saturday, September 30 2006
that old black magic
Charisma corrodes the intellect. How else to explain the behavior of intelligent people who fall under the spell of Bill Clinton's charm? A fawning report in the British Mirror notes:
...he became warrior and missionary, his faith helping the poor, his battle-plan to end global injustice. Since quitting the White House six years ago, Bill Clinton has dedicated himself to making the world a better place.
He founded the Clinton Foundation, a charity whose ambitions include battling to halt climate change, stamping out poverty and disease, and "racial, ethnic and religious reconciliation".
No longer forced to pander to narrow interests of US voters, Clinton has taken up cudgels on behalf of world citizenry.
The full story gets even ickier than that.
But let's move on to David Remnick's meatier New Yorker profile. Remnick tagged along as Clinton flitted about on the global stage, soaking up adoration everywhere he went.
Remnick is guilty of WUI -- writing under the influence. As Malcom Gladwell explained in The Tipping Point, super salesman have the ability to elevate the mood of people around them, who get giddy and buy the goods.
Clinton's "goods" is the image of himself as a statesman. Remnick is doing his PR.
Clinton found a new direction for his foundation in 2002, at an AIDS conference in Barcelona, where Nelson Mandela took him aside and urged him to do something about the H.I.V./AIDS epidemic in Africa—in particular, the cost of anti-retroviral drugs.
Mandela’s influence came partly through his obvious moral example, but also through his toughness and his gestures of sympathy.
Stop, please.
Nelson Mandela has no moral example about AIDS. None. Mandela and his right-hand man Mbeki (now President of South Africa) had a chance to prevent the spread of AIDS but did nothing. Worse, Mbeki denied the link between HIV and AIDS and banned anti-retroviral drugs.
See the Frontline documentary here. Part 2, Clip 3.
Clinton began to focus on trying to drive down the price of drugs for people with AIDS in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean; he has helped reduce the cost of treatment from sixteen hundred dollars to a hundred and sixty dollars a year by lobbying heads of state in Europe and Canada to donate funds, by pressuring generic-drug manufacturers to cut prices and by working to set up treatment and distribution centers with Third World leaders, the United Nations, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, and nongovernmental organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
All well and good, but Bill Gates is putting his money where his mouth is (and smartly). When Clinton was leader of the free world, he did little about AIDS. As Remnick admits a few pages later:
I had lunch with a senior official in the Clinton Administration who said that... “the motive for Clinton’s advocacy work is simple—he is trying to atone for what he did not do about AIDS and Rwanda when he was President.”
The former official went on, “His failure as President on AIDS is incredible. He knew all about the issue, but he let people push him away from it. The O.M.B. people told him he had a congressionally mandated budget cap that he had to observe, but there was never any effort to challenge the Republican Congress. The great question is why he didn’t do more in Africa, where he is a rock star, and it goes to the negative side of the balance sheet of the Clinton Presidency.”
A familiar story. Clinton lacked the guts to walk his talk.
Guess who did walk the walk, but hardly talked? President George W. Bush.
From the Frontline documentary here. Watch Part 2, Clip 5.
NARRATOR: As the president arrived for his State of the Union speech, everyone expected him to issue an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein. They were not prepared for what came first.
Pres. GEORGE W. BUSH: Today, on the continent of Africa, nearly 30 million people have the AIDS virus, yet across that continent, only 50,000 AIDS victims - only 50,000 - are receiving the medicine they need. I ask the Congress to commit $15 billion over the next five years, including nearly $10 billion in new money, to turn the tide against AIDS in the most afflicted nations of Africa and the Caribbean.
Dr. PETER MUGYENYI: That sounded like melodious music. From there onwards, things would never be the same. And that was victory for the people who were suffering and who were now going to have hope.
Dr. PETER PIOT: I believe that President Bush's State of the Union speech really was a historic moment in the fight against AIDS. It put the debate on AIDS funding into another league. We moved from the M-word to the B-word, from millions to billions.
NARRATOR: But Bush had decided to sidestep Kofi Annan's Global Fund. It would receive only $1 billion of the $15 billion plan.
During Clinton's 8 years he did very little but polish his approval ratings. Behind the scenes, he was an undiscplined ditherer who "lead" by opinion polls.
He did a wonderful performance as president, but so did Martin Sheen on The West Wing. People loved Clinton and still do. But they are loving an act, not a man.
Dick Morris, who knows Clinton as well as anyone, says Clinton craves attention like a drug. Without it, he's sullen and depressed. Only when he has an audience does he come alive.
Remnick describes a moment on Clinton's plane when:.
...around two-thirty pillows and blankets appeared and lights were dimmed. Sleep beckoned. But, just as it did, a familiar voice beckoned from the doorway: “Hey! How you guys doin’?”
I saw some of Clinton’s aides slouched in their seats in the rear of the plane, their eyes shut, their mouths agape like murder victims in a Weegee photograph. Clinton was carrying a marked-up copy of “The Party’s Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies,” by Richard Heinberg, on how oil production led to economic modernity and how its depletion will shape the future.
“Interesting book, Mr. President?” someone asked.
Clinton sat down on the arm of the seat and eased his way into a near-soliloquy that lasted two hours. First, he talked about light bulbs—their history, their physical properties, their contribution to greenhouse gases, the latest developments in bulb technology.
No doubt Bill was feeling peppy after all that attention.
In the context of Clinton's narcissism, his post-presidency initiatives, while undoubtedly doing good, are just a stage he's built for himself to get an applause fix. In the end it's pathetic.
But no more pathetic than the millions of people who buy his act and feed his needy ego. When he was president I was astonished by the smart people who bought his act, like rubes before a faith healer.
Then one day it dawned on me that people buy Clinton's act because they want to believe it. He strokes their narcissistic need to believe they're on the side of the angels. And his charm is a drug to his audiences, who come away with a buzz.
Such true believers will never be dissuaded by the plain facts of Clinton's failures. Feminists rationalized away his gropings and abuse of women. Idealists ignored his shredding of campaign finance laws. Black leaders never made a peep when he turned his back on Africa.
In a documentary about the Rwanda genocide, a 13-year girl told of surviving by hiding under bleeding corpses piled up in a church. She said, "I was sure when the world knew what was happening they would rescue us."
Bill Clinton was the leader of the free world and he knew all about it, but pretended he didn't. And 800,000 people were macheted to death.
No doubt Clinton was "forced to pander to narrow interests of US voters." But he could have "ended injustice" with a little bit of spine and 5,000 Marines.
That would have been real "cudgels on behalf of world citizenry."
bill cosby
...not joking at Spelman College:
“I have prepared for this talk for this time because you young women have to know that it is time for you all to take charge.
"You have to seriously see yourselves not as the old women, where the men stood in front and you all stood behind…because the men, most of them are in prison and here you sit graduating from college….
"The men as young boys are dropping out of high school, but they have memorized the lyrics of very difficult rap songs and they know how to braid each other's hair, and they know how to send their sperm cells out and then walk away from the responsibility of something called father.
"And I'm looking at you and I'm looking at your sisters and I want you all to spread the word, it's your time.
on this day six years ago
...came shocking images of a young Palestinian boy being shot in Gaza. Read the BBC report from that day.
Next watch the video that exposes the story as a sham.
mark helprin interview
I was introduced (turned on to in '60s-speak from the folks at Maggie's Farm) to writer Mark Helprin this summer. I began with Freddy and Fredericka, a satire of Prince Charles and Princess Di. It was a satire, but much deeper.
I sped through it, marvelling at the man's writing and level of thinking. I found myself rereading sentences simply becasue they were astonishing in their meaning and economy of language.
Hungry for more, I was pacing my living room yapping on the phone, when I looked down at my bookshelf and found Helprin's Memoir from and Antproof Case. How that book got there remains a mystery. It was another great read, totally different than the first.
Helprin is an odd duck as this interview makes clear. If you haven't read him, you're in for a treat.
JB
eating chinese
by Burt Prelutsky
With the possible exception of Italian, my favorite food in the world is Chinese. However, when friends suggest dining out at Chinese restaurants, my inclination is to decline, announcing, even before the msg has had a chance to kick in, that I have a headache. My reason for this is simply that I hate the mandatory practice of sharing entrees.
I suspect that this obnoxious tradition began many years ago, when most Americans hadn’t yet sampled Chinese cuisine. Back in those bygone days, it gave people a way of getting acquainted with a wide variety of exotic dishes. But that era has long since passed. By this time, almost everyone in a Chinese restaurant over the age of six is on a first-name basis with kung pao chicken, pork-fried rice, and tangerine beef, and it’s high time this particular tradition went the way of top hats and spats. There are times when a tradition is nothing but a habit with chin whiskers, and this is one of those times.
For me, the problem is that I always wind up with much less of what I want and lots more of what other people have ordered. For instance, say there are four of us. The way it usually works, I order my favorite, curry shrimp, and the other three order a chicken, a beef, and a vegetable dish. When the food arrives, it immediately starts getting passed around the table. Even if, against odds of four to one, my delectable dish starts out in front of me, I have to pretend I want to leave plenty of room for the other three entrees, and, so, I can only help myself to a quarter of the one item I really want. And, based on forty years of experience, I can kiss the shrimp good-bye. For down deep, even the person who felt obliged to order those damn steamed veggies naturally can’t resist helping themselves to plenty of my dinner.
It’s a terribly loony system. If it weren’t, it would be employed in other restaurants. But, as you may have noticed, it’s not. You don’t see people cutting up somebody’s tuna fish sandwich four ways. You don’t see people helping themselves to another person’s lamb chops, and you sure don’t see some shmoe eating half of some other guy’s soup.
I used to think that it was just a cliché that an hour after eating in a Chinese restaurant, you were hungry again. But it’s true. Just the other night, some friends and I dined at the Shanghai Palace, and an hour later, sure enough, I was hungry….for curry shrimp!
friday, September 29 2006
clinton might want to put some ice on his ego
...after this sting from Victor Davis Hanson:
Three explanations explain this postpartum ex-presidential depression: one, the country has moved steadily rightward—Congress, the Presidency, the Supreme Court, and state governments. So much of the whining is from the out-of-power, know-it-all and self-anointed, who, like precious wounded fawns, resent deeply their perceived wounds and lick publicly their scrapes.
Second, there is a lot of acclaim and money to be made by jetting around the globe, finger-pointing about right-wing insensitivity, the environment (so much for the ecological consequences of flying on private planes), third-world poverty, and American hubris.
Third, we are nearing an election, and a blow-up by Clinton can be passed off as yelling out “truth to power” as an out-of-office, unapologetic Democrat takes on “Fox News,” thereby galvanizing the true believers. Clinton as either truthful or without resources is, of course, laughable; but then so were his other roles as serious historian, global humanitarian, lip-biting empath, professorial wonk, and sensual, caring alpha-male. He is what he is—a half-grown-up, but canny chameleon, blessed with considerable skills at the impromptu rant and instant repartee, with a sharp mind and little real knowledge that ensure he has a veneer of impressive knowledge about an inch thick.
it's all part of a plot
According to Gallup 42 percent of those polled agreed with the following statement:
"The Bush administration deliberately manipulated the price of gasoline so that it would decrease before this fall's elections.''
And of those who believe such a thing, nearly two-thirds are registered Democrats. Wow. Talk about enough said.
Let me see if I understand: We have — living in America, perhaps right in our own neighborhoods — a frightening number of people who believe the Bush administration is capable of lowering gas prices.
That can only mean these same people believe Bush, in fact, caused Hurricane Katrina, which knocked out gulf oil supplies, driving up the prices, but now, so close to the election, Bush has decided against hurricanes, of which there currently are none.
Man alive, I thought Bill Clinton was the smart one, and he never got credit for starting and stopping hurricanes or raising and lowering gas prices. Bush manages to control nature itself, while at the same time we are told daily in the editorial pages what a dummy he is.
Furthermore, it must mean all Bush must do is make a strategic phone call once in a while and BIG OIL, which has been thoroughly demonized as impossibly greedy, becomes entirely willing to say, "Yes, we will gladly lower our prices and watch our profits tumble because, contrary to what has been said about us, we do not want to make any money.''
An alternative theory: Bush stopped the hurricanes this year to make Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" look bad (global warming was spawning killer 'canes don't you know).
getting better
After Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke at the UN last week, he met privately with some Iranian Americans. His translator wrote an account, excerpted here:
“One gentleman said the situation between America and Iran has gotten worse. No. It’s not worse than last year; it’s better. Better. “Last year,” he said, “we were under serious threats—military threats. Today, at the very worst, it’s economic threats, and even that—well, I don’t really want to say, but for those who would like to pursue them, the situation is not conducive ….
Even though there are those in America who would like to put pressure on Iran, they won’t be able to. We’ve really progressed. You see, 118 countries [of the Non-Aligned Movement] have specifically supported Iran’s nuclear program. That’s eliminated the excuse that four or five countries speak for the ‘international community.’
“In Indonesia, when I went there, there were great demonstrations in our favor,” he said. “And wherever we went in Asia, we heard shouts of ‘Ahmadinejad, we support you against America!’” He repeated the slogan in English—a language that, judging by his pronunciation, he obviously speaks well enough, but rarely uses. “Our political situation, by God’s grace, is great,” he went on. “For those who don’t want our people to progress, the situation is not good. In the Middle East, the situation for America has become very bad. Very.
...
President Ahmadinejad, apparently satisfied that he had convinced everyone that Iran was strong, moved on to the question of Iran’s nuclear program. “If, God forbid—God forbid—we budge on this issue, they’ll next say, ‘You have to give up your chemistry departments in your universities, and your physics departments too.’ Then even the medical schools.” The president’s tone wasn’t bombastic; if anything, it was very matter-of-fact. “It’s clear that they don’t want us to progress,” he said.
“Of course, not all Americans—Americans are good people. “Two thousand Zionists want to rule the world. You can do it elsewhere,” he said, as if speaking directly to the mysterious 2,000, “but not in Iran. It’s impossible—it’s not doable.”
thursday, September 28 2006
4000 al Qaeda killed in iraq
Those are the AQ's official numbers. Where did they find 288,000 virgins?
inner life of a cell
A beautiful Flash animation from Harvard.
dreamscapes
A dream researcher from John F. Kennedy University in California has discovered fundamental differences between the dream worlds of people on the ideological left and the ideological right.
Among his findings, Kelly Bulkeley discovered that liberals are more restless sleepers and have a higher number of bizarre, surreal dreams—including fantasy settings and a wide variety of sexual encounters. Conservatives’ dreams were, on average, far more mundane and focused on realistic people, situations and settings ...
"While some of my colleagues think my research reinforces the stereotype of repressed, uptight conservatives, it also shows that many liberals may he hanging on the edge of mental well-being,” Mr. Bulkeley said. “There may be a lot of hidden distress and unpleasantness in the liberal mind."
higher education
Seniors lack basic knowledge of America's history. More than half, 53.4 percent, could not identify the correct century when the first American colony was established at Jamestown. And 55.4 percent could not recognize Yorktown as the battle that brought the American Revolution to an end (28 percent even thought the Civil War battle at Gettysburg the correct answer).
Those are college seniors, mind you.
estimating our national intelligence
Jules Crittenden in the Boston Herald:
...the New York Times, based on fragmentary information leaked by unnamed sources, reported that U.S. intelligence agencies have agreed that the Iraq war is fueling global jihad.The Associated Press amplified that the next day in a story that devoted its first 10 inches or so to Democrats bashing the Bush administration and calling for a pullout in Iraq, while burying the suggestions of Republicans and administration officials that there might be other things in the report worth noting.
1. In time of war, the nation’s classified intelligence analysis of the enemy’s capabilities is none of our, the public’s, business. It is not the New York Times’ business. It is the business of those who are prosecuting this war. They use it to determine strategy and tactics for defeating that enemy.
2. It is, however, the business of a select few in Congress. For the purpose of oversight. Not for the purpose of scoring cheap political points. Thanks to the New York Times and its politically-tainted abuse of our nation’s classified intelligence, the NIE’s key judgments are no longer classified, and are very much the subject of political opportunism.
distract those allergies
Allergies could be wiped out in a single blow by tricking the immune system into thinking it is encountering an old foe. The idea is based on the so-called "hygiene hypothesis", the notion that the cleanliness of modern life deprives the immune system of a proper training against disease so that it ends up out of kilter and reacts to things that are harmless, such as grass pollen
"a clockwork strawberry"
Iowahawk sends up MSNBC ranter Keith Olberman.
wednesday, September 27 2006
tax cuts for the rich
QUIZ: The top ten percent of American taxpayers pay what percentage of total income taxes?
- 28 percent
- 49 percent
- 68 percent
- 12 percent
Answer: 68 percent. And the bottom 50 percent of American taxpayers? A mere 3.3 percent.
If you want to include FICA:
In a different analysis (link) in 2001, the CBO did its best to factor in all federal taxes (corporate, excise) and all income (401(k) matching, food stamps). This is how I summarize the results:
The top 1% earns 14.5% of the income and pays 23% of federal taxes.
The top 10% earns 37.5% of the income and pays 50% of federal taxes.
The top quintile earns 52% of the income and pays 66% of federal taxes.
The bottom 50% earns 11-12% of the income and pays 7-8% of federal taxes.
Meanwhile, the top half of taxpayers pay the highest tax share in decades.
karzai: "do you forget people jumping off the 80th floor?"
Powerful video of Hamid Karzai and President Bush meeting the press yesterday.
Karzai, delivered the following in soft, patient tones, as if addressing a child (the AP's Democrat hack Jennifer Loven, as it happens):
KARZAI: ...terrorism was hurting us way before Iraq or September 11. The president mentioned some examples of it.
These extremist forces were killing people in Afghanistan and around for years, closing schools, burning mosques, killing children, uprooting vineyards with vine trees, grapes hanging on them, forcing populations to poverty and misery.
They came to America on September 11, but they were attacking you before September 11 in other parts of the world.
We are a witness in Afghanistan as to what they are and how they can hurt. You are a witness in New York.
Do you forget people jumping off the 80th floor or 70th floor when the planes hit them? Can you imagine what it will be for a man or a woman to jump off that high?
Who did that? And where are they now? And how do we fight them, how do we get rid of them, other than going after them? Should we wait for them to come and kill us again?
global warming roundup
First, some uncowed skeptics:
There IS a problem with global warming... it stopped in 1998
For many years now, human-caused climate change has been viewed as a large and urgent problem. In truth, however, the biggest part of the problem is neither environmental nor scientific, but a self-created political fiasco. Consider the simple fact, drawn from the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero).Yes, you did read that right. And also, yes, this eight-year period of temperature stasis did coincide with society's continued power station and SUV-inspired pumping of yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
In response to these facts, a global warming devotee will chuckle and say "how silly to judge climate change over such a short period". Yet in the next breath, the same person will assure you that the 28-year-long period of warming which occurred between 1970 and 1998 constitutes a dangerous (and man-made) warming. Tosh. Our devotee will also pass by the curious additional facts that a period of similar warming occurred between 1918 and 1940, well prior to the greatest phase of world industrialisation, and that cooling occurred between 1940 and 1965, at precisely the time that human emissions were increasing at their greatest rate.
Since the early 1990s, the columns of many leading newspapers and magazines, worldwide, have carried an increasing stream of alarmist letters and articles on hypothetical, human-caused climate change. Each such alarmist article is larded with words such as "if", "might", "could", "probably", "perhaps", "expected", "projected" or "modelled" - and many involve such deep dreaming, or ignorance of scientific facts and principles, that they are akin to nonsense.
The problem here is not that of climate change per se, but rather that of the sophisticated scientific brainwashing that has been inflicted on the public, bureaucrats and politicians alike. Governments generally choose not to receive policy advice on climate from independent scientists. Rather, they seek guidance from their own self-interested science bureaucracies and senior advisers, or from the IPCC itself. No matter how accurate it may be, cautious and politically non-correct science advice is not welcomed in Westminster, and nor is it widely reported.
“Hot & Cold Media Spin: A Challenge To Journalists Who Cover Global Warming”
First, I would like to summarize some of the recent developments in the controversy over whether or not humans have created a climate catastrophe. One of the key aspects that the United Nations, environmental groups and the media have promoted as the “smoking gun” of proof of catastrophic global warming is the so-called ‘hockey stick’ temperature graph by climate scientist Michael Mann and his colleagues.This graph purported to show that temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere remained relatively stable over 900 years, then spiked upward in the 20th century presumably due to human activity. Mann, who also co-publishes a global warming propaganda blog reportedly set up with the help of an environmental group, had his “Hockey Stick” come under severe scrutiny.
The “hockey stick” was completely and thoroughly broken once and for all in 2006. Several years ago, two Canadian researchers tore apart the statistical foundation for the hockey stick. In 2006, both the National Academy of Sciences and an independent researcher further refuted the foundation of the “hockey stick.”
The National Academy of Sciences report reaffirmed the existence of the Medieval Warm Period from about 900 AD to 1300 AD and the Little Ice Age from about 1500 to 1850. Both of these periods occurred long before the invention of the SUV or human industrial activity could have possibly impacted the Earth’s climate. In fact, scientists believe the Earth was warmer than today during the Medieval Warm Period, when the Vikings grew crops in Greenland.
Climate alarmists have been attempting to erase the inconvenient Medieval Warm Period from the Earth’s climate history for at least a decade. David Deming, an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma’s College of Geosciences, can testify first hand about this effort. Dr. Deming was welcomed into the close-knit group of global warming believers after he published a paper in 1995 that noted some warming in the 20th century. Deming says he was subsequently contacted by a prominent global warming alarmist and told point blank “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.” When the “Hockey Stick” first appeared in 1998, it did just that.
Who are ignored as irrelevant "deniers" by the media:
Scott Pelley of "60 Minutes"
Pelley's most recent report, like his first, did not pause to acknowledge global warming skeptics, instead treating the existence of global warming as an established fact. I again asked him why."If I do an interview with Elie Wiesel," he asks, "am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?" He says his team tried hard to find a respected scientist who contradicted the prevailing opinion in the scientific community, but there was no one out there who fit that description. "This isn't about politics or pseudo-science or conspiracy theory blogs," he says. "This is about sound science."
The Holocaust analogy makes a convenient substitute for critical thought. To deny the Holocaust is to deny first-person testimony from both concentration camp survivors and liberators of the camps, photographic evidence and historical documents from the Third Reich.
Pelley need not trifle with the dissenting voices because, well, his mind is made up, and besides, people who disagree are nuts anyway. Sounds like passage from Alice in Wonderland.
Why are skeptics marginalized?
There are other reasons, too, why the public hears so little from those scientists who approach climate change issues rationally, the so-called climate sceptics. Most are to do with intimidation against speaking out, which operates intensely on several parallel fronts.
First, most government scientists are gagged from making public comment on contentious issues, their employing organisations instead making use of public relations experts to craft carefully tailored, frisbee-science press releases. Second, scientists are under intense pressure to conform with the prevailing paradigm of climate alarmism if they wish to receive funding for their research. Third, members of the Establishment have spoken declamatory words on the issue, and the kingdom's subjects are expected to listen.
On the alarmist campaign trail, the UK's Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir David King, is thus reported as saying that global warming is so bad that Antarctica is likely to be the world's only habitable continent by the end of this century. Warming devotee and former Chairman of Shell, Lord [Ron] Oxburgh, reportedly agrees with another rash statement of King's, that climate change is a bigger threat than terrorism. And goodly Archbishop Rowan Williams, who self-evidently understands little about the science, has warned of "millions, billions" of deaths as a result of global warming and threatened Mr Blair with the wrath of the climate God unless he acts. By betraying the public's trust in their positions of influence, so do the great and good become the small and silly.
tony blair: "democracy there means security here"
From his farewell address to the Labour party:
There are two views of what is happening in the world today. One view is that there are isolated individuals, extremists, engaged in essentially isolated acts of terrorism. That what is happening is not qualitatively different from the terrorism we have always lived with.
If you believe this, we carry on the same path as before 11th September. We try not to provoke them and hope in time they will wither.
The other view is that this is a wholly new phenomenon, worldwide global terrorism based on a perversion of the true, peaceful and honourable faith of Islam; that's its roots are not superficial but deep, in the madrassehs of Pakistan, in the extreme forms of Wahabi doctrine in Saudi Arabia, in the former training camps of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan; in the cauldron of Chechnya; in parts of the politics of most countries of the Middle East and many in Asia; in the extremist minority that now in every European city preach hatred of the West and our way of life.
If you take this view, you believe September 11th changed the world; that Bali, Beslan, Madrid and scores of other atrocities that never make the news are part of the same threat and the only path to take is to confront this terrorism, remove it root and branch and at all costs stop them acquiring the weapons to kill on a massive scale because these terrorists would not hesitate to use them.
Likewise take the first view, then when you see the terror brought to Iraq you say: there, we told you; look what you have stirred up; now stop provoking them.
But if you take the second view, you don't believe the terrorists are in Iraq to liberate it.
They're not protesting about the rights of women - what, the same people who stopped Afghan girls going to school, made women wear the Burka and beat them in the streets of Kabul, who now assassinate women just for daring to register to vote in Afghanistan's first ever democratic ballot, though four million have done so?
They are not provoked by our actions; but by our existence. They are in Iraq for the very reason we should be.
They have chosen this battleground because they know success for us in Iraq is not success for America or Britain or even Iraq itself but for the values and way of life that democracy represents.
They know that. That's why they are there. That is why we should be there and whatever disagreements we have had, should unite in our determination to stand by the Iraqi people until the job is done.
And, of course, at first the consequence is more fighting.
But Iraq was not a safe country before March 2003. Few had heard of the Taliban before September 11th 2001. Afghanistan was not a nation at peace.
So it's not that I care more about foreign affairs than the state of our economy, NHS, schools or crime.
It's simply that I believe democracy there means security here; and that if I don't care and act on this terrorist threat, then the day will come when all our good work on the issues that decide people's lives will be undone because the stability on which our economy, in an era of globalisation, depends, will vanish.
And...
I have come to realise that caring in politics isn't really about "caring".
It's about doing what you think is right and sticking to it.
So I do not minimise whatever differences some of you have with me over Iraq and the only healing can come from understanding that the decision, whether agreed with or not, was taken because I believe, genuinely, Britain's future security depends on it.
There has been no third way, this time. Believe me, I've looked for it.
democrat plans to squelch free speech
...by bringing back the Fairness Doctrine to gut conservative talk radio:
One nasty little surprise Democrats intend to enact if they gain control of Congress is the reinstatement of the "Fairness Doctrine." I produced a radio talk show in the early 1960s called "Home Executive Club." I had to supply our host, Charles Presley, with three guests a day. We ran the gamut from the Fire Chief to visiting dignitaries to political figures.
Every time I had, for example, Senator William Proxmire (D-WI) or Representative Henry Schadeberg (R-WI) or any other politician on the show, I had to be prepared to give their opponents time to express their views. It was a pain to administer and caused us to limit the number of political guests.
Liberals flop at talk radio, so they want to kill it. They already control the MSM and academia. Free exchange of ideas? Ha ha ha.
food police: drop that fat or I'll shoot
New York's health commissioner wants to ban saturated fats in restaurants.
scorn for juan cole
Excuse me while I pass along an important message to my fellow Muslims. You Muslims who are still burning Benedict in effigy, rejecting Vatican apologies, demanding a retraction, and engaging in other anti-papal mayhem, kindly note that you've been given a pass by a certain Juan Cole.
Who's he? Think of him as the bride at every Muslim wedding and the corpse at every Muslim funeral. Know what I mean? Anyway, you have his blessing to be just as ridiculous as you wish. He says we Muslims shouldn't be held to grown-up standards of judgment and behavior because Western great-grandfathers were mean to Muslim great-grandfathers. Now we've got a complex.
Cole pats us on our fragile little heads this way: "Some commentators have complained about Muslim sensibilities" in reaction to the Pope's recent use of a 700-year-old quote hostile to Islam. "But in my view, this sensitivity is a feature of postcolonialism. Muslims were colonized by Western powers, often for centuries, and all that period they were told that their religion was inferior and barbaric. They are independent now, though often they have gained independence only a couple of generations (less if you consider neocolonialism). As independent, they are finally liberated to protest when Westerners put them down."
Now, some of you may regard Cole's condescension as a particularly unsavory aspect of postcolonialism. But those of you who like being excused as pathetic have other matters to address.
For example, what about the Ottoman Turks, fellow Muslims who colonized so many other Muslims for centuries? What's their excuse for protesting against the Pope? And they've been so prominent in the anti-Benedict coverage, too! It was Turks who regarded their Arab subjects as "inferior and barbaric." Indeed, they had a charming rhyme ("Arab Jarab") that means, "Arabs are a plague!"
tuesday, September 26 2006
couch mobile
Leave home without getting up.
biggest solar battery in the solar system
ninety minutes with bush
Michael Medved was one of five radio talk show hosts invited to a private meeting with President Bush in the Oval office.
I had expected the President might ask us some questions about the concerns and opinions of the radio audience, or else he might have opened himself to questions or comments we wanted to pose. In the event, he did neither: he simply began talking about the world situation, and never stopped.
We had been scheduled for half an hour with Mr. Bush but he continued to speak-- with increasing energy and focus, as a matter of fact --for some ninety minutes before aides appeared to enforce the rigors of his schedule. Because the conversation was officially "off the record," I'm not supposed to quote specifics of the President's comments, but I can describe the subjects he covered and my general reaction to his conversation. He spoke primarily about the ongoing War on Terror -- showing unexpectedly detailed and meticulous knowledge of progress (or lack thereof) in many specific fronts around the world, including Iraq and Afghanistan.
Mr. Bush's critics like to deride him as an empty-headed frat boy who knows nothing about other world leaders, but in his lengthy session with us the President told a series of amusing and very revealing stories about a half dozen heads of state. Without breaking the ground rules and providing specifics, I can say that the Leader of the Free World feels hearty affection for Junichiro Koizumi, the out-going Prime Minister of Japan, and he gave a riveting account about meeting the Prime Minister of Spain that would have made any American-- Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal -- feel proud and grateful that this generally under-rated Texan represented the United States of America a that particular moment.
His comments about China, and the relationship between the Chinese economy and the nation's foreign posture, were particularly perceptive and persuasive, reflecting a much richer understanding of that confusing and powerful society than most reporters or pundits.
In the past, I've heard Bill Clinton or Newt Gingrich show off their brilliant minds with long, discursive, deeply informed rambles that sketch out a free-flowing view of the state of the world. I've never heard anyone suggest that George W. Bush, whatever his virtues of character and resolution, could be capable of a similarly dazzling tour of the horizon-- but he provided precisely that sort of over-view this Friday, full of insight on societies, individuals, and ongoing struggles.
Remaining steadfast:
He made the important point that if he abandoned his well-known commitments on this or other domestic issues, the nation's enemies (and the rest of the world) would take away the belief that the President could be bullied, prodded, overwhelmed and initimidated -- harming the war effort for which young Americans risk their lives. He deeply believes in the importance of resolution, determination, and consistency in world affairs-- and emphasized several times that he refuses to govern according to trends, polls, or public opinion.
Despite unending abuse from the media and personal attacks from Democrats, Bush remains undaunted.
This President doesn't grit his teeth, or feel beleaguered or forlorn over low opinion ratings, or the angry demonstrators who wait outside the White House fence every day.
[He] ...feels in no way cowed or discouraged or overwhemed, and that's the most encouraging lesson I took away from my hour-and-a-half in the Oval Office. He looks and sounds energized, and said several times how much he enjoys the Presidency, likes making decisions, and remembers what a privilege and an honor it is to be where he is.
He even indicated a determination to go back to an effort to save Social Security after the election --- despite the crushing opposition the last time he tried to perform this public service. The President clearly loves his job and relishes the opportunities it affords him to change the country. He doesn't feel sorry for himself, and with his savvy resolution to make the most of the two years remaining to him after the mid-term elections, he doesn't want anybody else's pity.
Clinton could learn from his example.
past eruptions of mount narcissus
Remember when Peter Jennings got the finger pointing treatment from Bill Clinton? Watch the video here. It's a classic example of self pity.
“When I, when I got a standing ovation at the United Nations from the whole world, the American networks were showing my grand jury testimony. Those were decisions you made, not me. I personally believe that the standing ovation I got from the whole world at the United Nations, which was unprecedented for an American President, showed not only support for me, but opposition to the madness that had taken hold of American politics."
In short, "the whole world loves me, so why not you?"
media bias roundup
Incoming Newsweek editor Jon Meacham believes Al Gore won in 2000 and believes Clinton is an "incredibly talented politician, greatest, you know, Democratic politician since Johnson, could have been a great, great man who was brought down by his appetites and his personal vices were in some ways his political virtues because he was charming; he was seductive; he was a larger than life figure."
Thomas Edsall, formerly the senior political reporter at the Washington Post, estimates that the ratio of Democrats to Republicans at the Post is 15-25% to 1. So much for diversity.
CBS's Harry Smith seems stunned that his expert blames Clinton for not getting Bin Laden. Still, Smith manages to work in a nonsequitur closing comment about the war in Iraq exacerbating terrorism. Watch the video.
who made katie the voice of us?
Katie Couric's "60 Minutes" segment on Condoleeza Rice on Sunday was comical at times. One exchange that made me laugh aloud:
Couric: "You used your credibility to rally the American people behind this. Now it turns out there were no weapons of mass destruction. Do you regret using that?"
Rice: "I don't regret at all overthrowing Saddam Hussein."
Couric: "But that's not the question."
Rice: "Do I wish the intelligence had been better? Absolutely. I've wished every day since we learned. The idea that somehow because the intelligence was wrong, we were misleading the American people, I really resent that."
Couric, seemingly surprised: “Really? Because that's what so many people think.”
Well, no wonder: that's what the MSM has been feeding the public. Then there was this gem:
Couric: "Is it really priority number one in terms of philosophically and pragmatically for the United States to be spreading democracy around the world?"
Rice: "Well, first of all, the United States is not spreading democracy. The United States is standing with those who want a democratic future."
Couric VO: “And the future is what she focuses on. A passionate student of history, Condi Rice believes turmoil often precedes periods of peace and stability. And she rejects the notion that the U.S. is a bully, imposing its values on the world.”
Rice: "What's wrong with assistance so that people can have their full and complete right to the very liberties and freedoms that we enjoy?"
Couric: "To quote my daughter, 'Who made us the boss of them?'"
Rice: "Well, it's not the matter of being the boss of them. It's speaking for people who are voiceless."
monday, September 25 2006
pathological narcissism
The narcissistic personality has several core problems, all involving dysregulation of one sort or another. First, they are subject to wide mood swings, the reason being that their mood regulation is not internalized but is dependent upon external circumstances. Circumstances good, mood good.
But if circumstances turn bad, than their mood will become poopy very quickly, as is true of my 17 month old. In his case, it is entirely developmentally appropriate. However, it’s a little frightening imagining him carrying around the nuclear football when he hasn't gotten his way.
turd analysis
In Book III of Gulliver’s Travels, there is a group of Projectors on the island of Laputa who are trying to decipher the secret thoughts and plans of diplomats from the color and composition of their turds. If The New York Times keeps on its present course, it too may find itself among that coterie on Swift’s island of The Whore.
The lower left front page of this Sunday’s Times introduces an article by David S. Cloud, complete with photographs and two sports diagrams, on Rumsfeld’s style of play on squash courts, which provides “a window into Mr. Rumsfeld’s complicated psyche.”
like gum on our shoes
...stuff about the Clintons keeps pulling us back. We don't to go overboard, but...
Patterico documents how Fox News did indeed ask the same tough questions of the Bush administration.
Dick Morris ponders the link between the Clintons and the emir of Dubai:
The relationship between the Clintons and the emir has long been too close to avoid scrutiny. Something is driving up Bill and Hillary's net worth pretty dramatically. In 2003, Sen. Clinton disclosed assets of at least $352,000 but less than $3.8 million. By 2005, she was declaring assets in the $10 million to $50 million range.
if you use use internet explorer
...or Outlook or Outlook Express, there's something nasty out there that can infect your system simply by rendering an image. Fortunately, there is an easy fix.
UPDATE: Microsoft released a patch on September 27. Just update via Windows.
day twenty-one of the day fire
The fire has burned 200 square miles since Labor Day. Here one edge of the fire
approaches the city of Santa Paula.
30 minutes after the first photo was taken a "supertanker" dropped a load of fire
retardant on the ridge.
A tiny finch seemed to be giving the engines a parade review at the Ventura County
fairgrounds where fire crews set up camp. One member of the night shift
gets a free chiropractic adjustment under the shade of a tree. Massages were free too.
The ocean is a mere 100 yards from the fire engine staging area. Santa Ana winds were
forecast for the weekend, but didn't materialize. Instead an onshore flow brought out the
kite surfers. Nature both destroys and amuses.
JB All Photos Copyrighted. All Rights Reserved.
clinton errata
Bill Clinton mentioned Richard Clarke's book 11 times yesterday as a defense of his record. What's in Clarke's book? Byron York writes Bill Clinton's Excuses and David Frum writes Dick Clarke's American Grandstand.
sunday, September 24 2006
the question chris wallace didn't ask
...after Clinton brought up the 9/11 Commission report, he should have said:
"Mr. President, that reminds me. During the 9/11 Commission investigation your former national security advisor, Sandy Berger, working as your representative stole and destroyed classified documents from the National Archive. What did he steal and what was he covering up? And did you ask him to do it?"
prickly, persecuted president clinton
This episode is just too rich. Watch the video. Read the associated links. Clinton is behaving, well, Nixonian. After accusing Chris Wallace of a "conservative hit job", he said:
"...and you got that little smirk on your face and you think you're so clever, but I had responsibility for trying to protect this country. I tried and I failed to get bin Laden. I regret it, but I did try and I did everything I thought I responsibly could."
He also complained about the "Path to 9/11" on ABC, saying it conflicted with the 9/11 Commission Report, as if the latter were the final word on the subject. Later, he referred to the report as a "political document." Which is it, Willie?
He contended that "right wingers" criticized him for being "obsessed" with Bin Laden. Oh? Read this from the right wing National Review 9/14/1998, after the Sudan bombing:
COMEDY Central's The Daily Show called it "Operation Desert Shield Me from Impeachment." Funny, but too cynical. The U.S. missile strikes against terrorist facilities in Afghanistan and Sudan were a response to a real threat: They targeted the operations of Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind who, according to U.S. intelligence, was responsible for the brutal bombing of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and was plotting further attacks on Americans.
Congressional leaders were therefore right to support President Clinton's action. The last thing Republicans should do is add to the inhibitions and hesitations of an Administration congenitally averse to the forthright use of American military power. The White House's blatant exploitation of the crisis for its own political purposes-dragging Mr. Clinton back from vacation for a portentous Oval Office address to the nation-should be a source of amusement only. Richard Nixon, too, tried to claim indispensability for his foreign-policy expertise-a much more valid claim in his case, and at the height of the Cold War to boot. It didn't help him.
Launching 75 Tomahawk cruise missiles at the training camp in Afghanistan and the chemical-weapons plant in Sudan was, by Clinton standards, a strong performance. In June 1993, responding to an Iraqi assassination attempt against ex-President George Bush, Mr. Clinton launched 23 cruise missiles at a military-intelligence headquarters in Baghdad-in the middle of the night, so that no one would get hurt! This time, the strike in Afghanistan was aimed at a gathering of terrorist leaders reported to be taking place on that day. Admirably cold-blooded, that.Bin Laden, the terrorist kingpin, is a new phenomenon, but we should not exaggerate either his novelty or the difficulty of defeating him. (There is a canard that he is an American creation. There is no evidence that he is. He did win his spurs in the Arab world's equivalent of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade-the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan-but U.S. money and arms went to the Afghan freedom fighters through the Pakistani military.) While he is a freelancer, bin Laden is dependent on the support of renegade governments, such as Afghanistan's and Sudan's, against which we have leverage. We can target his physical assets by military or covert means and his financial assets through other controls (as Mr. Clinton has also done). His Islamist revolutionary ideology is increasingly discredited in the Muslim world, even in Iran. Defeating him will take time, but it will be done.
Sounds like those "right wingers" we're encouraging Clinton to do more, while noting he'd been a pussy for too long.
As for Wallace's question constituting a hit job, has Clinton ever listened to the antagonistic questions from the White House press corps directed at Bush?
On Meet the Press, Clinton said:
...the biggest problem confronting the world today is "the illusion that our differences matter more than our common humanity."
Okay, but how are you going to end the illusion?
"That's what's driving the terrorism," he said. "It's not just that there's an unresolved Arab-Israeli conflict. Osama Bin Laden and Dr. al-Zawahiri can convince young Sunni Arab men, who have _ and some women _ who have despairing conditions in their lives, that they get a one-way ticket to heaven in a hurry if they kill a lot of innocent people who don't share their reality."
What about the Shia from Iran and Hezbollah? And how to end the despairing conditions? Regime change, as in Afghanistan and Iraq. It took a real man to do something more than talk.
ap = al-qaeda propaganda
...says the Boston Herald city editor:
The Associated Press, the reliable just-the-facts news agency you and I once knew, no longer exists. Amoral propagandists have taken over.
he not busy being born is...
OneCosmos:
If one were to look at the way things stood in the world over the 500 years or so up to 1700, one “would not have been optimistic about the future of mankind. As historian Robert McFarlane notes in his The Riddle of the Modern World, nearly every civilization had reached some sort of "invisible barrier” that prevented further development. "The world and its roughly 500 million inhabitants seemed to have reached the limit to its potential to support human life.... Mankind seemed to be caught on a treadmill."
How did we ever get off that treadmill? It's an important question, because it is at the heart of our current conflict with Islam. They are still on that treadmill, and when one isn't progressing, one generally degenerates. Life is not static. Reduced to stasis, it becomes death. There is no middle ground. You cannot be "a little bit" alive or dead. Any evolving system must maintain disequilibrium by exchanging matter or information with the environment. The deepest problem with the Islamic world is that it is a closed system, both individually and collectively.
Read it all.
shop class as soulcraft
Anyone in the market for a good used machine tool should talk to Noel Dempsey, a dealer in Richmond, Virginia. Noel’s bustling warehouse is full of metal lathes, milling machines, and table saws, and it turns out that most of it is from schools. EBay is awash in such equipment, also from schools. It appears shop class is becoming a thing of the past, as educators prepare students to become “knowledge workers.”
At the same time, an engineering culture has developed in recent years in which the object is to “hide the works,” rendering the artifacts we use unintelligible to direct inspection. Lift the hood on some cars now (especially German ones), and the engine appears a bit like the shimmering, featureless obelisk that so enthralled the cavemen in the opening scene of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Essentially, there is another hood under the hood. This creeping concealedness takes various forms. The fasteners holding small appliances together now often require esoteric screwdrivers not commonly available, apparently to prevent the curious or the angry from interrogating the innards. By way of contrast, older readers will recall that until recent decades, Sears catalogues included blown-up parts diagrams and conceptual schematics for all appliances and many other mechanical goods. It was simply taken for granted that such information would be demanded by the consumer.
Read it all.
pete rose teaches economics
Basic supply and demand. Maybe he could testify to Congress about oil prices.
everyone simpsons episode online
From this link page. D'oh!
presidents' daily briefs
During the politically-charged 9/11 Commission public hearings, Democrat Richard Ben-Veniste grilled Condoleeza Rice, insisting she read aloud the title of the August 6, 2001 presidential daily brief.
As Rice replied, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US" he tried to cut her off. Rice was trying to explain that, despite the exciting title, the memo was a rehash of things that had been known for some time.
Exactly how much time? Here's part of what President Bill Clinton was told in his PDB on Dec. 4, 1998:
SUBJECT: Bin Ladin Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks 1.
Reporting suggests Bin Ladin and his allies are preparing for attacks in the US, including an aircraft hijacking to obtain the release of Shaykh ‘Umar ‘Abd al-Rahman, Ramzi Yousef, and Muhammad Sadiq ‘Awda. One source quoted a senior member of the Gama’at al-Islamiyya (IG) saying that, as of late October, the IG had completed planning for an operation in the US on behalf of Bin Ladin, but that the operation was on hold. A senior Bin Ladin operative from Saudi Arabia was to visit IG counterparts in the US soon thereafter to discuss options—perhaps including an aircraft hijacking.
- IG leader Islambuli in late September was planning to hijack a US airliner during the “next couple of weeks” to free ‘Abd al-Rahman and the other prisoners, according to what may be a different source.
- The same source late last month said that Bin Ladin might implement plans to hijack US aircraft before the beginning of Ramadan on 20 December and that two members of the operational team had evaded security checks during a recent trial run at an unidentified New York airport.[—]
2. Some members of the Bin Ladin network have received hijack training, according to various sources, but no group directly tied to Bin Ladin’s al-Qa’ida organization has ever carried out an aircraft hijacking. Bin Ladin could be weighing other types of operations against US aircraft. According to [—] the IG in October obtained SA-7 missiles and intended to move them from Yemen into Saudi Arabia to shoot down an Egyptian plane or, if unsuccessful, a US military or civilian aircraft.
Did this prompt Clinton into action?
Between 1998 and 2000, the CIA and President Bill Clinton's national security team were caught up in paralyzing policy disputes as they secretly debated the legal permissions for covert operations against Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.
The debates left both White House counterterrorism analysts and CIA career operators frustrated and at times confused about what kinds of operations could be carried out, according to interviews with more than a dozen officials and lawyers who were directly involved.
Next time a Democrat complains that Bush has politicized the war on terror, remind them of their ugly abuse of the 9/11 Commission to blame Bush.
saturday, September 23 2006
clinton uncorked
His eyes bug, his finger starts jabbing, his skin turns pinker. Oh my, Bill is furious that some think he cared more about his approval ratings that getting Bin Laden.
Who the hell does this narcisstic sociopath think he's fooling? Does he really imagine he can sell the American people on the proposition that Republicans were actually less committed to dropping bombs on "brown people" than he was?
Let's say hypothetically this lying bastard is telling the truth. Let's say the Republicans really did want his candyass efforts to kill bin Ladin to be even more candyassed. What the hell is the Commander in Chief, then, doing bowing to political pressure to let a sworn enemy of the United States and mass-murderer of (then) hundreds of American lives live his life unmolested?
Is Clinton really claiming he let bin Ladin go on to murder three thousand people because he was afraid what Tom DeLay might say about him?
True fact: Clinton fought the Serbian War without an authorization for the use of military force from Congress and furthermore in direct violation of the War Powers Act. (Which is a law I think should usually be ignored; I point this out just to note Clinton knew how to go to war unilaterally when he wanted to.)
He can do all that to defend KLA terrorists in Serbia but he can't lift a finger to kill bin Ladin for fear of Rush Limbaugh mocking him?
days of awe
In 2003, the day after Rosh Hashanah, President Bush invited a group of rabbis to the White House:
"This is not a political event. Keep your politics close to your vests. I just wanted to talk with rabbis during the ten days of awe."
Rabbi Ginsburg recalls that meeting. Excerpt:
We're such a small people, and we have been controlled, restricted and murdered by the greatest empires in history. We have arrived at this period of history, still a time of danger for our people, but we are living in the freest country in history.
I was just stunned to be sitting across the table from the most powerful person in the world, a man of true humility and belief in one God, who spent much of this hour and a quarter, speaking from the depth of his heart about his concern about anti-Semitism and his understanding of Israel's predicament. I know many disagree with policies of his. I'm sure every rabbi there had some disagreements. But there was no denying the moment, the genuineness, the power of the experience. It felt surreal.
When I left I went across the street to the park and cried. I had so much emotion about being there. After all we have gone through as a people for 4000 years, so many tyrants under whom we have lived who have brutally mistreated us, to live in an an age when the leaders of the most powerful nation of the world care so deeply for this small people, as many presidents have, is amazing. It had a feeling of holiness to it -- of feeling God's words that "those that bless the childen of Israel will be blessed."
senator nonsequitur (d. iowa)
Sen. Tom Harkin, as part of his defense of Hugo Chavez:
"I understand the anger and frustration of a lot of poor people around the world, who see us, the richest country in the world putting $350 billion now into an unnecessary and unprovoked war in Iraq. And yet they can't get clean water."
Where to begin?
- Since when are we responsible for the world's drinking water?
- Do people without water follow our defense spending that closely?
- Harkin voted for the "unnecessary and unprovoked war"
- Some people suffering under tyrants would love us to liberate them (Zimbabwe comes to mind) so they can arrange their own clean water, thank you very much.
- 51 million people (Iraq and Afghanistan) have been liberated and have the chance to build free societies. How much is that worth, senator?
is osama dead?
Reliable sources think so. From typhoid. Which recalls a Bush comment, a couple years ago, to a reporter who noted that Bin Laden had not been captured, "Yeah, but I don't see him leading any parades."
how many reporters are embedded in iraq?
Nine. Three were from the Armed Forces’ Stars & Stripes, 1 from AFN (Armed Force Network), 1 from the Charlotte Observer, 1 from the BBC, 1 from the AP, 1 from RAI, and 1 from Polish Radio.
All the rest of the “coverage” of the Iraq war...came from reporters hunkered down in the hotels and other locations under the rubric “Baghdad News Bureaus.”
the poison well
Hugo Chavez plugged a Noam Chomsky book at the UN this week, and sales skyrocketed. Who is Noam Chomsky? One of the nastiest and hugely influential anti-Americans writers on the planet. Naturally, he's an American citizen (what a country!).
For a peek into Chomsky's thinking, we revisit a piece by David Horowitz, a few weeks after 9/11:
WITHOUT QUESTION, the most devious, the most dishonest and -- in this hour of his nation’s grave crisis – the most treacherous intellect in America belongs to MIT professor Noam Chomsky. On the 150 campuses that have mounted "teach-ins" and rallies against America’s right to defend herself; on the streets of Genoa and Seattle where "anti-globalist" anarchists have attacked the symbols of markets and world trade; among the demonstrators at Vieques who wish to deny our military its training grounds; and wherever young people manifest an otherwise incomprehensible rage against their country, the inspirer of their loathing and the instructor of their hate is most likely this man.
There are many who ask how it is possible that our most privileged and educated youth should come to despise their own nation – a free, open, democratic society – and to do so with such ferocious passion. They ask how it is possible for American youth to even consider lending comfort and aid to the Osama bin Ladens and the Saddam Husseins (and the Communists before them). A full answer would involve a search of the deep structures of the human psyche, and its irrepressible longings for a redemptive illusion. But the short answer is to be found in the speeches and writings of an embittered academic and his intellectual supporters.
Read it all.
Next, more on Chomsky's brother in arms, "historian" Howard Zinn, author of the huge selling Peoples History of the United States.
“Objectivity is impossible,” pop historian Howard Zinn once remarked, “and it is also undesirable. That is, if it were possible it would be undesirable, because if you have any kind of a social aim, if you think history should serve society in some way; should serve the progress of the human race; should serve justice in some way, then it requires that you make your selection on the basis of what you think will advance causes of humanity.”
That is, history is not an accurate record of what happened; it's a tool for social change. At least Zinn declares his dishonesty openly.
Through Zinn’s looking-glass, Maoist China, site of history’s bloodiest state-sponsored killings, transforms into “the closest thing, in the long history of that ancient country, to a people’s government, independent of outside control.” The authoritarian Nicaraguan Sandinistas were “welcomed” by their own people, while the opposition Contras, who backed the candidate that triumphed when free elections were finally held, were a “terrorist group” that “seemed to have no popular support inside Nicaragua.” Castro’s Cuba, readers learn, “had no bloody record of suppression."
The recently released updated edition continues to be plagued with inaccuracies and poor judgment. The added sections on the Clinton years, the 2000 election, and 9/11 bear little resemblance to the reality his current readers have lived through.
- In an effort to bolster his arguments against putting criminals in jail, aggressive law enforcement tactics, and President Clinton’s crime bill, Zinn contends that in spite of all this “violent crime continues to increase.” It doesn’t. Like much of Zinn’s rhetoric, if you believe the opposite of what he says in this instance you would be correct. According to a Department of Justice report released in September of 2002, the violent crime rate has been cut in half since 1993.
- According to Zinn, it was Mumia Abu-Jamal’s “race and radicalism,” as well as his “persistent criticism of the Philadelphia police” that landed him on death row in the early 1980s. Nothing about Abu-Jamal’s gun being found at the scene; nothing about the testimony of numerous witnesses pointing to him as the triggerman; nothing about additional witnesses reporting a confession by Abu-Jamal—it was Abu-Jamal’s dissenting voice that caused a jury of twelve to unanimously sentence him to death.
- Predictably, Zinn draws a moral equivalence between America and the 9/11 terrorists. He writes, “It seemed that the United States was reacting to the horrors perpetrated by the terrorists against innocent people in New York by killing other innocent people in Afghanistan.” Scare quotes adorn Bush’s “war on terrorism,” post-9/11 “patriotism,” and other words and phrases Zinn dislikes.
from the bureau of useless information
...also known as the Associated Press:
Now the death toll surpasses that of 9/11. U.S. military deaths from Iraq and Afghanistan now match those of the most devastating terrorist attack in America’s history, the trigger for what came next. Add casualties from chasing terrorists elsewhere in the world, and the total has passed the Sept. 11 figure.
The latest milestone for a country at war came Friday without commemoration.
Imagine that, no ceremony for a concocted milestone.
Consider this: 165,000 American citizens have died in traffic accidents since the war in Iraq began. Every single one of those deaths was preventable.
We don't need to drive cars. Millions of people on earth never drive and have never been inside an automobile. No more blood for speed!
friday, September 22 2006
army finishes best recruiting year since '97
The Army is ending its best recruiting year since 1997 and expecting similar success in 2007, despite the weight of grim war news from Iraq, Army Secretary Francis Harvey said Thursday.
Meanwhile, thousands of head in Blue States turned bloody from excess head-scratching.
who said this?
“Iran is the only country in the world that has now had six elections since the first election of President Khatami (in 1997). (It is) the only one with elections, including the United States, including Israel, including you name it, where the liberals, or the progressives, have won two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote in six elections: Two for president; two for the Parliament, the Majlis; two for the mayoralties. In every single election, the guys I identify with got two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote. There is no other country in the world I can say that about, certainly not my own.”
-- Bill Clinton in 2005
Read the full column by Amir Tehari.
Clinton extolls the virtues of Iran's "progressives" (who are not elected in any normal sense) and whose idea of progress is Sharia as their constitution, subjugation of women and executing homosexuals.
Clinton, as president, apologized to the Iranian people for installing the Shah.
“It’s a sad story that really began in the 1950s when the United States deposed Mr. Mossadegh, who was an elected parliamentary democrat, and brought the Shah back and then he was overturned by the Ayatollah Khomeini, driving us into the arms of one Saddam Hussein. We got rid of the parliamentary democracy {there} back in the ‘50s; at least, that is my belief.”
Amir Tehari, an Iranian expatriate, laughs:
Duped by a myth spread by the Blame-America-First coalition, Clinton appears to have done little homework on Iran. The truth is that Iran in the 1950s was not a parliamentary democracy but a constitutional monarchy in which the Shah appointed, and dismissed, the prime minister. Mossadegh was named prime minister twice by the Shah and twice dismissed. In what way that meant that the US “got rid of parliamentary democracy” that did not exist is not clear.
There are at least two things that Clinton does not know about Iran and Iranians.
The first is that the claim that the US changed the course of Iranian history on a whim would be seen by most Iranians, a proud people, as an insult from an arrogant politician who exaggerates the powers of his nation more than half a century ago. The second thing that Clinton does not know is that in the Islamic Republic that he so admires, Mossadegh, far from being regarded as a national hero, is an object of intense vilification. One of the first acts of the mullas after seizing power in 1979 was to take the name of Mossadegh off a street in Tehran. They then sealed off the village where Mossadegh is buried to prevent his supporters from gathering at his tomb. History textbooks written by the mullas present Mossadegh as the “son of a feudal family of exploiters who worked for the cursed Shah, and betrayed Islam.”
Apologizing to the mullas for a wrong supposedly done to Mossadegh is like begging Josef Stalin’s pardon for a discourtesy toward Alexander Kerensky.
Clinton does not know that it was President Harry S. Truman’s energetic intervention in 1946 that forced Stalin to withdraw his armies from northwestern Iran thus foiling a Communist attempt to dismember the Iranian state.
you're miserable, you dolt
Democrats incessantly harp that the American middle class is "disappearing." Numerous studies are cited to prove the point, with the subtext being the super-rich are hogging the wealth. If only we'd tax those greedy bastards, fairness could be restored to the Republic.
Endangered middle class? Who's buying all that Starbucks coffee? Bill Gates and his ilk can only consume so much caffeine. Now we learn that there are more televisions in the average American home than people.
Half of American homes have three or more TVs, and only 19 percent have just one, Nielsen said. In 1975, 57 percent of homes had only a single set and 11 percent had three or more, the company said.
So pricey coffee, more TVs. What else? Brink Lindsey writes:
...look at the two main indicators of middle-class status: a home of one's own and a college degree. Between 1970 and 2004, the homeownership rate climbed to 69% from 63%, even as the physical size of the median new home grew by nearly 60%. Back in 1970, 11% of Americans 25 years of age or older had a college or higher degree. By 2004, the figure had risen to 28%.
As to consumer possessions, the following comparison should suffice to make the point. In 1971, 45% of American households had clothes dryers, 19% had dishwashers, 83% had refrigerators, 32% had air conditioning, and 43% had color televisions. By the mid-1990s all of these ownership rates were exceeded even by Americans below the poverty line.
No matter how the doom-and-gloomers torture the data, the fact is that Americans have made huge strides in material welfare over the past generation. And with greater wealth, as well as improved access to consumer credit and home equity loans, they are much better prepared to deal with the downside of increased economic dynamism.
But, you say, what about the growing gap between rich and poor?
First, one must distinguish between societies where oligarchy and inherited wealth result in a quasi-feudal system and a stagnant economy; there the gap matters because the economic pie hardly grows. In a dynamic, open society and economy, the pie is ever expanding and the gap matters not.
Take as an extreme example the founders of Google. Ten years ago they barely had two dimes to rub together. Now they're multi-billionaires. Did they steal from the poor? Exploit the Third World? No, they created wealth with their intelligence and their entrepreneurial vigor.
Naturally, those who create wealth get much richer than those who don't. So what? Google has enriched my life and cost me nothing, zilch. Even if I had to pay for Google services, it would be my choice. Why should I resent that the Google guys are loaded?
Paul Graham created a software startup that became Yahoo Stores. He got rich. He's also a wonderful essayist. In Inequality and Risk he argues that the gap in America is good.
It sounds benevolent to say we ought to reduce economic inequality. When you phrase it that way, who can argue with you? Inequality has to be bad, right? It sounds a good deal less benevolent to say we ought to reduce the rate at which new companies are founded. And yet the one implies the other.
Indeed. For those who worship economic equality, move to Cuba. Everyone is equally poor.
Jim Bass
thursday, September 21 2006
forget homework
Says a new book, at least in elementary school.
the anchoress
His plans for raising taxes on American families and small businesses: “Democratic Representative Charles Rangel vowed to reach out to Republicans if his party wins control of the House in November, while acknowledging that they may find his plans for changing tax policy unpalatable.
“Rangel’s accession to the chairmanship of the committee would likely end six years of tax cuts by the Republican- controlled Congress. He said he ‘cannot think of one’ of President George W. Bush’s first-term tax cuts that merit renewal.”
None of them merit renewal, but just yesterday we read this report: US Treasury Sets New 1-Day Tax Receipt Record Of $85.8 Billion. Earlier we read that the growing receipts are doing real damage to the deficit...
See, this is one of the reasons I HAD to leave the Democrats. There is a disconnect, a fundamental refusal to engage in reality; to look at a thing and say, “gee…maybe we should rethink our old taxing habits,” seems not to be in their make-up. Unemployment is incredibly low - lower than it was in the “full employment” 1990’s. Tax receipts are incredibly high. But tax cuts are bad.
That’s right up there with the whole Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill debacle, whereby “strong, feminist women” were suddenly delicate shrinking violets unable to endure a ribald joke. Sexual harrassment - a serious issue - got defined downward for political expedience and suddenly the same women who had declared themselves “sexually emancipated” were cowering at a man’s appreciative glance at their legs, or a risque joke…that is, until Bill Clinton got into office and then, suddenly, we were told “boys will be boys” and “some guys have to be allowed one free grope…” or, you know…a woman complaining about sexual harrassment was “what you find when you run a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park.”
The inconsistancy, intellectual dishonesty and politically expedient double standards and rationalizations are breathtaking. I may not be a Republican much longer…but sometimes I wonder if I will ever be able to vote for a Democrat again.
we wanna be popular
When you enter a boxing ring, you agree to abide by the rules of boxing. But when you are attacked from behind in a dark alley, you would be a fool to abide by the Marquis of Queensbury rules. If you do, you can end up being a dead fool.
Even with a nuclear Iran looming on the horizon and the prospect that its nuclear weapons will end up in the hands of international terrorists that it has been sponsoring for years, many in the media and in the government that is supposed to protect us have been preoccupied with whether we are being nice enough to the terrorists in our custody.
house reverses itself, backs bush on interrogations
In an abrupt reversal, a U.S. House of Representatives committee narrowly voted on Wednesday to endorse President George W. Bush's plan for tough interrogations and trials of foreign terrorism suspects after Republicans rounded up enough members.
the impending american theocracy
Any reference to God from Republican politicians elicits a cry of "theocracy" from the left. The American Taliban and all that.
Of course, whenever Bill Clinton was feeling the heat of scandal, we'd see a page one photo of Bill and Hillary leaving church, Bible in hand, a godfearing couple.
Now Democrat Harold Ford has filmed a campaign ad inside a church.. The left's reaction?
Quiet as a church mouse.
lock that devil up!
Chavez has said the United States is "afraid of truth, is afraid of independent voices," yet Chavez has suffocated all dissent in his own backyard.
Beyond rewriting the Constitution to bolster his legal power, he's passed a law banning "the use of language deemed to be insulting to the President of the Republic."
In other words, if you travel to Venezuela and call Hugo the devil, you'd get arrested.
Chavez denounced capitalism as the generator of "mere poverty." Yet, thanks to a capitalist oil boom, he has profited from the richest Venezuelan government in history - but squandered its wealth on a new Venezuelan oligarchy of petro-millionaires masquerading as government officials. Meanwhile, misery and malnutrition are at a historic high.
Chavez railed against Western-style democracy. Yet it was western style democracy that brought him into power (after his own armed coup failed) and may remove him in the end. This is why he does everything he can to hollow and weaken democratic institutions.
It goes on and on.
UPDATE: Nancy Pelosi denounces Hugo as a thug . Apparently only Democrats are allowed to call Bush the devil. Has she called Cindy Sheehan to clue her in?
but tom harkin backs hugo
Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, a democrat, today defended Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's United Nations speech in which Chavez called President George Bush the devil. Harkin said the comments were "incendiary", then went on to say, "Let me put it this way, I can understand the frustration, ah, and the anger of certain people around the world because of George Bush's policies." Harkin continued what has been frequent criticism of the president's foreign policy.
...Harkin says, "We tend to forget that a few days after 9-11 thousands, thousands of Iranians marched in a candlelight procession in Teheran in support of the United States. Every Muslim country was basically on our side. Just think, in five years, President Bush has squandered all that." Harkin says the U.S. has put billions of dollars into the Iraq war, when it could be helping poor countries with things like clean water, medical aid and education.
"Every Muslim country was on our side?" That is spectacularly idiotic, even for a politician. As for Iran, the Iranian public is still pro-American, but the mullahs were never on our side.
And nitwits like Harkin accuse Bush of being stupid.
wednesday, September 20 2006
this has hit written all over it
See album cover here.
hugo chavez, democrat left find common ground
UNITED NATIONS - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez took his verbal battle with the United States to the floor of the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday, calling President Bush “the devil.”
“The devil came here yesterday,” Chavez said. “He came here talking as if he were the owner of the world.”
Note the author Hugo is plugging: Noam Chomsky, who along with Howard Zinn, are deans of the anti-American intelligentsia.
See the last item yesterday about Zinn.
playing the grace card
During a debate between the two candidates [Senator George Allen (R) and James Webb (D)], one of the media questioners, a local tv news person named Peggy Fox, asked Allen:
It has been reported that your grandfather Felix, whom you were given your middle name for, was Jewish. Could you please tell us whether your forebears include Jews and, if so, at which point Jewish identity might have ended?
Such a question is plainly out-of-bounds. Has any candidate in the modern era ever been asked by a respectable interviewer about the religion of his "forbears?" Our Constitution, for good reason, bans religious tests for public office. It may nonetheless be legitimate under some circumstances to ask a candidate how his or her religious views might affect decisions (as Mitt Romney no doubt will be asked many times).
But what legitimate basis can there be for injecting the religion of a candidate's grandfather into a campaign? And if that is legitimate, what's next -- a question about whether a candidate's forebears include African-Americans?
he loves puppies
A great political ad from Michael Steele, running for the Senate in Maryland. How many campaign ads make you smile while making a point? Very few.
media savvy
Twenty-first century Islamo-fascist terrorists... have refined the model and moved beyond an image of anger to a new form of prepared global ambush that integrates murder, terror and instant media.
The ambush technique coordinates blood-spilling violence with sensational imagery and rhetoric using a dispersed network of media operatives, guerrillas and terrorists. Networked, Coordinated Blood-spilling plus Sensationalism -- hence the technique's acronym: the CBS ambush.
The Koran flushing story, the Mohammed cartoons and recently the Pope all fit.
imagine
Imagine what it's like to be a young person living in a country that is not moving toward reform. You're 21 years old, and while your peers in other parts of the world are casting their ballots for the first time, you are powerless to change the course of your government. While your peers in other parts of the world have received educations that prepare them for the opportunities of a global economy, you have been fed propaganda and conspiracy theories that blame others for your country's shortcomings. And everywhere you turn, you hear extremists who tell you that you can escape your misery and regain your dignity through violence and terror and martyrdom. For many across the broader Middle East, this is the dismal choice presented every day.
Every civilized nation, including those in the Muslim world, must support those in the region who are offering a more hopeful alternative. We know that when people have a voice in their future, they are less likely to blow themselves up in suicide attacks. We know that when leaders are accountable to their people, they are more likely to seek national greatness in the achievements of their citizens, rather than in terror and conquest. So we must stand with democratic leaders and moderate reformers across the broader Middle East. We must give them voice to the hopes of decent men and women who want for their children the same things we want for ours. We must seek stability through a free and just Middle East where the extremists are marginalized by millions of citizens in control of their own destinies.
-- President Bush at the UN General Assembly yesterday
craving truth
A woman is buried to the waist in preparation for being stoned to death.Today humanity passionately craves commitment to the truth, devotion to God, quest for justice, and respect for the dignity of human beings. Rejection of domination and aggression, defense of the oppressed, and longing for peace constitute the legitimate demand of the peoples of the world, particularly the new generations and the spirited youth who aspire to a world free from decadence, aggression and injustice, and replete with love and compassion.
-- President Ahmadinejad at the UN General Assembly yesterday
tuesday, September 19 2006
required reading
Along with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn is considered one of the Left's great minds. When you hear Americans spouting anti-American arguments, they are often echoes of Chomsky-Zinn.
Dennis Prager interviewed Zinn on his radio show, and via polite but persistent questions, exposed the thinking that animates much of the angry left today. Sample:
DP: If America had never intervened, do we both agree that Kim Il-sung, the psychopathic dictator of North Korea, would have ruled over the entire Korean peninsula?
HZ: I think that's probably true.
DP: Do you believe that that would be a net moral or immoral result for the Korean people and the world?
HZ: That would have been an immoral result, but the result of the war itself was also immoral -- I'm talking about the killing of several million people. And what I'm suggesting is that the answer to . . . tyrannies like that is not war, which in our time always involves the massive killing of innocent people. . . . I think we have to find ways other than war to get rid of dictatorships and tyrannies.
DP: I would love that. But this is where we often consider people on the Left, at best, to be naive. . . . Let's talk about that naivete. You believe that there would have been another way to get rid of the Korean communists -- whom we both agree are monstrous -- as opposed to the Korean War. . . . This is the naivete of the Left, that ugly things can be gotten rid of in sweet ways.
HZ: Not sweet ways. I wouldn't say that. And I wouldn't say either in totally peaceful ways . . . by struggle and resistance but not by war. We have historical examples of what I'm talking about. The Soviet Union, Stalinism, was not overthrown by war. . . . Stalinism was really replaced, in time, by the Russian people themselves. . . . What I'm suggesting is that there are a number of places in the world where we have had tyrannies that have been overthrown without war. . . .
DP: Yes, there are. No one would deny that. And there are historical examples of where war is the only way to achieve a moral end.
HZ: Well, I'm not sure that's the only way.
DP: Was there another way to have gotten rid of Hitler?
HZ: In the case of WWII, I don't know what it would have taken to get rid of Hitler. We certainly had to resist him, we certainly had to get rid of him. . . . What bothers me most today is that people use WWII as an example for what we should do today. It's a very different situation.
DP: No, we use it as an example of where war is the moral choice. Are you prepared to say that war is ever the best moral choice?
HZ: No.
DP: Never. Not even against Hitler?
HZ: Well, I'm not sure about WWII.
Now consider this: Howard Zinn is professor emeritus of political science at Boston University. His "A People's History of the United States" has been adopted as required reading in high schools and colleges throughout the United States.
stop calling us violent or we'll shoot you
Cairo, Egypt (AP): Al-Qaida in Iraq warned Pope Benedict XVI on Monday that its war on Christianity and the West will go on until Islam takes over the world.
Got that? To radical Islam, it's us or them. Simple.
Does the Koran forbid stating the obvious? Because after the pontiff noted certain violent tendencies within Islam, a nun got shot in the back.
Pope Benedict has deplored the killing of an Italian nun in Somalia, saying that he hoped her sacrifice could lead to respect among religions.
Gunmen shot dead sister Leonella Sgorbati and her bodyguard on Sunday outside a children's hospital in north Mogadishu where she had worked since 2002.
Meanwhile, some Muslims have taken offense -- not at the murder which proved the Pope's point, but at his point. I love his Clintonesque apology, "Pope Says He's 'Deeply Sorry' for Reaction to Islam Speech."
Good one. We're all sorry about those reactions. We wish certain folks would grow up.
Including the lefty Americans who maintain that Bush invented the terror threat for political gain.
Shrinkwrapped offers a thoughtful perspective here.
essential for our next war with the swiss
The Geneva Convention, that is.
I'm not sure that there could possibly be a dumber argument for coddling terrorists than the one made by Lindsey Graham, who, as per usual, is playing Robin to John McCain's Batman, this time on the interrogation of terrorists. Here's Graham:
"Weakening the Geneva Convention protections is an unnecessary step and will put our military members and others defending our nation at risk by jeopardizing the protections they currently are provided.
"What is being billed as 'clarifying' our treaty obligations will be seen as 'withdrawing' from the treaty obligations. It will set precedent which could come back to haunt us."
Exactly what protections are our troops being provided by the Geneva Convention? No enemy we've ever fought or are fighting has abided by it. So, in real world terms, the Geneva Convention provides no protection for our troops whatsoever. If we completely withdrew from the Geneva Convention tomorrow, it would have no impact at all on how our troops are treated.
"copy what you like"
When I was in high school I spent a lot of time imitating bad writers. What we studied in English classes was mostly fiction, so I assumed that was the highest form of writing. Mistake number one. The stories that seemed to be most admired were ones in which people suffered in complicated ways. Anything funny or gripping was ipso facto suspect, unless it was old enough to be hard to understand, like Shakespeare or Chaucer. Mistake number two.
The ideal medium seemed the short story, which I've since learned had quite a brief life, roughly coincident with the peak of magazine publishing. But since their size made them perfect for study in high school classes, we read a lot of them, which gave us the impression the short story was flourishing. Mistake number three. And because they were so short, nothing really had to happen; you could just show a randomly truncated slice of life, and that was considered advanced. Mistake number four. The result was that I wrote a lot of stories in which nothing happened except that someone was unhappy in a way that seemed deep.
the "brilliant ten"
By “brilliant,” we don’t mean smart. Or at least not just smart. Brilliance is marked by insight, creativity and tenacity. It’s the confidence to eschew established wisdom in order to develop your own. It’s the foolishness needed to set out for the edge of understanding and sail right past it, ignoring the signs reading “Thar be monsters” (not to mention “Turn back lest ye never be awarded a decent research grant again”).
glad i didn't change the channel
The Dodgers are in a tight pennant race with the San Diego Padres, separated by a half-game. Last night I watched a 4-4 tie devolve (for the Dodgers) into 9-5 going into the bottom the ninth. Hopeless. Disgusted, I checked the description of the Seinfeld episode and wasn't interested, so I kept watching.
Then the Dodgers hit four consecutive home runs, only the fourth time it's been done in the majors. The game eventually went to a tenth, where San Diego scored a run and the Dodgers needed to keep pace. Nomar Garciaparra knocked a two-run homer to end it. And that was that. Wow.
my s0n tubby wants his chips
A group of mothers has started delivering fast food through a school's fence in protest at the campaign for healthier school meals.
The parents claim they are taking action because pupils are turning up their noses at what they describe as "overpriced, low-fat rubbish".
Four of them are using a supermarket trolley to make daily runs with fish and chips, pies, burgers, sandwiches and fizzy drinks from local takeaways.
monday, September 18 2006
case study in deception
You've heard how Bush flouts the Geneva Conventions, calling it quaint, right? Patterico shows how this BS got started by Newsweek's Michael Isikoff (also responsible for the phony flushed Koran story.)
From Newsweek:
“As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war,” Gonzales wrote to Bush. . . . Gonzales concluded in stark terms: “In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.”
The full Gonzales memo with the part cut by Newsweek in bold.
“As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war,” Gonzales wrote to Bush. . . . Gonzales concluded in stark terms: In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions requiring that captured enemy be afforded such things as commissary privileges, script (i.e., advances of monthly pay), athletic uniforms, and scientific instruments.”
double talk
Iran's Khatami addressed the Harvard swells in Farsi. The American audience heard a translator. Amir Tehari said it allowed Khamati to speak with forked tongue.
mark steyn
...underneath was something headlined "Half a Decade Gone By, A Reporter Still Cannot Comprehend Why." Well, in that case maybe you shouldn't be in the reporting business. After half a decade, it's not that hard to "comprehend": Osama bin Laden issued a declaration of war and then his agents carried out a big attack. He talked the talk, his boys walked the walk. If you need to flesh it out a bit, you could go to the library and look up a book.
But, of course, that's not what the headline means: Instead, it's "incomprehensible" in the sense that, to persons of a certain mushily "progressive" disposition, all such acts are "incomprehensible," all violence is "senseless." Unfortunately, it made perfect sense to the fellows who perpetrated it. Which is what that headline writer finds hard to "comprehend" -- or, rather, doesn't wish to comprehend. The piece itself was categorized as "Reflection" -- dread word. No self-respecting newspaper should be running "reflections" anywhere upfront of Section G Page 27, and certainly not on the front page. But it has exactly the kind of self-regarding pseudo-sophistication the American media love. The proper tone for 9/11 commemorations is to be sad about all the dead -- "the lost" -- but in a very generalized soft-focus way. Not a lot of specifics about the lost, and certainly not too many quotes from those final phone calls from the passengers to their families, like Peter Hanson's last words before Flight 175 hit the World Trade Center: "Don't worry, Dad. If it happens, it will be very fast." That might risk getting readers worked up, especially if they see the flight manifest:
"Peter Hanson, Massachusetts
"Susan Hanson, Massachusetts
"Christine Hanson, 2, Massachusetts"
No, best to stick to a limpidly fey, tastefully mopey, enervatedly passive prose style that suggests nothing very much can be done about the incomprehensible lost. This tasteful passivity is the default mode of the age: Five years ago it was striking, even in the immediate aftermath, how many radio and TV trailers for blood drives and other relief efforts could only bring themselves over the soupy music track to refer vaguely to "the tragic events," as if any formulation more robust might prove controversial.
la times does ethnic profiling
The screenwriter of The Path to 9/11 writes:
The L.A. Times, for one, characterized me by race, religion, ethnicity, country-of-origin and political leanings--wrongly on four of five counts. To them I was an Iranian-American politically conservative Muslim. It is perhaps irrelevant in our brave new world of journalism that I was born in Boulder, Colo. I am not a Muslim or practitioner of any religion, nor am I a political conservative. What am I? I am, most devoutly, an American. I asked the reporter if this kind of labeling was a new policy for the paper. He had no response.
The hysteria engendered by the series found more than one target. In addition to the death threats and hate mail directed at me, and my grotesque portrayal as a maddened right-winger, there developed an impassioned search for incriminating evidence on everyone else connected to the film. And in director David Cunningham, the searchers found paydirt! His father had founded a Christian youth outreach mission.
The whiff of the younger Mr. Cunningham's possible connection to this enterprise was enough to set the hounds of suspicion baying. A religious mission! A New York Times reporter wrote, without irony or explanation, that an issue that raised questions about the director was his involvement in his father's outreach work.
In the era of McCarthyism, the merest hint of a connection to communism sufficed to inspire dark accusations, the certainty that the accused was part of a malign conspiracy. Today, apparently, you can get something of that effect by charging a connection with a Christian mission.
I can hear it now: "are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Christian religion?"
more dangerous than microsoft?
...It seems to be the first example of Google benefiting from the Microsoft Office effect. In the 80s and 90s, Microsoft gradually killed off the competitors of its individual applications by making them tightly integrated. Obviously this works for web apps too.
Google may be even more dangerous than Microsoft, because unlike Microsoft it's the favorite of technically minded users. When Microsoft launched an application to compete with yours, the first users they'd get would alway be the least sophisticated-- the ones who just used whatever happened to be already installed on their computer. But a startup that tries to compete with Google will have to fight for the early adopters that startups can ordinarily treat as their birthright.
This is not just a problem for startups. It's a problem for Google's big competitors too. How can Yahoo or MSN or AOL launch some cool new thing when the people who care about cool new things never visit their sites?
The best solution for most startup founders would probably be to stay out of Google's way.
our trust is 15 percent contained
A wildfire has been raging since Labor Day in Southern California. Dubbed the Day Fire, it is now officially 14 days old and undergoing a growth spurt. Three days ago it encompassed 30,000 acres and was "13 percent contained."
I'm always amused by such precision: 13% you say? You sure it's not 14%? But then the devil Santa Ana winds blew in on Saturday and now the Day Fire is 65,000 acres, but 15% contained. Go figure.
Here in Thousand Oaks, 20 miles from the fire, we've been treated to gorgeous orange light beginning around 3 pm. The city has also taken on that camping aroma and windshields every morning show collections of fine ash. Nearly 2100 fire fighters have been working this fire. Tough work. Thanks to them all.
mature belgium
As one of the purported "mature" nations of Europe (as opposed to the adolescent USA), we are always interested in doings in Belgium. Somehow we missed this column by Bret Stephens last month. There's plenty to chew on, but this jumped out:
Amid a pervasive and growing sense of lawlessness--Belgium's per capita murder rate, at 9.1 per 100,000 is nearly twice that of the U.S.--the murder became the occasion of much national soul-searching. When Jean-Marie Dedecker, a senator from the ruling Liberal Party, opined in an op-ed that "policemen look the other way in order to avoid being accused of racism," he was rebuked by Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt for "inciting hostilities."
sunday, September 17 2006
hey, you said it
DES MOINES, Iowa - Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh defended Democratic assaults on President Bush's prosecution of the war on terror, but he warned Friday that his party can't come across as "a bunch of wimps" on security issues.
Asked about repeated Republican comments that Democrats are undermining the war on terror with their criticism, Bayh said Americans wouldn't buy it.
He means he hopes Americans won't buy it.
"These statements are wrong and the American people know that we're speaking out because we want to take a tougher, better approach to protecting this country," Bayh said in an interview.
Yes, getting tough by deploying troops from Iraq to Okinawa (Big John Murtha's plan), repeatedly harping about "exit strategies" and relentlessly focusing on the costs of war while ignoring the benefits.
With an election less than two months away, Bayh said Republicans are trying to focus voter attention on terrorism, a tactic that worked well in the 2002 and 2004 elections.
"Those statements we all know are made for political reasons," said Bayh. "The American people see through that and we need to denounce them, and immediately pivot and show how we will be stronger and better."
The American people might see through your pathetic attempts to talk tough. Remember, just two months ago your Democrat party released its New Direction for America and never, not once, mentioned fighting the terror war.
Meanwhile, Democrat Senator Barak Obama calls his party "confused" and "reactionary."
common sense down under
AUSTRALIA'S Muslim leaders have been "read the riot act" over the need to denounce any links between Islam and terrorism.
The Howard Government's multicultural spokesman, Andrew Robb, yesterday told an audience of 100 imams who address Australia's mosques that these were tough times requiring great personal resolve. Mr Robb also called on them to shun a victim mentality that branded any criticism as discrimination.
"We live in a world of terrorism where evil acts are being regularly perpetrated in the name of your faith," Mr Robb said at the Sydney conference.
"And because it is your faith that is being invoked as justification for these evil acts, it is your problem.
"You can't wish it away, or ignore it, just because it has been caused by others.
"Instead, speak up and condemn terrorism, defend your role in the way of life that we all share here in Australia."
Mr Robb said unless Muslims took responsibility for their destiny and tackled the causes of terrorism, Australia would become divided.
liberal democrats pushing "separate but unequal"
A few years ago, after the Democrats took over all branches of California's government, one of them boasted that the Golden State would be a proving ground for progressive (liberal) ideas. How true. And how frightening.
Jill Stewart notes how "progressives" in the state legislature are waging war on the State Board of Education. over bilingual education, by all rights a non-issue after voters approved Proposition 227 which eliminated it.
Under [Governor Pete] Wilson, an emboldened state Board of Education had already begun to reform the schools. Proposition 227 was a useful tool. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported in 1999, “In the past year alone, Wilson's board reinstated phonics instruction, changed how math will be taught, installed a new state achievement test, established grade-by-grade academic standards and refused to consider school district requests to teach in languages other than English.”
[Governor Gray] Davis' Board of Education was just as gutsy, linking textbook content to the tougher standards — despite opposition. Tests scores are now steadily climbing. Our awful schools are doing something right.
But last spring, the Legislature declared war on the Board of Education. “Progressive” legislators demanded that the board adopt a faddish idea, “Option VI,” to help “close the gap” between immigrant and nonimmigrant students. The board refused, so Democrats cut the board's $1.5 million annual funding.
No serious researcher would embrace “Option VI,” the latest Orwellian effort to segregate Latino students and water down standards. The “books and materials” were accurately described by the Los Angeles Times as having “more pictures and simple vocabulary.”
Dumbed-down. Separate.
Arnold will likely veto this latest attempt, but more will come.
So what's really going on? For starters, immigrant children are so quickly becoming literate in English compared with a decade ago that many California schools now refuse to identify them as fluent.
Why? Because California rewards schools for having “English learners.” Schools who admit a student has become “proficient” lose that money. That money, in turn, feeds a politicized adult lobby inside the schools whose jobs and power rely on keeping students in the “English learner” category.
One result: 170,000 children fluent in English are stuck in the “learner” category. And 522,000 immigrants, reclassified as proficient in English, scored higher on statewide tests than average California students. Their scores strongly suggest schools require “English learners” to learn the language better than average California students before they are classified proficient.
A tortured analysis in Escutia's bill claims that the “performance gap” between English-learners and other California students “has remained virtually constant in most subject(s)” since Proposition 227. How absurd. In truth, California's “English-learner” population of about 1.6million swells weekly from illegal immigration. As fast as kids learn English, their numbers are replenished. That's the so-called “gap.”
saturday, September 16 2006
deadly kindness
Richard Miniter visits Gitmo and concludes we're being too nice.
The high-minded critics who complain about torture are wrong. We are far too soft on these guys - and, as a result, aren't getting the valuable intelligence we need to save American lives.
The politically correct regulations are unbelievable. Detainees are entitled to a full eight hours sleep and can't be woken up for interrogations. They enjoy three meals and five prayers per day, without interruption. They are entitled to a minimum of two hours of outdoor recreation per day.
Interrogations are limited to four hours, usually running two - and (of course) are interrupted for prayers. One interrogator actually bakes cookies for detainees, while another serves them Subway or McDonald's sandwiches. Both are available on base. (Filet o' Fish is an al Qaeda favorite.)
Interrogations are not video or audio taped, perhaps to preserve detainee privacy.
Call it excessive compassion by a nation devoted to therapy, but it's dangerous. Adm. Harris admitted to me that a multi-cell al Qaeda network has developed in the camp. Military intelligence can't yet identify their leaders, but notes that they have cells for monitoring the movements and identities of guards and doctors, cells dedicated to training, others for making weapons and so on.
a peek inside the loony left mind
ThinkProgress, a leftist group, headlined a post "Bush Says Powell’s Criticism Is ‘Unacceptable’." From that, you'd think that Bush found Powell speaking up to be impertinent. But that was not Bush's meaning.
They even include the full exchange and still misunderstand.
During today’s press conference Bush said that criticism like Powell’s was “flawed logic” and “unacceptable.” Transcript:
QUESTION: Mr. President, former Secretary of State Colin Powell says, The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism. If a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former secretary of state feels this way, don’t you think that Americans and the rest of the world are beginning to wonder whether you’re following a flawed strategy?
BUSH: If there’s any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it’s flawed logic. It’s just — I simply can’t accept that. It’s unacceptable to think that there’s any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.
So Bush finds unacceptable any comparison between America's behavior and terrorists. Who can? People who can't listen and who cannot reason. If you have the stomach, read the comments.
f. scott fitzgerald and the name game
Freakonomics shows the author predicting the fashion in names. Be sure to check out the Baby Name Voyager that shows the popularity of names over time.
the pope and muslim rage
Instapundit has a nice collection of links.
survive this!
The CBS reality show Survivor debuted this season with four teams comprised of racial groups: Blacks, Latinos, Asians and honkies Caucasians. This was meant to stir controversy, which it did. Jeff Probst, the show's face man, also suggested it was a valuable social study, which it is not.
First the categories are nebulous. Asia is a mighty big place with a mighty diverse group of people. Are the Hmong people of Vietnam similar to Dehli Indians? As for Latinos, let me assure you that Miami's Cuban Americans do not consider themselves Chicanos.
Beyond that, the contestants were as undiverse as you can get. Virtually all were attractive, well-spoken and young. If Survivor wanted an lively social experiment, they should have tried these:
- Short, ugly people. Studies show that the tall and pretty earn more money and have more handed to them. But does it mean they have what it takes to survive? Go mutts!
- Bruthas from the 'hood. They know how to open fire, but can they start one?
- Trust fund brats. Nothing could be more entertaining than watching the spoiled get soiled.
- Jewish American Princesses. There will be kvetching, but it will be an organized group.
- Survivalists. Ain't it about time to see if they can live up their name?
friday, September 15 2006
starry night
Click image to see it full size.
tortured logic
James Taranto writes about the wrestling match over the Geneva convention:
...In this passage quoting a letter from retired general Colin Powell, the Financial Times gets to the nub of the problem without really realizing it:
"The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism. To redefine Common Article 3 [of the Geneva conventions] would add to those doubts. Furthermore, it would put our own troops at risk," Mr Powell wrote in a letter to Mr McCain released yesterday.
"We are not saying the CIA cannot carry out a programme," Mr McCain said yesterday. "We are saying it cannot amend the Geneva conventions, which calls for the kind of treatment of prisoners that fall under Common Article 3."
The argument is that unless we interpret the Geneva Convention as providing maximal protections to terrorists, our enemies will mistreat U.S. soldiers in their captivity. Assume for the sake of argument that this is true. If the restrictions on interrogations that Powell and McCain advocate result in another 9/11, then they will have sacrificed the lives of women and children in order to protect soldiers. Isn't it supposed to be the other way around?
Further, McCain's personal experiences--which lead people to be skittish about criticizing him on this subject--actually argue against his position. As a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, McCain suffered actual, brutal torture--not just aggressive questioning of the sort that the Bush administration seeks to legalize. America's adherence to the Geneva Conventions did not protect McCain--even though he, unlike the al Qaeda detainees, was a legitimate prisoner of war; and Hanoi, unlike al Qaeda, had ratified the Geneva Conventions and thus was legally bound by them.
Jidahis behead civilians and soldiers alike. How could it get worse?
The whole point of the Geneva Conventions is reciprocity: Nations agree that when they fight wars, they will do so in accordance with some civilized rules. Extending the conventions' protection to terrorists, who reject those rules, transforms Geneva into a suicide pact. John McCain is one of the Senate's true war heroes, but in this area his personal experience seems to be clouding, rather than clarifying, his views.
As for the world doubting "our moral basis" which world is that? Syria? Iran? North Korea? Or perhaps Germany. If you read this blog, you know that Germans are fed a steady diet of BS anti-Americanism in their media.
Must we adapt to appear normal in the fun-house mirror presented by foreign media? (Or the New York Times for that matter.)
Jimmy Carter and Michal Moore, to name just two, travel abroad telling foreigners how bad we are. Then their fans weep because "the world" doesn't love American anymore. Of course, it's all Bush's fault. Everything is.
stopfaxnow.com: a scam?
Junk faxes are infuriating. Today came an unsolicited fax from www.stopfaxnow.com promising to collect legal damages (senders are liable) for a cut of the action. The fax itself was spam and had no header or sender info. A web search turned up this.
hitchens debunks rich
...and Paul Krugman, too. Heard this one before?
The presidential press secretary, Ari Fleischer, condemned Bill Maher's irreverent comic response to 9/11 by reminding "all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do." Fear itself—the fear that "paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance," as FDR had it—was already being wielded as a weapon against Americans by their own government.
This "threat" was pure baloney, unlike the very real threat by Senate Democrats to ABC over last week's docudrama. Hitchens recounts the context of Fleischer's statement and shows the New York Times writers to be ugly propagandists.
too late smart
When I helped found Greenpeace in the 1970s, my colleagues and I were firmly opposed to nuclear energy. But times have changed. I now realize nuclear energy is the only non-greenhouse gas-emitting power source that can effectively replace fossil fuels and satisfy growing demand for energy.
Nuclear power plants are a practical option for producing clean, cost-effective, reliable and safe baseload power.
Nuclear energy is affordable. The average cost of producing nuclear energy in the United States is less than two cents per kilowatt-hour, comparable with coal and hydroelectric.
Nuclear energy is safe. In 1979, a partial reactor core meltdown at Three Mile Island frightened the country. At the time, no one noticed Three Mile Island was a success story; the concrete containment structure prevented radiation from escaping into the environment. There was no injury or death among the public or nuclear workers. This was the only serious accident in the history of nuclear energy generation in the United States. Today, 103 nuclear reactors quietly deliver 20 percent of America's electricity.
If, in fact, global warming turns out to be caused by human beings, should not the Green Scare folks (including Jane Fonda and her China Syndrome) be held accountable?
earmarks marked for death
With a disgusted electorate and an election less than two months away, the GOP-led House of Representatives has enacted new rules that purport to reform the out-of-control and corrupting "earmarks" process.
This is a much bigger victory than it might at first appear. It cuts the power of the Appropriators. Let that sink in because I've never seen them lose a fight over power in three decades.
John Boehner is exactly right: this moves the whole process "out of the shadows."
With this change, the public can, and will, see every earmark in every bill. The new pressure will be exactly the reverse of what has existed up until now where the members of the Appropriations Committee threatened their colleagues into submission. Now, the Appropriators are under the brightest beam of light; it'll be hard for them to keep loading up their own wheel barrels at the rest of the country's expense and much harder for them to pressure their colleagues. There will still be earmarks, but fewer of them.
Note that Republican Jerry Lewis, the old-timey Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, struggled against his reform-minded Republican colleagues and lost. David Obey, the thin-skinned, corpulent man who might be chairman if the Democrats take over, blows smoke about how this reform kills lobby reform. He's loud but wrong.
Earmark reform is a very strong cleaning agent -- if Members can't direct spending to special projects unless they do so in public and with their names attached, then the lobbyists paid to win appropriations will shift what they do and how they do it. They'll either be able to justify the need in public, or they will pursue other work, or they will wither away. That's effective lobby reform, Mr. Obey.
So here was an opportunity to spare taxpayers some pork barrel spending, and how did the vote go?
GOP: 199 ayes, 24 nays. Democrats: 45 ayes, 147 nays.
And more striking is that this was largely forced upon Congress by bloggers.
This earmark reform will feed bloggers left, right and center, which may turn out to be a very healthy discipline on Congress in general. Golly, that sounds like representational democracy might stick around.
"blind people know they can't see"
But journalists who deal with statistics often can barely add, let alone understand
It often gets dicey for readers when journalists, who are rarely math majors, play with numbers and then publish misleading or mistaken conclusions. It happened Labor Day when the Detroit Free Press published a horrifying map showing huge losses in household income across America. Horrifying and totally wrong, that is.
According to the map, between 1999 and 2005 median household income had fallen in 46 states, sometimes by double digits, plunging by 6 percent in the U.S. as a whole.
...
Every year, scores of fledgling journalists pour out of liberal arts programs. Though many will need to pick through mountains of statistics in search of the truth, few have been taught the skills to do it.
They quickly become victims of advocacy groups pushing skewed statistics. Through ignorance, they may also start manufacturing their own flawed numbers. Since number-crunching beats (such as business and finance) are generally viewed as a tedious waystation en route to more interesting beats, few are enthusiastic about developing these skills. And their editors may not be in any position to help them.
The problem is compounded by the fact that journalists who do know how to read a balance sheet, run a regression, or analyze economic data, can generally get a job that pays a lot more than journalism. Some stay in the field out of love for their work (journalism is a really great job), but in our experience some of the best flee to greener pastures.
Even worse, as mathematician John Allen Paulos is fond of pointing out, Americans are often too innumerate to analyze statistics printed in the newspaper. America’s schools haven’t given its citizens any more ability than its journalists to analyze the information that floods our lives. We would call it a case of the blind leading the blind, but the comparison is inappropriate. Blind people know they can’t see.
thursday, September 14 2006
oldest "new world" text found
In Mexico.
"everyone has a '60s"
Well, everyone who was alive then. Ginny at ChicagoBoyz offers a thoughtful essay.
One of my friends, Scotus, likes to see the movement between the early & late sixties as a contrast between the Beatles' "I Want to Hold Your Hand" (1963) and "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"(1967 ). He's got a point. But I'm amazed at how different our memories are: it wasn’t just different perspectives on the same music, idea, movie, place – the object at the center of our thoughts, often our obsessions, were different.
...
I try to explain to someone a generation younger – it wasn’t really that Dylan was counterculture. It wasn’t really that we were anti-war. We weren’t political – no one much was yet. (Well, Pete Seeger, of course.) Our music & our tastes came out of the fifties and its obsession with mental illness & alienation. We were prepared for it by the beats & the jazz our parents listened to. Brubeck cool.
Sure, Dylan sat at Guthrie's feet, but we didn't know Guthrie. We didn't care. We just wanted to sit around & talk about ourselves - throw in something from the novels we were reading, philosophy & history but in the end, it was always about us. Shannon’s right to complain about our generation’s naval-gazing, solipsism. But I’m not sure that we were that much worse than most are during those years. Still, there were so many of us and somehow, some of us never made our way out of that solipsism, that inward gaze of late adolescence. Probably the rest of you can give up on any of us still lost – I think we’ve passed the point of no return.
harvard prof not pleased with harvard
...Harvard has just welcomed the former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami to give a little talk. Harvard thinks this is free speech, but in fact the university has allowed itself to be used as a platform for sweet-talk in the service of a regime that hates, and wants to bamboozle, America. Note, too, that Harvard professor Stephen Walt and a Chicago professor have just written an exposé of the Israeli lobby's influence on American politics. They encourage the belief that Israel is the main problem we face .
Nor has Harvard relaxed its hostility to ROTC on the campus. The pretext is the military's policy discriminating against gays by requiring them to keep silent about being gay. Never mind what would happen to gays or defenders of gays if the Islamic fascists took over.
These are not isolated incidents but signs of the prevailing attitude at Harvard and other elite universities. There is lots of griping against the Bush administration but little activist dissent of the kind seen in protest against the Vietnam War. Cindy Sheehan's movement has not caught on.
All to the good, one might say. A university is not a political actor and should not be drawn away from its own business by too much concern for current events.
Yes, agreed. A university is an institution of learning, and as such takes a broad view of things. But this means it should learn from events if not try to control them. What has Harvard learned from Sept. 11? Very little.
Sept. 11 was a stunning blow to multiculturalism. The attacks showed that we have enemies who hate us because they hate both our principles and our practices. They despise the way we live not because we do not live up to our principles of freedom, democracy, and toleration, but because we do. They do not think we are multicultural; they believe we have one culture, and they mean to do away with it.
The feminists at Harvard seek to remove every vestige of patriarchy in America, but they have said almost nothing about the complete dismissal of women's rights by radical Islam. To do so would be to attack Islamic culture, and according to multiculturalism, every culture is equal and none is evil. They forsake women in societies that repudiate women's rights and direct their complaints to societies that believe in women's rights. Of course it's easier to complain to someone who listens to you and doesn't immediately proceed to slit your throat. No sign of any rethinking of feminism has appeared in the universities where it flourishes.
Civil liberties should be another topic of reconsideration. Civil libertarians on the left and the right assume that government is the object of their vigilance and minorities need special care. In time of peace that may be true, but in a war the government is your main friend, and the majority must be protected. The preaching of radical Islam is in fact ``a clear and present danger," and we need to suppress it. This sort of speech is not just blowing off steam or keeping us honest or puncturing our complacency. Here is a new task to occupy the anxious minds of civil libertarians in universities: how to distinguish truly dangerous speech and how to defeat it?
omar says kofi finally spoke the truth
After finishing his tour in the Middle East, Kofi Annan says most region leaders told him the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath have been a disaster. A disaster for whom, is the question…
Speaking about his tour of Middle East nations, Mr Annan told reporters:
"Most of the leaders I spoke to felt that the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath have been a real disaster for THEM...They believe it has destabilised the region."For the first time I agree with what dictators, despots and apocalyptic nutcases said!
I'd just replace "the region" with "their thrones" to make the statement correct.
Did the "invasion and its aftermath" destabilize the region from those leaders' perspective?
Absolutely yes! The Syrian Baath regime lost its eastern twin, Iran lost its anti-American, anti-Semitic western neighbor and the family-state in Saudi Arabia suddenly found itslef with a northern neighbor where minorities and majorities both have shares in governance.
Moreover, the peoples of the region, since then, became more daring in demanding their rights and criticizing the policy of their governments.
If this is not instability, then what is it?
the anchoress on the hot seat
...as she gets interviewed by a elementary school kid. Fun.
black and white and chicken all over
Comedian Colin Quinn observed that comics who flatter themselves as cutting edge by doing sexual humor are actually rather conventional -- the one touchy subject in America is race. People walk on eggs when race comes up.
A politician in Washington DC used the adjective niggardly and got fired, not because the word is racial but because some black nitwits failed to consult their dictionary before flaring their nostrils with indignation.
There's been a minor stink over tonight's Survivor episode because it pits four groups, based on race/ethnicity, against each other. Rush Limbaugh made fun of the controversy and was taken out of context by MSM to appear racist.
Dr. Clinton Chadwick, writing at PubliusPundit, takes on the subject and is bound to infuriate many.
Still it seems clear that some racial differences exist and examining them does not automatically make one a “racist.” Let us start by looking at a few sports. One of the under-celebrated sagas of human biodiversity in the last quarter of the twentieth century is the emergence of the black athlete. His primacy is so conspicuous in some sports, that at the highest levels of competition other racial groups are all but invisible.
Black superiority is dramatically illustrated in sprinting. No white has ever run a 100m in less than 10 seconds. At least 30 blacks have. The simplest explanation (usually the best) for black dominance in these sports is innate talent. Measurable anatomical and physiological differences support this conclusion.
In an intriguing statistical exercise, one specialist has calculated that the average black is athletically superior to the average white, in NBA scoring by almost an entire standard deviation (0.87) and about the same in sprinting (0.82). For those of you who do not understand “standard deviations” they are not something you do in the bedroom, but are measures of differences between people and other things in terms of a given variable. The measure of 0.87 is about like saying that blacks are 30% better than whites in NBA scoring and 28% in sprinting. Those are major differences!
Just imagine what affirmative action would do the NBA.
Let us shift to intelligence as a variable of interest. Ashkenazic Jews have earned 27% of the Nobel Prizes awarded to Americans, 25% of ACM Turing Awards (highly prestigious prize to individuals for contributions of a technical nature made to the field of computing), and 26% of the Fields Medals (awards for outstanding contributions given by the International Mathematical Union). They account for more than half the world chess champions.
Ashkenazic Jews, who are only two percent of the US population, make up 30% of elite-college faculty, 30% of Supreme Court law clerks, and 27% of Ivy Leaguers. One specialist suggests that the mean Ashkenazic IQ is 116 and infers an Ashkenazic “math IQ” of 1114. That is about 35% above average in verbal skills and 25% above average in math). There are several other studies that come to quite similar conclusions: Jews tend to be much more intelligent than average people. I think that could be called superior. Would that be racist?
And given the Jewish record of accomplishment, we cannever tally the cost to humanity of the Holocaust. One wonders whether Jihadis and other anti-Semites take their chances with polio since both vaccines were developed by Jews.
Chadwick makes a strong point about the differences between races, but one can always look at culture as a equally determining factor. If I go the public library on any school night, I will find a disproportionate number of Asian kids studying. This isn't a racial trait, but a work ethic inspired and enforced by parents, many of them immigrants who see the opportunity of the USA for what it is -- golden.
wednesday, September 13 2006
some women are supercolorful
Men are not, says new research into tetrachromats.
novak on armitage
The following came as an email from Novak; thus no link.
Now that former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage has finally acknowledged he was my source three years ago in revealing Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA employee, his interviews have obscured what he really did and said. I want to set the record straight based on firsthand knowledge of what transpired.
- Armitage did not, as he now indicates, merely pass on something he had heard and that he "thinks" might be so. Rather, he identified to me the CIA division where Mrs. Wilson worked and said flatly that she recommended the mission to Niger by her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson. He told the Washington Post last week that his answer was: "I don't know, but I think his wife worked out there." Neither of us took notes, and nobody else was present, but I recalled our conversation that week in writing a column, while Armitage reconstructed the conversation months later for federal prosecutors. In fact, he had told me unequivocally that Mrs. Wilson worked in the CIA's Counter-Proliferation Division and had suggested her husband's mission.
- Armitage did not slip me this information as idle chitchat. He made clear he considered it especially suited for my column. It is highly doubtful that he never expected this to be published, as he specifically noted to me that Mrs. Wilson's role was the sort of news item very much in the tradition of the old Evans & Novak column.
- An accurate depiction of what Armitage actually said deepens the irony of his being my source. He was a foremost internal skeptic of the administration's war policy, and I, likewise, had long opposed military intervention in Iraq. Zealous foes of George W. Bush have depicted me, implausibly, as the President's lapdog. But even they cannot fit Armitage into the left-wing fantasy of a well-crafted White House conspiracy to destroy Joe and Valerie Wilson. The news that Armitage, and not Karl Rove, was the leaker was devastating for the left.
- During his quarter of a century in Washington, Armiage and I had no contact before our fateful interview. I tried to see him in the first two and a half years of the Bush Administration, but he rebuffed me -- summarily and with disdain, I thought. Then, without explanation, in June 2003, Armitage's office said the deputy secretary would see me. This was two weeks before Joe Wilson outed himself as author of a 2002 report for the CIA debunking Iraq's interest in buying uranium in Africa.
- I sat down with Armitage in his State Department office the afternoon of July 8 with tacit rather than explicit ground rules: deep background with nothing said attributed to Armitage or even an anonymous State Department official. Late in the hour-long interview, I asked why the CIA had sent Wilson, who lacked intelligence and nuclear policy experience as well as recent contact with Niger. This began the three-year saga during which Armitage's silence caused intense pain for his colleagues in government and enabled partisan Democrats in Congress to falsely accuse Rove of being my primary source.
wtc lung disease: is it real?
...yesterday someone asked me about something that is in the news, and that I am qualified to comment on: "WTC syndrome". As it happens, I did watch a television documentary on that the other night. Since I spent a year in a trailer in the middle of the site, failing to wear my respirator as directed1, the commercials for those sorts of shows speak to me rather directly. They say "Want to find out if you're going to die horribly at an absurdly young age?"
Michael Fumento says that WTC Syndrome doesn't exist. He's extremely critical of the WTC health project at Mount Sinai, where I periodically go to get my breathing checked and have an earnest 22-year-old ask me whether I have thoughts of suicide.
I wouldn't go as far as Mr Fumento, though I think that there is much merit to his criticisms. Medical studies (other than for pharmaceutical approvals) are notorious for their poor design and willingness to draw conclusions from insufficient data. The figures confidently thrown around about how many WTC rescue workers are now sick are a good example. Only about 1/4 of the workers from Ground Zero are participating in the programme. Those who feel sick are much more likely to be trekking up to 106th Street in Manhattan (where most of the workers do not live or work) to get tested. Yet the media has repeated figures from the programme as if it were a double-blind, controlled study.
Moreover, everyone seems to be ignoring the enormous financial incentive that the cops and firemen have to be sick. Thanks to the immense amounts of overtime they received during the first few months of the recovery effort, many of the police and firemen who worked on the site had the highest earnings in 2001 that they will ever have in their lifetimes. If they retired by 2004, those earnings would be factored into their "average salary" calculations.
kyoto leaving (deutsche) marks
Ach du lieber! Being green costs money? Jobs? Who'dathunkit?
The Kyoto Protocol’s costs are coming as a shock to many German businesses and consumers. They’re finding higher utility costs resulting from their government’s implementation of the climate change treaty, The Wall Street Journal reported on September 11.
Reporter Jeffrey Ball noted that in Germany, Kyoto-inspired rules “have upset the business status quo” as they have ended up “creating winners and losers. The winners include utilities that can charge higher rates and profit from trading allowances” while the losers “include energy-intensive manufacturers.”
Later in his article Ball noted that the average German consumer also loses, with “wholesale electricity rates” going up “25% to 60% in the past few years.” Ball wrote that this is because while the tradable carbon allowance credits are free, “the utilities incorporate the value” into the price of electricity.
the french have pencils
Nidra Poller writes about a hot topic on French TV:
...A ten-minute feature on school supplies. Where? Not on a mail order channel, not on a morning show on a minor cable channel in Iowa (excuse me, Iowa) but right smack in the middle of the half-hour prime time news cast. School supplies. Not once, but at least fifteen times. Starting in mid-August.
Some people are getting a jump on things, buying school supplies before the back to school rush. Here’s monsieur so and so in this big supermarket chain, surrounded by packing cases packed with school supplies. He doesn’t have a pencil tucked behind his ear, but he talks as if he does. Yes, they’ve ordered and the shipments have come in, the shelves are stocked and the stock is backed up right here. Long shot of nifty clean warehouse. Pan to the school supplies department. A pretty young mother just happens to be there with a few neat clean children in summer clothes.
Philosophical comments on the price of notebooks, multiplied by the number of children, not to mention but of course she does mention the pencils, the erasers, the rulers, the felt-tip pens and colored crayons, the pencil cases, and a healthy dose of commonsense: of course she tries to avoid the “gadgettes” (French for gimmicks), though it isn’t always easy to resist, the children see the things on television (uh oh, we’re television our own selves!), you know, notebooks with Star Wars, pencils with flashlights…it adds up.
reading list
Google has a page devoted to "banned" books. It makes for a serviceable reading list, but the notion of banned books in contemporary America is twaddle. If you follow the link to the American Library Association, they simmer down to using, "Banned and/or Challenged Books."
Challenged would indicate the exercise of free speech, often parents or religious groups arguing against a book's inclusion in public schools or public libraries. While I disagree personally with most of the groups doing the complaining, and the books they dislike, they have every right.
For all the caterwauling about repression and squelched dissent, the USA is the most wide open society on earth. Those "mature" democracies of Europe, which liberals fawn over, don't have a First Amendment and it shows. Writers face criminal charges for words in books: just ask Orianna Fallachi.
Of course, there are times when repression is real. Just last week the Democrat party leadership threatened ABC/Disney with consequences if it broadcast a miniseries it found offensive.
In April 2001, left wing students at Brown University stole and destroyed 4000 copies of the student newspaper because it contained an ad arguing against reparations for American blacks. Usually the repression of free speech on campus is more subtle -- a bad grade given here, a Harvard president fired there.
The American Library Association, by the way, shrieked bloody murder about the Patriot Act for opening public library records to law enforcement review, yet refused to condemn Fidel Castro when he was throwing librarians in jail.
JB
disturbing dynamic in afghanistan
In the place where 90 percent of the world’s heroin supply originates, the Taliban, al Qaeda, and others harvest profits from opium poppy cultivation to buy weapons and equipment used to attack soldiers and civilians engaged in a mostly stalled reconstruction mission.
A reverse symbiosis is at work: Those who benefit most from the opium/heroin trades also benefit most from a destabilized Afghanistan, because a stable country with functioning government systems, reliable security forces, and a framework of laws is a bad climate for the drug trade.
Conversely, farmers growing crops such as cotton and beans benefit from a stable government climate, which affords the opportunity to think beyond the next crop cycle. In order to make agriculture a more successful business venture, farmers need a stable government as a partner. But since the interests of poppy farmers and narco-kings are in aggressive opposition to any plan to stabilize Afghanistan, this partnership is not even in the talking stages.
UPDATE: We should buy their opium.
tuesday, September 12 2006
reason #1298 why andy rooney should retire
The disaster on September 11th wasn't like any of those. It was manmade. Death by design. Some people who hated Americans set out to kill a lot of us and they succeeded
Americans are puzzled over why so many people in the world hate us. We seem so nice to ourselves. They do hate us though. We know that and we're trying to protect ourselves with more weapons.
And why do so many seek to immigrate here?
We have to do it I suppose but it might be better if we figured out how to behave as a nation in a way that wouldn't make so many people in the world want to kill us.
Behave how? Drape our women in black and beat them? Hang our daughters to preserve our family honor if perchance they get raped? Repeal the 1st Amendment and ordain Islam as the national religion and Sharia the law?
Is is our military? Well, we were on the side of Muslims in Afghanistan versus the Soviet Union. We intervened in the Balkins to save Muslims (and we're still there keeping the peace despite Clinton's estimate of a one-year mission). Was that wrong?
Did we not do enough for Europe during the Cold War?
Andy Rooney is a fatuous old man who would do well to read Mohammed at Iraq the Model for perspective on 9/11. And if he wants to understand anti-Americanism, he should read David's Medienkritik to understand how warped German media have warped German minds about the USA.
inscrutable
A photo of a Chinese basketball. And then there's the Chinese Oreo, the pandemic cookie.
even buddhists are not safe
...from Islamic terror. So teachers in Thailand are packing heat:
Teachers have one of the deadliest jobs in southern Thailand, with 44 killed by the bombs and bullets of an Islamic insurgency since 2004.
So the teachers are learning how to shoot back.
The Chulabhorn naval base, on the Gulf of Thailand in Narathiwat province, opened its heavily guarded gates on a recent Sunday to a training course for 100 public school teachers, mostly Buddhist men and women who say bringing a gun to school has become essential.
"You'd never see a teacher anywhere else in Thailand carrying a gun," said Sanguan Jintarat, head of the Teachers' Association that oversees the 15,000 teachers in the villages and towns of the restive south. "But, we need them, or we'll die."
the best time to buy everything
six degrees of separation is hokum
Says a BBC report.
more 9/11 video
Hot Air culled a lot of footage from that day into a 27-minute compilation.
But the most moving is an amateur video shot by of New York couple from their window. Facing more or less south, they could only see the first tower. Listen and watch as the horror of what happened sinks in. This is the final clip on the page. If you feel overdosed after yesterday's coverage, bookmark this for later.
crash course in america
The LA Times writes about a program to introduce Somali refugees to the strange American way.
Dogs are treated like people, money flows and life is easy. Or is it? U.S.-bound Somalian refugees get a crash course in survival.
They had learned how to buy bus tokens and clip coupons. Gotten hands-on training for lighting a gas stove and flushing a toilet. Taken a pop quiz on women's rights.
But for a group of U.S.-bound Somalian immigrants taking a three-day crash course on life in America recently, one topic by far stirred the most buzz: snow.
Staring at pictures of snow-covered roofs and hearing stories about waking up to find a frontyard covered in white, the Somalis (who'd rarely felt temperatures below 60 degrees) peppered the instructor with questions.
"How do I save my family from this … snow?" asked Hassan Mohammed Abrone, 41, a father of two who was already trying to embrace the American lifestyle by wearing a Statue of Liberty baseball cap and a pair of secondhand Nike Airs.
After hearing a description of coats, scarves, gloves and long underwear, another student, Lelya Yussuf, 23, asked: "How can we walk while wearing all that? Isn't it too heavy?" In an effort to explain snow to people who have never seen it, the instructor asked students to imagine how it would feel to live inside a refrigerator. But the analogy fell flat for some, because they'd never heard of such an appliance.
"This job takes a lot of patience," instructor Abdullahinur Sheik Kassim said. "You can't take anything for granted."...
Coming from a country without government or law, the idea that help is only a phone call away amazed Yussuf, whose parents were killed and who is traveling to the U.S. alone. "So if anyone bothers me, I just call 911 and the police come and beat them?" she asked. "Life must be very easy."
Immigrants also heard about U.S. laws. Beating your wife and children is illegal, they were told, and so is chewing khat, the leafy amphetamine-like stimulant popular in Somalia. Performing genital excision on young girls is prohibited.
"If I can't beat my wife, how will she know that I love her?" Abrone asked, seated next to his silent teenage bride.
Monogamy was equally unpopular with some men, who said their religion permitted four wives. But Kassim shut down the debate. "It doesn't matter," he told them. "In the U.S. you'll barely be able to afford one wife, anyway."
never united
We all saw clearly. But some of us were looking in a different direction. Some of us clearly saw the remorseless and ruthless murderers behind the attack, and knew that they were our mortal enemies who would attack us again if they possibly could, no matter what we did. Others were looking inward, and saw what they viewed as an ugly need for revenge amongst Americans.
We all vowed never again. Some of us vowed that we would do whatever it took to make sure that the terrorists didn't strike us again. Others vowed that they would do whatever it took to make America stop doing all the evil things that had inspired the attack in the first place.
The only consensus on 9/11 was that a terrible tragedy had occurred. There was no consensus as to who was truly responsible. And that is why within hours we began to hear, "Ask yourselves why they hate you." They knew that America had brought this onto itself; deep down they knew that we deserved it.
We all knew that reform was needed. Some of us thought it was the Arab/Islamic world which needed to reform. Others knew, deep down, that America was the true problem. To try to force reform onto the Arab world would be to renew the very mistakes which had caused the attack in the first place. And to even make the attempt would inspire more and more young Arab men to become terrorists against us, increasing the danger to us.
Some of us felt that the "root cause" of this war was Arab failure, and Arab shame at their failure. The others knew that the "root cause" was American failure, and America's refusal to feel shame at its failure.
We were not united on 9/11 and we have not been united on any day since. But that is not a weakness. If the people of America are ever 100% united on anything whatever, I will know that the country I love has died.
monday, September 11 2006
disconnected dots
Monday morning quarterbacking, 20/20 hindsight -- everyone is brilliant after the fact. In 2003 Malcolm Gladwell wrote an intriguing piece about intelligence.
In the fall of 1973, the Syrian Army began to gather a large number of tanks, artillery batteries, and infantry along its border with Israel. Simultaneously, to the south, the Egyptian Army cancelled all leaves, called up thousands of reservists, and launched a massive military exercise, building roads and preparing anti-aircraft and artillery positions along the Suez Canal. On October 4th, an Israeli aerial reconnaissance mission showed that the Egyptians had moved artillery into offensive positions.
That evening, AMAN, the Israeli military intelligence agency, learned that portions of the Soviet fleet near Port Said and Alexandria had set sail, and that the Soviet government had begun airlifting the families of Soviet advisers out of Cairo and Damascus. Then, at four o'clock in the morning on October 6th, Israel's director of military intelligence received an urgent telephone call from one of the country's most trusted intelligence sources. Egypt and Syria, the source said, would attack later that day. Top Israeli officials immediately called a meeting. Was war imminent? The head of AMAN, Major General Eli Zeira, looked over the evidence and said he didn't think so. He was wrong.
How could that happen? Easily. Read the piece.
being unfair to nazi appeasers
...despite Clinton's tough talk, that was, in fact, the end of his struggle against terrorism as far as military action was concerned. An astute observer would have gotten a better sense of things to come by listening to Ambassador Bill Richardson justify America's actions to the UN that day. Richardson defended the attacks by saying they were designed to "comply with international law, including the rules of necessity and proportionality." He went on to say that, "It is the sincere hope of the United States government that these limited actions will deter and prevent the repetition of unlawful terrorist attacks against the United States and other countries."
Unfortunately, taking "limited actions" and "hoping" was not an effective policy for deterring terrorist attacks, as America found out all too well on Oct. 12, 2000, when the attack on the U.S.S. Cole killed 17 sailors and wounded 40 more. Clinton, on his way out of office and focused on Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, did not respond militarily (he told the 9/11 Commission that there was inadequate evidence pointing to al Qaeda at the time).
The point is not that President Clinton completely ignored the threat of terrorism. More accurately, Clinton confronted it in much the same manner that today's liberals urge President Bush to approach it. The Clinton administration didn't "overreact," it made sure Americans were not too fearful of terrorism, it was conscious of "international law," it limited itself to low-scale military operations and was also actively involved in mediating a negotiated peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
Today's liberals want us to withdraw from Iraq out of a belief that the war is un-winnable and counterproductive. But that is precisely the same attitude that prompted the Clinton administration to withdraw from Somalia, an event of which bin Laden said, "our boys were shocked by the low morale of the American soldier and they realized that the American soldier was just a paper tiger."
...Before that fateful day five years ago, it was arguably understandable for people to have underestimated the threat posed by radical Islam (President Bush certainly did). But after Sept. 11, it is simply inconceivable that anybody would want to return to the way things were done before. Comparing Nazi appeasers to today's liberals is unfair to the appeasers of the 1930s, because at least they spoke out of ignorance about how dangerous Hitler was-- they weren't still arguing for appeasement in 1943.
what does/did the muslim world think of 9/11?
MEMRI films has the answer.
did it change us?
A great symposium. A must read.
loss of innocence
Anyone who lost their "innocence" on September 11 was too naïve by far, or too stupid to begin with. On that day, we learned what we ought to have known already, which is that clerical fanaticism means to fight a war which can only have one victor. Afghans, Kurds, Kashmiris, Timorese and many others could have told us this from experience, and for nothing (and did warn us, especially in the person of Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance).
Does anyone suppose that an ideology that slaughters and enslaves them will ever be amenable to "us"? The first duty, therefore, is one of solidarity with bin-Ladenism's other victims and targets, from India to Kurdistan.
That cliche should have been scrapped 140 years ago. Some say America lost its innocence when JFK was shot. Others say it's when the quiz show "21" was shown to be rigged (puhleeese). Other say it was WWI. But how could any innocence remain after the Civil War, when 20 percent of the population died?
abc's "path to 9/11"
For all the hubbub about ABC's miniseries, two things stood out. One, the director must be a frustrated dermatologist: why else shove the camera so close you're distracted by the actors' pores? Two, I can get seasick sitting on my couch when a director just can't keep the camera still. Sheesh.
Furthermore, National Geographic produced a much better four hour documentary a year ago. We linked to their website then and happly do it again because it is excellent.
sunday, September 10 2006
the backfire begins
Clinton shoulda kept his trap shut. Someone dug up this video from NBC News showing the blown opportunities to get Osama. Watch here.
from abc news in 1999
A different president, a different tune:
VINCE CANNISTRARO: Osama believes in "the enemy of my enemy is my friend and is someone I should cooperate with." That's certainly the current case with Iraq.
SHEILA MACVICAR: (voice-over) Saddam Hussein has a long history of harboring terrorists. Carlos the Jackal, Abu Nidal, Abu Abbas, the most notorious terrorists of their era, all found shelter and support at one time in Baghdad. Intelligence sources say bin Laden's long relationship with the Iraqis began as he helped Sudan's fundamentalist government in their efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
Three weeks after the bombing, on August 31, bin Laden reaches out to his friends in Iraq and Sudan. Iraq's vice president arrives in Khartoum to show his support for the Sudanese after the U.S. attack. ABC News has learned that during these meetings, senior Sudanese officials acting on behalf of bin Laden ask if Saddam Hussein would grant him asylum.
(on camera) Iraq was, indeed, interested. ABC News has learned that in December, an Iraqi intelligence chief, named Farouk Hijazi, how Iraq's ambassador to Turkey, made a secret trip to Afghanistan to meet with bin Laden. Three intelligence agencies tell ABC News they cannot be certain what was discussed, but almost certainly, they say, bin Laden has been told he would be welcome in Baghdad.
american exceptionalism
Yes, America really is unique. James Q. Wilson writes:
America differs from other democratic nations in many ways, some material and some mental. It has a more rapidly growing economy than most of Europe and a deeper sense of patriotism than almost any other country with popular rule. A recent survey of 91,000 people in fifty nations, conducted by the Pew Research Center and reported on by Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes, outlines our political culture and shows how different it is from that in most other democracies. Americans identify more strongly with their own country than do people in many affluent democracies.
While 71 percent of Americans say they are "very proud" to be in America, only 38 percent of the French and 21 percent of the Germans and the Japanese say they are proud to live in their countries. Americans are also much more committed to individualism than are people elsewhere. Only one-third of Americans--but two-thirds of Germans and Italians--think that success in life is determined by forces outside their own control. This message is one that Americans wish to transmit to their children: 60 percent of Americans say that children should be taught the value of hard work, but only one-third of the British and Italians and one-fifth of the Germans agree.
Over half of all Americans think that economic competition is good because it stimulates people to work hard and develop new ideas; only one-third of French and Spanish people agree. Americans would like their views to spread throughout the world: over three-fourths said this was a good idea, compared to only one-fourth of the people in France, Germany, and Italy, and one-third in Great Britain.
In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville discussed American exceptionalism in Democracy in America, and he is still correct. There was then and there continues to be now in this country a remarkable commitment to liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, and laissez-faire values. He gave three explanations for this state of affairs: we came to occupy a vast, largely empty, and isolated continent; we have benefited from a legal system that involves federalism and an independent judiciary; and we have embraced certain "habits of the heart" that were profoundly shaped by our religious tradition. Of these, Tocqueville rightly said that our customs were more important than our laws, and our laws more important than our geography. What is remarkable today is that a vast nation of around 300 million people still share views once held by a few million crowded along the eastern seaboard.
Read it all.