Very rarely does intelligence provide clear cut answers like: this group is going to attack this place on this day at this time with a force of this size. Intelligence usually provides hints, partial answers, and clues that are clear only in hindsight. The arguments one hears for all of this crap make it sound we need to start listening to this individual's phone calls in the next hour to avert some disaster.

No. Previously gathered hints, partial answers, and clues have led the intelligence agencies to this (or these) individual(s). And once they start listening to these conversations they will not get a clear cut answer; they will get more hints, partial answers, and clues. This additional information may, or may not, be enough for the intelligence officers to make sense out of the disconnected facts they have and pull the pieces together into a recognizable picture. So there's really very little real world justification for the argument that we can't afford the time to follow judicial procedures because otherwise some disaster will follow.

for the drop in violence. An additional 30,000 troops is diddlysquat in a country the size of Iraq. It was the new tactics employed by the army to get various tribal chiefs to fight against the various insurgent groups. These groups will regroup after being attacked from the rear and things will pick back up as it were.

Psychology? Maybe.

But the last sentence from your quotation from Mr. Steyn is, for me, illustrative. He says that the strategic challenge exposed by 9/11 has not been accepted by the electorate. Strategic challenge? What #@!!%$ strategic challenge (leaving aside the PC-speak for the moment)?? In al-qaeda we're talking about a relative handful of people with maybe a few hundred millions in funding. They have no military forces except for what might be called a militia armed with purely low tech weaponry, no Air Force, and no Navy. How in God's green earth can such an organization represent "a strategic challenge" to the country with the world's most over funded and badass military?

It reminds me of the questions I asked my senators and representatives prior to our invasion of Iraq. How, I asked, can a country with no blue water Navy, no long range Air Force, and no ICBMs that is half a world away be a clear and present danger to the US? Unfortunately, the braindead myopia exhibited in both instances strikes me as too similar to write it off as a simple psychological flaw.

The last crew I want confronting the complexities of modern life is the government which has proven over and over again that it is not only incompetent but also rigid in their incompetency. I'll certainly agree that greed played a role in the meltdown but it was not the only element and most of the greed wasn't on Wall Street, it was on Main Street where unscrupulous mortgage brokers suckered unsuspecting people into patently-going-to-fail mortgage arrangements that they then sold to Wall Street. So why is Wall Street so focused on short term results? I'll give you a hint: as with just about everything, it has to do with incentives and disincentives.

But your article was about overly optimistic executives. Executives aren't paid the big bux to be either pessimistic or optimistic. They're paid to be able to identify and react to strategic threats and opportunities confronting their companies. In an era when chief executives are oversexed, overpaid, and over here, they have pretty consistently been doing a piss poor job of executing their fundamental responsibilities. There's a reason for that, too. When you can cost your shareholders and companies around the world billions and billions of dollars and get fired with a multimillion dollar severance package, where are the wages of sin?

American law is biased against the male - this is experience speaking - joint custody of your children? Not if she objects. If you make more money than she does, you get to pay for her attorney even if you didn't want the divorce. Did she cheat on you? Well, I guess that's a good reason to get a divorce but you'll still pay for her attorney and it won't have any impact on any of the other outcomes. And don't even get me started on child support. I never had a problem supporting my children but I object to supporting my ex-wife through child support.

That said, I doubt that religious based arbitration is any better and may be worse since it will be ideologically based. It seems to me that the object should be to be fair to the two spousal units involved and not to impose some ideological preconception.

That's why I liked the Iranian model (this would be in 1978). A friend of mine married an Iranian girl when I lived there. They had to draw up a marriage contract that covered the waterfront: his responsibilities, her responsibilities, what happened in case of divorce, yada, yada, yada. In Iran, that would have been the governing document (it's probably all changed now that they have a theocracy) and I think that would probably yield a fairer consequence in the case of divorce since they both agreed to it at the outset. Could that be abused? Sure. Any system can be abused but I've got to believe that it's better than having a bunch of ##%&!!@# lawyers impose their agenda on you.