friday, june 30 2006
great rose images
Looking for rose photo, fine art prints to decorate your home or office. Check these out.
if you can't collect the dots, you can't connect the dots
peace and quiet
The Daily Kos lot received such a Niagara of ridicule for their meeting in Las Vegas (Alexander Cockburn's column in The Nation, available in a slightly different form on the Counterpunch site, making me almost feel sorry for them) that I now feel guilty for piling on. In particular, I feel that I ought to retract what I said on Hugh Hewitt's radio show last week, where I mentioned the self-important bloggers and Joseph Wilson-cultists in the same breath as those who are gathering—in quite another city—to indict the Bush administration for secretly sponsoring the assault of Sept. 11, 2001. Some comrades have rightly protested to me. I take the opportunity to say that, though there is some overlap between the two factions, this was a misuse of an amalgam on my part.
By way of restitution, may I propose some ways in which those who don't want to be associated with Michael Moore, George Galloway, Ramsey Clark, and the rest of the Zarqawi and Saddam apologists can make themselves plain? Here are four headings under which the anti-war types could disprove the charge of bad faith.
1) What about the land mines? A few years ago, a fairly broad consensus was achieved, to the effect that land mines should be regarded as an illegal and immoral method of warfare. Jody Williams and her group received a Nobel Peace Prize for their work on the question, and Princess Diana became an international star on the subject. The Clinton administration declined to sign the treaty, mainly on the grounds that a huge number of American land mines guard the so-called demilitarized (actually very highly militarized) zone that helps protect South Korea from a "dear leader" attack. But nobody is going to wander innocently into that zone. Whereas in Iraq and Afghanistan, every day dozens of these devices—sometimes known as "improvised explosive devices," or IEDs—are buried where anyone can step on them or be blown up by them. We have persuasive evidence that Iran and Syria have contributed some sophisticated explosives to the gruesome business. Would not now be the time to demand that the international community denounce land-mine atrocities and—especially the states that underwrite them? Anyone who has ever uttered the phrase "civilian casualties" has a particular obligation here.
Read it all.
german success in world cup has an american angle
...The chancellor, Angela Merkel, has praised him repeatedly, and his players have provided testimonials on how wonderful the team's preparation and spirit is.
It's largely product of Klinsmann's California connections. He lives in Huntington Beach with his Bay Area-born wife, Debbie, and their two children, has consulted for the Galaxy and Anschutz Entertainment Group - insisting Home Depot Center's construction include a roof, one of the stadium's chief characteristics - and has studied under former Galaxy coach Sigi Schmid and U.S. national team coach Bruce Arena.
"Living in the U.S. gives you a different perspective," Klinsmann, who has commuted between Southern California and DFB's Frankfurt headquarters, said before the World Cup.
The Germans always have been among soccer's elite, reaching 10 World Cup semifinals, playing in seven championship games and winning titles in 1954, '74 and, with Klinsmann, '90. Its talent pool seemed to dry up in the late 1990s - Michael Ballack is the only major player the country has developed in nearly a decade - and a surprise run the 2002 World Cup final only masked problems in the program.
He installed a team psychologist - unheard of in German soccer -and brought over Mark Verstegen, president and founder of Home Depot Center-based Athletes' Performance, as fitness coach.
He installed American training ideals, especially related to fitness, and changed the team's playing style, from slow and cautious to fearless and aggressive. And he welcomed young, mostly untested players into the team, broadening the talent pool with forward Lukas Podolski, midfielder Bastian Schweinsteiger, winger David Odonkor, defenders Philipp Lahm, Pet Mertesacker and Robert Huth, among others
scamming the scammer
A funny account of revenge against Nigerian email fraud.
the united states of mexico
by Burt Prelutsky
Sometimes, when I hear people objecting to illegal aliens on the grounds that they represent a security risk, I find myself shaking my head. To me, that sounds as if they wouldn’t have a problem with America’s porous southern border if only it weren’t for the tragic events of 9/11. The implication is that we wouldn’t object to all those millions of people sneaking into our country, except for those few bad apples who might be looking to level Los Angeles with a suitcase bomb.
These folks are entitled to their opinion, but they certainly don’t speak for me. My objection is based on the fact that I don’t like unwelcome guests. I don’t like them in my house and I don’t want them in my country.
Because we’re speaking, for the most part, about Mexicans, that opens me up to a charge of racism. So be it. In a society in which such repulsive characters as Barry Bonds, Cynthia McKinney, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Harry Belafonte, and O.J. Simpson, deflect all manner of criticism by attributing it to white racists, the word has lost virtually all meaning.
I happen to like Mexicans. Living here in the San Fernando Valley, I interact with them all the time. Several of them live on my block. I find them, by and large, to be a virtuous people. They tend to be hard- working, religious, family-oriented, and friendly. Although I’m not a big fan of refried beans and rice, I do like their music. Unlike the anti-social, unaesthetic, dreck that usually passes for music these days, most Mexican songs seem to be love ballads. What’s more, thanks to Church influence, their young people tend to get married and to raise their kids together. I do wish, however, that, as a group, the youngsters were as enthusiastic about attending classes as they are about ditching class to take part in public demonstrations.
All of that said, I am in favor of building a wall, digging a moat, doing whatever it takes to keep illegals out.
I understand that President Bush has a problem dealing with this problem. There are businesses, after all, that depend on a constant stream of unskilled workers. I say constant because we already have several million illegal aliens in America -- surely enough to pick our lettuce, bus our tables, wash our cars, and put the little mints on our hotel pillows. But this is the land of opportunity, and people don’t want to remain very long at the bottom of the food chain.
So George Bush promotes a worker program that is so idiotic, Republicans wish that a Democrat had come up with it, so they’d feel better about ridiculing it. Suggesting that after working in this country for a number of years, Mexicans will simply return to their country, and take their place at the back of the immigration line is perhaps the single stupidest, most naïve, notion I’ve ever heard. Even a four-year-old would recognize Bush’s brainstorm as amnesty in sheep’s clothing.
People who disagree with me on this issue point out that if I were a Mexican, I’d also do whatever I could to get into this country. And they’re right. Walk across the desert? You bet! To get to America, I’d walk across ground glass. But, so what? What I would or wouldn’t do is no basis upon which to form national policy.
It’s high time that the president stopped pandering to special interests, and, instead, started acting like a man who can afford to have principles. Otherwise, what’s the point of being a lame duck? It seems to me there should be some upside to never again having to worry about being re-elected.
If George Bush drew a line in the sand -- and then built a wall on that line -- I’m betting he’d even see his poll numbers bounce up. As a result of which, he might actually stop being a political liability as the GOP gears up for the congressional elections this November.
If Bush asked for my advice, I’d tell him it’s time he stopped listening to President Fox and started listening to the American people. And then I’d point out to him that no place in the Constitution does it say it’s his responsibility to cure Mexico’s crime and unemployment problems.
retaking the academy
The old Marxist strategy of “increasing the contradictions”—a strategy according to which the worse things get, the better they really are—is a license for thuggery. It excuses all manner of bad behavior for the sake of a revolution that will (so it is said) finally transform society when all the old allegiances have finally collapsed. If one or two tottering institutions require a little push to finish them off, so be it. Shove hard: You cannot, as comrade Stalin remarked, make an omelette without breaking eggs.
As with anything to which the word “Marxist” applies, there are at least eighty-seven things wrong with this strategy. Morally, it is completely irresponsible. Intellectually, it depends upon a fabricated “contradiction” to confer the illusion of inevitability. In real life, the only thing inevitable is the certainty of surprise.
Nevertheless, as one looks around at academic life these days, it is easy to conclude that corruption yields not only decay but also opportunities. Think of the public convulsion that surrounded the episode of Ward Churchill’s invitation to speak at Hamilton College earlier this year. The spectacle of a highly paid academic with a fabricated background comparing the victims of 9/11 to a Nazi bureaucrat was too much. Churchill’s fellow academics endeavored—they are still endeavoring—to rally round. But the public wasn’t buying it. Such episodes, as Victor Davis Hanson noted in National Review recently, were like “a torn scab revealing a festering sore beneath.”
Read it all.
wednesday, june 28 2006
viva kos vegas
Thank god for Iowahawk. Hilarious.
pick a fight with new york times
The battle of Midway Island was the turning point of the Pacific War. Victory at Midway was possible because the U.S. had broken the Japanese naval code. The Chicago Tribune spilled the beans in a story that ran under the headline: "NAVY HAD WORD OF JAP PLAN TO STRIKE AT SEA."
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was furious. He knew that if the Japanese read the story, they'd suspect their codes were compromised, and change them.
The president "initially was disposed to send in the Marines to shut down Tribune tower," wrote Harry Evans. "He was talked out of that, then considered trying (Chicago Tribune publisher Robert) McCormick for treason, which carried a death penalty in wartime."
never pick a fight with ann coulter
An amusing interview.
tuesday, june 27 2006
why americans are not big soccer fans
Betsy's Page has a nice roundup.
hawaii trivia
During World War II, the US printed special bills with Hawaii across the back in case the Japanese conquered the islands.
World War II caused important changes in money for the United States, although they ended with the war. An example of the first change is in this case. It looks like an ordinary $10 Federal Reserve Note, except that it has the word “Hawaii” stenciled in brown on the back and on the front. These notes were issued to residents of Hawaii during World War II out of fear that the Jap nese would capture the islands, and the US currency there.
serendipity
We drove up to Waimea Canyon, the "grand canyon of the Pacific" and indeed it is grand. Kauai has many microclimates; one the wettest spot on earth, with some 455 inches of rainfall annually. Which means that the law of averages says you're going to get wet sooner or later if you spend much time here. Yesterday was our turn to get drenched, as a storm moved in around noon and poured buckets for four hours.
Just as it began, we went to the Kalalau lookout where 4000 foot cliffs have been carved over time. Except we saw nothing but a curtain of rain. Fortunately, we waited it out and returned around 6 p.m. As you can see, the clouds had parted and revealed an amazing sight, one that kept changing over time as the sun set and clouds reconfigured.
Only one person was there when we arrived. I struck up a conversation and learned that he was David Boynton, a 30 year resident of Kauai and one of its top photographers. We talked photography and other things, always keeping an eye on the scene below. He offered to shoot pictures of my wife, daughter and I. Had he not been there I never would have stayed for nearly two hours, and I would have missed scenes like you see above. The sun is nearly set and lighting up the clouds that are wisping like smoke.
Tourist photographers, regardless of skill, can never compete with the pros -- you never have enough time to be in the right place with the right light and the right conditions to capture those special images. Unless you get lucky. As the time wore on David would enthuse, "I come here a lot and this is rare."
So in one day I got very wet and very lucky.
sunday, june 25 2006
jackals
Patsy Ramsey, mother of murdered JonBenet Ramsey, died yesterday of ovarian cancer. May she rest in peace.
This site takes plenty of shots at the political bias of the news media -- it’s part of what keeps us sane. But there’s also a vicious streak to the press that we all know but rarely acknowledge, in part because we enable it. For the Ramseys, the ugliness of newspapers and television made a hellish event, the murder of their daughter, into an ongoing and undeserved hell.
Most everyone remembers seeing the video of the four year old girl dolled up with makeup and prancing on stage. Out of context it was creepy, calling up images of stage mothers pushing their daughters to compete in beauty pageants. We react with disgust to children being sexualized.
But context is everything. As it happens, both Patsy Ramsey and her sister were Miss West Virginia pageant winners. At a pageant reunion, various alumnae took the stage to perform for the group.
Young JonBenet watched and was star struck. Afterward, she begged her mother to let her enter a pageant. The family thought she was too young, but Patsy was being treated for deadly ovarian cancer, diagnosed in 1993. She thought she’d never live long enough to see her daughter be old enough. So she relented. Thus the footage shown over and over on TV. But instead of it being creepy and competitive, it was just a little girl reveling in dressing up and acting dramatic. Not creepy, cute.
The Barney Fifes of the Boulder police department bungled the case. The Susan Smith murdering mom story was fresh on people’s minds, so the finger of blame pointed at the family. Jackals smelled blood and cashed in with a media lynching, feeding and heeding the cries of the mob.
What most of us never heard was that the Ramsey house had been on a home tour two weeks before the murder, allowing anyone able to buy a ticket a chance to case the place. Or that businessman John Ramsey’s company had been the papers a week before, reporting big profits. There was plenty more, but it didn’t fit the template.
So John and Patsy Ramsey, struck by the tragic death of their daughter, endured public scorn and humiliation. It’s hard to fathom that kind of pain.
Patsy Ramsey was right. Cancer did kill her before JonBenet Ramsey would be old enough.
saturday, june 26 2006
assemble the firing squad
BY NOW IT'S UNDENIABLE: The New York Times is a national security threat. So drunk is it on its own power and so antagonistic to the Bush administration that it will expose every classified antiterror program it finds out about, no matter how legal the program, how carefully crafted to safeguard civil liberties, or how vital to protecting American lives.
The Times's latest revelation of a national security secret appeared on last Friday's front page--where no al Qaeda operative could possibly miss it. Under the deliberately sensational headline, "Bank Data Sifted in Secret by U.S. to Block Terror," the Times blows the cover on a highly targeted program to locate terrorist financing networks. According to the report, since 9/11, the Bush administration has obtained information about terror suspects' international financial transactions from a Belgian clearinghouse of international money transfers.
The procedure for obtaining that information could not be more solicitous of privacy and the rule of law: Agents are only allowed to seek information based on intelligence tying specific individuals to al Qaeda; they must document the intelligence behind every search request and maintain an electronic record of every search; and, in an inspired civil liberties innovation that would undoubtedly garner kudos from the Times had a Democratic administration devised it, a board of independent auditors from banks reviews the subpoena requests to make sure that only terror suspects' transactions are traced. Any use of the data for criminal investigations into drug trafficking, say, or tax fraud is banned. The administration briefed congressional leaders and the 9/11 Commission about the system.
There is nothing about this program that exudes even a whiff of illegality. The Supreme Court has squarely held that bank records are not constitutionally protected private information. The government may obtain them without seeking a warrant from a court, because the bank depositor has already revealed his transactions to his bank--or, in the case of the present program, to a whole slew of banks that participate in the complicated international wire transfers overseen by the Belgian clearinghouse known as the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or Swift. To get specific information about individual terror suspects, intelligence agents prepare an administrative subpoena, which is issued after extensive internal agency review. The government does not monitor a terror suspect's international wire transfers in real time; the records of his transactions are delivered weeks later. And Americans' routine financial transactions, such as ATM withdrawals or domestic banking, lie completely outside of the Swift database.
The administration strongly urged the New York Times not to expose this classified program, and for good reason. According to the Times itself, the program has proven vital in hunting down international killers. The Indonesian terrorist Hambali, who orchestrated the Bali resort bombings in 2002, was captured through the Swift program; a Brooklyn man who laundered $200,000 for al Qaeda through a Karachi bank was tracked via the program. The Wall Street Journal adds that the July 7, 2005, London subway bombings were fruitfully investigated through the Swift initiative and that a facilitator of Iraqi terrorism has been apprehended because of it.
msm: wmd? bfd
Shrinkwrapped covers the big yawn that followed reports of Iraq WMD.
friday, june 23 2006
cultural awareness
Why calling someone "blue butt" is an insult in Japan. And ten gripes about India.
murtha's culture of corruption
Betsy Newmark notes this from Robert Novak:
Jack Murtha proves there are second acts in American politics. I had forgotten that federal prosecutors designated him an unindicted co-conspirator in the Abscam investigation 26 years ago. I was reminded of it after Murtha became a candidate for majority leader, not by a Republican hit man but a Democratic former colleague in the House. In a long political career, Murtha has made bitter enemies inside his party who are alarmed by his new stature.
aloha blogging
...from Kauai, also known as the "Garden Isle." It's a beautiful, wet mountainous garden with myna birds everywhere and, stop me if you already know this, wild chickens. Their Hawaiian name is moa. They're on the golf course, roadsides, marketplaces, as common as crows in California. These are the epitome of free range chickens.
For some reason, these vast numbers of large plump, gloriously appointed fowl grabbed my fancy. Oh yes, this island is gorgeous. Blindingly so. But those moa...
Perhaps, it's the wonder that they haven't appeared on someone's dinner table with a side of rice. After all, Kauai has a laid back, do-as-little-as-it-takes-to-get-along kind of attitude reminiscent of Key West. With a fishing pole and pellet gun, you could get fat off the land.
But no, the moa flourish and the roosters crow all day. Apparently they haven't seen the cartoons and know they're supposed to wait until dawn. But dawn is impressive. My first morning here began around 5 am, my body refusing to acknowledge the time change. I stood on my friends' porch, watching the moon and listening to the roosters crow from all sides.
If you've ever heard coyotes call to one another in the dark, imagine it with perhaps a dozen voices chiming in. Far from being bothersome, it had a musical quality, a fowl call and response. And maybe that's their secret. Who'd want to ruin such a concert?
More later. Or as the locals say, cock-a-doodle Aloha.
JB
thursday, june 22 2006
in honor of the world cup
Monty Python's international philosophy competition with Germany versus Greece.
pennsylvania's embarassment
Rep. Jack Murtha (D-Pa), imagines himself to be the scourge of the hawks in the Bush administration. Many journalists do, too, because they keep inviting him to appear on talk shows.
So why were the targets of Mr. Murtha's wrath doubled over with laughter during his appearance last Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press?" Rep. Murtha's newfound fame is a product of his call for immediate withdrawal from Iraq, or in the dishonest way he likes to phrase it, "redeployment" from Iraq.
wednesday, june 21 2006
german paper: bush bad for saving flipper
The kings of cynicism at Sueddeutsche Zeitung managed to spin a story about saving Flipper the dolphin into a diatribe against Guantanamo Bay. The article in question, "George W. Bush, Discoverer of the Oceans," blames Bush for reaching the decision to protect the ocean without consulting others. How rude! How insensitive! He didn't ask Congress or the European "friends" whether it was ok to save the whales! The opening passages and accompanying photo say it all:
"Acting alone, President Bush made the small Hawaiian islands into the world's largest protected area. But why? Did he want to do his wife a favor?
The kings of cynicism at Sueddeutsche Zeitung managed to spin a story about saving Flipper the dolphin into a diatribe against Guantanamo Bay. The article in question, "George W. Bush, Discoverer of the Oceans," blames Bush for reaching the decision to protect the ocean without consulting others. How rude! How insensitive! He didn't ask Congress or the European "friends" whether it was ok to save the whales! The opening passages and accompanying photo say it all:
"Acting alone, President Bush made the small Hawaiian islands into the world's largest protected area. But why? Did he want to do his wife a favor?
Of course! Bush wanted to please the First Lady. After all, he can't have genuinely wanted to do something good for the environment. Never mind that Kyoto was torpedoed by the US Senate 95-0 long before Bush ever came to office.
Never mind that the area in Alaska on which the Bush administration wants to drill comprises only 2,000 coastal acres in a natural preserve stretching over 19 million acres. Never mind that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is not the only "pristine" land remaining in Alaska as author Reymer Kluever erroneously claims. No. Bush is bad baby. He hates the environment and makes decisions all by himself...and that is exactly how we got Gitmo..
enemies of the state
Every time some clue-challenged leftoid spouts some piece of logically indefensible drivel, rational people clutch whatever remains of their hair and mutter uselessly into the wind. We can vent, but we can't understand. And of course, many things might enter into a given idiocy; greed, stupidity and social pressure are mighty forces. There is one common denominator, however, and we must see it clearly and fight it tenaciously or more generations of Americans will be lost.
Education used to be about teaching children to think; that is, to examine assumptions, test theories, cross-check facts, probe the chain of evidence, carefully construct the rationales, justify the connections and reference the final product back against personal experience, classic wisdom and opposing ideas or beliefs.
In recent decades, education has morphed away from this time tested method of turning short immature heathen into men. Now we slot our young into the temple of an unholy triumvirate alien to Christianity, real science and classic liberalism alike. The new holy grails are these: learning to blame and ignore if not actively hate traditional European history, ideas, people and religions; acquiring superficial self-esteem and vaporous unsubstantiated but virtuous sounding beliefs; and accepting victimology as religion, lifestyle and narcotic.
Education has adopted Doublespeak as its native tongue and failure as its trump card. Socrates, Michelangelo, Newton, Webster, Shakespeare, Edison, all would be laughed out of a convention of today's educational apparatchiks. Discipline, order, method? Hierarchy and standards? Preposterous! Children tutored in such a way might succumb to the lure of achievement, profit and ownership. They will never become dependable Democratic voters.
People raised in the new order may pass unrecognized on easy days, but they are simple to spot when the going gets tough. Leftists regardless of age, wealth or status retreat behind ad hominem attacks when they are challenged. They also argue from invalid assumptions, set up and knock down straw men with great vigor and smugness, switch subjects early and often, and retreat from all these rhetorical losing stances into the ever-welcoming arms of "well, I FEEL strongly so I know I must be right."
Read it all.
running
Lately, it has become popular to recant on Iraq. When 2,500 Americans are lost, and when the improvised explosive device monopolizes the war coverage, it is easy to see why — especially with elections coming up in November, and presidential primaries not long after.
Pundits now daily equivocate in their understandable exasperation at the apparent lack of quantifiable progress. The ranks of public supporters have thinned as final victory seems elusive. It is hard to find any consistent public advocates of the American effort in Iraq other than the editors and writers here at National Review, the Wall Street Journal, Christopher Hitchens, Charles Krauthammer, Mark Steyn, Norman Podhoretz, and a very few principled others.But for all the despair, note all the problems for those who have triangulated throughout this war.
First, those who undergo the opportune conversion often fall prey to disingenuousness. Take John Kerry’s recent repudiation of his earlier vote for the war in Iraq. To cheers of Democratic activists, he now laments, “We were misled.”
Misled?
Putting aside the question of weapons of mass destruction and the use of the royal “we,” was the senator suggesting that Iraq did not violate the 1991 armistice accords?
Or that Saddam Hussein did not really gas and murder his own people?
Perhaps he was “misled” into thinking Iraqi agents did not really plan to murder former President George Bush?
Or postfacto have we learned that Saddam did not really shield terrorists?
tuesday, june 20 2006
old whine, new bottles
Democrats are so convinced of their certitude that when they lose elections it means either a) voters are stupid saps, b) the election was stolen or c) stupid saps stole the election. Political diary notes:
... liberals are still circulating bogus claims that the [2004] election was stolen by forces allied with President Bush. The Internet has become a transmission belt for the latest science-fiction version of this story: a Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cover story in Rolling Stone titled: "Was the 2004 election stolen? "
Leave aside the irony of a prominent Kennedy family member complaining about voter fraud given the documented examples of how such tactics benefited John F. Kennedy in the photo-finish 1960 election.
Plus Al Gore is uncorking his "I got more popular votes" whine from 2000. Next time you hear this from a Democrat, tell them this:
In 2003, the New York Yankees scored more runs in the World Series, but lost to the Florida Marlins.
Did George Steinbrenner bitch because his team
got more popular votesscored more runs? No, because the championship is a series of games. Just like presidential elections are a series of state elections.If baseball played by different rules, the games would be managed differently. In games where the team is way ahead, managers might keep players in longer to pad the score instead of resting them. Etc.
So it is with winner-take-all state elections. Bush never campaigned much in California because polls told him it was a waste of resources. Had he done so, he could have boosted his popular vote totals. Ditto Gore in red states.
Back where I came from applying different rules after losing a contest was the mark of a sore loser. It still is.
but is it art?
by Burt Prelutsky
In olden times, art was art, and other things weren’t. In the beginning, artists, who were the guys either too frightened or too lazy to go hunting or gathering, passed the time painting the walls of their caves. When the artist’s wife would tell him to go out and kill a mastodon for dinner, he’d throw his beret to the ground, and holler, “Philistine! Can’t you see I’m working?”
Then, one day, some smart cookie, realizing there might be money to be made if artists could come up with a way for other people to cover the cracks in their own walls, came up with the notion of canvas. That worked out very well, indeed. It not only provided these guys with a livelihood and eventually got them out of those drafty caves, but it provided them with a semi-legitimate excuse for asking strange women to take off their clothes.
But almost before you knew it, all sorts of people were going around claiming to be artists. Knit a shawl and you were an artist. Hang a mobile and you were an artist. Glue together a collage, take a class in macramé, nail two boards together and give it a title, and, voila, you were an artist.
The few remaining people who didn’t claim to be artists, themselves, went into business as critics, somehow managing to pass off crankiness as expertise. I guarantee if you announced that your particular art consisted of pasting chicken bones to bricks, by the end of the week ten guys would have set up shop as chicken bone critics, the New Yorker would be profiling you, and the NEA would be sending you an enormous grant.
What’s put me in this cynical frame of mind is a story that’s just come out of Orange County. In the past, this was an area south of Los Angeles best known for having a baseball team called, if you can believe it, the Anaheim Angels of Los Angeles. As if that’s not embarrassing enough, now it’s also the site of the Coin-Op Gallery.
It seems that a group of disgruntled artists has simply gotten fed up with people looking at their art for free. “This is artists poking back,” announced Sarah Greer. “You want to see my art? Give me a quarter.”
At first blush, the price seems reasonable enough. However, when you hear that the work on display includes a hollow TV with a sculpture where you might expect to see Jay Leno, a ballerina with a feminist message, and a screen on which President Bush delivers a one-minute speech, the quarter begins to seem a tad pricey. For me, the real deal breaker is that you have to fork over a quarter for each and every one of the exhibits.
At least artist Catherine Blanksby gives you something tangible for your twenty-five cents. Her objet d’art is a gumball machine filled with what she calls Flirt Kits. These are plastic bubbles that contain a breath mint for you, a flower for her, and pickup lines in five different languages.
The kits, according to Ms. Blanksby, play into her philosophy of fusing theater and art. “It’s thart,” she insists, “and I’m a thartist.”
And who are any of us to argue with her? The real problem, of course, is that when her parents brag about Cathy, their friends are wondering why on earth the Blanksbys have suddenly started lisping.
watching people change
In the spring and summer of 1984, Peter Feldstein used a red marker to make a sign announcing that he wanted to take free portraits of everyone in Oxford, Iowa (pop. 673). Like a kid at a lemonade stand, Peter set up shop on Augusta Street, Oxford's main street.
Twenty-one years later, Peter set up his camera again. Some of the original residents had died and some had moved away, but a surprising number still lived in Oxford. So he photographed them again.
See the photographs. Be sure to read Hunter Tandy's story -- he is sixth from the left.
connie chung makes you squirm
Trying to be funny? Snockered? Your guess is as good as mine.
Watch the video of Connie torch singing on the last broadcast of her cancelled MSNBC show.
And what's with the piano player? Is he too embarassed to tickle the ivories?
monday, june 19 2006
zell's message
Yesterday's post "Donkey Jihad" noted the loss of character of the present Democrat party.
No one put it better than Zell Miller at the Republican convention. Sue Gertson pointed us to this video which takes Zell's speech and adds moving images.
seafood bandage
A new powder made from shrimp stops serious bleeding—fast. From Popular Science.
drive by politics
We should never forget that there are three world-historical movements competing against each other in the world today.
There is Civilization, the culture of commerce and law in the city begun in Mesopotamia some 5,000 years ago.
There is Progressive Puritanism, libertine in sex but rigidly controlling in everything else, a recurring conceit of well-born adolescents.
And now there is Muslim Reaction, a movement that needs no introduction. (There is also the culture of lefty thug dictators, a sordid sideshow beneath our contempt.)
In the culture of Civilization—which means, let us never forget, citification—city, commerce, and law come together like ham and eggs and hash browns. The greatness of the city is founded on a simple fact. It does not grow its own food, so it must trade for it. Thus it must foster commerce, and as soon as commerce emerges there is a need for law, for businessmen need an efficient way of adjudicating their mistakes and their disputes without destroying the bottom line.
The aftertaste of this happy meal is prosperity and wealth, every time it is tried.
prius grows tail, gets 100 mpg
Ryan Fulcher was so intent on getting more than 100 miles a gallon that he drove his Toyota Prius overnight to a technology fair in California, changed the wiring, and installed an extra battery in the trunk.
He returned to Washington as the owner of a "plug-in," a car that consumes even less fuel than an ordinary hybrid.
The additional battery serves as a spare fuel tank, except it supplies electrons, not gasoline. Each night, Fulcher recharges it from a wall socket at his Federal Way home.
ayatollah's grandson: overthrow the mullahs
The grandson of Ayatollah Khomeini, the inspiration of Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution, has broken a three-year silence to back the United States military to overthrow the country's clerical regime.
Hossein Khomeini's call is all the more startling as he made it from Qom, the spiritual home of Iran's Shia strand of Islam, during an interview to mark the 17th anniversary of the ayatollah's death.
"My grandfather's revolution has devoured its children and has strayed from its course," he told Al-Arabiya, an Arabic-language television station. "I lived through the revolution and it called for freedom and democracy - but it has persecuted its leaders."
nude cyclists are peddling threadbare ideas
Perusing reports of this month's World Naked Bike Ride in San Francisco, I was impressed by the way the acres of sagging mottled flesh stayed ruthlessly on message: "RE-ELECT GORE" was the slogan on one man's bottom, as fetchingly dimpled as a Palm Beach chad, while beneath the "GORE" of his butt his upper thighs proudly proclaimed "NO WAR" (left leg) "FOR OIL" (right). "I'D RATHER HAVE THIS BUSH FOR PRESIDENT" read one lady's naked torso with an arrow pointing down to the presidential material in question.
What a bleak comment on the bitter divisions in our society that even so all-American a tradition as nude bicycling down Main Street should now be so nakedly partisan. It's as if the republic itself is now divided into a red buttock and a blue buttock permanently cleaved by the bicycle seat of war.
OK, this metaphor's jumped the bike path. Let me see if I can find some historical analogy. Ah, here we go: Back in 1559, devastated by the loss of her last continental possession, Mary Tudor, England's queen, said that when she died they would find "Calais" engraved on her heart. When the Democratic Party dies, you'll find "NO WAR FOR OIL" engraved on its upper thighs. Despite the Republicans' best efforts to self-destruct, I can't see the Democrats taking either the House or Senate this November. As I said a few months back, even a loser has to have someone to lose to, and the Dems refuse to fulfill even that minimum requirement.
sunday, june 18 2006
donkey jihad
The Democrat party was once home to men such as JFK, Henry "Scoop" Jackson and Daniel Moynihan. Today, one of the lone statesmanslike figures in the party is Sen. Joe Lieberman. But maybe not for long, as the leftwing attempts a purge over his support for the Iraq war.
...a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece Lieberman wrote last November endorsing the president's announced strategy to defeat the insurgency and establish a democratic government in Iraq. That article infuriated Lamont and launched his candidacy. "It was decisive," Lamont told me in an interview. "Lieberman suggested that the critics were undermining the credibility of the president. I thought he was wrong."
"My opponent says it broke Democratic unity," Lieberman said. "Well, dammit, I wasn't thinking about Democratic unity. It was a moment to put the national interest above partisan interest."
Alas, such diversity is disallowed.
"I know I'm taking a position that is not popular within the party," Lieberman said, "but that is a challenge for the party -- whether it will accept diversity of opinion or is on a kind of crusade or jihad of its own to have everybody toe the line. No successful political party has ever done that.".
Update:
Classic [Jonah Goldberg]
Al Gore refuses to endorse Joe Lieberman — his former running mate — in Lieberman's re-election fight. (Nod to Ezra Klein ). I guess Lierberman would have been good enough to run the government if something bad happened to Gore. But he's not obviously the best qualified to be the junior senator from Connecticut, even though he had the same job when Gore tapped him in 2000.
eine kleine mindset
Time's Joe Klein (aka Anonymous) weighs in on Iraq:
And so, a mystery: How is it possible—with 2,500 U.S. solders dead, no discernible progress on the ground and a solid majority of the public now agreeing that the war in Iraq was a mistake—for the Democrats to seem so bollixed about the war and for the President to seem so confident?
Progress is quite discernable: elections, slow-but-sure political maturation, a decimated Al Qaeda in Iraq. Nonmedia elitists understand the war is not just about costs (2500 dead) but also benefits.
Last week, in the opening salvo of the 2006 congressional elections, Bush and Rove were reminding voters that the choice would be between the Democratic strategy of "cut and run" and the Republican war against Islamic "fascists," as the President called them. It was clear, yet again, that Bush and Rove would surf the complexities of the conflict for their political advantage.
Well, "Bush lied" is certainly nuanced, right?
"See, Iraq is part of the global war on terror," the President said. "And if we fail in Iraq, it's going to embolden al-Qaeda types."
Bingo. Just as we embolded them by running out of Somalia, convincing Osama that the US was a paper tiger. And when we let the Beirut barracks bombing go unavenged. Etc.
Rove helpfully added in a New Hampshire speech that al-Zarqawi wouldn't have been nailed if we had pulled out of Iraq, as Representative John Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat, recommended last winter.
And don't forget that Murtha wants to fight the war on terror from Guam. UPDATE: Now he's offering Okinawa as a plan B, plan B.
Rove's assertion was scurrilous and inaccurate. Al-Zarqawi had been eliminated through terrific intelligence work and air power, neither of which required a substantial U.S. ground presence in Iraq.
This is laughable. None of the intelligence work and air power would have been possible without our presence on the ground. Instead, we'd be firing cruise missiles from long distance like Clinton in 1998.
The President's line of attack was accurate but lethally incomplete. His poorly planned invasion of Iraq created the atmosphere that enabled al-Qaeda—and the local sectarian conflicts—to flourish. Iraq had become, in small part, a war against al-Qaeda; for the most part, it is a local sectarian conflict—because of American incompetence. If the President had not allowed General Tommy Franks to "cut and run"—that is, to close his headquarters and begin drawing down the U.S. military presence on May 1, 2003, the very same day as Bush's first cockpit stunt—the U.S. forces might have had a better chance to contain the insurgency.
Well, of course, armchair generals have perfect hindsight. Prediction: in ten years Iraq will be a troubled, but functioning Democartic tent pole of freedom in the middle east.
And Joe Klein will be anonymous.
don't sleep in the subway, darling
Al-Qaeda terrorists came within 45 days of attacking the New York subway system with a lethal gas similar to that used in Nazi death camps. They were stopped not by any intelligence breakthrough, but by an order from Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman Zawahiri. And the U.S. learned of the plot from a CIA mole inside al-Qaeda. These are some of the more startling revelations by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind, whose new book The One Percent Doctrine is excerpted in the forthcoming issue of TIME. It will appear on Time.com early Sunday morning.
U.S. intelligence got its first inkling of the plot from the contents of a laptop computer belonging to a Bahraini jihadist captured in Saudi Arabia early in 2003. It contained plans for a gas-dispersal system dubbed "the mubtakkar" (Arabic for inventive).
Fearing that al-Qaeda's engineers had achieved the holy grail of terror R&D — a device to effectively distribute hydrogen-cyanide gas, which is deadly when inhaled — the CIA immediately set about building a prototype based on the captured design, which comprised two separate chambers for sodium cyanide and a stable source of hydrogen, such as hydrochloric acid. A seal between the two could be broken by a remote trigger, producing the gas for dispersal. The prototype confirmed their worst fears: "In the world of terrorist weaponry," writes Suskind, "this was the equivalent of splitting the atom. Obtain a few widely available chemicals, and you could construct it with a trip to Home Depot – and then kill everyone in the store."
The device was shown to President Bush and Vice President Cheney the following morning, prompting the President to order that alerts be sent through all levels of the U.S. government. Easily constructed and concealed, mass casualties were inevitable if it could be triggered in any enclosed public space.
home grown
The New York Times profiles two budding leaders of American Islam.
Mr. Yusuf lives on a cul-de-sac in Danville, a Northern California suburb, in a house with a three-car garage. The living room is spread with Persian rugs; it is mostly bare of furniture. He held a dinner with guests in traditional Arab style — on the floor, while the smallest of his five sons curled up in the rugs and fell asleep. His wife, Liliana, tired from a day of home-schooling and driving the boys to karate lessons, passed around take-out curry. She converted to Islam after meeting Mr. Yusuf in college, to the chagrin of her Catholic Hispanic parents. The couple married outdoors, in a redwood grove.
Mr. Yusuf received the Arabic title of sheik from his teachers in Mauritania, in West Africa. There the honorific is usually given to old men with a deep knowledge of Islam who serve their communities as wise oracles, but Mr. Yusuf was only 28. His given name was Mark Hanson, and he was raised Greek Orthodox in a bohemian but affluent part of Marin County, just north of San Francisco.
He converted to Islam after a near-fatal car accident in high school sent him on an existential journey. He said that the simplicity of "no God but Allah" made far more sense to him than the Trinity, and he found the five daily prayers a constant call to awe about everything from the sun to his capillaries.
Guess he never read "Pray without ceasing" from Thessalonians. Or read Franny and Zooey, which makes much of that line of scripture.
blame dad
Hysterical liberals are always having a conniption fit about something. Why aren't they having one about that most odious of illiberal holidays, Father’s Day? Why haven’t they banned this insensitive celebration of white male patriarchal values yet? Instead of going after Christmas or Columbus Day, it seems to me that they would be better served to make a frontal assault on the source of all the trouble: fathers, those individual embodiments of Male Privilege.
After all, it’s not as if these groups don’t try to hide their contempt for fatherhood. According to an analysis by one of the most influential liberal feel-tanks, N.O.W., "Underneath the facade of Christian religion are the workings of the radical religious right, mobilizing men against the rights of women, lesbians, and gays."
As we have had occasion to note before, contemporary left-liberalism is overwhelmingly a movement of unhinged or unbalanced (i.e., divorced from healthy male energy) female energy in various forms. Bear in mind that I’m not talking about all liberals. There are obviously some sane ones left, such as Joe Lieberman. It is surely no coincidence that he is the one person they are trying to purge from the party--not knaves such as Al Sharpton and William Jefferson, lunatics such as Howard Dean and Ted Kennedy, or unalloyed simpletons such as Barbara Boxer and Harry Reid.Nevertheless, if you consider the primary constituents of the Democratic Party, you immediately realize that they could not be a functioning party without all of their dysfunction. Let’s just consider the black vote. "Job one" of the Democratic Party and their marketing arm--the brick-and-mortar spin machine known as the MSM--is to foment racial hatred and division. This is because the Democrats would no longer be a viable party in something like 26 states without 90 percent of the black vote. While there is rough parity between the parties, blacks represent only 12 percent of the population, but something like 20-25% of the Democratic base. Therefore, it is necessary to cynically keep them angry, riled up, persecuted, and, most of all, victimized.
If you could snap your fingers and and make one change that would instantly transform black culture, what would it be? More quotas? A new government program? More black faces on TV? More black coaches in the NFL? More sensitivity to Cynthia McKinney's changing hairstyles? No, of course not. Any right-minded person knows that you would wish for more fathers.
...
“...[T]he correlation between social deviancy and fatherless homes is irrefutably linked.... According to the CDC, DoJ, DHHS and the Bureau of the Census, the 30 percent of children who live apart from their fathers will account for 63 percent of teen suicides, 70 percent of juveniles in state-operated institutions, 71 percent of high-school dropouts, 75 percent of children in chemical-abuse centers, 80 percent of rapists, 85 percent of youths in prison, and 85 percent of children who exhibit behavioral disorders. In addition, 90 percent of homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes. In fact, children born to unwed mothers are 10 times more likely to live in poverty as children with fathers in the home.... '[The causal link between fatherless children and crime] is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime,' notes social researcher Barbara Whitehead."
low tech
Did it ever occur to you that your dog might have better health records than you do? While veterinarians routinely keep computerized records of their four-footed patients’ medications and vaccinations, human health care still relies heavily on pen, paper, phone and those little yellow Post-it notes that all too often come fluttering out of a patient’s file.
While most U.S. industries make superb use of information technology to collect, manage and distribute information, when it comes to healthcare, we lag far behind. In 2000, 90 percent of physicians in Sweden, 88 percent in the Netherlands, 62 percent in Denmark, 58 percent in the UK, 56 percent in Finland and 48 percent in Germany were using electronic medical records. Six years later, roughly 80 percent of U.S. physicians are still shuffling through manila folders.
Read on. It sounds like the free market needs a kick start from Uncle Sam.
saturday, june 17 2006
taliban leader renounces rebellion
KANDAHAR -- Rolled out in a wheelchair and surrounded by heavily-armed coalition soldiers, a visibly ill Mullah Mohammed Ibrahim shares his decision to support the Afghan government.
"I want all Afghans to abandon hostilities," he says, "and to unite for peace."
To have a senior Taliban commander lay down his arms is a major public relations coup for coalition forces, especially coming a day after insurgents killed 10 civilian contractors on their way to work at the Kandahar Airfield base.
marginal thinking
Today's entertainment section of the LA Daily News had a full-page diatribe from the New York Times Alessandra Stanley, basically upbraiding Jay Leno for not reaming Ann Coulter when she was a guest on his show.
She went on to say:
Ms. Coulter became a media star by portraying herself as a conservative gadfly tweaking the liberal hegemony, which is, of course, quite a revisionist feat. It may have been the case 30 years ago, but no conservative who came of age during the Reagan Revolution can credibly claim they are marginalized or unheard.
Not unheard, but outgunned. Did the NYT and other mainstream media get upset when:
- Alec Baldwin, upset about the upcoming impeachment of Bill Clinton said on Conan O'Brien: "if we were in another country... We would stone Henry Hyde to death and we would go to their homes and we’d kill their wives and their children. We would kill their families."
- When George Carlin (Leno's other guest that night) said: "Governor Bush, and I call him that because it's really the last thing he was elected to, ... when he reaches his Christian heaven I think he will have a lot to answer for." On Bill Maher, Carlin referreed to Barbara Bush, "The silver douche bag."
- When Whoopi Goldberg made coarse comments about Bush, using crude sexual comments at a John Kerry fundraiser.
- Randi Rhodes on Air America joked about assassinating President Bush
No. Which demonstrates just how conservative voices are marginalized.
OOPS, SHE SAID IT
Betsy Newmark notes Rep. Maxine Waters's unwitting, revealing remarks:
In the debate yesterday over the House Resolution on the Iraq War and battle against terrorism, Maxine Waters, always entertaining, revealed the real reason why the Democrats were so upset. (Thanks to Laura Ingraham for posting the audio.) She got up on the House floor and said that many Democrats were going to be "trapped" because they would have to vote on this resolution and they don't want to have to pick a side and vote on it.
"And so, many Democrats are going to get trapped. Because they claim that in their districts they have half of their constituents for it, this war and half against it and they don't know what to do."
Gee, isn't that what representatives are elected to do? Pick a side and take a stand. Even if they might have to tick off half of their constituents? What can be a more important issue than where you stand when the nation is at war? Representatives shouldn't just make vague statements of supporting the troops, criticizing the President, without making it clear what they think we should do.
Normally, I'm pretty scornful of these do-nothing resolutions, but I think this debate in both the House and the Senate over Kerry's withdrawl idea has been very illuminating. Read the text of the resolution and try to figure out which part of the resolution the Democrats are so furious about.
Resolved, That the House of Representatives--It must be the third statement against setting an arbitrary date for deployment or withdrawl. And isn't that a legitimate issue that members should have to take a stand on? Shouldn't constituents know before they go to the polls whether or not their representative wants to set a date for withdrawl or not? That's why these representatives feel "trapped." They have to show where they stand on a crucial issue for the country and they don't like having to take a stand.
(1) honors all those Americans who have taken an active part in the Global War on Terror, whether as first responders protecting the homeland, as servicemembers overseas, as diplomats and intelligence officers, or in other roles;
(2) honors the sacrifices of the United States Armed Forces and of partners in the Coalition, and of the Iraqis and Afghans who fight alongside them, especially those who have fallen or been wounded in the struggle, and honors as well the sacrifices of their families and of others who risk their lives to help defend freedom;
(3) declares that it is not in the national security interest of the United States to set an arbitrary date for the withdrawal or redeployment of United States Armed Forces from Iraq;
(4) declares that the United States is committed to the completion of the mission to create a sovereign, free, secure, and united Iraq;
(5) congratulates Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki and the Iraqi people on the courage they have shown by participating, in increasing millions, in the elections of 2005 and on the formation of the first government under Iraq's new constitution;
(6) calls upon the nations of the world to promote global peace and security by standing with the United States and other Coalition partners to support the efforts of the Iraqi and Afghan people to live in freedom; and
(7) declares that the United States will prevail in the Global War on Terror, the noble struggle to protect freedom from the terrorist adversary.
friday, june 16 2006
one less thing to feel guilty about
Mass Aztec deaths were not from European diseases:
...four centuries later, Acuña-Soto improbably decided to reopen the investigation. Some key pieces of information—details that had been sitting, ignored, in the archives—just didn't add up. His studies of ancient documents revealed that the Aztecs were familiar with smallpox, perhaps even before Cortés arrived.
They called it zahuatl. Spanish colonists wrote at the time that outbreaks of zahuatl occurred in 1520 and 1531 and, typical of smallpox, lasted about a year. As many as 8 million people died from those outbreaks.
But the epidemic that appeared in 1545, followed by another in 1576, seemed to be another disease altogether. The Aztecs called those outbreaks by a separate name, cocolitzli. "For them, cocolitzli was something completely different and far more virulent," Acuña-Soto says. "Cocolitzli brought incomparable devastation that passed readily from one region to the next and killed quickly."
After 12 years of research, Acuña-Soto has come to agree with the Aztecs: The cocolitzli plagues of the mid-16th century probably had nothing to do with smallpox. In fact, they probably had little to do with the Spanish invasion. But they probably did have an origin that is worth knowing about in 2006....
"This was certainly not smallpox," Acuña-Soto says. "If they described something real, then it appeared to be a hemorrhagic fever."
Hemorrhagic fevers are viral diseases with names that evoke justifiable dread—Ebola, Marburg, Lassa. They strike with sudden intensity, rarely respond to treatment, kill at high rates, then vanish as mysteriously as they came. They are called hemorrhagic because victims bleed, hemorrhaging in their capillaries, beneath the skin, often from the mouth, nose, and ears. The bleeding doesn't kill, but the breakdown of the nervous system does. At first there is fever, fatigue, and dizziness, but within a few days the person falls into delirium and finally a coma.
Read it all -- it's like nonfiction CSI.
HT: AlphaPatriot
holding hands
Seems like yesterday that Emily was a toddler. The last of our three children, she was the straggler, eleven years behind number two son.
From the beginning, she was independent--not defiant, but self-sufficient. If I offered to help her on with her coat, she'd demur and use her own technique, laying the coat flat on the floor and flopping onto her back and sliding into place, then bouncing to her feet with a satisfied smile.
On a trip to a Yosemite, we were descending steep stairs and I offered my hand. "I'll hold my own hand," she said, and proceeded to do just that. There's no point in arguing in with a child that refuses to be treated like a child.
On her first day of kindergarten, my hand became became her lifeline. Had her mitts been bigger, mine would have been crushed. Timid and uncertain, she insisted I remain until her class was called inside. Happy me.
The handholding continued the next day and the next, long after she was comfortable in school. Taking her to school, I could have pulled over and dropped her off, but I never wanted to. I always parked and walked her to class. And we held hands, well into fourth grade, maybe longer. All along I remember thinking, how lucky can I get?
Then came three years of middle school and the contact diminished. Each morning I drove her to her friend's house where she'd hook up with others and walk to school. No more hand holding, just me and my corny gags: hiding behind the door in my office when she came to get me, etc. At first my stunts earned groans, then eye-rolls, then sighs and then zilch.
Today is promotion day, where 8th graders march through a ceremony and get certificates. I will be there but I have no regard for celebrating such pseudo-milestones; after all, "an eighth-grade education" is a term we apply to an uneducated person.
Parents will jostle with camcorders and cameras, preserving yet another set-piece "Kodak moment." Photos of staged events have never resonated with me. Real moments, real memories are too delicate to be recorded in chips. They survive via remembrance and retelling.
Next year she begins high school, only four blocks away. No more rides. No more handholding. At least for another 15 years, when she may be offering her hand to me. Will I accept her gesture of help out of a chair or down a staircase, or insist on not being treated like a child?
I hope I'm wise enough to know I can't hold my own hand.
Jim Bass
land of the free, home of the brave new world
The Chinese want boys, and the Canadians want girls. If they have enough money, they come to the United States to choose the sex of their babies.
Well-off foreign couples are getting around laws banning sex selection in their home countries by coming to American soil — where it's legal — for medical procedures that can give them the boy, or girl, they want.
Opponents say this amounts to medical tourism for designer babies and should awaken lawmakers.
But one doctor who offers embryo selection for about $20,000 says he is serving the marketplace and helping Nature, not playing God. People will be less alarmed as sex selection becomes more routine, said Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg of the Fertility Institutes of Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
leftwing nostalgia dies hard
It has been a tough 10 days for those who see current events through the prisms of Vietnam and Watergate. First, the Democrats failed to win a breakthrough victory in the California 50th District special election--a breakthrough that would have summoned up memories of Democrats winning Gerald Ford's old congressional district in a special election in 1974. Instead the Democratic nominee got 45% of the vote, just 1% more than John Kerry did in the district in 2004.
Second, U.S. forces with a precision air strike killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, on the same day that Iraqis finished forming a government. Zarqawi will not be available to gloat over American setbacks or our allies' defeat, as the leaders of the Viet Cong and North Vietnam did.
Third, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald announced that he would not seek an indictment of Karl Rove. The leftward blogosphere had Mr. Rove pegged for the role of Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. Theories were spun about plea bargains that would implicate Vice President Dick Cheney. Talk of impeachment was in the air. But it turns out that history doesn't repeat itself. George W. Bush, whether you like it or not, is not a second Richard Nixon.
political, who us?
Just imagine the fit Democrats would have if the NRA received taxpayer dollars, and then promoted a slate of gun loving candidates for public office.
Well, Planned Parenthood gets taxpayer dollars and it announced plans to promote "progressive" candidates. Hmm, what party might they be from?
"We're going to channel our strength, our outreach, our power, and work with our pro-choice allies to help progressive voices win across America," said Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Richards, the daughter of former [Democrat] Texas Gov. Ann Richards, made the comments at the liberal "Take Back America" conference.
"freegans" always dine out
Some people seem put on earth just to amuse us.
Almost every week, Weissman organizes an event commonly referred to as “dumpster diving,” where he leads an open tour among the various trash heaps and dumpsters of Manhattan to gather discarded food.
The activity is part of a larger social movement known as freeganism, which views capitalism as the primary force in destroying the environment and avoids the capitalist structure through such practices as eating discarded food, squatting in abandoned buildings instead of paying rent and refusing to hold a job.
Capitalism generates the wealth that makes green living possible. Just compare the US to the commie cough-cough-wheez countries. Or to the Third World today.
In Dehli you'll find unwilling "freegans" cooking their begged vituals over dung fires. You can smell it in the air.
Just as vegans are vegetarians who avoid animal products, freegans subsist only on free food found in the garbage as consumer waste. In Manhattan, there is plenty to go around.
...Weissman has practiced freeganism in one form or another since he was 17. He is careful to point out that there is no “litmus test” for freeganism but rather a variety of lifestyle choices (such as dumpster diving) that are in alignment with the ethos of freeganism.
“Freeganism is an ideal, it’s a range of practices, it’s a commitment,” he said. There are many things one can do which are freegan but there is no standard by which someone has to meet a number of points to be a freegan.”
That being said, he does practice most of the movement’s ideals. He subsists solely on trash, or “recovered” food, and tries to acquire all of his possessions in a similar manner. For example, he owns a computer but acquired it in a decidedly freegan manner. An office building that was closing donated the hard drive. His friend gave him a monitor, and he found a keyboard in the trash. Found items do have their downside: He spent the majority of a recent afternoon on the phone with tech support because it stopped working.
Truly committed freegans would really help the planet via suicide -- just think of all the CO2 emissions that would save.
thursday, june 15 2006
"status quo" is working
A constant refrain from Democrats is that Bush keeps giving us "more of the status quo" about Iraq. Well, according to a document seized in the demise of Zarqawi, the status quo was working:
..."time is now beginning to be of service to the American forces and harmful to the resistance," the document said.
The document said the insurgency was being hurt by, among other things, the U.S. military's program to train Iraqi security forces, by massive arrests and seizures of weapons, by tightening the militants' financial outlets, and by creating divisions within its ranks.
"Generally speaking and despite the gloomy present situation, we find that the best solution in order to get out of this crisis is to involve the U.S. forces in waging a war against another country or any hostile groups," the document said, as quoted by al-Maliki's office.
So Al Qaeda's own assessment admitted they were losing.
pot declares kettle black
Democrats accused Republicans of playing election year politics with the Iraq war on Thursday, as the U.S. House of Representatives debated a resolution that wrapped the unpopular conflict into the overall war on terrorism.
On the day that the U.S. military death toll in Iraq reached 2,500, House Republicans put forward a resolution proclaiming that the United States would win the war on terror and declaring that it was not in the nation's security interest to set an "arbitrary date" to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq.
"It is not enough for this House to say we support our troops," said House Speaker Dennis Hastert. "That statement rings hollow if we do not also say we support their mission."
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said: "We know they are trying to politicize the war in Iraq. It's shameful, but they are."
No report on whether Pelosi burst into laughter after delivering those comments.
Democrats long ago determined that failure in Iraq would be good for them, and have done everything in their power to paint it black.
You want politics? How about Big John Murtha calling for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, then voting against a measure to do just that. And then whining about having his bluff called?
journalists "being played"
J. D. Johannes, a former Marine Sergeant, became an embedded reporter for syndicated TV news reports in Iraq. Some highlights from an interview with TCS Daily:
War News Template
...from the perspective of local media, there's really only four templates for the Iraq story: unit leaves; unit comes home; someone's hurt really bad and dies; and a wife of a reservist or guard member who's getting screwed over by the mortgage lending company.But you never get to see the guys over there doing the work, risking their lives and performing great things on a daily basis. I figured I could go over there and I've worked in television for years in the past. I could go over with a camera, a laptop computer and I could syndicate television news reports back to local markets where the actual reservists were from.
Boredom of war
...As you watched on the news early on, all you saw was the bombing, shoot outs, and explosions. What you didn't see was the day in, day out boredom of the war.Where I was -- with this group of marines in 2005 around the Fallujah AO -- we (the unit) would spend days and weeks trying to get into a shoot out -- attempting to get into a shoot out. I know that sounds absolutely insane, but that's the only way that you can engage the enemy. And when you have an enemy that you have to work so hard to bait out into the open, you're not dealing with a very strong enemy. You're dealing with a very annoying enemy. A very deadly enemy. But not a very strong enemy.
CNN
...three days later, we're done with the operation and it was successful. The Marines had made it and killed several ID teams. We come back to the base and we're sitting in the chow hall and it's all over the news on CNN, and Fox News. "Abu Ghraib a hotbed of insurgent activities." "Is this a new turn in the war?" We were like "Wow. That was really big news, wasn't it?"...the media had heard about it after the fact. It was a pretty big shoot out, but it was an absolutely dismal failure on the part of the insurgency. Their goal was to break down a wall and free the prisoners. They didn't make it. A very few of them even made it to the wall. Most of the insurgents, however, were gunned down in the open field.
No Americans were killed; a few Americans were injured, obviously with shrapnel, but actually more inmates were injured -- by shrapnel from the insurgents. So all they succeeded in doing was creating a lot of martyrs for their own cause and injuring the people they wanted to free; an absolute failure militarily.
But in the media, the fact that they could even put together an 80-man force to attack that base - "that's a sign of strength of the insurgency, right?" Never mind that they got their asses handed to them.
Being played
...many journalists have not figured out that they're being targeted by the enemy on purpose to help shape the coverage of the war. The insurgents don't want the reporters out and about running around. They're completely satisfied with the "balcony" report and some video shot by a stringer of the daily car bomb. That's the message that the insurgents want to get out. They don't realize that warfare is both the kinetic and non-kinetic. And, therefore, they miss how they're being played by the insurgents. I wish more reporters realized that.
hyperpolarity, wikipedia and al-zarqawi
So what's the connection between Wikepedia, the nationalization of the Bolivian gas industry, the rise of Pentecostalism and the successful Iraqi insurgency?
According to Moises Naim, writing in this morning's Financial Times, these are all little guys "calling the shots." Naim, the editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy, argues that the old Cold War world has been replaced by a "hyperpolar world" in which "many large, powerful actors co-exist with myriad smaller power (not all of which are nation-states) that greatly limit the dominance of any single nation or institution."
Thus, according to Naim, Bolivia can get away with breaking its gas contract with Royal Dutch Shell. Thus, a "ragtag" militia in Iraq can stand up to the world's greatest military power. Thus, Pentecostal Christians in Latin America successfully compete with the Vatican. Thus, Wikipedia (founded in 2001) can take on the Encylopedia Britannica (founded in 1768) and, in five years, become 12 times larger.
spending smartly: kyoto versus copenhagen
Money is always an object, so when looking for ways to help the world's poor, it makes sense to spend wisely.
In May 2004, the first Copenhagen Consensus Conference (CC04) took place. Based on extensive background material prepared by 30 economic specialists, eight leading international economists (of which four are Nobel Prize winners) assessed and prioritized the best solutions to ten of the greatest global challenges.
“What would be the best ways of advancing global welfare, and particularly the welfare of developing countries, supposing that an additional $50 billion of resources were at governments' disposal?”
With the point of departure in the question above, the expert panel assessed that the best and most promising solutions were HIV/AIDS prevention, combating malnutrition, combating malaria, and free trade. The proposed solutions to climate change were ranked at the bottom of the list.
The Copenhagen Consensus 2006 begins tomorrow at Georgetown University.
those sophisticated europeans
Yesterday my husband Paul Belien, the editor of this website, was summoned to the police station and interrogated. He was told that the Belgian authorities are of the opinion that, as a homeschooler, he has not adequately educated his children and, hence, is neglecting his duty as a parent, which is a criminal offence. The Ministry of Education has asked the judiciary to press charges and the judiciary told the police to investigate and take down his statement.
It appears that the Belgian authorities are again considering prosecution – the second time in barely two months. This time the claim is not that my husband posted allegedly “racist” texts on this website but that he is failing his children.
My husband, a lawyer by training, and I, a former university lecturer, have homeschooled four of our five children through high school. These four have meanwhile moved on to university. Our youngest child is also being homeschooled, but she has yet to obtain her high school certificate, for which she is currently taking exams. Like her four siblings she takes these exams before the Central Examination Board (CEB), an institution run by the Ministry of Education. The Belgian Constitution, written in 1831, allows parents to homeschool. The CEB exists to enable people who have not attended or who have failed school to obtain an official high school certificate.
Another quirk about Belgium is that political parties must be licensed. In 2004, the country's largest party was ordered out of existence.
walter williams
...explains the economics of prices:
...Say you owned a small 10-pound inventory of coffee that you purchased for $3 a pound. Each week you'd sell me a pound for $3.25. Suppose a freeze in Brazil destroyed half of its coffee crop, causing the world price of coffee to immediately rise to $5 a pound.
You still have coffee that you purchased before the jump in prices. When I stop by to buy another pound of coffee from you, how much will you charge me? I'm betting that you're going to charge me at least $5 a pound. Why? Because that's today's cost to replace your inventory.
Historical costs do not determine prices; what economists call opportunity costs do. Of course, you'd have every right not to be a "price-gouger" and continue to charge me $3.25 a pound. I'd buy your entire inventory and sell it at today's price of $5 a pound and make a killing.
If you were really enthusiastic about not being a "price-gouger," I'd have another proposition. You might own a house that you purchased for $55,000 in 1960 that you put on the market for a half-million dollars. I'd simply accuse you of price-gouging and demand that you sell me the house for what you paid for it, maybe adding on a bit for inflation since 1960. I'm betting you'd say, "Williams, if I sold you my house for what I paid for it in 1960, how will I be able to pay today's prices for a house to live in?"
forward together
Well maybe this is our best chance to achieve some progress security-wise and there's a growing feeling (I won't say dominant but it's here and it's visible) that the new government has the real and serious desire to end this tragic chapter of Baghdad's history.
It seems that President Bush's visit to Baghdad has given more credibility for the operation; that at least was what I heard from people around me or read in Baghdad's papers today; the visit definitely left a positive impression that America is dead serious this time about finding solutions for Iraq especially when it comes to security and critical parts of reconstruction like electricity.
No one can predict how much time this new operation will take but time in this case is of little importance compared to accomplishing the objectives of the operation...In order to encourage the residents of Baghdad to report abuse by the ISF or send tips to the authorities, the government announced phone numbers and email addresses to facilitate contact. The government knows that large segments of the people (mostly Sunni) do not trust these lines and think they could be used to track them back through corrupt elements within the security forces, so the government is trying to deal with this mistrust and they announced numbers that people can use to directly contact the office of deputy PM Dr. Salam al-Zouba'i (who's originally from the Accord Front) apparently to persuade the Sunni residents of Baghdad to feel safe about contacting the authorities.
I don't want to bet on the citizens' cooperation in this regard but at the same time I can say that they won't give the militants a hand. The militants are getting more and more isolated by the day and this isolation is directly related to the increasing suffering and contempt of the citizens from this useless armed opposition especially that most of the once were opposition parties have joined the political process and became an integral part of the government and they smothered their tone and making their demands through political routes.
over the bend
Byron York reports on the Plameologists.
gore: global warming = nazi holocaust
Jonah Goldberg writes:
...In “An Inconvenient Truth” and in interviews, Gore sticks to his guns. He quotes Churchill’s warning about the gathering storm of fascism and declares: “The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequence.”
In interviews, Gore calls global warming skeptics “deniers” with an acid surely intended to conjure comparison to Holocaust deniers.
Sounds like stifling dissent, no?
Of course, Gore isn’t alone. The people of good will who raise relevant and sober-minded questions about global-warming scaremongering are subjected to vicious character assassination on a daily basis. Scott Pelley of “60 Minutes” recently asked why he should interview skeptics of the new environmental groupthink: “If I do an interview with Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?”
giuliani goes nuclear
A small gathering in Mid town yesterday got a sneak peek at Rudy Giuliani's formula as he gears up for a likely 2008 presidential run. That formula: one-third leadership, one-third technocratic centrist and one-third radical conservative reformer.
There's a reason Giuliani outpolls Sen. John McCain regularly when it comes to who conservative Republicans prefer for the presidency - while also maintaining great popularity with centrists - and it was on full display in this Manhattan Institute-hosted talk on energy policy. (For the record, the ex-mayor's firm, Bracewell & Giuliani, does significant work for energy companies.)
The centrism came in the policy speech, which found the former mayor in full-on Ross Perot mode with a series of charts and graphs detailing 1) how U.S. energy demand has far outstripped domestic production since 1960 and 2) how countries like France and Belgium are far outstripping the United States in their use of nuclear power.
Drawing on his experience managing New York City's power problems, Giuliani spoke of the government red tape that makes it virtually impossible to build power plants, oil refineries and (especially) nuclear-power facilities.
Summing up U.S. energy policy since the 1970s, he was blunt: "We haven't done anything." We haven't drilled in Alaska. We haven't built oil refineries. We haven't ordered a nuclear power plant since 1978.
We need to start doing these things, he said, to diversify. Energy independence, he said, is simply the "wrong paradigm," despite the idea's popularity in quarters of both the Left and the Right. Instead, in a global economy, "We have to diversify, that's our strength . . . You can be independent by being diversified."
Read it all.
wednesday, june 14 2006
retiring corruption
Nancy Pelosi has officially retired the Democrats' "culture of corruption" slogan. Of course, it has nothing to do with various Democrats getting caught acting dirty. No, no.
It's because Democrats need to begin promoting their own vision of America.
“Now it’s time to talk about us. Enough of the Republicans. It’s time for us to talk about what are the priorities we’d like to see addressed, if we have the opportunity,” Pelosi said in an interview with The Hill on Wednesday.
Lemme guess: 1) cut 2) run 3) tax?
She outlined three areas where Democrats would seek to differentiate themselves from Republicans: integrity, civility and accountability. If Democrats were to take control of the House in November, their first actions would focus on promoting those values, she said.
Integrity: Pelosi plans to install a convicted criminal, Rep. Alcee Hastings, in a key intelligence committee position.
Civility: Howard Dean suggested that President Bush had advance knowledge of 9/11 and let it happen. Since 2000 virtually every leading Democrat, with the exception of Joe Lieberman, has had something ugly to say about President Bush.
Accountability: Democrats beat the drums of war against Iraq. Now that the war has taken longer than one election cycle, they hide from their own positions and claim "Bush lied." Just watch this video -- you'll need the Flash 8 plugin.
weird video
Japanese language instructors do, uh, hand aerobics to teach essential English phrases, such as, "Leave me alone" and "It's your fault this happened."
it was only a matter of time
For those who can't stand even one moment of silence. The iCrap?
minimum courage on minimum wage
Some Republicans in Congress are apparently worried about the midterm elections. They are so worried, they are starting to vote like Democrats.
rules in a knife fight?
By rote and by ritual most Americans to assert that they "Support our troops." But as we all know, yet seldom admit, America has more of the known reserves of the world's bullshit than the Saudis have oil. The truth of the matter is that far too many Americans are becoming far too interested in our troops behaving correctly than actually supporting and sustaining them. They blather support out of one orifice while spewing disdain from the other. We hear these clapped-out flatulators daily at work, on the street, and over the tube of the boobs. I don't know about you, but for me these hyperventilating hypocrites are beginning to gripe my hindquarters big time.
an iowahawk oldie but goodie
I was telling a friend about some of Iowahawk's older posts, and this one came to mind. For those who missed this the first time around, enjoy:
Blue State Blues as Coastal Parents Battle Invasion of Dollywood Values
"I'm not sure where we went wrong," says Ellen McCormack, nervously fondling the recycled paper cup holding her organic Kona soy latte. "It seems like only yesterday Rain was a carefree little boy at the Montessori school, playing non-competitive musical chairs with the other children and his care facilitators."
"But now..." she pauses, staring out the window of her postmodern Palo Alto home. The words are hesitant, measured, bearing a tale of family heartbreak almost too painful for her to recount. "But now, Rain insists that I call him Bobby Ray."
Even as her voice is choked with emotion, she summons an inner courage -- a mother's courage -- and leads me down the hall to "Bobby Ray's" bedroom, for a firsthand glimpse at the psychic devastation that claimed her son.
She opens the door to a reveal a riot of George Jones CDs, reflective 'mudflap mama' stickers, empty foil packs of Red Man, and U.S. Marine recruiting posters. In the middle of the room: a makeshift table made from a utility cable spool, bearing a the remains of a gutted catfish. "This used to be all Ikea," she says, rocking on heels between heaved sobs. "It's too late for us. Maybe it's not to late for me to warn others."
Read it all.
rove on saddam
In this video, Karl Rove reminds us why we need make no excuses for overthrowing Saddam Hussein.
tuesday, june 13 2006
hannah captured by cherry picker
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Police and firefighters evicted actress Darryl Hannah from a walnut tree on Tuesday and removed dozens of other protesters from a Los Angeles community garden destined for destruction.
The action by police, some in riot gear, ended a three-week campaign to save the garden oasis in the midst of gritty south Los Angeles that had attracted supporters ranging from singers Joan Baez and Willie Nelson to hundreds of residents.
tax cuts for everyone
Aided by surging tax receipts, President Bush may make good on his pledge to cut the deficit in half in 2006 — three years early.
Tax revenues are running $176 billion, or 12.9%, over last year, the Treasury Department said Monday. The Congressional Budget Office said receipts have risen faster over the first eight months of fiscal '06 than in any other such period over the past 25 years — except for last year's 15.5% jump.
The 2006 deficit through May was $227 billion, down from $273 billion at this time last year. Spending is up $130 billion, or 7.9%.
green scare and bad faith
Climatologists say the current cycle of hurricanes is normal, and that global warming has little or nothing to do with it. Bill Clinton is a smart guy, so he knows that. Clinton is also a man with no moral compass, so he'll say anything if he sees an advantage.
As we head into hurricane season, Clinton and other Democrats have figured that hurricanes are a no lose proposition for the 2006 elections. By blaming destructive storms on global warming, they figure to pin blame on Republicans in November. If the hurricane season turns out to be mild, no one will remember. So there's no downside.
As Tropical Storm Alberto threatened to strengthen into the ninth hurricane in 22 months to affect Florida, former President Clinton predicted Monday that Republican environmental policies will lead to more severe storms.
"It is now generally recognized that while Al Gore and I were ridiculed, we were right about global warming," Clinton said at a fundraiser for the Florida Democratic Party. "It's a serious problem. It's going to lead to more hurricanes."
Fact: in 8 years of Clinton-Gore, we got lots of talk and the Kyoto Treaty, a dead-on-arrival bit of nonsense that the Senate voted unanimously against. Even proponents admitted it would do little to reduce global warming. It excluded China and India.
Fact: Bush negotiated a methane reduction agreement that includes China and India, which according to Gregg Easterbrook at the Brookings Institution, may "do more to slow global warming than perfect compliance the Kyoto treaty."
This is part of a pattern.
- Clinton yapped about AIDS in Africa. Bush did something about it.
- Clinton demanded regime change in Iraq. Bush made it happen.
- Clinton dissembled as 800,000 Rwandans were macheted to death. Bush negotiated an end to the 40 year civil war in Sudan (not Darfur, the war that killed 2.5 million).
For those who like smooth talking empty suits, Clinton was the perfect president. May they fawn over him forever.
For those who can look past mangled phrases and see strength in deeds, Bush leads by doing, not talking.
global warming fever
There is a conceit among the American left that the American right cleaves to bad science out of deference to religion, while the left is all-science, all-the-time. Former Veep Al Gore's new movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," however, shows how unscientific -- and downright faith-based -- the left has become.
Is global warming human-induced? Gore says that it is, and he may well be right. Last month in The New York Times, Gregg Easterbrook of the Brookings Institution announced that he had converted from global-warming "skeptic to convert." Easterbrook noted that a 1992 survey found that a mere 17 percent of members of the American Geophysical Union and American Meteorological Society believed in greenhouse-gas climate change. Since then, scientists have found more evidence of the phenomenon.
Now, he is wrong when he argues in his movie that there is a complete consensus on global warming today. As proof Gore cites a 2004 study that looked at 928 climate abstracts and found none that refuted global-warming dogma. That says more about the researcher than the scientific community.
Gore was wrong in 1992 when he wrote that 98 percent of scientists agreed with him on global warming. Witness the survey cited above. There are a number of well-known scientists who don't believe that global warming is human-induced, or who believe that if it is, it is not catastrophic. Hurricane expert William Gray of Colorado State University believes the Earth will start to cool within 10 years. Neil Frank, former director of the National Hurricane Center, told The Washington Post that global warming is "a hoax." Climate scientist Robert Lindzen of MIT believes that clouds and water vapor will counteract greenhouse gas emissions.
iranian women march
Thousands turn out to protest mullahs’ misogyny.
time to bring our cops home?
There were 20 times as many murders in the US in 2005 as there were US soldiers lost in the War in Iraq.
<sarcasm>
My gawd, what is the president's plan?
More of the status quo, while Americans continue to die on American soil at American hands?
Maybe it's time to seek a political solution with the homicidal faction living amongst us. What are their concerns? If we dialog with them, perhaps they'll like us more and quit killing us less.
</sarcasm>
bush in baghdad
President Bush arrived in Baghdad today for a face-to-face meeting with new Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki -- an effort, the White House said, to get a clear sense of the premier's priorities and how the U.S. government could help his government succeed.
The White House originally had said Bush was scheduled to be at Camp David and to hold a video-conference with Maliki this morning. Instead, without telling the Iraqi government or all but his closest advisers, the president slipped out of Washington last night and made the 11-hour trip to Baghdad International Airport, landing at 4:08 p.m. Baghdad time (8:08 a.m. EDT).
kossacks: don your black arm bands
Karl Rove will not, repeat not, be indicted.
Karl Rove won't say it, and his lawyer won't say it, but I'll say it: Patrick Fitzgerald's conduct in the Rove matter has been disgraceful. He kept Rove hanging for eight months with his bizarre game of keeping the Rove case "open" even though he claimed he did not expect any more indictments. I'd guess this cost Rove several hundred thousand dollars in legal fees and months of sleepless nights. Nice work, Patrick. You have once again reminded us why the misbegotten term "special prosecutor" should be considered an obscenity.
The loony left must feel crushed.
amway of bile
From Maggie's Farm:
The dailykos is the Amway of Bile.
If you're unfamiliar with the multi level marketing approach, you're lucky. It's exemplified by Amway. Amway's often emulated approach to making money for its primary investors is by selling motivational and instructional marketing materials to an ever increasing pool of participants in a pyramidal formulation. Somewhere down the line someone's supposed to buy something besides marketing materials, but that someone never seems to show up.
For those of you lucky enough not to know what the dailykos is, it's the exemplar of a stripe of endless vitriol masquerading as political action that infests the blogosphere at the far left hand margin of the internet world. What do they think? Democrats are too Republican for them, is the short answer, if there is an answer; their message generally is encapsulated by Brando's dopey answer to "What are you rebelling against?" in The Wild One. "Whaddya got?" asked Brando in return, never answering the question, but nonetheless saying a lot.
...Their time is worthless enough, I guess, as it is spent in a kind of 24/7 alternate reality, a mirror image of real activity. They support quixotic candidates as a kind of kabuki political theater. The US military acts; they try to hamstring it, all the while holding their nose and claiming to support it. Their political opponents do things; they say they are against what is being done, or that it doesn't count anyway because their evil opponents did it for the wrong reasons. If unemployment drops from 4.6% to 4.5%, it means that we've all been forced to take crummy jobs that no one would want. If it goes to 4.7%, well, see-- there's no jobs for anyone. If it stays the same-- see? Another quagmire. Every day is 1931, in Vietnam circa 1969, to a koskid.
There is an expression for a force from nowhere that swoops in inexplicably and saves the day: deus ex machina; literally, God from the machine. The cadres of the Amway of Bile rely on the reverse -- the devil will come out of anything, no matter how benign, productive, wholesome, or innocuous, and that devil will allow them to hate that which is objectively good, while simultaneously allowing them to preen morally. Give me Beelzebub from the Machine, they fervently pray; defeat me, and concurrently absolve me of guilt in my defeat.
We don't lose elections, they tell themselves; they are stolen. We argue; you smear. We have facts, our opponents hatch machiavellian plots to misinform. Our opponents are too stupid to understand the TRUTH, and simultaneously so wily and clever they can't be defeated by logic.
...
When someone screams "I'm Somebody," and that person is manifestly nobody, just like we all are, it's not worth the effort to argue with them. When your toddler shows you the first turd he made in the bowl, and tells you he wants to bronze it because it's a faerie house, you flush the bowl and pat them on the head, you don't tell them there are no faeries.
What do you tell an adult, whose car is covered in Kucinich for President bumper stickers, wearing a "Bush is Hitler" shirt, when he tells you he's "Against War?" That's nice, you'd say, if you were kind; those mean fellow citizens of yours that absolutely adore war are everywhere, and if not for you and your bumper sticker, we'd be invading Canada for their maple syrup right now, I bet! Then you'd roll your eyes and cast a knowing look towards the other adults.
Or if you were Kos, you'd sign them up, and yoke them to your mission; your mission to have a mission.
monday, june 12 2006
juan cole, doofus with a degree
Iraqpundit returns to one of his favorite objects of scorn, University of Michigan prof, Juan Cole:
And now, back to The Juan Cole Show. Cole and his media celebrity have provided us all with a richly entertaining spectacle, and I for one am grateful. The Cole show has been well worth watching, because Prof. Cole's prominence as a go-to source for lazy reporters writing about Iraq is symptomatic of problems with two important institutions: Middle East Studies and journalism. I mean, Cole sets himself up as a transcendent expert on a country he's never in his life seen, and because he can dress up his sour, demonstrably ignorant, and often irresponsible views in academic robes, he soon becomes a sought-after source.
Let's take a quick glance at a now-completed chapter in Cole's intellectual adventure: his bizarre history with the subject of Zarqawi. There are two major themes to note. The first is that Zarqawi might not have existed, and the second was that if he did exist, he wasn't really al-Qaeda.
As recently as last fall, Cole was uncertain that there was a Zarqawi. He wrote, “Personally, I'm not sure Zarqawi exists, so I'd be reluctant to send a thousand Marines after him.”... This sort of learned distinction is a specialty of Cole's; it presumably demonstrates what's so "informed" about his commentary. But it's just crap. In a tape aired on Al Jazeera yesterday, no less than al-Qaeda's second banana, Dr. Zawahiri, offered blessings to Zarqawi.
why i vote gop
No matter how disgusted I become at certain Republicans (a lot), the thought of Democrats running the country sends shivers down my spine. Consider this:
Incomprehensibly, there are reports that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has decided to oust fellow Rep. Jane Harman of California in January as the top Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Mrs. Pelosi intends to replace Mrs. Harman in her Intelligence Committee leadership role with Rep. Alcee Hastings of Florida, who, depending upon which party achieves majority status, would either become chairman of the House intelligence panel or its ranking member. Either result would be appalling.
I lived in Florida in the 1980s and remember Alee Hastings well. He's a crook, pure and simple.
Mr. Hastings' past should disqualify him from such a position of trust. At the recommendation of a special investigative committee of the federal judiciary, which had concluded that Mr. Hastings, then a U.S. District Court judge, had lied and fabricated evidence to win an acquittal on bribery charges in 1983, the Democrat-controlled House voted 413 to 3 in 1988 to impeach him.
Several of the 17 impeachment counts, reported Congressional Quarterly, "alleged that Hastings committed acts of perjury during his 1983 trial." Keeping in mind that Mr. Hastings would be told the most sensitive intelligence secrets, consider the fact that another impeachment count approved by the House "alleged that Hastings leaked information about a wiretap he was supervising and thereby forced a halt to an extensive federal undercover operation in the Miami area in 1985."
A black man, he tried and failed to play the race card in his defense.
In 1989, a Democratic-controlled Senate convicted Judge Hastings of accepting a $150,000 bribe in 1981 in exchange for a lenient sentence and committing numerous acts of perjury at his own trial. Once he was booted off the federal court, voters in southern Florida elected him to Congress, after which Mrs. Pelosi -- the quintessential San Francisco Democrat -- appointed him to the House Intelligence Committee.
Nancy Pelosi, of course, has been yammering about a Republican culture of corruption.
JB
"Michiganders are furious at life"
In Michigan, Gov. Jennifer Granholm — the darling of Democrats when she was elected in 2002 — is now in a dead heat with Republican challenger Dick DeVos. A statewide poll last month by EPIC-MRA put him at 46%, her at 45%. Last fall, she had held a 23-point lead.
"Michiganders are furious at life, so they're furious at the governor," says Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. DeVos, former president of Amway, has been airing TV ads since February that tap voters' discontent over the state's direction and its battered economy. The state has the nation's second-highest unemployment rate, after Mississippi.
I know a few Michiganders. If they're furious at life, they don't let it show.
small miracles
THE scientist who led the team that cracked the human genome is to publish a book explaining why he now believes in the existence of God and is convinced that miracles are real.
Francis Collins, the director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute, claims there is a rational basis for a creator and that scientific discoveries bring man “closer to God”.
His book, The Language of God, to be published in September, will reopen the age-old debate about the relationship between science and faith. “One of the great tragedies of our time is this impression that has been created that science and religion have to be at war,” said Collins, 56.
terror links to saddam's inner circle
What was the relationship between Saddam Hussein's inner circle and Islamic terrorists? A newly released document appears to provide evidence that in 1999 the Taliban welcomed "Islamic relations with Iraq" to mediate among the Taliban, the Northern Alliance and Russia, and that the Taliban invited Iraqi officials to Afghanistan.
The document, captured in Iraq but never before seen by the public, offers glimmers of new insight at the Pentagon's Foreign Military Studies Office Web site. The FMSO is a research and analysis center under the U.S. Army's Training and Doctrine Command.
This particular document mentions two men with similar names, each with ties to Pakistani religious schools known as madrassas, Jihad training camps, the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
This original translation by my translator-colleague, who goes by the nom de guerre of "Sammi," comes from a notebook kept by an Iraqi intelligence agent. It provides evidence of a cooperative, operational relationship agreed to at the highest levels of the Iraqi government and the Taliban. The notebook is lengthy and we will present it on the FOX News Web site in a series of postings. It deals extensively with meetings between Maulana Fazlur Rahman, an Al Qaeda/Taliban supporter, and Taha Yassin Ramadan, the former vice president of Iraq, and other unnamed Iraqi officials.
chavez raving
In his most direct and brazen threat against the private sector yet, Hugo Chavez has warned Venezuelan businesses that unless they repatriate $10 billion in capital flight for his own disposal, he’ll take every last thing they have left in Venezuela.
It’s a profoundly menacing statement, and not only because he mentions he’ll act in just a few months, after he’s reelected in December but because he sounds so sure he’s going to win. If Venezuela were a true democracy, (and Chavez was not an election cheat) he would not be so sure of that. But more specifically, the threat signals Chavez’s intentions in the coming year, something he tends to act on swiftly.
sunday, june 11 2006
cuban comedy hour
Known psychopathic murderer Fidel Castro complains that Zarqawi deserved a trial.
complex inferority
...official multiculturalism sends two messages to newcomers.
One is: "Welcome! Don't change, we love you just the way you are!"
The other is: "You're coming to live in a country so confused and degenerate we've decided our culture isn't worth preserving, defending or extending. We've got nothing to offer you but jobs."
The latter is the nation that raises children who hate it.
We are, by and large, a secular culture, materialistic, spiritually shallow, sexually obsessed, and devoted to the pursuit of personal pleasure and satisfaction.
Frankly, that's pretty much the way I like it.
It's called freedom and it's the only thing we've come up with on the planet that actually works for human beings.
For all its faults, Western civilization creates economic prosperity without parallel, pushes the envelope of the human lifespan, and in which people on welfare live better than medieval kings.
We've cracked open secrets of the universe and linked the world via communications links that mere decades ago were the stuff of science fiction.
I suspect the very essence of our culture -- unbridled freedom and the right to be left alone -- is the thing that most offends the devout and, I believe, leads some on the fringes to plot against their adopted homeland.
My eldest kid -- who hails from a Romanian orphanage -- has met a couple of people from that part of the world. True products of Canadian multiculturalism, they professed shock she has no interest in learning about the culture that produced her.
Her answer: "If that culture was worth anything, it wouldn't have abandoned me and starved me for three years."
She first articulated that thought when she was 9, at a time when my wife and I were encouraging her to learn about the culture into which she was born.
Kid's smarter than her parents and the architects of national social policy.
HT: Betsy's Page
"surrounded by sociopaths"
Mohammed at Iraq the Model:
Hamas's reaction to the death of Zarqawi caused the contempt of so many Iraqis. The printed and watched Iraqi media lashed out vigorously on Hamas, politicians and ordinary people on the streets are just equally angered by some Arabic official and media reactions which spoke of the criminal as if he were a hero.
It is totally unimaginable why someone would describe the head chopping, children murdering terrorist as a hero. It's disgusting and infuriating beyond words.
This wrongful description of evil is a major reason for misery in this region and it only contributes to justifying more unjustifiable death and violence. This makes one sometimes whishes that Iraq is somehow lifted away from these perverted sociopaths who surround us....
I'll end this with a comment from Iraq…
I used to be against killing people because of their perverted opinions or their anti-freedom doings but after I have seen and lived through their terrorism and anti-humanity extremism I say now that the only solution is to end the life of those who are not even humans. They poison the minds and thoughts of sane people.
People, let the world live in freedom and happiness…
I say it to all the sane and rational people; congratulations on the death of Zarqawi.
"a good day"
From Alaa at the Mesopotamian:
...today is a good day indeed. An arch zombie has been blown to smithereens. You know, I am the sort of guy who gets distressed at the sight of blood and cannot bear the sight of even a dead animal, believe it or not. But you know, I was shocked at my own feelings of pleasure on beholding the photo of the dead face of Zarqawi. I would never have thought that possible. I have never felt this way my whole life. Yet the atrocities and outrages that these pseudo humans, these misanthropes, have perpetrated have engendered such anger, such sorrow, such rage that not even the most peaceful of souls can control their hatred of these criminals.
...
I want to congratulate the valiant eagles of the American Air force and all the men of the U.S. Army, the Iraqi security forces and all those involved in executing this just punishment and for being the instrument of providential justice. Blessed be the wombs that bore you, and please accept this expression of gratitude and love from an ordinary Iraqi man. And as for you American people rest assured that our faith in victory has not shaken on single iota. I can only end with the words of our dear President Bush: “God Bless Iraq and May God continue to Bless America”.
airplane nonsense
...from Freakonomics.
many in terrorist class of 2004
...have graduated to the afterlife, says the leading Arabic daily, Asharq Alawsat:
MADRID, Spain, AP - They rose up quickly to take up Osama bin Laden's call for jihad, ruthless men in their 20s and 30s heralded as the next generation of global terror. Two years later, 40 percent are dead, targets of a worldwide crackdown that claimed its biggest victory with the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaida's front man in Iraq.
Manhunts in Asia, Africa and Europe have pushed most of the rest deep underground — finding refuge in wartorn Somalia or the jungles of the southern Philippines. While there are still recruits ready to take up al-Qaida's call to arms, analysts say the newcomers have fewer connections than the men they are replacing, less training and sparser resources.
"There are more people popping up than are being put away," said Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert at the Swedish National Defense College. "But the question is whether the new ones have the fortitude to take up the mantle and carry the struggle forward. I don't see that they have."
Read it all.
marine says rules followed in haditha
From today's Washington Post:
A sergeant who led a squad of Marines during the incident in Haditha, Iraq, that left as many as 24 civilians dead said his unit did not intentionally target any civilians, followed military rules of engagement and never tried to cover up the shootings, his attorney said.
Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, 26, told his attorney that several civilians were killed Nov. 19 when his squad went after insurgents who were firing at them from inside a house. The Marine said there was no vengeful massacre, but he described a house-to-house hunt that went tragically awry in the middle of a chaotic battlefield.
"It will forever be his position that everything they did that day was following their rules of engagement and to protect the lives of Marines," said Neal A. Puckett, who represents Wuterich in the ongoing investigations into the incident. "He's really upset that people believe that he and his Marines are even capable of intentionally killing innocent civilians."
Read it all. And remember that much of the left, including Congressman John Murtha, have already convicted these men.
raw and forceful
...this video preview of a movie made by Marines is strong stuff. As Powerline put it:
All of the footage for the film was shot by Dollard or by the Marines he was with in places like Fallujah and Ramadi. Be warned, the trailer is vulgar and, to put it mildly, not politically correct. The participants are contemptuous of various liberals and, more broadly, of their own MTV generation. I think the movie looks good.
This is one where the advice might be: turn your speakers down a little. And if you're one of those "I support the troops but not the war" folks, you won't be pleased.
math and the simpsons
In the 1995 Halloween episode of the award-winning animated sitcom The Simpsons, two-dimensional Homer Simpson accidentally jumps into the third dimension. During his journey in this strange world, geometric solids and mathematical formulas float through the air, including an innocent-looking equation: 178212 + 184112 = 192212. Most viewers surely ignored this bit of mathematical gobbledygook.
On the fan discussion site alt.tv.simpsons, however, the equation caused a bit of a stir. "What's going on, he seems to have disproved Fermat's last theorem!" one fan marveled, referring to the famous claim by Pierre de Fermat—proved just months earlier—that for any exponent n bigger than 2, there are no nonzero whole numbers a, b, and c for which an + bn = cn. The Simpsons equation, if correct, would be a counterexample to the theorem, meaning that the proof had been wrong.
Plug the equation into any run-of-the-mill calculator and it seems to check out. The 12th root of 178212 + 184112, according to a calculator, is 1,922. Yet it's easy to see that the equation is false, because the left-hand side is odd, while the right-hand side is an even number. There's no paradox here: It's simply a matter of the calculator's round-off error.
To David X. Cohen, the Simpsons writer who concocted the equation, the fans' responses were a source of glee. Cohen had written a computer program specifically to look for what mathematicians call Fermat "near misses": combinations of numbers a, b, c, and n that come so close to satisfying Fermat's equation that they would seem to work when tested on a calculator.
Why go to such lengths for a background joke that would flash across the screen in a matter of seconds? Mainly for the fun of it, but also to flex intellectual muscles that don't typically get exercised in Hollywood script rooms: Cohen has a master's degree in computer science.
just do it (or else)
A video parody of Nike ads.
why dirt is good for you
"Our relationship with our parasites is so close that we actually do ourselves damage if we remove them completely." She detailed a few of the unexpected downsides of removing our pathogens (put away that Purell, you clean freaks):
Asthma, which is more common in industrialized countries, increased 75% from 1980-84 in US. Asthma is less common in rural environments, and families with more children, pets or farm animals. Just having older siblings likely to be associated with decrease in asthma.
Drinking unpasteurized milk means people are less likely to have allergies (we idiotic Americans don't allow unpasteurized cheese, except for some hard cheeses at Whole Foods and other such stores). Pasteurized cheese tastes like nothing compared to unpasteurized [and healthier] cheese. What about the danger of listeria?! Come on...all of France isn't coming down with it from unpasteurized cheese, now are they?
Endotoxin, a component of bacterial cell walls, may be a crucial component of the human body. It's particularly prevalent in rural environments. And higher endotoxin levels in bedding were associated with lower levels of asthma in a study 812 European children.
HT: Instapundit.
saturday, june 10 2006
haditha: time magazine's list of corrections
Sloppy in the cause of smearing Marines. They should be embarassed.
missed cinema: lamcombe, lucien
In late the late '80s, I attended a screening in a small theater in New York. I arrived moments after the film started and fumbled my way to a seat in the third row, stepping on a woman's toes in the process. I apologized, and after a few moments my eyes adjusted enough to make out her unmistakable profile: Candice Bergen. Which excited me because that meant the fellow to her right was her husband, Louis Malle, my favorite French director.
I consider Malle's Atlantic City one of the top two movies of the 1980s. Another Malle favorite, only recently available on DVD, is Lacombe, Lucien. My wife and I watched it again after 32 years, and it holds up well.
The title character (seen at right in the photo) is a 17-year-old aimless peasant kid in southwest France in 1944, soon after D-Day. Unsophisticated and a bit dense, he takes up with a group of French anti-resistance police and falls for the daughter of a Jewish tailor. The sense of time and place is perfect. The film contains small moments that would never make it into a Hollywood film and long stretches where hardly a word is spoken. You can get it from Netflix.
JB
something fresh in the state of denmark
The Danes really are different.
rubbish
Tom Friedman writes a nasty column about General Motors in the New York Times. GM tries to respond with a letter to the editor and hits a wall.
Here's a chance to see firsthand the arrogance of the news media.
Someone should tell Bill Keller and Pinch Sulzberger that, with the internet, they don't get the last word anymore.
HT: Mickey Kaus
airbrushing history
The adage that victors write the history has always been flawed. Some victors just never bother with words and let others define them. For example, when you say Viking, most people conjure up images of wild men raping and pillaging and not much else.
Most don't know that Vikings were sophisticated traders whose lines of commerce extended through Russia (which took its name from russ meaning red) to Istanbul.
Now we have the French and Germans, neither one a victor of much in the 20th century, writing self-serving history. As Atlantic Review notes:
Now France and Germany have produced a joint history textbook, which apparently is not just Euro-centric, but also teaches a pro-European sentiment on the expense of the United States. Chirac and Schroeder started this initiative to contribute to further Franco-German reconciliation and mutual understanding by teaching history to French and German highschool students from both French and German perspectitves, as the publisher explains in German and French.
The textbook was written by five German and five French historians. Guillaume Le Quintrec, who headed the French team, told The Times that the book contained "unashamedly pro-European ideology" and an underlying distrust of the United States. The textbook:
...starts in 1945, a convenient date that enables the authors to focus on "memories" of the Second World War rather than its causes. "The patriotic cult of victory has given way to a universal demand to remember the victims of the war," the work says. The next stage is the Cold War, where the US and the USSR are presented as broadly equivalent in moral terms. Both were engaged in an arms race described as "the balance of terror" and both sought to "impose themselves by an omnipresent propaganda" that involved "gross exaggerations and simplifications".
While the book might describe different French and German perspectives, according to The Times it apparently ignores the US perspective and describes the EU as good multilateralists and the United States as bad unilateralists:
A substantial section of the work is devoted to the EU -- a startling success story and a beacon for the rest of the world, according to the five German and five French scholars who worked on the project. "Through its willingness to co-operate with the Third World, its attachment to multilateralism, its dialogue with other regions, the EU appears as a model on the international scene," it says.
By contrast, modern American unilateralism "enshrined by George W. Bush is widely criticised throughout the world", it says. Music, cinema and other forms of culture are "dominated by American multinational firms, which are the main beneficiaries of the free trade". M Le Quintrec told The Times that it was "largely right" to describe the work as anti-American. But he said that German historians had insisted upon softening the message with sentences such as: "Some people, notably in Germany, consider the US to be a power which defends democracy in a world where the UN is not always able or willing to do it."
The BBC reports how the book was written:
The 10 authors did not encounter major difficulties, according to France's Le Figaro newspaper. Paradoxically it was not World War II which provided the main topic of debate, but the US role in the world since 1945, the newspaper said. It quoted Guillaume Le Quintrec, co-director of the project, who said "the French found the Germans to be pro-American and the Germans found our viewpoint anti-American". Heated discussions, in which each word was carefully considered, resulted in a text which both sides judged to be "balanced".
iowahawk gets zarkman exclusive
A dispatch from the other side of paradise:
Howzit swingin', fagsicles? Yeah, I know all you bitzoches all seen the pictures by now. Go on and laugh it up chump, like your drivers license photo is all George fuckin' Clooney. Personally I think I'm lookin' straight GQ, seeing as I just got a 500-pound laser guided curb stomp. Shit cuz, y'all should see Kahlid, a.k.a. "Ceiling Spackle." But, hey, whateva. You kuffar haters can finally step off my nuts, 'cause I. am. outtahere. Y'all can just suck it, 'cause Zarkman got his free pass to Allah's celestial Disneyland.
Read it all -- hilarious stuff.
stifling of dissent
Two Congresswomen from New Jersey ask book be banned:
In response to these incendiary, hate-filled attacks on women who suffered a terrible personal tragedy four-and-a-half years ago and have selflessly advocated to improve national security in the intervening years, the assemblywomen issued the following statement, denouncing Coulter's attacks and asking New Jersey retailers to ban the sale of her book throughout the state:
Ann Coulter's criticism of 9-11 widows, whose only desire since the attacks have been to repair their shattered lives and protect other families from the horrors they have experienced, is motivated purely by petty greed and hate.
Please. However intemperant Coulter is, at least one of these women is a strident, snarky loony-left Democrat activist. Absent her widowhood, she would be unknown and unacknowledged.
HT: Best of the Web
friday, june 9 2006
hot mama of invention
Winner of conceptual photography award.
dave barry needs your help
I will be addressing a group of people involved with the food industry, and with your indulgence I'd like to get you to write my speech for me do a little research here.
One area I want to explore the difference between the way men and women deal with the deli counter. In my experience, women generally buy ridiculously small quantities of cold cuts. They're always saying things like, "I'd like eight molecules of the low-fat, low-sodium, decaffeinated roast beef, and please slice it thin." Whereas men -- me, for example -- like to order a big ol' mass o' meat. We want them to slice up an entire cow. I don't know why this is. Some kind of hunter instinct, maybe.
Also: Grocery lists. Women always have them, and men do not seem to like them. At least I don't. They seem bossy. I prefer to rely on my hunter instincts, while roaming the aisles. This is why, when my wife has sent me to the supermarket to get, say, a box of Lucky Charms, I return home with many items -- beer, anchovies, Cheez-Its, beer, light bulbs, beer, etc. -- but not necessarily Lucky Charms. Don't be tying me down with your list, woman! That is how men feel. Or is that just me?
listen and weep
Until this week, U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown, a Briton, was best known as a confidante of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan who rents his Westchester home from billionaire buddy George Soros at a price only slightly lower than his U.N. salary.
But from this week forward, he will be known as the U.N. bureaucrat who tried to blow up relations with the United States by scorning "Middle America." He told us, in so many words, that we are a bunch of dumb rubes who need to be corralled by government.
"[M]uch of the public discourse that reaches the U.S. heartland has been largely abandoned to its loudest detractors such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News," Mr. Brown said Tuesday in a conference sponsored by two liberal think tanks. "The U.N.'s role is, in effect, a secret in Middle America" -- yes, he used the words "Middle America" -- whose media engages in "too much unchecked U.N.-bashing and stereotyping."
Let's see...bashing by noting the Oil for Food scandal, probably the largest financial scam in world history? And that Kofi, et al, shredded documents and whitewashed the investigation?
Or pointing out that Kofi Annan had 90 days advance warning about the genocide in Rwanda?
Or pointing out that UN "peacekeepers" in Africa rape young girls and trade food aid for sex?
Or that punk tyrants use the UN as a stage to piss on America?
His antidote? Not U.N. reform, of course -- not an end to the type of mismanagement which caused the Oil-for-Food scandal, the peacekeeper rapes or the shameful accession of Cuba to the supposedly reformed Human Rights Council -- but U.S. government action to quell the critics. The Bush administration has "fail[ed] to stand up for [the United Nations] against its domestic critics," he said. The message: If the government would only silence the media, then the United Nations could get along with its business as it has grown accustomed to.
Remember Sen. Voinovich getting weepy at the prospect of John Bolten as ambassador to the UN? Better order a crate of hankies.
this praise no longer operative
Via Al Jazeera comes a new video from Al Qaeda number two guy, Zawahiri. His main purpose was to inspire Muslims worldwide to reject democracy. But he had time to blow a kiss to Zarqawi:
"God bless the prophet of Islam in Iraq, the persistent hero of Islam, the Holy Warrior Abu Musab al-Zarqawi," al-Zawahiri said.
Of course, Zarqawi's "persistence" ended 48 hours ago. Speaking of the devil, its good to know that Zarqawi knew what hit him:
Militant leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was still alive when Iraqi police got to the scene of the air strikes that targeted him, the US military says.
Zarqawi had tried to move off the stretcher where he had been placed by Iraqi police, Maj Gen Caldwell said.
"Everybody resecured him back onto the stretcher, but he died almost immediately thereafter from the wounds he had received from this air strike," he said.
Given that Zarqawi gained fame by posting grisly videos on the internet, its fitting that his demise be posted on the web. Video here.
A strategic postmortem:
I just received a forwarded email with Stratfor’s initial operational analysis on the Zarqawi hit. Since you really need to be a subscriber to get it (and I am not one) I won’t post the whole thing, but I will say it’s titled, “Iraq: The Implications of Al-Zarqawi's Death,” and it’s available at Stratfor.com.
Allow me to draw out the important points.
1. AMZ was not just the public face, the “figurehead” as I heard on the radio today, but a very effective operational planner and executor. And he was the one guy in Al Qaeda who was producing results.
2. The removal of AMZ changes the Sunni/Shia/Kurd dynamic, for the better. That improves the chances for governmental unity.
3. AMZ wasn’t just found, he was fingered. This has Iraqi political implications and suggests that HumInt operations there more effective than we thought.
4. Iraqi political progress has implications in the U.S./Iran dynamic and in international oil investment. Both are very good things.
shrinkage
Dr. Sara Gibson looked into the television screen and got right down to it.
"What's keeping you alive at this point?" she asked her patient, a middle-aged woman who asked to be identified only as D. D grimaced, looked down, then to the side and finally into Dr. Gibson's face, which filled the screen before her in a tiny clinic three hours east of here in the Arizona desert.
"Nothing," said D, who Dr. Gibson says suffers from bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress from the sexual abuse she suffered as a child.
It is Wednesday in the hinterlands of rural Arizona, and the psychiatrist is in. Sort of.
Actually, Dr. Gibson was here in Flagstaff in a closet-size office of a nonprofit medical group, with a pale blue sheet behind her as a backdrop and a cup of tea at her side. She is one of a growing number of psychiatrists practicing through the airwaves and wires of telemedicine, as remote doctoring is known.
recharge your battery in seconds
Ever wish you could charge your cellphone or laptop in a few seconds rather than hours? As this ScienCentral News video explains, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are developing a battery that could do just that, and also might never need to be replaced.
thursday, june 8 2006
"a good day's work"
Hitchens:
The death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is excellent news in its own right and even more excellent if, as U.S. sources in Iraq are claiming, it resulted from information that derived from people who were or had been close to him. (And, if that claim is black propaganda, then it is clever black propaganda, which is also excellent news.)
It hasn't taken long for the rain to start falling on this parade. Nick Berg's father, a MoveOn type now running for Congress on the Green Party ticket, has already said that he blames President George Bush for the video-beheading of his own son (but of course) and mourned the passing of Zarqawi as he would the death of any man (but of course, again). The latest Atlantic has a brilliantly timed cover story by Mary Anne Weaver, which tends to the view that Zarqawi was essentially an American creation, but seems to undermine its own prominence by suggesting that, in addition to that, Zarqawi wasn't all that important.
Not so fast. Zarqawi contributed enormously to the wrecking of Iraq's experiment in democratic federalism. He was able to help ensure that the Iraqi people did not have one single day of respite between 35 years of war and fascism, and the last three-and-a-half years of misery and sabotage. He chose his targets with an almost diabolical cunning, destroying the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad (and murdering the heroic envoy Sérgio Vieira de Melo) almost before it could begin operations, and killing the leading Shiite Ayatollah Hakim outside his place of worship in Najaf. His decision to declare a jihad against the Shiite population in general, in a document of which Weaver (on no evidence) doubts the authenticity, has been the key innovation of the insurgency: applying lethal pressure to the most vulnerable aspect of Iraqi society. And it has had the intended effect, by undermining Grand Ayatollah Sistani and helping empower Iranian-backed Shiite death squads.
dixie chicks struggle
After parlaying their anti-Bush shtick into a Time magazine cover (bravely speaking truth to power blah blah blah), the chicks are not selling many concert tickets. CDs yes; tickets no.
michael yon interviews csm jeffrey mellinger
...the top enlisted man in Iraq, a key player to say the least. Listen here.
If nothing else, listen to the last three minutes or so. Mellinger:
From where I sit, I see great hope for this country. But nothing, including our nation, was ever achieved free or easy or without cost. The soldiers, sailors airmen and Marines, the coalition partners that we have here, understand that cost. And they're willing to pay the bill for something bigger than themselves, and that's Iraq.
He makes plenty of people in this country seem very, very small.
the woman behind the veil
She was once Sherry MacAulay. Now she's Cheryfa MacAulay Jamal, wife of an accused Canadian terrorist. Here's her story.
coulter bombs witches
Ann Coulter is smart, informed and funny. But she can also be shrill. Her latest book takes on the "9/11 widows" who, Coulter says, used their grief "to make a political point."
Her criticism was aimed at four New Jersey women whom she dubbed "The Witches of East Brunswick," after the town where two of them live. They have spent the years since the 2001 terror attacks supporting an independent commission to examine government failures before the attack, and in the 2004 presidential campaign they endorsed Democrat John Kerry. The women are Kristen Breitweiser, Lorie Van Auken, Mindy Kleinberg and Patty Casazza of New Jersey.
Who is Kristen Breitweiser? Newsbusters notes:
Kristen Breitweiser, the most prominent Bush-trashing 9-11 widow, has sounded like a liberal version of Coulter at times on her huffing and puffing blog at the Huffington Post.
For example, on April 5, after complaining that New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani shouldn’t be allowed to make a victim’s impact statement ("Which family member did Giuliani lose in the attacks?"), Breitweiser whacked the Bush administration with the snide stick:
By these standards, should I expect Condoleezza Rice (Ms. "Nobody knew planes could be used as missiles"), George Tenet (Mr. "I failed to tell the FBI for 18 months that two known al Qaeda killers were living in San Diego and planning the 9/11 attacks"), and perhaps, George Bush (Mr. "I was reading a story about a pet goat while thousands of people perished and burned alive in the World Trade Center because I didn't want to alarm the school children.") to provide victim's impact statements, as well?
On the Dubai ports, February 23:
As an aside Mr. President, perhaps you should have spent the past 5 years decreasing our dependency on foreign oil from nations like the UAE and Saudi Arabia so that maybe this deal might not have been so necessary for you to rubber stamp.
But, that is just a thought and a dream. A dream that won't come true until you and all your oil-rich friends have sucked this planet dry of every drop of oil and in the meantime cornered the market on alternative energy resources, right? Power-grab; Power-shift?
quote of the day
"Al-Zarqawi has made his last video," said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas.
Listen to interview with Omar of Iraq the Model.
remembering nicholas berg
...the young American civilian beheaded by Zarqawi. In 2004, Dennis Prager wrote how the world media played that story.
nbc's SLANT
From Tim Graham at National Review's The Corner:
It's sad that within minutes of announcing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's death, the network morning shows were already carrying criticism of the Bush administration. Not only did NBC invite Sen. Joe Biden so he could attack Bush incompetence (funny day for that!), ABC's Bill Weir reminded the audience that Zarqawi beheaded American Nicholas Berg, and then replayed Berg's left-wing dad saying at the time that he had no desire for his son's killers to be killed. Weir then reported that he spoke to Berg's father this morning, and he condemned the Zarqawi killing as part of an endless cycle of retribution.
NBC is probably irritated that Zarqawi's death is distracting people from Haditha.
self-loathing and denial
You're an enlightened world citizen. Your T-shirt says "9/11 was an inside job." You're pretty sure we're living in a fascist state, that President Bush taps the Dixie Chicks' phones, Christian abortion clinic bombers outnumber jihadis, and the war on "terror" is a distraction from the real threats: carbon emissions and Pat Robertson. Then you learn that 17 people were arrested in a terrorist bomb plot. How do you process the information? Let's take it step by step.
Gosh, that's horrible, you think. But no -- that's what they WANT you to feel. Recall the prime directive: Question Authority (unless he's a college professor). The plotters must have been impoverished olive farmers radicalized by the removal of Saddam Hussein. Why, if someone came in and toppled your president, you'd go to their country and ... well, you'd thank them. Unless they did it for the wrong reasons! Then you'd blow something up. Like an SUV dealership. At night. Anyway, you understand; you care a lot about Iraqis these days. You think about Iraq more than China, to be honest, but it's not as if you'll scrape off your "Free Tibet" bumper sticker -- unless it's to make room for "Free Darfur." Or "Hands Off Darfur," depending.
Wait a minute: The "terrorists" were Canadian? You can understand someone blowing up trains in Spain and London. They sent troops to an illegal war cooked up by neocons who want to kill brown people for Exxon and Jesus, or something. You can understand, reluctantly, blowing up teens in an Israeli pizza parlor, because the Jews took the West Bank from the sovereign, ancient nation of Palestine. (How can a liberal socialist country behave so poorly? The world is full of mysteries.) But Canada? Isn't Michael Moore from Canada? You can get medical marijuana from married gay doctors in Canada, and no one has guns. You console yourself: Maybe they were really planning to attack the U.S.
Read it all.
amnesia
Best of the Web pointed this out yesterday. Scientific American published a story about the destruction of the Mesopotamian marshlands -- the Garden of Eden -- in 1990 and then they're miraculous recovery beginning in 2003.
The fertile wetlands between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were diked and drained, turning most of 15,000 square kilometers of marsh to desert. By the year 2000, less than 10 percent of that swampland--nearly twice as big as Florida's Everglades--remained.
But reflooding of some areas since 2003 has produced what some scientists are calling the "miracle of the Mesopotamian marshes"--a return of plants, aquatic life and even rare birds to their ancestral home.
They never mentioned that Saddam destroyed the marshlands or that his ouster, courtesy of the coalition of the willing, allowed the miracle of recovery to happen.
See no evil, indeed.
wednesday, june 7 2006
fire in the hole
Iraqi chemical weapons buried in the sand. From a recently translated document:
1. A team from the Military Industrialization Commission when Hussein Kamel Hussein was conducting his responsibilities did bury a large container said that it contains a Chemical Material in the village (Al Subbayhat) part of the district of Karma in Fallujah in a quarry region that was used by SamSung Korean company and close to the homes of some citizens.
2. The container was buried using a fleet of concrete mixers.
3. Before the departure of the international inspectors in 1998 a United Nations helicopter flew over the region for two hours.
4. A large number of the region residents know about this container from the large number of machines used to hide it then.
5. It was noticed a non ordinary smell in the region.
6. No official visited the burial site through out the years which give the impression that it is not currently known by the Military Industrialization Commission.
7. Positions for the air defense were digged in the region that surrounds the quarry place without them knowing anything about the container. Also next to it are important headquarters like (Saddam factories-The warehouses of the Commerce ministry- Headquarters of Mujaheeden Khlaq).
magnetic fingertips
...give you a sixth sense.
temple grandin
If you don't know about the author/slaughter-house designer/autistic, here's a good introduction.
fungi go global
Dust clouds blowing across the Atlantic Ocean carry hidden pathogens that might reach the United States.
While the dust itself can cause respiratory stress, scientists have now confirmed that clouds originating in Africa carry microbial life that can cause disease in humans, plants, and other animals far from the source.
one brick and a time
How the Lego company bounced back.
endless summer?
The European countryside is as beautiful as ever. Hotels in the cities are as packed as they are high-priced. Tourists fill Rome. The same bustle is evident from Lisbon to Frankfurt. Everywhere European stewards welcome in millions of sightseers to enjoy the treasures of Western civilization. Never has life seemed so good.
Despite a public anti-Americanism, individual Europeans extend the old warmth and friendship to American visitors. Yet beneath the veneer of the good life, there is also a detectable air of uncertainty in Europe this summer, one perhaps similar to that of 1914 or the late 1930s.
what will protect us from leviathan?
From Brussels Journal:
Assume you are a mid-level bureaucrat in a government regulatory agency, and you know your pay and title depend on how many regulations you are responsible for administering, and the number of people who work for you. Do you think you would push for more or fewer regulations?
Assume you are a corporate regulatory compliance officer, and again you know your pay depends in part upon the number of regulations you must comply with, and the number of people who work for you. Would you tend to favor a world with more or fewer regulations?
Or, assume you are an elected politician, and a major scandal occurs because a financial manager has embezzled funds. Are you more likely to get coverage on the TV news if you say, “We already have laws against theft, and the authorities will take care of it,” or if you say, “We need more regulations to stop greedy financiers”?
The three examples I have just given are played out every day in the political process in almost every country. There is a huge private and public impetus to create a never-ending stream of regulations, whether needed or not. Bureaucrats looking out for their own interest rather than public interest is not new. The study of these behaviors is known as “public choice” economics and developed by Nobel laureates James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock.
...
Assume you go to a contractor and ask him to build a small house for you, and you agree to do it on a cost plus 5 percent profit basis. The contractor decides to build the house in a way that is 3 times as costly as necessary. Upon learning this, you would justifiably feel “ripped off,” and in fact you would be a victim of theft.
When politicians and bureaucrats pass laws and regulations that are unnecessarily costly, are they any different from the unscrupulous contractor? The taxpayers or business people forced to fund excessive compliance costs are “ripped off” by the political class every day – but they have no recourse – and that truly is criminal.
the iran-syria connection
There are plenty of "nightmare" scenarios about Iraq's future floating around the West. Many Westerners have demonstrably more antipathy for the U.S. than they have sympathy for Iraqis, and seem to get a kick out of contemplating -- and predicting -- open civil war, the breakup of the country, theocratic rule, etc. One of these nightmare scenarios involves Iraq becoming a mere satellite of the Iranian mullocracy. But like the other nightmares, this scenario remains more an issue of Western malice than of Iraqi reality.
There's an interesting item out of Damascus demonstrates the difference between the malice and the reality, even as it reveals that it is not Iraq than has devolved into a servant of Tehran, but Syria.
According to the London-based Arabic newspaper Al Hayat, Iranian diplomats in Damascus last month instructed the Syrian government to ban local sales of an Iraqi periodical called Al Ittijah Al Akhar or The Other Direction. The Iranians claim that the publication prints false information and makes Iran look bad. (Actually, you don't have to print false info to make Iran look bad; the stuff from Iran's own official press service makes Iran look bad every time it quotes their nutcase president. But never mind.) Al Hayat wrote that Iran objected to The Other Direction "because it criticizes Iranian influence in Iraq."
The weekly publication had reportedly been selling some 10 thousand copies in Syria, but not any more. The Syrian bureau of censorship followed Tehran's instructions and has banned the latest issue.
What was in that issue? Managing editor Fakhreddine Fayad told Al Hayat that the cover story dealt with Haditha. Inside, it had an interview with Khomeini's grandson, who has been calling for democracy in Iran. There were also stories about the roles played by Iranian intelligence services and Iranian death squads in Iraq.
tuesday, june 6 2006
update: seattle removes race page
It was eerie watching Brit Hume cover the Seattle Public Schools racism policy this evening. His story virtually matched my take, "Squirrely in Seattle" down to the focus on the "future time-orientation" clause (which is only a small part of the Seattle schools' policy).
There must have been quite an uproar in other quarters because it now reads:
In response to the numerous concerns voiced regarding definitions posted on the Equity & Race website, we have decided to revise our website in a way that will hopefully provide more context to readers around the work that Seattle Public Schools is doing to address institutional racism...
rumsfeld on larry king
...war is an ugly thing. I mean, I don't think you'll ever find a popular war.
People say in retrospect, "Oh, my goodness, well, it was written that we'd win the Cold War." It wasn't written at all. That was a tough thing, to have successive administrations of both political parties -- there were amendments to bring the troops home from Europe over and over again.
And in World War II, I mean, the vitriolic things said about Franklin Roosevelt -- you and I are old enough to remember it. ...
Think back to Vietnam War. My goodness. The -- Lyndon Johnson couldn't leave the White House. There were buses stacked around the place. So there's a -- any -- why should a war be popular? It's a vicious, ugly, horrible thing. But by golly, if we tossed in the towel every time we had a problem in this country, we wouldn't have a country. We wouldn't have won the Revolutionary War.
you're not a jerk, you're just sick
Call it Disorder Disorder -- the uncontrollable urge among psych-types to define bad behavior as illness. The latest is road rage, itself a media invented term.
The study that shoveled up this latest load was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. If you pay taxes, that means you.
canadian terror plot
...was thwarted by NSA-like surveillance. Betsy notes that "If Canada is a target, no country is safe."
ennui in a landslide
The Los Angeles Daily News conducts an unscientific daily poll. To vote, you call a number. These polls fascinate me, not for their results, which are meaningless, but for the total number votes cast, a barometer of what gets folks excited.
If the question pertains to sports, the total can reach 4,000 or more. More often the totals are in the 200-400 range. Yesterday's poll asked if readers planned to vote today. The answer was 75%-25% affirmative. Total votes cast: 9.
unholier than thou
Liberals love to boast that they are not “religious,” which is what one would expect to hear from the state-sanctioned religion. Of course liberalism is a religion. It has its own cosmology, its own miracles, its own beliefs in the supernatural, its own churches, its own high priests, its own saints, its own total worldview, and its own explanation of the existence of the universe.
In other words, liberalism contains all the attributes of what is generally known as “religion.” Under the guise of not favoring religion, liberals favor one cosmology over another and demand total indoctrination into theirs. The state religion of liberalism demands obeisance (to the National Organization for Women), tithing (to teachers’ unions), reverence (for abortion), and formulaic imprecations (“Bush lied, kids died!” “Keep your laws off my body!” “Arms for hostages!”). Everyone is taxed to support indoctrination into the state religion through the public schools, where innocent children are taught a specific belief system, rather than, say, math.
Liberal doctrines are less scientifically provable than the story of Noah’s ark, but their belief system is taught as fact in government schools, while the Biblical belief system is banned from government schools by law. As a matter of faith, liberals believe: Darwinism is a fact, people are born gay, child-molesters can be rehabilitated, recycling is a virtue, and chastity is not.
If people are born gay, why hasn’t Darwinism weeded out people who don’t reproduce? (For that, we need a theory of survival of the most fabulous.) And if gays can’t change, why do liberals think child-molesters can? Pedophilia is a sexual preference. If they’re born that way, instead of rehabilitation, how about keeping them locked up? Why must children be taught that recycling is the only answer? Why aren’t we teaching children “safe littering”?
liberal isolationism
...is ugly and illiberal.
foiled again
Tinfoil hats make it easier for the gummint to read your mind.
in five years you won't have to clean the john
Nanotech will do it for you.
this is gonna rock your world
...Brazilian physicist says speed of light is not constant. I always wondered about that. Honestly.
french take a day off
The French government was humiliated yesterday as its attempts to make people give up a bank holiday and work for nothing in a "day of solidarity" for the elderly and handicapped backfired. Less than half the country was at work as millions of employees stayed off, treating the day as a normal Pentecost or Whit Monday.
...
Unions, industry and even retirement home directors accused President Jacques Chirac's ministers of creating confusion and resentment: some people were asked to work without pay and others given the day off in a complex series of arrangements. The abolition of a popular national holiday was part of the government's response to the impact of the severe heatwave of 2003 which is believed to have caused the deaths of 15,000 old people in France.
The government said wages saved yesterday would raise about £1.5 billion, speeding the provision of additional places in homes for the handicapped and aged. It hoped to exploit a sense of national guilt after many elderly and infirm people died in the heat while their relatives - and ministers - were on holiday.
Irony abounds: a secular country of proud non-churchgoers (cathedrals are for tourists) refuses to give up its religious holiday. And the kinder, gentler, mature and sophisticated socialists don't give a damn about grandma.
berlin's top daily blames "white trash" in us military
...for Abu Ghraib etc.
manufacturing on winning streak
...the longest winning streak in 25 years:
You probably didn’t know that we’re living through historically GOOD times for manufacturing in America. Now you will.
For some reason, the The Institute for Supply Management (ISM) hasn’t trumpeted this news, even though the history-making began a couple of months ago when it issued its its March report announcing the 34th consecutive month of manufacturing expansion.
This BizzyBlog post from August of last year had this three-paragraph nugget from a CNN report (bold is mine) that led to my finding (bolds are mine):
nothing in common
All over the blogosphere this weekend, bloggers mocked the press accounts suggesting the suspects covered a ‘broad strata’ of Canadian society. The names of the suspects that have been released: Fahim Ahmad, Zakaria Amara, Asad Ansari, Shareef Abdelhaleen, Qayyum Abdul Jamal, Mohammed Dirie, Yasim Abdi Mohamed, Amin Mohamed Durrani, Steven Vikash Chand alias Abdul Shakur, Ahmad Mustafa Ghany and Saad Khalid.
Well, that’s some diversity there. It’s a regular Benetton ad!
By the way, when the press insists upon saying that the suspects represent a “broad strata” when 4 out of the 11 of the released names have “abdul/abdel/abdi” in them, 2 Ahmads, 2 Saads, and 3 Mohammeds, it sends one of two messages to readers. The first is “we think you’re stupid and can’t figure out the common thread these suspects have in common”; the second is that “we in the media are stupid and can’t figure out the common thread these suspects have in common.”
...
The news of the Canadian arrests reinforces certain conclusions and a certain worldview:
Of course, if you don't agree with those arguments, you won't want to spend a lot of time discussing the Canadian arrests. They challenge the other view.
...and leftwing blogs go silent
Ace could find nary a peep from the left about the massive terror bust in Canada and London. Good thing they invented the concept of denial.
monday, june 5 2006
rfk jr. full of baloney
Salon.com, certainly no friend of Bush or Republicans, debunks Bobby lite.
In Rolling Stone, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. argues that new evidence proves that Bush stole the election. But the evidence he cites isn't new and his argument is filled with distortions and blatant omissions.
"After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004," Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declares in the latest issue of Rolling Stone. And so, 19 months after the election, let us head once again into this breach.
If you do read Kennedy's article, be prepared to machete your way through numerous errors of interpretation and his deliberate omission of key bits of data. The first salient omission comes in paragraph 5, when Kennedy writes, "In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots." To back up that assertion, Kennedy cites "Democracy at Risk," the report the Democrats released last June.
That report does indeed point out that many people -- 26 percent -- who first registered in 2004 did not find their names on the voter rolls at polling places. What Kennedy doesn't say, though, is that the same study found no significant difference in the share of Kerry voters and Bush voters who came to the polls and didn't find their names listed. The Democrats' report says that 4.2 percent of Kerry voters were forced to cast a "provisional" ballot and that 4.1 percent of Bush voters were made to do the same -- a stat that lowers the heat on Kennedy's claim of "astounding" partisanship.
No doubt more people will read (or skim the headlines) of the Rolling Stone article than read Salon's analysis. Which means more self-righteous, whiny Democrats wandering the landscape with a misplaced sense of grievance.
not too swift
There a new verb in the MSM: "Swiftboating" which means to spread untruths to inflict political harm. Such use assumes the charges made by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth about John Kerry were untrue. Not so.
Now as then, the Times acts as if the issues involved were between Kerry's latest representations of his record and the "unsubstantiated" charges of the Swift Boat group. The Times used the term "unsubstantiated" more than twenty times during its election coverage and continues to make no discernable effort to examine any of the charges in detail.
But there was plenty of evidence in the work of other news organizations that some of the charges, and the Kerry military records themselves, were worth examining seriously. I found numerous problems with Kerry's records on his website in my own reporting for the Chicago Sun-Times: a Silver Star with a V for valor listed that the Navy stated it had never awarded in the history of the US Navy, three separate medal citations with some heavy revisions in Kerry's favor signed by former Navy Secretary John Lehman who denied ever signing them, to name two.
Additionally I found by examining the message traffic with experts that when the Swift Boat Vets charged that Kerry had written the Bay Hap after action report, by which he received his bronze star and the third purple heart that was his ticket out of Vietnam, the evidence showed that it was indeed probably written by Kerry himself. [NYT reporter] Zernike seems to have totally missed this in her reporting. Zernike is content to refer to Kerry's claim that "original reports pulled from the naval archives contradict the charge that he drafted his own accounts of various incidents," none of which she cites, provides, or analyzes.
Zernike appears to have made no effort to look at any record besides listing Kerry's latest assertions with obligatory quotes from the usual Swiftie suspects to provide "balance." She doesn't appear to be aware of the hilarious inconsistency of the Kerry hat story she recites dutifully as if this was the very first time the hat had appeared in print. As the clips should have shown her, Kerry first pulled the famous hat out of a "secret compartment" for Washington Post reporter Laura Blumenfeld's feature story in 2003. "My good luck hat," Kerry told Blumenfeld, "given to me by a CIA guy." Now he tells Zernike a "special operations team" member gave it to him on a secret "mission that records say was to insert Navy Seals" in February.
diagnosing dr. john
At a party Saturday night, I had a conversation with a friend, John, who despises President Bush. He said it's a "visceral reaction" going at least as far back as the Bush-Gore debates. John said, "I watched him talk about executing people in Texas...the man actually seems to enjoy killing people."
I remembered nothing of the kind, so I read the debate transcripts. And it's fascinating to see how ideas take hold and grow.
In the third and final debate, which featured questions from the audience, Bush was asked:
MEMBER OF AUDIENCE: In one of the last debates held, the subject of capital punishment came up, and in your response to the question, you seemed overly joyed and as a matter of fact proud that Texas led the nation in the execution of prisoners. Sir, did I misread your response and are you really, really proud of the fact that Texas is number one in executions?
So there is the germ of the idea, that Bush enjoys killing (pride, joy). It was a partisan "question" intended to make a partisan point. Bush's answer:
BUSH: No, I'm not proud of that. The death penalty is a very serious business, Leo. It's an issue that good people obviously disagree on. I take my job seriously. And if you think I was proud of it, I think you misread me, I do. I was sworn to uphold the laws of my state. During the course of the campaign in 1994 I was asked do you support the death penalty. I said I did if administered fairly and justly. Because I believe it saves lives, Leo, I do. If it's administered swiftly, justly and fairly, it saves lives. One of the things that happens when you're a governor, at least oftentimes you have to make tough decisions. You can't let public persuasion sway you, because the job is to enforce the law. And that's what I did, sir. There have been some tough cases come across my desk. Some of the hardest moments since I've been the governor of the State of Texas is to deal with those cases. But my job is to ask two questions, sir. Is the person guilty of the crime? And did the person have full access to the courts of law? And I can tell you looking at you right now, in all cases those answers were affirmative. I'm not proud of any record. I'm proud of the fact that violent crime is down in the State of Texas. I'm proud of the fact that we hold people accountable. But I'm not proud of any record, sir, I'm not.
Capital punishment came up in second debate in the context of proposed hate crimes legislation in Texas. A black man, James Byrd, had been dragged to death from the back of a pickup truck by racists. Activists demanded a hate crimes law. As governor, Bush disagreed.
BUSH: No -- well, what the Vice President must not understand is we've got a hate crimes bill in Texas. And secondly, the people that murdered Mr. Byrd got the ultimate punishment. The death penalty.
MODERATOR: They were prosecuted under the murder laws, were they not, in Texas?
BUSH: In this case when you murder somebody it's hate, Jim. The crime is hate. And they got the ultimate punishment. I'm not exactly sure how you enhance the penalty any more than the death penalty. We happen to have a statute on the books that's a hate crimes statute in Texas.
Bush was making a common sense point: murder is always a hate crime and James Byrd's murderers were being executed. This does not demonstrate pleasure in killing people.
Nevertheless, the idea took hold. No doubt it's been repeated millions of times by those suffering Bush Derangement Syndrome. But mere repetition does not make it true.
John also said he watched Bush's speech before the liberation of Iraq and heard Bush say four times that not invading would be "suicide." In fact, Bush used the word suicide once.
Terrorists and terror states do not reveal these threats with fair notice, in formal declarations -- and responding to such enemies only after they have struck first is not self-defense, it is suicide. The security of the world requires disarming Saddam Hussein now.
We're all entitled to our opinions about whether Saddam posed a threat. But no one is entitled to his own facts.
more dishonesty from the new york times
Don Surber deconstructs yesterday's NYT editorial on Haditha.
sunday, june 4 2006
minding the "health gap"
Is America getting the proper bang for it's healthcare buck?
croquet's "dark side"
Wow, it's amazing what people can find to get excited about.
inside the mind of ahmadinejad
An excerpt from the Spiegel interview:
Ahmadinejad: We don't want to confirm or deny the Holocaust. We oppose every type of crime against any people. But we want to know whether this crime actually took place or not. If it did, then those who bear the responsibility for it have to be punished, and not the Palestinians. Why isn't research into a deed that occurred 60 years ago permitted? After all, other historical occurrences, some of which lie several thousand years in the past, are open to research, and even the governments support this.
SPIEGEL: Mr. President, with all due respect, the Holocaust occurred, there were concentration camps, there are dossiers on the extermination of the Jews, there has been a great deal of research, and there is neither the slightest doubt about the Holocaust nor about the fact - we greatly regret this - that the Germans are responsible for it. If we may now add one remark: the fate of the Palestinians is an entirely different issue, and this brings us into the present.
measles parties in germany
Bring your kid to get infected.
...in order to protect their loved ones from vaccines -- responsible, incidentally, for the virtual disappearance of smallpox and for the radical reduction of a number of dangerous infectious diseases the world over -- German mothers would rather throw a party to infect their kids with a potentially deadly disease like measles. Chicken pox parties are also a highlight on a number of childhood calendars in Germany.
canadian terror plot global
TORONTO - A Canadian counter-terrorism investigation that led to the arrests of 17 people accused of plotting bombings in Ontario is linked to probes in a half-dozen countries, the National Post has learned.
Well before police tactical teams began their sweeps around Toronto on Friday, at least 18 related arrests had already taken place in Canada, the United States, Britain, Bosnia, Denmark, Sweden, and Bangladesh.
There was a similar raid on a terror cell in England on Friday. There's a ho-hum reaction to such events. Had the plot against the World Trade Center been foiled, one could imagine a brief story on page 3 of the newspaper reporting the facts.
msnbc finally makes sense
See here.
letter from samarra
Powerline published a letter from Lt. Peter Hegseth, serving in Samarra. Here is a brief excerpt:
“One might hope our own [U.S.] democratic development -- which included the Articles of Confederation and a "fiery trial" that cost more than 600,000 American lives -- would remind critics that we must sometimes be patient with others. We are engaged in an enterprise of enormous importance: helping a traumatized Arab nation become stable, free and self-governing.
Success isn't foreordained -- and neither is failure… The process of democratic reform has begun, and now would be precisely the wrong time to lose our nerve and turn our back on the freedom agenda. It would be a geopolitical disaster and a moral calamity.” Regardless of pre-war opinions, we have a duty to finish what we’ve started. Have we brought daily violence to Iraq? Yes. Have we made costly strategic and tactical errors? Yes. But can we still ‘win’ peace, stability and freedom for the men, women and children of Iraq? Yes. And for that reason, we must press on. We must keep a longview.
Above my little work area, I have one sign posted front and center. It reads "They want to believe..." and my time in Samarra has confirmed this maxim. The Iraqi people will never love us, nor will they overtly praise our efforts. However, despite the violence and our tragic missteps, the silent majority of Samarrans want to believe. They want to believe in the legend that is America. They want to believe that we can do anything. They want to believe that we came to rebuild their city and to rid their streets of “terrorists.”
Now, the pressure is on us to deliver. Now is not the time for a troop draw-down, it is time to deliver. Bring the American GIs in by the boatloads; we have the insurgents on the ropes in Samarra and if our fair city is any indication of greater-Iraq, then send even more troops so we can finish them off! Now is the time to prove our message of progress and hope, to fulfill the promises we have offered.
saturday, june 3 2006
voter fraud: i don't need no stinkin' papers!
Democrat candidate for Congress encourages illegals to participate:
“Everybody can help, yeah, absolutely, you can all help. You don't need papers for voting, you don't need to be a registered voter to help.”
deception
From Shrinkwrapped:
During the Vietnam War, the press worked hard to penetrate the "light at the end of the tunnel" rhetoric of the Administration. As time went on, and victory kept receding farther and farther away, the press (now the MSM) began to take a more and more adversarial role toward the government. This was part of the "Credibility Gap" which doomed the Lyndon Johnson administration and ultimately fatally undermined the war effort.
As part of the effort to attack the war and justify opposition to the war, it became necessary to question the motives for the war; after all, if our motives were moral, then the war, being prosecuted for the benefit of the South Vietnamese and to stop the spread of totalitarian Communism, was more difficult to oppose. (Since all behavior is multiply determined, there were a mix of motives for the Vietnam War, some good and some bad; the opposition focused on the bad to the exclusion of the good.) In order to attack the moral foundation of our efforts in Vietnam, the opposition inevitably began to question the morality and ethics of our soldiers. The narrative that grew up, with considerable aid and assistance from John Kerry and the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, was that American soldiers were routinely committing war crimes (raping, killing, cutting off ears, in Kerry's famous comparison of our troops to Genghis Khan.)
At the same time, our only sources of images of the war was the Media, which acted then as the eyes and ears for the body politic. The Vietnam War was the first war to be televised, and every night on our TV sets, Walter Cronkite showed us the oversimplified template of the horrors of war and the tragedy of the innocent Vietnamese peasants being crushed beneath the American war machine. The efforts to discredit the war in order to ennoble opposition to it were successful and had, as an unfortunate side effect, the demonization of the American soldiers who served in Vietnam.
The My Lai massacre became the "proof" that the allegations were true. The fact that the United States investigated the massacre and punished the offenders, something very rare in war time, was minimized and the events of My Lai became the emblematic depictions of the war, along with a full coterie of other images of abuse. As a result, the soldiers were treated alternately as war criminals and/or victims by the media, and not surprisingly, when they returned home, they tended to be seen in the same terms; the stories of Vets being spat upon were not apocryphal. All Vietnam vets were drug addicts and baby killers until shown otherwise, and sadly, it took our nation a generation before we finally began to show these men and women the honor they earned and deserved.
michael yon sues shock
These French punks picked on the wrong guy.
missed cinema: "Mishima: a life in four chapters"
Yukio Mishima was the most celebrated writer of postwar Japan, a star. He wrote wrote 40 novels, 18 plays, 20 books of short stories and more. He was also one very odd guy.
Writer-director Paul Schrader made this biographical film in 1985. Because of the theatrical circumstances of Mishima's death (no spoiler here), the Japanese are very touchy about him. It took the clout of George Lucas and Francis Ford Copolla to get the film made, and it was never released in Japan.
Successful films about artists are rare. For every Amadeus, there are dozens of Carringtons, Wildes and Fridas. I suspect it's because the thing that makes artists noteworthy -- their art -- gets lost in translation.
Schrader cleverly dramatizes three of Mishima's stories and integrates them into a narrative that connects Mishima's life and his work. Like much of Schrader's films, Mishima is more intellectual than emotional. But few movies hold up after 20 years, and this one does.
JB
friday, june 2 2006
drop that burger or i'll shoot!
I caught five minutes of Neil Cavuto on Fox. His guest was Meme (pronounced Mimi) something, a member of the Food Police, who reacted gleefully to news that the FDA was jawboning restaurants about food portions.
Exclaimed Meme, "Thank god someone is saving us from ourselves!" (note: I'm writing from memory)
"Someone" of course means Uncle Sam or Nanny Sam. Neil asked if people didn't have the right to be fat. Her answer, "Not when it impacts on the rest of us in terms of health care costs."
So there you have it: the government has an open-ended excuse to mind your business.
Many choices we make affect our health, therefore Uncle Sam can dictate anything for our own good (sorry, skiing breaks bones). And this, mind you, is absent any kind of national healthcare. If that ever takes hold, there's no stopping the food police.
The irony is that leftists, eager volunteers for the army of busybodies determined to regulate our lives, freak out because the NSA scans phone transactions over privacy concerns.
JB
el charter school nightmare
Charter schools offer a ray of hope to parents and educators stifled by educrats and labor unions. Naturally, the educational establishment resents them. One argument is that charter schools could teach anything, say, creationism or Mormon polygamy.
Red herrings, mostly. But then you get a real stinker such as Academia Semillas del Pueblo, an LAUSD K-8 charter school, funded by taxpayers.
"dedicated to providing urban children of immigrant native families an excellent education founded upon their own language, cultural values and global realities."
Which are? The school's 28-year old principal, Marcos Aguilar, explains:
...We don’t necessarily want to go to White schools. What we want to do is teach ourselves, teach our children the way we have of teaching. We don’t want to drink from a White water fountain, we have our own wells and our natural reservoirs and our way of collecting rain in our aqueducts. We don’t need a White water fountain.
What they need, apparently, is to learn Nahuatl, the Aztec tongue.
By learning Nahuatl, they will be able to understand their relationship with nature (because language is based on our human relationship with nature) and be able to understand themselves as part of something larger, not as an isolated individual. They will be able to understand our own ancestral culture and our customs and traditions that are so imbued in the language.
The importance of Nahutal is also academic because Nahuatl is based on a Math system, which we are also practicing. We teach our children how to operate a base 20 mathematical system and how to understand the relationship between the founders and their bodies, what the effects of astronomical forces and natural forces on the human body and the human psyche, our way of thinking and our way of expressing ourselves.
And so the language is much more than just being able to communicate. When we teach Nahuatl, the children are gaining a sense of identity that is so deep, it goes beyond whether or not they can learn a certain number of vocabulary words in Nahuatl. It’s really about them understanding themselves as human beings. Everything we do here is about relationships.
Base 20 math and astrology? How about a relationship to reality? Or a relationship to the country they've moved into, often without being invited.
...ultimately the White way, the American way, the neo liberal, capitalist way of life will eventually lead to our own destruction. And so it isn’t about an argument of joining neo liberalism, it’s about us being able, as human beings, to surpass the barrier."
The school has the support of MEChA, a radical Mexican separatist movement that defines much of the United States as Aztlan, which it plans to retake. See map below -- you might live in Aztlan and not know it.
KABC radio has been covering this story. Yesterday:
...a Los Angeles radio reporter was assaulted outside a charter school Thursday morning by a man driving a sedan who first tried to run him down and then stole his audiotape, police said.
The incident occurred after the reporter, Sandy Wells of KABC-AM (790) radio, had just finished interviewing parents, students and administrators of the Academia Semillas del Pueblo Charter School in El Sereno. The reporter's radio station has reported that the school teaches separatist ethics and has no white, Asian or black students.
morons on the march: maxine waters in nolae
C. Ray "Chocolate City" Nagin celebrated his reinaugural as mayor of New Orleans yesterday, drawing such luminaries as Jesse Jackson and Rep. Maxine Waters. Long way to go for a mayor. Of course this wasn't about Nagin, it was about black racism:
...Waters, former chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, recalled Nagin railing against the stymied state and federal response in the horrific days after Katrina in tirades that drew national attention and some criticism.
"We all felt his pain and appreciated his anger," she said. "He spoke truth to power."
No and no. First, he did not speak truth: he spread rumors about 10,000 dead, rapes in the Superdome and snipers firing at rescue choppers. The latter cost lives as rescue operations were interrupted to deal with a nonexistent threat.
Second, Nagin was the power, at least part of it. His city had an evacuation plan and he didn't execute it. Hundreds of school busses went unused in the rescue effort. Nagin blew it big time. He is incompetent.
For national black leaders to troup across country to celebrate an incompetent is racist: it sends a message that being black is what counts, not what you achieve.
racial profiling by the la times
The LA Times writes about Congressman William Jefferson, aka Dollar Bill. Or, as Al Sharpton might rhyme: the man-uh with cold cash in his Amana. Anyway, the Times avers:
"His perceived flaw among his peers has always been that, shaped by his humble beginnings, Bill loved money and desperately wanted to be a rich man," said Allan Katz, a New Orleans-based political consultant who has known Jefferson for more than 30 years. "It was the Deep South kind of hardship that shaped African American backgrounds."
Got that? His humble beginnings made him do it. So, what about Condi Rice? She came from similar circumstances and didn't need to take $100,000 bribes. What about the Enron boys, is that their excuse too?
...last month, when the FBI reported capturing the eight-term congressman on videotape accepting a leather briefcase with $100,000 in alleged bribe money from an undercover informant in front of a northern Virginia hotel. Of those marked bills, $90,000 wound up in Jefferson's freezer, the FBI said after a search of Jefferson's Washington home.
No charges have been filed against the congressman, and Jefferson has been forceful in his denial of wrongdoing. "There are two sides to every story," he recently said, adding that he could not answer specific questions on the advice of his lawyers.
But the clumsy bravado outlined in government documents has held Washington rapt. According to a 95-page affidavit filed by the FBI, Jefferson demanded bribes in exchange for helping iGate Inc., a Kentucky-based technology company, win Internet and telephone service contracts in Africa. The company's chief executive, Vernon L. Jackson, pleaded guilty last month to bribing Jefferson with more than $400,000 in cash and millions of shares of company stock.
ice cold and very cool: st. Petersburg ice house
A replica of the original Ice Palace from 1740 has been mounted on Dvortzovaja Ploschtjad near Hermitage Palace by the team of 14 ice-art masters led by famous ice-sculptor from St. Petersburg, Valerij Gromov
The replica has been build according to the original descriptions of Prof. G.Kraft from St.Petersburg Academy of Science which worked with original project 1740. This event was dedicated to the victory in Turkish war. Ice building on Dvortzovaja Ploschtjad was in these times part of carnival tradition. Ice art belongs also the Russian national tradition. In XVIII Century Russian ice artists worked systematically with design plans and drawings for ice sculptures and buildings.
See 360 degree panoramas of it here.
thursday, june 1 2006
turn your speakers down
...as you watch sound waves turn salt into fascinating patterns.
greenpeace unmasked
Before President Bush touched down in Pennsylvania Wednesday to promote his nuclear energy policy, the environmental group Greenpeace was mobilizing.
"This volatile and dangerous source of energy" is no answer to the country's energy needs, shouted a Greenpeace fact sheet decrying the "threat" posed by the Limerick reactors Bush visited.
But a factoid or two later, the Greenpeace authors were stumped while searching for the ideal menacing metaphor.
We present it here exactly as it was written, capital letters and all: "In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world's worst nuclear accident, there have been nearly [FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID HERE]."
watch the bee tonight
ABC will broadcast the finals of the National Spelling Bee tonight from 8-10 pm.
If you haven't seen Spellbound, a fascinating documentary about the kids who compete, and how they train for the competition, be sure to check it out.
underreported news
Despite four years of tough combat deployments, the U.S. Marine Corps has retained a higher percentage of top recruits. The Center for Naval Analyses in April analyzed the Marines' first term re-enlistment population and determined that the quality has continually improved over the last six years, with more first tier recruits remaining in the Marine Corps than drop out after four years.
breaking glass
Glass artist Dale Chihuly is suing for copyright infringment.
gerard van der leun
Has a moving essay about the man who gave him his name.
james taranto nails pinch
...Pinch Sulzberger, that is. He's the rich kid who, by fluke of birth, came to be the publisher of the family-owned New York Times. Excerpt:
In an essay on CBS News's Web site, the network's Dotty Lynch laments the lack of anti-Iraq sentiment among kids today:
As the war in Iraq rages on I keep asking myself: Where are the young people this time around? Where are the campuses? Where are the new Tom Haydens and Sam Browns and where are the Noam Chomskys, William Sloane Coffins and Daniel Berrigans?
For the past four months, I was at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, surrounded by idealistic young people and their liberal professors. There was virtually no support for the war (except for the offspring of a few famous neo-cons) but neither was there serious organized activity to try to stop it.
Large groups of students traveled to New Orleans to help rebuild it and another group went to Washington to protest the genocide in Darfur. But why so quiet about Iraq?
Lynch, who says that as a lass during the Vietnam era she "was passionately against the war," then considers various theories to explain why Iraq is not another Vietnam. It's pretty trite stuff, but what's interesting is the underlying premise: that Vietnam is the norm--that in the usual course of things, as we put it a while back, "a war is supposed to become a quagmire, which provokes opposition and leads to American withdrawal."
America's defeat in Vietnam was a triumph for Americans of a certain ideological and generational profile. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times, made this clear earlier this month in a commencement address at the State University of New York's New Paltz campus:
When I graduated from college in 1974, my fellow students and I had just ended the war in Vietnam and ousted President Nixon. OK, that's not quite true. Yes, the war did end and yes, Nixon did resign in disgrace--but maybe there were larger forces at play.
Either way, we entered the real world committed to making it a better, safer, cleaner, more equal place. We were determined not to repeat the mistakes of our predecessors. We had seen the horrors and futility of war and smelled the stench of corruption in government.
Our children, we vowed, would never know that.
So, well, sorry. It wasn't supposed to be this way.
This wonderfully encapsulates several elements of the liberal baby-boomer mindset. First, the self-congratulation: "My fellow students and I had just ended the war in Vietnam and ousted President Nixon." Even Sulzberger, however, is self-aware enough to present this with some irony: "OK, that's not quite true. . . . Maybe there were larger forces at play."
greg easterbrook on global warming
Here's the short version of everything you need to know about global warming. First, the consensus of the scientific community has shifted from skepticism to near-unanimous acceptance of the evidence of an artificial greenhouse effect. Second, while artificial climate change may have some beneficial effects, the odds are we're not going to like it. Third, reducing emissions of greenhouse gases may turn out to be much more practical and affordable than currently assumed.
This briefing will address the three points above and, in an appendix, offer non-jargon explanations of the most important recent findings of greenhouse science. But the pressing point of this briefing is not so much scientific as it is practical—that action against artificial global warming may not prove nearly as expensive or daunting as commonly believed. Greenhouse gases are an air pollution problem, and all air pollution problems of the past have cost significantly less to fix than projected, while declining faster than expected. This gives cause to hope that artificial greenhouse gases can be controlled reasonably cheaply and without wrenching sacrifices to the global economy. And if there is a chance of an economical approach to greenhouse-gas reduction, then what are we waiting for? Let's start now.
Easterbrook writes as a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution. His paper is clearly written, avoids partisanship and is surprisingly optimistic. Furthermore, he promotes market-based solutions (with a nudge from the government.)
Consider this excerpt:
Industrial soot today is emitted almost exclusively by developing country industries, which need Western help in achieving clean manufacturing and power production. Methane reduction, meanwhile, is already being advanced by a 2003 multinational agreement initiated by the Bush administration. In fact, President Bush’s methane reduction agreement—bet you didn't even know it existed—may do more to slow global warming than perfect compliance with the Kyoto treaty. But methane reduction could become an even higher international priority—buying the world time to deal with other greenhouse gases.
Finally, the fact that the Bush administration already has an unheralded greenhouse-gas reduction program is an indictment of the U.S. media, which refuse to report the existence of the program because it spoils the preferred narrative of “Bush as Kyoto villain.” Otherwise, the methane program is an optimistic sign.
President Bush must believe artificial global warming is a real danger or he wouldn’t have a methane reduction program. The president must also believe that America can lead the world in fixing the greenhouse effect problem, or he wouldn’t have put the United States at the forefront of methane control. With two and a half years remaining in office, President Bush has ample time in which he could speak to history by starting the great project of global warming reform. Who better than a Republican oilman from Texas to propose the first binding controls on U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases?