Gun Lobby Sophistry. It is inconceivable, as John Lott argues, that people are safer the more guns there are floating around. Suicides and accidents alone account for a significant number of deaths that would not occur were guns simply unavailable, and rage-induced injuries and deaths that could not happen absent a gun surely matter. I have never heard of a "drive-by knifing".
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Lott wants us to believe that the drop in many types of crime over the past several years, and especially during the Brady ban, are mere coincidence that would have happened anyway. Not credible. It makes as much sense to argue that laws restricting access to guns are useless as it does to argue that laws against robbery and murder are useless so should be abolished, because the people who are going to do these things will do them whether there are laws against them or not. But would anyone seriously entertain the notion that laws against murder are a bad idea? I suspect John Lott would. After all, he wrote a book called More Guns, Less Crime. He wants us to forget about all those societies like Canada that have fewer guns and much less crime. Mere illusion. Sure they are. Sure.
+
(Responsive to "Shooting Blanks", op-ed piece by John R. Lott, Jr. in the New York Post, December 29, 2004)
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(Little Milestone: I think, but am not sure, that this is the 200th post to this blog.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:29 PM

 
Not One Damn Dime Day. I received the following message from a woman I used to work with in New York, and heartily endorse the project.

This seems like a good idea. You can always make sure you buy what you need the day before and pack your lunch to take to work.

Now here's an interesting idea!

Not One Damn Dime Day - Jan 20, 2005

Since our religious leaders will not speak out against the war in Iraq,
since our political leaders don't have the moral courage to oppose it,
Inauguration Day, Thursday, January 20th, 2005 is "Not One Damn Dime Day" in America.

On "Not One Damn Dime Day" those who oppose what is happening in our name in Iraq can speak up with a 24-hour national boycott of all forms of consumer spending.

During "Not One Damn Dime Day" please don't spend money. Not one damn dime for gasoline. Not one damn dime for necessities or for impulse purchases.
Not one damn dime for nothing for 24 hours.

On "Not One Damn Dime Day," please boycott Wal-Mart, Kmart, Target...
Please don't go to the mall or the local convenience store. Please don't buy
any fast food (or any groceries at all for that matter).

For 24 hours, please do what you can to shut the retail economy down. The
object is simple. Remind the people in power that the war in Iraq is immoral
and illegal; that they are responsible for starting it and that it is their responsibility to stop it.

"Not One Damn Dime Day" is to remind them, too, that they work for the
people of the United States of America, not for the international
corporations and K Street lobbyists who represent the corporations and
funnel cash into American politics.

"Not One Damn Dime Day" is about supporting the troops. Now 1,200 brave
young Americans and an estimated 100,000 Iraqis have died. The politicians
owe our troops a plan - a way to come home.

There's no rally to attend. No marching to do. No left or right wing agenda
to rant about. On "Not One Damn Dime Day" you take action by doing
nothing.

You open your mouth by keeping your wallet closed. For 24 hours, nothing
gets spent, not one damn dime, to remind our religious leaders and our
politicians of their moral responsibility to end the war in Iraq and give
America back to the people.

Please share this email with as many people as possible.

What a great idea.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:41 AM

 
History: All-Straight, All the Time. I hadn't intended to address gay issues two days in a row. But straight writers address straight issues every day of the week, if not every day of their life, and do not feel tedious therefor.
+
The New York Post had an irritating column yesterday, about a recent book that claims that Abraham Lincoln was homosexual, which I need to answer. This is the letter I sent the Post in reply:

Eric Fettman does precisely what he accuses a gay historian of doing: making extravagant claims on the basis of flimsy evidence. Fettman claims that it was ordinary and unremarkable for 19th-century professional men to share a bed for years without anything sexual going on. Oh? Men are quintessentially sexual. You lie in bed with a man nite after nite and something is going to happen. Abe Lincoln hewed fences and built log cabins. He couldn't make a separate bed for himself, or sleep on the floor? He was a lawyer, yet was too poor to afford his own bed?
+
Human nature doesn't change from century to century, and men play around with whatever body is beside them at nite, unless a deep loathing forbids. I don't even claim to know whether Lincoln loathed sexual contact with men or craved it. Neither does Fettman. It is simply NOT KNOWABLE, and no one, straight or gay, should claim to know with certitude what in fact we do not and, lacking specific, forthright evidence, cannot know.
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What I do know is that Lincoln was NOT our "most important president", no matter what the fool Larry Kramer might say. Lincoln merely presided over a war that some part of the Nation was certain to survive. But without Washington, there would have been no Union to preserve. (Washington married a fertile, 28-year-old woman with young children but had no children of his own. Was he sterile? or gay? Not knowable.)
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I also know that straight society can't give up a single great man to homosexuals. A recent movie (that I will never see) apparently portrayed Alexander the Great as straight, even tho a History Channel special said plainly that he lay upon the body of his dead "friend" for hours until dragged off it, then wept continuously for three days and was never the same thereafter. Even the Encyclopaedia Britannica has conceded that Richard the Lion Heart was homosexual, but you never hear that, do you? The schools teach nothing but straight-washed history, and gay kids are never to have anyone to look up to. We're tired of it. You have enuf straight heroes. Let us have our own, gay heroes. History, like Hollywood, is not all straight.

(Responsive to "Abe: Honest & Straight", column by Eric Fettman, New York Post, December 27, 2004)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:03 AM

 
Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish. God killed an antihomosexual bigot yesterday. Thank you, God.
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Reggie White, a former NFL football star who was also an ordained minister, died suddenly and unexpectedly at age 43. Forty-three. He had been dubbed the "Minister of Defense" because he was both a defensive lineman and a supposed 'man of God'. AP reports today that "White worked tirelessly in the offseason with inner-city youths. But his image was tarnished when he gave a speech in which he denounced homosexuality and used ethnic stereotypes. White later apologized." Not quite. ABC News reported last nite that he apologized only for the ethnic remarks. He stood by his condemnation of homosexuality.
+
And that is why God killed him in the prime of life.
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The AP story, by one Paul Nowell (an alternate spelling for "Noel", by the way, as in this Christmas season), says:

"Reggie White was a gentle warrior who will be remembered as one of the greatest defensive players in NFL history," NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue said. "Equally as impressive as his achievements on the field was the positive impact he made off the field and the way he served as a positive influence on so many young people."

"Positive influence"!?! Promoting antihomosexual bigotry among young people? Aren't there enuf ghetto thugs, at the very bottom of society in every sense, pretending themselves superior to "faggots" — even those who hold advanced degrees and great jobs and serve as veritable pillars of the community — without a minister of God encouraging them in that vicious and useless delusion?
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And what of the multitudinous young black homosexuals whom he implicitly told to accept their blackness but not their sexual nature? To seek a good life as black people but not as gay people? What of the HARM he did to them?
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I do not honor Reggie White's memory, nor that of any other simpleminded antihomosexual bigot who parrots the lunatic ravings of the JEWISH rant Leviticus while never thinking for so much as an instant how perfectly homosexuality accords with the Golden Rule given to us by Jesus: perfectly, absolutely accords, word-for-word, with His teaching, "As you would have others do to you, so too do to them". Gay men can use superstition as blatantly as their enemies do. Let us indeed proclaim that Reggie White died young because he promoted hate while claiming to speak for the God of Love. God killed him, because God is on our side!
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I don't really believe in God, but Reggie White claimed to, and used his position as a minister of God to denounce homosexuality and try to make life more difficult for people who never did him wrong. A black man, who should have known better than to indulge in, much ess promote, bigotry, undid all his good works, as far as hundreds of millions of men all across this planet are concerned, by attacking people who never attacked him.
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So let gay men and their allies use God to bolster our position just as Reggie 'White' did, and claim that God in his infinite wisdom struck down the unrepentant sinner Reggie White for his unprovoked offense against men who are following God's teaching, "As you would have others do to you, so too do to them" — literally. The God of Love has struck down hate by making an example of a man who misread His message and promoted intolerance. Who's to say otherwise?
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:02 PM

 
War on Christmas; Soft Numbers on the Toll of Debt. Today is the day that (Western) Christians worldwide celebrate the birth of "The Prince of Peace", but we, the largest Christian nation on Earth, are at war, an unjust war against a country that never attacked us, a war that Jesus surely would condemn. It is at best sad, and at worst a stain on our honor and pain to our conscience — if we have one anymore, somewhere under all the patriotic hype and militarist pride. How long will manipulated patriotism and a siege mentality continue to suppress our conscience? How will we redeem ourselves as a Nation, as a people, as individual human beings? And who speaks for the best in us? (Other than me, that is.)
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Before the U.S. national election last month I tried to warn the Democratic Party, several times, that they would lose the election badly unless they focused on their biggest and best issue, personal debt. They ignored me and did indeed lose badly — not in terms of percentage of the vote, since the Republicans managed to win only 51% of the popular vote, but in terms of the organs of government secured: Presidency, Senate, and House of Representatives.
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Now the Democrats are almost marginalized, as the Radical Rightists and neocons pretend that a 51% just-barely-squeaked-by win is a "resounding victory", a "mandate" to enact the most extreme and regressive features of their program. Dubya announced yesterday his intent to resubmit 20 controversial nominations for federal judgeships and ram them thru the Senate, by a rules change to end filibustering if need be. The Democrats are reduced to little-girl protestations that that's not nice and will polarize the Nation (as tho we're not profoundly polarized already). They don't have the votes to stop any of this, but must win moderate Republicans to their side to prevent a neocon steamroller from carrying off a revolution that could transform this country beyond recognition if not reversed within a few short years.
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None of this had to happen. The Democrats could have won the White House, won the House of Representatives, won the Senate. But they refused to use their most powerful issue, personal debt. Refused even to MENTION it in the final weeks of the campaign.
+
Until this week, most of my information about personal debt focused on the financial figures, but it is personal experience with debt that allowed me to understand how oppressive debt has become. The leadership elites of both major parties are, however, rich, so the Demmies might simply have disregarded my advice as alarmist and overblown since it did not accord with their personal experience. I don't think that's what happened. They couldn't be that out of touch, because all of them have staff made up of ordinary working people at lower income levels, coping with debt; all had pollsters telling them what most concerns ordinary people. No, they made a conscious choice not to talk about their strongest issue. Why?
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I have been forced to conclude that they decided this was not a good time to win control of the national government, which they could easily have done had they focused on the Republican Party's heartlessness in actively conniving to drown the poor and middle class in usury and debt, and prevent them from escaping debt by "reforming" the bankruptcy laws to make it almost impossible for ordinary people to wipe out debts in one brief legal procedure. But the Democrats felt they could not afford to win the election, because they had concluded that the situation in Iraq is now and will likely remain for the next several years a nitemare that will devastate the political prospects of whoever is in charge, and they'd rather the Republicans be ravaged than the Democrats. They no more have an "exit strategy" than have the Republicans, and European and other allies refused to commit to help a Democratic administration internationalize the "nation-building" project. So Democrats would have been left the hard choice of continuing to kill and destroy, and suffer American casualties (over 2,000 killed, 10,000 wounded to date), or just walk away and try to contain, outside Iraq, the chaos that would ensue.
+
They decided to let the Republicans be engulfed in those flames. If that means that the people have to suffer third-degree burns in the process, that's tuf — 'can't be avoided, and besides, anyone who voted Republican deserves to suffer! In the end, the liberals will be proved right, the rightwingers will be crushed, and we can all move on.' Or can we?
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I'm not sure they have miscalculated. Certainly the news out of Iraq in the past 10 days or so has been horrible. Queries to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld from soldiers, on his most recent visit shifted from 'Why don't we have armor on all our vehicles?' and similar complaints to 'How can we win the media war?' — as tho the media are making up the violence they report — and 'Why don't the media show all the good things we are achieving?'
+
Republicans' assertions that things are really much better than they appear ring absolutely and profoundly hollow. The Fallujah assault may have killed 1,000 "insurgents" — and literally uncounted numbers of noncombatants, who apparently don't matter; they would matter if it were American mothers and children being slaughtered by an occupying Arab army, but in today's reality don't matter at all since they are 'only' Arabs murdered by Americans — but that didn't stop the "insurgency", did it? Everyone who knows anything about guerrilla warfare, which is what this has become, knows that guerrillas know better than to stand and fite a vastly superior force. Rather, they melt away and attack elsewhere, where the enemy (that would be us) is weaker — like a dining room under a TENT!
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Iraqi and allied guerrillas must be astonished at how STUPID Americans are that they send UNARMORED vehicles into a war zone and make their soldiers eat under a TENT within range of mortars! Oh, the claim now is that there was a suicide bomber and the hole in the top of the tent came after, not before, the blast that killed 22 Americans and additional numbers of Iraqis, and wounded 72, but media reports are unclear as to whether that's really what happened or the Pentagon is just covering its ass, trying to pretend that the problem was not that its men were eating under a TENT but that somebody got into the mess tent with explosives strapped to his body. Is that supposed to reassure us? How is that better? (And yes, it is almost solely American men who are dying in Iraq, despite all the bullshit about "our fiting men and women" that we hear endlessly from our lesbianized, Communized government that feels compelled to exaggerate the role of women in the military beyond all resemblance of reality.)
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Can't critics reply that if you know there's a problem with security, why on Earth would you concentrate hundreds of men in a single location at specific times of day as to make them prime targets for mortars OR ground blasts?
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Hundreds and hundreds of Iraqis have been killed by the "insurgents" in recent weeks, a toll far worse for Iraq than the World Trade Center and Pentagon blasts were for us, a country 12 times as populous as Iraq. Exactly how many Iraqis have been killed? We don't know. The U.S. and British governments that control the whole of Iraq adamantly refuse to count Iraqi deaths! Tom Fenton, a distinguished CBS News correspondent based in Britain, addressed this issue on December 13th. (Comments in brackets and italics are mine.)

In the early days of the invasion of Iraq, Gen. Tommy Franks famously told reporters at his headquarters in Qatar, "We don't do body counts." The Pentagon and our British allies have stuck to that position ever since. They have never given an accounting, or even a rough estimate, of the number of Iraqi civilians who have died in the bombing and crossfire of combat during the invasion, or in the deadly insurgency that still wracks the country.

The United States and Britain, under the Geneva Convention and Hague Regulations, have a binding responsibility as occupying authorities to prevent civilian deaths, including those resulting from the breakdown of law and order and inadequate health care or sanitation. So you might think a little accounting would be in order. * * *

It has been left up to anti-war campaigners, NGO's and other unofficial sources to provide their own estimates. Chief among them is Iraq Body Count, ... [which] has compiled roughly 15,000 Iraqi civilian deaths as a result of the war and its aftermath. But attempts to do body counts through deaths reported in the press necessarily underestimate, since areas where civilians are being killed are often areas where journalists don't dare go.

For a few months this year, the Iraqi provisional government published figures obtained by counting bodies arriving at hospitals. Its total was 3,853 civilians killed between April and November. [Note (a) that this is almost a year after Dubya declared "Mission Accomplished" and the active phase of the invasion had ended — that is, 'peacetime'; and (b) that 3,853 is almost a thousand more people than died in the September 11th attacks (2,749 at the WTC plus 189 in the Pentagon and 44 in the crash of the third jet = 2,982). Multiply by 12 to get the equivalent in U.S. terms for the Iraqi government estimate of 3,853 killed in a mere seven or eight months: 46,236.] Again, that is necessarily an underestimate, since many of those who are killed or die never reach a hospital. [In the U.S. and other First World countries with well established governments, a Bureau of Vital Statistics keeps excellent track of births and deaths, and violent deaths must be evaluated by a coroner. But Iraq has no functioning government, and Islam requires that a body be buried within 24 hours after death, so a great many deaths show up in no statistics kept by anyone.]

The most scrupulously scientific effort to arrive at a realistic figure was reported in October by the [distinguished] British medical journal The Lancet. ... It estimated there have been 98,000 "excess" civilians deaths since the start of the war. Given the relative size of the two countries, that would be the equivalent of roughly 1,200,000 American deaths.

That devastating figure has been widely disputed, especially by the British and American governments. [Oh? On what basis, if you refuse to do body counts? Huh? You can't have it both ways. Either keep track or shut up.] But whatever the truth, it is clear that civilians are usually not only the first casualties of war. They are the most numerous.

The Lancet study was reported by U.S. media on October 28th, but the story vanished by the next day. (See my entry to this blog of October 29th, second item.) Americans plainly don't want to think about how many Iraqis they have killed — and continue to kill. They want to think of themselves as "the good guys" bringing democracy, peace, and progress to the benighted Middle East. They are not, and need to face the fact that this war, and the previous 13-year campaign of terror against Iraqis committed by both Republicans and Democrats, is the darkest chapter in our national history — to date. If we have as a Nation lost our conscience and become a militarist monster making war all over this planet for reasons the people do not understand and don't care about, it may be only the first of many dark chapters, until, like Nazi Germany, we are destroyed by a worldwide alliance and subjected to a military occupation ourselves. I suspect we won't regard that as "liberation".
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We might luck out, find our national conscience — where is it hiding? — and redeem ourselves by ousting the scum that has floated to the top of society and turning them over to an international war-crimes tribunal. But as of now, there is no prospect of that happening. Our aggressors are "heroes". Our dead "enemies" are uncounted. And we don't need good reasons to go to war. Any pretext will do. And once we're there and the pretext is shown false — Weapons of Mass Destruction, Dubya's ass! — the bulk of the population will still "rally round the flag", and not merely ignore but actually defy conscience!
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The Brookings Institution on March 25, 2003 observed:

The invasion of Iraq has validated a basic rule of American politics: Americans rally round the president in times of national crisis. Polls now show that seven in 10 Americans support the decision to go to war. * * *

Signs of a rally round the flag were evident even before the first bombs fell .... Between last August and the beginning of March, Gallup found that support for the war generally fluctuated between 52 and 59 percent. Then in mid-March, as diplomacy began breaking down, public support crept higher. The last Gallup poll before the war started showed 64 percent in favor.

The increase in support for the war also carried over to support for President Bush. His overall public approval rating jumped between five and 13 percentage points, depending on the poll, in the first days of fighting.

The rally round the flag, however, extended beyond the White House. As also happened with the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan wars, the public responded to the invasion of Iraq by giving higher marks to Congress and expressing greater optimism about the country's future. A New York Times/CBS poll found that Congress's approval rating jumped 7 percentage points and now sits at 52 percent. [Think about that: before the war, only 45 percent of Americans, a minority, had a favorable view of Congress!] Gallup found that the percentage of the public expressing satisfaction with the way things are going in the country jumped from 36 to 60 percent. Rather than being simply about the president, the rally is better understood as a surge of patriotic support for the government and country as a whole.

The phrase "rally round the flag" apparently came into the popular culture of the United States due to a Civil War-era song, The Battle Cry of Freedom. A website about it is worth a visit, not just for the full lyrics of the two versions (Rallying Song and Battle Song), which speak to our best instincts, but also for the quotes at the bottom, which urge us to speak out when the Nation is going wrong. Consider these lyrics:

[Rallying Song]
Yes, we'll rally round the flag, boys
Rally once again,
Shouting the Battle Cry of Freedom * * *

We will welcome to our numbers
The loyal, true and brave,
Shouting the Battle Cry of Freedom
And altho' they may be poor
Not a man shall be a slave * * *

And we'll hurl the Rebel crew
From the land we love the best,
Shouting the Battle Cry of Freedom!

[Battle Song]
And we bear the glorious stars
For the Union and the right, * * *

Yes, for Liberty and Union
We're springing to the fight, * * *
And the vict'ry shall be ours
For we're rising in our might,
Shouting the Battle Cry of Freedom.

[Chorus of both versions]
The Union forever!
Hurrah boys hurrah!
Down with the traitor, up with the star,
For we're marching to the field, boys,
Going to the fight,
Shouting the Battle Cry of Freedom!

Today, the Southern scum who tried to destroy the Union are in charge of the very Nation they tried to destroy, and are using their excessive power to disgrace us. Oh, they're still using the battle cry of "freedom", but this war has nothing to do with freedom, only with Zionism (see this blog's entry of October 29th, item 1). Indeed, at home they are doing everything in their power to destroy freedom and reduce everyone to wage slaves, debt slaves, and conformists who allow the most regressive religious dictates to control them sexually and in every other way.
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In abandoning us to these regressive forces, the Democratic leadership made a conscious choice to let the Republicans prove how catastrophic their policies will be, so the electorate might recoil in horror and revile the Republican Party and all its tenets for the next 40 years.
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But how often does a society regain its conscience? How often does it feel it has gone too far to back out but must plow ahead, justifying the unjustifiable because to heed their conscience is too painful? Good people heed their conscience at all times, and don't let flags (today's 'Redneck, White and Blue') or wars or anything else silence the still, powerful voice deep in their head and heart that tells them Yes or No.
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One David H. Hackworth on the website Soldiers for the Truth, says of the red, white, and blue, a phrase we sometimes substitute for "the flag":

Congress approved the new flag on June 14, 1777. In this legislation, the Continental Congress also defined the symbolic meaning of the colors: white was designated to signify purity and innocence; red for hardiness and valor; and blue for vigilance, perseverance, and justice.

That's worth remembering when we see people who have few or none of those qualities wrap themselves in the flag.
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Bad people give in to their worst instincts and charge right ahead, rationalizing away all doubts. They will NEVER accept that they did anything wrong. But good people who have erred can accept blame — if they can immediately escape the pains.
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That is why Christianity has been such a success, because it permits a declaration of moral bankruptcy, in the best sense of the concept of bankruptcy: you admit fault, repent, and are forgiven. Your sins/debts are washed away and you start over, fresh and renewed.
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But in order for this Christian escape from sin to work, the leadership of the Church must accept the sinfulness of the course they too embraced, and I have serious doubts that the rightwing denominations in this country can accept that they have been part of a horrendous crime against humanity. How are they to grant absolution who are party to the crime and do not themselves repent? You see the problem.
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Catholics (24% of our total population) at least have a Pope who, fortunately, is opposed to this war. They can repent easily, and they have priests to confess to and receive absolution from thru prayer. Episcopalians (1.7% of the total American population), as part of the Anglican communion, have the Archbishop of Canterbury, who is also opposed to this war, to appeal to their conscience. But many Protestants in this country belong to churches with no hierarchy at all, each congregation being independent. Indeed, the largest group of Protestants in the Nation, and especially in the South, which now dominates national politics, are Baptists (31% of Protestants, 16.3% of the total national population), who practice "congregational polity":

congregational polity means that Baptist churches are independent. They are free to choose their own ministers, to determine their own standards for church membership, to organize their worship, to select their literature, to designate their offerings, and to decide their ministries in any manner that the congregation thinks best.

What are the chances of these thousands of individual congregations independently seeing the error of their ways and repenting? Not good, I'm afraid. Since they are unlikely to lose their political clout anytime soon, we are likely to be stuck with bad policy for several years because the Democrats abandoned us to the barbarians. It didn't have to be this way.
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The website iWon.com's daily survey on Tuesday, December 21, 2004, titled "Stressed Over Debt", asked "Are you worried about your personal level of debt?" The answers were:

17% - Yes - it's extremely stressful
36% - Yes - it's somewhat stressful
30% - No - I don't stress about it
16% - I don't have any personal debt [the group I now belong to]
1% - I don't care

The surveys at iWon.com usually tilt slightly, perhaps 4-6 percentage points, higher for Republican and conservative views by virtue of the fact that they are surveys of computer users, mainly computer owners, who are more prosperous than the general population. Nonetheless, this one survey shows 53% of Americans stressed or "extremely" stressed by personal debt. Yet the Democrats spoke not one word about debt in the closing weeks of their campaign for President and Congress. Not one word.
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They lost by 3 percentage points, in a country where 17% of people are "extremely stress[ed]" over debt, and 53% are at least "somewhat stress[ed]" about debt. I cannot but conclude that the Democrats could have won, but refused to. They are, thus, responsible for the division, violence, and regressiveness of the Republican revolution we are almost certain to suffer over the next four years. It didn't have to happen.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:44 PM

 
Shia Control of Iraq Not So Bad? Amir Taheri's attempt to reassure us that Shiite domination of Iraq would not be a disaster fails because Shia is everywhere connected with extremism. (His use of the bizarre term "Saddamites" to scare us about the Sunni alternative is manipulative. How is that word to be pronounced? Like "sodomite"? Taheri is trying to use anti-gay bigotry to inspire anti-Sunni sentiment in readers. That is contemptible.)
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People who flagellate their own bare backs with chains until blood soaks their pants and runs down their legs are not to be trusted to be rational and moderate, toward themselves or others. There is exactly one country on Earth with a government dominated by Shiites: Iran. Can any sane person be reassured by that?
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(Responsive to "Iraqi Election of Doom", column by Amir Taheri, New York Post, December 21, 2004)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:40 PM

 
Item 1: Puppet of the Year. Time Magazine has named George Bush its "Person of the Year". Absurd.
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Naming Dubya "Person of the Year" is like naming Howdy Doody, Miss Piggy, or Charlie McCarthy "Person of the Year".
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George Bush is a puppet, not the real president. He showed plainly in the first debate that unless his handlers can script something for him, he doesn't know what to say! In later debates, they more thoroughly prepared him, and wrote him lots of lines for different situations, so he wasn't completely baffled. But it is plain that George Bush says what he is told to say by his betters, the Real Presidency, a collective leadership — or rightwing politburo — that really sets the policies that Bush merely announces. He is our second Imitation President, after another teflon Republican, Ronald Reagan, the best actor in the history of the world, who actually had billions of people believing he was President of the United States!
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If Time were properly to go with a Republican this year, it would have had to go with a "Group of the Year", comprising people like Dick Cheney, Karl Rove ("a tech-savvy puppet master for Bush", says Wayne Madsen in CounterPunch newsletter), Paul Wolfowitz, Tom Delay, and many others, some in a foreign-policy group, some in a domestic-policy or economic-policy or social-policy group. Outsiders don't know who all of them are, nor how large a group it is. What we do know is that George Bush is the front man for a faceless, collective leadership whose most prominent member is doubtless Vice President Cheney, the man who acted decisively (tho too late) in the September 11th crisis while Dubya dithered in a gradeschool classroom.
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The only way you could get George Bush's photo on the cover of Time Magazine to represent the Real President is if you did a foto-montage like the one I placed in this blog October 17th (which see), made up of many little fotos of other faces, the faces of the real individuals who comprise the Collective Presidency that the Republicans have given us two of their last three times in the White House. (Dubya's father really was President — not a very good President, mind you, but real. He gave orders. Baby Bush takes them.
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Item 2: Offshore Outsourcing a Permanent Disaster. Dubya's handlers in the economic-policy working group have proclaimed repeatedly that offshoring even the best jobs in the Nation (except, of course, their own) is not just 'inevitable' but also good for us! Their arguments were destroyed last March, in an article in the Asian edition of Business Week that I heard about only today from a colleague in Britain. In that article, an Assistant Treasury Secretary during the Reagan Administration (Paul Craig Roberts) demolishes the claims of Bushian economists that offshore outsourcing promises to benefit everyone.

Today's economists can't identify what the new industries and occupations might be that will replace those that are lost, but they're certain that those jobs and sectors are out there somewhere. What does not occur to them is that the same incentive that causes the loss of one tradable good or service — cheap, skilled foreign labor — applies to all tradable goods and services. There is no reason that the "replacement" industry or job, if it exists, won't follow its predecessor offshore. * * *

This is what is wrong with today's debate about outsourcing and offshore production. It's not really about trade but about labor arbitrage. Companies producing for U.S. markets are substituting cheap labor for expensive U.S. labor. The U.S. loses jobs and also the capital and technology that move offshore to employ the cheaper foreign labor. Economists argue that this loss of capital does not result in unemployment but rather a reduction in wages. The remaining capital is spread more thinly among workers, while the foreign workers whose country gains the money become more productive and are better paid.

Economists call this wrenching adjustment "short-run friction." But when the loss of jobs leaves people with less income but the same mortgages and debts, upward mobility collapses. Income distribution becomes more polarized, the tax base is lost, and the ability to maintain infrastructure, entitlements, and public commitments is reduced. Nor is this adjustment just short-run. The huge excess supplies of labor in India and China mean that American wages will fall a lot faster than Asian wages will rise for a long time.

How long is "a long time"? How about 100 years?
+
The latest Chinese census showed, in 2001, that Communist China's population is over 1.2 billion, and had grown by 132 million since 1990. Population experts think the figures are low because of hidden children (China's government pursues a "one child" policy, so extra children may well be concealed when the census-taker comes around) and may actually be as high as 1.5 billion. China is presently growing by 14 million a year, so today, three years after the census, should have 1.3 billion people.
To put that in context, 1.3 billion is four times the total population of the United States; 1.5 billion would be five times our total population.
+
India's population passed a billion in 2001 and is increasing by 16 million a year, such as to pass China in population by the year 2050, at 1.6 billion over 1.4 billion.
+
Together, China and India account for less than half the population of the Third World, which comprises 80% of the world's total population and is growing much faster than the First World. The Population Reference Bureau says that "nearly 99% of all population increase takes place in poor countries".
+
How are wage rates to rise when the labor pool of the Third World grows at such an extraordinary rate? If anything, the natural dynamics of supply and demand should REDUCE world wage rates, ours included if we are forced to compete over open borders with people who make a tiny fraction of what we do? How tiny? One study, of wage rates of McDonald's counter staff, shows Americans making $6.00 an hour but Chinese 42 cents an hour (1/14th the American pay rate) and Indians 29 cents an hour (less than 1/20th the American rate). What about better-paying types of jobs?

An entry-level software programmer in India earned about $6,400 last year. Indian call center operators earn about $3,000.

But more seasoned programmers or managers do far better. An Indian IT programmer or other professional with at least five years on the job typically earns $25,000 to $30,000.

That's less than half the $60,000 to $80,000 for a similar IT worker in the U.S.

That report says that Indian wages have indeed risen so high that other countries are now undercutting them! If Indian wages are being undercut, what on Earth will happen to American wages?
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How are we in the First World, and more particularly in the United States, supposed to provide jobs to all the world's people without destroying our own economy and civilization?
+
And if the United States collapses, the world collapses. There is no replacement for the United States as engine of the world economy and world development, and guardian against world war. If the U.S. falls, the entire planet enters a new Dark Age — but with nuclear weapons in the hands of a dozen nations this time!
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Should we in the United States accept a stark reduction in our wages for 100 years until the Third World catches up with our wage rates and every working man, woman, and child — yes, child — makes the same crappy wage with no benefits? Or should we accept that the only way to reduce the steep wage differential that ships jobs overseas without ravaging our own working people is by promoting economic revolution in the Third World in which workers DEMAND good wages and benefits so they can live as well as people here?
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U.S. and other First World labor unions should be fomenting worker revolution across the Third World, including general strikes and, if need be, violent overthrow of despotic, plutocratic and kleptocratic governments, to achieve a fair distribution of wealth abroad, which alone will reduce the steep slope between First World wages and benefits on the one side and Third World wages and benefits on the other, without destroying the United States for the sake of the rich — which would end up being the reverse of "enlightened self-interest" ("benighted self-interest"? "endarkened self-interest"?), because if the United States collapses, the rich fall with the rest of us and may actually find themselves shot dead, their mansions burned to the ground, and their own bodies and those of the children they pretend to be doing all this for, hacked to pieces.
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Let's be plain: it is absolutely impossible for there to be free trade between the United States and the Third World without economic catastrophe to the United States, all without, at the same time, bringing commensurate benefit to the people of the Third World. It's a lose-lose situation for everybody but the rich (and if it goes too far, even they will be destroyed by it).
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The rich are few. We are many. Why do they rule — and so STUPIDLY?
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:01 PM

 
Crazy Crime. The news in recent days has carried what one wishes were an "Urban Legend" kind of nitemare story, a young pregnant woman murdered and her baby cut from her belly by a crazed woman who wanted a child to replace one she had recently lost to miscarriage. Alas, the story is all too real, and, most poignantly, it is almost certain that the evil monster who committed this horrendous crime will get away with it rather than be killed herself.
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Her attorney will almost certainly plead temporary insanity — or insanity more generally — and invoke provisions of the law that permit lunatics to kill with impunity. Legislators who pass such laws should themselves be killed, and the insane laws they wrote repealed.
+
Instead, we will pretend that it is "only humane" to forgive violent crimes by lunatics against the rest of us because "they're not responsible". Of course they're responsible. You do something deliberately, you're responsible. End of discussion.
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Scot Peterson is to be killed for (supposedly) killing his pregnant wife. Why should he be killed, for a crime we don't know for sure he committed, but this woman, whom we know with certitude did commit the crime of which she is accused, should not? To quote Dickens' "the law is a ass" is not good enuf. We must fix the law so it is not "a ass".
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There is no justification for this hideous crime, so the full force of the law, the majesty of the state and will of the people to defend the innocent by destroying the guilty, must come into play. The murderess must die. If she is really out of her mind, she won't know what's happening.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:38 PM

 
Item 1: Marathon Madness. Television is suffering from monomania. Channel after channel nowadays is inflicting marathons upon viewers. TV Land, almost all of whose programming consists of "classic" series that have been in syndication for decades, is a particularly egregious offender, pre-empting regularly scheduled programs for entire weekends, even weekdays, unpredictably, for 24-hour or 48-hour marathons of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (a dreadful show), Baywatch (never watched it, never will), Three's Company, Bonanza, and other ancient series. Its related service, Nick at Nite, similarly disrupts regular programming for marathons of The Cosby Show, Roseanne, and other programs that have been shown on that service for years. Why?
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Programming monomania is not restricted to cable stations, alas. Our local Newark/New York City PBS station WNET (the Nation's first "educational" broadcaster) is notorious for showing, for instance, the entire multi-hour Ken Burns series New York, Baseball, or Jazz (all 18 1/2 hours of it!) during pledge breaks (what I call "begathons" — which should be forbidden by law).
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What is wrong with the programmers who schedule such nerve-deadening repetition? Few of us — the normal people out there, the audience — want to see hour after hour of the same thing, even if it's good stuff — which not all marathons broadcast. "Variety is the spice of life" should be on the wall of every programmer's office. Instead, they seem to subscribe to the notion that "Too much is not enuf". They have already planned the next imposition upon the audience before the current festival of monomania has ended. It's got to stop.
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Item 2: Brokaw Leaves, Williams Arrives. Permit me brief comment on the departure a couple of weeks ago of longtime NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw. I never particularly cared for him. He was at best OK, but for some reason he was permitted, year after year, to inflict a speech defect upon millions of listeners. Again and again he employed the "dark-L" where the "lite-L" belongs.
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Lite-L is the usual sound of L in initial and final position (line, ill, lull). It is pronounced with the tongue near the front of the mouth (thus closer to the lite). Dark-L is a special sound usually employed only before a consonant but occasionally at the end of a word, as everyone says cold and some people say full. It is pronounced with the tongue farther back (and thus in the dark). It is NEVER to be said in initial position nor between two vowels, but Tom Brokaw says it everywhere, which makes him sound like he's gargling whenever he says an L.
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NBC should long ago have insisted he stop that and speak correctly: 'You're a speech exemplar, for Chrissake.' The only other person I have heard in national news who is permitted to use that defect on air is Robert Bazell, a health/science reporter also employed by NBC. It would seem that NBC doesn't take seriously the responsibility of broadcasters to provide good guidance as to speech so that people who model their pronunciations on the speech of newscasters speak well.
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Tom Brokaw also put the crazy and offensive term "The Greatest Generation" into the language, referring not to the Founding Fathers of the United States, the true greatest generation of all (if any is to be said greater than the present generation, ever), but to the generation that suffered and struggled thru the Great Depression and World War II. (See this blog's entry of June 1, 2004.)
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On the other hand, I was delited to hear Brokaw's voice narrating the film that plays in the visitor center at Mount Rushmore, South Dakota. (That national memorial — giant sculpted heads of four presidents blasted into the rock of a mountain in the Badlands — is a truly wonderful sight everyone should see at least once, like Niagara Falls. Yes, I know it's in the middle of noplace. Go anyway.)
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Brokaw is from South Dakota, and even tho he has lived in New York for decades, he never lost sight of his roots, and never disowned his origins. So he's not a bad guy. He just speaks badly.
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Brian Williams, his replacement, is from New Jersey. More specifically, he is from the town(ship) I grew up in, Middletown, in Monmouth County, in a section from which, on a clear day, you can see Manhattan's towers across the interconnecting waters of Sandy Hook Bay, Lower New York Bay, and Upper New York Bay. It can be a spectacular view.
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One evening, as I was walking thru Times Square on my way to work (I lived for 35 years in Manhattan, the last 25 in Hell's Kitchen, and walked to work for seven years thru Times Square to East 42nd Street), I saw him standing on a sturdy plastic box/milk crate, microphone in hand, with a camera pointed up to show him in front of the giant TV screen at One Times Square, which was showing NBC programming at the time. I thought to myself how silly he looked: 'What some people will do for money and fame!'
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Now he's top dog at NBC News. Being willing to look silly by standing on a box in Times Square sure paid off.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:09 PM

 
Unjustified Verdicts. The two verdicts in the Scott Peterson case are incomprehensible, given that (a) no one knows how Laci died; (b) so there is no murder known to have occurred; (c) no murder weapon has been found — in part because (d) we don't know what kind of weapon that might have been, since we don't know how she died; (e) there is nothing to connect the nonexistent murder weapon with Scott in any case (you can't, after all, have fingerprints on a nonexistent murder weapon);(f) there wasn't a single witness to any crime; and (g) Scott did not confess. The entire case revolved around motive, Scott's apparent lack of panic about his wife's disappearance, and the suspicion, ever-present, that whenever a wife is killed, the husband did it. Yes, the husband is often the murderer, but not always, no matter how many commentators and comics, like Jay Leno, may want to convict a husband without the need for proof.
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I am not at all opposed to the death penalty for people whose guilt is unquestioned, but Scott Peterson denied murdering his wife and unborn son — the latter being an even more unlikely crime for a middle-class American man — and there is no real evidence to prove he did any such thing. I'm not saying he didn't do it. I'm just saying (1) there is no evidence that the wife and son were even murdered, much less that Scott murdered them; and (2) given the powerful reasons to doubt the rightness of a conviction, it is morally impermissible to impose the death penalty on someone who continues, beyond conviction, to maintain his innocence.
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Is there any alternative explanation for how Laci and son died? Yes, of course there is. More than one. The most disturbing aspects of the 'evidence' against Scott for me are (a) that the child was found outside the mother's body and (b) that both bodies were found. They were not weighed down by chains or concrete or anything else that would have kept their bodies from ever floating ashore. How did the child get out of the mother's body??
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Isn't it conceivable that Laci went to the dock thinking maybe her husband was working on the boat or relaxing there with friends, and while there had a contraction that doubled her over and caused her to fall into the water, where she continued to have contractions while struggling to keep from drowning, expelling the child in the process, and then nonetheless drowning? If the tides don't account for a death at the dock, there must be other places where a similar situation could have developed. Or perhaps she was herself in a boat to perform or have performed an abortion upon herself and then throw the child's body into the ocean to remove the evidence of her crime, but something went wrong and she fell overboard after losing blood and thus consciousness. Or perhaps she had an abortion on land, died on the table, and a doctor who had had trouble with botched abortions in the past disposed of the two bodies to keep himself from being subjected to a ruinous malpractice action or even a criminal prosecution.
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There are, in short, a number of ways Laci and, separately, her son's bodies could have ended up in the ocean, unweighted as to float ashore. Scott Peterson may have been an adulterer, but that does not make him a double murderer. Absent real proof of his guilt, it is insane to find him guilty just because he's not likable, and doubly insane to sentence him to death for a crime that may not even have occurred.
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I hope that, on appeal, saner heads rule that the jury finding is contrary to the very-sketchy facts produced at trial; that other possible explanations for the deaths plainly exist; and that at the least a death penalty is excessive, given the reasonable doubts any impartial observer must have.
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Maybe Scott Peterson did kill his wife and children. Absent a credible confession, however, that is unknowable. If he did, a death penalty would be appropriate. But maybe he didn't, in which case death is entirely inappropriate.
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Three things, if nothing else, are clear: (1) our trial system stinks, and leaves us over and over with verdicts that many people cannot accept; (2) defendants must be required to testify, so the non-self-incrimination provision of the Fifth Amendment must be abolished, because it also prevents self-exoneration; and (3) we must devote ourselves to finding an absolutely foolproof way of checking the truthfulness of testimony — a "lie detector" that really works. With compelled testimony and reliable truth-checking technology, we might end up with verdicts everybody can accept.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:38 PM

 
Hyperzionism. The Expansionist Party received the following odd email today, under the subject line "Contacts from Israel".

Hi!
We are - israeli right-wing movement "Bead Artseinu" - seek contacts.
The international Hyperzionist Movement "Bead Artseinu" ("For Motherland!" ["For Our Homeland", on their website]) was founded in 2001 by a group of young Israeli politicians, intellectuals and journalists.

The Movement includes several hundred activists (primarily Russian-speaking repatriants, although there are representatives of different Jewish diasporas, as well as different nationalities).

The number of those who support Bead Artseinu is numbering in the thousands.

Today "Bead Artseinu" is the only movement on the Israeli social-political scene, which has a clearly defined strategic goal as well as a unique ideology.

The official ideology of the movement is Hyperzionism. Hyperzionism is a thoroughly developed ideology, in development of which took part the best politologists of Israel and Russia. Hyperzionism is an ideology of the 3rd millenium, that has come to replace the obsolete ideology of political zionism, which is intended to give a new impulse to the growth and development of Israel, and which fully corresponds to the realities of the coming post-industrial era. This is why the importance of Hyperzionism transcends the boundaries of Israel and is capable of resolving the most urgent questions faced by mankind as a whole. The intent of Hyperzionism is to support the development of a powerful and independent Israel as a country which would have leading roles in the global economy, science and culture, the creation of "the Israeli Empire" in minimal borders from the Nile to Euphrates [their website shows a map of Israel taking everything from the Euphrates to the Suez Canal], the rebuilding of the Jerusalem Temple, and returning of the glorious heroic image to the Jewish people, as described in Tanakh.

The movement is active internationally. One of the main goals of the Movement's existance is to counteract Muslim fundamentalism, which presents a fundamental threat not only to Israel, but to the entire modern civilization. To ehnance awareness of this threat and to unite the forces, capable of standing against it, "Bead Artseinu" employs its versatile international connections, first and foremost in Western Europe, Russia and CIS ["Commonwealth of Independent States", former Soviet republics], in various Christian and Muslim circles.

The movement has conducted a number of political actions, directed to defend the Jews of diaspora, the Holy Land as well as in support of our political allies.

Two films were made about "Bead Artseinu", which were screened on Israeli TV channels "Israel-Plus" (a film by Petr Majstrovoy "For God, King and Fatherland") and "NTV-World" (a film by Alexander Stupnikov "The New Jewish Revolutionaries"), also there was multiple news coverage on the TV networks of Israel, Russia and other countries. Also, a chapter is dedicated to the movement in a book "Against the Modern World" by professor Michael Sedgwick, published by the Oxford University (the book deals with modern Traditionalist political parties and movements). Altogether, the activities of "Bead Artseinu" receive regular coverage in Israeli and foreign press. Many members of the movement have gained recognition in various areas * * *.

The official mass medium of "Bead Artseinu" is website www.zarodinu.org, where materials are hosted in 5 different languages (Hebrew, Russian, English, German, French). Chapters of the movement exist in Russia, the United States, Great Britain, the West Indies and Germany with a planned chapter in Italy.

Alexandr Rybalka, Secretary of Movement
secretariat@zarodinu.org

I replied:

BOY, have you reached a wrong number! We are wholly opposed to Zionism, and especially hyperzionism. We are hostile to any form of imperialism, and especially to one based on race or religion, or some crazed notion that God has 'chosen' just a few people out of the whole of humanity as his favorites.
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I'm glad you are at least forthright about your imperialist and ethnocentric designs. As for rebuilding the temple [see brief discussion toward the end of my blog entry of November 25, 2004], it does puzzle outsiders why, once Israel gained control of the whole of Jerusalem, it did not start on plans to rebuild the temple.
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A worldwide population of 18 million Jews should not have such insanely grandiose plans for the planet. Germany had 3 or 4 times as many people at a time when the world had only a couple of billion people, but its neighbors didn't like its designs, and Israel risks the same kind of wide, military alliance, including the United States, to stop designs such as yours. Cheers.

Coincidentally, my brother arrived in Israel this morning, after stopping briefly, on layover, in Newark. We played some pool (I wanted his help in understanding "leaves", english (spin), etc.), so we played on the table I recently had installed in my basement), and then went to Kentucky Fried Chicken in East Orange for lunch. (Alan loves KFC. Happenstantially, I used to work for Colonel Sanders' lead trial lawyer in his controversies with the corporation that bought his U.S. operations, so I met the Colonel a couple of times.)
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While talking over lunch, he mentioned that there is a lot of tension between Israel and the United States now, in large part because Israel recognizes that without the U.S., Israel would not exist, and that kind of dependency makes Israelis very testy toward us. I mentioned that the law firm I work for has some Arab accounts, managed by some of our Jewish partners, and one of our Jewish associates was talking this week about visa requirements for travel to Saudi Arabia. I remarked that it used to be that Jews could travel anywhere, but now their movements are restricted because of Israel.
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This is one of the points made by the anti-Zionist Jewish website, jewsnotzionists.org — that Zionism has made Jews not more secure in their physical safety or freedom to practice their religion unencumbered, but less secure and more the target of intolerance.
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Zionism has even endangered non-Jews, as attacks on Americans in many countries around the world prove. U.S. support for Zionism has led to the bizarre accusation that we are "crusaders". The people of the Middle East should wish we were crusaders, because if we conquered the Christian "Holy Land" we would establish a secular government over it that would respect the right of every community to practice its own religion fully and openly, and give everyone equal treatment under law, guaranteed by the military might of the U.S. Government. People of all religious communions should think about what a (U.S.) State of Palestine would be like, and consider aloud ending the current miserable state of affairs to pursue admission of all of the Holy Land as a State of the United States.
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The current situation, tho generally grim, does lead to a few humorous incidents. My brother Alan had a story about the need for international businessmen to have multiple passports. He was working in Algeria, and at the airport a colleague presented his passport without thinking, only to realize that he had presented the one with stamps from Israel. So he pulled that one back and presented another, only to realize that that one had stamps from South Africa (which at the time was on a no-travel list in Algeria), so pulled THAT one back to present one with no objectionable travel stamps! The people traveling with him were sure he was going to be arrested, but apparently the customs officials were sufficiently familiar with the multiple-passport practice as not to bat an eye.
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My family is always a little worried when Alan travels to Israel to see his children and grandchildren. During college he met a woman who had been interned in Auschwitz as a child, and her parents thought they would be disgraced in the Jewish community of Lakewood (NJ) if their daughter married a "goy" (gentile), so my brother, not attached to his Catholic and Protestant upbringing, converted to Judaism. He and Phyllis (whom I always liked) eventually divorced, and Alan reverted, informally, to Christianity. But according to Jewish tradition and practice, the children were raised as Jews — Orthodox, no less — and Phyllis moved the family to Israel.
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My nephew David is now a rabbi who lives outside Jerusalem and teaches in a well-regarded yeshiva. His younger sister Debbie also lives in Israel, but the oldest child, Erica, moved back to the U.S. with her British-born Orthodox Jewish husband ("my [brother's] son-in-law the docta"), and has no plans to return to Israel. Phyllis's parents, Abe and Celia (who have terrific accents and were always fun to be around), moved to Israel for a while but were unhappy there so moved back to the U.S. and retired from New Jersey to Florida.
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In a normal world, none of this would matter. But in a world where Zionism has poisoned attitudes toward the Jews and provoked endless war in the Middle East and elsewhere (al-Qaeda trained Philippine guerrillas, who may have been involved in a bombing that killed 15 Christians today in Mindanao), it makes a huge difference. My brother takes his life in his hands when he simply goes to his oldest grandson's bar mitzvah. American Jews are made to feel guilty if they live here rather than in a horrible little country they can't stand, and don't even speak the ugly, useless language Hebrew. The Jews of the Diaspora, 2/3 of all Jews worldwide, have restrictions placed upon their travel and risks of anti-Jewish violence are a constant in their lives all because of an insane, pie-in-the-sky pipedream of Central European Jews a century ago. How much worse would things be for everyone if Hyperzionism came to have as powerful a hold on the consciousness — and restraint on the moral conscience — of Jews worldwide as Zionism now has?
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Hyperzionism, like Zionism, should be renounced by Jews themselves refusing entreaties to ethnic and religious imperialism lest the world, weary of endless war and crazy plans of self-centered Jews, have to end this nitemare by force. The next travel ban may be a U.S. ban on travel to Israel, preparatory to a full-scale "shock and awe" attack to end, once and for all, the nitemare that Zionism has given us. It can't come soon enuf for me.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:04 PM

 
Stupidity on Steroids. I hoped, when I saw the heading "What's Wrong with Players on Steroids", that it was some kind of devil's-advocate joke, in which the preposterous arguments the authors make would be shown at the end to be false. But they continued to the very end making insane and irresponsible suggestions.
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"What's wrong with cheating? If a student gets into a college or job he can't handle, he'll fail in the long run anyway. Where's the harm?" Never mind that the honest person can't get the place in a limited college entry class or a job s/he deserves because that place was stolen by a cheater. Who cares? Only every sane and decent person in the world, that's who.
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The radical-libertarian relative-morality espoused by Lott and Jones are precisely the kind of evil that makes the whole world hate "conservatives", and why all over this planet moral leaders have to employ fear of an Almighty to keep people in line, because you can't reason with fools.
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Do these fools think that athletes really "weigh their choices" when deciding whether to take "performance enhancing" chemicals -- "On the one hand, I can do better than other players, even tho no one will believe me the real superior of people who performed without chemicals, and prolong my career and increase my salary; on the other hand, I might end up dead at 52 from a brain tumor or heart attack -- but what a way to go! in a blaze of glory in the recordbooks!" No. "It's not going to happen to me" is the official motto of morons who take drugs. It is for wiser heads to watch out for fools, and save them from their own stupidity.
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We can save athletes from the unintended consequences of their stupidity on steroids. Alas, we can't save Lott and Jones from their stupidity.
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(Responsive to "What's Wrong with Players on Steroids?", New York Post, December 7, 2004)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 10:44 AM

 

Stomping Out Cigarets. Nicole Gelinas repeats the claim of the New York State Health Department that "188,000 New Yorkers have quit smoking since 2000 — mostly due to tax hikes." That is not credible. Tax hikes in the past have never produced a steep drop in smoking. Far more likely is it that smokers are finding that they are tired of going out into the cold (literally and figuratively) to smoke, tired of being resented by coworkers for taking cigaret breaks when nonsmokers get no such breaks, tired of being edgy and uncomfortable in the many social situations where they are not allowed to smoke, so have decided their lives would be simpler if they just stop smoking altogether instead of risking pneumonia to duck outdoors. They know that smoking is expensive, but that never stopped them. They know that smoking is bad for their health, but that never stopped them. What is stopping them now is that society has stopped smiling on smoking, stopped adjusting around that disgusting, stupid vice, and made life hard for smokers, as till recently smokers made life hard for nonsmokers.
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Smokers are also realizing that their clothes smell better, their dry-cleaning bills are down, they're coughing less, their breath smells better, and they have more money in their pocket because society won't let them chain-smoke. Keep the pressure on. Let's set a goal of 0% of Americans smoking and pursue it by ceaseless pressure on smokers to stop subverting their health and that of everyone around them. Unless smokers find a way to keep every trace of their smoke from invading the air that other people have to breathe, they should be actively persecuted until they give up their noxious, weak-willed behavior and join the civilized world.
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(Responsive to column "Cigarette Burn", New York Post, December 6, 2004)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:44 PM

 
Kissing Israel's Ass. I sent the following letter to the New York Post today.

The Post is, as usual, wrong in its editorial comment that it is "Hard to argue" with the assertion by [New York] State Senator Serphin Maltese that "[The UN] has evolved into an anti-Israel, anti-Semitic group of petty, sniping bigots who are pursuing an anti-freedom, anti-democratic, anti-American agenda. To authorize an expansion of their headquarters (in NYC) would be a slap in the face of American citizens." What a load of crap. And does he really think that French-kissing Israel's butt is going to win progressive New York Jews to the Republican Party? He's a fool, and so is the Post.
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"Semitic" means "speaker of a Semitic language", and the great preponderance of all speakers of Semitic languages are ARABS. The UN is not anti-Arab. The New York Post is anti-Arab, as is the Government of the United States, but the UN reflects the wide world's hatred of Zionism, which is not "freedom" or "democratic" but enslavement of Palestinians under a brutal, anti-democratic occupation marked by endless death and injustice 100 times worse than segregation in the U.S. South ever was. Improving Palestinians' status to that of blacks in 1956 Mississippi would be a huge advance, but the U.S. instead backs every obscene violation of human rights committed by Zionists who never heard of the Ten Commandments, including the building of a WALL to keep Palestinians in their place that makes the Berlin Wall look like a white picket fence.
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New York should be extremely flattered that, despite the criminal behavior of the U.S. Government in the Middle East (and, alas, elsewhere, as for instance in shipping $125 billion a year to the Butchers of Beijing thru unfair trade), that august body wants to add to its New York presence and spend more money here. I'd rather have that money spent Tristate than in Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, or anywhere else. New York City and State should embrace the UN's plans for expansion in Manhattan, and the U.S. should follow the UN's lead to end the dream-turned-nightmare of Zionism by disestablishing Israel and uniting all the peoples of Palestine in a single, pluralistic, and tolerant nation fit to call itself the "Holy Land".

Responsive to editorial, "Annan's Bad Week", New York Post, December 5, 2004)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:23 PM

 
Worrying about Nothing. Today is "World AIDS Day", a festival of ignorance and misguided sympathy. The Associated Press story on commemorations of this 'momentous day' states that:

"Some 39.4 million people worldwide are infected with the HIV virus that causes AIDS, according to the U.N. AIDS agency."

When 40 million people are "infected" with something but aren't sick, that proves not that their infection will make them sick but that the microbe at issue is harmless.
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Indeed, there is essentially no more powerful proof that a microbe is harmless than that a great many people have it in their system   but AREN'T SICK!
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The presence of antibodies to any microbe shows not that an infection is current and growing but that it is either waning or completely over, past, done, thru. That is because once the body identifies a microbe and successfully manufactures antibodies, those antibodies coat those microbial cells and set them up for destruction by the body's immune processes. Vaccination works because it induces the body to produce antibodies, and those antibodies prevent the body from being invaded successfully by that microbe into the future. In the case of AIDS, the theory is that if only we could create a vaccine against HIV, we would be safe. Indeed, the U.S. Government announced in 1985 that it expected a vaccine to be ready in about five years. It is now almost 20 years later, but there is no vaccine.

And even if there were a vaccine, all it would do is produce the very same antibodies that are present in people said to be "infected with HIV" but who are almost all truly "formerly infected with HIV". (The presence of antibodies indicates not a present infection but a past infection, a DEFEATED infection, and thus not that a person with those antibodies is going to die from that infection but that s/he has survived it and is thereafter safe.) Yet we are told that the presence of the very antibodies that would protect against HIV proves that the person with those antibodies will die from AIDS! — unless, of course, s/he takes extremely expensive medications for life!
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But in order to know that antibodies prove safety, not danger, you'd have to understand the most rudimentary realities of biology, and, alas, most people don't. Biology is magic, as far as they're concerned. They don't understand any of it.
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In order to relax about HIV, which I was able to do by June 1987, you'd have to understand that the patterns of AIDS are not the patterns of a microbial infection spread by sex and blood but the patterns of substance abuse (in the West) and endemic poverty and disease (in the Third World), having nothing whatsoever to do with a particular virus.
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In the First World, people have good nutrition, indispensable to good health; clean water; safe sewage treatment; preventive and critical medical care. People in the Third World have none of these things.
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The First World also has a horrible problem with dangerous chemicals known as "drugs". The Third World, as John Stewart of the Daily Show might say, "not so much". Drug users interact with other drug users. Non-drug users avoid them like the plague — an apt expression, as it turns out. This close social and sometimes sexual interaction within the drug community but apart from the general community leads to a false impression that a microbe passed from person to person in that community is responsible for the sickness and death suffered by members of that community, when in reality it is the chemicals they are all using that produce injury to their immune system and undermine their health, even to the point of death. People who use the same drug combinations but never meet develop the same health problems, thousands of miles apart: New Yorkers and Singaporeans who have no sexual intermediary separately develop AIDS from toxic chemicals, but government insists that somehow a virus that started in New York MUST somehow have reached Singapore, even tho there is no carrier to connect the two communities 11,000 miles apart. And naive, trusting people believe that.
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If government were to say that because New Yorkers have been dying from traffic accidents in large numbers long before Singaporeans started to die from traffic accidents in significant numbers, therefore traffic accidents are a disease spread from New York to Singapore by some unknown means, should we believe them? That is precisely the kind of nonsense government is promoting with regard to AIDS, yet people by the BILLION believe.
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No, traffic accidents aren't transmissible, and even tho they may have identical characteristics, they are not caused by a common microbe. Nor are DRUG ACCIDENTS, which is what AIDS in the First World is: a host of similar drug accidents and reactions induced by similar drug chemicals in stupid people who think that it doesn't matter what kinds of chemicals you take into your body — no chemical can do them harm, especially chemicals that make them feel good.
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In the Third World, and especially in sub-Saharan Africa, the world's basket-case, poverty and backwardness are causing people to die from the same things poor people in these regions have always died from, but now their sad, poverty-induced deaths are magically transformed by government pronouncements into an "epidemic" — no, "pandemic" — produced by a single virus (which, alas, is merely ASSUMED to be present; you don't need proof). Is HIV really the cause of their deaths? Or is it simply a harmless ambient virus widely prevalent which tens of millions of people there have been exposed to and easily defeated and to which they then bear completely effective antibodies for the rest of their (brief) lives?
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In the West, most people suffer the common cold (which is apparently a class of many different viruses that produce similar symptoms). What if we decided to see the common cold as a lentivirus (slow-acting virus) that eventually and invariably produces death, because the overwhelming preponderance of all Americans who die from any illness had, beforehand, at least once in their life had a cold? That cold came first, and death later, so the cold must be the cause of the death, right? Nope. That's just plain wrong. This false reasoning (fallacy) is so common that it has its own Latin name and is explained thus by L. Kip Wheeler, an assistant professor of English at Tennessee's Carson-Newman College:

Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc (Literally: "After this, therefore because of this"): This type of false cause occurs when the writer mistakenly assumes that, because the first event preceded the second event, it must mean the first event caused the later one. Sometimes it does, but sometimes it doesn't. It is the honest writer's job to establish clearly that connection, rather than merely assert it exists. Example: "A black cat crossed my path at noon. An hour later, my mother had a heart-attack. Because the first event occurred earlier, it must have caused the bad luck later." This is how superstitions begin.

Belief in AIDS as virus is little more than a superstition promoted by government to control sexual behavior. It works because the bulk of people are credulous and easily scared by things they don't understand: superstitious.
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Some people are indulgent of governmental abusiveness, so might think, "So what if HIV doesn't cause AIDS? Isn't it still a good idea to discourage people from having sex out of wedlock? Where's the harm?" HERE'S the harm: a (black) man was recently sentenced to 137 YEARS IN PRISON for spreading HIV! Other people have been induced to COMMIT SUICIDE on finding out that they are HIV-positive, even tho dispassionate people know that that is, at worst, nothing like a death sentence, and smart people know that HIV has nothing to do with AIDS, so someone infected with HIV might VERY well live a long and healthy life without so much as one milligram of ANY anti-HIV drug.
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The way the AIDS Conspiracy (of government, duped media, and drug users who don't want their drug use blamed) works is that the conspirators talk about oranges and imply that they are talking about apples. For instance, if we were actually talking apples and oranges, and the government said that frost threatens to kill off 90% of the trees in an apple orchard, we would know from our own experience with these deciduous trees (which survive severe winters to blossom anew each spring) that that's ridiculous. BUT if government made you think it was talking about ORANGE trees when they said that subfreezing temperatures will kill off entire orchards, you could believe that, because our experience is that orange trees do not survive winter in the North. The AIDS Conspiracy talks about apples (HIV) and makes you think they are talking about oranges (AIDS). But the one is NOT the other.
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HIV is a virus called "Human Immunodeficiency Virus" just as another virus is called the "cold" virus, even tho HIV has nothing to do with immunodeficiency and the "cold" virus has nothing to do with cold! When government speaks of 40 million people being 'infected with AIDS', they are lying, pure and simple. When anyone claims that 20%, or 23%, or 25% of the people of country X in Africa are "infected with the virus that causes AIDS", that is a flat-out invention. To get such a figure, you would have to test everyone (or at least a truly representative sample) for, at the least, ANTIBODIES to the virus, or for actual viral presence. That has NEVER HAPPENED ANYWHERE. Nothing like 100% of Americans, in a hugely rich country with one doctor for every 400 people, have been tested for HIV! In Africa, there is in many places no more than one doctor for every 15,000 or 30,000 people. You would have to be an idiot to believe that in such countries, 100% of the population has been tested for HIV, or even that the healthcare system is so sophisticated that it is able to test a truly representative sample of the population. So when you hear a figure like that, you have an absolute intellectual obligation to DISBELIEVE.
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In the United States, there was one attempt to do random sampling of blood in hospitals across the country, to find the actual incidence of HIV in anonymous, unlabeled blood specimens. That sample found that if it was representative, only 550,000 Americans were infected with HIV (not with AIDS). The government was very unhappy with that result, because it had been telling the world for years that there were 1-2 million Americans infected with HIV. They asserted, without justification, that susceptible minorities (in blood samples taken from ghetto hospitals, among other places) must have been underrepresented. Still, the only real evidence they had from an actual survey of blood samples indicated that only 550,000 Americans were infected with HIV. Rather than give that number, government fudged a bit and lowered its estimate of infections from 1-2 million to 600,000 to 1 million. They had no basis for the 1 million figure, but they had used it so long and it was so well known that they kept asserting it, even after evidence came in that it was too high.
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Thru 2003, the CDC reported today, the number of Americans diagnosed with AIDS is 902,223. Interesting, isn't it, that there are more than half again as many people diagnosed with AIDS than were found to have been infected with HIV in an actual blood survey? Soon there will be more people with AIDS than the higher number of people asserted to have been infected with HIV. How will they explain that? They won't. They don't have to. Every time a case is found of a person with clinical AIDS who shows no trace of HIV, the government brushes it off as inconsequential and irrelevant. That individual just had something that looks (exactly) like AIDS. In AIDS, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's not a duck unless it has HIV.
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As for Africa, who HAS been tested? Almost nobody, and generally only people who are already sick. Patient A, who has a fatal illness with wasting and tests positive for HIV, is said to be dying from AIDS. Patient B, in the very next bed, who has the identical illness with wasting but tests negative for HIV, is said to be dying from something else! That makes about as much sense as testing everybody dying from cancer for the cold virus and pronouncing that everyone who tests positive for the cold virus is dying from a cold but everyone who tests negative for the cold virus is simply dying from cancer!
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Meanwhile, AIDS, the condition of life-threatening immune deficiency, has practically disappeared as a public health concern, because nobody from the general population but only people from drug-soaked minorities get it. It's been 24 years, but AIDS has still not invaded the general population, an utter impossibility for a viral disease spread by sex and blood. But the general population is still supposed to worry! What's happening here can't be used to scare people, so government constantly talks about AIDS in Africa or a supposed "global pandemic" instead. No, AIDS hasn't invaded the general population HERE, but Africa proves that it COULD. Of course, 20 years ago half of all AIDS cases were in the United States, so if anything like a general epidemic were to occur, it should have occurred here. But it hasn't. AIDS never invades the general population here, but retains a very tight relationship with drug use. You are not supposed to think about that. 'If it can happen in Africa, it can happen here. It's a ticking time bomb and is bound to go off, sooner or later.' Famines that kill millions happen in Africa. Does that mean they're bound to happen here too?
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Apples (non-drug-using Americans) are supposed to worry because oranges (drug users) are dying from immune deficiency. Apples (rich Americans with safe water and readily available doctors and medicines) are supposed to fear for their lives because oranges (Africans living in appalling conditions, at the edge of starvation and assailed by water-borne, insect-borne, tropical diseases) are dying young. It's all so stupid!
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If you really want to know what's happening with AIDS, go to www.virusmyth.com and read, especially, the articles by Peter Duesberg and John Lauritsen. Then, if you use hard drugs, and especially combinations of drugs, STOP, or risk dying young. If you do not use hard drugs, you can stop worrying about AIDS!

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:09 PM