Wrong Comparison. The New York Post today published as an op-ed piece, excerpts from a Donald Rumsfeld speech that completely missed the mark. I emailed this short letter to the editor in reply.

In a speech to the American Legion, Donald Rumsfeld made a blithe comparison between dealing with "terrorists" today and appeasing Hitler in the 1930s. He ignores the fact that the war he first mentions, World War I, caused the even worse World War II. Had the U.S. simply stayed out of World War I, in which we had absolutely no legitimate interest, the two sides would have had to make peace without humiliation, and then would have recoiled in horror at the pointless futility of it all. Instead, the U.S. charged in, handed victory to one side, then stood by and allowed the victorious Allies to inflict upon the Central Powers the humiliation that alone produced Hitler and a will to get even. That is the real lesson of the World Wars, for our times: that injustice fuels the will to avenge. It is decades-long American violence against Arabs thru callous and insane backing of every one of the crimes of Israel that has targeted us for destruction.
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There is only one cure for rage at injustice: to do justice. There will certainly always be a few violent lunatics who will strike out at people for their own demented reasons, but they can't make a worldwide movement out of their private demons. It is Zionism that fuels the rage of hundreds of millions against us, and only abandoning Zionism will remove us from the target list.
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Had we stayed out of World War I, there would have been no World War II. Had we stayed out of the Arab-Israeli conflict, there would have been no attack on the World Trade Center. And if we now step away from Israel and let it fight its own battles, with its own resources only, without so much as one red cent from us, we will find ourselves no longer in the crosshairs of terrorists.

(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,638 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:33 PM

 
"Trickle Down" Redux. CNN yesterday hilited a New York Times report that 90% of Americans have seen their income fall behind the rate of inflation. The CNN.com summary is headed, "Most not seeing real wage gains".

Most workers have not seen wage gains keep pace with inflation during the current economic expansion, the first time that has happened since World War II, according to a published report.

The New York Times reports that the median hourly wage for American workers has declined 2 percent since 2003, after factoring in inflation. Median wages are the point at which equal numbers of workers earn more and less. * * *

The paper says that about nine out of 10 workers have seen inflation that has outpaced their pay increases over the last three years, according to the Labor Department. That includes workers earning up to $80,000 a year, a level that puts them in the 90th percentile of wage earners.

So who, exactly, is benefiting from the economy that Dubya keeps telling us is so wonderful?

the top 1 percent of earners — a group that includes many chief executives — received 11.2 percent of all wage income, up from 8.7 percent a decade earlier and less than 6 percent three decades ago.

In addition, corporate profits are growing more quickly than wages and salaries. Employee pay now makes up the lowest share of the nation's gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, according to the paper, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960s.

The broadcast version of the report added that not only are top executives getting increases in compensation that do outpace inflation, but top executive pay now averages 821X what a minimum-wage worker gets! 821 times. That's obscene.
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Even more disgraceful is that these obscenely rich executives will consent to raise the minimum wage only if the estate tax is ended, so they can inherit even more wealth without paying government any part of it.
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Meanwhile, iWon.com's daily Internet poll the same day, yesterday, asked "How many hours do you work in a typical week?" Here are the results midday:

18% - Less than 40
35% - 40-49
9% - 50-59
6% - 60 or more
30% - I am currently unemployed
1% - I'm not sure

Of iWon's visitors, then, 30% are unemployed, and 18% work either a standard office workweek of 35 hours, or are underemployed. You can't tell which, from the form of that option's answer. I ask again, whom is this great economy that Bush keeps bragging about, benefiting?
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If the Republican Party wants to ask the electorate to return them to office on the strength of the economy, let them. Let Democrats run on the fact that 9 out of 10 working Americans are falling farther and farther behind every year that Republicans remain in power.
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Will the poor people of the South finally wake up to how viciously they are being abused by the Republican Party that they put in charge of the Nation? Or are they so blinded by their Radical Right religion that they will vote to continue their own exploitation? Are elections even contested in their districts, or has the Democratic Party just rolled over and conceded scores of "safe" districts to Republicans?
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It is an ugly secret that partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts has produced an almost immovable division between the parties.

"Right now it's pretty easy to predict who will win about 400 of the nation's 435 districts," [Steve Hill, who works on political reform programs for the non-partisan New America Foundation in San Francisco] said.

Congressional Quarterly reported that in 2004 there were 64 uncontested House 'races', 36 Republicans and 28 Democrats. 64 means that 15% of all House seats are uncontested. That means that not even a nominal opponent, badly funded and scarcely advertised, is set up for defeat. It means the party doesn't even bother to put a challenger on the ballot!
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The present party breakdown in the House of Representatives is 231 Republicans, 201 Democrats, 1 Independent, and two seats vacant. So the difference between Democrats and Republicans is 30 seats. The Democrats don't even contest 36 Republican seats, and the bulk of the others are almost a foregone conclusion: they almost certainly will go to the party that now holds them. I wonder how this election will turn out.
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How, exactly, are disaffected voters in those 36 uncontested Republican districts to express their dissatisfaction? How are we to get change in Congress if elections are little more than formalities, and we know the results beforehand?

38 of the 64 [uncontested seats] are in the 13 states CQ classifies as Southern.

Leading the nation in free riders with 11 out of 25 seats is Florida, where allowing large numbers of House incumbents to run unopposed has become something of a bipartisan tradition.

That's democracy? How are we supposed to have change at the polls when there is only one candidate? A host of our "elections" are no more elections than were those for Saddam Hussein or Fidel Castro. That is a disgrace.
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If the Democrats want to be taken seriously as caring about changing the Nation, they have to contest every damned election in Congress. Every damned one.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,632 — for Israel.)





- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:07 PM

 
Don't Worry about Russia. A colleague emailed me an article by one Joseph Stroupe* about a supposedly emerging coalition of China, India, and Russia designed to bring the United States low, and asked my reactions.
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The transmittal email from a British woman suggested that the U.S., and in lesser measure Britain as well, deserve the anger that Russia is supposedly now directing against the West, in part for enlarging NATO to bring it to Russia's very borders.
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Here, then, is my reply to my colleague from the American South.

NATO is no threat to "Russia's security" — unless that were perverted to mean the security of a Russian dictatorship. When we say "Russia", we must mean the PEOPLE of Russia; and the extension of full-stage, advanced Western civilization into Russia, not just into its neighborhood, would be very much in the interest of Russia.
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My Russia piece warns of the kinds of danger being pointed out in the piece you sent. Unlike the article you sent, however, my piece gives solutions.
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I must correct one assertion made by the British woman who forwarded the article to you: a Brit did not create the "Internet"; he created the World Wide Web, which works OVER the Internet. The Pentagon and American universities, with some help from Al Gore (believe it or not), created the Internet. The WWW, with its HTML way of handling text, created a standard that allowed many different people of varying levels of computer sophistication, to use the Internet, but HTTP, FTP, secure sockets, and all the rest of the aspects of the Internet, the switching mechanisms, routers, and such, were created by others, mainly in the U.S.
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The alarmist remarks in the Stroupe article's first two paragraphs are absurdly overstated:

The vast bulk of the world's oil, gas and strategic minerals resources either is coming under or is already under the control of authoritarian, or less-than-democratic, or leftist, or otherwise radical regimes either with a decidedly anti-Western political stance and ideology or pointedly decreased sensitivities to strategic US interests.

It is difficult to name more than a handful of resource-rich states that are liberal democracies and that are still significantly aligned with the West. Only Canada and Mexico come immediately to mind, and even Canada is increasingly embracing China and the East in the sphere of strategic energy deals and agreements.

Especially overstated is the preposterous suggestion that Canada is about to move from the U.S. sphere of influence to the Chinese sphere!
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The U.S. has never been a dominant portion of Saudi Arabia's market, but only 17% of Saudi exports and less than 14% of its imports.
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I've heard it all before, for over 40 years. "The U.S. is in decline" — for over 40 years! And every year we become more powerful. All this reaction AGAINST U.S. dominance PROVES the dominance.
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What the article fails to appreciate is that these various countries with 'nationalizing' resource-based industries have NO AFFINITY TO EACH OTHER, and "nationalization" is not INTERnationalization. It should surprise no one that national governments are nationalist, and to the extent that the negatives of globalization need a counterbalance, this is all to the good. Nationalism may be a poison in some regards, but poisons in small doses have long been used medicinally.
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Meanwhile, technology advances and changes in the U.S. and other advanced countries, as makes biodiesel (from soybeans, corn, and unexpected sources, like organic garbage), as well as hydrogen and solar power, fuel cells, all kinds of things, newly competitive with petroleum. Moreover, aside from vehicles, which require portable fuel, energy for other sectors, such as the home, business, and train-based transportation (freight) and transit (people) systems, are easily and increasingly shifting to wind, hydro, wave, solar, geothermal, coal, biomass, and other sources found within the national boundaries of Western countries and either very sizable (like coal reserves in many Western countries) or infinitely renewable and thus inexhaustible.
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So, even if there were a vast international conspiracy to afflict the U.S. and West more generally by raising petroleum prices and reducing Western supplies, that would only HELP the shift to other technologies!
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We have the financial and intellectual capital to carry out the research and install the infrastructure for new technologies. Stroupe is, in effect, worrying very publicly and very loud about a worldwide conspiracy to monopolize the production of buggywhips!
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Worse, for the Third World, as they increase consumption of dirty fuels, they simultaneously increase ambient pollution, with all its hazards to health, while the West moves to cleaner energy and thus reduces ambient assaults upon health.
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As for other "resources", there are some things to keep in mind.
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First, tungsten, chromium, diamonds, and other minerals need a market to have any economic value. There are limited uses for most of these specialty minerals, and refusing to sell, from spite, to certain countries would be seen by most nationalists as just plain foolish, because there is no replacement for those customers.
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Second, there's only so much wealth-generation that poor countries can achieve by trading among themselves. They need Western markets, and will continue to need them for the foreseeable future. You cannot impoverish your customers and still sell to them.
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Third, any "barrel" an international cartel might think they have us over, be it an oil barrel or a specialty metal, is almost certainly technologically replaceable when you are dealing with hugely rich societies with extremely advanced science and the technology to put that science into useful products. Remember Japan's assumption that if only it could take over Malaya's rubber plantations, the West would grind to a halt because it would have no tires for vehicles, no fanbelts or gaskets for engines? We developed synthetic rubber. And Western interests created natural-rubber plantations in Brazil. So much for indispensable Malayan rubber. We can make automotive fuels from coal and natural gas, and use less fuel much more efficiently by installing fuel cells widely. Thus on, and on.
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When crude oil is cheap, we use that. When crude oil gets expensive, all its competing fuels and alternative technologies, once too expensive, become practical. And once you achieve economies of scale, new technologies may become less expensive even than petroleum started at before its supplantation by new fuels.
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Fourth, we have started to appreciate, as societies, that it makes better sense to recycle metals and other materials than to throw them away and dig new metals out of the ground, or produce new plastics from petroleum or new glass from sand. Recyling now accounts for a fair amount of consumer content of many products, and can be upped to account for ever more.
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Fifth, the population of the West, except for the United States, has stabilized and is even in decline. If you pass down durable goods, like fine furniture, from generation to generation, recycle things that break down (refrigerators, washing machines), or have been emptied (glass and plastic bottles) or obsoleted (computers), and you are going from a greater population to a smaller population, you don't need to take much of anything new from the ground.
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This Stroupe guy is living in the past, as his concluding paragraph shows:

Contrary to the assumptions of conventional wisdom, the US hasn't any longer the global leverage to shape unfolding developments in its favor. Russia is rapidly acquiring such leverage, and it is expertly plying that leverage against US vulnerabilities in the energy sphere.

The wealth of the future is not oil, not gas, but knowledge. Science and technology, the Information Society, are the future, and, far from having a monopoly on those things, Russia is almost completely out of the loop.
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Nor can any country monopolize the human mind, and for every nationalist or conspirator against others, there is someone who sees other people not as enemies to be humiliated and exploited, but as fellow human beings to share with and profit with.
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Inventors like to see their inventions used. They don't like them to languish in patent offices or be used by only some of the people they might help. Call it ego, call it altruism, inventors want their inventions used by as many people as might benefit from them.
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Don't worry about oil and gas. Don't worry about economic domination over the world by China, India, and Russia. It's all nonsense.
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Tho all those countries want power and influence, they want it for themselves, each, not for a group of which they are only part. China is as much India's or Russia's rival/enemy, for this purpose, as it is ours. And the same goes for India and Russia regarding China and each other.
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Nationalism sets people against others — ALL others; it does not create transnational combinations of any duration.
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Ambitious nations might combine for a short war. They cannot combine in a permanent bloc. Stroupe may be living in the past, but he doesn't even appreciate the geopolitical lessons of the past. The history of the world is replete with shifting coalitions, changing alliances to provide a "balance of power".
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Right now, some countries might see a need to balance the power of the United States. But were U.S. power ever to be OVERbalanced, then they would have to redress the NEW power imbalance by turning their attentions against each other.
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Look at little Britain. Time and again it could have been destroyed by a combination of the other great powers. Instead, it played one off against another, for centuries, and each saw more benefit in being in an alliance with Britain than in an alliance against it. And so it will be with the United States.
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The U.S. market, U.S. technology, U.S. investment will be valuable parts of the progress of each of these players for a very long time to come, as near to "forever" as makes any sense to talk about, not only in regard to internal development but also in regard to their relative position in the grand scheme of things vis-a-vis each other. Do not doubt that India's national and state governments will compete against Chinese and Russian equivalents for U.S. investment and technology transfer. Indeed, one Indian state will compete against others, one Chinese province against others, one Russian region against others for such investment and technology.
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Relax. Balance against rule of the world by heartless corporations is a very good thing. It is not the U.S. that is being counterbalanced here but transnational corporations that have no nationality, no patriotism, no concern for the little guy anywhere. And Americans as individuals have every reason to favor the development of many forces that would rein in this economic terror that is the real danger to our future.

____________________

* The Hong Kong website where the article appears, Asia Times, says that "W Joseph Stroupe is editor of Global Events Magazine online at www.GeoStrategyMap.com. He has authored a new book on the implications of ongoing energy geopolitics titled Russian Rubicon — Impending Checkmate of the West."
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,621 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:38 PM

 
"Use a Stem Cell, Save the Embryo?" AOL today hilites a CNN video by Dr. Sanjay Gupta in which he describes a technique in which a single cell is taken from an embryo of perhaps 100 cells and then "coaxed" into yielding a stem-cell line. (In order to see that video on AOL, you must sit thru a commercial. I am livid at this ever-growing abuse, and in general will close a video window rather than submit to being forced to watch corporate propaganda. Alas, I really wanted to see this story and didn't want to have to track down the story in another form. I afterward went to CNN.com to see if I could give you a URL for a print version of the story, but did not find any alternative to that video and its compulsory commercial.)
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In the video, Dr. Gupta reveals what pretty much nobody knows: that an embryo of 100 cells killed to create stem cellS might produce only one stem-cell line. One. What he did not say is that that one line might not produce any usable results of any kind, in any area of science whatsoever. All we can know for sure is that a child has been killed. That's the one certitude: death. Not life, not a cure for anything nor even a reasonable expectation of a cure. Only death.
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The new technique would take only one of the cells of a 100-cell embryo and try to produce a stem-cell line from that one cell, leaving the remainder of the embryo to grow normally. Gupta does point out that there is a second-step moral dilemma here: could that one cell grow into a human being if it were not prevented from doing so? I suspect it could, so we aren't really solving the moral dilemma, only creating a second-stage moral dilemma: instead of killing the first embryo, we would be killing a second. And again, no useful scientific advance might proceed from that death. Death would. But we don't know that a cure for anything would.
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Medical researchers urge us to be patient about advances from stem-cell research. We are told they might take years to emerge. What they don't say is that great advances may never occur. The whole premise may be wrong.
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Nor do they tally the price in death. How many dead children is an acceptable number for restoring some mobility to a quadriplegic — who is a stranger to the children killed? My answer: zero. No child deserves to die so some stranger for whose condition s/he bears no responsibility might be cured of anything, or aided in healing in any measure, slight or complete.
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Embryonic stem-cell research is scientific vampirism: some must die so others might live. A vampire kills human beings to preserve its own life. What is embryonic stem-cell research but the same phenomenon? Some must die so that others might live? — or live somewhat better lives? That is, if anything comes of the slaughter of innocents. If the whole idea turns out to be mistaken, and we can't cure Parkinson's or Alzheimer's, or heal spinal-cord injuries with stem cells, then what? We will merely have slaughtered literally uncounted numbers of children for nothing.
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That someone might have a health problem is unfortunate. But that is his or her own problem. It's not some child's problem that some stranger has a bad kidney or liver or spinal cord, or a problem in the brain. You don't grab someone off the street and cut out his heart to give to someone else. One person's medical problem is not another person's reason to die. If Bob Jones has a bad heart, that's Bob's problem. You don't kill Stanley Warren and transplant his good heart into Bob Jones just so Bob can live. Neither Stan nor a nameless infant has any obligation to die so Bob can live. It's really that simple.
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Perhaps we won't reach the point where we decide that Bob's life is so important and Stan's so worthless that we can "justify" ripping out Stan's heart and giving it to Bob. Then again, we might. Cheapening life is self-generalizing, outward. If embryos are dispensable, how about fetuses? If fetuses are dispensable, how about infants? If infants are dispensable, how about adults? If the march of medical progress is supremely important, it doesn't matter how many innocents die along the way. Josef Mengele used concentration-camp prisoners in medical experiments, and was looked down upon for it — but largely because his experiments had 'dubious scientific value'. By contrast, the "scientists" of Japan's infamous Unit 731 used local civilians, POWs, and others in medical experiments that produced results so valued by the United States that the U.S. Government protected those "scientists" from prosecution for crimes against humanity. Where do we draw the line on medical research?
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Perhaps we need to establish a Josef Mengele or Unit 731 or Frankenstein Prize in Medicine to wake people to the fact that there are a lot of "scientists" who are perfectly willing to cross all bounds of propriety in fanatical pursuit of "progress".
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,615 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:39 AM

 
Fiting Diversity. My colleague in northern England sent me this email today. (I have added emphasis, per my practice here.)

On the weblog of Charlie Stross (liberal sci-fi author, atheist of Jewish origin) I found an interesting take on Israel's hostility to Lebanon. Would you agree with it?

The big honking problem for the Zionist project, all along, has been that there is a large ethnic minority within their borders that, were it to be enfranchised and given the vote, would vote Israel into a non-Jewish state. Indeed, back in 1947 the Palestinian Arabs were near-as-dammit 50% of the population of the mandate territory. Therefore the minority had to be either expelled or neutralized if an explicitly Jewish state was to exist.

Both strategies have been pursued — the West Bank and Gaza Strip were for many years run as Bantustans, on the South African model — but partition isn't terribly viable in the long term because demographics shift.

Lebanon is interesting because it's a model of a nation where a Moslem and non-Moslem community managed for a long time to live together on a more-or-less democratic basis. It's no surprise that radicals in Israel focussed for many years on schemes to destabilize Lebanon politically, contributing to the civil war of the 70s and then moving the Israeli army in during the 80s (and again today): its mere existence is deeply subversive to the project of building a Jewish state — it demonstrated the availability of an alternative one-state model — so it had to go.

Bluntly, democracy and ethnic identity nationalism are incompatible ideologies. Democracy has been losing the argument inside Israel for decades now, as all the major parties agree (as an axiom of their participation in political life) on the necessity for ethnic identity nationalism as a foundation stone for the nation.

And while it pains me to admit this — I still identify ethnically as Jewish — I cannot view Israel today other than as a failed attempt at building a democracy, poisoned because the foundations of the building are tainted with racism.

I replied:

I hadn't considered it, and I don't know how large a part it plays, consciously, in the determination of Israeli policy, but it makes sense, in its own twisted way. I have absolutely no problem with a Jewish ETHNIC identity and the contributions the Jewish ethnic group has made to, for instance, American culture. For several years, it was literally true that my best Friend (some of my older friends will know why that's capped) was Jewish, tho he wandered among religions, being even Catholic at one time); and I've worn a yarmulke at my brother's wedding, after nominal conversion to Judaism so he could marry his college sweetheart (tho that marriage ended in divorce, I still have Jewish blood-relatives, including, alas, some in Occupied Palestine, including a rabbi (my nephew David) in Jerusalem), attended a Seder, etc., here at home, and work in an industry (law) in which there are a great many Jews. But when Jewishness becomes the equivalent of racism, the whole world must "call" the Jews on it.
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The real problem, however, is that Jewish identity in Zionism is even worse than racism because it is imbued with (literally) "Holier Than Thou" pretensions to be God's Chosen People who OWN the land, exclusive of anyone else's claims, because of an express gift from God. Somehow, some people outside the Chosen group have allowed that madness some legitimacy, even tho it insults them. When Hitler made similar claims, without, perhaps, the express benediction of God but with hints of ancient German paganist benedictions — that the German people have a divine right to lebensraum and mastery over others — outsiders didn't buy into the German delusion. Why some others are buying into the Jewish delusion, I do not understand.
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The issue comes down to how willing the Jews are to part from their delusion and accept something less than exclusive control of "the Holy Land" or "Promised Land". Why SHOULDN'T they be content to walk where David, Solomon, and various of the prophets (but, tellingly, NOT Moses) walked? Why do they have to CONTROL the land and oppress others, kill others, to do so? That's what an American cannot understand.
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I, for instance, am a white man who lives in a predominantly black neighborhood in a city with a black mayor and largely black council. I don't need my group to control; I need my principles and values to control. And then we can all live in peace, as good neighbors. That's The American Way. It is certainly not the Zionist way, Hitler way, Tojo way, or Islamist way.
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There could indeed be a worldwide Pax Americana if "Americana" meant American in values, not enforced by American power. We really did find the way, not because we invented it from a blank slate but because we had to find a modus vivendi for 13 different societies that had had separate histories for as long as 169 years before 1776 (Jamestown, 1607;* Plymouth, 1620). We couldn't impose a unitary state and rule by a single unified ruling class even if we had wanted to; so we learned not to want to. Always, however, there has been this tension between the centralizers and the federalists, which we see playing out today in the attempts by the Bush Administration to seize more and more power for the center, and especially the Executive Branch, and the people of many different types resisting the creation of an oppressive unitary state. And always, in recent times, we have had the example of Lebanon to scare us away from extremism, because we know that if the various communities here have to fite for dominance, the Lebanese civil war will look like a walk in the park by contrast with ours.
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I was going to say that at least we don't have an Israel on our border exacerbating our internal problems. But we do, don't we? The End Times loons and Christian Zionists have corrupted American churches, and the model of a "Jewish State" has emboldened people who want to make the U.S. a "Christian Nation" and impose a New Testament 'Islamic Republic' here. Again, this argues for annexing Palestine and imposing the American Way there, lest its alien ways instead destroy us here.

____________________

* In double-checking the date of the founding of Jamestown (I was pretty sure; I have visited the Jamestown site, now part of a national park and know my American (pre-)history pretty well), I found this interesting quote:

The Far East has its Mecca, Palestine its Jerusalem, France its Lourdes, and Italy its Loretto, but America's only shrines are her altars of patriotism — the first and most potent being Jamestown; the sire of Virginia, and Virginia the mother of this great Republic.
— from a 1907 Virginia guidebook

(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,613 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:47 PM

 
Topic 1 (of 2): "False Confession". I do not recall, in my 61+ years on this planet, another occasion on which the media have been so insistent on not believing a confession as in the current media circus surrounding John Mark Karr, who appears to have confessed that he was involved in the murder (tho he says accidental death) of JonBenet Ramsey 10 years ago in Boulder, Colorado. At the time of the child's death, the media were keen to convict the parents, and particularly the father. Now they seem unwilling to consider the possibility that they were woefully quick to judge, and that someone far from the family might have done the deed. Media are trying to prove that Karr wasn't even in Colorado at the time; his former wife, 'who has no reason to lie', says he was with her far away when the child was killed, etc., etc.
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I don't much care about that particular murder, and am indignant, again, that so much attention is focused on one murder of a white person while thousands of murders of blacks and Hispanics get absolutely no attention from the media, and scant attention from the police. But I am struck by how skeptically the media are approaching an apparent confession in the Ramsey case. Is this out of concern that justice be done, or that the media's rush to judgment against the father 10 years ago not be seen as just plain wrong, factually and morally?
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(2) Desperate Times for Israel. Speaking of morally wrong, the American Jewish Committee is now showing an anti-Hezbollah commercial, apparently fearful that Hezbollah has made huge gains in esteem among Americans. They've heard the jokes about Hezbollah rushing aid to Lebanon, quickly handing out $12,000 in hundred-dollar bills to people whose house was destroyed, such that some Americans have joked aloud that they'd prefer Hezbollah to FEMA!
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Having lost their first war to Arabs, the Israelis are terrified that Arabs, once armed with and trained in advanced weaponry, will succeed not just in defending themselves, as Hezbollah did so brilliantly, but even in taking the war to Israel, in an actual mass invasion — and that the American people will let it happen, by simply abandoning Israelis to fite their own damned wars and accept their own richly deserved fate. To preempt all such possibilities, Israel's agents in media and the military are now openly talking up war plans against Iran, trying to prepare the American people for the next war they want us to fite for them.
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CNN Headline News this morning had an analysis of what a war against Iran would entail. The Republican Right Wing is eager to get us into another shooting war before the November election so that "patriotism" (jingoism) and militarism will seize control of the electorate, whereupon Republicans can portray themselves as national heroes and Democrats as traitors. Never mind that the country to which Democrats are to be thought disloyal is Israel, which is not their country, nor the electorate's. We're not to think of that. We're supposed to feel that the "State" of Israel is one of the "States" of our Union, the very same thing as the United States, so any enemy of Israel is an enemy of ours. Israel = the United States. The United States = Israel. So if Hezbollah or Iran is an enemy of Israel, it must be an enemy of the United States. If Israel can't defend itself, it is our job, our duty — no, our sacred duty — to fite that war for Israel, and save the Jews from their own stupidity.
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Make no mistake: Israel lost the war against Hezbollah big-time. It was a catastrophe for Israel, not so much in terms of actual physical damage to Israeli territory and loss of Israeli military and civilian life, as in the utter failure to accomplish any of the war's goals. The Israelis did not crush Hezbollah; they did not stop Hezbollah from raining rockets down deep inside Israel's borders, even once the Israeli "Defense" Forces reached the Litani River; they did not get their two kidnapped soldiers back. The people of Israel saw their once-invincible army utterly fail in everything it tried to do, and saw rockets land in areas they once thought unreachably safe from attack. There will almost surely be a massive 'exodus', you should pardon the expression, of people who now finally see that Israel is a death trap, a failed experiment that could well get them and their entire family killed.
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Already the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has published an opinion piece (undated, but sometime since the war against Hezbollah started) by an Arab who suggested that the costs of sustaining Israel are getting too high, and Israelis really ought to think seriously about just giving up and going away.

Israel should pack up and go

By Nadim Shehadi

What is the logic that will emerge from this war? If Israel can exist only by destroying the neighborhood, then it's time to declare it a failed state. The Zionist dream has turned into a nightmare and is not viable. If the future holds more of the same, then the time has come to reconsider the whole project. Every state has a duty to defend its citizens, but also it has a duty to provide them with security and the two are different. The prospects are for more destruction, fanaticism, violence and hatred. No unilateral separation can isolate Israel from this, nor can the region or the world live with the consequences. This seems to be the only choice, and Israel must do itself and others a favor and go away.

The writer speaks to the viciousness of Israel against Arabs, but that seems not to bother Jews, not in Palestine, not here.

The occupation of the West Bank and Gaza shows a country deprived of all humanity. The West Bank is unliveable, the population strangled into three prison clusters. Concrete barriers, barbed wires, bypass roads, human beings emerging like rats from underground tunnels, daily humiliation from hundreds of checkpoints. Gaza has been under siege since the population dared to elect Hamas, its infrastructure has been obliterated and its population has been driven to despair in what now seems like a dress rehearsal for what was to come in Lebanon. * * *

There is a doctrine that says Arabs need to be crushed, that they can be bombed into submission, that they will eventually fall on their knees. It is the doctrine, not its application, that is flawed. It says that by terrorizing the population, they will respect us and make peace; it says that those who dare resist need to be eradicated through targeted assassination and their supporters annihilated no matter what the cost. The only lessons Israel learned is that it should do it better next time.

And so Israel descends ever further, year by year, into barbarism. Every year the dream becomes starker and starker a nitemare. As long as it is only Arabs who lived that nitemare, Israelis didn't care. But now Israelis cannot sleep secure in the knowledge that they are safe from rockets raining down on them in that sleep, and Moslem armies armed with the best weapons that Chinese, North Korean, and Russian technology can build and Iranian oil money can buy might sweep across the borders of their tiny 'state' and push their backs to the sea. Sooner or later, the Arabs will get tank-killer weapons, and those now-invincible heavy tanks will become death traps for Israel's sons.
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With little fanfare, the evacuation has already begun. In 1993, Alon Ben-Meir, then a professor at NYU, wrote in Middle East Policy:

A major factor which limits the potential growth of Jewish population and which constitutes a serious national demographic concern is the emigration of Jews from Israel. Because many Israelis leave Israel under different categories such as students and visitors, and still others leave for limited, job-related periods, no official hard data exist for the number of Israelis who have left permanently. It is estimated by numerous Israeli sources, however, that, during the last twenty-five years, 500,000-800,000 Israelis (13-20 percent of the total population) left the country for extended stays abroad. The majority have become citizens or permanent residents of their host countries. * * *

Israeli emigres were stigmatized as yordim (Israelis who left Israel). When he was prime minister between 1974 and 1977, Yitzhak Rabin referred to yordim as dreck (roughly translated as dirt).

A February 2002 article in The Village Voice says:

It is no longer unmentionable, but people are still careful. Young mothers at the playground whisper about it so the kids won't hear. People test their friends at dinner parties by casually mentioning the "worrying" trend. Many Israelis are "preoccupied with a subject no one likes to talk about . . . ways to get the hell out of here," columnist Yoel Marcus wrote in Ha'Aretz the other day. * * *

Some 20 percent of adult Israelis say they have recently considered living in a different country, according to a January poll conducted by Market Watch for Ma'ariv newspaper.

More surprising, the survey found that 12 percent of Israeli parents would like their children to grow up outside Israel.

An earlier poll by the Mutagim Agency for Ha'Aretz said only 37 percent of Israelis held negative feelings toward those who left, and 16 percent actually viewed them positively.

Those are startling statistics in a country where the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin once described emigrants as the "lowliest of parasites." * * *

No one knows how many Israelis are in the diaspora, but two years ago it was estimated that there were 500,000 of them, or 8.3 percent of the Israeli population. It has to be more now. * * *

[Said one Israeli woman] it is not the Arabs we are running away from — it is the kind of people Israelis have become after living for 50 years with this pressure."

That article is titled, "Escaping the Hell of the Holy Land: Israelis Contemplate the Unthinkable — Moving Out". If this was happening when Israel seemed militarily invincible, what will happen now that Hezbollah has fought the IDF to a standstill?
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That some 500,000 Israelis have already left is well understood. Perhaps 350,000 have moved to the United States. A writer in the Jewish Post addresses the issue of these "Yordim" (people who "go down", as opposed to those who go on aliyah, migration to Israel, which is "going up".

There is no special agency in the government to deal with this 500,000 ‘Yordim.’ No one is willing to find facts or data. No one is willing to produce a policy. The leaders are indifferent. Why? The Israeli leadership is still originated in the 19th century romantic Zionism, the East-Europeans style. The moral is, “If you leave Israel, you are a deserter from the battle, get lost!” In the Knesset they, the members, always tend to preach Zionism to the ‘Yordim.’ One can think that the ‘Yordim’ are a new tribe of monsters with horns. It is very hard to speak about them in a realistic positive, pragmatic way. The ‘Yordim’ are the scapegoats of the failure of Zionism in Israel. In the eyes of many Israelis, even Arabs who want to destroy Israel’s Jewishness, its identity, are better, morally, than the ‘Yordim.’ Recently, the attitude of the leaders to the ‘Yordim’ has improved but their indifference is still the standard behavior.

Interestingly, that writer, Gad Nahshon, also says:

Israeli society is over-Americanized. Israeli life is based on the dollar. People even say that Israel should ask to be the 51st state of the USA. Why not?

Why not? Because you can't have a "Jewish State" of the Union. You can have a predominantly Jewish state, but no state can discriminate on the basis of religion, ethnicity, race, etc. So if you're going to admit any area from that region, there's no reason not to admit all of Palestine and use our laws to secure equality for everyone, and the economic resources of the Nation to give all the people a great quality of life. To do that, however, would end the Zionist experiment, by admitting it has failed, and replace Zionism with a different conception: appreciative presence in the land of the prophets, not domination over it.
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Why wouldn't that be good enuf?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,611 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 10:42 AM

 
Topic 1 (of 2) Duplicity on Democracy. Dubya held a news conference today in which he told Americans to be patient with Iraqi democracy. Apparently he did not mention that his beloved Israel has undone democracy in Palestine by arresting 40 members of the elected government there! The Israelis who so indignantly launched a war against both Palestine and Lebanon over the kidnapping of 3 Israeli soldiers have now seized 40 Palestinian government officials, apparently in a plan (plot) to exchange them for the Israeli soldiers who were in turn kidnapped to hold for exchange for Arab prisoners! So, kidnapping people for a prisoner exchange is perfectly alrite if Israel does it, but horribly evil, a casus belli (cause for war!) if Arabs do it. And democracy — the Bush Administration's simple-minded cure to all the problems of the Mideast — can be undone anytime you don't like the results. What an interesting foreign policy the Republican Right (sorry; that should be "The Republican Wrong") has given us!
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Naturally, the Democrats too are absolutely silent about this criminal antidemocratic behavior by Israel. Israel, you see, can do no wrong. When anyone does exactly the same things as Israel, those people can be denounced for crimes against democracy, crimes against humanity, etc., but never Israelis. They are the Teflon People. No criticism may ever issue against any Israeli for any action taken in "defense" of Israel, no matter how detestable it might be.
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(2) Land of the Free(k). I made the mistake of watching Comedy Central's "roast" of William Shatner last nite. It was a truly appalling parade of deviancy, filled with vile language and disgusting, explicit sexual references, often to a vicious and violent deformation of homosexuality that departs from the mutual and affectionate equality of two men into a power trip in which one party abuses the other. What has happened to this country?
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Everywhere you look, even in small towns, you see degeneracy pervading the popular culture. Tattoos cover large parts of the body and piercings poke thru the skin in bizarre locations in young people influenced by the deviants of popular music, the MTV generations who have been seduced into self-mutilation as some kind of perverse "self-expression". Decades after society recognized that drugs were producing catastrophic consequences for millions of individuals and ravaging entire swaths of cities and even suburbs, Jay Leno and other 'comedians' keep making drug 'jokes'. "Celebrities" treat marriage as a doormat outside a revolving door — but gay men are blamed for subverting marriage for wanting the permanency that heterosexual marriage seems to have abandoned. TV talk shows are filled with DNA tests to try to establish the paternity of children conceived out of wedlock — and in some cases, testing of 6 and 7 different men still can't find the father!
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Joseph C. Phillips, who played "Denise"'s husband "Martin" in the Cosby show and is now a social commentator as well as actor, observes on Black America Web:

In 1965, Patrick Moynihan issued his now famous report entitled "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action." Forty years ago, the Moynihan report was distressed by an illegitimacy rate in the black community of 22 percent. The current illegitimacy rate among whites is 24 percent. It is 44 percent among Hispanics. In 1965, the percentage of unwed mothers nationally was eight percent. That figure now stands at 34 percent.

So we have gone from being alarmed about a 22 percent illegitimacy rate among blacks in 1965 to being blasé about a 24 percent illegitimacy rate among whites. Rightwing Republicans blame gay men for the failure of heterosexual marriage and the appalling lack of stable relationships in which to raise children, and insist that the reason marriage must be reserved to straight people is because it is basically about children. Tell that to all the children of multiple divorce and their confused, 'blended' families, all the "daddies" who have come into their lives, then left.
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Phillips goes on:

From Bill Cosby and his call-outs to conservative and liberal pundits across the country, all behave as if declining marriage rates and soaring illegitimacy rates only exist in the black community.

While it is true that some of these challenges predominate in the black community, they are by no means exclusive to the black community.

The decline of two parent households and the social costs that accompany it is an issue that transcends race and economics. It is an American problem.

Conspicuously absent from his commentary is a figure for black illegitimacy (see below).
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Alas, Phillips identifies the wrong culprit:

The current crisis in marriage is an outgrowth of the American cultural revolution of the late 1960’s. Many of the social changes of the time clearly made America better. However, in the midst of these social changes, we discarded old school notions of marriage and family and embraced new school notions of self-actualization. Americans embraced the idea that life is first and foremost about fulfilling the self. It is a vision at odds with the idea of two becoming one. Marriage is the process of sacrificing what is best for the “me” in service to what most benefits the “we.”

It often happens that people fix on the wrong culprit. For instance, a lot of commentators blamed slavery for the destruction of the black family, claiming that white slaveowners sold children away from their parents and that established a pattern of weak family relationships. The reality, however, is that the black family, both nuclear and extended, was very strong until the mid-20th Century, long after slavery had vanished in every trace, and largely in urban settings in the North, where there never was slavery. Walter E. Williams, a black writer,* observes:

The black illegitimacy rate is close to 70 percent. Less than 40 percent of black children live in two-parent families. This produces devastating socioeconomic consequences, but is it caused by racial discrimination? Or, might it be a legacy of slavery? In the early 1900s, black illegitimacy was a tiny fraction of today's rate. Roughly 75 percent, and in New York City 85 percent, of black children lived in two-parent households. The fact of lower illegitimacy and more intact families, at a time when blacks were much closer to slavery and faced greater discrimination, suggests that today's unprecedented illegitimacy and weak family structure have nothing to do with discrimination and slavery. It's explained better by promiscuity and irresponsibility, and as such it's not a civil-rights problem.

And it did not come to us from the Sixties. I came to adulthood in the Sixties, and know full well what the Sixties did and did not do to the popular culture. It did not destroy marriage, but did tend to put it off and substitute living together until people were sure they wanted to be together long-term. No, the range of grotesque, antisocial behaviors I have pointed out above, at least as regards the majority community, is much more the result of the influence of television, film, video games, and, most especially, MTV and its peers, which have raised the deviants among us to the point where their deviancy is not just no longer regarded as deviant but to the status of role models!
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Music, once rare in human society, is now omnipresent. From TV to radio in the home to radio in the car to CDs in the home and then everywhere, on portable CD players, to music on computers first at home, and then on mp3 players carried everywhere, the deviant 'norms' of the bizarre individuals who produce an astoundingly large portion of today's music has been catastrophic to young people. Aside from the devastating shortening of the attention span produced by intercut images that race thru the brain at a rate of two and three a second, for hour after hour, and a scatterbrained approach to life produced by constant interruptions from IMs and text messages and cellphone calls everywhere they go, the images that they are soaked in are monstrous.
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Bill Cosby, as "Dr. Huxtable" in one episode of his famed show, denounced a video his kids were watching as "a nitemare set to music". Precisely so. Combine these horrifying images with antisocial lyrics that pound themselves into young people's consciousness over the course of hours a day, and you get an entire generation of deviants confused about everything.
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Let me give one example of a nitemare set to music. Perhaps 10 years ago there was a music video — think about that: music video — in which a female vampire lured dozens of young men to their death and placed the bodies in body bags that hung from the ceiling of a warehouse. ♫ That's entertainment! ♪
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Why do we permit such mad, violent, antisocial deviance to fill the minds of our youth? The First Amendment doesn't cover visual images or music, but only speech and the press. Music videos are not extensions of speech or the press but of the graphic and performing arts, which the Framers of the Constitution knew about but chose not to protect. Dance is not protected; nonspeech sound is not protected; violent images that normalize mass murder, rape, etc., are not protected by the Constitution. We need to fite back against the madness that threatens to engulf us and destroy us as a civilization. No wonder we have so great a tolerance for violence in our foreign policy: violence has become the ubiquitous, inescapable wallpaper of our lives.
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Joseph Phillips is right about this much:

We can support marriage through public policies like tax credits and housing subventions. Certainly these are helpful. But substantive political change must be preceded by cultural changes, and cultural change begins with words. Changing ideas about marriage and family demands a passionate and vocal advocacy. We must take every opportunity to bear witness to the world the way in which sacrifice, problem-solving and enduring tough times only to reach for each other again, have enriched our lives. Those on the other side of the debate do not shy away from advocating their position, and they are not armed as we are with truth and mountains of research.

Except that "the other side" does not debate: they indoctrinate thru images and music. If they put into explicit words the messages they are propagandizing by sound and lite, even stupid kids could see the madness: violence is normal; violence is good; using and abusing others is normal and admirable; if you're going to use others, expect and joyfully accept being used and abused yourself; debase yourself, deform yourself, mutilate your body with permanent markings and painful piercings; love hurts, so never love; hurt others before they can hurt you; break off relationships before the other person does; and on, and on.
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As for the "humor" of "roasts", where did this inhuman ugliness come from? Again, from entertainment deviants.

The Friars Club has held celebrity roasts in private since the 1920s. Only recently has the public been invited to see them. Dean Martin hosted a series of roasts on television during the 1960s and 1970s as part of The Dean Martin Show. The humor at these broadcast tributes was far tamer than the sometimes extremely vulgar and explicit language of the private, non-televised ones.

Decent society has always recognized that there is something about show business that attracts and indulges deviancy. In 'the olden days', men played women's roles in stage plays because theater companies were regarded as unfit places for women. Society was right. Barbara Streisand was denied an apartment in a pricey New York coop building in part because she was in show business, in part because of concern that her fans would invade the building, congregate outside, or otherwise make life unpleasant for the (respectable) tenants.
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Entertainers are not like the rest of us, which they show plainly in their hair styles, tattoos, piercings, tomcat sexual behavior, etc. Until fairly recent times, society had marginalized these entertainers, and other people set the standards for behavior, from parents and educators to clergymen to political leaders and writers. But the arrival of the multiplicity of entertainment media has brought hundreds of these deviants into the home and computer, and onto portable devices. This country has developed a fascination with "celebrities" that has created them into a type of royalty to admire and emulate. Alas, many celebrities are utterly unworthy of any kind of admiration or emulation, but are inhuman scum with the morals of vermin.
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At least the Friars Club roasts were held behind closed doors, and decent people knew to stay away from the raunchy proceedings. The Dean Martin roasts, which popularized the form, were carefully censored to exclude the worst remarks. But Comedy Central's roasts are censored only at times, and only so narrowly that one can all too easily guess what the bleeped words must be. Comedy Central's late-nite "Secret Stash" feature broadcasts every ugly word.
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There comes a point where society needs to recognize aloud that public life is not just being coarsened by the language and sexual imagery that fills film and cable, but that fundamental harm is being done to people who immerse themselves too deeply and for too many hours in the deviant trash that pours from media — and do something to rein it in.
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* "Dr. Walter E. Williams is the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va."
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,611 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:16 PM

 
Monopolizing the Conversation. Wolf Blitzer, a Jew, had a discussion about the Lebanon situation on his show today. His two guests — his only two guests — were Senator Arlen Specter, a Jew, and Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Jew. Oh, that's balanced. When will we stop letting Jews tell us what to do in the Middle East?
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Everyone knows that Jews are grossly overrepresented in American politics. Jews themselves freely admit it. Murray Friedman and Alan Mittleman in an article on the website "First Things" say plainly:

Jews, for example, are disproportionately represented in Congress, with Jewish members coming often from states that have few Jews. Survey research shows overwhelmingly a sharp decline in anti–Semitism; indeed, most Americans have friendly feelings for Jews.

The Jewish Virtual Library says:

Though the Jewish population in the United States is roughly six million (about 2.3% of the total U.S. population), roughly 89 percent live in twelve key electoral college states. These states alone are worth enough electoral votes to elect the president. If you add the non-Jews shown by opinion polls to be as pro-Israel as Jews, it is clear Israel has the support of one of the largest veto groups in the country. * * * [But note that in no state do Jews comprise more than 8.7% of the population. So how can so insignificant a population dominate anywhere? And why should candidates for popular election kowtow to a tiny minority?]

For example, in the 109th Congress [the present Congress], 11 Senators are Jewish (11 percent) while Jewish members comprise almost 6 percent of the House.

California, which is represented in the U.S. Senate ONLY by Jews, is only 2.9% Jewish. Wisconsin, which is also represented in the Senate only by Jews, is 0.5% Jewish!
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Here is a list of the 11 Jewish Senators. To the right of the Senator's name is their state and the percentage of that state's population that is Jewish:

Barbara Boxer (CA: 2.9%)
Norm Coleman (MN: 0.9%)
Russell Feingold (WI: 0.5%)
Dianne Feinstein (CA: 2.9%)
Herbert Kohl (WI: 0.5%)
Frank Lautenberg (NJ: 5.7%)
Carl Levin (MI: 1.1%)
Joseph Lieberman (CT: 3.2%)
Charles Schumer (NY: 8.7%)
Arlen Specter (PA: 2.3%)
Ron Wyden (OR: 0.9%)

How did this happen?
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One consequence of the gross overrepresentation of Jews in Congress and media is to fool people into thinking there are far more Jews in this country than there are. Judaism is said to be one of our "three major religions", along with Protestantism and Catholicism. No way in the world does 2% constitute a "major religion".
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The 6 million figure for Jews in the United States is probably inflated. We have lived with that number so long that nobody seems to have challenged it. But a survey by the World Jewish Congress suggested last year that the Jewish population of the United States is only 5.8 million, part of a worldwide decline in Jewish population.

The overriding reason for the decline in numbers of Jews outside Israel, however, is intermarriage. Fifty percent of diaspora Jews marry outside their faith, and in some American cities the intermarriage rate reaches 80 percent. Other surveys indicate that of intermarried couples in the U.S. where one partner is Jewish, only about 20 to 25 percent raise their children as Jews.

The Jewish Virtual Library says Jews in the United States numbered 6,155,000 in 2001, and translates that to 2.2% of the total population. The Census Bureau estimates the population of the Nation as 296,410,404 at July 1st of this year. Divide that thru and you see that even if the figure for Jews were 6,155,000 and hasn't shrunk, Jews comprise less than 2.1% of the Nation's population (and the Census's figure probably does not include illegal immigrants, most of whom are from Latin America and thus Roman Catholic). If the number of Jews is 5.8 million, the Jewish population rate is 1.96%. 11 Senators is 11%. The most representation Jews should have if Senate seats were distributed fairly would be 2. They thus have 9 more than they would be entitled to, which is 450% overrepresentation. If Jews are overrepresented, somebody else is underrepresented.
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Would U.S. policies in the Middle East be different if there were only 2 Jewish Senators and only 2% of the House were Jewish? Bet on it.
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Would U.S. policies be different if outspoken opponents of Zionism had 11% of the seats in the Senate? Bet on it.
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Would U.S. policies be different if all the Jews in media were replaced by Arabs, and no Jew appeared on public-affairs programs? Bet on it.
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There is a very serious question as to why a minority of 2% has such extraordinary power in the United States. Latinos comprise 14% of the population and blacks, 13%. But they don't dominate public discourse. Latin America and Africa get almost no attention or assistance from the U.S. Government. Why is that?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,607 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:22 PM

 
Another Unwarranted Apology. When are Americans going to get some guts and stand by the things they say?
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Andrew Young — minister, former mayor of Atlanta, Georgia, and, under President Jimmy Carter, U.S. Ambassador to the UN — apologized yesterday for remarks he made in defense of Wal-mart's tendency to make life difficult for "mom and pop shops":

"But you see, those are the people who have been overcharging us, selling us stale bread and bad meat and wilted vegetables. And they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they've ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it's Arabs; very few black people own these stores."

Young, who has since apologized for the remarks, said he decided to end his involvement with Working Families for Wal-Mart after he started getting calls about the story.

"Things that are matter-of-fact in Atlanta, in the New York and Los Angeles environment, tend to be a lot more volatile," he said.

A Jew bitched about this:

The remarks surprised Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, who pointed to Young's reputation of civil rights work.

"If anyone should know that these are the words of bigotry, anti-Semitism and prejudice, it's him," Hier said. "I know he apologized, but I would [hound him anyway] say this ... during his years as a leader of the national civil rights movement, if anyone would utter remarks like this about African-Americans his voice would be the first to rise in indignation."

But who could say such a thing about blacks? Blacks don't own stores in white neighborhoods or 'Asian' neighborhoods that overcharge locals for substandard goods.
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Andrew Young was absolutely right about some "mom and pop shops". In inner cities, we're not talking about Doug and Lois Dumbrowski's general store, in which their kids, Doug, Jr., Ted, and Mary Elizabeth, help out when they're not in school. We're really talking about Kim Daejung working 16-hour days and employing only his family, not locals; or about Muhammed Saleh and the other Yemenis he has brought over to work extremely long hours at low pay, in convenience stores in black neighborhoods, while, again, not employing locals. Those stores have convex mirrors to watch black customers to make sure they don't steal. The employees may even carefully follow blacks with their eyes if not even follow them physically, in person!
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(Interesting sidelite (well, I think so): In looking for typical Korean names, I found a webpage that defines the common name "Young":

YOUNG m & f Korean
Means either "forever" or "prosperity" in Korean.

Forever, Young! Oddly, that page does not show the most common Korean name we encounter, "Kim". Hmm.)
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Latino neighborhoods tend not to have the same problem. Perhaps because Latinos come from societies where Latinos are in charge, when they come here, they tend to set up their own little bodegas — which, again, tend to hire non-family members only if no family member is available to help out. That's not so bad, tho, because they tend to operate only in predominantly Latin neighborhoods. They don't colonize black neighborhoods and treat the locals as The Enemy.
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The lack of entrepreneurship in establishing black small businesses has been a sore point among blacks for decades, but they never seem to progress. Yes, some American blacks do establish going concerns, some quite large (e.g., Johnson Publishing, the people who have given the Nation Ebony and Jet magazines). But the participation rate for blacks in small business is appallingly low. Tho one is tempted to fault white folk for robbing blacks of initiative, the reality is that until the era of compulsory desegregation, there were a great many black communities that had very well-established and profitable black-owned businesses for decades — that were destroyed by desegregation! Black businesses didn't have the leverage in getting good wholesale prices that larger, white-owned businesses had, so they had to charge higher retail prices. Once black customers no longer had to patronize black-owned business but could enter any business, much of their customer base abandoned higher-priced black businesses 'wholesale'. Thriving communities of black businessmen were wiped out by desegregation. Ironic, but true.
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Equally true is everything Andrew Young said. He should not have apologized, and should, indeed, retract his apology and reissue his remarks. We need to talk truth in this country, not play stupid games with "political correctness".
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If the truth hurts, fix the problem. Don't lie about it.
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For my part, I apologize to regular readers of this blog for not being able to update it at my customary rate of three or more posts per workweek, but this was an unusually tough week. On Monday I had my state real-estate salesperson's exam, which I passed. On Thursday I had a test at the office on WordPerfect, which I'm not as sure of. (WordPerf's paragraph-numbering feature is execrably bad in its Windows versions. It used to work fine in DOS, but is just awful in Windows. I hate, ever, to admit that anything in MS Word is better, but have to confess that Word handles paragraph numbering much, much better. I did well enuf in everything else, but paragraph-numbering kept fiting me, which kept me from finishing everything else on time. [Postscript: I passed my WordPerf test too, tho realized after the fact that I could have handled things differently, better. No matter. I passed.]) In addition to working at my part-time nite spot almost 20 hours during my regular four-day workweek, I have another c. 3 hours a day in commuting time (roundtrip) to deal with, and on one nite took another couple of hours to take pix for my Newark fotoblog, which I do post to for every day. I also keep my Simpler Spelling Word of the Day website up-to-date. Once I get home, I have email to catch up on, cats to feed and clean up after, laundry and housework to do, and on, and on. So if on the days I do have time to post to this blog, I sometimes write more than is convenient for you to read at one sitting, I beg your indulgence. If need be, you can download a long post to your own computer, call it up into a word-processing program, and store a "pickup" mark (say, two backslashes: \\) to search for in order to pick up later where you left off.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,607 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:30 PM

 
Four Topics: Air Travail; Britain and Us; Ending the War — or Widening It?; Bicoastal Cooling. (Long post; read at your leisure. I probably won't have time to post anything over the next couple of days anyway because of prior commitments.)
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(1) Air Travail. The English word "travel" derives from French "travail". As my Random House Unabridged Electronic Dictionary puts it:

1325–75; ME (north and Scots) , orig. the same word as TRAVAIL (by shift "to toil, labor" > "to make a laborious journey"

"Travail" is defined as:

1. painfully difficult or burdensome work; toil. 2. pain, anguish or suffering resulting from mental or physical hardship.

In the 14th Century, when "travail" mutated to "travel", travel was indeed extremely difficult in England, as in most of the rest of the world, especially if there were no water route available. Roads were few and cruddy, rut-ridden and dusty in dry weather, almost impassable in wet weather. That remained the pattern for most of human history. I have seen ruts of the Oregon Trail still in existence near a museum somewhere in eastern Oregon (Baker?). That's right: ruts from the Oregon Trail were still visible 140 years later.
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We have forgotten how recent most of the major improvements in quality of life really are. Vintage movies show Tin Lizzies navigating rough offroad terrain — because as late as the 1930s, good, paved roads were in short supply even in much of the United States. Passenger air travel as an industry dates back only to the late 1920s, and it still took a very long time on cramped, noisy planes to get anywhere distant. Domestic air travel up to the 1950s was as difficult and time-consuming as transoceanic air travel in 2005.
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Now, with the (apparent) exposure of an international terrorist plot to blow up airliners mid-Atlantic by combining various innocuous liquid chemicals mid-flite, the world has taken a huge step backwards, making international air travel, at least across the Atlantic, extremely arduous and inconvenient. And you can't just switch to the train.
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Is this the way it's going to be for the rest of human history? Is the modern world to collapse into fearful mutual suspicion in which no one can be trusted and no one can travel freely unless they strip down to their underwear and travel without luggage?
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This is what Israel has done to us, in roiling the Moslem world against us. This is what Israel will continue to do to us as long as it exists. The "Hundred Years War" lasted 116 years, with occasional periods of 'peace'. The wars produced by the Protestant Reformation lasted over a century. The Crusades were an on-again-off-again series of wars that lasted 190 years. The wars that created the Arab Empire (Caliphate) lasted 120 years. The Spanish and Portuguese wars to free themselves from the Arab Empire lasted 770 years! The wars produced by Zionism have, so far, lasted almost 60 years, and there's no end in sight. Is this what we face, "permanent war"? For what? For Israel? Is the world insane?
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Why on Earth would three and a half billion people allow themselves to be manipulated into fiting each other so that a cult of less than 16 million — on the entire planet — can control a piece of dirt in a desert? I'd rather nuke Jerusalem and have done with it.
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In the alternative, how about a final Crusade? Christian countries (but especially the United States) are the most powerful on Earth. Palestine is supposed to be our Holy Land. Why on Earth do we let Jews control the Christian Holy Land? Why not just reconquer it ourselves and let others visit their shrines but take political control into our own hands? Usama bin Laden calls us "Crusaders", but Crusaders conquered the Holy Land for Christendom, not for the Jews.
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Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's Daily Show last week said he'd like to see Jerusalem created into an international city open to all. I'll go him one better: let's make unified Palestine into a State of the United States, in which civil-rights laws end religious and ethnic discrimination, and economic-development programs create universal prosperity.
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Moslems, Christians, and Jews all get along fine here. They can do so in Palestine too, but perhaps only as a State of the Union — not the "State" of Israel, but the State of Palestine, USA. Sure beats the hell out of World War III.
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Odd little thing. In searching for a correction I made to this blog entry, I chose what I thought would be a unique combination, "usa", and found that it appears in "Crusade", "Jerusalem", and "Usama". Coincidence? Well, yeah, I suppose. (As a TV satire show might handle this, "Or is it?" — loud music thunders: Duhn, duhn, DUHNN!)
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(2) Britain and US. Some rightwing commentators have trumpeted the triumph of British intelligence in exposing an (apparent) grave plot and said they were able to do so only because British intelligence has greater leeway than American intelligence services, implying that there might be plots here that we won't discover because of our (excessive) concern for civil liberties. The argument is fatuous and vicious.
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We have had no home-grown terror plot of consequence, and intelligence operations respectful of the Bill of Rights have sufficed, along with various international events, to prevent a recurrence of a major terrorist attack for almost five years. The last one before that was eight years earlier. In lite of these facts, while we need to be vigilant, we don't need to sacrifice our liberties on the altar of security. Trading freedom for security is a fool's bargain. Where does it stop?
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The pretense of those rightwing commentators is that Britain is no less free than we are, but that is false. Britain is less free than we, and always has been. That's why we broke away! And that's why British-born, British-raised Moslems are resorting to violence, even to the point of committing suicide, to get even with British society for unfair treatment.
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Britain has 1.6 million Moslems (I heard on some news channel a few hours ago). The U.S. has perhaps 6 million. How many American-born Moslem terrorists do we have? How many American Moslems are eager to become suicide bombers? Damned few. Jose Padilla is a famous exception to the rule that American Moslems understand that they can succeed in society and be accepted as long as they abide by the peaceful and tolerant teachings of classical Islam, the Islam of the Baghdad Caliphate which ruled from Afghanistan to Morocco over populations diverse in race, language, and, yes, religion.
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I have known people from minorities who left old British colonies for London and then, appalled by the way they were treated, left for New York, where they found freedom and acceptance. One was a young Chinese woman from Singapore, another a Goan (Indian) man from Uganda. They thought the "Mother Country" would welcome them home. Boy, were they in for a shock.
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Tho Britain has changed somewhat under the impact of relatively massive recent immigration, mainly from former colonies, Britain's self-conception as a white, Christian country hasn't budged an inch, and in much of the country nonconformists — even Catholics, who are legally barred from becoming monarch — are only grudgingly tolerated. People know when they are accepted as against when only barely tolerated.
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Britain has had race riots, Indo-Pak riots, and Protestant-Catholic "troubles" that have killed thousands in the past several decades. No, it is not for the U.S. to emulate Britain, but for Britain to emulate the U.S.
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Our Revolution, which is now 230 years old, rose from Enlightenment principles that educated Americans encountered in the writings of British intellectuals. Their revolutionary principles failed at home, but succeeded here. Some Brits understand that. British author Jonathan Freedland, in his book Bring Home the Revolution: The Case for a British Republic summarizes this theme thus:

[T]he spirit that inspires the American secret is actually our own — a British revolutionary fervour mislaid across the Atlantic. This what has made America the diverse, freedom-loving, self-sufficient, independent icon to the world: the place where socialism never took hold because it is inherent in the founding vision, where capitalism at the same time has reached its apogee; where many cultures contribute to the national fabric and yet the sense of belonging to the nation and reverence for its symbols is unmatched across the globe. It's time Britain shared the vitality: time to reclaim the revolution and bring it home.

One has to wonder if a revolution 230 years delayed can ever arise within Britain if it remains independent. For the first 120 years or so after the Declaration of Independence, Britain was our worst enemy, doing everything in its power to hem us in (as for instance by creating Canada against us), even break us up in the Civil War. Then the British ruling class accepted that the U.S. had already passed Britain in population and would soon surpass it in power too, and not long thereafter pose a serious challenge to the Empire as world power. So they started to cozy up to our ruling class, which shared similar names, religion, etc.
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When World War I broke out, the British ruling class yelled for help, and the WASP ruling class of the United States bailed them out, if belatedly.
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Some tension remained, as long as Britain retained an Empire, but after the Empire largely vanished (some colonies remain), the British made sure they became our best buddy (replacing their creation, Canada), in hopes of becoming the tail that wags the dog. So intimate has this relatively new partnership become that the U.S. allowed a British company, BP, to take control of the Alaska Pipeline, which it has now shut down! How on Earth did we allow so vitally important a part of our national economy to be alienated to a foreign company, from any foreign country whatsoever?
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A trans-Atlantic conspiracy of WASPs has emerged in which the most retrograde, not progressive, elements of the two societies have reinforced each other, and the United States Government has moved in the direction of the imperial, arrogant, authoritarian kingdom our ancestors fought against.
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It doesn't have to be that way, but will be as long as a border remains between us.
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The peoples of the United States and Britain are far more progressive than their governments. Odd but true. These two democracies have become so ossified that a self-interested ruling class has emerged against the dynamics of democratization and that periodic revolution at the ballot box that is supposed to keep turning out the old and bringing in the new.
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Britain has universal healthcare, which we are just a few dozen votes short of getting thru Congress. Were Britain part of the United States, we would pass universal healthcare legislation within a year and see it in force within two. The stranglehold the regressive U.S. South holds upon American politics would be broken by the liberalism of Southern England, and the forces of cultural democratization in the United States would expand opportunities for Britons in all the new states.
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Together, our societies would meld into a brilliant, progressive, humane force in the world, using Britain's old colonial ties to increase our influence in the Third World. But apart, the dynamics of the last few decades threaten to make the Anglo-American alliance a force of violent aggressiveness and imperious interventionism in an ever-widening arc outward from our two centers.
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An article in my 1973 Encyclopaedia Britannica speculated that if the Thirteen Colonies had not left the Empire but the Empire had accommodated to their demands, in time the center of gravity of the Empire, and even the capital, would have migrated to North America, as indeed did the Encyclopaedia Britannica itself! Alternate history can be diverting, but is hardly useful. The future is only speculation too, of course, but at least we have some control over that.
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We can set reasonable conditions for accession to our Union, such as abolition of the make-believe "monarchy" — that bunch of pompous popinjays preening for the cameras and pretending to be better than everybody else — and leaving the European Union. In exchange, Brits would have huge representation in Congress, the right to run for President, access to government contracts, automatic defense by the U.S. military, completely free flow of capital, labor, and goods with richer consumers than the EU affords, Cabinet positions and other access to the halls of world power, and on, and on. It would be a supremely good deal for both sides. By contrast, the present relationship is destructive to both countries within it and to the world outside it.
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(3) Ending the War — or Widening It? Israel is making noises about 'unusual activity' on the Syrian border, mere hours before a ceasefire is set to go into effect. The claim is that Syria is removing mines from and massing tanks on the border. Well, what could that mean, and what would it 'justify'? Surely Syria has every reason in the world to mass defensive forces on its border when its long-time, bitter enemy has invaded Lebanon. But removing mines? That suggests an aggressive intent, as Israel wants us all to believe. But why would Syria want to broaden the war and open itself to the kind of devastation Lebanon has suffered, mere hours before a ceasefire is to go into effect? An impending Syrian attack makes no sense, so cannot be believed.
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Far more likely, Israel has tired of waiting for the United States to destroy Syria (and then Iran) for it, so is trying to prepare the American public for a mass attack upon Syria — in "self-defense" of course, as all Israel's aggressions are always "self-defense". Israel would use U.S. armaments with names like "Apache" and "Blackhawk" so all the world is clear on who is 'behind' these attacks: the United States. That would guarantee that the Moslem world continues to seethe with a burning and ineradicable hatred for the United States, as will guarantee that the U.S. public will feel compelled to side with Israel, and thus continue to make things ever worse.
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Israel wants, everyone acknowledges, to seize as much territory as it can before the ceasefire, so that the "facts on the ground" will be frozen in time, and an international force will make that buffer zone permanent. Will Israel gladly consent to have areas of Israel remain within range of Syrian-based missiles? Or does it want to drive as far into Syria before the ceasefire as it has driven into Lebanon? — and then have the UN save its ass from retaliation, by cutting short the war before both Syria and Hezbollah together can rain down serious destruction upon Israel?
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If Israel cannot slip this invasion into the window before tomorrow-morning's deadline, that is no guarantee it won't launch a separate incursion into Syria, after having ordered Washington to make sure to put a protective UN force into place before Syria can retaliate. And then, if that does not produce World War III (a possibility Israel dismisses but no one else should), the next target will be Iran, which it will hope to attack with impunity just as it attacked Iraq's nuclear research facility at Osirak in 1981, then let the UN, at Bush's ostensible instigation (but really Israel's), step in to prevent Iranian retaliation. Hit and run, hit and run; hide behind the UN and U.S. so there is only one-sided attack, never prolonged counterattack, which Israel could not sustain.
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Will Israel dare to follow thru on its apparent intent? Or will Washington say, "Whoa, buddy! That's too far. Back off."? We'll see, but not necessarily before 1am Newark time tomorrow.
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Finally, (4) Bicoastal Cooling. I noticed on the national weather map that New York and Los Angeles were both to have a high temperature of 79 degrees (Fahrenheit) today, August 13th. Two cities, on opposite sides of an enormous continent, 79 degrees? On August 13th. This is global warming? The past two nites have been cold here in Newark. I have had to close my windows most of the way and cover myself with two topsheets to stay warm. In the middle of August.
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We have had two heat waves this summer, but are now starkly below normal. Spring was cold. Last autumn was cold. Early winter was mild but late winter just went on and on, as temperatures 10 and more degrees below normal went on for weeks beyond the start of spring. And all the while the air around them was subnormally cold, the media headquartered in New York kept talking about "global warming". Then came the heat waves, and the media said, in effect, "See? We told you so." Now that we're subnormally cold again, however, the media are completely silent about it. Why is there no skepticism as to "global warming"? Why do our own senses count for nothing? Why are our own, local weather patterns irrelevant? The media say, in effect, "Believe what we say, not what you feel with your own skin." That's not the way I work. To me, "global" warming means all areas get warmer, not that some areas get warmer while others get colder.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,601 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:39 PM