Charity Is Bad. Netscape today carries a claim, in a news story titled "Economist Blames Aid for Africa Famine", that foreign aid actually produces the catastrophes it is intended to alleviate.

When aid money keeps coming, all our policy-makers do is strategize on how to get more," said [economist James Shikwati] the Kenya-based director of the Inter Region Economic Network, an African think tank.

"They forget about getting their own people working to solve these very basic problems. In Africa, we look to outsiders to solve our problems, making the victim not take responsibility to change." * * * Shikwati notes an additional problem: Even African countries that have food to spare can't easily share it because tariffs on agricultural products within sub-Saharan Africa average as high as 33 percent, compared with 12 percent on similar products imported from Europe.

"It doesn't make sense when they can't even allow their neighbors to feed them. They have to wait for others in Europe or Asia to help," he said. [Hmm. "Europe or Asia". I guess the U.S. and Canada don't count.] "We don't have any excuses in Africa. We can't blame nature. We have to tell our leadership to open up and get people producing food."

So tell us, Mr. Shikwati, your solution to the famines that periodically ravage this or that part of Africa. Should the outside world just avert its eyes and let Africans die if they can't solve their own problems? I assure you that hundreds of millions of people would be very happy to do that. But I suspect that, were the world to turn its back on Africa, you'd complain about that too.
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As the old expression goes, "Damned if you do, damned if you don't."
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It may be true that if you give a man a fish, he will eat for one day, whereas if you teach a man to fish he will be able to fish for himself the rest of his life. But what if there are no fish to catch, because the rivers have dried up because of desertification brought on by overpopulation, or have been polluted so badly the fish die? What if the population all around him has grown so large that it exceeds the capacity of the land to support, even in good times, but especially in times of ecological stress such as drought or locust swarm? What then, Mr. Shikwati? What then?
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The kids with distended bellies who are too weak to swat flies from their eyes didn't produce the policies that are killing them, and, absent outside help, won't live long enuf to demand change. Worse, there will never be enuf kids dead from famine to bring Africa's overpopulation and underdevelopment problems under control. Africa needs basic change, quite so. But until and unless it comes — and how long, pray, will that take? — somebody's got to save the kids. If their fellow Africans cannot or will not, who will?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,792.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:19 AM

 
Briefs. Three short items.
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(1) Greed Is Good. Bribery Is Better. I just emailed the following letter to the editor:

AMAZING. The Post actually published an opinion piece in praise of payola: corruption in the music industry. What next? Legalize bribing public officials? If the free market is in favor of corruption, maybe we should abolish capitalism and make socialism work. Or maybe people should just stop reading the New York Post.

(Responsive to "Eliot's Sour Note", July 29, 2005 column by Ryan Sager in the New York Post)
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(2) Sand in the Gears. Advocates of targeting searches of bags to people most likely to be terrorists by means of "racial profiling" focused on people who somehow look "Middle Eastern" (which might well take in lots of Latinos and southern Europeans) have run into a big problem: most of the men arrested in connection with the second cluster of London bombings are plainly what in the United States would be perceived as "black". Let's hear all those Jewish advocates of "profiling" now. Are they going to advocate searching not just people who look Middle Eastern but also everybody black in the United States? I dare them!
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(3) Words and Images. An ad posing as an Internet poll on same-sex marriage uses a graphic showing two male icons (like those we are accustomed to seeing by restrooms), rather than two female icons, holding hands. The "lesbigay" movement must be very unhappy, since they have done everything in their power to replace the public conception of homosexuality as being lust between men with instead the feeling that it is only affection between women. People inclined to manipulate passions, however, know which image will incite more negativity, and use the more incendiary.
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Words as well as images make a difference. In a short real-estate seminar I attended last week, the wife (of a husband-and-wife team of presenters) said that when approaching people interested in selling, you speak of selling their "house". But when you talk to people looking to buy, you speak of buying a "home". Clever, huh? You linguistically separate sellers from their emotional connection to a structure and engage potential buyers' emotions in making a nest.
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Little things matter.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,792.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:29 AM

 
Personal Energy. I am 60½ years old (and yes, I do vaguely remember when we were so eager to be credited with being older, that we asserted every half or even quarter year), and I can sometimes work 14 hours in one day on my various Internet and other computer activities, plus the things one must always do to maintain a household, feed the cats, feed the fish, clean out litterboxes, etc. Other times, however, on days when I am active many fewer hours, I am exhausted, for no apparent reason, no matter how well I eat, no matter how many vitamin pills or nutritional supplements I take.
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I am trying, only now, to remember if I ever, in earlier stages of my fairly long life — longer by far, alas, than most people in the Third World get to enjoy; and the quality of my long life heretofore has been immeasurably better than theirs — tired so easily and got so little done with my free time. I want to believe that I did, because I was always lazy, and I'm slowing down now only because I'm lazier now. But that's not true, any of it.
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My father used to accuse me of laziness, because my biorhythms, even when I was a child, made me groggy in the morning but alert in the afternoon. My father was alert in the morning, and insisted I be so too. No could do.
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He wanted me to do things, like plant tulip bulbs, early in the morning. I was actually really glad to plant tulips, but not in the morning. Can't we do it in the afternoon? NO!
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I'm writing this entry after 7am, when I've been up all nite. I was exhausted at 4pm, so lay down, and was able to function at 5:15pm. Then I was out of the house doing useful things for several hours.
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I'm active and alert now, at 7:20am. I didn't plan that. My father thought I was willful and lazy. I was neither. I was just on the Night Shift, but neither of us knew it.
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For many years — no: for decades — I accepted my father's judgment that I was lazy. Then, perhaps 10 years ago (and remember, I'm 60½ years old, so that's only 1/6 of my life away), I did an actual survey of how I spent my time. I created a fill-in table for what I do every quarter hour of the day, and printed out multiple copies. Then I wrote down in each appropriate space what I was doing at the time.
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It turned out that I was working 3 and 4 hours a day at home in addition to the 7 or so hours a day I was working for somebody else in an office. On the days when I wasn't working outside the house, I was working 5, 6, or even 13 hours a day on my computer, and additional hours every day on housework, laundry, etc. I wasn't lazy! I worked very hard almost every day! REVELATION. But I actually had to do a quarter-hour-by-quarter-hour recordation of my activities to realize that.
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Now, however, I find myself lagging. I have heard television descriptions of clinical depression, and I want not to believe that I am clinically depressed. But let's examine a few specifics.
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I have filled my house with my favorite foods. I have Japanese gyoza in the frij, and la yu (ra yu) hot-pepper sauce on hand. (Whoa! I just found out, thru mistyping, that "sauce" and "cause" are anagrams!)
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I have Indian pea-and-potato samosas in the frij, plus marmalade, grape jam, and honey to put on them. I have beef for London broil. Frozen pizza in the freezer, and anchovies to put on it in the pantry. Ice cream. Peanut M&M's and Jolly Ranchers in various flavors.
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But I don't want to eat any of that.
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Yes, it's summer, and I want to lose winter weight — consciously. But I have no appetite, and it may not just be that nature tells me to cool it as regards calories given this weather (98 F two days ago). I just have no joie de vivre right now, not in terms of appetite, not in terms of anything.
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I get a little boost when I see a beautiful man (and I did see a really goodlooking (young) guy earlier this evening, sitting at the same table as I at a real-estate seminar), but I am not moved to pounce on him nor even draw him in with my radiant smile. It's as tho I'm already 80 and dying.
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I can plan for tomorrow, and make lists of a few things I hope to accomplish in a given day, but I wake up with no enthusiasm for life.
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Is that living? Or subsisting? And how do you recapture life when it seems to have left you?
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The first thing, of course, must be to resolve to stay alive thru an awkward and atypical time. Counselors constantly, and wisely, advise: "Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem." Quite so.
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I actually wake up most days eager to scan the headlines, first to find a hot word for my Simpler Spelling Word of the Day website and second to settle upon a topic for my (almost-)daily political blog (which you're reading). I try to alternate between themes I touch repeatedly and issues I have never dealt with before. But, in truth, I'm not that varied a man myself. My interests are few but deep. I know a little about a great many things, but a lot about only a few. (Even so, I know more about almost everything than 98% of the general public. That is not bragging, only reporting.)
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There are other days when I simply don't want to get out of bed for hours later than I "should" ideally rise.
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My younger sister referred me to a longevity-calculator website. I filled in the requested specifics and was presented, according to that site's preprogrammed conclusions, with an anticipated lifespan of little more than 69 years — meaning I should die at most 8 years from now.
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I have been inclined to pooh-pooh any such suggestion, on the basis that no one in my family, on either side, has died before their late 70s, and my father's mother died at 95 (albeit senile at the time).* My personal experience of the world, however, inclines me to caution.
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I worked for years in a New York law firm in which one associate was a very nice man who was 67 years old. He began to tire easily, and started falling asleep at his desk. Marilyn, the receptionist, on discovering him asleep at his desk, would close his door and divert calls.
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Then, on Good Friday one year, when most people left the office early, we got a call from the police at Grand Central Station. An elderly man had collapsed and died in the Station, and the authorities needed someone to ID the body. My boss had that dubious honor, and sadly did ID our elderly friend. He was only 67.
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At least he had no lingering death, no humiliating loss of memory or bowel control. He just "kicked it" on the way home from work.
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How many of us will have such luck?
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How many will struggle thru life, then suffer progressive debilitation into utter disability?
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That's not a happy thought, I realize. But when you get old, you think such thoughts. Life becomes at once inexpressibly more valuable AND something you know you must part with. You rejoice in still living, and resign yourself to dying, at the same time.
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I have been attending school — !! — for perhaps 10 weeks, learning the real-estate business. I was abruptly fired from my job as a word processor for lawyers / legal secretary on the evening shift on January 4th, ostensibly because my JEWISH employers resented my criticisms of the political stances of SOME Jews, tho it might just have been a pretext for firing me for other reasons, such as my age (I turned 60 a mere 15 days before I was fired), sexual orientation (homosexual), gender (male, occupying a job ordinarily held by women), disability (surgery on both knees) during a period when the managing partner was in intensive care for a heart attack that might require enormously expensive heart-transplant surgery that was straining the firm's healthcare plan, etc.
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In any case, I am very happy about the change of career I have embarked upon, especially the more I get to know about the real-estate field. But I wonder if I will have the energy to pursue a late-life career.
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"Careers", rather than "jobs", ordinarily require some intensity about making money. I've never had that.
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Presently I don't care about money because I've got a lot, as I see things: in my 401(k) account; Roth IRA; equity in my house; and money in the bank from my mother's estate. Moreover, I will reasonably soon qualify for Social Security. For the first time in my life, then, I have both time (I'm not working: I was fired, remember?) and money — initially, Unemployment benefits; now savings from my mother's bequest. I recently exhausted my Unemployment benefits because I chose not to appeal my wrongful firing. Perhaps I should appeal anyway, even tho I am taking steps to change careers and don't really NEED the money. So I can do, comfortably, what I WANT to do.
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I have serious ethical problems with our present, misguided "laws" about at-will employment versus protected employment, so have not pursued rights that people who do not have my ethical reservations might have appealed for, or sued for. I'm still thinking of suing, since I suspect there were other factors than my political views at work in my firing.
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It's not that I sympathize with the "dirty Jew bastards" (my goodness that phrase rolls off the tongue easily) who fired me, but only that I believe that in private employment, people have the right to refuse to hire, to promote, or even to fire anyone they want for any reason they want, even if that be race, religion, gender, or any of that other crap which government has no right to inquire into or punish people for considering. So my principles rebuke me for even thinking of challenging an extension of my Unemployment benefits, tho they probably shouldn't. I don't know if so much as 1/20th of people who feel themselves wrongfully discharged would hesitate for an instant in appealing for a full year of Unemployment benefits after the first 26 weeks had expired. But, then, I'm not your average bear.
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No one can intimidate me. So if the "dirty Jew bastards" — I do like the sound of that, tho of course not all Jews are bastards! The ones who fired me sure are, tho — at Saiber Schlesinger Satz & Goldstein hoped to silence me by firing me from a c. $50,000-a-year job, they made a major miscalculation. All they did is embitter me against Jews, and who needs that? Much of the world hates Jews. You'd think Jews (who will gladly tell you they, e.g., Albert Einstein, are the smartest people on Earth) would have the good sense not to antagonize people needlessly. But they don't. So much for Einstein. He was the exception to the Jewish rule.
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If it were simply a contest between my will to live and the preference of Zionist Jew bastards that I die, I would of course rally to live. But at end, Jews aren't really important to anybody but Jews. Christians and Moslems could work a deal without even telling the Jews about it. The whole planet could sidestep and bypass the Jews without the tiniest bit of difficulty. Why, then, DOESN'T the whole world just ignore the Jews? Good question. Do you have an answer? I sure don't.
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My present existing-but-not-really-living is a phenomenon having nothing to do with economics. I am devoid of worry about my economic future, but I'm not particularly happy to be alive. Do you know the feeling? I'll get over it, I think. But I ask anyone else out there in a funk, Will you? If you're worried you might not, do not hesitate to seek professional help. There's no more shame in plumbing the depths of your psyche with the help of a professional than there is in hiring a plumber to replace a corroded garden-hose connection or asking an electrician to replace a wall outlet that burst into flame a week ago.
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The human race has spent thousands of years acquiring knowledge of many types, in many specialties. That knowledge is now available to us, and we don't always even have to pay for it. If we are temporarily depressed because of age, poor health, effort without emotional reward, or any other cause, we can consult a professional, and perhaps feel better afterward. Couldn't hurt.
_________________

* A friend of mine many years ago (John B.) suggested that Alzheimer's might be "nature's way of easing the end" of life, so that one is not aware of, and thus not afraid, of imminent death.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,791.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:05 AM

 
Good Jew, Bad Jew. U.S. culture today is dramatically and bitterly split between the vicious selfishness of the rich, self-contented Right and the ardent enemies of selfishness and complacency who remain true believers in the conception of the United States as a society devoted to "liberty and [socioeconomic] justice for all" — who are not the Left but all the rest of us.
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Not surprisingly, American Jews are now also bitterly split, between the liberalism and tolerance that characterized the Jewish community in the U.S. for the bulk of the 20th Century and a new, mean, selfish, radical conservatism completely at variance with historical Jewish behavior in this country — but absolutely typical of Jewish behavior in Palestine.
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We on the liberal left have long appreciated the powerful support and even leading role of Jewish liberals in areas like civil rights and worker's rights. But there always were Roy Cohns.
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Today, the traditional liberalism of American Jews might best be seen in Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's Daily Show and Barbra Streisand, who has raised millions of dollars for liberal causes. The newly prominent retrograde conservatism of Israel-identified Jews might best be seen in people like Paul Wolfowitz and New York Post columnist John Podhoretz. In some matters, even more moderate conservative Jews take stances wildly out of keeping with American Jewish tradition. Know your enemy.
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In the past two days, two rightwing Jewish columnists of the New York Post (a) defended arbitrary and unconstitutional searches of bags in the New York subways (Arnold Ahlert) and (b) attacked people in Hollywood who dared to suggest that the United States is not blameless in the conflict with Moslem militants (John Podhoretz). I sent the following emailed letters to the Post about those columns.

[1] Arnold Ahlert ridicules concerns about civil liberties in our ever-enlarging police state by claiming that "War changes everything." But we are not at war. A war is declared, but Congress refused to declare war. Against whom are we at war? A war has a specific enemy, and when you defeat that enemy, the war is over and wartime restrictions on rights are ended. The only wars the people approved, albeit without a declaration of war as the Constitution requires, [were] against the Taliban government of Afghanistan and the Hussein government of Iraq. Both have been ousted. But Ahlert says we're still at war. Against whom? For how long? When will we know the war is over? And if it is never over, then our rights can be ever more tightly restricted, until they are all gone, all in the name of safety.
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(Responsive to "The Right to Live in Safety", column by Arnold Ahlert in the New York Post, July 28, 2005)
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[2] Why isn't John Podhoretz in the Israeli army? He is stridently, viciously anti-Arab, and wants the U.S. to wage world war against Islam, but he won't put his own life on the line for his extremist views. Rather he, like so many other Israelis and pseudo-Israelis — those couch soldiers in the United States — is willing to fight for Israel to the last Christian. Well, America's Christians are starting to wonder why on Earth we are fighting for the Jews. Let the Jews do their own damn fighting and leave us out of it.
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(Responsive to "Hollywood Hell", column by John Podhoretz in the New York Post, July 27, 2005)

As a courtesy, I sent Mr. Ahlert copy of my comment on his column, and he sent this reply:

I didn't "ridicule" anything, Congress authorized the use of force in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and the United States Court of Appeals D.C. Circuit approved the use of military tribunals to try "enemy combatants."

We're at war against terrorist organizations and the countries and constituencies that aid and abet them — for as long as it takes. Hope that chills your conspiratorial fever — but I suspect you would prefer to "roll the dice" riding on a subway. Good luck selling that idea to New Yorkers, Mr. Chairman.

(Ahlert may be right about New Yorkers. New Yorkers put up with more s**t than people in the next 10 largest cities of the United States put together. They are sheep, perhaps in part because so many of them aren't Americans at all but immigrants from places where dictatorial government is the rule.)
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Look carefully at this portion of that reply: "We're at war against terrorist organizations and the countries and constituencies that aid and abet them — for as long as it takes." Hmm. What does he mean by "constituencies that aid and abet them"? I guess that means anyone who disapproves of endless war, police-state restrictions on our liberties, discrimination against Arabs in Israel, a global war for Zionism — pretty much anybody who disagrees with the "permanent war" launched by (Paul) "Wolfowitz & Co.", the Zionists in the U.S. Government who will kill as many people as it takes to make the world safe for Israel — Moslem and Christian without distinction, in the millions if need be.
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I happen to be one Christian who does not care to die for Israel. And I don't want to kill for Israel either. Nor have my liberties taken away for Israel. Nor be taxed more than need be so Dubya can send billions to Israel.
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Plainly searching knapsacks in New York City subways is not the full extent to which crackdowns on those "constituencies that aid and abet" "terrorist organizations" might go. As Ahlert's cohort Podhoretz plainly indicates, everyone who so much as utters a word of criticism of the "war" is aiding and abetting terrorism, so must be silenced. If they (we) won't be intimidated out of criticism, by aspersions on our patriotism or decency, or by being fired from our jobs (as I was), then something more draconian must be employed. What might that be?
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Let's look at Ahlert's original article for clues.

Every war America has engaged in has led to the diminution of certain rights: Habeas corpus was suspended during the Civil War, the Espionage Act of WWI provided penalties for interfering with the recruitment of troops, Japanese were interned during WWII and the Patriot Act has given the government greater powers to monitor individuals.

Democracy is flexible. Habeas corpus was restored, no one gets arrested for advocating an anti-war agenda, the Japanese were freed and the Patriot Act has a "sunset clause."

But rightwingers are trying to eliminate that "sunset clause". The Washington Post reported 6 days ago that:

Within hours of a second attack on the London transit system, lawmakers in the House and Senate pushed ahead yesterday with starkly different bills to extend the controversial USA Patriot Act anti-terrorism law.

[Tho a Senate measure was inclined to restrict some of the wider powers of the present law,] After a day-long debate, the House voted 257 to 171 last night to extend or make permanent the most controversial provisions of the law while adding a handful of new restrictions on the FBI. Forty-three Democrats joined 214 Republicans in approving the Patriot renewal bill. Other proposals for sharper limits were rejected.

Permanent war, permanent "Patriot Act". And if terrorist attacks continue abroad — note that the House action came within hours of an attack 3,000 miles away, in a foreign country — or, far worse, return to the U.S., then what? Plainly the measures we have already taken will be said not to be working, so we'll have to do something more, won't we? And maybe those measures will be enforced by "internment" and "military tribunals" for all those "enemy combatants".
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Well, we will indeed have to take more draconian measures if terrorism continues if we accept the idea that we should be at permanent war against a billion Moslems for Israel!
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But what happens if we end support for Israel? What if we publicly announce that we were seized with madness for a while, but have returned to our own country's revolutionary first principles — equality under law, no expropriation of Arabs for Jews, no preference for one religion over another — so cut off all relations with Israel, cut off every cent of U.S. public and private aid to Israel, apologize to Palestinians for the crimes committed in our name by the Israeli government and prior U.S. governments, recognize the Palestinian Authority as the sole legitimate government not just of present "Palestinian" areas but of all of historic Palestine, and lavish it with billions of dollars of aid of all kinds to help it build a united, multiethnic and multireligious, secular Palestine? What if we declare victory in Afghanistan and Iraq and bring our troops home? What then?
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Well, maybe the John Podhoretz's and Paul Wolfowitz's will then have to move to their beloved Israel and join its army, and Jews faithful to the United States can return to their traditional liberalism.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,788.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:46 PM

 
Grotesque Commercials. There are a number of truly horrible, if not literally horrifying, commercials running on U.S. television at present. I pass over, for this purpose only, some Vonage (web telephony) commercials that show people doing stupid things, some of which might, in the footage shown, have caused them real harm.
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(1) Anheuser-Busch. Bud Light has, since Superbowl 2005, been showing a hideous and inhuman commercial in which a skydiving instructor is trying to motivate a scared new jumper to take the plunge by showing him a six-pack of Bud Light bottles, then tossing it out the plane's open door for him to chase after. Instead, the pilot of the plane, who wears no parachute, suddenly runs out from the cockpit and jumps out the open door after the six-pack, in effect both leaping to his death and leaving the two remaining men (instructor and first-time jumper) in a pilotless plane that they will die in unless they jump. That detestable, inhuman ad actually won an award from Michigan State University!
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Everyone who created, approved, and funded that unbearably, intolerably monstrous ad, and everyone who voted to grant that award, should literally be thrown from a plane to their death. I don't misuse the word "literally" to mean "figuratively". They should literally — actually — each and every one of them be thrown from a plane to their death.
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What on Earth were the advertisers thinking? First, tossing heavy beer-filled bottles (or even empty glass bottles) out of a plane would constitute bombing the ground underneath with potentially deadly missiles.
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Second, this hideous commercial trivializes the certain death of a pilot. As I recall, we didn't think the death of the pilots on the various hijacked 9/11 planes was trivial.
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Third, the two men left on board would be killed unless they jumped, when the plane eventually plummeted from the sky. The skydiving instructor plainly would have no problem jumping to safety. But the terrified student? What if he were paralyzed by fear? He'd die. That's supposed to be funny?
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And what of the people who might be hit by a plane falling from the sky — if they hadn't already been killed by bottles falling thousands of feet and achieving massive force in terminal velocity?
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What of the destruction of property, the plane at the least?
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Is any of this supposed to be funny? "Don't try this at home" doesn't cover it.
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(2) Dairy Queen. This despicable company has two detestable commercials being broadcast now, both of which you can see at http://www.dairyqueen.com/en-US/DQ+Ads/default.htm.
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In the first, and far more objectionable, two men die! What fun!
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Two Indian-accented scientists are shown in a laboratory. One comes up to the other with a DQ "Dream Pie blizzard" he is impressed by to tell the other that he must try it. The other is busy making buzzing noises to a "killer bee" visible at a magnifying glass. On inquiry, he says he has learned "to speak bee". The second challenges him: "What possible scientific purpose could that serve?" The first then speaks and gestures to the bee to attack, which it does. The second scientist slaps his neck at the bee that has just stung him, then dies! That is, the first scientist has just deliberately murdered the second, a colleague who in the spirit of friendship came up to him in the first place just to recommend that he try this wonderful new drink!
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Then the first takes the "blizzard" drink away from the dead scientist (I guess robbery is the assumed motive for this murder), then laughs what would ordinarily be a knee-slapping laugh at having murdered his colleague to steal his drink, but his hand hits a bee on the counter, and he dies! The announcer then says of the DQ Dream Pie blizzards, "They're to die for."
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No, they're not.
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Everyone responsible for that ad should be subjected to attack by huge swarms of "killer bees".
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The second offensive Dairy Queen ad features a father trying to teach his bespectacled little boy to shoot hoops by providing him the incentive of heading to DQ if he makes a basket. The kid is hopelessly inept and fails every attempt by the father to make things easier for him. The father actually takes the backboard off the garage wall and holds it mere feet from the kid, whereupon the kid throws the ball hard toward it, but actually hits his father in the face, hard. If you have ever been hit in the face, or pretty much anywhere else, by a basketball, which is not a cream puff, balloon, nor beachball, you know that such an impact would cause serious damage. But the father withstands that accident with no harm and merely tells the kid, impatiently, as tho he is merely a tad annoyed rather than stunned and injured physically, "Just get in the car."
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What messages are we subjected to here? Kids with glasses are incompetents who deserve our contempt? You can throw a basketball hard into a person's face without doing any damage whatsoever? What? Is being hit in the face with a basketball supposed to be funny? I don't find it so.
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(3) Red Bull. A caffeinated "energy drink" originally from Austria has invaded the U.S. market with noxious and barely comprehensible, crudely animated commercials that tell viewers that drinking it will give them "wiiings".
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One of those commercials features an apparent low-level Mafia hitman phoning his capo from a public phone on "dock 13" about a problem he has encountered in trying to drown a man the capo apparently told him to kill. It seems the would-be victim requested as his last wish a can of Red Bull, and even tho the professional killer encased his feet in concrete and threw him into deep water off a dock, he kept popping up above the water level, then flew off on the "wiiings" that Red Bull gave him.
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Isn't that charming? Mafia killers set a man's feet in concrete and throw him into the ocean to die! What fun! Let's see how much fun the creators and funders of this ad find that to be when we encase their own feet in concrete and throw them off a pier to drown.
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(4) Grand Theft Auto (and Other Toxic "Games"). Violent ads are also running for the hyperviolent (and, we recently discovered, secretly pornographic) video game "Grand Theft Auto, San Andreas", which glorifies crime — specifically mass murder, of men by women as much as of women by men or men by men — all as entertainment for America's youth.
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This is, alas, not the only evil video game poisoning the minds of (young) people in many countries, but it is the most prominent here, now.
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Every form of murder shown in that evil "game" should be turned into a form of execution for its conceptual creators, programmers, and marketers, and of the executives of the companies that pour that toxic waste into public waters of the mind.
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The four commercials hilited above are not alone in their monstrousness. Every day we are assailed by astounding evil in media that I call "entertainment for Nazis", and we pretend that it's just make-believe, so has no effect.
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But there is no such thing as visual fiction. We are programmed by nature to heed everything we see and everything we hear as being absolutely real.
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We could not have survived the challenges to our animal nature in a hostile world if we second-guessed our senses. No, we have to accept everything we see and every auditory cue we hear, and react to it immediately, lest we die from discounting a danger or missing an opportunity that might be our last chance to survive in a harsh environment.
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That's the way our species has evaded danger and pursued prey for millennia. Some part of our primitive brain believes every single thing we see and every single thing we hear to be absolutely true.
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When we are assailed by graphic, deviant violence, we necessarily and inescapably believe some part of it. It is sophistry to pretend that we can discount all of it and be unaffected.
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People who immerse themselves in violent fantasies accept some part of them as true. Even if it were only 1/100th or even 1/1,000th of 1% for each exposure, multiply that by thousands and thousands of exposures, hours of immersion in a fantasy world that seems real and complete, and you see that people are ineluctably poisoned by such nitemare images and moral constructs — death is funny! violence is normal and normative; human life means nothing — to the point that they are hardened against human suffering, and come to believe, subintellectually, in the gut, that the world is a deadly dangerous place where everybody is out to kill you, so you had better be prepared to kill them first.
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If al-Qaeda offered "games" like Grand Theft Auto, San Andreas, as training materials for potential soldiers in its unconventional army, would we regard them as "games" or "combat simulations"? If those video games/simulations taught players/soldiers to behead opponents, would that be mere "fun"? — or something more serious?
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The vile, inhuman madness of the ads and games discussed above is not what any sane person could want for their society.
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All toxic media, all toxic ads, in whatsoever medium, should be destroyed, and the people guilty of inflicting them on uncountable hordes (and especially on unnumbered hordes of young people) should be punished with extreme severity, up to and including death.
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It never occurs to most people, until too late, that the human mind has no "erase" button but that everything they take in to their brain stays in their brain, where it can do phenomenal harm for many years, even to the end of their days.
+
To wound one person that way is bad enuf. To wound millions cannot adequately be punished except by death.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,783.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:12 AM

 
Huh? Sometimes the stupidity and irration of the New York Post are just mind-boggling. Today, Arnold Ahlert, one of the least loony of the Post's regular columnists, actually tried to draw a connection between terrorism and language.

HERE's a modest suggestion for helping America fight terror: make English the official language of the United States. * * * [Immigrants have established] autonomous communities which have purposefully separated themselves from mainstream culture. That in and of itself has the potential to foster terrorist activity.

No, Mr. Ahlert, it does not. Quite the contrary, giving people some control over their culture and embracing diversity defuses tensions and resentments, producing more peace, not more strife.
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Compare Turkey's attempts to eradicate Kurdish culture, which produced guerrilla warfare and terrorism, with the peaceful integration of tens of millions of Hispanics into American society.
+
Immigrants are actually assimilating faster and more completely than ever before in our history. Hispanics often lament that their children don't want to speak Spanish, ever, even among themselves when no anglo friends are around. They have to take Spanish as a foreign language in high school to cope with the grammar, and even when they try to speak Spanish, their sentences are peppered with English words and expressions because they either can't come up with the Spanish equivalent or the English better expresses what they want to say.
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Ahlert and other language alarmists would seem not to know our history. It was commonplace in this country for entire neighborhoods to be islands to themselves, where the only language people would hear around them was Italian or German. Tho the children might learn English, with difficulty, in school, the parents rarely or never did, relying instead on their children or the local priest to translate for them when the need arose.
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Now, thanks to the multiplicity of English-language oral and written materials available in every home in every neighborhood, most immigrants themselves learn enuf English to get by, enjoy a TV show, and make themselves understood outside their own neighborhood. That never used to happen.
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Their kids become fluently bilingual in very short order, and within two generations, at most, the bulk of the descendants of immigrants have completely lost their ancestral language.
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My father's family is primarily Dutch, from Upstate New York. They arrived in the 1640s and 1650s, when that region was New Netherland, a Dutch colony where everybody (except the Indians) knew Dutch. The historian of the Schoonmaker Family Association (part of the Huguenot Historical Society in New Paltz, New York) told me that Dutch was still spoken by some members of the family until about 1912! So much for quick assimilation in 'the good old days'.
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Were the Schoonmakers and Hasbroucks terrorists? The British thought so, since they served in the Continental Army that drove the British out of New York and helped establish this country. But they never rose in rebellion against the United States, unlike those good old English-speaking boys of the South!
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Linguistic diversity emphatically does not breed terrorism. The reverse is true: linguistic intolerance incites resentments that can, and, all over the world, have produced violence.
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English does not need any help in eradicating immigrant languages. It is doing a fine job all by itself, because (aside from its spelling) English is an extremely powerful language, intrinsically and culturally. It is simpler than any other major language. For instance, in regular verbs there are at most two forms in each tense: I/you/we/they talk, he/she/it talks; I/you/we/they have talked, he/she/it has talked; and in the simple past, I/you/we/they/he/she/it — everybody! — talked.
+
Small wonder that people rush to embrace it, not just for its utility in communicating across neighborhoods and borders but also for its simplicity and cultural sweep.
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France has to pass laws requiring the use of French, out of fear that French students and businesses will abandon French in France! We have no reason to worry about the future of English in its very heart and bastion, the United States.
+
And we certainly don't have to worry that tolerance breeds terrorism!
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(Responsive to "Fight Terror, Speak English", column by Arnold Ahlert in the New York Post July 26, 2005)
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,782. The figure hit 1776 early yesterday — with no mention in media that I saw — but swiftly moved up.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:05 PM

 
Mission to Baghdad (and the Rest of Islam). Scores of millions of people all around the Moslem world are reacting with disgust to the violent madness that fills their headlines — bombings, beheadings, shootings, all committed in the name of Islam. Tho they want to disown such behavior as "not Islamic" but a "perversion of Islam", every attack, every senseless killing makes it more difficult — nay, impossible — to defend Islam as an innocent victim of misinterpretation. What kind of muddy moral teaching could allow of such "misinterpretation"?
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If the Koran merely prescribes forms of worshiping God, without teaching anything about morality, it is unworthy of heed.
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If there are moral teachings in the Koran, but they are so vague and lacking in prominence that Islamists miss them, then Islam cannot claim moral majesty.
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How can decent people reconcile these grievous defects with the notion that Islam is the final revelation of the will of God as revealed to God's true messenger, Muhammed?
+
That is surprisingly easy: Muhammed was misquoted. The Koran was not written by Muhammed, who was illiterate (as was almost everyone else in those days), nor even by people of his own time, who might then read back to him what they had written down and ask if that correctly reflected his teachings.
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There were no mass communications in those days, nor even a publishing industry. The Koran was plainly not written from an outline of any sort, since the suras (chapters, or major divisions) have no thematic or stylistic unity internally and the book overall has no logical structure. The suras are arranged in haphazard order, mainly longest toward the beginning and shortest toward the end, not chronologically nor by type of text: e.g., passages dealing with the nature of God and man's obligations to God; passages dealing with morality; passages dealing with ritual.
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The teachings of Muhammed that became the Koran were originally written down in fragmented form by many different people, as they remembered them after the fact. Altho the oral tradition in pre-literate societies has sometimes preserved remarkably consistent stories and very long literary works in good order, that is only true of specific works entrusted to people specially trained to memorize and recite those texts. Those are not the people who heard Muhammed speak. There have been amusing experiments in which a short text is told secretly to one person (say, a third-grader), who is then told to whisper it into the ear of the next person, and on and on around the room, until the last person (of 20 or 30) says aloud for everyone what it is s/he heard. Rarely is the text remotely intact but has been changed massively, often beyond recognition. A pre-literate society of "the oral tradition" might not mangle a text as badly, but it is inconceivable that the version as reported by the 10th person would be identical to the version recited by the 1st.
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Most of the teachings of Muhammed were given orally in front of groups of ordinary people who later tried to remember exactly what he said. But they had no special training in memorization, and almost none were themselves able to write. Even if they could write, the script ordinarily employed showed only consonants, not vowels. In English, if we were to write D*N, where * represents any vowel, how would we know which of these 10 words was intended: Dan, den, din, don, dun, deign, dean, dine, Doane, dune? That's one written word's uncertainties. Multiply that by all the possible alternative words in every sentence written like that, and you can see that the possibilities for error are incalculably huge.
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Isolated individuals or groups would write down as much as they remembered, on palm leaves, stone, scraps of papyrus, parchment, or whatever else might serve. (Paper had not yet been brought to the Middle East from its original home, China; that was to come only after the Caliphate expanded to touch China, a century after Muhammed's death.)
+
Some of those writings were then collected after the Prophet's death, and the religious scribes of the day tried to put them into some order, conform differences, and create a unified text from many scattered remnants.
+
Some scholars believe that some of the writings gathered to create the Koran did not even relate to what Muhammed said but predate him by a century!
+
So even if Muhammed had given those around him a divinely inspired revelation, he did not himself write it down nor dictate it to a battery of scribes waiting on his every word.
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Moreover, writing was poorly established in Arabia at the time, there being very few surviving inscriptions from before the time of the Koran. And Arabic, like any other language, has changed enormously over the centuries. A reader of modern Arabic may completely misunderstand passages of Koranic Arabic because the words today (some 1,300 years later) have radically different meanings than they had then.
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Further, anyone who sees the many mistakes that get past highly qualified proofreaders and copy editors at major publishing houses and broadcasters today, a time of universal education in the world's major countries, should recognize that it is essentially impossible that simple, uneducated tribesmen in a backward country almost 1,400 years ago could have produced an accurate and authentic transcription of Muhammed's teachings.
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If you've ever read a transcript of almost anything and compared it to the original oral presentation on videotape or film, you will have seen that all kinds of errors can be made, from mishearing plain words to guessing wrong at muffled or soft passages, to writing the wrong one of homonyms, misplacing punctuation, etc. Each such mistake reduces the reliability of the message. Multiply such mistakes by many different people writing down snippets of what they recalled and passing them down decades later, and you can end up with a hideous mishmash that bears little resemblance to what Muhammed actually said. Some German researchers have concluded that about a fifth of the Koran makes no sense at all!

Gerd-r Puin speaks with disdain about the traditional willingness, on the part of Muslim and Western scholars, to accept the conventional understanding of the Koran. "The Koran claims for itself that it is 'mubeen,' or 'clear,'" he says. "But if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply doesn't make sense. Many Muslims — and Orientalists — will tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a fifth of the Koranic text is just incomprehensible. This is what has caused the traditional anxiety regarding translation. If the Koran is not comprehensible — if it can't even be understood in Arabic — then it's not translatable. People fear that. And since the Koran claims repeatedly to be clear but obviously is not — as even speakers of Arabic will tell you — there is a contradiction. [And since the exact word of God cannot contain a contradiction,] Something else must be going on."

When you don't have a videotape or audio recording to refer to, you may never know what was really said.
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Most Moslems cannot read Arabic, so chant by rote texts they can understand only from translations. But Islam recognizes only the Arabic original as authentic. No translation is regarded as "the real Koran" but only as an interpretation.
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Anyone who knows anything about languages knows that if you take any passage of size in one language and translate it into another language, then have different people translate the resulting passage back into the first language, you end up with a text that differs significantly, and sometimes wildly, from the original. So there is always a loss in translation.
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Some of the Korans that large numbers of people read in various languages are not even direct translations from Arabic but only translations of translations!
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All these complications are real, so can, entirely legitimately, be used by wavering Moslems to justify abandoning a corrupted message as inauthentic, not the original divine revelation given to Muhammed, at all.
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Christianity has a great opportunity today, to spread the message of the "Prince of Peace" to Moslems in war zones who are hungering for peace.
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Christian missionaries (by any name) should approach Moslems by pointing out (1) that Muhammed never claimed to be God himself, but only the Messenger of God; and (2) that the words we read today are not the words Muhammed spoke, but only a mangled misrepresentation of his message; but (3) Jesus is Himself God, and His message, on key points of morality, is clear in any language because it speaks to the heart.
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Christians can argue that if a person looks into him- or herself and lets conscience guide, s/he is hearing God's words in his or her own internal voice. That voice requires peace from and justice to all people. Violence begets violence; peace begets peace. And there is no glory, only shame, in killing the innocent. No Paradise awaits so great a sinner. Paradise is reserved for the just and the generous, the peacemaker who resorts to war only to protect others, not to dictate private conscience. Because conscience is the Lord speaking to you thru your heart, and thus more reliable than any words written or spoken by men. That is why Jesus could tell people to look within themselves, not to the priests (imams) or political leaders, to know right from wrong. Because when you think before acting to 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you', you are hearing God speak and making your choice of how to act in accord with His advice.
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I think there are a great many millions of Moslems ready to accept that Islam is self-destructing. Who see that all of the world's greatest, richest, and most advanced countries save only Japan are Christian. And who are willing to accept Christianity as the means to achieve peace among men, and to progress toward material comfort and technological advancement without any moral loss.
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The churches of the West should be pouring forth a great effort all across the Moslem world to win present Moslems to Jesus by honoring Muhammed's intent but suggesting that his message has been so badly mangled that the best way to recapture his meaning is to heed the higher authority of Jesus. After all, Muhammed was trying only to tell us to love and heed God, which is exactly what Jesus was put on Earth to do, and Jesus knew God's mind because Jesus is part of the godhead.
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To people who recoil in horror at the thought of a direct theological challenge by Christianity to Islam in its own homeland, I would ask, "How much worse could things get?"
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Islam honors Jesus, and Christian missionaries can point that out. In honoring Jesus, then, Arabs and others in predominantly Moslem countries would be doing what Muhammed told them to do. That part of Muhammed's message is plain, even if other parts are muddled.
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If Islamists are violent because they feel that adherence to Islam is threatened by modernism, nothing is going to reassure them, because modernity is coming to all the world, and there's nothing they can do to stop it. Western civilization, the dominant and irresistible global modernizer, is Christian. Whereas some Christian conservatives see modernization as threatening Christianity, in producing hordes of only-nominal Christians whose beliefs border on agnosticism and atheism, Arab and other societies can see a shift to Christianity as an integral part of modernism that retains piety in aspiring to live up to God's teachings thru his Son, who came to Earth to experience what it is to be human, the better to relate to people and motivate them.
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I am not persuaded that Islam can modernize. Christianity is infinitely adaptable. Islam is rigid. Increasingly, Islam is becoming a problem for all the world. Tho the ultimate solution to the problem of religious fanaticism is rejection of all religion, that is a step too far for most people even to consider. But moving from piety in Islam to piety in Christianity? That is a little step of great potential.
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Bringing the "good news" (gospel) of Jesus Christ to others is supposed to be a fundamental obligation of Christians. They should thus devoutly resolve to do everything in their power to win the Arab world, and all the rest of the Moslem world, to Christianity.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,775. Only one more to 1776.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:57 AM

 
Please, Please Take Our Freedom Away! The daily Internet opinion poll on the website iWon.com today addressed plans by New York City to have police conduct "random searches" of bags carried by people trying to enter the subway system. People who refuse to be searched would be refused the right to ride a subway system they pay for twice, once in fares and once in taxes that subsidize the service.
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The results so far this morning are:

What do you think of random searches on commuters to prevent and deter terrorism on mass transit systems?

49% - A minor and necessary inconvenience
31% - A nuisance, but still necessary
4% - An unnecessary exercise
9% - A violation of my civil liberties
2% - None of the above
4% - I'm not sure

How many searches does New York plan to conduct? What conceivable good would a small number of such searches do? If a great many searches are to be conducted, how many would be necessary to accomplish so much as one thing, and how much would that interfere with the functioning of "rapid transit"?
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About.com says:

The New York City subway consists of 468 stations, 277 of them [ ] underground.... Approximately 4.5 million passengers ride the subway daily, totalling 1.384 billion rides in 2003.

An op-ed piece in today's rightwing New York Post ridicules random searches. Michelle Malkin writes:

"Random," of course, is a synonym for blind. And we all know what it means when you put blind bureaucrats in charge of homeland security: Grannies and toddlers, prepare to be on heightened grope alert.

Malkin's quarrel is not with searches but with randomness. She wants racial profiling! Don't bother innocent Amuricans. Focus on them durned Ayrabs! Her point might be more persuasive were she not a Jewess — oh, so sorry! -ess endings are forbidden among the "politically correct", even conservatives! (By the way, for people outside New York, "Jew" is not a dirty word. I actually heard some black guy on TV recently equating "Jew" with "nigger" as rude words he shies away from! But I don't want to seem condescending. In seventh grade, in Little Silver, NJ, I had to ask a female Jewish friend if "Jew" was an insult. She informed me that it was not, just descriptive, and something Jews are ordinarily happy to be called.)
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Michelle Malkin wants Ayrabs to be watched like hawks (hmm; that expression is grammatically vague, isn't it? It implies a predicate: "... like hawks watch fieldmice" or such), but 'decent folk' to be let alone.
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How often in the course of a given day are Ayrabs to be hassled? Once for every 10 Ayrabs or Pakis? Twice a day for each and every last one of them durned furriners? 100 times a day until they leave this country and go back where the f**k they came from?
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Would Michelle Malkin and all other Jews in this country like to be singled out for such treatment because the country they can be presumed to be loyal to, Israel, is the be-all and end-all of the troubles we have with the Arab world, the very cause of 9/11? I suspect they would not. We could require them to wear some identifying mark so we can know whom to search, say, a yellow star of David. Oops, that's been done. To death.
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So let's shift everything onto Ayrabs, and require them, and all them other Mohammedamns to wear a star and crescent so us reggaler Amuricans is able to ID the bastids fer sher, and leave good ole Amuricans alone!
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Fareed Zakaria, editor of the international edition of Newsweek, was on Comedy Central's Daily Show last nite. He's a frequent guest whose insights (Jewish-)host Jon Stewart values, even tho Zakaria wrote one of the all-time stupidest and most dishonest pieces of crap about the Middle East I ever read, an extended 'analysis' of the reasons Arabs hate us that appeared in Newsweek on October 15, 2001, a mere month after the 9/11 attacks. Here is a typical passage:

Now we get to Israel. It is obviously one of the central and most charged problems in the region. But it is a problem to which we cannot offer the Arab world support for its solution — the extinction of the state. We cannot in any way weaken our commitment to the existence and health of Israel. Similarly, we cannot abandon our policy of containing Saddam Hussein. He is building weapons of mass destruction.

(I pass over the oft-disproved bulls**t about Saddam having been "building weapons of mass destruction" — for this purpose only.)
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No, we can't dissolve the State of Israel and merge it into a secular Palestine, in which no one, of any group, is treated better than anyone else, of any other group, because, hmm, because, well, because — I don't know. Why the hell can't we?
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No, Zakaria's explanation for why Arabs hate us is not that we kill them by the truckload, back Israel's crimes to the hilt, slaughter Arab children in decades of one-sided war against Iraq thru two wars and a decade of "sanctions" that starved the poor and kept medicine from the sick. No, Arabs hate us because we are a success and they are failures! Of course that's why they hate us-in-particular.
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They don't, as Usama bin Laden pointed out, hate nor attack Sweden, another very successful and very rich country, because it is free. They attack us because we are rich and free. Of course they do. Right. Would you like to buy a bridge?
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Mr. Zakaria was born in India, and is one of those people with Moslem-sounding names who pass as Moslem in the non-Moslem U.S. but are perhaps so alienated from their roots — if indeed they have any Moslem roots and are not just misidentified — that they cozy up to the powers that be in this non-Moslem and anti-Moslem society by telling us what we want to hear.
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He did, however, remark, as I have remarked on various occasions, that the problem with the Moslem world is that it doesn't have a Pope to guide the faithful as to what Islam does and does not permit, morally.
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Zakaria then compared Islam instead to Protestantism, in which no central authority controls and provides certain guidance as to doctrine, but in which every sect and would-be leader sets itself/himself/herself up as an authority and competes for adherents.
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Zakaria himself used the example of Jerry Falwell, who was not consecrated by some hierarchy to speak for Chistians but set himself up as an authority whom all should heed, and some people (were so stupid as to) heed him.
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The world is so much simpler if you just accept that there is no reason behind why we are here, no purpose as to "what we were put here for". No God. No afterlife. No supernatural force looking out for us, waiting for us to trip up so s/He can send us into eternal damnation, or, alternatively, guiding our hand to righteousness. There's no "God on our side" — and against the other side. We don't have 100 lives, or 1,000 lives in which to achieve unity with the divine. We live only one, all-too-short life, and satisfactions come from being as good to others as we wish they would be good to us.
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Religion has value only to the extent it has nobility and wisdom. When religion tells us to kill in the name of God, we should have the good sense to back off and say openly, aloud and without shame: "That's just crazy!" And not all wisdom depends on "God".
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Tennessee Williams, the gay American playwright, gave us "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers." Is that a Christian phenomenon only? Or is kindness to strangers equally a requirement of ancient Judaism, medieval Islam, and secular humanism?
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You just plain don't need religion of any kind to be a good person, tho the empire-builders of religious sects want you to believe that it is not enuf to be good; you must be reverent, pious, "holy", and seek a relationship with God that only they, and the institutions they created or champion, can serve as go-between — indispensable interlocutor — between you and God.
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Further, it is not enuf to be good and in reverential communion with God. You must also abide by certain ridiculous rules and rituals. You cannot eat spare ribs (Judaism and Islam), because some ancient fool said that the hog is unholy, not just externally unclean for wallowing in mud to suppress skin parasites. You cannot eat a cheeseburger (Judaism), because eating meat and dairy at the same time is forbidden. Why on Earth would anybody in his right mind prohibit any such thing? Well, no one in his right mind would prohibit any such thing, but a lot of loons do.
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If once you accept that life is short and all too often filled with hardship and pain, too little filled with pleasure and satisfaction, you can eat spare ribs, and cheeseburgers, and bacon cheeseburgers any day of the week; eat meat on Friday; drink alcohol (in healthful moderation); play around, mutually respectfully, with someone, of either gender (according to your true orientation), sexually. You don't need some book or some pretentious, dirty-minded, slave-to-guilt fool to tell you right from wrong — as tho any of them has the slightest idea of right and wrong, in intellectually defensible terms.
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All you need is a little bit of common sense and respect for others. The Golden Rule is pretty near universal across planet Earth, among all cultures, races, and places, tho the particular formulation, in words, may differ.
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In Christianity, the Golden Rule is a positive duty, not just to abstain from doing harm but affirmatively to do good. In other faiths, the formulation is ordinarily in the negative, that one has a duty not to hurt others.
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A New York Baha'i website sets forth these formulations of the Golden Rule from nine religions, in this sequence (oldest to newest):

Hinduism: "This is the sum of duty: do naught to others that which if done to thee would cause pain."

Judaism: "What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow men. That is the entire law; all the rest is commentary."

Zoroastrianism: "That nature only is good when it shall not do unto another whatever is not good for its own self."

Buddhism: "Hurt not others with that which pains yourself."

Taoism: "The sage has no interests of his own, but regards the interests of the people as his own. He is kind to the kind, he is also kind to the unkind; for virtue is kind."

Christianity: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"

Islam: "No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself."

Sikhism: "Precious like jewels are the minds of all. To hurt them is not at all good. If thou desirest thy Beloved, then, hurt thou not anyone's heart."

Baha'i: "Blessed is he who preferreth his brother before himself."

At end, however, it's just common decency, which is a form of common sense.
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If only we would do the right thing, we wouldn't be facing hostility from 200 million Arabs and a billion Moslems. But we won't. We will fite to the last breath against doing the right thing. And if the war effort requires us to throw our civil liberties away and let the government treat us all as potential terrorists, we will do that gladly. No sacrifice is too great for Israel.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:09 AM

 
London, Again. There were four "attempted bombings" in London, media here report. Only one person was injured this time, but nerves were rattled nonetheless. The term "attempted" was affixed to "bombings" because not all the bombs went off. Those that did were not, however, "attempted" but actual, so "attempted" is an annoying manipulation of language plainly designed to reduce concern.
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Two Blairs, one the police commissioner (Ian), the other the Prime Minister (Tony), had different takes on the motive behind the blasts:

"Clearly the intention must have been to kill," Ian Blair told a news conference. "You don't do this with any other intention." * * * "We can't minimize incidents such as this," [Tony Blair] said at a joint news conference with the Australian prime minister at No. 10 Downing St. "They're done to scare people, to frighten them and make them worried."

If "we can't minimize incidents such as this", why call them "attempted" bombings?
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And if blasts can worry people without killing them, is that enuf to make them think that maybe they should change the policies that are bringing bombs to Britain?
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Sad to say, the first bombings, two weeks ago, do seem to have been suicide blasts, contrary to what was first believed. It's tragic that some young people, who have unnumbered reasons to live, are so maddened by injustice and religious fanaticism that they kill themselves to kill others.
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Rodney King famously asked, "Can't we all just get along?" No, I'm afraid we can't, not as long as religious fanatics of one type demand the right to dispossess people who have lived in Palestine for hundreds or thousands of years because God Himself "gave" them that land, and religious fanatics of another type insist that everyone must believe only one thing, and anyone who dissents must be killed.
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Religious tolerance is a rare and precious thing.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,771.) Will media take note when the number rises to 1776?
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:01 PM

 
Stiffing "Spics". George Bush has nominated yet another WASP to the Supreme Court — just what we (don't) need.
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Hispanics are now the largest minority in the Nation, but there has never, in the entire history of this Republic, been so much as a single Latino justice on the Supreme Court. Dubya had the chance to remedy that injustice, but chose not to.
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Instead, he chose a white, heterosexual, Anglo-Saxon, (presumably) Protestant(?) man to fill a seat vacated by a white, heterosexual, Irish(, Catholic? — religious affiliation is a closely guarded secret nowadays, so it is impossible to know it unless someone has publicly stated a religious preference — and why is that, in this day of supposed religious tolerance, that people hide their affiliation?; it's contemptible) woman. The Republican Party has shown yet again, if any proof were needed after all these years, that it is indeed the party of WASPS — but nobody else.
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How many more generations must Hispanics wait until some President puts a Latino on the Supreme Court? In an era when the name of the second-largest city in the Nation is "Los Angeles" and the largest minority is Hispanic, it is grotesque that not so much as one ninth of the Supreme Court is to be occupied by a Latino. Instead, Jews, a trivial 2% of the population — as against some 14% for Hispanics — have two seats on the Supreme Court: 22% of the total and 40% of a voting majority. Why is that?
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Hispanics should pull out all stops to demand that the Senate reject yet another WASP and instead put a Latino on the Supreme Court. It is their due, and would give to us decisions that more people can accept as reflecting the genuine will of the people — despite the fact that 5 unelected individuals can say what "the law" is for 300 million people, against their will!
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We stupidly call this judicial dictatorship "democracy". It is no such thing.
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When "democracy" systematically excludes Latins, generation after generation, everyone must be concerned that the high-handed dictates of a uniformly Anglo Supreme Court might not be accepted by the people but be resisted by all means necessary, including violence.
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Where, however, would trivial violence get us? There is no mechanism in the Constitution (at present) by which Congress (with or without the President) can override a Supreme Court decision, tho there should be. So how are we to undo the judicial dictatorship into which this miserable excuse for a democracy has fallen?
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Latin Americans know that sometimes only revolution can make a needed change. So they may lead us to a new way of ousting dictators: the rope. It would be salutary to our "democracy" for a mob to storm the Supreme Court building, grab all the "justices", drag them out by the scruff of their necks, put ropes around all those necks, toss the loose end of those ropes over stout limbs of nearby trees or strong lite stanchions, then hoist those arrogant scumbags into the air, slowly, so they dance the dance of their death and of our liberation — at the end of their rope.
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If the members of the Supreme Court don't want to be hanged, every last member without distinction (for they all deserve to die, some for some decisions, others for others), they had better stop trying to rewrite the Constitution and overrule elected officials.
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Democracy requires not just that the will of the people be done but also that those who would void the will of the people be killed. To quote the state motto of Virginia, "Sic semper tyrannis."
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,769.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:24 AM

 
Briefs. (1, of 4) Losing Internet Freedom.
The Associated Press reported July 6th (tho I saw this report hilited only today):

Internet users worried about spyware and adware are shunning specific Web sites, avoiding file-sharing networks, even switching browsers.

Many have also stopped opening e-mail attachments without first making sure they are safe, the Pew Internet and American Life Project said in a study issued Wednesday.

"People are scaling back on some Internet activities," said Susannah Fox, the study's main author. "People are feeling less adventurous, less free to do whatever they want to do online." * * *

According to Pew, 48 percent of adult Internet users in the United States have stopped visiting specific Web sites that they fear might be harboring unwanted programs.

Twenty-five percent stopped using file-sharing software, which often comes bundled with adware. Rogue programs can also disguise themselves as songs or movie files awaiting download on file-sharing networks.

Eighteen percent of U.S. adult Internet users have started using Mozilla Firefox or another alternative to Internet Explorer.

In addition, 81 percent have become more cautious about e-mail attachments, a common way for spreading viruses, though rare for spyware or adware.

All told, 91 percent have made at least one behavioral change.

Question: Why should individuals have to protect themselves from the slimeballs who infest the Internet? Where is government?
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(2) Battle over the Thermostat. Also on July 6th, hilited today, CNN/Money reported:

As summer temperatures rise and air conditioners get turned on, chilly office temperatures can lead to tiffs in the workplace * * * From bringing flannel pajamas to the office to keeping space heaters running by their desks [!!], workers are finding numerous ways to battle the cool temperatures indoors this summer * * * When office temperatures were turned up from 68 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit, typing errors fell 44 percent and overall typing output rose 150 percent .... That translates into about an extra $2 per worker in productivity when temperatures are turned up[.]

Why on Earth are indoor spaces of this country too cold in the summer and too hot in the winter?
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I keep having to complain in my favorite bar that the room is too cold. That place sells primarily very cold beer (the most common drink) and iced mixed drinks, not hot buttered rum, coffee, or tea. Why would management want to keep the room so cold that people can't face the thought of holding a cold drink in their hands?
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(3) Honoring India. The Washington Post reported today that President Bush last nite hosted only his "5th Grand Dinner", a 134-guest state White House affair for India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

"This, of course, is the largest democracy on the face of the Earth," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld explained to reporters[.]

Well, yes and no. India is indeed technically a democracy, but it's a damned poor exemplar of a democracy. Its so-called "federal" government regularly takes over state governments that irritate it and imposes federal rule. Our federal government wouldn't dare even to try that.
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And India is not remotely a social democracy, but is wracked by caste discrimination, despite lip-service attempts to "lift" the "backward castes".
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It is, however, good for the U.S. to encourage India to evolve in our direction, and there has been very large growth in our bilateral relationship in the past decade. Alas, increased economic interchange has left Americans holding the short end of the stick (an odd but expressive phrase). India-based software engineers and other high-tech professionals (e.g., call-center tech support people) are displacing Americans in significant numbers, and that trend is almost certain to worsen, since India's per capita income is 1/10 ours.
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India is so large that transfers of wealth from the U.S. to India cannot make a significant dent in India's grotesque poverty. There are still people starving to death in that benighted country. If an Indian gets sick, loses his job, and has no family to fall back on, he is likely to die, because there's no "social safety net".
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Still, it's a good idea to draw India ever closer to our civilization.
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Can you imagine? Dubya is actually doing something right!
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(4) Confirmation. A New York-based Spaniard of my acquaintance agrees that there has been much more attention given in the U.S. to the London subway and bus bombing than there was to the much more deadly Madrid train bombing of March 2004, as I discuss in the entry to this blog immediately below. Maybe we're both wrong. I don't think so.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,769.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:20 PM