No Shame. I heard only today about an outrageous claim that President Bush made two days ago, that Saddam Hussein is responsible for the violence in Iraq today! Huh?
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Saddam has been out of power for nearly three years, and in jail since December 2003, over two years. It is impossible honestly to blame him for anything going on in Iraq today. He's not some Mafia don running the mob from prison thru a network of visitors and fone calls. He has absolutely nothing to do with what is happening today. Nothing. But of course that won't keep the man really responsible, George W. Bush, from accusing him, as Bush accused Saddam of having Weapons of Mass Destruction and harboring Al-Qaeda — false accusations Bush has never retracted nor apologized for.
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Plainly Dubya's puppetmasters are so desperate to find someone other than the United States Government to blame for the Iraq mess that they are putting forth truly pitiful excuses. I would be embarrassed for Bush and his cabal of murderers if I weren't so disgusted with them.
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How, pray, is Saddam supposed to be to blame?

Bush said that Saddam was a tyrant and used violence to exacerbate sectarian divisions to keep himself in power, and that as a result, deep tensions persist to this day.

"The enemies of a free Iraq are employing the same tactics Saddam used, killing and terrorizing the Iraqi people in an effort to foment sectarian division," Bush said. * * *

"Iraq is a nation that is physically and emotionally scarred by three decades of Saddam's tyranny," Bush said in a speech to Freedom House, a more than 60-year-old independent organization that supports the expansion of freedom in the world. * * *

He criticized lawmakers calling for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq - a move that Bush said would have disastrous consequences for American security. If troops were withdrawn now, Iraq would turn into a safe haven for terrorists, who could arm themselves with weapons of mass destruction and could attack moderate governments in the Middle East.

"The Iraqi government is still in transition, and the Iraqi security forces are still gathering capacity," Bush said. "If we leave Iraq before they're capable of defending their own democracy, the terrorists will win."

What a load of crap. Bush himself can't really expect Americans to buy such a ridiculous pack of lies. Indeed, a poll on iWon.com today shows only 30% believe Saddam is to blame. 20% see the U.S. occupation as being to blame, and 42% see both Saddam and the U.S. equally to blame. That last is a soft middle of people who cannot yet accept that the war they backed has caused such horrendous problems.
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Iraq's physical destruction was done by Saddam? All those bombs and artillery barrages by the United States military, all those years of mass starvation and preventable deaths from disease produced by more than a decade of sanctions had nothing to do with it?
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And what Weapons of Mass Destruction could a ragtag band of terrorists develop that a government could not? "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." The American people have been fooled once. They will not be fooled twice.
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The tensions between groups in Iraq much predate Saddam Hussein's reign, even birth. Conflict between Shia and Sunni Islam has been going on for centuries, in countries where Saddam played absolutely no role.
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A map of "Kurdistan" appears at http://www.akakurdistan.com/kurds/stories/index.html after the introductory remark, "The map you are about to see was presented at the San Francisco Conference by the Kurdish League Delegation on March 30, 1945." That map shows a large region embracing parts of modern Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. A somewhat different map appears at http://kurdistan.org/mapofkurdistan.html, but it too shows an area across those four countries. Yet another map appears at Wikipedia's article on Kurdistan. If you click on that map, you get a larger version that shows that Kurds also occupy a small part of Armenia (which is clearest in yet another enlargement you can get to by clicking on an area outlined in red). The Wikipedia article says, of Kurdish aspirations to nationhood:

Following World War  I and the defeat of Ottoman Empire, Kurds were promised an independent nation-state in the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres. Turkish nationalists, however, rejected the terms of the treaty * * *

[T]he Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), has fought an armed campaign in Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran for over thirty years. In Turkey, more than 30,000 Turkish and Kurdish people have died as a result of the war between the state and the PKK, with alleged atrocities being committed by both sides.

World War  I ended in 1918, and Kurdish aspirations to nationhood were vetoed by Turkey in the early 1920s. Saddam Hussein was born in 1937. He had nothing to do with Kurdish struggles against their neighbors, not in Iraq and certainly not in Turkey, which he never controlled.
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As for Shia-Sunni conflict, the BBC addresses intercommunal violence in Pakistan thus:

Shias revere Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed

Pakistan is 20% Shia, 70% Sunni

Violence between Sunni and Shia factions began from early 1980s

Over 150 people have died in the past year alone

Around 4,000 people have been killed in total

Saddam never controlled Pakistan, which is 800 miles from the nearest part of Iraq.
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A South Asian observer presents the wider historical picture:

Shia-Sunni sectarian conflicts have been a feature over most of Muslim history, and they have closely linked to the competition for power. It was this that led Syed Amir Ali (writer on Islamic history and society) to remark in his book, The Spirit of Islam, "Alas! That the religion of humanity and universal brotherhood should not have escaped the internecine strife and discord; that the faith which was to bring peace and rest to the distracted world should itself be torn to pieces by angry passions and the lust of power".

Aside from Iraq and Pakistan, Sunni-Shia violence also occurred in the 20th Century in Lebanon, which Saddam also had nothing to do with. The only reason there isn't a wider area of conflict between the two sects is that Shias are geographically concentrated in the neighborhood of Iran, not scattered widely across the Moslem world like Catholics and Protestants are across the Christian world.
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Shia and Sunni Islam diverged "[s]hortly after the death of the Prophet of Islam". Muhammed died in 632 A.D. To try to blame conflict between Shia and Sunni Islam on Saddam Hussein will not wash.
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As for the claim that if U.S. troops withdrew, "Iraq would turn into a safe haven for terrorists, who could arm themselves with weapons of mass destruction and could attack moderate governments in the Middle East", get serious. U.S. forces do not have to be on the ground to destroy Iraqi WMD installations. We can rain death and destruction from the air. No, ground forces are supposed to be there to build (Iraqi democracy), not destroy (speculative Iraqi WMD). Moslems really are not stupid. They know that spy satellites and U-2 spyplanes they cannot shoot down can watch developments on the ground and direct smart bombs and bunker-busters to destroy any attempt to build an arsenal or army capable of attacking neighboring states. So that assertion won't wash either. These are indeed very dirty lies.
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The claim that "If we leave Iraq before they're capable of defending their own democracy, the terrorists will win" is more drivel. Iraqi democracy is stymied by its own gridlock, not by terrorism. Parliament was elected in December but has met exactly once, on March 16th, for less than an hour!

The parliamentary meeting was reduced to 20 minutes of protocol that did little but meet a constitutional deadline.

"It is just something we have to get off our backs," one senior parliamentarian told Reuters. "Then we'll go and sit at the negotiating table and yell at each other."

Who's to blame? The U.S., plainly. We set up a parliamentary form of government, and it is that form of government that has prevented Iraq from getting democracy underway. If we had set up an American-style government, the Iraqi Congress would have started work immediately on being sworn in, knowing that they have to work together for at least the next two years because their term of office is fixed, so they can't oust their opponents by vote of no-confidence. The President of Iraq would have started to use his executive powers instantly upon taking office.
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What moron came up with the idea of installing a British-style government in a society that has none of the characteristics of a relatively homogeneous society like Britain? Iraq is diverse, much more like the U.S. It should have been given a federal structure with large areas of subject-matter autonomy at the state level and a limited government at the federal level. It worked for us. Why did the Bushies think it would not work for Iraq?
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What the Bush Administration put in place in Iraq is what's causing the political paralysis.
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And the U.S. military occupation is the irritant that drives the insurgency. It is the proverbial bur under the horse's saddle. As long as that bur continues to dig into the horse's flesh, that long will the horse be agitated and unridable. Remove the bur, and the horse will calm down.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,326.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:32 PM

 
Good News, for a Change. (1) Christian Science Monitor journalist Jill Carroll was released by her captors in Iraq today. It was insane of Moslem men who claim respect for women to have taken and threatened her to begin with, but they have redeemed their honor. Good for them.
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Her family "has no plans to travel to Baghdad" to welcome her back to society. Yes, please do not go to Iraq. We don't need more Americans taking foolish risks with their lives.
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Iraqi insurgents need to prove that Islam is about peace and justice. Right makes might.
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(2) Today is the anniversary of the death of the vegetable Terri Schiavo, over whom Republican loons became so exercised that they made themselves look like the fools and extremists they are. The good news? Ms. Schiavo is still dead, and the attempt by the Schindlers, her stupid parents, to make her death into "euthanasia" cannot succeed.

Robert and Mary Schindler have reorganized the Terri Schindler Schiavo Foundation to mount a political attack on what they call "the deliberate killing of the disabled or anyone deemed 'unworthy' of life."

Nobody killed Terri Schiavo, and she wasn't alive in anything like a human sense. Real Christians don't lie. And they sure don't make false accusations of murder against people who value real human life.
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The fake controversy that religious nuts stirred up around their dauter was resolved within weeks of her finally being released from vegetative-life after the Schindlers had wasted hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars of other people's money, and in so doing taken resources away from people who could actually have been helped. An autopsy revealed that Schiavo's brain had wasted to half its normal size, so there was absolutely no possibility of her ever having resumed normal human functioning.
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Senator Bill Frist — a doctor, for chrissake — disgraced himself in making a 'diagnosis' from a video(!) that she was not in a "persistent vegetative state". It turned out that yes, she sure as hell was.
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Will that egregious error in judgment blunt Frist's drive for the White House in 2008? One can hope so. Every time the Schindler-Schiavo crowd open their mouth, they remind the Nation of how wrong they and Frist were. Keep up the good work.
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Life is for the living, and medical care is for people, not vegetables.
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(3) Randy McCloy, the miner who just barely survived a mine cave-in that killed 12 others almost three months ago, is up, walking, and talking! Hey! The whole Nation came together in concern over this one West Virginian who was in a coma for weeks after his rescue, hopeful for his full recovery, but worried. We also listened sadly to the stories of the notes that miners who did not survive left for their loved ones. They had the quality of those poignant letters from Civil War soldiers who were later killed that made so much of Ken Burns's magnificent PBS documentary series, The Civil War, so wrenching.
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West Virginia is a persistent remnant of that war, since it comprises the counties of Virginia that remained faithful to the Union when their traitorous fellow Virginians tried to secede. Isn't it time to heal that wound? Let's merge West Virginia back into Virginia, one of the more progressive/less regressive Southern states, and thereby strengthen Virginia's faithful elements. Maybe West Virginians can get Virginia to rename all those highways and other public places given the names of traitors.
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(4) Two New Orleans police officers caught on videotape beating a helpless man on a sidewalk for no good reason have been indicted "on felony charges that could send them to prison for years." Whether they are ultimately acquitted or convicted is in a way less important than that they have been indicted, because such indictments put on notice all police officers tempted to "excessive force" / "police brutality". Much of any police force is recruited from the same social classes as the criminals they are tasked to control. But when society gives people guns and truncheons, it must also strive to give them ways to control themselves. For that, we need both carrot (training and counseling) and stick (prosecution of officers who abuse their power).
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(5) Here in Newark, we are finally seeing some real springtime weather. My crocuses are open, my daffodils and hyacinths are popping, and the leaves that precede flower stalks on my tulips have come up thick thru last autumn's leaves. After weeks of subnormally cold weather — where is all that Global Warming we're supposed to have? We need some here — we might finally break 70 today, or tomorrow at worst.
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March has been a lion in many ways. Maybe it will finally go out as a lamb after all.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,327.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:42 PM

 
More Madness from Wrigley. AOL today hilites a minor controversy over a stupid ad for Bud Light shown weeks ago, in which men tell their wives they're going up to the roof to make repairs, only to set up lawn chairs on pitched roofs and drink beer.

Anheuser-Busch, the makers of Bud Light, says the ad was a spoof.

Critics said that the commercial sent a dangerous message that it was fun to drink on rooftops and that the ad violated the beer industry's advertising and marketing standards, which stipulate that ads "should not portray beer drinking before or during activities, which for safety reasons, require a high degree of alertness or coordination."

The poll that accompanied that New York Times article on AOL shows that 77% of readers do not believe it encourages unsafe behavior. As well they might. That commercial is just silly, and no one is going to take it seriously.
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Another commercial does, however, encourage irresponsible behavior. Were it the only case of its sort, it might be harmless. But it's not the only such case and not harmless.
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In the commercial I object to, Orbit gum shows a young man driving down the road and checking out his dazzling-white smile first in the rearview mirror, then left side mirror, ignoring the road. So captivated is he by his own smile, that he can't take his eyes off the mirror, so runs off the road and thru several businesses, until his car finally stops in a front-end crash into a solid wall. People are shown scrambling for cover, but, magically, no one is hurt.
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Reckless driving is not harmless, and not the slitest funny.
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In looking (unsuccessfully) for an online showing of this revolting ad, I came upon astonishing praise for a Pontiac commercial from 2003 in which a blind woman is shown driving. Blind. Driving. And the National Federation of the Blind actually praises that commercial! That organization should be crushed out of existence.
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Blind people are not entitled to the 'exhilaration' or 'joy' or 'liberation' of driving. Driving is not so safe that even the blind can drive, and to suggest otherwise is criminally irresponsible. That Pontiac commercial is insane, and should be punished by a permanent, lifelong ban from advertising and media for everyone responsible in any way for its creation or broadcast. The executives at General Motors who authorized it should be fired, and banned from executive responsibilities of any kind forever. Plainly they don't have the judgment of a five-year-old. No wonder GM is in perpetual danger of going bankrupt.
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Hollywood — and now the National Federation of the Blind?— has been teaching people to drive recklessly for at least 70 years. Drivers are regularly shown taking their eyes off the road for extended periods to look at the person next to them in conversation, as tho this is a sane and sensible practice necessary to make a real connection in conversation. Racing on public streets, speeding, car chases, car crashes, and jumps by speeding vehicles over and into obstacles are standard fare in Hollywood movies, and almost never is anyone killed or even injured in these extraordinarily dangerous behaviors. Now Wrigley adds its two cents to encourage people to think that inattention and reckless driving are funny. What's the worst that can happen? You bang up your car. None of the dozens of people who had to run for cover in that ad is injured, and crashing into a wall does you no harm either. "It's all good." (That is one of those Hollywood expressions I detest.)
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No, it's not all good. It's not AT all good. It's inexcusably irresponsible, and should be punished. Graphic images and moving pictures are not protected by the First Amendment. They are an extension not of human speech nor the press but of statuary, painting, and other publicly displayed art, which the Founding Fathers knew about but did not protect.
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We have a very real problem in this country with inattention during driving. A very different, responsible commercial now showing, for Allstate, shows a man momentarily distracted by an open cup of coffee he is drinking while driving. A car ahead has stopped unexpectedly, and our driver not only drops his coffee but despite his best efforts to brake in time, crashes into the car ahead. The Allstate spokesman, black character actor Dennis Haysbert, intones some appropriately solemn warning about needless accidents and claims that Allstate is working to reduce accidents thru driver education and other measures. Now that is all good.
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It is not funny to make lite of women putting on mascara while driving, or of anyone using a cellfone with one hand and drinking a cup of coffee from the other, while steering with the elbows. Things like that actually happen, because some people are morons who think nothing bad can happen to them. They've done things like that before and nothing bad ever happened. Well, moron, it's just a matter of time. And when something bad does happen, it can be very bad indeed.
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Cars are thousands of pounds of steel and glass hurtling with enormous force. Crashes can not just crumple steel and shatter glass, but kill or permanently maim people, even several people in a single accident, especially if drivers following irresponsibly close are then involved in multi-car pileups.
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According to the futurists who speculated on highway safety features in, for instance, the 1939 New York World's Fair, we were supposed to have, by now, automatic spacing between cars, and system-wide speed and direction controls that adjusted to road conditions, weather, and congestion, to keep us from having auto accidents. Hasn't happened, even tho we do still hear of plans finally to put such things in place.
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Until and unless that happens, we are going to have to rely upon the judgment of drivers, and drivers must always be aware that driving is an intrinsically dangerous activity, so they must always drive responsibly, which means paying attention primarily to the road, not to friends, nor coffee, nor makeup, nor music, nor radio news, nor unexpected cellfone calls, or anything else.
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The message must be consistent. We can afford no encouragements in the popular culture to regard reckless driving as a harmless lark.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,325.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:08 PM

 
False Comparisons. Two items.
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News or American Idol? CNN Headline News today reported that more people watch American Idol (33 million) than the major network newscasts (28 million), then posed a man-on-the-street interview question to New Yorkers as to which they would prefer to watch, "the news" or American Idol. Almost all said "news". CNN leaped to conclude that they were just not owning up to their real preference. Very sloppy logic.
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The leap CNN made is false in at least two regards: first, more people are home when American Idol airs; and second, the major networks are not the only source of television news.
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Many years ago, NBC Nightly News reported that Americans are working longer hours and facing longer commutes, leaving the house earlier and arriving home later than ever before in recent history. Within about six months thereafter NBC and the other two major networks moved their evening news shows a half hour earlier. Yes, you heard me: earlier.
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ABC, CBS, and NBC had theretofore run a half-hour news show at 7:00 p.m. Six months after the story appeared that Americans are getting home later than ever, all three networks moved their news shows earlier, so they now air at 6:30, when part of their old audience isn't even home from work yet. Network executives knew that they would lose some of their audience but moved their evening newscasts earlier anyway. Why?
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There was speculation at the time that the networks wanted to stop airing evening newscasts altogether, because of expense and logistics, but were bound by tradition and public opinion to keep them going. They wanted to turn over that half hour to local news or entertainment, which are far more profitable. But they couldn't justify doing so, especially in lite of the FCC and public expectation that broadcasters would operate over "the people's airwaves" as custodians of a public trust.
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So they contrived to reduce the audience, as to justify plans to terminate evening newscasts altogether by claiming that people don't want to watch. (Note that the newer networks (Fox, UPN, the WB, Paxson) did not institute evening newscasts when they came online.)
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It didn't work. Enuf people still watched that the old-line networks couldn't abandon the audience, and the people within networks prevailed who felt there was an absolute obligation to the public to maintain evening newscasts even if they didn't make a ton of money.
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Why, then, didn't the networks move their shows back to 7 p.m. to recapture the viewers they lost, as better to fulfil their public duty? Because, you see, if any of the three networks stayed at 6:30, that one stood to take a substantial proportion, if not an actual majority, of viewers away from the others. That's why all three went to 6:30 to begin with: one went earlier, and the others, fearing their audience would be wiped out if they stayed at 7:00, moved theirs too in rapid succession. (I think it was NBC that went to 6:30 first, because I noted at the time the irony of NBC being the network on which I saw the report about people getting home later being the network that first moved its show earlier.) So they would all have to move their news show back to 7, or none would. Thus is it that decades later, when people are working still longer hours and bearing even longer commutes, so getting home even later, the network news shows are still willfully precluding millions of Americans from watching them.
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The second element to the falsity of the comparison of news vs. American Idol is that cable news channels like CNN Headline News, the original CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News Channel, in English, and the evening newscasts of Univision and Telemundo in Spanish, all add dramatically to the number of viewers of news. What is the real total, then, of people who watch news regularly? Hard to say.
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One website estimates that the daytime viewership is about 1.3 million and evening viewership 2.2 million. I don't know how they can calculate that, given that the cable channels offer 24-hour news and that same website says:

Looking at audiences each month, fewer than 700,000 people watched cable during any given daytime moment between October 1997 and July 1998, and fewer than 1.2 million watched in prime time.

That's at "any given ... moment". How do they calculate the 24-hour total? I don't know. But if a total of even only 1.3 million watch in the daytime and 2.2 million watch at nite, that's 3.5 million combined. Add that to the 28 million who watch the over-air networks' evening newscasts, and you get 31.5 million. Add to the news figure, which is for national and world news, all the local newscasts, over-air and cable, and the total number of news viewers doubtless exceeds American Idol's 33 million — by a lot.
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It is only in looking for figures on local news audience that I found an express acknowledgment of my main point here, at the website State of the News Media 2006:

Some of the decline in viewership, however, has nothing to do with channel preference but probably has to do with changes in the way people live. Americans wake up earlier and commute longer. Indeed, as the chart above shows, roughly one-third of the news audience is no longer available to watch news because they are either commuting during the evening newscast or asleep by the time the late news begins. One sign of this is the fact that, according to news professionals, the most likely growth area for local news in most markets has been early morning news, before 7 a.m. This is why many stations now produce more hours of news, starting as early as 5 a.m. in larger markets. The trend has included stations in large markets pushing the start of their morning news programs earlier and earlier, while midsize markets are adding morning news where they once aired syndicated shows.

So let's not dumb-down the American public more than is warranted. We watch lots of news, when we can.
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Monkey Business on AIDS. CNN reports today that a new approach holds promise of preventing infection with "HIV" the so-called "AIDS virus":

Scientists have long believed that a vaccine is the best way to stop the spread of AIDS, but efforts to invent one have miserably flopped. [Why is that? You're not supposed to ask. The answer, however, is plain: you can't vaccinate against injuries, and AIDS, in the Western world, is a drug injury.]

Now they may have found something already on pharmacy shelves that seems to prevent infection.

It's a combination of two drugs that have shown such promise in early experiments in monkeys that officials just expanded tests of them in people around the world. * * *

Specifically, six macaques were given the drugs and then challenged with a deadly combination of monkey and human AIDS viruses, administered in rectal doses to imitate how the germ spreads in [some] gay men.

Despite 14 weekly blasts of the virus, none of the monkeys became infected. All but one of another group of monkeys that didn't get the drugs did, typically after two exposures.

Problem: monkeys don't get AIDS.
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HIV has no effect on them whatsoever. That is why the "test" had to inject "monkey and human AIDS viruses".
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It is a simple, hard, unalterable rule of science that you cannot permit two variables and claim results for only one of them.
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If you inject one germ into a test subject and a medication shows good results, you may develop evidence of effectiveness. If you inject two different types of germ that produce similar symptoms, administer a medication, and see positive results, you cannot know if both germs were countered or only one. Nor can you know which one. Except we can in this case know that injecting HIV – Human Immunodeficiency Virus – into a monkey is irrelevant to the health of the monkey, because in no event would HIV cause immunodeficiency in monkeys! It's called "Human Immunodeficiency Virus" because it (supposedly) produces immunodeficiency only in humans, NOT in monkeys, chimpanzees, guinea pigs, rabbits, cats, dogs, or any other animal standardly used to test medicines. This is, indeed, one of the telltale signs that the assertion that HIV produces AIDS in people is so dubious as to be extremely suspicious. This was well understood as long ago as 1990.

No one has tried injecting HIV into a healthy human being, but scientists have stuck all kinds of mice and rats and monkeys and chimpanzees, and none of them got anything resembling human AIDS.

Same story in 1996:

Several species of animals are paying the price of scientists['] refusal to drop their age-old methodology in the face of our new and complex virus. One favourite is the chimpanzee — not presently used in British laboratories because of its status as a[ ] threatened species. These primates have 98% of our genetic make-up — they are as close to humans as it is possible to be. More than 100 chimps have now been deliberately infected with HIV and not one of them has developed the opportunistic infections and cancers associated with AIDS. They do not even carry the HIV virus in all the body fluids that AIDS patients do. And they are kept, in isolation, in the highly unnatural environment of a research laboratory, suffering physical and psychological stress [which can in itself weaken the immunological system].

As recently as last October, science accepted that HIV does not affect monkeys. Rather, a supposed monkey 'version' of HIV, Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV), is used in AIDS studies as a model. All "studies" of SIV as regards their usefulness in understanding HIV are speculative and absolutely unscientific, akin to using studies of the atmosphere of Mars to speculate about the atmosphere of Earth. But you wouldn't know that from CNN's uncritical passing along of the medically worthless crap it broadcast today.
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This is the kind of evil lie that "science" has been shoveling about AIDS for decades. But people in general are so lacking in scientific sophistication and so trusting that they believe every syllable uttered by scientific and government liars. Wake up, people!
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,323.).
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:55 PM

 
Infantilism in the Black Community. In an astonishingly un-self-aware bit of rationalization, a black woman named Joy Jones, concurs (in an opinion piece in yesterday's Washington Post) with what a 12-year-old black boy once told her: "Marriage is for white people."

I realized that all the things I expected marriage to confer — male companionship, close family ties, a house — I already had, or were within reach, and with exponentially less drama. I can do bad by myself, I used to say as I exited a relationship. But the truth is, I can do pretty good by myself, too.

Oh, can you really? Can you really dispense with a permanent, stable love relationship? Is loving companionship so trivial to you? You say at one point you can't afford at present to buy a house on your own, but you could eventually. How lucky you are, if that happens. But who will be in that house? You, alone? What a full, rich, rewarding life that will be.
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Completely missing from her moronic discussion was the actual state of financial affairs for blacks in general, black women more particularly, and black children most particularly.
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The median income for black households in the United States in 2001 was $29,470; for whites, $44,517. Blacks have only two-thirds of white income. Put another way, whites make half again as much as blacks.
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24.7% of blacks live in poverty. For whites, the figure is 10.8%.
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5.5% of married couples live in poverty; 13.5% of male householders with no wife present live in poverty; 28.4% of female householders with no husband present live in poverty.

Children with two married parents are much less likely to be living in poverty than children living only with their mothers. In 1996, 10% of children in two-parent families were living in poverty, compared to 49% in female-householder families.

This contrast by family structure is especially pronounced among certain racial and ethnic minorities. For example, in 1996, 14% of black children in married-couple families lived in poverty, compared to 58% of black children in female-householder families.

Refusal to marry, or stay married, is a real bargain for black people, isn't it?
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I've got the solution. Let's just outlaw black marriage. Then they might want it. It has worked with gay men. Let's try it with black women.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,323.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:32 PM

 
A Little More on Immigration. Yesterday's L.A. demonstration was reported again today, with a little different information. Some idiot Hispanic quoted in today's version disowned the idea of Hispanics as terrorists by asking 'Who do you think built the World Trade Center?' If he really thinks that the extremely well-paid, unionized labor that built the WTC was illegal aliens from Mexico, he is demented.
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When we speak of illegal aliens, we're not talking about skilled labor, because skilled workers can ordinarily get into this country legally, assuming there is a real demand for their skills that is not met by domestic supplies. Illegals here are not building our great towers but picking crops, cleaning houses, busing tables, washing dishes, doing unskilled labor at construction sites, and other menial jobs with long hours, lousy pay, no benefits, and minimal worksite safety standards. Why do they put up with it? Because it's better than what is available to them in their home countries.
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I hate to agree with Dubya on anything, but he's right to try to reinstitute a bracero program.
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I was aware of the bracero program when it existed and when it was, for reasons beyond my comprehension then or now, abolished. It was basically an agricultural program in which Mexicans were brought in to do the work we really do have trouble getting Americans to do, the backbreaking labor involved in harvesting crops that cannot readily be harvested by machine. But they were brought in only for the agricultural season, as temporary workers. And then they went home, with some money in their pockets that they couldn't make at home, but no dislocation, and none of the cultural disorientation that would arise from being permanently submerged in a foreign culture that comes from permanent relocation.
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In Cuba during the sugar harvest, the government simply mobilizes the townsfolk in compulsory service, or sends enthusiastic (brainwashed) Communist youth into the fields as a 'sacred' duty. Here, we don't even try to mobilize ghetto or college youth to take temp jobs in the fields, especially given the unfortunate mental association for blacks of fieldwork with slavery. I can visualize harvest as a type of fun collective activity, a sort of working-with-your-hands "spring break" for hundreds of thousands of high school and college kids given a respite from studies to find out what life is like for 'the other half' or what life used to be like for almost everyone thru most of time. A structured event could alternate hard work with parties and social/sexual opportunities. Those parties would be restrained by weariness to some degree, but that might actually be a very good thing, in giving kids an early lesson about 'a time and place for everything', and 'everything in moderation'.
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But as long as we can import mestizo or indio labor from Latin America, we don't need even to try such a thing.
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A revived bracero program would have to be well regulated to provide good housing, medical care, and careful oversight to make sure that people are paid what they are supposed to be paid, and are treated in accord with labor standards, safety standards, etc.
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But a revived bracero program does not have to draw upon self-righteous Mexicans. After all, we could perfectly well charter a few dozen ships to bring in hundreds of thousands of agricultural workers from India or China and take them back home when their work is done. The world is filled to overflowing with poor people who would love to work part of the year in the U.S. and take back what is to them a lot of money, home to Asia or Africa. After all, the British Empire imported Indians into Africa to do types of work they didn't rely upon locals to do.
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Hispanics should be very careful not to rile Anglos. We certainly can afford to build a Great Wall of America — with coolies from India (where, oddly, the word originated, even tho we generally picture a 'chinee' with a pigtail when we hear the word "coolie"), or from China, Brazil, Nigeria, or any number of other countries.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,322.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:20 PM

 
Toughening Immigration Laws. The big story today was demonstrations in various cities across the Nation by immigrants against proposed Federal legislation to make willfully violating the immigration laws of this country into a felony. The AP news story quotes some of the demonstrators in Los Angeles saying naive, even dishonest things like this:

"They say we are criminals. We are not criminals," said Salvador Hernandez, 43, of Los Angeles, a resident alien who came to the United States illegally from El Salvador 14 years ago and worked as truck driver, painter and day laborer.

You violated the immigration laws but are not a criminal? I'm afraid you are. Immigration laws are laws. You violate them, you're a criminal. Res ipse loquitur — the thing speaks for itself.

Francisco Flores, 27, a wood flooring installer from Santa Clarita who is a former illegal immigrant, said, "We want to work legally, so we can pay our taxes and support the country, our country."

Oh, what country would that be? I saw coverage of those demonstrations, punctuated with waving Mexican, Honduran, and other foreign flags. If you are so proud of your country of origin, why did you leave? It really is not our responsibility to make up for the defects of your societies. It is up to you to make your countries work, not make it harder for our own country to work.
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And if you paid taxes, could you still afford to work so cheaply as to be preferred over native-born Americans?

Elsa Rodriguez, 30, a trained pilot who came to Colorado in 1999 from Mexico to look for work, said she just wants to be considered equal.

"We're like the ancestors who started this country, they came from other countries without documents, too," the Arvada resident [said]. "They call us lazy and dirty, but we just want to come to work."

Sorry, folks. "Driver, painter and day laborer" are not jobs that no American will take. When illegal aliens arrive and work extremely cheaply, they undercut drivers, painters, and laborers in many fields who could make a living wage at such occupations were it not for the constant inpouring of illegals. And Ms. Rodriguez, there are a great many pilots in this country who have been thrown out of work by turmoil in the aviation industry. We don't need to import competitors to native-born Americans.
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Few people nowadays call Mexicans lazy. Quite the contrary, they have gained a reputation of being hard workers who gladly work cheap. But they work all too often in occupations that Americans are willing to work in if they could make a decent wage, with reasonable hours and working conditions. The only reason they cannot make a decent wage in those occupations is because criminals who violate our immigration laws steal jobs, subvert wages by unfair competition, and accept working conditions that no self-respecting American would put up with. So illegals are three times criminals: first, they violate our borders in defiance of our immigration laws; second, they steal jobs from Americans; and third, they co-conspire in violating wages-and-hours and other benefits laws designed to protect workers. In consenting to be exploited, they empower employers to abuse their employees of whatsoever nationality. Illegal immigration is not harmless.
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How did these people normalize their legal status if they came here illegally? Amnesty? Have they become U.S. citizens? If not, why not? If their loyalty is to their country of birth, they should go back, and put their money where their mouth is. But they mustn't take our money with them.
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You can tell our money from theirs. Ours has our name on it: "United States of America".
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Americans can't just step across the Mexican, Honduran, or Salvadoran border and compete with locals for jobs. Hell, Hondurans and Salvadorans can't just step across the Mexican border and compete with Mexicans. Why should they think they have the right to ignore our border and our laws?
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Tho it is certainly true that at various times in history, people have moved from place to place without paper permissions, it is also true that people, like other animals, defend their territory. Animals mark their territory with pee and poop, and defend it with violence. People mark their territory with borders, fences — gates with skulls on stakes. The Chinese built a Great Wall to keep outsiders outside. There's nothing unique here.
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Our country is ours. You have a country of your own. We have no more obligation to take in foreigners than they have to take us in, and citizenship has its perks. Some countries don't naturalize more than a tiny proportion of immigrants, if indeed they permit any immigration at all. U.S. law is unusually generous. But the purpose of immigration is to serve our interests, not yours. That goes for our geopolitical interests, not just our economic interests.
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If we open the Golden Door, don't be surprised if we charge for admission.
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That charge may be in the form of a requirement that you pay an application fee to ask permission to enter; wait your turn; prove that you have skills we need and that you will not push labor rates down, impose burdens upon localities you move to, go on welfare, commit crimes, or otherwise adversely affect this country. We may even, if military recruitment dips dangerously low, require military service of new immigrants. And require immigrants to pledge either to leave after five years or apply for citizenship.
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If you pass all those tests, we will let you in — in due course, meaning, in our own sweet time. If you are not willing to play by the rules, we will keep you out or, if we find you here, kick you out, and bar you from re-entry for any period we may decide, up to life.
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The U.S. has had restrictions on immigration thru much of its history, and immigrants today face nothing like the indignities and anxieties that immigrants passing thru Ellis Island faced. Even those were mild as against much of the rest of the world thru much of history, including what is now Latin America. An Indian of a neighboring tribe found on Aztec land might well find himself at the top of a great pyramid in Tenochtitlán ("Templo Mayor" in modern Mexico City), there to have his heart cut out with a stone knife and held aloft while still beating. A Mongol found on the wrong side of the Great Wall was likely to be killed or enslaved. Now those are harsh immigration laws.
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If Mexicans and Central Americans want open movement to all parts of the United States, let them agitate for their governments to petition the United States for admission as States of the Union.
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In 1849, the British Empire was aggressively seeking to enlarge its Mosquito Coast colony in eastern Nicaragua and Honduras, and even seize territory in the Gulf of Fonseca with an eye to creating a sea-level canal thru Central America, in blatant disregard of local sovereignty.

Several of the Central American republics, including Nicaragua, had become so apprehensive of British designs that they were looking to the United States for protection. As [U.S. Secretary of State John M.] Clayton bluntly informed [the British minister in Washington]:

There is not one of these five Central American states [Panama was then only part of Colombia] that would not annex themselves to us tomorrow, if they could, and if it is any secret worth knowing you are welcome to it — Some of them have offered and asked to be annexed to the United States already. [Italics in original.]*

A year earlier, the U.S. had annexed all of northern Mexico west of Texas. Three years before that, we annexed Texas, which had been independent almost ten years but before its independence had also been part of Mexico. In the Mexican War that brought the Mexican Cession, the All-Mexico Movement had advocated that the entire territory of defeated Mexico should be annexed to the United States and created first into territories for a transition period and then into full states. Had that been done and Central America also annexed, we wouldn't have the problems with immigration from those exact areas that we have today. Instead, the entire region from the Rio Grande to the northern border of Colombia would be prosperous Sunbelt states today (for we would surely have made Panama a state too if Costa Rica had already been made so by the time we broke Panama off from Colombia to dig the Panama Canal).
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If we show the kind of foresight our ancestors did not, and bring Mexico and Central America into the Union now, they will be prosperous Sunbelt states 50 years from now. Better late than never.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,322.)
____________________

* A Diplomatic History of the American People, by Thomas A. Bailey, 1969, p. 275.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:38 PM

 
Deathknell for Antigay Bigotry? Americans are adjusting much faster than almost anyone could have predicted to the arrival of gay marriage, and that has serious implications for the future of the Republican Party. The Associated Press reported yesterday:

The public backlash over gay marriage has receded since a controversial decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Court in 2003 to legalize those marriages stirred strong opposition, says a poll released Wednesday [3/22/06].

Gay marriage remains a divisive issue, with 51 percent opposing it, the poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found. But almost two-thirds, 63 percent, opposed gay marriage in February 2004. * * *

The number of people who say they strongly oppose gay marriage has dropped from 42 percent in early 2004 to 28 percent now. Strong opposition has dropped sharply among senior citizens and Republicans.

People are now evenly split on allowing adoptions by gay couples and six in 10 now favor allowing gays to serve openly in the military.

Uh oh.
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The Republican Party is counting on fury over gay adoption to turn out their base this November and win re-election for a Republican majority in both houses of Congress. They have placed initiatives against gay adoption on the ballot in a number of key states, hoping that they can distract the poor people of those states who have been screwed-over by Republican policies into voting against their own interests because the Republicans will protect them from them damned faggots! It might still work, this November. But how long can Republicans keep the poor white trash of the South from realizing that Republican policies are destroying them?
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The greatness of the United States is showing. The fundamental decency and devotion of the American people to "the pursuit of happiness" is winning out over fearmongers' trying to control behavior they don't approve of by making extravagant claims that letting people be themselves will somehow destroy our civilization. But their alarums and excursions are proving increasingly useless. People are realizing that the terrible things they were told would happen if faggots weren't kept down just aren't happening. The "homosexual agenda" isn't destroying the Nation. The sun did not explode when Massachusetts legalized gay marriage.
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The working slogan of this country is neither "E Pluribus Unum" nor "In God We Trust". It is "Live and Let Live".
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The Republican Party is on the wrong side of history, and history is moving fast. Consider that figure of people strongly opposed to gay marriage. It dropped by 14 points in two years! Two years! 14 points on a base of 42% is exactly 1/3, in two years! To put that in even starker context, the 28% that remains is only twice the 14 point drop in two years. Moreover, the drop in total opposition was 12 points in two years, to the edge of becoming a minority stance, just 51%. In two years! It took far longer than that to get gay men to favor gay marriage!
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Reforming marriage laws was one of the stances that my organization, Homosexuals Intransigent!, took very early (by February 1972), and we were criticized, if not even condemned, for being "hetero-imitative". The libertines in our crowd proclaimed that "sexual liberation" meant we must not be tied down to a single partner, because "monogamy is unnatural". Is any form of marriage, then, natural? Or is only sex with whomever one is attracted to biologically normal?
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Well, all societies are dominated by men, and all societies have marriage. Ergo marriage could not be unnatural, could it?
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What about polygamy? "Monogamy with exceptions" (affairs, "cheating")?
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Polygamy is common in past human history, but so is monogamy. After all, the sex ratio in the human species is too close to permit everyone to have more than one wife (and we are, for all practical purposes, talking about polygyny (more than one wife) when we speak of polygamy, because polyandry (formalized permission of a woman to have more than one husband) is practically unheard of.
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An essay on monogamy among animals and its implications for people appears on the website of San Antonio's Trinity University. In "Deflating the Myth of Monogamy", David P. Barash, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington, discusses monogamy in the sense of sexual exclusivity.
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Hilites (emphasis added):

[M]ales tend to follow a "mixed reproductive strategy," whereby they establish a mateship with a designated female (and perhaps assist in nest building, territorial defense, care of the young, and so forth insofar as those activities increase their reproductive success) while also making themselves available for E.P.C.'s ["extra-pair copulations", that is, adulterous couplings] with other females, whom they will not assist.

To be sure, males can be expected to be at least minimally discriminating, because there may be costs associated with too much sexual gallivanting: A careless Lothario might be attacked, for example, by an outraged "husband." Or, while seeking his own E.P.C.'s, a philanderer might be cuckolded by other males having similar designs on his mate, unavoidably left unguarded. * * *

For some species, notably certain lizards and insects, there appears to be a payoff in increasing the genetic diversity of one's offspring by copulating with multiple partners. For some birds, there may be an immediate benefit – such as being fed by one's lover. In many cases, the payoff appears to be more indirect, via genetic benefits accruing to the "out-of-wedlock" offspring. By mating with males who are especially fit and/or who possess secondary sexual traits that are particularly appealing to other females, would-be mothers apparently can increase the fitness as well as the eventual sexual attractiveness of their offspring. ...

The anthropologist Sarah Hrdy [sic; Czech for "proud"; her husband's surname] has suggested that among primates in particular, females solicit E.P.C.'s in order to buy a kind of tolerance from their extra-pair sexual partners: Males of many species (including langurs, chimpanzees, and certain macaques) often kill offspring they have not fathered. By copulating with males from outside the troop, females could well be bribing them to avoid such violence toward offspring that might be their own. * * * [This leaves unanswered the question of how a male animal can know which are his offspring and which not. I suspect, in part from the behavior of my cat Leo, that he can actually smell it.]

Social conservatives like to point out what they see as threats to "family values." But they don't have the slightest idea how great that real threat is, or where it comes from. Monogamy is definitely under siege, not by government, declining morals, or some vast homosexual conspiracy -- but by our own evolutionary biology. Infants have their infancy. And adults? Adultery. * * *

... before the cultural homogenization that came with Western colonialism, more than three-quarters of all human societies were polygynous.

But it's one thing to conclude that our biology favors polygyny, and quite another to decide that most people, most of the time, were either keepers or members of harems. The likelihood is that only a few succeeded at polygyny, just as only a small proportion of females were chosen (or coerced). The great majority of people -- of both sexes – undoubtedly practiced monogamy, at least its social variety. * * *

In response to surveys, 25 to 50 percent of American men report having had at least one episode of extramarital sex. The numbers for women are perhaps a bit lower, but in the same ballpark. * * *

There is no question about [sexual] monogamy's being natural. It isn't. But at the same time, there is no reason to conclude that adultery is unavoidable, or that it is good. "Smallpox is natural," wrote Ogden Nash. "Vaccine ain't." Animals, most likely, can't help "doing what comes naturally." But humans can. A strong case can even be made that we are never so human as when we behave contrary to our natural inclinations, those most in tune with our biological impulses.

In a gay couple, the natural disposition of males to look around is doubled, but there is still an aspiration to faithfulness, at least emotional.

A 1994 study in The Advocate, the largest national gay and lesbian magazine, reported that 52% of the gay male couples described themselves as being monogamous ("The 1994 Advocate Survey of Sexuality and Relationships: The Men," The Advocate, August 23, 1994, pp. 16-24). * * *

In the 1994 Advocate study, the huge majority of gay couples say that sex outside the relationship is the most difficult problem they face -- 85% of the respondents in the study reported that this topic had caused their biggest fights.

It's not easy to be faithful, even when the risks of losing an enormously important emotional relationship would seem to make the prize not worth the gamble.
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Merely "tying the knot" does not really bind people, and society has had to exert itself mightily to stop people from having sex outside the bounds of matrimony. In the United States, we gave up that fite, as regards heterosexual marriage, decades ago and recognized that if people wanted out of a marriage (usually to pursue a sexual relationship with someone else, either already known or speculative for the future), they would find a way. We decided that "Divorce, American-Style" shouldn't be Marcello Mastroianni's Divorce, Italian Style (murder), nor the prior American style of divorce, filled with recriminations, private detectives, and adultery real and faked.
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The first no-fault divorce law was, oddly, signed in 1969 by Ronald Reagan when he was governor of California. The last was South Dakota's, in 1985.
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Conservative social critics have recently tried to mount a great crusade to abolish no-fault divorce, claiming it has caused this country to go to hell in a handbasket, cheapen marriage, and subvert the family. Note that these are some of the same grounds used to oppose gay marriage. But all 50 states abolished fault-divorce, because the mess that prior laws produced was awful. Tho many social observers are concerned that reformed divorce laws have indeed produced more broken marriages than the old laws, which is surely true, there is no chance that reactionaries will be able to saddle us with laws we abolished decades ago.
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There is likewise very little chance that Massachusetts will repeal gay marriage. Quite the contrary, it seems certain that now that high anxiety about same-sex marriage has subsided, Americans will relax and see legalization of gay marriage as the next step in our progress as a Nation toward "liberty and justice for all".
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,320.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:06 PM

 
Civilizing Savages. Prosecutors in Afghanistan are threatening to execute a man for converting from Islam to Christianity, and all that President Wuss will do is say "I’m troubled when I hear, deeply troubled when I hear, the fact that a person who converted away from Islam may be held to account."
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Not nearly good enuf. What he should say is "We forbid it. Stop this trial, abolish that law. Now." And if the Afghans defy that absolute, unequivocal demand, kill everyone responsible. Kill the legislators who passed the law. Kill the prosecutors involved in that suppression of the absolute right to freedom of conscience. Kill anyone and everyone who would commit this crime against freedom of conscience.
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We aren't in Afghanistan to stand idly by while crimes against humanity are committed.
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Why is the largest Christian country on Earth so timid about defending the right of people to become Christians? If the man on trial in Afghanistan were to be threatened with death for being a Jew, would we be so timid? Oddly, no. Crimes against Jews are taken very seriously by our (non-Jewish) government, but crimes against Christians, in the Sudan and elsewhere, are a matter of no concern. That must change.
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The Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaims unambiguously:

Article 18.
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Afghanistan was a signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights when it was passed in 1948, a long time ago. Afghanistan was civilized in 1948. Now it is barbarous. That's not the way things are supposed to go. Countries should become more civilized over time, not less.
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Afghanistan recognized its obligation to respect, indeed defend, freedom of conscience in 1948, and must accept that obligation now. If it does not act decisively to revoke all attempts at interfering with freedom of conscience, the United States should take all necessary measures to teach Afghan savages that they may not compel religious conscience. If they try, we will stop them. If they resist, we will punish them. If they fite against this universal principle, we will crush them.
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I would rather kill every single savage in Afghanistan than let savages execute people for converting to Christianity, to any other religion, or to atheism.
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Civilization is not weak. Civilization has the capacity to destroy barbarism, and we should not hesitate to warn barbarians that they must step up to civilization or we will crush them underfoot.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,319.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:44 AM

 
Fake News, Disinformation Section. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Comedy Central's satiric "fake news" show, last nite had as guest one Georges Sada, described as a general in Saddam Hussein's regime who has written a book he was pushing via that appearance. Stewart was bubbling with enthusiasm for this man, whom he found at once courageous and cuddly. 'He sat opposite Saddam, told him things he didn't want to hear, and lived to tell about it!' Alas, Sada seems a Bushite disinformation drone who referred to the "liberation" of Iraq and claims in his book that not only did Saddam have Weapons of Mass Destruction immediately before the Bush invasion — 'I saw them with my own eyes' — but he moved them into Syria before the fall of Baghdad, where, presumably, they remain today. Plainly this is part of the propaganda the Bushies are shoveling by the truckload to work us to war against both Syria and Iran.
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Perhaps they think the Nation is so stupid that it will consent to two more wars in the Middle East, just in time for the November elections. I hope they're wrong.
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Before the U.S. attack, and in hopes of giving people information and argumentation to influence the decision whether to attack or not, I wrote a 31,000-word presentation called "No Iraq Attack".
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In that presentation, at the heading "Saddam, Modernist", I make the points that (a) Saddam was most unlikely to have WMDs, because he could not use them against the U.S. or Israel (and defending Israel is the real, sole reason the U.S. attacked Iraq) without triggering a devastating counterattack from the United States, which would destroy everything Saddam was trying to accomplish in the Arab world, and (b) there was no chance Saddam would turn over WMD to anyone he could not control. That goes for Syria as well as al-Qaeda.

The pretense is that Saddam is in league with al-Qaeda and plans to give "terrorists" weapons of mass destruction to transport to the U.S. The reality is that Saddam is notoriously untrusting — one might say "paranoid" — so would NEVER permit weapons of mass destruction to be turned over to ANYONE he could not CONTROL ABSOLUTELY, because he fears that such weapons might be used against HIM.

Saddam is no fool. He knows that Islamists are his enemy. He knows that most of the "terrorists" hostile to the U.S. and Zionism are almost equally hostile to every Arab government in the world, and wants them all replaced with Islamic dictatorships of mullahs and other "holy men" who would safeguard the souls of Moslems against the temptations of the modern world — of which Iraq is plainly part.

No, Saddam is not giving weapons of mass destruction to Islamists. Not EVER. NEVER.

So, realistically, we need concern ourselves only with such forces as Saddam feels confident he can control: his own military. He knows that any use by Iraq of nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction from Iraqi soil would be detected immediately and punished with overwhelming force that would surely kill him and destroy everything he dreams of for Iraq. This is called "deterrence", and it has worked to prevent nuclear war for the entire Atomic Age.

In the Cold War, such deterrence was mutual. Both the Soviet Union/Warsaw Pact and United States/NATO had the capacity to obliterate the other side. This was called "Mutual Assured Destruction" or "MAD". MAD was enuf to prevent World War III from breaking out, despite the two sides having between them on the order of 30,000 nuclear weapons!

We are asked to believe that tho MUTUAL Assured Destruction could work against the Soviet Union, ONE-SIDED Assured Destruction (which I call "O-SAD") would NOT be enuf to restrain Iraq. Ridiculous! Saddam is not a suicide bomber. Nothing he has ever said or done would lead anyone to think that he believes he will go instantly to Paradise if he attacks the United States and is vaporized in return. Who can believe that a man who has built dozens of palaces all over Iraq and holds out grandiose hopes for a reunion of "the Arab Nation" under his leadership would throw it all away and cause it all to be destroyed by an insane and reckless attack upon the United States?

Iraq is not a danger to the United States or any other great power, in the West or anywhere else. Iraq's missiles are so crappy that despite dozens of attempts, they have never brought down so much as a single U.S. or British warplane patrolling the "no-fly" zones within Iraq's own territory. How, given such preposterous inaccuracy at very short range, could such crappy missiles ever reach a U.S. or even British target?

Iraq is a danger to Israel. That is all. And that is not reason enuf for the United States to disgrace itself in a war of aggression against a country that has never attacked us.

Saddam had great plans for himself and his nation. He would not deliberately have brought on the destruction of either, much less both. It was therefore not credible that he would have developed, at enormous cost, weapons that could do him no good because he could never use them, and even having them on hand would endanger not just his regime but also his own existence. As it turned out, even not having them could not save him from Zionist liars in the United States.
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In lite of Saddam's fate, why on Earth would Syria accept WMD into its territory, and thus invite the very same destruction Iraq suffered, on the same pretext? It's absurd. Syrians would have to be insane, and I don't believe that a Syrian regime that has lasted for decades is suicidal, any more than that Saddam was suicidal. But Zionists in media seem to believe that they can get away with the same lies over and over again; that "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me" has no meaning to Americans. They will follow the leader into another devastating war, against Syria, on the basis that it now has those Weapons of Mass Destruction we could not find in Iraq. And then into another war, against Iran, because Bush has pledged openly that he will use military force to protect Israel from Iran, pre-emptively, even tho Iran has never attacked Israel and is not expected to be in position to do so for at least five years.
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Zionists believe that they so utterly and absolutely control the U.S. Government that they can defy even the electorate, even in an election year. Indeed, they may feel that the only time they will ever be able to launch a pre-emptive strike (thru the U.S., of course, since Israel cannot do it) against both Syria and Iran, their last remaining credible military enemies in the entire region, is if they do it before November, because the Democrats won't go for two more wars in the Middle East, and Democrats may well take over one or both Houses of Congress in November.
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Democrats are Americans, not imitation-Israelis. Democrats are captive to Liberals, who are largely nonreligious or benign-religious. They don't believe in a God of Wrath but, if in any God at all, then in the God of Love, and the God of Love does not smile upon Americans killing for Israel.
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Democrats are Americans, who believe the U.S. should go to war, if ever, only for American interests and American principles, not for Israeli interests and Israeli principles — if one could even characterize Zionist tribalism and racism as "principles" at all.
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The Radical Religious Right that controls the Republican Party is treasonous. They truly believe we are living in "End Times", and that if only they can provoke Armageddon thru massive aggression in the Middle East, Christ will return in glory to Earth and bring a thousand years of divine rule. The wicked will be destroyed in fiery retribution, and the Elect will sit at the right hand of Christ in his Earthly dominion.
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Democrats don't share that insane delusion, and do not believe in killing for Christ by actually killing for Israel.
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Democrats don't believe that the end of the world is a good thing, to be pursued ecstatically in the expectation that the destruction of this world will produce the arrival of a better one. Nor do they believe that the mere laying waste of two more countries in the Middle East and the death of thousands (or tens of thousands) more American young people will bring on the end of the world. After all, there's no Soviet defender of either Syria or Iran to retaliate against a U.S. invasion with a full-scale nuclear war. So where is the end of the world and the beginning of Christ's reign to come from if we do invade Syria and Iran?
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The End-Times premise is absurd, even as regards the practicality of producing Armageddon thru such a trivial cause. We would destroy not the world but only Syria and Iran, and then have to answer for those crimes, if not at the Last Judgment, then at least every day for the rest of our lives in the tribunal of our own conscience.
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It is imperative that Americans make very plain that we aren't buying the lies. We don't believe there are Iraqi "Weapons of Mass Destruction" in Syria. We know better than to believe that we have to invade Iran or it will destroy the world. We're not that stupid, but the Bush Administration and Israeli lobby believe we are that stupid. Unless we mobilize to send an unmistakable message to the Republican Party now that we will not tolerate a war against either Syria or Iran, much less both, we will have both before November.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,319.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:50 AM

 
NRA, Militarism Kill Another Kid. The Associated Press reported today that:

A man who neighbors say was devoted to his meticulously kept lawn was charged with murder in the shooting of a 15-year-old boy who apparently walked across his yard. * * *

Larry Mugrage, whose family lived next door, was shot in the chest with a shotgun. The high school freshman was pronounced dead at a hospital.

[Charles] Martin, 66, allegedly told police he had several times had problems with neighbors walking on his lawn. * * *

Neighbors said Martin lived alone quietly, often sitting in front of his one-story home with its neat lawn, well-trimmed shrubbery and flag pole with U.S. and Navy flags flying.

The NRA says over and over again, "Guns don't kill people. People kill people." (I don't know if that is an exact quote from the NRA, but it certainly has achieved currency as the NRA's public stand.) But this is one of innumerable cases in which, absent a gun, no one would have died. A 15-year-old kid could outrun some 66-year-old maniac with a knife. But he couldn't outrun shotgun pellets.
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This murder is yet another disproof of the suggestion that only restrictions on handguns are warranted to keep us safe, because people who own long guns are responsible gun owners and can be trusted to control themselves. No, they can't.
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I find it telling that this Ohio lunatic flew a Navy flag, not just the national flag. Militarism is a poison that cheapens human life. Prussian militarism led to Nazism; Japanese militarism led to the Rape of Nanking, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the retribution of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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Where will American militarism lead us?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,319.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:13 PM