The Expansionist
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Raise New Orleans, Move It, or Abandon It. Hurricane Katrina has plunged 80% of New Orleans under water because the city had over the past several decades sunk to some 7 feet below sea level. A disaster such as that which today befell the city was bound to happen sooner or later. It turned out to be sooner.
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If engineers cannot figure a way to raise New Orleans permanently and significantly above sea level, the low portions should be abandoned, forever. No reconstruction below sea level should be permitted, period.
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I have very limited sympathy for the people who refused the "mandatory evacuation". It wasn't a "recommended evacuation". It was a "mandatory evacuation". Everyone in the city was told in no uncertain terms to get the hell out of the city, and if they couldn't do so, to go to the Superdome. From there, the various governments responsible for emergency preparedness should have evacuated the poor. No such massive government assistance was forthcoming, and poor people used the absence of such help as an excuse to stay put. Now the Nation is being asked required, actually to save the people of New Orleans from their own stupidity and obstinacy, and I for one resent it.
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There's an old joke about an elderly man who refused a mandatory evacuation in the face of an approaching storm. A local rescue team came by in a bus and offered to take him to higher ground. He replied that he wasn't afraid: God would save him. The waters flooded the first floor of his house, and he fled to the second. A rescue team swung by in a boat and insisted he come with them. He refused, insisting that God would save him. The waters rose even higher, and he fled to his rooftop. A rescue team hovered overhead in a helicopter and lowered a powerful man in a harness to take him to safety, but he refused, adamant that God would save him. And then the waters rose over the peak of his roof and drowned him. On arriving in Heaven, he saw God and asked why, despite his infinite trust and faith, He didn't save him. God said, "I sent you a bus, I sent you a boat, I sent you a helicopter...."
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We're not God, and it's not up to us to keep trying to save people from their own obstinate stupidity. If the people of Louisiana want to rebuild New Orleans where it is, below sea level, the rest of the Nation should say, "Do what you want, but we won't lift so much as one little finger to save you from the next hurricane" and stick to that resolve. After all, scientists keep telling us that global warming is bound to raise sea levels even higher, so with every passing year, New Orleans falls farther and farther below sea level. When do we give up and get out?
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New Orleans is not Venice, another city perennially on the edge of drowning. N.O. is a relatively old city by U.S. standards, and has its tourist attractions. But it is not a World Heritage Site, an irreplaceable human treasure. We have the technology to move individual important buildings to high ground, just as we moved Abu Simbel in Egypt from the rising waters of Lake Nasser. If we do not, however, have the technology to raise the entire city of New Orleans, then let's move what we can and let the rest sink beneath the sea.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,880.)
Monday, August 29, 2005
Treasonous Farmers. The public opinion survey on iWon.com today says:
Earlier this month, Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman secured a deal for his state to export $17 million in agricultural goods to communist Cuba, starting with the first U.S. shipment of great northern beans to the island since Fidel Castro came to power in 1959. A decades-old U.S. embargo severely limits travel and trade with Cuba, but an exception created in 2000 allows food and agricultural products to be sold on a cash-only basis. (AP)
So, farmers are eager to sell us out to bolster Cuba's Communist regime, are they? I am so tired of farmers misusing the rest of us. They are the only category of worker that is paid to do jobs they can't do profitably on their own. Would-be writers, actors, artists, and others who would prefer to work at something they can't make a living at don't get government subsidies so they can do what they want rather than what they can support themselves in. Why are farmers specially indulged?
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If you can't make a living at farming, do something else, and let people who can make money in agriculture do so, without stealing from the pocket of the American taxpayer. Why should low-paid Americans who live in bad urban neighborhoods have to ship off money to Nebraska, especially now that we see that Nebraskan farmers are active traitors?
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Fidel Castro is a major enemy of the United States, but shoring up his regime doesn't trouble Nebraska's farmer-thieves, who already steal from urban taxpayers. It's time to cut off all subsidies to farmers and hold them to the same standards of loyalty as everyone else. Would Nebraska's farmers have sent food to Nazi Germany? Probably so, had it not been outlawed. Fidel Castro is no more a friend of the United States today than was Adolf Hitler in the 1940s or Usama bin Laden today. Anyone who would trade with Castro, Hitler, or bin Laden is a contemptible traitor, and should be treated as such.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,877.)
Sunday, August 28, 2005
Of Backbone and Skin.
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(1) Standing Up to the Feds. A number of states have told the Federal Government that they're mad as hell and they're not going to take it anymore. The particular cause of this multistate rebellion is the declared intention of the Federal Government to close down hosts of military bases (especially but not solely in Blue States) and remove the equipment that state National Guard units use in their work to defend not just the Nation from invasion or in military action abroad but in fulfilling their responsibilities to their own area. Governor Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania
reacted with defiance.
"Unless they get the (federal court) decision overturned, no one is going anywhere," the Democratic governor said in a statement posted to his Web site.
"If someone showed up tomorrow from the federal government and said 'give us the planes', as the Commander in Chief of the 111th, my answer would be 'no' and we'd hand them [U.S. District Court] Judge (John) Padova's order."
Rendell has explained that the bulk of the National Guard's work is in local emergencies and homeland security.
The governor commands the unit's activities 90 percent of the time, as it responds to floods, errant planes and other emergencies, Rendell said. Federal officials command the Guard only when it is activated for missions such as the war in Iraq.
How are we safer with fewer military bases? Otis Air Force Base in Massachusetts is one of the bases from which aircraft were scrambled on 9/11. If it is closed, who will be closer? How far apart can bases be and still provide us good security in this day of local attacks?
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Current military thinking seems to be that all challenges will originate from thousands of miles away and can be headed off far from our shores. That's not what happened on 9/11. The earlier model was that we need to have military units and trained men and materiel in place all over the country, because emergencies can arise anywhere at any time, without warning and without any ability to intercept a force far from our borders. Which view is more sensible?
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Communist China is building a strong submarine force, and many military observers believes China is preparing for war against the United States, at least in the Taiwan Strait when it chooses to conquer Taiwan, and possibly as part of its aspirations to replace the U.S. as at least the dominant power in the Asia-West Pacific region and possibly on planet Earth. (After all, they think, China has more than four times as many people as the U.S. Why shouldn't it be dominant over so relatively small a country?)
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If Chinese or any other enemy attempts to land sabotage units or infiltrate terrorists onto our shores by landing in a remote part of our huge coastline, who will be there to stop them? How much of our coastline is patrolled. Now? In the future?
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At present, China is not in cahoots with al-Qaeda or other anti-U.S. terrorist organizations. Surely that could change. Is it really so hard to envision Communist China landing a team of suicide bombers and a mid-size Japanese car on some secluded beach within a couple of hours' driving time of Los Angeles with a suitcase-sized nuclear weapon in the trunk? China has nuclear weapons technology and submarines. You do the math. L.A., San Fran, Seattle, Silicon Valley all front on the Pacific Ocean, right across from China. But if such targets were regarded as too obvious, Chinese submarines traveling across the Indian Ocean could pick up terrorists from the Middle East and proceed to attack New York, Boston's complex of high-tech educational institutions and laboratories, even Washington, which is a short drive from quiet beaches in Delaware. Am I the only one thinking such things? Or are Chinese Communists and Islamist terrorists thinking similar thoughts?
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The old model of national defense, that every part of the Nation (but especially our shores) must be within easy reach of military force, is correct. The newer model that we can rely upon intercepting threats thousands of miles away is just plain wrong.
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So I am very pleased that governors and other state representatives are fiting the needless base closings. The claim is that these closings will save some $38 billion over 20 years. Think about that: that's $1.9 billion a year.
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It is almost impossible to find a simple statement of the size of the Federal budget in dollars. You can find charts, that allow you to approximate, but a simple statement, "The total Federal budget for fiscal year 2006 is $______" is apparently information you are not to know, because it is carefully concealed on the several websites that purport to tell you about it. You can get a breakdown by department (Defense: around $475.4 billion), but you have to guess from a chart as to total size: about $2.3 TRILLION, roughly 20% of the Nation's economy. As a proportion of the Defense budget, $1.9 billion is less than 4/10 of 1%! Of the entire Federal Budget, 1.9 billion is 1/1,210th. Stated another way around, there are about 300 million Americans today. $1.9 billion is $6.33 per person for an entire year, and that is not distributed evenly but is slightly shifted toward the more prosperous.
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The "savings", even if not entirely illusory, would not begin right away, because closing down bases is expensive and takes time, as much as three years in some cases. I am not persuaded that the base closings now proposed make the slightest bit of sense, any way you look at it. At a time when we are more aggressively engaged with the world than ever before, to be closing down military bases seems completely inconsistent with our goals and needs.
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In any event, the revolt occasioned by the base-closing recommendations could prove salutary if states say, "No", and demand that the National Guard, which is a state militia, is a state responsibility over which states have authority, and demand that Defense moneys which are taken from the people of all the states be disributed in some rational way among the states.
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(2) Nonsense About Tanning. A study by some American 'scientists' claims, according to a summary at iWon.com, that
anywhere from 25-50% of people catching rays at the beach may actually be addicted to tanning. After interviewing 145 beachgoers, U.S. researchers found that a significant portion met a series of addiction criteria traditionally used to diagnose alcoholism and other substance use disorders.
A Reuters story summarizing the findings shows the flimsiness of the assertion.
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This country has got to stop calling everything people like to do and do regularly "addiction". That trivializes real addictions and tries to push onto people guilts for things they enjoy. The Puritans who founded parts of what became this country are still having negative effects upon our culture. Sometimes it's good, in both the moral and health senses, to do what gives us pleasure, and we should have the good sense to tell bluenoses who see "addiction" in everything to shut the hell up.
Thursday, August 25, 2005
Of "Tantrums", "Clashes of Civilizations" and Simple Bullpucky. The Radical Right is trying to foment war hysteria about Iran, all the while downplaying and trivializing the danger we face from North Korea.
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Yesterday, the New York Post published a major opinion piece by Amir Taheri (see yesterday's blog entry, below) that tried to worry us about Iran's nuclear ambitions, as yet unrealized, by claiming that Iran anticipates rallying all of Islam (a billion people) under its banner to unite the planet under its "only True Faith" that is, that Iran hopes to conquer the world, including the United States, and subject everyone to radical Islam, this despite the fact that Iran has neither so much as a single nuclear device nor a single rocket capable of reaching the U.S., and has a military that is only a fraction the size of ours, with nothing like the technological sophistication of ours.
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Today, by contrast, an opinion piece by Jim Hoagland in the same rightwing newspaper, the New York Post, trivializes the danger we face from North Korea, a country that has both working nuclear weapons and long-range missiles:
[Condoleezza Rice's State Department] has breathed new life into international efforts to manage North Korea's nuclear-weapons tantrum.
Think about this.
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On successive days, the Post tried first to worry us about Iran and then make us discount even the possibility that North Korea could be a danger to us.
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On Wednesday, Amir Taheri warned us that feckless, backward Iran whose main language is spoken by no other country and whose minor languages are spoken only by countries even more backward than it is; which is not part of the Arab world and has no other kind of automatic "in" with any other country on Earth will lead a worldwide "clash of civilizations" in which its nuclear program would contribute mightily to bringing the U.S. low within 20 years. Two and a half years ago, worries about a nonexistent nuclear-weapons program by Saddam Hussein were used to justify a massive, murderous invasion of a country 7,000 miles from our shores that had never attacked us and, as it turns out, had neither plans to attack nor the slightest ability to reach us, since it had no intercontinental ballistic missiles, no long-range aircraft, no missile-launching submarines, no aircraft carriers, no vehicle of any kind with which to carry out an attack.
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On Thursday, Jim Hoagland tells us not to worry about North Korea, even tho North Korea is said by our own experts actually to have (a) nuclear weapons and (b) missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads at least as far as Hawaii and possibly also the U.S. West Coast, to insignificant little places like the Nation's second-largest metropolis, Los Angeles (17 million people), and high-tech centers in Silicon Valley and Seattle. But that doesn't worry the Post. North Korea is only having a "tantrum". It is not an "imminent threat", as Iraq was said to be 2½ years ago and Iran is now being set up to seem.
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North Korea's bizarre and unpredictable dictator, Kim Jong Il, recently proclaimed that he might launch a pre-emptive first strike against the United States if he felt his regime was in danger. That sounds like an imminent threat to me. Why doesn't the Radical Right see North Korea as an "imminent threat"? And why does all the war talk we now hear concern Iran, not North Korea?
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The answer, dear reader, is all too simple: Iran is near Israel. North Korea is very far from Israel. North Korea can kill only Americans. It can't kill Israelis. That is the be-all and end-all of why the Radical Right is trying to drum up war fever against Iran but couldn't care less about North Korea: because the Radical Right is actively disloyal to the United States. They are major, furiously busy agents of a foreign power, not faithful Americans at all.
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Oh, they'll use patriotic rhetoric to mislead us, but they don't care a thing about the United States, only about Israel. So a country that actually has nuclear weapons and the means to carry them to our shores is only having a "nuclear-weapons tantrum", but countries in the Middle East that do not have either a single nuclear weapon nor any means to rain them down upon the United States are 'threats' that 'must be dealt with'.
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Every time you hear anyone describe Iran, Iraq, or any other Middle Eastern country as a 'threat', ask yourself, "A threat to whom?" If the answer comes back "Israel", know that you are being asked to kill for Zionism, not for the United States, by people whose first loyalty nay, only loyalty is to Israel. And if you think the war in Iraq has produced more problems than it has fixed, multiply that by at least 5 to get a sense of how costly a war against Iran would be. Multiply by 30 or 50, however, to get an idea of how costly to this country, not Israel, refusing to deal with North Korea could prove.
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Given a choice, I would much rather see Jerusalem incinerated than Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, or Seattle. Wouldn't you? It's not even remotely a close call for me. I don't give a damn about Israel. I'm an American.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,873.)
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Murderous Hypocrisy. Two items from the news make plain once again that the guardians of religion are very selective about which features of their religion they should guard.
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Pat Robertson, a supposed Christian conservative, has called for the assassination of a democratically elected leader of a sovereign nation in this Hemisphere. Since when are Christians allowed to commit murder?
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CBS News on Logo, Viacom's new "lesbigay" cable channel, reported last nite that in another area of the world, Iran, supposed moral leaders have executed gay men. The excuse given was that they had committed rape, but CBS's take is that they were killed for being homosexual. Islam is traditionally tolerant of homosexuality, but the current leaders of lunatic Islam don't seem to know that tradition.
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Pat Robertson must admire Iran's current leaders, and maybe Radical Rightwing Christian 'conservatives' of his ilk can do something to head off a grave conflict that the newly installed President of Iran is eager to engage in.
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According to the New York Post's frequent contributor Amir Taheri, an expatriate Iranian, Iran's new Islamist president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has presented a 7,000-word document setting forth his goals.
The document states that the region is heading for a "clash of civilizations" in which the Islamic Republic represents Islam while the United States carries the banner of a West that has forgotten God.
The document calls the United States "the hegemon" and asserts that the Bush plan for the Greater Middle East is a device to slow down the decline of the United States as a superpower: "Despite its pharaonic roars . . . the hegemon is in its last throes." [Hmm. I thought the Iraqi insurgency was in its "last throes".]
The United States, Ahmadinejad's manifesto explains, is a "sunset" (ofuli) power while the Islamic Republic is a "sunrise" (tolu'ee) one. America will crumble because it is based on a system that produces "endless material needs" which lead into "the desert of lust" where men are handed over to Satan. The Islamic Republic is going to win because it has God on its side. The Americans may "mock the divine system" in Iran. But Islamic Iran is the model for the future of mankind. * * *
The goal of the "Islamic pole" [of a multipolar world] would be to unite the world under the banner of Islam as the "final Divine message" and "the only True Faith."
"Iran Prez: Democracy? Never!", column by Amir Taheri in the New York Post, August 24, 2005
Pat Robertson probably thinks that Christianity is "the only True Faith", so on this point the two forces, Iranian Islamism and conservative Christianity, might not be able to agree. But perhaps they can agree on enuf other points, from abortion to homosexuality, to keep us from total (nuclear) war. And all it will require is the murder of twenty or thirty million homosexuals. Ain't religion wonderful?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,873.)
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
More Phony Accents. Matt Damon, an American actor from the Boston area, is affecting a BRITISH accent to play a GERMAN in the soon-to-be-released film The Brothers Grimm. Is everybody in Hollywood an idiot?
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Does moving from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Hollywood, California cut one's IQ catastrophically?
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Let's be clear here. Germans trying to speak English do so with a German accent, not a British accent. And when they are speaking in their own country, to other Germans, in German as they are supposed to be doing in this movie they have no accent. If this is an American film, it should be filmed with everybody speaking American English unless a given character is non-German, in which case each such character should be assigned suchever accent as his nationality mandates: a British accent only if he is British; Danish if he is Danish; Czech if s/he is Czech.
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You'd think that would be obvious, even to Hollywood. You'd be wrong.
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Every American actor or actress yes, I know that "actress" has, of late, become "politically incorrect", but, like In Living Color's Homey the Clown of old, I "don't play dat" who takes the role of a foreigner, of almost any nationality, ends up affecting a British accent. Have they no pride in this greatest of all countries, ever?
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There are, it would seem, only two types of people on this entire planet: Americans and everybody else. Americans speak with an American accent (correctly). All foreigners speak with a British accent (defectively).
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As Ed McMahon might say in a Carson riff, "I did not know that!"
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I thought that Germans spoke with a German accent, Frenchmen spoke with a French accent, ancient Greeks would be expected to speak with a modern-Greek accent, ancient Romans would be expected to speak with an Italian accent, and anyone from an unfamiliar speech community wouldn't speak with any accent whatsoever but would speak to us normally as he would be perceived to speak normally in his own language, since any depiction of him speaking with his peers in his own country would be designed to give us insight into the person and culture from within, not without. But that doesn't always happen.
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Sometimes it does, or at least used to. There is a 1940 James Stewart film, The Shop Around the Corner, that ranks among Time magazine's 100 films of all time. It is set in pre-World War II Budapest, Hungary (Note: the very next year, Hungary became a military ally of Hitler, a fact few Americans today are aware of). In 1940, however, Budapest was a quaint Central European backwater where an innocent romance could be set. And so we were allowed to see Hungarians as they saw themselves: with no accent. James Stewart and his eventual (tho initially concealed) love interest, Margaret Sullavan, spoke perfect American English, since their characters would have spoken perfect Hungarian and we, as viewers of their life as tho from within, would also have spoken perfect Hungarian. Thus, we hear perfect English. That's the way language should work: accents only BETWEEN cultures, not WITHIN cultures. And even then, the accent should be authentic to the culture in question: German accent for Germans, French for French, Russian for Russian. Not British for everyone.
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That's not the way the idiots who run Hollywood today operate. Dreamworks, an American company, produced Gladiator, starring Russell Crowe, an Australian. Joaquin Phoenix, an American playing a Roman emperor, affected a British accent. Why?
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ABC recently showed a miniseries entitled Rome, in which everybody spoke with a British accent, even tho there was no such thing as a British accent at the time the series took place. Why? The mere fact that this was an ABC/BBC co-production is no explanation. Why should the British partner dominate? ABC/Disney is much bigger than the BBC, and much richer. The United States is 5 times as populous as Britain. Why is American speech denigrated on American TV?
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Now Miramax, headquartered in New York City, has put out a movie about Germans in which two co-stars, one American and one Australian, speak with British accents. Why?
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It's got to stop.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,869.)
Monday, August 22, 2005
Saying No to Federal Dictation. The states of Connecticut and Utah one Blue State, one Red have both challenged the "No Child Left Behind" attempt to impose Federal standards on education, a state responsibility. "No Child Left Behind" is an appalling overreach into areas forbidden to the Federal Government. It is, as well, riddled with the notorious "unfunded mandates" that states and localities have tolerated for far too long. The Feds pass a law requiring states to do things, but then don't provide any money for them to do those things with! That's an outrage. It is even more outrageous when the Feds dare to invade an area of exclusive state jurisdiction like education, which the Constitution does not authorize the Federal Government to act in at all, and thus, as the Constitution works, forbids the Federal Government to act in. The Tenth and final Amendment of the Bill of Rights says plainly:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
That's very clear, isn't it? What the Federal Government is not authorized by the Constitution to do, it is forbidden to do. All powers not given to the Feds "are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people". That means directly or indirectly: what the Federal Government is forbidden to do directly, it may not do indirectly, as by compelling states to do things against their will. Otherwise, a prohibition on action would be easily sidestepped. For instance, we don't just forbid people to commit murder themselves. We also forbid them to hire someone to commit murder for them. We forbid both direct and indirect murder, and the Constitution forbids the Federal Government from asserting proscribed powers directly and indirectly.
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But the (temporary) officeholders now in charge of the Federal Government don't want any limit on the power they wield, so they ignore the express wording of the Constitution, all the while pretending to be "conservatives" and "strict constructionists" who bitch and moan about "activist judges" doing things the Constitution does not authorize. What about "activist Presidents" and "activist Congresses" that issue executive orders the Constitution forbids and pass "laws" that Congress is forbidden to write?
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The powers of Congress (and thus of the President, who enforces the laws properly passed by Congress) are enumerated in the Constitution, at Article I ONE! You don't have to read too far to find the list; it's in Article I! Section 8. (Hmm. Section 8: "'Section 8' is common U.S. slang for 'crazy', based on the U.S. military's Section 8 discharge for mentally unfit personnel." I'd say that allowing the Federal Government to ignore the Constitution's express enumeration of its powers and the reservation of all powers not enumerated to the states or the people instead is crazy. How appropriate.)
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Despite the Tenth Amendment and Article I, Section 8, Congress and the President keep passing "laws" they are forbidden to pass. They are not really laws, but merely acts of pretended legislation that are dictatorial abuse of the American people, who are supposed to be protected from abuse by our federal structure and the express provisions of the Constitution. But the Constitution is only words, and words are no match for a powerful, nearly all-powerful, Federal Government of 12.1 million people directly and indirectly involved in carrying out Federal mandates! That includes over 2 million direct Federal civilian employees and 1.4 million uniformed military personnel. I had no idea that the Federal Government was that big. Did you? The Congressional Budget Office("CBO") in 2001 confirmed this scale of overall employment. In fact, the following webpage shows it to be 13 million: http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?index=2864&sequence=0#part1. It gets worse. Both the CBO and the National Center for Policy Analysis ("NCPA") cite studies by Paul Light of the Brookings Institution as the source for their overall count. The NCPA says:
In addition to individuals who owe their employment directly to the federal government, the report suggests states still need to add about three million jobs by 2010 to meet Bush administration mandates in education and homeland security, although no such growth appears yet in the study. That would bring total federal-related employment to 20 million from 17 million, Light predicts.
So when the Feds say "Jump!", the states have tended, all too often, to ask "How high?" Maybe that is finally changing.
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The excuse that powergrabbing Feds have used for their ever-increasing stranglehold on society is that the "elastic clause", the last paragraph of Section 8, authorizes them to do anything they damned well please. But read the exact text of the "elastic clause".
[Finally, Congress is authorized] To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.
That is a far cry from authorization to ride roughshod over the states and the people. It grants Congress only authority to make laws in pursuance of "the foregoing powers" and any other power given to any other part of the Government, e.g., the President's power to make treaties. It does not say that powers not granted can simply be grabbed.
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The word "education" does not appear in the Constitution, for good reason: the Founders never intended that the Federal Government take over from states and localities responsibility for and power over education.
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The Federal Government was intended to do, basically, only those things that individual states could not do because more than one state was involved. The "United States" was, originally, much like the United Nations is today: a body to facilitate interactions among sovereign states, not a supergovernment entitled to dictate to the states and take away all their powers.
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The original Thirteen States were very jealous of their perquisites and were willing to allow the Federal Government to control only interstate matters, not matters that states could control within their own borders. That worked very well for a very long time. We should go back to that, and challenges to "No Child Left Behind" are a good place to start, to restore federalism to a country that is moving precipitously toward a unitary state with all the dangers to liberty intrinsic in a massive government being authorized to do anything it wants to anyone, anytime, no matter what the Constitution may say.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,868.)
Sunday, August 21, 2005
Kerry Still Doesn't "Get It". Senator John Kerry, miserably failed candidate for President, is still completely out of touch with what really concerns Americans. Speaking to a group of 750 Democratic state legislators attending the National Conference of State Legislatures in Seattle this past Friday:
Kerry said Democrats have an opportunity to rebuild nationally by simply addressing the concerns that affect people's daily lives energy, transportation, health care and security.
"We have to go out and fight for the real issues that make a difference in the lives of the American people and we don't need some great lurch to the right or lurch to the left or redefinition of the Democratic Party," the Massachusetts Democrat said. "The last thing America needs is a second Republican Party."
Conspicuously absent from Kerry's short list of what really concerns Americans are the powerful paired issues with which the Democrats could have blasted the Republicans out of the White House and their majority in both houses of Congress: debt and usury. The multimillionaire Kerry still just doesn't understand what life is like for working people. Apparently he doesn't even watch television, or if he does, just doesn't understand what he sees.
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Watch virtually any TV station on any nite of the week for more than two hours and you will see commercial after commercial after commercial for debt-consolidation loans and debt-reduction services. The extreme prevalence of such commercials practically shouts, for everyone in public policy to hear, that the people of the United States are drowning in debt, crushed by usurious interest rates! But Kerry doesn't hear any of it. The Democrats don't hear any of it. Nobody in public policy hears a word of it. Are they actually deaf? Or do they willfully ignore what they don't want to deal with?
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Do they all own stock in credit-card companies and banks? How else can we explain the refusal not failure: refusal of government to do anything at all about usury and the crushing debt burden that Americans suffer?
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As for those other issues Kerry mentioned, all of them subordinate in importance to the daily oppression at least 100 million Americans face with regard to consumer debt, energy costs (for gasoline and home heating) wouldn't mean much if people weren't paying hundreds of dollars a month just in interest to credit-card and other consumer-debt companies.
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"Transportation"? What does that mean? Most people provide their own transportation, via private car. Public transportation cannot compete with the convenience of the private automobile or SUV. You can't easily lug groceries or bulky items on a bus or train. If you have more than one person to transport, the higher costs of the private vehicle quickly drop below the costs of public transit, because it costs the same to drive two people as one, or five people as two. Public transportation makes no such adjustments. You don't have entire families traveling for one person's fare plus perhaps 2% for the extra energy required to move the extra weight. No, two passengers equals two fares; five passengers, five fares. Who can afford that? And public transportation doesn't run often enuf or late enuf to be really useful for anything but commuting to and from work. That's not likely to change.
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Mind you, it could change. We could perfectly well run vans half or a third the size and cost of regular buses, covering more routes with more frequent service for the same fuel cost as running one big bus, tho salary cost would be greater altho with a smaller vehicle, you'd have a wider selection of drivers as could bring labor costs down somewhat. But who's doing that? Some private transportation companies are, but darned few.
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"Security"? What does that mean, and how good a job is any government doing about that? There are entire neighborhoods in this country where you still, in this day and age, take your life in your hands to go half a block to a convenience store to get a quart of milk. Kids have been killed in their own bed by stray bullets from driveby shootings. Forget about terrorism from abroad. It's crime from the block that kills most American victims of violence, often from the people who should be most protective of them. And why? Because we have 200 million guns in this country, and when somebody loses his temper, instead of raving and punching, he gets a gun and blows people away.
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We don't need the Federal Government to take care of that. States are entrusted with the bulk of law enforcement, and states are doing a lousy job. Indeed, state legislators are responsible for mass lawlessness because the laws they write are insane. "Youthful offenders" can commit multiple murder and serve a few years in juvie! then be released into the general public and the record of their ever having killed anybody is permanently concealed from the public! Drug pushers ravage neighborhoods but are never executed. We play at drug enforcement and call it "war". Some war! Only one side dies.
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As for "health care", surely that is something the states don't have to wait on the Federal Government to do. States can enact their own universal programs. (Indeed, as I understand it, Canada's universal healthcare program is administered by the provinces, not their federal government, tho I'm not sure how that works.) There has simply developed in this country a mindset that it's up to "the Government" meaning the Federal Government to take care of this, and every other level of government is helpless. But other governments are not helpless.
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Some municipalities are embarking upon creating wireless Internet service for their entire geographic area free to everyone. We've got "free" education for kids paid for by the general taxpaying population. We can do what we want about healthcare, whenever we want, at whatever level we want. Surely, for instance, any small town could create its own health insurance group, to itself or with neighboring towns or the county government, to bring healthcare costs down to a manageable level, and cover the indigent or working poor from public funds if it wanted to. My city, Newark, has about 285,000 people. Couldn't that be made into a powerful group-insurance group? My state, New Jersey, has 8.7 million people. Surely that is a big enuf group to bring individual healthcare costs way down if it were constituted into a great big health-insurance "group".
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States and their creatures, municipalities and counties, have many powers they can use for the public good, if they will it. There's just a lack of will.
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Perhaps that's changing. Perhaps the one most important thing Kerry said is this:
"The states are now the laboratories, much more than before, because of the refusal of Washington to do what's important and necessary. You're forced to spend too much time cleaning up what Washington either messes up or leaves undone altogether."
Quite so. But the states have always been laboratories, and innovative state programs have always been watched by other states, and the Feds, to see what works and what doesn't. That's one of the strengths of federalism. You can have 50 different approaches all running at the same time, and compare and contrast
them as to costs and results. For instance, before the Federal Government addressed getting people off welfare, Wisconsin led the Nation in formulating and instituting a welfare-to-work program. Why hasn't any state instituted universal healthcare coverage?
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States have the power to solve big problems within their boundaries. They should stop being so timid, and start leading the way. We certainly aren't being led in the right direction by the Feds and if we wait for them to see the lite, the most enlitened areas of the Nation will forever be held back by the most benited.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,864.)
Friday, August 19, 2005
Scorched Earth in Gaza. The Israelis are doing exactly what I anticipated they would do: destroying the buildings in the Jewish settlements they are evacuating, so that Palestinians cannot occupy them and finally get some decent housing. That is inexcusably evil, but why would we expect anything else from Israel, the most evil country on Earth?
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Tho there are certainly some Palestinians who want every trace of the Jewish settlements destroyed, there are a great many Palestinians who have had decades of bad housing in wretched, overcrowded refugee camps, and they should have been offered decent housing in the newly Jew-free towns on Palestinian land. If the Palestinians were to decide, after unemotional and rational consideration, that they want to destroy such housing because it is ecologically inappropriate or for some other defensible reason, then the Palestinian Authority, with Israeli Government or U.S. aid, could itself destroy such housing. But Israel didn't give the Palestinians a choice. They destroyed housing built with American money (because everything in Israel is dependent upon American money) so that Arabs couldn't live well. That is detestable.
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Will they remove the debris, or leave it as a permanent stain on the landscape, and constant reminder of Israel's will to ravage anything they can't have? We'll see.
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Brilliant Ad Campaign. Have you noticed the preposterous but winning series of commercials for Kellogg's Raisin Bran Crunch and now also Honey Nut Crunch? These are the spots in which a young guy in an office cubical ("Johnson") is eating cereal at his desk when a supervisor ("Smith") tries to fire him, but the guy is unable to hear what Smith is saying because his cereal is too crunchy.
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In the first (not on the website) and second, the supervisor is alone when he tries to fires him. In the third, Smith brings a higher-level supervisor with him, who says that Smith has fired him 15 times but he keeps showing up. Why? Johnson hears nothing but crunching. The manager then says he understands him. He doesn't take no for an answer! and turns to the lower-level supervisor to say "Smith, be more like Johnson." In the fourth commercial (not yet on the website), there's a second guy sitting alongside Johnson, also eating cereal his intern! Smith reacts indignantly, and suggests sarcastically, 'Why don't you take my corner office while you're at it?', to which the manager responds that that's a good idea, it will give them more room!
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Commercial TV can be draining, especially now when there are so many ads, several times as many as there were 30 years ago. But brilliant commercials can briten one's day. Kudos to Kellogg's.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,862.)
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
Hell (Metorologically Speaking) Is Not Eternal. My area of the world (Newark, NJ, USA) has had horrible weather for many months. The winter was severe. Spring was subnormally cold, by 10 and more degrees Fahrenheit. Then all of a sudden we seemed to jump from June to August, and set new records, 101 or 102 degrees Fahrenheit a couple of days ago. No rain for 14 days or more, save one day when we had a rain so lite it did not reach the ground on my property but merely wetted the leaves of the oaks and evergreen that tower above.
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We're back to normal now, tho maybe a little below normal, as a matter of fact.
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People inclined to blame an oppressive heat wave on "global warming" are misled. Only days ago I saw reference in a news story to the actual, recorded increase in global temperatures that scientists have observed: about 1 degree Fahrenheit in a CENTURY!
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So when our local weather is 10, 15, even 20 degrees below normal, as it was here in Newark in May and June, or 10 or 20 degrees hotter than normal in July and August, that is not "global warming" but an aberration specific to a time and place that has no greater significance. There have always been "heat waves" and "cold spells". It is in the nature of the human creature to think that now is more important than then, and what we are experiencing now indicates how things will be in the future. That does not compute.
Now is now. Then was then. The future is the future. None of these indicates much of anything about any of the others, meteorologically speaking. When you are dealing with so trivial a difference in global temperature as one degree Fahrenheit, which is too small for most people to distinguish (one degree Celsius is almost 2 degrees Fahrenheit, and thus easier to perceive), conclusions are unreliable if drawn from data that may vary depending upon the accuracy of a given thermometer or even the eyesight of the person taking the reading! or his/her inclination to round UP or round DOWN.
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It is also in the nature of the human creature to think that now is more important than then, and distress now warrants special attention. It does not, scientifically, not when we're talking about long-term trends and the public policy adjustments we do or do not need to make.
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"Heat Wave" is the name of a great old Martha and the Vandellas Motown hit from 1963. It is not a forecast of catastrophic global warming.
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Gas-Guzzling Rich. It is insufficiently appreciated that the rich are driving up the price of gasoline that the poor and middle class have to pay. When the rich buy gas-guzzling huge SUV's, they use up far more than their fair share of gasoline, and cause gasoline producers to raise the price at the pump to accommodate increased demand. Do only the rich pay that higher price? No. Everybody has to pay the higher price that the gas-guzzling rich produce.
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How do we adjust this to arrive at something like fair pricing?
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Altho it would seem appropriate to hit all owners of gas-guzzling vehicles with the same high price, and exempt all vehicles that do not swill gasoline like a drunk chugs booze, the fact is that some poor people do need larger vehicles to transport large families. High gas prices victimize them as much as they do poor owners of economy cars.
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Still, there's got to be a way to adjust the price at the pump for vehicles according to their mileage, with exemptions downward for poor people who have to have a larger vehicle because of a larger number of people who need to be transported, not as a luxury, to go where they don't necessarily need to go, but as a necessity.
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How might this work?
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Everything is computerized now, at least in major enterprises. It would be very simple for a computerized price-adjusting mechanism to be attached to all gas pumps in major-brand gas stations all across the country. The model name of every vehicle sold in the U.S. could be preprogrammed into a price-adjusting database at every pump such that if you drive in with a little Saturn or Geo (my own old car brand) you get one price (lower) but if you drive in with a huge Cadillac Escalade, you get a much higher price. Any owner of a gas-guzzling SUV who is actually poor but needs the room for his or her large family would have an exemption card, with bar code, to present to the gas-station employee to qualify for a lower pump price.
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The Motor Vehicles agency for each state could issue exemptions upon presentation of appropriate documentation by applicants for vehicle registrations.
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Thus could we penalize the owners of Hummers and other preposterously gas-guzzling vehicles but reward the owners of fuel-efficient vehicles, and make some economic sense of the irrational disparities in wealth that the free market has produced. Let's do it!
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,854.)
Monday, August 15, 2005
Something About Pots and Kettles. I emailed the following letter to the editor of the New York Post today.
I INVOLUNTARILY laughed out loud and had to stop reading John Byrnes's silly defense of the indefensible Iraq war at this fatuous and hypocritical remark: Cindy Sheehan's dead son "helped overthrow and bring to justice a vicious dictator who will soon go on trial for the first of many counts of mass murder." Mass murder? How many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis has the United States killed in 15 years of war and sanctions against Iraq? Madeleine Albright acknowledged on CBS' 60 Minutes that half a million Iraqi children (567,000 to be more exact, according to the UN) had died as a result of sanctions as of May 1996. And the British scientific journal The Lancet published a study in October 2004 that suggests that 100,000 Iraqis have died as a direct result of the latest war. So what's the real total of Iraqis killed by the United States? We will never know because Saddam didn't want his people to know, the U.S. Government does not want our people to know, and the Iraqi government put in place by the U.S. does not want the Iraqi people to know, lest it be seen as a Quisling co-conspiring in mass Iraqi death. Only one thing is sure: the U.S. has killed far more Iraqis than Saddam ever did, and the chaos we produced has, according to The Lancet, made life for Iraqis 58 times as dangerous as it was under Saddam!
(Responsive to "A Mother's Loss", op-ed piece by John Byrnes in the New York Post, August 15, 2005)
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,853.).)
Saturday, August 13, 2005
Legal Sex Discrimination. A 28-year-old female teacher in Tennessee who had sex with a 13-year-old boy has been sentenced to nine months in jail:
she will be on supervised probation for the rest of an eight-year suspended sentence. The judge also ordered her to surrender her teaching certificate and said she would be registered as a child sex offender. The sentence prohibits her from profiting from the case and does not allow interviews.
How would a 28-year-old man who had sex with a 13-year-old girl have been treated? Michigan toughened its laws in April 2003:
Teachers and school administrators could face up to life in prison for having sex with a student under one of the new laws.
The measure would prohibit the practice as criminal sexual conduct, punishable by up to life in prison, even if the student was 16, the age at which a minor is judged capable of knowingly consenting to sex.
The conduct would be defined as first- through fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct, depending on the sex act involved and the age of the student. A first-degree charge is the most serious.
Plainly there is huge variation in sentencing from place to place. It seems to me that a very good case can be made that such crazy variation deprives people who are similarly situated of "the equal protection of the laws" required by the Fourteenth Amendment of the federal Constitution.
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Sexual abuse has, in this antisexual Republican age, become a focus of extreme alarmism and draconian legislation. Law professor Douglas A. Berman of Ohio State's Moritz Law School observes:
the broader story is the new social panic about sex offenders which is, like so many criminal justice developments, driven by headline-making anecdotes of horrible individual cases rather than by refined data-driven policy analysis.
You see, Berman reports, sex offenses had actually declined 40% from 1992-2000, before the recent legislative changes that made penalties for sex "crimes" far worse than for almost any other category of crime.
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Moreover, some of the laws are insanely at variance with our constitutional scheme. According to Save our TexSons:
it is our goal that any young man accused of a sex crime be allowed to offer a defense. The way the laws are written today, if the "child" is more than 36 months younger than the "perpetrator," there is no defense, conviction is automatic. The law does not care that there may be mitigating circumstances such as the alleged victim's past sexual history, her willingness to participate or, as in many cases, her misrepresentation of her age.
If that is true, the authors of the legislation should be flogged and the law repealed.
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This country has really got to grow up about sex. Consensual sex, no matter the age of the partners, is not awful; it is wonderful. We do not flee from sex but expend enormous energy trying to get sex. Our laws should reflect our actual carnal nature, not some crazed antisexual obsession derived from willful misreadings of the Bible. "As you would have others do to you, so too do to them" Jesus's teaching in the Golden Rule plainly smiles upon consensual sex.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,847.)
Friday, August 12, 2005
Ghoulish Garbage. In an exercise of spectacular excess, the New York Fire Department has released 15 hours of recordings of radio transmissions and 500 oral histories about the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in response to a Freedom of Information lawsuit by The New York Times and survivors of WTC victims. This hideous display of ghoulish delite with tragedy is far in excess of the stated purpose of the suit.
A group of victims' families who have become advocates for reforming building codes and emergency response had eagerly awaited the release of the records in hopes they would challenge the notion that many firefighters in the north tower heard, but chose to ignore, an evacuation message issued after the south tower collapsed.
Some city officials, including former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, have suggested some firefighters ignored the mayday call in acts of personal heroism. But the group of families has sought to lay blame on the city for providing firefighters with faulty radios.
That issue was resolved by a few key testimonies from firefiters on the scene like this one:
Another firefighter who was in the north tower, Paul Bessler, recalled seeing a fellow firefighter going up the stairs as though he was "on a mission."
"Just at that point, my radio came clear as day, 'Imminent collapse. This was a terrorist attack. Evacuate."'
End of discussion. If that was the legal issue, it could have been resolved with the release of only a few key passages. The vast amount of data released is pointlessly excessive. It serves no legitimate purpose but is utterly ugly in its ghoulishness. What kind of beast wants to read or hear such things? It's like a horror flick for the demented, who need real horror fictional horror won't do.
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I am disgusted.
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I live about 16 miles from Downtown Manhattan and do not need to be reminded of that day. I happened to have to go to the hospital that very day for a serious accident I had had two days earlier but the severity of which I didn't yet know until my mother and sister insisted I couldn't just tuf it out to see if things got better. We couldn't go to the nearest hospital, UMDNJ, because it was receiving ambulances and medevac helicopters from Manhattan, so had to drive to a small Catholic hospital several miles beyond. As we rounded a bend of South Orange Avenue near UMDNJ, we could see a huge brown cloud of smoke across the horizon floating above the miniature Manhattan skyline, and a medevac helicopter landing on the roof of UMDNJ.
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As I was admitted to Saint James, a television in the waiting room showed the disaster a scant 11 or so miles from that hospital, and the male Filipino nurse at the admissions computer remarked that no matter how bad my situation might be, he was sure I was glad to be here rather than there. How right he was.
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I don't understand this ugly impulse in some people to relive nitemarish events from the past, to delve into them in vivid detail. I don't "get" the fascination with the "Holocaust" or Gulag or Pearl Harbor or the aftermath of Hiroshima. Let it go. Take the lessons, release the rest.
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It is extremely unhealthy to replay past nitemares. We don't need the tapes, we don't need the transcripts, we don't need the oral histories after the fact. Those memories have seared themselves into the brains of the people who saw the horror and wish they could forget it. Why would anyone go out of his way to sear horrifying images into a brain that had escaped them?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,847.)
Thursday, August 11, 2005
Not Reassured; Deadly Fleas; Counting the Costs. Three brief items.
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(1) The New York Post, the Republican Party and its President, and others on the Right keep trying to reassure us that everything is going our way in the "war on terror" / "international struggle against extremism" or whatever it is they are calling it at the moment. Why am I still uneasy? I emailed the Post this short letter to the editor:
All the assurances the Post publishes that we are winning the war in Iraq, the forces of terrorism are on the run, and we will soon emerge from today's nightmare planet into the bright new dawn of a post-Islamist world in which moderation has defeated extremism, sound like the arguments made in the early 1940s by Indian sociologist Krishnalal Shridharani that it was impossible that India would be partitioned because partition made no sense, and the people of India were not so foolish as to destroy the unity that alone made India viable. He made a good case.
(Responsive to "Al Qaeda's Woes", column by Amir Taheri in the New York Post, August 11, 2005)
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(2) Did you know that fleas can kill kittens? I didn't, until it happened in my household. Fleas carry disease, and the blood they drain from tiny kittens can produce fatal anemia. Most anti-flea preparations cannot be used on kittens younger than 12 weeks, but if they are attacked by many fleas, they may die long before then, especially if they are simultaneously under the strain of a serious infection. I have found one flea shampoo online that says it can be used on very young kittens, but I was unable to get it in time, and several beautiful babies died because of fleas. Moreover, a pregnant cat had a miscarriage due to illness transmitted by fleas. Fleas can also introduce tapeworms into their hosts, both pets and people. Fleas are not a mere annoyance. They can kill.
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In lite of this fact, which has been ignored if not actually concealed by inexcusably irresponsible media had I been on guard against this eventuality, I would have had Adams flea shampoo on hand and my kittens might be alive today I must wonder why we have been unable to eradicate fleas, or roaches, from this infested planet. How is it that human beings are supposed to be able to alter the climate of this enormous globe but cannot wipe out tiny little insects? Maybe we are no more able to alter climate than to eradicate fleas and roaches.
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(3) A friend (Joe from Belleville, a northern suburb of my city, Newark, NJ) sent me the URL for a very interesting website, an online clock that tallies the present, and rapidly growing, cost in dollars of the war in Iraq: http://costofwar.com/. The cost is presented initially as the total for the entire United States, but you can then check for your specific state and for some localities within that state, and compare that tally to the costs of various categories of expenditure for which that money might instead have been used. The national total when I started to write this description was $186.811 billion. It had risen another million by the time I finished checking my state and city, written this description, then rechecked the national total.
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Try it yourself. It shows another dimension to the war than the cost in terms of dead American soldiers, which I have been showing at the end of each new entry to my blog for some time now. Are these dollars and lives well spent? You decide.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,843.)
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
A Pioneer Dies. John Johnson, founder and publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines, died yesterday in Chicago after a long illness. A good summary of his life appears in the obituary by CBS and AP.
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I'm offended that media have paid enormous attention to the death of Peter Jennings, but almost none to the death of a far more substantial media person. Jennings was, after all, mostly just a news reader who sat behind a desk and read summaries of other people's work. To the extent he did any real reporting himself, some of it was hopelessly inept, such as his preposterously credulous and alarmist reports on AIDS. Does anybody remember how wildly wrong he was on that?
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He lent his voice and credibility to the suggestion that the whole world would be decimated by a "pandemic". At the time he made such assertions, half of all the world's AIDS cases were found in one country, the United States. But, oddly and inexplicably, that changed! All of a sudden, AIDS wasn't here, but way over there, in starving Third World countries where people have always died young, except that now those early deaths are "AIDS". Still, we are supposed to 'heed the warning of Africa' in our own lives over here, where we live under very different conditions and where AIDS has vanished as a matter of public alarm. Indeed, public service announcements promoting worry about HIV, the phony "cause" of AIDS, practically disappeared under the Clinton Administration, but returned when the antisexual, and especially antihomosexual, Bush Administration took over the White House. Despite the best efforts of Republicans to worry us that the sky is falling, nobody in the general public worries about AIDS here. Nor should they. Republican attempts to scare people out of sex are an abysmal failure, and rates of pregnancy out of wedlock and of VD (which are more commonly called "STD's" today, but I don't change my terminology to fit the momentary fashion) are sky high without having produced a devastating AIDS "plague" racing thru American society.
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Jennings was wrong. He paid no attention to AIDS Dissidents (see, e.g., www.virusmyth.com), the scientists and activists who realized by mid-1987 that HIV could not possibly be the cause of AIDS, but that the bulk of AIDS was the result of years of stupid behavior by people who used multiple dangerous drugs, often in complicated and varying patterns that could not be replicated in studies, and exposed themselves to repeated serious infections from sexual activity. Those infections often included hepatitis, which in itself can kill and which produces liver damage that reduces the liver's ability to clear out of the body the poisonous chemicals that illegal drugs constitute, with the effect that they build up and up in people who continue to use drugs atop liver damage, to the point where they cause catastrophic immunological and neurological damage: AIDS.
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Tho Peter Jennings was entirely wrong and irresponsible in regard to AIDS, he did make some contribution in the area of raising awareness of the dangers of tobacco, but he was hardly a pioneer. The U.S. Surgeon General announced that in January 1964. Jennings didn't even start at ABC until later that year. (Sidebar: One bio says that Jennings attended, among other institutions of higher education, Rider College (now University) here in New Jersey. He never graduated from college, but managed to do quite well for himself nonetheless, didn't he?)
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Peter Jennings also fell into "the family business" when he entered broadcasting, because his father was a well-established figure at the Canadian Broadcasting Company.
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By contrast, John Johnson was a self-made man who made a major contribution to an all-too-invisible people's self-image and self-respect thru vision and hard work. As the CBS/AP obituary puts it:
Born into an impoverished family in Arkansas City, Arkansas, Johnson went into business with a $500 loan secured by his mother's furniture and built a publishing and cosmetics empire. * * * Johnson encouraged major white companies to advertise in black media. He sent an ad salesman to Detroit every week for 10 years before an auto manufacturer agreed to advertise in Ebony.
And he did this against the advice of friends.
Civil rights leader Roy Wilkins advised Johnson to forget the publishing business and save himself a lot of disappointment; Wilkins later acknowledged he gave Johnson bad advice.
Alas, Johnson apparently had no son to whom to pass on his "family business", so he passed it on to his daughter, just as Hugh Hefner has, bizarrely, passed along the Playboy empire to his daughter!
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This is all too common a pattern: a lot of supposedly powerful women, from media to politics, gain much of what power they exert not by their own efforts or virtues but by inheritance. And black Americans do not need more women controlling developments. One of the main problems even perhaps the most fundamental problem of the American black community is the absence of strong male role models, and Johnson did his people a grave disservice in not seeking out a compelling black man to take over the company.
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Nobody's perfect.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,838.)
Monday, August 08, 2005
Time for a Name Change. A friend drew my attention to the headline on the front page of today's New York Daily News, "JENNINGS DIES; Famed anchor [of "ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings"] battled lung cancer". The story inside mentioned, in part:
Born and raised near Toronto, Jennings added dual U.S. citizenship in 2003. "Canada's ingrained in my soul, but this is my home," he told the Daily News.
Is there really such a thing as dual citizenship, recognized by the United States? If so, Congress had better rewrite the laws, because dual citizenship is dual loyalty is divided loyalty is potential conflict of interest is disloyalty. You want to be an American? Then renounce all foreign allegiances. If you're not willing to renounce all foreign allegiances, then you should be denied U.S. citizenship and go home!
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Why did we allow him to host U.S. election coverage, both before the elections, where he, as a foreigner, might have influenced people's perceptions and thus their votes, and after, during the election-nite coverage that is one of the ripest plums in all of American journalism? Americans are often accused of excessive nationalism, but in this matter of allowing foreigners to take the best jobs in this country and poke their nose into our politics, we seem more like colonials too timid to complain about being lorded over by foreigners.
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I saw Peter Jennings in person once, in late 1964 or early 1965, when I was working for ABC News as a clerk-messenger for a documentary unit in my first job in New York after my actual first job ever, a couple of months at a McDonald's in my hometown of Middletown, NJ (where Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw's successor as anchor of NBC Nightly News, is from). Jennings was the new guy in national news and had been invited to stop by at the end of the nite at the company's bowling league on the Upper West Side. He apparently came at the invitation of a left-handed attorney from the legal department, a gorgeous guy with beautiful brown eyes, like the song ("Beautiful, Beautiful Brown Eyes"), and bowled a game after our regular league play had finished.
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I was then, as now, interested in Canada as potentially a hugely important part of the United States, but Jennings never did anything to promote Canadian entry into the Union. Quite the contrary, he refused U.S. citizenship for decades, even tho he had taken a number of very good jobs away from Americans and worked for the "American" Broadcasting Company. I found that very offensive.
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Only after almost 40 years of working for ABC a few of them spent in London (England, not Ontario), so he had an excuse for those years Jennings finally decided to accept that he had become American, and deigned to take our miserable citizenship.
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But the Daily News says he took "dual citizenship", never relinquishing Canadian nationality. I don't know if that is possible in either Canadian or U.S. law, but it should be permissible in no nation's law. A or B, not AB, not BA: one thing or the other. Canada and the United States are barely on speaking terms today. What if things got worse and we ended up at war? Whose side would Peter Jennings have taken?
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We have the right to expect that anyone who has been granted our extremely valuable citizenship will be faithful to the United States. I don't trust any "dual national".
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Phil Hartman, the (late) comic from Saturday Night Live, was on a late-nite talk show one evening when he mentioned that he (also originally Canadian) had become a U.S. citizen, at which some applause broke out. He turned to the audience and asked if they were applauding his being a "turncoat". Odd thing to ask, no?
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Hartman's remark revealed the onus that the nationalistic Canadian upbringing has put on Canadian expatriates: they are made to feel that even if they think that joining the U.S. would be in everybody's very best interest, they are still to feel bad about even thinking such a thing, much less working to make it happen.
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Michael J. Fox is another prominent Canadian-born celebrity who spent decades here before finally taking citizenship just in time to appear before Congress and lobby for more money for Parkinson's Disease, a malady that affects him.
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I once appeared very briefly on the old Chris Rock show on HBO, in an episode about minor political parties. When I mentioned Canada, Fox's name came up, and I criticized him for not taking U.S. citizenship. Rock then had Fox respond to that criticism. Fox practically bragged that he had been in the United States for 18 years but never taken citizenship. Within two more years, however, he had finally come over to our side. Perhaps his friends asked him, "You've been here 18 years? Why haven't you taken U.S. citizenship? You're married to an American and have American kids. You're not moving back to Canada, are you? So why aren't you a U.S. citizen?" Whether that happened or not, Michael J. Fox did become a citizen within about two years of that exchange.
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Jim Carrey has expressed the desire to take U.S. citizenship as soon as legally practical. But what about all those other Canadians who live here, the Pamela Andersons and other entertainers, the horde of Canadian reporters and anchors on U.S. television? Why are so many of the best jobs in this country given to foreigners who adamantly refuse to take U.S. citizenship?
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We need to demand more respect for our citizenship from the foreigners who come into this country for our money and other opportunities but refuse our nationality. If our citizenship isn't good enuf for you, then our money and our jobs aren't good enuf for you either. You love Canada? Go there. Live there. And stay the hell out of the United States. But if you are going to live here the rest of your life, become a citizen. To refuse our citizenship is to insult every single American.
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It's time for us to put legal and/or social pressure on long-time foreign nationals resident in the United States. Do not invite them to A-list events. Snub them at parties. Boycott their movies and the TV shows they appear on. Canuck Go Home and take professional hockey with you!
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,833.)
Sunday, August 07, 2005
Seeing Red over Lunatic Political Correctness. The NCAA has decided, on its own nonexistent authority, to decree from on high that no college that participates in post-season play will be permitted to use American Indian mascot names or logos. How dare they?
The NCAA's executive committee decided this week the organization did not have the authority to bar Indian mascots by individual schools, committee chairman Walter Harrison said Friday.
Despite acknowledging that they have no authority they are simply asserting such authority anyway!
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No one elected the executive committee of the NCAA to be censors of our national culture, and everyone who values freedom of speech should tell the NCAA to go f*ck itself.
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Perhaps it's time to get rid of this corrupt and arrogant body entirely, to replace it with a group that knows that its job is to coordinate intercollegiate schedules and control drugs and bribery, not to tell people what to think. Who the hell do these stupid bastards think they are?
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Every college in this country should tell the NCAA that what colleges choose to call their teams is their own business, not the NCAA's, and demand that the entire executive committee resign, or the colleges of the Nation will create a completely different organization to run intercollegiate sports and resign en masse from the NCAA.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,829.)