Tuesday, December 19, 2006
An Idealism that strangles Mercy
Michael Gersen, former speech writer for George Bush writes an interesting piece for Newsweek :
As antigovernment conservatives seek to purify the Republican Party, it is reasonable to ask if the purest among them are conservatives at all. The combination of disdain for government, a reflexive preference for markets and an unbalanced emphasis on individual choice is usually called libertarianism. The old conservatives had some concerns about that creed, which Russell Kirk called "an ideology of universal selfishness." Conservatives have generally taught that the health of society is determined by the health of institutions: families, neighborhoods, schools, congregations. Unfettered individualism can loosen those bonds, while government can act to strengthen them. By this standard, good public policies—from incentives to charitable giving, to imposing minimal standards on inner-city schools—are not apostasy; they are a thoroughly orthodox, conservative commitment to the common good.
Campaigning on the size of government in 2008, while opponents talk about health care, education and poverty, will seem, and be, procedural, small-minded, cold and uninspired. The moral stakes are even higher. What does antigovernment conservatism offer to inner-city neighborhoods where violence is common and families are rare? Nothing. What achievement would it contribute to racial healing and the unity of our country? No achievement at all. Anti-government conservatism turns out to be a strange kind of idealism—an idealism that strangles mercy.
But there is another Republican Party—what might be called the party of the governors. It is the party of Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, who has improved the educational performance of minority students and responded effectively to natural disasters. It is the party of Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, who mandated basic health insurance while giving subsidies to low-income people. Neither of these men embrace big government; both show convincing outrage at wasteful spending. But they have also succeeded in making government work in essential government roles—not a small thing in a post-Katrina world.
The future of the Republican Party depends on which party it wants to be—the party of purity, or the party of the governors. In that decision, Republicans should consider: any political movement that elevates abstract antigovernment ideology above human needs is hardly conservative, and unlikely to win.
Read it all, it is not long.
What Gersen says is true. People don't want small government, they want effective and honest government. The voting public will not thank the purists for doing away with the drug pescription program..when their Mom or Grandma benefits from it. They will not thank the purists for doing away with financial aid for college tuition when they have kids to send to college.
And they will not thank the purists if everything from Social Security reform to immigration reform die in vitro because purists of either extreme refuse to compromise.
As antigovernment conservatives seek to purify the Republican Party, it is reasonable to ask if the purest among them are conservatives at all. The combination of disdain for government, a reflexive preference for markets and an unbalanced emphasis on individual choice is usually called libertarianism. The old conservatives had some concerns about that creed, which Russell Kirk called "an ideology of universal selfishness." Conservatives have generally taught that the health of society is determined by the health of institutions: families, neighborhoods, schools, congregations. Unfettered individualism can loosen those bonds, while government can act to strengthen them. By this standard, good public policies—from incentives to charitable giving, to imposing minimal standards on inner-city schools—are not apostasy; they are a thoroughly orthodox, conservative commitment to the common good.
Campaigning on the size of government in 2008, while opponents talk about health care, education and poverty, will seem, and be, procedural, small-minded, cold and uninspired. The moral stakes are even higher. What does antigovernment conservatism offer to inner-city neighborhoods where violence is common and families are rare? Nothing. What achievement would it contribute to racial healing and the unity of our country? No achievement at all. Anti-government conservatism turns out to be a strange kind of idealism—an idealism that strangles mercy.
But there is another Republican Party—what might be called the party of the governors. It is the party of Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, who has improved the educational performance of minority students and responded effectively to natural disasters. It is the party of Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, who mandated basic health insurance while giving subsidies to low-income people. Neither of these men embrace big government; both show convincing outrage at wasteful spending. But they have also succeeded in making government work in essential government roles—not a small thing in a post-Katrina world.
The future of the Republican Party depends on which party it wants to be—the party of purity, or the party of the governors. In that decision, Republicans should consider: any political movement that elevates abstract antigovernment ideology above human needs is hardly conservative, and unlikely to win.
Read it all, it is not long.
What Gersen says is true. People don't want small government, they want effective and honest government. The voting public will not thank the purists for doing away with the drug pescription program..when their Mom or Grandma benefits from it. They will not thank the purists for doing away with financial aid for college tuition when they have kids to send to college.
And they will not thank the purists if everything from Social Security reform to immigration reform die in vitro because purists of either extreme refuse to compromise.
Smoky Polonium 210 bombs?
Hot air asks "What am I missing?"
A grain of salt seems too large to me, something more like a 10 micron sized particle would do. Lets run through some numbers. If a 10 µm sized particle is LD50/30 -- 50% mortality in 30 days -- then a volume of Po-210 equivalent to a human hair 1 inch long would suffice to kill or sicken about 200,000 people. How large a dose would individuals receive while breathing in a cloud dispersed throughout a large volume? Let us suppose that same hairsized volume of Po-210 dispersed in a stadium, say a football field that holds ~100,000 and a cloud 100 m high. Such a cloud would have dimensions of about 250m x 250m x 100m and a volume of about 6e9 liters. If we further assume a spectator inhales 20 L/min for 15 minutes, or about 300 L, then the fraction of the LD50/30 inhaled by each spectator would be about 1%. Looks like most folks would survive such an attack, although those close to the bomb probably would not.
How does that dose compare to a grain of salt, say a little cube 1 mm on a side? Such a cube has a volume of about five times that of the hair, so about 20 such cubes would poison the whole stadium. Assume $10 million a cube, then for a price of about $200 million in materials one could cause some real damage. Hmmm, decisions, decisions. Still, it looks to me like the money would be better spent on widely available plastic explosives or dynamite.
These numbers are very rough, but I think they do highlight one of the prime problems of chemical warfare: delivery. If that same amount of material could be individually targeted then one could kill millions. Biological warfare at least has the advantage of contagion if the right pathogen is chosen.
Caveat: I haven't rechecked all the numbers. Later.
Help me out here. By Zimmerman’s own estimation, the dose that killed Litvinenko was “perhaps the size of a couple of grains of salt.” What he doesn’t mention is that the street value of those grains was a cool $10 mil. Doctors believe that he would have been killed with even 1/10th the dosage, which means we’re talking about $1 million per lethal dose. Do the world’s jihadis have nothing better to do with the Saudis’ money than drop half a billion dollars on a “smoky bomb” that would kill 500 people?
A grain of salt seems too large to me, something more like a 10 micron sized particle would do. Lets run through some numbers. If a 10 µm sized particle is LD50/30 -- 50% mortality in 30 days -- then a volume of Po-210 equivalent to a human hair 1 inch long would suffice to kill or sicken about 200,000 people. How large a dose would individuals receive while breathing in a cloud dispersed throughout a large volume? Let us suppose that same hairsized volume of Po-210 dispersed in a stadium, say a football field that holds ~100,000 and a cloud 100 m high. Such a cloud would have dimensions of about 250m x 250m x 100m and a volume of about 6e9 liters. If we further assume a spectator inhales 20 L/min for 15 minutes, or about 300 L, then the fraction of the LD50/30 inhaled by each spectator would be about 1%. Looks like most folks would survive such an attack, although those close to the bomb probably would not.
How does that dose compare to a grain of salt, say a little cube 1 mm on a side? Such a cube has a volume of about five times that of the hair, so about 20 such cubes would poison the whole stadium. Assume $10 million a cube, then for a price of about $200 million in materials one could cause some real damage. Hmmm, decisions, decisions. Still, it looks to me like the money would be better spent on widely available plastic explosives or dynamite.
These numbers are very rough, but I think they do highlight one of the prime problems of chemical warfare: delivery. If that same amount of material could be individually targeted then one could kill millions. Biological warfare at least has the advantage of contagion if the right pathogen is chosen.
Caveat: I haven't rechecked all the numbers. Later.
Lobbying reform?
Mark Tapscott weighs in on lobbying reform:
The new bill isn't out there yet, nor am I likely to wade through it when it appears, so I will have to wait for further analysis. But this doesn't look good. If citizens groups receiving $50,000 or more in outside funding are to be considered "lobbyists", then we have reached a point where the first amendment is looking pretty thin.
Why are lobbyists evil anyway? Seems to me the problem isn't with the lobbyists, it is with the legislators. Maybe we should require quarterly reports from the congress critters.
The key provision of the 2006 bill was its redefinition of grassroots lobbying to include small citizens groups whose messages about Congress and public policy issues are directed toward the general public, according to attorneys for the Free Speech Coalition.
All informational and educational materials produced by such groups would have to be registered and reported on a quarterly basis. Failure to report would result in severe civil penalties (likely followed soon by criminal penalties as well).
The new bill isn't out there yet, nor am I likely to wade through it when it appears, so I will have to wait for further analysis. But this doesn't look good. If citizens groups receiving $50,000 or more in outside funding are to be considered "lobbyists", then we have reached a point where the first amendment is looking pretty thin.
Why are lobbyists evil anyway? Seems to me the problem isn't with the lobbyists, it is with the legislators. Maybe we should require quarterly reports from the congress critters.
Monday, December 18, 2006
The Corner on National Review Online
The Corner on National Review Online: "the social gospel and the state cannot be married because the government cannot love you. This is not a metaphysical point but a practical one. States cannot love individuals in much the same way deck furniture cannot write poetry: it is not in their nature. It cannot be done. And when people attempt otherwise, horrible folly ensues. "
Come on, tell us what you really think
Editorial: Carter removing all doubt - Examiner.com: "WASHINGTON - There appears to be no bottom to the pit of specious vacuity in which former president Jimmy Carter has been falling since his massive repudiation by voters in his 1980 election loss to Ronald Reagan. Carter’s latest book — “Palestine: Peace, not Apartheid” — poses a ridiculous argument and commits unforgivable intellectual sins while doing so."
Sunday, December 17, 2006
news @ nature.com - People track scents in same way as dogs - Human reputation for poor sense of smell is down to lack of practice.
news @ nature.com - People track scents in same way as dogs - Human reputation for poor sense of smell is down to lack of practice.: "If you think only hounds can track a scent trail, think again: people can follow their noses too, a new study says. And they do so in a way very similar to dogs, suggesting we're not so bad at detecting smells — we're just out of practice.
Scientists have found that humans have far fewer genes that encode smell receptors than do other animals such as rats and dogs. This seemed to suggest that we're not as talented at discerning scents as other beasts, perhaps because we lost our sense of smell when we began to walk upright, and lifted our noses far away from the aroma-rich earth."
Saturday, December 16, 2006
Nobody said it would be easy
Charles Krauthammer has an interesting article on the rise of America as a unipolar power and the challenges we face in Iraq and the world as other forces consolidate to oppose us. It is too long to excerpt, so just read the whole thing. He does offer some hope, but it is a sobering read.
I think I like this post by Victor Davis Hanson even better. I especially agree with his remarks about media induced panic. His historical analysis is right on. He is right, this is not Dunkirk. I do however, disagree with his suggestion that we put a dime tax on a gallon of gas. That would be political suicide.
I think I like this post by Victor Davis Hanson even better. I especially agree with his remarks about media induced panic. His historical analysis is right on. He is right, this is not Dunkirk. I do however, disagree with his suggestion that we put a dime tax on a gallon of gas. That would be political suicide.
Hate
Story Time.
I believe I made reference to this story before so please forgive me for repeating myself.
Years ago in Konowa, Oklahoma a white woman was killed by Indians. The year was 1911. The woman's husband was a saddler and blacksmith. He had made a saddle for two Indian men who lived in the area with their families. The men went to pick up the saddle and the woman was alone. The story was they gave her the money but she refused to hand over their property. Instead she grabbed a gun and went after them. One of the men pulled a knife and killed the woman. In an effort to hide what had happened they tried to feed her to the hogs.
Of course they were picked up with the saddle. The local KKK got wind of the situation and decided that the only good Indian was a dead Indian and besides they had God on their side so they went to what passed for a local jail house and took the men. My great grandfather Fin Scoggins had the audacity to suggest that even an Indian should get a fair trial and these good Christians burned down his barn with his best cow still in it.
They then took the Indians and tied them to huge wagon wheels and whipped them with straps. When they tired of that they poured kerosene over them and lit a match.
My grandmother's family was forced to leave the area. They went to Singer, Texas for awhile and after a few years came back to Konowa when Papa Fin thought it would be safe again. My grandmother was eight years old when this happened, she was 13 when they returned to Oklahoma.
Question: Were these men, who thought they were doing the work of the Lord, vigilantes, terrorists or just plain murderers?
I think perhaps there is another question as well. I was raised in the Southern Baptist Church. They were good people in many ways and if anyone in the congregation was sick or alone they always had support in the Church. But, I have to say the idea of turning the other cheek got lost in the fire and brim stone. I have heard men quote scriptures to justify some of the most unjust acts imaginable. That is why I left the Church. I still consider myself a Christian, but not that kind of Christian.
I suppose my other question is what if the KKK or someone like them had become the political force in our politics that Muslim fundamentalism has in much of the Muslim world? What would that do to do how the nonChristian world views us? After all these guys burn crosses for a reason.
I know people will say that did not and can not happen, but I live in Indiana and it was only about a generation or so ago that the Governor of Indiana had ties to the KKK. In the small town nearby there used to be sign at the edge of town warning all blacks to be gone by nightfall. There are still no black people here. The loss of influence by the likes of the KKK came about because of the rape and murder of a white girl by a prominent member of the organization, not because they saw the light or had a magnaminous change of heart. And whatever they did, they used the bible to justify it, so does that mean the bible is a dangerous book?
This was not some small group of crazies, they were mainstream every day Christian men and women and not only did they not love their fellow man, they hated him.
Where does this kind of hate come from? I honestly do not know, but I think hate feeds on hate. I think that the Jihadis believe that too. They know that the more we hate all Muslims, the more they hate us back. They know that when they riot over silly cartoons we think they are barbarians...they like being barbarians, it makes them powerful. They want a holy war and to have a holy war means they must have an enemy. And right now that is us. I am not some pie in the sky romantic. I am not a flower child. But I know that this kind of hate devours the hater and I want no part of it. When an American can say {and I have heard it said} that he does not care how many innocent people die over there because there are no innocents in the Muslim world..he has lost his humanity. I fear that enemy, the enemy of hate almost as much as the one with the bomb.
I believe I made reference to this story before so please forgive me for repeating myself.
Years ago in Konowa, Oklahoma a white woman was killed by Indians. The year was 1911. The woman's husband was a saddler and blacksmith. He had made a saddle for two Indian men who lived in the area with their families. The men went to pick up the saddle and the woman was alone. The story was they gave her the money but she refused to hand over their property. Instead she grabbed a gun and went after them. One of the men pulled a knife and killed the woman. In an effort to hide what had happened they tried to feed her to the hogs.
Of course they were picked up with the saddle. The local KKK got wind of the situation and decided that the only good Indian was a dead Indian and besides they had God on their side so they went to what passed for a local jail house and took the men. My great grandfather Fin Scoggins had the audacity to suggest that even an Indian should get a fair trial and these good Christians burned down his barn with his best cow still in it.
They then took the Indians and tied them to huge wagon wheels and whipped them with straps. When they tired of that they poured kerosene over them and lit a match.
My grandmother's family was forced to leave the area. They went to Singer, Texas for awhile and after a few years came back to Konowa when Papa Fin thought it would be safe again. My grandmother was eight years old when this happened, she was 13 when they returned to Oklahoma.
Question: Were these men, who thought they were doing the work of the Lord, vigilantes, terrorists or just plain murderers?
I think perhaps there is another question as well. I was raised in the Southern Baptist Church. They were good people in many ways and if anyone in the congregation was sick or alone they always had support in the Church. But, I have to say the idea of turning the other cheek got lost in the fire and brim stone. I have heard men quote scriptures to justify some of the most unjust acts imaginable. That is why I left the Church. I still consider myself a Christian, but not that kind of Christian.
I suppose my other question is what if the KKK or someone like them had become the political force in our politics that Muslim fundamentalism has in much of the Muslim world? What would that do to do how the nonChristian world views us? After all these guys burn crosses for a reason.
I know people will say that did not and can not happen, but I live in Indiana and it was only about a generation or so ago that the Governor of Indiana had ties to the KKK. In the small town nearby there used to be sign at the edge of town warning all blacks to be gone by nightfall. There are still no black people here. The loss of influence by the likes of the KKK came about because of the rape and murder of a white girl by a prominent member of the organization, not because they saw the light or had a magnaminous change of heart. And whatever they did, they used the bible to justify it, so does that mean the bible is a dangerous book?
This was not some small group of crazies, they were mainstream every day Christian men and women and not only did they not love their fellow man, they hated him.
Where does this kind of hate come from? I honestly do not know, but I think hate feeds on hate. I think that the Jihadis believe that too. They know that the more we hate all Muslims, the more they hate us back. They know that when they riot over silly cartoons we think they are barbarians...they like being barbarians, it makes them powerful. They want a holy war and to have a holy war means they must have an enemy. And right now that is us. I am not some pie in the sky romantic. I am not a flower child. But I know that this kind of hate devours the hater and I want no part of it. When an American can say {and I have heard it said} that he does not care how many innocent people die over there because there are no innocents in the Muslim world..he has lost his humanity. I fear that enemy, the enemy of hate almost as much as the one with the bomb.
Friday, December 15, 2006
People need to do some things for themselves
David mentioned in the comments to the Skook's Five o' Clock post below that Bush is responsible for the ignorance of the Democrats and the American people in regards to the enemy because he is too politically correct to name the enemy.
I disagree. I have heard both Bush and Blair say that we are in a war with Islamic fascists and all they got for their trouble was hell from the press and the pundits.
But the truth is people need to do a better job of figuring some of this out for themselves. Whether they be private citizens or Congressional Representatives there is no excuse for sitting back and waiting for George Bush to tell you who the enemy is when the enemy is out there threatening to kill you on a daily basis. I mean really, we live in a world in which there is an unprecedented amount of information available to people and it is as if the more information there is, the more confusion there is.
My father told me that when they heard that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii he and his best friend went to the school house to look at the globe and find Pearl Harbor. But today, they could go to Google and probably get pictures of the smoking hulks of US Naval ships.
And yet people argue over whether it is Bush's job to tell who is Sunni and Shia and AlQaida and Hezbellah. In truth political correctness is not the only problem, or even the main one. The problem is people do not agree on who the enemy really is.
I for one do not believe we are in a war with Islam. I resent people on the Right characterizing all Muslims as being the same, as if they are part of the Borg, some ccollective intelligence that commands all their movements and beliefs. At the same time there are people on the Left who see all Muslims as victims, as some oppressed class who bear no responsiblity for themselves or the world they are a part of. Both views are overly simplistic and tell us more about the people who have such beliefs than they do about the Muslim world itself.
I was watching the show Closer recently, an episode that I believe was called Serving the King. An older CIA agent has asked Kyra Sedgwick's character to help in an investigation of the murder of an Arab teen because the CIA believes there are ties to terrorism and that perhaps the agency itself has a traitor. This agent makes a comment that I think says who our enemy is as well as any I have heard: He said that years ago the enemy read Mein Kampf and then the there was a new enemy who read Lenin and Marx and dispatched people with a shot to the back of the head. Now the enemy misuses the Koran and kills with bombs. Same enemy, different book.
So no, I don't think it is that simple. I don't think any president, politically correct or not is going to go on TV and make some statement that will satisfy people. He can not simply name the enemy and win the debate. Especially if people can not be bothered to educate themselves enough to know who and what they are dealing with and to agree among themselves what it means.
I disagree. I have heard both Bush and Blair say that we are in a war with Islamic fascists and all they got for their trouble was hell from the press and the pundits.
But the truth is people need to do a better job of figuring some of this out for themselves. Whether they be private citizens or Congressional Representatives there is no excuse for sitting back and waiting for George Bush to tell you who the enemy is when the enemy is out there threatening to kill you on a daily basis. I mean really, we live in a world in which there is an unprecedented amount of information available to people and it is as if the more information there is, the more confusion there is.
My father told me that when they heard that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii he and his best friend went to the school house to look at the globe and find Pearl Harbor. But today, they could go to Google and probably get pictures of the smoking hulks of US Naval ships.
And yet people argue over whether it is Bush's job to tell who is Sunni and Shia and AlQaida and Hezbellah. In truth political correctness is not the only problem, or even the main one. The problem is people do not agree on who the enemy really is.
I for one do not believe we are in a war with Islam. I resent people on the Right characterizing all Muslims as being the same, as if they are part of the Borg, some ccollective intelligence that commands all their movements and beliefs. At the same time there are people on the Left who see all Muslims as victims, as some oppressed class who bear no responsiblity for themselves or the world they are a part of. Both views are overly simplistic and tell us more about the people who have such beliefs than they do about the Muslim world itself.
I was watching the show Closer recently, an episode that I believe was called Serving the King. An older CIA agent has asked Kyra Sedgwick's character to help in an investigation of the murder of an Arab teen because the CIA believes there are ties to terrorism and that perhaps the agency itself has a traitor. This agent makes a comment that I think says who our enemy is as well as any I have heard: He said that years ago the enemy read Mein Kampf and then the there was a new enemy who read Lenin and Marx and dispatched people with a shot to the back of the head. Now the enemy misuses the Koran and kills with bombs. Same enemy, different book.
So no, I don't think it is that simple. I don't think any president, politically correct or not is going to go on TV and make some statement that will satisfy people. He can not simply name the enemy and win the debate. Especially if people can not be bothered to educate themselves enough to know who and what they are dealing with and to agree among themselves what it means.
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Why do you ask me these questions at five o’clock?
“Why do you ask me these questions at five o’clock"?
You know, some guy always comes up to my window to renew his driver's license at 5:02. Of course, he swears that by his watch, it is only 4:55. Every friggin' day.
Followed quickly by:
"Can I answer in Spanish? Do you speak Spanish?"
No. Disculpe, pero no entiendo castellano.
It is going to be a very long century.
You know, some guy always comes up to my window to renew his driver's license at 5:02. Of course, he swears that by his watch, it is only 4:55. Every friggin' day.
Followed quickly by:
"Can I answer in Spanish? Do you speak Spanish?"
No. Disculpe, pero no entiendo castellano.
It is going to be a very long century.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Lies We Must Live With
New at CSPO: "I find efforts to reconcile science and Judeo-Christian religion rather bizarre, despite many well-meaning efforts (such as the recent book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence of Belief, by NIH National Human Genome Research Institute director Francis Collins). After all, religion cannot exist without ultimate meaning, and science cannot exist with it. It would be a strange God who laid reality out as a mystery for scientists’ continual amusement, and a strange science whose job was simply to reveal the mechanics behind God’s mysterious ways. But wait a minute, that’s what Copernicus, Kepler, and other titans of early Western science thought they were doing. Kepler, for example, saw in science a gift to humans that allowed them “to some extent taste the satisfaction of God the Workman with his own works,” and he viewed celestial mechanics as “this music which imitates God.” Sounds a little too close to Intelligent Design for comfort, doesn’t it?
On second thought, it is not particularly problematic for science to trace evolution or celestial mechanics back to an ultimate origin in God’s work, since ultimate origins don’t really make any difference one way or the other to the validity of the science. The authority of an evolutionary biologist is in no way threatened by the notion that it all started through supernatural intervention, since you can push “it all started” as far back into pre-history as you like, say, 15 billion years. Where you get into trouble, though, is when you try to explain phenomena like moral reasoning or religious belief in terms of, say, neurological activity or the evolution of the brain, which of course is just the sort of thing that researchers in fields such as cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology try to do. This type of trouble was acknowledged with rare candor by Columbia University biologist Robert Pollack in his book The Faith of Biology & The Biology of Faith, who writes that “evolution through natural selection explains certain facts of life that touch on matters of meaning and purpose . . . [T]he vision of the natural world these explanations produce is simply too terrifying and depressing to me to be borne without the emotional buffer of my own religion.”
I am going to miss this guy
Via Greg Tinti :
In typical Bolton fashion, he's not going to go out without a bang.
The outgoing US ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, is backing a call for the president of Iran to be charged with inciting genocide because of his speeches advocating the destruction of the state of Israel.
Barely a week after he announced his resignation from the UN post, Mr Bolton will appear tomorrow among a panel of diplomats and lawyers calling for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be prosecuted. The panel has been convened by a Jewish umbrella group in the US, the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organisations.
I know the ICC will not do anything to the mad mullahs, but it is nice to see someone have the nerve to call Ahmadenijad on his crap. I understand that David Duke attended the Holocaust Conference in Teheran. With all those haters there in one spot it is too bad that God or the President of the United States did not send down a lightning bolt to blast them straight to hell where their kind belong.
In typical Bolton fashion, he's not going to go out without a bang.
The outgoing US ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, is backing a call for the president of Iran to be charged with inciting genocide because of his speeches advocating the destruction of the state of Israel.
Barely a week after he announced his resignation from the UN post, Mr Bolton will appear tomorrow among a panel of diplomats and lawyers calling for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be prosecuted. The panel has been convened by a Jewish umbrella group in the US, the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organisations.
I know the ICC will not do anything to the mad mullahs, but it is nice to see someone have the nerve to call Ahmadenijad on his crap. I understand that David Duke attended the Holocaust Conference in Teheran. With all those haters there in one spot it is too bad that God or the President of the United States did not send down a lightning bolt to blast them straight to hell where their kind belong.
Would Jefferson be ticked?
dafydd says he would be. Why? Because bloggers like Dean Barnett claim that we have failed to establish a Jeffersonian Democracy in Iraq. Dafydd's point being that we never said we would. Jeffersonian Democracy was not the model. He also makes a good point that if violence is a sign of a country that can not live under a democratic system then our Civil War should have made it plain we were incapable of it long ago. Dafydd's most interesting comparison however, is with Greece. Not so long ago that country seemed to be locked in hopeless violence.
Personally I don't think that most people today even know what Jeffersonian Democracy is. And that includes Americans.
Joyce Appleby, a modern day historian of Thomas Jefferson says that the true Jeffersonian legacy is to be hostile to legacies. The man was a contradiction, a libertarian slave holder, a believer in states rights and the author of the Declaration of Independence. Let us not burden him with the responsiblity of creating a democratic model for the Middle East.
Europeans and Japanese and Turks have each managed their own form of representative government. It is the only modern style of government which mandates accountability and that is what the Middle East is most in need of.
Personally I don't think that most people today even know what Jeffersonian Democracy is. And that includes Americans.
Joyce Appleby, a modern day historian of Thomas Jefferson says that the true Jeffersonian legacy is to be hostile to legacies. The man was a contradiction, a libertarian slave holder, a believer in states rights and the author of the Declaration of Independence. Let us not burden him with the responsiblity of creating a democratic model for the Middle East.
Europeans and Japanese and Turks have each managed their own form of representative government. It is the only modern style of government which mandates accountability and that is what the Middle East is most in need of.
Abolish the Education Degree?
Transterrestrial Musings: "Mr. Levine's research shows that even the students themselves know how weak their programs are. Sixty-two percent of ed-school alumni say their training didn't prepare them to 'cope with the realities of today's classrooms.' Surveys show that school principals agree. "
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
From the Academic Parallel Universe
Language Log: Slogan strong: "It's hard to disagree with the idea that the US Army really needs a new slogan. For some mysterious reason it's become difficult for the military to recruit new soldiers these days. "
Compare:
WASHINGTON - Though Americans are increasingly pessimistic about the war in Iraq, the Pentagon said Tuesday it is having success enlisting new troops. The Navy and Air Force met their recruiting goals last month while the Army and Marine Corps exceeded theirs, the Defense Department announced.
The Army, which is bearing the brunt of the work in Iraq, did the best. It signed up 6,485 new recruits in November compared with its target of 6,150 — meaning 105 percent of its goal.
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