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.
beyond photography, part two
Andrzej Dragan has a doctorate in quantum physics. He took up photography only three years ago, but has created a body of work that is both stunning and creepy. Have a look.
chris matthews makes up news
On the January 18, 2006 edition of his Hardball show, Matthews misstated four times that Laura Bush had said, “God wants New Orleans to be rebuilt”.
The reality of the situation was that the First Lady had been asked to comment on a speech recently made by New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin in which he said, “Surely God is mad at America. Surely He’s not approving of us being in Iraq under false pretense. But surely He’s upset at black America also. We’re not taking care of ourselves.”
The President’s lady jokingly replied that she “didn’t really think she could speak for God”, but that she “believes Nagin wants New Orleans to be rebuilt”.
Matthews spoke the bogus quote twice in a segment with former Clinton White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers and former Bush adviser and Republican strategist Ed Rogers, then repeated it two more times in a subsequent segment with NBC News political analyst Charles Cook and Mike Allen of Time magazine, smugly asking his guests to comment on the outrageous words never spoken.
In one exchange, he says,
How does she know? Why are people talking for a deity? We can argue whether there is a God, but then to be hearing voices. This is the Joan of Arc stuff.
Wow! Hearing voices? Joan of Arc? Notwithstanding the self-constructed origin of the quote, these are grossly evocative words to be hurling at the wife of the leader of the free world!
wake up time
Amir Taheri, a former Executive Editor of Kayhan, Iran's largest daily newspaper, now lives in Europe. He wrote this for the Telegraph.
Last Monday, just before he announced that Iran had gatecrashed "the nuclear club", President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad disappeared for several hours. He was having a khalvat (tête-à-tête) with the Hidden Imam, the 12th and last of the imams of Shiism who went into "grand occultation" in 941.
According to Shia lore, the Imam is a messianic figure who, although in hiding, remains the true Sovereign of the World. In every generation, the Imam chooses 36 men, (and, for obvious reasons, no women) naming them the owtad or "nails", whose presence, hammered into mankind's existence, prevents the universe from "falling off". Although the "nails" are not known to common mortals, it is, at times, possible to identify one thanks to his deeds. It is on that basis that some of Ahmad-inejad's more passionate admirers insist that he is a "nail", a claim he has not discouraged. For example, he has claimed that last September, as he addressed the United Nations' General Assembly in New York, the "Hidden Imam drenched the place in a sweet light".
Last year, it was after another khalvat that Ahmadinejad announced his intention to stand for president. Now, he boasts that the Imam gave him the presidency for a single task: provoking a "clash of civilisations" in which the Muslim world, led by Iran, takes on the "infidel" West, led by the United States, and defeats it in a slow but prolonged contest that, in military jargon, sounds like a low intensity, asymmetrical war.
In Ahmadinejad's analysis, the rising Islamic "superpower" has decisive advantages over the infidel. Islam has four times as many young men of fighting age as the West, with its ageing populations. Hundreds of millions of Muslim "ghazis" (holy raiders) are keen to become martyrs while the infidel youths, loving life and fearing death, hate to fight. Islam also has four-fifths of the world's oil reserves, and so controls the lifeblood of the infidel. More importantly, the US, the only infidel power still capable of fighting, is hated by most other nations.
According to this analysis, spelled out in commentaries by Ahmadinejad's strategic guru, Hassan Abassi, known as the "Dr Kissinger of Islam", President George W Bush is an aberration, an exception to a rule under which all American presidents since Truman, when faced with serious setbacks abroad, have "run away". Iran's current strategy, therefore, is to wait Bush out. And that, by "divine coincidence", corresponds to the time Iran needs to develop its nuclear arsenal, thus matching the only advantage that the infidel enjoys.
Moments after Ahmadinejad announced "the atomic miracle", the head of the Iranian nuclear project, Ghulamreza Aghazadeh, unveiled plans for manufacturing 54,000 centrifuges, to enrich enough uranium for hundreds of nuclear warheads. "We are going into mass production," he boasted.
The Iranian plan is simple: playing the diplomatic game for another two years until Bush becomes a "lame-duck", unable to take military action against the mullahs, while continuing to develop nuclear weapons.
Thus do not be surprised if, by the end of the 12 days still left of the United Nations' Security Council "deadline", Ahmadinejad announces a "temporary suspension" of uranium enrichment as a "confidence building measure". Also, don't be surprised if some time in June he agrees to ask the Majlis (the Islamic parliament) to consider signing the additional protocols of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT).
Such manoeuvres would allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director, Muhammad El-Baradei, and Britain's Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, to congratulate Iran for its "positive gestures" and denounce talk of sanctions, let alone military action. The confidence building measures would never amount to anything, but their announcement would be enough to prevent the G8 summit, hosted by Russia in July, from moving against Iran.
While waiting Bush out, the Islamic Republic is intent on doing all it can to consolidate its gains in the region. Regime changes in Kabul and Baghdad have altered the status quo in the Middle East. While Bush is determined to create a Middle East that is democratic and pro-Western, Ahmadinejad is equally determined that the region should remain Islamic but pro-Iranian. Iran is now the strongest presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, after the US. It has turned Syria and Lebanon into its outer defences, which means that, for the first time since the 7th century, Iran is militarily present on the coast of the Mediterranean. In a massive political jamboree in Teheran last week, Ahmadinejad also assumed control of the "Jerusalem Cause", which includes annihilating Israel "in one storm", while launching a take-over bid for the cash-starved Hamas government in the West Bank and Gaza.
Ahmadinejad has also reactivated Iran's network of Shia organisations in Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Yemen, while resuming contact with Sunni fundamentalist groups in Turkey, Egypt, Algeria and Morocco. From childhood, Shia boys are told to cultivate two qualities. The first is entezar, the capacity patiently to wait for the Imam to return. The second is taajil, the actions needed to hasten the return. For the Imam's return will coincide with an apocalyptic battle between the forces of evil and righteousness, with evil ultimately routed. If the infidel loses its nuclear advantage, it could be worn down in a long, low-intensity war at the end of which surrender to Islam would appear the least bad of options. And that could be a signal for the Imam to reappear.
At the same time, not to forget the task of hastening the Mahdi's second coming, Ahamdinejad will pursue his provocations. On Monday, he was as candid as ever: "To those who are angry with us, we have one thing to say: be angry until you die of anger!"
His adviser, Hassan Abassi, is rather more eloquent. "The Americans are impatient," he says, "at the first sight of a setback, they run away. We, however, know how to be patient. We have been weaving carpets for thousands of years."
VikingPundit takes apart the New York Times's approach to the problem.
American Thinker has some calming thoughts with Don't Panic with Iran and Lightweights: The Iranian Nuclear Threat.
but will jane fonda make a new movie?
In the early 1970s when I helped found Greenpeace, I believed that nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust, as did most of my compatriots. That's the conviction that inspired Greenpeace's first voyage up the spectacular rocky northwest coast to protest the testing of U.S. hydrogen bombs in Alaska's Aleutian Islands. Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change.
Look at it this way: More than 600 coal-fired electric plants in the United States produce 36 percent of U.S. emissions -- or nearly 10 percent of global emissions -- of CO2, the primary greenhouse gas responsible for climate change. Nuclear energy is the only large-scale, cost-effective energy source that can reduce these emissions while continuing to satisfy a growing demand for power. And these days it can do so safely.
Read it all. And remember that when anti-American leftists gripe that the US produces more than its share of greenhouse gases, it was they who killed nuclear energy here. France, by contrast, produces 80 percent of its energy via nuclear reactor.
Jane Fonda's China Syndrome, a hysterical anti-nuke film, pretty much made nuclear plants impossible in the US. Rather than build new ones, we shut existing ones down.
Next time some liberal mocks religious people for disrespecting science, remind them of their "religious" resistence to nuclear power.
sunday april 16, 2006
it's a big ad. a very very big ad.
...from Australia.
wuzzat?
In an otherwise good column on the Duke lacrosse/stripper controversy, there is this:
And then there is the question of Duke itself. It is not an easy university to love. Few universities do as much to enroll minority students, and yet its public face is one of arrogance and elitism. Surrounded on most sides by down-at-the-heels black neighborhoods, the school sits like a fortress amid privation, its faux Gothic architecture all but declaring wealth and entitlement.
So taking actions to enroll minority students isn't enough. Duke must redo its architecture to conform with the neighborhood?
why mexico is poor
In a word, oligopoly:
For the minority of Mexicans who can afford a phone, their service comes from a telecom group that controls 94% of land lines and 80% of cellular service, charging rates that are among the highest in the world.
Watching TV? Two behemoths own 94% of Mexico's television stations, and recent legislation probably only served to strengthen their grip.
Buying a beer? Whatever the brand, chances are it was brewed by one of two companies whose combined share of the market tops 99%.
...
"Mexico has been a paradise to create and sustain unhealthy monopoly practices," said Mexico City political scientist Ricardo Raphael, a researcher at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education, who blames weak antitrust legislation and Mexico's long history of crony capitalism for concentrating power in relatively few hands.
Economists say business monopolies have saddled Mexican consumers with high prices, slowed the country's economic growth and exacerbated the divide between rich and poor.
Market share of companies in selected industries:
Broadcasting: Grupo Televisa -- 56%*, TV Azteca -- 38%*
Cement: Cemex -- 54%, Holcim Apasco -- 23%
Beer: Grupo Modelo -- 57%, Cerveceria Cuauhtemoc Moctezuma-- 43%
Tortillas/corn meal: Gruma -- 73%, Minsa -- 15%
a general misunderstanding
Mr. Rumsfeld does not give in easily in disagreements, either, and he will always force you to argue your point thoroughly. This can be tough for some people to deal with. I witnessed many heated but professional conversations between my immediate commander, Gen. Tommy Franks, and Mr. Rumsfeld — but the secretary always deferred to the general on war-fighting issues.
Ultimately, I believe that a tough defense secretary makes commanders tougher in their convictions. Was Donald Rumsfeld a micromanager? Yes. Did he want to be involved in all of the decisions? Yes. But Mr. Rumsfeld never told people in the field what to do. It all went through General Franks.
Mr. Rumsfeld did not like waste, which caused some grumbling among the military leadership even before 9/11. He knew that many of the operational plans we had on the books dated back to the 1990's (some even to the late 80's), and he wanted them updated for an era of a more streamlined, technological force. He asked us all: "Can we do it better, and can we do it with fewer people?"
Sometimes General Franks and I answered yes, other times we answered no. When we said no, there was a discussion; but when we told him what we truly needed, we got it. I never saw him endangering troops by insisting on replacing manpower with technology. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, we always got what we, the commanders, thought we needed.
This is why the much-repeated claims that Mr. Rumsfeld didn't "give us enough troops" in Iraq ring hollow. First, such criticisms ignore that the agreed-upon plan was for a lightning operation into Baghdad. In addition, logistically it would have been well nigh impossible to bring many more soldiers through the bottleneck in Kuwait. And doing so would have carried its own risk: you cannot sustain a fighting force of 300,000 or 500,000 men for long, and it would have left us with few reserves, putting our troops at risk in other parts of the world. Given our plan, we thought we had the right number of troops to accomplish our mission.
Remember that Donal Rumsfeld is a reformer and reformers always get arrows in the back. Consider this from June 2001 (before 9/11):
No one expected defense to become a major issue. George W. "Help Is on the Way" Bush and Dick Cheney made it so. The Pentagon assumed that help meant money.
Donald Rumsfeld said no, not yet. First, the new secretary of defense refused to press for large supplemental appropriations. Then he convened a klatch of high-level independent and confidential panels, "The Rumsfeld Review," to study every aspect of defense and come up with a basis for future thinking and action.
Soon, Rumsfeld found himself on everybody's hit list. The Pentagon, an array of conservatives (the kind who never met a weapon they didn't like) and an array of leftists (who never met a weapon they did) launched a well-publicized campaign to discredit the review. Publicly, nobody seemed sure how many panels there were, or what they might eventually report out. What mattered was to trash the product, perhaps even Rumsfeld himself.
news the news media ignores
In the last six months, the U.S. Army is seeing 15 percent more soldiers re-enlist than expected. This continues a trend that began in 2001. Every year since then, the rate at which existing soldiers have re-enlisted has increased. This despite the fact that 69 percent of the troops killed in Iraq have been from the army. New recruits continue to exceed join up at higher rates as well.
All this is extremely important, especially when there is a war going on. Experience saves lives in combat, and more of the most experienced troops are staying in. This means that, a decade from now, the army will have a large and experienced corps of senior NCOs. That, in turn, means the younger troops are likely to well trained and led.
saturday april 15, 2006
hidden history of iraq war critics
...most of whom advocated removing Saddam when Clinton was in the White House (before 9/11 upped the ante for not doing so).
Saddam was then on his way to setting the Guinness World Record for most resolutions violated. Wanting to indict President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and senior Pentagon officers for “an invented war,” as former top planner Lt.Gen. Newbold now puts it, they dare not admit that the Bush administration was, in fact, looking at the threat posed by Iraq in much the same way its predecessor did… the difference being that while Bill dallied, W. took on the threat.
a song made of 37 cello parts
Strummed, plucked, thumped and bowed. Video here.
jetpack made of shaken soda
the other generals speak up
"I think what we see happening with retired general officers is bad for the military, bad for civil-military relations and bad for the country," retired Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs under Mr. Bush, said in an interview with The Washington Times. He said he would elaborate his views in an op-ed essay.
"I'm hurt," said retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Michael P. DeLong, who was deputy commander of U.S. Central Command during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and briefed Mr. Rumsfeld at the Pentagon."When we have an administration that is currently at war, with a secretary of defense that has the confidence of the president and basically has done well -- no matter what grade you put on there, he has done well -- to call for his resignation right now is not good for the country," he said.
cheney's donate $7 million to charity
For medical research and help to the poor. Contrast that with humanitarian Al Gore, who was also once vice-president, who contributed $353 to charity in 1997. Which fits: liberals are best being generous with other peoples' money.
barking mad
The president of Iran again lashed out at Israel on Friday and said it was "heading toward annihilation," just days after Tehran raised fears about its nuclear activities by saying it successfully enriched uranium for the first time.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Israel a "permanent threat" to the Middle East that will "soon" be liberated. He also appeared to again question whether the Holocaust really happened.
bush derangement syndrome
...earns this crank a feature in the Washington Post.
two camps in the left
From the Guardian:
The war in Iraq dramatised, but did not of itself cause, a split in the left - one which is becoming more pronounced with every passing day. Much of the left took the view that the American-British invasion of Iraq was wrong; a significant part of that saw the reason for the war as stemming from, or containing, one or more of the following elements: A rampant American imperialism; a move to control Middle East oil supplies; a strategy dictated by US support for Israel - or dictated by the "Jewish lobby" and/or by Israel itself; Islamophobia; and (on the part of the UK) a poodle-like dependence on the US.
Opposition to some or all of these has increasingly defined much of the left, especially the further left. In the centre-left and in political, intellectual and media opinion generally, a diluted version of that view is popular, one that implicitly or explicitly sees the Iraqi events as at best a series of blinders.
A view that the war was a mistake is a perfectly rational and arguable one. What has, however, been horrifying to see has been the disappearance, or even non-appearance, of any consideration of the nature of the regime of Saddam Hussein that was destroyed by the invasion. That which had been a prime object of left politics - the removal of dictatorship, made more urgent in Iraq's case by the mass murderous and sadistic character of the Saddam regime - has dropped from consideration, or is given only formal recognition.
What had once been an imperative - an expression, and where possible more than an expression of solidarity with the suffering under such a dictatorship - has been vitiated by the main aim of much of left politics: a cultivation of anti-Americanism. In many parts of the left, that has meant close alliances with fundamentalist Islamic groups, whose policies on civil and human rights, including equal rights for women and gays, are deeply reactionary. It has at times seemed to mean rhetorical support for those seeking to terrorise Iraqi, and other, societies out of any move towards democratic rule.
friday april 14, 2006
looking back: lincoln's assassination
Today is the anniversary of Lincoln's assassination. The London Guardian reprints its article from that day. Betsy Newmark adds context:
Today, Lincoln has achieved an iconic status that is far removed from how he was regarded in his own time. People forget that, in the Spring of 1864, Radical Republicans were maneuvering to remove him from the ticket and put in someone of their own such as John C. Fremont or Salmon P. Chase. The Confederates were trying their utmost to influence the election by increasing northern war weariness to such an extent that the Democratic candidate, George McClellan would win. McClellan was the classic flip-flopper of a candidate, voicing his determination to prosecute the war to its finish while running on a peace platform.
Fortunately, Lincoln and his supporters' political acumen outmaneuvered his enemies within his own party. Sherman's victory in Atlanta, Farragut's in Mobile, and Sheridan's in the Shenandoah came in timely fashion to combat the horror from Grant's Overland campaign. But, if we'd had polling back then, Lincoln's victory would not have seemed a sure thing until right before the election. If he'd lived, he probably would have been demonized by both the radicals in his own party who wanted a harsh peace imposed on the South and by the Southerners who would have personalized all their resentment and bitterness in their criticisms of him. His assassination, on Good Friday no less, removed him from the political wounds that would most likely have been his fate in his second term.
black eye for buckeyes
Female profs at Ohio State claim "sexual harassment" over book recommendations:
Scott Savage, who serves as a reference librarian for the university, suggested four best-selling conservative books for freshman reading in his role as a member of OSU Mansfield’s First Year Reading Experience Committee.
The four books he suggested were The Marketing of Evil by David Kupelian, The Professors by David Horowitz, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis by Bat Ye’or, and It Takes a Family by Senator Rick Santorum. Savage made the recommendations after other committee members had suggested a series of books with a left-wing perspective, by authors such as Jimmy Carter and Maria Shriver.
Savage was put under “investigation” by OSU’s Office of Human Resources after three professors filed a complaint of discrimination and harassment against him, saying that the book suggestions made them feel “unsafe.” The complaint came after the OSU Mansfield faculty voted without dissent to file charges against Savage. The faculty later voted to allow the individual professors to file charges.
Read the whole thing. Amazing. True stifling of dissent.
As for "sexual harassment," my how that definition has changed. At the time of Anita Hill, it meant something like, "Honey, either you put out or you don't get promoted." Then it expanded to anything that might remotely make a woman uncomfortable at work, like guys telling dirty jokes in the lunch room. Now, it's recommending books with "objectionable" politics.
speaking with forked tongue
...literally. For those who find tattoos and piercings insufficient.
thursday april 13, 2006
russian comedy
Pravda means truth in Russian, and as a newspaper, Pravda has a history of anything but truth. At times it resembles Weekly World News, but without the wit. Now it proclaims that the US plans another staged attack (y'know, like 9/11) to justify going after Iran.
Next week, perhaps Pravda will bring us a portrait of Russia as a superpower, not the AIDs ridden, alcoholic, hollowed out spectre of its former self, a nation where life expectancy is lower than Bangladesh.
democrat heros
Murtha and Moran hear it from a soldier:
...a veteran injured in Afghanistan stood up to offer his view. "If I didn't have a herniated disc, I would volunteer to go to Iraq in a second with my troops," said Mark Seavey, a former Army sergeant who had recently returned from Afghanistan. "I know you keep saying how you have talked to the troops and the troops are demoralized, and I really resent that characterization. The morale of the troops I talk to is phenomenal, which is why my troops are volunteering to go back despite the hardships. . . ."
"And, Congressman Moran, 200 of your constituents just arrived back from Afghanistan -- we never got a letter, we never got a visit from you, you didn't come to our homecoming. The only thing we got was a letter from the governor of this state thanking us for our service in Iraq, when we were in Afghanistan. That's reprehensible. I don't know who you two are talking to, but the morale of the troops is very high."What was the response? Murtha said nothing, while Moran attempted to move on, no pun intended, stating: "That wasn't in the form of a question, it was a statement."
john kerry, simpleton
KERRY ON 'MEET THE PRESS': On Sunday, the junior senator from Massachusetts earned the first 'D' given out by OxBlog for a talk-show performance. In keeping with the habits of the blogosphere, I will explain my decision by inserting my comments into the transcript of Kerry's interview:
SEN. KERRY: Tim, it’s unconscionable that any young American is dying because Iraqis, five months after an election, are dithering and squabbling and cannot find the ability to compromise and come together in a democracy. Our kids didn’t die for that. Our kids didn’t go over there to do that. Our soldiers have done their job. They’ve given them several elections, three elections. They’ve given them a government, the opportunity to have a government.
Unconscionable? Kerry seems to believe that it was fully conscionable for young Americans to die throughout the first thirty months of the occupation, during which three elections were held. Yet somehow, it has become unconscionable for our servicemen and -women to die now that the formation of a government based on those elections is taking longer than expected.
"The opportunity to have a government." For a long time now, it has been plausible to argue that Iraqis had their opportunity and wasted it. But if Kerry believes the three elections were valuable enough to fight for, how can he advocate walking away if Iraqis won't meet his forty-day deadline?
The only way we made the elections work -- with more voters and fewer attacks on each polling day -- was by waging an unrelenting war against the insurgents for almost three years. None of the political progress in Iraq has come quickly or easily. How can Kerry insist that now it should?
MR. RUSSERT: Senator Joe Biden, your fellow Democrat in the Senate, said this about your proposal: “The problem with John’s plan is it sets a date, but it doesn’t tell you what happens when the rest of the world falls apart - when you have the Turks and the Iranians in Iraq and there’s a regional war. He doesn’t tell you that part.”
No, of course not. Which is way Kerry had to answer that challenge so evasively:
SEN. KERRY: Well, actually I disagree with Joe. I do set forth what you need to do in that part because there’s a complete absence of diplomacy here, Tim. I mean, you remember the times of Henry Kissinger, shuttle diplomacy, an incredibly engaged effort to try to get resolution in the Middle East? Do you remember Jim Baker moving around, talking, unbelievable engaged effort to help build a coalition for Desert Storm? You don’t see any of that taking place here. There’s a complete absence of real diplomacy.
Kerry insists just a few minutes later that 120,000 American troops "can't do anything about a civil war" in Iraq, but thinks that "shuttle diplomacy" would make a difference?
As for Henry Kissinger, one ought to recall that his strategy for Iraq in the 1970s was to cut a deal with the Ba'athist dictatorship that led to the slaughter of thousands of Kurds who had once believed America was on their side. How appropriate that Kerry is now invoking Kissinger's name to justify another betrayal.
And if Kerry thinks our ambassador in Iraq isn't "engaged," he's being willfully ignorant.
reagan library yesterday
...from outside the Air Force One Pavilion:
beyond photography
The amazing portfolio of Jim McNitt. See it here.
an evolutionary timeline
A webpage 135 feet wide. Use your horizontal scroll button to navigate.
dinner table debate
Just in time for Passover and Easter get-togethers: How to expose concealed anti-Americanism.
the sixteen words were true
In the late 1980s, the Iraqi representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency—Iraq's senior public envoy for nuclear matters, in effect—was a man named Wissam al-Zahawie. After the Kuwait war in 1991, when Rolf Ekeus arrived in Baghdad to begin the inspection and disarmament work of UNSCOM, he was greeted by Zahawie, who told him in a bitter manner that "now that you have come to take away our assets," the two men could no longer be friends. (They had known each other in earlier incarnations at the United Nations in New York.)
At a later 1995 UN special session on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Zahawie was the Iraqi delegate and spoke heatedly about the urgent need to counterbalance Israel's nuclear capacity. At the time, most democratic countries did not have full diplomatic relations with Saddam's regime, and there were few fully accredited Iraqi ambassadors overseas, Iraq's interests often being represented by the genocidal Islamist government of Sudan (incidentally, yet another example of collusion between "secular" Baathists and the fundamentalists who were sheltering Osama Bin Laden). There was one exception—an Iraqi "window" into the world of open diplomacy—namely the mutual recognition between the Baathist regime and the Vatican. To this very important and sensitive post in Rome, Zahawie was appointed in 1997, holding the job of Saddam's ambassador to the Holy See until 2000. Those who knew him at that time remember a man much given to anti-Jewish tirades, with a standing ticket for Wagner performances at Bayreuth. (Actually, as a fan of Das Rheingold and Götterdämmerung in particular, I find I can live with this. Hitler secretly preferred sickly kitsch like Franz Lehar.)
In February 1999, Zahawie left his Vatican office for a few days and paid an official visit to Niger, a country known for absolutely nothing except its vast deposits of uranium ore. It was from Niger that Iraq had originally acquired uranium in 1981, as confirmed in the Duelfer Report. In order to take the Joseph Wilson view of this Baathist ambassadorial initiative, you have to be able to believe that Saddam Hussein's long-term main man on nuclear issues was in Niger to talk about something other than the obvious. Italian intelligence (which first noticed the Zahawie trip from Rome) found it difficult to take this view and alerted French intelligence (which has better contacts in West Africa and a stronger interest in nuclear questions). In due time, the French tipped off the British, who in their cousinly way conveyed the suggestive information to Washington. As everyone now knows, the disclosure appeared in watered-down and secondhand form in the president's State of the Union address in January 2003.
If the above was all that was known, it would surely be universally agreed that no responsible American administration could have overlooked such an amazingly sinister pattern. Given the past Iraqi record of surreptitious dealing, cheating of inspectors, concealment of sites and caches, and declared ambition to equip the technicians referred to openly in the Baathist press as "nuclear mujahideen," one could scarcely operate on the presumption of innocence.
wednesday april 12, 2006
iraq economy is healthy
...as the Iraq campaign continues to be labeled a disaster by political opponents of the Bush administration at home, by those suspicious of the United States abroad, and increasingly by conservatives who call themselves realists yet have no realistic plan for Iraq, positive indicators about the Iraqi economy are not too hard to find. Though the economy expanded by an unimpressive 2.6% in real terms in 2005, that figure is scheduled to reach over 10% this year, as reported by the International Monetary Fund. Dawn Liberi, director of the U.S. Agency for International Development in Iraq, noted in February that per capita income has increased from $500 at the time of the invasion in 2003 to $1,500 today.
Despite the charge by Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies that American efforts to improve the devastated Iraqi economy "have largely been a wasteful, and highly ideological and bureaucratic failure," more than 30,000 new businesses have been registered with USAID in the past seven months alone.
making up news
This time it's the Washington Post.
not just jobs, but good jobs
The US economy isn't just producing jobs these days, it's also producing good jobs. Alongside the ads for jobs handling a cash register or a spatula are these new opportunities:
• In St. Louis, AFB International is enlisting both technicians, paid $30,000 to $40,000, and PhD scientists, offered $80,000 to $100,000, in its quest for the perfect pet food.
• In Delaware, Honeywell plans to hire people at $40,000 to $100,000 to work in a data-storage center.
• In southern California, some of the latest openings involve working on the railroad, for $35,000 to $70,000 a year. Union Pacific plans to add 2,000 employees altogether.
dispelling military myths
Five of the biggest myths include:
1) The U.S. Defense Department is unable to recruit enough military personnel to defend the country and its interests abroad.
2) Critical combat arms units are not being filled.
3) The military will accept any warm body and any dull brain it can get its hands on.
4) American minorities (and those from lower income urban areas) are suffering disproportionately higher losses on the battlefield.
5) Female soldiers are fighting in offensive ground combat operations.
facing down iran
Most Westerners read the map of the world like a Broadway marquee: north is top of the bill—America, Britain, Europe, Russia—and the rest dribbles away into a mass of supporting players punctuated by occasional Star Guests: India, China, Australia. Everyone else gets rounded up into groups: “Africa,” “Asia,” “Latin America.”
But if you’re one of the down-page crowd, the center of the world is wherever you happen to be. Take Iran: it doesn’t fit into any of the groups. Indeed, it’s a buffer zone between most of the important ones: to the west, it borders the Arab world; to the northwest, it borders NATO (and, if Turkey ever passes its endless audition, the European Union); to the north, the former Soviet Union and the Russian Federation’s turbulent Caucasus; to the northeast, the Stans—the newly independent states of central Asia; to the east, the old British India, now bifurcated into a Muslim-Hindu nuclear standoff. And its southern shore sits on the central artery that feeds the global economy.
If you divide the world into geographical regions, then, Iran’s neither here nor there. But if you divide it ideologically, the mullahs are ideally positioned at the center of the various provinces of Islam—the Arabs, the Turks, the Stans, and the south Asians. Who better to unite the Muslim world under one inspiring, courageous leadership? If there’s going to be an Islamic superpower, Tehran would seem to be the obvious candidate.
higher education and the holy cookie
SO ISOLATIONIST IS AMERICA that when confronted with questions of great pith and moment, we immediately turn to questions of great and persistent triviality. In some ways this underscores the bedrock of the country's greatness. No other country in history, nor any other country you can imagine, has the capacity to win a pocket war on the other side of the globe, play patty-cake with global terrorism, launch a fierce and bitter cultural and political argument at home, pull the global economy upward like The Little Engine That Could chanting "I think I can, I think I can," all while driving a couple radio-controlled web cams across the surface of Mars just to get some snapshots of rocks. Then we all go out to the Food Court, select from any one of the world's six leading cuisines and try to remember both where we parked and in which one of the family's seven vehicles we came in.
euro novels of discontent
There is an interesting trend in Europe. Books with a similar theme are becoming bestsellers. They relate the story of a white-collar middle-class man employed in a small enterprise, who tries to make ends meet for his family. He commutes daily to a city. Confronted with the perennial transportation problem in his country he loses his temper.
After crying out his rage against the collapsing civil service, harsh taxation that increasingly makes it impossible to make ends meet, the privileged corporations, and the entrenched political elites his message strikes a chord with the media looking for some drama in the somnambulist politics. Forming a new political party, he manages to capture the mood of discontent in the middle class and the book ends when he wins an election and stands poised to make some gargantuan societal change like decreasing taxation.
tueday april 11, 2006
why spiders don't spin
...from the end of their thread.
egalite, liberte 401(k)
The funny part of France's latest round of riots is what they're rioting about. These rabid rebels smashing their way through people and property alike, shouting revolutionary slogans and playing Robespierre in a FCUK hoodie are demanding ... continued job security with paid vacations. Gone are the days of tearing down the system. Now is the time to burn a car for better dental benefits.
He sees similar thinking among US liberals:
...today's liberalism is a lot of slide-rule wonkery. The smartest and most passionate thinkers of American liberalism are more actuary than revolutionary. Scan the pages of the New Republic or the American Prospect and you will learn that the sunny uplands of history can be reached not by sticking it to the man but by expanding the earned income tax credit and jiggling around some obscure provision of Medicare Part B. They're the rebels with a clause.
...and radical ideas coming from the right:
Who are the folks who want to rethink the status quo and truly liberate the masses? Pretty much where they've always been: on the libertarian right. Witness Charles Murray's exciting new book, "In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State." It's an elegant little tract that makes a sustained, sober and fact-driven case for scrapping the whole calcified edifice of the welfare state.
Under Murray's plan, all transfer payments would vanish, from Social Security and Medicare to corporate welfare and agricultural subsidies. In exchange, every low-income American over the age of 21 and not in jail would get $10,000 a year from the government. And everybody else would still get at least $5,000 a year from Uncle Sam. The only hitch is that people would be required to take out a minimal health insurance policy, and the tax code would stop favoring companies that offer health insurance.
In a flash, the working poor would be richer. Work even for a half a year at minimum wage, and the extra $10k would put you above the poverty line. The whole bloated, nannying welfare state would be a memory. Market forces would finally be introduced to the health insurance industry, driving down the absurdly high price of health care. Women who choose not to work so they can raise their kids would get the full $10,000 no matter how much their husbands earned, supporting families more than the current system and with less paperwork.
Charities and local communities would be revitalized, enjoying a flexibility denied to traditional bureaucrats. Those who wanted to walk on the wild side would get pocket change to do so but would have to live with the consequences. The old problem of subsidizing out-of-wedlock birth would become an anachronism.
number crunching
Brooking Institute releases a monthly Iraq report. Opinionated Bastard sifts through the data.
who's being rational?
The socialist economies of the major European countries are failing -- the French and German economies are stalled, and the entire socialist system is unsustainable -- but this, too, has no impact on the Left in America. The future they want for America has actually been tried in fellow Western democracies and is failing. To invert the famous statement of Westerners who praised communism, "We have seen the future and it doesn't work." One wonders if ever before in history such a large number of people had such a clear view of the consequences of their policies, and despite the failure of those policies, continued to devote their lives to enacting them.
And the Left thinks religious Americans are irrational.
That is why the language of liberal condemnation of tax cuts is that they are "tax cuts for the rich" rather than that they are "bad for the economy." It is resentment of the wealthier -- and most productive -- sector of America that animates liberal opposition to tax cuts, not concern about unemployment.
But the unemployment data not only challenge the Left. The record low jobless rate also challenges a widely held belief of many on the right -- that illegal immigrants have been taking jobs away from Americans.
look out, hillary
...he's a shoo-in candidate to unite the Democrats. He's bold, ruthless and dresses great. Click here to find out who.
french-o-nomics
Danielle Scache tries to avoid using the term "capitalism" in her economics class because it has negative connotations in France.
Instead, she teaches her high school students about the market economy, a slightly less controversial term she started using last year after a two-month internship at the dairy giant Danone. That was an experience that did away with more than one of her own prejudices, she said.
"I was surprised to see that people actually enjoyed working in a company," said Scache, who is 59. "Some of them were more enthusiastic than many teachers I know."
"You know," she confided with a laugh, "in France we often think of companies, especially multinationals, as a place of constant conflict between employees and management."
This view of bosses and workers as engaged in an endless, antagonistic tug-of-war goes some way toward explaining the two-month rebellion against a new labor law.
Jobs grow on trees. There is such a thing as a free lunch. The government is the source of wealth. Such sophistication.
monday april 10, 2006
some are more equal than others
The left worries over illegal immigrants but is ready to cast Iraqis to the savages.
To better understand the beleagured Iraqis, read this soldier's account of his time near Umm Qasr and the local family befriended by his unit.
HT: Instapundit.
kyoto is pointless
...say 60 leading scientists.
"'Climate change is real' is a meaningless phrase used repeatedly by activists to convince the public that a climate catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause. Neither of these fears is justified.
"Global climate changes all the time due to natural causes and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural 'noise'."
global warming stopped in 1998
...but the political hot air is just getting started...tipping point etc. But wait:
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.
yeah he's evil, but he's a snazzy dresser
Demonstrating new degrees of moral tone deafness, yesterday's LA Times published this:
Say this about Saddam Hussein: The man still knows how to dress. He won notice last week in court for his "signature black suit over a dark sweater and white shirt buttoned up to his neck," as The Times described it, "the conservative style of middle-class Arab merchants." It was a savvy move politically and sartorially, and there should never really have been any doubt that he could pull it off.
Hussein's audacity extends to his wardrobe. As a ruthless dictator, he was as comfortable in army fatigues as in a Tom Wolfe-style white suit, and he was willing to put just about anything on his head. Whether relaxing at home with a phonograph or posing with his horse, he exudes an easy confidence.
On the third anniversary of the overthrow of evil, the Times views the day through a fashion prism. Consider these witness accounts:
There was a machine designed for shredding plastic. Men were dropped into it and we were again made to watch. Sometimes they went in head first and died quickly. Sometimes they went in feet first and died screaming. It was horrible. I saw 30 people die like this. Their remains would be placed in plastic bags and we were told they would be used as fish food . . . on one occasion, I saw Qusay personally supervise these murders.
Another witness told us about practices of the security services towards women: Women were suspended by their hair as their families watched; men were forced to watch as their wives were raped . . . women were suspended by their legs while they were menstruating until their periods were over, a procedure designed to cause humiliation.
The Times said nothing of how Saddam's victims were dressed.
stifling of dissent
It took 10 police officers to keep order last month when Brigitte Gabriel gave a speech at Memphis University. A passionate and powerful speaker who had witnessed Palestinian terrorism and experienced anti-Jewish and anti-Christian propaganda in her native Lebanon, Ms. Gabriel had been invited to speak at the Tennessee campus by religious studies professor David Patterson.
When Ms. Gabriel and Mr. Patterson arrived in the campus auditorium 15 minutes before her scheduled presentation, several rows of seats in the front of the room were already occupied by men and women dressed in distinctive Muslim clothing.
Before Ms. Gabriel was introduced, a Muslim man who has been a long-term graduate student at the university strode to the front of the room and announced: "We have been told that the speaker will only accept questions written on cards. Everyone who believes this is an undemocratic lecture, raise your hands." The Muslims in the audience shouted their agreement.Ms. Gabriel then went to the front of the room and announced that the lecture belonged to her and that all who did not see it this way were welcome to leave. Two campus police officers stood, one on either side of her. They also called for backup. By the time order was restored and Ms. Gabriel began her speech, 10 police officers were posted in the room. Mr. Patterson implored the audience to give her a chance to be heard.
After her speech, she answered every question submitted -- questions she described as "Palestinian talking points" -- before the Muslim audience members swarmed onto the stage and surrounded her, yelling angrily at her. Finally, police officers grabbed her and hustled her out a side door. Someone else had to retrieve her coat and suitcase while she waited in a police car to be driven to the hotel where, for security reasons, she was registered under a fictitious name.
Meanwhile, NBC was busy manufacturing "news" by sending people who "look Muslim" to a NASCAR race to demonstrate how intolerant red-state people are.
misunderstanding bush
Both Democrats and Republicans have misjudged the man.
If they weren't doing such a disservice to their readers and the public discourse, it would be fascinating to listen to press, pundits and politicians as they completely misunderstand George W. Bush, a feat made all the more laughable because he's the most transparent leader we've ever had.
Unfortunately, the talking heads have a variety of self-interests that they're seeking to vindicate which tend to obscure their view of reality. So, for the Left, George Bush is alternately an idiot, a neocon, a tool of oil interests, or whatever. For the far Right he's a crypto-liberal, betraying the legacy of Saint Ronald Reagan. And for the neocons, he's one of them, having been forced into agreement with them by the events of 9-11. The reality is that George W. Bush ran and has to a remarkable degree governed as a Third Way theoconservative, or what he called a "compassionate conservative."
Recall that his platform in 2000 consisted of cutting taxes, reforming Social Security via personal accounts, the Faith Based Initiative, No Child Left Behind, originalist judges, moralistic foreign policy, and a very few other items.
While much of this is simply classical free market conservatism, several broad themes emerged. First, by combining the school vouchers of NCLB with the personal accounts in SS Reform and the Health Savings Accounts in the Medicare Reform Bill and various other retirement savings reforms, the President has at least laid the groundwork for an Ownership Society, whereby citizens will be freed from dependence on the state by the creation of individualized but government-mandated security nets.
parkinson's war
From American Thinker
Parkinson was best known for his social critiques, often disguised as humor, and usually dealing with bureaucracy and administration. His major contribution came in the form of Parkinson’s Law:
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
This is not as obscure as it sounds. Simply put, it’s an explanation why bureaucracies accomplish less as they grow larger. As far back as the 1930s, Parkinson had noticed that the Royal Navy’s administrative establishment continued expanding even as the fleet grew smaller, and predicted – quite correctly – that the Navy would eventually have more admirals than ships. The same process was apparent in the Colonial Office, which had more personnel in the late 1950s than it did when the British Empire was a going concern. Investigation into other fields demonstrated that the effect was universal.
...
When FDR required a covert action unit in WW II, he didn’t send a memo to the Pentagon or FBI. He called in WW I hero Bill Donovan and told him to get cracking. Donovan went to work recruiting eccentrics, adventurers, misfits, and Communists, and the legendary OSS was carrying out operations within a matter of months. (Contrast this to the modern CIA, which in 2004 announced it would require another six years before it would be reconfigured for terror war operations.)
In the mid-50s, when Lockheed was approached concerning a crash program to construct a high-altitude reconnaissance plane, the company turned to designer Kelly Johnson, whose Skunk Works – a small design team working in an out-of-the-way hangar – designed, built, and tested the aircraft in a matter of months (the Air Force had been working on the same project for several years, coming up with a lot of paper). The result, the U-2, is being phased out only today.
Read it all.
le mob rule
After weeks of protests and strikes, President Jacques Chirac announced plans Monday to "replace" a law that would have made it easier for companies to fire workers under age 26.
The deal represents a defeat for Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, who had insisted on the law as a means of reducing high unemployment rates among young people.
"a good leak"
The Washington Post gets it right:
PRESIDENT BUSH was right to approve the declassification of parts of a National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq three years ago in order to make clear why he had believed that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons. Presidents are authorized to declassify sensitive material, and the public benefits when they do. But the administration handled the release clumsily, exposing Mr. Bush to the hyperbolic charges of misconduct and hypocrisy that Democrats are leveling.
Rather than follow the usual declassification procedures and then invite reporters to a briefing -- as the White House eventually did -- Vice President Cheney initially chose to be secretive, ordering his chief of staff at the time, I. Lewis Libby, to leak the information to a favorite New York Times reporter...
The affair concerns, once again, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV and his absurdly over-examined visit to the African country of Niger in 2002. Each time the case surfaces, opponents of the war in Iraq use it to raise a different set of charges, so it's worth recalling the previous iterations.
Mr. Wilson originally claimed in a 2003 New York Times op-ed and in conversations with numerous reporters that he had debunked a report that Iraq was seeking to purchase uranium from Niger and that Mr. Bush's subsequent inclusion of that allegation in his State of the Union address showed that he had deliberately "twisted" intelligence "to exaggerate the Iraq threat." The material that Mr. Bush ordered declassified established, as have several subsequent investigations, that Mr. Wilson was the one guilty of twisting the truth. In fact, his report supported the conclusion that Iraq had sought uranium.
Mr. Wilson subsequently claimed that the White House set out to punish him for his supposed whistle-blowing by deliberately blowing the cover of his wife, Valerie Plame, who he said was an undercover CIA operative. This prompted the investigation by Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald. After more than 2 1/2 years of investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald has reported no evidence to support Mr. Wilson's charge.
In last week's court filings, he stated that Mr. Bush did not authorize the leak of Ms. Plame's identity. Mr. Libby's motive in allegedly disclosing her name to reporters, Mr. Fitzgerald said, was to disprove yet another false assertion, that Mr. Wilson had been dispatched to Niger by Mr. Cheney. In fact Mr. Wilson was recommended for the trip by his wife. Mr. Libby is charged with perjury, for having lied about his discussions with two reporters. Yet neither the columnist who published Ms. Plame's name, Robert D. Novak, nor Mr. Novak's two sources have been charged with any wrongdoing.
As Mr. Fitzgerald pointed out at the time of Mr. Libby's indictment last fall, none of this is particularly relevant to the question of whether the grounds for war in Iraq were sound or bogus. It's unfortunate that those who seek to prove the latter would now claim that Mr. Bush did something wrong by releasing for public review some of the intelligence he used in making his most momentous decision.
bill maher, legal whiz
To Rep. Cynthia McKinney, who smacked a capitol police officer, Bill Maher said, "I know you can't talk about this because it somehow got to litigation because everything in Washington does."
McKinney faces criminal charges, as anyone who hits a policeman would. This is a matter of prosecution. Litigation is for civil disputes.
al qaeda woes
Strategypage lays out their long list of failures.
jesus and medicare
When Republicans mention god they get accused of fomenting theocracy. So where's the outrage over Sen. John "Reporting for Duty" Kerry blagging this:
Not in one phrase uttered and reported by the Lord Jesus Christ, can you find anything that suggests that there is a virtue in cutting children from Medicare.
He didn't say anything about volume controls on iPods either, or whether tech stocks will remain robust in the long term.
sunday april 9, 2006
three years ago today, saddam was toppled
A nice roundup from Winds of Change. Here's a reminder of the evil we ended:
The witness against the government of Iraq walked stiffly into the room, metal callipers buckled to heavy medical shoes. They had tortured her two years ago. She is now four.
Her father had been suspected of involvement in a plot to kill Saddam Hussein's psychopathic son, Uday. He fled to the north of Iraq, but the secret police, the mukhabarat, came for his wife, still in Baghdad, and tortured her. When she wouldn't break, they tortured 'Anna' in front of her.
Her father, 'Ali', is a thick-set Iraqi who worked in Saddam's privileged inner circle. He described what they did to her: 'They had a wooden stick. They would squeeze her feet and ask "Has Daddy called you?" - she understood - "Does Daddy contact you?"'
late crashers
We watch movies on DVD and thus are never current. So it wasn't until last night that we tuned in Crash, this year's best picture, according the Academy Awards. Various thoughts bubbled up as the film unspooled. The first was from Shakespeare:
...a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Yes, Crash had sound and fury and, Hollywood gullibility notwithstanding, signified nothing.
Then I wondered if this was a giant prank: filmmakers stuff as many caricatures as possible into two hours and see if anyone will notice. The scenes were as overplayed as a Tex Avery cartoon. All that was missing was eyeballs leaving their sockets.
I started to dimiss Crash as just another stupid movie, when I recalled how Stalin found himself troubled by the example of America. We were the Golden Door, the land of opportunity, the light on the hill. This monkey-wrenched the grand notion of a worldwide communist revolution. Knowing he couldn't defeat us, he unleased his propagandist Willie Munzenberg.
Munzenberg stumbled across the Sacco and Vanzetti controvery and set about using it to taint the United States.
Münzenberg’s first idea was to create and sustain a worldwide anti-American campaign that would focus its appeal upon the mythology of the country’s immigration. The purpose of such a campaign would be to instill a reflexive loathing of the United States and its people as a prime tropism of left-wing enlightenment. To undermine the myth of the Land of Opportunity, the United States would be shown as an almost insanely xenophobic place, murderously hostile to foreigners.
In this he succeeded brilliantly. He duped some of the most brilliant liberal minds, including Felix Frankfurter, to stoke international outrage. When the duo was executed:
...the reverberations were international. Demonstrations in American cities were duplicated and in many places exceeded all over Europe. In Paris the Communist daily Humanité printed an extra sheet on which was splashed the single block word “Assassinés!” Crowds surged down the Boulevard Sebastopol, ripping up lampposts and tossing them through plate glass windows.
Protective tanks ringed the American embassy, and sixty policemen were injured when a mob tried to set up barricades there. Five thousand militants roamed the streets of Geneva the evening before the executions, overturning American cars, sacking shops selling American goods, gutting theaters showing American films.
One of the greatest demonstrations in the history of the Weimar republic took place in Berlin; there were tumultuous demonstrations in Bremen and Wilhelmshaven and Hamburg, and a two hour torchlight parade in Stuttgart. During that turbulent week, half a dozen German demonstrators were killed. No one was killed in England, but on the night of the executions, a crowd gathered in front of Buckingham Palace and sang “The Red Flag.”
Such is the power of propaganda. I was taught about Sacco-Vanzetti in high school in the context of "Red scares" and xenophobia. Only recently did it become clear that Sacco was guilty and that his lawyers knew it. Even Upton Sinclair knew of their guilt and said nothing.
Today, we find ourselves in war of ideologies. Al Jazeera feeds anti-American bunk to a willing and gullible audience. A Turkish movie depicts American doctors harvestng organs from Iraqi prisoners to send to Israel and sets box office records. European media echo similar themes.
And our response? Hollywood boldly tells the world that Los Angeles is a simmering stew of racial animosity. Only in America: piss on your homeland for acclaim and profit.
JB
club gitmo
Instapundit has a nice collection of linked stories about how prisoners released from Guantanomo spoke highly of the experience.
Asadullah strives to make his point, switching to English lest there be any mistaking him. "I am lucky I went there, and now I miss it. Cuba was great," said the 14-year-old, knotting his brow in the effort to make sure he is understood.
He spent a typical day watching movies, going to class and playing football. He was fascinated to learn about the solar system, and now enjoys reciting the names of the planets, starting with Earth. Less diverting were the twice-monthly interrogations about his knowledge of al-Qaida and the Taliban. But, as Asadullah's answer was always the same - "I don't know anything about these people" - these sessions were merely a bore: an inevitably tedious consequence, Asadullah suggests with a shrug, of being held captive in Guantanamo Bay.
much ado about zilch
If the president decides to make information public, it is public — no matter how classified it was before, and no matter who in the government thinks the publicizing of it is a bone-headed move. The president gets to do that — and that’s part of why it matters who the president is.
Classified information belongs to the executive branch. Under the Constitution, the executive power is vested in a single official, the president. As Justice Scalia pointed out in his classic dissent in Morrison v. Olson, this does not mean some of the executive power; it means all of the executive power. The president can make a bad de-classification decision, but it is his decision to make. (In this case, it happens to have been a good decision, made to balance the misinformation put into the public domain by Joseph Wilson and others trying to mislead the public about Iraq’s nuclear intentions.)
But governance is freighted with politics — which means it is beset by misinformation, half-truths, and the inaccuracies you get in a bumptious partisan environment, fueled by 24-hour news channels and a press whose default state is frenzy. Consequently, when misinformation approaches a tipping point in the court of public opinion, it is often to the greater good for a president to disclose some sensitive, accurate information so the public is not led astray.
Classic example of this? After the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed in 1998, the Clinton Administration retaliated, in part, by bombing the al Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. Almost immediately, President Clinton was attacked politically: we had taken out a mere aspirin factory, Sudan was not a threat to us, it was a gratuitous act of American aggression, etc.
So what did the Clinton Administration do? Exactly what it should have done. It had intelligence officials leak to the media previously undisclosed, previously classified information which put President Clinton’s decision in sensible context. Besides anonymous leakers, the Administration later sent its top counterterrorism official, Richard Clarke, to provide — selectively — some of the available intelligence, so the public would understand why President Clinton’s actions had been justified. Here’s how the Washington Post reported it on January 23, 1999:
While U.S. intelligence officials disclosed shortly after the missile attack that they had obtained a soil sample from the El Shifa site that contained a precursor of VX nerve gas, Clarke said that the U.S. government is “sure” that Iraqi nerve gas experts actually produced a powdered VX-like substance at the plant that, when mixed with bleach and water, would have become fully active VX nerve gas.
Clarke said U.S. intelligence does not know how much of the substance was produced at El Shifa or what happened to it. But he said that intelligence exists linking bin Laden to El Shifa's current and past operators, the Iraqi nerve gas experts and the National Islamic Front in Sudan.
Given the evidence presented to the White House before the airstrike, Clarke said, the president “would have been derelict in his duties if he didn't blow up the facility.”
condi at the keyboard
Piano keys, that is. A nice profile from the New York Times.
for the fretful, more to fret about
Supermarkets have already brought everything under the sun under one roof, and along the way been accused of denuding the High Street of butcher, baker and candlestick-maker.
Now they are introducing a new technology that some say threatens a fundamental invasion of our privacy.
We are all familiar with barcodes, those product fingerprints that save cashiers the bother of keying in the code number of everything we buy.
Now, meet their replacement: the RFID tag, or radio frequency ID tag. These smart labels consist of a tiny chip surrounded by a coiled antenna.
saturday april 8, 2006
more nuttiness from hamas
United States churches are secretly run by Jews who converted to Christianity with the intention of controlling religious Americans including President Bush, a top Hamas member claims.
"Even the churches where the Americans pray are led by Jews who were converted to Christianity, but they were converted to keep controlling the Americans," Mohammad Abu Tir, the number two Hamas terrorist in the newly formed Palestinian Authority government said during an exclusive interview from his home yesterday with top radio host Rusty Humphries and WND Jerusalem bureau chief Aaron Klein.
"I made a study and I know very well that all this radicalism in some parts of the Christianity, (including) the Anglicans who are being led by Bush, is because of the control of Zionists," said Abu Tir.
Someone needs to introduce these clowns to Occam's Razor.
reaganomics spreads to china
From the Oriental Morning Post.
f-14 vs. concrete wall
This video should 1) dampen enthusiasm for terrorists thinking of flying a plane into a nuclear power plant and 2) help 9/11 conspiracy nuts understand why nothing was left of the plane that slammed the Pentagon.
teachable moment: media bias
If you care to point out liberal media bias to those who refuse to acknowledge it, now is a perfect teachable moment. Begin by reaching for newspapers from two days back.
President Bush authorized aides to release -- in 2004, after Saddam was ousted and the occupation was in full swing -- details from his prewar National Intelligence Estimate. This document is written in large part by the CIA, where Valerie Plame worked.
That NIE showed that Bush had been told that Saddam had WMD. Plame's husband, Joe Wilson, was working to get John Kerry elected president and told a different story. Rather than stand mute while Valerie Plame's husband spread lies, Bush set the record straight.
News of this has the Democrat-friendly media calling Bush's release "leaking," implying that Bush's denunciation of real leaking (NSA wiretaps, for example) is somehow hypocritical.
Now the story mutated that Bush released the name of Valerie Plame. Bush haters worldwide are inventing false stories. Just watch them run with it. People who don't follow the news closely, which is most people, will be left vaguely remembering Bush was up to no good.
For mediacrats, mission accomplished.
hubba hubba
The launch of a version of Playboy magazine in Indonesia has sparked a heated reaction in the world's most-populous Muslim nation.
Muslim leaders condemned the publication as "moral terrorism" that destroyed the nation's way of life.
But some readers were unimpressed by the toned-down content. One radio caller said he had been deceived as there were no nude women. A caller to Jakarta's 68H radio said: "It's a scandal! There's no nude women in the magazine. I think we have been deceived."
Another said: "It's sinful to read Playboy if there's no nudity."
junk science
The Top Ten Junk Science stories of the past decade. My favorite is dioxin:
The EPA and a California-based activist group, Communities for a Better Environment, are attacking a San Francisco-area gasoline refinery operated by the Tosco Corp for its discharges of dioxin into San Francisco Bay. Tosco’s wastewater is permitted by the EPA to contain 0.14 trillionths of a gram of dioxin per liter. Last November, the EPA moved to reduce this level to zero.
Sounds bad, putting dioxin into SF Bay. But the author sent Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream to the lab.
...based on our testing, a single serving of Ben & Jerry’s contains about 2,285 times more dioxin than an 8-ounce “serving” of gasoline refinery wastewater at the permitted level.
None of this is to say that Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is dangerous. But here’s the conundrum for the pushers of dioxin hysteria, including their ally and financial backer Ben & Jerry’s.
If dioxin was so dangerous, it is unlikely that Ben & Jerry’s would be selling ice cream. Certainly, an appropriate new flavor would be “Tasty Toxics.”
friday april 7, 2006
solar eclipse as seen from the space station
Here.
culture of hypocrisy
Democrats plan to campaign on the GOP's "culture of corruption" even after the retirement of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. But before throwing stones, they should board up their own glass house.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi didn't come to praise Caesar when on Tuesday she released a statement on the resignation of Rep. Tom DeLay, saying:
"Mr. DeLay's departure from Congress is one piece of the changes needed to end the Republican culture of corruption. This Republican corruption continues to cost the American people at the pharmacy, at the gas pump and in their home energy bills."
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid has echoed these talking points, saying earlier this year:
"The American people have paid the price for the Republican culture of corruption over the last five years, and the president's budget proposes more of the same."
Let's leave aside for the moment the lawsuits from the Democrats' very own special interest, the trial lawyers, that have raised the cost of health care and drugs. Or the fact that Democrats have led the parade in blocking development of domestic oil and natural gas in Alaska and the Outer Continental Shelf and on federal lands in the West. Or that Democrats have their share of the "earmarks" slipped into budget bills that bloat the deficit.
Let's consider the ethics of those casting these rather large stones. Conspicuously absent from media coverage of DeLay's alleged transgressions is Pelosi's very real election law violations.
For example, House and Senate leaders are allowed one so-called leadership PAC in addition to their own campaign committee, the purpose of which is to make contributions to other candidates. Pelosi had two.
In early 2004, the Federal Election Commission fined both PACs associated with Pelosi, the second making $5,000 contributions to 36 campaigns that had already received the maximum $5,000 allowed by law from the first.
And when it comes to cashing in on family connections, DeLay's relatives can't hold a candle to Reid's family.
In June, 2003, the Los Angeles Times reported that in the prior four years firms employing Reid's sons or sons-in-law earned more than $2 million in lobbying fees from special interests that were represented by the kids and helped by the senator in Washington. Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D.-Ill, head of the Democrats' effort to retake the House and make Pelosi speaker, said "the power of the special interests, the control the powerful lobbyists continue to hold, tells the American people everything they need to know about Tom DeLay's departure — that DeLay may be gone, but nothing has changed."
Emanuel has seen corruption and malfeasance firsthand, having served as a senior adviser in the Clinton administration, famous for the White House coffees, renting out the Lincoln bedroom, and Johnny Chung showing up at the White House with a $50,000 check he handed to Maggie Williams, Hillary Clinton's chief of staff, among other questionable things.
The 2000 campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton, who would be our president, recently conceded filing false FEC reports, understating in-kind contributions by nearly $722,000, including those of three-time convicted felon Peter Paul.
As we have noted, Reid got $70,000 from sources linked to lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whom Democrats tried to hang around DeLay's neck like a political albatross. John Kerry got $100,000, and Senate campaign committee chief Chuck Schumer got nearly $30,000. Schumer in 2003 quietly paid a $130,000 fine plus $120,000 in refunds to 77 donors for violations in his 1998 campaign.
Why, it's enough to make your eyes bug out.
how to be a man
If you gotta ask, or read a book on the subject, don't bother.
boko-maru in america
In the satirical novel Cat's Cradle, the islanders of San Lorenzo practice a ritual called boko-maru--pressing the bottoms of their feet together so their souls can mingle. Boko-maru is illegal and punishable by death, yet everyone including the island's dictator do it regularly.
Thus it is with Saddam and the missing WMD. Virtually everyone in the western world was certain that Saddam had WMD, but now, acts like Bush invented the notion for his own ends. (See the video clips of Hillary, Ted Kennedy and Jay Rockefeller in our Big Lie section.)
The latest act in this absurd drama was news that Bush authorized the public release of information from one of his intelligence briefs, information which showed that our intelligence services believed Saddam had WMD. For this Democrats are calling him "leaker in chief." Sorry, you cannot leak against yourself.
The leaking on this matter came from inside the CIA where certain individuals decided to bloody President Bush's reputation during an election year. Joe Wilson (Mr. Valerie Plame) was the public face of this effort.
Joe Wilson's "explosive revelation" was that he'd been sent to investigate a report that Saddam was trying to buy uranium from Niger. He claimed Cheney had sent him on the mission (a proven lie) that his wife did not recommend him for the job (a proven lie) and that his report to the CIA discredited the Niger story (another proven lie.)
As it happens, Joe Wilson had a speaking gig in LA last night. The report in the LA Daily News recycled a lie:
...on July 6, 2003, The New York Times published a scathing column titled "What I Did Not Find in Africa."
Penned by Joseph C. Wilson IV, the column effectively debunked a key tenet of the Bush administration's justification for invading Iraq: namely, that Saddam Hussein was actively seeking a key ingredient for nuclear weapons in Africa.
In fact, independent investigations by the British and the Senate (again, see the Big Lie section) concluded that Iraq was indeed trying to buy uranium from Niger. Furthermore, contrary to what Wilson later publicly claimed, his report buttressed the CIA's suspicious about Iraq buying ingredients for a nuke.
Wilson was exposed long ago as a political partisan and a liar. But with an ignorant and/or biased press retelling the tale, none of that matters. One student who heard Wilson's lecture exclaimed:
"This is the headline news of the evening. It is very bizarre when that happens at your campus or in your neck of the woods," said Leanne Vincent, student leadership coordinator. "Whatever it is, it's a great learning experience."
Ms. Vicent didn't learn anything true.
See also Much Ado About Nothing. And there's Joe Wilson unfiltered.
thursday april 6, 2006
harry reid needs clinton lessons
If you're gonna fib, do it with panache. Bill Clinton was born with a special gene that lets him lie to your face and make you admire him for doing it. Watching Al Gore trying to follow in his foot steps was both comical and unsettling.
Now Sen. Harry Reid finds himself caught in a lie about his position(s) on illegal immigration and can't keep his stories straight. As charming as a undertaker (apologies to undertakers), Reid reveals himself as both scheming and flat footed.
zeyad is coming to america
The second Iraqi blogger I began to read regularly, Zeyad, is coming to attend college and become a journalist.
the other side of the story
Bill Crawford picks up where Arthur Chrenkoff left off.
look at the numbers
81, 76, 50, 49, 43, 25
What are these numbers? This week’s Powerball winners? A safe deposit combo? New numbers to torment those poor b*stards stranded on the island in Lost?
No, they’re the number of troops that have died in hostile actions in Iraq for each of the past six months. That last number represents the lowest level of troop deaths in a year, and second-lowest in two years.
All this is from Brookings Institute.
zarqawi gets the axe
Alas, only the figurative axe.
ABU MUSAB AL-ZARQAWI, the most feared commander in the Iraqi insurgency, may have been forced to surrender his leadership by rival groups, angered by his bloody tactics and the interference of foreign fighters in the Iraqi conflict.
According to Huthayfah Azzam, the son of Abdullah Azzam, al-Zarqawi’s former mentor, the notorious commander of al-Qaeda in Iraq was stripped of his political duties at a meeting two weeks ago.
“The Iraqi resistance high command asked al-Zarqawi to give up his political role and replaced him with an Iraqi because of several mistakes,” said Mr Azzam in an interview with al-Arabiya, the Arabic news channel. “Al-Zarqawi’s role has been limited to military action,” he said.
But wait...Murtha said the terrorists are winning in Iraq. Then why fire the boss?
katie couric a loss leader?
Did you know that NBC's Today show is the most profitable show on any network? I didn't until last fall, when I read Ken Auletta's excellent piece in the New Yorker.
And key to Today's success is/was Katie Couric. I guess you must be a Steel Magnolias fan to understand the appeal. To help you on that front, read this gushing (to put it mildly) valentine published in today's LA Daily News.
So perhaps CBS had more in mind that pumping up its nightly news ratings. By paying Couric $15 million a year, they get her off NBC's cash cow and gain a shot at dislodging Today. Nightly news is not a big profit center. Morning fluff time is. Follow the money...
dutch treat: work or we'll fine you
The Dutch are known for their tolerance, which extends even to tolerance of intolerance directed against themselves. But apparently some lines shall not be crossed, and one of them is staying home to raise a family:
“A highly-educated woman who chooses to stay at home and not to work – that is destruction of capital,” she said in an interview last week. “If you receive the benefit of an expensive education at society’s expense, you should not be allowed to throw away that knowledge unpunished.”
So said Sharon Dijksma, a leading parliamentarian of the Dutch Labour Party, that wants:
...to recover part of the cost of their education from highly-educated women who decide not to seek paid work. Between 2001 and 2005 the number of Dutch women aged between 15 and 65 who were out on the labour market rose from 55.9 to 58.7 per cent. Dijksma says she wants to stimulate more women to join the work force.
In the municipal elections earlier this month the PvdA became the biggest party in the Netherlands thanks to the Muslim vote. The PvdA is generally expected to win the general elections next year, when the 35 year old Dijksma, who has been an MP since she was 23 and is a leading figure in the party, might become a government minister.
Irony abounds. Muslim immigrants, whose birthrates exceed the native Dutch by a mile, are providing the electoral oomph to put Dijksma in power where she plans to make raising children tougher for educated women.
Yes, we have so much to learn from the Europeans.
wednesday april 5, 2006
good reason to be scared of the dentist
P.J. O'Rourke, when asked if he could live in any era, which would it be? "Now." And why? "Modern dentistry," he replied. To demonstrate the march of progress, scientists have discovered a 9000 year old dentist drill.
the ignorant, self-willed president
I recently ran across the text of a letter, penned by liberal historian and former Secretary of the U.S. Navy George Bancroft, about the president of the U.S.
In it, he wrote: "How can we reach our president with advice? He is ignorant, self-willed, and is surrounded by men, some of whom are almost as ignorant as himself.
"So we have the dilemma put to us. What to do when his power must continue for two years longer and when the existence of our country may be endangered before he can be replaced by a man of sense. How hard, in order to save the country, to sustain a man who is incompetent."
Bush? No Abraham Lincoln.
maggie's farm on mass. healthcare
A Massachusetts reader offers this:
What are you guys smoking over there? Here I am in Massachusetts, without health insurance, and with a family of four, and all that has happened is on top of having to pay full freight for my family's doctor bills, I get fined $1000.00 for the privelege.
I don't want your stinking welfare greenstamp department of motor vehicle government cheese copay paperwork foodstamp prepaid doctor tax charity ward let a millionflowers bloom supervision of my family's medical situation, thank you very much.
Catastrophic medical insurance is currently illegal in Massachusetts. All they had to do is allow me to purchase what I could get if I lived 50 miles west, which is REAL LIVE INSURANCE, that is, they would pay if something unexpected, substantial, and expensive happened. And it would cost me a couple hundred bucks a month. But no, I have to pay full freight for every lamebrain thing that every knucklehead who has a job with benefits wants tax free..
help tim rutten, the churchies are out to get him
The LA Times's Tim Rutten reviews Jon Meacham's American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation which:
...examines the religious right's claims that the United States was founded as a "Christian nation" and that failure to act accordingly explains everything they find wrong with America today. They are invincibly ignorant of the fact confirmed by every serious historian that all but a handful of the Founders were deists and men of the Enlightenment. Their religion was mostly a matter of tradition and ceremony."
Fair enough. After doing a nice job reviewing the book, Rutten gets squirrely, asking:
Why is it no longer permissible to point out that biblical literalism isn't even a respectable theological position, let alone a guide to public policy?
No, the question is since when is it not permissible? Rutten is being ridiculous. Religious belief (at least Judeo-Christian belief, Islam is another matter) is openly mocked in all media.
And what policy is being made based on biblical literalism? Name one.
Why are the rest of us being forced to accept some Americans' personal decisions as an "interest" like any other that must be given its say and taken into account?
Rutten feels put upon because others differ from him. What of diversity?
Rutten begins his review by citing, reducio ad absurdum, the example of some Colorado primitives who hectored a teacher out of her job for teaching Faust. As if that sums up the faithful.
Then what of Reverend Martin Luther King? Or the Quakers who led the charge to abolish slavery? And what of Southern California's leftist Cardinal Mahoney who incites violation of US immigration policy?
Hardline liberals fancy themselves rationalists, all the while espousing unshakeable faith in government to run our lives. They're just as dogmatic and pious in their own way, but are blind to it. It's both comical and sickening to witness their righteous strut.
cbs hires cupie doll as anchor
Katie Couric will restore our credibility. Yeah, that's the ticket!
ode to our strange tongue
When the English tongue we speak.
Why is break not rhymed with freak?
Will you tell me why it's true
We say sew but likewise few?
And the maker of the verse,
Cannot rhyme his horse with worse?
Beard is not the same as heard
Cord is different from word.
Cow is cow but low is low
Shoe is never rhymed with foe.
Think of hose, dose, and loseAnd think of goose and yet with choose
Think of comb, tomb and bomb,
Doll and roll or home and some.
Since pay is rhymed with say
Why not paid with said I pray?
Think of blood, food and good.
Mould is not pronounced like could.
Wherefore done, but gone and lone -
Is there any reason known?
To sum up all, it seems to me
Sound and letters don't agree.
Written by Lord Cromer in 1902
nbc "internets" ex-girlfriend katie
...says American Digest.
amazing sand art
Watch the video and see it being created.
apple to let xp run on new macs
michael barone
Let's say you were part of a group designing the news media from scratch. Someone says that it would be a good idea to have competing news media -- daily newspapers and weekly magazines, radio and television news programs. Sounds like a good start.
Someone else says that it would be a good idea to staff these news media with people who are literate and well-educated. Check. Then someone says let's have 90 percent of the people who work for these organizations be from one of the nation's two competitive political parties and 10 percent from the other.
Uh, you might find yourself saying, especially if you weren't sure that your party would get the 90 percent, maybe that's not such a good idea. But that's the news media we have today.
Surveys galore have shown that somewhere around 90 percent of the writers, editors and other personnel in the news media are Democrats and only about 10 percent are Republicans. We depend on the news media for information about government and politics, foreign affairs and war, public policy and demographic trends -- for a picture of the world around us. But the news comes from people 90 percent of whom are on one side of the political divide. Doesn't sound like an ideal situation.Of course, a lot of people in the news business say it doesn't make any difference. I remember a conversation I had with a broadcast news executive many years ago.
"Doesn't the fact that 90 percent of your people are Democrats affect your work product?" I asked.
"Oh, no, no," he said. "Our people are professional. They have standards of objectivity and professionalism, so that their own views don't affect the news.""So what you're saying," I said, "is that your work product would be identical if 90 percent of your people were Republicans."
He quickly replied, "No, then it would be biased."
massachusetts takes the plunge
...for near universal health coverage, using a combination of carrots and sticks. This is a story to follow. Note that this is not "single payer" which is a euphemism for government monopoly.
The bill, which resulted after months of wrangling between legislators and the governor, requires all Massachusetts residents to obtain health coverage by July 1, 2007.
Individuals who can afford private insurance will be penalized on their state income taxes if they do not buy it. Government subsidies to private insurance plans will enable more of the working poor to be able to afford insurance and will expand the number of children who are eligible for free coverage. And businesses with more than 10 workers that do not provide insurance will be assessed a fee of up to $295 per employee per year.
All told, the plan is projected to cover 515,000 uninsured people within three years, about 95 percent of the state's uninsured population, legislators said.
"It is not a typical Massachusetts-Taxachusetts, oh just crazy liberal plan," said Stuart H. Altman, dean of the Heller Graduate School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. "It isn't that at all. It is a pretty moderate approach and that's what's impressive about it. It tried to borrow and blend a lot of different pieces."
tuesday april 4, 2006
pinched perspective
The NY Times headline screams "Americans in Iraq Face Their Deadliest Day in Months." Read the story and learn nine military lost their lives. Five of them in a freak auto accident. Must be Rumsfeld's fault somehow.
who hates whom more?
Libs or conservatives? Dennis Prager observes:
Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic Party, said on national TV, "Our moral values, in contradiction to the Republicans', is we don't think kids ought to go to bed hungry at night." Republicans don't care about starving children. Liberals deem conservatives to be racist, homophobic, war mongering, money worshipping and sexist. It makes perfect sense to hate such people. I would, too.
The converse is not true. Conservatives tend to view liberals as immature and foolish. But childish adults and fools don't merit the hatred that racists do. And the liberal charge that conservatives generally label war critics "traitors" is pure fabrication.
bill cosby: cleanse yourselves
Humorist Bill Cosby lectured black residents of New Orleans over the weekend, saying their community was "wounded" by crime even before Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city and killed their neighbors.
"It's painful, but we can't cleanse ourselves unless we look at the wound," Cosby told the rally of about 2,000 people at the city's convention center, where thousands of Katrina evacuees had gathered seven months earlier.
"Ladies and gentlemen, you had the highest murder rate, unto each other. You were dealing drugs to each other. You were impregnating our 13-, 12-, 11-year-old children," he said, in quotes picked up by Reuters.
"What kind of a village is that?"
"i have no relation to reality"
Islam practices a charming form of genital mutilation on young girls, snipping off their clitoris. Dr. Sanity brings us, via Memri, this interview snippet from Egyption TV:
Interviewer: Is the girl asked whether she wants to be circumcised or not?
Dr. Muhammad Wahdan: No. We ask the doctor, who makes the decision.
Dr. Malika Zarrar: God help us.
Interviewer: So what about the girl's opinion?
Dr. Muhammad Wahdan: What do you mean?
Interviewer: What if she says: I don't want to be circumcised. What happens then?
Dr. Muhammad Wahdan: If a girl says she doesn't want it, she's free. No problem.
Interviewer: Is this what happens in reality?
Dr. Muhammad Wahdan: I have no relation to reality. I am talking about how things should be.
Interviewer: You are a religious sheik, from Al-Azahar University. You cannot say you have no relation to reality.
Dr. Muhammad Wahdan: Reality is a mistake, we must rectify it.If there was ever in history a better example of the paranoid fear of female sexuality, I can't think of it. I don't pretend to be an expert on Islam, but it appears to me that much of Muslim culture (particularly in the Middle East) has evolved into a structure for the sole purpose of containing female sexuality. This containment has not only become a key aspect of the worship of their god; but it also is a key factor in individual personality development; as well as the main pollutant of all social interactions.
The men of Islam are obsessed with sex beyond even the wildest imaginings of the Western male's mind. And the obsession is far from healthy.
So frequently do we joke about men's preoccupation with sex and female body parts in the West, that we have failed to notice that the Muslim world is literally consumed by female sexuality and with their fear of it.
hot, political air
"60 Minutes" conned its audience once again. Three weeks ago, they presented NASA scientist James Hansen as a whistle-blower risking his job to speak truth to power. That would be the Bush administration which, he claimed, muzzled his dire (and in his view incontestable) warnings about global warming.
Bull. Robert Novak notes:
James E. Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has been telling the world that story for many years. Nor was his charge that the science is being covered up by the Bush administration anything new. He made that complaint during the 2004 election year in the same speech in which he endorsed Sen. John Kerry for president against his boss, George W. Bush.
If that suggests Dr. Hansen is more political than a scientist ought to be, the dispute over whether the U.S. government should regulate emissions of greenhouse gases is at heart political. But it is not a matter of industry's allies in government nullifying unanimous scientific opinion. The scientists are divided, and Hansen and his friends are using political tactics to try to prevail.
It may shock some people, but scientists can be and often are political partisans.
In his "60 Minutes" interview, Hansen gave the impression of a faithful government scientist who, frustrated by politicians, at long last dared to speak out. Asserting the need to reduce CO2 emissions, Hansen warned: "If that doesn't start within 10 years, I don't think we can keep additional global warning under 1 degree Celsius. And that means there's a great danger of passing some of these tipping points. If the ice sheets once begin to disintegrate, what can you do about it?"
Hansen sounded much the same alarm in 1988, when he energized the global warming movement by predicting a temperature rise of 0.8 degrees Fahrenheit over the next 10 years. When the actual rise in surface temperatures over the decade was only 0.2 degrees, Hansen stepped back from his earlier predictions.
"The forcings that drive long-term climate change are not known with an accuracy sufficient to define future climate change," Hansen wrote in 1998. He later admitted devising "extreme scenarios" about global warming to get the attention of "decision-makers."
Shoddy muzzle?
As the fiercely contested presidential election of 2004 neared its end, an obviously unmuzzled Hansen declared publicly he was muzzled. Speaking at the University of Iowa on Oct. 26 that year, he declared: "In my more than three decades in government, I have never seen anything approaching the degree to which information flow from scientists to the public has been screened and controlled as it is now." At that same event, Hansen said he was voting for Kerry. In short, if you want the truth about environmental peril, you better get rid of Bush.
CBS presented other scientists who attested to Hansen's bona fides. But wait:
Roy Spencer, a research scientist for the University of Alabama in Huntsville who disagrees with Hansen's science, recently wrote: "Hansen is a smart, productive public servant that is on a crusade for what he believes in." In waging that crusade, his claims that he is muzzled can get him on "60 Minutes" faster than sober debate over whether the "tipping point" is so far in the future that technological advances surely will be available to cope with the problem.
And finally, that secretive White House meme:
In concluding the Hansen segment on "60 Minutes," CBS correspondent Scott Pelley said: "For months, we've been trying to talk to the president's science adviser, but we were finally told he would never be available." White House communications director Nicolle Wallace told me: "'60 Minutes' never contacted the press office." Assuming both statements are accurate, they resulted in a one-sided political presentation that ignored the real scientific debate.
are facts obsolete?
What is more frightening than any particular policy or ideology is the widespread habit of disregarding facts. Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey put it this way: "Demagoguery beats data."
People who urge us to rely on the United Nations, instead of acting "unilaterally," or who urge us to follow other countries in creating a government-run medical care system, often show not the slightest interest in getting facts about the actual track record of either the UN or government-run medical systems.
Those who believe in affirmative action likewise usually see no reason to find out what actually happens under such policies, as distinguished from what they wish, hope, or imagine happens.
The crusade for "a living wage" that will enable a worker to support a family proceeds without the slightest interest in finding out whether most people who are making low wages actually have any family to support -- much less seeking out the facts about what actually happens after the government sets wages.
People who have made up their minds and don't want to be confused by the facts are a danger to the whole society. Since the votes of such people count just as much as the votes of people who know what they are talking about, politicians have every incentive to pass laws and create policies that pander to ignorant notions, if those notions are widespread.
victor davis hanson
Hypocrisy and paradoxes abound when it comes to illegal immigration.
Even the fiercest critics of illegal immigrants in the American Southwest never seem to check first the legal status of those who fix their roofs, mow their lawns or wash their dishes.
This past week, thousands of Hispanic demonstrators, fearful of strict new immigration laws, chanted "Mexico" and for some reason waved the flag of the country they fled from and most certainly do not want to return to.
Increasingly, Latin American governments have elected vocal anti-American politicians — even as they count on their citizens leaving for the U.S. in record numbers.
The Mexican government seeks to entice wealthy retired Americans to build homes south of the U.S. border, even as it exports its own homeless to this country. What a cynical mindset: "You take our Mexican poor, we'll take your American rich."
...
As we've seen from second- and third-generation legal immigrants, when a person from Mexico comes to the U.S. with legal documentation, learns English and regards an unskilled job as the start, not the end, of a career, success most often follows.
And when immigrants, of all nationalities, finds themselves surrounded by others from all over the world, they generally accept English as our vital bond and see that a common culture, not race, is what matters.
Second, numbers are important. The U.S. can assimilate hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, as it does with other immigrant groups, who come legally and are integrated throughout the nation in multiethnic neighborhoods. But it cannot assimilate quickly millions of abject poor who live in apartheid communities. There the joy of reaching the U.S. is replaced by the bitterness of becoming part of its collective underclass.
Third, immigrants can survive one strike against them, maybe two — but not three. A Mexican citizen who is here illegally might do well with fluent English and a high-school diploma. But when one is illegal, not fluent in English and without education — and immersed with millions who share such disadvantages — then we witness the sort of raw emotion now on display in Congress and on our streets.
So, given these realities, we should allow those illegal immigrants who have been living and working here for at least five years to start their citizenship process. But we should insist this be a one-time exemption rather than yet another periodic amnesty that encourages others to break the law and unfairly cut ahead in the immigration line.
puritans spotted in america
...by Hollywood because America stiffed Basic Instinct 2, a movie in which Sharon Stone:
... just slithers around moaning come-ons in an attempted throaty purr that, if you closed your eyes, would make you think of a female impersonator. Actually, even with your eyes open you might think that, given the comically drag-queeny poses she strikes in, for instance, a halter-top catsuit or a how-many-raccoons-had-to-die-for-this coat. At this point, there are inflatable toys that are livelier than Stone, but how can you tell the difference? "Basic Instinct 2" is not an erotic thriller. It's taxidermy.
So the movie sank because it stunk, right? No, it's because the Bush administration is religious or somesuch. Powerline notes the silly whines from Hollywood.
set your alarm
On Wednesday, April 5, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be: 01:02:03 04/05/06
That won't happen again in our lifetime.
UPDATE: Apparently we took this quirk too lightly. According to the LA Daily News, this is a big cosmic deal:
"I feel like I know something's going to happen - like a rush through my whole body," said fortune teller Gina Lee of Northridge Psychic. "At that particular second, I do see good things for the nation. ... There will be a change in the world for everyone."
One Los Angeles astrologer consulted charts for Los Angeles and for Greenwich, England - the international meridian at zero degrees longitude - and saw the dawn of sharing and cooperation among rich and poor nations.
He also saw the signal for tremendous growth in L.A.
"The city will shoot up, with houses being ripped down for high-rises; one-story strip malls will go by the wayside," said astrologer Bill Mayer of Stars Over Los Angeles. "It all starts on that moment in time."
Not everyone is convinced:
For Mike Wyner, an up-and-coming astrologer whose birthday falls on Wednesday, it's not a moment worth waking for.
"It doesn't do much for me," said Wyner of West Hills. "I don't think I'll go out and pop a champagne bottle."
And "up-and-coming" astrologer? How does one make that determination, by consulting the stars?
english spoken 521 ways
The Speech Accent Archive lets you hear how various speakers from different parts of the world accent their English. Lots of fun.
monday april 3, 2006
jill carroll: the big picture
trouble brewing south of the border
Dick Morris on why President Bush is being solicitous of Vincente Fox:
On July 2, the Mexican people will decide whether to elect ultra-leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (known as AMLO) as their next president.
Rumors have abounded for months that Lopez Obrador's campaign is getting major funding from Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. And last month Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz)., a moderate Republican, told several Mexican legislators that he had intelligence reports detailing revealing support from Hugo Chavez to AMLO's Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).
Chavez is a firm ally of Cuba's Fidel Castro. Lopez Obrador could be the final piece in their grand plan to bring the United States to its knees before the newly resurgent Latin left.
Between them, Venezuela and Mexico export about 4 million barrels of oil each day to the United States, more than one-third of our oil imports. With both countries in the hands of leftist leaders, the opportunity to hold the U.S. hostage will be extraordinary.
Think we have security problems now, with Vicente Fox leading Mexico? Just wait until we have a 2,000-mile border with a chum of Chavez and Castro.
hey, where'd everybody go?
Europe is fast on its way to becoming unEuropean, at least as we traditionally understand Europe. Women are simply having fewer babies, not even close to the 2.1 population replacement level.
... the number [of women] without children will double in many countries to around 20% - except Germany, where the figure is already closer to 30%, partly because it is seen as having some of the most family unfriendly policies in Europe.
Alexandra, who has a long-term partner, says that up until her mid-20s, she always thought she would have children. But, after changing her mind, she says she is confident that nothing will make her change it back again.
She says that the assumption that it is only the work-mad who shun parenthood is far from accurate. "I didn't make the choice for career reasons - it was a lifestyle choice. I only work part-time and I like to enjoy life," she says.
Said lifestyle will soon disappear. Consider these birthrates:
Ireland: 1.99
France: 1.90
Norway: 1.81
Sweden 1.75
UK: 1.74
Netherlands: 1.73
Germany: 1.37
Italy: 1.33
Spain: 1.32
Greece: 1.29
Meanwhile, new immigrants to Europe are not holding back. In 1974 Algerian President Boumedienne in 1974 told the UN General Assembly:
"One day millions of men will leave the southern hemisphere of this planet to burst into the northern one. But not as friends. Because they will burst in to conquer, and they will conquer by populating it with their children. Victory will come to us from the wombs of our women.”
get market forces back into health care
Alan Hubbard in the New York Times:
Health care is expensive because the vast majority of Americans consume it as if it were free. Health insurance policies with low deductibles insulate people from the cost of the medical care they use — so much so that they often do not even ask for prices. And people don't recognize the high premium costs of this low-deductible insurance because premiums are paid by employers. Finally, the tax code subsidizes these expensive, employer-purchased insurance policies.
To control health care costs, we must give consumers an incentive to spend money wisely. We can do this by encouraging the purchase of high-deductible policies and providing the same tax benefits for out-of-pocket health spending that employer-provided insurance enjoys. The overall cost to the consumer will be no greater than it is now and, in most cases, significantly lower. And no consumer is better than the American consumer at driving prices down and quality up.
The president has proposed a package of reforms that will spur such changes by building on the success of consumer-directed Health Savings Accounts and the insurance policies that go with them. Health Savings Accounts allow people to save money tax-free to pay their out-of-pocket health costs, as long as they have high-deductible health policies to cover catastrophic expenses. Enrollment in these accounts has grown rapidly since their introduction in 2003, with more than three million people now contributing to them.
...
The accounts aren't just good for the health care system — they're a good deal for American families. Catastrophic policies have affordable premiums that bring health insurance into reach for lower-income families. And the low premiums compensate for most, if not all, of the policies' higher deductibles.
Consider the following two real policies offered by the same insurer in Columbus, Ohio, for a healthy family of four earning $50,000 a year. A Health Savings Account policy has a premium of $3,750, a deductible of $3,000, and co-insurance of 20 percent up to a maximum of $5,000. Meanwhile, a traditional Preferred Provider Organization policy has a premium of $5,800, a deductible of $1,000, and 10 percent co-insurance up to a maximum of $2,000.
If the family's medical bills totaled $1,000, they would save $1,900 by choosing the Health Savings Account policy. Under the president's policy proposals, the savings would jump to $3,200. Even if something catastrophic confronted the family with $10,000 in medical bills (fewer than 20 percent of families face costs this high in a year), under the current law, the family would pay only $400 more by choosing the Health Savings Account rather than the P.P.O. Under the president's proposals, they'd save $1,600. That's why 40 percent of these Health Savings Account-based policies are purchased by families with incomes lower than $50,000.
General motors and the french
"60 Minutes" had a balanced report on the financial squeeze General Motors finds itself in. In a nutshell, GM's labor costs are unsustainable. Said costs include health and pension benefits to both active and retired employees.
What's remarkable is that the UAW -- the labor union representing the employees -- understands the economics and is giving back some wage increases. As someone put it, the choice is not between gold (what they have now) and silver, but between silver and lead. Silver ain't so bad.
This is a mature assessment. Contrast that with France, where a proposal for a pilot program that would allow employers to fire workers with less that two years in the job, brought riots and 3 million marching in the streets. The French economy is no more sustainable than GM under its current contract.
Sophisticated liberals often describe the United States as "an adolescent nation" in comparison to the mature, wise Europeans. To paraphrase Ms. Gump, mature is as mature does.
dep't of water, power and nookie
LA's Department of Water and Power, affectionately known as DWP, wants to raise rates 18% over the next four years, plus some surcharges. Meanwhile, DWP spends $16 million per year on extras including breast feeding classes for employees, a choir and a fitness center. Like many public agencies in LA, it spends a lot on overtime, $51 million last year.
During California's energy crisis a few years ago DWP price gouged the state when it sold excess electricity. Oh, and it funds expensive public art projects for its remote pumping stations.
Let's put these folks in charge of healthcare.
why americans hate the immigration debate
To ordinary Americans, the definition of “immigration” is very specific: You come here with absolutely nothing except a burning desire to be an American. You start off at some miserable, low-paying job that at least puts a roof over your family’s head and food on the table. You put your kids in school, tell them how lucky they are to be here – and make darn sure they do well even if that means hiring a tutor and taking a second, or third, job to pay for it. You learn English, even if you’ve got to take classes at night when you’re dead tired. You play by the rules—which means you pay your taxes, get a driver’s license and insure your car so that if yours hits mine, I can recover the cost of the damages. And you file for citizenship the first day you’re eligible.
Do all this and you become an American like all the rest of us. Your kids will lose their accents, move into the mainstream, and retain little of their heritage except a few words of your language and – if you’re lucky—an irresistible urge to visit you now and then for some of mom’s old-country cooking.
This is how the Italians made it, the Germans made it, the Dutch made it, the Poles made it, the Jews made it, and more recently how the Cubans and the Vietnamese made it. The process isn’t easy – but it works and that’s the way ordinary Americans want to keep it.
suits vs. turbans
From Iraq the Model on the stalemate over forming a government:
...right now I see that chances split 50-50 between solution and a confrontation.
The reasonable politicians within the parties know very well that there will be no future for them or for the country if a balanced government is not formed soon in Baghdad but the hardliner clerics in these parties have a different vision based on the dream of building a religious state or dying doing so.Of course this sounds insane for the guys in suits but for the turbans this represents the choice of the holy ancestors; either victory or death. They do not care about this life and they seek to satisfy God thinking that this is the only right path as they conclude from their confused reading of a confused history.
Clerics, like tyrants, tend to bet on the 'street' and to have wrong estimations of how far this 'street' is willing to follow them in their fantasies; they think-just like Saddam convinced himself-that the people will explode like a raging volcano to fight for Allah and protect the faith but this is not true as history proven in more than an occasion and most of the 'soldiers' will seek shelter from harm except for a minority of enthusiasts (fanatics) who will fight until the last man.
I think the coming days will show a stiffer attitude on the end of the religious hardliners and this includes both Sunni and Shia and we will also be hearing more tense and inflammatory statements that will focus more on rejecting the American presence, not only in the form of the calls to deport or replace the ambassador like the ones we heard during Friday prayers but I'm afraid some clerics are preparing to declare Jihad as the American presence represent the major obstacle facing their dreams of a religious state.
sunday april 2, 2006
another week of infamy at the u.n.
Three weeks after the urgent matter of Iran’s non-compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was referred to it, the Security Council issued a non-binding presidential statement. The members could not even draft a Security Council resolution. They could not bring themselves to repeat the grave charges tabled by their own International Atomic Energy Agency, nor formally acknowledge that the IAEA had presented the case to them for action. They found no fault in the Iranian president’s repeated promises to “wipe-out Israel”, or in his public musings about the Koranic apocalypse being at hand.
Instead, they expressed “serious concerns”, about e.g. "Iran’s decision to resume enrichment-related activities”, and called upon that country to “take steps ... which are essential to build confidence”. After which, Iran replied with a huge public raspberry.
mark steyn
If I were an anti-war leftie, I'd be very depressed by the Iraq anniversary protests. A few hundred people show up hither and yon to see Cindy Sheehan get arrested for the 15th time that week, or Charlie Sheen unveil his critically acclaimed the-World-Trade-Center-was-a-controlled-explosion conspiracy theory. The "Hot Shots! Part Deux" star is apparently an expert in that field, and he'd never seen commercial property break up that quickly since Heidi Fleiss' hooker ring. Anyway, Susan Sarandon's going to play Cindy in the movie, or maybe she's playing Charlie, or both -- either way, they might as well give her the Oscar during the opening titles.
But, while Charlie Sheen is undoubtedly a valiant leader, you couldn't help noticing it was followers the anti-war crowd seemed to be short of on the third anniversary. The next weekend half a million illegal immigrants -- whoops, sorry, half a million fine upstanding members of the Undocumented-American community-- took to the streets, and you suddenly realized what a big-time demonstration is supposed to look like. These guys aren't even meant to be in the country and they can organize a better public protest movement than an anti-war crowd that's promoted 24/7 by the media and Hollywood.
Well, OK, half the anti-war crowd aren't meant to be in the country either, if they'd kept their promise to move to Canada after the last election. But my point is there's no mass anti-war movement. Some commentators claimed to be puzzled by the low turnout at a time when the polls show Iraq increasingly unpopular. But there are two kinds of persons objecting to the war: There's a shriveled Sheehan-Sheen left that's in effect urging on American failure in Iraq, and there's a potentially far larger group to their right that's increasingly wary of the official conception of the war. The latter don't want America to lose, they want to win -- decisively. And on the day's headlines -- on everything from the Danish cartoon jihad to the Afghan facing death for apostasy -- the fainthearted response of "public diplomacy" is in danger of sounding only marginally less nutty than Charlie Sheen.
operation steel gazelle
Iowahawk has fun with Democrat attempts to seem tough on terror.
HARRY: Hello, I'm Harry Reid, leader of the Democrats in the United States Senate.
NANCY: And me Nancy Pelosi.
HARRY: Like millions of patriotic Americans, Nancy and I, along with our Democratic colleagues in Congress, are concerned about our rapidly deteriorating national security situation. Nearly five years after the tragic events of 9/11, not only is our country wracked by record economic misery, low teacher salaries, expensive senior prescriptions, and widespread leprosy, it also remains at risk for illegal attacks from the terrorist Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile, the Bush administration has us mired in a disastrous unrelated civil war in Iraq, consuming billions of your taxpayer dollars that could be spent on preserving Social Security and community health care block grants for America's starving teachers.
NANCY: We can better do!
HARRY: You bet we can, Nancy. That's why we've purchase space on America's abandoned and neglected websites to present the Democratic vision for a smart, yet tough new national security concept that makes a clean break with the discredited and dangerous policies of this administration. As you can see by the American flags behind us, this is a smart and tough new approach, embodied in a comprehensive plan that was developed by some of America's foremost military minds: Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger, Markos Zuniga, and former General Wesley Clarke -- the celebrated "Falcon of the Balkans." We call our plan "Operation Steel Gazelle" -- strong and tough like steel, but smart and agile like the gazelle, as it nimbly eludes its hungry predators.
saturday april 1, 2006
penn & teller take on gun control
Watch the video. Hint: Michael Moore won't like this.
race cards don't count as valid id
Rep. Cynthia McKinney smacks a cop, blames it on racism.
fire down below
The fire started in 1962 when some trash was set afire. It still burns. Read the fascinating history of Centralia Pennsylvania.
put down that cell phone and your snake
A man crashed his car after a pet snake he had wrapped around his neck began attacking him, authorities said.
everyone's a victim
The moment is close when the United States will be composed entirely of victim groups. For the last year, the press has sounded the alarm about a new gender crisis in education: boys reportedly make up a declining portion of applicants to, and students within, colleges. More than 56 percent of undergraduates are women; two-thirds of all colleges and universities report receiving more applications from girls than from boys, according to a recent New York Times op-ed. The implication is obvious: we—the federal government, state bureaucrats, and the endlessly expanding diversity industry—need to do something! Even New York Times columnist John Tierney, ordinarily a ruthless debunker of big government, called last week for the federal Department of Education to “figur[e] out how to help boys reach college.”
And so the future is clear. That rustling sound you hear is the migration of university deans and associate provosts, “managing differences” consultants, and ed school faculty to the next big employment bonanza: helping boys succeed! Boys are poised to become the newest victim class, requiring a sturdy structure of advisors, trainers, and counselors just to get by. The requisite helping apparatus is already in place: the professions and academia overflow with committees on the recruitment and retention of minorities and women; they will undoubtedly be only too happy to expand their mandate to boys.
the return of history
IN THE DAYS AFTER THE TOWERS FELL, in the ash that covered the Brooklyn street where I lived at that time, in the smoke that rose for months from that spot across the river, when rising up in the skyscraper I worked in, or riding deep beneath the river in the subway, or passing the thousand small shrines of puddled candle wax below the walls with the hundreds of photographs of "The Missing," it was not too much to say that you could feel the doors of history open all about you.
Before those days, history happened elsewhere, elsewhen, to others. History did not happen to you. In your world, until that day, you lived in the time after history. There were no more doors in front of you, all history lay behind you. It was a given.
You would have, of course, your own personal history. You would live your life, no bigger or smaller than most others. You would meet people, have children, go to the job, enjoy what material things came your way, have your celebrations, your vacations, your possessions, and your dinner parties. You would hate and you would love. You would be loved and betrayed. You would have your little soap opera and the snapshots and emails to prove it. At some point or another you would die and be remembered by some for some time. Then it would all fade and the great ocean would just roll on. And that would be fine.
History was behind us. It was something our parents entered for a while during the war but they emerged into what was, essentially, the long peace. They'd had enough history, didn't want any more, and did what they could to keep history from happening. In general, the history of the Cold War is the history of what didn't happen punctuated by a few things every now and then such as Korea and Vietnam. But all in all, for over 50 years, history didn't happen.
Read on.
tipping points and assertion of reality
At the end they discuss the cartoon intifada (not using those words, of course) and Tom Friedman points out that because the world has gotten smaller (I am reluctant to describe the world as being flat since he does it repeatedly) the Muslim world is being forced to confront their essential failures every day.
Despite being told they are the heirs to the perfect monotheistic faith, chosen of Allah, they can see with their own eyes that the Arab world is stagnant, non-productive, and falling further behin don a daily basis; this is intolerably shameful and humiliating (which is where the rage comes from.) He follows this with a warning to the Arab world. He points out that Hitler discovered that democracies can be very slow to action (and certainly many Americans would like to go back to sleep, as Vanderleun so beautifully described yesterday) but once aroused, their response can be overwhelming.