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Safe
House: High-end “Panic Room” hideouts becoming more common (SFC)
“Paula Milani bought a home with three bedrooms, two baths and one
Batcave. Her secret hideout is behind a seamless wall in her one-story
ranch house in rural Livermore. A robber could break in, check every room
and never know she’s a few feet away, calling authorities as she
loads a handgun. Milani is one of the hundreds of Bay Area residents who
have a real-life ‘panic room,’ which real estate insiders used
to call safe rooms before the hit movie starring Jodie Foster came out.
Some are converted closets with doors that bolt shut from the inside.
Others are like Milani’s — with secret entrances that are impossible
to detect unless you know where they are. And a few are similar to Foster’s
fortresslike hideout in Panic Room, or even more intricate,
with heat-sensing cameras, multiple ventilation systems and chemical washbasins
for scrubbing away biohazards. In Los Angeles, most A-list celebrities
and entertainment executives have safe rooms, said Bill Rigdon, who is
a vice president of Building Consensus, a Los Angeles company that builds
the hideaways. He said Bay Area safe-room owners are a little less conspicuous.
‘It’s the guy who owns the grocery store chain, software people,
an owner of several hundred business franchises,’ said Rigdon, who
has built more than a dozen safe rooms from San Jose to Marin County.
‘During the next fiasco, where do you want to be?’”
Among
the Bourgeoisophobes: Why the Europeans and Arabs, each in their own way,
hate America and Israel. (David Brooks)
“Around 1830, a group of French artists and intellectuals looked
around and noticed that people who were their spiritual inferiors were
running the world.... Hatred of the bourgeoisie became the official emotion
of the French intelligentsia.... Of all the great creeds of the 19th century,
pretty much the only one still thriving is this one, bourgeoisophobia....
Since September 11, there has been a great deal of analysis of the roots
of Muslim rage. But to anybody familiar with the history of bourgeoisophobia,
it is striking how comfortably Muslim rage meshes with traditional rage
against meritocratic capitalism. The Islamist fanatic and the bourgeoisophobe
hate the same things. They use the same words, they utter the same protests.
In an essay in the New York Review of Books called ‘Occidentalism,’
Avishai Margalit and Ian Buruma listed the traits that enrage al Qaeda
and other Third World anti-Americans and anti-Westerners. First, they
hate the city. Cities stand for commerce, mixed populations, artistic
freedom, and sexual license. Second, they hate the mass media: advertising,
television, pop music, and videos. Third, they hate science and technology
— the progress of technical reason, mechanical efficiency, and material
know-how. Fourth, they hate prudence, the desire to live safely rather
than court death and heroically flirt with violence. Fifth, they hate
liberty, the freedom extended even to mediocre people. Sixth, they despise
the emancipation of women. As Margalit and Buruma note, ‘Female emancipation
leads to bourgeois decadence.’ Women are supposed to stay home and
breed heroic men. When women go out into the world, they deprive men of
their manhood and weaken their virility. If you put these six traits together,
you have pretty much the pillars of meritocratic capitalist society, practiced
most assertively in countries like America and Israel.”
Myths
of the Crusades hard to kill (Vincent Carroll)
“You look at the latest U.S. News & World Report
cover story, on the Crusades, and you figure they’ve got to be kidding.
You know they can’t be serious in proclaiming the Crusades ‘the
first major clash between Islam and Western Christendom,’ or in headlining
the Crusades — in both print and in the version at USNews.com —
as ‘The First Holy War.’ No sober journalist or historian could
claim that ‘During the Crusades, East and West first met — on
the battlefield,’ and expect any reader even casually familiar with
world history not to leap out of the chair in exasperated shock. It’s
a gag, almost certainly, when U.S. News quotes the chair
of Islamic studies at American University as solemnly maintaining that
‘The impact of the Crusades created a historical memory which is
with us today — the memory of a long European onslaught.’ No
serious news journal would let such a statement stand without some mention
of what happened before 1099 and the sack of Jerusalem by the
likes of Tancred and Godfrey of Bouillon.... Like so many articles on
the Crusades since the attacks of Sept. 11, U.S. News takes
for granted the idea that the Crusades constitute a looming grievance
against the West that rightly resonates to this day. And it would be funny,
this journalistic malpractice, if it didn’t buttress the convictions
of the fanatics who are still seeking revenge.”
China’s
Economic Facade (Arthur Waldron)
“Officially, China has for some time been claiming growth rates of
7 percent or more. But information casting doubt on those figures has
long been available. Visitors see lots of rural people camped out at urban
railroad stations or on sidewalks: Clearly they have nothing to do where
they come from, or where they have arrived. Block after block of abandoned
construction projects in cities suggest someone has run out of money (as
does the recent proposal that money be raised for the Three Gorges Dam
by selling stock). Almost daily protests by workers, many violent, are
also a clue that all is not well. Moreover, even the official figures
don’t make sense: How can it be that energy use is falling in a booming
economy? And unemployment rising (as the official statistics show)? This
is unprecedented in economic history. Finally, the state borrowing for
pump priming to which Premier Zhu refers has always been public knowledge.
Why, if the economy is burning up the track, has stimulus been necessary?
Once again Chinese officialdom has put one over on Western observerdom.
The shining exception is Prof. Thomas Rawski of the University of Pittsburgh,
who over the past year or so has been making thoroughly empirical and
highly persuasive presentations across the United States on China’s
economy, based entirely on open Chinese sources, comparisons with other
fast-growing economies and some solid economic analysis. He argues that
China’s economy may actually have been contracting since 1998.”
They
are the product of institutionally indoctrinated hatred of the West or
of Jews (Howard Gerson and Harold Waller)
“The myth that suicide bombers are necessarily produced by ‘desperate’
or ‘inhumane conditions’ should have been fully dispelled by
the suicide attacks of Sept. 11, which were carried out by highly indoctrinated
and motivated individuals who were neither economically deprived nor oppressed.
Rather, they had been living freely in the United States for years. For
many of us, this lack of desperation or of any apparent oppression was
one of the most intellectually indigestible facts to emerge from the investigation
post-Sept. 11. Perhaps there is a powerful need in Western culture to
ascribe something other than simple hatred to explain a phenomenon as
extreme as a suicide attack. Similarly, the idea that such attacks are
the result of an institutionally indoctrinated hatred of the West or of
Jews is repugnant to our rational and liberal approach. The Western psyche
demands a reason to make ‘sense’ out of the act: The homicidal
terrorist must suffer from ‘desperation,’ ‘humiliation,’
or "hopelessness." There must be ‘another side’ or
a ‘missing link’ to the story. Yet the evidence that the recent
suicide attacks in Israel are the result of indoctrinated hatred actively
carried out or condoned by Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority,
and by the Arab states, is overwhelming.”
Bush
must face truth about Arab terror against Israel (Norman Podhoretz)
“A linguistic child of the concept of moral equivalence, the words
‘cycle of violence’ allow of no distinction between terrorist
attacks and retaliation against them. They allow of no distinction between
the deliberate murder of civilians and the inadvertent harm done to civilians
in a military action. And in the context of the ‘Arab-Israeli conflict’
(itself a deceptive label for what should actually be called ‘the
Arab war against Israel’), to speak of a ‘cycle of violence’
is to conjure up a Hatfield-McCoy type of feud between equally irrational
parties. This maneuver is calculated to conceal the crucial fact that
Palestinian terrorism is neither a random nor an uncontrollable nor a
‘senseless’ phenomenon. On the contrary: it is a tactic carefully
designed to advance a precise objective. And that objective is to wipe
the Jewish state physically off the map, just as Israel is erased from
the maps of the region printed in the textbooks given to Palestinian and
other Arab schoolchildren.”
Journal
Editors Disavow Article on Biotech Corn (WP)
“The science journal Nature has concluded that a controversial article
it published last year on the discovery of genetically engineered corn
growing in Mexico was not well researched enough and should not have been
published. In a highly unusual ‘editorial note’ in this week’s
edition of the journal, the editors said that based on criticisms of the
article and assessments by outside referees, ‘Nature has concluded
that the evidence available is not sufficient to justify the publication
of the original paper.’ .... The initial study had been embraced
by anti-biotechnology activists, who said it confirmed worries that the
technology was spreading in uncontrolled and unapproved ways. But Nature’s
near-retraction of the article was welcomed by advocates for the technology.”
Say
goodbye, Yasser Arafat (Mark Steyn)
“It’s very difficult to negotiate a ‘two-state solution’
when one side sees the two-state solution as an intermediate stage to
a one-state solution: ending the ‘Israeli occupation’ of the
West Bank is a tactical prelude to ending the Israeli occupation of Israel.
The divide among the Palestinians isn’t between those who want to
make peace with Israel and those who want to destroy her, but between
those who want to destroy Israel one suicide bomb at a time and those
who want to destroy her through artful ‘peace processes’....
As for the Palestinians, they’re a wrecked people. It’s tragic,
and, if you want to argue about who’s to blame, we can bat dates
around back to the Great War. But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t
even matter whether you regard, as the Europeans appear to, the Palestinians’
descent into depravity as confirmation of their victim status: as Palestinian
Authority spokesman Hasan Abdul Rahman said on CNN after a new pile of
Jewish corpses, it’s the fault of Israel for ‘turning our children
into suicide bombers’. Might be true, might be rubbish. Makes no
difference. They can’t be allowed to succeed, because otherwise the
next generation of suicide bombers will be in Bloomingdale’s and
Macy’s. That’s why Arafat will never be president of a Palestinian
state, and has begun his countdown to oblivion. The unravelling of the
Middle East has just begun.”
Fawning
Critics Don’t Say Book Was Fraud (Glenn Harlan Reynolds)
“In the fall of 2000, professor Michael Bellesiles of Emory University
published his book Arming America, which purported to establish
that the core historical argument behind the Second Amendment was a fraud.
The brave minuteman armed with his trusty rifle, Bellesiles told us, was
mostly a myth — Americans at the time of the Revolution, and for
many decades afterward, seldom owned guns, but instead relied on the government
for protection. Bellesiles received glowing reviews in the New York
Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the
Atlantic Monthly, and many other publications, from reviewers
who were often visibly pleased that he was sticking it to the National
Rifle Association. As it turns out, the fraud was on Bellesiles’
end. At least, that’s the conclusion of those who have examined his
work — from journalists, to historians, to law professors —
and found it wanting. Bellesiles turns out to have quoted sources out
of context, to have falsely reported data, and to have claimed to have
used documents that have not existed since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
One historian familiar with Bellesiles’ work called it a case of
‘bona fide academic fraud.’ Emory University is investigating....
Yet despite all these problems with Bellesiles’ work, many of the
publications that afforded his book so much laudatory attention when it
came out have remained silent.”
Crusade
Propaganda: The abuse of Christianity’s holy wars. (Thomas Madden)
“The crusades are quite possibly the most misunderstood event in
European history.... The crusades were in every way a defensive war.
They were the West’s belated response to the Muslim conquest of fully
two-thirds of the Christian world. While the Arabs were busy in the seventh
through the tenth centuries winning an opulent and sophisticated empire,
Europe was defending itself against outside invaders and then digging
out from the mess they left behind. Only in the eleventh century were
Europeans able to take much notice of the East. The event that led to
the crusades was the Turkish conquest of most of Christian Asia Minor
(modern Turkey). The Christian emperor in Constantinople, faced with the
loss of half of his empire, appealed for help to the rude but energetic
Europeans. He got it. More than he wanted, in fact.... Despite modern
laments about medieval colonialism, the crusade’s real purpose was
to turn back Muslim conquests and restore formerly Christian lands to
Christian control. The entire history of the crusades is one of Western
reaction to Muslim advances. The crusades were no more offensive than
was the American invasion of Normandy.”
Understanding
America (Owen Harries)
“The great sympathy felt for America immediately after September
11 has quickly evaporated and been replaced by suspicion and hostility.
Rosemary Righter, chief leader write of the London Times, has observed
recently that ‘America-bashing is in fashion as it has not been since
Vietnam’ — and she is talking, not of Asia and the Middle East,
but of London and Paris and Berlin. Moreover she asserts that it is not
just a case of the usual suspects on the Left, but that a ‘resurgent
anti-Americanism’ exists across the political spectrum. As she says,
‘America is never less loved in Europe than when... it is angry,
determined, and certain that it is in the right’. Let me be clear:
After the outrage of September 11, I do not believe that the United States
could have reacted in any way other than as she did. But doing so will
carry a cost. The long term significance of what happened some months
ago may be that it forced American decisively along a course of action
that — by emphasising her military dominance, by requiring her to
use her vast power conspicuously, by making restraint and moderation virtually
impossible, and by making unilateralism an increasing feature of American
behavior — is bound to generate widespread and increased criticism
and hostility towards her. That may turn out to be the real tragedy of
September 11.”
Religion
of Peace Update (Rod Dreher)
“On the way to work [NYC] this morning [Apr. 3, 2002], I stopped
into an Arab-owned convenience store to buy a newspaper. A wiry Arab man,
about my age and looking like a tightly coiled spring, stood by the counter
holding a clipboard. ‘You should not buy that one,’ he said
to me in a thick accent, as I picked up a New York Post.
‘You should buy this one. It’s more fair about this story,’
he said, holding up a Daily News — which, like the Post,
reports the Bethlehem siege on its front page. The man’s eyes were
hot, and I didn’t want to argue with him. I told him I prefer the
Post. ‘But they print lies about Palestine!’ he
said, his voice rising (the Post's editorial policy is strongly
pro-Israel). ‘Hitler, he knew what the those people were about. He
knew that if you give them freedom, they will take over your country,
just like they have done here. And I’m not just saying that because
I’m a Muslim.’ I pointed out to the man, as calmly as I could,
that Hitler killed six million Jews. ‘Not true!’ he shot back,
sticking his finger in my face. ‘It’s a lie!’ I turned
and walked out without saying a word more. Because there is nothing left
to say to such fanatics.”
Quiet
time campaign muzzle (Jacob Sullum)
“No one disputes that the First Amendment applies to opinions about
who should run the government and what the government should do. Yet in
the topsy-turvy world of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, the closer
speech gets to the sort of political expression the Framers clearly meant
to protect, the more restricted it is. An organization may criticize a
politician, so long as the message is timed so it’s not likely to
change anyone’s vote. Or it may discuss an issue, so long as it does
not mention a particular official’s position on it. What it may not
do is engage in ‘electioneering communication’ — speech
that might actually have a political impact. These restrictions do not
apply to news organizations, which helps explain why so many of them looked
favorably on campaign finance reform. (For newspapers and magazines, as
Reason’s Jeff Taylor has noted, there was also the possibility of
attracting ad revenue that would otherwise go to TV and radio stations.)
Unlike environmentalists and anti-abortion activists, journalists remain
free to discuss the merits of candidates at any time and in any terms
they choose.”
Area
man says father shot Martin Luther King Jr. (Gainesville Sun)
“Claiming he wanted to get a 34-year-old secret off his chest, an
Alachua County man said Tuesday that his father was the triggerman in
the April 4, 1968, assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. And, the Rev.
Ronald Denton Wilson said, portions of the murder plot were hatched in
Gainesville.... ‘My dad was the one who shot Dr. King,’ he said.
He said his father, Henry Clay Wilson, died in 1990 at age 68 and is buried
in Gainesville. His father’s two co-conspirators, R.D. Wilson said,
also are dead. Wilson, who lives near Keystone Heights, and several other
family members and ministry associates gathered at the Gainesville Community
Plaza to reveal what they said was the truth about the King assassination.
Wilson and his sister, Velma Roark of Waldo, said their father told them
many times over the years that he shot King.”
“Why
Do They Hate Us?” (John Perazzo)
“Since September 11, the uniquely introspective, self-critical people
known as Americans have asked this question countless times. What elusive
logic, we want to know, lies behind much of the Muslim world’s overt
hatred of our nation? Not surprisingly, our progressive social critics,
ever eager to explain the logical underpinnings of anti-Americanism, have
dutifully provided numerous answers to these questions.... Considering
the amount of time Americans have devoted to analyzing the aforementioned
questions, it is utterly remarkable that the opposite questions are never
raised: What have Muslim societies done to convince us that we should
not hate them? Have they demonstrated an ability to resist engaging in
‘meddlesome,’ ‘cruel,’ ‘decadent,’ or ‘arrogant’
behavior? These would be reasonable queries coming from a citizen of the
mostly-Christian United States, given that his or her fellow Christians
are treated abominably in much of the Islamic world.”
Suicidal
Lies (Thomas Friedman)
“The world must understand that the Palestinians have not chosen
suicide bombing out of ‘desperation’ stemming from the Israeli
occupation. That is a huge lie. Why? To begin with, a lot of other people
in the world are desperate, yet they have not gone around strapping dynamite
to themselves. More important, President Clinton offered the Palestinians
a peace plan that could have ended their ‘desperate’ occupation,
and Yasir Arafat walked away. Still more important, the Palestinians have
long had a tactical alternative to suicide: nonviolent resistance, à
la Gandhi. A nonviolent Palestinian movement appealing to the conscience
of the Israeli silent majority would have delivered a Palestinian state
30 years ago, but they have rejected that strategy, too.... Let’s
be very clear: Palestinians have adopted suicide bombing as a strategic
choice, not out of desperation. This threatens all civilization because
if suicide bombing is allowed to work in Israel, then, like hijacking
and airplane bombing, it will be copied and will eventually lead to a
bomber strapped with a nuclear device threatening entire nations. That
is why the whole world must see this Palestinian suicide strategy defeated.”
We
shall not fear (David Warren)
“We hang not on the Cross, but on Christ’s Resurrection. At
the centre of all Christian doctrine — and according to Christians,
at the centre of everything — is this one moment. It is not understood
as a miracle, but as the miracle at the heart, explaining all miracles
before and after. It was, or rather it is, the grand intersection between
the eternal and our own transitory world of space and time. Everything
in nature and in ourselves was — is — transformed by it. It
casts backwards through history as well as forwards, it gathers together
every strand of meaning, into one knot, into one flame, and is of the
moment with the Creation. And in prayer, and contemplation, the Christian
apprehends, through the fact of the Cross, and shining through the Cross,
the Resurrection. It is the lifting of the burden, the weight — of
sin, of mortality, of fate. Christ, according to the Gospels, came into
the world to abolish death. To abolish the tyranny over us, to free us
from our greatest fear. In the moment of contemplating Christ’s Resurrection,
we know the truth, and the truth has set us free.”
Bogus
bias at MIT (John Leo)
“The sad truth is that MIT, one of the world's great centers of scientific
education, has now produced and accepted two astonishingly unscientific
studies of its own administrative behavior. In response to these studies,
nobody on campus has spoken out. ‘The people on the gender committees
control the airwaves on this story, and nobody will speak up,’ Steiger
says. ‘And with good reason. If they speak, they will be branded
as misogynists, and their careers will be in jeopardy.’ Worse, the
culture of MIT is being changed. Gender equity has replaced scientific
merit as the value administrators will be judged by. And as always in
preference schemes, women on the faculty will now come under suspicion
as people who wouldn’t be there except for politics. And all without
any real discussion or open debate. Amazing.”
Listening
for the Voices of Women (NYT)
“In the two decades since she wrote In a Different Voice
and went on to identify a crisis of confidence in adolescent girls —
a phenomenon Ms. Gilligan famously dubbed ‘losing voice’ —
her work has attained the status of public gospel, inspiring pop psychology
books, feminist lobbies and op-ed columnists, and galvanizing policy makers.
Ms. Gilligan is often cited as an impetus behind the 1994 Gender Equity
in Education Act, which, with an eye toward improving girls’ test
scores, banned sex-role stereotyping and gender discrimination in the
classroom.... Meanwhile, social scientists were busy challenging her research.
In a Different Voice was attacked almost as soon as it appeared.
Some researchers rejected Ms. Gilligan’s claim that women were more
likely to consider their obligations to others (what she called an ethics
of ‘care’) in making moral decisions, while men were more likely
to rely on abstract principles of fairness (what she called an ethics
of ‘justice’). Ms. Gilligan was accused of using unorthodox
interview methods, of lacking control groups and of failing to publish
her data in peer-reviewed journals. In a 1983 article in the journal Social
Research, Debra Nails, now a philosophy professor at Michigan State University,
dismissed In a Different Voice as ‘social science at
sea without anchor.’ Since then, trying to replicate Ms. Gilligan’s
findings has become a virtual social-science subfield, employing a small
army of researchers — with little success.”
What
You Say Reveals How You Think (David Stolinsky)
“The same paper, like most papers, takes great care to refer to anyone
who has not yet been convicted of a crime as an ‘alleged’ or
‘accused’ murderer or rapist. This wording avoids lawsuits,
and more importantly, it follows the American tradition that one is presumed
innocent until proven guilty. So why is it that this paper began a story
about child abuse in the Catholic Church with the front-page headline
‘Mahony Won’t Name Abusers.’ Not one of these priests had
been charged with a crime, much less convicted, or their names would already
be a matter of public record. But those Cardinal Mahony didn’t name
were not referred to as ‘alleged’ abusers. Somehow the fear
of lawsuits, and the devotion to civil liberties, were forgotten in the
rush to condemn the Catholic Church — and, by extension, Christianity
in general. Accused murderers and rapists in jail awaiting trial are ‘alleged,’
but priests not formally charged with anything are ‘abusers.’
How inconsistent. But how revealing.”
The
slyer virus: The West’s anti-westernism (Mark Steyn)
“The Arabs say America is to blame for the Middle East. And Britain
and America don’t disagree, not really. The Durban Syndrome —
the vague sense that the West’s success must somehow be responsible
for the rest’s failure — is a far slyer virus than the toxic
effusions of the Chomsky-Sontag set, and it has seeped far deeper into
the cultural bloodstream. At its most benign, Durban Syndrome manifests
itself in a desire not to offend others if one can offend one’s own
instead. We saw this after September 11 in the incessant exhortations
from government, public service announcements, the nation’s pastors
and vicars, etc., that the American people should resist their natural
appetite for pogroms and refrain from brutalizing Muslims. Ninety-nine-point-nine-nine-nine
percent of Americans had no intention of brutalizing Muslims but they
were sporting enough to put up with being characterized as a bunch of
knuckledragging swamp-dwellers, understanding that diversity means not
just being sensitive to other peoples but also not being too sensitive
about yourself. Similarly, at airports across the continent, eighty-seven-year-old
grannies waited patiently as their hairpins were confiscated and their
bloomers emptied out on the conveyor belt, implicitly accepting this as
a ritual of the multicultural society: to demonstrate that we eschew ‘racial
profiling,’ we go out of our way to look for people who don’t
look anything like the people we’re looking for.... I am woman, hear
me roar! Say it loud, I’m black and proud! We’re here, we’re
queer, get used to it! The one identity we’re not encouraged to trumpet
is the one that enables us to trumpet all the others: our identity as
citizens of a very particular kind of society, built on the rule of law,
property rights, freedom of expression, and the universal franchise. I
am Western, hear me apologize!”
A
Turn from Tolerance (WP)
“Long before Sept. 11, many white Europeans had deep-running concerns
that their countries were involuntarily becoming multicultural as guest
workers and refugees, mostly Muslim, established themselves in residence.
There are about 15 million Muslims in Europe, making Islam the the continent’s
largest non-Christian religion. The post-Sept. 11 concerns underscored
a paradox that has cycled through European politics for years: The continent
needs foreign workers to gird an aging workforce but is queasy about accepting
them, especially if they are Muslim. ‘There is this fear for national
identity combined with a fear of Muslims that has fueled this debate on
immigration,’ said Jan Niessen, director of the Migration Policy
Group, a research organization in Brussels.”
As
the Web Matures, Fun Is Hard to Find (NYT)
“Just 11 years after it was born and about 6 years after it became
popular, the Web has lost its luster. Many who once raved about surfing
from address to address on the Web now lump site-seeing with other online
chores, like checking the In box. What attracted many people to the Web
in the mid-1990’s were the bizarre and idiosyncratic sites that began
as private obsessions and swiftly grew into popular attractions: the Coffee
Cam, a live image of a coffee maker at the University of Cambridge; the
Fish Tank Cam from an engineer at Netscape; The Spot, the first online
soap opera; the Jennicam, the first popular Internet peephole; the Telegarden,
which allowed viewers to have remote control of a robot gardener; and
the World Wide Ouija, where viewers could question the Fates with the
computer mouse. The Web was like a chest of toys, and each day brought
a new treasure.... The problem facing the Web is not that some of these
particular sites have come and gone — there are, after all, only
so many times anyone can look at a coffeepot, even online — but that
no new sites have come along to captivate the casual surfer.”
What’s
news for the experts is common knowledge to most (Kay Hymowitz)
“Not so long ago, everyone knew that children — boys and girls
— were cruel, aggressive, Darwinian creatures who needed adults around
to teach them self-restraint. William Golding’s classic 1954 novel
Lord of the Flies, a disturbing story of English private
school students deserted on an island after an airplane crash, illustrated
the point most dramatically. It was common knowledge that, while girls
didn’t often resort to fisticuffs, they were prone to back-stabbing,
manipulation and scheming, a fact known to everyone from William Thackeray,
who created the infamous Becky Sharpe in the novel Vanity Fair
to Charles Schultz, inventor of Charlie Brown’s nemesis, Lucy. But
in the late 1960s, development experts began revising the commensense
view of children’s natural ethical state. This was partly because
of the influence of the liberation movements of the time, partly to address
changes in the family such as divorce and working mothers that made autonomous
children a necessity.... But after a dramatic rise in juvenile crime and
bullying, a slew of suburban school shootings, and just the daily grind
of adult-child warfare, this theory was bound to disappoint.”
U.S.
maintains the upper hand (David Warren)
“As I reported in this newspaper on Friday, the ‘jailing,’
or rather probationing of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has been taken
over from Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, by U.S. Vice-President
Dick Cheney. It is an extremely significant step, not because it ‘disempowers’
the Israelis, but because it puts the United States forward directly in
the role of Israel's protector, negotiating on Israel’s behalf. While
lost on the western media, the point has been taken in several capitals
of the Arab world: Mr. Arafat and his terrorist groups are no longer simply
confronting Israel. They are now confronting a United States that is increasingly
aware of their international connections. Mr. Cheney set the conditions
for a meeting between himself and Mr. Arafat in Cairo yesterday, which
did not take place because Mr. Arafat did not meet them. The essential,
verifiable condition was that Mr. Arafat would deliver a public address,
to his people, in unambiguous Arabic, demanding an immediate end to all
terrorist strikes against Israel, and be seen delivering like orders to
all the Palestinian militias under his ultimate command. Instead, he appeared
on Palestinian TV looking as if he were a hostage reading a prepared statement
by his kidnapper. He condemned, after the fact, only one particular suicide
bombing in Jerusalem. This was 11 eggs short of a dozen.”
Stranglehold
on Speech (Robert Samuelson)
“Free speech is not selective speech, respectable speech or popular
speech. Free speech does not exist unless it can include speech that you
— and perhaps most people — despise. People must have, as individuals
and as groups, the routine right to express themselves, even if their
expressions offend. Somehow these truths escape the supporters of ‘campaign
finance reform,’ whose crusade threatens free speech.... In the final
60 days before the 2000 election, more than 135,000 political advertisements
were run by sponsors who weren’t candidates or the political committees
of candidates, reports the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.
The new campaign finance legislation — known variously as McCain-Feingold
and Shays-Meehan after its main Senate and House sponsors — aims
to remove many (if not most) of these ads by non-candidates from the air.
Unless political advertisements aren’t ‘speech,’ this represents
a massive suppression of free speech.... Free speech must be a concept
that ordinary people can grasp in most ordinary circumstances. It must
not become a lawyerly collection of qualifications, footnotes and regulations,
and that is where the campaign finance crusade is leading.”
Bleak
future looms if you don’t take a stand (Dan Gillmor)
“This is a quiz about your future. It’s about how you view some
basic elements of the emerging Digital Age. 1. Do you care if a few giant
companies control virtually all entertainment and information? 2. Do you
care if they decide what kinds of technological innovations will reach
the marketplace? 3. Would you be concerned if they used their power to
compile detailed dossiers on everything you read, listen to, view and
buy? 4. Would you find it acceptable if they could decide whether what
you write and say could be seen and heard by others? Those are no longer
theoretical questions. They are the direction in which America is hurtling.
Media conglomerates are in a merger frenzy. Telecommunications monopolies
are creating a cozy cartel, dividing up access to the online world. The
entertainment industry is pushing for Draconian controls on the use and
dissemination of digital information.”
The
Great Terror (Jeffrey Goldberg)
“Gosden believes it is quite possible that the countries of the West
will soon experience chemical- and biological-weapons attacks far more
serious and of greater lasting effect than the anthrax incidents of last
autumn and the nerve-agent attack on the Tokyo subway system several years
ago — that what happened in Kurdistan was only the beginning. ‘For
Saddam’s scientists, the Kurds were a test population,’ she
said. ‘They were the human guinea pigs. It was a way of identifying
the most effective chemical agents for use on civilian populations, and
the most effective means of delivery.’ The charge is supported by
others. An Iraqi defector, Khidhir Hamza, who is the former director of
Saddam’s nuclear-weapons program, told me earlier this year that
before the attack on Halabja military doctors had mapped the city, and
that afterward they entered it wearing protective clothing, in order to
study the dispersal of the dead. ‘These were field tests, an experiment
on a town,’ Hamza told me. He said that he had direct knowledge of
the Army’s procedures that day in Halabja. ‘The doctors were
given sheets with grids on them, and they had to answer questions such
as “How far are the dead from the cannisters?”’ Gosden
said that she cannot understand why the West has not been more eager to
investigate the chemical attacks in Kurdistan. ‘It seems a matter
of enlightened self-interest that the West would want to study the long-term
effects of chemical weapons on civilians, on the DNA,’ she told me.
‘I’ve seen Europe’s worst cancers, but, believe me, I have
never seen cancers like the ones I saw in Kurdistan.’”
The
good, the bad and the Gallic shrug (Mark Steyn)
“Countries A and B may be at war, but there is no good side and no
bad side, just two parties ‘trapped’ in a ‘mindless’
‘cycle of violence’ that ‘threatens the peace process.’
The ‘peace process’ tends to be no peace and lotsa process,
in which Western panjandrums have invested considerable amounts of their
prestige. That’s why in Paris this weekend most of my dining companions
were outraged not by the deaths of Palestinians or Israelis but by the
shelling of Palestinian Authority buildings. ‘These buildings,’
one indignant Frenchman told me, ‘were built with money direct from
the Union!’ — i.e., the European Union. ‘We have given
billions, and now it is rubble.’ ‘Oh, your money's perfectly
safe,’ I said. ‘Its sitting in the Hamas bigshots’ numbered
bank accounts in Zurich.’ .... Forget the ‘cycle of violence’
and the ‘peace process.’ History teaches us that the most lasting
peace is achieved when one side — preferably the worst side —
is decisively defeated and the regime’s diseased organs are comprehensively
cleansed. That’s why National Socialism, Fascism and Japanese militarism
have not troubled us of late.”
Households
Divided (Jean Bethke Elshtain)
“Wilson argues that the destructive features of a world without fathers
are by now so well documented that they are beyond challenge. No responsible
person wants to see that world expand, given its clear and present dangers.
But how did it come about, and how are we to bring the second nation closer
to the standard of the first in order to ensure that, in the parlance
of the moment, no child is left behind? Wilson reminds us that when Sen.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan first alerted the country in 1960 to the troubles
looming on the horizon as the world of fatherlessness and rising out-of-wedlock
birth was coming into view, he was denounced, accused of everything from
racism to sexism to cultural imperialism, even as many people within the
black community were saying the same thing — that a leap in fatherlessness
was a ‘pathology.’ But that made no difference to the mainstream
media or scholarship. As a result, it was easy for the first nation, irresponsibly,
to ignore the problem of the second. Forty years later, facing an epidemic
in teenage motherhood — by 1995, ‘three out of every four births
to all teenagers were to unmarried girls; for black girls, it was nine
out of ten’ — the alarm bells finally went off as politicians
and social analysts converged on the same point: This trend cannot continue,
as too much measurable harm is being done to children. As the evidence
piled up, even those most resistant to the notion that fatherlessness
as an independent factor generated risk factors for children, whatever
the family’s socio-economic status, were forced to acknowledge the
data. ‘Children in one-parent families, compared to those in two-parent
ones, are twice as likely to drop out of school. Boys in one-parent families
are much more likely than those in two-parent ones to be both out of school
and out of work. Girls in one-parent families are twice as likely as those
in two-parent ones to have an out-of-wedlock birth.’”
How
Oscar Ghettoized Poitier (John Podhoretz)
“The spin on the evening was that it made history because two black
performers won Best Actor and Best Actress on the same night that the
first black movie star, Sidney Poitier, received an honorary Oscar. But
there was something terribly retrogressive about the way all this was
treated. The Oscar show worked overtime to make us think of Denzel Washington,
Halle Berry and Poitier not as unique and remarkable talents but rather
as tokens. Why were only black actors and actresses given a chance to
speak in the three-minute film tribute to Sidney Poitier? Did Poitier’s
career really have meaning only to black performers? Of course not. His
extraordinary dignity and power gave the lie to the racist idea that white
audiences could only respond to white performers and white stories. In
a magnificent speech that was the highlight of the otherwise-unspeakable
ceremony, Poitier himself paid a powerful and modest tribute to the directors,
producers and studio heads who made history by casting him in the films
that made him a star. They were all white. So is Poitier’s wife Joanna.
Poitier had two daughters with Joanna, who are therefore both black and
white. He is an integrationist not only professionally, but personally.
For him to be seen as an inspiration only to black people is
to ghettoize an extraordinary man who simply refused to accept the limits
of race.”
Dumbing
Down the SAT: The very existence of intelligence differences in America
is about to become a forbidden truth. (Stanley Kurtz)
“There was a time when Americans believed that finding and training
the country’s finest minds was in the national interest. Certainly,
all American children ought to have access to quality education. But,
ultimately, it is to our collective advantage as a nation to have a way
of identifying students of high aptitude. And it is fairer to students
themselves — especially those from lesser schools — to have
a way of recognizing intellectual potential that has not yet come to the
surface. The irony is that support for destruction of the SAT test comes
from a liberal elite that is itself the product of our educational meritocracy.
Guilt about success combines here with a hidden craving for moral superiority
over the benighted middle classes. Those in the middle — and many
minorities as well — still believe in the principles of liberty and
equality that created the meritocracy in the first place. But once again,
the liberal elite, in a conversation amongst itself, is managing to turn
our most basic values and practices inside out — with nary a peep
from a public that would fight these changes if they were honestly told
what is happening.”
Of
conscience & cowardice (Robert Going)
“I happen to believe in the sanctity of human life from conception
to natural death. While perhaps a minority view, it is generally not considered
an extreme position except by those who take delight in yanking babies
feet first three quarters of the way out of their mothers’ wombs,
sticking a needle in the head and sucking the brains out. Those people
would doubtless find my views radical. Still, if I had written what I’ve
just written, or said it aloud in a public place at any time from 1985
when I first became a candidate for judicial office until I left the bench
in 2001, I would have been subject to discipline, even removal, by the
Commission on Judicial Conduct. Some members of that commission and its
staff have even gone so far as to state that accepting the nomination
of the Right to Life Party is judicial misconduct.... After I became a
county-level judge, the death penalty was restored in this state. As a
cross-assigned judge I was offered the opportunity to take special training
that would allow me to sit on capital cases. I declined, and wondered
what I would do if such assignments became mandatory. Most of us don’t
give a lot of thought to the death penalty. I never did, truthfully. But
when faced with the real possibility that you might someday decide who
lives and who dies, you’d sure better start thinking about it. I
likely would have ended up as one of those who should have resigned rather
than follow the law. But would I have? I believe in the sanctity of human
life from birth to natural death. It’s such an easy thing to say.
Now.”
But
Seriously, Folks (Larry Miller)
“But, you see in all of American life there has, for a long time,
been a battle of sorts to define what is serious and what is not, and
all the wrong people are consistently winning. No matter how stupid, wrongheaded,
or immoral some of our leaders and representatives have been over the
years, if they can affect an appearance of troubled thoughtfulness when
they address our problems, if they speak in a measured way, if they look
around and nod with gravity, and if they use coy, calculated gestures
— biting a lower lip, say — they will always be considered ‘serious’
people, and there’s no telling how far they can go. And I just don’t
get it. P.J. O’Rourke has created some of the most immensely funny
things in the history of immensely funny things, and I consider his work
to be wise, large, insightful, and practical; in short, serious. The problem
for me, you see, is that I don’t know what to call the ‘serious’
people of today, because I don’t think they are. When Mr. Daschle
holds forth on our war effort, everyone thinks he’s serious, he certainly
thinks he’s serious, but all I see behind those unblinking blue eyes
is a man thinking, ‘Boy, I sure would look good stepping off that
big, green helicopter and saluting.’ The ‘support’ Messrs.
Daschle, Leahy, Biden, et al. have given to our war effort has the same
sincerity of the wrestling bad guy who spends two minutes gouging the
face of his opponent with an awl and then, when confronted by the referee,
slips the iron into his shorts and holds up his hands like a Vegas dealer
going on his break.”
The
1930s, Again: A hard rain is going to fall. (Victor Davis Hanson)
“And so we Americans, like those 70 years ago who so wanted a perpetual
peace, pray for a return of sanity in the Middle East. We chose to ignore
horrific stories of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia — the embryo of 9/11.
We are more amused than shocked that madrassas have taught a
generation to hate us. When mullahs in Iran speak of destroying Israel
we wince, but also shrug. We want to see no real connection between madmen
blowing themselves up to kill us in New York and the like-minded doing
the same in Tel-Aviv. We put our trust in peace with a killer like Mr.
Arafat, who packs a gun and whips up volatile crowds in Arabic. All the
while, no American statesman has the guts to tell the Arab leadership
that statism, tribalism, fundamentalism, gender apartheid, and autocracy
— not America, not Israel — make their people poor, angry, and
dangerous.... I don’t listen any more to the apologies and prevarications
of our whiney university Arabists, our equivocators in the state department,
and the really tawdry assortment of oil men, D.C. insiders, bought and
paid for PR suits, and weapons hucksters. The truth is that a large minority
of the Middle Eastern world wishes a war with America that it cannot win
— and much of the rest is apparently either indifferent or amused.
So we should stop apologizing, prepare for the worst, hope for the best,
and accept this animosity — just as our forefathers once did when
faced by similar autocrats and their captive peoples who threatened us
in 1941.”
New
Analysis Says Women’s Studies Prism Emits a Distinctly Feminist Coloring
(FOXNews)
“The modern woman is plagued by stereotypes imposed by a male-dominated
society, which keeps her relegated to rearing children, keeping home and
working in low-paying, menial jobs. That is the universal claim found
in women’s studies textbooks on college campuses today, according
to a critical analysis by the Independent Women’s Forum, a women’s
group that has often tangled with the traditional feminist establishment.
The treatise, set forth by Christine Stolba, a senior fellow at IWF, has
already drawn fire from scholars who see Stolba as an ‘ultra-conservative’
with an ax to grind against traditional feminists.... She said many of
the textbooks ignore the advances women have made in order to push an
anti-male, liberal agenda that is rooted more in the stone age of gender
relations than in 21st-century culture. ‘It is a truth universally
acknowledged in women’s studies textbooks that women have been and
continue to be the victims of oppression,’ wrote Stolba. ‘Women’s
studies textbooks support a large number of factual inaccuracies. Many
of these are deliberately misleading sisterly sophistries.’”
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