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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.
