Right-Wing of the Gods

Cutting out for Keeps

2007-01-19T07:19:00.000-05:00

Imagine this: you go to a company's headquarters to give a talk on Business ethics. While you're on the podium, glancing out the window, you see the manager in charge of accounts receivable out in the parking lot, trying to get your hubcaps loose. You feel somebody brushing against your hip; somebody in human resources is trying to pick your pocket. As you interrupt your speech and try to get a hold of the CEO and see if he can restrain his people a little bit, you notice that he's just cracked open your briefcase and is rifling through your credit cards, while scolding you out loud for being so judgmental as to mind. Tell me - what is the likelihood of your deciding to continue that speech on ethics, and if you did decide to continue it, who could your intended audience possibly be at that point?

The story in the parting post on my personal blog gets a little involved, but the absurdity of the hypothetical situation I posed is the absurdity of the situation I faced, and it has been far too many times in my dealings with the Pagan community. I guess you could say this one was that one time too many; a mature philosophical discussion of ethics is at the core of what I was attempting, and Pagandom, with a tiny handful of exceptions lost and buffeted around in the boisterous crowd, just doesn't offer an audience appropriate for the material. If you were one of the people who wanted to know when there were going to be further updates to the Almond Jar, as I announced on one of the pages on that site, there won't be any.

I guess you could say that I'm discouraged but not disheartened, as I do have other places to me. More time spent doing Mathematics and Engineering, playing with my nieces and nephews, working on my recipes, spending time with my friends ... doesn't sound like much of a loss. Life will be growing more rich for me, not less, to say nothing of more prosperous, as the drain on my time that being "Antistoicus" involved was hardly boosting my income, any more than it was improving my mood, as I was one of those strange people who never tried to turn religion into a business. Were I sacrificing on behalf of a community that gave the gods good reason to feel glad for their worship, I might not mind the loss because it would be the price of something serving the greater good, but after a few years of bashing one's head into the wall, as a friend of mine is fond of saying, one should be prepared to conclude that the wall isn't what is likely to give way. Further sacrifice would be for nothing.

Cutting out for a while

2006-06-05T17:08:00.003-05:00

[post slightly updated, Monday, January 8, 2007, and Wednesday, December 30, 2009]

In case you were looking for them, yes, I've deleted my posts (which began on Thursday, July 20, 2006) to this blog about the Appius Claudius Priscus / Joseph Keller affair at Nova Roma, relocating them to this new page on my diskpace at Friendlyfirm. If you haven't seen them, they were a discussion of how we approach the issue of freedom of speech in a real world in which all is not hugs and love, in application to the case of somebody whose racial views didn't please everybody, and an illustration of how the standards of justice we can expect out of our Politically Correct friends aren't changing for the better. This evolved into long enough of a personal segue, that I didn't feel comfortable with the idea of leaving it on Right Wing of the Gods, but for those who want to read it, here it is.

I don't know what the plans of the other contributors are, but we haven't heard from them for a while, so I'm guessing that we won't be hearing from them in the near future.

I'm going to take a break from the Internet for a while, to enjoy the warm weather the way the gods intended - outdoors. When I get back, I probably won't be posting much. I commented on this on "Jotting it Down" - the amount of traffic one gets doesn't seem to justify the effort. Not complaining, certainly not whining, it's just supply and demand. There's a huge supply of blogs and relatively little potential readership. When seven hits per day makes your blog one of the big boys, you come to realize just how little potential readership there is.

Useful information; more of us will redirect our efforts elsewhere. See you later.

Note added, January 12, 2007: I got a little clarity a few days ago, when I was transferring the Appius files to my diskspace at Googlepages. A rate of seven visitors per day was definitely not making my day, but it was also raising questions because it seemed so statistically anomalous. Why exactly seven visitors, for so long? OK, maybe because we only had the same seven people visiting us over and over came the discouraging thought, but ... the same seven people who never miss a post? The same seven people who never have a kid's birthday they're too busy planning, who never have their computer go down, who never just plain don't feel like it? In real life, traffic is never that steady. Where was the fluctuation? Even a moving average should fluctuate a little, especially when it's that low. This moving average wasn't doing that. Why?

I found a partial answer as I cleared the files. Once I've deleted a post, it's gone, so I was being very careful as I did this, placing each post and its copy up on screen, comparing original and copy paragraph by paragraph before deleting and republishing the blog, in effect revisiting the thing a few times. Near the end of the process, I found that RWOTG stop loading on my screen. It literally could not handle the traffic I was giving it, just going through that series of posts. Guess how many posts I was into the series before I found myself unable to load the next?

That would certainly explain the lack of random fluctuation; if and when traffic started to pick up, those who would have lifted the daily average to eight visitors (or dare I dream, to nine or even ten) would have been in for a frustrating experience, one which wouldn't have left them wanting to return. Nobody enjoys having a page hanging on his screen, refusing to load. Attached as this blog was (and still is, at the time of this writing) to a site that, shall we say, sees a few more than seven visitors per day according to site stats, and what we have is the likelihood of more visitors being pumped into this location, than the rather weak system was designed to handle. The average didn't fluctuate because the cap wasn't fluctuating.

To anybody who had that experience, if by some remarkable chance you are seeing this, I regret the annoyance and I suspect the others do as well. I honestly didn't know that this was happening, probably because I like to get up very early during the summer and would have been one of the first people clicking on this site. At this point, as far as I'm concerned, the fat lady has sung for both RWOTG and my own personal blog. I'll be happy to leave both in place as they are free and Blogger seems to allow this, but writing a page on which traffic is effectively capped at such a low level seems pointless. Producing a blog post may not take as much work as putting together a webpage, but it still represents a real effort, one not justified by the tiny audience circumstances allow us to have. Whether our own efforts could have attracted a larger crowd in as competitive a field as blogging, I don't know, but wouldn't it have been interesting, to find out?

No grand exits for me, as I only blogged for a few months and this moment is really not redefining my life, but this is a shame, I suppose. As before, I can only speak for myself, having not consulted with Dan and the others on this, but as for me, I'm fairly sure that this is my last Blogger post.

Striking a blow for Goosey Loosey!

2006-05-09T17:57:00.001-05:00

This is truly a good year to be a goose in Chicago. About a month and a half ago, I wrote about an elderly man who was facing a possible prison sentence for accidentally killing a canadian goose. It's been over a month, now, so I suppose that it is time for the animal right's activists to have their dementia validated again, and so it has been.

The Chicago City council has passed a law banning the sale of foie gras, fattened goose liver. The rationale is as bizarre as the legislation - the fattening of geese is supposedly "cruel". Guess what "force feeding" consists of? One takes the goose's head, tilts it back, and pours as much grain down the throat of a notoriously gluttonous animal as it will take. Supposedly this is "cruel" because it's bad for the health of the goose.

Excuse me? The goose is due to be killed in about a month when force feeding commences. Life expectancy is, by then, a rather moot point. But our crusaders will not be denied in their holy quest to take control of the lives of others. As one of our local chefs told a reporter

"Today, Tramonto laughs off the exchange. 'Charlie and I got a chuckle out of it. Hey, both of us made Newsweek.'

But he finds nothing funny in the current situation. "Unfortunately, the public is the loser," he says. "If [animal rights groups are] going to dictate what we're going to eat, what's next? That's the problem that I have. I wish I could say that the people have spoken, but I don't really think the people had anything to do with this."

The spin one sees from the outside media is what one would expect. Many leftists talking about how wonderful it is that our city council has gone where no obtrusive American legislator has gone before. One gets the usual snide remark from lone individuals on the coasts about ignorant Midwestern hickishness running amok into legislation, as if farmers tended to be in favor of this kind of thing. But let me give you the little detail the newspapers won't pick up on, because pointing out this kind of thing is politically incorrect, and because knowing this would involve knowing the community one was reporting on, instead of just pulling the story off the wire, e-mailing a few people, and tossing in a few editorial glosses.

Chicago, like Louisiana, is home to a large ethnic French population. Chicago, unlike Lousiana, has a lengthy history of treating its French-Americans like dirt, to be trampled underfoot and defecated on, when nobody is looking. The largest contingent in that community is the Alsatian one. Guess which is one of the delicacies most closely associated with Alsace, very much a part of that province's traditions, traditions that our not very good friends from the North Shore have been trying to high pressure some of us into giving up for generations?

Foie gras, a key ingedient used (usually sparingly) in a number of Alsatian dishes served on very special occasions. It's as if Boston passed a law against the sale of cardone, and then tried to pretend that this was not aimed at the large Southern Italian community in the North End. It is nativism masquerading as humanitarianism, and the second most amazing thing about the whole situation is that this is being marketed as "progressive" legislation. The most remarkable thing is that many people will probably accept that, considering the flimsiness of the pretext under which the traditions of others are being sabotaged.

Ignorantly simpleminded? Hardly, "Sneaky" is more like it. Openly passing a law banning the consumption of Alsatian food, at the very least, would raise a few eyebrows. Trying to accomplish the exact same thing indirectly, in bits and pieces, won't raise as many, and that's the idea. The real kicker is what Joseph Moore, the author of this legislation, has the actual nerve to put near the top of his ward's homepage:

"Celebrating Diversity in the 49th Ward"

I guess diversity doesn't include you or your traditions if you happen to be French, in Mr.Moore's vision of Chicago. But then, for those of Southern European descent, that's how things usually work around here. By the way, according to this page on the official Democratic party homepage,

"Joe Moore, Alderman from the 49th Ward in Chicago, is chairman of the National Democratic Municipal Officials Conference and serves on the Executive Committee of the Democratic National Committee."

You remember the Democrats, right? Our courageous fighters for tolerance and individual liberty? Still want to know why I vote Republican? If so, stick around. The goose stepping tendencies of the Chicago Democratic party are an inexhaustable subject, one that does not fit in with the public image that party likes to cultivate, and you'll be hearing more about them here. A lot more, and it gets a lot worse.

Iran: Not sure that I'm buying this

2006-05-03T21:35:00.000-05:00

I'd like to start by noting that I was and am very much in favor of Pres.Bush's decision to remove Hussein from power. Yes, he had every right to do so, yes, even had he done so unilaterally. Hussein was a strongman who ruled brutally without any consent from the governed by benefit of the power granted to him through the sale of high tech Western weaponry, with which he and those relatively few close to him successfully crushed a long series of attempted coups, drowning them in blood. Handguns and knives vs. attack helicopters, machine guns, tanks, poison gas, etc. - how, realistically speaking, can that scenario be expected to play out? For the West to claim neutrality, having done so much to tip the balance of power in favor of Hussein in his dealings with his own people, would be absurd.

What is even more absurd is the argument that in some nebulous sense, the US victimized Iraq by invading it. Who in Iraq, specifically, was left with a legitimate grievance? Where there are no victims, there is no victimization, and while there certainly were some casualties of war, there were unusually few of them considering the scope of the operation, and nothing like the body count Hussein was running up. What we are left with, then, is the sobbing of a bully who discovered that a bigger kid was willing to step in and stop him from terrorising the smaller kids (the bully being Hussein's faction), and those softheaded in just the right, trendy way that allows them to sustain the illusion that bullies have the right to proceed unimpeded, as they attack their intended victims. Didn't we outgrow this kind of thinking back in kindergarten? Apparently not.

Then there was the "scandal" of not finding any weapons of mass destruction, aside from the ones that were actually witnessed in use to fill some of those mass graves, I suppose. "But where is your evidence that Hussein was going to make and use MORE poison gas, hmmmmm ...." Yeah. Right. As for the failure to locate any nuclear warheads, let us consider what was being looked for. The plutonium core of a thermonuclear device is about the size of a grapefruit. The rest of the bomb in mostly a mass of Lithium Hydride. The desert in Iraq covers an area about the size of California, one very large haystack in which to drop a few potentially very destructive needles. Take your plutonium core, and find an underwater reservoir of water, or any other hydrogen rich liquid like say ... petroleum. The figure I hear quoted is that five meters of water (about 17 feet worth) will provide the same shielding against radiation as that offered by the earth's atmosphere at the elevation at the top of the Sandia Crest, outside of Albuquerque. Even allowing for the fact that the liquid in and underground reservoir is mixed with substrate material, then, we have the reality that as you drop your core fairly deeply into a reservoir that may go down a few hundred feet, that very little gamma radiation and virtually no neutron radiation will even reach the drier parts of the soil overhead, much less the surface.

The fact, then, that no warheads were found is not informative, because one wouldn't expect to find any. They're just too easy to hide, as common sense should have told many of those offering such sagely smug commentary. Entire cities have been lost in the desert and not been found for centuries, and even small villages do tend to be somewhat larger than grapefruit. This reality is bound to dawn on people, who may find themselves uninclined to listen to the peaceniks when they realize how weak the arguments they had been offered by that crowd often were, and this can be regrettable. The problem is that the peaceniks are not always wrong. I'm wondering if we're approaching one of those moments when they aren't, and if so, whether or not they'll be listened to, after their previous ranting.

Iran is not Iraq. While it is certainly not a society that I or most Americans would care to live in, the revolution that introduced its current form of repression did seem to be a popular one, so we begin without the likelihood of winning the hearts and minds of the Iranian people, should our army invade that nation of over 68 million people. We'd be sending our army into a likely bloodbath were we to go that route, and I would hope that we would respect the sacrifices made by our armed forces enough to not ask them to walk into one of those, lightly. But if Iran remains defiant, do we have another choice? Possibly yes, and here's one we might consider: walking away and leaving this one alone.

I have the strangest feeling of deja vu, right now, remembering these bizarre shouting matches (as if they weren't all bizarre) I used to have with extreme liberals, who'd be appalled by my support for the commercial use of nuclear power. "Oh yeah, what about Hiroshima", displaying a mystifying inability to distinguish between the use of a nuclear reactor and a nuclear warhead. But this time, we have some conservatives not getting the distinction and that is truly strange. Eight percent enrichment of uranium is not 90 per cent, no matter how one may try to dance around the subject, and do we really want to be in the position of telling the Iranians that peaceful technological progress is forbidden to them? How would we react to such a proclamation, especially in an era in which discussion of what to do when the oil becomes scarce has already become so very topical?

If there were some real reason to suspect that Iran intended to build a hydrogen bomb, we MIGHT have some cause for concern. (Note that the military nuclear club already has one Islamic member - Pakistan. How many warheads has it used so far?) But if there is evidence for this, I have yet to hear about it. What I am seeing is some heavy handed pressure being used in an attempt to keep Iran from doing something that it has every right to do, so far seems to pose no credible threat to anybody, and in the long run, might just make Iran LESS dangerous.

Yes, you read that right. Less dangerous. Why? Think about it. What is the argument for thinking that if Muslims get the H bomb, that they will necessarily use it? Aside from the ons who already have it, and haven't used it, I mean? The Islamic belief that if one dies in the service of God, that the wonders of Paradise will await one. Well, excuse me, but exactly how is that different from what Christianity teaches, on the same subject?

While we're thinking about it, I'd also like to remind some of one of the images from the end of the first Gulf War - that of Iraqi soldiers coming out of their bunkers, terrified for their lives (as well they might be), kneeling before the victorious American forces and kissing their hands in a gesture of humility, submission and anything else that might keep them from being shot, blown up or incinerated. They certainly didn't seem that indifferent to their own survival, Muslims though they were. One might think that people would have noticed that, but for some reason, many of our citizens don't seem to want to do so, preferring a demonic enemy we can't understand or an angelic adversary who would treat us with all gentle grace were we to but smile glady upon its numbers, to the messy flesh and bloody reality of dealing with another mixed bunch of flawed human beings, with whom one must measure one's severity and compassion with prudence and at least moderately difficult deliberation. Angels (as seen by liberal commentators) and devils (as seen by neocon ones) are so much more comfortable to deal with, because one can deal in simpleminded absolutes, and without doubt.

But sometimes we need to get back to reality.

Let us ponder this. Why would any Christian hesitate to be a martyr, with such wonderful rewards waiting for him in Heaven? Yes, he would be leaving his family behind, but surely they could find opportunities to join him and ... appalling image, isn't it - a chain suicide by proxy. But why do we hesitate? Why are we horrified? Because we know that faith isn't knowledge. We may believe that an afterlife is waiting for us, but there is that nagging doubt, and one's very existence is a lot to put at risk. If your life is basically good, that can be a lousy deal. But if your life seems so inescapably wretched that the theoretical rewards granted by God to the martyr are the only hope one sees for a bearable existence, then the logic of one's situation changes greatly. Look at the past pattern of performance by the civilizations in question - in the Middle Ages, when life was far harder for the Europeans than for the Muslims, religious fanaticism was more common in the West than the Middle East and now, over the centuries, the roles have reversed.

This is one reason why I am reluctant to go along with Bush's position. While building nuclear warheads wouldn't contribute positively to the very prosperity that may help make throwing one's life away less appealing to the young people of Iran, building nuclear reactors just might, especially after the oil starts to get scarce. Reactors offer power, not just for lighting and heating homes, but for keeping factories and farms going as well, and while our country seems determined to forget this, it is those basic sectors of the economy (manufacturing and agriculture) upon which much of the wealth that the financial sector channels depends. Cripple those, and pushing for the acceptance of free market reforms is going to be a quixotic gesture, because market mechanisms won't have any resources to help allocate.

Iran has a right to a future, and there is no future in technological stagnation. Nor is there much of a one in remaining dependent on outsiders in order to function at all, which is what is wrong with the self-serving Russian suggestion that the Iranians have their uranium processed in Russia, no doubt for a modest fee per unit mass of uranium enriched. What some of us need to remember is that when one fight to close off another's path to a brighter future, one corners him into fighting back, and if one leaves him with little to lose, one leaves him with little to fear. We can do better than that, and often have. Now would be a good time to do so, while the West can still claim the moral high ground.

A Holocaust Debt Long Overdue for Repayment

2006-04-25T14:25:00.000-05:00

The truly vile picture you see to the left comes to us courtesy of Shamash.org, "the Jewish network". If you find this image crude, just think about how crude the reality it portrays would have to be in Jewish eyes, anywhere. Yet experience tells me that if I were to put a mailform on this site and thus make responding easy, I'd probably hear from somebody who, having seldom thought about the incident, would be outraged at the portrayal. Actual horror, some can forgive and forget. It's being reminded of that horror that provokes their anger. One could not image a more genuinely selfish point of view, and yet the Emily Post standards of "etiquette" called for by "proper, high class people" in this country tend to be perversely supportive of that which common decency would condemn. Perhaps this is why some of us, at times, seem to embrace an almost self-conscious earthiness: we are too used to seeing a brittle facade of elegance laid over a core of savagery that would bring shame to the heart of a New Guinea headhunter, and we find ourselves with a deep craving for directness. With that thought in mind, I'm going to be a little blunt about a story that just bounced across the Yahoo homepage.

In Ynet news (an Israeli news site), we find the story "Survivors still waiting for compensation". I could not help but be annoyed by the opening passage:

"Thousands of Holocaust victims who have yet to receive compensation from Germany are living in Israel. The sums are not large and will not make them wealthy, but they will help Holocaust survivors end their lives with honor.

Some of them live beneath the poverty line, and they hope that their legal suit against the Prosecutions Committee – an international organization connecting the Holocaust survivors and the German government – can help them out of their sad situation.

In 2002, 1,915 Holocaust survivors sued for the compensation, under the name of the non-profit organization "The Children of the War". The survivors sued for a sum of NIS 19 million (about USD 4). The prosecutors claim the Prosecutions Committee decided on criteria for who is eligible for the compensation which do not appear in the decision of the German government.

The criteria which appear for men is that they must show 80 percent disability or 50 percent lack of physical fitness, which came as a direct result from Nazi persecution. ...

Now, excuse me, but let's draw a few distinctions that some are bound to use a little impassioned rhetoric to try to gloss over. This is not a group of people doing as some PUSH members would do here in Chicago, and say "your ancestors oppressed my ancestors 500 years ago, so you owe it to me to buy me a summer home". "Yeah, yeah, Antistoicus", somebody usually pipes up, "but this was over 60 years ago, so shouldn't we let bygones be bygones". "Oh, really?", I'll respond to the (usually Anglo-Saxon) person asking the question, "let's say that I was a lot older, and that I had taken an woodman's axe to a few schoolchildren in Kenilworth during the 1920s - would you be prepared to let bygones be bygones". (For those living outside the Chicago area, Kenilworth is a very rich, very Anglo-Saxon kind of place). Disgusted expressions and a shocked hush usually follow, pierced by my raised voice as I ask where they get off being offended by my question, given what they just had the nerve to ask. Take a good look at that photo. To be clear on this, I've never committed any such crime as the one I hypothetically described, but if I were that kind of person, I could clear out an entire school district, raping every little victim before and after their demise, and I still would not be able to compete with the people who made the above picture possible for just sheer, graphic, gratuitous and horrific evil.

Do I have to put it that crudely? Yes, I do, because if I should be so cooperatively gentle as to leave alone the sensibilities of those I'm bothering at this point, I'm going to be letting them sidestep a question that "polite" people have been allowed to sidestep for far too long. Why does my hypothetical example of an atrocity committed on a lesser scale among Anglo-Saxons produce more horror than the reality of atrocities committed with unimaginably greater cruelty to far more people, for absolutely no reason whatsoever? Before the survivors of the Deutsche Yehudim prudently fled, in many cases to America where their descendents are often noteworthy for their patriotism as Americans, the Jewish population of Germany wasn't just a pack of innocent bystanders, by and large, they were a loyal, productive and patriotic segment of the German population, contributing to their society in a measure out of all proportion to their actual numbers. What was done to them, then, becomes not only an exercise in savagery but one in an almost incomprehensible cowardice, the frustrations of the post WWI era taken out on a nearly defenseless minority population that had worked long and hard to be a good friend to the people among whom it had dwelled for generations.

Why does this not produce more outrage than it does? Yes, one can show a few graphic pictures, and after some griping about how unnecessary such graphic imagery is, one will hear maybe a few reluctant expressions of horror from some of our upper crust friends, but one wonders if one has hit them in the heart or the stomach. The uncomfortable reality is that as much as some of these "nice" people will try to deny it, they don't see their Jewish neighbors as being quite as fully human as those they more closely identify with, and no, that is not a universal human trait. Worrying about your own people (whoever they may be) first may be a universal trait, but "do not do unto others that which you would find hateful if done unto you" is an observation that spans most of the globe, and most of the microcosm of that globe that is American society at its less "polite", lower, working and middle class grassroots level.

"It's been over 60 years, so can't we just let bygones be bygones". In a case in which we are talking about the compensation, not of the distant descendents of the victims but of the victims themselves, this only makes matters worse. One of the issues that has arisen has been the compensation of Jews who had their property confiscated by the German government under Hitler and never had it returned. Imagine being robbed when you are twenty, having to wait until you are eighty before compensation is even considered, and then being asked to forgive the *ahem* loan you were coerced into making to your own personal oppressors on the basis that their heirs had dragged their feet on repayment for so long. If this were done to "nonhyphenated Americans" (ie. members of the Anglo-Saxon psuedo-majority), the expected response to such a suggestion would be one of pure, out of control rage, even under circumstances far less provocative, yet Central European Jews are expected to be "good sports" about the exact same thing, by "high class" people who then wonder out loud why they are hearing talk about hypocrisy.

"It's been over for 60 years ..." Can you picture walking past a pile like the one seen in that photo, looking down unsure as to which of those withered corpses was a parent or sibling, and being pyschologically whole in a hundred years, much less 60? But, of course, as we can see by looking at those insane conditions set for compensation, psychological wholeness is not the only issue. Imagine it! If one is "merely" 75 percent disabled, a glorious 25 percent removed from being confined to a feeding tube for the rest of one's life - and don't ask me how such a thing could be quantified - too bad for you. You'd be basically helpless in a job market in which even the partially disabled have mostly faced long term unemployment for years, your disability the product not merely of negligence but of open, malevolent, willful harm done by the authorities, but you get nothing and you get flipped the bird in the name of sovereign immunity and German government policy.

What boggles my mind is that the German government was allowed to set the terms for compensation, in an episode that should almost redefine the word "actionable". Just imagine the possibilities for wrongful death suits, alone. But, we get back to that bad old concept of sovereign immunity, strangely supported by many conservatives, under which a government can only be sued with its own consent. Real conservatives, as far as I'm concerned, believe in holding people responsible for their own choices. The rationale I've heard for sovereign immunity holds that the people should be viewed as being an innocent party, too, who would be wronged by the need to raise their taxes in order to pay out for any judgement against their government (thus transferring the penalty to them), but in a democratic society, who is to blame for the fact that the current idiots are in charge, but the people themselves? To reject sovereign immunity, then, is to do no more than extend the established and sensible principle that an employer is civilly liable for the misdeeds of his employees, the employees of the population as a whole being its government.

Some will try to respond to this by saying that Nazi Germany was no democracy, which it certainly wasn't, but Weimar Germany was, and as much as some apologists would like to forget this, Hitler et al. did come to power through democratic means, at a time when they were anything but vague about what it is that they believed. How surprised did the German people really have the right to be? Then there are those who will point out that after all of this time, we would be penalizing an electorate most of which had not even been born at the time the outrages occured. Were we to talk about demonizing contemporary Germans based on what had occured in their country during the 1930s and 1940s, that would certainly be unjust for exactly that reason, but we're not. We're talking about repayment of a debt, something of a more civil than criminal nature in spirit, and there is no precedent for the notion that debts are dissolved upon the death of the debtor. They, in fact, are inherited along with the estate that ran them up, so unless the current German people wish to vacate Germany, it is difficult to see how one can justify such a refusal to honor their legitimate debts, even hereditary ones.

Unjust? Unfair? Are we not setting the grandchildren's teeth on edge because their grandparents have eaten bitter lemons? Hardly. Look at the basis for objection. One could call for the end of Social Security on the same basis, or even the confiscation of the bank accounts of retirees who are, after all, effectively obtaining the living their money buys in exchange for work performed before those from whom they obtain those goods and services they buy today were even born, very often - do you feel cheated by this fact, or do you accept this as being simply a matter of the elderly getting their due? The same principle applies. What should have been done at the end of WWII is clear - even granting the residual and righteous anger that the highhanded imposition of the Versailles treaty produced in Germany, the Germans should have been forced to accept their debts, at gunpoint if necessary, which if you think about it is pretty much how individuals are forced to accept their debts. (Try unilaterally reneging on a debt and ignoring a court judgement, and see what happens).

Today, that would be a little more difficult to do directly, as Germany isn't lying prostrate as it was in 1945, and we are dealing with the heirs of the guilty rather than the guilty themselves which would make waging war in collection of the debt an option almost nobody would care to entertain, myself included, but it is not too late to apply a little pressure. Germany, like any net food importer, is highly dependent on foreign trade, and as musch as some of their citizens may like to make defiant remarks about "Jewish ears perking up to the sound of German cash registers", the Germans can ill afford to disregard the sensibilities of a world community among which they must trade merely to obtain the necessities of life. To exploit this fact in order to extract from them more than is just would be wrong, but there is no injustice in forcing others to grant justice, especially when justice is so long overdue. The only question is whether the world community will care enough about justice to be bothered.

The question almost answers itself, doesn't it?

A few reservations about the Hussein trial

2006-04-06T16:24:00.000-05:00

To talk about justice in connection with the trial of Saddam Hussein may seem comical. It is as if Hitler had survived World War Two, and found himself facing the Nuremberg tribunal, the difference being that Hitler was a far more sympathetic figure. One can not imagine a figure more clearly, damnably guilty, more perfectly the embodiment of pure evil than this absurd little man sitting in a Baghdad courtroom. Yet I find myself with misgivings over what I am seeing, and even more misgivings about the fact that nobody else seems to be having any misgivings at all.

Looking just in the moment, we find ourselves with nothing to worry about. The facts are not in serious dispute, only the spin is. But let's look ahead a little, this time, and think about the system that is about to be validated by what is likely to be felt as a moment of long awaited relief - the conviction and likely execution of Hussein. There is no jury in the new Iraqi judicial system, I'm told. All is decided by the decree of a single man - the judge - in this case, somebody who, having served prison time under the Hussein regime, is unlikely to prove impartial. There probably is little damage to be done to the level of justice that Hussein can personally expect from the system, because there is so little justice that the man can still be said to be owed, but one can not necessarily say the same of the next defendent to come along in a system that seems designed to be abused.

Embedding the jury trial requirement into the US Constitution early in the process of amending it was not just an arbitrary cultural choice. Having the right to be tried by "a jury of one's peers", no matter how horrendous the charges against one, means that the government can't simply trump up a charge, grab one off the street, hold a show trial and then kill one; or drop one into a dungeon somewhere. It is a necessary check on the ability of a capricious government to abuse its discretion as it tries to disguise tyranny as law enforcement. One would think that if any nation on earth would have an appreciation of the dangers of not hemming in the abuse of governmental power, right now, it would be Iraq.

Hussein might not deserve any better than he is about to get, but the Iraqi people do. Righteous anger should never become a pretext for pushing through an unrighteous law.

Watching the Culture Wars on Immigration

2006-04-03T04:20:00.000-05:00

Yes, more grassroots garbage. I know it might not seem as important as what is going on in Congress, but this is where politics begins. One can't leave this out of the picture, even if one finds oneself sighing and going "people, must we", which some of us are bound to do. While forgetting this became fashionable during the 1990s, America is not entirely compromised of highly assimilated Anglo-Saxons and angry inner city minority activists. As extreme positions are taken on both sides of an issue and sniping starts to go back and forth, somewhere barely noticed (by some) in the background one will find us, the silenced majority, wishing BOTH sides would sit down and be quiet. A few comments about some of the commentary I've heard about immigration and multiculturalism, in some cases by people I will name:

1. To the many angry Latino activists I saw on the news, talking about how they were being oppressed by proposed penalties for illegal entry into this country, and by the very idea of immigration being restricted at all:

You may feel that you or that relative or neighbor back home, who you'd like to bring over, would be a wonderful addition to this country. You may well be right and I may well agree with you, but the fact of the matter is that you and yours are trying to move into somebody else's home, in many cases, without even asking first. Those whose country this is, have every right in the world to say "no" to you for almost any noncoercive reason they please, be it wise or stupid. That's what ownership means - one has the right to make one's own choices, even bad ones - and the citizenry owns its country. Please do not insult anybody's intelligence by pretending to believe otherwise. Note that Mexico, whose government has long screamed a blue streak about US limitations on Mexican immigration, has not been shy about limiting immigration into Mexico from Central America, from countries whose emigres often have had a far stronger claim to refugee status than the vast majority of would-be Mexican immigrants. This leaves Mexico in the position of telling the US "do as we say and not as we do".

Should you really be surprised when such demands are greeted hostilly? This isn't a time to make demands. You are belligerently greeting the population of a nation from which you desire consideration. To what end do you do this? To browbeat people into giving you what you want? How would you respond if you were greeted in that matter? It would be a matter of honor, would it not, to respond to such a rudely made petition with defiance? Do not be surprised if that which would anger you, angers somebody else as well.

Let us speak plainly. The country you are trying to bully into submission could turn Spanish into a dead language in less time than it takes to make a decent cup of atole, quick frying everything right up to the Portuguese border. I certainly wouldn't like to see that happen, and I'm glad to say that neither would many people in the US, but even in the absence of a genocidal impulse, it still leaves us with the reality that there is no muscle behind your bluster, and the American people can well afford to disregard your anger, if it seems unreasonable to them. When you demand that Mexican immigrants get a free pass into this country that hasn't been given to any immigrant group before them, demanding a special privilege for your own people granted to none other, that is unreasonable and that is going to generate deep resentment in people absolutely capable of telling you "no".

When you approach somebody, desiring something from him that he has both the power and the right to deny you, don't make demands, make polite requests, and make the effort to be the kind of person whose requests others would like to answer with a "yes". When you pridefully declare your right to disregard the laws of the country you're entering, as did one demonstrator who angrily insisted that being an illegal didn't make him a criminal, you're not being that kind of person by anybody's standards. If you break the law, you're a lawbreaker. It's a tautology. Let's move on.

2. Lou Dobbs of CNN's Money Report got much less heat than he deserved, lately, for remarks that would have been considered backward well before Political Correctness made its appearance on the American scene, resurrecting the ghost of nativism. Nativism, if you're fortunate enough to have never encountered it, is an entitlement mentality based system of non-thought that holds that a particular brand of Anglo-Saxon culture (that fancies itself as being the mainstream culture of the US) is entitled to a privileged status within the US, having a special claim to calling itself THE American culture in a way in which any of the many other American cultures do not, and sometimes that Anglo-Saxons are themselves more legitimately American than other Americans. I like to think of it as being the old British imperialism's whiny bast**d stepchild, complete with that desire to ram one's own way of life down everybody else's throad, by whatever means expedient.

Mr.Dobbs has apparently opposed most immigration into the US from Mexico, and fine, that's his privilege. But he's also complained about Mexican Americans waving Mexican flags at Cinco de Mayo and even to the holding of St.Patrick's Day, beloved of what may well be the least likely American ethnic subculture to ever harbor separatist ambitions. That is not his privilege, because that is not any of his business.

Yes, you're reading that right and I mean it exactly the way it sounds - the man is not entitled to his opinion. By this, I do not mean that I think that there should be any kind of government sanction against him for voicing that opinion. I do believe in the first amendment. But the first amendment was never supposed to provide those who made outrageous remarks with bulletproof protection from the negative social consequences that might result. The right to voice one's opinion does not always give one to do so without encountering scorn and social censure, especially when one is so presumptuous as to tell other members of a supposedly free society what they should have for dinner or do on their free time.

Mr.Dobbs, like many like him who come out of the woodwork at moments like this, would return America to a past that never was, to honor a vision that would have profoundly disgusted the founding fathers. America, above all else, was created to be a place of refuge where those who found that they could not live life on their own peaceful terms in the old country (wherever that might be), could find their own little pocket to live in and make their own, living in freedom and in peace, and you know what? Not only did this work, but it worked gloriously, producing a highly non-homogenized America that bears little resemblence to the place some of our Corporatist friends would like to transform our country into. What Mr.Dobbs is calling for today, following in the undesirable footsteps of Teddy Roosevelt as he dares to portray this as an expression of patriotism, is the very un-American unitary version of nationalism that made so much of early modern Europe into the Hell it became for so many - "one land, one people, one culture", and if that sounds like something Hitler might have said, this is not without reason.

A country that is created as a place of refuge is going to tend to catch all of the many varied subcultures that the intolerance of so many other lands will drive out, and that's what built the real America, not this plastic, synthesized culture of TV sitcoms, plywood ranch house subdvisions and mediated, conformist groupthink that many assume one is celebrating, when one flies the American flag on one's site or over one's home. America has been so much more than that, and that is its strength, a strength that some have a great deal of difficulty accepting. One might ask how one can demand that others give up so much of what has made America distinctively American (as opposed to European) and call this "patriotism", or express intolerance for that very traditional diversity of cultures that America has enjoyed from its beginning, and pretend to be doing so for the sake of brotherhood. Brothers let brothers be themselves, and draw joy from their own individual presences. But aside from all of this, one should be amazed that so many believe that what this intolerant brand of nationalism offers is anything but a route to decline and decay.

Let us examine the history of monism. Consider France. Before the Revolution, it was noted as a country remarkable for its regional variation in every aspect of culture, language included - there are a number of languages native to France, other than the Parisian French widely recognized. (Occitan, Breton, Basque, Alsatian and Corsican come readily to mind). After the Revolution, in a spirit of Modernism that would meet approval in some of the trendy circles one meets pro-assimilationists in, the governing of France was radically centralized (France has no federalism) and regional identities were suppressed. According to a monist's view of how the world should work, this should have strengthened France by weakening the divisive presence of regional diversity and identity. In actual point of fact, France was the leading land power in pre-revolutionary Europe, and post-revolution, has gone on to become known as the country that couldn't defend itself against Italy. (Literally - WWII, Mussolini's armies were able to occupy the Southeastern corner of France). Germany, on the other hand, while it did embrace some of the more regrettable spinoffs of 19th century notions of nationalism, never pursued Paris' program of homogenizing the provinces, and hardly seems to have been hobbled by this.

Homogenity, then, is a cure looking for a disease, a prescription for building a stronger society that, having failed every time it was tried anywhere, still wins the support of a pseudo-intellectually trendy crowd that will never let itself be slowed down by the facts, as long as it has rhetoric. Its apologists speak of cultural diversity as being an impediment to progress, in some vague handwavey way, amazing those of us who actually have studied the subjects that make what is commonly known as "progress" possible. Speaking as one of those people, I can tell you that of all of those I've known who've done well in postgraduate study in the pure or applied sciences, not one has ever come from what would be called a "mainstream" cultural background. The one who came closest was an unreconstructed confederate from Tennessee - not the same thing at all.

If one destroys the cultural backgrounds that have given rise to about 100% of America's scientists and engineers, guess what happens to technical progress? We may argue about why American pluralism has been such a fountain of strength for our country, except when it is blindingly obvious (eg. WWII, with refugee scientists from Europe contributing outstandingly to the Manhattan Project), but short of doing the equivalent of closing one's eyes and covering one's ears and yelling "no, no, no", one can't escape the fact that it has been a blessing. Richer and more varied cultures simply tend to produce more creative people, and creativity is what powers research. If you'll pardon an apt cliche, the Europeans, in their folly, killed the goose that had, culturally speaking, been laying the golden eggs. In doing so, they ended their own Golden Age.

Mr.Dobbs would have us follow in their footsteps, out of a fear, perhaps, that comes from projecting his own intolerance onto others, but having been the odd ethnic kid out more than a few times, I can certainly tell you from personal experience that the unassimilated ethnics were the last ones one ever needed to fear. It was the self-consciously homogenized "ugly American" crowd that posed almost all difficulty. In this, one can see a sign of where American and European civilization went their own seperate ways. When a European sees strange and exotic customs in the province next door, he fears the civil war that may someday come, with people shooting their neighbors over a difference in dress, or dialect or family structure. When the average American hears about the same thing, his fear is that he'll run out of gas during the road trip, when he'll get to have fun checking out that exotic strangeness. Diversity only becomes a source of weakness for those who've become so timid, that they've forgotten how to enjoy it.

Of course, looking at Dobbs, one struggles to picture him enjoying anything, so for one such as him, we bypass the argument from pleasure and get to points greatly reminiscent of those posed to the pro-immigration extremists mentioned above. "You're making demands about the disposition of something that doesn't belong to you - somebody else's money and leisure time - and you don't have the firepower to back up these ludicrous demands, so get over it". America is 93% non-Anglo-Saxon, and the culture Mr.Dobbs et al. want to bully everybody else into adopting isn't even close to being universal among Anglo-Americans. Go visit Georgia, Arizona and Massachussetts in short order, and compare and contrast. If maybe - what, 2 or 3% of the population wishes to force its ways on the other 97 or 98% of the population, how is that supposed to work?

It's high time that the rest of us called their bluff, and backed people like this guy way the H*** off. Nothing is more American than the willingness to stand up for oneself, when one is being pushed around.

3. On the far end of something, one finds a remarkable piece of anti-Americanism by Tony Hendra on a blog called "The Obfuscation Report", which I offer to the reader in much the same spirit that I might hand somebody a tape of "Plan 9 from Outer Space". It's so bad, it's good. Sort of.

I discussed this one in greater detail in my April 1 post to Conservative Midwestern Pagans. To summarize briefly: Mr.Hendra supports open borders with Mexico on the basis that the American people have no right to live in their own homes, and have offended him by not cooperating with his desire to see their society become as dystopian as he'd like it to be. He's even angry at some of them for restoring some of the old Victorian homes, feeling that in some vague sense, they are promoting an ancient corporate evil by doing so.

I am laughing at Hendra, not with him. He's laughable only because he is powerless. The level of hatred he puts on display is quite remarkable, and it is sobering to think of what he would do, if he could, judging by his own words. What I find quite disturbing, as I look at the seemingly left wing blog on which I found that rant, is that the editor reposting the man's words can not (or will not) bring himself to describe this outpouring of venom as being anything other than just another opinion.

There is, sometimes, a social duty to pass judgement, because not everything should be negotiable. For those who feel that it is the left that cares about the common man, I offer that post as an excellent example of why I don't buy that. The difference between anger and hatred is that anger would like to find resolution and hatred is only inflamed by the attempt. Look at the tone of that article, and try to imagine making peace with that man. Would it even be possible?

For those of us on the Right, anger is a reality that we have to deal with, and the source of strength nature gives us to fight when we must. We come to terms with it, but we don't find pleasure in it. When one reads an article in which the author is enraged by the very concept of somebody enjoying a pleasure as simple and inoffensive as that offered by the beauty of a traditional old home, flying into a dyspeptic rage over the mere presence of a porch on somebody's home, he is clearly not trying to resolve anything at all. He's enjoying hatred for its own sake, and he's getting validated by his fellow liberals as he does so.

That's the difference between us and them.

We want YOU for RWOTG!

2006-03-17T12:21:00.000-05:00

I've put this off, because self-referential blogs make for tiresome reading, but people do ask and it has sort of come up, so here goes:

Dan is no longer administering RWOTG (the blog you're reading). He's still a contributor, but as you may know, Dan is in the army, and these are very busy days for the US armed forces. This left him without the time to update as often as he'd like, and so he offered the administration of the blog to the contributing members. I ended up being the new admin. To sum up the upcoming changes I have planned for the blog: Not much. The changeover, in most things, is just a formality, my watching the store while Dan is busy helping defend our country.

We are currently looking for new contributors, one of whom (Kallistos) joined recently. The way I do these things is by asking would-be contributors to sign up for Conservative Midwestern Pagans and introduce themselves. I do ask that those joining have a reasonably well-developed page of their own, and yes, blogs count. Why? For one thing, because it gives me a chance to check out your writing. For another, because in Pagandom especially, one can find more than a few liberal trolls who try to pass themselves off as conservatives, in order to slip into and undermine conservative communities. I know that sounds paranoid, but people have tried. What I want to see is solid evidence that you basically really are a Conservative, a Libertarian, or some combination of these, and have been for some time, and I want to get some sense of who you are, as a person. I want to know who it is that I'm sending an invitation to, before I send it. I would also ask you to look over the blog, and make sure that this is a site you'd like to help us build.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Book 'em, Danno!

2006-03-16T15:58:00.001-05:00

A story from home, more or less - DuPage County, Illinois, where I grew up. Yes, it's another story from the mean streets of Suburbia.

Written by Ted Gregory, a staff reporter in the Chicago Tribune, Wednesday, March 15 issue on the bottom of the front page (really) - "Man Shoots Goose. Will the Judge cook his?"

A nice cassoulet would go over well, right now, but guess they meant that more figuratively ...

"Like a lot of homeowners, Larry Tomko has grown weary of geese. He's tired of scraping poop from his driveway with a shovel."

Hey, buddy, let's not mince words. We call that "doo-doo" around here.

"He's fed up with boorish geese gobbling millet he leaves for the chickadees. He feels overrun when dozens of the feathery transients loll in the pond a few steps from his yard."

And probably less than completely excited when a bunch of them decide to fertilize his car. Picture a 50 pound pigeon with a nasty disposition. Now picture a bunch of those travelling in huge numbers, much higher than anything you'd see almost anywhere in Chicago, because unlike those oh-so-clever, habitually liberal and self-righteously environmentally sensitive city folk, we ignorant bumpkins did not see the wisdom of turning our own home into a poisoned, barren, broken glass-strewn concrete-choked wasteland, meaning that we actually have an ecosystem we have to deal with. What could we possibly have been thinking about? Good thing that a whole bunch of those sensitive liberal city folk decided to show their environmental sensitivity by moving out to live with us, at least until the rising property taxes they voted in resulted in a whole bunch of us being uprooted, forcing some of us ignorant bumpkins to move into the aforementioned poisoned, barren, concrete-choked wasteland, and witness how magnificently glass strewn it was. Have you ever seen the sparkle of the first rays of the rising sun off of the facets of the ten year old debris of a Michelob bottle down by the Lake? It's a sight you'll never forget.

I can certainly see why a writer located downtown would pick up a snarky tone as he talked about how the remaining native hicks who hadn't been displaced, yet, were treating the environment. Why, do you realise that some of us were letting the weeds continue to run wild, so much so that they had grown into these patches called "prairies" and "savannahs", some of them miles across? I can still remember the dark days of my youth when, my home suffering from the insensitive ravages of Conservative Republican rule as it was, run by the kind of men who just don't understand that nothing can possibly be good until it's been changed around a lot, I found that I could bicycle for miles down some roads, and where the land had not been overrun by the savannahs and prairies, it was under a thick blanket of glossy greenness, stretching as far as the eye could see in some directions. I think that such places used to be called "forests".

The good news is that after so many of our good, liberal democratic voting friends from Chicago proper and from the cities of the coasts arrived, bounced us rednecks out and started tearing down some of those hideous Victorian and Georgian structures we had laying around (replacing them with the finest in contemporary plywood), they saw the environmental crisis we had left brewing and took action. In place of the woods and prairies and savannahs and other blights upon our landscape, the newcomers have transformed much of DuPage into one of the world's largest reserves for the rare and endangered Kentucky blueglass, which I understand at one point covered no more than a few million acres. There's still a lot of work to be done, what with the prairies still choking out as much as three square miles of Illinois - the prairie state - but courtesy of tax policies that force many people to sell whether they want to or not and federal road subsidies that encourage the sprawl, we need not doubt that this nasty little problem will dusted off, soon enough. But I digress.

"When his frustration brims, Tomko has run out his front door waving him arms and shouting at the geese. Sometimes he launches bottle rockets at them. About ten years ago, he started firing pellets from an old air rifle at the geese. They would squawk and flee.

Then on Feb.26, he killed one, accidentally, sort of, with the pellet gun. Geese are federally protected, and neighbor Jack Casino saw it. Casino is a former hunter who said he has seen too many innocent animals suffer at the hands of man.

Now Tomko has a date with the criminal justice system."

As well he should, bad, bad man that he is, and what a tribute to the well-focused set of priorities our criminal justice system is developing. How well focused? Remember that earlier post about the Children's bootcamps? Well, you'd have some of the convicted felons running the camp accidentally kick some of the campers in the head or stomach because they were thoughtlessly throwing up or selfishly suffering renal failure after a forced march through the Southwestern deserts, during which the camp counselors had inadvertantly re-enacted the Bataan death march, only with children and under harsher conditions. Don't you hate it when that happens? I mean, you turn around, and all of a sudden you've raped a few of the 14 year old girls whose care you were entrusted with and some selfish brat who you unintentionally forced to strip naked in front of the other kids has started bleeding out of some of his orificies, and just won't stop no matter how lovingly you beat him.

How do these things happen?

Well, as hard as some of you may find this to believe, some of us backward conservative hicks wanted those guys brought up on manslaughter charges or worse, on some goofy legal theory that brutalizing children is at least as bad as brutalizing adults. You'll be relieved to know that we didn't get our way. The counselors, in those cases, were hardly ever charged with anything more serious than "reckless endangerment" (the same charge levelled against a single mother who leaves her children home alone when she goes to work), when they were charged at all, and nothing more than suspended sentences were given out to those running the ~~death camps~~ camps for troubled teens. We have to keep those prison cells empty for the real criminals, the truly dangerous people who our justice system has seen the need to focus its energies on the pursuit of: the accidental killers of unowned livestock. Godspeed, men! Let's see how the story continues.

"Casino, 45, is a self-employed tree specialist who calls himself an environmentalist. He and his family have lived in the neighborhood, bordered by a federally protected wetland, for about four years. Their home sits on two acres where horses and wild turkeys roam."

And the deer and the antelope play. Note that horses are not indigenous to Northern Illinois. They are an intruder species, one notorious for damaging grasslands, and Jack has reportedly brought in a whole bunch of them, according to this story, once again showing his commitment to serving the environment by helping to transform it beyond recognition. Good work, Jack! But let's read and learn more about this hero's tale.

"Casino said he started hunting at age 12 but grew increasingly unsettled by it and stopped in his mid-20s. About five years ago, he watched as a Canada goose was struck deliberately and killed on Warrenville Road.

'I swore if I ever saw that again,' Casino said, 'I'd do something about that.'"

Shouldn't he be out on a dark foggy night, maybe standing on top of a skyscraper, as he says something like that, while the voiceover man says "make room for a different kind of hero"? Isn't it really the tragedy at the beginning that makes the hero - Batman losing his parents, Superman losing his homeworld, and Casinoman losing about 40 lbs. of perfectly good protein? I picture him on the ground, cradling the goose's head in his hands, pleading with it to honk just one more time, crying out "as God is my witness, I shall never purchase sauerkraut again", as the goose breathes its last. I'm sorry, I need a moment here, I promised myself that I wasn't going to cry ...

I'm better, now. Really I am. But alas, Goosey Loosey can not say the same, for such is the destiny of a hero - the tragedy that defines him must always repeat itself.

"At about 2 pm Feb.26, while driving by, Casino said he saw Tomko level a pellet rifle and a goose on the frozen pond and fire.

'It was probably about five minutes of flopping and staggering', Casino said. 'I saw it die. It was pretty gross.'

Tomko said that he also was astonished and saddened. he said he had hit 'literally hundreds' of geese with pellets from the spring-loaded rifle and never injured one.

Tomko said that he became frightened by the irate Casino, who shouted that he was calling the police."

which is such a strange way for a 61 year old man to react, when a 45 year old man completely loses it and starts screaming at him, right? The authorities wasted no time in responding to this crisis.

"When two DuPage County sheriff's officers arrived a few minutes later, Tomko confessed. the officers told him to stay in town.

The next afternoon, one of them phoned Tomko and offered to let him surrender at the sheriff's office March 3, which he did. He also surrendered the pellet rifle. ...

Tomko was charged with unlawful taking of a migratory waterfowl, a misdemeanor violation of the Illinois Conservation Code. He was booked, posted a $250 bond and given a March 30 court date in Wheaton ...

Tomko said that he joked with his pastor that God had exacted retribution for missing church the day of the killing, a Sunday. The night before he surrendered, friends took him to a "last supper" and presented him with a bottle of Grey Goose vodka.

But Tomko conceded that he is a little nervous. If convicted, he could spend a year in jail and be fined $500 to $5000.

'I've never gone through this before', he said.

Casino says that he hopes that a prosecutor 'nails [Tomko's] butt' ..."

The state of the prisons being what it is, if one sends this rather nonthreatening looking, partially retired man even into a county correctional facility, somebody probably really will "nail his butt", as Mr.Casino says, ever so elegantly. As you read about this incident and the reactions of those involved, keep in mind that this man getting forcibly sodomized is likely to be a part of the package that will be his punishment, in response to his having had a freak accident with what amounts to being a souped-up BB gun, while trying to scare off an animal pest. Even if he does get put in with boy scouts, which seems unlikely given the reality that there are now gangs in the increasingly urbanized (and certainly no longer rural) DuPage County, we still have this terrified old man being thrown into prison for a year.

Does the punishment seem to fit the so-called crime? Jack Casino seems to think so. Starting exactly where we left off in the Tribune article, at the end of that last quote

"... although even Casino acknowledges that geese are a problem in the neighborhood. 'So what? The law is there to protect them', he said."

Either that, or to radically empower tinplated dictators with messiah complexes; sometimes one has difficulty remembering which. Such an exaggerated response to such a minor aggravation does little for the already strained community life of the region, as the report notes:

"Casino and Tomko barely know each other, but their feud has placed neighbor Chris Strong in an awkward spot. The goose was on strong's pond.

He is friendly with both men, but considers the geese a nuisance, especially when they chase his kids, or when his wife refuses to leave the house in the geese's presence.

'I'm not in a state of mourning, right now,' Strong said of the goose's end. 'I respect everybody's ideas, but I sure would like to see more hunting. That would be a great start.'"

And don't forget the garlic and white beans.

Guys, a goose isn't your neighbor, it isn't even a pet. It is livestock and the only right it has, as somebody once put it, is the right to be served with the proper garnish. The only immorality to be found in any of this, aside from the likelihood that the Winfielders would leave the sausage out of that Cassoulet when the goose was finally served, is to be found in the way Mr.Tomko has been treated, and I'm not going to joke about that. I salute the man's strength, for his being able to joke about what has happened, himself, and only wish that more of the people around him could be equally cool.

Children's Bootcamps: A well-paved road to Hell

2006-03-14T03:11:00.001-05:00

An observation you can confirm for yourself and a question to ponder: If one takes a look at a traditional Jewish family, or a traditional Chinese or Thai one (I'm thinking of a particular branch of our extended family), one sees very little (if any) corporal punishment going on. One rarely hears a son calling his father "sir". Yet these cultures produce many of the most dutiful children ever found, and many of these children remain respectful of their parents throughout their lives. Why?

Because respect is not fear. Fear implies distrust, and one can't respect somebody that one doesn't trust. By declining to call his father "sir", the Jewish son does not refuse him the respect he would show his boss, he elevates him by showing that to him, the word "father" conveys far greater esteem than the word "sir" ever could; no substitute for that simple and loving word could ever ring as praise on his father's ears. Of course, this relationship is far likelier to be found in a culture in which the son would have learned from an early age that no points were to be made among his friends by any show of disrespect for his elders, meaning that while the relationship between parent and child may have had its strained moments, it would have never proceeded on a truly adversarial basis.

Once the seeds of distrust are sown and well watered, uprooting the noxious growth that results will be difficult, maybe even futile. It is not without reason that many of us view "modernity" as being a giant step backwards.

I came across this page and skimmed it, and probably would have been very skeptical about it, but for one accident of my personal history: a past girlfriend was a survivor of one of the places mentioned (North Star) and spoke out about the place before it ever hit the news. The page: Children's Gulags.

I'll try to keep the length of this post under control, because I'd rather you spent your time listening to what the people who are reporting such abuses have to say - and please feel free to link to reports of other such incidents in the comments section.

What we are seeing in these stories is the dark side of "do your own thing", and some of us have been saying this for years. Ever since the 1960s, an attitude has become entrenched in many parts of society that those of us who speak of the need for morality are a bunch of killjoy fuddie-duddies who can't get with the times and see the liberation that comes when people decide that meaning well and feeling warm fuzzy feelings are together an acceptable substitute for honoring the rules of civilized society. The thing is, once there are no longer any rules in the picture and the norms of behavior are thus left free to drift like an untethered boat, one can find oneself amazed at what supposedly loving people will be able to rationalize and keep on rationalizing, until it is too late to save the innocent from an undeserved fate.

Killing your child through an abundant display of "tough love" is not conservatism. Responsible and loving parenting is what would constitute a conservative response to the beautiful (if sometimes stressful) reality of this little person who is sitting on one's lap, looking up at one and expecting so much that one wonders if one will know how to give, and who will need so much from one for so many years to come. We speak of the need to expect things of our children, and in reasonable measure, that is part of love: a child raised without demands put upon him grows without developing self-control, and that leads to an empty life and the inability to live well with others. But how strange that very often, little has seemed to have been expected of the parents, who've (at times) been invited to run their own families as if they were their own private fiefdoms, subject to no civilized restrictions.

It's the flipside of a social trend that drives me buggy - this business of children calling their parents and other elder relatives by the first names. Undue informality, even when coming from a child who is fully grown. In this case, more of the same, in a different form: instead of asking the child to greet the adult as if he were another child, the adult is expected to act as if he were another child and do what feels good, now. We are to protect our younger relatives, in the long term out of that sense of love of family that grows and deepens with time and familiarity, but in the short term, when our better natures fail us, out of that most unfashionable thing - a sense of duty. Would you rather be out partying at Metro, instead of sitting at home with the little ones RIGHT NOW? One suspects that every parent, or every babysitting uncle or aunt has had something roughly akin to that thought, or maybe even the impulse to act on it, but the discipline that was instilled in us growing up draws us back to our duty before we come close to doing wrong, or at least doing as much wrong as we might were we less socialized. It slows us down, calms us, thus helping the fleeting madness of an impulse to give way to something deepier, worthier, more heartfelt and in the long run, a lot more fulfilling.

But lacking that self-control and being as young children when we should be as adults? Those kids stand between a stressed guardian and a quick and easy good time, and if one is so free of the thought that there are rules one should have to honor and duties one should be ready to embrace whether or not they "feel right for you", then there is nothing that is going to force one to slow down, do the hard work of self-examination, and unravel the resentment that can so easily build, just below the surface, when sacrifices need to be made. Shame and guilt aren't hip or cool, but without them, God help us. Passive aggression runs out of control, as we fool ourselves with a skill that would have done Johnny Cochrane proud.

What goes for us goes for previous generations, some of which, regrettably, were known to sustain fads for very permissive parenting, bringing us to today. In the horror stories on that site - and you can find a multitude that are just as bad elsewhere - one hears parents crying about the horror after the fact, but when muscle bound thugs show up at one's house, put one's teen in a headlock, and drag him off into the desert to be physically brutalized - and that's how the program was pitched to one - what does one expect is going to happen? Genuinely loving, responsible parents aren't so eager to find shortcuts to dealing with their children, that they're going to drag those children through a detour that potentially dangerous.

I remember greatly amusing somebody from a more "assimilated", "mainstream" nuclear family oriented cultural background by observing out loud that at the current rate of diffusion, I expected our little clan to reach the Gulf Coast some time in the next few hundred years; I was guessing sometime around the year 2500. Extended family cultures, like our quasi-mediterranean (and now partially Southeast Asian) grouping, do not move quickly. Think of what must be done to preserve such a structure, and you'll see why. As much as I like New Orleans - and that's a lot more than I like Chicago - unless I wish to trash some serious family obligations, I have to bring my family with. That doesn't just mean my brothers (and certainly my dad, now that mom is gone) and my nieces and nephews, but my cousins as well, and there is the difficulty. They, of course, will have to bring their cousins with, who in turn will have to bring their cousins ... and so on and so on, until Northeastern Illinois' population has seriously dipped. Realistically speaking, it's more than I can pull off. It's more than anybody can pull off.

Tradition is very big and I am very small. Family is one of those things that I can connect to that is far bigger than myself, greater than anything that I could ever create.

It blew her mind that I wouldn't just toss away all of that old fashioned stuff and just do my own thing on the spot, especially during the long grey chill of a Chicago winter and the less than cordial reception often given to people from both mom and dad's ethnic and cultural backgrounds around here. "Why not just do your own thing". I could speak to those asking such questions by speaking of a rich level of interdependent existence that comes from connecting to a network in which one's membership is not negotiable, something bound by blood, a living reality that redefines everything and everybody it touches - and I would be as the one who tries to explain the color red to somebody who was born blind. In the absence of common referents, my words would be reduced to meaningless patterns of sound for the one I was speaking to.

But in moments like the ones leading up to the incidents in that article, maybe we can find something that the assimilated among us can connect to a little, if they're open to understanding why, when they ask those keeping to a more traditional life to "just relocate", they keep hearing the word "no". Where a more traditional way of life is seen, one still sees some dysfunction, one just doesn't see quite as much of it, and certainly a lot less of the kind of dysfunction that the parents were responding to, in however inappropriate a way. Why?

One word covers a lot; "babysitting". Having the brothers and sisters and first and second and third cousins around (and well known) means that the parents can get out a lot more than can their supposedly more modern and "liberated" counterparts in mainstream society, and that saves a lot of sanity, when practical. Family members take turns babysitting each other's children while the cousins bond. But also, the experience of life becomes so rich that drugs and alcohol have little allure and the bad apples at school can't even begin to compete. Ponder the experience of the nephew who, when he had a few questions about Science, in short order found his wishes travelling along the family tree until they found their way to a few scientists PhDed in the right areas. I understand that in some cultures it is considered unusual for the life of the mind to begin for a child before the age of ten; at less than half that age, I got to learn about Relativity and start working on my future major (Mathematics). Those more artistically inclined could find guidance from yet another extended family member who could actually achieve the "trompe l'oeil" effect usually associated with the art of past centuries ...

Do you begin to gain a sense of how huge this is? What is possessed within one becomes part of what is lived by all. Yes, it is a huge cultural advantage for those pursuing careers, and certainly a boon that helps those of us from such backgrounds weather economic storms better than we otherwise would, but it offers the child something else as well. Suppose, given that early boost in life, young Samuel comes across somebody who wants to give him a doobie. He's already been told far more about the psychological and physiological consequences by an array of family members than any kid would probably ever want to know, but aside from the fear, he's a lot less likely to be tempted. Why? Think about it. If you found yourself gazing upon a beautiful vista that you had long heard about and travelled to see, would you be in a hurry to blur your own vision? The pleasures we share with him require mental focus to be enjoyed; the only thing the pusher can offer him is an instant loss. Where is the temptation going to be?

That's the part of the answer some of us have for the question "well, what's a parent supposed to do when a kid goes that wrong"; don't wait for things to get that bad. Keep the child's life a full one from the beginning, and such problems are a lot less likely to arise in the first place. The bad news for some is that Hillary Clinton, for once, was right when she said this: "It takes a village to raise a child". No village lives on uncompromising self-indulgence; all must yield a little if all are not to lose greatly. With that statement, I suppose that I'll probably open the floodgates to a fair amount of indignant commentary, because this fits in poorly with almost every version of Political Correctness known, but so be it. So long as one tells the truth, all else can be left to sort itself out.

One option re: Iraq that might get considered and doesn't

2006-03-02T20:24:00.000-05:00

As the new Iraq moves closer and closer to civil war, as the factions in question (Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite) fight over who will have how much power in the new republic, I find myself asking one question that some people don't seem to want to accept really ought to be on the table:

Why are we (the US and the West in general) so set on seeing to it that these people all live within the same national boundaries?

Think about it. One of the usual rationales for binding smaller entities (like the Greek city-states in antiquity or the somewhat more historically recent German principalities) into larger entities that the people may not be so happy with (modern nation-states) is that the small fry will be easy prey for the empire builders, unless they give up a little of their identities and some of their self-determination, and band together for mutual defense. But take a look at the parties in question, and take a look at what is becoming of the Iraqi landscape. Do these factions seem likely to come to the defense of one another?

For that matter, do they really seem like "small fry"? Quickly skimming some comments by the UCLA International Institute, one comes across a condescending reference to the Kurds as being a "rump state". There are, in fact, 20 million Kurds, which would make a unified Kurdistan about half the size of Spain, or twice the size of Portugal. If that's a rump, it's an impressively big one, substantially larger in population than the original United States, which nevertheless was large enough to sustain political stability. (See remarks in Federalist papers regarding the dangers of majority faction formation in very small political entities).

One does not even have the far-fetched rationale the colonial authorities had, as they released Egypt from their grip, of resurrecting a long lost ancient land. Mesopotamia was a region, not a kingdom or nation, that would frequently be divided between two or more civilizations (eg. the Akkadians and Sumerians, the latter a diverse collection of city-states) and united only under empires which would spread far enough to hardly be specifically Mesopotamian (eg. the Assyrian Empire). One would have something akin to 19th century Romanticism at its most absurd - a reckless return to a past that never was, that would blindly ignore all that had changed in the thousands of years of real history that had happened since the time of one's imagined bygone realm. None of which, by the way, has produced anything resembling a rationale for thinking of the Iraqis as being any more each other's countrymen than the countrymen of some of each other's neighbors. A Kurd in Mosul is closer to an Arab in Baghdad more than he is to a Kurd in Southeastern Turkey? Why would that be?

Why, then, fight so hard to revive and keep united an ancient land which never really existed, at least not as some would carelessly imagine it? Let the three regions go their separate ways, each a respectably sized nation unto itself, and the issue of domination by the hated other ceases to be an issue, at least in the new parliament, or parliaments as the case may be. Because, apparently, the British government decreed it to be so a few decades back, without feeling any great concern about what the newly made Iraqis might think about their newly created identity imposed from on high by their departing colonial masters, and the fashion is to take the status quo as being an unquestionable given. Which, considering the remarkable look of the current maps of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, takes a remarkably willful blindness and more than a little inertia on the part of some to maintain. (Small reminder: Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, once deemed to be permanent Soviet acquisitions, to be inevitably Russified, are now members of NATO - the world does change, and it changes greatly).

I went looking for available references today, after getting back from tutoring a client, and am still looking, but this is what I remember (and please check the history to see if I've remembered this correctly) - I remember a reference being made to the Kurds being incorporated into the newly created Iraq over the objections of the Kurds on the basis that if they were granted the independence that they desired, that one of the two remaining factions in Iraq would easily dominate the other. Well, I'm sorry, but to offer that as a rationale for giving away somebody else's country is just simply arrogant. One does not have the right to give away another's future as a gift; the Kurds had the right to make their own destiny regardless of whether or not their choices would suit somebody else's geopolitical aims. Such a stance is, in civilized terms, unbelievable. Imagine the descendants of a triumphant Mongol Empire finally agreeing to leave a long colonized Europe, and telling the English that they would be forced to remain part of the new country of Noreuropa which the Mongols had just assembled, including most of what was once France and Germany, because in their absence the ethnic Germans would easily dominate the ethnic French.

The proper response to such an argument is "what of it and who do you think you are". I could certainly understand why an appointee of the British Empire would behave in such a highhanded and presumptuous manner, but given the history and rationale of the foundation of the US, why does our government feel compelled to rubber stamp the results of the aforementioned highhanded act of nation building, governing imposted on terms agreeable to Britain without the consent of the governed? Wasn't there some small disagreement between our countries about that kind of thing back around 1776? But apparently the Kurds et al. are not supposed to expect the same say in their creation of their own future, that America demanded for itself - and got? This position would irritate almost anybody on the receiving end, and it is decidedly un-American, so one might well ask, where is it coming from?

Go to Europe or North America and you will find, for all of the many imperfections of these two regions, countries whose boundaries were set through the struggles and choices of those living within them. The results have not been perfect, especially in such cases in which an unwilling weaker subject has been annexed by a stronger power, but in time more and more of those are finding their way to freedom (eg. Ireland in the 1920s and many of the newly independent Eastern European countries), and along the way we have countries that basically work. Go to much of the Third World, to Africa and the Middle East in particular, and one will find nation-states whose boundaries were set by fiat by outsiders, without consulting the natives, and lo and behold - one finds countries that basically don't work. There should be a lesson in that for some of us, but it's a lesson that some of us are reluctant to learn because it calls for a little humility - know when to back off and leave tradition be, because we're never as clever as we think we are.

Comments on M.Jacques post

2006-03-02T19:47:00.000-05:00

In a recent post, I rebutted a few absurdities penned by somebody named Martin Jacques. How cruel of me to pick on the mentally challenged like that, and why am I wasting the reader's time by focusing on the rantings of some nobody on the Net like that, some might ask? Let's take a look at the bottom of the article linked to in that previous post:

Martin Jacques is a senior visiting research fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

While Jacques may deserve to be nobody, in terms of status he very much is somebody and this means that he does get heard. As I keep saying, read and be amazed. Many conservatives have complained about the politicization and resultant intellectual downgrading of much of academic life, only to be told to stop exaggerating and overdramatizing the situation.

Look at that article I linked to, which reads so much like the diary entry of a freshman who needs to spend a little less time at the peace rallies and a little more time in the library, and think about the position of the man posting it, and what he was hired to do. What you've been hearing from some of those annoyed (and sometimes greatly distressed) conservatives is not exaggeration or overdramatization, it is a recognition of the sad truth that an academic tradition that has taken centuries to create is being coopted by those who engage in politics as a fashion statement, and is thus being prostituted along the way.

One need not look all of the way to Singapore to find this being done, either. One of these days, I'll get around to ranting about the use of Bayesian methodology in social statistics by those with blatantly activist agendas, much of which is just absolute fraud and can be rigorously be shown to be such. ("Choose whichever a priori distribution best meets your personal needs"). Yet there the practitioners are in a variety of departments, holding tenured chairs and deciding who the next faculty hires will be. There is a serious need for some serious housekeeping in Academia, but with the cranks having as entrenched a position as they do, at present, I wonder where reform would even begin.

Martin Jacques and the Temple of Gold

2006-02-28T14:49:00.001-05:00

Image Source: Yahoo/AP, thanks to Michelle Malkin for finding and posting this on her site.

This image should be a sobering one for any Muslim who views it. Even were not a single person to have been caught in the blast that left us with these before and after shots, Islam would still have lost one of its holy places and Mankind have lost a piece of its cultural heritage, something that had stood for well over a thousand years, a little bit of wonder forever gone from the world. And so it has, with loss of life as well? This was not done by a West intent on breaking the spirit of Islam, but by other Muslims, and now retaliatory bombings are taking place across Iraq by (who else) Muslims. At the moment, the greatest enemy the Islamic world would seem to have is itself.

No, I'm not laughing at that thought. I am somewhat saddened by the observation that nobody in Iraq seems to be having it. Where I do find some mild amusement is in the excellent rebuttal it offers to some of the fear mongering being encouraged by one Martin Jacques, who I understand used to run something called "Marxism Today", in response to the cartoon riots. Quoth Jacques:

A continent that inflicted colonial brutality all over the globe for 200 years has little claim to the superiority of its values

As opposed to the love and kisses some of the Arabian caliphates were blowing across the straits of Gibraltar during the Middle Ages, or the kind caring compassion the Chinese have bestowed upon the Tibetans, or the gentle touch of the Aztec priesthood as they'd slice the heart out of a prisoner's chest (done with love, I'm sure) and let's not forget the gentleness the Hutus and Tutsis have long shown to each other in Rwanda or ... ad infinitim. Our Earth is not a gentle world, and non-Westerners in general have often obliterated each other's cities with gleeful abandon, in some cases millenia before the Europeans played much of a role on the World's stage. I wonder if somebody ever heard of the Assyrians, perhaps had gotten word of that whole mass impalement of the conquered business? If not, then I would urge them to read and be amazed. Without defending such moments as the destruction of the indigenous population of Tasmania, one is left with the sad reality that as dark as some times have been in the West, the Europeans do not come even vaguely close to being the most brutal civilization in history.

But let's continue, and note just how Orwellian some of the writing will get:

Europe has never had to worry too much about context or effect because for around 200 years it dominated and colonised most of the world. Such was Europe's omnipotence that it never needed to take into account the sensibilities, beliefs and attitudes of those that it colonised, however sacred and sensitive they might have been. On the contrary, European countries imposed their rulers, religion, beliefs, language, racial hierarchy and customs on those to whom they were entirely alien. There is a profound hypocrisy - and deep historical ignorance - when Europeans complain about the problems posed by the ethnic and religious minorities in their midst, for that is exactly what European colonial rule meant for peoples around the world. With one crucial difference, of course:

To be sure. The Western misdeeds Jacques speaks of are the misdeeds of some of the upper class ancestors of some of the Europeans, carried out at a time when few if any of us were even born yet; indeed, in many cases, one's greatgrandparents hadn't even met at the time. The attempt by the rioters to deny freedom through the use of intimidation is happening right now. There is certainly no comparison at all, and more than a little shamelessness in a double standard that shines a spotlight on Western mistreatment of non-Westerners, while casually overlooking the brutality often inflicted by non-Western powers, many times on Europeans - the Ottomans in Greece and the Mongols in Russia come to mind.

But it is no longer possible for Europe to ignore the sensibilities of peoples with very different values, cultures and religions. First, western Europe now has sizeable minorities whose origins are very different from the host population and who are connected with their former homelands in diverse ways. If European societies want to live in some kind of domestic peace and harmony - rather than in a state of Balkanisation and repression - then they must find ways of integrating these minorities on rather more equal terms than, for the most part, they have so far achieved. That must mean, among other things, respect for their values.

In case the reader doesn't see what's coming next, Jacques is speaking about the values of the rioters. Yes, he's going to seriously argue that the Europeans are oppressing the Muslim world by refusing to let themselves be bullied into submission. But that they could bully others in such a manner more often, these days, but let's read on.

Second, it is patently clear that, globally speaking, Europe matters far less than it used to - and in the future will count for less and less.

In other words, "give in or else", sidestepping the entire issue of whether or not the demands made by the rioters have any legitimacy by using fear as an argument - "give in, because your defeat and the defeat of your values and notions of freedom are inevitable, no matter what your arguments may be". Hmmm, where have we heard that before? Could the answer perhaps be found in the standard Marxist argument for Socialism (or Communism, if you prefer), which sweeps aside questioning of the Marxist vision of the future of World Society by claiming that the Socialist revolution is an inevitable outcome of historical forces? Causes may crumble, but old habits die hard, I suppose, especially when there's always a new brand of totalitarianism to be an apologist for.

Europe has little experience of this, and what experience it has is mainly confined to less than half a century. Old attitudes of superiority and disdain - dressed up in terms of free speech, progress or whatever - are still very powerful. Nor - as many liberals like to think - are they necessarily in decline. On the contrary, racial bigotry is on the rise, even in countries that have previously been regarded as tolerant. The Danish government depends for its rule on a racist, far-right party that gained 13% of the seats in the last election.

So, let's see - we supposedly have Europe being destroyed by non-Western immigrant rioters in the street if it doesn't become meekly submissive enough to instantly yield on any matter which any one group of nonwesterners wants to throw a tantrum about, but having assumed that, we should then go on to agree that only a racist could be opposed to immigration into Europe? Should we conclude, then, that a desire to not be burned out of one's own home and eventually murdered if one doesn't surrender one's civil liberties is a form of racism? Intriguing - and such are the implications of the man's own stated assumptions. One might say something about the racism and outright paranoia of assuming that nonwesterners are acting in monolithic collusion to bring down the freedoms of Europeans, but then one would be oppressing Jacques by saying something he doesn't want to hear, and we dare not do that.

The decision of Jyllands-Posten to publish the cartoons - and papers in France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere to reprint them - lay not so much in the tradition of free speech but in European contempt for other cultures and religions: it was a deliberate, calculated insult to the beliefs of others, in this case Muslims.

This kind of mentality - combining Eurocentrism, old colonial attitudes of supremacism, racism, provincialism and sheer ignorance - will serve our continent ill in the future. Europe must learn to live in and with the world, not to dominate it, nor to assume it is superior or more virtuous.

There you have it - Jacques equating the concept of Europeans not letting themselves be dominated by a Middle Eastern street rabble's fanaticism - apparently a fanaticism that some among the Islamic clergy have been futily trying to defuse among a misbehaving segment of the laity - with an alleged European attempt to dominate the Islamic World. As I wrote in Pagan Conservatives, this strikes me as being a very Marxist failing, a failure to see where the self begins and the other leaves off. Peter having the imagined right to steal from Paul, because Paul's not letting Peter forcibly take something from him has been equated with Paul forcibly taking it from Peter, this fallacious equation being rationalised by failing to recognize that some things are Peter's and some are Paul's. As with property rights, so with freedom of expression - as Jacques illustrates so well, the old naive defense of Marxism that holds that it is "just an economic theory" does not hold up under inspection of the behavior of Marxists, in practice. Jacques goes on to write:

This attitude of disdain, of assumed superiority, will be increasingly difficult to sustain. We are moving into a world in which the west will no longer be able to call the tune as it once did. China and India will become major global players alongside the US, the EU and Japan. For the first time in modern history the west will no longer be overwhelmingly dominant. By the end of this century Europe is likely to pale into insignificance alongside China and India. In such a world, Europe will be forced to observe and respect the sensibilities of others. ...

For 200 years the dominant powers have also been the colonial powers: the European countries, the US and Japan. They have never been required to pay their dues for what they did to those whom they possessed and treated with contempt. Europeans have treated this chapter in their history by choosing to forget.

In other words, "they're entitled to oppress us because our ancestors oppressed their ancestors hundreds of years ago, and if you're Jewish or Polish or Greek or Welsh or a member of some other group of Westerners who were themselves being oppressed in centuries past - ssshhh! Stop being so divisively provincial". And don't bother asking just how much Colonialism the US has actually been guilty of. Some people call that being progressive. I'll call it being masochistic. Jacques continues the self-flagellation, writing

So has Japan, except that in its case its neighbours have not only refused to forget but are also increasingly powerful. As a consequence, Japan's present and future is constantly stalked by its history. This future could also lie in wait for Europe. We might think the opium wars are "simply history"; the Chinese (rightly) do not. We might think the Bengal famine belongs in the last century, but Indians do not.

Europe is moving into a very different world. How will it react? If something like the attitude of the Danes prevails - a combination of defensiveness, fear, provincialism and arrogance - then one must fear for Europe's ability to learn to live in this new world.

bringing us to what lies at the root of the left wing's ethic of appeasement - a paranoid and ironic fear that all the rest of the world will unite and go after us if we are not properly submissive. Ironic because such timidity only encourages aggression, thus increasing the likelihood of a destructive coalition of hostile powers, because to put this in quasi-Skinnerian terms, one is reinforcing the both the aggressive stance and the expectation that it will be rewarded with compliance, and thus the misplaced sense of aggrievement when some hear the word "no". As they must, sooner or later, because otherwise demands will simply escalate without limit until the one appeasing has nothing left to yield - and even after that.

This time, however, one need only ponder that very sad image this post opened on, that of the destruction of the historic golden domed mosque of Samarra. All of the world will unite together in this jihad against the publishers of a cartoon? A call for real repression based on the assertion of an unreal scenario. How unreal? Take a good long look at that shattered dome. All of the rest of the world is a monolithic front? Hardly. When one can't even count on the followers of another denomination of one's own religion among one's own countrymen to not blow up a place of worship, one clearly isn't even seeing monolithic support in one's own backyard, much less globally. To expect the latter would to to sink into the realm of fantasy.

But then fantacising about monolithic rebellions is what Socialists love to do best, isn't it? Jacques may be enjoying the opportunity to indulge in a nostalgic return to a past, back before his revolution of choice ended up on history's scrap heap, but should any of the rest of us begin to respond to his fear-mongering with actual fear, I hope that they will take the time to consider the source.

And then maybe wash their worries down with a bottle of Tuborg.

Illegal immigration

2006-02-11T11:25:00.000-05:00

When are we going to start enforcing our bordrer security? We seem to have this open-border policy with Mexico. The Mexican government has issued a comic book detailing how to enter the US illegally and avoid being caught. We have more than 7 million illegals living in the US. They're starting to get violent.

I say we close the border entirely. Make it as tough to get through as the Berlin wall used to be. Start deporting illegals instead of giving them jobs and benefits. Start fining companies that hire illegal immigrants, whether they know it or not. That will make the companies a little more careful in checking out the background of their employees. Finally, empower local and state police to hold illegals simply for being illegals. As it is right now, local cops just watch the illegals waltzing through town because they don't have authority over immigration issues (although some have taken steps to rectify this issue). I say, grant them some authority. Give them the power to jail illegal immigrants for 48 hours. If INS doesn't come and get the illegals in that time, then let them go.

There's a good article on why it isn't a victimless crime here. If you agree, write your congressman and senator, and tell them you want the Mexican border closed to illegal immigrants, and, more importantly, you want the illegals already here deported.

Floridians are nuts part 2

2006-02-02T12:49:00.000-05:00

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/13765726.htm

It seems that a couple senators from Florida are now proposing a plan to permanently prevent drilling within 260 miles of Florida's coast. Just 1 day after Bush explained in the SOTU address that we needed to reduce dependance on foreign oil, Florida's elected officials agreed, but it shouldn't be done in their pristeen waters. I'm so pissed I can't even gather all of my thoughts. Here goes though.

First, the congress needs to pass a bill authorizing drilling in all states and all federal waterways. Second, they need to pass laws regaurding the building of X number of refineries. Third, they need to allow nuclear power, setting aside 1 nuclear power plant per X number of miles.

Floridians are nuts part 1

2006-02-02T12:40:00.000-05:00

It seems that the Florida supreme court has issued a stay of execution for a man who stabbed an elderly woman, then drowned her. Why, you might ask, because he is concerned with it being painful. It seems that he feels this would be a cruel and unusual punishment for him to feel the slightest of pains in his death, when he did not consider that while murdering an elderly woman. I think he is right...he should not recieve lethal injection (pause for people to boo me) he deserves much worse, unfortunatly that isn't allowed. We need to bring back quarterings and such.

http://boortz.com/nuze/200602/02022006.html#execution

Danish boycott ... the cartoonist isn't kidding!

2006-02-02T08:55:00.000-05:00

See: Day by day strip for the day of this post, alluded to in the title.

Yes, this has apparently really happened, or at least there has been large amounts of consistent buzz to that effect: LETTER FROM COPENHAGEN. My morning coffee (iced, please), a newspaper and some serious head clearing await, but for now let's take a look at some selected excerpts from the article in question.

Denmark has become, much to its tolerant citizens' bewilderment, the target of an international Muslim boycott, in protest of what international Muslim groups call Denmark's "aggressive campaign waged against Islam and its prophet."

"Boycott" actually understates the case. In the past week alone, crowds of angry Muslims in several Arab countries burned the Danish flag, a mob attacked European Union offices in Gaza and at least two Danes were beaten in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia withdrew its ambassador from Denmark; Libya closed its embassy, and Iraq, Iran, Jordan and Sudan lodged official protests. A meeting of Arab interior ministers in Tunis demanded that Denmark punish the "authors" of the offense. Danish products were taken off the shelves in Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Kuwait, Bahrain and other countries, forcing one Danish dairy firm to lay off 800 workers. The European Union trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, struck back with a threat to haul the Saudis before the World Trade Organization. Muslim states replied by submitting a complaint to the United Nations. At midweek the dispute was growing into a full-scale global confrontation between Islam and the West.

The cause of the fury? A dozen cartoons that were published in a Danish newspaper last September, depicting the Prophet Muhammad in satiric guises. One showed him with a fuse attached to his turban; another showed him telling dead suicide bombers that he had run out of virgins to reward them. ...

But the furor has not died down. The 55-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference declared this week that Denmark's refusal to censor its newspapers was, oddly, "an affront to free expression." ...

Danes themselves seem shocked. They are, after all, citizens of a country that has opened its doors to tens of thousands of Muslim immigrants in recent decades. They have been generous in their support, monetary and political, for the Palestinian cause. Danish public debate, strongly pro-Israel a generation ago, has followed the general European shift toward the Palestinians. Just days before the Palestinian election, Denmark's Channel 2 Television rebroadcast a 2002 documentary on the "Jenin massacre," reviving the now-discredited slur that Israel perpetrated a mass killing in the West Bank city. The film was a tendentious mélange of anti-Israel propaganda that somehow never mentioned the U.N. investigation showing the "massacre" to be a fabrication.

Then again, the same Channel 2 broadcast a program this week on the 1969 American moon landing. This gave equal time to crackpots who say that the whole thing was faked. ...

Denmark, like France, Great Britain and the Netherlands, is finally being forced to face the question of just what it means to be an immigrant. Does it mean accepting the culture of one's adopted homeland, keeping one's own roots as long as they don't violate the law? Or does it mean, "Thanks for a piece of your territory, and now I will teach you — or force you — to live by my norms"? And what's a free society to do about it?

Learning to remember to trust one's friends before one trusts one's enemies is always a good start. Sigh. The United States has been a friend and ally to Denmark for how long? Was there even a time when the US was hostile toward Denmark? Remember all of those US troops that used to be over there, protecting Western Europe from becoming a Soviet acquision during the late 20th century? Do they remember WWII at all? And, on the other hand, we have the fun loving people who've been setting off explosions in a variety of public places in Europe for the last few decades, killing and maiming innocent bystanders aplenty.

Are all Muslims like that? No. Are a whole lot of them like that? One need only look at the body count to get an answer to such a question. When one knows that trouble has often arrived from one particular direction, common sense should incline one to keep a slightly warier eye on those approaching from that particular direction.

Yes, I know, "love those who hate you", Jesus said that, and somebody sooner of later is bound to notice the "Christo-" part of the word "Christohellenic", up near the top of my (Antistoicus') own personal blog, and are going to love having the chance to pounce on an imagined inconsistency. But love has to be tempered with prudence and a realistic picture of what one can expect from those loved at the moment. Love in this sense is an openness to the possibility of progress in a relationship, a willingness to gently nudge that relationship in a more positive direction, and when we say that we love our neighbor, we shouldn't confuse that with the concept of liking him. When we speak of "liking him", this refers to what we expect from him, what we think he wants for us; when we speak of loving him, this refers to what we expect of ourselves, what we want for him.

There is some logic in a call to love one's enemies; without such love, conflicts can only hope to escalate. There is, however, no sense in unconditionally liking one's enemies. "Love" is encouraging the drunk next door to get to an AA meeting, because doing so will help him begin a better life for himself. "Liking him" would mean letting him into your place after he's tied on a few and doesn't have a good explanation for why it is that he's carrying that broken bottle, or something else equally foolhardy. Not the same thing at all.

In this case, one might argue, not only aren't the two synonomous, they aren't even compatible. The attitudes expressed through this most recent outburst of fundamentalist hysteria - one in a long series - are not attitudes compatible with any sort of even remotely liberal democracy. They aren't even compatible with peaceful co-existence with one's neighbors, and let us be realistic. If the Islamic world approaches all of the rest of humanity in this hyperaggressive manner, it will eventually learn that it should not have done that. Europeans may dither to a potentially fatal extent when it comes to their own self-defense (eg. pre-WWII, Neville Chamberlin), but the Chinese, for example, are most unlikely to be equally timid, and if truly pushed could easily turn Islamic civilization into a scorched, smoking memory. What's love? Love, in this case, is doing one's part to help urge some of those societies off the ultimately self-destructive path they're on, and if one should help out one's own society in the process, there's nothing wrong with that.

There's nothing wrong or hateful about setting limits, about sending the message people eventually get when, having abused the hospitality of many, they find more doors closed to them than they'd like, doors they discover that they can't reopen with a show of bluster and bravado, and they have no escape from the dreadful prospect of having to wonder why that is, and the even more dreadful need to act on the understanding that follows. It's like showing that drunken, violent neighbor the door - you need to do it for yourself, yes, but the drunken, violent neighbor needs you to do it, too, because nothing else will force him to do what he needs to do, but doesn't know to want to do yet - engage in some long, intense self-examination.

As with individuals, so with cultures. I might ask, given the long centuries of Jewish service to the societies of Europe and the long-established pro-Western stance of Israel, where this easy comfort with bashing Jerusalem comes from, but I think that one can guess. The desire for instant gratification as one seeks comfort and ease. One appeases one's enemies by stepping on one's friends because one is more worried about how one's enemies will respond than one's friends, right up until the day one has so alienated one's former friends that they've become enemies in their own right, as well, and why not? If one sets perverse incentives in place, should one be amazed when the rewards one reaps for oneself are equally perverse?

Respect should be shown when and to the extent that it is earned, not demanded. In this case, many of our muslim neighbors (across the sea, if you're in Europe; across a whole ocean for us in North America) have not been earning respect at this point; a demand that we live by their laws is nothing more than de facto imperialism. What defines where a nationa's boundaries lie, but the extent to which its laws are applied? No apologies should be offered, nor even attempts at diplomacy; the demands made have been arrogant and outrageous, so this is the time for open defiance. I'm pleasantly surprised to see that some of it has been on display in Europe of late. Let's hope that there will be more to come.

State of the Blog

2006-02-01T14:52:00.000-05:00

Yes, I have an oppinion on the SOTU, but first I'm wondering what has happened to our fearless leader, so Dan, where are you?

With the State of the Union, I will post the transcript with my thoughts italicized.

Mr. Speaker, Vice President Cheney, members of Congress, fellow citizens:

As a new Congress gathers, all of us in the elected branches of government share a great privilege: we have been placed in office by the votes of the people we serve. And tonight that is a privilege we share with newly elected leaders of Afghanistan, the Palestinian territories, Ukraine, and a free and sovereign Iraq.

Two weeks ago, I stood on the steps of this Capitol and renewed the commitment of our nation to the guiding ideal of liberty for all. This evening I will set forth policies to advance that ideal at home and around the world.

Tonight, with a healthy, growing economy, with more Americans going back to work, with our nation an active force for good in the world -- the state of our union is confident and strong. Our generation has been blessed -- by the expansion of opportunity, by advances in medicine, and by the security purchased by our parents' sacrifice. Now, as we see a little gray in the mirror -- or a lot of gray -- and we watch our children moving into adulthood, we ask the question: What will be the state of their union?

Members of Congress, the choices we make together will answer that question. Over the next several months, on issue after issue, let us do what Americans have always done, and build a better world for our children and grandchildren

blah blah blah

First, we must be good stewards of this economy, and renew the great institutions on which millions of our fellow citizens rely.

America's economy is the fastest growing of any major industrialized nation. In the past four years, we have provided tax relief to every person who pays income taxes, overcome a recession, opened up new markets abroad, prosecuted corporate criminals, raised home ownership to the highest level in history, and in the last year alone, the United States has added 2.3 million new jobs. When action was needed, the Congress delivered -- and the nation is grateful.

Bam!!! To the point, showing off a bit of America's greatness.

Now we must add to these achievements. By making our economy more flexible, more innovative, and more competitive, we will keep America the economic leader of the world.

America's prosperity requires restraining the spending appetite of the federal government. I welcome the bipartisan enthusiasm for spending discipline. I will send you a budget that holds the growth of discretionary spending below inflation, makes tax relief permanent, and stays on track to cut the deficit in half by 2009. My budget substantially reduces or eliminates more than 150 government programs that are not getting results, or duplicate current efforts, or do not fulfill essential priorities. The principle here is clear: a taxpayer dollar must be spent wisely, or not at all.

I hope this gets done as stated, but am afraid it is a pipedream

To make our economy stronger and more dynamic, we must prepare a rising generation to fill the jobs of the 21st century. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, standards are higher, test scores are on the rise, and we are closing the achievement gap for minority students. Now we must demand better results from our high schools, so every high school diploma is a ticket to success. We will help an additional 200,000 workers to get training for a better career, by reforming our job training system and strengthening America's community colleges. And we will make it easier for Americans to afford a college education, by increasing the size of Pell Grants.

A nice brief to the point on education.

To make our economy stronger and more competitive, America must reward, not punish, the efforts and dreams of entrepreneurs. Small business is the path of advancement, especially for women and minorities, so we must free small businesses from needless regulation and protect honest job-creators from junk lawsuits. Justice is distorted, and our economy is held back, by irresponsible class actions and frivolous asbestos claims -- and I urge Congress to pass legal reforms this year.

ABOUT TIME SOMEONE SAYS THIS

To make our economy stronger and more productive, we must make health care more affordable, and give families greater access to good coverage, and more control over their health decisions. I ask Congress to move forward on a comprehensive health-care agenda -- with tax credits to help low-income workers buy insurance, a community health center in every poor county, improved information technology to prevent medical errors and needless costs, association health plans for small businesses and their employees, expanded health savings accounts, and medical liability reform that will reduce health-care costs, and make sure patients have the doctors and care they need.

For the most part this is awesome. Notice how he stated his words carefully, including credits for low income workers, this isn't a giveout to the lazy, instead assistance for those who atleast put forth some effort. Again he hits with getting rid of frivolous lawsuits

To keep our economy growing, we also need reliable supplies of affordable, environmentally responsible energy. Nearly four years ago, I submitted a comprehensive energy strategy that encourages conservation, alternative sources, a modernized electricity grid, and more production here at home, including safe, clean nuclear energy. My Clear Skies legislation will cut power plant pollution and improve the health of our citizens. And my budget provides strong funding for leading-edge technology -- from hydrogen-fueled cars, to clean coal, to renewable sources such as ethanol. Four years of debate is enough -- I urge Congress to pass legislation that makes America more secure and less dependent on foreign energy.

Again the president went on the offensive with an excellent plan

All these proposals are essential to expand this economy and add new jobs -- but they are just the beginning of our duty. To build the prosperity of future generations, we must update institutions that were created to meet the needs of an earlier time. Year after year, Americans are burdened by an archaic, incoherent federal tax code. I have appointed a bipartisan panel to examine the tax code from top to bottom. And when their recommendations are delivered, you and I will work together to give this nation a tax code that is pro-growth, easy to understand, and fair to all.

Could the president be considering the fair tax?

America's immigration system is also outdated -- unsuited to the needs of our economy and to the values of our country. We should not be content with laws that punish hard-working people who want only to provide for their families, and deny businesses willing workers, and invite chaos at our border. It is time for an immigration policy that permits temporary guest workers to fill jobs Americans will not take, that rejects amnesty, that tells us who is entering and leaving our country, and that closes the border to drug dealers and terrorists

He is a bit weak on illegal immigration with this...one of his few week points.

One of America's most important institutions -- a symbol of the trust between generations -- is also in need of wise and effective reform. Social Security was a great moral success of the 20th century, and we must honor its great purposes in this new century. The system, however, on its current path, is headed toward bankruptcy. And so we must join together to strengthen and save Social Security.

If only he could destroy this leech

Today, more than 45 million Americans receive Social Security benefits, and millions more are nearing retirement -- and for them the system is sound and fiscally strong. I have a message for every American who is 55 or older: Do not let anyone mislead you. For you, the Social Security system will not change in any way.

For younger workers, the Social Security system has serious problems that will grow worse with time. Social Security was created decades ago, for a very different era. In those days people did not live as long, benefits were much lower than they are today, and a half century ago, about 16 workers paid into the system for each person drawing benefits. Our society has changed in ways the founders of Social Security could not have foreseen. In today's world, people are living longer and therefore drawing benefits longer -- and those benefits are scheduled to rise dramatically over the next few decades. And instead of 16 workers paying in for every beneficiary, right now it's only about three workers -- and over the next few decades, that number will fall to just two workers per beneficiary. With each passing year, fewer workers are paying ever-higher benefits to an ever-larger number of retirees.

So here is the result: Thirteen years from now, in 2018, Social Security will be paying out more than it takes in. And every year afterward will bring a new shortfall, bigger than the year before. For example, in the year 2027, the government will somehow have to come up with an extra $200 billion to keep the system afloat - and by 2033, the annual shortfall would be more than $300 billion. By the year 2042, the entire system would be exhausted and bankrupt. If steps are not taken to avert that outcome, the only solutions would be drastically higher taxes, massive new borrowing, or sudden and severe cuts in Social Security benefits or other government programs.

I recognize that 2018 and 2042 may seem like a long way off. But those dates are not so distant, as any parent will tell you. If you have a 5-year-old, you're already concerned about how you'll pay for college tuition 13 years down the road. If you've got children in their 20s, as some of us do, the idea of Social Security collapsing before they retire does not seem like a small matter. And it should not be a small matter to the United States Congress.

Atleast he hits strong with some facts here

You and I share a responsibility. We must pass reforms that solve the financial problems of Social Security once and for all.

Fixing Social Security permanently will require an open, candid review of the options. Some have suggested limiting benefits for wealthy retirees. Former Congressman Tim Penny has raised the possibility of indexing benefits to prices rather than wages. During the 1990s, my predecessor, President Clinton, spoke of increasing the retirement age. Former Sen. John Breaux suggested discouraging early collection of Social Security benefits. The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan recommended changing the way benefits are calculated.

All these ideas are on the table. I know that none of these reforms would be easy. But we have to move ahead with courage and honesty, because our children's retirement security is more important than partisan politics. I will work with members of Congress to find the most effective combination of reforms. I will listen to anyone who has a good idea to offer. We must, however, be guided by some basic principles. We must make Social Security permanently sound, not leave that task for another day. We must not jeopardize our economic strength by increasing payroll taxes. We must ensure that lower income Americans get the help they need to have dignity and peace of mind in their retirement. We must guarantee that there is no change for those now retired or nearing retirement. And we must take care that any changes in the system are gradual, so younger workers have years to prepare and plan for their future.

As we fix Social Security, we also have the responsibility to make the system a better deal for younger workers. And the best way to reach that goal is through voluntary personal retirement accounts. Here is how the idea works. Right now, a set portion of the money you earn is taken out of your paycheck to pay for the Social Security benefits of today's retirees. If you are a younger worker, I believe you should be able to set aside part of that money in your own retirement account, so you can build a nest egg for your own future.

He's getting better, again hitting with "privatized" social security

Here is why personal accounts are a better deal. Your money will grow, over time, at a greater rate than anything the current system can deliver -- and your account will provide money for retirement over and above the check you will receive from Social Security. In addition, you'll be able to pass along the money that accumulates in your personal account, if you wish, to your children or grandchildren. And best of all, the money in the account is yours, and the government can never take it away.

The goal here is greater security in retirement, so we will set careful guidelines for personal accounts. We will make sure the money can only go into a conservative mix of bonds and stock funds. We will make sure that your earnings are not eaten up by hidden Wall Street fees. We will make sure there are good options to protect your investments from sudden market swings on the eve of your retirement. We will make sure a personal account can't be emptied out all at once, but rather paid out over time, as an addition to traditional Social Security benefits. And we will make sure this plan is fiscally responsible, by starting personal retirement accounts gradually, and raising the yearly limits on contributions over time, eventually permitting all workers to set aside four percentage points of their payroll taxes in their accounts.

Personal retirement accounts should be familiar to federal employees, because you already have something similar, called the Thrift Savings Plan, which lets workers deposit a portion of their paychecks into any of five different broadly based investment funds. It is time to extend the same security, and choice, and ownership to young Americans.

Our second great responsibility to our children and grandchildren is to honor and to pass along the values that sustain a free society. So many of my generation, after a long journey, have come home to family and faith, and are determined to bring up responsible, moral children. Government is not the source of these values, but government should never undermine them.

Because marriage is a sacred institution and the foundation of society, it should not be re-defined by activist judges. For the good of families, children, and society, I support a constitutional amendment to protect the institution of marriage.

One of the big areas I disagree with the president

Because a society is measured by how it treats the weak and vulnerable, we must strive to build a culture of life. Medical research can help us reach that goal, by developing treatments and cures that save lives and help people overcome disabilities -- and I thank Congress for doubling the funding of the National Institutes of Health. To build a culture of life, we must also ensure that scientific advances always serve human dignity, not take advantage of some lives for the benefit of others. We should all be able to agree on some clear standards. I will work with Congress to ensure that human embryos are not created for experimentation or grown for body parts, and that human life is never bought or sold as a commodity. America will continue to lead the world in medical research that is ambitious, aggressive, and always ethical.

Another area I don't totally agree.

Because courts must always deliver impartial justice, judges have a duty to faithfully interpret the law, not legislate from the bench. As president, I have a constitutional responsibility to nominate men and women who understand the role of courts in our democracy, and are well qualified to serve on the bench -- and I have done so. The Constitution also gives the Senate a responsibility: Every judicial nominee deserves an up-or-down vote.

Common sense, glad he mentioned it though

Because one of the deepest values of our country is compassion, we must never turn away from any citizen who feels isolated from the opportunities of America. Our government will continue to support faith-based and community groups that bring hope to harsh places. Now we need to focus on giving young people, especially young men in our cities, better options than apathy, or gangs, or jail.

I don't totally agree with this, depending on if he allows any faith based organization of any religion, then I am all for it

Tonight I propose a three-year initiative to help organizations keep young people out of gangs, and show young men an ideal of manhood that respects women and rejects violence. Taking on gang life will be one part of a broader outreach to at-risk youth, which involves parents and pastors, coaches and community leaders, in programs ranging from literacy to sports. And I am proud that the leader of this nationwide effort will be our first lady, Laura Bush.

Because HIV/AIDS brings suffering and fear into so many lives, I ask you to reauthorize the Ryan White Act to encourage prevention, and provide care and treatment to the victims of that disease. And as we update this important law, we must focus our efforts on fellow citizens with the highest rates of new cases, African-American men and women.

Because one of the main sources of our national unity is our belief in equal justice, we need to make sure Americans of all races and backgrounds have confidence in the system that provides justice. In America we must make doubly sure no person is held to account for a crime he or she did not commit -- so we are dramatically expanding the use of DNA evidence to prevent wrongful conviction. Soon I will send to Congress a proposal to fund special training for defense counsel in capital cases, because people on trial for their lives must have competent lawyers by their side.

What I didn't like is CNN did not include the word for word transcript. It didn't include how Bush attacked on the NSA program that has been used by MANY presidents (Hillary wasn't happy about that). Also he had some great shots throwing in his acknowledgment of 2 new Supreme Court justices. All in all, great speech President Bush

Another open reply to Pawnman's Post

2006-01-28T09:51:00.000-05:00

The article I'm responding to is "How does religion affect politics". Shaun has already posted a reply and I've just placed one of my own, written from a different theological perspective (a Christohellenic one) on my own personal blog.

Paging Mr.Dilbert ...

2006-01-28T04:28:00.000-05:00

Sometimes, as a Conservative, one encounters an expectation that one will stubbornly assume that people always get their just deserts and that all has to be for the best, in this best of all possible worlds, and that we're nasty punitive types who love nothing better than cracking down on people who've gotten out of line, instead of having a big huggy lovefest and letting bygones be bygones, like those caring lovable liberals. No doubt, some of them might point to this story as an example of how insane and horrible life can become, when big business runs amock with its harsh conservative attitudes:

Stephen Chiu remembers the time a prospective employer asked what kind of shampoo he used.

"Head and Shoulders," replied the electrical engineering senior at the University of Texas at Austin.

Chiu didn't get invited for a second interview.

The interviewer worked for a manufacturing firm that made shampoo among its other products, and the question was designed to see how much job candidates knew about the company. Chiu admits he didn't even know the company produced shampoo.

I can already picture some future Bill Clinton clone reading this story on the campaign trail as an example of how Kafkaesque life has become in George Bush's America (insert rehearsed hisses), and there's no denying that this kid was treated badly by the interviewer. Even if it would have been reasonable to expect him to know what every subsidiary of the company did - and given how many leads one has to pursue in search of that first job, it's not - was the guy supposed to have known from birth which brand of shampoo he would be expected to have purchased on the day of some interview far off in his future? Was he supposed to lie to the interviewer if he'd been buying another brand - in the process doing something which would offer a firm legal basis for later termination (lying during an interview)? The interviewer's stance is absurd to the point of just, sheer lunacy, and that's one was not really an isolated case either. A lot of good people get shut out for reasons this dumb or dumber, and some of them suffer real, serious and unjust damage to their personal lives because of it. I wouldn't dream of denying that, and neither would most conservatives.

But before we break out our copies of the Marx-Engels Reader and begin the good fight against elitism, judgemental standards, etc. let's notice one thing that usually gets glossed over during these post-horror story rantfests that some like to engage in. It's a rare day when the CEO conducts an interview. The people who do these crazy, horrible things to people looking for a start in life, or for a chance to get back on their feet aren't this nebulous entity called "big business", these are specific individuals in specific low rent corporate positions, who've been radically empowered. You remember "empowerment", right? That was something that corporations were supposed to do for their employees, so that the employees would have their self-esteem boosted, even if that meant letting the employees act like complete nitwits. Why, how very sweet of the companies to agree to this, how non-judgmental, how very, very ...

Liberal. "Who cares about the results, as long as we feel good about ourselves" is not, was not and never has been a conservative idea. Look at that interviewer and ask yourself "is he putting in a professional performance". Is he doing what is in his employer's best interests, what his boss would want him to do, or is he just letting his own ego run unchecked and enjoying a power trip? Then as you ponder the image of this guy throwing a roadblock in the way of that kid's life, and maybe think about how unforgivingly harsh those evil monolithic corporations are, remember this - somebody had to hire that nutcase of an interviewer. Did the standards he had to meet seem that harsh or judgmental? And as one of my brothers who works in labor law would tell you, firing the nitwit over so subjective and minor an issue as his glaring incompetence is not always so easy for the nitwit's boss, especially if said employee is an inheritence from the boss' predecessor and has been with the firm for years. Nonjudgmental hugginess sometimes carries the weight of law, and those who try to get rid of employees belonging to protected classes, even employees who richly deserve it, can find themselves on the losing end of costly litigation.

After all, our compassion must be unconditional, must it not? At least, as it applies for those it is fashionable to care about.

And if that loony employee should be standing in the way of somebody who really does deserve a break? Then badly misplaced compassion is going to burn somebody who deserves better - a lot of those somebodies, to be exact, because looniness is not a fleeting condition, which gets us to a possibility that I would invite some to consider, as they talk about the cold, uncaring harshness of a red state dominated America that has cut off opportunity for so many, and left many of those who remain having to jump through an unreasonable number of hoops. Maybe the unreasonable harshness of the job market that Mr.Chiu is encountering is a direct consequence of the inadequate harshness of the job market of a few decades back, junior employees of that era who should never been hired for positions of responsibility going on, as they were allowed to pursue opportunities they should never have been able to enjoy, to become the nightmare managers tormenting the next few generations of employees trying to make their way.

It's nice to want to be nice, but maybe, in the long run, there's such a thing as a maximum sustainable level of kindness and that societies that try to push beyond it for those living in one era, can only do so at the expense of those in the eras that follow - and maybe a truly decent person tries to think about all who his choices will impact on, not just the ones who are sitting right in front of him right now, and are making him uncomfortable with those forlorn looks as they see him reach for a pink slip or can't understand why he won't just give them the A they need to get into B-school. Seeing somebody's life get stomped down on hard isn't fun, but you know what? Somebody has to do it, sooner or later, and if one acts in such a way as to insure that the person who does get stepped on probably won't be the one who will have deserved it, is that easy escape from an uncomfortable situation a kind choice on one's part, or a selfish one?

Responsibility is not supposed to be fun, but somewhere along the way a lot of people who should have known better got the idea that they were supposed to feel happy and comfortable 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, and every time somebody saw that expectation getting indulged, it got reinforced a little more, producing a cumulative, lasting impact on the culture. When hard choices needed to be made by those who might have made them more reasonably some years back, they didn't get made, and somebody else ended up paying for it. A good many somebodies, in fact, in so many places at so many times throughout the current era. A vote for liberalism is a vote to start that whole destructive cycle all over again; the easy comfort we steal for ourselves today has to be paid for tomorrow.

why feminists are a joke

2006-01-24T12:04:00.000-05:00

http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/mikeadams/2006/01/23/183352.html

A sampling on why Mike Adams can't take femiNazis seriously:

Most feminists don’t really want equality.

One good example of this phenomenon comes from a recent argument I had with one of the stars of The Vagina Monologues. She wrote me to complain about a column I published criticizing that infamous feminist play. She told me she was “offended” and “hurt” by my critique. I then asked her whether the flashing “vagina” sign in front of the school was offensive to the Greek Orthodox or Baptist churches located nearby. She responded by saying that she “didn’t give a sh*t” what they thought. It mattered very much that she was offended. It didn’t matter at all that she had offended others. (Take a moment to look up the word “sociopath” in the dictionary).

Doctor assisted suicide

2006-01-21T18:06:00.000-05:00

Oregon's supreme court recently ruled that doctor assisted suicide is legal. I personally don't care. However I recently heard a local radio talk show bringing up a valid arguement. Short of paralyzation and such, why can't you do it yourself? Why bring a doctor into it? He also asked what the best way to go would be, harming as few people as possible and overall not be a burden in your death. My first thought was to dress as a blonde, take Ted Kennedy drinking, and have him drive me home.

"Did I say Chocolate? I meant more of a parfait."

2006-01-17T21:39:00.000-05:00

Up date to Nagin wants a chocolate New Orleans; Nagins has since apologized for his remarks. Whether the fact that he seemed to do far better among white voters than black ones played any role in his decision to offer that apology is a matter for speculation.

I would have to agree with Shaun; what we are seeing is a double standard at work. Picture Mayor Daley saying something like "G-d wants to see a white Chicago", and imagine what the response would be. How is this any different?

Nagin wants a chocolate New Orleans

2006-01-16T18:43:00.000-05:00

If any white or republican made such statements their position would be gone before they finished what they were saying. But of course most people will ignore it because Nagin is a hero for attacking Bush. Here is the story.

I want one!

2006-01-11T10:40:00.000-05:00

Chrysler unveils two new concept cars with vintage names, the Challenger and the Imperial, at the 2006 Detroit Auto Show.

Sorry, that Challenger looks more like a Barracuda, but I still think it's damn sexy.

The Imperial - not so much, but I do like the suicide doors.

More on my next car:

The Challenger concept is powered by Chrysler’s 425-horsepower 6.1-liter HEMI V8 whose deep tones were heard at the press conference. Chrysler officials said the car should go from 0-to-60 miles an hour in 4.5 seconds, which is on par with many sports cars, and top speed is 174 mph

.
OOOh.

If given a final OK for production, the Challenger could be in showrooms by the 2009 model year.

Dammit.

But don't you want to spend money on this?

2006-01-07T00:43:00.001-05:00

Let me tell you a story. OK, a few stories, really.

I live in Chicago, which in most years is a bleak and gray winter wonderland from November well into what should be Spring. This tends to leave the locals very much in favor of whatever will help them escape those winters. One of those escapes is a pair of domed gardens - they're a little big to be called greenhouses - called the Lincoln Park and Garfield Park conservatories, where one can go in to the 80 degree heat, look at the greenery growing around one, and if it weren't for the 45 mph wind whistling past, one could almost forget that it was winter. This is open to the public, free of charge, courtesy of the tax supported park district. Isn't that wonderful? Surely only a big old meanie could be opposed to tax dollars being spent that way, right, bringing a little cheer into a person's day?

Most of the time, those of us who question that kind of thing hold our tongues, because not being thought of as being the reincarnation of Ebenezer Scrooge does make it much easier to get through one's day. But let's think about that one for a second. It's a nice thing to have, but why do so many people get so upset when somebody suggests that the government ought not be in the business of providing this small urban pleasure? Dig through a lot of indignant rhetoric, and what you'll come to is a very casual equating of the notion of the government doing something with the thing being done at all; ie. suggesting that maybe the city government maybe shouldn't be spending tax dollars on such things is assumed equivalent to saying that it shouldn't be done at all.

Where does such an assumption come from? Gardens were with us for millenia before the government saw the need to subsidize such things; private citizens and groups created such things on their own, and sometimes people would share what they had created with their neighbors. Back before "bleed 'em dry so the government can spend like there's no tomorrow", there even used to be this thing called "philanthropy" where rich people and the foundations they would establish would share some of that wealth with the rest of us. Enough to build a really big greenhouse, you ask? Friend, enough to build entire universities and museums, things that dwarf that friendly little oasis, and yes, sometimes things of beauty. No, a little showpiece like this would be no problem. Yet it is not done so very often, any more. Why?

Because there is no such thing as a free lunch; the wealth and manpower that the government takes control of and puts to its own uses is no longer available for private efforts. Taxation doesn't create wealth, it commandeers wealth, leaving all of us, the rich included, with less control over our own assets which are in no way enriched by the transaction, and what's worse is that as that commandeered wealth is used to do for the people that which they could do for themselves, the people get out of the habit of thinking that they can do such things for themselves or even that they should. Compared to many things that we might want to see done, creating even an elaborate garden is a small thing, indeed. What does it say about the state of private initiative in a community if even creating something like that garden gets to be beyond what the people think themselves capable of?

Where is the harm? Yes, I'm going to get to a bigger topic than sheltered winter blossoms in a moment, but right now I'm busy leading you down the garden path. A typical example of the problem that arises at this level can be found when one takes a look at the annual chrysanthemum show. Easily their best show, the high point of that institutions display season, or at least it was until a few years ago. What went wrong? One of the park district administrators got the bright idea that if the mum show was started a little earlier, that he'd be able to squeeze an extra show in. The problem? Mums won't blossom in warm weather, and with the man's schedule change, they were now being planted one week after the official end of Summer, and being uprooted at the end of November to make way for the next show. Anybody who grew up in the Midwest should know better - in most years, Summer is followed by Indian Summer, and most of October can be very warm, indeed. For the next few years, some relatively expensive buds were yanked up by the roots; most of the mums didn't have time to open.

If that admin were to go up to some private individual, having done something that incredibly boneheaded, and ask for a donation, he would most likely be out of luck, not just because he needlessly disappointed his visitors, but because his policy lead to him foolishly squandering the money already given to him, doing something that countless others had told him not to do - pride, pride über alles, even over common sense. When it's your own personal cash, the fact that somebody is asking you to let him flush it down a toilet is something that you may take very personally. But with taxation and tax subsidized public services, the person controlling the purse strings is not spending his own money, and given the difficulty in getting a government employee fired or his budget cut for even the grossest exercise in incompetence, in practice the person disbursing the funds doesn't have to answer to anybody, and he feels little personal loss if the money is spent foolishly, because this is not money that would have contributed to his own personal lifestyle. The results were predictable - as badly as the policy change worked out, the admin wouldn't budge and now the same silly thing gets done every year.

We can laugh about this one item because it's only a flower show and the money squandered is, by itself, not enough to sink the city. It certainly contributes, though, to an overbloated city budget - it and a thousand other things as silly - and it should give us something to think about. Even the most developmentally challenged farmer would know better than to plant a late autumn crop just after the close of summer; if our illustrious city government can't handle a decision that simple, just imagine how it will handle something more complicated and important - the education of our children. Non sequitir? Not really. As I've said before, if a student flunks Arithmetic, do you try him out on Calculus?

Dan S. recently wrote about the priorities of the NEA. The subject struck a chord with me; like a lot of people out looking for more regular work, I've done the substitute teaching thing, for the glorious $50/day (before taxes) alloted us courtesy of the generous folks in the Chicago Public School System, and our beloved union. This has allowed me the opportunity ~~to learn how to find cover really quickly~~ to see yet another branch of our local government spend the funds that citizens are forced to give to it at gunpoint, more or less. How were they doing? Let me give you an example of one of those magical work days.

I wouldn't even get to work until late morning, even though I got up at 5 am. Sub center would often take its own sweet time about calling back, and as I would come in at 11 am, I would find myself confronted by a principal who'd want to know where I had been. "I didn't get my assignment until 10:30; considering the fact that I'm on the CTA and had to transfer twice, I think that's pretty good time". Miraculous, actually; my lungs feel like they're going to start bleeding from the running I did to make those miraculous transfers. The principal is stunned for the half-second it takes her to remember how often this has happened in the past. "We called the absence in yesterday", she says. Half the day is now gone, and students have taken advantage of the lack of supervision to start sneaking off of campus. Oh, and even though my academic background is primarily in Mathematics (supposedly a subject the CPS is straining to find teachers in), and I speak not a word of Spanish, I've been assigned two Spanish classes, one gym class, and the rest of the day will be humanities in a variety of forms.

Something that you learn relatively early on is that giving a lecture in one of those classrooms is a lost cause. The students view that as an attempt to establish dominance over them, but you have to teach them somehow, don't you? Not that you do, most of the time, the job usually seeming more like crowd control than like teaching, not really much of a surprise as all that the kids are usually given to occupy an hour of their energetic young lives is a word puzzle that should take them about five minutes to finish - babysitting masquerading as teaching, with the vacuous curriculum dictated from on high, very often - but today I'm feeling ambitious, and it looks like I might even get away with it! The way around the impasse that I've found most effective is to print up lecture notes and exercises, expanding on the assigned material, pass the notes around the class as a massive assignment, and then attend each of the students individually as questions arise. They're too overwhelmed to feel the urge to act up, and the fact that they're calling me over lets them pretend that they're running the show. They keep their pride and don't get their backsides kicked in on the way home. Probably. And I get to teach.

At least, so goes the theory, but today I'm being told that while the principal doesn't mind my expanding on the assigned material, running copies off on the ditto machine is an extravagance that Pershing Road (the headquarters for CPS) can't afford. Amazing. If you've ever been to that building, you know that the word to describe it is cavernous. Six stories or so high, covering a very large city block, entirely populated by administrative personnel. Chicago's a big town, but we're not Tokyo; this is excessive. What's even more excessive is what I get to hear after I come back home, exhausted from yet another unfunded day of fruitlessly trying to keep the students from damaging the facilities too much. I flip on the news, and discover that the many, many employees down on Pershing Road were treated to a steak and lobster dinner at one of those administrative meetings, tonight, full portions of both, apparently. I thank the gods for a cultural background that has provided me with a wealth of recipes for beans, and chow down on my lentils. Not exactly lobster, but at least my lights aren't being turned off. All the same, it would have been nice if maybe a little of that luxury could have been foregone from time to time so that we could, oh, say hire a few extra security guards, something that probably would have come in handy when Benny (a 7'6" student) was busy slamming my puny 6'5" frame into the wall. I turn off the TV, and turn on talk radio (oh, what a mistake), where I get to hear a few people griping about the terrible teachers who let the schools become zoos. "And you know that we're not allowed to give out detentions, right? And that the school can't expel students for disciplinary violations?", I ask after getting on the air. "What are we supposed to do without the system backing us up? Tell a few of the Disciples that we won't like them any more if they won't stop slamming us into the wall?"

As my eldest brother has observed, "these are the wonder years". But I digress.

Oddly enough, very few people, having had the memorable experience of having subbed, ever want to go back to one of those schools. No teaching is encouraged, unless you believe that working a crossword puzzle or a jumble is educational, the environment is chaotic to the point of thwarting any attempt to get anything done, one sees no support from parents or administration, and one gets the final crowning indignity of being scapegoated for the inevitable results of stupidly bad decisions that one doesn't even get to give input on. And the admins can't be fired. At least, not without a near-epic struggle, waged by people with a lot more clout than most of us, and most of them have their kids in private schools, so they have little personal reason to get involved.

What would work better? Here's a possibility to kick around. Let the parent choose the school, and whatever funds would have been allocated for that child's education goes to that school, wherever those fund may have come from (parental contributions, or maybe some sort of financial aid for those children whose parents need help). Just as with those gardens I spoke of earlier, but with so much more at stake, I think that we need to recognize that in the absence of accountability, a kind of entropy takes down performance; those attempting to uphold standards get in trouble for rocking the boat, far more than those who slightly lead the herd as it drifts toward slack. But if schools have to compete for students? Think of yourself as the parent, with these limited funds to be allocated for something you have a personal stake in - and then think of being told at one of those competing schools that all your kids are going to get there is an opportunity to work a few puzzles while ducking garbage being tossed out of the lunchroom. How impressed would you be, and how long would it take you to take your business elsewhere?

Liberals by the score can be heard speaking out about the evils of nonresponsive monopolies, when the monopolies are privately held. Why do they imagine that the same principle will hold any less if the monopoly in question has guaranteed government support?

Who knows? In time we might even get back to the idea of private charity helping out the poor, lessening the need for public aid offices to do so, which given the poor return on the dollar offered by such agencies, might be taken to be prudent management of resources, at the very least. But say this in public and what do you hear? "How can you be against children getting an education?" Which is why I took that detour through the Park District - maybe, before some knew where I was going with this, I got them to think about a few principles they take for granted, because it's harder to get overwrought about chrysanthemums than it is about children. But how sad it is if caring comes to mean not thinking clearly about what needs to be done and why.

(This post has been subjected to open trackbacks at: Stop the ACLU; Mudville Gazette; Right Wing News; Basil's Blog; Stuck On Stupid; Outside the Beltway; Third World Country ; TMH's Bacon Bits; Point Five; Right Wing Nation; The Conservative Cat -Dan S.)

The Wages of Price Controls

2006-01-06T12:57:00.000-05:00

I ran into Publius Pundit's article while parusing Babalu Blog and found this interesting post. Apparently Uncle Hugo's economic policies are causing shortages of coffee, meat, and electricity:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez froze telephone and electricity rates and restricted foreign currency trading after a 2002-03 strike cut oil production and cost the nation's economy $11 billion. Frozen rates have hurt the profitability of the country's power companies.

Kids, this is what happens when you try to substitute the market with a political ideology.

Let's not try this at home, shall we?

Political Blame-Game: The WV Miners

2006-01-05T10:05:00.000-05:00

Already the New York Times has published a piece blaming Bush and "profits" for the deaths of the 12 miners in West Virginia-nevermind that the cause of the explosion has not been found yet.

Of course, who can be bothered with waiting for the facts when you can use this opprotunity to take a swipe at your political and ideological enemies?

Luckily, the internet has given the rise to smart guys who look at the facts first. BizzyBlog is the one to step-up to the plate on this issue.

Contrary to what The Times would have you believe, the trend has been favorable (”reassuring,” if you will) for many years, especially the past four, where there has been a near-50% drop in fatalities. In fact, these results support the contention that staffing Interior with people who actually know their industry has led to greater safety. And where was The Times when coal mine fatalities increased over 40% during the last three years of the previous administration’s arguable responsiblity (1999, 2000, and 2001, given that a new administration’s first budget and full implementation of its priorities typically does not occur until October of its first year in office)?

It's no wonder the intelligensia try to convince everyone that bloggers are not smart enough to comment on the news.
(h/t: Malkin)

Annoying Liberals

2006-01-05T09:29:00.000-05:00

Right Wing News has posted The 20 Most Annoying Liberals In The United States for 2005. Check out the whole list here.

Hell, I thought all liberals were annoying.

Breaking News: Jesse Jackson, Kanye West, and Louis Farrakhan blew up coal mine

2006-01-04T19:34:00.000-05:00

It seems that these influential Americans are responsible for blowing up the coal mine in West Virginia. Farrakhan claims it was in retaliation for Bush blowing up levee's in New Orleans. Kanye West was quoted as saying "We had to do it because Bush hates blacks, so we figured we would go into W. Virginia and launch pre-emptive strikes on the rednecks of America. We believe white people digging up coal is just another attack on the color black". Jesse Jackson said "it is time we turn on each other, not to each other".

I realize this is a tragedy, and my intent in this parody is not to offend, but instead show the ridiculousness that people such as the three listed made in another tragedy, and show the bad taste they showed during the hurricane.

Also it was a pre-emptive strike on those who blame Bush for this accident.

An open response to Pawnmans post

2006-01-04T19:00:00.000-05:00

I was going to just respond to his post, however I felt that not enough people would see it. Here is why pagans, specifically Wiccans, will not see the light of the right.

The reason that paganism and conservatism will not mesh, atleast in the near future, is Wicca. I'm not going to bash the religion as I try not to do that with ANY religion. Why I claim it is Wicca is for several reasons:

Wiccan's, in general, are environmentalists. They believe that the best way to preserve the environment is through government regulation. Often they will ignore, or make excuses to the fact that it is capitalism that has made the environment the best it has been since they started recording such things, in the 20's.

They are against religion. Why? Because they have a victim mentality. They believe that because there was a time when people (who weren't pagan more often than not) were burnt at the stake. It's the same attitude liberals take towards slavery. Sorry, you, or anyone you know has never been discriminated against because of religion. Many see Christians as an enemy. Many want religion completely taken out of society and left in the house, which goes against everything the founding fathers were going for.

They are against capitalism for several reasons. They don't like seeing successful companies because of the damage it may do to a few for the benefit of many. They don't accept the fact that people are never going to be equal, that the strong will become stronger while the weak and lazy will suffer. Yet they still own cell phones, cars, houses, and many other products made by large corporations.

Many interpret the Rede to an extent they will go so far not to harm individuals that they harm others indirectly, themselves, or society in general. Wiccanism was created by hippies, the worst form of communists. Very few Wiccans (statisticly in comparison to other groups in society) are not successful, therefore they use government handouts and rarely have to pay a large percentage of taxes which fund such handouts. The ideals are right, however they ignore human nature believing that everyone will be as generous as them, until they become successful and lose that generousity.

They only want amendments in the Constitution, and laws in general that benefit them or their ideals. They fight for the first amendment, when they want to attack a president or congressman. However they run websites where if you make statements they view as offensive or against their beliefs they will ban you(while its obvious to those who have been to the site I reference what I am speaking of let me state that the problem isn't with the webmaster. The webmaster and his wife are both wonderful people and I have much respect. The problem is that instead of being the be all end all he has deligated the decisions to a group of people who are much less understanding than himself). They won't fight for the second amendment because their ideals go against reality therefore they are against guns. I've already discussed their oppostion to religion. They won't fight for the 10th amendment because they fear that their rights to kill babies will become illegal. In the 5th amendment they ignore "except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger". They ignore the 12th amendment because the president they wanted didn't win. They ignore article 1 of the 14th amendment which only gives these rights to American citizens. Because of the blatant disregard for the founding document of the United States of America will keep pagans away from the right.

They are often people who were outcasts in school, never learning that despite how passive they were the bully wouldn't stop, until of course he faced someone who stood up and stopped him. All of this is based on personal experience and does not fit all pagans or Wiccans.

NEA Priorities

2006-01-04T11:07:00.000-05:00

Teachers' Pets

If we told you that an organization gave away more than $65 million last year to Jesse Jackson's Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, Amnesty International, AIDS Walk Washington and dozens of other such advocacy groups, you'd probably assume we were describing a liberal philanthropy. In fact, those expenditures have all turned up on the financial disclosure report of the National Education Association, the country's largest teachers union.

But leftists activist aren't the only ones getting rich from teacher's paychecks:

We already knew that the NEA's top brass lives large. Reg Weaver, the union's president, makes $439,000 a year. The NEA has a $58 million payroll for just over 600 employees, more than half of whom draw six-figure salaries. Last year the average teacher made only $48,000, so it seems you're better off working as a union rep than in the classroom.

The article lists several donations:

Many of the organization's disbursements--$30,000 to the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association, $122,000 to the Center for Teaching Quality--at least target groups that ostensibly have a direct educational mission. But many others are a stretch, to say the least. The NEA gave $15,000 to the Human Rights Campaign, which lobbies for "lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equal rights." The National Women's Law Center, whose Web site currently features a "pocket guide" to opposing Supreme Court nominee Sam Alito, received $5,000. And something called the Fund to Protect Social Security got $400,000, presumably to defeat personal investment accounts.

Not only that, but they've been spreading the money around to groups that are good for the Union, but not got the teachers:

There's been a lot in the news recently about published opinion that parallels donor politics. Well, last year the NEA gave $45,000 to the Economic Policy Institute, which regularly issues reports that claim education is underfunded and teachers are underpaid. The partisans at People for the American Way got a $51,000 NEA contribution; PFAW happens to be vehemently anti-voucher.

I think this is sick, many teachers are working for peanuts, and those woth a talent for it are working in better paying jobs, yet the Union only interested in itself.

Their priorites are obviously:
1. Money
2. Political Power
Somewhere after that is education.

Sick.

Sorry, It's The Poor That Are Getting Richer

2006-01-04T10:22:00.000-05:00

For awhile now, I've been sick and tired the "rich are getting richer" meme-especially when it's made by leftists who are rich themselves. Now Dr. Walter Williams of George Mason University has a new article to bust the myth.

The Poverty Hype

Now excuse me, I'm going to post this where libs will it.

Science News

2006-01-04T09:07:00.000-05:00

Contrary to what the above moonbats may think, it takes more than a Cadillac Escalade to do massive environmental damage:

Geologists Link the "Great Dying" to Volcanism

Roughly 252 million years ago, life on the earth nearly ceased to exist--as much as 90 percent of marine life and 70 percent of terrestrial life died out. At around the same time, a vast up swelling of magma covered between one million and four million cubic kilometers of what is now Siberia. The eruption continued off and on for about a million years, with basalt lava and poisonous gases seeping up through cracks in Siberia's mantle. Now rocks from Italy may have linked the two events.

Airborne All The Way

2006-01-03T10:01:00.000-05:00

This is a poem from a 'Nam vet and paratrooper turned poet:

(I'd like to dedicate this to our newest troll, Al)

Force Multipliers
Wikipedia: force multiplier-a military term referring to a factor that dramatically increases (hence multiplies) the combat-effectiveness of a given military force.

In Iraq an IED explodes,
An American soldier dies,
But that blast will grow as the media blow
It up before our eyes.
And trumpet to the watching world,
These fifth column falsifiers,
Like sheep they bleat we face defeat,
Our foe’s force multipliers.

Osama and his minions know,
In combat they can’t beat us;
So they hope and pray will come a day,
Our own media will defeat us.
Ignoring all the good we’ve done,
Liberals focus on the gore,
On losses mounting and body counting,
To prove we’ve lost this war.

They disgraced us once in Vietnam,
So now these leftists feel,
That again they’ll win with media spin,
And make America kneel.
But defeatists aren’t the only ones,
Learned lessons from the past;
Back then we swore we’d lose no more,
This time we’re standing fast.

The Internet’s exposed them,
As elitist media liars;
They stand unclothed and widely loathed,
Our foe’s force multipliers.
Some day when all our troops return,
With Iraq on freedom’s path,
The liberal elite who sought defeat,
May face some Righteous wrath.

Russ Vaughn
2d Bn, 327th Parachute Infantry Regiment
101st Airborne Division
Vietnam 65-66

(Hat tips to Small Town Vet and M.Malkin)

How does religion affect politics

2006-01-03T09:18:00.000-05:00

In response to an earlier comment, here are my thoughts about how paganism and conservatism can not only be reconciled, but actually mesh well together.

Paganism, at least in many forms, has a concept of karma. Do good, and good comes to you. Do bad, and bad things will happen to you. This meshes perfectly with the conservative view that hard work brings reward, and you should work for your own happiness rather than trying to appropriate someone else's.

Similarly, if someone attacks you, they have some bad karma coming. Who's to say you can't deliver it yourself? Many modern pagans seem to feel that no conflict is ever worth the cost. I say that history is full of examples of pagans going to war. If you shorten the whole rede to "harm none", then it's easy to see how you can be a strong proponent of peace. But if you take the original rede that Crowley put to paper, you see the nuances:

"Do the least amount of harm possible, to the least number of people possible".

So, what's the worse harm? Letting your own countrymen get steamrolled by a foreign power because you don't want to harm anyone? Or standing up and protecting those who cannot help themselves. I'm inclined to think that the latter leads to fewer people harmed all the way around.

Things We Now Know

2006-01-02T05:46:00.000-05:00

100 things we didn't know this time last year

Notable things we didn't know last year:

7. Baboons can tell the difference between English and French. Zoo keepers at Port Lympne wild animal park in Kent are having to learn French to communicate with the baboons which had been transferred from Paris zoo.

Researchers also noted that this disparity maybe due to the monkeys knowing the difference between the scent of bad food and surrender.

8. Devout Orthodox Jews are three times as likely to jaywalk as other people, according to an Israeli survey reported in the New Scientist. The researchers say it's possibly because religious people have less fear of death.

Strangely enough, they are also far less likely to not blow themselves up in crowded markets. Experts think this might have something to do with not being "the religion of peace."

14. It's possible for a human to blow up balloons via the ear. A 55-year-old factory worker from China reportedly discovered 20 years ago that air leaked from his ears, and he can now inflate balloons and blow out candles.

Great. Somewhere, some redneck is telling his friends "hey, y'all watch this" right before he's rushed to the ER.

27. Only in France and California are under 18s banned from using sunbeds.

Curious. In America, we also wish France and California would fall off into the sea. Coincidence? I think not.

59. Oliver Twist is very popular in China, where its title is translated as Foggy City Orphan.

They're also working on Oliver Twist in Iranian, except it's called, "Kill the Orphan Infidel" Al-Jazeera has already given it two stumps-up.

74. It takes a gallon of oil to make three fake fur coats.

In that case, I'll remember to use furry animals to sop-up the mess the next time a drunk tanker captain decides to run his ship aground. I'll be rich!

90. Ordinary - not avian - flu kills about 12,000 people in the UK every winter.

What?! It's a quagmire! Where's Murtha?! Pull out now!

99. The Japanese word "chokuegambo" describes the wish that there were more designer-brand shops on a given street.

The Swedish word, "Ïmawhínylíberäl" decribes the incessant complaining about the lack of socialized heathcare because you cant get someone else to volutarily pay your doctor bill, or, that you can't fill-up your Hummer H3 on $20 because everyone else drives SUVs.

Haji Mohammed's Cabin

2006-01-02T05:25:00.000-05:00

Katrina inspires Iranian director to stage “Uncle Tom's Cabin”

“I believe that Blacks living in the U.S. are still suffering from discrimination. Based on my direct observation and studies, the view considering American Blacks as second-class citizens is still common in that country. One and a half centuries after ‘Uncle Tom's Cabin’ was written, Hurricane Katrina showed that discrimination is still alive. This fact made me more determined to stage the play,” he added.

Nevermind that this play is from a (thankfully) bygone era that is more of a piece of history rather than a relevant social commentary concerning modern American society. But hell, you can't discount the sheer propaganda value, and it's America-hate that's in vogue, don'cha know?

I'm sure we'll read a positive review in the N.Y. Times.

By the way, did I mention that Mohammed was in the top 20 names for children born in England and Wales? Just think, in ten years British toy stores might have a big market selling bomb belts!

Where I Stand

2006-01-02T02:16:00.000-05:00

I'm always apprehensive about tests like these. So often the results can be based on a pre-determined outcome or a full understanding of defining issues. But this one isn't too bad, it's about where I thought I would be:

You are a
Social Liberal
(66% permissive)

and an...
Economic Conservative
(90% permissive)

You are best described as a:

Libertarian

Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid
Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

It’s The Demography, Stupid

2006-01-02T01:48:00.000-05:00

Mark Steyn gives a bucket of cold, wet reality concerning the Islamic threat and the self-destruction of western society:

It’s the demography, stupid

It's a long article, but worth reading. Afterwards, I wondered what kind of world my kids would have to live in. These are serious times, and contrary to the delusions of some, it's not Bush or Halliburton we need to worry about. It's the self-destructive path of western civilization.

As a famous Arnold Toynbee quote puts it: “Civilizations die from suicide, not murder”—as can be seen throughout much of “the western world” right now.

Uncle Hugo Rides Again

2006-01-02T01:06:00.000-05:00

Got this one from DU:

Venezuela takes over 32 privately operated oilfields

Venezuelan oilfields returned to state control Sunday with the start of the new year, the government said.

At midnight Dec. 31, a deadline expired for all private companies with contracts to independently pump oil to agree to joint ventures that will give Venezuela's state oil company majority control.

The 32 operating agreements were signed between 1990 and 1997, when Venezuela's petroleum industry was open to private and foreign capital. The objective at the time - when the price of crude was below $10 US a barrel - was to increase production at low-priority oil fields that had been closed because of their location or lack of resources and which Petroleos de Venezuela S.A., or PDVSA, had no plans to reactivate.

How extensive is the takeover?

The state could take as much as a 90-per-cent stake in the new ventures. The amount the private companies have invested in the fields will determine the amount of control they have, Ramirez has said.

Anyone want to set up a betting pool as to how long it'll take to for socialism to drive yet another resource-rich country into the ground?

Of course, the Che-wannabes at DU have been thoroughly indocrinated to believe that political vision can trump economic reality, or history for that matter:

"Good. Oil is too important to be in the hands of corporations"

Not to mention the plainly delusional:

bush will quickly burn him at the stake, just as the US did Castro when he nationalized and shut out all the american owned businesses and properties. They really thought they would own Castro the same as they owned the former dictator. Chavez may well be bush's nemesis because he at least can give oil to the poor of the US and the president would rather they just freeze! The poor and the old have no place in bushamerica!

Capitalism Is Not An "Ism"

2006-01-01T20:47:00.000-05:00

I just finished reading Thomas Sowell's book, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation As a Basis for Social Policy . Excellent book with many thought-provoking points. Expect to hear more from it in the future. One section I got a kick out of was his rebuttal to the re-definition of the word "capitalism" made by those who wish to gloss-over what it is and assign their own "anointed" view:

Capitalism

Since capitalism was named by its enemies, it is perhaps not suprising that the name is completely misleading. Despite the name, capitalism is not an "ism." It is not a philosphy but an economy. Ultimately it is nothing more and nothing less than an economy not run by political authorities. there is no capitalist institutions; any number of institutional ways of carrying out economic activities may flourish under "capitalism"-that is, the absence of control from above. You may get good from a restaurant, or by buying it from the supermarket and cooking it yourself, or by growing the food on your own land and processing it all the way through to the dinner table. Each of these is as much "capitalism" as the others. at any given time, caravans, supermarkets, or computerized shopping methods may be used, but none of these is anything more than a modality of the moment. the do not define capitalism but are simply one ofthe innumerable ways of doing things when choices are unconstrained by authorities.

Many have argued that capitalism does not offer a satisfactory moral message. But that is like saying that calculus does not contain carbohydrates, amino acids, or other essential nutrients. Everything fails by irrelevant standards. Yet no one regards this as making calculus invalid or illigitimate. Once again, the selective application of arbitrary standards is invoked only when it promotes the vision of the anointed.

Good stuff to keep in mind the next time some dupe in a Che t-shirt tells you about how "oppressive" capitalism is.

It's 2006!

2006-01-01T00:04:00.000-05:00

New Years' Resolutions

2005-12-31T19:31:00.000-05:00

What are yours? I resolve to improve RWotG. Which begs a question to be asked:

What suggestions do you have to improve this site?

Let us know anything you think this site is lacking. Content-wise, layout-wise, or anything else you can think of.

FYI

2005-12-31T18:16:00.000-05:00

I am now posting by my real name

Memnoch/Shaun

20/20

2005-12-31T16:21:00.000-05:00

While I normally don't watch this show because it is nothing more than how your favorite product is killing you, this weeks preview got me to watch. It was about the 10 biggest lies/myths/ect. in America.

From http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=123606 (my comments in bold)

This one seemed obvious to me and most people...its the victim mentality types who believe this myth
MYTH #10 — We Have Less Free Time
Countless news stories tell us we're running ourselves ragged. And everyone thinks it's true. Lots of Americans say have no free time. We all seem to be rushing everywhere.
Sherri Kowalski is busy. She's a working mom, who's in a constant struggle to get everything done.
She has two kids, and a husband who helps. But there's a lot to do: laundry, cooking, cleaning, helping kids with their schoolwork. When we visited her home, she was so busy she didn't even sit down to eat her meals.
Everyone we interviewed said they were pressed for time.
It made me want to seek out some real data on this. I talked with sociologist John Robinson of the University of Maryland, who's been trying to measure how much time we have for several decades. Since 1965, Robinson has had people keep time diaries, so he could calculate how much free time people really have.
I assumed that we've lost free time since 1965, but Robinson said that's not the case.
Surprisingly, since 1965 we've gained an hour more free time every day.
"There is a discrepancy between what people say and what they report when they keep a time diary," he said.
Sure enough, when Kowalski and some of the other people we met at the mall kept Robinson's time diaries, what they wrote down didn't always match what they'd said.
Sherri had twice as much free time as she'd estimated. She finds time to exercise every day, and she often goes to a tanning salon. Kowalski also watches some TV; that's the No. 1 free time activity in America.
We have more free time now, say the experts, because we're working less, marrying later, having fewer children, and retiring earlier.
If we're so stressed for free time, it's hard to explain how 36 million people can find time to golf, and 65 million people can go camping, and hundreds of millions go to the beach, the movies, and sports events.
Economist Stephen Moore says, "One of the reasons that Americans feel so pressed for time is there's so much more to do in life today."

Interesting. As I don't make $50k I still could use more money for happiness. Seriously though I can see both sides of it. Then again I'm a happy person for the most part, even when I shouldn't be.
MYTH #9 — Money Can Buy Happiness
I guess politicians are no different than the rest of us. Politicians want federal money for nice things like museums and senior centers and highways in their states. We want more money too, because we think it'll buy us things that make us happy.
We get a lot of messages from television and movies telling us that more money will make us happy. Lottery winners have press conferences, reality shows have pretty women lining up to marry rich guys.
But in fact, one lottery winner told us she was very happy for several days, then the thrill wore off.
Milionaire hip-hop promoter Russell Simmons told me wealth didn't make him or his friends happy either. "If I know 15 billionaires, I know 13 unhappy people," he said.
Simmons' brother, Reverend Run was the lead rapper for Run DMC. He said he suddenly realized money wouldn't buy happiness when he was at the peak of his career.
"I get to L.A., and I've got the presidential suite," he said, "and it all came at once. … And it was too much. I realized, 'OK, I got it, God. I got it. I got it. This will not work. It is not gonna make me happy.' … The only thing that's gonna make me happy is the joy that's on the inside of me."
Research suggests that Reverend Run and Russell Simmons are right. A survey of 49 of the Forbes richest found that they weren't any happier than the rest of us.
Money magazine columnist Jean Chatsky polled 1,500 people for her book "You Don't Have to Be Rich" and found that more money makes people significantly happier only if their family income's below $30,000, but by $50,000, money makes no difference.
"Once you get to that $50,000 level, more money doesn't buy more happiness," she said.
Happiness researchers agree with Simmons and Chatsky: Purposeful work is what makes people happy. And finding religion. And family.

Sadly this one is true. Not of true conservatives...but then again there are few of them in Washington. We need to get the republican party out of the pockets of the AARP and a few other groups.
MYTH #8 — Republicans Shrink the Government
Republicans always trot out the slogan that they oppose big government and want to shrink the federal payroll. President Bush tells us that "big government is not the answer."
President Reagan told us, "Our government is too big and it spends too much."
But for more than 75 years, no Republican administration has cut the size of government. Since George W. Bush became president, government spending has risen nearly 25 percent.
And the spending increase isn't just tied to the war on terrorism. The Office of Management and Budget says spending at the Environmental Protection Agency is up 12 percent; it's up 14 percent at the Agriculture Department, 30 percent at the Department of the Interior; 64 percent at the Department of Labor, and 70 percent at the Department of Education.
And the pork keeps pouring out. Even the Peanut Festival in Dothan, Ala., got $200,000.
Alabama congressman Terry Everett, a Republican, got them the money. He wouldn't talk to us about it, but the locals said they like getting your money. "I think it's a waste of money, but if they're going to waste money, I guess it's better to waste it here than anywhere else," one man told me.
Economist Stephen Moore, a Republican, says, "We fought a war against big government and you know what? Big government won."
He noted, "You look at what's happened to the government in the 10 years since the Republicans took control of Congress, the government is twice as big."

The problem is it is getting crowded in the wrong places. That, and the people having the most children are the ones who shouldn't have children at all
MYTH #7 — The World Is Getting Too Crowded
We've heard protests about this for decades: News articles warn of "the population bomb," and "a tidal wave of humanity," and plead: No more babies.
The world population today is more than 6 billion. It seems like so many people. But who says it's "too many?"
There are lots of problems all over the world caused by too many people
But there's no space problem. Our planet is huge. In fact we could take the entire world population and move everyone to the state of Texas, and the population density there would still be less than that of New York City.
But, you might wonder, won't we run out of resources, like food?
Paul Ehrlich wrote the book "Population Bomb," and warned 65 million Americans would starve in a "Great Die Off" in the 1980s. The 1973 movie "Soylent Green" predicted food riots would erupt in the year 2022 but it doesn't look like that will happen.
According to media mogul and philanthropist Ted Turner, population growth is "a time bomb waiting to happen." If it continues, at the current rate, according to Turner, "Eventually you stand around in a desert with nothing to eat." But that too is a myth. We see the pictures of starving masses in populous places, but the starvation is caused by things like civil war and government corruption that interfere with the distribution of food.
With more people, we also have more smart ideas. Every year we learn how to grow more food on less land. Thanks to improved technology, the United Nations now says the world overproduces food.
About 15,000 babies are born every hour. But they are not a burden, they offer more brains that might cure cancer, more hands to build things, more voices to bring us beautiful music.

We have all tried explaining this to liberals, but you will never convince them. Also not long ago a report came out on how second hand smoke has no direct link to sickness/death. This is one I really want people to quit spouting
MYTH #6 — Chemicals Are Killing Us
In America today, there's this myth that quietly, secretly, everywhere, chemicals are gradually poisoning us. Of course some chemicals, in high enough doses, do kill people.
Americans' fear of chemicals has caused us to obsess about everything from hair dye and dry cleaning to coffee and artificial sweeteners even though there's no proof that the small amounts of the chemicals in those products have harmed anyone.
Cancer deaths are actually declining in America. But our fear is contagious and sometimes deadly.
Health Minister Jim Muhwezi of Uganda points out that as many as 2 million to 3 million people may die because of DDT. But not because DDT is bad, but because Americans' fear of it has deprived much of the world of the DDT that could have saved them.
How did this happen? Well, 50 years ago, Americans sprayed tons of DDT everywhere. Farmers used it to repel bugs, and health officials used it to fight mosquitoes that carry malaria. Nobody worried much about chemicals then.
Today DDT is rarely used. America's demonization of it caused others to shun it. The U.S. government does spend your tax dollars fighting malaria in Africa, but it will not spend a penny on DDT.
The result has been a huge resurgence of malaria. More than 50 people million have died, mostly children.
"If it's DDT, it must be awful. And that's fine if you're a rich, white environmentalist," says Amir Attaran, a scientist leading a campaign urging the use of DDT to fight malaria. "It's not so fine if you're a poor black kid who's about to lose his life to malaria."
The United States fights malaria with drugs that the government's own Web site admits fail up to 80 percent of the time. But we will not use DDT, even though USAID acknowledges it's safe to use.

Conservatives have always known this.
MYTH # 5 — Guns Are Always Bad for Us
America is notorious for its culture of gun violence. Guns sometimes do cause terrible harm, and many kids are killed every year in gun accidents. But public service announcements and news stories make it seem as if the accidents kill thousands of kids every year.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, however, fewer than 100 kids 15 and under are killed in gun accidents every year. Of course that's horrible, and I understand why demonstrators say we need more gun control.
But guess what? The Centers for Disease Control recently completed a review of studies of various types of gun control: background checks, waiting periods, bans on certain guns and ammunition. It could not document that these rules have reduced violent crime.
The government wants to say regulations and laws like the Brady Gun Control Law are making a difference, but they aren't. Some maximum security felons I spoke to in New Jersey scoffed at measures like the Brady law. They said they'll have no trouble getting guns if they want them.
A Justice Department study confirmed what the prisoners said. But get this: the felons say that the thing they fear the most is not the police, not time in prison, but, you, another American who might be armed.
It's a reason many states are passing gun un-control. They're allowing citizens to carry guns with them, it's called concealed carry or right to carry. Some women say they're comforted by these laws.
But many people, including Rev. Al Sharpton, are horrified at the idea of concealed carry laws, and predict mayhem if all states adopt these laws.
But surprise, 36 states already have concealed carry laws; and not one reported an upsurge in gun crime.

Another good one, but again its hard to get hippies to pay attention long enough to notice...and if you do they are probably so stoned they won't remember.
MYTH # 4 — We're Drowning in Garbage
We've been told we're running out of places to put our garbage. We do produce a lot of it — more than any other country in the world. But it's not the crisis described in so many media reports.
Analysts say this myth was jumpstarted by a 1987 story about a garbage barge on the Mississippi River.
The barge was filled with 3,000 tons of compacted trash and garbage from New York. It was supposed to have been shipped to a landfill in Louisiana, but on the way, the shipper tried to save money by dumping the trash in North Carolina.
Suspicious local officials said no thanks. Their response got so much publicity that by the time the barge reached its original destination, the Louisiana dump wouldn't accept it anymore.
The publicity over the barge ignited 10 years of activism.
Cynthia Pollack of the WorldWatch Institute said back in 1987 that we were approaching an emergency situation. But it wasn't true.
The EPA says while some cities have to ship garbage out, overall landfill capacity is actually increasing. All around America, people are building bigger landfills. Some landfill owners are competing for our trash.
Jeremy O'Brien, of the Solid Waste Association of North America, said some of his group's members are actually looking for waste.
Some communities put parks and golf courses on top of trash sites.
O'Brien said, "In the United States, there's plenty of land to properly dispose of our solid waste for hundreds and even thousands of years."
We hardly have a garbage crisis.

This one (actually most of these) need posted on a forum Dan belongs to. What is bad is I explained this to my environmentalist girlfriend and she claimed that the government saved the Forests. She would not accept that loggers have long realized if they didn't replace what they took they would be out of business, capitalism at its best.
MYTH # 3 — We Are Destroying Our Forests
Lots of Americans feel bad when they see images of trees being cut down, because they've been told that America's running out of forestland.
Carl Ross, of the group, Save America's Forests, says we've cut way too much.
"The loss of natural forests in America is a crisis," he said. "And we will lose species forever, and they'll go extinct, if we don't take action now."
Other environmental groups run ads warning of the dire consequences.
But The U.S. Agriculture Department says America has 749 million acres of forestland. In 1920, we had 735 million acres of forest.
We have more forest now. How can that be? One reason is technology that allows us to grow five times more food per acre — so we need less farmland. Lots of what once was farmland has reverted to forest.
But Ross says we don't really have more forests. "We have more areas, in America, with trees on them, that's true. But we have less that are natural," he said.
He's right that many of the oldest trees have been cut down, and about 7 percent of America's forests have been planted by man, but that still means that 93 percent are natural.
Ross is also concerned that loss of old-growth forest is leading to a loss of biodiversity. But while some species have decreased, the populations of many others animals have actually increased in the past 75 years.
Michael Shermer says many people believe America is destroying the forests because environment groups need to scare people to raise money.
"The fear is there," he said, "because, if your goal is to raise funds you have to scare people. You can't tell people things are getting better, and here's the data. You have to tell people things are worse."
The truth, however, is that today in the United States there are two acres of forestland for every single person, and America is growing more trees than it cuts.

I learned this in Korea, 20 degrees, outside in shorts and a t-shirt, eating ice cream.
MYTH # 2 — Getting Cold Can Give You a Cold
All through my childhood, I had to watch health movies which sold us the old wive's tale: being cold will give you a cold.
I spoke with some adults who still think that's true, and they make sure their kids are more than prepared for nasty weather. So what happens when kids play a game of football without any coats — some without any shirts — on a 40-degree day? Probably nothing.
Public health expert Dr. Mark Callahan explained being cold has nothing to do with getting a cold. "Running around outside in the cold won't give you a cold. You have to get exposed to a virus, pick it up and then you'll get a cold," Callahan said.
I learned about this myth years ago, when "20/20" sent me to a cold part of England. Scientists there found that dropping cold viruses into people's noses often made them sick. But getting them cold and wet made no difference.
The researchers had people walk outside in the winter rain and then sit in unheated rooms in various stages of undress, and those chilled people got no more olds than anyone else.
The cold is caused by a virus, not by temperature. And people get more colds in the winter, only because then we spend more time indoors passing the virus back and forth because we're closer to each other. Being cold has nothing to do with it.

Myth #1 is that we are destroying the world with polution. The world is less polluted now than it was in the 20's, despite SUV's, hairspray, and big business. They even went on about how people swim in the East River. It really is something that environmentalists will never accept

Open Post

2005-12-30T10:47:00.000-05:00

Today's a day-off and I'm feelin' lazy. So if your out there, have at it.

2005

2005-12-30T09:34:00.000-05:00

Now is the time where everyone looks back on the year and starts evaluating how it went:

LGF is culling together it's nominees for the Fiskies - otherwise known as the Idiotarian of the Year Award.

Atlas Shrugs has her list of the Top Ten Worst Americans, and the Dishonest Reporter Award, 2005.

Newsbusters has the "Top 10 Lowlights of the New York Times in 2005", and also details the CNN piece this moring about how they ranked Cindy Sheehan over The Pope's death as one of 2005's big stories. I ask, "Cindy who?"

The biggest story of 2005? RCP has a suggestion.

I'm sure I'll find more lists. It seems that everyone has one.

Come Visit The Socialist Paradise That Is Libya

2005-12-29T11:51:00.000-05:00

For some Gods-forsaken reason, Michael Totten went to Libya. He gives us this report decribing the wealth and beauty that Kaddafi built with the principles of the superior political ideology that is socialism:

In the Land of the Brother Leader

I saw no corporate advertising: no Pepsi signs, no movie posters and no cute girls flashing milk-mustache smiles for the dairy industry. I did, however, see one hysterical propaganda billboard after another. They were socialist cartoons from the Soviet era, the same kinds of living museum pieces still on display in North Korea and other wonderful places where starving proles live in glorious jackbooted paradise.

The Happy Worker theme was a common one; smiling construction workers wore hardhats, and Bedouins-turned-widget-makers basked in the glory of assembly-line work. One poster showed two hands chained together at the wrist below an image of Qaddafi’s sinister Green Book descending from heaven.

It's sad really, because from the sounds of it, that place could draw a good amount of tourism, from the Arch of Marcus Aurelius to the ancient -but now empty- city of Ghadames. I wonder what the beaches are like.

Yet another place full of riches squandered by a terrible political system.

Saddam's Lawyer: "Let My Dictator Go!"

2005-12-29T11:42:00.000-05:00

Free Saddam to end woes in Iraq, lawyer tells Bush

The United States should free Saddam Hussein if it wants to end its problems in Iraq and earn the friendship of Arabs, the former Iraqi president's lawyer wrote in a letter to U.S. President George W. Bush.
The chief lawyer for Saddam at his trial for crimes against humanity in Baghdad told Bush that Iraqis who supported their former leader were waiting for a bold decision from the world's most powerful statesman to free him.

"I call on you (President Bush) to release Mr. President (Saddam) immediately to allow the Iraqis to decide his fate. Only then will you get out of your predicament in Iraq and truly become an advocate of justice," Khalil Dulaimi wrote in a letter obtained by Reuters.

Such a decision would prove to be the panacea that would end Washington's woes over Iraq, Dulaimi asserted.

Awww why not? He's harmless. He's not going to cause trouble. He'll retire, find a nice two bedroom apartment and get a job as a greeter at Wal-Mart (if and when it's built).

Hey, I'm all for letting ol' Saddamy go, right down the main street of every town from the top of Iraq to the bottom. If he makes it, he can keep going.

No help though!

Don't Piss-off Dad

2005-12-28T11:13:00.000-05:00

Dad Replaces Bad Kids 360 with Coal

Someone placed an ad on Craig's List saying that he was selling an Xbox 360 for $100. The guy says he's sick of his ratbag son and needs to teach him a lesson. So he's going to sell the console, controllers and headset but keep the box, to fill with charcoal.

Why?

This from the alleged ad:

My kid has been an absolute terror for the last month. He has been demanding more and more from my wife while constantly pestering us to give him his X-box 360 early so he can play it. Last night was the last straw when he kicked my $2000 stereo system after I refused to give it to him early.

Damn, that's HARSH. The kid deserved it, but what makes him think that stfliesflys in the house? Seems someone has spared the rod for a while and set a precedent that the little punk can be a terror. Of course there's probably more to the story...if it's true.

For All You "True Believers"

2005-12-28T07:10:00.000-05:00

Dust My Broom has a lesson in political history:

Liberals, Conservatives, Beer, and the Wheel

The Hard Right vs. The Easy Wrong

2005-12-28T06:55:00.000-05:00

This guy chose the easy wrong:

SEATTLE (AP) -- A 12-inch hole in the fuselage of an Alaska Airlines jet caused the plane to lose cabin pressure, forcing the pilots to make an emergency descent and return to the airport, authorities said Tuesday.

The incident Monday involved an MD-80 jet en route from Seattle to Burbank, Calif. The plane landed safely at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, and none of the 140 passengers was hurt.

A ramp worker acknowledged that he failed to report immediately striking the plane at the gate Monday with a baggage cart or baggage-belt machine, said Jim Struhsaker, a spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board.

One wonders if he still is choosing the easy wrong when he stated that, "he was not aware he had dented it."

Sometimes You Just Have to Draw Them a Picture

2005-12-27T21:02:00.000-05:00

Reason and logic are governed by their own laws and employ their own methods. they launch themselves at will, and they head straight for their target. This is why we call actions that seem to us reasonable and logical "right," because they are right on target.
-Marcus Aurelius

Logic Times stays true to it's name by the way of this flow chart, which breaks down the claims made by the anti-victory "patriots". Great stuff (thanks RWN!).

Little did I know that what was said about the "insurgency" in Iraq was also said about the "insurgency" in post-Hitler Germany. Hell, I didn't even know post-Nazi Germany had an "insurgency". Thank you, California public education!

The Mainstream Press Launches Preemptive Strike on the Blogosphere

2005-12-27T10:28:00.000-05:00

Picked-up this story from a morning recon into the enemy territory known as The Democratic underground:

Bloggers, Money Now Weapons in Information War

Now when I saw the headline, I thought this article may be about an active conspiracy hatched, driven, and directed by the by the military in an effort to subvert the blogosphere for propaganda purposes. The article, however, talks about something much less sinister:
Retired soldier Bill Roggio was a computer technician living in New Jersey less than two months ago when a Marine officer half a world away made him an offer he couldn't refuse.

Frustrated by the coverage they were receiving from the news media, the Marines invited Roggio, 35, who writes a popular Web log about the military called "The Fourth Rail" ( http://www.billroggio.com ), to come cover the war from the front lines.
So a reporter is invited by the Marines to ride along and report what goes on. Not much different than when the DoD invited (and continues to invite) mainstream media journalists to embed and ride along with the troops starting with the initial invasion of Iraq. As we all know, they were all over that. As the adage goes, "if it bleeds, it leads".
He raised more than $30,000 from his online readers to pay for airfare, technical equipment and body armor. A few weeks later, he was posting dispatches from a remote outpost in western Anbar province, a hotbed of Iraq's insurgency.
Yup, Bill Roggio, like every other reporter in Iraq, still had to pay for his own equipment, which his readers graciously paid for. Which says something about the amount of demand that people have for this kind of journalism.

What kind of journalism is that? The Michael Yon style of journalism where someone who has spent time in the military (Army Special Forces in his case), goes and simply reports what's going on, for good or bad, from a ground-floor level.

What caused me to groan and roll my eyes was the inclusion of news regarding the allegation concerning the monetary support of local Iraqi media by the military. In the mind of the reporters in the mainstream media, this automatically MUST mean that our military is paying them to print only what our military wants them to print:

A local U.S. Army National Guard commander acknowledged that his officers "suggest" stories to the station and review the content of the program in a weekly meeting before it is aired. Though the commander, a lieutenant colonel whose name is being withheld because he is based in the same area, denied that payments were made to the station, the Iraqi television producer said his staff got $1,000 a month from the military. It does not disclose any financial relationship to viewers. There was no explanation of the discrepancy between that amount and the figure of $600 per week provided by Blanton.

"The coalition forces support us," said the producer, who added that while the U.S. military reviews each program, "they don't change anything."

Therefore, the Iraqi producer's admission virtually makes this a non-story. Even so, use of propaganda in war is nothing new. I find it particularly telling that the WaPo doesn't delve into exactly what news story's were favorable! You'd think they couldn't find someone who speaks Arabic and English.

Note that this mention is irrelevant to Bill Roggio. There is no evidence he is being paid by the military to print propaganda, or at least none the WaPo has produced in this story. After all, who the hell raises money to spend on a trip to one of the most dangerous places on earth without more than $30k (before expenses, mind you) worth of incentive?

Notice also the sad attempt by the WaPo to sling mud in response to their reporting being called into question by the military, not to mention their willingness to be accomplices in terrorist-staged propaganda.

Yet this still is irrelevant to the Bill Roggio trip to Iraq.

Why is the military allowing him to tag-along? Because they are fed-up with the status quo reporting they get from mainstream sources:
"His reporting was objective, credible and compelling. But most of all, it was independent," Pool said. "He didn't have to worry about some editor back in the States altering what he wrote before it got published. Plus, he had no competition from other news sources to churn out a 'marketable' product on a day-to-day basis."
On other words, they just want honest reporting. Most likely they've read or at least witnessed the reaction to the excellent account from Michael Yon, in which he followed a battalion from the 24th Infantry Division as it fought to drive the terrorists out of Mosul. A series that starkly contrasted the defeatist news regularly reported back home.

In my assessment, those in the mainstream media are worried. The rise of so-called "Pajamas Media" has provided anyone with an internet connection virtually unlimited alternative news and views without having to subscribe to a newspaper or wait for it to be broadcast on TV. Now with the success of Yon and the grass-roots support of Roggio, we are seeing the mainstream media lose control in the one area where they had a monopoly on: war.

So I see this article as more of an preemptive attempt at damage control by attempting to discredit Bill Roggio before he becomes another Mike Yon. Lord knows we don't want the public to know that you don't need a journalism degree or a position in a major media outlet to accurately report what's going on.

(you can check out Roggio's dispatches here)

UPDATE:

Bill Roggio answers this article, and lists numerous errors and attempts to set the record straight.

Anti-Christian Hysteria

2005-12-26T13:55:00.000-05:00

Something I picked up from the same message board I frequent, from Mother Jones:

A Nation Under God

I made it through a couple of paragraphs before the storytelling aspect of the story got on my nerves. I skimmed about halfway through looking for something firmly in the "non-biased-fact" genre before I gave up and moved on.

All this alarmism is ironic. For the last few decades in this country (though the phenomenon has existed for a few centuries), a small group of vocal ideologues have been telling people that much of what Americans have thought is wrong and that they have the answers to solving society's ills. Poverty? It's all because of racism. Crime? It can be cured with a therapeutic approach to the criminal.

Nevermind that when the "War on Poverty" began in the ' 60s- originally to reduce dependency on government programs - that the number of people who were below the official poverty line was half of what it was a decade before. Crime - which was also decreasing before people such as Attorney General Ramsey Clark enacted reforms - skyrocketed after the justice system tried to reform criminals rather than punishing them.

There's other issues, but you get the point. Those ideologues use "logical" arguments - that generally use the rules of argument than the rules of logic - to divert the debate away from the flaws in their ideas, and then blame the American public for being ignorant and stupid.

Well, guess what? Some in the public are fighting back, and it seems that the ideologues wish to paint their opponents as this article has painted some Christians. I find it ironic in a poetic sort of way.

One thing I did notice about this article: the book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) , wasn't written by Gary DeMar, it was written by Robert Spencer. How can one attribute a quote from a book to a man when the real author has his name right in the front of the book?

Anyways, read the article if you wish. But since I haven't heard of anyone burned at the stake since this country was founded. I'm not going to subscribe to the fear-mongering these ideologues are trying to sell me.

Merry Christmas!

2005-12-26T13:26:00.000-05:00

Oh, Am I a day late? Did I have a blog to run? I forgot. I've been playing Call of Duty 2 and spending my time killing fascists. Which brings up an interesting point: when will we see the Iraq War video games? Fascists are fascists, whether they are from Europe or the Middle East, and killing them on my computer is fun. I wonder what CAIR (Council on Islamic-American Relations, the group that polices speech considered "anti-Muslim") will have to say about it. Maybe they'll tell us that killing Islamic terrorists is racist, nevermind the killing of ethic Germans, which is okay. Too bad, they have alot in common.

So is it bad to beat a game the day you recieved it? Must've been all that time I spent at Ft. Benning and FT. Bragg learning how to flank and do the '3-5 second rush'. It's a good game though, yet I would be interested to see a title published from the viewpoint of a German soldier. Historically, it would be an interesting and educational perspective of WWII. Alas, I think in this age of literary embellishment, it would be too tempting to add-on to history to further a political point, and certainly if history contradicts a prevailing political ideology, you'll see an uproar about it. That shouldn't stop people from being honest, but it does.

BTW, it's a great game.

NSA Wiretapping

2005-12-23T08:59:00.000-05:00

Yesterday John Hinderaker (a lawyer) at Powerline did an excellent analysis of the legality of President Bush's use of Echelon:

On the Legality of the NSA Electronic Intercept Program

Pass this around to all your friends who think President Bush broke the law.

Too Little, Too Late?

2005-12-22T12:43:00.000-05:00

Talks resume in NY transit strike

Wikipedia has some good info on the strike, such as the union demands:

The TWU is asking for all employees to receive an 8% salary increase per year for each of the 3 years of the contract, plus improved benefits for maternity leave, and better funding for station maintenance. The MTA has offered a 3% raise the first year, a 4% raise the second year, and a 3.5% raise the third year. The striking workers reportedly earn an average of about 48,000 USD annually.

The TWU also wants to lower the age of retirement (at which point the employee is eligible for a full pension) from 55 to 50. The MTA had wanted to raise the retirement age for newer workers from 55 to 62, but dropped this demand in exchange for pension contributions from new workers of 6% of gross salary per year for the first 10 years of employment. Under the previous contract, workers contribute 2% to their pension plan. [3]

Citing the rising cost of health care, the MTA wants new employees to contribute 1% of their salary to pay for health insurance. Transit workers currently pay nothing for health insurance.

At the last minute, the MTA offered a 3.5% per year raise and no change in the retirement age, with the caveat that new transit workers pay 6% of their wages into the pension fund, up from the 2% that current workers pay. The offer was rejected, and a strike declared.

Combined, the pension and healthcare reforms the MTA seeks would cost about 30 million USD over the span of the three-year contract. Critics have lambasted both the MTA and TWU for allowing a strike to occur over such a relatively small sum. However, the pension costs would balloon to 160 million USD in the first 10 years, and 80 million USD per year after 20 years. The MTA claims that its reluctance to give in to the TWU on this point stems from fear of future deficits (projected to be 1 billion USD by 2009).

Now the same site also states that the average salary for a bus or subway operator is $63,000/year! The average salary for a cleaner is $40,000!

Now think about this from an economic standpoint. How many have invested in alternative means of transportation? Will they dump their investment just to go back to riding the train? Also consider the effect on businesses that will now have to lay off or close their doors due to lost revenue, perhaps causing people to get jobs closer to work, or relocate from he city altogether.

This union really pissed some poeple off. I wouldn't be suprised if we see a bigger movement to change the union laws. Which brings up another point:
According to the US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, from 1993-2003 the percentage change in non-farm private sector employees was 17.7% growth overall. The change in Right to Work States was 24.1% growth, while the change in "union shop" States was 14.2% growth.

According to the US Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis, from 1993-2003 the percentage change in real personal income was 29% growth overall. The change in Right to Work States was 37% growth, while the change in "union shop" States was 26% growth.

According to the US Bureau of Census, from 1982-2001 the percentage change in manufacturing establishments was 1.5% loss overall. The change in Right to Work States was 7% growth, while the change in "union shop" States was 4.9% loss.

Also according to the US Bureau of Census, from 1993-2003 the percentage growth of people covered by private health insurance was 8.5% growth. The change in Right to Work States was 13.6% growth, while the change in "union-shop" States was 5.9% growth.

According to both the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of Census, from 1991-2001 the percentage change in real value added per production worker was 11.1% growth overall. The change in Right to Work States was 17.1% growth, while the change in "union-shop" states was 8.4% growth.
True that the article above also states there may be other factors, but this seems to be a pretty clear trend here.

The talking heads already say that MTA will withdraw its last-minute demands, and the union will effectively win. Time will tell what kind of long-term impact on the economy of New York.

Darwinism in Action

2005-12-21T16:37:00.000-05:00

Stupid Rifle Tricks

The pathetic thing is that the guy probably went home and told all the ladies at the bar some B.S. "no shit, there I was..." war story.

The Left's Strategy for Our Their Victory

2005-12-21T11:00:00.000-05:00

Allow me to sum up the homeland security strategy of America's do-nothing brigade, led by the armchair generals at The New York Times and ACLU headquarters:

First, bar law enforcement at all levels from taking race, ethnicity, national origin and religion into account when assessing radical Islamic terror threats. (But continue to allow the use of those factors to ensure "diversity" in public-college admissions, contracting, and police- and fire-department hiring.)

Second, institute the "Eenie-meenie-miny-moe" random-search program at all subways, railways and bus stations.

Third, open the borders, sabotage all immigration enforcement efforts and scream "Racist" at any law-abiding American who protests.

Fourth, sue. Sue. Sue.

Fifth, yell "Connect the dots!" while rebuilding and strengthening the walls that prevent information-sharing between the CIA, State Department, Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security and other key government agencies.

Sixth, hang the white flag and declare victory.

Seventh, sit back and wait to blame the president for failing to take aggressive, preventative measures when the next terrorist attack hits.

Repeat.

Read the rest.

To All You Young, Aspiring Socialist Revolutionaries: Your Ideology Doesn't Work

2005-12-21T09:12:00.000-05:00

This morning I wrote a response to the socialist I remarked on in an earlier post. I invested some time in it and I thought it worthy enough to share with you all.

(Of course names have been changed to protect the innocent)

I think what we have here is a misunderstanding of what capitalism is and of what socialism involves. This is directly due to the lack of quality education on the subject of economics as taught in our government schools.

Modern socialists and their friends aren't the first bunch to think of a profitless society. Even Marx wasn't the first. The thing is that historically, our world was pretty stagnant as far as the standard of living for the average man for a long, long time. You had the nobility, and you had the subjects. everything the subjects produced was the property of the nobility.

When human beings discovered profit thru trade and business, then you saw the quality of living gradually raise, you saw the assertion of subjects to own what they produced. The American Revolution wasn't simply about a form of government that was chosen by the people, it was more about a system of government that would allow people to own property and let them determine how best to manage it. "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" is almost a direct quote from John Locke, who said that all men have right to, "life, liberty, and estate (or property)".

People will work hard and persue excellence only if there is an incentive to do so. Profit is that incentive. This has been proven by other groups who sought to "follow, extend, and refine [Marx's] ideas on socialism", as well as by our own government when it tried to curb profit in order to avert whatever "crisis" the politicians decided would come about without their wisdom.

Case in point:

In 1979 the government placed price controls on the sale of gasoline. Now mind you, most if us have seen or heard of the long lines and such. Yet do we know that 1978 was a record-breaking year for gasoline sales, and that in 1979 there was only a 3.5% drop in gasoline sales? The amount of gasoline consumption in 1979 was still higher than any previous year other than 1978.

So why the legendary long-lines? Because with government price controls, retailers had no means of adjusting price to meet increasing costs of meeting increased demand, such as hiring additional workers, providing increased upkeep for machinery (since it was recieving increased use) and moving gasoline from one station where it wasn't selling to another where it was selling out. So what was the retailer to do to keep his business from breaking down and from running dry (a dry station gets no business, therefore no means to pay the rent, electricity, or other regular costs)? Easy: either raise the price lower the cost. The government stopped the former, so retailers had to do the latter.

In New York City during September 1978, gas stations were open an average of 110 hours a week, but cut back to only 27 hours a week in June the following year. Why? The retailer no longer had an incentive to please the consumer under government price controls. The consumer became a source of increased cost rather than a source of increased profit.

The same mentality was seen in the profitless society of Soviet Russia, as I quote from the book I offered to one socialist on a message board:
"In the vast common fields, fleets of tractors fanned out to begin the plowing. Plan fulfillment was calculated on the basis of hectares worked, and so it was to the driver's advantage to cover as much territory as quickly as possible. the drivers started by cutting deep furrows around the edge of the field. as they moved deeper into the fields, however, they began to lift the blade of the plow and race the tractor, and the furrows became progressively shallowed. The first furrow was nine to ten inches deep. A little farther from the road, they were five to six inches deep, and in the center of the field, where the tractor drivers were certain that no one would check on them, the furrows were as little as two inches deep. Usually, no one discovered that the furrows were so shallow in the middle of the field until it became obvious that something was wrong from the stunted nature of the crop."
No one works just to work. No one works for the sole benefit of another without any sort of profit for themselves, monetarily, material, or otherwise. Like someone else has remarked, we are human beings, not a colony of bees. If those Soviet fields were owned by the tractor drivers and they recieved the profits, you'd be hard-pressed to find a shallow field.

Socialism as taught on general political or ideological terms sounds good, but when you get to the nitty-gritty of specifics it's not very well thought-out.

108 House Democrats Not Committed To Victory In Iraq

2005-12-20T15:29:00.000-05:00

On Friday the House voted on H Res 612, which simply asked are you committed to victory in Iraq. 108 Democrats and 1 Independant voted that they were for failure. Here is a link providing how your representative voted.

Bush Has Opprotunity To Be Reagan-like

2005-12-20T15:22:00.000-05:00

As everyone has heard that the MTA in NYC is on strike? Not only is this an illegal strike, it is uncalled for. Considering that the transit workers make 47k-55k salaries, take an average of 13 sick days per year, the retiree's make a total of 50 million+ dollars in benefits, and they were offered a 10% raise over 3 years; that wasn't good enough. So they choose to strike illegally. What does that have to do with Reagan? When the FATC (Air traffic controllers) went on strike illegally in the 80's President Reagan fired them all. Bush needs to use that as a guide in how this is dealt with.

Unhinged Yet Again

2005-12-20T12:18:00.000-05:00

This little gem from the Democratic Undergound:

It's all about the PNAC, man. Totally. *grabs bong*

Ho-Freakin'-Ho

2005-12-20T10:42:00.000-05:00

Now put the money in the bag.

Drunken Santas on a rampage in New Zealand, armed German robbers in Santa disguises, a British St. Nick wanted for flashing, and a Swedish vandal in a Santa outfit are giving the big man in red a bad name this year.

Reports of "Bad Santas" breaking the law or otherwise wreaking havoc have been circulating around the world.

Echelon and the Left: Hoping We Don't Remember

2005-12-20T08:54:00.000-05:00

Check this out:
Created in response to last week's bloody attacks, the draft "Mobilization Against Terrorism Act" (MATA) rewrites laws dealing with wiretapping, eavesdropping and immigration. The draft, intended to increase prosecutors' courtroom authority, also unleashes the government's Echelon and Carnivore spy systems.
Read the date in the link:
10:15 AM Sep. 20, 2001 PT.

Yup. four years ago we knew about Echelon and the White House plan to tap domestic phone lines without a warrant. We didn't care then because we were pissed-off and literally wanted heads to roll. Politicians didn't care then because being anything less than anti-terror and pro-American victory would be political suicide, which isn't the case these days if you judge by how the left has acted lately.

Abraham Lincoln said that, "the Constitution is not a suicide pact". He also suspended Habeus Corpus and even deported "agitators". FDR, rounded-up and held Nazi sympathyzers and held them as enemy combatants without trial. He also interned 100,000+ Japanese for fear of infiltration by agents. Harsh measures in a time of war are nothing new, and Echelon is tame by comparison.

Addendum
Here is the transcript of 60 Minutes' investigation of the Echelon program in Febuary of 2000. For all you visiting Kos Kidz, that was before Bush.(h/t Michelle Malkin)

The Anointed Socialist Argument.

2005-12-19T21:26:00.000-05:00

I've just started reading Thomas Sowell's The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation As a Basis for Social Policy and he has this great quote from Joseph Epstein:"Disagree with someone on the right and he is likely to think you obtuse, wrong, foolish, a dope. Disagree with someone on the left and he is more likely to think you selfish, a sell-out, insensitive, and possibly evil."
The thing to note is that this book was written ten years ago, and that quote is from the New York Times Magazine ten years before that. Amazing that in 20 years time the left view of their detractors has gone from "possibly evil" to downright evil. Add to that they think we on the right are racists, fascists, terrorists, and want to establish a totalitarian theocracy.

Case in point: On one of the message boards I frequent someone curiously asked "why are so many Americans so anti-communist?" Now most of us (and you know who you are out there) who are anti-communist had pretty much the same thing to say "because it doesn't work" or remarked about it's tendency towards totalitarianism. Of course there is always one.

This one believes that essentially Americans don't understand Socialism nor do we have the facts, yet in the same thread states that real socialism has never been tried, and of course, communism is not socialism nor has real communism been tried either.

I asked about the good things socialism had done and how it has improved people's lives.

I've gotten no answer. Only this:Please show some level of respect. I'm a member of the social party here, and quite frankly, they're a lot more intelligent and educated than your average political group
Which goes to show that Thomas Sowell - who was once an avid follower of Marxist theory - is a very wise man.

Is Global Warming a Dead Cause?

2005-12-19T10:42:00.000-05:00

Yes: Here are 10 good reasons why the global-warming issue can be put to rest.

Excellent editorial.

My thoughts? Global warming is indeed happening, but there is little proof it is due to man or his machines. I believe we are in the middle of a cycle that is perfectly natural. Truth is, there has been 5 million years of climate change. Not to mention that temperatures are not constant, but are cyclic:

but let's be serious, the global warming debate is political in nature, not scientific.

Anyone Catch Bush's Speech Last Night?

2005-12-19T07:35:00.000-05:00

You can watch it here if you missed it. Even my politically apathetic wife thought it was one of his best. Sounded to me like the speech that many on the right wished he made a year or so ago, and hope that he will follow-up on in a few weeks.

Your thoughts?

Holiday Christmas Ramblings

2005-12-18T16:55:00.000-05:00

Just got back from Christmas shopping.

Holy Crap.

I know everyone across our fruited plain has something to say about how nuts people get around this time of year. Of course, idiots like me who wait 'till D+7 to start our shopping only make it worse.

I've lived in the southwest, northwest, two states formerly of tha' Confetahrahcee, and a latin "paradise". Miami, year-'round, is like how most places in our country are during this time. Now imagine how nuttier a city of nuts can get. It's like full-moon at an insane asylum.

Traffic backed-up for a couple miles at the mall, people getting angry because they can't find parking spots in front of the mall - while people like me have no problem finding one because we park around the back and walk (what a concept). Hordes of people bumping into one another. All this is why I get there before 1 in the afternoon.

Of course, I like to rattle the cage a bit and wear my Che Guevara t-shirt that has a big slash through his face ala Ghostbusters. So far everyone that has bothered to say anything likes it, and the worst I get it is a few negative glares. Today a sales clerk voiced his approval and told me how he also worked at a school library and a couple of the kids are into Che-wear, yet they have no idea who he was, what he stood for, much less know about what he did. Makes me wonder what those latinos in the mall really know about him, or what they think when I pass. Not that I place much stock in what they think anyway.

Overall, my holiday has been good. No horror stories as of yet. What about you?

Politics and "Torture"

2005-12-17T09:59:00.000-05:00

I've written relatively extensively on this blog about what I think (also here, here, and here) of McCain and his Torture Amendment and the entire torture debate for that matter. He's also gotten a thorough scrogging by the blogosphere, as well.

So here we are, McCain has managed to get his amendment through Congress and now President Bush has capitulated to him. The issue really isn't torture, because torture is already illegal. The issue is of harsh and humiliating treatment, in which we have gotten information from terrorists that has prevented more terrorist attacks here in the States.

But let's be real here. What does this all boil down to?

Politics.

Plain. Simple. Politics.

McCain himself admitted that he gave up more info than he should have when subjected to torture. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mind behind 9/11, is said to have given up the goat after two minutes of being waterboarded. Yet it is the politicians that scream that these techniques don't work, but is it the politician's jobs to figure out the best way to get information from a terrorist? Nope, that's the job of professional interrogators. Politicians, however, only care about image and getting re-elected - or being elected to a higher office, as is McCain's case.

I want to ask all of you reading this a question: If one of your family members worked at a high value target, say anywhere in Washington D.C., New York City, even here in Miami or another big city, and there was someone who was planning to attack said target, what would you do to stop it in order to safeguard your family?

This issue is far beyond politics. This is life and death, and I personally would rather place my trust in the ability and training of our professional interrogators than our politicians.

Open Post

2005-12-16T14:15:00.000-05:00

Post what you want in the comments section. Go ahead, let it all out.

Divorced Barbie

2005-12-16T09:19:00.000-05:00

Got this one via E-mail:

One day a father gets out of work and on his way home
he remembers that it's his daughter's birthday.

He pulls over to a toy store and asks the salesperson,
"How much is the Barbie on the display window?"

The salesperson answers, "Which one? We have:

Work out Barbie for $19.95

Shopping Barbie for $19.95

Beach Barbie for $19.95

Disco Barbie for $19.95

Divorced Barbie for $265.95".

The amazed father asks: "What? Why is the Divorced
Barbie $265.95 and all the others only $19.95?"

The salesperson annoyingly answers : "Sir...,
"Divorced Barbie comes with:
Ken's Car, Ken's House, Ken's Boat, Ken's Furniture,
Ken's Computer and... One of Ken's Friends.

Headlines From the Year 2029

2005-12-16T08:39:00.000-05:00

(via Freepers)

Ozone created by electric cars now killing millions in the seventh largest country in the world, Mexifornia formally known as California. White minorities still trying to have English recognized as Mexifornia's third language.

Spotted Owl plague threatens northwestern United States crops and livestock.

Baby conceived naturally. Scientists stumped.

Couple petitions court to reinstate heterosexual marriage.

Last remaining Fundamentalist Muslim dies in the American Territory of the Middle East (formerly known as Iran, Afghanistan, Syria and Lebanon).

Iran still closed off; physicists estimate it will take at least 10 more years before radioactivity decreases to safe levels.

France pleads for global help after being taken over by Jamaica.

Castro finally dies at age 112; Cuban cigars can now be imported legally, but President Chelsea Clinton has banned all smoking.

George Z. Bush says he will run for President in 2036. Postal Service raises price of first class stamp to $17.89 and reduces mail delivery to Wednesdays only.

85-year, $75.8 billion study: Diet and Exercise is the key to weight loss.

Average weight of Americans drops to 250 lbs.

Massachusetts executes last remaining conservative.

Supreme Court rules punishment of criminals violates their civil rights.

Average height of NBA players now nine feet, seven inches.

New federal law requires that all nail clippers, screwdrivers, fly swatters and rolled-up newspapers must be registered by January 2036.

Congress authorizes direct deposit of formerly illegal political contributions to campaign accounts.

Capitol Hill intern indicted for refusing to have sex with congressman.

IRS sets lowest tax rate at 75 percent.

Florida voters still having trouble with voting machines.

Yet Another New Look

2005-12-15T21:47:00.000-05:00

I swear this is the last time (at least for the forseeable future).

Thoughts?

Democrats Attack Ohio Representative For Calling Murtha A Coward

2005-12-15T18:30:00.000-05:00

Apparently it is acceptable to call the Commander-in-chief a war criminal but it isn't acceptable to say Murtha is a coward for his can't-do attitude when it comes to Iraq. Who cares if he was a war "hero"? That was then, in another war, when he held a different job. Now he is a senator who has given comfort to the enemy by telling them America can not win. He may have been a hero, he is now a coward, call a spade a spade.

The funniest bit about this is that the "environmentalist" Democrats are spending money on a Mobil billboard which is a horrible pollutant...but ignore the coward behind the curtain and focus on the attacks. Bottom line is, while I do find this dispicable, I find comfort in the fact the Democrats are doing nothing to advance causes and being proven wrong on their attacks (psss...the elections were today, we are winning in Iraq). Here is the story.

Sign asking customers to speak English is illegal

2005-12-15T18:25:00.000-05:00

Here locally there is a story about a bar owner who could loose his business and the American dream for putting up a sign saying "For service speak English". Is it insensitive? Yes. Is it racist? No. Why is it the government can't stay out of individual rights? Why is it that asking someone to speak the most common language in this country reason to shut down a business? Political Correctness has gone too far. Here is the story.

This is the Day...

2005-12-15T08:34:00.000-05:00

...the Iraqis are voting and will tell us whether all the blood and sweat was worth it.

I don't think they will disappoint.

Blogs to watch for the latest:
Iraqi Bloggers Central
The Iraqi Vote <~with pics!
Iraq the Model <~with pics!
Purple Finger For Freedom <~with pics!
Hassan at RedState has some election analysis.
Pajamas Media has a good round-up of the latest updates.

More and more people are going to the polling centers and the turnout levels have exceeded 84% in some centers, for example in the center that lies in al-Khaleej district more than 2650 voters did vote as of 3 pm out of 3190 registered total voters for this particular center.
The overall turnout is estimated at around 75% in the province

One more thing: Someone call Howard Dean and let him know we are winning.

Thursday 'Toons

2005-12-15T07:39:00.000-05:00

A few funnies I ran into while doing my usual tour of the 'net this morning:

Environmentalism Kills?

2005-12-14T12:50:00.000-05:00

Or at least the knee-jerk and extreme factions have indirectly - according to John Stossel's article today. The issue stems from the disallowance of the highly-effective pesticide DDT:

Two to three million people die of malaria every year, Uganda's health minister has said, because the U.S. government is afraid of a chemical called DDT. The United States does spend your tax dollars trying to fight malaria in Africa, but it won't fund DDT. The money goes for things like mosquito netting over beds (even though not everyone in Africa even has a bed). The office that dispenses those funds, the Agency for International Development, acknowledges DDT is safe, but it will not spend a penny on it.

Now the Libertarian in me begs to ask the question, "why should we pay to spray pesticide in Africa?" but that is neither here nor there regarding the lie about DDT perpetrated by environmentalist activist lobby (h/t Freepers).

First, the scientific study that led to the banning of DDT was scewed:
The alleged thinning of eggshells by DDT in the diet was effective propaganda; however, actual feeding experiments proved that there was very little, if any, correlation between DDT levels and shell thickness. Thin shells may result when birds are exposed to fear, restraint, mercury, lead, parathion, or other agents, or when deprived of adequate calcium, phosphorus, Vitamin D, light, calories, or water. While quail fed a diet containing 2 percent calcium produced thick shells, a calcium content of only 1 percent resulted in shells 9 percent thinner than normal. In the presence of lead, shells were 14 percent thinner, and with mercury, 8 percent thinner.

Bitman and coworkers demonstrated eggshell thinning with DDT by reducing calcium levels to 0.56 percent from the normal 2.5 percent. After this work was exposed as anti-DDT propaganda, Bitman continued his work for another year. Instead of the calcium-deficient diets, however, he fed the quail 2.7 percent calcium in their food. The shells they produced were not thinned at all by the DDT. Unfortunately, the editor of Science refused to publish the results of that later research. Editor Philip Abelson had already told Dr. Thomas Jukes of the University of California in Berkeley that Science would never publish anything that was not antagonistic toward DDT (T. Jukes, personal communication). Bitman therefore had to publish the results of his legitimate feeding experiments in an obscure specialty journal, and many readers of continued to believe that DDT could cause birds to lay thin-shelled eggs.

JunkScience also has the short and sweet on the DDT debate.

Stossel asks an important question:

Why? Fifty years ago, Americans sprayed tons of DDT everywhere. Farmers used it to repel bugs, and health officials to fight mosquitoes that carry malaria. Nobody worried much about chemicals then. People really did just sit there and eat in clouds of DDT. When the trucks came to spray, people often acted as if the ice cream truck had come. They were so happy to have mosquitoes repelled. Huge amounts of DDT were sprayed on food and people, who just breathed it in.

Did they all get cancer and die?

Nope.

The sad thing is that we in the U.S. do not have to worry much about insect-borne diseases (aside from the West Nile scare, and that wouldn't have happened if we still used DDT), but those in under-developed countries in Africa, Asia, and South America do.

"If it's a chemical, it must be bad," said scientist Amir Attaran. "If it's DDT, it must be awful. And that's fine if you're a rich, white environmentalist. It's not so fine if you're a poor black kid who is about to lose his life from malaria."

But hey, those who are driving the environmentalist lobby think there is too many people on Mother Earth anyway.

Yeah, But....

2005-12-13T06:59:00.000-05:00

Bush Estimates 30,000 Iraqis Killed in War In a rare, unscripted moment, President Bush on Monday estimated 30,000 Iraqis have died in the war, the first time he has publicly acknowledged the high price Iraqis have paid in the push for democracy.
Let me remind you that (as Logic Times has pointed out) most of those casualties were likely either "insurgents", or non-combatants killed by "insurgents".

Yet despite the obvious spin of this article (and the media), the Iraqis are still going to have their 3rd straight successful vote:

Rest in Peace...

2005-12-13T06:54:00.000-05:00

.... Albert Owens, Tsai-Shai Yang, Yen-i Yang, Ye-Chen Lin.

Crips Gang Co-Founder Executed in Calif.

So far L.A. remains (relatively) quiet. But hey, is anyone gonna get up this early to riot?

France: Part Deux?

2005-12-13T06:29:00.000-05:00

Racial Unrest Spreading in Australia

The difference being that the Aussies are letting the cops do their job:

The rioting began Sunday on Cronulla Beach when about 5,000 white youths, many drunk and wrapped in Australian flags, attacked people believed to be of Arab or Middle Eastern descent after rumors spread that Lebanese youths had assaulted two lifeguards earlier this month.

Police, who had stepped up patrols on the beach after learning of cell phone text messages urging people to retaliate for the attack on the lifeguards, fought back with batons and pepper spray.

Carloads of young Arab men then struck back in several Sydney suburbs, fighting with police for hours and smashing dozens of cars with sticks and bats, police said. Thirty-one people were injured and 16 arrested in the first day of unrest.

Thank a Soldier Week

2005-12-12T15:20:00.000-05:00

December 19-25 is thank a soldier week, I think that about says it all, when was the last time you have thanked a soldier? What I find funniest about this is I've never met a soldier who wants or needs thanks. Everyone I knew when I served never knew how to respond to a thank you. The average soldier doesn't think anything of what he does, its a job, its his duty; he isn't doing anything he sees as exceptional. Yet at the same time, I think they truely deserve all of the thanks we can give them. I would like to start with a thank you to Dan and Pawnman, I see both of them more as friends than soldiers, however they are both in the armed services and are fighting the good fight...fortunatly both are in the CONUS, but they are as important as those overseas. I truely miss the little time I was in and wish it were possible to go back without having to go through covering a slightly offensive tattoo that is very meaningful to me. I'm done dragging on, but please, thank a soldier through this site, and thank every soldier you meet, active, reserve, or retired.

Howard Dean White Flag Ad

2005-12-12T15:06:00.000-05:00

It seems that after Howard Dean made is ignorant comments about how we "can't win the war in Iraq". The Republicans finally grew a set of balls and went after him making an ad showing Dean waving the white flag (or the unofficial French flag). The Democrats found another anti-war hero to attack Bush for allowing the Republicans to expose Democrat beliefs.

Monday Reading

2005-12-12T09:20:00.000-05:00

Fighting to Win - "With the proper strategy, victory in Iraq is far more likely than people think."

Rumor of levee dynamite persists- The wackos still persist with their conspiracy theory.

Check here for the official Tookie Countdown Clock

Anti-war concert gets snubbed by vets - In Caledonia, NY, a group of veterans has forced a anti-war concert to move it's venue away from the city war memorial were it was planned. The moonbats are crying "censorship".

Christmas bashing extends to Narnia - Apparently not only do nativity scenes scare people, but "Christian propaganda" does too.

Rummy says that rumors of his resignation are bunk.

First Gaza, now the Wall - Palestinians are now claiming the Western (Wailing) Wall is Muslim property, since Mohammed tied his horse there...once.

Narnia: Movie Review

2005-12-10T21:03:00.000-05:00

Just Saw The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. If you haven't heard about it (and who hasn't?), it's an adaptation of C.S. Lewis' book written in 1950.

Overall the movie is very good-looking, and the special-effects on the talking animals and mythical creatures was incredible. The acting is lacking a bit, but not nearly enough to kill the whole thing.

The wife appreciated that it mirrored the book quite well(the exception being the longer battle scenes - hooray!), and said that, "it's probably the best movie adaptation of a book I've seen in a good long while". The kids really enjoyed it, which isn't suprising considering the talking animals.

I've never read the book, but I understood that Lewis was a religious man, and that this story (and The Magician's Nephew) contains alot of religious allegory. The parallels between the movie and the New Testament interested this Bible-school dropout, but even if you don't care for religious imagery, you can still find it enjoyable.

Overall I'd say it was a bout a B+/4 out of 5 stars/two thumbs up, etc.

I'm Just One of the "Government's Poorly Paid Contract Killers"

2005-12-09T10:17:00.000-05:00

Or I am according to Ted Rall, of cartoon and column fame. He also has this to say about people like me:

"What if they gave a war," a poster of the Vietnam era asked, "and nobody came?" If we are, as Jean-Paul Sartre posited, defined by our actions, most of the blame for the murder of more than 100,000 Iraqis belongs to our top government officials. But Bush's armchair warriors couldn't have invaded Iraq without a compliant and complicit United States military--one that, it should be noted, is all volunteer. These individuals, who enjoy free will, fire the guns and drop the bombs. If personal responsibility is to have any meaning, the men and women of our armed forces have to be held individually accountable for the carnage.

"Supporting our troops while opposing their actions may seem contradictory," argues Joshua Frank in the antiwar.com article. "The duties of U.S. soldiers in Iraq are wrong and many may be committing horrible crimes against humanity. True. But soldiers are mostly not bad people (though, of course, some are)." How is a person who voluntarily commits "horrible crimes against humanity" not a "bad person"?
So basically, Ted Rall has defined that the entire military is guilty of whatever "atrocities" Ted Rall has a beef with (including the false claim of 100,000 dead civilians). From what I gather I'm essentially guilty of defying the ethics of Ted Rall's fantasy world, when you boil it all down.

Ted Rall, if your unfamiliar with his exploits:

He called our war in Afghanistan “genocide,” perpetrated to build an imaginary oil pipeline through the region. He supported Marxists Jean Bertrand-Aristide, Hugo Chavez and the Castroite government of Grenada; and he opposed sanctions against Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya and Serbia. He has also said George W. Bush should be "warming a prison cell right now" and strongly hinted that leftist Senator Paul Wellstone was assassinated.
He also inked this attempt at "political humor":

He's also inked cartoons depicting Condoleezza Rice proclaiming herself as President Bush's "House nigga" , and has made a comment (no longer on CNN's page) that Bill Cosby should go to "racial re-education camp".

Yet he's a 2x winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. In other words, he's an approved voice of the fringe leftists.

But hell, at least he's an honest fringe leftist:

"You can drop the "support the troops" shtick now."

I wish the rest of the anti-war and anti-victory movements would be this honest with us.

(Thanks to Right Wing News for bringing this to our attention).

Bake Tookie

2005-12-09T07:35:00.000-05:00

I've been sort-of following the Stanley "Tookie" Williams death penalty case. I haven't payed alot attention to the details because for one, I support the death penalty, two, 24 years of appeals (including one upheld in 2002 by the the 9th ~~Circus~~ Circuit, probably the most left-wing court in the land) is enough to convince me that he's guilty, despite whatever procedural wrongdoing he alleges.

In my book, if one deprives another of life and liberty, then one forfeits their right to life and liberty. Murder is the most heinous of crimes, and deserves the harshest of punishments. Many people have argued the moral implications of the death penalty, and you can read both sides here. I remain steadfastly for the execution of those who take a life.

The good Williams may have done does not condone the violence he did to earn the right to be put to death, therefore it should not commute the sentence. If one wishes to turn their life from violence, that is great, but one should still be willing to accept the consequences of their actions. The good that Tookie had done should be for it's own sake rather than simply an excuse to remove his punishment.

For one in this situation, it becomes a decision of "the hard right versus the easy wrong", whereas this follows the logic that the morally right thing to do is often the hardest thing to do. In my view, if Williams really cared about something other than saving his own skin, he would own up to what he had done, accept his sentence, die as a man with a cleaner concience knowing that he deserved justice and hope that his death brings closure to the families of those he brutally murdered.

Don't Fault The Air Marshal For Doing His Job

2005-12-08T07:59:00.000-05:00

My take on the air marshal shooting of a deranged man down here in Miami? Take your medication, don't make bomb threats and reach in your bag when someone has a gun drawn on you.

Sickeningly the local news has the animated title of "Mayhem in MIA" when they report on this story. They are emphasizing how the man's wife warned the marshals of the man's mental illness, and conducting the obligatory interviews of the man's neighbors, who of course, are shocked. It seems the local media has decided to use this incident as a means to showcase themselves on the national stage, adding all the drama possible and essentially turning what would have been an unfortunate incident into a national tragedy in their quest for higher ratings.

I wonder how long 'till the ACLU gets involved.

Today in Infamy

2005-12-07T10:12:00.000-05:00

The 7 December 1941 Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor was one of the great defining moments in history. A single carefully-planned and well-executed stroke removed the United States Navy's battleship force as a possible threat to the Japanese Empire's southward expansion. America, unprepared and now considerably weakened, was abruptly brought into the Second World War as a full combatant.

Eighteen months earlier, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had transferred the United States Fleet to Pearl Harbor as a presumed deterrent to Japanese agression. The Japanese military, deeply engaged in the seemingly endless war it had started against China in mid-1937, badly needed oil and other raw materials. Commercial access to these was gradually curtailed as the conquests continued. In July 1941 the Western powers effectively halted trade with Japan. From then on, as the desperate Japanese schemed to seize the oil and mineral-rich East Indies and Southeast Asia, a Pacific war was virtually inevitable.

By late November 1941, with peace negotiations clearly approaching an end, informed U.S. officials (and they were well-informed, they believed, through an ability to read Japan's diplomatic codes) fully expected a Japanese attack into the Indies, Malaya and probably the Philippines. Completely unanticipated was the prospect that Japan would attack east, as well.

The U.S. Fleet's Pearl Harbor base was reachable by an aircraft carrier force, and the Japanese Navy secretly sent one across the Pacific with greater aerial striking power than had ever been seen on the World's oceans. Its planes hit just before 8AM on 7 December. Within a short time five of eight battleships at Pearl Harbor were sunk or sinking, with the rest damaged. Several other ships and most Hawaii-based combat planes were also knocked out and over 2400 Americans were dead. Soon after, Japanese planes eliminated much of the American air force in the Philippines, and a Japanese Army was ashore in Malaya.

It amazes me how far we have come. What would we have said of people like Howard Dean, Cindy Sheehan, and Ward Churchill back then?

Poll: Americans Favor Torture in Rare Occasions

2005-12-07T09:10:00.000-05:00

Not that I place much stock in polls, but this is interesting:
“I don’t think we should go out and string everybody up by their thumbs until somebody talks. But if there is definitely a good reason to get an answer, we should do whatever it takes,” said Billy Adams, a retiree from Tomball, Texas.

In America, 61 percent of those surveyed agreed torture is justified at least on rare occasions. Almost nine in 10 in South Korea and just over half in France and Britain felt that way.
Of course this doesn't address the debate over what is considered torture. To some, America would be guilty of torture if we used the comfy chair.

Yeah, But They Still "Support" the Troops, Right?!

2005-12-06T14:40:00.000-05:00

Saying the "idea that we're going to win the war in Iraq is an idea which is just plain wrong," Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean predicted today that the Democratic Party will come together on a proposal to withdraw National Guard and Reserve troops immediately, and all US forces within two years.

Dean made his comments in an interview on WOAI Radio in San Antonio.
What an Asshat

Yet it doesn't end there! More Asshattery(h/t KisP)
JOHN KERRY Face the Nation/12.4.05
"And there is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women, breaking sort of the customs of the--of--the historical customs, religious customs."Yup. I guess I'll have to re-name this blog "Right-Wing of the Terrorists", or maybe we should re-name Milblogs, "Terrorblogs". Asshat.

Well, At Least The CIA Snatches The Cheap Ones.

2005-12-06T14:30:00.001-05:00

Khaled al-Masri, who is being represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, said he was arrested while attempting to enter Macedonia for a holiday trip and flown to Afghanistan. During five months in captivity he was subjected to “torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,” says a lawsuit he filed in U.S. District Court in suburban Alexandria, Va.

Yup, suing the CIA, for $75,000.

Obviously he hasn't paid much attention to the scope of the American lawsuit industry. Maybe he should do some research:

A West Virginia convenience store worker was awarded a whopping $2,699,000 in punitive damages after she injured her back opening a pickle jar, this according to a report in the Charleston Daily Mail.

A California man is suing the Las Vegas Hilton and Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino, claiming the casinos were negligent in allowing him to gamble away more than $1 million while he was intoxicated.

Nearly four months after the recall, Berkman filed a $50 million class-action lawsuit against Robert's Foods, claiming "emotional distress" and "weight gain...mental anguish, outrage and indignation." The complaint claims to represent all consumers who ruined their diets and had to spend more time at the gym because they ate mislabeled Pirate's Booty.
A Montana man has sued media giant Viacom, saying the MTV show "Jackass" plagiarized his name, infringed on the trademark and copyright o his name and defamed his good character...The plaintiff's name is Jack Ass...He's seeking at least $10 million in damages.
When an American Airlines flight from Los Angeles to New York encountered severe turbulence in 1995, terrified passengers were hurled from their seats, and some were sure they were about to die. Those 28 seconds of terror were worth $2 million.
Bennie Casson filed a lawsuit in Belleville, Ill., against PT's Show Club for its negligence in allowing a stripper to "slam" her breasts into his "neck and head region" as he watched her, a little too close to the stage....The $200,000 lawsuit states that Carson was "bruised, contused, lacerated and made sore" by Heart's breasts, which reportedly weigh in at 40 pounds apiece.

Oprah for what?!

2005-12-06T08:02:00.000-05:00

President.

Does that mean Dr. Phil will be Secretary of State?

Why I Am Not A Leftist Liberal (Part 3)

2005-12-05T18:00:00.000-05:00

Part Three in my series addressing what could possibly be one of the only instances in modern time (well, at least in the last three years) that a Liberal has defined what he believed, other than being against President Bush and the war in Iraq.

(also check out part one and part two)

I believe multinational corporations do not always act in the best
interests of America,

Technically, the purpose of a corporation is to make a profit for it's shareholders, who in turn must provide enough incentive to hire the best businessmen they can afford in order to keep the corporation afloat. The businessmen, in turn, must maintain and increase profitability in order to provide an incentive for shareholders to keep their investments within the corporation's stock. So really it's a system of mutual self-interest. In other words, all business is to make a profit by means of trade and commerce, and rightly so, because no one is going to engage in trade in order to lose money. This has a beneficial effect of employing workers, providing goods to consumers at a lower price, which has the side-effect of being good for America.

But is it the purpose of the corporation to serve the state? It is if your a politician trying to get elected, or a idealogue; both who are looking out for their own self-interests, same as the businessmen, often to the deteriment of business, and therefore America.

The cost of doing business in America is higher than in other countries. This is because our taxes and regulations have made it so. Yet are we supposed to hate the multinationals because they have the ability to move elsewhere?

I believe that women should have every option available to them when it comes to their health,

Obviously this is allegory for being pro-choice. Though if you were to take the statement at face value then you'd have to ask yourself, "what about the men?"

Of course the abortion issue involves more than being pro- or anti- choice. Margaret Sanger - the founder of Planned Parenthood - was a big believer in eugenics. Femanists have used the issue to push their agenda, and have cut the rights of the father completely out of the picture. Conversely, the religionists look upon this issue as a moral one based on their prohibitions against murder. The politicians use this devisive issue to their benefit.

In short, this argument has very little to do with health, and more to do with ideology, theology, and politics.

I believe that the government wastes more money on military spending than it does on welfare or aid to the needy,

Whoa, let's look at the numbers. The militaru currently eats up alot of the budget, but also consider that the U.S. is currently fighting two wars, and if you want to ensure victory, you don't try to fight on the cheap. Now consider that the welfare system encompasses six different government agencies: Health and Human Services, Agriculture, HUD, Labor, Treasury, and Education. add to that Social Security, which is effectively bankrupt.

Look at the projections for government spending on the above link. Is defense taking up the majority of the budget? Nope. Welfare in it's various forms is, and looks to grow.

So what's the problem? The fact is that whether we win this war or not (and we will), a war can still be be won. Yet there will always be poverty - even though the poor in this country live better than the majority of the world's population - in a room full of billionares, the man with $900 million is a schmuck.

You have to look at things in terms of incentives rather than intentions. Does welfare reduce poverty? Nope, but it gets politicians elected. I believe children should be taught science not mysticism,.
All well and good, but our current public education system doesn't let you have that choice does it? In a way this is poetic justice. For years people have had to endure the teaching of ideologies to their children that they don't approve of, yet now the shoe is on the other foot.

Maybe Liberals would be willing to compromise? Perhaps we can have school vouchers and therefore the power to determine what our kids are taught? Of course this means the Leftists would also have to give up their ideologically-based education programs, and that ain't happenin'. I believe that taxes should be paid by those who can most afford to pay them,

The fallacy here is the implication that taxes are something fixed, rather than defined by government spending and political social engineering and buying of votes.

It's interesting to note that the very same politicians who claim that, "the rich don't pay their fair share", have no problem finding tax loopholes. John Kerry, whose worth is around $700 million, only pays 10% in taxes, whereas those who make more than $200k are supposed to pay 25%. Who is really not paying their fair share? But I digress.

This idea frankly has very little to do with sound fiscal policy and everything to do with class envy and greed. Yes, greed. Greed that one feels that if they want a particular social program for their personal benefit, that all they have to do is take the money needed to run it from another. Regardless of the right of a man to keep what he has earned, which was the foundation of the American experiment, and the reasons our Founding Fathers went to war. The difference is that instead of taking it for the king, it is being taken for the benefit of our elected officials and given to people who will vote for them, and then called "social justice".

My view on the rich? If you don't like them, then invent a product or service they think they can't live without and sell it to them. Then you can be rich and redistribute your money how you see fit, but don't think you have the right to tell me what to do with mine.
I believe running huge government budget deficits will hurt our economy,
No kidding, but look at the information above. These deficits are being run up by the very same social welfare programs that this author supports, and looks to support in the future.

Time and time again we have seen that what is bad for the economy is continued government over-regulation and over-taxation. It comes down to this: the government does not know how to spend your money, care for your needs, and look out for your interests, as well as you can.
I believe that everyone is entitled to health care,

Actually all we are entitled to in life is death, everything else is a result of work or luck.

The problem with socialized healthcare is that it isn't free and doesn't provide the quality of the free-market variety (keep in mind that what we have now is not a free-market). As Canada has proven, if you want to screw-up an industry. get government involved in it:
As reported in a December 2003 story by Kerri Houston for the Frontiers of Freedom Institute titled "Access Denied: Canada's Healthcare System Turns Patients Into Victims" (http://ff.org/centers/ccfsp/pdf/CCSFP-1203-PP.pdf), in some instances, patients die on the waiting list because they become too sick to tolerate a procedure. Houston says that hip-replacement patients often end up non-ambulatory while waiting an average of 20 weeks for the procedure, and that's after having waited 13 weeks just to see the specialist. The wait to get diagnostic scans followed by the wait for the radiologist to read them just might explain why Cleveland, Ohio, has become Canada's hip-replacement center.
Then there is the issue of when the "right" of one to "free" healthcare infringes on the rights of another to provide for it:
And slavery is really what's at issue here: the enslavement of some to the needs of others. For to the degree health care is made a "right," health care providers are enslaved. Doctors, nurses, scientists and businessmen with too much self-respect to have their abilities declared your "right," will simply abandon medicine, leaving your medical future to those lacking such self-respect. (It's already begun.) Investment dollars will divert from health care interests into freer and thus more profitable areas. (That's begun, too.) Oh, but this has its upside: there'd be no gripes about the "high cost" of new prescription drugs -- there'd never be any new drugs.
That last part is true, since we in America with our uncompassionate pharmaceutical corporations lead the world in advanced medicines.

Health care isn't a "right" anymore than it's a "right" for you to walk to the local mechanic and demand he fix your car.
I believe that the government wastes more money on military spending than it does on welfare or aid to the needy,
Again, at least you see more in return with the military than you do with social welfare programs, and it even costs less.

Then you have the reality of this issue: a nation cannot maintain it's soveriegnty without an effective military, yet limiting social welfare contributes to it's prosperity.

I believe corporations are not people and should not have the same rights as persons,

Now I'm not sure of the deeper meaning here. On the surface there is the fact that this overlooks the knowledge of what a corporation is: people. Corporations are people who run a business that are answerable to other people who buy their stock. I believe we should take affirmative action to correct the socio-economic imbalances created by racism and sexism,
Except by "correcting" one imbalance, you create another, that is those who are denied a job not because they aren't skilled, but because they are of a certain race/gender.

This attitude is a result of the philosophy that embraces an equality of results rather than an equality of opprotunity. Meaning that our society is sexist/racist because there is not an equal amount of black millionaires to white millionaires, despite the fact that there are no rules barring the hiring of certain races or genders.

It's important to note that blacks and minorities were graduating college in increasing numbers long before affirmative action, as Thomas Sowell notes:

There was no affirmative action when I was admitted as a student at Harvard College in 1955 but, even if there had been and even if I had been admitted because of it, what about all the blacks who went to Harvard before me? The first black man graduated from Harvard in 1870 -- about a century before affirmative action.

It is not just a handful of individuals who advanced without the supposedly indispensable black "leaders." Most of the reduction in the number of black families in poverty occurred in the 1940s and 1950s -- before any major civil rights legislation. Black males doubled their years of schooling during that time. When you double your education, your income tends to go up -- with or without Jesse Jackson or other black "leaders."

Remember this famous line:
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

And these less famous lines by Frederick Douglass:

Everybody has asked the question. . ."What shall we do with the Negro?" I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are wormeaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature's plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!

In short kids, by giving minorities and women affirmative action, you are telling everyone that they cannot stand on their own merits, when history has already proven that wrong.

But hey, it keeps Jesse Jackson rich. and I believe that we are a nation of immigrants and we should welcome those with the drive, determination and ambition to come to America in search of a better life.
I have no problem with immigants or immigration. The issue I have is illegal immigrants who pay no taxes yet recieve all the benefits and social welfare programs of a taxpayer. If you come to this country, you come to work and earn your way without government interference, not to sit on your ass and get a handout from 'rich Americans.'

The other issue is the borders, and it's a security issue. Anyone can come in to our country to do whatever harm they wish. That's unacceptable in our post-9/11 world. Immigration is fine, but we need to know that those who come here intend to do us no harm.

The divide here between Liberals, Leftists and Conservatives is between the idealistic view of what "should happen" and what does happen. Does rent control work? Nope. It creates housing shortages while eliminating the incentives to build new housing and maintain old housing. We need to think in terms of incentives, rather than intentions. Yeah, socialism is a great idea on paper, but it can't compete with capitalism. That's because socialism lacks the incentive to achieve and excel.

Obviously there is more to these issues than what I've said here, but I hope this is a good overview on my attitude towards these.

New Look!

2005-12-04T16:34:00.000-05:00

Whaddya think?

Go Army! Beat Navy!

2005-12-03T08:21:00.000-05:00

A Good Read

2005-12-01T15:55:00.000-05:00

US Military Runs Torture Training Facility

Find out what our guys go through, in training.