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1901
Politics & Religion / Stop Faxing me or I'll Sieze your Cessna
« on: October 22, 2005, 03:26:33 PM »
Perhaps misfiled, but this librarian got annoyed with junk faxes and so used various resources to put a lien against the faxer's private aircraft. Pretty good humor.

And You Thought Late Fees Were Bad

Matthew O'Neil, a librarian at Palm Harbor Library in Palm Harbor, Florida, hates junk faxes. He's channeled his disgust for one particular fax blaster into small claims court.

His reward? A private airplane. His tale:

Over the course of the last few months I have received unsolicited facsimile transmissions from one particular fax blaster. The number for removal and the number to fax back the advertisements for health insurance, mortgages, hot leads, selling my business and so on is also in my area code. The telephone number is not serviced by the local exchange carrier (Verizon) but a competing local exchange carrier (CLEC)

After the first fax on August 7th I called the ?removal? number on the fax but it was busy. I tried about six times but it was always busy. I used nanpa.com to find out who serviced the number and complained to them (the faxer?s phone company). The faxes continued. I filed 1 small claims suit against the sender and subpoenaed the records of the CLEC (competing local exchange carrier- the faxer?s phone company) they sent me the records within 3 hours of receiving the subpoena. It seems that other had complained about the illegal faxing as well.

When I found out who was really sending the faxes I decided I should use my librarian super powers to find out more about them. I found out that they are incorporated in Florida (using sunbiz.org and lexis-nexus) I found out the corporation holds assets in corporate name. The corporation has only one officer and for some reason he put both an automobile and an aircraft in corporate name (thanks to lexis-nexus). I don?t have any idea why he didn?t put them in his own name so creditors could not attach them.

So since I knew there were assets to attach I filed one additional small claims action for each illegal fax for a total of ten. The law limits the damages to $500 for each fax sent. However if there is an egregious violation they allow treble damages. So I filed 9 additional small claims actions against the same party- each fax must be a separate action.

The legal requirements were a bit of a pain in the arse, but nothing a librarian couldn?t handle. I served the resident agent of the corporation as required. We had a court date scheduled. I went to court and full well expected these geniuses to show up as they called me and asked me to dismiss the suit. I said for $1000 to the Leukemia Society (this is called an offer in compromise). They never called back. Well they never showed up in Court either. In the pre-trial conference I met with the hearing officer and asked for treble damages and costs as I the violations were egregious, I have to change my telephone number, and I had made an offer in compromise to mitigate damages. Well the hearing officer looked at my information and immediately transferred it to the judge. (In Small Claims they try to mediate things rather than punish people). A few days later after the notice of hearing was served upon myself and the registered agent a conference was held with the judge ?. Guess who was there! Yep just me and the nice judge.

So the judge and I chatted for ten minutes or so in case they were stuck in traffic, then he tried the removal number on the fax and it was amazingly busy. So the hearing began and I presented all of my evidence and since they were not there they presented none of theirs (a default judgment would have garnered me only minimal damages so I asked to proceed in absentia), The judge asked me a few questions about my fax machine, what kind of toner (I use a roll which is quite expensive as opposed to the new laser faxes) and if I changed my fax number solely because of this.

Then I made a motion to merge all the cases into one hearing (as 10 copies of everything had gone out with the same date and time on them) the judge thought this was just spiffy, as it would save the Court time. I moved for treble damages and noted that their failure to show up after being properly served was contempt for the process and for the Court itself. I figured it would fail and I?d simply get default judgments X 10/ Well it worked. I asked for no stay of the execution beyond statutory requirements and was given that as well.

I figured as the nasty faxers would contact me in the interim, as there is a waiting period before judgments can be enforced. Well they never did. I guess they thought I was joking around.

So Monday I took my paperwork and a check for $800 to the sheriff and asked that they execute the judgment against the company. I asked that they seize a Cessna 340, a Lexus, and cash assets of the defendant. So the sheriff stamped and stapled and filed and collated the paperwork. Today I found out that they have seized the aircraft the corporation owns and will sell it at public auction next month.

I will get my money! The defendant has ignored all of the notices given to him and the time for appeals has passed. If no one bids higher than the judgment at the public auction the aircraft is mine. I was awarded $1500 for each fax, plus filing fees for each case of $155, plus fees for copies, printing, certified mail and the like. The total is $16837.32. I think I?ll come out OK since the aircraft is valued at more than a quarter of a million dollars and it is chained to the ground until after the sheriff?s sale. Oh, and I get back the $800 I paid the sheriff too.

Moral of this story:
1) Don?t screw with the librarian
2) Libraries- take action on your unsolicited faxes- they are illegal.
3) Reference tools are your friends!

Oh and it is all going to the Leukeima Society less my costs. In fact if they were nice and reading this I would settle for a ckeck for $10K to the Leukemia Society and my costs reimbursed ($10*$155, $800 plus misc postage and copying less than $200)

Epilouge:

Friday October 14, @03:43AM    [ #3771 ]
What was here has been settled. I have entered into an agreement that makes me whole, and provides a charitable donation. However in the settlement agreement I was asked not to discuss the particulars of the case. I agreed to remove my previous post from LISNews as the company could possibly be identified. (even though I left that detail out)
I can say that I am more than pleased with the outcome.

845 PM - still waiting for the fax they promised by the end of business. Fax is on and paper is in the machine (this fax I let them send it is the satisfaction of judgement.) I'm not signing anything until the checks arrive :)

9:30AM Saturday The fax really was there, the paper was just not in exactly right to print.

Two things I learned for next time.
If you file multiple suits serve them individually. If you put 9 of them in one envelope and send it certified mail to the defendant they may argue improper service.
Even if you have a judgement the defendant can appeal. If the judgements combined are more than the limits of small claims court then they can ask to have it transferred to county or circuit court (I don't know if it will be transferred but just something to consider.)

So if I have to sue someone in small claims court again for several things that happen over several days I'll file each one on a different day and serve them independent of one another.

I'll try and post the story again after I tidy it up.... or at least post how I went about doing it. I just don't want to torque anyone off, even though I have the fax I don't have the checks.

1902
Politics & Religion / Littoral Line in the Sand
« on: October 22, 2005, 11:06:02 AM »
Interesting piece about the evolution of costal naval warfare with more than a few implications. The original piece is well annotated with links and can be found at:

http://fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com/2005/10/far-line-of-sand.html


The Far Line of Sand
The Belmont Club | October 21, 2005 | Wretchard

The USS Maine, a 6682-ton second-class battleship built in 1895, spent her active career operating along the U.S. east coast and the Caribbean area. In 1898 she was sent to Cuba, to protect U.S. interests during a time of local insurrection and civil disturbances, where she famously blew up. Contemporary images of the Maine, available from the link above, show a vessel with guns down low along sides that sloped inward from her waterline to her deck, the so-called "tumblehome" hull form. It was an image of the classic gunboat of the type which Joseph Conrad described in the Heart of Darkness.

"I left in a French steamer, and she called in every blamed port they have out there, for, as far as I could see, the sole purpose of landing soldiers and custom-house officers. I watched the coast. Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you-- smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, Come and find out. This one was almost featureless, as if still in the making, with an aspect of monotonous grimness. The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost black, fringed with white surf, ran straight, like a ruled line, far, far away along a blue sea whose glitter was blurred by a creeping mist. ...  Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn't even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long six-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech--and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives--he called them enemies!--hidden out of sight somewhere."

These types of gunboat operations ended in the first decades of the 20th century as "sea mines, surface and submarine torpedo-attack craft, long-range rifled guns ... and ... aircraft meant that the traditional form of blockade ... could no longer be sustained ...  maritime blockade evolved into long-range operations". Naval warfare became a thing of fleets grapping with rival fleets for control of the blue water. But things have changed again. The decay of the Soviet fleets and the rise of terrorism has shifted emphasis to the coasts once more. As Roger Barnett put it:

After 9/11 the central security problem, for the United States at least, became how to ensure that no weapons of mass destruction could be used by nonstate entities against American citizens in the homeland.  ... It is far better to seek to control shipping or the shipment of contraband at the source rather than at the destination. ... In today?s context, contraband WMD can be shipped from states, nonstate entities, or individuals, or consigned to any of the three. The form of blockade operations, accordingly, has changed dramatically from close blockade through distant blockade and blockade zones, to prevention of movement of specific items at, or as close as possible to, their source.

Many of today's critical naval tasks require operations close inshore; including keeping choke points open, preventing piracy in strategic waterways, ensuring harbor security and blockade. Unfortunately, open ocean warships are at their most vulnerable in restricted waters. The US Navy, invincible in the blue water, suffered its worst losses since Korea in the littoral. The FFG-7 class USS Stark was nearly sunk by two Exocet missiles in the Persian Gulf in 1987. During Desert Storm in 1991, Aegis class cruiser USS Princeton and Iwo-Jima class LPH USS Tripoli suffered extensive mine damage.  One of the most powerful surface combatants in the world, the Burke class destroyer USS Cole, was nearly destroyed in 2000 by an explosive-laden small boat while in port at Aden.

In consequence, the USN has been recreating the capability lost since British failed to force the Dardanelles in the face of mines and coastal artillery; to be able say as Nelson once did that 'the enemy's coast is our frontier'. Apart from changes to doctrine, new classes of USN warships now coming online will make this possible. The former Ohio-class USS Georgia SSBN is now being converted to an SSGN "Tactical Trident" SpecOps Sub and may be followed by the USS Ohio (SSBN 726), USS Michigan (SSBN 727), USS Florida (SSBN 728). These vessels can transport the ASDS minisub, designed to operate as an offshore "underwater hotel" for SEALs landing on an enemy coast.

A wholly new class of warships called the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), able to transit open oceans at half-helicopter speeds is being fielded in considerable numbers. These ships can act as small amphibious landing ships or platforms for unmanned aerial and waterborne unmanned vehicles. Depending on their configuration, they can land forces or deploy robotic vehicles to find enemy mines or submarines. Up to 60 LCS vessels are planned.

But if anything visually represents how things have come full circle, it is the Navy's planned new destroyer class, the DD(X). It's weapons will be deployed along the rim of the hull. And it will have, shades of the Maine, a tumblehome hull form.  The accompanying image in the DD(X) link shows a vessel firing into a continent at a camp of enemies 'hidden out of sight somewhere'.

(Speculation alert) If form follows function the shape of the 21st century US Navy suggests that the "dark-green ... almost black" coastlines of the Third World will again become a theater of operations with this fundamental difference: areas that 19th century Europeans once sought to penetrate are now localities that need to be contained. No longer are arms being landed on those whispering coasts in hopes of conquest. The flows now go the other way. Today they must be blockaded against the outflow of weapons, armed gangs and multitudes of desperate people bent on escape from their misery. The USN by restructuring itself in response to the logical implications of terrorism,  is anticipating a crisis that, to use Thomas Barnett's terminology, the "Core" governments have yet to face: how to bring freedom, prosperity and functionality to the "Non-Integrating Gap". The system of World Courts, multilateral institutions and development agencies which had their genesis in the 1950s and 60s will not be enough. Fund raising rock concerts will not be enough. The task requires the spread of functioning democratic institutions and market systems assisted where necessary by peacekeeping and relief operations. One day even the UN and the EU will realize that need and on that day America will be ready with some of the means.


Update

The Joseph Conrad quote above was chosen with the awareness of its historical context. The Heart of Darkness was written as a moral examination of human behavior using the example of the Congo. Conrad's Congo was the plaything of King Leopold II of Belgium, who turned it into his private concentration camp. From it he extracted billions of dollars in rubber and ivory from slave labor under the mantle of extending European civilization. In the process he killed ten million people. Better yet, his crimes, which bear comparison with Hitler's, have been largely forgotten by history. In 1914 England would go to war to preserve the neutrality of poor defenseless Belgium. Conrad's work serves even today as an allegory for crime committed in the guise of virtue.

The Heart of Darkness has the potential to make many sorts of people uncomfortable. It is a cautionary tale for those who would remake the Third World by force, but it is also comes uncomfortably close to characterizing the virtuous enterprise of "international" organizations whose rich livelihoods depend on a steady stream of human misery; who leave disease and oppression unaddressed in order to remain true to the banners under which they march. There's a rich vein of unmined irony in the high-minded posturing of countries (where is Brussels?) who only a century ago were dividing the map of the world into private fiefdoms with colored pencils; from whose actions in part derive the mess which must now be cleaned up, though not by them after their retirement from history.

In any case the reflux from European colonialism, with further impetus from non-European forces of expansionism such as Islam, have now burst upon a world too small to ignore it. I was struck by boldness of the USN's decision to re-invent itself as a force capable of fighting in the littoral, creating capability in advance of policy. It bore historical similarities to the initiatives of Major Earl H. Ellis, who in the years between the World Wars, foresaw the need for amphibious warfare long before Pearl Harbor made it necessary.

1903
Politics & Religion / Lawful Commerce Act in Perspective
« on: October 20, 2005, 03:43:33 PM »
Please note: the article as posted at nationalreview.com is heavily annotated, with much of the text linking to primary sources.

October 20, 2005, 9:13 a.m.
Suiting Down
Congress guns for fairness?

By John R. Lott Jr. & Jack Soltysik

Almost all products have illegitimate uses and undesirable consequences. In 2002, 45,380 people died in car accidents, 838 children drowned, 474 children died in house fires, and 130 children died in bicycle accidents. Luckily, local governments haven't started recouping medical costs or police salaries by suing car manufacturers, pool builders, makers of home heaters, or bike companies.

Many items, including cars and computers, are also used in the commission of crimes. But again, no one seriously proposes that these companies be held liable.

People understand that what makes a car useful for getting to work also makes it useful for escaping a crime. They also understand that the penalty should be on the person who uses the product for ill.

This logic is ignored when cities sue gun makers for costs incurred from improper firearm use, and the House of Representatives looks poised to end the practice today. Multibillionaire George Soros, via the Brady Campaign, has funded most of these suits. Last year the "Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act," to rein in these suits, was defeated when Democrats added amendments to extend the so-called assault-weapons ban.

Generally, with the exception of some short-term victories, suits against gun makers haven't had any more legally success than if similar suits had been brought against car companies. The legislation would limit civil suits to cases where the sellers or manufacturer has broken any law. In practice, this will make the selling of guns similar to other products. Car dealers are not sued simply because their cars are used in a crime, but they can be if they knowingly provide a car to facilitate a crime.

While gun-control advocates can dream about more such victories, the Brady Campaign had more practical goals: imposing large legal costs on gun makers. Even the largest gun companies make only a few million dollars in a good year. Those below the top ten make just a few thousand guns a year and are usually family operations.

The Bad and the Good
Obviously, bad things happen with guns. But the suits ignore that guns also prevent bad things by making it easier for victims to defend themselves. Unlike the tobacco suits, gun makers have powerful arguments about the benefits of gun ownership.
More than 450,000 crimes, including 10,800 murders, were committed with guns in 2002. But Americans also used guns defensively more than two million times that year, and more than 90 percent of the time merely brandishing the weapon was sufficient to stop an attack.

Police are important in reducing crime rates, but they virtually always arrive after a crime has been committed. When criminals confront people, resistance with a gun is by far the safest course of action. A 2004 survey found that 94 percent of 22,600 chiefs and sheriffs questioned thought that law-abiding citizens should be able to buy guns for self-defense.

John Lott's own research has shown Increased gun-ownership rates are associated with lower crime rates. Poor people in the highest crime areas benefit the most from owning guns. Lawsuits against gun makers will raise the price of firearms, which will most severely reduce gun ownership among the law-abiding, much-victimized poor.

Advocates for these suits claim that the gun makers make their weapons attractive to criminals through low price, easy concealability, corrosion resistance, accurate firing and high firepower. Lightweight, concealable guns may help criminals, but they also have helped protect law-abiding citizens and lower crime rates in the 46 states that to varying degrees allow concealed handguns.

Women benefit most and also find it easier to use smaller, lightweight guns. Poor victims benefit more than wealthier ones from the ability to protect themselves simply because they are more likely to be victims.

Some suits have sought to hold gun makers liable because accidental deaths are "foreseeable" and not enough was done to make guns safe. Nationally, the Centers for Disease Control shows that 26 children under 10 and 60 under 15 died from accidental gun deaths in 2002. Yet with 90 some million people owning more than 260 million guns, accidental deaths from guns are far less "foreseeable" than from many other products. Most gun owners must be very responsible or such gun accidents would be much more frequent.

Data collected from doing a Nexis search on all accidental gun shot cases for children under age ten show that accidental shooters overwhelmingly are adults with long histories of arrests for violent crimes, alcoholism, suspended or revoked driver's licenses, and involvement in car crashes. Meanwhile, the annual number of accidental gun deaths involving children under ten ? most of these being cases where someone older shoots the child ? is consistently a single digit number. It is a kind of media archetype story to report on "naturally curious" children shooting themselves or other children ? though in the five years from 1997 to 2001 the entire United States averaged only ten cases a year where a child under ten accidentally shot himself or another child.

In contrast, in 2001 bicycles were much more likely to result in accidental deaths than guns. Ninety-three children under the age of ten drowned accidentally in bathtubs.

And, Yet, Still...
Yet, despite all this the vote might in the House might depend on requirements on a Senate provision that required gunlocks to be included with any guns sold. As mentioned, the number of accidental gun deaths are many fewer than most suspect, but the real problem is that convincing people to lock up guns actually leads to more deaths. When people lock up their guns, they are less able to defend themselves from criminal attacks and criminals become more emboldened to attack people in their homes. Providing gunlocks with guns is just one additional way to exaggerate in people's minds the risk of owning guns in the home. Including this provision may be the political price to pass the legislation, but it distracts from the overall benefits of the bill.
Attempts to have the court system ignore a product's benefits to society are bad enough. Even worse is the cynical attempt to file bogus lawsuits simply to impose massive legal costs to eventually try bankrupting legitimate companies.

Passing the "Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act" today would still allow suits but would put gun makers on the same legal footing as other American manufacturers.

? John Lott, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of More Guns, Less Crime and The Bias Against Guns. Soltysik was an AEI summer intern and is currently a student at the University of Missouri.

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/lott_soltysik200510200913.asp

1904
Politics & Religion / The Fine Printer
« on: October 18, 2005, 03:45:40 PM »
Is Your Printer Spying On You?

Help EFF Watch the Watchers

Update, October 13th
Learn to decode Xerox DocuColor tracking dots using our guide - or use our decoding program to decode them.
Imagine that every time you printed a document, it automatically included a secret code that could be used to identify the printer - and potentially, the person who used it. Sounds like something from an episode of "Alias," right?

Unfortunately, the scenario isn't fictional. In a purported effort to identify counterfeiters, the US government has succeeded in persuading some color laser printer manufacturers to encode each page with identifying information. That means that without your knowledge or consent, an act you assume is private could become public. A communication tool you're using in everyday life could become a tool for government surveillance. And what's worse, there are no laws to prevent abuse.

The ACLU recently issued a report revealing that the FBI has amassed more than 1,100 pages of documents on the organization since 2001, as well as documents concerning other non-violent groups, including Greenpeace and United for Peace and Justice. In the current political climate, it's not hard to imagine the government using the ability to determine who may have printed what document for purposes other than identifying counterfeiters.

Yet there are no laws to stop the Secret Service from using printer codes to secretly trace the origin of non-currency documents; only the privacy policy of your printer manufacturer currently protects you (if indeed such a policy exists). And no law regulates what sort of documents the Secret Service or any other domestic or foreign government agency is permitted to request for identification, not to mention how such a forensics tool could be developed and implemented in printers in the first place.

With no laws on the books, there's nothing to stop the privacy violations this technology enables. For this reason, EFF is gathering information about what printers are revealing and how - a necessary precursor to any legal challenge or new legislation to protect your privacy. And we could use your help.

In the preliminary research paper linked below, we explain what we've observed so far, briefly explore the privacy implications, and ask you to print and send us test sheets from your color laser printer and/or a color laser printer at your local print shop. That way, we can watch the watchers and ensure that your privacy isn't compromised in ways that harm your fundamental consitutional rights.

In addition to documenting what printers are revealing, EFF has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, and we will keep you updated on what we discover. In the meantime, we urge you to participate and pass the word along about this research project. Thank you for your support!

More information

White paper: "Investigating Machine Identification Code Technology in Color Laser Printers"
Directions for printing test sheets
FOIA request
DocuColor Tracking Dot Decoding Guide
List of printers that do or do not print tracking dots
Andrew "bunnie" Huang's research on printer watermarking, including a modified scanner that scans only in blue
Articles

Government Uses Color Laser Printer Technology to Track Documents PCWorld, 2005
Dutch Track Counterfeits Via Printer Serial Numbers. PCWorld, 2004
FBI Is Keeping Documents on ACLU and Other Peaceful Groups ACLU, 2005

http://www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/

1905
Politics & Religion / Venona Code Breaking Effort
« on: October 15, 2005, 09:23:19 PM »
Very long and dense recitation of a National Security Agency effort to break Soviet codes. Next time you hear about the communist witch hunts of the 1950s, you'd do well to review the particulars of Venona.

http://www.nsa.gov/publications/publi00039.cfm

1906
Politics & Religion / Al Qaeda's Pentagon Papers?
« on: October 14, 2005, 01:03:50 PM »
October 13, 2005
An Honest Missive
Zawahiri boasts strategy for "victory of Islam."
by Bruce Thornton
Private Papers

The website of the Director of National Intelligence just published a letter from Al Qaeda?s number two leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head-terrorist in Iraq. This document repays careful reading, for it explodes much of the received wisdom many people rely on in making sense of jihadist terror.

According to this standard interpretation, Islamic terror is the handiwork of a fanatic minority that has ?highjacked? and distorted Islamic doctrine. These medieval throwbacks gain traction from the political autocracy and oppression that dominate the Muslim governments in the Middle East, regimes that cannot provide the freedom and prosperity that would eliminate the frustration and despair breeding terrorist violence. The leftist variation of this analysis lays the blame on Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, and Western, particularly American, imperialist and colonialist misdeeds in the region. Either way, the underlying assumption is that jihadist terror is a sort of cultural neurosis arising in reaction to political or material circumstances. Thus the cure for the terrorist ?disease? must be found in improving those circumstances: installing democratic governments or compelling Israel to surrender Judea and Samaria (aka the ?occupied West Bank?) so that a Palestinian state can be created.

Zawahiri?s letter, however, offers little that squares with this received wisdom. Its shrewd analysis and careful argument are the signs not of a wild-eyed religious fanatic but of a thinker shaped by his religion?s history and spiritual imperatives. Indeed, Zawahiri is very clear about the traditional jihadist motivation, one that is not a mere reaction to Western misdeeds or a distortion of Islam, but rather squarely in its history and traditional values: the eventual triumph of the true faith over ?atheism? and ?polytheism,? the latter term code for Christianity. Thus the struggle in Iraq is the site of ?the greatest battle of Islam in this era,? another in a long series of ?epic battles between Islam and atheism.? However, in Zawahiri?s analysis, ?the victory of Islam will never take place until a Muslim state is established in the manner of the Prophet in the heart of the Islamic world.? For only then can the caliphate ultimately be reestablished: ?The goal in this age,? Zawahiri writes, ?is the establishment of a caliphate in the manner of the Prophet.? The terror of the insurgents in Iraq is a ?large step directly towards that goal.?

Rather than a localized response to American-Zionist imperial adventurism, then, the insurgency in Iraq according to Zawahiri is merely the means to achieving the first of several ?incremental goals? aimed at the eventual establishment of the caliphate throughout the ?heart of the Islamic world,? that is the whole Middle East. The first ?goal? is to ?expel the Americans from Iraq? as a necessary precondition to creating ?an Islamic authority or amirate [province],? one that will have no truck with infidel Western notions of secular democracy or human rights. Note well: the insurgents are murdering and maiming not in reaction to Abu Graib, not to forestall Western control over oil reserves, not out of frustration with Israel?s defensive wall, not for any of the reasons we in the West cook up out of our own materialist prejudices, but for a spiritual goal: the fulfillment of Allah?s will that the traditional lands once conquered by his armies and subjected to Islam be restored to rule by adherents of the true faith.

After this goal is achieved, the ?third stage? will involve expanding ?the jihad wave to the secular countries neighboring Iraq.? And then will come the final stage: ?the clash with Israel.? Zawahiri?s references to Israel are significant, and make clear that despite years of propaganda in which Palestinian frustrated ?nationalist aspirations? are trotted out as excuses for murder, it is Israel?s very existence, no matter what it does, that makes its elimination necessary. As Zawahiri puts it, Palestine is the ?heart? of a ?bird? whose wings are Syria and Egypt. The Western powers understood the strategic importance of this location for destroying the unity of the Muslim-Arab world; hence, ?they did not establish Israel in this triangle surrounded by Egypt and Syria and overlooking the Hijaz [western Saudi Arabia containing Mecca and Medina] except for their own interests.?

In other words, Israel is simply a weapon in the war of the infidel against Islam, an outpost of the West as much as were the medieval Crusader kingdoms, a state ?established only to challenge any new Islamic entity.? That is why Israel must go, not because it has prevented the Palestinians from creating a state. Indeed, Zawahiri implicitly rejects the ?nationalist? interpretation of the struggle against Israel: ?It is strange that the Arab nationalists also have, despite their avoidance of Islamic practice, come to comprehend the great importance of this province [Palestine] . . . They have come to comprehend the goal of planting Israel in this region, and they are not misled in this, rather they have admitted their ignorance of the religious nature of this conflict.?

Nor is this interpretation the idiosyncratic obsession of a crank, as the existence of numerous Palestinian jihadist terror organizations attests. The West?s failure to recognize that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an episode in the centuries-long spiritual struggle between Islam and the ?infidels? continues to this day, as we see with the vast hopes pinned on Mahmoud Abbas and democratic elections, all the while organizations like Hamas, committed like Zawahiri to the destruction of Israel, continue to enjoy significant support among Palestinian Arabs and to function as an autonomous state-within-a-state. The creation of a Palestinian state, then, is merely a stage towards that eventual ?clash with Israel? Zawahiri speaks of. Until we recognize this spiritual motivation and compel the presumed ?moderates? who sincerely reject it to act on their beliefs ?? more bluntly, to destroy the armed terrorists?? there will be no solution to that crisis that does not leave Israel vulnerable.

Zawahiri understands that the pursuit of this traditional Islamic goal must take place in a modern world in which the infidels have an overwhelming military superiority. This means that the struggle must be carried on at the psychological and perceptual level as well. He understands that ?half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media? in a ?race for the hearts and minds of our Umma [the whole Muslim community].? Suicide attacks on Shiites in Iraq, then, are condemned not on moral or religious grounds, but as tactical errors in the battle for ?hearts and minds.? Why a gory beheading when ?we can kill the captives by a bullet. That would achieve that which is sought after without exposing ourselves to the questions and answering to doubts.? As we have seen repeatedly in Israel, terrorist murder is condemned on tactical, not moral, grounds. Always the larger goal, the restoration of Islamic dominance, is the only standard by which to judge any action.

Finally, Zawahiri makes it clear that the Islamic arrogant assurance of its spiritual superiority and righteousness is validated by the corresponding spiritual dysfunction of an American society that puts material comfort and security ahead of everything else. Zawahiri?s confidence that the ?Americans will exit soon,? as he puts it, and so planning should commence for the political order that will arise upon their departure, is confirmed for him historically by Vietnam: ?The aftermath of the collapse of American power in Vietnam ?? and how they ran and left their agents ?? is noteworthy.? Indeed it is, but not for the false ?quagmire? analogy trotted out periodically by those opposed to the war in Iraq. Rather, the significance of Vietnam lies in how the United States, as a South Vietnamese defense minister put it, ?snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.?

In other words, military power may have succeeded in turning back the North Vietnamese, but political and moral weakness undid all the gains earned by the sacrifice of 60,000 American lives and millions of Vietnamese. As Zawahiri indicates, the lesson was learned by our enemies: make enough Americans uncomfortable, disturb their leisure and sensibilities with enough grisly images helpfully broadcast by their own media, and eventually they will cut and run. And indeed, if we were to abandon Iraq after suffering there about the same number of deaths as we did in two months in Vietnam, such abandonment would confirm for the jihadists their estimation of our spiritual corruption.

Over and over the jihadist enemy tells us why he wants to kill us, and over and over we dismiss his words or reduce them to our own categories. Paralyzed by our fear of being ?insensitive? to cultural differences, and deluded by our materialist preconceptions that reduce religion to an expression of some more ?real? cause, we refuse to name clearly the enemy: an Islamic faith that for centuries has killed, enslaved, plundered, ravaged, and conquered in the service of its arrogant assurance of its spiritual superiority.

http://victorhanson.com/articles/thornton101305.html

1907
Politics & Religion / VDH on Zbig's Doomsaying
« on: October 14, 2005, 12:53:12 PM »
October 14, 2005, 8:10 a.m.
An American ?Debacle??
More unjustified negativity on the war in Iraq.
Victor Davis Hanson


In a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed entitled ?American Debacle? Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national-security adviser to President Carter, begins with:

Some 60 years ago Arnold Toynbee concluded, in his monumental ?Study of History,? that the ultimate cause of imperial collapse was ?suicidal statecraft.? Sadly for George W. Bush's place in history and ? much more important ? ominously for America's future, that adroit phrase increasingly seems applicable to the policies pursued by the United States since the cataclysm of 9/11.
Brzezinski soon adds, ?In a very real sense, during the last four years the Bush team has dangerously undercut America's seemingly secure perch on top of the global totem pole by transforming a manageable, though serious, challenge largely of regional origin into an international debacle.?

What are we to make of all this, when a former national-security adviser writes that the war that began when Middle Eastern terrorists struck at the heart of the continental United States in New York and Washington ? something that neither the Nazis, Japanese militarists, nor Soviets ever accomplished ? was merely a ?challenge largely of regional origin??

Some ?region? ? downtown Manhattan and the nerve center of the American military.

Aside from the unintended irony that the classical historian Arnold Toynbee himself was not always ?adroit,? but wrong in most of his determinist conclusions, and that such criticism comes from a high official of an administration that witnessed on its watch the Iranian-hostage debacle, the disastrous rescue mission, the tragicomic odyssey of the terminally ill shah, the first and last Western Olympic boycott, oil hikes even higher in real dollars than the present spikes, Communist infiltration into Central America, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Cambodian holocaust, a gloomy acceptance that perpetual parity with the Soviet Union was the hope of the day, the realism that cemented our ties with corrupt autocracies in the Middle East (Orwellian sales of F-15 warplanes to the Saudis minus their extras), and the hard-to-achieve simultaneous high unemployment, high inflation, and high interest rates, Mr. Brzezinski is at least a valuable barometer of the current pessimism over events such as September 11.

Such gloom seems to be the fashion of the day. Iraq is now routinely dismissed as a quagmire or ?lost.? Osama bin laden is assumed to be still active, while we are beginning the fifth year of the war that is ?longer than World War II.? Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo purportedly are proof of our brutality and have lost us hearts and minds, while gas prices spiral out of control. The U.S. military is supposedly ?overextended? if not ?wrecked? by Iraq, while the war in Afghanistan ?drags on.? Meanwhile, it is ?only a matter of time? until we are hit with another terrorist strike of the magnitude of September 11. To cap it off, the United States is now ?disliked? abroad, by those who abhor our ?unilateralism? and ?preemptive? war.

All that is a fair summation of the current glumness.

But how accurate are such charges? If one were to assess them from the view of the Islamic fundamentalists, they would hardly resemble reality.

Many of al-Zarqawi or Dr. Zawahiri?s intercepted letters and communiqu?s reveal paranoid fears that Iraq is indeed becoming lost ? but to the terrorists. The enemy speaks of constantly shifting tactics ? try beheading contractors; no, turn to slaughtering Shiites; no, butcher teachers and school kids; no, go back to try to blow up American convoys. In contrast, we are consistent in our strategy ? go after jihadists, train Iraqi security forces, promote consensual government so Iraq becomes an autonomous republic free to determine its own future. We will leave anytime the elected government of Iraq asks us to; the terrorists won?t cease until they have rammed, Taliban-style, an 8th-century theocracy down the throats of unwilling Iraqis.

Bin Laden is in theory ?loose,? but can?t go anywhere except the wild Afghan-Pakistan border or perhaps the frontiers of Kashmir. His terrorist hierarchy is scattered, and many of his top operatives are either dead or, like him, in hiding. For all the legitimate worry over the triangulation of Pakistan, it is still safer for Americans openly to walk down the streets of Islamabad than for bin Laden. In any case, at least the former try it and the latter does not. How much food and medical supplies will bin Laden airlift in to his fellow Muslims reeling from the earthquake?

Note how al Qaeda has dropped much of its vaunted boasts to restore the caliphate over the infidel, and now excuses its violence with the plea of victimhood: ?After all this, does the prey not have the right, when bound and dragged to its slaughter, to escape? Does it not have the right, while being slaughtered, to lash out with its paw? Does it not have the right, after being slaughtered, to attack its slaughterer with its blood??

The war against the terrorists may be entering the fifth year, but despite over 2,000 combat fatalities, we have still only lost a little over 2/3s of those killed on the very first day of the war, almost 50 months ago ? quite a contrast with the over 400,000 American dead at the end of World War II. And a wrecked Japan and Germany were not on a secure path to democracy until six years after America entered the war, unlike Iraq and Afghanistan that were defeated without killing millions and already have held plebiscites on new constitutions.

Westerners, it is true, sensationalize the abuses of Abu Ghraib and perceived grievances of Guantanamo far more than they do the abject slaughtering and beheading by the enemy. Nor do Americans write much about the heroics of their own U.S. Marines in retaking Fallujah or their brave Army battalions in providing security for civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq to vote.

But our enemies still are not impressed by such a self-critical mentality, and know that a trip to Abu Ghraib does not mean either a Saddam-like torture chamber or an al Qaeda beheading, but rather far better conditions than they ever would extend to others, and often a rest of sorts between attacking Americans. As for Guantanamo, it is humane compared to any jail in the Middle East, and fundamentalists only harp on its perceived brutality since they think such invective resonates with Western opponents of America?s current policy.

Oil is the weirdest theme of the debate over the war. Opponents claim that we went there to steal or control it. But after we arrived, as in the case of 1991 when we had the entire mega-reserves of Kuwait in our grasp, we turned it back over to the local owners, ensuring that for the first time in decades a transparent Iraqi government ? not the French, not the Russians, not the Baathists, not the Saddam kleptocracy ? now controls its own petroleum. The more the terrorists talk about Western theft of their national heritage, the more OPEC gouges the industrialized world and sends its billions in petrodollars abroad to foreign banks.

The story of the war since September 11 is that the United States military has not lost a single battle, has removed two dictatorships, and has birthed democracy in the Middle East. During Katrina, critics suggested troops in Iraq should have been in New Orleans, but that was a political, not a realistic complaint: few charged that there were too many thousands abroad in Germany, Italy, the U.K., Korea, or Japan when they should have been in Louisiana.

Afghanistan is nearing the status of the Balkans ? after nearly four, not eight years of peacekeeping to keep down the remnants of fascism while democracy takes root. And Afghanistan was a war (like Iraq) approved by the U.S. Senate and House ? unlike Mr. Clinton?s bombing of Serbia.

The enemy seems frustrated that it cannot repeat September 11 here in the United States. Hundreds of terrorists have been arrested, and direction from a central al Qaeda leadership has been lost. Killing jihadists in Afghanistan and Iraq has, as their communiqu?s show, put terrorists on the defensive ? understandable after losing sympathetic governments like the Taliban.

We have made plenty of mistakes since September 11, often failed to articulate our goals and values, and turned on each other in perpetual acrimony. Federal spending is out of control, and our present energy policy won?t wean us off Middle Eastern petroleum for years. But still lost in all this conundrum is that the old appeasement of the 1990s is over, the terrorists are losing both tactically and strategically, and, as Tony Blair said of the evolving Western mentality, ?The rules of the game are changing.?

Finally, we need to be systematic in our appraisal of the course of this war, asking not just whether the United States is more popular and better liked, but rather whether Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, and Egypt are moving in the right or wrong direction. Is Europe more or less attuned to the dangers of radical Islam, and more or less likely to work with the United States? Is the Israeli-Palestinian dispute getting worse or stabilizing? Is our security at home getting better, and do we understand radical Islam more or less perfectly? Are Middle East neutrals like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan more or less helpful in the war against the terrorists? Are global powers like India and Japan more or less inclined to America? And are clear-cut enemies such as Iran and Syria becoming more or less emboldened or facing ostracism?

If we look at all these questions dispassionately, and tune out the angry rhetoric on the extreme Left and Right, then we can see things are becoming better rather than worse ? even as the media and now the public itself believes that a successful strategy is failing.

And as for Mr. Brzezinski?s indictment ? most of us still would prefer the United States of 2005 to the chaotic America of 1977-80 under an administration that did little to confront the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, which began in earnest on its watch with the real debacle in Tehran.

? Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His book A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War appears this month.

    
http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200510140810.asp

1908
Politics & Religion / Bomb Materials from Iran Intercepted
« on: October 13, 2005, 08:06:19 PM »
Iran's killer bombs found

Bombs seized ... where
cargo was found

From TOM NEWTON-DUNN
Defence Editor, in Al Amarah, Iraq

A HUGE cache of hi-tech bomb-making kit has been seized from terrorist smugglers crossing from Iran into Iraq.
The find included detonators, military-style charges and a whopping 100kg of plastic explosives ? enough to flatten a tower block.

Exactly the same technology was used in five devastating roadside bombs that killed eight British soldiers recently.

Iraqi forces seized the cargo in a sparsely-populated border area in desolate Maysan province, which is largely scrub and marshland.

This is the first hard proof of Iran?s highly controversial sponsorship of terrorism against Our Boys in southern Iraq.

Military sources said the leadership in Tehran must have authorised the moving of such a large and lethal consignment.

Last night one said: ?It?s inconceivable this sort of highly sophisticated material can cross the border without some very important people in Iran knowing about it.

Foiled ... Iraqi officers capture insurgent with cache this week

?We cannot publicly accuse Tehran yet ? but this is as close as it comes to catching the Iranians red-handed ? without actually seeing them pull the trigger.?

The seizure happened in July but was kept secret before being confirmed for the first time yesterday by British military in Basra. It cranks up tensions further between Iran?s Ayatollahs and furious politicians in London.

PM Tony Blair has already accused elite troops from Iran?s Revolutionary Guards of giving insurgents the deadly new bombs to kill British soldiers. Earlier this week defence sources in Iraq piled on the pressure by insisting the Iranians were also running training camps in Iran.

And yesterday Captain Will Blackhurst of the Staffordshire Regiment Battle Group based in Camp abu Naji ? which has lost five members to the new bombs ? hinted the terrorists? tactics have evolved recently. He said: ?The enemy is fighting a far cleverer war than he did last year and his skills and tactics have improved greatly.?

Last night a spokesman for British forces in Iraq said: ?We can confirm that there was a large find reported by the Iraqi Department for Border Enforcement.

?It was a great success for everyone in Iraq as it has taken a large amount of weaponry out of the insurgents? hands.?

http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2005470753,00.html

1909
Politics & Religion / Democracy Activist Beaten in China
« on: October 10, 2005, 12:32:38 PM »
'They beat him until he was lifeless'
How democracy activist in China's new frontline was left for dead after a brutal attack by a uniformed mob

Benjamin Joffe-Walt in Taishi, southern China
Monday October 10, 2005
Guardian

The last time I saw Lu Banglie, he was lying in a ditch on the side of the street - placid, numb and lifeless - the spit, snot and urine of about 20 men mixing with his blood, and running all over his body.
I had only met him that day. He was to show me the way to Taishi, the hotspot of the growing rural uprisings in China. It felt like heading into a war. Taishi is under siege, I was warned. The day I arrived a French radio journalist and a Hong Kong print journalist were rumoured to have been beaten somewhere around Taishi.

The Taishi election had also been scheduled for that very day, and news of a hunger strike by one of the two most famous figures in Taishi had just come out.

Mr Lu was a very soft-spoken man, one of those skinny guys who looked like he might start tearing at any moment. Born as a peasant in Baoyuesi village of Bailizhou town in Zhijiang city in Hubei province, he was a people's representative and had been in the village of Taishi since the start of a democratic movement in the area.

That movement, deeply unpopular with the local authorities, has come to be seen as a weather vane for China's tentative steps toward a more representative society. It has led to beatings and mass arrests among its population as well as for observers who ventured into its environs.

Mr Lu was at the forefront of this maelstrom. And yesterday this was where the problem lay. We had hired a taxi. Mr Lu got in the car to put us on the right road. As we got closer, I asked him to get out. He refused. "If you go, I go," he insisted. I told him he would be endangering himself, the driver and maybe us. He was unfazed, not even listening. I repeated for a third time that I wanted him to get out of the car. It didn't work. The translator was annoyed and asked me to leave it. Mr Lu knew the risks better than us, he reasoned. So I dropped it, and it was this appeasement that determined Mr Lu's fate.

We arrived on the outskirts of Taishi, just as the dirt roads start. There were 30 to 50 men - angry, inebriated, bored men. Most looked like thugs. Some wore military camouflage uniform. Some wore blue uniforms with badges on the shoulders, and one guy had a greyish-mauve uniform with a walkie-talkie. Our taxi driver, who we had hired randomly in a neighbouring village, was called out by the thugs. They screamed at him: "What the fuck are you doing here?"

He knew nothing. He came back in and screamed at us. "Fuck all of you, look now you've gotten me into trouble."

We told him to reverse but by that time it was already too late, the car was encircled. "Don't go out!," I screamed, telling everyone to lock their doors. I called a colleague on my mobile, asked him to stay on the phone with me.

The men outside shouted among themselves and those in uniform suddenly left. Those remaining started pushing on the car, screaming at us to get out. They pointed flashlights at us, and when the light hit Mr Lu's face, it was as if a bomb had gone off. They completely lost it. They pulled him out and bashed him to the ground, kicked him, pulverised him, stomped on his head over and over again. The beating was loud, like the crack of a wooden board, and he was unconscious within 30 seconds.

They continued for 10 minutes. The body of this skinny little man turned to putty between the kicking legs of the rancorous men. This was not about teaching a man a lesson, about scaring me, about preventing access to the village; this was about vengeance - retribution for teaching villagers their legal rights, for agitating, for daring to hide.

They slowed down but never stopped. He lay there - his eye out of its socket, his tongue cut, a stream of blood dropping from his mouth, his body limp, twisted. The ligaments in his neck were broken, so his head lay sideways as if connected to the rest of his body by a rubber band.

We were probably in the car another five to eight minutes. The front windows were open and various men were reaching in to unlock my door. I held my hand tight to the lock. They punched me, twisted my wrist, tried everything possible with a quick grab to get me out. But I wouldn't let go, and I defended myself while watching Mr Lu get beaten through the window.

Eventually, my translator got out. I followed. They opened my pen, searched my pockets, underwear and socks, asked my translator if his watch could record anything. They asked what we were doing in Taishi. They found my Chinese press pass. "You foreigners you are ruining Taishi," they screamed. "You write write write so much about what's happened here that all these businesses have fled the new industrial zone."

My head was spinning. I was in a mixed state of shock at what had happened to Mr Lu and utter fear for my life.

I shamelessly begged. I prayed. I offered them money. I tried to smile at them. Random people came up to Mr Lu and kicked him in the head, clearing their nose of snot on his body, spitting on him, peeing on him, showing off for each other. I had no idea what to do.

I stood there, sweating, my hands ripping my hair out, just staring at the blood all over the man who had risked his life to help me.

An ambulance came. The medic got out, checked his pulse and left. Then it hit me: I'd done absolutely nothing to save Mr Lu. I stood there watching. I'm trained as a medic, and I did nothing to save Mr Lu. Absolutely nothing. They put us in a car, told us we were being taken for interrogation. On the way the men joked, laughed and we shook.

Mr Lu spent his adult life working to empower villagers and to get the attention of Beijing and the world. He was beaten up many times, had scars all over his body. This, he thought, was part of his work.

Once at the township, they put us at a conference table with flowers and spring water. About 15 officials sat round it and politely questioned us, videotaping the interaction as if it were a TV show. "Why did you come to Taishi? Why did you meet Lu Banglie? How did you meet him?" they asked.

"We are not interested in the reception of media interviews of any kind at this juncture in time," one official explained.

His superior arrived: Ms Qi Hong, associate director of the government news office in Guangzhou. "China is open to foreigners," she said. "We welcome any journalists in Guangzhou, but if you don't follow the proper procedures how can we guarantee your safety?"

The initiator of Mr Lu's beating sat at the table, eyes bloodshot, arms crossed at an angle, his elbow jutting into the air as if to show his extreme disinterest in us.

They said we had broken the law by coming here without permission. We apologised. That is all, that is how the night ended. We walked out of the government building, still being filmed, across the lawn, past the Chinese flag at high mast, and into the car.

They waved and smiled, filming us as we drove off. And this is all I can say about the story of Mr Lu because I never saw Taishi from the inside and cannot tell you how it looks, what the people say, how the air feels.

What I can tell you is that what's going on in Taishi is perhaps the most significant grassroots social movement China has seen since the Cultural Revolution, a rural revolt against corruption, against deterioration of healthcare, against the illegal sale of farmland, and broadly against urban capitalism that has reaped no benefits for these farmers.

The Guardian has been unable to confirm what happened to Mr Lu.

Police said they had received reports that he had been taken to hospital, but that he had been released and was "fine". The three nearest hospitals said that no one had been admitted yesterday.

The last words of Mr Lu I wrote down were: "The police cover their arses. They employ all these thugs whose lives mean nothing to them to kill you. That's why once we are in this we can't go out."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,7369,1588595,00.html

1910
Politics & Religion / VDH on Quiet Agreement
« on: October 10, 2005, 09:10:43 AM »
As always, VDH lends perspective.

October 07, 2005, 7:58 a.m.
The Quiet Consensus on Iraq
The more they argue, the more they sound the same.
Victor Davis Hanson

Some 30 months after the removal of Saddam Hussein, an unspoken consensus is emerging about Iraq. The Howard Dean/Michael Moore/Cindy Sheehan fringe of the Democratic party so far has made almost no inroads into mainstream party thinking. Perhaps this new Copperhead movement to find political resonance has failed because most Democratic stalwarts ? senators Kerry, Clinton, and Biden ? themselves voted to remove Saddam. And these erstwhile supporters of the war can offer nothing much different on Iraq now except to harangue about the need for more allies or more multilateral/U.N. help.

True, most Americans are tired of Iraq; but they wish to win rather than withdraw immediately and lose the country to the terrorists. The odd thing is that the more the rhetoric heats up, the more both sides sound about the same.

More troops?
The ostensible military advantage of having a larger U.S. troop presence to pacify Sunni hotspots was always outweighed by a number of other, though less immediately apparent, disadvantages.
The key to stabilizing Iraq has been to promote the autonomy of Iraqi security forces ? impossible if they are ensured that 300,000 or so American combat troops will do their fighting for them. And in this type of socio-cultural war, a smaller foreign footprint is critical, since the last thing we wish is an enormous ostentatious American military bureaucracy in Baghdad.

The shortcoming was never the number of U.S troops per se, but our self-imposed straightjacket on rules of engagement that apparently discouraged the vital sorts of offensive operations that we have at last seen the last two months.

The lesson of Vietnam is that the south was more secure in 1973 without almost any American ground troops than with over 500,000 present in 1968. Promises of air power to support ARVN forces between 1971-3 proved about as viable as thousands of prior search-and-destroy patrols by American soldiers. It also never made sense to tie down nearly half of available American combat manpower in Iraq, at a time when vigilance was necessary in Korea, near China, and in other spots in the Middle East.

That the United States needs at least 4-5 more combat-ready divisions is not the same question as the wisdom of putting more American personnel into Iraq.

Departure?
Even the Democratic leadership has made no move to demand a scheduled timetable of withdrawal, much less, Vietnam-style, to cut off funds for general military operations in Iraq.
Yet most supporters of the war do not want an open-ended commitment to Iraq either, with large permanent basing and perpetual subsidies to such an oil-rich state. So here too there is general agreement emerging about our goals as outlined by most of the military's top brass: in a year or two begin to downsize our presence in Iraq, ideally leaving behind special forces and elite units embedded within Iraqi units, backed up by instantaneous air support.

In the larger sense, with Saddam gone ? he was the reason for America's 1991 build up in the region in the first place ? our total regional troop strength could decline, contingent on the degree to which Al Qaeda poses less of a conventional threat than Saddam Hussein once did in this critical area. The departure from Saudi Arabia was long overdue, and few Americans wish troops to return there. Again, no mainstream figure is demanding either an immediate withdrawal from Iraq or an imperial build-up.

Democracy?
It is now popular to caricature the effort to prompt democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to encourage them elsewhere in the Gulf, Lebanon, and Egypt. We all know the homilies ? "You can't implant democracy by force" or "There is no history of democracy in that part of the world."
Yet few leftist critics of the administration have advised not to pressure Syria to leave Lebanon, not to encourage elections in Beirut, not to hector Mubarak in Egypt about allowing fair voting, or not to engage in the messy work of consensual government in Iraq and Afghanistan. No Democrats are calling for a strongman in Iraq, or endorsing the general status quo in the Middle East. If anything, we hear the Orwellian refrain, "We should not be supporting dictators" ? at precisely the time in recent memory that we are beginning not to!

There is a quiet but growing assumption that there is really not much of a choice other than to come down on the right side of history and support the democratizing efforts now under way. Freedom and the rule of law offer the best hope of undermining Islamic fundamentalism faster than it can subvert consensual government. Far from being a Puritanical, messianic vision of forcing Islamic cultures to follow a cookie-cutter American model, our policy of post-September 11 arises because most Americans are tired of giving their money to dictatorships in Egypt, or lining up with monarchies in the Gulf, or having autocracies harbor and bribe terrorists to turn their wrath against the United States.

To their credit, in past years Democrats were more likely to object to realpolitik in the first place, so it makes absolutely no sense now for them to criticize George Bush for doing more to end the old cynicism than Bill Clinton ever did.

Iraq and the war on terrorism?
The old debate whether Saddam Hussein was involved with al Qaeda is now calcified. Liberal conventional wisdom denies any such linkage since there is no firm evidence that Saddam knew of, or was involved in, the September 11 attacks. Thus most on the left ignore entirely that Ansar al-Islam was doing Saddam's dirty work in fighting the Kurds, that Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas resided in Baghdad, that Saddam openly harbored Abdul Rahman Yasin and Ahmed Hikmat Shakir who were connected to the effort in 1993 to blow up the World Trade Center and various anti-American plots, and that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi fled Afghanistan to the sanctuary of Iraq.
No matter. That was then, this is now ? and there is no denying that al-Zarqawi is conducting al-Qaedist operations in Iraq, or that the sort of people who attacked us on September 11 are the sort of people now flocking to the Sunni Triangle and often dying at the hands of U.S. military forces. Everyone can agree on that.

The "flypaper" exegesis ? that Iraq has become a magnetized burial ground pulling in wannabe al Qaedists ? is widely dismissed as unsophisticated and yokelish. But we saw the same phenomenon on the Afghan border in late 2001 where the Pakistani madrassas thinned out as jihadists went over the mountains to the Taliban's aid ? only to be bombed to smithereens, the survivors limping back to warn others to give up such a holy trek.

In one of the strangest developments of this entire war, the Western world hears almost nothing about the aggregate number of jihadists killed by coalition forces in Iraq, even though we suspect it may have been several thousand ? 10,000, 20,000, 50,000? Surely this has had both a concrete and a spiritual effect on hundreds of thousands of angry young Islamists, who are beginning to realize that a trip to Iraq may be lethal ? and unwelcomed by most Iraqis who just wish to be left alone to form their own new government. Whatever one thought about the nexus of Iraq and terror before, no one now denies that our jihadist enemies are in Iraq and are being fought and defeated there each day.

Ideology
For nearly four years, debates raged in the West over the Patriot Act, supposed Islamophobia, and the sense that the war was never a war at all, but a cooked-up overreaction by Bush-Cheney/Halliburton/Fox News (take your pick) to further a corporate imperial agenda.
But after bombings and assassinations in the United Kingdom, Spain, and the Netherlands, the almost weekly arrests of Middle Eastern suspects from New Jersey to Lodi, California, few now deny that we are in a war with real jihadists, who are energized by an Islamo-fascistic creed that flares up from Bali to Pakistan.

Saddam is ancient history. The real war in Iraq is against al-Qaedists who behead, murder, and seek to turn any village they get their hands on into an 8th-century nightmare. Democrats may groan about the Patriot Act; ACLU liberals will occasionally cry bigotry against Muslims; but there is no longer any real debate that one of the tools of the jihadists is to repeat a September 11 on a larger scale through the stealthy terrorism of infiltrators from the Middle East. Better then to draw them out and hit them abroad than just play defense at home.

Optimism?
It is easy to be pessimistic about Iraq, given the media's constant barrage of bad news. But why then are there not millions in the street as in the fashion of Vietnam-era moratoria? Why doesn't the Senate move to cut off funds? Why don't the Democrats bring forth another George McGovern?
Moveon.org, Cindy Sheehan, or Michael Moore in the short-term may be useful stilettos to the Democrats. But most keep their safe distance from such blood-stained rapiers, since few know how Iraq will turn out ? or what such razor-sharp groups and firebrands will say or do next.

If Iraq is a more lethal theater than Afghanistan, and appears the more unstable, then we should remember that Saddam Hussein was sui generis, and his warped country the linchpin of the Arab Middle East. Who knows what Iraq will look like in, say, 15 months, given that its liberation had about that much lag time after the fall of the Taliban?

On the horizon there are a number of events whose public repercussions are impossible to predict, although they may well enhance the efforts of democratic reformers. The elections of October will be followed by even more voting in December. For all the predictions of Sunni boycotts and subversion, at some point the wiser ones will participate ? understanding that the insurgents are losing, destroying not the Americans, but their own country in the process, and that a constitution moves onward, with or without them.

Soon there will be a globally televised trial of Saddam Hussein that may well shock the Arab autocracies ? especially when their unfree populations gaze on the most well-known and thuggish of the Arab illegitimate leaders, chained in the docket and demurring to a constitutionally-appointed judge.

Yes, America is divided about Left/Right politics and over occasional antiwar street theater. But on the major issue of the war on terror and Iraq, most critics have very few ideas of doing anything other than what we are doing right now. The result is a strange consensus that few speak about ? but fewer still wish to undo.

? Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His book A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War (Random House) appears this month.

http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200510070758.asp

1911
Politics & Religion / Carlin on Katrina?
« on: October 07, 2005, 01:04:27 PM »
I can't vouch that this was truly penned by George Carlin, but as someone who grew up with all his comedy LPs (back in those prehistoric days when CDs had two sides and were much bigger) this certainly sounds like something he'd say.

George Carlin on Katrina (funny)
email going around

Been sitting here with my ass in a wad, wanting to speak out about the bullshit going on in New Orleans. For the people of New Orleans... First we would like to say, Sorry for your loss. With that said, Lets go through a few hurricane rules: (Unlike an earthquake, we know it's coming)

#1. A mandatory evacuation means just that..Get the hell out.

Don't blame the Government after they tell you to go. If they hadn't said anything, I can see the argument. They said get out... if you didn't, it's your fault, not theirs. (We don't want to hear it, even if you don't have a car, you can get out.)

#2. If there is an emergency, stock up on water and non-perishables. If you didn't do this, it's not the Government's fault you're starving.

#2a. If you run out of food and water, find a store that has some.

(Remember, shoes, TV's, DVD's and CD's are not edible. Leave them alone.)

#2b. If the local store has been looted of food or water, leave your neighbor's TV and stereo alone. (See # 2a) They worked hard to get their stuff. Just because they were smart enough to leave during a mandatory evacuation, doesn't give you the right to take their stuff...it's theirs, not yours.

#3. If someone comes in to help you, don't shoot at them and then complain no one is helping you. I'm not getting shot to help save some dumbass who didn't leave when told to do so.

#4. If you are in your house that is completely under water, your belongings are probably too far gone for anyone to want them. If someone does want them, let them have them and hopefully they'll die in the filth. Just leave!

(It's New Orleans, find a voodoo warrior and put a curse on them)

#5. My tax money should not pay to rebuild a 2 million dollar house, a sports stadium or a floating casino. Also, my tax money shouldn't go to rebuild a city that is under sea level. You wouldn't build your house on quicksand would you? You want to live below sea-level, do your country some good and join the Navy.

#6. Regardless of what the Poverty Pimps Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton want you to believe, The US Government didn't create the Hurricane as a way to eradicate the black people of New Orleans; (Neither did Russia as a way to destroy America). The US Government didn't cause global warming that caused the hurricane (We've been coming out of an ice age for over a million years).

#7. The government isn't responsible for giving you anything. This is the land of the free and the home of the brave, but you gotta work for what you want. McDonalds and Wal-Mart are always hiring, get a damn job and stop spooning off the people who are actually working for a living.

President Kennedy said it best..."Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."

Thank you for allowing me to rant.

George Carlin

1912
Politics & Religion / Wahhabism's Water Carriers
« on: October 05, 2005, 01:38:50 PM »
Senate Will Probe Saudi Distribution Of Hate Materials

BY MEGHAN CLYNE - Staff Reporter of the Sun
October 5, 2005
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/20998

WASHINGTON - The American government is demanding that Saudi Arabia account for its distribution of hate material to American mosques, as the State Department pressed Saudi officials for answers last week and as the Senate later this month plans to investigate the propagation of radical Wahhabism on American shores.

The flurry of activity comes months after a report from the Center for Religious Freedom discovered that dozens of mosques in major cities across the country, including New York, Washington, and Los Angeles, were distributing documents, bearing the seal of the government of Saudi Arabia, that incite Muslims to acts of violence and promote hatred of Jews and Christians.

A Washington-based group that is part of the human rights organization Freedom House, the Center for Religious Freedom also found during its yearlong study that the Saudi-produced materials describe democracy and America as un-Islamic. They instruct recent Muslim immigrants to consider Americans as enemies and the materials urge new arrivals to use their time here as preparation for jihad. The documents also promote the version of Islam officially embraced by Saudi government and several of the September 11, 2001, hijackers, Wahhabism, as the only authentic Islam.

In response to the Freedom House report and as part of the Saudi Arabia Accountability Act of 2005 sponsored by Senator Specter, a Republican of Pennsylvania, the Judiciary Committee - of which Senator Specter is chairman - will be holding hearings into the hate materials on October 25, a spokesman for the senator, William Reynolds, said yesterday.

The Accountability Act, introduced in June, says its purpose is "to halt Saudi support for institutions that fund, train, incite, encourage, or in any other way aid and abet terrorism, and to secure fully Saudi cooperation in the investigation of terrorist incidents." The legislation is highly critical of the House of Saud for its support of terrorist activity and cites the January Freedom House report as evidence of the kingdom's complicity in the spread of radical Islamist ideology. As part of the

Accountability Act, Senator Specter has in the past held Judiciary Committee hearings into Saudi financing of terrorism and Saudi Arabia's role in injecting ideology into textbooks for Palestinian Arab schoolchildren.

Many of the details of the Judiciary Committee hearing later this month, Mr. Reynolds said, are still being arranged, including a final witness list. In the meantime, the committee expects testimony from the State Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Freedom House, and terrorism experts. The committee will press to determine whether the Saudi government has taken steps to stop the distribution of the materials, and will cull from witnesses recommendations to prevent their future dissemination, Mr. Reynolds said.

Also demanding answers about the hate materials is the State Department's undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, Karen Hughes. During a high-profile trip to the Middle East last week, Ms. Hughes said American representatives had addressed the propagation of Saudi hate material in America during private meetings with government officials.

In a State Department briefing held en route to Ankara, Turkey, from Saudi Arabia last Tuesday, Ms. Hughes was asked why she had raised the issue that day during a public meeting with Saudi journalists, becoming the first American official to do so publicly. "We had been raising the issue privately," Ms. Hughes said, "and as part of raising difficult issues that we need to discuss, I felt it was appropriate." The undersecretary did not elaborate on the results of the private meetings, but the degree to which Saudi Arabia is making efforts to stop the propaganda will be a subject of the Senate hearings, Mr. Reynolds said.

Requests for comment from the Embassy of Saudi Arabia yesterday were not returned.

1913
Politics & Religion / No Bushido in Britain
« on: October 05, 2005, 12:58:59 PM »
Kinda the antithesis of the militia ethos being created in the UK. You'd think someone there would be detecting a pattern.

Crackdown on Samurai swords
devon.editorial@archant.co.uk
04 October 2005

A CAMPAIGN to stop shops selling Samurai swords has been launched by Devon and Cornwall police.

Police have written to retailers asking them to act responsibly and withdraw the weapons from sale.

They also hope to persuade people who own swords to surrender them at the police station to stop them falling into the wrong hands.

The move comes after a number of incidents in the area involving the swords, including the death of Sidmouth man Matthew Stiling in July.

Chief Superintendent Bob Pennington said: "We are experiencing a significant number of offences being committed using Samurai swords.

"These offences include murder, serious assault, criminal damage and possession in a public place.

"The threat to the public and the police is significant and we have had to deploy officers with firearms and special equipment to deal with these incidents."

Mr Pennington said there had been 18 incidents in Devon and Cornwall between April 7 and August 2005. "This has a direct effect on the public in terms of cost and preventing officers from dealing with other incidents.

"We want to reassure the public we are doing everything we can to deal with Samurai swords and reduce the opportunity for people to have access to them," he said.

http://www.devon24.co.uk/midweekherald/news/story.aspx?brand=MDWOnline&category=news&tBrand=devon24&tCategory=newsmdw&itemid=DEED04%20Oct%202005%2015%3A42%3A15%3A397

1914
Politics & Religion / The Living Constitution is Dead
« on: October 01, 2005, 12:13:55 AM »
September 30, 2005, 4:09 p.m.
Living Constitution, R.I.P.
I know what I learned this summer.

By Curt Levey

Democratic senators claim not to have learned much from the recent confirmation hearings for (now) Chief Justice John Roberts. I, on the other hand, learned a lot by listening to those senators. An analysis of their rhetoric reveals trends in constitutional interpretation and evolution that are sure to influence the looming battle over the president's second Supreme Court nominee.

Observation #1: Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery
Judicial activism? has long been a label conservatives use to describe liberal court decisions that seemingly elevate judges? personal views above statutory and constitutional law. The Roberts hearings confirm that the term has now become a favorite invective of Democrats. Senator Ted Kennedy accused Roberts of being an "aggressive activist." Wisconsin?s senator Herb Kohl decried "judicial activists [who] have used [conservative judicial] philosophy to limit our rights and freedoms." And Senator Chuck Schumer labeled Justices Scalia and Thomas as "activist judges" on par with liberal luminary justices Marshall and Brennan.
Many of my right-of-center colleagues found it maddening to watch those senators borrow the judicial activism charge and use it against conservative paragons of judicial restraint. But it's unlikely the Democrats are fooling anybody. Their real concern is that Roberts won?t be activist enough to see the constitutional penumbras and emanations that support Roe v. Wade and, perhaps, a constitutional right to gay marriage.

Democrats? appropriation of the activist allegation should be viewed as evidence that proponents of judicial restraint are making headway. It is an implicit admission that this critique of liberal jurisprudence has proved effective. Moreover, the Democrats? reliance on a ?so are you? argument indicates the absence of a defensible judicial philosophy on the Left. And, like former segregationists embracing civil rights, liberals? calls for judicial restraint ? no matter how insincere ? are a sign that the times have changed for the better.

Observation #2: Living Constitution Dead at 70?
Closely related to judicial activism is the concept of a "living Constitution," one whose principles and interpretations evolve to reflect the changing values of society. While liberals have traditionally embraced the living Constitution, conservative legal thinkers abhor it. They see it as nothing more than an excuse for judges inventing law ? like the Supreme Court's Miranda warnings and the "right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, [and] of the universe."
Given the dependence of the liberal judicial agenda on a living Constitution, it is telling that the term and its equivalents were used only once by a Democratic senator during the Judiciary Committee's five days of hearings and voting. Dahlia Lithwick of Slate reports a similar abandonment in the literature. One can only conclude that liberals now feel the need to distance themselves from the concept. Deprived of the unabashed support of its biggest fans, the living Constitution?s best days are likely behind it.

May the living Constitution rest in peace. The concept is utterly without meaning as a legal standard and, instead, is a recipe for unrestrained judicial power. Because the Constitution is a contract between the people and their government, its modification should require the consent of the parties to the agreement. Thus, a living Constitution can be analogized to an automobile lease agreement that the car dealer feels free to modify as his notions of a fair deal evolve.

Observation #3: Don't Say the "A" Word

The classic defense of the living Constitution is that the Framers could not peer 200 years into the future. But the Framers were well aware of that limitation. Thus, they provided us with a democratic method of constitutional evolution, the amendment process, which has proved to be brilliantly effective. Constitutional amendments are responsible for the greatest achievements of our legal system in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the elimination of slavery and the enfranchisement of African Americans and women.
And yet, throughout the Judiciary Committee's proceedings, not a single senator discussed the amendment process except to say that that it was difficult or should be infrequent. This inattention to the Framers? intended method of constitutional evolution is paralleled by the period since 1971, during which there has not been a single substantive constitutional amendment. Compare that to the previous hundred years, which saw about a dozen pivotal amendments.

The Amendment process ? requiring approval by two-thirds of Congress and three-fourths of the states ? is an arduous one, as the Framers intended. But that cannot fully explain senators? disinterest in it. After all, the process is no more difficult than in the heyday of constitutional amendments, and more than 80 percent of the amendments that have been approved by Congress have also been ratified by the states.

The real answer lies in the ascendancy, in recent decades, of a tempting alternative to constitutional amendments, namely the living Constitution and judicial activism. In this age of quick fixes, the amendment process is viewed as too cumbersome by politicians and impatient interest groups. Most significantly, amendments require a solid democratic consensus. That makes them unattractive to the intellectual elite ? in Congress, the courts, law schools, and think tanks ? whose ?evolving values? are often out of sync with those of the larger populace. A living Constitution is seductive exactly because it is undemocratic.

But the tide may have turned. The rhetoric of the Roberts hearings suggests that the political viability of judicial activism is waning. Renewed attention to constitutional amendments cannot be far behind. The battle for a humbler approach to the Constitution is hardly over, but the signs are encouraging.

? Curt. Levey, an attorney specializing in constitutional law and civil rights, was the director of legal and public Affairs at the Center for Individual Rights from 1998 to 2004.

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/levey200509301609.asp

1915
Politics & Religion / Islamofascist & Free Exercise of Choice
« on: September 30, 2005, 10:21:14 AM »
Think this piece overreaches and ulitmately flounders, but it does make several points that resonate. I've always felt, for instance that those with martial skills who choose peace are a lot more worthy of respect than the mewling peace protesters who gather for the cameras. The former opt on a regular basis not to slap idiots upside the head while the latter embraces an emotional onanism and exhibitionism that does little more than manufacture foolishness. This piece speaks to a similar dichotomy.

Liberals and Islamofascists
September 29th, 2005

What merit is there in not stealing because you fear that your hand will be cut off? In not drinking because you have no alcohol? In not being aroused by a woman in a burqa?

An Islamofascist walks the streets of America and sees a man enter a massage parlor. "What an immoral society!" he thinks. He does not notice the men who do not go in. He sees the temptations Americans are subject to, but not their resistance to those temptations. He sees their immorality, but not their morality.

Americans are free to be either moral or immoral. How immoral would our enemies be if they were free?

America is free to be immoral, but when America is moral, its morality is genuine?because it is free to be immoral. No one praises prison inmates for not breaking into houses?or Saudi women for not having automobile accidents.

The Islamofascist cannot conceive of morality without coercion. To the Islamofascist, coercion is morality, and freedom is immorality. Freedom is license to him, not the arena in which we choose good or evil. Morality is imposed and external, not free and internal.

To the Biblically-grounded Christian or Jew, ?the battle line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man,? in the glorious words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. For too many Muslims, the battle line between good and evil runs between the Islamic world and the world yet to be conquered.

Christians and Jews do have a duty to fight evil outside themselves, but their primary adversary must always be the enemy within. The rhetoric of Islamofascists reverses this priority, sometimes to the point of completely forgetting their own sins. America does not need lessons in sexual morality from men who take baths and perfume themselves in expectation of the seventy-two virgins they will each enjoy as soon as they blow themselves up next to Christians or Jews.

Ideological Affinities

Unfortunately, many in the West also see only the sins of America. They also confuse license and freedom, repression and self-control, taxation and charity. They also equate good conduct motivated by fear of temporal rulers and good conduct motivated by love of God and man.

Above all, they too focus on the sins and alleged sins of others to the exclusion of their own sins and thereby equate changing someone else?s behavior with doing the right thing. The most moral people are, in their view, the people who most vigorously condemn traditional American values. An ordinary person might strive to benefit society by giving to a charity or volunteering; they strive to benefit society by promoting political and social change.

They confuse poverty imposed by an economic system and voluntary poverty, destitution and poverty of spirit, backwardness and protection of the environment. They think that Americans are more materialist than people with fewer material goods?as if people in other countries don?t desire the same things. They think that socialism is compatible with Christianity and capitalism is not, forgetting that socialism is as much a system for producing material goods as capitalism is, just a less efficient one. They think that there is something inherently wrong with wanting a car that does not break down or a computer that does not crash, but cars, computers, and other consumer goods are not evil. Making idols of them is evil; putting them to good use is not. They think that because Native Americans were technologically backward, they must have been environmentalists. Again and again, they confuse morality with constraint: the constraint of poverty, the constraint of inefficiency, the constraint of backwardness, ultimately the constraint of tyranny.

To their way of thinking, the Internal Revenue Service is a charitable organization, like the Red Cross or the Salvation Army; indeed it is more charitable because contributions to it are involuntary. Charity consists precisely in the taking of the money. Taxation is thus a virtue in and of itself, reflecting the merit of the society imposing it.

Money that is freely given falls short of true charity because it lacks the element of coercion essential to their morality. How can a society be moral if it allows people to forgo charity? What kind of charity is it that allows people not to give?

Morality consists in telling other people what to do, and charity consists in aiding the poor with other people?s money. Thus, Hillary Clinton says that conservatives place too much emphasis on ?private morality? (obeying the Ten Commandments) and not enough emphasis on ?public morality? (obeying her).

But surely I am being unfair. What, other than enemies, does Hillary Clinton share with Islamofascists? Liberals in America support gay rights; Islamofascists want to stone homosexuals. Liberals are feminists; Islamofascists don?t want to let women out of the house. Liberals hate war; the terrorists want to set the world ablaze with it.

Well, similar contradictions were not too much for liberals in the Cold War. The Soviet Union did not embody their values. Or so they tell us.

On the other hand, the communists did hold up before their apologists a utopian vision, while the Islamofascists don?t even bother to present a positive message. It turns out that the Islamofascists know a lot of things that we don?t. For instance, that a message of pure negativity has as much appeal as the demagogic ideal of a world without poverty or strife. Liberals are just as energetic in explaining away the mass murder of Kurdish villagers by Saddam Hussein as they were in praising Potemkin villages in the Soviet Union. How long does it take a liberal to turn a discussion of the use of poison gas on Kurds to a discussion of the evils of Reagan and Bush?

So perhaps liberals are not responding to the Islamofascist message after all. They will simply excuse the behavior of enemies of the United States no matter how opposed the values of those enemies are to the values of liberals. Indeed, liberals and Islamofascists are opposites. Or so they tell us.

However, as the agreement between liberals and Islamofascists on the fundamental issue of the relationship between freedom and morality suggests, there is a deep ideological affinity between liberals and Islamofascists. They do not simply share hatred of President Bush. They are bound by more than their enemies.

An examination of the history of Islam and of the relationship of the West to it shows that there are always those in the West who will make common cause with Islam. Without their aid, Islam would have long ago collapsed.

Out of pure expediency or Realpolitik, Western merchants will trade with Islamic enemies of the West and even sell them arms, and Western powers will ally themselves with Islam, as when the Austro-Hungarian Empire allied with the Ottoman Empire in World War I or when the United States and the Soviet Union vied for allies in the Middle East during the Cold War.

Out of what might be called ideological expediency, some in the West have attempted to take ideological advantage of the Islamic threat. During the height of religious strife in Europe, for instance, many Protestants saw in Islam a critique of Catholicism similar to their own, and many Catholics saw in it a warning against schism and heresy. This ideological expediency can develop into a genuine ideological affinity, as is happening today and has been happening for hundreds of years.

For a striking example of this ideological expediency/affinity, ask yourself who wrote the following poem, translated from the original German. Hint: the author was not a Muslim.

A Song to Mahomet

See the mountain spring
Flash gladdening
Like a glance of stars;
Higher than the clouds
Kindly spirits
Fuelled his youth
In thickets twixt the crags.
Brisk as a young blade
Out of cloud he dances
Down to marble rocks
And leaps again
Skyward exultant.
Down passages that hang from peaks
He chases pebbles many-coloured,
Early like a leader striding
Snatches up and carries onward
Brother torrents.
Flowers are born beneath his footprint
In the valley down below,
From his breathing
Pastures live.
Yet no valley of the shadows
Can contain him
And no flowers that clasp his knees,
Blandishing with looks of love;
To the lowland bursts his way,
A snake uncoiling.
Freshets nestle
Flocking to his side. He comes
Into the lowland, silver sparkling
And with him the lowland sparkles,
And the lowland rivers call,
Mountain freshets call exultant:
Brother, take your brothers with you,
With you to your ancient father,
To the everlasting ocean,
Who with open arms awaits us,
Arms which, ah, open in vain
To clasp us who are craving for him;
Avid sands consume us
In the desert, sun overhead
Will suck our blood, blocked by a hill
To pools we shrink! Brother, take us,
Take your lowland brothers with you,
Take your brothers of the mountains,
To your father take us all!
Join me then!
And now he swells
More lordly still; one single kin,
They loft the prince and bear him high
Onward as he rolls triumphant,
Naming countries, in his track
Towns and cities come to be.
On he rushes, unrelenting,
Leaves the turrets tipped with flame,
Marble palaces, creation
Of his plentitude, behind him.
Cedar houses he like Atlas
Carries on his giant shoulders;
Flags a thousand rustling flutter
In the air above his head,
Testifying to his glory.
So he bears his brothers, bears
His treasures and his children surging
In a wave of joy tumultuous
To their waiting father?s heart.

Who is it who says that Muhammad makes the lowland sparkle, that flowers spring from his footsteps and cities from his track? Who is it who celebrates the tumultuous joy of Muhammad?s followers and the plenitude of his creation?
"A Song to Mahomet" was written in 1772-1773 by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the least romantic of the German Romantics, the least insane of the German intellectual giants of the last 250 years.

Goethe was not an aberration. Anyone wishing to understand the long tradition of Western affinity with Islam, a tradition that is as old as Islam itself, should read Islam and the West by Bernard Lewis, especially the chapter "Gibbon on Muhammad," in which Lewis says

"the image of Muhammad as a wise, tolerant [!], unmystical [!], and undogmatic [!] ruler became widespread in the period of the Enlightenment, and it finds expression in writers as diverse as Goethe, Condercet, and Voltaire." [exclamation points added]

What started as the (rather absurd) idea that Muhammad was a forerunner of Luther and Calvin and that Islam could as a result be an ally of the Protestants against Roman Catholicism morphed into the (also absurd) idea that Islam was refreshingly free from the dogmatism of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular and that it could as a result be an ally of the Enlightenment against the forces of darkness, that is, Christianity, which in turn morphed into the (beyond absurd) idea that Islam is an innocent victim of the warmongering Bush Administration and that as a result progressives in the United States should stand with the resistance in Iraq against imperialism, Zionism, Neo-Conservatism, capitalism, globalism, unilateralism, consumerism, racism, sexism, speciesism, heterosexism, homophobia, Halliburton, homework, hot weather, hurricanes, homemakers, electoral fraud, SUVs, McDonalds, AIDS, Starbucks, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, conservative bloggers, censorship, carnivorousness, second-hand smoke, the CIA, cell phone rays, and impurities in paint thinner.

George Orwell said that only university professors could be stupid enough to believe that the capitalist democracies were no better than Nazi Germany. Stupidity, or at least education, must be more widespread in our day because an equivalent belief is held by respectable churchman and tenured radical alike. America is no better than Iraq under Saddam Hussein or Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini, they think, and we should not impose our way of life on others.

Of course, most Americans had more in mind imposing death on Hussein and Khomeini than our way of life on Iraq and Iran, but the charm of this belief is that it appeals to robed religious leaders as much as to campus radicals in academic gowns, not to speak of similarly appareled sheiks.

Liberals posing as Christians reason, if one can call it reason, as follows: Sexual exploitation is all around us, along with crass materialism and a callous disregard for the unfortunate. Americans are spoiled, selfish, and stupid. Our insatiable desire to remake the world in our image is matched only by our ignorance of it. Who are we to tell people how they should live? The United States is the only country ever to drop atomic bombs on anyone. We have tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, but we begrudge other nations even a few. What hypocrites! What right do we have to tell Iran and North Korea that they can?t have nuclear weapons?

The radicals fear that we will create a virtuous Iraq, these Christians that we will create an immoral one. The trouble is that nowadays one can hardly tell the difference between the radicals and some religious leaders. Certainly the difference between debauched sinners and Anglican bishops is increasingly indiscernible. Madonna is a slut who found religion and went whoring after false gods; they might as well make her an archbishop of certain denominations.

The bishops of some churches think that we could have peace for the asking. We have asked. Have they not heard the answer? "Peace! Peace!" they cry, though there is no peace. They fancy themselves prophetic witnesses to an unjust society. Unjust it may be, though not as unjust as they think, but if they are prophets, all that is necessary for prophecy is to repeat what network anchors say. They style themselves learned and get their information from newspapers, television, government radio, and oddball magazines. What have these prophets ever foreseen?

They call us to charity and denounce us for donating our best blood and hundreds of billions of dollars to the freedom of Iraq. They say that we are addicted to consumer goods and shriek when we spend our money to help the most downtrodden. They call us racists when we fight for the well being of Arabs. They call us Crusaders as we spread religious freedom. They call us selfish as we give them money. They attribute our prosperity to exploitation of the Third World, but never refuse the donations we give them out of our allegedly ill-gotten gains. They repeat enemy propaganda and huffily complain that we doubt their patriotism.

Islamofascists, religious big wigs, and campus radicals say that America is ruled by plutocrats who use sex to sell to a consumer society. Then Saudi moneybags buy girls from India and Pakistan, American prelates hide child molesters from the police, and campus radicals, who say that what they do in the privacy of their own bedrooms is none of our business, celebrate ?transgressive? sexual acts in public. Certainly, these groups deserve each other. But do the rest of us deserve them?

1916
Politics & Religion / Russia Provides Syria w/ Ammo, Training
« on: September 29, 2005, 10:35:28 AM »
Hmm, given the current context this is an interesting tidbit.

Russia to supply Syria with ammunition, train officers
17:47   |   29/ 09/ 2005
 
MOSCOW, September 29 (RIA Novosti) - Russia will provide Syria with small arms ammunition and allow more Syrian students to study at Russian defense ministry universities, a ministry spokesman said Thursday.

Syrian Chief of Staff General Ali Habib, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, and Chief of Staff Yury Baluyevsky reached this agreement during talks in Moscow September 27-28, the source said.

"[The parties] agreed on small supplies of ammunition for small arms to Syria and doubling the number of Syrian students in Russian higher education institutions under the Ministry of Defense. There are about 30 Syrian officers studying in Russia now," the spokesman said.

The source also said the parties had not signed any high-level agreements during the talks.

While in Russia, the Syrian general visited the Instrument Production Design Bureau in Tula (about 200 km south of Moscow), which has developed and produced 130 types of arms and military equipment for the Russian armed forces.

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20050929/41548890.html

1917
Politics & Religion / Self Defense, a Human Right
« on: September 27, 2005, 02:58:10 PM »
Interesting pro-Second Amendment site that seeks to convert the uninitiated:

http://www.a-human-right.com/

1918
Politics & Religion / A Survey of Realism
« on: September 27, 2005, 09:50:09 AM »
This lengthy piece exams current American policy through a realpolitik "realism" lens. Raising more questions than answers, the piece straddles one of my philosophical divides; on the one hand I think Machiavelli and Hobbes etc. had fairly accurate (and often grossly misunderstood) views on politics and the exercise of power. Flip side is that I think big ideas like "freedom," "democracy," and "self-determination" all hold a power the realists tend to overlook or at least minimize. A thought provoking piece, all in all.


September 2005

Bush and the Realists

Gary Rosen

Foreign-policy ?realism? has never been an easy sell in America. Its emergence as a mature school of thought in the early years of the cold war is generally credited to Hans J. Morgenthau, a German-Jewish refugee whose self-assigned task was to cure his adopted country of its inveterate and, to his mind, reckless idealism. As Morgenthau argued in his classic Politics Among Nations (1948), the U.S. could no longer afford to indulge the ?crusading? mentality of Woodrow Wilson, especially when confronted by the no less dangerously universalistic claims of Soviet Communism. In dealing with the USSR, American resistance had to be tempered by compromise and engagement, by a concern for stability and order. Both superpowers had legitimate interests, the mutual recognition of which, Morgenthau insisted, was the only hope for survival in the nuclear age.

Realist prudence prevailed often enough during the long decades of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry, but, to Morgenthau?s dismay, it proved impossible to exorcise the ideological dimension of the conflict from American politics and discourse. In a nation persuaded of the world-historical significance of its own democratic principles, statesmen might practice realpolitik but would hesitate to avow it. Realism?s directives were what gifted advisers like Dean Acheson, George Kennan, and Henry Kissinger whispered to Presidents behind closed doors (or urged in their own writings), not the stuff of stump speeches and party platforms.

This is not to say that realism has lacked American constituencies. In the academic field of international relations, self-proclaimed ?neorealists? have flourished for decades, tracing their intellectual roots to Morgenthau and, more distantly, to the bleak, unforgiving analyses of Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Hobbes. Being modern political scientists, they have tried to put their work on a properly scientific footing; ?rigor? and ?parsimony? are their tests of excellence. Where others see great variety in the motives of states, academic realists dwell on the unrelenting demands of power and survival. Scholars who share this approach have produced an enormous and (as any graduate student in the field can attest) ever-growing constellation of competing hypotheses, models, and case studies.

In the political sphere, realism was once a prominent element in the foreign-policy establishments of both parties, undergirding the cold-war doctrine of containment. Since the Vietnam war, however, it has had a decidedly mixed career. Realist thought has largely faded from view among Democrats, who for decades have tended either to shrink from the assertion of American power or to insist on its strict validation by international norms and institutions?positions difficult to reconcile with the unsentimental pursuit of the national interest. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was Jimmy Carter?s national security adviser, is often mentioned as an exception to this rule, but he was controversial for his hawkishness even at the height of his influence, and remains a marginal figure among Democratic policy-makers.

Which leaves the Republican party, the contentious if usually accommodating home of realpolitik since the 1960?s. Though neoconservatives and other cold warriors never trusted Kissinger and his heirs, they tended to grant them at least a grudging respect. The realists who served in the Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and first Bush administrations (to say nothing of Nixon and Bush, Sr. themselves) may have been ?soft? on Communism, as their detractors on the Right often charged, but they shared certain fundamentals with the more ideological factions of the conservative camp. They recognized the nature of the Soviet threat, took seriously the balance of power, and knew that treaties and diplomacy, however useful, were no substitute for American military might and credibility.

Running for President in 2000, George W. Bush gave every indication that he would extend this Republican tradition. Though he struggled at times with the finer points of international relations, famously flubbing a reporter?s pop quiz, he was clear about his strategic priorities. A Bush administration would focus on major issues like trade and military readiness and on improving relations with major powers like China and Russia. Writing in Foreign Affairs in the lead-up to the election, then-campaign adviser Condoleezza Rice argued for ?a disciplined and consistent foreign policy,? one that, in contrast to the Clinton record, would separate ?the important from the trivial.? Her article was titled ?Promoting the National Interest,? a phrase that in itself spoke volumes.

But then came 9/11, and very soon thereafter the candidate who had mocked ?nation-building? and recommended an international posture of ?humble? strength emerged as a President of unapologetically neoconservative convictions. A similar conversion seems to have been experienced by Rice, his alter ego on foreign affairs. In the years since 9/11, this transformation has been noted?and lamented?in many quarters. But the shock of it has fallen hardest perhaps on realists, both inside and outside the Republican party, whose expectations have been rudely disappointed.

Indeed, the President has gone out of his way to signal that his own most controversial policies, particularly the decision to overthrow and replace the regime of Saddam Hussein, have sprung in part from a conscious repudiation of Morgenthau?s legacy. As he declared in June 2004 to the graduating class of the U.S. Air Force Academy,

Some who call themselves ?realists? question whether the spread of democracy in the Middle East should be any concern of ours. But the realists in this case have lost contact with a fundamental reality. America has always been less secure when freedom is in retreat. America is always more secure when freedom is on the march.

It is no surprise, then, that realists of various stripes have been among the administration?s most determined critics. Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to Ford and Bush p?re (and Rice?s one-time mentor), registered his discontent early on, arguing that Iraq would be a costly diversion from the war on terrorism. In the pages of the quarterly National Interest, the Nixon prot?g?s Robert F. Ellsworth and Dimitri K. Simes have objected strenuously to Bush?s unilateralism and aggressive promotion of democracy. So has Owen Harries, the journal?s distinguished former editor. On Capitol Hill, Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a self-styled realist and likely contender for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008, has voiced increasing skepticism about the war. Even usually quiescent realist scholars, including many of the biggest names in the field, have gotten into the act, speaking out against the invasion of Iraq and, in its wake, helping to form an anti-Bush advocacy group called the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy.

To top off this shift into opposition, the realist camp now has two new manifestos. Though both written by senior members of the guild, they are strikingly different books. Stephen M. Walt of Harvard, a leading international-relations theorist and a charter member of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, has composed a blistering critique in the form of an academic treatise. Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a veteran of several Republican administrations (including the current one), has dispatched a polite but firm diplomatic protest, a plea for a new course. Walt is the naysayer, Haass the consensus-builder. One might think of them as the bad cop and the good cop of realist dissent.

Walt?s point of departure is neatly summed up by his title, Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy (W.W. Norton, 320 pp., $27.95). Since the end of the cold war, he writes, Americans have vigorously debated how best to use their country?s unsurpassed military, economic, and cultural might. But we have failed to consider how this behemoth looks to other nations. ?In a world of independent states,? Walt observes, ?the strongest is always a potential threat to the rest, if only because they cannot be entirely sure what it is going to do with the power at its command.? A state enjoying such primacy is especially threatening when filled with righteous indignation, as the U.S. has been since 9/11, and when led by a President like George W. Bush, whose indifference to international opinion is matched only by his ?smug overconfidence? in America?s ability to go it alone.

Yet, even in their relative weakness, other states are not without recourse against American primacy. Although ?balancing? in the classic realist sense?that is, by means of a grand countervailing alliance?has not occurred, ?softer? forms of balancing are not difficult to find. We have seen in recent years not just deepening strategic ties among China, Russia, and Europe, but also more cooperation among ?so-called rogue states? like Iran and North Korea. As for a ?nonstate group? like al Qaeda, its preferred balancing option has been the ?asymmetric strategy? of terrorism, which seeks to alter U.S. behavior ?by persuading it that its current policies are too expensive to sustain.?

Weaker states, especially allies, also have been able to accomplish their own ends through various tactics of accommodation. One of these is what Walt calls ?bonding,? typified by Tony Blair?s deft exploitation of the ?special relationship? between Great Britain and the U.S. Though derided by critics as Bush?s ?poodle,? the British prime minister has been able to use his influence to win a prominence for himself and his country that otherwise would not have been available. Still more impressive as a tool to sway American power is domestic political ?penetration.? Here Walt?s chief example?in fact, the book?s most extended case study?is the ?Israel lobby.? In a democracy, he emphasizes, such pressure is perfectly legitimate, but there is no denying its distorting influence. Since ?the objective [his emphasis] case for a close U.S.-Israel partnership is weaker today than it was in the past,? the explanation for the tight bond can lie only in ?Israel?s unmatched ability to manipulate the American political system.?

Resistance to U.S. primacy is inevitable, Walt believes, but its present-day intensity is not. By openly defying the interests and expectations of other nations, the Bush administration has made American power seem threatening in an unprecedented way. What sort of grand strategy, then, would better suit America?s extraordinary position of dominance?

Walt?s own blueprint entails a fundamental shift in America?s global posture, one that would ?reassure? friends and foes alike of our benign intentions. He labels it ?offshore balancing,? and its essence is simple: the U.S. would dramatically reduce the overall ?footprint? of its military power, especially in Europe and the Middle East, and directly intervene only in instances of ?overt aggression? against our ?vital interests,? leaving the maintenance of stability in key regions to ?local actors.? More important perhaps, the U.S. would stop ?telling the world what to do and how to live? and stop ?trying to impose democracy at the point of a gun,? as we have so disastrously attempted to do in Iraq. If Americans lack the ?wisdom and self-restraint? to pursue such a course, he warns, we may well awake one day soon to discover new international arrangements ?whose main purpose,? in a sad replay of our own cold-war strategy, ?is to contain us.?

Walt plainly intends Taming American Power as a provocation. He takes sharply contrarian positions on a range of difficult issues, from nuclear proliferation to the Arab-Israeli conflict, emphasizing in each instance just how wrong a turn he thinks the U.S. has taken under its benighted current leadership. Equal parts professor and polemicist, he is eager to demonstrate realism?s analytical virtues?its austerity, its clinical detachment, its focus on the fundamentals of interest and power.

What is refreshing about Walt?s brand of Bush-bashing is that, unlike many liberal critics, he is no earnest internationalist, looking expectantly toward the day when the world?s swords will be beaten into plowshares. He is unembarrassed by American primacy, and has no moral compunctions about the pursuit of American interests. His objection is not that U.S. policy under the Bush administration has been selfish but that it has been dangerously counterproductive, the source of a mounting international backlash.

It is a peculiar realist calculus, however, with which Walt tries to support this hyperbolic claim. As evidence of rising opposition to the United States, he begins by offering up the polling numbers that have become common exhibits in the foreign-policy debate: the U.S., he reminds us, has come to be seen in an increasingly unfavorable light by much of the rest of the world. Such news is troubling, to be sure, but it is difficult to see why it would figure in the reckonings of a hard-edged realist, particularly one who, like Walt, is so frankly distrustful of popular judgment in foreign affairs. Is not the crux of the issue how states behave?

Yet on this point he fails to produce the goods. By Walt?s own admission, U.S. power under Bush has not generated the countervailing alliance?the ?hard? balancing?that realist theory would predict. Other nations have resisted specific American policies and imposed real costs on U.S. action, but, as Walt concedes, they have not contemplated the sort of ?encircling coalitions that Wilhelmine Germany or the Soviet Union provoked.?

To explain this ?anomalous? situation, Walt recites a catalog of factors, only to note in passing that the U.S. is not seen as ?an especially aggressive country,? having never sought ?to conquer and dominate large sections of the globe.? Putting the point more explicitly, one might say instead that, in contrast to most other ascendant powers in the history of the world, the U.S. has not aspired to empire, and has lacked such ambitions largely because it is a liberal democracy whose own identity springs from a declared commitment to the right of self-government and to the independence of nations.

Orthodox ?neorealism? frowns on such ?unit-level analysis? (as it is known in the jargon of the field); the character of a particular state is not supposed to matter as compared with the quantum of raw power at its disposal. But America?s well-known aversion to dominion is the key to understanding how other nations gauge its intentions. As it happens, most countries, even those deeply unhappy with the Bush administration?s policies, do not appear to share Walt?s view that neoconservative Washington hopes ?to govern vast areas of the world by force.?

No grand alliance has formed against the U.S., one might also add, because the world increasingly shares the Bush administration?s urgency in fighting Islamist terrorism. Although Walt dismisses the American effort as a ?crusade,? it is one in which many countries now have a serious and growing stake. Trans-Atlantic cooperation on this front is already substantial and, in the wake of the London bombings, will surely intensify (to say nothing of such recent wonders as France?s active collaboration with the U.S. in confronting Syria). As for the Islamic world itself, the red-hot center of anti-American sentiment, barbarous assaults in Sharm el-Sheikh, Baghdad, Jakarta, Istanbul, and elsewhere have finally prompted second thoughts about the piety of the jihadists. In the fatwas of clerics and in Islamic public opinion, suicide attacks are starting to win condemnation. Even the UN is preparing, at long last, to call terrorism by its proper name. More of the world, in short, seems to be coming around to the view that the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, far from being (as Walt would have it) a ?strategy? for reversing hated policies, poses a nihilistic threat to any kind of civilized order.

It is also worth recalling that Americans themselves were familiar with Islamist terrorism well before 9/11. Indeed, for years they have watched the citizens of Israel, an ally and fellow democracy, endure the vicious onslaught of Muslim ?martyrs.? Without claiming to possess Walt?s ?objective? understanding of these matters, one might venture that this sense of shared trauma and threat has been a chief source of continued American-Israeli solidarity, even more significant than the influence of the Jewish advocacy groups and public officials in whom Walt takes an obsessive, almost unseemly, interest. In a similar vein, the best explanation for Tony Blair?s enthusiastic support of President Bush may lie not in the quid pro quos of ?bonding??after all, he has often returned home from Washington empty-handed?but in his endlessly and eloquently stated loathing for Baathist and Islamist totalitarianism. Such motives find no place in Walt?s reductive paradigms.

As for ?offshore balancing??Walt?s proposed solution to the international woes of the United States?it is a strategy of retreat, and would surely be interpreted as such by our enemies. Its toll on American credibility, even with our vast military and economic resources, would be incalculably high. As a response to anti-Americanism in the Middle East, it would likely backfire, drawing justifiable charges of hypocrisy and neglect. The people of the region may have mixed feelings about democracy-promotion by the U.S., but they certainly have had enough of the sheiks and strongmen on whom Walt, following the lead of too many American administrations, would rely for stability.

Are Stephen Walt?s views ?isolationist?? He bristles at the suggestion, and with some justice. But that is their unmistakable valence in today?s foreign-policy debate. For confirmation, one need look no further than the signed declarations of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, where ?realism? takes the form of denouncing America?s incipient ?empire? and where Walt and his academic fellow-travelers have found, among the nativist minions of Patrick J. Buchanan and the libertarian ideologues of the Cato Institute, their natural allies.

Richard Haass, it is safe to say, is no petition-signer or rhetorical bomb-thrower. The director of policy planning at the State Department under Colin Powell before leaving in 2003 to lead the Council on Foreign Relations, he is known to have clashed with the administration?s neoconservatives over Iraq and other big strategic questions. Like Brent Scowcroft, his boss at the National Security Council in the first Bush administration, Haass is the voice of the sober, moderate realist establishment. Though now very much on the outside looking in, he is someone who, in a future Republican administration, could easily wind up with a prominent job.

His book, The Opportunity: America?s Moment to Alter History?s Course (Public Affairs, 242 pp., $25.00), possesses none of the bite and theoretical pretension of Walt?s, but it takes aim at many of the same targets. Haass, too, laments the Bush administration?s unilateralism, fearing that it will stimulate a return to harsh balance-of-power politics. He has no taste for assertive democracy-promotion, arguing that the U.S. must concentrate instead on the external actions of other states. And he considers the war in Iraq both ?unwarranted??Saddam Hussein, he suggests, could have been contained by enhanced sanctions?and far too dear in terms of American resources and attention.

But rehearsing familiar criticisms is not Haass?s aim; he has an agenda of his own. Whatever his differences with recent U.S. policy?and despite the frightening new threats at large in the world?he believes that we live at a uniquely fortunate moment in global affairs, a moment (as his title proclaims) of profound ?opportunity.? The end of the cold war has left behind the past century?s great ideological divide. More countries than ever before are democratic and market-oriented. Most important of all,

For the first time in modern history, the major powers of the day?currently, the United States, Europe, China, Russia, Japan, possibly India?are not engaged in a classic struggle for domination at each other?s expense. There are few contests over territory. For the foreseeable future, war between or among them borders on the highly unlikely and, in some instances, the unthinkable.

The task for the United States, according to Haass, is to turn this still-nascent harmony into something more permanent, into ?rules, policies, and institutions? that will allow the world to manage the formidable goods and evils of globalization. To achieve such ?integration,? Americans will have to think more broadly, moving beyond their fixation on fighting terrorism, and they will have to check their impulse to act alone. Only ?effective multilateralism,? in which the U.S. accepts limits on its own actions and seeks consensus on the urgent issues of the day, can ensure the continued advance of peace and prosperity. Now as always in modern history, Haass writes, the balance between the ?forces of order and disorder? will be ?largely determined by the degree to which the major powers . . . can agree on rules of the road?and impose them on those who reject them.?

Although Haass cites the post-Napoleonic ?concert of Europe? as a precedent for such cooperation, what he has in mind is more far-reaching, and in many respects defies conventional realist thinking. It is up to the U.S., he argues, to persuade the world to accept a range of positive commitments that impinge on traditional notions of sovereignty. Where genocide threatens, the international community should accept ?a right and a duty to act to protect innocent life.? States that promote or even passively abet terrorism should be understood to be committing ?an act of war.? Regimes that engage in nuclear proliferation should face the strongest of sanctions, ?not to exclude attack and removal from power.?

In the economic realm, Haass would press nations rich and poor to trade ever more freely, subject to the liberalizing superintendence of the World Trade Organization (WTO). At the same time, the U.S. must attend to the abiding backwardness of whole regions of the world: ?We need to absorb the idea that the failure of other countries to provide political and economic opportunity to their citizens is not just a humanitarian or moral problem but a strategic one as well, as such societies all too often spawn radicals and terrorists.? The ?safest and best way? to deal with the worst of these international offenders, Haass believes, is to co-opt them with social and cultural advantages and with rising living standards: not regime change but regime ?evolution? should be our watchword.

If the U.S. is to accomplish even part of this agenda, Haass concludes, we must reacquaint ourselves with the etiquette of international leadership. Consultations with the other major powers need to be ?frequent and genuine,? particularly on issues of war and peace, and the American point of view cannot always prevail. We must play for the long run, not for transient victories. ?Diplomacy need not be a dirty word.?

Haass is hardly alone in wishing to change the tone set by American foreign policy in recent years. Indeed, the Bush administration itself appears to have come some way toward his view. For all the attention focused on the nomination of the ?undiplomatic? John Bolton?arguably, a perfect fit for the peculiar perversities of the UN?the administration has been impressively involved of late on the diplomatic front, not least in the frenetic globe-trotting of Condoleezza Rice, who since becoming Secretary of State has spent much of her time consulting, cajoling, and confronting world leaders.

In any case, Haass goes too far in what he expects the U.S. to cede in such powwows, describing if not a veto for other nations then certainly a substantial check, one that few American Presidents are likely to accept any time soon. Foreign policy is not an overseas popularity contest, and even our most sincere diplomatic overtures are unlikely to reverse the tide of anti-Americanism, which is a force in the world with a life very much of its own. That does not mean we should be unconcerned about the perceived ?legitimacy? of U.S. policy; as Haass rightly argues, the judgment of the rest of the world may not necessarily be sound, but the support of other countries can help us to shape the international climate to our own goals.

Unfortunately, Haass?s own version of those goals is at once overly ambitious and woefully shortsighted. There is, in the first place, a gross mismatch between the worthy ends that he proposes and the modest means available to achieve them. Reaching into his diplomatic pouch, he pulls out the familiar tools of realist statecraft: ?carrots and sticks,? interests and incentives, rules and institutions. Nowhere, however, does he suggest what, precisely, would induce the other major powers to accept the changes he envisions.

China and Russia, in particular, may be willing to give up some measure of their sovereignty in order to achieve the fullest benefits of trade under the WTO, but on the issues of security emphasized by Haass?genocide, terrorism, nuclear proliferation?it is hard to imagine circumstances in which they would endorse ?rules of the road? encouraging muscular action against offenders. For China and Russia alike, after all, sovereignty is what protects and bolsters their authoritarian regimes.

There is no obvious or easy solution to this problem, but Haass is reluctant to confront it at all. For him, the only option for the U.S. is to wait for ?integration,? especially of the economic sort, to work its magic on the Chinese dragon and the Russian bear, unleashing in due course the forces of political liberalization. In the meantime, we may issue, sotto voce, an occasional human-rights protest but must not consider real penalties in the form of privileges lost or sanctions imposed. Provoked though we may be, the U.S. must forgo any ?temptation to actively work against a fellow major power,? and taking a stand on democracy and human rights ?is rarely something that can be allowed to crowd out other objectives.?

The fact that this is standard-issue realism cannot hide its ugliness. While it is true that the U.S. needs the cooperation of Beijing and Moscow, the converse is also true, and can be made contingent to some degree on political progress (or at least on an absence of political regression). Pressing such issues is important not only for the sake of the reformers and dissidents to whose side the U.S. should rally. In the case of China in particular, it is incumbent upon us to recognize the looming tension there between dynamic economic and social change, on the one hand, and political stasis and oppression, on the other. To assume that China?s present course will ensure stability is to share the complacency of its Communist rulers.

Still more disappointing is Haass?s impulse to hedge his high-minded principles of integration even in areas that do not require confronting a ?fellow? major power. Among his stated priorities is ?taking on? Islamist terrorism, and he finds little merit in the argument, voiced by Walt among others, that such violence is an answer to particular American or Western transgressions. The aims of ?existential? terrorists are so far-reaching, Haass writes, ?that they could never be satisfied through policy give-and-take or compromise?; in this category he makes a point of including not just the adherents of al Qaeda but also ?those Palestinian terrorists who reject a Jewish state.?

And yet, in almost the next breath, Haass declares the need for high-level American pressure to bring about, as soon as possible, a Palestinian state, in order to improve ?perceptions of the United States? and our ?diplomatic prospects? in the Arab world. Whether this state would stand any real chance of eluding the grip of the Islamists does not appear to interest him; it is enough that the Palestinian Authority?s new leadership has ?disavowed? terrorism.

For establishing a Palestinian state, Haass?s time frame is tomorrow or sooner; for advancing democratic reform, it is eventually, if then. This patience is doubly regrettable with respect to the Arab world, where Haass plainly recognizes the nature of the threat we face and its origins in the region?s isolation and ferocious resistance to modernity. But he would deal with the problem in the mild, temporizing way that passes for assertiveness among realists:

[Our] public statements and private advice can create support for change and help launch debates. Economic resources can empower civil society. Exchanges that bring students and young professionals to the United States can introduce new ideas and provide valuable experience. Teacher and language training, translation of texts, the adoption of modern curricula?all can improve the quality of education. Radio, television, and the Internet can be used to . . .

And so forth, and so on. What is notable about this list is that, in one form or another, such initiatives have been under way for some time, certainly since well before the attacks of 9/11. Why, one might wonder, is it only now, as Haass himself notes, that we seem to be making progress in promoting reform among the Arabs?

The answer, of course, is the U.S. campaign in Iraq. Even by the testimony of some of the Middle East?s anti-American stalwarts, the emergence in Iraq of an embattled experiment in constitutional self-government has had an electrifying effect on the prospects for democratic change in the region. Popular expectations have shifted, and so too have political realities, from Lebanon and Syria to Saudi Arabia and Egypt. In the careful ledger sheet that Haass uses to assess the war in Iraq, he records many debits, pointing to the undeniable costs of the American invasion. But he fails to record any credits (except for the fall of Saddam himself), and certainly none for the Middle East?s recent and unprecedented turn toward liberalization.

?Good motives give assurance against deliberately bad policies,? Hans J. Morgenthau cautioned, in an axiom cited by Haass, but ?they do not guarantee the moral goodness and political success of the policies they inspire.? One might go further and say, as Morgenthau himself did, that good motives can blind us to the requirements of successful policy, as they have sometimes done in Iraq. But Morgenthau?s prudential advice also has its limits.

It is true that good motives?by which he meant moral aims??guarantee? nothing. But the same can be said of every motive, even the clear-eyed pursuit of a starkly defined national interest. Indeed, if events of the past several years demonstrate anything, it is the na?vet? of confining American foreign policy to narrow questions of interest and to the maintenance of amicable relations among the major powers. Mere cooperation among states is no promise of peace and security when what goes on within states, large and small, has assumed such potentially lethal proportions. In this respect, as President Bush correctly observed in his June 2004 speech at the Air Force Academy, realism has proved a most unrealistic guide to foreign policy.

None of this makes it easier?or, in every instance, practical?to put freedom ?on the march,? in Bush?s phrase. But our predicament leaves few other options, and we will never discover the right combination of ?carrots and sticks? for the job if, for fear of offending our friends, we resign ourselves to a status quo that nurtures our enemies.

Gary Rosen is the managing editor of Commentary and the editor of The Right War? The Conservative Debate on Iraq, which has just been published by Cambridge University Press.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=12002033_1

1919
Politics & Religion / JC ain't PC
« on: September 27, 2005, 09:11:37 AM »
As an agnostic I have a hard time getting worked up about most religious tempests. Still, the tizzy inspired here about a reference to Christ in a speech to Ivy League freshpersons inspires more than a shake of the head.

September 27, 2005, 8:12 a.m.
?God Fearing? Dartmouth
Ivy overreaction.

By Stefan Beck

It's become a truism that student government is the bailiwick of shallow, egotistical resume-padders. Tracy Flick, the junior-varsity Lady Macbeth of the 1999 movie Election, was instantly recognizable, as was her nemesis, Tammy Metzler. Remember Tammy's speech? "The same pathetic charade happens every year, and everyone makes the same pathetic promises just so they can put it on their transcripts to get into college." Hard to argue with that. The odd thing is that sometimes the Tracy Flicks go off to college and do it all over again.

A few days ago, a friend of mine pointed me to a Convocation speech given by Noah Riner '06, Dartmouth's student-body president, to the class of '09. I scanned the page, a pastiche of quotes by Martin Luther King Jr., Shakespeare, Bono. Why had my friend given me this? "It mentions Jesus," he explained. "People will go berserk."

So it does. It mentions Jesus, and then Bono mentions Jesus, and then Riner passes the baton to Dr. King ? perhaps thinking nobody will wise up to the Lord's presence. I confess that at this point, I thought my friend was indulging a bit of right-wing paranoia. Surely nothing as banal, as reliably soporific, as Riner's address could rankle anyone. Surely people didn't even listen to these things.

As it happens, I couldn't have been more wrong. The bored work in mysterious ways, and a number of Dartmouth students saw the speech as a fine occasion for an attention-grabbing moral tantrum. The Daily Dartmouth's "Verbum Ultimum" allowed that "Riner had every right, as a member of a community that values the freedom of speech, to speak freely about what matters to him." But he chose an "inappropriate forum" ? perish the thought ? and "[preached] his faith from a commandeered pulpit." Clearly, Riner is corrupting the youth of Hanover. Somebody fetch the hemlock.

The Student Assembly's vice president for student life (savor that deliciously Orwellian title), Kaelin Goulet '07, resigned immediately. "I consider his choice of topic for the Convocation speech reprehensible and an abuse of power," she said. Addressing Riner directly, she wrote: "Your first opportunity to represent Student Assembly to the incoming freshmen was appalling. You embarrass the organization; you embarrass yourself. . . . I pity the freshmen in Leede Arena yesterday."

Got all that? Pity is something you feel for hurricane refugees, not for the "victims" of a convocation speech. Woe betide the student who hears Christ's name in an "inappropriate forum"! It's almost as though Goulet saw Riner as Father Karas and the freshmen as a host of demons, writhing in agony beneath a spray of verbal holy water. This is condescension distilled to its essence. Usually it's the college acting in loco parentis, not the other students. What we are witnessing here is trickle-down ideology, with students employed as a sort of Securitate for their administrative overseers.

Could Goulet really have felt anything like the outrage and disappointment on display in her letters? Let's examine Riner's sole reference to Jesus:

Jesus' message of redemption is simple. People are imperfect, and there are consequences for our actions. He gave His life for our sin so that we wouldn't have to bear the penalty of the law; so we could see love. The problem is me; the solution is God's love: Jesus on the cross, for us.
It may be unusual for a student speech, but the Edict of Worms it is not.

Another Student Assembly member, Tim Andreadis '07, complained that Riner "did not clearly label his religiously charged comments as reflecting his own beliefs." A lack of clear labels ? that's the real problem, isn't it? Just as Andreadis doubtless expects his plastic baggies to be clearly labeled a choking hazard, so he expects every word out of a fellow student's mouth to be accompanied by an explicit disclaimer. Who needs in loco parentis when so many students are big enough to pull their own Huggies on?

And let's not leave out Paul Heintz '06, whose crudely hieroglyphic "Guy & Fellow" comic strip "parodied" Riner's speech. In the strip, a stick figure with Riner's head says, "Jesus, together you and I shall rule the world and vanquish all those infidels and looters and rioters." Pot-smoking Jesus replies, "Yo, chill out, dawg. Take a hit of this sh** and chill the f*** out." Pot-smoking Jesus! How marvelously transgressive! Now have a gingersnap and back to the nursery with you.

As responses to the speech go, this had at least the merit of being too demotic to match the self-righteousness of all those pompous op-eds and public resignations. Of course, this made it no less embarrassing.

Is it worth training the Doppler radar on this teacup tempest? Higher education will always have its dull speeches, its Tracy Flicks, its outsize outrage. After a while, most students will forget about this and go on to something useful. But none of that is the real story. The fascinating ? and disappointing ? thing is that something as ordinary and blameless as religious belief should seem such a terrifying menace to college students. And what delicate little Hummels those students have become: They use tepid terms like "community" and "inappropriate" and "alienating" and then congratulate themselves for their sensitivity. I pray they never have to face something more trying than words ? but I certainly wouldn't count on it.

? Stefan Beck is assistant editor of the New Criterion.
   
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/beck200509270812.asp

1920
Politics & Religion / Never one to Mince Metaphors
« on: September 26, 2005, 03:48:00 PM »
fighting words
Anti-War, My Foot
The phony peaceniks who protested in Washington.
By Christopher Hitchens
Updated Monday, Sept. 26, 2005, at 11:19 AM PT

Saturday's demonstration in Washington, in favor of immediate withdrawal of coalition forces from Iraq, was the product of an opportunistic alliance between two other very disparate "coalitions." Here is how the New York Times (after a front-page and an inside headline, one of them reading "Speaking Up Against War" and one of them reading "Antiwar Rallies Staged in Washington and Other Cities") described the two constituenciess of the event:
The protests were largely sponsored by two groups, the Answer Coalition, which embodies a wide range of progressive political objectives, and United for Peace and Justice, which has a more narrow, antiwar focus.

The name of the reporter on this story was Michael Janofsky. I suppose that it is possible that he has never before come across "International ANSWER," the group run by the "Worker's World" party and fronted by Ramsey Clark, which openly supports Kim Jong-il, Fidel Castro, Slobodan Milosevic, and the "resistance" in Afghanistan and Iraq, with Clark himself finding extra time to volunteer as attorney for the g?nocidaires in Rwanda. Quite a "wide range of progressive political objectives" indeed, if that's the sort of thing you like. However, a dip into any database could have furnished Janofsky with well-researched and well-written articles by David Corn and Marc Cooper?to mention only two radical left journalists?who have exposed "International ANSWER" as a front for (depending on the day of the week) fascism, Stalinism, and jihadism.

The group self-lovingly calling itself "United for Peace and Justice" is by no means "narrow" in its "antiwar focus" but rather represents a very extended alliance between the Old and the New Left, some of it honorable and some of it redolent of the World Youth Congresses that used to bring credulous priests and fellow-traveling hacks together to discuss "peace" in East Berlin or Bucharest. Just to give you an example, from one who knows the sectarian makeup of the Left very well, I can tell you that the Worker's World Party?Ramsey Clark's core outfit?is the product of a split within the Trotskyist movement. These were the ones who felt that the Trotskyist majority, in 1956, was wrong to denounce the Russian invasion of Hungary. The WWP is the direct, lineal product of that depraved rump. If the "United for Peace and Justice" lot want to sink their differences with such riffraff and mount a joint demonstration, then they invite some principled political criticism on their own account. And those who just tag along ? well, they just tag along.

To be against war and militarism, in the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, is one thing. But to have a record of consistent support for war and militarism, from the Red Army in Eastern Europe to the Serbian ethnic cleansers and the Taliban, is quite another. It is really a disgrace that the liberal press refers to such enemies of liberalism as "antiwar" when in reality they are straight-out pro-war, but on the other side. Was there a single placard saying, "No to Jihad"? Of course not. Or a single placard saying, "Yes to Kurdish self-determination" or "We support Afghan women's struggle"? Don't make me laugh. And this in a week when Afghans went back to the polls, and when Iraqis were preparing to do so, under a hail of fire from those who blow up mosques and U.N. buildings, behead aid workers and journalists, proclaim fatwahs against the wrong kind of Muslim, and utter hysterical diatribes against Jews and Hindus.

Some of the leading figures in this "movement," such as George Galloway and Michael Moore, are obnoxious enough to come right out and say that they support the Baathist-jihadist alliance. Others prefer to declare their sympathy in more surreptitious fashion. The easy way to tell what's going on is this: Just listen until they start to criticize such gangsters even a little, and then wait a few seconds before the speaker says that, bad as these people are, they were invented or created by the United States. That bad, huh? (You might think that such an accusation?these thugs were cloned by the American empire for God's sake?would lead to instant condemnation. But if you thought that, gentle reader, you would be wrong.)

The two preferred metaphors are, depending on the speaker, that the Bin-Ladenists are the fish that swim in the water of Muslim discontent or the mosquitoes that rise from the swamp of Muslim discontent. (Quite often, the same images are used in the same harangue.) The "fish in the water" is an old trope, borrowed from Mao's hoary theory of guerrilla warfare and possessing a certain appeal to comrades who used to pore over the Little Red Book. The mosquitoes are somehow new and hover above the water rather than slip through it. No matter. The toxic nature of the "water" or "swamp" is always the same: American support for Israel. Thus, the existence of the Taliban regime cannot be swamplike, presumably because mosquitoes are born and not made. The huge swamp that was Saddam's Iraq has only become a swamp since 2003. The organized murder of Muslims by Muslims in Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan is only a logical reaction to the summit of globalizers at Davos. The stoning and veiling of women must be a reaction to Zionism. While the attack on the World Trade Center?well, who needs reminding that chickens, or is it mosquitoes, come home to roost?

There are only two serious attempts at swamp-draining currently under way. In Afghanistan and Iraq, agonizingly difficult efforts are in train to build roads, repair hospitals, hand out ballot papers, frame constitutions, encourage newspapers and satellite dishes, and generally evolve some healthy water in which civil-society fish may swim. But in each case, from within the swamp and across the borders, the most poisonous snakes and roaches are being recruited and paid to wreck the process and plunge people back into the ooze. How nice to have a "peace" movement that is either openly on the side of the vermin, or neutral as between them and the cleanup crew, and how delightful to have a press that refers to this partisanship, or this neutrality, as "progressive."

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent books include Love, Poverty, and War and Thomas Jefferson: Author of America.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2126913/

1921
Politics & Religion / Political Rants
« on: September 26, 2005, 02:54:00 PM »
rogt says:
Quote
The right-wingers sure do get defensive when anybody makes the comparison between Iraq and Vietnam.


Don't think there's a defensive element to the piece in question. Sarcastic, ironic, caustic, annoyed, exasperated, and so on, sure, but defensive? That fellow was very much on offense.

Quote
We would never have gotten through (and won) WW1 and WW2 if the American public weren't willing to deal with wars that drag on for years and involve massive casualties. The "lesson of Vietnam" is that the public must be convinced that the cause is worth the price in order for them to support the war. Even if the public is willing to swallow a bunch of BS to justify a war, they're only going to do it for so long.


Don't think the analogy stands up 'cause there are a lot of other variables unaccounted for. The one that galls me most are the 90-second passion plays most issues are turned into by the mewling class, aka the press. Their incessant, usually partisan, polarization makes discourse subtler than "no blood for oil" and the ilk pretty darn difficult. My guess is that if, in 1913 or 1942 every living room had a glass teat sitting in it dishing up predigested bits of polarized pabulum and earnest half witticisms the outcomes of those conflicts would have been vastly different.

1922
Politics & Religion / A Vietnam Analogy Primer
« on: September 26, 2005, 12:34:54 PM »
Why Iraq is not like Vietnam: A Primer for the Geopolitically Challenged

by Mac Johnson
Posted Sep 26, 2005

One of the many negative consequences of America?s defeat in The Vietnam War has been the uncontrolled proliferation of Vietnams since then.

Nicaragua threatened to become another Vietnam.  Lebanon nearly became another Vietnam.  Had Grenada been only slightly larger than a manhole cover and lasted one more hour, it would have become a Caribbean-Style Vietnam.  The invasion of Panama was rapidly degenerating into a Narco-Vietnam, right up until we won.  Likewise, the First Gulf War was certainly developing into another Vietnam, but then sadly, it ended quickly and with few casualties.

For people of a certain age or political stripe, Vietnam is like Elvis: it?s everywhere.  For example, during a long wait at a Chinese Buffet in Georgetown in 1987, Ted Kennedy was reported to have exclaimed ?QUAGMIRE!? and attempted to surrender to a Spanish-speaking busboy.

And that was probably the smart thing to do, because the lesson of Vietnam is: it is best to lose quickly, so as to avoid a quagmire.  It could be argued that the real lesson of Vietnam is that it badly damages a country?s reputation and character to lose at all.  But that is not at all supported by the evidence.  Nope, Vietnam taught us that winners know when to lose immediately.  Entire wars have been fought by countries that have failed to realize this.

No country was therefore more prepared to fight a long unconventional war against grimy little terrorists in strange distant places than America, who learned how to lose in Vietnam.

Thus, it is with considerable joy that those who are ready to teach the lesson of Vietnam (LOSE NOW BEFORE IT?S TOO LATE!), find that they finally have another war that has lasted longer than John Kerry?s first position on it.  Obviously, they crow, we have stepped into some deep Vietnam in Iraq.

The best course of action is to therefore withdraw from Iraq immediately, allow the country to become an oil-producing Al-Qaeda Super-state and retreat to within our secure borders --where no terrorist will ever touch us.  Oh, and begin the political positioning to win election in 2008 on an ?I KNEW IT WAS VIETNAM RIGHT AWAY!? platform.

And I guess you could argue that might be the right thing to do, if only the Iraq conflict were actually like Vietnam in some way.  Disappointingly, other than smelly peacenik rallies and the American press preparing daily to report an Iraqi ?Tet offensive,? the similarities are pretty meager.

The differences, by contrast, are obvious and glaring --but that?s no reason to interrupt a good ?OH GOD! IT?S VIETNAM!? national flashback.  Unless, that is, you want America to win Iraq, rather than lose Vietnam again out of habit.  For that minority of the populace, I present a few tiny little differences between Iraq and Vietnam, ranging from the mundane and material, to the moral and philosophical.

1. The Iraqi insurgency has no universal philosophy capable of attracting Iraq?s entire populace.  The Viet Cong were, I?m told, Communists.  Communism was a worldwide movement preaching a fanciful utopian equality among man, and with a substantial following on every Continent.  It could appeal to intellectuals and peasants, workers and soldiers.  It was a philosophical movement proselytizing universal solidarity.  You never knew who might become a commie.  Every South Vietnamese could be an enemy sympathizer or agent.

The Iraqi insurgency is principally a Sunni Arab tribal affair.  Shiites and Sunnis are not converting one another at all, and have not for the last few hundred years.  The Iraqi Kurds are a nation within a nation and running their own affairs very well.  In this insurgency, the Sunni Arabs (20% of the population) are fighting for continued domination of the Kurds and Shiites (20% and 60% of the population respectively).  This is a cause that the Shiites and Kurds are unlikely to embrace with much enthusiasm.  Were there not a single other difference between the Vietnam and Iraq conflicts, this one would totally disqualify any comparison.  Anyone can become a Communist.  Black men do not join the Klan.  Likewise, the Iraqi insurgency cannot draw recruits from the Shiite and Kurdish majority while espousing a philosophy of Sunni Arab Supremacism.   The worst case, then, is that the population splits 4 to 1 in favor of the new government.  Thus, it can get ugly, but the issue is not really in doubt, long term.

2. The Iraqi insurgency has no inviolable state in which to openly organize the population; and we are not fighting for a tie with that inviolable state.  North Vietnam was a real country, with a border that we could not cross for geopolitical reasons.  Inside that country, the Communists trained and rested, worked in weapons factories on a par with any in Asia, controlled broadcasts, recruiting centers, schools, the police, the courts, the roads, and ports full of foreign supply ships.  We never invaded North Vietnam and so they could never, ever, lose the war.  Every week they sent troops and advisors out of their safe home base to invade South Vietnam in little waves.  Every week we sat outside the border and played goalie against the most recent wave.  Essentially, we fought from the outset of the Vietnam War for a tie: the continued existence of both a North and a South Vietnam.

The Sunni insurgents have no such luxury.  We are in their hometowns, their fields, their roads, their skies, their rivers.  They have no country.  We took it already. They have holes in the ground and basement bomb factories.  The North Vietnamese fielded a modern air force that could often shoot down our most advanced planes.  The Sunni insurgents strap bombs to donkey carts.  They cannot openly recruit or train, because ?their? country is full of Shiites, Kurds and other Sunni Arabs that arrest, shoot, and bomb them constantly.

3. The Sunni insurgents have no Soviet or Chinese support.  A few truckloads of trouble from Syria and Iran cannot in any way compare to the massive material support that the Vietnamese Communists received from the Soviet Union and Red China.  Support to North Vietnam from ?comrades abroad? was estimated by the CIA at $400 million in 1965.  That would be $2 billion per year adjusted for inflation.  There is no comparable aid for our enemies in Iraq.  Additionally, There is no KGB-like worldwide intelligence organization, with agents all over the US government, feeding information to the insurgents.  That is worth more than money, and it did us much harm in Vietnam.

4. North and South Vietnam had a combined population 22% of that of the United States in 1970.  Iraq has a population less than 9% of today?s United States.  The Sunni Arab population of Iraq is less than 2% that of the US.  The scale of today?s problem is in a whole different league than Vietnam ?a much more minor league.

5. The Communist forces of Vietnam had 20 years of experience in guerilla combat against the Japanese and French before America ever sent one soldier into what we call ?the? Vietnam War.  The Sunni insurgents had little established guerilla war capacity at start.  Their inexperience costs them greatly.

6. There were no polling places in Hanoi during the war.  The effect of elections in Iraq has been remarkable.  In just a few months, since the first democratically elected government of Iraq took power, the whole war has changed character for the Iraqis.  The issue is no longer as simple as Sunni rebels fighting an infidel occupier.  It is now Iraqi majority vs. Iraqi minority.  The most effective propaganda weapon the insurgents had is gone, never to return.  The Sunni mainstream that boycotted the first elections has seen control of Iraq swept away from them by millions of other Iraqis.  Now most Sunni leaders are telling their people to vote in the upcoming referendum on the Constitution.  They dare not ignore an election again.  The Vietnamese Communists never faced this dilemma.

7. There was no oil in Vietnam.  Eventually, the money to be made from Iraq?s oil will give rise to a self-interested alliance of leaders with one common goal: profitable stability.  Revenue streams pave their own banks.

8. There is no military draft in today?s US army.  The insurgents know they are not fighting unwilling whiners freshly failed-out of the Communications Program at Kent State.  (OK, no one has ever failed out of a Communications Program, but still you get the point).  The morale of our soldiers is high and in the insurgents? face.  It is only our civilians that threaten to go wobbly.

9. The Communists had never ruled South Vietnam.  By contrast, the Baathist have ruled Iraq.  The Iraqi people know who they are, and how they will really rule.  No one believes they fight for a worker?s paradise.  Saddam Hussein has been recruiting allies for us for the last twenty years, with his mass graves, prisons and rape rooms.

10. Who is Iraq?s Ho Chi Minh?  Iraq?s war is tribal and local.  The closest thing to a grand leader is Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, and he?s on Democracy?s side.  Majorities LOVE democracy.

11.  In Vietnam, it was obvious that American withdrawal would probably lead to South Vietnamese defeat.  No one can say that US withdrawal would lead to Shiite surrender or that the Kurds could even be kept within the nation of Iraq.  Our coalition is more than a match for the insurgents.  The insurgents can never defeat the new government in the sense of taking control of the whole country. Their only hope is to cause chaos and carve out local wartime autonomy.  By contrast, the new Iraqi government can totally defeat the insurgents and take control of the whole country.  The insurgents know they are fighting for only a part of the country, at best.

12.  The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army were not killing one another.  Zarqawi?s foreign Sunni terrorists and the native Sunni insurgents are shooting at each other, and more and more.  Imagine, for a moment, if the United States Military and the New Iraqi Army were ambushing each other between battles with the insurgents.  How much media attention would that produce?  What would it say about the alliance?  The two main forces of the insurgency actually have begun shooting at each other.  The locals think Zarqawi is mad.  Zarqawi thinks the locals are traitors to Islam and weak.

13.  Ho Chi Minh was not, at any point during the Vietnam War, sitting in a box with a French Lawyer while awaiting trial and execution by his vengeful former subjects.  Saddam Hussein is.  There is a certain demonstration of lost power in that.  And Zarqawi could join him any day.

But other than all that, Iraq is just Vietnam all over again --and in High Definition on Cable.  Now consider one last reason why the two wars are not alike, one that goes to the heart of the issue and should be more than enough to shore up even Chuck Hagel: A loss in Vietnam was not going to bring newly energized Viet Cong recruits into New York or San Francisco with truck-bombs or a suitcase nuke to finish us off.  A loss in Iraq--regardless of why the war was begun, or how bad we want to go home, or how little most Americans care about giving foreigners democracy or toiletries--will energize our enemies, as only a historic victory on the world stage can.

If you liked what our quick, casualty-saving withdrawal from Somalia did for us at the Khobar Towers, at our embassies in East Africa, at the waterline of the USS Cole, and at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, then you?ll love what a quick ?casualty-saving? withdrawal from Iraq will do for us for the next twenty years.  It?ll finally make you stop worrying about Vietnam.

http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=9300

1923
Politics & Religion / The Plot Thickens
« on: September 25, 2005, 10:25:54 AM »
September 25, 2005

The Sunday Times

SAS in secret war against Iranian agents
Michael Smith and Ali Rifat, Basra

TWO SAS soldiers rescued last week after being arrested by Iraqi police and handed over to a militia were engaged in a ?secret war? against insurgents bringing sophisticated bombs into the country from Iran.

The men had left their base near the southern Iraqi city of Basra to carry out reconnaissance and supply a second patrol with ?more tools and fire power?, said a source with knowledge of their activities.

They had been in Basra for seven weeks on an operation prompted by intelligence that a new type of roadside bomb which has been used against British troops was among weapons being smuggled over the Iranian border.

The bombs, designed to pierce the armour beneath coalition vehicles, are similar to ones supplied by Iran to Hezbollah, the Islamic militant group.

?Since the increase in attacks against UK forces two months ago, a 24-strong SAS team has been working out of Basra to provide a safety net to stop the bombers getting into the city from Iran,? said one source. ?The aim is to identify routes used by insurgents and either capture or kill them.?

The forces have tried to seal the notoriously porous border using high-technology sensors that monitor movement by night. They report to a major based in Baghdad in an unmarked building known as the ?station house?.

Special forces commanders believe that a tip-off from a local worker at their base may have led to the men?s capture last Monday after a car chase by police, who later handed them to the Mahdi army of Moqtada al-Sadr, the maverick Shi?ite cleric. They were freed from a nearby house.

The disclosure that the SAS has targeted the Iranian border coincides with claims by a former Iraqi defence minister that parts of Iraq have fallen under Tehran?s control.

Hazim Shalan, who left office last May amid a scandal over huge sums of missing money, claimed that 460 Iranian agents had been apprehended in the past two years. He accused Iranian officials of bringing weapons and drugs into Iraq and of paying voters to back their chosen candidates.

An inquiry into the capture of the SAS team and clashes that followed between British forces and an Iraqi mob was being carried out by the Royal Military Police Special Investigation Branch.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) said this would focus on how the soldiers had been compromised but it was also expected to address claims that they had shot an Iraqi police officer.

The officer, Quteeb Rasheed Abdul Hameed, alleged that he had been wounded in the leg when the soldiers opened fire as police approached their unmarked car to question them.

A judge said yesterday that he had issued warrants for the arrest of the SAS men over the shooting and the alleged killing of a second man shot in the car chase. Judge Ragheb Mohamad Hassan al-Muthafar told The Sunday Times in an exclusive interview that the soldiers were ?suspects who attempted to commit a wilful act of murder?.

He added: ?Whatever their mission they have no right to fire intentionally on anyone, let alone a security man whose job is to protect this country.?

According to the judge, nine people were killed and 14 injured, including two boys aged 13 and 14, when the mob attacked British forces surrounding the police station where the men were detained.

The MoD declined to comment on the toll but said the warrants had no legal basis. ?All British troops in Iraq come under the jurisdiction of Britain,? a spokesman said.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1796566,00.html

1924
Politics & Religion / Common Defense Provided
« on: September 23, 2005, 03:27:05 PM »
11250 Waples Mill Road    ?Fairfax, Virginia 22030    ?800-392-8683
www.NRAILA.org

Major Victory For Firearms Owners And Freedom In Louisiana

Friday, September 23, 2005


(Fairfax, VA) -- The United States District Court for the Eastern District in Louisiana today sided with the National Rifle Association (NRA) and issued a restraining order to bar further gun confiscations from peaceable and law-abiding victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

?This is a significant victory for freedom and for the victims of Hurricane Katrina.  The court?s ruling is instant relief for the victims who now have an effective means of defending themselves from the robbers and rapists that seek to further exploit the remnants of their shattered lives,? said NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre.

Joining LaPierre in hailing the U.S. District Court decision was NRA chief lobbyist Chris W. Cox. ?This is an important victory.  But the battle is not over.  The NRA will remedy state emergency statutes in all 50 states, if needed, to ensure that this injustice does not happen again."

The controversy erupted when The New York Times reported, the New Orleans superintendent of police directed that no civilians in New Orleans will be allowed to have guns and that ?only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons.?  ABC News quoted New Orleans? deputy police chief, saying, ?No one will be able to be armed. We are going to take all the weapons.?

The NRA also pledged that it will continue its work to ensure that every single firearm arbitrarily and unlawfully seized under this directive is returned to the rightful law-abiding owner.

1925
Politics & Religion / Hydrogen Hucksters
« on: September 23, 2005, 03:24:27 PM »
It's always fun to encounter an iconoclast. This piece looks at hydrogen as a fuel, does the math, and comes to a conclusion the environmental types won't like.


The case for nuke cars?it's called 'hydrogen.'
BY PATRICK BEDARD
October 2005

Funny thing about hydrogen cars: If we were all driving them now, the President's FreedomCAR initiative would be anteing up its $1.8 billion to invent the gasoline engine. Freeing us from hydrogen would be "the moral equivalent of war," to use the words of a long-past energy-crisis president. Gasoline would be the miracle fuel. It would save money by the Fort Knoxful. It would save energy by the Saudi Arabiaful.

To see why this is so, let's look at the numbers. And for once, we're talking about a miracle fuel without speculation. We can see exactly how the "gasoline economy" would work by looking back to a year that's already happened. In 2000, gasoline consumption averaged 8.47 million barrels per day. Gas contains 5.15 million British thermal units of energy per barrel. For big numbers like this, it's customary to think in "quads," or quadrillion BTUs. So the gasoline energy used by motor vehicles in the year 2000 worked out to 16 quads.

Now let's do the same driving in hydrogen cars. Hydrogen is the most plentiful element on earth, but there's no underground pool of it we can drill into. All of nature's hydrogen atoms come married to other atoms in earnestly stable relationships. It takes an industrial process to break apart those marriages to obtain pure hydrogen in a form that can be used by fuel cells.

Think of fuel cells as black boxes into which we put hydrogen on one side and oxygen from the atmosphere on the other. Out the bottom come water and a small electrical current. There is no such thing as free power, of course. If you get power out when you let hydrogen and oxygen get married in a fuel cell, then you must put power into the process of divorcing them.

The industrial divorcing of water molecules is known as electrolysis. This is fuel by immaculate conception, according to most greenies. To make the chemistry work, you must put in 39.4 kilowatt-hours of energy for each kilogram of hydrogen you expect to liberate. Unfortunately, the electrolysis process is only 70 percent efficient. So the total energy input must be 56.3 kilowatt-hours per kilogram of hydrogen.

This energy to be added must come from somewhere. The U.S. has an excellent supply of coal. Coal-fired powerplants are about 40 percent efficient, so 140.8 kilowatt-hours of coal energy are required to net the 56.3 kilowatt-hours of electricity to produce our one kilogram of hydrogen.

My source for these calculations is Donald Anthrop, Ph.D., professor emeritus of environmental studies at San Jose State University, in a Cato Institute report.

In a perfect world, the fuel cell in our car would produce 33.4 kilowatt-hours of useful energy from each kilogram of hydrogen, and 6.0 kilowatt-hours would go to water vapor, giving you back your net investment of 39.4 kilowatt-hours at the electrolysis plant. But the world is not perfect, and the best fuel cells are only about 70 percent efficient. So the energy yield is 23.3 kilowatt-hours.

One more loss must be reckoned with. Hydrogen is a gas. It's lighter than air. Remember, it was the stuffing for the airship Hindenburg. Hydrogen gas (at atmospheric pressure and room temperature) containing the same energy as a gallon of gasoline takes up 3107 gallons of space. To make a useful auto fuel, Anthrop says it must be compressed to at least 4000 psi (Honda uses 5000 psi in the FCX; GM is trying for 10,000). The energy required to do that further trims the yield to 17.4 kilowatt-hours. Pressures higher than 4000 would increase miles available from each fill but cost more energy for compression. Liquefying hydrogen, which BMW advocates, costs upward of 40 percent of hydrogen's energy content.

So far, the numbers say this: Starting with 140.8 kilowatt-hours of energy from coal gives you 17.4 kilowatt-hours of electrical power from the fuel cell to propel the car, or an energy efficiency of 12 percent.

Anthrop goes on to estimate the fuel-cell power needed for the 2.526 billion miles driven in the U.S. in 2000. According to Southern California Edison, the electricity needed per mile for passenger cars is at least 0.46 kilowatt-hour. For the whole U.S. vehicle fleet, that works out to 1.16 trillion kilowatt-hours. You'll need 32 quads of coal, which is twice the energy actually consumed in 2000 with gasoline.

As for global-warming implications, the use of hydrogen from coal instead of gasoline would produce a 2.7-fold increase in carbon emissions.

Of course, all of today's electricity doesn't come from coal. But even with the current mix of sources, including natural gas, nuclear, hydro, solar, and wind, that much hydrogen would raise our carbon output to about twice the 2000 level.

The enviros like to talk about renewable energy. Anthrop has done those calculations as well. Hydro power is our largest source of green electricity, but it would take 15 times the current amount for an all-hydrogen vehicle fleet. Given the pressure to remove existing dams, it's unlikely we'll have any additional hydroelectricity.

Photovoltaic cells? Anthrop says it takes about eight years of cell output to make back the electrical power originally consumed in manufacturing the cell.

Wind power? It defies calculation, in part because wind blows only intermittently.

Virtually all the hydrogen produced today, about 50 million tons worldwide, comes from natural gas. The process, called "steam reforming," is only about 30 percent efficient, much less, he says, "than if the natural gas were simply burned" in the generating plant.

Producing enough hydrogen to replace gasoline by reforming natural gas would increase our gas consumption by 66 percent over 2002's usage. And don't forget the carbon emissions.

That leaves the unspeakable?nukes.

Presumably, BMW knows all of this, yet it has been thumping the tub for hydrogen since the 1970s. Along with hundreds of other invitees, I attended BMW's hydrogen hootenanny at Paramount Pictures in 2001. Mostly, it amounted to a day of corporate preening before California's greenies. Still, BMW is famously brave in confronting technology. Does it have a plan? I summed up the science of this column, in writing, and passed it up through BMW's official channels, along with the obvious question: Where will the necessary quads and quads of energy come from for hydrogen cars? That was nearly two years ago. BMW has not answered.

No answer, of course, is the anwer.

1926
Politics & Religion / Military Pirates
« on: September 22, 2005, 04:04:24 PM »
Perhaps misfiled here, but I can't help wondering what else the Russian military is into if it's keep itself afloat pirating DVDs.

Want a pirate DVD? Try the secret nuclear bunker
From Jeremy Page in Moscow

DURING the Cold War the West spent billions of dollars trying to spy on the military installations of the Soviet Union. Now Western governments are targeting secret Russian military facilities in a new conflict, this time over the piracy of music, films and software.

The Russian Interior Ministry has revealed that millions of pirated DVDs, CDs and CD-ROMs are being produced at factories on secret military facilities beyond the jurisdiction of the police. The ministry said: ?Some of the counterfeit production is being made in commercial structures installed in secret and top-secret facilities.?

Western companies have lobbied the Kremlin for years to shut down the factories that have made Russia, with China and Indonesia, one of the biggest producers of pirated DVDs, CDs and CD-Roms. President Putin has come under pressure this year because the inclusion of Russia on a US piracy watchlist is a key obstacle to its hopes of joining the World Trade Organisation.

Russian police have had little success in clamping down on the factories, which can churn out an estimated 250 million discs a year, of which 90 per cent are pirated. In a kiosk less than 500 metres from the Moscow office of The Times, Anatoly offered a pirate DVD copy of the Adam Sandler comedy The Longest Yard ? released in Britain on September 9 ? for only 150 roubles (?3). ?Tomorrow I?ll have Revolver,? he said, even though Guy Ritchie?s latest film had its premiere in London only this week.

Industry experts say that of the 42 factories known to be producing bootleg films, music and software at least 12 are on restricted government or military sites, many in or around Moscow. Konstantin Zem-chinkov, the director of the Russian Anti-Piracy Organisation (RAPO), said: ?They want to make it difficult for police to come in and raid them. The military knows about it and the Government knows about it.?

The problem, he said, was that much of Russia?s vast military industrial complex was moribund and desperate for cash. ?They have to have some money but the Government can?t supply it.?

It is hard to estimate the value of Russia?s pirate disc business, but with production costs of six roubles a disc it is undoubtedly huge. American businesses lost more that

$1.7 billion (?940 million) last year to copyright piracy in Russia, and more than $6 billion in the past five years, according to US officials. Shutting down such a lucrative business, therefore, has its risks. Last year Russian police working with the RAPO shut down Europe?s largest counterfeiting operation in a rented building on a military base in the city of Pushkino, near Moscow. The factory, which had been running for two years, housed equipment worth an estimated ?7 million including an ultramodern production line capable of producing 650,000 discs a month.

The pirates have threatened to retaliate against the RAPO and even tried to recover the confiscated machinery by using their connections in the Government. In June an anti- piracy activist in the far eastern region of Primorye was attacked by four men with baseball bats and rubber batons a day after he helped police to raid a pirate disc factory.

Even if the pirates are caught, they are rarely punished. Since the start of the year only 11 of 446 people found guilty of pirating offences have been given prison sentences, with the others receiving suspended sentences or having to pay fines.

1927
Politics & Religion / Rewarding Failure & Punishing Success
« on: September 20, 2005, 09:26:01 AM »
As somone who spent  a big chunk of his life running restaurants, and who was often times the only white boy in the kitchen, I've had to contend with various manifestations of the welfare state, the most common one being folks who only wanted to work long enough to regain unemployment benefits and then sought a way to be taken off the schedule that wouldn't make them ineligible for unemployment insurance. I understood the game, knew how to counter it, and hence never had a successful unemployment insurance claim brought against me. Word spread and folks who were into that scam curiously stopped trying to get short term gigs in restaurants I ran.

Those up close and personal dealings with a manifestation of the welfare state on a micro level leave the following macro level thoughts ringing true.

September 20, 2005, 8:16 a.m.
?Bold, Persistent Experimentation?
Post-Katrina is a time for changing.
Rich Lowry

It is the other flood: The outpouring of concern for the poor of New Orleans. According to nearly every journalist in America, our consciousness has been raised about the invisible scourge of poverty in this country, and nothing is too much to ask when addressing the plight of the disadvantaged evacuees of New Orleans. They should get every form of aid possible ? except, that is, assistance that might help give them more control over their lives.
     
The most controversial parts of the Bush aid package for New Orleans are the ones that attempt to free the poor from the tentacles of government bureaucracy. He wants to give the unemployed personal accounts to assist in their job search and create a $500 million program to fund school vouchers for displaced children to attend private schools. The current political climate is premised on the notion that no one should say "no" to any Katrina-related program, but Democrats will attempt to veto these proposals.

One argument that has always been advanced to block aid to poor families who want to send their children to private schools is that, in effect, the government can't afford it; it will starve public schools of funding. But no one in Washington has any credibility to say the federal government can't afford anything, since there is very little that this Congress and administration isn't funding fulsomely. Will $500 million for vouchers bleed public-education spending? That's hard to see when President Bush increased federal education spending 65 percent during his first term.

The objection to these Bush proposals isn't fiscal, but philosophical. They serve to undermine the principle of government dependency that underpins the contemporary welfare state, and to which liberals are utterly devoted. In a reversal of the old parable, liberals don't want to teach people how to fish if they can just give them federally funded seafood dishes instead.

The unemployed now get 26 weeks of federal unemployment benefits, which are often extended and also supplemented by various state programs. This is a social safety net that can become a trap. The longer and more generous benefits are, the less incentive someone has to find work (see Germany in particular and Western Europe generally for examples of the phenomenon at work). The Bush program would establish accounts that unemployed people could use as they see fit for education, training programs and child care to support their job search. If they find a job within 13 weeks they can keep up to $1,000 of the $5,000 account.

This would reverse the traditional incentive of unemployment benefits; it would do an end run around work-force investment boards, the state-level bureaucracies that now eat up federal dollars; it would allow each person to tailor federal aid to his own needs and strengths. It would be at least a step toward preserving individual initiative from the enervating clutch of bureaucracy.

The education vouchers, meanwhile, make private school available to kids who had suffered in the atrocious New Orleans public system and help preserve the choice many families had already made. Out of 248,000 students in the broader New Orleans area, 61,000 went to private schools. Opponents of the voucher proposals want to say to bereft families of those private-school students, "Congratulations, you lost everything, and we hope your children now get trapped in public schools on top of it."

New Orleans was partly a catastrophe of the welfare state, which has subsidized inner cities with countless billions of dollars throughout the past 30 years, with little to show for it except more social breakdown. The past few weeks should be the impetus for "bold, persistent experimentation," as Franklin D. Roosevelt put it, in the country's social programs. Instead, we are likely to get more spending on more of the same, and eventually everyone's attention will shift once again from the shame of New Orleans and the persistent failure of the welfare state.

1928
Politics & Religion / FEMA Primary Source
« on: September 19, 2005, 12:42:03 PM »
An interesting "primary source" here.

A FEMA Volunteer Judges The FEMA Response As She Saw It
Written by Jodi Witte

Monday, September 19, 2005

Dear Friends and Family,
I just got home from 15 days in New Orleans and the surrounding areas.  I am tired, and I am emotional.  But mostly I am angry.  I am angry at the news--the television stations, the newspapers--for what I view is a grossly misrepresented placement of blame.  For those of you who know me, you know I work for FEMA as an "intermittent employee" of a disaster response team.  My team, called VMAT or Veterinary Medical Assistance Team, is part of the response branch of FEMA known as the National Disaster Medical System.

Let me tell you how "awful" FEMA's response was from someone who was there on the front lines working for FEMA.

President Bush declared a state of emergency prior to Katrina's landfall due to its strength and location.  This is not normally done before a hurricane makes landfall.  Damn good work by George W., in my honest opinion.  This opened the door for our federal teams to pre-deploy assets in nearby locations so that we were ready when Katrina did hit.  I was contacted by FEMA before the hurricane hit, asking for my availability and to place me on alert.  Many teams were moved into the region including 2 VMAT teams.   My team was mobilized immediately after landfall and I arrived in the area before New Orleans had completely filled with water, before we even realized how bad it was truly going to be.  FEMA responded immediately and with unprecedented numbers of responders.  There were DMAT teams inside the Super Dome before the levee broke.  Never before had so many FEMA teams and personnel been sent into a disaster.

One thing you must understand: the DMAT, VMAT, and DMORT teams that make up the National Disaster Medical System are NOT "first responders."  Our job is to supplement overwhelmed communities if needed.  The initial responsibility lies with the state.  If they become overwhelmed in the aftermath of a disaster where their local hospitals, medical, veterinary, and mortuary assets cannot handle the magnitude of the disaster, we come in and augment their resources.  It takes 24 to 48 hours to mobilize the federal assets in normal circumstances.  We come from every state in the United States, leaving our jobs and families behind at the drop of a hat to help where ever it is needed.  Our cache of equipment and medical supplies must either be moved from our home base or from the federal warehouses in Maryland by truck or plane.  This takes time.  But we were there before Katrina hit and many more arrived immediately after even before knowing the full scope of this disaster.

So why is FEMA being blamed?  I'm not exactly sure.  I really am not. Yes, FEMA was overwhelmed.  God sakes how could it not be?  This hurricane has been the largest natural disaster the United States has had on record.  Nothing can compare.  We train and train for almost anything.  We try to be ready.  But no one was ready for how bad this truly was.  I am sure there were some bad decisions made high up, and of that I cannot deny.  It was a logistical nightmare to get the teams placed and the supplies sent in.  Some stuff arrived too late.  But, seeing how hard the FEMA employees worked to help the people and animals of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama makes me angry and very, very sad to hear us put down so bad on television and in the news.

One day, just a couple days after New Orleans was under water, I was stationed in the New Orleans airport.  This is where I was the first week.  The airport was where all the buses and helicopters that were rescuing people from the city brought them first.  They came in the thousands to the airport and went through lines holding their last bit of possessions, which included a small amount of clothing or keepsakes and often times their pets.  Yes, they got to bring their pets with them on the buses and helicopters.  I know because I was there.  I saw them.  They came in and were triaged by FEMA medical personnel. Minor injuries or illnesses were treated with the utmost care and love by FEMA DMAT teams and then they took their place in line through concourse C to board planes to shelters where they could receive follow up medical treatment.  The very ill were moved into the D concourse area for more thorough medical care and support in a true MASH hospital set up right there inside the airport.  I walked through this area frequently and watched as DMAT members held hands of people critically and gravely ill, cared for them, helped them in so many ways trying to save their lives and to comfort those who could not be saved.

 I walked through feces, urine, blood, and vomit covering the floor of the airport.  I watched custodians working tirelessly to clean up the floor even though it was soiled again as soon it was cleaned.  People were handed water and food as soon as they arrived.  Those who were well, moved through an endless line to concourse B to board both commercial and military planes going to shelters in other states.  I walked the lines of concourse B, C, and D as did other members of my VMAT team to provide any needed veterinary care to the pets who were evacuated with their families.  We cared for stray animals that arrived at the airport too.  See, the coast guard and military helicopters were picking up stray animals if they had room when they would rescue people from the city. FEMA personnel did everything possible to comfort and care for the people of New Orleans.  I know because I was one of them, and I did everything I could for them, and I saw with my own eyes what the others were also doing.
 

 
This is a photo on the FEMA website.  What you don't see here is that this little dog is sitting below the hospital gurney of his master who was critically ill inside one of the DMAT MASH tents.  I walked through this medical tent to check on the dog with a couple other members of my VMAT team.  The nurse had given the dog a dish of water and was feeding him some crackers.  We promised the man we would bring back some food for his dog.  He was very thankful as he laid there with IVs going.  I returned a few minutes later with one other member of my team, bringing a Ziploc bag of dog food.  When we arrived they were moving him to a different stretcher because he needed to be medivac'ed out on a helicopter for more intense medical care.  The helicopter pilot told us he cannot take the dog unless its in a crate.  I stepped up to talk to the very ill man.  I asked him if he would let me care for his dog while he went to the hospital.  He grabbed my hand and had tears in his eyes as he begged me to help him take his dog with him because it was all he had left in the world.  There was nothing else. I looked into this man's eyes as he cried.  He was a middle aged white man with cuts and scrapes all over him.  His face was puffy and feverish with infection.
 
I then looked at the DMAT nurse and the Coast Guard pilot.  Both looked back at me with very grave expressions and each asked me to please find a crate for the dog so he can go with the man.  My teammate and I both knew right then that this man may not make it and we had to make sure he got to spend as much time as possible with his dog.

There was no way we were going to make him leave his dog behind. We took off running and found an empty crate.  It was a bit too small for the dog, but would work temporarily.  We returned and found the pilot waiting for us with the man.  Once we got the dog in the crate and on the stretcher with the man, he again took my hand and thanked us as we cried together.  He said "you have no idea what you have done for me and I will never forget it."  Then he was wheeled away toward the waiting helicopter.
 
So, at the end of this day--a 29 hour shift that I spent at the airport--I arrived back at our bunk location, a building on the campus of LSU where we slept on the floor, and I got to see the news on one of the cable networks.  I was absolutely outraged at the reports of the lack of response by FEMA.  I changed to another cable news network and saw the same thing there.  What they don't mention when they talk about FEMA is the people who make up FEMA's response, working countless hours, pouring their very heart and soul into this response despite being slammed and criticized all over the news.
 
I cried with sadness and anger at how we are viewed all over the world.  I am a FEMA responder who cannot wear my FEMA badge in public in Louisiana because everyone thinks we are so terrible.  Do they even yet mention how hard we have worked for the people and animals of Louisiana?  No, maybe they never will.
 
Just yesterday the radio was criticizing the fact that FEMA had so many trucks filled with water and supplies that were just sitting somewhere and was costing $600 per day each to sit and wait.  Does anyone realize this is the right thing to do?  There is already a tremendous amount of water and supplies in the areas.  The reason there are trucks waiting full of more supplies and water is so they can move at a moments notice to where ever they are needed at any time. Would they rather have the extra supplies sitting in a warehouse where they would have to wait to secure trucks, then load the supplies and water, then move them out?  No.  They complain about the lack of quick response by FEMA yet don't get the whole concept that these supplies and water sitting in trucks ready to go is for quick response and now they criticize FEMA readiness without realizing it.  The contradictions in the news is ridiculous.
 
Now 13 days after I first saw the news reporting how awful FEMA is, I still remain proud to be a member of FEMA, and I am proud of the work I did in New Orleans and I am proud to work for the federal government headed up by a strong and brave president.  It was not easy, and things may not have gone perfectly, but we did and continue to do amazing work there even if no one knows it because they will only look at what went wrong instead of so much that went right.

About the Writer: Jodi Beck Witte is a veterinary technician and weapons of mass destruction specialist for a FEMA disaster response team and manages an animal health website http://www.animalhelp.com. Jodi receives e-mail at jwitte@animalhelp.com.

http://www.chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=16863

1929
Politics & Religion / Flirting w/ Disaster
« on: September 19, 2005, 11:53:39 AM »
Out of curiosity, if Nagin's calls for citizens to return to New Orleans before there is potable water, electricity, 911 service, and a coherant evacuation plan succeed, should another storm come along will the easily foreseeable results still be Bush's fault?


New Orleans Mayor Defends Return Plan
Relief Chief Says It's Still 'Very, Very Soon to Try and Do That'
By MARY FOSTER, AP

NEW ORLEANS (Sept. 18) - New Orleans' mayor has the authority to let residents return to his hurricane-damaged city, but the Coast Guard official in charge of the federal disaster response said Sunday that all the information from health and environmental experts recommends against it.
      
Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen plans to meet with Mayor Ray Nagin on Monday and develop what he called a logical plan to repopulate the city.

If Allen gets his way, that repopulation won't start on Monday, as the mayor planned, but it will be soon.

"I wouldn't want to attach a time limit to it, but it includes things like making sure there's potable water, making sure there's a 911 system in place, telephone, a means to notify people there is an approaching storm so you can evacuate it with the weakened levee situation," Allen said on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday.

"We can do that, and we can do that fairly soon, but it's very, very soon to try and do that this week," he said.

Nagin didn't appear ready to back down Saturday as he defended his plan to return up to 180,000 people to the city within a week and a half despite concerns about the short supply of drinking water and heavily polluted floodwaters.
      
"We must offer the people of New Orleans every chance for a sense of closure and the opportunity for a new beginning," he said.

He wants the Algiers, Garden District and French Quarter sections to reopen over the next week and a half, bringing back more than one-third of the city's half-million inhabitants, though city officials have backed off a specific date for reopening the famous French Quarter. The areas were spared the worst of Hurricane Katrina's flooding.

Nagin said his plan was developed in cooperation with the federal government and balances safety concerns and the needs of citizens to begin rebuilding.

But Allen said he had spoken personally with the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and the director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and returning now wouldn't be advised. A prime public health concern is the tap water, which in most of the city remains unfit for drinking and bathing, he said.

"We really support his plan to restart New Orleans," Allen said. "We are right in sticking with his vision. It's a matter of timing and creating the, enabling the structures that will allow us to do this safely."

Those structures would include an evacuation plan if another storm hits the region and threatens an already delicate levee system, he said.

There are also still bodies to be recovered. Allen said over 90 percent of the primary house-to-house sweep was complete, but some homes are still under water and searchers will have to return.

On Sunday, the death toll in Louisiana increased by more than 60 to 646, according to the state Department of Health and Hospitals. That raised the total Gulf Coast deaths linked to the hurricane to 883.

Despite floodwater remaining in some areas and a lack of residents in the city, business owners were allowed back in to some sections of the city to begin the long process of cleaning up and rebuilding, part of Nagin's plan to begin reviving the city by resuming a limited amount of commerce.

But confronted with damage that could take months to repair, many said hopes for a quick recovery may be little more than a political dream.

"I don't know why they said people could come back and open their businesses," said Margaret Richmond, owner of an antiques shop on the edge of the city's upscale Garden District that was looted. "You can't reopen this. And even if you could, there are no customers here."

The Wal-Mart store in uptown New Orleans, built within the last year, survived the storm but was destroyed by looters.

"They took everything -- all the electronics, the food, the bikes," said John Stonaker, a Wal-Mart security officer. "The only thing left are the country-and-western CDs."

If the store had not been looted, it could be open in two weeks, Stonaker said. Now he doubts it will be open by January.

In the French Quarter, the hum of generators, the thumping of hammers and the whir of power tools cut through the air Saturday as business owners were allowed in to survey the damage and begin cleaning up. Some threw an impromptu street party, complete with a traditional feast of red beans and rice.

At the famous French Quarter restaurant, The Court of Two Sisters, director of food and beverages Andrew Orth was removing plywood from the windows on Saturday morning. The coolers lost power and the food was rotting. Orth estimated it would take several weeks to get the restaurant ready to serve diners again.

"We couldn't open even if the electricity was on," he said.

Associated Press Writer Doug Simpson contributed to this report from Baton Rouge.

9/18/2005 13:34:36

1930
Politics & Religion / Shaignhai Suicide
« on: September 19, 2005, 11:42:53 AM »
U.S.: Suicide Bomber Says He Was Kidnapped
September 19th, 2005 @ 4:22am
By TAREK EL-TABLAWY
Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - A suicide bomber captured before he could blow himself up in a Shiite mosque claimed he was kidnapped, beaten and drugged by insurgents who forced him to take on the mission. The U.S. military said its medical tests indicated the man was telling the truth.

Mohammed Ali, who claimed to be Saudi-born and appeared to be in his 20s, said he managed to flee after another suicide attacker set off his bomb, killing at least 12 worshippers Friday as they left a mosque in the northern city of Tuz Khormato.

In confession broadcast on state television later that day, Ali told Iraqi interrogators he did not want to bomb the mosque and hoped to go home.

Results from medical tests on Ali were "consistent with his story and characterization of his treatment," Col. Billy J. Buckner, a U.S. military spokesman said Sunday.

Ali said insurgents kidnapped him from a field near his home earlier this month, then drugged and beat him.

His story was similar to those recounted by other captured militants. The captives routinely claim they were either coerced or fooled by insurgent leaders who promised them a role in the holy war against the U.S. military, only to find themselves as would-be suicide bombers sent to attack civilians.

Musab Aqil al-Khayal, a 19-year-old Syrian, was shown on state television Saturday confessing to his aborted involvement in a bombing earlier in the week in which a companion exploded his car bomb in the midst of day laborers assembled to find work. The Wednesday attack killed 112 people and wounded 250. Al-Khayal said handlers from the al-Qaida in Iraq terror group had duped him.

"Those dogs fooled me," he told Iraqi interrogators.

Televised interrogations and confessions are becoming increasingly common as Iraqi and American officials capture more militants and use their confessions in an attempt to undercut support for militants.

Ali, who also holds Iraqi citizenship, said he strapped on a crude suicide vest and was led to a second mosque in Tuz Khormato, about 130 miles north of Baghdad, "where he was told he would become a good Muslim and go to heaven if he carried out the attack," the U.S. military statement said.

Forced to enter the mosque, he waited until the others were distracted, ran out of the building and was arrested just minutes after the first attack, the statement said.

The kidnapping demonstrates the desperation of al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his ability to execute his strategy," said Buckner.

"He knows that he can't win against Iraqi security and coalition forces, and is therefore willing to use innocent Iraqi citizens to further his cause to disrupt the election process and prevent a free and democratic Iraq," he said.

http://www.620ktar.com/?nid=46&sid=77473

1931
Politics & Religion / No Defense Insurance
« on: September 16, 2005, 03:18:51 PM »
Perhaps a little dense, but a lot of interesting ramifications here. Sounds like the kind of issue that will eventually percolate to the top of the legal system.

Insurer Not Required to Defend Homeowner Who Shot Intruder
John Caher
New York Law Journal
09-16-2005


A man who killed an intruder in his home in self-defense is not entitled to insurance defense in a wrongful death action, a divided Albany appellate panel ruled Thursday in a case of first impression.

The split by New York's Appellate Division, 3rd Department, in Automobile Co. of Hartford v. Cook, 97160, illustrates a debate that has divided courts across the country. The question is whether a homeowner's insurance policy provides coverage when an insured is sued for wrongful death stemming from a killing in self-defense. That question was apparently addressed for the first time Thursday by a New York appellate court.

Justice John A. Lahtinen and three of his four colleagues strictly construed the insurance policy language in holding that an occurrence of justifiable homicide results from an intentional rather than accidental act. Here, the defendant shot the decedent at close range with a 12-gauge shotgun. The action thus triggers the exception for incidents that are "expected or intended" by the insured, the panel found.

But Presiding Justice Anthony V. Cardona dissented, distinguishing "defend" from "indemnify" and arguing that an insurance company has an obligation to provide a defense, at least until the point where it is determined that the allegedly wrongful death resulted from intentional rather than negligent conduct.

"The cases across the country are split right down the middle," said Albany appellate attorney Michael J. Hutter, who represented the insurance company. "But this is the first time it has ever been raised in New York. The Third Department took a very strict approach."

At the heart of the case is a money dispute between acquaintances Alfred S. Cook and Richard A. Barber. In 2002, Barber barged into Cook's home. Cook shot and killed Barber, and was charged with murder.

After an Albany County jury acquitted Cook, the Barber's estate sued for wrongful death. Then, the Automobile Insurance Co. of Hartford, which provided Cook with homeowner's insurance, sought a declaration that it had no duty to defend or indemnify.

Albany Supreme Court Justice Edward Sheridan said the insurance company had a duty to provide Cook's defense.

Thursday, the 4-1 Third Department panel reversed.

"The jury apparently concluded in the criminal case that the prosecution failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the 120-pound Cook did not have legal justification for shooting the 360-pound decedent -- who had previously attacked and injured Cook -- after he refused to leave Cook's home and approached Cook in a menacing way," Lahtinen observed. Regardless, the majority held as a matter of law that Cook's actions were not covered by the homeowner's policy.

"While he allegedly did not anticipate that the injury inflicted would result in death, the facts (and his admission) establish that he intended the result of a bodily injury," Lahtinen wrote in an opinion joined by Justices D. Bruce Crew III, Edward O. Spain and Anthony T. Kane.

In dissent, Cardona noted that "an insurer's duty to defend its insured in pending litigation is exceptionally broad and far surpasses the insurer's duty to ultimately indemnify in the event that the insured is found liable."

He said that duty should be alleviated only when "no plausible reading" of the allegations could "bring the contested events within the purview of the insurance policy at issue." Here, Cardona said, Barber's death could be viewed as an act of negligence rather than intentional conduct.

"[A]lthough it might ultimately be determined that Cook's liability to decedent's estate, if any, is based upon his intentional conduct, thereby obviating plaintiff's duty to indemnify Cook, I cannot conclude that this is the only possible outcome considering the allegations in the underlying complaint," Cardona wrote.

His reasoning follows that of state courts in West Virginia and Arizona. Courts in Michigan and Vermont have held that insurers are not obligated to defend or indemnify in self-defense cases.

Robert P. Roche of Roche, Corrigan, McCoy & Bush in Albany argued for Cook. Benjamin F. Neidl of Tabner, Ryan & Keniry appeared for the estate.

Roche said the ruling establishes a nonsensical distinction between holders of commercial policies and homeowner's policies. He said that as a result of this decision, a shopkeeper who shoots a thief is covered because he helped prevent a crime on the property. But a homeowner, Roche said, is not similarly covered.

"A commercial policy allows the holder to protect either his employees from being assault or to prevent the commission of a crime upon his property by using force up to and including deathly physical force, and he is covered," Roche said. "But a homeowner is not. Here is a man who stood trial and 12 of his peers said 'not guilty.' He acted properly and in a manner dictated by circumstances over which he had no control."

Roche said he will seek leave to appeal to the state Court of Appeals.

http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1126775114950

1932
Politics & Religion / Supreme Court Circumlocutions
« on: September 16, 2005, 09:49:01 AM »
I'm in the awkward position of being someone who generally supports abortion freedom, but who loathes the dubious and destructive manner by which it was arrived at. Krauthammer does a good job here of spelling my feelings out.

Roe v. Roberts
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, September 16, 2005; A31


In our lifetime has there been a more politically poisonous Supreme Court decision than Roe v. Wade ? Set aside for a moment your thoughts on the substance of the ruling. (I happen to be a supporter of legalized abortion.) I'm talking about the continuing damage to the republic: disenfranchising, instantly and without recourse, an enormous part of the American population; preventing, as even Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said, proper political settlement of the issue by the people and their representatives; making us the only nation in the West to have legalized abortion by judicial fiat rather than by the popular will expressed democratically.

The corruption continues 32 years later. You could see it played out hour by hour in the Senate confirmation hearings of Judge John Roberts. Question upon question that pretended to be about high constitutional principle was really about abortion in ill-concealed disguise.

Senators asked gravely about how deeply Roberts believes in upholding precedent. Do you think that any of the Democrats were concerned whether Roberts would uphold Richmond v. Croson , the precedent that outlawed racial quotas in municipal contracting? Or Boy Scouts v. Dale , which permitted the exclusion of gay Scout leaders?

This is all about Roe . Take the lines of interrogation about Roberts's belief in the right to privacy. They are not asking about search and seizure in your home. They are asking about the "right to choose" (a brilliant locution that expunges the ugly word abortion from all political debate about abortion) -- what Roberts in 1981 correctly termed the "so-called 'right to privacy,' " a skepticism he is now required to disavow.

Why? Because everyone knows what happened to Robert Bork when he forthrightly and honestly denied some kind of separate, newly hatched right to privacy.

And then there are the learned Judiciary Committee disquisitions on "originalism" -- the judicial philosophy by which Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas try to anchor the Constitution in something real, i.e., the meaning of the words as intended and understood at the time they were written.

Originalism is itself highly problematic, the worst judicial philosophy except for all the others, because they permit unmoored and arbitrary constitutional interpretation -- and thus unmoored and arbitrary judicial power. The learned senators, however, really don't care much about originalism, except to the extent that it would, almost by definition, make Roberts a categorical opponent of Roe . Which is why Roberts denies that he has any ideology, any "overarching judicial philosophy," and is nothing more than an ad hoc, bottom-up type of guy.

Maybe he is. Maybe he isn't. But he knows that if he dares to say otherwise, he gets Borked. If, on the other hand, he pretends to have a mind so scrubbed of theory that he is at a loss to explain gravitation itself, he gets to be chief justice of the United States for 40 years.

In 2000 Al Gore declared that he would not nominate a justice who did not support Roe. Dianne Feinstein says today that if she determines that Roberts opposes Roe , she will be compelled to vote against him. For Democrats, abortion is an open litmus test. For Republicans, it is a test of agility: Can they find the nominee who might be against Roe but has been circumspect enough not to say so publicly and who will be clever enough to avoid saying so at his confirmation hearings?

Circumspect and clever Roberts has been. No one really knows. But I predict two things: (a) Chief Justice Roberts will vote to uphold Roe v. Wade , and (b) his replacing his former boss, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, will move the court only mildly, but most assuredly, to the left -- as measured by the only available yardstick, the percentage of concurrences with the opinions of those conservative touchstones, Scalia and Thomas.

I infer this not just by what Roberts has said in his hearings -- that he supports Griswold v. Connecticut , that he deeply respects precedent and that he finds Roe itself worthy of respect. That is little beyond boilerplate. I infer it from his temperament, career and life history as an establishment conservative who prizes judicial modesty above all. Which means that while he will never repeat Roe , he will never repeal it and be the cause of the social upheaval that repeal would inevitably bring.

Not that this in any way disqualifies Roberts in my conservative eyes. He is a perfectly reasonable traditional conservative, who will be an outstanding chief justice. He is just not a judicial revolutionary. If you're a conservative looking for a return to the good old days, you'll be disappointed. And if you're a liberal who lives for the good old days because that's all that liberalism has left, tell Chuck Schumer to relax.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/15/AR2005091502141.html

1933
Politics & Religion / Political Rants
« on: September 16, 2005, 07:23:09 AM »

1934
Politics & Religion / Preparing for the Next Awareness Crisis
« on: September 15, 2005, 11:14:33 AM »
Perhaps this piece speaks to FEMA's priorities. Not exactly the way I'd triage things. . . .

FEMA to the Rescue
The essentials prep work.
John Derbyshire

[On seeing the suffering caused by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, a close friend of mine contacted his local FEMA office to offer his services as a volunteer. He was told to report the following morning for an Orientation Class. All volunteers, he was told, must complete this class before being sent into the disaster area. My friend kindly provided me with a copy of the class schedule. I have reproduced the first two pages of the schedule below.]

Week One: The Volunteer as Citizen

Day 1: Diversity Awareness

The area affected by Hurricane Katrina includes a diverse population of many ethnicities, national origins, immigrations statuses, and faith traditions. In carrying out relief work, it is important that our workers and volunteers exhibit proper sensitivity to relief recipients from all backgrounds. Volunteers will undergo appropriate training, including the ?privilege walk,? basic Spanish-language instruction, and brief study of passages from the Q?u?r?a?n, the Bhagavad Gita, the Dhammachakkappavattana Sutra, and the collected speeches of Marcus Garvey.

Day 2: Harassment Awareness

Volunteers working with FEMA employees come under the scope of federal rules on sexual harassment, as set out in relevant EEOC guidelines. These guidelines will be reviewed and discussed. All volunteers must demonstrate full awareness of sexual harassment issues, both as they apply to other aid workers and volunteers, and as affecting aid recipients. Class events will include a taped lecture by Prof. Anita Hill, class staging of a one-act drama Tailhook Torment, and the ever-popular Packwood Pi?ata.

Day 3: Profiling Avoidance

Few behaviors give more offense, and few are as inimical to social harmony, as profiling. In our efforts to restore the social environment in the disaster area, we must strenuously avoid all appearance of profiling. All aid recipients must be dealt with on a basis of strict equality. In this workshop, attendees will study and discuss police profiling on the New Jersey Turnpike, airport security screening procedures, and the maligh effects of stereotyping on academic performance. This day?s session also includes a one-hour written test to screen volunteers for Islamophobia.

Day 4: GLBTQA Awareness

Our country has a dark record of oppression and discrimination towards orientational minorities. Because of this, we need to show particular sensitivity towards aid recipients from the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, questioning, and asexual minorities. This day?s session will involve group case studies led by qualified, credentialed GLBTQA-awareness trainers, including HIV-positive persons. Rubber gloves, condoms, and dental dams will be supplied.

Day 5: Liability Awareness

While the federal government and its agencies are exempt from most liability issues, volunteers who are not federal employees need to be aware of their susceptibility to lawsuits alleging nuisance, negligence, trespass, etc. Experienced courtroom professionals will address the class, and there will be a case study: ?Punishing Good Deeds ? The Good Samaritan as Defendant.?

Week Two: The Volunteer as Custodian of the Environment

Day 1: Diversity in Nature ? Protecting Endangered Species.

When conducting disaster-relief operations, we must bear in mind that the environment exists not only for humans, but for our friends in the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Wetland species are especially vulnerable?

1935
Politics & Religion / Candidate Crime Fighter
« on: September 14, 2005, 02:19:44 PM »
Nick Coleman: He knows the streets and he knows trouble
Star Tribune
September 14, 2005

A guy in a white shirt almost became a historical footnote about 4:30 last Sunday morning. He almost was the first guy to get himself shot by a candidate for mayor of Minneapolis.

"I'm in the dark, holding a gun on him and telling him to get on the ground, but he keeps backing away from me," Mark Koscielski was saying. "Then the guy points at his shirt and says, 'I have a white shirt on, and it'll get dirty if I get in the mud.' And I say, 'It's going to get red if you don't get on the [expletive] ground.' "

In the end, the guy got muddy, and he got arrested, too, charged with attempting to break into Koscielski's Guns & Ammo, at 2926 Chicago Av. S. That was just one of three attempted break-ins at the store in the past two weeks, during which time there has been a rash of burglaries near the corner of Chicago and Lake Street.

Koscielski, 51, was a distant also-ran in Tuesday's mayoral primary. His campaign to keep open his heavily secured gun shop, watched over by electronic surveillance and a pair of raucous parrots called Toto and Cleo, may be running out of ammo, too: The Minnesota Court of Appeals is scheduled next month to decide whether the city has acted illegally in trying to zone Koscielski into oblivion.

He's a political gadfly, a thorn in the side and an affably goofy gunsmith (he teaches a training course for those who want to apply for permits to carry handguns) who has been fighting to keep his gun store alive for 10 years. Despite his loss (again) at the polls, if you want to discuss the shape of Minneapolis, you can do worse than talk to Koscielski. He may never be mayor (thankfully), but he knows the streets. And he knows trouble.

For months, the area around Lake and Chicago has looked like a disaster zone: the streets torn up, with concrete barricades and debris everywhere, while work proceeds on turning the old Sears building into offices, condos and a hotel.

City planners promise upscale lofts, white-collar office workers and boutiques. Those who try to make a living on the disrupted streets, which are deserted at night, just hope to be able to see that bright future.
"We have tried to steel ourselves," says Mark Simon, owner of Robert's Shoes, which has suffered four break-ins in the past two weeks as thieves have used road construction debris to smash store windows and grab shoes. "Every day, it's a different brick," he says with a game smile. "But when the new developments start to open, the hope is there will be too many decent people around for the bad guys."

Koscielski scoffs at that vision, saying new sidewalks and new trash cans won't deter prostitutes and gangsters. He relies on his trusty .38- caliber Colt revolver, which he bought in 1972 at a Holiday Stationstore in the city and which he trained at the would-be burglar until the cops arrived. (Two accomplices got away, one jumping from the gun shop roof onto Koscielski's Ford Explorer, leaving a footprint on the hood not far from the "Terrorist Hunting Permit" bumper sticker.)

Following his own training advice, Koscielski, who had dialed 911, secured his weapon at the first sign of the police and raised his hands, hollering, "Help! Police!" That, he says, helps the cops tell the bad guy from the honest citizen. With all his hollering, first at the suspect, then for the cops, Koscielski lost his voice. But it came back Tuesday, even as he was losing his quixotic bid for mayor, with its cheesy campaign signs topped with blood-red words that dripped, "Stop! Murderapolis!"

"If that guy had something in his hand -- a pry bar, a screwdriver, an ice pick, anything -- he probably would have died," Koscielski says, shaking at the memory of the confrontation.

Fortunately, no one was shot, and the future for Lake and Chicago is still bright. But the guy in the white shirt might want to ponder how close he came to losing his future.

On election day, the erstwhile mayor of Minneapolis was dressed in sandals, camouflage shorts and an old T-shirt. The shirt said, "Some People Are Alive Simply Because It Is Illegal To Kill Them."

1936
Politics & Religion / Procedural Pontificators
« on: September 14, 2005, 02:14:36 PM »
Quote
I wouldn't say the disaster is all Bush's fault, but I think he
appointed "Brownie" and all these other unqualified hacks to FEMA
positions as a reward for their past service in one or both of his
election campiagns, figuring they'd never actually have to do anything
and if some real emergency did come up, he could simply replace them
with people who actually knew what they were doing.


Let's not forget that "Brownie" was vetted by 535 professional second guessers in congress. These days as we're being endlessly reminded about the solemn advise and consent role of congress as nominee Roberts gets the dog and pony show rolled out, let's be sure to take these procedural pontificates at their word. If they have a duty to examine things before the vote then they have an obligation to shoulder the blame after it.

1937
Politics & Religion / Political Rants
« on: September 14, 2005, 08:40:02 AM »
And, in reference to the above, it's the way the emergency plan reads. I work with an emergency rescue team; all triggers get pulled locally and then escalate, and it's the local jurisdiction's responsibility to send a coherant request for assistance up the line.

Though at times like this federal authorities are expected to have an omniscience that frankly flabbergasts me, the truth of the matter is that the locals are the ones who should have the best grasp of the situation, and are the ones who need to send that info up the line in a useful manner.

1938
Politics & Religion / Carjacker Crashes
« on: September 13, 2005, 09:18:44 PM »
Mom, suspect killed in carjacking, shooting

By DON PLUMMER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 09/13/05

Kimberly D. Boyd took her son to preschool Monday morning, then dropped by a bank before heading to her office in north Cobb County.

Minutes later, her routine was shattered, and sometime before 9:30 a.m. she was struggling for her life with a carjacker as her Toyota Sequoia raced south on U.S. 41. The kidnapping ended with the 30-year-old Acworth woman dead and the carjacker fatally shot by a passer-by.

Boyd died instantly when her SUV was broadsided by a cement truck, police said. Within seconds, the man driving Boyd's car was also dead ? shot by Shawn Roberts, 31, who had seen Boyd fighting the man and followed the car, police said.

"She was fighting for her life," Roberts, who lives in Acworth, told WAGA-TV.

Roberts told police he was driving north on U.S. 41 about 9:30 a.m. when he saw a man beating a woman outside the SUV, just south of the Lake Allatoona bridge. He stopped and turned around on the four-lane road to help the woman, said Cobb Police Cpl. Dana Pierce.

The carjacker pushed the woman back into the SUV and took off, with the doors still open. Roberts followed about two miles to Lake Acworth Drive, where the crash occurred, Pierce said.

As Boyd's car turned east on Lake Acworth Drive it was struck by the cement truck.

Witness Bobby Williams said the truck had just started away from a traffic light and was traveling no more than 10 mph when it hit the SUV.

Williams, owner of A2Z Auto Service at 4356 North Cobb Parkway, said he saw Roberts get out of his 2004 black Dodge Ram pickup and run toward the accident scene wearing a leather shoulder holster.

"He looked official," Williams said, explaining that he thought Roberts might be a plain-clothes police officer. "He hollered at [the carjacker], 'Stay where you are. Stay where you are.'"

The carjacker ran toward a Raceway gas station on the corner and Roberts chased him. He told police the man turned a gun toward him, and he had to do something.

"I shot and killed a man today," Roberts told WAGA-TV. "I don't feel good about it, but if I hadn't have done something somebody else would have died."

Williams said he heard at least four, perhaps five, gunshots.

"He [the carjacker] was five feet in front of me when he got hit," Williams said. "On TV, all that flailing around that goes on is not what happened. He dropped like a sack of potatoes."

Monday night Cobb police identified the dead man as Brian Clark, 25, who has family in Acworth. Police did not say whether Clark lived in the area.

No charges were filed against the cement truck driver, who was not identified.

Police questioned Roberts, who they said was not an off-duty officer, before releasing him without filing charges.

"All I can say right now is to offer my condolences of the family of the woman," Roberts said when reached at his home Monday night in Acworth. "I'm postponing any comments just for a few days," he added, saying he was acting on legal advice.

Boyd's family could not be reached Monday.

Police are still unsure where the carjacking began, Pierce said. They are tracing possible routes from Allatoona Truck Rental, the business Boyd operated on Cherokee Street in Acworth, according to public records. Police said she left her office shortly after arriving there Monday morning. The first 911 call on the crash and shooting came in about 9:30 a.m.

Police also were investigating the possibility that the carjacker's gun had been taken in a robbery, rape and carjacking in Acworth last Tuesday, said Cobb robbery squad Lt. Tom Arnold.

"We're looking into that and whether the suspect in this assault is the same as in last week's attack in Acworth," Arnold said.

Acworth police spokesman Wayne Dennard said his department also is investigating the possibility that the man killed Monday morning was the suspect in a rape last Tuesday.

In last week's attack a woman was assaulted as she left home and was forced inside, where she was beaten and raped before being forced to drive to a nearby bank to get money from an ATM, Dennard said. The woman instead ran inside the bank and her assailant drove away in her car, which was later found abandoned, he said.

Late Monday, Boyd's SUV was driven on a flatbed into the Cobb crime lab impound building next to the medical examiner's office where the bodies of Boyd and her assailant were taken, Arnold said.

Fingerprints were taken from the dead man Monday, Arnold said. Autopsies on Boyd and the man are to be conducted today. Police will compare the dead man's fingerprints and DNA to evidence recovered from last week's attack, he said.

http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/cobb/0905/13carjacking.html

1939
Politics & Religion / We're From the Government and We're Here to Help
« on: September 13, 2005, 09:05:40 PM »
Mr. Gruhn:

Doubtless I'm seeing things through a Libertarian lens, but the events shown in the clip in question give me the willies on several levels. First, there are CA cops enforcing LA emergency directives of dubious origin (see above Kopel piece). It's hard to imagine a coherent statutory mechanism that gives CA police the power to enforce directives contrary to the LA, and US, constitutions. Authority is exercised nonetheless.

Second, it's quite clear to me that the homeowner doesn't want the cops in her home, nor does she want to leave it. Though it's hard to know the exact circumstance of the area from viewing the clip, there doesn't appear to be any imminent danger. There have been a lot of contradictory statements out of LA about just how vigorously, and by which legal mechanism, evacuation can be forced. Despite many a gray area by all reports, the CA cops enforced evacuation with a vigor that spooked me.

Finally what the fornication was a news crew doing in the mix? What, the area is too dangerous for homeowners, but camera crews can intrude where they will? Though I suppose some would argue we should count ourselves lucky for having the fourth estate there to bear witness, I can't help but wonder how the observers impact the observed. It's not like some omniscient eye just happened by, rather a reporter, producer, cameraman, and perhaps sound man managed to attach themselves to a group of police doing a sweep. The all trundled into a private residence, and perhaps served as a moderating influence, or perhaps served to exacerbate things. What cop wants to be filmed turning tail on an older woman; if his buddies saw the tape he'd never live it down.

Bottom line for me is that here's a woman who's survived a pretty horrific event coming into contact with agents of the government ostensibly there to help her. The result? She is wrestled to the ground by an out of town cop, disarmed, and evicted. Perhaps I'm more idealistic than I let on, but I can't help thinking it wouldn't take much official effort to produce a far more desirable outcome.

1940
Politics & Religion / This Dude ain't no Doughboy
« on: September 11, 2005, 12:58:14 PM »
Thursday, September 08, 2005
Taking the Chinese at their word

Michael Pillsbury, a scion of the Pillsbury family, has translated volumes of Chinese strategic thought, from ancient to modern. He is a key influencer behind recent moves to beef up the Pacific Command in order to deal with potential contingencies involving China:
Michael Pillsbury, influential Pentagon adviser and former China lover, believes most Americans have China all wrong. They think of the place as an inherently gentle country intent on economic prosperity.

In that camp he lumps the lower ranks of the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, most U.S. investors and the majority of American China scholars, whom he chides as "panda huggers." Mr. Pillsbury says his mission is to assure that the Defense Department doesn't fall into the same trap.

"Beijing sees the U.S. as an inevitable foe, and is planning accordingly," warns the 60-year-old China expert. "We'd be remiss not to take that into account."

Mr. Pillsbury's 35-year China odyssey, from fondness to suspicion, parallels Washington's own hot and cold relations with Beijing -- from the diplomatic warming of the 1970s, through the shock and disillusionment of the post-Tiananmen Square era, to today's growing economic and political tensions. That's hardly a coincidence: Whether in public or in the policy-making shadows, Mr. Pillsbury has been a persistent force in shaping official American perceptions of a nation increasingly seen as the world's fastest-rising power.

Washington these days is a welter of emotions on China, many of them heightened by the recent furor over Cnooc Ltd.'s failed bid to buy American oil company Unocal Corp. President Bush came to office calling China a "strategic competitor." He now calls relations with China "good" but "complex." Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has lately taken a dimmer view of China than her predecessor, Colin Powell, saying it remains unclear whether China will play a positive role in the world.

Thanks in part to Mr. Pillsbury's nudging, the Pentagon has staked out a particularly wary view of Beijing's global intentions. "We must start with the acknowledgement, at least, that we are unprepared to understand Chinese thinking," Mr. Pillsbury says. "And then we must acknowledge that we are facing in China what may become the largest challenge in our nation's history."

A lanky patrician with bright blue eyes, combed-back gray hair and a ready laugh, Mr. Pillsbury is known around the Pentagon as the Sphinx. Independently wealthy, he spends most days working in his two-story brownstone near the Capitol. He appears on no public Defense Department roster, and top officials decline to speak on the record about his work, noting that he is merely one of hundreds of paid consultants.

Yet Mr. Pillsbury, a fluent Mandarin speaker and author of three esoteric books on Chinese military strategy, has become one of the Pentagon's most influential advisers on China, with a direct line to many of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's top aides.

After decades spent nurturing contacts within China's military, Mr. Pillsbury has amassed mounds of Chinese-language military texts and interviewed their authors to get a grip on China's long-term military aims. His conclusion has rattled many in Washington: China sees the U.S. as a military rival.

"Mike's core insight has been to plumb the subterranean anti-American feelings within China's military," says Daniel Blumenthal, a China specialist at the Defense Department until late last year and now a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. "He takes the Chinese at their word, and that has given him real influence within the Pentagon."

Mr. Rumsfeld has sharpened his posture on China in recent months. In June, he ruffled feathers in Asia when he used an annual security forum in Singapore to charge that China's military buildup could upset the region's delicate security balance. The Pentagon then upped the ante with a report warning that the Chinese military nurtures ambitions well beyond defending its historical claim to Taiwan.

The report laid out five "pathways" that could lead China to develop "more assertive foreign and security policies" or even provoke small wars to secure its growing energy needs. U.S. China experts noted that these and other passages seemed lifted straight from Mr. Pillsbury's scholarly work.

The Chinese government disputes Mr. Pillsbury's assessments, as well as the Pentagon's assertion that Beijing is dramatically increasing its military spending. Asked to comment on Mr. Pillsbury, the Chinese Embassy in Washington said in a statement that "any words or actions that fabricate and drum up China's military threat are detrimental to regional peace and stability."

Mr. Pillsbury's numerous critics call him a charming but combative China hawk whose work has overblown the thoughts and writings of a small cadre of Chinese military officials. Even admirers note the intensity with which he defends his views. "Michael has played a singularly important role in surfacing Chinese attitudes toward the U.S.," says Kurt Campbell, the Pentagon's top Asia hand during the Clinton administration. "But as with all brilliance, there is also a touch of madness."

Chu Shulong, a leading scholar on U.S.-China relations at Tsinghua University's Institute of Strategic Studies in Beijing, questions Mr. Pillsbury's conclusions. "All these ideas of the rising power and inevitable conflict, I'm afraid, are very out of date," he says, asserting that China is above all intent on assuring its economic well-being.

Mr. Pillsbury, who has nurtured ties with the Chinese military since the early 1970s, insists he remains open-minded. "My core doctrine is that the Chinese think differently than we think they do and that it's imperative we understand what motivates them," he says.

Chinese writings, Mr. Pillsbury says, show a military establishment obsessed with the inevitable decline of the U.S. and China's commensurate rise. On the economic front, he cautions that Americans shouldn't be taken in by the profusion of fast-food restaurants in China or other signs that make China look like the West. Beneath the growing trade ties with U.S., he says, runs a nationalistic fervor that could take American investors by surprise.

Mr. Pillsbury got the China bug as an undergraduate in the early 1960s, and later spent two years in Taiwan while earning a doctorate in Chinese studies from Columbia University. In late 1972, just months after President Nixon's famous trip to China, Mr. Pillsbury joined Rand Corp. as a 27-year-old China scholar. At the think tank, he began to do classified work for the U.S. government.

By then, Mr. Pillsbury had already made his first contacts with the Chinese military through a friendship with a People's Liberation Army general, Zhang Wutang, who was posted at the United Nations. He used the contact to understand PLA aspirations, and then passed along his conclusions to the Pentagon and the CIA in a series of secret memos. "I was giddy with the Confucian classics and all the magnificence of Chinese culture," he says.

He earned his first acclaim -- and a handwritten letter from then California Gov. Ronald Reagan -- with a 1975 essay in Foreign Policy magazine urging the U.S. to deter Moscow by establishing military and intelligence ties with China. At the time, that idea was almost scandalous. Later, under Presidents Carter and Reagan, such liaisons became a standard part of U.S.-China relations.

Mr. Pillsbury came slowly to what he calls his epiphany on China. Through the Reagan and first Bush administrations, he hopped between jobs at the Pentagon and the Senate, working to enhance military and intelligence cooperation with Beijing. In the 1980s, the U.S. began selling China powerful new torpedoes, upgrades for its jet fighters and advanced electronics for artillery -- arms sales that officials say Mr. Pillsbury helped push.

Then in early May 1989, Mr. Pillsbury flew to Beijing for a low-key military mission, arriving just as the Tiananmen protests picked up steam. He was unsettled by the ruthless crackdown that ensued, and also by how Chinese authorities blamed the U.S. for helping foment the dissent. "I was stunned," he says. "Even some friends in the Chinese military that I'd known for years began to describe us as a mortal enemy, an evil force."

Following Tiananmen, Mr. Pillsbury's conclusions on China became notably darker. In one 1993 study, he noted: "China has the advantage that many experts on Chinese affairs...testify soothingly that China today is a satisfied power which deeply desires a peaceful environment in which to develop its economy. They put the burden of proof on others, defying pessimists to prove that China may ever become hypernationalistic or aggressive."

An inveterate free-lancer, Mr. Pillsbury has never had to worry about steady employment. He's a member of the Pillsbury flour family, and his wealth has allowed him to pursue his research despite a knack for championing unpopular causes and for landing in political scrapes. Once, while helping funnel weapons to anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan and Angola in the 1980s, he lost and regained his security clearance amid allegations of leaking secret information to the press.

Mr. Pillsbury has also avidly collected high-level protectors, counting Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch and retired North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms among his patrons. His long-time mentor and current employer is the Pentagon's Andrew Marshall, a mercurial figure who at 83 still runs the department's long-term planning shop, the Office of Net Assessment.

In early 1995, Mr. Marshall sent Mr. Pillsbury to Beijing to gather Chinese military writings. The Pentagon by then was promoting a new generation of heavily computerized military hardware, and Mr. Marshall wanted to see what the Chinese made of this so-called revolution in military affairs.

Mr. Pillsbury interviewed dozens of authors, and returned after several trips with crates of books and journals, more than 500 volumes in all. The haul formed the core of his first two books, both published by the Pentagon's National Defense University.

Hardly light reading, the books got glowing reviews from several neoconservative thinkers, including Paul Wolfowitz, Mr. Rumsfeld's former top aide and now president of the World Bank.

In his 1997 "Chinese Views of Future Warfare," Mr. Pillsbury portrays a military hierarchy fascinated with information warfare and the need for weapons systems to deliver "acupuncture" strikes and take out satellites. A particular obsession: what he claims to be the Chinese pursuit of "shashoujian," or a secret "assassin's weapon" that China can use to surprise a more powerful opponent.

"Mike can make a good case that the Chinese are developing submarines to sink our aircraft carriers or missiles to take out our satellites," says James Lilly, a former CIA station chief who served as ambassador to China in the early 1990s. "His whole point is, 'Pay attention. Listen to what they are saying.'" China's long-term strategy, Mr. Pillsbury argues, is to amass its strengths while attracting as little attention as possible.

He is increasingly convinced that China's military thinkers and strategists derive much of their guidance and inspiration from China's Warring States period, an era of pre-unification strife about 2,300 years ago. This is the thesis of his latest book, "The Future of China's Ancient Strategy," which the Pentagon plans to publish this fall. Its core assertion is that China's history and culture posit the existence of a "hegemon" -- these days, the United States -- that must be defeated over time.

After President Bush took office in 2001, officials in the Defense Department were quick to embrace Mr. Pillsbury's warnings on China. His prominence became abundantly clear when China's then-vice president, Hu Jintao, stopped by the Pentagon in May 2002 to visit Secretary Rumsfeld.

The State Department had opposed the meeting, arguing that the Defense Department was not the proper place for the visit of a soon-to-be president of China. When Mr. Hu's party arrived, Mr. Rumsfeld dismissed the State Department interpreter and had Mr. Pillsbury do the job instead.

Defense Department officials, while declining to elaborate, say that Mr. Pillsbury is now being considered for a full-time post at the Pentagon.

Chinese officials are also keeping tabs on Mr. Pillsbury. In June, the Communist Party's People's Daily tagged the China expert as the main force behind the Pentagon's recent report on the Chinese military. "Mike Pillsbury always sits beside Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld," at policy sessions on China, the story said.

1941
Politics & Religion / We the Unorganized Militia
« on: September 10, 2005, 08:17:13 PM »
Oh my god. Watch brave California Highway Patrolmen whup on an armed, older woman who does not want to leave her home. Un-freaking-real:

http://www.ktvu.com/news/4936363/detail.html#

Go to the story near the bottom of the page titled:

CHP Takes Part In Door-To-Door Search

1942
Politics & Religion / New Orleans Gun Confiscation
« on: September 10, 2005, 05:17:22 PM »
I've been shocked at what seems to me to be extra legal confiscation of firearms in New Orleans. Indeed, I was left agog by a photo published in yesterday's Washington Post where two SWAT garbed men identified as "drug enforcement officers" armed with sub-machine guns were using entry tools to force open a door of a private residence so they could "search for weapons."

I've heard a quote over the years to the effect that no urban area is more than 48 hours away from food riots. It also seems no jurisdiction is more than 72 hours away from the suspension of all constitutional protections by extra legal methods.

[David Kopel, September 9, 2005 at 9:57pm]
New Orleans Gun Confiscation is Blatantly Illegal:
On Monday, I'll have an article on the New Orleans gun confiscation on Reason.com. But there's one part of the story that's too important to wait: the confiscation is plainly illegal. I realize that there are plausible arguments that the house-to-house break-ins and gun-point confiscations violate the Second, Fourth, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution, as well as numerous provisions of the Louisiana Constitution, including the right to arms. Indeed, the confiscations are inconsistent with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and with natural law. But my point is much more specific. The particular Louisiana statute which allows emergency controls on firearms also clearly disallows the complete prohibition being imposed by the New Orleans chief of police.

The relevant statute is La. Stat., title 14, ? 329.6. It provides:

?329.6. Proclamation of state of emergency; conditions therefor; effect thereof
A. During times of great public crisis, disaster, rioting, catastrophe, or similar public emergency within the territorial limits of any municipality or parish, or in the event of reasonable apprehension of immediate danger thereof, and upon a finding that the public safety is imperiled thereby, the chief executive officer of any political subdivision or the district judge, district attorney, or the sheriff of any parish of this state, or the public safety director of a municipality, may request the governor to proclaim a state of emergency within any part or all of the territorial limits of such local government. Following such proclamation by the governor, and during the continuance of such state of emergency, the chief law enforcement officer of the political subdivision affected by the proclamation may, in order to protect life and property and to bring the emergency situation under control, promulgate orders affecting any part or all of the territorial limits of the municipality or parish:

(1) Establishing a curfew and prohibiting and/or controlling pedestrian and vehicular traffic, except essential emergency vehicles and personnel;

(2) Designating specific zones within which the occupancy and use of buildings and the ingress and egress of vehicles and persons shall be prohibited or regulated;

(3) Regulating and closing of places of amusement and assembly;

(4) Prohibiting the sale and distribution of alcoholic beverages;

(5) Prohibiting and controlling the presence of persons on public streets and places;

(6) Regulating and controlling the possession, storage, display, sale, transport and use of firearms, other dangerous weapons and ammunition;

(7) Regulating and controlling the possession, storage, display, sale, transport and use of explosives and flammable materials and liquids, including but not limited to the closing of all wholesale and retail establishments which sell or distribute gasoline and other flammable products;

(8) Regulating and controlling the possession, storage, display, sale, transport and use of sound apparatus, including but not limited to public address systems, bull horns and megaphones.

(9) Prohibiting the sale or offer for sale of goods or services within the designated emergency area for value exceeding the prices ordinarily charged for comparable goods and services in the same market area at, or immediately before, the time of the state of emergency. However, the value received may include reasonable expenses and a charge for any attendant business risk in addition to the cost of the goods and services which necessarily are incurred in procuring the goods and services during the state of emergency, pursuant to the provisions of R.S. 29:701 through 716.

B. Such orders shall be effective from the time and in the manner prescribed in such orders and shall be published as soon as practicable in a newspaper of general circulation in the area affected by such order and transmitted to the radio and television media for publication and broadcast. Such orders shall cease to be in effect five days after their promulgation or upon declaration by the governor that the state of emergency no longer exists, whichever occurs sooner; however, the chief law enforcement officer, with the consent of the governor, may extend the effect of such orders for successive periods of not more than five days each by republication of such orders in the manner hereinabove provided.

C. All orders promulgated pursuant to this section shall be executed in triplicate and shall be filed with the clerk of court of the parish affected and with the secretary of state of this state.

D. During any period during which a state of emergency exists the proclaiming officer may appoint additional peace officers or firemen for temporary service, who need not be in the classified lists of such departments. Such additional persons shall be employed only for the time during which the emergency exists.

E. During the period of the existence of the state of emergency the chief law enforcement officer of the political subdivision may call upon the sheriff, mayor, or other chief executive officer of any other parish or municipality to furnish such law enforcement or fire protection personnel, or both, together with appropriate equipment and apparatus, as may be necessary to preserve the public peace and protect persons and property in the requesting area. Such aid shall be furnished to the chief law enforcement officer requesting it insofar as possible without withdrawing from the political subdivision furnishing such aid the minimum police and fire protection appearing necessary under the circumstances. In such cases when a state of emergency has been declared by the governor pursuant to R.S. 29:724 et seq., all first responders who are members of a state or local office of homeland security and emergency preparedness, including but not limited to medical personnel, emergency medical technicians, persons called to active duty service in the uniformed services of the United States, Louisiana National Guard, Louisiana Guard, Civil Air Patrol, law enforcement and fire protection personnel acting outside the territory of their regular employment shall be considered as performing services within the territory of their regular employment for purposes of compensation, pension, and other rights or benefits to which they may be entitled as incidents of their regular employment. Law enforcement officers acting pursuant to this Section outside the territory of their regular employment have the same authority to enforce the law as when acting within the territory of their own employment.

F. Notwithstanding the provisions of this Section, except in an imminent life threatening situation nothing herein shall restrict any uniformed employee of a licensed private security company, acting within the scope of employment, from entering and remaining in an area where an emergency has been declared. The provisions of this Subsection shall apply if the licensed private security company submits a list of employees and their assignment to be allowed into the area, to the Louisiana State Board of Private Security Examiners, which shall forward the list to the chief law enforcement office of the parish and, if different, the agency in charge of the scene.

First, there are the procedural issues. According to subsection B, emergency orders must be published in a newspaper in the jurisdiction; the Times-Picayune is heroically publishing on-line, but I did not find any evidence, on Friday night, of any publication of the gun confiscation order, whose implementation had already begun on Thursday. According to subsection C, an emergency order must also be filed with the court in the relevant parish (impossible under current conditions), and with the Secretary of State (whose office in Baton Rouge is entirely functional). The Secretary's website gives no indication that a gun confiscation order has been filed.

The more serious issue is the substantive one. The emergency statute creates authority for "prohibiting" some things, and for "regulating" other things. The statute uses "prohibiting" in subsections (A)4, 5, and 9. The statute uses "regulating" in sections (A)3, 6, 7, and 8. Quite clearly the legislature meant to distinguish "prohibiting" authority from "regulating" authority. In the context of the statute, it is not plausible to claim that "prohibiting" means the same as "regulating."

"Prohibiting" authority applies to the sale of alcohol, presence on public streets, and the sale of goods or services at excessive prices. "Regulating" authority applies to firearms, flammable materials, and sound devices (such as megaphones). The "regulating" authority is undoubtedly broad. But it is not equivalent to "prohibiting." The statute does not authorize the New Orleans Police--abetted by the National Guard and the U.S. Marshalls--to break into homes, point guns at people, and confiscate every single private firearm--or every single private bullhorn or private cigarette lighter.

Yet New Orleans' lawless superintendant of police, P. Edwin Compass, has declared, "No one is allowed to be armed. We're going to take all the guns."

The Compass order appears to be plainly illegal. Under section 1983 of the federal Civil Rights law, any government employee who assists in the illegal confiscation would appear to be personally liable to a civil lawsuit. Moreover, higher-ranking officials--such as the National Guard officers who have ordered their troops to participate in the confiscation--would seem to be proper subjects for impeachment or other removal from office (and attendant forfeiture of pensions), depending on the procedures of their particular state.

All police officers, National Guard troops, and U.S. Marshals take an oath to uphold the Constitution and the laws. It appears that carrying out an illegal order to confiscate lawfully-owned firearms from homes would be inconsistent with the oath, contrary to sworn duty, and perhaps a criminal act.


UPDATE: Orin's response to my post (above) contains several misunderstandings, in my view:

1. The most serious problem is that he reads the power of "regulating and controlling" as equivalent to the power of "prohibiting and controlling." By his theory, the Louisiana legislature could just as well have said "controlling" instead of "prohibiting and controlling" and the legislature still would have granted the power of prohibiting. In an abstract semantic sense, Orin's theory is not implausible. But the Louisiana legislature obviously used the words more precisely; the repeated shifts from "regulating" to "prohibitting" plainly show that the two words are not identical, and that adding "and controlling" after each word does not create identical phrases. If the Louisiana legislature meant to convey the same powers over each of the items in subsection (A), the legislature would have used the same operative words in each subsection.

2. He's right that the statute doesn't specify whether proper publication and filing are necessary for the emergency orders to be lawful. (And as my original post indicated, it's not absolutely certain that proper publication and filing have not occured, although it would be odd for the Louisiana Secretary of State not to post the filing of such an important order.) At least in some circumstances, strict adherence to the provisions of subsections (B) and (C) would be impossible. For example, the Secretary of State's office might be closed; indeed, the courts in Orleans Parish are currently closed. However, if the police chief failed to file the proper notice with the Secretary of State, even when the Secretary of State's office is open, the failure to file indicates, at the least, a disregard on the part of the chief for proper legal procedure.

3. Note subsection (B)'s rule that "Such orders shall be effective from the time and in the manner prescribed in such orders... Such orders shall cease to be in effect five days after their promulgation..." Has the police chief ever promulgated a proper emergency order about firearms? Sending police officers out to confiscate guns is not "promulgation." For the order to be valid, there must, at least, be some form of proper order to the public, not merely to the police. The "promulgation" must, at the least, include a date on which the order goes into effect, because a legal start date is necessary to calculate the automatic expiration date five days thereafter. It seems unlikely that a press conference merely announcing--after the confiscations and break-ins have already begun--the confiscations are taking place, consistutes the promulgation of an "order." The only Louisiana case law definitions of "promulgate" come from election law cases; they rely on the dictionary definition of "promulgate" as "To make known or announce officially and formally to the public." The cases further specify that "promulgate" should be understood in its specific statutory context. E.g., LeCompte v. Board of Sup'rs of Elections of Terrebonne Parish, 331 So.2d 173 (La. App. 1976). And it appears that the chief of police has not complied with any of the statute's specific standards for promulgation (newspaper, parish court, Secretary of State).

4. Violation of a person's state constitutional right to keep and bear arms is a violation of her 14th Amendment rights, and gives rise to a cause of action under section 1983. Kellogg v. City of Gary, 562 N.E.2d 685, 696 (Ind. 1990):
For all of the foregoing reasons, we now hold there is a state created right to bear arms which includes the right to carry a handgun with a license, provided that all of the requirements of the Indiana Firearms Act are met. This right is protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and is both a property and liberty interest for purposes of ? 1983.
If the confiscation of firearms is illegal under Louisiana statute, then the confiscation is very likely a violation of the right to arms under the Louisiana constitution. Moreover, pursuant to United States v. Emerson, the Second Amendment is recognized as an individual right in the Fifth Circuit, which includes Louisiana. The Second Amendment, even if unincorporated, would be the basis of a section 1983 claim against any federal employees involved in the confiscation. Also, the warrantless entry into homes and illegal confiscation of property might give rise to section 1983 claims premised on the Fourth and Fifth Amendments.

5. In response to some of the issues raised by comments on related posts...the President of the United States probably has the power, as Commander in Chief, to order the confiscation of firearms from areas in actual rebellion, following a proclamation of martial law. Martial law has not been declared. The "standard of scrutiny" question for the deprivation of state or federal constitutional rights is irrelevant here; the question would be relevant if there were a challenge to the constitutionality of the Louisiana emergency statute. When the police chief exercises power which he was never granted by law, then his act is ultra vires, and necessarily illegal.

http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_09_04-2005_09_10.shtml

1943
Politics & Religion / Let's Plant some Axioms and Watch them Grow
« on: September 09, 2005, 07:28:53 PM »
Not sure anything Buckley says can be construed as a rant, but this is as close as he gets to one.


September 09, 2005, 1:33 p.m.
Post-Katrina Doublethought
William Buckley

The war against stable thought blazes on, the objective being to put the blame on the Bush administration for what happened in New Orleans.

Thomas Friedman of the New York Times personalizes even further. The administration has a "tax policy . . . dominated by the toweringly selfish Grover Norquist ? who has been quoted as saying: 'I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.?" You would think that Mr. Friedman would leave a little place in life for hyperbole ? what would he do with the political poets who speak of the "end" of hunger and disease? But he hangs onto the metaphor: "Mr. Norquist is the only person about whom I would say this: I hope he owns property around the New Orleans levee that was never properly finished because of a lack of tax dollars. I hope his basement got flooded." Planted axiom: the unrepaired levee in New Orleans is the result of a shortage of federal dollars.

Across that editorial page we have the argument placed a little differently. Not that Maureen Dowd will neglect an opportunity to anthropomorphize Katrina. No, she explains, the tragedy was the result of the Bush political family, Dick Cheney being the next in line. What was he doing when Katrina struck? He was "reportedly . . . shopping for a $2.9 million waterfront estate in St Michael's" ? which is a ?retreat in the Chesapeake Bay where Rummy" ? the Secretary of Defense ? "has a weekend home."

"As the water recedes," Dowd explains, "more and more decaying bodies will testify to the callous and stumblebum administration response to Katrina's rout of 90,000 square miles of the South." Another planted axiom. It is that the Bush Administration, to return to the language of Mr. Friedman, "has engaged in a tax giveaway since 9/11 that has had one underlying assumption: There will never be another rainy day."

The gravamen against Bush becomes plain: The Bush administration insisted "on cutting more taxes, even when that has contributed to incomplete levees and too small an army to deal with Katrina, Osama, and Saddam at the same time.?

The proposition that the Federal Government under George W. Bush has been shortchanging welfare is in astonishing conflict with the figures. Under Bush, federal spending increases have been at the fastest rate in 30 years. Non-defense discretionary spending under Bush has grown by 35.7 percent, the highest rate of federal government growth since the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson.

Again, the planted axiom is that the New Orleans levee has been for years a national pustule that George Bush refused to lance because he didn't want to drain the money needed by Dick Cheney to buy his waterfront estate. If New Orleans was conspicuous for its vulnerability, why hadn't the city?s articulate mayor, or his fellow Democrat the articulate governor, said something about it? Why did it not figure in the demands of the Democratic party at its convention in Boston? How explain the silence on the subject of candidate John Kerry?

It is tempting to weigh directly the cost of repairing the levee, and the size of the tax cuts. But what is going to pay for all the ounces of prevention we could contingently use on all the frontiers of national vulnerability? To single out the levee is on the order of blaming the destruction of the Twin Towers on the architects who situated them where they were. The first-level threat to America is a nuclear bomb, then biological and chemical weapons. What preemptive precautions should be taken against the development of such weaponry? What Republicans are objecting to federal expenses on those fronts?

We have been promised reports on Katrina from almost every official body, legislative and executive. It diminishes confidence in purposive thought to lose oneself in polemical theater. Grover Norquist uses his own language. But he could be using that of John Adams, who warned that the government seeks to turn every contingency into an excuse for amassing power in itself. Or that of Woodrow Wilson, who said that the history of liberalism is the history of man's efforts to restrain the growth of government. If New Orleans is a land doomed by nature, then nature's reach needs to be tamed, or else yielded to. The critics have not yet charged that movement away from New Orleans was prohibited by George Bush.


http://www.nationalreview.com/buckley/wfb200509091333.asp

1944
Politics & Religion / Triaging Blame
« on: September 09, 2005, 02:36:07 PM »
As fun as it is to whup on Bush--accusing him of all manner of nefarious schemes when not naming him an utter dunce--my take is that there is plenty of blame to go around. Think Krauthhammer does an effective job of blame triage here, though I'd move his final point about the American people up a notch or two.

Assigning blame
Charles Krauthammer

September 9, 2005


WASHINGTON -- In less enlightened times, there was no catastrophe independent of human agency. When the plague or some other natural disaster struck, witches were burned, Jews were massacred and all felt better (except the witches and Jews).

     A few centuries later, our progressive thinkers have progressed not an inch. No fall of a sparrow on this planet is not attributed to sin and human perfidy. The three current favorites are: (1) global warming, (2) the war in Iraq and (3) tax cuts. Katrina hits and the unholy trinity is immediately invoked to damn sinner-in-chief George W. Bush.

     This kind of stupidity merits no attention whatsoever, but I'll give it a paragraph. There is no relationship between global warming and the frequency and intensity of Atlantic hurricanes. Period. The problem with the evacuation of New Orleans is not that National Guardsmen in Iraq could not get to New Orleans, but that National Guardsmen in Louisiana did not get to New Orleans. As for the Bush tax cuts, administration budget requests for New Orleans flood control during the five Bush years exceed that of the five preceding Clinton years. The notion that the allegedly missing revenues would have been spent wisely by Congress, targeted precisely to the levees of New Orleans, and reconstruction would have been completed in time, is a threefold fallacy. The argument ends when you realize that, as The Washington Post notes, ``the levees that failed were already completed projects."

     Let's be clear. The author of this calamity was, first and foremost, Nature (or if you prefer, Nature's God). The suffering was augmented, aided and abetted in descending order of culpability by the following:

     1. The mayor of New Orleans. He knows the city. He knows the danger. He knows that during Hurricane Georges in 1998, the use of the Superdome was a disaster and fully two-thirds of the residents never got out of the city. Nothing was done. He declared a mandatory evacuation only 24 hours before Hurricane Katrina hit. He did not even declare a voluntary evacuation until the day before that, at 5 p.m. At that time, he explained that he needed to study his legal authority to call a mandatory evacuation and was hesitating to do so lest the city be sued by hotels and other businesses.

     2. The Louisiana governor. It's her job to call up the National Guard and get it to where it has to go. Where the Guard was in the first few days is a mystery. Indeed, she issued an authorization for the National Guard to commandeer school buses to evacuate people on Wednesday afternoon -- more than two days after the hurricane hit and after much of the fleet had already drowned in its parking lots.

     3. The head of FEMA. Late, slow and in way over his head. On Thursday he says on national television that he didn't even know there were people in the Convention Center, when anybody watching television could see them there destitute and desperate. Maybe in his vast bureaucracy he can assign three 20-year-olds to watch cable news and give him updates every hour on what in hell is going on.

     4. The president. Late, slow and simply out of tune with the urgency and magnitude of the disaster. The second he heard that the levees had been breached in New Orleans, he should have canceled his schedule and addressed the country on national television to mobilize it both emotionally and physically to assist in the disaster. His flyover on the way to Washington was the worst possible symbolism. And his Friday visit was so tone-deaf and politically disastrous that he had to fly back three days later.

     5. Congress. Now as always playing holier-than-thou. Perhaps it might ask itself who created the Department of Homeland Security in the first place. The congressional response to all crises is the same -- rearrange the bureaucratic boxes, but be sure to add one extra layer. The last four years of DHS have been spent principally on bureaucratic reorganization (and real estate) instead of, say, a workable plan for as predictable a disaster as a Gulf Coast hurricane.

     6. The American people. They have made it impossible for any politician to make any responsible energy policy over the last 30 years -- but that is a column for another day. Now is not the time for constructive suggestions. Now is the time for blame, recriminations and sheer astonishment. Mayor Nagin has announced that, as bodies are still being found and as a public health catastrophe descends upon the city, he is sending 60 percent of his cops on city funds for a little R&R, mostly to Vegas hotels. Asked if it was appropriate to party in these circumstances, he responded: ``New Orleans is a party town. Get over it.'

1945
Politics & Religion / The Racial Gong
« on: September 07, 2005, 02:33:30 PM »
Though the usual suspects are beating the racial gong, a look at the numbers suggests the the equation is a lot more complex than the race baiters would have it. I'd argue underwriting failure with tax dollars had a lot more to do with the pathologies emerging in New Orleans than any putative racist policy. The following underlines those points.



September 07, 2005, 8:29 a.m.
A Fuller Picture
Beginning to understand what we are seeing in New Orleans.
Michael Novak


There has been something askew in the reporting from New Orleans. It has bothered me for a week now. Finally, when I took a look at the 2000 census data on New Orleans, a lot became clearer.

According to the Census, the population of New Orleans in 2000 was 485,000 of whom 326,000 were black, 136,000 white, and the remaining ten thousand or so each, Asian or Hispanic.

If 75-80 percent of the population evacuated the city safely before the storm hit, as everybody is reporting, that means that far more than half the black population escaped safely before the storm slammed into the city. Even if all those who did not evacuate were black ? and that is manifestly not true ? 25 percent of the total population is only 121,000. Twenty percent is 96,000. By far the majority of blacks in New Orleans, who numbered as the storm began some 326,000, evacuated in advance.

Even they lost much, maybe everything, but at least they were not caught in the roiling water.

Secondly, I have heard ever since reading about Huey Long of the 1930s that Louisiana is one of the most corrupt and dependency-prone states in the Union. Of all the cities in the south, New Orleans seems the one most welfare-oriented, least entrepreneurial, most state-dependent, and least economically dynamic. More than any other southern city, it is "Old South" rather than "New South." That, of course, is part of its charm. It refuses the modern bustle, says "Slow down, Be easy." It lulls. Its charm seduces. And it is also the prototypical, old-time welfare-state city.

The Census report shows what that means in vivid detail. In 2000, there were only 25,000 two-parent families in New Orleans with children under 18. By contrast, there were more than 26,000 female householders with children under 18, and no husband present. In other words, slightly more mothers all alone with children than married-couple mothers.

In addition, there were more than 18,000 householders who were more than 65 years old and living alone. Of these, most would normally be female.

If you add together the 26,000 female householders with children under 18, no husband present, and the 18,000 householders more than 65 years old and living alone, that is an estimated 40,000 female-headed households. That explains the pictures we are seeing on television, which are overwhelming female, most often with young children. The chances of persons in this demographic being employed full-time, year round, and with a good income, are not high. The chances of them living in poverty, and without an automobile, are exceedingly high.

In the future, city planners should carefully count in advance the numbers of persons who fall in this demographic when they formulate evacuation plans. Female householders all by themselves with children or over 65 are statistically likely to be severely disadvantaged in thinking about options for the future, disadvantaged in not having the means to determine their own destiny, and disadvantaged with respect to the habits of mind that accustom them to taking charge of their own future. Special provision will need to be made for helping them. They are likely to be accustomed to being taken care of by the state.

The younger mothers among them have been abandoned by those they should have been able to count on, the males in their lives. The over-65s (in urban areas) are likely to be totally dependent on Social Security and other government benefits, without private pensions or homeownership of their own. In emergencies, such persons need someone else to take care of them. It is wrong to throw them, at this point, solely on their own resources. Some will be able to manage that, but by no means all.

Is this not what our eyes are showing us among those who failed to evacuate in time? To be sure, thousands of those taking refuge are men, and some are married couples, and some are white, Hispanic, or Asian. More research could show that my own hypotheses ? and even visual observations ? are wrong. But the Census data helps explain to me what my eyes are seeing.

Another question that bothers me: I would also really like to know what happened to the better-off blacks and whites of New Orleans, who escaped before the storm hit. How many have lost their homes? How many have loved ones still unaccounted for?

What are things now like in those lovely suburbs around New Orleans?

It is not only those who did not evacuate in time that seem to have suffered horribly. I would love to see more reporting about the middle class ? and sympathy for them, too. They are Katrina's victims, too.

Is it possible that many of them will not receive the insurance payments they are counting on, in order to get their lives started up again at a level not too far below where they were before the storm hit? Have they taken a permanent hit? How will many cope with that?

The poor may suffer worst of all, but they are not the only ones to taste bitter ashes in times of calamity, and to find their souls tested. Those of the middle class who worked hard (maybe even worked their way out of poverty), played by the rules, and set aside some resources for times of trouble, also deserve our help. Especially just at that exact moment when everything they made so many sacrifices to attain has been taken from them.

It was just then that Job was tried. So might we all be.

? Michael Novak is the winner of the 1994 Templeton Prize for progress in religion and the George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. Novak's own website is www.michaelnovak.net.

   
http://www.nationalreview.com/novak/novak200509070829.as

1946
Politics & Religion / Armed Citizens into the Breech
« on: September 06, 2005, 02:16:41 PM »
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
What Michael Moore and Liberals Don?t (and Will Never) Understand About the Second Amendment
Armed citizens protecting their neighborhoods from marauders. [link]

Some of the most heartening tales coming out of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina are the tales of Americans standing up and taking responsibility for their own safety and survival rather than whining about ?the government? not taking care of them.

The Washington Post reports that in Popps Ferry Landing, a neighborhood near Biloxi, Mississippi, the local neighborhood watch is keeping an armed night watch to prevent looters from invading the neighborhood. Following the looting of the local Dollar Store, neighbors who very rarely spoke to each other, got together to protect their own. They?re not going out hunting down anyone; they?re just camping out at their houses with their constitutionally protected firearms preventing the roving bands of criminals from destroying their peaceful middle class neighborhood.

It is times such as these, for which the Second Amendment is so important. In the aftermath of the greatest natural disaster in the history of this nation, it is the citizen himself that must stand in the breach of the wall of civilization, created by the storm and the consequent disorganization and lack of police presence, to protect himself from the anarchy which reigns in the world outside. These are the minute men of the 21st Century. These are ordinary middle class men, plumbers, engineers, managers, carpenters, and salesmen who have gotten out of their easy chairs and off their sofas, gone out into their neighborhood and introduced themselves to their neighbors. They have, in this time of danger decided, not to wait around to become a victim and then whine about why our government hasn?t done something to protect them, but to take responsibility for their own safety. Our Founding Fathers would not be proud of these men they would merely nod their heads in acknowledgement of men doing what should be expected of them.

It is precisely this for which the Second Amendment was designed. I know it?s difficult for Liberals to understand, but as we are seeing currently, we can?t always depend on the police. The Second Amendment is not, much to the chagrin of Liberals like Michael Moore, Al Gore, and John Kerry, about a person?s right to hunt; it is about the American citizen?s right to feel safe in their own residence. This fact which so sadly escaped the two last Democrat candidates for President is what made the images of John Kerry traipsing around in borrowed jacket with borrowed gun attempting to look like a hunter so hysterical to the gun owners of America. The N.R.A. is not about arming criminals like Michael Moore has inappropriately and inaccurately tried to portray in his crassly exploitive movie ?Bowling for Columbine,? it is about educating the American citizen on the rights and responsibilities of gun ownership, the proper use and care of those firearms, and the protection, from those who would usurp those rights under the misapprehension that a gun-free state is a safe state, of those rights as guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.

It is true that guns are designed for the purpose of killing. They are the most efficient form of killing that the average citizen has available to them. They are also the most effective form of self defense the average citizen has available to them. In their absence, individuals, men, women, and children are at greater risk. To an unarmed man, alone on a road or in his house, a group of four or five (or even a couple) burly men intent on evil represent a real life threatening situation; to an armed man, or women, properly trained in the use of firearms, they become a manageable threat. In a society in which the criminal frequently has more rights than the victim, being armed should be, as the Second Amendment intends, an untouchable right. Carrying a firearm, whether concealed of openly, should not only be allowed, it should be encouraged. The fact of the matter is, the better armed the citizens of a community, the lower the crime rate, particularly the violent crime rate, of that community. Those cities like Washington D.C., New York, and possibly soon to be San Francisco, have the highest per capita violent crime rate in the nation.

As can be seen in the Popps Landing example, total dependence upon government agencies for our safety can quickly turn into a liability, if those agencies are overwhelmed by circumstances beyond anyone?s control. At a time when police response to emergency calls can be five to ten minutes (if not much longer) it is ludicrous for the American people to be forced to rely on the government for their protection, as the anti-gun lobby would have us do. That is a real path to the imprisonment of the average citizen inside their houses. In Britain, certainly there is a lower murder rate than in the U.S.A., but the overall violent crime rate is considerably higher than in America. Groups like Handgun Control International, Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, and Common Cause would have Americans surrender their rights to self-defense for the illusory concept of complete safety. There is no such thing as complete safety, and a person can be as easily and more surely killed by a knife as a gun. It has been stated by the Second Amendment lobbying groups so often as to become a trite saying, ?if guns are outlawed; only outlaws will have guns.? Trite maybe, but also true, so true that it becomes a profound statement of universal truth. By definition, an outlaw, a law breaker, a criminal, does not care whether or not he is breaking the law by carrying a firearm. If a person has criminal intent, he will find a means to implement it.

These people, people of the left like Mr. Moore, are the same people who would have had us unilaterally disarm during the cold war in the face of a growing Soviet Nuclear threat. President Reagan, proved how mistaken the unilateralist?s position was by presiding over the first stages of the complete dismantlement of the Soviet Union. Unilateral disarmament in the face of a known threat is an invitation to victim hood. It is only by show of strength that threat can be countered. This is not some new ?off-the-wall? concept, this is human nature at its very core. The anti-gun forces exhibit the same Pollyannaish naivet? of human nature that the Marxists do. There are and always will be predators in our society. It is the human nature of some to covet more than their ?fair share.? The entire concept of ?fair share? is faulty thinking based on the mistaken concept that material wealth is a zero sum game. It is also human nature for some in our society to desire that for which they are not willing to work. They are the predators which must be confronted in everyday life. If relying on the police was a successful concept, there would be no crime. No one would have to lock their door and a woman walking downtown after dark by herself would neither be uncommon nor foolish. Since not even the most rabid Liberal in society would consider that situation reasonable behavior, the basic premise of their arguments against guns is false. I dare say that Sarah Brady would not feel comfortable walking the dark alley ways of D.C. even though there are extremely strong anti-gun laws in place there.

There are no reasonable arguments in favor of gun control, only emotional ones. That is why one so often hears bogus statistics coming out of the anti-gun lobbyists. Thankfully, most Americans understand this concept and reject the irrational policies recommended by the gun haters. You will also hear them claim that they are not anti-gun, rather that they are only seeking to impose ?reasonable? restraints on gun ownership. This is an evolutionary principle for them brought about through their numerous defeats, by gun owners, in their legislative endeavors. You will often hear them use the phrase ?I am a hunter myself...? or ?We?re not talking about taking away a hunter?s guns...? invariably followed by the word ?but.? They then will use the phrase, ?reasonable people,? or ?reasonable restrictions,? so as to make it clear that only an ?unreasonable? person would object to their efforts to restrict gun ownership.

In a society of law-abiding citizens, we have nothing to fear from an unrestricted right to gun ownership. Law-abiding citizens are by definition going to obey the law. By restricting their ?right to keep and bare arms,? we only encourage law breaking by those same citizens. Laws are intended to preserve freedoms, not restrict them. In committing a crime, someone is infringing on the rights and freedoms of another. In an armed society, those who would seek to impose their will on another are significantly less inclined to do so. It is for that reason, that the citizens of Popps Ferry Landing will not have to worry about having their property destroyed or stolen, their families killed or injured by marauding bands of criminals. And the authorities will not be additionally burdened in the exercising of their duties responding to this crisis.

An armed citizenry is a safe and fearless citizenry.
posted by Will Malven at 10:17 AM

1947
Politics & Religion / Mississippi Citizens Restore Order
« on: September 05, 2005, 01:47:19 PM »
Now the Washington Post has published a story that portrays armed citizens in a positive light. Only need The Nation to do so to make the trifecta.

Neighbors Team Up To Provide Security
By Allison Klein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 5, 2005; A23


BILOXI, Miss., Sept. 4 -- Jeffrey Powell yanked the cushions off his living room sofa and arranged them on the bed of his truck. Then he got his shotgun, made himself comfortable, and spent the night in his driveway, protecting his hurricane-ravaged home and enjoying whatever breeze he could catch on a steamy night.

Powell is part of the Popps Ferry Landing neighborhood watch, a group of citizens trying to restore order and peace in their middle-class community a week after Hurricane Katrina brought her chaos.

"We're not going to have any looters out here," said Dan Shearin, 56, Powell's next-door neighbor. "We have some burly men who are sleeping outside with guns. If the looters come, we'll take care of them."

They haven't shot anyone, but they had to scare off a few groups of people they didn't know in the middle of the night, Shearin said.

As stories of violent and desperate looters have made their way across Mississippi, people in communities where law enforcement has been overwhelmed are reaching for their guns to police their streets.

In Popps Ferry Landing, many neighbors had lived near each other for years but had never spoken. The realization that their safety and homes were vulnerable and police presence was scarce brought them together quickly. The Dollar Store up the road was looted and vandalized pretty badly.

"We haven't exactly seen organized law enforcement out here," said Hugh Worden, 53, who lives on the other side of Powell. "The first day after the storm, we saw law enforcement out here. After that, there's not been much patrol. I suppose police are protecting the main streets."

Worden, a manager at Treasure Bay Casino before it was destroyed, said he has talked to everyone within three blocks of his home.

"The good thing is, now we all know each other," he said.

Popps Ferry Landing is tucked away in an enclave of western Biloxi, not far from Pass Road, the main east-west thoroughfare through town. Most of the houses here are two-story Colonials built in the early 1990s, and valued between $100,000 and $175,000. Many lost all or part of their roofs in the storm, and on some the entire front was torn away, as well. Piles of wood and aluminum siding stand in yards. So many trees are down, the road is an obstacle course.

Shearin said he did not sleep outside with a gun, but like most of his neighbors, he owns one. He has a Smith & Wesson .38.

"If I see somebody who's not supposed to be here, I'd shoot over their head," he said. "I wouldn't shoot anyone. I'm not a violent person -- not yet, anyway."

Shearin, a retired phone salesman, said he has been disappointed that police don't have the manpower to deal with looters.

"What good is the federal government?" he asked. "You've got to take care of yourself."

Sitting on his porch drinking a bottle of Aquafina, Shearin said he'd never seen as much destruction as Katrina brought.

"The terrorists couldn't do this much damage," he said.

He and his wife, Dottie, said they'd like to get out of Biloxi for a while, but they, like their neighbors, have to stay and wait for insurance claim agents to come by and assess the damage. The Shearins lost half their roof and most of their back yard, including a new hot tub.

"We are waiting on the insurance agents," Dottie Shearin said. "They have to come by and make a visual inspection."

Around the corner, Marti McKay, 30, said she and other neighbors have scattered their cars around the street to make it look as if everyone is home. It was scariest before they got their power back Saturday.

"It's nerve-racking at night around here because it's so dark," McKay said. "It's so quiet. We're used to the sound of air conditioning, and lights."

Her housemate Robin Frey helped organize some spotlights in the neighborhood powered by generators. And neighbor Oliver Fayard, 49, walked the streets with a flashlight to check on everyone.

"You didn't have a choice but to get out there and network," Frey said. "We saw some cars we didn't know that came through the neighborhood. We gave them a look to kill. We made it known these are not vacant houses."

1948
Politics & Religion / The Coming Collapse of Arab Civilization?
« on: September 04, 2005, 11:21:40 PM »
The Impending Collapse of Arab Civilization

Lieutenant Colonel James G. Lacey, U.S. Army Reserve

Proceedings, September 2005

Slender minarets with muezzins calling the faithful to prayer symbolize the stability and timelessness of the Muslim world. This one in Rabi'ah, a small town on the Iraqi-Syrian border, is a classic?and the Muslim faith is flourishing. Arabs, however, most of whom are Muslims, are not.

If a country wants to be on the winning side of history it first and foremost must get its grand strategy right. With that done, it can make any number of operational mistakes and weather many a setback and still walk away a winner. In the Cold War, our grand strategy of containing the Soviet Union eventually won the day despite many tribulations over the fifty years it was in place. Diplomat George Kennan's famous "X Article," anonymously published in the journal Foreign Affairs in 1947, became the conceptual pillar of Cold War strategy and withstood a decades-long assault by critics until eventually vindicated by the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

Was the containment theory hurt by the vitriol of its critics? I would argue the opposite is true. Criticism forced the supporters of containment theory to examine and hone their arguments. In order to properly answer their critics, supporters of containment were forced to continually evaluate their strategic models under regularly changing conditions. The end result was a strategy that proved adaptable to shifting circumstances and able to garner the support of the bulk of public opinion. Today, however, more and more of our strategic judgments are being built upon the untested edifice of two books: Bernard Lewis' The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror and Samuel P. Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. While there have been a few critical reviews of both works, for the most part they have become the basic canon of 21st century strategic thought with very little serious negative commentary. In military publications and briefings these works are now cited repeatedly and uncritically as authoritative support for developing strategic concepts.

Both books paint a dismal global picture. Huntington argues that for centuries civilizations have been kept apart by distance and serious geographical obstacles. However, modern technologies are eroding these obstacles and as civilizations begin to interact on a more regular basis they will find each other so repugnant they will be unable to resist trying to slaughter one another. Bernard Lewis is not as pessimistic about the global environment. Rather, he focuses his dire warnings on just the Muslim world, which appears to him on an irreversible road to doom.

It amazes me that Huntington's theory of civilizational war ever gained the traction it did. I had always assumed that everyone would awake one day and discover Hindus were not planning the annihilation of the Mongols, that Africans were incapable of getting together to fight anyone, and that Europeans have lost the will to fight about anything. Maybe, just maybe, some Arabs would like to take on their neighbors. But let's assume for a moment that all twenty-two Arab nations put aside their considerable differences and raise a military force to take on the world, what would that force look like? Well, with a combined GDP a bit less than Spain's, it probably would not amount to much. The combined conventional military power of a united Arab world is not likely to keep Pentagon planners up at night. Lewis, on the other hand, makes a good argument for the collapse of the Islamic world. Unfortunately, by accepting his thesis the United States is put in the unenviable position of confronting a religion in what may be a prolonged conflict-prone situation. Do we really want to make war on a religion? The major flaw in Lewis's argument, though, is in the title of his book. Islam is not in fact in a crisis state. From a purely religious point of view things have not looked this good for the Muslim faith in hundreds of years. Mosques are full, new adherents are pouring in, and the cash coffers are being filled with donations. If this is a religious crisis it is one most of the world's other faiths would envy.

A more accurate understanding of events leads to the conclusion that Arab, not Muslim, civilization is in a state of collapse, and it just happens that most Arabs are Muslims. In this regard, the fall of the Western Roman Empire was a collapse of Western Europe and not a crisis of Christianity. The next question is, how could the world have missed an entire civilization collapsing before its eyes? The simple answer is that no one alive today has ever seen it happen before. Well within living memory we have seen empires collapse and nation-state failure has become a regular occurrence, but no one in the West has witnessed the collapse of a civilization since the Dark Ages. Civilizational collapses take a long time to unfold and are easy to miss in the welter of daily events.

Interestingly, on the Arab League's website there is a paper that details all of the contributions made by Arab civilization. It is a long and impressive list, which unfortunately marks 1406 as the last year a significant contribution was made. That makes next year the 600th anniversary of the beginning of a prolonged stagnation, which began a dive into the abyss with the end of the Ottoman Empire. Final collapse has been staved off only by the cash coming in from a sea of oil and because of a few bright spots of modernity that have resisted the general failure.

Statistics tell an ugly story about the state of Arab civilization. According to the U.N.'s Arab Human Development Report:

There are 18 computers per 1000 citizens compared to a global average of 78.3.

Only 1.6% of the population has Internet access.

Less than one book a year is translated into Arabic per million people, compared to over 1000 per million for developed countries.

Arabs publish only 1.1% of books globally, despite making up over 5% of global population, with religious books dominating the market.

Average R&D expenditures on a per capita basis is one-sixth of Cuba's and less than one-fifteenth of Japan's.

The Arab world is embarking upon the new century burdened by 60 million illiterate adults (the majority are women) and a declining education system, which is failing to properly prepare regional youth for the challenges of a globalized economy. Educational quality is also being eroded by the growing pervasiveness of religion at all levels of the system. In Saudi Arabia over a quarter of all university degrees are in Islamic studies. In many other nations primary education is accomplished through Saudi-financed madrassas, which have filled the void left by government's abdication of its duty to educate the young.

In economic terms we have already commented that the combined weight of the Arab states is less than that of Spain. Strip oil out of Mideast exports and the entire region exports less than Finland. According to the transnational Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), regional economic growth is burdened by declining rates of investment in fixed capital structure, an inability to attract substantial foreign direct investment, and declining productivity ? the economic trinity of disaster.

Economic stagnation coupled with rapid population growth is reducing living standards throughout the region, both comparatively and in real terms. In the heady days of the late 1970s oil boom, annual per-capita GDP growth of over 5% fueled high levels of expectations. GDP per-capita grew from $1,845 to $2,300. Today, after adjusting for inflation, it stands at $1,500, reflecting an overall decline in living standards over 30 years. Only sub-Saharan Africa has done worse. If oil wealth is subtracted from the calculations the economic picture for the mass of Arab citizens becomes dire.

Things are indeed bad in the Arab world and will get much worse.

This statement should not be read as mere opinion. While predictions of the future are usually fraught with peril, those based on demographics are, barring some unforeseen plague or truly catastrophic war, uncannily accurate. Using even the most optimistic assumption?that fertility rates drop by fifty percent in a generation?the respected Population Resource Center, based in Princeton, New Jersey, expects Arab populations to grow from 280 million to almost 460 million by 2020 and to over 600 million a generation later. On the face of it the Arab world is staring political and economic disaster in the face. Arab governments and institutions are already failing to meet basic human needs in many Arab countries. It is hard to imagine how they will cope with the stress of such a massive population increase.

The percentage of the population under age 15 is double that of Western Europe and those under age 24 make up 50% to 65% of Middle East countries?an astonishingly young population. This youth bulge is already beginning to rock the foundations of Islamic society. Upheaval and revolution are the likely results of a massive number of youth confronted by stagnating or collapsing economies as they enter adulthood.

A youth bulge has always correlated strongly with increased levels of violence within a society, from terrorism to war. Massive youth violence is predictably more likely when lack of economic opportunity stunts ambitions for a satisfying job, a good marriage, and a home. A 2004 study by The World Bank calls this combination of a youth bulge coupled with poor economic performance an "explosive combination." In socially and politically repressive societies, found throughout the Middle East, there are very few outlets for pent-up frustrations except for violence or immersion into religion?a combustible mixture. In the Middle East, it is evident that terrorism and especially suicide operations are a phenomenon closely associated with youth. Youthful involvement in terrorism can be viewed as the extreme end of a broader youthful attraction to violence more generally. Additionally, this attraction is being reinforced within a generation that is being radicalized by an environment featuring high levels of violence, radical religious ideology, and growing anti-Americanism.

One serious question that requires an answer is why youth are attracted to Islamic organizations, which to Western eyes appear to be extremely repressive to many of the aspirations and desires of typical young men and women? In a 2003 Brookings Institution paper, Graham Fuller, a senior resident consultant at the RAND Corporation, provides this answer:

. . . the religious activism of Islamism in the Muslim world is not politically conservative at all: it calls for change to the status quo that is broadly hated. Much of the youthful spirit of rebellion against the status quo can thus be readily harnessed by the Islamist movement, both violent and non-violent. They provide a channel for the expression of discontent, blessed and legitimized by powerful religious tradition that incorporates nationalist impulses as well. It is noteworthy that Islamism serves as a vehicle of protest everywhere except where it is in power, such as Iran and Sudan. It is the status quo that is the major target of anger. (Author's emphasis) A youth bulge is always destabilizing, but it can often be managed if a society is able to properly educate its youth and provide them with adequate economic opportunities at the end of the education process. Arab nations are failing in both areas.

As I see it, the overarching cause of civilizational collapse is that culture and institutions of that civilization can no longer adapt to external stresses. This assertion is grounded in my interpretation of the writings of Will Durant, Story of Civilization, John Roberts' The Rise of the West, and Fernand Braudel's A History of Civilizations. The tyrants and dictators who have long ruled the Arab world have proven unable to implement the changes required to reverse the trends of collapse. Unable to reverse economic and societal ills, and unresponsive to the mass of the Arab population, these rulers instituted polices of strong internal oppression, which further closed off Arab society from the adoption of new ideas and methods.

Populations that were unable to influence their governments found that some methods of expression were still allowed within the context of Islam. Working within this framework radicals found that they could shelter their activities within a religious infrastructure, while at the same time religious leaders realized that they were gaining enough strength to make a grasp for secular power. This was a struggle that went on in the West for a thousand years after the fall of Rome until finally won by secular authority during what is now called the Age of Reason.

Still, Islam is not the root cause of collapse. For instance, it has not stood in the way of economic advancement and societal adaptation in Asia. It is more accurate to say that fundamental failure of Arab culture is causing people to begin looking backwards at the golden age of their civilization. Two things ring out to them from those past centuries: Arabs were powerful when they were united and when their faith was new, vital, and fundamental.

A lot of the evidence that Huntington presents for his theory of civilizational war makes more sense when viewed through the prism of the collapse of Arab civilization. Global maneuvering that Huntington interprets as preparations for a new round of world conflict are in reality the spontaneous adjustments that other societies are making in reaction to the collapse of a neighboring civilization. By accepting that we are facing the collapse of Arab civilization we can, for the first time, create a grand strategic concept for success. We no longer have to engage in a war against terrorism, which is a method of fighting and not an enemy. Additionally, we now have a strategic explanation for what is going on that does not make Islam the culprit. Hence we do not have to fight a religious war to win.

The grand strategic concept that provides the best chance of success is the one that served us so well in the Cold War?containment. No matter what else we do we must position ourselves to contain the effects of the complete collapse of Arab civilization. Already 10 percent of the French population is from Muslim North Africa. Europe's ability to assimilate a larger flood of economic refugees is questionable. And mass migration is just one effect a total collapse will have. Containment will mean adopting and maintaining difficult policy choices, which include:

Working closely with the European nations to defend their southern border against the mass migration of tens of millions of destitute Arabs as well as armed confrontations with failing Arab states.

Renewing our close ties with Turkey and making that nation a bulwark against the effects of collapse.

Working to help modernize and integrate the Russian military into an enhanced European defense structure.

Ensuring China is a partner in this containment effort.

Propping up weak border states that are already dealing with the spillover effects of Arab collapse?such as Pakistan and the new Caucasus states. Assisting the Iranian popular will to establish a government not based on a religious oligarchy. The Persian people may form an eastern bulwark against collapse.

Plan for the security of critical resources even during possible upheavals and regional turmoil.

Spillover effects such as terrorist groups already evident in places like Indonesia and the Philippines must be eradicated or reversed. We need to be clear that this is not a failure of Islam. In this regard we must help Muslims outside of the Arab world find their own interpretations of their faith and not fall prey to those being espoused by the Arab world?Wahhabism.

None of the above policy prescriptions will be easy, nor can they be achieved overnight. Most of them require the support of other nations, which may be problematic. Many of these nations have not recognized the risks they face from Arab collapse and see no reason to take preemptive measures. It is easy to say that we need to work closely with Europe to secure its southern border. In reality, that task will be devilishly hard, not least because the Europeans appear very reluctant to take any measures to protect themselves that might give even a whiff of intolerance. Furthermore, American diplomacy, as of recent decades, has not shown it is up to accomplishing many of the recommended tasks. For instance, all attempts to engage Iran since the fall of the Shah have been a debacle. Unfortunately, as the Iranian nuclear crisis unfolds there is no indication we have gotten any better at it. Do we have the wherewithal to engender a democratic society in Iran and then to engage its support in our common interests? Can we deal with an increasingly autocratic and threatening Russia? Can we manage China's emergence as a superpower so that it can be peacefully integrated into the global political system? The answers to these questions are still unknown. However, because containment of a civilizational collapse cannot be done by the United States alone finding the right answers is critical.

By accepting that we need to contain the effects of a failing Arab civilization we are then free to adopt one of three basic approaches:

Attempt to accelerate the collapse and pick up the pieces, akin to letting an alcoholic hit bottom.

To contain the effects, but not to interfere with the fall for good or bad. Reverse the tide when and where we can.

For a number of ethical and practical reasons the third choice is the one that should and is most likely to be adopted, keeping in mind that resisting the macro-forces of historical change will not be easy.

By adopting the third option we can craft policies to improve economic conditions and help specific regions within the Arab world adapt to encroaching modernity. The United States must be able to spot shining lights in the Arab world and work to protect them even as we help to expand their influence. Discarding the theories of two men as eminent as Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis is not a matter to take lightly. History may even prove both men right and my analysis to be well off the mark. However, the almost blind acceptance now being given to these men's ideas is a dangerous trend. As military leaders build the strategic plans and policies that will guide our forces for a generation or more it is best to be skeptical of all underlying assumptions. This article is designed to strike at the foundation of the two most widely accepted arguments in the current forum of ideas. If they are correct and sturdy then my position will not topple them. In fact, like Kennan's X article they will be made stronger by having to defend themselves against criticism. If they are weak, then it is best to discard them now.

Lieutenant Colonel Lacey is a Washington-based writer focusing on defense and international affairs issues. He was embedded with the 101st Airborne Division during the war in Iraq. He served on active duty for a number of years and later edited journals on international finance.

1949
Politics & Religion / Political Rants
« on: September 04, 2005, 10:45:35 PM »
Get Off His Back (Updated)
By Ben Stein
Published 9/2/2005 11:59:59 PM

A few truths, for those who have ears and eyes and care to know the truth:

1.) The hurricane that hit New Orleans and Mississippi and Alabama was an astonishing tragedy. The suffering and loss of life and peace of mind of the residents of those areas is acutely horrifying.

2.) George Bush did not cause the hurricane. Hurricanes have been happening for eons. George Bush did not create them or unleash this one.

3.) George Bush did not make this one worse than others. There have been far worse hurricanes than this before George Bush was born.

4.) There is no overwhelming evidence that global warming exists as a man-made phenomenon. There is no clear-cut evidence that global warming even exists. There is no clear evidence that if it does exist it makes hurricanes more powerful or makes them aim at cities with large numbers of poor people. If global warming is a real phenomenon, which it may well be, it started long before George Bush was inaugurated, and would not have been affected at all by the Kyoto treaty, considering that Kyoto does not cover the world's worst polluters -- China, India, and Brazil. In a word, George Bush had zero to do with causing this hurricane. To speculate otherwise is belief in sorcery.

5.) George Bush had nothing to do with the hurricane contingency plans for New Orleans. Those are drawn up by New Orleans and Louisiana. In any event, the plans were perfectly good: mandatory evacuation. It is in no way at all George Bush's fault that about 20 percent of New Orleans neglected to follow the plan. It is not his fault that many persons in New Orleans were too confused to realize how dangerous the hurricane would be. They were certainly warned. It's not George Bush's fault that there were sick people and old people and people without cars in New Orleans. His job description does not include making sure every adult in America has a car, is in good health, has good sense, and is mobile.

6.) George Bush did not cause gangsters to shoot at rescue helicopters taking people from rooftops, did not make gang bangers rape young girls in the Superdome, did not make looters steal hundreds of weapons, in short make New Orleans into a living hell.

7.) George Bush is the least racist President in mind and soul there has ever been and this is shown in his appointments over and over. To say otherwise is scandalously untrue.

8.) George Bush is rushing every bit of help he can to New Orleans and Mississippi and Alabama as soon as he can. He is not a magician. It takes time to organize huge convoys of food and now they are starting to arrive. That they get in at all considering the lawlessness of the city is a miracle of bravery and organization.

9.) There is not the slightest evidence at all that the war in Iraq has diminished the response of the government to the emergency. To say otherwise is pure slander.

10.) If the energy the news media puts into blaming Bush for an Act of God worsened by stupendous incompetence by the New Orleans city authorities and the malevolence of the criminals of the city were directed to helping the morale of the nation, we would all be a lot better off.

11.) New Orleans is a great city with many great people. It will recover and be greater than ever. Sticking pins into an effigy of George Bush that does not resemble him in the slightest will not speed the process by one day.

12.) The entire episode is a dramatic lesson in the breathtaking callousness of government officials at the ground level. Imagine if Hillary Clinton had gotten her way and they were in charge of your health care.

God bless all of those dear people who are suffering so much, and God bless those helping them, starting with George Bush.

**** UPDATE: Sunday, Sept. 4, 2005, 2:13 p.m.:

More Mysteries of Katrina:

Why is it that the snipers who shot at emergency rescuers trying to save people in hospitals and shelters are never mentioned except in passing, and Mr. Bush, who is turning over heaven and earth to rescue the victims of the storm, is endlessly vilified?

What church does Rev. Al Sharpton belong to that believes in passing blame and singling out people by race for opprobrium and hate?

What special abilities does the media have for deciding how much blame goes to the federal government as opposed to the city government of New Orleans for the aftereffects of Katrina?

If able-bodied people refuse to obey a mandatory evacuation order for a city, have they not assumed the risk that ill effects will happen to them?

When the city government simply ignores its own sick and hospitalized and elderly people in its evacuation order, is Mr. Bush to blame for that?

Is there any problem in the world that is not Mr. Bush's fault, or have we reverted to a belief in a sort of witchcraft where we credit a mortal man with the ability to create terrifying storms and every other kind of ill wind?

Where did the idea come from that salvation comes from hatred and criticism and mockery instead of love and co-operation?

http://www.americanprowler.com/dsp_article.asp?art_id=8693

1950
Politics & Religion / Smaller is Better
« on: September 04, 2005, 05:57:08 PM »
Lessons of smaller states

By Richard W. Rahn
Published September 4, 2005
REYKJAVIK, Iceland.
    Why is this cold, rainy land with its stark volcanic landscape, without much in the way of natural resources, one of the wealthiest places on Earth?
    Small states, in the past, were most often poorer on a per capital income basis than large states, but in the last half-century many have become much richer then their large neighbors. Among the wealthiest places on the planet, in addition to the United States, we now find Luxembourg, Hong Kong, Denmark and Ireland, none with many natural resources.
    In a just-concluded meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in Iceland, some leaders of small states that have developed very successful economies met with some of the worlds' leading free-market economists and policy institute professionals, partly to discuss what lessons the rest of the world can learn from these small states. Mart Laar, former prime minister of Estonia, was the principle architect of his country's remarkable economic transformation from impoverished vassal of the Soviet Union into one of the world's freest (No. 4 in the world according to the 2005 Index of Economic Freedom) and most dynamic economies. Mr. Laar said he succeeded by following the teachings of Nobel Prize-winning economists F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman.
    After obtaining freedom 15 years ago, Estonia rapidly moved to establish a rule of law, protect private property and create a sound currency. Estonia removed most price controls, discarded useless regulations, privatized most state-owned enterprises and established a free-trade regime. The result has been the largest percentage increase in real per capita incomes of any of the former communist states.
    Estonia has now moved on to create the world's first "e-government": Most government operations are on the Internet, and in electronic form. By moving away from bureaucrat paper, Estonis reduced corruption and cost and created much more transparency and accountability. All proposed laws are placed on the Internet before passage so any citizen can review and comment before they are voted upon.
    Former Iceland Prime Minister and current Foreign Minister David Oddsson detailed how he took a typical, economically stagnate, Scandinavian socialist welfare state and turned it into an economic tiger by privatizing state industries, freeing labor markets, and reforming the financial structure. Iceland has been engaged in a massive tax reduction (for instance, the corporate tax rate has been cut from 50 to only 18 percent, and the inheritance tax to a maximum 5 percent). Yet government revenues have steadily increased because of the resulting economic dynamism, and the national debt has fallen from 50 percent of gross domestic product to only 15 percent.
    One of their greatest success stories was moving from a pay-as-you-go social security system (like that of the U.S.) to a combination of a limited means-tested government system with a private inheritable system, giving Iceland one of the strongest and soundest systems in the world.
    Professor Victoria Curzon-Price of the University of Geneva in Switzerland and president of the Mont Pelerin Society argued Switzerland has succeeded because (with the exception of farming) it is mostly a free-trade nation, with strong fiscal and tax competition between cantons. Switzerland is a voluntary, direct democracy, federal contractual state made up of a couple dozen cantons divided on linguistic and religious lines and more than 3,000 communes -- i.e., small towns.
    Having most government power at local levels reduces friction among the various groups that make up Switzerland. It allows the people to decide if they wish to live in a commune with a large government and relatively high taxes, like Geneva, or in a low- tax, limited-government jurisdiction.
    In her brief for the Swiss system, Professor Curzon-Price argued "the splitting of political units into tiny elements" provides a "huge gain in terms of the legitimacy of the state." And, "a state obtains obedience in one of three ways: repression, bribery and consent. Most modern democratic states end up using, and abusing, the second of these (with the political class bribing marginal voters to maintain power)." Repression and bribery are costly, but neither is needed if the government can obtain the willing consent of the governed, which is best obtained by direct democracy within small political units.
    The lesson is that large states can obtain the economic gains small states have made by freeing up their economies. They also can gain greater democratic legitimacy and a more satisfied electorate by devolving power to states and localities.
     
    Richard W. Rahn is director general of the Center for Global Economic Growth, a project of the FreedomWorks Foundation.

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