Observations on political, economic, social and military scenarios that appear unwinnable. In one of the Star Trek films, Captain Kirk beat the 'Kobayashi Maru' training scenario by thinking laterally: reprogramming the simulation. It was designed to test character - to see how people would handle no-win situations.
(Beyond that theme, this blog has absolutely nothing to do with Star Trek.)
Conspiracy Theories, London and Princess Di
Side note:1997 seems like a very very long time ago, doesn't it?
From the Guy Who Married 'Hanoi' Jane.
..
...and thought the UN worthy of a $1Billion donation, we now have - apparently .
Ted Turner is visiting North Korea next month to discuss turning the DMZ into a Park...Why do men and women with a public face (e.g.The North Koreans have agreed to meet with the former CNN founder to discuss his ideas on a revamp of the most heavily fortified and land mined area in the world...
When will the Jane Fondas and Ted Turners of the world realize that they are constantly being used as propaganda tools for the despots and tyrants of the world?
, Ted Turner, Jane Fonda, Jesse Jackson, Sean Penn, etc.), who obviously feel passionately about these issues, and are clearly somewhat intelligent and reasonably accomplished within the realm of their original profession think (over and over and over again), that all of that somehow translates into competency in international politics, diplomacy, military strategy, cultural detente and arms negotiation? (Oh, we never thought of that!
Why thank you, Mr. Turner! We'll call Mr.
Eisner and Mr. Rumsfeld right away to get going on the park!)
What is it about fame and human nature that leads some people to believe that the heartfelt inner purity of their commitment, combined with personal charisma will change the minds and melt the hearts of hardened dictators and faceless institutions when history proves decisively that they are simply the dupes ("useless idiots") of these regimes - prolonging the pain and suffering of great masses of downtrodden people whose lives and safety they purport to care about?
I have great respect for true pacifists who truly live their views, though I've met very few in my travels. I don't know if Ted Turner is one. I suspect not, but it doesn't matter.
Having been a radical leftie myself in the 1980's when Reagan was upping the ante with the Soviet Union, I can understand the fearful high-minded impulses that may be driving him. (I won't even speculate as to whether a profit motivation may be in play, though it could be.) But unlike Ted, I was a clueless teenager when I had those impulses.
I got over it. Carter's unilateral and highly destabilizing disarmament notions almost got us all charbroiled. Reagan's apparent warmongering changed the world forever - for the better.
If Mr. Turner is a pacifist, I'm almost willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on motives simply because this move is so utterly naive to the situation on the ground and the history of the conflict that one can only conclude that he really believes that what he's doing is right. Which of course does not make a whit of difference in terms of its effects, which can't help but be counterproductive.
I like to think of this as the polar opposite of what Natan Sharansky experienced in the gulag when he heard Reagan call the Soviet Union the 'Evil Empire', i.e., hope.
Millions of North Koreans who get wind of this stunt can only have their hopes crushed by this. At the very least they will have their collective ignorance prolonged as their tormentor is legitimized by a major symbol of Western entrepreneurial capitalistic success.
But there's another level at which this is just plain nuts that's even more common and worth punching holes in.
A vast left wing consensus seems to assume that compassion and unilateral pacifism operate best at the level of institutions (the UN, the U.S. government, the DPRK.
) They do not. Those desirable traits start in the human heart. The Holy Spirit works one by one.
I won't claim to be the world's best authority on this, but as I understand scriptural admonitions to peace and loving thy neighbor, (aka the Golden Rule) they operate at the level of individuals.
States do not change their minds because of a flamboyant gesture. Institutions do not change their hearts because of the unilateral purity of their neighbors.
They change only when forced to do so - sometimes through diplomacy, sometimes through threat, sometimes at the point of a gun. Sometimes only after those guns are fired - repeatedly. States may change their policies, but states and institutions simply do not have overnight conversions the way some people do when presented with a radical gesture of peace and friendship.
Ted is desperately misguided on this one. I don't care what his motivations are. All I can say is please please sit down and shut up.
Preferably now.
Lance for President?
At least . Of course, Mr. Armstrong would run as a Republican.
Interesting in light of . Can you say 'paranoia'? (For the record, Mr.
Maru is an avid endurance athlete.)
While the left wrings it's hands over perceived U.
S. "imperialism", influential Syrian born Muslim cleric, Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, (now based happily in Britian), had : In an interview with Reuters, Bakri described Osama bin Laden, leader of the radical Islamist network al Qaeda, as "a sincere man who fights against evil forces..
. I would like to see the Islamic flag fly, not only over number 10 Downing Street, but over the whole world."
Can we agree now that the enemy has raised his hand, clearly declared his ambitions, ( ), and is in the process of pursuing them by any means at his disposal and with no reference whatsoever to the niceties of the Geneva Convention or any other moral code?
Can we stop looking for moral equivalence where it simply is not present? Can we stop believing the genuflections in the direction of 'condemning' the taking of innocent lives while supporting those who do so? Can we stop ignoring this incitement to war and calling it 'religious' by self-flagelistic reference to the accrued sins of Western civilization during the Crusades for goodness sakes?
Can someone start farming these liberal ostriches for meat rather than listening intently to their foreign and domestic policy prescriptions and writing about them reverently and at length in the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly?
(OK, that last one was a joke. I didn't mean to insult such a fine and magnificent animal.
)
The Sheikh went on to taunt his sworn enemies:
"I think that would be political suicide for the British government if they started to deport and imprison all extremists and radicals."I wouldn't be so sure. Despite the support his statements may get from the naive, absolutist left-wing media, the West may be a lot closer than he thinks to doing just that.
As Dirty Harry would say: "Go ahead. Make my day." Or as Justice Robert H.
Jackson in the 1949 free speech case Terminiello vs. Chicago, taking a somewhat different slant on societal self-immolation: "the Consitution is not a suicide pact."
Note to Mr. Bill: Sit Down, Shut Up and Chill Out I have several theories on the only president in over 100 years to suffer an actual impeachment vote:
1) He think's he's still president and the media is under the same wish/illusion.
2) He's kicking himself that he didn't propose an amendment to the Constitution making that possible while he still had the power to do so.
3) He's planning to run as Veep, then off his wife after she gets the job.
4) He's running for Kofi Annan's job.
Regardless of which are true, (and all of them could be), I find it odd that statements , that would be savaged by the MSM if the current president said them, are adoringly reported as gospel when they at a gathering with Nelson Mandela recently in South Africa:
"Not very far from you in the South Pole in the last 10 years, 12 chunks of ice the size of Rhode Island have broken off," Clinton told the volunteers with City Year South Africa, a youth service organization he helped inspire.Three quick thoughts:"If this continues for another couple of decades, part of South Africa will be under water, and we will lose 50 feet of Manhattan Island in New York."
1) "not very far from here"? Has he looked at a map?
President Bush would be torn to pieces for that kind of ignorance masquerading as sleight of hand.
2) "50 feet of Manhattan"? That has a price.
It is high, but not in the $trillions. Having just spent $10 billion to 'fix' our local infrastructure here in Boston (far far less than Kyoto would cost), it seems that even if global warming were true, it could be dealt with through engineering and construction rather than avoidance. After all, that creates union jobs and aren't Democrats for that?
Besides, what the $%^ do some kids in South Africa care about a slice of Manhattan? They probably care a lot more about whether they have the opportunity to industrialize their society on fair terms and get jobs, and that takes energy, which creates Co2. Answer: Bill cares because that's the center of his universe and his universe is the only universe that matters.
3) Ever notice how these announcements come in a great flurry whenever the East Coast of the US, (i.e., MSM influence central) is having a heatwave?
Ever notice how they don't happen very often in February?
'Nuf said.
Tony Blair - The Way U.S. Democrats Used to Be In response to the other day, a friend reminded me that Tony Blair is on the liberal left - of the Labour Party - and therefore, the implication being, was I really sure I liked him?
Answer: unequivocally yes, (at least as regards terrorism and what we're doing to fight it.) to his own party, where one would think he might be inclined to pull a few punches, only adds to my already great respect for him:
The prime minister told Labour party members it would be a "misunderstanding of a catastrophic order" to think extremists would act differently if the developed world changed its behaviour. "If it is the plight of the Palestinians that drives them, why, every time it looks as if Israel and Palestine are making progress, does the same ideology perpetrate an outrage that turns hope back into despair?This is the way U.S. Democrats such as Harry Truman and John Kennedy used to talk.If it is Afghanistan that motivates them, why blow up innocent Afghans on their way to their first-ever election? If it is Iraq that motivates them, why is the same ideology killing Iraqis by terror in defiance of an elected Iraqi government? What was 11 September 2001 the reprisal for?
"
Even a few current Democrats talked this way for a few months after 9-11. Some, such as Hillary Clinton continue to talk this way, but with three important differences: 1) they say different things to their own party members than they do to the general public, 2) the tough talk is largely calibrated to the polls, and 3) it is not backed up by support for tough U.S.
policies. The world is complex and ever changing, they argue, so our principles and policies should be also. Policies?
Yes. Principles? No.
Tony Blair has principle and it shows. Principle is easy to recognize because those who possess it behave in a way that is precisely opposite to the three points listed above: the line is the same no matter who is listening or what the polls say..
. and it is backed up by action. That's called leadership.
It makes some people crazy. They mistake representative democracy - wherein leaders are chosen to lead and given reasonable latitude to do so, with a poll-driven hyper-democracy that puts the masses in the driver's seat directly.
I believe that history will treat both Tony Blair and George Bush quite kindly.
They are speaking a truth that many don't want to hear, and following through on their words. My only wish is that Mr. Bush could be as eloquent and forthright as Mr.
Blair. As with the terrorists themselves, rhetorical appeasement of the domestic wacko fringe only emboldens their hate.
UPDATE: on Chirac's pique vs.
Britain. Choice excerpt: Behind all Mr Chirac's macho chest-beating hides a man struggling to salvage his reputation. More and more, the French are wondering how he can carry on as president for two more years when the polls show that fewer than one person in three trusts him.
Now This is Funny..
. Hate, Rancor and Liberal Myth
I live in a particularly liberal corner of New England - by fate of birth, (happy) luck of marriage, and roots set down long before my political conversion and religious awakening. John Kerry took my town by more than a 4:1 margin.Barney Frank lives a few blocks away. Mike Dukakis once crossed a street on foot in front of me as I was stopped at a red light. (No, I did not gun the engine.
I waved.)
One woman takes great pleasure in driving around town in a vehicle she painted herself, complete with a giant dead president effigy on the roof and "IMPEACH BUSH NOW!" in big block letters on the side.
People smile and wave and give her the thumbs up sign. Bumper stickers are - the ratio of Kerry to Bush rhetoric much much greater than the 4:1 voting margin - for fear of vehicles getting keyed, I suspect. Dinner parties are, how to say.
.. tolerable but nervous-making affairs, always on the knife edge of becoming if I dare on anything but the weather.
And with "global climate change" mania all the rage, even that is now off limits. Such is the landscape, and I accept it. For now, I choose to live here for reasons having nothing to do with politics.
What gets frustrating, and occasionally amusing are business meetings in which liberals somehow mistake me for one of their own and go off. A recent meeting was a case in point. I will leave the details blurry to avoid fingering the guilty.
The mealtime conversation veered suddenly to how terrible it was that "Bush" (always "Bush", never "the President" or "President Bush") was getting away with lying about Iraq: "there was never any link with Al Queda and they know it!" Uh, . They talked of how scary it was that "facts don't seem to matter anymore", (ironic, no?
), and how the press was "just going along for the ride". (Hello! Have any of them ever even glanced at the long, large and ever growing body of evidence and anecdote for gross, pervasive and cynical liberal media bias?
)
My sudden silence and poker face didn't slow things down a bit as they delved into grievances harbored since the Reagan administration. "James Watt said that Christ wouldn't come until all of the trees were cut down - can you believe it!" Uh, no, I thought.
I can't. Because . It's been , perpetuated for years because it felt good to those doing the publishing.
I was getting increasingly uncomfortable, but knew that to speak up, even on a point of fact like this, would be to commit professional suicide in the most permanent manner imaginable. I was caught. Like my choice to live where I do, there were still good reasons to work with these people.
Attempts at changing the subject or deflecting didn't work. Getting up to leave wouldn't work either. I'd just sat down to eat.
"And can you believe that Christians are trying to portray themselves as victims?" "Can you believe the arrogance? Victims!
" The implication being: Victims are who WE say they are - the liberal establishment.
With great but unnoticed irony, the conversation turned to diversity and how we needed more in the group: "people of color, and other sexual orientations, and from other countries." All well and good.
There was already quite a bit in the room. But what never got brought up were differences of perspective. Nope.
We want a rainbow of races and other attributes, but nobody who disagrees with us.
The myths were obvious, the rancor palpable. Diversity means a very particular thing to liberals that's all about appearances and not about being challenged.
To this isolated conservative Christian, the hate was clear: the threat of social and professional ostracism in the air should I say what I thought. Yes, it was a passive hate, but to borrow a liberal koan, I felt "threatened" and "uncomfortable". After all, isn't that the yardstick for victimhood that liberals themselves have established?
My feelings and not the speakers' intentions?
Ironically, at least two of the speakers were Buddhists..
. calm and centered and warm and content..
. until it came to Christianity and "Bush!" (said with a spitting sound): "Their God is trashing the earth and making war and spreading hate!
" (As if God and the USA were one and the same.) What was not mentioned was that this evil USA/deity thing they had invented in their minds is also protecting their sorry arses from terrorists and spreading jobs to third world countries and liberating millions of women and children tortured under the Taliban and Saddam and sacrificing their lives to do it. The long knives had come out.
.. waiting.
I have nothing against Buddhists or liberals as people, but this was clearly the dark side of a few. As the Anchoress likes to say, ?
Islamofascists in the West: Ants, Rats or Wolves? Related to my about the London bombings:
..'s 'Wretchard', ( as Richard Fernandez, formerly of Harvard, and Belmont, Massachusetts, by way of the Phillipines and Australia), has on what the Islamic terrorists may be capable of, concluding that:.there is a limited supply of suicide bombers so, their Islamofascist handlers might reason, why waste them if its not necessary? .
..If Saddam had to offer $25K to families to keep the supply up and that market support is no longer there, one would think the supply - however large it may be - would have diminished somewhat with his removal from the role of market subsidizer.
...The . Wretchard/Richard's conclusion: Western passiveness enabled 9-11; pro-actively engaging the enemy on his turf has led to a weakening of what he is capable of in the West. This is not reason to back off, but to continue the fight.there is no obvious way one can get from Iraq to the London operation. Occam's Razor urges a simpler conclusion: that Al Qaeda's British minions either didn't have enough explosive to do worse or they didn't have the know-how to assemble a bigger bomb..
. They would have blown up 30 trains if they had the means. Certainly it was not the milk of human kindness that stayed their hand.
.. The inevitable question then is 'why could Bin Laden not find the means to attack 30 trains?
' The answer it seems to me, must be Afghanistan, Iraq, the Horn of Africa and hundred other places where he is engaged without quarter by US forces. Resources, whether Jihadi or no are not infinite. They do not have some magical machine that allows them to be everywhere at once, to sustain losses yet grow.
[emphasis added]
Awaiting Complaints re. Hurricane at Gitmo Mark my words, someone, perhaps Amnesty International or Dick Durbin, is going to complain that Gitmo detainees in their cells and/or that they're being put in harm's way by being so close to the beach.
Just wait. You heard it here first. :)
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL STATION, Cuba (AP) - Packing devastating 150 mph winds, Hurricane Dennis tore down a guard tower at the U.S. detention camp for terror suspects as it stalked Cuba's south coast and prepared Friday to strike into the heart of the largest Caribbean island..
. troops watched from a cliff as the churning Atlantic Ocean threw up massive waves of salt spray that towered over the razor wire fence surrounding the camp at Guantanamo Bay. The troops fixed metal shutters over the steel mesh windows of some prison cells overlooking the sea at Camp Delta, which is just 150 yards from the ocean.
If This is Science, We're All in Trouble Earlier this week, a sometimes professional colleague and I were discussing working together on a project he's pursuing around what he termed "Global Climate Catastrophe" - (same acronym at Global Climate Change..
. a clever but pointlessly didactic little twist on an already assumptive acronym dear to the sky-is-falling politics-as-science left.) He knows our views are utterly at odds on this and nearly all other subjects political, however I thought it possible to persuade him that the project would be better off if we looked into the full range of climate change issues, non-issues, solutions, non-solutions and red herrings.
I.e., stare the sacred cows straight in the eye and shoot them if we need to.
(mm...
steak...
real food...
)
But he was trying to score some easy debating points that made him feel better somehow. I let it go. From this bad start though, things got worse.
"I'd like to frame the project by simply taking the science as a given", he said.
"Which science?" I asked.
"The science that predicts catastrophe in 100 years", he replied.
"But if it's a prediction", I said, "it's not science at all - at least not by any accepted definition of that word. It's just an theory, based on grossly incomplete data, run through some computer models, the validity of which can't be substantiated for decades, all in support of a grand political agenda that has the oh-so-well-respected UN/Brussels crowd rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of re-arranging the global economy to their own broken vision.
" (Or words to that effect. I'm always more eloquent a few hours later in writing than I am on the spot in the midst of a noisy, bustling Starbucks.)
Suffice it to say, we did not come to a melding on visions on this topic.
That conversation however, sensitized me to in today's WSJ (subscription required), describing a issued earlier this week on the effectiveness of the by the U.S. House , as chaired by (R, CA).
[Funny side note: click on the editorials button on Pombo's web page while looking at his picture and 'Presto!' out of the suit and into the cowboy hat. I love it.
Very Reaganesque but for the moustache.]
At this point in the story, the MSM (as well as most of my former academic friends in the Environmental Studies and Geology departments at my alma mater), will dismiss such a study as partisan merely by looking at the letter next to the committee chairman's name. (I.
e., R = bad. Bush = bad.
) They are entitled to that opinion. Unfortunately for them, the data on which the study is based, (data being a really good thing to look at in such matters) is drawn directly from the U.S.
Fish Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service - the folks we've paid to track and know such things.
What the study shows, after 30+ years and hundreds of millions in expenditures - to say nothing of the economic distortions, private costs and property rights infringements perpetrated in the name of saving snail darters and such - is that the Act has done very very little to protect endangered species, and that more than a few of those deemed endangered were designated as such simply because of a lack of good information on their numbers.
That may not be a reason to throw out the Act entirely.
It certainly isn't a reason to start bulldozing willy nilly, (a strawman that I guarantee we'll see in the MSM in coming days.) But at minimum it does challenge the axiomatic notion that the particular approach to environmental protection established 30+ years ago, and the absolutist goals it sets out to achieve, should be perpetuated indefinitely into the future when they have demonstrably failed to date.
Of the nearly 1,300 domestic species on the endangered list, the law has managed to "recover" a grand total of 10.Now there's a new concept: science at any given point in time doesn't know everything in the universe...That's a success rate of less than 1%. Supporters of the law would say that species recovery is slow work that has to be measured over a long period -- say, 100 years. But even the trends don't look good.
A mere 36% of listed species are considered stable or improving. And even this 36% is nothing to celebrate, given that in many cases the only reason a species is deemed on the mend is because officials overstated the problem in the first place. When the plant, Johnston's frankenia, was first listed, it was thought to have dwindled to about 1,500 specimens.
Oops, someone miscounted. There are close to nine million, which explains why Fish Wildlife is now proposing to remove the plant from the endangered list. Of the 10 officially "recovered" species, six were subject to erroneous original data.
Humility - a lost art. But why have humility when there's ? When man and reason are the ultimate in knowledge and control?
I wonder if that has any relevance to the "Climate Change Catastrophe" set that wants us to apply the precautionary principle writ large based on data they don't have about the entire temperature profile of the planet from ocean floor to the top of the stratosphere for the last 100 years? Nah. Let's barge on ahead.
We know everything we need to know and how to manage it. Pay no attention to the Endangered Species Act man behind the curtain. This is a catastrophe!
The sky is falling! Send money to the UN now!
Hubris is an ugly thing.
UPDATE: I must have been in a hurry, because I missed pasting in this critical tidbit from the aforementioned WSJ piece:
Another problem is that the law doesn't allow for real priority setting. Call it the Lake Wobegone effect for species. In a statistic that defies logic, more than 92% of listed species have been accorded priorities that put them in the upper half of Fish Wildlife's priority ranking system -- i.e., they are all a top priority. This makes it impossible to focus on species truly in need.
[emphasis added]
News RSS