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TIMESTAMPS
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20110512145148/http://pajamasmedia.com:80/instapundit/
The Washington Post’s Outlook section just gave ex-jihadi Moazzem Begg a half-page this Sunday to lament the U.S. war on jihadis, and Begg repaid the Post by showcasing a photoshopped image of a dead President Barack Obama on his advocacy website.
“The decision to publish Begg’s piece does not reflect a blanket endorsement of his views or of everything that appears on his organization’s Web site,” according to a statement from Carlos Lozada, the section’s editor. He reports to Marcus Brauchli, the Post’s executive editor. “It reflects our interest in exploring the many ways that Osama bin Laden shattered and upended lives… [and] the experience of a Guantanamo detainee is completely relevant.”
The Investigative Project on Terrorism directed TheDC to the photo on Begg’s website.
Begg’s action came just before Thursday, when shareholders are expected to protest financial losses by the newspaper’s parent company, The Washington Post Co. The company’s main revenue-source, the Kaplan education division, has lower profits than expected.
But then as Ramesh Ponnuru of the Corner notes, Begg’s article isn’t the only “Exceptionally Strange” item the Post has run in recent days:
Richard Cohen’s attack on “American exceptionalism” — which “has been adopted by the right to mean that America, alone among the nations, is beloved of God” — takes him into some strange territory.
The huge role of religion in American politics is nothing new but always a matter for concern nonetheless. In the years preceding the Civil War, both sides of the slavery issue claimed the endorsement of God. The 1856 Republican convention concluded with a song that ended like this: “We’ve truth on our side/ We’ve God for our guide.” Within five years, Americans were slaughtering one another on the battlefield.
Therein lies the danger of American exceptionalism. It discourages compromise, for what God has made exceptional, man must not alter.
Does Cohen really want to maintain that the Republicans of the 1850s should have been more willing to compromise on slavery? Is this what liberalism has come to?
WELL, THAT’S ONE WAY TO DESCRIBE HIM: PJTV’s Trifecta: “Ron Paul Sounds Like an Angry, Constipated Chicken and Other Thoughts of the GOP’s 2012 Field:”
“Mitt Romney has RomneyCare around his neck. Sarah, I love her, but she’s sunk in the polls to the middle tier of likely candidates.
Giuliani can’t get nominated. Herman Cain has no money. Ron Paul sounds increasingly like an angry, constipated chicken…and on it goes.” — Steve Green
DEMOGRAPHY AND ECONOMIC GROWTH: Tyler Cowen links to this study on shifting demographics of a society in relation to financial market returns, and cautiously suggests there might be something to it. I agree perhaps there is. But strikingly, it is precisely what I’ve been turning over in my mind since reading Tyler Cowen’s fine, short essay, The Great Stagnation: How We Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit. I think, actually, it should have been subtitled, How We Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit and After That All the Next Generation’s Seed Corn.
The essay suggests that we’ve already absorbed the easy gains that more or less follow on the genuinely history changing Industrial Revolution, and that incremental gains are much tougher to come by, unless we are fortunate enough to find some new scientific or technological breakthrough of a kind that is difficult to predict, let alone will into being. (I’m simplifying and perhaps editorializing.) Even as I read it, however, my reaction was that it did not take into account – in multiple directions – the effect of an aging population. Which is what the cited paper attempts to do. Aging populations take less risk, innovate less, make fewer breakthroughs in new technology, consume more but not necessarily in ways that produce increases to the general standard of living. And when the aging generation has political power from numbers, they tend to think in terms of themselves – and call it social justice. Insofar as they have not produced lots of new children, they are less invested in the future after themselves, and are perfectly willing to eat the next generation’s seed corn.
I think all those effects have a huge impact on Cowen’s “low-hanging” thesis, which seems – perhaps I am mistaken – to oddly operate from a demographically static model. Yet thinking there is something right about this thesis is not the same as saying that investors can easily benefit from it, precisely because it is a generalized effect across markets, asset classes, investment opportunities. The growth rate in innovation slows – in part for the reasons that Cowen’s essay identifies, and in part for reasons that older populations simply innovate less. The general mean in innovation shifts, perhaps only slightly, but with impacts on the future. How do you short that? Go long on populations with lots of young people? That assumes that they have not just youth and energy, but also education, societies that provide the coherence necessary for innovative ideas to pay off, and lots of other things … that almost none of them has. The places that have lots of youth are not the places that have the other elements necessary for innovation to take hold and become sources of increase in the standard of living.
(Also, if this sounds like I think my Baby Boomer Generation is morally the most preening and objectively The Worst … yeah.)
“Let your fingers do the walking” could be replaced with “let your finger do the clicking” in San Francisco. It’s poised to become the first U.S. city to restrict delivery of Yellow Pages business directories.
The Board of Supervisors cast a 10-1 first vote on Tuesday to ban unrequested home and business delivery of the hefty telephone directories. There will be a second reading and final vote next week.
The idea is to protect the environment, fight neighborhood blight and help the economy. And advocates say the Internet makes the directories unnecessary.
That last item may be so (12 years or so ago when we got our first cable modem, it seemed obvious that the Yellow Pages was suddenly superfluous) but that’s not the role of the government to decide. If I was the publisher of one of the city’s myriad free and/or alternative newspapers, I’d be worried.
Of course, if San Francisco actually does want to fight neighborhood blight, they’re really doing it wrong.
PRAY FOR HUCKABEE?: “PrayForHuckabee.com — a new website that Huckabee promoted on Wednesday through his official Facebook page — features a personal message from the 2008 Iowa caucuses winner as he mulls another White House bid.” Let’s just say I have some doubts that God appreciates being co-opted into anyone’s Presidential bid. And if He wants my advice, He will smite Huckabee’s presumption … by causing that the FEC shall inquire as to the monetized value of Divine intervention as a campaign contribution, even if in the form of an aw-shucks plea for Divine “guidance.” Unless, of course, Huckabee can produce a notarized affidavit that God has not coordinated with Huckabee’s campaign.
WHAT GOES UP MUST COME DOWN, DEPT. OF: And comes down fast. From Strategypage (H/T Rand Simberg), on the problem of Libyan rebels firing scarce rounds into the air. “All those bullets eventually return to earth, and people do get hurt.”
The City University of New York, which has already outraged Israel supporters with its decision to honor anti-Israel playwright Tony Kushner, will also be taking the unusual step of flying a Palestinian flag at the upcoming commencement for City College, a spokesperson for the university told me today.
“The City College flies all of the flags that are flown at the United Nations,” the Vice President for Communications Mary Lou Edmondson told me. “It has nothing to do with foreign policy.”
But there’s one problem—the United Nations doesn’t fly the Palestinian flag. It only flies the flags of its 192 member states.
Then what prompted the college’s decision? I’ve asked Edmonson to clarify her statement, and haven’t heard back yet. But it seems pretty obvious that politics did play a role. CUNY’s City College hasn’t flown the flag in previous years, and so this decision had to have been made recently. And with the Kushner debate still raging, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a no doubt the most volatile subject on campus.
Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, who’s been at the center of the Kushner controversy, said that the flag issue seemed to point to a double-standard at the university.
“I would think if we were going to fly the flags of aspiring nations, then we should certainly those of aspiring nations that have been in the mix even longer, like Tibet, like Kurdistan,” Wiesenfeld said. “In other words, whatever the policy is, it should be based on a consistency, but not a fashion of the moment.”
At yet another fundraiser in El Paso [on Tuesday, Obama] let fly with the following canard about immigration: “One CEO had this to say about reform. ‘American ingenuity is a product of the openness and diversity of this society… Immigrants have made America great as the world leader in business, science, higher education and innovation.’ That’s Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News, and an immigrant himself. I don’t know if you’re familiar with his views, but let’s just say he doesn’t have an Obama bumper sticker on his car.” There are only two minor problems with this. As TheDC’s Matthew Boyle notes: “Obama may have taken Murdoch’s comments a bit out of context, though. Murdoch legally immigrated to the United States and acquired U.S. citizenship in 1985. The immigrants Obama was trying to help with his ‘comprehensive immigration reform’ are in the U.S. illegally.” Details, details. The other problem is that in 2008, Murdoch advised his official biographer Michael Wolff to vote for Obama in the NY Democratic primary. Why? “He’ll sell more papers.” But hey, it’s not like he put it on a bumper sticker.
Of course, saying that Murdoch “doesn’t have an Obama bumper sticker on his car,” sort of implies that most in the news media do.
FORGET IT JAKE, IT’S ABBOTTABAD. (Or alternatively, insert Moe Green reference here): “In another interview, on Fox News (see video below) Inhofe told Shepard Smith, that Bin Laden’s skull did seem to be intact but the bullet had exploded inside, forcing ‘the brain to come back out of the eye socket.’”
NEWT GINGRICH’S PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN IN TWO VIDEOS.
Posted at 2:57 am by Ed Driscoll
May 11, 2011
THE NEW YORK TIMES AND THE INFORMATION THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS: This is my draft, unpublished take on the business-cultural model of the New York Times, from a couple of years ago. It starts by announcing that Beloved Wife and I finally gave up the home delivered subscription in DC. This did not turn out to be true, married as I am to a True New Yorker. This, even though it runs something like $800 a year for home delivery, and despite the fact that the editor of the Times’ digital edition, who is an old family friend from our days in New York, expressed disbelief that anyone would pay those rates for out of town home delivery.
Posted at 11:39 pm by Kenneth Anderson
THOMAS NACHBAR: Justice, violence, and the OBL killing. I find nearly all of this article utterly compelling – and important parts of it not focused on by other commenters; particularly what is said about the different institutional roles of different actors, such as the CIA:
What SEALs and the other members of our nation’s armed forces do is different from what law enforcement officers do, although both occasionally involve violence. (As a society, we tend to accentuate the role that violence plays in both professions—police are, after all, “peace officers,” and today’s wars are being fought through building as much as they are by targeting insurgents and terrorists.) Both members of the armed forces and law enforcement officers operate according to well-defined principles, but they are not identical principles, and those differences need to be preserved in both rhetoric and practice. The principles under which CIA operatives operate, given their status as neither members of the armed forces nor law enforcement officers, are considerably murkier. Lumping what all three groups do together under the rubric of “justice” might be rhetorically appealing, but it invites the same kind of mistakes that were made in places like Abu Ghraib, where the blurring of such lines helped erode adherence to our principles, with catastrophic results.
The argument is also an exercise in practical ethics of a practical kind. Its payoff, after all, is this – and it says something I’ve been trying to say, but better:
Already, lawyers (among them Geoffrey Robertson, Julian Assange’s defense attorney) are opining that, in order for the killing of Bin Laden to have been legal, the SEALs on the raid must have acted in self-defense and that the Navy should accordingly conduct an investigation into whether his killing was justified. But that is treating SEALs on a combat mission as though they were law enforcement officers conducting an arrest. By virtually any account of the law of war, Osama Bin Laden was a valid military target, and as far as we can tell from the news accounts, this was a military mission undertaken by a military unit. To require that military units can use lethal force only in self-defense is not only a complete misunderstanding of the law of war (under whose auspices the SEALs were operating); it would subject our servicemembers to intolerable risk and cripple our nation’s ability to defend itself. Understanding the distinction between security and justice is not just a limit to protect against overreaching by security agencies; it’s also a protection for our armed forces as they carry out their lawful mission to defend our national security.
That two way relationship between security and justice is very astute, and not one that I had focused on. Yet there is a part in the opening of the article with which I don’t fully agree, though it is easily the most persuasive of the critiques of “justice” in the killing of OBL – and I’ve spent a lot of time reading unpersuasive ones in the last week. It is the version of the argument that requires real analytic engagement, the one that I believe sets the terms of debate. The deep philosophical and moral question here, one that goes to the heart of “sides” in war; the bonds of affection and the fiduciary use of violence that is for the protection of a political community – what Tom calls the question of security – and yet is also a question of justice; and how one reconciles justice and partiality.
Tom is both a friend and someone whose intellect I’ve come to appreciate visiting at UVA this term. I look forward to taking up those questions with him – and I’ll report back, over at Volokh.
Posted at 11:29 pm by Kenneth Anderson
MICKEY KAUS ON OBAMA’S BORDER SPEECH: ‘“The fence is now basically complete.” Huh? Or was there an implicit “as far as I’m concerned” tacked onto the end of this sentence?’
Posted at 11:01 pm by Kenneth Anderson
FORTUNE REPORTS RETURN OF MBA JOB MARKET: Turnaround in job market for newly minted MBAs. “Moreover, the improved numbers represent B-schools and corporate recruiters across the board, not merely the top 25 or 50 schools, which tend to outperform the industry or the large-scale MBA recruiters that essentially make the market.” I wonder to what extent this could be said of law jobs – not, of course, that one could tell by asking the schools themselves. My impression, admittedly much influenced by Larry Ribstein, is that consolidation of the private law firm market is going to put pressure on law schools outside the very top tier for some time to come.
Posted at 10:33 pm by Kenneth Anderson
THE ECONOMICS OF GROUPON: From our own Megan McArdle, at the Atlantic. “The LASIK is almost certainly a “raise prices and discount” situation–you have no idea what their normal price is. Even so, who wants discount eye surgery? (Eleven people, apparently. Good luck with that.)” (Fixed link.)
The International Book Awards, in their second year, awarded prizes in 130 categories to 300 winners and finalists. Reza’s book, as his title implies, concerns his life as a secret agent for the West in Iran. You can read an excerpt on his website or buy the book here.
I, FOR ONE, WELCOME OUR NEW ROBOTIC OVERLORDS’ MESSAGING: And it turns out the message is … GRITS (Georgia Robotics and Intelligent Systems). “A masters student at Georgia Tech University has created a system that allows a group of robots to move into formations without communicating with the other robots it is forming shapes with. The robots have no predefined memory or prior knowledge of their location.” (The video at the link is quick fun.) (Before I get deluged with emails, read the story to see that it does require inputs from an overhead camera that might be thought of as the equivalent of GPS. This is not as radical as the quoted sentence suggests.)
CORUSCANT — Obi-Wan Kenobi, the mastermind of some of the most devastating attacks on the Galactic Empire and the most hunted man in the galaxy, was killed in a firefight with Imperial forces near Alderaan, Darth Vader announced on Sunday.
In a late-night appearance in the East Room of the Imperial Palace, Lord Vader declared that “justice has been done” as he disclosed that agents of the Imperial Army and stormtroopers of the 501st Legion had finally cornered Kenobi, one of the leaders of the Jedi rebellion, who had eluded the Empire for nearly two decades. Imperial officials said Kenobi resisted and was cut down by Lord Vader’s own lightsaber. He was later dumped out of an airlock.
Read the whole thing, young padawan — or at least don’t miss the holographic image at the top of the page.
RELATED: Ace writes, “It’s a well-done parody,” but, “the connection they make is a little dicey.”
The Arab Spring popular revolts caught al-Qaida by surprise. The revolts are not al-Qaida’s operational handiwork, and they certainly do not fit the ideologically driven historical narrative spun by al-Qaida elites, such as the late Osama bin Laden.
Of course, militant Islamists are exploiting the revolts. Egyptian Islamist extremists have launched attacks on Coptic Christians, seeking to ignite a sectarian civil war and derail Egypt’s transition process. Al-Qaida’s Musab al-Zarqawi attempted the same ploy in Iraq, pitting Sunnis against Shias.
However, demands for jobs and freedom swamp calls for a caliphate.
Bin Laden’s death at any time would have been a coup, but his death now, in this fascinating Arab Spring, provides Arab modernizers with a political tool to challenge the utopian poppycock of militant Islamist extremists and forward the goal of marginalizing them in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria.
Al-Qaida has always been first and foremost an information power whose most potent weapons are psychological manipulation, ideological influence and media exploitation.
Bin Laden’s death gives the entire civilized world an opportunity to attack al-Qaida’s strengths.
We told you it was happening, and now it has. The cash-strapped city of L.A., which is having trouble hiring cops and keeping fire stations manned, is officially giving billionaire El Broad $52 million for a parking lot.You heard it right. The L.A. City Council approved the deal this week. Of course, there are details that help public officials deflect the reality of of the situation.
Like the fact that the cash is coming from a separate fund — from the controversial Community Redevelopment Agency, which is supposed to help redevelop blighted properties (not rich guys who want to house their art collections with the aid of your dollars).
Still, it’s a bit of a boondoggle, innit?
Gov. Jerry Brown has been attempting to seize CRA money across the state for precisely this reason — that it’s being misused.
Broad is building a museum as part of downtown’s Grand Avenue redevelopment project. His venue would house his multimillion-dollar art collection.
I think it’s definitely safe to call such euphemistic hyperbole shovel ready, though.
Posted at 6:45 pm by Ed Driscoll
LIFEGUARDING IN ORANGE COUNTY IS TOTALLY LUCRATIVE: “High pay and benefits for lifeguards in Newport Beach is the latest example of frustrating levels of compensation for public employees. More than half the city’s full-time lifeguards are paid a salary of over $100,000 and all but one of them collect more than $100,000 in total compensation including benefits.” Full-time lifeguards are organized as part of the Fire Department’s union. PS: I should add that my objection is not to the fact that making sure you have a competent lifeguarding staff on the beaches – 200 or so tower lifeguards, according to the article – and keeping all that organized and operational requires year-round, full-time, supervisory staff who of course must be better paid than some summer-job hourly rate. It’s the rate assumed is required to get competent supervisory staff, how many, and with what benefits that’s the problem here.
SYRIA SHAMED OUT OF RUNNING FOR HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL SEAT: “A coalition of 25 human rights groups headed by the Geneva-based UN Watch cheered today’s withdrawal by Syria of its candidacy for a seat on the UN Human Rights Council.” This is good news. The problem is that it takes vast amounts of political capital to achieve something that, on any ordinary moral calculus, should not even be up for discussion. Yet, the UN being the UN, it is. The Human Rights Council is itself the shame, and the US does neither itself nor the cause of human rights any good by being on it.
Posted at 5:50 pm by Kenneth Anderson
BATMAN ARRESTED! Sure, Batman is a self-described duly-deputized officer of the law. But isn’t Michigan a bit out of his jurisdiction?
“The Founders created a system of checks and balances — three branches of government, for example, and two chambers of the Congress — precisely because they anticipated these passions,” Reid said on the Senate floor.
“Long after that system was created, a new independent federal agency was created in the same spirit of checks and balances,” said Reid. “That agency is the National Labor Relations Board, and it acts as a check on employers and employees alike.”
I’m George Washington, and I approve this power grab? Somehow I don’t think so. And as Jennifer Rubin noted in the item we linked to earlier today, the NLRB could hand the Republicans a potent issue in 2012.
UPDATE: Good question from a reader: If Boeing wanted to move its factory to Nevada, a right-to-work state, would Reid be OK with the NLRB forbidding such a move?
Well, that’s different — somehow.
Posted at 5:16 pm by Ed Driscoll
INSTAVISION AT THE NRA CONVENTION:
Is 3D home printing the new future in gun magazine clip production? Glenn Reynolds catches up with gun blogger Sebastian from Snowflakes in Hell to get the scoop on his newest project.
“With 3D printing you can actually make real stuff. And that has really been a technical revolution.” — Glenn Reynolds.
Approximately eight minutes. Click here or on the screencap below to watch:
USHA RODRIGUES ON THE PRIVATE TRADING MARKET: “When does a company get too big to stay private?” She discusses the “shadow” market that has sprung up for companies like Facebook, which have not yet gone public, but in which every legal tool of interpretation is being brought to bear by people looking to get in. I recently heard Professor Rodrigues give a riveting talk at UVA law school on related topics. The Conglomerate, where she and others post on business law issues, tracks these questions very well. Things like the Skype acquisition, Facebook, and more.
SANDEEP GOPALAN in the international edition of the WSJ: Why it matters whether Washington puts out a firm and clear view of how it sees the legality of the OBL killing. I’m not the only one harping on this topic; Gopalan puts the case better than I’ve managed to do. ”
But first, the popular question: Who cares?
Osama bin Laden was responsible for the most heinous act of terror in modern history. Only lawyers and their sophistry could defend human-rights protections for someone who displayed so little humanity. Right?
These arguments may seem obvious to most, but disquiet in legal circles has been growing after the initial euphoria following bin Laden’s death. It is quickly becoming apparent that the “who cares” retort will not wash, that Washington must establish a proper legal basis for having killed bin Laden. By doing so the U.S. could not only deconstruct the myth that an unarmed bin Laden was an innocent who was killed unjustifiably; it could also negate the jihadi narrative about Western hypocrisy: that we are no different from the terrorists. In what could be bin Laden’s last hurrah, Washington has yet to make its case, and the Obama administration is rapidly losing the narrative.
CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION on the undergraduate admissions process: What the admissions deans say about this year, as things wind down, students make their final decisions, wait lists are wound up. Someone mentioned that professors don’t really take an interest in the business model of the higher education business until they have a college-applying kid. That’s exactly right in my case; I’m paying attention now. The CHE does a good job of covering the business model, remarkably neutrally given that it is an industry newspaper. But far and away the most useful book for parents in the throes is Andrew Ferguson’s Crazy U. As he says, there is nothing in the life of a teenager that the college admissions process does not corrupt.
Posted at 3:55 pm by Kenneth Anderson
BRITAIN’S ANDREW ROBERTS on the sneers, jeers, and contempt in his country at the United States for taking down OBL: I am frequently asked these days by academics and policy professionals on why I keep harping on the need for the Obama administration to forthrightly defend the legal-policy legitimacy of its OBL killing. They tell me I’m getting all worked up over something that is merely surface froth among chattering class types, around for one news cycle and gone. I think they’re wrong; it matters because legitimacy matters, and legitimacy is partly a matter of being willing to set the public baseline for debate, rather than letting others set it for you. I know this because I’ve run NGO campaigns before; others, like former State Department Legal Adviser John Bellinger, know this because they’ve been on the receiving end. Secretary Clinton, call your lawyer.
President Obama could soon have the ability to personally text message every single cell-phone-toting American -— whether they like it or not — with “critical emergency alerts” under a new federal program that civil libertarians and political opponents say is a Big Brother-like intrusion posing a high risk of political abuse.
Federal officials in New York yesterday unveiled the three-tiered emergency alert system that would blast messages about Amber Alerts, impending weather disasters and terror threats to mobile devices.
Cell-phone users could opt out of most alerts if they want to, but not the texter-in-chief’s presidential pages.
“It’s like the state rep sending out mailings about how wonderful they are,” said Tad Kasperowicz of the Quincy Tea Party. “President Obama says,’Here come the high winds and the thunderstorms’ and it’s not really an emergency, but, hey, he gets his name out to every cell phone in the area. I can see that. Absolutely. There’s potential for abuse there.”
NLRB AND BOEING: “The NLRB hands the Republicans a potent issue,” Jennifer Rubin writes at the Washington Post “Frankly, this is one case the Democrats better hope they lose, that is if they want to deprive Republicans of a boffo campaign issue and keep in play in 2012 some important right-to-work states.”
UPDATE: Texas will certainly be in play if the GOP follows “David Kahane’s” advice on who to nominate.
Posted at 3:15 pm by Ed Driscoll
CHANGE: “I will be shorting US bonds,” Veteran investor Jim Rogers “said on Wednesday he plans to short US bonds and sees more currency turmoil in the markets this fall,” CNBC reports:
Bonds in the US have been in a bull market for 30 years, Rogers said.”In my view that’s coming to an end…the bond bulll market is coming to an end. If any of you have bonds I would urge you to go home and sell them. If any of you are bond portfolio managers I would get another job,” he said.
Addressing one bond portfolio manager among conference delegates, Rogers said: “If I were you I would think about becoming a farmer. You buy land and learn how to farm.”
IN PRAISE OF STRAWMEN: At the Duck of Minerva, an observation that strawmen arguments have legitimate uses. After all, what can get dismissed as a strawman argument might well be an idealized or abstracted form of a whole series of particular arguments with a common structure. Or we might use an abstracted form of the argument to sharpen the debate, even though it leaves out many subtle qualifiers in a first approach to the argument. I rather agree.
Update: Some further qualifications from Stacy McCain, with which I also agree. There is a question of good rhetorical judgment here. There are strawman arguments that are just that. I just mean to say, let’s not burn the [?] along with the Wickerman … I’m not sure what exactly to stick in the brackets, but you get the idea.
I don’t know much about the ongoing war in the Congo other than the fact that it makes the Middle East look like Canada by comparison. Millions of people have suffered and died there in silence. Few go there to report on it, and even fewer agitate to do anything about it.
Why Darfur captures the attention and passion of so many while the Congo does not is a mystery, though I think it’s partly because hardly anyone is even aware that the Congo is a war zone at all, let alone the worst one in the world. Maybe this book will help a bit. Maybe. Anyway, I ordered a copy.
Posted at 1:33 pm by Michael Totten
MISSISSIPPI RIVER FLOODING: This is the AP wire story. I don’t have much understanding of levees, rivers rising and cresting; I grew up in an arid region of California and have never lived near the great interior rivers, the Mississippi, the Missouri, or the Ohio River valley. But our thoughts are with those in the downstream path. Update: Given how little I know that geography, I am taking the liberty of posting a long email from someone who is actually there, and thanks for sending. Posted below the fold.
MORE AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL: I agree entirely with Michael that Amnesty is becoming downright creepy. But I’d add that it faithfully reflects its membership base. I talk about the moment in which Amnesty decided to affirmatively switch gears from human rights to, well, All Things Globally Progressive and Then Some in this short academic book review.
More generally, the main human rights organizations face an unsustainable dilemma [corrected, per guest ed. Michelle Dulak Thomson]. On the one hand, merely converting all supposedly “progressive” values into claims of human rights, which means economic, social, and cultural claims that make “human rights” a mile wide and a nan0-inch thick. And, on the other hand, the gradual capture of the language and international machinery of human rights by Islamic states and their agendas, in which human rights is gradually converted into a language for suppressing criticism of Islam.
The effect of the former is, ironically, not to make more progressive agenda items more enforced as actual rights, but instead merely to show that anything can be framed as a right – and so to hand it over as a rhetorical language to the illiberalism of the Muslim world and its most influential states. The dominant human rights monitors, meanwhile, gradually turn into being elite global managers of a human rights agenda amounting to the endorsement of “global religious communalism,” the first tenet of which is the denial of free speech. (I myself recommend the Human Rights Foundation, which is currently holding the Oslo Freedom Forum.)
Posted at 12:31 pm by Kenneth Anderson
ORIN KERR ANALYZES health care mandate appellate argument: Judges seemingly unpersuaded by activity/inactivity distinction, he says, discussing yesterday’s oral argument. More discussion at Volokh.
OH, AND HEY, YOU CAN FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER now if you’re into that sort of thing.
There are lots of other good Middle East feeds, too, including my old friend Noah Pollak, one of the main “characters” in my book; Michael Young at Beirut’s Daily Star; Tony Badran, who is also from Lebanon, at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; and Lee Smith, author of the outstanding book The Strong Horse
Amnesty shamefully fired feminist Gita Sahgal last year for criticizing the organization’s relationship with that terrorist-supporting outfit, but she was right then, and she’s even more right today.
Posted at 11:43 am by Michael Totten
CITY JOURNAL’S CALIFORNIA EDITION: Someone might already have mentioned this, but it is the go-to place for analysis of the California political economy. Scary stuff.
The last six months have proved a climacteric in the history of Islam. An astonished world has witnessed the deposition of rulers in Egypt and Tunisia, revolts in Syria and Libya, the intensification in Iran of a struggle between President Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Khamenei, and the United States’ imposition on Osama bin Laden of a wild but under the circumstances salutary justice.
Yet however tumultuous the events may be, Islam seems unlikely to undergo the reformation its most generous hearts and intelligent minds desire. The revolutions in the Arab states more nearly resemble the abortive ones of 1848 than the successful ones of 1989: Only the identity of the ruling cabals is likely to change. Osama is dead, but his cult and myth live on. He has already been enrolled by many Muslims in the register of their martyrs, while others piously approach his house in Abbottabad as they would a reliquary shrine.
It wasn’t just Seventies Bryn Mawr Muslims who were “moderates”. So were, comparatively, Muslims all over the world. The Sudan’s always been a nutty joint but you’d have had a harder time convincing anyone to jail an English schoolmarm over a teddy bear 50 years ago: The Prophet’s authoritative cuddly-toy suras date back all of 20 minutes. In 1950, a young Pakistani emigrating to Scotland or Canada would have received an education different only in degree, not (as now) wholly foreign in kind and ever more resistant even to the possibility of assimilation. One can detect similar trends in Indonesia, Singapore, the Central Asian stans, the Balkans – and among the de-assimilationist third generation Muslims in western Europe.
Even in photos, backward runs the progress until reeled the mind. Where it all ends knows (somebody’s) God.
Posted at 10:32 am by Ed Driscoll
EXECUPUNDIT’S POLITICALLY INCORRECT AUTHOR LIST: Following up on my Great Books post featuring the very politically incorrect A.A. Gill. Why don’t you go to Execupundit and add your own names to the list?
GUILT — WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR? Last week, Bob Owens of Confederate Yankee blogged, “Guy makes $120K in Two Days on Osama Bin Laden Tee Shirts:”
Maurice Harary, 23, set up his T-shirt website Osamadeadtees.com as soon as he heard that the former Al Qaeda leader had been shot by U.S. Navy Seals on Sunday night.The New Yorker raced home to his apartment to work on building the website on Sunday night and it was ready to go live at 3.30am on Monday morning.
Making money: Maurice Harary, 23, from New York, made $120,000 from his Osama Bin Laden merchandise website in two days.
By Tuesday evening he had already sold more than 10,000 items at $12 a time.
T-shirts bearing slogans including ‘Obama killed Osama’, ‘Osama’s back – not!’ and ‘Just dead it’ have been flying off his virtual shelves.
“I will now be refunding all orders on Osama dead tees,” he says. “Celebrating over the death of someone, whoever it is, is evil in my eyes.”
“I feel it’s not a positive way to be making money,” he says. “I don’t want my success to come at the expense of anyone else.
He says he wants to make money the right way.
So, he’s launching another site, selling a wider variety of clothing.
CBS notes that “The 23-year-old is a business student at New York University.” Oh to have been a fly on the wall if his professors discussed this topic with him.
Fortunately, Confederate Yankee has a suitable T-shirt he links to, that, as Bob writes, will “honor those who made Bin Laden a room-temperature commodity.”
A Navy-funded effort to harness nuclear fusion power reports that its unconventional plasma device is operating as designed and generating “positive results” more than halfway through the project.
The latest quarterly update from EMC2 Fusion Development Corp. comes amid other signs that seemingly oddball approaches to fusion research may not be all that oddball after all. Just last week, General Fusion announced that Amazon.com’s billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, was part of a $19.5 million investment round to further the company’s plan to take advantage of a technology called magnetized target fusion. Another billionaire, Paul Allen, is an investor in Tri Alpha Energy, which is working on its own hush-hush fusion project (and occasionally publishing its research).
EMC2 Fusion doesn’t have tens of millions of venture capital to play with — but it does have a $7.9 million Navy contract to test a plasma technology known as inertial electrostatic confinement fusion, also known as Polywell fusion. The idea is to accelerate positively charged ions in an electrical cage to such an extent that they occasionally spark a fusion reaction, releasing energy and neutrons. The concept was pioneered by the late physicist Robert Bussard, and carried forward by the EMC2 Fusion team in Santa Fe, N.M.
There’s no secret anymore as to why the paper has become worse than it ever was. The editors and writers are on the political left; and they are pompous enough to think that since everyone they know thinks the same way, what they are writing is objective. This is not to say that its bias is a relatively new thing. It’s just that in the paper’s heyday, you could find relatively straightforward top-notch reporting. But even then, on certain issues, there was very little difference between the editorial side and that of the reporters.
Of course, as William McGowan has discussed in Gray Lady Down, since Pinch began running the paper, it’s become top-heavy with editorial columnists whose personalities (Modo! Krugman! Friedman! And the soon to be departed Frank Rich) define the newspaper, rather than the actual news the paper generates. But even so, every once in a blue moon, the paper grudgingly concedes its otherwise immediately obvious biases.
Faced with the loss of that resonant, bourbon-on-ice voice, what a moving yet dignified and yes, heroic piece of writing. Thank you, sir, for the lesson, and please accept this in my defiant regard: God bless you!
It will be a dreadful day when this singular voice can no longer reach us via any media but memory.
Now, you may not work in an airplane factory and it’s even less likely that you own an aircraft company. But the federal government’s attempt to tell one company which states it can and cannot do business in is a threat to the free enterprise system that has been the fertile soil of this nation’s economic strength for decades.
So put yourself in the position of an entrepreneur. If you currently own a business or have ever thought about it, imagine if you did everything in step with every current regulation, permit, law and rule. You not only fill out massive numbers of red-tape forms, but also wait weeks — if not months — on end for the necessary government approvals. After finally navigating these hurdles, you invest heavily in property, buy expensive specialized machinery and tools, and even begin the hiring process. All the hassle and government bureaucracy is ultimately worth it, as you know you will be able to do good business, benefit the economy by adding new jobs, and make a nice profit (which, contrary to what many people in our nation’s capital believe, is not a dirty word).
But then the federal government steps in and says that you must stop because you do not have the approval of a union in a completely different state. They are, in fact, telling you where and how to run your business.
This outrageous action — while not completely unsurprising given the board’s recent blatant Big Labor activism — will send chills throughout the economy if allowed to stand. For an administration that talks so much about creating jobs and not strangling business, the NLRB’s actions speak to an opposite intent.
That’s been of the dominant themes of this administration, even before it began.
THE GREAT BOOKS ACCORDING TO ME: Starcrossed, by AA Gill. I do understand that it won that year’s Bad Sex Writing Award, and no doubt deserved. Imagine the movie Notting Hill – made a good deal more gritty, nasty, cruel, really dirty, and lots, lots funnier, while still preserving Antigone and a weird bittersweet, genuine romance, at the center. For anyone who has actually read the novel, I know that you’re cringing. Great book? Well. A senior editor of the Times Literary Supplement, also a dear friend, once told me: “Ken, you have such almost exquisite taste.” “Oh?” I inquired, all coyness and demurity. “Yes,” he said, “marred only by your fondness for AA Gill.” And a barely perceptible pause. “And Mark Steyn. But you knew that.”
TICK-TOCK, TICK-TOCK: Lawfare’s Robert Chesney points out that the clock is rapidly running on the intersection — collision? — of the War Powers Resolution and the Libyan whatever-it-is. Update, also from Bobby Chesney: What did Senator Kerry mean, “deferring to NATO”? I was pretty sure, for nearly all intents and purposes, we are NATO, or at least, there is no NATO there if the US is not there. And, if your “presence” is a drone, is that enough to trigger the WPR?
Logan officials said they were first told of a passenger who may have attempted to open a door mid-flight. Police are now investigating the sky-high scare.
Phil Tigh from Plympton was seated next to the suspect. He said the man “screwed up” when he reached for the handle.
“He knew he messed up,” Tigh told the Herald. “He sat at the bar and had too much to drink. He screwed up.”
Indeed.™
Posted at 3:00 am by Ed Driscoll
IF A COUNTRY OF 80 MILLION PEOPLE FALLS and the media is deaf does anyone hear?
Posted at 12:32 am by Michael Totten
“I DON’T NEED TIME MAGAZINE,” Bob Dylan ranted in the movie “Don’t Look Back.” The TIME reporter was Horace Freeland Judson, who died last Friday at the age of 80. We watched “Don’t Look Back” about a year ago, and I blogged back then about the Dylan/Judson confrontation. (“The reporter, whose bland doughiness makes a funny contrast to Dylan’s intensity, might look as though he doesn’t know what is happening here, but I got to thinking that the gears in that head were turning, and he was judging and gathering material.”)
ADDED: The video I tried to display has been taken down from YouTube. You can read the transcript of the exchange here.
“IT’S SO CLEAR, EVEN TO DEFENDERS OF GRAD SCHOOL, that grad school is a bad financial decision, that this guy has resorted to saying that you need to go to grad school to be a good person. Of course, I went nuts on him.”
A few years ago, a German entrepreneur made headlines when he proposed all-nude charter flights. Near as well can tell, that idea appears to have never taken off; perhaps these two early adopters are now trying to force the idea upon the States. On the other hand, when Republican Congressmen are now posing (if not yet legislating) shirtlessly, how far behind can it be?
So to speak.
Posted at 10:36 pm by Ed Driscoll
IT’S ABOUT TIME. John Kerry finally gives up on Syria’s Bashar al-Assad as a reformer. “He obviously is not a reformer now,” the senator said.
Assad wasn’t a reformer earlier, either, and that was obvious to at least some of us all along.
Meanwhile, Jennifer Rubin reports that Marco Rubio intends to introduce a resolution in the Senate supporting the people of Syria against their dictator. We shouldn’t expect democracy there any time soon, but anything that hurts Assad, even if only slightly, beats doing business with him.
THE CAMPUS-CARRY MOVEMENT: Alex Hannaford’s Atlantic article is written much-too-much for the magazine’s bobo audience (i.e. people like me); I’m not wild about it. It’s transparently condescending, for example, to express grave wonderment that anyone could think that Barack Obama is on the side of gun-controllers – look at all the gun-rights laws he’s passed!! – rather than looking at what he tells those to whom he unburdens his soul about bitter clingers, etc. It strikes me as at least possible that Jerry Brown has actually changed his minds about guns, at least when it comes to him owning them; Barack Obama, naw.
As to campus-carry, however, I myself am torn. Beloved Daughter is about to go off to college in Texas, as I mentioned, and she is interested in firearms training. I am a strong supporter of gun rights – and also think that urban kids like my daughter, who has shot a gun once in her life at age 12 in God’s Own Country (that’s the Owens Valley to the rest of you) and does not come from gun culture, needs a lot of real, honest to goodness training in safety and shooting and how one behaves in situations of self-defence with guns. That’s a lot more than some on-line gun course, and here’s your license. I want her to be able to carry – but I want her knowledge and training to be real.
And that’s true for the rest of the campus community. I understand fully the way in which permits and training requirements are manipulated to be a backdoor route to gun control; I also wouldn’t want my kid carrying a gun unless she had a whole lot of it, and updated on a regular basis. I want her to come back from school not just owning a handgun as a toy, but competent to use it. (Thanks to reader DM for the recommendation on a training course in our area.)
Posted at 8:48 pm by Kenneth Anderson
DID YOU KNOW MITCH DANIELS’S WIFE left him and their 4 children, married another man, then came back and remarried Mitch? Is he reluctant to declare his candidacy because he doesn’t want to have to explain that? Come on! Frame it as a pretty story, and run with it.
President Obama said the fence was now “basically complete.” This declaration is completely false. The fence along the southern border in total equals 670 miles. The entire southern border is 2000 miles long, which is nowhere near, “basically complete.” On top of a meager border fence, the February 2011, Government Accountability Office report shows “1120 southwest border miles have not yet achieved operational control.” Also, according to Sheriffs working and living on the U.S.-Mexico border, Obama’s assertion that his administration has done it’s part to enforce the border is laughable.
Well, over the past two years we have answered those concerns. Under Secretary Napolitano’s leadership, we have strengthened border security beyond what many believed was possible. They wanted more agents on the border. Well, we now have more boots on the ground on the southwest border than at any time in our history. The Border Patrol has 20,000 agents – more than twice as many as there were in 2004, a build up that began under President Bush and that we have continued.
They wanted a fence. Well, that fence is now basically complete.
So, we have gone above and beyond what was requested by the very Republicans who said they supported broader reform as long as we got serious about enforcement.
Obama took credit for confiscating 64 percent more weapons than ever before. Well, that’s what happens when the federal government sends thousands of guns into Mexico in the first place through Operation Fast and Furious under the Obama Justice Department and ATF, of course it becomes easier to confiscate more guns when you put more into an area to begin with.
“On another note, Obama asked the audience if he needed to build a moat on the border to make republicans happy. There is already a moat on the border Mr. President, it’s called the Rio Grande.”
President Obama said the fence was now “basically complete.” This declaration is completely false. The fence along the southern border in total equals 670 miles. The entire southern border is 2000 miles long, which is nowhere near, “basically complete.” On top of a meager border fence, the February 2011, Government Accountability Office report shows “1120 southwest border miles have not yet achieved operational control.” Also, according to Sheriffs working and living on the U.S.-Mexico border, Obama’s assertion that his administration has done it’s part to enforce the border is laughable.
Well, over the past two years we have answered those concerns. Under Secretary Napolitano’s leadership, we have strengthened border security beyond what many believed was possible. They wanted more agents on the border. Well, we now have more boots on the ground on the southwest border than at any time in our history. The Border Patrol has 20,000 agents – more than twice as many as there were in 2004, a build up that began under President Bush and that we have continued.
They wanted a fence. Well, that fence is now basically complete.
So, we have gone above and beyond what was requested by the very Republicans who said they supported broader reform as long as we got serious about enforcement.
Obama took credit for confiscating 64 percent more weapons than ever before. Well, that’s what happens when the federal government sends thousands of guns into Mexico in the first place through Operation Fast and Furious under the Obama Justice Department and ATF, of course it becomes easier to confiscate more guns when you put more into an area to begin with.
Posted at 8:16 pm by Ed Driscoll
“NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE RELIES UPON FAKED RESEARCH TO SMEAR MILITARY:” At Commentary,Jonathan S. Tobin writes:
Entitled “A Beast in the Heart of Every Fighting Man,” Luke Mogelson’s story described the murder of an Afghan elder in Kandahar province as well as two other civilians by five members of one army platoon. Since the news had already been reported elsewhere, Mogelson had a broader point to make. As his title made clear, he saw the activities of one small group of soldiers led by a sociopathic sergeant as representative of the U.S. military—not only the spirit of the American effort in Afghanistan, but the governing ethos of the U.S. military as a whole. Although the number of U.S. war crimes has been relatively small, Mogelson believes it is wrong to view them as exceptional. The fault is not so much “the exceptional few” who commit atrocities, but the “institutional failures” of the military and the nature of the wars that we are fighting. To buttress this assertion he claims:
Over the course of military history, American soldiers have become increasingly willing to kill. In World War II, just 15–20 percent of infantrymen fired their rifles at the enemy during battles; in Korea that number increased to 55 percent; in Vietnam it reached 90.
The source of these statistics was General S. L. A. Marshall, a military historian who included it in his 1947 book Men Against Fire. Mogelson pulled them from a more recent book by retired military psychiatrist Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, whom Mogelson quotes as accusing the military of “programming” soldiers to kill indiscriminately.
But what Mogelson fails to disclose in his article is that, more than 20 years ago, the New York Times itself published an article debunking the numbers upon which his entire argument rests.
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE: A reader emails:
I have read some of Col. Grossman’s books and have taken a course from him in person. He would never accuse “the military of “programming” soldiers to kill indiscriminately.” Now I can believe someone could take some of what Col. Grossman has writtten and by taking his words out of context twist it so it seems he is saying the opposite from what he really is saying. Col. Grossman admires the men and women of our military and law enforcement.
by Jason Stearns. 
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