NYTimes.com tells us, in a headline, that Diplomacy Fails to Slow Advance of Nuclear Arms. This one’s about North Korea, but it might as well be about the Middle East or almost anywhere else.
Theodore Rex didn’t get a lot of things right, but he hit it right on the head when he said “Speak softly but carry a big stick.”
Stephen Evans, North America business correspondent for BBC News, asks US security: Protection or intrusion? And this is his answer:
…There is a view that states of permanent high alert and tension suit President George W Bush’s election hopes.
You do not have to subscribe to that theory to think that the authorities are getting it right.
It may be, rather, that putting security at the top of the agenda legitimises endless intervention in our lives. And because the enemy is unknown, it is impossible to know how much intervention is warranted.
So the police scream around in convoys. People in uniform – railway officials, hotel staff, security guards – seem to think they have a right to know your business.
That is not a conspiracy to keep the people frightened.
Anyway, I am not sure that a state of constant alert does suit President Bush.
A weariness and a wariness of officialdom may be setting in with people who think they have heard that cry of “Wolf!” once too often.
Of course, if there were a serious bomb attack, let us say a week before the election, that would be a different political matter.
Mr Bush might then look like the strong defender, the man whose warnings were prescient.
Terrorists shape our daily lives in tedious ways.
They also shape the election for president of the United States of America.
Headline from AP via Yahoo! News: Party-Switching La. Congressman Draws Ire. Well, Representative Rodney Alexander is drawing the ire of Democrats because he’s decided to run for re-election as a, gasp, Republican. The story notes that “Democrats reacted to the news by calling the first-term congressman a turncoat and a coward.” That’s a fine thing to call someone who until two days ago was your “friend and colleague” — as they say in Washington about anyone who isn’t Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein.
From Wired:
Probe Set to Test Einstein Theory
NASA’s Gravity Probe B spacecraft could begin testing Einstein’s general theory of relativity as early as this week, according to mission controllers at Stanford University….
Though many of the theory’s underlying concepts have been tested and proven in the 89 years since Einstein first published them, the proof for two concepts has remained elusive.
The first concept suggests that Earth — and almost any body in space — creates a dimple in the universe’s so-called space-time fabric. The second suggests that the rotation of the Earth twists that fabric….
This could be bigger than Botox.
Rod Dreher, posting on The Corner, shares his notes from an editorial board session with John Lehman. Here’s my favorite:
8. “The Secretary of Transportation is obsessive about [racial profiling]. He will not relent on it….”
He raked Norm Mineta over the coals for his “absurd” fear of racial discrimination, which prevents common sense screening at airports. Lehman said we have limited resources, so we should apply them intelligently.
“We’re spending nine-tenths of the money we have on people who have 99/100ths of one percent of the likelihood of being terrorists, because we want to be politically correct. It’s crazy,” Lehman said.
One of my colleagues suggested that perhaps as a Japanese-American who was interned as a child during WW2, he has a special perspective on how badly things can go when profiling goes too far. Lehman wasn’t having any of this.
“Look, that’s his problem, not my problem,” he said. “I’ve got problems too, and I don’t take them out on [public policy].”
Lehman leapt into prominence as Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan. Unlike most Navy secretaries, who were content to be figureheads, Lehman actively pushed his agenda: rebuilding the Navy, which had shrunk considerably in the aftermath of the debacle in Vietnam.
One of the obstacles Lehman had to overcome was a nay-saying “think piece” — a pseudo-scientific piece of claptrap — that emanated from the think-tank where I worked at the time. Lehman soon took care of that. The think-tank had been operated for 15 years by a university under a contract that the Navy had habitually renewed. But no longer. The contract was let for competition and, lo and behold, the university didn’t win the competition. Under new management the think-tank began to produce a lot less claptrap and a lot more hard analysis of real data. That is, it rediscovered its original mission, with some help from Mr. Lehman.
Art Spiegelman, creator of something called Maus, for which he apparently won a Pulitzer, has now created something called In the Shadow of No Towers, which The New York Times calls his “artistic response to the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, as well as an expression of his deep opposition to the war in Iraq.” The following quotations are from interviews conducted at his Lower Manhattan studio, as well as by telephone and e-mail.
Spiegelman recalls the morning of September 11, 2001:
My wife…and I had just walked out our door when we saw that first plane crash into the tower about 10 blocks south of us. We ran down to find our daughter, Nadja, a freshman at Stuyvesant High School, and got her out of the school just before the north tower collapsed right behind us. Then we made our way to the U.N. School to scoop up 10-year-old Dash. I was willing to live through the disaster wherever it took me, as long as we were all together as a family unit.
Then he comments on Mikail Moore’s Fahrenheit 911:
I sure admire his ability to make effective arguments that can be understood outside the rarefied circles of one’s already-convinced friends. His sympathy for that woman who becomes the star of the second half of the film [whose soldier son was killed in Iraq] is, to me, so admirable. I was just so impatient with her. It allowed him to express more clearly than I the class-war aspects of this and how to talk to people who are acting against their own best interests.
Class war? Is he talking about Saddam and all those palaces from which he was evicted? Is he talking about the Iraqis who were impoverished by Saddam’s rapaciousness and control of Iraq’s oil? What class war does he have in mind? Perhaps he’s referring to all those American draftees who were marched off to Iraq at gunpoint.
He doesn’t talk about the innocents who were slaughtered on September 11, 2001. He doesn’t talk about the cretins who flew the planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, or about Osama bin Laden, or about terrorism in general. It’s all about him. It’s all about his hatred of the war in Iraq. But he’s going to make some money off September 11, by selling copies of his thing to like-minded Manhattan jerks.
I’ve already explained why I’m not a conservative. (I’m a libertarian of conservative mien, yes, but not a through-and-through conservative with rightward, statist leanings.) Now, it’s time to say why I’m not a Democrat or a modern liberal:
1. Though I’m far, far, far from being super-rich, I’m comfortable. I didn’t get there by luck, I got there by hard work and prudent investing. I didn’t get there by inheritance, except the inheritance of a work ethic from parents who might best be described as upper-lower class striving toward lower-middle class. I’m better off than I would be if, when I was an idealistic 20-year old, I had retreated behind John Rawls’s veil of ignorance and sold my soul to the welfare-regulatory state.
2. I’m economically literate, and skeptical to boot. I learned a lot of economics as an undergraduate and in my brief career as a graduate student, but it all boils down to two things: Incentives matter and there’s no free lunch. The welfare-regulatory state robs people of incentives, distorts incentives, and steals wealth and income, often by stealth. In sum, people are worse off because of the welfare-regulatory state, and most people don’t understand that. Yes, yes, yes, there are always the poor and infirm to worry about, but in the absence of the welfare-regulatory state (a) there would be fewer of them and (b) there would be a lot more income and wealth to give to those fewer, via private charity. As for the aged, fewer of them would be poor in the absence of the regulatory-welfare state (see #4, below), and those who might be poor would also benefit from the greater sums available for private charity.
3. I’m not a social engineer. If people want to smoke, for example, let them smoke and don’t take advantage of their addiction by continually raising taxes on cigarettes. Smokers know the likely consequences of their addiction, as they did long before surgeons general got into the act. If you don’t like to eat or drink where smoking is allowed, go where it isn’t; there are enough non-smokers to support establishments where smoking is prohibited (by the owners of the establishments) or carefully confined to well-ventilated smoking areas. Employers can, and should, set their own rules about smoking on company property; if you don’t like the rules, work somewhere else. The costly consequences of smoking can and should be borne by smokers and their insurance companies; smoking isn’t an infectious disease, so it’s not a public-health issue. And that’s just a small sample of my take on the nanny world of social engineering, which exudes fear of the free market, condones hysterical environmentalism as a substitute for science, and bows before the altars of affirmative action and public education (a vestige of 19th century social engineering).
4. As a recipient of Social Security, and with Medicare waiting in the wings, I’m an unwilling “beneficiary” of the welfare state. How much more SS income would I have if I could have invested my SS “contributions” myself — prudently, mind you? About twice as much. With that extra income I could go to doctors who won’t take me as a Medicare patient, pay for my pills, and pay the premiums on a health insurance policy with “catastrophic” coverage — and dine out more often and give my grandchildren better Christmas presents — instead of forcing the generations behind me to help me make it through my old age.
5. I’m realistic about the state of the world. No amount of multilateralism, largesse, and “understanding” will lessen the threat of terrorism. If we won’t defend ourselves, and do it vigorously — at times, pre-emptively — who will defend us? Not the politically correct who are afraid to offend those who have taken and will continue to take advantage of our soft-headedness. Thus I am not a deluded neo-isolationist when it comes to war or a wimp when it comes to so-called racial profiling. Neither am I a protectionist when it comes to trade; labor unions and non-competitive corporations can go to hand-in-hand to hell.
6. Finally, I spent 31 years in and around government and another three years trying to run my own business in spite of government. I know how government works — or, rather, how it doesn’t work. There are some things it must do because those things shouldn’t be done by private parties: foreign policy, defense, and criminal justice. If government were focused on those missions, taxpayers could afford to pay more of the best and brightest to execute them. And that’s another argument against the kind of expansive welfare-regulatory state which is the religion of Democrats and modern liberals
UPDATED BELOW
It all began with Michelle Malkin’s post about her new book, In Defense of Internment: The Case for “Racial Profiling” in World War II and the War on Terror. It escalated into exchanges between Malkin and Eric Muller, guest-blogging at The Volokh Conspiracy. I’ve been commenting from the sidelines, and I thought I was through when I said
The ultimate word goes to Instapundit, because he agrees with what I’ve said about the Muller-Malkin exchange, namely, “most of the discussion has to do with things that happened 60 years ago, as opposed to what we ought to do now.”
But Malkin gets the last word because she has summarized her recommendations for the present emergency:
…I am advocating narrowly-tailored and eminently reasonable profiling measures such as:
…The post-September 11 monitoring of Arab and Muslim foreign students on temporary visas.
…Airport and travel screening measures that subject individuals of certain nationalities to heightened scrutiny; preventive detention of known illegal aliens, suspected terrorists, or enemy combatants; immediate deportation of illegal aliens from terror-sponsoring and terror-supporting nations; a moratorium on temporary visas to countries with large al Qaeda presences.
…Heightened scrutiny of Muslim chaplains and soldiers…serving in the military and in prisons.
In addition,…I discuss the need for “structural reforms that allow our country to better meet the potential threat posed by future Kenji Itos (he was a suspected intelligence agent for Japan who was acquitted of federal charges because prosecutors couldn’t introduce MAGIC into a civilian court), Jose Padillas, and Zacarias Moussaouis but that also allow enemy combatant designations to be reviewed by an independent board or court.” I also draw lessons from the need to protect MAGIC during WWII and apply them to the current need for more secrecy in some vital national security matters today….
UPDATE:
Eric Muller and Greg Robinson are still trying to rebut Malkin. Click on this link to their most recent post, then scroll down to see more. I think they’re just nit-picking and being smarmy because they’ve been kicked in the teeth (figuratively) by an intellectually tough opponent who (rightly) isn’t cowed by their Ph.D. degrees. Judge for yourself.
Today’s Washingtonpost.com blares this headline: Alabama Executes 74-Year-Old Man
(subhed: Infirm Convict’s Death Spurs Debate on Age, Appeals Process)
Then we read that
J.B. Hubbard’s failing body kept him lying in bed — a bunk on Alabama’s death row — most of the last days of his life. Other inmates say they walked his wobbly frame to the showers and listened to him complain about the pain: the cancer in his colon and prostate, the hypertension, the aching back. They combed his hair because he couldn’t. They washed him.
When spasms of dementia made him forget who he was — what he was — they told him: a 74-year-old, small-town Alabama man gone bad, a twice-convicted murderer, the oldest inmate on “the row.” He left them behind, these most unlikely of caretakers, one month ago and was transported south to a drab, gray prison set back in the cotton fields of lower Alabama. As the sun was tipping toward the horizon, Hubbard was put to death there Thursday, becoming the oldest inmate executed in the United States in more than six decades.
Oh, but wait:
Hubbard’s attorneys had argued that his execution for the 1977 killing of Lillian Montgomery, the 62-year-old owner of a Tuscaloosa general store, would be an act of “cruel and unusual” punishment and an indefensible stroke of public vengeance against a man they said had a low IQ to go along with a host of ailments, including hepatitis and emphysema.
“An old, frail man isn’t dangerous,” said Bryan Stevenson, a lawyer with the advocacy group Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, who had consulted with Hubbard.
But prosecutors said long-overdue justice was being done and railed against a court system that took 27 years to execute a two-time killer.
See, Hibbard was 47 years old when he killed Lillian Montgomery. And he wasn’t too frail to kill her.
Hibbard should have been executed no more than 26 years ago, soon after his heinous crime and while he was well enough to fully appreciate the justice of his execution. The problem isn’t that Hibbard was too old and ill to be executed. The problem is that it took so long to happen.
A FINAL UPDATE (#3 BELOW)
It started when Michelle Malkin touted her new book, In Defense of Internment: The Case for “Racial Profiling” in World War II and the War on Terror. Eric Muller, a guest-blogger at The Volokh Conspiracy, has begun scrutinizing Michelle’s book. I’d say that he’s less than enthusiastic about her defense of the relocation of Japanese-Americans during World War II and its implications for the way we might behave toward Muslims in this country. To my mind, the issue was framed best by Justices Black and Frankfurter in Korematsu v. United States (1944). Here’s Justice Black writing for the U.S. Supreme Court:
To cast this case into outlines of racial prejudice, without reference to the real military dangers which were presented, merely confuses the issue. Korematsu was not excluded from the Military Area because of hostility to him or his race. He was excluded because we are at war with the Japanese Empire, because the properly constituted military authorities feared an invasion of our West Coast and felt constrained to take proper security measures, because they decided that the military urgency of the situation demanded that all citizens of Japanese ancestry be segregated from the West Coast temporarily, and finally, because Congress, reposing its confidence in this time of war in our military leaders — as inevitably it must — determined that they should have the power to do just this. There was evidence of disloyalty on the part of some, the military authorities considered that the need for action was great, and time was short. We cannot — by availing ourselves of the calm perspective of hindsight — now say that at that time these actions were unjustified.
Justice Frankfurter’s concurring opinion says, in part:
The provisions of the Constitution which confer on the Congress and the President powers to enable this country to wage war are as much part of the Constitution as provisions looking to a nation at peace. And we have had recent occasion to quote approvingly the statement of former Chief Justice Hughes that the war power of the Government is “the power to wage war successfully.”…Therefore, the validity of action under the war power must be judged wholly in the context of war. That action is not to be stigmatized as lawless because like action in times of peace would be lawless.
That’s good enough for me.
UPDATE 1 (10:54 PM, 08/04/04):
Eric Muller’s latest post cites Greg Robinson, author of By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans, which Muller calls “the definitive scholarly account of the genesis of the Administration’s decision to evict and detain all of the West Coast’s Issei and Nisei.” Robinson’s work apparently undercuts Malkin’s “argument…that intercepted and decrypted Japanese ‘chatter’ about efforts…to recruit Japanese aliens (“Issei”) and American citizens of Japanese ancestry (“Nisei”) was ‘the Roosevelt administration’s solid rationale for evacuation.'” This is all peacetime hindsight of the sort rejected by Black and Frankfurter. You do what you have to do in wartime, based on the best information available at that time. Because erring on the side of caution — or civil liberties — can be fatal when thousands, tens of thousands, and millions of lives are at stake. Muller and company are refighting past wars. Malkin is trying to help us win the present one.
UPDATE 2 (10:35 AM, 08/05/04):
Now Eric Muller writes this:
[Malkin’s] book quotes extensively from a handful of deciphered messages (the “MAGIC” cables) about Japanese efforts to develop some Issei and Nisei as spies for Japan. It really all turns on those MAGIC cables. The trouble is that the historical record tells us absolutely nothing more than that Roosevelt, the Secretary of War (Stimson), and his top assistant (McCloy) generally had access to the thousands of messages of which these concerning potential Issei and Nisei spies were a tiny few. The record tells us nothing about who actually reviewed which of the intercepts, or when, or what any reader understood them to mean. The record is just silent on these issues–reflecting, in a way, the silence of the actors themselves on MAGIC at the time. One might well say (and Michelle does), “but they couldn’t talk or write about the MAGIC decrypts; they were ultra-secret and everybody was keen to keep them that way.” That may well be so. But that doesn’t mean we can fill in the silence in the record with our own suppositions about what they must have read and what they must have thought about what they read. In short, Michelle’s book presents no evidence–because, apparently, there is none–to show that MAGIC actually led anybody to think or do anything….
But there are the MAGIC intercepts. The rest is, as Muller admits, supposition. Why is his supposition any better than Malkin’s? Muller then changes the subject from why the Issei and Nisei were relocated to where they were relocated:
…The federal government, having evicted Japanese Americans from their homes and confined them in the late spring of ’42 in racetrack and fairground “assembly centers,” wanted to move Japanese Americans to wide-open, unguarded agricultural communities in the interior, modeled after Civilian Conservation Corps camps. But in early April of 1942, the governors of the Mountain States unequivocally rejected that idea, saying (I quote here the words of Governor Chase Clark of Idaho) that “any Japanese who might be sent into [the state] be placed under guard and confined in concentration camps for the safety of our people, our State, and the Japanese themselves.” The federal government, needing the cooperation of the states, had no choice but to accede to the governors’ demands.
So Japanese Americans ended up going into guarded camps (call them what you will) because Mountain State governors demanded it. Do you think that the governor of Idaho had access to the MAGIC decrypts, and that he formulated his demand for “concentration camps” on the basis of an evidence-based belief of military necessity? Or do you think maybe something else explained it?…
Yes, racism probably had a lot to do with how the Issei and Nisei were treated after the federal government had ordered them out of their homes. It might have had something to do with the decision to evict them. But this is all beside the real issue, which is the wholesale suspension of civil liberties in wartime — as a matter of military necessity. Justices Black and Frankfurter, quoted above, settled that issue in 1944, to my satisfaction.
UPDATE 3 (9:15 PM, 08/05/04)
The penultimate word goes to Greg Robinson, quoted by Eric Muller:
Michelle Malkin engages in overkill. Her stated purpose is to prove that the removal and confinement of Japanese American aliens, and particularly of citizens, was based on justifiable fears of espionage and sabotage, rather than racism (and thus to make the case for racial profiling by the Bush Administration). If this were all she wished to argue, she could have stopped with the signing of Executive Order 9066 itself. She could then more easily have made the case that the Army and the Executive felt obliged to act as they did considering the circumstances, though it was a terrible injustice to loyal citizens. After all, how the government’s policy played itself out afterwards is logically irrelevant to the initial cause.
That’s precisely the point I’ve been trying to make by quoting Justices Black and Frankfurter.
The ultimate word goes to Instapundit, because he agrees with what I’ve said about the Muller-Malkin exchange, namely, “most of the discussion has to do with things that happened 60 years ago, as opposed to what we ought to do now.”
Recently I had an exchange of views with someone who seemed to fear large, multi-national corporations more than government. John Kenneth Galbraith seems to suffer the same fear, according to this review of his latest book, The Economics of Innocent Fraud. The reviewer, Daniel Ben-Ami, recaps Galbraith’s fear:
For Galbraith, the all-powerful role of companies defines contemporary society. As he argues in his latest work: “Central to my argument here is the dominant role in the modern economic society of the corporation and of the passage of power in that entity from owners, the stockholders, now more graciously called investors, to the management. Such is the dynamic of corporate life. Management must prevail.” (2) He rejects the view that consumers are sovereign. Instead he says it is producers, in the guise of corporate management, who truly control the economy.
Galbraith goes on to argue that corporations dominate the state; that government institutions are forced to obey the narrow interests of companies. From here it is a small step to his argument that the recent Iraq war was fought for the military establishment and weapons industries. Younger authors are more likely to point to energy firms such as Halliburton, but the view is the same.
Ben-Ami’s response to that line of reasoning echoes my own:
But Galbraith misjudges the power of the state relative to the corporation. During his seven decades as an economist, the state has come to play an increasingly central role in economic life. State spending accounts for a high proportion of gross domestic product (GDP) in all the developed economies. The state is also highly active, through a wide variety of institutions such as central banks and financial regulators, in maintaining economic activity. In fact, today’s corporations could almost be seen as an arm of an ever-growing state.
Moreover, the extent to which large corporations have a lot of influence on laws and regulations is an argument for restricting laws and regulations to those that protect us from force and fraud. Show me a heavily regulated industry and I’ll show you an industry that’s sheltered from competition.
Even The New York Times admits it:
For the second time this campaign season outside groups that are not legally allowed to coordinate with Mr. Kerry’s campaign are riding to its rescue at a crucial time in its advertising campaign against President Bush – the most expensive on record. The spots hit just when Mr. Kerry ceased advertising and when Mr. Bush increased his with commercials reminding the nation of what it has been through, the dangers that lie ahead and, in one released Tuesday, declaring it is “rising to the challenge.”
What an amazing coincidence!
Not that the failure of McCain-Feingold bothers or surprises me. But it would have been better if McCain-Feingold had died in Congress or had been invalidated by the Supremes. Flouting the law foments disrespect for the rule of law.
Dem lawmakers say Fox News is unbalanced
UPI – Tuesday, August 03, 2004
Date: Tuesday, August 03, 2004 7:13:55 PM EST By HANNAH K. STRANGE, UPI Correspondent
WASHINGTON, Aug. 3 (UPI) — Several members of Congress sent a letter Tuesday to Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, to express their opposition to what they say is the network’s “unfair and unbalanced” bias towards the Republican Party.
The group, composed of 38 Democrats and Independents from the U.S. House of Representatives, has requested that Murdoch meet with them to discuss their concerns.
“The responsibility of the media is to report the news in an unbiased, impartial and objective manner,” the letter reads….
I guess they’re upset that all major media outlets don’t tilt to the left. What do you expect from legislators who believe that the Constitution is their license to redistribute income?
Remember those detainees at Guantanamo whose “rights” the U.S. Supreme Court was so avid to protect? Well, BBC News reports this:
Guantanamo inmates refuse review
Five detainees at the US naval base in Guantanamo, Cuba, have refused to participate in military hearings to review their cases, officials say….
The reviews were set up after the US Supreme Court ruled the detainees had a right to challenge their detentions….
The detainees who refused to appear when called this week were [a] Saudi, [a] Moroccan and three Yemenis….
* one Yemeni admitted being with Osama bin Laden during the siege of the Tora Bora caves near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in 2001 and was “captured with an AK-47 rifle”
* the Saudi, 29, fought on the front line in Afghanistan and was later captured in Pakistan
* the Moroccan, 32, was a Taleban fighter captured by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan
The first detainee who was reviewed, a 24-year-old Algerian, reportedly said he would “kill Americans” if released.
Don’t you sleep better at night knowing that the U.S. Supreme Court has placed their non-existent rights above your safety?
Washingtonpost.com reports:
Federal investigators concluded that Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) divulged classified intercepted messages to the media when he was on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, according to sources familiar with the probe.
No, that’s not news. But if you read on you find some nuggets:
Specifically, Fox News chief political correspondent Carl Cameron confirmed to FBI investigators that Shelby verbally divulged the information to him during a June 19, 2002, interview, minutes after Shelby’s committee had been given the information in a classified briefing….
Cameron did not air the material. Moments after Shelby spoke with Cameron, he met with CNN reporter Dana Bash, and about half an hour after that, CNN broadcast the material, the sources said. CNN cited “two congressional sources” in its report….
The disclosure involved two messages that were intercepted by the National Security Agency on the eve of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks but were not translated until Sept. 12. The Arabic-language messages said “The match is about to begin” and “Tomorrow is zero hour.” The Washington Post, citing senior U.S. intelligence officials, reported the same messages in its June 20, 2002, editions.
National security officials were outraged by the leak, and moments after the CNN broadcast a CIA official chastised committee members who had by then reconvened to continue the closed-door hearing….
Emphasis added by me to underscore an important difference — at least in this case — between Fox News, on the one hand, and CNN and The Washington Post, on the other. The First Amendment protects the press from censorship, but it doesn’t ban self-censorship.
FuturePundit informs us that Long Droughts Were Common in American Great Plains Holocene Era:
A team of Duke University researchers led by Jim Clark looking at core drillings found repeated dust bowl periods during “the mid-Holocene period of 5,000 to 8,000 years ago in parts of the Dakotas, Montana and western Minnesota.”
PORTLAND, ORE. – Events like the great Dust Bowl of the 1930s, immortalized in “The Grapes of Wrath” and remembered as a transforming event for millions of Americans, were regular parts of much-earlier cycles of droughts followed by recoveries in the region, according to new studies by a multi-institutional research team led by Duke University.
Some of those prehistoric droughts in the northern Great Plains of what is now the United States also lasted longer than modern-day dry spells such as the 1930s Dust Bowl decade, according to sediment core studies by the team.
The group’s evidence implies these ancient droughts persisted for up to several decades each….
Too many people believe that whatever weather one has seen in one’s own lifetime is “normal”. When weather suddenly veers from the pattern one has become accustomed to there is a human tendency to look for some exceptional cause such as human intervention. While human intervention may well be changing the climate, the climate is not stable to begin with. We should expect large climate changes as natural.
Even the 1930s drought was not unique in modern times with the 1890s having gone through a drought period as well….
The regularity of these ancient droughts make much more recent Great Plains droughts in the 1890s and 1930s appear “unremarkable” by comparison….
…Whether or not humans reduce their emissions of green house gases, sooner or later the Earth is going to go through some large regional and eventually even global climate shifts….
However, not all the natural changes lying in our future will come to pass. At some point humans are going to start intervening to prevent some changes while perhaps in other cases humans will engineer other desired changes….
But it will happen because the parties with a stake in the outcome (e.g., agribusiness and food processing) make the necessary investments in research and technology, not because FDR’s spiritual successors impose yet another government program on taxpayers.
From a Guardian Unlimited profile of neo-octogenarian Paul Fussell:
He thinks Bill Clinton is “wonderful”, and argues that anti-semitism was one reason why Americans were so eager to punish his affair with Monica Lewinsky.
That’s a new one. If you can’t defend Clinton on his own merits, make up an absolutely silly reason to discredit his opponents.
“Conservatives know that I cannot be trusted… I hate them in general, I grew up in that atmosphere, my father was a corporate lawyer and always voted Republican — that’s one reason I decided not to. It’s a standard boy’s reaction. If your father’s a dentist you either become a dentist or you ridicule dentists for the rest of your life.”
At least he admits that his liberalism arose from adolescent rebelliousness, which I have contended is a primary source of liberalism.
Fussell was vigorously opposed to last year’s invasion of Iraq: “If you don’t get angry about this war you don’t deserve to be alive.”
If he’s serious, he’s certainly an examplar of today’s hateful version of liberalism. If he’s merely trying for hyperbole, he’s not doing a very good job of it.
Fussell, having fought in World War II, rightly attacks those who romanticize war. But the fact that war isn’t a romantic adventure doesn’t make it any the less necessary, from time to time.
Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg, professors of political science at The Johns Hopkins University, have written Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public. This review by Robert Heineman tells me all I need to know. Here are some excerpts from the review:
…Somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, the authors assert, policy elites became disengaged from the political public because a mass base was no longer needed for influencing and manipulating public policy….
[T]he proliferation of special interests in the nation’s capital has provided bureaucrats with a ready substitute for public approval and support. In the authors’ words, “The era of the modern citizen, which began with a bang, is quietly slipping away”….
Group conflict within the beltway now dominates American politics, and by the mid–twentieth century political scientists viewed group activity as “the essence of American politics”…. With the rise of what Theodore J. Lowi has critically described as interest-group liberalism, government became little more than a broker for competing interests. Moreover, in terms of information and access, the increase in regulatory institutions at the national level has given group leaders located within the beltway a tremendous advantage over their colleagues in other parts of the nation. Perhaps of most concern, these “insider” groups themselves now discourage their members’ active political involvement….
The proliferation of groups that function without public support has been encouraged by major changes in the litigation process. By providing successful plaintiffs with a right to legal fees in many cases, Congress has encouraged attorneys to push advocacy and tort litigation, which in turn has been facilitated by judicial loosening of the requirements for standing and class action. Thus, special interests now can obtain from the courts policy decisions that previously would have required political pressure on elected officials….
Despite the acuity of the authors’ insights into the dire direction of the U.S. policy process, they seem oblivious to the possibility that big government itself is the cause of the problem….
Indeed.
In summary: The pigs keep demanding a bigger public trough at which to feed, and their “public servants” in Congress continue to comply.
UPDATED BELOW
There’s surprisingly little chatter in the libertarian-conservative segment of the blogosphere about this:
About 70% of voters agreed to add this sentence to the Missouri Constitution: “To be valid and recognized in this state, a marriage shall exist only between a man and a woman.”
Are libertarians depressed? Are conservatives trying not to gloat? Or perhaps they expect one of the lawyers at The Volokh Conspiracy to tell us that the will of the voters is likely to be overturned by the Missouri Supreme Court or the U.S. Supreme Court.
We’ve heard from The Corner, but that’s about it. Someone else say something.
UPDATES:
Stanley Kurtz at The Corner adds this:
Apparently, …Democrats outnumbered Republicans at the polls. That makes the already dramatic 71 percent vote in favor of the Missouri marriage amendment all the more impressive. The Post-Dispatch also notes that gay marriage advocates outspent opponents, and launched a major television ad campaign to boot….
In a post that predates the Missouri vote, the usually sensible Virginia Postrel opines that:
People support abortion rights out of fear. They support gay marriage out of love.
A lot of “people” support abortion rights and gay marriage simply because it’s the politically correct thing to do — a litmus test of one’s open-mindedness and liberality — and a form of delayed adolescent rebellion against moldy reactionaries and religious fundamentalists.
I’m not surprised that an antiwar libertarian like Gene Healy sees Bush vs. Kerry as Freddy vs. Jason. He does admit, however, that it’s hard to vote for Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian Party candidate, with a straight face. Healy cites a piece by Bill Bradford, in which Bradford says:
Badnarik believes that the federal income tax has no legal authority and that people are justified in refusing to file a tax return until such time as the IRS provides them with an explanation of its authority to collect the tax. He hadn’t filed income tax returns for several years. He moved from California to Texas because of Texas’ more liberal gun laws, but he refused to obtain a Texas driver’s license because the state requires drivers to provide their fingerprints and Social Security numbers. He has been ticketed several times for driving without a license; sometimes he has gotten off for various technical legal reasons, but on three occasions he has been convicted and paid a fine. He also refused to use postal ZIP codes, seeing them as “federal territories.”
He has written a book on the Constitution for students in his one-day, $50 seminar on the Constitution, but it is available elsewhere, including on Amazon.com. It features an introduction by Congressman Ron Paul and Badnarik’s theory about taxes. His campaign website included a potpourri of right-wing constitutional positions, as well as some very unorthodox views on various issues. He proposed that convicted felons serve the first month of their sentence in bed so that their muscles would atrophy and they’d be less trouble for prison guards and to blow up the U.N. building on the eighth day of his administration, after giving the building’s occupants a chance to evacuate. In one especially picturesque proposal, he wrote:
I would announce a special one-week session of Congress where all 535 members would be required to sit through a special version of my Constitution class. Once I was convinced that every member of Congress understood my interpretation of their very limited powers, I would insist that they restate their oath of office while being videotaped.
One assumes, although one cannot prove, that none of this is an exercise in irony. At any rate, these opinions were removed from the website shortly after he won the nomination, and they didn’t come up when he visited state party conventions. Nor did his refusal to file tax returns, thereby risking federal indictment and felony arrest. While many of his closest supporters were aware of these issues, they were unknown to most LP members.
Irony seems to be lost on card-carrying Libertarians. The Party seems to have been taken over by the tinfoil-hat brigade.
Politics and Prosperity 