friday march 31, 2006
Unique rose images
Looking for rose photographs, fine art prints to decorate your home or office. Check these out.
jimmuh knows all
I was watching Bob Greene on C-Span talk about his book, Fraternity, about getting to know the presidents from Richard Nixon to George H. W. Bush after their presidencies to find out what their post-presidential lives were like. What struck Greene (and me as I listened to him) about Jimmy Carter was how Carter was so obsessive about telling other people how to do things they knew how to do.
He describes how Carter kept giving the Secret Service driver directions to where they were going even the guy knew how to get there and Carter kept acknowledging that the driver knew where he was going. But he kept giving him directions anyway. When someone asks to take a picture of Carter, he's giving the person directions on how to use his own camera! When he does a little 20 second tribute for a charity affair, he insists on looking at the playback on the monitor and then redoing it so he can move his chair a foot to the side and get a better background for the picture. He sounds very irritating to be around.
Hearing these anecdotes, you can see the same character trait that leads Carter to give other presidents advice on how they should be running their presidency even if it is all criticism and sometimes delivered from overseas. It is almost as if the man can't help himself.
photos to stir your blood
Did you know that much of the USA actually belongs to Mexico? Neither did I. Gem quote:
One of the more negative parts of the march was when American flags were passed out to make sure the marchers were looked on as part of "America".
This is from a march organizer, not some Anglo critic.
suck-up clinton tells brits america envies them
Former President Bill Clinton is starting to look and sound more and more like Jimmy Carter every day. Today Bill Clinton again slammed George W. Bush while at a speaking engagement out of country. In a strange political twist of misrepresentation, Clinton ripped into the booming US economy saying Great Britain's slow growth economy was the envy of America:
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton said on Tuesday that Britain’s economy, environmental policy and attempts at modernization were envied in the United States, where comparable policies under President George W. Bush were lacking.
Taking a look at Great Britain:
* Britain's gross domestic product is predicted to grow by 2 percent to 2.5 percent in the coming year. (The world’s economy is booming at an average rate of over 4%, but Europe’s growth has stagnated at an inflated 1.5%.)
* The treasurer added that inflation is sitting at 2 percent.
* British Treasury chief Gordon Brown came under fire from economists last year for his overly optimistic forecasts for the economy, and eventually downgraded his predictions significantly to 1.75 percent growth in gross domestic product for last year, marking the slowest expansion since 1992.
* The number of unemployed in Britain, as measured by the International Labour Organisation, rose by 37,000 to 1.528 million in the three months to January from the previous quarter and was the highest level since October 2002. The unemployment rate, as measured by the ILO, increased to 5.0 percent in the three months to January, up 0.1 percentage points from the previous quarter.
Now, looking at the United States:
* Real GDP increased 3.5 percent in 2005, and growth was revised up from an original estimate of 1.1 percent to a 1.6 percent annual rate for the fourth quarter of 2005. The economy has been growing for 17 straight quarters, and the composite index of leading indicators increased 1.1 percent in January, indicating continued economic growth.
* The unemployment rate is 4.8 percent - lower than the average of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. (Yes, that would include you, Bill Clinton!)
* Real disposable incomes have risen 2.2 percent over the past 12 months. Since January 2001, real after-tax income per person has risen 8.2 percent.
* The core Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose just 0.2 percent in January. Core CPI has increased a moderate 2.1 percent over the past 12 months, indicating core inflation remains contained.
* During the past four quarters, productivity has increased 2.5 percent. Productivity has grown at a 3.4 percent annual rate since the business-cycle peak in the first quarter of 2001.
The reality is that Great Britain, our ally, would love to have the economic growth we see in the US, but it is struggling with the rest of Europe. Bill Clinton, shamelessly, has his envy misdirected and is just playing a political game. And, since he's only 59, we can expect many more years of his sideline president bashing in the future.
What Clinton means is that certain Americans envy the British government's ability to meddle in people's lives. The rest of us Amuricans jest ain't sophisticated enough to unnerstand that personal freedom and individual initiative are so passe.
why iraqis hit "mute" when ms. albright speaks
From Iraqpundit:
Madeleine Albright basically says in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times that Bush is a bit at sea with his good vs. evil strategy. After demonstrating her expertise by explaining that Iraq and Iran fought a long war in the 1980s and that Iran condemned the Sept. 11 terror attacks, Albright said:
"The administration is now divided between those who understand this complexity and those who do not."
The implication is that Albright is so much wiser than those in the Bush administration because she understood the complexity of the region when she was secretary of state. But Iraqis want to know why she thinks her view of, say, Iraq is anything anyone should respect. And frankly, we advise Iranians and others to consider Albright's view of their lives and the lives of their children before listening to anything she has to say.
Take for example, this 1996 chilling exhange on CBS:
Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes: "We have heard that half a million [Iraqi] children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?"*
US Secretary of State Madeline Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price - we think the price is worth it."
And in 1997, Albright told a Georgetown University audience "We do not agree with nations who argue that if Iraq complies with its obligations concerning weapons of mass destruction, sanctions should be lifted."
Iraqis have no interest in hearing Albright's opinion about anything.
If that's not enough, recall the image of Madeleine Albright chasing (literally) Yasser Arafat outside the US Embassy in Paris after he walked out of negotiations. Yes, she is such a wise woman.
* The 500,000 figure was Saddam playing public relations. It worked: the Oil for Food program was created and Saddam used it to bribe foreign leaders and extend his reign of misery on Iraq.
buy this and be popular
...or at least less irritating:
A DEVICE that can pick up on people's emotions is being developed to help people with autism relate to those around them. It will alert its autistic user if the person they are talking to starts showing signs of getting bored or annoyed.
One of the problems facing people with autism is an inability to pick up on social cues. Failure to notice that they are boring or confusing their listeners can be particularly damaging, says Rana El Kaliouby of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It's sad because people then avoid having conversations with them."
The "emotional social intelligence prosthetic" device, which El Kaliouby is constructing along with MIT colleagues Rosalind Picard and Alea Teeters, consists of a camera small enough to be pinned to the side of a pair of glasses, connected to a hand-held computer running image recognition software plus software that can read the emotions these images show. If the wearer seems to be failing to engage his or her listener, the software makes the hand-held computer vibrate.
the latino backlash myth
The current illegal immigration issue played out with identical arguments and passions in California in 1994 over Prop. 187. The proposition, which would have denied public services to illegal immigrants, passed by 59% with a sizeable chunk of Hispanic voters in support.
The law was promptly killed by a judge who said the law was an unconstitutional attempt by Californians to control immigration, a federal prerogrative. Ever since, the Republican party in California has been in decline, some say because of 187. Debra Saunders says that is bunk:
Call that the Backlash Myth. In fact, Prop. 187 passed with 59 percent of the vote, and GOP Gov. Pete Wilson, who championed the measure, was re-elected in 1994. In 2003, when Democratic Gov. Gray Davis signed a bill that would allow illegal immigrants to get driver's licenses, he so enraged voters that he sealed his political demise. After Davis was recalled from office, the heavily Democratic California Legislature repealed the bill.
That's your backlash.
Don't blame racism. While some in the media may think all Latinos vote alike, the Los Angeles Times poll found that 38 percent of Latino voters in California strongly opposed giving driver's licenses to illegal immigrants.
If there is a backlash, it probably will be against the demonstrators. Even before students began blocking the Los Angeles streets to protest legislation in Congress to toughen penalties for illegal immigrants and smugglers, Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies told me over the telephone, "I hope they keep doing it. It just makes it less and less likely the Senate's going to pass any amnesty."
nine out ten doctors recommend growing a spine
Democrats have polled extensively on national security, testing various possible messages for the fall, and found that the more emphasis put on securing the homeland, the more voters respond.
According to one poll taken for the Democratic National Committee, nearly three-quarters of those surveyed responded positively to such a message, rather than a message that emphasized taking the fight to the terrorists and staying the course in Iraq.
If this sounds familiar, it's the Bill Clinton style of leadership: take a poll to find out where the crowd is headed, then rush to the front and cry out, "Follow me."
Thus the Democrats' hissy fit in witnessing real leadership from President Bush. They deride Bush's refusal to shift with the wind as stubbornness and arrogance.
saddam's slow war
The latest quip accusation that the United States "rushed to war" with Saddam's Iraq conveniently ignores 12 years of combat, terror and crime.
Perhaps The Slow War -- Saddam's war against the U.N.-mandated sanctions and inspections regimen that halted Operation Desert Storm -- has slipped from public historical memory. It shouldn't, for The Slow War is the long, violent bridge connecting Desert Storm to Operation Iraqi Freedom.
From March 1991 to March 2003, Saddam fought The Slow War savvily and savagely, utilizing an array of political, military and economic ploys. Moreover, by early 2003, Saddam believed he was winning.
The Iraqi dictator had reasons to make that calculation. Recall the fall of 2002 -- and the growing realization that the entire post-Desert Storm sanctions regimen had withered. The curious lack of political will on the part of key Security Council members (France and Russia) to keep Saddam properly caged was increasingly evident.
What the world didn't know, and wouldn't learn until early 2004 when the Iraqi Interim Government began naming names, was how effectively Saddam had corrupted the Oil for Food program. Oil for Food, a program designed to provide food and medicine for the Iraqi people, had in fact become an insidious economic weapon in The Slow War, used to buy political influence and corrode the entire sanctions policy.
A recent article in "The Economist" quoted former Saddam crony Tariq Aziz as telling interrogators that Saddam had given France and Russia millions of dollars in contracts "with the implied understanding that their political posture ... would be pro-Iraqi." In other words, mass murderer Saddam was bribing his way to a political victory that would have reversed his battlefield defeat in Desert Storm.
thursday march 30, 2006
new record for people in a bubble
...excluding Beverly Hills, that is. The new record is 19.
lying with polls, episode #24983
If political polls are to mean anything, they must predict how people actually vote. Thus polling samples must reflect the right mix of Dems, Republicans and Indies to mean anything. In 2004, party identification was even. The "big news" yesterday was that Dems now lead Republicans by one point.
If party identification is so close as to be a dead heat, why do polling services routinely underrepresent Republicans? CBS polls routinely overpoll Democrats so badly that their results are hardly worth the effort of analyzing. Their last major poll had a disparity between Democrats and Republicans of thirteen points -- which they corrected to a nine-point difference. Surprise! It found that Bush's approval numbers had dropped!
top 87 worst predictions
Here.
talking tough
The mood in Washington has been sour lately so Democrats in Congress thoughtfully provided a little levity Wednesday by issuing their National Security Strategy.
On Feb. 3rd, the Department of Defense issued its quadrennial report on defense strategy. It was 92 pages long. The "Democratic Plan to Protect America and Restore Our Leadership in the World" is six pages long. Half of that is repeating the report in Spanish. And there is a cover page in each language. So the actual "plan" is just two pages long, presented in bullet points in large type, with ample white space between them. Party elders must have labored for months to produce this bear.
The first pledge the Democrats make is to: "Rebuild a state-of-the-art military by making the needed investments in equipment and manpower so that we can project power to protect America wherever and whenever necessary."
This would be a welcome change from past Democratic practice, since a majority of Democrats in both houses of Congress voted against virtually every major weapons system (the M1 tank, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the Patriot missile, the B-2 bomber) that brought us victory in the Cold War, the Gulf War, and the march to Baghdad.
The Democrats pledge to "Eliminate Osama bin Laden, destroy terrorist networks like al Qaida, finish the job in Afghanistan, and end the threat posed by the Taliban."
Since the goal of eliminating Osama bin Laden isn't exactly a radical departure from the policies President Bush is pursuing, Democratic stress on this objective suggests they think they could be more successful in obtaining it than the president so far has been. But the Democratic "plan" provides no hint of what Democrats would do differently.
Perhaps what Democrats have in mind is to build a time machine, and go back to February of 1996, when the government of Sudan, where bin Laden was then residing, offered to turn him over to the United States, and the Clinton administration refused to accept him. Where is H.G> Wells when you need him?
an hour later you feel decaffeinated
Maureen Dowd on a Starbucks cup.
geekonomics: wealth in scarcity
What if everything in life were free? You'd think we'd be happier. But game designers know better: We'd be bored.
Economics is loosely defined as choice under scarcity. After all, in the real world, there's only so much to go around. You can't always get what you want, and unfulfilled desires give rise to markets. But in a game world, there's no inherent reason for scarcity. Game designers have given us plenty of utopias where we can have all the mithril we want, to buy whatever we want whenever we want it.
Problem is, those worlds turn out to be dull. For example, the developers of Active Worlds made everything in the game free. Players built enormous houses - in which there was nothing to do. The game never quite caught on. That's why today's newer massive synthetic worlds make life hard.
wednesday march 29, 2006
why donald trump would flop in france
"You're fired!" apparently has no French translation.
Yesterday 3 million French took to the streets to protest a provisional labor reform that would allow workers under age 26 to be fired for incompetence in the first two years on the job. Such an outrage makes for some great photos, which you can see here.
Then there's Defending the Frogs.
UPDATE: The four ways you can fire someone in France.
el ranto grande
Rodolfo F. Acuña, a professor of Chicana/o Studies at California State University, Northridge, vented his spleen in today's LA Daily News. Some nuggets:
With the advent of the right-wing think tanks and the Internet, immigrant-bashing became an industry. Playing on the fears of white Americans who have historically been narcissistic and consumed by angst, these groups have made millions by creating a living hell for people who just want what others want a place to live in peace and educate their children.
Such a living hell that thousands keep coming. And isn't that a rather nasty description of white people?
Aside from the mendaciousness of the nativist, their stupidity is mind-blowing. The United States has been criminally negligent when it comes to Latin America. Its drug market has converted many Latin Americans into suppliers of American demand for drugs. As a result, the governments of these countries have morally decayed.
Those devil gringos make us sell them drugs!
The U.S.' green revolutions have destroyed agricultural subsistence, and the North American Free Trade Agreement has destroyed nascent manufacturing industries.
So we should go back to subsistence farming because Mexico can't/won't grow up?
Today, the only thing that is sustaining Mexico and Central America is the remittances sent back annually by hard-working compatriots.
Why is that? Why can't so many Latin American countries function?
If it were not for these remittances, those economies would crash and there would be many more immigrant workers coming into territory that was illegally taken from their ancestors. They are illegal because the border was moved.
If we hadn't stolen Texas, there's just be that much more Mexico run by crooks and incompetents.
I shudder to think that someone so incapable of clear thought influences the minds of students, and is doing so with my tax dollars.
JB
no good deed goes unpunished
...at least for people trying to immigrate to the USA legally:
President Bush is currently considering allowing illegal immigrants to “not jump the line” but at least “get to the back of the line” to citizenship – for just $3000.
I expect you see why I am still trying to get over the shock…
There is no line to citizenship that I, an educated Brit, can even get to the back of... I’ve already spent my $10,000s. I’ve already put in my thousands of pages of paper work. I’ve already invested greatly in your economy. I am using my education directly to benefit hundreds of thousands of Americans who are using the service I provide (for free, by the way), and yet American law requires me to state an intent not to stay permanently. May I humbly ask this country for at least the same rights as an illegal Latino? Now, I’m guessing the word “Mexican” isn’t going to appear anywhere in the legislation, so should I just let my visa expire; go quiet for a while; become an illegal British immigrant, and then get all the rights for which I’ve been spending so much time and money, as well as some rights that I cannot have as an alien executive manager, by registering as a guest worker? If it wasn’t so serious, it would be funny.
So watch out for your next immigration crisis, America. You will see a new phenomenon: legal alien residents like me will be trying to find ways to become illegal immigrants just so we can join the same line to citizenship that is denied to us as legal productive alien residents … And it will be the best $3000 we’ve ever spent – a small fraction of what’s it’s already cost me to conduct business here for just a year. I wonder if I’ll have to learn Spanish to fill in the forms?
HT: Polipundit
9/11 conspiracy theories
...conveniently collated. Choose your own nutty flavor.
forty-two midgets vs. one lion
...and it wasn't even close.
how to pour ketchup
blood and gore
That's David Blood and Al Gore writing "For People and Planet" in Opinion Journal. (Rule of thumb: be wary of non-astronomers who use the word planet.) Read the column, then read the comments from other readers. My favorite, from J. Reynolds - Houston:
Many American companies indeed already are accounting for environmental and other societal costs--expenses such as regulations, taxes and the monstrous overall levy necessary for the USA to maintain the armed forces that protect Western civilization.
The manner in which companies are accounting for this overwhelming burden is to ship as many jobs as possible to India and elsewhere--to nations that baldly reject the burdens necessitated by such societal overhead, and accordingly can provide labor for mere pennies on the dollar. Al Gore is preaching to the choir here. Let's see him take his sermons overseas, and convert some genuine heathens.
Oh yes, India. You may remember that Al negotiated the Kyoto Treaty, which exempted India and China in stark contravention of a unanimous Senate. Which is why Kyoto was DOA long before Bush came to Washington.
"marriage is for white people"
LaShawn Barber comments on the WaPo story that got people talking. Here's a startling stat: 52% of black women will marry by age 30 compared with 81% of white women.
Is anyone to blame beyond those making bad choices? Liberal government policy meant to help the poor (welfare benefits to unwed mothers) exacerbated the problem.
In 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan (why don't they make Democrats like him anymore?) warned how illegitimacy would destroy black families. He caught hell for it, but he was right.
tuesday march 28, 2006
frog marching
Hundreds of thousands of people poured into the streets of cities across France today in the biggest show of force to date against Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin and his new labor law targeting youth. One of the country's largest unions, the CGT, put the nationwide figure at 3 million, a turnout that the CGT secretary general, Bernard Thibault, hailed as "historic."
The marches were part of a nationwide day of action against the Villepin legislation, which was intended to encourage hiring by making it easy for companies to fire workers under age 26 during their first two years on the job.
Student and union opposition to the law has ballooned into one of the biggest protest movements in France in years.
The unofficial theme song for the day was the Beatles "I, Me Mine."
All through the day, I me mine
I me mine, I me mine
All through the night, I me mine
I me mine, I me mine
Now they're frightened of leaving it
Everyone's weaving it
Coming on strong all the time
All through the day I me mineI-I-me-me-mine, I-I-me-me-mine
I-I-me-me-mine, I-I-me-me-mine
greenhouse theory all hot air?
According to Vladimir Shaidurov of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the apparent rise in average global temperature recorded by scientists over the last hundred years or so could be due to atmospheric changes that are not connected to human emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of natural gas and oil. Shaidurov explained how changes in the amount of ice crystals at high altitude could damage the layer of thin, high altitude clouds found in the mesosphere that reduce the amount of warming solar radiation reaching the earth's surface.
Shaidurov has used a detailed analysis of the mean temperature change by year for the last 140 years and explains that there was a slight decrease in temperature until the early twentieth century. This flies in the face of current global warming theories that blame a rise in temperature on rising carbon dioxide emissions since the start of the industrial revolution. Shaidurov, however, suggests that the rise, which began between 1906 and 1909, could have had a very different cause, which he believes was the massive Tunguska Event, which rocked a remote part of Siberia, northwest of Lake Baikal on the 30th June 1908.
incredible macro photography
Shooting small is a hobby of mine. Seeing a portfolio like this makes me jealous. I do wonder whether the insects were alive when he shot them.
how we dress
Photos of the dress codes of social groups.
voting with their feet
The United States accounts for 37.1% of the world's immigration. WorldMapper visualizes the data. Poke around the site a bit, there is plenty of interesting info.
clean air is dangerous to the planet!
File this under "damned if you do, damned if you don't."
THE amount of sunshine reaching earth is increasing, accelerating the pace of climate change, scientists have found.
A series of independent studies around the world show a significant rise in the amount of sunshine penetrating the atmosphere to be absorbed by the earth’s surface and turned into heat.
“The enhanced warming we have seen since the 1990s along with phenomena such as the widespread melting of glaciers could well be due to this increased intensity of sunlight compounding the effect of greenhouse gases,” said Professor Martin Wild of the Institute of Atmospheric and Climate Science in Zurich, Switzerland.
And what's causing more sunlight to get through? Cleaner air!
Measurements of sunshine levels between 1960 and 1990 had shown a decrease in the amount of sunshine reaching the earth, a phenomenon known as global dimming.
This was thought to have been caused by dust, smog and other pollutants, mainly from industrialised western countries.The pollutants, known as aerosols, reduced sunshine levels by absorbing and scattering solar radiation and promoting the formation of clouds that reflected radiation back into space.
In the last two decades, however, there have been significant decreases in such pollutants, partly due to industry becoming cleaner but largely because of the collapse of the Soviet Union and much of its heavy industry.
Wild said: “Sunshine levels had been decreasing by 2% a decade between 1960 and 1980 — a total decline of about 6%. Now they are going up again. Perhaps this is why our Swiss glaciers are melting.”
A 6% increase in the amount of solar radiation reaching earth would have a powerful impact on climate, especially when added to the warming effect of greenhouse gases which have already raised global temperatures by about 0.6C. Researchers predict an additional rise of at least 1.5C by 2050.
Sheesh. You try to do good for Mother Earth and look what it gets you.
newsweek, time predict global cooling
From 1975, Newsweek notes ominous signs that the world is cooling and we might all starve.
And Time Magazine, Monday, Jun. 24, 1974:
Another Ice Age?
In Africa, drought continues for the sixth consecutive year, adding terribly to the toll of famine victims. During 1972 record rains in parts of the U.S., Pakistan and Japan caused some of the worst flooding in centuries.In Canada's wheat belt, a particularly chilly and rainy spring has delayed planting and may well bring a disappointingly small harvest. Rainy Britain, on the other hand, has suffered from uncharacteristic dry spells the past few springs. A series of unusually cold winters has gripped the American Far West, while New England and northern Europe have recently experienced the mildest winters within anyone's recollection.
The current Time cover reads: "Be Worried. Be Very Worried."
Uh yeah, how about, "Be skeptical. Be very, very skeptical."
MOnday march 27, 2006
pillow talk gets results
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - A Muslim couple in India has been told by local Islamic leaders they must separate after the husband "divorced" his wife in his sleep, the Press Trust of India reported.
Sohela Ansari told friends that her husband Aftab had uttered the word "talaq," or divorce, three times in his sleep, according to the report published in newspapers Monday.
When local Islamic leaders got to hear, they said Aftab's words constituted a divorce under an Islamic procedure known as "triple talaq." The couple, married for 11 years with three children, were told they had to split.
The religious leaders ruled that if the couple wanted to remarry they would have to wait at least 100 days. Sohela would also have to spend a night with another man and be divorced by him in turn.
body armor
To score political points, Democrats made combat body armor a political issue (callous Bush and Rumsfeld don't care about GIs etc.). Well, now more body armor has been delivered to Marines in Iraq where it...sits in closets.
Extra body armor - the lack of which caused a political storm in America - has flooded into Iraq, but many Marines here promptly stuck it in lockers or under bunks. Too heavy and cumbersome, many say.
claire berlinski
Yesterday we linked to an article about the recent French riots. The author of that piece was interviewed by John Hawkins:
John Hawkins: In the book, you said that anti-Americanism seemed to be at least in part, a religion substitute for many Europeans. Can you elaborate on that idea?
Claire Berlinski: Certainly. The phenomena to be explained are the irrationality and the ardor of European anti-Americanism. Irrational, because entirely disproportionate to any real faults in American society. Of course America has flaws, and no, it is not lunacy to point them out. But in poll after poll, you see substantial numbers of Europeans, non-trivial numbers, who believe the September 11 attacks were staged, yes, staged, by an oil-hungry American military-industrial complex to justify its imperialist adventures in Iraq. In Germany, 20 percent of the population believes this.
In France, a book arguing this case was a galloping bestseller. Now that is bughouse nuts. Totally bats in the belfry. Then the ardor: "My anti-Americanism," wrote one columnist in the British Telegraph, "has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness." If only we could harness all that outrage and transform it into a non-polluting energy source! You see this kind of thing all the time in the European press. (Meanwhile, if the French, say, wipe out the entire Ivorian air force, do you see protestors on the streets chanting "No blood for cocoa?" What a question.)
When you have these two phenomena together-irrationality and this curious passion, this fervor-it seems reasonable to conclude that you are in the presence of something like a cult. So you consider it, sociologically. What role does this ideology serve in the European psyche? One answer: It fulfills many of the roles once played by the Church. It offers a comprehensive-if lunatic-answer to the question, "Why is the world the way it is, and why is there evil in that world?" It provides a devil to excoriate and then to exorcise. There is community and belonging in anti-American activism, ecstasy in protest. Again, a form of Christian heresy, and no more lunatic, surely, than anything the Cathars believed, if also no less.
paul graham on web 2.0
The most dramatic example of Web 2.0 democracy is not in the selection of ideas, but their production. I've noticed for a while that the stuff I read on individual people's sites is as good as or better than the stuff I read in newspapers and magazines. And now I have independent evidence: the top links on Reddit are generally links to individual people's sites rather than to magazine articles or news stories.
My experience of writing for magazines suggests an explanation. Editors. They control the topics you can write about, and they can generally rewrite whatever you produce. The result is to damp extremes. Editing yields 95th percentile writing-- 95% of articles are improved by it, but 5% are dragged down. 5% of the time you get "throngs of geeks."
On the web, people can publish whatever they want. Nearly all of it falls short of the editor-damped writing in print publications. But the pool of writers is very, very large. If it's large enough, the lack of damping means the best writing online should surpass the best in print. [3] And now that the web has evolved mechanisms for selecting good stuff, the web wins net. Selection beats damping, for the same reason market economies beat centrally planned ones.
As usual for Paul Graham, this is a meaty, well written essay. Read it all.
hey mister taliban...
..On Thursday the 27-year-old women's rights activist, a member of the Afghan Parliament, mounted a stage at Yale and turned her fire on the university's decision to admit a former Taliban official as a special student.
"All should raise their voice against such criminals," she told a crowd of 200. "It is an unforgivable insult to the Afghan people that he is here. He should face a court of law rather than be at one of your finest universities." The Yale Daily News reported that the large attendance at her speech showed that the former Taliban official "continues to be widely controversial." Last night the Yale College Council, the undergraduate student government, began debating a resolution urging the university's administration not to admit Mr. Hashemi as a regular sophomore in the fall.
european ills
Europe’s social disaster is unfolding while the rest of the world is booming at its fastest rate in three decades. 2004 and 2005 were record years for China and India, which have double-digit growth rates, and for the USA, which fully enjoys the benefits of globalization. The world’s economy is booming at an average rate of over 4%, but Europe’s growth has stagnated at an inflated 1.5%.
Why is Europe performing so poorly? Europe’s deficient performance is incompatible with its huge potential as the world’s largest single consumer market. Its slow growth contradicts its unequalled industrial productivity and infrastructure, its outstanding education level and labour ethics, its favourable climate, “fair business” morality, and not in the least its tremendous potential provided by the opening of the iron curtain. Obviously Europe’s fairy-tale is not materializing.
Read it all. Note the change in Ireland's tax burden. Ireland, once the sick man of Europe, now imports workers to keep pace with economic growth.
illegal sentiments
Saturday's large (and peaceful) march in Los Angeles against a proposal to toughen laws on illegal immigration may backfire politically. One placard I read (in a news photos) said:
"If you think I'm illegal because I'm Mexican then learn the true history because I'm in my homeland."
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times overtly changed its report to play down the Mexican flags. Mickey Kaus notes:
Put Out More Flags--L.A. Times True to Form: That propagandistic LAT story on Saturday's big demonstration, the one that mentioned the presence of Mexican flags only in the tenth paragraph, has now been amended and updated--to eliminate any reference to Mexican flags at all! The story now also contains the following:
In contrast to demonstrations 12 years ago against Proposition 187, Saturday's rally featured more American flags than those from any other country.
From what I saw, this statement is false. There were about as many Mexican as American flags (as reported below). Here's what to me seems a representative LAT photo of the crowd--judge for yourself.** Maybe it depends what part of the demo you were at and at what time. But at the very least "more American flags" is a highly deceptive assertion.
the department of peace
A touching story of Marines in Iraq and a little girl who needed a wheelchair.
a weird french dynamic
Last fall's riots in France, with the fragrance of roasted Citroens in the air, was seen either as a form of quasi-jihad or the frustrated expression of Muslims marginalized by society.
Last week's riots were unambiguous: French youths were up in arms (and torching cars) because of potential labor law reforms they don't like. Both riots are different sides of the same coin:
Last Saturday morning, needing help to move several heavy cartons of books from my apartment in central Paris to a storage room, I hired two movers and a van from the want ads. Students were in the streets protesting the Contrat de Premier Embauche (CPE) -- a law proposed to combat unemployment by giving employers more flexibility to fire young employees -- and the barricades and traffic diversions made our four-block drive into a half-hour ordeal. As we turned down one obstructed street after another, the movers -- both Arab immigrants -- became more and more incensed."They're idiots," said the driver, gesturing toward the ecstatic protesters. "Puppets for the socialists and the communists." He pantomimed pulling the strings of a marionette.
"It's us they hurt," added the second man. By this he meant immigrants and their children, particularly the residents of France's suburban ghettos, where unemployment runs as high as 50 percent. And, of course, he was right, as everyone with even a rudimentary grasp of economics appreciates: If employers are unable to fire workers, they will be less likely to hire them. It is now almost impossible to fire an employee in France, a circumstance that disproportionately penalizes groups seen by employers as risky: minorities, inexperienced workers and those without elite educations, like the outraged man sitting beside me.
This is the second time in four months that France has been seized with violent protests. And in an important sense, these are counter-riots, since the goals of the privileged students conflict with those of the suburban rioters who took to the streets last November. The message of the suburban rioters: Things must change. The message of the students: Things must stay the same. In other words: Screw the immigrants.
Screw them until they start to listen seriously to the crazy imam's call for the return of the Caliphate.
The issue is fear of a real overhaul of France's economically stifling labor laws. While some of the suburban hoodlums have joined in these protests -- after all, a riot is a riot -- it is clear that unless this overhaul proceeds, the immigrants are doomed. If so, last year's violence will seem a lark compared with what is coming.
Curiously, however, no French politician will say this openly. They will not even say these obvious words: France is a representative democracy; if you don't like what your elected leaders are doing, you can vote against them. Some more words you will never hear in France: Students who continue to disrupt civil and academic life will be expelled. Strikers will be fired. We are calling in the troops.
Instead, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin is nightly seen on television, earnestly proposing one compromise after the other, even as his supporters scuttle for cover. The powerful barons of the labor unions, on the other hand -- the puppet masters of that golden flock of imbeciles now on the streets -- can scarcely be bothered to give interviews. Compromise? Only when the law is repealed. By then, of course, compromise would be unnecessary. Instead of negotiations, they call for a general strike.
That's because France is still in the grip of precisely the political mentality that has prevailed here since the Middle Ages. As the protesters themselves cheerfully declare: It's the street that rules. Today's mobs, like their predecessors, are notable for their poor grasp of economic principles and their hostility to the free market. Only wardrobe distinguishes these demonstrations from those that led to the invasion of the national convention in 1795, when first the mob protested that commodity prices were too high; when the government responded with price controls, it protested with equal vigor that goods had disappeared and black market prices had risen.
Similarly, the students on the streets today espouse economic views entirely unpolluted by reality. If the CPE is enacted, said one young woman, "You'll get a job knowing that you've got to do every single thing they ask you to do because otherwise you may get sacked."
Imagine that.
why blair should stay at 10 downing st.
Blair has said that he intends to resign before the next British election. The ritualistic leftists in his Labour Party have been putting pressure on him to resign -- the sooner, the better. Now the fastidious right has moved in to increase the pressure on Blair. Think of it. This brave and farsighted man who told all Europe that the enemy was coming is asked to resign even though the enemy has struck and he has been vindicated. He summoned the forces worldwide to repel the brutes and he is succeeding. The man who, with the Coalition of the Willing. is whipping the New Nazis, the Islamofascists, in two countries, is prevailed upon by some of his fellow citizens to give up his post before the job is done. And if he does, who will take over as prime minister, Neville Chamberlain?
With the Economist's editors assuming this preposterous position, let me assume at least an equally impudent position. As the editor in chief of The American Spectator I call upon Blair to finish his premiership and resign only after he has handed authority over to a functioning Iraqi government with the Iraqi military pacifying its country. Frankly, I admire Blair as one of the rarest of politicians. He is a man who has taken chances on behalf of principles, principles that are at once sound and require resolve to defend. In this case the principle is defending civilized values against barbarism.
nothing to wear? Just spray on your duds.
Manel Torres has developed Fabrican, a cotton-fabric that comes in a can. Once sprayed onto your body, the pressurised liquid turns instantly into a fabric. Each squirt from the can sends thousands of cotton fibers splattering against your skin. The fibers then bend together to form a disposable garment that peels away when you undress. Since the fibres are delivered in a diffused form, other elements can easily be added, like perfumes, pigments or treatments.
sunday march 26, 2006
seat me in the no-yapping section, please
New technologies offer humans new ways to be rude, as the cell phone proves. I remember standing in line at the post office as a type-A female behind me blabbed loudly about her personal business. No one would think of collaring a stranger and dragging them into a phone booth to witness their conversation.
Now there's a chance that the Feds will allow cell phones on airplanes. Perish the thought. We've been hectored about the damage from secondhand smoke, but what about secondhand conversation?
Ben Stein weighs in.
Trivia: people speak so loudly into cell phones because, unlike land line telephones, a portion of their outgoing voice is not fed into their speaker. People speak louder to compensate for the perceived loss.
The ambient noise level on airliners is quite high -- just see how loud you need to turn up a CD player to hear, then listen at that same level in a quiet room -- so the speaking level of cell phone yappers would be quite a din.
feeling self-absorbed?
Take this free personality test.
google idol
Don't know 'bout you, but I'm voting for Pomme and Kelly.
dictator of the month
Tyrants need recognition, too.
becoming a german
...means passing a test.
When the German state of Hessen announced plans last week for a strict citizenship test -- with questions on German artists and philosophers that even some native-born Germans can't answer -- immigration became (again) a burning topic in Germany. Which is odd, considering that fewer people than ever actually even want to become German: Since 2000 the number of immigrants applying for citzenship halved.
The German state of Baden-Württemberg got the whole debate rolling in January, when it announced a new citizenship test. At the time it was criticized by many as anti-Muslim. But now, ahead of three state elections on Sunday, German politicians from the left and right are falling over each other to declare the controversial exams a good idea.
ocho questions for illegals
Suposedly 500,000 people turned out for an rally on behalf of illegals:
Joining what some are calling the nation's largest mobilization of immigrants ever, hundreds of thousands of people boisterously marched in downtown Los Angeles Saturday to protest federal legislation that would crack down on undocumented immigrants, penalize those who help them and build a security wall on the U.S. southern border.
Dear rally people, please answer these questions:
- How many people live on earth? (Answer: 6 billion or so)
- How many currently live in the USA? (280 million)
- How many of the 6 billion would like to live in the USA? (More than can fit)
- Does the USA have the right to choose who gets to live here?
- Should Mexicans, by virtue of living on our border, get to cut in line ahead Chinese, Korean, Polish, Irish etc. citizens waiting to come legally?
- If you answered "yes" (or si) to #5, why is that not racist?
- Why is Mexico such a basket case that it cannot support its own people? Mexico has natural resources and people willing to work hard. Why not fix your own country?
- Do you understand why American citizens (of any extraction) might regard marching with Mexican flags in Los Angeles to be impertinent?
Memo to
LA Times: "undocumented" immigrants are undocumented because they broke the law and thus did not get their documents. That's why honest folks calls them illegal immigrants. Which isn't to say that they are not kind, hard-working family-oriented people who could make fine citizens.
saturday march 25, 2006
e tu, pute?
Remember how the French and Russians opposed the liberation of Iraq on principle? Well, many high-ranking French interests were being bribed by Saddam with oil vouchers and other goodies. The Russians fretted over Saddam's multi-billion dollar debt to them -- who'd pay up if the dictator was gone?
Now comes word the Russians were feeding Saddam military intelligence:
Moscow had informants inside U.S. Central Command whose information on the March 2003 invasion of Iraq was relayed to dictator Saddam Hussein days before American troops ousted him from power, according to a Defense Department history released yesterday.
And, as U.S. troops encircled Baghdad in April, Russia's ambassador fed information from Moscow's intelligence service to Saddam's regime regarding U.S. troop movements.
The new disclosures show that Moscow was working against the Bush administration in private, as it opposed in public the U.S. desire for a United Nations Security Council resolution explicitly authorizing the invasion.
save our planet: ban dihydrogen monoxide
You can fool most of the people most of the time.
barefoot & pregnant
Ask the Imam: Are women allowed to work?
According to the Shari’ah, the Qur’aan and Ahaadith, the woman’s place is at home. It is the responsibility of the husband to support his wife and fulfil all her needs. If a woman does not have any financial support, then only she may seek employment. In such a situation, she must adhere to the laws of Hijaab.
The concept of females working merely for economic independency has no basis in the Shari’ah. In fact, it is a root of many evils. It is this economic independency in a woman that gives her the courage to break her marital home. Consider the marital breakdown in the US (4-5) due to woman independency. If she was dependant, or her husband, she would exercise restraint and maintain her marriage. That is best in the interest of her family, husband and children. It does not mean that a woman should be dependant on men merely to maintain her marriage.
We have merely expressed the wisdom of a female being dependant. This also does not mean a female cannot be rich. She may earn an income but without violating the laws of the Shari’ah. Firstly, a wife must get the consent of her husband to work. If the husband refuses, she cannot work.
friday march 24, 2006
the religious left strikes again
Three Christian "peace activists" held hostage for four months in Iraq were rescued yesterday, and promptly insulted the hands that saved them. In a statement, their organization, Christian Peacemaker Teams, noted:
...their only protection was in the power of the love of God and of their Iraqi and international co-workers. We believe that the illegal occupation of Iraq by Multinational Forces is the root cause of the insecurity which led to this kidnapping and so much pain and suffering in Iraq. The occupation must end.
That generated a righteous outcry, which led to this addenda today:
We have been so overwhelmed and overjoyed to have Jim, Harmeet and Norman freed, that we have not adequately thanked the people involved with freeing them, nor remembered those still in captivity. So we offer these paragraphs as the first of several addenda:
We are grateful to the soldiers who risked their lives to free Jim, Norman and Harmeet. As peacemakers who hold firm to our commitment to nonviolence, we are also deeply grateful that they fired no shots to free our colleagues. We are thankful to all the people who gave of themselves sacrificially to free Jim, Norman, Harmeet and Tom over the last four months, and those supporters who prayed and wept for our brothers in captivity, for their loved ones and for us, their co-workers.
No shots were fired because the bad guys were away at the time of the rescue. But if present, would it have been wrong to shoot them? Remember, they killed one of the four hostages and dumped his body on the streets of Baghdad.
One also has to wonder what these folks expected to accomplish in Iraq. Were they planning a Rodney King, "Can't we all just get along?" moment?
One aspect going unnoticed is that their kidnappers appear to have been common criminals, not political actors. Saddam dumped 125,000 criminals onto the streets of Baghdad just before the country was liberated. Such scum are extreme opportunists, and have contributed mightily to the suffering of Iraqis trying to build a nation. They ain't insurgents or jihadis, just criminals.
I was living in Miami when Fidel Castro opened his prisons and let thousands of his scum emigrate during the Mariel boatlift. Within weeks, Miami absorbed 125,000 newcomers, including some of those crooks. Even in a stable country, their effect on crime was immediate and profound.
JB
victor davis hanson
...talks about his latest column with Hugh Hewitt:
...I live in a house that was built in 1870, and so I have an alternate version of U.S. history, because I grew up with stories from my parents, about my grandparents, about my great-grandparents, about my great-great-grandparents. And it was always the take on the U.S. from this particular house, whether it was the Great Depression or World War I, or the Spanish-American War.
And I was just saying that if I could synthesize that take on the world of people who lived in this house, it looks just about the same as it did when it was built, was a tragic view that they accepted that Americans did not have to be perfect to still be good, that when you went to war, you had a bad choice and a worse choice.
But we, the generation, and I said the people that live in this house live in a very different therapeutic world. Even though the house looks the same, I think that our ancestors would look, if the house could talk, would say what's wrong with you people? Do you think that you have a birthright to have perfection? Don't you understand that we almost died? We starved to death, we had Typhoid, people got Polio in this house? We were lucky to eat? We built this farm out of nothing, and now you have six hundred channels, and you're less happy than we were. And I think I was trying to use this as a metaphor to a way a lot of Americans look at Iraq, for example.
...either somebody who's in the administration, a spokesman's got to say now just wait a minute. We went 7,000 miles over to the ancient caliphate, and right in the heart of the autocratic Middle East. We're trying to make a democracy. We've lost 2,300 people, but that's about two weeks in Okinawa, and this country's been through a lot worse at Shiloh and Antietam, Belleau Wood, Iwo Jima, the Yalu River, and we can win this, and we're not getting any oil, the price skyrocketed. We have the biggest, magnanimous foreign aid plant since the Marshall Plan, $87 billion dollars.
We don't have anything to apologize for, and we're almost there. We've had three successful elections. We've dismantled a lot of al Qaeda. We have millions of people in Iraq who've pledged their lives to see this democracy work, and we're not going to stumble before the finish line. So stop it, and just get a grip on yourself. But we need to hear that.
Read Davis's column here.
darfur vs. abu ghraib
Our friend Joerg at Atlantic Review (we did his Blog Carnival logo) compares German media coverage of the Darfur genocide and Abu Ghraib. The pictures are quite striking.
Check it out.
saddam was no a real threat
Heartburn ahead for the Bush Lied crowd, as more of Saddam's papers become public.
SADDAM HUSSEIN'S REGIME PROVIDED FINANCIAL support to Abu Sayyaf, the al Qaeda-linked jihadist group founded by Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law in the Philippines in the late 1990s, according to documents captured in postwar Iraq. An eight-page fax dated June 6, 2001, and sent from the Iraqi ambassador in Manila to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Baghdad, provides an update on Abu Sayyaf kidnappings and indicates that the Iraqi regime was providing the group with money to purchase weapons. The Iraqi regime suspended its support--temporarily, it seems--after high-profile kidnappings, including of Americans, focused international attention on the terrorist group.
chim
Great photographs, now at Washington D.C.'s Corcoran. See samples here.
i feel so beat
American Digest does a great sendup of Allen Ginsburg's Howl:
Growl
by Gerard Allen Van der Ginsberg
For Karl Rove Solomon
I SAW the second-best minds of my not-so-Great Generation destroyed by Bush Derangement Syndrome, pasty, paunchy, tenured, unelectable, and not looking too sharp naked,
bullshitting themselves through the African-American streets at cocktail hour looking for a Prozac refill,
aging hair-plugged hipsters burning for their ancient political connection to the White House through the machinations of moonbats,
who warred on poverty and Halliburton's Wal-Mart and bulbous-eyed and still high from some bad acid in 1968 set up no-smoking zones on tobacco farms in the unnatural darkness of Darwinistic delusions floating a few more half-baked secular notions like "Let's all worship zero!",
who bared their withered breasts and, he or she, bleated their vaginas' mawkish monologues to John Kennedy's ghost under the capitol dome and french-kissed Mohammedan agents in the gore-drenched redrum rooms of Guantanamo,
who passed gas and on into universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating President Al Gore and Vice-President Noam Chomsky envisioning world peace among the masters of war and stayed on and stayed on and stayed on sucking off the great teat of academe in upaid student loans and over-paid professorial positions the better to molest the minds of children for decades with every third year off for bad behavior,
Read it all. For those unfamiliar with Howl, read it here.
huge crater discovered in sahara
Scientists have discovered a huge crater in the Sahara desert, the largest one ever found there.
The crater is about 19 miles (31 kilometers) wide, more than twice as big as the next largest Saharan crater known. It utterly dwarfs Meteor Crater in Arizona, which is about three-fourths of a mile (1.2 kilometers) in diameter.
In fact, the newfound crater, in Egypt, was likely carved by a space rock that was itself roughly 0.75 miles wide in an event that would have been quite a shock, destroying everything for hundreds of miles. For comparison, the Chicxulub crater left by a dinosaur-killing asteroid 65 million years ago is estimated to be 100 to 150 miles (160 to 240 kilometers) wide.
thursday march 23, 2006
russians nosing around iraq
...and Mohammed isn't pleased:
I am completely in support of opening the Iraqi market for foreign capital because simply Iraq will never have a strong economy without foreign investors making business here but this attitude on the end of Basra's governor and the Russians does not read as 'free market' but rather as 'political deal' and a losing one because a smart politician would move to award contracts to those who stood with his people not those who were good friends of the tyrannical regime that oppressed him and his people.
If I were the governor of that province I would be inviting and encouraging the rich countries to invest in my city and not countries whose people were living nearly a famine just a decade ago and whose technologies were proven backward.
I don't like the Russians; they are known for their corrupt deals and the smell of their firms' scandals during the 'oil for food' program still stinks till this day and I think this more than enough reason to put them at the bottom of the list.
blow 'em up
Jyllands-Postens revealed today that a French TV Station France-2 has undercover video of the Danish Cartoon Faking Imams threatening to blow up a Moderate Danish Muslim politician and the Ministry!
Ahmed Akkari the lying Imam behind the Danish cartoon riots, and accused child abuser, is currently out of the country at a Islamic gathering in Bahrain on Western attitudes towards Islam.
tony blair
From "Why we fight on"
...the defining characteristic of today's world is its interdependence; that whereas the economics of globalisation are well matured, the politics of globalisation are not; and that unless we articulate a common global policy based on common values, we risk chaos threatening our stability, economic and political, through letting extremism, conflict or injustice go unchecked.
The consequence of this thesis is a policy of engagement not isolation; and one that is active not reactive.
Confusingly, its proponents and opponents come from all sides of the political spectrum. So it is apparently a "neo-conservative" ie right wing view, to be ardently in favour of spreading democracy round the world; whilst others on the right take the view that this is dangerous and deluded - the only thing that matters is an immediate view of national interest. Some progressives see intervention as humanitarian and necessary; others take the view that provided dictators don't threaten our citizens directly, what they do with their own, is up to them.
The debate on world trade has thrown all sides into an orgy of political cross-dressing. Protectionist sentiment is rife on the left; on the right, there are calls for "economic patriotism"; meanwhile some voices left and right, are making the case for free trade not just on grounds of commerce but of justice.
The true division in foreign policy today is between: those who want the shop "open", or those who want it "closed"; those who believe that the long-term interests of a country lie in it being out there, engaged, interactive and those who think the short-term pain of such a policy and its decisions, too great. This division has strong echoes in debates not just over foreign policy and trade but also over immigration.
Progressives may implement policy differently from conservatives, but the fault lines are the same.
Where progressive and conservative policy can differ is that progressives are stronger on the challenges of poverty, climate change and trade justice. I have no doubt at all it is impossible to gain support for our values, unless the demand for justice is as strong as the demand for freedom; and the willingness to work in partnership with others is an avowed preference to going it alone, even if that may sometimes be necessary.
I believe we will not ever get real support for the tough action that may well be essential to safeguard our way of life; unless we also attack global poverty and environmental degradation or injustice with equal vigour.
Of course, poverty exists where people do not/cannot create wealth. Tyrannies seldom produce economic growth. In Zimbabwe, a tyrant did the inverse: killing a thriving economy and creating poverty.
So the first step to attacking global poverty is to attack tyrants.
It is in confronting global terrorism today that the sharpest debate and disagreement is found. Nowhere is the supposed "folly" of the interventionist case so loudly trumpeted as in this case. Here, so it is said, as the third anniversary of the Iraq conflict takes place, is the wreckage of such a world view. Under Saddam Iraq was "stable". Now its stability is in the balance. Ergo, it should never have been done.
This is essentially the product of the conventional view of foreign policy since the fall of the Berlin Wall. This view holds that there is no longer a defining issue in foreign policy. Countries should therefore manage their affairs and relationships according to their narrow national interests. The basic posture represented by this view is: not to provoke, to keep all as settled as it can be and cause no tectonic plates to move. It has its soft face in dealing with issues like global warming or Africa; and reserves its hard face only if directly attacked by another state, which is unlikely. It is a view which sees the world as not without challenge but basically calm, with a few nasty things lurking in deep waters, which it is best to avoid; but no major currents that inevitably threaten its placid surface. It believes the storms have been largely self-created.
This is the majority view of a large part of western opinion, certainly in Europe. According to this opinion, the policy of America since 9/11 has been a gross overreaction; George Bush is as much if not more of a threat to world peace as Osama bin Laden; and what is happening in Iraq, Afghanistan or anywhere else in the Middle East, is an entirely understandable consequence of US/UK imperialism or worse, of just plain stupidity. Leave it all alone or at least treat it with sensitivity and it would all resolve itself in time; "it" never quite being defined, but just generally felt as anything that causes disruption.
This world view - which I would characterise as a doctrine of benign inactivity - sits in the commentator's seat, almost as a matter of principle. It has imposed a paradigm on world events that is extraordinary in its attraction and its scope. As we speak, Iraq is facing a crucial moment in its history: to unify and progress, under a government elected by its people for the first time in half a century; or to descend into sectarian strife, bringing a return to certain misery for millions. In Afghanistan, the same life choice for a nation, is being played out. And in many Arab and Muslim states, similar, though less publicised, struggles for democracy dominate their politics.
...
The easiest line for any politician seeking office in the West today is to attack American policy. A couple of weeks ago as I was addressing young Slovak students, one got up, denouncing US/UK policy in Iraq, fully bought in to the demonisation of the US, utterly oblivious to the fact that without the US and the liberation of his country, he would have been unable to ask such a question, let alone get an answer to it.
the sheen factor
Satire from The Therapist:
Washington--Already shaken by low approval ratings, sources inside Washington say that public skepsism of the 9/11 attacks from "Spin City" actor, Charlie Sheen, could be the "nail in the coffin we've always feared."
Sheen, the star of the currently-running Two-And-A-Half Men, contends that the implosion of the twin towers on September 11th Looked like an "inside job". Sources inside the White House say that they have been "moderately successful" in deflecting seemingly baseless charges from those not besotted with relentless cocaine addiction, adultery, and the propensity to hire hookers with abandon.
"Those days are now over," said one source. "We are now facing our arch-nemesis right in the face."
While many believe that the actor's ability to be critical of the President in war time would be hindered by charges of woman-beating in the not-so distant past, others contend this is the kind of "credibility fuel injection" needed to head off Bush's "tsar-like" leadership.
Sheen's impressive resume of duplicitous behavior doesn't stop there.
"If it becomes common knowledge that Mr. Sheen, despite being married to the visually stunning Denise Richards, solicited a steady array of hookers from Hollywood madam, Heidi Fleiss, we may as well write off the mid-term elections now," said one source.
"This could be the end," they said. "We hope Mr. Sheen is unable to tap his full potential, because it is enormous."
coming soon to tv
Not satire from the Democrats:
Senate Democrats have mapped a political battle plan for the March congressional recess that calls on lawmakers to stage press events with active duty military personnel, veterans and emergency responders to bash President Bush on virtually every one of his national security policies.
The game plan, devised by the office of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, is contained in a six-page memo distributed to Democratic senators on Thursday at a closed-door meeting at the Capitol and provided to The Washington Times by a congressional staffer.
Titled "Real Security," the political document calls for staged town hall events at military bases, weapons factories, National Guard units, fire stations and veterans posts.
"Ensure that you have the proper U.S. and state flags at the event, and consider finding someone to sing the national anthem and lead the group in the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of the event," the battle plan states.
the iraqization of the conflict
U.S. military deaths during the past month have dropped to an average of about one a day, approaching the lowest level since the insurgency began two years ago, according to a USA TODAY analysis of U.S. military data.
The decline in U.S. deaths comes as Iraqi casualties are the highest since the U.S. military began tracking them in 2004.
In the past month, nearly five times as many Iraqi forces and civilians were killed as troops in the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, U.S. military data show.
The shift from spring 2004, when U.S. and Iraqi casualty rates were comparable, reflects an insurgency that increasingly targets Iraqis and the growing presence of Iraqi forces on the front lines.
“The Iraqi army is far bigger in number, far higher in training capability and far more willing to go where the fight is and take casualties,” British Defense Secretary John Reid said in an interview.
wednesday march 22, 2006
war and peace: the numbers
From Instapundit:
Take a look at the actual US Military Casualty figures since 1980. If you do the math, you wil find quite a few surpises. First of all, let's compare numbers of US Military personnel that died during the first term of the last four presidents.
George W. Bush . . . . . 5187 (2001-2004)
Bill Clinton . . . . . . . . . 4302 (1993-1996)
George H.W. Bush . . . . 6223 (1989-1992)
Ronald Reagan . . . . . . 9163 (1981-1984)To which a reader noted:
...He is absolutely right that soldiers die in accidents and of natural causes when they are in garrison. What he doesn’t take into account is that the military was much larger under Carter, Reagan and Bush I than it has been under Clinton or Bush II. Clinton and Bush II are really the only two comparable numbers.
Looking at those numbers, it appears that the Iraq, Afghanistan wars have resulted in an increase of 885 dead over what could have been expected through normal garrison operations in Bush II’s first term. That is not too bad when you consider that Bush has liberated two countries and fought a prolonged insurgency in both and that America lost over 1,000 dead in taking Vichy French North Africa in 1942 (that was before we even so much as fired a shot at the Germans).
a clash about civilization
WHILE PRESIDENT BUSH continues to field inane questions from the likes of Helen Thomas, and appear here and there about the land armed with standard soundbites, it falls, as it often does, to Britain's Tony Blair to articulate in a deeper and more meaningful way just what the stakes are in The First Terrorist War. Today 10 Downing released the transcript of Foreign Policy Speech I; the first of three speeches Blair will make on this issue in the near future: "In the second he will outline the importance of a broad global alliance to achieve our common goals and in the third he will say how the international institutions need radical reform to make them capable of implementing such an agenda."
This is an excerpt, but I commend the entire text to you as the definitive answer to "Why we fight:"
There is an interesting debate going on inside government today about how to counter extremism in British communities. Ministers have been advised never to use the term "Islamist extremist". It will give offence. It is true. It will. There are those - perfectly decent-minded people - who say the extremists who commit these acts of terrorism are not true Muslims. And, of course, they are right. They are no more proper Muslims than the Protestant bigot who murders a Catholic in Northern Ireland is a proper Christian. But, unfortunately, he is still a "Protestant" bigot. To say his religion is irrelevant is both completely to misunderstand his motive and to refuse to face up to the strain of extremism within his religion that has given rise to it....
This is not a clash between civilisations. It is a clash about civilisation. It is the age-old battle between progress and reaction, between those who embrace and see opportunity in the modern world and those who reject its existence; between optimism and hope on the one hand; and pessimism and fear on the other. And in the era of globalisation where nations depend on each other and where our security is held in common or not at all, the outcome of this clash between extremism and progress is utterly determinative of our future here in Britain. We can no more opt out of this struggle than we can opt out of the climate changing around us. Inaction, pushing the responsibility on to America, deluding ourselves that this terrorism is an isolated series of individual incidents rather than a global movement and would go away if only we were more sensitive to its pretensions; this too is a policy.� It is just that; it is a policy that is profoundly, fundamentally wrong.
who said this?
A hundred thousand or more of the Iraqi patients have died. Sectarianism and extremism, fundamentalism, is now rampant in Iraq. The entire Muslim world has been radicalized. There are flames spreading throughout the Muslim world. They are even reverberating outside the Muslim world, in Europe, including in the capital city of London, where I sit.
Now even amongst the crazed Zionist Crusader fundamentalists who got us into this war, Richard Perle is an extremist. In fact, most of the neo-con Zionists who talked Bush into this war have now begun to admit that this has been a terrible catastrophic mistake. Unfortunately, it is not their blood, which has been shed. It has been the blood of entirely innocent people, whose lives have been destroyed.
The nutjob running Iran? Leader of Hamas? Nope, British MP George Galloway.
"supply and demand of hate"
Applying economic theory...
While some try to surmount or cope with irrationality, others feed upon it. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Edward Glaeser began using behavioral economic approaches to research the causes of group hatred that could motivate murderous acts of that type. "An economist's definition of hatred," he says, "is the willingness to pay a price to inflict harm on others." In laboratory settings, social scientists have observed subjects playing the "ultimatum game," in which, say, with a total kitty of $10, Player A offers to split the cash with player B. If B accepts A's offer, they divide the money accordingly, but if B rejects A's offer, both players get nothing. "In thousands of trials around the world, with different stakes, people reject offers of 30 percent [$3 in our example] or less," says Glaeser. "So typically, people offer 40 or 50 percent. But a conventional economic model would say that B should accept a split of even one cent versus $9.99, since you are still better off with a penny than nothing." (If a computer, rather than a human, does the initial split, player B is much more likely to accept an unfair split—a confirmation of research conducted by professors at the Kennedy School of Government. . .)
Clearly, the B player is willing to suffer financial loss in order to take revenge on an A player who is acting unfairly. "You don't poke around in the dark recesses of human behavior and not find vengeance," Glaeser says. "It's pretty hard to find a case of murder and not find vengeance at the root of it."
The psychological literature, he found, defines hatred as an emotional response we have to threats to our survival or reproduction. "It's related to the belief that the object of hatred has been guilty of atrocities in the past and will be guilty of them in the future," he says. "Economists have nothing to tell psychologists about why individuals hate. But group-level hatred has its own logic that always involves stories about atrocities. These stories are frequently false. As [Nazi propagandist Joseph] Goebbels said, hatred requires repetition, not truth, to be effective.
"You have to investigate the supply of hatred," Glaeser continues. "Who has the incentive and the ability to induce group hatred? This pushes us toward the crux of the model: politicians or anyone else will supply hatred when hatred is a complement to their policies." Glaeser searched back issues of the Atlanta Constitution from 1875 to 1925, counting stories that contained the keywords "Negro + rape" or "Negro + murder." He found a time-series that closely matched that for lynchings described by historian C. Vann Woodward: rising from 1875 until 1890, reaching a plateau from 1890 until 1910, then declining after 1910.
tuesday march 21, 2006
s'pose they gave a civil war and nobody came?
After the Samarra shrine bombing, the Iraq narrative suddenly shifted from "insurgency" to "on the verge of civil war." A clear provocation -- the bombing -- caused outbreaks of violence, but no civil war. Walking to the brink and turning back is a positive sign, although you'd never know it from listening to the media.
Yesterday NPR lead its hourly newscasts with "President Bush insisted in a speech today that progress is being made in Iraq." Insisted. Of course, NPR knows better.
Politically what's interesting is how the narrative has changed. Nobody is talking about the Sunni insurgency succeeding any more. Even the press hardly makes the claim of an insurgency on the brink of success. As late as November 2005, the Daily Kos was boasting: "The occupation is exacerbating terrorism in the country. America is losing, the insurgency is winning. Maybe we should say, 'has won.'" But by the December 2005 elections this view could no longer be held by anyone with the slightest regard for the facts. Juan Cole said:
The guerrillas are really no more than mosquitoes to US forces. The casualties they have inflicted on the US military, of over 2000 dead and some 15,000 wounded, are deeply regrettable and no one should make light of them. But this level of insurgency could never defeat the US military in the field.
Cole forgets to remind the reader that mosquitoes did for the French in Algeria, the Russians in Afghanistan and even pushed the Israelis out of Lebanon. The enormity of the victory against the insurgency was never a given. In some respects the US achievement was historical. Whatever else happens, this should be remembered.
Cole also rejected assertions that Iraq was in Civil War.
[Myth:] Iraq is already in a civil war, so it does not matter if the US simply withdraws precipitately, since the situation is as bad as it can get. No, it isn't. During the course of the guerrilla war, the daily number of dead has fluctuated, between about 20 and about 60. But in a real civil war, it could easily be 10 times that. Some estimates of the number of Afghans killed during their long set of civil wars put the number at 2.5 million, along with 5 million displaced abroad and more millions displaced internally. Iraq is Malibu Beach compared to Afghanistan in its darkest hours. The US has a responsibility to get out of Iraq responsibly and to not allow it to fall into that kind of genocidal civil conflict.
Instead of insurgency the talking points have changed to how Sunnis might soon become victims of an ethnically hostile Iraqi army in a Civil War. Going from a boast of conquest to a portrayal of victim is usually an indicator of something. In my view, the shift of meme from the "insurgency" to a "civil war" is a backhanded way of admitting the military defeat of the insurgency without abandoning the characterization of Iraq is an American fiasco. It was Zarqawi and his cohorts themselves who changed the terms of reference from fighting US forces to sparking a 'civil war'. With any luck, they'll lose that campaign too.
the southpark scientology episode
The one that made Issac Hayes quit the show (it mocked his religion) and Comedy Central refused to rebroadcast. See it here.
photos of the circus
...that is San Francisco turning out for a political march. Hey, even exhibitionists can be amusing.
And you can watch this Malkin-Preston video of the Washington DC. march. My favorite sign was "Pay for college not war."
teflon europe
...the European Milosevic just dropped dead while under custody of the U.N. at the postmodern tribunal at The Hague. This follows the recent suicide of Croatian Serb leader Milan Babic, likewise an inmate in a European detention center.
Few in Europe said much about the deaths of such high-profile prisoners, whose barbarity differed from that of many of the killers in Guantanamo mostly in order of magnitude. If American Rambos can keep alive Muslim jihadists, with their radically different customs, religion, languages, and diets, why cannot the more sensitive Europeans ensure that fellow Europeans don't drop dead in their jails?
We often hear about how incompetent the Iraqis, under American tutelage, have been in trying Saddam Hussein. After all, his trial is only in its initial stages, two years after he was captured. But compared to the more illustrious court of The Hague, Saddam's trial is racing along at a rapid clip. Before his sudden death, Milosevic had been in court for four years without a verdict. In terms of utopian international jurisprudence, the reprobate Milosevic died a free man, at his last breath still innocent until proven guilty.
...
The more interesting task is not listing such hypocrisies, but explaining them. Some of the exegeses are now well known since September 11: Europe is weak and America far stronger, so the latter is held to a higher standard, as the former suffers from loud envy and public resentment.
The powerful don't care as much to dress up their omnipotence with utopian affectations; the weaker, in lieu of military strength, have only such pretensions. And note how America's forging of closer ties with Japan, Australia, and India somehow does not meet European requisites of "multilateralism" — a neologism for deference to Europe.
There is also a more disturbing element at play. Europe triangulates with the non-West against the United States, both to corral American influence and to seek economic advantage by offering a more sensitive Western commercial alternative. That means, in the case of the Middle East, a desire to reveal European empathy to the Islamic world. So there is a blanket condemnation of much of what the United States does, without any acknowledgement that detaining killers, trying former heads of state, and hunting down populist terrorists are not easy — even for the European Union.
When Westerners die in Afghanistan, it is back-page news; but in Iraq, the deaths make the front page. Why? Because the "bad" war in Iraq was supposedly "unilateral," while the "good" war to dethrone the Taliban is now a multilateral enterprise. Yet to the jihadists, there is little difference between the two: a German soldier in Kabul looks every bit the crusader that the American in the Sunni Triangle does. We in the West make the distinction between the wars; the radical Islamists don't.
monday march 20, 2006
"yes, iraq will be the model"
From Mohammed at Iraq the Model, his post in its entirety:
The third anniversary...sacrifice, fear and hope.
It has been three years since 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' began and for three years we debated whether the decision was right or wrong and until this moment we have different feelings and opinions about where this operation brought us and where its aftermaths are going to lead us.This disputed operation no doubt had-and will continue to have-major effects on the future of the region and the rest of the world and it's not limited to the boundaries of Iraq; a fact that makes rational debate legitimate by all standards.
To me, each anniversary brings emotions, thoughts and expectations; some are personal and others are for the future of my country and people. Today I relive those historic moments and remember the way my mind accepted and welcomed those moments like all, or say most Iraqis did as we were praying to see Saddam overthrown without even bothering to think of the consequences or results…all we wanted was to see Saddam out of power, period.
Maybe people still remember how Iraqis first reacted to the change; they directed their rage against anything that reminded them of the regime they hated, burning and looting anything that represented Saddam and his regime. The rich and the poor both stormed those buildings because those angry crowds felt those buildings were Saddam's property and few of us realized at that time that that was wrong yet the emotions driving it were understandable.
The smoke faded away and we woke up to see all the chains gone and instead of the God-president and his iron grip over our destinies, we found ourselves without a guide, without any guidance but our long buried primitive nature, the long repressed nature of loving freedom and practicing it.
The change began then, at that moment where reason mixed with sentiments; were we free…or, were we lost?
Actually it was a lot of both and there was also a sense of great relief that the terrifying warnings from hundreds of thousands of deaths, famine and mass refugees were not true at that point, on the contrary the military operation itself was clean and successful by all standards and didn't cause any serious harm to the civilian population, the infrastructure, or the marching troops.
Saddam was gone and suddenly Iraqis and Americans found themselves face to face in a place that felt new to both of them. They knew almost nothing about each other as the prison Saddam built around us left the world with little knowledge about Iraqis except for the whispers of Iraqis who fled the horrors of the tyrant.
On the other hand, all that Iraqis knew about America was that it's the merciless enemy of Muslims and Arabs, the invader coming for oil, the all-time supporter of Israel against the Palestinians, the imposer of the sanctions and above all, the America that let us down in 1991.Now the two strangers had to work together to accomplish a goal Iraqis knew almost nothing about; they knew that America wanted to topple Saddam and secure the oil fields but that's all they knew while America was thinking of a huge transformation for the entire Middle East with Iraq being the key to that transformation.
There was a wide gap between the two but we had no choice but to work together, because in a moment Iraqis didn't choose, America and a group of Iraqi ex-pat leaders were suddenly replacing a regime that controlled everything for too long.
Iraqis were confused and vulnerable and there were too many differences to cope with but we were there and there was nothing we could do about it and we had to prepare ourselves for many transitional stages that some Iraqis thought were improvised and arbitrary while others thought were planned long time ago.
The question keeps ringing…
Was it the right decision to remove Saddam?I say yes, and that's what most Iraqis said and still say even if they became divided over what happened later…the truth is that virtually no one wants Saddam back.
I will just ignore the weepers, whiners, teenagers and half educated naïve people and their silly rallies as I don't want to waste time on people who can do nothing but blindly oppose everything without thinking. I will ignore them and focus on the more important goals we want to reach here…
Life stopped and time stopped when Saddam ruled Iraq, actually that totalitarian regime was moving backwards and dragging us with it and nothing could stop the deterioration that began the moment Saddam