April 01, 2004
The Nobel Peace Prize Isn't Worth A Warm Saucer Of Spit
Back on November 5, 2002 I started a little project called the Henderson Prize for the Advancement of Liberty. (I picked that day because it falls on my birthday, not because of Guy Fawkes Day.) The March 31 winners are announced here.
I'll post some commentary on the prize later this week. For now I want to reprint the October 14, 2002 post that inspired creation of the prize. I have essentially two criticisms of the prize. First, it awards intentions before results have been achieved. Second, there is no rigid definition of "peace" stated in either the name of the prize (as in a hypothetical "peace and freedom award") or in the Nobel guidelines. The committee often fails to distinguish between the short-term peace of appeasement and the long-term peace that is a byproduct of liberty, and it sometimes uses "peace" synonymously with something that it is not, like "fighting for liberty" (re: Shirin Ebadi) or "improving the physical human condition" (re: Norman Borlaug). Until long-term peace and liberty can be tied to them, what they really deserve now are a Dissidents Prize and a Screw Paul Ehrlich, I'm Saving People's Lives Prize, respectively.
For the record, if the Nobel committee were ever possessed to give me the prize, I'd take it. It comes with a nice chunk of prize money, and I would love the opportunity to contribute to the Nobel foundation's permanent archive of Nobel laureate acceptance speeches.
And now, on with the feature presentation.
Please, may I have more? »
Now that Jimmy Carter has received the Nobel Peace Prize for 2002 (see here for a list of all Nobel laureates), a lot of people think the prize is losing its respectability - especially after Fidel Castro offered his congratulations. I have news for those people - the prize was a joke from the beginning.
The first prize was shared by Jean Henri Dunant, founder of the International Red Cross (which itself won the prize several times over the years), and Frédéric Passy, founder of the Société francaise pour l'arbitrage entre nations. Passy had founded an earlier "peace society," the Ligue internationale et permanente de la paix, a vain attempt to avert war between France and Prussia. In France's Chamber of Deputies he opposed colonialism and pushed for disarmament and international arbitration of disputes. The French peace evangelist died in 1912, two years before World War I proved that the European peace efforts of that time, his included, were on the wrong track.
Passy is representative of one of the chief failings of the Nobel committee: it often gives the Peace Prize to people or agencies for offering peace plans that have yet to be tested. Many of the early prizes were given to people involved with peace organizations. After WWI, the committee demonstrated that it had not learned its lesson. In 1919 it gave the prize to President Woodrow Wilson for founding the ill-fated League of Nations. Five others received the award for their work with the League, at least one of whom fought for disarmament. Two Nobel Laureates of that time were Aristide Briand (1926) and Frank Billings Kellogg (1929), whose drafted the Kellogg-Briand Pact, a treaty that outlawed war.
After outlaw nations Germany, Japan, and Italy were defeated by the Allies, the Nobel Committee continued to dole out Peace Prizes to people who talk about peace more than they implement it. Cordell Hull (1945) was one of the first of several to win the prize for work with the United Nations, an agency which over the years has waged a sort of diplomatic cold war against the United States and Israel. Ralphe Bunche was the first to receive the prize for negotiating nonexistent peace in the Middle East. Disarmament - a concept which should have been discredited in 1914 and 1939 - would continue to attract the wooing of the Nobel committee, in 1962, 1982, 1985, 1995, and 1997. And untested peace processes would still be honored, as illustrated by the honoring of Nelson Mandela and F. W. DeKlerk (1993) and John Hume and David Trimble (1998).
So who was the first mouthpiece for murderous regimes to become a Nobel laureate? That would appear to be the only person in history to decline the prize: Le Duc Tho (no biography available). He and Henry Kissinger were awarded the prize for the Paris Peace Accords that ended the Vietnam War. Kissinger wrote an acceptance speech that was read by US ambassador to Norway Thomas R. Byrne, who represented him at the award ceremony. The message contained this remark: "Certain war has yielded to an uncertain peace in Vietnam. Where there was once only despair and dislocation, today there is hope, however frail." If Kissinger could get an award for peace that might come in the future, can I get an Academy Award for a movie I might direct in the future? (I'd like to thank the Academy for hypothetically granting me this honor, and Cameron Diaz and Edward Norton for their possibly outstanding performances.) Ironically, Le was the honest one of the pair. He knew that North Vietnam wasn't giving up on its plans to conquer the South. His job was to get the US out of the way so the NVA could march into Saigon as it did two years later. If Kissinger didn't understand that, he was utterly naive.
At least two other such thugocrats would receive the prize. Yasser Arafat (1994) is the most obvious, a man who talks peace with the West but organizes terrorism with his comrades. The other is Rigoberta Menchú. In 1992, coincidentally (?) 500 years after Columbus' subjugation discovery of the Americas (or at least the Caribbean portion), she was honored for raising awareness of the alleged abuses against her fellow Guatemalan Mayan Indians. David Horowitz reported the research of anthropologist David Stoll, whose book reveals the fraudulence of I, Rigoberta Menchú, the Marxist-feminist's autobiography which is required reading at many universities. Horowitz writes:
As a result of Stoll’s research Rigoberta Menchu has been exposed as a Communist agent working for terrorists who were ultimately responsible for the death of her own family. So rigid is Rigoberta’s party loyalty to the Castroist cause, that after her book was published and she became an international spokesperson for indigenous peoples, she refused to denounce the Sandinista dictatorship’s genocidal attempt to eliminate its Miskito Indians.
"Yeah, but what about Albert Schweitzer, Martin Luther King, Andrei Sakharov, Mother Teresa, and Lech Walesa? And don't forget about the Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders)." Okay, so there's a few good apples. But the roster of Nobel Laureates is dominated by ineffectual stabs toward promoting peace, and a handful of stabs against it. To judge the award by the worthy few who won it is like judging a factory that produces 90% scrap by the ten percent products it manufactures correctly. The award is meaningless.
« That's quite enough, thank you
March 31, 2004
More random thoughts...
Question asked.
Question answered.
Didn't know there was a test going on today.
That middle article is especially worth a gander. A year after the fact, Jackson Diehl can discuss the rationale for war in Iraq so scary, that none dare speak its name. Other than a few bloggers, Perle and Wolfowitz.
==========================
This Derbyshire special is one for the permanent archives. I don't know why he gets a bad name... he's merely exceptionally honest and an old fashioned conservative.
Ooops. Talk about question asked, question answered.
===========================
Please, may I have more? »
The nice thing about America, is we are willing to do what it takes to provide a level playing field. Since things were kinda crappy for girls in education for about 120 years or so, we've decided to level the playing field by ensuring boys get screwed for the next 120 years. This last year, around 40% of incoming college freshman were men, 60% were women. The percentage of men drops each year. Yet still the old line feminists insist that the education system is hostile to women, and we need to do more to feminize schools. Many of our boys are drugged up and classified as disabled, basically because they act... like little boys. Single sex education sometimes helps, especially for at risk kids - boys and girls alike. Evidently, the status quo is preferable, for democratic reasons. And Democratic reasons as well.
===========================
I'm sure the alleged terrorists captured this morning in London with a ton of ammonium nitrate were simple farmers, working at one of those big ranches that litter downtown London, where the corn grows as high as an elephant's eye.
And the alleged terrorists captured with several hundred pounds of TNT in the Phillipines were... um... this is tougher... hang on... ahh, yes. Workers in a gravel pit. Yeah, that's it. They are miners, innocents caught up in an Ashcroftian dragnet of hideous strength.
And this guy, claiming that the U.S. interrupted Al Qaida plans to attack LA and Chicago... well, he's clearly a big phony. Rumor has it, he was in Skull and Bones with Prescott Bush's masseuse, Abdullah. Everybody knows that the attack on the U.S. on 9/11 was about that Midland Oil pipeline to run oil from Trashcanistan, to Israel; and it wouldn't have happened if the U.S. didn't embrace that torturer, Sharon.
Besides, all three stories are made up or at least totally exaggerated, phony put-up jobs to convince people there is some terrorist threat and we need to keep this phony war going and reelect Bush. Law enforcement tactics will win the war on terror; it begs the question - why have we never tried that before.
Oh well, doesn't matter. It's nothin but blue skies... for Mr. Clarke. Blue skies was the program to covertly support the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, to help it overthrow the Taliban. The Bushies beefed it up, increasing funding of Blue Skies 500% in the days prior to 9/11. Dick Clarke says the Bushies didn't care about terrorism though; but Bill Clinton was the bestest Preznit ever when it came to fighting terrorism, and I believe him. I think it's shameful for a sitting president to stoop to insulting a poor dedicated civil servant like Mr. Clarke...
What do these articles and my comments on them have in common? Simple. It goes to show that if you want to stick your head in the sand and call it night, it will appear to you to be dark outside, and nothing will convince you otherwise. This is why I don't argue about politics with most of my liberal friends. For the most part, they've passed the point where they would ever change their beliefs. They are impervious to facts or logic. If Dubya said the Earth was round, they'd whip out a DNC press release proving it was flat, and the NY Times Op-Ed page would decry the politics of personal destruction practiced by attack dogs who would use pictures and math in a slanderous attempt at shameless political gain. Wishin' used to make it so, but there are enough sources of information out there that even the NY Times' high quality ministers of agit-prop can't move national events they way they used to.
As for my friends, well, they are still moved to tears by Paul Krugman. As a result, we can't even talk about the weather any more, because they insist that Bush wrecked that too, by getting the Senate to get the U.S. to pull out of Kyoto. Never mind that it was killed by a 97-0 Senate vote in 1997... it's still the fault of the Bushrove.
As Kelly Bundy once famously said, "it wobbles the mind." Truer words were never spoken.
« That's quite enough, thank you
March 30, 2004
Censored by my own computer
For reasons unknown to me I am unable to reach the site www.georgewbush.com. There's no filtering software of any kind on this computer. I've tried it in both IE6 and Netscape Navigator. My ISP is Dodo Internet.
I'd like to blame John Kerry or the Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade for this, but I suspect it's something more prosaic that I'm doing wrong. Any of my technically gifted readers have any idea?
March 29, 2004
En garde
The case for dueling, as put forth byPejman. Makes sense to me.
My gloves, damnit, where are my gloves?
It could have been much, much worse

You are William Safire! You're ruthless and
cunning, and a conservative demigod. You used
to write speeches for Nixon. Now you write
another column on the English language which
has made you the world's most popular
etymologist. You hate media deregulation, but
love the Bush administration. If only you
weren't such a brilliant writer. You bastard.
Which New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla
(via Damian Penny, who is blogging up a storm, and whom I should have credited for the Guardian/UN link a few posts below)
March 28, 2004
Turning the clock back
In many places today is an important day. It's the day that Britons wind the clock forward and go onto summer time, and the day where many states in Australia wind the clock back to come off summer time.
Let me say right now, I hate summer time. I loathe this meddling in God's own sunshine. Spare me the cant- it's a dodgy scheme and it is of no benefit to anyone.
As I understand it, summer time was introduced by the industrialised nations as a wartime measure- for what purpose I am sure I do not know. Why we need it in this day and age I am at a loss to know.
I just know that I really don't like it.
March 27, 2004
Odds & Sods
Richard Clarke.
You know, nobody involved in the failure to prevent 9/11 covered themselves in glory. But Clarke's 180 in sworn testimony (before congress in 2002, before the 9/11 Commission this week) on what was being done, and not being done, is especially wierd and destructive of his credibility. Particularly when you consider the timing of his book, CBS entitlement to book profits, his friendship and collaboration with Clintonite Rand Beers, his top-dog position for over 9 years (he hasn't mentioned any particular failures on his own part, just a "we in government failed you" comment, I notice) and most of all, Clarke's decision to put Osama bin Laden's family members on planes to Saudi, at a time when no other commercial jets were flying. Most amazing of is that a bunch of Congressmen are pressing to declassify his 2002 testimony, and there are [stage] whispers from Congress about perjury prosecutions. You see, Congress gets a little funny when you tell them lies under oath. The Member leading the charge, Porter Goss (R-FL) is a very serious person. He's an ex-CIA officer, and chair of the House Select Committee on Intelligence. He is not a Bush poodle, and he is a man I would not trifle with, and Dick Clarke appears to have peed directly on Mr. Goss's cornflakes. This is going to get a whole lot uglier, before it gets prettier...
Please, may I have more? »
Then there is blogger Matt Margolis getting his ass kicked by pro-Kerry union thugs. I guess that will teach him to wave a sign in favor of Bush around any Dems. In a nutshell, that is the Dems' stance on First Amendment issues. They may not agree to what you say, but they will defend to the death your right to say it. With the caveat, of course, that by "the death" they mean your death, and with the additional caveat that your death may come a lot sooner than you think if they have anything to say about it.
I guess it's what you'd expect from a party, whose chief uses a likeness of the President as a doormat. Funny, Republicans who did stuff like that - remember the Clinton-faced toilet paper? - were slammed as insane Clinton haters. To my knowledge, none of the people marketing the toilet paper or using it happened to be Republican Party chairmen.
Ahh, the Dem leadership. A class act. As in "no class."
No plan, either. If you ever listen to John Kerry's stump speech, he tells us... well, a lot of nothing. "My plan, will fix this country. Unlike the Republicans, my plan will be inclusive. My plan, will lead to unparalleled chickens in every pot. My plan, in short, is superior." [Leaves the stage to the sound of whooping and cheers.]
Okay, I realize I'm a complete dick - but if he wants me to vote for him, am I being completely unreasonable in hoping to see a copy of the plan he references 91 times a minute, before I cast my vote? Or is the fact he has a superior plan, TBD, supposed to compel me to vote for him? The one fact he has mentioned is that he is going to change the law so that companies can't move off short, for profit. Okay, fine. But (1) I wonder what Congress thinks about that; and (2) I wonder what Mrs. Kerry, whose Heinz Co. operates in 57 foreign countries, thinks about that.
It's not a war between civilizations. That theory is all wrong. It's a war between civilization, and not civilization. By way of proof: Here's a broadcast of a popular Egyptian show, teaching you the ins and outs of beating the fuck out of your wife, without actually killing her. Meanwhile, here is an Imam who is going to lose his job, for suggesting that perhaps men ought to help out on the housework - you know, act as a respectful partner rather than as the fearful Caliph of the home.
That's right folks, it's a war between civilization, and not. And make no mistake - not all Muslims or Arabs are on the other side, and in fact, the shorthand of referring to them as the only threat against civilization is wrongheaded. The lefty pacifists, the socializers who can't let a war and the cost of guns get in the way of butter giveaways, along with other knuckleheads in this country who are equally destructive of the social fabric in their own way - all are equally nihilistic and equally opposed to Western Civ. They may not be as honest as the Islamofascists, or as direct or as openly violent. But they definitely have each others' flank in this assault on Western culture.
Silflay Hraka, y'all. If you aren't checking out Hraka on a reg'lar basis, you are missing out. Bigwig and the boys are running a couple first rate group blogs. You may not hear about something first from Bigwig, but you will definitely hear about it if it is worth hearing about. Take for instance this post about another blogger, who has discovered that the outrage over 9/11, is actually a half dozen "men in the street" who coincidentally get interviewed over and over again for their opinions on Bush and 9/11. Bigwig is also running an apparently conservative anonyblog, The Warren, plus a good blog about, well, Fishin', Stinkin' 'n' Drinkin'. Oh yeah, and Bigwig also started the idea of "Carnivals" of blogs. So, take advantage of the linky-love and give Hraka a hit. Before you get absorbed into their Borg-like hive of blogs.
Then there's AllahPundit. Wow. What can I say, but "May his first offspring be a male child."
Bill Raftery doing the color commentary on the NCAA Basketball tournament... is there anyone with more irritating verbal tics, this side of Bill "Random Incoherent Thoughts" Walton? Raftery does this thing where it sounds like he's trying to take a crap while he's doing color commentary. He grunts out a word slowly, like he ate too much cheeze, not enough celery the other day. "Shavlik Randolph... knaaaahhhhhhmmm-cks one down."
Oh, jeebus Bill. If you can't spit the words out without sounding like you are pushing one out, then shut the fuck up. You're killing the game. The fact that it could be worse, Digger Phelps could be doing the broadcast, isn't much consolation.
While I was at the CBS site, I noticed they are doing a special on Jesus. They are going to tell us what his life and ministry really meant. In the wake of the 60 Minutes / Simon & Schuster / Dick Clarke revelations, I can't help but wonder if they own the rights to the Bible, or at least collect some royalties on it. And one wonders if Jesus, in a surprise move, will refute his earlier testimony.
Basta!
Take that any way you want.
« That's quite enough, thank you
Chaucer & Spring
First off, it was a beautiful day in D.C. today. It seemed like the first real Spring day we have had in the Washington area. It was 70 degrees (F, not C), the first wildflowers bloomed, and I went for a long walk with my evil spawn. On a day like this, there is only one way I can sum up my feelings. And that way, is to whip out the prologue to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
Aside from being a great collection of stories and allegories, the Tales have the best summary of what Spring really means - and best of all, it's really bawdy, once you know your literary history. Matter of fact, the Canterbury tales are pretty much one long dirty joke, in a lot of ways.
Please, may I have more? »
Too bad you have to study Medieval History, Literature, Arts, Semiotics, Alchemy, Biology, and Middle English to get the punchline. To read and know Chaucer, is to realize that Shakespeare never could have crafted his works, had Chaucer not paved the way for densely written, clever, jokey, smart, philosophical literature. Chaucer basically invented literature as we understand it. Compared to Chaucer, as Sergeant Major Plumley might have put it, Shakespeare's a pussy. Yet despite Chaucer's brilliance, he isn't as accessible as Shakespeare due to the archaic Middle English vernacular of his day, and the fact that a lot of brilliant enlightenment thinkers wrote of the Medieval ages as the "Dark Ages" - thereby ignoring Chaucer and his Italian sorta-counterpart, Bocaccio. Nevertheless, until you study Chaucer formally (which I urge you to do, it is a mental picnic) I will translate - my translations denoted with a hyphen
1: Whan that aprill with his shoures soote
- When the sweet rainshowers of April
2: The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,
- Have quenched the March drought, soaking the roots of the plants
3: And bathed every veyne in swich licour
- And soaked every root in such sweet fluid
4: Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
- Exemplified in the blooming flowers
5: Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
- When the warm wind, with its sweet breath,
6: Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
- Has inspired in every field and forest,
7: Tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
- Tender crops of vegetables; and the Son of the early astrological year
8: Hath in the ram his halve cours yronne,
- Is halfway through the phase of the Ram
9: And smale foweles maken melodye,
- And the little birds sing
10: That slepen al the nyght with open ye
- The birds that keep one eye open at night,
11: (so priketh hem nature in hir corages);
- So nature encourages them to sing and carouse;
12: Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
- That's when people want to go on pilgrimages,
13: And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
- And pilgrims want to seek strange lands,
14: To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
- To distant shrines well known in strange lands;
15: And specially from every shires ende
- And especially the folks from the boondocks, out in the counties
16: Of engelond to caunterbury they wende,
- of England -- they make their way to Canterbury Cathedral.
17: The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
- To pray at the internment site of the holy martyr
18: That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
- Who helped them when they were sick.
Okay, so it works pretty well as a straight up poem. But it works as a dirty joke, too, the smut is denoted with asterisks (*)
1: Whan that aprill with his shoures soote
- When the sweet rainshowers of April
2: The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,
- Have quenched the March drought, soaking the roots of the plants
***Ahh, we're talking about spring. Fertility, people. Bathing things in life-giving fluids...
3: And bathed every veyne in swich licour
- And soaked every root in such sweet fluid
4: Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
- Exemplified in the blooming flowers
*****Hmmmm... flowers, eh? Nothing a man loves more than to pick the flowers, nothing better in nature than soaking the seed of life with fluid so it grows... this is about sex & virginity here, and reproduction & fertility.
5: Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
- When the warm wind, with its sweet breath,
6: Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
- Has inspired in every field and forest,
7: Tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
- Tender crops of vegetables; and the Son of the early astrological year
8: Hath in the ram his halve cours yronne,
- Is halfway through the phase of the Ram
*****Um, the warm weather is making everyone horny. The plants are reproducing, and the Ram - a symbol of virility - is halfway through executing his plans thanks to the mere occurrence of warm spring weather. There was a theory in those days, about blushing and sweat - you know where this is going. Yep, the wind blows, and the horny goat runs around. Whew, I'm getting warm just thinking about it.
9: And smale foweles maken melodye,
- And the little birds sing
10: That slepen al the nyght with open ye
- The birds that keep one eye open at night,
****Those birds that are singing with one eye open at night are cuckoos. Some cuckoos breed by eating and removing one egg from another bird's nest, and laying one of their own to be raised by the unsuspecting host bird. Hence the term "cuckold." Chaucer is saying that randy guys are all over the place looking to get a leg over, even with married women if the chance presents itself.
11: (so priketh hem nature in hir corages);
- So nature encourages them to sing and carouse;
***Priketh means to "spur onward"; the term "prik" also meant "prick", as in penis. So Chaucer is saying that nature makes everyone drop trou and run wild, thinking with the little head yet again.
12: Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
- That's when people want to go on pilgrimages,
***People used to walk a long distance to famous chapels. The pilgrimage journey might take weeks or months, and there would be some prayer involved. There was also some boozing, and some Girles Gawne Wilde involved. Walk and pray all day, eat and booze (and if you were lucky, screw) all night. Yes, that's right, a trip to Canterbury or San Jaun Compostela might just as easily be holy, or be "holy shit it's MTV (Medieval Transubstantiation and venery) Spring Break 1381! Woooooohooo!"
13: And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
- And pilgrims want to seek strange lands,
*** Palmers - pilgrims carrying symbolic Eastertime palm fronds. Not to be confused with the Palmers (chiropractors) insulted by H.L. Mencken.
14: To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
- To distant shrines well known in strange lands;
****Hmmmm... head for "strange" lands.
15: And specially from every shires ende
- And especially the folks from the boondocks, out in the counties
16: Of engelond to caunterbury they wende,
- of England -- they make their way to Canterbury Cathedral.
17: The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
- To pray at the internment site of the holy martyr
18: That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
- Who helped them when they were sick.
*****You pray to the martyr, or go to see him, to cure what ails you. If you were sick and prayed, you get healthy. If you are horny, well, you can maybe get some sexual healing. Fix you right up.
There's a lot of other good stuff in Chaucer. He was a bit of a court poet, yet he was also a radical critic of social problems of the day. This made his position quite touchy - he really slams the Catholic Church for clericalism (he was arrested once for punching out a corrupt friar); he slams the nobility as bloodthirsty jackasses, he rants about golddigging middle class women, you name it, he attacks it. And almost everything is a filthy double entendre.
When he read his poetry before his Duke - Lancaster, as I recall - he no doubt inspired a lot of laughter. And a lot of "I think he was joking... he was joking right?" comments as well.
There you have it: Geoffrey Chaucer wasn't the Shakespeare of his age - he was the Lenny Bruce.
« That's quite enough, thank you
I'm sorry; so sorry...
I owe an apology to Jesse Walker In a post a while back discussing how I have come back around to religion, and how following a strongly traditional mainstream faith fits my political outlook and my pragmatic view of life, I mistakenly dissed a good man.
Please, may I have more? »
The man I dissed was Jesse Walker. It happened rather innocently on my part but this does not excuse my error. At the time, I was hammering on anarcho-libertarianism, one of the flavors of libertarianism that can only exist so long as it is located within a good strong society, with orderly people, not generally organized along strict libertarian lines. A lot of people whose understanding of libertarianism goes about as far as "Atlas Shrugged" label themselves libertarians, and apply snark rather than deep thought and confuse their lightweight version of anarcho-libertarianism for a workable libertarian critique, and this seriously chaps my ass. It comes across as dumb and shallow, and to my way of thinking, the only anarcho-libertarian experiments that have really worked before involve communes set up to promote vice - to sell dope, or sex, or gambling. (See, e.g. pre-1960 Las Vegas...)
In the process of hammering on thatt viewpoint, I put up as exemplars the good folks at Reason.com, some of whom... well, labeling their viewpoint as anarcho-libertarianism is probably an insult to Murray Rothbard, it doesn't rise to his level of forethought or sophistication. My main motivation was to hammer on the anti-conservative dialogue steadily maintained by a number of writers at Reason, in particular, the offhand bashing of religion in which that subset engages.
I am of the opinion that nobody has any business tearing down mostly useful social institutions, organized religion in the West being mostly useful, most of the time, like civic associations or neighborhood associations, or other vital moderators of human behavior. Burke agreed with this; as did classical liberal John Stuart Mill, especially in his later years; and Hayek was perhaps the leading proponent of respecting "how people traditionally do things," lending it an empirical rationale and voicing a philosophical kernel that underlies the theory of spontaneous organization, so in vogue today. That is the background; I was pissed.
My error was to bash Jesse, when I meant to bash Nick Gillespie, and I apologize for it. Jesse is actually a voice of reason at Reason, and his own blog is quite deliberative, and he and I would probably agree on many philosophical matters. Hell, he even quotes Albert Jay Nock in this entry... I recognize a lurking Hayekian in Mr. Walker, and I respect that, and apologize for my erroneous slam.
I wrote the entry at a time when Reason's writers Tim Cavanagh and Nick Gillespie were coming off a series of cheap shots at Catholicism, including the tossing around of the term "mackeral snapper". That's no big slur, I guess, unless you figure calling a Black person a "fried chicken and watermellon eater" isn't a cheap shot. As far as I'm concerned, it's a cheap shot, an ad hominem, and even if my mistaken reference to Jesse is inexcusable, perhaps you can understand how I got there.
Anyhow, enough rationalization. The yellow flecks are egg on my face, my voice sounds muffled because my foot is in my mouth, and you can't hear me too well because my head was inserted in my rectum, at least on this point.
« That's quite enough, thank you
March 26, 2004
What liberal media?
Via Stefan Sharkansky's very worthwhile new project, Oh, That Liberal Media, Dave Huber points us to alist (by a leftist!) of heavyweight media worthies who helped prepare John Kerry for debates. In Al Franken's apartment, no less.
The other participants included:
Al Franken and his wife Franni;
Rick Hertzberg, senior editor for the New Yorker;
David Remnick, editor for the New Yorker;
Jim Kelly, managing editor for Time Magazine;
Howard Fineman, chief political correspondent for Newsweek;
Jeff Greenfield, senior correspondent and analyst for CNN;
Frank Rich, columnist for the New York Times;
Eric Alterman, author and columnist for MSNBC and the Nation;
Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist/author of ‘Maus’;
Richard Cohen, columnist for the Washington Post;
Fred Kaplan, columnist for Slate;
Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate and author;
Jonathan Alter, senior editor and columnist for Newsweek;
Philip Gourevitch, columnist for the New Yorker;
Calvin Trillin, freelance writer and author;
Edward Jay Epstein, investigative reporter and author;
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who needs no introduction.
US and them
Good on the USA and John Negroponte, for voting against the UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel for vaporizing Sheikh Yassin. I'm glad that someone in the world still believes that terrorists are better off dead.
The Guardian, in its inimitable fashion, inserts this priceless quote in the middle of the above-linked article:
On Wednesday, the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva voted 31-2 to condemn Israel for Yassin's death, but the body has no power to punish countries. A resolution by the Security Council would have carried more international weight.
Emphasis, alas, mine.
As if the UN, the Security Council, or any of their bastard agencies carried any weight with anyone at all. Or not. I'm sure the Iraqis are sure as heck grateful to the UN making heaps of money off their oil while they were raped, maimed and killed. I bet the good people of Srebernica have nothing but kind words for the blue-helmets who stood around while they were being massacred. Even the Palestinians, a group of people I'm not disposed to sympathize with, have been screwed over for half a century by the UN.
Why? WHY? Why do people still have faith in the UN?
And this man, Sheikh Yassin, that so many of them mourn, was such a fine, holy, spiritual man that he sent terrified, brainwashed 16-year-olds to do his dirty work.
Of course, his mother has no problem with, you know, killing himself and 20 other people. He just didn't know what he was doing:
Mrs. Abdo, in a view echoed by many others, made clear that she opposed only those suicide attacks carried out by under age bombers. "Maybe if he is 20, then perhaps I could understand," she said of her own son. "At that age, they know what they are doing, they are fighting for their homeland."
And her neighbor echos the sentiment:
The clusters of young men who gathered in the street outside the family home expressed the same sentiment. "I don't think anyone here opposes these attacks because of the situation the Israelis have put us in," said Muhammad Zeidal, 20, a university student. "But to use someone his age is very, very wrong."
Mr Zeidal has no problems with the murdering of innocents. Just using young people to carry it out.
The world's gone bonkers.
Your truly hilarious mental image of the day
Richard Simmons vs. 255-lb cage fighter.
(via Tex)
March 25, 2004
New stuff to explore
I've updated the "Things I like" section with more books, music and DVDs that have been catching my eye lately. Or not so lately. In my adult existence, anyway. Do check out.
But what about the children?
I'll be digging into the ol' blog vault again. In my first month of blogging I did a couple of posts on two Palestinian women who expressed opposite reactions to the "martyrdom" of their children. While these bombings were conducted by Fatah's al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, they are representative of the operations of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, PFLP, and all other terrorist organizations in Israel. This is Sheik Yassin's legacy: a society cajoled and pressured into celebrating the deaths of loved ones.
Here is the first post:
Back in April, Jay Manifold wrote this commentary on the Mideast conflict, which included a noteworthy quote from Dennis Prager:
"The second more frightening aspect of Arab/Muslim Jew-hatred is that many of these haters do not value their own lives."
What brought this to mind is this translation by MEMRI of an interview with Umm Nidal, the mother of a Palestinian suicide bomber (original source: Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, an Arabic-language daily in London). There are two possibilities: that the woman was parroting lines fed to her by terrorist handlers, or, even more frightening, that she was speaking from her heart.
These lines from the song "Russians," recorded by British rock star Sting during the height of the Cold War, also come to mind:
We share the same biology
Regardless of ideology
Believe me when I say to you
I hope the Russians love their children too
[In the original post I should have commented that the parental attitudes of the overall Russian population were irrelevant to the outcome of the Cold War as long as it had no voice in government. Note to Sting: it's the political leadership, stupid.]
Conscious desire for losing one's children to suicide attacks isn't exactly the sort of thing that basic maternal instincts allow one to regard as a loving act. It takes an extreme step away from human nature for a mom like Umm Nidal to make the statements she did in the interview and mean it (assuming she was not under some extreme outside pressure). I won't make any bets as to whether or not they constitute a majority, but I imagine that there's a lot of Palestinian moms who don't want to go along with the human-sacrifice-for-peace program. I hope that some day they will be liberated from their terrorist masters.
Now for the second post:
In Part 1, I expressed wonder if Palestinian mom Umm Nidal was really speaking her mind or buckling to terrorist coercion when she made glowing statements about her son's suicide bombing mission. There's no way to ever know what's really going on in her head, but I imagine that some parents of "martyrs" are strongarmed into spouting the terrorist party line whenever the press shows up on their doorsteps.
Of greater concern is any pressure the al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades may be exerting on the suicide bombers themselves. Evidently some of these bombings do involve such coercion, as this story reports. Issa Budeir, a 16-year-old male, and Aren Ahmed, a 20-year-old female, were pressed into a bombing mission at town of Rishon Lezion on May 21. Both tried to back out at the last minute, but after pressure from their handlers Issa complied, killing himself and two Israelis and injuring 40.
Issa's mom Fatiyeh deserves credit for being a sane and rational human being, grieving the loss of her son rather than celebrating it.
March 24, 2004
I coulda been a contender
I'm not as cute as the cross-dressing crouton doctor.
Gee, thanks, guys. Way to make my ego deflate.
March 23, 2004
What if Clarke is Right?
Richard Clarke says that the Bush Administration never took terrorism seriously, and that Bush should be made to answer – i.e. impeached and or tried – for this huge failure.
Well, this ignores the Clinton failures; and the Bush reorganization of the counterterrorism strategy; and political realities of the pre-9/11 world, but I’ll bite.
So let’s all do a mental exercise here. Let’s assume Bush did take terrorism very seriously indeed, and took absolutely prescient actions to stop the Al Qaida gang in their tracks. How would that turn out?
REUTERS NEWSWIRE
September 10, 2001
By Andrew Cawthorn
Bush, Cheney, Indicted for War Crimes
King Fahd said to be pleased by developments
Arab Street Celebrates
ROME – 10:10 AM GMT – The International Criminal Court (ICC) today handed down indictments against embattled U.S. President George Bush, and Vice President, Dick Cheney. Cheney, whose ties to Oil Companies Halliburton and Enron have embroiled the Administration in controversy, is said to be only the first junior member of the Bush junta to be indicted.
An ICC spokesperson indicated that National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Homeland Security Advisor Tom Ridge, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas are up “in the next innings.”
The indictments came as a shock to the Bush Administration, which thought the world would support its “War on Terror Campaign” launched in March, 2001. The so-called War on Terror was the right wing ideological justification for a string of failed prosecutions in the United States, and a series of assassinations targeting foreign militants abroad.
Please, may I have more? »
A Spanish district court in the village of La Paloma, Spain, has ordered the extradition of the entire senior leadership of the Bush Administration. France, Brussels and Germany have agreed to arrest “any U.S. soldiers or government officials we can get our hands on.” Bush is said to be sequestered in the White House, afraid to travel anywhere except to Texas, Britain, Australia, or 34 small and irrelevant countries out of the 180 or so U.N. members in good standing.
Defense attorney Art Shapiro, who represented several members of the “WTC 19”, said “this is a great day for liberty, for security, and for social justice. It just goes to prove that this illegitimate Bush government and his fascist henchman John Ashcroft can be made to answer to the world, even if they can’t be made to answer to the U.S. court system.”
Shapiro’s clients had been accused of plotting to hijack several jets, and fly them into skyscrapers at some future date. Clinton Administration Counterterrorism Czar Richard Clarke, testifying as an expert witness at the WTC 19 trial, was described by jurors as a key factor in their acquittal decision.
Juror Roland Snipe indicated that the Ashcroft prosecutions were “just ludicrous, dude. The idea that somebody could hijack a plane with a boxcutter… please. And take down a building by flying a plane into it? That would never happen." Snipe indicated that he thought Attorney General Ashcroft was "probably smoking some of that medical marijuana he keeps seizing from cancer patients... and man, I hope he doesn't bogart it all." Key to the jury's verdict was Clarke's testimony, that Al Queso is a foreign terrorism threat. According to Snipe, "they’ve never done anything in the U.S. before, so why would they do anything now? If we felt so strongly about them, we should have just shot their camels in the butt with some cruise missiles.”
The Administration claimed for nearly six months that monumental terrorist attacks, of a magnitude never seen before, were afoot. Consequently, it took highly irregular and illegal action to thwart the alleged attack plans.
In early April, a number of important Middle East leaders were found dead, among them a Sheik Omar, leader of Afghanistan, who unlike Bush was actually elected. Omar was found dead along with a well known Saudi construction magnate, Osama bin Laden. The deceased leaders were thought to be victims of internecine struggle among Middle Eastern amateur religious and pharmacological entreperneurs. It did not arouse any suspicion until the body of a Zaccarias Moussaoui turned up in a London flat. Moussaoui was found with an ace of spades on his forehead, and the body of a deceased American high school student, John Walker Lindh, in his bathroom.
The card carried the insignia of the Fifth U.S. Special Forces Group, a shadowy and secretive U.S. Army group based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. This tied the Bush Administration to the deaths, leading UN Special Investigator Hans Blix to make the connection between Moussouai, an innocent flight school student, and the murdered Middle Eastern leaders.
From that slender lead, investigative journalist discovered that other notable Muslim activists were also found to be missing, including Abu Abbas and Abu Nidal. Both disappeared from their plush Baghdad estates some time in late May. Yassir Arafat, Palestinian Statesman, died when the Israelis bulldozed his home. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu ordered the bulldozing only after President Bush indicated that he had no further use for Arafat, and would just as soon be rid of him “rather than lose one more Brooklyn born Jewish settler.”
At the time, Bush was said to be hopeful the Palestinians would elect an honest leader, “that I can cut a peace deal with.” Bush is listed in the ICC charges as an accessory to Arafat’s murder.
Renowned scholar Edward Said is also on the list of suspected victims. He passed away from allegedly natural causes, but the Counsel on Arab American / Islamic Relations (before its court ordered disbanding for alleged funding of terrorism) claimed that he was driven to suicide by Congressional hearings into the alleged “corruption and perversion of federally funded Middle Eastern Studies curriculum.”
The British connection to the Bush murders was discovered when former British minister Claire Short wrote in the Guardian, “I can no longer tinker with Bush’s and Blair’s machinery of death.”
Short revealed that MI-6 and the CIA, along with various military intelligence units, had collaborated in assassinating “hundreds, if not over a thousand” alleged terrorist operatives and fundraisers worldwide. Short indicted that Vladimir Putin was also involved in the “crooked campaign to stifle Muslim and Arab political free speech”, but she wasn’t sure how Putin was involved.
British Member of Parliament George Galloway had promised to reveal the nature and extent of the Putin-Bush-Blair connection, but he was unfortunately killed in a filling station accident when a spark from his cellphone ignited gas fumes from a lingering spill. Short chalked up that death to Bush and Blair as well, but Foreign Minister Jack Straw indicated that Galloway probably just got too much petrol, and wasn’t smart enough to keep quiet, choosing instead to speed dial the grizzled wise man of the political press, George Monbiot, on his expensive little cell phone.
In other news, Senator John Kerry, sage of the U.S. Senate, and now favored to win the U.S. Presidency in 2004, called for domestic war crimes trials against Bush and “his evil minions, the evildoers, the spreaders of terror.”
Kerry added that “it’s time we raise the bar between law enforcement and intelligence. It’s time we put the brakes on the military, and chain up this out of control, rabid dog. It’s time we stop treating terrorists as sub-human vermin to be stamped out, and start treating them as criminals, as humans who can be rehabilitated. It’s time we stop these phony, racially motivated prosecutions of legitimate Middle Eastern visitors to this country.” Kerry was applauded at that Press Conference by Dr. Sami Al Arian, a noteworthy voice for oppressed Muslims in America. “He is the nearest thing to a gallant French nobleman this Allah-forsaken country has ever produced,” said Dr. Arian. “Allah’s infinite blessings be upon him.”
Kerry is thought to be the probable next President of the United States as a result of his stalwart efforts to reign in the U.S. military, law enforcement and intelligence services. He is so secure in his front runner status, that he has picked an energetic former governor of Vermont, Dr. Howard Dean, as his vice presidential choice. Dean is... an enthusiastic and energetic man, who Kerry said, "adds a lot of energy to my initiatives."
Three members of the U.S. Supreme Court also issued a joint statement today, making an odd and rare public comment on current political and legal events. Justices O'Connor, Ginsburg and Kennedy, champions of using notional "international law theory" as a normative principle in U.S. Constitutional law, said "this is a victory for an emerging consensus of world opinion." The statement continued, noting that the three justices were "looking forward to employing international human rights standards in cases brought in American courts, including the pending polygamist marriage case, Doe & Roe & Doe v. Ashcroft.
Frequent Court dissenter and target of a Democratic Senate impeachment probe as well as an ICC human rights case, the ultraconservative Antonin Scalia, was contacted for comment on the three justices' statement. His chambers issued a cryptic comment referring to the "smug pieties and convictions of the age." Scalia is expected to be arrested within the week and extradited to Rome by police in Massachusetts, where he is duck hunting with some college buddies.
Bush's downfall is traced by legal experts to his signing of the International Criminal Court Treaty, also called the Treaty of Rome. The Treaty had been resisted by the Clinton Administration on the grounds that it would hamstring U.S. autonomy and sovereignty. Law Lord Freddie Smythe-Smythe-Brown, sitting by designation on the ICC, said "why nothing could be further from the truth." Smythe-Smythe-Brown, who oversaw the extradition of Pinochet to Spain, and of Maggie Thatcher to Argentina, both for crimes against humanity, thought the effect of the treaty was largely salutory. "After all," he told a Reuters reporter, "how else can you bring war criminals, and human rights violaters like Bush and Sharon, and Ron Reagan to justice?"
Commenting on Kerry’s fiery, inspired speech, widely respected philosopher Noam Chomsky commented, “it’s important we understand the root causes of this Bushitler reign of terror. It’s nothing but unjustifiable and inexplicable colonialism, an exploitation, if you will, of the oppressed peoples of the world; a fantastical and masturbatory imagining of vast conspiracies against Amerikkka, that will never even become a realized eventuality.” Chomsky continued, adding that “the U.S. pathological need to maintain hegemony over the brown-skinned peoples of the world is a fascistic modality that has almost inevitably led to this tragic genocide, this unprecedented slaughter of innocents. It is the truly inevitable outgrowth of power, and only the physical and semiotic neutering of America, the castration of its phallic image, and the smashing of its fortress mentality Pentagon, will cure this long national psychotic episode.”
[UPDATE: The estimable Jesse Walker, a man who can swim with the Snarks, points out that this is totally lame, way too long, and besides, Noam Chomsky would never talk like this. I can't do anything about the length, I was born this way, but in this interest of reality in this thought-exercise, substitute the above paragraph with the following words of Noam:
Respected philosopher and linguist chalked up the Bush attacks and simmering hatred of America to America's support of the murderous zionist entity. According to Chomsky, Americans are culpable for Israel's actions, and thus deserve whatever they get. Chomsky says that "Palestinians are subjected to. . . gross violation of the Geneva Conventions, and other actions that are recognized as crimes throughout most of the world, apart from the US, which has prime responsibility for them."
Chomsky was no less sanguine regarding what he called the artificially generated so-called war on terror - a ludicrous and impossible concept of a war on a phenomenon. He feels that the U.S. is the biggest terrorist state in the world, and an utter lawless scofflaw, arguing that "we should recognize that in much of the world the US is regarded as a leading terrorist state, and with good reason. We might bear in mind, for example, that the US was condemned by the World Court for "unlawful use of force" (international terrorism) and then vetoed a Security Council resolution calling on all states (meaning the US) to adhere to international law. Only one of countless examples."
Hope that satisfies your reality jonez Jesse. I always aim to please. ]
« That's quite enough, thank you