sunday april 30, 2006
french twist
France is agog (or should be) with reports Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin tried to smear political rival Nicolas Sarkozy by concocting a phony corruption scandal via a Luxembourg bank called Clearstream. It has a plot out of le Carré with a computer whiz relative of pro-Syrian Lebanese president Emile Lahoud involved.
who's gouging who?
"From 1986 to 2003, using 2004 dollars, the real national annual average price for gasoline, including taxes, generally has been below $2 per gallon," noted the Federal Trade Commission in a 2005 report absolving the industry of collusion. "By contrast, between 1919 and 1985, real national annual average retail gasoline prices were above $2 per gallon more often than not."
In other words, gasoline prices were lower than at anytime since 1919 for much of recent history. Some conspiracy! Maybe somebody should have been investigating consumers for "gouging" the oil companies.
And just who is the profiteer here? While the average profit on the sale of a gallon of gasoline is nine cents, the average state and federal tax on that same gallon of gasoline is about 45 cents (and 52 cents in Michigan). And if we must have an investigation, how about investigating the extent to which government regulations drive up prices and block new production?
Management guru Peter Drucker once remarked, with his usual drollery, that profit is "whatever government lets a company keep." But most folks have a vastly inflated view of corporate profits. One regular survey of Americans found that the majority believes the average corporate profit is between 30 percent and 40 percent of sales, while the real figure is closer to 4 percent.
deadeye dick
A highly improbable shot left an officer's bullet in the cylinder of a gunman's revolver, and police say it's a pretty clear sign that the officers who shot the man faced a deadly threat.
saturday april 29, 2006
peace and prosperity in iraq
...the Kurdish territory in the north. After the Gulf War, the US and Britain established and patroled no- fly zones to prevent Saddam from murdering his enemies in the north and south of Iraq.
With our protection, over ten years the Kurds established a functioning democracy. Today they are prospering.
Michael Totten's travelogue painted a picture of ho-hum normalcy. In today's LA Times we learn that Iraqi Kurds are doing commerce with Turks, their longtime enemy.
To date, 314 Turkish companies have signed contracts for projects valued at more than $1 billion, officials of Iraqi Kurdistan have said.
Visitors to Kurdistan can fly into one of two airports built by companies based in Turkey, drive Turkish-built roads and see Turkish-built housing developments and university buildings.
"Turkish companies are everywhere in Kurdistan and doing everything," said Ilnur Cevik, a Turkish businessman whose Cevik Ler company claims more than $100 million in Kurdish government construction contracts.
"Soon my company will be generating electricity in collaboration with the Kurdistan government," he said.
Today's Iraqi Kurdistan would not exist without our help. Bush's war critics act as if liberating Iraq were all for naught. How can liberals, who profess to care about people, dismiss this success?
Furthermore, critics ignore the reality that Iraq's status quo circa 2003 was unsustainable. Our "allies" were violating the sanctions (true blood for oil) and the Saudis wanted us to stop flying air patrols from bases in the Kingdom.
59 things a man should never do past 30
slouching to eurabia
Sweden has withdrawn from European military exercises due to be held next month in Italy because of Israel’s participation, Swedish foreign ministry and military officials said on April 26.
dying for love
why faces age
It's the bones.
malcolm gladwell on eye witness testimony
Psychologists don’t particularly like eye witness testimony. Elizabeth Loftus has done a lot of really interesting work exposing its various frailties. Juries and laypeople (and prosecution attorneys) tend to have a great deal more faith in someone’s ability to pick a suspect out of a lineup than they should.
In Blink, I mentioned the research of Jonathan Schooler on lineups: he’s showed that merely requiring people to write down a physical description of the suspect before viewing the lineup radical impairs their ability to pick out the correct person.
But the Duke case is an example of another, even more problematic aspect of eyewitness identifications, and that is that we aren’t particular good at making them across races.
Fascinating stuff. Read it all.
high-low: pondering prices
All the griping and politicking over gas prices reminded me of one item that has always seemed suspiciously overpriced: eye glass frames. How can a small bit of wire cost $100 and up (way, way up)? Is there something special about the materials used or high labor costs involved?
Can't be, because Costco sells three-packs of reading glasses for $18 -- that's with the standard magnifiying lenses included. And the frames that come with those glasses are as durable as the pricier ones.
A British college student named Murray Wells wondered about the high cost of glasses, too. He dug into it and learned the markup was around 2000 percent in England:
"...it turned out that my £150 pair of glasses probably only cost about seven pounds to make.”
Murray Wells was supposed to be hammering the books in preparation for his finals but instead found himself immersed in the glasses industry.
He learnt about optometrical testing, how the frames are made and the lenses are cut.
He discovered that the market is around 70 per cent controlled by just four high street retailers: Vision Express, Boots, Dolland & Aitchison and Specsavers.
But, most significantly, he learnt that he could make glasses for a fraction of the price that they were being sold on the high street.
And now Murray Wells is in the eyeglass business.
A complete discussion of prices must include impossibly low prices, too.
Consider this: in 1993, I bought my first CD burner, a 1x Sony that cost $5000. That's right -- five grand.
It had a tiny buffer, so any glitch in data transfer would ruin the disc being burned. Blank CDs cost $20 each. And the software to make CDs cost another $500.
This week I replaced my HP burner (which cost $250 four years ago) with a Memorex DVD burner. It makes all flavors of CD/DVD including dual-layer DVDs at a top speed of 16x. Included was a suite of software that burns audio discs, movie DVDs and slideshows, plays movies and runs scheduled system backups. Price: $79 before the $20 rebate.
So in my hand, an electronic device with lasers, circuits and motors that cost $59. Resting on my ears and nose are glasses that cost twice as much. Please don't mention this to Congress. If they get involved the glasses will likely stay the same but the burner will go back up to $5000.
JB
democrat culture of corruption
The F.B.I. has notified three nonprofit organizations created by Representative Alan B. Mollohan and financed primarily through special federal appropriations he steered their way that they should expect subpoenas soon for financial and other records.
Mr. Mollohan, Democrat of West Virginia, stepped down from the House ethics committee last week over accusations of financial impropriety that stem largely from a complaint the conservative National Legal and Policy Center has filed with the United States attorney in Washington.
Why, news like is enough to make Nancy's eyes bug out.
friday april 28, 2006
let 'em eat lutefisk
Sweden's largest Muslim organisation has demanded that Sweden introduce separate laws for Muslims, according to Swedish television. Sweden's equality minister Jens Orback called the proposals "completely unacceptable".
The Swedish Muslim Association, which represents around 70,000 Muslims in Sweden, has sent a letter to all Sweden's main political parties suggesting a number of reforms, SVT's Rapport programme reported.
The proposals include allowing imams into state (public) schools to give Muslim children separate lessons in Islam and their parents' native languages. The letter also said that boys and girls should have separate swimming lessons and that divorces between Muslims should be approved by an imam.
better mouse trap
Maggie's Farm linked to this company that created a table saw that won't cut your fingers off. It's amazing what people invent when they put their minds to it.
creating wealth
A recent visit by in-laws produced some mild debates. One morning, someones griped about the high compensation paid to Terry Semel, CEO of Yahoo.
He: It's ridiculous what these CEOs get paid.
Me: The guys who founded Google are billionaires. Are they paid too much?
He: No, they built something.
Me: So did the two guys who founded Yahoo. And at some point they realized they didn't have the skills to take Yahoo to the next level, so they hired Terry Semel. If his savvy increases the value of the company, isn't he in fact building something, too?
And thus it went.
Football fans know that Bill Parcells turns losing football teams into winners -- he's got something special. But they stumble over the idea that some CEOs make companies into winners, and thus make big bucks. (Having idiot bosses partially explains this prejudice.)
Which brings us to Exxon-Mobil's retiring CEO, Lee Raymond, who was paid $686 million over 13 years:
Raymond inherited a company that was undervalued and transformed it into one so efficient it has become a model not only for his own industry, but most others as well.
...during Raymond’s 12 years as CEO, Exxon Mobil’s stock price quintupled and the market value of the company rose from $82 million to more than $352 billion.
Over a career that spanned 43 years, Raymond worked his way up from a production research engineer to head man. Exxon Mobil now has 86,000 employees working in 20 countries. By all accounts it treats its workers very well and its pay is well above the industry’s average. During Raymond’s stint as CEO, it never was forced to lay off an employee.
He should be ashamed, at least according to Paul Krugman.
speaking of krugman
If Paul Krugman put on a Howdy Doody costume, had pictures taken of himself and then ran several of those photos in the space usually devoted to his New York Times column, it wouldn't be more laughable, more beside the point, more a comment on the decline of a once-great newspaper, than the stuff he often writes.
Take for instance a recent outing in which he took on global warming. He did not bother to engage the issue so much as to employ two logical fallacies, one of which is his very favorite technique, the ad hominem attack, delivering swift kicks at the character or motives of people with whom you disagree. Maybe Krugman gets it that you don't prove or disprove anything with this method of argument, but if he does, he apparently doesn't care.
hillary-nomics
On the one hand, Clinton acknowledged a growing economy, a stock market at historic highs, strong productivity and profits, and low unemployment, while on the other she called for big-government investment in infrastructure and heavy spending on health care and education.
The senator argued that “tax cuts are not the cure-all for everything that ails the American economy,” and that instead we need the “right tax system (and) the right investment, including infrastructure … decisions and policies that only all of us acting together through our government can make to set the stage for future prosperity.”
So what we have is a plea for a government-directed economy. This used to be called industrial planning, until the dismal economic performances of France, Germany and Japan totally discredited those terms. But for Clinton, government planning is back.
...
Clinton also engaged in class warfare, telling the assembled businesspeople: “America did not build the greatest economy in the world because we have rich people. Nearly any society has some of those.” She implied tax increases on the rich and a redistribution program worthy of any centrally planned economy.
Hasn’t Clinton noticed the spread of free-market capitalism that has become such an enormous wealth creator across the globe? The growth principles of higher after-tax returns for work and investment, deregulation to limit government’s reach, and the privatization of government-run companies have become almost commonplace.
Clinton would have us turn the clock. She defines her goals in terms of “a middle-class life, education, health care, transportation and retirement.” But all this is nothing more than a dose of government spending and regulating — a sure prescription for more taxes and a declining economy.
tax cuts for the rich
The nation's economy regained momentum in the first quarter of the year as it recovered from the hurricanes of 2005, the Commerce Department reported today, growing at a rate of 4.8 percent compared to 1.7 percent in the previous quarter.
It was the hottest pace for the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in two-and-a-half years, with robust spending by consumers, business and government all doing their part.
thursday april 27, 2006
oiling a slippery slope
Economic idiocy drove me from the Democrat party 30 years ago. Let me them run the economy and brace yourself. (For those tempted to cite the golden Clinton years, remember six of his eight years featured a Republican Congress behaving like Republicans.) Anyway:
The Democrats threaten to take oil company profits and invest them into “rebates” for consumers to make the public think they’re playing Robin Hood - taking greedy profits from evil big oil and giving it to the poor, average American so they can afford gas - completely ignoring the fact that the “rebates” will be offset by the oil companies passing such cost along to those very consumers.
But let’s look at two things higher gas prices bring us:
1. Conservation - people generally don’t buy what they can’t afford
2. Incentive to oil companies to explore - higher gas prices encourage gas exploration into areas previously restricted by cost, or exploration into alternative fuel sources altogetherBut if government is taking away the profits and giving them to consumers as “rebates” then consumers have no reason to conserve, and oil companies have no incentive to explore. How do I know this? Because that very scenario played out in the 1970s and early 1980s.
This is an excerpt from a meaty post by Texas Rainmaker, who includes this telling graphic:
neil young gets old
Sondra K. does a line-by-line skewering of Neil Young's Impeach the President. I'm a big fan of NY, but he's made himself look like a primitive with this puked-up outburst.
Only his friends and peers could have prevented this embarassment, but then they'd need to be clean of Bus Derangement Syndrome to have have known.
god helps those who help themselves
...so try out do-it-yourself Lasik surgery? You could be the blind leading the blind.
wednesday april 26, 2006
chindogu
The Japanese art of inventing useless products. Funny.
blame it on gender stereotyping
WASHINGTON — Just like human boys and girls, male monkeys like to play with toy cars while female monkeys prefer dolls, a research project has shown.
This intriguing discovery is one of many signs of deep-rooted behavioral differences between the sexes that scientists are exploring with the latest tools of genetics and neuroscience.
Researchers report significant differences in the structure and functioning of male and female brains — in humans and in animals — that show up in different behaviors.
windfall for the dimwitted (reprised from December)
George Will on the politics of oil:
"None of us know much about what is happening with respect to pricing," said Dorgan, disclaiming a competence rarely ascribed to senators. But, quickly recovering from uncharacteristic humility, Dorgan joined Senate colleagues in exhibitionistic indignation about the fact that the five largest oil companies, led by ExxonMobil's $9.9 billion, had combined third-quarter profits of $32.8 billion.
ExxonMobil, which has more than $50 billion of past profits invested in energy development, made 9.8 cents per dollar of sales, much less than the 21.2 cents made by a company selling another fluid that lubricates American life -- Coca-Cola.
Nevertheless, another Midwestern populist, Sen. Charles Grassley, the increasingly eccentric Iowa Republican who chairs the Finance Committee, admonished the oil companies to contribute 10 percent of their third-quarter profits to augment existing federal subsidies that help some Americans pay their heating bills. Many of those Americans live in the chilly Northeast and vote for liberals who, in Congress, write this narrative:
By blocking much drilling in Alaska and offshore, Congress does nothing to lower the price of oil. Then Congress spends taxpayer dollars to soften the impact of the price, thereby encouraging consumption that raises the price. Then Grassley asks oil executives to join the moral grandstanding by squandering their shareholders' wealth -- diverting it to protect oil consumers from some consequences of their representatives' irrationality.
importance of failure
You can have an entire career in the drug industry, just sitting around telling people that their ideas aren't going to work. And more than nine times out of ten, you'll be right. Fortunetellers and stockpickers should have such a record! So what's the problem?
Well, the problem is, the whole industry depends on those times when someone's idea actually works. For that to happen, chances have to be taken, risks run. Being in charge of reluctantly-killing-off-once-promising-projects has a lot more job security, but someone has to go and make something happen once in a while.
kennewick man from japan?
The latest:
What the experts were able to ascertain from their brief encounter with Kennewick is that he did not look like a Native American. In fact, Berryman says Kennewick’s facial features are most similar to those of a Japanese group called the Ainu, who have a different physical makeup and cultural background from the ethnic Japanese.
Some Ainu’s facial features appear European. Their eyes may lack the Asian almond-shaped appearance, and their hair may be light and curly in color. However, this does not mean that Kennewick Man necessarily was European in origin. His features more closely resemble those of the natives of the Pacific Rim than those of Native Americans.
Here's another teachable moment about political correctness, science and the religious left.
Native Americans wanted to destroy a rare archeological find because their religion demanded the old bones be buried, not studied. The left backed the Indians' religious prerogative.
But what if the bones were not of an ancient Indian? That's where it gets sticky. For a full recounting of the Kennewick saga go here.
heads-up soccer
File this away for the next time a Democrat whines that Bush offended our allies and made us (gasp!) unpopular. A major German weekly reported to its readers that American troops play soccer with severed heads of Iraqis:
Medienkritik reader CH made as aware of this story about a deserter from the American army because of the war in Iraq:
I am writing to you because I came across this article in 'Die Zeit'. Among other things, the article makes the claim that the American soldiers play soccer with the heads of dead Iraqis:
Josh has no fear. What should one be afraid of when one has stormed 75 houses in Ramadi and Falludscha and has seen how his comrades play soccer with severed heads of dead Iraqis? What should one still be afraid of, then, someone should tell him. No one can say that to him – not to him.
liberals favorite general is a poodle
Jed Babbin, a former deputy under-secretary of defense, writes:
When President Bush brought Rumsfeld back to the Pentagon, the president told him to shake up the Pentagon, to transform it from the Cold War structure and culture that it was stuck in to a new force with strategies that could respond to the post-Cold War world.
Months before Sept. 11, as Rumsfeld began the transformation of the Pentagon, he ran into contumacious obstructionism from the army and its then-Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki. Shinseki dug his heels in and refused to change much of anything about the Army. Shinseki went as far as to go behind Rumsfeld’s back to the Senate where his political mentor (and long-time family friend, Sen. Dan Inouye of Hawaii) and others backed his play.
But for the political cover Sen. Inouye gave Shinseki, he might have been fired then and there. Civilian control of the military means people such as Shinseki cannot be allowed to play the back-channel political games he played again and again. Shinseki stayed, and the Army went on to spend billions on the Stryker armored vehicle, a Cold War style peacekeeping vehicle that is too big and too heavy to be moved by a C-130 tactical airlifter without being partially disassembled.
And then came Sept. 11. The Secretary of Defense became the secretary of war and the transformation he had brought to the Pentagon had to be continued under fire. Still, the Army resisted.
Shinseki balked at striking at the Taliban. For the record, our forces slashed into the Taliban around Oct. 5, 2001, less than a month after Sept 11. But — aside from Rangers and Army Special Forces — the Army stayed home. Shinseki wanted at least six months to assemble and move an enormous Soviet-like force into Afghanistan and the president wasn’t having any of it. This is why Shinseki retired in 2003 with a festering grudge against Rumsfeld.
And then Rumsfeld did the unthinkable. Instead of replacing Shinseki with one of his like-minded underlings, Rumsfeld looked for someone who would fight. Gen. Peter Schoomaker, a Special Forces vet, was brought out of retirement to transform the Army in the middle of a war. And he did it. But in the process Rumsfeld, Schoomaker and his team shook up a lot of people.
Read it all.
tuesday april 25, 2006
gas bags, or high-test incompetence
Why is gas selling for $3/gallon?
Oil prices hit $75 a barrel last week, while gas has reached a national average of about $2.85 a gallon. The Republican response has been to put on Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi fright wigs and shout about corporate greed and market manipulation. House Speaker Denny Hastert and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist fired off a letter to President Bush yesterday demanding the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department investigate "price fixing" and "gouging." Senator Arlen Specter wants to go further and impose stricter "antitrust" laws for oil companies, as well as a "windfall profits" tax. Mr. Hastert also delighted the class warriors in the press corps by lambasting recently retired Exxon CEO Lee Raymond's pay "unconscionable."
There's been unconscionable behavior all right, most of it on Capitol Hill. A decent portion of the latest run-up in gas prices--and the entire cause of recent spot shortages--is the direct result of the energy bill Congress passed last summer. That self-serving legislation handed Congress's friends in the ethanol lobby a mandate that forces drivers to use 7.5 billion gallons annually of that oxygenate by 2012.
At the same time, Congress refused to provide liability protection to the makers of MTBE, a rival oxygenate getting hit with lawsuits. So MTBE makers are leaving the market in a rush, while overstretched ethanol producers (despite their promises) are in no way equipped to compensate for the loss of MTBE in the fuel supply. Ethanol is also difficult to ship and store outside of the Midwest, which is causing supply headaches and spot gas shortages along the East Coast and Texas.
These columns warned Republicans this would happen. As recently as last year, ethanol was selling for $1.45 a gallon. By December it had reached $2 and is now going for $2.77. So refiners are now having to buy both oil and ethanol at sky-high prices. In short, the only market manipulation has been by politicians.
And shame on President Bush for wilting under the political heat and joining the chorus of "concerned" pols in Washington. Hey, what about ANWR?
retired generals, msm and the big picture
From Strategypage:
April 25, 2006: The recent flap over six retired American generals publicly calling for the Secretary of Defense to resign, also brought out opinions, via the Internet, from lower ranking troops (active duty, reservists and retired.) The mass media ran with the six generals, but got shot down by the troops and their blogs, message board postings and emails. It wasn't just a matter of the "troop media" being more powerful. No, what the troops had going for them was a more convincing reality.
Unlike the six generals, many of the Internet troops were in Iraq, or had recently been there. Their opinions were not as eloquent as those of the generals, but they were also more convincing. Added to that was the complaint from many of the troops that, according to the American constitution, it's the civilians (in the person of the Secretary of Defense) that can dismiss soldiers from service, not the other way around. While the six generals were only expressing their opinions (which only active duty troops are restricted from doing, because of the different military legal system they operate under), it rubbed a lot of people (military and civilian) the wrong way because of the constitutional angle.
Naturally, the details of this media battle didn't get a lot of coverage in the mass media. Makes sense. Who wants to discuss a defeat, by a bunch of amateurs no less. But the mass media has been missing an even larger story about the military and the Internet.
The military has become a lot more responsive to "what the troops want" in the last decade, since the Internet became widely available. What happened was simple. The troops got online, found each other and have been sharing opinions and experiences, getting to know each other, and doing it all very quickly. The most striking example of this is how it has changed the speed with which new weapons and equipment get into service.
Troops have always bought superior commercial equipment, usually from camping and hunting suppliers. And a lot more of that gear has been available in the last decade. Because the word now gets around so quickly via the net, useful new gear is quickly purchased by thousands of troops. After September 11, 2001, with a war on, having the best gear was seen by more troops as a matter of life and death. This quickly got back to politicians, journalists and the military bureaucrats responsible for buying gear for the troops. The quality of the "official issue" gear skyrocketed like never before because of the Internet pressure.
zarkman hates email
Iowahawk has another hilarious "guest commentary" by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi Senior VP, Al-Qaeda In Iraq"
Word up whitebread, how you livin'?
Yeah, I been gettin' all your email haterade. All y'all infidels be texting and emailing, and it's all like "yo Zarks where u at? Al Qaeda cut off your TypePad account? LOL!!!"
Hey cuz, act like you know. Like the Zarkman got time to be blogging this bitch with the Q1 decapitation reports overdue, and Fatima all up in my grille wantin’ money for the kids' summer martyr camp, and Team Satan sendin’ another crew of laser-guided "downsizing consultants" every freaking day.
Fo real, you think Zarkman got time to play penpal with you chumps? Cracka, every damn morning I got an Outlook inbox full of fresh steaming dung to deal with. Meeting notices from Zawahiri. Overdue notices from the IED suppliers. Ads for Hoodia and boner pills. Six different NCAA pools. Then there's the tardmail from my Daily Kos fanboys:
Hey Zarkman!
OMG u r teh ROXOR! Its like u r total Che Guervera and Fidel and Malcom X plus System of a Down!! Good luck against the Zionist neocon occupiers!!!! Ya,, SCREW those mercenaries!!! Everybody here at UCLA Ed school thinks u r total l33t HARDCORE!!!Fight teh POWER bro!!!
Dr. Peter McLaren
Professor, Graduate School of Education
University of California at Los AngelesPS - check out this awesome flash movie!!! Its Bush turning into a fukkin nazi monkey!!!! LOL!!!!
Yep. Welcome to my fan base, sunshine. Go ahead and yuk it up, but imagine how depressing this shit gets. I used to have MS Outlook filter out ".edu" emails, but Zawahiri made a new policy that we have to answer them. "Good PR, good for recruiting and fundraising," or some goatshit like that.
a mary mccarthy primer
From Hot Air:
This is one of those stories where, if you miss the first 48 hours, you end up feeling so far behind the curve that you tune it out and never bother with it again. So here’s a round-up of news and blog coverage which, while longish, will bring you up to speed. As of this writing, McCarthy “categorically denies” being the leaker, according to former counterterrorism official/Kerry campaign staffer Rand Beers. So the jury’s still out – although government sources are telling Newsweek to fret not, for the leaker is most definitely she.
Read it all.
iraq gets its first german restaurant
Sauerkraut and sausage washed down with a cold German beer to the sounds of a tuba honking out Bavarian folk tunes. It's no longer just a distant dream to the residents of the northern Iraqi city of Arbil.
Now, finally, just in time for the World Cup, Iraqis have the opportunity to savour German cuisine and culture following last week's opening of the country's first German restaurant, in the northern city of Arbil.
Note that this story is from Der Spiegel, which never misses an opportunity to describe the liberation of Iraq in the worst terms.
france's immigrant problem -- and ours
The three weeks of Muslim rage across France during autumn 2005 brought Schadenfreude to many Americans. They saw a thin scab of French hypocrisy scraped off — revealing a deep wound of invidious religious and racial separatism festering in Muslim ghettoes. As during the August 2003 heat wave that killed nearly 15,000 French elderly in stifling apartments while their progeny enjoyed their state-subsidized vacation at the beach or mountains, French talk of solidarity and moral superiority proved spectacularly at odds with the facts.
So for much of last October and November, Americans congratulated themselves that French-style rioting could, of course, never happen in the United States. After all, their economy is moribund. Ours is growing at well over 3 percent per year. French unemployment hovers near 10 percent; America’s is half that. Fifty-seven million jobs were created in the U.S. during the past 30 years, only 4 million in all of Europe. Our minority youth, as a result, are much more likely to be working than idling in the streets. And sure enough, in France, about 25 percent of youths between 15 and 24, regardless of race or religion, are out of work.
update on mexico's campaign
...from Publius, who is happy with the trends.
selling fake fakes
Buying a fake of the Mona Lisa is fair enough, it's a great painting, hangs in the Louvre and isn't for sale. But buying a fake of a fake? Unwitting buyers have been shelling out thousands for faked forgeries of Mona and other classics, apparently thanks to fraud by the great-niece of the man who forged the Hitler diaries.
Forging seems to run in the family of the late Konrad Kujau, who gave the world the Hitler diaries and faked hundreds of oil paintings. His great-niece Petra, 47, is now under investigation for writing her famous relative's signature on hundreds of cheap Asian-made copies of masterpieces and selling them over the Internet, sometimes for thousands of euros apiece.
Police in the eastern city of Dresden said they had confiscated more than 200 "supposedly original fakes" of paintings bearing the Konrad Kujau signature in the offices of his great-niece.
For those who don't remember the Hitler diaries, Newseek magazine paid to serialize them. When suspicions arose about their authenticity, Newsweek's editor wrote: "Genuine or not, it almost doesn't matter in the end."
shrink: cannibal still hungry
Armin Meiwes, the German cannibal standing trial for the second time for killing and eating 44 pounds of flesh from a man who wanted to be eaten, is so fixated on male human meat that he could kill again, a psychiatrist told the court on Monday.
monday april 24, 2006
natan sharansky on bush
Political leaders make the rarest of dissidents. In a democracy, a leader's lifeline is the electorate's pulse. Failure to be in tune with public sentiment can cripple any administration and undermine any political agenda. Moreover, democratic leaders, for whom compromise is critical to effective governance, hardly ever see any issue in Manichaean terms. In their world, nearly everything is colored in shades of gray.
That is why President George W. Bush is such an exception. He is a man fired by a deep belief in the universal appeal of freedom, its transformative power, and its critical connection to international peace and stability. Even the fiercest critics of these ideas would surely admit that Mr. Bush has championed them both before and after his re-election, both when he was riding high in the polls and now that his popularity has plummeted, when criticism has come from longstanding opponents and from erstwhile supporters.
With a dogged determination that any dissident can appreciate, Mr. Bush, faced with overwhelming opposition, stands his ideological ground, motivated in large measure by what appears to be a refusal to countenance moral failure.
state of jihad address
Walid Phares on Osama's latest audio tape:
After careful reading, my assessment of the “piece” got reinforced: This is not just another audiotape or videotape of a renegade in some cave. Regardless of who is the speaker and his whereabouts, the 30 minutes long read statement is a declaration, probably as important as the February 1998 declaration of war against America, the Crusaders and their allies.
This is a “state of Jihad address” by a Terror-leader who projects himself as the supreme leader of all Salafi Jihadists in the world. The document provide guidelines and vision to the followers across the continents: A call for mega-terrorism and a fiery delivery of a bloody war in all directions. Not one single civilization and religion got away from Usama’s grapes of wrath: Muslim moderates, Shiites, Christian Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox; Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and Atheists as well. Europeans, Chinese, Indians, Semites, Africans and others were all deciphered as Kuffars, infidels.
In two decades of Salafi and Khumeini rhetoric monitoring, I haven’t heard or seen a cross-infidel speech as the one aired by al Jazeera on April 23, 2006.
...
Throughout the day I analyzed most of these "axis" on MSNBC, but I was able to observe the airing process on al Jazeera as well.
Imagine yourself as an Arab viewer: The speech was repeated endlessly throughout the day. Bin Laden didn't have his 20 minutes of shine, but 24 hours at least. The Bin Laden audiotape wasn't played one or two times but until every word was sinking deep in the minds of the attentive viewers. However the most powerful part of the speech wasn't restricted to its content: Al Jazeera lined up the best of its "experts on Islamist groups" to react instantly to the audiotape and throughout the day, and add "more details and substance."
Read it all, especially Osama's list of grievances and his shit list (hint: you're on it).
chait talk
In his column in yesterday's LA Times, Jonathan Chait writes:
He [McCain] lavished extravagant praise on President Bush for his leadership in the war on terror, even though McCain criticized most of Bush's specific decisions, such as letting Osama bin Laden escape and invading Iraq with too few troops.
Bush decided to let Osama escape? Please. The only president to consciously let Osama go free was Bill Clinton, who turned down Sudan's offer to extradite him to the US.
let's all bow our heads
Environmentalism doesn't need the support of the church, it's a church in itself -- and furthermore, one explicitly at odds with Christianity: God sent His son to Earth as a man, not as a three-toed tree sloth or an Antarctic krill. An environmentalist can believe man is no more than a co-equal planet dweller with millions of other species, and that he's taking up more than his fair share and needs to reduce both his profile and his numbers. But that's profoundly hostile to Christianity.
Oh, and here's my favorite -- Dr. Sue Blackmore looking on the bright side in Britain's Guardian:
"In all probability billions of people are going to die in the next few decades. Our poor, abused planet cannot take much more. . . . If we decide to put the planet first, then we ourselves are the pathogen. So we should let as many people die as possible, so that other species may live, and accept the destruction of civilization and of everything we have achieved.
"Finally, we might decide that civilization itself is worth preserving. In that case we have to work out what to save and which people would be needed in a drastically reduced population -- weighing the value of scientists and musicians against that of politicians, for example."
Hmm. On the one hand, Dr. Sue Blackmore and the bloke from Coldplay. On the other, Dick Cheney. I think we can all agree which people would be "needed" -- Al Gore, the guy from the New Yorker, perhaps Scarlett Johansson in a fur-trimmed bikini paddling a dugout canoe through a waterlogged Manhattan foraging for floating curly endives from once-fashionable eateries.
Here's an inconvenient truth for "An Inconvenient Truth": Remember what they used to call "climate change"? "Global warming." And what did they call it before that? "Global cooling." That was the big worry in the '70s: the forthcoming ice age. Back then, Lowell Ponte had a huge best seller called The Cooling: Has the new ice age already begun? Can we survive?
The answer to the first question was: Yes, it had begun. From 1940 to 1970, there was very slight global cooling. That's why the doom-mongers decided the big bucks were in the new-ice-age blockbusters.
And yet, amazingly, we've survived. Why? Because in 1970 the planet stopped its very slight global cooling and began to undergo very slight global warming. So in the '80s, the doom-mongers cast off their thermal underwear, climbed into the leopardskin thongs, slathered themselves in sun cream and wired their publishers to change all references to "cooling" to "warming" for the paperback edition. That's why, if you notice, the global-warming crowd begin their scare statistics with "since 1970," an unlikely Year Zero which would not otherwise merit the significance the eco-crowd invest in it.
thousands lie down in caracas to protest
barking dogs
Osama released another tape. Democrats released another stupid statement:
Jane Harman, a leading Democratic member of Congress, said it was a sign that the largest manhunt in history had not yielded results. "Part of the reason is because we've been bogged down in Iraq," she added.
--and--
The defeated 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, Sen John Kerry, said the failure to capture bin Laden was one of the reasons why US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should resign.
Maybe finding one Islamo terrorist hiding in wild Waziristan is a tall order.
Remember that the Atlanta bomber/abortion clinic bomber Eric Rudolph was on the lam for five years in North Carolina and was only caught by accident, despite a huge FBI effort to capture him.
Part of the reason it took so long is that Bill Clinton was bogged down in the White House playing with cigars.
sunday april 23, 2006
march of progress
...or regress? The black light tattoo.
making water flow uphill
The Dyson water feature. Cool.
khalid the jihadi
...didn't find much love in Iraq:
Khalid had been in Iraq for only a few weeks, but he was already sick of the place. It wasn't the missions that bothered him. He was fighting alongside a small group of Saudis, and they were consummate professionals when it came to jihad, completely focused on the lightning-fast attacks they staged each day on the foreign invaders. The ambushes usually lasted no more than five or 10 minutes, but Khalid revelled in the chance to hit the streets and fire off his AK-47 at the American soldiers and their allies, four grenades strapped to his waist so he could kill himself if captured.
After the attacks, however, Khalid and the other fighters were confined to safe houses in Mosul and Haditha - dark, dank places with no hot water or electricity. The biggest problem was the Iraqis, the very people he was there to help. Sometimes it seemed as though there were double agents everywhere, checking him out on the street, trying to overhear him speaking the Yemeni dialect that would betray him as a foreigner, all so they could pick up their cell phones and call in the Americans, maybe even collect a reward. That made this jihad more dangerous and unpredictable than the other wars Khalid had fought in - Afghanistan, Bosnia, Somalia, places where they were often treated like heroes. When they weren't out on missions in Iraq, he and the Saudis were forced to stay in the safe house, the shades pulled down, with only a well-thumbed copy of the Koran and five prayer sessions a day to break the monotony.
Khalid is from northern Yemen:
...one of the most lawless and drug-addicted places in the world. Despite a recent government crackdown, hand grenades are laid out alongside fresh produce at street-side markets, and sources estimate that there are at least 10m guns in circulation in a country with a population of 20m. Social life revolves around qat, a leafy, reddishgreen plant that contains amphetamine-like substances.
Eighty per cent of adult men in Yemen chew regularly, and important political and business decisions are routinely made in the mafraj, a room in many homes specially designed for chewing sessions. The leaf combines the talkative affability of pot with the drive of speed. First comes euphoria and intense sociability - not ponderous, marijuana-induced ramblings, but a deep appreciation of the flow of conversation. In this stage, five hours can pass in what seems like 10 minutes. Next comes reflective quiet - a comfortable silence descends as people look inward, contemplating the contents of their minds.
The final stage is depression and insomnia - it's not uncommon to see solitary cloaked figures roaming the streets at night, waiting for the effects of the drug to pass. On average, Yemeni men spend about a third of their income on qat, and commerce in the leaf accounts for a third of the nation's GNP.
fit to print
Mickey Kaus busts the New York Times for sloppy reporting. A story about billionare Ron Burkle and Bill Clinton had this:
The two men first met when Mr. Clinton was running for president in 1992 and touring neighborhoods in Los Angeles that had been torched during riots after the acquittal of several police officers charged with beating Rodney King. Mr. Clinton noticed that some supermarkets were still open, and asked why, his aides recalled. He was told that those stores were not burned because the owner, Mr. Burkle, treated his customers and employees fairly. Mr. Clinton asked to meet him.
Hmm. Too good to check? Not if you have NEXIS! At the time of the riots, Burkle owned a chain of markets called Food 4 Less. (He apparently didn't acquire Ralph's markets until 1994.) Here's the lede paragraph of a June 1, 1992 story in the Orange County Business Journal:
Ron Burkle was in the middle of a meeting in a downtown Los Angeles hotel room when the Rodney King verdict came in last month. As word of the ensuing riots spread, television sets in the room were turned on. Burkle, chairman of La Habra-based Food 4 Less Supermarkets Inc., soon found himself watching intently. Buildings were burning. His buildings.
ap shows its hand
To illustrate a story about the CIA firing Mary McCarthy, a Democrat partisan leaker of CIA secrets, the Associated Press chose a photo of ... Scooter Libby.
But wait, there's more!
culture of treason
Consider the reporter, Dana Priest, who took McCarthy's leaks and turned them into a Pulitzer Prize.
While Dana Priest was publishing leaks from a high level CIA operative, her husband's organization, CIP, was releasing articles, quotes and interviews like this one in the Baltimore Sun:
Over the years, there have been many attempts to politicize intelligence. But no government has been so blatant as the Bush administration, which used phony intelligence to justify the war against Iraq and has introduced a new director of central intelligence, Porter J. Goss, to conduct a political housecleaning at the highest levels of the agency.
The CIA director, Mr. Goss, has warned all hands that they must "support the administration and its policies," and appears to have begun a bureaucratic housecleaning to ensure such support...
...Instead of negotiating the intelligence reform proposals of the Senate and House, it is time for the intelligence committees of the legislature to monitor the political behavior of the CIA director and to ensure that the agency provides objective and balanced intelligence assessments to policy-makers.
While Dana Priest was doing interviews about Gitmo torture practices, her husband's organization releases this piece on Gitmo abuse:
Their argument is that given the many reports of detainees being abused there, Guantanamo has come to be seen internationally as a symbol of U.S. disregard for human rights and for the Geneva Conventions. And so, to get rid of the harmful symbol, we should close it.
They are right. The administration's denials that any abuses have occurred have lost all credibility.
While Dana Priest was writing about clandestine "rendition" operations that actually started under Bill Clinton, her husband's group, The Center for International Policy, was/is actively promoting an anti-Bush, anti-American foreign policy message:
Before 9/11, The Center for International Policy, CIP, a Fenton Communications client, mainly acted as Fidel Castro's greatest "think tank" ally. Much of its million-dollar budget was spent lobbying to end economic sanctions and travel restrictions against Cuba.
Now, it has another mission. Fenton has established a "war room" with CIP called The Iraq Policy Information Program (IPIP). Its main job is getting the anti-Bush foreign policy message out to the media and providing guests for talk shows. A featured speaker of the IPIP is former ambassador Joe Wilson, one of the Bush administration’s most vocal enemies. Like Moveon.org and Win Without War, the contact for the Iraq Policy Information Program is Fenton Communications. Win Without War also collects tax-deductible donations through CIP.
meanwhile...
No Proof of Secret C.I.A. Prisons, European Antiterror Chief Says
fun house mirror
More from the Washington Post on the CIA leaker:
The rare firing last week of a CIA officer accused of leaking information to the news media stems both from the sensitivity of the subjects she allegedly discussed and the Bush administration's forceful efforts to block national security disclosures that have proved embarrassing or caused operational problems, according to current and former intelligence officials.
Operational problems? Leaks have caused allies (Poland for one) to withhold cooperation because they fear we cannot keep a secret. Important intelligence gathering operations have been ruined.
The WaPo editors can only think in political terms, thus the notion of "embarassing." And thus their decision to publish stolen secrets, the nation be damned.
The use of polygraphs to force out the CIA officer, a historian and Africa specialist named Mary McCarthy who lately has been working for the agency's internal inspector, comes amid long-standing administration suspicions that employees of the spy agency have not sufficiently toed the policy line set by the White House on matters such as the fight against terrorism and the war in Iraq.
Toed the line? The CIA is there to serve the president, any president. If he cannot trust his own agency, we all lose. Would the WaPo consider it acceptable for a major to overrule a general in battle?
saturday april 22, 2006
will ben affleck suggest she be hanged?
...for treason? The Washington Post reports:
The CIA fired a long-serving intelligence officer for sharing classified information with The Washington Post and other news organizations, officials said yesterday, as the agency continued an aggressive internal search for anyone who may have discussed intelligence with the news media.
CIA officials said the career intelligence officer failed more than one polygraph test and acknowledged unauthorized contacts with reporters. The "officer knowingly and willfully shared classified intelligence, including operational information" with journalists, the agency said in a statement yesterday.
Said spook passed classified intelligence to the Washington Post's Dana Priest, who just won a Pulitzer Prize for taking the leaked secrets and making them public. So the she-spook feeds the she-scribe and both come out a winner. What a proud coupla gals!
The CIA did not reveal the identity of the employee, who was dismissed Thursday, but NBC News reported last night she is Mary McCarthy. An intelligence source confirmed that the report was accurate.
So the CIA officially refused to name Ms. McCarthy, but someone at the agency leaked her name!
Meanwhile, the blogosphere is discovering connections to Sandy "Scissorhands" Berger and other Democrat operatives.
If McCarthy doesn't face criminal charges for her subterfuge, then why the hell is Scooter Libby on the hot seat?
how to tell a leaker from a whistleblower
Journalism, like politics, depends on a slew of useful fictions. They're too numerous to list here (besides, they make for so many useful column topics, I'd hate to pre-empt myself). But it is worth pausing to watch as a new myth is sculpted before our very eyes.
Over the last decade or so the media has carefully cultivated an ingenious distinction. Call it: whistleblowers versus leakers. You've surely seen both of these mesmerizing creatures on display in the carnival menagerie that is your nightly news. "Whistleblowers" reveal things "America needs to hear." "Leakers" have grubby agendas.
iraqi gets down to business of governing
Omar provides a moment-by-moment account of today's Iraqi parliamentary session. Many have written Iraq off as a disaster (mostly as a way to hurt Bush), but this shows the story is far from over.
One wonders how much the naysayers recall of American history. Looking back, it's a miracle the United States survived at all. We endured a prolonged period of squabbling and weak government under the Articles of Confederation, far in excess of the four months the Iraqis have been haggling over forming their government.
We had sectarian violence. We had uprisings and murders. We had our first president saddle up and ride out to put down an insurrection. The North wanted to secede from the union after President Thomas Jefferson (who was hated in the Yankee states) completed the Louisiana purchase.
Our constitution was the fruit of some ugly deal making -- sanctioning slavery, counting slaves as 3/5 of a person in order to boost the South's population numbers, awarding podunk states two senators, etc.
We had the First Amendment violated almost immediately via the Sedition Act, as critics of the government were jailed for criticizing the John Adams administration.
And we had a civil war that killed 20 percent of our people. The union was preserved but the issue of freedom for blacks was never settled by all that death -- that took another hundred years. Meanwhile black American citizens suffered under Jim Crow and the terror threat of the KKK.
And women didn't get to vote until 144 years after the Declaration of Independence.
The list goes on. Despite it all, we have survived and managed to spread freedom around much of the world. Let's give the Iraqis, who face much tougher challenges, a break.
general amnesia: tale of two zinnis
General Zinni, the media's favorite Rumsfeld critic, was for the war before he was against it.
No finer example of such media memory lapse has occurred recently than what is transpiring with all the military generals now waxing publicly philosophic about why we never should have gone to war with Iraq.
One of the more prominent members of the hindsight-worshipping crowd is former Clinton CENTCOM commander Gen. Anthony Zinni, who has now conspicuously stated that he never saw any proof that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction or was in any way an imminent threat.
Of course, this has been thoroughly debunked by the recent revelation here of a February 29, 2000 briefing by Zinni to Congress, wherein the general made it quite clear that “Iraq remains the most significant near-term threat to U.S. interests in the Arabian Gulf region,” stating quite unequivocally that Iraq either possessed or was aggressively pursuing WMD.
Still, an even more bizarre oddity concerning the media’s acceptance of Zinni’s current position is another revelation from 2000 that the general actually briefed senior Clinton administration officials concerning a massive military strike to overthrow Saddam.
Hadn’t heard about this? Well, as reported by the Chicago Tribune on October 2, 2000:
Zinni has briefed senior administration officials on a secret war plan that details how the U.S. military, with limited allied help, would seek to topple Hussein. The effort would be massive, involving possibly as many as half a million troops, according to one knowledgeable official.
The article continued:
Although he has confidence in U.S. forces, Zinni has no illusions that such a scheme could win public support, considering the cost in lives and dollars it would almost certainly involve.
Yet, conceivably the most telling statement made by Zinni in this piece was the following:
Containment is what you do when you can’t come up with the popular will to take decisive military action.
reviving dead news
...from yesterday:
They always try to bury the bad news on Friday afternoon, and so Congressman Alan Mollohan of northern West Virginia has stepped down this afternoon from his position as the No. 1 Democrat on the House ethics committee.
Mollohan has steered millions of federal tax dollars to an organization headed by Laura Kuhns, a business partner and former member of his staff. With their spouses, they own an island in North Carolina.
Hey folks, this is what happens when you put the same guy in Congress for 24 years. After a while he wants to make his pile. Duke Cunningham had a menu for bribes that lobbyists could pay him.
Mollohan's scheme may be legal. He set up organizations, put his friends on their boards and their staff rosters, and then used his position on appropriations to give them federal money. At election time, they gratefully gave money to his campaign.
So the Democrat's top ethics fella quits his gig because he might be dirty. What's Nancy Pelosi have to say after all these months of chanting "Republican culture of corruption"?
“The allegations against Congressman Mollohan originate from the National Legal and Policy Center, which engages in highly partisan attacks on Democrats. These attacks are an attempt to deflect attention from the long list of Republican criminal investigations, indictments, plea agreements¸ and resignations that have resulted from the reported long-term and extensive criminal enterprise run out of House Republican leadership offices. The Republican culture of corruption has been ignored by the Ethics Committee for a year and a half following the decision of the Republican leadership to fire their own chairman and some Committee members for doing their job.
Pelosi deflects her own dirt by claiming the other guys are deflecting dirt.
friday april 21, 2006
missed cinema: "next stop greenwich village"
Just out on DVD, this 1976 Paul Mazursky film holds up well after 30 years. Largely autobiographical, it follows a young actor and his cohorts in 1953 New York.
Mazursky's films tend to be episodic and weakly structured, which you either accept or not. I loved Harry and Tonto and Blume in Love. He's more famous for Down and Out in Beverly Hills and Moscow on the Hudson.
Christopher Walken has a nice role in Next Stop, as does Ellen Greene, who most people will remember as the dumb blonde in Little Shop of Horrors. It was amusing to see the "topical" reference to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, believed by the film's characters in 1953 to be innocent, and I suspect by Mazursky in 1976.
History has proved them guilty, but one wonders whether that fact would make it into a Hollywood film even in 2006. Definitely not if George Clooney were directing.
sadr spins the washington post
Want to watch while a Washington Post reporter get spun like a top by one of Moktada Al Sadr's thugs? Then go to this story, which greatly overly simplifies the rift between the bearers of two well-known and respected Shiite family names -- Al Hakim and Al Sadr -- who are currently competing for power in Iraq.
The Post reporter simply regurgitates the Al Sadr side of the story, as supplied by a mouthpiece for the half-wit "cleric." But that's what happens when you parachute in reporters for whom Iraq is terra incognita: While your paper is revealing the U.S. to be engaging in "propaganda," your journalists are sitting ducks for the other side's propaganda.
trick photography
Living in Southern California means running into celebrities from time to time. There's often a disconnect because they don't look like they do in magazines or on film.
FluidEffect has a fascinating website where you can see before-and-after photographs of famous faces. Just think, with a little Photoshop we could all be beautiful. Or at least have perfect skin.
duke university splashes cold water on global warming
Durham, N.C. -- Instrumental readings made during the past century offer ample evidence that carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases" in the atmosphere are warming Earth's climate, a team led by Duke University scientists has reported.
But by analyzing indirect evidence of temperature fluctuations over six previous centuries, the team also found that the magnitude of future global warming will likely fall well short of current highest predictions.
In making their deductions, the researchers ran some 1,000 computer simulations, covering 1,000 years, that took into account a range of modern and ancient climate records. Modern records are based on thermometer readings, while measurements derived from such sources as tree rings and ice cores served as markers of warm and cold spells over prior centuries.
Green Fundamentalists such as Al Gore will not be pleased.
Dated but related -- Prof. David Deming from University of Oklahoma wrote:
In 1995, I had published a paper in Science where I noted that North America had undergone a modest warming over the last 100 to 150 years. But I also concluded that there was no way to determine if the warming was due to human activity or natural climatic variation.
Subsequently I received a telephone call from a National Public Radio reporter. He was interested in doing a story on my article--but only if I would tell him that the warming was due to human causes. He explained, "that's what everyone is interested in". When I refused to compromise my scientific integrity, he hung up on me. It was my first intimation that the media intentionally filter the information the public receives.
thursday april 20, 2006
dirty old man offers free breast exams
...and finds two takers. Museum of Hoaxes notes:
Even weirder was the case, reported by Portuguese newspapers in 2002, of a woman who phoned other women and told them about a revolutionary new technology that allowed breast examinations to be conducted by satellite.
All they had to do, she told them, was stand topless in an open window and a passing satellite would conduct a mammogram. Every woman who was contacted complied with the strange instructions. One woman even stripped entirely naked. The phone would then ring again, but instead of getting their mammogram results, the phony doctor would describe her sexual fantasies to the women in graphic detail.
Sheesh. Even in sixth grade the girls in my school were smart enough not to fall for the "falsie inspector."
crack in the quagmire
Jaafari withdraws as a candidate in Iraq.
man invents machine that invents machines
John Koza Has Built an Invention Machine. Its creations earn patents, outperform humans, and will soon fly to space. All it needs now is a few worthy challenges
usA records big decline in death rates
Huh? With all the chemicals in our food? With the epidemic of obesity? We're living longer? Go figure.
In a powerful testament to U.S. health improvements, the annual number of deaths in the country dropped by about 50,000 in 2004 -- the largest such decline in more than 60 years.
Overall, age-adjusted death rates fell to a record low of 801 deaths per 100,000 population in 2004, down from almost 833 deaths per 100,000 in 2003.
the housing bubble
...why 20-year gains may never be repeated.
the green scare
Liberals fancy themselves rationalists, free-thinkers unimpeded by religious doctrine.
Which is amusing when you watch them get strident over environmental issues. I had a friend instantly reach a boil when I dared question the dogma of human-created global warming. And that was all I was doing, questioning.
Jonah Goldberg writes about Al Gore and his new film, An Inconvenient Truth:
Now, it's true that Earth has gotten warmer — one degree since the 19th century — and it will probably get warmer still. And it's probably true that human activity plays a significant part in all that. But it's also true that we don't have a clear picture of what's happening now, never mind what will happen. Just ask the 60 climatologists from around the world who wrote Canada's prime minister that "observational evidence does not support today's computer climate models, so there is little reason to trust model predictions of the future." But that's all beside the point to Gore & Co., who say the time for debate is over. And if you disagree, get ready for the witch hunt. Major news media have gone after scientists who argue there's still time to study global warming rather than plunge into some half-baked environmental jihad that could waste possibly trillions of dollars.
As Richard Lindzen, professor of meteorology at MIT, recently lamented in the Wall Street Journal: "Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science."
And dissenters pay a heavy price.
In Vanity Fair, writer Mark Hertsgaard alleges that Frederick Seitz, the former president of the National Academy of Sciences and the former president of the prestigious Rockefeller University, was a shill for, of all things, the tobacco industry. A press release by the National Environmental Trust proclaims "Scientist Who Spearheaded Attacks on Global Warming Also Directed $45M Tobacco Industry Effort to Hide Health Impacts of Smoking." Seitz, a giant in American science, says this is all "ridiculous, completely wrong." Now 94, Seitz explained to TCSDaily.com that R.J. Reynolds had given Rockefeller University $5 million a year for basic research. Seitz says he directed the money toward non-tobacco-related efforts in the study of prions (the virus-like proteins that cause mad cow disease), tuberculosis and other diseases. Prion researcher Stanley Prusiner thanked both R.J. Reynolds and Seitz in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
But Gore & Co. aren't troubled by such details because the smears are all for a good cause. That's why Gore saw nothing wrong in bullying dissident climate change scientists when he was a senator or waging a mean-spirited campaign to discredit the work of his old mentor, Harvard oceanographer Roger Revelle, because Revelle thought alarmism was unwarranted.
Hence the irony of the title "An Inconvenient Truth." It is the green scare that has no patience for inconvenient truths. For example, Gore blames the disappearing snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro on global warming, but a 2003 study in Nature identified the clear-cutting of surrounding moisture-rich forests as the culprit. In the famously fact-checked New Yorker, Editor David Remnick pens a love letter to Gore in which he laments that Earth will "likely be an uninhabitable planet" if we don't heed Gore's jeremiads. Oh … come … on!
wednesday april 19, 2006
if you can't beat 'em, redefine 'em
This is precious, twenty EU "terminologists" are busy:
...working on a public communication lexicon which blacklists the term "Islamic terrorism."
The "non-emotive lexicon for discussing radicalisation" should be submitted to EU leaders who will meet in June, according to press reports.
EU officials drafting the guidelines hope that the European Commission and the European Parliament will also endorse the linguistic code of conduct, which will be non-binding.
"Certainly 'Islamic terrorism' is something we will not use ... we talk about 'terrorists who abusively invoke Islam'," an EU official told Reuters.
George Orwell could not be reached for comment. However, in the spirit of multilateralism we offer these suggestions for the EU lexicon.
Old Term
|
New Term |
suicide bomber |
party crasher |
jihadi |
Holy Roller |
terrorist |
de-animator |
beheading |
cutting off debate |
caliphate |
United Nations |
murdering Jews |
pest control |
stoning women to death |
affirmative action |
Sharia |
common sense |
9/11 |
a fine September morn' |
hostage |
reluctant guest |
JB
Permalink
liberal bigots
Here it is 2006 and conservative blacks are enduring slurs worthy of a grand wizard of the KKK. Is it possible that liberals are the worst bigots of all?
You may ask: How can that be? Surely, you say, liberals were the ones marching for civil rights in the 1960s, so how can they now be accused of bigotry? Because most of the incidents involve discrimination against blacks, I was tempted to use the word racists, but most of the bigots are also black, so bigotry is the more accurate term.
In my opinion, Condoleezza Rice is the most important woman in the world. Our secretary of state grew up in the segregated South and was a friend of Denise McNair, one of the four girls killed in the Birmingham, Ala., Baptist church bombing in 1963.
Then you have Aaron McGruder, the young creator of the controversial and infrequently amusing cartoon "The Boondocks," who has portrayed Ms. Rice in vicious ways in his comic strip and has called her and a former secretary of state, Colin Powell, murderers. Of course, Mr. McGruder, a Californian who was raised in a black middle-class family and attended private schools, has only a vicarious idea of what discrimination is, especially when filtered through tired liberal channels.
generals call for resignation of media leaders
his back pages
Gerard Van der Leun revisits his days as a Berkeley radical with another wonderful essay.
radical islam vs. the world
From Brussels Journal:
Hugh Fitzgerald, Vice President of Robert Spencer’s website Jihad Watch, has explored some of the limitations of the “clash of civilizations” paradigm. As Fitzgerald points out, it gives the impression that America or “the West” or Western Christian or Western post-Christian civilization are the enemy, while in reality the global Islamic Jihad is as much directed at Hindus and Buddhists, and the Eastern Orthodox Christians in the Balkans, and the non-Muslim black Africans, as it is against the much more powerful, and therefore more dangerous, United States of America:
Fitzgerald: Clash of civilizations? Yes and no
The phrase “clash of civilizations,” made famous by Samuel Huntington, is misleading. In Huntington’s formulation, there are the Sinic, the Orthodox, the Hindu, the Islamic, the Western, and so on. And these are all potentially clashing. But this is nonsense.
There is only one clash that counts: that of Islam with all of non-Islam. If, in the future, China and America were to go to war, it would not be because the former is “Sinic” and the latter “Christian” or “Western” or some such, but because of perceived Great-Power rivalries – for China and America are now part of the same civilization, the shared, modern, universal civilization, with disagreements at the edges, but nothing like the clash between Islam and all Infidels.
In fact, a war between China and America would be about power, and thus no different from, for example, the rivalry, ending in war, between Germany and England in the pre-1914 period. It is interesting to note, meanwhile, that Arab and Muslim analysts around the world tend to prefer the phrase “clash of civilizations” – because it avoids the truthful description of the conflict as one motivated by a belief-system, the belief-system of Islam.
how to infuriate telemarketers
The no-call list works pretty well, but there's always this approach.
firefox hits the road
...as artwork on a bus.
liberals on the couch
Psychiatrist blogger Dr. Sanity explores the unhealthy mindset of many leftists today:
...denial is not a natural method of coping for a mature adult (except possibly as a brief interlude to allow the psyche time to assimilate reality). Denial is a break from reality itself; and as such, it can have serious--even deadly consequences.
The pervasive denial of the reality of 9/11 and what it exposed is most evident in the political left; but it is certainly not confined to that side of the political spectrum. However, the left has many, ready-made ideological tools to facilitate psychological denial about terrorism and the treat of radical Islam; in large part because they have been utilizing the same denial strategy and tactics since the end of the cold war and the 20th century.
The rise of politically correct speech; the dogma of multiculturalism; the homogeneity of ideas and lack of intellectual diversity in academia; as well as the distortions and rationalizations that are currently the hallmark of intellectual debate within our institutions of higher learning and politics-- have all combined to accentuate the failure to assimilate and analyze the reality of the terrorist threat.
Denial may be conceptualized as an attempt to reject unacceptable feelings, needs, thoughts, wishes--or even a painful external reality that alters the perception of ourselves. This psychological defense mechanism protects us temporarily from:
-Knowledge (things we don’t want to know)
-Insight or awareness that threatens our self-esteem; or our mental or physical health; or our security (things we don't want to think about)
-Unacceptable feelings (things we don’t want to feel)The unacceptable knowledge is that we are in the midst of a terrible global war that we neither wanted nor provoked; and that there are evil people who want to destroy our civilization and kill or enslave all of us.
The insight that threatens to overwhelm them is that all of their political correctness; all of their multicultural BS; in fact, all of the shibboleths and platitudes of the the left that have been the glue holding together the house of cards of their ideology since the end of the last century, are no longer capable of preventing the collapse and disintegration of that ideology. If they think about it long and hard enough, they might even begin to realize the horrible truth: that in order for their ideology to survive, they must bet--all or nothing--on a win by the Islamic fanatics who want to destroy us all (including them).
Read it all. It explains a lot about the irrational behavior of medicrats today.
if m.c. escher were in school today
See here.
facing down iran
For this to be a mortal struggle, as the cold war was, the question is: Are they a credible enemy to us?
For a projection of the likely outcome, the question is: Are we a credible enemy to them?
Four years into the “war on terror,” the Bush administration has begun promoting a new formulation: “the long war.” Not a reassuring name. In a short war, put your money on tanks and bombs—our strengths. In a long war, the better bet is will and manpower—their strengths, and our great weakness.
Even a loser can win when he’s up against a defeatist. A big chunk of Western civilization, consciously or otherwise, has given the impression that it’s dying to surrender to somebody, anybody. Reasonably enough, Islam figures: Hey, why not us? If you add to the advantages of will and manpower a nuclear capability, the odds shift dramatically.
What, after all, is the issue underpinning every little goofy incident in the news, from those Danish cartoons of Mohammed to recommendations for polygamy by official commissions in Canada to the banning of the English flag in English prisons because it’s an insensitive “crusader” emblem to the introduction of gender-segregated swimming sessions in municipal pools in Puget Sound? In a word, sovereignty. There is no god but Allah, and thus there is no jurisdiction but Allah’s. Ayatollah Khomeini saw himself not as the leader of a geographical polity but as a leader of a communal one: Islam.
As always, read the whole thing.
tuesday april 18, 2006
dinner with tom cruise
...you might want to identify that mystery meat before digging in.
ancient pyramid in bosnia?
Archaeologists have begun digging for what they think might be a pyramid hidden beneath a hill in Bosnia.
dirty dozen vs. everyone else
Putting the general critics of Rumseld into perspective.
michael totten in iraqi kurdistan
A nice travelogue with photos.
red light. green light.
A man who said he bought a device that allowed him to change stop lights from red to green received a $50 ticket for suspicion of interfering with a traffic signal.
judas: a saint for our seasons
WHEN IT COMES TO DISCOVERING new ways to cheapen the human soul, the "professional intellectuals" of our society have cornered the market. So it was last week when, timed carefully to cash in on the Easter holiday, the "serious" editors of National Geographic chose to release their gleanings from a sheaf of rags and call them "The Gospel of Judas."
Having risen through the echo chamber of "higher" education and survived the ruthless but quiet vetting process of their "profession," these editors knew full well that what they were putting out into the world was not a "gospel." They also knew that calling it a "gospel" would ensure greater attention and greater sales. Beyond that, the editors, secular cultists all, also got a quiet little tingle by having, in their minds, "stuck it" to the Christian church once again. As usual, such secularists love to stick it to Christianity. Addicts of auto-erotic spiritual asphyxiation, their onanistic pleasure in these deeds is only enhanced if they can be performed during the most holy days of the Christian calendar. Only then can maximum profit and pleasure be assured.
This dark thrill of denigration has the immediate benefit of pleasingly confirming them in their own Church of Zero, and the secondary benefit of being much, much safer than, say, sticking it to Islam, a faith that enforces its demands for respect with bombs and beheadings, and whose central message to all cowards is "Don't mess with Muhammad." The sad fact of our modern era is that if you denigrate Islam, you often have to bag up body parts and hose down the sidewalk, but when you denigrate Christianity the most you need to clean up after yourself is a warm washcloth.
scott savage cleared
The Ohio State librarian charged with sexual harassment has been cleared. Eugene Volokh notes:
It turns out that Scott Savage, the librarian who is charged with sexual orientation harassment because he had recommended that the school assign to freshmen an apparently anti-gay book, is a conservative Quaker who has given up many modern things, including conventional schooling — his wife home-schools (or at least home-schooled) their five children — and cars; he takes a horse and buggy to work.
bds* down under
From Tim Blair:
Phillip Adams joins Carroll on a Bush-is-crazy bender:
We cannot wait any longer for the impeachment of George W. Bush. Far more efficient to have Bush certified. There is no need for further debate on his mental state. The US President is bonkers.
As it ever was, conservatives must be either evil or stupid (Bush, according to his critics, spends equal time in both camps; you’d think a wicked/dumb guy like that would be an election easybeat). Also from Phil, some military history:
Like Vietnam, the Iraq war was launched with presidential lies. Like Vietnam, the Iraq war descended into a moral and military quagmire. And if Iraq seems to be less of a stuff-up, consider this fact: it’s taken just three years in Iraq for US deaths to equal the body count after six years in Vietnam.
Very clever. US personnel were in Vietnam from the late ’50s, but their role wasn’t overt; about 400 “military advisors” were killed between 1957 and 1964. The US body count six years after actual troops entered Vietnam in March 1965 is a little higher: 53,446.
german public: USA more dangerous than iran
According to this poll, more Germans consider the U.S. to be a danger for world peace than Iran.
45 % of Germans call the U.S. a "greater threat to world peace" than Iran. 28 % think that Iran is a greater threat. For 16 %, the U.S. and Iran pose identical threats.
The results don't surprise me at all.
I mean, Iran is economically extremly promising for Germany. And Iran has made it clear what it expects in return for economic favours: "The international deputy of Iran's Chamber of Commerce, Dr. Fereidoun Entezari, believes that business relations will surely improve if the Europeans do not pollute the economic issues with the political ones."
We destroy the Nazi regime. Rebuild their country. Protect them from Soviet domination for 45 years. How do you spell ingrate in German?
german home schooling is verboten
While the German school system's many shortcomings are in the center of a heated debate in Germany, a possible alternative - home schooling - isn't considered a viable option. It just doesn't fit in the German concept of collective education. Home schooling isn't just not allowed - it's "verboten" and carries a hefty fine. Parents may even have to go to prison for homeschooling.
monday april 17, 2006
mao maoing the tibetans
The Chinese authorities say they are putting up a huge statue of Chairman Mao Zedong in Tibet.
The 35-ton memorial is being built to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the former leader's death.
It is being erected in Gonggar County, near the Tibetan capital Lhasa, China's state-run news agency Xinhua said. Mao Zedong ordered the Chinese takeover of Tibet in 1950.
Not only did Mao take over Tibet, he also killed an estimated 77 million Chinese during his reign. Building monuments to such men is, uh, inscrutable.
f-shaped pattern for reading web pages
Being a good web designer requires understanding how people read. Studies show that with web pages divided into three columns, users will typically ignore one of the columns. Once ignored is pretty much forever ignored, too.
See if this eye-tracking study of web reading matches your habits.
abortion stats
USA Today has an interactive feature (look on the left, down a bit) that compares abortion by states. For example, you learn that 37% of pregnancies in Washington DC are aborted, 33% in New York and 31% on New Jersey. The bottom three are Utah and the Dakotas.