October 2, 2007 – 10:35 am
Violence declined sharply in Iraq last month. This was such unwelcome news at the New York Times that the story, which opened with the sentence “The number of violent civilian deaths in Iraq dropped precipitously in September compared with the previous month”, was presented “below the fold” on page 10, having been knocked off the […]
October 1, 2007 – 11:12 pm
Well, it looks like John McCain is done. I don’t suppose that he had much of a shot at the Republican nomination anyway, but now he’s being roasted alive for some candid remarks he made during an interview at Beliefnet.org. What was McCain’s unpardonable offense? Being a Christian himself, he expressed a wish to have […]
September 19, 2007 – 5:23 pm
One hears a lot these days about a “right” to health care. I bristle at this, because I think the notion of “rights” as anything other than matters of human convention is rubbish. We may, as a society, choose to define our laws such that they include a “right” to those things we deem appropriate: […]
September 18, 2007 – 10:33 am
Our pal The Stiletto takes a pointed look at farm subsidies. Here.
August 5, 2007 – 11:54 pm
Here, from the journal Foreign Affairs, is Barack Obama’s obligatory term paper on foreign policy. (Thanks to my friend Jess Kaplan for sending the link our way.) Though the paper deals mostly in generalities, its tone is encouraging, and although I doubt Obama will get the Democratic nod next year, I was pleasantly surprised to […]
The Washington Post offers us an interesting and disturbing glimpse into the private life of President Bush; it is an odd life of isolation, and, one has to imagine, a kind of desperation as well. From the article: After reading Andrew Roberts’s “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900,” Bush brought in the author […]
Michael Moore is on his (presumably steel-reinforced) soapbox once again. In his newest movie, Sicko, he brings his folksy propaganda style to bear on the American health-care system, which is, he alleges, fundamentally inferior to the socialized arrangements in place in other countries, including even the tyrannized and impoverished nation of Cuba (whose “revolutionary” medical […]
A few days ago we directed waka waka waka readers to a Wall Street Journal piece by Bernard Lewis, in which he explained the psychological boost and doctrinal validation that a US abandonment of Iraq would give to our jihadist foes. Now that article is followed by a politically brave item by the Democrat Bob […]
We note that Jerry Falwell, the prominent religious extremist, sanctimonious prig, and bigot, has died. This is the man who, on September 13th, 2001, said: I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, […]
A few days ago the New York Times offered a revealing glimpse of the august body of solons by whose sage and impartial judgment New Jersey law is made.
March 22, 2007 – 10:33 am
Two things you should never watch being made. Here.
December 23, 2006 – 11:51 pm
Having spent a couple of years working at the tragically self-immolated “prospective Web search” company PubSub, where we were among the first to gather comprehensive real-time statistics about blogs, I occasionally poke around a bit myself to see who is linking to whom — and in particular, to me. In a visit to Technorati a few minutes ago, I saw that I had been linked to, back on December 2nd, by a writer named “Sini”, at a blog called Jusiper. Here is the text of the post, in its entirety:
I suppose this is the adult version of fratboys who party to “Trenchtown Rock”: a Republican, warloving Fela fan.
Presumably the best time to do a line is right after they kill Fela’s mama.
I don’t know anything about “fratboys” who particularly enjoy Jamaican music; presumably there are some, as appreciation of good music transcends political allegiances. I do feel rather misunderstood, however.
December 3, 2006 – 12:49 am
The gist of the essay is that the current administration, rather than being incompetent, or overweening, or imperialistic, or all three, is in fact a gang of Nazis, and we’d better wise up. The author, aghast at our complacency, seeks to rouse us from our stupor by pointing out – breaking news! – that the Germany of the 1930’s became utterly evil, in large extent, of its own volition, and suggests that the same is happening here.
November 30, 2006 – 3:18 pm
Political disagreements, such as those that have been taking place lately in comment threads here at waka waka wakaexhibit a property not unlike that ascribed astrophysicists to the hypothetical “dark energy” that is thought to permeate the cosmos: they exert a mysterious repulsive force.
November 22, 2006 – 1:11 pm
Here’s yet another entertaining website, brought to our attention by my friend Jess Kaplan. It is maintained by an outfit calling itself SurveyUSA, and is an interactive map of the current mood of the nation, taken state by state, regarding possible 2008 Presidential election pairings. Here’s what they’ve done:
November 17, 2006 – 1:58 pm
The front page of today’s New York Times features an outstanding photo, a real peach. In the foreground are the presumptive Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and her intraparty foe Steny Hoyer. Ms. Pelosi, who has yet even to take up the gavel, has already shown outstanding political ineptitude in her attempt to foist small-bore Pennsylvania pork broker and Mideast defeatist John Murtha upon the House as majority leader. The Democratic caucus, in what many see as a telling lack of fealty and sign of party disunity, decisively rebuffed her, installing Mr. Hoyer, currently the minority whip, instead.
November 1, 2006 – 11:49 am
The lugubrious, thatch-crowned Ent John Kerry, who is so in love with his own orotund bombast that he simply cannot, even for the sake of his own sallow hide, keep his gaping pie-hole shut, has made a fool of himself again. This man simply will not go away, and some good Samaritan should find a hammer and a wooden stake and do the right thing.
October 19, 2006 – 11:47 pm
This past Friday, President Bush signed into law H.R. 4411, the Internet Gambling Prohibition and Enforcement Act, which prevents U.S. financial institutions from transferring money to online gambling services. The bill was sneaked, in typical sausage-and-legislation fashion, into the SAFE Ports Act (H.R. 4954 As Amended) for the Senate vote, where it passed 98-0, with two abstaining (Sens. Chafee and Akaka).
September 27, 2006 – 3:33 pm
I’ve been posting a lot of political items lately; too many, really, as I don’t want political issues to dominate here. I also think I am giving the impression that I am far off on the right, when actually my opinions vary widely on an issue-by-issue basis – I tend to side with the Left on most social issues (gay marriage, church/state, abortion, drug laws, environmental and energy policy), though not all (affirmative action, gun control, border control, and pushing toward socialism generally), and with the Right, specifically the neoconservative right, on one issue only, which is foreign policy, to the extent that US influence is fairly and honestly brought to bear in a struggle against tyranny. I have defended, at length, our our decision to knock Saddam off his perch, but I agree also that the job was catastrophically bungled, and that heads that still issue orders should have rolled. I also share the Left’s low opinion of George Bush generally – his swagger, his smug religiosity, his inarticulateness, his lack of intellectual subtlety, and his inability to admit and correct error – as I have made abundantly clear in any number of posts.
So I’ll try to ease off on the political rants. But not just yet; here’s one more.
August 11, 2006 – 9:54 pm
I wrote yesterday about the irritating tendency of affluent left-leaning types here in Wellfleet and back home in Park Slope to speak in glowing terms of the many blessings that Fidel Castro (whose current status is reminiscent of Schroedinger’s famous Cat) has showered upon the fortunate citizens of Cuba. The fact that the island is an impoverished police state, where dissidents languish in dungeons, and whence people flee by the thousands in leaky boats whenever restrictions on leaving the country are lifted, is usually passed over unmentioned, so that the discussion may focus on Cuba’s fantastic health-care system, which of course puts ours to shame, and which is an enlightening example of the benign vision of the saintly Maximum Leader.
Startlingly, the vaunted Cuban health-care infrastructure actually falls somewhat short of its reputation. Have a look over here.
August 10, 2006 – 10:35 pm
As readers of these pages will know, I spend a good deal of time in the lovely seaside village of Wellfleet, out on the far end of Cape Cod. Demographically Wellfleet is an interesting mixture; its flinty and hard-working year-round population of fewer than 3,000 swells to almost 20,000 in the summertime, as affluent vacationers flock to its sheltered inlets, freshwater ponds, art galleries, theater productions, excellent restaurants, and of course its spectacular Atlantic beaches, framed by towering dunes.
I suppose I’ll weigh in on the situation on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, although I tend to shy away from politics in these pages. In short, my view is that Israel is doing exactly what it ought to be doing, and ought to keep doing it for a little while longer. I offer a few thoughts, none of them particularly original.
In today’s New York Times, former chess champion Garry Kasparov, who has forsaken competitive chess for pro-democratic political activism, challenges the Western democracies to take “a tougher stand” against the increasing trend toward authoritarianism in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Garik writes:
Opposition activists and journalists are routinely arrested and interrogated. The Kremlin, in complete control of the judiciary, loots private businesses and then uses state-controlled companies to launder the money abroad.
Mr. Bush and Europe’s leaders apparently believe it is best to disregard such unpleasantness for the sake of receiving Russia’s cooperation on security and energy. This cynical and morally repugnant stance has also proven ineffective. Just as in the old days, Moscow has become an ally for troublemakers and anti-democratic rulers around the world. Nuclear aid to Iran, missile technology to North Korea, military aircraft to Sudan, Myanmar and Venezuela, and a budding friendship with Hamas: these are the West’s rewards for keeping its mouth shut about human rights in Russia.
Read the entire essay here.
My friend Eugene Jen, whose restlessly curious mind makes him a rich source of interesting material, has sent along a link to a story about the great logician Kurt Gödel. Apparently Gödel, in preparing for his U.S. citizenship examination, made a characteristically analytical reading of the document, and realized that despite the Framers’ aversion to tyranny, they had left in place a weakness that might lead, under the worst of circumstances, to the establishment of a dictatorship. It was Gödel’s intention to mention this at his examination, but his good friend Einstein, who had accompanied him to the proceedings, talked him out of it.
In today’s Wall Street Journal newsletter was a link to a recent commencement speech by John McCain, in which he tries to frame the context of political debate, and reminds us that more unites us than divides us. It’s well worth reading, and you can find it here.
I’ve been getting a little back-channel heat about my tendency, lately, to make unkind remarks about the UN. So, for the record, I’d like to say that I have always felt that the only hope for the world, in the long run, was some sort of universal government, and that I think the historical tendency of “non-zero-sum” cooperative arrangements to emerge at larger and larger scales makes such an arrangement practically ineveitable, sooner or later. I used to be a big defender of th UN, back when US foreign policy seemed to consist mainly of prppoing up whatever foul despot would take our side against the Reds (although we are still cozying up to a few who will take our side against the jihadists).
A story in yesterday’s New York Times brings to our attention once again the fine job that the United Nations is doing to make the world a better place:
Liberian girls as young as 8 are being sexually exploited by United Nations peacekeepers, aid workers and teachers in return for food, small favors and even rides in trucks, according to a new report from Save the Children U.K.
Of course, the entire civilized world, its patience already stretched to the limit by US abuses at Guantanamo, immediately rose up in outrage, and anti-UN rioting paralyzed the world’s capitals.
Oh wait – well, actually, nobody seems to be bothered, particularly, except for Save the Children, who recommends a swift and severe response:
Save the Children said Liberia and the United Nations should set up an office to investigate cases of the sexual exploitation and to work to ensure that the behavior stops, prosecuting the offenders, among other steps.
It also said United Nations workers accused of sexual exploitation should “go through judicial proceedings,” and if found guilty, should not be sent elsewhere as peacekeepers.
That ought to do it.
Johns Hopkins professor Fouad Ajami was on the Wall Street Journal’s television program, the “Journal Editorial Report”, over the weekend, to discuss the recent conference in Philadelphia honoring the 90th birthday of the great Mideast scholar Bernard Lewis.
My friend Mike Zaharee who works in PubSub‘s Granite State Research Kitchen up in Nashua, NH, reminded me the other day that New Hampshire is the only state in which the Right of Revolution is written right into the Constitution. Here it is, Article 10:
Government being instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security, of the whole community, and not for the private interest or emolument of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought to reform the old, or establish a new government. The doctrine of nonresistance ag ainst arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.
This is the same state about which Daniel Webster once said, referring to the iconic (and recently departed) Old Man of the Mountain:
Men hang out their signs indicative of their respective trades; shoemakers hang out a gigantic shoe; jewelers a monster watch, and the dentist hangs out a gold tooth; but in the mountains of New Hampshire, God Almighty has hung out a sign to show that there He makes men.
From the notes for the United Nations’ Disarmament Commission 2006 Substantive Session 269th & 270th Meetings (AM & PM):
In other business, the following delegations were elected as Vice-chairpersons, by acclamation: Chile, Uruguay and Iran.
So now Iran, whose rabid president has declared that his country “doesn’t give a damn” about UN efforts (including possible resolutions) to ensure that it does not arm itself with nuclear weapons, is to be a “Vice-chairperson” of the Disarmament Commission.
(Thanks to James Taranto for pointing this out.)
It is increasingly hard to defend the idea that there is any conceivable value in our continued participation in this feckless and corrupt organization.
April 21, 2006 – 10:32 pm
Here are a couple of photos from Chinese president Hu Jintao’s vist to the White house. During the reception on the South Lawn (we decided to snub Hu and crew by not throwing a state banquet in their honor; after all, he is only the leader of the world’s most populous nation) Hu was manhandled by President Bush, and heckled by an adherent of Falun Gong. While introducing the Chinese national anthem, an announcer mistakenly referred to the People’s Republic of China as the “Republic of China”, which of course is Taiwan. And once everyone went inside, Dick Cheney apparently fell asleep.
I have to wonder if the whole thing was a prank; I rather hope it was. You can just imagine them all trying to keep a straight face. I still don’t think it tops Bush père vomiting in the lap of Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa back in 1992, though.
What a pack of cards.
April 19, 2006 – 12:29 pm
My friend Jess Kaplan has sent me a link to an essay by Carl Bernstein that, not unsurprisingly, calls for a Congressional investigation, possibly leading to impeachment proceedings, of George Bush. You can read it here. While Bernstein’s credentials on the subject of ousting Republican presidents are, of course, unimpeachable, one must be wary to some extent, because of his visceral, Krugmanesque loathing for Bush the man.
April 17, 2006 – 11:04 pm
Today, having been summoned for jury duty, I spent a few hours as a cog in the machinery of American justice. Admittedly, a case could be made that my contribution was actually quite minor: I showed up at 8:45 a.m. at the Supreme Court building at 360 Adams Street in downtown Brooklyn; sat in a large room, reading, until lunchtime; took a very enjoyable stroll (accompanied by an equally enjoyable sandwich) down to the lovely Brooklyn Promenade overlooking New York Harbor, where I dined al fresco in the delightful spring sunshine; returned to the Central Jury room at 2; sat there reading until the end of the day, at which point I was discharged. Still, despite the fact that my name was not called even once other than to send me packing, I exited the building with that special glow of inner satisfaction that only those who, like me, have sacrificed in the service of their country can really understand. Not pride, mind you, but just the knowledge that one has done one’s Duty, and done it well.
February 21, 2006 – 11:58 pm
I have been a bit cut off the past few days – I’ve been out of town, and have lost my Internet connection at home. I missed the papers for a couple of days. So I am rather poorly informed as regards a story that seems to be all over the place – the impending takeover of major port facilities by a corporation based in the United Arab Emirates.
February 17, 2006 – 11:34 pm
There has been quite a stew about how to deal with the fact that the terrorist organization Hamas is now the democratically elected leadership of Palestine. Many are suggesting that they should be starved out; Palestine’s economy is so utterly barren that a cessation of foreign aid would have a devastating effect. Indeed, why on earth should Israel and its allies feed a virulent enemy who is sworn to its annihilation?
Quite predictably the Left, who have tilted a long way toward outright antipathy toward Israel in recent years (as witness the late Rachel Corrie, who died defending a Palestinian arms-smuggling tunnel), have delighted in the discomfiture of the West at this unfortunate outcome of the nascent democratic process. If we are going to engage in something as arrogant as trying to increase the number of people in the world who can live in free and democratic societies instead of brutal tyrannies, then it serves us right when the whole thing backfires. How dare we?
Anyway, I had myself been leaning toward ostracization of the Hamas government, as the idea of offering any support to their poisonous ideology seemed completely wrong. But Thomas Friedman, writing in today’s Times, has led me to rethink my position.
December 22, 2005 – 12:41 am
This transit strike has the city clenched and writhing like a spider stuck by a pin. Businesses are withering, traffic is packed solid from river to river, municipal and union officials are locked in a snarling impasse, while Gotham’s hapless and frozen workforce staggers to and fro across the city’s bridges in their hundreds of thousands. And all of this four days before Christmas.
New York is rightly renowned for taking these things in stride, but this is going to get old in a hurry.
December 20, 2005 – 10:12 pm
The campaign by Biblical literalists to have their mythology masquerade as science in the public schools has been dealt another setback. In a welcome and much-needed decision, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones has struck down the Dover Township, PA school board’s attempt to smuggle “Intelligent Design” into the biology curriculum.
You can read the judge’s opinion here.
December 20, 2005 – 12:43 pm
Well, the bus-and-subway strike is on. New York depends on mass transit more than any other city in the country, and this is going to be very bad indeed, especially given the timing.
December 19, 2005 – 11:05 pm
I expect that most of you have read George Orwell’s Animal Farm, but you may not have seen the preface that he wrote for a Ukrainian edition. The preface was censored in England, and was not added to most English translations. I certainly hadn’t seen it before my friend Duncan Werner sent me a link to it today.
December 18, 2005 – 5:34 pm
President Bush yesterday owned up to having authorized the NSA to monitor the private communications of US citizens without first having to obtain a court order. I realize we are at war, but this is wrong, and I am angry about it. I am angry not only because it is exactly the sort of thing that goes on in the Orwellian police states we are supposedly setting ourselves in opposition to, but also because I have at considerable social cost defended the Bush administration’s foreign policy for years now, while he can’t manage to keep up his end of the bargain by not appearing at every opportunity to be exactly the conniving and hubristic autocrat his hysterical opponents claim him to be.
Obviously his political foes will seize hungrily upon this. I think it is going to be a very serious problem for him, and rightly so.
December 15, 2005 – 10:20 am
I ran across this, from Peggy Noonan, in this morning’s WSJ newsletter:
Howard Dean, that human helium balloon ever resistant to the gravity of mature judgment, said of the administration that they lied us into war. He left no doubt that he meant they did it deliberately and cynically. But there seems to me a thing that is blindingly obvious, and yet I’ve never seen it remarked upon. It is that an administration that would coldly lie us into Iraq is an administration that would lie about what was found there. And yet the soldiers, searchers and investigators who looked high and low throughout Iraq made it clear they had found nothing, an outcome the administration did not dispute and came to admit. But an administration that would lie about reasons would lie about results, wouldn’t it? Or try to? Yet they were candid.
Wouldn’t it be good if our serious journalists and historians looked into what happened to weapons that Saddam once used and once had? He abused weapons inspectors who came looking, acting like a man who had a great deal to hide. And wouldn’t it be good for our serious journalists and historians to look into exactly how it is that faulty intelligence, of such a crucial nature and at such a crucial moment, came to America and Britain? It is still amazing. Oh, for journalists and historians who would look only for truth and not merely for data that justify their politics and ideology.
December 13, 2005 – 11:41 pm
Norman Podhoretz, one of the msot articulate representatives of the “neoconservative” school of political thought, had an excellent article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. In it he likens the “panic” among the Left regarding our efforts in Iraq to the “sunshine patriots” of the Revolutionary War. The term refers to those who began to question and undermine the wisdom of the venture after it became apparent that it might actually be a long and arduous struggle.
December 13, 2005 – 11:12 pm
I live in one of the “bluest” neighborhoods of one of the bluest cities in the nation, the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. It is a lovely place, with splendid Victorian architecture, and it adjoins one of the world’s great city parks, Prospect Park, which is right at the end of my block. We have a fascinating, complex mix of educated and creative people here. The neighborhood prides itself on tolerance and inclusion.
December 7, 2005 – 10:47 am
Our Secretary of State is feeling the heat over in Europe, where many a garment is being rent over our use of “secret” places of detention. I certainly agree that we must not violate the very principles we stand for in order to defend them, but there is a moral calculus involved that is not as simple as our disingenuous “allies” would have us think they think.