monday, july 31 2006
Unique rose images
Looking for rose photographs, fine art prints to decorate your home or office. Check these out.
thirties redux?
The history of 20th-century America is largely about a country that never prepared for war, and was always compelled — by our enemies — to conduct enormous crusades. It was seemingly all or nothing for us. The history of America in war, like that of most others, is largely about making enormous blunders at the beginning, and then sorting it out.
Our great strength is not so much avoiding error, but the ability to recover quickly, change tactics and even strategy, and get it done. I think that applies to the three world wars in the last century.
The scary thing about our current jam is that 9/11 was supposed to have been the wakeup call, but we are again asleep. For this I blame our leaders — both the administration and the Dems. The administration is constitutionally unable to explain itself, and the Dems have no qualms about losing all present battles so long as they can elect their candidates and bring down this president.
The greatest failure of our leaders, with rare exceptions, is their refusal to see the war plain, which means Iran and Syria (might as well call them “Syran,” since they operate in tandem, with Tehran pushing most of the buttons). It was never possible to “win in Iraq” so long as we insisted on fighting in Iraq alone. You can not win a regional war by playing defense in one country. It was, and remains, a sucker’s game. Syran pays no price at all for killing our kids and our allies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now in Gaza and Lebanon/Israel.
and the crowd yelled "moo!"
A leading agricultural show ended in disarray when a young woman performed an impromptu striptease among the cattle lines.
As security officers at the Royal Welsh Show rushed to the scene and tried to restrain her, she was hosed down with water normally used to wash the cattle, preventing them from getting a grip on her.
The stripper ended her table-top performance by throwing her thong into the crowd, which was returned on the end of a pitchfork.
photo or line art?
If I didn't know it already, I wouldn't discern that the gallery below is made up of drawings. Yes! They are NOT photographs. Vector drawings using gradient mesh to be specific. Except for Bert Monroy, all of the vector art displayed here are 100% made from Adobe Illustrator.
Whether for challenge, or for pushing the boundaries of what the Illustrator can do, or just for the sheer pleasure of creating, these brilliant artists have dazzled, wowed, and amazed me with the pyrotechnic showcasing of their technical mastery.
Check out the gallery he links to.
microsoft "photosynth" technology
Watch the video here. Read about it here.
john bull's slow suicide
SCHOOLS would no longer be required to teach children the difference between right and wrong under plans to revise the core aims of the National Curriculum.
Instead, under a new wording that reflects a world of relative rather than absolute values, teachers would be asked to encourage pupils to develop “secure values and beliefs”.
The draft also purges references to promoting leadership skills and deletes the requirement to teach children about Britain’s cultural heritage.
congo quiz
Today, the Democratic Republic of Congo goes to the polls to elect a new president. Under President Mobutu Sese Seko, who died in 1997, Zaire (as the country was then called) saw its per capita gross domestic product decline by an average of 4.9 percent per year between 1980 and 2000, the worst record among countries for which data are available. As Congo heads to the polls, we wonder: What is most remarkable about its recent past?
A. Fastest economic growth rate
B. Received more development aid than any other country
C.Highest birth rate in the world
D. Lowest income per capita in the world
They have their answers, and it's certainly factual. But 3.5-4.5 million estimated deaths from the civil war are certainly remarkable, too.
H/T: VikingPundit
sunday, july 30 2006
clear thinking
From Omar:
...if Zawahiri, Nesrallah, Ahmedinejad and Sadr are calling upon extremists whether, Sunni or Shia, from all over the world to put aside their differences and unite in this war against the free world and to establish the Empire of terror from "Afghanistan to Andalus" then this is more than enough reason for you in the free world and for us who are struggling for our freedom to put aside our differences and disagreements and unite, from Sydney to Mumbai to Baghdad to Paris and London all the way till California, all must stand against this evil that is trying to destroy our world.
ghettoization of war
...the notion that "fighting" a war is the monopoly of those "in uniform" gets to the heart of why America and its allies are having such a difficult time in the present struggle. Nations go to war, not armies. Or, to be more precise, nations, not armies, win wars. America has a military that cannot be defeated on the battlefield, but so what? The first President Bush assembled the biggest coalition in history for Gulf War I, and the bigger and more notionally powerful it got, the better Saddam Hussein's chances of surviving it became. Because the bigger it got, the less likely it was to be driven by a coherent set of war aims.
War is not like firefighting: It's not about going to the burning house, identifying what needs to be done, and doing it; it's not a technical solution to an obvious problem. And, if you think it is, you find yourself like George Bush Sr. in 1991, standing in front of the gates of Baghdad and going, "Er, OK. Now what?"
Some people look at the burning house and see Hezbollah terrorism; others see Israeli obduracy, or a lack of American diplomacy, or Iranian machinations, or a need to get the permanent Security Council members to send peacekeepers, or "poverty" or "despair" or an almighty pile-up of abstract nouns. You can have the best fastest state-of-the-art car on the road, but, if you don't know where you're going, the fellow in the rusting '73 Oldsmobile will get there and you won't. It's the ideas that drive a war and the support they command in the broader society that determine whether you'll see it through to real victory. After Korea and Vietnam and Gulf War I, it shouldn't be necessary to have to state that.
No one can argue with U.S. military superiority. America has the most powerful armed forces on the planet. The Pentagon is responsible for 40 percent of the world's military spending, and outspends the next 20 biggest militaries combined. It's responsible for almost 80 percent of military research-and-development spending, which means the capability gap between it and everyone else widens every day.
So why doesn't it feel like that?
In Iraq, the leviathan has somehow managed to give the impression that what previous mid-rank powers would have regarded as a little light colonial policing has left it stretched dangerously thin and bogged down in an almighty quagmire. Even if it were only lamebrain leftist media spin, the fact that it's accepted by large numbers of Americans and huge majorities of Europeans is a reminder that in free societies a military of unprecedented dominance is not the only source of power. More importantly, significant proportions of this nation's enemies also believe the spin. In April 2003 was Baby Assad nervous that he'd be next? You bet. Is he nervous now?
We live in an age of inversely proportional deterrence: The more militarily powerful a civilized nation is, the less its enemies have to fear the full force of that power ever being unleashed. They know America and other Western powers fight under the most stringent self-imposed etiquette. Overwhelming force is one thing; overwhelming force behaving underwhelmingly as a matter of policy is quite another.
Read it all.
living longer, healthier lives
New research from around the world has begun to reveal a picture of humans today that is so different from what it was in the past that scientists say they are startled. Over the past 100 years, says one researcher, Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago, humans in the industrialized world have undergone “a form of evolution that is unique not only to humankind, but unique among the 7,000 or so generations of humans who have ever inhabited the earth.”
The difference does not involve changes in genes, as far as is known, but changes in the human form. It shows up in several ways, from those that are well known and almost taken for granted, like greater heights and longer lives, to ones that are emerging only from comparisons of health records.
The biggest surprise emerging from the new studies is that many chronic ailments like heart disease, lung disease and arthritis are occurring an average of 10 to 25 years later than they used to. There is also less disability among older people today, according to a federal study that directly measures it. And that is not just because medical treatments like cataract surgery keep people functioning. Human bodies are simply not breaking down the way they did before.
So maybe the "food police" will disband and leave us alone? Don't count on it.
saturday, july 29 2006
looks like mel will be self-financing all his movies
Once inside the car, a source directly connected with the case says Gibson began banging himself against the seat. The report says Gibson told the deputy, "You mother f****r. I'm going to f*** you." The report also says "Gibson almost continually [sic] threatened me saying he 'owns Malibu' and will spend all of his money to 'get even' with me."
The report says Gibson then launched into a barrage of anti-Semitic statements: "F*****g Jews... The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." Gibson then asked the deputy, "Are you a Jew?"
current events
Q. What do these nations have in common?
Algeria, Argentina, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Brazil, Cameroon, Canada, China, Cuba, Czech Republic, Djibouti, Ecuador, Finland, France, Gabon, Germany, Ghana, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Japan, Jordan, Malaysia, Mali, Mauritius, Mexico, Morocco, Netherlands, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Republic of Korea, Romania, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Tunisia, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Uruguay, Zambia
A. They are members of the UN Human Rights Committee.
Q. What has the committee done of late?
A. Told the USA to shut down secret detention facilities. It urged the government to ensure the rights of poor people and blacks were respected in relief efforts. And claimed both poor people and black people were "disadvantaged" in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
Ain't it a crazy world when the likes of Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Cuba get to lecture the US on human rights? Perhaps it the opinions of some of those nation's ambassadors about John Bolton that so troubled John Kery.
missed cinema: "journey into amazing caves"
Filmed for IMAX, this DVD packs a powerful visual experience as it follows two adventurous women into some, well, amazing caves. The screen cap shows them rappelling into a cave inside the Grand Canyon. There's also a trip down a 50 foot ice cave in Greenland and an underwater cave in the Yucatan.
The film lasts 37 minutes. Then watch the "making of" extra, another 37 minutes. Next time you read about some heroic actor doing his own stunts, think of these adventurers -- and that includes the film crew. This is truly extreme filmmaking.
friday, july 28 2006
cross your fingers
A drug made to enhance memory appears to trigger a natural mechanism in the brain that fully reverses age-related memory loss, even after the drug itself has left the body, according to researchers at UC Irvine.
hilarious
Stephen Colbert infuriates another politician. Or so it seems.
iranians ticked off at mullahs
...for plenty of reasons, but one of them is giving money to Hezbollah:
“Let them fight with each other until they get tired,” said Reza Muhammadi, 33, who runs a small grocery in the center of town. “Arab countries are not supporting Hezbollah, but my country is? They are giving my share to the Arabs.”
Mr. Muhammad said he worked six days a week from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. to feed his family. So, he said, he had no tolerance for his government’s financial commitments abroad. “One percent of our budget has been approved by my Parliament to give to Palestine,” he said. “Why should I not get angry about this?”
two comedians, neither one funny
Warren Christopher, former Secretary of State, waxes on about how his diplomacy stopped the fighting in the mideast over and over and over... Like any true believer, he counsels repeating the same strategy, more ceasefires.
Meanwhile, Al Qaeda's #2 man says, "The war with Israel does not depend on cease-fires ... It is a jihad (holy war) for the sake of God and will last until (our) religion prevails ... from Spain to Iraq," said al-Zawahri. "We will attack everywhere."
Hear that, Spain? Your foreign minister can don a kafiya and condemn Israel, but Al Qaeda wants the Iberian peninsula back.
poseurs in turbans
It would actually be wiser for Moktada (or his puppet masters) to study the case of Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, than it would be to come to his aid. There is a lesson waiting for Al Sadr in Lebanon.
Where exactly is Hassan Nasrallah these days? He's hiding in a figurative spider hole of his own, redefining "victory" as survival while waiting for the diplomatic corps to save his reckless hide. (One report has him hiding in the Beirut embassy of his Iranian paymasters, though Iran denies it.)
Hezbollah's gunmen are regarded as making a better showing in battle than such predecessors as the Egyptian army, which took off its boots in order to run away faster. But then those poor Egyptians fled because they wanted to live, whereas
Hezbollah's gunmen have been persuaded to embrace "martyrdom" even as their leader keeps his distance from battle and his location a great secret. Perhaps there's a spider hole awaiting Moktada, too, depending on the role his "movement"
plays.
Do you remember when Al Sadr used to appear in public wearing a shroud in anticipation of his own martyrdom? That was when the U.S. sought to arrest Al Sadr for the murder of the reformist cleric Khoe'i (who was, unlike Moktada, a real cleric). What a set of poseurs these are under those turbans.
john vs. john
Gateway Pundit shows how John Kerry tried to embarrass John Bolton yesterday in his confirmation hearing. Among other things, JFK Lite bitched about lack of progress with North Korea:
John Kerry: This has been going on for five years, Mr. Ambassador.
John Bolton: It's the nature of multilateral negotiations, Senator.
John Kerry: Why not engage in a bilateral one and get the job done? That's what the Clinton Administration did.John Bolton: And, very poorly since the North Koreans violated the agreed framework almost from the time it was signed.
And it's not all Clinton's fault. In the midst of negotiations with North Korea, Jimmy Carter (pompous, pious failed president and Nobel laureate) pulled a Jesse Jackson and, unasked, publicly inserted himself into the mix, limiting Clinton's options.
(Be sure to follow the CSPAN link and watch the video.)
Kerry's suggestion to "engage in a bilateral one and get the job done" underscores the dangerous mindset among liberal Democrats: they believe in talk, talk, talk. Just sit down like reasonable adults and talk through your differences.
Which ignores the existence of evil psychos. Kim Jong Il has starved two million of his own people. But to Kerry, the North Koreans are reasonable, not us. Why? Because we "invaded" Iraq and all the poor North Koreans want is assurances they're not next.
To believe that, you'd have to ignore North Korea's long history of paranoid isolation and belligerence. Besides, the threat of becoming another Iraq actually makes talk work. Witness the end of the multi-decade civil war in Sudan after the bastards in Khartoum saw Saddam climb out of a spider hole. Or Libya giving up its nukes. Or Syria leaving (mostly) Lebanon.
Will Rogers said, "Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock." To Kerry and his feminized brand of Democrats, diplomacy begins and ends with "nice doggie." How deliciously ironic that these very same Democrats refer to themselves as the "reality-based community."
JB
politics in science? how shocking.
Earlier this week the Center for Science in the Public Interest issued a report, Ensuring Independence and Objectivity at the National Academies. The National Academies of Science, like many government agencies, routinely recruit outside experts from universities, industry and other organizations to advise them on scientific matters.
Just how objective are such experts? The CSPI report found that over a five year period that one out of five scientists on 21 different NAS scientific panels had "direct conflicts of interest." Famously, CSPI describes itself as the "food police" decrying all manner of fat and cholesterol laced delicacies. The CSPI released its new study at a panel discussion, Government Science Panels: Fair and Balanced?, at the National Press Club this past Monday. The CSPI is not alone in worrying about conflicts of interest on government scientific panels.
thursday, july 27 2006
slain u.n. peacekeeper: we're being used as shield
"What I can tell you is this," he wrote in an e-mail to CTV dated July 18. "We have on a daily basis had numerous occasions where our position has come under direct or indirect fire from both (Israeli) artillery and aerial bombing.
"The closest artillery has landed within 2 meters (sic) of our position and the closest 1000 lb aerial bomb has landed 100 meters (sic) from our patrol base. This has not been deliberate targeting, but rather due to tactical necessity."
Those words, particularly the last sentence, are not-so-veiled language indicating Israeli strikes were aimed at Hezbollah targets near the post, said Maj.-Gen. MacKenzie.
"What that means is, in plain English, 'We've got Hezbollah fighters running around in our positions, taking our positions here and then using us for shields and then engaging the (Israeli Defence Forces)," he said.
That would mean Hezbollah was purposely setting up near the UN post, he added. It's a tactic Maj.-Gen. MacKenzie, who was the first UN commander in Sarajevo during the Bosnia civil war, said he's seen in past international missions: Aside from UN posts, fighters would set up near hospitals, mosques and orphanages.
throwing flowers
This is not the first time an Iraqi leader has thanked America, but it's nice to be reminded:
"Let me begin by thanking the American people, through you, on behalf of the Iraqi people, for supporting our people and ousting dictatorship. Iraq will not forget those who stood with her and who continues to stand with her in times of need.
Thank you for your continued resolve in helping us fight the terrorists plaguing Iraq, which is a struggle to defend our nation's democracy and our people who aspire to liberty, democracy, human rights and the rule of law. All of those are not Western values; they are universal values for humanity."
Read the whole speech.
one man's experience with the wisdom of crowds
From Business Pundit:
The Business Experiment began as an idea in February 2005, after I read James Suroweicki's "Wisdom of Crowds." I wondered if a crowd could make better strategic decisions than a handful of upper level managers, and decided it could be tested (sort of). In June 2005 I launched the site, which quickly grew to over 500 members. My initial plan was to let the crowd choose a business, and have them vote on all the major strategic decisions of the company. It made some nice waves around the blogosphere.
npr's lightweights
Daniel Schorr is used to producers popping into his Washington, D.C., office at National Public Radio to ask, on deadline: Which war came first, Korea or Vietnam? (Answer: Korea.)
Of course, they know the answers to everything else. Just listen and learn.
HT: Best of the Web
hizbollah, hezbollah, hiz'b'allah
Any way you spell it, the news ain't good for them, says Captain's Quarters:
Haaretz reports that Israel has penetrated Hezbollah communications, and Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah has quite a different spin on events internally than externally. While issuing public statements full of bombast and dire predictions for Israelis, his private communications acknowledges the shock of Israeli military action has taken a toll on operational capability and morale:
An Israel Defense Forces analysis of the messages transmitted by Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah to his men during the fighting in Lebanon reveals a slightly different tone from the one he took in three public television interviews in the same period and in an interview with the Lebanese newspaper A-Safir. ...
Nasrallah admits that his organization is having morale problems and says his group will receive support and encouragement.
He adds that not only Hezbollah, but also Israel, has been badly hit.
He also complains frequently that the Arab states have deserted Hezbollah and the Lebanese and are not helping them against Israel.
wednesday, july 26 2006
iowahawk
...writes I Love You Too, Cecilia Lucas.
hezbollah hiding in plain sight
The FBI had better be taking note. As Iran's Hezbollah issues direct threats to America while Israel continues to pound the terrorists, apparently the FBI is frantically looking for Hezbollah sleeper cells in the United States. Considering some of the characters at an anti-Israel rally in New York city today, it seems Persons of Interest may be hiding in plain sight.
aging (dis)gracefully
Ain't it time to weed the Baby Boomer patch? Let's get a list going. Kay S. Hymowitz make clear the need as she writes about Desperate Grandmas:
The women of the Second Wave were already highly evolved—liberated yet sensitive, strong yet compassionate—but in Second Adulthood they are ascending into goddesshood. Christiane Northrup’s bestseller The Wisdom of Menopause describes the years after menopause—average age 51—as potentially “the beginning of a woman’s most sexually passionate, creatively inspired, and professionally productive phase of life.”
So profound are the changes that a woman goes through as she passes into Second Adulthood that she must first pass through what Sheehy has dubbed “Middlescence,” a term that may sound to the cynics suspiciously like “obsolescence” but is actually meant to stand for “midlife adolescence.” Middlescence is Sheehy at her most canny—which is very canny indeed. Through the elixir of pop sociology, she offers boomers what they have most wished: they can now remain teenagers into old age.
Just what we need, another celebration of arrested development...
The shape of midlife teen turmoil is well on display in Levine’s Inventing the Rest of Our Lives, a book of such stunning banality it makes Sheehy look like Hannah Arendt. “My teenagers and I are grappling with the same two disorienting questions,” Levine explains. “What is happening to my body and Who am I?”
...and narcissism.
kofi's clowns
With apologies to the Everly Brothers:
Don't want your help any more.
Don't need your mush mouth, that's for sure.
As more folks die, come hear the sound:
"In they march, they're Kofi's clowns."We all gotta stand tall.
Before the devil never, ever crawl.
Not one more inch or it's good's demise
It's life or death so no more lies.
And no giving in at all.Don't want your resolutions any more.
No more emtpy talk, that's for sure.
More bombs will fall despite this sound:
"Here they come, they're Kofi's clowns."
Yeah Kofi sheds a tear,
Could be quite sincere,
But Kofi's corrupt and Kofi's weak
And with situation bleak
We defend our own frontier.Don't need your talk any more.
Don't want your mush mouth, that's for sure.
More lies will die despite this sound:
"Here they come, they're Kofi's clowns."
why the u.n. is worthless
If anyone wonders why the UN has rendered itself worse than irrelevant in the Arab-Israeli conflict, all he or she need do is read UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's July 20 statement. Annan goes to great pains to suggest equal fault and moral equivalence between the rockets of Hezbollah and Hamas that specifically target innocent civilians and the self-defense efforts by Israel, which tries desperately, though not always successfully, to avoid causing civilian casualties. In his statement, Annan never condemns, or even mentions, terrorism, which is a root cause and precipitator of the conflict.
tuesday, july 25 2006
cnn: stooges for hezbollah
A few years after having admitted that CNN let Saddam Hussein have control over their reports from Iraq, they now admit that they let Hezbollah have control over Nic Robertson's piece on how civilians, not Hezbollah were being harmed by Israel's attacks.
who hates whom in the mideast
are you a conformist?
Click the rectangle and find out.
printing on water
New technology.
hating evil
...everyone hates someone, and that includes people on the Left. The problem is that because they don't hate evil, they hate those who oppose evil. That is how liberals went from anti-communist to anti-anti-communist.
To paraphrase one of the greatest moral insights of the Talmud, those who show mercy to the cruel will be cruel to the merciful. So, George W. Bush, not the Islamic terror world, is the Left's villain; life-embracing Israel is the Left's villain, not their death-loving enemies; and religious Christians who note moral weaknesses within the Islamic world are the real danger, not the moral weaknesses within the Islamic world.
james lileks
You can’t call this the Arab-Israeli war of 06, since the usual belligerents have declined to participate. You could call it World War Three, as Newt Gingrich has suggested; he has a point, but that annoys everyone who wanted the Cold War to be WW3. (Somehow World War Four is less scary if we got another one out of the way without a nuclear swapmeet.) You could call it the Israel-Hezbollah War, but that lets the Syrians and Iranians off the hook.
So let’s just call it Bush’s Fault! At least that’s what Howard Dean proposes. The energetic head of the DNC had this to say:
“If you think what’s going on in the Middle East today would be going on if the Democrats were in control, it wouldn’t, because we would have worked day after day after day to make sure we didn’t get where we are today. We would have had the moral authority that Bill Clinton had when brought together the Israelis and the Palestinians.”
The problem with Moral Authority is its antonym, the Palestinian Authority.
Does Dean mean the Oslo accords? President Clinton had been in office less than a year. There‘s a reason they’re not the Little Rock Accords: Norwegian diplomats did all the heavy lifting. (Specifically, suspending disbelief about Arafat’s motives, which can throw your back out if you’re not careful.) Does Dean mean the Camp David negotiations, which ended in the bloody second intifada? Details, details. Moral authority, that’s what counts. Doesn’t stop wars, but it makes the bad guys look extra guilty. Ingrates!
nobel peace prize winner: "kill bush!"
NOBEL peace laureate Betty Williams displayed a flash of her feisty Irish spirit yesterday, lashing out at US President George W.Bush during a speech to hundreds of schoolchildren.
Campaigning on the rights of young people at the Earth Dialogues forum, being held in Brisbane, Ms Williams spoke passionately about the deaths of innocent children during wartime, particularly in the Middle East, and lambasted Mr Bush.
"I have a very hard time with this word 'non-violence', because I don't believe that I am non-violent," said Ms Williams, 64.
"Right now, I would love to kill George Bush." Her young audience at the Brisbane City Hall clapped and cheered.
"I don't know how I ever got a Nobel Peace Prize, because when I see children die the anger in me is just beyond belief. It's our duty as human beings, whatever age we are, to become the protectors of human life."
What an idiot. Did she want to kill Saddam for torturing/murdering children? How about Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe? Or Kim Jong Il for starving two million people in North Korea?
stadium venue for saddam
Really, I think the world needs to listen to Saddam. He's certainly proved his ability to correctly gauge political situations ("Those chickenhawk Americans would never dare try to depose me.") respond appropriately to human behavior ("Son, if the girl says no to a date, we'll just have her kidnapped, you and the Republican Guards can rape her, then we'll feed her to the dogs whether she's still alive or not.") and even to stunningly decorate a wide variety of dwelling spaces ("It has to be kinda like those whorehouses and even a little better. You can never have too many Moorish Gold screens or too many airplane hangar sized tapestry depictions of me. Trust me, when it's done you'll wish you'd been living there all your life.")
I think I can find a little space here if Saddam wants to be a regular contributor. Readers, post your questions and concerns and we'll let wise old Uncle S. enlighten us. I'll even start the ball rolling with this simple inquiry: Suppose you have a maniacal dictator who tortured and slaughtered enough people to populate a good-sized city. Would the proper procedure be to put him, naked and unarmed, in a stadium with all the next of kin, give them ice picks, box cutters, cattle prods and vise grip pliers and see what happens?
limited options
...an exasperated West is running out of choices in the Middle East .
For years, the Arab world clamored for the Israel "problem" to be solved. Then peace and security would at last supposedly reshape the Middle East . The Western nations understood the "problem" as being Israeli retention of lands it had captured in Sinai, the West Bank, Gaza , Syria and Lebanon after defeating a series of Arab forces bent on destroying the Jewish state.
But after the Israeli departure from Sinai, Gaza and Lebanon , and billions of dollars in American aid to Egypt , Jordan and the Palestinians, there is still not much progress toward peace. Past Israeli magnanimity was seen as weakness. Now Israel 's reasoned diplomacy has earned it another round of kidnapping, ransom and rocket attacks.
Finally, the world is accepting that the Middle East problem was never about so-called occupied land — but only about the existence of Israel itself. Hezbollah and Hamas, and those in their midst who tolerate them (or vote for them), didn't so much want Israel out of Lebanon and Gaza as pushed into the Mediterranean altogether. And since there will be no second Holocaust, the Israelis may well soon transform a perennial terrorist war that they can't easily win into a conventional aerial one against a terrorist-sponsoring Syria that they can.For its part, the United States has spent thousands of lives and billions in treasure trying to birth democracy in Iraq . We wished to end our old cynical support for Middle East dictators that earned us such scorn and instead give liberated Iraqis a choice other than either theocracy or autocracy.
In multilateral fashion, America has also welcomed the help of the European Union, the United Nations, China and Russia in convincing the Iranians of the folly of producing nuclear weapons. But like Hezbollah and Hamas , Iran does not wish to parley -— just as the beheaders and kidnappers in Iraq don't, either.
The two most liberal societies in Europe — Denmark and the Netherlands — welcomed almost anyone to their shores from the Middle East . Their multicultural hospitality was supposed to have led to a utopian "diverse" nation of various races, nationalities and religions.
Instead, such liberality has earned both small nations pariah status in the Muslim world for the supposed indiscretions of a few freewheeling filmmakers and cartoonists.
Yet for all their threats, what the Islamists — from Hezbollah in Lebanon 's Bekaa Valley to the Iranian government in Tehran to the jihadists in Iraq 's Sunni Triangle — don't understand is that they are slowly pushing tired Westerners into a corner. If diplomacy, or aid, or support for democracy, or multiculturalism, or withdrawal from contested lands, does not satisfy radical Islamists, what would?
monday, july 24 2006
arrogance and bad grammar
"If I was president, this wouldn't have happened," said Kerry during a noon stop at Honest John's bar and grill in Detroit's Cass Corridor.
Bush has been so concentrated on the war in Iraq that other Middle East tension arose as a result, he said.
So Kerry's smooth manner would have soothed the savage breast in Hezbollah? Convinced 'em not to fire rockets at Israel?
And the proper grammar is, "If I were president..." It's called subjunctive mood and comes into play when you express a wish or something that is not actually true.
Thank god Kerry's only a subjunctive president.
UPDATE: Kerry vs. Rush Limbaugh:
Limbaugh said the most frequent guest in the Clinton White House, besides Monica Lewinsky and the campaign donors in the Lincoln bedroom, was Yasser Arafat. He called President Bush the best friend Israel ever had in the White House.
This got Kerry mad.
"Rush Limbaugh needs to pick up a history book instead of a doughnut. It was a Democratic president who first recognized the State of Israel. It was a Democratic president who first sold Israel defensive weapons. And it was a Democratic president who first sold Israel offensive weapons."
A donut? Besides being ad hominem, it's dated. Limbaugh lost weight a long time ago. Come to think of it, Kerry's list of Democrat deeds for Israel reach back quite a few decades.
air america co-founder dons tinfoil hat
Sheldon Drobny is a wealthy Jewish financier of the Democrats, and founder of Air America, the liberal-left “answer” to conservative talk radio. See this Chicago Jewish News interview for a sense of the man.
Remarkably, Drobny actually believes the virulent anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment on the left is in reality a conspiracy orchestrated by the right. As Drobny’s last sentence states: “I see Karl Rove’s fingerprints all over this”. Below are excerpts from his blog:
“I came to the conclusion that the hostile comments about Israel on these liberal blogs are not coming from true liberals. Most of the anti-Semitism comes from racism and most of the racism I have experienced has come from the far right, not the left.
“So my conclusion is that the bloggers who violently hate Israel and see it in black and white terms are not really liberals. They may even be anti-Semites, but they are not representative of the liberal community that was so active in achieving racial and ethnic equality. It is a contradiction for a true liberal to be an anti-Semite.
Furthermore, I would not put it past the right wing to flood the liberal blogs with hateful criticisms of Israel to advance a perception that liberals are anti-Israel or anti-Semitic. And I see Karl Rove’s fingerprints all over this.”
Cognitive dissonance leads to denial. Drobny discovers anti-Semitism on the left and cannot reconcile it. He's right, true liberals are not anti-Semites. Which is why many former liberal Democrats say that "we didn't leave the Democrat party, it left us."
Instead of facing the painful truth, Drobny concocts a conspiracy. Here's a fact: while on vacation in Kauai recently I listened to Pacifica Radio news. The Gaza skirmish had begun after Hamas kidnapped an Israeli soldier. The anti-Israel bias was blatant. Israel was an "invader" and Hamas terrorists were "resistence fighters." Karl Rove was not writing their news copy.
How ironic that a man so divorced from reality funnels money to leftist propagandists (Air America) to set us straight.
"dirty bomb" ingredients stopped on route to iran
Border guards seized a British lorry on its way to make a delivery to the Iranian military - after discovering it was packed with radioactive material that could be used to build a dirty bomb.
The lorry set off from Kent on its way to Tehran but was stopped by officials at a checkpoint on Bulgaria's northernborder with Romania after a scanner indicated radiation levels 200 times above normal.
The lorry was impounded and the Bulgarian Nuclear Regulatory Agency (NPA) was called out.
On board they found ten lead-lined boxes addressed to the Iranian Ministry of Defence. Inside each box was a soil-testing device, containing highly dangerous quantities of radioactive caesium 137 and americium-beryllium.
The soil testers had been sent to Iran by a British firm with the apparent export approval of the Department of Trade and Industry.
czechs put heat on castro
Those who endured communism stand up to it best:
Once a subservient member of the Soviet bloc, the Czech Republic is now one of Fidel Castro's top foreign tormentors, providing material and moral support to dissidents, leading efforts to condemn the island's human-rights record in U.N. bodies and pushing a reluctant European Union to take a tougher stance on Castro.
Such actions have earned the tiny nation of 10 million vitriolic condemnations by the Castro government, the harassment of its diplomats in Havana and the gratitude of the Cuban-American community.
''The Czech Republic is at the heart of the U.S. efforts to secure multilateral support for precipitating a transition for democracy in Cuba,'' says Miami Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. ``They've stuck to their principles every step of the way. Thank the Lord for the Czech Republic.''
And lately the Central European nation seems to be devoting more resources to the cause. Besides the antennas, believed to be beaming pro-democracy broadcasts to Cuba, the embassy has a full-time Cuba desk officer and is distributing pro-democracy literature on the island, said Czech Ambassador Petr Kolar.
The 44-year-old Kolar, who worked as janitor in the 1980s after he was ejected from a university for refusing to join the Communist Party, and more recently oversaw a human-rights division in the foreign ministry, said Czechs have a sense of kinship with the Cuban opposition.
''After the fall of communism, it became our natural duty to help people in countries where they have authoritarian or totalitarian regimes,'' he told The Miami Herald. ``We remember how important it was to be supported from outside.''
That history gives unique legitimacy to the Czech efforts on Cuba, as well as a sense of what might work best to undermine a communist government.
paul graham's island test
I've discovered a handy test for figuring out what you're addicted to. Imagine you were going to spend the weekend at a friend's house on a little island off the coast of Maine. There are no shops on the island and you won't be able to leave while you're there. Also, you've never been to this house before, so you can't assume it will have more than any house might.
What, besides clothes and toiletries, do you make a point of packing? That's what you're addicted to. For example, if you find yourself packing a bottle of vodka (just in case), you may want to stop and think about that.
For me the list is four things: books, earplugs, a notebook, and a pen.
Read on...
god's army has plans
...to run the whole Middle East, writes Amir Taheri:
Hezbollah, the group at the heart of the Lebanese conflict, is the spearhead of Iran’s ambitions to be a superpower, says Iranian commentator Amir Taheri ‘You are the sun of Islam, shining on the universe!”
This is how Muhammad Khatami, the mullah who was president of Iran until last year, described Hezbollah last week. It would be no exaggeration to describe Hezbollah — the Lebanese Shi’ite militia — as Tehran’s regional trump card. Each time Tehran has played it, it has won. As war rages between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, Tehran policymakers think that this time, too, they can win. “I invite the faithful to wait for good news,” Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said last Tuesday. “We shall soon witness the elimination of the Zionist stain of shame.”
What are the links between Hezbollah and Iran? In 1982 Iran had almost no influence in Lebanon. The Lebanese Shi’ite bourgeoisie that had had close ties with Iran when it was ruled by the Shah was horrified by the advent of the clerics who created an Islamic republic.
Seeking a bridgehead in Lebanon, Iran asked its ambassador to Damascus, Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour, a radical mullah, to create one. Mohtashamipour decided to open a branch in Lebanon of the Iranian Hezbollah (the party of God). After many meetings in Lebanon Mohtashamipour succeeded: in its founding statement it committed itself to the “creation of an Islamic republic in Lebanon”. To this end hundreds of Iranian mullahs, political “educators” and Islamic Revolutionary Guards were dispatched to Beirut.
sunday, july 23 2006
presidential humor
The legions of Bush haters have excluded themselves from enjoying one of the funniest, quick-witted presidents in memory. Yes, yes, Bush can come across as a stammering dope. But to conclude that that's the man is a big mistake. It's misunderestimation.
Yesterday we posted about Maureen Dowd mistaking Bush's teasing relationship with Tony Blair, which Blair seems to enjoy, as bad manners. Such sour critics forget that much of Bush's humor is self-deprecating.
In another instance, Newsweek reported on Bush's trip to Russia for the G-8:
The cold war may be ancient history, but Secret Service agents believe the president and his aides are under surveillance at all times. They have ordered White House staffers to hand in their BlackBerrys and cell phones so Russian spies can't track their conversations. Russian security refuses to allow a sweep for bugs at "the cottage"—a McMansion-style villa complete with a pool and weight room. Hovering above the ground nearby is a white communications balloon that Bush's aides believe is recording everything they say outdoors.
As host of the summit, the Russian leader has decided to ferry Bush around in a golf cart, which Putin insists on piloting himself. NEWSWEEK asks whether Putin maintains his dour KGB face in private, or whether he is more relaxed behind closed doors.
Bush looks up at the spy balloon and states clearly, "That's your phrase, not mine."
Funny. And:
Before leaving for the giant media tent, where the world's press is waiting, Bush and Putin huddle with their aides in different corners of the same cottage. Bush's staffers warn him of likely questions and suggest possible answers. They hand him two cards of bullet points; ignoring the script, as he usually does, he turns one over and scribbles his own notes on the back.
Within minutes the two presidents are standing in a cramped hallway, awaiting their cue. Bush sees Putin clutching some notes, and leans over. "Are you sure you want to say that?" he quips. Putin looks up and glares, then gets the joke. Bush straightens his red tie and pats Putin on the back. "Have fun," he says as they walk into the cloud of camera flashes.
mark steyn
...In one of the most admirably straightforward of Islamist declarations, Hussein Massawi, the Hezbollah leader behind the slaughter of U.S. and French forces 20 years ago, put it this way:
"We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you."
Swell. But, suppose he got his way, what then? Suppose every last Jew in Israel were dead or fled, what would rise in place of the Zionist Entity? It would be something like the Hamas-Hezbollah terror squats in Gaza and Lebanon writ large. Hamas won a landslide in the Palestinian elections, and Hezbollah similarly won formal control of key Lebanese Cabinet ministries.
But they're not Mussolini: They have no interest in making the trains run on time. And to be honest, who can blame them? If you're a big-time terrorist mastermind, it's frankly a bit of a bore to find yourself Deputy Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Pensions, particularly when you're no good at it and no matter how lavishly the European Union throws money at you there never seems to be any in the kitty when it comes to making payroll. So, like a business that's over-diversified, both Hamas and Hezbollah retreated to their core activity: Jew-killing.
...
[leaders of Arab states] now belatedly realized they're at that stage in the creature feature where the monster has mutated into something bigger and crazier. Until the remarkably kinda-robust statement by the G-8 and the unprecedented denunciation of Hezbollah by the Arab League, the rule in any conflict in which Israel is involved -- Israel vs. PLO, Israel vs. Lebanon, Israel vs. [Your Team Here] is that the Jews are to blame.
But Saudi-Egyptian-Jordanian opportunism on Palestine has caught up with them: It's finally dawned on them that a strategy of consciously avoiding resolution of the "Palestinian question" has helped deliver Gaza, and Lebanon and Syria, into the hands of a regime that's a far bigger threat to the Arab world than the Zionist Entity.
Cairo and Co. grew so accustomed to whining about the Palestinian pseudo-crisis decade in decade out that it never occurred to them that they might face a real crisis one day: a Middle East dominated by an apocalyptic Iran and its local enforcers, in which Arab self-rule turns out to have been a mere interlude between the Ottoman sultans and the eternal eclipse of a Persian nuclear umbrella. The Zionists got out of Gaza and it's now Talibanistan redux.
The Zionists got out of Lebanon and the most powerful force in the country (with an ever-growing demographic advantage) are Iran's Shia enforcers. There haven't been any Zionists anywhere near Damascus in 60 years and Syria is in effect Iran's first Sunni Arab prison bitch. For the other regimes in the region, Gaza, Lebanon and Syria are dead states that have risen as vampires.
how to parse a research paper
A handy guide.
unidentified flying cloud
A photo.
sacre blue
Pity the French. Ten of the last 21 Tours de France have been won by Americans.
PARIS -- The highs and lows of Floyd Landis' nail-biter of a bike race ended without a hitch Sunday as he won the Tour de France and kept cycling's most prestigious title in American hands for the eighth straight year.
The 30-year-old Landis, pedaling with an injured hip, cruised to victory on the cobblestones of the Champs-Elys Dees, a day after regaining the leader's yellow jersey and building an insurmountable lead in the final time trial.
"I kept fighting, never stopped believing," Landis said, shortly after he received the winner's yellow jersey on the podium, joined by his daughter, Ryan.
sacre brown
What's with the British? Haven't they heard of irrigation? My daughter walked into the room to see the British Open on TV, noting the brown fairways and brown greens.
She: Where is this?
Me: Where do you think, I replied?
She: Uh, the houses look English but the grass is from Arizona.
Wrong. On Arizona golf courses the grass is as green as Ireland.
Also, whatever happened to English manners? The clowns in the gallery couldn't figure out not to fire off their camera phones when the players needed quiet.
the 100 mpg car that isn't
OUR liberal media friends are getting all excited about the birth of the 100 miles per gallon car. There are even people driving around with stickers advertising their triple digit gas sippers. Here’s a characteristic gushy article on the topic from MSNBC.
But wait a minute. These gas sipping miracles aren’t really getting 100 mpg. If their owners were corporate advertisers they would be getting sued for false advertising.
This phoney-baloney way to get to 100 mpg relies on buying an expensive conversion kit, including more of those expensive metal-hydride batteries, and plugging your car into the electric outlet. You don’t really get 100 mpg from the total energy input into the car. You get 100 mpg on the gasoline you buy, augmented by “free” power from your home electric outlet. Only you get to see the cost of the free power on your electric bill.
saturday, july 22 2006
kettle-ette cries black
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd writes like a catty high school girl who can't get a date and gets revenge on the cool kids with cutting wit in the school newspaper.
A natural Bush hater, this 50-ish spinster coined such bon mots as "Rummy" for Rumsfeld and "Bushies" for members of the administration. Such is the state of the NYT.
In a recent column titled, "W. Always Comes Off As A Frat Boy" (oh, how she must hate frat boys!) she chastises him for blowing off Tony Blair's offer to help with Israel-Lebanon crisis, and instead ridicules his birthday gift, a Burbery sweater.
Dowd writes:
"Thanks for the sweater. Awfully thoughtful of you." Then he razzed the British Prime Ministers, who was hovering and wheedling like an abused wife." I know you picked it out yourself."
Here is the actual transcript:
Bush: Thanks for the sweater — it’s awfully thoughtful of you.
Blair: It’s a pleasure.
Bush: I know you picked it out yourself.
Blair: Oh absolutely — in fact I knitted it!!!
Both of them laugh. Then Bush turns serious, asking Blair about comments apparently made about the Middle East crisis by the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, another guest at the summit.
Bush: What about Kofi? He seems all right. I don’t like his ceasefire plan. His attitude is basically ceasefire and everything sorts out . . . But I think . . .
Blair: Yeah, no I think the . . .
Frankly, what I take away from reading the complete transcript is the informal, comfortable manner between Bush and Blair. At another moment, Blair says to Bush, "On this trade thingy . . ."
Anchoress explains how the updated transcript shows how Bush answered Blair.
BTW, Anchoress is a more graceful and insightful writer (go through her archives) than Dowd.
dave chappelle
Best comedy skits, courtesy of Cracked and YouTube.
born to run
The fact that Israel is able to launch an attack on Hezbollah today without instantly inciting a multination conflagration in the Middle East is proof of what Bush has accomplished. He has begun to create a moderate block of Arab leaders who are apparently not interested in becoming the next Saddam Hussein.
There's been no stock market crash, showing that the markets have confidence that Israel will deal appropriately with the problem and that it won't expand into World War III.
But liberals can never abandon the idea that we must soothe savage beasts with appeasement -- whether they're dealing with murderers like Willie Horton or Islamic terrorists. Then the beast eats you.
There are only two choices with savages: Fight or run. Democrats always want to run, but they dress it up in meaningless catchphrases like "diplomacy," "detente," "engagement," "multilateral engagement," "multilateral diplomacy," "containment" and "going to the U.N."
ugliness in spain
From Barcepundit:
There was an anti-Lebanon war demonstration yesterday in Madrid, officially organized by the Socialist party (Zapatero's), the Communist party and several anti-war groups. Turned out to be an anti-Semitic fest, with chants like: "Nazis, Yankees, Jews: no more choosen people!" "Long Live the Intifada!" and "We Want to See, We Want To See, Zapatero Burning the Israeli Embassy!" (trust me, it's more musical in Spanish)
A brave soul went there with a pacard that, on one side, said "Israel DOES want peace; stop the killings", and on the other "Don't be fooled: whoever votes for Hamas or Hezbollah doesn't want peace". He was quickly surrounded by people shouting "Who's is paying you to come and provoke us?" which quickly degenerated into a chorus people rhythmically shouting "Nazi" at him. Things were turning ugly so he had to be taken away by anti-riot police.
There's a video of the scene.
bookstore sabatoge
Freakonomics posts about bookstore visitors hiding books they dislike:
“I’ll be glad when [Ann] Coulter drops off the [best-seller] list, for obvious reasons of taste, but also because customers keep turning her book around or taking it off the shelf and hiding quantities in the back of the store.”
So is this practice more widespread by leftists or rightists? The debate unfolds in the comments section. But this stuck out:
I am a bookstore “freak”, and in my regular business travel throughout the country will spend spare time visiting bookstores, and baby, let me tell ya . . .
From: Portland, Oregon, Portland, Maine, Houston, Fort Lauderdale, Boston,
Omaha, San Francisco, San Diego, Denver, to Chicago...
I have asked this question of the staff and checked the actual stock of both liberal and conservative hot-button authors, and the Left Wing wins this contest hands down. In fact, even in several “liberal” town stores and in one in Orange County, CA, the staff were honestly hard put to even come up with ONE instance of liberal authors ever being moved from where they were originally placed.
Six years ago David Horowitz wrote about the politics of books on Amazon. It's fascinating how the left is so intolerant of free debate.
in other news...
Ethiopia has sent troops into Somalia to restore order, and a Somali Islamist leader declared Holy War.
malignant narcissism and tipping points
Often the woman involved has her own psychological issues that cause her to minimize the danger. Typically, the Malignant Narcissist, who needs the "other" to support his sense of himself, finds a Dependent woman who will tolerate his abuse in the service of her own dependency needs. It is a very unfortunate combination and particularly resistant to intervention. The man does not recognize any problems. His abuse is barely conceded and always imagined as the outcome of his wife's (or girlfriend's) provocation. (I have actually heard one such man say he hit his wife because "she wouldn't shut the f*ck up.") She has such a strong need to be loved and attached that she is willing to accept a great deal of the responsibility. (It was my fault, I didn't have the beer he likes; I should have known better.) For both parties, their self esteem and self concept depends on maintaining the relationship.
In such settings, warnings from others tend to be discounted until something happens which breaks through the victim's denial. In the not so distant past, this was compounded by the tendency of authorities to not take such problems seriously. Even now, when domestic violence is recognized as a serious problem, the legal response, obtaining "orders of protection", are only as good as the paper they are written on in protecting the victims. Only if, and when, victims of such abuse reach a "tipping point" can they begin to extricate themselves; those who never reach such a point are forever at the mercy of the abuser.
I have been wondering if we are reaching just such a tipping point in the Middle East.
Since 9/11 (which was a tipping point for many former liberals, now neocons) those of us who supported an aggressive stance with the Islamic fascists and their apologists, in all their many manifestations (Palestinian, Iranian Shia, Saudi Sunni) were often marginalized and attacked by friends and family for our apostasy. The liberal position was that the Palestinians, and Muslims more generally, were victims of oppressive Israeli and/or Western policies of colonialism, occupation, and oppression.
friday, july 21 2006
lebanon in a nutshell
mideast big bang: shaken and stirred
The US invasion of Iraq has so shaken and stirred the Middle East that some exceptionally strange things are happening. More importantly, these things unequivocally favor the US in influencing the outcome of the Israeli-Hezbollah War now taking place in Lebanon.
...
Before the US invasion, Iraq was the geostrategic pivot of the Middle East. All of the fault lines in the area's politics converge there. The Sunni-Shia split; the Arab-Persian split; the Ba'athist-Wahhabist split; and the Muslim-Israeli split: each of these ran through Iraq via its ethnic and religious makeup; its geographic location; and its former interests, alliances, and enemies.
The 'big bang,' as invading Iraq has sometimes been called, was meant to reorder the nature of politics in the region. This has been accomplished in a fundamental way. The idea of dividing an enemy force into its constituent parts and then dealing with it piecemeal is at least as old as Caesar's actions in Gaul. It applies no less to US strategy in the Middle East. Every faction there has been made to reconsider its relationship with every other. Rather than there being a monolithic clash of civilizations, thus far the US is dealing with the area in pieces -- in whatever way it sees fit to do so -- whether making it tacitly clear to Syria that what happened in Iraq could more easily happen to it, or threatening Iran on behalf of the region and world, or seeking cooperation with the Saudis in hunting down al Qaeda.
Far from being a bit of belated triumphalism about the invasion, all of this has immediate and direct consequences. While the success of Iraq's democracy hangs in the balance from an operational perspective, the strategic advantages created by the invasion of Iraq are working very favorably for the US in the current Israeli-Lebanon crisis in very tangible ways.
Were Saddam still in power, the Arab world would not feel nearly as threatened by Hezbollah, the Frankenstein's monster of Iran's creation. Instead, they would have sided with the Syrian foreign minister's strong support for Hezbollah. Saddam himself might even have offered cash rewards to anyone attempting martyrdom against the Jews.
"hockey stick" and hot air
From Red State:
As we mentioned earlier in the week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing yesterday featuring Dr. Edward Wegman, the Chairman of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics, no rube. He had looked at the statistics and statistical methods used by Michael Mann in developing his famed "hockey stick" graph, ostensibly proving the theory of global warming.
Since everybody else who doubts global warming is accused of being on the oil companies' payroll (they are not), Dr. Wegman actually worked pro bono, i.e., for free. He concluded that the statistical methods -- and thus, presumably, the conclusions -- of Mann's famed study were flawed. People who were at the hearing told us he was "bullied" by the minority (i.e., Democrat) members of the Committee. Lovely. That's what dissenting views get you.
You can read a two-page summary of Wegman's conclusions here. Here's a quote:
It is important to note the isolation of the paleoclimate community; even though they rely heavily on statistical methods they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community. Additionally, we judge that the sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done. In this case we judge that there was too much reliance on peer review, which was not necessarily independent. Moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that this community can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility. Overall, our committee believes that Dr. Mann’s assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis.
In short, we have scientists behaving badly to make political points and cover their own asses. But to question them makes you a DENIER.
Similar criticisms of the hockey stick graph were noted here.
l.a. melodrama
In Los Angeles, the mayor has no control over the school district. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa wants to change that and has been working the political angle to make it happen. Part of that effort has been pointing out the schools' failures.
Yesterday, school superintendent Roy Romer (an ex-governor of Colorado) struck back:
Superintendent Roy Romer's annual "State of the Schools" address erupted in controversy Thursday after Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Japanese-American community leaders demanded an apology for what they claimed was a "racially insensitive" comment made during the speech.
During his second annual address, Romer blasted Villaraigosa for portraying the district as failing, comparing his comments to "propaganda spread by the U.S. government during World War II that resulted in the internment of more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans."
'Twas a pretty lame analogy, which touched off the usual outrage. Meanwhile...
a real outrage
"In fact, what he did was corruption," Huntsman said. "He stole money. Workers worked for that money and it was taken from them under false pretenses. Through false pretenses, that money was used for his personal benefit so he could get elected to a job he was seeking.
"And when that union inquired what happened, he participated in a cover-up to hide where the money went. It's very much a case of corruption."
That was an assistant DA speaking of one Martin Ludlow, a former City Councilman and Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, leader who pleaded guilty this year to serious ethics violations.
Confessed crooks get shunned, right?
Oh, how passé: he's getting a fundraiser from some of LA's biggest swells.
An invitation to the dinner to support the Martin Ludlow Legal Defense Fund portrays Martin and Kimberly Ludlow as having "courageously dealt with tremendous legal and professional challenges" costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines and legal expenses.
"Now, admitting to a mistake in judgment during his primary election campaign in 2003, he has sustained three levels of government prosecution simultaneously," the invitation says. "Throughout this process we salute Martin for standing up publicly, admitting his mistakes and blaming no one else.
"We know the true character of a man reveals itself in times of controversy. We're proud of the manner in which he has handled this."
Dinner donations start at $500 and range to $4,000 for the event at a Holmby Hills estate.
It notes a who's who "reception committee" that includes actor Danny Glover, civil rights attorney Connie Rice, Police Commission chief John Mack, former Police Commission chief David Cunningham III, City Councilman Herb Wesson, Senator-elect Mark Ridley-Thomas, U.S. Rep. Diane E. Watson, D-Los Angeles, and Assemblywoman Karen Bass, D-Los Angeles.
axis of evil
Remember the spasms of indignation and eye-rolling from prominent Democrats (Madeline Albright comes to mind) when President Bush made his "axis of evil" speech? Said axis consisted of Iraq, North Korea and Iran. Consider this:
One or more Iranians witnessed North Korea's recent missile tests, deepening U.S. concerns about growing ties between two countries with troubling nuclear capabilities, a top U.S. official said on Thursday.
Asked at a U.S. Senate hearing about reports that Iranians witnessed the July 4 tests, Assistant Secretary of State Chris Hill, the chief U.S. negotiator with Pyongyang, replied: "Yes, that is my understanding" and it is "absolutely correct" that the relationship is worrisome.
thursday, july 20 2006
iran's war games
hizballah activity in usa
More than you'd think. And the government has nailed quite a few of them.
turning spam into art
When Romanian artist Alex Dragulescu looks at junk e-mails, he sees patterns - bits and bytes that can be manipulated into colorful plantlike images or stark architectural forms.
As a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego, he and fellow student Tim Jaeger collected spam and used it to create live multimedia shows of sound, text, and animation - "like a VJ and DJ performance," Mr. Dragulescu says in a phone interview.
myths
What we must realize here is the involvement of the theological (mythological) element in this particular conflict which is also the reason why this conflict has the potential to expand into full-scale regional war.
It is true that religion had always been playing a central role in the numerous chapters of the conflict between the Muslims and the West but this time there's a totally different theological belief that is being used by Iran to provoke and direct this war; I think the best way to say it is that we are about to see Iran launch the mullahs' version of an 'Armageddon'.
I know this may sound absurd and maybe some of you are thinking no one could possibly be thinking that way but remember, I am telling you what extremist theocrats seem to be planning for and logic has very little space in the mullahs' way of thinking.
It's a long post. Read it all.
pickle face gets set straight
Vile old bat Helen Thomas gets the Tony Snow treatment. Video here.
let slip the dogs of war?
Ali, brother of Omar and Mohammed of Iraq the Model, blogs as Free Iraqi.
I wish it goes on and on
As horrible as it may seem I do wish the war between Israel and Hezbollah goes on and on, that it spreads to involve Iran and Syria. I feel terrible for the losses among the innocents, Lebanese and Israeli, but I think that this is the only way for them, and us to finally have some peace.
The “anti-war” in the west cannot see any good coming out of war, and how can they when some of them probably haven’t heard a gun shot probably in 10 years if not more! It seems to me that although most of them are intelligent and honest people, they still don’t understand the way we live, here in Iraq, there in Lebanon or Syria. They can’t understand that peace for us, the one we used to live in and the one the Lebanese used to live in, the Syrians and Iranians is not even close to what it is to them and therefore war for us is not even close to what it is for them.
Death is not the worst outcome to us and I’m sure they can understand if they want to but they still can’t imagine it. I only cared that much about life when I was given a chance to live a decent life. Now that this chance is slipping count me on the cheerleaders for death; death of dictators, their killing machine and the terrorists, and if it means our death too then so be it. Some of us (those who are not free yet) will live that life you (anti war people) are so protective of and will value it *just* like you do.
It’s a difficult equation, to value life and then to be prepared to die to protect it for others but also us if we survive. It’s still rather alien to most of us since we were always told that nothing worth dying for except a better life after death. This needs to change.
Read it all.
wednesday, july 19 2006
i spy
China builds a huge scale model of a disputed mountainous area on the Indian border. People playing with Google Earth discover it. Fascinating, and worrisome for India. Or is it a hoax?
move medicine into information age
Bill Frist, Senate majority leader and physician, writes:
At a Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center just a few miles from my office in the U.S. Capitol, you can glimpse a piece of American medicine's future. Sitting at an ordinary desktop computer, Dr. Ned Evans hits a few keys on the keyboard and clicks his mouse a few times. Sample patient data spill out: X-ray images, lab notes, and blood pressure numbers. "Everything I might want, everything I need, I can see right here," he says. "It's a seamless part of life. It lets me do just about everything better."
And when the New England Journal of Medicine used 11 measures to compare VA patients with Medicare patients treated on a fee-for-service basis, the VA's patients were in better health and received more of the treatments professionals believe they should. According to the VA's own medical professionals, a computer system called Vista is the key to their success. "I'm proud of what we do here, but it isn't that we have more resources," explains Sanford Garfunkel, the director of the Washington VA Medical Center. "The difference is information."
While it's a glimpse into the future, the VA's computer system isn't a breakthrough. Everything the VA's system does has been possible for some time. I used electronic medical records myself 15 years ago to track the complex regimens of pills and procedures I used to treat my heart transplant patients. I published papers based on the data I collected, and feel I did at least a little to advance the science of transplantation as a result. Given how much data it requires, it seems likely that transplant medicine would have developed much more slowly without computers. But the use of information technology in medicine simply hasn't lived up to its early promise. Even today in transplant medicine, there's no common standard for sharing or keeping data.
Many of our doctors and hospitals remain stuck in a medical stone age. While people speak of a medical "system," American medicine is in fact very unsystematic: It lacks the standards, measures, and ability to exchange information that constitute a true system. Even where the VA and other organizations like Kaiser-Permanente and Utah's Intermountain Health Care have built systems, the systems can't communicate with each other or exchange records. While the VA has invested a lot in its computer system, most hospitals haven't invested enough. Among America's important economic sectors, health care spends the smallest percentage of its revenue on information technology--only about 3 percent. Industries such as banking spend 10 percent or more.
Frist also started a group medical blog.
another liberal idea disproved
Just in the past week we've seen that lower tax rates can increase tax revenues -- an old idea, actually, but one that liberals cannot/will not fathom.
Then we saw that gun control does not reduce crime, another liberal article of faith.
Now, as we celebrate the 10th anniversary of welfare reform, liberals once again are proved wrong.
When Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, conservatives celebrated and liberals screamed; three administration officials quit their jobs in protest. The act ended a 60-year-old federal guarantee of cash aid for the poor.
The law, modeled on state pilot programs begun in 1994 with federal approval, was intended to prod welfare mothers and fathers into the workplace with a series of carrots and sticks. Work, and you got help with child care, job training, transportation. Refuse, and you risked sanctions and being cut off by time limits.
A decade later, the worst fears of liberals haven't materialized. States did not enter what critics feared would be a money-saving "race to the bottom." Thousands of poor children did not wind up "sleeping on grates," as Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan predicted.
Major employers hired thousands of welfare recipients. UPS hired 52,000; CVS/pharmacy hired 45,000, 60% of whom remain. Welfare offices have shed the look and language of their first 60 years for the aura of job-services agencies.
Nearly 70% of all single women are working, compared with 66% of married women, a reversal of the past. Single women's incomes have risen, thanks in part to the expansion of the earned income tax credit, a tax break of up to $4,400 for low-income workers. Child poverty rates have dropped, particularly among blacks and Hispanics. Teen pregnancies are down. Child support collections are up.
"Everything has worked," says conservative Douglas Besharov of the American Enterprise Institute. "Every critique one might have is about what could have gone better, not something that has gone poorly."
The unspoken message, one that will really gall liberals who pride themselves on caring for others, is that welfare often stood between individuals and their own success.
So, in the name of doing good, liberal programs often smother their recipients in pity. And for this libs lay claim to the high moral ground.
top ten dumbest web ideas that struck gold
You never know what's gonna fly.
good shit
Why Bush should swear more.
downsizing the new york times
Pinch's big plans get pinched.
tuesday, july 18 2006
nuts & bolts leadership
Massachusett's governor Mitt Romney is a potential GOP presidential candidate.
He's been dealing with a scandalous public works project, the infamous $14.6 billion (yes, Billion) mile long tunnel in Boston. The project and other highway failures, predate Romney.
Yesterday, Romney took charge of fixing the project. You can watch his live news conference here. Scroll down to "Gov. Romney speaks on bolts..."
A rare chance to see leadership in action.
HT: the Corner
proof of global warming
Why didn't Al Gore use this image?
understanding rockets
...But now for the layer complexity: Hezbollah hides these weapons among apartment houses and in villages– other words, nests of rockets in neighborhoods.
These neighborhoods and villages are controlled by Hezbollah, not the Lebanese government.
Israel is being fired upon from a Lebanon that “is not quite Lebanon” in a truly sovereign sense.The rockets, of course, come from “somewhere,” but Hezbollah’s “somewhere” is a political limbo in terms of maps with definitive geo-political boundaries. Lebanon is a “failed state”– a peculiar failed state (its not Somalia), but nevertheless failed. It will continue to fail so long as the Lebanese government cannot control Hezbollah–and control means disarm.
So Hezbollah attacks Israel with ever more-powerful, longer-range rockets, then hides behind the diplomatic facade of the greater Lebanese nation state.
Thus terrorists and terror-empowering nations, like Iran and Syria, abuse the nation-state system– or exploit a “dangerous hole” in the system..
Iran and Syria then appeal to the United Nations (a product of the Westphalian “nation state” system) to condemn Israel for attacking Lebanon– when Israel is attacking Hezbollah, which “is and is not Lebanon.”
fortune telling
In the 1980's John Naisbitt struck gold with a series of "Megatrends" books portending the future of business and society. You couldn't pick up a business magazine or attend a conference without someone referencing one Megatrend or another. I got a special kick out of Naisbitt's uniform, a bushy beard and a three piece suit: one part guru, one part serious business consultant.
This came to mind reading, "A fascinating and highly accurate picture of the future from a panel of experts" from Paul's Tips.
Catchy title, eh? It's an example of a basic template for one of the most lucrative industries on the planet: fortune-telling. This is an industry that a 1997 estimate found was worth $200 billion a year in the United States alone.
Those are some big bucks.
But what does the fortune-telling industry consist of exactly? Most people would think of psychics, astrologers and tea-leaf readers. The educated and worldly laugh at anyone who believes in the predictions of such charlatans. But judging by the reading-material most people consume, the vast majority of us are in the habit of paying for prophesies.
Many supposedly reputable professions - such as financial analysis, political punditry, economics, futurology, and technology consultancy - are also heavily involved in the fortune-telling game. Pick up any newspaper or most magazines and you'll find that a large proportion of what's inside deals with what "will" happen, not what "has" happened.
"had prince, want frog back"
When I saw that bumper sticker, I wanted to honk and wave until the woman driving pulled over so I could hug her, ask her where she got it, ask her to run for president. It so perfectly captures the reality that began to dawn on American women after 9-11, when firefighters and cops and military guys suddenly were chic and back in demand. A reality that is solidifying now, as the biological clocks are ticking for more and more of our sisters. Reinforced as and more and more men are being seduced by the metrosexual dark side, selling their souls to the next promotion, throwing their lives and money away at girls young enough to be their daughters.
Or granddaughters.
Count your blessings if you don't know this story, ladies. But I'm betting too many of you do. The empty glory of the perfect yuppie life bought at the cost of being married to a MAN. The boredom of having to pretend that your guy, try as he might, will ever even remotely approach the intuitive tenderness that any random woman on the street could give to listening. The bogus heart-to-heart with a man you wish would just give up the pretense, stop trying to hide his interest in your chest and go back to the game so you can clean closets and paint your nails in peace.
The great house and the comfortable stock portfolio, and not a damned soul who cares to get home on time to hang around that kitchen and flirt with you while you cook. Oh, he cares, sure. He'll be home, later, and bring takeout, he has all the local places on speed dial. He'll pick up the dry cleaning when it's his turn, if he remembers. But he's too tired and too politically correct to wrestle you, giggling, into submission. Too "evolved" to order a woman into a sexy little nurse costume. Until he finds a neighbor or a business colleague or a manicurist who "understands" him, of course.
Then his honesty, his conviction that above all you want him to be happy, will compel him to share all the intimate details of his new lustier love. If you've got a tough, Daily Kos case on your hands, he may also try to illuminate your children's lives with all the sensitive, authentic details. So they can "learn about life."
God help you.
Read it all.
racist russia
A report from PubliusPundit.
skydive without leaving terra firma
Wind tunnel skydiving is here. Watch the video.
twisted gipper
Liberals pretend the Reagan years--in contrast to the Bush years--were a golden idyll of collaboration between congressional Democrats and a not-so-conservative president. When Reagan died in 2004, John Kerry recalled having admired his political skills and liked him personally. "I had quite a few meetings with him," Mr. Kerry told reporters. "I met with Reagan a lot more than I've met with this president."
Of course, that wasn't Mr. Kerry's take on Reagan during his presidency: In 1988, he condemned the "moral darkness of the Reagan-Bush administration." A chief complaint of liberals and the media in those days was that Mr. Reagan was a "detached" president, not one easily accessible to Democratic members of Congress or anyone outside his inner circle of aides. But Reagan had to talk to Democrats on occasion since they controlled at least half of Congress. Mr. Bush rarely consults them for the simple reason that Republicans run all of Capitol Hill; so he talks frequently with Republican congressional leaders.
Liberals today talk about Reagan as if the hallmark of his administration was a lack of partisanship--again in contrast with Mr. Bush. Mr. Kerry noted in 2004 that Mr. Reagan "taught us that there is a big difference between strong beliefs and bitter partisanship." Mr. Bush, naturally, is the bitter partisan. Of course that's what liberals then thought of Reagan--and they were partially right: While never bitter, Reagan was in fact a partisan Republican.
monday, july 17 2006
eat this quote
“If you think what’s going on in the Middle East today would be going on if the Democrats were in control, it wouldn’t, because we would have worked day after day after day to make sure we didn’t get where we are today.
We would have had the moral authority that Bill Clinton had when he brought together the Northern Irish and the IRA, when he brought together the Israelis and the Palestinians.”
Oh, really?
The moral authority that got Arafat invited to the White House over and over by Clinton? That earned Arafat's wife a kiss from Hillary?
The same Arafat that robbed Palestinians of billions of aid money, prolonging their squalor to suit his political aims? Who murdered thousands? Moral what?
And what authority (or statesmanlike dignity) was in evidence when Madeliene Albright chased after Arafat -- literally chased him to his car -- begging him to return and continue negotiations?
Former oilman George Bush, once in office, had the smarts to see that Arafat was a dry hole and didn't waste a second on the creep.
teresa kerry's link to hezbollah
...one of the participants from the United States was a group called United for Peace and Justice. Ordinarily, this would just be one of the icky little anti-American groups that America produces, along the lines of Code Pink : Women for Peace (which also attended this little American and Israel hatefest).
What distinguishes United for Peace and Justice is that Teresa Kerry funds it. So, in 2004, a couple of months before Americans decided whether to put John Kerry in the White House, his wife’s money was being used to fund one of the participants in a virulently anti-American meeting held in Beirut and hosted by Hezbollah. Once again, we have reason to be grateful that American voters put their money on George Bush.
new era of pirate diplomacy
We missed this from Scrappleface a week ago. In case you did too:
With Time magazine’s announcement that the era of President George Bush’s ‘cowboy diplomacy‘ has officially ended, the weekly opinion journal will announce next week the start of the era of ‘pirate diplomacy.’
The cowboy label came as a result of the president’s declaration that he wanted Usama Bin Laden “dead or alive.” But in the new era of pirate diplomacy, Time’s editors write that the Commander in Chief will respond to North Korean missile launches and Iranian nuclear snubs with new picturesque expressions like “Aaargh!” and “Shiver me timbers!”
...
The forthcoming editorial explains that, “The use of dramatic terms like cowboy and pirate saves time and intellectual energy for our readers, who don’t want to be bothered with careful analysis of the president’s foreign policy as it applies to varied situations. The simple people need a clever, easy-to-remember way of talking about complex issues, and we provide that.”
nike foreign policy: just do it
I know I often criticize the Democrats for failing to articulate their positions and come up with realistic policies. But Jane Harman (D-CA) sure showed me on “Face the Nation” this morning:
Bob Schiffer: “How could we have disarmed them [Hezbollah]?”
Rep. Harman: “How – well, we could’ve insisted that the Lebanese government disarm them.”
Schiffer: “I see.”Brilliant. Now why didn’t Condi Rice think of that?
Of course, Hezbollah would scoff, "You and what army?"
But maybe Jane Harman is on to something: when faced with seemingly intractable problems just insist they be fixed. Just do it.
great stuff at getty center
If you're in Los Angeles between now and Sept. 24, check out the special exhibit at the Getty Center featuring paintings in which Rubens and Brueghel collaborated. If you're not, the Getty website has a terrific presentation.
ben stein: god bless george w. bush
God bless George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice. While France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Russia predictably blamed the victim -- Eretz Israel -- Bush and Rice alone stood up for justice and for the right of Israel to self-defense and against murder.
There is no end to the loyalty and courage of Mr. Bush where Israel is concerned. Yes, he has made mistakes aplenty. Yes, he sometimes listens to his heart instead of his head. But his selfless devotion to Israel is a shining chapter in the history of American political leadership. Where LBJ and Kennedy washed their hands of Israel, could not have cared less about whether Israel survived, where Clinton had the thief, murderer Arafat to the White House, more than any other world leader Bush has stood foursquare for the survival of Israel.
salty
What the microphone picked up:
"I think Condi is going to go (to the Middle East) pretty soon," Bush said.
Blair replied: "Right, that's all that matters, it will take some time to get that together. See, if she goes out she's got to succeed as it were, where as I can just go out and talk."
Bush replied: "See, the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hizbollah to stop doing this shit and it's over."
heads i win, tails you lose
Heads I win...tails you lose. That would be a fitting summary of the journalistic approach taken by SPIEGEL ONLINE's Washington correspondent Georg Mascolo. Mr. Mascolo's most recent piece is a classic of the America-and-Bush-can-do-no-right genre.
The article, entitled "Crisis in the Middle East: Superpower at a Loss," draws several remarkable conclusions on the current crisis in Israel and Lebanon. The first paragraph reads:
"The escalation in violence in the Middle East calls for US leadership. Despite that, Washington is caught between pronouncements of solidarity for Israel and careful appeals for restraint. Where does George W. Bush stand?"
So let's get this straight: SPIEGEL ONLINE's chief correspondent believes that the current crisis "calls for US leadership"? Wait a minute...objection! Where are the Europeans? Where are Germany's master diplomats? Aren't we supposed to solve the world's crises through the UN and other multilateral channels and not rely on unilateralist cowboys? Kofi? Javier? Joschka...?
According to SPIEGEL, Americans are warmongers, mercenaries, cowboys, Rambos, religious nuts and conceited bungling occupiers who have created a catastrophe-disaster-debacle-quagmire-civil war in the Middle East. And now the same online magazine wants us to believe that the current crisis in the region "calls for US leadership"!? Does that make sense to anyone else? Could it be that the United States really is a positive force in the world and not the summation of vile stereotypes and chronic biases displayed on German newsstands?
And never mind that Europe can do little about the crisis other than look on in bumbling impotence. This is all America's fault, because Bush is not being decisive enough and has allegedly tied his nation down in Iraq. Mascolo quotes Time magazine's assertion that America is too weak to act because it has "bled itself white in Iraq." Bled itself white with fewer US deaths in Iraq than on 9/11 alone? Bled itself white with dozens or even hundreds of times fewer casualties than in previous wars? As an historic reminder to Mr. Mascolo, the United States suffered 81,000 casualties and 19,000 combat deaths in the Battle of the Bulge alone, and the nation was certainly not too weak to finish the task of occupying Germany.
sunday, july 16 2006
more from big pharoh
The leaflets Israel is dropping in Lebanon... his story of meeting the Lebanese Army at the beach club in Beirut. Keep checking in with him.
mark steyn down on "great men" idea
I was on the road the other night and so found myself watching CNN's coverage of Israel, Lebanon, Gaza, etc. It was "Larry King Live," and it was one of those shows where Larry interviews great men about what needs to be done and the great men all agree that what needs to be done is that the president needs to get other great men involved to "broker" a "deal." Sen. Chuck Hagel proposed that Bush appoint Colin Powell or Jim Baker as his Special Envoy; Sen. Barbara Boxer proposed that Bush appoint Madeleine Albright as his Even More Special Envoy. Sen. George Mitchell, who himself served as Extra-Special Super-Duper Envoy a few years back, proposed that Bush involve the European Union. And someone else proposed the G-8. And Larry suggested Putin. Oh, and some smooth-talking apologist in Savile Row pinstripes proposed Chirac, because he and Bush had agreed a U.N. resolution on something or other a year or two back.
...
And none of these Great Men meeting with other Great Men gets us anywhere. Some of the Great Men can't speak for their peoples (Mubarak) or their legislatures (Abbas). And a lot of the Great Men can't even speak for themselves: From the late Yasser Arafat to Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, they say one thing in meetings with Western emissaries and something entirely different to their compatriots. And some of the Great Men we send to negotiate aren't all that great: the wretched Mohammed El Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Authority, is, in fact, a patsy for the nuclear mullahs. To reprise one of my all-time favorite Iranian negotiating positions, let's recall the perfect distillation of what Great Man diplomacy boils down to in the Middle East, as reported in the New York Times exactly a year ago:
"Iran will resume uranium enrichment if the European Union does not recognize its right to do so, two Iranian nuclear negotiators said in an interview published Thursday."
If we don't let Iran go nuclear, they'll go nuclear. Negotiate that, Chuck Hagel.
The forces at play in the Middle East are beyond the Geopolitical Friars' Club. The median age in Gaza is 15.8 years old. How likely is it that any of those bespoke Palestinian "moderates" who've been permanent fixtures on CNN and BBC Middle East discussion panels for 30 years have any meaningful sway over a population of unemployed uneducated teenage boys raised by a death cult? Israel withdrew from Gaza and, instead of getting on with a prototypical Palestinian state, Hamas turned the territory into an Islamist camp. Israel withdrew from Lebanon entirely in 2000, yet Hezbollah is now lobbing rockets at Haifa.
Why? Because in both cases these territories are now in effect Iran's land borders with the Zionist Entity. They're "occupied territories" but it's not the Jews doing the occupying.
wise guy
This student will probably do better in English than math.
fantasy lands
The LA Times has one redeeming feature, its Column One series. Two recent columns are thematically linked. The first, "Forging Ahead in Moscow (subscription) " spotlights Russians faking prosperity to keep up with the Ivanovs.
MOSCOW — Always wanted to brag to your friends about your trip to Brazil, but couldn't afford to go? No problem!
For $500, nobody will believe you weren't sunning yourself last week on Copacabana Beach, just before you trekked through the Amazon rain forest and slept in a thatched hut. Hey! That's you, arms outstretched like Kate Winslet on the bow of the Titanic, on top of Corcovado!
Persey Tours was barely keeping the bill collectors at bay before it started offering fake vacations last year. Now it's selling 15 a month — providing ersatz ticket stubs, hotel receipts, photos with clients' images superimposed on famous landmarks, a few souvenirs for living room shelves.
If the customer is an errant husband who wants his wife to believe he's on a fishing trip, Persey offers not just photos of him on the river, but a cellphone with a distant number, a lodge that if anyone calls will swear the husband is checked in but not available, and a few dead fish on ice.
Of course, it's not the real thing. But in Russia, this is a distinction that easily can drift into irrelevance. If there is a world capital of audacious fabrication, it must be Moscow, where fake is never a four-letter word.
Forget fake Rolexes and Gucci bags — that's kids' stuff. Russian entrepreneurs offer million-dollar fake Ivan Shishkin paintings, forged passes to the Kremlin bearing President Vladimir V. Putin's apparent signature, false medical school diplomas and alley cats palmed off for $300 as "Siberian purebreds."
But it's not just limited to consumer goods.
False diplomas and term papers are the busy student's way of getting over that last hurdle at school. Even Putin's doctoral dissertation, researchers from the Brookings Institution revealed earlier this year, contained major sections lifted from a text published by academics from the University of Pittsburgh.
The revelations were barely repeated in the Moscow press, not because they were scandalous, but because they weren't — government officials routinely rely on fake dissertations patched together by underlings.
A woman named "Nadezhda," whose number was distributed in Moscow subway stations offering to provide university diplomas, was asked by a reporter if she could come up with a degree from the Russian State Medical University.
"No problem. It will cost you 15,000 rubles ($555). What year of graduation do you want?" she asked.
"How about somewhere between 1982 and 1984?"
"It is doable."
She told the caller to provide his full name and education specialty, and asked what kind of grades should be listed on his transcripts and whether he wanted to have attended day classes or night school. "By the way, have you studied medicine?" she inquired then, in an apparent attack of conscience.
"Frankly, no."
Then we go to China for "Illusions on Sale in Shanghai" where a Potemkin shopping mall is all show:
SHANGHAI — Amid the towering glass-and-steel splendor of the Plaza 66 mall — packed with boutiques offering Dior, Prada, Cartier and other luxury brands — shop clerk Xu Junyuan idly scratched his bald head as a lone shopper browsed the deserted aisles.
"I'm just bored," said Xu, who works at the jeans boutique Diesel.
At Fendi, black-suited clerks yawned as they propped themselves against counters. At the palatial Louis Vuitton shop next door, a 7-foot-tall plasma television played to no one.
In this populous city of fanatical shoppers, Plaza 66 is what some locals call a gui gouwu zhongxin — a ghost mall.
The prices are so high that no one buys much. But then, no one really cares.
Just as Stalin erected Potemkin villages to display the glories of communism to outsiders, Shanghai is creating its own illusion of prosperity out of the world's most luxurious brands.
Offering cut-rate rents to top-tier fashion houses, this city of about 18 million is determined to make itself look like a world capital of high fashion.
And the Burberrys, Hermes and Chanels are all too happy to join in the charade.
"Most leading luxury brands will need to have a flagship store in Shanghai if only to put Shanghai along with London, Paris, Milan on their bags," said Paul French, founder and China chief of Access Asia, a marketing research firm in Shanghai.
The illusion is so thin that some stores don't bother to carry much stock. Others may have lots of clothes on the racks, but they carry just one size: medium, which is too big for most Shanghai women.
Some shops "don't ring up a single sale for days," Xu said.
The people with money in China fly to Hong Kong for buying junkets to escape the high taxes on the mainland (is Nancy Pelosi China's economic advisor?), but the illusion doesn't stop there.
In the last decade, city leaders have sought to regenerate the lost hype in part to draw foreign investment. And they've been largely successful, capturing worldwide attention from the media and others who gush about Shanghai as Asia's most vibrant city, overflowing with wealth and grandeur. Gleaming malls like Plaza 66 have risen to replace decrepit neighborhoods.
But Shanghai isn't what it appears to be.
The Shanghai Stock Exchange boasts Asia's largest trading floor inside a 27-story glass building modeled on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. But the floor stays largely empty because trading is electronic, and the stock exchange remains a joke among serious traders for its lack of transparency and inadequate regulations.
At a cost of $1.2 billion, Shanghai built the world's fastest train in 2003, which at a regular speed of 267 mph beat out Japan's bullet trains. But residents have complained that the magnetic-levitation train to Shanghai's largest airport is a white elephant because it doesn't run during hours when many flights arrive or depart. Although the train's hours were recently extended, passengers still have to go to the outskirts of the city to catch the train.
saturday, july 15 2006
big pharoh sees pigs flying
Someone hit me right now to wake me up. I think I'm day dreaming. I can see pigs flying. The conference of Arab foreign ministers in Cairo are not, as usual, arguing over Israel, they're discussing the legitimacy of Hezbollah. Saudi Arabia is leading the camp of ministers criticizing Hezbollah.
mustapha's humor
Dark humor in a dark hour, Lebanese blogger Mustapha mocks the bias of Al Jazeera.
humor: the 10 worst company urls
From IndependentSources. Sample:
1. A site called ‘Who Represents‘ where you can find the name of the agent that represents a celebrity. Their domain name… wait for it… is www.whorepresents.com
2. Experts Exchange, a knowledge base where programmers can exchange advice and views at www.expertsexchange.com
3. Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island at www.penisland.net
4. Need a therapist? Try Therapist Finder at www.therapistfinder.com
shine on, you crazy diamond
Believe it or not, there has been other news this week, non war and non political, worth commenting upon. I have had a long-standing interest in the intersection of Psychology and Psychopharmacology. As part of my occasional look at the issues that arose from the poorly understood impact of the drug culture of the 60s on our zeitgeist, I was struck by the coincidence of the death of Syd Barrett last week and the publication of an article suggesting the utility of Psylocibin in inducing mystical states.
Both of these items reflect the persistent echoes of the 1960s. So much of what afflicts us started in the 60s. In 1960, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, Psychology professors at Harvard University, conducted a series of scientific investigations of hallucinogenic drugs.
They started with volunteer prisoners, then began to use the drugs themselves (and Leary, in 1965, was quoted as saying that he "...learned more about...(his)brain and its possibilities....(and) more about psychology in the five hours after taking these mushrooms than...(he)had in the preceding fifteen years of studying doing (sic) research in psychology...") Shortly thereafter they began to share their hallucinogenic drugs (LSD, Psylocibin) with undergraduates, conspicuously not under the auspices of university approved research protocols.
Both eventually were relieved of their employment by Harvard, but their imprimatur had a significant effect in glamorizing and normalizing the use of hallucinogenic drugs in the 60s. Drugs were touted as liberating minds and expanding consciousness. Middle class American youngsters, raised in conditions of unparalleled material bounty, invested with an inordinate amount of their parents' post-war fueled narcissism, increasingly spiritually impoverished by the loss of belief in old discredited authority (including the death of God via existentialism) no longer had to consider devoting a lifetime to spiritual quests for enlightenment; enlightenment was (supposedly) available through a pill, a mushroom button, a sugar cube, or a tiny piece of blotter paper upon which a drop of LSD had been deposited.
A lot of young people were only too ready to "turn on, tune in, drop out," to quote Leary's infelicitous rubric. It certainly seemed more appealing than entering the robotic ranks of corporate man, or going off to die in a distant country fighting for corporate America (as the choices were so often described.)
A generation raised with only a limited and passing acquaintance with the concept of "delayed gratification" was ideally situated to avail themselves of "instant enlightenment". Sadly, like so many promises of Utopia in a pill, or a bottle, or an ideology, such hopes were soon dashed, but not before too many succumbed to the siren call and many were lost. Syd Barrett, the brilliant enigma who founded the seminal Psychedelic band Pink Floyd, was a casualty of the Psychedelic 60s.
friday, july 14 2006
lebanese want israel to strike syria
Mustapha, from Beirut Spring, has a string of interesting posts on what's going on in Lebanon. including this:
Many Lebanese are very surprised why Israel is leaving Syria alone. In fact, one of the most commonly held conspiracy theories in Lebanon is this one: Israel and Syria had this worked out together in a perverse deal to hurt Lebanon.
Nobody knows why, but unless Israel goes to the source, more people will believe in this particular conspiracy.
val and joe sue for piece
...of a book contract? Byron York:
I have been out of position and working on another story, but a few things stand out about the Joseph Wilson/Valerie Plame lawsuit against Cheney, Libby, Rove, and ten unspecified officials.
The first has to do with the Plame book deal. Remember that her deal with Crown, for a reported $2.5 million, fell apart a few weeks ago. No one has publicly said what happened, but it appears that the deal had been finished and then, for some reason, both sides announced that they were releasing the other from their obligations. Neither side would comment on what took place.
The Wilsons then began talking to Simon and Schuster, but in the interim, Patrick Fitzgerald sent out word that he did not intend to indict Karl Rove. Even with New York publishers who are avidly on the side of anyone willing to attack the Bush administration, that news did some damage to the Plame proposal. The value of her book, such as it was, was that it would tell the story of the human costs of a conspiracy that went straight to the top of the U.S. government. A Rove indictment would have been a great blessing for her book proposal; the absence of such an indictment was a great loss.
And if there are no further indictments in the case — and it certainly seems that Fitzgerald, by sending word to Rove and to Robert Novak that their parts in it were over, is winding down rather than gearing up — then the conspiracy scenario that underlay the Plame book proposal, and indeed all of Joseph Wilson's public appearances, appears to be falling apart. How does one keep that alive, at least through a seven-figure book deal and a few more speeches? Well, a lawsuit wouldn't be a bad idea.
UPDATE: Val and Joe want you to contribute money for their legal fees, making them the Jimmy and Tammy Faye of politics. All that remains to be seen is if Val can cry on cue.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen something quite as ballsy as this website in which our favorite media loving Bush haters Joe Wilson and his wife Valerie are asking people to contribute to them for the bogus lawsuit they filed.
And old Joe is himself a paid author for his “Politics of Truth” (How’s that for an ironic title), and is a paid speaker.
The next thing that comes to mind is the absolute gall of these two in asking for people to give them money for this sham lawsuit.
And let me tell you this, these are the two stupidest people on the planet if they’re paying one dime for lawyer fees. Cases like theirs are almost always done on a contingent fee basis, where you don’t pay the lawyer if you don’t get money.
Sure, you might have to pay costs for copies, filing fees, and the like, but any lawyer who got a fee agreement wherein the Wilsons agreed to pay by the hour for this case - win or lose - ought to have a bronze statue erected in his or her honor.
GatewayPundit thinks they've suffered enough, poor dears.
guns and taxes: cognitive dissonance alert for libs
A tough week for liberals. First came undeniable evidence that Bush's tax rate cuts actually increased tax revenues, primarily from the wealthy and corporations. Just as predicted.
Now they have to swallow (further) evidence that sometimes liberalized gun laws reduce crime.
Florida is, of course, the inventor of liberalized handgun concealed carry permits, of "castle doctrine" laws that allow lethal force in self defense without having to retreat, and a few other such measures.
Naturally, the Brady Campaign used Florida as their poster child for a gun-crazy state. Brady began an advertising campaign to warn tourists against entering this dangerous state. "The �Shoot First� law is a new law in Florida that police, prosecuting attorneys and gun violence prevention advocates worry may lead to the reckless use of guns on the streets of Florida cities." Sarah Brady intoned, ""The net effect of the new 'Shoot First' law in Florida is, unfortunately, precisely what we feared. People are dying who did not deserve to die."
Just for good measure, Brady added "Gun violence in Florida could increase in 2005 because Congress failed to renew the federal assault weapon ban, which expired last fall, and Florida has no state law restricting assault weapons or rapid-fire ammunition magazines. Florida also does not require background checks at gun shows, does not require child-safety locks to be sold with guns, does not have any handgun safety standards to limit Saturday night specials and even forces police to let people carry hidden handguns in public."
Well, the Palm Beach Post reports that Florida's crime rates have fallen to the lowest level since 1971. "A telephone message left for comment after hours with the The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence in Washington, D.C. was not immediately returned."
You can get the report, in pdf format, here. It shows that, even though the state's population is growing, total homicides fell by 6.9%, and firearm homicides by 6.1%. Given the population increase, the decrease in rates would have been greater.
the general's speech
From Maggie's Farm:
Speech by Marine Maj Gen Michael R Lehnert, commanding general of Marine Corps Installations-West, Camp Pendleton, CA, to the San Diego Chamber of Commerce Military Affairs Advisory Council, 26 June 2006.
Good morning ladies and gentlemen,
Eight days ago, I was present in the audience when Tom Brokaw addressed the 2006 Stanford graduating class. After the initial pleasantries and one-liners, Mr. Brokaw said something unexpected. He told the class that they were the children of privilege, fortunate to be attending one of the finest educational institutions in the country, the anointed because they had both the test scores for admittance and parents who were able to afford their tuition. He noted that they could likely expect rapid advancement in almost any endeavor they choose and that they were destined to lead the most powerful country in the world.
The class was beaming.
And then Brokaw reminded them that the liberties and freedoms they enjoyed were being defended by young people their age that did not have their advantages. That at this time thousands of men and women were fighting, dying and suffering debilitating injury to ensure that the rest of us could live the American dream.
There was an uncomfortable shifting in the seats, followed by slow but growing applause from the audience. When we sent my son to Stanford four years ago, we filled out a form asking for demographic information. One of the questions for the parents said, what is your profession? After it was a list of about thirty professions including doctor, lawyer, congressman, educator, architect. Military was not listed so I filled in "other."
Read it all.
international humor
Remember when Fidel Castro hit the ground a few months back? Now we know why. Zidane.
collateral damage to lebanon
There are millions of Lebanese who would love to see Hizbollah gone from their nation. Now they're paying dearly for Iran's stooges making war on Israel:
Violence in Lebanon intensifies as Israeli attacks on parts of Beirut escalated minute by minute Thursday. A series of blasts in Beirut's international airport closed down 3 runways. The southern section of the country undergoes its heaviest air campaign ever from its neighbor in the last 24 years. Strikes on the airport came hours before Israel imposed a naval blockade on Lebanon to cut off supply routes to the Lebanese militants Hezbollah.
As of press time, war planes continue to pummel the south while bombings in the capital came to a temporary standstill.
There is no business in Beirut for the moment. Most of the shops, banks, travel agents and offices remain close today. Travel agents, collectively, are helping hotel guests evacuate Beirut hotels, finding them cars to transport them over to the Syrian border, into Damascus back to their domicile. From Syria, they fly back to their countries. Otherwise, most Arab visitors got into their cars and drove out as quickly as possible. The ones who came on their own are taking the route out to Syria.
As we interviewed a reliable source, an official tourism consultant for years, who requested to remain anonymous, he said there is a massive exodus.
The traffic traversing the Beirut-Damascus highway and major roads leading to the borders is bumper-to-bumper.
anti-missile test "phenomenal"
The Army had a "phenomenal" success in the latest test of the American anti-ballistic missile defense system. Jason Gibbs reports for the Las Cruces Sun-News that a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile intercepted and destroyed a warhead and its contents:
Hundreds of miles above southern New Mexico, it was a picture-perfect impact between two missiles. ...
The pre-dawn art show was the result of the third of five tests planned at White Sands Missile Range to determine the effectiveness of THAAD — Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile. And military officials said the test went better than they could have hoped.
"This was phenomenal," said U.S. Army Col. Charles Driessnack, the project manager for the Missile Defense Agency's THAAD program. "It performed as expected."
The test demonstrated the THAAD's ability to "completely destroy that warhead so that no chemical or nuclear residue would contaminate areas" below the explosion, Driessnack said. ...
thursday, july 13 2006
the (unintended) comedy stylings of nancy pelosi
Courtesy of Anklebitingpundits.
night and day
Darkness versus light. Good versus evil. Rarely can these be seen in such bold relief.
This 2004 satellite image of east Asia shows, in black and white, the difference. Whereas Japan, China and South Korea are lit up at night, the Hermit Kingdom is plunged into darkness.
South Korea has the 11th largest economy in the world, ahead of India, Russia, Mexico and Australia. Across the 38th parallel, North Koreans are starving.
The difference is the USA's commitment to keeping the south free. We've been there since 1953.
No one whines about an "Exit Strategy." Despite all, there is a measure of anti-Americanism among the South Koreans. No good deed ever goes unpunished.
My leftwing friends love to cite the sins of America. Granted, we've committed 'em. Did we overreach and stumble as we fought the Cold War? No question. Was the cause worthy? Did we spare millions great suffering and enable millions more to prosper?
The answer is black and white. I can see it on my Samsung monitor.
JB
the moment of "we told you so"
For the Israeli right, this is the moment of "We told you so." The fact that the kidnappings and missile attacks have come from southern Lebanon and Gaza--precisely the areas from which Israel has unilaterally withdrawn--is proof, for right-wingers, of the bankruptcy of unilateralism. Yet the right has always misunderstood the meaning of unilateral withdrawal.
Those of us who have supported unilateralism didn't expect a quiet border in return for our withdrawal but simply the creation of a border from which we could more vigorously defend ourselves, with greater domestic consensus and international understanding. The anticipated outcome, then, wasn't an illusory peace but a more effective way to fight the war. The question wasn't whether Hamas or Hezbollah would forswear aggression but whether Israel would act with appropriate vigor to their continued aggression.
So it wasn't the rocket attacks that were a blow to the unilateralist camp, but rather Israel's tepid responses to those attacks. If unilateralists made a mistake, it was in believing our political leaders--including Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert--when they promised a policy of zero tolerance against any attacks emanating from Gaza after Israel's withdrawal. That policy was not implemented--until two weeks ago. Now, belatedly, the Olmert government is trying to regain something of its lost credibility, and that is the real meaning of this initial phase of the war, both in Gaza and in Lebanon.
"the same war"
No one should have any lingering doubts about what’s going on in the Middle East. It’s war, and it now runs from Gaza into Israel, through Lebanon and thence to Iraq via Syria. There are different instruments, ranging from Hamas in Gaza to Hezbollah in Syria and Lebanon and on to the multifaceted “insurgency” in Iraq.
But there is a common prime mover, and that is the Iranian mullahcracy, the revolutionary Islamic fascist state that declared war on us 27 years ago and has yet to be held accountable.
It is very good news that the White House immediately denounced Iran and Syria, just as Ambassador Khalilzad had yesterday tagged the terrorist Siamese twins as sponsors of terrorism in Iraq. For those who doubt the Iranian hand, remind yourself that Hezbollah is a wholly owned subsidiary of the mullahcracy (with Syria providing some supplies, and free run of the territory), and then read what Iraq the Model had to say yesterday, Wednesday:
Hizbollah is Iran's and Syria's partner in feeding instability in Iraq as there were evidence that this terror group has a role in equipping and training insurgents in Iraq and Hizbollah had more than once openly showed support for the “resistance” in Iraq and sponsored the meetings of Baathist and radical Islamist militants who are responsible for most of the violence in Iraq.
Notice, please, that he says Iran “sponsored the meetings of Baathist and radical Islamist militants...” He is talking Sunnis here, the same Sunnis who, according to CIA deep thinkers and scads of academic experts, cannot possibly work closely with Shiites like, ahem, the mullahs of Tehran. Iraq the Model isn’t burdened by this wisdom, and so he just reports what he sees on the ground in his own country.
soaking the rich
From Opinion Journal:
... The real news, and where the policy credit belongs, is with the 2003 tax cuts. They've succeeded even beyond Art Laffer's dreams, if that's possible. In the nine quarters preceding that cut on dividend and capital gains rates and in marginal income-tax rates, economic growth averaged an annual 1.1%. In the 12 quarters--three full years--since the tax cut passed, growth has averaged a remarkable 4%. Monetary policy has also fueled this expansion, but the tax cuts were perfectly targeted to improve the incentives to take risks among businesses shell-shocked by the dot-com collapse, 9/11 and Sarbanes-Oxley.
This growth in turn has produced a record flood of tax revenues, just as the most ebullient supply-siders predicted. In the first nine months of fiscal 2006, tax revenues have climbed by $206 billion, or nearly 13%. As the Congressional Budget Office recently noted, "That increase represents the second-highest rate of growth for that nine-month period in the past 25 years"--exceeded only by the year before. For all of fiscal 2005, revenues rose by $274 billion, or 15%. We should add that CBO itself failed to anticipate this revenue boom, as the nearby table shows. Maybe its economists should rethink their models.
Remember the folks who said the tax cuts would "blow a hole in the deficit?" Well, revenues as a share of the economy are now expected to rise this year to 18.3%, slightly above the modern historical average of 18.2%. The remaining budget deficit of a little under $300 billion will be about 2.3% of GDP, which is smaller than in 17 of the previous 25 years. Throw in the surpluses rolling into the states, and the overall U.S. "fiscal deficit" is now economically trivial.
ted nugent
From Maggie's Farm:
Ted Nugent was being interviewed by a British journalist. The journalist
asked, "What do you think the last thought is in the head of a deer before you shoot it? Is it`Are you my friend?` or is it `Are you the one who killed my brother?'"
Nugent replied, "They aren't capable of that kind of thinking. All they
care about is, 'What am I going to eat next, who am I going to screw next, and can I run fast enough to get away. They are very much like the French in that way."
wednesday, july 12 2006
orange county jihadi
HotAir does a nice job connecting the dots about Adam Gadahn, the twerp-cum-terrorist from Southern California. See the video here. Seeing him waxing Islamic in his turban evokes memories of Woody Allen posing as a guerilla in Bananas.
go ask alice
Medical science returns to the study of magic mushrooms:
In a study that could revive interest in researching the effects of psychedelic drugs, scientists said a substance in certain mushrooms induced powerful, mind-altering experiences among a group of well-educated, middle-age men and women.
Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions researchers conducted the study following carefully controlled, scientifically rigorous procedures. They said that the episodes generally led to positive changes in attitude and behavior among the 36 volunteer participants and that the changes appeared to last at least two months.
Participants cited feelings of intense joy, "distance from ordinary reality," and feelings of peace and harmony after taking the drug. Two-thirds described the effects of the drug, called psilocybin, as among the five most meaningful experiences of their lives.
But in 30% of the cases, the drug provoked harrowing experiences dominated by fear and paranoia. Two participants likened the episodes to being in a war. While these episodes were managed by trained monitors at the sessions where the drugs were taken, researchers cautioned that in less-controlled settings, such responses could trigger panic or other reactions that might put people in danger.
Indeed, they're not for everybody.
One of the last influential studies was the Good Friday Experiment in 1962 in which 20 seminary students were given either psilocybin or nicotinic acid during a religious service. The 10 who got psilocybin reported intense spiritual experiences with positive benefits; one follow-up study suggested those effects lasted 25 years.
"It's remarkable that we have a class of compounds that has sat in the deep freeze for 40 years," Dr. Griffiths said. "It seemed to me scientifically it was high time to look again" at psychedelic agents.
For some, it was quite an experience.
A third of the participants said the experience with psilocybin was the single most significant experience of their lives, and an additional 38% rated it among their top five such experiences -- akin to, say, the birth of a first child or the death of a parent. Just 8% of the Ritalin episodes were reported to be among the top five meaningful occurrences. Two months after the sessions, 79% of the participants indicated in questionnaires that their sense of well-being and satisfaction increased after the psilocybin episodes, compared with 21% for Ritalin.
change of heart
Another wonderful essay by Gerard Van der Leun. Excerpt:
Politics is the great game of our globe. It is now and always has been the only blood sport played well by both warriors and wimps. This is as it should be since the amount of blood that has to be spilled to obtain any of many possible outcomes hangs in the balance. In all this, change may be for the better or the worse, depending on where you stand, but change will have its time and send its butcher's bill. And the bill will always be more than you imagined you would have to pay. In blood and in treasure, the stakes are fates.
All of that is hard and difficult and, more often than not, splits parties, factions, families and friends right down to the living bone. It is played in real time and with live ammunition. But none of it is mysterious. In the end it involves only the process of politics and, while the rules may be at times obscure, they can still be descried and codified.
Not so the changes of the darkest realm of our lives; that realm we know only dimly but tell ourselves, in our error, that we know well. This is the realm of the human heart; a place where change comes more slowly than wisdom accrues, and rolls below our conscious minds like a deep, underground river into which we have drilled, through the bedrock of our lives, the wells of love and the wells of hate.
color coded history in europe
Admiral Horatio Nelson may have guided the British naval fleet to a famous victory at the Battle of Trafalgar, but he faced a far tougher foe during celebrations to mark its 200th anniversary. Organizers of a re-enactment of the sea battle in 2005 decided to bill it as between a “Red Fleet” and a “Blue Fleet”, rather than Britain and its French and Spanish adversaries, describing it as a re-enactment of “an early 19th century sea battle.”
Trafalgar, in which the British Royal Navy saw off a combined Franco-Spanish fleet off the southern coast of Spain, marked a crucial defeat for Napoleon’s sea power. Nelson himself fell during the battle.
Apparently, we now live in the age of the Borderless Utopia and the Brotherhood of Man, and shouldn’t be too hung up on Spain, England, France or other irrelevant historical details. It’s just rude. Maybe soon, we will hear that WW1 or even WW2 was fought between the Yellow Team and the Blue Team. We wouldn’t want to insult anybody, would we?
happiness is a warm bureaucrat
From Brussels Journal:
Mr Huet telephoned me earlier today in a sweat about something he had just read in the newspapers. Apparently, the Government is considering whether to add the teaching of happiness to the National Curriculum. According to a report in The Independent on Sunday,
“Lessons in happiness are to be introduced for 11-year-olds in state schools to combat a huge rise in depression, self-harm and anti-social behaviour among young people [...]
“Lessons using cognitive behavioural therapy techniques will include role play designed to help children build up their self-esteem, challenge negative ways of thinking and express their thoughts clearly [...]
“They will also be shown special breathing exercises to keep them calm when their parents are arguing and avoid blaming themselves for situations that are beyond their control, for example, the fact that their parents may be divorcing [...] The anti-depression classes, due to be introduced in South Tyneside, Manchester and one rural location, have been approved by Lord Layard, the Government’s "happiness" tsar.”
tuesday, july 11 2006
pelosi's time to eat crow
Back in the spring of 2003, shortly before President Bush signed tax cuts into law and unleashed this remarkable economic boom, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) had this to say:
“None of these tax cuts is affordable. None of them creates jobs, and they are not fair. All of them do damage to our long-term economic growth and contribute to the national deficit.”
Huh? Mrs. Pelosi could not have been further off the mark if she tried.
Let’s break down that ridiculous statement.
“None of them creates jobs…” Actually, since the passage of Bush’s tax cuts, over 5 million jobs have been created in the U.S. Unemployment dropped from 6.3 percent to 4.6 percent. Simply put, Americans are working.
“All of them do damage to our long-term economic growth…” Wrong. The economy has grown at a 4.0 percent annualized rate, way above historical averages. $13 trillion of new wealth has been created during this time.
“All of them…contribute to the national deficit.” Wrong again. Amid a surge in tax collections, the Bush administration cut its estimate of this year's budget deficit today by 30 percent to $296 billion. The projected shortfall is down from the $423 billion deficit the White House forecast five months ago and represents 2.3 percent of gross domestic product, according to the OMB. Government revenue has risen 13 percent so far this year, driven by higher than expected tax receipts as the economy grew at an annual rate of 5.6 percent in the first quarter, the fastest in almost three years (when the tax cuts were introduced). Individual tax receipts were almost $60 billion higher than expected because of the rise in personal income. Corporate tax receipts were over $50 billion higher than expected.
Despite stubborn naysayers like Mrs. Pelosi, the pro-growth, supply-side tax cut formula is a winner. It has been proven right, yet again.
arthur gets the last laff
It's official — Arthur Laffer wins. New data show federal revenues surged in the first three quarters of the current fiscal year. Corporate tax receipts are up more than 26% over the same period last year, ringing in at $250 billion.
Individual income tax collections, at $791 billion, are up 14% over the first nine months of fiscal 2005. The Congressional Budget Office projects corporate tax receipts will total $330 billion by the end of the fiscal year. As a result, the deficit for the year is expected to be about $300 billion, down from $318 billion last year and $412 billion the year before.
what kind of brew would jesus drink?
A vandalized billboard causes a stir.
dangerous bunk
This email will not die. Many of your well-meaning friends have probably forwarded it to you. It includes:
HOW TO SURVIVE A HEART ATTACK WHEN ALONE
Since many people are alone when they suffer a heart attack, this article seemed in order. Without help the person whose heart stops beating properly and who begins to feel Faint, has only about 10 seconds left before losing consciousness. However, these victims can help themselves by coughing repeatedly and very vigorously. A deep breath should be taken before each cough, and the cough must be deep and prolonged, as when producing sputum from deep inside the chest. A breath and a cough must be repeated about every two seconds without let up until help arrives, or until the heart is felt to be beating normally again. Deep breaths get oxygen into the lungs and coughing movements squeeze the heart and keep the blood circulating.
In fact, this is very bad advice and could be fatal. Read the Snopes item on this.
euro-twits
A recent poll showed large numbers of Europeans believe that the USA is greater threat to world peace than Iran or North Korea. Liberals, no doubt, feel ashamed and wonder how we've sunk so low.
But I just wonder how so many Europeans can be so stupid. Well, here's one explanation: they are fed stupid news by stupid news media. David's Medienkritik notes:
We at Medienkritik have seen a lot of media folly in three years. But few articles exhibit greater ignorance and the ability to warp views on the nature of democracy in the United States than Thomas Klau's recent column in Financial Times Deutschland. The article, entitled "In Patriotic Morass" makes the following assertion:
"America's military leadership discusses with remarkable openness whether excessive brutality and a lack of cultural sensitivity have contributed to driving Iraqis into the resistance. Whoever follows the political debate and the media reporting in the USA on the matter, however, can hardly find an independently researched word not authorized by the military."
That's right: Mr. Klau honestly believes that the debate over Iraq in the United States is somehow controlled by the US military (and that means Bush must be behind it all.) He believes that the USA has devolved into a land of mind-numbed robots so blinded by patriotism that independent thought is nearly impossible.
...
So we have to ask: What United States is Mr. Klau talking about? Has he missed the daily body counts on CNN and FoxNews? Has he missed the media obsession with Cindy Sheehan? Has he missed President Bush's low approval ratings? Has he missed Michael Moore and Gore Vidal and Al Gore and Al Franken and the hundreds upon hundreds of anti-Bush books published in the USA over the past several years that can be found in virtually any bookstore anywhere in the country? Did he miss the American media's coverage of Abu Ghraib and Haditha? Did he miss the recent media revelation (straight from the New York Times) that the US was eavesdropping and monitoring banking records to track terrorists? Has he completely missed statements by Jack Murtha or Ted Kennedy or John Kerry on US troops and operations in Iraq? Has he missed all of the anti-war demonstrations that have taken place in the US since 2001?
humoring black people
I was recently shown a videotape of people reacting to radio talk shows. Organized by a firm that specializes in analyzing radio talk shows, the members of the listening panel were carefully chosen to represent all major listening groups within American society.
But I quickly noticed something odd -- I saw no blacks among the selected listeners. I asked why. And the response was stunning.
Blacks had always been included, I was told, but no more. Not because the firm was not interested in black listeners -- on the contrary, blacks are an important part of the radio audience. They were not invited to give their opinion about various radio shows because in its previous experience, the company had discovered that almost no whites would publicly differ with the opinions of the blacks on the panel. Therefore, once a black listener spoke, whites stopped saying what they really thought, if what they thought differed from what a black had said.
I believed that this was the reason -- not some racist animosity toward blacks -- since such companies are paid to give accurate reports on audience reactions to radio programs, and clearly their results would be skewed without input from black listeners. But I still needed to test this thesis. Do most whites really not publicly say what they believe, if what they believe differs from what a black believes -- even when the subject has absolutely nothing to do with race (i.e., reactions to a radio talk show discussing other subjects)?
So I posed to this question to my radio audience, and, sure enough, whites from around the country called in to say that they are afraid to differ with blacks lest they be labeled racist.
I could not imagine anything more detrimental toward abolishing racism and to enhancing black progress in America than such an attitude. But apparently it is the norm in American life to so fear being called a racist that individuals as well as institutions react to blacks as they would to children -- humoring them rather than taking them seriously.
This is another terrible legacy of the dominant liberal attitudes vis a vis America's blacks. For the liberal worlds of academia and media, as for the Democratic Party, blacks are not seen as individuals, the way members of virtually other minority and majority groups are. In the liberal mind, blacks are an oppressed group -- the ultimate oppressed group in America -- and there is little more about black Americans that one needs to know.
monday, july 10 2006
wrong place, wrong time
Lightning strikes train, then truck, then a car behind, then...
hans blix and saddam
It's amazing what is turning up in the captured Iraqi documents, which are finally being released and translated. Captains Quarters is on the topic.
eco-blather
The Washington Post reported that because of melting ice caps and glaciers, "The End Is Near!" But melting Arctic ice won't raise sea levels any more than the melting ice in your drink makes your glass overflow.
MSNBC and the BBC ran stories on the coming calamity from Greenland's melting glaciers. Unlike Arctic ice, those melting glaciers could raise sea levels. But other reports note that Greenland's ice has been thickening in the interior of Greenland.
...
The fundamentalist doom-mongers ignore scientists who say the effects of global warming may be benign. Harvard astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas says added carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may actually benefit the world because more CO2 helps plants grow. Warmer winters would give farmers a longer harvest season.
Why don't we hear about this part of the global warming argument?
"It's the money!" says Dr. Baliunas. "Twenty-five billion dollars in government funding has been spent since 1990 to research global warming. If scientists and researchers were coming out releasing reports that global warming has little to do with man, and most to do with just how the planet works, there wouldn't be as much money to study it."
And the politicians would have one less excuse to take control of our lives.
the religious left preaches
A group of bishops have warned Prime Minister Tony Blair that the possession of Trident nuclear weapons is "evil" and "profoundly anti-God".
In a letter published in The Independent, the 20 bishops said Trident was "evil" and that "possession and use are profoundly anti-God acts."
The money would be better spent helping developing countries, they say.
Or treating mind rot in British clerics.
"Nuclear weapons are a direct denial of the Christian concept of peace and reconciliation, which are social and economic as well as physical and spiritual.
"The costs involved in the maintenance and replacement of Trident could be used to address pressing environmental concerns, the causes of terrorism, poverty and debt and enable humanity and dignity to be the right of all, and would go a long way towards helping Make Poverty History."
Wait, didn't Jesus Christ himself say "you'll always have the poor?"
When Pat Roberston or Jerry Falwell open their mouths and let stupidity out, it makes headlines. Why not this?
not kissing cousins
Our friend Tom writes:
When my parents and I immigrated to New York, my father was reunited with my uncle (his brother) who had gone through WW2 in America, become successful, and had a son – my cousin Michael. Michael was weird, difficult and aggressive. Fortunately, although he was older, I was a bit bigger and stronger.
But he was always provoking me and when necessary I had to fight back, and the conflicts often escalated to the point where even his parents realized he was a brat and chided and punished him. The worst incident was when he struck me with a toy hammer from my toolbox while we were playing, drawing blood and causing a scar that I still carry on my chin. Naturally he was punished severely and as always he left crying and screaming, “I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean it!”
Today as I watch the infernal dynamic between the Israelis and Palestinians I am reminded of my cousin. The Palestinians harbor deeply rooted and possibly even legitimate resentment toward their younger and stronger adversaries. But instead of realistically addressing their concerns and behaving like a mature nation, they provoke their stronger rivals, suffer inevitable and predictable retaliation, and then ask for a truce (so that they can presumably regroup to strike again).
You can almost hear them screaming “We didn’t mean it, we didn’t mean it,” which interestingly enough could serve as a theme for all of their government pronouncements and negotiations. You can make an interesting connection to potential “negotiations” with Iran.
Those who still have a memory might recall the months of the hostage situation under Carter, with different factions inside the “government” saying conflicting things about when the hostages would be released and what might get it done. The press dutifully reported all of these utterances as though they had some substance and meaning.
Today we get the same conflicting statements out of that government about their nuclear ambitions, as though there could be any doubt about their intentions. Anyone with a mind and a memory must now realize that since the current “president” of Iran was one of the hostage takers, “they didn’t mean it, they didn’t mean it.”
pinch feeling the pinch?
Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr, publisher of the New York Times took in a cool $1 million salary and $560,000-plus in bonuses last year. How did his company's stock do? The S&P is the red line. The NYT company is the black line.
More from Pajamas Media.
sunday, july 9 2006
cultural health: jews vs. palestinians
It has always surprised me that more historians and anthropologists don’t look at child-rearing practices to try to understand the basis of cultural health, pathology and change, and why some cultures are so much sicker than others.
But hardly any do, mainly because of the dominance of the politically correct view that no culture is better or worse than any other--except for Western culture, which is the worst. And yet, how could it not be? If you have a culture that systematically abuses children in the most grotesque way--say, the Palestinians--why should anyone be surprised that they are arguably the most comprehensively depraved people on earth?
Likewise, being that Jews have been practicing more humane child-rearing for millennia, why should anyone be surprised that, pound for pound, they have contributed more to human excellence than any other human culture? How is it that Jews, who represent two tenths of one percent of the world’s population, have won 15 to 20 percent of the Nobel Prizes, and perhaps constitute an even higher percentage of the world's greatest comedians?On the other hand, the Palestinians have won exactly one Nobel Prize, and it was given to one of the most depraved monsters who ever drew breath. And the Palestinian contribution to comedy has been negligable, or at least unintended--e.g. the wild-eyed imams with their crazed Friday evening sermons, the comical s'alapstiq "work accidents" in which they accidentally blow themselves up, Arafat's sham marriage to a goy named Suha, etc.
how iraq war helped save hudson tunnel
On Friday came news that a terror plot to bomb New York City's Hudson tunnel had been thwarted. What has gone largely unremarked is the part of the Lebanese government in the bust:
Lebanese authorities found maps and bomb plans on the personal computer of an Al Qaeda suspect arrested in an alleged plot to attack train tunnels in New York City, a senior Lebanese official said Saturday.
Consider for a moment that a mere 18 months ago, the government of Lebanon was effectively the government of Syria, aka, Assad and his thugs.
That changed after the assassination of Lebanese politician Rafik Harriri by Assad's hitmen caused a popular uprising that was supported by the United States and France, among others. Under pressure, the Syrians pulled out of Lebanon after 18 years of occupation.
No doubt seeing Saddam sitting in a jail cell contributed to Assad's decision to withdraw. So for all the critics of the Iraq war, who count nothing but its costs (in dollars and lives), here's a chance to acknowledge one of its benefits.
And for those who rant that Bush's policies have poisoned us with the Arab world, please acknowledge that Lebanon behaved like an ally.
the rational dane
Bjorn Lomborg busted--and that is the only word for it--onto the world scene in 2001 with the publication of his book "The Skeptical Environmentalist." A one-time Greenpeace enthusiast, he'd originally planned to disprove those who said the environment was getting better.
He failed. And to his credit, his book said so, supplying a damning critique of today's environmental pessimism. Carefully researched, it offered endless statistics--from official sources such as the U.N.--showing that from biodiversity to global warming, there simply were no apocalypses in the offing. "Our history shows that we solve more problems than we create," he tells me. For his efforts, Mr. Lomborg was labeled a heretic by environmental groups--whose fundraising depends on scaring the jeepers out of the public--and became more hated by these alarmists than even (if possible) President Bush.
Yet the experience left Mr. Lomborg with a taste for challenging conventional wisdom. In 2004, he invited eight of the world's top economists--including four Nobel Laureates--to Copenhagen, where they were asked to evaluate the world's problems, think of the costs and efficiencies attached to solving each, and then produce a prioritized list of those most deserving of money.
The well-publicized results (and let it be said here that Mr. Lomborg is no slouch when it comes to promoting himself and his work) were stunning. While the economists were from varying political stripes, they largely agreed. The numbers were just so compelling: $1 spent preventing HIV/AIDS would result in about $40 of social benefits, so the economists put it at the top of the list (followed by malnutrition, free trade and malaria). In contrast, $1 spent to abate global warming would result in only about two cents to 25 cents worth of good; so that project dropped to the bottom.
drawing a new mideast map
International borders are never completely just. But the degree of injustice they inflict upon those whom frontiers force together or separate makes an enormous difference — often the difference between freedom and oppression, tolerance and atrocity, the rule of law and terrorism, or even peace and war.
The most arbitrary and distorted borders in the world are in Africa and the Middle East. Drawn by self-interested Europeans (who have had sufficient trouble defining their own frontiers), Africa's borders continue to provoke the deaths of millions of local inhabitants. But the unjust borders in the Middle East — to borrow from Churchill — generate more trouble than can be consumed locally.
tax cuts for the rich
"The long-term prognosis is still very, very bleak, and the administration doesn't have any kind of long-term plan."
That's the Democratic response to this news: An unexpectedly steep rise in tax revenues from corporations and the wealthy is driving down the budget deficit this year, even though spending has climbed sharply because of the war in Iraq and the cost of hurricane relief.
On Tuesday, White House officials are expected to announce that the tax receipts will be about $250 billion above last year's levels and that the deficit will be about $100 billion less than what they projected six months ago....
Tax revenues are climbing twice as fast as the administration predicted in February, so fast that the budget deficit could actually decline this year. The main reason is a big spike in corporate tax receipts, which have nearly tripled since 2003, as well as what appears to be a big rise in individual taxes on stock market profits and executive bonuses.
From corporations and the wealthy? Okay, frame that.
saturday, july 8 2006
slow learners
The geniuses at Yale deny the Taliban student, finally.
And in England, the BBC is set to air a show demonizing Lady Margaret Thatcher. The left can't stand her; after all, she proved them wrong and saved Britain. For that there can be no forgiveness, let alone gratitude.
deadwood transcripts
The writing on HBO's Deadwood is curious combination of profanity and elegance. Watching the series is a bit like watching Shakespeare -- much goes by too fast. Fortunately, someone has taken on the task of transcribing the episodes.
In this sample, the obsequious hotelier E. B. Farnum is insulting his dimwitted cook and perceived inferior, Richardson. E.B. fears being fired by George Hearst, the hotel's new owner.
EB: Candidly, Richardson, as I imagine you foraging for berries and grubs, and flicking at insects with your sticky tongue, I feel a certain dismay.
Richardson: What are you talking about?
EB: You are to be discharged, fool. As, I suspect in a wink of time, once some stage from a different direction arrives with my replacement, am I.
Richardson: What did we do wrong?
EB: Your error, surprisingly enough, is not to be a grotesque of inconceivable stupidity, but that you are white and male and not repulsively obese. As for my own, I wonder if it lies in an excessive courtesy and eagerness to please.
(George Hearst descends the stairs)
EB: Shoo, skunk. Shoo. Go, go. (Richardson runs back into E.B.’s room.) Mr. Hearst.
Hearst: Farnum, have you a moment for us to talk?
EB: I do. I’d ask only that you be brief and forbear from false camaraderie.
(He is bending over, his head nearly on the desk. Hearst leans down, looking at him curiously. E.B. straightens up.)
EB: Come, Hearst. I’ve seen the Ethiop. Who indeed could miss her? And even as she supplants Richardson, what person, I wonder, of what depraved exotic origin have you engaged to take my place?
Hearst: I hadn’t thought of replacing you. Do you want me to? (E.B. pauses, an “OhshitwhatdidIjustsay!” look on his face.)
EB: The world begins to dance before my eyes.
safe at any speed
Remember how the nannycrats (Democrat party) kept us driving 55 mph for 20 years after the oil embargo ended? Their excuse was saving lives. They were wrong.
As a public policy matter, this steady decline is a vindication of the repeal of the 55 miles per hour federal speed limit law in 1995. That 1974 federal speed limit was arguably the most disobeyed and despised law since Prohibition. "Double nickel," as it was often called, was first adopted to save gasoline during the Arab oil embargo, though later the justification became saving lives. But to Westerners with open spaces and low traffic density, the law became a symbol of the heavy hand of the federal nanny state. To top it off, Congress would deny states their own federal highway construction dollars if they failed to comply.
In repealing the law, the newly minted Republican majority in Congress declared that states were free to impose their own limits. Many states immediately took up this nod to federalism by raising their limits to 70 or 75 mph. Texas just raised its speed limit again on rural highways to 80.
This may seem non-controversial now, but at the time the debate was shrill and filled with predictions of doom. Ralph Nader claimed that "history will never forgive Congress for this assault on the sanctity of human life." Judith Stone, president of the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, predicted to Katie Couric on NBC's "Today Show" that there would be "6,400 added highway fatalities a year and millions of more injuries." Federico Pena, the Clinton Administration's Secretary of Transportation, declared: "Allowing speed limits to rise above 55 simply means that more Americans will die and be injured on our highways."
all hail kobayashi, king of the wienies!
by Burt Prelutsky
By this time, the entire civilized world knows that Mr. Takeru Kobayashi, 27, has pulled off the near-impossible feat of winning his sixth consecutive Coney Island hot dog eating contest. I have no idea how one goes about training for this event, and I suspect I wouldn’t want to know, but I’m pretty darn sure that steroids play no part in it. For that alone, the man is to be commended.
The only thing comparable that springs to mind is Lance Armstrong’s string of Tour de France victories. But I think that even if Mr. Armstrong is innocent of all those blood-doping charges that blood-doping losers keep bringing up, his accomplishment pales by comparison to Kobayashi’s.
After all, how many adults do you know who still ride bicycles? But everybody eats. And a great many of us eat hot dogs. But how many do you think you could eat at one sitting? Maybe three? Let’s say you starved yourself for a day or two. Think you could maybe down four or five? The great Kobayashi devoured slightly more than 53 in 12 minutes, and that included buns! That works out to about four-and-a-half per minute, or roughly one every 14 seconds. Truly, the mind boggles. To tell you the truth, just thinking about it makes my stomach do a little boggling.
Kobayashi, who weighs a mere 160 pounds -- although I don’t know if that’s his before or after weight -- is no one-trick pony. Once, in order to win a $25,000 prize, he put away 17.7 pounds of pan-seared cow brains. I’m not aware if there was a time limit on that occasion. I’d say if he managed to do it in less than 10 years, he more than earned his money.
Aside from being a human garbage disposal, Takeru might be a very nice fellow for all I know, but you invite this guy for dinner, and it could blow your food budget for the next six months. You don’t worry about his asking for seconds; his firsts will clean out your refrigerator and whatever’s hanging around in your pantry.
Apparently, food-eating contests have become a big deal while I wasn’t paying attention. For instance, Kobayashi had a real fight on his hands from an up-and-comer named Joey Chestnut. He wolfed down 52 hot dogs to run a close second. And if you’d been smart enough to put your money on Joey, who was, according to the bookies, a four hot dog underdog, you’d have cleaned up.
But there are others in the field deserving of recognition in their own right. They even come with nicknames which I assume, for reasons possibly having to do with eating disorders, they’ve attached to themselves. Most notably, there’s Sonya “The Black Widow” Thomas, the pride of Alexandria, Virginia, who once ate 65 hardboiled eggs in 390 seconds, and Eric “Badlands” Booker, a 425-pound subway conductor from Long Island, who holds speed-eating records for pies and matzo balls. But, not simultaneously, one hopes.
It is, I think we’d all agree, a pretty impressive list, proving once again that what the mind of man can imagine, the stomach of man can accomplish.
And yet, I can’t help but think that in my own small way, I’ve earned the right to regard myself as one with Takeru, Joey, the Black Widow, and Badlands. For every Tuesday evening, so long as I lived with my folks, I had to deal with my mother’s diabolical salmon patties. To the question as to whether they were animal, vegetable or mineral, the most appropriate answer would have been…maybe. Compared to dealing with one of those babies, even consuming 53 hot dogs in 12 minutes seems no more than a cheap party trick.
ken jennings has a blog
The Jeopardy phenom writes about the missing DVDs in his collection. If you remember, he is quite the movie fan.
friday, july 7 2006
rolling hunger revue
The Left can be hilarious sometimes. Take for example, Cindy Sheehan and gang's "rolling fast" -- a hunger strike conducted like a relay race in which celebrities take one day off from eating, then pass the fast onto someone else. As Larry Elder said yesterday, that used to be called a buffet.
Anyhow, Tim Blair has some fun with this.
confused people
Wearing a green Hamas headband, waving a Hamas flag, swinging a Kalashnikov and chanting for Israel's demise, Bassem Shorah looks to be a prototypical Palestinian militant. His olive green shirt, however, tells a different story. It's a spot-on replica of those worn by soldiers in the United States Army, replete with combat patches and unit designations.
Though he's a committed Islamist activist in a movement that denounces the United States for supporting Israel and occupying Iraq, Shorah proudly sports what has become the latest trend in Palestinian street wear: US military apparel. "This is the new fashion in the market," says Shorah. "It's a show of force, because the US army is powerful. It's a symbol of strength and of our refusal to put down arms."
political generals
Jed Babbin, once deputy undersecretary of defense, understands the politics of the Pentagon. Most media coverage of Donald Rumsfeld at DoD fails to frame its stories in their political context.
My father spent six (long) years as a budget officer in the Pentagon, and it's one of the most political places on earth. How could it be otherwise, with the vast sums of money it spends and the life-and-death nature of its mission?
Rumsfeld took the job, for the second time, to reshape the military from its Cold War orientation. Change means someone is going to lose. So from the moment he walked in the door, the long knives were waiting. Waiting to stifle his initiatives, waiting to leak ugly stories to willing newspaper reporters, among them Tom Ricks of the Washington Post. Babbin:
Unlike the New York Times's [James] Risen, Ricks isn't an ideologue. But he, and the generals he's bound to quote, were comfortable in the Clintons' Pentagon. And like those same generals, Ricks may have lost the personal access he once had. Ricks's theme of anger-based analysis may be rooted in little more than loyalty to those who once befriended him. But - like Risen and the rest of Keller & Co. - Ricks will no longer be able to claim to be an unbiased reporter. Those reporters bound by their ideological or personal biases, once exposed, can no longer claim to be otherwise. If Ricks's book appears in the form advertised, the Post will have to choose between keeping him on the defense beat and maintaining any pretense of unbiased Pentagon coverage
Ricks - wittingly or not, and Holbrooke intentionally - may be fomenting a confrontation between the administration and the military that would not otherwise exist. Politics and the military are combined at our risk. Like church and state, they cannot be combined without conflicting with our system of government - which is something the Clintons worked hard to change as I wrote about three years ago.
The Clintons - and the plural is more accurate than the singular - picked generals for their political fealty rather than military prowess. The worst public examples were Wesley Clark (a Friend of Bill from their Oxford Rhodes scholar days), and Anthony Zinni. Having spent too much time in the company of Arab leaders, Zinni became addicted to stability in the Middle East and opposed the Iraq war from the beginning. But in the middle of the April "revolt", Zinni - echoing Congressman Jack Murtha - once accused Rumsfeld of, "disbanding the Army."
The least public and most political general is former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki. When Rumsfeld took over the Pentagon, his orders were to shake the military out of its Cold War mindset and strategies. According to one source (who was an active duty army officer when he told me this) Shinseki tried to make Rumsfeld an offer he couldn't refuse: Shinseki would make Rumsfeld look good on Capitol Hill if Rumsfeld would leave the Army alone and not force it out of its Cold War garrison-force mentality. Rumsfeld didn't take the bait, and instead treated Shinseki gently, allowing him to retire with dignity instead of firing him. And then Rumsfeld went about building a better team made up of war-fighting generals who could transform the force under fire. Could Rumsfeld have treated some people more gently? Certainly. Were careers ended? Yes, and deservedly so.
Messrs. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld have certainly made mistakes in the Iraq war. And, unless the only histories are written by people such as the angry Ricks, they will be judged fairly. One mistake they didn't make is turning the military into a political arm of the White House. Which brings us back to the conscience of a general.
How many of the generals now cooperating with Ricks and Holbrooke and the Democratic Party resigned rather than obey orders that conflicted with their conscience? None. That is the best measure of the credibility of these men and the writers who rely on them.
thursday, july 6 2006
gee, i always think of programmers or doctors
...but Sen. Joe Biden thinks of Indians as fast food workers. Video here.
new economic indicator, the "but" factor
When a Republican is president, the economy suffers even when it booms. At least that's what you find in the newspapers. Today, we learn that:
Overall economic growth raced ahead at a breakneck pace of 5.6 percent in the first three months of this year.
Care to wager on the next word in the article?
But surging gasoline prices, rising interest rates and a cooling housing market are all weighing on the economy. Analysts believe economic growth slowed to about 2.5 percent to 3 percent in the just-completed April-June quarter and will remain at that pace in the second half of the year as consumers cut back on spending.
So regardless of what is, pay attention to what some economists say it might be.
Larry Elder has more on economic doomsaying in the media.
why lucentis is such a bright spot
My father has seen most of the world. Remarkably, for his first 80 years, he saw it without the need of eyeglasses, not even for reading. But once he turned 80 his eyes turned against him via age-related macular degeneration (AMD) , the leading cause of blindness in the elderly.
AMD sufferers lose acuity in their center of vision (as the image illustrates--click the image for more) and compensate by sideways scanning, pulling in details with their peripheral vision.
His doctor was slow to make the diagnosis. This is unfortunate because the disease is progressive and the earlier the detection the better the outcome.
Slowly, he was losing his vision. To read a newspaper, he used +3 reading glasses plus a magnifying glass. I got him a 19-inch computer monitor, but he still needed the magnifier and extra large fonts to make do. With his birthday approaching last November, he needed to pass an eye test to renew his driver's license. Although he could navigate his way around town, he knew he'd never pass the eye exam.
At first, his doctor treated him with Macugen, a drug which is injected directly into the eyeball. That sounds like torture, but my father says it's no big deal. After a few months of Macugen, he noticed a slight improvement.
Finally, in January, with a little prodding, his doctor tried an experimental treatment using Genentech's cancer drug, Avastin. Avastin treats colo-rectal cancer by destroying the blood cells that feed cancerous tumors.
Because some forms of macular degeneration are caused by an excessive buildup of blood vessels in the eye, a few eye doctors injected Avastin into the retina to see if it might help. My father was one of the lucky patients whose doctor was willing to experiment.
The results were dramatic. Within 48 hours of his first injection, my dad was reading three lines farther down on the eye chart. He set aside his magnifying glass. Six weeks passed and his condition relapsed a bit. But another shot of Avastin seems to have had lasting effects. The doctors at the eye clinic were buzzing. (Read AMD patient accounts of Avastin here.)
Genetech was not pleased by the off-label use of Avastin. One dose of the cancer drug costs around $1000. The amount needed for eye treatment is about $50. Because this is not an FDA approved use, Medicare does not cover it. For my dad, it was $50 well spent.
But Genetech's bigger issue was Lucentis, a drug it specifically developed for macular degeneration. Naturally, they saw Avastin potentially cannabalizing sales of their new drug. I have no beef with them over this -- they've invested millions of dollars to create a treatment that will aid millions of patients. They deserve to be rewarded.
Lucentis received FDA approval about a week ago. Soon it will be covered by Medicare. My dad will stop paying $50/treatment and the government will start paying around $1000.
Genetech says Lucentis is better for treating macular degeneration, and I believe them. For my father and others with his condition, this is big news. I say thank you to Genetech. For people who cannot afford Lucentis, there is still Avastin.
To all of you with aging parents, stay on top of their vision. And stay on top of their eye doctors. Don't assume anything. Remarkable progress is being made, but some doctors are slow to act on the latest treatments.
As for my dad, he recently drove roundtrip to Phoenix, negotiating some of the nastiest urban traffic (Los Angeles) in the process. A year ago this time, he was expecting to be "grounded" and dependent upon me to get him around. The loss of independence would have hit hard.
Better living through chemistry, indeed.
Jim Bass
For the latest on macular degeneration, read here.
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blowing smoke
As a long-ago reformed smoker, I appreciate smoke-free public spaces. On this, we are years ahead of Europe. But the stench of smoke doesn't have to constitute a health risk to merit banishment from the public square.
Liberals fancy themselves intelligent, scientific minded people (as opposed to those religious nuts on the right), but are quite willing to ignore science when it suits them. Second-hand smoke is just such a case, as Michael Fumento writes:
The reason active tobacco smoking could be such a terrible killer while passive smoke may cause no deaths lies in the dictum "the dose makes the poison." We are constantly bombarded by carcinogens, but in tiny amounts the body usually easily fends them off.
A New England Journal of Medicine study found that even back in 1975 – when having smoke obnoxiously puffed into your face was ubiquitous in restaurants, cocktail lounges, and transportation lounges – the concentration was equal to merely 0.004 cigarettes an hour. That’s not quite the same as smoking two packs a day, is it?
But none of this has the least impact on the various federal, state, and city agencies and organizations like the American Lung Association for a very good reason. They already know they’re scientifically wrong. The purpose of the passive smoking campaign has never been to protect non-smokers, but rather to cow smokers into giving up the habit.
It’s easy to agree with the ultimate goal, but inventing scientific outcomes and shutting down scientific debate as a means is as intolerable as it was when Nazi Germany “proved” the validity of eugenics.
a peek into the mind of the msm
Editorial page editors at the McClatchy Co.-owned Minneapolis Star-Tribune removed king-sized chunks of syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg’s recent column about New York Times, et al. revealing national secrets and compromising national security, during the war on terror.
Read to see what the libs at the Star-Tribune found objectionable -- in an op-ed, no less!
happy birthday, mr. president
The Anchoress reprises her post. Nice perspective.
never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity
Betsy Newmark on the Palestinians:
Abba Eban was so right when he said that in 1973 and they have not changed at all. What they have turned Gaza into since the Israeli pullout demonstrates this so clearly as Charles Krauthammer points out.
Before the eyes of the whole world, Israel left Gaza. Every Jew, every soldier, every military installation, every remnant of Israeli occupation was uprooted and taken away.
How do the Palestinians respond? What have they done with Gaza, the first Palestinian territory in history to be independent, something neither the Ottomans nor the British nor the Egyptians nor the Jordanians, all of whom ruled Palestinians before the Israelis, ever permitted? On the very day of Israel's final pullout, the Palestinians began firing rockets out of Gaza into Israeli towns on the other side of the border. And remember: those are attacks not on settlers but on civilians in Israel proper, the pre-1967 Israel that the international community recognizes as legitimately part of sovereign Israel, a member state of the U.N. A thousand rockets have fallen since.Remember this is what the Palestinians have claimed they wanted - control of their own territory and Israeli withdrawl. No Israeli settlers to complain about and their own government. They could have used that opportunity to have governed themselves and proven how they could help their own people. But that would have meant taking advantage of the opportunity rather than missing that opportunity. And the Palestinians don't do that.
dumbest soccer mistake ever
A short video.
keeping secrets
For perspective on the damage done by the New York Times in publicizing leaks over the NSA program for data mining telephone records and the Swift financial tracking program, it's worth remembering the hard choices the government will make to preserve an intelligence program that produces results.
For example, the US let a spy get away with giving our nuclear secrets to the Soviets. The rat was Theodore Hall, a brilliant 19-year old physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. He felt strongly that "an American monopoly" on nuclear weapons "was dangerous and should be avoided."
In a written statement published in 1997, Hall came close to admitting the charges: "To help prevent that monopoly I contemplated a brief encounter with a Soviet agent, just to inform them of the existence of the A-bomb project," the statement said. "I anticipated a very limited contact. With any luck it might easily have turned out that way, but it was not to be."
What Hall gave up, say Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel, authors of the 1997 book "Bombshell: The Secret Story of American's Unknown Spy Conspiracy" (Times Books), was not merely knowledge of the bomb's existence, but technical information that helped the Soviet Union build a bomb years earlier than would have been possible otherwise.
Referring to assessments that his actions changed the course of history, Hall said: "Maybe the course of history, if unchanged, could have led to atomic war in the past 50 years -- for example the bomb might have been dropped on China in 1949 or the early 1950s. Well, if I helped to prevent that, I accept the charge."
America treated such treachery harshly, as the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg demonstrated. But Ted Hall was never arrested nor charged. He moved to England, became a professor and died of natural causes at age 74.
Why was he not prosecuted? Because doing so would have exposed the Venona Program, a super secret program that had broken the Soviet diplomatic codes. Venona allowed the NSA to know what was in the Soviet mind.
Venona was so vital to national security that American officials swallowed hard and let Ted Hall get away with treason. They understood the big picture, something Sulzberger and Keller at the NYT cannot.
wednesday, july 5 2006
"where the poor people are fat"
The newcomer who sees America for the first time typically experiences emotions that alternate between wonder and delight. Here is a country where everything works: The roads are paper-smooth, the highway signs are clear and accurate, the public toilets function properly, when you pick up the telephone you get a dial tone. You can even buy things from the store and then take them back if you change your mind.
For the Third World visitor, the American supermarket is a marvel to behold: endless aisles of every imaginable product, 50 different types of cereal, multiple flavors of ice cream, countless unappreciated inventions like quilted toilet paper, fabric softener, roll-on deodorant, disposable diapers.
The immigrant cannot help noticing that America is a country where the poor live comparatively well. This fact was dramatized in the 1980s, when CBS television broadcast an anti-Reagan documentary, “People Like Us,” which was intended to show the miseries of the poor during an American recession.
The Soviet Union also broadcast the documentary, with the intention of embarrassing the Reagan administration. But it had the opposite effect. Ordinary people across the Soviet Union saw that the poorest Americans had television sets and cars. They arrived at the same conclusion that I witnessed in a friend of mine from Bombay who has been trying unsuccessfully to move to the United States for nearly a decade. I asked him, “Why are you so eager to come to America?” He replied, “Because I really want to live in a country where the poor people are fat.”
Read it all.
secret, not secret
The New York Times undertook to blow what it called, in its headline, the "secret" international terrorist financing tracking program, for reasons that it never has been able to explain. Initially, there was no doubt about the fact that the Times was exposing a secret; reporter Eric Lichtblau used that word to describe the SWIFT program something like twelve times in the body of the Times' article. But when the Times unexpectedly found itself under heavy criticism for damaging national security, it took the nearest port in a storm, and claimed that the SWIFT program wasn't a secret after all. Everyone knew about it! Which, of course, left people scratching their heads over the story's page one, above the fold placement.
It turns out, though, that there was at least one guy who didn't know about the SWIFT program--Eric Lichtblau. In November 2005, as noted this morning by Villainous Company, Lichtblau himself authored an article in the Times titled, "U.S. Lacks Strategy to Curb Terror Funds." In that article, Lichtblau, obviously unaware of the SWIFT program, wrote that progress in identifying sources of terrorist funding had been poor, and that the administration:
is now developing a program to gain access to and track potentially hundreds of millions of international bank transfers into the United States.
But experts in the field say the results have been spotty, with few clear dents in Al Qaeda's ability to move money and finance terrorist attacks.
Apparently those "experts in the field" didn't know about the SWIFT program either, even though it had been going on for years, as Lichtblau later reported, nor did they evidently know about its role in capturing the most wanted terrorist in Southeast Asia, Hambali.
So much for the "everybody knew about it" defense. Note, too, what it says about the editorial policies of the Times: if the administration allegedly lacks a strategy, it should be criticized for that. If it turns out that it had a strategy all along, and the strategy was a successful one, then the administration should be criticized for keeping it a secret.
If Lichtblau had an ounce of integrity or self-respect, he would resign in disgrace, along with Bill Keller and Pinch Sulzberger.
"west coast" philanthropy
MSNBC spots a trend in Bill Gates:
Technology entrepreneurs who have amassed fortunes are using their business skills to augment financial contributions in a manner distinctly different than their counterparts of the early 20th centuries, such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.
While Carnegie and others donated billions in today's dollars, sometimes to inventive causes and ones that weren't always popular, their giving often focused on conventional charities and capital projects -- buildings with a name chiseled in stone.
Today's philanthropy, by contrast, is marked by a drive to find different ways to address social needs, often with an eye on sustainability and leveraging additional resources. It's done not just with the goal of building libraries as an end in itself, but with a result such as spreading computer literacy to rural areas.
And this century's mega-wealthy philanthropists monitor their donations to ensure change happens.
"These donors are not so concerned with social approval. They would rather make a dent in the causes they care about," said Peter Hero, president of the Community Foundation of Silicon Valley, which pushes its local business leaders to become philanthropists.
the new american manufacturing
When Richardson Industries shut down its 300-person furniture manufacturing operation in 2002, it was “the most painful thing I ever had to deal with—to look people in the eyes and say they weren’t going to have jobs anymore,” says Joe Richardson III, chief executive officer of the Sheboygan Falls, Wis., company. Chinese competition had gotten the best of Richardson and most of the rest of the domestic wood-furniture business, and the company became a U.S. sales and marketing outfit for imported tables and chairs.
But over the past couple of years, Richardson has put smiles back on the faces of about two dozen of his old employees—and $13-an-hour paychecks back in their pockets—by rehiring them at a new division he launched to manufacture fine wood cabinets for yachts. It was the brainchild of Gary Kane, a manager who had fled Richardson’s doomed furniture business for a job managing a yacht builder, who came back to his old boss with the idea. Since 2003, Richardson Yacht Interiors has been stealing market share from European competitors with quality, price, delivery and customer-service advantages.
While it’s barely a $10-million enterprise thus far, Richardson believes “this is a manufacturing model that can work in this country. It’s not something the Chinese can be drawn to, because they want to make large production runs. This is something that we can build on and grow.”
From Richardson, at Wisconsin’s oldest family-owned company, to Anne Mulcahy at mighty Xerox, from vacuum-cleaner impresario David Oreck in Mississippi to Fred Keller of Cascade Engineering in Michigan, American manufacturing CEOs are learning how to remain players in a world that is now awash in lowcost goods made virtually everywhere else.
time to sic jesse jackson on sony
Joystiq notes the racially charged ad campaign Sony has launched in Holland. There are even worse images in the campaign.
independence day, july 4 2006
how to understand soccer
Here is your guide to the game.
two brothers, two sneakers
Billy Witz at the LA Daily News has the story of how two feuding brothers created two sneaker companies, Adidas and Puma, in one small German town.
In any event, when Rudi returned from a stint in an American prisoner of war camp in 1948, he left the Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory and founded Puma. Shortly thereafter, adidas - short for Adi Dassler - was created; and the feud was on.
Soon the town was split into two camps. If you worked at adidas, you didn't socialize, date or marry anyone from Puma. Herzogenaurach has been described as "the town of bent necks" because locals wouldn't talk with anyone until they looked to see what shoes they were wearing.
The brothers' feud wasn't limited to splitting the town. They frequently sued each other, often over such picayune things as adidas' advertising claim that it sold "the best sports shoes in the world."
If Adi scored a coup helping Germany win its first World Cup in 1954, then Rudi had his turn when Pele, just as a World Cup final was about to kickoff, bent down to tie his shoes. The TV cameras followed, showing the world his Pumas.
pinch and bill get a spanking
Boys mature into men, if they and their communities are lucky enough for them to do so at all, because of the direction, inspiration and discipline of good men. When boys lack suitable male role models and guides, they become gang members, androgynous slackers, redneck bullies. Or Pinch Sulzberger and Bill Keller.
Hurting and unable to cope, these people spend a lifetime looking for a way to pay Dad back. Usually these unmatured boys hurt only the unfortunate few close to them; the pregnant and abandoned girlfriends, the heartbroken mothers, the disappointed teachers, the victims of their crimes.
In the case of Pinch and Bill, we all are likely to suffer. As they have continued their tantrums, defiance and deviant thrashing about, they have escalated the seriousness and ugliness of their acts. That's just the way addiction works, and addicted they certainly are. It's no longer enough for them to act out at home while Dad is off running the country. Now in order to get their kicks and also as a desperate plea for someone to take them seriously, they've got to do real damage to themselves, their newspaper and their country.
I've considered the argument that they are brave crusaders, that it takes a real man to do the right thing regardless of the risk. But even presupposing that the disclosure of this program was the right thing to do, what risk did Pinch and Bill run? When all the risk is shoved off on others, we are looking at the act of cowards, not heroes. Pinch and Bill may be so determined to do - whatever - that they are willing to risk blasting their own lives, having their friends killed, losing their own cherished toys and privileges. But evidence suggests not.
So far they have risked mostly the lives of the American Military, a group that suffers barely disguised contempt from the Times, and Cops and Firefighters, people not nearly so sophisticated and polished and nuanced (and thus not as valuable, of course, to the elites) as Pinch and Bill. They risk the children of Middle America, while their own expensively protected little ones are locked safely away, far from any likely terrorist attacks.
With the cheering of the elites in their ears, Pinch and Bill have forgotten that most Americans really, really don't like them, and not because we are all uneducated bigots unable to understand our betters. No, we resent them because they lecture us about morality when we are the ones who show discipline and courage. We shun them because they cannot find satisfaction in life from productive and useful activities, but only by lying, manipulating and perverting what we believe. We pity them because our own less advantaged sons are far, far better men. We scorn them for their weakness in not getting over their Daddy issues and finding something real to do.
monday, july 3 2006
europe is more crime ridden than usa
...say a variety of sources cited by Gates of Vienna.
amazing photo
...of a tornado. I doubt there's a pot of gold at the end of that rainbow.
science: money doesn't buy happiness
It was expected that those who made less than $20,000 a year would spend 32 percent more of their time in a bad mood than those that had an annual income greater than $100,000.
In reality, the low-income group spent only 12 percent more time in a bad mood than their wealthier counterparts. This suggests that the link between income and mood has been perhaps overstated.
The researchers once again surveyed another group of women in 2005. In this study, participants not only recorded their overall satisfaction with life but a moment-to-moment account of their contentment.
The results showed that higher income had less of a correlation with momentary happiness than with overall life satisfaction.
"If people have high income, they think they should be satisfied and reflect that in their answers," said study team member Alan Krueger, an economist from Princeton University. "Income, however, matters very little for moment-to-moment experience.
my blood is blue too
Actress Brooke Shields has a pretty impressive pedigree—hanging from her family tree are Catherine de Medici and Lucrezia Borgia, Charlemagne and El Cid, William the Conquerer and King Harold, vanquished by William at the Battle of Hastings.
Shields also descends from five popes, a whole mess of early New England settlers, and the royal houses of virtually every European country. She counts renaissance pundit Niccolo Machiavelli and conquistador Hernando Cortes as ancestors.
What is it about Brooke? Well, nothing—at least genealogically.
Even without a documented connection to a notable forebear, experts say the odds are virtually 100 percent that every person on Earth is descended from one royal personage or another.
"Millions of people have provable descents from medieval monarchs,'' said Mark Humphrys, a genealogy enthusiast and professor of computer science at Dublin City University in Ireland. "The number of people with unprovable descents must be massive.''
le exit
PARIS -- An amnesty for foreign students who are in France illegally expires with the end of the school year tomorrow, making tens of thousands of youths eligible for deportation and prompting cries of alarm from left-wing and pro-immigrant groups.
Even as surveys show that many Frenchmen approve of tough new immigration legislation drafted by the center-right government, they are uneasy at the prospect of expelling large numbers of school-age children.
an american idiot speaks up
Alaska Republican Senator Ted Stevens talks about the Internet. Whew.
mexico voter turnout high
I drove to Tijuana today, the city of 4 million on the farthest northwest corner of Mexico, to witness one tiny piece of the most momentous presidential election of the year - Mexico’s.
Seventy-one million Mexicans were qualified to vote, and based on what I saw in Tijuana, they took it seriously. Everyone voted. Many of those who forgot to register to vote from the consulates in the U.S. drove to Tijuana to vote - and there were polling stations right over on the other side of the border specifically for them.
Early in the morning, Mexican expat voters crossed the border into Mexico to vote for president as the sunrise broke across the east.
Tijuana was resplendent with red signs for Roberto Madrazo of the patronage-left PRI party, which had ruled Mexico for 71 years until it was ousted six years ago. But most people I met said they planned to vote for Felipe Calderon, of the center-right PAN party, which has had northern Mexico as its political stronghold for many years, since at least 1986 - even though the ruling party didn’t start “letting” them win elections until many years after that. The PAN has been winning elections for years in this part of Mexico.
What was striking to me was that despite discontent with the PAN party under Fox, the support for PAN seemed to be rock solid and the people’s faith unshaken. Many cited their faith in free trade and desire to remain friends with the U.S. I found that moving.
sunday, july 2 2006
pinch and keller's twist
One Cosmos weighs in on the Times leaking the Swift story:
Richard Weaver saw this coming. In his Ideas Have Consequences--which was published in 1948--he discussed the effect of the new journalistic cosmology on the soul. As the medieval peasant might have looked up and seen “a revolving dome of fixed stars,” today we see something similar in looking at the daily newspaper; we see "the events of the day refracted through a medium which colors them as effectively as the cosmology of the medieval scientist determined his view of the starry heavens.
The newspaper is a man-made cosmos of the world of events around us in time. For the average reader it is a construct of significances which he no more thinks of examining than did his pious forebears in the thirteenth century...” It presents “a version of life quite as controlled as that taught by medieval religionists, though feeble in moral instruction...”
When you uncritically read a newspaper or passively watch television news, you are participating in someone else’s metaphysical dream, not your own. And it is generally a sick dream with horrifying, infrahuman assumptions about reality.
You can be absolutely certain that Keller and Sulzberger are not only unashamed of their treason against the Good. Rather, they are proud of it. And as Augustine taught, “all the other vices attach themselves to evil, that it may be done; only pride attaches itself to good, that it may perish.”A normal soul loves what is good and therefore despises evil. The abnormal soul does not love what is good, but “the place of a suppressed devotion never remains empty.” Thus, the essence of perversion, on the soul level, involves passion and pride. Passion, in its classical sense, means to flee from God, while pride is to “rise up against Him” (Schuon). The proud man has “the propensity to brook no humiliations while readily inflicting them, upon others,” especially if they are Richeorge Nixbush and their illegal war on Viet Saddam. But don't ever question the Times' pervatriotism. They're better than patriots--they're dissenters!
The two--pride and passion--go together and are generally insatiable, thus the need to repeat the drill again and again. There is a reason why God shuns the proud. Pride is related to smug self-satisfaction, while humility is linked to honest and accurate self-assessment. The self-satisfied soul “is one who is saturated with his own imaginary worth which he projects onto his scanty knowledge and mediocre authority.” This is why they must give Pulitzers every year, so the biggest offenders may honor themselves again and again to keep the illusion alive. They can put this one right next to Walter Duranty's.
malcolm gladwell: times has a drug problem
The Tipping Point author notes selective reporting in the New York Times:
The New York Times led its business section today with the headline: “Drug Prices Up Sharply.” The subject of the piece was a study by AARP showing that prices of prescription drugs rose 3.9 percent in the first three months of this year, four times the rate of inflation. Outrageous!
But wait: it isn’t until you read a little closer that you realize that the price increase just refers to brand-name pharmaceutical prices. And what the article never mentions at all is that the AARP released a second study yesterday, showing that generic drug costs in the
United States were unchanged in the first quarter and fell 0.1 percent over the past year. Here is the key paragraph from the AARP report, which—unbelievably—never made it into the Times piece:
"The rate of increase in average annual change in manufacturer’s list price for generic prescription drugs most widely used by older Americans was about one quarter the rate of general inflation for 2005.”
Now why would the Times ignore lower generic drug prices and highlight higher brand name drug prices? I have no idea.
But it drives me crazy, because this kind of reporting reinforces the notion (perpetuated, among others, by big Pharma,) that there is some magical distinction between brand name and generic drugs.
There isn’t. Drugs are drugs. And these days, in most of the major therapeutic categories, there is a perfectly acceptable and much cheaper generic substitute available. And the real news from yesterday is not bad news, but good news.
dr. spock replaced by kofi annan
Blogger Paul Belien of the Brussels Journal is an irritant to the bureaucrats that run Belgium. Now they've decided to harass him and his wife over their home schooling regimen.
In today’s Belgian newspaper Gazet van Antwerpen Bob Van de Voorde, the spokesman of Frank Vandenbroucke, the minister of Education, says:
“One of the conditions [for homeschooling] is that the homeschoolers must sign a document in which they promise to rear their children along the lines of the UN Convention on Children’s Rights. These parents have not done this. This is why the ministry has started an inquiry.”
The parents Mr Van de Voorde is referring to in the paper are my husband (TBJ editor Paul Belien) and myself. The “inquiry” is a threat to prosecute us.
Homeschooling is a constitutional right in Belgium. We have homeschooled four of our five children through high school. Only the youngest is still being homeschooled because the others are already at university. And yet, as if they have nothing better to do, the Belgian police and judiciary are conducting an “inquiry” into our homeschooling to see whether we “rear our children along the lines of the United Nations Convention on Children’s Rights.”
saturday, july 1 2006
no lloyd bridges, he:
From BrothersJudd:
'Elvis diplomacy' a hit with Japanese leader (Alec Russell, 01/07/2006, Daily Telegraph)
The world has become accustomed to unconventional diplomatic routines. There has been panda diplomacy and ping-pong diplomacy. Jack Straw and Condoleezza Rice have inaugurated "courtship" diplomacy. Yesterday Mr Bush unveiled Elvis diplomacy, as he became the first sitting president to visit Graceland.
Since the Japanese leader pointed at the cowboy-boot wearing Mr Bush at their first meeting, five years ago yesterday, and said "High Noon", the two have hit it off.
The White House staff had clearly done their homework. On that first encounter at Camp David, Mr Bush gave his visitor a poster of Gary Cooper. Mr Koizumi returned to the theme in his after-dinner speech at the White House on Thursday, when he said: "I see the image of the United States as Gary Cooper in my favourite movie, High Noon. Marshal Cooper stood up alone against four outlaw men. However, the United States is not alone when facing the evils that exist today."
High Noon is the ideal metaphor because Will Kane selflessly does for the townfolk what they will not do for themselves, indeed, what they resent him for doing.
why the slovakias haven't learned lessons of socialism
Generally, governments that are voted out are ones whose international reputation is miserable. In this case everything is the way it should not be. Mr. Dzurinda’s government has been inundated with more international praise than a salad gets dressing from a well-tipped waiter. Note that the tribute extended did not express the dictate of political correctness; it was earned by a once laggard country’s excellent economic performance. It is this success that dug the premier’s political grave.
What did the dismissed government do? For one thing it reduced unemployment from 18 to 11%. That came about by cutting the time it took to establish a business. At the same time a flat tax of 19% was introduced.
Thanks to that the country is becoming one with the highest per capita production of (quality) automobiles. Even Hungary’s entrepreneurs – although they are disliked in Slovakia – began to leave their originally leading homeland in terms of “Foreign Direct Investment” in favor of Slovakia. The more so since the personal income tax rate there is expected to move to 15%. Indeed, there was an economic miracle in the making. Given a bit more time the fact would have gained recognition beyond the circle of the economically astute. So the question is what derailed the well-running choo-choo-train?
Ever since the stone age, modernization has had numerous detractors as it entails creative destruction. The demise of outdated industries makes place for new enterprises that ultimately absorb more people under improved terms than the superceded undertakings did. There is no way to deny that, for those caught in redundant industries, the pain of the dislocation must have outweighed the benefits extended by what was emerging. Traversing from the safe arid shore to the one where Eden lay meant getting wet. Perennially, whatever was presumed to guarantee the shaky “security” of the known, represented a desirable alternative to the success to be retrieved by passing through the dark forest of the new, the unknown. If you consider outcomes, then the achieving societies were the ones that chose to take the pioneering risks that brought their success. In these cases the groups that had a vision and the courage to pursue it could assert themselves against organized interests that detected their well-being imbedded in immobility.
Socialists of the international (Communists) and national (Nazi) variety, as well as their mutations that now emerge in places such as Bolivia and Venezuela, have something in common with the reactionary stand-patters that misuse the term “conservative.” They all pledge to protect those whose existence appears to be challenged. This is akin to promising Eskimos not better igloos but tropical weather.
sticking it to the man, mildly
Revenge on the traffic cam in Australia.
fit and unfit to print
The Wall Street Journal explains why it published the story about financial tracking of terrorists. Long story short: the NY Times was going to publish regardless and the Bush administration was trying to ensure they got their facts straight.