Serious about Syria
WSJ: Serious about Syria
Sarah at trying to grok makes an excellent point:
|
We hear both sides of the story. On abortion, the environment, gay marriage, war, and taxes, we hear the liberal side from the national media, and we hear both sides in the local media and radio. Sure, we hear the liberal side twice, but at least we hear the conservative side once. Another reason liberals never hear the other side is that they're such bullies. Intellectual bullies, that is. I'm sure Manhattan has conservatives, but they live in such an intolerant environment, they probably keep quiet. Things like this are hard to quantify, but you can detect it in how liberals argue their political positions. Consider hate crimes laws. They criminalize thought. We can all agree that things like assault, murder, and theft should be illegal, but only an intellectual bully is interested in whether you had the correct thoughts about those you were murdering or assaulting. Or consider sex education. Liberals oppose laws requiring abstinence education. These laws don't forbid schools from continuing on with the traditional "we know you're going to have sex, so here's a condom" philosophy, they merely require that schools also inform kids of the benefits of abstinence. Only intellectual bullies would feel so threatened by the idea of students hearing both points of view. Another trademark of intellectual bullies is that they can't resist calling people names. They honestly think their opponents are evil or stupid. We're homophobes. Patriarchs. Greedy. Fundamentalist. Bigots. Gun-toters. White trash. Bible-thumpers. It's hard to listen to new ideas with these thoughts in your head... ...These city folk are victims of a new cultural hegemony in America. Whenever we turn on the TV or watch a movie, we learn all about life in their little corners of the world. They seldom get a glimpse at us. I tried to think of current TV sitcoms or recent movies which tell our story. There aren't many. The closest I came was "Northern Exposure," a '90s show about a New York medical school graduate forced to practice in a small town in Alaska. But I ruled that one out. It was about a New Yorker. And towards the end, the story line was hijacked by two gay men who moved to town to operate a bed-and-breakfast and an environmental wacko who lived in an air-tight dome and claimed he could sense releases of toxic gasses thousands of miles away. Those plots are really about Hollywood life, not ours... ...I think the TV series "Roseanne" was set in a red state, hence the blue staters' belief that we're mostly fat, poor, and stupid. It's very hard to think of a recent movie or TV show which sympathetically portrays our lives. "The Waltons," "The Andy Griffith Show," and "Petticoat Junction" were set in red states, but they're all set in the past. A few movies, like "A Walk to Remember," are sympathetic portrayals of contemporary rural American life, but they're the exceptions that prove the rule. If you want to see a small-town southern preacher who is wise and compassionate, watch this movie. You won't see it again soon. But every election day, our stories and our values count just as much as those in blue states. And for just a little while, they notice us. |
|
| However mixed or misguided our intentions were in launching this war, we are attempting, at considerable cost to ourselves, to improve life for the Iraqi people.
Despite the numbers of Iraqi dead and the travesty of Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi insurgents know that we did not come to their country to rape their women or to kill innocent civilians. Every thinking person in the Muslim world understands that if our goal had been to kill Iraqis and steal their oil, millions of Iraqis would now be dead and their oil would be flowing. The terrible truth about our predicament in Iraq is that even if we had invaded with no other purpose than to remove Saddam Hussein from power and make Iraq a paradise on Earth, we should still expect tomorrow's paper to reveal that another jihadi has blown himself to bits for the sake of killing scores of innocent men, women and children. The Iraqi people have been traumatized by this war and by decades of repression. But this does not explain the type of violence they wage against us on a daily basis. War and repression do not account for suicidal violence directed against the Red Cross, the United Nations, foreign workers and Iraqi innocents. War and repression would not have attracted an influx of foreign fighters willing to sacrifice their lives merely to sow chaos. We are now mired in a religious war in Iraq, and elsewhere. Our enemies, as witnessed by their astonishing willingness to slaughter themselves, are not principally motivated by political or economic grievances... ...Anyone who imagines that terrestrial concerns account for terrorism by Muslims must explain why there are no Palestinian Christian suicide bombers. They, too, suffer the ordeal of the Israeli occupation. Where are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers for that matter? The Tibetans have suffered an occupation far more brutal than any we or the Israelis have imposed on the Muslim world. The truth that we must finally confront is that Islam contains specific doctrines about martyrdom and jihad that directly inspire Muslim terrorism. |
| Clifford Arnebeck won’t let it go. He can’t let it go. Not, he says, while America refuses to recognize that John F. Kerry was elected president Nov. 2.
Arnebeck, a Democratic lawyer here and co-chairman of a self-styled national populist alliance, is petitioning the state’s highest court to throw out official results that favor President Bush and instead hand Ohio’s 20 electoral votes — and thus the White House — to Kerry. Or, at least, order a revote. The bid appears quixotic, to put it politely, as Bush has been officially declared the winner by 119,000 votes and Arnebeck is arguing before a Republican-dominated Supreme Court in Ohio. Nor is the Massachusetts senator helping him out, said Arnebeck. "I can’t for the life of me understand why Kerry isn’t fighting harder for this. Maybe it’s some secret Skull and Bones tradition, where you’re not supposed to show up the other guy," Arnebeck said, referring to the Yale secret society of which Bush and Kerry were both members... |
| If you paid real money for the L.A. Times, we have a word for you: "Sucker"! Kf readers email with more evidence of the LAT's near-desperate near-free distribution policy: ...
I just subscribed for LA Times for 2$ a week for A YEAR. This was after I had tried to cancel my subscrtiption ..." --reader S. "I subscribed to a full 52 weeks of Saturday and Sunday delivery to the LA Times for a $5 add-on to my Wired magazine renewal---and I didn't have to give my phone number ... " --reader C. |
They were not overwhelmed by New York's holiday crush; Baghdad's population is roughly 5.7 million people. Stores there are overflowing with goods and the streets jammed with shoppers. It appears that the number of cars has doubled in a year. "The middle class is growing," says Omar. After the April 9, 2003, "liberation," Mohammed was determined to photograph every new building in Baghdad. "Now there is a new building in Baghdad every day; I can't count them all." Land and real-estate prices are surging. Most of the investment is coming out of the Arab world, not the West. They made a couple of other interesting points about Iraq's political mood. One, Iraqis won't vote for a government dominated by Islamist religionists. Why? The abhorred next-door example of Iran's mullahs... |
As Ronald Reagan said in 1981, "We who live in free market societies believe that growth, prosperity and ultimately human fulfillment, are created from the bottom up, not the government down. Only when the human spirit is allowed to invent and create, only when individuals are given a personal stake in deciding economic policies and benefiting from their success--only then can societies remain economically alive, dynamic, progressive and free. Trust the people." ... |
| 518,000 Rush Limbaugh
469,000 Ann Coulter 368,000 Hugh Hewitt 254,000 Walter Williams 204,000 Sean Hannity 189,000 Thomas Friedman 177,000 Bill Bennett 77,000 E.J. Dionne 40,100 Alan Colmes 32,000 Thomas Oliphant (includes Tom Oliphant) |
In all, there are perhaps two dozen suspected nuclear facilities in Iran. The 1000-megawatt nuclear plant Bushehr would likely be the target of such strikes. According to the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, the spent fuel from this facility would be capable of producing 50 to 75 bombs. Also, the suspected nuclear facilities at Natanz and Arak will likely be targets of an air attack. American air strikes on Iran would vastly exceed the scope of the 1981 Israeli attack on the Osiraq nuclear center in Iraq, and would more resemble the opening days of the 2003 air campaign against Iraq. Using the full force of operational B-2 stealth bombers, staging from Diego Garcia or flying direct from the United States, possibly supplemented by F-117 stealth fighters staging from al Udeid in Qatar or some other location in theater, the two-dozen suspect nuclear sites would be targeted. Military planners could tailor their target list to reflect the preferences of the Administration by having limited air strikes that would target only the most crucial facilities in an effort to delay or obstruct the Iranian program or the United States could opt for a far more comprehensive set of strikes against a comprehensive range of WMD related targets, as well as conventional and unconventional forces that might be used to counterattack against US forces in Iraq... |
How many similar labs exist around the world? |
...A 1990 Gallup survey for the National Endowment of the Humanities, given to a representative sample of 700 college seniors, found that 25 percent did not know that Columbus landed in the Western Hemisphere before the year 1500, 42 percent could not place the Civil War in the correct half-century, and 31 percent thought Reconstruction came after World War II... ...Americans as donors and taxpayers have been exceedingly generous to our universities. Given our universities' gross betrayal of trust, Americans should rethink their generosity as well as rethink who serves on boards of trustees that, in dereliction of duty, permit universities to become hotbeds of political activism and academic fraud... |
Every publisher in America ought to be asking their internet techies for comprehensive stats on viewership of columnists via the web. Does Dionne score 1,00 readers, 10,000, or 10 million? Compared with, say, Charles Krauthammer, do Dionne's tired cliches justify his salary in terms of readers he brings to the Post's web site? This can now be measured --traffic is a very definite thing. Shareholders have a right to demand that the company in which they are invested not subsidize silliness that doesn't bring any readers to the game. There are plenty of fine lefty columnists out there --this isn't a call for purely market driven commentary, though surely shareholders should want to know if their products underrepresent the opinions that draw viewers to their internet editions. But deadwood is deadwood, and traffic statistics can diagnose dead wood in an afternoon. It may be that Dionne draws a crowd, but wouldn't those numbers be interesting to view? Don't hold your breath, though. MSM believes in accountability for other institutions, not its own tenured elites... |
"Saddam had given $300,000 in cash to Ayman Al Zawahri, Osama bin Laden's number two man, in the spring of 1998," the Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes told WABC Radio's Monica Crowley on Saturday. "It's likely that Saddam was giving some of his [Oil-for-Food] money to al-Qaida." In an eerie coincidence, an October 2001 estimate by the Justice Department put the entire cost of the 9/11 operation at $300,000. While the inception of Iraq's financial relationship with al-Qaida predated the 1996 Oil-for-Food program, the U.N. jackpot enabled Saddam to become much more generous toward his terrorist allies in the years before 9/11. Hayes said the total amount of Iraqi cash funneled into al-Qaida reached into the "millions." ... |
| * OUTSIDER. Bush is an alien inside the Beltway. His election was the equivalent of getting a green card to work in Washington. He's not part of the social whirl. Nor has he made many close friends on Capitol Hill or around town. What separates him from the Washington crowd? More than anything else, it's religion... It's not a part-time, Sunday-only thing. Leave Washington and you frequently encounter people who say of the president, "He's one of us." You don't hear that in Washington. A Texas friend recently sent the president a copy of Natan Sharansky's book, The Case for Democracy. Bush read most of it and asked Sharansky to meet with him at the White House. Bush praised Sharansky for his years as a dissident in the Soviet Union. To which Sharansky replied, "Now you are the chief dissident of the world."
* PRESS-BASHER. Bush has not made peace with the press, far from it. He views most reporters as political opponents eager to pepper him with gotcha questions. In Colombia last month, he appeared before reporters with President Alvaro Uribe. Bush didn't like the first question about a scuffle two days earlier involving the Secret Service. "This is a question?" he said, and gave a curt answer. Uribe said, "Do you want to get in one more [question]?" Bush said, "That's plenty. No. Thank you," ending the press conference prematurely... |
| 7/24/2004
Warmup: 30 minutes biking 1) Three sets of Hindu pushups 2) Three sets of diamond (close-grip) pushups - super-set by moving to knees when exhausted 3) Three sets of pullups 4) Five sets of curls using chin-up bar - basically, a very short form a of a chin concentrating only on biceps |
| 12/06/2004
Warmup: 20 minutes biking 1) 125 Hindu squats 2) Set of 16-18 dive-bomber pushups, then set of 10-12 3) Set of 20-24 elevated pushups (feet on exerball, hands on floor with 1-second pause at bottom), then set of 15-18 4) Four sets of Michigan dips (brief pause at bottom and top) 5) Three sets of lat pulldowns 6) Four sets of hammer curls |