Dateline: Hawaii, April 28, 1945.
Well into the third week of the invasion of Okinawa, congressional Democrats criticized the President for poor planning and execution of the invasion.
"The troops are bogged down in the southern part of the island, we haven't made any progress in days. How could this have happened?" said Theodore Kennedy, Mass. Democrat.
Other Democrats questioned the reasoning behind the decision to attack the island in the first place. "It makes no sense to attack this island, everyone knows the Japanese are on the mainland," said one congressional staffer. "The War in Okinawa has turned into a quagmire. We need to get the troops out and turn out attention to what's really important, like finding Tojo."
Democrats expressed their alarm at the magnitude of American casualty figures. "This is completely crazy," said one. "We are losing thousands in one day."
Other Democrats expressed doubt about the likelihood of winning against such an intractable and fanatical foe. "This war is unwinnable. We've lost dozens of ships to suicide rocket-bomb pilots, we can't possibly continue at this pace."
Some even insisted that the President had lied about the reasons for the invasion. "He said that we needed that island as a launching point for air attacks on the Japanese mainland, but we are already attacking the mainland from other air bases."
Meanwhile, reports of prisoner abuse continue to crop up from interviews of Japanese prisoners of war. "It is well known throughout the Japanese Empire that American soldiers rape and kill their women prisoners and eat the livers of Japanese children," a Red Cross representative reported.
In a related matter, for the forth week in a row Democrats demanded hearings into overcharging of the Government by Boeing for high altitude bombers. "Everone knows this war is nothing more that a scheme to enrich the President's friends," said an unnamed source.
Democrats also renewed their demands for disclosure regarding the super secret Manhatten Project. "Hundreds of millions of dollars have gone into a secret military project that we aren't even allowed to examine. As far as we can tell not one dime of that money has gone to anything practical for the war effort."
Friday, July 01, 2005
Thursday, June 30, 2005
Decline in International Terrorism
Except for certain parts of the Middle East, there has been a decline in international terrorism the world over since the invasion of Iraq.
http://www.tkb.org/Home.jsp
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
The Truth and Terri Schiavo's Brain Are Both Wrecked
You know, after the 2000 and 2004 elections I really had begun to think that it was the people on the left end of the political scale that habitually ginned up crises, distorted the facts, ignored established law in favor of their own emotional take on a given situation, constantly wanted to change the rules or ignored the rules to suit their own whims, and so on.
How totally un-cynical to think that way. I am embarrassed.
With the Terri Schiavo case I am forcefully reminded that right-wingers are capable of exactly the same sorts of things.
Ginning up a crisis? Ignoring ethical guidelines for the sake of emotionalism? Boy, you should hear some of these talk radio people hitting the emotional hot buttons or look at conservative online forums. That a person has the right to refuse any treatment has been established law for many years now, that a person's autonomy should not be violated is a conservative ideal, and yet they want to throw this out the window.
Refusing to face the truth? There is no therapy, there is no test, and there is nothing whatsoever that is going to make any difference in her condition. An MRI of her brain will tell us nothing that will do any good. She has been this way for fifteen years. The way she is now, however you want to describe it, is the way she'll be for the foreseeable future. That's just the fact of it whether some people want to face the truth or not. The possiblity of some sort of miraculous recovery is nill.
Distorting the issues? We are getting one red herring after another from the right-wingers on this matter. Whether or not Terry is actually in persistent vegetative state, whether or not she got an MRI of her brain, whether or not a miracle is possible, whether she got this or that type of therapy are all irrelevant. The only thing that has any relevance is what Terri would want to have done if she could tell us.
Unfairly smearing people? The way in which the husband has been smeared is despicable. He has been accused of neglecting Terri, of refusing to provide "necessary" treatment, of refusing to have "necessary" tests done, of wanting her dead for his own selfish reasons. All of these allegations have been shown to be false in the courts.
Refusing to abide by the rules? Disregard of due process? The whole issue of whether the husband is the one to tell us what her wishes would be given his current situation is relevant, but the court has considered that very matter carefully already. We ought to respect that process. The people who in good faith spent the hours actually going over all the evidence of her status and attendant issues have been denigrated by the idiotic, ill-informed second-guessing that some conservatives have been doing.
How totally un-cynical to think that way. I am embarrassed.
With the Terri Schiavo case I am forcefully reminded that right-wingers are capable of exactly the same sorts of things.
Ginning up a crisis? Ignoring ethical guidelines for the sake of emotionalism? Boy, you should hear some of these talk radio people hitting the emotional hot buttons or look at conservative online forums. That a person has the right to refuse any treatment has been established law for many years now, that a person's autonomy should not be violated is a conservative ideal, and yet they want to throw this out the window.
Refusing to face the truth? There is no therapy, there is no test, and there is nothing whatsoever that is going to make any difference in her condition. An MRI of her brain will tell us nothing that will do any good. She has been this way for fifteen years. The way she is now, however you want to describe it, is the way she'll be for the foreseeable future. That's just the fact of it whether some people want to face the truth or not. The possiblity of some sort of miraculous recovery is nill.
Distorting the issues? We are getting one red herring after another from the right-wingers on this matter. Whether or not Terry is actually in persistent vegetative state, whether or not she got an MRI of her brain, whether or not a miracle is possible, whether she got this or that type of therapy are all irrelevant. The only thing that has any relevance is what Terri would want to have done if she could tell us.
Unfairly smearing people? The way in which the husband has been smeared is despicable. He has been accused of neglecting Terri, of refusing to provide "necessary" treatment, of refusing to have "necessary" tests done, of wanting her dead for his own selfish reasons. All of these allegations have been shown to be false in the courts.
Refusing to abide by the rules? Disregard of due process? The whole issue of whether the husband is the one to tell us what her wishes would be given his current situation is relevant, but the court has considered that very matter carefully already. We ought to respect that process. The people who in good faith spent the hours actually going over all the evidence of her status and attendant issues have been denigrated by the idiotic, ill-informed second-guessing that some conservatives have been doing.
Bolton Tells It Like It Is
The UN is just a joke. Might as well have fun with it.
Like this:
"There is no such thing as the United Nations."
"If I were redoing the Security Council, I'd have one permanent member: the United States."
"It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law."
If you're going to play the oldest established permanent floating transnational crap game for laughs, might as well pick an act with plenty of material. What I love about Bolton, America's new ambassador to the U.N., is the sheer volume of "damaging" material.
Like this:
"There is no such thing as the United Nations."
"If I were redoing the Security Council, I'd have one permanent member: the United States."
"It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law."
...Sending Bolton to be U.N. ambassador is like . . . putting Sudan and Zimbabwe on the Human Rights Commission. Or letting Saddam's Iraq chair the U.N. Conference on Disarmament. Or sending a bunch of child-sex fiends to man U.N. operations in the Congo. And the Central African Republic. And Sierra Leone, and Burundi, Liberia, Haiti, Kosovo, and pretty much everywhere else.
All of which happened without the U.N. fetishists running around shrieking hysterically. Why should America be the only country not to enjoy an uproarious joke at the U.N.'s expense?
Judge in Schiavo Case Not Activist
No doubt a lot of people will be slamming this judge for being "activist" for not granting the Schindlers an injuction, but he in fact had no choice. He was just following the letter of the law in a straightforward manner just as conservatives have always said that judges should do.
The granting of an injunction hinged only on whether or not the Schindlers were likely to prevail on appeal. There was just nothing that supported that contention. All of their previous appeals to federal court has been turned down, and they provided nothing new to support a new appeal. In the hearing the judge was practically pleading with the Schindler's lawyer to come up with something that justified an injunction.
Conservatives have always said that they want judges to apply the law and not make it. But if judges just apply the law as written or established then they will unavoidably make rulings that even they don't like. It's only the activist judges who get to change the law to get the outcome they want.
The granting of an injunction hinged only on whether or not the Schindlers were likely to prevail on appeal. There was just nothing that supported that contention. All of their previous appeals to federal court has been turned down, and they provided nothing new to support a new appeal. In the hearing the judge was practically pleading with the Schindler's lawyer to come up with something that justified an injunction.
Conservatives have always said that they want judges to apply the law and not make it. But if judges just apply the law as written or established then they will unavoidably make rulings that even they don't like. It's only the activist judges who get to change the law to get the outcome they want.
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
The Cost of Care
We have been struggling in this country with the issue of rationing medical care for as long as I can remember. First it was restrictions on what traditional medical insurance would pay for. This was quickly eroded by lawsuits against insurance carriers. Then it was the gatekeeper concept for a while, and that was also eroded by patient dissatisfaction and by lawsuits. Restricting access to specialists, restricted formularies, etc. didn't work. And now we are pretty much back to the status quo ante, except that even more people can't afford medical insurance than ever before.
Having observed all of this my impression is that the only way to impose rationing is to do it across the board all at once, and the government will have to do it. The government is the only entity with enough power to make it stick. I don't think that we have the political will in this country to do that yet, and things will have to get much worse before we do.
This is not a perfect solution, of course, because the government will be susceptible to political pressure to inject nonsense and idiocy into the system. For example, there are categories of disease recognized by US government health entities that received recognition as real biological disease states only because the people who think they have those diseases, which are in fact most likely psychosomatic, have pressured the government into that position. Not because there is any actual evidence of an objective, biological abnormality.
The health care system of a certain Scandinavian country is at the verge of crisis over this sort of thing, in which a large proportion of the population is claiming disablity for having a disease that does not actually exist but that the system was politically forced to recognize.
We do have rationing in this country, make no mistake about it. And the rationing is of the form that poor people don't have access to the range of options and convenience of care that wealthier people do.
You might think that with medical insurance that you have access to the "best" care. It's not true. There are levels of care above you that you could only dream about, that only the very rich elites of this country can get. For example, if you need, say, a hemorrhoid removed you can use your company supplied insurance and go see a physician, get tests done 3 weeks later, surgery scheduled 6 weeks later, get kicked out of the hospital on the day of surgery and deal with any problems that arise between then and your next follow up visit yourself at home. If you can afford to forget the insurance you can fly somewhere and the whole thing will get done in 2 or 3 days, and nobody will rush you out of the door after surgery.
But don't worry, the care is more convienient and the doctors are more likely to humor you, but the rich are no healthier for it. Take a look at Michael Jackson's face if you doubt it.
Having been involved in the charity care end of the profession for many years I happen to think that the care provided by public hospitals is often the more rational because patients are generally not in a position to strong arm health care workers into providing unnecessary or extravagent care. Yet most of the time the care is quite adequate for the purpose of actually keeping people healthy, and because there is often more organization and more continuity those poor people generally get better care for chronic problems like hypertension and diabetes.
Having observed all of this my impression is that the only way to impose rationing is to do it across the board all at once, and the government will have to do it. The government is the only entity with enough power to make it stick. I don't think that we have the political will in this country to do that yet, and things will have to get much worse before we do.
This is not a perfect solution, of course, because the government will be susceptible to political pressure to inject nonsense and idiocy into the system. For example, there are categories of disease recognized by US government health entities that received recognition as real biological disease states only because the people who think they have those diseases, which are in fact most likely psychosomatic, have pressured the government into that position. Not because there is any actual evidence of an objective, biological abnormality.
The health care system of a certain Scandinavian country is at the verge of crisis over this sort of thing, in which a large proportion of the population is claiming disablity for having a disease that does not actually exist but that the system was politically forced to recognize.
We do have rationing in this country, make no mistake about it. And the rationing is of the form that poor people don't have access to the range of options and convenience of care that wealthier people do.
You might think that with medical insurance that you have access to the "best" care. It's not true. There are levels of care above you that you could only dream about, that only the very rich elites of this country can get. For example, if you need, say, a hemorrhoid removed you can use your company supplied insurance and go see a physician, get tests done 3 weeks later, surgery scheduled 6 weeks later, get kicked out of the hospital on the day of surgery and deal with any problems that arise between then and your next follow up visit yourself at home. If you can afford to forget the insurance you can fly somewhere and the whole thing will get done in 2 or 3 days, and nobody will rush you out of the door after surgery.
But don't worry, the care is more convienient and the doctors are more likely to humor you, but the rich are no healthier for it. Take a look at Michael Jackson's face if you doubt it.
Having been involved in the charity care end of the profession for many years I happen to think that the care provided by public hospitals is often the more rational because patients are generally not in a position to strong arm health care workers into providing unnecessary or extravagent care. Yet most of the time the care is quite adequate for the purpose of actually keeping people healthy, and because there is often more organization and more continuity those poor people generally get better care for chronic problems like hypertension and diabetes.
Monday, March 14, 2005
The Farm Is Where Socialism Dies
Everyone is familiar with George Orwell's novel "Animal Farm" wherein the faults of Marxist-Leninism were explored using barn-yard animal characters. But there is little recognition of the extent to which it is on the farms of a nation that the practice of a centrally controlled economy and collectivism is shown to be unworkable.
From the very beginning of the socialist experiment in Russia the farms were problematic. Lenin personally felt it necessary to demand that peasant farmers be summarily executed because they were refusing to fall in line with the communist program. Stalin starved rural peoples to death in order to avoid the trouble they were causing with his control of the economy.
It's a phenomenon that illustrates the way in which leftist ideas have sprung not from the experience of ordinary country people, who have learned through experience the lessons of human nature, the necessity of private property, and the necessity of a free market, but from the elite urban intellectuals, who have been seperated from nature and rural life all of their lives, often for several generations.
It is, in fact, only from the minds of people who have no experience in practical matters, unavoidable in rural life, that ideas like collectivism and central economic control could possibly originate. Only from the mind of people like Marx, unable to do anything but research and write in a library, supported by rich fools like Engels, could the Communist Manifesto spring.
Every farmer knows the importance of establishing boundaries between his land and the land of his neighbors and enforcing those boundaries and knows what will happen if this is neglected, human nature being what it is. Every farmer knows what happens to land on which the flocks of several farmers graze, human nature being what it is. Every farmer knows and can deal in the market and knows the importance of being able to quickly sell his produce in a fair market and of having the flexibility to respond to changing conditions of the weather, the market, insect threats, and other factors. Every farmer knows what happens to people who are denied the benefits of their own production, who have no stake in their work on in the land.
Only the urban intellectual is unaware of the importance of these things or could possibly even imagine that command control of all of these things or collective property is possible. Only an intellectual completely ignorant of basic human nature could think a thing like the "new Soviet man", unconcerned about private property and working only for the common good, could ever arise.
It was only with the most brutal force that farmers in the Soviet Union were made to conform to central control. And the farmers never, ever gave up the market, which continued in an illicit form for seventy years. What little land they were able to call their own they used to the utmost, and it was said that the little gardens tended by farmers supposedly for their own use outproduced all the other land that was held in common.
From the very beginning of the socialist experiment in Russia the farms were problematic. Lenin personally felt it necessary to demand that peasant farmers be summarily executed because they were refusing to fall in line with the communist program. Stalin starved rural peoples to death in order to avoid the trouble they were causing with his control of the economy.
It's a phenomenon that illustrates the way in which leftist ideas have sprung not from the experience of ordinary country people, who have learned through experience the lessons of human nature, the necessity of private property, and the necessity of a free market, but from the elite urban intellectuals, who have been seperated from nature and rural life all of their lives, often for several generations.
It is, in fact, only from the minds of people who have no experience in practical matters, unavoidable in rural life, that ideas like collectivism and central economic control could possibly originate. Only from the mind of people like Marx, unable to do anything but research and write in a library, supported by rich fools like Engels, could the Communist Manifesto spring.
Every farmer knows the importance of establishing boundaries between his land and the land of his neighbors and enforcing those boundaries and knows what will happen if this is neglected, human nature being what it is. Every farmer knows what happens to land on which the flocks of several farmers graze, human nature being what it is. Every farmer knows and can deal in the market and knows the importance of being able to quickly sell his produce in a fair market and of having the flexibility to respond to changing conditions of the weather, the market, insect threats, and other factors. Every farmer knows what happens to people who are denied the benefits of their own production, who have no stake in their work on in the land.
Only the urban intellectual is unaware of the importance of these things or could possibly even imagine that command control of all of these things or collective property is possible. Only an intellectual completely ignorant of basic human nature could think a thing like the "new Soviet man", unconcerned about private property and working only for the common good, could ever arise.
It was only with the most brutal force that farmers in the Soviet Union were made to conform to central control. And the farmers never, ever gave up the market, which continued in an illicit form for seventy years. What little land they were able to call their own they used to the utmost, and it was said that the little gardens tended by farmers supposedly for their own use outproduced all the other land that was held in common.
Bush, Clinton, and Pre-Packaged News
The Instapundit writes:
A LOT OF PEOPLE are noticing this story from the New York Times about prepackaged fake news from the Bush Administration. But if you read the whole thing, to coin a phrase, you come upon this passing acknowledgement:
Funny, but I don't remember much of a stink about it when it happened during the Clinton Administration.
The Instapundit article goes on to point out that a big proportion of the news stories we see in the papers and on TV were written by trade, industry, union, consumer, and other interest groups for that very purpose, i.e., to further their own agenda. It has become, more or less, a standard way of communicating with the public for any interest group, and a big part of an editor's job at a news organization consists simply of wholesaleing these outside sources of copy.
A paper's "slant" is increasingly determined by which of these sources of copy that they are willing to use. Thus, the New York Times, say, is loath to use anything produced by the Administration but will lap up anything cranked out by the DNC or anyone else in their leftist orbit. A large proportion of the left wing organizations out there exist for no other reason than to produce and send out these "press releases" which are in fact prepackaged stories that reporters can make their own simply by inserting their by-line at the top.
For example, if you see a story about a defective product on the market that is harming people you can almost bet that the story was mostly written by the group of lawyers who want to put together a legal action. For another example, many of the stories you see about global warming and the environment are mostly written by environmentalist groups pushing this agenda.
Thus, the idea that the Administration somehow violated the principles of an "independent" press is laughable. A Jeff Gannon type reporter in passing stories on from the Administration would be doing nothing more or less than exactly what other reporters do all of the time.
Given this background, one is inclined to wonder just where it is that the New York Times gets all this concern about the sanctity of the press. Rather than ask why the Bush or Clinton administrations do this it might be more to the point to ask why it is that the Administration alone from all interested parties should have this avenue of communication closed to them.
A LOT OF PEOPLE are noticing this story from the New York Times about prepackaged fake news from the Bush Administration. But if you read the whole thing, to coin a phrase, you come upon this passing acknowledgement:
The practice, which also occurred in the Clinton administration, is continuing despite President Bush's recent call for a clearer demarcation between journalism and government publicity efforts.
Funny, but I don't remember much of a stink about it when it happened during the Clinton Administration.
The Instapundit article goes on to point out that a big proportion of the news stories we see in the papers and on TV were written by trade, industry, union, consumer, and other interest groups for that very purpose, i.e., to further their own agenda. It has become, more or less, a standard way of communicating with the public for any interest group, and a big part of an editor's job at a news organization consists simply of wholesaleing these outside sources of copy.
A paper's "slant" is increasingly determined by which of these sources of copy that they are willing to use. Thus, the New York Times, say, is loath to use anything produced by the Administration but will lap up anything cranked out by the DNC or anyone else in their leftist orbit. A large proportion of the left wing organizations out there exist for no other reason than to produce and send out these "press releases" which are in fact prepackaged stories that reporters can make their own simply by inserting their by-line at the top.
For example, if you see a story about a defective product on the market that is harming people you can almost bet that the story was mostly written by the group of lawyers who want to put together a legal action. For another example, many of the stories you see about global warming and the environment are mostly written by environmentalist groups pushing this agenda.
Thus, the idea that the Administration somehow violated the principles of an "independent" press is laughable. A Jeff Gannon type reporter in passing stories on from the Administration would be doing nothing more or less than exactly what other reporters do all of the time.
Given this background, one is inclined to wonder just where it is that the New York Times gets all this concern about the sanctity of the press. Rather than ask why the Bush or Clinton administrations do this it might be more to the point to ask why it is that the Administration alone from all interested parties should have this avenue of communication closed to them.
Thursday, March 10, 2005
In the European Streets...
...They're not marching for Arab democracy:
Why are so many Westerners, living in mature democracies, ready to march against the toppling of a despot in Iraq but unwilling to take to the streets in support of the democratic movement in the Middle East?
Is it because many of those who will be marching in support of Saddam Hussein this month are the remnants of totalitarian groups in the West plus a variety of misinformed idealists and others blinded by anti-Americanism?
Or is it because they secretly believe that the Arabs do not deserve anything better than Saddam Hussein?
Those interested in the health of Western democracies would do well to ponder those questions.
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
Freedom? Why Europe Can't Be Bothered
Europe has pretty much given up on the whole undertaking [the idea of freedom and democracy] now: we tried it and it ended in the Terror. We went through our phase of proselytising democratic revolution with Bonaparte and look where that ended. Spreading freedom? All that amounts to is killing off one generation of autocrats and replacing them with another. Trust the people? They are just as likely to follow a fascist demagogue as to perpetuate the sacred principle of justice.
Better to make your cynical peace with the worst aspects of human nature than to pretend that free men will always choose good over evil. Much better to make a mutually profitable trade-off behind the scenes than to expose political decisions to the popular will. What evidence is there that the people actually know what is best for them? Most charitably, the European philosophy of government - shortly to be permanently installed under the EU constitution - is paternalistic. At worst, it is arrogant and authoritarian.
But whatever it is, it no longer has a belief in real democracy of the kind that Americans recognise - government of the people, by the people and for the people - at its heart.
Europe has traded liberty for security, democracy for reasurring bureaucratic control and over-regulation. European hatred of the US stems in good part from jealousy of American self-belief and from European shame over their lost ideals. To them, American talk about spreading freedom is a reproach.
Anyway, europeans have found something better than personal freedom. They have found the wealth one gets from spending nothing on national defense. So now they are not even fit to defend themselves or sort out problems in the own back yard like the Balkans. They have neither the will nor the military resources to help America spread freedom to anyone.
Better to make your cynical peace with the worst aspects of human nature than to pretend that free men will always choose good over evil. Much better to make a mutually profitable trade-off behind the scenes than to expose political decisions to the popular will. What evidence is there that the people actually know what is best for them? Most charitably, the European philosophy of government - shortly to be permanently installed under the EU constitution - is paternalistic. At worst, it is arrogant and authoritarian.
But whatever it is, it no longer has a belief in real democracy of the kind that Americans recognise - government of the people, by the people and for the people - at its heart.
Europe has traded liberty for security, democracy for reasurring bureaucratic control and over-regulation. European hatred of the US stems in good part from jealousy of American self-belief and from European shame over their lost ideals. To them, American talk about spreading freedom is a reproach.
Anyway, europeans have found something better than personal freedom. They have found the wealth one gets from spending nothing on national defense. So now they are not even fit to defend themselves or sort out problems in the own back yard like the Balkans. They have neither the will nor the military resources to help America spread freedom to anyone.
Hillary is a Lose-Lose for the Democrats
This author thinks that at the very time when Democrats need to be seriously rethinking their agenda that a Hillary candidacy for President would encourage them to dig their heels in and refuse to examine what has been going wrong for their party:
Mr. Clinton himself was, of course, re-elected. Otherwise, since his ascension, the Democrats have lost two Presidential races; lost control of the House of Representatives; lost control of the United States Senate; lost, on balance, more state legislatures and governorships than they have gained.
Granted, given all the variables—national trends, local idiosyncrasies, the giant sea change that was Sept. 11—it would be ridiculous to lay all this rubble entirely at the feet of the former President. But it is much more ridiculous to sculpt it, somehow, into an argument that America is longing for more of him.
Yet this is precisely the argument that whole swaths of Democrats will make....
Court Backs Three Oxen Dowries
WASHINGTON, D.C.: In a far-reaching decision that will likely create complicated consequences for the American livestock and wedding-planning industries, the Supreme Court this morning ruled 5-4 that all US marriage dowries "must include three non-diseased oxen."
Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy cited "the weight of the expansive penumbra surrounding the historically emerging and prevailing opinions of tribal shamans from Lesotho to Myanamar" in issuing the historic ruling in American Cattleman Association vs. Modern Bride, Helverson, et al.
In a scathing and sometimes caustic dissent, Judge Antonin Scalia wrote that "Holy. Freakin'. Sh*t."
In keeping with the desire of the court to consider international opinion regarding the law, the court also found:
Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy cited "the weight of the expansive penumbra surrounding the historically emerging and prevailing opinions of tribal shamans from Lesotho to Myanamar" in issuing the historic ruling in American Cattleman Association vs. Modern Bride, Helverson, et al.
In a scathing and sometimes caustic dissent, Judge Antonin Scalia wrote that "Holy. Freakin'. Sh*t."
In keeping with the desire of the court to consider international opinion regarding the law, the court also found:
=That signage on U.S. Interstate Highways must be translated to both French and Flemish by 2007.
=That starting Friday, motorists may drive on either side of American roads.
=That prevailing Nepalese-Canadian-Yemeni standards should be considered in opening the way for legalized stonings at arranged gay marriages.
=That although it reversed death sentences for prisoners convicted of crimes committed while juveniles, states may voluntarily terminate prisoners as "extremely late-term abortions" under Roe v. Wade.
=That a previous decision by a European panel should be overturned, and Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg should be declared winner of the 2003 Eurovision Song Contest.
=That, considering the tradition of international courts of ignoring US court rulings, this ruling itself was unconstitutional.
It's Time to Praise Wolfowitz
Let us now praise Paul Wolfowitz. Let us now take another look at the man who has pursued - longer and more forcefully than almost anyone else - the supposedly utopian notion that people across the Muslim world might actually hunger for freedom.
Let us look again at the man who's been vilified by Michael Moore and the rest of the infantile left, who's been condescended to by the people who consider themselves foreign policy grown-ups, and who has become the focus of much anti-Semitism in the world today - the center of a zillion Zionist conspiracy theories, and a hundred zillion clever-Jew-behind-the-scenes calumnies.
...it's time to step back and observe that over the course of his long career - in the Philippines, in Indonesia, in Central and Eastern Europe, and now in the Middle East - Wolfowitz has always been an ardent champion of freedom.
Let us look again at the man who's been vilified by Michael Moore and the rest of the infantile left, who's been condescended to by the people who consider themselves foreign policy grown-ups, and who has become the focus of much anti-Semitism in the world today - the center of a zillion Zionist conspiracy theories, and a hundred zillion clever-Jew-behind-the-scenes calumnies.
...it's time to step back and observe that over the course of his long career - in the Philippines, in Indonesia, in Central and Eastern Europe, and now in the Middle East - Wolfowitz has always been an ardent champion of freedom.
Vietnam the Next Iraq?
Perhaps soon the "lessons of history" from the War in Vietnam that the left attempts to apply to Iraq and every other conflict that the US has become involved in since the '70's won't even apply that well to Vietnam any more.
This story details a conversation with Dr. Que, a pro-democracy dissident in Vietnam that the authorities there, under international pressure, have recently released from prison.
This story details a conversation with Dr. Que, a pro-democracy dissident in Vietnam that the authorities there, under international pressure, have recently released from prison.
Dr. Que does not have access to the daily diet of news that feeds the free world. But given the feats of modern technology to spread information, he knows enough about what is now happening in the Middle East so that he wished to share his views on how America's intervention in Iraq is like the war in Vietnam, and how it isn't. The similarity, he says, "is the same fighting spirit for freedom." The difference, he adds, is that in the fight for freedom, the side America is on "will triumph this time."
Why?
"The world is changing," says Dr. Que. "There are more opportunities than ever."
He is right, and if the world is changing, it is because the U.S. is hardly alone in prizing freedom.
Sunday, February 27, 2005
The Angst and Anger of the Left
This sums up the situation better than I ever could:
The Republican Party was in this situation not that long ago. They came out of it, but not before losing some of the old guard and modifying their ideas and their agenda.
If you are puzzled by the reference to Susan Estrich, that is explained in this link:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon_02_24_05hm.html
This is what the Left has left. They were enraged by the "stolen election" of 2000. Many of 'em opposed war in Afghanistan. Lost. They campaigned hard for the Democrats in 2002. Lost. Opposed war in Iraq. That happened anyway. They hoped for a quagmire. The statue came down in three weeks. They celebrated the hard times in Iraq. But they didn't last forever. They bet all their chips and threw every last bit of effort into The Most Important Election of Our Lifetimes (TM)...and lost. And lost pretty resoundingly -- the Left had to resort to hyping and celebrating Obama's victory over Unmedicated Alan Keyes.
And now they see Iraqis happily voting.
Their entire worldview has collapsed. They've been left with nothing. No sign that the House or Senate will get any closer anytime soon. They've been shown evidence that they don't have a majority of the American people; the great revolution just isn't going to happen. And so they're bitter. All they've got is hate.
And they're looking for somebody to hit. Larry Summers is one. Susan Estrich's explosion at Mike Kinsley is another example of this phenomenon. Jeff Gannon.
But this is what they've got...
The Republican Party was in this situation not that long ago. They came out of it, but not before losing some of the old guard and modifying their ideas and their agenda.
If you are puzzled by the reference to Susan Estrich, that is explained in this link:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon_02_24_05hm.html
Tuesday, February 01, 2005
Myths About Iraq From the Left
(1) The Ba’ath regime was in some sense “progressive”: It is very revealing that few western “leftists” ever went beyond ritualised, purely verbal opposition to the “excesses” of the regime, even in the midst of their efforts to hijack the leadership of the anti-war movements from the pacifists, Muslim fundamentalists, “Not in My Name” solipsists and other malcontents with whom they made such opportunistic alliances. Meanwhile, a horrifyingly large number of “leftists” actually praised the regime – for its “secularism”, disregarding the Ba’athists’ praise for Islam as the “soul of the Arab nation”, Saddam’s fictional claim of descent from the Prophet and the addition of “Allah is great” to the national flag; its “socialism”, disregarding the whole sorry history of tyrannies deploying empty leftist rhetoric; and its sporadic defiance of the western powers, disregarding the fact that it happily cooperated with those powers whenever it suited it and them to do so. The western “left” has evidently become so habituated to denouncing the hypocrisy and cynicism of western governments – which we also denounce, though more consistently – that it is now incapable of discerning the hypocrisy and cynicism of nonwestern governments. Any organisation that can call, as the Socialist Workers Party did, for “Victory to the Resistance”, as if the Ba’ath regime’s last remaining loyalists, and those it imported from other Arab countries, resembled the French Resistance rather than the Vichy regime’s Milice and their Nazi friends, has not just deserted Marxism, it has taken off into a world of fantasy from which it looks unlikely to return.
(2) The suffering of the Iraqi people was mainly due to the effects of UN sanctions: If that was true, how was it that, on all the standard indicators – infant mortality, standards of literacy, public health provision and so on – the Kurds in the Northeast were measurably better off than the rest of the Iraqi people, despite being subject to the very same sanctions? The suffering of the Iraqi people was mainly due, sanctions or not, to the misgovernment and brutality of the Ba’ath regime, which, unlike all too many such regimes in former colonies, was not installed with aid from the West, or the former Soviet bloc, or China, but was entirely indigenous in origin, apart from its borrowings of ideas from the writings of various western fascists. The western “left” bears a heavy responsibility for its utter failure to recognise the regime for what it was: the rebirth in the Middle East of Nazism, in opposition, not just to “Jews, Persians and flies”, as a notorious Ba’ath pamphlet proclaimed, but to all the heirs of the Enlightenment, from liberals and social democrats to revolutionary socialists and anarchists. The people of Iraq tried to tell the western “left” what it was inconvenient for them to hear, but their pleas for aid, just like those of the people of Bosnia and Kosova, fell on deaf ears. Thus, yet again, an oppressed people who had a right to expect help from the western “left” were compelled to turn to western capitalist states for help instead, with all the reactionary side-effects that that implies.
(3) Hostility to Saddam’s regime was “really” hostility to the “Arab world” and/or to Islam: The West is undeniably permeated by suspicion and distrust with regard to Islam, which is reinforced by widespread ignorance of, and contempt for, the countries in which Islam is dominant. What is also undeniable, however, if Islam is what you claim to care about, is that the western powers did more than any Muslim government did to help the largely Muslim peoples of Bosnia and Kosova; that Saddam’s regime killed more Muslims than any other regime in history; and that Muslim minorities in western countries are treated at least as well as, and often much better than, non-Muslim minorities in Muslim countries are. But so what? Religious affiliation is no more reliable a guide to political and economic relations now than it has ever been, and the “Muslim world” is as internally divided as the “Christian world”. As for the “Arab world”, only a fanatic (such as Robert Fisk of The Independent) could believe in such a mirage, not only in the face of the obvious political, economic and social differences between (say) Iraq and Kuwait, Egypt and Bahrain, Algeria and Jordan, but also in the face of the presence in almost all these countries of non-Arab peoples (Kurds, Berbers, Turcomen and others, not to mention the slaves of Mauritania), whose mistreatment the western “left” has been silent about for too long. Just as 19th-century Pan-Slavism degenerated from its liberatory origins into being a vehicle for Russian imperial expansionism and Serbian ultranationalism, so Pan-Arabism fragmented long ago into traditionalism (as in Saudi Arabia), fascism (as in Syria) and Stalinism (as in Libya), and now has nothing to offer to the Arabs or the other peoples of these countries as they start to move against the assorted regimes that currently control their lives. In that respect the liberation of Iraq has at least the potential – which, of course, may not be realised – to assist the process of democratising and modernising Islamic countries in general, and Arab countries in particular. Compromise and collusion with any nationalism, or any religion, in these countries or anywhere else, can only delay and undermine that process, and give comfort to fanatics and reactionaries.
(4) The western powers kept Saddam in power, armed his troops and funded his foreign ventures, so they cannot be trusted now: The left used to have a better grasp of history, and of its importance in shedding light on the present: this highly slanted, selective version of the recent past sheds no light at all. For a start, which western powers are being referred to? While Britain had virtually no contact with the Ba’ath regime up to 1979, and the United States had no diplomatic relations with Iraq until 1984, France (and the Soviet Union) started making deals about oil and arms in 1972, and none other than Jacques Chirac himself first visited Baghdad as long ago as 1974. In any assessment of the 35 years that Saddam and the Ba’ath were in power, the French (and Russian) record of 31 years of continuous and very close relations weighs a lot heavier than either the US record – six years of cynical and ineffective collaboration against Iran versus 29 years of hostility – or even the British record of 11 years of opportunistic trade deals versus 24 years of hostility. The behaviour of Jimmy Carter, Margaret Thatcher and their colleagues was certainly hypocritical and repulsive, but taking the present governments of the United States and Britain to task for the crimes of their predecessors is analogous to blaming Winston Churchill for the errors of Neville Chamberlain. Meanwhile, what adjectives are left to describe the French government’s wholly unprincipled objections to the war, which attracted the wholly predictable support of the depressingly gullible western “left”? As for trusting any of the western powers, that is not even a serious proposition: our concern as historical materialists is to judge states, political movements and individuals alike not by what they say but by what they do. From that perspective, liberating Iraq from barbarism, whatever the motive for doing so, counts as a greater good than helping the Ba’ath regime to carry on, which is what the French government and its allies, including the western “left”, were effectively doing for as long as they could.
(5) The war against the Ba’ath regime was a violation of international law: The British Liberal Democrats demonstrated the sheer silly irrelevance of this claim by asserting before the war that it would be “illegal” without a second (in fact 18th) resolution of the UN Security Council, and then, during the war, that its legality could be determined only by an international court once it was over. We expected this kind of unprincipled opportunism from that party of shallow, complacent, vaguely left-leaning but ultimately timid petit-bourgeois idiots, but we are still baffled by the readiness of those who regard national laws as bourgeois illusions to treat “international laws” as if they are any different. In this internecine dispute between some bourgeois lawyers and politicians and others of their kind, the US and British interpretation was probably right, and the French and German side was probably wrong. The willingness of such lawless dictatorships as China’s to go along with the latter merely confirms that conclusion. But that is a problem for liberals (and Stalinists) to sort out, and should have nothing to do with socialists’ attempts to assess the rights and wrongs of the war. Some day in the unknown future, a democratically elected world authority may perhaps be in a position to make and enforce genuine, socialist international laws. Until then Marxists need to be at least as realistic about relations between states as those states’ own policy-makers are. If that means making temporary alliances with bad capitalist regimes against even worse ones, then so be it.
(6) The war was opposed by majorities of the populations of Britain, the United States, Australia, Arab countries, Muslim countries, the whole world, and, if the Pope can be trusted, Heaven as well: The western “left”, having spent years denouncing opinion polls as just another part of the capitalist propaganda machine, suddenly took to citing them when they briefly seemed to go their way, then just as suddenly took to denouncing them again when they showed large majorities in many of the coalition countries supporting the war. Equally inconsistently, the British “left” dropped all their hostility to “parliamentary fetishism” for as long as it looked as if the House of Commons might vote against the war, then reverted when the Commons voted in favour of the war, twice. But who really knows what most people support or oppose? Are demonstrations really more reliable guides to popular feeling than parliamentary votes or media campaigns? What if the government, in any of the coalition countries, had called their critics’ bluff and arranged a snap referendum on whether to go to war? The chances are that they would have won a convincing majority – and that the “left” would have denounced it as manipulated and unreliable. Why can’t the “left” simply argue its case strictly on its merits, regardless of whether it has majority support or not? It might then gain some more respect, and possibly a larger audience, than it does at present with all its lies and bombast.
As for claims to be able to discern Arab or Muslim public opinion, either in general or within any one country, they must all be regarded as highly suspect. These are societies controlled by regimes that do not permit free media (even Al-Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV are by no means as “independent” as they or their new fans claim they are); that impose severe restrictions on political activity; and that give religious fundamentalists privileged positions from which to spread their poison. There is thus no genuine Arab public opinion to be discerned, and not much in most other Muslim countries. Perhaps most Arabs do feel humiliated by the coalition’s actions; perhaps they feel far more humiliated by the actions of Arab regimes; perhaps they are much less concerned about the fate of Iraq than we might wish them to be. In the absence of reliable evidence we refuse to trust any of the self-appointed experts, especially when their reading of Arab public opinion just happens to coincide with their own views and/or depends on applying monolithic stereotypes to millions of people – if that isn’t racism, what is?
(7) The war was “really” all about US control of the world’s oil supplies: Of course the US ruling class is as capable of stupidity and ignorance as any other ruling class, but historically it has shown a keener sense of self-interest than this crass economistic nonsense suggests. If the fate of the oil industry was the overriding concern then the US government and the oil companies with which it is closely connected could and would have carried on as before, collaborating with the Saudis and others to keep the oil flowing. The fact that US oil companies are now being awarded contracts for work in Iraq indicates only that they are the leading players in the industry, their only serious rivals being French and Russian – and is it any surprise, or cause for indignation, that US and British decision-makers prefer to deal with US companies rather than companies from two of the countries that were close to the Ba’ath regime before and during the war?
Meanwhile, we are not so naive as to suppose that, because oil was not the main motive, the liberation of the Iraqi people was. The US administration and the other governments in the coalition, with their customary cynicism, exploited that goal, and the issue of weapons of mass destruction, to promote their shared vision of an international order that is safer for capitalism, implying, among other things, more liberal democracies, with more compliant governments; more “free” trade, in oil as in other commodities; and more effective joint action against terrorism. There is every reason to think that they are insincere about much of this programme, and that their definitions of such terms as “democracy” or “terrorism” differ from ours. There is no reason, however, to think that they are insincere about all of it – the western “left” has no monopoly on self-deluding idealism – and it makes more sense to assess each scene in this continuing drama on its own merits, by the light of the doctrine of the lesser evil, than to either buy into the whole deal or reject it out of hand simply because it isn’t revolutionary socialism. Given the widespread popularity of capitalism and the vanishingly small support for socialism in the contemporary world, it would be stupid to expect anything more radical. On the other hand, as long as we are to be ruled by capitalist states, which would you rather be ruled by: a coalition of liberal democracies that pay at least lipservice to free speech, or any number of ruthless genocidal dictatorships that want to revive the worst aspects of the Middle Ages (and we don’t mean folk songs or William Morris wallpapers)? If you can’t or won’t answer that question, how can you claim to be interested in contemporary politics, as opposed to useless dreaming about the politics of the distant future?
(8) Invading a country in order to remove its regime from power was an unprecedented violation of “state sovereignty”: Like the fake “left”, we few remaining adherents of the real, Marxist left can easily list all the bad precedents, from Vietnam onwards, although we utterly reject the selective approach that allows ageing Stalinists and “Trotskyists” alike to go on and on about the Bay of Pigs, an invasion that failed, while evading discussion of the invasions of Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968, or the Serbian campaigns that first destroyed the Yugoslav federation, and then came close to destroying Bosnia and Kosova. But what about the good precedents, that is, the invasions that genuinely liberated millions of human beings from barbarism and helped them to establish replacement regimes that, though inevitably falling far short of Utopia, were certainly significantly better than what went before? Well, now: Italy and France in 1944, Germany, Austria and Japan in 1945, Uganda in 1978, Cambodia in 1979, Afghanistan, paradoxically enough, in 1979 and 2002 ... If “state sovereignty”, or any other piece of rotten bourgeois rhetoric, stands in the way of liberation from barbarism, then let it be disregarded. But what on Earth is such rhetoric doing in the mouths of people who still insist, despite all their posturing, inconsistency and laughable arrogance, on deluding themselves and others that they have anything in common with genuine Marxism?
(9) The coalition forces have met with stiff resistance from the Iraqi people: “Stiff resistance”, if it means anything at all, suggests months or even years of sustained and at least sporadically effective opposition to an invading force. That was not what happened in Iraq, where deserters (wholly to their credit) heavily outnumbered those few conscripts who stayed at their posts, while a few fanatics, many of them not even Iraqis, spent a few weeks killing and injuring a few American and British soldiers, and trying to avoid being killed or injured, not only by the coalition forces, but also by the people they had helped to oppress for decades. The “Iraqi people” means some 23 million human beings, about one fifth of whom, namely the Kurds, have indeed been putting up stiff resistance for decades, not to any western forces, but to the Ba’ath regime, which tried to eliminate them from the planet while most of the western “left” either ignored all Kurds or romanticised the struggle of the Kurds in Turkey, who have certainly been mistreated but have at least not been gassed.
Yes, of course, except for a day or two in Basra the Shi’as chose not to rise up against Saddam when the coalition forces arrived. But then, they had been betrayed back in 1991, and they had also been told not to rise up by their imams and by the coalition forces this time round. Accordingly, the only people who were surprised at their passivity were the western “left”, once again caught out confidently making useless predictions on the basis of shallow dogma rather than sober analysis.
The Left and Iraq
I found this very sensible analysis of the sitation in Iraq vis-a-vis the left on, of all places, democraticunderground.com, where it was linked from a Marxist web site in Britain. Of course, the author is a Marxist.
Yes, of course, many Iraqis, both during the war and since it ended, have visibly expressed at best wariness and at worst outright hostility towards the coalition forces: who but a western “leftist”, vocally antiracist but unconsciously deeply in thrall to racist stereotypes, would expect a uniform response, favourable or not, from so many human beings with so many different interests, backgrounds, hopes and fears? Nevertheless, it is equally plain that many Iraqis have expressed joy and gratitude for their liberation, although the western “left” has been quick to deny their existence even so, partly because so many “leftists” belong to that tribe of self-satisfied bourgeois pseudointellectuals who regard it as beneath their dignity to watch television at all, and so missed what everyone else saw. We do not know which response represents the feelings of the majority in Iraq and, unlike those commentators who deliriously predicted the course of the next few years within a week of the war ending, we do not claim to be able to know. Suffice it to say the following. First, whatever they are feeling now, the majority of Iraqis would certainly not want to see the Ba'ath regime restored, and it was the coalition forces that removed it. Second, we shall all know what they are feeling when the first democratic elections in the lifetimes of most Iraqis are held in their country – yet if the western “left” had had their way those elections would never be held at all.It sticks in the throat to have to admit that for once the western powers have done more to promote justice than the western “left” has. It is nauseating to find “Marxists” trying to ensure that any human beings should go on living under a dictatorship. Such are the contradictions of advanced capitalism.
...Just as Stalin's “Communist” dictatorship destroyed the lives and hopes of so many socialists of an earlier generation, the complicity of the “left” in the growth of Ba'athism, “Pan-Arabism”, Islamic fundamentalism, “Third Worldism” and the other anti-democratic ideologies that have brought us to this point has helped to destroy all prospects of any advance beyond liberalism for another generation at least. We cannot forgive these charlatans and renegades their betrayal of the very tradition they pretend to uphold, and we are confident that the working class will go on seeing them for what they really are. Then again, given their remoteness from any contact with working-class people, their embedding in academia, journalism and other marginal outposts of the capitalist system, and their total incapacity to realise that they have made stupendous errors, let alone learn from them, it is already abundantly clear that the western “left” no longer has anything in common with the working class – and that, somewhere behind their smug masks, they know it.
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
The Sickening Slide
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.
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)