THK sez:
The perpetration of certain myths that diplomacy and alliances are a sign of weakness is Neanderthal. I never heard of teaching a child to make enemies so they can get along in the playground.
And I never heard of teaching a child to believe that someone who lies to him or betrays his trust is an ally. But I didn’t have the advantage of Ms. H-K’s “liberal” education.
Paul Nitze died on October 19 at the age of 97. Most readers are probably stumped by the name. Here’s a bit of his bio, from Wikipedia:
Paul Henry Nitze (January 16, 1907 – October 19, 2004) was a high-ranking United States government official who helped shape Cold War defense policy over the course of numerous presidential administrations.
Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, Nitze attended the Hotchkiss School graduated from Harvard University in 1928. After working in investment banking, he enter government service during World War II. In 1942, he was chief of the Metals and Minerals Branch of the Board of Economic Warfare, until named director, Foreign Procurement and Development Branch of the Foreign Economic Administration in 1943. During the period 1944-1946, Nitze served as director and then as vice chairman of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey….
In the early post-war era, he served in the Truman Administration as head of policy planning for the State Dept (1950-1953). He was also principal author in 1950 of a highly influential secret National Security Council document (NSC-68), which provided the strategic outline for increased U.S. expenditures to counter the perceived threat of Soviet armament.
…In 1961 President Kennedy appointed Nitze assistant secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs and in 1963 he became the Secretary of the Navy, serving until 1967.
Following his term as secretary of the Navy, he served as deputy secretary of Defense (1967-1969), as a member of the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) (1969-1973), and assistant secretary of Defense for International Affairs (1973-1976). Later, fearing Soviet rearmament, he opposed the ratification of SALT II (1979). He was President Ronald Reagan’s chief negotiator of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (1981-1984). In 1984, Nitze was named special advisor to the president and secretary of State on Arms Control. For more than forty years, Nitze was one of the chief architects of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union. President Reagan awarded Nitze the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1985 for his contributions to the freedom and security of the United States….
I met Nitze in 1965 when, in his tenure as Secretary of the Navy, he was gracious to a young analyst (me) whom the Commandant of the Marine Corps had called upon to make a dubious case for sending more Marines to Vietnam.
Nitze later served as a trustee of the defense think-tank where I was chief financial and administrative officer. He spoke seldom, but when he did he cut to the heart of the matter.
Nitze was a rare “public servant” who truly served his country. He was hard-nosed, non-partisan, and brilliant.
I read an online excerpt of Cornel West’s Democracy Matters several weeks ago, but I decided not to blog about it because I didn’t know where to begin. It is simply one of the worst pseudo-intellectual excretions I’ve ever stumbled into. Luckily, Will Wilksinson was willing to hold his nose long enough to deal with West’s waste, in an essay at Tech Central Station). Here’s a sample of Wilkinson’s take:
…A fellow professor once quipped: “Cornel’s work tends to be 1,000 miles wide and about two inches deep.” In a new book, Democracy Matters,…West promises to examine a triple threat to democracy: “free-market fundamentalism,” “aggressive militarism,” and “escalating authoritarianism.” Despite the occasional insight and illuminating connection, mostly we observe Professor West in his thousand-mile pool, out of his depth, gurgling in dropped names like a baby face-down in a puddle….
…Despite West’s intellectual posturing, Democracy Matters is a prime example of the quasi-intellectualism of the far left, a triumph of moralizing, name-dropping rhetoric over argument. West’s wide-ranging erudition is impressive, but nowhere provides a curious but skeptical reader with a reason to believe that the market does in fact have this kind of distorting effect on our minds, or a corrosive effect on democracy as it is less tendentiously understood. West engages no advocates of the free market, nor does he even deign to knock down straw men. Overestimating the world-making powers of language, West simply slaps negative labels on his opponents and declares victory. The choir is no doubt delighted.
That’s more than enough of Cornel West.
Virginia Postrel has it exactly right:
[A] Bush victory will be interpreted as public approval (a majority’s, at least) of his executive style and personality, of the war in Iraq, and of his economic policies, particularly the tax cuts. A Kerry victory will be interpreted as public rejection of Bush’s temperament, of the war in Iraq, and of his tax cuts and of his pro-business (and in some cases pro-market) policies.
I wish I’d said it.
…with one story, from The Washington Times:
Russian special forces troops moved many of Saddam Hussein’s weapons and related goods out of Iraq and into Syria in the weeks before the March 2003 U.S. military operation, The Washington Times has learned….
So much for Russia. So much for Kerry and the Democrat defeat-mongers.
Next.
Donald Luskin (The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid) really, really, really, dislikes Paul Krugman. Luskin responds to a reader who takes him to task for making an issue of Krugman’s shortcoming in the vertical dimension:
…Reader Vivek Rao asks, ” I’m on your side — the side of free enterprise — and try to help in the fight against Krugmanism. But I think that mocking his height is overly personal and detracts from your site. We dislike him because he’s a nasty, dishonest, socialist — not because he’s short. Right?” Fair question, and the answer is “yes.” I don’t dislike Krugman because he is short. But I do dislike him for more reasons than just that he is a nasty, dishonest, socialist (though I admit he is certainly all those things). Another reason I dislike him is his haughty, arrogant pose of infallibility — the snotty, condescending, know-it-all tone he assumes when he writes from the august pages of America’s newspaper of record. I do not intend to ever grant him the authoritativeness he pretends to have, or accord him any respect at all based on his pedigree or position. One way I can puncture his pedigree and position is to constantly show that this man is not the titan he pretends to be. As anyone knows who has seen him on television or in person, he is a short, pudgy, whiny, stuttering, shifty-eyed, ill-groomed, gray little homunculus. Keep that in mind when you read his New York Times columns — it puts everything in perspective. Am I stooping to name-calling? If I am, too bad. The emperor has no clothes, and I intend to keep calling him naked.
Saying that Luskin really, really, really dislikes Krugman is an understatement. It would be more accurate to say that Luskin loathes Krugman — and I empathize with Luskin. Krugman is a lying rabble-rouser of the first order. His presence on the op-ed pages of the Times speaks volumes about the prevailing mentality and standards of that once-great newspaper.
The Boston Red Sox broke the Curse of Bill Buckner by beating the New York Yankees to advance to the World Series. Now, the Red Sox have broken the Curse of the Bambino by beating the St. Louis Cardinals to win the Series.
How long before the Sox win another Series? As a Yankees fan, I curse the Sox to another 86-year wait.
Get ’em next year, Yanks.
Climatology isn’t the only politically correct science. Nicholas Wade of The New York Times reports about race and genetics in “Articles Highlight Different Views on Genetic Basis of Race“:
…In articles in the current issue of the journal Nature Genetics, scientists at Howard, a center of African-American scholarship, generally favor the view that there is no biological or genetic basis for race. “Observed patterns of geographical differences in genetic information do not correspond to our notion of social identities, including ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity,’ ” writes Dr. Charles N. Rotimi, acting director of the university’s genome center.
But several other geneticists writing in the same issue of the journal say the human family tree is divided into branches that correspond to the ancestral populations of each major continent, and that these branches coincide with the popular notion of race. “The emerging picture is that populations do, generally, cluster by broad geographic regions that correspond with common racial classification (Africa, Europe, Asia, Oceania, Americas),” say Dr. Sarah A. Tishkoff of the University of Maryland and Dr. Kenneth K. Kidd of Yale….
Here we have so-called scientists at Howard University trying to deny the obvious and their “peers” at other universities merely confirming it. You’d think scientists would want to do something worthwhile with their time.
Wade continues:
Two years ago Dr. Risch, a population geneticist, plunged into the long-taboo subject of race and said that these geographic patterns correlated with the popular conception of continental-based races – principally Africans, East Asians, American Indians and Caucasians (a group that includes Europeans, Middle Easterners, and people of the Indian subcontinent).
These categories were useful in understanding the genetic roots of disease, many of which follow the same geographic pattern, Dr. Risch said. His article was provoked by editorials in medical journals suggesting there was no biological basis for race.
The articles in today’s issue of Nature Genetics represent a second round of the debate. The Howard scientists agree that there is a geographic pattern in human genetic variation but favor the approach of going directly to the underlying genetic causes of disease without taking into account any possible correlation with race….
Why is race off limits as a scientific topic? What are the “scientists” at Howard afraid of learning about their race? Where’s the shame in truth?
I will say once again that I fully understand Bush’s refusal to kow-tow to scientists (see here and here). Most Americans, unfortunately, have subscribed to a false view of science as coldly precise and unerringly accurate in its power to prescribe “wise” policies. I don’t subscribe to that view, as you’ll find by reading this and following the links.
I wrote recently about a report by Richard Muller that took a chunk out of the hockey-stick theory of global warming:
This [hockey-stick] plot purports to show that we are now experiencing the warmest climate in a millennium, and that the earth, after remaining cool for centuries during the medieval era, suddenly began to heat up about 100 years ago — just at the time that the burning of coal and oil led to an increase in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide….
Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick….
This improper normalization procedure [used in the computer program] tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not….
Muller was, in the end, rather restrained in his criticism of the authors of the hockey-stick theory, namely, University of Massachusetts geoscientist Michael Mann and colleagues. Not so restrained is a research paper published recently in the journal Science by Professor Hans von Storch and colleagues at the Institute of Coastal Research at Geesthacht, Germany. Scientists Willie Soon and David R. Legates, writing at Tech Central Station, report:
In short, the new paper…confirms what several other climate researchers have long stipulated. The hockey stick curve — which is a mathematical construct, as opposed to actual temperature information recorded at individual locations — is problematic because it yields air temperature changes on timescales of a few decades to a century that are simply too muted to fit the phenomena of the Medieval Warm Period (ca. 800-1300) and Little Ice Age (ca. 1300-1900), which are well recorded in historical documents and recognized in indirect climate data from growths of tree-rings and corals or isotopic content in ice cores and stalagmites collected around the world.
This is traditional science, with results from one group tested by others. What makes this case important, though, was explained by Von Storch in Der Spiegel:
“The Mann graph [i.e., the hockey stick of IPCC TAR] indicates that it was never warmer during the last ten thousand years than it is today. … In recent years it [the hockey stick] has been elevated to the status of truth by the UN appointed science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This handicapped all that research which strives to make a realistic distinction between human influences and climate and natural variability.”
According to Soon and Legates, Von Storch calls the hockey stick “junk” or “rubbish.”
Max Borders, writing at Jujitsu Generis, says:
A viable Libertarian Party is going to have to change its ways: 1) its platform, i.e. to moderate its views; 2) it’s [sic] image, i.e. of geeks and pot-smokers; and 3) maybe even its name and brand, i.e. a name and brand sullied by 1 and 2.
Here’s a better plan. Don’t run LP candidates for office — especially not for the presidency. Throw the LP’s support to candidates who — on balance — come closest to espousing libertarian positions. Third parties — no matter how they’re packaged — just don’t have staying power, given the American electoral system. The LP’s only hope of making progress toward libertarian ideals is to “sell” its influence to the highest bidder.
In an op-ed at Yahoo! News, William F. Buckley Jr. says:
LONG LIVE OIL
Thu Oct 14,12:05 AM ET
By William F. Buckley Jr.
Teresa Heinz Kerry’s reference to “greed for oil” can be passed over, and is being passed over, as routine political hyperbole. But maybe the time has come to examine the words and their meaning. This is so because “oil” is widely used as the great engine of human avarice. In years — and centuries — gone by, the devil word was “gold.” It was gold that brought out the reserves of evil in men. It ranked with and even exceeded love and sex. Oil could not, of course, go through hobgoblinization until its uses were discovered. But now it is used as the commonplace agent of evil.
What needs to be said about oil is that it IS worth fighting for. We would all agree that air and water are necessities. Without them life instantly ends. Without oil, life does not end, but life radically changes….
Only the super-rich can afford to be haughtily condescending about things like oil (evil incarnate) and the environment (to be protected regardless of the cost in jobs and GDP).
UPDATED:
Mike Brock takes out similarly minded lefties who begrudge any signs of happiness among Teresa’s “common people”:
[T]his morning, I had a discussion with somebody at a local coffee shop….
“Do you know what really bothers me?” he says, “all of these middle-class people making $40,000 a year, living out in the suburbs thinking their lives are so great. They actually think because they have a house and two cars in the driveway, that they are living on the up and up”.
“Are you aware that you are evil?” I asked him. He responded only with a blank stare.
“You resent that people have found relative happiness in their lives. You would seek to convince them that they should be depressed,” I said to him straightly.
He then announced his theory that the only reason they were happy, is because the bourgeois and corporations had brainwashed them into thinking that they were happy, when they really are not.
I’ve only recently started to pay attention to this mindset among left-wingers, but now that I’m really looking at it, I realize just how evil and shallow some people are. How can you resent somebody for finding happiness on a modest income? What the hell is wrong with these people?…
These people will only accept the happiness of others if it’s happiness in the context of what they deem to be an appropriate way of living. The fact that Joe Anybody doesn’t complain about working 8-hour days, 5-days a week, and enjoys his weekend doing home improvements and going out to dinner with his family, bothers these people deeply. They don’t want these people to be happy. They want to remind them that they live a meager lifestyle, and they are slaves to capitalism, and that they should be resentful of our society….
These people…seek only to lower the spirits [of] and bring grief [to] the average person, in order to satisfy their own personal insecurities.
Yep. Insecurity (emotional if not financial) breeds an unfounded sense of superiority.
(Thanks to Megan McArdle for the tip about Buckley’s piece, and to The Monger for the tip about Mike Brock’s post.)
Megan McArdle, guest-blogging for Instapundit, devotes a lot of bytes to Andrew Sullivan’s endorsement of Kerry. McArdle skewers Sullivan’s clumsy theory that Kerry would have to hang tough on national security:
The idea that we should trust Kerry, even if we think his previous foriegn policy instincts have all been bad, because he has nothing to gain from failing to pursue Al Qaeda, makes little sense. Surely George Bush had nothing to gain from failing to suppress the insurgency in Iraq, and yet his administration still hasn’t done so. This argument seems to fall into the partisan assumption that if Kerry fails it will be out of malice. But most people who think that Kerry isn’t the right man for the job think he will fail not because he wants to, but because he’s fundamentally wrong in some way in his national security strategy.
Similarly, it doesn’t strike me as very logical to imply that Democrats have abandoned national security issues, and then suggest electing them anyway as a way to force them to “take responsibility” for national security, any more than I would employ a drug addict in a pharmacy on the theory that this would force him to “take responsibility” for enforcing our nation’s drug laws.
But Sullivan shouldn’t be taken that seriously. He’s merely grasping at excuses for his anti-Bush stance, which is predicated on Bush’s opposition to gay marriage.
P.S. Mike Rappaport of The Right Coast seems to agree with my diagnosis of Sullivan’s real issue with Bush.
Regarding the ambush that killed about 50 Iraqi soldiers heading home after graduation from a U.S.-run training course, the AP headline blares “Allawi Blames Ambush on ‘Great Negligence’.” Whose great negligence?
…Allawi told the Iraqi National Council…that coalition forces’ negligent handling of security was responsible for Saturday’s deadly ambush along a remote highway near the Iranian border.
“It was a heinous crime where a group of National Guardsmen were targeted,” Allawi said. “There was great negligence on the part of some coalition forces.”
But there’s more to the story:
…However, in an interview with Al-Arabiya television, Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan blamed the recruits, who in their eagerness to get home decided to leave immediately after their graduation and take an unauthorized route.
“They are to blame. They graduated at 12 p.m. and could have delayed their trip,” he said. Shaalan added that neither the Defense Ministry, the Kirkush commanders nor the U.S.-run forces were to blame.
“They are the ones who chose this road that led them to this ugly result,” he said of the victims. “There might have been some people who gave information about them to hostile sides.”…
Aha! Personal responsibility evaded. Treachery abetted. Life in the Middle East.
If you think that you can jinx your favorite team by watching its games on TV, Dennis Overbye agrees with you, in “This Season, Heisenberg Wears a Red Sox Rally Cap.”
In lieu of “About Us” (with links to biographical sketches of the bloggers), the sidebar at pandragon.net has this: “Who We Be”. Is it okay for the liberal, white bloggers at pandragon.net to mock ghetto English? A libertarian or conservative blog would be considered racist for a similar lapse of taste.
Like Bill Clinton, the “boyz” at pandragon.net (and they are boys) can get away with it because “their hearts are in the right place.” Ha!
…he’d win in a landslide. That’s what Jeff Jarvis seems to be saying. Yes, and if pigs had wings…
UPDATE:
Twisted Spinster nails Jarvis:
I once remarked that reading Jeff Jarvis’s blog is like staring at a train wreck full of naked old people: appalling, but you just keep peeking between your fingers. Well. That latest post is a particularly pathetic example of the premature senility affecting the “political consciousness” of a certain age group.
Yes, reading Jarvis is like reading a high-school civics text circa 1955. Jarvis’s blog is a variation on this theme: Government holds the solution to all our problems. Our duty as citizens is to educate ourselves on the issues so that we can elect the “right” bunch of commissars to tell us how to run our lives.
I had just today removed Jarvis’s blog from my roll. I feel vindicated in doing so by Twisted Spinster‘s take on Jarvis.
(Thanks to Random Jottings for the tip.)
The liberal mindset can be summed up as “no trust, no respect, no responsibility”:
It’s a blend of superiority and condescension that seeks to suppress individuality and self-reliance in the name of “rationality” and “compassion”.
Kerry says, “The ethical test of a good society is how it treats its most vulnerable members.” True. But Kerry — as a typical liberal — equates “society” with “government”. He sees government as a parent-surrogate, upon which we depend for food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and psychological satisfaction. He has no conception of government as a “night watchman” — a neutral protector who defends us from predators so that we may advance beyond dependency and fulfill our potential.
According to an article at Wired, the Computing Technology Industry Association earlier this month asked Bush and Kerry to answer these 12 questions:
* What government training, education and certification policies can help make American technology workers more competitive in the global economy?
* What is the appropriate role of the federal and state governments regarding Internet telephony and other similar Internet applications?
* What should the federal government do to address the issue of cyber security?
* What is the appropriate role for the federal government in addressing concerns about content over the Internet?
* What should federal policy be toward protecting intellectual property on the Internet -recognizing the harmless role played by mere conduits – and facilitating the free flow of ideas based on those creations?
* What should the federal government do to encourage widespread broadband deployment to businesses and homes?
* What should the federal government’s role be in regard to protecting personal privacy on the Internet?
* What should the federal government’s role be in regard to SPAM?
* What should the federal government do to encourage innovation and the broader use of wireless services that rely on unlicensed spectrum?
* How can the federal government help small businesses better compete in the global, Internet-based economy?
* How can the federal government better encourage investment in both basic and applied research and development?
* How important is the IT industry to the growth and development of this nation?
To ask such questions suggests that the federal government should interfere in the development and use of information technology. That’s the last thing the federal government should do. If the tech industry is left to its own devices, intense competition will lead us to better, cheaper, and more secure IT. If the government gets involved, everything will be worse — with censorhip thrown in.
Ryan Lizza writes this:
It looks like the race is down to ten swing states: Florida (27 electoral votes), Pennsylvania (21 votes), Ohio (20), Wisconsin (10), Colorado (9), Iowa (7), New Mexico (5), Nevada (5), West Virginia, and New Hampshire (4). Assuming the other 40 states are out of play, Kerry has 217 electoral votes wrapped up, and Bush has 208.
Ha, ha! Reputable polls, such as Rasmussen’s, have it the other way around (Bush 220, Kerry 190).
Lizza goes on to envision a tie in the Electoral College, which would throw the election into the House of Representatives. His take:
Almost half the country still thinks Bush’s presidency is illegitimate. There probably isn’t a way for a second Bush term to seem more illegitimate in the eyes of Democrats than his first term than for this election to be decided by the House, a far more partisan and less respected institution than the Supreme Court. But it could happen.
Where did he get that bit about almost half the country thinking Bush’s presidency is illegitimate? Source, please.
And so what if the House is partisan? It’s supposed to be partisan; it’s an elective body. Why would it be illegitimate for the House to decide the election in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution? I can see the headlines in the liberal press: Bush Re-elected by House, Madison’s Scheme to Blame!
UPDATED – 10/28/04, 12:48 PM (CT):
I wasn’t the only blogger to note Lizza’s slippery (sloppy?) thinking about the election going to the House. As Lizza admits today:
LEGITIMATE POINT: Mickey Kaus is taking me to task for writing that an electoral college tie decided in Bush’s favor by the House of Representatives would be seen as more illegitimate to Democrats than Bush’s first term. Just to make it clear, I don’t think it would be illegitimate–just as I don’t think Bush’s first term was–but I was saying that Democrats would see it that way.
But Mickey is right. It’s silly to argue that the result of a process carefully spelled out in the Constitution could be construed as illegitimate. And, thinking it over, I imagine most Democrats would accept such a result–as long as Bush also wins the popular vote. What I should have said is that if the race ends in an electoral college tie and a popular vote victory for Kerry, then a House-decided win for Bush would be seen as illegitimate by many Democrats, who would argue that the House thwarted the will of the majority. But I admit that what I wrote, which was unfortunately quoted in The Washington Post, was sort of dopey….
I heartily agree with Lizza that what he wrote was dopey. He’s right, however, that Dems would see a Bush victory in the House as illegitimate — which says a lot about the Dems and their willingness to subvert the Constitution when they don’t get what they want.
Politics and Prosperity 