:: Bluestarblog ::

:: Sunday, September 29, 2002 ::

David Suzuki's latest scientific folly.

:: Scot 10:49 PM [+] :: ::
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David Warren on George Bush's 'Baghdad Express.'

:: Scot 10:44 PM [+] :: ::
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Eco terrorism and pan activism. The invasion of transnational progressivism continues apace.

:: Scot 10:31 PM [+] :: ::
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Christmas is coming and I think I know what I want.

:: Scot 8:21 PM [+] :: ::
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Want to know what Iraq has been up to? Check out Iraq Watch.

:: Scot 9:39 PM [+] :: ::
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From the Jordan Times: Government declares country ‘free of Satanism’. (Does this mean no Marilyn Manson concert?)

:: Scot 9:27 PM [+] :: ::
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The best argument I've read on the ethics of music downloading. John Dvorak writes:

The music industry began to act like a monopolist. With the advent of the CD, it found that it could continue to gouge its customers. While the industry lectures the public on illegal copying, it gets busted for price fixing. So much for the morality argument.

When Edison first released his prerecorded cylinders, they sold for $4 each. With mass production, he eventually brought the price down to 35 cents, nearly a 90 percent reduction. If the same ratio held true with $16 CDs, the cost of which has been perpetually propped up by price fixing, they would cost $1.40. Since it costs less than 25 cents to mass-produce a CD, $1.40 is reasonable and profitable.

Of course, the industry would need to adjust from extravagance and sloppiness to frugality and normality. Less Dom Perignon, for starters. And it's not as if record companies and artists won't make money. 45-rpm singles used to cost 50 cents each, and it was a big deal to sell a million of them. Elvis Presley led a good life, it seems to me, by leveraging his career with those old profit margins. Heck, he was giving away Cadillacs.

I'm not sure if the RIAA realizes this is only the start of a technological sway that they are quickly losing control over. Moves like this not only convey desperation, but may have also started a hacking war that could bury them.

:: Scot 8:55 PM [+] :: ::
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It's Fox's Bill O'Reilly vs. rap star Ludacris. Soundbitten makes a good case for Ludacris.

:: Scot 4:13 PM [+] :: ::
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I'll give credit where it's due. France comes through big.

:: Scot 7:02 PM [+] :: ::
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Is it transnational progressivism or bureaucratic leftism? Daniel Pipes argues for the latter, but reaches many of the same conclusions. He also adds that America in the future can expect to find itself at great ideological odds with this.

:: Scot 3:44 PM [+] :: ::
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Richard Wolin reviews The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics(by Mark Lilla) and Heidegger's Children (by Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse) in his piece The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals.

:: Scot 3:21 PM [+] :: ::
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Mark Krupnick on the state of English professors today:

It is necessary to keep in mind the social as well as the personal side of such wounded narcissism. Western intellectuals like Diderot and Voltaire once were literary generalists who, nevertheless, were also trenchant social and political critics. Contemporary critics, some of whom aspire to be "public intellectuals" like Sartre and Camus, have been compelled by economic changes to seek refuge in the universities. As their critical idiom has become more and more technical and specialized, they have exercised less and less influence on the general culture. But they still want to be noticed. It is almost as if they live in the shadow of the great literary-political intellectuals of the past, and are constantly trying to measure up. Their solution has been to achieve celebrity in the self-enclosed world of academic literary studies.

The baby boomers have prevailed. Now there are fewer clashes within cutting-edge English departments, because nearly everyone is a theorist or cultural-studies specialist. The victors don't always present a pretty picture. Baby-boom and younger academics in English often project a sanctimony about their secular political-cultural convictions that I never see when my Divinity School colleagues touch on their religious beliefs. Their moralism strikes me as being at odds with their obsession with intradepartmental power plays and their rapt attention to new fashions in criticism and whatever will advance their careers.

:: Scot 3:14 PM [+] :: ::
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Big S Blog backs up the assertion that the enemy needs a humiliation like Hirohito's. Describing a photo of the Japanese Emperor standing next to General MacArthur:

This picture was taken in the days immediately after Japan's surrender to the Allies. This picture became public, and spread alarm throughout the Japanese. Why? Because it showed that Japan had been defeated. There was an obvious difference in the stature and demeanor of MacArthur v. Hirohito. MacArthur is relaxed, wearing a relatively casual khakis. Hirohito is stiff, in very formal attire, and looking a bit worse for wear. The picture created an impetus among the Japanese to engage in self examination for the first time, and with the active help of the MacArthur, truly changed Japanese society forever.

:: Scot 3:00 PM [+] :: ::
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Israel Defies U.N., Continues Siege

Now you're gettin' it...

:: Scot 8:52 PM [+] :: ::
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Jonah Goldberg on the confusion of comparing America to the Roman Empire:

In fact, if you look really, really closely, you'll discover that when American lefty intellectuals prattle about American imperialism it is mostly a metaphorical argument. They confuse our cultural dominance with the Roman Empire's dominance, skipping right over the fact that the Roman Empire installed Roman governors, collected imperial taxes, imposed Roman law, conscripted colonial subjects into the Roman army (eventually), and generally considered Rome the supreme and final authority on any important question.

Sure, the U.S. has military bases all over the world — which are often compared to Roman garrisons — but unlike Roman garrisons their host countries can get rid of them by asking them to leave. The same holds true for our overly hyped "imperial" holdings, like Puerto Rico. They are one referendum away from independence.

Anyway, my point is simply this: Saying we rule the world doesn't make it so. We don't rule the world. We lead the world — this is a huge distinction to people who live outside the intellectual menagerie of an Ivy League English department. If the coolest guy in school wears a leather jacket and all the other kids follow suit, that's hardly the same thing as the coolest guy forcing them at gunpoint to buy a leather jacket from him.

Now, the fact that we are not an empire, but could be one if we wanted to, confuses the dickens of all sorts of people. Indeed, some people find the idea so confusing they willfully refuse to believe it and just go on insisting we are an empire the way the guy in the Monty Python skit just kept insisting the parrot wasn't dead. Other folks don't use the word "empire" but they are just as confused about America's behavior. Marxists, for example, have a hard time fathoming that America doesn't behave according to their straight-line predictions about how a capitalistic "hegemon" should behave. So they mine the data. They ignore the inconvenient and misinterpret the unignorable.

Read the whole essay - it's classic Goldberg.

:: Scot 8:46 PM [+] :: ::
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Canada as a peacekeeping nation commited to foreign aid? Not so says the Globe and Mail's Jeffrey Simpson.

As of August, Canada had 275 peacekeepers abroad (that is, personnel working for UN missions). That effort put Canada in 34th place among UN members contributing to peacekeeping.

Here are a few commitments by way of comparison to Canada's 275 men and women: Bangladesh (one of the world's poorest countries) 5,422; Australia 1,135; Fiji 698; Ghana 2,478; India 2,857; Poland 1,015; Portugal 720; Slovakia 508; Uruguay 1,569. Twenty-four other countries made larger contributions.

Was this year an aberration? Apparently not. In 2001, Canada was 32nd and, in 2000, 33rd. So for the past three years, this stalwart peacekeeping country has been 34th, 32nd and 33rd on the list of countries contributing to UN peacekeeping missions. So much for the myth of Canada the peacekeeper.

Foreign aid is another case in point. Its budget is heading upward again after years of going down. We still have an aid strategy worthy of a G8 country on a budget worthy of a country with two-thirds of Canada's GNP.

The Afghan conflict illustrated the gap between ambition and reality. Ottawa insisted on opening an embassy in Kabul (as many smaller countries were doing) but refused to give Foreign Affairs additional funds. So Canada had soldiers on the ground -- a commitment that stretched the military's capabilities -- but wouldn't pay for an embassy.

:: Scot 12:16 PM [+] :: ::
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U.N. still roughing up Israel:

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan asked both sides to reverse course in exchange for a peaceful solution to the 54-year-old conflict. Calling terrorist attacks "morally repugnant," Mr. Annan urged all Palestinians, "especially the leaders of all political factions, to renounce this wicked instrument of terror clearly and irrevocably, now and forever." To the Israelis, he appealed for "greater care to protect civilians" and to cease acts that hinder Palestinian progress on reform and security.

Is the U.N. really this stupid? The more they treat the Israelis and the Palestinians as equally culpable in this mess, the longer the conflict will continue. Nevermind the moral absurdity that equates defending your country (Israelis) vs. attempted genocide (Palestinians), how about viewing this in the larger context of Arab cultural failure? To focus on this particular battle is to blind yourself from the larger war that sees the Palestinians as pawns of Arabia, not as noble citizens looking to simply carve out a dignified existence for themselves. NOTHING BUT THE COMPLETE DESTRUCTION OF ISRAEL WILL SATISFY THESE MONSTERS. Not land, not peace, not aid, and certainly not U.N. sponsored nogotiations. Negotiations happen after a war, not as a substitute for it. The only end to this mess is when one side sees no advantage in continuing with war and must therefore surrender. It appears the U.N. has no desire to let this happen.

:: Scot 12:04 PM [+] :: ::
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Peter Beinart wonders about Bush's speech to the U.N. Although he was praised for his multilateralist overture, it was predicated on a lie.

...Bush's speech was fundamentally dishonest. Before he took the podium on Thursday morning, the United States had one rationale for war with Iraq: to prevent Saddam from gaining the nuclear capacity that could threaten the world. By the time Bush stepped off the podium, the United States had another: to make the United Nations relevant. It is this second, multilateralist rationale that has won President Bush newfound goodwill among European leaders who don't particularly fear Saddam but who love the U.N. That goodwill, however, rests on a fiction. The Bush administration is not going to war to empower the U.N., a body that until last week it treated with scarcely concealed disdain. The gap between Bush's speech and the reality of American policy will come back to haunt this administration sooner or later. And the bogus war rationale Bush has ginned up for the world is already undermining the clarity of his case at home.

:: Scot 9:28 PM [+] :: ::
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The geopolitical relationship of George Bush and Tony Blair. Andrew Sullivan outdoes himself with this one.

:: Scot 9:11 PM [+] :: ::
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You had to bet an article sub-titled 'In defense of Susan Sontag, Noam Chomsky, and Gore Vidal' would get my blood a little warm. The essay however is nothing new. Dismissing these idiotarians as cranks is still bemoaned as censorship (the flat Earth society has long tired complaining of this) and any commonality in opinion between me and McDonald's is the result of sinister media/corporation/government manipulation. These arguments are less familiar with reason than they are with emotional pumps. True to fringe-left form, the concepts of oppression (of the, ahem, intelligensia) and victimhood (of us foolish sheep) ring loudly in this article, as it does with these thinkers. The sad truth is that the left won't be taken seriously again until they prove 1) they don't oppose the war and 2) they can take a bloody nose without whining about it. This writer has come to the defence of the wrong intellectuals.

:: Scot 5:32 PM [+] :: ::
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A couple of cool essays from Gerry Bowler on The Simpsons and religion here and here. The best TV essay I've ever read had to be Lewis Napper's Here on the Island. Read his sociological take on Mary-Ann:

The most fascinating and delicious twist of Schwartz's tale is the relative obscurity of its central character -- Mary Ann. Her name is not in the title and as compared to the other characters, she is not often seen or heard. This lack of input is the very essence of the Mary Ann character. Some may think this kind, level-headed, lovable symbol of the heartland is insignificant to the story, but nothing could be further from the truth. In many ways Mary Ann is the story. More precisely, in times of critical decision making, Mary Ann's absence is the point.

Mary Ann is easily the most well-adjusted of the characters. She exhibits a healthy sexuality, yet she is unquestionably moral and at the same time not hurtfully devout or judgmentally pious. She is the only truly competent individual on the island. She provides all that is necessary and essential for life. Full of blue-collar know-how, her rugged instincts move her to farm, cook and provide health care and other critical services.

Her lack of self-confidence and doubt of self-worth coupled with an overly-inflated opinion of the others is all that keeps Mary Ann from asserting her rightful place as leader. This revolutionary theme of Mary Ann as most vital yet least compensated, most important yet least revered, most adept yet least trusted, is crucial to understanding the series. It is an attempt to show the common person the folly of their institutionalized reverence of traditional leadership and their legitimate legacy as masters of their own destiny.

:: Scot 4:56 PM [+] :: ::
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Dawson reports 'The Jetsons' turn 40 today.

:: Scot 12:26 PM [+] :: ::
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Dahlia Lithwick sees the courts, not the universities, as the main protector of free speech.

Free speech does not encompass the right to fire, suspend, or riot your way into a universe in which everyone agrees with your views, even if you have legitimate grievances. The courts are well aware of this, but it seems that universities, both here and in Canada, are not. On campus, you may "speak" freely—with fists, chairs, and broken glass—so long as you are a member of an aggrieved minority with delicate sensibilities and a narrative of oppression.

This leaves the state to take on a new role in protecting free speech. The state must be responsible for busting up the monopoly that has taken over the marketplace of ideas: a monopoly of suffering, political correctness, and sympathy without limits. In the firing cases, the state will be represented by the courts, which will reinstate faculty fired for no reason other than unpopular views. And in the campus protest cases, the state must acknowledge that people who use force to suppress the opinions of others are not performing some sacred protected speech act. They are committing assault, not merely on other humans and on the basic promise of free speech, but on democracy itself.

For more on reports of Middle Eastern bias in the universities, check out Campus Watch.

:: Scot 12:21 PM [+] :: ::
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Charles Krauthammer makes this observation about the U.N:

This fawning over the president's rescue-the-U.N. rationale is not just sentimental, it is illogical. Assume--big assumption--that the U.N. does act and passes a resolution magnanimously allowing Americans to fight and die in Iraq. How does that rescue the U.N. from irrelevance? Under a feckless U.S. administration that allowed things to drift, the U.N. sat on its hands through the '90s and did nothing. If not for this American president who threatens to invade on his own if he has to, the U.N. would still be doing nothing. The U.N. is irrelevant one way or the other. It is acting now only because of American pressure. It will go back to sleep tomorrow when America eases that pressure.

I get the same impression. It seems unlikely the U.N. in five to ten years won't be anything more than a charity dispenser that sits on their bloated rumps tossing scraps to Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia. Memo to these regions: Get your act together before you have to rely on this mainly Euro band of half-wits for your next meal.

My point is not to blame France or China or Russia for acting in their national interests. That's what nations do. That's what nations' leaders are supposed to do. My point is to express wonder at Americans who find it unseemly to act in the name of their own national interests and who cannot see the logical absurdity of granting moral legitimacy to American action only if it earns the approval of the Security Council--approval granted or withheld on the most cynical grounds of self-interest.

I don't think this jousting with the U.N. was part of the war plans. Does America really need to sell itself whenever it is acting in the obvious best interest of the world? Will this song and dance again be necessary if we decide to settle with Iran, Syria (a U.N. 'Security Coucil' member), and Saudi Arabia? I'm hoping the U.S. is contemplating a subtle exeunt from the U.N. if further co-operation becomes too difficult.

:: Scot 11:51 AM [+] :: ::
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A peek into the money sources of Iraqi mouthpiece Scott Ritter courtesy of Stephen Hayes.

Over the past two years, Mr. Ritter has taken $400,000 from Shakir Al-Khafaji, an Iraqi-American businessman with ties to Saddam, to produce a documentary called, "In Shifting Sands." Mr. Ritter concedes that Mr. Al-Khafaji is "openly sympathetic with the regime in Baghdad." And that may be an understatement. Mr. Al-Khafaji runs propaganda sessions for Saddam. Euphemistically known as "expatriate conferences," the biannual gatherings decry the "terrorism and genocide" the U.S. commits against the Iraqi people through U.N. sanctions.

Mr. Ritter claims Mr. Al-Khafaji had no editorial input on the film project, a claim he undermines by openly admitting that his benefactor is responsible for arranging Mr. Ritter's interviews with high-ranking Iraqi government officials, including chief propagandist, Tariq Aziz. Even before his project was completed, Mr. Ritter predicted at a press conference that "the U.S. will definitely not like this film." These contacts no doubt helped Mr. Ritter earlier this month, when he returned to Baghdad and became the first American to speak before the Iraqi National Assembly.

"There are those who wish Iraq harm regardless of the circumstances or costs, and many of these currently reside in the government of the United States," he told the Iraqis. "We must find a way to overcome the politics of fear and those who practice it. The best way to do this is to embrace the truth. In regards to the current situation between Iraq and the United States, the truth is on the side of Iraq."

A book, a movie, trips around the world, and spots on numerous talk shows and media outlets. I guess every man does have his price.

:: Scot 11:31 AM [+] :: ::
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Cool Rumsfeld quote found on blogsite Winds of Change:

"The last thing we want is a smoking gun. A gun smokes after it has been fired."

:: Scot 1:05 PM [+] :: ::
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More on the cellphone-cancer in the head paranoia. Latest study says no link.

:: Scot 12:56 PM [+] :: ::
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Some more Euro-bashing. Good essay from David Gelernter on The Roots of European Appeasement.

:: Scot 12:52 PM [+] :: ::
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David Brooks on George Orwell:

But for Orwell to really matter today, he can't just be some exemplar of abstract virtue or an academic semiotician before his time. He has to address the main issues of our day. And it is here that Hitchens fails to persuade. The three great issues of the twentieth century were imperialism, fascism, and Stalinism--and Orwell was right on all of them, Hitchens argues, carving out a principled anti-tyrannical leftism (a tradition that Hitchens claims to carry on).

To hold this ground, Hitchens must defend Orwell from those he sees as Orwell's enemies on the left and Orwell's co-opters on the right. Hitchens meticulously rebuts the attacks on Orwell from the likes of the Marxist historian E.P. Thompson and the culture-studies guru Raymond Williams, who despise Orwell because he gave ammunition to the anti-Communist enemy. Then Hitchens turns around and tries to show that Orwell would not have become a neoconservative.

But to reenter these debates is really to go into an intellectual-history museum. E.P. Thompson may have believed that Orwell was an apologist for quietism. Raymond Williams may have regarded Orwell as hopelessly bourgeois. But aside from a few dozen professors, does anybody really think Orwell still needs defending from these ideological dinosaurs? And as for the argument over whether or not Orwell would have ended up at the Hoover Institution, who cares? Orwell was valuable as long as the Soviet Union was around, but few people cite Orwell to buttress their arguments on, say, whether we should seek regime change in Iraq. The Orwell tug of war is over.

:: Scot 12:49 PM [+] :: ::
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Radio Telescope Proves a Big Bang Prediction

For a bunch of talking monkeys, we can do some pretty smart things.

:: Scot 10:54 AM [+] :: ::
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:-)

Happy 20th birthday to Scott Fahlman's smiley face emoticon. Impressive when you consider it has an offspring in the thousands.

:: Scot 10:37 AM [+] :: ::
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Hyper-perfectionism. An often overlooked disorder I've seen from grade school to university.

:: Scot 10:21 AM [+] :: ::
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Here's some good news from the Muslim American front:

About 500 Arab men marched around the McNamara Federal Building (Detroit) Wednesday to voice their anger at Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and to show their support for the United States.

The demonstrators, most of whom were of Iraqi descent, carried signs and banners denouncing Hussein, Local 4 reported. The marchers shouted "down, down Saddam," and "Saddam is a fascist," and made other derogatory remarks against the Iraqi leader.

:: Scot 10:13 AM [+] :: ::
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Ramesh Thakur writes in the Japan Times:

The legitimacy of the Security Council has been subject to a fourfold erosion: It has been perceived as being increasingly ineffective in results, unrepresentative in composition, undemocratic in operation and unaccountable either to the General Assembly or an independent judiciary.

The industrialized Western countries often chafe at the ineffectual performance legitimacy of the Council, and their desire to resist the Council's role as the sole validator of the international use of force is the product of this dissatisfaction at its perceived sorry record. Hence Bush's challenge to the U.N.: Enforce your demands on Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, or I will do it for you (and, implicitly, rub your nose in the dirt of your impotence).

Secretary General Kofi Annan has warned in the past that "if the collective conscience of humanity cannot find in the U.N. its greatest tribune, there is a grave danger that it will look elsewhere for peace and for justice." If the Council members -- and the five permanent members in particular -- fail to make it relevant to the critical issues of the day, then they can only expect it to diminish in significance and stature.

Ouch.

:: Scot 10:01 AM [+] :: ::
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A religion of peace...

:: Scot 11:50 PM [+] :: ::
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Israeli Troops Surround Arafat's Compound After Bus Bomb Attack

Screw UN condemnation - just kill this prick already.

:: Scot 11:48 PM [+] :: ::
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Think of where your money goes next time you support PETA:

-- $5,000 to Josh Harper, convicted of assaulting police and firing on a fishing vessel

-- $2,000 to Dave Wilson, convicted of firebombing a fur cooperative

-- $7,500 to Fran Trutt, convicted of attempted murder of a medical executive

-- $20,000 to Rodney Coronado, convicted of burning a research lab at Michigan State

:: Scot 11:47 PM [+] :: ::
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One Hit Wonder's featured artist - Hipsway! Remember "The Honey Thief"?

:: Scot 11:42 PM [+] :: ::
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Silicon Valley reports on the 10 choices that were critical to the Net's success.

Got this from the rev who wonders about the absence of porn on the list. I have to agree - smut deserves its due. The internet, and things like holodecks in the future, will be driven by the desire for porn. Like it or not, money and market guides our choices of leisure technology. Adult entertainment is a competetive industry where providers must continuously top each other by offering the better service, often seeing their websites outfitted with the latest in audio and video production (in this respect, video games deserve much of the credit for the smooth processing abilities in today's computers). Doom, Quake, and the Pam and Tommy Lee video as the impetus of technological advancements. Who said capitalism had to be pretty?

:: Scot 11:35 PM [+] :: ::
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In case you were wondering what Otzi the Iceman had for his last meal, it was grains, venison and ibex meat.

:: Scot 11:28 PM [+] :: ::
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Den Beste has some terrific observations on our Islamist enemies and the state of Arab cultural failure.

Bernard Lewis has more.

:: Scot 11:21 PM [+] :: ::
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Davis Asman interviews Iraqi sympathizer Scott Ritter.

:: Scot 10:54 PM [+] :: ::
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Victor Davis Hanson on the lulls of war:

Wars, by their very nature, are different from the drama of individual battles. Even during infamously bloody conflicts such as the Peloponnesian and Punic Wars, the American Civil War and World War II, there were long periods of relative calm. Indeed, such intervals of apparent peace often mystify historians. In retrospect, they sometimes cannot distinguish the real beginning, duration, or end of a war. Thucydides seems initially to have been confused whether the Peloponnesian War had ceased with the Peace of Nicias (421 B.C.) and then restarted a few years later--or, in fact, had constituted a three-decade-long continuum all along.

:: Scot 10:53 PM [+] :: ::
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The new Women's Quarterly is finally out. Jonathan Last on the special interest du jour - the transgendered.

Transgender people were once the forgotten stepchildren of sex interest groups. When the gay-rights revolution erupted at Stonewall in 1969, the transgender set wasn’t even an afterthought. Twenty-five years later, the group has been completely embraced by the gay-rights crowd, with the word “transgender” tucked into the mission statement of every advocacy group in the cosmos, from the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund to the Human Rights Campaign.

:: Scot 8:17 PM [+] :: ::
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I return with a well deserved lambasting of Canada from Tom Nichols.

Mark Steyn completes the one-two punch.

(I missed this Steyn gem during my offline flu)

:: Scot 8:03 PM [+] :: ::
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Words can not describe my frustration over the last 3 weeks (fried network card in case you were wondering).

:: Scot 7:59 PM [+] :: ::
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