Plenty of Room at the Top. Does the Post really believe that the arrest or execution of any given "terrorist" means a damn thing? If one high-ranking al-Qaeda operative is arrested, somebody else in the organization moves up. If one operative reveals details of planned attacks, the organization merely abandons that plan and starts another. In "terrorism", no one is indispensable.
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We have more than a century of experience with the Mafia, and the Post itself reports that another Mafia "don" has just been convicted. Has that destroyed the Mafia? Of course not. To the extent the Mafia has faded away, it is because conditions in society have changed as to destroy the ability of the Mafia to recruit new 'goodfellas' into a life of needless danger for scant reward in a society in which Italian-Americans are not downtrodden and desperate.
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The conditions that have produced massive anti-U.S. "terrorism", however, especially the daily humiliation and brutalization of Arabs by Israel and its uncritical U.S. ally, haven't changed one whit. So al-Qaeda will have no trouble whatsoever replacing Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani — or any other member, even Usama bin Laden himself (who may very well have died from kidney disease months ago).
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Are we as stupid as Israel, which kills "terrorists" almost every day, yet has more terrorism than any other country save only, and only since the U.S. invasion, Iraq? Or will we wise up and realize that only by doing justice to Arabs can we end the easy recruitment of "terrorists"? Kerry might learn that lesson. Bush never will. (Responsive to editorial "Terror War Takedown", New York Post, July 31, 2004)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:50 PM

 
"Liberation" Your Ass! The New York Post cannot stop lying about the war in Iraq, and the larger war of aggression against Islam in general and against Arabs more particularly, and against Palestine most particularly.
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It continues to declaim that this war was in defense of “America and its commitment to freedom and human dignity”. What a load of cynical, evil, lying crap!
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Where is our dedication to “freedom and human dignity” for the Palestinians, who are in a concentration camp of oppression and violent death paid for by an uncritical U.S. that backs every atrocity, from preventing Palestinians from establishing businesses, then periodically sealing the border so that Palestinians forced to work for slave wages in Israel cannot even get to their jobs; closing down schools for days and weeks at a time; and shooting children for the capital offense of throwing rocks; to firing missiles into residential neighborhoods to kill "terrorists" — plus any civilian, including baby, that happens to be nearby — to building a fence that dwarfs the Berlin Wall and makes Missisippi segregation circa 1950 look lovingly benign by comparison? In the U.S., "separate is inherently unequal". In Occupied Palestine ("Israel" and the Occupied Territories), it is a boon to 'freedom and human dignity'.
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How do you “free” Iraqis by invading their country; overthrowing their government; imposing a military occupation by people of a different religion, language, and culture; imposing a hand-picked “government” of Quislings; and putting off elections for years at a time?
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Let’s reverse the premise, a standard technique in trying to get people to understand their error and arrogance. If supremely powerful Arabs invaded and conquered the United States; overthrew the Bush Administration and arrested everyone at its top, promising to try them all for war crimes and crimes against humanity (of which they are plainly guilty); imposed a years-long military occupation; shut down hostile newspapers; hand-picked a “government” that grossly underrepresents key constituencies and consists of people with no prior government experience, who have never won an election; outlawed both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, for their obvious co-conspiracy in a decades-long war of aggression against Arabs; forbade even cities and states from holding elections, and put off national elections until 2½ or three years after the invasion (if, indeed, they will be held then); fired rockets and mortars into residential neighborhoods to kill “insurgent” Republicans and Democrats; and termed “terrorists” every American who dared take up arms to resist the occupation — would we feel “liberated”? I don’t think so. (Responsive to editorial “Kerry’s Strategic Myopia”, New York Post, July 30, 2004)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:08 PM

 
Whore TV. Connie Chung’s husband, Maury Povich, has a hugely popular syndicated TV talk show, Maury, which frequently offers unwed mothers the chance to have the man or men they think might be the father of their child given a DNA paternity test. The results are read aloud to both the woman and the tested man/men in the presence of the audience, to loud cheers or hoots of derision. If, as often happens, the accused man is proved innocent, he usually leaps to his feet in triumph and calls his accuser a whore (as, of course, she is, since she doesn’t even know who fathered her child).
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Povich then offers the crestfallen whore the chance to have an/other man or men tested! And then his staff helps locate him or them so they can repeat the exercise for the edification of the audience. Sometimes it happens that the second man or group of men is also exculpated of the ‘guilt’ of fathering her child! This has gone on thru six, seven, eleven men!
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Maury also sometimes follows up what happens once the father is finally found, to see if, six months or more later, the father has accepted paternal responsibilities. Sometimes he has; sometimes he hasn’t.
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The larger question is, “What legal obligation should any man have for a child he did not intend to father when having sex with a woman who sleeps around and who takes no precautions against becoming pregnant?”
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More: “Since a man has no control over a woman’s fertility and no right to safeguard the life of his child, or in the alternative to kill it — decisions that our wicked government has declared to be wholly under the control of the mother — how can he be held responsible in any way for a child he did not intend to father, during sex outside of marriage?” Marriage is a compact that implicitly constitutes acceptance of responsibility for children that arise from that union. But when people refuse to marry, they have no legitimate claim whatsoever upon each other’s money, time, or attention.
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I suspect, however, that the insane legal establishment now in place would gladly try to impose child-support obligations upon the particular male partner of a whore who accidentally fathered a child. Men must demand that the law reflect the true state of biology today, and be consistent in assigning responsibilities and rights. If men have no right to control "a woman’s body” to protect their child, no right to demand the abortion of an unwanted child — but the woman can kill the child any time she might choose, in complete defiance of the father’s wishes — then fathers have NO responsibilities whatsoever toward children they do not undertake to father, as in entering into a voluntary, well-considered marriage.
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Children of whores are not responsible for the harlotry of their mother, of course, and should not suffer unduly. We have welfare and charities for people who need help. And at the best of times different children are born into different circumstances, some to luxury, others to poverty. It is because the distribution of wealth across society is unfair that we need to address economic inequity generally. But that is a large issue, not specific to child support.
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If everyone has economic justice thru redistribution of wealth from where there is too much to where there is not nearly enuf, every child can be raised with economic security, without victimizing any particular person. If, however, we don’t intervene to lift from poverty children born to married people, we must not force men who refuse to marry to shoulder a burden they never intended to accept merely in screwing around.
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Women who feel themselves economically vulnerable if they have a child should not themselves screw around. If they insist on taking chances, in playing Baby Roulette, and lose, that’s tuf. She who gambles risks losing. If you don’t want to lose, don’t gamble.
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Each of us is responsible for his or her knowing acts. No man can know if any given woman is fertile when she has sex. She, however, does know. The responsibility is hers. Let her accept her responsibilities and the consequences of her acts, not try to push those responsibilities off onto someone else.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:53 PM

 
Can Fools Learn? The New York Post editorially hopes that attempts to make Americans realize how badly they are doing as against the rich will fail "because most Americans don't see anything wrong with being rich, and are working very hard to become rich." The rich want everyone to believe that they will someday be rich, in order to con the poor and middle class into keeping taxes on the rich preposterously low. Americans must wake up.
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Let's be plain: if you are not already rich, in all likelihood you will NEVER be rich. If you are deep in debt, you will likely die in debt, after decades of struggling with usurious interest rates and penalties and fees the rich never have to pay but are glad to heap onto you.
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Poor and middle-class voters must wake to the fact that they are being played for fools by people who have millions of dollars left at the end of the year, even as most of us end every year in debt. Are Americans going to vote the interests of the rich, or their own interests? We'll see. (Responsive to editorial "Democratic Revisionism", New York Post, July 28, 2004)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:09 PM

 
(I followed my own advice yesterday. I had nothing to say, so said nothing.)
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Play Nice. I hate to agree with rightwingers, but John Kerry’s wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, did disgrace herself and the Democratic Party with her hypocritical and unwarranted attack upon a rightwing journalist last Sunday, telling him to “Shove it.” Tho “Shove it” does not rise to the level of Vice President Cheney’s infamous remark to Senator Leahy (which apparently was approximately “Go f**k yourself.”), Mrs. Kerry’s remark followed a denial that she said something she had indeed said.
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In urging more dignity and respectfulness in campaigns, she said, "We have to turn back some of the creeping, un-Pennsylvanian and sometimes un-American traits that are coming into some of our politics." The remarks were tape recorded when expressed, but apparently not well prepared, because when challenged by a conservative reporter from Pittsburgh (Mrs. Kerry’s home base) about what she meant by “un-American”, she denied she had said “un-American”. Did she ad-lib that remark and then not remember her exact words?
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My friend and co-founder of the Expansionist Party of the United States, the late Stanley Hauser, once quipped (approximate quote), when asked what he had just said, “How do I know? You think I listen to that crap?” Ordinary people don’t have to remember their exact words. Presidential candidates, and their wives, do.
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Mrs. Kerry cannot both bemoan a lack of civility in politics AND tell a reporter to “Shove it” in the same appearance — nay, same campaign. Yes, there may be people who tick you off, and there was a history of confrontation between the Pittsburgh-based “right-wing rag” whose reporter she rebuked and Teresa H.K. that made her less patient than the situation called for, but if Mrs. Kerry is not to be the quiet, dutiful wife who sits by and merely looks adoringly at her man, she has got to be consistent. If she’s a fighter, let her fight. But fighters shouldn’t pretend to be peacemakers. Indeed, aren’t Democrats indignant that Dubya wants to pose as both a “war president” and a peacemaker?
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Moreover, if you go too far in a heated moment, apologize for it once you've calmed down. Campaigns do need to be more civil. Governor Schwarzenegger should have apologized for his "girlie-men" remarks; Mrs. Kerry should have apologized for her "Shove it" remark. Why not a handshake between the two, with mutual apologies to the public and a vow to be more civil hereafter?
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Mrs. Kerry’s background contrasts favorably with that of the unaccomplished little wife Laura Bush. For one thing, she’s (white) African!, having been born Teresa Simões-Ferreira in Portuguese Mozambique. She speaks five languages, graduated from one of South Africa’s best universities, was married to the late Senator John Heinz (yup, another John, but that one a Republican!) and oversees the Heinz Philanthropies. She passed up a chance to run for Heinz’s Senate seat after his tragic death in an airplane crash in 1991.
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(Curiously, the first article on Senator Heinz's death that I looked at in researching this post contains this quote calling him a “peacemaker”:

"He was the peacemaker of the Republican Party," one state Democrat said. "Heinz was able to keep the conservatives at bay and the party in the mainstream." Now [1991], the Democrat said, he expects the Pennsylvania Republicans to swing to the right.

Alas, that observer was right. John Heinz was one of the most liberal Republicans in the Senate. Now, Pennsylvania is (mis)represented by one of the most retrograde of Senate Republicans (which is very backward indeed): Rick Santorum, an antigay bigot who is at the forefront of the Republican Radical Right but who, because his state is not nearly so regressive as he is, often mouths nice platitudes about race, the poor, etc., that belie his arch-conservative politics.)
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Returning to Mrs. Heinz, she shared many of her late husband’s views but did not want to run for his Senate seat. She instead took up an active role in steering a course for the Heinz Philanthropies and pursuing her own enthusiasms (e.g., the environment) thru private activism.
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By contrast, before she married Dubya, Laura Bush was a public-school teacher — an admirable occupation, to be sure, but it does not compare to overseeing and guiding the work of philanthropies that have assets of $1.3 BILLION. Everything of any importance that Mrs. Bush has done (minor initiatives in the area of childhood literacy, mainly) came to her as a byproduct of her husband’s position. Mrs. Kerry inherited her first husband’s enormous wealth, to be sure. She did not create it. But she apparently plays a real and active role in the Heinz Philanthropies, whereas Laura Bush is only a part-time, nominal leader of her charities.
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I hope Mrs. Kerry can rise above the pettiness and nastiness she displayed last Sunday and will use her five languages to get her husband’s message out. Who knows? Maybe she’ll even visit the large Portuguese and Brazilian community here in Newark USA. (Responsive to “Covering for Teresa”, commentary by Eric Fettman, New York Post, July 27, 2004)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:29 PM

 
Childslaughter Destroying Democrats. If Americans voted their actual interests, the Republican Party would be crushed beneath a landslide of discontent, reduced to little more than a third party. In actuality, it looks increasingly as tho a party that has inflicted vast misery upon Americans and made us more economically and physically insecure, will succeed in returning an idiot to the White House. Why? Because the Democratic Party is the party of childslaughter, and key elements of its core constituency, the poor, detest abortion-on-demand and simply cannot bring themselves to vote for people who regard children as garbage to be discarded as medical waste.
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Who turns out the black vote? The churches. Are black churches pro-abortion? Many are staunchly anti-abortion. Their leaders hold their noses and urge their parishioners to hold their noses as well, to vote for Democrats anyway, but they cannot mobilize their entire congregations, because many deeply moral black people cannot and will not vote for abortionists. They don't have to vote Republican, which they also cannot bear to do. All they have to do is stay home and not vote at all. It looks as tho millions of black Americans will do precisely that this November.
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Who turns out the Hispanic vote? The Roman Catholic Church. Holy Mother Church despises abortion as the greatest moral evil of our tme, and cannot urge parishioners from the pulpit or thru Catholic youth groups, family groups, etc., to unite to oust an anti-abortion Republican Party from the White House and Congress. Quite the contary, many priests, nuns, and lay leaders caution the people they talk to that they must look deep within themselves and their attitude toward the sanctity of innocent human life before casting their vote, and if they cannot in good conscience vote for people who advocate mass slaughter of children, they must either vote for people who fight this evil or at worst stay out of the fray and deprive childslaughterers of their support.
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Can the Democratic Party really afford to antagonize these key elements of their core constituency? I suggest it cannot.
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Poor people tend to have very different views toward children than do the middle class and rich. It astounds some people better situated financially that so many poor people have children they plainly "can't afford". But they LOVE their children and see that children are the center of their purpose in life. Young blacks all too often feel they have nothing but their fertility. Their manhood or womanhood is defined by being able to have, and in fact having, children. Many young black women (including young teens) feel that even if everything else in the world is insecure, they can, in a child, find a center, a rock, a person who will always be there for them, always love them, no matter what. And they can face the "hardship" that having a child entails because they have never known anything but hardship, so that is normal to them.
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In similar fashion, many Latinos accept the Church's teaching that life is a banquet and it is wrong to deny children a place at the table. They regard life as a blessing to be shared joyously. Children are not an albatross around their neck. They are what makes life worth living, the warmth at the center of their heart. And if providing for them is hard, what that is worthwhile is easy? They would much rather have a son than a swimming pool; a daughter than a vacation in the south of France or a fancy foreign car or gas-guzzling SUV. And they don't need a big house if it's empty.
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Even black and Hispanic moral leaders who accept "a woman's right to choose" do so most hesitantly. They regard abortion as a tragedy, a terrible hard choice that should be made only when all other options are exhausted. They don't regard abortionists as champions of human rights, and women who have multiple abortions as heroines of feminism, as top Democrats seem to suggest.
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I'd like to see these Democrats who speak so glowingly of "a woman's right to choose" say to their children and grandchildren, whom they are so eager to show off in "photo-ops", "You're very lucky to be alive, because we had the right to kill you in utero." Explain to them that their lives have no value in themselves but only if their parents say so.
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There must be a massive shift in the Democratic Party's public attitudes toward abortion. It must stop asserting the most extreme "rights", such as the "right" to murder a child as its head is coming out of the birth canal after a full nine months of gestation, as "late-term abortion" or "partial-birth abortion" or anything but what it is: obvious, cynical, brutal murder.
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The Democrats must defend the sanctity of human life or they make a mockery of their pretense to be the champion of "the little guy", because who, really, is littler than an unborn child?
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They must stop making abortion seem like a terrific, wonderful thing that every woman should undertake litely, but instead "choose life" if at all possible.
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Democrats must accept that for almost all the world, including the great preponderance of Americans, abortion is a very personal and private tragedy, not a civil right to shout from the rooftops. Millions of women who have been rooked into killing their child by propaganda about how wonderful it is to strike a blow for feminism end up living the rest of their life with terrible guilt and sadness, wondering what their child would have been like, and how their life might have been different if they had embraced their baby rather than killed "it". Democrats must not trivialize this tragedy and thus casually inflict it on millions more women.
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If Kerry and Edwards are to take the White House in November, the Democrats must turn out every member of their core constituency. If they do not, they will lose this election. And they will deserve to lose if they continue to be the party of childslaughter.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:47 PM

 
Behind the Times. George F. Will bemoans a purported drop in reading, in a column that is at once uncomprehending of what is really going on and ends in melodramatic nonsense:

Britain then [1940] still had the cohesion of a common culture of shared reading. That cohesion enabled Britain to stay the hand of Hitler, a fact pertinent to today's new age of barbarism.

What drivel! How did he get to such a ridiculous conclusion? Well, he started by decrying this short set of statistics:

A survey of 17,135 persons reveals an accelerating decline in the reading of literature, especially among the young. Literary reading declined 5 percent between 1982 and 1992, then 14 percent in the next decade. Only 56.9 percent of Americans say they read a book of any sort in the past year, down from 60.9 percent in 1992. Only 46.7 percent of adults read any literature for pleasure.

None of that leads anywhere near his alarmist conclusion. Quite the contrary, we have far more shared culture today, thanks to mass media, and are far more integrated over space, thanks to the Internet, than ever before.
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Until quite recently, (a) most people worked at an occupation (agriculture, manufacturing) that kept them away from reading and (b) the only fiction or news sources available to them were in printed form. Today, by stark contrast, (a)  a large proportion of people have to read for hours a day as part of their job. They are not eager to go from reading at work to reading at home, from reading as work to reading as leisure. Who can blame them? And (b) fiction and information of many types are readily available to them in visual and spoken form, so they don't have to work — and let's not pretend that reading isn't work — to be entertained or informed. Mass-marketed movies (in theaters and at home), TV shows, DVD's, videotapes, spoken books on audiotape, etc., etc., are widely enjoyed and create huge communities of shared experience. Much of TV is informational, from the most serious explications of crises in the past available on the History Channel to the litest-weight celeb gossip on E! And passive absorption of pre-packaged pap via TV screen is not the only way people take in entertainments and information in the electronic age.
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Will himself observes that:

By 1995 — before the flood of video games and computer entertainments for adults — television swallowed 40 percent of Americans' free time, up one-third since 1965. Today electronic entertainments other than television fill 5.5 hours of the average child's day.

"Electronic entertainments other than television" include not just video games but also surfing the Internet, "chatting" in Internet chatrooms and via Instant Messenger, exchanging emails, reading and posting to news groups and online forums on everything from celebrities to teen angst to sci-fi and even politics. The "blogosphere" has become a major hangout for millions of teens. And the bulk of things posted on the Internet are in written form, not pictures. So when kids are spending 5.5 hours on these "electronic entertainments other than television", they may actually be spending a very large part of that time reading and, even more amazing, writing!
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Moreover, neither Will nor any other commentator on declining levels of reading for pleasure acknowledges that the insane spelling of English makes reading very difficult, especially when people are dealing with a literary vocabulary that is hugely larger than the vocabulary used in ordinary conversation. Many unfamiliar words have bizarre spellings that make it impossible for people to know how to pronounce them, and each time a reader encounters such a word, s/he is irritated not to know how to pronounce it, and torn between looking it up and just skipping over it. You put a whole series of such barriers between reader and what s/he is trying to read, and you progressively turn readers away from print.
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We need to accept that the spelling of English is indefensibly absurd, and must be reformed. We've got to stop throwing good money after bad, stop wasting years and years of English class time on teaching people merely to decipher absurdly spelled words (like "decipher"), stop turning people off to print, and stop blaming rational people for being unable to cope with an irrational "system" that confuses and frustrates them.
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I am a spelling reformer. In my 20s (c. 1971) I created a phonetic spelling system for English, pretty much as an idle intellectual exercise, by means of which everyone could spell every word in English unambiguously by using a single short table, one spelling per sound, such that everyone else who knows that table can understand it, even to the point of knowing what accent one speaks (e.g., by whether one writes "tamaeto" or "tamoto", "glaans" or "glons", "luetenant" or "leftenant"). I used the resulting system for personal note-taking, in part to hide my thoughts from others. But then I discovered that it was easily readable even by people who had never seen the table nor the few explanatory notes that accompany the table — and secrets I thought safe weren't safe at all.
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I realized that if my system could be read easily, I might have something of value to society, so started to promote that system, Fanetik, as a spelling reform that could at least help people learn to read, whether it were adopted as a general-purpose spelling reform or merely employed as a brief transition to traditional spelling, then as pronunciation key thereafter. When the Internet came along, I created a website where people can go to evaluate this proposal, at http://members.aol.com/Fanetiks. And on June 1st of this year I created a different website, "Simpler Spelling Word of the Day", to promote nonsystematic spelling reform, one word a day: www.geocities.com/sswordday.
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If people who agree that the traditional spelling of English is preposterous and causes serious problems of functional illiteracy, avoidance of print, and enormous waste of educational resources, can agree on ways to reform spelling, they can, from the grassroots up, force change. One easy way to start is to consult the Simpler Spelling Word of the Day website (which contains a daily word and an archive of all the simpler spellings proposed so far) and use those spellings in their personal note-taking and correspondence, Internet chats, emails, online forums, etc. In time, dictionary publishers will see these spellings as "citations" , the base research material on which today's "descriptivist" dictionaries are based. At present, some publishers resist Internet usages as lacking authority. As one webpage that seeks to collect sci-fi terms for the Oxford English Dictionary states: "E-books, Web pages, and movies are not acceptable sources for the Oxford English Dictionary (though Web pages may provide useful historical information that can be used to track down print examples, and physical copies of movie scripts can be used)." Over time, however, such snobbishness will be increasingly indefensible, as even the most careful writers make ever greater recourse to the Internet to express themselves. Thus, if 90% of all materials published on the Internet were to use "mor" rather than "more", you can bet that "mor" would soon be listed in every reputable English dictionary worldwide. In a democratic age, dictionaries and schools must eventually yield to popular usage. (Responsive to "Literary Lag", New York Post, July 24, 2004)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:24 PM

 
Saddam and al-Qaeda (Separate Stories). The 9/11 Commission Report, released today (and available in its entirety on the Internet at http://www.gpoaccess.gov/911/index.html), puts to bed the Republican Right's lie that Saddam Hussein was in on the WTC attack. It states plainly that the Iraqi government had occasional contacts with al-Qaeda but did not participate in any way in the attacks upon the U.S. Why, then, you may ask, did Iraq have any contacts with al-Qaeda at all?
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Al-Qaeda has many targets. Intelligence services gather information from many sources. To the extent that al-Qaeda might have programs that targeted enemies of Iraq within Iraq's region (e.g., Iran, Kuwait), Saddam would of course want to know about them. Whether Iraq would participate in any subversion, covert operation, terrorist plot, or concerted series of attacks on any given target is a separate question. But any intelligence service wants to know what's going on.
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The mere fact that Iraq may have conversed with al-Qaeda operatives no more demonstrates collusion with Usama bin Laden than do police interrogations of known Mafiosi and dealings with Mafia informants indicate that the police are in concert with the Mafia.
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Saddam Hussein had many enemies, some of whom were also Bin Laden's enemies. We have an expression in English that everyone knows: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." It is that premise that caused the United States to ally itself with Stalin's Soviet Union in World War II, to our enormous harm. Saddam didn't make the same mistake but kept his distance from Bin Laden. Because tho Bin Laden may have been the enemy of Saddam's enemy the United States, Bin Laden was also an enemy of Saddam himself, for being intent on replacing all secular Arab governments, like Saddam's, with Islamist governments.
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I have looked at every single reference to Iraq in the 9/11 Commission's Final Report. To the extent you want to know what that Report says about Iraq's involvement, I have done the homework for you, but provide above the link to the full text if you wish to do the same search yourself. Here are the salient points. Anything in boldface type is my emphasis, not the Commission's. (Aside: I thank the Commission for using the proper form of Bin Laden's name, Usama. There is no O in the Arabic alphabet.)

Bin Ladin was also willing to explore possibilities for cooperation with Iraq, even though Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, had never had an Islamist agenda—save for his opportunistic pose as a defender of the faithful against “Crusaders” during the Gulf War of 1991. Moreover, Bin Ladin had in fact been sponsoring anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan,and sought to attract them into his Islamic army.53
To protect his own ties with Iraq,Turabi reportedly brokered an agreement that Bin Ladin would stop supporting activities against Saddam. Bin Ladin apparently honored this pledge, at least for a time, although he continued to aid a group of Islamist extremists operating in part of Iraq (Kurdistan) outside of Baghdad’s control. In the late 1990s, these extremist groups suffered major defeats by Kurdish forces. In 2001, with Bin Ladin’s help they re-formed into an organization called Ansar al Islam.There are indications that by then the Iraqi regime tolerated and may even have helped Ansar al Islam against the common Kurdish enemy [not against the United States].54
With the Sudanese regime acting as intermediary, Bin Ladin himself met with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer in Khartoum in late 1994 or early 1995. Bin Ladin is said to have asked for space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but there is no evidence that Iraq responded to this request.55As described below,the ensuing years saw additional efforts to establish connections. [p. 61]
* * *
There is also evidence that around this time Bin Ladin sent out a number of feelers to the Iraqi regime, offering some cooperation. None are reported to have received a significant response.According to one report,Saddam Hussein’s efforts at this time to rebuild relations with the Saudis and other Middle Eastern regimes led him to stay clear of Bin Ladin.
In mid-1998,the situation reversed;it was Iraq that reportedly took the initiative.In March 1998,after Bin Ladin’s public fatwa against the United States, two al Qaeda members reportedly went to Iraq to meet with Iraqi intelligence. In July, an Iraqi delegation traveled to Afghanistan to meet first with the Taliban and then with Bin Ladin. Sources reported that one, or perhaps both, of these meetings was apparently arranged through Bin Ladin’s Egyptian deputy, Zawahiri, who had ties of his own to the Iraqis. In 1998, Iraq was under intensifying U.S. pressure, which culminated in a series of large air attacks in December. [That is, military attacks drove Saddam to consider an alliance with Bin Laden; thus 'military pressure', far from moderating Saddam's behavior, actually moved him to consider a more extreme position.]
Similar meetings between Iraqi officials and Bin Ladin or his aides may have occurred in 1999 during a period of some reported strains with the Taliban. According to the reporting, Iraqi officials offered Bin Ladin a safe haven in Iraq. Bin Ladin declined, apparently judging that his circumstances in Afghanistan remained more favorable than the Iraqi alternative. The reports describe friendly contacts and indicate some common themes in both sides’ hatred of the United States. But to date we have seen no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States. [p. 66]
* * *
With UN sanctions [against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan] set to come into effect in November, [Richard] Clarke ["a special assistant to the president long involved in counterterrorism"] wrote [Samuel ("Sandy") Berger [Clinton's national security advisor] that “the Taliban appear to be up to something.” Mullah Omar had shuffled his “cabinet”and hinted at Bin Ladin’s possible departure. Clarke’s staff thought his most likely destination would be Somalia; Chechnya seemed less appealing with Russia on the offensive. Clarke commented that Iraq and Libya had previously discussed hosting Bin Ladin, though he and his staff had their doubts that Bin Ladin would trust secular Arab dictators such as Saddam Hussein or Muammar Qadhafi. Clarke also raised the “remote possibility” of Yemen, which offered vast uncontrolled spaces. In November, the CSG discussed whether the sanctions had rattled the Taliban,who seemed “to be looking for a face-saving way out of the Bin Ladin issue.” [p. 125]

As it happened, the Taliban did not expel Bin Laden after all.
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In November 1998,the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (Manhattan) issued an indictment of Usama bin Laden for planning attacks on U.S. defense installations, which asserted that al-Qaeda had “reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects,specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq." The Report adds, tellingly, "This language about al Qaeda’s 'understanding'with Iraq had been dropped, however, when a superseding indictment was filed in November
1998." (p. 128)
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In February 1999, "one reliable source reported Bin Ladin’s having met with Iraqi officials, who 'may have offered him asylum.' Other intelligence sources said that some Taliban leaders, though not Mullah Omar, had urged Bin Ladin to go to Iraq. If Bin Ladin actually moved to Iraq, wrote Clarke,his network would be at Saddam Hussein’s service,and it would be 'virtually impossible' to find him." (p. 134) ONE "reliable source" made that assertion. One ANONYMOUS source. In fact, of course, Bin Laden did NOT move to Iraq.
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The 9/11 Commission Report examines the claim that Muhammed Atta, one of the WTC hijackers, met with an Iraqi diplomat in Prague, central Europe, on April 9, 2001. However, (a) a bank surveillance camera clearly showed Atta to be in Virginia Beach, VA on April 4th, and Atta rented an apartment in Coral Springs, FL on April 11th. (b) The diplomat he was supposed to have met in the city of Prague was firmly established to have been 70 miles outside the city at the time. "No evidence has been found that Atta was in the Czech Republic in April 2001." (p. 228)
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Asked by Dubya on 9/12 to find out whether Iraq was involved in any way in the 9/11 attacks, Clarke investigated, then submitted a memo on 9/18 that

found no “compelling case” that Iraq had either planned or perpetrated the attacks. It passed along a few foreign intelligence reports, including the Czech report alleging an April 2001 Prague meeting between Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer ... and a Polish report that personnel at the headquarters of Iraqi intelligence in Baghdad were told before September&11 to go on the streets to gauge crowd reaction to an unspecified event. Arguing that the case for links between Iraq and al Qaeda was weak, the memo pointed out that Bin Ladin resented the secularism of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Finally, the memo said, there was no confirmed reporting on Saddam cooperating with Bin Ladin on unconventional weapons." (p. 334)

Even before that, at Camp David on 9/15, the decision was made not to assume that Iraq had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks but to focus on Afghanistan:

Secretary [of State Colin] Powell recalled that [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz—not [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld—argued that Iraq was ultimately the source of the terrorist problem and should therefore be attacked.66 Powell said that Wolfowitz was not able to justify his belief that Iraq was behind 9/11. “Paul was always of the view that Iraq was a problem that had to be dealt with,” Powell told us.“And he saw this as one way of using this event as a way to deal with the Iraq problem.” [p. 335]

The Radical Zionist Paul Wolfowitz kept trying to use 9/11 to promote an attack upon Iraq:

Within the Pentagon, Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz continued to press the case for dealing with Iraq.Writing to Rumsfeld on September 17 in a memo headlined “Preventing More Events,”he argued that if there was even a 10 percent chance that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attack, maximum priority should be placed on eliminating that threat. [pp. 335-36]

Think about that. In civil trials, juries are instructed to decide on a clear preponderance of the evidence, not a 10 percent possibility; in criminal trials, the standard is guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. But Wolfowitz wanted us to go to war against a sovereign country on the basis of a "10 percent chance". Astounding. And appalling.
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At page 336, the Report says that General Tommy Franks was eager to go to war against Iraq too. I know that Wolfowitz is Jewish and Radical Zionist. What is Franks's religion and attitude toward Zionism? We have the right to know the motives behind people's advice to the President.
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Having dispensed with the drivel about Saddam being in on the 9/11 attacks, the Commission addresses the lessons of 9/11 and makes some recommendations, among them these:

We should offer an example of moral leadership in the world, committed to treat people humanely, abide by the rule of law, and be generous and caring to our neighbors. ... That vision of the future should stress life over death: individual educational and economic opportunity. This vision includes widespread political participation and contempt for indiscriminate violence.It includes respect for the rule of law,openness in discussing differences,and tolerance for opposing points of view.
Recommendation:Where Muslim governments [but not Israel???], even those who are friends, do not respect these principles, the United States must stand for a better future. One of the lessons of the long Cold War was that short-term gains in cooperating with the most repressive and brutal governments were too often outweighed by long-term setbacks for America’s stature and interests.
American foreign policy is part of the message. America’s policy choices have consequences. Right or wrong, it is simply a fact that American policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and American actions in Iraq are dominant staples of popular commentary across the Arab and Muslim world.That does not mean U.S. choices have been wrong. It means those choices must be integrated with America’s message of opportunity to the Arab and Muslim world. Neither Israel nor the new Iraq will be safer if worldwide Islamist terrorism grows stronger. [pp. 376-77]

Amen.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:16 PM

 
Item 1: Japanese Justice. Two stories in the news this week show the madness of the Japanese government. Again.
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The first concerns Charles R. Jenkins, a U.S. Army defector to North Korea in 1965 who happily promoted the government of the lunatic North Korean Communist regime, a regime which has killed, at minimum, a million of its own people thru famine it refused to cure, and maybe as many as three million! While in that hellhole, he met and married a Japanese woman, Hitomi Soga, who in 1978 had been KIDNAPPED from her home in Japan(!) by the lunatics of North Korea and forced to teach Japanese to North Korean spies! In 2002, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visited North Korea and brought out Soga, her daughters, and four other abducted Japanese, but she left Jenkins in his beloved North Korea.
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Jenkins, you see, feared that if he joined his wife and daughters in Japan, he would be arrested and extradited to the U.S. to stand trial for desertion and various other charges that could result in his being condemned to life imprisonment — not that that is likely to be very long, since he is 62 years old and apparently quite ill. Because of his illness, however, Jenkins did reunite with his wife and daughters, first in Indonesia, then in Japan, which has an extradition treaty with the U.S. Jenkins has not, however, been extradited to face charges. Why not?
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The Bush Administration, which you would think would be very concerned about leniency toward deserters given our two present-day wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, has not (yet) demanded his extradition, perhaps in part because the Japanese Government has, astonishingly, leapt to defend Mr. Jenkins so he can stay with his Japanese family. Think about that: the Japanese Government wants to defend a man who was an active ally of the very government that KIDNAPPED the woman he ended up marrying — and other Japanese as well — from Japanese territory!
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There may even be an election-year element to Dubya's reticence, in that Jenkins' birth family resides in the key battleground state of North Carolina. Does Bush really risk antagonizing North Carolina voters in prosecuting a traitor who just happens to have been born in the Tar Heel State? Treason isn't popular in North Carolina.
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Quite the contrary of treating this defector as a criminal, the Japanese government, according to a report in Britain's Daily Telegraph, actually rented an entire floor of a ritzy Indonesian hotel for his reunion with his wife and daughters, "including the presidential suite, which costs more than £1,000 [$1,847] a night."
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Contrast that behavior of the Japanese government with this second story. Bobby Fischer, the American chess prodigy of past decades, was arrested this past week, in Japan, for having an invalid passport. You see, Fischer committed the unpardonable crime of playing chess in Yugoslavia in 1992 during the U.S. boycott of that government because of its behavior in Croatia and Bosnia. For that, his passport was revoked, and he is under indictment for violating the boycott, which could carry a penalty of ten years in prison. That's right: 10 years in prison for playing chess. He didn't aid the Yugoslav assault on Croatia and Bosnia. He didn't bring money to the Milosevich regime. Quite the contrary: he won the match and took away $3 million!
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Yet, the very same Japanese government that resists turning over a defector who actively aided a government that kidnapped Japanese citizens and held them for decades against their will, using them to train SPIES against Japan, wants to extradite Fischer to the U.S. in exchange for an agreement by the U.S. not to seek extradition of the traitor Jenkins!
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I've said it before and will say it again: Japan is insane, a profoundly bonkers society that needs to be shaken out of its madness.
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Complicating the issue is the fact that Bobby Fischer, whose mother was Jewish (and so, by Jewish law, Bobby is himself Jewish even tho his own choice is Christianity), has turned rabidly anti-Jewish and has made remarks praising the attacks upon the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 9/11. According to a report in the Philadelphia Daily News of July 17, 2004, Fischer declared on Philippine radio shortly after the 9/11 attacks:

"This is all wonderful news," he said, "I applaud the act. The U.S. and Israel have been slaughtering the Palestinians, just slaughtering them for years. Robbing and slaughtering them. Nobody gave a s---. Now it's coming back to the U.S."

Some media observers see Fischer as a pawn in an international chess game the ends of which are, are, what? Justice? A private citizen plays chess and is to be sent to prison for 10 years, but a military deserter who actively assisted the criminal regime of North Korea, which killed over 37,000 Americans in the Korean War (5,639 of them helpless prisoners of war!), is to be allowed to live out his life in freedom because the government of Japan, a country that has absolutely no discernible morality, has decided to sacrifice Fischer to save Jenkins. That is insane and unacceptable. The Bush Administration MUST demand the extradition of Jenkins, and should discontinue its malicious prosecution of Bobby Fischer for the non-crime of playing chess.
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Item 2: Lance Armstrong — a Worthless Life (and a Cheat?). American bicyclist Lance Armstrong seems likely to win, this Sunday, his sixth consecutive Tour de France, an unprecedented accomplishment (as was his fifth consecutive win, last year). Accusations have surfaced that despite many denials, Armstrong has used the "banned blood booster erythropoietin (EPO)." I'm more concerned about his testosterone.
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It's not easy to clarify via the Internet Armstrong's medical condition, that is, whether his famous bout with testicular cancer resulted in the removal of both testes or only one. He is reported to have had a child from sperm that was frozen, which suggests that both testicles had been removed, since there would be no need to freeze sperm if he still had one functioning gonad. But the Lance Armstrong Foundation website says that "Lance underwent two surgeries, one to remove his cancerous testicle [singular] and another to remove two cancerous lesions on his brain."
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So why was his sperm frozen? If one testicle is removed, the other takes over. Were the surgeons concerned that once they opened him up they would find that both had to be removed, so sperm was frozen just in case? If so, why was that frozen sperm used to produce a child, rather than simply discarded when it became plain that he would be able to resume normal sexual functioning?
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The base question as to his athletic performance thus becomes, "If Lance Armstrong has no testicles, is he taking testosterone as hormone replacement therapy? And if so, how much is he taking?"
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If he is taking as "replacement" more testosterone than he would normally produce, or more than his sexually intact competitors naturally produce, would that excess (1) enhance his athletic performance and (2) be detectable as cheating?
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I don't know the answer to any of these questions, but I do have to wonder. How likely, really, is it that one person could, without performance-enhancing drugs, dominate a grueling event that draws the top competitors from the entire world, for six years in a row? I don't follow sports closely, but I can't think of a single competition of the same sort — many competitors in a rough-and-tumble free-for-all — that consistently produces a single winner six years in a row. Some boxing champs retain their title for years at a time, but they aren't boxing everyone willing to fight them. They fight a tiny number of bouts that are carefully controlled by industry gatekeepers. The Tour de France, by contrast, has hundreds of entrants all competing at the same time. Rarely, nowadays, does the same sports team win the World Series or NBA Championship more than twice in a row, and no team has won any such championship six times in a row! It makes me wonder.
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As for Lance Armstrong's life, he is making MILLIONS of dollars for living a life of utter uselessness. Since age 13 he has done nothing but ride a bicycle! RIDE A BICYCLE! That's kid stuff, and he gets away with it. While you and I are working for a living, he is gallivanting around Europe RIDING A BICYCLE and making MILLIONS from that and from product endorsements and commercials. What the hell kind of message does that send to people?
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Had he not developed cancer, he would probably never have done a damned thing worthwhile in his entire life. Only the advent of that disaster caused him to do anything socially useful, helping to create the Lance Armstrong Foundation. I don't know how much good that foundation does, but it does something. His earlier "contribution" was a cycling foundation to promote bicycle-riding by children! Wow. That's socially useful, isn't it? Oh, it might get a few flabby kids to be more active, but basically it feeds the useless bicycle-competition industry, promoting careers of uselessness. I despise Lance Armstrong and all other grown people who spend their lives playing children's games for millions of dollars, while people who do the heavy lifting in society make almost nothing by contrast.
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We may not be able to change a popular culture that values bike-riding and playing football, baseball, and basketball more than teaching, policing, nursing, and the huge host of hard and important jobs that ordinary people do. What we can do, however, is take the preposterously excessive money those infantile pursuits pay, away from those useless creatures and use them to lower the taxes on working people. Let us thus develop a progressive taxation system that takes from the overpaid and benefits the underpaid. Then I won't mind, so much, that Lance Armstrong and hosts of other perpetual children make a fortune from lives of irresponsibility, because we will MAKE them responsible by taking their excess income and using it to fund socially valuable programs and to lower taxes on decent people.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 10:12 PM

 
Governor Scheissfurgeist and "Flip-Floppers". Arnold Schwarzenegger, the foreign promoter of violence in films who conned Californians into making him governor, has shown the ugly, stupid face of the Republican Right for all to see. In calling Democrats "girlie-men" for opposing his budget, he has attacked women, attacked gay men (by (mistaken) implication), and shown his willingness to promote gender and orientation stereotyping and intergroup hatred. Moreover, he has, of course, got everything exactly backwards: in standing up against "The Terminator", these legislators have proved their courage, not their cowardice, as was his implication: that anyone who opposes him is less than a man, lacking integrity and courage for taking orders from "special interests" — the Republicans' favorite buzzword of all time. (The Israel Lobby and the rich, the only people the Republican Right care a thing about, are, of course, not "special interests" — except to real Americans.)
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Which is easier, to go along with an incomprehensibly popular governor or to stand against him? Which takes more guts, more "manhood", if you will? And are men the only people with guts?
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Gov. Scheissfurgeist (German for "shit for brains" — feel free to use it, but credit me for the term) was caught redhanded at one and the same time of accusing women of having no courage nor integrity and of implying that Democrats are 'homos' (tho many gay men are hypermasculine and seek out other ultramasculine men) — and he won't admit any wrongdoing! He stands by his remarks, confident that he will get away with them, as Republicans are getting away with all the other ugly and stupid insults they daily dish out for their foes. He's no "flip-flopper". He will stand by his stupidity and bigotry, and it is that kind of consistency that the voters want!
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George Bush accuses Kerry and Edwards of being "flip-floppers" on the war against Iraq because they learned the truth and changed their mind. Bush makes it sound as tho it is a virtue to learn that his war of aggression was premised on lies, lies that have now been revealed, but he stands by the lies and will continue to repeat them to his dying day! That's Republican "integrity". If you're caught in a lie, stand by the lie, stand by the slander, stand by the name-calling. Never change your mind. Never admit error. Never correct a mistake. Just brazen it out, deny that a lie was a lie, pretend that it doesn't matter whether policy is based on lies or truth, and compound the initial error by committing ever more resources to defending an insane decision that has had catastrophic consequences and, as ever more compounded, may have ever more disastrous effects, on us as much as on Iraq and its region.
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Dubya has the nerve to claim that Iraq is better off today than it was before the invasion! Oh, yeah. Under Saddam, there was peace in the streets. People could go about their daily business without worrying whether the car next to them would explode, killing them and their children. Forces of extremism were held in check by a pervasive police presence that infiltrated and destroyed terror groups before they could do any harm. The government was secular and religiously tolerant, and kept sectarian resentments and rivalries from exploding into violence. The oil wells pumped crude safely thru pipelines to make money for the government that would otherwise have had to be raised by taxes on ordinary citizens. Despite an international embargo led by the Zionists of the United States Government, the bridges and highways were intact, the power systems and water and sewage treatment plants operated, the schools and hospitals were undamaged and fully functioning, and Iraqis had a life that was, considering the embargo, pretty much normal. Not now.
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Now, thanks to Dubya's invasion, daily life in Iraq is desperate and precarious; car bombs, and mortar attacks, and small-arms fire kill scores of Iraqis a week — plus a dozen or more Americans who were taken thousands of miles from home to die for causes they know nothing about. The Iraqi Government is itself the target of these insurrectionaries, as makes it impossible for that government to function normally and provide services effectively. The oil supply is regularly interrupted by attacks on pipelines and other facilities, and valuable crude goes up in black, sooty, polluting smoke, starving the Iraqi people of the resources that oil money could buy. (The American taxpayer is required to make up the shortfall, in a war that has already cost us over $100 billion and threatens to continue to cost us billions in perpetuity.) Electric generating stations that served residential neighborhoods and businesses were destroyed by the United States, as were schools, hospitals, water systems and sewage treatment plants. Despite a year of rebuilding things that wouldn't have to be rebuilt if the U.S. Government hadn't destroyed them, that Government's own General Accounting Office reports that almost nothing is back to "prewar levels", which were already inadequate due to the U.S.-led embargo!
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Hundreds of foreign fighters have been drawn into a "holy war" that has killed over 800 Americans and thousands of Iraqi men, women, children, and babes in arms slaughtered by indiscriminate car bombs and mortar blasts. And the temporary truce between ordinarily hostile religious and ethnic communities that united to oppose the U.S. occupation, remain just under the surface, waiting to explode if the military force needed to restrain them weakens or is withdrawn.
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Iraq is better today than before the war??? For whom? Not for Iraqis. Oh, for Israel!
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The neo-cons (i.e., Radical Zionists) who launched this war of aggression to defend their beloved Israel — their real country — think that things are going swimmingly. They couldn't be happier that "Gentiles" are slaughtering each other, Moslems killing Christians and other Moslems; Christians killing Moslems; and none of them seeing that Israeli Jews set them at each other's throat.
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But Dubya isn't "flip-flopping". He's standing his ground, defending his insane decision to attack Iraq, pretending that it was the right thing to do and that Iraq is better off because of it. Can the electorate really be so stupid as to believe such crap?
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I'm voting a straight Democratic ticket this November, and urge everyone in the Nation to do the same. The Republican Party has been taken over by aliens. Oh, they didn't arrive as pods from outer space, but they might as well have, because their "values" are not ours but those of an entirely alien culture, Israel. The Republican Party needs a shock at the ballot box to waken it to the need to purge itself of the Radical Zionist, turn-the-country-over-to-the-rich nuts who have seized it, and return it to its first principles, those of Abraham Lincoln. Old Abe would be horrified to see what has become of his party.
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The Republican Party desperately needs "flip-floppers", people who aren't afraid to admit they made a mistake; who have the guts to accept responsibility for mistaken policies and try to correct errors, not compound them. All psychological counselors will tell you that the first step to overcoming a problem is to admit you have a problem. From Scheissfurgeist to the empty-headed neo-con puppet in the White House, the Republican Party has a problem with admitting error.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:08 AM

 
Mass Murderer as "Hero". The New York Post today published a disgusting tribute to an "American Hero", citing this wonderful accomplishment:

According to his [Silver Star] citation, Smith's actions killed 20 to 50 Iraqis, allowing the American wounded to be evacuated, saving an aid station and headquarters, as well as possibly 100 American lives.

I'm so proud, as proud as the German people doubtless were of their brave soldiers who saved them from Polish aggression in September 1939 and the Japanese were proud of their brave heros who saved them from Chinese aggression, first in Manchuria in 1931 and then in China more broadly by 1937.
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The comparison is exact. Hitler did in fact claim that Poland attacked Germany and intended to crush his "Reich" by military force. The Japanese asserted a right of "self-defense" against Chinese attacks and "provocations" on China's own territory as justification for invading first Manchuria and then the rest of China. George Bush has asserted that Iraq was planning attacks upon the United States, in concert with al-Qaeda, which were an 'imminent danger' to the United States. Bush's lies belong in exactly the same category as Hitler's and Tojo's, and the 'right of self-defense' of Americans INVADING a country over 6,000 miles from the nearest shore of the United States is preposterous. Thus, when an American invader kills 20 to 50 Iraqis in their own country to defend other invaders in their commission of an illegal and immoral aggression, he is committing mass murder.
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He is not a hero. He is a war criminal. His family, his Nation, should be profoundly ashamed of him and all those other "heros" we are endlessly told to honor. I will not honor them, ever. When criminals get killed in the commission of their crimes, they get what they deserve. That they do not understand themselves to be criminals does not for an instant absolve them of responsibility nor of guilt in the crime of aggression. (Responsive to "American Hero: Sgt. 1st Class Paul Ray Smith, US Army", New York Post, July 20, 2004)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:30 PM

 
Europe's Not the Problem. Peter Brookes is right to be concerned that arms sales by the EU to Communist China could endanger U.S. influence and personnel in the Pacific — altho he didn't use the word "Communist"; why the hesitancy to call a spade a spade? But a trifling $5 billion in arms sales from Europe is not the real concern. The real concern is Communist China's $70 billion military budget, and the source of that money: American consumers, who are shipping $124 billion a year to the Butchers of Beijing to fund an arms race against us. Perhaps we need to stop being so shy in calling free traders' "constructive engagement" of Communist China what it is: treason.  (Responsive to "Arming China", New York Post, July 19, 2004)


- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:50 PM

 
(This blog has not appeared for several days because my 9-month-old Dell computer crashed Saturday, and I am just barely back up, with a number of things still to be fixed. I am very unhappy with Dell, and warn people thinking of buying a Dell to think again.)
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Coup d’Etat Trial Balloon. Newsweek magazine raised a furor in reporting a tentative plan by the Bush Administration to remain in power past its constitutional term by 'postponing' elections in the event of a "terrorist attack" on the day of or in the days (weeks?) before the regularly scheduled November election. Fortunately, the Federal Government does not control elections, even for Federal offices, however – thank you, federalism! – so this apparent attempt to stay in office despite a possible rejection by the voters will be hard to carry off.
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It takes very little imagination to see this as a means by which the Bush cabal could seize perpetual power.
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What is to keep Bush operatives from themselves instigating a "terrorist" attack to stay in power in the face of a likely rejection at the polls?
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Remember Watergate? It was only clumsy incompetence that kept the Republicans from getting away with a very serious violation of election laws at that time. The present crew may think themselves much smarter, as to be able to stage a "terrorist" attack and get away with it — even if it should be discovered and exposed by some media — even as other media refuse, or pretend to refuse, to believe any such attack could have occurred.
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After all, (a) the Bush invasion of Iraq has gladly killed tens of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds and hundreds of Americans (with more killed every day) and (b) the original justification for a first-strike war against Iraq has been shown with certitude to have been bullcrap, but an appalling portion of the general population has continued to pretend that war was justified anyway, by the latter-day rationalizations put forward about "liberating" Iraq and democratizing the Arab world. The cynical lies that the Bush Administration has piled six feet high (the same measure as the graves they have dug for over 850 young Americans) have met with eager public willingness to embrace nonsense, bad faith, and deception out of misguided "loyalty" or "patriotism".
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What level of proof of a "terrorist" attack actually carried out by Radical Rightwing Republicans would suffice to win the yahoos of the South and Bible Belt over to accepting that the Bush Administration is a criminal conspiracy that has no respect whatsoever for the Constitution nor any of our most fundamental institutions or principles? How many scores of millions will rush to assume that any asserted "terrorist" attack is precisely that, and reject as "conspiracy theory nonsense" any revelation that Bushites killed Americans to stay in office?
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How many times could a Bushite paramilitary cell carry out "terrorist" attacks, with the connivance or willful blindness of the "intelligence" services who regard the Radical Right as the true "Amuricans" and Democrats as enemies of the Nation? And what if the journalists who investigate the Bush Administration’s role in "terrorist" attacks become themselves "victims of terror"?
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Are we really secure in the stability of our institutions and the dedication of our protectors to the principle that every election affords the people a chance at bloodless revolution? Or are there in fact a very significant number of people in government, the intelligence services, and the military who believe that "security" requires that elections be "suspended", the Constitution itself be "suspended", and "freedom" be reined in to defend "freedom"?
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The United States is getting old, as societies go, and retrograde forces are everywhere evident. Many, many countries have seen militaries intervene to 'postpone', 'suspend', or simply void popular elections, with the excuse that the times are too dangerous to permit a change of government in the midst of crisis.
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The pretense behind the present trial balloon (which trial balloon should warn everyone that a coup d’etat is looming) is that the fact that a primary election in New York State on 9/11 itself was postponed without harm to that state’s democracy proves that it would be prudent and reasonable to 'postpone' a national election if a "terrorist" incident occurred in some unspecified period before the November election. But a primary is not a general election. It puts no one into office — and, more to the point, removes no one from office. New York’s general election went ahead on schedule.
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Moreover, calls by rightwingers to have Rudolph Giuliani remain in office as mayor of New York past his term because of the ‘emergency’ were, fortunately for this Republic, rejected, and Giuliani left office on time — in part because the incoming mayor, pushy billionaire Michael Bloomberg, would not permit him even to try to extend his term. If New York City, which suffered some 2,800 dead in September 2001, could proceed with its general election that November and stick to preset term limits to oust a 'hero' mayor despite vast devastation, surely no "terrorist" attack could be so grave as to require this entire, immense Nation to abolish ("suspend") democracy.
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Mayor of a city, even the Nation’s greatest and most powerful city, does not begin to compare with President of the United States. There is no New York Army to close down polling places and keep an elected official in office after his term has expired. The stakes are nowhere near as high locally as nationally, so the rationalizations for drastic action are nowhere near as compelling.
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I do not believe that the people of this country have the guts to stop a Bushite coup d’etat. Americans today are the greatest agglomeration of cowards in the history of great powers, as can plainly be seen in the gross overreaction to "terrorism" in Boston and New York City’s preparations for the major parties' conventions, and in the effective shutdown of Washington, DC to tourists — that is, to the people. The people’s palace, the White House, has been closed to the people. Pennsylvania Avenue, formerly the busiest thorofare in the Nation’s administrative center, is being torn up and made into a war-zone wasteland — all out of hugely exaggerated fear of "terrorism". (Washington is only the administrative center of this country. New York is the Nation’s actual capital. The New Year doesn’t start until the ball drops in Times Square.)
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No country has ever, for very long, preferred liberty to security. Despite generations of inculcation in the values of democracy and brave words in our national culture about the indispensability of "freedom", a very large proportion of Americans today are not just consenting to the erosion of their freedom but are actually begging government to take away ever more freedom to make them "safe".
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The grave is safe. No one can hurt you there. Freedom entails risk. Living entails risk. All in all, I prefer those risks to the safety of a national grave.
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The Republicans, under the influence of "neo-conservatives" (who aren’t conservatives at all, because the values they espouse are entirely alien to our tradition), have embarked upon "permanent war" against a billion Moslems worldwide, and are using the "danger" they themselves have created to justify ever tighter restrictions on Americans' traditional liberties.
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Cowed by alarmist rhetoric, perhaps 150 million Americans are demanding that government "protect" us by "suspending" what we used to think of as "unalienable rights". It is not possible to cow the brave. It is the easiest thing in the world, however, to cow cowards.
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This is NOT "the home of the brave", and if Republicans mount a coup d’etat, I am not at all sure this generation of Americans will have anything like the guts and integrity of the first generation of Americans — the truly “Greatest Generation”: the generation of Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Revere, the Adamses, John Hancock, Patrick Henry, Nathan Hale and the rest — that rose against tyranny and pledged their "lives, fortunes, and sacred honor" in a struggle to the death for liberty.
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I worry today not about our “security” but about the safety of our National soul.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:27 AM

 
Blog Not Updating. My entry from yesterday has still not appeared in the blog as accessed from the Internet, and I don't know why. I see it listed as an entry I can edit, and when I click on that option, the text appears. But if I visit the blog itself, no such entry appears.
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I am not about to take the effort to write a new entry if this service is not working. I'll try to publish this entry and see if it appears. Maybe it will, and will fix the problem. If not, I'll have to see if I can get Help from some at Blogspot Support. We'll see.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:40 PM

 
Muzzling Money. In trying to discredit restrictions on the power of money to affect elections, Ryan Sager and other opponents of any restriction on the corruption of money pretend that any advertisement for Fahrenheit 9/11 is illegal under McCain-Feingold. All these people know full well the difference between an ad for a candidate and an ad for a movie, and the courts know the difference too.
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The rich have no sense, but they have lots of dollars. Their agenda is disgusting, and when stripped of video finery comes down to "Give the rich everything they want, no matter how it may hurt everybody else" is a loser. So they want to dominate the debate with massive numbers of color-postcard paeans to patriotism and other irrelevancies to distract people from the reality that the Republican Party is reducing everyone but the rich to penury and its concomitant wage slavery and debt slavery. We won't let them use their money that way.
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Let them vote their views; there are a lot more of us than them. If they have so much money they don't know what to do with it but spend it on distortions and video crap, let's just take it away with much higher taxes on the rich, and use that money to pay off the national debt they are endlessly piling onto us.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:47 PM

 
House Arrest for Murder Suspect? To borrow an expression from the South, a lot of the judges and legislators of this country "need killing".
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Netscape carried this Associated Press report today.

"PRINCETON, W.Va. A 14-year-old girl under house arrest on charges of murdering her father escaped after cutting an electronic monitoring device off her ankle and gluing it to a cat, authorities said.
"Police searched on Wednesday for Kayla Marie LaSala, who fled an uncle's house early Saturday.
"If she thought pinning the device to the cat would fool authorities, it did not work: An alarm went off when a circuit in the device was broken, officials said. But she was gone before police could get there.
"'She's very, very sharp. She's cunning,' said sheriff's Detective C. T. Lowe.
"Kayla is awaiting trial Sept. 7 on charges of stabbing her father to death in February. Sheriff's Sgt. A. D. Beasley said the motive for the slaying was unclear.
"Lowe said Kayla told family members she planned to escape by July 2. He said the relatives were asleep when she fled.

Why on Earth was an accused murderess who was believed to constitute a serious risk of flight ever given bail to begin with or allowed to set so much as one little toe out of a full-scale, high-security jail? Who allows such things?
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Stabbing is up-close-and personal. Someone accused of that kind of murder must be considered especially dangerous — and when the victim is her own FATHER, she plainly is not going to stay in any given location by FAMILY considerations. So why was she with an uncle?
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If the family knew she intended to flee, why wasn't her bail revoked so that she would be confined to jail? Did the family refuse to report that information? If so, slit their throats, as co-conspirators in the stabbing of the father and release of a dangerous criminal into society. If they did report it and the police/judicial authorities did not revoke her bail and send her to jail, their throats should be slit.
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Altho the Constitution says that bail shall not be "excessive", the idea of giving bail to anyone accused, with good reason and good evidence, of committing MURDER is crazy. I do not believe the Founding Fathers intended that murderers should be let out of jail and allowed to wander unsupervised.
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Murder was relatively rare but was still known to the Framers of the Constitution. It is a unique crime and should not be lumped in with all others. There should be no bail and no unsupervised house arrest for people accused of murder who do not have massive and persuasive connections with the community as provides reasonable certitude that no flight will occur. And I'm not persuaded that any such certitude is possible when it comes to murder.
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Presuming innocence as a legalistic formality can go too far, and it is entirely reasonable to confine people accused of the most serious crimes for however long it might take to get a trial underway, especially given that we now have rules requiring speedy trial. Children who murder their parents are not entitled to a supposition of harmlessness.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 10:52 PM

 
When You Have Nothing to Say, Say Nothing. Yesterday the news broadcasts were full of speculation substituting for news. They speculated about whom John Kerry had chosen for his running mate and whether a captured U.S. Marine was dead, alive, even freed. They speculated long and loud, in a total absence of information. Why?
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News is what has in fact happened, not what might — which is also, by definition, what might NOT — happen.
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The understanding was that Kerry would make his announcement the following day but say nothing before then. Why not just say "We know nothing, so will say nothing. When we know, you'll know"? Oh, no, they couldn't do that! They have to speculate, emptily, stupidly, wastefully of our time and energy. You can't just wait one day? What the hell is wrong with you people?
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Why waste our time with background info about Senator Bob Graham of Florida and what he might bring to the ticket (the great prize, Florida) or similar types of information about Richard Gephardt, Tom Vilsack, and John Edwards on Monday if we'll know on Tuesday that the candidate is only one of them — tho of course it might have been none of them. It turned out, we found out today — as we were told it would be announced today — to be John Edwards. So we didn't need to know about Bob Graham or Richard Gephardt or Tom Vilsack, did we? Why are supposedly reputable news organizations wasting our time with irrelevancies?!?
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In the same vein, news media had no hard news whatsoever to report about the captured Lebanese-born U.S. Marine, but of course they kept chattering endlessly noentheless, reporting this Islamist website claim and that idle rumor and this pointless speculation and that hopeful glimmer. Just shut up and wait! Can you do that? If you can't, you need professional help.
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When you know nothing, say nothing.
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P.S. A few hours after I posted this entry, I heard that the New York Post did worse than idly speculate in the absence of real information. It actually reported, full-front-page, that Kerry had chosen Gephardt as running mate! Astounding. Now, for the sake of trying to scoop the competition by a few insignificant hours, the editors of the Post made themselves look like the biggest bunch of boobs in journalism. Oh, wait. They are the biggest bunch of boobs in journalism! Never mind.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:52 PM

 
Phony-Baloney "Freedom" Tower. New York City's Jewish mayor, Michael Bloomberg, laid the cornerstone for a new, preposterously named "Freedom Tower" on the site of the old World Trade Center yesterday, and uttered these ridiculous words:

"I cannot imagine a more appropriate day to stand on this sacred ground and lay a cornerstone dedicated to freedom, the defining principle of our nation and the reason that we were attacked on September 11, 2001".

What inexcusable drivel!
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The United States was attacked by Arabs on September 11th to retaliate for endless attacks by the United States Government upon the Arab world incited by people like Michael Bloomberg, the vile "Israel lobby" that has made the United States rightly hated by all decent people worldwide — including increasing numbers of Americans, who are desperately ashamed of their country's behavior in endlessly backing the most outrageous atrocities by Israel against non-Jews.
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The Jews of the United States are scared shitless that American Christians and other non-Jews will wake up to the fact that Zionism brought on the WTC attack and the ongoing war against us by Moslem militants, and blame the Jews for 9/11 — for which they do indeed bear responsibility. Thus, American Jews have tried to invent a different reason than the utterly obvious only reason for the attacks. They came up with the ridiculous, utterly implausible and unbelievable contention that ARABS are attacking AMERICANS, 6,000 miles from home, because we are free! Who on Earth is so stupid as to believe such nonsense?
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Who commits suicide to attack someone else's freedom? It's ridiculous.
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Most of the world is not free, yet we are not under assault from sub-Saharan Africans nor from Chinese nor Cubans, Vietnamese, or any other group but Moslems generally and Arabs most particularly. Nor are they sending terrorists to destroy Tokyo and kill free Japanese.
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Everyone knows why we are being attacked by Arabs. Everyone knows! But we are not allowed to admit it aloud. That has got to end.
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Policy must be predicated upon truth, no matter how unpleasant that truth may be. To base policy upon a fraudulent premise is to guarantee that it will fail.
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The policy that we must recognize as having produced endless war against us by Arabs is mindless, blank-check support for the insane idea of Nineteenth Century Central European Jews of recreating ancient Israel in modern Palestine. The idea was, when first proposed, absolutely off-the-wall nuts. It remains, to this day, absolutely off-the-wall nuts.
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We have poured an astonishing amount of taxpayer money into this insane scheme. Ohio's Columbus Free Press suggests this tally:

Since 1976, Israel has been the leading recipient of foreign assistance from the United States. From 1949 through fiscal year 2000, the United States has given Israel over 81 billion dollars in foreign aid, making Israel the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II. It is important to note, however, that $81 billion is a conservative number for U.S. foreign assistance to Israel. The figure, $81 billion, does not include Department of Defense allocations for joint defense projects such as, for example, the $200 million allocated in past years for Israel’s development of the Merkava tank. Moreover, the figure does not reflect imputed interest Israel receives from early disbursement of U.S. foreign assistance. U.S. foreign assistance to Israel is unique because repayment on loans to Israel is waived [and thus we are not really talking "loans" at all, but outright grants] and the United States has pledged in the Cranston Amendment to provide Israel with economic assistance not less than the amount Israel owes the United States for previous loans. A more accurate total of cumulative U.S. foreign assistance to Israel may be closer to $91 billion.

And that's only PUBLIC money, thru the year 2002.
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A wider view is afforded by a report by the Congressional Research Service, which tallies all sources of aid for Israel (which happens to be essentially from the United States alone):

Israel is not economically self-sufficient, and relies on foreign assistance and borrowing to maintain its economy. Since 1985, the United States has provided $3 billion in grants annually to Israel. Since 1976, Israel has been the largest annual recipient of U.S. foreign assistance, and is the largest cumulative recipient since World War II. In addition to U.S.
assistance, it is estimated that Israel receives about $1 billion annually through philanthropy, an equal amount through short- and long- term commercial loans, and around $1 billion in Israel Bonds proceeds.

The bulk of those additional $3 billion per year is from U.S. sources: U.S. philanthropists, U.S. commercial lenders, and U.S. purchasers of Israel Bonds.
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Think about that: $6 BILLION dollars pretty much from only one country, the United States, each and every year, year after year after year. By contrast, U.S. assistance to Palestine totals about $100 million — that's "million", with an M: 1,000th of a billion. This means that if Israel gets $3.3 BILLION in a typical year and Palestinians get $100&Million, Israel gets 3,300 TIMES as much money from taxpayers as do Palestinians. Are there 3,300 times as many Israelis as Palestinians? No, there are not.
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Actually, the total population of Israel is about 6.3 million, only 80% of whom are Jewish — but virtually all of the benefit of U.S. aid to Israel goes to the Jewish portion of the population. I tried to find population information on Palestine from the same source as for Israel's population, The World Factbook of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. But, astonishing and appalling to say, "Palestine" does not exist, to the CIA. They never heard of it. It is not a listed country; the "Reference Map" of the Middle East on the website does not show the existence of any such thing as Palestine! Oh, that's even-handed, isn't it?
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You have to think to look up, separately, "Gaza Strip" (1,324,991) and "West Bank" (2,311,204 ) to find that Palestine has a population of 3,636,203. So Israel has 6.3&million people (including a maltreated 20% minority of "Israeli Arabs" (Palestinians by another name) who get little of that), which is only 1.73 times as many people as Palestine; if we count only Jews as recipients of U.S. aid to Israel, which is fair, the difference is about 5,040,000 Israelis as against 3,636,203 Palestinians, or 1.39 times as many Israelis as Palestinians.
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These 5,040,000 Jews (the largest number there has ever been in Israel, tho that "country" has been receiving this same order of U.S. aid for decades, when the numbers of recipients were much smaller) amounts to $3.3B (of public money) divided by 5.04M = $655.76 for every single Israeli man, woman, child, and babe in arms, every year, year after year without end.
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By contrast, $100M for Palestinians divided by 3.6M = $2.78 per person a year.
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An Israeli family of five — and yes, the typical Israeli family is larger than the typical U.S. family — thus receives $3,273.81 from the U.S. taxpayer each and every year. A Palestinian family of six (yes, one more child) receives $16.68 A YEAR! And that's counting only the direct tax benefit. Since Israel actually receives on the order of $6.3B from all U.S. sources each year, the typical Israeli family actually receives on the order of $6,000.00 from the U.S. each year, while the typical Palestinian family still gets only $16.68!
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Let's put this difference, of 353 times as much per family, into a U.S. context. Let us posit that the government were to give $6,000 per white child in school but less than $17 per black child. Would we regard that as equitable, fair, "equal treatment under law" in keeping with our declared national purposes in the Declaration of Independence and other basic documents that Bloomberg so proudly invoked? Or would blacks erupt with violence every few days to shake society out of this insanity, with devastating effect — the equivalent of a new WTC attack every week?
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And what about the rest of this starving planet? Israelis aren't starving (tho Palestinians practically are). Every dollar given to Israel is diverted from starving children in the Third World.
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It amazes me that Americans, who like to think themselves fair and decent people, consent to grotesque unfairness in the Middle East, carried out in their name, which of necessity produces hatred for us in decent people everywhere. Even passing over the mass death and destruction that Israel commits every month against Arabs, without end, just the constant maintenance of Palestinians in bitter, dehumanizing poverty while Israelis luxuriate on U.S.-taxpayer-provided welfare would produce violence against us.
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The whole damned country of Israel is on welfare! and Americans, who bitterly disapprove of their own countrymen gorging at the public trough, consent year after year to keep Israelis living unfairly well at our expense, while keeping Palestinians miserable.
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It is that misery that makes people embrace suicide bombing as liberation. They seek "Freedom" too, Mr. Bloomberg, freedom from Israel, freedom from the Israel lobby, freedom from active oppression by the United States Government.
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Thus, for Michael Bloomberg to declaim that he can think of no more fitting day to celebrate the behavior that produced the World Trade Center attacks than July 4th is an obscenity. How on Earth can you reconcile "All men are created equal" with the insanely unequal treatment the U.S. gives Jews and Arabs?
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When will we wake from this nitemare, cut Israel completely off welfare, treat Palestinians equally to Israelis (at the least), and thus bring peace the only way it can ever be brought: by doing justice?
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:22 PM

 
Item 1: The Deadliest Sin. Every July 4th, there are hundreds of "eating contests" all across the United States, celebrations of the long-condemned sin of Gluttony, one of the Seven Deadly Sins that, according to the Catholic Church, puts one's "immortal soul" at risk of "eternal damnation".
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The full list of the Seven Deadly Sins is Pride, Covetousness, Lust, Anger, Gluttony, Envy, and Sloth.
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Of these, the deadliest in personal terms and ugliest in today's world of want is gluttony, defined simply as "eating to excess" (Wordnet, Princeton University) or, more fully, as "an inordinate desire to consume more than that which one requires".
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The world is starving, with hundreds of millions of people so malnourished that even a few weeks of food intake below the ordinary produces mass death. Specifically, Bread for the World Institute's website reports that:

"798 million people in the developing world are undernourished. They consume less than the minimum amount of calories essential for sound health and growth.

"Poor nutrition and calorie deficiencies cause nearly one in three people to die prematurely or have disabilities, according to the World Health Organization.
* * *
"153 million children under 5 in the developing world are underweight. Worse yet, 11 million children younger than 5 die every year, more than half from hunger-related causes.

"Most of these deaths are attributed, not to outright starvation, but to diseases that move in on vulnerable children whose bodies have been weakened by hunger.
* * *
"In the developing world, 27 percent of children under 5 are moderately to severely underweight. 10 percent are severely underweight. 8 percent of children under 5 are moderately to severely wasted, or seriously below weight for one’s height, and an overwhelming 32 percent are moderately to severely stunted, or seriously below normal height for one’s age."

TheHungerSite.com is a "click to donate" website in which visitors can give food for free, paid for by sponsors who want to be associated in people's minds with alleviating hunger. Its figures are a little different, but, alas, in the same ballpark as those of Bread for the World:

"It is estimated that one billion people in the world suffer from hunger and malnutrition. That's roughly 100 times as many as those who actually die from these causes each year.

"About 24,000 people die every day from hunger or hunger-related causes [that works out to 8,760,000 per year, more than the total population of New York City]. This is down from 35,000 ten years ago, and 41,000 twenty years ago. Three-fourths of the deaths are children under the age of five.

"Famine and wars cause about 10% of hunger deaths, although these tend to be the ones you hear about most often. The majority of hunger deaths are caused by chronic malnutrition. Families facing extreme poverty are simply unable to get enough food to eat."

In lite of these horrendous facts, it is an OBSCENITY of the worst order that the First World actually celebrates and rewards GLUTTONY, a sin that has been recognized as evil for many, many centuries.
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Aside from the issue of gluttony in a world of starvation, there is the practical reality that the U.S. is the fattest country in the world, and tens of millions of Americans have a serious weight problem. This is no time to be celebrating the base cause of obesity: eating too damned much!
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The Food and Drug Administration says:

"'Overweight and obesity may soon cause as much preventable disease and death as cigarette smoking,' says Satcher, whose term expired Feb. 13. 'People tend to think of overweight and obesity as strictly a personal matter, but there is much that communities can and should do to address these problems.'

"About 300,000 U.S. deaths a year are associated with obesity and overweight (compared to more than 400,000 deaths a year associated with cigarette smoking). The total direct and indirect costs attributed to overweight and obesity amounted to $117 billion in 2000.

So why on Earth are major corporations and media glorying in gluttony? It is disgraceful that media play up hot-dog eating contests, pie-eating contests, and other such dangerous and disgusting obscenities in a world of want and a nation suffering serious health problems from obesity.
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What can we do? Probably the most famous of these glorifications of gluttony is the July 4th contest at Coney Island each year sponsored by "Nathan's Famous", which sees people gorge themselves on more than 40 hot dogs in 12 minutes). If we can get that shut down, we can make progress against the perverse glorification of gluttony in these profoundly ugly spectacles.
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If you share my indignation, tell Nathan's it should be ashamed of itself. Send them email to ask them to stop rewarding gluttony in a world of starvation: cs@nathansfamous.com is the "Consumer Suggestions" email address; the postal address, phone and fax info are:

Nathan's Famous Executive Offices
1400 Old Country Road
Westbury, NY 11590

Phone: 516-338-8500
Fax: 516-338-7220

Tell them you are indignant. Perhaps they will pay attention if you also pledge to boycott Nathan's and all its restaurants and brands (which you can find at its website, http://www.nathansfamous.com/). Then follow thru and indeed boycott all of Nathan's businesses.
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If Nathan's discontinues its glorification of gluttony in a world of starvation, we will have taken a major step in the right direction, and other such contests might also come to a permanent end, to be resumed only if and when everyone, across this entire planet, has enuf to eat.
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Item 2: New Start at the WTC. I hated the bulky, blocky imposition the World Trade Center made on New York's skyline, but was resigned to its permanence. The open-air observation deck atop it was wonderful to look OUT from, to be sure, and the hoards of people rising from the bank of escalators from the PATH was exciting during rush hours. But the sterile, empty plaza was an eyesore, and most of the time there was nothing to do there for ordinary people, who couldn't afford dinner and drinks at Windows on the World.
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The broadcast tower atop the WTC did give me, perhaps 13 miles away, straight-line, in Newark, really good TV reception, better on my second floor than first and glorious on my third floor. But a TV broadcast antenna on a worthier architectural base would have been much better.
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Then the towers came crashing down, and New York got a chance to start over. Rarely does a city get to rework its skyline in any major way twice in 35 years.
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The cornerstone of a new skyscraper (the dishonestly named "Freedom Tower", as tho the WTC attack had anything whatsoever to do with an attack on freedom) was today laid on the site devastated by the 9/11 attacks, and New York has now begun to redevelop that ground. Alas, the design chosen is of an imitation-skyscraper. Rather than a real building, much of the "Freedom Tower" will be a void, a make-believe building holding up a useless toothpick of a spire that mocks rather than celebrates the vitality and utility of real skyscrapers. Still, it's a step in the right direction.
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For one thing, it has a geometric point, rather than being a simple rectangle, like the empty-headed boxes of the old WTC. Unfortunately, the geometric point may have no architectural nor functional point. Altho six months ago the claim was made that a 300-foot broadcast tower would top the spire, the architect's rendering shown on AOL today does not appear to incorporate such a tower. I hope the rendering is just not large enuf to show clearly an antenna that is nonetheless planned.
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The more important 'point', however, is that starting actual construction on the old WTC site shows that New York hasn't rolled over to play dead, nor to make Downtown into a mawkish paean to loss and grief.
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New York is finally doing what New York has always done: accepted that the past is at best prolog, and now it's time to move on.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:54 PM