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Clayton Cramer's BLOG
Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
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Saturday, April 15, 2006
Death of a Friend
There's a saying among historians that, "Everytime an old person dies, it's like a library burning down." My best friend's mother died very early yesterday morning--a broken hip, dementia, and all the tragedies that go with us. I got to know Virginia pretty well some years ago, while working with her on writing her autobiography.
Originally, the goal was to help her learn to use a PC that she had been given, but over time, it developed into a regular part of my Saturday morning. Virginia was a graduate of the University of Texas, with a degree in French, but her writing needed some help--I liked to kid that I was translating it from Texan to English.
I have had no luck finding a publisher for it, which is unfortunate. Virginia had some amazing stories! She had a very hard life, growing up in Depression era Texas, and the manuscript is a mix of tragedy, humor, some heart-warming stories of small town life--and some eye-opening accounts of an era that will probably shock anyone who thinks "the good old days" were morally superior to the present. Here's one amusing story of her years working for the Navy on Treasure Island, during World War II, while her husband was serving in the Pacific.
The Navy tried to find work for the wives on the base, and civilian employees had lunch on the base in the enlisted men's mess. Part of the pay was a meal coupon book to pay for your lunch; each coupon was valued at twenty cents. The reason for requiring civilian employees to eat in the mess halls was because no one was allowed to bring a package of any kind on the base (for security reasons) and to prevent theft when leaving. Unfortunately, some people, including the servicemen, would try to sneak things out of the base, so there was a device called the inspectoscope you had to walk through on way out every day. The inspectoscope was manned by security, which included the Military Police.
The security detail also guarded the German POWs, most of whom were from the famed Afrika Korps. The Afrika Korps were supposedly the cream of the Nazi troops, but those on the base were just ordinary people, ranging from fifteen to middle aged. When I saw them, I realized that the Germans were running out of prime physical specimens for their army.
The German POWs worked in details on the island, with one guard for each group. The group was sent to help keep the library clean (where I worked). The guard with them was only fifteen; when the ice cream truck came by one day, he went down to get ice cream for everyone. The guard handed his rifle to one of the prisoners, asking him to hold it. The prisoner was in shock backing away saying "no, no, iss not right." The guard then tried to have me hold the gun for him; I refused also. The guard just set the rifle in the closet and went on downstairs for the ice cream. The prisoners all went to the far side of the room; they were very upset that someone might think they were causing trouble and they were shaking their heads in disbelief. The guard came back with ice cream for the whole group; he did not pick up his gun again until he finished eating his ice cream. The prisoners ate the ice cream, but they were very uncomfortable until the guard had his gun in hand again. One in particular kept shaking his head saying "iss not right" over and over.
One of the prisoners drew a picture of me and left it at the desk with a note written in German. I have no idea what it said, as I did not know any German, but I kept it. It was a remarkable likeness of me, done in pencil, but it was professional artist quality.
I hope the person that drew it was able to use his talent to better his life when he was returned to his country. All of them were extremely polite, but not many spoke enough English for me to communicate with them. When they completed the job of polishing all the shelves and dusting all the books, the one who was to instruct the rest on what we wanted done was so proud. He had said that he knew how to place the books in library order. He beamed as he told us it was done and, "Didn’t it look wonderful now?" I did not have the heart to tell them what was wrong. Mrs. Barr, the head librarian, was also polite. She told him it did indeed look much better, but it would be a problem to find the books that someone wanted. All the books were arranged by color and size; all the same color together, in stairsteps, from tallest to shortest. After they left we three who worked in the library got busy with the help of some of the visitors there that were more aware of the Dewey decimal system of shelving. We were able to get them on proper shelves by number, even though it really did look more artistic the other way!
TRACY, Calif. -- After months of planning, hundreds of gay and lesbian high school students are expected to attend their own prom Thursday night.
Students from Merrill F. West High School in Tracy are organizing the event at Anthony's Steak House as an alternative to the school-sponsored prom.
"Prom can be intimiating to most people, especially gay and lesbian students," said Justin Daley, organizer of the prom. "When you have students with a same-sex partner, they are intimidated to go to a school function, especially one where they might be subjected to hate crimes."
I'm not sure exactly how many students attend Merrill F. West High School, but I find the idea that "hundreds of gay and lesbian high school students" will be attending this event implausible, unless they are drawing off a much larger student body than just one high school.
Gay men are about 3-4% of the adult male population; lesbians are about 1-2% of the adult female population. For an average of about 2%, if "hundreds" of students are attending from one high school, either the high school has more than 5000 graduating seniors--or there is something spectacularly anomalous about this community.
Heresy at Ohio State! At Least They Aren't Burning The Librarian
I've pointed out repeatedly that there is something unnervingly totalitarian about the manner in which homosexuals are suppressing debate. Professor Volokh, of all people, points to an example of a librarian at Ohio State named Scott Savage who sat on a committee responsible for selecting books for something called the First Year Reading Experience that all the freshmen go through. This librarian suggested that since all the books that had been proposed took a left-wing perspective, perhaps it would be good to include some books with an alternative point of view:
But if we are decided that we want to engage our students in the kind of exchange of ideas on which the "secular" university is founded, then let's choose something that confronts the accepted wisdom of Ohio State University! Like students and young profs did in the '60s, man!
Well, one of the books that he suggests is David Kupelian's The Marketing of Evil--and for suggesting that book, professors on the committee filed a complaint that the librarian was engaged in sexual harassment becuse Kupelian's book does not accept homosexuality.
The complaint--and the emails that flew back and forth--are here. There is a fierce fear of dissent on many college campuses--especially about homosexuality. Read the emails back and forth--and you can tell that there are a lot of professors engaged in this struggle who clearly don't believe that students should hear more than one perspective about sex. Usually, that's a sign of someone who knows that they won't win the argument on its merits. posted by Clayton at 9:20 AM permalink
Thursday, April 13, 2006
House Project: DSL; Water
Frontier Telephone made an appointment to install DSL between 1:00 and 5:00 PM today, assuming that it was possible. They said that if something came up that made it impossible, they would give me a call. Just to make sure that the message didn't get lost by my somewhat absent-minded son, I gave them my work number. At least voicemail would get it.
So I took the afternoon off work. I figured that there were other tasks that I could be working on up at the new house while I was waiting for them.
Well, I removed the lead filters from their fancy stainless steel and very expensive housing. Sure enough, they were clogged with silt, and the water pressure improved quite noticeably afterwards. After filling the tub a couple of times with hot water, the hot water is now coming as clear as the cold water--pretty much indistinguishable from city water.
Just to make sure, I took a water sample to be tested for lead and iron. Assuming that everything is within safe levels, this will probably be the last test that I do for several months.
About 2:30 PM, I suddenly asked myself, "Maybe I should call, and make sure that they are still supposed to be here today." So I called--and customer service informed that they had discovered that they could not give me DSL, after all, but, "They called the phone number you gave them, but no one answered, and there was no answering machine or voicemail." This is nonsense. My office phone has voicemail. The chance that my employer's voicemail was inoperative when they called is essentially zero. It is time to call BitSmart; SpeedyQuick Networks, the other wireless internet provider that believed that they could provide service, decided that they couldn't.
I will say, it is very quiet and beautiful up there. The clouds were drifting back and forth across the Sun. Big cumulus clouds like a Western movie; subtle shadows across the mountains. Very nice.
I mentioned a few days back a letter from 60 prominent scientists to Canadian Prime Minister Harper arguing that the anthropogenic origins of global warming are not proven, and recommending some caution on the Canadian governmental policy in this area. Here's the letter--and it is a pretty impressive list of signatories.
ATLANTA — Ruth Malhotra went to court last month for the right to be intolerant.
Malhotra says her Christian faith compels her to speak out against homosexuality. But the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she's a senior, bans speech that puts down others because of their sexual orientation.
Malhotra sees that as an unacceptable infringement on her right to religious expression. So she's demanding that Georgia Tech revoke its tolerance policy. With her lawsuit, the 22-year-old student joins a growing campaign to force public schools, state colleges and private workplaces to eliminate policies protecting gays and lesbians from harassment. The religious right aims to overturn a broad range of common tolerance programs: diversity training that promotes acceptance of gays and lesbians, speech codes that ban harsh words against homosexuality, anti-discrimination policies that require college clubs to open their membership to all.
The Rev. Rick Scarborough, a leading evangelical, frames the movement as the civil rights struggle of the 21st century. "Christians," he said, "are going to have to take a stand for the right to be Christian."
In that spirit, the Christian Legal Society, an association of judges and lawyers, has formed a national group to challenge tolerance policies in federal court. Several nonprofit law firms — backed by major ministries such as Focus on the Family and Campus Crusade for Christ — already take on such cases for free.
The legal argument is straightforward: Policies intended to protect gays and lesbians from discrimination end up discriminating against conservative Christians. Evangelicals have been suspended for wearing anti-gay T-shirts to high school, fired for denouncing Gay Pride Month at work, reprimanded for refusing to attend diversity training. When they protest tolerance codes, they're labeled intolerant.
If I speak out against racism, am I creating a hostile environment for racists? If I speak out against forcing women to wear burkhas, am I am creating a hostile environment for Muslims who subscribe to Talibanesque interpretations of Islam? Am I creating a hostile environment for all Muslims?
There needs to be a clear line here. I completely agree that yelling "faggot" at homosexuals is creating a hostile environment, antithetical to the purpose of a university. But expressing one's disapproval of homosexuality in a polite and reasoned way is hardly the same situation. posted by Clayton at 4:08 PM permalink
Democrats opposed the ratification of the Central America Free Trade Agreement last year for fear that it would undercut American workers made to compete with cheap Latin American labor. The problem the Democrats must have had with this effect on American workers was that it was too indirect. The party now favors importing lots of that same cheap Latin American labor directly into the United States.
Bizarrely, it is the Democrats who most strongly support a lax immigration system that acts as a subsidy to business interests eager to hire workers at the lowest wages possible and to upper-middle-class Americans who don’t want to pay too much to have someone mow their lawns. And this subsidy comes at the expense of American low-skill workers, many of them African-American and Hispanic, who are supposed to be the heart of the Democratic party.
The thesis of the Thomas Frank book, What’s the Matter with Kansas? has become gospel for Democrats — that working-class voters in the heartland are misled into voting against their economic interests by supporting Republicans. That argument needs an overhaul now that it is clear that Democrats think there’s nothing the matter with Kansas, or anywhere else, that can’t be solved by more wage-competition from a flood of foreign low-skill workers.
“This is the one issue,” said Rosemary Jenks of the pro-enforcement group Numbers USA, “where Democrats sell out all their principles.” The party, and its allies in the unions, no doubt see potential new voters and members in the influx of Hispanic newcomers. They are also increasingly in the grip of a grievance-based ethnic politics that champions the rights of illegals, and of a post-national “we are the world” ideology that has little use for nationhood and borders.
There is disagreement about how much the wages of native low-skill workers are depressed by cheap immigrant labor, but it is common sense that as the supply of cheap labor increases, its price declines. Some notable liberal writers — unconcerned with cynical electoral calculations — still view immigration through this prism. Paul Krugman, Nicholas Kristof, and Michael Lind have all noted on the New York Times op-ed page the economic senselessness of bringing more low-skill labor into the country. “The cold reality,” Kristof writes, “is that admitting poor immigrants often means hurting poor Americans.”
There was a time when liberals writing such things wouldn’t have stood out. The great labor leader Samuel Gompers supported a more restrictive immigration policy in the early 20th century to boost the wages of native workers. Liberal icon Cesar Chavez, the organizer of agricultural workers, excoriated illegal immigration. The end of the “bracero” guest-worker program in the mid-1960s led to a one-time increase in the wages of Chavez’s workers by 40 percent.
He also goes on to point that some Republicans are "getting it," and emphasizing tha they are quite happy to be on the opposite side from Big Corporations, and on the side of the poorest American workers. posted by Clayton at 2:21 PM permalink
Attempts To Intimidate Scientists About Global Warming
Ambiguous scientific statements about climate are hyped by those with a vested interest in alarm, thus raising the political stakes for policy makers who provide funds for more science research to feed more alarm to increase the political stakes. After all, who puts money into science--whether for AIDS, or space, or climate--where there is nothing really alarming? Indeed, the success of climate alarmism can be counted in the increased federal spending on climate research from a few hundred million dollars pre-1990 to $1.7 billion today. It can also be seen in heightened spending on solar, wind, hydrogen, ethanol and clean coal technologies, as well as on other energy-investment decisions.
But there is a more sinister side to this feeding frenzy. Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.
More importantly, Professor Lindzen points out that even the claims that are the basis for the alarm aren't correct:
First, let's start where there is agreement. The public, press and policy makers have been repeatedly told that three claims have widespread scientific support: Global temperature has risen about a degree since the late 19th century; levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have increased by about 30% over the same period; and CO2 should contribute to future warming. These claims are true. However, what the public fails to grasp is that the claims neither constitute support for alarm nor establish man's responsibility for the small amount of warming that has occurred. In fact, those who make the most outlandish claims of alarm are actually demonstrating skepticism of the very science they say supports them. It isn't just that the alarmists are trumpeting model results that we know must be wrong. It is that they are trumpeting catastrophes that couldn't happen even if the models were right as justifying costly policies to try to prevent global warming.
If the models are correct, global warming reduces the temperature differences between the poles and the equator. When you have less difference in temperature, you have less excitation of extratropical storms, not more. And, in fact, model runs support this conclusion. Alarmists have drawn some support for increased claims of tropical storminess from a casual claim by Sir John Houghton of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that a warmer world would have more evaporation, with latent heat providing more energy for disturbances. The problem with this is that the ability of evaporation to drive tropical storms relies not only on temperature but humidity as well, and calls for drier, less humid air. Claims for starkly higher temperatures are based upon there being more humidity, not less--hardly a case for more storminess with global warming.
A Tucson man was arrested Tuesday for his role in the burning of a Mexican flag as part of a counterprotest at a pro-immigration rally. At about 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, Tucson police cited Roy Warden, 58, on suspicion of assault, criminal damage and reckless burning, and then released him, according to Sgt. Decio Hopffer.
Video footage shot Monday by police and the media showed Warden assaulting a TV cameraman and a photographer, Hopffer said. Because only one of the men pressed charges, there is only one assault charge.
Now, the assault charges are a completely separate issue, and if Warden attacked someone, this is not okay. If he stole someone else's Mexican flag to burn it, that's a crime--but robbery or larceny, not "reckless burning."
Somehow, I can't picture the ACLU defending Warden's right to burn the Mexican flag. That was...insensitive.
I am inclined to think that while the Framers doubtless did not intend flag-burning to be protected free speech, it does more harm to the firebug's position than good. It should probably be lawful, even if it isn't truly protected by the First Amendment. But there's no reason why burning an American flag should be protected speech, but that of other countries is not. posted by Clayton at 1:27 PM permalink
What's The Big Deal? It's Just Their Sexual Orientation
In Waynesville, a small county seat in the mountains of western North Carolina, people whispered about the three older men who lived together south of town.
They were lovers, and there were rumors that the trio had turned a room in their house into a dungeon where they filmed sadomasochistic sex scenes — and then posted them on the Internet.
Someone asked the local sheriff to investigate the men, but his officers determined their activities, although unorthodox, were perfectly legal.
Last month, however, the men were arrested on charges that shocked the community.
Authorities say they performed castrations and other types of genital surgeries on at least six people. Detectives searching the home found bloody scalpels, syringes, and prosthetic testicles in a room the men referred to as "the dungeon."
Officers confiscated a video camera apparently used to record the procedures, as well as scores of CDs and computer files. They also seized a Tupperware container from the kitchen freezer holding what appeared to be human testicles.
The suspects acknowledged performing surgeries, but they told investigators that the procedures were completely consensual and that the men who requested the operations traveled long distances for the procedures.
The defendants — Richard Sciara, 61; Michael Mendez, 60; and Danny Reeves, 49 — are due in court this week for a probable cause hearing. Each is charged with five counts of felony castration and five counts of conspiracy, as well as eight counts of practicing medicine without a license. They remain in jail in lieu of $150,000 bail.
The arrests on March 30 of Sciara, a retiree, and Mendez and Reeves, both workers at the local Indian casino, astounded many in Waynesville, a town of about 10,000.
"It's pretty much disbelief. Surprise and disbelief and disgust," said District Attorney Michael Bonfoey.
....
The Asheville Citizen-Times reported that Sciara identified himself as "Master Rick" on an S&M Web site, Collarme.com. In an online profile published by the newspaper, Sciara posted a photo of himself in leather chaps and wrote that he had two slaves — Danny and Bob — and was searching for more.
"This is NOT a game with me, I live this lifestyle," he wrote. The profile has been removed from the site.
Reeves is pictured in leather shorts on the site in a profile for "dungeonslavedan."
Danny Reeves
"Am fully versed in all aspects of the BDSM lifestyle as well as being into wrestling and boxing," his profile reads.
Bill Leslie, a lawyer for Reeves, insisted that his client had "absolutely nothing to do with" the surgeries, but asserted that the castrations were not related to sadomasochism.
"Our position is it's certainly not a sexual gratification thing," he said. Asked if they were performed on men seeking sex changes, he said, "Our position is that's not the reason either."
He declined to elaborate.
...
Bill Jones, the lawyer for Mendez, said it was incorrect to refer to the castrated men as victims.
"I would hesitate to use that word. Even what the police are saying is that this was consensual," he said.
Gay activists and law professors everywhere can cluck at me all they want for being narrow-minded, but regardless of whether this was consensual or not, this is a form of mental illness.
ATLANTA (Reuters) - In a sleazy hotel room, "Brittany," then aged 16 and drugged into oblivion, waited for the men to arrive. Her pimps sent as many as 17 clients an evening through the door.
A "john" could even pre-book the pretty young blonde for $1,000 a night, sometimes flying in and then flying out from a nearby airport.
None of this happened in Bangkok or Costa Rica, places that have become synonymous with sex tourism and underage sex.
It took place in Atlanta, the buckle of the U.S. Bible Belt, where the world's busiest passenger airport provides a cheaper, more convenient and safer underage sex destination for men seeking girls as young as 10.
"Men fly in, are met by pimps, have sex with a 14-year-old for lunch, and get home in time for dinner with the family," said Sanford Jones, the chief juvenile judge of Fulton County, Georgia.
A new federal law passed in 2003 ensures that American sex tourists landing on foreign soil and hiring prostitutes under the age of 18 can get 30 years in prison.
But in Georgia, punishment for pimping or soliciting sex with a girl under 18 is only five to 20 years, according to Deborah Espy, the Deputy District Attorney of Fulton County.
"Men are coming to Atlanta to have sex with a child," said LaKendra Baker, project manager for the Center to End Adolescent Sexual Exploitation (CEASE).
Half of the street-level prostitutes in Atlanta are believed to be under 18, according to experts.
Others are booked through Internet sex sites and from social sites like Black Planet, where girls innocently post profiles, said Baker.
Just in March, police arrested a Canadian man meeting a 14-year-old girl he found through the Internet, said Cathey Steinberg, executive director of the Juvenile Justice Fund, which funds treatment for abused girls and prevention.
Another man drove from North Georgia, with a bag containing a teddy bear, a love note and condoms, snorting methamphetamine on the way.
He expected a 13-year-old girl, but instead found Heather Lackey, a corporal with the Peachtree City Police Department.
Does Sexually Provocative Material Change Adolescent Behavior?
It is a matter of faith in some circles that a steady diet of violent entertainment or sexual entertainment has no deleterious effects on minors--because then this crowd would have to confront the difficult and unpleasant cost/benefit question of whether the negligible positive benefits to society of having kids exposed to such material exceeds the damage that it does to kids. There's enough evidence that suggests that violent entertainment is a problem for at least some significant fraction of kids that I don't think anyone but law professors and ACLU attorneys would argue that point anymore. What about materials that are highly sexualized?
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Sexually charged music, magazines, TV and movies push youngsters into intercourse at an earlier age, perhaps by acting as kind of virtual peer that tells them everyone else is doing it, a study said Monday.
"This is the first time we've shown that the more kids are exposed to sex in media the earlier they have sex," said Jane Brown of the University of North Carolina, chief author of the report.
Previous research had been limited to television, said the study which looked at 1,017 adolescents when they were aged 12 to 14 and again two years later. They were checked on their exposure during the two years to 264 items -- movies, TV shows, music and magazines -- which were analyzed for their sexual content.
In general it found that the highest exposure levels led to more sexual activity, with white teens in the group 2.2 times more likely to have had intercourse at ages 14 to 16 than similar youngsters who had the least exposure.
Okay, this is really no surprise. If what kids see on television really doesn't influence them, then the advertising industry is engaged in fraud. Most people can see that there is real hazard in kids this young being sexually active, both from physical risks (pregnancy, STDs) and emotional hazards. Now, in some intellectual circles, this isn't considered a problem--the ACLU, for example, argues that teenagers have a "due process liberty interest" -- a Constitutional right -- to have sex with adults, with severe limits on how the government may restrict that right.
What was quite disturbing was why this exposure increased the level of sexual intercourse for whites so much more than for blacks:
The effect was not as pronounced for blacks, the study said, perhaps because the black youngsters in the study were already more sexually experienced than the whites were when the research began and thus were less influenced by media exposure over the two-year period.
The survey group at the start was aged 12 to 14. This is discouraging and worrisome.
Now, this news report did say that one of the problems is that the entertainment media are effectively surrogate parents about sex education:
At the same time parents tend not to talk about sex with their children in a timely and comprehensive way, leaving a vacuum in which the media may become a powerful sex educator, providing "frequent and compelling portraits of sex as fun and risk free."
"Interestingly one of the strongest predictors of risk for early sexual intercourse for both black and white teens (in the study) was the perception that his or her peers were having sex," the report said.
Youngsters "may begin to believe the world view portrayed and may begin to adopt the media's social norms as their own. Some, especially those who have fewer alternative sources of sexual norms, such as parents or friends, may use the media as a kind of sexual superpeer that encourages them to be sexually active," the report added.
Unfortunately, this it the core problem. For many kids, MTV is their parent. They spend more time watching TV than they spend with their parents--and not suprisingly, the immorality that infects the entertainment industry, where men are studs, and girls (not women) are sexual gratification devices, wins the battle. posted by Clayton at 11:22 AM permalink
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
A Remarkably Crisp Disposal of 9/11 Conspiracy Theories
You are probably aware that there are lots of bizarre conspiracy theories about 9/11 out there: that the Mossad did it; that Bush knew that the attacks were going to happen, and let them happen so that he would have an excuse to set up a police state (I didn't notice that one was set up); that the World Trade Center towers were destroyed by demolition experts, not the airplanes; that the Pentagon was hit by a missile, not an airliner. These arguments are like X Files on speed in their bizarreness, with vast conspiracies involving thousands of people with no consciences--and no screwups.
I was reading comments about the upcoming movie United 93, and the ignorance, credulity, and borderline mental illness of the crowd insisting that Bush made everything happen--and that Osama Bin Laden took credit for something that he didn't do because he wanted to be popular. One tremendously thoughtful criticism of these lunatics impressed me:
Finally, I don't believe the US government is capable of the conspiracy theorized. While many opponents of the current administration will no doubt argue that Bush is heartless and would willingly sacrifice thousands for a pretext, that's not what I'm referencing. I don't believe the US intelligence services are competent enough to pull off a 9/11. In order to do this, they would have to rig three occupied skyscrapers for demolition (I believe a week in advance is the current theory) and conceal both the operation to rig and the explosives themselves, seize 4 airliners and dispose of the passengers as well as the aircraft themselves (for those theories that the attacks weren't actually the airliners but either missiles or government aircraft), recover all evidence after the fact at locations swarming with volunteers, avoid any random cameras (tourists, journalists, random by-standers) that might catch real discrepancies (like a fighter ramming the pentagon), and have dozens if not hundreds of participating operatives maintain complete operation silence for 5 years afterwards with no one stepping forward with a guilty conscience or looking for a quick buck (this when a president can't even have a consensual affair without having half a dozen people leak to the press). What administration in US history could ever have pulled that off? And what for the love of God makes you think the current one could do it. If the conspiracy theory were true, the Bush administration pulled off the most complicated and seamlessly executed covert operation in history (with less than a year's planning and ground work). These same geniuses then failed to kill or capture Osama Bin Laden or Mullah Omar. They then failed coerce either the Saudis or the Turks to comply with the invasion of Iraq. Not only failed to find WMD in Iraq, but even failed to plant either American or Israeli provided WMD to justify the invasion. Then failed to kill or capture (overtly or covertly) Zarqawi, Al-Sistani, or Sadir while getting utterly played by Chalabi and Al-Sistani. These evil geniuses couldn't even remove the international loathed head of state for Haiti without ending up with egg on their collective faces. Explain to me how the massive and elaborate 9/11 plot unfolded seamlessly while the CIA fell on its face with the covert rendition program and uberspies with the NSA got called to the carpet with the domestic surveillance program. Your stating Bush hit a flawless grand-slam, then proceeded to (spectacularly) strike out for the next 5 years.
I'm afraid that those who hate Bush can't have it both ways. Either the Bush regime are clear sighted, focused masters of manipulation; or they are clumsy idiots with only the most tenuous of grasps on power and reality. Judging by their track record, I think you should look else where for your evil, mastermind. A part of me would actually prefer if the US were behind 9/11, because then while our government might be treasonous murderers, at least they would competent treasonous murderers. If the CIA/NSA had been competent enough to plan 9/11, then today we would be at peace with a stable Central Asia giving us leverage over both China and Iran; a stable, secular, oil-pumping Iraq giving us leverage over the oil-producing Arabian peninsula states; a pro-USA Venezuela would be providing the US with affordable oil, ignoring China, and isolating Cuba; Iran would be a reformed/secular state invalidating Islamism and providing a counter balance to Sunni fundamentalism, growing Russian influence in Central Asia and leverage on the rising Indian power; and best of all no-one would hate the USA because no-one would know. Unfortunately, our spy masters weren't working on 9/11, but they sure proved their mettle afterwards and US is still dealing with that fallout.
SACRAMENTO - The state Senate will consider a bill that would require California schools to teach students about the contributions gay people have made to society -- an effort that supporters say is an attempt to battle discrimination and opponents say is designed to use the classroom to get children to embrace homosexuality.
The bill, which was passed by a Senate committee Tuesday, would require schools to buy textbooks ``accurately'' portraying ``the sexual diversity of our society.'' More controversially, it could require that students hear history lessons on ``the contributions of people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender to the economic, political, and social development of California and the United States of America.''
Though it's a California bill, it could have far-reaching implications, not only by setting a precedent but also because California is the nation's largest textbook buyer and as such often sets the standards for publishers who sell nationwide.
Oh yeah, this is really important! What's even more outrageous is that homosexuals have been claiming various important figures from history as gay with evidence that to call it "thin" would be generous.
Was Shakespeare gay? A lot of people claim it because of his sonnets--but fail to understand the nature of how Elizabethan writers wrote poems in language that today would seem like an experssion romantic love, but was at the time considered a way of expressing strong fraternal love.
It is certainly possible that Shakespeare was bisexual. Christopher Marlowe, one of Shakespeare's contemporaries, was certainly interested in sex with other men, and made no secret of it. There were no actresses in those times; boys dressed up to play women's parts, and as much as many proper Englishmen of the time disapproved of women acting, after the Restoration, it appears that concern about the moral hazards of dressing boys up in dresses and having them kissed by grown men took precedence over women playing women.
Still, the most that we can say about Shakespeare is that he could have been bisexual. There's no evidence for it.
The argument is "irrefutable," Gore Vidal blurbs on the book's cover. And, in fact, Tripp's work is as good as the case gets for Lincoln's walk on the Wilde side.
Unfortunately, that is merely a way of saying the Gay Lincoln Theory fails any historical test. "Useful history" is always a dubious kind of scholarship. But in its attempt to be useful for gays today, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln reaches far beyond the merely dubious. The book is a hoax and a fraud: a historical hoax, because the inaccurate parts are all shaded toward a predetermined conclusion, and a literary fraud, because significant portions of the accurate parts are plagiarized--from me, as it happens.
Tripp and I intended to be coauthors of the book, laboring together on the project from 1995 to 2000--when our partnership, already fissured by dueling manuscripts, came to a bitter end. We quarreled constantly over evidence: I said the Gay Lincoln Theory was intriguing but impossible to prove; he said it was stone-cold fact.
More advocate than historian, Tripp massaged favorable indicators (Lincoln's early puberty), buried negative ones (Lincoln's flirtations with women), and papered over holes in his story with inventions (Lincoln's law partner and biographer William Herndon never noticed the homosexuality because he was an extreme heterosexual and thus afflicted with "heterosexual bias").
I quit the project first in 1999, when Tripp refused to include citations to Charles Shively, a former University of Massachusetts historian and Tripp's main guide to the gay Lincoln. "Darwin didn't do it," he said to me, referring to Darwin's initial failure to cite precursors in The Origin of Species. Although Tripp profusely copied ideas and references from Shively's flamboyantly rendered Lincoln chapter in Walt Whitman's Civil War Boy Lovers, he brushed off proper mention because he thought Shively's reputation for being "too gay-lib" would dissuade readers.
More importantly, a rather prominent gay activist tried to blackmail Nobile into not criticizing this dishonest crock:
"IF YOU DON'T STOP MAKING A STINK about Tripp's book, I'm going to expose you as an enormous homophobe," Larry Kramer telephoned me to say last October. "For the sake of humanity, please, gays need a role model." I replied that the book was so bad, it would backfire on the homosexual movement when reviewers and readers caught on to the fabrications, contradictions, and general nuttiness of The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln.
And this is the problem. Homosexual activists are desperate for positive role models to make themselves feel good about themselves. There's a bit of a shortage of prominent homosexuals in history, partly because homosexuality throughout much of history has been reviled so severely--and those that were unquestionably homosexual or bisexual are hardly stunningly positive: Edward II; King James I (yes, the guy who commissioned the King James Version of the Bible); Ernest Roehm, Hitler's leader of the Sturmabteilung.
The Effects of Illegal Immigrants on Unskilled Workers
There's an article at USA Today about this question that contains some interesting claims and some data:
For some Americans, however, illegal immigrants loom as a direct threat to their livelihood. Jobless for three months, construction worker Michael Williams, 49, says the immigrant workers he sees gathered outside Los Angeles area Home Depots will work for half his customary $100 daily wage. "You have a lot of illegal aliens here," says Williams. "It takes food off the table."
Measured against the passions it arouses, immigration's economic consequences are surprisingly modest, economists say. Less than 5% of the nation's 148 million workers are illegal immigrants, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. By one estimate, immigrants raise total economic output by $21.5 billion — equivalent to less than one day of extra output each year. "We know that the net benefit of immigration is very small," says George Borjas, an economist at Harvard University who specializes in the subject.
Transfer of wealth
Yet, that tiny economywide number masks a major redistribution of wealth. The cross-border movement of generally low-skilled, low-educated immigrants has depressed wages for unskilled native workers while helping keep consumer prices under control and inflating profits for employers.
Borjas estimates that workers lose $278 billion because of immigration, while employers gain $300 billion. "There's a huge redistribution away from workers to people who use immigrants. ... That's what people are arguing about," says Borjas, an immigration specialist.
...
Surging immigration inflates unemployment for native workers on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder and appears to be driving some out of the labor force altogether, says Steven Camarota of CIS.
From 2000 to 2005, the percentage of the least-educated workers who left the labor force rose from 40.9% to 43.7%, while the share of foreign-born dropouts barely changed.
"Natives with relatively little education are leaving the labor market in droves," Camarota says. "This should not look like this at this point in an economic recovery."
States where immigrants' share of the labor force jumped the most from 2000 to 2005 have seen some of the sharpest declines in labor force participation by less-educated Americans. In Maryland, the percentage of unskilled Americans working fell from 73.2% to 65.5%, while immigrants as a share of the workforce rose from 12.7% to 22.1%, Camarota says. Similar sharp increases were noted in North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia.
Do immigrants take jobs from Americans? Wednesday, President Bush urged the Senate to endorse his guest worker proposal, saying: "There are people here working hard for jobs Americans won't do."
But Census Bureau data show that 17 million less-educated Americans work in occupations where immigrants are heavily represented. Example: 1.7 million immigrants and 1.2 million Americans work in building cleaning and maintenance. Replacements for the foreign-born workers could be found among the 362,000 native workers with experience in that field who remain unemployed, Camarota says.
Put another way, there are 2.3 million unemployed Americans who last worked in one of five job categories such as food preparation, farming or construction that currently employ 7.9 million immigrants.
The Duke Lacrosse Team Rape Case I mentioned this a few days ago, and how disgusted I was with the email that one of the team members sent a few hours after the alleged rape. I'm still disgusted with that email--but the evidence is now in--whoever raped the "exotic dancer," it wasn't any of the 46 white Lacrosse team members that she accused. The DNA tests have come back--none of them matched. It would even appear that there was no evidence of any sexual contact at all:
According to court documents, only lacrosse team members were at the party. Authorities ordered 46 of the 47 players on Duke's lacrosse team to submit DNA samples to investigators, who compared them with evidence collected from the woman.
Because the woman said her attackers were white, the team's sole black player was not tested. It was not known whether investigators tested for DNA other than the players'.
Cheshire said the report indicated authorities took DNA samples from all over the alleged victim's body, including under her fingernails, and from her possessions, such as her cell phone and her clothes.
"They swabbed about every place they could possibly swab from her, in which there could be any DNA," he said.
District Attorney Mike Nifong has said he would have other evidence to make his case should the DNA analysis prove inconclusive or fail to match a member of the team.
"I believe a sexual assault took place," Nifong told The News & Observer of Raleigh on Monday. "I'm not saying it's over. If that's what they expect, they will be sadly disappointed."
He would not comment about the results to the AP.
North Carolina Central University, where the alleged victim is a student, said after the results were released that the prosecutor would appear at a campus forum on Tuesday to discuss the case.
"The truth is if you speak to crime lab directors, they will tell you that in only a relatively small number of cases is there any DNA evidence," said Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project.
Cheshire said even if the alleged attackers used a condom, it's likely there would have been some DNA evidence found suggesting an assault took place. He said in this case, the report states there was no DNA on her to indicate that she had sex of any type recently.
"The experts will tell you that if there was a condom used they would still be able to pick up DNA, latex, lubricant and all other types of things to show that — and that's not here," Cheshire said.
Starting in 2008, the Idaho Legislature plans to meet in the courthouse as its century-old Statehouse undergoes a $115 million revamp.
Historic preservationists say they'll fight attempts to remove the murals, products of the Works Progress Administration Artists Project, a federal program that employed jobless artists during the Depression. They consider the 1940 works a part of the building.
Still, Indian leaders and many lawmakers say turning the old Ada County Courthouse into Idaho's most public building, even temporarily, will force to state to confront the future of the murals, which one local judge in the 1990s found so offensive he draped an American flag over them. Race relations in Idaho, once home to the white supremacist Aryan Nations group, are a sore spot.
"It's a perfect opportunity to educate the state of Idaho and its citizens on the kind of biases that native people endured," said Chief Allan, chairman of the Coeur d'Alene Indian Tribe in northern Idaho. "If we could sit down with the historical society, and have a sit-down with them, we could help make sure this won't happen again in the future."
Some Shoshone-Bannock tribe members, whose traditional territory included Ada County, say the murals make many Indians uncomfortable.
"As an individual member of the Shoshone-Bannock tribe, those murals do impact people and their feelings," said Claudeo Broncho, of Fort Hall. "They should be painted over."
...
While the lynching murals don't represent a known event in Ada County, they're representative of what might have occurred in Idaho and the rest of the West as settlers descended on the region, Hart said.
For instance, Qualchan, a Palouse Indian, was hanged by Col. George Wright near the Idaho-Washington border along a tributary of the Spokane River at the conclusion of the Coeur d'Alene War of 1858. And as many as 400 Shoshone Indians were killed by the U.S. Army Cavalry along the Bear River near present-day Preston in 1863.
I posted last May about a traffic accident that we happened upon--one that wiped out an entire family named Perfect. A drunk with a history of aggressive driving prevented a young man attending Boise State University from passing on a two lane road--and the aggression built up, until a mother, a father, and their infant daughter were dead--and the lives of the two survivors have been irreparably destroyed:
Both Cam Hall and Mark Lazinka broke down in court Monday while addressing relatives of the Eagle family who died last spring in a crash prosecutors say was caused by the two men's aggressive driving.
Lazinka, whose truck slammed into the Perfect family's car May 7, was sentenced to 30 years in prison for three counts of vehicular manslaughter. Hall, a former Boise State University football player, was placed on five years probation and given a six-month jail sentence for leaving the scene of the fatal accident.
"If just one of my actions were different that day, three people would still be with us," Hall said, his voice breaking as he spoke to the family of Tony, Stephanie and Zoe Perfect.
"I do wish something different would have happened," Hall said, then stopped, unable to finish his sentence.
Earlier, Lazinka lost his composure when addressing the Perfects' family, telling them that "bad judgements can have devastating consequences.
"I would gladly trade places with (5-week-old Zoe) because she had no choice to get in that car," Lazinka said, talking slowly, his lower lip quivering. "I hope this never happens to anyone else."
Both Hall and Lazinka were sentenced by 4th District Judge Thomas Neville Monday in a courtroom so packed that some members of the public were turned away. Both pleaded guilty earlier this year.
Lazinka was sentenced Monday to three consecutive 10-year prison sentences, but he can ask for parole after 12 years.
Neville sentenced Hall to 180 days in the Ada County Jail, five years probation and a $2,500 fine. He also ordered the BSU senior to write a 2,500 word essay on what he did wrong, which might be released publicly when it is finished. Hall was given a withheld judgement, which means if he successfully completes the terms of probation, his guilty plea to the felony charge will be removed from his record.
Motor vehicles are dangerous. Alcohol can turn reasonably behaved people into irresponsible monsters. The combination of alcohol and a car (or alcohol and a gun, or alcohol and a chainsaw) is incredibly dangerous. posted by Clayton at 9:13 AM permalink
They Grow Up So Fast
Our youngest turned 18 today. Last night, my wife and I were up at the new house, sorting through boxes so that stuff we don't need on a daily basis could be put in airtight containers in the attic. My wife was going through a box of keepsakes associated with each of our kids--a first baby blanket, a My Little Ponies lunchbox--and she found this sandal that our son must have worn when he was about two years old, and she started crying. "It was just yesterday."
As we were driving back down the hill, she was still teary-eyed about this. "I loved being a Mom. I remember thinking that changing diapers was going to go on forever, but now he's turning 18. I just can't understand mothers who put their kids into daycare. It was so much fun raising my kids."
I know that there are mothers who don't have the choice on this, because their husband doesn't make enough to support a family--or worse, has run off--but if there is any way that you can be raising your own kids--instead of farming it out to someone who, much of the time, is doing this because there is no other job available to them--the rewards are spectacular. You also wont find yourself a couple of decades later wondering, "Did I do the right thing? What would it have been like when my daughter took her first steps, read her first word, started talking?" posted by Clayton at 9:03 AM permalink
Monday, April 10, 2006
I Wouldn't Write Any 30 Year Mortgages in San Diego, If I Were You
The May 2006 Astronomy has an article by Bill Cooke titled "Fatal Attraction," about asteroid Apophis, which is a near Earth object that is going to be making a very close pass in 2029--within 22,000 miles, so close enough to easily see as it passes by. There are particular slots in space called "resonance keyholes" that can strongly influence where an asteroid goes on subsequent passes:
As of this writing, additional observations have ruled out a passage through all but one keyhole. Not surprisingly, the remaining keyhole is the one closest to Apophis' projected path. Located about 18,700 miles (30,l100 km) above Earth's surface, this 7/6 resonance keyhole -- the numbers mean the asteroid would make exactly 6 complete orbits around the Sun in 7 years -- is pretty small, only about 600 yards (550m) wide. But if the asteroid passes through thsi zone, it will be on a trajectory to strike Earth in April 2036, possibly off the western coast of northern Mexico.
This is a 350 yard diameter object--a collision would be about 870 megatons equivalent. posted by Clayton at 10:51 PM permalink
WINDHOEK (Reuters) - Pregnant Hollywood siren Angelina Jolie and boyfriend Brad Pitt have taken refuge in a remote Namibian game lodge where wild lions will help protect them from the media, a Namibian newspaper said on Monday.
The celebrity couple and their two adopted children Maddox and Zahara arrived in the southern African country last week, fuelling media speculation the Oscar-winning actress plans to give birth in Namibia away from the spotlight.
Namibian Afrikaans daily newspaper Die Republikein said the pair had moved from a luxury beach resort in the harbor town of Walvisbay to a lodge in the Etosha National Game Park in northern Namibia, where lions are a top tourist draw and would help deter intruders trying to photograph the couple.
The 30 year Treasury bond yields are still above 5%, but the the yield curve is still rising to the right--meaning that yields on shorter bonds are still lower than on long bonds. This suggests that institutional bond buyers are still reluctant to snap up the long term bonds because they think those yields will rise a bit more.
I am inclined to agree. There are Federal Home Loan Bank Board bonds available that are due in 2026 with 6.62% yields--and at par price, so that if (or more accurately when) the FHLBB calls these bonds before maturity, you will still get 6.62% yield per year--perhaps just fewer years than you hoped. These bonds have been on the market since Friday, so I guess that big institutional bond buyers are saying, "There's some more room for yields to rise--we're in no hurry."
I also see that Schwab is offering Nationwide Bank 20 year CDs with 6.5% annualized yield. This is a very curious type of CD--it has a 20 year lifetime, and it is FDIC insured--but at the same time, it is described as callable. I suspect that Nationwide has constructed a type of CD that, like the FHLBB bonds, is financing home mortgages, and if those mortages get paid off early (as they usually do), Nationwide will call the CD. It appears to have the insured safety of a CD and the high yield of an agency bond, without the certainty of how long it will you will continue to receive interest payments. posted by Clayton at 1:41 PM permalink
I suppose that we should be glad that there's still some sort of line between Texas and the rest of Mexico, and that they haven't included the rest of the Southwest as part of their reconquista. Maybe that isn't what the Democrats meant when they put this together--but that's how I would read it, and that's certainly how many non-Hispanics are going to read it.
Michelle Malkin posted some pictures of the signs from the Dallas protest. These give me tremendous confidence about wonderful it will be to be a white, black, or Asian person living in Mexiamerica.
I've had a grudging respect for the Washington Post for some time now. Yes, they are a liberal newspaper, but unlike the New York Times, they seem to be making a serious effort on the editorial page to be fair, honest, and accurate. (I would be happy if the New York Times could get even one of those adjectives operational on their editorial page.)
Still, it is shocking and wonderful to see one of America's most cited newspapers--and a liberal one, at that--publish this editorial:
PRESIDENT BUSH was right to approve the declassification of parts of a National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq three years ago in order to make clear why he had believed that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons. Presidents are authorized to declassify sensitive material, and the public benefits when they do. But the administration handled the release clumsily, exposing Mr. Bush to the hyperbolic charges of misconduct and hypocrisy that Democrats are leveling.
Rather than follow the usual declassification procedures and then invite reporters to a briefing -- as the White House eventually did -- Vice President Cheney initially chose to be secretive, ordering his chief of staff at the time, I. Lewis Libby, to leak the information to a favorite New York Times reporter. The full public disclosure followed 10 days later. There was nothing illegal or even particularly unusual about that; nor is this presidentially authorized leak necessarily comparable to other, unauthorized disclosures that the president believes, rightly or wrongly, compromise national security. Nevertheless, Mr. Cheney's tactics make Mr. Bush look foolish for having subsequently denounced a different leak in the same controversy and vowing to "get to the bottom" of it.
The affair concerns, once again, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV and his absurdly over-examined visit to the African country of Niger in 2002. Each time the case surfaces, opponents of the war in Iraq use it to raise a different set of charges, so it's worth recalling the previous iterations. Mr. Wilson originally claimed in a 2003 New York Times op-ed and in conversations with numerous reporters that he had debunked a report that Iraq was seeking to purchase uranium from Niger and that Mr. Bush's subsequent inclusion of that allegation in his State of the Union address showed that he had deliberately "twisted" intelligence "to exaggerate the Iraq threat." The material that Mr. Bush ordered declassified established, as have several subsequent investigations, that Mr. Wilson was the one guilty of twisting the truth. In fact, his report supported the conclusion that Iraq had sought uranium.
Mr. Wilson subsequently claimed that the White House set out to punish him for his supposed whistle-blowing by deliberately blowing the cover of his wife, Valerie Plame, who he said was an undercover CIA operative. This prompted the investigation by Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald. After more than 2 1/2 years of investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald has reported no evidence to support Mr. Wilson's charge. In last week's court filings, he stated that Mr. Bush did not authorize the leak of Ms. Plame's identity. Mr. Libby's motive in allegedly disclosing her name to reporters, Mr. Fitzgerald said, was to disprove yet another false assertion, that Mr. Wilson had been dispatched to Niger by Mr. Cheney. In fact Mr. Wilson was recommended for the trip by his wife. Mr. Libby is charged with perjury, for having lied about his discussions with two reporters. Yet neither the columnist who published Ms. Plame's name, Robert D. Novak, nor Mr. Novak's two sources have been charged with any wrongdoing.
As Mr. Fitzgerald pointed out at the time of Mr. Libby's indictment last fall, none of this is particularly relevant to the question of whether the grounds for war in Iraq were sound or bogus. It's unfortunate that those who seek to prove the latter would now claim that Mr. Bush did something wrong by releasing for public review some of the intelligence he used in making his most momentous decision.
Forward this to your favorite leftist--just to watch smoke come out of their ears. posted by Clayton at 12:13 PM permalink
International Climate Experts Say Kyoto A Mistake; Amusing Advertising Results
Canada's new Conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper, has been urged by more than 60 leading international climate change experts to review the global warming policies he inherited from his centre-Left predecessor.
In an open letter that includes five British scientists among the signatories, the experts praise his recent commitment to review the controversial Kyoto protocol on reducing emissions harmful to the environment.
"Much of the billions of dollars earmarked for implementation of the protocol in Canada will be squandered without a proper assessment of recent developments in climate science," they wrote in the Canadian Financial Post last week.
They emphasised that the study of global climate change is, in Mr Harper's own words, an "emerging science" and added: "If, back in the mid 1990s, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would almost certainly not exist, because we would have concluded it was not necessary." Despite claims to the contrary, there is no consensus among climate scientists on the relative importance of the various causes of global climate change, they wrote.
"'Climate change is real' is a meaningless phrase used repeatedly by activists to convince the public that a climate catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause. Neither of these fears is justified.
Regular readers of my blog will not be surprised by this. What is amusing is that throughout this article, there were certain phrased highlighted, such as "climate change" and "global climate change." At first, I thought that these were hyperlinks to other articles--but no, when you moused over them, ads from oil company BP emphasizing their concern about global warming appeared. This is rather like the example I pointed to a few days ago of the problems of automated ad placement--sometimes the results aren't quite what you expect.
By the way, BP's television ads on this subject really annoy me. The format implies that they picked people at random in public places and asked them how they feel about protecting the environment, and global warming--with the implication that BP shares their environmental concerns. I am astonished at the stupidity of the people that they interview (assuming that these aren't actors)--almost like BP thinks that the general public concerned about the environment are inarticulate dunces like the ones in these commercials. Of course, if you are convinced by these ads that BPs is concerned about Mother Earth, you probably are an inarticulate dunce.
A few days ago, I posted a translation of a document culled from the captured Iraqi documents that the US found during Operation Iraqi Freedom. This particular memo, dated March 17, 2001, comes from a brigadier general in the Iraqi Air Force and requests a list of volunteers from all units under his command for suicide attackers. The memo explicitly explains the targets for these terrorist attacks, as the original translation from Joseph Shahda shows:
The top secret letter 2205 of the Military Branch of Al Qadisya on 4/3/2001 announced by the top secret letter 246 from the Command of the military sector of Zi Kar on 8/3/2001 announced to us by the top secret letter 154 from the Command of Ali Military Division on 10/3/2001 we ask to provide that Division with the names of those who desire to volunteer for Suicide Mission to liberate Palestine and to strike American Interests and according what is shown below to please review and inform us.
When I posted this document, readers of this blog questioned the accuracy of the translation. People know that Joseph translated this for Free Republic, a strongly pro-war website, and that it was distributed by Laurie Mylroie, another pro-war commentator. Skeptics felt that this pedigree lent itself to a possibly warped interpretation of the memo. While the accuracy of the translation remained in question, the actual text -- which showed an active Iraqi terror program aimed at Americans -- would not get the attention it deserved.
In order to solve this problem, I decided to hire two Arabic translators on my own.
Those Arabic translators came up with essentially the same results.
Now, if only the Bush Administration would try and defend itself.
Investor's Business Daily also covers this document, and reminds everyone:
Though little noticed by the press, during a July 2004 visit to Kazakhstan the Russian president said that between 9-11 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, "Russian special services and Russian intelligence several times received . . . information that official organs of Saddam's regime were preparing terrorist acts on the territory of the U.S. and beyond its borders, at U.S. military and civilian locations."
This new document, said Darling, "would seem to refute a long-standing contention among members of the U.S. intelligence community that Iraq ceased its involvement in international terrorism after its failed 1993 plot to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush." Darling cites former National Security Council official Richard Clarke's book "Against all Enemies," which contends that the NSC, the CIA and the FBI all agreed Iraq posed no terrorist threat to the U.S.
Equally embarrassing to our spies is another newly released document from 1999 detailing plans for a "Blessed July" operation.
According to the English translation on the Foreign Military Studies Office's Joint Reserve Intelligence Center Web site, Saddam's older son Uday ordered 50 members of the fanatical "Fedayeen Saddam" group to stage bombings and assassinations in Iraq and Europe — including London, where 10 people were assigned.
Excerpts from a long, recently declassified report by the U.S. Joint Forces Command's Iraqi Perspectives Project will be published in the upcoming issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. Looking at the "Blessed July" document, Foreign Affairs notes this "regime-directed wave of 'martyrdom' operations against targets in the West (was) well under way at the time of the coalition invasion."
For many years now, human-caused climate change has been viewed as a large and urgent problem. In truth, however, the biggest part of the problem is neither environmental nor scientific, but a self-created political fiasco. Consider the simple fact, drawn from the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero).
Yes, you did read that right. And also, yes, this eight-year period of temperature stasis did coincide with society's continued power station and SUV-inspired pumping of yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
In response to these facts, a global warming devotee will chuckle and say "how silly to judge climate change over such a short period". Yet in the next breath, the same person will assure you that the 28-year-long period of warming which occurred between 1970 and 1998 constitutes a dangerous (and man-made) warming. Tosh. Our devotee will also pass by the curious additional facts that a per
