31 December 2003
Cultural preservation
[source]
The French journalist Alain Hertoghe paid a heavy price for accusing leading French newspapers of being unreasonably critical of the United States when covering the war in Iraq. In a recent book, La Guerre à Outrances, he wrote that the papers saw “the war they would have liked to have seen,” infusing news stories with their ideological preferences. This prompted Hertoghe’s own employer, the Catholic daily La Croix, to fire him because he had maligned its war coverage.
Clearly this was done because dissent is American and we can’t have that kind of thing in France.
It's not dissent if it's the wrong opinion
Tim Bueler recently received some unusual advice: His principal and a campus police officer suggested that he stay home from his California high school for a few days.
They feared for his safety because Tim, the founder of Rancho Cotate High School’s new Conservative Club, said he had received threats from other students after writing an article for the club newsletter calling for a crackdown on illegal immigration.
The article also cites a number of incidents where teachers
- explicitly declined to protect Bueler
- told him he “deserved” the violence he was threatened with
- joined in name calling and abuse of Bueler
I wonder if any of those teachers ever complain about the lack of discipline and respect among their students.
It's not like it's important data
A company developing security technology for electronic voting suffered an embarrassing hacker break-in that executives think was tied to the rancorous debate over the safety of casting ballots online.
This doesn’t make me feel less confident about electronic voting - that meter was already pegged.
Texas Democrats avoid burdening voters
The head of the Texas Democrats on Tuesday vowed that his party would field “scores” of candidates to challenge incumbent Republicans in the 2004 elections, but with filing for the March primaries ending Friday, no Democrat has stepped forward in any of the statewide races.
It’s just the primaries - why get the voters involved in selecting the candidates for the real election?
Free markets vs. compassionate markets
[source]
Some will see this as simply a natural disaster of the kind to which Iran, according to Khatami, is “prone”. Four days earlier, however, there had been another earthquake of about the same intensity, this time in California. In which about 0.000001% of the buildings suffered serious structural damage and two people were killed when an old clocktower collapsed. So why the polar disparity between Bam and Paso Robles?
This is not a silly question. True, the Californians are much richer than the Iranians. But if you believed everything you read in the works of M Moore and others, you would anticipate a culture of corporate greed in which safety and regulation came way behind the desire to turn the quick buck. Instead you discover a society in which the protection of citizens from falling masonry seems to be regarded as enormously important.
Whereas in Iran - for all its spiritual solidarity - the authorities don’t appear to give a toss. The report in this paper from Teheran yesterday was revealing. It was one thing for the old, mud-walled citadel to fall down, but why the new hospitals? An accountant waiting to give blood at a clinic in the capital told our correspondent that it was a “disgrace that a rich country like ours with all the revenue from oil and other natural resources is not prepared to deal with an earthquake”.
[…]
What, I wonder, has Arundhati Roy to say now about the superiority of traditional building methods over globalised ones? Some Iranians might think that it’s a shame there wasn’t a McDonald’s in Bam. It would have been the safest place in town.
As a flock, they're there to be fleeced
The ancient city of Bam, the epicenter of the quake, has a long history of destruction. It was first destroyed in an earthquake almost 1,900 years ago. But such is the unexplainable magnetism of Bam that, almost eight centuries later, it had become an important trading center with a cosmopolitan population of Muslims, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians.
The city was again almost totally razed by an earthquake in 1911. But by the 1930s it had reemerged as a trading center and a producer of dates and pistachios. Then came other earthquakes in 1950 and 1966.
By the early 1970s, the government had decided not to allow people to build new houses in Bam itself. The city’s ancient monuments were declared part of the heritage of mankind under UNESCO and no new buildings permits were issued for almost six years.
The revolutionary turmoil of 1978-79 provided racketeers with an opportunity to seize large chunks of land in Bam and use it for poorly designed and badly constructed houses and shops. The racket was backed by a group of powerful mullahs who, in exchange for a cut in the proceeds, issued fatwas (religious opinions) that canceled government orders that banned house-building in the city.
Stunning, the kind of benefits the Iranian Revolution has brought to The People™.
30 December 2003
The Challenge of Fundamentalism - a review
THE CHALLENGE OF FUNDAMENTALISM: Political Islam and the New World Disorder, by Bassam Tibi. 262 pages. California, $19.95.
For two decades, Bassam Tibi, one of the tiny and dwindling number of Muslim liberals, has been preaching conciliation between his co-religionists and the rest of the world. “The Challenge of Fundamentalism,” which was written after the first Gulf War but before Sept. 11, 2001, then revised, represents a viewpoint that may need serious revision again as a result of the second Gulf War. Nevertheless, as a comprehensive and clarifying statement from one end of the political range, it repays reading.
If nothing else, it’s worth $19.95 to clear away the sappy misconception that Islam is a “religion of peace.”
Tibi explains that this refers not to peace now, but to a promise in the Koran that eventually the warfare between dar al-Islam (house of Islam) and dar al-Harb (house of war) will end with Islam triumphant. There will then be no more war between the houses, since one will have ceased to exist.
That such a childish tautology has status as profound doctrine in Islam shows how very different Islam is from other societies, leading some, like Professor Samuel Huntington of Harvard, to predict a “clash of civilizations.”
Tibi also demolishes the idea that jihad means spiritual struggle. Of course it means armed violence, he says, which will hardly surprise anyone but the willfully ignorant.
“Fundamentalism” is an unfortunate term to use for American audiences, because it gets confused with Christian Fundamentalism, which is not even remotely similar to the Islamic kind. Nor, says Tibi, is Islamic fundamentalism either traditional or authentic. He contends that Islam as a religion should be viewed as an ethical system, that sharia does not derive from either the Koran or hadith (sayings of Prophet Muhammad) and that Islamic fundamentalism is riddled with modern, although unacknowledged, concepts.
“The Challenge of Fundamentalism” is loosely reasoned, but among several candidates as the central point, Tibi argues that the concept of the nation-state is western and alien to the rest of the world — not just the Islamic part. The borders and the forms of government, not being organic to their societies, of course have failed.
With the Cold War ended, this hidden crisis springs into the open.
The situation is complex, with Tibi taking pains to try to separate out strands such as pan-Arabism, legal systems (Islam has four) and anti-colonialism.
He concluded, though, that Gulf War I was a political victory for Saddam Hussein. It’s a dubious proposition, but if ever true, it didn’t last.
Tibi, a Syrian who lives in the West (as almost all Muslim liberals must do to avoid being murdered), says that the political program of the Islamic fundamentalists can never succeed, but that does not mean they cannot create a “new world disorder” by trying.
He disparages military solutions from the West, suggesting instead that Islam as a religion could revert to an authentic tradition of rationality and secular government. Unfortunately, the last important Muslim philosopher who advocated rationalism died more than 500 years ago, and Tibi does not explain how to inculcate an admiration for rationalism in a billion people who are mostly illiterate, who do not enjoy a free press when they can read and whose leading intellectual institutions are avowedly antirational.
If there were suitable institutions, even he avers that “in the minds of the Islamic peoples . . . democracy is not an important issue.”
If that’s right, then Tibi’s program of “international morality and cross-cultural bridging” is more a counsel of despair than a practical political program.
He lets his guard down at one point, noting that “there are competing views of what the commonalities might be.”
In that case, then, they aren’t commonalities.
Nevertheless, Tibi is persuaded that the only alternative to a clash of civilizations (which Islam is certain to lose) is “cross-cultural morality.”
“The Challenge of Fundamentalism” is meant to be an optimistic analysis. It comes across the opposite.
Ooooh, that's gotta hurt!
[source]
An examination of what has grown into a multibillion-dollar contract to restore Iraq’s oil infrastructure shows no evidence of profiteering by Halliburton, the Houston-based oil services company [emphasis added]
Some things are worth the incoherence
[source]
If we have to have an incoherent, self-loathing “peace” movement, then women showing off their hooters in support of a culture that would stone them to death for showing off their ankles is about as good as it’s gonna get.
29 December 2003
Hate vs. compassion
[source]
“We greatly welcome any assistance from the United States. We welcome assistance from all countries except Israel,” [provincial governor] Alavi said.
Yes, clearly better to let people die from the aftermath of an earthquake than suffer the presence of Israelis. There’ll be no peace until those in the Middle East love their children more than they hate the Jews.
The disrespectful youth of today
This is mean, but funny.
In the picture is John Kerry, a Democratic Party candidate for President. He’s doing one of those silly but required exercises where he talks to high school students who can’t vote. The picture shows him trying to make a point to one of the students, whose shirt says “Your mouth keeps moving but all I hear is ‘blah, blah, blah’ “
The article says
The student told the Monitor that he did not mean to make a political statement with the shirt, which features the likeness of “Psycho Chihuahua,” a talking Mexican dog whose appearance in Taco Bell commercials is the subject of recent litigation. “I completely forgot that he” — Kerry, not the Chihuahua — “was coming,” LaGuardia, 17, told the Monitor. “I asked, ‘Do I have time to ride home to change?’ But I didn’t.”
One finds this explanation suspect; LaGuardia admitted that he is a Republican.
I have to agree with the article writer on that last point.
Sadly, if Kerry had an actual campaign this would damage it, despite the complete irrelevance of the image.
However, It’s still funny.
UPDATE: I knew this reminded me of something else — the AG Ashcoft vs. the naked breasts of Justice flap. Ashcroft supporters have maintained that the real problem was photographers striving to make sure the breasts were in pictures of Ashcroft speaking. As far as I can tell, Ashcroft himself has never officially commented on the issue.
Don't put that sauce on me!
Democratic presidential contender Howard Dean has demanded release of secret deliberations of Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force. But as Vermont governor, Dean had an energy task force that met in secret and angered state lawmakers.
Dean’s group held one public hearing and after-the-fact volunteered the names of industry executives and liberal advocates it consulted in private, but the Vermont governor refused to open the task force’s closed-door deliberations.
In 1999, Dean offered the same argument the Bush administration uses today for keeping deliberations of a policy task force secret.
“The governor needs to receive advice from time to time in closed session. As every person in government knows, sometimes you get more open discussion when it’s not public,” Dean was quoted as saying.
I don’t like to pound on Howard Dean, because frankly I want him to get the Democratic Party nomination. That would result not only in a resounding Republican victory in 2004 but would also serve up a giant helping of Big Media Delusion. I fully expect that Big Media will report a close race right until Dean’s concession speech, at which point we’ll have a repeat of the California’s governor’s race aftermath.
It's always more complicated
As an update to yesterday’s post about supporting Poland, Winds of Change has a response. It’s worth reading but the summary is that the issue isn’t money, but equipment. The supplies that are wanted by Poland are ones that the USA doesn’t have suffficient supply for our own front-line troops.
The comments are interesting as well and indicate that no small part of the bottleneck is a political unwillingness to gear up for war production. Blame for that can be attached to President Bush and Congress in equal parts.
28 December 2003
Molly Ivins reduced to recycling conservative jokes
[source]
In this Texas Observer column from September, leftoid Molly Ivins wrote:
One problem I have with Arnold Schwarzenegger is that he looks like a condom stuffed with walnuts.
One problem I have with Molly Ivins is that she’s a goddamn joke thief. And not just once, but twice. In October the Texan gag bandit repeated her crime on CNN:
I went out to California to look at this race and came back saying, oh, Gray Davis makes Mr. Rogers look like he was on steroids, and Arnold Schwarzenegger looks exactly like a condom stuffed with walnuts. This was not the most profound observation I have ever made about serious public affairs, but it’s irresistible.
Irresistible … to steal! Ivins lifted “the observation she made” from Australian writer Clive James. It’s at least a decade old. Resign, you shameless, dishonest, joke-pinching she-beast!
As a final nail in the coffin, Clive James is of course conservative. But I suppose that since Lefties cannot mock their own icons, they presume the same of conservatives (or could it be that Ivins presumed that none of her readers would ever read something by a conservative?)
It's a wonder we have allies sometimes
Poland did have one request - a humble one, in the great scheme of things. Warsaw asked for $47 million to modernize six used, American-built C-130 transport aircraft and to purchase American-built HMMWV all-terrain vehicles so elite Polish units could better integrate operations with American forces. Much of the money would go right back to U.S. factories and workers.
Our response? We stiffed them.
For once, the Pentagon and the State Department agree: No can do. Impossible. Our pocket are empty. Got to FedEx every penny to our favorite dictators.
Poland, eh? What kind of ally are they?
I found the cure.
I found the cure to anti-Americanism: Come to Poland.
After two years of traveling almost exclusively to Western Europe and the Middle East, Poland feels like a geopolitical spa. I visited here for just three days and got two years of anti-American bruises massaged out of me. Get this: people here actually tell you they like America — without whispering. What has gotten into these people? Have all their subscriptions to Le Monde Diplomatique expired? Haven’t they gotten the word from Berlin and Paris? No, they haven’t. In fact, Poland is the antidote to European anti-Americanism. Poland is to France what Advil is to a pain in the neck. Or as Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins foreign affairs specialist, remarked after visiting Poland: “Poland is the most pro-American country in the world — including the United States.”
Oh, that kind.
We couldn’t spare what is in the scheme of the invasion of Iraq pocket change? Poland has troops in Iraq, which puts it a bit ahead of certain other putative allies. This is just flat out embarrassing.
27 December 2003
A new round of attacks in Iraq
[source]
suicide bombers and assailants with mortars and grenade launchers blasted coalition military bases and the governor’s office in this southern city [of Karbala] Saturday, killing 13 people and wounding at least 172.
The death toll in Karbala included six coalition soldiers - four Bulgarians and two Thais; six Iraqi police officers; and a civilian.
At least 172 people, many of them civilians caught in the chaos […]
How are Bulgarian and Thia soldiers getting killed in this “unilateral” action by the USA? Have those who blather on about that thought about how rude such dismissal of the sacrifices being made by our real allies is?
26 December 2003
Education in America
A couple of tidbits on our school systems.
in a survey I conducted last spring, music teachers said songs that could be considered American children’s musical heritage often aren’t part of the public school curriculum. Among their comments: “My school is low socio-economic, so I teach only pop music.” “Our curriculum is multicultural. We do not teach songs of the American culture.” “These songs aren’t in my textbooks, so I don’t teach them.” “These songs aren’t appropriate for us. I teach in Hawaii, not in America.”
The children sit in a circle. Some are wearing mittens; others are waiting expectantly with little plastic shovels. The rules of the game state that a few of the children must do nothing but sit and watch as the action begins. On the leader’s “Go!” the children scramble for 100 pennies that have been scattered on the floor in the center of the circle. […]
During the second part of this exercise students are asked to devise plans for a fair distribution of the pennies. They are asked to pass judgment on the other students who did or did not give away some pennies to others, and whether or not there should be a redistribution of wealth in America, and how to accomplish this redistribution.
Of course, it would be silly to ask “how can we get more pennies?”.
Virtual property rights in China
A Chinese court has ordered an online video game company to return hard-won virtual property, including a make-believe stockpile of bio-chemical weapons, to a player whose game account was looted by a hacker. […]
The company argued that the value of the virtual property only existed in the game and was “just piles of data to our operating companies.”
This went to court in China. Why didn’t the company just return it? Why was it worth going to court over? That said, it’s quite interesting that a Chinese court made this decision (although maybe not - this is the kind of property that a Communist government wouldn’t be concerned about).
Petard watch
[source]
The latest Palestinian suicide bombing and a ceaseless spate of attack alerts may leave Israel no option but to take unilateral steps stripping Palestinians of land they seek for a state, political sources said on Friday.
Reuters is actually leading a story with the concept that perhaps violence by Palestinians might, in some way, be contributing to the lack of peace in the Middle East? That’s a very bad sign for the terrorists.
24 December 2003
Taking the long weekend
Merry Christmas to all those so unfortunate as to read this weblog! Hopefully I’ll be back on line Monday. Until then, be happy, be safe, be free.
23 December 2003
DID YOU KNOW: Nigeria e-mail scams are Bush's fault!
This is too hard to excerpt, but basically Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee falls for a Nigerian e-mail scam involving tuition for a fake student & school. This would be enough stupidity for a normal person, but Toynbee is a Guardian columnist - she must excell from the heard. She compounds her stupidity first by writing about it publically so we all know she’s an idiot. To cap it off, she blames it on the USA in general and President Bush in particular. She must be right, because as we all know there wasn’t any Nigerian scam e-mail before Bush was elected.
22 December 2003
Egyption Foreign Minister assualted for talking to Israeli government
[source]
Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher returned home Monday evening after a short visit to Israel where he was assaulted by Muslim worshippers at the Al Aqsa mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem.
During the one-day trip, Maher met separately with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom on ways to break the deadlock of the Palestinian-Israeli peace track, the state-run television reported. […]
The visit was seen as a significant thaw in ties between Israel and Egypt. […]
Explain to me again how the Palestinians really want peace when they assualt foreign dignitaries for even talking to Israelis.
Earthquake in San Jose
Personal sources tell me that there was an earthquake in the San Jose area within the last hour, although I don’t see anything on Google News. According to one source, the earthquake “shook gently … it was kinda soothing”.
More later after 100,000 other bloggers have reported on this.
UPDATE: Fox News reports on the magnitude 6.5 earthquake, although without much more information than is here.
If spiders could, wouldn't they encourage disorder to make webs easier to build?
I have said numerous times over on Winds of Change that international aid NGOs are parasites on international disorder, and that the American military’s mission to eliminate that disorder made the American military the NGOs’ enemy. For the American military to fulfill its mission means the elimination of the work international NGOs do.
If this is a quagmire, why is that so bad?
Canadian soldiers are noticing dramatic changes in the security and economic well-being of the Afghan capital.
“You can see buildings that weren’t there a couple of months ago,” said Lt.-Col. Don Denne, the commanding officer at Camp Julien, the largest Canadian Forces base in Afghanistan, as he toured Kabul on Saturday.
“I’m beginning to see new shops everywhere. Some pretty nice houses too.”
Even some of Canada’s hockey greats, in Kabul to boost the morale of Canadian troops, have recognized the impact the soldiers have had on security in the capital.
“I just talked to my Afghan interpreter, and asked him ‘Do you want the Canadian soldiers here?’” Former NHL tough guy Dave (Tiger) Williams said Sunday.
“He said ‘They have to stay, they have to stay.’ Every day, he says, they’re saving thousands of lives.”
This is good news, and we can only hope this spreads to the rest of the country as well.
Anti-war activist comes clean
Only someone who believes that the end justifies the means will think the liberation of the Iraqi people from Saddam’s murderous dictatorship, the creation of a democratic state in Iraq, or even the flowering of democracy in the entire Middle East, will justify the killing of tens of thousand of Iraqis.
— Raimond Gaita, professor of “moral philosophy”
I guess he think it’s better to have the Ba’ath regime kill tens of thousands of Iraqi to not liberate Iraq or have the flowering of democracy in the Middle East. Hey, at least he’s honest!
21 December 2003
Communists: as honest as they are fair
In his latest book, “North Korea: Another Country” (New Press), Cumings sets out to show, among other things, that the United States visited a “holocaust” on North Korea during the Korean War, that the rebuilt country came much closer to being a socialist paradise than we give it credit for, and that it is the Bush administration, not the Kim regime, that is to blame for the current tensions.
Cumings’ biggest problem seems to be taking the word of a Communist dictatorship at face value. Apparently he finds it inconceivable that such a government would lie about its economic data. Despite everything, it’s still stunning to see this kind of apologia for what is probably the most horrific regime on the planet. Here’s an anecdote from the comments which might shed further light on Cumings’ point of view (by SteveMG):
I had a bizarre exchange with Cumings a few years ago on a NPR radio show in Washington when he was on tour promoting his book about the incident at No Gun Ri.
Cumings argues that the incident - the “massacre” - was just one of a number of massacres perpetrated by U.S. troops. Specifically on No Gun Ri, Cumings acknowledges that North Korean troops hid among fleeing Korean civilians to attack U.S. troops. The incident at No Gun Ri, from all existing evidence, appears to have started when N.K. troops fired on U.S. troops. U.S. troops fired back, killing civilians.
However, Cumings totally absolved N.K. troops from complicity in this tragedy and cites the incident, as noted above, as one of many “massacres’ committed by the U.S.
I asked him that IF U.S. troops had hid among fleeing Korean civilians to attack N.K. troops, and the N.K. had fired back, who would be the guilty party? “The Americans,” he replied.
Of course! Only Americans have moral agency.
Plastic Turkey Brigade
Via Tim Blair we have a list of journalists who are promulgating the bogus “plastic turkey” story about President Bush’s visit to Baghdad.
- Mark Morford of The San Francisco Chronicle
- Matt Tiabbia of The Nation
- Heather Wokusch;
- Ian McNamara
- Adam Porter
- W. David Jenkins III
- Philip Adams
- Kasha
- Nico Pitney
- Alan Ramsey
- Mark Lawson
- A.L. Kennedy
- Greg Easterbrook (that’s disappointing, Easterbrook is normally cluefull)
BBC Watch
[source]
An internal BBC email tells its reporters not to refer to Saddam as a dictator. From the Daily Telegraph’s London Spy column:
“An email has been circulated telling us not to refer to Saddam as a dictator,” I’m told. “Instead, we are supposed to describe him as the former leader of Iraq. Apparently, because his presidency was endorsed in a referendum, he was technically elected. Hence the word dictator is banned. It’s all rather ridiculous.” The Beeb insists that the email merely restates existing guidelines. “We wanted to remind journalists whose work is seen and heard internationally of the need to use neutral language,” says a spokesman.
At what point do stories like this become “dog bites man” stories?
20 December 2003
We are the exception that proves the rule
Q. Why haven’t you identified the television journalists who paid off the Iraqi officials? By not naming them, you wound up implicating the entire press corps.
[Burns] That was an unfortunate consequence … The points I had to make were not personal ones. The points were broader. They were matters of principle … It’s an impossible dilemma. I am not going to talk about individuals.
As Orrin Judd points out, journalists would never let anyone else get away without naming names.
19 December 2003
"Chickens? Sure, I'll look for them" said the Fox
Israel Law Center Director Nitsana Darshan-Leitner has written a letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft, warning that the Palestinian put in charge of investigating the Gaza roadside bombing that killed 3 Americans in October—Rashid Abu Shabak—is probably the perpetrator.
But I’m sure he gets along fine with the State Department, and who could want more than that?
NY Times cooks Baghdad murder rates
A New York Times op-ed by two Brookings Institution researchers, Adriana Lins de Albuquerque and Michael O’Hanlon, claims that Baghdad’s murder rate is among the highest in the world. Supposedly Baghdad’s annualized murder rate from April to October this year ranged from an incredible 100 to 185 per 100,000 people […]
Yet, according to the Wall Street Journal Europe, the U.S. Army 1st Division in Baghdad reports that the numbers fell continually from a high of 19.5 per 100,000 in July to only 5 per 100,000 in October. […]
I contacted the authors of both pieces. Albuquerque and O’Hanlon, who wrote the Times piece, provided two sources for their murder rate numbers: An article by Neil MacFarquhar in the New York Times (Sept. 16, 2003) and a piece by Lara Marlowe in the Irish Times (Oct. 11, 2003). Yet, both references clearly stated that much more than murder was included in the reports that they used from the Baghdad morgue. MacFarquhar notes that these deaths also included “automobile accidents” and cases where people “were shot dead by American soldiers,” cases that clearly did not involve murders. The Irish Times piece mentions that “up to a quarter of fatal shootings [in the morgue] are caused by U.S. troops.” […]
The Wall Street Journal Europe instead relied on the U.S. Army 1st Division stationed in Baghdad. A public affairs officer with that division, Jason Beck, confirmed for me that a large part of the Iraqi legal system is being overseen by the U.S. JAG officers, and they are using the same standards for murder rates as used in the U.S. and separating out murders from other deaths.
The NY Times cooking the numbers between source and cite? I wish I could be surprised.
Big Media - willfully ignorant
As you can see in my pictures there were scores of reporters and cameras all over the place. And since the rallies ended in front of the Palestine hotel we thought that it would be impossible for the media to ignore this event. I felt a bit awkward walking along reporters carrying just a little digital camera while they had all the equipment.
The last thing we expected was to be the first to publish anything about the protests. It felt both good and awful at the same time. Good for scooping Reuters, AFP, AP, and other wire services and media stations. And awful for the people that depended on these services for their news. I’m telling you there were reporters from every station in the world at the demos that day and yet only a few mentioned them at all.
So these reporters just forgot to mention this to their senior editors?
:UPDATE: Long post at Instapundit with the NY Times lame excuse that they didn’t cover the protests because they weren’t notified ahead of time. Skipping over the fact that it was all over the blogosphere beforehand, we can see from above that the reporters were there anyway and the NY Times actually published one (one!) picture from the protest. So the story was dropped or spiked, not just missed.
18 December 2003
Ok, so it's not the career that's the root cause
Everyone seems to be linking to this interview with John Rhys-Davies, who plays Gimli in the movie trilogy Lord of the Rings. The reason is thatMr. Rhys Davies comes off as having a working brain and a good awareness of reality, unlike so many of his fellow thespians. I’ve been trying to avoid paying attention to celebreties because the fault is not that they’re stupid but that others pretend their words have significance. However, Mr. Rhys-Davies gets beyond the “it’s not that the pig sings well, but that it sings” stage so I will cite him as well.
I mean… the abolition of slavery comes from Western democracy. True Democracy comes form our Greco-Judeo-Christian-Western experience. If we lose these things, then this is a catastrophe for the world. […] There is a change happening in the very complexion of Western civilization in Europe that we should think about at least and argue about. If it just means the replacement of one genetic stock with another genetic stock, that doesn’t matter too much. But if it involves the replacement of Western civilization with a different civilization with different cultural values, then it is something we really ought to discuss […]
That was then, this is now
[source]
Saddam Hussein has long been an obsession for the world, and particularly the United States. Yet Iraq was so cut off from the outside that it was impossible for anyone — including, it seems, American intelligence officials — to get a clear picture of who he really was… George W. Bush’s Saddam Hussein was both vicious and efficient — a combination that made him a clear and imminent threat to international security. He not only had the will to harm his neighbors and the United States, he had the means. He was rapidly expanding an arsenal of biological and chemical weapons while steadily moving closer to becoming a nuclear power. He was so clever and well organized that he might surprise the world with nuclear weapons at any time. And although his regime was a secular one, it was so single-minded in its anti-Americanism that it was undoubtedly working with the radical Islamist terrorists of Al Qaeda.
— New York Times editorial, December 17, 2003.
Mr. Bush’s blunt assessment of the Iraqi threat and the need for a firm, united response by the United Nations were well put. Iraq, with its storehouses of biological toxins, its advanced nuclear weapons program, its defiance of international sanctions and its ambitiously malignant dictator, is precisely the kind of threat that the United Nations was established to deal with. Betting on the good faith of Saddam Hussein or trusting that the problem will fade away is unrealistic. As Mr. Bush said, after a decade of Iraqi defiance the U.N. faces a defining moment and a test of its purpose and resolve.
— New York Times editorial, September 13, 2002.
17 December 2003
Lomborg vindcated, Scientific American humiliated
[source]
Lomborg Decision Overturned by Danish Ministry of Science
The Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation has today repudiated findings by the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (DSCD) that Bjørn Lomborg’s book “The Skeptical Environmentalist” was “objectively dishonest” or “clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice”.
[…] The Ministry finds that the DCSD judgment was not backed up by documentation, and was “completely void of argumentation” for the claims of dishonesty and lack of good scientific practice. […]
The Ministry characterises the DCSD’s treatment of the case as “dissatisfactory”, “deserving criticism” and “emotional” and points out a number of significant errors.
[…] Several points are so serious that, according to the Ministry, each point individually leads to remission of the case to the DCSD.
[emphasis added]
I’ll note that the original source here has a long list of technical, administrative and logical errors by the DSCD. This wasn’t even a close call, the DSCD decision was shoddy through and through. My favorite error on the part of the DSCD was
Dr Lomborg has not been told exactly where he has, allegedly, made mistakes. This is a case of “significant neglect in case processing by the DCSD”.
So Lomborg was generally wrong without being specifically wrong according to the DCSD. I’ll also note that Scientific American was a leading supporter and contributor to the DCSD. This doesn’t surprise me since I long ago dropped my subscription because of the excessive politicization of the content.
Another former Clintonista goes loony
[source]
on Special Report with Brit Hume tonight, Mort Kondracke reported that Madeleine Albright told him that she believed the Administration had already captured Osama bin Laden but is waiting until next October to produce him when it will achieve maximum political effect.
He’s probably staying in the Lincoln bedroom.
Big Media bias watch
As mentioned earlier, the Iraqi Foreign Minister laid down some major smackie on the UN for its lack of concern for the Iraqi people. The BBC’s reporting of this forgets to mention this little fact. But no bias here, folks, move along and pay the license fee.
Not quite the plan I was looking for
[source]
(Sept. 11) was a big thing for me. I was saying to liberal America, “Well, what are you offering?” And they said, “Well, we’re not going to protect you, and we want some more money.” That didn’t interest me.
Big Media bias watch
Isntapundit has an excellent document on the incredible bias of CNN in covering demonstrations in Iraq. The anti-Ba’ath protests got nary a whisper but the pro-Ba’ath protests were covered. Well worth a viewing. Via Instantman.
Dictatorial hygiene
Iraq’s foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, accused the United Nations Security Council today of having failed to help rescue his country from Saddam Hussein, and he chided member states for bickering over his beleaguered country’s future.
“Settling scores with the United States-led coalition should not be at the cost of helping to bring stability to the Iraqi people,” Mr. Zebari said in language unusually scolding for an occupant of the guest seat at the end of the curving Security Council table.
[…]
“The United Nations as an organization failed to help rescue the Iraqi people from a murderous tyranny that lasted over 35 years, and today we are unearthing thousands of victims in horrifying testament to that failure.”
[…]
He continued: “I’d like to remind you that the governing council is the most representative and democratic governing body in the region.”
He said, “The members of the Security Council should be reaching out and encouraging this nascent democracy in a region well known for its authoritarian rule.”
Good lord, no, they can’t do that! If the UN starts encouraging democracy it may well spread to the member states!
16 December 2003
Where's my money?
Saddam Hussein’s fugitive number two, Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, may have surrendered to US-led coalition forces in Iraq, Kuwait Television reported on Tuesday, quoting its correspondent in Baghdad.
The correspondent said on air that “the information is not confirmed and is confusing.”
He said that according to the information, Duri had given himself up on Tuesday morning and that no more details were available.
Two things:
- Remember the 48 hour rule - with rumours like this, wait 48 hours before taking them as more than rumours.
- Can Al-Duri collect the $10,000,000 reward if he turned himself in?
UPDATE: Looks like this isn’t panning out. I can’t find any recent stories about it and one would think that it would be reasonably big news.
Vatican moral compass still spinning
A top Vatican official said Tuesday he felt pity and compassion for Saddam Hussein and criticized the U.S. military for showing video footage of him being treated “like a cow.” […]
“I felt pity to see this man destroyed, (the military) looking at his teeth as if he were a cow. They could have spared us these pictures,” he said.
“Seeing him like this, a man in his tragedy, despite all the heavy blame he bears, I had a sense of compassion for him,” he said in answer to questions about Saddam’s arrest.
Here we see ruling class solidarity overcome the PR machine.
Free markets are not a panacea
Market-dominant minorities are the Achilles heel of free market democracy. In societies with such a minority, markets and democracy favour not just different people or different classes but different ethnic groups. Markets concentrate wealth, often spectacular wealth, in the hands of the market-dominant minority, while democracy increases the political power of the impoverished majority. In these circumstances, the pursuit of free market democracy becomes an engine of potentially catastrophic ethnonationalism, pitting a frustrated indigenous majority, easily aroused by opportunistic politicians, against a resented, wealthy ethnic minority. This conflict is playing out in country after country today, from Bolivia to Sierra Leone, from Indonesia to Zimbabwe, from Russia to the middle east.
This demonstrates how important culture issues are to a successful self-ordered society.
They missed Stalin, too
Disbelief and gloom seized many Palestinians Sunday at news of Saddam Hussein’s capture as Israel fired off a telegram of congratulations to Washington.
The former Iraqi ruler was a hero to many Palestinians for his stand against Israel and its U.S. ally, as well as for helping families of Palestinians dead in an uprising [emphasis added].
For Israel, he was a menace over the horizon who long bankrolled the enemy.
“It’s a black day in history,” said Sadiq Husam, 33, a taxi driver in Ramallah, West Bank seat of the Palestinian Authority.
I think they mean “families of Palestinians dead by their own hand while trying to commit mass murder”. But somehow, the sympathy meter is not getting off the zero mark.
Wesley Clark: US has no right to defend itself
I would say to the Europeans, you know, we’ve had our differences over the years, but we need you. The real foundation for peace and stability in the world is the transatlantic alliance. And I would say to the Europeans, I pledge to you as the American president that we’ll consult with you first. You get the right of first refusal on the security concerns that we have. We’ll bring you in.
It’s not a right if you have to ask permission.
15 December 2003
Tobacco policy in the UK
[source]
The average cost of a pack of cigarettes in the UK is £4, of which £3 & 20p goes to taxes. So, of course, the UK government is investigating price fixing. How this price fixing worked in spite of the massive smuggling of cigarettes in the UK isn’t clear. And doesn’t price fixing help with preventing tobacco use, something the UK government is considering making tobacco illegal to prevent? The UK government should give the companies involved a reward and tell them to work harder at raising the price.
Shut off those alarms, they annoy me
[source]
Here’s how badly the Democrats have positioned themselves: [Howard] Dean’s statements about Saddam today are being referred to as doing “damage control”. When the capture of a mass murdering dictator by your own nation is damaging to your political prospects, it’s time to ask yourself what the heck you’re doing.
Meanwhile Dean is getting ready to buddy up with Arafat and Kim Jong Il. In for penny, in for a pound I guess.
14 December 2003
God's tinker toys
Just too flat out cool for words - orbiting galaxies with a trail of dust hundreds of thousands of light years long between them.
Losing the info war, part 1
The State Department alone spent more than US$1-billion on global public relations last year, and the “Changing Minds, Winning Peace” report recommended both a spending increase and the appointment of a Cabinet-level “image czar” to help sell U.S. policies to a surly, skeptical world.
[…]
In mid-November, Sue Smethurst, a 30-year-old Australian journalist, made the long flight to LAX to conduct an exclusive interview with local resident Olivia Newton-John for a Down Under magazine called New Idea. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials blocked Smethurst from entering the country, because she lacked a “journalist visa,” an obscure document that until seven months ago was almost never demanded of reporters from the 27 U.S.-friendly countries covered under the visa waiver program, which gives free three-month passes to visitors travelling for “business or pleasure.” Journalism, inexplicably, qualifies for neither.
For the next 15 hours, Smethurst was interrogated, handcuffed and probed, before being sent back on a plane to Australia. “I was body-searched,” she told the Australian Associated Press. “I’ve had every part of me groped beyond belief.”
Immigration and Customs officials later called it a “simple pat-down for weapons.”
On an effort-to-impact scale, in terms of U.S. image, the Smethurst rebuke was truly impressive: Nearly every news outlet in Australia reported her withering take on the States (“I would have walked across broken glass to get home”); the foreign affairs spokesman of Australia’s Labour Party demanded an explanation from the U.S. embassy, and the tale made headlines on several continents. Several newspapers ran her photograph, in which she looks roughly as threatening as an upper-class socialite out shopping for handbags.
[…] Smethurst wasn’t alone in learning about LAX’s new journalist-visa enforcement the hard way.[…] In May, at least eight French and British reporters attempting to cover L.A.’s enormous E3 computer-game conference were blocked, probed and sent back home, drawing protests from Reporters Sans Frontieres.
In each of these cases, the journalists had no right to see a lawyer, no right to call their local consulate and no right to appeal (these rules come courtesy of anti-terrorism measures passed in 1996 and 2001). […]
Journalists from allied countries are singled out for exemption from the visa waiver program; if you were an evil-doing terrorist from France, Britain, Australia or the 24 other eligible countries, all you’d have to do is deny that you are a journalist, state that you are travelling for non-journalistic “business or pleasure,” and the red carpet would be rolled out for you. […]
In the coming weeks, State will likely spend thousands of dollars to fly a senior department official out to L.A. to meet with the anxious local foreign press and diplomatic corps, and shake his head sadly that there’s nothing much he can do. Homeland Security officials will likely counter that if Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, doesn’t like it, he should stop complaining and change the rules.
Now, I realize that journalists are often nefarious people, but we should either give up on the psywar of trying to win the hearts and minds of non-USA citizens, or we should accept that foreign journalists are a necessary part of that process. As Welch points out, however, this serves State by justifying even more money for PR campaigns while Homeland gets to embarras State. What a stroke of governing genius creating a Department of Homeland Security was!
NY Times - just not paying attention
C-SPAN’s Washington Journal program aired live Friday morning from the Washington bureau of the New York Times, with five of the bureau’s reporters and editors taking calls. Two callers wanted to know why the Times (along with all the other major dailies) had failed to cover Wednesday’s anti-terrorist demonstration in Baghdad […]
Taubman’s reply: “I was not aware of that, but that’s something that you really should take up with the correspondents who work for the Times in Baghdad.”
As for the anti-terror demonstration? Weisman apparently hadn’t heard about it, either: “I’m not sure that I know about that specific episode, that demonstration that you just referred to.”
As noted, the demonstration was a fact and not news so of course senior staff at the NY Times were unaware of it.