The "Mystery of the Insurgency", Solved

The New York Times' reporters may simply be too stupid to cover this war:

American forces in Iraq have often been accused of being slow to apply hard lessons from Vietnam and elsewhere about how to fight an insurgency. Yet, it seems from the outside, no one has shrugged off the lessons of history more decisively than the insurgents themselves.

The insurgents in Iraq are showing little interest in winning hearts and minds among the majority of Iraqis, in building international legitimacy, or in articulating a governing program or even a unified ideology or cause beyond expelling the Americans. They have put forward no single charismatic leader, developed no alternative government or political wing, displayed no intention of amassing territory to govern now.

Rather than employing the classic rebel tactic of provoking the foreign forces to use clumsy and excessive force and kill civilians, they are cutting out the middleman and killing civilians indiscriminately themselves, in addition to more predictable targets like officials of the new government. Bombings have escalated in the last two weeks, and on Thursday a bomb went off in heavy traffic in Baghdad, killing 21 people.

This surge in the killing of civilians reflects how mysterious the long-term strategy remains - and how the rebels' seeming indifference to the past patterns of insurgency is not necessarily good news for anyone.

It is not surprising that reporters, and evidently American intelligence agents, have had great difficulty penetrating this insurgency. What is surprising is that the fighters have made so little effort to advertise unified goals.

Counter-insurgency experts are baffled, wondering if the world is seeing the birth of a new kind of insurgency; if, as in China in the 1930's or Vietnam in the 1940's, it is taking insurgents a few years to organize themselves; or if, as some suspect, there is a simpler explanation.

"Instead of saying, 'What's the logic here, we don't see it,' you could speculate, there is no logic here," said Anthony James Joes, a professor of political science at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia and the author of several books on the history of guerrilla warfare. The attacks now look like "wanton violence," he continued. "And there's a name for these guys: Losers."

"The insurgents are doing everything wrong now," he said. "Or, anyway, I don't understand why they're doing what they're doing."

Steven Metz, of the Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, said the insurgency could still be sorting itself out. Yet, he said, "It really is significant that even two years in there hasn't been anything like any kind of political ideology or political spokesman or political wing emerging. It really is a nihilistic insurgency."

He warned that this hydra-headed quality could make the insurgents hard to crush, even as the lack of unity makes it unlikely they will rule Iraq. "It makes it harder to eradicate the insurgency, but it also makes it more difficult for insurgents to gain their ultimate objective - if that is to control the country," he said.

That no one knows if that is the objective is, by historical standards, one of several remarkable, perplexing features of this fight.

A clear cause - one with broad support - is usually taken for granted by experts as a prerequisite for successful insurgency.

But insurgents in Iraq appear to be fighting for varying causes: Baath Party members are fighting for some sort of restoration of the old regime; Sunni Muslims are presumably fighting to prevent domination by the Shiite majority; nationalists are fighting to drive out the Americans; and foreign fighters want to turn Iraq into a battlefield of a global religious struggle. Some men are said to fight for money; organized crime may play a role.

This incoherence is something new. "If you look at 20th-century insurgencies, they all tend to be fairly coherent in terms of their ideology," Dr. Metz said. "Most of the serious insurgencies, you could sit down and say, 'Here's what they want.' "

The Iraq War is not the Vietnam War. In fact, no other war was the Vietnam War. Each war is different, with different combatants, aims, and strategies.

Just on the off chance that The Times cares about covering the Iraq War, and not merely about taking cheap shots at a Republican administration, here is what is going on in Iraq, written in simple words so even Columbia Journalism School alumni might have a chance to comprehend it:

1. While the UN was busy lining their pockets with Oil-for-Food money and cluck-clucking about the slowest rush to war since WWII, Saddam Hussein laid plans for an insurgency during the eventual American occupation of Iraq. This involved some degree of coordination with terrorist groups chiefly supported by Syria and Iran.

2. On the eve of the war, Hussein let a large number of violent criminals out of Iraqi prisons. The intent was to create mayhem.

3. During the war, a large number of Iraqi military units simply dissolved. Some of their leaders and combatants went underground, eventually surfacing in Sunni strongholds.

4. The reason why there are no coordinated efforts in the "insurgency" is that to a very real extent there is no insurgency. There are pockets of foreign terrorists and plenty of violent criminals plying their deadly trade. al Zarqawi couldn't care less about "hearts and minds" of Iraqis---he wants to kill Americans and force an eventual American withdrawal. He's not a guerilla leader, he's a terrorist. He has no real movement. Likewise, the violent criminals committing random murders and bombings don't care about winning over anybody---they simply don't want to go back to jail, and are taking out some sick measure of revenge upon the Iraqi people. The Syrian and Iranian agents couldn't care less what happens to the Iraqis---they're pursuing their own interests, which chiefly are getting American troops off their doorsteps.

5. The "insurgency" has been a media creation. Like the "wolf packs" of former Nazis who were mopped up in the years after V-E Day, there's not a lot of evidence that the attacks in Iraq represent a coordinated rebellion or foreign intervention. Pieces of it no doubt are, but this does not make for "The Insurgency".

6. Journalists who fault our military for not "learning the lessons of Vietnam" are simply too stupid to worry about. U.S. military doctrine is firmly based on lessons learned in Vietnam, and much of the discussion in war colleges over the past 30 years have been over how to avoid such a disaster in the future. Do you wonder why American military commanders placed so much emphasis on getting electric grids, sewage treatment plants, and trash collection up and running in the middle of an "insurgency"? It's because they understand the importance of winning over the Iraqi civilians. The U.S. press doesn't cover these important counterinsurgency tactics because a) they make the Bush Administration and Don Rumsfeld look good and b) they're boring stories. The fact that this indicates the war for the hearts and minds of Iraqis is won by the good guys already and that more and more "insurgents" are being turned in by these same civilians simply escapes the MSM. Thus the "mystery."

Instead of talking to "counterinsurgency experts" nobody's ever heard of, why don't you call up an American Lieutenant Colonel over in Iraq and ask what he thinks? This would of course require actually having U.S. military officers in your Rolodex, which might be a stretch for our reporters.

If that's too hard, try calling up a military historian like John Keegan or Victor Davis Hanson. They'll tell you what's going on.

Of course, that gets back to my original dangerous assumption: that the MSM actually cares what's going on in Iraq.

Update:

If Powerline be with us, who can be against us?

It's Neither Legal Nor Rare, Either

And now it seems abortion's not safe, at least for future children:

Having an abortion almost doubles a woman's risk of giving birth dangerously early in a later pregnancy, according to research that will provoke fresh debate over the most controversial of all medical procedures.

A French study of 2,837 births - the first to investigate the link between terminations and extremely premature births - found that mothers who had previously had an abortion were 1.7 times more likely to give birth to a baby at less than 28 weeks' gestation. Many babies born this early die soon after birth, and a large number who survive suffer serious disability.

The research leader, Dr Caroline Moreau, an epidemiologist at the Hôpital de Bicêtre in Paris, said the results of the study, which appear in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, provided conclusive evidence of a link between induced abortion and subsequent pre-term births.

Last night anti-abortion campaigners seized on the evidence to demand that all women seeking a termination be warned, routinely, that they are jeopardising the well-being of future babies. A series of earlier, smaller studies had failed to provide clear evidence of a link and so women currently opting for an abortion are not warned of the risk.

Dr Moreau said: "Clearly there is a link. The results suggest that induced abortion can damage the cervix in some way that makes a premature birth more likely in subsequent pregnancies."

Her study compared the medical histories of 2,219 women with babies born at less than 34 weeks with another 618 who had given birth at full term. Overall, women who had had an abortion were 40 per cent more likely to have a very pre-term delivery (less than 33 weeks) than those without such a history. The risk of an extremely premature baby - one born at less than 28 weeks - was raised even more sharply, by 70 per cent. Abortion appeared to increase the risk of most major causes of premature birth, including premature rupture of membranes, incorrect position of the foetus on the placenta and spontaneous early labour. The only common cause of premature birth not linked to abortion was high blood pressure.

Mr Peter Bowen-Simpkins, a spokesman for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and a consultant obstetrician at the Sancta Maria Hospital in Swansea, said the study revealed that abortion might not be as safe as previously supposed. "This study shows that surgical termination of pregnancies may have late complications and may not be without risk," he said.

Of course, the Left will crank up its Death Cult to go after this study and its authors full-bore.

Can't have anything puncturing the notion that an abortion's no more complicated or dangerous than a vaccination, can we?

Those Open-Minded Liberals

Well, here's a novel way to prevent diversity of opinion in a newspaper:

When Lee Enterprises Inc. agreed to purchase Pulitzer Inc. for $1.46 billion, it also agreed that the flagship St. Louis Post-Dispatch will keep its longstanding liberal editorial slant for at least the next five years, according to the purchase agreement mailed to Pulitzer shareholders Friday.

"For a period of at least five years following the Effective Time, Parent (Lee Enterprises) will cause the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to maintain its current name and editorial page platform statement and to maintain its news and editorial headquarters in the City of St. Louis, Missouri," the agreement states.

The Post-Dispatch platform statement, adopted in 1911, includes the pledge that the newspaper "will always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty."

Over the years, the paper's editorials have taken a reliably Democratic or liberal view of issues, positions some worried would change under Lee's ownership.

Lee had previously told employees that it has "has always been cautious about making changes to longstanding editorial positions of the newspaper." In a question-and-answer sheet distributed soon after the January announcement of the purchase, Lee said it lets "local publishers and editors ... decide what positions are best for their communities."

Putting a condition like that in the actual purchase agreement, however, is unusual, said one broker, who demanded anonymity. "First off, why would they be worried about Lee taking the paper out of St. Louis?" the broker said. "But the editorial viewpoint, I think that's been mentioned in some of the deals we've done...but it is not typical at all."

Of course, newspapers are the only business monopolies liberals love. Wonder why?

(HT: Drudge)

Kofi Annan, Liar

No wonder why the Democrats love him:

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan did not initially tell investigators in the oil-for-food probe that he met twice with representatives of his son's employer as the Swiss company began soliciting United Nations business.

Annan's omissions last November raised credibility concerns with the chief investigator, Robert Parton, that persisted even after Annan later provided his recollections about the meetings. Investigators had uncovered the contacts in calendars recovered from computers, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The Associated Press.

Parton sought to make an issue of Annan's veracity, concluding the U.N. chief wasn't initially forthcoming and his story evolved as new facts emerged. Parton also noted Annan's account sometimes conflicted with other witnesses deemed credible. Drafts of Parton's report, however, were substantially revised.

The three-member committee that supervised Parton used a different tone when it laid out the discrepancies in the version of the report released to the public two months ago. "He had checked the records and now remembered the meeting," the final report said about one of the meetings Annan hadn't originally disclosed.

The final report also didn't mention that Annan had originally denied knowing one of his son's business associates with whom he had had lunch. Nor did it mention that the business associate testified that he specifically discussed Kojo Annan's interest in doing business in Iraq with the U.N. chief.

Wouldn't it be great to see he and Hillary pulled before a grand jury in 2005?

And Here I Thought Iraq War Opposition Was All Principled and Stuff

Claudia Rosette has more on the Oil-for-Food scandal. The Hair Helmet Hamas won't be happy about this:

When Senator Norm Coleman (R., Minn.) last year compared the United Nations Oil-for-Food scandal to “an onion,” he had just one thing wrong: The more you peel, the bigger it gets.

The latest insights into this cosmos of U.N.-fostered corruption come by way of a bipartisan report just released by the Senate Permanent Subcomittee on Investigations, or PSI, led by Coleman. In detail, with supporting documentation, the report shows how Saddam Hussein, via Oil-for-Food, gave rights to buy millions of barrels of underpriced Iraqi oil to two politicians who supported his regime: former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua and British Member of Parliament George Galloway.

In a press release, Coleman notes: “This report exposes how Saddam turned the Oil for Food program on its head and used the program to reward his political allies like Pasqua and Galloway.”

That’s news, because both Pasqua and Galloway have denied allegations that they received any such riches from Saddam’s regime. Galloway last year won a libel suit in the U.K., against the British Daily Telegraph, over similar allegations — which were based on documentation different from that produced by Senate investigators.

The importance of this Senate report goes well beyond those two names, however. Using documents from Saddam’s own records, supplemented by interviews with officials of the former Saddam regime, Senate investigators are uncovering detailed new evidence that Oil-for-Food served as a vehicle for Saddam to thwart sanctions, fund terrorists, and buy political influence within the U.N.’s own Security Council.

Citing interviews with Saddam’s former deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz, former vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan, and an unnamed former senior Iraqi official, the Senate report says that Iraq's Baathist regime, in doling out rights to buy cheap oil through the U.N. program, “gave priority to foreign officials, journalists and even terrorist entities.” Ramadan, Saddam’s former vice president, told Senate investigators that such oil allocations were “compensation for support.” According to the report, the list of terrorists named by these Iraqi officials as engaging in this quid pro quo includes “the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Abu Abbas, and the Mujahedeen-e Khalq.”

Another of the report’s findings is especially interesting in light not only of Saddam’s subversion of Oil-for-Food to bust sanctions, but also as context for the hot debate within the U.N. Security Council just prior to the U.S.-led military overthrow of Saddam in 2003. The report explains that the prime targets of Saddam’s scheme to buy influence were “individuals and entities from countries on the U.N. Security Council.” Both documents and interviews with former senior officials of Saddam’s regime confirm that “The regime steered a massive portion of its allocations toward Security Council members that were believed by the Hussein regime to support Iraq in its efforts to lift sanctions — namely, Russia, France, and China.”

It turns out that not only did several of Saddam’s oil-ministry charts expressly separate oil-allocation recipients by country; these charts further spelled out whether the country was a member of the Security Council.

Looks like it was the opposition to the war which was about oil, doesn't it?

Movin' On Up

Up out of Africa, that is, according to this study:

By studying the DNA of an ancient people in Malaysia, a team of geneticists says it has illuminated many aspects of how modern humans migrated from Africa.

The geneticists say there was only one migration of modern humans out of Africa; that it took a southern route to India, Southeast Asia and Australia; and that it consisted of a single band of hunter-gatherers, probably just a few hundred people strong.

Because these events occurred in the last Ice Age, when Europe was at first too cold for human habitation, the researchers say, it was populated only later, not directly from Africa but as an offshoot of the southern migration. The people of this offshoot would presumably have trekked back through the lands that are now India and Iran to reach the Near East and Europe.

The findings depend on analysis of mitochondrial DNA, a type of genetic material inherited solely through the female line. They are reported today in Science by a team of geneticists led by Dr. Vincent Macaulay of the University of Glasgow.

Everyone in the world can be placed on a single family tree, in terms of their mitochondrial DNA, because everyone has inherited that piece of DNA from a single woman, the mitochondrial Eve, who lived some 200,000 years ago.

There were, of course, many other women in that ancient population. But over the generations, one mitochondrial DNA replaced all the others through the process known as genetic drift.

With the help of mutations that have built up on the one surviving copy, geneticists can arrange people in lineages and estimate the time of origin of each lineage.

With this approach, Dr. Macaulay's team calculates that the emigration from Africa occurred 65,000 years ago, pushed along the coasts of India and Southeast Asia and reached Australia by 50,000 years ago, the date of the earliest known archaeological site there.

The Malaysian people whom the geneticists studied are the Orang Asli. The term means "original men" in Malay.

They are probably descended from this first migration, because they have several ancient mitochondrial DNA lineages that are found nowhere else.

These lineages are 42,000 to 63,000 years old, the geneticists say. Subgroups of the Orang Asli, like the Semang, have probably been able to remain intact because they adapted to the harsh existence of living in forests, said Dr. Stephen Oppenheimer, the member of the geneticists' team who collected blood samples in Malaysia.

Is it me, or is there a flaw in this approach?

The likelihood that a tiny band of several hundred could wander over thousands of miles of harsh terrain, engaging in dangerous hunting with primitive weapons, subject to the whims of their environment, just strikes me as off.

Moreover, haven't these geneticists made a basic error in assuming that just because a certain lineage of mitochondrial DNA doesn't exist today it never existed at all? Wouldn't lineages die out all the time, especially those of isolated groups making the first exoduses out of Africa?

Through the Glass, Darkly

Victor Davis Hanson is a must-read on WWII revisionism:

There is a pattern here. Western elites — the beneficiaries of 60 years of peace and prosperity achieved by the sacrifices to defeat fascism and Communism — are unhappy in their late middle age, and show little gratitude for, or any idea about, what gave them such latitude. If they cannot find perfection in history, they see no good at all. So leisured American academics tell us that Iwo Jima was unnecessary, if not a racist campaign, that Hiroshima had little military value but instead was a strategic ploy to impress Stalin, and that the GI was racist, undisciplined, and reliant only on money and material largess.

There are two disturbing things about the current revisionism that transcend the human need to question orthodoxy. The first is the sheer hypocrisy of it all. Whatever mistakes and lapses committed by the Allies, they pale in comparison to the savagery of the Axis or the Communists. Post-facto critics never tell us what they would have done instead — lay off the German cities and send more ground troops into a pristine Third Reich; don’t bomb, but invade, an untouched Japan in 1946; keep out of WWII entirely; or in its aftermath invade the Soviet Union?

Lost also is any sense of small gratitude. A West German intellectual like Grass does not inform us that he was always free to migrate to East Germany to live in socialist splendor rather than remain unhappy in capitalist “subservience” in an American-protected West Germany — or that some readers of the New York Times who opposed Hitler might not enjoy lectures about their moral failings from someone who once fought for him. Such revisionists never ask whether they could have written so freely in the Third Reich, Tojo’s Japan, Mussolini’s Italy, Soviet Russia, Communist Eastern Europe — or today in such egalitarian utopias as China, Cuba, or Venezuela.

Second, revisionism requires knowledge of orthodoxy. One cannot dismiss Iwo Jima as an unnecessary sideshow or allege that Dresden was simple blood rage until one understands the tactical and strategic dilemmas of the age — the hope that wounded and lost B-29s might be saved by emergency fields on Iwo, or that the Russians wanted immediate help from the Allied air command to take the pressure off the eastern front in February 1945.

But again, most Americans never learned the standard narrative of War II — only what was wrong about it. Whereas it is salutary that an American 17-year-old knows something of the Japanese relocation ordered by liberals such as Earl Warren and FDR, or of the creation and the dropping of the atomic bomb by successive Democratic administrations, they might wish to examine what went on in Nanking, Baatan, Wake Island, Guadalcanal, Manila, or Manchuria — atrocities that their sensitive teachers are probably clueless about as well.

After all, this was a week in which thousands of the once-enslaved Dutch in Maastricht were protesting the visit of a president of the nation that once liberated their fathers, while thousands of neo-Nazis were back in the streets of Berlin. A Swedish EU official recently blamed the Second World War on "nationalistic pride and greed, and…international rivalry for wealth and power" — the new mantra that Hitler was merely confused or perhaps had some “issues” with his neighbors. Perhaps her own opportunistic nation that once profited (“greed”?) from the Third Reich itself was not somehow complicit in fueling the Holocaust.

How odd that Swedes and Spaniards who were either neutrals or pro-Nazi during World War II now so often lecture the United States not just about present morality but about the World War II past as well.

If there were any justice in the world, we would have the ability to transport our most severe critics across time and space to plop them down on Omaha Beach or put them in an overloaded B-29 taking off from Tinian, with the crew on amphetamines to keep awake for their 15-hour mission over Tokyo.

But alas, we cannot. Instead, the beneficiaries of those who sacrificed now ankle-bite their dead betters. Even more strangely, they have somehow convinced us that in their politically-correct hindsight, they could have done much better in World War II.

Sure they could have. All they needed to do was give those Nazis a great big hug and tell them to "get real".

Big Bird, Bolshevik

George Neumayr, once more:

The arrogance of the liberal cabal at PBS is incredible. They complain in proportion to their lost privileges. They automatically assume that Americans should feel happy to pay higher taxes to finance what amounts to PBS infomercials for the Democratic Party and the ideological cultural left.

The media coverage of Tomlinson reflects this arrogance of the aggrieved ruling class pining over its diminution (and minor at that) of power at PBS. Starting with the premise that liberalism is synonymous with editorial neutrality and independence, the media cast Tomlinson as "political" while his liberal critics at PBS are treated as "independent." This drawing of artificial lines is necessary in order to make the story sound compelling. But the story isn't alarming in the least if people know that the independent critics here are Democrats and liberals who treat PBS tax dollars as their own personal piggy bank for ideological projects.

Under a picture of Bill Moyers, the Washington Post ran the caption: "Bill Moyers's PBS program is reported to have been monitored for 'anti-Bush' content." That's supposed to sound very chilling. But what Tomlinson did sounds responsible once you know that Moyers's infomercials for the Democrats are financed with tax dollars. Didn't the same press now getting worked up over Tomlinson complain recently about tax dollars going to pro-Bush content (from Armstrong Williams and the like)? If tax dollars shouldn't go to pro-Bush journalism, by that same reasoning the press should object to tax dollars going to Bill Moyers for anti-Bush journalism. That Tomlinson objected to Moyers' anti-Bush content isn't any more threatening to editorial independence than the press's legitimate squawking about tax-financed right-wing punditry.

The media's contrived contest of Tomlinson vs. PBS isn't politics vs. independence, but politics vs. politics. And Tomlinson's politics (which consists in this case of simply ensuring that a government agency under George Bush's control adheres to the philosophical balance the law establishing PBS mandated) is justified. He is, after all, a political appointee. The political maneuvering of PBS staffers isn't justified. They aren't political appointees.

No, they aren't. They are media figures, and thus completely unused to any public accountability at all.

C'mon, George---understand our role. We unwashed masses are simply supposed to write checks to our bettors so they can continue to propagandize our kids while attending wine festivals and John Tesh concerts.

Get with it, man.

Why Are We Still Talking about a GOP Nuclear Option when Senate Democrats Pressed the Button Weeks Ago?

Rich Lowry gets it:

The routine filibuster of judicial nominees is being portrayed by its defenders as one of the most hallowed traditions of American governance, up there with Robert’s Rules of Order, congressional committee hearings and Rose Garden bill-signing ceremonies. But this tradition dates from only 2003, when Democrats found themselves in the minority in the Senate and desperate to block Bush judicial nominees.

The judicial filibuster isn’t a tradition, but an innovation; not a function of checks and balances, but a perversion of them; not an outgrowth of the Constitution, but at best irrelevant to it.

The Senate has two broad traditions. It has respected the filibuster, which allows a minority of 41 senators to extend debate indefinitely and block a vote on a bill. But it has also brought — in its “advice and consent” role under the Constitution — a president’s nominees to the floor for an up-or-down vote without filibusters. The Democrats’ new tack of filibustering judicial nominees has created a clash of traditions: Either the traditional respect for the filibuster or advice and consent as traditionally practiced must give way.

Throughout the history of the Senate filibuster, it has usually applied to legislative business. The theory is that if the Senate wants to make its internal business more difficult by requiring 60 votes, so be it. But the president’s nominations are a different matter. They involve another branch of government. With limited exceptions, senators have avoided filibustering them because it was thought that the Senate’s advice-and-consent function compels it simply to approve or disapprove a nominee.

The Democrats have broken with this tradition. Through routine party-line filibusters that bottle up judicial nominees indefinitely, they are changing the Senate’s advice-and-consent function. They have created an entirely new minority veto for presidential nominees who otherwise have the votes to be approved by the Senate. This is not how the constitutional scheme was supposed to work, or has ever worked in the past. And no one has ever claimed otherwise — until now.

Is there anybody in America dumber than a GOP senator? At this point, Barbara Boxer looks like Blaise Pascal in comparison.

The Cult of Death, Continued

One more "victory" for liberal education:

Bjerregaard made arrangements for his students to be a part of a dissection of a dog that was still alive.

The dog was still alive, but the teacher said it was sedated before the dissection began.

With the students watching, the sedated dog's digestive system was removed.

"It just makes me sick and I don't think this should go on anywhere and nobody's learning from it," student Sierra Sears said.

The teacher said the lesson would allow students to see the organs actually working.

"I thought that it would be just really a good experience if they could see the digestive system in the living animal," Bierregaard said.

The school's principal, Kirk Anderson, said notifications went to parents explaining the dog was going to be euthanized and that the experiment would be done with the dog's organs still functioning.

The teacher is standing by his decision and calls it the ultimate educational experience.

Principal Anderson said he supports the lesson and it will be allowed to continue because the students are learning.

What is it with the Dutch and euthanasia?

This wasn't an experiment, by any definition. There was no hypothesis being tested, aside from the hypothesis that the sicko teacher could get away with an act of animal cruelty perpetrated publicly, which he apparently has done.

Wonder where the PETA crowd is on this one, or were they too busy protesting McDonald's to take notice?

Tick Tick Tick Tick

Must be pretty bad at your news magazine when even a two-bit terrorist-loving Clintonista-marrying hack like Christiane Amanpour skedaddles lest the stink stick to her:

Globetrotting CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour is ankling "60 Minutes," saying she has decided not to renew her deal with the CBS newsmagazine.
Amanpour had worked for "60 Minutes" part-time since 1996, contributing five to six stories a year to the program. She will continue to work as chief international correspondent for CNN.

"I have concluded that this unique arrangement has now run its course and therefore I have decided not to seek a renewal of my contract with '60 Minutes,'" Amanpour said in a statement.

(HT: Drudge)

Hell on Rails

Amtrak screws up, again:

As Amtrak’s high-speed Acela Express trains sit idle on sidetracks due to faulty brakes, we need to ask ourselves what have taxpayers gotten for the $29 billion put into Amtrak thus far?

The answer: Not much.

Amtrak wants the highest subsidies ever now, in asking for $1.82 billion for 2006. Its chairman explained that without this support, the railroad would have no cash by September. Year after year Congress allocates funds to keep Amtrak from going bankrupt.

Amtrak has failed again. Last month it suspended its flagship Acela Express service because of faulty brakes. The trains are not expected back on track until “sometime this summer,” according to Amtrak officials. Amtrak keeps promising a glorious new day for train travel but has yet to deliver it.

Long before the brakes went bad, Acela Express breakdowns were plentiful and resulted in train cancellations, late arrivals, and lawsuits. But the resulting drop in ticket revenues for the trains that travel between Boston, New York, and Washington is the latest in a long list of reasons why Amtrak is heading toward bankruptcy — again.

Acela Express schedules (when the trains did run) were embarrassing when compared with trains a half-century ago. In 1954, the New Haven Railroad’s Advance Merchants Limited linked New York with Boston in 3 hours and 57 minutes. The Acela was only about 30 minutes faster.

The train was supposed to be the railroad’s crown jewel and help “save Amtrak.” In fact, the Acela shows that Amtrak lacks the distinctive competencies required to design a high-technology train to serve the consumer-travel market. Acela is a case study in poor design, excessive delivery delays, component failures, and rising costs.

Liberals' obsession with mass transit continues to yield these type of dividends. Of course, as with education, there can only be one solution: a special blue-ribbon panel comprised of retired Democrat politicians, and more money. Lots more money.

Don't Like America? Then Stay Home

President Bush's best buddy Vincente Fox continues to bite the hand that feeds him:

Mexico has reacted furiously to a bill signed into law by the US this week that would fund a border wall and prevent illegal Mexican migrants from obtaining US driving licences.

President Vicente Fox said he would lodge a diplomatic complaint, and was considering complaints to multilateral bodies if Mexico could not unable to resolve the problem bilaterally.

In the US, leaders of the Mexican community threatened to strike to send a message to US employers that they could not survive without cheap Mexican labour.

Santiago Creel, Mexico's interior secretary, said the “Real ID” law was “negative, inconvenient, and obstructionist”.

“Building walls doesn't help anyone build a good neighbourhood,” he said. “Taking away the possibility of obtaining driving licences for people who are working in legal jobs, who pay their taxes there, who send remittances home here, seems to us to be an extreme measure, particularly given the new understanding that we thought we had after the re-election of President Bush.”

Andrés Manuel López Obrador, mayor of Mexico City, supported Mr Fox's stance. He said the problem of growing immigration could be “resolved by encouraging development in Mexico and Central America, not by building walls and using the border control”.

Hmm, if this is true, then why does Mexico aggressively patrol its own southern border? How much money does the Mexican government provide to their southern neighbors for economic development?

Last I saw, Mexico doesn't have an open northern border, much less an open southern one with its less-developed neighbors who work for less money than Mexicans do.

Sauce for the goose and all that.

The Fickle Finger of Fate...

...has been found:

The mysterious finger that a woman claimed to have found in a bowl of Wendy's chili came from an associate of her husband who lost the finger in an industrial accident, police said Friday.

"The jig is up. The puzzle pieces are beginning to fall into place, and the truth is being exposed," Police Chief Rob Davis said.

The discovery of the finger's owner marks a significant break in a case that has confounded authorities for nearly two months, ever since Anna Ayala claimed she bit down on the well-manicured, 1 1/2-inch finger in a mouthful of her steamy chili.

The case became the talk of the Internet and late-night talk shows and spawned numerous bizarre tips and theories about the source of the finger, including one about a woman whose fingertip was bitten off by a spotted leopard kept as a pet.

Authorities said last month that they believed the story was a hoax, and they arrested the 39-year-old Ayala at her home in Las Vegas and charged her with attempted grand larceny for allegedly trying to shake down Wendy's. But whose finger was in the chili remained a mystery.

The owner was traced through a tip made to a Wendy's hot line, Davis said. He said the man lost the finger in December, and authorities "positively confirmed that this subject was in fact the source of the fingertip." The nature of the industrial accident was not disclosed.

Davis said the Nevada man, whose name was not released, is cooperating. The police chief would not say if the man was in on the alleged hoax.

Margaritas For All My Amigas!

Nothing says, "I Got Hammered At El Compadre Before My Book Signing And Thought It Would Be A Great Idea To Wear The Tablecloth In Case It Got Kinda Chilly At Book Soup," like a radioactive stripey poncho.

HT: Go Fug Yourself

Leave No Administrator Behind

How's this for education reform?

Here are two cold-hearted facts:

First, if children in Asia receive a better education than your children, they will surpass yours in next generation’s global competition.

Second, they will deserve to do so.

Of all society’s institutions from which we should demand excellence, schools top the list. Yet, we tolerate their consistent failure to convert huge financial inputs into adequate education outcomes.

Stories are all too common about students sharing out-of-date textbooks, teachers paying for basic supplies with their own money, and classrooms lacking computers. Meanwhile many administrators take home six-figure salaries with monthly car allowances that have local BMW dealerships keeping their phone numbers on speed-dial.

The call continuously goes out for more money. But when taxpayers respond generously, where does that money go? Too often, not to America’s classrooms, where it’s needed most.

A business technique called “best practices” counsels studying one’s competitors to identify current benchmarks. In that spirit, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), the national average for “classroom spending” is 61.5 cents of every dollar of operational budgets (defined to include teachers, textbooks, classroom supplies and activities including athletics, music, the arts, and special-needs instruction).

To date, only four states spend 65 cents or more of their budgets in classrooms (Maine, New York, Tennessee, and Utah).

This “best practice” observation is the inspiration behind a national grassroots movement that has the potential to remake the K-12 education system as we know it. First Class Education seeks to have each school district in America direct at least 65 cents of every dollar away from centralized administrators and into classrooms for more and better-paid teachers, newer textbooks and computers, and to foster an environment that inspires learning.

Many wonder what difference could be made by redirecting 3.5 pennies of every dollar of school budgets into classrooms. Here’s the answer: According to the June 2004 report by the NCES, if all 50 states and Washington, D.C. allocated 65 cents of school spending to classrooms, an additional $14 billion would be available — enough to provide a new laptop computer to every student in America or hire 300,000 more teachers. All without a tax increase.

I'm skeptical. As long as educrats control budgets, they're simply going to line their pockets and pad their perks as they've always done. Individual teachers have to buy pencils and other supplies for classrooms, but your school superintendent always has plenty in his mahogany desk inside his great big office. It's a joke.

My reform plan is simpler:

1. Abolish federal educational funding and the Department of Education.
2. Privatize all primary education.

No one will go uneducated, as you'll see a bumper crop of financial assistance and charitable scholarships crop up immediately. Also, the cost of education will drop like a rock with real competition amongst schools, the best teachers will make beaucoup bucks as schools compete for them, parents will be more attentive since they'll be well aware of the dollars they're spending, and the current politically-correct Oprah curriculum will be replaced by useful instruction in math and science.

It will never happen in our lifetime, if at all.

We simply don't care that we're handing out diplomas to dummies.

Do They Teach Statistics In Public Schools?

Apparently not, given the laughably-flawed study which claims public schools do a better job than private schools in educating students:

In fact, it makes perfect sense that within each racial and socioeconomic group it’s the low performers whose parents will be motivated to make the sacrifices necessary to put them in private schools. What counts is whether those students make better or worse gains over time after they enter private school — and that’s just what this study can’t tell us.

I could go on, but instead I’ll let the authors explain it for themselves. Buried in the back of the study, they write:

NAEP data [the test score set they use] do not allow for examinations of growth in achievement over time, nor do they include information about student movement between school sectors. Therefore, correlations between school sector and achievement are not demonstrably causal. In other words, one cannot conclude from this analysis that public schools are more effective at promoting student growth than private schools.

Read that last sentence again: One cannot conclude from this analysis that public schools are more effective at promoting student growth than private schools.

So what about all the huffing and puffing in the front of the study — “At this time when market-style reforms are changing the public school landscape, this study offers fresh evidence that challenges common assumptions about the general superiority of private schools,” etc.? It’s just smoke and mirrors.

As it happens, there’s a large body of very high-quality research that does allow us to evaluate the causal connection between school type and student achievement, and it overwhelmingly finds that private schools do better. The most convincing evidence comes from seven studies using “random assignment,” the same method used in medical trials. In all seven studies, students who won a random lottery to use a school voucher at a private school had significantly greater test-score gains than similar students who lost the lottery and stayed in public schools. Numerous studies using other methods have also produced a very strong consensus in favor of this finding.

As a general rule, whenever a researcher announces that his study finds something that contradicts all the other empirical evidence, and the finding just happens to coincide with the self-interest of powerful political groups, it’s a good idea to do a reality check. One can only hope this study doesn’t damage the chances that more students will be empowered to attend superior private schools through voucher programs.

You don't need to be a statistician to figure this one out.

If public schools are better, then why are people willing to pay through the nose for private school tuition when they get public school education for "free"?

The Equal Right to Have Your Guts Blown Out

The Army embraces feminism by sending women to die in combat:

As Elaine Donnelly has pointed out, the Army has apparently rewritten the regulations regarding women in such a way as to make Bill Clinton’s infamous statement that “it depends on what the meaning of is, is,” appear to be straightforward. In her May 8 NRO piece describing a presentation by Army chief of staff General Peter Schoomaker at the American Enterprise Institute, she writes:

Current directives exempt female soldiers from direct ground-combat units such as the infantry and armor, and from smaller support companies that “collocate” (operate 100 percent of the time) with land-combat troops. The new, unauthorized wording narrows the “collocation rule” to apply only when a combat unit is actually “conducting an assigned direct ground combat mission.” (Emphasis added.)

General Schoomaker recited Defense Department regulations, but claimed (without justification) that the Army has separate rules that exempt female soldiers from collocation with land-combat battalions “at the time that those units are undergoing those operations” (emphasis added). By adding the words “conducting” or “undergoing” (a direct ground-combat mission) to the collocation rule, the Army has created a new regulation that has not been authorized by the secretary of defense, or reported to Congress in advance, as required by law.

In other words, the Army says it is not in violation of DoD regulations because women in FSCs are not really “collocated” until the combat unit is engaged or about to be engaged in a direct combat mission. The breathtaking assumption here is that women in these units can be pulled out before the battle starts.

General Schoomaker is a very experienced and able soldier. He certainly understands the role of “friction” and the “fog of uncertainty” in battle, having experienced these phenomena first hand. He must know that trying to pull women out of their units under such circumstances, even if it could be done at all in the chaos and confusion of combat, would be incredibly disruptive, undermining unit cohesion and effectiveness and diverting resources needed to prevail in the battle.

Women in combat has been a failure everywhere it's been tried. Aside from the sheer physical strain of the battlefield, men have a natural instinct to protect women. When I was involved with POW resistance training back inna day, the surest way to get American male soldiers to do anything you wanted them to do was to imply violence toward one of the female soldiers. This approach never failed to work, even in an academic setting where participants knew no actual harm would be done. Seeing women maimed, abused, or killed has a strong deleterious effect on morale and combat performance.

Of course, the performance of the American armed forces has never been of importance to the Left.

But there was a time when it was important to the Army.

Et Tu, Oprah?

The Oprahfication of America continues apace:

Ever since America began to wean itself off the sociological junk-food of victimization and the much-maligned Culture of Blame, the landscape has been steadily overspread by an antithetical conceit — loosely bracketed as "empowerment" — whose preachments can be summarized as follows: Don't let anyone take away your dreams. Everything you need to succeed is right there inside you. Believe it, achieve it.

Today, Fortune 500 conglomerates draft optimistic business models in bullet points drawn from Stephen Covey's seven (highly effective) habits; families settle disputes using ameliorative diagnostics straight out of Dr. Phil; millions of everyday Americans owe their feelings of "personal power" to prow-jawed fire-walker Tony Robbins, the arguable father of today's mainstream brand of empowerment. And, of course, there is that daily dose of spiritual adrenaline from Oprah Winfrey, who is seldom categorized as a guru in her own right, but whose role as the movement's éminence grise cannot be discounted: The road to self-help's promised land — and a bite of its $8.56 billion-dollar fruit, as per the latest figures from Marketdata Enterprises — goes right through the vast king-making machine that is Harpo Productions. The guiding nostrums delivered via sundry channels by these and other self-help celebrities form a cultural given, an uncontested (and, one is led to believe, incontestable) foundation for the present starry-eyed Zeitgeist.

Lost in all the adulation is the downside of this tireless effort to uplift. The overselling of personal empowerment — the hyping of hope — may in fact be the great unsung irony of latter-day American culture, destined to disappoint as surely as the pity party it was supposed to replace. And in a far more insidious fashion.

I'm sick of railing against this nonsense.

Listen up, America:

Listen to Oprah and Dr. Phil. Empowerment is everything. You make your own reality. The only thing that matters is you. When you close your eyes, the universe winks out of existence until you open them again. We are all figments of your imagination. Visualize, then realize.

And while you're doing that, I'm going to be eating your lunch, getting your promotion and your raise, and having the success you left in the gutter, all because you were too weak and lazy to ignore the sophistry of the mealy-mouthed psychobabblers and put your back into your work. And guess what: my kids are going to do the same, since they're not going to worship at the altar of Oprah.

How do you realize dreams? You work, you sweat, you sacrifice.

Anything else is crap.

Update:

Welcome, readers from Ankle Biting Pundits and Dummocrats (and thanks to the Dummocrats for the warnings regarding the vengeance of the Cult of Oprah).

Feel free to look around.

Out of Africa, But How?

An interesting hypothesis on the route man took out of Africa:

WASHINGTON Were our earliest ancestors beach lovers?

Two reports out this week indicate that the first humans who left Africa may have traveled along the coast of the Arabian peninsula.

That's contrary to what scientists used to think -- that our ancestors moved off of Africa through Egypt and the Middle East.

The studies were put together by researchers in Scotland and India.

How did researchers figure out travel plans from 65-thousand years ago?

They looked at codes in our D-N-A which show how long ago one group split from another.

There's also some more straightforward evidence. Researchers say Australia was settled thousands of years before Europe, pointing to an early migration east.

I find these theories endlessly fascinating, in part because they tend to become orthodoxy very quickly, then get overturned very quickly by the emerging new orthodoxy.

The bottom line is that our knowledge of the ancient world is very sketchy, and what we do know is based on a web of assumptions not fully consistent with one another nor totally verifiable.

Way Inside Baseball Constitutional Law Essay

What? You still here?

Ed Whelan's got a great piece on originalism and Brown v. Board of Education:

The Left's "killer" argument against an originalist reading of the Constitution is that adherence to the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment purportedly would not have yielded the just result — the end to the evil of segregated public schools — mandated by the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Margaret Talbot's interesting but flawed profile of Justice Scalia and originalism in a recent issue of the New Yorker (which I wrote about here) is typical: The only "way to get to Brown," she asserts, is "to embrace the 'living Constitution.' " Why's that? "[I]t's hard to see an originalist justification" for Brown, since, she claims, the "same Congress that passed the Fourteenth Amendment segregated Washington schools." Justice Scalia "sometimes acknowledges as much, saying that a faulty — that is, a non-originalist — method can occasionally produce good results, a Scalian variation on 'Even a broken watch is right twice a day.' " And further, she tells us, liberal legal scholar Cass Sunstein has declared that a "doctrinaire originalist" would reject Brown. Case closed. No need for further discussion.

But wait: Every one of Talbot's assertions is off the mark. First, the 37th Congress created segregated public schools for black children in D.C. in 1862, but it was a later, different Congress — the 39th — that in 1866 proposed the Fourteenth Amendment, which was ratified in 1868. As the brilliant scholar (and now tenth-circuit judge) Michael McConnell explains in his 1995 Virginia Law Review article "Originalism and the Desegregation Decisions": "At no time after the Fourteenth Amendment did Congress vote in favor of segregated schools in the District [of Columbia] (although Congress appropriated money for the segregated schools that already existed)." In addition, the restrictions of the Fourteenth Amendment apply only to states, not to Congress, so congressional action with respect to D.C. schools provides a shaky foundation for any inference as to the contemporaneous understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Second, what Talbot characterizes as an acknowledgment by Justice Scalia is no such thing. To make the obvious point that non-originalist decisions — that is, judges doing whatever they want — can produce good results in no way implies that originalism would not yield those same results. To use Talbot's analogy: That a broken clock is right twice a day doesn't mean a working clock is wrong twice a day.

Third, just as one may rightly be suspicious when liberals instruct conservatives on what "genuine" conservatives would do, one need not accept Cass Sunstein as the final word on how an originalist would decide Brown.

I've always loved how liberal judges ignore time-honored precedents, introduce whatever psychobabble fad showed up on "Oprah" this week, crank out ludicrously-reasoned opinions to justify their tinfoil-hat notions, then chide conservatives for not respecting the "precedent" they've set.

Chalk it up as Reason 998 why Frist had better nuke the Democrats and get rational people back on the federal bench.

But Is the Movie Any Good?

George Neumayr is now a must-read for me:

The gravitation of liberals to illiberal ideologies is uncanny. The more illiberal the ideology, the more likely liberals will endeavor to understand and defend it. Militant Islam enjoys the benefits of this phenomenon in this century, just as the totalitarians of the Soviet Union benefited from it in the last. Militant Islam's most powerful propagandists are not Muslims but self-hating Westerners who interpret militant Islam's history and doctrines with a sympathy they never extend to Western religion.

The latest illustration of this self-hatred is Kingdom of Heaven, an anti-crusader movie that contains Hollywood's idea of a happy ending -- Christians in retreat and Islam on the march. Owing to this species of death-wish liberalism, Islamic conquerors against the West don't even need to rewrite history. Defeated Westerners will rewrite it for them, making their imperialism by the sword look harmless

A few years ago PBS, making a great effort to refurbish Islam in the wake of 9/11, produced a documentary depicting the early Muslim warriors as 7th-century Alan Aldas. Kingdom of Heaven keeps this propaganda rolling, which director Sir Ridley Scott's spokesman didn't even bother to hide prior to the movie's release. He told the London press last year that the movie is designed to please Muslims. "We hope that the Muslim world sees the rectification of history," Scott's spokesman said.

What's meant by rectification of history here is the rewriting of history according to politically correct exigencies in the liberal mind. This need produces a ludicrous movie that looks as if it was assembled by a committee at the U.N. The movie's portrayals break down as: Believing Christians bad, Muslims and de-Christianized Knights good.

Flying the Unfriendly Skies

Is Terror Air open for business?

Ibrahim, the alleged mastermind of the 1993 bomb plot, is possibly the closest thing to a real-life Keyser Soze, the legendary mastermind of The Usual Suspects. Counterfeiting, assassination attempts on rivals in Bangkok, extorting Bollywood film studios, gunrunning to Africa, large-scale heroin smuggling to Europe -- Ibrahim and his violent "D-Company" gang do it all, all across the world. Despite fleeing India after the bombing, he is still alleged to control much of the subcontinent's underworld from exile.

But Dawood Ibrahim is more than just a sinister criminal and narcoterrorist; he is also a supporter of Al Qaeda. On October 17, 2003, the U.S. Treasury Department declared him a terrorist and froze his assets. According to Treasury, Osama bin Laden and his organization use Ibrahim's smuggling routes for a fee. (Treasury does not reveal exactly what Osama smuggles along those routes.) Furthermore, Ibrahim is a financial backer of the Pakistan-based terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Taiba, which continues horrific attacks inside India, including the December 2001 assault on India's parliament. When al Qaeda bigshot Abu Zubaydah was arrested in Faisalabad, he was hiding in a Lashkar-e-Taiba safehouse.

In case you're not worried yet, this journalist reports that Dawood Ibrahim may be "operating an airline from a Central Asian republic." The republic may be Nepal, where D-Company has invested in the local branch of an airline. Granted, Nepal's passenger carriers are not exactly in the market for the new jumbo Airbus. But a drug-running Islamic terrorist with his own airline? That ought to focus the mind.

Not Enough Sleaze in the World?

Scott Seward Smith, a brother aspiring writer, thinks so:

The rejections came in again and, again, appended to one was a hand-written note: "Good writing but characters are sleazy, uninteresting, no real history on either one and no sense of place." This is a rejection? I thought. Except for the "uninteresting" part I would consider it a blurb: sleazy characters slapped from nothing into consciousness, acting out their brief parts on the short-story stage. Of course there was no sense of place: most of the action takes place in a casino -- the most placeless of places. The rejection was actually a perfect summation of my idea of good fiction.

And I realized that most of my short stories were full of sleazy characters -- poets who fail to kill themselves, drunks who cheat on their wives, teachers who sleep with their students, men who learn how to fight because they are cowards, prodigies who are hopelessly cynical by the time they complete college. I don't know why they are so sleazy; I invited them onto the page and that is how they presented themselves and how they kept my attention.

I'm currently enjoying Professor Rufus J. Fears' excellent lecture series on The Great Books for The Teaching Company. I think if Scott listened to these, he'd know why the rejection letters pile up.

Great fiction tells great truths. And the great truth regarding evil is how utterly uninteresting those who practice it are. Spend some time with your typical sleazoid, hanging outside the 7-11 smoking Marlboros and waiting for a "friend". Engage him in conversation, and commit to enduring 15 minutes of the same. I doubt you'll find it interesting.

The Devil's a bore, despite what Milton says, and fiction which sets out once again to show how "interesting" half-men are simply doesn't cut it, at least now that evil isn't rare. Oh, you might be able to pull off a compelling villain, if you're Shakespeare and the villain's Iago. Most of us aren't.

When everybody else is spewing the same old cynical garbage, why not churn out a few "fairy tales"? It's harder than you think, requires tossing away the crutch of the stock "interesting" villains and antiheroes, and likely requires lots of sweat to pull off. Competition's fewer though, and the need is greater.

Will Benedict Bring A Beat-Down?

Sounds like all the right people are afraid he will:

If there were any "losers" in the election of Pope Benedict XVI, they certainly will not be found among the faithful, or the Latin American or African Catholic churches. No, the biggest losers are here in the United States, where influential, liberal Catholic priests who have actively and publicly defied the Vatican, along with several Cardinals selected late in the reign of Pope John Paul II, find themselves in a bit of a political pickle.

"Pope Benedict knows better than any one else who the trouble makers are in the United States, and he knows who has worked against the Church's teachings there," says an ordained source at the Vatican. "You will be seeing changes soon."

Hope he cleans out the Augean stables of moral equivalence, politicking, and corruption in the American Catholic Church. Millions of American Catholics deserve better than they've gotten from Law, Mahony, and the other "enlightened" clergy.

And They Seemed Like Such Harmless Little Lunatics

PETA kills animals dead.

(HT: The Corner)

The MSM Loves A Man In Uniform---Russian Uniform,That Is

Brent Bozell's just warming up on the Hair Helmet Hamas' horror over Bush actually, you know, supporting freedom in the former Soviet slave states, just like, you know, he said he would:

Last week, President Bush gave a terrific speech in Latvia about the rise of freedom and democracy in the world, hailing the Baltic nations for keeping their love for liberty and independence alive during a long period of Soviet occupation.

Then he went further, decrying the agreement at Yalta that consigned Eastern Europe to Soviet domination. "The agreement at Yalta followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable. Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a continent divided and unstable. The captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history."

You knew, you just knew, that the American media would object.

And they did. Check out Bozell's examples.

And I Like His Pizza Too

Rising GOP star Herman Cain takes on media bias over Social Security reform:

According to a recent Washington Post/ABC poll, President Bush's plan to restructure the Social Security system has lost public support. What the poll doesn't tell you is that the network news has focused so much on the liberal side of this debate that the result isn't a surprise. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The Post story stated, "58 percent of those polled this time said the more they hear about Bush's plan, the less they like it." And what are they hearing about Bush's plan? That it's a bad idea, of course. The networks have been beating up the idea of restructuring Social Security for months.

A new study by the Media Research Center's Free Market Project finds that the evening-news shows delivered liberal talking points on the Social Security debate more than twice as often as points from the conservative side advocating restructuring Social Security. The idea of personal retirement accounts doesn't stand a chance with numbers like those.

The study looked at the evening news programs on CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, and Fox between Nov. 15, 2004, and March 15, 2005. This time frame covered a period from shortly after Bush's reelection to the launch of his "60 stops in 60 days" campaign. The study examined the use of liberal and conservative talking points in Social Security stories as part of an ongoing analysis of media coverage of this debate.

CNN and CBS battled it out for the honor of being the most biased. Fifty-six percent of the CBS stories had a liberal leaning, compared with just 20 percent conservative. Over at CNN, it was 61 percent liberal and 22 percent conservative. Although the tally was close, CBS won by undermining conservative positions whenever possible.

If you still don't think the media tilts left, you're simply not awake.

Following the Terror Trail

Christopher Brown connects some dots on al Qaeda and WMD:

One key was that Abu-Hafs al-Masri, a.k.a. Mohammed Atef, in the role of military commander (a position analogous to the secretary of defense for al Qaeda, i.e. number 3), was personally in charge of al Qaeda's efforts to gain a WMD capability. Bin Laden himself, sometime in the early 1990s, added this duty to the position. In fact, Atef's predecessor, Abu-Ubaydah al-Banshiri, was on a mission to procure material for a dirty bomb — possibly part of the embassy-bombing plot originally planned for 1996 but delayed until 1998 — when he drowned in Lake Victoria in May of 1996.

Atef's personal oversight of al Qaeda's WMD programs means that Zarqawi, as the commander of al Qaeda's WMD training camps in Afghanistan (where the videos of choking dogs were filmed), would have reported directly to Atef. Zarqawi would likely have been assigned to this post personally by Atef. This could indicate that Zarqawi was not only a direct subordinate of Atef's in al Qaeda's WMD program but might have been Atef's prodigy.

Following Atef's death in November 2001, Abu Zubaydah became the military commander until his capture in Pakistan on March 28, 2002. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed then assumed this position until his capture in March 2003. During this time Saif al-Adil, who took the place of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and Zarqawi were in Tehran under the protection of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Zarqawi is believed to have remained in Iran until sometime in late October 2002, when he was involved in the killing of a USAID official in Amman.

Interestingly, a former member of the Iraqi intelligence services, Haydar al-Shammari, claimed that his commander Col. Abu-Wail ordered him to aid al Qaeda members fleeing from Afghanistan to enter Iraq through Jordan and Syria, where they joined up with Ansar al-Islam. This included experts in explosives, car bombs, and chemical weapons. This might explain why Zarqawi entered from Jordan rather than Iran.

This is why keeping nukes out of North Korean and Iranian hands is so important---terror states can easily farm out terror capabilities to terrorist groups. Iran and Syria have likely been doing just that with al Qaeda, as did Saddam Hussein.

Their Secret's Out

Why The Left is So Angry:



*chuckle*

HT: What Attitude Problem?

A Little Tuesday Morning Pick-Me-Up Part II

Heh.

You'll laugh... guarateed.

(Rated C for College Kids. A.k.a. "Don't click on the link if you can't take a joke.")

HT: What Attitude Problem?

Oh Yeah? Well, Your Pope is a Janitor!

Or a custodian, whatever. The Anchoress explores some thoughts (and some excellent links) on why it is unthinkable for Pope Benedict to come along and change Catholic doctrine based upon the dictates of its liberal members.

He's apparently not the dictator and supreme ruler of the Catholic Church, but the custodian of its legacy entrusted to him by Christ.

Interesting.

Weird World News

Are you kidding me? This is a joke right?

Oscar-winning actress Renee Zellweger and country music star Kenny Chesney were married Monday in a small ceremony on the island of St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands, a publicist for Zellweger said.
The ceremony took place in front of close friends and family, Los Angeles-based publicist Nanci Ryder said in a statement. The bride wore a Carolina Herrera dress, she added.
It was the first marriage for both.
The couple met at the Concert of Hope tsunami relief benefit Jan. 15, where Chesney was singing and Zellweger was answering telephones, the syndicated TV show "The Insider" reported.
Chesney, 37, lives on St. John, while Zellweger, who turned 36 two weeks ago, is from Katy, Texas.
Zellweger won a best supporting actress Oscar in 2004 for "Cold Mountain." She was nominated for Oscars for her work in "Chicago" and "Bridget Jones's Diary."
Chesney currently has two albums on Billboard's top 10 country albums chart, and his single "Anything But Mine" is No. 6 on the magazine's hot country songs list.
Chesney was named Country Music Association entertainer of the year in November, and his "When The Sun Goes Down" was named album of the year. His other hits include "Me and You" and "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy."
According to Country Weekly magazine, Chesney long ago named Zellweger as his favorite actress and was inspired to write his 1999 hit "You Had Me From Hello" after seeing her in "Jerry Maguire."
Zellweger appeared at a recent Chesney concert in Jacksonsville, Fla., presenting him with a margarita and a kiss on stage, Country Weekly magazine reported.
Zellweger has dated White Stripes singer Jack White and "Me, Myself & Irene" co-star Jim Carrey.

Didn't know she had a thing for tractors. But she is from Texas, I guess.

Smooth Criminal?

Jonah Goldberg knows why Michael Jackson is bad:

At minimum, Michael Jackson's handlers knew he had a reputation for abusing children. Before that, they knew he behaved in ways with children that sane, normal, people do not. They saw how he surrounded himself with a giant playroom used to entice boys into his bed. Jackson's staff crafted elaborate electronic warning systems other safeguards to ensure that Jackson was not caught doing anything with children by people who might turn against him. What sort of person installs an electronic warning system for an accused pederast? What sort of person sees that system every day — or even every now and then — and does nothing? What sorts of parents send their kids to a rumored sex offender's house on the thin rationalization that he was never technically convicted of wrongdoing?

The Michael Jackson story is an extremely exaggerated microcosm of Hollywood's moral climate. Hollywood is ruled by a class of people who believe that money solves problems and that the worst sin in the world is to judge another person's behavior. "Comedian" Bill Maher, for example, recently explained that he thought the charges were no big deal, even if true. After all, Jackson didn't rape anyone, he's merely accused of "servicing" young boys — and that's not nearly as bad as getting beaten up by schoolyard bullies. Wrong. In normal America, if kids beat up your kid, you demand a reckoning. If a middle-aged freak "services" your kid, you call a hearse.

Obviously, there are lots of people in the entertainment industry who are horrified by the allegations and behavior of Michael Jackson. But only in Hollywood could such a thing happen in the first place.

The Kingdom of Excrement

Wisdom isn't learning from experience, it's learning from others' experiences. James Bowman has spared me the experience of watching "Kingdom of Heaven":

Sir Ridley Scott's Crusades movie, Kingdom of Heaven, though visually impressive as we might expect, is shockingly unhistorical. I know that this is not supposed to matter and probably will not to the historically illiterate 13-year-olds who will make up its main audience, but the rest of us might at least want to be aware of the crudeness of the historical mise-en-scene, which could scarcely be greater if Sir Ridley and his screenwriter, William Monahan, had had their 12th century knights riding into battle in Humvees. But because most of the anachronisms he deals in are moral rather than material they will probably pass unnoticed. And what, you may ask, is the moral of the story? Well, it's not as if you couldn't guess. Turns out that the Crusades were not the struggle between Christians and Muslims that you might have thought they were, but between both Muslim and Christian religious fanatics on the one hand and modern tolerant liberals like the film-makers -- oh and, by the way, everyone else in Hollywood -- on the other. Who knew?

The most hilariously idiotic of the film's many historically stupid moments comes at the climax of the battle for Jerusalem in 1187 when Balian of Ibelin (Orlando Bloom), the commander of the city's Christian defenders, has a parley with the leader of its Muslim besiegers, Saladin, here invariably given his more authentic moniker, Salah al-Din (Ghassan Massoud). Nice that they insist on accuracy in something. Balian tells his adversary that he will surrender the city if the Muslim army will give its Christian inhabitants a safe-conduct to the sea, where they may take ship to return to Europe. The terrible alternative, Balian tells him, is that he will give the order for all the religious sites in the city to be destroyed: "Your holy places, ours -- everything that drives men mad." It's hard to imagine a more perfect example of Hollywood's view of religion -- or of a thought that would have been more unthinkable to the person supposedly uttering it.

Such words would have been sheer gibberish -- evidence of madness themselves -- in an age in which "religion" was inseparable from the culture. Another character says, "I put no stock in religion," and generally speaking we are to understand that neither does anyone else who is in the least sympathetic here. The only true religious believers, at least on the Christian side, are thugs and murderers. But at the time of the Crusades "religion" wasn't the optional Sunday-morning pastime it has since become. It was a matter of identity. For someone to say, "I put no stock in religion," would have been as nonsensical as saying, "I put no stock in being my father's son." People's religion wasn't just what they believed, it was what they were. In other words, like so many moviemakers before them, Scott and Monahan have looked into the past and seen nothing but their own silly faces looking back at them.

The era of the Crusades is intensely interesting for even novice students of history. Why Hollywood is incapable of an honest treatment of the subject is beyond me, but given how few G movies are made (the most profitable movies made run from G, to PG, to PG-13, to R, to NC-17, high to low), I doubt it has anything to do with money but everything to do with ignorance and arrogance.

Volcker's Reputation---Going, Going, Gone

A man should never whore out his good name the way Paul Volcker has with the Oil-for-Food whitewash or Dick Thornburgh did with the Rathergate coverup:

You say the U.N. isn't a government? That Kofi's Kumbaya Klub has no power or jurisdiction over an American citizen who is no longer in its employ? Tell Paul Volcker's "Independent Inquiry Committee" which asked the U.N. to instruct Robert Parton, former U.N. Oil for Food Program investigator, to refuse to comply with subpoenas from Rep. Henry Hyde's International Relations Committee.

The request is part of the Oil-for-Food-for-Bribes-for-Weapons melodrama being scripted, directed, and performed by Kofi Annan's consigliere cum inquisitor, Paul Volcker. In a press conference last week, Volcker announced that if Congress did anything before he gave permission, they could cause the deaths of cooperating witnesses. "Lives of certain witnesses are at stake," said Volcker, though he declined to name the witnesses or those who threatened them. "We're not playing games here, we are dealing, and let me just emphasize this, in some cases, with lives." Who would ever suggest Mr. Volcker was playing games?

Volcker, desperate to regain control of the facts, witnesses, and documents at the heart of the scam, was hyperventilating about the progress being made by several congressional committees, principally Hyde's, to penetrate the smokescreen Volcker has blown around his whitewash of the largest ripoff in the history of man. By surrendering documents in his possession that show the reasons he quit -- principal among which is that Volcker's team is letting Kofi off too easy -- Parton has committed an act of integrity hitherto unknown in the U.N. under Annan. In so doing, Parton -- and his companion in resignation, investigator Miranda Duncan -- have scared the pants off Annan and demonstrated the complete lack of credibility of the Volcker investigation.

Paul Volcker's "inquiry" began more than a year ago. In that time, it has not exposed anything that hadn't already been in the press. In January 2004, the Al Mada newspaper in Baghdad published a list of hundreds of governments, government officials, companies, and private individuals who apparently -- according to records kept by Saddam's Germanically meticulous henchmen -- received the billions of dollars in bribes by which Saddam bought the U.N. Security Council's opposition to American military action. In two interim reports, Volcker's team hasn't even indicated that it was investigating the matter with any seriousness. Volcker's reports said little more than that the inquiry suspected Benon Sevan -- the former head of the Oil for Food program -- of receiving $160,000 in questionable payments and Kojo Annan (the Secretary General's son) of obtaining employment with a U.N. Oil for Food program contractor under circumstances in which his father apparently played a questionable role. Even the most cursory comparison with the real investigations into the scam drives the conclusion that the Volcker effort is, to be charitable, unserious.

While Volcker's team has been pecking away at the edges of the scam, U.S. investigators, including several congressional committees and the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, have made real progress that is burning an ever-widening hole in the silk curtain surrounding the U.N. scam. Indictments have been issued, convictions have been obtained, and a few outer layers of corruption have been revealed. Which is why Volcker and Co. are now screaming so loudly.

We -- all those who care to see that justice is done, that those who bribed and were bribed are jailed and the money stolen from the people of Iraq returned -- have lost any faith in Volcker's investigation. It's about as likely to determine the facts of the Oil for Food scam as Mohamed el-Baradei's purblind International Atomic Energy Agency is to find that Iran is building nuclear weapons. El-Baradei may discover the truth if a mushroom cloud rises over Dallas, but Volcker never will.

Quoth Iron Maiden, "The evil that men do lives on and on, [but the good is oft interred with their bones.]"

What's Dubya Doing to Stop the Mullah Bomb?

Not enough, apparently:

Iran confirmed for the first time Monday that it converted 37 tons of raw uranium into gas, a key step ahead of enrichment, before it suspended all such activities in November under international pressure.

The confirmation means Tehran is in a position to quickly start enriching uranium if it chose to end its suspension of enrichment-related activities. It comes at a crucial time, with Europe trying in fragile negotiations to seal an agreement to ensure that Iran's nuclear program does not produce weapons.

The Europeans agreed last year that Iran could finish converting the 37 tons. Iran had begun processing the material in a rushed attempt to do it just before the suspension.

Mohammad Saeedi, Deputy Head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, told The Associated Press that Iran had processed the uranium into UF-4 gas. If processed further into UF-6, the material could be fed into centrifuges and enriched, allowing it to be used either to produce electricity or make nuclear weapons.

"We converted all the 37 tons of uranium concentrate known as yellowcake into UF-4 at the Isfahan Uranium Conversion Facility before we suspended work there," Saeedi said.

Nuclear experts say that when fully processed, the 37 tons of yellowcake can theoretically yield more than 200 pounds of weapons-grade uranium, enough to make five crude nuclear weapons.

No matter what foreign policy successes this administration has had, it will be for nought if an axis of hostile nuclear-powered terrorist states arise in its wake.

My Idol

It's high time I wrote about this. What keeps me from it? It's ugly. It's baring; embarrassing. It's stupid. It makes me feel like a selfish and silly five-year-old. But it's threatening to take me down.

When you talk about things and let them go, there is a healing that takes place. (And don't put on your Oprah glasses yet, ladies. I'm not that kind of girl.) When you take what was a secret and expose it, it loses its hold over you. It's no longer a secret with strength. It automatically becomes weak.

I was a fat child, a fat adolescent, a fat teenager, a fat college student. Fat.
F-A-T. Yup. Loved food. Ate too much, too often. Had nothing to do with my parents' eating habits (i.e. a gynormous Mexican meal followed by ice cream on the way home) or the fact that they are both grossly overweight... But I digress.

Stats:
1st grade: 80 pounds
4th grade: 5'4" 150 pounds (taller than most of my teachers)
8th grade: 5'7" 165 pounds
High school: 5'9" 200 pounds
My freshman year in college: 5'9" 250 pounds

What I learned:
Fat = slow, slobbish, dumb, conspicuous, ugly, disgraceful, klutzy, clumsy, smelly, weak.
Thin = quick, neat, sharp, dulcet, beautiful, graceful, fastidious, lilting, sinuous, popular, strong.
Fat = You don't belong.
Thin = Welcome!
Reinforced by? = commentary from my Dad, Mom, grandmother, grandmother's little-old-lady friends, boys, girls, TV, books, ads, after-school-specials, magazines, movies, billboards, cartoons, life in general.

I had to make it on brains, wit, personality and determination. Funny thing is, I didn't care so much. I acted in and directed plays at school, wrote, sketched, read; I did my thing and didn't care who was looking. I knew I was fat, but I didn't pine after the star quarterback -- I didn't care about the star quarterback! He was boring and dumb. I didn't care about homecoming queen, the student council, the honor society or the cheerleading squad. That was death to me.

What I wanted was a viable life of creativity and freedom. I wanted unsupervised expression of my passion for art, literature and philosophy (as tenuous a hold as I had at 18). I wanted my own world. I wanted out. And I still wanted beauty and all of that, but it was a secondary concern. It seemed unimportant. I still wore makeup and jacked-up hair; I still loved earrings and bracelets... I just thought people would love me for me. Period. I didn't think about bikinis and getting a fabulous tan. I stayed inside and watched movies. It was more fun.

But in the early part of 1996, I developed a nasty crush on someone who was much smaller than I. And I was convinced that if I became thin, I would be noticed. So I stopped eating much of anything.

Three months later, I ended up in the hospital at 3 am with severe stomach cramps. The ER doctor who examined me noted my 60-pound weight loss, bruises and thinning hair and then... congratulated me. *smirk* Thanks, Doc.

But I got noticed. And to an extent, I got what I wanted. But my crush ended up being a jerk. Not only to me, but to girls much prettier and thinner. Hmm...

In 1998, at 180 pounds, I developed another crush. It wasn't an insane crush. But it did develop into a relationship. This guy was very fit. And creative, and interesting... Pretty cool! Fat girl's doing well for herself...

Until...

Fitness tips began insinuating themselves into our conversations... Then food suggestions, unsolicited commentary, dissertations on women, pregnancy and weight gain; women, marriage, and weight gain; women and weight gain. Weight gain. Weight. Because this man was also instrumental in guiding me toward the Church, I felt it was my good-girl duty to conform, get with the program, just do it! Everyone said so. Everyone agreed.

By 2002, I was 150 pounds of muscle and a comfortable size 6. I worked out 4 or 5 days a week and was a militant calorie counter. I was obsessed with fitness. I no longer cared who was looking, I was finally strong. Forget the movies, I'm going to kickboxing class!

I began tanning. My hair was long and full and curly. I did everything to look the part: Beautiful. But no matter how fit or thin I got, the man who had helped start me on this path would not commit. After 4 years of discipline, work, striving, and crying -- I spent the fittest summer of my life alone.

Here's the scene: I'm at the beach with friends. I'm little Miss size six, tanned, perfect-makeup-outfit-jewelry-hair girl with killer arms. And? Nothing. Except jerks. Plus, I look exactly like every other girl at the sugar shack. Every single one. I realize I'm going to have to survive on brains, wit, personality, and determination. But even then, the pickings are slim.

So wait, all this work to catch a prince and they still turn out to be frogs? Even when I can't do anything else to look better short of plastic surgery? Hmm...

Even though I'd lost 100 pounds, I didn't feel it. I still felt like I was beating myself against a brick wall. I didn't have what I wanted; what They promised me; what They told me this was supposed to be like. I looked more like a billboard than I ever had in my life, but I still felt empty. Something still eluded me. Something was still missing, just beyond my reach. I was just too dumb or blind to catch it.

And I had no quality of life. My whole life was fitness and nutrition. I was also now obsessed with Jesus, which was pretty cool. But that too, was framed by an unhealthy environment. I was still the little girl being ostracized. My Pastor bellowed it from the pulpit. He said he was speaking for God. The church staff clapped and nodded and amen-ed. The rest of us were evil. We weren't good enough. We didn't measure up. No matter what we did.

I still didn't fit.

[Enter, the Knight.]

No, he didn't come along and fix me. That's why I love him. But he did accept me exactly as I am. He risked it all and offered me himself. He stuck his neck out and was authentic from word one. All he expected from me in return was the same courtesy.

He's never mentioned my weight in a negative way to me. He supports me in my efforts for self-improvement, but I know nothing in our relationship hinges on what size my clothing is. The only thing he pushes me toward is expressive, creative work. Because he believes that I am talented and knows that's what I crave. And when he got down on one knee and asked me to be his wife, I bawled. Because I knew I was finally accepted. I knew where I belonged. I knew he would always do his best to support me, be with me, and love me -- even when we're yelling at each other. What a beginning. What a future. What a relief.

I know (and expect) that things will not be perfect. I know that marriage is not a billboard or a TV commercial. I'm very aware of reality in that way. I can allow for flaws and imperfections in relationships. I do in all of mine. With my friends, family, co-workers, strangers, clergy, just about everyone. I recognize and accept flaws as natural variation, an extension of free will. God lets everyone do it. I do, too.

Except in myself. I have to be perfect. I have to hold up the entire universe with my perfect behavior. If I don't something bad will happen, either to me or to those I hold dear. People will be upset with me. God will turn away. And it'll be my fault when things go wrong.

I have no idea when I became the second Incarnation but... *wink*

And I found that my fitness and nutrition ideals were very hard to maintain. I still work out 4 or 5 days a week, 45 minutes at a time, but have relaxed my caloric intake from 1500 to around 1800 (sometimes 2000 *gasp!*) per day. Now I'm 160 pounds and a size 9. And this is where I'm stuck. At 5'9", I'm still at a healthy weight and I have lots of muscle to move me along. And I know I could be smaller, but when you've been on a diet for 7 years, it gets old having to watch and weigh every single thing that goes in your mouth. And, dammit, I'm hungry!

Yet with a wedding coming up in October, I'm not comfortable with this size 9 thing . I want to be back to where I was during that tanned, size 6 summer. (That summer my family kept telling me I was too thin.) If I'm not, something bad will happen. My guests will be disappointed. I will reflect poorly on my husband. My family will not be as proud of me. I will not look back on my wedding day with as much joy.

How stupid. How self-centered. How ridiculous.

I know that I create my own reality, intellectually at least. But... it's hard to let go of this choke hold I feel I have to maintain on my life. I want so much to be able to not think about calories and how people perceive me. I want so much to be comfortable in my own skin -- even skin that sags from being radically shrunken. I want so much to tune every negative message out -- or better still, take what I might perceive as negative and turn it around. I want to let go of this and look back fondly on this with wisdom and humor. "I remember that. That was so funny. *Sigh* So glad I got over that."

I want to be able to give myself credit for what I've accomplished.

Sometimes I am free and unconscious of my body. Those are the most precious moments in my life -- when I am untethered to a frame and I am all eyes and ears and sensations. Funny thing is, that's usually when I'm out jog-walking with my iPod cranked up.

And I've let God in on the idea of my giving up. I've told Him over and over that I'm finished, I'm done. That I refuse to be ruled by something so petty and inconsequential. That I want Him to guide me. That I don't want to be my own god anymore. And I've asked Him to heal me. All I need to do now is really let Him. The only condition I have is that it not involve gaining weight. *sigh*

It's mindboggling how I could spend this much valuable time on myself and then rail against the hypocrisy of others so loudly, isn't it?

What a faker.

But we all are. We're all fakers in some way or another. That's some comfort, I guess. I know I am surrounded by a host of imperfect people who love each other (and me) despite their imperfections. And I am surrounded and infused by a God who is Love itself.

And that Love cannot be sized.

Diablogical!

The Wittenberg Gate has an offshoot, for interested parties, called the Evangelical Diablog. It's a (formative) place where EC's and others can engage each other on topics for and about the Evangelical Church.

Sounds like a good idea to me.

And You Thought Grammar School Was Over

Poor grammar and punctuation: My mother's biggest pet peeve. I don't know how many times I've heard her say it. She corrects newscasters, papers, magazines, public speakers -- no one is beyond criticism.

As the daughter of an English teacher, correct usage was drilled into my head. And though I don't know my definitions as well as I should, I still get around the whole communication thing pretty well.

When I was in school, we diagrammed sentences until our eyes bled and our fingers locked in an arthritic grip around our trusty #2's. The act of diagramming one sentence could (and did) take up to two sheets of paper. (College ruled!) But in today's school curricula? No more.

*Sigh* I hate to even give her credit... But the School-Mistress T has a little pop quiz for you kiddies. And she makes a brilliant point in the process. No amount of poetry, free writing, journal entries or haiku will ever replace proper training in the mechanics of the English language.

Is History History?

The study of the past, I mean.

Victor Davis Hanson wonders:

Why do we not carry with us at the least the whispers of those who gave us what we have, from the Hoover Dam and Golden Gate Bridge to penicillin and relief from polio? In part, it is a simple ignorance of real history. The schools and university curricula today are stuffed with therapy -- drug counseling, AIDS warnings, self-improvement advice, sex education, women's/gay/Chicano/African-American/Asian/peace/urban/environmental/leisure studies. These are all well-meaning and nice -isms and -ologies that once would have been seen as nonacademic or left to the individual, family or community. But in the zero-sum game of daily instruction, something else was given up -- too often it was knowledge of the past.

I have routinely been stunned in conversation to discover how abysmally small most interlocutors' knowledge of the past is. How can one possibly process the great panoply of events and information which confronts us daily without accessing the wonderful framework provided by a knowledge of history?

Yet in an age where rolling rubbers on rampant fruit is considered essential academic instruction, is it any wonder that only your most advanced high school graduate (and precious few of your college graduates) have any notion of who Xenophon was and why his cry of "The sea! The sea!" should resonate through the ages? Is it not obvious why so few know who Leonidas was, the Winston Churchill of ancient history (I daresay most have no clue who Churchill was either, nowadays), whose sacrifice saved Western Civilization from being strangled in its crib by great Xerxes. I can assure you that had Leonidas chose to tend to his farm in Sparta rather than die at Thermopylae there'd be no political correctness to concern us---there'd be no notion of liberty from whence such spurious concerns inevitably arise, only the heavy yoke of eternal despotism.

If your knowledge of history is weak (and whose isn't, really?) I cannot recommend The Teaching Company's marvelous lectures enough. Why go see Ridley Scott's godawful treatment of The Crusades when you can get the real story in all its wondrous complexity from a top-notch medieval historian?

Sometimes I get asked why I'm angry to this day about the Soviet Union and its bastard offspring. There is no surer sign of one's ignorance of history than not being able to readily muster outrage at the depredations of mass murderers like Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Josef Stalin, who after all lived contemporaneously with our parents and grandparents just a few decades back.

Wear your "cool" Che shirt, ignoramus, blissfully unaware that it was Guevara who set up the Cuban gulags and devised the methods for torturing and executing their political prisoners before begging for his life like the coward he was as the Bolivians cut him down.

History is the most useful of academic disciplines, as it affords both the comfort that nothing lasts forever and the surety that however bad you've got it, most of humanity had it much worse.

Happy Mother's Day

Hope all of you with XX chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA you've passed on had a wonderful day today.

I had to settle for sending my own mother a basket of flowers, given the geographic distance, but when I called she told me it was her best Mother's Day gift ever. She has Alzheimer's Disease, which is still in the early stages, so the Mother's Days like these are likely very finite in the future.

Still and all, I thank God for them, and those we've had in the past. You only have one mother, you know, and the woman who raised you is it, even in those cases where it's not her particular mitochondrial DNA you carry.

Comic Cover of the Week: District X #13

I'm a sucker for visual gags, and this one's in the great tradition of the ones Julius Schwartz used to put together to challenge writers at DC Comics back in the Silver Age:

When Allies Attack

How many times must I say it?

Vladimir Putin is not our ally:

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday urged leaders of the 12-member club of ex-Soviet states, some of them already shifting to the West, to stick together to fight extremism and terrorism.

Putin, avoiding controversy as he raised the curtain on three days of summits and parties marking the Allied victory over Nazi Germany, made no mention of the political about-face in four members of the Commonwealth of Independent States.

But, referring to a U.N. call to fight national extremism, terrorism, racism and xenophobia, he said: "I am convinced the CIS is capable of becoming an effective instrument for such a joint fight."

I love the notion that Putin attempting to rebuild the Soviet bloc is somehow "avoiding controversy." I suppose he was similarly "avoiding controversy" by interfering in the Ukrainian election and by attempting to assassinate eventual winner Viktor Yuschenko.

Tell me---does the MSM ever find Communists controversial?

Tax Policy Isn't Rocket Science

Surprise, surprise---tax revenues "exceed expectations", despite the MSM's claims that Dubya's cuts would be a budget buster:

That said, the news of higher tax payments is big. And the real story behind the numbers is the successful supply-side experiment that began in the middle of 2003, when investment tax rates were slashed on capital gains and dividends. With new incentives to counter the deflation of investment during the 2000-02 period, both capital formation and economic growth came back from the dead.

Real GDP since the tax cuts has averaged 4.3 percent at an annual rate, whereas growth was only 2.4 percent during the anemic recovery that preceded the tax cuts. The latest government data on tax collections for calendar-year 2004 confirm a tax-cut-led recovery through the explosion of tax receipts at lower tax rates. Once again, the Laffer curve is working.

With more people keeping more of what they earn and invest, after-tax, a major new economic boom has been launched. Enormous wealth creation from real estate, stocks, and small-business formation is the backbone of this entrepreneurial recovery. Despite the rantings of the naysayers in the mainstream media and on parts of Wall Street, strong economic expansion will continue for many years to come.

Supply-siders in the White House and the Republican Congress have the economic story absolutely right. That is why the Bush investment tax cuts have been extended to 2010 from 2008 in the congressional budget resolution. Even the estate tax rate may be cut to 15 percent, or eliminated altogether, in this Congress.

The biggest economic threat? That would be the Keynesians at the Federal Reserve tightening money too much and deflating the boom. But let’s hope the Fed comes to its senses and stops its rate-hiking crusade. Lower tax rates and strong growth are antidotes to inflation. But money-meddling at the central bank will only make matters worse.

Here's the very simple reality behind the Laffer Curve and supply side economics:

High tax rates, particularly those placed on "the rich", drive taxpayers to shelters and the people who can navigate and manage the same. This legally protects a portion of their income from taxation, which drops tax revenue to lower levels than one would expect if you simply multiplied someone's income by their associated tax rate. Since taxes are high, they feel (quite rightly) that it's worth the time, money, and effort to do this.

When you cut tax rates, you eliminate this incentive. The lower tax rates are cut, the less incentive their is for "the rich" to hire accountants to shelter their income. It's simply not worth the effort or headache as you're not saving as much money. Thus they simply cut a check to the IRS, which sees revenues "exceed expectations" since people who were historically expected to send in less money pre-tax cut thanks to those shelters send in more than anticipated.

Since there is always a large bubble of people in the lower ranks of "the rich" who don't have longstanding relationships with accountants nor enough assets to warrant the same, absolute revenues tend to increase following tax cuts.

This is exactly the behavior predicted by The Laffer Curve when tax rates are too high.

Anyone think the post-Dubya cuts are too low?

Send in extra money on your own initiative, then. The IRS won't turn you away, and at least you'll be putting your money where your philosophy is instead of mine.

It's A Real Small World When You're Stuck Riding the Same Amusement Park Ride All Day

Hugh Hewitt, Blogfather, offers his radio producer an offer he can't refuse: in honor of Disneyland's 50th anniversary, he has to ride the "It's A Small World" ride 50 times.

Radioblogger has the producer's hilarious account of hell on Earth here.

(Hat tip: Captain's Quarters)

When Meat Is Murder

PETA loses touch with reality completely:

Ingrid Newkirk, the alpha wolf over at the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), has just issued a classic non-apology "apology" for PETA's odious "Holocaust on Your Plate" Campaign, which explicitly compared eating meat to participating in the gassing of millions of Jews.


The purported equation between the Holocaust and normal practices of animal husbandry wasn't presented between the lines by PETA. Nor was it implied subtly in the hope that the viewer would infer a similarity. Rather, comparing Auschwitz to your corner butcher shop was the explicit and unequivocal theme of the entire international pro-vegan campaign.

First there were the photographs. PETA juxtaposed pictures of emaciated concentration-camp inmates in their tight-packed wooden bunks with chickens kept in cages. Worse, in a truly despicable comparison (on several levels), a picture of piled bodies of Jewish Holocaust victims was presented next to a photograph of stacked dead pigs.

The text of the campaign was even worse. In a section entitled "The Final Solution," PETA made this astonishing assertion:

Like the Jews murdered in concentration camps, animals are terrorized when they are housed in huge filthy warehouses and rounded up for shipment to slaughter. The leather sofa and handbag are the moral equivalent of the lampshades made from the skins of people killed in the death camps.

For two years, PETA presented the Holocaust on Your Plate Campaign throughout the United States and much of the world. In almost every city and country where PETA activists turned up to promote Holocaust on Your Plate, Jewish groups and others angrily protested. But PETA doggedly stuck to its propaganda. Then, unexpectedly, on May 5, Newkirk issued an "apology for a tasteless comparison."

So, has PETA really recognized the error of asserting a moral equivalence between genocide and stock yards? Not in the least. PETA's is an apology that doesn't really say "We are sorry." In fact, Newkirk takes great pain to justify the entire Holocaust on Your Plate approach:

The "Holocaust on Your Plate" Campaign was designed to desensitize to different forms of systematic degradation and exploitation, and the logic and methods employed in factory farms and slaughterhouses are analogous to those used in concentration camps. We understand both systems to be based on a moral equation indicating that "might makes right" and premised on a concept of other cultures or other species as deficient and thus disposable. Each has it own unique mechanisms and purposes, but both result in immeasurable, unnecessary suffering for those who are innocent and unable to defend themselves.

Since the group clearly still believes in its advocacy, what does PETA admit it did wrong? Resorting to that old standby of the unrepentant who know that public relations problems necessitate the appearance of contrition, Newkirk apologizes merely for the "pain" PETA's campaign caused to Jews. Newkirk's is thus a classic non-apology "apology."

Why do I suspect that PETA members take less exception to the very real mass murder of six million human beings than they do to the metaphorical murder of chickens?