Sunday, January 30, 2005

The Anniversary of the Tet Offensive, but Not Much Has Changed

I asked my dad, a post-WWII Air Force photographer, and his cousin, a WWII B-29 crewman, whether the media today, as contrasted with pre-Vietnam days, are truly as appallingly negative and anti-American as they seem to me. Their responses indicate to me that I was naive -- today's media are far, far more negative and anti-American than I thought.

I don't know where it all went wrong, but by Vietnam, journalists had begun to believe that their job was not to report mere facts, but to present a case for their own worldview. The Tet Offensive in 1968 showed how powerful their jettisoning of any ethical standards could be: an American military victory was successfully portrayed as a defeat to the folks on the home front.

Today, that can't happen, thanks to the blogosphere. But it sure isn't changing the behavior of the MSM -- their news out of Iraq is essentially entirely negative, regardless what is actually happening on the ground. Just one more thing to think about before you re-up for your local paper, or switch the channel to that network news show.

We Need More Guys Like This, Too

Bull Moose and I probably disagree on almost everything, but not on his main point here.

Sadly, now that initial reactions are out in the MSM and from lefty bloggers, his wish has obviously not come true.

Bush Wins Another National Election!

CNN reports 72% turnout after polls close in Iraq, with no major attacks. How will the critics spin this one? They can't ignore the good news, like they did in Afghanistan.

It'll be interesting to see, but don't look for them to wise up any. The same people who droned about a "quagmire" in Afghanistan a few days after fighting began, who predicted months of battle and 10,000 American dead before Baghdad would fall, and who are generally stupid and wrong every time they open their shrieking mouths, will move on to some other topic to predict doom over -- and nobody will call them on their countless past errors.

This Guy Must Want to be the Next Bjorn Lomborg

Some reason from a former Greenpeace activist.

Mark Steyn is Brilliant Again

Here's his latest. My favorite line:
''Stability'' is a fancy term to dignify laziness and complacency as sophistication.

We Need More Like Him

Saturday, January 29, 2005

America's Decline?

Here's an excellent article by Jonathan Rauch on something I've previously commented about, the perennial predictions of America's preemption by another superpower.

Rauch's comparison of today's predictions of European preeminence with those about Japan less than two decades ago is illuminating. But he skirts or even misses some important points. One is the lack of military power in any challenger right now; there exists nowhere an army with the numbers and technology to rival America's. Except for Great Britain, no European state can field a force that can even really assist the US in battle, owing to the enormous disparity in technology. And as I've pointed out before, all of Europe has gotten a free ride on the defense front since WWII, and when those countries are forced to shoulder the true burden of their own defense, their vaunted "superior economic models" will be revealed for the hollow shells they really are.

But that leads to the other important point. Even with the freebies on defense, Europe's main economies today are in no position even to be compared with Japan's in the late '80s. They are growing scarcely at all, have high rates of unemployment, and a desperate need for structural reforms that a coddled populace won't countenance. Add in a native population in decline, and a burgeoning but unaddressed unassimilated immigrant problem, and European countries leave much to be desired. They are not a threat to America -- they are mainly a threat to themselves.

Morons "Don't Get" Free Speech

Here's an interesting contrast in stories.

The first one is about a college student expelled for writing a paper promoting corporal punishment in schools. Scott McConnell was studying for his Master's of Education and wrote the paper for a course on classroom management.

Colleges were once places of free inquiry, where conflicting opinions were discussed and debated. But the same shrill "defenders" of such rights as the one to pull a near-term baby from the womb and kill it with scissors to the back of the head think that even mentioning spanking an unruly grade-school student warrants expulsion. What a world we've made for ourselves.

But in the meantime, expect those same shrill demons to launch demonstrations if the good folk in this story succeed in preventing a murdered from speaking in City Hall. Imari Obadele was the leader of a black terrorist organization that killed Jackson, Miss., police officer William Louis Skinner, who was part of a force serving an arrest warrant at a house the group was holed up in.

Mr. Obadele has served his far-too-short sentence, and should have the right to speak his mind. But the numbskulls on the left believe the right to freedom of speech means the right to a forum, which is absolutely not the case. Jackson Councilman Kenneth Stokes no doubt believes he's doing right by inviting the murderer to speak in Jackson's City Hall, but that just means Stokes's mother didn't bring him up right. Proper manners would dictate deference to a murdered police officer's survivors, not to the man who murdered him. But then, proper manners aren't exactly a high priority for those who see spanking as evil, but murdering police officers as noble.

Sunday, January 23, 2005

Where are the Adults??

My recent reading of I am Charlotte Simmons, and the memories it raised of my own college experience, have had me wondering what ever happened to the notion of mature adults setting limits and expectations for children and young adults.

It seems the world now is awash in parents and "adults" in positions of authority who believe it's more important to be seen as "cool" by their charges than actually to protect them. The concept of in loco parentis was long ago jettisoned by the adolescents of all ages who run our universities. And we read stories such as this week's news about the mother who held booze, drug, and sex parties for her teenage son and his friends.

Sadder still is this story. A young woman died a year ago on a cheerleading trip to Hawaii when she broke her 2 am curfew to spend the night with a young man she'd met upon arriving at her resort hotel the day before. We'll never know why Laura Crossan fell from the ninth-floor balcony of her new "boyfriend's" room, but this is a far cry from "Leave it to Beaver," isn't it?

Accidents happen, and some young people will die for seemingly unfathomable reasons. But the whole idea of adult authority is to substitute what should be a more mature judgment for that of youthful indiscretion and inexperience, therefore to reduce the chances for avoidable tragedy. Our culture's worship of youth as not only physically beautiful, which it often is, but also intellectually advanced (note the tautological storyline of seemingly every TV show that adults are ignorant and stupid boobs and youngsters are brilliant savants), which it almost always is not, is a recipe for disaster -- especially when combined with the effete "adults" that our abandonment of real adulthood back in the '60s has now created.

Cynics Without a Cause

A very smart friend of mine told me recently I was a cynic, but that "cynicism is fine, as long as you have a passion to make things better."

The Democrats are cynics -- but their passion today appears to be twofold: find any scheme that will regain them the power of their glory years, while heaping vitriol and bile upon those they find so appallingly stupid (i.e., anyone who disagrees with them).

These self-appointed geniuses, though, can't grasp the obvious point that the two steps in their program are like matter and antimatter -- put 'em together, and POW -- annihilation!

The always-brilliant Mark Steyn makes the point here.

Saturday, January 22, 2005

Santayana Said it Best

How many times have you read or heard that fat, stupid Americans are ignorant of history, and therefore on a bumbling path to ruin? This is a good example of such tripe.

Meanwhile, the talking heads largely ignore, when they're not openly praising, those who really are on a path to doom well-trod by history. So when I opened my latest issue of The Economist today and read the latest about the evil despot Hugo Chavez in Venezuala, I thought of George Santayana's excellent admonition about those not knowing history being doomed to repeat it. Chavez's murderous thugs have now launched their effort to make land ownership "fair," by stealing it from those who own it now and giving it to others -- which is bad enough, but that they're giving it to hand-selected "peasant co-operatives" really makes the ol' alarms go off in the history department.

Okay, I could see how a poor country's peasants may not have heard of the collective farms of the Soviet Ukraine, or the Great Leap Forward in China, or even Pol Pot's magnificent repopulation of rural Cambodia (that is, with the Cambodians he didn't kill immediately). So maybe they don't know that the peasants in those co-operatives mainly ended up starving to death, in their uncountable and unimaginable millions. But for Pete's sake, Zimbabwe is pretty recent history, and the collapse of its previously productive farming capacity thanks to dictator Robert Mugabe's racism should be fairly well-known.

Ah, well. Santayana will again be proved right, and the peasants cheering for Chavez now will rue the day later -- at least the ones who survive. Here's more (and thanks to McQ at Q and O Blog, who shared my thoughts and did even better research.)

This is Why My Boy will be Home-Schooled

Educators today can't find time to teach things like history, science, English, and math -- but they can surely make time to indocrinate your child! What a load of crap.

Sunday, January 16, 2005

Forget Oil-for-Food! What About the Minority-Owned Business Scam?

Read these three stories about the corruption that's rampant in the City of Chicago's program to use minority-owned businesses.

Such programs are an absolute crock. As with these cases, it's easy enough for anyone to run a business that qualifies for "minority-owned" status. Indeed, it seems that, like Oil-for-Food, they often become a conduit for enriching the well-connected.

But even if we assume all the businesses that are certified as such truly are owned by minorities, exactly what purposes do such programs serve? Are they eliminating present racism? I'd say the willingness of buyers to set up such programs puts any allegation of rampant racist "freezing out" of minorities from the marketplace to lie. Are they making up for past bigotry? Well, unless you believe this is accomplished by steering more cash into the hands of present-day well-heeled people who by accident of birth share the sex or skin color of someone who was at some time discriminated against, no (see my "Corporate Thoughts #1" for more about this concept).

And there's this complication: such programs aren't free. Oh, I'm sure some of them on paper are about merely identifying, and sourcing bids from, relevant businesses owned by minorities. But the programs never, ever stop there. Whether they say so explicitly or not, they come with goals -- goals for money spent, or for the number of businesses employed, or for the number of transactions completed. And the only way to meet these goals is to pay more for the services of minority-owned businesses than you otherwise would. This is simple economics; too many dollars are chasing too few minority-owned businesses, so prices must rise. (Plus, since such businesses are usually sourced without bidding, there is no competition at all to make them "sharpen their pencils.")

So what we have are government and corporate entities paying more than market price for goods and services, to serve no other ends than to satisfy liberal white guilt, and to keep corrupt race-baiting "activists" off their backs. And the sole identifiable outcome is the kind of corruption revealed in the articles at the link. But at least all it costs is that we, the taxpayers and shareholders, are left holding the proverbial bag.

And Speaking of the Murdering Swine...

It seems they're not that far away.

A Coptic Christian family of four in New Jersey were found dead in their home Friday morning -- murdered, each bound with his throat slit. Frighteningly, early speculation is that Islamic nut-jobs targeted them because of exchanges on a religious chat website. (See the whole story at Free Republic.)

The most ironic passage of the story is this:

"We are not a bloody people," said Ahmed Shedeed, director of the Islamic Center of Jersey City. "This is not from the Quran. This is not from Islam at all."

Asked about passages in the Quran that may suggest murdering non-believers in a manner that resembles the family's deaths, he replied, "The Quran talks about people fighting in the battle of war. It's not talking about people who live next to you. ...This has nothing to do with our community at all."


I have no reason to doubt that Mr. Sheheed is a fine man, and speaks what he believes is the truth of his religion. But until people like him come to to terms with what Islam is becoming across the world -- a cult of death, power, and backwardness the world hasn't seen for centuries -- and begin helping the isolate and weed out the rabid nutcases that tar Islam as a whole, such stories will only become more and more commonplace. Remember Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands? Well, such things are not so far away now. September 11 should have been our wake-up call here in America. Unfortunately, it seems many of us just hit the "snooze."

Favoring the Palestinians

I am continually amazed at the bias in so many quarters that gives the Palestinians a pass on their frequent animal behavior, while castigating Israelis if they even raise a hand to defend themselves against attack.

The whole security fence fiasco is an excellent example. But even more basic is the utter silence we hear from our media when the Palestinians execute "collaborators." That's probably the saddest thing of all: the media regale us with the tales of the innocent Israelis killed by the monsters of Hamas, Fatah, and the PLO, since blowing up buses is, to our international journalists, a suitable means of "expression" -- but we never hear of the innocent Palestinians murdered by those bold "freedom fighters," because that information might just be enough to show the world what swine the Palestinian "armed resistance" is made up of.

Power Line details the latest such episode; unfortunately, while this one may get a bit more attention, it's hardly unique.

Saturday, January 15, 2005

CJR -- Now a Farce?

The standard-bearer in journalistic balance, The Columbia Journalism Review, greatly diminished its reputation with its recent article on the Rathergate fiasco. Corey Pein's article, "Blog-Gate," was a poorly researched hit-piece that tried to smear the bloggers who exposed CBS's forgeries and lies.

Now CJR Executive Editor Michael Hoyt has jumped in the fray, and taken the partisan, journalistically-challenged line as well, not only backing the ridiculous Pein article in a recent letter to The New York Post, but going so far as to continue to assert that CBS's discredited documents might be genuine! Little Green Footballs has the story here.

Abject Apologies: A Fresh Update to "Latino Heritage?"

In my post "Latino Heritage?" I took a young lady named Delia to task for appearing on TLC's "What Not to Wear" in what I took to be the standard, always-fashionable Che Guevara T-shirt.

But how mistaken I was. Her shirt wasn't pro-Che, but stridently anti-Che, with a red circle and slash across his picture, and the slogan "Cuba Libre Hoy" ("Free Cuba Today") across the back. (Thanks to NRO's "The Corner" for setting me straight!)

So my deepest apologies to Delia. Perhaps she should be the one telling people what to wear.

Sunday, January 09, 2005

Another Jewel From Stein

Saturday, January 08, 2005

Another One From the Gun-Controllers' Playbook: Science Doesn't Back Us? Ignore It or Lie about It!

Here's an article about the recently-released study of gun control laws and their effects from the National Academy of Sciences, which generated countless headlines about right-to-carry laws not reducing crime.

There's only two problems: the headlines covered a lie in the report, and the report was about a whole lot more that shoots the gun-banners down (pun intended).

John Lott Jr. has an excellent op-ed about it here -- it's worth reading the whole thing. But here's the relevant passage about right-to-carry:

James Q. Wilson, professor of public policy at UCLA, was the one dissenting panelist and the only member whose views were known in advance not to be entirely pro-gun control. His dissent focused on the right-to-carry issue, and the fact that emphasizing results that could not withstand peer-reviewed studies called into question the panel's contention that right-to-carry laws had not for sure had a positive effect.

Wilson also said that conclusion was inaccurate given that ''virtually every reanalysis done by the committee'' confirmed right-to-carry laws reduced crime. He found the committee's only results that didn't confirm the drop in crime ''quite puzzling.'' They accounted for ''no control variables'' -- nothing on any of the social, demographic and public policies that might affect crime -- and he didn't understand how evidence that wouldn't get published in a peer-reviewed journal would be given such weight.


Of course, numerous studies by others have already proven the point: right-to-carry laws reduce crime. Florida led the way with such a law, and a follow-up study showing its effectiveness, some ten years ago.

Of course, all the other errors of omission and commission are bad, too. Read the whole article.

UPDATE 1/9/05 -- Fixed missing links.

Of Course...

I'm someone with way too much time and money on his hands, too. And you can be sure I'll never, ever shut up.

Ever!

Of Masculine and Feminine

Neil Cavuto of Fox News reports on a run-in he had with a feminist who got bent out of shape when he held the door for her. Here's the whole sad tale, but I really liked this part:

"Excuse me," I asked — now feeling every bit of my offended macho Italian roots — "but exactly what bug got up your butt?"

"Treating me like I have to be coddled," she said.

"By opening a door?" I asked.

She went onto explain the door thing was part and parcel of a bigger thing: An attempt by men, she said, to make women feel like they're lesser.

This is part of a big problem we have. Oh, not the whole ages-old women vs. men thing. No -- I'm talking about the one where we've gotten so damn wealthy we can now take normal everyday things and make them crises.

This particular one is akin to the argument over the third-person singular pronoun. That's the one where the feminists have ruined good English by insisting that we're all sexist thugs for using male pronouns (he, him, or his) in general cases, such as, "An activist makes a complete ass of himself when he insists we change our language to cater to his idiotic and ignorant opinions." Their argument is that we favor males by defaulting to their pronouns. And the rest of mankind (oh boy, there's another can of worms -- the synecdochic use of "man" to refer to all humans) is supposed to ignore the flipside argument, that we belittle men by making their pronouns multi-purpose, while women have theirs all to themselves.

What it comes down to is that we have whole classes of people now who have too much time and too much money, and spend both by making themselves a thorn in the side of humanity. But what I wonder is why the rest of us even listen to them, much less change our freaking ways to try to make them shut up. Because you can count on this: such pathetic, whining (actually I prefer the British "whinging"), find-something-to-bitch-about-at-all-costs wastes of space and air will never, ever shut up.

Ever.

Washington State Update -- Rossi Files Challenge

Ever hear of Republican Dino Rossi? He was governor-elect in Washington until the Democratic machine was able to manufacture enough votes in three counts to swing the election to their candidate, Christine Gregoire. And he has now filed a lawsuit challenging the results of that tainted election.

Obviously, the vote itself -- one that featured one heavily Democratic county continually "finding" ballots to help put Gregoire on top, dead people voting, and more votes than voters in many precincts -- was the bad news here. On the plus side, though, the local media in Seattle actually seem to be reporting on the mess, rather than ignoring it as the national MSM has chosen to do. See here and here.

And Sound Politics continues to do an excellent job rooting out the apparent fraud and holding the feet of the elected officials and bureaucrats responsible to the fire.

Friday, January 07, 2005

Latino Heritage?

My wife likes TLC's "What Not to Wear," the goofy personal re-make show that's essentially "Queer Eye For the Straight Guy" without the "alternative lifestyles."

On the episode she watched tonight was a young lady who insisted she not be changed so much that she lose her authentic Latin American heritage. That heritage consisted, apparently, of wearing really, really awful clothes, not understanding how to improve her far-far-less-than-model-perfect looks with makeup -- and, of course, sporting a Che Guevera T-shirt.

The priceless Jay Nordlinger of National Review has been doing a magnificent job questioning the fascination of America's liberals and Latin Americans with the murderer Che. Quite a fashion statement to wear togs promoting a guy who delighted in administered the coup de grace to the innocents mowed down by the evil revolution's machine guns -- and this is just one example of the horrendous evil perpetrated by this "doctor of the people."

I noticed just the other day one of the Hispanic workers in the manufacturing plant I work in sporting "Che Guevera" as a nickname on the back of his bump cap. As Jay Nordlinger says, this wholesale worship of a butchering thug is an evil that would take massive effort and years to stamp out.

Let's start now.

Thursday, January 06, 2005

Home Defense Sense

Read this article from ABC News in Portland, Oregon -- or just check the meat of it here:

Robbery suspect caught by well-armed homeowner

KELSO, Wash. - Cowlitz County Sheriffs say they have taken a bank robbery suspect who has been on the loose into custody.

Deputies received a call from a resident on Kalama River Road
Wednesday at 5:10 p.m. saying they were holding a person at gunpoint on their property who matched a description of the bank robbery suspect.


This kind of story may be big news to you. Of course, National Rifle Association members read a number of such stories each month in "The Armed Citizen," a column in the monthly members' magazine American Rifleman. The stories usually end with the intruders fleeing, sometimes injured. But sometimes the homeowners shoot and kill.

Even if you aren't a gun owner, ask yourself: If you were faced with an intruder in your home, with seconds to determine if your life is in danger, whether the intruder is armed, and what constitutes "reasonable force," would you want to have some publicity-seeking prosecutor or a comfortable police desk jockey second-guessing what you did to protect your family, home, and life?

Now read this, from the December 9, 2004, issue of The Economist:

SIR JOHN STEVENS, the head of London's police, thinks that Britain's burglary laws are too soft on criminals. A troupe of indignant newspaper columnists agree. Listeners to “Today”, an influential BBC breakfast radio show, voted it their most-wanted new law.

This week, the Tories hoped to catch the mood, tabling a bill that replaces the old idea that householders can use “reasonable force” against intruders with a new one, that all but “grossly disproportionate force” is allowed. Tony Blair, always unwilling to be outflanked by the Tories on crime, responded by saying that the law might need to be changed.

The facts suggest otherwise. Under the existing law, only two people have been imprisoned for using force against burglars within recent memory. The first, Tony Martin, shot a teenager in the back with an unregistered shotgun while the boy was climbing out of a window. The second, Barry-Lee Hastings, stabbed a man 12 times in the back, and kept stabbing even after the burglar had left the house. Neither makes a credible folk hero. Dominic Grieve, the shadow attorney-general, who drafted the bill for the Conservatives, concedes that no have-a-go heroes have been convicted.

We can judge the bias of The Economist by the author's failure to mention that Mr. Martin was alone in his isolated rural house, at night, and was confronted by two intruders (he killed one and injured the other with a single shotgun blast). But regardless, the lad he killed had broken into his house. But in Great Britain, all handguns are banned for the general public, and all other firearms, including BB guns and air rifles, are heavily regulated. Mr. Martin's shotgun was unlicensed, and he ran afoul of the "reasonable force" law so favored by The Economist. (Great Britain is also experiencing a horrendous wave of violent crime and home intrusions, dating -- curiously enough -- the the laws that largely disarmed the populace.)

A just law should be very simple: Any force in such a case should be justified. An intruder, armed or not, should be seen as an immediate threat to the lives of all those present in the home. To set up a tribunal to judge after the fact (and usually ignoring or belittling the inevitable panic and uncertainty of a homeowner faced with such a threat) whether force was justified, when fractions of a second in such instances often determine whether the innocent live or die, is ludicrous.

Tony Martin himself, the reclusive farmer who acted properly to save his own life, only to have it ruined by the criminals who preyed on him and a society that made him pay with years of that life lost to an unjust prison sentence, said it best: "We are supposed to live in a civilised society. It's not the way I have been treated... People are not aware of what it's like in the countryside. Criminals prevail. It can't be right."

No, Mr. Martin, it isn't right.

Wednesday, January 05, 2005

Democrats Hit Rock Bottom and Start Digging

You can't make this kind of stuff up. For years now I've heard predictions of the ultimate demise of one party or the other, and learned a long time ago to laugh them off. This time, though, the Dems may actually be committing suicide.

I think the two-party system has served us well, and maybe this would clear things out so a group of adults can once again represent the left -- though finding adult leftists nowadays may prove a challenge...

This Woman Has Gall

Christine Gregoire, whose party machine is well on their way to stealing the election for governor of the state of Washington, had this to say:
"This rhetoric that I hear every day on talk show radio is serving to further divide this state of Washington," she said. "There is something more important than partisanship in the state of Washington.''

This from a woman who insisted on TWO recounts. Of course, Democratic questioning of election results is never divisive, and Democratic vote-inventing is never partisan.

Read the whole disgusting story here.

This Cartoonist is the Greatest

Not only is Michael Ramirez a fantastic cartoonist, but he's also a very nice guy.

I had the pleasure of meeting him some years ago in Memphis, when he was with the Commercial Appeal. A mutual friend of ours, knowing my "right-wingedness," had told me a number of times I needed to meet him, and several times we were at the same parties or bars, but we just kept missing each other.

Fortunately, right before I moved, I was playing with a band at a local dive and Michael showed up. He entertained my wife and our friends by drawing some funny little doodles while I played, and we had a great chat during the band's break. He was very complimentary of my harmonica playing, so I gave him one of my harps, with a note about how nice it was to meet him on its included instruction sheet. I told him we were moving, but that we'd frame some of his doodles to remember him. He insisted on something better, telling us to get our new address to him through our mutual friend.

Well, he lost our address after our friend had given it to him the first time. But he remembered us, asked for it again, and a few months after we got settled a very nice print of one of his cartoons showed up in our mail. It's now framed over our bar, appropriately enough!

There's been ample commentary about the dearth of conservative editorial cartoonists in the MSM. Say what you will about the Los Angeles Times, but they've had Mr. Ramirez on staff for years now. So because he's so accomplished that he's not just a great conservative cartoonist, but a great cartoonist, period -- and because he's a great guy -- Michael becomes our first non-print link at the right.

Tuesday, January 04, 2005

Let's Make it a Quick One Today

It's another jewel from the inimitable Mark Steyn.

Monday, January 03, 2005

There's Plenty of Blame to Go Around, Right?

I think we can now see the tack the MSM will be taking regarding Rathergate. Beginning now with the publication of rank distortions and character attacks on the bloggers by Corey Pein in the January/February 2005 issue of Columbia Journalism Review, they've launched into a "yeah, our side did bad, but your side did too" kind of "offsetting penalties" defense.

Pein's approach to the analysis of the forged documents is so laughable, its publication in what I've heard was once a distinguished publication is its own commentary on the left's desperation. Here's the crushing defense by one of the outfits Pein attacks, Little Green Footballs. Wizbang, another of the blogs attacked, also does a number on this ridiculous travesty here.

But this passage really takes the cake.
As Memogate progressed, certain talking points became conventional wisdom. Among them, that CBS’s producer, Mary Mapes, was a liberal stooge; that her source, Bill Burkett, was a lefty moonbat with an ax to grind. Both surely wanted to nail a story that Bush got preferential treatment in the National Guard. Still, there was a double standard at work. Liberals and their fellow travelers were outed like witches in Salem, while Bush’s defenders forged ahead, their affinities and possible motives largely unexamined.
Oh, that's right -- the fact that Mary Mapes spent five years trying to find some way of substantiating this story is proof of her evenhandedness! And Dan Rather's own attack, from his nightly news anchor chair, on the bloggers and others questioning his saintliness as "partisans" obviously doesn't count as a questioning of their motives.

What a pathetic joke.

Sunday, January 02, 2005

More Good News on the Miracle Rabies Girl

Well, she didn't make it home for Christmas. But she did go home yesterday, with no brain damage and with miraculous healing still going on.

We're talking about fifteen-year-old Jeanna Giese, the young lady from Wisconsin who contracted full-blown rabies from a bat bite last September. Here's the latest.

America vs. Europe

There suddenly seems to be increasing interest in comparing the economies of the US and Europe. Powerline has a couple of posts to that effect, including this one discussing the laughable Jeremy Rifkin's new book about how great Europe is. (I'm going to nominate Rifkin for The Economist's ongoing contest for the wisest fool. Despite decades of being wrong about everything of note he has ever said, Rifkin remains a newsmaker and hero of the left. Go figure.) And the always-right and always-funny Mark Steyn has a column about it here.

What's usually missing in any of these discussions, though, is the military angle -- specifically, the fact that the US has one (a really, really, really big one), and the European nations don't. Okay, the UK has a passable force that has been at our right hand in all our recent forays. But France? Germany? Spain? Italy? Give me a break. My personal firearms collection puts me on par militarily with those weaklings.

Folks can tout European GDPs and standards of living all day, but until they then compensate for the fact that the good ol' US of A has been providing the defense of those whiny adolescent citizens' supposedly superior way of life since WWII, the figures themselves mean little. As we roll forward with our troop realignments over the next few years, those coddled populations are in for a big awakening. Maybe they'll even finally have to work for a living.

Saturday, January 01, 2005

More on the San Fran Gun Ban

"When you get guns out of people's homes and off the streets, it means that that gun is not going to be used in a shooting that kills someone, whether a murder or an accidental shooting." -- San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly, commenting on the city's proposed handgun ban

"There has been a troubling increase in the use of firearms." -- Chief Inspector of the Constabulary Keith Povey, commenting on Great Britain's continuing and increasing wave of violent crime in the wake of their ban of all handguns in 1997, and the subsequent introduction of draconian regulations for all other guns (BB guns included)

It may become a mantra here: how do you caricature such people?

Campus Clowns

I just ripped through Tom Wolfe's I am Charlotte Simmons over the past few days. It's an excellent read (I am rarely able to finish a book of 600+ pages this quickly), and speaks volumes about our campuses. It was a dishearteningly accurate portrait of the small private school I went to twenty years ago ("Catholic," no less!), with the addition of a much more powerful sports team and far more overtly biased professors.

And that last bit gets to the main point of this rant. Here's a passage from Wolfe:

But how could the rest of them sit there and just listen to this PC s**t and not say anything? F**king sheep... they just swallow the sheep s**t he gives them and regurgitate it every time he asks a question. If that's all you do, it doesn't matter whether you believe it yourself or not. It ends up being the only "proper" s**t to say, and so you keep on saying it because why not be proper and not the kind of person you can't invite anywhere because he might introduce a fart into a proper conversation.
The reality of American campus intolerance for any viewpoint but the left-liberal orthodoxy was covered very nicely in the Dec. 4 issue of The Economist. (Isn't it sad, by the way, that it takes a British publication finally to address this sickening reality, which has previously only been heard within conservative opinion circles? The American MSM has been ignoring it for decades.) Here's a letter to the editor responding the the article:

SIR -- Your call for greater political diversity in academia is reasonable and desirable. But it would require conservative intellectuals to dissociate themselves from their brethren who deny evolution, global warming and the value of stem-cell research, while promoting homophobia and the rest of the dreary litany of popular but ludicrous conservative causes. The political imbalance in academia derives not from a leftist cabal but the intellectual indefensibility and moral bankruptcy of so many conservative notions, which taint those that may be worth discussing.

John Payne
Los Angeles
Get it? The liberal establishment admits it's cocooned in an academic world of "free inquiry" that currently allows only left-wing thought. But it welcomes conservative opinion, just so long as it unerringly echoes left-wing opinion, challenges no left-wing assumptions, and creates no discomfort for those on the left! Because, it's obvious, any concept that would make a liberal uncomfortable or might make him actually think about the drivel he's spouting is intellectually indefensible and morally bankrupt.

How do you caricature an intellectually insecure but nonetheless oh-so-smug "thinker" like Mr. John Payne?

I shouldn't paint the left with such a broad brush, of course. The always thought-provoking Nat Hentoff (who I've now added as our first opposite-side viewpoint link at right) of The Village Voice has been covering the shenanigans of this sort within the Middle East Studies Department at Columbia University.

UPDATE 1/2/05 -- Here's an excellent article by John Leo in US News & World Report about Wesleyan University, which sounds as though it may have been the model for Wolfe's fictional Dupont U.

Washington State Election Theft

What can you say about the blatant theft of the governorship of Washington? It's a prime example (not that there aren't hundreds of examples, every single day) of the left's primary tactic. That is, they shriek to the heavens about their opponents' supposed illegal or immoral behaviors, when those behaviors are in fact the left's own stock in trade. While the MSM prattles on and on about "questions" in Ohio, they seem to find very little to note in the patently obvious invention of additional votes that put Democrat Christine Gregoire over the top in the third vote count.

Just a year ago, none of this would ever have seen the light of day. Now we have the blogs, and there is some excellent work going on tracking this travesty. It may yet all come to naught in this particular race, but it will add to the already overwhelming evidence of the evil to which the increasingly powerless and desperate left has descended. Sound Politics, Pull on Superman's Cape, and Michelle Malkin are but a few following this outrage.

There IS Some Good News

Here's an amazing story about a little girl who actually paid attention in class, and saved hundreds of lives on one of the beaches in Thailand last week. Wow.