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March 31, 2005
Time To Hit The Barricades, Or Mattresses, Or Something...
Charles at LGF highlights this bloody travesty of a major university professor. (Thanks Mark at Decision '08) Here's some of her final exam:
FINAL EXAM
Instructions: Write essays on each of the following 4 questions (25 points each). [...] This test is designed to see how well you have thought about the materials we have read and discussed and your ability to discuss these materials after you have reflected on them. [...]
2. Discuss the sweeping attack on democratic rights under the Bush administration and what this means for the future of democratic government in America. [...]
4. Describe and discuss the role of the Bush advisors. Who are they? What is their agenda? And how is it being carried out?
Since I just tonight finished Tenured Radicals by Roger Kimball, I have absolutely no patience with this load of bollocks. We must put an end to this. I'll have more on this.
Posted at 11:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)March 30, 2005
Those Steenkin' Rich Republicans
Stewart Johnson at Right Intention has an informative quiz:
Trivia: The five wealthiest senators are.....Choose one:
a) all republicans
b) democrats and republicans
c) all democrats
Stumped? Here's a hint:
...John Kerry's assets exceed the total assets of all 51 republican senators combined by a very significant margin (35%). Repeat...all 51 republican Senators combined.
Excellent post--it's already in my mental arsenal. It's worth reading all of it.
Posted at 10:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (3)Useful FAQ on Sciavo
Here's an excellent FAQ on the Schiavo case. It's getting a lot of linking, justifiably so. (via INDC Journal)
I may have to reconsider my position.
Posted at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)Jonah In The Zone
Jonah Goldberg is in mid-season form over at Opinion Duel. His column is in response to an article in The New Republic by Jonathan Chaitt (it's listed under Jonah's column). The topic, according to Jonah, is Chaitt's assertion "that liberals are demonstrably and obviously more 'reality-based' than conservatives are." Goldberg:
Let me explain what conservatives — or at least the ones Jonathan is referring to — do and don't believe. It's true that some — and I hope most — conservatives still believe that limited government is a good in and of itself. Smaller government — which I like very much, by the way — is a sloppy shorthand for the conservative's true desire for a government that has very defined responsibilities that it does not exceed without very good cause. Hence, conservatives who believe in limited government also believe in a government that protects us from foreign enemies, enforces contracts and civil rights, etc. A government that isn't activist in upholding the rule of law endangers freedom. I bring this up because it isn't accurate to say that all conservatives believe that merely "shrinking" the government increases freedom.
Emphasis mine. This comes very close to my own definition of conservatism. I just don't identify with the hard-core libertarians who would love nothing more than to shrink government (including the armed forces) down to a nineteenth century level.
I want efficient government, and efficiency can be achieved only through ruthless empirical evaluation. And notice: I am perfectly fine with that empiricism being driven by high ideals. It is the implementation that requires the reality check.
Chaitt's response is due tomorrow at Opinion Duel.
Posted at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)Random Thoughts On The Schiavo Case
The Schiavo case. So, shall I move from trying to decipher the Ph.D.-level discussions on the methodology of the Lancet study to now comment on this sad and infuriating story?
To be honest, these "social conservative" issues don't succeed in engaging me to any great extent. They certainly are valid and important; but a person has just so much indignant outrage to spend--and I choose to spend most of mine on other important issues--education and foreign policy, for example.
Rather than produce a linearly reasoned argument leading to a powerful conclusion (which I can't do anyway, since my opinion is rather "distributed"), let me, for now, just throw out a few bullet points which have been bugging me subconsciously:
1) The intervention of Congress in the case of a specific individual. I know I may not have the entire lowdown on the precise mechanism Congress wished to enforce, but the appearance of Congress acting on an issue of a single individual seems to set a bad precedent. Not to mention the Federalism/state's rights question (and I am a dedicated Federalist--usually).
2) Consistency of judgement. This case has been heard by more than a few judges over the span of fifteen years. I am inherently suspicious of "new" facts that suddenly emerge in the late stages of a legal argument.
3) Perceived promotion of "God's law" over the the laws of our land. I have felt a definite perception from the "pro-life" or "religious right" of the idea that Congress, the Supreme Court, Jeb Bush, or anyone, is morally obligated to help this woman, regardless of the legal or personal cost.
Does anyone remember, several interminable news cycles ago, the low-level debate about whether social security reform would split the Republican party, and dissipate GWB's accumulated political capital? I fear, as I flee from CNN's and Fox's (not to mention one personally beloved conservative blog's) obsession with this case, that this news event might might provide a hand hold upon which the Dems might mount elective attacks in 2006 and 2008.
See here for more that makes sense to me.
Posted at 12:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)March 29, 2005
Knifefights On The Internet
There have been some nasty suppression fights on the internet lately. First there was the GayPatriot fracas, which is still reverberating around the blogosphere.
Now there's more questionable goings-on from Google: the Jawa Report has been dropped from Google News, for supposed "hate speech".
"Hate speech", "offensive writing", "hurtful words"--why, why is so hard to understand that someone, some distinct fallible human, has to define what hate is, what's offensive, and what's hurtful? And that their definition just might not be accurate, or well-reasoned, or just?
The US, India, and Pakistan
An article in last Sunday's Houston Chronicle details the techno-diplomatic dance being played out between the U.S., Pakistan, and India:
Much was made Friday of the Bush administration's long-awaited announcement that it would sell F-16 fighter planes to Pakistan, initially about two dozen, ultimately an unspecified number.
But Washington needs both India and Pakistan, albeit for different post-Sept. 11 purposes. So, less noticed Friday, Washington also made India a valuable offer: the chance to shop from a menu of US fighter planes, including jets that could be built in India. The two offers spelled a shift in the US approach to nuclear South Asia, one that feeds a potentially dangerous arms race in a region rife with conflict.
It appears the US-India relations are on the rebound after the chill caused by India's not-quite-upfront nuclear testing in the late 1990's. Beyond even a simple balancing of fighter jet quotas, the Bush administration seems to be pursuing a longer-term plan of courting India as a strategic ally:
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has presented to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh the Bush administration’s outline for a “decisively broader strategic relationship” between the world’s oldest and largest democracies, a senior US official said.
“Its goal is to help India become a major world power in the 21st century,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “We understand fully the implications, including military implications, of that statement.”
There is an important subtext to the fighter jet angle. The recent diplomatic talks also indicated a US willingness to provide India with technology for domestic nuclear power production (at the hopeful expense of Indian plans to build an Iran-India pipeline):
But analysts say the US's latest moves go beyond “Next Steps” by offering India access to nuclear power reactors ending the 30-year export ban on this technology and in effect showing Washington trusts India as a nuclear power. [...]
This dialogue will almost certainly involve India's plans to build a controversial gas pipeline to Iran, via Pakistan. Ms Rice said the US opposed the pipeline because of the Bush administration's “well known” antagonism to Iran.
I like all these moves, even though there is no guarantee they'll be successful in the long run. There's no reason to treat the India-Pakistan relationship as a zero-sum game--if we play our cards right, perhaps we can keep both as allies.
Correction...
I've corrected the math error I made in the update to the Lancet post below...it should have read "5,000 Iraqis would have to have been killed every month...". So much for late-night arithmetic.
Posted at 12:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)March 27, 2005
The Lancet Study
Joe Katzman at The Winds of Change has more on the highly questionable study that claims that 100,000 Iraqis have died since the beginning of the war.
This study, published in the British medical journal The Lancet, was conducted by a research team at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University and published less than a week before the presidential election. Following the debate on this study gets complicated, but the overall weakness of the study is clear. I think the most important point to observe is that the much-referred-to "CI", the "confidence interval", must lead one to conclude the study is worthless. On the day the study was released online, Fred Kaplan at Slate wrote (emphases mine):
That number [of deaths since the war began] is 98,000. But read the passage that cites the calculation more fully:
We estimate there were 98,000 extra deaths (95% CI 8000-194 000) during the post-war period.
Readers who are accustomed to perusing statistical documents know what the set of numbers in the parentheses means. For the other 99.9 percent of you, I'll spell it out in plain English—which, disturbingly, the study never does. It means that the authors are 95 percent confident that the war-caused deaths totaled some number between 8,000 and 194,000. (The number cited in plain language—98,000—is roughly at the halfway point in this absurdly vast range.)
The significance of the CI number was never explained in the published study. That's bad enough; add to that the very small sample size of reported deaths discovered by the interviewers. From a Winds of Change commenter who analyzed the study (emphases mine):
Roberts et al. surveyed households in 33 randomly-chosen clusters in Iraq. 988 households were chosen, most were successfully interviewed. Interviews in the 32 clusters outside of Fallujah turned up reports of 9 deaths due to Coalition action. Interviews in the Fallujah cluster yielded reports of 52 deaths due to Coalition action.
And I think the trumpeting of this study by the left misses the larger point: Even if civilian deaths in Iraq did increase, that by no means proves that we shouldn't have invaded the country and removed Saddam. It's certainly analogous to looking at the terrible conditions that existed in Europe in the winter of 1946.
UPDATE: Commenter "Brian" at the Chicago Boyz blog gives a devastating (and non-technical) argument against the validity of the Lancet study: To get to the stated "100,000 deaths" number, over 5,000 Iraqis would have to have been killed every day month for the fifteen or so months between the start of the war and the summer of 2004. Given that any large car bombing that resulted in casualies was covered relentlessly in the MSM, it beggars belief that 5,000 deaths could have passed unremarked upon.
March 26, 2005
Those Pesky Details
An interesting point on the Schiavo case from an email Steve Sailor received (via Powerline):
Something that interests me about the Terri Schiavo case, and that doesn't seem to have gotten much media attention: The whole case rests on the fact that the Schindlers (Terri's parents) were totally outlawyered by the husband (Michael Schiavo) at the trial court level. [...]
This fact is of crucial importance -- and it's one often not fully appreciated by the media, who like to focus on the drama of cases going to the big, powerful appeals courts: Once a trial court enters a judgment into the record, that judgment's findings become THE FACTS of the case, and can only be overturned if the fact finder (in this case, the judge) acted capriciously (i.e., reached a conclusion that had essentially no basis in fact). [emphasis mine]
I think this is a really important background item; it's the type of information that should be provided dependably and without fanfare by our news media. And most of us, i.e., the news consumers, should be thinking critically enough to ask the question in the first place.
Posted at 11:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)March 25, 2005
What's The Arabic For "Keeping It Local"?
John Hindraker at Powerline reiterates an important point that still doesn't get enough airplay. In his post relating an anti-insurgency protest march by electrical workers in Baghdad, he writes:
I think it's interesting that the signs are all in Arabic. All around the world, antiwar and anti-American demonstrators brandish signs in English. Why? Because the intended audience isn't their countrymen, it's us. Here, the demonstrators wanted to get through to the terrorists and to their fellow Iraqis.
There have been a few sharp observers (and I can't recall who they are) that have made this point before--and once you're made aware of it, you can see it all the time. In the photo accompanying Hindrocket's post, the banners in English are conspicuous by their absence.
Posted at 10:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)Not So Fast...
According to the WaPo, the death toll of jihadists in the recent raid conducted by US and Iraqi forces may have indeed been overblown. (via The Corner)
Posted at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)Smokin' Larry Carlton
Dave over at Logical Meme expounds upon one of the greatest guitar solos of all time.
Posted at 12:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)March 24, 2005
Impaired Logic, Indeed
Radley Balko hits one of my hot buttons with this post:
Despite all the "get tough" laws, the .08 limit, and sobriety roadblocks, a recent NTSB press released announced that highway deaths from "hardcore drinkers" are going up, not down.
Anyone who reads their local newspaper can figure this out--the overwhelming majority of all stories I read about drunk-driving fatalities has the perpetrator with an blood alcohol level of around 0.15 or more.
Yet no one ever seems to ask the neo-prohibitionists the obvious question: "What is the average blood alcohol level of all drunk drivers involved in fatality accidents?"
Be sure and read Balko's article at Tech Central Station
Posted at 10:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)Do The Dems Need To Outsource Their Forgery Business?
Carpe Bonum offers up a clear and concise summary of the "talking points memo" affair now percolating through the blogosphere.
If those lame goofballs keep setting'em up, the blogosphere will keep knocking'em down.
Posted at 06:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)March 23, 2005
Scientific Mysteries
Earlier in the day I saw this post over at Hobbesian Conservative, and figured I'd put up a link to it this evening. But he who hesitates gets scooped by Mark at Decision '08. Good stuff in New Scientist: "Thirteen Things That Don't Make Sense".
Obviously it's not an article about politics--otherwise it'd read "Thirteen Million Things..."
Posted at 11:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)More Jihadists Taken Out
A nice haul today for coalition and Iraqi forces (hat tip LGF):
85 Militants Killed in U.S. Raid in Iraq
BAGHDAD, Iraq [via AP]- U.S. and Iraqi forces killed 85 militants at a suspected training camp along the marshy shores of a remote lake, one of the highest guerrilla death tolls of the two-year insurgency, officials said Wednesday. They said citizens emboldened by the January elections are increasingly turning in intelligence tips. [...]
In three days, according to Iraqi and U.S. officials' accounts, troops have killed at least 128 insurgents nationwide, culminating in the announcement of Tuesday's attack by Iraqi commandos, backed by U.S. air and ground fire. [...]
The [US] military declined Wednesday to confirm the Iraqi government's death toll of 85 militants, and it was impossible to check the figure independently. [...]
Well, let's hope the number is accurate; the following seems to be in keeping with the first estimate:
U.S. Army Maj. Richard Goldenberg, a 42nd Infantry Division spokesman, said an estimated 80 to 100 insurgents were at the camp, 60 miles north of Ramadi, and that some insurgents fled with casualties before the area could be surrounded.
First, there's no indication of how the 85 were killed (if indeed that number is correct), but the marshy conditions and difficult access could indicate that that majority were taken out by ground forces, as opposed to the air support. My point is that 85 killed would indicate to me a well-functioning, disciplined Iraqi force--this wasn't a small operation. Any and all reports of successful ops by Iraqi forces are damned good news.
Second, given the admitted participation of Iraqi troops (regardless of how they performed), isn't the headline a little odd?
Very encouraging, anyway. Now let's get that government finalized.
Posted at 10:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)March 22, 2005
The Historic Mission Control
Our six-year-old son is on spring break, so today we packed up and headed down to Space Center Houston--it was our first visit. The Center itself was okay; after we had been there awhile, I said to my wife, "This place is pretty much what I expected, but there's enough interesting stuff here to stay interested." We both added at the same time: "Barely." But overall Space Center was worth it--they had real Apollo, Gemini, and Mercury capsules; some real lunar soil and rocks; a Skylab and orbiter simulator; and lots of kid stuff. (UPDATE: I've been reminded, correctly, by my wife that our kiddo loved the entire experience--he was so excited he was close to launching, himself.)
But then we went on a tram tour of the Johnson Space Center proper (Space Center Houston--the visitor's center--is located directly next door), and the main stop on this particular tour was what's now called "Historic Mission Control," the familiar room from which all US space flights were controlled up to 1996. They seat the tourists in the little VIP auditorium that sits behind a big glass window overlooking the MCC itself. Luckily my wife, the kiddo, and I got a seat in the front row (hey, maybe I sat in the same chair Nixon sat in!). Here's what it looked like today (they've restored all the vintage '60s consoles):
I could never properly describe myself as a world traveler, though I've been in a few places that are steeped in history: Westminster Abbey and the USS Constitution, for example. But I've never felt such a visceral grip of past events as I did today. I'm sure it was due partly to the fact I was such a space freak as a kid: I still can recall seeing on TV the Gemini launches and the news bulletin about the Apollo 1 fire, not to mention all the lunar landings.
But another reason I was so affected is that I recently finished the best non-fiction book I have ever read--Apollo, by Charles Murray (yes that Charles Murray) and Catherine Bly Cox. Why do I think it's the best? First, the prose: it's economical without being austere; transparent yet stylish; and accessible yet precise.
Second, Murray and Cox display an astonishing ability to sniff out the true line of the story, and refuse to allow themselves to be distracted from it. And their story is about the people behind those now-empty consoles, the people behind the scenes. This book is not about astronauts; it's about the thousands of equally talented, driven and fascinating people who supported them.
In the foreword to the new edition (the first 1989 edition was out of print for years) Cox and Murray relate how the computing power of the entire Saturn V stack is less than today's average cell phone. They go on:
The anachronisms point to the biggest change in the way that the story of the Apollo program will be seen as time goes on: The audacity of Apollo becomes more striking as contemporary technology moves farther from the technology that took us to the moon. Consider the case of Ron Howard's film Apollo 13, meticulously accurate in almost everything. Why then do the scenes in Mission Control show colored charts and graphs on the flight controllers' consoles? When the film was shooting, Jerry Bostick, a Flight Operations veteran who was acting as a technical advisor, explained to Howard that he should show the flight controllers looking at black screens filled with columns of white numbers. Howard replied that there are some things that an audience just won't accept, and computer displays as incomprehensible as Bostick described are one of those things.
Contrast the placid picture we took today, with this. In the book this photo appears with the caption, "'Mission Control' to the outside world, the 'MOCR' to the controllers, as seen from Management Row. ... This picture was taken during the Apollo 13 crew's telecast five minutes before the oxygen tank exploded. ... Their quiet evening was about to turn into a nightmare."
Black screens full of columns of white numbers...that's all those guys had to work with, and the lives of those astronauts depended on any random one of those numbers being X, and not Y.
Murray and Cox so completely fleshed out those Mission Control characters, I felt today that they were still there in front of me, "working the problem" of Apollo 13.
March 21, 2005
Poor Old Saddam
Dr. Sanity has a very worthwhile post on one of my favorite topics: the tortuous philosophical travails of the liberal arts academy.
Posted at 11:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)Lefties + Math = Trainwreck
Mark Coffey at Decision '08 checks Juan Cole's math. After a comprehensive analysis that must have taken all of five seconds, Mark concludes that Cole's extrapolations are not quite...rigorous, shall we say.
Posted at 10:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)March 20, 2005
The Arab Street And GWB
Tony at Across The Bay has some sharp observations on the war anniversary demonstrations, or lack thereof (via Belmont Club):
The most revealing thing about all the anti-Bush, anti-war demonstrations the other day was how in the Arabic-speaking ME, they were negligeably small -- almost token -- and passed really unnoticed, overshadowed by much more important local issues.
Tony continues with some very interesting stuff on Wolfowitz.
You know, it just struck me--as long as the MSM continues their current tack of obstinate bias, its decline in both readership and influence will remain self-perpetuating. For the new media now provides a klieg light to illuminate each successive failure of the MSM to get the facts right, each new instance of wishful self-delusion. Sure, the usual American anarcho-malcontents marched, but thanks to bloggers like Tony we get the vital counterbalance.
I just discovered Across the Bay. I think it is well worth your time.
Posted at 10:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)Emotion vs. Reason
Jim Hindraker over at Powerline has some thoughts on why the Dems can't seem to move on from their defeats. He had recently noticed a Paul Wellstone bumper sticker on a car in St. Paul, over two years after Wellstone's death.
It seems to me that many Democrats--not a majority, probably, but certainly most of the party's core--have gone into a state of permanent opposition. No election is ever over. No administration not favored by them can ever be legitimate. This is, I think, something new in American history--or modern history, anyway. In the past, elections were hard-fought, but when they were over, the lawn signs came down and life went on. Hatreds were not nursed--not, at least, on the mass scale that we see today. And people, by and large, accepted the quaint idea that once a government had been chosen by the majority, people should accept it and even, in foreign policy at least, give it their support.
I remember vividly a small dinner party a few years ago, at which all of our closest friends were present. They are all to the left, to varying degrees, of my wife and me. I can still remember our host's skepticism (who was once a hippie anti-authoritarian, now single-mom professional) when I stated that the baby boomer generation was spoiled rotten, and that we boomers had little appreciation of the hardships of our parents' generation.
To make a sweeping generaliztion, I think the root problem with the left is that at heart, they base their positions on emotion. And as the difficulties each succeeding post WWII generation faces diminish, the emotional focus of leftists falls on more and more trivial ideas, and elevates them to an importance they don't deserve on a comparitive historical scale.
And no, I'm not diminishing the threat of the Islamo-fascists, nor the tragedy of 9/11. But we lost over 400,000 men killed in WWII, and my point at the dinner party, which I still adhere to, is that we are ill-equipped to even consider those kinds of losses today.
Posted at 12:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)March 19, 2005
The Return Of The Horse Race Blogger
Stop the presses! Great news: Jay Cost is blogging again. He'll be contributing to RedState.org.
Jay ran the short-lived but indispensable Horse Race blog during the end of the 2004 campaign. It was my main site during the crucial evening hours, as Florida turned and then Ohio swung to Bush. Jay had up to the minute county-by-county breakdowns that were just riveting--and his analysis in the days preceding the election justified his rapid rise to blog fame.
Posted at 11:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)Is This The "Dead Ball Era" of Judicial Nominations?
Gerry Daly at DalyThoughts has mined the historical records and constructed a chart that gives the stats on the judicial confirmation "batting average" for all the presidents going back to Truman. Very interesting. (Hat tip: Hugh Hewitt)
Posted at 10:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)Destroying "Independent Journalism"
The Minneapolis Star Tribune is continuing their feeble vendetta against the Powerline guys:
The column by one Tamara Baker criticizes the March 9 article by Star Tribune reporter Eric Black on blogs. Baker's column tars us and Charles Johnson's Little Green Footballs as tools of Republicans who seek to destroy "independent journalism."
Joseph Knippenberg at No Left Turns has more on Ms. Baker's resume, and concludes with this pointed barb:
Did the folks at the Minneapolis paper know what they were getting when they accepted this op-ed, which tells us one thing, or did they not dig at all into her background, which tells us something else? Are they malign or negligent? Or both?
That's my kind of thinking.
Posted at 04:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)March 18, 2005
Wolfowitz
RDS over at Ten O'Clock Scholar has some good analysis on the Paul Wolfowitz nomination to head the World Bank.
Posted at 03:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)March 17, 2005
Band of Brothers, Oh Brother...
The Media Research Center has published their seventeenth Annual Awards for the Year’s Worst Reporting (via Mark Nicodemo). Here's an excruciatingly delicious excerpt(.pdf) from the "GI John Award (For Saluting John Kerry's Vietnam Record)" category (emphasis mine):
"Veterans haven't been a big force in past campaigns...but the Vietnam vets may feel bound together more strongly...It may be too early to know how influential they'll be in Kerry's campaign, but they've already done one thing: If the Republicans had any hope of casting Kerry as some Michael Dukakis-style effete Eastern liberal, that’s over. The band of brothers stands in his way." -- CNN's Bruce Morton on Inside Politics, January 30.
I'll say. John O'Neill and his band of SwiftVet brothers stood in Kerry's way, all right--guarding the door to the White House.
Be sure and check out all the awards at the Media Research Center--to see these outrageous displays of corrosively-biased pseudo-journalism collected in one document, in print, is just staggering.
Posted at 11:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)Time To Drop The Big Legal Hammer
Why is this not surprising? Kathleen Rhodes at CNSNews.com has a piece up in which she explores the funding sources for some of the most extreme of the far-left activist groups:
Anti-Bush groups like the International Action Center boast of their support for the "courageous Iraqi resistance that has derailed the U.S. Empire."
Those activities [such as "convicting" President Bush of "war crimes"] are significantly bankrolled by a non-profit group called the People's Rights Fund, whose tax-exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service precludes it from engaging in "substantial use of inflammatory and disparaging terms."
Rhodes examines the relationship between organizations governed IRS's 501(c)(3) provisions (the governing rules for thousands of non-profits across the US) and groups operating under 501(c)(4) rules, which allow more political leeway:
[The IRS provisions] also warn groups involved not to "express conclusions on the basis of strong emotional feelings" at the expense of "objective evaluations." [...]
"Whenever you have a relationship between a (c)(3) and a (c)(4)," as in the case with the People's Rights Fund and the International Action Center, [chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center Ken] Boehm said, "the rule is, (c)(3)'s can give to (c)(4)'s, but they have to be for the types of activities that are (c)(3) activities."
Rhodes goes on to explore the morass of interconnecting funding relationships between various (c)(3) and (c)(4) organizations, and how several will oftentimes share the same physical address:
In a January 28 interview with the Cybercast News Service, Bob Huberty, executive vice president of the Capital Research Center, expressed concern about the fact that the IAC, the People's Rights Fund, and a number of other groups "are all at the same address in New York, all different groups."
Boehm agreed that the concept of a 501(c)(3) sharing an address with one of its sponsored projects was a cause for concern. The address, 39 West 14th Street in New York City, is also listed by the Troops Out Now coalition, People Judge Bush.org, Vote No War.org, Vote To Impeach.org, No Draft No Way.org, and others. [...]
There are also several connections between International ANSWER and IAC, both of which share office space in New York City and show a cross-pollination of leadership.
We can talk all day about McCain-Feingold and the law of unintended consequences; and we can discuss how that law allowed the rise of both MoveOn.org and the SwiftVets. But this is clearly outside of that debate--it looks like we have a situation that is crying out for a little law enforcement. Where are those IRS auditors when you need them?
March 16, 2005
I Feel So Good About This Post
Good article in Scientific American on the noxious effects of the self-esteem movement (hat tip: Logical Meme). The article recounts how former California governor George Deukmejian set up a task force to study self-esteem and social responsibility:
The results [of the task force's study of relevant literature] appeared in a 1989 volume entitled The Social Importance of Self-Esteem, which stated that "many, if not most, of the major problems plaguing society have roots in the low self-esteem of many of the people who make up society." In reality, the report contained little to support that assertion.
"...the report contained little to support that assertion"? Gee, I just love it when policy is based on wishful thinking, instead of actually applying a reasoned thought process to the problem. Sheesh.
Posted at 04:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)Get Your Education News Here!
The latest edition of the Carnival of Education is up over at The Education Wonks. Here's a sample (on a subject dear to my heart):
No Left Turns is a collectively-written site by scholars associated with The Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs at Ashland University. This week, they discuss liberal education in both the classic and modern sense. (We ran in to our old friend Alexis de Tocqueville.)
Go read'em all.
March 15, 2005
Science (Should) Trump Politics
Houston Chronicle writer Lynn J. Cook today interviewed Amy Myers Jaffe, the energy fellow at Rice University's James A. Baker III Institute of Public Policy. Some interesting points:
Q: You believe spending on solar could actually commercialize it. Why?
A: With solar, whatever you take out of the atmosphere you've taken out, but there's no waste. There are no corollary issues. Politicians say solar would take too much space, but did you know to electrify the entire United States through solar panels it would take less land than we are using right now to grow corn for ethanol? And don't forget it takes diesel to run the farm equipment to plant the corn.
You have to look carefully at the science behind this stuff. Hydrogen is the perfect example. If we are going to use natural gas to create hydrogen to power cars, we need to know what the implications are. Where's this stuff coming from? Given the limitations of our own domestic resource base, we're going to have to import it and — bingo — we're back to OPEC. And what's the point of building an entire hydrogen infrastructure derived from natural gas when the whole idea behind it is to diversify from the Middle East?
Q: Energy issues are tough to understand. Do politicians get it?
A: Energy is too complicated for most politicians to understand, so they go with constituent-related positions that might not be well-informed on all aspects. [...]
President Bush's position is for more drilling access offshore — but not in Florida, his brother's state. Think about this: We had the worst hurricane we've ever had in the history of the oil industry, Hurricane Ivan. Underwater mudslides wrecked pipelines, the tops of rigs with no GPS systems on them were floating around lost for weeks. It took months to get production back on line. This was the largest crisis in energy infrastructure in the United States, and there were no pollution consequences at all.
We have politicians sitting on the Hill saying we can't drill off Florida or North Carolina because if a giant hurricane hit, we'd have terrible pollution. But one did hit, and it didn't happen.
Q: What would you like to see the government do differently?
A: We're actually cutting spending on science in the current budget. We need real breakthroughs, and $1 billion a year isn't going to get us there by 2050.
As Americans, we need to understand how these things come about. Take Japanese cars. We can buy them, get better mileage, have fewer emissions, and they're still convenient. The reason we can do that is because the Japanese government subsidized the research that went into those cars.
Japanese industry benefited, and jobs were created from the export market. The U.S. doesn't have that.
I get worried whenever politic and "constituent-service" outweighs conclusions based on good science. I guess that's why I worry a lot. Her point about solar power was (good) news to me--and how idiotic is it to spend billions on hydrogen research, when the source of the hydrogen is...natural gas?
John O'Neill in TAE
As far as dead tree publications go, The American Enterprise is the only political mag that I still subscribe to (the cycling mags are a different story!). Scott Johnson at Powerline highlights the April/May issue, which features an interview with John O'Neill, the man who, as Johnson notes, had an immeasurable effect on the 2004 presidential race. Here's a brief excerpt:
TAE: How do you explain the media's response [to the SwiftVets May 4 press conference]?
O'NEILL: The establishment media was very pro-Kerry. They were opposed to any story that was critical of Kerry, and I believe that they were captured by their own bias. We met with one reporter around that time. We told a story to him relating to Kerry's service. He acknowledged it was true and terribly important. And he told us he would not print it because it would help George Bush. That's when we began to realize we had a real problem on our hands.
Johnson concludes with the suggestion that O'Neill should be awarded the Medal of Freedom:
There is no more deserving recipient, and it would drive...well, you know who, nuts.
Ohhh, yeah!
Posted at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)Obsolete Afghani Warlords
David S. Cloud in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) describes how a once-feared warlord has been maneuvered into a bland bureaucratic job--courtesy of the US Afghanistan policy that has emphasized patience over quick results:
Today [Ismail Khan], the man once dubbed "the Lion of Herat" sits behind a near-empty desk in Kabul fingering amber worry beads and signing documents. He is the country's minister of power, but the only warmth in his shabby suite comes from a glowing space heater. His days as a mujaheddin commander are over, he says.
Mr. Khan has made the journey from feared warlord to bland bureaucrat thanks to the Bush administration's gradual, flexible strategy for reconstructing Afghanistan since ousting the Taliban government in 2001. Rather than trying to force radical change overnight, the U.S. has been patient. It has avoided confrontations with tribal elders and warlords -- letting them until recently keep their private militias and weapons and even paying the salaries of their fighters -- while building a credible central government in Kabul.
Cloud goes on to recount the "experts'" predictions that the US would fall victim to the same fate as the British and Soviets before them. But the Americans have been more successful than the Soviets right from the start, and even more importantly, the pace of progress is accelerating:
Instead, the U.S. has fared much better, especially in the past six months. Afghans' deep fatigue with war has helped but so has the slow U.S. approach. Warlords around the country are now peacefully ceding power to President Hamid Karzai's government, which won national elections last October. The U.S. has trained a multiethnic military that is taking over security around the country.
This approach differs quite clearly from the US strategy in Iraq. Leaving aside the complicated questions of the effectiveness of the Bush/Rumsfeld/Franks strategy to defeat Saddam, in Afghanistan
[e]xpectations were so low for actually rebuilding Afghanistan that the U.S. occupation here proceeded with little interference from Washington and on a multiyear time frame unacceptable in Iraq, where the U.S. occupation authorities initially had much grander plans.
"We call it salutary neglect," Col. David Lamm, the chief of staff to the top U.S. general in Afghanistan, says of the relative inattention Afghanistan has received from Washington. "It's been quite helpful."
The absence of outside pressure has allowed the Americans (and the U.N.) to more efficiently utilize one of their greatest assets: money. For example, all payments to local militias will cease in June; if the men agree to give up their arms and enroll in training programs for jobs such as farming or construction, they will continue to receive a small wage.
The effect has been dramatic: Over the past six months, many of the top militia leaders have begun stacking their weapons and giving way to the ANA -- and ordering their soldiers to do the same. Roughly half the estimated militias have now been demobilized, and the pace is accelerating, officials say. Gen. Rashid Dostum, a major ethnic Uzbek warlord from Mazar-i-Sharif in the north, and his main rival agreed to demobilize their forces late last year. Bringing another former rival into his government, Mr. Karzai this month named Mr. Dostum as his chief military adviser. [...]
"It's a defining moment," says Mr. [Peter] Babbington, the head of the U.N. program. "Early on in the Panjshir, they looked at us with deep suspicion, but they have realized that they have to come into the real world and not miss out on all the aid."
Qasimullah, a 32-year-old fighter who goes by just one name, recently signed up for retraining as a construction worker and has been told by the U.N. workers that he will receive training and an apprenticeship. "The time for fighting is over," he says.
It appears this is a common theme--the fighting is finished, it's time to move on (and not miss out on the aid money). Back to Ismail Khan, the ex-warlord-turned-bureaucrat:
Today the former commander spends his days signing purchase orders for new generators and puzzling over how to increase electricity production in a country where only an estimated 6% of the population has regular power. He has given up pursuing armed jihad, he says, for a different type of struggle.
"Jihad is not only war; it is not only fighting. Jihad means making life better for the country. There is no need to fight right now in Afghanistan," he says.
Whatever happened to the blizzard of stories about the brutal torture of British soldiers, and the numbing quagmire that mired the Soviets?
March 14, 2005
It Ain't Over in Lebanon!
Good news from Lebanon! In response to the recent pro-Syrian demonstrations, pro-democracy Lebanese have turned out in a massive demonstration of their own. From the AP story (via Captain's Quarters):
Organizers said a million people had joined the protest. No independent estimate was available, but witnesses said the rally looked even bigger than last week's pro-Syrian demonstration organized by Hizbollah and attended by hundreds of thousands.
Interesting:
In contrast to previous anti-Syrian protests since a bomb blast killed Hariri on Feb. 14, many Sunni Muslims joined Druze and Christians in taking to the streets. Hariri was a Sunni.
Although I do recall reading that Sunnis joined in the original anti-Syria protests.
Over at Sam Jaffe's, reader "shaulie" made a good point while on possible benefits for the U.S.:
Syria out of Lebanon advances the US interests because it weakens Syria (an axis of evil wanna be) financially and politically. It reduces their ability to oppose US interests in the region and draw US intellegence, diplomatic, and military resources away from other activities. [...]
What is the CIA's role in organizing the Lebanon opposition? They are very good at this, Serbia and Ukraine are among their successes. Are they in Lebanon now?
I hope so. That's one of the reasons the CIA exists. Let's also hope the Ukrainian pattern is repeated in Lebanon.
UPDATE: Fox News says it's over 1 million:
Monday's protest easily surpassed a pro-government rally of hundreds of thousands of people last week by the Shiite Muslim militant group Hezbollah (search). [...]
While there were no official estimates of the size of the crowd, police officers privately estimated it at about 1 million people. [...]
An Associated Press estimate by reporters on the scene put the number at much higher than the approximately 500,000 who attended the March 8 pro-Syrian rally.
The Effects of Overturning Roe v. Wade
Ramesh Ponnuru, a stauch pro-lifer, has an intriguing comment on the possible aftershocks of overturning Roe v. Wade. In a post considering Condi Rice's potential run for the presidency, he wrote:
Every time I hear about one of these promising pro-choice Republican candidates [like Condi Rice], it strikes me that their chances would be much, much better if pro-lifers [did he mean pro-choicers?] succeeded in overturning Roe. With Roe gone, having control of the presidency would matter a lot less to pro-lifers because appointing judges would matter less than electing legislators. A pro-choicer with restrictions such as Evan Bayh would have a better shot at the Democratic nomination, too. I don't believe the pundit CW that the end of Roe would be a disaster for pro-lifers. I do think we'd have a more moderate and less polarized politics.
It's a very interesting point. If I recall correctly, polls have shown that most Americans are in favor of 1st trimester abortions; they are against 2nd and 3rd trimester abortions. Would throwing the question back to the states actually allow a more accurate reflection of the genearal desire of the people?
Posted at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)March 12, 2005
Some Environmentalists Do Have Second Thoughts
Logical Meme highlights Nicholas Kristoff's column on the danger of environmentalists having second thoughts:
Liberal NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof actually acknowledges that environmentalists too often discredit themselves with incessant alarmism fueled (no pun intended) by bad science:
When environmentalists are writing tracts like "The Death of Environmentalism," you know the movement is in deep trouble. [...]
The fundamental problem, as I see it, is that environmental groups are too often alarmists. They have an awful track record, so they've lost credibility with the public.
Kristof, ever the Bush basher, of course characterizes conservatives as un-nuanced in all matters, the environment being no exception. And yet Kristof himself appears to be discovering some of the 'nuances' of conservatives' approach to environmental concerns: if it's based on solid science, then it's a real phenomenon.
The influence of pseudoscience is at an epidemic level in this country--it's fueled by several generation’s worth of "progressive" education ideas that denigrate the validity of empirical evidence. It is truly amazing that people to whom the edict "question authority" is a mantra, and who would never believe a single word that comes out of Don Rumsfeld's mouth, would also swallow any new regulation by the EPA as gospel truth.
I discovered Logical Meme a couple of weeks ago. I think it's outstanding--consistently so.
Posted at 11:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)March 11, 2005
Hey Bernardine, Ever Heard Of This Guy?
An oft-repeated slander of the blogosphere by the MSM goes something like, "They keep saying they're going to replace the mainstream media...". Of course this is nonsense; it's been pointed out many times by bloggers that we will always need what the MSM provides: money, for salaries. Salaries for foreign correspondents and stringers, for writers to take the time to dig deep into a story.
Claudia Rosett at the Wall Street Journal is "in the zone", as an athlete would say. Her reporting on the U.N. Oil-for-Food Scandal has been exemplary. And now comes this:
Saigon's Sharansky: Will Vietnam be the next Iraq?
So it happens that a message reached me last weekend from within one of the world's most repressive states: Vietnam. Word came that the Sharansky of Saigon, democratic dissident Nguyen Dan Que, had been released from his latest stretch in Vietnam's prisons. Though Dr. Que, as he prefers to be called, is now dogged by state security agents around the clock and allowed no phone or computer of his own, he could arrange to be on the receiving end of a phone call.
So at an appointed hour, I picked up the phone in New York and spoke with Dr. Que, a 63-year-old doctor who has by now spent almost half his life fighting for liberty in Vietnam. Given that Vietnam's secret police almost certainly eavesdrop on any contact he has with the wider world, I was prepared for a discreet and carefully phrased conversation, meant to minimize his risk. Dr. Que was not. He got straight to the point: "What I want is liberty for my people."
It is important for the world to understand that in saying such things, Dr., Que knows all too well the risk he is taking. Back in 1975, as Saigon fell, he had a chance to leave--and turned it down. [...] Instead, for more than 30 years he has seized every chance to speak out and demand liberty for his country. For that, under Vietnam's communist regime, he has paid dearly--spending more than 20 years in labor camps and prisons. [...]
Who of us, sitting here at our expensive computers sipping chardonnay, can really imagine what it's like to summon up the visceral courage to say those words, "What I want is liberty for my people", when you know that your oppressors are listening, and that for speaking those words, you might wind up back in the prison from which you had just been released?
Where are the "progressives", relics like Bernardine Dohrn who will take up their story and demand justice for them? Uh, sorry, I’ve got classes to teach—good luck to you, buddy.
Or like we say in bike racing as we pass riders who've just crashed, "See ya, wouldn't want to be ya!"
Posted at 12:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)March 10, 2005
Blogosphere Network Analysis
Kevin Drum has a fascinating post about a study of the linking patterns between blogs (hat tip Decision '08). Out of many interesting observations Drum makes, one that sticks with me is it appears that there aren't a lot of sustained relationships occurring between right and left.
This is a blog skill I personally need to work on--it's very easy (and lazy) to stick with the sites I've become comfortable with. Those sites--like The Corner, Instapundit, Powerline, Captain's Quarters--usually tend to be analytical and reasoned, with a minimum of ad hominem name calling. (And to any liberals reading, by reasoned I mean only that there is some attempt to make a point by a valid argument supported by evidence or premises. The attempt is what's important, not whether or not you think he or she is full of crap--and they may be, of course.) But I recognize I need to spend more time reading lefty/lib blogs.
Kevin makes another observation:
The primary finding of the study (or at least the finding I think is the most interesting) is that conservative blogs have a stronger sense of community than liberal blogs — a quality that I often wish liberals could emulate.
The usual point I make about this one is that I think conservative blogs are more interested in supporting their arguments by linking to sites that provide evidence or prove a premise. But it gets a little more complicated that that. One commenter made a provocative observation:
I'd be curious about comparing links to original source material. Could it be that there is more linking between 'conservatives' because they bounce each other's mistruths around, whereas 'liberals' link to original source documents, instead of some other blogs interpretation of same?
Along that line, couldn't the pattern suggest that 'liberal' bloggers tend to do their own thinking and analysis, while 'conservatives' wait for, and then distribute other's opinions?
Leaving aside the "mistruths", it is worthwhile to consider where all those links are going. It goes back to the "linker/thinker" classification. It's very easy to build a blog by just linking to other posts you like--plus the trackbacks are a way to build readership. Citing "original source documents" could imply a stronger argument, of course, but even then you have to watch your definitions. I'd have no problem counting a published academic document or a government publication as a source document--but linking to the BBC coverage of the Iraq war is not; just because it's MSM and not a blog, doesn't get you objectivity brownie points.
In the liberal arts academy it's an evidently accepted practice to preface your latest wild assertion with phrases like "It's clear that..." or "We can deduce that...", without providing any support for the argument whatsoever.
So, a blogger that doesn't link to other bloggers is not necessary demonstrating "original thought". There is a difference between opinion, considered opinion, and truth.
Posted at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (2)March 09, 2005
More Reasoned Debate on Education
Don Perata is California Senate President Pro Tem, a liberal's liberal, and the recipient of $27,000 in campaign donations from the California Teachers Association PAC, according to Mike Antonucci at the Education Intelligence Agency (emphasis mine):
So why is Perata the target of 50,000 CTA mailers, 18 newspaper ads and a number of giant yard signs? Because in a moment of candor he told the Los Angeles Daily News that Proposition 98, the state's school funding initiative that guarantees schools about 40 percent of the budget, is "an escalator without pause. Some people say you need more revenues, but I'm operating in a world of reality."
Ooops. CTA doesn't want Perata operating in a world of reality, the union wants him operating in the surreal world of California public education, where increases are cuts, and the highest paid teachers in the country are underpaid. "It wasn't so much that he said it, as who he said it to – to the governor and to reporters," CTA President Barbara Kerr explained to San Francisco Chronicle reporters Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross. "He forgot to say it to us so we could talk about it."
And certainly it would have been more cost-effective to threaten Perata in private than have to spend media bucks to send a public message. But look at the bright side, Ms. Kerr. Now CTA doesn't have to threaten each legislative Democrat individually. A brick through Perata's window sends the proper message to all involved.
Perata, however, is unapologetic. "People don't cower in that situation," he said. "They get angry."
The collaboration of the university colleges of education with the teacher's unions has resulted in a perfect storm of resistance to reform: "progressive" ideology in college combined with the job protection racket of the unions, particularly their leadership bureaucracies.
"For the children's sake" is used as an excuse for all kinds of government regulation--except when it really is for the children.
Get Your Education News Roundup Here...
The latest Carnival of Education is up over at The Education Wonks.
Posted at 02:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)Bolton: Good Choice, But Will He Help?
Little Green Footballs commenter J. Lichty has a great take on John Bolton's nomination as U.S. ambassador to the U.N.:
Bolton will give some good speeches, as did Moynihan, Kirkpatrick, Negroponte and a host of Israeli ambassadors like Eban, Netanyahu and Gillerman.
The UN is not broken, it has a design flaw. You cannot expect the world to check their hate at the door, and you cannot give them power and expect them not to use it for evil. They hate America and Israel with all of their fiber so why wouldn't they use the forum where their voice means as much or more than America to try to hit America and the Zionist entity. Why would you expect these countries to check their agendas at the door for the good of the globe? To expect it be to more than the sum of its parts is naiive and expensive.
We don't need more speeches. Time is now for us to throw up our hands and to stop playing by their rules. Lets take our ball and go home. We don't need it, it needs us.
I wish we would take our ball and go home...and then start again from scratch, so we could level the playing field by allying ourselves with the countries that really value freedom of the individual and the rule of law.
March 08, 2005
A Professional View of the Sgrena Incident
Andrew Olmstead is a Major in the Army Reserve, and his unit is involved in training National Guard and Reserve soldiers before they go into combat overseas. Here is his very informative post that details the complexity and pressure that every soldier must deal with when fighting in Iraq. He relates the types of problems the soldiers face in dealing with civilians on the battlefield, and he then writes about how his trainees learn to clear urban buildings, any room of which might contain either friend or enemy.
He then moves on to the radically different assignment of manning a roadblock. In light of the recent friendly-fire event concerning Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, Major Olmstead's professional take on the difficulties that must be dealt with (emphasis mine):
A traffic control point presents a different stress, of course. There is not the constant ebb and flow of adrenaline presented when a soldier has to clear multiple rooms. Instead the soldier has to balance the boredom of standing at a checkpoint with limited traffic with the knowledge that a TCP is a target for enemy forces and any vehicle which approaches the checkpoint may contain a lethal threat to that soldier. Yet most vehicles which approach contain nothing more lethal than local Iraqis who are indistinguishable from terrorists. So every vehicle which approaches the TCP is a game of chicken that forces the soldiers to decide whether or not it is a threat in seconds. A vehicle approaching a TCP at 60 miles per hour will cover 88 feet per second. Assuming the TCP is set on a straightaway with 300 feet of visibility in all directions (not always an easy condition to meet), that gives soldiers less than four seconds to decide whether or not to engage a vehicle approaching at high speed. Even a vehicle moving at 30 miles per hour gives less than eight seconds for soldiers to react. If vehicles coming towards the TCP don't slow down, the soldiers are forced to make a life-or-death decision almost immediately.
Major Olmstead thoughtfully questions whether we could do better. His conclusion, I think, is correct, and ehoes my own: That these kinds of events have been occurring since war was invented; that when leaders say that we must be prepared for tragedies and hardship, this is the reality they were talking about; and that the best we can do is train our troops as completely as we can while integrating the most recent lessons learned, and continue to believe in the correctness of our mission.
Conspiracies and the Italian Left
Arthur Chrenkoff on the Giuliana Sgrena affair:
I wrote two days ago that "the critics think America Machiavellian enough to want to kill the Italians, and at the same time stupid enough to do it a way that created one of the more serious diplomatic incidents since the start of the war. Can't have it both ways, I'm afraid." My sentiment has been echoed by an unnamed Italian intelligence source quoted in "Corriere della Serra": "It would have been the simplest thing for the Americans to send their agents to suppress the incident and therefore blame the Iraqis, or to send Iraqis to perform the dirty job, rather than commit the act with friendly fire without even succeeding in the attempt." [...]
But you have to wonder why the Americans could possibly want to create one of the biggest propaganda coups for the opponents of war and damage the relationship with one of their staunchest allies in order to silence one woman. Sadly, in a world where "The Da Vinci Code" is the best selling book of recent times, too many people will think that just about anything is possible.
More evidence, as if any was needed, of the irrationality of the left. Friendly fire accidents have been occurring since warfare began, and they are always tragic. The "outrage" of the left over the incident is just another facet of the usual utopian bait-and-switch tactic: All actions by the U.S. (and indeed anyone or any idea that is opposed to the aims of the left) are measured against a standard of perfection--a standard of course defined by the left. And of course when perfection is not achieved, the left is already zeroed in.
But this doesn't pass even the most rudimentary test of logic. I heard a military commentator on Fox (Scales? Can't find the transcript yet) speculate that the U.S. roadblock probably constituted an armored platoon, which would mean that there were two Abrams tanks and at least two Bradleys. Let's see, that's two tank main guns (that can track and destroy a moving enemy tank at a mile or more), a couple of 25mm chain guns on the Bradleys (they have explosive rounds that tear a car to shreds), and several .50 cal machine guns (more serious firepower). If the U.S. had wanted her dead, not only would everyone in the car been killed, their remains along with the remains of the car would have been scattered over a radius of 20 yards.
But as Charles Krauthammer said, again on Fox yesterday, the political damage should be limited--because the successful Iraqi election has fundamentally altered the political landscape both in Iraq, and Europe. There is now much less of the supportive background noise that feed the overhyped reaction to tragic stories like this.
UPDATE: I fixed the link to Chrenkoff's piece.
Posted at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)March 07, 2005
Education News and Preliminary Rant
Check out The Carnival of Education, Week 1 over at the Education Wonk. Week 2 will be up soon, I believe.
I've got some heavy-duty posts coming up in the coming weeks concerning the state of the curriculum in the Spring Branch Independent School District here in Houston (my home district).
Let me just point out for now: My wife and I make two 20-mile roundtrips every day to take our son to a modestly-priced but academically excellent private school. The nearest public elementary school is about 700 yards from our house. I never bat an eye at the longer trip; to say it's worth it is an understatement.
Posted at 10:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)March 06, 2005
"Scary Smart" Or Scary "Smart"?
Of all the many unanswered questions I have regarding the psychology of political belief, I guess the most persistent one is: "How can a person become a blazing success at his or her chosen profession and yet exhibit the inability to assess the difference between George Bush and Adolph Hitler."
My own private name for this behavior is the "Shockley Effect", named after William Shockley who won the Nobel Prize for co-inventing the transistor. He later severely damaged his reputation by insisting that there were genetic differences in intelligence between different races.
Today, over at The Conservative Philosopher I found this:
Richard A. Posner on Academic Idiocy (KBJ)
Most people, including most academics, are confusing mixtures. They are moral and immoral, kind and cruel, smart and stupid—yes, academics are often smart and stupid, and this may not be sufficiently recognized by the laity. They are particularly likely to be both smart and stupid in an era of specialization, when academic success is likely to crown not the person of broad general intelligence but rather the person with highly developed intellectual skills in a particular field, and both the field and the skills that conduce to preeminence in it may be bulkheaded from the other fields of thought. The brilliant mathematician, physicist, artist, or historian may be incompetent in dealing with political or economic issues. Einstein's political and economic writings are a case in point. Picasso's artistic, or Sartre's literary and philosophical, or George Bernard Shaw's dramatic genius did not inoculate them against Stalinism, or Heidegger's philosophical genius against Nazism. But if the compartmentalization of competence, and the underlying disunity of the self, are not widely recognized—and they are not—a successful academic may be able to use his success to reach the general public on matters about which he is an idiot. It doesn't help that successful people tend to exaggerate their versatility; abnormal self-confidence is a frequent cause and almost invariable effect of great success.
(Richard A. Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline [Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2001], 51 [italics in original; footnote omitted])
This is one of the most cogent statements of the problem I've seen.
Posted at 11:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)March 05, 2005
Say It Ain't So, Mark
Mark Coffey at Decision '08 runs a great blog, as I noted a while ago. But--and maybe I'm missing some brilliant ironic rhetorical device--the name of Dan Rather and the Beatles should never appear in the same sentence.
But Mark is dead-on right about the Rolling Stones best period being '67-'73. To me, the albums from Let It Bleed through It's Only Rock and Roll represent their best work--and not coincidentally it was the time lead guitarist Mick Taylor was with the band.
It's not just that Taylor was a flash guitarist--God knows there were plenty of hot blues players around in the late sixties. The important thing was that he provided a perfect complement for Keith Richards, in a way the Ron Wood never has. Keith was probably the best rock rhythm guitarist of the classic era (the hot argument was always who was better--Keith or Pete Townshend) and Taylor was just a pure lead player: head down, oblivious to Jagger's antics, and just burning. As I've preached over the years to anyone who would listen, anything Ron Wood could do, Keith could do better; and Wood couldn't do anything that Keith couldn't do. Taylor and Richards were perfect complements.
There was a time long ago, when I could play just about every lick Mick Taylor played on Get Your Ya-Ya's Out. Everyone who learned rock guitar back then developed a very precise thumb--to learn a lick you had to move the cartridge back over the same grooves over and over.
These days it's so much easier. For my own amusement I've been learning some Leo Kottke tunes (Stropes has some very high quality transcriptions). You just record the tune on the computer, and with a program like Sound Forge, you can precisely play any section you want with ease. You can even slow it down without screwing up the pitch.
When you're in your forties the idea of solo playing is a lot more attractive--it's just too damn much work to find reasonable bandmates.
By the way, even though I think Keith may have had the edge as a guitarist, I thing Pete Townshend's music has stood the test of time much better.
Good Stuff...
Since I've started this blog, I've been amazed at the the number of blogs I've found that have small viewer stats, but have truly excellent writing and analysis. Here of a few:
Decision '08
Carpe Bonum
The Ten O'Clock Scholar
Well, two weeks ago they had small viewership; by now they've had several instalanches between them. Check'em out.
Just Another Biased Headline Story
The lead story in the Houston Chronicle today trumpeted:
A new rallying cry for conservatives?
After losing a key ruling, some vow: 'No more Souters, no more Kennedys,' only hard-liners
WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court's decision to abolish the death penalty for juveniles has incensed many conservatives, who vow to step up their pressure on President Bush to resist compromising on the ideology of judicial nominations.
The article exhibits the classic symptoms of bias that Bernie Goldberg documented so exactly: conservative stances are characterized as somehow extreme, hard line, controversial; while by default, liberal values are assumed to be mainstream. In this piece of over 900 words, the word "conservative" is mentioned 15 times--that's fine, it is an article about conservatives, after all. But the word "liberal" is mentioned--twice. Conservatives are described as "hard-line", once in the body of the piece, and also in the headline. Kennedy is described as "consensus-oriented".
Although the White House has not publicly divulged potential Supreme Court nominees, Bush suggested during his 2000 campaign that his model Supreme Court justices were Scalia and Thomas — the court's most hard-line conservatives.
The president has also nominated a number of controversial conservatives to federal appellate courts, drawing the opposition of Senate Democrats who have filibustered their confirmation.
"Controversial"? To whom, all those "hard-line" left wingers? (I guess they must not exist, otherwise they certainly would have been qouted here.) And yet no one doubts that those "controversial" nominees would easily gain Senate confirmation if only they were allowed a vote by the full Senate.
The article really demonstrates the insidiousness of MSM bias--author Bennett Roth does manage to sketch out conservatives' complaints against Kennedy:
Conservatives, however, are concerned the Supreme Court may be drifting toward judicial activism rather than strict interpretation of the Constitution. [...]
Some conservatives said it was not just the international examples that offended them, but also the majority's reasoning that juveniles should not face the death penalty because they did not have the maturity of adults.
"It is absurd to think that a 16-year-old doesn't know that murder is wrong," said Todd Gaziano, director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Of course this cogent example of common sense comes about one column-inch from the end of the article, buried on page A12.
If you strip the muscle off of this story, I suppose the skeleton is could be described as symmetrical. But it's as if the patient has had a stroke: one side is fleshed out, and the other side has atrophied.
March 04, 2005
Richard Rhodes and the 21st Century
While cleaning up the kitchen this evening, I caught the last bit of a documentary on the History Channel about the making of the atomic bomb. Among the people interviewed was the peerless Richard Rhodes, author of the classic The Making of the Atomic Bomb. In the concluding moments of the show, which naturally focused on the legacy of the bomb and the fate of Robert Oppenheimer, Rhodes noted that over the 100 years previous to 1945, the annual death rate from warfare had increased at an exponential rate. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Rhodes said, the rate of deaths dropped to around one million per year, and has stayed essentially at that rate since.
I couldn’t help but wonder, as I loaded the dishwasher, what the shape of that graph will look like for the next twenty years. Even though the Soviets were oppressive murderous thugs, they still had a basis of reasonableness (read self-preservation).
Let us hope that, given the regimes in Iran and North Korea, Rhodes's graph has not been artificially suppressed for sixty years.
March 03, 2005
The Navy, the Marines, and Tsunami Relief
Interesting stuff from Robert D. Kaplan on the modern U.S. Navy (hat tip Pejmanesque):
AS the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln returned home to San Diego this week from its relief mission in Indonesia, the main lesson of the United States military's remarkable tsunami relief effort has yet to be acknowledged: that the global war on terrorism, rather than distracting the military from performing humanitarian deeds, has made it far more effective at them. This is worth bearing in mind, especially now that President Bush's request for $82 billion in emergency military spending has re-opened the argument over Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's longstanding plan for remaking the armed forces as a leaner, more flexible military machine.
The fact is, the Navy of the 1990's could not have responded nearly as quickly and efficiently to the tsunami as did the post-9/11 one. This is largely because of structural changes made to fight the war on terrorism.
A decade ago, our carrier battle groups mainly did planned, six-month-long "pulse" deployments. Since 9/11, the Navy has put increasing emphasis on emergency "surge" deployments, in which carriers, cruisers and destroyers have to be ready to go anywhere, anytime, to deal with a security threat. The new strategy explains why, in late December, the Abraham Lincoln strike force was able to so quickly leave Hong Kong for Indonesia at a best speed of 27 knots.
Read it all. Kaplan notes that the Navy has placed greater emphasis on "green water" (i.e., close to shore) operations since 9/11. And he notes that a byproduct of the humanitarian aid effort has been a demonstration of the military expertise of the Navy and Marines, compared to the "floundering" efforts of the Chinese navy.
Posted at 10:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)March 02, 2005
Ward Churchill: Just a Soloist in the Choir
During the initial Ward Churchill fracas I made the point that, once the lurid hyperbole is stripped from his pronouncements, Churchill's underlying message is standard issue in the liberal arts academy.
Now Glenn Reynolds has found this nugget over at the Rocky Mountain News:
The acting chair of the University of Colorado ethnic studies department seems in some respects to be picking up where her predecessor, Ward Churchill, left off. In a slightly disjointed, poorly written essay for Counterpunch, a leftwing Web newsletter, Emma Perez suggests criticism of Churchill is a "neo-con test case for academic purges." In other words, Churchill is under siege from a vast rightwing conspiracy. [...]
How appropriate that Ms. Perez invokes the word "purge". The relentless suppression of skeptical inquiry and intellectual diversity by the academic street gangs that control the academy is nothing if not Stalinist.
Then there is this remarkable assertion: "The general strategy in forcing and then manipulating this 'investigation' of Ward's scholarship shares key tactics with the neo-con sinking of Emory historian Bellesiles in 2001 . . ." In fact, Michael Bellesiles resigned after a panel of scholars from places such as Harvard and Princeton concluded his failure to cite sources for material in his book, Arming America, "does move into the realm of 'falsification.'" Hardly a poster boy for the so-called new McCarthyism.
"Ward's scholarship"? What scholarship? Paul Campos, a law prof at CU, demolishes the stupid assertion that Ward's "scholarship" has any validity.
Professor Reynolds concludes:
It appears that Churchill may sing more loudly, and off key, but that he's fundamentally part of the chorus.
Exactly. Professor Perez' words illustrate how replacing Ward Churchill is like pulling a shark's tooth: there is an inexhaustible supply of identical replacements lined up to assume the position.
Posted at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)Padilla: Enemy Combatant or Abused Citizen?
RDS at the Ten O'Clock Scholar has some interesting observations about the Jose Padilla decision handed down today:
Those who plead Constitutional Rights are being violated should go read it, and find out the Constitution explicitly allows for the suspension of the Writ of Habeus Corpus when the public safety requires it, such as in the case of insurrection, invasion, or rebellion. [...]
See, holding POWs is not a criminal matter! They're being detained for our safety, not because they committed a crime!
In Padilla's case, and those like him, the "crimes" of being an illegal combatant are ON TOP of that, and it would be perverse in the extreme to have privileges descent upon them that they otherwise would never have had they been ordinary combatants!
Imagine: if a U.S. citizen had been captured in the Battle of the Bulge, fighting for Germany in an S.S. unit, do you think there would have been an outcry for his Constitutional rights as a U.S. citizen?
Michelle Malkin has more:
In fact, Congress did pass a joint resolution that supports Padilla's detention. S.J. 23, enacted September 18, 2001, gives the President the power to
use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.
That language is pretty clear. Congress gave President Bush the authority to use force against organizations that he determines carried out the September 11 attacks (i.e., al Qaeda) in order to prevent future acts of terrorism. The word "force" presumably doesn't refer to pattycake.
There seems to be a lot of instant experts promoting their position on the civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution. But the nooks and crannies of the law (such as the Constitutionally allowed suspension of the Writ of Habeus Corpus, employed by Lincoln, no less) must be given the attention due them.
Posted at 09:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)