Voices in the Wilderness: Versus the age-old sirens of appeasement. (10/18/02) new
By Victor Davis Hanson at The National Review Online
“Every day a Marine is killed, a French tanker blown up, Christians butchered in Pakistan, tourists incinerated in Bali, terrorist cells broken up from Oregon to New York — and our pundits demand proof that we are at war. Why do the presidents’ critics press their attacks, the more principled playing down the chances of future danger, the more disingenuous engaging in character assassination and cheap psychoanalysis? In a word, human nature. It is our way always to put aside distant threats of the future to enjoy the tangible, but temporary, lull of the present.”

False Alarm: Why Liberals Should Support the War (10/10/02) new
By Jonathan Chait at The New Republic Online
“It is perhaps telling that the case for war with Iraq was most clearly made not by Republican President George W. Bush but by Democratic President Bill Clinton. ‘Predators of the twenty-first century,’ Clinton warned, speaking four and a half years ago, ‘will be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them.... There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.’ And if the world were to allow Saddam to continue to construct his terrible weapons? ‘Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost its will,’ Clinton declared. ‘He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And some day, some way, I guarantee you, he’ll use the arsenal.’”

Air War: How Saddam Manipulates the U.S. Media (10/17/02) new
By Franklin Foer at The New Republic Online
“Like their Soviet-bloc predecessors, the Iraqis have become masters of the Orwellian pantomime — the state-orchestrated anti-American rally, the state-led tours of alleged chemical weapons sites that turn out to be baby milk factories — that promotes their distorted reality. And the Iraqi regime has found an audience for these displays in an unlikely place: the U.S. media. It’s not because American reporters have an ideological sympathy for Saddam Hussein; broadcasting his propaganda is simply the only way they can continue to work in Iraq. ‘There’s a quid pro quo for being there,’ says Peter Arnett, who worked the Iraq beat for CNN for a decade. ‘You go in and they control what you do.... So you have no option other than to report the opinion of the government of Iraq.’ In other words, the Western media’s presence in the Ministry of Information describes more than just a physical reality.”

Say “No” to War on Iraq (10/17/02) new
By Josh Feit in The Stranger
“There’s a much more logical and honest (and urgent) way to proceed against terrorism. Let’s promote democratic reforms in the real linchpins of the region: Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. And I’m not talking about Radio Free Europe broadcasts — an imprecise, hit or miss Cold War tactic waged against our enemies. I’m talking about a direct American campaign for democracy (and women’s rights!) in the Middle East aimed at our suspect allies. In short, we have more than radio waves to influence the likes of Cairo and Riyadh. We’ve got dollars, business investments, and political relationships. Let’s get tough, and demand changes from our friends; demands backed with the threat of pulling our support.”

Say “Yes” to War on Iraq (10/17/02) new
By Dan Savage in The Stranger
“You see, lefties, there are times when saying ‘no’ to war means saying ‘yes’ to oppression. Don’t believe me? Go ask a Czech or a European Jew about the British and French saying ‘no’ to war with Germany in 1938. War may be bad for children and other living things, but there are times when peace is worse for children and other living things, and this is one of those times. Saying no to war in Iraq means saying yes to the continued oppression of the Iraqi people. It amazes me when I hear lefties argue that we should assassinate Saddam in order to avoid war. If Saddam is assassinated, he will be replaced by another Baathist dictator — and what then for the people of Iraq? More ‘peace’ — i.e., more oppression, more executions, more gassings, more terror, more fear.”

They want to kill us all (10/19/02) new
By Mark Steyn in The Spectator
“An appeaser, said Churchill, feeds the crocodile in the hope that it will eat him last. But sometimes the croc eats him first anyway. For months, the US, Britain and Canada had warned the Indonesian government about terrorists operating within its borders. So had Singapore and Malaysia. President Megawati’s administration responded by calling Washington anti-Muslim. The American ambassador was publicly denounced by her vice-president. Hassan Wirayuda, the foreign minister, said in February that the outside world’s fears of Islamic terrorism in Indonesia were overblown and that in Jakarta ‘we laugh at it’. Ha-ha. From government contacts to police indifference, the administration’s strategy was to deny the crocodile existed and then quietly slip him the à la carte menu. Now, Indonesian stocks are down, the rupiah’s in the toilet, the national carrier’s flying empty, and the official tourism websites have switched to continuously updated info on dead tourists, safe in the knowledge that they’re unlikely to be getting any new bookings from live ones.”

Don’t blame the west (10/16/02) new
By Clive James in The Guardian
“But let us allow, for the moment, that the mass outcry against American hegemony is the voice of the true, the eternal and the compassionate left. Allowing that, we can put the best possible construction on its pervasiveness. Not just the majority of the intellectuals, academics and schoolteachers, but most of the face-workers in the media, share the view that international terrorism is to be explained by the vices of the liberal democracies. Or, at any rate, they shared it until a few days ago. It will be interesting, in the shattering light of an explosive event, to see if that easy view continues now to be quite so widespread, and how much room is made for the more awkward view that the true instigation for terrorism might not be the vices of the liberal democracies, but their virtues.”

So Long, Fellow Travelers: Is That All That’s Left? (10/20/02) new
By Christopher Hitchens in The Washington Post
“As someone who has done a good deal of marching and public speaking about Vietnam, Chile, South Africa, Palestine and East Timor in his time (and would do it all again), I can only hint at how much I despise a Left that thinks of Osama bin Laden as a slightly misguided anti-imperialist. (He actually says he wants to restore the old imperial caliphate and has condemned the Australian-led international rescue of East Timor as a Christian plot against Muslim Indonesia). Or a Left that can think of Milosevic and Saddam as victims.”

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter wins Nobel Peace Prize (10/11/02)
In The San Francisco Chronicle by Doug Mellgren of The Associated Press
“Former President Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday ‘for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights.’ .... ‘It should be interpreted as a criticism of the line that the current administration has taken,’ Gunnar Berge, chairman of the Nobel committee, said. ‘It’s a kick in the leg to all that follow the same line as the United States.’”

There He Goes Again: Jimmy Carter, our “model ex-president.” (05/02/02)
By Jay Nordlinger in The National Review
“Carter is immensely proud of his rendezvous with Middle East history, and he trades on it constantly. No one should assume, however, that he’s an honest broker — at least anymore. For the past many years, he has been passionately anti-Israel, more or less embracing the PLO line. He has repeatedly been at the service of Yasser Arafat. After the Gulf War, the PLO chief was on the outs with Saudi Arabia, because he had backed Saddam Hussein. So he asked Carter to fly to Riyadh to smooth things over and restore Saudi funding to him — which he did. Arabs are also robust funders of the Carter Center, the ex-president’s redoubt and vehicle in Atlanta.”

Carterpalooza! Jimmy Carter, our “model ex-president.” (10/11/02)
By Jay Nordlinger in The National Review
“The ex-president is known as Joe Human Rights, but he’s mighty selective about whose human rights to champion. If you live in Marcos’s Philippines, Pinochet’s Chile, or apartheid South Africa, he’s liable to care about you. If you live in Communist China, Communist Cuba, Communist Ethiopia, Communist Nicaragua, Communist North Korea, Communist...: screw you.”

Harry Belafonte Slams Colin Powell as Race Sellout (10/08/02)
At The Drudge Report by Matt Drudge
“Singer Harry Belafonte took to the AM radiowaves on Tuesday morning to slam Secretary of State Colin Powell as a sellout to the black race! Belafonte, appearing on San Diego’s 760 KFMB, told host Ted Leitner that Powell was like a plantation slave who moves into the slave owner’s house and only says what his master wants him to say.”

Harry Belafonte’s Havana Farewell (07/18/00)
By Ronald Radosh at FrontPage Magazine
“Most American admirers of Harry Belafonte probably don’t realize that the popular singer and actor is an unreconstructed Stalinist.... In an interview he gave in 1995, Belafonte claimed that ‘racism has sucked up my entire life,’ and that as a result, he decided never to accept ‘an indignity where I might find one.’ Some might view genuflecting before Castro in the year 2000 as an ultimate indignity — but to Harry Belafonte, the illusion dies hard. What will be left, I wonder, when the Cuban people finally are free of the longest surviving dictator in the world and his grotesque socialist prison? The banana boat is coming, Harry, and it won’t be long.”

C.I.A. Letter to Senate on Baghdad’s Intentions (10/07/02)
In The New York Times
“¶Since Operation Enduring Freedom, we have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of Al Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad. ¶We have credible reporting that Al Qaeda leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire W.M.D. capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to Al Qaeda members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs. ¶Iraq’s increasing support to extremist Palestinians coupled with growing indications of relationship with Al Qaeda. suggest that Baghdad’s links to terrorists will increase, even absent U.S. military action.”

Who’s killing the children of Iraq? (10/08/02)
By Margaret Wente in The Globe and Mail
“Of all the reasons to oppose a war against Iraq, one of the most compelling is the image of innocent civilian victims. Children will die — if only because Saddam Hussein won’t hesitate to build orphanages atop his weapons labs. And of all the accusations hurled against the West in its treatment of Iraq, the most damning is the human cost of sanctions. According to many peace groups, humanitarian organizations and politicians, sanctions have killed 500,000 Iraqi children. The total death toll from sanctions amounts to a million and a half innocent people. Are these figures credible? Only if you believe Saddam Hussein.”

Text: Iraq Resolution (10/10/02)
In The Washington Times by The Associated Press
“The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to – (1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and (2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq. ”

A just war? (10/06/02)
By Jean Bethke Elshtain in The Boston Globe
“Several weeks ago, 100 teachers of Christian ethics, both pacifists and those working within the just war tradition, signed a petition declaring, in its entirety: ‘As Christian ethicists, we share a common moral presumption against a pre-emptive war on Iraq by the United States.’ Although I am an ethicist and a Christian, I was not among the signatories, for two reasons. First, the statement is vague and, therefore, evasive. Within the just war tradition, there is a common moral presumption for justice as well as a recognition that all war is terrible. But there are times when justice demands the use of force as a response to violence, hatred, and injustice.”

Kids beat man to brain death, police say: Nearly 20 suspected of taking part, one just 10 years old (10/01/02)
In The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel by Leah Thorsen
“A mob of nearly 20 kids beat a man brain dead Sunday night after he confronted them for throwing an egg at him and punched one teen in the mouth, police said. Eight suspects, at least one as young as 10, were in custody Tuesday, police said. The victim, Charlie Young Jr., 36, remained on life support. Police said the group chased Young onto the porch of a house at 2021 N. 21st Lane and used bats, shovels and boards to pummel him in an attack that left blood splattered floor to ceiling.”

Community reacts with disbelief, outrage: Police, politicians, neighborhood groups condemn beating (10/01/02)
In The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel by Leonard Sykes Jr.
“As police continued their investigation Tuesday into the mob beating that left Charlie Young Jr. dead, reaction throughout the city ranged from shock and disbelief to outrage. From community centers, schools and City Hall, police, politicians and neighborhood groups condemned the brutal beating as they wrestled with what — if anything — can be done to prevent similar incidents in the future.”

Victim’s response to egging prompted beating, boys say: Youths tell police they were angry at Young’s overreaction (10/02/02)
In The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel by Jamaal Abdul-Alim
“Based on detailed statements police say some of the boys gave, none of the boys had any problem with Young, 36, and they were hanging out with him at a house on W. Brown St. for at least part of Sunday evening. But around 10 p.m., one of them — a 13-year-old nicknamed ‘Bump’ — objected to how Young intruded on a game of insults between Bump and his girlfriend and ‘started ribbing on everybody.’ That’s when Bump threw an egg that might as well have been a bombshell.”

10 held in beating death: Only one is adult; more suspects sought; murder charges expected (10/02/02)
In The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel by Jamaal Abdul-Alim and Jessica McBride
“Among those prosecutors expect to charge with murder in adult court is a 10-year-old boy, who could be the youngest person ever prosecuted as an adult in Wisconsin. Milwaukee Police Chief Arthur Jones said eight of those in custody have confessed to their roles in the beating death of Charlie Young Jr., who died Tuesday evening at Wauwatosa's Froedtert Memorial Lutheran Hospital after being attacked Sunday by about 20 boys and young men.”

7 boys charged as adults in beating: 10-year-old kept in Children’s Court; other juveniles expected to be charged (10/02/02)
In The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel by Jessica McBride, Jamaal Abdul-Alim, and Tom Held
“Prosecutors charged seven youths as adults with first-degree reckless homicide Thursday in a savage mob beating, but they spared the youngest, a 10-year-old, from adult court and a possible 40-year prison term. The 10-year-old was charged with second-degree reckless homicide in Children’s Court, where he now could face a two-year sentence at a juvenile prison, a sentence that could be extended only until he is 18. At least three more teens in custody are expected to be charged next week, and police are looking for more suspects.”

Crime, gangs and broken homes play large part in boys’ lives (10/03/02)
In The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel by Gina Barton
“The 10-year-old who told police he helped beat Charlie Young Jr. to death has been smoking marijuana since summer, his half sister says. A 14-year-old being held in the case already is the father of a baby girl. He was arrested on a burglary charge when he was 8 or 9.”

Wichita to revisit brutal slayings as testimony begins (10/07/02)
In The Washington Times by Valerie Richardson
“The brothers, 24-year-old Reginald and 22-year-old Jonathan, face 113 criminal counts, notably kidnapping, rape, robbery and five murders, in connection with a crime spree from Dec. 7 to Dec. 15, 2000, that terrorized Wichita and much of Kansas. If convicted, they could receive the death penalty.... The Carr brothers are black, and each of the five victims was white. At the time of their arrest, Sedgwick County District Attorney Nola Foulston refused to charge them with hate crimes, explaining that the main motive was robbery, and that Kansas did not have a hate-crimes law.”

Inside Al Qaeda’s Training Camps: What they’re ready for. (10/01/02)
By Bryan Preston at The National Review Online
“Al Qaeda, the notorious terrorist gang responsible for killing 3,025 innocents a year ago, is still alive and planning future atrocities. Though last fall’s military campaign robbed the group of its terrorist training bases in Afghanistan, and possibly of its leader, Osama bin Laden, there is every reason to believe that al Qaeda is still trying to train its troops in weapons use, tactics, and hostage-taking at bases we’ve yet to find and destroy. And as recent developments in upstate New York make clear, al Qaeda probably already has scores of sleeper troops inside the U.S. and around Europe — troops already trained, and awaiting their signal.”

The Bigotry of Jihad (10/02/02)
By John Perazzo at FrontPage Magazine
“Liberals in academia and the media largely refuse to acknowledge the prejudice that animates anti-Israeli and anti-American sentiment in much of the Arab world today. Rather than identify it as raw, unadulterated bigotry, they posit all sorts of rational ‘explanations’ for Muslim antipathy toward other groups.... Rarely is it suggested that Islamic extremists might just be plain, old-fashioned bigots — not unlike the white American bigots who killed James Byrd four years ago.”

Innocents Abroad (10/01/02)
By George Will in The Washington Post
“Not since Jane Fonda posed for photographers at a Hanoi antiaircraft gun has there been anything like Rep. Jim McDermott, speaking to ABC’s ‘This Week’ from Baghdad, saying Americans should take Saddam Hussein at his word but should not take President Bush at his. McDermott, in his seventh term representing Seattle, said Iraqi officials promised him and his traveling companion, Rep. David E. Bonior, a 13-term Michigan Democrat, that weapons inspectors would be ‘allowed to look anywhere.’”

McDermott accuses Bush of plotting to be emperor (10/07/02)
In The Seattle Times by David Postman
“U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott broadened his attack on George W. Bush’s war plans yesterday, saying the president is threatening military action in Iraq as part of a plot to crown himself emperor of America. Criticized for saying on a trip to Iraq early last week that Bush would mislead the American public, McDermott, a Seattle Democrat, was back in his district yesterday telling cheering supporters that Bush is planning a war to distract voters’ attention from domestic problems.”

Crude (10/07/02)
By Peter Beinard at The New Republic
“Whatever you think of the Bushies, September 11, 2001, changed their view of the world. And it is that changed view that has brought America to the brink of war. The left can call that new outlook reckless or arrogant or dumb. But they should at least admit that it’s sincere.”

Message Full of Hypocrisy: Labour forgot Clinton’s notorious foreign policy (10/07/02)
By Christopher Hitchens in The Mirror
“Imagine if, during the Clinton presidency, ex-presidents Reagan or Bush had addressed the Tory Party conference, cast doubt upon the legitimacy of Clinton’s election, trashed his domestic and foreign policy and offered him lukewarm support at a time of crisis. It never happened, because there is a tradition it should not, but in breaking with ex-presidential etiquette Clinton, who’ll do anything for an audience, met an audience that would apparently do anything for him.”

Put up or shut up (10/05/02)
By Mark Steyn in The Spectator
“Structurally, the UN is a creature of the Cold War. It formalised the stalemate of East and West: it was designed to prevent rather than enable action; it tended towards inertia, which was no bad thing given the potentially catastrophic consequences of the alternative. But we no longer have a bipolar world, and so the vetoes only work one way — to restrain the sole surviving superpower. England’s clergy have redefined the Christian concept of a just war to mean only one blessed by the Security Council, which is to say the governments of France, Russia and China: it will be left to two atheists and a lapsed Catholic to determine whether this is a war Christians can support.”

Occasionally, some links are moved from this section into the Featured Webpages Trove.

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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Special Wayback Collections at The Internet Archive:

The September 11 Web Archive
“This collection of archived documents was commissioned by the Library of Congress to preserve digital materials covering the events of September 11, 2001.”

US Election 2000
“This collection was commissioned by the Library of Congress to archive digital materials covering the Election of 2000. It contains 800 gigabytes of data gathered from 8/1/2000 to 1/21/2001.”

Web Pioneers: The Early Years
“A special Wayback collection of websites that began the Internet revolution.”

A chronicle of high-level USA government actions in September 2001, at two websites:

Ten Days in September (WP)
“This series is based on interviews with President Bush, Vice President Cheney and many other key officials inside the administration and out. The interviews were supplemented by notes of National Security Council meetings made available to The Washington Post, along with notes taken by several participants.”

Response to Terror (Austin American Stateman)
“This is an eight-part series by The Washington Post describing the response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks at the highest levels of government.”

Coverage of September 11 and the aftermath:

Fighting Terrorism: America Retaliates (BG)
“Archive stories from the Boston Globe: Tuesday Sept. 11 – Sunday Sept. 16”

Attack on America (Guardian Unlimited)
Special Report with continuing coverage

9-11 A Year Later (USA Today)
Special Investigations, etc.

9/11: One year later (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
The Attack on America

NRO 911 Archive (National Review Online)
Collected writings from the early aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001

Complete coverage of 9/11/02 (New York Daily News)
The Daily News’ coverage of the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks

new 9-11: One Year Later (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel)
Coverage of the first anniversary of the Sep. 11 attacks

new September 11th One Year Later (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review)
Coverage of events marking September 11, 2002

Miscellaneous Collections:

new Historic Documents (CNSNews)
“CNSNews.com is pleased to present this library of important documents as a public service”

new Jonathan & Reginald Carr on Trial (Wichita Eagle)
Local newspaper coverage of the trial of two brothers who went on a robbery/murder rampage, December 2000, in Kansas

new Bali Blasts (Sydney Morning Herald)
Special coverage of the terrorist bombings in Bali

Abortion Bias Seeps Into the News (Los Angeles Times)
“A four-part 1990 study of major newspaper, television and newsmagazine coverage over 18 months, including more than 100 interviews with journalists and with activists on both sides of the abortion debate, confirms that this bias often exists.”

Arts & Letters Daily
2002 Archive

“All Nine Alive!” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
The story of the Quecreek Mine rescue

“I was a Negro in the South for 30 days” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
“Fifty years ago [1948], Ray Sprigle of the Post-Gazette posed as a black man to experience firsthand what life was like for 10 million people living under the system of legal segregation known as Jim Crow.”

Catholic Poets (ELCore.Net)
Joyce Kilmer, Alice Meynell, Joseph Mary Plunkett

Verse (Bartleby.com)
Public-domain Anthologies and Individual Volumes

HTI American Verse Project
“The American Verse Project is a collaborative project between the University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative (HTI) and the University of Michigan Press. The project is assembling an electronic archive of volumes of American poetry prior to 1920.”

Newman Reader (ed. Bob Elder)
Life and Works of Venerable John Henry Cardinal Newman

What We Think of America (Granta)
“In this issue twenty-four writers drawn from many countries describe the part America has played in their lives — for better or worse — and deliver their estimate of the good and the bad it has done as the world’s supreme political, military, economic and cultural power.”

Hot Issues: Persecution (Christianity Today)
Reports of contemporary persecution of Christians world-wide

Gay Activism in Schools (Teachers in Focus)
“A single-themed issue on homosexual activism in the schools”

Skepticism Toward The Skeptical Environmentalist (Scientific American)
The Great Debate between Lomborg and Anti-Lomborgs

Document Archive in English (ZENIT)
The World Seen from Rome

Archives: Fallout of September 11 (ZENIT)
The World Seen from Rome

STATS Spotlight (Statistical Assessment Service)
“Here are pieces of more extensive unpublished STATS research.”

Legacy of Shame (New Times LA)
News and opinion about Roger Cardinal Mahony

A Trust Betrayed:
Sexual Abuse by Teachers (Education Week)
“This three-part series on child sex abuse by school employees is the result of a six-month project by Education Week involving scores of interviews with state and local education and law-enforcement officials, other experts, teachers, principals, parents, and victims, as well as an extensive review of court documents, journal articles, and public-policy records.”

Catholic Church Abuse Scandal (Yahoo! News)
U.S. Full Coverage

The Crusades (Catholic Dossier)
“It is difficult for one who lives in an increasingly secularized society not to be influenced by its prejudices. One of the great misunderstandings in the West, even among Catholics, has to do with the Crusades. This issue of Catholic Dossier provides fundamental and irrefutable historical information about what actually happened and why.”

Pope Pius XII (Catholic Dossier)
“The accomplishments of the Vatican diplomatic corps in the various countries occupied by the Germans, over which the sinister Eichmann preyed, had received the plaudits of all free men, not least those in the new country of Israel. There groves were planted in honor of the Pope and of many of his nuncios, not least Cardinal Roncalli who, as nuncio in Istanbul, had been the good right arm of Pius in rescuing Jews. Pius XII escaped martyrdom during his lifetime, but he has been subjected to the martyrdom of vilification, defamation and incredible falsification after his death.”

The New Rise of Islam (Catholic World Report)
“Late in the 20th century, the renewed vigor of Islam has become one of the most important developments on the world scene. By dint of their energetic proselytism, their migration to new lands, and their high birth rate, Muslims are rapidly gaining attention and influence in many countries where their faith has heretofore been virtually unknown. CWR aims to make readers better acquainted with Islam, with a primer on the religious principles, and public practices of that faith.”

Christianity and Islam, Terrorism and War (Catholic World Report)
“Why have thousands of Muslims joined in anti-American protests in Pakistan, Kenya, and Indonesia since the start of the US air strikes on terrorist bases in Afghanistan? These demonstrators are not all supporters of al-Qaeda, thirsting for American blood; they are not Arabs, caught up in the political turmoil of the Middle East. They are united only by the Muslim faith. Is it Islam, then, that prods them toward violence?”

The Cross and the Crescent (Catholic World Report)
“To a remarkable degree, America has united behind President Bush in the war on terrorism. For the first time since World War II there is an overwhelming consensus that we are fighting a necessary battle, for a just cause. That national unity is a clear sign of strength, and a clear warning to our enemies. Nevertheless, beneath the surface of that consensus the careful observer can still detect signs of the fault lines within American society. We are united against terrorists, but divided among ourselves.”

new A Call for “Holy War” (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review)
Pittsburgh-area connections to radical Islamists

Diane Alden
inflyovercountry

Ann Coulter
Town Hall

Bill Dunn
Faith and Funnies

Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online

Charles Krauthammer
Washington Post

Michael Kelly
Washington Post

Jonah Goldberg
National Review Online

Jonah Goldberg
Town Hall

Nat Hentoff
The Village Voice

John Mallon
Peter’sVoice

Steve Milloy
Fox News

Peggy Noonan
Opinion Journal

Fred Reed
Commentary with Moxie

Mark Steyn
National Post

Deb Weiss
A View from Here

George F. Will
Washington Post

Jonah Goldberg rebuts vapid objections to war in Iraq, at The National Review Online:

Same Old: Tiresome arguments of war. (10/01/02)
“You can’t turn on a radio or see a TV debate on the issue without someone throwing around something you know is stupid, but you can’t quite remember why. So I thought I’d start compiling a list. It’s not exhaustive, but it’s a start.”

More of the Same Old Tired Arguments: Blah, blah, blah. (10/02/02)
“Yesterday’s column addressed some of the knee-jerk arguments used against a possible war with Iraq. Enough readers, particularly desperate college kids, wanted more for their campus battles. So here ya go.”

“Rookie Priest”: a 12-part series in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette chronicling the first year of Rev. James Farnan in the priesthood:

Ordination culminates the answer to a long call (06/25/00)
“Farnan felt compelled to consider whether God was calling him. The idea frightened him. But he also believed that the greatest gift he could ever give someone was to offer them Christ in the Eucharist. He called the diocesan vocations office and joined its ‘affiliate’ program, which allowed him to spend time at the seminary without declaring himself a candidate.”

How a priest learns he’s not alone (07/04/00)
“He was ordained a priest on June 24 after six years of seminary and four years of wrestling with whether to enter seminary. Raised as the sixth of seven children by two parents who adored each other, he had feared the isolation of living without a wife and children. But witnessing his father draw strength and courage from the Eucharist before his death from cancer in 1988 had led Farnan down a 12-year path to priesthood and this Mass.”

Priest forges bonds of unity (07/23/00)
“Farnan doesn’t blame people for misperceptions. He learned things in seminary that he figured he should have known from Catholic high school. And now he is learning what they didn’t teach him in seminary. Especially about all the rules, protocols and paperwork involved in a Catholic wedding.”

On-the-job training tests a new priest’s resolve (09/04/00)
“Death is a constant presence in the lives of priests, who tend to the dying and bury the dead. In fact, a good part of their ministry prepares people for this final passage of life.”

Priest, parish tee off for God (10/22/00)
“Farnan’s father taught him to play golf when he was 10. He played against his brothers as he grew up, and with customers when he was a manufacturer's representative for restaurant and janitorial supplies. His time on the greens plummeted when he entered seminary and could no longer claim games as a tax write-off. Some of his clubs were gifts from friends who know that, with a monthly salary of $1,250, he won't be buying many on his own.”

Work day for hustling green cleric is 18 hours (11/26/00)
“He also has a poster of Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos, who worked for nine years as a parish priest in 19th-century Pittsburgh, then died tending the sick during an epidemic in New Orleans. Farnan was struck by how Seelos’ saintly character was honed and revealed by the everyday, often anonymous, tasks of priestly ministry.”

Day of sorrow touched by God (12/31/00)
“As he drove to the hospital, Farnan reflected on what he had learned from his constant acquaintance with death. People’s faith, and their need for that faith, is starkly revealed when they confront death, he said. Those with faith have hope. Their grief is a sign of love, not of despair. Those without faith are more distraught and confused.”

Rookies find priests hit the ground running, don’t stop all day (01/29/01)
“As Farnan reflected on what to tell them, memories of a half-dozen teen-agers whom he or his siblings had known in high school floated to the surface. Some had been killed or paralyzed in alcohol-related crashes. Adolescent foolishness had led to lifelong consequences for them or for someone else.”

Study in Eternal City affirms priesthood’s eternity (03/11/01)
“Tension tends to run strongest between young priests and those who were ordained in the heyday of Vatican II renewal. Older priests look warily at youngsters who talk enthusiastically of restoring traditions their parents rejected. The suspicion can be palpable when priests ordained a generation ago arrive at the college for a sabbatical.”

Rookie priest at home in Rome (04/29/01)
“Another kind of inspiration comes from Masses he offers in St. Peter’s Basilica for family and friends who visit Rome. It is not only an architectural treasure but the burial site of the Apostle Peter and other early martyrs. Farnan was ordained a deacon there in 1999. For a priest, he conceded, it’s ‘like playing Carnegie Hall.’”

Two Italian burial sites offer lessons in sacrifice (05/27/01)
“Farnan might have chosen work in a hospital or soup kitchen, but he wanted to lead pilgrims to Peter’s grave because his own decision to give up his sales career for the priesthood was inspired by Peter’s decision to leave his fishing boat to follow Jesus. To qualify as a guide, he spent a year studying the history and archaeology of Vatican Hill.”

Rookie year behind him, a priest visits home as past and future converge (07/08/01)
“He watched Jim this year for signs of change. He saw the same guy who had always worked hard, played hard and treated others with a magnetic mix of quick wit and kindness. But an intangible force now seemed to be at work as his brother drew grace from his rhythm of prayer, the Mass and from countless actions whose purpose was to draw others to Christ.”

A three-part series at CBSNews culled from an interview of George W. Bush by 60 Minutes II:

Bush On 9/11: Moment To Moment (09/11/02)
“‘I thought it was an accident,’ says Mr. Bush. ‘I thought it was a pilot error. I thought that some foolish soul had gotten lost and - and made a terrible mistake.’ Mr. Bush was told about the first plane just before sitting down with a class of second graders. He was watching a reading drill when, just after nine, United Flight 175 exploded into the second tower. There was the sudden realization that what had seemed like a terrible mistake was a coordinated attack.”

Part II: The Days After (09/11/02)
“When Sept. 12 dawned, President Bush was demanding a war plan. No one in the White House or the Pentagon could be sure of what the president would do. In office for just eight months, he’d never been tested as commander-in-chief. ‘I never asked them what they thought,’ President Bush said of the Pentagon brass, ‘because I didn’t really – because I knew what I was gonna do. I knew exactly what had to be done, Scott. And that was to set a strategy to seek justice. Find out who did it, hunt them down and bring them to justice.’”

Part III: Bush On Bin Laden (09/11/02)
“A lot has happened in the year since Sept. 11. One year ago, the president was new on the job, with little experience in foreign policy. He had wanted to pull the military back from foreign entanglements. Now, on his orders, U.S. forces are engaged around the globe in a war he did not expect, in a world completely changed. In the Oval Office last week, CBS News Correspondent Scott Pelley asked the president about Iraq, about whether Americans are safe at home and about Osama bin Laden.”

A five-day series in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: “This week, the focus is on how the family structure is breaking down to the point of becoming not just a critical public policy issue, but a threat to the community’s future.”

Community’s fate tied to strength of families: Weak homes, economics hurt children’s chances (06/30/02)
“A war is on, across the metropolitan area, but especially in impoverished neighborhoods, to improve the lives of children and to strengthen families.”

Stopping cycle of kids having kids: Culture of acceptance may be boosting city’s teen pregnancy rate (07/01/02)
“More and more people wonder if the accepting attitude toward teen pregnancy that evolved in the last quarter century is actually contributing to the phenomenon.”

Remembering forgotten fathers: Year-old program drives home lessons that teen dads need to help their children (07/02/02)
“A small number of programs are targeting the side of teen pregnancy people don't usually pay any attention to: the guys. And why do some of those guys feel obligated to become fathers?”

Kids may pay for city’s high rate of single moms: Where 60% of mothers are single, children are left with a murky future (07/03/02)
“Few factors have more influence on a child’s healthy development than a strong, loving, two-parent family. So says a recent report by a nationally known organization devoted to children’s issues. And yet fewer and fewer children grow up in such a family.”

In fight for families, small wins add up: Though not a substitute for solid homes, city programs try to fill in parenting gaps (07/04/02)
“David beat Goliath in the Bible story, but all the would-be Davids, armed with their good programs, have seemed to make only some dents in the Goliath of a tattered social fabric in large sections of Milwaukee. Still, there are victories, and they should be celebrated.”

Joe Klein is writing a multi-part report from Europe for The Guardian:

France? It’s like 1970s America (05/28/02)
“Over the next six weeks, Joe Klein, America’s leading political commentator, will be travelling through Europe for the Guardian. Today, 36 years after he first arrived there in search of “dark-eyed lovelies with difficult personalities”, he reports from France”

The Prince (06/06/02)
“Is Silvio Berlusconi a medieval thowback to a time when rich men could buy power? Or the shape of things to come? And is he dangerous — or just a colourful rogue? In the second of his weekly dispatches from Europe, Joe Klein meets the billionaire prime minister who just wants to be loved”

How the Solidarity dream turned sour (06/12/02)
“Poland was eastern Europe’s great success story, a reborn country that had embraced free markets and liberal democracy and stood poised to join the EU. But now its economy is in tatters and ugly Catholic nationalism is on the rise. In the third of his weekly dispatches from Europe, Joe Klein asks what went wrong”

How Germany was suffocated (06/19/02)
“For 57 years Germany has been struggling to make amends for its Nazi past and be accepted by its neighbours. But has its desire to avoid discord stifled the nation's public life and prevented much needed reform? On the fourth leg of his European tour, Joe Klein finds a society addled by ‘ferocious blandness’”

Who’s in charge here? (06/26/02)
“The great European project has three — or maybe four — presidents, two foreign policy chiefs and endless, baffling bureaucracy. So can it really hold its own against the might of the US? In the fifth instalment of his continental odyssey, Joe Klein travels to Brussels and Seville to find out”

Neither here nor there (07/03/02)
“For six weeks, Joe Klein has been travelling through Europe, taking the pulse of the continent and exploring its fractious relationship with his native country. He ends his journey in Britain with the gap between the US and Europe wider than ever. So which way should we turn? Neither, he says — we are perfectly placed to take the best of both worlds. And he has some tips: get Bill Clinton to make speeches and Silvio Berlusconi to arrange the social events”

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