Couldn't Have Said It Better Myself. Spain legalized same-sex marriage today, the last day of what is in this country Gay Pride Month (which proceeded from Gay Pride Weekend, the name of which I offered in the spring of 1970). I am very pleased not just with the action by Spain's Government but also with what the Prime Minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, said in the debate preceding the vote:

"We were not the first, but I am sure we will not be the last. After us will come many other countries, driven, ladies and gentlemen, by two unstoppable forces: freedom and equality".

The Associated Press article on Spain's courageous liberalism added:

Zapatero said the reform of [the] Spanish legal code simply adds one dry paragraph of legalese but means much more.

He called it "a small change in wording that means an immense change in the lives of thousands of citizens. We are not legislating, ladies and gentlemen, for remote unknown people. We are expanding opportunities for the happiness of our neighbors, our work colleagues, our friends, our relatives."

To think that 30 years ago, Spain was ruled by the arch-conservative dictator Francisco Franco (and yes, Franco is still dead). The Stonewall Riots in New York were in June 1969, 36 years ago, but we don't have gay marriage here. Our mealy-mouthed politicians, like New York City's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who is running for re-election, walk in the annual Gay Pride march (that I helped establish) but do nothing to legislate gay marriage in Albany, Sacramento, or anyplace else. And we let them get away with their hypocrisy.
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Meanwhile, Canada's House of Commons passed national gay-marriage legislation two days ago, and its Senate is expected to finalize passage by the end of July.
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60 years ago, Europe emerged from the worst war in world history, during which Europeans slaughtered each other by the millions. Today, they have a free-trade area, and most of the old combatants share a single currency. By contrast, the thirteen original United States, then separate countries, joined together 229 years ago and offered Canada admission to the Union 228 years ago, in Article XI of the Articles of Confederation (and Perpetual Union). Canada is not only still a separate country (to the immense economic harm of its inhabitants and political harm of Americans), but we don't even have a common currency, even tho we are far more alike than are Europeans.
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In both gay rights and international integration, we started out far ahead of our time, but have fallen behind. How did that happen?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,744.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:22 PM

 
In Brief. (1) The Supreme Court announced some bizarre decisions at the end of its term. I sent the following emailed letter to the editor responsive to one columnist's commentary.

John Podhoretz is quite right in ridiculing the Supreme Court's mutually contradictory decisions on the display of the Ten Commandments. Two points bear comment, tho. First, the Ten Commandments are Jewish, not Christian, and it is bizarre for a predominantly Christian society to inflict Jewish morality upon its citizens, not one whit more bizarre than it would be to impose Islamic sharia law upon America. Second, the Supreme Court building in which Moses is depicted wasn't built until 1935, 146 years after the Framers of the Constitution forbade government endorsement of religion. Each year farther along we go, the further we get from the Constitution, and the more imperiled our civilization gets for such wandering.

(2) Eminent Madness. The Court's 5-4 decision on eminent domain is extremely unpopular, as shown by a poll on iWon.com on Monday, June 27th:

Do you agree with the Supreme Court’s decision allowing governments to seize property for economic development?

4% - Yes

89% - No

7% - I'm not sure

When the Supreme Court is so utterly out of step with the popular will, it becomes plain that we urgently need a mechanism by which the people, thru their elected representatives, can overrule it. See this blog's entries of June 24th and May 24th.

(3) Nonsense on Ice. In one of the most bizarre and ridiculous legal cases I have seen — which is quite a distinction — the State of New Jersey is now involved in prosecuting for drunk driving the operator of a Zamboni (ice resurfacing machine) who was supposedly driving too fast, but indoors, in a private ice-skating rink. Absurd. He wasn't on a road. There were no cars, animals, or people; no trees; no houses; no nuttin' to be hit by a Zamboni driver. The drunk-driving laws were not intended to cover such things, and any physical damage a drunk Zamboni driver might do to a rink's walls is a civil matter, not criminal. The State is actually threatening to take the man's driver's license away for operating a Zamboni on an ice-skating rink where not one person was in danger. This is the kind of insane abuse that this country is descending into: a police state that inflicts crushing governmental force upon people without the slightest understanding of what government is for, nor what the people do and do NOT want government to do.
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(4) Perpetuating Stereotypes. I had the misfortune of catching a few minutes of the odious TV Land special "Tickled Pink", an ostensibly friendly look at gay and lesbian characters on classic television. Narrated by a woman, whereas most TV Land specials are narrated by men, this hideous production over and over again asserts that gay men are not men and not homosexual but endlessly and totally fascinated by women.
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At one point, the narratress actually says, "Queers cruising for camp" turned to Dynasty! Would TV Land as readily say, "Niggers cruising for drugs", "Jigaboos cruising for white women", "Spearchuckers cruising for pussy" or any other comparable combination of insulting name-calling and stereotyping? I don't think so.
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Carson Kressley, the contemptible blond fruit from the contemptuously named Bravo show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, actually calls himself "a white chick" from the suburbs! "White chick". He actually tells the world that he identifies as a woman! I hope he, and all the other self-loathing losers who were featured on that horrible program meet up with fagbashers who will put them out of our misery and free us from their willful misrepresentation of what homosexuality is.
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TV Land should be ashamed of itself and should destroy its vicious, slanderous attack upon gay men, "Tickled Pink". If they refuse, I hope that everyone responsible for it is "Beaten Bloody".
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,744.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:57 PM

 
Anti-Germanic Bigotry, Pronunciation Problems. I sent the following emailed letter to the editor of the New York Post today.

Bloodthirsty psychopath Ralph Peters may hold a grudge against Germany, but most Americans — Christian Americans — have long since moved on. Over 15% of Americans are fully German in ancestry, and many more are part-German. Even non-Germans have deep respect for German classical music and other aspects of German arts and letters. Germany has 82 million people and the fifth largest economy in the world. It is presently suffering economically first because a fourth of the country was occupied by Communists for 45 years — how sound would our economy be if everything from Denver west had been devastated by Communism for half a century? — second, because it is the focus of immigration from the poorest regions of Eastern Europe and Turkey, and third, because globalization is exporting jobs from Germany just as it is exporting jobs from the U.S.

Had we listened respectfully to Germany two years ago, Americans wouldn't be dying in Iraq today, and 140,000 Iraqis now dead would still be alive.
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Not content to insult Germany alone, Peters also uses the word "Teutonic" sneeringly, thus attacking the Dutch, Belgians, Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, Anglo-Saxons, etc. — tens of millions more Americans.
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To compare Germany to Liberia or Myanmar is not just stupid. It is insulting to the 60 million and more Americans who are proud of their "Teutonic" ancestors — the people who pretty much invented this country, wrote all its basic documents, and created most of its economic and charitable institutions. Perhaps Mr. Peters should write his slanders in Hebrew or French rather than the Teutonic language of the Angles and Saxons.

(Responsive to "Gerhard's Grovel", column by Ralph Peters in the New York Post, June 27, 2005)

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How the Heck Is That Pronounced? The Associated Press yesterday, in a story on the winner of Iran's presidential election, tried to give readers a cue as to how to pronounce his last name, but the folk phonetics they employed left at least four things unclear.
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AP wrote, "Ahmadinejad (pronounced 'Aah-MA-dee-ni-JAHD'')". Clear as mud.
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(1) Does the "Aa" represent short-A, as in "bad"? Or does "Aah" represent short-O (broad-A), as in "Open your mouth and say aah"? (2) Is the H in "Aah" pronounced, or is it just there to show that the sound of the vowel is as in "say aah" or "oohed and aahed"? (3) Is "MA" supposed to be pronounced like the English informal word for "mother", or is the A supposed to be seen as short ("lad"), not broad ("father")? (4) Do the A's in the first syllable ("Aah") and last syllable ("AH") match or differ? and (5) Which of the two syllables shown in block caps bears the primary stress and which the secondary stress?
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Folk phonetics doesn't work. We need some agreed way to show, unambiguously, the sounds of English for situations like this, even if we don't use that system for overall spelling reform.
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Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear that I just happen to have a system that will do that handily.
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Called "Fanetik", it is a one-to-one representation of the phonemes of English (that is, the individual speech sounds, independent of context), which is based on standard ways of representing those sounds that we see in Traditional Orthography ("T.O.", the spelling we have suffered with for hundreds of years).
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As you might guess, "Fanetik" is a Fanetik rendering of the word "phonetic". If you guessed right before being told, then you have seen the key thing about Fanetik: that most people who have already learned to read T.O. can guess right almost all the time when they see Fanetik text, even if they have never seen the rules.
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In Fanetik, the name of the new president of Iran would be written "Omodinijod" if the A's in the first two syllables of the Associated Press's's folk-phonetic rendering are broad or "Aamodinijod" if the first A is short and the second broad. (This also assumes that the H's that AP used are supposed to be silent.) That accounts for the sounds. What about stress?
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There is a form of Fanetik with accents to show syllabic stress, for use in pronunciation keys (as here) or to teach reading, especially to students of English as a Second Language. Augméntad Fanétik employs the three familiar accents of French, acute, grave (usually pronounced "grov"), and circumflex.
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Acute shows primary stress; grave, secondary; and circumflex, tertiary stress. Most words have only a primary stress, which Augméntad Fanétik shows by the most familiar accent, acute, which is also used in Spanish for this purpose, if stress falls someplace you wouldn't expect it to according to the ordinary rules of Spanish: Pérez, sábado.
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In medium-long English words, there is also often a secondary stress (for instance, ìnconsístency, mùltitúdinous). In very long words, there is even tertiary stress (àntidiscrîminátion) — tho it is sometimes difficult to distinguish which of two or more lesser-stressed syllables is more stressed than the others, in which case you would use the acute accent for the primary stress, which is easy to agree on, and only the grave accent for all other stressed syllables (àntidiscrìminátion).
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Augméntad Fanétik would thus (if the H's in AP's rendering are silent) render the name of the new president of Iran as either "Omódinijòd" or "Aamódinijòd" if the second syllable takes the heavier stress, or "Omòdinijód" or Aamòdinijód" if the last syllable takes the heavier stress.
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If the H is pronounced, it would be written once if it is just a mild H, as in ordinary English; twice (HH) if it is like the CH in German "ich"; or KH if it is a strong, guttural, throat-clearing H.
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Alas, not everyone on television has heeded AP's guidance, and I have heard Ókhmodìnajod (where A represents schwa, the short, unstressed neutral vowel in "about"), Ómadìnajod, Òmadéenajod, and other pronunciations. I think any of those Augméntad Fanétik renderings, however, is clearer than "Aah-MA-dee-ni-JAHD", and thus that it would be really convenient for everybody if we had a single agreed way of showing the sounds of English, including syllabic stress, to guide readers in pronunciation keys.
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Augméntad Fanétik would serve that function handily, with the only issue left being how to represent the accents in ordinary text, as in emails or typewritten materials.
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Computer keyboards show the grave accent (to the extreme left of the top row, below the Function keys) and the circumflex accent (over the 6, also on the top row). The apostrophe stands in for the acute accent.
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Most ordinary typists on computers, however, do not know how to form overstrike characters in email programs, as to put the accent directly over the relevant vowel. They can simply put the accent immediately after the relevant syllable: Omod'inijod` or Omod`inijod'.
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Many typewriters, however, do not have either grave or circumflex accents. Typists could nonetheless easily show primary and secondary stress — they'd probably have to forget about showing tertiary stress — by using an apostrophe for primary and a quotation mark (": like two apostrophes, side-by-side) for secondary stress, at the end of the syllable: Omod'inijod" / Omod"inijod'. In handwriting, of course, we can easily put the accent right over the vowel.
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Augméntad Fanétik can, as these examples show, clearly and easily indicate the pronunciation of even the most un-English of words or names, in the speech sounds closest to the original language's sounds that speakers of English can replicate.
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Folk phonetics, however, can't.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,742.)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:51 AM

 
Bad News for Israel? Yesterday Iran elected, by a landslide, an ultraconservative as its new president. Says the Associated Press:

He is expected to be a tough negotiating partner in Iran's talks with Europe over its nuclear program. Iran says the program is to produce energy but the United States contends nuclear weapons are the goal.

[Newly elected president] Ahmadinejad has criticized Iran's current negotiators as making too many concessions to Europe — particularly in freezing the uranium enrichment program — and he was expected to put Iran's nuclear program into the hands of some avowed anti-Western [and, presumably, anti-Zionist] clerics.

The pragmatic Rafsanjani [(the defeated reformist candidate) had] appeared more willing to negotiate on the nuclear program. But a Foreign Ministry spokesman Friday underlined that the suspension is temporary and that enrichment will eventually be restarted no matter who wins the election.

The analyses I have seen of Iran's nuclear program of course believe that it is intended to create nuclear weapons. Iran is the world's fourth largest oil exporter. It also exports large quantities of natural gas. It does not need nuclear power.
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Moreover, many observers believe that offensive use of nuclear weapons, rather than holding them in reserve in a strictly defensive capacity, is the ultimate intent, if not for a missile attack upon Israel, then perhaps to employ enriched uranium in "dirty bombs" or other terrorist attacks against Israel and its one ally on Earth, the United States.
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Israel would love to knock out Iran's nuclear program as easily as it thinks it did Iraq's nuclear-weapons program many years ago. Israelis believe that a single attack on a single reactor, Osirak, near Baghdad, in June 1981 ended any aspirations Iraq may have had to develop nuclear weapons. Whether Iraq had any such intense desire before the Osirak attack, however, has never been established, and the Osirak reactor was built with assistance from the French, which suggests that it was not designed for the creation of nuclear weapons. Some observers believe that, exactly contrary to the Israeli version of events, the Osirak attack not only did not stop Saddam's nuclear program but actually accelerated it and caused Saddam to disperse it so it would be less subject to attack, and hide it from inspectors. According to such analysts, only the U.S. attacks of the first Gulf War ended Saddam's nuclear aspirations.
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Israel cannot reach Iran directly, since there is no common border. It would have to overfly some Moslem country, and none is likely to give permission. Even if it could ignore Jordanian objections — and Israel has never cared one bit about Jordan's sensibilities — it would still have to overfly Iraq to get to Iran.
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The supposedly sovereign government of Iraq would be most unlikely to grant permission for such an overflite, even tho Iran has long been perceived by many Iraqis as an enemy of Iraq. Tho Israel would surely be contemptuous of the Iraqi government, which probably could not shoot down any significant number of Israeli planes if Israel defied an Iraqi ban, it has a real military problem with Iraq's occupier and overlord, the United States.
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If the United States gives permission for such an attack, it would be held fully accountable for Israel's behavior, which would be catastrophic to U.S. interests. One could expect a worldwide condemnation of U.S. "aggression", an uprising against the U.S. occupation by Iraq's Shiite majority (who have heretofore been cooperative), even a demand by Iraq's Shia-dominated government that the U.S. get the f**k out of Iraq, immediately!
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If the U.S. ignored such a demand, it would expose the Iraq occupation as a Zionist crime against Iraqis, not an attempt to help Iraqis to enjoy "freedom" and "democracy" — since Bush would have to void the direct order of a democratically elected Iraqi government. If you think Iraq is a hotspot for U.S. soldiers today, quadruple or quintuple the trouble after the U.S. co-conspires with Israel in an attack upon a "fellow Muslim nation"!
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If the U.S. warns Israel in advance that it will neither actively consent to an Israeli overflite of Iraq nor turn a blind eye to such an attack and pretend it didn't know about it before or even as it was happening — which no one on Earth is stupid enuf to believe — Israel would have two choices: (1) call off the attack or (2) defy the United States and "do whatever we have to do for our defense".
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In that event, the U.S. has three choices: (1) consent to the Israeli overflite of Iraq and see the entire region explode in anti-American violence, undoing all the careful work of decades to promote U.S. interests in that vital area; (2) intercept Israeli warplanes and try to turn them back or force them to land in Iraq without shooting them down; or (3) do everything in our power to stop them from reaching Iran, meaning almost certainly shooting them down, via missiles, dogfites, or whatever else we might have on hand. At that point, all bets are off.
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Israeli pilots would fite back, attacking U.S. missile emplacements and shooting down, or trying to shoot down, U.S. fighters, killing Americans. Israelis believe that they are the world's supreme fighting force, and can easily defeat even the U.S. military, because Israel's pilots are better than American pilots and their technology is better than our technology.
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Everything could escalate out of control, to an active U.S. attack on the airfields in Israel from which the attacks were launched, so the planes would have nowhere to return to; even to a full-scale U.S. "shock and awe" campaign against Israel to destroy its offensive capability, including all its nuclear installations.
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Were the U.S. to turn against Israel even for a limited strike on Israel's home territory, there is no telling what the Israeli lunatics who brought this on might do. They might even decide that it's all over, and they are going to kill as many Americans as they can if Israel dies, so launch nuclear weapons against U.S. forces in Iraq, and even against the U.S. homeland!
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Israel has a space program. It can launch missiles into orbit, then bring them raining down upon Washington, the U.S. heartland, any part of this country. The U.S. would, upon detecting an Israeli launch of long-range ballistic missiles, have no choice but to retaliate with a full-scale nuclear attack upon Israel, ending the mad Zionist experiment in undoing history once and for all.
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But even if things didn't go completely nuts, as to produce full-scale war between the United States and Israel, as soon as Israel defies the U.S. to try to overfly Iraq, U.S. public opinion will turn violently anti-Zionist. Not only will loud voices be heard from almost all parts of the U.S. political spectrum, making it impossible for even the staunchest Radical Zionist voices in the U.S. to stand with Israel, but we could see some very ugly reactions against Jews in general, all across the Nation, including the firebombing of synagogs and yeshivas, beatings of individual Jews, and a demand that Zionist Jews be rounded up and thrown into internment camps. We do, after all, know who they are. They have made no secret of their affiliations with pro-Israel organizations.
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At the very least, all U.S. aid to Israel, in any form, public and private, would be cut off. Israel cannot survive without U.S. governmental or private aid.
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One would hope that Israelis are not completely insane, so would never launch an attack upon Iran, since the consequences of such an attack are utterly unpredictable. What, then, short of their own attack, can they do about Iran's nuclear program?
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They can try to persuade the U.S. to do what we have been doing for years: fite Israel's wars for it. But an air attack on Iran's deeply buried nuclear facilities would not work. A ground war would be required. And the time for a U.S. ground war against Iran, if it ever existed, has passed.
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The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are going so badly that the American people won't stand for another war in the region, this time against a vastly more powerful enemy than Iraq and Afghanistan put together. Already even some Republicans have started to rebel against an open-ended occupation of Iraq, and a majority of public opinion now holds that the war was a bad idea from the beginning and we should get out as soon as feasible.
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Trial balloons for an attack even on Syria, a feeble foe by contrast with Iran, have fallen flat. And in lite of our experience with the lies we were told about Saddam's "Weapons of Mass Destruction", extravagant claims that "intelligence" shows Iran an "imminent threat to U.S. security" would be met with extreme skepticism and disbelief. How, then, is the U.S. to do Israel's dirty work?
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If Israelis really believe (a) that Iran is intent on creating nuclear weapons and (b) that it will use those weapons to attack Israel, they have one question to ask themselves: "Do I want to die, along with my entire family, for Israel?"
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Given Jews' pride in Masada, where hundreds of ancient Judean rebels committed suicide rather than submit to Roman conquest, no one can know how many Jews will decide to replicate Masada on a gargantuan scale.
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If the answer to the do-I-want-to-die-for-Israel question is "No", or "What would be the point of that? One nuclear blast in Tel-Aviv and Israel is over. Anyone who survives will leave as fast as they can get a plane, boat, or inner-tube raft going", they had better start making plans for the evacuation of their families — now. But don't plan on coming here. We have quite enuf Jews as it is, thank you.
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Much of the U.S. has historically been at best tolerant of and at worst actively hostile to Jews. The evangelicals of the Bible Belt, now so large a part of U.S. political support for Israel, do not love Jews in the United States. They love them in Israel, because they believe that Israeli behavior will bring on Armageddon and thus the Second Coming of Christ, a thousand years of peace under his rule on Earth, and the Last Judgment, at which the "elect" will be raised into Heaven and the wicked cast into Hell.
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Mainline Christians may not understand this whole "Last Days" thing. I've done some reading.
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The "Last Days" people believe that events going on right now are plain evidence that we are in "End Times". They want to believe that the world is about to end (in nuclear Armageddon?). Rather than being horrified by the thought, they look forward to such an event because they won't be harmed but gathered into Christ's arms and raised up to Heaven. To them, Israel is a very good thing because (1) its establishment constitutes one of the necessary preconditions for the Last Judgment and (2) its rash behavior is going to produce Armageddon in our lifetime, and thus a thousand years of heaven on Earth — thru all of which each of the True Believers will live; yup, each of them will live 1,000 years under Christ's divine rule — followed by the admission of "the elect" into Heaven.
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(One must wonder "What's the rush? What do you care when the world ends if you and your loved ones are pious, so individually enter the Kingdom of Heaven, and meet Jesus there rather than on Earth?" One mustn't ask such questions.)
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"Last Days" Christians believe fervently that the behavior of Israel will surely bring about Armageddon and thus the end of this wicked world that they so devoutly pray for. In the End Times, the Jews will finally accept Jesus as their Savior!
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But (a) if the gathering of all Jews into one place is a necessary predicate to the Rapture, then American Jews (well, at least religious Jews, if not also secular Jews) must leave the United States! and (b) if Jews leave Israel and disperse themselves around the world once more, the Rapture can't happen anytime soon!
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If instead of converting to Christianity, as they are supposed to in the End Times, Jews become adamant refusers of the Divine Word of Jesus Christ, stubbornly 'persisting in error', despite all the efforts of all the preachers over all the centuries to bring them to The Revealed Truth, and flee to the U.S., pre-empt Armageddon, and continue to deny Christ, then they become enemies of Christ — here, among us! Evangelical Christians don't want that.
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How soon might Armageddon arrive? Well, one commonly hears the assertion that there must first arise an "Antichrist", who rises to power by posing as a good and decent man, then leads people astray, away from Christ, and rules for seven years before Jesus destroys him in the final battle between good and evil. George W. Bush has now been in office for almost 4½ years, and it's not hard for End-Timers to see Dubya as the Antichrist. He won office by talking about restoring national virtue, then launched us upon a course of undeclared wars for the sake of Zionism, that is, ultimately for Jews, the unrepentant refusers of Christ. If he is the Antichrist, and Armageddon arrives 7 years after his rise to power, the Second Coming of Christ should happen in about 2½ years! That comports very nicely with the schedule by which Iran might develop nuclear weapons and the capacity to launch them against Israel. To End-Timers, then, all systems are go!
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But for Armageddon to arrive, Israelis must remain in Israel. Indeed, American Jews have to leave for Israel, along with all other Jews from all other countries. Conversely, however, if the Jews leave Israel, Armageddon is off! End-Timers certainly won't welcome emigrants from Israel here.
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So Israelis had better explore other options.
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Canada is an immigration society and might take some, but Canada feels no special connection with the Jews, and French Canadian culture is traditional anti-Jewish. Germany might take some, in atonement for Nazi-era guilts. But would Jews really find Germany congenial? France is famously anti-Jewish. Europe more generally is historically cool to Jews — or worse. Australia is too small a society and economy to absorb more than a few hundred thousand in the next few years. Moslem countries are out of the question. Most Christian countries in Latin America surely don't want a horde of Jews descending upon them. Sub-Saharan Africa is terribly poor and violent. It couldn't absorb many immigrants, and Jews accustomed to First World conditions would probably rule out emigration to Africa.
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What does that leave? India, China, and other Asian countries, pretty much, who might welcome well-educated immigrants who bring needed skills and their own money into the country, and use their international connections to promote their exports. But India and China are crowded. Would they really want to take in the Jews of Israel?
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That's not my problem. But finding someplace to go if Iran succeeds in creating nuclear weapons may well become a very serious problem for Israelis. Good. Just don't try to make it our problem.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,737.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:27 PM

 
Spinning Out of Control. Radicals from both sides are taking over more and more of this country, leaving less and less of the middle ground for the rest of us to occupy.
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Item 1: Extreme Court. The United States Ext... Supreme Court ruled yesterday that it is just fine for governments to seize property from one private owner and turn it over to another private owner if they want to, using as justification that such transfer is in the public interest. I'm appalled and astonished that a supposedly "conservative" court would think it appropriate for government to steal private property because it's not producing enuf taxes, jobs, or any other rationalization.
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Just one day before the ruling, I raised this issue in the real-estate salespersons class I am taking, when the discussion came around to eminent domain. Like most people, I had a simplistic understanding of property rights before I started that course, thinking private ownership was pretty much absolute. Not so.
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We don't live in a historical vacuum. Our legal system evolved from and in opposition to the historic land-ownership system of medieval Western Europe, the feudal system, in which all land was deemed to be owned by the king, who permitted others to possess it for a time in exchange for various services. That is, he theoretically granted the right to a manorial lord to hold some of his land if that lord provided services to the sovereign, often in the form of fighting in the king's wars but also in the form of a levy of labor to build castles, defensive works, etc. ("public works", today). Our term "landlord" harkens back to that era.
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In theory, the lord held the land but did did own it, and upon his death, the land reverted to the king rather than being passed to the lord's own heirs. Under a weak monarch, that was more theoretical than real, and land passed as tho owned absolutely by the lord. Under a strong monarch, however, the king's control of land was very real indeed, and each new generation of landlords had to get the king's permission to continue in possession.
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Move to the present. The king has been replaced by society, "the public", represented by governments at the various levels we have created in this country: local (municipal), county, state, and federal, plus quasi-governmental agencies. When all is said and done, society owns the ultimate right of control over land, but permits individuals to own individual parcels for almost all purposes. The "bundle of rights" to land that a private owner enjoys is very large, but society retains four very important rights: (1) taxation; (2) eminent domain; (3) police power; and (4) escheat.
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(1) Taxation. Society has the right to levy taxes upon land, by means of which the public can finance the many things government does for the public good. Instead of owing the king personal service, we owe society money with which services can be purchased. If you don't pay those taxes, society has the right to compel payment or, as a last recourse, take back the property because you're not holding up your part of the bargain.
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(2) Eminent Domain. When society needs a given piece of land for "public use", it has the right to take it from you, but only if it gives you "just [fair] compensation", which is established by market value or, if there is a dispute as to value, by arbitration or court proceeding.
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(3) Police power is the right of society to ensure that what you do with property does not adversely affect other people's rights but contributes to social harmony and wellbeing. This is how government gets the right to zone different areas for different uses and set building codes, health codes, and the like to control what happens on private property.
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(4) Escheat, finally, is the right of society to resume ownership of land abandoned by a private owner or left with no owner by virtue of the death of an owner who has no heirs.
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So the right to own land is not absolute. It is conditioned by the reality that "No man is an island" but part of society, which is deemed the ultimate owner of the land.
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That does not, however, mean that society, acting thru any government or quasi-governmental agency, can just take your land without compensation or for insufficient cause in terms of the public interest. Eminent domain has long been used to create space for highways, schools, parks, and other governmental structures, and most people accept that those things have to go somewhere, so somebody has to sell if there is no appropriate vacant land to be had.
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The problem we have recently been presented with, however, is that from "public use", we have moved to "public good" as the standard for taking. That is a very slippery slope.
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Hard-pressed localities may have a small assessed valuation for all the properties within their boundaries, as would not permit them to raise much in the way of revenue from existing taxpayers. They are not always content to live within their means nor find some other way to raise needed funds, as by an income tax, sales tax, or selling public property.
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Some governments find themselves responsible for severely depressed areas that provide little in the way of tax revenue but demand much in the way of expense, for schools, police, fire protection, health services, drug treatment, and a whole laundry list of social needs. So they want to redevelop and replace low-yield property owners with high-yield. How far can they go?
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My own city, Newark, has a high ratio of nontaxable land, occupied by governments (we are a county seat and site of major public buildings for city, county, state, and federal government offices and courts), colleges (we have 48,000 higher education students, more than there are students in the public schools K-12), churches, and various nonprofit organizations, from hospitals and community development organizations to museums and performing arts centers. What do we seize for redevelopment?
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We have a lot of storefront churches. Should we seize them and force them to go elsewhere or consolidate operations in a major church center? Could we even do that, given the First Amendment's protection of religion?
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Should we shut down the Newark Museum or NJPAC, the New Jersey Institute of Technology or Essex County College? Knock down the courthouses and hospitals? That wouldn't serve the public good. But there is prime real estate along a major Downtown roadway, Mulberry Street, that is underperforming, so the City wants to seize it and turn it over to a private developer who will build high-end condominiums and high-density housing where there are now only low-end small businesses. Is that fair?
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I don't think so.
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The case decided yesterday by the Extreme Court arose from an attempted seizure of 15 houses against the will of the owners in New London, Connecticut, a city that has fallen on hard times. I've been to New London, for the wedding many years ago of one of my brothers, whose first wife came from there. It's an old city, and I value old cities. But there's got to be another way to revive New London, or Newark, or any other town or village in this country, without uprooting "the little guy" for the benefit of rich developers.

City officials envision a commercial development including a riverfront hotel, health club and offices that would attract tourists to the Thames riverfront, complementing the adjoining Pfizer center and a proposed Coast Guard museum.

How nice. But the way the free market is supposed to work is that if that is an economically viable plan, a private developer will just do it without asking government to steal property from unwilling sellers. He will negotiate an agreed price and build on suchever land as he can buy, adjusting plans around any parcel he cannot buy.
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One of the most striking examples of a major developer altering its plans to accommodate holdout owners is the centerpiece of New York's Rockefeller Center, the 70-story art-deco skyscraper designated 30 Rockefeller Plaza (formerly the RCA Building, now the GE Building). People familiar with the Avenue of the Americas side of that structure know that there are two little non-deco buildings at the corners that were not demolished but survive in the shadow of their colossal neighbor. After much hunting thru Google and Google Images, I found this picture of one of them, on the 49th Street corner opposite Radio City Music Hall (at http://fotot.jarvenpaa.net/fi/0000000146):

Note the little brown building to the right of the Radio City marquee. There is a pair to it, but gray, on the 48th Street corner, bookending the enormous tower over them. Here's a photo (from http://www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com/bigmap/manhattan/midtown/rockefellercenter) of that other little building, called "Hurley's Holdout" for the bar that occupied the ground floor at the time.

The Rockefeller Center project wasn't stopped by the refusal of the owners of these two small buildings to sell. It was adjusted, and so tastefully that most people don't even notice that 30 Rock does not occupy the entire "Sixth Avenue" blockfront.
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That's what should happen whenever and wherever there is not a match between a willing buyer and a willing seller. The would-be buyer builds what he can with what he is entitled to own. He does not strong-arm unwilling sellers or get the government to steal their property and hand it over to him.
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That is our tradition, and that is the way things have always worked until very recently, when high-handed local governments decided they have no respect for private property but will jump-start economic development, and get themselves a richer property-tax base, simply by seizing one person's property and turning it over to another, who will create a bigger ratable on it.
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If a public entity wants to build public housing, that's one thing. But don't steal land from Peter and give it to Paul.
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If government took private property for publicly owned corporations that are doing things ordinarily done by private entities (e.g., building market-value condos), that would be seen as just plain wrong, downright "Communist".
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What is it, however, when government seizes property from one private owner to give it to another private owner, ostensibly to advance public purposes — that is, government in effect hands over public power to private companies? Corporatism? Sort of. Neo-corporatism? Sort of. Corporatocracy? Sort of, especially inasmuch as that entails risks of bribery to influence government action, an objection raised in the New London Supreme Court case. Plainly rich corporations have more economic leverage to get their way, over or under the table, than do private homeowners or small business owners, and many public officials are more than happy to take "campaign contributions" to listen to the concerns of contributors.
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However, maybe "fascism", with a lowercase-"f", is the best term for our emerging public-private polity (even if it too is not quite right) because private companies are inflicting the crushing power of the state intended only to advance the "public good", upon people who think that the public good is best served when the rights of all those many people who constitute the public are staunchly preserved.
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But perhaps we need a new term, one that addresses the ever-increasing shift of public power to private or quasi-private (usually called "quasi-governmental") entities, like regulatory agencies, port authorities, and "public corporations", that are ruled by people who are not elected and not subject to day-to-day control by elected officials.
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Alas, most people in the cities of this country don't take much interest in local government, and may either not vote at all or vote blindly, from name recognition. So even if elected officials were to have ostensible control over quasi-private development corporations, those public officials are themselves not really controlled by the electorate, but are free agents, at liberty to turn a blind eye to abuses because they will never be held to account for the actions of private or even quasi-governmental corporations to which they have transferred public power.
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This is becoming a very serious problem in our democracy, and needs to be addressed.
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All entities that exert governmental power must be brought under the control of the electorate. Trusting your rights to courts is, as we saw yesterday, a very risky proposition.
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(A 7-page discussion of the issues in the New London case, written before yesterday's ruling, appears at "Economic Development, Eminent Domain and the Property Rights Movement".
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Item 2: The Commies Are Coming! The Commies Are Coming! The Government of Communist China is trying to buy Unocal, the ninth largest oil company in the United States, via its state-owned oil company, CNOOC Ltd. Four U.S. Senators are alarmed, and want the Treasury Department to look very carefully at the security aspects of the proposed deal. Radical free-marketeers are pooh-poohing such concerns:

"This is not a company building military aircraft or missile technology. This is energy, at the end of the day," said Lawrence Goldstein, president of the nonprofit Petroleum Industry Research Foundation in New York.

Oh? And what exactly can you do with a military aircraft or missile without fuel? And how do you make a military aircraft or missile without energy?
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This is far from the first attempt by the Communist Chinese government to purchase major U.S. assets — with our own money, transferred by U.S. corporations to Communist China via a massive trade deficit that has, in the past decade, poured ONE TRILLION U.S. dollars into Communist China. There is also, pending, a proposed purchase of major-appliance maker Maytag, and

Chinese computer maker Lenovo's $1.75 billion purchase of IBM's personal computer division was cleared by a U.S. federal panel in March. * * *

Oil analyst Fadel Gheit at Oppenheimer & Co. in New York said it would be the "pinnacle of hypocrisy'' for the United States to put roadblocks in CNOOC's way, considering that President George W. Bush and others in his administration have repeatedly scolded Russia for not opening its doors wide enough to U.S. oil companies.

"American companies must expand globally, but if we cut off people from coming into our country other countries will just block our companies from doing the same," Gheit said.

Oh? But earlier in that article appears this warning:

"It's not a business transaction at all," said C. Richard D'Amato, chairman of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a congressional advisory panel. "This is not a free market deal. This is the Chinese government acquiring energy resources."

Mr. D'Amato left out a word: "Communist" — "Chinese Communist government". Butchers of Beijing. The people who have starkly increased their military spending every year, year after year, in preparation for a war against us.
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How many times do we have to quote Lenin to wake people to the dangers we create for ourselves when we do business-as-usual with Communists?

The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.

(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,735.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:15 PM

 
Ludicrous Finalists for "Greatest American". Cable television's Discovery Channel is running a program called "Greatest American", which claims to have received nominations from 500,000 people, reduced to 100 top choices, which have been whittled down to, now, 5 top contenders: Benjamin Franklin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, and George Washington.
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For MLK and Ronald Reagan to be mentioned anywhere near the words "Greatest American" is absurd.
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The description at the website where visitors can vote for MLK says, "A man willing to stand up to injustice and inequality, Martin Luther King, Jr. redefined courage and honor while demanding change." What a bunch of bullshit.
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The long, long struggle for civil rights and respect for blacks was not a one-man show but a train of courageous acts of defiance and character by literally millions of people, both black and white, over centuries. To focus on MLK as tho he did it all is an outrageous distortion of history that insults everyone before, contemporaneous with, and since King.
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We know dozens of their names, from Crispus Attucks in the Revolution to Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, to Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and George Washington Carver, to Roy Wilkins and Roy Innis, to Julian Bond, James Meredith, Thurgood Marshall and Rosa Parks, who lived to do great things for their people and our civilization.
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We know as well the names of some others, who weren't so lucky: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and the three civil-rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner whose murder in Mississippi was the subject of a trial that ended just this week with the conviction of one man for manslaughter exactly 41 years to the day after the murders.
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To list even this many names, or any number of names, does injustice to all those whose names we know but do not mention, and gross injustice to the myriad people whose names we don't know but whose efforts, as individuals and in groups, have, bit by bit, transformed, and continue to transform society for the better.
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Thus, to subsume all the efforts of all these people into a tribute to one man, Martin Luther King, Jr., is an obscenity. Especially obscene is it when one considers that specific man.
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Martin Luther King was no saint. He cheated on his wife and plagiarized many authors throughout his academic and religious career.
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Consider the first flaw: MLK was an ordained minister who swore a solemn oath of faithfulness to his wife, before God, then cheated on her with other women!
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A book reviewer addresses these issues, and King's unorthodox theology, online:

In Martin Luther King’s famous "I-have-a-dream," speech (1963), he poignantly expressed the hope that someday his four children would be able to "live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." Character indeed.

However, if the famous civil rights leader had been judged more by the content of his character than by his civil rights activities, he would have carved a far different niche in history. At least that is the conclusion one might draw after reading Michael Eric Dyson’s new book, I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. (Free Press, 2000).

Might the uncritical, exaggerated praise heaped upon MLK have something to do, oddly, with his name? He was called "King". And not just "King", but also "Martin Luther". Words have connotations. Would "King" have been as highly praised, elevated in esteem, and placed beyond criticism, if his name had been "Billy Ray Little"? ("Little" was Malcolm X's original surname.) Would his sexual sins have been so easily overlooked if his last name had been "Johnson"?
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In any case, there has been entirely too much attention paid to MLK. He was not the only civil-rights leader in our history, nor, arguably, even the most important. He was elevated into the ranks of saints, even demigods, only because he was shot. That doesn't justify calling him anything like the "Greatest American".
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The nomination of Ronald Reagan is even more ridiculous. Reagan wasn't even really President, but just an actor playing President. He said what he was told to say, he danced to whatever tune his pipers played, in whatever pattern might result when his puppeteers jerked his strings.
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The text at the place one can vote for him online says, "Reagan is credited with engineering the downfall of communism and the restoration of a nation's spirit". Preposterous.
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Reagan had no more to do with the downfall of Communism than any other President since World War II.
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Truman established the Marshall Plan, Truman Doctrine, and NATO to stop Communist expansion in Europe, and every President thereafter, without exception, staunchly opposed Communism.
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Eisenhower headed NATO before becoming President, then faced down North Korea and its Soviet and Communist Chinese backers to hold the line against Communist takeover of South Korea.
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Kennedy stopped the installation of ballistic missiles in Cuba by blockading that island against Soviet ships, and began U.S. defense of South Vietnam.
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Johnson fought the Vietnam War, and committed huge resources to try to protect South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from Communist takeover.
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Nixon ran from Vietnam, but even before his presidency tried a different tack, engagement of Communist China and working to lessen the feeling of encirclement of the Soviet people. In his 1959 "kitchen debate" with Nikita Khrushchev, he said

[W]e do not and will not try to impose our system on anybody else. We believe that you and all other peoples on this earth should have the right to choose the kind of economic or political system which best fits your particular problems without any foreign intervention.

He followed that up with a treaty to limit strategic arsenals, all designed to reduce tensions as would permit Soviet citizens to turn more attention to internal problems and domestic discontents.
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Ford concluded more arms-reduction arrangements with Brezhnev, also to lessen the feeling of Soviet citizens that their problems were our fault.
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Carter negotiated further arms limitations, but once the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, sent aid to the Afghan resistance. He also boycotted the Moscow Olympics and, more tangibly, announced plans to deploy cruise missiles in Europe.
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Tho it is true that Reagan's Administration embarked upon a very expensive arms race, and announced a "Star Wars" plan (that has never been implemented), it is absurd to say that he "engineer[ed] the downfall of communism". If anything, U.S. support for the Afghani mujahedeen, begun by Carter and only continued by Reagan, was more important:

Most observers agree that the last war of the Soviet Union created or aggravated the internal dynamics that eventually culminated in the dissolution of the country itself.

Nothing Reagan did was different in any significant way from the consistent policy of anti-Communism pursued by every American President since World War II, and it is preposterous to give Reagan's Administration special credit just because all the strands of Soviet dissolution came together, by historical coincidence, during that period. It is especially preposterous to credit Reagan the man.
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Reagan was the world's best actor, who actually had billions of people believing that he was the President of the United States. But he was never President save in name and lawful authority. He was a front for a collective Republican leadership, many of whose members are part of the second Republican imitation-presidency, that of George Dubya Bush.
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So, is any of the three remaining candidates for "Greatest American" worthy of that honor?
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Benjamin Franklin was undoubtedly a great man, but he never held the highest office of the Nation so was only one of many people who contributed to the policies that created this most wondrous of nations. His astonishing creativity set a standard for every American after him who aspired to make a difference in writing, science, diplomacy, or practical inventiveness.
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Abraham Lincoln did three things of great importance. (1) He preserved the Union against attempted secession, but only after many missteps and poor choices of generals and strategies. (2) He issued the Emancipation Proclamation — but (a) it had no practical effect at the time, since it applied only to areas he did not control, not to slaves within Union territory; (b) he delayed it almost two years after the start of the war, (c) he countermanded orders by at least two commanders in the field who had attempted to free slaves within their jurisdiction, and (d) he made plain that restoring the unity of the Nation, not abolishing slavery, was his prime concern:

If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.

Nor did Lincoln believe in the equality of the races, nor in social integration. He even entertained aloud the idea of helping free blacks to leave the United States, for Liberia or Central America. A speech he is said to have given before would-be black colonists contains remarks on racial inequality that would be regarded today as incendiary. I cannot vouch for that text, but an article at Answers.com seems to confirm its gist.
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(3) Lincoln also contributed noble phrases to the canon of ideals to which Americans like to believe themselves devoted. He wrote one of the most famous short works of prose in all of English, the Gettysburg Address, which eloquently dedicated not just a cemetery but also a Nation:

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. * * * [And so] we here highly resolve ... that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

And he gave voice to the feeling of his countrymen that it is specially important to the course of history and human progress that the Union survive, for we were "the last, best hope of Earth". Even many non-Americans concede aloud that, with all the reservations they may have as to some uses of U.S. power, the survival of American unity really was important to world civilization.
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But Lincoln didn't create the Union that he preserved. That task fell to the last of the nominees for "Greatest American", George Washington.
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Without Washington, there would be no United States. There would have been no Union to preserve. There would be no nationality called "American". His picture is on both the dollar bill and the quarter, his name is on the national capital, for good reason.
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In more ways than we know, Washington set the standard for all of us. At times we have exaggerated his virtues and glossed over his failings. He was, after all, a slaveholder, tho he did provide that after his wife's death his slaves should be freed.
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But he kept the Continental Army together when it seemed, over and over, to be at the verge of collapse and dispersion. He harried the British, avoiding catastrophic engagements, but making them eventually realize that they faced an unwinnable war. He gave the thirteen separate colonies/states a sense of unity they had never felt before. He was the one man every "American" could claim for himself. Be he Virginian or New Jerseyan, every man saw Washington as "ours".
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More, he refused a crown, refused to become King George I of America, which he could probably have become, as at least constitutional monarch. He astonished Europe when he refused to run for a third term but left office precisely on time, handing over power peacefully to his successor. Thru all of our remaining history, his self-imposed two-term limit was heeded as binding precedent by every President but one, FDR, who used as excuse that we were in the middle of a world war so could not risk changing horses in midstream. After FDR's demise, the Nation entrenched in the Constitution the two-term limit that Washington imposed upon himself.
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There's no question in my mind who was the "Greatest American", and I urge everyone who reads this to vote for George Washington at AOL or by dialing, toll-free ("from landlines"), 1-866-669-3105.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,728.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:39 PM

 
John McCain, Traitor. I am so tired of hearing Senator McCain of Arizona being described as a "hero". He was a victim, not a hero, and this country has got to learn the difference. Moreover, the torment he suffered at the hands of his Vietnamese Communist captors may well have driven him out of his mind — unless he was just always bizarre.
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A hero is someone who, for the sake of others, knowingly risks fully foreseeable, horrendous, and possibly fatal consequences of his acts. Not everyone in the military qualifies as a hero, just because they know they might conceivably be killed, wounded, or captured, because almost nobody goes into the military with the real expectation that they will be killed. "That won't happen to me!" is the way they really feel. It's always the other guy who will get killed or maimed. Most military volunteers are young, and the young are notorious for feeling invulnerable and immortal.
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Nor does the pilot of a ground-attack fighter-bomber really expect to be shot down nor, if shot down, expect to survive, be beaten by a mob, then taken captive by the enemy's military, hung from the ceiling by guards, and subjected to 5 years of imprisonment, 2 of them in solitary confinement, in defiance of the Geneva Convention.
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It is dubious that McCain even really chose to be in the military. He was the son and grandson of four-star admirals, so was expected to follow their footsteps into 'the family business'. Born to a life of privilege in the Panama Canal Zone (my mother was also born in the Canal Zone, but not to a life of privilege), he attended the Naval Academy (Annapolis), practically as of right, whereas most people have trouble getting appointed to a military academy.
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Once he was taken captive in Hanoi, he did do one admirable thing: he refused early repatriation offered because of his father's high military rank, instead insisting he not be treated specially but be released in the customary order, first taken, first released. That supposedly infuriated his captors and led them to abuse him (tho a column by media pundit Margaret Carlson says his treatment was no worse than some U.S. captives in Afghanistan have received).
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However it may have happened, this man born to privilege, victim-turned-"hero", parlayed his advantages to take his Rightful place in the ruling elite by running for Congress, then Senate from Arizona. He has been a puzzlement ever since.
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Today, on NBC's Today show, Senator McCain, an ostensible conservative Republican, again played champion of Communist Vietnam, as leads me, again, to wonder if the Vietnamese "broke" him and "turned" him, into their active agent in Washington. This dynamic is known as the "Stockholm Syndrome". A captive comes to identify with his captor, appreciate his point of view, even defend his actions:

The Stockholm Syndrome is an emotional attachment, a bond of interdependence between captive and captor that develops 'when someone threatens your life, deliberates, and doesn't kill you.' (Symonds, 1980) The relief resulting from the removal of the threat of death generates intense feelings of gratitude and fear which combine to make the captive reluctant to display negative feelings toward the captor or terrorist. In fact, former hostages have visited their captors in jail, recommended defense counsel, and even started a defense fund. It is this dynamic which causes former hostages and abuse survivors to minimize the damage done to them and refuse to cooperate in prosecuting their tormentors.

This seems to have happened with McCain, who has visited Communist Vietnam several times since his release, and happily advocates reconciliation with the Communists who not only mistreated him but also launched a war of aggression that killed over 3 million of "their own people". Remember that it is slaughter of "his own people" that was used to demonize Saddam Hussein and justify a war that Senator McCain has always fully supported. McCain reiterated that support Today.
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This morning McCain at once championed Communist Vietnam's admission to the World Trade Organization, a reward for its murderous assault upon and takeover of South Vietnam, and backed a continuing U.S. military occupation of Iraq, a country we had no right to attack in the first place, and where our presence is a constant irritant that produces endless violence and an inpouring of foreign fighters who would not be intent on ravaging a sovereign Iraq were there no "Crusader" soldiers there fighting for Zionism.
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The man's politics are all over the map. No one can predict how he will come down on any given issue. He has no consistent principles whatsoever. He positions himself as a moderate Republican, and even indulges talk of being nominated for President by the Democratic Party, then says, 'No, I'm a Republican and will stay a Republican', then backs the most regressive policies of the rightwingers who now dominate the Federal Government. Maybe the Vietnamese destroyed his mind.
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In any case, I'm tired of hearing from him, tired of all the insane talk of making him into, in effect, a "fusion" candidate for President. John McCain is a nutjob, and an active enemy of the United States as regards Vietnam, a country still ruled by the people who murdered 3 million of "their own people", killed over 58,000 Americans, tortured American prisoners, and has never uttered so much as a syllable of apology for their crimes, but now profit mightily from trade with the American 'enemy' they so hated not long ago. We are their largest trading partner, thanks to 'normalization' embarked upon by the Vietnam peacenik Bill Clinton 10 years ago. Given his "antiwar" (pro-Communist) behavior in the Sixties, it's hardly surprising that Clinton would favor "normalizing" relations with Communist butchers. But why would a supposedly conservative Republican President do so?
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During the Vietnam War, when I was, as now, an anti-Communist liberal, I had a letter published by The New York Times that asked pointed questions, among them, 'Which way do refugees flow, toward Communist-controlled territory or away?' In case you don't know, the answer was always away from Communism, not toward it. That did not stop our brave heroes in Washington from abandoning the South Vietnamese to Communist takeover, all the while pretending devotion to "freedom", as they still do.
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George Bush is actually meeting, this very day, with the premier of Vietnam, a 71-year-old who since age 14 has been an ardent Communist and who was actively involved in what the Vietnamese Government's website calls "the American war"(!). That war was ended by another traitorous, supposedly conservative Republican, the "crook" Richard M. Nixon and his commsymp Secretary of State, the foreign-born Jew, Henry Kissinger. Now the Republicans are "making nice" with Communists and getting Americans killed for Jews in the Mideast.
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What has happened to this country? And how do we escape the madness? How did traitors come to dominate both major parties? And when will American interests and American principles recapture the national government?
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Cozying up to Communists and killing Arabs for Jews is not "the American way". It would seem we need a lot better teaching of American history to explain to Americans what our civilization is and is not.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,724.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:06 AM

 
The Myth of the "Self-Made Man". The United States today is dominated by arrogant fools who think that the wealth and power they enjoy is due to their own virtue and personal effort, as tho they have it by Divine Right, a gift from God Himself, and therefore owe nothing to others, not here, not in the world at large. Such a feeling, or ideology, is delusional. No one is "self-made". No one.
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We did not create ourselves, any of us, but were almost all the accidental result of biological forces we did not invent nor control in any measure. So we can't claim credit for having made ourselves in a literal sense. Our parents made us, but couldn't have done that had conditions not permitted. They had to live to a certain age to conceive us, and couldn't have done that absent various social conditions, including peace, an adequate supply of food, sanitary drinking water, and the availability of healthcare. They did not create any of those conditions, the absence of even one of which could have killed either or both of them long before they could have produced us.
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Many of us could not ever have come into existence were it not for the establishment of the United States, because our parents' families came from different parts of the world and would never have met had there not been a United States to migrate to. No one from these foreign countries created the United States.
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They could not have gotten here if there were no ships or planes. They didn't create ships or planes.
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Neither ships nor planes could have brought them here unless someone had created navigation systems and instruments to set a course for a specific spot on the globe. Our parents didn't invent navigation systems nor the instruments they require.
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Many of our parents met in school or college. They didn't create the school or college. They didn't educate the teachers nor build the buildings nor invent the buses that took them to school. They didn't refine the gas that powered the bus, nor build the refinery nor invent the technology to make gasoline from crude oil. They didn't create the pipeline or tanker that took the crude from one place and delivered it to a refinery in another place. They didn't drill the hole that penetrated the oil reservoir. They didn't finance the drilling.
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Perhaps their relationship depended on a first date arranged by telephone. They didn't invent the telephone, nor make the particular instruments they spoke into, nor install them, nor erect the telephone poles that carried the wires into their houses. The telephone runs on electricity. They didn't create the electricity, nor invent the technology, nor build the power stations, nor deliver the fuel to the generating stations, nor dig that fuel out of the ground, nor even finance the many, many interdependent projects and pay the millions of individual workers who did the actual work on which everything we do depends.
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You can't run a business or drive a car or take a business class or pick up a phone or speak a language or type a letter or negotiate a contract or do anything else of any sort without making use of the energies and talents of millions of people before you and around you, each of them contributing in his or her way to "your" success. How would you get to work without the highways or train lines that somebody else built? You can't even pay for the things you need, nor calculate how much you're worth, without using somebody else's money. No one of us invented the U.S. dollar (or any other currency), and without a society to back it, all money is worthless. Even gold and diamonds are worthless unless a society gives them value. They're just dead metal and shiny rocks unless somebody says they have value. And the value of any currency depends on the strength of the economy, a state of peace or war, the presence of absence of famine and pestilence, and many other forces not one of us controls.
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Nothing any of the rich and powerful has achieved in life would be even remotely possible without all the "little people", the ones who do the actual drilling and ditch-digging and laying of brick on brick or steel beam upon steel column; who run the buses and trains; who stitch the clothes and make the cloth; who grow the food we eat and fibers we cover our bodies with; who keep the bad guys at bay thru police work, or keep our homes and businesses from burning to the ground; who man the assembly lines that make our cars and computers, here or in dozens of countries around the planet; who process the mail or pick up your FedEx package; who dry clean your suit or cut your hair so you can be presentable at those business meetings you're so proud of; who made the conference table you make your deals around, and the swivel chairs you sit on; who do all the uncountable little jobs without which NOTHING WOULD WORK.
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So give me no bull about "self-made men". If it weren't for society, each of us would have to grow his own food, make his own clothes, build his or her own house, and fite everyone around just to survive. There would be no civilization, no money, no wealth, no safety, no security, no religion, no language! How would you even communicate without language? Compute costs and profits without math — which you would never have learned without school?
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At end, then, how can we justify extreme differences in income, if the wealth at the top of a social pyramid depends on the labors of huge numbers of people lower down? Absent the base, there is no top. And you can't arrange a second row unless there is a complete base row. Every step up the pyramid requires a solid base below. Remove the base, or even seriously weaken it, and the apex collapses.
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It is convenient for the privileged to credit themselves for their success. That is delusion. All of civilization not only stands on the shoulders of giants, but also rests on the strong backs of uncountable millions of "little people".
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,723.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:55 PM