Strike Three. Given three chances to nominate a Hispanic to the Supreme Court, George Bush struck out, leaving the Nation's largest minority unrepresented on the Nation's highest court.
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Instead, he chose a distinguished Italian New Jerseyan from my county, a judge who maintains his chambers in Downtown Newark (my city), despite the fact that the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, on which he sits, meets mostly in Philly and sits here only two weeks a year. Alito also judges moot court at Seton Hall Law School, in Downtown Newark; lives in West Caldwell, my county (Essex); was born in Trenton, New Jersey's state capital; went to college, undergrad, at Princeton; and was called 'very much a Jersey guy' by one reporter on cable news. (I will let pass, for the moment, the insult in dropping the "New" from "New Jersey". Would a reporter call New York "York", New Hampshire "Hampshire", or New Mexico "Mexico"? I don't think so.)
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This is all sort of happy news for me as a New Jerseyan and Newarker, especially inasmuch as the backdrop for the report from Newark was our very handsome Federal Courthouse, which should help dispel some of the ridiculously outdated negative perceptions of my splendid city. [Click here to see photos of other splendid Newark sights at my Newark website, www.resurgencecity.org.] Alas, it is also a blatant attempt to influence the New Jersey Governor's race, in which the Republican, multimillionaire Doug Forrester, is running an extremely ugly campaign, accusing the Democrat, megamillionaire Jon Corzine, not only of tolerating corruption but of actually being corrupt himself, and thus trying to portray himself as Mr. Clean. In this context , the nomination of Alito must be seen as an attempt to extend Alito's spotless reputation to the Republican Party in general and thus sway voters next week. We'll see if it works. I hope it does not.
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Hype Lying in State. Rosa Parks is being honored in the Rotunda of the United States Capitol Building, the first woman so honored and only the second black. (It is a tribute to the incompetence and stupidity of American media today that I still don't know who the first black was, since media didn't bother to add that relevant bit of information.)
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CNN's story today contains this preposterous quote:

"I rejoice that my country recognizes that this woman changed the course of American history, that this woman became a cure for the cancer of segregation," said the Rev. Vernon Shannon, 68, pastor of John Wesley African-Methodist-Episcopal Zion in Washington[.]

Last week, on the satiric cable show The Colbert Report on Comedy Central, Stephen Colbert used the word "overrated" in connection with Rosa Parks, to initial groans and hoots of disapproval from the audience until he went on comedically. I don't want to be comic about this. Rosa Parks truly is grossly overrated.
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I have tried to research exactly what it is that Rosa Parks did to warrant being called "The Mother of the Civil Rights Movement", and came up with exactly this: she refused to get up from a bus seat because she was tired. That's it.
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Oh, she had been a low-level member of the NAACP before that incident, so was militantly disinclined to yield her seat. And she had done some work in trying to register blacks to vote. But she was not a leader, just a worker, the kind of decent, hard-working volunteer whom every public-purpose organization relies on to do the grunt work. That would not have made her "The Mother of the Civil Rights Movement", any more than it made 20,000 other low-level volunteers major figures in the movement.
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Ms. Parks merely provided a rallying point for other people, real leaders, to blow things up into a major confrontation between the forces of segregation and regression on the one hand and the forces of integration and progress on the other. Prime but not alone among those real leaders was Martin Luther King, Jr. The entire extent of Rosa Parks's contribution to the early civil-rights movement was to refuse to get up from a bus seat and then to permit herself to be trotted out by the real leaders to take a bow or say a few words.
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The early civil-rights movement was actually completely dominated by men, in a subsociety that is all too largely matriarchal because of broken families. The men who controlled the movement wanted to put a female face to their movement, for internal political reasons and to blunt some of the hostility of the men who dominated the white, segregationist establishment, because chivalry toward women was part of the Southern tradition.
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It is actually rather insulting to fix on Rosa Parks, a nonleader, rather than a real female leader like Barbara Jordan or Shirley Chisholm, as "The Mother of the Civil Rights Movement".
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It is not Rosa Parks's rhetoric that resounds in the memory of the Nation. She didn't write the "I Have a Dream" speech, nor the anthem of the movement, "We Shall Overcome". It is not her strident, forceful leadership and organizing prowess that animated the masses. She didn't run for Congress or President. She just permitted herself to be trotted out again and again as a figurehead, and used to establish a minor charitable foundation late in life. The rest of the time she served as little more than a receptionist in a Congressman's office — except when he wanted to trot her out for some event.
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I searched the Internet for a list of her substantive accomplishments, a distinguished resume of decades of writings, speeches, confrontations at the doors of universities or in Congressional or state legislative hearings. There is no such long and impressive list. I watched an hour-long documentary about her life on the Biography channel. Very sketchy. It tried to magnify tiny accomplishments into a distinguished record of public leadership. She has no such record.
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Rosa Parks was a very nice lady who did very nice things but who would have accomplished nothing had her particular tiny act not been picked up and run with by real leaders who made it into a cause celebre. Had they settled instead on some woman who got arrested for trying to register to vote or sit at a segregated lunch counter, that other woman would have been plumped up as "The Mother of the Civil Rights Movement".
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While it is very nice to honor Ms. Parks (who, sadly, never had real children of her own) as a decent woman who contributed in her way to national progress, the rhetoric about her is way overblown. It is more than a little condescending to put her in place under the Capitol dome, a sop to blacks as a force in our culture and politics (now displaced by Hispanics as our largest minority), personalized around a modest woman of modest accomplishments who was little more than a front for ambitious others.
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Rosa Parks was a nice lady who wanted better things for herself and her people. That is enuf to say about her.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,026.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:12 PM

 
Running Into the Flames. Rather than seek an escape from the Iraq mess, the right wing is trying desperately to get the U.S. to attack two more countries, Syria to Iraq's west, Iran on Iraq's east, all as part of the supposed drive to democratize the Middle East and bring "freedom" to oppressed Moslems. But we all know what it is really all about: Israel.
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The New York Post today contains two opinion pieces about the 'dangers' Iran poses. One hilites a statement by the new President of Iran.

In a speech Wednesday, Ahmadinejad described Israel as "a stain of shame that has sullied the purity of Islam," and promised that it would be "cleansed very soon." All nations that establish ties with Israel, he warned, would burn "in the fires of our Islamic rage."

Ahmadinejad was not simply carried away by his rhetoric: He was inaugurating "A World Without Zionism" — a week of special events in thousands of mosques, schools, factories, offices and public squares, dedicated to mobilizing popular energies against the Jewish state.

A world without Zionism! Can you imagine? How much better the world would be today if the insane project of re-establishing a country that had vanished more than 2,000 years ago had never been implemented!
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Tho it should be plain that Israel is the real focus of Moslem rage in the Middle East, and the U.S. is hated only because it protects Israel, rightwing commentators don't want us to think that. No, the Jews are not responsible. Moslems hate "the West", and are preparing for a "clash of civilizations" against the West because of the nature of the West, not because of U.S. support of Zionism. What a load of crap.
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Amir Taheri, the Post's Moslem 'house nigga' lapdog for Zionism,* claims:

But the real reason for Ahmadinejad's Jihadist outburst may well be his deep conviction that it is the historic mission of the Islamic Republic to lead the Muslim world in a "war of civilization" against the West led by the United States. One of the first battlegrounds of such a war would be Israel.

See? Israel's not to blame. It is an innocent victim, a bystander who just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, when militant Islam is trying to destroy the West, or at the very least, drive Western values out of the Middle East, and the poor, long-suffering Jews are caught in the crossfire. One more time: what a load of crap.
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On the very same day, Ralph Peters says cheerfully:

Meeting with a lively group of American businessmen on Tuesday, I was asked how we'd know when Tehran was on the verge of acquiring a nuclear capability. "You'll see Israeli planes in the sky over Iran," I said with a smile masking my seriousness.

But it won't be as easy as Israel's 1981 destruction of Iraq's French-built Osirak reactor. This time, Israel will need more than attack aircraft (and better refueling means). It may take a combination of aircraft, missiles, special-ops teams and clandestine resources to interrupt Iran's nuclear program if the world fails to act. The effort would look more like the opening of the 1967 war than a pin-point strike. * * *

Even for the military power of the United States, shattering Iran's nuclear-weapons program would be complicated.

Read between the lines: Israel can't do it. The U.S. will have to do it for Israel. Lest we reach that obvious conclusion, Peters introduces a new notion to an American public skeptical about the wisdom of yet another war in the Middle East:

Yet, for all of the concern that Israel, the United States and blithely irresponsible Europe should feel about Tehran's quest for nuclear weapons, the Sunni Muslims of the Middle East and Pakistan should be more worried still.

The likeliest future nuclear exchange in the Middle East may not be between Israel and Iran, after all, but between Shi'a and Sunni Muslims.

So, you see, we need to protect our beloved Moslem friends in Iraq and elsewhere by destroying Iran's nuclear program, even if that means we have to launch a massive invasion of a country of 70 million people 8,000 miles from our nearest shore! After all, the current war against a country of 25 million 7,000 miles away is going so well!
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These same columnists and other rightwingers have repeatedly tried to persuade us that we cannot win the war against the Iraq insurgency without destroying the current government of Syria, because that government is supposedly not just ineffective at stopping infiltration across the Syrian-Iraq border (contrast the brilliant effectiveness of the U.S. Government in stopping infiltration of illegal aliens across our Mexican border) but actually sympathetic to the insurgents and perhaps even helping them! So we need "regime change" in Syria just as we needed "regime change" in Iraq. Ergo, the United States needs to attack two other countries to 'make the Middle East safe for democracy'.
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Remember World War I? — the War to End War. The U.S. needed to intervene in a war in which we had absolutely no legitimate national interest. As President Wilson said so high-mindedly in his war message to Congress in April 1917:

The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them.

That went well, didn't it? War was ended and the world was made safe for democracy. Never again would tyrants endanger the peace of the world. Oh. Wait. Actually, WWI, which killed 10 million people, produced World War II, which killed at least 48 million. Overthrowing the Kaiser produced the Fuhrer. Hmm. Maybe war isn't the solution to every problem. Maybe it even makes things worse.
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But we already know that from the case of Iraq, don't we? Our news programs have shown ordinary Iraqis saying that 'at least under Saddam we had electricity and clean water, and car bombs weren't going off every day.' Now large areas of Iraq have unreliable, intermittent electricity, undrinkable water, and mass death. Iraqis take their lives in their hands every time they go to a public market. We have done them such a favor in "saving" them from Saddam. How much bigger a favor might we do them and their peers across the region in saving the whole Moslem world from Iran and its client, Syria?
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I emailed the following short letter to the editor of the Post:

The Post's resident bloodthirsty psychopath, Ralph Peters, is plainly trying to prepare the United States for full-scale war against Iran by pretending that we would be fiting Moslems not for Israel (which is the only reason the U.S. attacks anyone in the Middle East) but for Moslems: that is, we are to kill Moslems for their own good, not because Zionists control the U.S. Government and media. It won't wash. We are not going to war against Iran for Israel, nor against Syria for Israel, nor against any other country of the Middle East for Israel, no matter the pretense. One catastrophic war in the Middle East is already one too many for Americans, and we want out of that one. We don't want to go into two more.

____________________

* For those of you who don't understand the concept of "house nigga" or "house nigger", here's an explanation by L.S. Butts, a blogger:

I really didn’t know the meaning of house nigger, so [a black friend] explained. A house nigger [is a historical reference to a slave who works indoors and who] always keeps his mouth shut because he gets to stay in the master’s house. He gets to wear nice clothes and eat in the master’s kitchen. A house nigger doesn’t have to work in the fields and he gets treated with respect. No smart house nigger would ever risk losing his good life by opening his mouth! And finally, my friend looked at me and said, "Whether you are in the house or in the field, if you don’t stand up the to master and speak the truth, you will always be just his nigger".

The term is thus not really about race but about a member of any disapproved minority currying favor by saying what s/he thinks the majority wants to hear.

(Responsive to "Nukes for Allah" by Ralph Peters and "Iran's New Anti-Israel 'Rage'" by Amir Taheri in the New York Post, October 28, 2005)
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,009.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:48 AM

 
Exit Strategy. It's a pity the Bush Administration cannot figure out an escape from the Iraq mess as tidy and quick as its escape from the Miers-nomination mess.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,006.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:46 AM

 
Disgusting Campaign. My state, New Jersey, is nearing the end of the dirtiest campaign for governor that I can recall, and I'm 60 years old.
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Two multimillionaires (New Jersey is, after all, a rich state), Republican Doug Forrester and U.S. Senator Jon Corzine, the Democrat, are spending a fortune, much of it their own money — well, thank goodness for that!, tho for nothing else in this wretched mudfest — on TV ads attacking each other's stands on taxes and corruption. Forrester's ads are the ugliest, dirtiest, slimiest I have ever seen in this state. If they are not truly actionable slander, legally speaking, they are so close that if Corzine weren't a public figure he might well receive a very handsome recovery in a court of law.
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Forrester is running on a pledge to chop property taxes by 30%, mainly by 'eliminating waste' and 'rooting out corruption'. Only a fool could think (a) that the savings from those two sources alone would be enuf to cover the shortfall in governmental income and (b) that a governor — any governor — could cut LOCAL (property) taxes without inciting revolt by every municipality in the state. Property taxes are not levied by the state nor collected by the state. So how is a governor going to cut property taxes without invading local governments' jurisdiction and taxing authority?
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Alas, there are plenty of fools even in New Jersey, one of the most highly educated states in the Nation. It is easy to fool a fool, but even a fool can perceive obvious absurdities.
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Why doesn't Corzine simply run ads saying, "There is no way in the world you can cut local revenues by 30% without causing catastrophic reductions in services. Not only would we have to cut students' extracurricular activities and high-school sports teams, end music classes and art classes, reduce public-library hours or even close branch libraries entirely, close municipal swimming pools, slash the number of lifeguards at our beaches to dangerous levels (remember that the Jersey Shore is an enormous part of the state and its economy), stop picking up fallen autumn leaves, and cut back on garbage collections, but we would also have to close down some firehouses and public health clinics, slash police forces, and stop filling potholes. Do you think your streets really need more potholes? How many flat tires and dented rims can you afford? How many fewer cops on the street can your town take?"
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Forrester (hereinafter, "Mr. Slime", or words to that effect) has run ads that claim Corzine has voted for tax increases (of what kind, on whom — rich, poor, middle class, or everyone without distinction — is not stated) 133 times. Corzine's camp has responded with feckless ads that say that Forrester's claims have been found by reputable media truth squads to be misleading, but the attribution of such critical admonishments, as to The New York Times, Bergen Record, Asbury Park Press, or other respected entity, have been in small type you cannot easily read on a regular-size TV screen.
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Taking their cue from Republican Slime Central, the Corzine campaign has counterattacked, asserting that, when mayor of some (unnamed) municipality — which turns out to be tiny, inconsequential West Windsor, present population about 25,000 out of the 8.7 million people in this, the Nation's 10th most populous state, despite its small geographic size (4th from the bottom) — Forrester himself doubled property taxes!
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Another Corzine ad quotes an attack on Forrester's (campaign) tax plan that had been asserted in a direct-mail piece sent out by one of his rivals in this year's Republican primary: Forrester's (campaign) plan is a shell game that, if adopted, would end up doubling our tax bill in ten years!
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I suppose that is intended to mean that if you drop taxes of one type, you have to raise taxes of another type, but that is not stated. The direct-mail piece cited had been sent out by Bret Schundler, the Republican Party's nominee for Governor last time (2000). Schundler is the former mayor of Jersey City, second most populous municipality in the state (after mine: Newark), who had done wonders in bringing a lot of outside money (mainly from New York and foreigners deeply invested in New York) into Jersey City, which now hosts a lot of "back-office" operations of financial and other firms that were once served from Manhattan, right across the Hudson.
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(Downtown Newark is only 10 miles farther away, but that 'gaping' distance seems too far for some New Yorkers to contemplate. People in Manhattan, after all, are very insular. That may seem appropriate in that Manhattan is an island. But it's a mid-river, not mid-ocean, island, and 10 miles into the heartland is an easy distance to span, especially with the immense numbers of interconnections between New York and Newark. Come on now, people. Invest some of your billions in Newark! We've got the (English-speaking) workforce. We've got the educational and cultural institutions. We're where your money belongs and can do its best work for the best return.)
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Senator Corzine has tried not to be dragged down into the muck that Mr. Slime lives in, but has been too gentle. I guess either he or his advisors have decided to try to take the high road, with only occasional, brief trips to the upper levels of the Republican ooze, to throw doubt on Forrester's credibility.
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The Democrats recently started airing ads in which Bill Clinton says he served as a governor (of Arkansas) himself for 12 years; over the course of that time met 150 other governors; and that in all that time he never once met anyone better suited to be a governor himself than Jon Corzine. Pretty powerful stuff, and positive. But perhaps not tuf enuf.
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Can you really fite negatives with positives? Only? If so, that will be great news to the rest of the country.
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Alas, Slimeboy Dougie (Forrester) is now running a particularly poisonous ad, accusing Corzine personally of corruption. New Jersey's reputation for corruption is, unfortunately, well earned (tho I imagine there are a lot of other places equally corrupt, but not so famously), so any accusation of this sort is likely successfully to taint anyone who does not answer it forthrightly and powerfully.
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I think it's time for Corzine to blast Forrester in the most basic and plainspoken way possible:

"Doug Forrester is a slimy, detestable liar who disgraces himself, his party, and the state of New Jersey with his lies."

If Corzine does not respond in some blunt, powerful way, the taint of corruption will stick. New Jerseyans like plain speaking. Sock it to Slime Man!
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Forrester's slimy, corruption-themed ad tries to appeal, sub rosa, to antihomosexual bigotry in dragging in the name of former Governor James McGreevey, who resigned from office because he was about to be exposed as a homosexual man so infatuated with an Israeli that he tried to give him a very high office in state government (homeland security director) for which he was not qualified (despite the assertions we hear endlessly that Israel knows how to protect against terrorism). The Forrester ad accuses McGreevey of 'scandal after scandal', when in fact the only scandal anyone ever heard of was the loverboy fiasco, which was affectional (McGreevey was married to a woman at the time), not financial. So plainly Forrester's attack is intended to identify the Democratic Party in general and Jon Corzine in particular with 'faggotry'. Of course, in this royal-blue state, Forrester's scumbags can't simply say, as Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, or other Red State yahoos can, "Ain't no place in this great state for faggots!" No, Forrester has to pretend that McGreevey's sad infatuation somehow constituted corruption — in which Corzine was somehow implicated.
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Never mind that McGreevey was a terrific governor who closed a huge budget gap that George Bush's insane tax cuts for the rich opened up in every state's budget — and that McGreevey did so without raising state taxes or cutting services as far as anyone could tell. No, the mere fact that McGreevey was a faggot makes him, the party he belongs to, and that party's current candidate for the same office, (morally?) 'corrupt'.
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Corzine still leads in the polls, but not by a comfortable margin this close to November. If he doesn't answer the horrendously ugly and viciously dirty ad about his own personal corruption, he might lose this election, which would embolden Republicans everywhere to use the dirtiest of dirty politics to tighten their stranglehold on this Republic. It is thus urgently important that the people of New Jersey bury Forrester's dirt under six feet of clean electoral soil. Or that Corzine arrange to have somebody shoot the bastard. This is New Jersey, home to television's Sopranos and a host of real-life (and death) "goodfellas". If Forrester truly believed Corzine was corrupt, he wouldn't dare attack him, because there's plenty of room in the Meadowlands for Forrester's chunky corpse.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,002.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:28 AM

 
2,000 Dead "Not a Milestone". The U.S. military, trying to blunt the emotional impact of American military dead reaching the round number 2,000, tried to stop media from using terms like "milepost" by using "milestone" themselves:

"I ask that when you report on the events, take a moment to think about the effects on the families and those serving in Iraq," Boylan said in an e-mail. "The 2,000 service members killed in Iraq supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom is not a milestone. It is an artificial mark on the wall set by individuals or groups with specific agendas and ulterior motives."

Boylan said the 2,000th service member to die in Iraq "is just as important as the first that died and will be just as important as the last to die in this war against terrorism and to ensure freedom for a people who have not known freedom in over two generations."

This pitiful and offensive ploy, once again pretending that the war against Iraq was (from the outset) really against international terrorism and for Iraq, did not work. The words "milestone" and "milepost" were all over the news, print as well as spoken. Indeed, the article quoted above is titled "Grim milestone for U.S. military in Iraq". If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a milestone. And we know about the military's and Zionists' agendas and ulterior motives. War against Arabs is not for Arabs. No one is fooled but fools.
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Missing from this report, and all reports in U.S. media, is the unknown number of Iraqis who have died as a result of the U.S. assault and occupation, and the chaos unleashed upon Iraq by people fiting the occupation — or using it as excuse for their efforts to install an Islamic theocracy and crush Shia Islam, which many Sunni insurgents regard as heresy.
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Iraqis would exult if they had only 2,000 dead.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,000.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:36 PM

 
Crushing Relationships under Medical Debt. Among the other crimes of the Republican right wing is destroying marriages by inflicting extreme hardship upon couples from medical bills. Our self-appointed 'defenders of marriage' have ravaged marriage thru their refusal to permit us to adopt universal health insurance, which has trapped uncountable Americans in profoundly oppressive medical debt. Since money problems are a major cause of divorce, it is beyond-contention true that the Republican Party has produced large numbers of divorces that would not otherwise have occurred, all of this devastation so we don't have to raise taxes on the rich and super-rich, who wouldn't miss the money, they'd have so much left. So much for Republican "family values".
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On Dr. Phil today, a particularly immature and selfish woman was hilited as saying she deeply resented the economic hardship into which her husband's liver transplant plunged them. To Dr. Phil's and the audience's astonishment, this stupid woman admitted aloud, as tho no shame were due, that she resents having gone deep into debt to pay the bills for her husband's liver transplant and the followup medications that alone keep him alive! Dr. Phil said that "the word 'selfish' doesn't cover" her attitudes, and reproached her very publicly, as to ask if she'd rather her husband were dead than that she be saddled with bills. She said no, of course not, but she doesn't see why she should have to pay for his misfortune.
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Dr. Phil tried reverse psychology, asking how she would feel if (heaven forfend) she had come down with breast cancer and her husband were saddled with her bills. She let on that she'd want him to bear that responsibility, and he said he would absolutely be willing to pay that price to keep his wife alive, because he loves her, and that's just what you do when you love someone.
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But Dr. Phil asked the wrong question.
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The question he should have raised, but didn't, is more basic than that, and has three parts: (1) why should anyone assume personal responsibility for the ravages of nature, which victimizes people randomly and without reason, as makes plain to any sensible observer that disease is a social, not personal, responsibility? (2) why didn't you just declare bankruptcy (when that was possible) so you don't risk having to sell your house and move into an apartment just to pay medical bills, and (3) why do we as Americans, citizens of the richest country in the history of the world, allow our government to continue to destroy the lives of decent people by saddling them with crushing debt for medical expenses, when all the rest of the industrialized world has universal healthcare, so that no one is crushed by medical debt?
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The Dr. Phil show is not political. This blog, this society, are. Dr. Phil should, beyond question to my mind, have protested the evil that victimizes us uniquely in all the industrialized world. He did not. But, then, there's a lot wrong with Dr. Phil. That plain, outspoken good-ole-boy from the South sometimes just doesn't "get it".
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I should be on TV to correct mistakes that people like Dr. Phil and multitudinous other commentators make. As my mother used to say playfully when we'd complain about something beyond personal control, "Comes the revolution ... !". That was the entire emphatic utterance, meaning, "Once the revolution arrives, we'll fix that!" Where is this revolution? I've been waiting half a century.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,997.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:33 PM

 
Deliberately Paying More. "Imported" still has panache for some Americans. Perhaps not in cheap textiles and gadgets, nor in the host of manufactured goods that are flooding this country from places like China and destroying our economy, but in some luxury goods and even a few low-brow things like beer. I once saw a literally dirty bum lying on his side on a Manhattan sidewalk, one elbow pushing up from the ground to hold up his head, the other holding a Heineken! That's right, a youngish homeless man spent some of the money he had panhandled, to buy imported beer!
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I thought at the time that a Heineken advertising executive should have seen that scene and considered whether that was a good thing or bad thing for people to observe. On the one hand, Heineken could argue that the difference in quality is worth the extra price, no matter how little you make. On the other hand, does Heineken really want dirty bums lounging on the sidewalk drinking Heineken? Is that their target audience? The image they want to cultivate? I wish everybody in the world had taken in that little street scene.
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As far as I'm concerned, buying imported goods when domestic are comparable in quality and actually lower in price is subversive, given our astronomical trade deficit and the harm it is doing us long-term. I regard it as casual treason. We may not make TV sets here anymore, or affordable clothing or hosts of other things, but we sure as hell make beer.
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I have had Heineken. I have had Corona. I just can't see any difference worth paying extra for. Especially do I not understand why anyone would pay a premium price for a beer that probably sells in Mexico for the equivalent of 15 cents!
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"Buy American" doesn't seem to work very well in weaning consumers from Gucci this and Hermes that. But beer?? How about "Drink American"? U.S. wines have come up strong in the world market, and few households at any income level today are embarrassed to buy American wine. Why not American beer? 'Relax. Unwind with American hops and grain. The buzz starts here.'
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,996.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:35 AM

 
Chopping American Wages. George F. Will, contemptible rightwing pundit, is cheering the impoverishment of American labor. His column in today's New York Post calls health insurance and other fringe benefits of American workers "welfare"! We don't earn these things as an integral part of our compensation for services rendered. No, they are given to us as welfare! Slit his throat. I mean that literally. His odious commentary contains this observation:

Robert "Steve" Miller, [bankrupt former General Motors subsidiary, auto-parts maker] Delphi's CEO, minces no words, telling The Wall Street Journal that defined benefit programs are imprudent anachronisms: "The notion of having all your retirement eggs in one basket — your employer — is a concentration of risk that is simply inadvisable for anyone in today's fast-moving economy." He calculates that a competitive American industrial compensation cost is about $20 an hour. And to get to a total compensation cost of $20, including health care, retirement and workers' compensation "which is high in the states we are in like New York, Ohio and Michigan," you have to have a basic hourly wage of $10. Pay at Delphi's plants in China is roughly $3 an hour.

Miller bluntly says that the post-1945 social contract is being — must be — repealed because, given globalization, unskilled manual labor cannot be paid $65 an hour [including all benefits], with the cost passed on to consumers.

Pray, who is going to buy anything if working people's incomes are reduced to a pittance?
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Why on Earth would American workers accept having their compensation being chopped by 70%? Anyone who smiles upon so catastrophic a development, an attack upon the idea that Americans, who built and maintain our First World economy, should be reduced to the level of the Third World, is an enemy of the United States, to be destroyed.
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What is Delphi CEO Miller's compensation? $20 an hour, all fringe benefits included? Oh, no. He is "skilled" labor. What is fair compensation for skilled labor in the global marketplace? $25 an hour? $30?
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Americans must wake up to the fact that the ruling class of our economy and government has become our enemy, and draw the necessary conclusions. We need full-scale, two-sided class warfare in this country, with the poor, working class, and middle class fiting back. Right now there's only a one-sided war being carried out by the rich against all the rest of us. How can it be that we let them get away with this? There are far more of Us than of Them. They should be very, very scared of Us, because We have the literal power of life and death over Them.
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Free trade cannot but destroy everything we have built in this country. We cannot possibly compete with the Third World without making the United States into a Third World country too. I do not consent to that.
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(Responsive to "GM's Welfare Problem", column by George F. Will in the New York Post, October 21, 2005)
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,992.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:53 PM

 
Future Grim? An Internet poll yesterday on iWon.com, an Ask Jeeves site, asked visitors about their expectations for the future.

Will They Do Better?

According to recent polling by the Marguerite Casey Foundation, rich and poor Americans differ over the causes of poverty — but both groups are optimistic about the financial future of their children. (AP)

Are you confident that your children/grandchildren will be financially better off than you?

36% - Yes
39% - No
14% - I don't plan on having any children
12% - I'm not sure

I found this poll result interesting for a couple of reasons, the first being the fact that little more than a third of respondents think their children or grandchildren will be better off than they are. I went to the Marguerite Casey Foundation's own website to see if their poll's results differed, but, oddly, those results are not given on that site. A nonspecific summary appears, but no specific questions nor percentages are shown.
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My second item of interest is that 14% of the respondents to the iWon poll don't plan to have children. As with all Internet polls, this is skewed toward people of higher incomes because only they are likely to have computers in the home and thus the leisure time to take webpolls. People of lower income, who may have access to the Internet at work or a public library, are less likely to use their computer time for leisure.
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The overall population of the United States keeps rising due mainly to immigration and the high birthrate among the poor. Moreover, the bulk of present immigrants, legal and illegal, are poor. The middle and upper classes are not replacing themselves. That suggests that the striking disparity in wealth that the Casey survey addressed is likely to become ever wider, with fewer and fewer people controlling more and more of the Nation's wealth, as the rich become less numerous and the poor have ever more mouths to feed from their meager incomes so become less and less able to give their children the education that alone is likely to empower them to do better. The poor usually do not have health insurance, so are unable even to protect their children from debilitating chronic conditions, fully repair injuries, etc., as may leave a significant number of them unable to function at a high level in school and in life.
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Higher education and healthcare are the two most prominent areas of the economy in which costs are rising much faster than the overall rate of inflation. The high costs of both impact the poor far more adversely than the rich.
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The only thing the poor have in abundance is votes. Alas, they generally don't vote, but that can change if they are motivated to do so by a campaign that speaks powerfully to their issues.
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A column in the New York Post yesterday anticipates trouble for the Republican Party in next year's congressional elections. Recalling the 1994 "Contract With America" that helped Republicans to increase their share of seats in both houses of Congress, Ryan Sager says:

Democrats are already running the numbers on a Democratic Contract With America.

A strategy memo released Monday by James Carville and Stan Greenberg, using just such language to describe their project, shows voters responding to a Democratic "contract" centered on universal health care, lifetime education, raising fuel-efficiency standards, canceling tax cuts for the rich and beefing up homeland defense.

Let's hope the Democrats have finally wakened to the fact that their base is the poor and middle class, and they must address the anxieties of those groups. Conspicuously absent from the list Sager gives of issues to be incorporated into a Democratic Contract With America, however, are debt relief and outlawing usury. If Demmies remain Dummies and don't wake up to the crushing burden that debt and usury inflict upon the poor and middle class, nothing else they do is likely to raise them from perpetual minority status in Congress. Nor should it.
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But if Democrats offer a "contract" that is headed by debt and usury, then moves on to lesser concerns, we might just have a Democratic Congress in 2007 and Democratic President in 2009. Wouldn't that be a nice change?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,987.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:50 PM

 
Regression and Progress. Yesterday, the bankruptcy "reform" passed by the Republican Right in the service of banks and credit-card companies to trap ordinary people in debt while permitting major corporations to use the bankruptcy laws to void labor contracts and cut benefits, went into effect. It was a dark day in our history that will surely produce grave hardship for tens of millions of Americans. It may ultimately do some good, however, in making the poor, even in the most backward parts of this country (that's code for "the South" and "Bible Belt"), realize that the Republican Party hates them, and produce a revolt that will overthrow the regressive forces that have seized control of this country by using simpletons' prejudices against them. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out.
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On the other hand, I discovered today that the White House, even under rightwing Republicans, offers various materials in Spanish on its website! There is an index of Spanish-language materials on the White House's official website at http://www.whitehouse.gov/espanol/index.es.html. By contrast, a search within the White House's site for "francais" found no such index and only one "hit" of any kind, a joint press conference of Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin in Ottawa. A search for "français" (with the cedilla) produced no results at all. So the White House recognizes, unofficially, the special status of Spanish as our second national language.
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The jingoists and alarmists at places like U.S. English must be horrified! That organization is just plain behind the times, as evidenced by the fact that the opening screen at its website employs an outline map of a United States with only 48 states. We've had 50 states since 1959! Its advisory board includes such odious luminaries of the Right as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Charlton Heston, along with some surprises, such as celebrities Alex Trebek and Arnold Palmer.
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What people like that don't "get" is that, as Wikipedia's article on "Spanish in the United States" points out,

Hispanics who are second-generation American in the United States almost all speak English, but about 50 percent speak Spanish at home. Two-thirds of third-generation Mexican Americans speak English exclusively at home.

That article goes on to point out that Spanish has vanished from entire societies/countries it used to be spoken in. The only way Spanish continues to survive in the U.S., much less interfere with the cultural unity of the Nation, is that we have tens of millions of people moving back and forth between Latin America and the United States in a constant cultural and demographic convection. Without that convection, our Spanish-language media would wither away, as the usefulness of Spanish plunged to nonexistence.
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I'm not eager to see that happen. I often watch some news and such in Spanish when commercials come on in the English-language evening news programs, or I can't find anything worth watching in English (which happens, especially Sundays and late at nite any day, even tho I receive about 130 English channels on my cable service). My Spanish is so crappy that I miss a lot of many reports and almost everything in some dialects, but I get enuf out of some reports to make the effort worthwhile, and I think such viewing is helping me to improve my Spanish for political and economic reasons.
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I do look forward, however, to millions of immigrants from Latin America abandoning their connections to the cultures of their birth at least to the point of taking U.S. citizenship so they can vote, and by voting change the political complexion of the Nation to a more progressive hue.
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Speaking of progress, there's been some progress in the political-satire world. Comedy Central has instituted The Colbert Report (silent-T in both "Colbert" and "Report") immediately following The Daily Show. It had an impressive debut last nite, and now has a website.
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Not all Comedy Central programming is worth watching, to be sure! As we say in Spanish, desafortunadamente, mucho de su programación es estinko ("unfortunately, much of its programming is stinko"), such as the execrable and insane Drawn Together, soon to start its second season. Whatever for? Drawn Together and Too Late with Adam Carolla, but not Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn? What are they thinking?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,981.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:52 PM

 
Birdbrain Flu. Media and governments have gone absolutely out of their minds with wildly exaggerated fears about bird flu, and killed uncounted thousands of healthy birds to 'contain the contagion'. Crazy talk of a "global pandemic" that could kill 150 million people is circulating in every medium, and the onslaught against wild birds could produce new endangered species. I get the feeling that some people are prepared to destroy the entire category of life called "bird" all over this planet to stop this "global pandemic", even to the point of dispensing with four major food sources for the world's human population, the chicken, duck, goose, and turkey.
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What is the cause of his insane hysteria? 60 people in Asia have died of avian flu that jumped from birds to people, and no one has died from person-to-person contagion. So the total human death toll, since it was first noted in 1997, some eight years, is 60. Not 60 million; not 60,000. 60 individuals. In Asia, the continent that contains more than half the world's total population. So of 3.6 billion people, 60 have died of avian flu. No sane person would go hysterical over so utterly unimportant a death rate: 1 in 60,000,000.
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The pandemic we really need to fear is stupidity.
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Here, we finally have a justification for one of the stupidest things ever said, considering the context of the remark when first uttered in 1933: "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."* The U.S. was in the depths of the Great Depression. Tens of millions of people were suddenly unemployed, banks were failing, homes were being foreclosed in huge numbers, millions of people had lost their life savings, there was no governmental safety net and private charities were in well over their head. Fascism had already taken over Italy; Communism was making a play for the American intelligentsia; Nazi and Japanese imperialism were on the horizon. There was plenty to fear, then. So when it was said, and during the decade in which it was constantly repeated, the assertion was just plain nuts. Here, however, it makes perfect sense.
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You can't get bird flu, or any disease, from healthy birds. Killing healthy birds by the millions is insane and evil. What if we took the same approach to controlling contagion in human populations? One person in a village gets a deadly, contagious illness. Should we kill him and everyone else in the village? everyone in a small town? a city? an entire state? country? continent?
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Why on Earth are they killing thousands and thousands, even millions of healthy birds? That inexcusable, monstrous evil, born of stupidity and hysteria, has got to stop.
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It's time to drop the alarm about avian flu by at least 99%. Work on sensible and morally defensible measures such as vaccinating domesticated fowl and people but stop the mindless slaughter.
____________________

* Well, that's the way most of us remember the saying, but the exact quote from Roosevelt's first inaugural address is actually, "So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,976.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:38 PM

 
"Let's Just Wait and See." People in government and media are speculating about whether the Iraqi electorate approved or rejected the draft constitution in their referendum yesterday. Why? The results are supposed to be known tomorrow, or Tuesday at latest. Why do some people have to pretend to be able to see into the future? What's the point of speculating about something that will be known very soon? Just stop the blather. If asked, simply respond "Let's just wait and see."
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,975.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:04 PM

 
No Littering in Space! I was offended, and astounded, by a news report today.

Evidently "Star Trek" actor James "Scotty" Doohan took the catch phrase "beam me up" very seriously — his cremated remains will be launched into space in accordance with his last wishes.

Commercial space flight operator Space Services Inc. will launch the late actor's remains into space aboard its Explorers Flight on Dec. 6, a company spokeswoman said Friday.

She said the remains of more than 120 others will be aboard the flight, including those of an unidentified astronaut and Mareta West, the astrogeologist who determined the site for the first spacecraft landing on the moon. * * *

"Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry also had his remains shot into space after his death in 1991. They returned to Earth in 2002, Schonfeld said.

Doohan's cremated remains will be packed into a special tube that is ejected from the rocket and expected to orbit Earth for about 50 to 200 years before plunging into the planet's atmosphere and burning up.

Are the people responsible for hurling trash into space out of their minds?
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The website Space.com reports:

A 1999 study estimated there are some 4 million pounds of space junk in low-Earth orbit, just one part of a celestial sea of roughly 110,000 objects larger than 1 centimeter — each big enough to damage a satellite or space-based telescope.

Some of the objects, baseball-sized and bigger, could threaten the lives of astronauts in a space shuttle or the International Space Station. As an example of the hazard, a tiny speck of paint from a satellite once dug a pit in a space shuttle window nearly a quarter-inch wide.

Aware of the threat, the U.S. Space Command monitors space debris and other objects, reporting directly to NASA and other agencies whenever there's threat of an orbital impact.

As of June 21 2000, the agency counted 8,927 man-made objects in the great above and beyond; some are there more or less permanently. Of the total, 2,671 are satellites (working or not), 90 are space probes that have been launched out of Earth orbit, and 6096 are mere chunks of debris zooming around the third planet from the Sun. The United States leads the former Soviet Union in the total quantity of orbital junk, but some companies and other organizations contribute significantly to the count.

But there are more objects up there [too small to be seen by existing devices].

Now a commercial space outfit is deliberately putting more space junk into orbit!?! How can that be permitted? NASA's website says plainly:

Controlling the growth of the orbital debris population is a high priority for NASA, the United States, and the major space-faring nations of the world to preserve near-Earth space for future generations. Mitigation measures can take the form of curtailing or preventing the creation of new debris, designing satellites to withstand impacts by small debris, and implementing operational procedures ranging from utilizing orbital regimes with less debris, adopting specific spacecraft attitudes, and even maneuvering to avoid collisions with debris.

Is somebody asleep at the switch?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,970.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:09 PM

 
Scamming the Public on Iraq. The Bush Administration was caught in an attempt to manipulate public opinion yesterday, when broadcast news organizations got hold of tapes showing that a supposed impromptu discussion between the President and 11 preselected soldiers in Iraq (10 Americans and one Iraqi) was not just coordinated to run smoothly for the cameras but practically scripted! The Administration was thus again revealed to be slimy and dishonest.
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Here are excerpts of CNN's written story.

"You've got tremendous support here at home," Bush said.

Less than 40 percent in an AP-Ipsos poll taken in October said they approved of the way Bush was handling Iraq. Just over half of the public now say the Iraq war was a mistake. *nbsp;*nbsp;*

[Soldierette Corine] Lombardo told the president that she was in New York City on Nov. 11, 2001, when Bush attended an event recognizing soldiers for their recovery and rescue efforts at Ground Zero. She said the troops began the fight against terrorism in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and were proud to continue it in Iraq. *nbsp;*nbsp;*

Paul Rieckhoff, director of the New York-based Operation Truth, an advocacy group for U.S. veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, denounced the event as a "carefully scripted publicity stunt." Five of the 10 U.S. troops involved were officers, he said.

"If he wants the real opinions of the troops, he can't do it in a nationally televised teleconference," Rieckhoff said. "He needs to be talking to the boots on the ground and that's not a bunch of captains."

Note that the Bushies have a woman they put into harm's way — in our lesbian-feminist, Communized military where there is no gender, only cannon fodder and killing machines — continue the lie that the war in Iraq was somehow tied to 9/11, even tho there was never any connection between the two.
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Contrast Rumsfeld's highly publicized appearances with troops many months ago. (Hmm. Why haven't there been any more of those, recently?)
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I am no admirer of Donald Rumsfeld, but he didn't need a script, because he really is the Secretary of Defense, and he can handle real, impromptu situations. But Georgie Boy is President only in name and law. He is actually only a front man, playing the part of President, pushed on stage by a collective leadership, our Republican politburo. He can't handle real questions from real soldiers who aren't preselected to give the public the impression that all our soldiers are united in seeing this war as a wonderful thing they are so proud of!
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The cynicism of the Bush Administration is showing, and the people are not pleased.
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New JibJab Cartoon Satire. I saw this mentioned on CNN Headline News today and checked it out. This time the two guys originally from my state, New Jersey, who were ABC News's "Persons of the Year" last year for their comic video "This Land Is Your Land", a satire on Bush and Kerry, address offshore outsourcing. Check it out: Big Box Mart.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,966.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:38 PM

 
Mirabile Dictu. How could it happen?!? I actually agree with something in the New York Post! Maybe this is The End Times after all.
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Dr. Marc Siegel, described as "an associate professor of medicine at the NYU School of Medicine and author of 'False Alarm: The Truth About the Epidemic of Fear'", wrote an op-ed piece that appeared in yesterday's Post pooh-poohing all the hype we have in recent days heard about "avian flu" (ABC News's preferred term) / "bird flu" (NBC News's preferred term). He reminds us of the fear that media generated about SARS 2½ years ago when SARS traveled by jet from China to Toronto, a mere hop-skip-and-jump from us. Who knows? Maybe all those traitorous film producers and movie stars making movies in Canada to save money at the expense of American little guys whose jobs are given to Canadians who work cheaper, would contract SARS and bring it back to the good old U.S. of A. Didn't happen — tho I for one would be delited to see thousands of the scumbags who export American jobs die from a plague of foreign origin. That would be poetic justice indeed.
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Media are now speaking of avian flu as practically a guaranteed worldwide pandemic, tho that is very far from the case. As Siegel says:

The hysteria comes in when we assume a deadly mutation must occur — when it hasn't, and is unlikely to any time soon.

Mutations do of course sometimes occur that permit a microbe specific to one species to jump to another and thence from individual to individual within that second species. But it doesn't always happen, and in fact may be quite rare. After all, how many people do you know who have developed distemper?
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Siegel points out what many others have observed, that people are concatenating unrelated disasters into a generally fearful outlook that gives rise to exaggerated concerns about bird flu.

FEARMONGERS are having a field day lumping bird flu together with other deadly disasters. Dr. Shigeru Omi, the World Health Organization's regional director for the Western Pacific, recently said, "Even if you control avian flu, the next one is coming . . . I think it is similar to tsunamis and earthquakes . . . we do not know when."

We have had a lot of natural disasters of late, and some fool (Jeffery Taubenberger) recently reconstituted the 1918 Spanish flu virus that killed 50 million people worldwide in 1918, a story that not only made headlines that worried a lot of sensible people but actually won for that idiot honor as ABC's "Person of the Week" for his insane 'achievement'. Scientists justified this astoundingly irresponsible act by saying that they needed to understand how that virus worked to predict how other dangerous viruses, such as avian flu, might work. That is just plain crazy. One virus is not interchangeable with another, and lessons learned from one virus might have little or no relevance to fiting another.
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They utterly ignored the hazards of resurrecting a deadly microbe known with certitude to have killed massive numbers of people in many countries.

The public health risk of resurrecting the virus is minimal, U.S. health officials said. People around the world developed immunity to the deadly 1918 virus after the pandemic, and a certain degree of immunity is believed to persist today. Also, in previous research, scientists concluded that modern antiviral medicines are effective against Spanish flu-like viruses.

Oh? Do all countries have such antiviral medicines at the ready? Do all hospitals and doctor's offices across even the U.S. have such medications in abundance? Do scientists ever make mistakes, such that these scientists might simply be (you should pardon the expression) dead wrong?
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Let's examine one error in scientific judgment, which gave us Africanized bees. The Encyclopedia Smithsonian sums it up:

In 1956, some colonies of African Honey Bees were imported into Brazil, with the idea of cross-breeding them with local populations of Honey Bees to increase honey production. In 1957, twenty-six African queens, along with swarms of European worker bees, escaped from an experimental apiary about l00 miles south of Sao Paulo. These African bee escapees have since formed hybrid populations with European Honey Bees, both feral and from commercial hives. They have gradually spread northward through South America, Central America, and eastern Mexico, progressing some 100 to 200 miles per year. In 1990, Killer Bees reached southern Texas, appeared in Arizona in 1993, and found their way to California in 1995. ...

Damage done: Africanized Honey Bees (=Killer Bees) are dangerous because they attack intruders in numbers much greater than European Honey Bees. Since their introduction into Brazil, they have killed some 1,000 humans, with victims receiving ten times as many stings than from the European strain. They react to disturbances ten times faster than European Honey Bees, and will chase a person a quarter of a mile. Other concerns with Africanized Honey Bees are the effects on the honey industry (with an annual value of $140 million dollars) and general pollination of orchards and field crops (with an annual value of 10 billion dollars). Interbred colonies of European and Africanized honey bees may differ in pollination efforts, be more aggressive, excessively abandon the nest, and not survive the winters. Further, beekeepers may not continue their business of honey production if faced with aggressive bees. The packaged bee and queen rearing industries are in the southern United States, which would affect the honey industry across the continent.

Note that the scientific intent was to increase honey production, but the result has been exactly the opposite. Bees Online adds:

Large numbers of them may sting people and livestock with little provocation. [So add to human deaths the death of unknown numbers of cows, calves, horses, and other animals, including beloved pets.] They also "take over" European colonies by entering them and killing the resident queen. Because of these bees' noxious behaviors, many beekeepers abandoned beekeeping[.]

Should we compare mere agricultural researchers with the exalted scientists at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology? Why not?
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Science fiction writers have tried, for generations, to warn people about the risks of stupid projects and careless disregard for hazards. Perhaps the most famous fictional case is that of HAL 9000, the computer in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey that was given independent decision-making by artificial-intelligence scientists, and which decides to kill the crew of the mission it is meant to serve. Perhaps the most famous cases of real-life scientific disregard for human beings are the creation of nuclear weapons and the activities of World II medical experimenters Josef Mengele (Germany) and Unit 731 (Japan). There are good reasons to be afraid of scientists as much as of the things they investigate.
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But the multiple natural and human disasters that have of late befallen us — the Indian Ocean tsunami, hurricane Katrina, devastating increases in energy costs, deadly flooding in the Northeast, this past week's Indo-Pak earthquake — should not be lumped together to make us fearfully inclined to see as inevitable a worldwide bird-flu pandemic that will kill 150 million people. We do, of course, need to take reasonable precautions, as, for instance, improving the rate at which vaccines are created and manufactured (the latter which matter Siegel addresses). But media need to dial down the volume on their shrill and irresponsibly excessive disaster alarms. They are creating needless anxiety that serves no legitimate public purpose.
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(Responsive to "Flighty Flu Fears", opinion piece by Dr. Marc K. Siegel in the New York Post October 12, 2005.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,964.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:19 AM

 
Megan Dishonored. My state, New Jersey, which gave the name "Megan's Law" to statutes that require local governments to notify the community of the presence of sex offenders in their midst, makes a mockery of Megan's Law thru administrative laxity and incompetence.
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I recently discovered that, before they are released, convicted sex offenders are required to report where they will live. But no effort whatsoever is made to ensure that they are really going there. They can give a completely phony address — a vacant lot, the house of a stranger — and nobody checks it before they are released! 'We don't have the staffing' is the excuse. So the State of New Jersey just releases convicted sex offenders into society without verifying that the address they are required to report really is their address.
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Does your state do the same?
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If we are really concerned about registering sex offenders, shouldn't we require that a public employee accompany a sex offender to the residence he claims, to confirm that he really lives there?
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How many sex offenders are released in any given time period? How many person-hours could it possibly take to do that?
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If we need to hire a few more people per state to do that and to make periodic checks of addresses, let's do it. Increase the income tax rate on the rich by 1/5 of 1% as a dedicated tax and we'll have plenty of money with which to check addresses of released offenders. And not just to track released sex offenders, but to keep tabs on all kinds of parolees, many of whom just stop reporting as required and move without giving a forwarding address. Let's hire investigators to keep track of dangerous people — or keep them in prison — whatever we need to do so we know where they are.
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The rich can pay for either solution. They've got all the money in the world, and should be glad to have society indebted to them for covering the cost of something people in general want, but don't want taxes on them raised for. If we are thankful to the rich, maybe we won't be so angry at them. That's a win-win situation.
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(Caveat: This country is too negative about sex, despite entertainment media's obsession with it, and some things that are criminalized (such as "statutory rape", which is actually consensual sex) should not be criminalized. Moreover, making penalties for sexual conduct too severe can produce the unintended, horrendous consequence of sexual abusers killing their victim to hide the crime. But there are indeed a lot of people whose whereabouts need to be known to police, and to neighbors.)
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,960.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:16 PM

 
Does the Context Matter? William Bennett, Secretary of Education under Reagan and drug czar under the elder President Bush, has apologized not for his recent controversial remarks but for media's distorting his remarks. He said plainly, in the first instance:

"I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down."

Bennett, who is an abortion opponent, went on to say that such abortions would be "an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky."

Black leaders have been furiously indignant, but not necessarily about the right thing. Bennett, for whom I have no fond feelings whatsoever, was not suggesting that black babies should be aborted. He is a foe of abortion-on-demand (as am I and every other decent person), and said plainly that aborting all blacks would be "morally reprehensible".
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But he did say that aborting all blacks would bring the crime rate down. It is that assertion that should be examined to see if context matters. I suggest it does not, but that we need to examine the assertion in itself, not in any "context".
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Would, in all likelihood, the crime rate go down if no black babies were born in this country? And if it would, why would it?
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To think it likely that the crime rate would go down is not necessarily to say that blacks have a special predisposition to commit crime.
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Race and poverty are linked. Poverty and crime are linked. Ergo, to reduce the burden of children on black people would reduce poverty and thus reduce crime. Wouldn't it?
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That reduction in crime would come at the cost of the genetic elimination of the black race from this country (if the 100% abortion rate continued very long and black immigration were not stepped up sharply), and that would entail huge losses to the Nation's cultural vitality; impoverish its music and performing arts; massively adversely impact sports; and change not just the face but also the 'soul' of the United States in myriad ways, some of which we can't even imagine. But black poverty and crime also cost us hugely in terms of economic outlays to the dependent poor, economic losses from theft, and from injury and death to productive citizens (of all races), and the terrible predations upon our civilization by the culture of poverty and violence that ghetto blacks have inflicted upon us.
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I live in a preponderantly black neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey, but it is a middle-class and working-class neighborhood free of most of the pathologies of the urban black poor, tho drugs are too easily available in parts of the wider community some distance from my house. My city's mayor is black, the majority on the city council are black, as are many other high local officials, and my Congressman is black. Most things run like clockwork, and the neighborhood is very safe. If you want to be really safe, move to a middle-class black neighborhood, because the neighbors know what to watch for and are intent on protecting what they've got, because they have worked much too hard, to lose it.
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There are, however, vast swaths of the inner cities of this country devastated by the pathologies of the ghetto, and there's no getting over that truth.
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Much of the poverty that drives all the other problems is due to there being too many children for the parental income available to support them. Teenage mothers drop out of school and consign themselves to decades, if not an entire lifetime, of badly paid employment or governmental dependency while they raise their kids. The kids feel deprived, and aggrieved, and strike out to snatch some of the good things in life that other people seem to have but they don't. They're hurting, and they don't care whom else they have to hurt to make their own hurt go away. If they can't change the economic, social, and educational conditions that make them miserable, they can at least dull the pain or forget it, temporarily, by zonking out on drugs. But of course using drugs just makes everything worse when they emerge from their fog.
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If the babies that are dragging down the poor were never born, would the lives of their parents — and especially their mothers — be better, in economic terms? Surely. But economics isn't the only consideration for teenage mothers who choose to become pregnant and choose to bear the child rather than get an abortion. They want security; they want love. They want somebody they can take care of the way they wish someone had taken care of them — whether they can actually take care of anyone, including themselves, or not. They want someone who has to love them and has to stay with them no matter what. And a baby seems the perfect plug for the hole in their heart. So they have babies, and find that they can't support them, can't take full-time employment with a future, can't finish their education, and can't even take the crying and dirty diapers and whining and acting-out of what they hoped would be their little darlings. So they lash out and brutalize their children, who then lash out at others around them in a cascading series of displacements.
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If even one generation of black girls would break the chain and hold off to have children until age 30 — hopefully thru contraception, not abortion — so they could finish their education, find well-paid employment, and achieve the maturity to prepare for motherhood emotionally and by investigating the best in parenting literature and practice, wouldn't everything change for the better?
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One thing is plain. The fierce reaction to Bennett's remarks reveals the truth about abortion: it is a crime against the people aborted. Blacks are reacting to Bennett's remarks as tho he called for killing black babies but leaving white babies alone. That's not what he said, but that's how it was felt.
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So opponents of abortion should use this same argument to clarify the most basic issue in abortion. If the law forbade white women to have abortions but permitted blacks, mixed-race Latinos, and Asians to have as many abortions as they wanted, would that be regarded as an unfair benefit given to nonwhites that discriminates against whites, or an attack upon nonwhites that discriminates against them? What do you think?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,954.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:42 AM

 
Frost in Qatar. The BBC announced Friday that "Sir" David Frost, distinguished British journalist who achieved great fame in the U.S. too, has joined the on-air talent behind "al-Jazeera International, the pan-Arab news network's new English-language channel, due to be launched next spring."

"Most of the television I have done over the years has been aimed at British and American audiences," he said.

"This time, while our target is still Britain and America, the excitement is that it is also the six billion other inhabitants of the globe." * * *

An al-Jazeera statement called Sir David "the only person to have interviewed the last seven presidents of the United States and the last six prime ministers of the United Kingdom".

It said: "(He) has joined the line-up of key on-air talent at the new 24-hour English language news and current affairs channel."

Aljazeera (the broadcaster's own spelling of its name) has gained notoriety for broadcasting videos produced by al-Qaeda and other Arab terrorist and guerrilla organizations, so jingoists here will probably make some comparisons to "Tokyo Rose", an American who broadcast Japanese propaganda during World War II. That prospect has not deterred Frost from lending his voice to a dialog between the Arab world and the West. Good for him. And maybe good for us.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,954.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:33 PM

 
More Zionist Nonsense from the Post. I sent two emailed letters to the editor of the New York Post in response to Radical Zionist columns this past week.

[1.] John Podhoretz claims that Arab nationalists are all, of necessity, our enemy: "Secular Islamic radicals and militant Islamic theocrats are united in their determination to confront and destroy liberal democracy". Bull.
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WHAT exactly are "Secular Islamic radicals"? One is either secular or Islamic. The one voids the other. Podhoretz also claims there is a wide movement to unite "the Islamic nation" and that that is dangerous to us. Actually, pan-Arabism speaks mainly of "the Arab nation". Even when secularists speak of a wider Moslem community as "the Islamic nation", much as Christians used to speak of "Christendom" (whatever happened to that?), it is not necessarily in imperial or confrontational terms.
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Consider this quote from a speech by Egypt's President, Hosni Mubarak:
>>No one should imagine that the desire of the Islamic nation to unite its will, join forces, and integrate its policies is just an attempt to brace for a civilization clash or to vie with other international blocs.
This is rather a legitimate race that springs first and foremost from the nation's will to regain its glory to maintain its distinguished status and to help its peoples, like all others, realize better chances of decent life, and to arm coming generations with science, knowledge and economic potential of survival and competition.<<

I don't see a threat there. As for a single great empire of all Moslems, that is as unlikely a project as a single great nation to be created from all Christian countries around the world. Ain'ta gonna happen, so don't worry about it.

(Responsive to "Naming the Enemy", October 7, 2005 column by John Podhoretz in the New York Post)
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Podhoretz was referring to President Bush's major address on Thursday, October 6th, to the National Endowment for Democracy, which pretended that the U.S. cares deeply about democracy, even tho his party has gerrymandered state legislatures that Republicans control to make elections almost pointless, and that that is part of why Islamists hate us. But he went further — much, much further:

No act of ours invited the rage of the killers, and no concession, bribe or act of appeasement would change or limit their plans for murder. We will never back down, never give in and never accept anything less than complete victory.

The fact that we have sent over 95 billion Christian taxpayer dollars to Israel, smiled upon transfers of billions more Jewish private dollars to support Zionism, and consistently defended, by vetos of condemnations of Israeli crimes in the UN, and by a constant inpouring of military aid to Israel, has nothing to do with anything. The fact that we went 7,000 miles from our shores to attack a Moslem, Arab country that never in its history attacked us and had no plans to attack us nor the means to do so had nothing to do with this 'unprovoked' war against us. Yeah, right.
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Bush cannot believe that. Nor can anyone else on Earth. So why do we put up with this arrant nonsense, this evil, unending lie?
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Moreover, his Administration actively opposes an amendment approved by the U.S. Senate to forbid torture in the interrogation and general treatment of prisoners! That is beyond-belief astounding!
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The Law of Tit-for-Tat (in Latin, lex talionis) holds that if you do something bad to someone, he has the right to do the same to you. Does the U.S. really want to establish as legitimate the principle that combatants can be tortured by their captors? Doesn't the U.S. sometimes lose soldiers to capture by the other side?
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Tellingly, the prime mover of the Senate amendment against torture was Senator John McCain, who spent over five years in the "Hanoi Hilton", being brutally mistreated by Vietnamese Communists. He survived. Other U.S. prisoners did not. He knows better than to say that torture is neato-keen and fine for us to do to others, both as a moral issue and as a practical matter, protection for our own combatants. He put the case plainly: part of what empowered him and other captives to withstand the psychological and physical mistreatment was the belief that we are better than that, and if the situations were reversed, we would never do to our prisoners what they were doing to ours. But that's not important to the Bush Administration.
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One website's discussion of the lex talionis states (emphasis added):

The lex talionis is a law of equal and direct retribution: in the words of the Hebrew scriptures, "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, an arm for an arm, a life for a life."

The earliest written code of laws was the Code of Hammurabi, the most famous of the Old Babylonian, or Amorite, kings of Mesopotamia. [Note: Mesopotamia is the old name for Iraq. Sumer, part of Mesopotamia (Iraq), is the original homeland of the Hebrews.] Hammurabi's code of laws is almost entirely based on the principle of equal and direct retribution; it betrays the origin of law in retributive violence. Since the lex talionis is often the earliest form that law takes, from it we can conclude that the basic function of law is revenge and retribution. Unlike direct retribution, however, the law is administered by the state or by individuals that cannot be victims of revenge in return. While revenge and retribution threatens to break down society as people take reciprocal revenge [on] one another, revenge as it is embodied in law and administered by the state prevents mutual and reciprocal revenge from tearing the fabric of society apart.

The author of that discussion overlooks the fact that there is more than one "state" in the world, and that the state does not have a monopoly on violence. So, altho individual citizens may not be able to retaliate against their own state, other states certainly can retaliate for acts of state that they regard as unjust, and groups of citizens, acting in concert as insurrectionaries, revolutionaries, "insurgents", or guerrilla warriors, can also retaliate against acts of state with which they militantly disagree. That is what we face today with al-Qaeda, with the Iraqi insurgents, with all kinds of insurrections all over this planet.
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Jesus recognized the endless, vicious-cycle nature of violence and counterviolence and sought a way to defuse it. His formula was not "an eye for an eye" but "turn the other cheek" — don't retaliate, and hope that refusal to fite back will disarm the aggressor. Mahatma Gandhi put it this way:

An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind.

That plainly does not always work, but it has worked in surprising contexts. For instance, the Mongol hordes that killed uncounted hundreds of thousands in their rampage across Eurasia killed almost everyone in cities that resisted but allowed some cities that surrendered without a fite to go relatively unmolested — but only some. Others were destroyed and everyone killed anyway. Gandhi's nonviolent resistance to British imperial control of the Indias (now mainly India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) worked. An identical campaign against the Mongols would have failed, and produced catastrophic mass death.
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The practicalities then, have to be weighed. The morality of torture does not. Jesus made that plain almost 2,000 years ago in his Golden Rule (Matthew 7:12):

[King James version]
Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.

[Or, perhaps a tad easier to understand in modern English, the New International Version]
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.

Plainly George Bush would not want to be tortured. How, then, can he oppose a prohibition on torture by Americans yet consider himself a good Christian?
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A day before Bush's speech, I emailed another letter to the editor of the New York Post about a different columnist's uncomprehending remarks, to warn of the ultimate tit-for-tat.

[2.] Arnold Ahlert does not seem to realize that when he says, "The whole world will also continue to tolerate an entire society steeped in psychotic, self-destructive behavior, which makes one wonder: Who is sicker, those who commit atrocities — or those who let them pass in silence?" he is talking about Israel, not Palestine. And not just Israel. The longer Jews worldwide back Israel's crimes to the hilt, the more endangered they become. Sooner or later the world will stop tolerating Zionism, and turn on all Jews who do not starkly disown Zionism and its necessary crimes. The creation of a Jewish country in an Arab land was an insane, stupid mistake. Mistakes should be corrected, not compounded — endlessly, thru mass murder. At end, Israel endangers the very existence of Jews worldwide. Tho Zionists may say "Never again", much of the rest of the world is starting to think, "One more time!"

(Responsive to "Another Mom 'Martyr'", October 6, 2005 column by Arnold Ahlert in the New York Post)
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Consider this observation from the Jewish website jewsnotzionists.org:

So, Zionism has protected no one. At first it endangered the old Jewish inhabitants of the Holy Land. Then it endangered the millions who lived there. Finally, it has plunged into danger Jewry world wide and many others, including Americans anywhere around the world.

Can that possibly be what the Jews, and Christian Americans, want? to turn the entire world against them to demand a Final Solution that Hitler could not achieve because large parts of the world opposed him for other things?
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Apparently Zionists think that they can permanently divide The Enemy (everyone not Jewish) and stay safe by pitting Christians against Moslems. But if those two great communities ever realize that they are being played for fools and set at each other's throat by the Jews, won't there be hell to pay?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,951.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:19 AM