Archive for: December 2001

CNN is reporting that Japan has effectively abandoned the Kyoto Protocol. Additionally, the “nation’s deep economic slump is … likely to make corporate Japan fight harder against any measures that increase the costs of production.”

Common sense is beginning to shine its light right on through that “CO2 blanket” we’ve heard so much about…

Writing for WorldNetDaily, Henry Lamb explains how a last-hour “unanimous consent” maneuver by Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev) sought to enact legislation that otherwise “can’t stand the scrutiny of public debate and public opposition.” The bill — S. 990, The American Wildlife Enhancement Act of 2001 — passed, and Lamb is none too pleased:This particular bill should have been entitled ‘Screw-The-Landowner Act of 2001.’ It is one of several proposals to provide tax dollars and authorization to convert even more of the rapidly diminishing private property in America to government inventories.

This bill provides $600 million per year for five years for the ‘acquisition of an area of land or water that is suitable or capable of being made suitable for feeding, resting or breeding by wildlife.’ With this broad purpose, no land anywhere is safe from condemnation and acquisition by an agency of government. The money can also be given to environmental organizations for land acquisition. Moreover, this bill explicitly exempts land deals from scrutiny or oversight required by the federal Advisory Committee Act.

Apparently, the U.S. Senate will use our taxes to buy pigswill if it is sold in a green bucket.More advocacy legislation, huh? Well, no worries. Modern identity politics provides us all with loopholes to get around such garbage. Here’s my ploy: I’m planning on claiming I’m “ethnically amoeban” by virtue of an evolutionary “heritage” I can trace back billions of years. Once I prove my case, I plan to apply for a good-sized chunk o’ that beachfront “wilderness area” land (in Oregon, maybe?) the feds have been hoarding (to allow frogs to copulate in peace, from what I understand…).

Once I get things set up, I’ll have you all over for a barbecue…

The Washington Post is reporting that “‘There will be no famine in Afghanistan this winter,’ according to Catherine Bertini, executive director of the UN World Food Programme, which trucks food into Afghanistan”:’There will be deaths, because the country was in a pre-famine condition this summer before the war started. But it will be isolated, and not large-scale.’Earlier reports making this claim were based on an Iranian press release, but if the Post is carrying it, well… ‘Sucks for proponents of the “silent genocide” trope.

[via InstaPundit]

The New Republic’s running an “Ari Fleischer Out-of-the-Loop Watch” in its “Notebook” section. So, how out of the loop is he, according to TNR?:There was last February’s presidentially authorized strike on Iraq–a mission Fleischer learned about from the press. There was the stem-cell decision, Bush’s most important pre-9/11 policy announcement, which occurred while Fleischer was on vacation and was handled by Karen Hughes. And now Fleischer has admitted that the president never told him about last Friday’s procedure to remove four lesions from his face. After Fleischer failed to mention the procedure in either his morning or afternoon briefing on Monday, curious reporters who noticed marks on the president’s face at a photo op started asking questions. The White House soon released a statement explaining that doctors had removed the lesions, two of which were precancerous, on Friday in the White House physician’s office.’Tseems Ari might be having trouble with access…?

A Manhattan man who was trying to quit smoking, and who had “violent visions” about beating his wife and kids as a result, just won his family back after a long court battle, The New York Post reports… The odd case dates back to February 1999, when A.V. went to see the family nurse and told her “he had these nightmares and visions of violence,” Bloom said. The nurse referred him to a psychiatrist, and then both reported A.V. to the city Administration for Children’s Services (ACS).

The agency forced him to move out of his house and keep away from his wife, son and daughter, except for supervised visits.

In May 2000, that move was formalized when Family Court Judge Jody Adams found A.V. had neglected his children.

The Appellate Division decision, however, found the case against A.V. was cloudy, and that ACS didn’t meet its burden to prove its case by “preponderance of the evidence.”

The judges noted that A.V.’s family denied he’d ever hit them, and that the kids’ teachers, doctor, and even an ACS caseworker found no evidence of abuse.This kind of case has got to give libertarians the cold bloggin’ heebie shudders…

UPI’s James Bennett writes that blogging may force an information reformation (I say we go with “conjunction junction,” but then I’m in to kitsch…):Bloggers and their readers may form only a small percentage of the Anglosphere populations, but they are typical “early adopters” — trendsetters and opinion leaders. The crossover between the blogs and mainstream media means that ideas, opinions and identified errors from blogspace will be reflected more and more in mainstream media, to the extent that they remain distinct things.

This writer feels much of academia and the media throughout the Anglosphere has come to resemble, in a way, the Church in Europe immediately before the Reformation. They have grown intellectually lazy, out of touch with the people they believe they exist to enlighten, and irrelevant to the needs they exist to serve. They have come to see their position, incomes and the respect of the public as entitlements due to them for their virtue, rather than earned by achievement.

The intellectual monopoly of the medieval Church was undermined by the advanced communication technology of the printing press. Printers and pamphleteers mushroomed throughout northern Europe, and the rapid and hard-to-control exchange of ideas their network enabled created the medium for new awarenesses and attitudes. Large parts of the old structure of the Church were overthrown and replaced; that which was left was greatly transformed by the Counter-Reformation.

Are these little Weblogs the harbinger of a similar reformation of the academia and media establishments of the Anglosphere? I wouldn’t count it out.Well, everybody loves a favorable review… An interesting sidenote: ‘Tseems to me there’re a healthy number of decent bloggers involved with the academy in one way or another (or were, at one time or another), despite the intellectual laziness and bureaucratic veneer of many contemporary universities and university systems; perhaps we bloggin’ educators are trying — however obliquely — to worry established classroom and department orthodoxies right here in the ol’ ether?

Who knows. Could be we just like to post stuff.

Crazed Avenger Matthew Edgar is at it again, peeling the skin back from the bloated belly of the FDA and showing you the knots of red-tape and the curdled funk of self-love clotted and tangled beneath it. This time, he debunks the FDA’s attempt to tie Kava to liver problems…

Freedom House, in its authoritative annual survey, “Freedom in the World,” reports:The spread of democracy spurred by the end of the Cold War has made elected government the norm around the globe–except in Islamic countries. The new study shows that of the 47 countries with mostly Muslim populations, fewer than one quarter are ‘electoral democracies,’ while more than three quarters of the world’s other 145 governments are.

This is only the beginning of the disparity. Freedom House assesses whether a country is an electoral democracy and whether it is ‘free.” The latter is a much tougher standard. Not that Freedom House uses the term “democracy” loosely as some people ‘did in the old days of ‘people’s democracies.’ To be counted democratic a country must have fair and competitive elections. Still, many democracies, especially the new ones, have not yet firmly established the rule of law, due process, independence of the press, and the like, so they are counted by Freedom House as only ‘partly free.’ To qualify as ‘free,’ a country must have democratic elections as well as a gamut of civil liberties and citizens’ rights.

Lots of countries do meet this standard. Of the non-Muslim countries, 58 percent are ‘free’ and only 14 percent are ‘not free,’ i.e., strict dictatorships. The remaining 28 percent fall in that middling category of ‘partly free.’ But among the Muslim countries the proportions are reversed. Only one country–Mali–out of 47 ranks as free, 2 percent of the group. Thirty-eight percent are partly free, and a whopping 60 percent are ‘not free.’ The 47 Muslim-majority states, in other words, account for a majority of the world’s ‘not free’ states. [from Joshua Muravchik,The Weekly Standard, subscriber's only]Freedom: another Jewish Conspiracy ….? ‘Dunno. But Muravchik himself reaches certain conclusions, based on the report’s findings, that are worth reading over:This climate of unfreedom is the swamp where terrorism breeds. The repression, humiliation, and violence that are the daily portion of people living under autocratic regimes nurture rage and fanaticism. And the absence of a free press seems to cause a kind of epistemological retardation conducive to paranoia and lunatic conspiracy theories (e.g., “the Mossad did it”). Moreover, the lack of democracy means not only that grievances go unaddressed but also that people fail to learn the virtues of moderation and compromise.

The implications of all this are quite different from what those who raise the issue of “root causes” intend. Far from pointing toward a relaxation of military efforts, it suggests that the more terror-loving tyrannies the United States can topple the better. Not only will their demise clear the ground where seeds of freedom may then take root, but the example will embolden and inspire those who dream of freedom in the region.Obligatory rebuttal from the Arab street: “‘Epistemological retardation conducive to paranoia,’ you say? Nonsense. Who sent you — was it the Zionists?”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (among others) is reporting that new federal airport security screeners won’t need a high school diploma to land the plump gubbmint job.[...]The Transportation Security Agency, the new Department of Transportation organization created to supervise transportation security, decided earlier this month that a high school diploma isn’t necessary if candidates have a year of on-the-job experience.

‘We don’t want to disqualify anyone with one year of experience just because they don’t have a high school diploma,’ Transportation Security Agency spokesman Paul Takemoto said. ‘They’d be a valuable asset.’…Yeah. As scapegoats, maybe…

No word yet if a madrassah diploma will be accepted in lieu of one year of experience, though the TSA has ruled out certificates of completion from most major terrorist training facilities, regardless of the airport screening experience or bomb-making prowess of those applicants. This “decision based on the worst kind of racial exclusionarianismopitegemony” has not gone unnoticed by C.A.I.R, who (in addition to coining cool new words) finds “the marginalization of Muslim Extremist technical students based solely on their area of training — in this case, applied explosives engineering — deplorable.”

The U.K.’s The Observer catches on:Osama bin Laden’s network gave [Shoe Bomber Richard] Reid’s suicide mission sophisticated backing, paying for him to criss-cross the world on numerous airline flights, despite his having no discernible form of work or official address. It taught him to obtain plastic explosives and fashion them into a cunningly disguised bomb.Yes. But thankfully the “network” never taught him how to ignite a “cunningly” simple match…