As Instapundit points out, speech limits on campus have gotten ridiculous when you can't even call the people in career services incompetent morons. And this is at Harvard Business School!
The deans complained that the cartoon violated HBS Community Standards, which stipulate that HBS community members must have “respect for the rights, differences and dignity of others.”
“We do not want students to engage in discourse that hurts others,” Clark said.
I don't think this can be blamed on political correctness, but the spirit "don't hurt people's feelings unless they're Republicans" seems to have wafted across the Charles River to the B School side of campus.
Given the president's very successful week -- in which he won a resounding victory in Tuesday's elections, then secured a unanimous resolution on Iraq from the U.N. Security Council -- his supporters and many of his opponents found themselves agreeing that he has often been misunderstood and underestimated. For more than two years, at the mere mention of George W. Bush, critics on the left started hooting over his fractured syntax, counting his IQ and tsk-tsking over his simplistic foreign policy. Sample Web site: toostupidtobepresident.com. Even some Republicans joined in behind closed doors.
My only quibble with Orrin's comments is that Ivy League intellectuals don't actually join Mensa, as it tends to attract math and science geeks. But overall, it is correct that you can be "too smart" for your own good. Many policies crafted by intellectuals would work in a society made up only of intellectuals. Fortunately there are none.
Upsetting stereotypes of Vietnam-era protests by flower-draped co-eds and flag-waving veterans, younger Americans are more likely to support the use of military force against Iraq than are senior citizens, recent surveys suggest. Americans aged 18 to 29 back US military action by a 3-to-1 margin (69 percent to 23 percent). In contrast, support falls to 51 percent among those aged 65 or older, 31 percent of whom oppose a war against Iraq, according to three surveys by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.
The kibbutz where the latest attack took place was as leftist and pro-Arab as there is in Israel. Obviously, terrorists aren't interested in finding out how good you are on their issues before they kill.
The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement claimed responsibility for the attack, in which a gunman slid under the security fence meant to shield the kibbutz from the adjacent West Bank. Within minutes, he had slipped into a nearby house, where he took point blank aim at two children sleeping in their beds, also killing the mother of the boys, Matan, 4, and Noam, 5.
Before making his escape into the darkness of the agricultural backyard of the village, he also gunned down a woman strolling nearby, and traded fire with and shot dead the secretary of the kibbutz, the communal village's most senior official.
"This is yet another Israeli tragedy, that indeed this place - that for years and years has been a symbol of living together beautifully, with the respect between Metzer and [the Israeli-Arab village of] Meisar, with their shared soccer team, and the extraordinary neighborliness and of their lives together - should fall victim to such cruel terrorism," said leftist Meretz lawmaker Avshalom Vilan.
The kibbutz was founded in 1953, largely by immigrants from Argentina fired with the avowedly Marxist ideology of the 'Hashomer Hatzair' (Young Guard) kibbutz movement, the pillar of the Mapam political party, now a part of the Meretz faction.
We need to improve fuel economy so we can stop kowtowing to the Saudis, and the technology is in sight using the good ol' internal combustion engine.
And even though retail prices of vehicles would rise some $1,000 to $2,000, depending on the model, consumers would save that much at the gas pump within five years.
I don't doubt higher fuel economy may come at a price in terms of performance or even passenger safety. But if we are asking American men and women to risk their lives (and some will die) to secure vital resources (yes, it is about oil to some extent, and the free world cannot dictators and fascists to use oil to blackmail us) we at home should be prepared to make sacrifices of our convenience and even our safety. And the President should demand it.
Josh Marshall argues that many Democrats got it wrong on Iraq and the party was punished at the polls as a result.
So long as Saddam remains on the other side of the nuclear threshold, we can keep him in check with occasional bursts of cruise missiles or whack him back into line with our massive conventional forces if he ever really gets out of line. But once he acquires nuclear weapons he becomes almost infinitely more difficult to control. Rather than our nukes deterring him, Saddam is likely to think -- and not without good reason -- that his nukes will provide deterrence against us and an umbrella under which he can go back to his old ways.
if we believe John Miller's 1999 Esquire interview, neither bin Laden nor his followers have anything resembling a Western sense of humor. (Miller's description of bin Laden's incomprehension at an attempted ice-breaker - to the effect that, as an engineer, Osama should know how to build a decent driveway up to his cave - is itself high comedy.)
No doubt they have a sense of the drama, however.
Religious fanatics of any stripe tend to suppress levity, but I don't think the article is correct in arguing that Muslims in general lack a sense of humor. Growing up, my favorite collection of humorous tales were the Nasr-ed-Din Hodja stories. This one, A Guest For Halil, I still remember quite clearly. I would be delighted if my Camberwell Tales could be as memorable.
More information has come out about the last "alleged" Symbionese Liberation Army terrorist who was arrested Friday in South Africa.
Bombings in the Bay Area in the early to mid-1970s were so routine that federal agents sometimes compared Northern California with Beirut.
Kilgore was taken peacefully Friday evening when South African police knocked on the door of the modest home he shared with his wife and two young children, said Mark Mershon, the top FBI agent in San Francisco.
"Are you James Kilgore?" the police officer asked, showing him some papers.
"Yes, that's me," Kilgore replied, according to Mershon. Kilgore had been living under the name of Charles William Pape and was a lecturer at the University of Cape Town.
I thought I was stretching it a bit when I had Professor Hatcher in my last Camberwell Tale be an ex-bomber. Little did I know. Well, at least Kilgore didn't have tenure.
President Bush has settled on a war plan for Iraq that would begin with an air campaign shorter than the one for the Persian Gulf war, senior administration officials say. It would feature swift ground actions to seize footholds in the country and strikes to cut off the leadership in Baghdad.
But much of this scenario is discussed in Kenneth Pollack's book The Threatening Storm, so I don't think it's giving away anything that isn't fairly obvious to professionals. Pollack is concerned about the path we have chosen, which is to mobilize short of war, wait for inspections, and then possibly be forced to stand down because of the burden of keeping active divisions in the field. On the other hand, while Saddam is rational, he is prone to misjudgement because he is surrounded by syncophants who are afraid of arguing with him. He may well play chicken, and get his head cut off.
Humorist Garrison Keillor blasts Senator-elect Norm Coleman in Salon.
It was a dreadful low moment for the Minnesota voters. To choose Coleman over Walter Mondale is one of those dumb low-rent mistakes, like going to a great steakhouse and ordering the tuna sandwich. But I don't envy someone who's sold his soul. He's condemned to a life of small arrangements. There will be no passion, no joy, no heroism, for him. He is a hollow man. The next six years are not going to be kind to Norm.
it's a test of comedy if you can do it in front of the people whom you are satirizing.
but I Senator Coleman might want to skip this piece.
I saw Garrison Keillor a few weeks ago when he did a reading in Cambridge, and it directly inspired these Camberwell Tales. But I'm no Yellow Dog. Call me a Leopard Democrat or even a Cheetah Republican. My support of either party is quite spotty.
The defendants, now in their 50s and most with families and children, were once members of the radical group that became prominent when it kidnapped newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst in 1974. A fifth suspect in the bank slaying, James Kilgore, 55, has been a fugitive since the 1970s.
Montague admitted in court that she pulled the trigger in shooting 42-year-old Myrna Opsahl during an April 21, 1975, robbery of the Crocker National Bank in suburban Sacramento. Montague received the longest term of eight years.
My next tale will be about Camberwell's conflicted attitude toward having servants.
A prominent reformist scholar has been sentenced to death on charges of insulting Islam's prophet and questioning the hard-line clergy's interpretation of Islam, his lawyer said Thursday.
A court in Hamedan in western Iran sentenced university professor Hashem Aghajari to death, Saleh Nikbakht told The Associated Press.
Aghajari was detained in August after a closed hearing in Hamedan where he made a speech in June questioning the hard-line interpretations of the ruling clerics.
Nikbakht said Aghajari, a top member of the reformist political party, Islamic Revolution Mujahedeen Organization, was also sentenced to 74 lashes, banned from teaching for 10 years and exiled to three remote Iranian cities for eight years.
Iranian courts often impose such multiple sentences in cases where it wants to make an example of the accused. In cases where the death sentence is imposed, the others are not carried out.
Thank heaven for that! At least he won't be banned from teaching in the afterlife.
The Guardian predicts a second victory for the President:
George Bush's presidency emerged triumphant on both foreign and domestic stages yesterday, as a UN deal was effectively brokered on a concerted hardline stance towards Iraq, and after Republicans seized total control of Congress in midterm elections.
Even as news of the election results was coming in the American ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte, declared that Washington would force a vote tomorrow on its Iraq resolution, drafted with British support, after nearly two months of negotiations.
The draft allows further security council discussions if Baghdad refuses to comply with comprehensive, unfettered weapons inspections, but it does not commit the US to wait for a new UN resolution before going to war.
Republican Mitt Romney won the Governor's race here in Massachusetts. That's funny, because aside from myself, I don't know anyone who voted for Romney. It reminds me of the story about Pauline Kael, the film critic, who was puzzled about how McGovern lost in 1972 because "Nobody I know voted for Nixon."
Actually, it's possible that some people I know voted for Romney but kept quiet about it. In Camberwell Country, voting Republican is a little like farting. You might do it, but you don't bring attention to it.
I'll make sure to vote for Senator John Kerry, even though he running essentially unopposed. There is no Republican on the ballot. However, there is a write-in campaign being waged against Kerry by Randall Forsberg, to "protest Sen. John Kerry's vote to let Bush make war in Iraq."
Ironically, Forsberg's big issue to is UrgentCall, "a new initiative to engage and educate a broad public about the growing danger that nuclear weapons will be used, and about practical steps to reduce that danger." Yet she opposes the most practical step that would prevent Iraq from getting nuclear weapons, and eliminate the chance that a new Arab-Israeli War would involve a nuclear exchange.
Forsberg is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (the so-called genius award). Outside of the sciences, where the awards have been uncontroversial, critics see the MacArthur grants as highly politicized, and mostly made to nurture the next generation of talent on the political and cultural left.
Turkey's Islamic party has won a smashing victory at the polls, but its leader is banned from becoming Prime Minister, because of a poem he read in 1998, which included:
The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers.
It's hard to put a pacifist, spiritual spin on that, though some will surely try.
It is an intellectual scandal that, since September 11, 2001, scholars at American universities have repeatedly and all but unanimously issued public statements that avoid or whitewash the primary meaning of jihad in Islamic law and Muslim history. It is quite as if historians of medieval Europe were to deny that the word "crusade" ever had martial overtones, instead pointing to such terms as "crusade on hunger" or "crusade against drugs" to demonstrate that the term signifies an effort to improve society.
I'll be casting a ballot for Republican Mitt Romney for Governor tommorow. His Democratic opponent, Shannon O'Brien, is pretty good as Democrats go around here; I voted for her when she ran for Treasurer. But the Democrats control both houses of the Legislature, and every seat in Congress. If she wins, there will be no check on the hacks on Beacon Hill, and with a Republican in the White House, Massachusetts won't be getting many favors out of Washington in the next two years.
There is a referendum on bilingual education, and the Latino community is split. Local blogger Hublog has an interesting perspective based on his experience overseas. Everyone in Massachusetts agrees that the old model of bilingual education has failed, which is why proponents of bilingual education passed a "reform" bill this year. I believe the reform is an example of "too little, too late" and will support the initiative.
The neoconservative Wolfowitz would once have seemed strange company for this soft-spoken Brandeis professor, who came to politics as an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where in the late 1960s he was a Trotskyite and pro-Palestinian activist. So, for that matter, would Vice President Dick Cheney, with whom Makiya has also met.
But times have changed, and so has Makiya. The attack on the Kurds was part of that change; nearly two decades of sustained research and writing on the institutional violence of Ba'athist Iraq was another. Since the Bush administration announced its plans to topple Saddam Hussein, Makiya, one of the dictator's most outspoken Iraqi critics abroad, has found common ground with the Bush administration's most hawkish elements.
Part of the problem, it seems, was the deliberate electoral strategy of the previous Socialist Party government of Lionel Jospin, which chose to court the vote of the larger Muslim community, taking for granted the party’s traditional Jewish support. It was, in fact, on the Left, not on the far Right, that anti-Semitism showed itself most forcefully. Greens, Trotskyists, and anti-globalists were not ashamed to demonstrate in company of Hezbollah and Hamas activists calling for jihad with shouts of “Death to the Jews,” according to Pierre-André Taguieff, a specialist in racism and anti-Semitism. The anti-globalist José Bové even questioned the reality of anti-Semitic attacks in France, suggesting that widespread manipulation by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad lay behind them. Libération, the newspaper founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, printed a cartoon showing Ariel Sharon standing in front of a cross with nails and a hammer preparing to crucify Yasser Arafat for Easter.
The dispatch continues:
The politically correct cult of Holocaust remembrance into which France has been plunged for the past fifteen years has taught nothing, Jean Kahn, president of the Consistoire central des israélites de France, observes. Worse, L’Express adds, its theme has been turned inside out like a glove, with the Israelis now figuring as the Nazis and their Palestinian adversaries as deportees.
Moment Magazine's web site has been flakey this morning, but this article is well worth reading if you can get through. The International Jewish Conspiracy to corner the comedy market has gone kaput!
Indeed, in 1979 Time magazine, the quintessential barometer of American life, told the nation that even though Jews made up only 3 percent of the population, 80 percent of America's working comedians were Jewish.
but
As the comedy pie has gotten bigger, the Jews' proportionate slice of it has shrunk. "At first, in the late '80s, practically everybody was Jewish," says Judy Carter, a comedy coach in Los Angeles and the author of The Comedy Bible. "Then there was an influx of Catholics. At first, they had a fear of revealing themselves. Then in the '90s, gay comics came out. Lately, there have been a tremendous number of Asian comics."
Here's a joke about the quality of customer service in Israel:
It was mealtime during a flight on El Al.
"Would you like dinner," the flight attendant asked the man seated in front.
According the New York Times, Al Qaeda's underground network in Pakistan's largest city leans heavily on above-ground supporters. The critical role of above-ground supporters of terrorists is illuminated in a book which I recommend that you borrow from your library, Bill Ayers memoir Fugitive Days. Don't buy it--he doesn't deserve your money.
Ayers was a member of the Weather Underground, a terrorist offshoot of the student movements of the 60's. He proudly owns up to involvement with a number of bombings, including three pounds of dynamite that went off in a Pentagon bathroom in 1972. No one was hurt in any of the bombings he admits to, though his lover Diana Oughton and two others died in 1970 when the bomb they were preparing went off prematurely. The Weather Underground's bombings were frequently preceded by warnings to evacuate the area. This does place them in a better class of terrorist than, say, Palestinian suicide bombers who seek to maximize casualties.
Ayers description of life underground includes tips on getting and preserving fake identities (compartmentalize, so one busted identity doesn't blow another) and the pitfalls in selecting an alias
One comrade named John was laughingly challenged by another John at a party. You're the first John I've ever met, he said, who's asked directions to the toilet using his Christian name.
I found it illuminating--particularly the role of supporters who live apparently normal lives, but provide money, safe houses, and essential means of communication between otherwise isolated members of an underground movement. Of course, once the role of an above-ground supporter becomes known, that person may drop out of sight and join the underground.
A 1996 law allows prosecution of some supporters of foreign terrorists (I'm not sure if it would apply to domestic terrorists like Ayers)
The 1996 law making it a crime to "knowingly provide material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization" was part of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. Congress's main objective was to prevent foreign terrorist groups from raising money -- especially through purported charitable contributions -- that might be diverted into terrorist activities or free up other resources for such activities.
By the way, while condemning the crimes of America, Ayers never has a bad word to say about Communism. He still admires Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara. He does, it is true, condemn the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, but blames the U.S. for its existence. Curiously, he refers to Pol Pot as an "ultra-nationalist" as if he cannot bring himself to associate the glorious word "Communist" so loathesome a creature.
This is ridiculous. Just because we support the President on Iraq doesn't mean that support extends across the board.
The White House expressed support for Mr. Webster as well as for Mr. Pitt, who was harshly criticized today for failing to inform other commissioners before they approved the choice of Mr. Webster that he had led the audit committee of a company facing fraud accusations.
"The president still has confidence in Harvey Pitt," said Dan Bartlett, Mr. Bush's communications director. "He does believe Harvey Pitt is the right man for the job."
Mr. Webster — who was solicited for the board by the White House and Mr. Pitt after another candidate, John H. Biggs of the investment plan TIAA-CREF, was challenged by the accounting profession for being too aggressive — said he had no intention of leaving.
Webster is 78. I know there is a trend toward septugenarians (Mondale, Lautenberg) but at risk of committing ageism, we need some vigorous enforcement of accounting standards. The lack on confidence in accounting statements is one of the drags on our economy today. We need someone in this position who is not a patsy.
I saw Senator John McCain in Cambridge last night. He was speaking about his new book, Worth The Fighting For.
He came up to the mike, and started by offering to sing some "Streisand tunes." That got a big laugh. He's a funny guy.
He discussed how his first big hero, aside from his Navy Admiral father and grandfather, was a fictional character--Robert Jordan of Hemingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls. He came across the book when he was 12 on his father's bookshelf, and read it from start to finish. It inspired him to believe in causes higher than personal ambition, though he admitted to a lot of that too.
I liked his take on patriotism, which should not be a devotion to "blood and soil" but to American ideals.
When asked whether he would run for President again, he indicated that it was unlikely. However, he quoted his friend,the late Mo Udall, saying that "Any Senator who is not under indictment or in detox automatically considers himself a presidential contender."
There were a number of young people wearing red jackets in the audience who were from City Year, a national service program. McCain praised it, and them highly.
It was not a typical Cambridge crowd. McCain received standing ovations at the beginning and at the end of his talk. There was only one confrontational question, by a pony-tailed man regarding McCain's support for the use of force in Iraq. McCain answered thoroughly, but what impressed me most is that he went back to the questioner to give him a chance to respond. It was very gentlemanly.
The next installment of my Camberwell Tales is now up at FrontPage Magazine. This one is a profile of the illegal immigrant who's running for Mayor in Camberwell, "New England's most progressive community."
I think you'll laugh, but if you want to cry, then read this article about how the visa applications of several Sept. 11 hijackers were invalid on their face and should have been denied, according to the standards of that time.
My next tale will be about Veteran's Day in Camberwell. Old soldiers need not appear. In Camberwell, it's the veterans of Vietnam War protest demonstrations who get to parade.
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