Regardless of the huffing and puffing I sometimes do in my ferociously morose moods, I don't think that left wingers are bad people. But I do think that they have, perhaps with good intentions, set themselves on a road and become imbued in a culture that ends up in a very bad place.
If a leftist could show me how their ideas would end up with the kind of just society that they want, then I could go along with it. But those ideas won't and they can't, and I think that history has more than definitely shown that again and again.
For every group of leftists today who think that they are different, that their agenda is improved and smarter and won't bring us yet another totalitarian state, there is the story of an identical group of idealists who thought the same thing 30, 40, 50 or 70 years ago but whose ideals put them on the road to the killing fields of Cambodia, the mass starvation of the Chinese cultural revolution, the millions killed in re-education camps in Vietnam, Stalinist Russia, and so on.
And yet they just can't or won't see that.
They can't see that behind the idealism of any radical there is an ordinary human being with ordinary human nature, who will act as human nature dictates, in selfish ways and in cruel ways to get his way if given that power. No, they think that they are different, so much better than any of the leftists before them, so much better than anyone at the other end of political spectrum, better than those who will acknowledge the unavoidability of selfishness in human affairs. They can't believe that their honest good intentions could ever produce an undesirable outcome.
But we have an exemplar of all of this in the present day, that is, Venezuela. It is the sickening slide of a nation and a people into a totalitarian nightmare of oppression, degradation, and possibly starvation.
Venezuela's Marxist dictator, Hugo Chavez, has begun confiscating farms and ranches, a violent act worthy of Zimbabwe's ethnic cleansing, marauding socialist tyrant Robert Mugabe. Like Mugabe, his made his first target a wealthy British aristocrat. But unlike Mugabe, who openly reveled in barbarism, Chavez is using stagecraft calculated to create a melodrama that will excite his supporters, while putting the rest of the world to sleep. And he's doing it to conceal reality.The land is supposedly going back to the people after being taken from a rich landowner in Britain. In reality it's being given to 25 of Chavez's friends, and so many of the poor people are not happy with what Chavez is doing.
So, in the end what has happened in Venezula is that one group of elites led by Chavez has taken control of the country from the old elites, and the people at the bottom are still screwed.
All with the best of intentions, of course. Chavez knew he could not just give parcels of land out to poor people because he knew that food production would go to zero in that event, and so he came up with this scheme to keep the land in competent hands. Most likely, food production will go down regardless, and it will be the common people who suffer, as always, in that case.
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Thursday, November 18, 2004
Life in Fallujah with the Insurgents
Accounts of the plight of common people under the Iraqi insurgents lends insight concerning what they have in mind for the whole country if they succeed in driving the USA out.
Such is the fear that the heavily armed militants held over Fallujah that many of the residents who emerged from the ruins welcomed the US marines, despite the massive destruction their firepower had inflicted on their city.A man in his sixties, half-naked and his underwear stained with blood from shrapnel wounds from a US munition, cursed the insurgents as he greeted the advancing marines on Saturday night.
"I wish the Americans had come here the very first day and not waited eight months," he said, trembling. Nearby, a mosque courtyard had been used as a weapons store by the militants. . . .
The same story of arbitrary executions was told by another resident, found by US troops cowering in his home with his brother and his family. "They would wear black masks, carry rocket-propelled grenades and Kalashnikovs, and search streets and alleys," said Iyad Assam, 24. "I would hear stories, about how they executed five men one day and seven another for collaborating with the Americans. They made checkpoints on the roads. They put announcements on walls banning music and telling women to wear the veil from head to toe." It was not just pedlars of alcohol or Western videos and women deemed improperly dressed who faced the militants' wrath. Even residents who regard themselves as observant Muslims lived in fear because they did not share the puritan brand of Sunni Islam that the insurgents enforced.
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
The Fallujah Campaign
"Once they have finished in Fallujah, they will head toward you. You must not let them succeed in their plan," said terrorist leader Zarqawi in a taped address that must have sounded more desperate than encouraging to his followers.
The Fallujah campaign has been a success on a number of levels. 2500 enemy combatants have been put out of action or killed, their intent for all of Iraq should they succeed has been laid bare with the opening of torture and killing rooms, a vast quantity of their weapons have been destroyed, and weapons supply lines from Syria to Baghdad have been interdicted. Ordinary Iraqis can take heart the the Iraqi and American governments mean business and mean to clean out pockets of terrorist defiance.
Fallujah was the "insurgency's" most important base, where most of their activities in Baghdad and elsewhere were headquartered. The remaining pockets, including Mosul, will not be nearly as difficult to deal with.
In the same taped address, Zarqawi said, "This war is very long, and always think of this as the beginning, and always make the enemy think that yesterday was better than today."
Unfortunately, too many people in the West are willing to buy into that propaganda gambit. The meme is often repeated that war against terrorism will only produce more terrorists, even in the face of evidence that this is false.
Members of the mainstream media point to activity in the Sunni triangle as evidence that things are only getting worse. Meanwhile, there have been no successful attacks against the US homeland for over three years, activity in Europe is at a very low level, activity in Israel has steadily declined, and even most of Iraq is at peace. Khaddafi in Libya has thrown in the towel, none of the Arab states in the Middle East have the moxie to permit terrorists a base of operations behind their borders, and some countries such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have active anti-terrorism programs. Efforts by Al Qaeda to establish bases in Northern Africa have been snuffed out by multilateral anti-terrorism programs that include French and American elements. Islamofascists the world over have been put on the defensive and have become increasingly ineffective. Even the liberal Dutch have had enough of radical Muslims.
The War on Terror is proving to be successful, but members of the mainstream media and the liberal elite in America and Europe are never going to admit that, nor will they ever stop cheerleading for our terrorist enemies.
The Fallujah campaign has been a success on a number of levels. 2500 enemy combatants have been put out of action or killed, their intent for all of Iraq should they succeed has been laid bare with the opening of torture and killing rooms, a vast quantity of their weapons have been destroyed, and weapons supply lines from Syria to Baghdad have been interdicted. Ordinary Iraqis can take heart the the Iraqi and American governments mean business and mean to clean out pockets of terrorist defiance.
Fallujah was the "insurgency's" most important base, where most of their activities in Baghdad and elsewhere were headquartered. The remaining pockets, including Mosul, will not be nearly as difficult to deal with.
In the same taped address, Zarqawi said, "This war is very long, and always think of this as the beginning, and always make the enemy think that yesterday was better than today."
Unfortunately, too many people in the West are willing to buy into that propaganda gambit. The meme is often repeated that war against terrorism will only produce more terrorists, even in the face of evidence that this is false.
Members of the mainstream media point to activity in the Sunni triangle as evidence that things are only getting worse. Meanwhile, there have been no successful attacks against the US homeland for over three years, activity in Europe is at a very low level, activity in Israel has steadily declined, and even most of Iraq is at peace. Khaddafi in Libya has thrown in the towel, none of the Arab states in the Middle East have the moxie to permit terrorists a base of operations behind their borders, and some countries such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have active anti-terrorism programs. Efforts by Al Qaeda to establish bases in Northern Africa have been snuffed out by multilateral anti-terrorism programs that include French and American elements. Islamofascists the world over have been put on the defensive and have become increasingly ineffective. Even the liberal Dutch have had enough of radical Muslims.
The War on Terror is proving to be successful, but members of the mainstream media and the liberal elite in America and Europe are never going to admit that, nor will they ever stop cheerleading for our terrorist enemies.
Tuesday, November 16, 2004
How Many Moles Does Karl Rove Have?
Following University President Don Randel’s warm introduction, the famed author, host, and wry wit of A Prairie Home Companion, started by commenting on election results.
“I am a Democrat—it’s no secret. I am a museum-quality Democrat,” Keillor said. “Last night I spent my time crouched in a fetal position, rolling around and moaning in the dark.”
Not one to shy away from speaking his mind, Keillor proposed a solution to what he deemed a fundamental problem with U.S. elections. “I’m trying to organize support for a constitutional amendment to deny voting rights to born-again Christians,” Keillor smirked. “I feel if your citizenship is in Heaven—like a born again Christian’s is—you should give up your citizenship. Sorry, but this is my new cause. If born again Christians are allowed to vote in this country, then why not Canadians?”
Monday, November 15, 2004
Ruthless, Dictatorial President Purges CIA
Left wingers have their panties in a twist about the President's plan to get rid of malcontents at the CIA, the ones that were working so hard to get Kerry elected by leaking damaging information about foreign policy to the press.
They didn't get upset about this when it happened before, 10 years ago, under Clinton:
They didn't get upset about this when it happened before, 10 years ago, under Clinton:
Senior managers of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of
Intelligence (DI) -- the arm of the Agency responsible for analysis -- held an unusual emergency meeting with their analysts on the afternoon of 1 July, just before the start of a long holiday weekend. The purpose of the meeting was to announce plans for a complete reorganization of the Central Intelligence Agency.
[...]By April 1994, Administration displeasure with CIA had turned into indignation. Faced with a growing number of foreign policy debacles, Clinton officials -- notably several on the staff of the White House and National Security Council -- grew increasingly furious at CIA intelligence assessments which suggested that Administration policy in North Korea, Somalia, Bosnia, China, and Russia was in trouble. Administration officials started to argue that CIA was not providing them with "the proper support." Some officials implied
that if CIA had done a better job analyzing the world, Mr. Clinton’s foreign policy would not be in trouble. [...]
In private meetings with other senior DI officials, MacEachin -- who is said to have claimed that he is acting on behalf of Director Woolsey -- laid down the real objectives of his reorganization plan:
Consolidating and institutionalizing changes already made.
..."purging the culture of the 1980s" at the CIA. ...
Assuring that CIA briefings coincide with Administration policy and cannot lead policy makers to accuse the Agency of "disloyalty." MacEachin was quoted as having actually said in a recent meeting with senior CIA officials: "Analysts must recognize that if they give a briefing which deviates too much from official policy, they may be accused by Clinton Administration officials of being disloyal."...
Validation by Defeat
If Democrats are losing elections then it can only be because the people are not smart enough.
Even while John Kerry was making blunder after blunder during his campaign and making a mess out of its management the meme was being propagated in the mainstream press that he was too smart for most people to properly understand. That he didn't poll well and eventually lost the election was, to them, just more evidence of the stupidity of ordinary Americans.
From George Will:
It is passing strange. As the American public has become more educated, American intellectuals have become more disparaging of the public's intellectual incapacities and moral shortcomings. In 1940, more than half of the U.S. population had only an eighth-grade education, or less. Now that 85 percent are high-school graduates, 53 percent have some college education and 27 percent are college graduates, it is an article of faith among the progressive intelligentsia that the public is becoming increasingly obtuse, bigoted and superstitious.
There was a time—say, from the early 1930s to the mid-1960s, the period of the Democratic Party's ascendancy—when progressives thought their job was to increase the material well-being of ordinary Americans. It is not mere coincidence that the Democratic Party's strength has waned as its intellectuals' disapproval of ordinary Americans has waxed.
Even while John Kerry was making blunder after blunder during his campaign and making a mess out of its management the meme was being propagated in the mainstream press that he was too smart for most people to properly understand. That he didn't poll well and eventually lost the election was, to them, just more evidence of the stupidity of ordinary Americans.
From George Will:
It is passing strange. As the American public has become more educated, American intellectuals have become more disparaging of the public's intellectual incapacities and moral shortcomings. In 1940, more than half of the U.S. population had only an eighth-grade education, or less. Now that 85 percent are high-school graduates, 53 percent have some college education and 27 percent are college graduates, it is an article of faith among the progressive intelligentsia that the public is becoming increasingly obtuse, bigoted and superstitious.
There was a time—say, from the early 1930s to the mid-1960s, the period of the Democratic Party's ascendancy—when progressives thought their job was to increase the material well-being of ordinary Americans. It is not mere coincidence that the Democratic Party's strength has waned as its intellectuals' disapproval of ordinary Americans has waxed.
Sunday, November 14, 2004
Why I Am Not A Liberal
Surely you didn't need much help with this one. It ought to be clear to you that I'm not exactly a liberal. But here are a few bullet points:
1. I am deeply skeptical of the government's ability to do most of the things that real liberals want it to do.
...like eliminate poverty, or educate the young, or manage the economy, or you name it.
2. I am against liberal attacks on our religious and moral traditions.
...not that I actually ascribe to them myself, or even follow a lot of them, but I disapprove of liberal efforts to do things like redefine marriage and define deviancy down.
I'm especially hostile to liberals who style themselves as atheists or "secularists", because those people are just creepy and misguided, having morphed their political persuasion into a quasi-religion. This gives rise to all kinds of nonsense having to do with the narcissistic desire to define whatever warped disposition in which a person finds himself or herself as being normal regardless of how obviously maladaptive that disposition is.
3. I think it ought to be obvious even to the brain dead academics that haunt our institutions that centralized economies and economies that don't uphold property rights and a more or less free market have been abysmal failures. We've kicked that old, dead, rotten rodent around the yard quite enough. Time to move on.
4. I'm absolutely in agreement with the idea that one hundred people chosen at random out of a phone book would do much better at running things that a million of the bureaucrats who style themselves as the educated elite experts would ever do and have ever, obviously, done.
1. I am deeply skeptical of the government's ability to do most of the things that real liberals want it to do.
...like eliminate poverty, or educate the young, or manage the economy, or you name it.
2. I am against liberal attacks on our religious and moral traditions.
...not that I actually ascribe to them myself, or even follow a lot of them, but I disapprove of liberal efforts to do things like redefine marriage and define deviancy down.
I'm especially hostile to liberals who style themselves as atheists or "secularists", because those people are just creepy and misguided, having morphed their political persuasion into a quasi-religion. This gives rise to all kinds of nonsense having to do with the narcissistic desire to define whatever warped disposition in which a person finds himself or herself as being normal regardless of how obviously maladaptive that disposition is.
3. I think it ought to be obvious even to the brain dead academics that haunt our institutions that centralized economies and economies that don't uphold property rights and a more or less free market have been abysmal failures. We've kicked that old, dead, rotten rodent around the yard quite enough. Time to move on.
4. I'm absolutely in agreement with the idea that one hundred people chosen at random out of a phone book would do much better at running things that a million of the bureaucrats who style themselves as the educated elite experts would ever do and have ever, obviously, done.
Why I Am Not A Conservative
Reasons why I can't be truthfully described as a conservative:
1. I'm against the death penalty.
...for one principle reason, and that's that the legal system of America is a horrible mess of mistakes, a huge comidy of errors, a horrible mess of human affairs, a series of blunders. It doesn't deserve the power of life and death over a mad dog, much less a fellow human being.
2. I'm pro-choice
...not because I like the idea of killing babies, but because I think a baby is better off dead than being raised by someone who didn't want him or her in the first place. If a woman is selfish and self-centered enough to want to kill her own child then the child is better off not coming into the world to be raised by a person like that.
As I have mentioned before, I think there is an element of eugenics here, the sort that Margaret Sanger originally had in mind, that is at work, and I'm not at all sure that's such a bad thing.
3. I'm in favor of affirmative action.
...because you and I both know that there are people in positions that matter that would take advantage of the situation if AA were not in force. Not many, not the majority, but enough to matter to the public.
4. I'm in favor of socialized medicine.
...because the kind we have now is not working for too many people. Yes, I know that we'd get the kind of medical care that nobody would prefer, with waiting lists, and rationing, and long lines and restrictions of medicines and procedures and so forth. But we can't go on rationing care in accord with who has the money, which is what we are doing now.
5. I'm in favor of certain other kinds of big government programs as well.
...In short, the one's that can be proven to work. That's not that many, of course, but it's not nothing, either.
1. I'm against the death penalty.
...for one principle reason, and that's that the legal system of America is a horrible mess of mistakes, a huge comidy of errors, a horrible mess of human affairs, a series of blunders. It doesn't deserve the power of life and death over a mad dog, much less a fellow human being.
2. I'm pro-choice
...not because I like the idea of killing babies, but because I think a baby is better off dead than being raised by someone who didn't want him or her in the first place. If a woman is selfish and self-centered enough to want to kill her own child then the child is better off not coming into the world to be raised by a person like that.
As I have mentioned before, I think there is an element of eugenics here, the sort that Margaret Sanger originally had in mind, that is at work, and I'm not at all sure that's such a bad thing.
3. I'm in favor of affirmative action.
...because you and I both know that there are people in positions that matter that would take advantage of the situation if AA were not in force. Not many, not the majority, but enough to matter to the public.
4. I'm in favor of socialized medicine.
...because the kind we have now is not working for too many people. Yes, I know that we'd get the kind of medical care that nobody would prefer, with waiting lists, and rationing, and long lines and restrictions of medicines and procedures and so forth. But we can't go on rationing care in accord with who has the money, which is what we are doing now.
5. I'm in favor of certain other kinds of big government programs as well.
...In short, the one's that can be proven to work. That's not that many, of course, but it's not nothing, either.
Jihad DENIED
The mujahideen talk tough. They make idiotic claims about their God smiling upon their despicable acts. They run around in their kaffiyehs and face masks for the AP and Reuters photographers, trying to look fearsome, like delusive adolescents. But in the end, they are flattened by the U.S. military anti-jihad machine.
Saturday, November 13, 2004
Scott Peterson Guilty
My girlfriend called me for her work at one of Houston's downtown energy trading companies to say that the Peterson verdict was coming in. The guys in her office were making book on the outcome, and would I like a piece of the action?
She wasn't serious, of course, because she knows I don't gamble. (When I have the urge to lose money on a bet I use the stock market.) But, going along with the gag, I said, "Sure, put $100 down on Peterson to be guilty, first degree," which was the line with the best odds.
Too bad she didn't really place the bet, because I would have made $400 on it.
The people outside of the trial following it the most closely were the news people, and most of them seemed to be convinced that Peterson was guilty. That was based on all the circumstancial evidence regarding things Peterson did leading up to and following the murder, which made him look like a creep, a cad, and guilty man.
But the jury deliberated for 6 days without a verdict. Clearly, they didn't see it that way, not the jury as it was originally composed, anyway. And everyone knew it hinged on the lack of physical evidence linking Peterson to the crime. The prosecution's strategy was to paint Peterson as a person who deserved to die even if they couldn't produce evidence proving he actually did the crime.
The circumstances around the trial suggested a conspiracy toward a certain verdict. The jurors holding out for a not guilty verdict, the lawyer/doctor who saw the problem with the evidence, perhaps, the woman smart enough to want to do her own research, were thrown out on vague pretexts, and the jury willing to render the proper verdict was finally seated. And with that jury it only took a few hours more to get the right outcome.
It never really mattered whether Peterson actually did it or not. He was still guilty of failing to protect his wife and unborn child. He was still guilty of failing to grieve their loss with the proper verve. He was still guilty of being a cad. Only one verdict was possible.
I'd be willing to bet that with this jury he gets the death penalty, but I don't think I could get anyone to cover that bet.
She wasn't serious, of course, because she knows I don't gamble. (When I have the urge to lose money on a bet I use the stock market.) But, going along with the gag, I said, "Sure, put $100 down on Peterson to be guilty, first degree," which was the line with the best odds.
Too bad she didn't really place the bet, because I would have made $400 on it.
The people outside of the trial following it the most closely were the news people, and most of them seemed to be convinced that Peterson was guilty. That was based on all the circumstancial evidence regarding things Peterson did leading up to and following the murder, which made him look like a creep, a cad, and guilty man.
But the jury deliberated for 6 days without a verdict. Clearly, they didn't see it that way, not the jury as it was originally composed, anyway. And everyone knew it hinged on the lack of physical evidence linking Peterson to the crime. The prosecution's strategy was to paint Peterson as a person who deserved to die even if they couldn't produce evidence proving he actually did the crime.
The circumstances around the trial suggested a conspiracy toward a certain verdict. The jurors holding out for a not guilty verdict, the lawyer/doctor who saw the problem with the evidence, perhaps, the woman smart enough to want to do her own research, were thrown out on vague pretexts, and the jury willing to render the proper verdict was finally seated. And with that jury it only took a few hours more to get the right outcome.
It never really mattered whether Peterson actually did it or not. He was still guilty of failing to protect his wife and unborn child. He was still guilty of failing to grieve their loss with the proper verve. He was still guilty of being a cad. Only one verdict was possible.
I'd be willing to bet that with this jury he gets the death penalty, but I don't think I could get anyone to cover that bet.
Friday, November 12, 2004
More Global Warming Junk
Arctic indigenous peoples urged the United States on Friday to join other nations in cutting greenhouse gas emissions to brake an accelerating thaw of the polar ice.
What do the scientific studies of artic ice show?
Johannessen et al. (1999) used surface-based measurements to derive variations in area-averaged Arctic sea-ice thickness from 1978 to 1991. They, too, detected a downward trend in this parameter. All of the drop occurred rather abruptly over a single period of not more than three years (1987/88-1990/91) .
Winsor (2001) based on a more extensive analysis concluded that "mean ice thickness has remained on a near-constant level around the North Pole from 1986 to 1997."
Holloway and Sou (2002) On the basis of a number of different data-fed model runs, they found that for the last half of the past century there had been no downward trend in artic ice thickness. They noted that year to year variablity of ice thickness can be large.
Polyakov et al. (2002) and Polyakov et al. (2003), reported that the available fast-ice records "do not show a significant trend."
Laxon et al. (2003) Using radar techniques over the largest areas surveyed up to now they saw high year to year variablity in artic ice mass not supportive of current ideas of global warming induced change.
Pfirman et al. (2004) analyzed Arctic sea-ice drift dynamics from 1979-1997, showed that ice was being pushed out of the artic into seas further south by higher winds in certain years, a phenomenon which probably best explains the high annual variablity of the artic ice mass. The life of sea ice in the artic can be as short as 3 years as ice pushed out is constantly being replaced. Thus, the whole system is highly dynamic and subject to variablity from a number of factors, including the winds and ocean currents during certain years.
It's the old story. High degrees of natural variablity in certain measurements are filtered through global warming groupthink to become evidence of impending doom, and anecdotes of eskimos falling through thin ice are made to trump carefully done scientific studies.
What do the scientific studies of artic ice show?
Johannessen et al. (1999) used surface-based measurements to derive variations in area-averaged Arctic sea-ice thickness from 1978 to 1991. They, too, detected a downward trend in this parameter. All of the drop occurred rather abruptly over a single period of not more than three years (1987/88-1990/91) .
Winsor (2001) based on a more extensive analysis concluded that "mean ice thickness has remained on a near-constant level around the North Pole from 1986 to 1997."
Holloway and Sou (2002) On the basis of a number of different data-fed model runs, they found that for the last half of the past century there had been no downward trend in artic ice thickness. They noted that year to year variablity of ice thickness can be large.
Polyakov et al. (2002) and Polyakov et al. (2003), reported that the available fast-ice records "do not show a significant trend."
Laxon et al. (2003) Using radar techniques over the largest areas surveyed up to now they saw high year to year variablity in artic ice mass not supportive of current ideas of global warming induced change.
Pfirman et al. (2004) analyzed Arctic sea-ice drift dynamics from 1979-1997, showed that ice was being pushed out of the artic into seas further south by higher winds in certain years, a phenomenon which probably best explains the high annual variablity of the artic ice mass. The life of sea ice in the artic can be as short as 3 years as ice pushed out is constantly being replaced. Thus, the whole system is highly dynamic and subject to variablity from a number of factors, including the winds and ocean currents during certain years.
It's the old story. High degrees of natural variablity in certain measurements are filtered through global warming groupthink to become evidence of impending doom, and anecdotes of eskimos falling through thin ice are made to trump carefully done scientific studies.
Reformist Right Beats Reactionary Left
The left in America has become a reactionary force. The left champions Cold War-era international institutions, fascist dictators like Saddam Hussein and Fidel Castro, and insists that New Deal and Great Society programs like Social Security and Medicare must not be changed. The recent election was a triumph of the reformers over the reactionaries.
The untold story from last week's Republican victory was the ineffectiveness of the left's attacks on right-wing reform. Democrats surprisingly did not launch a national campaign against partial privatization of Social Security. They did unlimber heavy artillery against radical changes in federal taxation but ended up shooting duds.
This failure was dramatized by Senate elections in the very red states of Oklahoma and South Carolina. Right up to Election Day, serious Democratic strategists saw an excellent chance to win in both states because the Republican candidates were uncompromising reformers and, therefore, stigmatized as loony rightists. Instead, former Rep. Tom Coburn in Oklahoma and Rep. Jim DeMint in South Carolina won easily.
The Accomplishments of Yasser Arafat
1950 - Founded Fatah
1965-1969 - Several terrorist attacks against infrastructure targets in Israel. First attacks against airliners, including a multiple simultaneous hijacking, using Jordan as a base.
Sept. 1971 - Arafat driven from Jordan by Jordanian forces after giving the government there no end of grief.
Sept. 1972 - Arafat moves his base to Lebanon. Israeli olympic team murdered in Munich by the Black September wing of Fatah.
Oct. 1972 - Lufthansa jet airliner hijacked.
March 1973 - Black September group took American hostages in the Saudi consolate in the Sudan demanding the release of Sirhan Sirhan, Bobby Kennedy's killer.
April 1974 - PLO slaughtered eighteen residents of Kiryat Shmona in their apartment building.
May 1974 - Palestinian terrorists attacked a school in Ma'alot, murdering 26 Israelis, including several children.
June 1974 - the PLO endorsed what it called a "phased plan" to obliterate Israel.
November 1974 - PLO awarded observer status in the UN.
1980 - Arafat recognized as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinians by the EEC.
1982 - Arafat driven from Lebanon by the IDF.
1985 - a PLO cell identifying itself as the Palestine Liberation Front, led by Mohammed Abu al-Abbas, hijacked the Italian cruise ship, Achille Lauro. As his horrified wife looked on, the terrorists viciously shot a 69-year-old, wheelchair-bound Jew named Leon Klinghoffer, then tossed him overboard to die in the sea.
1987 - First intifada breaks out in Gaza. Arafat's group kills 3000 Israelis and even more of his own people were killed in political purges.
1988 - PLO granted right to particpate in UN General Assembly sessions.
1993 - Oslo accords.
1994 - Arafat wins Nobel Peace Prize.
1996 - Arafat, speaking to an Arab audience, said, "We plan to eliminate the State of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian state. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion.... We Palestinians will take over everything, including all of Jerusalem."
2000 - Under intense U.S. pressure driven by Clinton's need for a legacy, Israel offered Arafat the creation of a Palestinian state over 90 percent of the West Bank and all of Gaza, with its capital to be in East Jerusalem. Arafat rejected this offer.
2000 - The Second Intifada began with the collapse of the Oslo accords.
2001 - Following one of his typically belligerant addresses to the Palestinians in December, 2001, the administration of President George W. Bush let it be known that Arafat would no longer be dealt with. Bush asserts the doctine of global anti-terrorism and war subsequent to Sept 11, and Arafat's effectiveness is curtailed and he is gradually marginalized and reduced to pariah status.
2002 to the Present - Arafat is trapped in his compound in Palestine. Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist leaders are picked off one by one by the Israeli anti-terrorist forces.
1965-1969 - Several terrorist attacks against infrastructure targets in Israel. First attacks against airliners, including a multiple simultaneous hijacking, using Jordan as a base.
Sept. 1971 - Arafat driven from Jordan by Jordanian forces after giving the government there no end of grief.
Sept. 1972 - Arafat moves his base to Lebanon. Israeli olympic team murdered in Munich by the Black September wing of Fatah.
Oct. 1972 - Lufthansa jet airliner hijacked.
March 1973 - Black September group took American hostages in the Saudi consolate in the Sudan demanding the release of Sirhan Sirhan, Bobby Kennedy's killer.
April 1974 - PLO slaughtered eighteen residents of Kiryat Shmona in their apartment building.
May 1974 - Palestinian terrorists attacked a school in Ma'alot, murdering 26 Israelis, including several children.
June 1974 - the PLO endorsed what it called a "phased plan" to obliterate Israel.
November 1974 - PLO awarded observer status in the UN.
1980 - Arafat recognized as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinians by the EEC.
1982 - Arafat driven from Lebanon by the IDF.
1985 - a PLO cell identifying itself as the Palestine Liberation Front, led by Mohammed Abu al-Abbas, hijacked the Italian cruise ship, Achille Lauro. As his horrified wife looked on, the terrorists viciously shot a 69-year-old, wheelchair-bound Jew named Leon Klinghoffer, then tossed him overboard to die in the sea.
1987 - First intifada breaks out in Gaza. Arafat's group kills 3000 Israelis and even more of his own people were killed in political purges.
1988 - PLO granted right to particpate in UN General Assembly sessions.
1993 - Oslo accords.
1994 - Arafat wins Nobel Peace Prize.
1996 - Arafat, speaking to an Arab audience, said, "We plan to eliminate the State of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian state. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion.... We Palestinians will take over everything, including all of Jerusalem."
2000 - Under intense U.S. pressure driven by Clinton's need for a legacy, Israel offered Arafat the creation of a Palestinian state over 90 percent of the West Bank and all of Gaza, with its capital to be in East Jerusalem. Arafat rejected this offer.
2000 - The Second Intifada began with the collapse of the Oslo accords.
2001 - Following one of his typically belligerant addresses to the Palestinians in December, 2001, the administration of President George W. Bush let it be known that Arafat would no longer be dealt with. Bush asserts the doctine of global anti-terrorism and war subsequent to Sept 11, and Arafat's effectiveness is curtailed and he is gradually marginalized and reduced to pariah status.
2002 to the Present - Arafat is trapped in his compound in Palestine. Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist leaders are picked off one by one by the Israeli anti-terrorist forces.
The "Moral Values" Canard
With the 2004 presidential election an exit poll was conducted that included the following question:
Which one issue mattered most in considering your vote for president?
A. Education, 4 percent.
B. Taxes, 5 percent.
C. Health Care, 8 percent.
D. Iraq, 15 percent.
E. Terrorism, 19 percent.
F. Economy and Jobs, 20 percent.
G. Moral Values, 22 percent.
Because "moral values' includes so many issues, such as gay marriage, crime, abortion, and even character, it polled slightly higher than the others, which were all more narrowly defined. Group the other issues into broad categories such as "the war" or "domestic issues" and they easily out-polled "moral values."
Nevertheless, another leftist canard was born with that survey, which was the idea that Kerry was defeated by bigoted Christian rednecks. Maureen Dowd in the New York Times said it with the most verve, cursing the Republicans for pandering to "isolationism, nativism, chauvinism, puritanism and religious fanaticism" in their unfailing drive to "summon our nasty devils."
An analysis of the polls conducted after the election contradicts this idea. Bush received no more of the vote in states that had anti-gay marriage proposals on the ballot than he did in 2000, for example, and the moral values issues came up as being no more imporant than usual in other polls. The proportion of the electorate claiming to be fundamentalist Christian did not change, either.
But it can never be that the Democrat's message was simply rejected. It's never that they've gone wrong. The liberal elite must find a way to deligitimize the Republican victory and assuage their moral vanity, and this was going to be the theme this time, much like "Angry White Men" had been the theme in an earlier election.
So it is that, while standing on the smoldering ruins of yet another Democratic defeat, they angrily, absurdly claim moral superiority.
Which one issue mattered most in considering your vote for president?
A. Education, 4 percent.
B. Taxes, 5 percent.
C. Health Care, 8 percent.
D. Iraq, 15 percent.
E. Terrorism, 19 percent.
F. Economy and Jobs, 20 percent.
G. Moral Values, 22 percent.
Because "moral values' includes so many issues, such as gay marriage, crime, abortion, and even character, it polled slightly higher than the others, which were all more narrowly defined. Group the other issues into broad categories such as "the war" or "domestic issues" and they easily out-polled "moral values."
Nevertheless, another leftist canard was born with that survey, which was the idea that Kerry was defeated by bigoted Christian rednecks. Maureen Dowd in the New York Times said it with the most verve, cursing the Republicans for pandering to "isolationism, nativism, chauvinism, puritanism and religious fanaticism" in their unfailing drive to "summon our nasty devils."
An analysis of the polls conducted after the election contradicts this idea. Bush received no more of the vote in states that had anti-gay marriage proposals on the ballot than he did in 2000, for example, and the moral values issues came up as being no more imporant than usual in other polls. The proportion of the electorate claiming to be fundamentalist Christian did not change, either.
But it can never be that the Democrat's message was simply rejected. It's never that they've gone wrong. The liberal elite must find a way to deligitimize the Republican victory and assuage their moral vanity, and this was going to be the theme this time, much like "Angry White Men" had been the theme in an earlier election.
So it is that, while standing on the smoldering ruins of yet another Democratic defeat, they angrily, absurdly claim moral superiority.
Thursday, November 11, 2004
Bush And The USA Are Loved More Than You Can Believe
An astonishing letter from a member of a humanitarian organization who has worked all over the Middle East:
Every time I went to Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iraq on humanitarian missions the people begged me to assure them that Bush would be elected. These weren't a few people, as I'd first hoped (as a committed left winger,) but hundreds, thousands. They saw their struggle as I saw Cuba, Angola or Kosovo. I'm now forced, albeit with some personal reservations and resistance, to see their point. The people in these countries even begged me to tell the Americans to bomb their neighborhoods to kill the 'Taliban' that live there. Heartbreaking--but a heartbreaking admission of how sick they are of living under totalitarianism. They see America as freedom.
While watching the elections in Afghanistan I never saw such joy. Such hope. The people would come and shake my hand, hug me, just because of my nationality. What a success, I had to admit.
Even we on the left have to start coming to grips with the world, and that means coming to grips with the fact that unlike us liberal/left, a lot of people in the world admire, even love, George Bush, their 'liberator.' I hear even more passion for Bush in Iraq, worse (or better, depending on your point of view) from the people than even the soldiers, and the military are at least 5 to 1 for Bush...this would make the indigenous population maybe 9-1 for our current administration.
I was coming back from the Middle East when Bush was elected and saw the Iranians with the 'V' for victory claiming the streets in the thousands, the hundreds of thousands celebrating the Bush election.
We're going to have to rethink a lot of issues, positions, prejudices and fears, folks...it's a sad fact for some of us, but the future of the Islamic world seems to be in democracy. And we're more loved than our media and politicans are telling us--even Bush! Weird, maybe. True, unfortunately. Honest, indubitably.
Every time I went to Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iraq on humanitarian missions the people begged me to assure them that Bush would be elected. These weren't a few people, as I'd first hoped (as a committed left winger,) but hundreds, thousands. They saw their struggle as I saw Cuba, Angola or Kosovo. I'm now forced, albeit with some personal reservations and resistance, to see their point. The people in these countries even begged me to tell the Americans to bomb their neighborhoods to kill the 'Taliban' that live there. Heartbreaking--but a heartbreaking admission of how sick they are of living under totalitarianism. They see America as freedom.
While watching the elections in Afghanistan I never saw such joy. Such hope. The people would come and shake my hand, hug me, just because of my nationality. What a success, I had to admit.
Even we on the left have to start coming to grips with the world, and that means coming to grips with the fact that unlike us liberal/left, a lot of people in the world admire, even love, George Bush, their 'liberator.' I hear even more passion for Bush in Iraq, worse (or better, depending on your point of view) from the people than even the soldiers, and the military are at least 5 to 1 for Bush...this would make the indigenous population maybe 9-1 for our current administration.
I was coming back from the Middle East when Bush was elected and saw the Iranians with the 'V' for victory claiming the streets in the thousands, the hundreds of thousands celebrating the Bush election.
We're going to have to rethink a lot of issues, positions, prejudices and fears, folks...it's a sad fact for some of us, but the future of the Islamic world seems to be in democracy. And we're more loved than our media and politicans are telling us--even Bush! Weird, maybe. True, unfortunately. Honest, indubitably.
Sarin Nerve Gas Found in Fallujah
NPR reports that a truck containing canisters of the deadly nerve agent was found hidden in the Iraqi city of Fallujah. The source and age of the supply of Sarin was not known, but labels on the canisters were in English.
US forces have suspected that nerve gas might be used in the defense of Fallujah and have had gas masks available during the attack.
US forces have suspected that nerve gas might be used in the defense of Fallujah and have had gas masks available during the attack.
Comments Turned On
I have enabled comments from this post forward. Attempts to add comments for posts older than this one won't work. There are no comments for those older posts even though a comment link has been added to them.
Letter From A Pot Smoking Bush Voter
A pro-abortion, pro-legalization-of-marijuana, pro-gay marriage, pro-human rights, pro-world democracy generation X person defends his decision to vote for Bush. This letter was written in response to John Perry Barlow's article "Magnanamus Defeat" in which the author makes some attempts to understand the pro-Bush voter:
I think what bemused me most when reading your missive, Mr. Barlow, was your description of the young man who was probably popular and on the football team and supported Bush, while you the nerdy outsider supported Kerry, and you saw the whole thing through some sort of 50s-vs.-60s lens. Nothing could show me just how insular so many on the left have become than that. Few of the war supporters I know fit such stereotypes at all. "Think for yourself, question authority" is something a lot of us sucked in with our mothers' milk--and by the way, you know we kids who were born in the 1960s are now in our 30s and 40s and parents ourselves, right? A lot of us grew up being told to question authority, and a lot of that authority we now question is the left-wing orthodoxy of your generation, an orthodoxy many of us bought into as it was taught to us in school, in the books we read, and especially in the universities, not to mention in a lot of what we see out of Hollywood today.
We came to reject a lot of that orthodoxy as we got older and learned to think better for ourselves--not because we "embraced the establishment," but because we were questioning the establishment.
There's lots more. It's worth it to read the whole thing.
I think what bemused me most when reading your missive, Mr. Barlow, was your description of the young man who was probably popular and on the football team and supported Bush, while you the nerdy outsider supported Kerry, and you saw the whole thing through some sort of 50s-vs.-60s lens. Nothing could show me just how insular so many on the left have become than that. Few of the war supporters I know fit such stereotypes at all. "Think for yourself, question authority" is something a lot of us sucked in with our mothers' milk--and by the way, you know we kids who were born in the 1960s are now in our 30s and 40s and parents ourselves, right? A lot of us grew up being told to question authority, and a lot of that authority we now question is the left-wing orthodoxy of your generation, an orthodoxy many of us bought into as it was taught to us in school, in the books we read, and especially in the universities, not to mention in a lot of what we see out of Hollywood today.
We came to reject a lot of that orthodoxy as we got older and learned to think better for ourselves--not because we "embraced the establishment," but because we were questioning the establishment.
There's lots more. It's worth it to read the whole thing.
Sunday, November 07, 2004
So much for exit polls.
So much for the power of the mainstream media.
So much for the idea that undecided voters always go for the challenger.
So much for the Democrat's belief that the popular vote should decide the Presidential election.
So much for the idea that a big turnout always favors the Democrats.
So much for Tom Daschle.
So much for the youth vote.
So much for the winds of change.
So much for Zogby.
So much for Michael Moore's efforts.
So much for the Washington Redskin's last home game going the way of the incumbent in the election.
So much for Hollywood's clout.
So much for George Soros.
So much for the power of the mainstream media.
So much for the idea that undecided voters always go for the challenger.
So much for the Democrat's belief that the popular vote should decide the Presidential election.
So much for the idea that a big turnout always favors the Democrats.
So much for Tom Daschle.
So much for the youth vote.
So much for the winds of change.
So much for Zogby.
So much for Michael Moore's efforts.
So much for the Washington Redskin's last home game going the way of the incumbent in the election.
So much for Hollywood's clout.
So much for George Soros.
The Scopes Monkey Trial
Darwinism is as true as scientific truth can be as a theory of biology, and most of us can agree that teaching creationism in biology classes is a bad idea.
The efforts of Christian fundamentalists to include creationism in the public school biology curriculum is often cited as archtypical of the conflict between the forces of rationality and science and those of fundamentalist religious superstition.
An event often cited as an example of this conflict is the Scopes Monkey Trial. The trial in 1925 pitted populist William Jennings Bryan and his friends against defense lawyer Clarence Darrow and his client John Scopes, who was accused of violating a state law against teaching Darwinism in a public school.
Recently, this episode of American history has been revisited by several pundits, and liberals often cite the trial to frame their opposition to the conservative political agenda in terms similar to those used to characterize the Scopes Trial, i.e., the battle of the rational, scientific and informed against the superstitious and ignorant.
However, in delving into the history of the Scopes Trial one finds that things were not as they are often portrayed in the popular media (or in the news media of the day, for that matter.) For example, the idea that William Jennings Bryan objected to the teaching of evolution only because he thought it undermined the Christian religion is a myth. It wasn't just the right to teach the theory of evolution as a theory of biology that was being defended in the trial.
The textbook from which Mr. Scopes was accused of teaching was A Civic Biology Presented in Problems by George William Hunter. In this text the theory of evolution was not primarily what was being taught, certainly not in a proper biological sense. There was not much in it about Darwin's evidence, nothing about how the theory was developed, no biological examples, nothing that put the idea in a biological context. In fact, the main trust of the book was eugenics, which in the 1920's was considered to be the logical, scientific and rational extension of the theory of evolution into civic life. Civic Biology went into what the author thought were the logical conclusions that could be derived from the theory of evolution in justification of eugenics, such as the idea of white supremacy, the "scientific" justification of the inferiority of certain other races, the necessity of racial purity, and so forth.
Eugenics was what passed for a progressive and rational idea of that day. It was the backward, irrational, religious fanatics like Bryan, who insisted that all men are equal in God's eyes, that objected to the advocacy of eugenics. Bryan, informed by his religious beliefs, strongly upheld the ideals of human rights and equality. These were the same religious ideas and beliefs that had been used to advocate for the abolition of slavery 60 years before.
Looking back on this from our present position in history, having seen where these racist ideas lead, it is difficult for us to understand the thinking process behind the trial. Both Bryan and Darrow looked upon all of the racist ideas advocated in Civic Biology as being a corollary of Darwinism. There was no attempt to seperate Darwinism, which as a theory of biology stood up well even then, from derivative ideas like racism and eugenics. It was all part of a piece. Darwinism was eugenics and eugenics was Darwinism.
In the trial, Darrow made no bones about his approval of eugenics as a scientific and rational idea. The first witness for the defense was Maynard M. Metcalf, a member of the American Eugenics Society. The judge ruled such testimony immaterial and for that was ridiculed by the press for refusing to consider the scientific evidence.
Bryan, who was often called "the great common man" because of his advocacy of equality and social justice, saw where the whole idea of Darwinism/eugenics was leading. The fact that Darwinism appeared to contradict Christian teaching was to him just one part of the evidence that the whole thing was wrong. Bryan didn't object to a theory that made men the relatives of monkeys so much as he objected to a theory that justified treating people like animals. Of Darwinism, he wrote that "Its only program for man is scientific breeding, a system under which a few supposedly superior intellects, self-appointed, would direct the mating and the movements of the mass of mankind -- an impossible system!"
Whenever people advocating a secular and progressive agenda get frustrated with the objections of religious people they should stop and consider what it was their counterparts were defending in the Scopes Monkey Trial. That's not to advocate for the ascendency of religion over science and rationality in public policy, but, at the very least, to say that that religion and traditional values have a necessary role.
The efforts of Christian fundamentalists to include creationism in the public school biology curriculum is often cited as archtypical of the conflict between the forces of rationality and science and those of fundamentalist religious superstition.
An event often cited as an example of this conflict is the Scopes Monkey Trial. The trial in 1925 pitted populist William Jennings Bryan and his friends against defense lawyer Clarence Darrow and his client John Scopes, who was accused of violating a state law against teaching Darwinism in a public school.
Recently, this episode of American history has been revisited by several pundits, and liberals often cite the trial to frame their opposition to the conservative political agenda in terms similar to those used to characterize the Scopes Trial, i.e., the battle of the rational, scientific and informed against the superstitious and ignorant.
However, in delving into the history of the Scopes Trial one finds that things were not as they are often portrayed in the popular media (or in the news media of the day, for that matter.) For example, the idea that William Jennings Bryan objected to the teaching of evolution only because he thought it undermined the Christian religion is a myth. It wasn't just the right to teach the theory of evolution as a theory of biology that was being defended in the trial.
The textbook from which Mr. Scopes was accused of teaching was A Civic Biology Presented in Problems by George William Hunter. In this text the theory of evolution was not primarily what was being taught, certainly not in a proper biological sense. There was not much in it about Darwin's evidence, nothing about how the theory was developed, no biological examples, nothing that put the idea in a biological context. In fact, the main trust of the book was eugenics, which in the 1920's was considered to be the logical, scientific and rational extension of the theory of evolution into civic life. Civic Biology went into what the author thought were the logical conclusions that could be derived from the theory of evolution in justification of eugenics, such as the idea of white supremacy, the "scientific" justification of the inferiority of certain other races, the necessity of racial purity, and so forth.
Eugenics was what passed for a progressive and rational idea of that day. It was the backward, irrational, religious fanatics like Bryan, who insisted that all men are equal in God's eyes, that objected to the advocacy of eugenics. Bryan, informed by his religious beliefs, strongly upheld the ideals of human rights and equality. These were the same religious ideas and beliefs that had been used to advocate for the abolition of slavery 60 years before.
Looking back on this from our present position in history, having seen where these racist ideas lead, it is difficult for us to understand the thinking process behind the trial. Both Bryan and Darrow looked upon all of the racist ideas advocated in Civic Biology as being a corollary of Darwinism. There was no attempt to seperate Darwinism, which as a theory of biology stood up well even then, from derivative ideas like racism and eugenics. It was all part of a piece. Darwinism was eugenics and eugenics was Darwinism.
In the trial, Darrow made no bones about his approval of eugenics as a scientific and rational idea. The first witness for the defense was Maynard M. Metcalf, a member of the American Eugenics Society. The judge ruled such testimony immaterial and for that was ridiculed by the press for refusing to consider the scientific evidence.
Bryan, who was often called "the great common man" because of his advocacy of equality and social justice, saw where the whole idea of Darwinism/eugenics was leading. The fact that Darwinism appeared to contradict Christian teaching was to him just one part of the evidence that the whole thing was wrong. Bryan didn't object to a theory that made men the relatives of monkeys so much as he objected to a theory that justified treating people like animals. Of Darwinism, he wrote that "Its only program for man is scientific breeding, a system under which a few supposedly superior intellects, self-appointed, would direct the mating and the movements of the mass of mankind -- an impossible system!"
Whenever people advocating a secular and progressive agenda get frustrated with the objections of religious people they should stop and consider what it was their counterparts were defending in the Scopes Monkey Trial. That's not to advocate for the ascendency of religion over science and rationality in public policy, but, at the very least, to say that that religion and traditional values have a necessary role.
Friday, October 15, 2004
If We Elect Kerry President
...we, first of all, will give up the notion that America can do big things.
Once a nation that tamed a frontier, stood down the Nazis and stood upon the moon, we will announce to the world that bringing democracy to the Middle East is too big of a task for us. But more significantly, we will signal to future presidents that as voters we are unwilling to tackle difficult challenges, preferring caution to boldness, embracing the mediocrity that has characterized other failed civilizations. The defeat of President Bush will send a chilling message to future presidents who may need to make difficult, yet unpopular decisions. America has always been a nation that rises to the demands of history regardless of the costs or appeal. If we elect Kerry we will turn away from that legacy, we will turn away from who we are.
Second, if we elect Kerry we will inform every terrorist organization on the globe that the lesson of Somalia was well learned. In Somalia we showed terrorists that you don't need to defeat America on the battlefield when you can defeat them in the newsroom. They learned that a wounded America can become a defeated America. Twenty-four-hour news stations and daily tracking polls will do the heavy lifting, turning a cut into a fatal blow. Except that Iraq is Somalia times 10. The election of John Kerry will serve notice to every terrorist in every cave that the soft underbelly of American power is the timidity of American voters. Terrorists will know that a steady stream of grizzly photos for CNN is all you need to break the will of the American people. Our own self-doubt will take it from there. Al Qaeda will recognize that they can topple any American administration without setting foot on the homeland.
If we elect Kerry we will begin the process of fading into the oblivion we may then deserve.
Once a nation that tamed a frontier, stood down the Nazis and stood upon the moon, we will announce to the world that bringing democracy to the Middle East is too big of a task for us. But more significantly, we will signal to future presidents that as voters we are unwilling to tackle difficult challenges, preferring caution to boldness, embracing the mediocrity that has characterized other failed civilizations. The defeat of President Bush will send a chilling message to future presidents who may need to make difficult, yet unpopular decisions. America has always been a nation that rises to the demands of history regardless of the costs or appeal. If we elect Kerry we will turn away from that legacy, we will turn away from who we are.
Second, if we elect Kerry we will inform every terrorist organization on the globe that the lesson of Somalia was well learned. In Somalia we showed terrorists that you don't need to defeat America on the battlefield when you can defeat them in the newsroom. They learned that a wounded America can become a defeated America. Twenty-four-hour news stations and daily tracking polls will do the heavy lifting, turning a cut into a fatal blow. Except that Iraq is Somalia times 10. The election of John Kerry will serve notice to every terrorist in every cave that the soft underbelly of American power is the timidity of American voters. Terrorists will know that a steady stream of grizzly photos for CNN is all you need to break the will of the American people. Our own self-doubt will take it from there. Al Qaeda will recognize that they can topple any American administration without setting foot on the homeland.
If we elect Kerry we will begin the process of fading into the oblivion we may then deserve.
Friday, October 08, 2004
What Liberals Don't Get
1. The world is a dangerous place, filled with deadly people. Not just people who are misunderstood. Not just people who are poor. Not just people who have different "values."
2. Most nations in the world look out for themselves. We cringe at the idea of a 'global test' because we know who's going to be grading the test.
3. America is not the world's problem--America is the world's solution. The United States is the only great nation in the world whose people are willing to make real sacrifices of blood and treasure for world peace. If we don't do it, no one will. President Bush knows this. The American people know it. American liberals don't.
American liberals are making the same mistake in the war on terror that they made during the Cold War. They trust anti-American voices around the world more than they trust the American people.
2. Most nations in the world look out for themselves. We cringe at the idea of a 'global test' because we know who's going to be grading the test.
3. America is not the world's problem--America is the world's solution. The United States is the only great nation in the world whose people are willing to make real sacrifices of blood and treasure for world peace. If we don't do it, no one will. President Bush knows this. The American people know it. American liberals don't.
American liberals are making the same mistake in the war on terror that they made during the Cold War. They trust anti-American voices around the world more than they trust the American people.
Sunday, September 12, 2004
Regarding the Killian Memos
The whole point of the bloggers was that someone could just sit down at at a computer with MS Word and start typing the memos. Not even have to change default margins etc. Then run the output through a copier a few times to "age" it.Well, if this is not MS Word Times New Roman, that theory flies out the window. And one consistent character difference means it is not MS TNR.
I think you make a good point. However, looking at the points you mention I'm not sure that these differences can't be accounted for by distortion due to recopying and scanning.
If you say that MS Word didn't create those memos, then how were they created?
The aha! moment over these memos for me was seeing how an MS Word generated document almost exactly recreates the memos. I don't see how that could possibly be the case if the memos were created by a typewriter in 1972. Someone has even gone to the effort of deliberately trying to recreate the memos with an IBM Selectric Composer, and it could not be done.
When I started hearing people say that producing these documents with the Composer might have been possible, I had to laugh because I know from personal experience how absurd that is. Believe it or not I used to work for a small newspaper many years ago. I assisted in the use of a Linotype machine, the machine that the Composer sort of replaced. The Linotype was the machine that replaced manual typesetting, and it was the most ridiculous Rube Golbergian machine ever created. It must have had a million moving parts, was gas fired and electric. The operator worked at a keyboard with more than 300 keys, as I recall, one key for every character, the capital characters, and all special characters. The operator hit a key and a piece of type (actually a type mold for an individual character) was dispensed from a magazine above, carried on belts and over wheels to the ruler line where it was deposited to create a line of type. Despite all of the mechanical geegaws the operator was often required to position type manually on the ruler, reaching in with his fingers to pluck out errant type or insert type. When a line was complete the operator pulled a big lever, molten typemetal (mostly lead) poured in and a complete line of printer type was cast. At least once an hour, it seemed, the machine would spray molten metal when the casting process didn't work for any of a million reasons.
The other thing I remember about the Linotype was the fact that it was hot, hot dirty and greasy. In the non-airconditioned shop you ended up sweaty and as dirty as a coal miner after working with or around the darn thing. And it was always breaking down, and the operator had to be more than half mechanic to use it.
It was horrible. I probably still have lead poisoning from those days.
The paper I worked at had a Composer or something similar, but we ink stained monkeys were not allowed to even approach it. It was out in the nice, clean front office. The IBM Composer was referred to as a cold typesetter because it did the same job as a Linotype but without the molten metal. Nevertheless, it had the same Rube Goldbergian, clunky quality to it that the Linotype did. Like the Linotype, the thing had something like a ruler on which a line of "type" was assembled, and there was a little window that the operator watched to monitor this. If you messed up and put too many or too few characters in a line of type the whole thing fell apart and you had to start over. Most of the special characters, centering, and other effects were produced manually and took a lot of time. But at least a Composer wouldn't spew hot typemetal all over, and it had a greatly simplied, typewriter style keyboard compared to the grand pipeorgan type keyboard of the Linotype.
All this has brought those memories back, and all I can say is Thank God for computers and computer printers. (Youngsters these days have No Idea, and THAT is why the forgeries were done the way they were.)
The point of all this is to say that these machines were NOT the kind of thing that someone would sit down and pound a memo out on. There is NO WAY that anyone would use a Composer like that. The only reason to put up with the Composer's quirks was in order to produce copy that looked like it was typeset, so that it could be photographed and used in lithography to produce hundreds of printed copies. It would probably take an hour for an expert operator to create one of those memos as printed using a Composer, with centered text, special characters, superscripting and all. So that defense of those memos is just absurd.
I think you make a good point. However, looking at the points you mention I'm not sure that these differences can't be accounted for by distortion due to recopying and scanning.
If you say that MS Word didn't create those memos, then how were they created?
The aha! moment over these memos for me was seeing how an MS Word generated document almost exactly recreates the memos. I don't see how that could possibly be the case if the memos were created by a typewriter in 1972. Someone has even gone to the effort of deliberately trying to recreate the memos with an IBM Selectric Composer, and it could not be done.
When I started hearing people say that producing these documents with the Composer might have been possible, I had to laugh because I know from personal experience how absurd that is. Believe it or not I used to work for a small newspaper many years ago. I assisted in the use of a Linotype machine, the machine that the Composer sort of replaced. The Linotype was the machine that replaced manual typesetting, and it was the most ridiculous Rube Golbergian machine ever created. It must have had a million moving parts, was gas fired and electric. The operator worked at a keyboard with more than 300 keys, as I recall, one key for every character, the capital characters, and all special characters. The operator hit a key and a piece of type (actually a type mold for an individual character) was dispensed from a magazine above, carried on belts and over wheels to the ruler line where it was deposited to create a line of type. Despite all of the mechanical geegaws the operator was often required to position type manually on the ruler, reaching in with his fingers to pluck out errant type or insert type. When a line was complete the operator pulled a big lever, molten typemetal (mostly lead) poured in and a complete line of printer type was cast. At least once an hour, it seemed, the machine would spray molten metal when the casting process didn't work for any of a million reasons.
The other thing I remember about the Linotype was the fact that it was hot, hot dirty and greasy. In the non-airconditioned shop you ended up sweaty and as dirty as a coal miner after working with or around the darn thing. And it was always breaking down, and the operator had to be more than half mechanic to use it.
It was horrible. I probably still have lead poisoning from those days.
The paper I worked at had a Composer or something similar, but we ink stained monkeys were not allowed to even approach it. It was out in the nice, clean front office. The IBM Composer was referred to as a cold typesetter because it did the same job as a Linotype but without the molten metal. Nevertheless, it had the same Rube Goldbergian, clunky quality to it that the Linotype did. Like the Linotype, the thing had something like a ruler on which a line of "type" was assembled, and there was a little window that the operator watched to monitor this. If you messed up and put too many or too few characters in a line of type the whole thing fell apart and you had to start over. Most of the special characters, centering, and other effects were produced manually and took a lot of time. But at least a Composer wouldn't spew hot typemetal all over, and it had a greatly simplied, typewriter style keyboard compared to the grand pipeorgan type keyboard of the Linotype.
All this has brought those memories back, and all I can say is Thank God for computers and computer printers. (Youngsters these days have No Idea, and THAT is why the forgeries were done the way they were.)
The point of all this is to say that these machines were NOT the kind of thing that someone would sit down and pound a memo out on. There is NO WAY that anyone would use a Composer like that. The only reason to put up with the Composer's quirks was in order to produce copy that looked like it was typeset, so that it could be photographed and used in lithography to produce hundreds of printed copies. It would probably take an hour for an expert operator to create one of those memos as printed using a Composer, with centered text, special characters, superscripting and all. So that defense of those memos is just absurd.
Sunday, August 29, 2004
Bush Holds All the Aces
According to people who attended Harvard Business School with George W. Bush, the President was in those days an avid and skilled poker player. One of the best strategies in poker is to convince one's opponent that one is a boob who doesn't know what he is doing, and so gets the opponent to bet a lot on a weak hand. It's a pattern one sees again and again in Bush's political career.
It must be a bitter pill to swallow. The pain of embarrassment must burn brightly on the faces of Democrats as the "Chimpident", in the process of laying down another winning hand, is about to take all of their chips once again.
Astonishing, even to an admirer like myself, is the fact that the President's advisors had predicted two years ago that the Democrats would attempt to make Vietnam the issue in this campaign season. The feeling was that the Democrats wouldn't be able to help it. Vietnam was the last time the left was ascendent in this country. They had to return to that and try to justify their position on it again. It is the very centerpiece of their whole concept of war, the government, and everything.
What they didn't count on was that the triumphs of US forces in the battlefield, especially the invasion of Iraq, would encourage old warriors, who had been cowed by academia and the media up to now, to speak out and dispute the Vietnam dogma of the left.
And, sure enough, it is becoming clear that the left, and Kerry, had been lying all along.
And so, Kerry's retro braggadocio on ice for the forseeable future, the Democrats fall back on conspiracy theories, pulling out multicolored charts showing that Kay Bailey Hutchinson is a "close friend" of some consultant to the Swiftboat Vets for Truth, and so on. Yawn.
Bush hatred is morphing into depression. Any shaggy nudists or trust fund socialists who manage to pull stunts at the Republican National Convention will only strengthen Bush's appeal.
It must be a bitter pill to swallow. The pain of embarrassment must burn brightly on the faces of Democrats as the "Chimpident", in the process of laying down another winning hand, is about to take all of their chips once again.
The President sat back, as John Kerry's consultants, the Iowa caucus voters, the Democratic Party at large, and the media convinced themselves that the one card that trumps Bush's leadership in the war on terror was Kerry's four months in Vietnam, and bet everything on it. They have just lost that hand.
Kerry is in seclusion, unable to expose himself to any but the most sycophantic interviewers, and getting whumped by hundreds upon hundreds of fellow Swift boat veterans, plus former POWs, plus retired admirals, over every aspect of his brief stay in the Mekong Delta.
The Senator put his money on the wrong war.
Astonishing, even to an admirer like myself, is the fact that the President's advisors had predicted two years ago that the Democrats would attempt to make Vietnam the issue in this campaign season. The feeling was that the Democrats wouldn't be able to help it. Vietnam was the last time the left was ascendent in this country. They had to return to that and try to justify their position on it again. It is the very centerpiece of their whole concept of war, the government, and everything.
What they didn't count on was that the triumphs of US forces in the battlefield, especially the invasion of Iraq, would encourage old warriors, who had been cowed by academia and the media up to now, to speak out and dispute the Vietnam dogma of the left.
And, sure enough, it is becoming clear that the left, and Kerry, had been lying all along.
And so, Kerry's retro braggadocio on ice for the forseeable future, the Democrats fall back on conspiracy theories, pulling out multicolored charts showing that Kay Bailey Hutchinson is a "close friend" of some consultant to the Swiftboat Vets for Truth, and so on. Yawn.
Bush hatred is morphing into depression. Any shaggy nudists or trust fund socialists who manage to pull stunts at the Republican National Convention will only strengthen Bush's appeal.
Thursday, August 19, 2004
Democrats Despair Over Kerry
Privately, but no longer quietly, Democrats are beginning to despair.
They cannot fathom why their man, John Kerry, cannot seem to fathom how easy it should be to put President Bush away, seize the high ground and take command of the issues of the war on Iraq and the war on terror.
Yet another Democrat pundit who has confused the opinion of his friends with popular opinion. He goes on to say that Kerry ought to unreservedly assert the left-liberal line on the war; i.e., we were lied to, we'd have never done it, we need to get out now, it was all a mistake, etc. The problem with that, of course, is that Kerry's own pollsters have probably concluded that such a strategy would loose him the election.
It's why Kerry saluted during his acceptance speech, why he talked about little else but his war experience, why he has said that he'd back the war regardless of how things have turned out. That he'd fight the war, but do it better. The left wing of the Democrat Party despairs that Kerry is not singing their tune. What they don't seem to recognise is that too few people out there like that tune. It is just another sign of the decline of power and influence of the left.
Yeah, the problem with a guy like Kerry is that you never know who he'll backstab next. It could be you, red diaper bone fides and all.
On the other hand, the nice thing about having a candidate with no set principles is the way in which you can exactly match the candidate with current popular opinion, whatever that might be, pretty much without regard for what that candidate has stood for in the past.
And on the third hand, I find this all oddly reassuring. For a while I believed that Kerry would be like Carter, a president apparently determined to destroy the country. Now I can see that Kerry is nothing like Carter. Carter was an evil little man who despised his own country and believed all of its citizens were evil for being prosperous, but he had a set of convictions, quasi-Marxist convictions, most likely, but convictions nevertheless. And he stuck with those convictions straight through one of the worst four year terms the country has seen, determined to punish the people of the US for being optimistic, productive, competent, and hopeful in the face of so much misery elsewhere.* Kerry, on the other hand, is going to go wherever the wind blows and is unlikely to do anything with the office.
-------------------
*And then after he'd been tossed out on his ear by the election, he had the gall to come before the people in a TV address and try to put a guilt trip on us for declining to partake in another 4 years of punishment with him, as if he hadn't been hard enough with the whip, or something. But don't get me started on that.
And, by the way, forget about Kerry being able to win allies in Europe. The people who insulted the American people by giving Jimmy Carter the Nobel Prize hate the US far too much to ever be our allies except as a pretext for screwing us over.
They cannot fathom why their man, John Kerry, cannot seem to fathom how easy it should be to put President Bush away, seize the high ground and take command of the issues of the war on Iraq and the war on terror.
Yet another Democrat pundit who has confused the opinion of his friends with popular opinion. He goes on to say that Kerry ought to unreservedly assert the left-liberal line on the war; i.e., we were lied to, we'd have never done it, we need to get out now, it was all a mistake, etc. The problem with that, of course, is that Kerry's own pollsters have probably concluded that such a strategy would loose him the election.
It's why Kerry saluted during his acceptance speech, why he talked about little else but his war experience, why he has said that he'd back the war regardless of how things have turned out. That he'd fight the war, but do it better. The left wing of the Democrat Party despairs that Kerry is not singing their tune. What they don't seem to recognise is that too few people out there like that tune. It is just another sign of the decline of power and influence of the left.
Yeah, the problem with a guy like Kerry is that you never know who he'll backstab next. It could be you, red diaper bone fides and all.
On the other hand, the nice thing about having a candidate with no set principles is the way in which you can exactly match the candidate with current popular opinion, whatever that might be, pretty much without regard for what that candidate has stood for in the past.
And on the third hand, I find this all oddly reassuring. For a while I believed that Kerry would be like Carter, a president apparently determined to destroy the country. Now I can see that Kerry is nothing like Carter. Carter was an evil little man who despised his own country and believed all of its citizens were evil for being prosperous, but he had a set of convictions, quasi-Marxist convictions, most likely, but convictions nevertheless. And he stuck with those convictions straight through one of the worst four year terms the country has seen, determined to punish the people of the US for being optimistic, productive, competent, and hopeful in the face of so much misery elsewhere.* Kerry, on the other hand, is going to go wherever the wind blows and is unlikely to do anything with the office.
-------------------
*And then after he'd been tossed out on his ear by the election, he had the gall to come before the people in a TV address and try to put a guilt trip on us for declining to partake in another 4 years of punishment with him, as if he hadn't been hard enough with the whip, or something. But don't get me started on that.
And, by the way, forget about Kerry being able to win allies in Europe. The people who insulted the American people by giving Jimmy Carter the Nobel Prize hate the US far too much to ever be our allies except as a pretext for screwing us over.
Wednesday, May 05, 2004
Policy Manifesto
I tripped over this while doing some research. I found it to be astonishing:
So who put that manifesto forward? Was it the US Democrats, the British Labour Party, the Canadian Liberals, some European Social Democratic party? No. The manifesto is an extract from the (February 25th., 1920) 25 point plan of the National Socialist German Workers Party and was written by the leader of that party: Adolf Hitler. Most of the rest of the manifesto had to do with the Jews, of course, which made it all that much more attractive to German leftists, many of whom were very antisemetic.
Elsewhere, the author that reviews this bit notes that many of the world's states are increasingly turning toward fascism, which old Adoph himself described as a third way between capitalism and socialism that features the best elements of both.
Policy Manifesto:
All citizens of the State shall be equal as regards rights and duties.
The first duty of every citizen must be to work mentally or physically. The
activities of the individual may not clash with the interests of the whole, but
must proceed within the frame of the community and be for the general good.
Therefore we demand:
That all unearned income, and all income that does not arise from work, be abolished.
Since every war imposes on the people fearful sacrifices in life and property, all personal profit arising from the war must be regarded as a crime against the people. We therefore demand the total confiscation of all war profits whether in assets or material.
We demand the nationalization of businesses which have been organized into cartels.
We demand that all the profits from wholesale trade shall be shared out.
We demand extensive development of provision for old age.
We demand the creation and maintenance of a healthy middle-class, the immediate communalization of department stores which will be rented cheaply to small businessmen, and that preference shall be given to small businessmen for provision of supplies needed by the State, the provinces and municipalities.
We demand a land reform in accordance with our national requirements, and the enactment of a law to confiscate from the owners without compensation any land needed for the common purpose. The abolition of ground rents, and the prohibition of all speculation in land.
So who put that manifesto forward? Was it the US Democrats, the British Labour Party, the Canadian Liberals, some European Social Democratic party? No. The manifesto is an extract from the (February 25th., 1920) 25 point plan of the National Socialist German Workers Party and was written by the leader of that party: Adolf Hitler. Most of the rest of the manifesto had to do with the Jews, of course, which made it all that much more attractive to German leftists, many of whom were very antisemetic.
Elsewhere, the author that reviews this bit notes that many of the world's states are increasingly turning toward fascism, which old Adoph himself described as a third way between capitalism and socialism that features the best elements of both.
Sunday, January 04, 2004
The Biological Basis for Morality
Do we invent our moral absolutes in order to make society workable? Or are these enduring principles expressed to us by some transcendent or Godlike authority? Efforts to resolve this conundrum have perplexed, sometimes inflamed, our best minds for centuries, but the natural sciences are telling us more and more about the choices we make and our reasons for making them.
There is a tremendous amount of handwaving and vagueness on Wilson's part in this article when he goes about explaining how science is eventually going to explain religion and ethics. I for one am not inclined to give Wilson the benefit of the doubt. Philosophers have been struggling with this very question for over 90 years, and I'm quite certain that they would regard Wilson's effort here as glib and as lacking rigor.
Wilson concludes by saying that religious and ethical traditions will be subsumed under secular humanism, and in that he has already been proven wrong. I'd recommend the writings of Alasdair MacIntyre in that regard. I don't doubt that secular humanists will continue to attempt to explain religion and ethics, but MacIntyre explains why the attempt will never succeed.
In brief, efforts to explain ethics and theology with science will always founder because science itself is not completely rational and cannot be.
As is often the case for the secular thinker, Wilson seems unaware of the ways in which the very foundation of science is irrational. This is fatal to his argument because this irrational foundation rises up to choak off logic and reason whenever science intersects with the more sensitive aspects of human nature.
At one point in the article Wilson poses the question of what aliens from outer space would think of human behavior and concludes that they would regard ethics and theology as arising out of the biological imperatives of human nature. This might be correct, but until we have the aliens to consult on the matter we are stuck with human beings as the only sentient beings willing to try to understand ourselves, and that gives rise to unavoidable problems.
At several points in this article hints of the the pre-rational foundation of science, i.e., Wilson's overweening pride in his "completely rational" scientific approach, the same chauvinistic, tribalistic aspect of science as a community that he seems to look down upon in religions, threaten to break through and reveal science to be the all too human tradition that it is.
In other words, science will never be an adequate explanation for the workings of the human heart if for no other reason than human beings are not inclined to be emotionally satisfied with such explanations, and because emotions are bound to intrude on the science itself. (One need go no further than a critical reading of the current human psychology literature, as bound up in issues of political correctness as it is, to confirm that much.)
Science and theology are in some ways parallel traditions in modern cultures that will always be seen as the masters of their own domains. People can and will shift back and forth between them as the need arises, using that tradition which works best in the particular circumstance. Thus, science and engineering will continue to be used to design computers and jet airplanes, and ethics and theology will be evoked to settle questions of morality.
There is a tremendous amount of handwaving and vagueness on Wilson's part in this article when he goes about explaining how science is eventually going to explain religion and ethics. I for one am not inclined to give Wilson the benefit of the doubt. Philosophers have been struggling with this very question for over 90 years, and I'm quite certain that they would regard Wilson's effort here as glib and as lacking rigor.
Wilson concludes by saying that religious and ethical traditions will be subsumed under secular humanism, and in that he has already been proven wrong. I'd recommend the writings of Alasdair MacIntyre in that regard. I don't doubt that secular humanists will continue to attempt to explain religion and ethics, but MacIntyre explains why the attempt will never succeed.
In brief, efforts to explain ethics and theology with science will always founder because science itself is not completely rational and cannot be.
As is often the case for the secular thinker, Wilson seems unaware of the ways in which the very foundation of science is irrational. This is fatal to his argument because this irrational foundation rises up to choak off logic and reason whenever science intersects with the more sensitive aspects of human nature.
At one point in the article Wilson poses the question of what aliens from outer space would think of human behavior and concludes that they would regard ethics and theology as arising out of the biological imperatives of human nature. This might be correct, but until we have the aliens to consult on the matter we are stuck with human beings as the only sentient beings willing to try to understand ourselves, and that gives rise to unavoidable problems.
At several points in this article hints of the the pre-rational foundation of science, i.e., Wilson's overweening pride in his "completely rational" scientific approach, the same chauvinistic, tribalistic aspect of science as a community that he seems to look down upon in religions, threaten to break through and reveal science to be the all too human tradition that it is.
In other words, science will never be an adequate explanation for the workings of the human heart if for no other reason than human beings are not inclined to be emotionally satisfied with such explanations, and because emotions are bound to intrude on the science itself. (One need go no further than a critical reading of the current human psychology literature, as bound up in issues of political correctness as it is, to confirm that much.)
Science and theology are in some ways parallel traditions in modern cultures that will always be seen as the masters of their own domains. People can and will shift back and forth between them as the need arises, using that tradition which works best in the particular circumstance. Thus, science and engineering will continue to be used to design computers and jet airplanes, and ethics and theology will be evoked to settle questions of morality.
Sunday, December 21, 2003
Bush Was Right
Over the past five years, by turning over two suspects for trial, acknowledging its complicity in the Lockerbie bombing and paying compensation to victims' families, Libya finally managed to persuade the United Nations Security Council to lift the international sanctions that had shadowed its economy and its international reputation for more than a decade. Those sanctions were lifted in September. This page recommended lifting American sanctions as well, but President Bush left them in place pending further steps, most notably Libya's decision to end its unconventional weapons programs. It is now clear that he was right to do so. The added American pressure worked just as intended.
Friday, December 19, 2003
Why Iraqis Don't Trust the UN
For the first time, the U.N. Security Council heard some home truths about Iraq from a representative of the liberated country. Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari reminded the Security Council on Tuesday, "The United Nations as an organization failed to help rescue the Iraqi people from a murderous tyranny that lasted over 35 years. "And today we are unearthing thousands of victims in horrifying testament to that failure."
Wednesday, December 17, 2003
Bjorn Lomborg Vindicated -- Again
Bjorn Lomborg is an inconvenience for statist environmentalists, who have yet to produce any credible objections to the bulk of his work. Yes, he made a few minor mistakes, which he has acknowledged, but they do not amount to a repudiation of his main thesis -- that things are generally getting better for man and the planet, and will continue to do so.
That is why the weird decision of the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty has been deployed so often by his enemies. The committees found that Lomborg had been scientifically dishonest, but didn't mean to be, which is a pretty odd definition of dishonest, if you ask me. The committees did no independent investigation of the charges, instead relying almost exclusively on a series of articles in Scientific American by scientists whose conclusions Lomborg disagreed with.
The DCSD report was a hatchet job designed to keep Lomborg out of contention for a position as the head of the Environmental Research Institute in Denmark. His book has been a great blow to the environmentalist cult worldwide. The dishonesty and cynicism of the cult, of which the DCSD report is typical, has been apparent in their response to Lomborg as in nowhere else.
In the book, Lomborg argues that environmentalist claims that the world is running out of resources, that the air and water are getting more and more polluted, and that the earth cannot sustain human population growth are not supported by the evidence. In fact, most resources are nowhere near running out now or in the foreseeable future. Those resources such as oil that are likely to become less abundant in two or three generations can be replaced by technological advances, and human activity is unlikely to have that much of an effect on, for example, the atmosphere or the oceans.
Moreover, he argues that living conditions for peoples the world over have been steadily improving as a result of institution of public health, economic, and technology solutions such as improved communication, free trade, open markets, and sanitation. He points out how simple solutions such as providing a clean water supply to communities has a much greater effect on human wellbeing than any of the priorities of the environmentalists are likely to have. (IN fact, his emphasis on human well-being as a criteria for environmental policy rankles environmentalists to no end.) He regards evironmentalism inspired efforts such as the campaign to limit population growth or limit commerce and industrial activity (e.g., the Kyoto Protocol) as misguided and counterproductive.
That is why the weird decision of the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty has been deployed so often by his enemies. The committees found that Lomborg had been scientifically dishonest, but didn't mean to be, which is a pretty odd definition of dishonest, if you ask me. The committees did no independent investigation of the charges, instead relying almost exclusively on a series of articles in Scientific American by scientists whose conclusions Lomborg disagreed with.
Well, Bjorn's institute in Denmark today issued this press release:
Lomborg Decision Overturned by Danish Ministry of Science
The Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation has today repudiated findings by the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (DSCD) that Bjorn Lomborg's book "The Skeptical Environmentalist" was "objectively dishonest" or "clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice"
The Ministry, which is responsible for the DSCD, has today released a critical assessment of the Committee's January 6 ruling. The Ministry finds that the DCSD judgment was not backed up by documentation, and was "completely void of argumentation" for the claims of dishonesty and lack of good scientific practice.
The Ministry characterises the DCSD's treatment of the case as "dissatisfactory", "deserving criticism" and "emotional" and points out a number
of significant errors. The DSCD's verdict has consequently been remitted.
The DCSD report was a hatchet job designed to keep Lomborg out of contention for a position as the head of the Environmental Research Institute in Denmark. His book has been a great blow to the environmentalist cult worldwide. The dishonesty and cynicism of the cult, of which the DCSD report is typical, has been apparent in their response to Lomborg as in nowhere else.
In the book, Lomborg argues that environmentalist claims that the world is running out of resources, that the air and water are getting more and more polluted, and that the earth cannot sustain human population growth are not supported by the evidence. In fact, most resources are nowhere near running out now or in the foreseeable future. Those resources such as oil that are likely to become less abundant in two or three generations can be replaced by technological advances, and human activity is unlikely to have that much of an effect on, for example, the atmosphere or the oceans.
Moreover, he argues that living conditions for peoples the world over have been steadily improving as a result of institution of public health, economic, and technology solutions such as improved communication, free trade, open markets, and sanitation. He points out how simple solutions such as providing a clean water supply to communities has a much greater effect on human wellbeing than any of the priorities of the environmentalists are likely to have. (IN fact, his emphasis on human well-being as a criteria for environmental policy rankles environmentalists to no end.) He regards evironmentalism inspired efforts such as the campaign to limit population growth or limit commerce and industrial activity (e.g., the Kyoto Protocol) as misguided and counterproductive.
Sunday, December 14, 2003
Iraqi Reaction to the Capture of Saddam Hussein
From the Mesopotamian:
The Ululation of Gunfire again; you should all be here now. What fireworks! You should be here. The Baghdadis are expressing what they really think again. Can you hide this now CNN & others?...Just now the Miserables are beginning to bomb the streets, out of hatred and desperation. They will attack the people. I tell you, there should be no complacency. Unleash the people against them and NOW. ...Before this, I prayed the traditional prayers of thanksgiving. That I, and the Iraqi people should see this day! This, surely, is the mother of all days for us. The heroes of our valiant Pesh Mergas, and the heroes of the U.S. Fourth division have done it. Now is the time to unleash the Iraqi Counter Terror; now is the time to go for the kill. Let us go after them. Don't lose this moment. They want to recant and live in equality with the people? they have a chance - otherwise they will have to go. I am too overwhelmed with emotion to write coherently; please excuse me. The foul mouths of the enemies of our people everywhere and the neighboring vultures and hyenas be stuffed with dirt; we will come after you; your time will come.
Long live the great alliance of Mesopotamia and the United States of America and her allies. Now is the time, now is the time; Do not delay; unleash the Counter Terror.
God Bless Iraq; God Bless America; God bless the Allies
Captured!
Saddam Hussein has been captured literally hiding in a hole near his home town. Bearded and disheveled, he put up no fight and admitted his identity when captured. Reports are that he has been cooperative and talkative.
This is a signal event in the war on terrorism, the result of the admirable and excellent work of a dedicated, tenacious, and courageous US military, and the result of a bold policy advanced by President George W. Bush at tremendous political risk both to himself and his party.
The hope is that with Saddam's capture the situation in Iraq will further stablize and allow for the transfer of power to a more democratic Iraqi government at a much earlier date than otherwise would have been possible. Ultimately, the peace and security of this entire region of the world should be greatly improved. Time will tell if these hopes are realized.
Monday, December 01, 2003
God on the Quad
The Quad at Harvard University, that is.
New England's liberal college campuses have become fertile ground for the evangelical movement, which is attracting students in record numbers.
As an agnostic, I'm unable to appreciate the benefits of formal religious faith. However, I've always had a great deal of respect for religious beliefs, and I recognise the importance of these beliefs and of the rich symbolism of formal religions for the vast majority of people the world over. Unlike most atheists, I don't regard my inability to believe as being indicative of superiority on my part in any way.
Here the best and brightest student minds in America still make room in their lives for formal religious beliefs and apparently see no contradiction.
My theory is that spirituality is an essential human characteristic, present in all cultures and at all times in history. This is why it keeps springing up in renewed forms even in places where it seems to have been long absent and will often be expressed in non-traditional forms if traditional forms are suppressed.
Everyone has a spiritual outlet of some kind, and for those who eschew formal religions this outlet is often an ideology that entrains all of the emotionality and irrationality of any spiritual belief system. Channeled in this way spirituality can be destructive and counterproductive in a way and magnitude that formal religions never have been. One need look no further than the totalitarian states created by leftists for an example of this principle. For all the tens of thousands of people killed in the Inquisition, for example, it can't hold a candle to the tens of millions slaughtered and starved to death in the previous century by atheistic Communist zealots.
Saturday, November 22, 2003
Marriage is Dead, Get Over It
Brooks in the New York Times promotes marriage that is something that is good for everyone. He regards it as a way to promote long term relationships, which begs the question of why the institution of marriage is needed to promote relationships when there is nothing about the institution that enforces that commitment.
Brooks' notion of marriage is based on what he thinks marriage ought to be, not what it is.
These days, people will stay together if they are "committed" to each other. When they get tired of that "commitment", for whatever reason or for no reason, they will cast it aside, marriage or not.
So, I ask, what is the point? Marriage is an institution that is no longer worth defending.
Conservatives lost the battle on marriage many many years ago. There is no point in kvetching about the mop up operations.
Friday, November 21, 2003
How Noam Chomsky Thinks
And that's the way Chomsky does it. He leaves stuff out. He relies on the fact that his supporters don't know, don't care, or are too lazy to read up on history for themselves, and the things he leaves out are all important details that would totally change the meaning of his accounts. It is a dishonest way to write history, but it is a tactic he must use because the truth almost never supports his thesis.
This is an interesting snippet about Chomsky because it puts Chomsky's whole modus operandi in a nutshell:
The dust jacket [of Chomsky's book] bears the legend, which one can't be around a Chomsky fan for long without hearing:
"Arguably the most important intellectual alive" - The New York Times
This very old quotation from the newspaper of record is in fact truncated. The full quotation reads as follows:
"Arguably the most important intellectual alive, how can he write such nonsense about international affairs and foreign policy?
I've added the emphasis, because I think you will agree that the elision of the italicised passage does subtly change the meaning of the sentence.
And that's the way Chomsky does it. He leaves stuff out. He relies on the fact that his supporters don't know, don't care, or are too lazy to read up on history for themselves, and the things he leaves out are all important details that would totally change the meaning of his accounts. It is a dishonest way to write history, but it is a tactic he must use because the truth almost never supports his thesis.
Friday, October 31, 2003
Schiavo Case
Some days I'm embarrassed to be associated with conservatives, and the Schiavo case brings up one of those instances.
Terri Schiavo is the woman in a permanent vegetative state over whom the controversy is raging concerning whether or not she can be allowed to die.
It was never a question of whether or not Schiavo is aware of what's going on. It was never a case of whether her quality of life is good enough. It was never a case of what the family wanted, or what her husband wanted, or what the courts wanted, or what the public wanted. It all came down to just one question: What does she want?
Because the law has always found that all of us have the right to refuse medical treatment if we don't want it. And that includes even things like feeding and watering. We have that right, the right to refuse care, and no one should be allowed to take that away from us as long as that truely is our wish. We have that right without regard to what anyone else thinks of our quality of life.
I don't know of a more bedrock solid conservative principle that that -- the principle of personal sovereignty and autonomy.
Since she is not able to tell us what she wants herself we've got to rely on other people to tell us what she, as a person, wants based on what they know about her.
Schiavo's husband has been consistent for 13 years in saying that his wife never would have wanted to be kept alive this way. The courts have gone through hours and hours of deliberation and testimony, and the courts decided that it was indeed true that she would want to refuse treatment in this situation that she's in. Perhaps more than anything else, they agreed with that because it is such a reasonable decision.
You can argue now about whether it's appropriate for the husband to be "making this decision". You can smear him and claim that he's doing it for selfish reasons. But remember that he was never really relied upon by the courts to make any such decision. What he did was tell the doctors and the courts what he thought she wanted, and the courts decided that he was correct about that after carefully weighing all the facts including any facts that would indicate a conflict of interest on his part. The courts didn't decided this on a whim or out of a sense of guilt based on their own personal experience, but based on the facts of her life and after weighing a lot of other testimony from other people who knew her prior to her illness as well.
I suspect that her parents just can't stand to see her die. They have contested the idea that their daughter would want to die in this situation, but the courts have concluded that they are mistaken about that. More than anything it has become a contest of wills between them on one side and the husband and the courts on the other. They have fought for custody and lost, they have fought to overturn the court's decisions about her care and lost. So these parents have gone complaining to everyone who will listen.
And so now the idiot talk radio people and the idiots in the Florida legislature and that idiot Jeb Bush have waded into the matter and destroyed the results of what is probably hundreds of hours of careful and thoughtful deliberation made in good faith. They have taken it upon themselves to take any vestige of personal autonomy and dignity away from her. I can forgive radio jocks for being stupid enough to be caught up in this, but Bush and the Lesgislature ought to know better.
In a since it doesn't matter because they are not really dealing with a person in the body of this woman. I've seen a number of people in her situation, and, believe me, she's not really there anymore. There is not enough of a brain left to process any information. There is no perception. It's just a collection of reflexes. I don't care what people think they see on the videos. The lights are on, people, and their ain't nobody home. There's no quality of life there because there's really no life. There's no one there to feel pain or anything else.
If the Florida legislature wants to keep this vegetable alive out of a ghoulish desire to pander to faux populists and assuage their mistaken sense of morality, then fine. Fine, fine, fine.
I just hope to God that they don't treat me this way if I end up in her condition, with my pathetic, mindless body as their warm trophy.
He Told Us It Would Be Easy
Then there's this:
That was February 26, before the war. This was on April 15:
This was a day later:
And there is a lot more along these lines if anyone cares to look it up.
...whine the Democrats.
The most recent lie from Democrats is that the President led the American public to believe that the post-war reconstruction of Iraq would be easy, he never anticipated these problems, and can only blame himself for not lowering expectations. This is what he actually said:
We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We're bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous. We're pursuing and finding leaders of the old regime, who will be held to account for their crimes. We've begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated. We're helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools. And we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq as they establish a government of, by, and for the Iraqi people. The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done.
Then there's this:
The work ahead is demanding. It will be difficult to help freedom take hold in a country that has known three decades of dictatorship, secret police, internal divisions, and war. It will be difficult to cultivate liberty and peace in the Middle East, after so many generations of strife. Yet, the security of our nation and the hope of millions depend on us, and Americans do not turn away from duties because they are hard. We have met great tests in other times, and we will meet the tests of our time.
That was February 26, before the war. This was on April 15:
Our victory in Iraq is certain, but it is not complete. Centralized power of the dictator has ended -- yet, in parts of Iraq, desperate and dangerous elements remain. Forces of our coalition will engage these enemies until they surrender or until they're destroyed. We have waged this war with determination and with clarity of purpose. And we will see it through until the job is done. As we press on to liberate every corner of Iraq, we are beginning the difficult work of helping Iraqis to build a free and stable country.
This was a day later:
American and coalition forces still face serious risks in Iraq. Scattered enemy is still capable of doing harm to our forces and to the innocent. But we'll stay focused. We will finish what we've begun. We will press on until our mission is finished and victory is complete… With all the hardships of this transition, the lives of the Iraqi people will be better than anything they have known for generations. The journey from a totalitarian, brutal dictatorship to a free society is not easy. It will take time to build the institutions of democracy and the habits of freedom.
And there is a lot more along these lines if anyone cares to look it up.
Party Line
A really excellent opinion piece in The New Republic about Democratic opposition to the reconstruction in Iraq, which, the author contends, is purely a manifestation of party politics and makes no sense at all either from the standpoint of national interests or the standpoint of basic Democratic/liberal party values.
He points out that the most recent contention on the part of the Democrats, that the Bush administration does not have a plan for the reconstruction, is simply a politically inspired lie:
Whatever its earlier blunders, the Bush administration now clearly does have a plan to reconstruct Iraq. Its aid request specifies in excruciating detail how the United States will rebuild different sectors of Iraqi society. And, on the day Edwards and Kerry voted no, the United States won U.N. backing for a plan under which Iraq will write a constitution and then hold elections in 2004. But that's the whole point: On one of the key national security votes of the post-September 11 era, policy barely mattered at all. And it's not likely to anytime soon.
Saturday, September 13, 2003
The Quasi-Religious in Political Discourse
As the debates over the War and the economy rage on over the internet, the accusation often raised is that people have made a religious belief system out of their politics. Conservatives are often accused of having a cult-like belief in the free market. Leftists, of course, have turned their entire political system into a quasi-religious belief system that defies or denies quite a bit if reality. The postmodernists tacit agreement is apparently that only the true believers can understand; having denied all basis for truth one must be a leftist in order to know the truth, a truth that, to the leftist, is left unspoken and therefore unchallenged.
In the context of such debates most of the time "religious" means "deeply held, pre-rational beliefs with great emotional appeal."
All of us of can be said to be guilty of having such beliefs. Indeed, it might be argued that we need to have such beliefs as a necessary requirment for emotional stablity. (The quesition of what happens when people apparently have no such beliefs is the topic for another essay, but suffice to say that they are fairly dysfunctional.)
It's usually easy to spot these beliefs even in people who regard themselves as free of them. For example, ask the average secular modernist liberal to defend the rationality of egalitarianism.
Where it gets creepy is when people start denying that they are arguing out of such a basis when they clearly are; i.e., when they are clearly closing their eyes to reality in an untoward fashion in order to hang on to emotionally appealing core beliefs.
And, of course, there is no arguing with such people. There is no point in a dialogue unless it is to sway the undecided bystanders.
Thursday, August 28, 2003
Once More Into the Fray for Bjorn Lomborg
Bjorn Lomborg, author of the Skeptical Environmentalist, has been the object of a number of ad homenim attacks since the publication of his book.
There was the trashing of his work in Scientific American, which backfired badly against Scientific American:
As Philip Stott, a distinguished emeritus professor of biogeography at the University of London put it at the time, "I have been involved in the editing of scientific journals for over 15 years, and I could never conceive of treating an author in the manner that the Scientific American has dealt with Dr. Lomborg. …
"Not only did the magazine run an editorial criticizing Dr. Lomborg, it gave space to four known environmentalists to write separate articles attacking him with no balancing articles whatsoever from senior scientists who are likely to support Dr. Lomborg's critique. Again, I have never heard the like. In a so-called scientific journal, such a course of action beggars belief."
Then there was the creation of an ad hoc "committee on scientific dishonesty", created especially to attack Lomborg, that issued a report accusing him of dishonesty. This also backfired as hundreds of Danish scientists closed ranks with Lomborg and defended the honesty of his work.
Now we have one, last desperate salvo by the Green Cult against Lomberg.
But his opponents never seem to learn. So this week another round of Lomborg bashing begins. But what this week's Danish panel, the DCSD, Scientific American and others who perpetuate the sustained intellectual pie-throwing campaign against Lomborg can't seem to come to terms with is a much bigger problem on their hands. The long-held convictions of the environmental movement are crumbling under withering scrutiny from independent scientists and academics who refuse to kowtow to green orthodoxy and pressure.
Thursday, August 07, 2003
More on The Da Vinci Code
From a reviewer writing for amazon.com:
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown is a gripping mystery novel. The story moves on four fronts: the hero and heroine, the head of a Roman Catholic organization, the chief inspector of the French police and a fanatical murderer. Like checkers on a checkerboard the chapters move these pieces of the story in turn until they all reach home row at the end. The author is able to maintain suspense throughout the story so that it has momentum to the very last page, not letting the mystery completely dissolve until the end. It is not the nature of this book to probe deeply into the human character, the nature of reality or to generate beautiful prose. It reads like a movie script, al la Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The author uses two characters as experts on everything, especially Christianity and some of its historical struggles. Because the book is fiction it is able to build its own picture of Christianity and the church without regard to historical accuracy. It does convey a patronizing attitude toward the church and its faith, an attitude common place now and throughout the history of the church.
Theirs is an old scenario: Jesus was a great man whose movement got hijacked by powerful people in Roman society and transformed into a secular power. Their version adds the proposition that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and the two produced children. This story line sets up a classic mystery novel struggle between an evil titan and a heroic minority replete with centuries of intrigue and violence, i.e. Luke Skywalker and the Federation. This is all great fun in a novel, but should not be confused with the truth.
Proposing that Jesus was married and had children is just another way of saying he wasn't the one proclaimed by the Christian faith, that he was a man in the flow of history not an intersect between God and history. Tying this idea in with the worship of a female goddess adds mystery and tension to the story and taps into the energy of the modern struggle between the sexes and society's effort to harness the sex drive.
Genuine historians that are anti-Christian don't claim that Rome hijacked the Christian movement, but rather that the Christian movement hijacked Rome. So even though the church was changed by its being adopted as the state religion, and even though its secular power led to terrible corruption, it's first three hundred years laid down the fundamental message. Constantine did not. What he did do was demand that the church settle its message so he could have a coherent religion to authorize.
The story line of this book elevates the divine female as if this were a breath of fresh air in an oppressive male-dominant Christian society. The divine female is nothing more than the ancient worship of sex. It is as commonplace as Hustler magazine. The worship of Venus three thousand years ago is the same impulse that drives the advertising and entertainment industry today. Just as commerce is dependent on sex today, production was linked to procreation then. If you could get the male and female gods to mate (so they reasoned), you could produce human, animal and vegetable crops on the earthly plane, i.e. wealth.
Christianity was born into a male-dominated culture. It didn't create it. The church has deviated from its earliest affirmation of the equality of male and female ("in Christ there is neither male nor female" -- the apostle Paul, 60 AD.) God's voice in the Bible never admits to being male or female. When Moses asks for God's identity, he gets "I am who I am."
The book's experts are fiction and so is their expertise. Solomon's temple, for instance, was destroyed long before Mary Magdalene came along. We know little about it and certainly don't know what its columns looked like. It was the second temple, the one build by Herod the Great that she would have seen. The holy of holies was not under ground but rather stood at the center of temple mount. She couldn't have gotten in it much less under it, dead or alive. The Crusades were a silly business that brought back nothing of historical value except the knowledge of a Muslim culture more advanced than the European culture. The Crusaders were completely ignorant of the land they conquered. The local people neither new nor cared where the bones of Mary Magdalene might be. They did know they could sell the Crusaders anything with the right story. So the knights credulously or greedily brought back relics purported to be fragments of the cross, the hair of John the Baptist and so on. The grail may have had a forged artifact initially or may have just been a story brought back without the souvenir.
My expertise doesn't extend to all the areas the "experts" in the book claim, but if their errors in fact are consistent with the ones I can pick out without research, I presume that it is all fiction and should be taken as such.
It is a fun book that is irrelevant to the serious subjects of Christian faith, sexuality and hope for a better world.
Goddess Craze Gone Goofy
My teenage son gave me a copy of Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" for my birthday. This is a book that is apparently popular among the anti-Christian idiotarians.
It's not hard to see why the left wingers love Brown's book since it is simply bursting with the kind of silly conspiracy theories that get their motors running these days. Opus Dei, Priory of Sion, Knights of Templar, The Brotherhood, Holy Grail, you name it. Moreover, it's sneering attitude toward Christianity and especially toward the Catholic Church, would warm the heart of any Marxist.
As a mystery novel it's a pretty good read, and interesting and informative in its way. But, in addition, Brown's book is becoming the bible for Ya-Ya sisterhoods. This is because the book promotes the idea that modern western religion is part of a male conspiracy to keep women down by tossing out the Mother Goddess allegedly worshiped by early man and demonizing women.
This interpretation of history is, of course, a gross oversimplification, not to mention in many ways a distortion. But what else is new? Is any honest history being written anywhere anymore, let alone in a mystery novel? History must bow to the zeitgeist.
Goddess book clubs, goddess hiking troops and goddess support groups already abound. Any time three or more women gather these days, the goddess word is likely to bubble up.
...If you type in "goddess" on Amazon, 1,302 entries pop up, including diet books and tarot card guides, as well as scholarly works on reclaiming the sacred feminine, invocations and rituals. Google "goddess" and you get 2,430,000 entries, a review of which might lead us to reasonably conclude the following:
Oogedy-boogedy.
It shouldn't surprise anyone that the culture that made the feminist gynecological encyclopedia "Our Bodies, Ourselves" a coffee table book - followed by the riveting scene of women discovering themselves by squatting over mirrors in "Fried Green Tomatoes" - inevitably would morph into the self-absorbed, self-worshiping goddess movement.
Fast forwarding from "I am woman, hear me roar" to "I am goddess, back off Bubba," the goddess movement is a logical extension of the narcissistic self-esteem movement.
The central secret of the plot of Brown's book is taken from a book Holy Blood Holy Grail which promotes the idea that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were "married" and that Mary was pregnant at the time of Jesus' cruxifician. Jesus' descendants, moreover, are still supposedly alive and protected as the Merovingians, an old French royal family.
However, this story is a hoax which was perpetrated by Pierre Plantard, a notorious French anti-semite and radical right winger, in the late 1950's. The purpose of this hoax was apparently self promotion since Plantard claimed to be the Merovingian pretender to the French throne.
Wednesday, July 30, 2003
Quote of the Month
"This time I think the Americans are serious. Bush is not like Clinton. I think this is the end." - Uday Hussein, Saddam's son, in early April, according to an associate.
Monday, July 28, 2003
Not In Their Name
In the Sunday book pages of the Strib was an article about the women of Afghanistan. It was discussing the new-found freedoms of women in the post-Taliban society, about girls queuing for school after years of oppression. Quote: “No matter what one's political misgivings about the war might be, the sight of those girls was a thrilling shock.”
That sentence stuck in my head, and made me think back to October 01, to all the discontent over the Afghan campaign. We've forgotten what that was like - the marches in Europe, the predictions of mass casualties, the accusations of empire-building, how it was all about (cue Twilight Zone theme) an oil pipeline, how it would become a quagmire, how it was a quagmire, how we should have used international law to bring OBL to justice. It was the dress rehearsal for Iraq. The same blind sputtering fury; the same protests with Bush = Hitler posters and giant mocking puppets; the same inability to accept that a byproduct of the campaign would be a freer society for the very people the protesters supposedly cared about.
Any mass executions at the Kabul soccer stadium recently? No?
Wonder why.
No thanks to the people who purport to care, that's for sure. Not in their name, no.
There Is No God? So What?
[An atheist, regarding the existance of God:] There ain't no such thing, any the amount of time you spend "worshipping" and praying and sending money to him is a complete waste of your time and effort.
On the contrary, even if there is no God then the effort, time and money spend in devotion to God or Gods is not wasted. It fulfills an important human need, and all people need to acknowledge and have some respect for that demonstrably universal and immutable aspect of human nature, including the need for spirituality in their own lives.
Why must this aspect of human nature be acknowledged? Because if one form of its expression is stamped out or suppressed then it will just surface in another way, perhaps in a way that is more irrational and counterproductive.
One example of this is that liberals who say that they are atheists usually have an irrational quasi-religious political idealism that makes dialogue and compromise impossible, rendering society and political life more unstable, more prone to extremes.
Friday, July 25, 2003
James Morrow Writes:
But this Vietnam analogy, recently taken up by the global media after months of bleating by the anti-war, anti-Bush Left, starts to fall apart very quickly under scrutiny. The news that Saddam Hussein's two sons, the much-loathed Uday and Qusay, were killed in a firefight yesterday with US forces only further shows the bankruptcy of this already shoddy argument. Indeed, with 34 of the 55 most-wanted Iraqis dead or in US custody, the US can be said to be slowly but surely winning the mop-up phase of the war in Iraq.
Those who continue to try to play the quagmire card should look at, and recall, the facts. US involvement in Vietnam lasted a decade and cost more than 50,000 US lives. So far, it has been barely four months since US troops first crossed into Iraq, and since the end of major combat on May 2, just 33 US soldiers have been killed by the so-called "Iraqi resistance".
While every soldier's death is tragic (and it is touching to see so many on the Left suddenly concerned about the welfare of American men and women in uniform), it doesn't take a Stephen Hawking to figure out that these losses are nothing like those inflicted by the Vietcong.
Indeed
Thursday, July 24, 2003
Fifth Column?
Just a little sample of how some leftists think these days:
Doesn't a part of you wish that Queasy and Duh-day [Hussein] were alive? I'll admit they're scum and rightfully so, but anything that lands as even more humiliation on W's grotesque shrivelled face is that much the better.
It's sad, really, that as despicable as they are, Saddam's family seems to be the lesser of two evils when you compare them to the wretched little bastard occupying the White House and destroying America in the process...
Treasonous? Perhaps Ann Coulter was right all along. What is the Democratic candidate for the nomination going to have to say to appeal to scum like this?
You Mean Lying is Bad?
After years of defending Clinton, liberals love the piquant irony of calling Bush a liar. For 50 years liberals have called Republicans idiots, fascists, anti-Semites, racists, crooks, shredders of the Constitution and masterminds of Salvadoran death squads. Only recently have they added the epithet "liar." Even noted ethicist Al Franken has switched from calling conservatives "fat" to calling them "liars."
This is virgin territory for Democrats -- they never before viewed lying as a negative. Their last president was called "an unusually good liar" by a sitting Democratic senator. Their last vice president couldn't say "pass the salt" without claiming to have invented salt. Having only just discovered the intriguing new concept of being offended by lies, the Democrats are having a jolly old time calling Bush a liar. But they can't quite grasp the concept of a lie as connoting something that is -- at a minimum -- untrue.
No Chaos in Iraq
No, there is no chaos in Iraq. Things are going very well there, in fact. Here is a summary of the situation currently:
The entire south and north are impressively stable, and the center is getting better day-by-day. The public food distribution is up and running. There is no food crisis. I might point out we planned for a food crisis; fortunately, there isn't one. Hospitals nationwide are open. Doctors and nurses are at work. Medical supply convoys are escorted to and from the warehouses. We planned for a health crisis; there isn't one. Oil production has passed the 1 million barrels per day mark. We planned for the possibility of massive destruction of this resource of the Iraqi people; we didn't have to do it.
The school year has been salvaged. Schools nationwide have reopened and final exams are complete. There are local town councils in most major cities and major districts of Baghdad, and they are functioning free from Ba'athist influence.
Some quagmire.
Tuesday, July 08, 2003
Traditions of Knowledge
It seems to take a certain willingness to engage in double-think, and a desire to put one's faith before evidence. "Faith" is just an elaborate form of wishing. If it helps people handle their spiritual lives I don't have a problem with it, but when it's used as a starting point for knowledge, or as a filter on what knowledge is true, right, or appropriate, I don't respect it at all.
You can't avoid the problem. All traditions of human knowledge start with pre-rational concepts, including science.
And before you go off on the "science is just another form of faith" argument: first, scientists who simply accept what they are told by the scientific community aren't scientists. Second, all science is founded on the principle of verification and prediction. If you can't verify somebody else's results, or predict the same results from past behavior, your theory is inadequate. Creationism supplies neither of those things, so what good is it?
Creationism is rapidly becoming the straw man of the atheists.
Let's consider a more relevant and important point. If you accept the idea that human beings have certain inalienable rights, then where did you get that concept? You can't get it from science, which is indifferent to the values behind such ideals. You can only get it from human traditions of knowledge that are not completely rational and which include an important element of faith.
No one doubts the importance of such things as engineering or the efficacy of science in systematizing them.
Neither does anyone doubt the importance of such things as ethics and morality, and science is of no use where they are concerned.
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