Occam's Razor

Are We Winning the War Yet, Mommy?

2006-03-15T19:23:00.000-08:00

I have in ten weeks learned more than enough about Islam to advance a number of logical, fact-based opinions about the Islamic challenge to modern civilization. So, let's begin.

Terrorist Recruitment

While infidel nations led by the United States can in some degree contain Islamic international terrorism through military action and diplomatic pressure they cannot by themselves end the threat of militant Islam. Behind every terrorist there is an imam and a mosque and more often than not the two are financially supported by Saudi Arabia. You cannot find a Muslim nation that will refuse the generous contribution of new mosque paid for by Saudi Arabia and staffed by a Muslim fanatic trained in Saudi Arabia.

Infidels can do absolutely nothing to contain the spread of Saudi Salafist Islam in the Muslim world. If the spread of militant Islam is to be contained or reversed in the Muslim world it is Muslims who must achieve that end. Inasmuch as the oil wealth of Iran and Saudi Arabia allows them to purchase influence in the corrupt governments of most Muslim nations we can expect militant Islam to become an increasingly powerful movement in the Muslim world. Almost all of some 57 Muslim nations are losing ground with respect to the spread of militant Islam. There is not a damn thing America or any other infidel nation can do to reverse this process.

The Myth of Assimilation

Muslim immigrant populations cannot be assimilated by an infidel host society. Islam forbids the marriage between Muslim women and infidel men. Muslim men may marry women who are "People of the Book" -- Jews and Christians -- with the understanding that all offspring of those marriages will be raised as Muslims. In this regard Muslims resemble Hasidic Jews and Amish Christians.

Intermarriage between different ethnic groups, religious faiths and races is the sine qua non of assimilation because it creates a vital common interest between otherwise exclusive groups. When an Eastern Orthodox Christian marries a Protestant both families are forced to find ways to interact and cooperate in the common cause of supporting their children and sharing their hoped for grandchildren. When a black Pentecostal person marries a white Presbyterian you can safely assume that both families will be in an uproar. They will then have to find a modus vivendi if they hope to share something that they both value. This, more than anything else, is secret of the successful American melting pot. Half of all Asian-Americans currently marry out of their ethnic groups. Half of American Jews marry someone who is not Jewish. The free selection of mates leads over the course of generations to a common American identity.

While Muslims can and do work hard and are, at least in America, self-sufficient and law-abiding they can never be assimilated. They will remain a self-contained and exclusive community incapable of joining others in a shared national identity. This is not a problem as long as they remain a relatively small and powerless minority. It is a catastrophe if significant political power becomes within their reach. Infidels are ill-treated and marginalized wherever Muslims hold political sway.

Eurabia

Most of Western Europe is in a demographic death spiral because of low birth rates. Lacking a common religious faith that can compete with Islam and sharing a common nihilistic philosophy much of Europe lacks a cultural immune system capable of resisting the infection of Islam. A few, small cohesive European nations with a strong sense of national identity may be able to resist the Muslim onslaught but the prospects are bleak for the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. There is every reason to believe that much of Europe will become part of the Muslim world before this century ends.

The Missing Muslim Moderate

Militant Muslims will kill anyone who stands in their way. The same cannot be said of moderate Muslims. The violent and united few have almost always been able to impose their will on the peaceful and divided many. Moderate Muslims hide in the weeds and watch as their violent coreligionists engage in countless acts of barbarism out of a sense of self-preservation. Iran is a good example. Most of its very young population yearns for liberty and modernity. Nevertheless, they are unwilling to fight and die in order to liberate themselves from Islamic oppression. It is not difficult to imagine a modern Islamic empire, like the former Soviet empire, in which the brutal few are masters of the hapless many.

The Long View

The Muslim world is in the early stages of a major upheaval that will last for generations. In nations without oil wealth Islamism is a recipe for economic decline and that, in the end, may be the final antidote -- populations sick of suffering in the name of Islam. Few of us, if any, will live long enough to see the end of this.

Islamic Evil

2006-03-02T10:57:00.000-08:00

In the aftermath of 9/11 I set about learning more about Islam and tried to better understand the bizarre perversity that I had observed in Arabs for nearly half a century. The recent cartoon brouhaha pushed me over the edge and I impulsively and without any forethought whatsoever decided to fight back via a blog dedicated to Islamic evil.

In a few minutes I created a Blogger template and 15 post topics with no content. I chose a dark and brooding motif that echoed the colors of the Nazi flag. This, I think, was a fortunate choice as it heightened the impact of graphic imagery.

I soon found that I didn't know enough to write authoritatively on any aspect of Islam. I had a vague and general level of knowledge and that was nowhere near enough to do what I wanted to do. Content development and self-education ran in parallel. I now know Islam for what it is: a loathesome, primitive, oppressive, despotic, retrograde and barbarous creed.

Everyone with a blog that he or she hopes to be popular installs a hit counter. Most are hidden so as not to publically embarass the blogger. I boldly gambled with an unusual visible hit counter because I hoped to attract a respectable international audience and advertising that fact would increase my credibility. In retrospect I think that was a good decision.

I quickly found that there were a large number of anti-Islamic pages that had been fighting the good fight before I knew there was a good fight to be fought. I decided that I would compete with none of them. My blog would not be driven by daily events nor would it be focussed on a single aspect of Muslim nastiness. I would instead endeavor to create a concise, top-level crash course that would begin with the evil done in the name of Islam and work back to its causes. I would wherever possible avoid duplicating the fine work of others and, instead, invite attention to it.

I decided to interpose irreverant humor with serious discourse in order to punctuate narrative in the same way that some movies do. Some visitors enjoy this approach but I am not sure this was a good decision.

At every turn I followed my instincts and it is only now that I sit back and attempt to dispassionately analyze what I did and how I could make it better. While there is somewhat more to be done I am pleased with what I achieved. Although there is no search engine that will cough up my blog visitors still show up and their numbers are increasing daily.

I have devils sitting on each of my shoulders. One tells me to purge all personal observations and commentary from my blog in order to make it better. The other one tells me my blog is in some measure a personal statement and there is nothing wrong in personalizing it. They wrestle with each other every waking moment of every day but the contest remains a draw.

In any case, visit islamicevil.blogspot.com with the back-story in mind.

While I can find a feminist resource that deplores the patriarchal iconography of Frosty the Snowman (a carrot for a nose and all that) I have yet to find any objection on any American feminist website to the dreadful oppression of women burdened by the yoke of Muslim bondage. Female genital mutilation? They couldn't care less. They are a sick, morally bankrupt and vile band of harpies.

Nor could I find any page concerned with the nastiness of Islam that emanated from a left-wing source. Conservatives were outraged at the Muslim demand that they hold their tongues in accordance with Sharia law. The left didn't care a wit. While we can and should argue about means and ends anyone who dares to call him or herself an American should at least show some evidence of moral conscience. The hard left has instead jumped on the jihad bandwagon. But the hard left has always allied itself with those who would destroy most of us. I hoped that they would show some measure of decency in regard to Muslim aggression. That, it appears, was asking for too much.

The Able Danger Story

2006-02-19T11:10:00.000-08:00

The Department of Defense and various Clinton appointees are in full CYA mode as a congressional inquiry into the suppression of the Able Danger program continues. This story is far more important than Dick Cheney's hunting accident. It provides insight into how a careerist permanent Federal bureaucracy puts its interests before those of our nation. The antique media are, of course, ignoring the whole matter. Citizen reporters are taking up the slack. The Able Danger Blog provides one-stop shopping for a cover-up story that should make your blood boil.

Vile, Offensive, Fatwa Worthy and Fun

2006-02-18T09:09:00.000-08:00

Origins of Islamic Terrorism

2006-02-09T18:12:00.000-08:00

Hide your children and farm animals. This could get even uglier.

Amazon.com offers nearly 300 titles devoted to Islamic terrorism while the press and Internet have been deluged with news reports, commentary and analysis. Much of it is misguided.

The teachings and practices of Islam have not changed in any significant way for centuries. So called "radical" or "fundamentalist" Islam is a myth as is "moderate" Islam. The only notable change in Islam over the last 1,000 years was a 13th century ruling of the Hanbali school of Muslim jurisprudence that allowed polytheists and idolators to become dhimmis (protected subject peoples) instead of being killed or enslaved. Islam today is no different from the Islam of 500 or more years ago. The difference between a peaceful Muslim and a Muslim terrorist is not one of religious doctrine. They do not interpet the Koran differently. They do not interpret the Hadith differently. They do not belong to different Islamic sects. It is the duty of every Muslim to make jihad against infidels until all infidels have been converted, killed, enslaved or subjugated. While Muslims may disagree on strategy and tactics they are in complete agreement on the desired outcome.

By the end of the 18th century it became clear to the rulers of the Ottoman Empire that they didn't have the means to successfully engage in warfare against European infidels. Islam was in retreat by the end of the 19th century and the subject peoples of Europe free from Muslim rule. With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after WWI the last foreign provinces of the Muslim Turkish empire were subordinated to the rule of Britain and France. Muslims almost everywhere were ruled by Christians. Nevertheless, Muslims in the main did not revolt against colonial rule nor did they engage in acts of terrorism against infidels. Muslims worldwide were a despairing, weak, ignorant, helpless, impoverished people and recognized themselves as such. That all changed with the dismantling of British and French colonial empires in the aftermath of WWII.

The Muslim intelligentsia everywhere embraced nationalism and socialism as the panaceas that would lead them to wealth, power and modernity and their new national leaders as those who would clear the way. In every case they were betrayed by the corrupt, authoritarian regimes that became the norm in the Muslim world. Instead of catching up with the West, the nations of Islam fell ever further behind. Those Muslim nations with oil wealth could at least purchase abroad some of the amenities of modern civilization and in so doing create the appearance of modernity without it substance. The rest could look forward to endless squalor and permanent inferiority to the much more advanced nations of the West. Nevertheless, Muslims did not conduct jihad against the infidels they so greatly envied and profoundly resented. The utter failure of Muslim secular institutions was a source of great shame and hopelessness. This common feeling was nowhere more intense and insufferable than amongst the Arabs who in time would be thoroughly trounced by tiny Israel in four different wars.

Against this backdrop a number of important events would shape the perceptions of Muslims in general and Arabs in particular. Among them were the defeat of the French during the Algerian War of Liberation and in Indochina. To this we must add the American defeat in Vietnam and its poor showing in Lebanon and in dealing with American diplomatic personnel taken hostage during the Iranian revolution. The finishing touch was the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The once mighty had been brought low time and time again by relatively small and dedicated groups through unconventional warfare. This perception was reinforced by the success of Palestinian organizations that had successfully increased their power, political legitimacy and foreign revenues while conducting terrorist attacks on foreign infidel targets. Muslims once weak and powerless in the face of infidel military might now had a proven means for defeating it. Means alone were insufficient for Muslims to regain their long lost power and glory. They required a common purpose and for some that entailed looking no further than their religious faith.

The person primarily responsible for the creation of what is thought of as political Islam was Sayyid Qutb. He did not in any way reinterpret the Koran or Hadith. Instead he argued for the complete rejection of all infidel practices and institutional models that Muslims at various time and places had in some measure attempted to emulate. His critique of infidel practices and institutions was thorough, detailed and completely consistent with the teachings of Islam. He argued for the restoration of traditional Islamic society not because it would improve the material well-being of Muslims but because Allah created man to do his bidding on Earth. Sharia law is Allah's bidding and there is no other legitimate source of law.

Muslims who had lost faith in secular institutions copied from the West were provided a moral argument for rejecting them altogether. It was not Muslims who had failed at achieving modernity. Modernity itself was a revolting failure. This message was welcome to Muslims ashamed of the hopeless backwardness and squalor in which they and others like them lived. It was most welcome of all to Muslims with direct personal experience of the infidel West. Raphael Patai in his "The Arab Mind" writes eloquently and at length about the conflicting feelings of attraction and repulsion and envy and shame and superiority and inferiority that many if not most Muslim Arabs suffer when they directly compare the way infidel Westerners live and how their compatriots live. Qutb offers a path leading to a restored sense of honor and superiority to those traumatized by their experience of the West.

Once all Muslims were governed by Sharia law virtue and justice would prevail. While Qutb rejected Socialism his notions of political economy appear to be collectivist. He realized that one needs leadership and administration as well as laws to govern but makes no clear statement of how this combination might work in his perfect Islamic society. While advocating jihad he recognizes that where violence is impractical peaceful means must be found to advance the cause of Islam. The promotion of Islam must be both relentless and adaptable to circumstances. Qutb was not a terrorist. He was, instead, an idealistic Muslim apologist and revivalist. He was to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt what Marx is to communism.

Due to a lavishly funded effort by Saudi Arabia to spread its very traditional and orthodox form of Islam there was no shortage of fire-breathing, infidel-hating Muslim clerics in Muslim lands. Qutb provided the purpose while successful experience had shown the means. All that was left for Islamic international terrorism to flourish was funding and organization. Saudi and Iranian financing supplemented by Muslim charities abroad would provide the former. Osama bin Laden, an admirer of Qutb, would with the aid of others provide the latter.

For Islamism to flourish it was necessary for Muslim secular institutions to fail and they repeatedly and dismally did so to the shame and despair of many Muslims. For this, if for no other reason, America's attempt to create an Iraqi Muslim society with successful secular institutions is necessary. What much of the Muslim world lacks is an attractive, proven alternative to Islamism. Hope and a credible path to modernity that is consistent with Islam are the most powerful weapons we can use in the war against Islamism. If that doesn't work, we are faced with war without end.

For more information on Qutb during his 1949 sojourn in America go here. For a brief overview of his life and work go here. A long, scholarly dissertion on his life and works can be found here.

A Brief Service Interruption

2006-02-08T22:31:00.000-08:00

The Muslim cartoon brouhaha pushed me over the edge and for the last week I have been at work on a blog named Islamic Evil. Check it out at islamicevil.blogspot.com. I'll be back here when I am done there.

Defiance

2006-02-01T10:37:00.000-08:00

To the left is another of the cartoons that have the Muslim world in an uproar. I rather like it because it expresses Muhammed's misogyny and murderous nature. It was he who first ordered the assassination of those who dared ridicule him. I included it with the following email. If I have failed to contact a violent Islamic organization, please let me know. I would have none overlook me.

subject: Muhammed Cartoons

to: info@jamaat.org The leading Muslim terrorist group in Pakistan
SCIRI@btinternet.com Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq
cair@cair-net.org Council on American-Islamic Relations
pnaweb@gov.ps Palestinian National Authority
sair@saudinf.net Saudi Arabian Government
lbyun@undp.org Libya's UN Delegation
matbuat@mfa.gov.ir Iran's Foreign Ministry
info@moqawama.net Hizbullah, The Party of God in Lebanon

cc: annonce@jp.dk The Danish newspaper that published the cartoons

It has come to my attention that there are those of your faith who demand that infidels defer to your religion and do nothing to offend the religious sensibilities of Muslims. I am an American and as such I bend my knee for no master nor do I hold my tongue at the command of Muslims. Instead I have republished some of the Muhammed cartoons Muslims find offensive on my web log. You may find them at kenlydell.blogspot.com. I will republish more in the future and I have encouraged others to do so as well. You now may demand that my government apologize for my impertenence in the futile hope that you will be taken seriously. You also may bring my conduct to the attention of one of your more murderous imams so that he can issue a fatwa calling for my death. I would sooner suffer the fate of Theo Van Gogh than be cowed by the likes of you. You will not rule me through fear nor through force of arms. I am an American.

Ken Lydell

Sent this day, February 1, in the year of our Lord 2006. May God have mercy for their benighted, heathen souls. Oops! I forgot for a moment that I am an atheist. There are times when I wish that was not so. This is one of them. Nevetheless, the deed it done.

God Bless the Danes!

2006-02-01T08:11:00.000-08:00

The Muslim assault on the right to free speech enjoyed by the Danes is an outrage. I for one will express my support for the Danish people in three ways. I will immediately develop a taste for Havarti cheese and gorge myself on baby back ribs while drinking Tuborg beer in response to Thomas Lifson's appeal to buy Danish. I will also publish on this blog some of the Danish cartoons of Muhammed that have led to death threats and boycotts. And then I will email the embassies of those Muslim countries that have taken action against Denmark and invite their attention to what I have done. Some of you who value liberty may wish to follow suit.

The French newspaper France Soir has republished the Muhammed cartoons with this (machine translated) statement:

"France Soir denounces in the same way the intolerance of the "Moslem Brothers, Syria, Islamic Jihad, Ministers of Interior Department of the Arab countries, Islamic Conférence" who demand the "citizens of secular democratic societies, to condemn a dozen caricatures considered to be offensive for the islam".

"No, we will never excuse ourselves [the right] to free speech, to think, believe... Since these self-proclaimed doctors of the faith make a question of principle of it, it is necessary to be firm. Let us protest as much as it will be necessary to demonstrate that one has the right to caricature Mahomet, Jesus, Buddha, Jehovah and all the variations of theism. That is called the freedom of expression in a laic country ", affirms the leader-writer of the newspaper."

This expression of solidarity comes from an unexpected quarter. It is a noble example our own newsmedia should emulate. Newspapers in Spain and Germany are following suit. Europeans are showing more grit than I would have expected.

The cartoons in question may be found here. The server has been overwhelmed by page requests. Be patient.

My Precious!!!

2006-01-31T15:41:00.000-08:00

Today for the first time I traveled through the fever swamps of the liberal blogosphere. It is an unpleasant place that is overflowing with paranoia, rage and despair. While there is no shame in briefly enjoying the sight of one's enemies writhing in pain it is not a vision civilized people would care to dwell upon. My tour was relatively brief as it will take me some time to become accustomed to the unbridled expression of hatred. Nevertheless, I came away with some strong impressions that tempt me to speculate about the future.

Sites like moveon.org and democraticunderground.com have done a splendid job of fostering an online community of disaffected leftists. They have created a large auditorium where people can shout together rather than alone. And, at every turn, they can find affirmation for their bizarre belief systems. The Left can now be mobilized in a way hitherto impossible. Its members are no longer the rats in the rafters of the Democrat Party. They are becoming a powerful movement. However, their power is confined to their ability to shape the policies and agenda of the Democrat Party. They stand for nothing that most Americans are for and are against what most Americans favor regardless of party affiliation. Their over the top rhetoric has little appeal to the 85% of Americans who are strongly or very strongly patriotic and are hard pressed to find evidence in their daily lives that they live in a fascist, racist, theocratic, imperialist police state.

Samuel Alito's successful ascension to the Supreme Court has engendered on the Left a response that reminds me of Gollum's response to Frodo's assertion that he intended to destroy the one ring that ruled them all. NOOOOoooo! My Precious! The Left in its collective sense of entitlement, outrage and hunger for power has increasingly come to resemble the character of Gollum in Lord of the Rings. It has become something unwholesome and deformed by an obsession that has driven it to madness. However, the outrage of the online Left now appears to be directed towards the Democrat Party because it failed to filibuster Alito's nomination.

I see here the possible makings of a third-party movement. It would not be any more viable than the communist-led Progressive Party that bolted from the Democrat Party during 1948 national election or Ross Perot's short-lived Reform Party assembled out of who knows what for the 1992 election. The tinder is there. For it to burst aflame it will take a leader with a match. If Republicans win the Presidency in 2008 and retain control of both House and Senate the subsequent emergence of a left wing third party seems more likely than not. The re-emergence of left wing terrorist groups in the tradition of the Weathermen may also occur. The Left wants its Precious back -- by any means necessary.

Hamas Uber Alles

2006-01-30T08:07:00.000-08:00

The obligatory stream of punditry retailing explanations of and prognostications about the Hamas electoral victory in Gaza has been depressingly eurocentric. Some analysts argue that the Hamas victory was in large measure the result of a general distaste for Fatah's corruption. However, all Arab governments are inevitably corrupt by Western standards. Every Arab country consists of tribes and clans competing with one another to get more than their fair share of everything while enhancing their power and prestige. The special welfare of tribal coalitions trumps the general welfare.

Yassir Arafat was a master at dispensing money favors in a way that insured that competing tribes would not bite the hand that fed them. He was no less masterful in his use of Arab shame and honor rhetoric to soothe the wounded pride of Palestinians. Furthermore, he had perfected the art of emptying the pockets of those credulous foreign governments who swallowed his lip service to peace and ignored his prosecution of terrorist war against Israel. The same cannot be said of his successor, Mahmoud Abbas.

To understand the dynamics of the last Palestinian election one must disabuse oneself of the notion that there is a major Palestinian political constituency that favors a peaceful, two state solution to the conflict. Approximately 30% of Palestinians are pessimistic enough to accept a two state solution but it is unlikely that there is single Palestinian who would prefer that outcome to the annihilation of Israel. There is a profound difference between grudging acceptance and endorsement.

Eurocentric pundits perceive the political conflict amongst Palestinians as one of practical secularists versus idealistic Islamists. In fact, it is a confict between tribal coalitions for privileged access to the public trough and the honor of continuing the forever war against Israel. Behind the scenes are foreign contributors and Hamas has cornered the Saudi and Iranian markets. Furthermore, Hamas will soon have at its disposal funds from the European Union. Those monies will be used to purchase the support of additional clans and tribes in order to consolidate Hamas' power. The remainder will be used to finance the continuing war against Israel with a smidgeon spent on conspicuous public works to maintain the illusion of responsible government.

The best way to weaken the Hamas tribal coalition is to starve it of funds and the Bush administration appears to favor this approach. Although this will not fill the pockets of the Fatah tribal coalition it will nonetheless help preserve it thereby setting the stage for a Palestinian civil war. It would not be a war between ideologies but instead a war between factions. It matters not who wins. It matters greatly that Palestinians be sick of war when the struggle is concluded.

Writer's Envy

2006-01-29T20:16:00.000-08:00

I consume a vast amount of expository writing on a daily basis. I do a bit of it myself. However, there is only one modern writer who writes about public affairs so well as to put my poor attempts at prose to complete shame. I am not alone in that regard. He trumps us all.

Ordinary good writers know how to punctuate, spell, paragraph, organize a piece and make a point or two in so doing. Our writing is no more interesting than that which we write about. The same cannot be said of truly brilliant expository writers and the brightest light of the current generation is Theodore Dalrymple. You know that you have encountered a truly great writer -- a creative genius -- when the joy of reading his or her prose transcends the subject written about. That came clear to me when reading an essay in Dalrymple's "Our Culture or What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses".

One of Dalrymple's earlier essays describes nothing more than his reflections on visiting exhibitions of Mary Cassat's work and Joan Miro's later works in New York on the same day. I am not a fan of either painter. I had no interest in the subject matter whatsoever but was entirely enthralled by the writer's prose. I read it through for the simple pleasure of reading English language expository writing at its best and the subject matter be damned. The same held true throughout. Dalrymple's writing was better, to me, than what he wrote about. His observations and analyses were to me persuasive and affirmative but in the end the way in which he expressed them utterly awe-inspiring.

I have also read Dalrymple's "Life at the Bottom" and found it to be the most compelling piece of social commentary I have either read or can imagine. It is utterly brilliant. His prose is not florid or clever or poetic. I cannot recall a turn of phrase. Dalrymple's prose is a partially open window into his mind and soul and a gateway to some of the realities he has experienced. It is one thing to tell people what you have seen. We can all do that. Making people see what you have seen through your eyes is a truly magical gift. Dalrymple is in that respect truly gifted. I pray for his health and longevity. I hope I go to my final resting place before he has written his final word.

A Deadly Embrace

2006-01-29T17:08:00.000-08:00

Before the 1968 Democrat National Convention in Chicago there really wasn't a great deal of difference between our major national political parties. Both were committed to containing the Communist menace abroad and strong on national defense. We had the choice of a slightly center-right national government and a slightly center-left one in terms of domestic policy. Politics was not then a matter of good versus evil. It was a matter of which party could do the most good or the least harm. The changes in the national political landscape since are both monumental and profoundly disturbing.

Democratic politics bears a striking resemblance to marketing. In order to maximize your market share and then defend it you must offer a mix of products and services more promising than that of your competitor and then insure that it does not fall so far short of expectation as to greatly erode consumer confidence. Your primary constituencies must get at least a little of what they wanted and that must be more than they would expect from your major competitor. You also must provide some return on investment to your financial contributors who are, in effect, your party's stockholders. It isn't a pretty picture but all of the idealistic alternatives to the crude workings of democracy have, when applied, proven to be dreadful failures.

Before 1968 the fundamental issue in contention between the Republican and Democrat parties was what was good for America. There has been no change since then in the Republican Party. Its foreign policy shamelessly aims at furthering American economic and security interests. Its domestic policy is oriented towards fostering economic growth and it is, on average, no more socially conservative than the average American. It has become a big tent. The same cannot be said of today's national Democrat Party.

While it is possible in a few strokes of the brush to characterize the Republican Party I find it impossible to do the same with the Democrat Party. While one need not look far to find a mountain of complaints directed towards Republicans in general and the Bush administration in particular it is impossible to find a mole hill of positive substance. Where do Democrats, in the main, stand on national security and foreign policy? What are the primary domestic policy initiatives that Democrats, on the whole, favor? Who, if anyone, speaks for the Democrat Party? Howard Dean? John (by the way, he served in Viet Nam) Kerry? The Daily Kos? Moveon.org? George Soros? Hillary Clinton?

Vagaries about doing some unspecified nice thing or things for "working families" or giving lip service to "social justice" simply will not do. Invoking class warfare isn't helpful when so many Americans have invested either directly or indirectly in the stock market in order to secure a comfortable retirement. Lot's of Democrats drive light trucks and SUVs and an energy policy aimed at punishing the owners of both is not successful party platform material.

For a successful center-left party to succeed it must have a center to anchor it in political reality and a left that pulls it no further left than the center can tolerate. Where, in the name of God, can one find a national Democrat center these days? The ever more demanding Left representing at most 20% of American voters is flourishing while the Democrat center has failed to hold. This is not a good thing because it vitiates the Democrat Party and in so doing artificially strengthens a Republican Party that needs a strong challenge to keep it focussed and honest.

The gradual erosion of the Democrat center that began in 1968 appears to be close to having run its full and catastrophic course. Like the Balrog in "The Two Towers" plummeting into a void the Democrat Party will very likely pull its adversary down with it. I do not look forward to an America governed by a corrupt and complacent Republican Party opposed by a small, leftist party of little popular appeal.

Politicians are to me almost all cut from common cloth regardless of party. They are, on the whole, easily bought if the price they must pay is that of re-election. They are no wiser or honest than the average American and in many cases much less so. The few conservative idealists who make it to Congress are soon disillusioned. Politicians on the edge and uncertain of their political futures are those most responsive to their most important constituencies. If the center of the Democrat Party loses to its Left conservatives will lose, proportionately, their influence on the Republican Party. The Republican Party will in turn lose its heart and soul.

Much Ado About Nothing

2006-01-22T09:00:00.000-08:00

I have for nearly all of my adult life entirely rejected the notion of the objective existence of human rights. I cannot accept the proposition that human beings, alone amongst all other life forms, are imbued with the natural right to more of anything than a hamster or racoon. God-given rights are a matter of faith rather than reason and have no traction with those, like me, who are devoid of religious faith. Furthermore, I think that our Bill of Rights is better understood if we think of it as what it really is: a bill of restrictions on government power. Nevertheless, I cherish liberty and would like to see its blessings conferred on the people of all nations. I recognize this as a personal preference. The best objective argument I can make for liberty is that where it flourishes so do economies, political stability and individual lives.

No fair and straightforward reading of our Constitution leads to the conclusion that it confers on American women a "right" to abortion. Nor does the same reading lead a rational person to conclude that the Constitution forbids abortion. In that regard Roe versus Wade was a thoroughly dreadful decision and should be reversed as soon as possible because it was an act of judicial fiat rather than a legitimate Constitutional ruling.

The reversal of Roe versus Wade would make abortion, as it always should have been, a matter to be decided by the states or their subordinate political units. If that were to occur we could expect all blue states to quickly eliminate any residual statutes forbidding abortion. Most red states would soon follow suit and at the end of the day a few states would inconvenience female residents desirous of an abortion by making it illegal within their borders. The worst possible outcome is that some women might have to cross a state line to secure an abortion. NARAL and its various affinity groups could then spend their millions of dollars of donations assisting them rather than hiring lobbyists, running TV ads and harrassing Congress.

The Supreme Court has never had a dog in this fight. The whole matter is a tempest in a teapot. It is much ado about nothing.

History the Way It Ought To Be

2005-12-30T08:19:00.000-08:00

I have of late been refreshing and increasing my knowledge of the history of Western Civilization. I have tried to avoid the kinds of history books that are for the most part a chronology of political events – actions by governments or reactions against them. Those events are, on the whole, not terribly interesting. There have, of course, been times and places when history has taken a very dramatic and colorful turn. Those have very often been times of war, revolution or civil disorder. Well-written accounts of certain kinds of historical events or periods can be very entertaining but in the end are not particularly helpful in terms of providing insight into the forces and influences that have shaped Western Civilization. Economic and cultural histories are much more useful in that regard.

When exploring the historical foundations of contemporary Western civilization one is inevitably drawn to Hellenistic Greece and the Italian Renaissance. The very best cultural histories of those periods are those of Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt. His “The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy” first published in 1860 remains the definitive work on this subject. You will find in it no mention of the Arab or Islamic world as it played no significant role in the development of the Italian Renaissance. The book, of course, has never been out of print. It is also available gratis on the Internet. In order to partake of the pleasures and insights of Burckhardt’s historiography you must first acquaint yourself with the political history of the Italian Renaissance. It is worth the effort.

Burckhardt’s “The Greeks and Greek Civilization” is a selection of his lectures on the subject. It became available to Americans in English translation 1998 and is derived from a five-volume work in German first published in 1872. There is no better cultural history of the ancient Greeks available in English and after reading it you almost feel as though you have lived among them and seen the world through their eyes. Burckhardt’s style of writing is lively and entertaining. Nevertheless, you must brush up on your ancient Greek mythology and political history before reading it or you will soon find yourself adrift in a sea of unfamiliar names and events.

“A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War” by Victor David Hanson is not a traditional political or military history. Hanson strives to convey a sense of what it was like to personally participate in that war. Military history buffs will prefer Donald Kagan’s “The Peloponnesian War” in either its abridged one volume version or in its full four volume manifestation. Hanson’s work is aimed at a broader audience. Together with Burckhardt’s “The Greeks and Greek Civilization” it leaves one with the feeling that the Greeks in general and Athenians in particular were a remarkably nasty lot.

The Belgian historian Henri Pirenne was a pioneer in economic history and his works are essential to an understanding of the European medieval period. His “Mohammed and Charlemagne” published posthumously in 1937 presents a very different picture of the fall of the Roman Empire than the once generally accepted interpretation advanced by Edward Gibbon in the “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”. Pirenne persuasively makes the case that the fragmentation of the Roman Empire following the deposition of the last Western Roman Emperor in 476 did not lead to the collapse of Western Roman civilization. He argues instead that the Muslim conquest of the western and southern shores of the Mediterranean led to the economic collapse of Western Europe and that, in turn, led to the dramatic transformation in social and economic organization that characterized medieval Western Europe.

Pirenne was the most respected medieval historian of his era. His “Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe” paints a picture of the period very much different from the impressions one might acquire from conventional political histories. It is gratifyingly free of dates and names. As Pirenne equates the beginning of the medieval period in Europe with the crowning of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor in 810 A.D. his book continues on from where “Mohammed and Charlemagne” ends.

The Eastern Roman Empire lingered on after the demise of the Western Roman Empire in 476 A.D. It fell to the heathen Turks in 1452. It was only then that the last vestiges of Western civilization were eradicated from Asia Minor and the Middle East. Although Byzantine history is irrelevant in terms of the main influences that have shaped the development of Western Civilization it is nonetheless an entertaining blend of treachery, intrigue, venality, murder most foul and caprice. It has about it the quality of soap opera and there is no more entertaining account of this bizarre era than “A Short History of Byzantium” by John Julius Norwich. It is an abridged version of Norwich’s full three-volume series.

Respectable historians who specialize in American history hold one of two general views about the origin and nature of the American Revolution or one some place in between. There are some that argue that the American Revolution entailed a radical political and social transformation. The other and I think more balanced view is that the American Revolution was both conservative and reformist in nature. It was conservative in that it strove to preserve and protect traditional Anglo/American political institutions threatened by an increasingly intrusive and exploitive British colonial administration. It was reformist insofar as it required the formation of a national government that would be as good or better as the British government had once been in protecting personal property and individual liberty.

Indispensable to an understanding of American history is Bernard Bailyn’s “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution”. In it Bailyn describes in exhaustive but not exhausting detail an American colonial political debate about the proper role and organization of government that had begun a very long time before the Corn Laws and Intolerable Acts. Bailyn’s primary sources are pamphlets, sermons, newspaper opinion pieces, diaries and the like. They reflect a lively public discourse inspired in significant measure by the works of John Locke and other liberal Republican Englishmen written in the early 1720s. John Adams once remarked that the American Revolution had been effected before hostilities began. Bernard Bailyn explains why this was so.

All of the books described above have the virtue of providing a broader and more useful historical perspective. None of them resemble the dreadful school textbooks we have all suffered through at one time or another. They help make sense of it all.

Jacob Burckhardt's portrait graces the Swiss 1,000 franc note shown above.

The Bottled Water Rip Off

2005-12-23T13:09:00.000-08:00

I have for too long seen countless people carrying with them bottles of water as they go about their business. Many if not most of them appear to believe that they should drink at least 64 ounces of water a day to stay “hydrated” and that bottled water is sufficiently superior to tap water to justify paying for what is normally available for free. Where could they have possibly gotten those silly ideas?

Those bizarre notions seem to be the product of a clever marketing campaign by those who sell bottled water that dovetailed nicely with their customers’ ignorance of human physiology. The false claims of the International Bottled Water Association provide a nice summary of the common marketing pitch.

The IBWA states that people should drink at least eight 8-ounce servings of water a day. This is about 300 milliliters more than the minimum of 1.6 liters of water we need to replace each day. However, the water content of the food we eat will satisfy about 60% of that requirement. Most of the things we eat each day are mostly water: meat, potatoes, rice, vegetables, eggs, breakfast cereal, etc. Hard cheese is about 35% water. While there is an average amount of water we excrete each day that needs to be replaced there is no arbitrary amount of water that we should drink.

The IBWA advocates drinking water before you become thirsty. There is no medical or physiological basis for this claim. You are advised to drink plenty of water throughout the day and always keep a bottle of water with you. However, you are a mammal. The physiological mechanisms in your body that regulate fluid balance are identical to those in a dog, horse, rat or raccoon. Other mammals don’t drink before they are thirsty or drink plenty of water throughout the day because they don’t need to. Neither do you. Your pituitary gland regulates urine formation in order to preserve your electrolyte balance while nerve cells in your lateral hypothalamus trigger the process that makes you feel thirsty when blood volume falls below a certain level. Initial thirst comes before dehydration. Physiological stress from dehydration begins when your normal blood volume has declined by 5%. You start feeling thirsty when it has declined by about 2%.

Drinking too much water can temporarily disable you or permanently kill you. The medical word for lowering the sodium content of your blood to the point where you sicken or die is hyponatremia. The following description of the condition is from Wikepedia. It is consistent with information from other sources.

“Water intoxication is a medical condition (also known as hyperhydration) in which an individual's intake of water is excessive. A person with two healthy kidneys can rid themselves of about 1.5 liters of water per hour at maximum filtration. The main consequences of over consumption are hyponatremia (decreased plasma sodium, due to dilution) and suppression of the production of antidiuretic hormone. Extreme hyponatremia (with plasma sodium levels less than 100 mmol/L) frequently leads to cerebral edema, seizures, coma, and death.

Although water intoxication invariably leads to hyponatremia, the two conditions are in fact distinct. (Hyponatremia may occur in the absence of elevated water intake; for instance in conditions such as diarrhea where sodium is flushed excessively from the body).

Famous sufferers of water intoxication include Leah Betts and Anna Wood (both fatal), 2002 Boston Marathon competitor Cynthia Lucero (also fatal) and athlete Craig Barrett (recovered). In a much-publicized case of fraternity hazing, four members of the Chi Tau House at Chico State University pled guilty to forcing 21-year-old student Matthew Carrington to drink excessive amounts of water while performing calisthenics in a frigid basement as part of initiation rites on Feb. 2, 2005. He collapsed and died of heart failure due to water intoxication.”

There have been at least three other recent fatalities from over consumption of water. Two were young soldiers in basic training and the third a New York City policeman competing in a bicycle race. While the members of the International Bottled Water Association would have us believe that there is no such thing as consuming too much of their product, the death toll from doing so continues to rise.

A Google search for references to water intoxication will generate about 3.4 million hits. Drill down further and you will find countless references to people so afraid of dehydration that they drank enough to induce seizures, comas and in some cases brain damage from cerebral edema (swelling of the brain).

Another myth promoted by hydration faddists and the bottled water industry is that only pure water – ideally out of bottles – can replenish the amount we normally excrete in a day. I am living proof that this is a lie. I have on many occasions for many months at a time not consumed a single glass of water. The only water I consumed came from the food I ate, soft drinks containing caffeine, tea, coffee and beer. Why am I still alive? I should have perished from dehydration long ago.

Beverages containing caffeine have a mild diuretic effect. They increase your rate of urine production. However, the additional amount of urine you produce is less than the amount of water contained in the beverages. Coffee and Coca Cola do not cause dehydration. There are peer-reviewed scientific articles supporting that assertion. There are no scientific studies contradicting that assertion.

It should therefore be no wonder that I have the urge to roll my eyes when I see hydration faddists trundling along clutching their plastic water bottles. How utterly foolish they appear to me.

The enormous waste of resources involved is described in this news report.

ANWR Idiocy

2005-12-22T13:39:00.000-08:00

I once spent a year living in central Alaska and traveled as far south as Delta Junction and northward to the Brooks Range. Alaska is something I know about from personal experience. It is vast and the human footprint on it so faint as to be negligible. ANWR oil extraction would entail a footprint about the size of L.A. International Airport. It could not have a significant adverse impact on the ecology of the North Slope and could very well be beneficial.

The Central Arctic Herd of caribou that migrates through and calves in the area to be occupied by Prudhoe Bay oil field facilities was carefully counted by air before development began. The herd consisted of about 3,000 caribou in 1970. The size of the herd increased rapidly as the oil fields were developed and has since stabilized at about 23,000. Herd sizes may increase or decline year to year. They grow during mild winters and decline during exceptionally severe ones. In 1998 the Central Arctic Herd numbered 38,552. Nevertheless, environmentalists paradoxically argue that oil extraction has harmed the herd by disrupting its pattern of migration and calving.

The Western Arctic Herd went through a steep decline in the 1970s. It fell from 242,000 animals before the Trans-Alaska pipeline to a low of 75,000 after its completion. It then recovered and numbers 490,000 animals today. On the whole, there are far, far more caribou in Alaska now than before oil development began. Furthermore, there is no scientific evidence that any other species of plant or animal has declined as a result of Alaskan oil extraction.

One of the factors that contributed to the dramatic growth in herds is that oil development provided well-paying jobs to Native Alaskans normally relying on caribou as their primary winter food source. A Native Alaskan family living off the land needs to kill and eat about one caribou a week to survive winter. If the family relies on a team of sled dogs it will need to kill a caribou about every five days. It doesn't take many hunter-gatherers to hunt a species to extinction. Native Americans repeatedly did so before European immigration.

Given a complete absence of evidence of any measurable harm suffered by Alaskan plant and animal life environmentalists and their stooges in Congress can do little more than claim harm from oil spills and emissions. However, in the absence of scientific evidence of a harmful effect on any species of plant or animal those events must be considered causes without effects.

Perhaps the most fatuous argument against ANWR oil extraction is that there isn’t enough oil to make it worthwhile. That is a decision best made by the free market rather than bureaucrats, Greenies and venal politicians. Significantly increasing worldwide oil production is going to take many development efforts that achieve little individually and a great deal together. If no profit can be made extracting oil from the ANWR no extraction will take place. If a profit can be made, extraction should take place.

Vile France

2005-11-09T14:20:00.000-08:00

I once saw one of the currently rioting cités looming in the distance while enjoying the pleasures of tourist Paris. I found its Bauhaus architecture repellent and had no desire to investigate. Most of those who would publicly express an opinion in English about the “root causes” of the ongoing Muslim insurgency in France have gotten no closer to the areas affected than I did. So, how do we make sense of it all?

The best we can do is to attempt to formulate an understanding of what is taking place by collecting those undisputable facts available to us, considering the anecdotal reports of those with some direct personal experience of the situation and weighing the competing analyses of those who would explain it all to us. This is no easy task but useful progress is possible. Let us first consider some pertinent facts:

There are approximately 750 to 800 largely Muslim residential areas scattered throughout France that are lawless. They are called zones sensibles (sensitive areas) collectively called la Zone. They are public housing projects located in suburbs and surround every major city in France and many large towns. Control of those areas was deliberately ceded to Muslim street gangs. As the rate of crime inevitably went up, the number of police assigned to those areas was systematically reduced.

Theodore Dalrymple in his prescient “The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris” published in the City Journal in August of 2002 summarizes the effect of this policy:

“Reported crime in France has risen from 600,000 annually in 1959 to 4 million today, while the population has grown by less than 20 percent (and many think today’s crime number is an underestimate by at least a half). In 2000, one crime was reported for every sixth inhabitant of Paris, and the rate has increased by at least 10 percent a year for the last five years. Reported cases of arson in France have increased 2,500 percent in seven years, from 1,168 in 1993 to 29,192 in 2000; robbery with violence rose by 15.8 percent between 1999 and 2000, and 44.5 percent since 1996 (itself no golden age)."

More than 28,000 vehicles had been torched this year before the recent insurrection while police during the same period reported 9,000 instances of their vehicles being stoned while driving through la Zone. Worse yet, French judges are notoriously lenient in dealing with criminals.

The French national unemployment rate is slightly less than 10%. Unemployment rates in zones sensibles are on the average about 30%. Those residents who are employed earn on the average 40% less than those living elsewhere. While they are the primary victims of the criminal gangs that rule their neighborhoods they earn too little to escape the public housing projects.

The French welfare state devours 54% of the French GDP. It is generous with its benefits. The jobless poor and the poor with jobs are well fed, tolerably housed, receive good quality free medical care and free education through graduate school. Substantial public funds are spent on renovating and improving public housing, providing recreational outlets for the idle and the like. The inhabitants of la Zone needn’t fear starvation, homelessness or lack of medical treatment. The state provides for all of their basic needs with the exception of public safety. That summarizes the most salient facts available to us.

This will all seem quite familiar to those of us who remember the original promise and utter failure of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and who later watched neighborhoods in Detroit, Watts and Washington D.C. burned down by fully assimilated black Americans.

We needn’t invoke the specter of Islam to explain either France’s or America’s past and present zones sensibles. If there are major differences between French Muslim street gangs and the black and Hispanic street gangs that bedevil many of our American cities I have yet to discover them. Pride, honor, revenge, alienation, tribalism, territoriality and a complete disregard for the suffering of their victims are what make them all similar.

Faced with a soaring crime rate, much of it perpetrated by blacks against blacks, America got tough on crime. We incarcerate a higher percentage of our population than any other Western country. Our national crime rate is, as a consequence, approaching a 40 year low. We no longer build massive public housing projects and have had the good sense to demolish many of the worst of them. We instead rely on the free market to provide housing while offering Section 8 rent subsidies contingent on good behavior. Half of those who may have once spent the rest of their lives on public assistance are now at work due to welfare reform. Aggressive and effective policing has restored order to New York City -- now a far safer place to live than either London or Paris. America learned from its failures. But can the French learn from our successes? I think not.

If the French are ever to climb out of the very deep hole they have dug for themselves they must do at least two things, one very difficult and the other impossible. They first must do what interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy promised to do – restore law and order to la Zone. Regrettably, French law enforcement agencies and the criminal justice system are ill suited to this task. Restoring public order would entail major reforms that would discomfort entrenched political interests and lead to the usual strikes, riots and protests. The second thing that France must do is quadruple its annual rate of economic growth. France needs to look no further than Ireland to find ways of doing so. France must reduce government expenditures to 40% or less of GDP. That would entail a staggering 26% reduction in government spending over time that would come at the expense of the country’s most powerful public sector labor unions.

France would also have to greatly liberalize its labor market and reduce its lavish farm subsidy programs. In so doing it would invite strikes and riots. Reducing the lawful minimum wage, twice the size of ours, in order to increase the number of entry-level jobs would be political suicide.

Clearly, the majority of French people will have to make sacrifices if the least among them are to have jobs for the first time or find better jobs that will pay them enough to escape la Zone and work their way up the economic ladder. If the few are to have opportunity the many must relinquish some of their security. That will not happen. The French lack both the temperament and the moral character necessary for rescuing the hopeless denizens of la Zone. They will find a more palatable alternative in the stick of repression and the wilted carrot of loudly hailed cosmetic programs that achieve nothing of consequence.

There are of course problems that all Western nations with Muslim minorities must deal with. Those include anti-Semitism, separatism, intolerance, terrorism and the oppression of women. France will need to find ways to deal with all of those. In the meantime, public disorder and hopeless poverty can only make them much worse.

The European Intifada

2005-11-07T08:53:00.000-08:00

I followed the Muslim riots in France from the time they were first reported in the foreign press. That gave me a head start on the NY Times that took a week longer to discover that something was amiss in France and worthy of note. The MSM, blinkered as always, did its best to ignore or soft-pedal the fact that the men and boys throwing Molotov cocktails and assaulting police often shouted “Allahu Akbar” while doing so. Be that as it may, there are lessons to be learned.

The first and most obvious lesson is that weakness invites aggression. Over the course of 30 or more years the French government lost control of some 750 “sensitive” Muslim neighborhoods. Law enforcement was replaced by the rule of Muslim street gangs supplemented by Muslim imams preaching hatred for infidels. It was thus possible for Muslims to continue their vile practices of honor killing, forced marriage, polygamy and the oppression and abuse of women with impunity. The French in effect ceded portions of their national territory to Muslim colonists. France is not alone in this regard. The same phenomenon can be observed in Belgium, Sweden and Denmark. An excellent exposition of the deplorable Muslim impact on Scandinavia is available from a Norwegian blogger who goes by the name of Fjordman. The Flemish Brussels Journal offers a broader European perspective.

Intermarriage is the sine qua non of assimilation. However, Islam forbids marriage between Muslim women and infidels and few infidel women are foolish enough to marry Muslim men. In the latter case the infidel wife will usually be persuaded to convert to Islam and in any case Islam decrees that her children will be raised as Muslims. Islam allows Muslims to show friendship towards infidels only when Muslims are at their mercy. Otherwise, infidels are to be given a choice of conversion to Islam, death or subjugation by Muslims. Those who renounce the Muslim religion or convert to another are to be slain. This is not radical Islam. It is mainstream Islam. Therefore, the second lesson is that assimilation of observant Muslims is a childish Western fantasy. The best one can hope for is to give Muslims an economic stake in society so that they have a good deal to lose in making war against their infidel host societies. America has done this well while Western Europe’s economic stagnation guarantees that millions of Muslims have little or nothing to lose.

The third lesson is that Europe is morally and spiritually weak. Muslims can incrementally seize its territory with impunity and when the size of the Muslim population grows beyond a certain point Muslims can through violence and the threat of violence impose its will on the spineless infidel majority. If a few thousand Muslim men and boys can bring France to its knees using little more than clubs, stones and Molotov cocktails, what could be accomplished with a full arsenal of terrorist weapons? Jihadist imaginations are no doubt hard at work.

The final lesson is that Western European welfare states are incubators for Muslim extremism and disorder along with nonsectarian criminality and irresponsibility. The fledgling democracies of Eastern Europe should certainly take that lesson to heart.

The Unbroken Circle

2005-10-17T06:27:00.000-07:00

Since Arrafat's long overdue and most welcome demise I have believed that Israel should do what it appears to be doing now -- stop negotiating and create through military withdrawals and the construction of defenses a de facto Palestinian State. I favored this approach because I believed that it would lead to a Palestinian civil war pitting Arab clan against clan and tribe against tribe. That is what we now see in Gaza and the sooner the West Bank follows suit the better. Palestinians united are a far greater threat to the civilized world than Palestinians divided through bitter internecine warfare. Far better that their barbarous Bedouin culture and the murderous rage it fosters express themselves in the most self-destructive ways possible.

If there is to be any path to peace it must entail at some point the war weary pragmatism evident in Lebanon today. Israelis are not inclined to be the helpless victims of a genocidal Arab honor killing. Palestinians must abandon their hopes of exterminating the "Zionist Entity" if they are to ever to experience the personal security and prosperity enjoyed by the citizens of civilized nations. The more Palestinians brutalize and immiserate themselves the better. Only when they reach rock bottom will they find, as Iraqis are finding now, a different and more constructive way to restore their lost honor.

Will Abbas survive and prevail? I hope not. The only way to cut off the enormous flow of foreign donations, largely from the useful idiots of the EU, that form the ultimate prize for the next Palestinian dictator is to foster chaos. I hope Israel is wise enough to continuously destabilize the situation and America prudent enough to look the other way. If the bonfire of Arab vanity is ever to abate it must be fed with the lives of Arabs until the time that most Arabs firmly refuse to sacrifice themselves in order to keep it burning. In the meantime, burn, baby, burn.

Why the Wheels Fell Off

2005-10-11T17:41:00.000-07:00

Democrats smell blood in the political water and seem to share the view that now is the time to strike as the enemy appears weak. Try as they may they don't seem to be able to exploit a situation that they regard as pregnant with wonderful possibilities. Some of them engage in “What do we really stand for?” navel gazing while others stew in the juices of their vindictive rage. A once great and powerful party seems enfeebled, divided, confused and indecisive? Why?

During its heyday the Democrat party was a grand coalition of Marxists, populists, left-leaning pragmatists, Big Labor and traditional party apparatchiks later supplemented by black grievance peddlers. The elements of the coalition were on the whole patient and flexible and with the exception of the Marxists no less patriotic than the average American. The interests of one group were not largely inimical to the interests of any other group. There was much common ground to be found. The programs, policies, initiatives and messages originating in this shared interest space were appealing enough to allow Democrats to dominate the political landscape. Then something changed and it all came tumbling down and before long it was the Republican fox frolicking in the political henhouse. What changed?

The civil rights movement won and blacks have more than equal opportunity and are no longer objects of pity or sympathy for most Americans. Reasonable feminists won and no plausible argument can be made to the electorate that women are victims of institutional oppression. Marxists lost with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Their numbers were decimated and most of the remaining true believers left demoralized. Big labor declined in the private sector. Americans on the whole became wealthier thereby making them less susceptable to populism. Class warfare, never a popular cause for most Americans, became even less appealing. There was an onset of compassion fatigue for the poor, the homeless, unwed mothers, and whoever we were supposed to feel compassionate towards. "The War on Poverty", the most ambitious public policy initiative in America's history, proved to be a complete failure.

At the same time polymorphous leftist radicalism flourished. Environmentalist groups dedicated to the destruction of industrial civilization joined the party and their interests were inimical to almost all other interests. Multiculturalism blossomed and was hostile to the values of most Americans. Gay rights groups blossomed along with “Queer Theory” and their interests were inimical to those of blacks and Big Labor as well as most other Americans. Radical femininism flourished and it was inimical to the interests of everyone except militant lesbians. Postmodernist factions, claiming to be the avant garde of progressivism, declared war on objective reality thereby alienating every serious scholar or scientist in search of universal truth. Blatant anti-Americanism, once the exclusive province of communists, became a defining characteristic of the left with Noam Chomsky leading the charge. Anti-semitism flourished as the radical left made common cause with Islamists and Arab radicals. Those groups and others like them demanded seats at the Democrat political table and if they didn't get them they at least got standing room.

Building a political majority entails forming a coalition where everyone gets some of what they want while no one gets a lot of what they don't want. There has to be a net return on political investment. The common ground that once united the Democrat Party has shrunk to the point where I am not sure you can stand on it with both feet. Another word for this is chaos.

Political parties in the past have been torn apart, albeit briefly, due to irreconcilable differences between constituencies. Over the last 100 years we have seen the Republican Party twice divide and briefly spawn entities that called themselves progressive parties. Communists, Marxists, democratic socialists and their sympathizers bolted from the Democrat Party in 1948 and again formed a Progressive Party because their interests couldn't be harmonized with the Democrat mainstream. Southern Democrats bolted at the same time in the course of creating a racist Dixiecrat Party.

The bonds between the constituencies the Democrat Party caters to have not weakened to the point where they will cause a party split before the next presidential election. If Democrats can regain control of the Presidency or at least one house of congress in the next election their constituencies will be motivated to continue cooperating. If Democrats have their clocks cleaned once again there is a good chance that an increasingly fragile Democrat coalition will bifurcate and spawn yet another so called "progressive party" that will be so thoroughly trounced in the following election that it will attempt to return to the Democrat fold. If that were to happen I would advise the Democrat mainstream, for its own future health, to deny readmission.

Understanding Humanity's Problem Children

2005-10-11T12:57:00.000-07:00

I have for the last several weeks been immersed in the study of Arab history and culture. I was looking for the answer to four questions. What is the cause of the violent irrationality characteristic of so many Arab thoughts, utterances and actions? How could a people so backward, primitive and ignorant by the standards of modern civilized peoples ever have had a medieval Golden Age? Why did the Arab world stagnate, decline and finally succumb to collective brain death in 1400 A.D. or thereabouts? Finally, is there any good reason to believe that Arabs can develop democratic, pluralistic and prosperous nation states?

There are two books that should be on the reading list of anyone who wants to understand 9/11, what some call Islamofascism, Israel’s struggle for survival and the current insurgency in Iraq. “The Closed Circle – An Interpretation of Arabs” by David Pryce-Jones is an invaluable introduction to how Arab culture shapes Arab politics. Pryce-Jones appears to have a great deal of sympathy for the suffering masses of the Arab world and a great deal of contempt for those aspects of Arab culture responsible for poverty, ignorance, oppression and hopelessness. His analysis is bleak, disheartening and pessimistic.

“The Arab Mind” by Raphael Patai is an analysis of how pre-Islamic Bedouin culture and Islam together shape Arab thoughts, feelings and actions. While Pryce-Jones is a journalist who studied Arab history and culture in the course of working a middle-eastern beat Patai is an academic Arabist with a deep affection for the Arab people and a profound appreciation of their cultural history. His analysis is broader, deeper and richer than that of Pryce-Jones. However, Patai provides no analysis of Arab politics and in that regard his book is incomplete.

The two books together provide a remarkably good examination of humanity’s Arab problem children. I now understand the factors that shape the Arab rhetoric that I very often find to be bizarre and incomprehensible. I understand why Arabs seem to have trouble distinguishing between the remote and recent past. I believe I understand the origin and nature of Arab irrationality, stagnation and violence. My contempt has been tempered with pity.

Is there any hope for the Arab world? Patai is optimistic while Pryce-Jones is not. Will America succeed as midwife in the birth a truly modern Arab state? I have no idea. Nevertheless, American intervention in Iraq is a noble and necessary experiment. If that experiment fails there is little reason to believe that Arab culture is capable of adapting to the modern world. Marsh Arabs will continue to live the same way they did 3,000 years ago, as will the Bedouin nomads who still roam the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East. One Arab tyrant will violently depose another in the name of some convenient ideology and then with the help of family, clan and tribe oppress the masses in the course of robbing them blind. This vicious circle would continue unbroken and unbreakable.

There was a genuine medieval Muslim Golden Age that flourished during the reign of the Arab Abbasid Caliphs in Baghdad. However, one should ignore all Arab accounts of this period and its contributions to human knowledge. The honor, shame, revenge dynamic of Bedouin culture leads to gross exaggeration, credit stealing, flights of fancy and outright lying. Arabs did not invent algebra. That was a multicultural achievement. The brilliant mathematician, Al-Khwarizmi, did write a book that verbally described solutions to all first and second order algebraic equations and in so doing gave us the word “algebra”. He also refined and introduced the Indian number system to the Arab world. However, Al-Khwarizmi, like the poet and mathematician, Omar Khayyam, was Persian. Worse yet, Al-Khwarizmi very likely was not a Muslim but a Zoroastrian. Arabs claim for their own the best physicians of the time: Avicenna and Razi, both of whom were Persian. There are other brilliant Persians who have been retroactively made Arabs in order to pad the Arab intellectual resume. Nevertheless, Arab contributions to the intellectual achievements of the medieval Muslim world and later, indirectly, to the Western world are thoroughly impressive. So, what went wrong? Were successive conquests by Seljuk Turks, Mongols and Ottoman Turks enough extinguish every intellectual light in the Muslim world for six centuries? I don’t yet have the answer.

The Easy Way Out

2005-09-06T15:57:00.000-07:00

The mainstream media as always has failed to provide adequate explanations for the Katrina disaster. It has told the story that is easy to tell rather than the one that should be told. Heart rending human interest pieces, blame-shifting sound bites from local politicians on the ropes, Bush-bashing and the angry utterances of uninformed observers are the easy way out -- the inevitable Big Easy of the news media so many of us have learned to despise.

In the end, it will be largely sorted out by a vast Internet community dedicated to making honest sense of it all. Chris Regan and Bryan Preston have made an excellent start in a splendid piece published in the National Review Online. Did New Orleans have a viable emergency plan? Did the mayor make any credible effort to use available local resources to evacuate people he knew needed help? You can read the New Orleans and state plans and the history of both in dealing with threats comparable to Katrina if you know where to look. That is something the New York Times is incapable of doing.

Leighton Levy in the Jamaica Star expresses the heartache the majority of decent, hardworking black people feel when an antisocial black underclass takes the low road. The MSM instead features the self-serving bigotry of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Randall Robinson. Another big journalistic Easy. Yes, Leighton, I too feel your pain. It is not because I share your color but because I respect and admire so many who share your skin color with you.

Bob Williams, a former Washington state legislator who knows something of disaster planning provides a brief and cogent analysis of how the hierarchy of disaster response is supposed to work and how it failed in New Orleans. You can't expect FEMA to take charge at a moment's notice of any disaster in every city and state in the nation. The planning has to be ground up.

Douglas Kern amongst others aptly points out that the National Guard is organized to round-out regular Army combat units. This comes at the expense of training and equipment appropriate to disasters like Katrina. Donald Rumsfield and the DOD have been working that problem and policies were put in place before Katrina to fix it.

Mac Johnson takes a good look at the deplorable condition of the New Orleans police department. It was, perhaps, the worst law enforcement organization in a major city in the United States. It was corrupt, poorly paid, poorly led, poorly equipped, understaffed and in the end almost entirely ineffective. Removing this pathetic outfit from New Orleans probably reduced the crime rate and increased public order.

A lot of people needlessly died because city and state politicians were loathe to make hard choices. They gambled with the lives of the most vulnerable and needlessly lost those lives.

The truth will come out in time although you may not discover it by reading the mainstream media. FEMA appeared to arrive late because no one else in Louisiana showed up early.

A Bit Too Easy

2005-09-05T16:44:00.000-07:00

I have fond memories of New Orleans but no illusions about the general corruption and incompetence endemic at all levels of government in Louisiana. Going along to get along has been going on for so long that it is a local way of life. Wretched schools, corrupt police departments and politicians on the take are hard problems to fix. It is so much easier to go with the flow.

The general collapse in public order in New Orleans in the aftermath of major flooding was entirely predictable. Public order is always a problem in mainly black, low income enclaves. Watts in Los Angeles, Hunter's Point near San Francisco and East Palo Alto near Stanford University are a few examples from California. Other states also have urban concentrations of poor and uneducated blacks that are just one police shooting, major blackout or disaster away from violent anarchy. Disaster planning for those areas necessarily entails a swift and robust response by police and military personnel. That was notably lacking in the case of New Orleans. If you have trouble maintaining public order when things are more or less normal it should be clear that you will have a major problem if things get very abnormal.

When the whole story is told as it inevitably will be it will be one of leadership and communications failures across the board with the likely exception of the President. George Bush has no magic wand that he can wave to make all the unpleasantness go away. He doesn't control the weather any more than he controls the international free market price of oil. He doesn't spend his days auditing FEMA emergency plans or making sure that Lousiana is well governed by local authorities.

The physical security of New Orleans is first and foremost the responsibility of those who live there. It is their city. It is secondly the responsibility of what passes for a Louisiana state government. It is thirdly the responsibility of Louisiana's elected representatives in Congress charged with bellying up to the public trough of Federal money. FEMA and the National Guard are what you rely on when all else fails. They are supplements to rather than substitutes for effective local planning and action. They can help you help yourself. If you come apart at the seams as New Orleans did it will take a lot more time and effort.

Polymorphous Islam

2005-08-23T16:36:00.000-07:00

Before 9/11 I, like almost everyone else in the Western world, had no interest in Islam. However, nothing invites an interest in the ideology or religion of others quite like the mass murder of your fellow citizens performed in the name of that ideology or religion.

My investigation of Islam began with Bernard Lewis' "What Went Wrong". The title of the book is misleading. Lewis invites attention to various peculiarities and anomalies of the Ottoman Empire but in the end has nothing very useful to say about the matter. Nor has anyone else to my knowledge.

A careful reading of the Koran and Hadith would lead one to believe that Islam is a genuinely evil creed that provides ample justification for murdering, plundering, enslaving and oppressing infidels. A study of historical Moslem depredations and conquests reinforces that point of view. However, scripture and history can no more be used to indict today's Moslems than today's Christians. Both have had at various times and places a murderous and intolerant history. The Moslem invasion of India is heartbreaking in its cruelty, viciousness and slaughter. So too is the history of Europe's 30 Years War between Protestants and Catholics. If scripture and history lack explanatory value, where should we look instead? A good place to begin is in the former Ottoman provinces in Europe.

There is today no nation in the world more favorably disposed to the United States than Albania. This tiny, impoverished country has supplied a small contingent to coalition forces in Iraq although its dominant religion is Islam. Bulgaria and Germany have largely Turkish Moslem minorities that are millions strong who quietly practice their faith without threatening or doing violence to Christian majorities. Turkey has struggled for nearly a century to become European with mixed results. Nevertheless, there is a separation of church and state and Turkish Jihadists are extremely rare. The Moslem Druze minority in Israel have long allied themselves with the Jewish state and played an important role in its military affairs. This carefully selected sample would suggest that Islam is not incompatible with a modern civil society.

We need look no further than Saudi Arabia, Iran and parts of Pakistan and Bangladesh along with various other Arab states to find something quite different and genuinely evil by the standards of the more civilized nations of the world. Given both loathesome and admirable examples of Islamic populations we must conclude, at the least, that there is no useful, general statement about Islam that explains Islamic terrorism. Islam is polymorphous and can be either benign or malignant depending on who practices it and where it is practiced.

Islamic terrorists wherever they may be found subscribe to a version of Islam that is the unique product of Arab culture and entirely foreign to many other Moslem societies. The question then is not what is wrong with Islam or the Moslem world but what is profoundly wrong with the Arab culture responsible for this evil. That will be the subject of a future piece.

You Don't Always Get What You Want

2005-08-10T16:16:00.000-07:00

The Bush administration has made abundantly clear its fundamental war aims in Iraq. The initial goal was to remove from power a regime that had persuasively demonstrated a desire to acquire weapons of mass destruction, the ability to produce those kinds of weapons and the willingness to use them against defenseless civilians. That regime was also known to aid and abet international terrorist organizations. That was an easily achievable goal because it could be accomplished through the simple application of military force.

A second and more debatable goal was replacing the former regime with a friendly, respectable and viable democracy that would inspire Arabs elsewhere to demand nothing less and thus destabilize in a positive way the schlerotic despotisms that rule Arabs in other countries. This is a noble, necessary and extraordinarily ambitious experiment. However, it is not a goal that can be achieved through brute force. If it is to be achieved at all it must be accomplished by Iraqis with the motivation, influence, commitment and courage to settle for nothing else. America in general and the Bush administration in particular cannot be held ultimately responsible for the outcome in this regard. The best it can do is try to influence the shape of the political battlefield while using its good offices and limited powers of friendly persuasion.

It is therefore important for those who would make at least a pretense of objectivity to try to grasp a few basic facts. American armed forces can help the interim government buy the time it needs to create and deploy security forces capable of defeating the current insurrection. Public order is the responsibility of the Iraqi government.

America can't dictate the contents of the forthcoming Iraqi proposed constitution. While America can offer its advice to the Iraqis who must do the necessary haggling and political camel trading needed to create a constitution capable of winning broad approval, America can't be held responsible for the outcome in that matter either.

It is very hard to predict how things will ultimately play out as America has very little control over outcomes. We should therefore prepare ourselves for disappointment and have enough sense to allocate blame in a rational fashion. In the meantime, there are a number of scenarios that should be considered:

The politicians writing the Iraqi constitution do a superb job by Western standards. The Kurds love it, the Shiites can live with it and the Sunnis can endure it. It is widely embraced and enthusiastically endorsed by the great majority of Iraqi voters.
It's a great constitution by Western standards. While the Kurds love it, Shiites and Sunnis can't live with it.
It is flawed, by Western standards, and asserts that public policy and national laws will conform to Sharia law. It creates a political chasm between moderate Muslims and secularists and a slender Shiite majority.
The proposed constitution fails to win the approval of the required parties and it is back to the drawing board.

There are more possible outcomes than those listed above and America can be held accountable for none of them. The Iraqis must make the political bed that they will all share.

The content of the new Iraqi constitution, if it is accepted, does not guarantee that those elected to form a new constitutional government will honor it. The new government, just like the current interim government, may officially forbid torture and extrajudicial punishment while at the same practicing both. While America may have strived to create an Arab version of Switzerland it may have to settle instead for a replica of Egypt -- a corrupt, autocratic, oppressive, nominally democratic excuse for a modern civil society that is less threatening to our interests than most other Muslim nations.

The best we can do is use our limited influence to help Iraqis get the government that the majority of them deserve. If it proves in time to be a horrid government that isn't our fault. The Iraqis will have had their chance and blown it. So be it.

Big Government Conservatism

2005-08-09T16:09:00.000-07:00

The term "big government conservatism" is oxymoronic in terms of Libertarianism and Classical Liberalism. In the best of all possible worlds there would be no such thing. Furthermore, a national government that was by and large relatively small, weak, unintrusive and penurious was the norm before the Great Depression and the major political realignment that would transfer the keys to the political kingdom to the Democrat Party. Political affairs used to be a lot more to the liking of conservatives than they are now. If only we could make it so again. But can we?

Franklin Roosevelt's achievements in mitigating the devastating effects of Great Depression mass unemployment are debatable and it can be fairly argued that he did more harm than good by inhibiting the needed capital investment that would later be dramatically increased during WWII. However, an ounce of image is often worth more than a pound of performance in some circumstances and Democrat initiatives during the Roosevelt administration offered the only hope of future employment and economic security to much if not most of the population. For every person desperately unemployed there was very likely another who feared the same fate and there were others still who knew them both and sympathized with their plights and almost all looked to government to do something useful to help them. The era of big government was upon us.

The Great Depression produced what Thomas S. Kuhn may have classified as a paradigm shift. It certainly led to a radical change in general American thinking about the role of government in the economy and the respective duties and responsibilities of citizen and state. While there are conservatives who would very much like to put the toothepaste back into the tube it is unlikely they will make much progress in doing so. Americans, in the main, seem to want a big, activist government that solves problems and cures ills. So, what to do? Get real.

If the majority of Americans want a big, activist government it makes sense to give it to them. Doing otherwise is a recipe for political oblivion. If Republicans are to prevail against their Democrat rivals they need to propose policies and legislative initiatives that promise to make things better and those policies and initiatives should be designed to appeal to a majority of the electorate. At the same time they can endeavor to make those policies and initiatives consistent with some conservative values. That entails sensitivity to economic consequences, using economic incentives instead of coercion and block grants to states rather than centralized command and control bureaucracies enforcing one-size-fits-all solutions. The key to success then is creating a general perception that Republicans can do a better job of giving most Americans the big government they seem to want. That can be achieved by persuading most voters that Republicans are more innovative, more efficient and more pragmatic than their Democrat counterparts while being no less caring than Democrats about those who find themselves at or near the bottom of the economic totem pole. Republicans can also make a persuasive argument that they are less beholden to single-issue special interest groups than their Democrat rivals.

Democrat activists who hold an opinion on the matter seem to generally agree that their political party lacks a coherent message and "ideas" that a majority of voters would find appealing. They are correct. You can't cobble together a coherent, majoritarian message out of the conflicting or unrelated demands and priorities of NOW, the ACLU, AFL-CIO, Environmental Defense Fund, NAACP and other constituencies with public policy tunnel-vision. Sound public policy is not the mathematical product of minority grievances and rent-seeking.

I was once a small-government, traditional conservative who would have been delighted to witness the abolition of whole departments of government and a general retreat from big government. In time, I realized that the political product most appealing to the majority of voters is effective, efficient, pro-active, big government. George Bush's compassionate conservatism fills that bill. That product sells well and the Republican control of Congress and the White House are evidence of that.

I fancy myself a pragmatic conservative. Ideological wishful thinking is, to me, pointless. I am therefore a big government conservative. If we are compelled to perform odious tasks in order to gain and maintain political power let us at least try to do a more credible and efficient job than our clueless competition.

A Little Bit of Tolerance Can Go a Long Way

2005-08-08T17:16:00.000-07:00

I once knew a Young Earth Creationist Christian who attempted to prove to me that the Earth was a little bit more than 6,000 years old and everything that 99.9 percent or more of scientists thought to the contrary was wrong. As there was no amount scientific evidence that could possibly change his mind, I concentrated on discrediting his sources. In so doing I found some remarkably good material critical of some aspects of the theory of evolution. While it is clear that the universe and our planet are very, very old and the fossil record clearly shows that the evolution of life forms has in fact taken place, contemporary evolutionary theory is at times weak when it comes to mechanisms.

Darwin thought that evolution would be both continuous and very gradual. The fossil record says something very different. Taxa seem to be stable for incredibly long periods of time before going through periods of rapid change. Stephen Jay Gould attempted to explain this with his theory of punctuated equilibrium. There are other good natural explanations as well. While this phenomenon is currently the subject of scientific debate there is good reason that to believe that a satisfactory natural explanation will be forthcoming.

Evolutionary theory is also very shaky when it comes to characterizing how the first single cell creatures came into being. The dilute nutrient pond plus outside energy source (lightning, cosmic rays, etc.) theory leaves much to be desired. However, recent discoveries of novel ecological systems flourishing near deep sea hydrothermal vents suggest a viable alternate scenario. The late Tom Gold proposed yet another intriguing theory proposing that life formed in the deep crust of the Earth. However, Stuart Kauffman's theory of autocatalytic networks is a viable alternative to the conventional wisdom of the last half-century and neatly disposes of the argument that life could not have originated naturally because of astronomical improbability.

So, evolutionary theory in currently accepted form is on thin ice when it comes to origins and firmer but not completely solid footing in terms of mechanisms. It is in that regard, subject to attacks by those who deny that evolution is an established fact. However, there is an important distinction between the science that tells us what happened and the science that attempts to describe how it happened. What happened -- the fossil and geological records -- is indisputable. How it happened is another matter altogether. Much work needs to be done there.

There are those who argue that, along with conventional evolutionary facts and theories, we should also present an alternative called "Intelligent Design". Our universe may, in fact, be the result of a failed laboratory experiment conducted by a student on the planet Zork in another universe. Or it may have taken place in exactly the way described in the Biblical book of Genesis. The problem with Intelligent Design theories is that they cannot provide through any scientific means that we currently accept answers to the two most fundamental questions that arise from that theory: who did it and how did he, she, it or them do it? While Intelligent Design is an interesting speculation, it is nothing more than that.

However, some Christians have an incontrovertable belief in the divine origins of life on Earth. They want students to at least be exposed to the possibility that their notion has some merit. I see little harm in reasonable accommodation between contending parties in this matter. The theory of evolution is of little interest to almost everyone other than evolutionary biologists. At best, it is nice to know for the rare person who has an interest in the matter and irrelevant to everyone else.

I would therefore propose a measure of tolerance. Let Bible Belt school districts or other local authorities who dictate curricula go about their business without interference. No measurable or significant harm will be done and we can avoid a needless war between Christian anti-evolutionists and those who despise them that doesn't have to be fought to be won. This is not a life and death matter and the fate of the Republic does not hang in the balance. Lighten up, give some slack and no harm will be done.

The Imaginary Think Tank Gap

2005-08-05T18:04:00.000-07:00

There are countless organizations that retail themselves as think tanks providing fact-based and well-reasoned analysis of problems of various kinds and public policy proposals aimed at addressing them. The greater part of those specializing in economic, foreign policy and defense matters are either conservative or nonpartisan.

Sound public policy must meet three fundamental requirements. It must first and foremost be problem-oriented and define problems in a concrete and specific fashion. It must honestly and objectively collect pertinent facts and examine the various ways in which problems can be solved in order to offer sound solutions. Finally, public policy proposals must be politically viable. Recommending public policies that have absolutely no chance of being implemented is nothing more than wishful thinking. Think tanks that actually think about how to solve problems do not do so in order to advance an ideology. They are realistic and pragmatic.

Conservative and non-partisan think tanks, on the whole, do a respectable job of meeting those requirements. Conservative think tanks work hard to find free-market carrots that can be used by government to promote the general welfare and are motivated to find solutions that don't rely on rigid bureaucratic command and control models. They are predisposed to create economic incentives for people to do the right thing rather than commanding people to do the right thing and punishing them if they don't. This is a good thing as civilized people usually prefer persuasion to coercion.

While conservative think tanks are highly motivated to find free-market solutions to problems they are not adverse to employing coercion when there is no other practical alternative. This pragmatism is exemplified by the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. That extraordinarily successful piece of legislation betrays its conservative think tank origins by carefully avoiding the rigid, command and control systems often favored by the Left. While it established goals and measures of success it did not dictate how those goals should be achieved. Instead, it provided block grants to the states thereby funding 50 different experiments aimed at meeting the goals it had established.

Democrat Party soul-searching after its last major electoral defeat led some Democrats to conclude that they were losing the war of ideas and that this was in large measure due to a relative shortage of liberal think tanks. Using money donated by George Soros and others, Democrat activists attempted to create a competitive think tank that would in time provide for them well-researched and well-reasoned policy proposals consistent with their ideology. It calls itself The Center for American Progress. A brief visit to its Web page is instructive. Don't look for any original research reports. There aren't any. You will have to settle for links to genuine liberal think tanks like the The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Urban Institute and Brookings Institution. The Center for American Progress's Web resembles that of left wing political publications like The Progressive, American Prospect and The Nation. However, links to news reports and op-ed pieces are not the same thing as original research and analysis.

An alliance of 80 wealthy Democrats has pledged at least $1 million each to expand the number of liberal or progressive think tanks. But do liberals really suffer from a think tank disadvantage that is responsible for their lack of useful ideas in the public policy arena?

My review of bone fide liberal think tanks indicates that while they are certainly outnumbered and outspent by their conservative counterparts they do, in fact, engage in original research and formulate concrete public policy proposals. For instance, the Brookings Institution has put forth a competitive proposal for social security reform. Democrats are not as short of constructive public policy ideas as some may think. The real problem is that Democrat politicians are unable to make effective use of the research and analysis produced by liberal think tanks in the course of developing legislative initiatives.

On the whole, single-issue, special interest groups have relatively little influence in the Republican Party and a great deal of influence in the Democrat Party. Republicans can propose Social Security reforms without having them approved by the AARP. They can legislate tort reform without consulting with the Association of Trial Lawyers of America or the National Bar Association. They can attempt to improve K-12 education without seeking the approval of teachers unions. They can propose and pass the Central American Free Trade Agreement without seeking the approval of the AFL-CIO. They passed an energy bill without consulting with the World Wildlife Federation and Environmental Defense Fund.

Single-issue advocacy groups by their very nature care nothing about the general public interest. They are intent on furthering that one special interest that they passionately care about and care nothing about the harm that may befall others who don't share their interest. Environmental pressure groups are the clearest example of this problem. Some of their proposals would cripple the economy, throw millions of people out of work and increase poverty. They don't care. Teachers unions want their members to be paid more and work less while advancing a left-wing agenda. Don't expect innovative ideas for educational improvement from that source.

Republicans are not without special interest influences. The National Rifle Association and Pro-Life groups are important constituencies. But what about Big Business and corporations? They give about 60% of their donations to the party with the lion's share of power in Washington. Democrats got favorable treatment when they were ruling the roost and now Republicans are getting their turn. Businessmen and business associations have more access and influence during Republican administrations because Republicans want to see the economy thrive, exports grow and American competitiveness increase. You can't remove obstacles to success unless you talk to the people hindered by those obstacles and John Sweeney isn't one of them.

The Democrat Party needs to dramatically move to the center in order to develop innovative, pragmatic, public policy initiatives appealing to the majority of voters. Radical, single-issue special interest groups should be politely shown the door. The Web page of the Progressive Policy Institute demonstrates the good that can come from this. It is unashamedly patriotic and has a genuine interest in fostering economic growth in order to finance programs for the needy. It is a fan of biotechnology and the enormous good it can do by reducing starvation in poor countries and preserving the environment. It may get some things wrong but it is getting a lot of things right. It has a direct channel of communications to the Democratic Leadership Council and a handful of centrist Democrats in Congress. In that regard, it is unobstructed by the special interest groups that hold the rest of the Democrat Party in thrall. It shows where the Democrat Party needs to go in order to be a credible opponent in the war of ideas.

User Friendly Capitalism

2005-08-05T12:34:00.000-07:00

Laissez faire, unfettered capitalism, to the extent that it has ever existed, was, in effect unrestricted, total economic warfare. Products, services and political influence were the weapon systems and managers the officers and generals. Markets were the territories in dispute and market segments theaters of war. The goals of big business were the same as the goals of imperialistic wars: conquer the desired territory and exploit its inhabitants.

The ultimate prize was a market monopoly that would allow big businesses to charge all that the traffic could bear for the necessities of life. If competing armies were too numerous and strong to defeat, peace treaties could be negotiated. Prices then could be fixed not through competition but collusion. Geographical markets could be divided up in such a way as to create local monopolies. Foreign economic armies could be kept at bay through high tariffs if you lined the pockets of enough politicians. Why improve quality or lower prices when there was no need to do so? The consumer be damned.

And what of the men, women and children who performed industrial labor? There was a bottomless supply of immigrant humanity that when given the choice between brutal, inhuman working conditions and starvation would choose the former. If they were injured, crippled or killed because of unsafe working conditions they could be easily discarded and replaced. They, along with the consumer, could be squeezed dry in order to maximize profits.

This is an accurate depiction of what Frederick Bastiat called “the natural political economy”. Perpetual competition between large enterprises is as unnatural as perpetual warfare that admits no possibility of victory or negotiated settlement. The idealized depiction of unfettered capitalism retailed by orthodox Libertarian economists envisions a world in which creative entrepreneurs and managers endlessly and voluntarily compete with one another to provide the consumer with more and better for less. This fantasy can only be sustained by ignoring history.

In 1912 a large group of Republicans bolted from their party and created a new one, the National Progressive Party. They ultimately chose Theodore Roosevelt as their Presidential candidate. Regrettably, they lost the election. However, their party platform tells us much about the largely unfettered capitalism of the time.

In the section of the platform entitled “Social and Industrial Justice” it calls for the following:

“The supreme duty of the Nation is the conservation of human resources through an enlightened measure of social and industrial justice. We pledge ourselves to work unceasingly in State and Nation for:

Effective legislation looking to the prevention of industrial accidents, occupational diseases, overwork, involuntary unemployment, and other injurious effects incident to modern industry;

The fixing of minimum safety and health standards for the various occupations, and the exercise of the public authority of State and Nation, including the Federal Control over interstate commerce, and the taxing power, to maintain such standards;

The prohibition of child labor;

Minimum wage standards for working women, to provide a "living wage" in all industrial occupations;

The general prohibition of night work for women and the establishment of an eight hour day for women and young persons;

One day’s rest in seven for all wage workers;

The eight hour day in continuous twenty-four hour industries;

The abolition of the convict contract labor system; substituting a system of prison production for governmental consumption only; and the application of prisoners’ earnings to the support of their dependent families;

Publicity as to wages, hours and conditions of labor; full reports upon industrial accidents and diseases, and the opening to public inspection of all tallies, weights, measures and check systems on labor products;

Standards of compensation for death by industrial accident and injury and trade disease which will transfer the burden of lost earnings from the families of working people to the industry, and thus to the community;

The protection of home life against the hazards of sickness, irregular employment and old age through the adoption of a system of social insurance adapted to American use;

The development of the creative labor power of America by lifting the last load of illiteracy from American youth and establishing continuation schools for industrial education under public control and encouraging agricultural education and demonstration in rural schools;

The establishment of industrial research laboratories to put the methods and discoveries of science at the service of American producers;

We favor the organization of the workers, men and women, as a means of protecting their interests and of promoting their progress.”

The section of the platform concerning business is equally instructive about the economic conditions of the time:

“We believe that true popular government, justice and prosperity go hand in hand, and, so believing, it is our purpose to secure that large measure of general prosperity which is the fruit of legitimate and honest business, fostered by equal justice and by sound progressive laws.

We demand that the test of true prosperity shall be the benefits conferred thereby on all the citizens, not confined to individuals or classes, and that the test of corporate efficiency shall be the ability better to serve the public; that those who profit by control of business affairs shall justify that profit and that control by sharing with the public the fruits thereof.

We therefore demand a strong National regulation of inter-State corporations. The corporation is an essential part of modern business. The concentration of modem business, in some degree, is both inevitable and necessary for national and international business efficiency. But the existing concentration of vast wealth under a corporate system, unguarded and uncontrolled by the Nation, has placed in the hands of a few men enormous, secret, irresponsible power over the daily life of the citizen—a power insufferable in a free Government and certain of abuse.

This power has been abused, in monopoly of National resources, in stock watering, in unfair competition and unfair privileges, and finally in sinister influences on the public agencies of State and Nation. We do not fear commercial power, but we insist that it shall be exercised openly, under publicity, supervision and regulation of the most efficient sort, which will preserve its good while eradicating and preventing its ill.

To that end we urge the establishment of a strong Federal administrative commission of high standing, which shall maintain permanent active supervision over industrial corporations engaged in inter-State commerce, or such of them as are of public importance, doing for them what the Government now does for the National banks, and what is now done for the railroads by the Inter-State Commerce Commission.

Such a commission must enforce the complete publicity of those corporation transactions which are of public interest; must attack unfair competition, false capitalization and special privilege, and by continuous trained watchfulness guard and keep open equally all the highways of American commerce.

Thus the business man will have certain knowledge of the law, and will be able to conduct his business easily in conformity therewith; the investor will find security for his capital; dividends will be rendered more certain, and the savings of the people will be drawn naturally and safely into the channels of trade.

Under such a system of constructive regulation, legitimate business, freed from confusion, uncertainty and fruitless litigation, will develop normally in response to the energy and enterprise of the American business man.

We favor strengthening the Sherman Law by prohibiting agreement to divide territory or limit output; refusing to sell to customers who buy from business rivals; to sell below cost in certain areas while maintaining higher prices in other places; using the power of transportation to aid or injure special business concerns; and other unfair trade practices.”

The dissident Republicans who formed the National Progressive Party in 1912 weren’t Socialists or anticapitalists. Their objective was to declaw and housebreak capitalism; not abolish it.

While Milton Friedman and like-minded economists might argue that free-market competition would over time have ended child labor, 7 day work weeks and 12 hour work days while at the same time increasing workplace safety that will remain forever an untested and unproven theory. Corporations are by nature amoral and self-serving. Corporate management is nevertheless rational and pragmatic. It will comply with the laws and regulations designed to prevent exploitation of workers and consumers if the likelihood of getting caught doing otherwise is high enough and the resulting penalties severe enough.

The objectives of the 1912 National Progressive Party have more than been achieved. Today, American corporations and countless sole proprietorships are amazingly well behaved. Rogue corporations (Enron, Tyco, Adelphi, etc.) are rare and their abuses quickly led to greater regulatory oversight. The enormous creative energy of free enterprise has been effectively harnessed and put to work in the public interest. The continuing decline of the labor union movement is evidence enough of a larger proportion of the workforce believing that it is paid and treated fairly and decently by its employers.

It is therefore difficult for a rational person to fathom the fierce animosity towards large corporations expressed by the base of the Democrat Party. As it cannot be the result of knowledge, it must be the product of ignorance. Orthodox Libertarians on the other hand don't seem to appreciate the fact that contemporary American capitalism is an artificial creation of government. It is virtuous not because it is naturally so but because it is forced to be so.

The question then is not whether capitalists should be kept on a leash but how long or short that leash should be. If the leash is too long, consumers and workers suffer. If the leash is too short they suffer as well. The key to finding optimum leash length is sound public policy aimed at optimizing economic growth without compromising the general welfare. In this regard, neither Progressive paranoia nor Libertarian panglossian fantasies are likely to prove helpful.

Four Keys to National Survival

2005-08-04T16:17:00.000-07:00

Our government does many things. There are persuasive arguments that it does too much and opposing arguments claiming it does too little. However, there are four things that a government must do right for a nation to survive and prosper. They are:

Internal Security. Citizen's persons and property must be protected from the human predators that every society spawns. Citizens should feel safe in their homes, workplaces and in public places.
External Security. Government must be able to effectively defend the nation from external threats to its vital interests.
Political Economy. Government must remove obstacles to economic growth while at the same time insuring that neither workers nor consumers are ill-used or exploited in the process.
Accountability. Government must a provide a peaceful means by which it can be changed if it fails meet its fundamental obligations.

Everything else is frosting on the cake -- political luxury items if you will. They are not essential to national survival although they may be very desirable and nice to have.

Is American government doing a good job on the basics of national survival? How to find out? The list of links provided to the right is aimed at helping people figure that out. They are with one exception (Lucianne) links to think tanks or publications that debate and analyze public policy. All but one of the think tanks is either conservative or nonpartisan. The liberal Progressive Policy Institute earned its place because it publishes some very good analysis. It is a "Third Way", centrist Democrat endeavor that does not reject free-market solutions out of hand and it isn't driven by a radical ideology.

Is our foreign policy sound? Does it serve to protect or advance out vital national interests? Is our military sound? Are our defense dollars being well spent and are we spending too much or too little? What can we do to increase employment and alleviate poverty? How can we balance human wants and needs with our desire to conserve or improve the environment? How can we do a better job of growing our economy without doing more harm than good to workers and consumers? While you will not find definitive answers to all of those questions by exploring the links I have provided you will uncover some of the pieces of the puzzle and be exposed to some good ideas of what the rest might look like.

You will find no links to sites involved in the day-to-day partisan mud-wrestling that is offensive to anyone seriously interested in good government. There is nothing useful to be learned from either Paul Krugman or Ann Coulter or Al Franken or Rush Limbaugh when it comes to essential matters of sound public policy. I have little regard for partisan mobs brandishing their torches and pitchforks over issues of little substance or consequence.

Sound public policy can be a matter of life and death. It can be the difference between starvation and food security, chronic illness and health, economic growth and stagnation for many millions of people. Done wrongly it can break a lot of what works and done right it can fix a lot of what is broken. It should be taken seriously.

A Closer Look at the Progressive Promise

2005-08-03T17:55:00.000-07:00

It is hard to find anyone who can speak with clarity and authority about what self-styled Progressives stand for. An excellent example of this can be found in a mission statement published in the online version of "The Progressive" magazine:

“The mission of The Progressive is to be a journalistic voice for peace and social justice at home and abroad. The magazine, its affiliates, and its staff steadfastly oppose militarism, the concentration of power in corporate hands, the disenfranchisement of the citizenry, poverty, and prejudice in all its guises. We champion peace, social and economic justice, civil rights, civil liberties, human rights, a preserved environment, and a reinvigorated democracy.”

The purr words and catch phrases in this statement might have very specific and concrete meanings to Progressives but they are baffling to those who don't know their secret language. Is there anyone who publically opposes what The Progressive says it is for? Executing convicted murderers is, to me, an example of social justice. Paying people what they are worth is to me an example of economic justice. I am against poverty as well. But I think the best way to fight it is to grow the economy faster than the workforce. And what can The Progressive possibly mean by "a reinvigorated democracy"? Progressive rhetoric in this regard is labile. Its terms and slogans can mean anything you want them to mean.

Recently, the Congressional Progressive Caucus within the Democrat party took its best shot at producing an agenda and set of goals that would in large measure satisfy those who identify themselves as Progressives while at the same time offering the promise of appealing to centrist or mildly left-of-center voters who don't think of themselves as Progressives.

The position statement is entitled "The Progressive Promise: Fairness for All". That sounds nice. For many of us, life at times seems unfair. Children sent to bed before they are inclined to do so are one of many aggrieved parties. People who aren't paid as much as they would like to be paid may be displeased as well. Being passed over for promotion is a particulary irksome form of unfairness when you believe you were the best candidate. Life is filled, bulging to the seams, with perceived unfairness. The promise of fairness for all is the next best thing to a promise of happiness for all and, perhaps, just as empty. Let's take a closer look at how Progressives are going to insure fairness for us all.

THE PROGRESSIVE PROMISE: FAIRNESS FOR ALL

The Congressional Progressive Caucus offers the Progressive Promise for all. We believe in government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Our fairness plan is rooted in our core principles. It also embodies national priorities that are consistent with the values, needs, and hopes of all our people, not just the powerful and the privileged. We pledge our unwavering commitment to these legislative priorities and we will not rest until they become law. (Is there any American who is not a Muslim opposed to government of, by and for the people? )

1. FIGHTING FOR ECONOMIC JUSTICE AND SECURITY IN THE U.S. AND GLOBAL ECONOMIES.

To uphold the right to universal access to affordable, high quality healthcare for all. (There is no such right under the Constitution and it is unclear about how you can provide to everyone an unlimited amount of a scarce resource. Nevertheless, there are working models of universal mediocre healthcare. Canada and Great Britain are superb examples.)

To preserve guaranteed Social Security benefits for all Americans, protect private pensions, and require corporate accountability. (No one is attempting to deny elderly Americans Social Security benefits. You need not protect that which is not threatened. Private pensions are currently protected by a government pension insurance fund. Corporate accountability for what?)
To invest in America and create new jobs in the U.S. by building more affordable housing, re-building America’s schools and physical infrastructure, cleaning up our environment, and improving homeland security. (Public works projects don't create new private sector jobs producing new goods and services. Public housing projects are more of a problem than a solution and how would homeland security be improved?)

To export more American products and not more American jobs and demand fair trade. (We will export more American products if they are cheaper and better than those of foreign competitors. How can government accomplish that? Fair trade is a code word for imposing unaffordable burdens on poor countries that would like to trade more freely with us. Naughty, naughty.)

To reaffirm freedom of association and enforce the right to organize. (We already have the constitutional right to freedom of association and there is no credible threat to that right except, perhaps, for the Boy Scouts of America. Enforce the "right" to organize what?)

To ensure working families can live above the poverty line and with dignity by raising and indexing the minimum wage. (Economic studies show that working class families do not support themselves with minimum wage jobs although a lot of unskilled kids earn spending money by taking them).

2. PROTECTING AND PRESERVING CIVIL RIGHTS AND CIVIL LIBERTIES.

To sunset expiring provisions of the Patriot Act and bring remaining provisions into line with the U. S. Constitution. (No provision of the current version of the Patriot Act has been ruled unconstitutional by a Federal court. The final authority on constitutionality is the Supreme Court; not the Democrat party.)

To protect the personal privacy of all Americans from unbridled police powers and unchecked government intrusion. (What unbridled police powers? What unchecked government intrusion?)

To extend the Voting Rights Act and reform our electoral processes. (Why does the Voting Rights Act need to be extended and what is wrong with our electoral processes?)

To fight corporate consolidation of the media and ensure opportunity for all voices to be heard. (71 cable TV channels, satellite radio and 14 million BLOGS don't allow all voices to be heard? Time to ask Al Gore to demonstrate the Internet.)

To ensure enforcement of all legal rights in the workplace. (Is there a failure to enforce legal rights in the workplace? That's news to me.)

To eliminate all forms of discrimination based upon color, race, religion, gender, creed, disability, or sexual orientation. (You mean I don't get to pick my friends and date who I want? Or is there some form of systematic discrimination in law or business practice that has thus far gone unnoticed by the ACLU?)

3. PROMOTING GLOBAL PEACE AND SECURITY.

To honor and help our overburdened international public servants – both military and civilian. (Progressives are not known for honoring the military and I not sure what an "international public servant is". Please explain.)

To bring U. S. troops home from Iraq as soon as possible. (As soon as possible is when Iraqi security forces can put down the current insurgency without our help. That is already our policy. Another word for it is "winning".)

To re-build U.S. alliances around the world, restore international respect for American power and influence, and reaffirm our nation’s constructive engagement in the United Nations and other multilateral organizations. (Condolezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton are more than capable of doing that. )

To enhance international cooperation to reduce the threats posed by nuclear proliferation and weapons of mass destruction. (I thought we were already doing that.)

To increase efforts to combat hunger and the scourge of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and other infectious diseases. (The Bush administration is already doing that in spite of environmentalist opposition.)

To encourage debt relief for poor countries and support efforts to reach the UN’s Millennium Goals for Developing Countries. (Too late, the Bush Administration is already doing that. However, we determine our goals; not the U.N.)

Fairness for all then entails protecting that which is not threatened, doing what is already being done, forbidding that which is already forbidden, squandering money on public works projects in the futile hope that they will contribute to economic growth while raising the minimum wage and figuring out how to achieve the impossible: providing everyone with more medical services than are available or affordable.

The document is long on solving problems that exist only in the fevered imaginations of the left and profoundly short of concrete proposals aimed at solving real problems. It is in the final analysis, vacuous and little more than a concatenation of high-minded slogans that on closer examination prove to be meaningless. While it may make Progressives wiggly and excited it has little appeal to the average American. Better luck next time.

Portrait of a Compassionate Environmentalist

2005-08-02T16:17:00.000-07:00

One of the most striking features of the environmentalist movement leadership is its callous and psychopathic disregard for human suffering. Consider the following:

We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion—guilt-free at last!

—Stewart Brand (writing in the Whole Earth Catalogue).

Free Enterprise really means rich people get richer. They have the freedom to exploit and psychologically rape their fellow human beings in the process…. Capitalism is destroying the earth.

—Helen Caldicott, Union of Concerned Scientists

We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects…. We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of tens of millions of acres of presently settled land.

—David Foreman, Earth First!

If you ask me, it’d be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won’t give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other.

—Amory Lovins in The Mother Earth–Plowboy Interview, Nov/Dec 1977, p.2

The only real good technology is no technology at all. Technology is taxation without representation, imposed by our elitist species (man) upon the rest of the natural world.

—John Shuttleworth

I suspect that eradicating smallpox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.

—John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs.

—John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing....This is not to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run.

—Economist editorial

Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.

—Dave Forman, Founder of Earth First!

If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human populations back to sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS

—Earth First! Newsletter

Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, is not as important as a wild and healthy planet…Some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.

—David Graber, biologist, National Park Service

The collective needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans.

—Dr. Reed F. Noss, The Wildlands Project

If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.

—Prince Phillip, World Wildlife Fund

Cannibalism is a “radical but realistic solution to the problem of overpopulation.”

—Lyall Watson, The Financial Times, 15 July 1995

We, in the green movement, aspire to a cultural model in which killing a forest will be considered more contemptible and more criminal than the sale of 6-year-old children to Asian brothels.

—Carl Amery

To feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem.

—Lamont Cole

The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States: We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the U.S. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are. And it is important to the rest of the world to make sure that they don’t suffer economically by virtue of our stopping them.

—Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund

It is important to distinguish between people who have warm and fuzzy feelings about the biosphere and are concerned about the effects of human activity and those whose principle occupation and source of income are derived from environmental activism. Buying biodegradable laundry detergent does not an environmentalist make. Taking at face value the bogus claims of the World Wildlife Federation, Green Peace and the Environmental Defense Fund does not make you an environmentalist any more than reading the Wall Street Journal makes you a capitalist. Those sitting in the stands cheering their team are quite distinct from the players struggling to move the ball down the field. The environmentalist team, on the whole, regards humanity as a malignant infestation that should either be eradicated completely or reduced to insignificant and inconsequential numbers. The more infant mortality the better. The more poverty the better. The more disease the better. Famine and pestilence? Bring them on!

Savoring the notion of human extinction may be a loathesome, antihuman fantasy but engaging in mass murder is another thing altogether. If you pass the following multiple choice test you will understand this distinction.

The greatest mass murderer of the 20th century was:

a. Joseph Stalin
b. Adolph Hitler
c. Pol Pot
d. Saddam Hussein
e. Mao Zedong
f. William Ruckelhaus

The correct answer is f, William Ruckelhaus. Acting on behalf of the environmental movement he is directly responsible for the majority of 89 million avoidable deaths from disease. Hitler and Stalin together accomplished less in terms of mass murder and inflicting human suffering. In order to understand who died, why they needlessly died, how those deaths could have been prevented and the spectacular butcher's bill of the environmentalist movement you should thoroughly study the arguments made here: malaria fact s. Make sure javascript is on so you can envision people dying while you browse.

While you can kill tens of millions of impoverished Africans by denying them an effective means to control malaria you can kill many more by denying them clean water and continue to starve them by denying them the irrigation that would make their subsistence farm plots more productive. In this regard the environmentalist movement has been extraordinarily successful. It has in some measure delayed or defeated countless dam projects that would have provided clean water, irrigation and electrical power to millions of third world subsistence farmers who face starvation in lean years and don't do all that well in good ones. The monumental and inhuman cruelty of it all is staggering.

There is however, one leader in the environmental movement who truly and deeply cares about both the environment and the most needy and impoverished people in the world and who strives to find a practical balance in dealing with both. His name is Bjorn Lomborg and he is the author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist" -- a book everyone with an open mind and a concern about the environment should read. While the rigorous and well-documented critique of environmentalist claims found in this book are rightfully open to honest and well-reasoned debate it should be clear to every reader that Lomborg is no less sensitive to needless human suffering than he is to environmental concerns. His exquisite sense of balancing human environmental wants and needs with basic human wants and needs is admirable. He has been vilified and physically assaulted by mainstream environmentalists but nevertheless stands his ground. Throwing food and screaming insults are, to radicals and fanatics, forms of intelligent discourse.

While "The Skeptical Environmentalist" was a much needed antidote to hysterical environmentalist propaganda, Lomborg may, in time, achieve more good for humanity by advancing what he calls the "Copenhagen Consensus". That consensus is the product of bringing together a goodly number of first-class minds that worked together to find ways in which rich countries could best spend the money they were willing to spend in order to alleviate human suffering in impoverished and developing countries.

You don't have to be a genocidal monster to be a leader in the environmentalist movement although that is more often than not helpful. In that regard, Bjorn Lomborg demonstrates how to be a humane, rational and decent environmentalist. He is a Green while I am not. He is a European social democrat and I am far from that. But he remains one of my personal heroes. He should be one of yours as well.

The Scrooge McDuck Fallacy

2005-08-02T13:17:00.000-07:00

I recall Ann Coulter putting it very well when she said that Democrats were convinced that somewhere in America there is a hidden room containing vast quantities of self-renewing wealth that was serving no constructive purpose. If only Democrats could find it, and, like the good little Robin Hoods they aspire to be, distribute it to the needy. I think of this as the Scrooge McDuck Fallacy.

Scrooge McDuck was the enormously rich uncle of Huey, Dewey and Louie and he took great pleasure in cavorting in a huge swimming pool filled with some 30 cubic acres of lucre. Scrooge was both shameless and miserly. As a child I rather liked him and had enough sense to realize that rich people put their money into the bank or invested it just like ordinary folks putting away something for the future. Apparently some children couldn't figure this out and grew up to be Democrats.

The rich enjoy a very high standard of living. They get to buy expensive cars, live in expensive houses, have vacation properties, buy nice things and employ others to look after them and their children. However, those expenditures typically entail very small fractions of their net worth. Grostesque levels of conspicuous consumption are rare among those who have earned their wealth or they are prevented by trust fund managers controlling and conserving inherited wealth. The rare exceptions are more often than not entertainers. Michael Jackson's Neverland fantasy world is probably the most flagrant example of the self-indulgent squandering of wealth that you can find in America.

Estimates of John Kerry's wife's wealth range between $800 million and one billion dollars. Teresa likes to live well and certainly isn't inclined to forgo purchasing what she wants out of a misguided thriftiness. Nevertheless, it is very likely that she spends less than 1% of her net worth a year to pay for her life style. The other 99% or more of her fortune isn't hidden in a secret room or filling a huge swimming pool in the basement of one of her residences. It has been skillfully invested by professional money managers and is very likely producing a good return that more than covers her life-style expenditures.

In order to fulfill their Robin Hood fantasies Democrats are determined to confiscate a larger portion of what rich people earn. This in turn will reduce the amount they invest in the economy which in turn will lead to lower growth. If Democrats confiscate enough investment capital they can cripple the economy. We need look no further than France, Sweden and Germany in order to see that you can kill the duck laying all of those wonderful golden eggs that were once taken for granted.

Thank God for the rich (Michael Jackson, Paris Hilton and miscellaneous others excepted). Let's express our appreciation for the enormous good they do for us all by cutting their taxes. They will invest more and we will benefit along with them.

God Bless Air America

2005-08-02T09:07:00.000-07:00

Conservatives are inclined to ridicule Air America and take pleasure in imagining it folding some day due to lack of audience. They should instead regard Air America as a blessing because it reveals the true nature of the left. This is in sharp contrast to PBS, NPR, CBS, the New York and Los Angeles Times masquerading as objective news organizations while slyly doing their best to advance a left-wing agenda.

Conservative talk radio, at its best, is a mixture of political ridicule, criticism, analysis and positive messages about America that reaffirm mainstream, majority values and attitudes. While Air America can serve up a heaping portion of negativism it is incapable of tempering that message with positive assertions that have broad appeal. In order to keep its audience happy, Air America commentators should say nothing positive about any of the following:

Anything the Bush administration says or does.
America’s armed forces.
Police and law enforcement agencies.
Entrepreneurs and business leaders.
The economy.
Events in Iraq.
Condolezza Rice and American foreign policy.
Christianity.
Anything enacted by Congress and signed into law by President Bush.
Gun ownership.
Free enterprise.
Full-time mothers.
Heterosexual marriage.
Hunting and fishing.
SUVs.
Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and dead white men in general.
The Boy Scouts.
Western civilization.
Patriotism.

At the same time Air America commentators should avoid saying anything that the Democrat coalition of radical, single-issue constituencies might find offensive and those constituencies are very, very easily offended. Trapped in a rhetorical straightjacket, Air America can do little more than recite an unending litany of bitter complaints in the course of promoting a consistently negative image of America. If, at the end of listening to a Rush Limbaugh broadcast, you feel optimistic and proud to be an American Limbaugh has done his job well. If, at the end of an Al Franken broadcast, you feel pessimistic and ashamed to be an American Franken has done his job well.

Air America provides a very valuable service to conservatives because it gives the politically curious but uncommitted an easy way to compare Left and Right. Those who are turned on by Air America are beyond redemption while those who are turned off are potential grist for the conservative mill. God bless Air America.

China's Military Buildup

2005-08-01T15:37:00.000-07:00

Today I read "China's Military Faces the Future" edited by John R. Lilley and David Shambaugh. I also read "The Chinese Armed Forces in the 21st Century" edited by Larry M. Wortzel. I did so because of a recent story by Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz that claimed that the People's Republic of China would be in a position to successfully invade Taiwan two years from now and might very well do so. You can find this and other scarey stories here: Gertz Stories.

Experts on the subject of China's military capabilities now and for the foreseeable future agree on a number of important points. The first of those is that China lacks the high-tech military-industrial base needed to advance the state of the art in weapons systems. The best that China can currently do is buy weapons produced by other countries. Some of those weapons are very good indeed as weapons are the only high-quality manufactured products that have been available from the former USSR and current Russian Federation. Our good friend, Israel, given the choice between respecting our strategic interests or selling high-tech weapons to China has chosen the latter. Vile France, Perfidious Albion along with Italy and Germany have declining defense industries in desperate need of foreign customers and, in the absence of national interests in East Asia, are eager to sell to China. The only limit on the PRC's ability to acquire and deploy first-class, high-tech weaponry is the size of its defense budget.

While China can cobble together a formidable list of competitive weapons it is missing one critical piece of the puzzle: the digital command, control, communications and information systems (C3I) that give America its decisive advantage in land, air and sea operations. Chinese military strategists are accutely aware of this deficiency and some call for the development of systems of asymmetrical warfare that would neutralize America's C3I advantage. This type of thinking is called RMA for "Revolution in Military Affairs" and argues that given relative parity in weapons, personnel and training you can defeat an enemy by incapacitating its C3I capabilities. However, this is far easier said than done and you don't know whether your secret C3I neutralizers work until you try them.

On paper, China will, if not in two years, by end of this decade have enough high-tech military hardware to theoretically challenge America in the air and sea space essential to Taiwan's security. However, it will lack the high-tech C3I systems it needs to orchestrate a successful war. In the final analysis, it is not ship against ship, airplane against airplane and man against man. It is war-fighting system against war-fighting system. After two wars with Iraq where American forces were nominally outnumbered 3 to 1 this is abundantly clear to Chinese military planners. The correlation of forces, the traditional inventory list of military formations and weapons systems, can, at best, furnish a raw bill of materials. It will tell you nothing about how those raw materials are fashioned into a single coherent theater weapon system.

Chinese military diplomacy has two goals: securing access to current military products and technology and weakening military alliances between America and friendly nations in Asia and the Western Pacific. While China has had great success in achieving the former, it has had much less success in the latter. China has maritime territorial disputes with too many of its neighbors and if it attempts to resolve any of them through force it will quickly find itself balanced by defensive alliances with the U.S. The recent 10-year military cooperation agreement between India and America was in this regard a major setback.

The liklihood of an American war with China depends entirely on whether Chinese military and political leaders realistically assess relative military strengths and weaknesses. If they get it wrong, there may be a war. If they get it right there won't be one. Thus far, they have been more realistic than arrogant. Let us pray that this continues to be the case.

"China's Military Faces the Future" edited by John R. Lilley and David Shambaugh is available from Amazon for the bargain price of $92.50 a copy. Much of what it asserts is available above at my favorite price.

Alternate Mathematical Reality

2005-07-30T12:23:00.000-07:00

The following quotation is taken from "Arab Civilization and Its Impact on the West" by Dr. Abdullah Mohammed Sindi. The complete document can be found at Arab Alternate Reality along with various links to rabid antisemitic literature including The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Dr. Sindi also thoughtfully offers a large gallery of antisemitic caricatures that would have warmed Adolph Hitler's heart and found a welcome place on a bulletin board in the SS barracks at Auschwitz.

"The Arabs and Muslims contributed more to the field of mathematics, the basic foundation of modern civilization, than any other people in history. To the magnificent Arab civilization the world owes algebra, algorithm (logarithm), arithmetic, calculus, geometry, trigonometry, the decimal system, and the brilliant "zero". The revolutionary "zero", which gave us what is referred to in the West as the Arabic decimal numeration system, did not originate in India as some Western historians claim but was rather developed in ancient Iraq by the Neo-Babylonians maybe as early as 500 BCE. [21] American mathematics Professor Karl J. Smith indicated in his textbook, The Nature of Mathematics, that while the ancient Indians developed mathematical digital symbols, their numeration system offered no advantage over other earlier systems because it did not contain a "zero" or use a positional system. [22] Although the Arabs’ Semitic ancestors in ancient Iraq developed the “zero”, it was only through the great post-Islamic Arab civilization that it was incorporated into the main body of the general mathematical theory. It took Europe almost 300 years to finally accept the "zero" as a gift from the Arabs. The Arabic numerals were simultaneously expressed in somewhat two different figures or forms, one Abbasid (the eastern style which most Arabs currently use) and one Andalusian (the western style which is used today in the Arab Maghrib countries of Northwest Africa). It was this Arab Andalusian form of numerals (i.e., 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9) that the West and the rest of the world eagerly adopted; hence the worldwide label "Arabic numerals"

None of the above is true. So-called Arabic numerals, including zero, were invented around 400 A.D. in India. Arab mathematicians first became aware of this system of notation about 377 years later. The Arab mathematicians who made use of them properly referred to them as Indian numerals (أرقام هندية, arqam hindiyyah). Until the modern era it was only Arab mathematicians who used this system. Arabs involved in commerce used a method very similar to the Greek and Hebrew systems. It entailed the use of letters of the alphabet. The first set of nine letters corresponded to the numbers 1-9, the second to 10-90 and the third to 100-900. It had no symbol for zero nor did it allow decimal fractions. Arab astronomers used a base 60 Babylonian scheme that did allow for fractions and a zero.

The Italian mathematician Leonardo Pisano also known as Fibonacci made the formal case for general adoption of the Indian system in a book published in 1202. However, the system did not come into general use in the Western world until the invention of the printing press 250 years later. The Arab world followed suit centuries later. The complete truth of the matter can be found in the pertinent Wikepedia entry.

Dr. Sindi claims to have taught at a number of California colleges and universities. It is regrettable that young and impressionable American students were exposed to this bigoted, ignorant, delusional creature in the guise of an instructor.

Learning Political Economy by Example

2005-07-30T07:56:00.000-07:00

We now know that the former Soviet Empire was an economic and environmental catastrophe. We know that Cuba is poorer today than it was before the revolution. We know that people die by the millions of starvation in North Korea. We can see what a difference capitalism made in the People's Republic of China. We should know that Socialism is a recipe for poverty. Nevertheless, countless Communists, Socialists and anticapitalists in this country and others remain intent on imposing a discredited, failed economic model on their fellow citizens.

Capitalism, however, comes in a large number of flavors and to make capitalism successful you have to do it right. Some countries do it poorly. Others do it amazingly well while others sometimes change their ways for better or worse. I find two examples particularly instructive: Sweden and Ireland. Sweden has over the last generation gone from being the fourth richest nation in the OECD to the seventeenth richest. Meanwhile Ireland has gone from being one of the poorest and most hopeless countries in Europe to the second richest -- tiny Luxembourg is in first place at present.

It should be obvious that Sweden, richer than Ireland in natural resources, blew it big time. Where did it go wrong? What seems to be a sound analysis can be found here: Swede and Sour.

It should also be obvious that Ireland suddenly started doing things right. What was the Celtic Tiger's primary secret of success? Find out here: Celtic Tiger.

Several of the former eastern European satellites of the Soviet Union in search of a role model for economic success appear to have settled on Ireland. An overview of some of what they are doing can be found here: A Flattening Solution. Bulgaria is joining the party and tiny Estonia is growing its economy so rapidly that some are beginning to call it the "Baltic Tiger".

The varying European government economic policies and programs and their track records of success and failure can be instructive to the American voter. The Communist minority in the Democrat party favors the failed Soviet model. A much larger group of democratic Socialists (A.K.A. Progressives) who roost in the Democrat party favors the failed Swedish model. Republicans in the main favor the successful Irish model. Please choose wisely.

When Geopolitics Isn't

2005-07-29T17:21:00.000-07:00

The terms "geopolitics", like the word "issue", is being misused by people who haven't the slightest idea of what it means. This is particularly true of the "No Blood for Oil!" crowd who probably know very little about blood and nothing at all about how the international oil market functions and the ways in which the U.S. government attempts to insure uninterrupted supplies of oil at affordable prices.

Wikepedia provides a very thorough discussion of the origin and meaning of the term "geopolitics". It can be found here: Geopolitics defined. For the last 100 years the word has had a very specific and generally accepted meaning. Nevertheless, there are those who yearn for an impressive way of talking about energy security policy and have hijacked the word and put it to a different use.

A very good example is an excellent article describing American energy security policy. While it is incorrectly entitled "The New Geopolitics of Oil" it does give an overview of how our government tries to insure that we have an uninterrupted supply of oil at affordable prices. You can find it here: Petropolitics. Two elements of energy security policy it fails to address are pipeline and sea lane security.

When Saddam Hussein was ruling the roost the U.S. got about 3% of its imported oil from Iraq. This is petro chump change. If Hussein had found some way to insure that Iraqi oil didn't get to our refiners alternate suppliers would have made up the difference. In short, Iraq has never been a threat to our energy security nor is it likely to ever be an asset. It will, like any other oil producing nation, sell its oil to the highest bidder via a free market distribution system over which the U.S. has absolutely no control. In the end, "No Blood for Oil" leftists can do little more than darkly refer to "geopolitics" although they have no idea of what that word may mean.

Finally, the accepted primary definition of the noun "issue" has for the last 200 years been a dispute between two or more parties. An acknowledged software bug is not an issue. A concern, reservation, suspicion, problem, defective product or unsatisfactory service is not an issue unless it entails a dispute between two or more parties. Diarrhea is not a gastrointestinal issue. You don't have issues about anything. If you are not involved in a dispute with one or more other parties your life is issue free. Please, never use that word again.

Environmental Cognitive Dissonance

2005-07-28T17:01:00.000-07:00

Knowing something about nonlinear dynamical systems I immediately smelled a rat when the MSM began to retail various computerized global circulation models as reliable predictors of the Earth's temperature a century from now. It was clear to me that climatologists didn't know enough about key factors influencing climate to create trustworthy models and a century's worth of linear economic extrapolations were based on the assumption that there would be no significant innovations in energy production technology for the next 100 years. In order to predict the Earth's average temperature 50 years from now it is also necessary to predict the state of technology and characterize the global economy 50 years down the line. The foolishness of it all amazed me. How could anyone take any of this seriously?

Nonetheless, I dispassionately examined the science involved in the first and subsequent IPCC reports along with various doomsday predictions from environmentalist groups. The opinion I ultimately formed wasn't based on press releases but from a thoughtful scrutiny of peer-reviewed studies published in reputable scientific publications. I was helped by the fact that I have in the past been a published scientist and know a great deal about statistics and scientific method. In the end I concluded that the argument for significant anthropogenic sources of warming is weak, the climate is probably getting warmer in unexpected ways and that there was little we can do about it except to gradually adapt to changing circumstances.

Furthermore, it is entirely unclear to me whether further warming is bad or good. CO2 is plant food and necessary for almost all surface life on Earth. What concentrations are too little, too much or just right? There is an average surface temperature that promotes the greatest abundance and diversity of life on this planet. What is it? If you were made God for a day and given two knobs to tweak: CO2 as a percentage of the atmosphere and average surface temperature how would you adjust them in order to maximize plant and animal life on this planet? You don't have a clue, do you? No one else has one either. We are not alone.

Knee-jerk environmentalists who can't accept anything other than incipient ecological Armaggedon are immune to reason. Those who actually want to build a more realistic and dispassionate model of the state of climate prediction efforts are well advised to check out the following links:

The University of Calgary has produced a twenty minute or so video overview of some current scientific objections to claims that global warming is in large or significant measure anthropogenic. See it here Video.
The test of any mathematical model is predictive validity. Would you buy and sell stock based on a computer program that had in the past selected 3 winners, 27 losers and 1 stock that didn't move in either direction? I think not. Would you bet our economy on a global circulation model that did as poorly? You will find a summary of the accuracy of GCM predictions here: Scorecard.
Can you tell the difference between politicized junk science and objective sound science? The Junk Man will help you sort it out at Junk Science.

An enormous amount of grant money has funded a great deal of research since the initial IPCC report and Kyoto fiasco. Scientists have made enormous strides in reconstructing global mean temperatures and atmospheric CO2 concentrations over very long time spans. Their findings are incompatible with the notion that atmospheric CO2 concentration is the principle factor determining global mean temperature. As one would expect in a relatively immature area of scientific inquiry into a very complex phenomenon, the more we learn the less we know. That is as it should be. It also wise to refrain from betting the farm until we have a better understanding of how things really work.

A Gadfly on the Rump of Academia

2005-07-27T20:21:00.000-07:00

Conservatives, in spite of the blackout by the MSM, are well aware of the fact that liberal arts departments in most American institutions of higher learning have become political lunatic asylums run by the patients. However, there is only one ongoing story of the epidemic of ideological madness that I have been able to find. It can be found in a series of articles by Dr. Michael Adams who takes evident pleasure in being a conservative thorn in the side of his radical peers.

While Adams appears to have nothing particularly original or insightful to offer in terms of analysis the story of his various political travails and successes in overcoming them can be entertaining. It also pleases me that there is at least one conservative in academia who will neither bend nor bow and is more than willing to bite back. You can find his online publications here: Mike Adams

Ernie Pyle Reborn?

2005-07-27T18:31:00.000-07:00

What is it really like to fight insurgents in Iraq? While this question is of no interest to the MSM and will surely be misrepresented by "Over There" it certainly interests me. I have checked out various BLOGs published by armed forces personnel in Iraq but they typically reflect the experiences of an odd assortment of contributers who usually aren't engaged in regular combat and aren't in leadership positions. Nor is there much to be learned from the U.S. Central Command's bland and sanitized stories published at centcom.gov. Fortunately, there does appear to be a modern equivalent of WWII's Ernie Pyle who goes where the action is and risks life and limb to tell it like it is. His name is Michael Yon.

Michael Yon once served in the U.S. Army Special Forces. He can talk the talk and walk the walk. His BLOG is a must read for those who want to know what it is like to be on the bitter end of an incredibly brutal and heartless struggle. Check him out at michaelyon.blogspot.com.

Gun Totting Lesbian Libertarian

2005-07-27T18:14:00.000-07:00

Until today the little I knew about Tammy Bruce was gleaned from a brief account in the MSM published some time ago. The article made much of her defense of our right to keep and bear arms, her former status as a leader of a NOW chapter and her view that NOW's policies and politics had become lunatic fringe. I immediately imagined a beady-eyed bull dyke with a crewcut living in a double-wide with two pit bulls. I could not have been further from the truth.

Although Ms. Bruce doesn't operate a proper BLOG a visit to her web site can be mildly rewarding for those who share her very sound values. Check it out at www.tammybruce.com.