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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? »


Alan K. Henderson at 10:50 AM; filed to History | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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? »


Al Maviva at 12:29 PM; filed to Politics | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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?

Sasha Castel at 12:26 PM; filed to Sasha stuff | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
March 29, 2004
En garde

The case for dueling, as put forth byPejman. Makes sense to me.

My gloves, damnit, where are my gloves?

Sasha Castel at 10:33 AM; filed to Miscellany | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
It could have been much, much worse

William Safire
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)

Sasha Castel at 10:18 AM; filed to Amusements | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
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.

Scott Wickstein at 08:58 PM; filed to Australia | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
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? »


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? »


Al Maviva at 01:14 PM; filed to Arts | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
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? »


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.


Sasha Castel at 06:24 PM; filed to Media | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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.

Sasha Castel at 12:21 PM; filed to Middle East | Comments (12) | TrackBack (1)
Your truly hilarious mental image of the day

Richard Simmons vs. 255-lb cage fighter.

(via Tex)

Sasha Castel at 11:20 AM; filed to | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
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.

Sasha Castel at 11:37 AM; filed to Announcements | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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.

Alan K. Henderson at 10:16 AM; filed to The Wide World | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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.

Sasha Castel at 10:22 AM; filed to Weirdness | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)
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? »


Al Maviva at 01:45 PM; filed to The War | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)



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