KaufmaNet

Told you.

2009-06-22T15:44:00.002-04:00

I know I haven't blogged in a long, long time. That's mainly because, well, I've been on Facebook.

However, I return to this venue to say that I told you so.

In this post, way back in 2006, I explained about my ability to predict new cool things (despite my relative lack of coolness and complete lack of ability to make money knowing these things, and noted the following:

Now, nobody believes me when I say I saw these trends happening and wasn't merely a hanger-on, so I make my prediction, on a time-stamped blog, of the next fad:

Snuff.

That's right, I said snuff. The powdered, aromatic tobacco product that the aristocrats of the 19th century liked.

So in a year or two, when there are snuff bars all over Manhattan, and there's a big glossy 300 page "Snuff Afficionado" magazine on all the newsstands, and you see a clip of Paris Hilton putting something in her nose that is (amazingly) not white, you will remember -- you saw it here first.

It took a few years, but take a look at this article all about snuff, from Wired Magazine:

One of history’s most esoteric methods of satisfying a tobacco jones is making a resurgence as a new generation of hipsters trade lungs full of smoke for a nose full of snuff.

Stay tuned for the next thing, as soon as I figure out what it is.

2009-04-22T11:12:00.003-04:00

ACTION ALERT

Rally for Human Rights and Freedom on May 3rd in Manhattan.
We urge you to participate and please forward this flyer to your contacts.
Stuart Kaufman
stuartk@mrgreatneck.com
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. Edmund Burke

AIG and Sharia Finance

2009-03-20T09:52:00.002-04:00

"...The nationalization of AIG is forcing the American taxpayer to support a very different kind of toxic asset. I refer to AIG's promotion of Sharia (Islamic law)...." www.jewishworldreview.com/0309/west032009.php3

The Thomas More Law Center (bless them), in association with SANE (the Society of Americans for National Existence www.saneworks.us/), has filed suit against the Federal government for funding AIG in its business of insuring Sharia complant investments. These are investments that are ostensibly in compliance with the requirements of Islamic law. Although this might sound benign, it is, in fact, intensively subversive to the security of the United States. In addition to inuring us to the concept that Sharia Law should be acceptable to us, it is even more invidious as a practical matter. The structure of these investments puts in place “Sharia Compliance Boards” which among other things, require that the sponsoring institutions make contributions to certain sanctioned “charities,” which are not necessarily benign to the interests of the United States and the Constution. AIG has developed a substantial business in insuring these investments.
What is especially amusing is that “in its motion to dismiss, the Department of Justice claimed that the government does not control AIG….” (http://www.thomasmore.org/qry/page.taf?id=19).
Isn’t it past time for the people of the United States to wake up?

Congressional Chutzpah

2009-03-19T15:48:00.003-04:00

In light of the current state of what passes for Congressional action on the economic situation, I thought that it would be appropriate to cite some knowledge that ought to be “common,” but appears to be uncommon in the Capitol:

"No State shall… pass any pass any… ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts…." US Const Art I, sec. 10
This basic precept of the Constitution (made applicable to the Federal government by Amendment XIV) seems to have escaped most of the Congressional worthies who are tripping over themselves to get to the cameras for the purpose of trying to force AIG to rescind the “bonuses” that have been promised to various of it’s employees. If AIG made a contract with its employees, the government has no authority to interfere (you could look it up). Furthermore, today, the House voted by a vote of 128 to 93 to tax 90% of the AIG bonus receipts (ex post facto law, anyone?)

"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators." P.J. O’Rourke

"Politics is largely the process of taking credit for oneself, and putting the blame on others – regardless of the facts." Thomas Sowell
Let’s consider some of the prime recipients of AIG cash: Christopher Dodd… what do you know???!!! Now we can begin to understand the basis for the “Dodd Amendment” to the “porkulus bill (which featured the ratification of the AIG bonuses). Just watching the machinations of Senator Dodd (who was pleased to take credit for the “Dodd Amendment” before the rest of us learned what was in it) twisting himself into a pretzel before his superiors ordered him to confess his responsibility for it, is enough to prove the wisdom of Thomas Sowell and P.J. O’Rourke (as if that were even necessary).

"A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have." Gerald Ford
Just watch some of those worthies: Barney Frank, Charles Schumer, Carolyn Maloney, threatening citizens with the invocation of confiscatory tax laws. Watch, my personal favorite: the Hon. Gary Ackerman, of the 5th Cong District of NY – my very own congressman. Watch this unaccomplished, undistinguished backbencher wax eloquent in his scolding of the captive Chairman of AIG (a man who is serving for no compensation while trying to clean up Congress’ mess). It would be infuriating, except that Ackerman (with his ever present lapel flower) makes me think of “Chuckles the Clown” whenever I see him. This turkey is making policy that will have dire consequences for my grandchildren. The most amazing thing is that he has the chutzpah to call attention to himself in public.

Reacting to news Obama picked North Carolina to win the NCAA Championship, Mike Krzyzewski says, "the economy is something that [the president] should focus on, probably more than the brackets." http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/03/19/duke-coach-obama-worry-economy-ncaa-picks/
Let the President tend to his knitting. And let the members of Congress who are engaging in this Kabuki play, blaming everyone but themselves, slither back into the slime and leave us alone!

Contrarianism re AIG

2009-03-17T09:25:00.002-04:00

I have been listening to the sewage that is being spewed about the AIG "bonuses" with increasing exasperation. Why, for instance, are we assuming that these "bonuses" are "performance bonuses?" In many instances, applying the word "bonus" to this type of compensation is misleading. Frequently, these payments represent nothing more than deferred compensation. Companies and employees (or prospective employees) agree to lump sum payments to be paid after a certain time, rather than partially paid over a period of time (i.e. bi-monthly salary checks). Furthermore, it should not be surprising that these "bonus" agreements exist in AIG's case. These types of agreements are frequently used by companies that are in difficulty, to induce talented people to work for them.
It appears obvious to me that the sturm und drang that has ensued from the AIG "bonuses" is more a result of political calulations aimed at distracting attention from the true culprits (i.e., Congress), than from valid concerns.
The point of it all is that the government has no business in business. Providing public money for private companies is an invitation to the invocation of the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Self Protection

2009-03-17T09:07:00.002-04:00

Since the election (and, if truth be told, significantly before that), I have experienced an increasing amount of frustration, accompanied by acid reflux and much gnashing of teeth. My stepbrother-in-law suggested that I blog to relieve the pressures that build up in my system as a result of the continued assaults upon this county's future by those whom we (in our foolishness) have elected to govern us. So, I will try doing this as a method of self protection.
There is so much that is making me nuts.
The very existence of Barney Frank and Chris Dodd is sufficient unto itself to fill me with despair. This corrupt duo should be spending their lives in cells adjoining Bernard Madoff instead of in positions hat provide them with subpoena power.
.... What do you know!? Just being able to write that has made me feel better. I may try this again.

Seersucker revisited

2007-07-12T15:31:00.000-04:00

I have, in the past, given my father significant amounts of crap for his seersucker suit predilection.

However, in the interest of fairness I feel obligated to note that my opinion that seersucker is silly looking unless you are Mark Twain is evidently now the minority view.

According to and Abovethelaw.com poll, a clear plurality, 42.9% of respondents, deemed seersucker suits a "classy summertime staple." So my father is slightly vindicated by people who have so little to do that they can take the time to answer dumb internet pools.

The Starland Vocal Band is still considered terrible, though.

My Mother Responds...

2007-07-12T14:54:00.001-04:00

Still don't know how to post, so I'll just respond to you and if you want to post it on my behalf, feel free:

I'm obviously one of those rare people who have to admit I agree with the poll! I think a sense of humor is what you need to get through life. Of course, I admire most someone who appreciates MY sense of humor. I will readily admit that although I watch a ton of television, I rarely watch PBS -- except for the Britcoms and Mystery -- but I also don't watch any of the so-called "reality" shows, which I think are totally moronic and completely boring and cannot for the life of me understand their popularity. And that includes American Idol. Lately, I've been partial to the History Channel and the Discovery Channel, and when all else fails, there are always reruns of "Friends." Now, I'm not denying that looks are important -- my husband is a dead ringer for Sean Connery (just ask him) (my husband, not Sean) -- and marrying for money is always a good thing (although not very predictable if you're marrying young unless your fiancé is royalty). But looks and money are transitory. Money comes and goes. Men lose the hair on their head (although it returns on their backs, noses and ears), get a beer belly and snore. (Even women are known to get a little bit the worse for age, but that's a different story.) But your sense of humor is always with you. My husband and I share at least one really good laugh a day. Still. And we've been married for 39 [wonderful] years!

Oh, and you did so date in high school!

David's Mom

New Theory

2007-07-12T11:53:00.000-04:00

I was discussing this at work with some colleagues, and I have come up with a new theory as to why, in all of the "Cosmo" polls, "Sense of humor" is inevitably listed first among qualities women look for in men, when as indicated by my high school dating record (or relative lack thereof), it is demonstrably untrue. (For those of you playing at home, I'm pretty sure "Wavy hair and a BMW" were the actual top answers for my high school.)

It's like PBS. When asked by pollsters what television stations they prefer, people inevitably rank PBS far higher than its ratings indicate, because people don't want to admit that their favorite station is the WB (or whatever it's called now) and their favorite show is "Fear Factor," followed by "What About Jim." I think women are embarrassed to list "Looks like Brad Pitt" first on the list, so they put in "sense of humor," which is more "acceptable."

Your thoughts?

Freedom of Religion?

2006-10-04T09:52:00.000-04:00

OK, I know I haven't blogged in a little while, but this is absolutely absolutely Kafkaesque.

The Spring Valley NAACP is suing an Orthodox Jewish-run medical clinic, alleging that "the clinic's practice of remaining closed Saturdays in observance of operators' Jewish Sabbath, unlawfully imposes their religious beliefs on others."

Evidently, "[t]hose who work — more than 80 percent of the clinic's clientele are Hispanic or black, according to a letter the clinic sent to the Human Rights Commission earlier this year — would find it convenient to visit their doctors on a Saturday when they had the day off, Trotman[, the director of the NAACP] said yesterday."

What would you say is the bigger violation of religious freedom? The "convenience" of some clinic patients (who, presumably, can find another clinic on Saturday or go another day) or a governmentally imposed ruling ordering people to violate their religious beliefs?

Chutzpah

2006-03-24T14:26:00.000-05:00

I just learned about this. Evidently, while up for parole in 1982 for the 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy, Sirhan Sirhan advised the parole board that:

"If Robert Kennedy were alive today, he would not countenance singling me out for this kind of treatment."

Wow, what bad luck for Sirhan Sirhan. The one guy who would have supported him, and he killed him!

Just needs a little Velveeta...

2006-03-22T11:19:00.000-05:00

Ok, this recipe might conceivably be the most horrifying dish ever developed.

Fresh, new look...

2006-03-13T12:12:00.000-05:00

OK, you may have noticed that I have changed the template of the blog. This was mainly motivated by the fact that our comments and trackbacks totally didn't work right. So, being a completely hopeless HTML coder, I used one of the stock Blogger templates and tried to bring back that which I could of the old template.

Anyway, the comments work again, the trackbacks work again, and most of you couldn't care less that I did this. But I didn't want to let it go with absolutely no mention...

Back to your regularly scheduled blog.

Time to settle.

2006-02-10T10:52:00.000-05:00

It seems that Wal-Mart and a bike importer are being sued, on the basis that they've knowingly distributed "bikes whose front wheels have a tendency to fall off because of faulty quick-release levers.

Well, Wal-Mart, as part of its defense, gave the jury a bike so that jurors could get familiar with the bike doohickey at issue. It seems that 5 hours after the jurors began deliberations, the deliberations stopped as "the forewoman explained to a Marin County judge how a quick-release lever on a bicycle had broken off in the jury room."

Oops. On the other hand, it's fairly easy to argue that Wal-Mart didn't "knowingly" sell faulty bikes -- would you knowingly give a faulty bike to this jury?

UPDATE: The jury found in favor of Wal-Mart!!!

Deported Playmate tries to get back into the U.S.

2006-01-30T12:45:00.000-05:00

Evidently, a deported former Playboy playmate is trying to get readmitted to the U.S. under an "extraordinary ability" visa.

Tucker Carlson interviewed her lawyer. My favorite lines?

CARLSON: So that—you think that that‘s a valid criterion for entry into the country, having an extraordinary body, having a cute butt. That‘s sort of—you know, all the girls with the dumpy butts don‘t get in. But the ones with the cute ones do.

and

CARLSON: Do you think—is there a porn shortage in this country, do you think? I mean, is there a lack of homegrown porn actresses? Is this a crisis?
FELDENKRAIS: I do not believe it‘s a crisis. There‘s definitely a lot of talent out there. And but that doesn‘t stop us from...
CARLSON: Why should we flood the market with cheap foreign imports, thereby forcing our own porn actresses out of work and oppressing their wages?
FELDENKRAIS: I don‘t think we‘re flooding them. I think one person, two people. This is not an area where you‘re going to have 200 million people coming in as porn actresses. But you will have a select few, a very good few, that will be able to do what she does. And you‘re not necessarily letting the floodgates and allowing half a million people come in just because they have a cute butt. No.

Email etiquette

2006-01-23T12:59:00.000-05:00

Apropos one of my points from this post, some nice person has compiled a list of email etiquette rules.

Read them. Live them.

Worst day of the year.

2006-01-23T12:46:00.000-05:00

It's official. Today sucks.

The Next Best Thing.... continued

2006-01-19T19:14:00.000-05:00

At the risk of sounding foolish (which has never bothered me before) David gets his prescience from me. I was wearing fedoras before everyone else (everyone else is now wearing fedoras.... right?). I was wearing suspenders before everyone else. I bought David's motor scooter to ride around town before every other old geezer starting riding motor scooters (every old fart is now riding motor scooters.... right?).
Yes, I can say without fear of contradiction that David got his ability to foresee fads from me (everyone else is now foreseeing fads.... right?).

Random thoughts and rants...

2006-01-19T13:25:00.000-05:00

Everybody who is in front of me on the sidewalk -- walk faster, or get out of my way. Don't stand in the middle of the sidewalk like human cholesterol blocking the arteries of the city.

Attention, blogosphere (and especially blogs written by third year law students): Domestic spying may be unconstitutional or otherwise illegal under existing law. But it's not that clear. Actually, this is good advice for most issues that are Supreme Court fodder -- if it was as much of a slamdunk as you think it is (on either side, guys) then it wouldn't be an issue before the Court. So stop it.
And the corollary to the previous point: Don't argue policy to me when you're talking about Constitutionality. Even if you're right in your belief that requiring parental notification for a minor having an abortion would cause a thousandfold increase in deaths of 15 year old girls, that doesn't mean that the requirement is unconstitutional. Argue that one to your legislator, not the Supreme Court.
And, oh, yeah, another one I just thought of -- if the majority of this country is pro-choice then it doesn't matter who's on the Supreme Court because there won't be any laws against abortion. So don't worry about it. Or stop insisting that everybody's "pro-choice" the way you view it. Yes, most people believe that abortion shouldn't always be prohibited. But they also aren't really sanguine about abortion "on demand and without apology."
Last one about the Supreme Court: The Court is not here to protect you against stupid laws. That's the job of the legislative and the executive branches. Stop electing people who vote for stupid laws.
Lost totally freaks me out.
Gray's Anatomy is a great show.
The West Wing used to be a great show.
I'm pretty sure you can get a communicable disease from just looking at a picture of Paris Hilton.
I'm sick of the term "Jump The Shark." Will everybody stop using it? Or at least stop misusing it? (OK, that's mainly for people on the Yahoo West Wing Group.)
Jakers! The Adventures of Piggly Winks is so good that I'm actually considering joining PBS this year. It's probably not sufficient to overcome the anti-Semitic rantings that PBS likes to put on except during pledge week (when, at least in New York, PBS mysteriously puts on all of the Klezmer specials and "History of the Jews" that languish in the drawer the rest of the year), but the fact that I'm even considering it tells you how good that show is. But I wish they'd move it to Noggin so it wasn't even an issue.
While you're at it, move Sesame Street off of PBS also. Why the show needs a public subsidy when they make zillions of dollars from sales of Check Up Time Elmo and all the other schwag is beyond me.
Please don't use the word "myself" if "I" or "me" would work (e.g. "Would you like to go for a quick drive with Mary Jo Kopechne and myself?"). It doesn't make you sound smarter.
Email is great, and it's informal and quick, but have enough respect for the person you're emailing to at least make a stab at correct grammar, spelling, capitalization and punctuation, OK? I don't have the time to try and ferret out your meaning.
If you give me change after I buy something, don't put the dollar bills in my hand and then stick 83 cents in change on top of the bills so that I have no choice but to drop all of the change. Give me the change first, so it's firmly in my hand, and then give me the bills separately, OK?
Sometimes, when I'm at a class with my son, I look around at all of the other parents and think, "Each one of these parents thinks that their kid is the cutest kid in the world. Poor, self-deluded folk." See, even though everybody thinks their kid is the cutest, one of those kids actually is the cutest. And it's mine.
TiVo is the greatest invention ever. Fire is also a very good invention, mainly because it led to the invention of TiVo.

Updates as I think of more things to complain about.

The next big thing...

2006-01-19T10:49:00.000-05:00

OK, let's talk coolness and fads for a moment, OK?

I would not consider myself one of the "in, hip, crowd." When I left my last job, my goodbye party was held at 1 Little West 12th Street, which, in addition to being an OK restaurant, has an "in" bar scene (well, it was in at the time, I have no idea if it still is), velvet rope and all. I left to walk my wife home (I live around the corner) so she could put our son to bed, and when I came back, the guy wouldn't let me back in.

That's right. I wasn't allowed back into my own party until I reached someone inside to come vouch for me.

Now, that said, I seem to be the harbinger of what will be cool.

When I was in law school, I thought smoking cigars was kind of neat, and a year-and-a-half later, the cigar fad of the late '90s hit.

I started talking to my wife about how cool it would be to get a scooter, and a year later, Vespas became the "must-have" accessory of the cool.

We moved to our apartment roughly 4 months before the Meatpacking District exploded into the hippest neighborhood in NYC.

I got interested in poker about 6 years ago, and look around you -- it's EVERYWHERE! (Almost annoyingly so.)

Now, nobody believes me when I say I saw these trends happening and wasn't merely a hanger-on, so I make my prediction, on a time-stamped blog, of the next fad:

Snuff.

That's right, I said snuff. The powdered, aromatic tobacco product that the aristocrats of the 19th century liked.

So in a year or two, when there are snuff bars all over Manhattan, and there's a big glossy 300 page "Snuff Afficionado" magazine on all the newsstands, and you see a clip of Paris Hilton putting something in her nose that is (amazingly) not white, you will remember -- you saw it here first.

Cindy Sheehan Redux

2005-12-29T15:00:00.000-05:00

You know, I was pretty much done with Sheehan. She's nuts, right? Except I didn't realize just HOW off her rocker she is:

In a post over at Moorewatch.com, Lee notes that Cindy Sheehan went to London to meet with a whole bunch of other wackjobs. OK, fine. But then he notes who the other speakers were:

The scheduled speakers included Sheehan, who has become a focus of anti-war sentiment in the United States by camping outside the Texas ranch of President George W. Bush; Hasan Zergani Hashim, a spokesperson for Iraq’s radical Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr; and leftist British legislator George Galloway.

The usual suspects, right? However, did you notice in there that a spokesman for Muqtada al-Sadr was speaking? Hmmm.....

But wait --- how was Casey Sheehan killed?

In the first 48 hours of fighting Sadr’s followers seized police stations and government buildings across the country including the Governor’s Office in Basra. At least 75 Iraqis and 10 American servicemen were killed, among them Army Specialist Casey Sheehan.

That's right -- Cindy Sheehan is sharing a stage with a spokesman for the guy who killed her son.

Blogger seeks new Church

2005-11-28T13:02:00.000-05:00

The "Emperor Darth Misha" over at the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, fisks (in typically low-key fashion) a relatively old (May 2004) resolution from the United Methodist Church and then cries out in despair:

My grandparents fought Nazism, and I’m not about to piss on their sacrifices.

NEVER AGAIN!

What hurts me the most is that a church is issuing ignorant horse shit like that. You would think that they, of all people, would understand the Bible.

You’d be wrong.

So where to go?

Are there any denominations left that actually believe in Scripture?

Because I’m now a Christian without a church.

Hitchens on Darfur and Intervention

2005-11-09T11:37:00.000-05:00

Our Man Hitchens (okay Stuart...not your man, just mine), in dissecting the 'realist' approach used in Darfur, came up with what I think is the strongest refutation of those who campaign against intervention and advocate 'peace' (i.e., a 'peace' defined implicitely (and most recently by Brent Scowcroft)...but never honestly... as a situation where the U.S. is not involved in conflict, as opposed the occurrence somewhere of deadly conflict). The clincher:

"Nonintervention does not mean that nothing happens. It means that something else happens. (emphasis mine) Our policy in Darfur has not just failed to rescue a stricken black African population: It has actually assisted the Sudanese Islamists in completing their policy of racist murder."

I'm not one to argue that we should intervene wherever there is injustice or conflict. We can't. But I will never yield to the arguments against our intervention, such as in the case of Iraq, that our choice to intervene was one between war and peace. Such arguments are not just facile, they are insidious. Rather, our decision to intervene was a choice between, as it so often is, a war on our terms, and one on another's.

Anyway, as always, read the whole thing.

Norman Podhoretz

2005-11-09T11:30:00.000-05:00

The master speaks on the lie of all lies. I must say, I he is right in saying it won't die. And how depressing that is.

"Among the many distortions, misrepresentations, and outright falsifications that have emerged from the debate over Iraq, one in particular stands out above all others. This is the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral and/or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of lies that have now been definitively exposed.

What makes this charge so special is the amazing success it has enjoyed in getting itself established as a self-evident truth even though it has been refuted and discredited over and over again by evidence and argument alike. In this it resembles nothing so much as those animated cartoon characters who, after being flattened, blown up, or pushed over a cliff, always spring back to life with their bodies perfectly intact. Perhaps, like those cartoon characters, this allegation simply cannot be killed off, no matter what."....

"And so long as we are hunting for liars in this area, let me suggest that we begin with the Democrats now proclaiming that they were duped, and that we then broaden out to all those who in their desperation to delegitimize the larger policy being tested in Iraq—the policy of making the Middle East safe for America by making it safe for democracy—have consistently used distortion, misrepresentation, and selective perception to vilify as immoral a bold and noble enterprise and to brand as an ignominious defeat what is proving itself more and more every day to be a victory of American arms and a vindication of American ideals."

Read the whole thing. It's long, but worth it....although I know you all know this whole thing already.

Why Italy is one of the few European countries that doesn't suck.

2005-11-07T16:43:00.000-05:00

Grazie, Italia. Molte grazie.

No Bid Procurement scandal! Not Halliburton? Yawn.

2005-10-27T11:14:00.000-04:00

The Wall Street Journal carries an Op-Ed today which reviews some particularly disquieting news regarding influence peddling and corruption in contracting over at the UN.

Why isn't the left as furious over this stuff (which is far, far more documented and blatant) as it is over Halliburton?

Never mind. Don't bother answering that.

The recognition of a hero.

2005-09-22T11:29:00.000-04:00

The NY Sun carries a terrific story on its front page today -- The Long Ballad of Tibor 'Ted' Rubin:

On the evening of October 30, 1950, in the dark, early days of the Cold War, Red Chinese forces mounted a massive nighttime assault on American troops at Unsan, North Korea. As overwhelming numbers of communist soldiers attacked Americans throughout the night and into the next day, a rifleman with the Army's 8th Cavalry Regiment took up a 30-caliber machine gun at the south end of his unit's line, following in the footsteps of three other soldiers - all of whom had been killed at the post.

When the rest of the American troops were told to withdraw, the rifleman never received the order, and continued "steadfastly manning" the machine gun until his ammunition was exhausted, according to Army records. The brave soldier's "determined stand" single-handedly slowed the advance of the enemy in his sector, allowing the remnants of his unit to retreat southward, and to safety.

Fifty-five years later, the valor of the rifleman, Tibor "Ted" Rubin, is finally being recognized. On Friday, Corporal Rubin, who served in Korea from July 23, 1950, to April 20, 1953, will receive America's highest military accolade, the Medal of Honor, from President Bush in a White House ceremony.

Corporal Rubin, a survivor of the Mauthausen death camp, enlisted in the U.S. Army to, as he says, "express my appreciation to the United States - to the people who liberated us."

In addition to surviving Mauthausen, he survived internment as a prisoner of war by the North Koreans, where, ironically and somewhat tragically, his experience at Mauthausen served him well:

When his fellow soldiers, devastated by dysentery, could no longer muster the will to eat, Corporal Rubin force-fed them. When his fellow soldiers were filthy and injured, he bathed them and cleansed their wounds. When his fellow soldiers were infested with lice, he picked the parasites out of their hair. According to prisoners' accounts, when one soldier was wounded in the shoulder and infection set in, Corporal Rubin, recalling lessons learned at Mauthausen, jumped into the latrine to fetch maggots. He washed off the larvae and set them on the injured soldier's gangrenous flesh, leaving them to eat away the infection and removing them before they attacked the healthy skin - saving the soldier's arm, and his life.

I can't understand why it took so long for this man to receive the Medal of Honor, but I am overjoyed that he is finally receiving it.

UPDATE: The U.S. Army's site for Medal of Honor winner Corporal Tibor "Ted" Rubin is located here.

Further Update: Interestingly, the Army News Service press release about the award contains the following paragraphs:

Rubin was nominated for the MOH four times by grateful comrades. Fellow
Soldiers say Rubin might have received the medal five decades ago if not for a
sergeant who failed to forward recommendations because of Rubin’s Jewish and
Hungarian heritage.

Rubin’s award is being made under the National Defense Authorization Act
for Fiscal Year 2002, Section 552. The act called upon the secretaries of each
military department to review the service records of both Jewish and Hispanic
American war veterans to see if they should have been awarded the MOH. Rubin’s
case was accelerated because of the wealth of eyewitness statements,
Congressional support and because earlier recommendations on his behalf did not
receive due priority.

Better living through technology.

2005-09-21T12:30:00.000-04:00

Note to self:

Must get this.

Cars

2005-09-20T10:59:00.000-04:00

I received the following in an e-mail:

"What the American people have seen is this incredible disparity in which those people who had cars and money got out and those people who were impoverished died." -- Ted Kennedy on Hurricane Katrina

"Ditto" -- Mary Jo Kopechne.

It seemed particularly appropriate in light of that worthy Senator's continuing chutzpah in continuing to show his face in public instead of hiding in shame.

As to the issue of cars. I don't mean to make light of anything, but I heard a talk show host rhetorically ask, if none of the people who were left in New Orleans could get out because they couldn't afford cars, whose cars were left stranded in the muck all over New Orleans after the hurricane was over?

Rabbi Polakoff speaks in favor of Judge Roberts

2005-09-16T17:02:00.000-04:00

The Rabbi at my parents' synagogue, Rabbi Dale Polakoff, testified yesterday in favor of Judge Roberts' confirmation in Rabbi Polakoff's capacity as President of the Rabbinical Council of America. THe text of his testimony can be found here.

Evidently I am in charge of everything!

2005-09-12T15:00:00.000-04:00

Evidently, according to an "adviser" to Tony Blair, "Tony Blair decided to wage war on Iraq after coming under the influence of a "sinister" group of Jews and Freemasons."

Ahmad Thomson, from the Association of Muslim Lawyers, said Mr Blair was the latest in a long line of politicians to have been influenced by the group which saw the attack on Saddam Hussein as a way to control the Middle East.

. . . .

Mr Thomson wrote a book in 1994 in which he said Freemasons and Jews controlled the governments of Europe and America and described the claim that six million Jews died in the Holocaust as a "big lie". In The Next World Order, Mr Thomson, a Muslim convert who was born Martin Thomson in Rhodesia, wrote: "When the majority of people in a predominantly Christian society cease to worship God, the result is fascism.

"When the people in a predominantly Jewish society cease to worship God, the result is either communism or capitalism. A predominantly Christian society is concerned primarily with establishing a political ideology, whilst a predominantly Jewish society is concerned primarily with establishing an economic system."

Good to know. As it turns out, I am both Jewish and a Freemason, so I evidently run everything. And I am in favor of the Iraq war. So I guess he's right. Q.E.D.

More Katrina

2005-09-07T12:26:00.000-04:00

Brady Westwater makes some very good points (thanks to Brady for commenting here and alerting me to the post...). After pointing out NYT article about a self-described "weather nerd" blogger who raised the first big alarm about Katrina and tried to warn the Mayor of New Orleans several days before Katrina hit, he notes the following:

There are three ironies here. First, the fact that the New York Times does an article on a blogger covering Nagin's complete failure to prepare his city for the disaster - and yet the New York Times itself still - over a week later - still fails to address that story as a major story or even do a story mentioning those charges.

Second, that it took a blogger in Indiana to cover this story.

Third, and most distressing, is the hypocisy of the media in New Orleans and elsewhere. Increasingly, the media is calling for the heads of literally everyone in sight due to the abject mishandling of every aspect of this disaster. And yet, these are also the very same people who - when the Mayor of New Orleans lied to the people of New Orleans about the impact of the storm on the city - said... nothing.

. . . .

There is more than enough blame to go around for what happened in New Orleans in the past week. Far more than enough. But standing at the head of the line... is the media of New Orleans, and the media in the rest of the country; the same media that is now so self-righteously calling for everyone else's head.

Katrina

2005-09-06T12:00:00.000-04:00

It turns out that there was an article in the July 18, 2005 US News and World Report pointing out the dangers to New Orleans of a big hurricane:

New Orleans is more vulnerable today than ever. Development and levee construction have put 500,000 acres of nearby coastal wetlands under water since 1965, eliminating buffers against the wind-fueled spikes in water levels known as storm surges. Even a Betsy-like Level 3 storm, which has winds of up to 130 mph, is now more likely to trigger storm surges in the Mississippi River or Lake Pontchartrain that could spill over levee walls. The resulting flood could take months to drain. "You're talking about creating a refugee camp for a million homeless residents," says van Heerden.

The city's levees, meanwhile, aren't intended to protect from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane (a 5 has winds greater than 155 mph and storm surges above 18 feet), and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is at least a decade away from upgrading to that level of protection. The corps says the current levee system doesn't provide full protection from even Category 3 storms, which could be the scariest scenario of all. "If a Category 5 storm enters the Gulf, I don't think we'll have to encourage people to leave--it'll be an easy sell," says New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin. Category 3 or 4 storms, though, "are more dangerous . . . the community says, 'We might ride this out.'"

There's quite a bit of blame to go around. The local and state officials who delayed the evacuation order and made next to no provision for evacuating those without cars bear significant blame. As is shown by the above article, this was predictable. The Federal Government bears some responsibility, although it is important to note that for the most part the Federal Government's role is to act upon invitation from the state and local first responders. But they should have been more geared up. Unfortunately, I think my ex-boss Michael Chertoff is going to bear the brunt of the criticism (as opposed to the bleating mayor of New Orleans and governor of Louisiana), but maybe instead of taking the hit by being pilloried President Bush will nominate him to the Supreme Court (that's my hope, anyway). That said, Chertoff's agency does bear some responsibility; although I know they've been focuses on terrorist acts and the like, terrorists blowing up the levees was certainly a scenario they should have anticipated, and the detonation of a radiological weapon would have a lot of the same effects; required evacuation of a large affected urban area to remain in effect for some time.

Robert Tracinski wrote a column in TIA Daily which underscored a very interesting difference between this disaster and other disasters (big and small) in U.S. History, though:

For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists—myself included—did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.

. . . .

For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency—indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.

When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).

So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?

. . . .

75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of those who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then told me that early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails—so they just let many of them loose.

. . . .

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit—but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals—and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep—on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

All of this is related, incidentally, to the incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. In a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters—not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.

. . . .

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. And they don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to rescue them—this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of the 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing projects.

It's a pretty harsh assessment of the survivors, but I think it bears some thought; I've never (thankfully) lived through anything so disastrous, but I have lived through storms in Arizona during monsoon season. After one (which included a small cyclone) which knocked out power for a couple of days and caused massive flooding, everybody in my neighborhood ran around making sure people were OK, and went door to door with generators and sump pumps to help each other out. Instead of seeing those stories (which, as Tracinski notes, is the typical story you see after these types of disasters) I saw stories about a terrified woman who had to defend her house from marauding looters with a handgun, which she fired in the air to frighten them away. Those people should have been coming to make sure she was OK, not to pillage.

This just isn't the American way.

Hurricane Katrina Charities

2005-09-01T15:42:00.000-04:00

The blogosphere is, of course, responding to the Hurricane Katrina disaster in semi-coordinated efforts. I suggest the following charities for contributions to disaster relief:

United Jewish Charities, which is coordinating significant relief efforts, and
Noah's Wish, which is a charity specifically devoted to the rescue of animals after disasters.

In addition, The Truth Laid Bare has a blog charitable donation roundup, including suggested charities.

In order to facilitate the blogosphere coordination, I'm also including the following Technorati tags (I don't really know how this works, don't ask me, but it seems to help broaden the reach...): flood aid and Hurricane Katrina.

Life imitates art...

2005-08-30T18:19:00.000-04:00

Anybody who ever saw the movie Real Genius figured this already happened:

A U.S. Pentagon invention could make air combat resemble a battle scene from the movie 'Star Wars' with a laser so small it can fit on a fighter jet, yet powerful enough to knock down an enemy missile in flight.

. . . .

To date, such lasers have been so bulky because of the need for huge cooling systems to stop them overheating, that they had to be fitted to large aircraft such as jumbo jets, New Scientist magazine reported on Wednesday.

But the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency reckons it has solved the problem by merging liquid and solid state lasers to cut the size and weight by "an order of magnitude", according to its Web site.

Liquid lasers can fire a continuous beam but need large cooling systems, while solid state laser beams are more intense but have to be fired in pulses to stop them overheating.

"We've combined the high energy density of the solid state laser with the thermal management of the liquid laser," New Scientist quoted project manager Don Woodbury as saying.

Also, there's a guy living in Don Woodbury's closet.

But wait! There's more!

2005-08-30T12:52:00.000-04:00

Ron Popeil has sold Ronco to a holding company for $55 million dollars to be made in "two easy payments" of "$40 million now and $15 million later."

The Zionists are everywhere....

2005-08-26T14:22:00.000-04:00

Evidently some paper cups, contaminated by Israeli cooties, were used in a Saudi Arabian hospital.

“We were shocked and angry,” said an employee. “How can Israeli products be allowed and how did they enter this hospital?” he asked.

. . . .

The paper cups were quickly withdrawn from use but might there not be other, less obvious, Israeli products in our shops and marketplaces?

Boy, I hope not...

A bad name bonanza

2005-08-26T14:14:00.000-04:00

I don't know whose name is worse: "Punky Brewster" star Soleil Moon Frye or her newborn daughter -- Poet Sienna Rose Goldberg.

Cindy Sheehan should meet the President

2005-08-24T11:28:00.000-04:00

Laurence Simon gets it exactly right.

Read all the way to the end. Trust me.

Great Ad!

2005-08-22T14:03:00.000-04:00

Excellent!

Dead Guy In Trunk of Cab Promotes 'Sopranos': "To promote HBO's Sopranos, BBDO . . . placed life-like arms hanging out of a few cabs. New or old, we still think it's a great piece of advertising."

Least Surprising Headline of the Year Award

2005-08-22T10:45:00.000-04:00

Today's Washington Post: "Folk Singer Supports Anti-War Protesters."

You're kidding. A folk singer supports the anti-war protesters? I can't believe it?!

News would be David Crosby or someone standing up and saying, "This isn't Vietnam, guys. The '60s are over. There really are bad people out there, and this is going to help."

But they won't. They don't have the guts to take on "the folk man." I know this because I know what happened to my father. My father is a former folk singer, and after he courageously took a stand against the folk establishment and changed his party affiliation to "Republican," we were awakened at 2:30AM by the earth-shoe wearing folk police, who rapped at our door and, brandishing a warrant on recycled, bleach-free paper, seized my father's guitars and served him with a restraining order (this one on paper manufactured from a hemp by-product) forbidding him from going within 50 yards of "The Bitter End."

Now, when we are in the Village, my father, in order to comply, must ensure he is on the south side of Bleecker Street between Thompson and LaGuardia, and although I know it hurts him, he holds his head up high, secure in the knowledge that he has done the right thing, much as it may have cost him.

Lord Haw Haw Redux

2005-08-19T17:24:00.000-04:00

British MP George Galloway is apparently the new Lord Haw Haw. MEMRI has excerpts from some interviews and speeches on Arab TV in which he states:

Two of your beautiful daughters are in the hands of foreigners - Jerusalem and Baghdad. The foreigners are doing to your daughters as they will. The daughters are crying for help, and the Arab world is silent. And some of them are collaborating with the rape of these two beautiful Arab daughters. Why? Because they are too weak and too corrupt to do anything about it. So this is what Sykes-Picot will do to the Arabs. Are you ready to have another hundred years like the hundred years you just had?

. . . .

America is losing the war in Iraq, and even the Americans now admit it. Even the puppet ministers and regime in Baghdad know it. The former puppet minister (Iyad) Allawi admitted it three times in the last month. America is losing the war in Iraq. And this will not change. The resistance is getting stronger every day, and the will to remain as an occupier by Britain and America is getting weaker everyday. Therefore, it can be said, truly said, that the Iraqi resistance is not just defending Iraq. They are defending all the Arabs, and they are defending all the people of the world from American hegemony.

. . . .

Most of their resistance are Iraqis resisting the foreign occupation of their country. Most of the operations which they carry out are against the occupying forces and their collaborators, and this is normal in every liberation struggle.

I take it that the anti-war left will now explain that these statements show that Galloway is more, not less, patriotic.

I know a "musical genius"!

2005-08-19T12:49:00.000-04:00

One of my best friends, Marc Dinkin, has written a musical that is currently on at the New York Fringe Festival. According to today's New York Post'sPage 6:

SENSE OF HUMOR

HOW funny is the new Fringe Festival show, 'SUV: The Musical?' It's so funny that even an executive at Ford Motor Corp., which is repeatedly ridiculed in the play over its behemoth-sized cars and trucks, called it 'hilarious.' 'My wife and I laughed out loud all night,' said Bill Collins, who works in Ford's New York office. 'The audience had a great time, too, seeing crash test dummies humanized and auto execs demonized.' Collins singled out the work of Kenny Wade Marshall, who plays at least four roles in the play written by The Post's Gersh Kuntzman and musical genius Marc Dinkin.

Awww.

2005-08-17T11:01:00.000-04:00

My son turned one a little over a week ago. Can you believe that? Anyway, I was catching up on some blogs I check in with periodically, and there's a great post on Waiter Rant (a blog written by an anonymous waiter in an Italian restaurant in New York City). He tells the story of a patron who comes in right after his wife has their first child (because his wife is now craving Porcini Risotto), and the guy is in the middle of the slight mental breakdown that a new father has:

A quiet minute passes. The guy stares at the floor. He take a deep breath like he's about to say something. He doesn't. The clock ticks. I see moisture in his eyes.

"You'll be fine," I say gently.

The guy wipes his face quickly. "Yeah I know," he says, "but there's so much to worry about. I mean summer camp, private school, college. You know what college is gonna cost in eighteen years?"

"No idea."

"A million bucks!" he explodes.

"That much?" I wonder skeptically.

"And then there's braces, toys, broken arms," New Dad gushes as if a dam burst from within

I recognize what's happening. When New Dad held his baby for the first time the enormity of what's happening hit him. He's trying to process it all at once. I don't have kids of my own but I have friends who do. I've seen how they've handled it. I know what to say. I hope someone says it to me when my time comes.

"It's a lot of stuff but you'll break it down into small steps and it'll come together," I offer quietly.

"I guess," New Dad says.

"Think about everything at once and you'll go nuts," I say, "just remember, one day at a time."

"Your right," New Dad exhales.

"Enjoy your little girl. She's only a baby once."

I finally see a real smile. "She's beautiful," he says.

Whoohoo, do I know what that guy was feeling.

When my wife went into labor, I was so focused on her being OK that I hadn't even really focused on the fact that we were actually going to have a kid. I mean, I knew, in intellectual terms, that there would be a baby, but it wasn't until we had gotten to the hospital (23 hours, incidentally, after her labor began - ouch) and my wife called her mother and cried, "Mommy, I'm going to have a baby!" that the enormity of it hit me.

Holy crap. I'm going to have a son. Forever. Yikes. Privateschoolandcollegeandclothesandwe'llneedtomovesoonandmycaristoosmallandwhenhegetssickwillIbeabletocomforthimandIsuckatsportsandI'llstillhavetoteachhimtocatchahighpopflyaaaaahh! My legs went wobbly but I didn't want my wife to see it (after all, she had the really tough job) so I kind of slumped/leaned against the wall.

And then, right after he was born, they whisked him off to a room to suction all of the assorted gook that accompanies babies into this world, and I, of course, followed him (that was my job -- "FOLLOW THE BABY! DON'T WORRY ABOUT WIFE! OTHER PEOPLE WORRY ABOUT WIFE! BABY NEVER LEAVES YOUR SIGHT!").

So I'm watching them clean and suction and check and weigh and there, after all of this time, was my son.

And nothing else mattered.

"Stop! Or I'll say stop again!"

2005-08-15T17:15:00.000-04:00

See, here's the thing I don't get. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, in an apparent response to a comment by President Bush with respect to military force against Iran as a result of Iran's attempts to get nuclear weapons, stated, "Let's take the military option off the table. We have seen it doesn't work."

The military option can never actually be taken off the table. Not because you want to use it, but because that's the whole impetus for negotiating. Diplomacy works because at the end of the day, the implicit threat is there: "If you don't negotiate with me, then I'm going to force you to do the right thing, so you might as well talk now and maybe cut yourself a better deal than you'll get after I defeat you militarily and I make you do everything I want."

Without the implicit possibility of force, there is no reason to negotiate. Why should Iran cease the pursuit of nuclear weapons? Because Germany will be very cross with them? Oh, horror. No, it has to be because in the back of the leaders minds is the possibility, however, remote, that maybe there will be real repercussions if they pursue these weapons.

OK, fine. This is dumb.

2005-08-15T13:26:00.000-04:00

Well, it's finally happened. I have found a gadget even I think is a complete waste of money.

David's Foregoing Essay: False? Not false?

2005-08-12T11:57:00.000-04:00

David's comment is a perfect example of why I am so proud of my son. Instead of responding with emotional drivel (as I am wont to do), he answers instead with reasoned and intelligent argument. My unbiased, objective opinion is that he is the best!!

False? Not false?

2005-08-12T07:55:00.000-04:00

An anonymous commenter to my post about factcheck.org's analysis of NARAL's ad regarding Judge Roberts advises me that "The ad is not false" and directs me to Bitch Ph.D.'s reprint of NARAL's response email.

Unsurprisingly, I find NARAL's defense unpursuasive. For example, NARAL states that Roberts "sided with the bomber" because the SG's office filed an amicus brief and "[t]he filing of an amicus brief is discretionary." Well, firstly, it's discretionary as to whether the SG's OFFICE files an amicus brief. If you work for the SG's office, and the SG says, "file a brief," you file a brief. It's called working for someone. But regardless, I think that in practice, the SG's office rarely files an amicus brief without being requested to do so by the Supreme Court. So I don't think that's a particularly good response.

Besides, the reasoning and arguments (that by filing an amicus brief in a case which happens to include among its defendants a bomber, the filer is "supporting the bomber") could easily be applied to the ACLU arguing for the Nazi's rights to march in Skokie. There are plenty of overriding legal points that are made with disgusting litigants. Ernesto Miranda was a rapist.

But I think the whole thing is overblown. And by that I mean the entire abortion issue. I'm not sure why, but for some reason, the right to abortion has somehow taken on the status for the left as the supreme right that an individual can possess. And as a result of Roe v. Wade, the judicial branch, which should not be the forum for policy disputes, has become embroiled in them. One of NARAL's arguments in their response is that "reproductive health clinics were under siege by anti-choice extremists." So what? That's not a relevant point with respect to the legal arguments being made in that case. It's certainly a valid point when you want to argue before Congress or your state legislator, but it's not a legal argument, nor does it have one iota to do with whether Roberts is qualified to become a Justice.

Why is the right to an abortion the end-all be-all? There are, in my opinion, violations of individuals' rights to life, liberty and property on the part of national, state and local governments on a daily basis. All of them are constitutional, but from a policy standpoint I think they're ridiculous, and the choices that I am prevented from making impact nobody else, potential or otherwise. Abortion is, at the very least, the destruction of a potential human life and as a result there are certainly moral issues that should be debated when it comes to the policies of the state with respect to the practice. Roe hijacked the debate and it's now next to impossible to develop a nuanced policy toward abortion which could really reflect the views of the citizenry.

And I don't think even the most pro-choice idealogue could argue that Roe is a well-written decision, no matter how much they might agree with the outcome, if they're honest. Roe set up a trimester system which has been completely eclipsed by technology. Fetuses are viable much much earlier than they were in 1973, and I think it would be extremely simple to argue that based on the underpinning of Roe (that there is a right to terminate non-viable fetuses but that right diminishes as the potential viability of the fetus increases due to gestational age) abortion could be restricted almost completely in the second trimester at this point.

I'm in favor of the right to terminate a pregnancy. But to pretend that the issue is entirely clear cut and simple is ludicrous. And the fact that the issue has taken on such a status is far out of whack, especially in the case of a Supreme Court nomination, where it occupies such a small percentage of the Court's work.

NARAL Falsely Accuses Supreme Court Nominee Roberts - FactCheck.org

2005-08-10T16:10:00.000-04:00

As I noted below, NARAL seems to really be stretching as to why Judge Roberts shouldn't be nominated. Now, Factcheck.org deconstructs a NARAL ad running in several states and states flatly, "The ad is false."

How to Pronounce Zagat

2005-08-09T10:47:00.000-04:00

I always wondered the correct pronunciation. According to "Eater", this handy dandy little rhyme will help:

he's big, he's fat
it's warm where he sat
that's tim zagat.

Good to know!

Pro-Bolton Article

2005-08-03T19:57:00.000-04:00

A very interesting article about Michael Bolton in National Review by Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest ranking intelligence office to have defected from the Soviet bloc (he was national security advisor to Ceausescu).

According to him:

[Bolton] singlehandedly brought about the repeal of U.N. Resolution 3379 of 1975, which stigmatized Zionism as “a form of racism and racial discrimination.” That resolution was the Soviet bloc’s first major “victory” at the U.N. Soon after it was adopted, the Communists unleashed a vitriolic disinformation campaign portraying the U.S. as a rapacious Zionist country run by a greedy “Council of the Elders of Zion” (a derisive epithet for the U.S. Congress) that was plotting to transform the rest of the world into a Jewish fiefdom.

U.N. Resolution 3379 lasted 16 years — until Bolton came along. In December 1991, this unknown undersecretary of State had the guts to tell the General Assembly of the U.N. that it had been manipulated by the Communists, and to ask its members to wake up. Bolton was so well-armed with documentation, so bold, and so straightforward that he forced the U.N. to repeal its own resolution by the great margin of 111 to 25. Even my native Romania, until then the epitome of Communism, voted with Bolton.

OK, I'm a little worried about ESPN...

2005-08-03T10:17:00.000-04:00

Via Dave Barry, an extremely disturbing headline.

(There's no registration, but you have to click the little circle-y thing that says where you're from.)

Spacewalk! (Grunt, scratch.)

2005-08-03T10:10:00.000-04:00

Evidence that the Space Shuttle was built, not by men, but by guys, in a headline from today's New York Sun: Astronaut Will Use Duct Tape to Repair Shuttle.

Men use space age resin and injection molded tiling. Guys use duct tape.

KaufmaNet on The Blogosphere Political Compass Project

2005-08-02T15:04:00.000-04:00

We (actually, to be more accurate, I) have been added to The Blogosphere Political Compass Project, which graphs out (in theory, at least) where bloggers map out on the the Political Compass between Libertarian/Authoritarian/Conservative/Liberal.

Just thought you'd be interested...

The Supreme Court decides "What is Golf" (on a T-Shirt)

2005-08-01T17:24:00.000-04:00

I just found a very cute CafePress store which has legal quotes and other stuff on T-Shirts -- for example, Justice Scalia's dissent in PGA Tour v. Martin:

It has been rendered the solemn duty of the Supreme Court of the United States . . . to decide What is Golf.

Other good quotes include Learned Hand's opinions on the Income Tax laws, useful Latin legalese terms, and Justice Thomas's supreme understatement in Kelo v. New London:

Something has gone seriously awry with this Court's interpretation of the Constitution.

A little TOO cool, don't you think?

2005-07-26T17:17:00.000-04:00

My mom was a "cool mom", but the worst thing she ever did was to teach my friends how to make fake boogers with rice from Chinese restaurants...

You've gotta be kidding me.

2005-07-26T16:50:00.000-04:00

It seems that the Lt. Governor of Pennsylvania crashed the funeral of a Marine killed in action in Iraq, where she (wait for it) "hand[ed] out her business cards" and advised mourners that "'our government' is against the war."

Firstly, WHAT?!

secondly, WHAT?!

and thirdly, someone should mention to the Lt. Governor of Pennsylvania that she's not exactly the Constitutional officer in charge of foreign policy.

The Daily Show on Judge Roberts

2005-07-22T13:30:00.000-04:00

A very good point made by The Daily Show with Jon Stewart about the response to Judge Roberts (the quoted part starts at about 00:59):

Jon Stewart: What's been the reaction in Washington [to the selection of Judge Roberts]?
Ed Helms: Jon, liberals are outraged by Bush's choice. They have been for weeks.
Jon Stewart: Ed, they just found out about Roberts last night.
Ed Helms: That's not the point. The left wishes the President had picked someone they wanted, not someone he wanted. I mean, who gave him the authority? It's an abuse of power.
Jon Stewart: I think it's in the Constitution.
Ed Helms: What Democrats are saying is that they wish they had won the last election.

Do you think?

There but for the grace of G-d...

2005-07-21T18:00:00.000-04:00

A moment of silence, please for the TiVo of Right Thinking from the Left Coast's Lee.

Thank you.

Fatwa against a blogger

2005-07-20T20:07:00.000-04:00

Whoa. According to this, a fatwa has been issued against a blogger by "a known terror group," and the FBI "believe that the threat is real."

This is the best they could come up with?

2005-07-20T19:51:00.000-04:00

I honestly haven't read enough about Judge Roberts to decide about him, but NARAL is really stretching, in my opinion, if this is the best they could come up with for why "Mr." Roberts shouldn't be a Justice.

Everything listed under the "Hostility to Reproductive Rights" section are arguments made by Judge Roberts when he was a Deputy Solicitor General, with the obligation to argue cases as an attorney on behalf of his client, essentially the Administration.

The stupidest one they have listed is an example where, during oral arguments, "a Justice asked, 'Mr. Roberts, in this case are you asking that Roe v. Wade be overruled?' [Judge Roberts] responded, 'No, your honor, the issue doesn't even come up."

So, evidently, stating that he's not asking for Roe to be overturned is "Hostility to Reproductive Rights"?

If this is the best they can do, objectors to the confirmation of Judge Roberts are going to look opportunistic and stupid.

Hope on the left.

2005-07-20T19:38:00.000-04:00

Andrew Sullivan notes that some leftists are making affirmative statements against terror on a website/blog entitled Unite Against Terror.

An example:

We are witnessing one of the greatest betrayals by the left since so-called left-wingers backed the Hitler-Stalin pact and opposed the war against Nazi fascism. Today, the pseudo-left reveals its shameless hypocrisy and its wholesale abandonment of humanitarian values. While it deplores the 7/7 terrorist attack on London, only last year it welcomed to the UK the Muslim cleric, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who endorses the suicide bombing of innocent civilians. These same right-wing leftists back the so-called 'resistance' in Iraq. This 'resistance' uses terrorism against civilians as its modus operandi - stooping to the massacre of dozens of Iraqi children in order kill a few US soldiers. Terrorism is not socialism; it is the tactic of fascism. But much of the left doesn't care. Never mind what the Iraqi people want, it wants the US and UK out of Iraq at any price, including the abandonment of Iraqi socialists, trade unionists, democrats and feminists. If the fake left gets its way, the ex-Baathists and Islamic fundamentalists could easily seize power, leading to Iranian-style clerical fascism and a bloodbath. I used to be proud to call myself a leftist. Now I feel shame. Much of the left no longer stands for the values of universal human rights and international socialism.

KaufMuffins!

2005-07-20T19:20:00.000-04:00

Have you ever said to yourself, "Gee, I wish there was one appliance that would help me make my favorite breakfast sandwiches at home in minutes?"

Well, your wish has been granted!

Suicide Terrorism

2005-07-14T17:09:00.000-04:00

I don't know why this just came to my attention now, but there's a fascinating article from the June 2003 The Atlantic about the Israeli response to suicide bombings and how we can learn from them in the U.S.

Ivins admits a mistake

2005-07-14T14:31:00.000-04:00

Molly Ivins properly admits she was very wrong in a column:

In a column written June 28, I asserted that more Iraqis (civilians) had now been killed in this war than had been killed by Saddam Hussein over his 24-year rule. WRONG. Really, really wrong.

The only problem is figuring out by how large a factor I was wrong. I had been keeping an eye on civilian deaths in Iraq for a couple of months, waiting for the most conservative estimates to creep over 20,000, which I had fixed in my mind as the number of Iraqi civilians Saddam had killed.

The high-end estimate of Iraqi civilian deaths in this war is 100,000, according to a Johns Hopkins University study published in the British medical journal The Lancet last October, but I was sticking to the low-end, most conservative estimates because I didn't want to be accused of exaggeration.

Ha! I could hardly have been more wrong, no matter how you count Saddam's killing of civilians. According to Human Rights Watch, Hussein killed several hundred thousand of his fellow citizens. The massacre of the Kurdish Barzani tribe in 1983 killed at least 8,000; the infamous gas attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja killed 5,000 in 1988; and seized documents from Iraqi security organizations show 182,000 were murdered during the Anfal ethnic cleansing campaign against Kurds, also in 1988.

In 1991, following the first Gulf War, both the Kurds and the Shiites rebelled. The allied forces did not intervene, and Saddam brutally suppressed both uprisings and drained the southern marshes that had been home to a local population for more than 5,000 years.

Saddam's regime left 271 mass graves, with more still being discovered. That figure alone was the source for my original mistaken estimate of 20,000. Saddam's widespread use of systematic torture, including rape, has been verified by the U.N. Committee on Human Rights and other human rights groups over the years.

There are wildly varying estimates of the number of civilians, especially babies and young children, who died as a result of the sanctions that followed the Gulf War. While it is true that the ill-advised sanctions were put in place by the United Nations, I do not see that that lessens Hussein's moral culpability, whatever blame attaches to the sanctions themselves -- particularly since Saddam promptly corrupted the Oil for Food Program put in place to mitigate the effects of the sanctions, and used the proceeds to build more palaces, etc.

There have been estimates as high as 1 million civilians killed by Saddam, though most agree on the 300,000 to 400,000 range, making my comparison to 20,000 civilian dead in this war pathetically wrong.

I was certainly under no illusions regarding Saddam Hussein, whom I have opposed through human rights work for decades. My sincere apologies. It is unforgivable of me not have checked. I am so sorry.

Now, lest one think that the correction indicates an increased likelihood of my agreeing with Ivins, don't worry. The correction comes at the end of her new column, in which she misses the point of the Enron scandal entirely.

Honesty.

2005-07-14T11:45:00.000-04:00

Yes, I know I'm blogboy today. But this was funny.

On the sister site to "Overheard at Work," called "Overheard in New York," I found this:

Bag lady: Ladies and gentlemen, my husband and I are homeless. We can't stay at our shelter during the day so we come on the train to get food. Today we are asking for money so we can do laundry. Anything you can give will help.

Hobo: Why don't you just admit that you're gonna buy crack? I'm in the same line of work, don't believe her.

--N train

Metaphor alert.

2005-07-14T11:35:00.000-04:00

From "Overheard in the Office":

Project Manager: He said this, and we thought he meant that, and he thought we were doing this, and they thought we were doing that, and they didn't tell us they wanted that so we did this...and it all got lost in the...in the...in the big washing machine of communication.

Developer: Or possibly the tumble drier of tautology.

1-4 Warple Way
Acton, London

This just in... soda has sugar in it.

2005-07-14T10:58:00.000-04:00

More crapola from the "Center for Science in the Public Interest" a/k/a "Granola-eating socialists who want to ensure you can never ever have fun."

They have now called for warning labels to be placed on soft drinks.

I think we should instead require a warning label on all press releases from the CSPI:

WARNING: The following press release has been written by people who believe they are much smarter than you, so please pay attention because we've used small words so as not to confuse all of you dumb normal people who are still so stupid as to be doing things we don't think you should be doing. This means you.

Correction-o-rama!

2005-07-13T19:13:00.000-04:00

Gawker notes a particularly pathetic correction in the New York Times:

A front-page article on Saturday about the bombings in London on Thursday misstated the number of commuter trains bombed in Madrid on March 11, 2004. It was 4, not 10.
In the Times defense, these details are understandably difficult to confirm. Like when those 5 towers collapsed in Midtown on September 11.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the paper of record.

Who knew?

2005-07-12T17:05:00.000-04:00

I just found out that Don Francisco, the longtime host of Sabado Gigante is Jewish. How cool is that?

We're not Afraid!

2005-07-12T16:31:00.000-04:00

A response to the London bombing attack: We're not Afraid!

This is a very serious football fan.

2005-07-06T13:10:00.000-04:00

This is really gross, in my opinion.

Olympics to New York: Drop Dead.

2005-07-06T10:26:00.000-04:00

OK, so New York lost the Olympics bid.

I think I find myself a true New Yorker in my reaction to this. I thought having the Olympics in New York was a terrible idea; like we don't have enough trouble with traffic and security...

But I certainly didn't want anyone else to win!

One consolation, though. At least the Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys lost too.

Who edits over at ABC?

2005-07-06T10:21:00.000-04:00

I meant to write about this the other day, but life got in the way.

I didn't watch the Live 8 concert live on Saturday, but I did watch the ABC "recap." And apparently I should have watched the AOL feed.

What was ABC thinking? There were several travesties of editing. They showed a whole song by The Black Eyed Peas, a band which I seem to be unable to avoid, despite my best efforts.

They cut both the beginning and the end of The Who singing "Who Are You." They did, however, leave in Daltrey singing the "F" word (although they put "bleep" in the closed captioning).

Then, they actually truncated the REUNION OF PINK FLOYD!!! You gotta be kidding me.

And then they did the gutsiest thing. They actually cut Madonna.

Now, I understand that they could only show one song per band. Fine. They had time concerns. It was important that they only take two hours, because they had to show a rerun of America's Funniest Home Videos.

Oh, well. Whatever.

A very manly man.

2005-06-29T17:42:00.000-04:00

Whoa.

And I was all proud of killing an enormous waterbug all by myself...

Where to Park In Manhattan

2005-06-27T12:21:00.000-04:00

Totally useful book! The Feder Guide to Where to Park In Manhattan (and Where Not to Park It!) "lists every parking regulation on every street sign," so you can keep track of those fakakte "alternate side of the street parking" and other infuriating New York parking regulations.

"Hmmm. If Bono thinks it's a good idea..."

2005-06-22T19:10:00.000-04:00

Noel Gallagher, the lead singer of Oasis, and not someone I'd generally agree with, makes a very good point about the "Live 8" concert which is supposed to convince the so-called "developed world" to forgive foreign debt:

He says, "Correct me if I'm wrong, but are they hoping that one of these guys from the G8 is on a quick 15 minute break at Gleneagles (in Scotland) and sees ANNIE LENNOX singing SWEET DREAMS and thinks, 'F**k me, she might have a point there, you know?'

. . . .

"It's not going to happen, is it?"

PETA employees charged with cruelty to animals

2005-06-22T13:22:00.000-04:00

Well, now, this is ironic.

Two employees of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have been charged with animal cruelty after dumping dead dogs and cats in a shopping center garbage bin, police said.

Investigators staked out the bin after discovering that dead animals had been dumped there every Wednesday for the past four weeks, Ahoskie police said in a prepared statement Thursday.

. . . .

Police found 18 dead animals in the bin and 13 more in a van registered to PETA. The animals were from animal shelters in Northampton and Bertie counties, police said.

Well, while you'd think that would shock any deluded soul who still supports PETA, it's still just two PETA employees, right? Doing something outside of PETA's scope, right? But wait, what exactly were the PETA employees supposed to be doing?

The two were picking up animals to be brought back to PETA headquarters for
[wait for it...]
euthanization,
PETA president Ingrid Newkirk said Thursday.

(Emphasis most definitely added.)

That's right, ladies and gentlemen, "a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy" opiner herself, Ingrid Newkirk, advises that the employees weren't supposed to be dumping dead animals, they were supposed to be collecting live animals so that the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals could kill them.

Man, I hate these guys.

Who's dumb?

2005-06-09T23:21:00.000-04:00

So, it turns out that John Kerry's grades were actually worse than Bush's were at Yale.

Mr. Kerry had a cumulative average of 76, The Boston Globe reported Tuesday. He had four D's his freshman year - a 61 in geology, a 63 and a 68 in two history courses, and a 69 in political science. He also received one D in his sophomore year, The Globe reported. He graduated in 1966.

The Democratic candidate for president, Mr. Kerry had previously declined to release his college transcript, which was included in his Navy records. He gave the Navy permission to release the documents last month, The Globe reported.

The president's transcript was published in 1999 by The New Yorker magazine. It showed that Mr. Bush, who graduated in 1968, had a cumulative grade average of 77 in his first three years at Yale and a similar average under a nonnumeric rating system in his senior year.

I wonder if that's the real reason he didn't want his Navy records released?

Arachnophobia

2005-04-28T11:58:00.000-04:00

Holy Schnikees!!!!!!

A chef bitten by a deadly spider in his pub kitchen was saved after experts were able to identify the creature from a picture on his mobile phone.
Matthew Stevens was attacked by the Brazilian Wandering Spider which was hidden in a box of bananas delivered to the Quantock Gateway pub in Bridgwater.

Thinking quickly despite the shock, he managed to snap a picture, which he later showed to doctors.

Experts at Bristol Zoo were able to identify it and suggest an antidote.

Clearly, a cameraphone is a necessity in the dangerous world we live in...

Libertarian comics

2005-04-14T10:47:00.000-04:00

The wildly unfunny Beetle Bailey (yes, I know it's a "classic") ran a (relatively) interesting strip on April 3, which can be viewed here.

I guess Plato, the philosopher, is actually an Aristotelian Randian. (He said, pretending to be a college sophomore...)

Arabs and Israelis unite against a common enemy...

2005-04-11T13:01:00.000-04:00

Mimes.

Actually, what they're doing is locking Arabs and Israelis in an imaginary box, and together they will walk against the wind...

Hat tip: Dave Barry

Why Kofi Must Go

2005-04-05T18:30:00.000-04:00

There is an article in Sunday's Guardian (yes, the very far left UK paper) entitled: "How many more must die before Kofi quits?" Needless to say, I had to read it. So should you. The only thing I disagree with something implied by the article's title....it should not be up to Annan as to when he leaves. Read the whole thing.

Peretz on Bush

2005-04-04T16:58:00.000-04:00

It's not the first time Martin Peretz (editor in chief of the New Republic) has spoken highly approvingly of Bush. It started shortly after 9/11, when Peretz was one of the few liberals (in fact, he was a BIG Gore supporter...past tense) to 'get' what Bush was trying to do and liked it. Today he has a new article targeted at those who, in Peretz's words -- had Bush discovered the cure for cancer -- "would denounce him for having done it unilaterally, without adequate consultation, with a crude disregard for the sensibilities of others." It's a great article and I find it fascinating that he would write it in a periodical (which I used to read quite religiously) that is so steeped in Bush-hatred, that it's senior editor, Peter Beinhart, confesed in an article last year that he truly despises the President.

Anyway, that's their problem. And apparently, Peretz knows it, since this torrent of an article is aimed squarely at the opinions shared by those who author his magazine. The best line I think has to be this one, where Peretz is talking about the changes in the Middle East: "It is simply stupid, empirically and philosophically, to deny that all or any of this would have happened without the deeply unpopular but historically grand initiative of Bush." Yep...I agree.

Here it is in its entirety, since registration is required otherwise:

"If George W. Bush were to discover a cure for cancer, his critics would denounce him for having done it unilaterally, without adequate consultation, with a crude disregard for the sensibilities of others. He pursued his goal obstinately, they would say, without filtering his thoughts through the medical research establishment. And he didn't share his research with competing labs and thus caused resentment among other scientists who didn't have the resources or the bold--perhaps even somewhat reckless--instincts to pursue the task as he did. And he completely ignored the World Health Organization, showing his contempt for international institutions. Anyway, a cure for cancer is all fine and nice, but what about aids?

No, the president has not discovered a cure for cancer. But there is a pathology, a historical pathology, that he has attacked with unprecedented vigor and with unprecedented success. I refer, of course, to the political culture of the Middle East, which the president may actually have changed. And he has accomplished this genuinely momentous transformation in ways that virtually the entire foreign affairs clerisy--the cold-blooded Brent Scowcroft realist Republicans and almost all the Democrats--never thought possible. Or, perhaps, in ways some of them thought positively undesirable. Bush, it now seems safe to say, is one of the great surprises in modern U.S. history. Nothing about his past suggested that he harbored these ideals nor the qualities of character required for their realization. Right up to the moment Bush became president, I was convinced that his mind, at least on matters Levantine, belonged to his father and to James Baker III, whose worldview seemed to be defined by the pecuniary prejudice of oil and Texas: Keep the ruling Arabs happy. But I was wrong, and, in light of what has already been achieved in the Middle East, I am glad to say so. Most American liberals, alas, enjoy no similar gladness. They are not exactly pleased by the positive results of Bush's campaign in the Middle East. They deny and resent and begrudge and snipe. They are trapped in the politics of churlishness.

The achievements of Bush's foreign policy abroad represent a revolution in the foreign policy culture at home. The traditional Republican mentality that was so perfectly and meanly represented by Bush père and Baker precluded the United States from pressing the Arabs about reform--about anything--for decades. Not Iraq about its tyranny and its record of genocide, not Syria about its military occupation of Lebanon and its own brutal Baathist dictatorship, not Egypt about loosening the crippling bonds of a statist economy and an authoritarian political system, not Saudi Arabia about its championing of the Wahhabi extremism that made its own country so desiccated and the world so dangerous, and certainly not the Palestinians about the fantasy that they had won all the wars that they had actually lost and were therefore entitled to the full rewards due them from their victories. This was the state of U.S.-Arab relations in 2001: The United States was actually more frightened of the Arabs than they were of us. The extraordinary report of the 9/11 Commission about the delinquent reactions to the decade-long lead-up to the catastrophe of September 11 only confirms this impression of official U.S. pusillanimity.

The Clinton administration seized on every possible excuse--from the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, right through the atrocities in Kenya and Tanzania, to the attack on the USS Cole--not to respond meaningfully to Osama bin Laden. This aggressively dilatory approach was set early on, when Bill Clinton's first secretary of state, dead-man-walking Warren Christopher, proposed that a special bureau be set up to deal with drugs, crime, and terrorism in a single office, as if terrorism is a problem for policemen and not for strategists. The 9/11 Commission Report records that only congressional opposition aborted Christopher's concoction. Attorney General Janet Reno always worried about retaliation against any moves by the United States; Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, preoccupied with her "push for a peace agreement between the Palestinians and Israelis," was concerned that military strikes against the bin Laden operations in Afghanistan would strengthen the Taliban; National Security Adviser Sandy Berger fretted that a shoot-out might be seen as an assassination, and, always the trade lawyer, he consistently held out hope that some sort of carrot would turn the Taliban against bin Laden; General Anthony Zinni was more concerned about human rights abuses by the Taliban than by its hospitality to Al Qaeda and worried also that a mosque might be damaged in the course of bombing operations; Pentagon officials warned that a missile aimed at bin Laden might kill a visiting Emirati prince instead (but why was a UAE prince hanging out with bin Laden anyway?); and CIA Director George Tenet had so many objections to decisive action that it would be nearly impossible to enumerate them.

Clinton, it is true, resolved to eliminate bin Laden, but soon he eliminated his desire to eliminate him. The Clinton administration's true desire was to arrest bin Laden, to indict him, and to put him on trial--to "bring him to justice," as these men and women pompously exhorted each other. Except Berger also feared that bin Laden would be acquitted in a U.S. court of law. CIA personnel trying to cut a deal with the Northern Alliance to capture bin Laden warned that, if the Afghan "tribals"--that's the orientalism of liberals--did not bring him in alive but, heaven forbid, actually killed him, they would not be paid for their labors. The charismatic leader of the Afghan opposition and our best contact with it, Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was assassinated two days before September 11, thought he was dealing with madmen.

The new Bush presidency also found it hard to wrap its hands around the Al Qaeda phenomenon and preferred to focus instead on Star Wars redivivus--until, of course, a catastrophe in Lower Manhattan concentrated its mind. What the Bush administration gradually came to realize was that fighting the Muslim terrorist international could not be done in a vacuum. If the Islamic and Arab orbits were to continue to revolve around sanguinary tyrannies, there would be no popular basis in civil society to rob the cult of suicidal murder of its prestige. So, rather than being a distraction from the struggle against the armed rage suffusing these at once taut and eruptive polities, confronting their governments was actually intrinsic to that struggle. The Bush administration recognized that removing the effect means removing the cause. The 9/11 Commission seems to have grasped this, too, at least in its citations of Richard Clarke's assertion that bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, Al Qaeda and the Iraqi Baath could be natural allies.

History has never traveled in the Middle East as fast as it has during the last two years. In this place where time seems to have stopped, time has suddenly accelerated. It may be true (more likely, it is not) that a deep yearning for democracy has been latent throughout the region for a long time. There certainly was a basis in reality for skepticism about the Arabs' hospitability to the opening of their societies. Whatever the proper historical and cultural analysis of the past, however, the fact is that democracy did not begin even to breathe until the small coalition of Western nations led by the United States destroyed the most ruthless dictatorship in the area.

Democracy in Mesopotamia? A fantasy, surely. But not quite. Iraq was, despite its unbelievably bloody history, a rather sophisticated place. During the nineteenth century, many Baghdadis went abroad to study. Modern nationalism sank some roots. Baghdad itself had a plurality of Jews, learned and mercantile, until they fled to the new state of Israel. An ancient minority of Christians survived into the age of Sunni pogroms and survives--though in lesser numbers--still. The Kurds grew relatively tolerant in the areas they dominated. And the majority Shia, though viciously persecuted from the founding of the Iraqi state after World War I--with the not-so-passive consent of the British colonials--and condemned to near-genocide by Saddam's revolutionary republic, have generally maintained the restraint that piety sometimes allows. After a year and a half of nearly daily Sunni bloodletting among them, the Shia have not wreaked the vengeance they surely could and, equally as surely, some of them long to take.

The U.S. liberation-occupation has now tried to cobble together these diverging Iraqis into the beginnings of a democratic regime. Wonder of wonders, these estranged cousins have shown some talent in the art of compromise; and trying to make this polity work is hardly an effort undertaken without courage. The judge who was killed with his son outside his home on his way to work at the tribunal that will try Saddam knew that danger stalked him, and so did the rest of the victims of Sunni bloodlust. This bloodlust evokes an unmistakable but macabre schadenfreude among many critics of the war, who want nothing of history except to be proved right. It is as if suicide bombings and other sorts of helter-skelter murder were a just judgment on the wrongdoings--yes, there have been wrongdoings, some of them really disgusting--of the Bush administration. And, even if ridding western Asia of Saddam is reluctantly accepted as justified, what blogger couldn't have accomplished what came after more deftly?

In any case, this churlish orthodoxy tells us that the Sunnis need to be enticed into the political game lest it be deemed illegitimate. In this scenario, it is the murderers who withhold or bestow moral authority. John F. Burns, the defiantly honest New York Times journalist in Baghdad, who has consistently reported the ambiguous and truly tangled realities of the war, now sees the Baathist and Sunni warriors in retreat, if not actually beaten. What will probably happen in Iraq is a version of what endured for decades in Lebanon: a representative government rooted in sect--argumentative, perhaps even corrupt, but functioning. Lebanon was never perfect, but it worked reasonably well, until the aggressive Palestinian guests took to commanding Shia turf to establish a "state within a state." (This was a phenomenon that the nimble Thomas L. Friedman did not much report on in the first leg of his journey From Beirut to Jerusalem, confiding that fear for his life and livelihood kept him from deviating too far from the Palestinian story as they wanted it told. Eason Jordan avant la lettre.)

The fine fruits of the Bush administration's indifference to international opinion may be seen now in Lebanon, too. What is happening there is the most concrete intra-Arab consequence of the Iraq war. Nothing could be done in Lebanon without Syria's sanction, no government decision without the approval of Damascus, no business without a hefty Damascene percentage. Syrian troops and spies were everywhere. Lebanese of all sects and clans have been restive for years. But they lived in the fearful memory of their mad civil war, the civil war of the daily car bombs in the marketplace. Suddenly, the elections in Iraq, Bush's main achievement there, exhilarating and inspiring, sprung loose the psychological impediments that shackled the Lebanese to Syria. Even if the outcomes will not be exactly the same, this was Prague and Berlin at the end of the long subjugation to their neighbor to the east. More immediately, this was Kiev only a few months ago. The first mass protest against the Syrians and their satrap prime minister drew tens of thousands. Then there was the much larger crowd of pro-Syria Shia from the south, a disconcerting moment. But, after that, a multitude so huge that it defied counting, and so diverse. This was the true cedar revolution, a revolution of the young, for independence, for freedom from the failing but always brutal Damascus regime next door. Will Vladimir Putin be so stupid as to invest credit and arms in the stiff and callow son of Hafez Al Assad?

None of this happened by spontaneous generation. Yes, there were lucky breaks: Yasir Arafat died, Syria conspired somehow to have former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri assassinated. And yes, the new directions are young, and the autocratic-theocratic political culture of the Middle East is old, and it is once again too early to proclaim that the mission has been accomplished. As the ancient Israelite king observed, let he who girds his harness not boast as he who takes it off. But the mission is nonetheless real, and far along, and it is showing thrilling accomplishments. It is simply stupid, empirically and philosophically, to deny that all or any of this would have happened without the deeply unpopular but historically grand initiative of Bush. The hundreds of thousands of young people in Martyrs' Square knew that they had Bush's backing. The president seems even to have enticed Jacques Chirac into a more active policy toward Lebanon: For him, too, Syria had to go. If this satisfies Chirac's yearning for la gloire, so be it. (But it will not be so easy to maintain such alliances: Already, Security Council members are said to be working up plans to put the future of Lebanon under the protective care of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, when nothing in unifil's past--nothing--should provide confidence that it is able, or even disposed, to act decisively against Arab brutality.)

What is occurring in Saudi Arabia and Egypt is also heartening, if more than a bit tentative. Under pressure from the Bush administration, the Saudis have allowed the first local elections in the country's history: an election to bodies that cannot make big decisions, and an election limited to male voters, naturally. But infidels (that is, Shia) may also vote. By Saudi standards, this is the revolution of 1848. In Egypt, responding to the insistence of the Bush people, President Hosni Mubarak has allowed that he will permit opponents to run in the presidential elections against him. Mubarak has no chance of losing ... this time. Maybe, however, the son will not be the father's inevitable successor, and maybe the Arab custom of turning dictatorships into dynasties will also come to an end, at least in Cairo. And, in the brave figure of Ayman Nour, the world now has a hero of the anti-Mubarak forces to celebrate and to support. In both countries, to be sure, what we are seeing are the bare beginnings of a democratic process, the very bare beginnings. It will be years, maybe decades, before these become democratic polities. And there is always the chance--as was the case in Algeria, once the jewel in the shabby crown of the "nonaligned"--that the vox populi will vote wrong. In the Algerian instance, it had to vote wrong: The choice was between national fascists and pious fascists. Take your pick.

So the situation is certainly complex. But complexity is not a warrant for despair. The significant fact is that Bush's obsession with the democratization of the region is working. Have Democrats begun to wonder how it came to pass that this noble cause became the work of Republicans? They should wonder if they care to regain power. They should recall that Clinton (and the sanctimonious Jimmy Carter even more so) had absolutely no interest in trying to modify the harsh political character of the Arab world. What they aspired to do was to mollify the dictators--to prefer the furthering of the peace process to the furthering of the conditions that make peace possible. The Democrats were the ones who were always elevating Arafat. He was at the very center of their road map. After he stalked out of a meeting room in Paris during cease-fire talks in late 2000, Albright actually ran in breathless pursuit to lure him back. It was the Democrats who perpetuated Arafat's demonic sway over the Palestinians, and it was the Democrats who sustained him among the other Arabs. And so the cause of Arab democracy was left for the Republicans to pursue. After September 11, the cause became a matter also of U.S. national security.

The great diversion from the real politics of the Arab countries, and from the prospect of political reform, was the Palestinian grievance against Israel. In the early years of their conflict with the Zionists, the Palestinians thought that these countries would fight their battles for them, at the negotiating table and on the battlefield, which they did. But what happened in reality was that the various Arabs exploited the Palestinians as pawns in their own ambitions to pick off pieces of Palestine for themselves. That is why there was no Palestinian state in the West Bank or Gaza after the armistice of 1949, as one might have expected from the Partition Plan of 1947. The West Bank was annexed to Jordan. Gaza was not annexed but administratively attached to Egypt. Syria's armies won no decisive battles against the Jews; otherwise, they also would have taken a piece of Palestine. In any event, until the Six Days War, the Palestinian groan against the Jews was focused on the very existence of Israel within narrow and perilous borders, without strategic depth, without old Jerusalem, without the West Bank, without Gaza.

And Arab governments deflected the ample internal plaints of their own peoples with mobilized hysteria against the Jews. Every domestic grievance was dispersed with rousing rhetoric against Israel. The sun of Gamal Abdel Nasser rose and set with Cairo's failures in its wars with Israel. Hatred of the Zionists levitated the Baath dictatorships of both Iraq and Syria. In the end, after five wars and two intifadas, the Palestinians still seethed. But it had all come to nothing. And, finally, the angel of death unilaterally attacked Arafat. Bush had had the good sense to pay no attention to him, despite the urgent imprecations of the usual apologists: the European Union, the United Nations, France, Russia, and the editorial page of the Times. Had Bush made even a single accommodation to Arafat, Arafat's way in the world would have been enshrined in Palestinian lore for yet another generation as the only way.

But Bush didn't, and Ariel Sharon didn't, either. Now that there is some real hope among both Israelis and Palestinians about the future, let us examine the reasons for it. The first is that Bush made no gestures to the hyperbolic fantasies of Palestinian politics. He gave them one dose of reality after another. The second is that he gave Israel the confidence that he would not trade its security for anything--which means that Israel is now willing to cede much on its own. (Israeli dovishness for American hawkishness: This was always the only way.) The third is that Bush is holding Sharon to his commitments, and everyone who is at all rational on these issues now sees the Israeli prime minister as a man of his word and a man of history. After all, Sharon has broken with much of his own political party. Not for nothing is he now the designated assassination target of the Israeli hard right. Still, holding Sharon to his word also means holding Mahmoud Abbas to his. So far, the record is mixed. The serious shutting down of the terrorist militias has not yet begun, but the Palestinian Authority did run reasonably free local elections, and they were not accompanied by killing. It is true that Hamas won more of these races than makes either Sharon or Abbas comfortable, and its strength may even increase in the coming parliamentary voting. But this, too, is a part of the gamble of democracy; and, to the extent that the Palestinians are taking this gamble and following the newest fashion among the other Arabs, it is a tribute to the inked purple fingers of Iraq, which is to say, a tribute to Bush and his simplistic but effective trust in the polling place.

It has been heartening, in recent months, to watch some Democratic senators searching for ways out of the politics of churlishness. Some liberals appear to have understood that history is moving swiftly and in a good direction, and that history has no time for their old and mistaken suspicion of American power in the service of American values. One does not have to admire a lot about George W. Bush to admire what he has so far wrought. One need only be a thoughtful American with an interest in proliferating liberalism around the world. And, if liberals are unwilling to proliferate liberalism, then conservatives will. Rarely has there been a sweeter irony. "

Steyn on Schiavo

2005-04-01T09:47:00.000-05:00

Hits it out of the park.....

The site requires registration, so I've imported the full article for convenience.

"Do you remember a fellow called Robert Wendland? No reason why you should. I wrote about him in this space in 1998, and had intended to return to the subject but something else always intervened — usually Bill Clinton’s penis, which loomed large, at least metaphorically, over the entire era. Mr Wendland lived in Stockton, California. He was injured in an automobile accident in 1993 and went into a coma. Under state law, he could have been starved to death at any time had his wife requested the removal of his feeding tube. But Rose Wendland was busy with this and that, as one is, and assumed there was no particular urgency.

Then one day, a year later, Robert woke up. He wasn’t exactly his old self, but he could catch and throw a ball and wheel his chair up and down the hospital corridors, and both activities gave him pleasure. Nevertheless Mrs Wendland decided that she now wished to exercise her right to have him dehydrated to death. Her justification was that, while the actual living Robert — the Robert of the mid-1990s — might enjoy a simple life of ball-catching and chair-rolling, the old Robert — the pre-1993 Robert — would have considered it a crashing bore and would have wanted no part of it.

She nearly got her way. But someone at the hospital tipped off Mr Wendland’s mother and set off a protracted legal struggle in which — despite all the obstacles the California system could throw in her path — the elderly Florence Wendland was eventually successful in preventing her son being put down. He has since died of pneumonia, which is sad: the disabled often fall victim to some opportunist illness they’d have shrugged off in earlier times, as Christopher Reeve did. But that’s still a better fate than to be starved to death by order of the state.

Six and a half years later, the Terri Schiavo case is almost identical to Robert Wendland’s — parents who wish to care for a disabled daughter, a spouse who wants her dead, a legal system determined to see her off. The only difference is that this time the system is likely to win — it may already have done so by the time you read this — and that Mrs Schiavo’s death is being played out round the clock coast to coast, with full supporting cast. It is easy to mock the attendant ‘circus’, the cheapest laugh of the self-identified sophisticate. A 12-year-old boy has been arrested for attempting to offer Mrs Schiavo a glass of water. Ha-ha.

On the other hand, if one accepts the official version that the court is merely bringing to an end (after 15 years) the artificial prolongation of Mrs Schiavo’s life, since when has a glass of water been deemed medical treatment? In the public areas of Morton Plant Hospital in Clearwater, the waiting journalists grab a Coke or a coffee or even a glass of water every half hour or so without anyone considering it ‘medical treatment’. That it is, uniquely, a crime to serve Mrs Schiavo a beverage underlines the court’s intent — not to cease the artificial prolongation of life but actively to cause her death.

When poor Terri Schiavo broke on to the front pages, several commentators said the case was another Elian Gonzalez — the Cuban boy whose mother died trying to bring him to freedom in America. That’s to say, it was one of those stories where all sorts of turbulent questions of law, morality and politics collide. Two weeks on, if it’s Clintonian analogies we’re after, it seems to me the public regard it as something closer to the whole Paula/Monica/Juanita production line culminating in impeachment: if you recall, a large number of people were outraged by the President, a smaller number of people were determined to defend him to the end, and a huge number of people just didn’t want to hear about it; and the more Republicans went on about the DNA analysis of the dress stain and Mr Clinton lying about whether his enumerated parts had been in contact with her enumerated parts and the DNA analysis of the dress stain, the more they stuck their hands over their ears and said, ‘La-la-la, can’t hear you.’

That seems to be what’s happening here. Whether or not there’s anything in the various dubious polls claiming to show people opposed to Congressional efforts to reinsert Mrs Schiavo’s feeding tube, it seems clear that many of us would rather she’d been like Robert Wendland — a faraway local story of which they know little. A lot of Americans have paced hospital corridors while gran’ma’s medical taxi-meter goes ticking upward and, if my mailbag’s anything to go by, they’d rather this sort of stuff stayed in the shadows. Nobody likes to see how the sausage is made, or in this case the vegetable, if that indeed is what Terri Schiavo is. Many people seem to be unusually anxious to pretend that this judicial murder is merely a very belated equivalent of a discreet doctor putting a hopeless case out of her misery, or to take refuge in the idea that some magisterial disinterested ‘due process’ is being played out — or as a reader wrote to me the other day: ‘Why are you fundamentalists so clueless? It’s the law, dickbrain. Michael Schiavo isn’t acting for himself; he’s been legally recognised as the person qualified to act for Terri in expressing her wishes based on her own oral declarations.’

Which sounds fine and dandy, until you uncover your ears and a lot of the genteel euphemisms and legalisms and medicalisms — ‘right to die’, ‘guardian ad litem’, ‘PVS’ — start to sound downright Orwellian. PVS means ‘persistent vegetative state’, and because it’s a grand official-sounding term it’s been accepted mostly without question by the mainstream media, even though the probate judge declared Mrs Schiavo in a persistent vegetative state without troubling to visit her and without requiring any of the routine tests, such as an MRI scan. Indeed, her husband hasn’t permitted her to be tested for anything since 1993. Think about that: this woman is being put to death without any serious medical evaluation more recent than 12 years ago.

La-la-la, we don’t want to hear how the vegetable’s made....

Fortunately, if you want to execute someone who hasn’t committed a crime, you don’t need to worry with any of this ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ stuff. If an al-Qa’eda guy got shot up resisting capture in Afghanistan and required a feeding tube and the guards at Guantanamo yanked it out, you’d never hear the end of it from the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International and all the rest. Even given the litigious nature of American society, it still strikes me as remarkable that someone can be literally sued to death, and at the hands of a probate judge. Unlike other condemned prisoners, there’s no hope of a last-minute reprieve from the governor. That’s to say, he did reprieve her, and so did the legislature, and the US Congress and President — and the Florida courts have declared them all irrelevant. So, unlike Death Row, there’s no call from the governor, and no quick painless lethal injection or electrocution or swift clean broken neck from the hangman’s noose, and certainly no last meal. On Tuesday, getting a little impatient with the longest slow-motion public execution in American history, CBS News accidentally posted Mrs Schiavo’s obit on their website complete with vivid details that have yet to occur — the parents at her bedside in the final moments, etc. In this, they seem to be in tune with their viewers: sad business, personal tragedy, no easy answers, prayers are with her family, yada yada, is it over yet?

Just to underline the Clinton comparison, the Sunday Times’s Andrew Sullivan has dusted off his impeachment act and damned those of us opposed to Mrs Schiavo’s judicial murder as dogmatic extremist fundamentalist religious-right theocrats. If he’d stop his shrill bleating for a couple of minutes, he might notice that the ‘theocrats’ who want Terri Schiavo to live include Jesse Jackson, Ralph Nader and Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, who’s not just a Democrat but a gay one.

True, the TV networks — as they often do with what they see as socially conservative issues — prefer to train their cameras on some of Mrs Schiavo’s more obviously loopy defenders. But, for all that, it seems far weirder to me to be quite so enthusiastic about ending her life. I’ve received innumerable emails along the lines of, ‘If Terri Schiavo didn’t want this to happen to her, all she had to do under Florida law was make a “living will”’ — one of those documents that says in the event of a severe disability I do/do not want to be kept alive (delete as applicable). Well, OK, I haven’t received ‘innumerable’ emails, but I’ve received enough that I now send back a form response politely inquiring whether the correspondent has himself made a living will. I’ve yet to receive any answers. But I can’t see why, in a free society, healthy persons in their twenties should be expected to file legal documents in order to pre-empt a court order mandating their death a decade or two hence.

Even if you believe in living wills, it’s hard to argue that Michael Schiavo’s wildly inconsistent statements of his wife’s casual remarks about living on a tube should have the force of one. I’d be irked to find I was being deported to Pyongyang on the grounds that, while watching a TV documentary late one night in 1987, I’d been heard to say, ‘Wow, you know it’d be kinda cool to go to North Korea, don’t you think?’ But the Florida legal system’s position remains — as a reader, Adrienne Follmer, paraphrased it to me the other day — ‘We don’t know for sure if this woman wanted to live so let’s starve her to death.’

La-la-la, still can’t hear you....

One consequence of abortion is that, in designating new life as a matter of ‘choice’, it created a culture where it’s now routine to make judgments about which lives are worth it and which aren’t. Down’s Syndrome? Abort. Cleft palate? Abort. Chinese girl? Abort. It’s foolish to think you can raise entire populations — not to mention generations of doctors — to make self-interested judgments about who lives and who doesn’t and expect them to remain confined to three trimesters. The ‘right to choose’ is now being extended beyond the womb: the step from convenience euthanasia to compulsory euthanasia is a short one. Until a year or two back, I spent a lot of my summer Saturdays manning the historical society booth at the flea markets on the town common, and I passed many a pleasant quarter-hour or so chit-chatting with elderly ladies leading some now middle-aged simpleton child around. Both parties seemed to enjoy the occasion. The child is no doubt a ‘burden’: he was born because he just was; there was no ‘choice’ about it in those days. Having done away with those kinds of ‘burdens’ at birth, we’re less inclined to tolerate them when they strike in adulthood, as they did in Terri Schiavo’s case.

In that sense, the Schiavo debate provides a glimpse of the Western world the day after tomorrow — a world of nonagenarian baby boomers who’ve conquered most of the common-or-garden diseases and instead get stricken by freaky protracted colossally expensive chronic illnesses; a world of more and more dependants, with fewer and fewer people to depend on. In Europe, where demographic reality means that in a generation or so all the dependants will be elderly European Christians and most of the fellows they’re dependent on will be young North African or Arab Muslims, the social consensus for government health care is unlikely to survive. Terri Schiavo failed to demonstrate conclusively why she should be permitted by the state to continue living. As Western nations evolve rapidly into the oldest societies in human history, many more of us will be found similarly wanting.

Michael Schiavo’s lawyer, George Felos, is a leading light of the so-called ‘right-to-die’ movement, and his book, Litigation as Spiritual Practice, makes interesting reading. On page 240 Mr Felos writes, ‘The Jewish people, long ago in their collective consciousness, agreed to play the role of the lamb whose slaughter was necessary to shock humanity into a new moral consciousness. Their sacrifice saved humanity at the brink of extinction and propelled us into a new age.... If our minds can conceive of an uplifting Holocaust, can it be so difficult to look another way at the slights and injuries and abuses we perceive were inflicted upon us?’

Mr Felos feels it is now Terri Schiavo’s turn to ‘agree’ to play the role of the lamb whose slaughter is necessary to shock humanity into a new moral consciousness. As I read Felos’s words, I heard a radio bulletin announce that the Pope may now require a feeding tube. Fortunately for him, his life is ultimately in the hands of God and not a Florida probate judge.

I'm speechless.

2005-03-30T11:58:00.000-05:00

I have no words for this. I can merely quote Dave Barry's Blog:

ANOTHER SIGN OF THE APOCALYPSE: WING DOES ABBA
1. Go here.

2. Click on "Dancing Queen."

3. Shoot yourself in the head.

Update: This is also very moving.

Until Then...

2005-03-29T15:25:00.000-05:00

'Cause they stand on a wall. And they say, "Nothing's gonna hurt you tonight. Not on my watch."

- Aaron Sorkin, "A Few Good Men"

Voyeur technology improvements

2005-03-24T12:56:00.000-05:00

Sure these will be used for "birdwatching"...

Adult stem cell breakthrough

2005-03-23T17:46:00.000-05:00

Pillage Idiot notes a breakthrough in adult stem cell research:

The Australian reports that a research team (partially funded by the Catholic Church) succeeded in growing adult stem cells harvested from the nose. These cells appear to be able to deliver everything that embryonic stem cell research promises, but without the medical and ethical side-effects.

Notwithstanding the good news, apparently, having the Catholic Church on the side of science, health, and morality all at the same time was too much for a Federal Health bureaucrat who delivered a much-needed slap of agnosticism:

Federal Health Minister Tony Abbott, who officially launched the publication of the team's paper in the peer-reviewed journal Developmental Dynamics, steered away from describing the apparent breakthrough as a godsend.

"It's a science-send not a godsend," he said. "But if adult stem cell research is a prospect, as this particular project seems to suggest, well then, all those moral dilemmas we were wrestling with a few years ago...we may be delivered from."

On Schiavo

2005-03-23T11:39:00.000-05:00

My father opines below that the Schiavo case is one of "judicial murder."

As much as I hate to disagree with my father, I think he's wrong here. The Schiavo case is a horrible tragedy, and one that unfortunately has become politicized.

The issue of whether Terry Schiavo wants to be kept alive is an issue that has been examined thoroughly by the courts, and that's the sole issue. The courts have repeatedly found that she does not wish to be kept alive. Yes, there are published reports of, as my father notes, nefarious acts by Mr. Schiavo, allegations that this all about money, and so forth. But the courts found that evidence, such as it is, not to be compelling. I cannot see how we can substitute our judgment in this case, based as it is on information gleaned from 3rd hand reports in the media, for that of several courts, including a Federal District Court judge and, this morning, a Federal Court of Appeals.

Yes, I am disturbed that this is an issue of removing a feeding tube. Certainly, that's something more morally problematic than the removal of a respirator. Jewish law views the two differently, and, to my understanding, permits the removal of a respirator but not a feeding tube. But, thankfully, in this case, it's not my decision to substitute Jewish law or my moral concepts for those of Terry Schiavo. If the right to life means anything, it includes the right to decide how it ends. The courts have found that Terry Schiavo has made this decision, and as such, that decision should be respected.

To the extent this tragedy can have any positives, perhaps it will increase the use of living wills and health care proxies. I have a living will and a health care proxy which spells out what I want if, G-d forbid, I should ever be in a persistent vegetative state. I urge everyone to have one made up, to avoid being the subject of a politicized battle. Make your wishes clear now, so that a court doesn't have to try to figure it out.

Terry Schiavo

2005-03-23T10:50:00.000-05:00

I have become increasingly concerned with the Terry Schiavo situation as it has progressed. I have now reached the conclusion that we are witnessing nothing less than a case of judicial murder.
I do not think that the use of that term is hyperbolic. We have here a situation where a Court has ordered the killing of a person (make no mistake, it is "killing" not "allowing her to die") upon the sole evidence given by her titular husband that this would have been her intention. This man, Mr. Schiavo, her sole guardian, will become eligible to receive a huge amount of money at the moment that Terry Schiavo draws her last breath. If ever there was a more blatant case of conflict of interest I have yet to hear of it.
There is other evidence, which was ignored by the Court, in the form of affidavits from at least two of Terry's caregivers, that Terry was sentient and responsive. They attest to the fact that each time they tried to give her therapy, or even bring her out of her room, Mr. Schiavo threatened them, with the support of the institution that employed them. One of these caregivers swore that on at least two occasions, Mr. Schiavo injected Terry with insulin, which would have killed her had not immediate remedial action been taken. On at least one of these occasions, the nurse immediately reported the incident to the institution and to the police. She was terminated by her employer on the next day. She has tried to publicize these allegations for years, but was unsuccessful until she appeared on radio and television with Sean Hannity .
Only one doctor has diagnosed Terry as being in a permanent vegetative state. He spent a total of 45 minutes with her. Another doctor, a neurologist who spent 10 hours with her, has said that she could be rehabilitated to some degree, and this doctor was nominated for a Nobel Prize in this specific field!
Furthermore, there is no medical evidence as to the reason why Terry Schiavo collapsed in the first place. Her husband has said that it was brought on by bulimia, but there is no other evidence to verify that she had that condition, and several of her friends have denied that she was bulimic.
When there is doubt, the default should be life, not death - and there is plenty of doubt here... doubt that Terry Schiavo's intent would have been to die in the case of an irreversible vegetative condition, and doubt that she is, in fact, in an irreversible vegetative condition at all.
We are told that the majority of Americans believe that Terry Schiavo should die. However, these people are substituting there own intentions for themselves that they be "permitted to die" (again, the euphemism) were they in this situation, and assuming that that was Terry's intent. But they don't know that. Noone knows that. As previously stated, the only evidence of that comes from someone with a flagrant motive for wanting her dead.
As we countenance the withholding of sustenance from this woman, our ethical underpinning is eroding.
Wake up! We are witnessing the slow murder of Terry Schiavo. Let's call it what it is.

Don't worry, they're watching out for you...

2005-03-17T13:47:00.000-05:00

A review of the status of the post-9/11 "increased financial institution security" can be found here.

Hat tip: Yvonne.

NYT: "Filibustering is bad! No, wait, it's good!"

2005-03-17T13:17:00.000-05:00

Saul pointed out this rather amusing note in the Weekly Standard:

Obligatory New York Times Hypocrisy Item

A January 1, 1995, Times editorial on proposals to restrict the use of Senate filibusters:

In the last session of Congress, the Republican minority invoked an endless string of filibusters to frustrate the will of the majority. This relentless abuse of a time-honored Senate tradition so disgusted Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa, that he is now willing to forgo easy retribution and drastically limit the filibuster. Hooray for him. . . . Once a rarely used tactic reserved for issues on which senators held passionate views, the filibuster has become the tool of the sore loser, . . . an archaic rule that frustrates democracy and serves no useful purpose.

A March 6, 2005, Times editorial on the same subject:

The Republicans are claiming that 51 votes should be enough to win confirmation of the White House's judicial nominees. This flies in the face of Senate history. . . . To block the nominees, the Democrats' weapon of choice has been the filibuster, a time-honored Senate procedure that prevents a bare majority of senators from running roughshod. . . . The Bush administration likes to call itself "conservative," but there is nothing conservative about endangering one of the great institutions of American democracy, the United States Senate, for the sake of an ideological crusade.

If you need a notary in Florida

2005-03-16T13:46:00.000-05:00

This guy's available, although, as Dave Barry notes, I don't want to know where he keeps his stamp...

For the literate militant...

2005-03-15T18:23:00.000-05:00

Ok, so this is interesting...

This is clearly a phenomenal product for our more literate terrorists, enabling them to simultaneously terrorize their countrymen and catch up on the latest Danielle Steele novel.

Very Beginner Sushi

2005-03-11T18:35:00.000-05:00

For those of you who don't feel ready for advanced sushi, how about some very beginner sushi?

Advanced sushi

2005-03-11T17:51:00.000-05:00

Although the restaurants mentioned are in Los Angeles, this article from the LA Times gives a nice primer on how to really enjoy sushi...

"Law Student" racism and anti-Semitism...

2005-03-10T13:41:00.000-05:00

This post on Volokh is pretty scary, to me.

He notes a law professor who wrote to him regarding a different Volokh post:

I read with some horror, and admiration for Eugene's forthrightness, the exchange with the NeoNazis who began "counting Jews" on the UCLA law faculty. These fringe nuts are a bit scary, but I must confess I find the following even scarier, since it involves the kids who are or may be our students:

http://www.xoxohth.com/main.php?forum_id=2&hid=0&qu=jews

Click on a few of the threads that are called up, and you'll see what I mean.

This purports to be a prelaw discussion site, and it appears a large number of applicants and current law students post there. If the appalling anti-semitism isn't enough, then try the racism:
http://www.xoxohth.com/main.php?forum_id=2&hid=0&qu=nigger

or more here:
http://www.xoxohth.com/main.php?forum_id=2&hid=0&qu=blacks

Perhaps if you called attention to this, the site's managers might "clean up" the content a bit? And perhaps students might be encouraged to move to the more mature and civil prelaw sites, such as www.lawdiscussion.org.

Volokh correctly notes that the private message board could, naturally, shut down the posts without impacting the 1st Amendment, but goes on to posit that people are responding to the anti-Semitic and racist posts, and that "[p]roviding a forum for these posts, in a context where they can be quickly responded to, may actually be something of a public service." I'm not so sure that's true. I understand his reasoning but I'm really not sure I agree.

Frequently Asked Questions About TiVo

2005-03-10T13:21:00.000-05:00

As some of you know, I consider to be TiVo just below Saran Wrap and Liquid Prell when it comes to Inventions Which Have Bettered Humanity.

Accordingly, I note these answers to frequently asked questions about TiVo.

Example:

Q: Will TiVo change my life?

A: No, TiVo will not change your life so much as He will destroy your previous life, permitting a new and improved life to rise, phoenix-like, from your ashes. Switching from cable television to satellite is “change.” Moving to TiVo is closer to rebirth.

Today's indication of the upcoming apocalypse...

2005-03-10T12:23:00.000-05:00

At least according to The New York Post, prison could be the next beauty fad, since Martha Stewart's apparent blossoming while in custody.

A stint in a minimum-security facility looks like the fashionable new way to a mind-body makeover, thanks to the freshly sprung Diva of Domesticity.
. . . .

"A short stay in a low-security prison could be the new ashram," says Lesley Jane Seymour, the self-professed, constantly stressed editor of Marie Claire magazine.

"You'd get a nice break from the rat race - and you'd really be able to relax because it's probably one of the few places in the world that nobody can reach you," Seymour says.

"I would use the break to get rid of the dark circles under my eyes," she adds. "Did you notice how relaxed Martha's face looks ? How happy she looks? It's a far cry from the image she had - the soulless female executive who had clawed her way to the top - before she went into prison."

. . . .

[Fashion Designer Betsey] Johnson says, like Martha, she would focus on pastimes she rarely enjoys, like reading, and the biggie: losing weight.

"I bet if I was in jail I'd finally get around to doing the Carmen Electra striptease workout. I carry it around with me everywhere, but so far, I've only had time to watch it once."

I think we should encourage this idea and keep these lunatics off the streets...