sunday, december 31 2006
feared and pitiless, fearful and pitiable
NOBODY who experienced Iraq under the tyranny of Saddam Hussein could imagine, at the height of the terror he imposed on his countrymen, ever pitying him. Pitiless himself, he sent hundreds of thousands of his countrymen to miserable deaths, in the wars he started against Iran and Kuwait, in the torture chambers of his secret police, or on the gallows that became an industry at Abu Ghraib and other charnel houses across Iraq. Iraqis who were caught in his spider’s web of evil, and survived, tell of countless tortures, of the psychopathic pleasure the former dictator appeared to take from inflicting suffering and death.
Yet there was a moment when I pitied him, and it came back to me after the nine Iraqi appeal judges upheld the death sentence against Saddam last week, setting off the countdown to his execution. As I write this, flying hurriedly back to Baghdad from an interrupted Christmas break, Saddam makes his own trip to the gallows with an indecent haste, without the mercy of family farewells and other spare acts of compassion that lend at least a pretense of civility to executions under law in kinder jurisdictions. From all we know of the preparations, Saddam’s death was to be a miserable and lonely one, as stark and undignified as Iraq’s new rulers can devise.
Read on.
culture of corruption
Betsy Newmark notes how Democrat John Conyers gets a wrist slap for his ethics violation:
The ethics inquiry began in December, 2003 when former staff members complained to the ethics panel, formerly named the House Committee on Standards and Official Conduct, that Conyers had required his official staffers to work on campaigns, babysit his children, and run personal errands. Conyers subsequently hired Stanley Brand, a well-respected defense lawyer with a long track record of defending public officials implicated in corruption cases.
In 2003, Reps. Joel Hefley (R-Colo.) and Alan Mollohan (D-W.Va.) headed the ethics committee.
The Hill reported last March that two former Conyers’ aides alleged that he repeatedly violated House ethics rules by requiring aides to work on local and state
campaigns, and babysit and chauffeur his children. Deanna Maher, a former deputy chief of staff in the Detroit office, and Sydney Rooks, a former legal counsel in his district office, shared numerous letters, memos, e-mails, handwritten notes and expense reports with The Hill.His punishment is to clarify to his staff that they don't have to do these sorts of personal tasks and to promise not to ask them to do so. So, in effect, his punishment is to agree to obey the rules that he broke in the first place. And he gets the news of this wrist-slapping released on New Years Eve weekend in the midst of stories about Hussein's execution and President Ford's funeral. Lucky guy.
how other devils met their due
Most of the great butchers of the 20th century died of old age, in their own beds, some of them honored by millions. Not a single one met justice in the sense accepted in free states across the world. The handful who died otherwise are aberrations, victims of strange events that act as models for nothing.
There is one single exception - the hanging of Saddam Hussein on December 30, 2006 after a careful, lengthy trial carried out under extremely difficult circumstances according to internationally recognized judicial norms. The state of Iraq has succeeded where the rest of the civilized world has failed. It is a singular achievement, and it will stand.
"There is no more acceptable sacrifice than the blood of a tyrant." - Giovanni Boccaccio
those precious, precious eurotwits
"The EU has a very consistent view against using the death penalty and it should not have been used in this instance either, although there is no doubt over Saddam's guilt of very serious crimes against humanity," Finland's Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja told YLE television.
...
Louis Michel, a member of the EU's executive Commission, said he believed capital punishment was at odds with the democracy Iraqi leaders were trying to build. "You don't fight barbarism with acts that I deem as barbaric. The death penalty is not compatible with democracy," Michel, a former Belgian foreign minister, told Reuters.
As a citizen of the world's oldest, most free, most prosperous and most powerful democracy, I beg to differ about the death penalty being incompatible with democracy.
Furthermore, Belgians have much to learn about democracy. Belgium has no First Amendment and political parties need a government license to exist. One party, despite being the largest vote-getter, was forced to disband two years ago.
As for life and death matters, the Belgian peacekeepers in Rwanda fled the moment things got bloody, leaving 800,000 Tutsis to be exterminated. Glass houses, Michel, glass houses.
india: the new great game
Three recent events illuminate the contours and fault lines of Asia's emerging strategic landscape, amid the lengthening shadows cast by China's growing power.
First, the United States and India consolidated a wide-ranging military, economic, and diplomatic partnership on December 9, when Congress passed legislation enabling U.S.-Indian civilian nuclear cooperation. Then, at a summit in Tokyo on December 15, the leaders of India and Japan declared their ambition for a strategic and economic entente between Asia's leading democracies. This stands in sharp contrast to the intensifying rivalry between India and China: Tensions over territory and Tibet simmered at a summit on November 21, where Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh's assertion that "there is enough [geopolitical] space for the two countries to develop together" sounded more like hope than conviction.
As its relationships with the United States, Japan, and China show, India has reemerged as a geopolitical swing state after decades of marginalization as a consequence of the Cold War, its own crippling underdevelopment, and regional conflict in South Asia. Although its status as a heavyweight in the globalized world of the 21st century is new, India's identity as a great power is not: It was for centuries one of the world's largest economies and, under British rule, a preeminent power in Asia. Today, a rising India flush with self-confidence from its growing prosperity is determined not to be left behind by China's economic and military ascent. "The [Indian] elephant," says an admiring Japanese official, "is about to gallop."
The United States has an enormous stake in the success of a rich, confident, democratic India that shares American ambitions to manage Chinese power, protect Indian Ocean sea lanes, safeguard an open international economy, stabilize a volatile region encompassing the heartland of jihadist extremism in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and prove to all those enamored of the Chinese model of authoritarian development that democracy is the firmest foundation for the achievement of humankind's most basic aspirations.
India is the world's biggest democracy, a nuclear power with the world's largest volunteer armed forces, and the world's second-fastest-growing major economy. Few countries will be more important to American security interests and American prosperity in the coming decades, as five centuries of Western management of the international system give way to a new economic and security order centered in the rimlands of the Indian and Pacific oceans.
will jimmy carter please go away?
by Burt Prelutsky
Years ago, when I still worked in advertising, I was a copywriter on the Mattel account. It should have been fun because they made toys. But it wasn’t, mainly because of all the restrictions the FCC placed on commercials aimed at children. In one of the spots I wrote, a little boy, playing with his Mattel racing car on the floor, imagined himself leading the pack at the Indy 500. It never got produced. Even though it would have been shot as an obvious daydream, and even though every little squirt playing with the car would imagine himself winning at the Brickyard, we weren’t permitted to show the toys doing anything they couldn’t actually do in real life.
So, how is it that nobody else ever seems to get called on the carpet for their lies and exaggerations? How is it, for instance, that every liberal from Ted Kennedy to Jesse Jackson can get away with pretending that American blacks are still living like slaves, and that four decades after the Civil Rights Act, the only thing keeping blacks out of the cotton fields are Democrats in Washington?
How is it that every rotten movie can get away with lying about how terrific it is? And, unlike other products, they don’t come with money-back guarantees.
And, finally, how is it that Jimmy Carter, that sanctimonious phony who was a disaster during his four years in the White House and a disgrace in the quarter of a century since, can pass himself off as equal parts statesman and saint? While most of us wished that he would simply slink back to his peanut farm after Ronald Reagan whupped his butt in ‘80, we hadn’t realized how starved he was for the spotlight.
Recently, he has been barnstorming all over the country, peddling his book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” Carter contends that his purpose in writing the book -- in the unlikely event it was he and not some anonymous ghost who actually put Carter’s vile thoughts on paper -- was to open a dialogue about the Middle East. He calls upon America to take what he calls a balanced approach to the Israeli-Palestinian problem. He claims that America unfairly favors Israel because of the Jewish lobby. He also compares Israel to South Africa in the bad old days, equating the fence they’ve built as protection against terrorists with apartheid.
Where does one begin to deal with all the lies foisted off by Mr. Peanut? Would he have called for a balanced approach to Germany and Czechoslovakia or Germany and Poland in the 1930s? Would he have carried Chamberlain’s umbrella back from Munich?
Forgetting Jews in congress and the senate, why would any American, aside from Steven (“Munich”) Spielberg, find a moral equivalency between Palestinians and Israelis? Israel keeps trying to trade land for peace, and they keep getting their school buses and pizza parlors blown up in exchange. For people who are traditionally known to be pretty sharp when it comes to horse-trading, this doesn’t seem like a very smart way to conduct business. But, God knows, they keep trying.
Something that Carter, who has often boasted of his close friendship with Yasser Arafat, insists on overlooking is that prior to 1948, the “Palestinians” were in fact the Jews living on the land that was the basis for the modern state of Israel. It was land, mainly sand, they had bought at inflated prices from Arabs for over 50 years. The fact that it is now the Arabs who are known as Palestinians is the result of a clever P.R. firm that suggested that if they wanted to picture themselves as underdogs in order to garner sympathy, they should stop calling themselves Arabs. After all, there were only about five million Jews in Israel and about 125 million Arabs surrounding them, and calling for their extinction.
Now why on earth would Carter call for a balanced approach? After all, Israel, in spite of occasional differences with the U.S., is a staunch ally, one of the few nations that sides us with us at the U.N., and is the only western democracy in a part of the world where Islamic Nazis run wild.
Whenever I hear an American claim that he favors Arabs in this ongoing conflict, a conflict perpetuated by a people who think Hitler left the job only half-done, I wonder why. Whenever I hear an American claim that people who treat their women like chattel; who live under theocratic rule; who oppose freedom of speech and certainly religion; who cheered and danced on 9/11 and then, for good measure, insisted that Israel was behind the attack; and who pay homage to suicide bombers; are preferable to Israelis, a people who share our values and who are exactly like us, except that they’re Jewish, I know that I’m in the presence of an anti-Semite.
Even if he happens to be a former president of the United States.
saturday, december 30 2006
middle school gone wild
It’s hard to write this without sounding like a prig. But it’s just as hard to erase the images that planted the idea for this essay, so here goes. The scene is a middle school auditorium, where girls in teams of three or four are bopping to pop songs at a student talent show. Not bopping, actually, but doing elaborately choreographed re-creations of music videos, in tiny skirts or tight shorts, with bare bellies, rouged cheeks and glittery eyes.
They writhe and strut, shake their bottoms, splay their legs, thrust their chests out and in and out again. Some straddle empty chairs, like lap dancers without laps. They don’t smile much. Their faces are locked from grim exertion, from all that leaping up and lying down without poles to hold onto. “Don’t stop don’t stop,” sings Janet Jackson, all whispery. “Jerk it like you’re making it choke. ...Ohh. I’m so stimulated. Feel so X-rated.” The girls spend a lot of time lying on the floor. They are in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades.
As each routine ends, parents and siblings cheer, whistle and applaud. I just sit there, not fully comprehending. It’s my first suburban Long Island middle school talent show. I’m with my daughter, who is 10 and hadn’t warned me. I’m not sure what I had expected, but it wasn’t this. It was something different. Something younger. Something that didn’t make the girls look so ... one-dimensional.
It would be easy to chalk it up to adolescent rebellion, an ancient and necessary phenomenon, except these girls were barely adolescents and they had nothing to rebel against. This was an official function at a public school, a milieu that in another time or universe might have seen children singing folk ballads, say, or reciting the Gettysburg Address.
Read on.
zero to 80% in 60 seconds
Toshiba's new lith-ion battery recharges in under a minute.
2006 darwin awards
Honoring those people too dumb to live.
Photo collage from Fox News. See Pat Dollard's site for more photos and great quotes. And Yahoo.
Saddam drew his path to hell long time ago…he chose this fate the day he chose cruelty and oppression as a way to deal with his people. He built his reign with blood and terror and vowed to make death the fate of anyone who dared say no to him.
Saddam lost his humanity the day he committed his first crime, so the one I saw walking to the rope this morning was no man to me.
It was him who rejected humanity to become the monster that the weak feared and prayed to see him dead for years to be safe from his crimes.
Outside Iraq people will divide over his hanging, just like they divided over his life and rule but here in Iraq most of us feel that today justice has been served. Those who mourn him are a few and are still living in the past that has no future in Iraq.To those who didn’t like justice I say that his death means life to many.
Executing the dictator renews the hopes of not only Iraqis but also of other oppressed peoples in the world in having a better future where they enjoy freedom. It's time for other tyrants to learn from this lesson and realize that a similar fate is on the way if they refuse to change. Yes, it was the people though their elected government who put Saddam on trial and who says otherwise should go back and learn about how Saddam humiliated, murdered and tortured Iraqis and plundered their fortunes in his stupid adventures.
He deserved to die—our people are still suffering from his crimes till this moment, maybe not in person anymore but through the murderous terrorist machine he built and expanded over years; his orphans are still murdering our people in cold blood trying to deny us the right to build a model of life away from the culture of death the dictator created.
Executing Saddam is an execution to a dark era in Iraq's history and it's a message to all those who followed his ways that there is no turning back; yes, the people will never kneel to a tyrant again and will never give up.The future is in the hands of the people and they will choose their way no matter how big the sacrifice is. We have suffered too much for too long and we deserve a better life and that we will keep pursuing.
On this day as we celebrate justice we shall not forget to pray for blessings for the souls of the dictator's victims and we shall not forget to thank our brothers in America and the rest of the coalition nations who helped us and are still helping us in our struggle to build the new free and democratic Iraq.
UPDATE: cell phone video of the hanging. For strong stomachs only.
media's dilemma
By Steve Gorman
Reuters Friday, December 29, 2006; 8:19 PM
CBS News Vice President Paul Friedman all but ruled out showing footage of Saddam's hanging, saying, "I personally believe it is beyond the pale to show executions."
VERSUS
TERENCE SMITH: Last Sunday, the CBS Newsmagazine "60
Minutes" aired a story that showed Dr. Jack Kevorkian administering a lethal injection to Thomas Youk, a 52-year-old Michigan man suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease.
friday, december 29 2006
joe lieberman
In the Washington Post:
I've just spent 10 days traveling in the Middle East and speaking to leaders there, all of which has made one thing clearer to me than ever: While we are naturally focused on Iraq, a larger war is emerging. On one side are extremists and terrorists led and sponsored by Iran, on the other moderates and democrats supported by the United States. Iraq is the most deadly battlefield on which that conflict is being fought. How we end the struggle there will affect not only the region but the worldwide war against the extremists who attacked us on Sept. 11, 2001.
Because of the bravery of many Iraqi and coalition military personnel and the recent coming together of moderate political forces in Baghdad, the war is winnable. We and our Iraqi allies must do what is necessary to win it.
...
The most pressing problem we face in Iraq is not an absence of Iraqi political will or American diplomatic initiative, both of which are increasing and improving; it is a lack of basic security. As long as insurgents and death squads terrorize Baghdad, Iraq's nascent democratic institutions cannot be expected to function, much less win the trust of the people. The fear created by gang murders and mass abductions ensures that power will continue to flow to the very thugs and extremists who have the least interest in peace and reconciliation.
This bloodshed, moreover, is not the inevitable product of ancient hatreds. It is the predictable consequence of a failure to ensure basic security and, equally important, of a conscious strategy by al-Qaeda and Iran, which have systematically aimed to undermine Iraq's fragile political center. By ruthlessly attacking the Shiites in particular over the past three years, al-Qaeda has sought to provoke precisely the dynamic of reciprocal violence that threatens to consume the country.
On this point, let there be no doubt: If Iraq descends into full-scale civil war, it will be a tremendous battlefield victory for al-Qaeda and Iran. Iraq is the central front in the global and regional war against Islamic extremism.
Read it all.
It recalls a comment from three WaPo reporters who interviewed Bush on December 20.
Given the election results, is increasing the troop level in Iraq even a viable possibility or option?
Yes, Mike, all options are viable.
– given the political will out there?
As you can see, the reporters equated Democrat gains in Congress as a referendum on Iraq ("political will"). But Joe Lieberman was the most overtly pro-Iraq war candidate running, given that he'd lost the Democrat primary to an anti-war candidate and ran as an independent. Lieberman won, so how does that reflect a loss of political will?
enjoy a popcorn moment
With a corny Indian action movie... well, three minutes worth. Video here.
polls are open
Vote for the Idiotarian of the Year. It's a tough call -- there are so many deserving candidates.
nifong in the crosshairs
The Duke lacrosse "rape case" DA faces an ethics complaint by his state bar association. Bull Dog Pundit, a former prosecutor, puts it all in context.
syria crows at democrat bows
The murderous regime that controls Syria crowed that:
All bids to isolate Syria have failed," Bilal said in an interview with al-Jazeera satellite channel, pointing out to the European and US governmental and parliamentary officials who have been visiting Syria for consultations.
"Syria has always called for dialogue and peaceful solutions," the Minister noted, adding that the problem with the USA is to find the just solutions for the region's problems.
He stressed Syria's firm stance which calls for realizing the just and comprehensive peace in the region in accordance with the international legitimacy and in a way that guarantees a full Israeli withdrawal from occupied Syrian Golan to 4th June 1967 Line and occupied Lebanese land as well as establishing a sovereign Palestinian state with Jerusalem as a capital.
"Peaceful solutions" includes blowing to smithereens any Lebanese politician that stands in Syria's way of controlling that country. "Peaceful solutions" includes arming Hezbollah with rockets to attack Israel.
Such double-speak is reminiscent of Orwell's Animal Farm and would be laughable were it not for the pompous strutting of Senators Bill Nelson, John Kerry, and Christopher Dodd. All made visits to Syria to demonstrate their sophisticated approach to foreign policy -- that is, "engaging" our enemies and begging their help.
Thugs respond to fear and harsh consequences, not pretty talk. The freelancing Democrat senators communicated weakness, which is dangerous and foolish. Yet they credit themselves as being superior to Bush.
A world upside down.
thursday, december 28 2006
amish make food stamp bureaucrats look bad
...by not accepting Food Stamps.
This story from the Cleveland Plain Dealer is a couple of months old, but it's a fascinating example of how government tries to insist on "helping" people who are not so evidently in need of its "help." The Ohio Office of Family Stability is demanding that local welfare workers somehow get Amish people to sign up for food stamps. Why? Just because they are eligible on the basis of income. By refusing to sign up, the Amish are lowering the local food stamp participation rates, which makes the agency look bad.
optical computing breakthrough: ibm slows down light
IBM has announced that its researchers have built a device capable of delaying the flow of light on a silicon chip, which could lead the further development of using light instead of electricity to transfer data. Researchers have known that the use of optical instead of electrical signals for transferring data within a computer chip might result in significant performance enhancements since light signals can carry more information faster. The engineering challenge is buffering data on the chip, which is difficult given light’s speed. Thus, a means of using light effectively is to delay its travel.
thursday is worst day for british hospitals
From the BBC.
20 most innovative products of the year
PC World's List. And guess what? Microsoft got the top spot.
free advice
I usually the same time, and whenever a new project comes along, I find it really difficult to actually get started. Once I’ve begun making progress, I’m able to move smoothly without any problems. It’s the getting started that’s really difficult, especially if it’s something I’m not really interested in. At an intellectual level I know I have to get started, but I’m not able to summon up the motivation to begin.
For the last few months, the most reliable technique I’ve found to help me get started is to take the work to a coffee shop and begin while sipping coffee. I’ve found that this allows me to get excited about whatever is in front of me at that time. My brain appears to misattribute the physiological response to coffee as excitement about whatever I’m working on at that time.
nothing too trivial for busybodies
John Stossel writes about legal attacks on Tempe Arizona's Heart Attack Grill, which serves fatty foods with waitresses dressed as sexy nurses.
What upset the government was that the Heart Attack Grill waitresses call themselves "nurses." The waitresses dress like nurses -- although in some cases like nurses you'd see only in an X-rated movie. After customers eat the fatty food, they can ask their "nurse" to wheel them out to their car in a wheelchair -- just like at the hospital.
The customers like the gimmick, and the nurse-waitresses like working there, but the Arizona Board of Nursing says the restaurant violates state law. According to an intimidating letter from the office of the attorney general, only a person who holds a valid license to practice nursing may use the title "nurse."
...
The Board of Nursing would not talk to me about this, but Sandy Summers of the Center for Nursing Advocacy was eager to explain what bothers many nurses. "It's not only the Heart Attack Grill. It's the whole 'naughty nurse' image," she said. Her group says that stereotype kills thousands of people, because it creates a nursing shortage by discouraging women from becoming nurses.
"It's a constant association of sex and nursing that we object to. And it creates an environment where people actually think that nurses are people you can have anonymous sex with, these, these brainless sluts."
dangerous obsession
People in the media, in academia and among the intelligentsia in general who are obsessed with "disparities" in income and wealth usually show not the slightest interest in how that income and wealth were produced in the first place.
They are hot to redistribute the existing income and wealth but seem wholly unaware that how you do that today can affect how much income and wealth will be produced tomorrow. Any number of schemes for redistributing wealth have ended up redistributing poverty in a number of countries.
"Progressives" in the media and among academics and intellectuals claim to be interested in ending poverty but the production of more output is the only way to end poverty for millions of people.
It not only can be done, it has already been done in many countries, for all countries were once very poor by today's standards. But most self-styled "progressives" show virtually zero interest in economic history or in economics in general.
Even in the United States, most people did not have a telephone or a refrigerator as late as 1930. Today, most Americans living below the official poverty level have not only these things but also color television, air-conditioning, a microwave oven and a motor vehicle.
How did this happen? The progressive intelligentsia show no interest in that question.
Even such historically poverty-stricken countries as India and China, repeatedly struck by massive famines, have within the past two decades adopted changed economic policies that have raised vast numbers of people out of desperate poverty.
An estimated 20 million people in India rose out of destitution in just one decade and more than a million Chinese per month have risen out of poverty. But have you heard any progressive intellectuals explaining how such a dramatic change for the better came about?
Progressives are in the business of complaining and denouncing — as a prelude to seeking sweeping powers to control other people's lives, in the name of curing the ills of society. The last thing they want is to discover and discuss how millions of people rose out of poverty by entirely different methods, often by freeing economies from the control of people with sweeping power over other people's lives. Poverty and economic disparities are the raw materials from which the political left manufactures a sense of moral superiority, self-importance and political power.
Read it all.
wednesday, december 27 2006
another botched joke
Sen. John Kerry visits Iraq and gets a cold shoulder from the troops.
Before his arrival, rumors were already flowing that every FOB (Forward Operating Base) Commander told General Casey that they already had another "DV" (Distinguished Visitor) to support while Sen. Kerry was in country -- or that they would be in the middle of ongoing operations -- and hence were unable to support his visit. This rumor was either sparked or confirmed by a post by Matt on Blackfive. (Blackfive, for those who don't already read it, is an infinitely more interesting military blog than mine).
...
On Saturday night, a colleague emailed me and told me to bring my camera, as Senator Kerry was scheduled to give a press conference here in the Palace. At 2100, he entered a conference room wearing his leather flight jacket. Unfortunately, there was no media there, except for the enlisted soldiers from AFTN (Armed Forces Television Network) who had to be there. His aide looked around, saw that this just wasn't happening, and quickly escorted Kerry out before I could take a picture.
Finally, the next morning, Senator Kerry ate chow at the Dining Facility. Normally when a Senator/Representative visits, he is joined by a contingent of soldiers/Marines/airmen from his home state. Despite the fact that the MP unit responsible for Green Zone security is an Army Reserve unit from Massachusetts, not a single soldier went to sit with him. (By contrast, Bill O'Reilly, host of that terrible shoutfest on Fox, had over 400 soldiers waiting in line to meet him on Saturday).
Maybe he forgot to salute and chirp, "Reporting for duty!"
president ford, rip
Gerald Ford:
"A government big enough to give us everything we want is a government big enough to take from us everything we have."
UPDATE: Tigerhawk remembers Ford:
Ford was a remarkable man, as the wire service obituary reminds us. Even as the country mocked him for his clumsiness -- the press conveniently forgetting that he was perhaps the most accomplished athlete ever to occupy the White House -- and derided him for his pardon of Richard Nixon, he led with a decency and competence that I think most Americans of the left and right wish we could conjure up today. He did this at a time when the country was extraordinarily difficult to govern, and he almost paid for it with his life. In September 1975, two separate Californians tried to assassinate him only 17 days apart.
The country threw Ford overboard for Jimmy Carter in 1976, and historians will long debate whether the electorate did the right thing. Right now, Jimmy Carter is in favor among professional historians, but that is because most of them were voters in 1976 and remember the choice they made. If, as I have argued elsewhere, it takes 50 years for the interpretation of an American presidency to settle into consensus, we should not expect the first good history of the Ford and Carter years to be written until the 2020s. At a minimum, Jimmy Carter will also have to die.
cox news serves up kwanzaa bunk
As we noted yesterday, Kwanzaa has about as much significance as Festivus. (And Seinfeld writer Daniel O’Keefe isn't a felon.) Regardless, as predicted, the news media continue to spew goo about this bogus holiday.
Kwanzaa turns 40 today. The colorful holiday, invented by California professor Maulana Ron Karenga in 1966, is like a jazz musician who fuses bits and pieces of music into a vibrant mosaic of sound. Kwanzaa, "first fruit" in Swahili, is a fluent, nonreligious holiday that borrows liberally from a patchwork of cultures and traditions.
Karenga originally created the seven-day observance to empower black communities and uplift black culture and identity.
attention deficit on deficit
Back in July, I wrote this:
Pelosi is promising that if they take the house in the fall, Democrats will roll back the Bush tax cuts and focus on deficit reduction. Who wants to set the over-under on how long it takes them to find some pressing need that overrides deficit reduction? Or will the fact that they control only one branch hamper any attempts to pass new spending?
For Democratic economists who have been bashing Bush like a concrete pinata about the budget deficits, the answer is "ASAP".
Can we come up with an explanation for this seemingly inexplicable behaviour? Why, yes, I think I did: Why aren't we doing anything about the budget deficit? Because no one cares that much.
Oh, liberals say they care, just like conservatives cared when they were out of power. But what most liberals care about is rolling back the Bush tax cuts, not cutting the budget deficit. Why do I say this? Because they supported John Kerry's plan to roll back the Bush tax cuts, and replace them with new spending on health care.
Even if we rolled back all of Bush's tax cuts to those making over $200K, that would raise (according to the Kerry campaign) about $700 billion over 10 years; this would make a dent in the budget deficit, but won't close it. But given the very high marginal rates that would be required to close it (presuming we don't want to raise taxes on the poor and middle class), it makes more economic sense to look at the spending side, for example by giving up the idea that Medicare should provide prescription drugs.
But given the choice between closing the deficit and getting spending they want--on national health care, for example--most liberals would be full of reasons that the budget deficit isn't nearly as bad as we all have been thinking. Similarly, if they were in the opposition, watching all that new spending get passed, most conservatives would be happy to wax lyrical on the terrible downfall that awaits countries that spend more than they earn.
iowahawk bids goodbye to james brown
Here.
the "world's wealth"
Just what is "the world's wealth"?
You can check in your local phone book, surf the Internet or do genealogical research: There is no one named "The World." How can a non-existent being own wealth?
Human beings own wealth. Once we put aside lofty poetic nonsense about "the world's wealth," we at least have a fighting chance of talking sense about realities.
Who are these minority of the world's population who own a majority of the world's wealth?
They are the population of the United States, Western Europe, Japan and a few other affluent countries. How did these particular people come to possess so much more wealth than other people?
They did it the old-fashioned way. They produced the wealth that they own. You might as well ask why bees have so much more honey than other creatures.
...
Nobody likes to see poverty in a world where technology and economic know-how already exist that could give everyone everywhere a decent standard of living.
All you have to do is change people. But have you ever tried to do that?
The quick fix is to transfer wealth. But more than half a century of trying to do that with "foreign aid" has left a dismal record of failure and even retrogression in Third World countries.
Some countries have themselves made changes that lifted them from poverty to prosperity. Indeed, the affluent countries of today were once living in poverty.
But they didn't do it with quick fixes or by turning a dangerous power over to politicians.
tuesday, december 26 2006
medical miracles
The New York Time assays the march of progress in medicine.
boss murtha
...That arrangement over the years has yielded millions of dollars in federal support for the contractors, businesses and universities, and hundreds of thousands in consulting and lobbying fees to Murtha's favored lobbying shops, according to Federal Election Commission records and lobbying disclosure forms. In turn, many of PAID's directors have kept Murtha's campaigns flush with cash.
When the Democrats take control of Congress on Jan. 4, ethics and budget restructuring will be the first orders of business. Among the provisions in the Democrats' ethics package are demands for more transparency in the doling out of federal funds to home-district projects and a required pledge that no earmarks benefit a member of Congress personally. That could put an uncomfortable spotlight on lawmakers such as Murtha.
"It's a real tangled web between the congressman, the nonprofit, the defense contractors and the lobbyists," said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan watchdog group. "It's hard to say where one stops and the others start."
Murtha declined to respond to numerous phone calls and e-mails from The Washington Post requesting comment.
Maybe Nancy's boy has been deployed to Okinawa.
the "sadr swoon"
I can't get enough of these fawning Western stories about Moktada Al Sadr and his gang, and the reason is that they're so revealing. I mean, if an American journalist shapes his or her dispatches according to the U.S. military spin, then they risk being dismissed within their profession as dupes or propagandists. But hand your coverage over to the spinmeisters for a drooling jackass like Moktada – describe his new furniture, call him "high-minded" without ever meeting him -- and you're doing award-winning journalism.
Yet another example of the Sadr Swoon appeared this week. Hannah Allam, who writes for the McClatchy chain (formerly Knight-Ridder), and who has won an award for her Iraq coverage from the National Asssociation of Black Journalists (and the Overseas Press Club Award for Best Foreign Reporting), interviewed Hazem Al Araji, "director of Al Sadr's social programs and a local militia commander," for Sunday's papers.
In one notable passage, she lets Al Araji define the nuances of thuggery: "If we talk about the word 'militia,' the Mahdi Army doesn't fit the description. We are a group of people with a belief," said Araji, now national director of Sadr's social programs and a local militia commander. "We call it an army, but it's not just an army of gunmen. We protect our neighborhoods and provide services for our people."
The Sadr gangs do protect some neighborhoods, but, you know, they actually terrorize others. They kidnap, rob, and chase Iraqis they don't like from their homes. But Allam doesn't challenge Al Araji on these unfortunate details, nor does she quote anyone else who may provide such information.
Read on.
a touching kwanzaa story
Once upon a time, in the '60s, two radical black groups vied to be the baddest black folk in the land: the Black Panthers and the United Slaves of America, which abbreviated itself as US. (Cute.)
Things were tense. Both wanted to run the Afro-American Studies department at UCLA. One day in 1969, after two Panthers dissed Mauna Ron Karenga, the founder of US, in a public meeting, two of Karenga's men confronted the affronting Panthers after the meeting and shot them dead in the hallway. Dead bang campus politics.
Karenga had once proclaimed one of his members, Deborah Jones, an African queen. But then Karenga's brain told him that she was putting "crystals" in his food and water to kill him. So he and two others tortured Jones and another woman, stripping them, whipping them with electrical cords, beating them with a karate baton and sticking a hot soldering iron into their mouths.
Karenga was arrested, tried and convicted of felonious assault and false imprisonment. He was given 1-10 years in prison. A nut doctor testified at the trial that Karenga (real name Ron Everett) was bonkers:
This man now represents a picture which can be considered both paranoid and schizophrenic with hallucinations and elusions, inappropriate affect, disorganization, and impaired contact with the environment.
One might think that that would be that for felon Karenga; but no, a mere eight years later Karenga was named head of the Black Studies Department at Cal State Long Beach. From three hots-and-a-cot to academic respectability.
Along the way, he also cooked up a goofy "holiday" called Kwanzaa to stick it to whitey.
"Kwanzaa is not an imitation, but an alternative, in fact, an oppositional alternative to the spookism, mysticism and non-earth based practices which plague us as a people and encourage our withdrawal from social life rather than our bold confrontation with it."
Kwanzaa "was chosen to give a Black alternative to the existing holiday and give Blacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and history rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society."
Today Kwanzaa, instead of being laughed off as the fever dream of a felonious buffoon, gets treated reverently by the news media, the President, the US Postal Service and Hallmark Cards.
Only in America, land of opportunity and white guilt.
Sources: The Dartmouth Review. Frontpage Magazine. And Tony Snow.
a touching iraq story
Iraq's highest appeals court on Tuesday upheld the death sentence for Saddam Hussein in his first trial and said it must be carried out within 30 days. The sentence "must be implemented within 30 days," chief judge Aref Shahin. "From tomorrow, any day could be the day of implementation."
another stupid ap "milestone" story
The number of U.S. military service members killed in Iraq has exceeded the number of victims in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to an Associated Press count.
Right. And since we liberated Iraq, 164,000 Americans died in car accidents. See? We can write non sequiturs, too.
monday, december 25 2006
merry christmas, happy holidays, seasons greetings
...to one and all.
sunday, december 24 2006
on this day
In 1968, US astronauts orbited the moon for the first time.
The Apollo 8 spacecraft has taken its crew of three astronauts safely into orbit around the Moon, the first manned space mission to achieve the feat. The engine burned for just over four minutes, and then suddenly the avid audience of television-watchers on Earth had the first-ever eyewitness account of the lunar surface from astronaut James Lovell.
"The moon is essentially grey," he said. "No colour. Looks like plaster of Paris. Sort of a greyish beach sand."
In 1979, Europe launched its first rocket.
The first European-built rocket, Ariane 1, has successfully completed its maiden flight.
The space launcher finally took off from the Kourou Space Centre in French Guiana on its third attempt.
Test flight technicians have declared the flight an almost complete success. All three stages seemed to have fired and separated correctly and its tiny payload, an automatic tracking device, was put into the right orbit.
Photo of the week from Timecatcher, a group photo website.
The image was taken at Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada.
liberate this
Jihadis have their eye on the Iberian peninsula, too.
Earlier this year a jihadist document calling for the liberation of so-called occupied territories and issued by the al-Qaeda-linked group Nadim al-Magrebi was posted on the Islamic extremist website Alansar. In most European capitals, where the cult of Palestinianism reins supreme, such demands are often met with approval since the occupied land in question is usually Israeli. But this time the statement addressed Spain—not Israel. It warned of a “holy war against the infidel Spanish state which has occupied the two cities.”
saturday, december 23 2006
what if the nba had quotas?
Imagine the following press release:
In a closed-door meeting, the owners voted to limit the number of black players, in order to increase attendance from non-black customers. The NBA now consists of over 80 percent black players, which creates a non-diverse and less enlightening experience for the predominately non-black fan.
Thus, in order to continue basketball’s popularity, the NBA determines player diversity a necessity to maintain the game’s prosperity.
— NBA commissioner David Stern.
Before you could say “Michael Richards,” in swoop the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, as well as the other usual suspect “black leaders.” Marching, screaming, stomping, and howling will precede enough lawsuits to keep the entire American and National Bar Associations fully employed for the next decade.
Yet when it comes to colleges and universities admitting Asian-American students, this is, in effect, exactly what is happening. Because of the superior performance of Asian students on high school grades and pre-college aptitude tests, many colleges and universities, through unannounced policies, place these “minority students” at the back of the line.
California, in 1996, outlawed race-based preferences. After this new law, the percentage of Asian students enrolled at the elite, competitive campus of UC Berkeley increased from 34.6 percent to 42 percent by fall 2006. Similarly, the state of Washington outlawed preferences in 1998, and Asian enrollment at the University of Washington increased from 22.1 percent to 25.4 percent by 2004.
Michigan recently passed laws outlawing the use of race in government hiring, contracting, and admission into public colleges and universities. Expect an increase in the Asian student body at the University of Michigan.
Question: Why do Asian students and their parents put up with it?
Jian Li does not intend to. Li, a permanent U.S. resident, immigrated to America from China at the age of 4. He graduated at the top 1 percent of his high school class. On his SATs, he received a perfect 2400, and totaled 2390 (10 points less than perfection) on his SAT II subject tests in math and science.
Yet Li received rejections from Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT.
Li is not alone. Attorney Don Joe from Asian-American Politics, an enrollment-tracking Internet site — says he receives complaints “from Asian-American parents about how their children have excellent grades and scores but are being rejected by the most selective colleges. It appears to be an open secret.”
sandy scissorhands dossier
All about the thieving, lying document-destroying minion of Bill Clinton here.
For what would have happened if Condi Rice had done the same thing as Sandy Berger, read this thought experiment.
friday, december 22 2006
bitter pills
Is Big Pharma the bad guy? Many Democrats think so. Let's hope they think again.
The pharmaceutical industry operates in a high-fixed-cost and low-margin environment. It costs, on average, more than a billion dollars to get the first pill to market. All subsequent pills, however, can be made and marketed for only a few additional dollars or cents. Of course, no user ever wants to pay the big bill for that first pill. Instead, each fervently hopes to pay as close to marginal cost for the subsequent pills.
The problem with that is that unless someone pays for developing that first pill, there's no second pill to take. The central challenge to drug pricing is to figure out, quite literally, who swallows (and in what proportions) that huge front-end cost. Unfortunately, no company has a precise method to fairly, reasonably and palatably allocate the cost of drug development among the varied classes of subsequent consumers — large HMOs, hospitals, full-service pharmacies and Medicaid for starters. Each buyer has a strong incentive to push as many of those costs as possible onto someone else.The upshot is a rough-and-tumble bargaining game in which drug prices vary substantially across different market segments. But the corner drugstore doesn't have the same leverage to play one drug manufacturer off against another, so it usually pays higher prices for its wares than a large HMO. The resulting confusion leads to loud calls for equitable, industrywide price controls. But price controls would have the same dire consequences as they would in any other industry. Investment dollars will quickly move elsewhere if the regulatory system does not allow manufacturers to maximize their revenues over the useful life of the drug (which, incidentally, never exceeds the 11 or so years of patent protection).
Repeated studies, both domestic and foreign, have shown that price controls dull the incentives of pharmaceutical companies to develop new drugs. Even talk of price controls depresses investment.
Because of its high-fixed, low-variable cost structure, the drug industry will never reach perfect competitive equilibrium. But in our second-best world, ponder carefully the different consequences of two strategies. The first seeks to expand supply by avoiding regulation and encouraging the entry of new companies into the business. The second seeks to hold down prices by direct controls.
embryonic stem cell stumbles
...Stem cell–based therapies propose to treat human medical conditions by replacing cells that have been lost through disease or injury. Unlike an organ transplant, where a damaged or diseased tissue is removed and then replaced with a comparable organ from a donor, stem cell therapies would involve integration of replacement cells into the existing tissues of the patient. The dispersed integration of the transplanted cells throughout the targeted organ (indeed, throughout the entire body of the patient) would make it impossible to remove the stem cell derivatives surgically should any problems arise. Thus, the problem of immune rejection is of particular concern—if transplanted cells are attacked by the immune system, the entire tissue in which the foreign cells reside becomes the target of a potentially disastrous immune attack.
Over the past five years, the scientific community has focused almost exclusively on somatic-cell nuclear transfer, or cloning, as the best resolution to the problem of immune rejection. During somatic-cell nuclear transfer, the genetic information of an unfertilized human egg would be removed and replaced with the unique genetic information of a patient. This would produce a cloned, one-cell embryo that would mature for several days in the laboratory and then be destroyed to obtain stem cells genetically matched to the patient. Based on the success of animal cloning, human cloning was optimistically predicted to be a simple matter. Once we were able to clone human embryos, those embryos would provide patient-specific stem cell repair kits for anyone requiring cell-replacement therapies.
Human cloning has proved to be more challenging than anticipated. Human eggs, as it turns out, are considerably more fragile than eggs of other mammalian species, and they do not survive the procedures that were successfully used to clone animals. Multiple attempts by several research groups worldwide have been unsuccessful in generating human clones. The few reports of the successful cloning of human embryos were either unverifiable press releases or clear chicanery promoted by a quasi-religious group for its own publicity.
The elusive prize to generate the first human clone appeared to be won in March 2004, when a South Korean group led by Hwang Woo-Suk reported in the prestigious professional journal Science that they had generated a human stem cell line from a cloned human embryo. A year later, in June 2005, this same group sensationally reported that they had successfully generated eleven patient-specific stem cell lines from cloned human embryos and had dramatically improved their success rate to better than one in twenty attempts, bringing cloning into the realm of the possible for routine treatment of human medical conditions. Hwang was hailed as a hero and a pioneer, and his reported success evoked an almost immediate clamor to remove the funding restrictions imposed by the Bush administration on human embryonic stem cell research, lest America fall hopelessly behind South Korea in developing therapies.
By fall 2005, however, the cloning miracle had begun to unravel. Colleagues of Hwang raised serious concerns about his published studies, launching an investigation into possible scientific fraud. By December, it was conclusively shown that all the claimed cloned stem cell lines were fakes. To date, no one has successfully demonstrated that it is indeed possible to clone human embryos, and, based on the failed attempts of Hwang and others, human cloning is not likely to be a simple task, should it prove possible at all.
The scandal surrounding Hwang’s audacious fraud raised multiple concerns about the ethics of embryonic stem cell research. Investigations revealed that Hwang had used thousands of human oocytes for his unsuccessful attempts, not the hundreds as he had originally claimed. The medical risks associated with egg donation (the potential complications include both sterility and death) raise serious questions about the morality of conducting basic research on human cloning. Given that Hwang pressured junior female colleagues into donating eggs for his research, how can the interests of female scientists be protected from such professional exploitation? Given that thousands of human eggs from more than a hundred women were used by Hwang and not even a single viable cloned human embryo resulted from this research, how can the medical risks to women entailed by this research possibly be justified?
Read it all.
the best human nature stories of 2006
Collectled by William Saletan at Slate.
are we still evolving?
"Are humans still evolving? In the vernacular sense of improving morally and intellectually - by cultural changes - I think so," says Steven Pinker. "In the biological sense of changes in the gene pool, it's impossible to say." If pressed to come off the fence, however, the Harvard-based evolutionary biologist knows where he stands. "People, including me, would rather believe that significant human biological evolution stopped between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago, before the races diverged, which would ensure that racial and ethnic groups are biologically equivalent," he says.
Creationists would say that the question begs the question.
___________________________
"Begging the question" is a form of logical fallacy in which an argument is assumed to be true without evidence other than the argument itself. When one begs the question, the initial assumption of a statement is treated as already proven without any logic to show why the statement is true in the first place.
A simple example would be "I think he is unattractive because he is ugly." The adjective "ugly" does not explain why the subject is "unattractive" -- they virtually amount to the same subjective meaning, and the proof is merely a restatement of the premise. The sentence has begged the question.
To beg the question does not mean "to raise the question." (e.g. "It begs the question, why is he so dumb?") This is a common error of usage made by those who mistake the word "question" in the phrase to refer to a literal question. Sadly, the error has grown more and more ubiquitous common with time, such that even journalists, advertisers, and major mass media entities have fallen prey to "BTQ Abuse."
how to write good
- Always avoid alliteration.
- Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
- Avoid cliches like the plague—they're old hat.
- Employ the vernacular.
understanding the question is half the answer
Omar at Iraq the Model:
...the military component we need at this particular stage should be different from the routine military operations that US and Iraqi military had been conducting so far. The new military component should be designed to create a friendly climate where politicians can strike deals and reach compromise without coercion from radical extremists.
And so if more boots are to be added on the ground then the mission will have to include freeing politicians and parties such as Maliki and al-Hashimi (the Dawa and the Islamic party respectively) from the ropes that bind them to Sadr and harmful elements in the Sunni political scene.
Right now is a good time, perhaps the best time we have to launch this effort since there's already a large front forming from the parties that are willing to talk against the extremists' camp.If the way forward requires maintaining the basic course of the political process and empowering (and cleaning) the current government and its head then the only way to do this is to relief Maliki, his party and the rest of the Shia alliance from the dominance and influence of Sadr and there are two ways to accomplish this:
Either persuade Maliki and his team and promise them great support and protection from Sadr's reach. Or, Deal a lethal blow to Sadr and his militia in order to render him unable to inflict harm on Maliki and other members of the UIA.
Now really, it shouldn't be that difficult to figure out that the first way isn't working out right, what's needed now is to take the decision to try the second way and deal with the biggest threat to stability in Iraq in the way we should.
If claims that the militia is fragmented and not entirely under Sadr's control are true (and it's actually hard to believe that one man can control a militia of dozens of thousands spread over 11 provinces) then this must be an advantage for us because if that's the case there would be little reason to believe those renegade units would fight for Sadr since many have reached financial independence from the center leadership and let's not forget that money and fear are the main weapons militia leaders use to expand their power and maintain control over the militia members and the population.
thursday, december 21 2006 (the shortest day)
santa drives a brown truck
...labeled UPS. Here's a story about how the parcel delivery company tweaks its efficiency.
when ayaan hirsi ali learned history
ONE DAY IN 1994, when I was living in Ede, a small town in Holland, I got a visit from my half-sister. She and I were both immigrants from Somalia and had both applied for asylum in Holland. I was granted it; she was denied. The fact that I got asylum gave me the opportunity to study. My half-sister couldn't.
In order for me to be admitted to the university I wanted to attend, I needed to pass three courses: a language course, a civics course and a history course. It was in the preparatory history course that I, for the first time, heard of the Holocaust. I was 24 years old at that time, and my half-sister was 21.I learned that innocent men, women and children were separated from each other. Stars pinned to their shoulders, transported by train to camps, they were gassed for no other reason than for being Jewish.
I saw pictures of masses of skeletons, even of kids. I heard horrifying accounts of some of the people who had survived the terror of Auschwitz and Sobibor. I told my half-sister all this and showed her the pictures in my history book. What she said was as awful as the information in my book.
With great conviction, my half-sister cried: "It's a lie! Jews have a way of blinding people. They were not killed, gassed or massacred. But I pray to Allah that one day all the Jews in the world will be destroyed."
She was not saying anything new. As a child growing up in Saudi Arabia, I remember my teachers, my mom and our neighbors telling us practically on a daily basis that Jews are evil, the sworn enemies of Muslims, and that their only goal was to destroy Islam. We were never informed about the Holocaust.
Later, as a teenager in Kenya, when Saudi and other Persian Gulf philanthropy reached us, I remember that the building of mosques and donations to hospitals and the poor went hand in hand with the cursing of Jews. Jews were said to be responsible for the deaths of babies and for epidemics such as AIDS, and they were believed to be the cause of wars. They were greedy and would do absolutely anything to kill us Muslims. If we ever wanted to know peace and stability, and if we didn't want to be wiped out, we would have to destroy the Jews. For those of us who were not in a position to take up arms against them, it was enough for us to cup our hands, raise our eyes heavenward and pray to Allah to destroy them.
Western leaders today who say they are shocked by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's conference this week denying the Holocaust need to wake up to that reality. For the majority of Muslims in the world, the Holocaust is not a major historical event that they deny. We simply do not know it ever happened because we were never informed of it.The total number of Jews in the world today is estimated to be about 15 million, certainly no more than 20 million. On the other hand, the world's Muslim population is estimated to be between 1.2 billion and 1.5 billion. And not only is this population rapidly growing, it is also very young.
What's striking about Ahmadinejad's conference is the (silent) acquiescence of mainstream Muslims. I cannot help but wonder: Why is there no counter-conference in Riyadh, Cairo, Lahore, Khartoum or Jakarta condemning Ahmadinejad?
Why are the 57 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference silent on this? Could the answer be as simple as it is horrifying: For generations, the leaders of these so-called Muslim countries have been spoon-feeding their populations a constant diet of propaganda similar to the one that generations of Germans (and other Europeans) were fed — that Jews are vermin and should be dealt with as such?
In Europe, the logical conclusion was the Holocaust. If Ahmadinejad has his way, he shall not want for compliant Muslims ready to act on his wish. The world needs to be informed again and again about the Holocaust — not only in the interest of the Jews who survived and their offspring but in the interest of humanity.
Holocaust deniers have another hurdle: the Nazis kept impeccable records of their genocide (as did Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge) as "60 Minutes" reported last Sunday.
For the first time, secrets of the Nazi Holocaust that have been hidden away for more than 60 years are finally being made available to the public. We’re not talking about a missing filing cabinet - we’re talking about thousands of filing cabinets, holding 50 million pages. It's Hitler’s secret archive.
...
The storerooms are immense: 16 miles of shelves holding the stories of 17 million victims – not only Jews, but slave laborers, political prisoners and homosexuals. To open the files is to see the Holocaust staring back like it was yesterday: strange pink Gestapo arrest warrants as lethal as a death sentence, jewelry lost as freedom ended at the gates of an extermination camp. Time stopped here in 1945.
christmas video from al qaeda
Scrappleface has some fun with the latest video from the jihadi general.
people aren't happy. let's tax 'em.
Business Pundit dissects the Economist.
The Economist this week is all about capitalism and happiness. One of the lead articles discusses the idea that greater societal wealth doesn't make people happy. Why? Because we don't really want stuff, we just want more stuff than our neighbors. We want to be better than our peers. People spend so much time trying to get stuff that they don't need, then wonder why they are so unhappy. The surprising suggestion from this article is that taxes can fix the problem. The even more surprising suggestion from this article is that these taxes are not meant to address inequality, but rather, to force the acceptance of elitism and societal hierarchy.
Think of the scramble for schools, Mr Frank says. Only 10% of kids can go to the top 10% of schools. In many countries, wherever the schools are good, the houses will be expensive. Thus parents who want the best education for their child must overwork to afford a house in a good school district. In doing so, however, they raise the bar for everyone else.
Is mutual disarmament possible? Not without government help, Mr Frank and Lord Layard argue. The exchequer should tax earned income heavily enough to deter one-upmanship, they say.
Despite appearances, this is not a naked example of punitive redistribution-the fiscal politics of envy. Mr Frank and Lord Layard do not want to level the social order. Their aim is much more conservative than that. Their taxes would leave the pecking order intact and envy undiminished. But people would be deterred from acting on the green-eyed monster. The problem these economists want to tackle is not inequality per se. It is that people don't know their place and scramble vainly to improve it. Carlyle, who thought man should content himself with being the worthy follower of worthy superiors, would no doubt have approved.This is such an odd thing to read because taxes are usually proposed under egalitarian ideals. The assumption behind so much left-wing thinking is that we should all be more equal, despite being dealt different hands in the game of life, and playing the hand we have been dealt in different ways.
There's more.
losing shock value
From Asharq Alawsat:
The most dangerous thing that could happen in light of the mounting crises in our region is the loss of interest in them.
Let me ask you: does the news of a car bomb tearing through a crowded Baghdad street surprise you? Does it surprise you to hear the news of thousands of families in Gaza losing their monthly income or the outbreak of street warfare between the people of one of the world's "poorest" countries, namely, Somalia? Even news of the opposition or the majority in Lebanon taking to the streets in protest is no longer a surprise!
I will not relate the news of the fall of Somalian cities one after another at the hands of militants of the "Islamic Courts," (Africa's version of Afghanistan's Taliban), as such news is unsurprising. There was also a time when the news of a fierce clash between an Al Qaeda cell and Saudi security forces was part of this "unsurprising family" of news.
The extensive and prompt media coverage that takes place almost simultaneously as these events unfold, and even before these events develop, has become a key element of "accustoming" the viewer and diminishes the element of surprise – the kind of surprise that generates concern, observation and reflection.
Read it all.
a good excuse to loaf
Endless hours spent perfecting your golf swing or basketball shot could be a waste of time, according to a new study which shows that practice does not always make perfect.
Mark Churchland and colleagues at Stanford University in California, US, made the discovery after training macaque monkeys to repeat a simple reaching task thousands of times.
"The nervous system was not designed to do the same thing over and over again," says Churchland, whose team investigated the way the brain plans and calculates motion.
The team showed the monkeys a coloured spot and rewarded them for reaching out to touch it at different speeds. During the exercise, they monitored the promoter cortex of the monkeys' brains, which is the region responsible for movement planning, and tracked the speed of the resulting motion.
...
Contrary to conventional wisdom that movement variability is caused by muscle activity, Churchland’s team found that neural activity accounts for about half the variations. In other words, training muscles to perform a certain way through practice, such as countless hours teeing off or shooting a basketball, will not produce the same shot every time because the brain's behaviour is inconsistent.
wednesday, december 20 2006
piffle from thomas friedman, et al
New York Times columnist and bestselling author Thomas Friedman wrote in a recent column:
..here is some immediate advice I can give the president: If you want any positive legacy, it will not come from Iraq. There are only tears left there. No, the only way for you to salvage your legacy is to get back to your Texas roots and devote the rest of your term to really ending America's oil addiction...
Thus spake Friedman. Iraq, less than one year after 12 million Iraqis turned out to vote for a democratic government, is all finished, washed up, hopeless. Sorry Iraq, you had 10 months to get it done, but the clock's run out.
Which brings to mind a comment from Iraqpundit:
The press and the think tanks don't bother with Iraqis. We seem to be flyspecks.
Iraq is about Bush; Iraqis remain a sideshow. We matter as corpses, because then we can be used against Bush. But as living people who might have a stake – or at least an opinion...? Forget it.
Well, yes, the news media, carrying water for the Democrat party, began declaring Iraq a failure even before things started getting dicey last June. It had to fail for them to regain power.
Now that Democrats have gained slim majorities in both houses, everyone is supposed to be singing from the defeatist song book, including Bush. If he doesn't, it just confirms to them how stubborn/dumb/out-of-touch he is.
As Newbusters noted, Bush sat down with three swells from the Washington Post for:
...a 25-minute interview Tuesday with the three Washington Post White House correspondents: Peter Baker, Michael Fletcher, and Michael Abramowitz. The transcript in today's Post leaves the definite impression it was another game of asking "when will you submit to the will of the Democrats, er, the people?"
The tone of questioning suggests Bush is denying the reality that America is now in the capable hands of a MoveOn.org majority, and demands that he "listen" to their wish list, since his wishes are no longer viable:
Given the election results, is increasing the troop level in Iraq even a viable possibility or option?
Yes, Mike, all options are viable.
– given the political will out there?
Well, all options are viable. I think what the people want is -- they want a couple of things. They want to see Democrats and Republicans work together to achieve a common objective, and they want us to win in Iraq....
But the election results seemed people wanted to bring the venture in Iraq to closure. That seemed to be the strong lesson. And what indications are there that you're actually listening to that sentiment?
Oh, Mike, look, I want to achieve the objective....There's not a lot of people saying, "Get out now." Most Americans are saying, "We want to achieve the objective."
But there are a lot of people who are saying, "Let's get out with a phased deployment over a certain period of time."
If they felt -- if that leads to victory, it needs to be seriously considered. And I'm considering all options and listening very carefully to a lot of good people who have got different opinions about how to proceed.
Makes me wish Bush would say, "With recent circulation drops among your, and other newspapers, the American public has entered a vote of no confidence in your judgement or in your role as gatekeepers. Why should I listen to you?"
iowahawk looks back at the windy city, 1959
A trip down memory lane with the prairie wit.
meet mugabe's victims
Thousands have been killed or tortured by the Zimbabwean dictator. Here are the stories of three.
the lord smites snow and rocky
Senators Olympia Snowe and Jay Rockefeller raised eyebrows with their October 27 letter to the president of ExxonMobil, incouraging him to stop funding scientific research that debunks man-made global warming.
This act got one British Lord Monckton plenty p-o'd, and he wrote an open letter chewing them out. It's a gem.
You defy every tenet of democracy when you invite ExxonMobil to deny itself the right to provide information to "senior elected and appointed government officials" who disagree with your opinion. You are elected officials yourselves. If you do not believe in the right of persons within the United States to exercise their fundamental right under the world's greatest Constitution to petition their elected representatives for the redress of their grievances, then you have no place on Capitol Hill. You must go.
...
There is no evidence that today's temperatures are warmer than during the mediaeval warm period 1,000 years ago. Yet in 2005, the palaeoclimatologist David Deming wrote that after he had published a paper in Science [Deming, 1995] "I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. One of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said, 'We have to get rid of the Mediaeval Warm Period.'"
The UN's second assessment report, in 1996, had had a 1,000-year graph showing that temperature in the Middle Ages was warmer than today's. But the 2001 report contained a new graph showing no mediaeval warm period. It concluded that the 20th century was the warmest for 1,000 years. That graph, recently condemned by the US National Academy of Sciences as "having a validation skill not significantly different from zero" -- i.e. as being useless -- was repeated six times in the UN's 2001 report, each time in full colour. In the UN's forthcoming report, there will be no apology for the erroneous graph, from which data showing the existence of the mediaeval warm period had been excluded.
Why should ExxonMobil, or anyone, place the slightest credence in a body that, in the three examples cited above, has manipulated or ignored the truth, has suppressed the participation of dissenters, has failed to address scientists' legitimate concerns about the declared bias of its lead authors, and has failed to apologize even for its most blatant errors? Lord Lawson of Blaby, a distinguished former Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK, has called for the outright abolition of the UN's climate-change panel. I concur. We need honest science. Therefore we do not need the UN.
rod spared, rod spoiled
Missy Phillips knew she had a big problem on her hands when her boyfriend's 18-year-old son ransacked their house looking for the stash of unwrapped Christmas presents.
To keep the nosy teenager from finding the stereo, video games and hunting bow she and her boyfriend bought him, Phillips had to go out of the house - and into a self-storage unit - to hide the gifts until Christmas Eve.
Around the holidays, the units typically used to store furniture and household items are becoming temporary outposts for adults to hide and wrap gifts for kids and big-ticket items like televisions or bicycles for spouses. In Nashville, one storage service bills their smaller units as "Santa Closets."
An 18-year-old should know better. Instead of spending money to hide his gifts, sorta step-mom should teach the punk a lesson.
Stories like this smell like PR plants. The personal storage industry dreams up a way to goose demand and convinces some hapless news writer that there's a trend to be reported.
Next year the box industry may dream up faux boxes that Missy can hide in her house for say, an X-Box 360. When the kid unwraps it on Christmas, a note reads, "Merry Xmas, you've been punk'd, punk."
tuesday, december 19 2006
kofi annan, welfare queeen
The apartment was where Mr. Annan and his wife lived before 1997, when he became secretary-general. The Roosevelt Island home is part of an estate of low-rent state-regulated housing. For years, the Annans saved considerable sums by occupying an apartment meant to help financially strapped low- to moderate-income New York families.
One question Mr. Annan has never addressed is why he and his wife felt comfortable availing themselves of this generous arrangement. Another is how it is that, since Mr. Annan and his wife left that Roosevelt Island apartment 10 years ago to move into the rent-free residence on Sutton Place supplied to the secretary-general, their former low-rent apartment was handed over to be occupied by the family of Mr. Annan's brother.
zucker punch
Director David Zucker (Airplane, Top Secret and much more) is back with another video, this one taking on James Baker and the Iraq Study Group.
HT: Pat Dollard
hillary triangulates truth
As Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton continues to assess a possible presidential candidacy and the contours of a Democratic nomination fight, she has taken another step away from her 2002 vote authorizing President Bush to attack Iraq by saying that she "wouldn't have voted that way" if she knew everything she knows now.
Clinton has often been asked if she regrets her vote authorizing military action and she usually answers that question with an artful dodge, saying that she accepts responsibility for the vote and suggesting that if the Senate had all the information it has today, there would never have been a vote on the Senate floor. However, she has never gone as far as some of her potential rivals for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination -- who also voted for the war -- and called her vote a mistake or declared that she would have cast her vote differently with all the facts presently available to her -- until now.
This morning on NBC's "Today" show, Sen. Clinton was asked about her 2002 vote and offered a slightly evolved answer. "Obviously, if we knew then what we know now, there wouldn't have been a vote," she said in her usual refrain before adding, "and I certainly wouldn't have voted that way."...Sen. Clinton has long been viewed as potentially vulnerable on her left flank with regards to the war in a Democratic nomination fight where primary voters and caucus-goers tend to represent the more liberal wing of the party.
Click the thumbnail image to watch Hillary's video.
you vill behave!
German diplomats don't shoot from the hip - they talk even to hard core dictators, such as Syria's Assad. And Germany's foreign minister Steinmeier didn't mince his words:
"I call on Syria to desist from all actions that could contribute directly or indirectly to the destabilization of the situation," he said before boarding his return flight from Damascus to Germany: "If you follow this path, you will have a partner in Germany."
Hey, Germany's carrot and stick approach has worked before! Remember Steinmeier predecessor Joschka Fischer's sensational diplomatic success in the case of Iran's nuclear ambitions?
Here we go again. The results of Steinmeiers's Syrian talks so far are truly encouraging:
Nil. Zero. Nought.
nostalgia for sexual deviation
Last weekend rumors were flying about a certain cheerleader at my daughter's high school. Facts are tough to tease from such tales, but this much is known: said cheerleader used her cell phone to make a video of her young digits exploring her Mound of Venus.
She then emailed the video to her boyfriend (ain't technology great?) and from there her privates escaped into the public domain. The school threatened punishment and the parents, so the rumor reports, argued that the whole thing was no big deal. Just kids being kids.
Should they choose, the parents might cite Bill Clinton ("I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.") or Paris Hilton, whose amateur porn made her famous enough to launch a line of handbags.
Last month Los Angeles magazine ran a feature story, "A Porn Star is Born," about Sasha Grey. The moment Sasha turned 18, she drove down from northern California to the San Fernando Valley to pursue her dream of becoming a pornstar, an ambition she'd nursed since age 11.
Sasha got an agent right away, and with her young face and taste for pain (don't ask) became a hot commodity. The ten page article describes how much she earns depending upon which orifices are involved. Very matter of fact.
Los Angeles is a glossy, upscale magazine, the type that forces you to flip past ten pages of ads for $50,000 watches and other baubles before you locate the table of contents. I was struck by how normal they made Sasha's career choice sound--it could've been about a young girl who always wanted to become an astronaut. I imagined naive teenage girls reading this article and thinking, "Hmm. Good money, easy hours and fame." They erased any shame that might still attend.
Such journalism marks a milestone in our culture. As a member of the '60 generation (sex, drugs, rock 'n roll) it is odd to find myself feeling a bit prudish. Which reminds me of a conversation Burt and I had over lunch last month. I commented that I was tired of seeing gay men kiss on TV. I have no aversion to homosexuals. I think people are born gay and that we should all live and let live. But that doesn't mean I like watching men locking lips. Burt replied, "I liked gays much better in the closet."
Upon further reflection, I realized I'm not all that fascinated watching men and women frenching on TV or movies either. It seems rote. One exception was in a fine little movie called Dear Frankie in which the couple have yet to acknowledge their attraction.
As they stand outside the door to her flat, saying nothing for about 45 seconds, the audience gets to experience the tension that comes with first kisses. When they finally kiss, it means something. There was something sweet and pure about the moment.
Sweet and pure. Perhaps that is becoming the new deviation.
JB
monday, december 18 2006
bush, b.b. king, lucille and much more
did baker law firm scam iraq sanctions?
Maariv journalist Ben Caspit reports that he has obtained documentation which shows that the law firm in which former American secretary of state James Baker is senior partner used an Israeli agent to bypass the US sanctions on business dealings with Iraq.
Houston-based Baker Botts, with extensive dealings in the Arab world, earned tens of millions of dollars in fees from a deal it brokered between the Korean Hyundai concern and the Iraqi government at the peak of the sanctions imposed on the government of Saddam Hussein, according to Israeli businessman Nir Gouaz, who has been asked in 1998 by Baker's office to mediate in the deal.Now Gouaz wants to come clean and spill the beans to show Baker's hypocrisy and conflicts of interest. "I read all the essays about Baker's vision, about the Baker Report, about the man whom the United States placed at the head of the committee that is to decide on the future of the Middle East, and I decided that there is a limit to chutzpah. The time has come to tell the story," Gouaz told Ma'ariv.
africa giving aid to american episcopalians
In a twist, these wealthy American congregations are essentially putting themselves up for adoption by Anglican archbishops in poorer dioceses in Africa, Asia and Latin America who share conservative theological views about homosexuality and the interpretation of Scripture with the breakaway Americans.
“The Episcopalian ship is in trouble,” said the Rev. John Yates, rector of The Falls Church, one of the two large Virginia congregations, where George Washington served on the vestry. “So we’re climbing over the rails down to various little lifeboats. There’s a lifeboat from Bolivia, one from Rwanda, another from Nigeria. Their desire is to help us build a new ship in North America, and design it and get it sailing.”
how art can be good
I grew up believing that taste is just a matter of personal preference. Each person has things they like, but no one's preferences are any better than anyone else's. There is no such thing as good taste.
Like a lot of things I grew up believing, this turns out to be false, and I'm going to try to explain why.
One problem with saying there's no such thing as good taste is that it also means there's no such thing as good art. If there were good art, then people who liked it would have better taste than people who didn't. So if you discard taste, you also have to discard the idea of art being good, and artists being good at making it.
It was pulling on that thread that unravelled my childhood faith in relativism. When you're trying to make things, taste becomes a practical matter. You have to decide what to do next. Would it make the painting better if I changed that part? If there's no such thing as better, it doesn't matter what you do. In fact, it doesn't matter if you paint at all. You could just go out and buy a ready-made blank canvas. If there's no such thing as good, that would be just as great an achievement as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Less laborious, certainly, but if you can achieve the same level of performance with less effort, surely that's more impressive, not less.
Yet that doesn't seem quite right, does it?
Read it all.
For those unfamiliar with Paul Graham, he is a computer programmer, co-founder of ViaWeb, an essayist and painter. He is the author of