Why We Are Hated. Israel has launched an extraordinarily excessive and vicious attack upon the entirety of the Palestinian people of Gaza because one Israeli soldier has been taken captive.

Israeli warplanes bombarded two main vital bridges and the main power station in the impoverished Gaza Strip before pushing tanks and troops deep into the coastal strip early on Wednesday, June 28.

"Israel is continuing with its state terrorism against the Palestinian people," former minister and chief negotiator Saeb Erekat told Al-Jazeera news channel.

"We had an agreement, sponsored by the European Union, that energy and power stations should be left out of the conflict," he averred.

"We are seeing a humanitarian crisis unfold[ ] before our eyes."

Gaza City was plunged into darkness after Israeli aircraft hit the main power station, sending flames shooting into the sky and cutting off electricity to much of the coastal territory, where 1.4 million Palestinians live. [Electricity is needed to pump water — in a desert area — to housing, not just to run TVs and other electrical devices for business and residences.]

The attack followed air strikes that destroyed two main bridges and hit a road in the central Gaza Strip, as combat helicopters flew overhead and tanks and armored vehicles rolled into the strip.

Israeli public television said the air operation could be the prelude to a major ground offensive in Gaza[.]

To read the details is to be stunned by the insanity of the Israeli Government, and the wicked co-conspiracy of the United States Government — and media; after all, how much graphic, up-close detail have you seen on TV or in the press about this astounding over-reaction? — in the endless crimes against humanity committed by Israel with the active blessing and rich funding of American taxpayers
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Is it really any wonder that we are hated by billions of people around this planet, and why over a billion people cheered when they saw news footage of the World Trade Center towers pancaking to the ground?
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2,700 Americans died for Israel on 9/11. Over 2,500 more have died in Iraq for Israel since then. More die almost every day. For Israel.
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But the stupid children we send to die for "us" have no idea that they are really dying for Israel, a country that is not theirs and to which they neither owe nor feel the slightest allegiance. They die so Israel can kill, and every person Israel kills makes more enemies for the United States, more intent on killing more Americans, because our Government backs to the hilt every atrocity committed by Israel, and continues to ship boatloads of money to empower Israel to defy the world, defy morality, and kill with reckless abandon.
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Israelis are the stupidest and most evil people on Earth. They think they're smart, and pretend that they know how to deal with terrorism, but in fact, before the U.S. created chaos in Iraq, Israel had more terrorism than any other country on Earth, because Israel's approach to terrorism has always been incredibly stupid and ineffectual. American political leaders even praise Israel for the policies that have produced mass terrorism, and said we could learn from Israel! Sure we can: we can learn how to die and have bombs blow up on buses and in cafes and have our homes attacked by rockets and bands of armed gunmen. And now we have learned from Israel how to have the entire planet hate us.
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Contrast the behavior of the actual United States with what the Moslem world thinks of as the creature of the United States, Israel.
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On June 17th, two U.S. soldiers disappeared in Iraq, taken captive by insurgents.

8,000 U.S. and Iraqi troops scoured the region * * * One U.S. soldier was killed and 12 wounded during the three-day search across a vast area south of Baghdad, while two insurgents were killed and 78 detained, the military said.

We didn't bomb power plants, turning out the lites, TVs, radios, computers, air-conditioners, and pumps for water — in a desert — and sewage-treatment plants for 1.4 million people, destroy bridges, or otherwise inflict collective punishments upon the people of Iraq. To put this in perspective, the island of Manhattan has little more than 1.5 million people. Imagine Israel bombing Con Edison plants and knocking out power to 4/5 of Manhattan, and nobody paying attention. Imagine your own area being struck by bombers that knock out your power and bridges but nobody outside your area is indignant. The U.S. Government merely asks the country that bombed you to 'exercise restraint'. Would that mollify you? Or would you be livid and intent on killing whoever did this to you?
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What ever happened to our capacity to identify with the downtrodden? Was rooting for the underdog always just bullsh*t? Or did we once actually do that? We sure don't today. Well, government and media sure don't.
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Rather, we smile upon — or at least winkingly connive in — such grotesque overreaction by Israel. Oh, Condoleezza Rice may "call[ ] for efforts to 'calm the situation, not to let the situation escalate, and give diplomacy a chance to work and try to budget this release [whatever the heck that's supposed to mean!]'", but she doesn't mean a word of it, and the whole world knows she is a vicious, evil liar, a feckless pawn of Israel, as is George Bush, as is Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld — the whole damned U.S. Government, Republican and Democrat alike.
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The U.S. holds the power of life and death over Israel. Any time we want, we can end the existence of Israel, with a "shock and awe" campaign to destroy Israel's military entirely, including its nuclear facilities. We know where they are. We know how to get to them. We could warn Israel that our patience is at an end, and if Israel does not stop its crimes against humanity, and does not stop getting Americans killed (in being blamed for the crimes of Israel), we will destroy the Israeli state by overwhelming military force unlike anything Israel has ever seen, then merge Israel into a United Palestine. We don't. Rather, the U.S. Government utters timid, little-girl protestations — and then ships more billions of U.S. taxpayer money to Israel to buy more ammunition and more bombs with which to kill more Palestinians and destroy more infrastructure in an area that Israel and the U.S. have willfully and with malice aforethought co-conspired to make grotesquely poor. The result? More people all over this planet want more Americans dead.
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Who has done these horrendous, evil things? The people on the 87th floor of the World Trade Center? The soldiers dying in Iraq to defend Israel, but who thought they were there to defend the United States?
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No. George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, and a host of other traitors in high places in the U.S. Government before 9/11 and before the Iraq war. Will they ever be punished? Or will it just be the Little Guy who dies for the crimes of the Big?
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There is a clamor, at present by about 1/3 of the public (I heard on the news yesterday) to impeach George Bush. The Bushies think they can not just ride it out but also triumph at the polls this November by making indignant the redneck morons who wrap themselves in the American flag — when they're not wrapping themselves in the Confederate Battle Flag.
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But do those "good ol' boys" know that they are being asked to die for Israel? Do they understand that Christians are being slaughtered for Jews who revile Jesus and hold him a blasphemer who got what he deserved? Do they realize that more Americans than Israelis have died for Israel in the past five years, and that more Americans than Israelis will continue to die for Israel for the next five years, or ten, or a hundred, as long as the U.S. co-conspires in the crimes of Israel?
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I don't think so. If they were capable of thought, they'd see that. But they're morons. Which is why they vote Republican to begin with. They do, after all, vote to keep themselves poor by keeping in power the Party of the Rich who keep the Little Guy deep in debt at 26.9% interest and more. They'll vote for anything. All you've got to do is pretend it's the patriotic (or heterosexual) thing to do, to vote Republican, and they'll do it. Little do they know that the country the Republican Right owes its loyalty to is not the "good old U.S. of A." but Israel.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,532.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:32 AM

 
No on Gitmo. The Supreme Court redeemed the honor of the United States today in ruling that Dubya may not subject prisoners at Guantanamo to military tribunals.

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that President Bush overstepped his authority in ordering military war crimes trials for Guantanamo Bay detainees, saying in a strong rebuke that the trials were illegal under U.S. and international law.

Bush [nonetheless] said there might still be a way to work with Congress to sanction military tribunals for detainees and the American people should know the ruling "won't cause killers to be put out on the street."

[BUT] The court declared 5-3 that the trials for 10 foreign terror suspects violate U.S. law and the Geneva conventions. [So it doesn't matter what Congress tries to do. We are bound by the Geneva conventions, and the U.S. may not defy those conventions, which we signed.] * * *

Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the court, said the Bush administration lacked the authority to take the "extraordinary measure" of scheduling special military trials for inmates, in which defendants have fewer legal protections than in civilian U.S. courts. * * *

It was a broad defeat for the government, which two years ago suffered a similar loss when the high court held the president lacked authority to seize and detain terrorism suspects and indefinitely deny them access to courts or lawyers.

Bush's cabal of would-be tyrants is very unhappy over this check upon their aspirations to do whatever they please to whomever they please anywhere on Earth they please. That was the base issue.

"Trial by military commission raises separation-of-powers concerns of the highest order," Kennedy wrote in his opinion. "Concentration of power (in the executive branch) puts personal liberty in peril of arbitrary action by officials, an incursion the Constitution's three-part system is designed to avoid."

Would that the people had as much respect for the Constitution and fear of the excessive concentration of power that the Supreme Court has. Too many people in this country, and every country, are willing to trade liberty for security. It is because the bulk of people are cowards subject to idiotic passions that we have a republic, not a direct democracy.
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The hope of the Framers of our Constitution was that the nobler, wiser, more courageous among us would be selected for high office, and they would protect us from the stupidity, cowardice, and bigotry of the mob. They recognized, however, that even a majority of elected representatives might be inclined to attacks upon liberties, so required supermajorities for, among other things, amendments to the Constitution.
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Their wisdom was shown two days ago when a proposal to amend the Constitution to ban flag-burning failed by a single vote, getting almost the necessary two-thirds vote in the Senate. What a bunch of hacks. The Constitution is not supposed to deal with trivia, but with grand issues of public policy, the duties of government, and the rights of individuals. Whether a piece of cloth is burned does not rise to the level of a Constitutional concern.
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But Republican scumbags trying to distract the electorate from the serious distress that their policies have caused the majority of Americans — ever deeper personal debt at abusively high interest rates, oppressive gasoline and fuel-oil prices, mounting property taxes and sales taxes as states and localities try to make up for the shortfall produced by Federal policies, skyrocketing violent crime because the Bush Administration cut financial aid for local police, their sons (and an occasional dauter) shipped home from Iraq in body bags, and on, and on — keep dangling shiny "values" issues in front of our eyes to keep us thinking that they're "on our side", when in fact they hate us all, except the rich.
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Will the Democrats be able to redirect the attention of the voters to the terrible things that have happened to them during the Republican years? Probably not.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,529. More than incidentally, in past months the number of killed would often stay the same for days at a time, but recently it has jumped pretty much every day.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:56 PM

 
Telling the Boss. The Republican leadership is very angry with The New York Times for spilling the beans about a secret program of the Bush Administration to spy on bank accounts. Why? Don't the people have the right to know that their Government is watching their banking transactions? Don't the Republicans trust the people to judge the program on its merits?
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Well, you see, the problem is not with The People but with The People Who Matter — the rich. The Republican Party exists for one reason above all others: to serve the rich. And the rich may not want their banking activities watched.
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You see, not everything the rich do with their money is ethical. Some of it, like moving funds to tax havens offshore, may be borderline — or outrite — illegal. Can the rich really be secure in the knowledge that some Government whistleblower might see illegal activities in their banking transactions and institute prosecutions?
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Tho the program might have been initiated to track only funds going to terrorist organizations, no Government program can be kept narrowly confined to an original purpose. All Government programs overspill their banks, like the Mississippi in hurricane season.
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This scandal threatens to drown the Republican Party. See ya. Wouldn't want to be ya.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,525.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:55 PM

 
September Surprise. Observers of U.S. politics are familiar with the term "October Surprise", which Wikipedia describes as:

a stunning news event with the potential to influence the outcome of an election, particularly one for the presidency. It is so called because Election Day in the U.S. is the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, and events shortly before the election have greater potential to swing votes.

In the American election system of fixed terms, we always know when our next election will be. Generally, our major elections are held in November. Unfortunately, some stupid localities hold their elections earlier. We just had a mayor and council election in Newark in May, and a runoff for council earlier this month (June, for those of you, in the future, reading past posts).
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American elections should never be held at unexpected times but always in November. It's hard enuf to get people to the polls when they expect an election. It's almost impossible when they don't know about one. A week before our councilmanic runoff, we had a primary election for U.S. Senate that I didn't hear about until the very day it was held. I had received no materials from anyone except a sample ballot that I didn't even look at until after that primary passed, because I assumed it related to the councilmanic runoff, and it wasn't timely to look at that ballot until a day or two before that date. So I, a very political person, knew nothing about an election and didn't vote! I had no reason to vote anyway, because I am content to have Menendez run for re-election, and I think he was unopposed in the Democratic Party. We have open primaries in New Jersey, a seriously stupid practice that should be abolished. But, then, primaries should be abolished. They were intended to democratize the ballot but have had exactly the opposite effect.
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All that to the side, General George Casey, the Pentagon's top man on the war in Iraq, announced "recently" (the story appeared in The New York Times and on the broadcast networks today (Sunday), but the Toronto Globe and Mail story I read referred to his announcement being made earlier) that the U.S. might withdraw 7,000 troops in September:

there were revelations in Washington that the top U.S. commander in Iraq has drafted a plan for a significant reduction in its forces by the end of next year.

The first cuts are projected for September.

General George Casey gave a classified briefing at the Pentagon recently in which he outlined the reduction to five or six combat brigades by December of 2007 from the current 14, The New York Times reported. Brigades are generally comprised of about 3,500 troops.

While they do not make up the bulk of the 127,000-member U.S. military force in Iraq -- a reduction of up to nine brigades would shrink that number by about 30,000 -- the Times report highlights the political sensitivity in Washington over setting any kind of timeline for a pullout.

(This is unusually bad reporting as regards numbers. 14 combat brigades times 3,500 = 49,000. But we have 127,000 troops in Iraq? What are the others, typists? I don't want to be too hard on The Globe and Mail — and pass over the semi-illiterate usage "comprised of" (which should be "composed of"). The Globe and Mail did a major story about me many years ago and even ran a political cartoon of me in August 1977. But if "combat brigades" "do not make up the bulk of the 127,000-member U.S. military force in Iraq", what does?)
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Congress just this past week went thru the exercise of voting on two measures to require a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops, and the Republicans (who put up these straw men only to vote them down) rallied to defeat any such mandate. Now the Administration's own general is talking timetable, and the withdrawals he proposes would start shortly before the November election. What a coinkydink! — or, as they might say in parts of Canada, Quel surprise! (de septembre).
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Republicans really are slime. With one hand they pretend to be above public calls to end this war as soon as possible, because it would "send the wrong message" to insurgents and 'terrorists'. With the other, they announce an intent to start withdrawing troops only a few weeks before the November mid-term elections.
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Last week, announcing a timetable for withdrawal "would send the wrong message". Earlier today, announcing a timetable for withdrawal sends no message. In September, actual withdrawals will send the right message. That message, of course is, "Re-elect Republicans."
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Republicans plainly believe that they can have their cake and eat it too: pose as prepared to stay as long as it takes, not "cut and run", and start to withdraw (cut and run) shortly before the elections so they can fool the voters into thinking the Republicans have won the war and can now safely withdraw. Of course, if a few weeks later, safely after the elections have returned Republicans to control of both houses of Congress, things in Iraq turn bad again and "the generals" (meaning the Republican leadership) decides that the withdrawal was premature and we need to go back in with even more troops because insurgents have moved to fill a vacuum, and we now need to retake lost ground, they can replace the 7,000 troops withdrawn with 30,000 fresh troops sent in, and it will be too late for the electorate to do a thing about it.
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Since the decisions will (supposedly) have been made by "the generals", not "the politicians", the Republican leadership will be able to disown all responsibility for this electoral scam. And if they are sufficiently lucky, they will indeed fool the morons who are the bulk of their support. "Only in America."
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But what if the insurgents have an October Surprise to trump the Republicans' September Surprise, a mass offensive that inflicts devastating losses on U.S. forces, blows up hotels and embassies in the Green Zone, and otherwise proves that the U.S. is nowhere near winning this Republican war? Oh, they wouldn't think of that. They are too stupid in general and ignorant of U.S. politics in particular to know about October Surprises. Or are they?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,519.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:42 PM

 
Celebrating Violence. Fox News disgraced itself even more than usual today on its Heartland with John Kasich show. The segment I chanced across concerned bullying, with a focus on "Girlfighting". By way of illustration, Fox ran, to the right of the talking heads making serious comments, a hyperviolent video of teenage girls fighting. I had just tuned to Fox during commercials on whatever station I was watching at the time, and was truly amazed at the sensationalized and inhuman treatment of this topic, with vicious, graphic violence being shown essentially as entertainment while the show's experts prattled on about the causes of violence and consequences of bullying.
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Did they know that their remarks were being illustrated by a video of girls beating the crap out of each other that ran for well more than a minute? I was furious. There is no way on Earth to justify showing such a video, even for a few seconds, much less for 90 seconds or 2 minutes or whatever period it ran. Plainly Fox was reveling in such violence, not decrying it.
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Another chunk of video, used to illustrate talk about the mind-deforming effects of video-game violence, showed what I presume are fictional murders of story characters that children can commit in games like Grand Theft Auto (all of which should be destroyed, along with their creators).
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The 'people' at Fox News, starting with former Congressman John Kasich, should be ashamed of themselves. It's not enuf that the Nation is ashamed for them.
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It would be salutary to broadcast news if the executives responsible for these detestable 'news decisions' were fired. If Kasich approved it, he should be fired.
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Showing such videos in a 'legitimate' news and public-affairs program normalizes violence. Exposure of people to such images desensitizes them to violence and diminishes their appreciation of how aberrant such behavior actually is.
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Fox really is a pernicious influence on society.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,516.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:50 PM

 
Return of the Spam! For well over a year, my AOL email was relatively free of spam, but in recent weeks spam has returned with a vengeance. Every day I am besieged by multiple scams — millions of dollars I can share in if only I give over my banking information to strangers in Nigeria; millions of dollars or euros I have won in 'European' lotteries I did not enter; businesses looking for agents to receive payments from U.S. customers; dying philanthropists who want to give me money for my good works — and businesses that want to sell me Viagra or other drugs (real or counterfeit) that I don't need or want, advertising services I have no use for, etc.
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What happened?
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Plainly the governments of the world have no desire to protect recipients of email, because almost no one who uses email to defraud is ever prosecuted. Some greedy, desperate fools are actually fooled by the Nigerian scammers. I have seen two on TV court shows who admitted to a national, syndicated audience that they sent hundreds of dollars to strangers in foreign countries to get in on a good deal.
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Why does massive defrauding of Americans rouse no indignation nor prosecutorial effort by our various state and national governments?
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Why do we have to protect ourselves? Isn't protecting people the very first job of government?
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Perhaps people defrauded by email scams should take the amounts they lost off their income tax as an offset to protection the government owed them. Maybe we need a national movement of crime victims to demand that losses to crime be tax-deductible. Then we might see government galvanized to do its job of protecting the public from bunco artists at home and abroad. Maybe we'd even see a worldwide embargo thrown up around Nigeria until the government there ends this crime spree that could not operate without the active or passive complicity of the Nigerian government. I suspect a few smart bombs slamming into the Nigerian ministry of justice headquarters would produce a change in behavior pronto.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,515.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:43 PM

 
Who Is Threatening Whom? The prisons of this country are an extremely ugly joke, and need to be fundamentally reformed to become despotic, horrible places no one wants to go.
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The news here is filled with threats from imprisoned gang members (a) to create an "uprising" in four New Jersey prisons at the same time and (b) to murder the mayor-elect of my city, Newark, because he promises to get tough on gangs and the drugs they push.

Authorities said officers recently found three letters in the East Jersey State Prison cell of convicted murderer Lester Alford, an alleged leader in the gang known as the Bloods, detailing the plot.

"East Jersey State Prison" may not be familiar to many people. It is a newer name for what used to be called "Rahway State Prison", which might ring a bell, since is the site of a very famous program to deter young offenders called "Scared Straight". It was also, according to Wikipedia, where the boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter was incarcerated. It's not a place you would ordinarily want to spend much time in, but it is still too free for my tastes, if prisoners can, from within its confines, plot a four-prison "uprising" and the assassination of a major public figure.
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Prisons should be hopeless dungeons that destroy prisoners' will to defy society, to the point where their will to evil is crushed by terror of what society has already done to them and the even worse things society can easily do to them once it has them in its power. But who is afraid? Criminals? Or society? Who is more powerful?
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We live with many delusions, because the human race is, as I have said here on more than one occasion, feeble-minded, meaning that the human mind is easily misled into delusional belief systems and the absurd behaviors such delusions lead to.
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One of the delusions we live with is that we are helpless against crime. The exact opposite is true. We have the power to destroy crime, absolutely and beyond question. To crush it, to exterminate it, by crushing and exterminating the people even so much as inclined to commit it. Instead, we convince ourselves that we can't stop the drug trade, we can't suppress the Mafia — Mussolini did it, but we can't — we can't stop gangs from terrorizing our streets. Bullsh*t!
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Gangs are as nothing to us. We outnumber gangs thousands to one, and we have more guns, more clubs, more knives, more gas and gas masks and bulletproof vests — and military force. We have tanks and armored personnel carriers manned by a standing army of 1.2 million people! We have helicopter gunships and warplanes that can drop napalm on their ass. We are supremely powerful. Gangs are helpless against us.
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Do we act as tho we understand that? Alas, we do not.
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Even once we have arrested, tried, convicted, and confined criminals, they retain the delusion that we can't stop them. They continue to pursue criminal activities in the prisons we created to stop crime! And we tolerate that. We don't have to. We can make our prisons absolutely crime-free. We just choose not to.
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Well, it's time to choose to make our prisons, and our society, crime-free.
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Oh, we can't stop crimes of passion. There are always going to be some families blown away or stabbed to death by some parent or child who "loses it" and kills everyone. But that's not the bulk of our crime. Most of the crime that plagues our society and causes the bulk of the civilized world to hold us in contempt is crimes of profit, and those are extremely easy to suppress. You need merely make the cost of crime much higher than any possible gain, and, in extreme cases, kill the entire class of "people" inclined to such crimes.
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Gangs are especially easy to suppress, because they are organized. It is unorganized crime that is hard to suppress, because catching one criminal does not lead to capture of another, much less many others. But with a gang, you catch one, you catch 3. You catch 3, you catch 7. You catch 7, you catch 36, and before you know it you have as close to everyone as matters, because any gang members who remain can't do much of anything.
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It's so easy, both to destroy gangs and to kill prisoners. Piece of cake.
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And think about that: cake. We control everything every prisoner in every prison in this country eats. Any time we want, we can kill anyone we want in any prison in this country simply by poisoning his or her food. Easy. Easy as pie, or cake, or sandwich laced with cyanide. The simplest thing in the world.
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We don't have to warn them. We don't have to give them a date. We don't have to give them a fancy last meal. Any meal we choose can be their last meal, and they wouldn't know until too late, as their throat burns with caustic poison or they totter out of control instants after ingesting what we have made into their last meal.
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We are all-powerful. They have no power but what we grant them.
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Do we tell them,

Listen, moron. You're in prison. You couldn't escape us before, you can't escape us now. We control you. We can kill you — today — five minutes from now, two seconds from now — and there's nothing you can do to stop us. You are powerless against us. You're nothing as against us. We are everything. You are nothing. Got that?
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You'd better straighten up and fly right, or you are going to die here, and we will chop you up for parts for decent people. Shape up, or we will ship out what remains of your body, in a body bag, and burn it into ashes that we then dump in a forest with no tombstone, no plaque, no records of where the ashes were dumped. We might even take your face for a face transplant before we burn away every other proof that you ever existed.
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Your family will be so ashamed that they will never mention your name. Your neighbors will laff at the arrogance that brought you to an early end. And the world will be better for having killed you.

How do we restore sanity to society and its criminal element? It's actually pretty simple. As soon as anyone is arrested for a serious crime, such as gang activity or drug-pushing, you tissue-type him/her and say you are submitting the results of those tests to a national database of people waiting for organ transplants.
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You pass laws that make some crimes punishable by involuntary organ transplants. Remember the "eye for an eye" thing? We can perfectly well punish severe crimes by involuntary cornea transplants, one per customer or even two, rendering a heinous criminal completely blind for the rest of his miserable life.
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But of course, we could make that just the first step in the piecemeal dismemberment of incorrigible, permanent criminals. We can take one kidney and leave him or her alive with the other functioning kidney. We can take two lobes of the liver, leaving one to regenerate back into three. A few years down the line, we can take two lobes again. We can make our prisons into reservoirs of harvestable organs for decent people. And when we have removed all we can remove without killing the 'patient', we can then go on to harvest the rest, after we have killed the bastards, or as a process that in itself kills the bastards.
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Jack Kevorkian, "Dr. Death", has suggested that people convicted of capital crimes might profitably be executed by anesthetizing them on an operating table and removing all their usable organs and tissues, so they go to sleep like any other surgical patient, but never wake up. This is "lethal injection" with a plus: good people get to live while bad people die. The best of both worlds.
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The Constitution can't stop us. It is just paper, and is open to interpretation. The Fifth Amendment expressly permits capital punishment, and death on an operating table is just a form of constitutionally permitted capital punishment.
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Complaints have been voiced against Communist China for killing people needlessly to harvest organs for transplant to other people, and especially for sale to rich foreigners. The implication is that China kills innocents to steal their organs. But China has lots and lots and lots of common criminals who deserve to die as much as our common criminals deserve to die.
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Why should the Government of China, why should the Government of the United States or New Jersey or any other jurisdiction, waste the organs of 'people' killed for just cause?
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Is an organ taken from a Mafioso or street thug unworthy of transplant into a middle-aged teacher or 12-year-old child who would die without it? Is the recipient somehow tainted by receiving the benefit of a fully-warranted execution, of a terrible person who deserved to die? No, no, and no.
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The arrival of organ-transplant technology gives society the most powerful tool it has ever had to control crime, by absolutely terrorizing criminals into thinking that if they don't clean up their act, they are going to be chopped up for parts in their healthy youth. We should rejoice in that prospect. It's time criminals, not innocent people, shook in their boots from fear. It's time criminals were afraid to go outside, day or nite. It's time the good guys had the upper hand.
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That hand bears a scalpel.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,511.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:43 AM

 
Page What? In riding the subways recently I have noticed an oddity about the New York Post, being read around me. One of that paper's most popular features is a gossip column called "Page Six". Bizarrely, however, it does not generally appear on page 6 but all over the place — page 10 yesterday, page 24 last week. Why on Earth would the Post call something "Page Six" but put it on page 10? The world, he is strange.
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The U.S. military proved that again, in its own way, yesterday:

A Pentagon document classifies homosexuality as a mental disorder, decades after mental health experts abandoned that position. * * *

"Based on scientific and medical evidence the APA declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973 — a position shared by all other major health and mental health organizations based on their own review of the science," James H. Scully Jr., head of the [American] [P]sychiatric [A]ssociation, said in a letter to the Defense Department's top doctor earlier this month.

There were 726 military members discharged under the "don't ask, don't tell" policy during the budget year that ended last Sept. 30. That marked the first year since 2001 that the total had increased. The number of discharges had declined each year since it peaked at 1,227 in 2001, and had fallen to 653 in 2004.

But maladjusted homos and dykes are still enlisting in a military that hates them. In time of war that could get them killed! Why? I lucked out in the Vietnam era, when the military refused to take me. Why would anybody hide something that could get him out of being sent into a war zone?
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A third item of note: the Reader's Digest magazine, in studying the manners of people in major cities around the world, concluded that New Yorkers are the most polite on the planet. That may strike many people as preposterous, but the methodology is persuasive.

The magazine had its undercover reporters — half men, half women — fan out in 35 cities and assess politeness based on simple things such as whether doors were held open for them, whether sales staff thanked them or if people helped them pick up dropped papers. New York, Zurich and Toronto rated tops in the world.

When I lived in New York, I remarked aloud that New Yorkers couldn't be as rude as some outsiders thought because you just couldn't get along without manners, there being so many people crushed together in various situations. There would be fistfites all the time.
+
Still, New Yorkers pale before Newarkers in politeness, but New York was the only city in the U.S. that the Digest studied.
+
There are things some people in New York, not necessarily New Yorkers, do that do make life harder than it needs to be, such as blocking subway doors, sitting on stairs, and pushing past you without saying "Excuse me", that need work.
+
Happy first day of summer, everyone! I love the summer. You may have the winter. No, please. You take it. I insist.
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,508.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:22 PM

 
Un-righteous Indignation. Two U.S. soldiers in Iraq have apparently been found dead, their bodies mutilated and boobytrapped. A male relative of one of the dead was indignant about their deaths and wants the killers punished. Hmm. These guys go over 7,000 miles from home to invade a country that never attacked us and get killed for their trouble. Did they kill anybody during their stay? Do we even know? You join the army and go thousands of miles from home into a war zone and get killed? Quel surprise!
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War kills. The U.S. has destabilized an entire country and caused endless violence that kills dozens of Iraqis a day, and somehow that's okay. But when people fiting that invasion kill the invaders, that's somehow not okay. Very peculiar reasoning.
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is .)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:43 PM

 
Non-Attack Nonsense ("Biding their Time"). Every day we are attacked by nonsensical assertions from — or is it only "via"? — media. Probably the most ridiculous I have heard in months is the suggestion that al-Qaeda was ready to attack the New York City subway system (which I ride, 4 nites a week), but canceled the operation because the organizers thought it wouldn't be spectacular enuf. Ridiculous.
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Some network actually said that a subway attack could kill as many people as the WTC attack, almost 3,000, but al-Qaeda didn't want merely to repeat a prior death toll but increase it, so called off the attack. What kind of idiot believes such a thing?
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We are endlessly regaled with stories of suicide bombers in Israel who manage to kill pretty much nobody but themselves, because they weren't positioned right when they set off the bombs they were wearing. Even in the 'best' of cases, a suicide bomber can expect to kill at most 50 or 60 people. But al-Qaeda has not, to my knowledge, issued a public statement to people who agree with its goals, not to kill themselves unless they are absolutely certain to kill tens as many, or hundreds or thousands as many, people as they would kill by killing themselves in a suicide attack.
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Let me be plain. If I were a terrorist, I would want to kill as many of my enemy as I could, be it one or two in a given incident, 1,000 or 3,000 in a single explosion, or 100,000 or 16 million in a triumphal act. Think about it. If you were willing to die for a cause, wouldn't you also be eager to kill as many people, or as few, among the enemy as you could 'take out'?
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The suggestion that al-Qaeda had us in its crosshairs but called off the attack is not to be believed.
+
I don't know why the Bush Administration is telling us Al-Qaeda called off an attack on the New York City subway system. I do know, however, that such an assertion is ridiculous.
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,504.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:13 PM

 
Defying ADA. I almost missed the train home in the middle of the nite, when trains run only every half hour, because a local subway system (the PATH train) maliciously forces people to climb stairs, walk over to another platform, then climb down more stairs in order to catch a "connecting" train — and they must do all this within about 3 minutes or miss the train and have to wait a half hour. I have had three knee surgeries and am bad on stairs, as are many other people. Surely the federal Americans with Disabilities Act cannot smile upon such an outrageous attack upon people who cannot but move slowly.

Earlier in the same commute day, I had to walk something like 1,000 feet out of my way, or climb something like 120 stairs, to get out of a different subway system, because one of the two escalators at that exit was out of service, and the managers chose to run the one that still functioned, to go DOWN. Down, not up. Down.

This kind of crap has got to stop. And the only way it is ever going to stop is if the individuals responsible are punished, personally and severely.
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The two subway systems I have to deal with 4 or more times a week are the PATH (Port Authority Trans-Hudson system) between New Jersey and New York, and the New York City subway system of the MTA (New York State's Metropolitan Transportation Authority).
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The PATH is run by a bistate governmental agency. Like so many other (quasi-)governmental agencies and "authorities", the Port Authority is scarcely answerable to anyone, locally. But it's got to answer to the Feds.

The MTA is also a governmental entity, tho created solely by the State of New York. It is independent of direct control by the state government, but it too must answer to the Feds.
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The ADA is the "Americans with Disabilities Act" instigated by and passed under the first President Bush in 1990. It requires public transportation systems to be accessible (readily usable) by people with disabilities, meaning people who are wheelchair-bound or otherwise cannot readily negotiate stairs.
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Because many public transportation systems were built before the ADA was passed, those old systems were "grandfathered", meaning they did not have to comply with every aspect of the law. But "grandfathering" should go on only so long. When a transit system is large, ridden by a great many people, enormously important to the economy of an area, and richly funded by a public authority, "grandfathering" should eventually run out and all such systems be required to make every part of their physical infrastructure and operating practices compatible with the ADA. That has not been done with either the PATH or the MTA. It's time it was.
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If you take the PATH between Newark or Harrison in New Jersey and 33rd Street in Midtown Manhattan, you need to change trains in Jersey City. Ordinarily, during daytime hours, you need merely cross the same physical platform to catch the connecting train, which is either waiting there when your train pulls up or arrives within a couple of minutes. Not at nite. Late at nite, incomprehensibly, the managers of the PATH force passengers for Harrison and Newark to get off at Track 1, then go up perhaps 18 stairs, across an intervening area, and down another 18 or so stairs to board at Track 4, rather than Track 2, right across the way, without stairs intervening. At present, one of the two escalators that usually run to the mezzanine level between the two platforms is not working, being under reconstruction. If you don't know that and get off at the wrong point in the platform, you are in for an unpleasant surprise: a flimsy wooden wall barring entry to the escalator, with this sign toward the top.

It refers to "ARROWS TO ACTIVE ESCALATOR". You look for arrows. Not on that sign. Not on the adjoining signs.

Not anywhere on the entire enclosure blocking access to that escalator. So where is the dratted alternate escalator?
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You see an elevator, so decide to get on that. It goes up, but only to an exit. The sign by it says it goes to an exit but does not say "exit ONLY", which it surely should if that is the case, because otherwise people might get on it expecting to be able EITHER to exit or to move around on the mezzanine level and choose between the two platorms at that station. So you have to turn around and go back down in the elevator and then look for stairs or the alternate escalator. This takes so much time that you miss the train. I did that last week and had to wait 22 minutes. I was livid, and used my cameraphone to take the pix above to document the utter absence of arrows directing people to the alternate escalator.
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Tonite, I got out far from the working escalator so had to use the stairs, despite my problem with stairs. I rushed, to the extent I can rush at all, up the stairs, over to Track 4, and down another set of stairs, and just barely made the "connecting" train. Had I been a little slower — that is, a little more disabled — I would have missed the train. Surely this is a violation of the ADA.
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But the managers of the PATH don't care about that. They design their service around people who can run for a train if need be. That is not what the ADA requires transit systems to do.
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There is no way on Earth to justify shifting late-nite "connections" from across the platform to up some stairs, over a bit, then down more stairs — or you miss your train, when trains are not every 7 minutes, as in mid-day, but once a half hour. There is no good reason that connecting trains late at nite cannot or should not run on the track that stands across the platform the first train arrives on, as they do most of the day.
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But the managers of the PATH don't give a damn about people who can't move quickly and have trouble with stairs. That's why the ADA had to be passed in the first place. And that's why we have to pass more and more laws every year: because people don't use the sense they were born with and won't do the right thing unless forced to.
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What of that MTA decision to run the one functioning escalator DOWN in the evening rush hour? Did it not occur to them that it is easier for people to go DOWN stairs than UP? Are the people who run the MTA mental defectives? If the managers of the MTA are mental defectives, they should be given other jobs, under the ADA if need be, than jobs that require intelligence. Let them sweep up, for a tenth their present salary. But if they are entrusted to make intelligent decisions, they must have some sort of native intelligence, not be utter morons. And if they do indeed know that climbing stairs is far more difficult than descending stairs, yet nonetheless deliberately run a single escalator DOWN rather than UP, they should be flogged. Just grab them, rip their shirts off, tie them to a post, and flog them a minimum of one lash for every step they make disabled people climb. I could say, "one lash for every step that each and every disabled person has to climb" because of their outrageous decision, but that would be a death sentence, since 120 stairs (lashes) times 100 disabled people given hardship would be 12,000 lashes, fatal to anyone. I'm taking it easy on the bastards.
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The New York metropolitan area is filled with old systems that feel themselves entirely exempt from both the legal and the moral requirements of the ADA. New York's Penn Station has elevators (if any at all) that go only to the mezzanine level, not the lobby level. Some tracks to this day seem not to have even that, but have no elevator at all, unless it is hundreds of feet from where most people get off their train. And what if you arrive in Penn Station in a wheelchair or shortly after knee surgery or having broken a leg and being in a heavy, full leg-length cast? You just have to climb stairs, buddy, that's all. What do you think you are, special? You'll climb stairs like everybody else or you won't come into New York City. We're special. You want to be here, you climb stairs. You don't like that? Stay the hell out of New York City!
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Ah, but, last I knew, New York City was part of the United States of America, and, thus, subject to the Americans with Disabilities Act. But the ADA has grandfathered almost every part of the New York City public transit system.
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The MTA and PATH don't have to accommodate cripples, so won't. Not as a matter of law. Not as a matter of common sense, or human decency, or anything else. They will make you climb stairs whether you can or cannot. And if you can climb stairs but only slowly, they will make you miss your train. Because they can. Did the ADA really intend to put any transit system permanently above the law? If so, it's time to write its successor, the Real ADA.
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It's time to end all "grandfathering" under the ADA and compel adherence by every major transportation system in the Nation.
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Even without a "new, improved" ADA, we who don't move quickly do have some recourse. We can file a complaint with the people who are supposed to enforce the ADA. This website will give you information on how to do that: http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/ada/adahom1.htm.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,502.)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:01 AM

 
Squeezed. Federal Reserve Chairman Benjamin Bernanke claims that it's okay if energy prices stay high because they won't fundamentally increase the costs of everything else:

"To the extent that households and business owners expect that the Fed will keep inflation low, firms have both less incentive and less ability to pass on increased energy costs in the form of higher prices, and likewise workers have less incentive to demand compensating increases in their nominal wages," he said.

And so he is expected to lead the Fed to raise the base interest rate yet again — for the 17th time — at the end of this month.
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Now, explain how raising the cost of money fails to increase the price of everything, and thus contribute to inflation rather than restrain it.
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If energy costs go up, then everything that relies upon energy (meaning everything) costs more to business. How long will a business choose to or be able to absorb that cost without passing it along? Answer: not very long, and in some businesses, not for so much as a month.
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Truckers have to raise their tariffs to cover gas-price increases, so everything delivered by truck — which is to say, just about everything — has to cost more. Business owners are not going to see their profits vanish. They're going to raise prices, no matter what Bernanke says.
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Likewise, if the cost of borrowing money goes up, everything that relies upon borrowing — which, again, is pretty much everything — costs more. Businesses will not absorb that increased cost either but will have to pass it along. So how does raising interest rates cut inflation? Answer: it cannot and does not. Quite the contrary, higher interest rates mean higher costs to borrowers means higher costs of doing business or paying your adjusted-rate mortgage or doing much of anything else. So prices go up because of interest-rate increases. Wages, however, cannot, because there is too much foreign competition.
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Energy costs are going up mainly, we are told, because China and India, and in lesser measure other "developing" economies, are using more energy as more people switch from bicycles or walking to mopeds and cars, creating greater demand. At the same time, Chinese and Indian workers (and, in much lesser measure, others in other poor countries) are driving down wages for workers in the First World, who are simultaneously being hit by the higher prices caused by growing energy demand in the very places to which our jobs are being sent, and the Federal Government is raising interest rates which will raise our mortgage payments and the prices manufacturers and other businesses charge us. Everything is conspiring to impoverish working people in the First World, but especially the United States, where there are fewer worker protections than in Europe.
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Something's got to give.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties" and major U.S. media, has reached 'another deadly milestone', 2,500.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:41 PM

 
Elephants Are Companion Animals. Several animal-rights groups are suing Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus to stop practices it claims are inhumane. They believe that if those practices are stopped, the circus will have to stop using elephants altogether, and that is their real intent. They claim that employing elephants in the circus is inherently cruel. Bull. That describes not just an adult male elephant but this lawsuit as well.
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There are two things to remember here, both summed up in the phrase "companion animals". First, elephants and man have been in close association for millennia. Second, elephants are animals, not people.

"The Asian elephant has been semi-domesticated for centuries," said [Ringling Bros.' spokesman Bruce] Read, citing its use in warfare, farming and various ceremonies. "Our circus brings them to areas where people don't see such animals very often. That's not something we should deprive our future generations of."

Considering that the African elephant was used by Hannibal in 219 B.C., it is plain that "centuries" in the quote above is very conservative. Indeed, the website of the Letaba Elephant Hall in Kruger National Park, South Africa, shows this history:

c. 2000BC: Earliest evidence of tamed elephants in the Indus valley

1750-1123BC: Chinese Yin dynasty tames elephants

Now a few animal-rights extremists want us to sever that tie and 'free' all the elephants on this planet. There are lots of extremists in the animal-rights movement who unfortunately ascribe to animals a greater intellectual depth than we have any reason to believe they have. These people seem to think animals both understand and value the abstract concept "freedom" — whereas in fact not even all people do! — and the biological concept of "death", so that we cannot ever deprive any animal of freedom or life under any circumstances whatsoever. That is just plain nuts.
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Animals do not either understand or value freedom, nor, in the case of food animals, realize that they are being fattened for the slaughter. They know only that they are or are not eating regularly and are or are not in pain. So yes, we should avoid hurting animals when we can, but not to the point that we can neither use animal power nor consume animal products.
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I appreciate animals but do not fixate on them nor exaggerate their 'suffering' at the hands of people. Yes, cruelty should be forbidden, if there's any way to do that without rendering the animals we rely upon useless to us. I am not a vegetarian, but all animal-rights extremists are. Curiously, they think it's just fine if animals are carnivores. But we can't be. Indeed, they will "free" entire populations from fur farms to run into the forest and slaughter every squirrel, rabbit, mouse, bird, rat, muskrat, and other prey animal they can find for miles around. Alas, even that toll on animal life is rarely enuf to sustain the "freed" carnivores, and most die an agonizing death of starvation. So much for the concern of these extremists with the wellbeing of animals.
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Human beings are omnivores, not herbivores. "Omnivore" intrinsically includes "carnivore". Humane slaughter is a lot better than what animals can expect from nature. I suspect that if food animals had a choice, they would much rather be herded unsuspectingly into a slaughterhouse where, before they know what hit them, they are stunned into unconsciousness before being killed, than be chased by a pack of lions and ripped apart while still breathing.
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As for elephants, unless we can find some way to reverse human population trends and economic forces, and restore habitat, many of the world's elephants face being crowded out of existence or shot for their ivory. Circus elephants are protected, fed, and given veterinary care wild elephants don't get. If in return they have to perform a few tricks and travel in boxcars, that seems a fair trade.
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Can we keep elephants in place within boxcars (to keep them from shifting their weight and causing derailments that might kill them as well as people nearby) by more humane methods than chains? Maybe. Maybe not. What else could we use? Giant inflatable cushions to hem them in? Would they like that better? Or would such bolsters drive them nuts?
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By all means, let's be kind to our companion animals. But let us never forget that they are animals, not people.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,497.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:29 PM

 
Tolerating Intolerance. Free speech is always in danger, in this country as much as any other, despite an express provision in our Constitution protecting freedom of speech. AOL today hilited a story about a protest by white supremacists at the Antietam National Battlefield that drew counterprotestors, as demonstrations by white supremacists always draw counterdemonstrators, people who do not respect the right of people they disagree with to air their views. Their stance seems to be that we cannot tolerate intolerance. Plainly, however, that is a form of intolerance, so we can't tolerate that, now can we?

"The Supreme Court has ruled consistently that national parks in particular are places of freedom of expression," said park superintendent John Howard.

AOL ran a poll along with its story, and the results, at mid-afternoon, are disturbing.

Should groups be permitted to protest at national parks?
No 67%
Yes 33%
Total Votes: 143,278

Note the neutral language: "groups" — not "white supremacist groups", just "groups". Any group. Boy Scouts, Hare Krishna, Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholics, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, ACLU, People for the American Way, VFW, American Legion, Focus on the Family — any group.
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The poll does not ask "If not, why not?", and give various options. Nor, "If not, where should groups be allowed to protest?" That would be an interesting poll. I'd like to see where this 67% think people (groups or individuals) have a right to protest. Public street? Their own private property? Nowhere?
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The fascistic "homeowners associations" that have sprouted up all over this country in recent years have actually attacked the right of private persons to display 'poltical' signs on their own private property. These organizations should be broken up by government, after their leaders have been duly flogged 50 or 100 lashes and warned that any attempt to attack their neighbors' rights again will be met with 10 times the beating.
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There is always a temptation by the majority to impose conformity, of opinion as much as of dress, hair length and cut, religious belief, and lifestyle. The Founders of this Republic understood that the majority (the "mob") can be oppressive if not reined in, so they went to the trouble of drafting a protection for freedom of speech and enacting it as part of the national Constitution in the very First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, and then broadening its application to the states (and their subdivisions) in the Fourteenth Amendment. That does not keep some people from trying to prevent disapproved opinions from being expressed.
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Sometimes people merely suggest that it is "unpatriotic" to dissent or openly criticize the government, especially "in time of war", and use disapprobation as intimidation. New York City's mayor, Mike Bloomberg, remarked yesterday that that is exactly wrong, and it is fundamentally patriotic to criticize the government when we think it is wrong.

During a graduation speech at the University of Chicago, the Republican mayor said there is a "spirit of intolerance" for people with opposing views, who often are accused of being unpatriotic. * * *

"We all have to get together in this country and stop this right now and stand up to those who would demagogue," he said. "There is nothing — absolutely nothing — wrong with criticizing our government, on any topic, and challenging it to live up to the democratic ideals. It is not unpatriotic. In fact, what could be more patriotic?"

But many yahoos disagree.
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Some Americans — Americans! — do not believe that people they disagree with have the right to hold the views they hold, or at least have the nerve to say aloud things they shouldn't even think! Such "Americans" smile upon police intimidation of protests, even police inaction when counterprotestors 'take the law into their own hands' to beat the crap out of people they disagree with. And some "Americans" would actually entrust the government with the right to censor anything they don't want to appear in the papers or other media, including the Internet, and even arrest and punish anyone who says anything the government really dislikes.
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While we would like to think such people few and far between in the United States, I suspect they are actually very numerous, especially if the question were phrased to break out specific punishments: firing from a government job, broken down into ordinary worker or policymaker; a $5 fine; a $25 fine; a $500 or $1,000 or $10,000 fine; etc.
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When I was fired by a law firm for things I had written on the Internet, and remarked to a co-worker (who was accompanying me to my car so he could take back my cardkey after I had passed the locked doors to the parking garage) that I thought a law firm would have more respect for freedom of speech, he said you can say anything you want as long as you're willing to pay the price. That is an oxymoron. "Free" speech entails no "price", not a $5 fine, not losing your job.
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No constitution, no Bill of Rights, can protect people from the viciousness of people. Only a culture of tolerance and a government that actively protects dissent can guarantee people the right to say whatever they want, whenever they want, wherever they want, be it at a national battlefield or any other place, public or private, physical or virtual.
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It is only wide adherence to our informal national motto "Live and Let Live" that has kept us from multitudinous minor and major wars among ourselves. But there are always people who think they are so firmly in charge that they can safely impose their views on others and the minority will just have to go along. They forget that minorities don't have to go along at all. They can fite back. With guns and pipe bombs and fires set in the middle of the nite. They can make truck bombs from commercially-available fertilizer (as some Canadian would-be terrorists were planning to do and Timothy McVeigh actually did).
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"Live and Let Live", The American Way, is very good advice indeed, because the alternative is "Kill and Be Killed", which is, or has to date been, a very foreign way. I prefer the American way.
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,492.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:08 PM

 
Death of a Villain. One Villain. The people of Iraq, who have suffered so much, so long, got some good news yesterday. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian lunatic who seemed to believe that killing innocents is God's work, was killed by a U.S. airstrike.
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Unfortunately, there are many more such loons in the Moslem world. There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with Islam that it lends itself so easily to mass murder as God's command.
+
Algerian Islamists were able, somehow, to justify in their minds, killing pregnant women and their unborn child by cutting the child from his mother's belly while the mother still breathed. God's work. Their God told them to do that, to bring God's Kingdom to Earth.
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If that is truly the God of Islam, the world will have to exterminate Islam. But the mainline Islamic leadership says that is most definitely not at all what the God of Islam wants for the world. They had better get that message thru to their followers, in a hurry, because the rest of the world is getting very sick of mass-murderous Islamism.
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Let Islamists consider this: which way will you face if the United States destroys both Mecca and Medina with not one, not two, but three hydrogen bombs each, one after the other, and renders both unfit for human habitation for 10,000 years because of saturation with plutonium. If any part of the Kaaba survived, no one would be able to march around it for 10,000 years, and long before that, all Moslems around the world will have died of old age or converted to some less insane religion.
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In the battle of the Gods, our God, the one with thermonuclear weapons, is better than your God. But of course a lot of the people who developed nuclear weapons were rationalists, not superstitious nuts of any kind. At the time they did so, there was rational cause to take that step, because the world was in the midst of mass insanity, the worst and widest war in history. They understood that the human race is a bunch of violent nuts who can be held in check only by superior violence.
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The debate about whether it was proper to use nuclear weapons against Japan just heated up a bit, with the assertion by a recent documentary that not only did Japan itself have a nuclear program but even that Japan actually tested, successfully, a nuclear device off the coast of northern Korea, around the same time the U.S. dropped its bombs on the Japanese home islands. Tho I am very suspicious of the claim of a successful test — after all, if they had a working bomb, why would they not use it against U.S. forces in the Pacific? — especially coming 61 years late, I do not doubt that Japan would have developed and used such a device if it could have. The same documentary offered a different, interesting piece of information I hadn't heard.
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Toward the end of the war, Japan sent balloons laden with incendiary devices or anthrax and other biological agents up into the jet stream to attack the U.S. mainland. Some actually reached the U.S. I knew about that. What I did not know is that at least some of those balloons (a) were made of paper (b) by schoolchildren! If true, that is devastating information for those who like to pretend that Japanese civilians were "innocents" we ruthlessly murdered in dropping atomic bombs on Japanese cities.
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Plainly the Japanese population was wholly in collusion with its government in Japan's hideous crimes against the entire region. Unless there are more documentaries yet to be developed from heretofore undisclosed information, there was no Japanese "Resistance", no sabotage at munitions plants, no attempts to assassinate the Emperor or the other top leaders of the Imperial Japanese war machine, no mutinies by soldiers or sailors refusing orders to commit crimes against humanity.
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There comes a point where passivity in the face of savagery comes to constitute complicity. The complicity of the Japanese people brought Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What will the complicity of Moslem populations bring?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,489.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:56 PM

 
False Links. The Literacy Site, one of six click-to-donate sites (free to the donor) that I go to via The Hunger Site, is presently displaying the claim "The number of books in the home is directly tied to a child's reading abilities." That implies a cause-and-effect relationship: more books in the home produces greater literacy. But that is not the tie.
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The actual relationship is that parents who value literacy have books in their home, and those parents pass along their concern for literacy to their children. There may even be a genetic component at work: smart parents read; smart parents have smart children; smart children read.
+
The presence of books, then, is an indicator of literacy, not a cause. Literate people buy books and keep them in the home. Illiterates do not. In the same way, emaciation is an indicator of malnutrition, not a cause.
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Relationships are too often seen as causal that are only coincidental or companionate. Sometimes the one phenomenon that is suggested as cause of another is actually a result — people get things exactly backward. Or one thing is only casually, not causally, connected to the other.
+
Some years ago I saw a claim that children with odd names tend to do poorly in school, which implied that their odd names caused them problems that affected their scholastic performance. I knew immediately, however, that such an assertion concealed a racial issue, because a lot of the people in schools today who have what most people regard as bizarre names are black, and not just black but also from the lowest socioeconomic classes.
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A number of black comedians have used this tendency of lowest-class blacks to give their kids ridiculous names to prompt lafter in their acts: things like "Congolea" (from "Congoleum", a brand name for floor coverings). But it's really not funny, because black parents who give their children bizarre and obviously black names may be setting their children on a course of scholastic difficulty and lifelong economic hardship.

If nothing else, the first paper [study], * * * shows, for instance, that in recent years, more than 40 percent of black girls [in California] were given names that weren't given to even one of the more than 100,000 white girls born in the state the same year.

The paper says black names are associated with lower socioeconomic status, but the authors don't believe it's the names that create an economic burden. * * *

The data do appear to show that a poor woman's daughter is more likely to be poor when she gives birth herself — but no more so because she has a distinctively black name.

To [one study author, Roland] Fryer, that suggests black parents shouldn't be afraid to choose ethnic names. It also, he says, suggests more broadly that for blacks to improve economically, they don't have to change their culture, but should push for greater integration in society.

"It's not really that you're named Kayesha that matters, it's that you live in a community where you're likely to get that name that matters," Fryer said. * * *

The question is whether a distinctive name is a cause or consequence of black isolation.

A baby-naming website evaluated conflicting studies and had this to say:

A name like Dwayne, which was strongly African-American but carried no socioeconomic markers, didn't affect teachers' expectations. [Studies have shown that teachers tend to find what they expect.] But a name like Da'Quan, with multiple signals of economic status, did. Teachers, consciously or not, drew inferences about the child's background and potential based on these naming signals. In Figlio's data, a pair of brothers named Dwayne and Da'Quan could expect subtly different treatment in school, which translated into different levels of scholastic success [which in turn could produce differing levels of success in life after school].

It's a useful demonstration for prospective name-and-number-crunchers that names carry a rich web of connotations. People are extremely sensitive to names' nuances: history, popularity, spelling, punctuation...everything speaks to our mental models of names and culture. There's a reason that parents agonize for months over name choices. It's not just a black or white question.

Now, I don't regard "Dwayne" as particularly black. It's just a spelling variant of the familiar name "Duane". One man named "Duane" (Ausherman) has found 106 different spellings of that one name! There are, however, lots of names we do identify as black, from Shaniqua and Loquanda to Jamal and Deondre. Where do they even get these silly names? Do they go to authentic African sources, or just throw together some syllables they think "sound African"? How about "Boombalahboombah Johnson"?
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Fryer's suggestion ("parents shouldn't be afraid to choose ethnic names") is incredibly bad advice. When the "culture" from which ridiculous names proceed is the Culture of Poverty, which promotes stupidity and despises education, and "ethnic names" are a mark of that Culture of Poverty — which they are — then it is indispensable to black progress that parents refuse suggestions that they give their kids ridiculous names but instead choose names as "white bread" as they can stand.
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Fryer's irresponsible advice mirrors the aggressive stupidity and race-baiting of some blacks. They go out of their way to make a point of being black, then bitch and moan that white people treat them differently! This has been going on for a long time.
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In the Charlie Chan movies of the 1940s, Charlie Chan himself (tho usually played by a white guy) had a thick Chinese accent, but No. 1 Son (played most famously by Keye Luke) spoke absolutely flawless American English. No one speaking to him over the phone would know his race. But a sizable percentage of blacks go out of their way to make their race plain even over the phone, by choosing to speak 'blackese' (an apt term here, given the comparison I'm making to Chinese) — even affecting an accent they weren't born into in order to show solidarity with their "black brothers and sisters" and simultaneously "stick it to the white man".
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They even convert to Islam (out of the insanely wrong notion that Christianity enslaved blacks but Islam liberated them, whereas the exact opposite is true, there being slavery in the Moslem world to this day!), and then give their children Arabic names, refuse to participate in the holidays that the bulk of their compatriots celebrate, and then feign indignation when they aren't "accepted". They reject the society around them but then demand that the society they reject accept them! It doesn't work that way, moron. Nine times out of ten, what you blatantly and offensively reject rejects you with equal vigor.
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Some blacks just love to play the victim, as do some Jews. Essentially all members of other minorities aspire to acceptance and full integration while remaining true to themselves. But blacks and Jews, clutching to their breast ancient slavery (in the case of blacks, in the U.S. South; in the case of Jews, in Egypt), make a chip on the shoulder the center of their being, and spend their entire lives trying to prove that everything that is wrong with their lives is attributable to somebody else.
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To return to the initial premise of this blog entry, what is the relationship here between bizarre names and poor performance in school? Do ridiculous black names (Keshia, Ras) themselves cause the problem, or do they merely indicate a whole complex of problems that produce failure in school and in life? Does it matter if a kid is given a ridiculous name?
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Teasing matters. But not to some people. The successors of the "Ann Landers" column, two women who write "Annie's Mailbox", addressed bizarre names last Saturday, June 3, when someone wrote in:

I recently started working in a pediatric office. I am horrified by some of the names these parents give their children. A 16-year-old single mother just named her baby "Pretty." [In Spanish, "pretty" is our familiar name "Linda". Had that mother simply named her dauter "Linda", there would have been no problem. But perhaps she was a (nativist) champion of English, so wanted to make the point that if Hispanics can name their dauter "Linda", knowing that it means "pretty", English-speaking people can name their dauter "Pretty", since it means to English-speaking Americans exactly the same thing as "Linda" means to Spanish-speaking Americans.]

Don't these parents realize the cruelty they are subjecting their children to, not only in childhood, but for the rest of their lives? When I write to you, I say, "Dear Annie." But I doubt I would have any respect for a columnist named "Dear Cupcake." Such frivolous names compromise credibility and may hinder success.

I think kids these days have a hard enough time growing up without having to defend their names. What do you say? — Jane Smith

The writers of the column responded, blithely:

We agree that some names give children fits and don't improve with age. However, in the past several years, there has been an increase in the number of children with unusual names, which in turn, means it isn't so odd to have one. Gwyneth Paltrow has a daughter named "Apple," and Jason Lee [Who?] named his son "Pilot Inspektor." It almost makes us pine for "Moon Unit Zappa." Such names are distinctive, which is the point the parents are trying to make. If parents also make the child feel special and loved, the name won't hurt them — and if they truly can't stand it, they can always change it later.

But harm done in childhood can stay with people for a very long time, even, in some cases, to the end of their days.
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People should be told not only not to give their children ridiculous names that will cause them endless embarrassment and teasing, but also to think about initials. "Jeremy Richard Klein" may seem perfectly fine. But "JRK"? "Brian Arthur Davidson" = BAD. "Diane Ivette Masterson"=DIM. "Alan Stephen Smith"=ASS.
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In college, I attended some political meeting at which was announced formation of a "Student Union of Concerned Sociologists". Someone had the good sense to tell the organizers that the acronym would be SUCS, and they changed the name.
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What's in a name? A lot.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,484.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:10 AM