The Drudge Report today broke the news that British Royal Prince Harry has been on the front lines in Afghanistan since December (http://www.drudgereport.com/flashph.htm). I say, right-o, chum!
I think this is fantastic. Of course, there's the possibility that publicizing this makes bonnie Prince Harry a target for the Taliban, and the Royal Family was right to keep it under wraps for as long as they did. But it's fantastic that he's right in there with honest-to-God soldiers, doing
honest-to-God fighting (reportedly). It's a lot more than the Bush twins can say, along with most of the sons and daughters of our Congressional officials and presidential candidates.
Granted, according to the article, he's only on a three-month tour, but given the fact that the British Regular Forces (including the Army, the Naval Service, and the RAF) have 20,000 fewer enlisted men and women than they did five years ago, perhaps he'll serve more (see http://www.dasa.mod.uk/natstats/tsp1/gender.html). We'll have to keep an eye on what the Royal Family and British government have to say about that.
Whether you disagree with the greater War on Terror or not, I think most would say having Prince Harry, who's third in line for the crown, is a great morale boost and gives a little more integrity and credibility to the British war effort. Rather than say a Royal life is worth more than that of a regular Tommy in the trenches, Prince Harry is sending a message that he feels no more important than any one else his government sent to fight. It gives the phrase, "a government of laws, not of men," a greater ring of truth in the UK. Could this be a new trend? That would be a fantastic turnaround from the days of Vietnam and Creedence Clearwater Revival protest songs. But it will be a long time before we get there.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
History 101 - Lessons of the Past
Boys and Girls, today in History 101 we are going to begin with the basics of how to understand historical mistakes and how not to repeat them. Due to recently escalating events in the Middle East, understanding the past mistakes is crucial to resolve conflicts in this region. Our case study for today is Iran. Let's begin with the historical events and then move to their implications in the modern day.
In March of 1951, Mohammad Mossadegh was democratically elected within the political structure of
The impact of the 1953 coup in
With President Bush and Ahmadinejad’s hostility towards one another and Bush’s current regime change policies as exhibited by the invasion of
This tension is especially significant given the foreign policy of the Bush administration. Diplomacy between the United States and Iran is gravely needed in order to establish trust, improve relations, and to reach a compromise. "JustForeignPolicy.org" says it best:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJRcOF7rEfQ
Now go tell Mommy and Daddy what you learned in school today.
************************
Works Cited/Consulted
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJRcOF7rEfQ
Now go tell Mommy and Daddy what you learned in school today.
************************
Works Cited/Consulted
Ahmadinejad’s ‘Gift’ to
Barth, Linda. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
Buncombe, Andrew. Freed Iranian Diplomat Claims He was Tortured by the CIA in Iraq. April 9, 2007. The Independent. April 10, 2007.
Gasiorowski, Mark J. Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in
Oren, Michael B. Power, Faith, and Fantasy:
Risen, James. How a Plot Convulsed in
Secrets of History: The CIA in
Zabih, Sepehr. The Mossadegh Era: Roots of the Iranian Revolution.
More Irony
Frank Rich's Sunday editorial, "The Audacity of Hopelessness," is amazing and worth reading in its entirety. Here are some excerpts:
It’s not just that [Hillary Clinton's] candidacy’s central premise — the priceless value of “experience” — was fatally poisoned from the start by her still ill-explained vote to authorize the fiasco [Iraq]. Senator Clinton then compounded that 2002 misjudgment by pursuing a 2008 campaign strategy that uncannily mimicked the disastrous Bush Iraq war plan. After promising a cakewalk to the nomination — “It will be me,” Mrs. Clinton told Katie Couric in November — she was routed by an insurgency.
The Clinton camp was certain that its moneyed arsenal of political shock-and-awe would take out Barack Hussein Obama in a flash. The race would “be over by Feb. 5,” Mrs. Clinton assured George Stephanopoulos just before New Year’s. But once the Obama forces outwitted her, leaving her mission unaccomplished on Super Tuesday, there was no contingency plan. She had neither the boots on the ground nor the money to recoup....
The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it’s a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done. The Clinton camp has been the slacker in this race, more words than action, and its candidate’s message, for all its purported high-mindedness, was and is self-immolating....
In the last battleground, Wisconsin, the Clinton campaign was six days behind Mr. Obama in putting up ads and had only four campaign offices to his 11. Even as Mrs. Clinton clings to her latest firewall — the March 4 contests — she is still being outhustled. Last week she told reporters that she “had no idea” that the Texas primary system was “so bizarre” (it’s a primary-caucus hybrid), adding that she had “people trying to understand it as we speak.” Perhaps her people can borrow the road map from Obama’s people. In Vermont, another March 4 contest, The Burlington Free Press reported that there were four Obama offices and no Clinton offices as of five days ago. For what will no doubt be the next firewall after March 4, Pennsylvania on April 22, the Clinton campaign is sufficiently disorganized that it couldn’t file a complete slate of delegates by even an extended ballot deadline.
Sidenote #1: From Time magazine's Swampland blog:
"While [the Clinton campaign advisers] were busy 'discovering' the rules, however, the Obama campaign had people on the ground in Texas explaining the system, organizing precincts, and making Powerpoints. I know because I went to one of these meetings a week ago. I should have invited [Clinton's chief strategist] Mark Penn I suppose."
Rich continues:
This is the candidate who keeps telling us she’s so competent that she’ll be ready to govern from Day 1. Mrs. Clinton may be right that Mr. Obama has a thin résumé, but her disheveled campaign keeps reminding us that the biggest item on her thicker résumé is the health care task force that was as botched as her presidential bid....
As for countering what she sees as the empty Obama brand of hope, she offers only a chilly void: Abandon hope all ye who enter here. This must be the first presidential candidate in history to devote so much energy to preaching against optimism, against inspiring language and — talk about bizarre — against democracy itself. No sooner does Mrs. Clinton lose a state than her campaign belittles its voters as unrepresentative of the country.
Sidenote #2: Mark Penn's tendency to marginalize states where Obama won was labelled the "insult 40 states strategy" by Daily Kos, but I prefer "Is Your State Insignificant According to Hillary?":
#1. States that have a lot of black people are insignificant and are not quality. (sorry Alabama, DC, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland and South Carolina).
#2. Small states are insignificant and are not quality. (sorry Alaska, Delaware, Idaho, Maine, North Dakota and Utah).
#3. States in the middle of the country are insignificant and are not quality. (sorry Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska and North Dakota).
#4. States that have a lot of Mormons are insignificant and are not quality. (sorry Utah)
#5. States that run caucuses are insignificant and are not quality. (sorry Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Nebraska, North Dakota and Washington)
Make Music, Not Bombs
Leave it to the NY Phil to do what Washington can't.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/arts/music/26symphony.html?hp
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/arts/music/26symphony.html?hp
It's All in the Paradigm
I have to give a shout out to the Drudge Report (http://www.drudgereport.com/) for this one.
Anybody with at least slight misgivings about all the fuss regarding global warming might be interested to know that, according to a column by Lorne Gunter in the NationalPost.com on February 25th (http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=332289), the northern hemisphere is currently experiencing an uncharacteristically cold winter. The article reports that based on data from the US National Climatic Data Center, the average temperature for American cities in January '08 was three tenths of a degree Fahrenheit cooler than the average of that month for the twentieth century.
Whats more, Toronto was smashed with seventy centimeters of snow two weeks into this month, breaking the record of 66.6 cm. That record dates back to 1950, and was the total for the entire month - not just the first half.
Asia has been hit hard, as well. China is experiencing the worst winter there in a century, and the article says cities there have been brought to a standstill. Power lines were brought down by snow and ice, and conditions were too harsh to hazard any repairs, leaving residents with out power for as long as several weeks. According to the article, with all things considered, Siberia, Mongolia, China, in addition to northern North America, are covered in more snow than those continents had been since 1966.
Finally, the most notable and important tidbit concerns that arctic sea ice that we hear so much about. Records indicate that substantial amounts of that ice have been lost due to global-warming-induced melting. In fact, melting has caused the reduction of the ice to the lowest point on record. However, you might be intrigued to learn that these records only date back to 1972. Surely, thirty-six years is nowhere near an adequate amount of time to determine a trend for as grand a system as global climate.
Of course, somebody is going to tell me that after the warming, there's going to be cooling. After all, that's how it happened in The Day After Tomorrow. But according to Bernard Goldberg, author of Crazies to the Left of Me, Wimps to the Right (HarperCollins, 2007), the debate over global warming hasn't always been about global warming. In fact, in regards to the "global climate change" debate, as you may have noticed it is increasingly called as of late, a study by the Business and Media Institute shows that the New York Times and Time magazine have interchangeably run stories about global cooling and global warming for more than a century, beginning with cooling in 1895, warming in 1933, back to cooling as late as 1975, and back to the warming paradigm, which we are currently hearing about (see pages 67-69). In short, they don't know what they are talking about, and there is no way for anyone to be sure. Earth's weather makes up such a complicated system that it is folly to believe that any trends could be identified in a thirty-year sample, despite the argument from some.
My point isn't that we're about to tumble head first into an ice age. It's that Mother Nature has far more up her sleeve than we can correctly evaluate in such a short time span. Before we make stupid decisions regarding the need to reduce our carbon footprint (and how to do so), following the example of a man who buys "carbon credits" from his own company, we need to realize that there are much larger natural forces at work. Surely, it would be egotistical folly to say that our understanding of said forces can be derived from slivers of time, taken as samples that are supposedly representative of the entire climatic history of our planet.
Anybody with at least slight misgivings about all the fuss regarding global warming might be interested to know that, according to a column by Lorne Gunter in the NationalPost.com on February 25th (http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=332289), the northern hemisphere is currently experiencing an uncharacteristically cold winter. The article reports that based on data from the US National Climatic Data Center, the average temperature for American cities in January '08 was three tenths of a degree Fahrenheit cooler than the average of that month for the twentieth century.
Whats more, Toronto was smashed with seventy centimeters of snow two weeks into this month, breaking the record of 66.6 cm. That record dates back to 1950, and was the total for the entire month - not just the first half.
Asia has been hit hard, as well. China is experiencing the worst winter there in a century, and the article says cities there have been brought to a standstill. Power lines were brought down by snow and ice, and conditions were too harsh to hazard any repairs, leaving residents with out power for as long as several weeks. According to the article, with all things considered, Siberia, Mongolia, China, in addition to northern North America, are covered in more snow than those continents had been since 1966.
Finally, the most notable and important tidbit concerns that arctic sea ice that we hear so much about. Records indicate that substantial amounts of that ice have been lost due to global-warming-induced melting. In fact, melting has caused the reduction of the ice to the lowest point on record. However, you might be intrigued to learn that these records only date back to 1972. Surely, thirty-six years is nowhere near an adequate amount of time to determine a trend for as grand a system as global climate.
Of course, somebody is going to tell me that after the warming, there's going to be cooling. After all, that's how it happened in The Day After Tomorrow. But according to Bernard Goldberg, author of Crazies to the Left of Me, Wimps to the Right (HarperCollins, 2007), the debate over global warming hasn't always been about global warming. In fact, in regards to the "global climate change" debate, as you may have noticed it is increasingly called as of late, a study by the Business and Media Institute shows that the New York Times and Time magazine have interchangeably run stories about global cooling and global warming for more than a century, beginning with cooling in 1895, warming in 1933, back to cooling as late as 1975, and back to the warming paradigm, which we are currently hearing about (see pages 67-69). In short, they don't know what they are talking about, and there is no way for anyone to be sure. Earth's weather makes up such a complicated system that it is folly to believe that any trends could be identified in a thirty-year sample, despite the argument from some.
My point isn't that we're about to tumble head first into an ice age. It's that Mother Nature has far more up her sleeve than we can correctly evaluate in such a short time span. Before we make stupid decisions regarding the need to reduce our carbon footprint (and how to do so), following the example of a man who buys "carbon credits" from his own company, we need to realize that there are much larger natural forces at work. Surely, it would be egotistical folly to say that our understanding of said forces can be derived from slivers of time, taken as samples that are supposedly representative of the entire climatic history of our planet.
Monday, February 25, 2008
The NAFTA Fight
The two Democratic presidential candidates are, of course, sparring again:
"Sen. Clinton has been going to great lengths on the campaign trail to distance herself from NAFTA," Obama said Sunday in Lorain, Ohio. "In her own book, Sen. Clinton called NAFTA one of 'Bill's successes' and 'legislative victories.'"
"One million jobs have been lost because of NAFTA, including nearly 50,000 jobs here in Ohio. And yet, 10 years after NAFTA passed, Sen. Clinton said it was good for America. Well, I don't think NAFTA has been good for America -- and I never have," he said.
Now I don't doubt that Hillary Clinton supported NAFTA as First Lady, but the statistics are a little suspect. Now surely some people lost their jobs since January 1, 1994, when NAFTA went into effect, but total employment actually rose from 91.6 million jobs in Jan. 1994 to 113.0 million jobs in Jan. 2007, according to the Department of Labor. In fact, ignoring seasonal fluctuations, employment rose almost consistently from 1994 through 2000, with 2001 being the first year since NAFTA to experience net job loss:
Saturday, February 23, 2008
The Irony of Hillary Clinton
Maureen Dowd speculates that Hillary Clinton's "masculine" style is costing her the election:
Hillary was so busy trying to prove she could be one of the boys — getting on the Armed Services Committee, voting to let W. go to war in Iraq, strong-arming supporters and donors, and trying to out-macho Obama — that she only belatedly realized that many Democratic and independent voters, especially women, were eager to move from hard-power locker-room tactics to a soft-power sewing circle approach....
The first serious female candidate for president was rejected by voters drawn to the more feminine management style of her male rival.
Czar Vladimir?
Highlights from an article in today's New York Times, detailing "Putin's iron grip on Russia":
"In my opinion, at a certain stage, like now, it is not only useful, it is even necessary — we are tired of democratic twists and turns,” said the leader of Mr. Putin’s party in Nizhny Novgorod, Sergei G. Nekrasov....
A refrain often heard here and across Russia is that the distressing years right after Communism’s collapse left people craving stability and a sturdy economy far more than Western-style democracy. These days, they care little if elections are basically uncontested as long as a strong leader is in charge....
Today, authority flows from the Kremlin to a regional governor appointed by Mr. Putin, who abolished the election of governors in Russia in 2004. The governor, Valery P. Shantsev, was brought in from Moscow and is charged with running the region and ensuring that Mr. Putin’s party, United Russia, wins elections. The lines between the government and party have become so blurred that on election day in December, regional election commission members wore large United Russia badges....
A few weeks before the elections, [Andrei] Osipenko gave up, renouncing his party at a news conference that was heavily covered on state-controlled television and had the feel of the Stalinist-era public confessions that followed show trials. Other party officials did the same. The party’s remaining candidates in the region were too fearful to campaign. “You begin to think: you have a family, you have a business, and you may value this significantly more than a political career,” said Artur Nazarenko, an official with the Union of Right Forces. The party, once a regional power, received only 1 percent of the vote in the parliamentary elections.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Why the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, India Should be Rebuilt
In civic nations, such as
In 1992, when the BJP, VHP, and Shiv Sena tore down the Babri mosque inciting riots leaving more than 2,000 people dead, these groups were participating in terrorism. By holding these parties accountable for their actions and supporting the reconstruction of this historic building, the Indian government is acting within the realm of a civic nation and fulfilling its duty of equal, liberal democracy to all of its citizens.
Works Cited:
51/210. Measures to Eliminate International Terrorism. December 17, 1996. United Nations General Assembly. February 20, 2008.
Khilnani, Sunil. The Idea of
Timeline: Ayodhya Crisis. July 5, 2005. BBC News. February 20, 2008. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1844930.stm>
UNODC and Terrorism Prevention. 2008. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. February 20, 2008. <http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/terrorism/index.html>
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
John McCain Says the Darnedest Things
In his victory speech last night, John McCain came out swinging against Barack Obama, calling his appeal for change "eloquent, but empty." (For which, McCain received a full thirty seconds of applause.) He also attacked the Democratic Party and liberalism in general, calling it "a tired philosophy that trusts in government more than the people." Interesting words from a man who co-sponsored a law regulating campaign finance and wants to triple the U.S. troop presence in Iraq.
But perhaps the most unusual quote of the night is this:
Or will we risk the confused leadership of an inexperienced candidate who once suggested bombing our ally, Pakistan, and suggested sitting down without pre-conditions or clear purpose with enemies who support terrorists and are intent on destabilizing the world by acquiring nuclear weapons?
McCain was referencing this quote made by Barack Obama:
I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges. But let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al-Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will.
This doesn't sound that unreasonable to me. Furthermore, al-Qaeda leader Abu Laith al-Libi was killed by an American bomb in Pakistan. Taken together, McCain seems to be saying that he wouldn't go after al-Qaeda in Pakistan and that President Bush is "confused" and "inexperienced," altogether odd for a man who typically disagrees with Bush's war policy for not being drastic enough and once joked that we should "bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran."
Time magazine's Joe Klein on the subject
Clips from McCain's speech:
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