Powerline has two posts today on Democratic voter fraud in Washington and St. Louis.
Republicans in Washington are still fighting for a new election in Washington where blogger Stefan Sharkansky has exposed the myriad imperfections of voter registration in Democratic King County. The Seattle Times large front-page headline Sunday: Scores of felons voted illegally. Sharkansky's work represents the best of blogging. He did excellent research and reported in a timely and effective fashion creating the foundation for the Republican challenge. Even if the challenge fails he's struck a lasting blow for transparent and sensible voter registration practics.
The story in St. Louis is more local and lurid involving a Democratic committeeman who is charged with witness tampering and conspiracy to murder in a voter fraud case.
Monday, January 24, 2005
A voice of reason in academia
From Harvard, no less.
Ruth Wisse is the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard and writes eloquently on the Summers' brouhaha.
Feminist complainers, not Larry Summers, owe women an apology.
Amen.
I just hope Professor Wisse is already tenured.
Ruth Wisse is the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard and writes eloquently on the Summers' brouhaha.
Feminist complainers, not Larry Summers, owe women an apology.
Amen.
Recently the president of Harvard, Lawrence H. Summers, inadvertently provided further evidence of the opposition to free inquiry that currently governs our institutions of higher learning. Invited to speculate off the record on the "underrepresentation" of women in science, Mr. Summers threw out some hypotheses, including one about innate differentials in aptitude between men and women, that may account for the phenomenon. At this point in his remarks, an female MIT professor of science quit the room, declaring to the press that she couldn't breathe because "this kind of bias makes me physically ill."
"What better proof than she of Summers's thesis?" quipped a friend of mine--and, indeed, what better evidence of underprofessionalism than a scientist who becomes nauseated at the mere hint of a theory that differs from hers? But this woman had artfully framed her outrage. Her claim of "bias" was intended not simply to discredit the male who had asked whether there may be substantive differences between men and women, but to define the permissible terms of discussion. Her show of outrage and the ensuing media attention it elicited were designed to reinforce the claim that "bias" alone is responsible for the situation Mr. Summers addressed.
...Sounding more like a prisoner in a Soviet show trial than the original thinker that he is, Mr. Summers recanted his error, has apologized at least three times for his insensitivity, and will no doubt hasten to appoint and to promote as many females as he can. The casualties of this exercise are genuine discussion of why women excel faster in some fields than in others, and the kind of intellectual independence that universities were once expected to promote.
* * *
Unfortunately, the problem Mr. Summers addressed will persist despite the attempts to silence him. No one doubts that women seeking careers in science face greater challenges than those in other academic and research fields. At a recent forum of Harvard graduate students, a succession of budding female scientists expressed their anxieties about having chosen careers that will conflict, more than most, with their no less strong desires to raise and nurture a family. More than one young woman present felt that a job with reduced pressure during her childbearing years might better suit her needs than competition at the very highest levels. The good news is that most of the young women acknowledged that their dilemma was one of choice rather than a product of discrimination against them.
The very notion of "underrepresentation," based as it is on the implicit goal of numerical parity, greatly prejudices our ability to understand why women make the choices that they do. If women gravitate to the hard sciences less than to other fields, we ought to grant them the intelligence of sentient creatures, recognizing the potential loneliness of such choices while trying to understand why groups and individuals act as they do. It is not Mr. Summers who owes women an apology; it is the complainers and agitators who owe both him and all of us an apology for trying to shut down discussion of an "inequality" that is not likely to disappear.
I just hope Professor Wisse is already tenured.
Exposing Stephanopoulos
The brash, smooth-talking George Stephanopoulos was one of the most recognizable of Bill Clinton's young Turks in 1993. He parlayed his success into a job with CBS in 1997 doing tag-team political analysis with conservative Bill Kristol. Since the 2002 campaign he's been ABC's political analyst and host of This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Has the young Turk matured into an objective analyst? Hardly, but his ABC job has gained him the patina of objective legitimacy. Tim Graham of the Media Research Center exposes GS in the NRO today.
In case you've forgotten already this is the same ABC News that callously 'advertised' for military funerals scheduled for Inauguration Day which the blogosphere found and broadcast. We wrote about it here.
On [his] first appearance for ABC [eight years ago], Good Morning America co-host Charles Gibson asked: "I understand they're going to throw you in the pit with Sam and Cokie and George [Will]... Do you look at this as getting even, or do you look at it as being able to really contribute to the political dialogue of America?" With a smile, Stephanopoulos replied: "I'm hoping to contribute, but I wouldn't mind getting even every once in a while."
That might explain the pile of gloomy news from ABC as President Bush prepared to take another oath of office. On Monday night, ABC's first Nightline of inauguration week was guest-hosted by Stephanopoulos. The subject was more of the same: When will public opinion finally sink the war in Iraq? Formally, the topic was televised pictures of flag-draped coffins.
In case you've forgotten already this is the same ABC News that callously 'advertised' for military funerals scheduled for Inauguration Day which the blogosphere found and broadcast. We wrote about it here.
Stephanopoulos began: "Its roots are in Vietnam. But the phrase wasn't actually coined until 1999, when General Hugh Shelton, the military's top soldier, said that an American war must pass what he called the Dover test — the war should be fought only if public support could survive the flag-draped coffins, returning to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. For most of this war, that hasn't applied. The Pentagon banned press coverage of the dead coming home." If you were waiting for ABC to note that this policy began in 1991 — and continued throughout the Stephanopoulos era in the West Wing — keep waiting.
...The former Clinton spin doctor said President Bush is facing "growing doubts about the war in Iraq," and although Bush "told the Washington Post this weekend that his November victory ratified his judgments on Iraq...an ABC News poll out today showed more American disapprove of how the president is handling Iraq, more than at any time since the Abu Ghraib scandal."
In other words, what measure are you going to trust for a democratic verdict — an election counting up the voices of more than 120 million voters, or a random sample of 1,000 adults that ABC randomly selected out of the phone listings? ABC wants you to pick B.
* * *
[On a recent Good Morning America appearance] Stephanopoulos insisted to [ABC's Diane] Sawyer that Bush's big problem is "the conduct of the war right now. People are still being pummeled by these pictures of violence every single day from Iraq. We saw over the weekend the first photos in a year of flag-draped coffins coming home, those six National Guardsmen from Louisiana, and the White House aides again concede they know, as we head to this election in Iraq, it's going to get worse in Iraq again. More violence every day."
You have to smile at the passive-aggressive tone there. Bush is somehow being "pummeled by pictures," but by whom? Stephanopoulos is suggesting that Bush may have defeated Kerry, but he cannot defeat the Permanent Media Government. Stephanopoulos and all the "news" merchants who echo him believe that the "Dover test" is a sincere measure of democracy, even if it's a ruthlessly media-manipulated democracy suffused in daily images of hopelessness and death. The networks ought to end their newscasts with the slogan "Undermining America's Resolve for Military Action Since 1968."
What they are trying to do is not enlighten the citizenry, but badger it into submission, thinking that if they keep hammering the subject of casualties to death, eventually the public will grasp their enlightened point of view. Consider this: Would George Stephanopoulos consider hosting a Nightline program exploring candidates for high office in the Iraqi elections — who they are and what their platform might be? No, because ABC no doubt believes that would only help Team Bush sell the virtues of the war. "News" is defined by what harms Bush. Any more helpful subject isn't news, but despicable advertising for the military-industrial complex.
But all they're advancing is the strange vision of Presidents Carter and Clinton that the wisest and most honorable presidents never waste an American soldier's life on any risky military mission — and along with it, the strange notion that America was safer in the late 1970s or most of the 1990s, when we did nothing about gathering threats to our national security beyond babbling about the necessity of global arms-control agreements and kissing dictators on the cheek.
January 24, 1965
Forty years ago the greatest leader in the modern world and the (real) Man of the 20th Century died at age 90: Sir Winston Spencer Churchill. The Monk's admiration of the man and his place in history is difficult for The Monk to render into words. So those who have trod this path should have their say:
At this link is the obituary of Sir Winston by Anthony Lewis in the January 24, 1965 NY Times. The second line of Lewis's obit summed up the man nicely: "The great figure who embodied man's will to resist tyranny passed into history this morning."
Steven Hayward wrote a piece six years ago for the Ashbrook Center on leadership and Churchill that bears re-reading today.
Churchill is remembered as a great man not only because he led Britain and the free world in the ultimate battle against tyranny from 1939-1945, but also because he understood and recognized both the Nazi threat from its inception in 1933, and the Stalinist imperialist threat in the immediate post-World War II years, as typified in his "Iron Curtain" speech from 1946:
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow. Athens alone-Greece with its immortal glories-is free to decide its future at an election under British, American and French observation. The Russian-dominated Polish Government has been encouraged to make enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany, and mass expulsions of millions of Germans on a scale grievous and undreamed-of are now taking place. The Communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern States of Europe, have been raised to pre-eminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control. Police governments are prevailing in nearly every case, and so far, except in Czechoslovakia [where the Czech Communists led a Hitler-esque coup in 1947], there is no true democracy.
Churchill was a man ahead of his time and the world has been poorer for his absence these last 40 years.
[Note: I identified Steven Hayward as affiliated with The Weekly Standard. I confused him with Stephen Hayes.]
At this link is the obituary of Sir Winston by Anthony Lewis in the January 24, 1965 NY Times. The second line of Lewis's obit summed up the man nicely: "The great figure who embodied man's will to resist tyranny passed into history this morning."
Steven Hayward wrote a piece six years ago for the Ashbrook Center on leadership and Churchill that bears re-reading today.
Churchill is remembered as a great man not only because he led Britain and the free world in the ultimate battle against tyranny from 1939-1945, but also because he understood and recognized both the Nazi threat from its inception in 1933, and the Stalinist imperialist threat in the immediate post-World War II years, as typified in his "Iron Curtain" speech from 1946:
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow. Athens alone-Greece with its immortal glories-is free to decide its future at an election under British, American and French observation. The Russian-dominated Polish Government has been encouraged to make enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany, and mass expulsions of millions of Germans on a scale grievous and undreamed-of are now taking place. The Communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern States of Europe, have been raised to pre-eminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control. Police governments are prevailing in nearly every case, and so far, except in Czechoslovakia [where the Czech Communists led a Hitler-esque coup in 1947], there is no true democracy.
Churchill was a man ahead of his time and the world has been poorer for his absence these last 40 years.
[Note: I identified Steven Hayward as affiliated with The Weekly Standard. I confused him with Stephen Hayes.]
Monday Morning Reading Material
Here's your initial list to print and enjoy at lunch, coffee break, wasting time at work, etc.:
First and foremost, Victor Davis Hanson says our efforts in Iraq have strengthened the US, not weakened it.
On Townhall.com, economist and columnist Amity Shlaes tells Lawrence Summers to act like a man.
Robert Novak, the ultimate insider, notes the concerns that conservatives have over Bush's second term appointments.
The Independent of London has the latest BS climate change scare, only that paper presents it as actual news, sans irony.
In Germany, police detained two suspected al-Qaeda members. No word on if the German government will pay welfare benefits to the detainees whilst they are in the clink.
And the Mossad says that Iran has just about reached the point where its nuclear program will need no outside help, thereby successfully completing its attempt to play the EU for fools.
First and foremost, Victor Davis Hanson says our efforts in Iraq have strengthened the US, not weakened it.
On Townhall.com, economist and columnist Amity Shlaes tells Lawrence Summers to act like a man.
Robert Novak, the ultimate insider, notes the concerns that conservatives have over Bush's second term appointments.
The Independent of London has the latest BS climate change scare, only that paper presents it as actual news, sans irony.
In Germany, police detained two suspected al-Qaeda members. No word on if the German government will pay welfare benefits to the detainees whilst they are in the clink.
And the Mossad says that Iran has just about reached the point where its nuclear program will need no outside help, thereby successfully completing its attempt to play the EU for fools.
Sunday, January 23, 2005
Bush the Worldbeater
Mark Steyn shows how middle Americans have more sense than Washingtonian solipsists and how George Bush is THE realist in government:
The other day David von Drehle of the Washington Post did a monster tour of what he called "The Red Sea" -- Bush country -- and went to almost painful lengths to eschew the condescension the coastal media elite usually apply to their rare anthropological ventures into the hinterland. But in the middle of his dispatch was this quote from Joyce Smith of Coalgate, Okla.: "When Kerry said he was for abortion and one-sex marriages, I just couldn't see our country being led by someone like that."
Von Drehle added: ''Later, I double-checked what Kerry had said on those subjects. During his campaign, he opposed same-sex marriage and said that abortion was a private matter.''
If the point is that Red Staters are ignorant, double- or even triple-checking John Kerry isn't the best way to demonstrate it. Insofar as I understand it, Kerry's view on abortion was that, while he passionately believes life begins at conception, he would never let his deeply held personal beliefs interfere with his legislative program. On gay marriage, likewise. That's why gay groups backed Kerry and why von Drehle's media buddies weren't running editorials warning that a Kerry presidency would end "a woman's right to choose": They understood his deeply passionately personally deep personal passionate beliefs were just an artful but meaningless formulation designed to get him through election season. Message: If Kerry's elected, abortions will continue and gay marriage will happen and he'll be cool with both. Joyce Smith understood that. Von Drehle seems vaguely resentful that she wasn't dumb enough to fall for the spin cooked up by Kerry's hairsplitters and enthusiastically promoted by his media cheerleaders.
There's a big lesson for the Democrats there that goes way beyond the merits of abortion or gay marriage. On Sept. 11, the world came unspun: There's no shame in acknowledging, as Condi Rice did last week, that previous policy -- Republican and Democrat -- toward the Middle East is wrong. But there's something silly and immature about a party that, from Kerry to Boxer to Byrd, can't get beyond spin, grandstanding and debater's points: Joyce Smith sees through it, even if David von Drehle thinks it's ingenious. If the president's speech yoked idealism and realism, that doesn't leave much for dissenting Dems except their own peculiar combination of cynicism and delusion.
The other day David von Drehle of the Washington Post did a monster tour of what he called "The Red Sea" -- Bush country -- and went to almost painful lengths to eschew the condescension the coastal media elite usually apply to their rare anthropological ventures into the hinterland. But in the middle of his dispatch was this quote from Joyce Smith of Coalgate, Okla.: "When Kerry said he was for abortion and one-sex marriages, I just couldn't see our country being led by someone like that."
Von Drehle added: ''Later, I double-checked what Kerry had said on those subjects. During his campaign, he opposed same-sex marriage and said that abortion was a private matter.''
If the point is that Red Staters are ignorant, double- or even triple-checking John Kerry isn't the best way to demonstrate it. Insofar as I understand it, Kerry's view on abortion was that, while he passionately believes life begins at conception, he would never let his deeply held personal beliefs interfere with his legislative program. On gay marriage, likewise. That's why gay groups backed Kerry and why von Drehle's media buddies weren't running editorials warning that a Kerry presidency would end "a woman's right to choose": They understood his deeply passionately personally deep personal passionate beliefs were just an artful but meaningless formulation designed to get him through election season. Message: If Kerry's elected, abortions will continue and gay marriage will happen and he'll be cool with both. Joyce Smith understood that. Von Drehle seems vaguely resentful that she wasn't dumb enough to fall for the spin cooked up by Kerry's hairsplitters and enthusiastically promoted by his media cheerleaders.
There's a big lesson for the Democrats there that goes way beyond the merits of abortion or gay marriage. On Sept. 11, the world came unspun: There's no shame in acknowledging, as Condi Rice did last week, that previous policy -- Republican and Democrat -- toward the Middle East is wrong. But there's something silly and immature about a party that, from Kerry to Boxer to Byrd, can't get beyond spin, grandstanding and debater's points: Joyce Smith sees through it, even if David von Drehle thinks it's ingenious. If the president's speech yoked idealism and realism, that doesn't leave much for dissenting Dems except their own peculiar combination of cynicism and delusion.
Yushchenko takes charge
Today Viktor Yushchenko took over as president of Ukraine. After his swearing-in ceremony before Ukraine's Parliament, he went to Kyiv's Independence Square. There, he addressed a crowd of his Orange Revolution acolytes directly, noting that Ukraine would be independent and would work toward integrating with Europe and the EU. Most notable, at Yushchenko's swearing-in, "[t]he presidents of seven countries were in attendance -- Poland, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia and Moldova -- all ex-communist states committed to European integration." That says it all.
Johnny Carson 1925-2005
THE King of late night, Johnny Carson, died earlier today. The link in the title will take you to the AP obituary.
Carson is the godfather of so many comedians that the list is without end. If a comedian made it from "stand-up" to time in "the chair" talking to the master, it would launch his or her career.
My parents watched Carson every night from the monologue through the first guest. His true heir is Letterman, who occasionally used jokes on his CBS Late Show with David Letterman that Carson would email him. No wonder PaMonk watches Letterman religiously.
Jeff Jarvis has a remembrance that resonates with folks of my generation here. And here's Carson's bio on the Museum of Broadcast Communications' website.
Carson is the godfather of so many comedians that the list is without end. If a comedian made it from "stand-up" to time in "the chair" talking to the master, it would launch his or her career.
My parents watched Carson every night from the monologue through the first guest. His true heir is Letterman, who occasionally used jokes on his CBS Late Show with David Letterman that Carson would email him. No wonder PaMonk watches Letterman religiously.
Jeff Jarvis has a remembrance that resonates with folks of my generation here. And here's Carson's bio on the Museum of Broadcast Communications' website.
Friday, January 21, 2005
Ukraine's Super Sunday
It's official, according to blogger Dan McMinn in Kyiv, Viktor Yushchenko will be inaugurated on Sunday, January 23 (scroll down a few posts). A huge victory for freedom, democracy, liberty and integrity in government.
And it may not have happened if Ukraine's intelligence agencies had not worked against outgoing president Leonid Kuchma's wishes, as recounted in this article:
While wet snow fell on the rally in Independence Square, an undercover colonel from the Security Service of Ukraine, or S.B.U., moved among the protesters' tents. He represented the successor agency to the K.G.B., but his mission, he said, was not against the protesters. It was to thwart the mobilizing troops. He warned opposition leaders that a crackdown was afoot.
Simultaneously, senior intelligence officials were madly working their secure telephones, in one instance cooperating with an army general to persuade the Interior Ministry to turn back.
The officials issued warnings, saying that using force against peaceful rallies was illegal and could lead to prosecution and that if ministry troops came to Kiev, the army and security services would defend civilians, said an opposition leader who witnessed some of the exchanges and Oleksander Galaka, head of the military's intelligence service, the G.U.R., who made some of the calls.
* * *
Ultimately, the intelligence agencies worked - usually in secret, sometimes in public, at times illegally - to block the fraudulent ascension of Mr. Yanukovich, whom several of the generals loathe. Directly and indirectly, their work supported Viktor A. Yushchenko, the Western-oriented candidate who is now the president-elect.
The KGB's successor worked in the service of political freedom. Wow.
And it may not have happened if Ukraine's intelligence agencies had not worked against outgoing president Leonid Kuchma's wishes, as recounted in this article:
While wet snow fell on the rally in Independence Square, an undercover colonel from the Security Service of Ukraine, or S.B.U., moved among the protesters' tents. He represented the successor agency to the K.G.B., but his mission, he said, was not against the protesters. It was to thwart the mobilizing troops. He warned opposition leaders that a crackdown was afoot.
Simultaneously, senior intelligence officials were madly working their secure telephones, in one instance cooperating with an army general to persuade the Interior Ministry to turn back.
The officials issued warnings, saying that using force against peaceful rallies was illegal and could lead to prosecution and that if ministry troops came to Kiev, the army and security services would defend civilians, said an opposition leader who witnessed some of the exchanges and Oleksander Galaka, head of the military's intelligence service, the G.U.R., who made some of the calls.
* * *
Ultimately, the intelligence agencies worked - usually in secret, sometimes in public, at times illegally - to block the fraudulent ascension of Mr. Yanukovich, whom several of the generals loathe. Directly and indirectly, their work supported Viktor A. Yushchenko, the Western-oriented candidate who is now the president-elect.
The KGB's successor worked in the service of political freedom. Wow.
Academic intimidation succeeds
The Harvard University president, Lawrence H. Summers, apologized personally on Thursday to a group of distinguished women professors as he battled to convince the university's faculty of his commitment to diversity after remarks suggesting that women may be innately less able to succeed in math and science careers.
Monk and I opined on this at length the other day. Summers' apology is an ill-considered decision and sets a lousy precedent for free speech in academia. Even though he said nothing wrong or inflammatory but challenged a conference simply with IDEAS, the ensuing uproar from ultra-left in academia and the People's Republic of Cambridge forced him to apologize. It is a disgrace that the president of one of the leading institutions of higher learning in the world can't discuss ideas freely in an academic, closed setting.
Should we regulate our speech based on who it might OFFEND??!!!?!?
And where are the legions of fair-minded academics who should have come out in support of Summers? [outside of Steven Pinker]
This crap makes this Harvard alumnus mad as hell. [though not surprised]
al-Taqiyya
Let me preface this by saying that no official determination of motive has been made by authorities -which includes the FBI- investigating the Jersey City quadruple slaying.
Jihadwatch has a disturbing revelation, that if true, could really fire tensions between Egyptian Muslims and Coptic Christians which have been simmering since the vicious murders.
Out of curiosity [and a little bit of journalistic obligation] I did just a little bit of research on al-taqiyya. Al-Islam.org explains:
According the rest of the article, al-taqiyya seems largely defensive in nature and is essentially a doctrine where under duress and in periods of danger and great need Muslims are allowed dissemble and do other things like eat dead meat from animals and take alcohol.
So if Jihadwatch is right what these butchers did was NOT al-taqiyya but a vicious bastardization of it where trust is used to betray and murder. A damned, bloody shame in a community where Christians and Muslims were getting along.
HT: LGF
Jihadwatch has a disturbing revelation, that if true, could really fire tensions between Egyptian Muslims and Coptic Christians which have been simmering since the vicious murders.
A close friend of Hossam Armanious, the Coptic Christian who was brutally murdered in New Jersey along with his family, is the source of this information, which comes to you exclusively from Jihad Watch:
The Armanious family had inspired several Muslims to convert to Christianity — or thought they had. These converts were actually practicing taqiyya, or religious deception, pretending to be friends of these Christians in order to strengthen themselves against them, as in Qur'an 3:28: "Let believers not make friends with infidels in preference to the faithful -- he that does this has nothing to hope for from Allah -- except in self-defense."
It was these "converts" who knocked on the door of the Armanious home. Of course, the family, not suspecting the deception, was happy to see the "converted" men and willingly let them in to their home. That's why there was no sign of forced entry. Then the "converted" Muslims did their grisly work.
Out of curiosity [and a little bit of journalistic obligation] I did just a little bit of research on al-taqiyya. Al-Islam.org explains:
The word "al-Taqiyya" literally means: "Concealing or disguising one's
beliefs, convictions, ideas, feelings, opinions, and/or strategies at a
time of eminent danger, whether now or later in time, to save oneself from
physical and/or mental injury." A one-word translation would be
"Dissimulation."
According the rest of the article, al-taqiyya seems largely defensive in nature and is essentially a doctrine where under duress and in periods of danger and great need Muslims are allowed dissemble and do other things like eat dead meat from animals and take alcohol.
So if Jihadwatch is right what these butchers did was NOT al-taqiyya but a vicious bastardization of it where trust is used to betray and murder. A damned, bloody shame in a community where Christians and Muslims were getting along.
HT: LGF
EU narcissism in extremis
The link above will take you to the single most solipsistic, baseless, ignorant and arrantly stupid column I've seen in some time. It is a proposal to "save Student Ryan" by the EUrophilic Franck Biancheri, Director of Studies and Strategy at the foundation Europe 2020 and President of the transatlantic organisation TIESweb. Here is the proposal:
Jean Monnet Transatlantic Grants programme
Fifty years ago, the US pioneered large-scale exchange programmes designed to open young generations’ and future elites’ minds (in particular those of post-war Europeans) and to promote the US image among these categories of age. Today it is the Europeans’ turn to 'return the favour' and launch the 'Jean Monnet Transatlantic Grants' programme.
* * *
The programme should reach 20,000 young Americans per year for at least five years (i.e. 100,000 by the end of the decade) for a significant generational impact; this would imply a 50 million euro budget per year.
Here are the underlying reasons, with corrections to Biancheri's incorrect premises:
. . . the exposure of young Americans to international topics in primary and secondary education has practically disappeared, resulting in the emergence of entire generations of US citizens totally unaware of the rest of the world.
Yeah, like the European history subject I had in high school, the world history requirement I had, and all that American history teaching that involves what outside nations did (or tried to do) to us.
This trend is strengthened by the parochialism of the US media.
Like the Georgia-focused CNN and the US only coverage of Fox News World, right?
Such trends affect American relations with all other continents; but it particularly affects transatlantic relations that used to be based upon large-scale population exchanges between the two shores of the ocean, enabling our visions of the world and of the future to be shared.
Uh, the largest-scale population outflows from the US came in late 1917 when US troops arrived in France and 1943 when US troops arrived in Italy. Both times to help save Europe from itself. The outflows from Europe were in the late 1800s after the Irish potato famine, early 1900s as the Southern and Eastern European countries descended into economic despair, mid-1930s as people fled Eastern European despotism and late 1940s as people fled the torn-down husks that dotted the European landscape courtesy of the fascists that Europe (as a whole) enabled. Thanks to the Marshall Plan, Europe was put on solid financial footing, saw its economies grow and now has decent standards of living in most Western European countries and an increasing number of Eastern European nations.
Having had the opportunity to analyse this trend since 1991, I have noticed year after year the damage to the younger generations of Americans who no longer have, so to speak, the intellectual tools to understand the outer world.
Evidence, please. Understand = "accept horrendous deficiencies thereof" in this chap's parlance.
Let’s be aware of the fact that, in the US, such a decision coming from the EU would raise some very positive reactions among the academic and diplomatic spheres, students, multinational companies, and citizen networks, who are trying to fight against the decline of international education.
Really? Most studies show that students are more conservative now than they were 10 years ago and their parents, as shown by the recent election results, probably won't like a bunch of Eurocrats inculcating the politics of collective insecurity leavened by transnational rivalry that embodies the EU.
Poor Franck, he's been so deep in his EUrocentric cocoon for so long, he lacks the intellectual tools to be persuasive and to handle dealing with Americans.
Jean Monnet Transatlantic Grants programme
Fifty years ago, the US pioneered large-scale exchange programmes designed to open young generations’ and future elites’ minds (in particular those of post-war Europeans) and to promote the US image among these categories of age. Today it is the Europeans’ turn to 'return the favour' and launch the 'Jean Monnet Transatlantic Grants' programme.
* * *
The programme should reach 20,000 young Americans per year for at least five years (i.e. 100,000 by the end of the decade) for a significant generational impact; this would imply a 50 million euro budget per year.
Here are the underlying reasons, with corrections to Biancheri's incorrect premises:
. . . the exposure of young Americans to international topics in primary and secondary education has practically disappeared, resulting in the emergence of entire generations of US citizens totally unaware of the rest of the world.
Yeah, like the European history subject I had in high school, the world history requirement I had, and all that American history teaching that involves what outside nations did (or tried to do) to us.
This trend is strengthened by the parochialism of the US media.
Like the Georgia-focused CNN and the US only coverage of Fox News World, right?
Such trends affect American relations with all other continents; but it particularly affects transatlantic relations that used to be based upon large-scale population exchanges between the two shores of the ocean, enabling our visions of the world and of the future to be shared.
Uh, the largest-scale population outflows from the US came in late 1917 when US troops arrived in France and 1943 when US troops arrived in Italy. Both times to help save Europe from itself. The outflows from Europe were in the late 1800s after the Irish potato famine, early 1900s as the Southern and Eastern European countries descended into economic despair, mid-1930s as people fled Eastern European despotism and late 1940s as people fled the torn-down husks that dotted the European landscape courtesy of the fascists that Europe (as a whole) enabled. Thanks to the Marshall Plan, Europe was put on solid financial footing, saw its economies grow and now has decent standards of living in most Western European countries and an increasing number of Eastern European nations.
Having had the opportunity to analyse this trend since 1991, I have noticed year after year the damage to the younger generations of Americans who no longer have, so to speak, the intellectual tools to understand the outer world.
Evidence, please. Understand = "accept horrendous deficiencies thereof" in this chap's parlance.
Let’s be aware of the fact that, in the US, such a decision coming from the EU would raise some very positive reactions among the academic and diplomatic spheres, students, multinational companies, and citizen networks, who are trying to fight against the decline of international education.
Really? Most studies show that students are more conservative now than they were 10 years ago and their parents, as shown by the recent election results, probably won't like a bunch of Eurocrats inculcating the politics of collective insecurity leavened by transnational rivalry that embodies the EU.
Poor Franck, he's been so deep in his EUrocentric cocoon for so long, he lacks the intellectual tools to be persuasive and to handle dealing with Americans.
Milwaukee = Chicago II
More evidence that Milwaukee is the new Chicago when it comes to ineligible voters casting their ballots:
I like how the Milwaukee commission investigating the Milwaukee vote fraud "includes Lisa Artison, executive director of the Election Commission." That's like having Mary Mapes or Dan Rather on the Thornburgh-Boccardi investigation panel or Jamie Gorelick on the 9-11 Commission (oh wait, that happened). And Artison (rhymes with "partisan," natch) has previously stated that those calling for an investigation have an agenda at work: "'I think clearly there is an agenda at work here,'" Artison said of criticism she has faced. "'Our agenda is conducting elections within the law.'"
Earth to Ms. Artison: if you had more than 8,000 fraudulent ballots cast that you allowed to be counted, then you didn't conduct the election within the law.
Yeesh.
HT: the Cap'n.
A [Milwaukee] Journal Sentinel review shows that the city's records list 269,212 people - those with confirmed addresses or who could be sent verification cards - as voting, while 277,535 ballots were cast. That suggests a gap of 8,323 voters who cannot be sent the cards.
I like how the Milwaukee commission investigating the Milwaukee vote fraud "includes Lisa Artison, executive director of the Election Commission." That's like having Mary Mapes or Dan Rather on the Thornburgh-Boccardi investigation panel or Jamie Gorelick on the 9-11 Commission (oh wait, that happened). And Artison (rhymes with "partisan," natch) has previously stated that those calling for an investigation have an agenda at work: "'I think clearly there is an agenda at work here,'" Artison said of criticism she has faced. "'Our agenda is conducting elections within the law.'"
Earth to Ms. Artison: if you had more than 8,000 fraudulent ballots cast that you allowed to be counted, then you didn't conduct the election within the law.
Yeesh.
HT: the Cap'n.
Must read of the day
Judge Robert Bork (and David Rivkin) on the judiciary's role in the war on terrorists.
Left v. Right = Analysis of the day
Stanley Kurtz puts the Left v. Right world view debate in excellent focus today in an excellent post on National Review's The Corner (link in title). He compares two Washington Post columns appearing in today's paper. I've read the E.J. Dionne column, I'll read the Charles Krauthammer one at lunch. Kurtz's analysis of Dionne's column is dead-on. Here's what Kurtz said about Dionne, the Democrats and Kurtz's own political changes:
I turned conservative during the Reagan era, after a visit to the Soviet Union. Will the Democrats take up Peter Beinart's suggestion by purging their Michael Moore's and turning hawkish? The answer is in this morning's Washington Post. Just have a look at E. J. Dionne's response to the president's inaugural address. Dionne is a partisan liberal, but he's also a measured, thoughtful, at times even moderate commentator who represents the Democratic Party mainstream at its best. Yet as far as Dionne is concerned, 9/11 was a tragic but passing event that should not be allowed to redefine American politics, much less America's role in the word. Dionne sees 9/11, not as a world-changing moment, but as a tool misused by Republicans for political advantage. Beinart [editor of The New Republic -- TKM] thinks 9/11 changed the world. That's why Beinart believes the Democratic Party has to change itself in response. Dionne assumes that the Democrats cannot, will not, and should not change. He blames the Republicans for making it seem as though Democrats ought to change. If this is how even a reasonable mainstream Democrat like Dionne sees things, you can bet that Beinart's purge will never happen.
My Soviet visit forced me to confront the reality and danger of the dictatorship we faced. When I got home, I noticed that President Reagan kept talking about the Soviets, while liberals ignored the Soviet Union and were preoccupied instead with Reagan's hawkishness and supposed overreach. The more things change... Anything can happen in politics, but the Democrats seem doomed to be left behind. They cannot change, although the world clearly has.
Thursday, January 20, 2005
Never to Forget
On January 20, 1942, the Nazi Gestapo head Reinhard Heydrich chaired a conference at Wannsee House on a lake outside Berlin. The now-infamous Wannsee Conference was not the origin of the Nazis' plans to annihilate European Jewry. Instead, as Stephen Lehrer writes in Wannsee House and the Holocaust, the Conference streamlined the operations of the Nazi death machine: "By the time of the Wannsee Conference...the Einsatz groups, operating behind the army frontlines, had murdered more than half a million people. Thus there was no need of a decision at the conference to commit mass murder. The Wannsee Conference facilitated the killing."
On 9 February, 1942, 20 days after Wannsee, Hitler, in a radio broadcast, said: "The Jews will be liquidated for at least a thousand years." (Sources: here, citing Cornwell, J., Hitler’s Pope).
The Wannsee minutes and protocols -- i.e., the description of the conference and its plan of action -- are here. Heydrich is the only Nazi leader that the Allies successfully targeted for assassination (bless the Czechs). Other participants at the conference included Heinrich Mueller (head of the Nazi Secret Political Police, never captured) and Adolf Eichmann (head of the Final Solution, captured by the Mossad in Buenos Aires and executed in Israel).
Never to Forget.
On 9 February, 1942, 20 days after Wannsee, Hitler, in a radio broadcast, said: "The Jews will be liquidated for at least a thousand years." (Sources: here, citing Cornwell, J., Hitler’s Pope).
The Wannsee minutes and protocols -- i.e., the description of the conference and its plan of action -- are here. Heydrich is the only Nazi leader that the Allies successfully targeted for assassination (bless the Czechs). Other participants at the conference included Heinrich Mueller (head of the Nazi Secret Political Police, never captured) and Adolf Eichmann (head of the Final Solution, captured by the Mossad in Buenos Aires and executed in Israel).
Never to Forget.
Travels with The Monk
Two quick notes while I have a light day at work.
First, I went to New Orleans two weeks ago for business and met Oyster from Your Right Hand Thief, our so-called liberal "ombudsman". You'll see his name pop up in the comments every so often. We hung out at the New Orleans dining institution, Mother's, then grabbed drinks. Nice guy with cute baby girl who thankfully resembles the momma.
Second, Monkette2B and I went to Las Vegas last weekend -- what a freak show that place is. Vegas is simply not a normal human habitation outpost. There is wasteland and wasteland, tract houses, McMansions, a business district of some sort and then there' THE STRIP. I'd not been to Vegas in decades, so this was all new to me. But the hotels there are f-ing HUGE. Of the 20 largest hotels in the world (by # of rooms), 17 are on the Las Vegas Strip. The hotels are so large that the 2100+ room New York, New York hotel doesn't even rank. We stayed in the world's #3, the Luxor -- the freaky pyramid shaped monstrosity.
Vegas is a playground for adults: gambling, shows, more gambling, booze, and various entertainments in each hotel on the Strip (each of which is the size of a mini-mall) ranging from Great Cats at the Mirage (home of Siegfried and Roy) to a rollercoaster at NYNY to art museums at the Luxor, Venetian (Guggenheim) and Bellagio (MFA Boston outpost). Everything is overpriced and the food is substandard such that the price/quality ratio is decidedly worse than even your usual tourist traps like the various Caribbean destinations. All that said, it's certainly interesting -- like an interactive museum of American excesses. The Monk took it easy on everything but the booze and only lost about $60, and we also saw the Blue Man Group show. It's great if you've not seen one before, but it's VERY similar to the various other Blue Man Group shows throughout the country (we expected sizeable differences, not so).
First, I went to New Orleans two weeks ago for business and met Oyster from Your Right Hand Thief, our so-called liberal "ombudsman". You'll see his name pop up in the comments every so often. We hung out at the New Orleans dining institution, Mother's, then grabbed drinks. Nice guy with cute baby girl who thankfully resembles the momma.
Second, Monkette2B and I went to Las Vegas last weekend -- what a freak show that place is. Vegas is simply not a normal human habitation outpost. There is wasteland and wasteland, tract houses, McMansions, a business district of some sort and then there' THE STRIP. I'd not been to Vegas in decades, so this was all new to me. But the hotels there are f-ing HUGE. Of the 20 largest hotels in the world (by # of rooms), 17 are on the Las Vegas Strip. The hotels are so large that the 2100+ room New York, New York hotel doesn't even rank. We stayed in the world's #3, the Luxor -- the freaky pyramid shaped monstrosity.
Vegas is a playground for adults: gambling, shows, more gambling, booze, and various entertainments in each hotel on the Strip (each of which is the size of a mini-mall) ranging from Great Cats at the Mirage (home of Siegfried and Roy) to a rollercoaster at NYNY to art museums at the Luxor, Venetian (Guggenheim) and Bellagio (MFA Boston outpost). Everything is overpriced and the food is substandard such that the price/quality ratio is decidedly worse than even your usual tourist traps like the various Caribbean destinations. All that said, it's certainly interesting -- like an interactive museum of American excesses. The Monk took it easy on everything but the booze and only lost about $60, and we also saw the Blue Man Group show. It's great if you've not seen one before, but it's VERY similar to the various other Blue Man Group shows throughout the country (we expected sizeable differences, not so).
Light at the end of the fetid academic tunnel
OpinionJournal had an excellent and very long piece last week on how conservatives are finally making inroads into that great bastion of PC, post-modernism and appeasement, the American university. The first few paragraphs, to whet your appetite:
Throughout 2003 and into 2004, a surge of protests roiled American campuses. You probably think the kids were agitating against war in Iraq, right? Well, no. Students at UCLA, Michigan and many other schools were sponsoring bake sales to protest . . . affirmative action. For white students and faculty, a cookie cost (depending on the school) $1; blacks and Hispanics could buy one for a lot less.
The principle, the protesters observed, was just that governing university admission practices: rewarding people differently based on race. Indignant school officials charged the bake-sale organizers with "creating a hostile climate" for minority students, oblivious to the incoherence of their position. On what grounds could they favor race preferences in one area (admissions) and condemn them in the other (selling cookies) as racist? Several schools banned the sales, on flimsy pretexts, such as the organizers' lack of school food permits.
The protests shocked the mainstream press, but to close observers of America's college scene lately they came as no surprise. For decades, conservative critics have bemoaned academe's monolithically liberal culture. Parents, critics note, spend fortunes to send their kids to top colleges, and then watch helplessly as the schools cram them with a diet of politically correct leftism often wholly opposed to mom and dad's own values.
But the left's long dominion over the university--the last place on earth that lefty power would break up, conservatives believed--is showing its first signs of weakening. The change isn't coming from the schools' faculty lounges and administrative offices, of course. It's coming from self-organizing right-of-center students and several innovative outside groups working to bypass the academy's elite gatekeepers.
Bits o' Wisdom
I like Thomas Friedman from the NYTimes opinion section. He tends to be 'wettish' in the Thatcherian sense but I think he writes well, seems to get around a bit (writing from Paris today) and, from time to time, has interesting perspectives. He had a worthwhile column today.
The decline of the Tories is tragic. There's no heir of Thatcher just a party becoming increasingly marginalized because they've seemingly abdicated every message other than "Not Labour".
A ringing endorsement of American exceptionalism if I've ever heard one.
Remarkable. I don't expect the MSM or the Left to be trumpeting this though. Just like they don't care about PA oppressing Palestinians.
If you took all three major parties in Britain - Labor, Liberals and Conservatives - "their views on God, guns, gays, the death penalty, national health care and the environment would all fit somewhere inside the Democratic Party," said James Rubin, the Clinton State Department spokesman, who works in London. "That's why I get along with all three parties here. They're all Democrats!"
The decline of the Tories is tragic. There's no heir of Thatcher just a party becoming increasingly marginalized because they've seemingly abdicated every message other than "Not Labour".
"Europeans were convinced that Kerry had won on election night and were telling themselves that they knew all along that Americans were not all that bad - and then suddenly, as the truth emerged, there was a feeling of slow resignation: 'Oh well, we've been dreaming,' " said Dominique Moisi, one of France's top foreign policy analysts. "In fact, real America is moving away from us. We don't share the same values. ... In France it was a very emotional issue. It was as if Americans were voting for the president of France as much as for president of the United States."
The one concrete result of the U.S. election will probably be to reinforce Europe's focus on its own efforts to build a United States of Europe, and to further play down the trans-Atlantic alliance. "When it comes to emotions, the re-election of Bush has reinforced the feeling of alienation between Europe and the U.S.," Mr. Moisi said. "It is not that we are so much against America, it is that we cannot understand the evolution of that country. ... This election has weakened the concept of 'the West.' "
A ringing endorsement of American exceptionalism if I've ever heard one.
Funnily enough, the one country on this side of the ocean that would have elected Mr. Bush is not in Europe, but the Middle East: it's Iran, where many young people apparently hunger for Mr. Bush to remove their despotic leaders, the way he did in Iraq.
An Oxford student who had just returned from research in Iran told me that young Iranians were "loving anything their government hates," such as Mr. Bush, "and hating anything their government loves." Tehran is festooned in "Down With America" graffiti, the student said, but when he tried to take pictures of it, the Iranian students he was with urged him not to. They said it was just put there by their government and was not how most Iranians felt.
Iran, he said, is the ultimate "red state." Go figure.
Remarkable. I don't expect the MSM or the Left to be trumpeting this though. Just like they don't care about PA oppressing Palestinians.
Inauguration Speech
The Monk watched the speech and listened to it: a tremendous amount of it dedicated to America's place in the world and America as freedom's champion. This is both Wilsonian (democracy and world engagement) and Reaganesque (the "Shining City on a Hill" that is a beacon to mankind). Bush noted the position of America today, reiterated the need for freedom and democracy to flourish throughout the world, rejected the notion that those living under tyranny do not want to be free, pledged solidarity with democratic dissidents worldwide (that'll cheer up the gulag victims in Cuba and Burma) and decried the "Holiday from History" that the US took after the Cold War ended.
The delivery was a bit stiff, but the importance of the message is enormous. Here is Victor Davis Hanson's reaction:
The delivery was a bit stiff, but the importance of the message is enormous. Here is Victor Davis Hanson's reaction:
This is the first time that an American president has committed the United States to side with democratic reformers worldwide. The end of the cold war has allowed us such parameters, but the American people also should be aware of the hard and necessary decisions entailed in such idealism that go way beyond the easy rhetoric of calling for change in Cuba, Syria, or Iran-distancing ourselves from the Saudi Royal Family, pressuring the Mubarak dynasty to hold real elections, hoping that a Pakistan can liberalize without becoming a theocracy, and navigating with Putin in matters of the former Soviet republics, all the while pressuring nuclear China, swaggering with cash and confidence, to allow its citizens real liberty. I wholeheartedly endorse the president's historic stance, but also accept that we live in an Orwellian world, where, for example, the liberal-talking Europeans are reactionary -- [ ] realists who trade with anyone who pays and appease anyone who has arms -- confident in their culture's ability always to package that abject realpolitik in the highest utopian rhetoric. But nonetheless the president has formally declared that we at least will be on the right side of history and thus we have to let his critics sort of their own moral calculus.
Happy Inauguration Day!!!!!
It's January 20 in the year after a leap-year and that means Inauguration Day. Today is the Second Inauguration of the 43rd President of the United States, George Walker Bush. And a fine day it is.
Smile conservatives and rejoice! There is hope for this country for the next four years: we have a man of principle and character in the White House, not a Carter-lite stealth socialist liberal whose greatest talent is marrying rich women. There is possibility in this term: an unfettered victory plus the power of the bully pulpit can allow the President to (1) change our sclerotic Social Security plan so that people my age can actually benefit from the thousands of dollars they each sink into the system every year, (2) strengthen our winning hand in the war on terrorists, (3) appoint multiple Supreme Court justices who will have the strength and intelligence to turn back the tide of jurisprudential rubbish that has swamped our courts. Those would be the three things I want from this presidential term.
So enjoy. We got our man four more years to govern. Let's hope he does so wisely.
Smile conservatives and rejoice! There is hope for this country for the next four years: we have a man of principle and character in the White House, not a Carter-lite stealth socialist liberal whose greatest talent is marrying rich women. There is possibility in this term: an unfettered victory plus the power of the bully pulpit can allow the President to (1) change our sclerotic Social Security plan so that people my age can actually benefit from the thousands of dollars they each sink into the system every year, (2) strengthen our winning hand in the war on terrorists, (3) appoint multiple Supreme Court justices who will have the strength and intelligence to turn back the tide of jurisprudential rubbish that has swamped our courts. Those would be the three things I want from this presidential term.
So enjoy. We got our man four more years to govern. Let's hope he does so wisely.
The EU's impending collapse?
The CIA has this outlook on the prospects for the EU:
Given the CIA's uncanny accuracy with regard to Muslim terrorism and the inner workings of Iraq, the EU may take this report as a clean bill of health. But the CIA tends to know our "allies" better than it knows our enemies . . .
In a devastating indictment of EU economic prospects, the report warns: "The current EU welfare state is unsustainable and the lack of any economic revitalisation could lead to the splintering or, at worst, disintegration of the EU, undermining its ambitions to play a heavyweight international role."
It adds that the EU’s economic growth rate is dragged down by Germany and its restrictive labour laws. Reforms there - and in France and Italy to lesser extents - remain key to whether the EU as a whole can break out of its "slow-growth pattern".
Reflecting growing fears in the US that the pain of any proper reform would be too much to bear, the report adds that the experts it consulted "are dubious that the present political leadership is prepared to make even this partial break, believing a looming budgetary crisis in the next five years would be the more likely trigger for reform".
The EU is also set for a looming demographic crisis because of a drop in birth rates and increased longevity, with devastating economic consequences.
The report says: "Either European countries adapt their workforces, reform their social welfare, education and tax systems, and accommodate growing immigrant populations [chiefly from Muslim countries] or they face a period of protracted economic stasis."
As a result of the increased immigration needed, the report predicts that Europe’s Muslim population is set to increase from around 13% today to between 22% and 37% of the population by 2025, potentially triggering tensions.
Given the CIA's uncanny accuracy with regard to Muslim terrorism and the inner workings of Iraq, the EU may take this report as a clean bill of health. But the CIA tends to know our "allies" better than it knows our enemies . . .
Ghoul Journalism at ABC News
The US media: it really doesn't get any lower than this:
Jan. 19, 2005 — For a possible Inauguration Day story on ABC News, we are trying to find out if there any military funerals for Iraq war casualties scheduled for Thursday, Jan. 20.
If you know of a funeral and whether the family might be willing to talk to ABC News, please fill out the form below:
**************************
See our original post on the media's Ghoul Journalism.
Technology upgrades: Calling Microsoft
Streaming video needs improvement. At work I have a superfast T1 connection and a decent computer, but MSNBC.com's video stream of the inauguration festivities was choppy and FoxNews.com's video never connected (CNN required payola). So I popped on my boss's TV that still resides in my office.
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
Still going -- the "resigned" CBS execs
Seems that every once in a long while, actual information gets through Keith Olbermann's tinfoil hat. Today's news: the three CBS execs asked to resign in the wake of Memogate are still working there and fighting their "firings". So the number of heads rolling after the Thornburgh-Boccardi report's issuance stands at one, not four.
Courtesy: polipundit.com.
Courtesy: polipundit.com.
Vaguely unethical
Thailand was absolutely hammered by the tsunami last month. But the EU said it will not relieve tariffs on Thai shrimp (Thailand's major fishing industry) unless the Thai purchase 6 of the uberjumbo Airbus A380s -- a cost of 780,000,000GBP or about $1.48 billion. Thai shrimp ("prawns" in the UK) are taxed at a rate of 12%.
And the US? Well, we have not demanded a massive airplane purchase, but US tariffs on Thai shrimp are 97% because the US is "protecting" its shrimp-catching industry from the immeasurably more efficient Thai shrimpers.
And the US? Well, we have not demanded a massive airplane purchase, but US tariffs on Thai shrimp are 97% because the US is "protecting" its shrimp-catching industry from the immeasurably more efficient Thai shrimpers.
Will Nancy Hopkins please SHUT UP
At the moment the two most emailed articles from the NYTimes are:
1. Harvard Chief Defends His Talk on Women
2. No Break In Storm Over Harvard President's Words
Lawrence H. Summers, President of Harvard University, made certain comments at an economics conference on Friday that has sparked outrage among the truly insipid and obtuse post-modern gender knuckleheads in academia. According to Nancy Hopkins, professor of biology at MIT, -as reported by the Boston Globe- she had to get up and leave in the middle of the comments for fear she would have "blacked out or thrown up" otherwise.
Exactly what Summers said isn't available but what he said isn't in dispute. What has caused this ridiculous furor was his audacity to bring up an argument being studied in academia today on women in math and science. Note, not only did Summers note that he was referring to an argument he prefaced it several times with "I am here to provoke you" and after the comments said "I hope this argument is proven to be INCORRECT." [emphasis mine]
From the NYTimes:
From the Harvard Crimson:
Where's the travesty? But according to Nancy Hopkins, "When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn't breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill," Dr. Hopkins said. "Let's not forget that people used to say that women couldn't drive an automobile." Denice D. Denton, the chancellor designate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, questioned Dr. Summers sharply during the conference, saying she needed to "speak truth to power." [What in heaven's name is 'speak truth to power'?!]
Jonah Goldberg at NRO has done some research on Nancy Hopkins.
This is worse than much ado about nothing. This is an example of what's wrong with academia today where faculties and administratoins are overwhelmingly liberal and speech is free as long as its PC. This is intellectual intimidation at its worst.
[The Monk adds:]
Indeed, Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker ripped the idiocy underlying Hopkins' antics in an interview with the Harvard Crimson:
Recognize that last part? That's the marketplace of ideas concept, aka academic freedom in the university context, upon which free inquiry, learning and knowledge depend. Pinker's right because, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes set forth in Abrams v. U.S. (emphases added):
1. Harvard Chief Defends His Talk on Women
2. No Break In Storm Over Harvard President's Words
Lawrence H. Summers, President of Harvard University, made certain comments at an economics conference on Friday that has sparked outrage among the truly insipid and obtuse post-modern gender knuckleheads in academia. According to Nancy Hopkins, professor of biology at MIT, -as reported by the Boston Globe- she had to get up and leave in the middle of the comments for fear she would have "blacked out or thrown up" otherwise.
Exactly what Summers said isn't available but what he said isn't in dispute. What has caused this ridiculous furor was his audacity to bring up an argument being studied in academia today on women in math and science. Note, not only did Summers note that he was referring to an argument he prefaced it several times with "I am here to provoke you" and after the comments said "I hope this argument is proven to be INCORRECT." [emphasis mine]
From the NYTimes:
About 50 academics from across the nation, many of them economists, participated in the conference, "Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce: Women, Underrepresented Minorities, and their S. & E. Careers." Dr. Summers arrived after a morning session and addressed a working lunch, speaking without notes. No transcript was made because the conference was designed to be off-the-record so that participants could speak candidly without fear of public misunderstanding or disclosure later.
In his presentation, Dr. Summers addressed the question of why so few women were on math and engineering faculties at top research universities.
"I began by saying that the whole issue of gender equality was profoundly important and that we are taking major steps at Harvard to combat passive discrimination," he recalled in yesterday's interview. "Then I wanted to add some provocation to what I understand to be basically a social science discussion."
He discussed several factors that could help explain the underrepresentation of women. The first factor, he said, according to several participants, was that top positions on university math and engineering faculties require extraordinary commitments of time and energy, with many professors working 80-hour weeks in the same punishing schedules pursued by top lawyers, bankers and business executives. Few married women with children are willing to accept such sacrifices, he said.
In citing a second factor, Dr. Summers cited research showing that more high school boys than girls tend to score at very high and very low levels on standardized math tests, and that it was important to consider the possibility that such differences may stem from biological differences between the sexes.
From the Harvard Crimson:
...Summers referred repeatedly to the work of University of Michigan sociologist Yu Xie and his University of California-Davis colleague Kimberlee A. Shauman, whose analysis of achievement test results shows a higher degree of variance in scores among men than among women. While males and females posted similar average scores, males were more likely to fall at the higher and lower ends of the distribution. . .
Summers suggested that behavioral genetics could partially explain this phenomenon. He stressed that this hypothesis required further research, and he hoped it would turn out to be incorrect. But by that point Hopkins, who last year was inducted into the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, had left the conference room...
Where's the travesty? But according to Nancy Hopkins, "When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn't breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill," Dr. Hopkins said. "Let's not forget that people used to say that women couldn't drive an automobile." Denice D. Denton, the chancellor designate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, questioned Dr. Summers sharply during the conference, saying she needed to "speak truth to power." [What in heaven's name is 'speak truth to power'?!]
Jonah Goldberg at NRO has done some research on Nancy Hopkins.
Hopkins made a name for herself a few years ago by whining incessantly about gender discrimination at MIT. Indeed, she complained so much that she was able to finagle the chairmanship (sorry, the chairpersonship) of a committee tasked with finding discrimination at MIT. Shockingly, Hopkins found discrimination! Her report made her a hero in the pages of the New York Times, which dubbed her a "reluctant feminist" in the headline of its gushing profile of her.
The report, which emphasized the feelings of anonymous female professors, found that discrimination manifested itself in a "stealth-like" way at MIT — which is generally PC code for "I'm not going to provide any evidence." The supposedly convincing evidence was kept secret, while the official report explained: "Discrimination consists of a pattern of powerful but unrecognized assumptions. . . Once you 'get it,' it seems almost obvious."
Indeed.
This is perfectly consistent with Hopkins's current schtick . . . In the past, women used to claim that vulgar language would cause them to grow ill or faint. Now feminists like Hopkins use the same tactic to silence ideologically unacceptable ideas and to intimidate the intellectually curious. That's the stereotype Hopkins is reinforcing: that feminists and the Left are pro-science and pro-scholarship as long as they already agree with the conclusions.
This is worse than much ado about nothing. This is an example of what's wrong with academia today where faculties and administratoins are overwhelmingly liberal and speech is free as long as its PC. This is intellectual intimidation at its worst.
[The Monk adds:]
Indeed, Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker ripped the idiocy underlying Hopkins' antics in an interview with the Harvard Crimson:
CRIMSON: From what psychologists know, is there ample evidence to support the hypothesis that a difference in “innate ability” accounts for the under-representation of women on science faculties?
PINKER: First, let’s be clear what the hypothesis is—every one of Summers’ critics has misunderstood it. The hypothesis is, first, that the statistical distributions of men’s and women’s quantitative and spatial abilities are not identical—that the average for men may be a bit higher than the average for women, and that the variance for men might be a bit higher than the variance for women (both implying that there would be a slightly higher proportion of men at the high end of the scale). It does not mean that all men are better at quantitative abilities than all women! That’s why it would be immoral and illogical to discriminate against individual women even if it were shown that some of the statistidcal differences were innate.
Second, the hypothesis is that differences in abilities might be one out of several factors that explain differences in the statistical representation of men and women in various professions. It does not mean that it is the only factor. . .
CRIMSON: Were President Summers’ remarks within the pale of legitimate academic discourse?
PINKER: Good grief, shouldn’t everything be within the pale of legitimate academic discourse, as long as it is presented with some degree of rigor? That’s the difference between a university and a madrassa.
* * *
CRIMSON: Finally, did you personally find President Summers’ remarks (or what you’ve heard/read of them) to be offensive?
PINKER: Look, the truth cannot be offensive. Perhaps the hypothesis is wrong, but how would we ever find out whether it is wrong if it is “offensive” even to consider it? People who storm out of a meeting at the mention of a hypothesis, or declare it taboo or offensive without providing arguments or evidence, don’t get the concept of a university or free inquiry.
Recognize that last part? That's the marketplace of ideas concept, aka academic freedom in the university context, upon which free inquiry, learning and knowledge depend. Pinker's right because, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes set forth in Abrams v. U.S. (emphases added):
Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical. If you have no doubt of your premises or your power and want a certain result with all your heart you naturally express your wishes in law and sweep away all opposition. To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you do not care whole heartedly for the result, or that you doubt either your power or your premises. But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas-that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.
Do Not Miss
Click the link in the title, it's a page with more than 50 cartoons by comic strip writers and political cartoonists on the CBS fake-documents scandal. Courtesy Ratherbiased.com.
Milwaukee, it's the new Chicago
In 1960, the dead voted en masse in Cook County, Illinois, helping provide the statewide margin of victory that John F. Kennedy needed to win the state.
In 2000 and 2004, ghosts of another variety voted in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Enough known ghosts voted such that they establish the majority of the vote gap between the Democratic Presidential Candidate and George W. Bush. Combined with Wisconsin's statewide Fraudulent Vote Enabling Act (aka Same Day Registration law, see here for a link to a description of the statute), and the unverifiable frauds in other cities (Madison, Racine, etc.), it seems Wisconsin is the heartland's own version of Ukraine, circa November 2004. And this doesn't even count the dirty tricks by Dems, such as slashing tires of Republican Get Out the Vote vans.
Remember, in 2000 Gore activists were giving out food and other perquisites (cigarettes, booze) for homeless people to go to the polls in Milwaukee and vote for RobotMan. The unverifiable same-day registrants in Milwaukee exceeded Gore's total victory margin in the state -- that reeks of fraud.
In both 2000 and 2004, the number of same-day voting registrants were 30% or more of the total vote count in Milwaukee. Wisconsin does not throw voters off the rolls from one presidential election to the next, so something is amiss -- what city has that kind of massive turnover in a four-year period (other than NYC in the 70s)?
In fact, the situation in Wisco is so bad, even some liberals are noticing that nearly 11,000 unverifiable votes in Milwaukee alone, combined with an 11,384-vote margin of victory for Kerry doesn't quite pass the smell test . . .
In 2000 and 2004, ghosts of another variety voted in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Enough known ghosts voted such that they establish the majority of the vote gap between the Democratic Presidential Candidate and George W. Bush. Combined with Wisconsin's statewide Fraudulent Vote Enabling Act (aka Same Day Registration law, see here for a link to a description of the statute), and the unverifiable frauds in other cities (Madison, Racine, etc.), it seems Wisconsin is the heartland's own version of Ukraine, circa November 2004. And this doesn't even count the dirty tricks by Dems, such as slashing tires of Republican Get Out the Vote vans.
Remember, in 2000 Gore activists were giving out food and other perquisites (cigarettes, booze) for homeless people to go to the polls in Milwaukee and vote for RobotMan. The unverifiable same-day registrants in Milwaukee exceeded Gore's total victory margin in the state -- that reeks of fraud.
In both 2000 and 2004, the number of same-day voting registrants were 30% or more of the total vote count in Milwaukee. Wisconsin does not throw voters off the rolls from one presidential election to the next, so something is amiss -- what city has that kind of massive turnover in a four-year period (other than NYC in the 70s)?
In fact, the situation in Wisco is so bad, even some liberals are noticing that nearly 11,000 unverifiable votes in Milwaukee alone, combined with an 11,384-vote margin of victory for Kerry doesn't quite pass the smell test . . .
Marine 'murder-suicide' - details
I remember reading this in the NYTimes last week. The headline was:
"Kin of Marine Who Shot Policemen Ask If He Is A Casualty of War" Despite the headline it's a reasonably balanced article which explores why Raya may have done what he did.
Michelle Malkin follows up with some pertinent details:
HT: Boortz
"Kin of Marine Who Shot Policemen Ask If He Is A Casualty of War" Despite the headline it's a reasonably balanced article which explores why Raya may have done what he did.
Michelle Malkin follows up with some pertinent details:
...There's just one thing wrong with the sympathetic spin about the anti-war Marine. It's all dead wrong.
This much is true about Raya: The 19-year-old man did in fact serve with the Marines' 1st Intelligence Battalion's motor transport unit as a driver in Iraq.
But contrary to the impression left by initial media reports, Raya had never seen combat. And he was not headed back to Iraq. He had been transferred to a new unit scheduled for deployment to Okinawa. "During our investigation, we found he wasn't due to go back to Iraq, never faced combat situations and never even fired his gun," Stanislaus County Sheriff's Deputy Jason Woodman said.
Raya was high on cocaine at the time of the ambush, according to police reports. He was reportedly affiliated with the prison gang Nuestra Familia. Investigators found photos of Raya wearing gang colors and a shopping list in his bedroom safe that included body armor, assault rifles and ammunition. Authorities also discovered a video showing Raya smoking what appears to be marijuana and making gang sign gestures. The tape showed desecrated pieces of the American flag laid on a gymnasium floor to spell out expletives directed at President Bush.
HT: Boortz
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
When liberals care
Jay Nordlinger at NROnline has an absolute gem on the mindset of liberals. Excerpts: (but click title to read the whole thing)
For the life of me I cannot understand this liberal compulsion to constantly vilify the motives and actions of this great country. I guess I am just a dumb believer in American exceptionalism.
When I was in college, "liberals" basically cared about three groups of people: South Africans (above all), Filipinos, and Chileans. But they didn't really care about them, as I saw it; they just used those people to attack the United States. Once apartheid fell, Marcos left, and Pinochet stepped aside, who cared about those countries' citizens?
You could not get anyone — anyone — interested in the peoples behind the Iron Curtain. If you tried to do so, you were a right-wing fanatic, or "poisoning the atmosphere of détente." That was the big catchphrase of the day; I heard it constantly. Solzhenitsyn — another conservative who doesn't care about people and is not interested in the world — was vilified as a fascist, a reactionary, a warmonger.
...
And shall we get started on Vietnam? I don't think so. Why is it that, when I was younger, I heard about the boat people, the reeducation camps, and so on only from the lips of "right-wingers"? Has anything changed? And burned into the mind of every conservative is the New York Times's headline, when the Khmer Rouge took over in Cambodia: "Indochina Without Americans: For Most, a Better Life." Nice going, guys.
What about today? I am repeatedly praised — by Cubans and Cuban Americans — for my attention to Cuba, yet I do practically nothing. The reason I am praised is that I do a little more than nothing. The same with the Chinese, who are more than a billion people, aren't they? I once received an award from an exile group — a human-rights group. In my remarks to them, I said I was embarrassed to be receiving the award, because I had done so little — an article or two about Falun Gong, some acknowledgments of Laogai (the Chinese gulag), a few squibs about someone I know, Jian-li Yang, who languishes in some Chinese dungeon.
...
Back to Cubans for a minute: Not long before he died, I talked to Ambassador Vernon Walters about the Free World's indifference to them. (Actually, the indifference is not the worst part; the excusing of that brutal regime is the worst part.) Said Walters, "[Journalists] would go to the death searching out Franco's or Pinochet's prisoners. But the attitude toward Castro's is, 'They probably deserve to be there anyway.' Anti-Communist prisoners are of no interest to anybody. A prisoner of a left-wing government is highly suspect, probably a fascist."
...
It's hard to get liberals interested in the Sudanese, massacred as they are — because they are not massacred by the "right" murderers — and you really can't get them interested in Arabs. They care about Palestinians to the extent that they can cast Israel as a monster, and the United States as the monster's Frankenstein (Great Satan/Little Satan). What the PA does to Palestinians is of no interest to virtually any liberal.
For the life of me I cannot understand this liberal compulsion to constantly vilify the motives and actions of this great country. I guess I am just a dumb believer in American exceptionalism.
Color and Character
Deacon at Powerline reminds us why Hillary Clinton should not be President.
MLK: "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."
HRC: "...if we don't take race as part of our character, then we are kidding ourselves."
Because I can't say it any better, I'll just paste Deacon's searing comment.
MLK: "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."
HRC: "...if we don't take race as part of our character, then we are kidding ourselves."
Because I can't say it any better, I'll just paste Deacon's searing comment.
Hillary Clinton is on record that race is part of one's character. And those who refuse to adopt this racist view are kidding themselves. So now, according to Ms. Clinton, it must be proper to judge people on the basis of skin color, since it is part of the content of their character. What specific judgments about character are we expected to reach on the basis of race? In the context of the debate over race-based admissions policies, it seems that we are expected to conclude that African-Americans can't compete with whites. This is a conclusion I decline to reach. Am I just kidding myself?
And was Dr. King? The power of his speech (which I was fortunate enough to have been present for) lies precisely in the distinction he drew between skin color and character. Ms. Clinton not only conflates the two, but claims that those who decline to join her in this "don't understand Dr. King's dream and legacy." Would last Monday have been a holiday if King had proclaimed as his vision that his children would be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, but that skin color would factor into the evaluation of their character? Ms. Clinton would convert what is probably the most powerful, coherent speech in American history into gibberish.
I think I understand Dr. King's dream. His legacy, unfortunately, is up for grabs.
Hamstringing the War on Terror
Charles Graner got ten years and he deserved it for his puerile and idiotic actions which brought disrepute and dishonor to the US armed forces and the country itself. Opinion Journal points out that the severity of the sentence and the utter lack of any indication of a grand conspiracy of torture and humiliation at the trial guts the liberal anti-war effort to paint "an Abu Ghraib narrative" that starts with Bush and Alberto Gonzales which led directly to Abu Ghraib.
This of course doesn't stop folks like loony-left Illinois Senator Dick Durbin from wanting the Pentagon to report exactly what interrogation methods would be used. I cannot imagine a more effective way to hamstring the war in Iraq and the war on terror then by requiring the Army to document its methods - and - don't forget we aren't allowed to torture or injure prisoners so basically we may never get an iota of useful information from prisoners again.
WorldNetDaily has a piece on how the flow of information from Iraqi prisoners has been reduced to a trickle thanks to the new restrictions that US armed forces face in interrogation. Naturally the Left doesn't want to hear that ineffective interrogation leads directly to the death of Iraqi citizens and US soldiers.
This of course doesn't stop folks like loony-left Illinois Senator Dick Durbin from wanting the Pentagon to report exactly what interrogation methods would be used. I cannot imagine a more effective way to hamstring the war in Iraq and the war on terror then by requiring the Army to document its methods - and - don't forget we aren't allowed to torture or injure prisoners so basically we may never get an iota of useful information from prisoners again.
WorldNetDaily has a piece on how the flow of information from Iraqi prisoners has been reduced to a trickle thanks to the new restrictions that US armed forces face in interrogation. Naturally the Left doesn't want to hear that ineffective interrogation leads directly to the death of Iraqi citizens and US soldiers.
Magic Airbus
Europe's most weasally leaders, Gerhard Schroeder, Jacques Chirac and Jose Luis Zapatero, were positively giddy about the new Airbus A380 -- a monstrous 800+ seat jumbo-jumbo jet that is now the largest commercial airplane. The Airbus cost $14,000,000,000 to develop and was heavily subsidized by France, Spain, Germany and the UK. But here's the kicker from Airbus chief Noel Forgeard: "The European states -- so easily accused of weakness -- backed this fantastic challenge 35 years ago and have believed in the A380."
Get that? It took Airbus 35 years to produce a jumbo airliner larger than Boeing's 747. That's half a lifetime in most of the countries that backed the project, and it's longer than either Wongdoer or myself have been alive.
Not so impressive anymore, eh?
Get that? It took Airbus 35 years to produce a jumbo airliner larger than Boeing's 747. That's half a lifetime in most of the countries that backed the project, and it's longer than either Wongdoer or myself have been alive.
Not so impressive anymore, eh?
BlogBurst Announcement
On January 27, 2005, The Key Monk will participate in a BlogBurst with more than 100 other bloggers commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet Red Army. The list of co-participants is here. For more information on whom to contact and how to participate, talk to the Israpundit at IsraPundit@yahoo.com.
Thursday January 20, 2005 is the 63rd anniversary of the Wannsee Conference, wherein the Nazis drew up plans for the "Final Solution" to the "Jewish Problem." An overview of the conference's purpose and determinations is here. More to come on Thursday.
Thursday January 20, 2005 is the 63rd anniversary of the Wannsee Conference, wherein the Nazis drew up plans for the "Final Solution" to the "Jewish Problem." An overview of the conference's purpose and determinations is here. More to come on Thursday.
Dairyland Defrauded
Did the Democrats defraud Wisconsin voters of their ACTUAL choice for President by rigging the election in Milwaukee by gaming the system? The statistical evidence alone is compelling (see link in title), and made more so by the fact that Wisconsin (and Minnesota) both allow the fraudathon that is Same-Day Registration. Bush lost key Dem strongholds in Wisco by more than he lost in 2000, yet his overall Wisco "loss" to Kerry was smaller than the margin by which he lost to Gore in 2000 AND trends both nationwide and Wisconsin-wide showed Bush gaining ground compared to his 2000 performance.
The Democrat carping about Ohio (and Florida from 2000, but that's a different story) is pure rubbish. Bush won Ohio by more than 100,000 votes, the "long lines" that allegedly "deterred voters" were in Democratically run election districts -- if the Dems are too chintzy to shell out the cash for more voting booths/machines, that's their problem. If the voters do not take the obligation and right to vote seriously enough to wait out the lines, that's the voters' own fault.
But the REALITY of 10,000 unverifiable same-day votes in one city, Milwaukee, in a state that Bush "lost" by only 11,000+ votes strongly indicates something amiss. So do both the 69.7% voter turnout among Milwaukee County adults, compared to the 60% turnout nationwide among REGISTERED voters; and the 32% increase in votes cast from 1996-2004 in Milwaukee County despite the 4-5% DROP in population.
Maybe it's not the cheese that smells funny in Wisco.
For more, check out El Capitan here and here, and the Wisco-based Boots and Sabers blog.
The Democrat carping about Ohio (and Florida from 2000, but that's a different story) is pure rubbish. Bush won Ohio by more than 100,000 votes, the "long lines" that allegedly "deterred voters" were in Democratically run election districts -- if the Dems are too chintzy to shell out the cash for more voting booths/machines, that's their problem. If the voters do not take the obligation and right to vote seriously enough to wait out the lines, that's the voters' own fault.
But the REALITY of 10,000 unverifiable same-day votes in one city, Milwaukee, in a state that Bush "lost" by only 11,000+ votes strongly indicates something amiss. So do both the 69.7% voter turnout among Milwaukee County adults, compared to the 60% turnout nationwide among REGISTERED voters; and the 32% increase in votes cast from 1996-2004 in Milwaukee County despite the 4-5% DROP in population.
Maybe it's not the cheese that smells funny in Wisco.
For more, check out El Capitan here and here, and the Wisco-based Boots and Sabers blog.
Fuhrer Furor
The Monk is a Jew. Thus The Monk is offended by stupid British Royals wearing Nazi insignia at parties guested by morons and dolts. But there is such a thing as an overreaction to HRH Prince Harry's imbecility, as Mark Steyn (also a Jew) notes:
Personally, I found the sight of the Prince of Wales climbing into the full Highgrove hejab for dinner with that bin Laden brother a week after the 9/11 slaughter far more disquieting: it seemed a rather more conscious act of identification than his son's party get-up. But a good indication of societal decadence is when it prefers to obsess over fictional offences rather than real ones.
I suppose it's possible that, should fate bring Harry to the throne, he'd turn into a Victor Emmanuel or King Carol of Romania and lend a constitutional figleaf to some Fascist regime. But worrying about a minor Royal schoolboy's alleged Nazi bent seems something of an indulgence at a time when the neo-Nazis get as many votes in Saxony's elections as Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democratic Party; when from Marseilles to Paris, Jews are being attacked and their homes, schools, kosher butchers, synagogues and cemeteries burnt and desecrated in a low-level intifada that's been going on so long the political establishment now accepts it as a normal feature of French life; and when the Berlin police advise Jews not to go out in public wearing any identifying marks of their faith.
Monday, January 17, 2005
60 Years After -- Tribute to Raoul Wallenberg
Courtesy: Virtual Tourist
The picture above is the Weeping Willow at the Dohany Street Synagogue in Budapest. It is a Holocaust remembrance, whose "leaves" are inscribed with the names of Hungarian Jews killed in Auschwitz and the Budapest Ghetto. The memorial was paid for with funds raised by Tony Curtis.
Why is this important? In addition to being Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (although MLK's actual birthday is not January 17 -- the remembrance is the third Monday in January), today does mark 60 years from the date Raoul Wallenberg disappeared.
Wallenberg is one of the great men of the 20th Century. A Swedish businessman, he became the actual head of the Swedish diplomatic legation to Hungary in 1944 even though he was not a Swedish diplomat. In mid-1944, the War Refugee Board of the United States (a body created in 1944 to help save Jews from Nazi persecution; the US knew of the Nazi horrors no later than 1942) learned that Sweden had plans to commence a rescue of Hungary's Jews. The WRB worked with the Swedish diplomatic corps to set up the operation, with Wallenberg as the Swedish diplomatic secretary.
Wallenberg demanded "full authorization to deal with whom he wanted without having to contact the ambassador first. He also wanted to have the right to send diplomatic couriers beyond the usual channels.
"The memo was so unusual that it was sent all the way to [Swedish] Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson, who consulted the king before he announced that the demands had been approved."
By the time Wallenberg arrived in Hungary, only about 230,000 Jews had not been sent to the Nazi death camps. The Nazi death machine had deported more than 400,000 Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz between mid-May and July 8, 1944. Hungary (560,000) is second only to Poland (more than 3,000,000) in number of Jewish citizens killed by the Holocaust, yet the Holocaust barely affected Hungary before the Germans invaded it in 1944 because they no longer trusted Hungary's collaborationist government.
Wallenberg's efforts from mid-July 1944 until his disappearance on January 17, 1945, helped save nearly half of Hungary's remaining Jews, including preventing Eichmann's plans for a massacre of Jews confined to the Budapest Ghetto. He had verbal confrontations with German soldiers and Eichmann himself; he issued Swedish diplomatic documents for Hungarian Jews to insulate them from persecution due to Sweden's neutrality; he even once literally jumped on top of a train headed for Auschwitz and handed out diplomatic documents to the Jews trapped inside while the Germans shot at him. His ultimate fate? Arrest as a war criminal and spy by the Soviets when the Red Army "liberated" Hungary, he likely died in a Soviet prison.
So today is a day to hold tribute to another great man, Raoul Wallenberg (1912-1947?).
Right again
Forget the politics, Cox and Forkum may just be the sharpest political cartoonists working today. This one really whacks the nail on the head impeccibly.
GOOD NEWS
. . . from Iraq.
The link above is Arthur Chrenkoff's 19th bi-weekly roundup of positive news that you're not getting from the mainstream media.
That means there's been good news from Iraq of some sort for at least 9 months.
Calling Andrew Sullivan and all the squishy hawks: how come you're not covering this?
The link above is Arthur Chrenkoff's 19th bi-weekly roundup of positive news that you're not getting from the mainstream media.
That means there's been good news from Iraq of some sort for at least 9 months.
Calling Andrew Sullivan and all the squishy hawks: how come you're not covering this?
Former Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang dead at 85
Former Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang, a protege of paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, died in Beijing after 15 years under house arrest. Zhao, who was sympathetic to pro-democracy demonstrators who occupied Tianamen Square in June 1989 after the death of his reform-leaning predecessor Hu Yaobang, was purged in June 1989 by hard-liners who successfully crushed the Tiananmen Square protest with perhaps thousands of casualties.
Zhao is credited with introducing capitalism to China and 'providing specificity' to Deng Xiaoping's desire to reform the economy. His deteriorating condition had become a cause of concern for the current Chicomm leadership.
[It's interesting to note that the Yahoo article (linked) is much more detailed than the brief blurb in the NY Times.]
Zhao is credited with introducing capitalism to China and 'providing specificity' to Deng Xiaoping's desire to reform the economy. His deteriorating condition had become a cause of concern for the current Chicomm leadership.
The government took steps Monday to minimize any public reaction to Zhao's death, apparently still worried about his potential as a political symbol.
The official announcement to China's people was limited to a two-sentence Xinhua report carried by Web sites and afternoon newspapers. But Xinhua sent an advisory telling radio and television broadcasters not to use it. CNN broadcasts to hotels and apartment complexes for foreigners were blacked out when they mentioned Zhao.
[It's interesting to note that the Yahoo article (linked) is much more detailed than the brief blurb in the NY Times.]
Massive vote fraud in Wisconsin
The Boots and Sabers blog is reporting what appears to be massive vote fraud in Milwaukee:
It is incomprehensible that most Democrats raise ancient race-related fears to argue against showing ID at the polls. Count every vote indeed.
HT: LGF
In Milwaukee, about 75,000 people went through the process of registering at the polls in the November election. Got that? 75,000 people in a city of 600,000 were not registered to vote on the day of the election, so they registered at the the polls. That, in and of itself, seems to be a remarkable number to me, but I have not compared it to other municipalities.
Of those 75,000 registrations, a full 13% of them, or about 10,000 registrations, are illegible. Presumably the identity of the registrant was checked on election day, but since the registration can’t be read, there is no way to verify the registration. Off of the bat, we have 10,000 votes that were cast in Milwaukee for voters whose existence can’t be verified.
Of the remaining 65,000 registrations for which confirmation cards have finally been sent, the Elections Commission says to expect that a full third of them, or about 22,000, will be returned undeliverable. This means that the address was incorrectly written or outright fictitious. Considering that most people know how to write their own address and the poll worker should have confirmed the address from identification produced at the polls, I would say that the majority of these addresses are just outright fictitious.
We are up to about 32,000 people who voted on election day who should not have.
Of the remaining 43,000 registrants, there will be some who gave a real address, but don’t actually live there. There will also be some who have moved since the election. I would say that we could conservatively estimate that 10% of the remaining registrants - at the minimum - will be invalid. That’s an additional 4,300 people.
All told, it looks like there were a minimum of 36,000 votes cast in the City of Milwaukee for which no voter can be produced.
The election in Wisconsin was decided by 11,384 votes.
In the City of Milwaukee, there were 198,907 votes cast for Kerry/Edwards and 75,746 votes cast for Bush/Cheney. As you can see, the City of Milwaukee came out strong for Kerry/Edwards.
It is incomprehensible that most Democrats raise ancient race-related fears to argue against showing ID at the polls. Count every vote indeed.
HT: LGF
Islamic hate crime?
The grisly execution-style murder of a family of Coptic Christians in Jersey City looks disturbingly like a religiously inspired hate crime, according to a NY Post report.
LGF reports on the indignant denials that Muslims could have been responsible.
A NYTimes report quotes unidentified authorities dismissing the stabbing of a Coptic Cross on the daughter.
Hossam Armanious, 47, who along with his wife and two daughters was found stabbed to death in his Jersey City home early Friday, would regularly debate religion in a Middle Eastern chat room, one source said.
Armanious, an Egyptian Christian, was well known for expressing his Coptic beliefs and engaging in fiery back-and-forth with Muslims on the Web site paltalk.com.
He "had the reputation for being one of the most outspoken Egyptian Christians," said the source, who had close ties to the family.
...
The married father of two had recently been threatened by Muslim members of the Web site, said a fellow Copt and store clerk who uses the chat room.
"You'd better stop this bull---- or we are going to track you down like a chicken and kill you," [emphasis mine] was the threat, said the clerk, who was online at the time and saw the exchange.
But Armanious refused to back down, according to two sources who use the Web site.
Jersey City Mayor Jerramiah Healy would neither confirm nor deny that cops and prosecutors were looking into the religion motive, saying only that "nothing is being ruled out." But a relative of the mayor who answered the phone at Healy's home said there was information the murders were "religion-related."
...
A family member who viewed photos of the bloodbath said Sylvia seemed to have taken the most savage punishment.
"When we saw the pictures, you could tell that they were hurt really, really bad in the face; especially Sylvia," said Milad Garas, the high-school sophomore's great-uncle.
The heartless killer not only slit Sylvia's throat, but also sliced a huge gash in her chest and stabbed her in the wrist, where she had a tattoo of a Coptic cross.
...
Both the deacon and uncle poured cold water on the theory that the family were the victims of a robbery gone wrong. [Cash had been taken, according to the police.]
"This is not a robbery, Ayed said. "We found all of the jewelry in the house. They didn't take anything."
LGF reports on the indignant denials that Muslims could have been responsible.
A NYTimes report quotes unidentified authorities dismissing the stabbing of a Coptic Cross on the daughter.
A fitting tribute to Dr. King
From Roya Hakakian, a former Iranian refugee and co-founder of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, in the OpinionJournal:
At 2 a.m. one night in September of 1985, I was a jet-lagged refugee on my brother's sofa in Parsippany, N.J., morosely clutching a remote. So grief-stricken was I over our departure from Iran that even television could not work its anodyne magic. What was I doing in the land of the despised Uncle Sam? I was a child of the 1979 revolution, with a teenager's disdain for hypocrisy. And the more I watched, the more hypocritical I seemed to myself...
As I kept channel surfing, I stumbled upon the face of a black man. He stood at a lectern in suit and tie, calm in front of a crowd of thousands. When the camera zoomed in to bring his close-up into focus, he seemed to look me right in the eye, as he said: "I have a dream . . ." These were the first four words I had understood all night. But even before the words, I'd felt his conviction. Was this elegant cadence really English, the language I so dreaded? The crowd emulated him. And as he spoke, they all, passionately, gracefully, uttered words of affirmation.
A most reluctant immigrant, I'd arrived in America confident that she could never win me over. Having just finished high school in post-revolutionary Iran, I thought myself impervious to her allures of infinite wealth, skyscrapers and shopping malls. My initial encounters hardly proved me wrong...
...Now this man at the lectern was making me reconsider the old leaders. Even at the most glorious moments of the Iranian revolution, long before the country took its dark turn, Ayatollah Khomeini had jarred me. His eyes were always cast down, or away. He had managed to fashion a Persian so irreverent that it was nearly unrecognizable against the language I knew through our great poets, Rumi and Hafez. The crowd around him sounded like a covey of pigeons, cooing. This was because, after their shouting frenzy abated, he spurred them to weeping.
Until that night, the only history I knew of America was a skewed tale of unchallenged dominance of the white race, first over Native Americans, then over the African slaves...
I lay still, watching, as my smug confidence dissipated before my eyes. Discovering the gaps in my knowledge had disarmed me: There was a man I knew nothing about, who was black as black could be, and had ultimately succeeded.
Today, in the distant corners where terror is raging, many teenagers hold views on America similar to those I once held. The enemy has an arsenal, but also a narrative. According to that narrative, the world's superpower represents only one race, and its history is a single tale of intolerance, arrogance, and domination. The war against this enemy is impossible to win without defeating that narrative. To tell American history in its entirety is to disprove the fabrications about who an American is. To tell the story of the Civil Rights Movement is to tell the story of how arrogance was made to give way to justice by none other than a man who advocated peace. Against the grim and infallible image that is painted of America, this will be a truer portrait: colorful and human.
For the immigrant, only the physical arrival is marked by a definitive moment when ships lower their anchors, and planes touchdown. The emotional arrival is incremental, and endless. Nearly 20 years later, Dr. Martin Luther King has come to mean to me all the things that he means to all Americans. But in retrospect, it was he who helped me reconcile with America. He proved to be yet another Plymouth Rock.
Stalwart of Freedom and Justice
Today is "MLK Day" -- the common appellation for the Federal holiday created in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the civil rights champion who was assassinated on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee. On MLK Day, my college newspaper ran (while I was at UVa) the "I Have a Dream" speech as its lead editorial, in Dr. King's honor. Dr. King gave the speech as the keynote of the 1963 Civil Rights March on August 28, 1963. Today, in his honor, I will uphold that tradition:
I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.
Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves, who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.
But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.
In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."
But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we have come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.
We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.
It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.
But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must ever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.
The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.
And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.
I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecutions and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends. And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
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. I have a dream today!
I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today!
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.
This is our hope. This is the faith that I will go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day. And this will be the day, this will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning, "My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring!" And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.
And so let freedom ring -- from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.
Let freedom ring -- from the mighty mountains of New York.
Let freedom ring -- from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.
Let freedom ring -- from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.
Let freedom ring -- from the curvaceous slopes of California.
But not only that.
Let freedom ring -- from Stone Mountain of Georgia.
Let freedom ring -- from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.
Let freedom ring -- from every hill and molehill of Mississippi, from every mountainside, let freedom ring!
And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual,
"Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last."
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