paperwork that will allow the CFTC to get a better view as it watches oil prices rise.

The senators [Carl Levin, D-MI, and Dianne Feinstein, D-CA] said the recent increase in unregulated energy trading
by speculators was partly to blame for higher oil and natural gas prices.”

This makes about as much sense as saying that parachute manufacturers are partly to blame for gravity.

The appetite of Democrats for kooky conspiracy theories should never be underestimated….

Do those “missing child” posters actually work? I’ve heard some stories about kids with pictures on milk cartons and the like being found (or not), but the question in my mind has always been, what is the chance that someone who sees the child will actually see the poster — within enough time to make the connection between the two?

It turns out, most people don’t notice the child — even if the child is sitting right next to the poster.

Local 6 printed missing posters of Britney — a paid 8-year-old actress — and posted them at the entrance of the Fashion Square Mall in Orlando.

Britney sat alone on a mall seat near a missing poster as her father watched from a distance inside a nearby Panera restaurant.

The experiment was to determine how many people would notice or help the girl posing as a missing child.

Local 6 videotaped person after person entering the mall without even noticing the missing child signs.

Others who did see the posters on the doors were videotaped walking by the missing child.

So, people aren’t really that observant, right? OK, so they are busy and thinking about their own things, not looking around, right?

Well, no — it’s worse than that. They stopped a bunch of people who claimed to have noticed the child, but decided to do nothing.

“I saw her but didn’t know what to think,” shopper Megan Reed said.

“I didn’t even see her,” shopper Priseilla Landerer said. “I didn’t notice her.”

The majority of people at the mall who did see a missing person sign also saw the young girl but just kept walking, Local 6’s Donald Forbes reported.

“I took a good look at the poster,” shopper Tony Roush said. “I’m a photographer, so I’m good with faces and I walked in and I was like, ‘That’s the girl. What do I do?’”

Some people said they were fearful of getting involved.

And, some people were afraid of being mistaken for the kidnapper:

“That’s what I was thinking,” a shopper said. “I was scared the mom would pop out of nowhere and be like, ‘Why are you talking to my child?’”
…
“We don’t want to get really close because some people don’t like it when you bother their child,” shopper Linda Turner said.

Then again, two people did stop and talk to the child and tried to figure out what was going on. In real life, maybe that’s all it takes.

Still, it’s disturbing that people were willing to admit that they noticed and did nothing. I find this more disturbing than if they’d claimed not to have noticed. Why? Because the fact that they admit it means that they think — or think most people would think — that it’s OK to notice and do nothing. And THAT is what’s most disturbing of all.

Kathryn Jean Lopez writes:

I’m devastated to report that our dear friend, mentor, leader, and founder William F. Buckley Jr., died this morning in his study in Stamford, Connecticut.

He died while at work; if he had been given a choice on how to depart this world, I suspect that would have been exactly it. At home, still devoted to the war of ideas.

As you might expect, we’ll have much more to say here and in NR in the coming days and weeks and months. For now: Thank you, Bill. God bless you, now with your dear Pat. Our deepest condolences to Christopher and the rest of the Buckley family. And our fervent prayer that we continue to do WFB’s life’s work justice.

Buckley was one of the intellecutal giants of 20th-century America. He once said is proudest achievement was to run everything that was “antisemitic or kooky” out of the conservative movement.

As he always closed the obituaries he wrote: RIP.

Of course, the New York Times, which has no doubt been awaiting this moment for forty years or more, had its obituary online within moments of Mr. Buckley’s death.

Seems like they jumped the gun a bit — as of this writing, their obituary refers to two of Buckley’s books “scheduled to be published in 2007.”

Less than 24 hours after Fidel Castro’s resignation was announced, Hillary Clinton won the Havana primary with 98.65% of the vote.

You’ve probably heard the news of the shooting at Northern Illinois University, in which a former student got up on the stage of a lecture hall with a shotgun and two or three handguns, and shot 22 people, five fatally, then killed himself.

The question is, how could that possibly have happened? In Illinois, it’s illegal to carry a gun on campus — or pretty much anywhere for that matter. Didn’t that guy know he could have gotten into a lot of trouble if he’d been caught carrying those guns?

Normally in these situations people call for stricter gun laws. But in Illinois, the gun laws are already pretty much as strict as they can be. Obviously, the message is not getting through to the right people. Clearly, they need a large-scale ad campaign informing the public that’s illegal to carry guns. Better education would have prevented this tragedy … right?

Ben Smith at Politico.com relates:

Edwards responded sharply to a Clinton aide’s criticism today, intensifying a back-and-forth that began at last night’s debate, after Clinton said Nataline Sarkisyan could be alive if the patients bill of rights, which he’d boasted of championing, had passed.

“The Clinton campaign has no conscience,” Edwards said, after Clinton spokesman Jay Carson said Edwards does no more than “read articles about people who need help and talk about them.”

Well, if that isn’t the clearest case ever of the pot calling the kettle African-American, I don’t know what is. Recall this incident from the 2004 campaign, when Edwards said that the recently-deceased Christopher Reeve could be brought back to life if Bush had supported federal funding for stem cell research!

As CNN reported on October 12, 2004:

Edwards said Reeve, who died Sunday, “was a powerful voice for the need to do stem cell research and change the lives of people like him.

“If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve will get up out of that wheelchair and walk again,” Edwards said.

Now I understand there is a lot of controversy about what, if any, benefits might result from stem cell research, and how long it might take for those benefits to be realized. But nobody — nobody except John Edwards — ever claimed it would result in resurrections.

But when former heart surgeon and then-Senator Bill Frist called him on it,

Edwards campaign spokesman Mark Kornblau hit back, “Yes, breakthrough research often takes time, but that’s never been a reason to not even try — until George Bush.”

So to summarize: John Edwards blames someone’s death on a policy of his political opponent’s. Hillary Clinton blames someone’s death on a policy of John Edwards. John Edwards claims, based on this fact, that Hillary Clinton “has no conscience.”

Therefore, by John Edwards’ own standard, John Edwards has no conscience.

Either that, or John Edwards is a hypocrite. Which is the more charitable conclusion?

The second most common name for new baby boys in Britain is “Mohammed.”

Just don’t try that with a teddy bear!

Some Jews — in Israel, no less — are now against Channukah. On the grounds of … Global Warming!

In a campaign that has spread like wildfire across the Internet, a group of Israeli environmentalists is encouraging Jews around the world to light at least one less candle this Hanukka to help the environment.

The founders of the Green Hanukkia campaign found that every candle that burns completely produces 15 grams of carbon dioxide. If an estimated one million Israeli households light for eight days, they said, it would do significant damage to the atmosphere.

“The campaign calls for Jews around the world to save the last candle and save the planet, so we won’t need another miracle,” said Liad Ortar, the campaign’s cofounder, who runs the Arkada environmental consulting firm and the Ynet Web site’s environmental forum. “Global warming is a milestone in human evolution that requires us to rethink how we live our lives, and one of the main paradigms of that is religion and how it fits into the current situation.”
…
United Torah Judaism MK Avraham Ravitz called the environmentalists “crazy people who are playing with the minds of innocent Jewish people.” He said the campaign would only convince people who do not light candles anyway.

“They should encourage people to light one less cigarette instead,” Ravitz said.
…

But if they do that, they’ll only make people live longer, and produce more carbon emmissions!

No, that’s not a typo. AP reports:

MERRILL, Wis. - A service station that offered discounted gas to senior citizens and people supporting youth sports has been ordered by the state to raise its prices.

Center City BP owner Raj Bhandari has been offering senior citizens a 2 cent per gallon price break and discount cards that let sports boosters pay 3 cents less per gallon.

But the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection says those deals violate Wisconsin’s Unfair Sales Act, which requires stations to sell gas for about 9.2 percent more than the wholesale price.

Bhandari said he received a letter from the state auditor last month saying the state would sue him if he did not raise his prices. The state could penalize him for each discounted gallon he sold, with the fine determined by a judge.

Bhandari, who bought the station a year ago, said he worries customers will think he stopped the discounts because he wants to make more money. About 10 percent of his customers had used the discount cards.

Dale Van Camp said he bought a $50 card to support the local youth hockey program. It would have saved him about $100 per year on gas, he said.

So, there you go. Set higher prices, get sued for price gouging. Set lower prices, get sued for “unfair sales.”

As predicted, now researchers are reportedly using stem cells not (just) from embryos, but from born-alive infants killed for their stem cells. This according to the BBC, which (understatement alert!) is not exactly a right-wing news source. (Boldface in the original.)

Ukraine babies in stem cell probe

By Matthew Hill
BBC Health Correspondent
Tuesday, 12 December 2006, 09:34 GMT

Healthy new-born babies may have been killed in Ukraine to feed a flourishing international trade in stem cells, evidence obtained by the BBC suggests.

Disturbing video footage of post-mortem examinations on dismembered tiny bodies raises serious questions about what happened to them.

Ukraine has become the self-styled stem cell capital of the world.

There is a trade in stem cells from aborted foetuses, amid unproven claims they can help fight many diseases.

But now there are claims that stem cells are also being harvested from live babies.

Wall of silence

The BBC has spoken to mothers from the city of Kharkiv who say they gave birth to healthy babies, only to have them taken by maternity staff.

In 2003 the authorities agreed to exhume around 30 bodies of foetuses and full-term babies from a cemetery used by maternity hospital number six.

One campaigner was allowed into the autopsy to gather video evidence. She has given that footage to the BBC and Council of Europe.

In its report, the Council describes a general culture of trafficking of children snatched at birth, and a wall of silence from hospital staff upwards over their fate.

The pictures show organs, including brains, have been stripped - and some bodies dismembered.

A senior British forensic pathologist says he is very concerned to see bodies in pieces - as that is not standard post-mortem practice.

It could possibly be a result of harvesting stem cells from bone marrow.

Hospital number six denies the allegations.

Citizen SMASH attended Secretary Rumsfeld’s last “Town Hall” meeting in the Pentagon — basically, Rumsfeld’s farewell to the Pentagon employees. Read it and weep. Selections:

Donald Rumsfeld is not universally loved in the Pentagon. I’m told that he can be a tough, stubborn, and demanding boss. Rumsfeld is infamous for firing off short memos — known colloquially as “snowflakes” — asking next-to-impossible-to-answer questions or demanding revolutionary changes. He came to the building in 2001, promising to transform the Department of Defense from a Cold War force to a more flexible, agile military, better prepared to face the challenges of the Twenty-first Century. Almost six years later, that transformation is well underway, but not yet complete. Along the way, Rumsfeld has stepped on many toes, and slaughtered many sacred cows. Inevitably, he made some enemies, especially among the senior officers and long-serving bureaucrats who were heavily invested in the “old way” of doing things.

But the troops, and a solid majority of the officers, love him. This is abundantly clear from the warm reception Rumsfeld receives as he walks up to the podium.
…
Another woman asks what was his worst day, and his best day. I expect him to say “September 11, 2001.” But he surprises me.

“Abu Ghraib.” He says, and a pall crosses over his face. Most men, having been faced with such a profound shame, wouldn’t bring it up voluntarily. But Rumsfeld isn’t most men. He seems genuinely, personally ashamed of what happened in that awful place. It has been reported that he submitted his resignation over the affair, but that the President prevailed upon him to remain.

“My best day?” He pauses. “How about a week from Monday?” A week from Monday, Robert Gates will be sworn in as the new SECDEF, and Rumsfeld will leave the building. He will be missed.
…
After the questions are done, there is a standing ovation. People in the auditorium crowd up to the aisle, in order to shake Rumsfeld’s hand as he passes.

I’m watching all this from the outside, on the monitor. And then the doors open, and he’s in the hallway. A bit smaller than I expected — I’m guessing about 5′8″ — and he looks really short next to General Pace, who is a giant of a man. But at 74, he’s a remarkably solid man, and he walks with strength and confidence. He proceeds slowly down the line of chairs, stopping to shake hands with several people.

He’s standing right in front of me. I offer my hand, and he shakes it. He looks me straight in the eye. “My goodness,” he exclaims. “Did all of you people stand out here for all this time?”
…

Read the whole thing.

Milton Friedman, the world’s greatest exponent of economics, has passed away.

Reuters reports:

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov 16 (Reuters) - Milton Friedman, the free market economist and winner of a 1976 Nobel Prize, died on Thursday morning of heart failure, a spokeswoman for his family said. He was 94.

Friedman’s ideas played a pivotal role in forming the governing philosophies of world leaders like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

He preached free enterprise in the face of government regulation and advocated a monetary policy that called for steady growth in money supplies.

The influential economist died in a hospital in the San Francisco area, the spokeswoman said.

More extensive obituaries — no doubt written years in advance — are available from several different sources, and no doubt more are coming.

Saddam has been sentenced to hang, and Iraqis are dancing on the streets of Baghdad. This according to the London Telegraph — not exactly a bastion of neo-conservatism.

Yet, there are still UN officials American Democratic politicians who think that the Iraqis were better off under Saddam than they are now.

Some U.S. senator better go tell them they were better off under Saddam; they’re too busy celebrating Saddam’s downfall to realize it!

Well, that’s not the original headline of this story, but it could have been.

BOSTON (Reuters) - A Maine attorney who released information in 2000 about President George W. Bush’s drunken driving conviction was arrested on Tuesday after he dressed up as al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and waved a fake gun at traffic.

Police in South Portland, Maine, arrested Thomas Connolly, 49, of Scarborough, Maine, and charged him with criminal threatening. He was released on bail, local officials said.
…
Connolly, a Democrat, ran for governor in Maine in 1998.

The line about Connolly being a Democratic candidate was the second-to-last sentence in the story (the last giving the location of South Portland, Maine, relative to Boston).

I suppose it is an indication of the media’s bias (er, point of view) that much earlier in the article, they took the opportunity of the Democratic candidate’s arrest yesterday for criminal threatening to re-hash Bush’s arrest 30 years ago:

The Bush campaign said Democratic “dirty tricks” were behind the disclosure that at age 30 Bush had been arrested for drunken driving in Kennebunkport, Maine, pleaded guilty, paid a fine and had his license suspended for 30 days.

We’ll see if this guy gets any punishment at all for dressing up as a terrorist and running around waving (what looked like) a gun at random people. I wonder if he was drunk at the time. Or was he just an idiot? Here’s how he explained his actions:

In a phone interview, Connolly said he’d been trying to protest a planned change in local tax rules.

“I didn’t expect to be arrested,” he said. “Obviously I touched a post-9/11 nerve.”

Right. Protest tax laws by dressing up as a terrorist and running around waving a gun. By John Kerry’s standard, he ought to be sentenced to getting “stuck in Iraq.”

Around 11:00pm Eastern (U.S.) Time on Sunday Oct. 8, the North Korean news agency reported that North Korea conducted a successful nuclear test. Stay with me for a second, and pay attention to the times.

According to the Associated Press report, the test was conducted at 10:36 a.m. Monday Oct. 9 local time, which corresponds to 9:36 pm Sunday Eastern (U.S.) Time, or 01:36 Monday UTC (GMT). The AP report was stamped “11:25 PM US/Eastern,” or a bit less than two hours after the reported time of the test.

Now, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is reporting they detected an earthquake centered in North Korea, occuring at “Monday, October 9, 2006 at 10:35:27 AM” local time, or “Monday, October 9, 2006 at 01:35:27 (UTC)” — which is to say, and pretty much the exact same time as the reported nuclear test.

Incidentally, the AP quoted the North Korean news agency as saying, “there was no radioactive leakage from the site.”

Now I don’t know all that much about earthquakes, or all that much about underground nuclear weapons tests, but it seems to me that a good question to ask would be whether they look the same to seismographs (earthquake-detection equipment).

Now there has been a lot of speculation that the purported nuclear program of North Korea is all a bunch of lies, and according to this theory, the reason why Bush hasn’t attacked them (yet) is that he knows they are lies. So if we allow for that, there are three possibilities here:

1. This was a nuclear test that “looked” like an earthquake and was detected as such.
2. This was an earthquake, which the North Koreans opportunistically claimed to be a nuclear test.
3. This was a nuclear test, and the U.S. is trying to make it look like an earthquake to buy time to figure out what to do.
4. This one heckuva coincidence!

Now, the first possibility is unlikely if in fact there was no radioactive leakage. But so far we only have the work of the North Korean news agency on this, and I don’t trust them much. I’m pretty sure the U.S. and perhaps other governments can monitor radioactivity from a distance, and perhaps they’ll tell us what they find. Maybe. Because, ya’ know, an earthquake doesn’t have any readioactive leakage, either.

The third possibliity seems really unlikely — there would have to a contingency plan in advance to set something like that up, and if there’s a contingency plan, it would probably involve some more substantial response.

The second possibility seems more likely — I can actually believe that the North Korean regime would announce for several years that there is an imminent nuclear test, and wait for an earthquake they know the West will detect to claim to test occured. It is completely in character for them.

In fact, it’s even possible that the North Korean people charged with developing the nuclear weapon have done this to deceive their leader, Kim Jong Il. I’m imagining something like this: he orders them to build a nuclear weapon or be tortured to death, they either don’t know how to do it or don’t want to, so they decide the Dear Leader could be fooled by the next earthquake, so they wait for the next earthquake and tell him it’s the nuclear weapon.

The only trouble with this theory: According to the USGS “Historic Seismicity” map, most of the earthquakes in this region, at least since 1990, have been along a line that passes well to the east of the site detected today.

And oh yes, one other thing — the reported depth of the “earthquake” is “0 km” — which is pretty darn close to the surface for an earthquake, but well within the digging capabilities of North Korea.

Opponents of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy are fond of accusing Bush of “not having a plan” for dealing with Iraq after the war to overthrow Saddam Hussein. This is, of course, just a self-righteous way of saying they didn’t like the plan Bush actually did have, and that the plan has not lead to perfect results immediately.

Nevertheless, it’s worth asking those who call for an immediate pullout from Iraq, or a timetable for a pullout within a specified short time frame, what their plan is for dealing with the situation that will result from a pullout.

Clayton Cramer has posed this question, and given some realistic answers. All of his answers are worse than the worst likely scenarios resulting from staying in Iraq. As he points out:

But if the American people decide that the cost is too high, what is the alternative strategy? Leaving Iraq alone right now will lead to full civil war, and probably the crowd that likes to torture people to death with power tools will be back in power–just like the way things were under Saddam Hussein. As the declassified Key Findings of the National Intelligence Estimate last week pointed out, if we lose in Iraq, it will embolden jihadists throughout the world. The reason isn’t hard to figure out: it will be perceived that like what happened in Somalia, Americans are weak, and lack the willingness to fight.

What are the options? Here’s Clayton’s list (I’m summarizing here, not quoting — for his more complete explanations click here):

1. “Fortress America”: Lock down the U.S. at the border and within, and curtail civil rights in the pursuit of terrorists who are here. Of course, it only takes one terrorist to get through — either shipping a nuclear weapon with a long-period timer, or getting one single legal U.S. resident to cooperate. So we are probably looking at more 9/11-scale attacks. (Why is this less likely if we are in Iraq? Because so many jihadists are fighting us over there on their home turf. We don’t want them freed up to attack us at home.)
2. Make the terrorists happy: Don’t just leave Iraq — forget about stopping the Al-Qaeda-backed genocide in Darfur, give them back Afghanistan, cut off aid to Israel and acquiese when Iran uses nuclear weapons to annihilate Israel. And this will only work until they decide it’s time for all of us to convert to Islam also and replace the Constitution with Shari’a law, at which point we will have to either acquiese to that, or go to war with a much stronger enemy.
3. Here I’ll quote: “Treat Muslim nations the way they have treated every other nation. Invade them; occupy; convert their mosques into churches; send in troops with orders to kill anyone that gives them any lip; assess a special tax on Muslims; pass laws that give Muslims less legal rights than non-Muslims, not just in ways that matter (say, a ban on Muslims possessing anything more deadly than a butter knife), but in ways intended to degrade them, like the laws that Muslims nations had prohibiting non-Muslims from riding horses.” I don’t think we, as a society, are willing to do that. We still believe in religious freedom.
4. Prove that Islam is not really as superior as it claims, by nuking Mecca. I don’t think we’re willing to do that, either.
5. Nuke a lot of Muslims. I don’t think we’re willing to do that, either.

So next time someone tells you we should pull out of Iraq, ask them one question: What’s your plan for after that?

If the increase in gasoline prices was caused by price gouging on the part of oil companies, is the recent decrease in gasoline prices due to price gouging by drivers?

I’m just askin’….

Oriana Fallaci, arguably the greatest journalist of the century (this one, and the last one), passed away on Friday in her native Florence. She was 77, and had been fighting cancer for 14 years.

She had spend most of the last decade or two in New York, especially in the last year and a half — since she was facing charges in Italy for what she wrote in her last book.

Fallaci lived a fascinating life, and her biography reads like a history of the world from the time she was born. She joined the Italian anti-fascist resistance with her father at the age of 10. After Italy was captured by the Allies and switched sides, her father was tortured by the Nazis but released alive; Oriana was honorably discharged from the Italian Army at the age of 14. She started writing at age 15, and became a reporter in Florence at age 16, while attending the University of Florence. She was originally a Leftist, but was open to changing her mind based on what she saw — and as such, she necessarily abandoned the Left repeatedly on issues she covered in depth, from Vietnam to Iran to the Middle East to the War on Terror — which she never hestited to call Islamic terror. She was an avowed atheist who had a strong admiration for Pope Benedict XVI, and in fact was one of the first people invited to meet with him after he became Pope. (And she will be buried at an Evalgelical cemetary.)

The Left, of course, called her a fascist. Never mind the fact that she started off in life fighting the real fascists.

Tributes are pouring in from such diverse quarters as Daniel Pipes, Tammy Bruce, Victor Davis Hanson, The Anchoress, Rusty Shackleford, and many others.

Formal obituaries are from the New York Post, Times [of London], the Basque news channel EiTB,

Her manifesto against antisemitism is worth rereading. As is her interview with an Iraqi soldier in Saddam’s army.

One of the original — and I mean original — al-Qaeda-style Islamofascists was captured today in eastern Afghanistan. This is none other than the unlamentable (and unpronounceable) terrorist leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. I remember Hekmatyar from the 1980s when the U.S. was aiding anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan, and Hekmatyar was sort-of on our side in the sense that he was against the Soviets, but was deemed insufficiently trustworthy to receive U.S. support, since he seemed to spend as much time fighting other anti-Soviet allies as fighting the Soviets. When the (Islamic) mujahideen finally drove the Soviets out, Hekmatyar refused a place in the coalition government, claiming it was “un-Islamic” — and continued the war, shifting effortlessly from shooting rockets into Kabul to fight the Soviets, to shooting rockets into Kabul to fight the “un-Islamic” Islamic government. His nemesis was Ahmad Shah Masoud, “The Lion of Panjshir,” the very Islamic, and very pro-Western leader of the anti-Soviet resistance and then the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, better known as the Northern Alliance. Masoud was assassinated on September 9, 2001 — which, as you can see by subtraction, was two days before September 11, 2001. It’s never been entirely clear whether Masoud’s assassination was ordered by Osama bin Laden or Gulbuddin Hekmatyar — it’s believable either way.

As for Hekmatyar, he is the sort of guy who thought the Taliban were not “Islamic” enough — meaning, not violent enough against non-Muslims and not-his-type-of-Muslim. The funny part — if you can call it that — is that according to this biography written in 1997, Hekmatyar was originally a Communist. When he became disillusioned with Communism and fell under the influence of the writings of Sayd Qutb, he traded one form of absolute evil in for another.

And, today — five years to the day after the attack on the United States — this advocate of “martyrdom” to the cause of Islam, surrendered without a fight. Glenn Reynolds quotes Bill Roggio:

On the day of the fifth anniversary of the 9-11 attack, Coalition forces score a high value target in Afghanistan. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the commander of Hezb-i-Islami and ally of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, has been captured during a joint U.S. and Afghan Army raid in “eastern Afghanistan.” Hekmatyar, contrary to his rhetoric gave up to the Coalition forces without a fight. Hekmatyar’s arrest is said to be part of an ‘ongoing operation.’

Hekmatyar has been designated by the U.S. Department of State as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist“ and “has participated in and supported terrorist acts committed by al-Qa’ida and the Taliban.”

I’ve been waiting for 20 years for Hekmatyar to be taken out of action The first 15 of which were spent waiting for the West to decide he ought to be taken out of action.

As an aside, here’s my media prediction: This will get practically no play in the mainstream media. My subsidiary prediction is that if If I’m wrong about that and it does get significant play, half that play will consist of Democrat politicians and strategists and commentators explaining how unimportant it is.

It’s about as unimportant as capturing bin Laden.