United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan asked the United States this week to consider sending troops to Haiti to support a U.N. peacekeeping mission beset by mounting armed challenges to its authority, according to senior U.N. officials.
[…]
He expressed hope that the United States would participate in a planned U.N. rapid reaction force, authorized by the Security Council earlier this month, that would have the firepower to intimidate armed gangs threatening the country’s fragile political transition. Officials said that similar requests are being considered for other countries, including Canada and France. “We want scarier troops,” one senior U.N. official said. [emphasis added]
If the Canadians go, they’d better make sure they don’t take credit for scaring anyone or they’ll be in big trouble.
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I suggest that he [Polish celebrity visiting France] ask the French why the heck for so many years they encouraged Poles to build capitalism when as it turns out they are Communists themselves”
— Lech “Solidarity” Walesa
Did Walesa really expect the French to recommend something they thought worked to another country?
A White House official said Friday the administration finds it “somewhat puzzling” that Democrats are demanding presidential adviser Karl Rove’s apology or resignation for implying that liberals are soft on terrorism.
“I think Karl was very specific, very accurate, in who he was pointing out,” communications director Dan Bartlett said. “It’s touched a chord with these Democrats. I’m not sure why.”
So now it’s come to the point where the Democratic Party smears itself with the term “liberal”?
The British government, in sharp disagreement with the United States’ ultimate position, believed that post-invasion Iraq should be run by a Sunni-led government and not one controlled by the majority Shias.
Now, some are upset about this. But I’m not. After all, just change “Sunni” to “Franco-German EUlite” and “Iraq” to “Europe” and you have the plan for the European Union.
Don’t tolerate any more Canadian health care triumphalism, now that the Candadian Supreme Court has declared that Canada’s health care system is so bad that it violates human rights.
Best factoid: Canada is the only nation other than Cuba and North Korea that bans private health insurance.
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[Al Qaida] Iraq’s most feared terror group said Tuesday that it has formed a unit of potential suicide attackers who are exclusively Iraqis, an apparent bid to deflect criticism that most suicide bombers in Iraq are foreigners.
Just ponder what it says about the Associated Press and Al Qaida that they could write and think this. Ponder who is the intended, receptive audience for this PR ploy.
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Q: What is Gitmo?
A: Contrary to what some suggest, it does not stand for “Git mo’ Peking chicken for Muhammad, he wants a second portion.” It stands for “Guantanamo,” a facility the United States built to see if the left would ever care about human rights abuses in Cuba. The experiment has apparently been successful.
Of course, we already knew this but it’s always nice to get confirmation.
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Today, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a blow to home and small business owners throughout the country by allowing the government to use eminent domain to take homes so that businesses can make more money off that land and possibly pay more taxes as a result.
I guess it’s the establishment of a truly privileged class in the USA, with the ability to arbitrarily expropriate the property of the peasants. So completely disgusting that I’m not certain the evisceration of the First Admendment from McCain-Feingold was worse.
[16 Dec 2004] Now, another huge leak comes in the form of the disclosure by members of the Senate of a highly-classified satellite program. Three members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence have apparently committed a very serious crime by blabbing about a highly-classified satellite program to the press last week [9 Dec 2004]. […]
As a result of their revelations to the public and the press, three U.S. Senators — Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), who’s also the ranking Dem on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) — are the subject of a “criminal referral” made on Monday for speaking publicly about this satellite.
Two weeks ago I would have been surprised to see Senator Durbin’s name there. Now, I’m not. I’m also not a bit surprised that nothing came of those criminal referrals. We are simply not serious about such things.
Real leadership in Tal Afar lies with the 82 tribal leaders. Angered by the attacks and emboldened by the enlarged American military presence here, some sheiks [tribal leaders] have become outspoken critics of the insurgency. On June 4, at great risk to their own lives, more than 60 attended a security conference at Al Kasik Iraqi Army base near here. To the surprise of Iraqi and American commanders who organized the gathering, many sheiks demanded a Falluja-style military assault to rid Tal Afar of insurgents and complained that American forces do not treat terror suspects roughly enough. [emphasis added]
How long will it take the chatterati to go from “the Iraqis hate the Coalition for being too violent” to “The Iraqis just aren’t nuanced enough to understand their own interests”?
U2 frontman BONO was horrified during a visit to Ethiopia, when he saw local women pelting a breast-feeding aid worker with stones.
The American woman was oblivious of the offence she was causing, and had to escape the angry onslaught from female Muslims who had no qualms about injuring her or her baby.
Bono: “She didn’t mean to be insensitive.” But they did.
It wouldn’t be so bad to be expected to behave as others do in their countries if we could expect others to behave as we do in our country.
Eight months ago, defense attorney Thomas A. Mesereau Jr. made a strategic move that may have provided the key to Michael Jackson’s court victory: He hired a new private investigator and told him to focus relentlessly on the accuser’s mother.
Scott Ross had worked on the Robert Blake defense, digging up unsavory items about the actor’s murdered wife. The information allowed defense lawyers to argue that someone other than Blake, who was charged with killing her, had a motive. Moreover, the details gave jurors a reason to dislike the dead woman.
Mesereau wanted a repeat performance, and he gave his investigator a simple, blunt instruction, Ross recalled Monday: “I want you to do to [the mother of the alleged victim] what you did to Bonny Lee Bakley.”
Monday, as the Jackson jurors talked about their deliberations, they made clear how well Mesereau’s strategy had succeeded.
“What mother in her right mind would … just freely volunteer your child to sleep with someone, and not so much just Michael Jackson but anyone, for that matter? That is something mothers are naturally concerned with,” juror Pauline Coccoz of Santa Maria, a 45-year-old mother of three, said at a post-verdict news conference.
Juror Eleanor Cook, a 79-year-old grandmother, spoke of her distaste for the mother’s demeanor. The juror “disliked it intensely when she snapped her fingers at us,” she said. “I thought, ‘Don’t snap your fingers at me, lady.’ “
Juror Susan Rentschler, 52, of Lompoc, said she was “very uncomfortable” with the way the mother kept staring at jurors as she testified.
Mesereau’s strategy triumphed.
Classic bad journalism here. First a claim is advanced — the private investigation of the mother was critical to the success of the defense. Then examples are cited, not one of which validates the claim, then the claim is declared validated. Note that of the supporting evidence, two are actions of the mother in the court room and the other is something that was common knowledge before the trial started. Apparently for these writers, facts are simply baubles to display for which the concept of revelance is … irrelevant.
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I’m not much interested in the issue of Senator Kerry’s military records, since I think his “military heroism” is obviously bogus—any officer who would use a technicality to desert his men while they are on the front is contemptible.
But this business of the Boston Globe and the LAT apparently having Kerry’s records but not publishing them is fascinating. Especially considering the many times the Gasping Media have told us, with infinite smugness and self-satisfaction, that their “duty” to publish things trumps minor matters like national security or patriotism.
This article by Thomas Lipscombe is worth reading. Apparently the two papers are saying that they have no obligation to release or publish the records, since others can apply to the Kerry organization just like they did. And Kerry headquarters is now saying the “the issue is over,” since they have “released” the records! Pretty cute.
At least know we now the limits of the “publics’ right to know” as defined by Old Media.
[A]s Frank Calzón, director of the Center for a Free Cuba in Washington, D.C., told Clyne—after Castro staged a huge anti-Bush rally on May 17, rounding up many thousands of Cubans—the staging of that event showed Castro “feels threatened by this group [organizing the May 20 meeting].” After all, as Calzón’s remarks were paraphrased in the Sun:
“A legitimate and freely elected leader doesn’t need to rally hundreds of thousands of people to support him when confronted with hundreds of nonviolent dissenters.”
While most of the American media were sleeping during the Cuban dissenters’ preparation for May 20, Meghan Clyne reported that the House of Representatives had passed (392 to 22) a resolution, H.R. 193, expressing “support and solidarity to the organizers and participants of the historic meeting.”
Among the 22 who voted against the resolution was New York’s Charles Rangel because, he complained to the Sun, American politicians “refuse to give the government [of Cuba] the respect that it deserves.” As for the imminent assembly on May 20, Rangel said, “I don’t think it helps to be supporting insurgents overthrowing the government.” It would be better, Rangel continued, to try “to reach out to the government to see what we can do to help both the government and people of Cuba, not just isolating them by dealing with dissidents.”
I have to agree with Rangel that USA politicians, by and large, do refuse to give the Cuban government the respect it deserves: none. The Cuban government will be getting the respect it deserves when they start treating it as an illegimate stain on humanity.
New slogan for the DNC: It’s not the people, stupid! It’s the stupid people!
— Genecis
Via Buzz Machine we have this report concerning the suppression of visible human female nipples on television —
A similar situation exists on Canadian actress Pamela Anderson’s new TV series, Stacked. In an April interview on Howard Stern’s radio show, the actress complained that network censors ordered her nipples be “taped down” during filming so as not to offend prime-time audiences. [emphasis added]
OK, can someone explain how seeing Anderson’s nipples sticking out under her shirt will offend prime-time audiences while naming a show starring Anderson “Stacked” won’t? That’s without even considering the target demographic and how they’d feel about this issue.
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The New York Sun reports that Francoise Le Bail, spokeswoman for the president of the European commission, “suggested that improvements in the E.U.’s communications apparatus could have swung the vote the other way, and the European project needed to be ‘explained more clearly to citizens.’ “
Isn’t the real problem that the EU Constitution can’t be explained clearly?
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When I was in college, one of my professors used to complain that too many of his students had no “number gut.”
A number gut is an intuitive feel for the possible magnitude of a particular number that describes a particular phenomenon. […]
The lack of a number gut destroys any sense of context for numbers that describe a phenomenon, leading people to casually accept as valid statements that a little double-checking would show to be just plain silly. […]
Which brings me to the subject of the Lancet Iraqi Mortality Survey.
A lot of people who would know better in another context seem perfectly willing to swallow the estimate of 300,000+ dead that LIMS reports with the Falluja cluster included. Examined in detail, LIMS reports that of those 300,000, roughly 250,000 died from violence, and of those something like 220,000 died from Coalition airstrikes. The LIMS authors even suggest [p6 pg7] that this is likely an underestimate.
Anyone with a good number gut for such phenomenon would immediately recognize such numbers as implausible.
Why couldn’t 250,000 be dead from violence? Well, the first clue is that the total population of Iraq is around 25 million, so 250,000 dead represents 1% of the entire population. That means if LIMS is accurate then 1 in every 100 Iraqis were killed in the war up to Sept 2004. So what? After all, it’s a war and lots of people die in wars right? Well, not as many as most people think.
For example, during WWII the Japanese mainland suffered the most extensive aerial bombardment in history. Every major urban area save one (Kyoto) was burned to the ground. On march 10th, 1945 the great Tokyo fire raid burned down a third of the city and killed 100,000 people. Two major cities were nuked. Japan at the time had a population of 78 million, so 1% of the population would have been around 780,000. Now, what is your guess as to the number of Japanese killed on the Japanese mainland?
Did you guess around 500,000? Under 1%? Well, that is in fact the number (note: that’s only dead, not dead-and-wounded).
I just wonder how many people were counting the Japanese civilian war dead so assiduously in the aftermath of WWII. And it should also be noted that the casuality figures for Iraq include all combat related deaths, meaning enemy combatants as well.