Those who confidently predict a “containable and deterrable” nuclear Iran should consider the suddenly not-so-deterrable nuclear Russia and ask themselves whether such confidence is warranted.
Steve Bass has the details. If you haven't already fixed this problem, you should take a look.
When I was writing The Strange Death of the Soviet Union, an account of the collapse of Communism, I interviewed General Leonid Shebarshin, head of the First Directorate of the KGB, in charge of international affairs. Calmly he told me that the disintegration of the Soviet empire was only a temporary matter. Russia has such weight geographically and materially that the day would arise when it would reconstruct its empire over all the nearby peoples of lesser weight simply through circumstance. . . .It is too late to defend Georgia militarily. The logic of the situation now is that the West will duly let Georgia be dismembered and have as its next president someone ready to accommodate the Kremlin. In which case, Russian tanks will once again have determined the boundaries and the governments of other countries. Russian minorities live in Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Moldavia and they too can be used in the future to manufacture some mendacity about genocide, leading to invasion and their re-incorporation into the Russian empire. . . . [W]ithout the necessary resolve and imagination to devise a policy in defence of democracy and its allies, a Soviet Union Mark Two will have emerged with the potential to leave the West demoralized and defeated.
A producer at Al-Jazeera asked David Frum "to take part in a documentary commissioned by the Al-Jazeera Network, looking at means to resolve conflict in troubled areas of the world." After Googling the name of the man slated to host the series, Frum answered the producer:
I think I'd rather not participate in a documentary presented by a journalist who has written that he believes it is his role "to reflect and not condemn" Muslim radicals.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/aug/06/mondaymediasection.
politicsandthemediaThere is a saying in the Talmud that those who are kind to the cruel will be cruel to the kind, and I strongly suspect that this observation will apply only too aptly to Mr. Rees' work for al Jazeera.
Best regards,
David Frum
"A few minutes later," Frum writes,
I received an unintended reply. The producer had meant to forward my message to her associates - but the forward button is so often hard to distinguish from the reply button!
From: Giti Sorayyapour<giti@outofofficefilms.com>
Date: August 7, 2008 10:40:17 AM EDT
To: David FrumSubject: David Frum: absolute bastard!!!
I wrote back to thank the producer for her very illuminating reply - I could not have asked for a more emphatic confirmation of my suspicions of the production's actual intentions.
EconTalk, a collection of podcasts hosted by economist Russell Roberts, is one of the Web's great resources. Among my favorite epidodes is Roberts's discussion with Bryan Caplan of Caplan's book The Myth of the Rational Voter. One moment in the podcast jarred me: Caplan refers to "a certain non-economist's* . . . two favorite policies," one of them "a Berlin Wall at the Mexican border" (about 53:12 in). As any educated person who isn't a jackass knows, East Germany built the Berlin Wall to prevent East German citizens from escaping the nation's tyranny; supporters of a wall at the Mexican border (I'm one) want to keep people from entering the US illegally. The former imprisoned, the latter would protect.
Figuring he simply misspoke, I didn't hold Caplan's blunder against him. Then today I listened to (most of) a speech he gave a year or so later in which he uses the same phrase with the same intent (about 34:40 in). And tonight via an Everyzing search I found another podcast in which he uses it twice (about 42:40 and 46:42 in).
Caplan must be a smart man, but every time I hear him refer to "a Berlin Wall" on the Mexican border I think, "This guy's an idiot." If you know Caplan, and he isn't in fact an idiot, please do him and me a favor and suggest to him that he stop employing the image. It should embarrass him particularly because among his primary assertions is that economists tend to be smarter and better-informed than other people.
*Caplan reveals elsewhere that the non-economist is Caplan's father.
And on countries such as the U.S. that declined to object in 2001 when the IOC announced its selection. Jay Nordlinger, in Beijing:
The U.S. State Department has already warned Americans traveling to the Games:
All visitors should be aware that they have no reasonable expectation of privacy in public or private locations. All hotel rooms and offices are considered to be subject to on-site or remote technical monitoring at all times. Hotel rooms, residences and offices may be accessed at any time without the occupant’s consent or knowledge.Why are the Olympic Games being held in a place like this?
Sometimes a man survives a considerable time from an era in which he had his place into one which is strange to him, and then the curious are offered one of the most singular spectacles in the human comedy. Who now, for example, thinks of George Crabbe? He was a famous poet in his day, and the world recognised his genius with a unanimity which the greater complexity of modern life has rendered infrequent. He had learnt his craft at the school of Alexander Pope, and he wrote moral stories in rhymed couplets. Then came the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and the poets sang new songs. Mr. Crabbe continued to write moral stories in rhymed couplets. I think he must have read the verse of these young men who were making so great a stir in the world, and I fancy he found it poor stuff. Of course, much of it was. But the odes of Keats and of Wordsworth, a poem or two by Coleridge, a few more by Shelley, discovered vast realms of the spirit that none had explored before. Mr. Crabbe was as dead as mutton, but Mr. Crabbe continued to write moral stories in rhymed couplets. I have read desultorily the writings of the younger generation. It may be that among them a more fervid Keats, a more ethereal Shelley, has already published numbers the world will willingly remember. I cannot tell. I admire their polish—their youth is already so accomplished that it seems absurd to speak of promise—I marvel at the felicity of their style; but with all their copiousness (their vocabulary suggests that they fingered Roget's Thesaurus in their cradles) they say nothing to me: to my mind they know too much and feel too obviously; I cannot stomach the heartiness with which they slap me on the back or the emotion with which they hurl themselves on my bosom; their passion seems to me a little anaemic and their dreams a trifle dull. I do not like them. I am on the shelf. I will continue to write moral stories in rhymed couplets. But I should be thrice a fool if I did it for aught but my own entertainment.
W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence
Spin has a good, sympathetic piece on recording artist D'Angelo, who released two acclaimed and commercially successful albums and then vanished from the public eye. I didn't know that that video wasn't his idea.
The corruption of the Palestinian Arabs is exceeded only by that of their apologists in the West. Melanie Phillips:
As the Jerusalem Post reports, fierce fighting in Gaza between Fatah and Hamas over the weekend, in which 11 people died and dozens more were wounded, resulted in 180 Fatah refugees fleeing from what they called a ‘war of genocide’ by Hamas against Fatah supporters. And where did they flee to? Why, to Israel, of course. . . . These refugees say they cannot return to Gaza because they will be killed. How fortunate, therefore, that their own Fatah leader, Mahmoud Abbas, can give them sanctuary in the West Bank!But hang on – Abbas won’t let them in. Yup, with the exception of five individuals whom he did allow in, he’s denied them all sanctuary. He says they should go back to Gaza. . . .
So now Israel, with its iron commitment to human rights, is to hear a court case today where it will be argued that Israel has a moral duty to grant asylum to these Fatah men.
So let’s get our head round this: Palestinians committed to the destruction of Israel fled from other Palestinians committed to the destruction of Israel into Israel, which is providing them with sanctuary and medical treatment, while the president of their putative state who bases his claim against Israel on its alleged refusal to admit Palestinian ‘refugees’ refused to allow actual Palestinian refugees fleeing Palestinian violence access to that same putative state, while Israel agonises over whether to grant them permanent asylum. . . .
As Phillips writes, "[J]ust consider what that coverage would have been like if it had been Israel rather than Hamas that had behaved like this."
Ugandan columnist Charles Onyango Obbo:
If Obama wins the American presidential contest, he will become among the very few leaders in the Black man and woman’s history to have won an election without stealing votes; beating up the electorate to vote for the incumbent (as Kakooza Mutale’s Kalangala Action Plan did for President Museveni in 2001 and Zanu-PF goons did for Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe recently); or starving the voters into submission. . . .The other reason is that Black leaders all over the world have, in a perverse way, benefited from the racist prejudice that they will always be incompetent, or cannot be skilled enough at the job to be judged by word [world?—mg] class standards.
The bar has therefore tended to be lower for our leaders, allowing them to get away with murder, corruption, brutality, ineptitude, tribalism, name it. . . .
I can see the world looking around, careful not to be caught staring, and saying; “Well, so this thing isn’t about skin colour after all”, and wondering; “So why can’t these African leaders do at least one-tenth of what Obama is doing?”
Obama is a lucky man. He will probably win the election, so as US president, African leaders would find it hard put to lock him out. Otherwise, the leaders would have conspired to deny him an entry visa to any African country.
(Via Tim Blair.)
“The technology of the drilling industry may have improved, but offshore drilling is a dirty business, and it still leads to oil spills due to failed equipment, aberrant weather, or human error on a frequent basis,” Senator Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) said in July 19’s Houston Chronicle.Feinstein is correct. U.S. offshore oil drilling is not perfectly tidy. It’s only 99.999 percent clean. Indeed, since 1980 — as MMS [the U.S. Minerals Management Service] figures indicate — 101,997 barrels spilled from among the 11.855 billion barrels of American oil extracted offshore. This is a 0.001 percent pollution rate. While offshore drilling is not 100-percent spotless, this record should satisfy all but the terminally fastidious.
Ironically, in terms of oil contamination, Mother Nature is 95 times dirtier than man. Some 620,500 barrels of oil ooze organically from North America’s ocean floors each year. Compare this to the average 6,555 barrels that oil companies have spilled annually since 1998, according to MMS.
Iranian exile Amil Imani:
Parents who inquire at police headquarters about their arrested sons and daughters could be taken away or simply disappear. Students are tortured and, on many occasions, murdered for crimes they never committed. And yet, we see many western governments are engaging and heavily investing in the Islamic Republic where its survival depends upon shedding the blood of innocent Iranians.
In another piece he writes,
Many Europeans are fleeing their ancestral homeland ahead of the Islamic fire which is engulfing their countries. These are the affluent and the ones with foresight. . . . As Islam gains more power, it will inevitably impose itself and its ways on all others. And there will be those who will eventually wake up from their stupor, they will either completely capitulate or fight the Muslims back in bloody block-by-block, street-by-street battles.
Via Melanie Phillips, who asks, "Why aren’t we listening to the voices of Iranian resistance against this monstrous threat that faces us all?"
Jay Nordlinger celebrates "Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing" and the attitudes that produced it:
You often hear that white Americans know little about Black America — and this is undoubtedly true. The country is in important ways segregated. How often do whites listen to black talk radio? Black Americans know about the majority culture, as they cannot help doing. But white Americans can live their whole life without knowing much about this minority culture. . . .Well, thanks to the candidacy of Senator Obama, white Americans are learning a thing or two about Black America. . . . Think of the teachings of Jeremiah Wright. It no doubt shocked a lot of white Americans to hear that the U.S. government invented AIDS for the purpose of decimating black people. I doubt black Americans batted an eye. Same with the allegation that the government spread drugs throughout black communities, so as to have a chance to lock black youth up.
But there is so much that is beautiful to learn — such as “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” Black history is not just for February, and black culture is a lot more than hideous rap and baggy low pants.
Practically all artists and writers are aware of their destiny and see themselves as actors in a fateful drama. With me, nothing is momentous: obscure youth, glorious old age, fateful coincidences—nothing really matters. I have written a number of good sentences. I have kept free of delusions. I am going to die soon.
Eric Hoffer (unpublished)
Masab (now Joseph) Yousef predicts that his conversion from Islam to Christianity will have a powerful effect on Muslims:
What other case do you know where a son of a Hamas leader, who was raised on the tenets of extremist Islam, comes out against it?
A powerful and touching interview, worth reading in full. (Link via Noah Pollak.)
Click "More" for some quotes.
Peter Ferrara on the Democrats transformed:
Bill Clinton swept up the Democrats in 1992 based on the new politics of the Democrat Leadership Council (DLC), which he headed. . . . The historic battle between capitalism and socialism was over, and capitalism had won. The Democrats had to modify their policies and their rhetoric to recognize that. Most importantly, they had to accommodate the essential vision that led to the political success of the Reagan Revolution -- the American people overwhelmingly favored the policies of economic growth over the policies of taxation and redistribution ("It's the economy, stupid"). . . .The great showdown for the soul of the Democrats came in the 2008 primaries. Barack Obama, the most left-wing of all elected national Democrats, ultimately captured the hearts of the Democrat ideologues. Hillary never really believed in her husband's neoliberal DLC policies. Personally, she herself was still with Eleanor Roosevelt and the Old Left of the 1930s. But recognizing the political success of her husband's vision, and the political failures of the more left-wing candidates, she tried to project neoliberal responsibility and rhetorically hearkened back to the DLC successes of her husband's administration. That made her the target of the Democrat ideologues, resulting in her defeat.
Elections have consequences. Obama's left-wingers have now completely routed the DLC out of today's Democrat party. Make no mistake about it. The New Left is now in charge of the Democrats, with Obama, Pelosi and Dean at the helm. This is not your father's Democrat party, or Bill Clinton's.
Diana West, in a fascinating interview:
I have come to believe that the Western way of life — which I'll define in brief as life lived according to Judeo-Christian-evolved morality and liberty — is imperiled by the demographic spread and influence of Islamic ideology and laws. Notice I didn't say the spread of "Islamism." Or "Islamist-ism." Or "Islamofascism." Or just "Wahhabism." Or "fundamentalist militant extremism." Over the years, I have used most of these "ists" and "isms" in my column, trying them out one by one until I got to the point where I realized they were serving as a distraction, a form of verbal camouflage that turns our attention away from the ideology and laws of Islam itself. In the cause of not-giving-offense — the highest cause of Westerners-turned-multiculturalists—we have prevented ourselves from undertaking a hard-eyed appraisal of Islamic ideology as a whole, jihadism included, and engaging in a serious discussion of how to contain it.
There are moderate Muslims, but Islam itself is not moderate. Islam itself is a fascist ideology. There is no difference between Islam and Islamic fundamentalism. At most there is a difference of degree, but not of kind.
Stop asking what you have done wrong. Stop it! They're slaughtering you like sheep and you still look within. You criticize your history, your institutions, your churches. Why can't you realize that it has nothing to do with what you have done but with what they want.
Joseph Packer urges supporters of the free market to appeal to the public's emotions:
Imagery is effective, especially when combined with skillful storytelling. If you can honestly tell me that you watched Roger and Me without being overcome with deep grief and anguish, then you must have a heart of stone. . . . Although Michael Moore offers statistical representations of the economic downturn of Flint, Michigan, it’s the images of individuals evicted from their homes that haunt me. It is only by removing myself from the movie and viewing it in the larger context of the positive effects of outsourcing that I can see the flaws in Moore’s logic. . . . Libertarians can cry “unfair” and write all the scathing reviews they want, but both history and the relevant scientific data indicate that it will do little good.Instead they need to take up the tactics long deployed by the statists. Although we have a late start, we also have the enormous advantage of having a much stronger position to advocate. . . . Libertarians must learn a lesson that the marketplace has taught the business community over and over again: having the best product is not enough. . . .
[A] comprehensive case is not always as valuable in swaying public opinion as having effective case studies that take visual form.
(Via Craig Newmark.)
Every evening for the past four months, a tall young man with soulful blue eyes has been stealing hearts across the Middle East, from the refugee camps of the Gaza Strip to the gated mansions of Riyadh.But it's not just the striking good looks of Mohannad, hero of the hugely popular Turkish TV soap "Noor," that appeal to female viewers. He's romantic, attentive to his wife, Noor, supportive of her independence and ambitions as a fashion designer — in short, a rare gem for women in conservative, male-dominated surroundings.
"Noor" delivers an idealized portrayal of modern married life as equal partnership — clashing with the norms of traditional Middle Eastern societies where elders often have the final word on whom a woman should marry and many are still confined to the role of wife and mother. . . .
In Saudi Arabia, the only country with ratings, about three to four million people watch daily, out of a population of nearly 28 million, according to MBC, the Saudi-owned satellite channel that airs the show dubbed into Arabic for Middle East audiences.
In the West Bank and Gaza, streets are deserted during show time and socializing is timed around it. In Riyadh, the Saudi capital, and in Hebron, the West Bank's most conservative city, maternity wards report a rise in babies named Noor and Mohannad. A West Bank poster vendor has ditched Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein for Noor and Mohannad.
The grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Asheikh, has condemned Turkish soap operas, which have charmed millions of people across the Arab world, and prohibited people from watching them, Al-Watan daily reported yesterday.“It is not permitted to look at these serials or watch them. They contain so much evil; they destroy people’s ethics and are against our values,” said the mufti during the closing ceremony of a forum, which took place in Riyadh on Friday. He added that these “malicious” Turkish soap operas corrupt individuals and spread vice in society.
“Any TV station that airs them is against God and His Messenger (peace be upon him). These are serials of immorality. They are prepared by people who are specialists in crime and error, people who invite men and women to the devil.”
(Via David Frum.)
David Pryce-Jones condemns the celebrations accompanying the release of Samir Kuntar:
Rationalizations or excuses of course can be found to cover this glorification of murder. Arabs feel shame at their impotence and failure, for instance, so pretend that their defeats are victories. Or these Lebanese and Palestinian dignitaries know that they have to whip up hate in order to stay in power. Or that lack of education makes it possible to mobilize Muslims to believe they have a duty to kill those of other faiths.All of that is specious. . . . [H]ere are important and supposedly responsible men who find it in themselves to embrace, encourage, and hold up as a model a man as vile as any, as though there was no such thing as conscience, and never has been. By every human standard, this is degradation, this is depravity.
Very cute video. (Via Amanda Witt, via Tony Woodlief.)
They’ve been trying to kill us since 1979, and yet we still think we are one little clever move away from the Grand Bargain. We’re not. They don’t want a bargain, they want to destroy us. And they will keep at it until they have either won or lost.
Its murder rate is now second-highest in the world (behind El Salvador).
(Via NCPA.)
I am disturbed that with the general decline of public standards in education, morals, and reasoning, we have come to the point when a candidate like Obama can elude any serious cross-examination, and actually get himself elected President.
That was Dave Barry's reaction to "Hooty Sapperticker," a song I've wanted for years to hear. Today, thanks to YouTube, I finally did. Golly. Hypercritical he wasn't.
I prefer it to "I and I," though.
John Rentoul in the (UK) Independent on Sunday:
There was a moment last month – it was when Susan Sarandon, the actress, said she might emigrate to Italy or Canada if McCain won – when it seemed essential to the sanity of America that Obama should lose.But, no, it is more important that the daydream should be broken. The idea that there is some kind of clean, different, painless, perfect alternative to politics as usual is a distraction from taking difficult, compromised decisions in an imperfect world. If Obama lost, too many people around the world could continue to believe that if only America got out of whatever it is in, everything would be better. . . .
In office, he would be forced to use his eloquence and his global popularity to make the case for what is left of the coalition to see its responsibilities to the Iraqis through. Many of his supporters, especially outside the US, would see it as a betrayal. I think it would be a necessary one, by which he could at last heal the suspicion of American power that provides so many around the world with easy excuses.
Via Oliver Kamm, who adds,
Obama will receive much adulation on his European trip. It will not be merited, if you consider merely what he has achieved and said. But it will be welcome on two grounds. First, there is the obvious symbolism - which is important and entirely justified - of an articulate black American vying for the leadership of the free world. Secondly, there are few conflicts, crises or social problems in the world that would not benefit from more rather than less American intervention.The United States performs a unique and essential role in the international order. In the absence of world government, the US provides what the scholar Michael Mandelbaum describes as international public goods. . . . It's well past time that we progressive welfarist Europeans acknowledged the point. The pace of candidate Obama's "betrayals" suggests we might have to sooner rather than later, I'm pleased to say.
Stephen F. Hayes is no reflexive opponent of the Bush administration, so when he criticizes recent shifts in policy toward Iran and North Korea, we should pay attention:
It has been a dispiriting few weeks. Several conservative political appointees have said that they are embarrassed to be working in the Bush administration. One called the new policies "preemptive capitulation." Another suggested that whatever credit the Bush administration deserved for keeping Americans safe in the seven years after 9/11 would be offset by the blame the administration will have earned for emboldening America's enemies with its reflexive weakness. And a former adviser to Condoleezza Rice said: "This is stunningly shameful."
Writer Lou Aguilar supplies ten reasons.
It isn't David Lee Roth's fault that this sounds ridiculous unaccompanied. In context it's a great vocal.
He does look ridiculous.
(Via Philippe Gohier.)
Note: I've revised this post a couple of times (so far).
___________
I've never understood why so many people revere Bob Dylan's lyrics. I thought I'd try analyzing one of his most-admired songs, "Visions of Johanna," in search of enlightenment. Then Germaine Greer weighed in on it:
It's not verse, not even doggerel. Nor is it prose, because it doesn't make sense. Its combination of pretentiousness and illiteracy isn't surprising, which would be something; it's just annoying.
Norm Geras, the most intelligent Dylan fan of my (Web-only) acquaintance, responded:
I think Germaine Greer has bitten off more than she can chew. She doesn't rate Bob Dylan as a lyricist. I don't have what I'd need to establish that she's wrong about that, though I'm pretty sure she is wrong. . . .[Y]ou can't show that his lyrics are no good by citing one example of (what you take to be) some poor lines. That there's a ginger cat living next door doesn't show that the street is full of ginger cats. Third and decisively, there are just those songs in their gathered assembly. Stacked up against Greer's little number here, they don't give her much of a chance.
I decided to analyze all the songs Norm listed. What happened, though, is that I got through only the first four, and only partway through each of those, because I liked none of them well enough to finish. If you're interested, click "More" to read what I ended up with.
The war is basically over in Iraq, but the peace brings with it a return to the corruption and inefficiency that has cursed this part of the world for centuries. There are other annoying habits, like demanding "compensation" for any real or imagined loss that might possibly be pinned on U.S. troops. It's also popular to demand, with a straight face, that U.S. troops fix utilities, schools and whatever else people want, but are unwilling to take care of themselves. Peace has not brought out the best in the Iraqi people.The war is still going on, but now it's more of a police operation. U.S. and Iraqi forces are searching for several hundred known terrorists. Some of them are showing up outside the country, giving rise to the belief that al Qaeda has abandoned Iraq. This is apparently the case, but there are several other Sunni Arab terrorist organizations that will never give up. For these groups, tolerating Shia Arab rule of Iraq is a sin, and the sinners must be punished. Terror attacks are way down, but they can be expected to continue for years.
The U.S. is negotiating, with the Iraqi government, a renewal of its authority to operate in Iraq. This authority expires at the end of the year. As part of the negotiations, the Iraqis are asking for a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops. This is popular with many Iraqis, especially those in the government who are getting rich by stealing oil money. As long as the American troops are in the country, auditors have armed protection and can be very effective at revealing the thefts and getting the thieves punished. This makes thieving government officials very uncomfortable. Corruption in general remains a major problem (as it is in all Middle Eastern countries). While many Iraqis would like to see clean government, they are usually not the ones who get elected (elections involve a lot of bribery and trading of favors.)
The Iraqi Sunni Arabs (less than 15 percent of the population) and the Kurds (about 20 percent), want U.S. troops to stay. If the Americans leave, the Shia majority will likely resume revenge (for decades of abuse) attacks on the Sunni Arabs. The Kurds have been autonomous for over a decade, under U.S. protection, and are developing new oil fields in the north. Shia politicians have said that this oil belongs to "the Iraqi people" (or the Shia politicians running the government.)
The Shia majority is not monolithic either, and several large factions could form, attract part of the security forces and create new militias, and have a civil war. That would, in typical Middle Eastern fashion, lead to another dictatorship, this time run by a Shia tyrant. The Shia can do a Saddam, they just want a chance.
Iraqi politicians also want U.S. forces gone in order to halt improvements in the security forces. Iraqi troops and police are now strong enough to deal with the Sunni Arabs, but still a long way from Western standards of efficiency and honesty. The politicians do not want the troops and officers to be too effective, lest the generals be tempted to take over "for the sake of the country" and try to run a more efficient government.
Ralph Peters wrote a fierce column last week:
THE greatest lie intellectuals tell us is that "the pen is mightier than the sword." That's what cowards claim when they want to preen as heroes. . . ."Brave" columnists wrote countless columns bemoaning the suffering of the Kurds and the Shia under Saddam Hussein. Their earnest paragraphs didn't save a single life.
Only when better men acted did the surviving victims of one of the world's worst dictatorships glimpse freedom - an imperfect freedom but better than a mass grave.
Nothing positive is going to happen in Sudan or Zimbabwe (or Tibet) until rule-of-law states take action. . . .
Please, educate me: In over 5,000 years of more or less recorded history, how many tyrannies have been overthrown by noble sentiments? How many genocides have been averted by reasonable discussions? How many wars have been prevented by Quakers? . . .
Pacifists mean well. But they're a dictator's best friends. The man who won't fight for justice abets the terrorist, the tyrant and the concentration-camp guard. . . .
The use of the pen is an indulgence we can afford only because better men and women grip the sword on our behalf.
He's right, but what empowers intellectuals who would appease can be summed up in one word: women. Remember what novelist Barbara Kingsolver wrote little more than a month after 9/11:
I feel like I'm standing on a playground where the little boys are all screaming at each other, "He started it!" and throwing rocks that keep taking out another eye, another tooth. I keep looking around for somebody's mother to come on the scene saying, "Boys! Boys! Who started it cannot possibly be the issue here. People are getting hurt."I am somebody's mother, so I will say that now: The issue is, people are getting hurt.
Almost all the women I know think like Kingsolver. They consider men's aggressiveness primitive, childish, atavistic. They're suckers for the canard that diplomacy can end any conflict, or avert it, if only practiced by intelligent, articulate, well-meaning people. I too wish the world worked that way. It doesn't.
Of course, as I've noted before, some women recognize the nature of our enemies, the need to fight, and the danger of negotiation as a substitute for battle. But they're far outnumbered among their sex. And their peace-at-any-price sisters endanger the West in a time of war.
As though Israel did not have enough to worry about, it now faces a major water crisis. For years experts have been warning that the increase in population and decrease in rainfall will combine to push water levels way down, and now it’s been announced that by year’s end, and maybe even by the end of the summer, the Sea of Galilee, Israel’s main source of usable water, will for the first time dip down to the “black line,” below which water can no longer be pumped without causing irreversible ecological damage. The other main source of water for the country, the underground aquifers, are in even worse shape. The head of the water authority called it “the worst crisis since records started being kept 80 years ago.”
There's a long list of problems that our leaders are similarly failing to address effectively: Social Security, Medicare, terrorism, illegal immigration, infrastructure, energy. . . . Here's another that deserves serious attention:
A top scientist today warned the House Armed Services Committee America remains vulnerable to a "catastrophe" from a nuclear electromagnetic pulse attack that could be launched with plausible deniability by hostile rogue nations or terrorists.William R. Graham, chairman of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack and the former national science adviser to President Reagan, testified before the committee while presenting a sobering new report on "one of a small number of threats that can hold our society at risk of catastrophic consequences."
. . . The scariest and most threatening kind of EMP attack is initiated by the detonation of a nuclear weapon at high altitude in the range of 25 to 250 miles above the Earth's surface. The immediate effects of EMP are disruption of, and damage to, electronic systems and electrical infrastructure. Such a detonation over the middle of the continental U.S. "has the capability to produce significant damage to critical infrastructures that support the fabric of U.S. society and the ability of the United States and Western nations to project influence and military power," said Graham.
Read it all. This danger alone is reason enough for us to end the mullahs' reign in Iran.
Why don't the DNC and the RNC equip their respective election workers with cheap digital camcorders? We might prevent, or at worst resolve afterward, the kinds of controversies that followed the 2004 vote.
Although al Qaeda has officially abandoned Iraq, not everyone got the memo, or bothered to pay attention to it. Over the last two months, Iraqi and American forces have gone after the remaining 1,200 al Qaeda members, who have fled to the northern city of Mosul. Over half of the al Qaeda members have been killed or captured.The problem is that a lot of the money, and foreign volunteers, coming into Iraq was for the purpose of "defeating the Iranians". Many Sunni Arabs in the Persian Gulf region see Iran as their most dangerous foe, and believe letting the Shia majority in Iraq run the government [is] nothing but a front for actual Iranian control of Iraq. The result is that nearly all the remaining terrorists are Iraqi Sunni Arabs, and are determined to fight to the death (theirs, and as many others as they can take with them). They have the will, and they have the money (and plenty of venal Iraqis willing to supply them with what they want, for a fee.) Most of their fellow Sunni Arabs have turned on the terrorists, so a lot of the terrorist activity is against Sunni Arab leaders. The Sunni Arab leadership knew this would happen when nearly all of them openly agreed to renounce terrorism last year. . . .
The criminal gangs, who are a huge factor in the economy, and public safety (some neighborhoods are very safe simply because a powerful [gang] is headquartered there), are, separately from the Sunni Arab terrorism, trying to intimidate the security forces and judiciary from cracking down on all the stealing, kidnapping, smuggling, extortion, and so on (booze, prostitution, etc). Even during the Saddam period (and before, going back centuries), the criminal underground was powerful, and something everyone had to deal with. The exact terms of the deal in a democratic Iraq [are] still being worked out.
It is not hard to see why and how the middle classes, the poor, and the union members would like to see larger government programs and greater taxes on the wealthy, but why are so many in the upper-upper middle classes so vehemently pro-Obama?. . . Many enjoying the good life worry that their own privilege in some sort of way comes at the expense of someone else, or they fret that their present lifestyle in ecological terms is hardly sustainable. That concern does not translate into much concrete action. . . . Obama offers a reassuring sense of self-image: one can still maintain all the current mechanisms one is accustomed to in ensuring privilege, but visible support for Obama offers a sense of atonement and alleviation of guilt at rather modest cost. . . .
Somehow an Obama sticker, sign on the lawn, or a lapel button has become the equivalent of a crucifix around the neck of a prosperous 16th-century burgher: easy fides of inner good and a valuable totem in reconciling the apparent irreconcilable.
A great story from Laura Lee Donoho:
Back when I was a teenager my parents didn’t allow me to date until I was sixteen, and then it was with a group. When I was seventeen I was allowed to go out on a date with a guy in a car. If a young man got me home one minute late, my father was at the door to meet us with his double barreled shotgun.If I went on more than one date with a young man my dad put him through the trick glass quest. If he didn’t pass the sense of humor test he didn’t date me. And he went home with a wet shirt.
But quest number one? The young men I dated had to respect the gun.
My husband (back then just a cute guy who had completely caught my eye) got me home five minutes after my Dad’s curfew on our first date. I was a little nervous knowing my Dad’s proclivity to be at the door waiting with one of his guns.
A few times when I had gotten home on time Daddy was at the door with the gun and the young men turned pale and left as quickly as they could. I never heard from them again. It kind of hurt my pride but my Dad told me that they weren’t dating me for the right reasons if they couldn’t pass the gun test. If they were that sissy or afraid to face my father they just didn’t measure up. After a while (and I didn’t date that much really) I began to enjoy the idea and felt a sense of pride that my Dad was there waiting for me every time I went out.
But on the night that Bob got me home late I was nervous because I really liked him and I didn’t want Daddy to scare him off.
I needn’t have worried.
When we got home as we walked up to the house the front porch light went on. As we stepped on the porch the door opened and there was Daddy standing with his double barreled shotgun, looking serious. Bob took one look at him and grabbed the gun away from him and said, “Is that an LC Smith?” He took the gun apart, exclaiming over it and Daddy had found a kindred spirit. Before the night was over Daddy was showing Bob his barbwire collection. It got so late that I was sleepy and went to bed. Daddy and Bob were still talking.
"Dr. Barton Goldsmith, psychotherapist and author of Emotional Fitness for Couples," quoted here:
"Recession is good for relationships," he said. "People don't want to go out so they can cocoon, and sex can be fun for many couples.["]
(Via Kathryn Jean Lopez, I think, but I can't find the post here.)
Details here:
If you’re one of the first 100,000 to create an account by Independence Day, we’ll automatically apply a $10 credit to your first album purchase. The credit must be used by midnight Pacific time, July 4, 2008 – so sign up and start shopping today. Limit one per household.
Note: I've revised this post slightly for clarity.
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In the Weekly Standard, Anne-Elisabeth Moutet has a vivid piece on the al-Dura case and the French journalists siding with Charles Enderlin, who first broadcast the infamous footage. After a French appeals court found against Enderlin, "France's premier left-wing newsweekly" (Moutet's description) published a petition defending him:
There followed the names of over 300 journalists-sorry, "news professionals"-and hundreds more miscellaneous celebrity intellectuals (under the heading "Personalités"), as well as a vast slew of mere web surfers ("Internautes"). . . . It was as if the eight-year controversy had been irrelevant. From "news professionals," who were viewed as right by definition, no accountability could possibly be required. The guild was closing ranks.Scanning the long list (to which new signatures are added daily at the Nouvel Obs website), I experienced a kind of life-flashing-before-my-eyes moment. There were the names of people from every magazine or newspaper I'd ever worked at; people I'd trained with; people I'd been great pals with before life packed us off in different directions; and people I'd last seen only the week before. It was, to tell the truth, Stepford-like scary.
I resolved to call as many of the familiar names as I could. I knew, or thought I knew, where these people came from. Why had they signed? It might be awkward to ask, I reasoned, but wasn't it our business to ask questions?
As it turned out, it was plenty awkward.
For example:
Then there was someone who insisted so vehemently on not being quoted or described in any way that I won't even reveal this person's sex. "Look, this whole thing has been a nightmare for Charles. He's received hate mail, his wife has been threatened, he's about to have a nervous breakdown. You want the truth? I don't give a flying monkey about the case. I signed for Charles. In all honesty, I think he edited his film on deadline and was careless, and afterwards he didn't want to admit he'd screwed up. A one-minute film, and it snowballed from there. Don't put in anything that might identify me, I don't want him to think I don't believe 100 percent in what he says, he'd be devastated."
Behold the "highest popping in toaster the world":* The Moaster. Photo and video at link.
(Via Dave Barry.)
*That's the original syntax. Maybe the writer was too excited to think straight, and who could blame him?
Gail Heriot makes a Sowellesque point about "the ABA's efforts to withhold re-accreditation for George Mason University Law School,"
whose student body [at] 16.16% minority was not "diverse" enough to satisfy the ABA's over-the-top diversity standards.. . . Sadly, a very large portion of the minority students that the ABA pressured George Mason to admit did not do well. A full 45% of the African American students experienced academic failure (defined in GMU's academic regulations as a GPA below 2.15) in their first year. Only 4% of other students did so. . . .
The pity is that, as Richard's Sander's research suggests, some of these who failed at GMU might have succeeded at less competitive schools and had a greater chance of ultimately passing the bar. Because somebody at the ABA thought that it was more important for George Mason's student body to look like America, a number of students have now wasted a year of their lives and saddled themselves with debt with little or no chance of ever practicing law.
"Don't you know yet," he said, "that an idle and selfish class loves to see mischief being made, even if it is made at its own expense? Its own life being all a matter of pose and gesture, it is unable to realize the power and the danger of a real movement and of words that have no sham meaning. It is all fun and sentiment. It is sufficient, for instance, to point out the attitude of the old French aristocracy towards the philosophers whose words were preparing the Great Revolution. Even in England, where you have some common-sense, a demagogue has only to shout loud enough and long enough to find some backing in the very class he is shouting at. You, too, like to see mischief being made. The demagogue carries the amateurs of emotion with him. Amateurism in this, that, and the other thing is a delightfully easy way of killing time, and feeding one's own vanity--the silly vanity of being abreast with the ideas of the day after to-morrow.["]
Joseph Conrad, "The Informer"
A friend of the family has yet to grow comfortable on the computer, so I check her emailbox each week for anything urgent. This arrived yesterday from Emily's List:
Dear [my friend's name],You must have been as stunned as I was to read in last Friday's New York Times that many news execs denied the existence of sexism in the coverage of the presidential campaign, insisting that they covered the primary fairly and without bias.
I felt like I must have spent the last year on a different planet — which cable news shows were these execs watching? Were they reading their own papers? This story ran just two days after Fox News ran a caption about Michelle Obama calling her the Senator's "baby mama" and Keith Olbermann crowned Katie Couric the day’s "Worst Person in the World" after she, as noted in the Times story, echoed what so many of us felt: that much of the coverage of Hillary was "unfair," "hostile," and rooted in sexism.
We applaud Katie Couric for her integrity, and wholeheartedly disagree with her colleagues's assertion that sexism in the primary coverage was limited to "a few glaring examples." Rather, it stared us in the face every day between Clinton's entry into the race last year and her graceful, gracious concession speech — from Tucker Carlson's quip about Clinton making him want to cross his legs and Mike Barnicle's comparison of Clinton to a "first wife standing outside a probate court," to frequent references in both print and television media to her "cackle" and her cleavage.
Now, the punditocracy seems to have trained its fire on another powerful woman in the presidential race: Michelle Obama. Let the news execs be warned: we will not stand for blatant misogyny — or offensive stereotypes — aimed at Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Katie Couric, or any other woman.
It's up to us to make sure that women, from our own candidates to Michelle Obama, receive fair and respectful coverage. Together, we can make our voices heard on behalf of women everywhere.
Warmest regards,
Ellen R. Malcolm
President
The truth is that native peoples, like all other aboriginal societies on the planet, did anything and everything to their surroundings that might help them to survive. "There is now a very considerable body of research," Robert Whelan writes, "which demonstrates conclusively that the Indians made a massive impact on their environment before the arrival of the white man, and that much of this impact was damaging and showed no conception of a conservation ethic.". . . Tribes displayed neither tidiness nor restraint in harvesting various animals for food. University of Utah archaeologist Jack M. Broughton spent seven years sifting through the bird bones in a Native American dump near San Francisco Bay. "From 2,600 to at least 700 years ago," a University press release announces, "native people hunted some species to local extinction," and the animals only rebounded when the Indians became decimated by disease. Broughton's earlier research on Indians' quest for "anything big and juicy" turned up similar fates for fish such as sturgeon, as well as local varieties of elk, deer, geese, and ducks.
Anthropologist Paul S. Martin of the University of Arizona thinks the arrival of the first peoples to North America in prehistoric times meant the end for several big animals: "The basic facts are clear. People established themselves, colonized and spread into the New World at least by 11,000 years ago, if not earlier. And, at this time, large animals—camels, and extinct species of horses, ground sloths, saber-tooth cats, in addition to mammoths and mastodons, and a dozen or two dozen more genera of large animals—all go extinct at roughly the same time."
*I don't call them "Native Americans" because 1) it's a silly term—I was born in New York, so I'm a native American—and 2) I've read enough quotes from them (here, for instance) to know that they tend to refer to themselves as Indians rather than as Native Americans.
From Kathryn Jean Lopez's interview of Kathleen Parker on Parker's new book Save the Males: Why Men Matter. Why Women Should Care:
Lopez: Can feminism really be remade or is the f-word too tainted?Parker: Personally, I’m opposed to -ism and -ology. I agree with Walker Percy that we should repent of labels and I’m happy to retire feminism. Nevertheless, a more honest, serious feminism has important work in other parts of the world. Here in the U.S., I’d say we’re in the fine-tuning stage. When we’re debating golf-club memberships, the house that feminism built is fully furnished. We’re doing dust ruffles at this point. I’d like to see feminism focus on helping women who have to worry about being stoned by their sons for daring to speak to an unrelated man.
* * * * *
Lopez: How are you not dishonoring the service of women in Iraq and Afghanistan right now by arguing women are different than men in the military?
Parker: Well, by insisting that that’s not my intent. Women serving in war are my heroes. I just don’t want to see them — and the men who are with them — be sacrificed on the altar of misplaced feminist ambition. We’ve confused the ability to die with the ability to fight. Women have no place in combat for a variety of reasons — physical and psychological — but you’ll have to read the book to get the whole picture. The crux is that combat is not being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It has a specific definition, which is to actively and aggressively engage the enemy with the expectation of physical contact. Putting women in that circumstance, mano-a-mano with enemy men, is counter-intuitive on its face. My argument is principally a feminist position: Women do not have an equal opportunity to survive.
Andrew Stuttaford relates the tale of the EU constitution. Though Ireland's rejection of the Treaty of Lisbon should have ended the saga,
Early indications are that the ratification process will continue. As Jose Barroso, the EU’s chief bureaucrat, announced within minutes of the Irish result, “the treaty is not dead.”And that tells you much of what you need to know about the EU.
For years now, Sudan has not only been the locale of the planet’s bloodiest exercise in mass violence, but also the West’s most neglected front in the War on Terror. We have resisted understanding the ongoing massacre in Darfur for what it is — not some impenetrable tribal rivalry, but rather a prolonged irruption of Islamist terrorism in its most unapologetic form. . . .This is not an African civil war. As in Afghanistan and Iraq, this is a struggle between freedom-loving citizens and their Islamist oppressors. . . .
Can there be any doubt that Darfur is a criminally neglected front in the War on Terror and that the U.S. needs to support the Sudan Liberation Movement in every way possible? . . . The Sunni Awakening in Iraq has demonstrated that a native population eager to throw off the yoke of Islamism can be America’s best ally. What are we waiting for?
A warning from Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, chairman of Nestlé:
If there's one certainty, it is this: The production of biofuels has stimulated a massive, and destructive, reorientation of the world's agriculture markets. The U.S. Department of Energy calculates that every 10,000 liters of water produces as little as five liters of ethanol, or one to two liters of biodiesel. Biofuels are economical nonsense, ecologically useless and ethically indefensible. This year, the U.S. will use around 130 million tons of corn for biofuels. This corn was not available as human food, nor as fodder to animals. Is this the right strategy, for a product that won't satisfy even a small percentage of our energy needs?The biofuel madness is contributing to water shortages that are already endemic. Stretches of the Rio Grande, which partly separates the U.S. from Mexico, have dried up at regular intervals since 2001. China's Yellow River ran dry in 1972, in 1996 and in 1997.
Worse yet, we are overusing ground water in large parts of the world. Water levels are sinking rapidly both in China as well as in India's Punjab state. Great aquifers, whether in the Sahara or in the southwestern U.S., are being depleted rapidly. This is water that dates from thousands of years ago. Like oil, once gone, it is lost forever.
Increasing agricultural productivity is only part of the solution. We also need to encourage the responsible use of water. And the only way to do that is to introduce competitive pricing. Water is being wasted and misused because few people are even aware of its worth.
For a politician whose forte has never been domestic policy, McCain has a peculiar taste for complex, verging on unworkable, regulatory schemes — from campaign-finance reform, to comprehensive immigration reform, to a cap-and-trade system limiting carbon emissions.The attraction for McCain of these plans isn’t their intricacies, but their symbolism. Campaign-finance reform demonstrated his incorruptibility; comprehensive immigration reform his belief in an America open to all comers; cap-and-trade his commitment to fight global warming.
The California holding [story here—mg] carries a warning to states (and wavering politicians) all over the country: The middle ground on this issue is rapidly disappearing. The further you extend civil unions or domestic partnerships, the more rights guaranteed by those unions and partnerships, the more we will question why civil unions and domestic partnerships exist at all.* * * * *
California same-sex couples will be married under state income tax law but not under federal, will be entitled to spousal immunities if charged under state criminal law but not federal, will have one set of rights in contract cases but a different set under bankruptcy ... and on and on.
This is obviously not sustainable. Unlike, say, abortion rights, marriage is peculiarly badly suited to a federalist solution. The California decision settles very little - it sets the stage only for a more protracted national legal and political controversy.
* * * * *
[R]ecent experience in Canada and Europe suggests that for all the passion roused by same-sex marriage as an abstract issue, surprisingly few people will make use of it as a concrete right. In the second half of 2007, for example, the Canadian province of Ontario (population: more than 12 million) issued zero same-sex marriage licenses - even though these licenses now arrive with the full array of marriage rights under both provincial and federal law.
A few weeks ago the Weekly Standard published a remarkably interesting piece by Stanley Kurtz on a new book, Culture and Conflict in the Middle East, by anthropologist Philip Carl Salzman. Kurtz calls the book "the most penetrating, reliable, systematic, and theoretically sophisticated effort yet made to understand the Islamist challenge the United States is facing in cultural terms."
I expected Kurtz's article to receive attention from political bloggers, but I've seen none (though Arnold Kling posted a short review of the book itself). Kurtz's essay may be too long for most people to read in these busy times, so I'm going to post an unauthorized abridgment below (which may itself be too long, but one does what one can). This passage, I think, expresses the heart of it:
The religion [Islam] itself is an overlay in partial tension with, and deeply stamped by, the dynamics of tribal life. In other words--and this is [Salzman's] central argument--the template of tribal life, with its violent and shifting balance of power between fusing and fissioning lineage segments, is the dominant theme of cultural life in the Arab Middle East (and shapes even many non-Arab Muslim populations). At its cultural core, says Salzman, even where tribal structures are attenuated, Middle Eastern society is tribal society.
Kurtz sees cause for hope in Salzman's analysis:
While tribalism is in one sense culturally pervasive in the Middle East, tribal practices are less swathed in sacredness than explicitly Koranic symbols and commandments--and are therefore more susceptible to criticism and debate. Even jihad and suicide bombing can be interpreted through a tribal lens. We've taught ourselves a good deal about Islam over the past seven years. Yet tribalism is at least half the cultural battle in the Middle East, and the West knows little about it. Learning how to understand and critique the Islamic Near East through a tribal lens will open up a new and smarter strategy for change.
What I fear, however, is that once Iraq is strong enough to repel outside enemies, internal cultural stresses will rise, and it will become a bloody region of tribal warfare. I hope events prove me wrong.
Click "Read more" for Kurtz's piece as chopped up by me.
