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Year
One: We Didn’t Change After All (09/09/02) new
By Charles Krauthammer in The Spectator
“This September 11 marks not just a day of infamy, but the close
of Year One of that war. And to win it we will need to demonstrate —
as we did in the other great wars of necessity — patience, endurance,
determination, and a willingness to bear any burden. That is a solemn
calling, but it need not elicit grim solemnity. Success will require that
both sides of the American character — the visible fluff and the
(once) buried steel — remain in play. Last September 11, we thought
that the one must banish the other. The great lesson, the great triumph,
of Year One is that fury and grit did not drive out lightness and laughter.
And a good thing too. To prevail in this long twilight struggle, we will
need them all.”
The
triumph of American values (09/07/02) new
By Mark Steyn in The Spectator
“The change that occurred on 11 September was a simple one. When
Osama bin Laden blew up the World Trade Center, he also blew up the polite
fictions of the pre-war world. At Ground Zero, they’ve been working frantically
to clear away the rubble. Likewise, at the UN, EU and all the rest, they’ve
also been working frantically not so much to clear away the mess but to
stick it back together and reconstruct the great fantasy world as it existed
on 10 September, that bizarro make-believe land where Nato is a ‘mutual
defence alliance’ and Egypt and Saudi Arabia are ‘our staunch friends’.
Even in America, some people are still living in that world. You can switch
on the TV and hear apparently sane ‘experts’ using phrases like ‘Bush
risks losing the support of the Arab League’.”
America,
Be Angry: This is no time to “get over” Sept. 11.
(08/13/02) new
By Rod Dreher at The National Review Online
“The most patriotic thing the networks can do in the days running
up to the September 11 anniversary is run those pictures of the planes
crashing into the towers, over and over. They were taken off the air days
after the attack, for fear of traumatizing the shocked nation. Well, we
need to be shocked again. We need to be traumatized again. Our national
survival depends on it. And this time, don't withhold the images of human
beings jumping to their deaths from the upper floors of the towers. We
can handle the truth.”
It’s
a good time for war (09/08/02) new
By Christopher Hitchens in The Boston Globe
“I am not particularly a war lover, and on the occasions when I have
seen warfare as a traveling writer, I have tended to shudder. But here
was a direct, unmistakable confrontation between everything I loved and
everything I hated. On one side, the ethics of the multicultural, the
secular, the skeptical, and the cosmopolitan. (Those are the ones I love,
by the way.) On the other, the arid monochrome of dull and vicious theocratic
fascism. I am prepared for this war to go on for a very long time. I will
never become tired of waging it, because it is a fight over essentials.”
Say
no to the nay-sayers (08/31/02) new
By Bruce Anderson in The Spectator
“Before the summer recess, all of Mr Blair’s senior advisers were
convinced that America would go to war with the UK in support, and nothing
seems to have changed during the PM’s holiday. There is a constant interplay
of co-operation between London and Washington; the SIS and the CIA are
virtually functioning as one body. Recently, one British visitor was chatting
to CIA Director George Tenet about the Europeans’ role. ‘I’ll tell you
exactly what the President said the other day on that very subject,’ said
Mr Tenet. ‘He said, “I don’t give a sh*t what the Europeans think.”’”
Are
We Owed an Apology? Muslim leaders remain mute on 9/11. (08/16/02) new
By William F. Buckley Jr. at The National Review Online
“If a band of Americans, proclaiming their devotion to the faith,
assaulted a Muslim center, we would not need to wait very long for disavowals
— by Christian leaders. When John Brown carried his faith to unreasonable
lengths, we hanged him. What we are waiting for, says Dr. Graham, is an
apology from Muslim leaders. Why shouldn’t we have that? An explicit
disavowal, as contrary to acceptable teachings of the Koran — of the acts
of the terrorists.”
The
Parable of the Weed: Attacking terrorism at its roots. (07/19/02) new
By Victor Davis Hanson at The National Review Online
“The latter systematic choice in the short-term — the ending of Saddam
Hussein; ultimatums to Syria and Iran to cease their succor to Hezbollah,
Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, or else; a reckoning with the terrorist enclaves
in Lebanon; a gradual dissolution of alliances with the autocracies of
Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan; subsidies to democratic reformers throughout
the Middle East — is both unorthodox, frightening, and easily caricatured.
But, in the long term, it offers the only hope of destroying weeds like
al Qaeda for good. Anything less and we are simply pruning back a perennial
pest.”
US
begins push for humanitarian aid in Iraq (08/14/02) new
In The Financial Times by Carola Hoyos in Washington
“The US has launched a public bidding process for humanitarian relief
organisations to work in Iraq and surrounding areas in the run-up to a
possible military campaign against the regime of Iraqi president Saddam
Hussein. In addition, Central Command, the military operations centre
co-ordinating the war against terrorism, this week asked for a list of
American international relief organisations - non-governmental organisations
- working in or around Iraq, senior members of NGOs said.”
Preemptive
strike on Iraq to improve peace prospects (08/11/02) new
By Henry Kissinger in The Manila Times
“Military intervention should be attempted only if we are willing
to sustain such an effort for however long it is needed. For, in the end,
the task is to translate intervention in Iraq into terms of general applicability
for an international system. The imminence of proliferation of weapons
of mass destruction, the huge dangers it involves, the rejection of a
viable inspection system, the demonstrated hostility of Saddam combine
to produce an imperative for preemptive action. But it is not in the American
national interest to establish preemption as a universal principle available
to every nation.”
Act
Now: The danger is immediate. Saddam Hussein must be removed.
(09/06/02) new
By George P. Schulz in The Washington Post
“This is a defining moment in international affairs. Authorization
for action is clear. We have made endless efforts to bring Saddam Hussein
into line with the duly considered judgments of a unanimous U.N. Security
Council. Let us go to the Security Council and assert this case with the
care of a country determined to take decisive action. And this powerful
case for acting now must be made promptly to Congress. Its members will
have to stand up and be counted. Then let’s get on with the job.”
Target
Iraq’s Terrorist Regime, Not Just Osama bin Laden, to Win War on
Terrorism (10/02/01) new
By James A. Phillips of The Heritage Foundation
“President George W. Bush has declared war against international
terrorism in response to the September 11 terrorist attacks that killed
more than 6,000 innocent people. That war will require eradicating Osama
bin Laden’s global terrorist network and uprooting its Taliban protectors
from Afghanistan. But that alone will not be enough to stop terrorism.
Troubling questions have been raised about possible Iraqi support for
bin Laden’s network; this is not surprising, given Iraq’s past
support for terrorist attacks against America and its allies.”
Bushophobia
on West 43rd Street: The New York Times’s daily rant.
(08/12/02) new
By Erin Sheley in The Weekly Standard
“On two consecutive days last week, the New York Times advanced its
crusade against military action in Iraq with page-one ‘news’
stories — the first detailing a leaked war plan, the second predicting
dire effects for the U.S. economy. While these prominently featured pieces
occasioned much comment, lesser instances of the Times’s political
use of its news columns are commonplace and also deserve attention.”
The
Left has lost its way and lost its voice (08/17/02) new
By Camille Paglia in The London Times
“Only a lunatic fringe on the far Left is still calling for revolution,
a smashing of the social order, but it must be acknowledged how widespread
that idea was in the 1960s. Most leftists do believe that, without them,
the naive proletariat would wallow for ever in ignorance and slavery.
Unless they are volunteering hands-on service in blighted neighbourhoods,
however, most leftists are far removed from working-class life. Many are
wordsmiths — journalists or academics who run in packs. Leftism has become
wordplay — a refuge for bourgeois intellectuals guilty about their comfort
and privilege.”
Occasionally, some links are moved
from this section into the Featured
Webpages Trove.
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The
Role of Government in Education (1955)
By Milton Friedman in Economics and the Public Interest
“This re-examination of the role of government in education suggests
that the growth of governmental responsibility in this area has been unbalanced.
Government has appropriately financed general education for citizenship,
but in the process it has been led also to administer most of the schools
that provide such education. Yet, as we have seen, the administration
of schools is neither required by the financing of education, nor justifiable
in its own right in a predominantly free enterprise society. Government
has appropriately been concerned with widening the opportunity of young
men and women to get professional and technical training, but it has sought
to further this objective by the inappropriate means of subsidizing such
education, largely in the form of making it available free or at a low
price at governmentally operated schools. The lack of balance in governmental
activity reflects primarily the failure to separate sharply the question
what activities it is appropriate for government to finance from
the question what activities it is appropriate for government to administer
— a distinction that is important in other areas of government activity
as well. Because the financing of general education by government is widely
accepted, the provision of general education directly by govern mental
bodies has also been accepted. But institutions that provide general education
are especially well suited also to provide some kinds of vocational and
professional education, so the acceptance of direct government provision
of general education has led to the direct provision of vocational education.
To complete the circle, the provision of vocational education has, in
turn, meant that it too was financed by government, since financing has
been predominantly of educational institutions not of particular kinds
of educational services.”
Advice
to Graduates About Advice (06/06/1971)
By Edward C. Banfield at Claremont McKenna College
“Figures of speech, especially metaphors, are peculiarly serviceable
to people who give advice about social problems. The use of them tends
to create an emotional response in the listener that enhances the urgency
of the ‘problem’ thus raising the value of the putative ‘solution’
that the advice-giver offers. I sometimes wonder if we could have an ‘urban
crisis’ without a good supply of metaphors. Suppose that a writer
could not speak of ‘decaying neighborhoods’ but instead had
to say what he meant straight out — say that the well-off have moved
away from aging unfashionable neighborhoods, that this has given the less
well-off opportunities to move into housing better than they formerly
had, and that they, for obvious reasons, are in most instances disposed
to spend less on the repair and maintenance of houses than the former
occupiers were. Or suppose that a United States Senator instead of saying,
as one recently did, that ‘the cities are mortally sick and getting
sicker’ and that the ‘states are in a state of chronic crisis’
had to speak plainly — in this instance, perhaps, to say that although
in the last decade the cities and states have increased their revenues
by a factor of three, there are nevertheless many voters who would like
to have more spent, provided of course that the taxes are paid mainly
by others.”
The
End of History? (Summer 1989)
By Francis Fukuyama in The National Interest
“The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of
all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western
liberalism. In the past decade, there have been unmistakable changes in
the intellectual climate of the world’s two largest communist countries,
and the beginnings of significant reform movements in both. But this phenomenon
extends beyond high politics and it can be seen also in the ineluctable
spread of consumerist Western culture in such diverse contexts as the
peasants’ markets and color television sets now omnipresent throughout
China, the cooperative restaurants and clothing stores opened in the past
year in Moscow, the Beethoven piped into Japanese department stores, and
the rock music enjoyed alike in Prague, Rangoon, and Tehran. What we may
be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a
particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such:
that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the
universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human
government. This is not to say that there will no longer be events to
fill the pages of Foreign Affairs’s yearly summaries
of international relations, for the victory of liberalism has occurred
primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete
in the real or material world. But there are powerful reasons for believing
that it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run.”
An
Explosion of Green (Apr. 1995)
By Bill McKibben in The Atlantic
“In the early nineteenth century the cleric Timothy Dwight reported
that the 240-mile journey from Boston to New York City passed through
no more than twenty miles of forest. Surveying the changes wrought by
farmers and loggers in New Hampshire, he wrote, ‘The forests are
not only cut down, but there appears little reason to hope that they will
ever grow again.’ Less than two centuries later, despite great increases
in the state’s population, 90 percent of New Hampshire is covered
by forest. Vermont was 35 percent woods in 1850 and is 80 percent today,
and even Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island have seen woodlands
rebound to the point where they cover nearly three fifths of southern
New England. This process, which began as farmers abandoned the cold and
rocky pastures of the East for the fertile fields of the Midwest, has
not yet run its course.... This unintentional and mostly unnoticed renewal
of the rural and mountainous East — not the spotted owl, not the
salvation of Alaska’s pristine ranges — represents the great
environmental story of the United States, and in some ways of the whole
world. Here, where ‘suburb’ and ‘megalopolis’ were
added to the world’s vocabulary, an explosion of green is under way,
one that could offer hope to much of the rest of the planet.”
The
Doomslayer (Feb. 1997)
By Ed Regis in Wired
“The world is getting progressively poorer, and it’s all because
of population, or more precisely, overpopulation. There’s
a finite store of resources on our pale blue dot, spaceship Earth, our
small and fragile tiny planet, and we’re fast approaching its ultimate
carrying capacity. The limits to growth are finally upon us, and we’re
living on borrowed time. The laws of population growth are inexorable.
Unless we act decisively, the final result is written in stone: mass poverty,
famine, starvation, and death. Time is short, and we have to act now.
That’s the standard and canonical litany.... There’s just one
problem with The Litany, just one slight little wee imperfection: every
item in that dim and dreary recitation, each and every last claim, is
false.... Thus saith The Doomslayer, one Julian
L. Simon, a neither shy nor retiring nor particularly mild-mannered
professor of business administration at a middling eastern-seaboard state
university. Simon paints a somewhat different picture of the human condition
circa 1997. ‘Our species is better off in just about every measurable
material way,’ he says. ‘Just about every important long-run
measure of human material welfare shows improvement over the decades and
centuries, in the United States and the rest of the world. Raw materials
— all of them — have become less scarce rather than more. The
air in the US and in other rich countries is irrefutably safer to breathe.
Water cleanliness has improved. The environment is increasingly healthy,
with every prospect that this trend will continue.’”
A brilliant parody:
Transgressing
the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity
(Spring/Summer 1996)
By Alan Sokal in Social Text
“There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who
continue to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social
and cultural criticism can have anything to contribute, except perhaps
peripherally, to their research. Still less are they receptive to the
idea that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt
in the light of such criticism. Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed
by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual
outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists
an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual
human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are
encoded in ‘eternal’ physical laws; and that human beings can
obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws
by hewing to the ‘objective’ procedures and epistemological
strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.”
... and, in explanation, ...
A
Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies (May/June 1996)
By Alan Sokal in Lingua Franca
“For some years I’ve been troubled by an apparent decline in
the standards of rigor in certain precincts of the academic humanities.
But I’m a mere physicist: If I find myself unable to make heads or
tails of jouissance and differance, perhaps that just reflects
my own inadequacy. So, to test the prevailing intellectual standards,
I decided to try a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment:
Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies — whose
editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew
Ross — publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it
sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions?
The answer, unfortunately, is yes.... What’s going on here? Could
the editors really not have realized that my article was written as a
parody?”
Networks
Need a Reality Check: A firsthand account of liberal bias at CBS News.
(02/13/1996)
By Bernard Goldbert in The Wall Street Journal
“There are lots of reasons fewer people are watching network news,
and one of them, I’m more convinced than ever, is that our viewers
simply don’t trust us. And for good reason. The old argument that
the networks and other ‘media elites’ have a liberal bias is
so blatantly true that it’s hardly worth discussing anymore. No,
we don’t sit around in dark corners and plan strategies on how we’re
going to slant the news. We don’t have to. It comes naturally to
most reporters.”
There
is No Time, There Will Be Time (11/18/1998)
By Peggy Noonan in Forbes ASAP
“When you consider who is gifted and crazed with rage... when you
think of the terrorist places and the terrorist countries... who do they
hate most? The Great Satan, the United States. What is its most important
place? Some would say Washington. I would say the great city of the United
States is the great city of the world, the dense 10-mile-long island called
Manhattan, where the economic and media power of the nation resides, the
city that is the psychological center of our modernity, our hedonism,
our creativity, our hard-shouldered hipness, our unthinking arrogance.”
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