NGC Inside 9/11

Looking forward to this 4 hour, 2 part documentary with some anticipation and some anxiety.

Anticipation because I'm always eager to hear tidbits about the Global Jihad that I've not heard, perspectives I've not considered, or ways of thinking about the whole thing that I've not yet gotten my head around.

Anxiety because, well, it's a damned unpleasant thing to dredge up and I'm sure that some of the anger and hopelessness of it all will most likely resurface.

Curious to see if Scheuer (or anybody else for that matter) adds anything new.

Scheuer's new posting at lewrockwell.com makes some good points. I wish he'd tone down the shoe pounding just a leetle bit as it sometimes gets hard to see his usually valid points through the angry rhetoric. Not that there's nothing to be angry about. There's plenty, and I think his new article hits on a good chunk of that, but experience shows that it's hard to find a point when somebody's screaming buzzwords at you.

Take a deep breathe, Mike, and head back toward the more pedantic style of Imperial Hubris while keeping some of the more fiery style.

More after digesting the NGC special.

Robert Fisk's latest pieces on Iraq, FROM IRAQ, seem to be showing a side of Iraq that we're not seeing to much of from the Green Zone entrenched big media. Kudos to him for his bravery, fortitude and forthrightness. Thanks, Robert.

Cubs lose today 8-2, their eighth in a row and follows losses of 3-8, 4-9, 1-6, 0-2, and 5-9.

Pitching not good.

The White Sox have scored about the same amount of runs over the last 2 weeks but are winning games while the Cubs are losing. I've already pounded on the defense, so let's look at pitching.

Cubs have fallen to 10th in NL in ERA, wins, earned runs allowed, 15th in home runs allowed, 15th in walks allowed,

On the plus side, they are leading the league in strike outs. So they've got that going for them. Which is nice.

So, how to sum up? While the Sox still show no regular started hitting over .300, they've won 74 games and just took 2 of three from the $200mil Yanks in Yanktown. The Cubs have twice the Sox payroll, and just got swept by the Mets and Reds. Why? Pitching and defense. As Kenny Williams and the Sox marketing department call 'em...Grinders.

Meanwhile, the Cubs have Wood, Zambrano, Garciaparra, and now Aramis Ramirez playing hurt. Do your 3 million paying fans a favor and REST THEM. Please. Shut Wood down. Put Ramirez on the DL. Play Nomar every other day and if Carlos really isn't healthy with his back and toe, then rest him too.

September call ups can't come soon enough. Hopefully Hendry will give Dusty orders to play the kids for the month so we can see what we've got.

On the horizon, 7 games against St. Louis and Houston, with the entire SL staff coming in with an extra day's rest. My best guess is they might win 1 of 4 from the Cardinals.

Great article today on the Global Internet Jihad/Insurgency courtesy of the Washington Post and MSNBC. Nothing I haven't read before. Again Scheuer was on the money here.

The only thing I can really question is Scheuer's continued insistence that the AQ higher ups are somehow directing the troops. I'm not saying that they aren't pleased as camel flies about what the kids are doing in their name, and that they don't deserve tons of credit for creating the climate for these actions and making the tools available for the willing to carry them out, but I just can't see them directing these numbskulls in Britain. Sharm al-Sheikh maybe, but not Britain.

Another game this week and another loss. Our third game with the cavalry, our third loss.

Pitching and hitting aside, where they put themselves anyway, by the fourth inning poor Cubs defense had already killed us. Two errors were charged, but here's the real tally:

Ramirez-error leading to run
Macias-slow to ball and poor throw leading to run
Hollandsworth-slow to ground ball leading to run, bobble on ball leading to extra base and run
Lawton-off line throw home on shallow fly ball that also misses cut-off man
Barrett (passed ball allowing runner to advance that later scores

Say what you want about anything else, but teams that play like this don't win games, much less series, divisions or wild cards. Who's fault? I'm not sure, but I'd eliminate as many of these folks as possible next season. Assuming that Ramirez is the keeper group, bye bye to the other four in favor of folks who can catch the ball, throw to the the right base, hit the cut-off man, and take the ball to the opposite field when necessary.

Disgusting.

Dusty received a letter from somebody purporting to be a Cubs fan wishing his cancer was back so he'd die and the Cubs would get a new manager. I'm not sure how much of the current plight is Dusty's fault, but the only folks I can conceive of wishing had cancer are right now praying to Allah for an a-bomb to go off in one of our cities. Wishing that on somebody involved with sports, yes even here in Chicago, is so out of hand that I can't even conceive. Get a life, d00d. It's only sports. Dissect it. Bum out about it. Cheer and yell. Then get over it. It's entertainment. We've got kids being killed and maimed in Iraq and Afghanistan. That's worth taking seriously. It is life and death. Professional baseball isn't.

Great coverage to 1B by Wuertz on a double play groundball. Props where props are due.

Carlos leaves after the fourth inning. The hurt toe has turned into a hurting back as well. Perhaps it hurts from carrying the weight of his anemic offense and defense on his shoulders.

Began today with another predictable dose of Cubs waiting to catch the inevitable wave of a prolonged winning streak. To wit, this from Jim Hendry:

''Two years ago today, we were two games over, right around the same time in '03, and got on a heck of a run,'' he said. ''It's time. We have a lot of work to do. We got quality teams ahead of us that have played better baseball up to now.''

I am reminded of reading almost daily for all of 2003 news from somebody in the White Sox organization, especially Jerry Manual, about the winning streak that was always just around the corner. My question to them then, and to the Cubs now, is aside from the blind optimism of the hypercompetitive professional athlete, WHY should anyone think that this mythical win streak is really coming? No evidence exists anywhere I can see for this. Too many impatient hitters swinging at pitchers pitches out of the strike zone and either striking out, popping up, or hitting weakly to an infielder, baserunning mistakes and pitches left over the middle of the plate with two strikes.

Hey look! A pitcher (Maddux of course) covering first base in the sixth inning!

After dropping their national TV game today against the Mets, there are now 6 teams in front of the Cubs for the wild card. The feeling here is that they need to head back to spring training with a retooled lineup and work on the fundamentals that the White Sox have mastered, under a manager that actually emphasizes then, and try again some other time. When it's August and you're trailing the Brewers, something is seriously, seriously wrong with your $100 million baseball team.

Looks like pitchers have decided that pitching D Lee down and in and then higher than high (the Patterson) is the way to get him out. And from the looks of it over the last 18 days, they may be right, at least until Lee makes some adjustments.

Cubs fall to 1-3 on the road trip since declaring that:
*Each game is a must win game.
*Dusty does all the yelling he needs to behind doors to get guys' attention.
*We're practically making three trades with all of the guys we'll get off the DL this week.

The cavalry's here and we used 6 pitchers in a must win game to lose by 4 runs and fall behind the freakin' Milwaukee Seligs by a 1/2 game with 5 teams in front of us.

Uh huh.

"How many of our guys can we sneak through wavers to trade in August?" is the question we need to be posing, not the more commonly asked opposite. Cut the payroll, play the kids and find a nice, face-saving landing pad for Hendry's guy Dusty.

All that and Nomar's average dropped to .145 on his 0-fer. Welcome back, Superstar.



Today's music goodie is the last ever album by Epic Soundtracks "Good Things". Gorgeous. We miss him.

The two attacks on London and the horrific, apparently Bedouin abetted, attacks at Sharm al-Sheikh seem to me to provide further proof of Michael Scheuer's analysis of the "global war on terror" actually existing as a war on the West by a global Islamic Jihad insurgency, a completely different paradigm than the leadership seems to be on or seems able to admit.

After Zawahiri's latest love letter to Blair and Bush, it has really crystallized for me the fact that Bin Laden's second greatest wish, following our foolhardy invasion of Iraq, has finally come true. The seeds that Al-Qaeda has been planting for 10+ years in the Sudan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan seem to have taken fervent root and are approaching full bloom. Much discussion in the West seems to be centered on whether the good Egyptian doctor actually was taking credit for any of the July bombings. I think that this discussion, outside of a bar room argument with as much meaning as who should be the fourth pitcher out of the Cubs bullpen, is really beside the point.

Even if Al-Qaeda's leadership didn't order some or all of these attacks, they were clearly abbetted by the decade of training for asymmetric warfare and modern information dissemination capabilities supplied by Al-Qaeda. By training up to 100,000 bodies by some estimates at their camps and then dispersing their trainees all over the globe, from upstate NY and Oregon to Indonesia, Thailand, Australia, the Caucasus and Western Europe, and then providing all like-minded jihadis with enough information to make the Anarchist's Cookbook look more like The Joy of Cooking, I don't think the leadership needs to order anything but the highest profile attacks necessary to steer the overall global situation to their advantage. And in between these more spectacular attacks, the jihadi sprouts have more than enough motivation, support, information and rich targets to keep the authorities busy, acting as force multipliers for the parent organization, and fulfilling Usama's whimsical prophesy about sending a few guys to the furthest point the globe to wave a flag and send the Western leadership into an expensive conniption.

So it seems doubtful to me that Ayman and Usama somehow passed on the go-ahead for the relatively primitive attacks by the London bombers, but with the unquestioned the ability for the leadership to focus the worldwide Muslim anger onto the governments of Western Europe and the USA and then provide those angered with all the information they could ever need to make effective anti-personnel weapons on the cheap from a sporting goods store and hardware store, they've already done most of the heavy lifting. With the additional anger over the continued images in Iraq, the big two mostly need to sit back, make sure the AC's working in their high tech cave, and then fire up the video camera when the latest event falls their way, only further stirring the pot.

It seems pretty safe to say that one of the only places on Earth that didn't have a problem with jihadis was Iraq. Now we've got a self-fulfilling prophecy where we actually can take the fight to the terrorists in Iraq because Iraq is now "the Woodstock" of this generation of Muslim youth, as they said on Over There this week. We've turned a primarily secular society almost completely devoid of Islamic terrorism (outside of the US controlled no-fly zones where Ansar al-Islam had taken root), into one huge training camp (so attractive that message boards are telling young Muslims to stay away for the moment unless they have specialized skills because they're more a burden than a help) AND propaganda tool suitable for worldwide recruiting and inspiration.

How we fix this and refocus, I'm still not sure and I've not seen a ton of ideas. I see tons of suggestions about what not to do, some obvious, some potentially helpful, and all apparently ignored by the Vicious Bastards in DC, but I have yet to see anybody throw out a sort of all-encompassing plan that would at least get us started on the right road. It could be that as long as we're in Iraq, and making kissy face with the Saudi monarchy AND Sharon at the same time, not much of a plan is really possible.

But boy the blue bonnets sure are pretty in Central Texas in the spring, aren't they?

The Cubs head into tonight 54-54, with 54 games to play and without their center fielder, Jerry Hairston, who will miss the next months with a torn ligament in his non-throwing elbow. Expect to see a lot of Jeremy Burnitz in CF, with Corey Patterson mired below .220 in the minors.

For the weekend's series, we have Rich Hill vs. Tom Glavine (2.72 ERA in last 4 stars), which smells like a loss to me, then Maddux vs. Ishii where I see Maddux winning one after his last outing, wrapped up by Zambrano vs. Zambrano which I'll also chalk up to the Mets w/Carlos' raw big toe. Cubs come back to Wrigley 55-56 to face Cinci and St. Louis.

Curious to see how quickly the pitchers get over to cover first base tonight after the last few days of mishaps in that regard.

The Dusty to Someplace Else rumors have officially started on radio and in print. I like Dusty for the most part, but I'm really sick of seeing his team do things that "Dusty teams just don't do" like play poor D and mental mistakes in the "heat" of a wild card race. I can't tell you who would be better, but I can't tell you Dusty's team next year will be any better either.

Next week, politics.

Cedric Benson, get they West Texas Ass into training camp, pronto! Pronto!

The 2005 Cubs have turned into the 2004 Mets. $100,000,000.00 in payroll and no better 2/3 of the way through the season than when they started. The high water mark for this year's Cubs came on June 11, at 33-27, six games over when Todd Wellemeyer got the W against the world champs at Wrigley. On either side of that mark, the Cubs have shown a unique ability to combine short streaks of hot bats and ace pitching with:

Blunders on the bases-Dusty promised would be fixed in spring training. One would have though that the exit of Alou couldn't help but elevate the Cubs baserunning, but some of the most astonishingly poor baserunning I've ever seen has come this year thanks to Burnitz, Patterson, Lee and Ramirez.

shaky defense-Last year the Cubs ranked fifth in defensive efficiency, this year third. However, when the cozy confines of Wrigley are taken into account, they drop down to the bottom third of the league. Likewise, their fielding percentage ranks 13th of 16 teams, in spite of the dollars spent. Dusty has said more than once that "his teams don't play defense like this." Evidently they do. And they are.

From the Wayback Machine of Spring Training, Derrek Lee had this to say: "Last year, we didn't execute on the bases or defensively at all, really," first baseman Derrek Lee says. "This year, the coaching staff has put more emphasis on it. The players have, too. I just think it was a lack of concentration, maybe," Lee says. "Defense and baserunning basically come down to concentration."

Sadly, this hasn't changed.

Poor decision making and mental mistakes-Witness Barrett's play to lose last night's game when he neglected to run at the player stuck in the run down, which is taught at the earliest levels of Little League. Physical mistakes do happen. Mental mistakes that come from either a lack of concentration and focus by the player or a lack of emphasis by the lose ballgames and pennants.

The vaunted pitching staff "nobody wants to face in a short series"-Our team ERA is 8th in the league. If that's the marker, then I'm sure nobody wants to face the Milwaukee Brewers or Detroit Tigers in a short series either, because they both sport better team pitching than the Cubs at the 2/3 mark. Wood's hurt and wild (but struck out a ton of guys one day a few years,back). Prior's horribly inconsistent when healthy (but has huge calves). Maddux has one or two good game for every day he throws softballs instead of cutters. Jerome Williams and Rich Hill are young and show promise, but they're not taking anybody anywhere this year.

Tomorrow we get back Kerry Wood in the bullpen (how he's supposed to pitch 3 or 4 times a week out of the bullpen when his arm or shoulder couldn't handle once every 5 days is a mystery to me), Scott Williamson in the bullpen (same issues except he's coming back from Tommy John surgery 6 months early!) and Nomar Garciaparra (coming back from a torn groin muscle and who says he still can't go 100% out of the box). These three guys are being heralded as the cavalry, when in effect they're three gimpy guys who used to be good players. The odds of any of them making it to the last week of September are slim, and the odds of all of them making it are off the books. Wood will be shut down by mid-September to get him ready for next year. Williamson will be pitching every 4-5 days out of the pen if at all and Garciaparra at best will be seeing action 3 out of 5 days.

Welcome the cavalry!

I've been saying since late April that this is a .500 team. I was hoping to be proven wrong, but sadly that doesn't appear to be the case. I now find myself rooting not to fall below it.

On the happy side, I've rediscovered 1980's "Harder...Faster" by Canadians April Wine. What a great rock record! It's not going to scare anybody off with its ferocity, but it has a wonderful blend of arena rock and catchy as hell pop, perfectly captured in the stadium shaking anthem "I Like to Rock" that leads off the album and is quickly followed by the perfect pop tune "Say Hello" with it's bubbling synthy rhythms and Gibson echo. I loved this album in high school and damn if I don't love it now.