I guess I am getting too old and bored to blog my outrage too....

April 24, 2006
Joseph Bottum writes:
A submission to FIRST THINGS came across my desk recently. It was about the excesses of a women’s-studies department at a major American university, and I tried to read it. I really did. I mean, it’s my job to look carefully at all this stuff, but, somehow, I just couldn’t get through the essay, no matter how much I tried to force myself. Finally, I shuffled it to the bottom of the pile of mail, thinking I might come across it later as a surprise. (That was a trick I used to try back in the days when I graded freshman philosophy papers. It didn’t work then. It still doesn’t.)
The cause, I think, is that I’ve increasingly stopped caring what happens on mainstream American campuses. Whether it’s coming from the professors or the students, it’s all begun to seem so silly. My alma mater, Georgetown University, now has more members of its English department with specialties in film-making than it has members with active specialties in any recognizable field of literature. I want to care about this. I want to be outraged. But that would require that I believe there’s anything important about the intellectual life of America’s colleges, which has become increasingly hard to do.
Unfortunately, the pattern extends beyond academia. I’ve begun to skip over the obligatory articles in the New York Times about the oppression of homosexuals or women or racial minorities somewhere in America. I skip over the obligatory articles in the Washington Times about how a radical anti-American agenda is being sold in the name of oppression of homosexuals and women and racial minorities somewhere in America. I ignore everything in the Nation, and I ignore all the pieces in the conservative press that Midge Decter once said should be titled “The World Is Going to Hell in a Handbasket; Let Me Count the Ways.” Mostly I look at the pictures, and I turn the pages.
Maybe I’ve just gotten too old to stoke the fires of outrage anymore. The cost of aging, Matthew Arnold once wrote, is not that we no longer feel, but that our emotions are things so much less intense than they used to be. We are condemned to “feel but half, and feebly, what we feel.”
But repetition is also a cause of feeling’s decline. Who cares anymore about all that stuff? The culture wars are over, ended by terminal boringness. Oh, there are American campuses, here and there, about which it’s still worth having a fight. And there are degradations of the culture, here and there, that can’t be ignored. But for the most part, the complaint about how bad things are has no purchase left—and ought, I think, to have no purchase left. No one is left to persuade, one way or the other, and the way things are now is pretty much what we’re going to be stuck with for a long time to come.
Unless, of course, we manage to start offering a better alternative. The culture wars were always only half the fight: the negative critique, as it were, rather than the positive program. Last winter, the Heritage Foundation’s Lee Edwards assembled some friends to help put together a list of “classic conservative books,” and, listening to the discussion, I was struck by how many of the well-known conservative texts of the last fifty years are essentially negative—jeremiads, grievances, and criticisms. From The Closing of the American Mind on, they are, at root, complaints and explanations about how things went wrong.
That suffices, if we imagine that a kind of natural good sense will force us, when informed about outrageous error, to correct things. But if the solution isn’t apparent, the outrage eventually settles down to a shrug. Or a grimace. Or a yawn.
Of course, the insistence that things be done better isn’t, in itself, a solution. When we’re done moaning about how bad novels are these days, for example, we might go on to say that good literature is the corrective for bad literature. But it ain’t much help to demand that somebody write a good novel. Still, the great conservative complaint of the last fifty years has, I think, finally run its course. Time to move on.

Should we be worried, really worried... about Global Warming?

April 12, 2006
Richard John Neuhaus writes:
Moving to less controversial topics, George Will had a thoughtful column Sunday before last on new efforts to gin up the panic about global warming. He notes that Time magazine has this big issue declaring, “Be worried. Be very worried.” Will is amused by the piquant presumption that the nation will panic on command from Time.
Mr. Will notes that neither the science nor the economics surrounding the global warming debate is very convincing. “That is one reason why the Clinton administration never submitted the Kyoto accord on global warming for Senate ratification. In 1997 the Senate voted 95 to 0 that the accord would disproportionately burden America while being too permissive toward major polluters that are America’s trade competitors.”
It was not very long ago that we were told about the impending catastrophe of global cooling. Citing various alleged authorities, Mr. Will writes:
While worrying about Montana’s receding glaciers, Prof. Schweitzer, who is 50, should also worry about the fact that when he was 20 he was told to be worried, very worried, about global cooling. Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976) warned of “extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation.” Science Digest (February 1973) reported that “the world’s climatologists are agreed” that we must “prepare for the next ice age.” The Christian Science Monitor (”Warning: Earth’s Climate is Changing Faster Than Even Experts Expect,” Aug. 27, 1974) reported that glaciers “have begun to advance,” “growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter” and “the North Atlantic is cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool.” Newsweek agreed (”The Cooling World,” April 28, 1975) that meteorologists “are almost unanimous” that catastrophic famines might result from the global cooling that the New York Times (Sept. 14, 1975) said “may mark the return to another ice age.” The Times (May 21, 1975) also said “a major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable” now that it is “well established” that the Northern Hemisphere’s climate “has been getting cooler since about 1950.”
Following the money, which is usually a wise thing to do, Mr. Will opines that today’s global warming panic is driven in large part by the interests of coal and oil interests that want massive federal funding for new technologies that will putatively reduce the emissions that are putatively guilty of hotting up the world. Others say it is driven also by a strategy to prepare the public for a major reinvestment in nuclear power. I don’t know, but it sounds plausible.
Geologist Bob Carter, writing on Monday in the UK’s Telegraph, has further reflections on the basis of his work as an expert on paleoclimate:
The essence of the issue is this. Climate changes naturally all the time, partly in predictable cycles, and partly in unpredictable shorter rhythms and rapid episodic shifts, some of the causes of which remain unknown. We are fortunate that our modern societies have developed during the last 10,000 years of benignly warm, interglacial climate. But for more than 90 per cent of the last two million years, the climate has been colder, and generally much colder, than today. The reality of the climate record is that a sudden natural cooling is far more to be feared, and will do infinitely more social and economic damage, than the late 20th century phase of gentle warming.
Professor Carter notes that more recent studies suggest that the gentle warming phase has already ended, and that since 1998 temperatures have leveled off, if they have not dropped just slightly.
As I say, I am no expert on the science of these matters. But I have over the years paid more than a little attention to the ways in which science, religion, and everything else is exploited for dubious purposes by presumed experts. So whom do you trust? Among those I trust is Thomas Derr of Smith College. He is a Christian ethicist who has for decades assiduously followed the arguments and counterarguments and how they are used to various political and ideological ends. His article “Strange Science” was published in the November 2004 issue of FIRST THINGS. Herewith his conclusion:
It is clear, then, given the deep roots of the scare, that it is likely to be pretty durable. It has the added advantage of not being readily falsifiable in our lifetimes; only future humans, who will have the perspective of centuries, will know for certain whether the current warming trend is abnormal. In the meantime, the sanest course for us would be to gain what limited perspective we can (remembering the global cooling alarm of a generation ago) and to proceed cautiously. We are going through a scare with many causes, and we need to step back from it, take a long second look at the scientific evidence, and not do anything rash. Though the alarmists claim otherwise, the science concerning global warming is certainly not settled. It is probable that the case for anthropogenic warming will not hold up, and that the earth is behaving as it has for millennia, with natural climate swings that have little to do with human activity.
George Will, Bob Carter, and Thomas Derr are serious people. Of course, they may turn out to be wrong. But I remember a conversation a year or so ago with a noted climatologist from a major university. He confessed that some years back he had been part of promoting the global cooling scare. “I learned my lesson,” he said. “Whenever you see a faction of the scientific establishment join hands with the mainstream media in promoting alarm about what is happening to the planet, be skeptical. The truth is we don’t know.” So, at least for the time being, I think I will decline the directive of Time to be worried, to be very worried. Especially since there is so much else that I know we should be worried about.

Immigration issues

For those of you (who know me personally), and who might be inclined to be sympathetic to the "plight" of illegal aliens -- the 4+ years wait mentioned below in the following article, re: "nanny's" applying for entrance into the USA, applies more conspicuously & in a full-throttled way to my very own wife(Irish/Canadian citizen), who is still awaiting permission to enter the USA unfettered and honestly, vis-a-vis her resident status (ie, she would return to Canada/Ireland regularly, as required, until such time that she was admitted fully & permanently according to US law), so PLEASE don't forget that your silence on the injustice of this matter re: "legalizing" undocumented aliens DEARLY affects my own family!

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No easy answers on immigration conundrum
April 9, 2006
BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
Here's my immigration "compromise": We need to regularize the situation of the 298 million non-undocumented residents of the United States. Right now, we get a lousy deal compared with the 15 million fine upstanding members of the Undocumented American community. I think the 298 million of us in the overdocumented segment of the population should get the chance to be undocumented. You know when President Bush talks about all those undocumented people "living in the shadows"? Doesn't that sound kinda nice? Living in the shadows, no government agencies harassing you for taxes and numbers and paperwork.
Go ahead, try it. In Michelle Malkin's book Invasion, she recounts the tale of two fellows who in August 2001 pulled into a 7-Eleven parking lot in Falls Church, Va., in search of fake ID from the illegal-alien assistance network that hangs around there. Luis Martinez-Flores, who'd been living here illegally since 1994, took them along to the local DMV, supplied them with a fake address and falsely certified they lived there. The very next day, the two guys returned with two pals of their own, and used their own brand-new state ID on which the ink was not yet dry to obtain in turn brand-new state ID for their buddies. A couple of weeks later, all four of them used their Virginia ID to board American Airlines Flight 77 at Dulles Airport and plowed it into the Pentagon.
Think about that. From undocumented illegal alien in the 7-Eleven parking lot to lawful resident of the State of Virginia in just a couple of hours. Wow. Say what you like about Luis Martinez-Flores, but he runs one efficient operation.
By comparison, say you've got two kids under 5, and you'd like to bring over a nice English nanny to look after them. Name of Mary Poppins. Good references, impeccable character. If you apply now, there's a sporting chance the process may be completed before your children's children are in college.
Given that the new immigration "compromise" bill retrospectively approves all the millions of people who've been through the super-efficient Luis Martinez-Flores immigration system but without doing anything to improve the sclerotic U.S. government immigration system, maybe it would be better just to subcontract the entire operation to Senor Martinez-Flores and his colleagues. It would certainly be cheaper. The extensive Undocumented American support network manages to run it out of the back of the car from a parking lot without a lot of air-conditioned offices full of lifetime employees on government pensions, and given that the net result is exactly the same people who'd be living here anyway, why not go with the lowball bid? Legal immigrants to the United States can only envy the swift efficient service Messrs. Hani Hanjour and Khalid Almihdhar received outside that 7-Eleven.
All developed countries have immigration issues, but few conduct the entire debate as disingenuously as America does: The president himself has contributed a whole barrelful of weaselly platitudes, beginning with his line that "family values don't stop at the Rio Grande." True. They don't stop at the 49th parallel either. Or the Atlantic shore. Or the Pacific. So where do family values stop? At the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services. If you're an American and you marry a Canadian or Belgian or Fijian, the U.S. government can take years to process what's supposed to be a non-discretionary immigration application, in the course of which your spouse will be dependent on various transitional-status forms like "advance parole" that leave her vulnerable to the whims of the many eccentric interpreters of U.S. immigration law at the nation's airports and land borders.
Here's another place where family values stops: The rubble of the World Trade Center. Deena Gilbey is a British subject whose late husband worked on the 84th floor: On the morning of Sept. 11, instead of fleeing, he returned to the building to help evacuate his co-workers. A few days later, Mrs. Gilbey receives a letter from the INS noting that as she's now widowed her immigration status has changed and she's obliged to leave the country along with her two children (both U.S. citizens). Think about that: Having legally admitted to the country the terrorists who killed her husband, the U.S. government's first act on having facilitated his murder is to add insult to grievous injury by serving his widow with a deportation order. Why should illegal Mexicans be the unique beneficiaries of a sentimental blather about "family values" to which U.S. immigration is otherwise notoriously antipathetic?
How about "the jobs Americans won't do"? Most of them would be more accurately categorized as the jobs American employers won't hire Americans to do -- that's to say, in a business culture ever more onerously regulated, the immigration status of one's employees has become one of the easiest means of controlling costs. I see no reason why this would change, and given that, as a matter of policy, U.S. illegal-immigration law is not enforced by the U.S. government, it's hard to know why private employers should do it.
Meanwhile, U.S. immigration is cracking down on classical violinists. Don't ask me why. Presumably, Brahms' violin concerto falls into the ever dwindling category of jobs Americans will do. At any rate, the Halle Orchestra of Manchester, one of England's great orchestras, has just canceled its 2007 concerts at Lincoln Center. Why? Because all 80 musicians plus the 20 support staff are required -- under new "homeland security" regulations -- to be interviewed personally at the U.S. Embassy in London before each visa can be issued. They can't go en masse on the tour bus: They have to make individual appointments stretched out over several weeks. And they can't go to the local U.S. consulate in Manchester because -- and this detail is worth savoring five years after 9/11 -- the consulate's computers cannot handle the biometric data. The orchestra worked out that in train fares and accommodation it would cost about $80,000 to get the visas and decided it would rather cancel the tour. The good news is that Lincoln Center subscribers don't have to worry about the tuba player having plastic explosives packed down there. The bad news is, if a rogue tuba player ever breaks through the system, Homeland Security won't be able to e-mail his data back to the U.S. consulate in Manchester for a background check.
We're now expected to believe that this system will be able to stop hassling 68-year-old cello players long enough to process an extra 10 million-plus immigration applications, and that furthermore an agency that keeps no reliable records of legal entry into the United States will somehow be able to determine on the basis of utility bills whether this or that undocumented alien falls into amnesty-eligibility category.
Sure, believe that if you want to. It'll be good practice for swallowing the amnesty for the next 40 million circa 2025.
© Mark Steyn, 2006
Copyright © Mark Steyn, 2006
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Hendrix still rules, musically

I still believe that "Voodoo Chile" (NOT 'Slight Return') is the best rock 'n roll song ever, with Stevie Winwood on early electric organ... and "The End" and others (poetry notwithstanding) in close final running, but they just just don't cut it musically...and sorry El D, but the Clash & U2 & whoever have nothing whatsoever on this man....musically that is.... no blindside intended, but posted for effect..... gotta listen to "Voodoo Chile" again (NOT 'slight return') to hear what's going on musically....

Request of anti-war critics of the Iraqi war -- please help me to refute the following points....

I still don't understand why people don't get it .... Stating that the war was misguided may be understandable, but the effort by some to simply claim that war against Iraq was an obvious insanity perpetrated by Bush et al simply cannot be reasonable, unless the following points are refuted.

March 31, 2006, 7:45 a.m.
When Cynicism Meets Fanaticism -- Critiquing the critique of the war in Iraq.
Opponents of the war in Iraq, both original critics and the mea culpa recent converts, have made eight assumptions. The first six are wrong, the last two still unsettled.
1. Saddam was never connected to al Qaeda, the perpetrators of 9/11.
2. There was no real threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
3. The United Nations and our allies were justifiably opposed on principle to the invasion.
4. A small cabal of neoconservative (and mostly Jewish) intellectuals bullied the administration into a war that served Israel’s interest more than our own.
5. Saddam could not be easily deposed, or at least he could not be successfully replaced with a democratic government.
6. The architects of this war and the subsequent occupation are mostly inept (“dangerously incompetent”) — and are exposed daily as clueless by a professional cadre of disinterested journalists.
7. In realist terms, the benefits to be gained from the war will never justify the costs incurred.
8. We cannot win.
First, notice how the old criticism that Saddam was not connected to al Qaeda has now morphed into a fallback position that “Saddam was not connected to September 11” — even though the latter argument was never officially advanced as a casus belli.
Opponents have retreated to this position because we know that al Qaeda cadres were in Kurdistan, and that al Zarqawi fled to Baghdad, as did a mastermind of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, Abdul Rahman Yasin.
The Clinton administration in 1998 officially cited Iraqi agents as involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. That is part of the reason why the U.S. Senate, not the Bush administration, authorized a war against Saddam in October 2002: “ Whereas members of al-Qaeda, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens, and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq."
From the slowly emerging Baathist archives, we are learning that for more than a decade Saddam’s agents had some contacts with, and offered help to, al Qaeda operatives from the Sudan to the Philippines.
The issue is closed: Saddam Hussein’s regime had a mutually beneficial association with al Qaeda. All that remains in doubt is the degree to which Iraq’s generic support enabled al Qaeda to pull off operations like September 11. It may be that Saddam and Osama, in their views of Islam and jihad, were as antithetical to one another as Japanese and Germans were in attitudes about racial superiority. But in both cases, rogues find common ground in their opposition to hated Western liberalism
Second, we know now that worries over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were both justified and understandable. Postwar interviews with top Iraqi generals reveal that Saddam’s own military assumed that his stockpiles of WMDs were still current — confirming the intelligence estimates from Europe and most of the Arab world.
In addition, Iraqi arsenals of WMDs, in the judgment of both the Clinton administration and the United Nations, were still unaccounted for in March 2003. And even if the stocks were moved or destroyed, the prerequisites for the rapid mass-production of biological and chemical agents — petrodollar wealth, scientific expertise, alternate-use facilities, and a will to produce and use them — were met in Saddam’s Iraq.
Third, the opposition of the United Nations to the invasion lacks any moral significance, given the postwar revelations that the $50 billion Oil-for-Food scandal not only led to thousands of starved Iraqi civilians, but also enriched both Saddam’s family and U.N. insiders themselves. Europe’s opposition may have seemed ethical, but when one learns of French and Russian oil deals with Saddam, and German construction projects that fortified Saddam’s own Führerbunker, European principle too evaporates into nothing.
Fourth, the charge of neocon plotting has now reemerged under a patina of academic respectability in a recent paper by Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Harvard Kennedy School of Government academic dean Stephen Walt. “Some Americans believe that this was a war for oil, but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this claim. Instead, the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure.” At the tip of that Jewish spear was a “band” that was “small,” but of course still “a driving force”: “Within the US, the main driving force behind the war was a small band of neo-conservatives, many with ties to Likud.” Instead of silly allegations of conspiracy theories, we are lectured ad nauseam that an “Israeli lobby” got us into Iraq.
This recrudescence of blaming Israel first is false for a variety of obvious reasons. Likud opposed much of American strategy. That is why Ariel Sharon was hated by his former base — and why there is now a new political party in Israel that suffers the same charge that it caves to American pressures all too easily. And far more influential than Israel in American academia and politics is the role of Gulf State petrodollars and worry over Middle East oil.
There is no need for an Israeli lobby in the United States, not when nearly 70 percent of the American people support Israel because it is an atoll of Western democratic values in a sea of theocracy and dictatorship. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice — no Jews there, just plenty of hard-headed veterans who are not easily hoodwinked by supposedly clever Straussians in the shadows.
Our point man in Iraq, who prior to the war urged the removal of Saddam Hussein, is Ambassador Zalmay M. Khalilzad — a Muslim and an Afghan-American. And our current general in charge of all American troops at Centcom in the Middle East, General John Abizaid, is an Arab-American. Meanwhile, the U.S. pressured Israel to get out of Gaza, to support elections on the West Bank that led to the victory of Hamas, and to dismantle more settlements.
Fifth, after the three-week victory of April 2003, we have now forgotten the earlier prognostications of millions of refugees, oil wells afire, and thousands of dead that were to follow in Iraq. Twenty-three hundred American fatalities are grievous losses, but must be weighed against three successful elections, and the real chance that such sacrifice might result in the first true Arab democracy emerging in Iraq, with ramifications beyond the Middle East for generations to come. Currently, tens of thousands of Iraqis are the only Arabs in the world who daily risk their lives to fight al Qaeda terrorists — something that just may be in America’s interest.
Sixth, we have not had another September 11. Two-thirds of the leadership of al Qaeda is dismantled. Fifty million people have voted in Iraq and Afghanistan. Syria is out of Lebanon. The Middle East is in democratic turmoil from the Gulf to Egypt and Libya, not mired in the old autocratic stasis. The Europeans are waking up to the dangers of Islamism as the Western world seeks to deal with a nuclear Iran.
Weigh that success against the behavior of the media that sees mostly American incompetence. At CBS, Dan Rather insisted to us that a clearly forged memo, but one that fit his own ideological agenda, was authentic. Michael Isikoff relied on one anonymous — and unreliable — source about the purported desecration of a Koran that had serious consequences for thousands in the Middle East. CNN’s executive Eason Jordan admitted that his network passed on coverage of a mass-murdering Saddam Hussein — and later he wrongly alleged that the American military deliberately targeted journalists in Iraq.
Now we hear Time Baghdad Bureau Chief Michael Ware, in a drunken, live interview (“In fact, I'm drinking now…I try to stay as drunk for as long as possible while I'm here”) from the heart of dry Muslim Iraq, recklessly throwing around charges that American soldiers are guilty of manhandling Iraqi women (“We've seen allegations that women have been mishandled or roughly handled. That always inflames passions”) and terrorizing civilians (“We've also seen insurgents criticize other insurgent groups, 'cause you're not doing enough to get the chicks out! I mean, that's how important it can be, this is a matter of great honor, and it's a spark”). Ware’s are precisely the lies and fantasies that feed the Islamists.
Indeed, the better example of ineptitude in this war lies with the media that demands from others apologies for incompetence that it will never offer itself. Few professions today ask so much of so many others and so very little of themselves.
Seventh, we won’t know the ultimate judgment of costs and benefits in Iraq until its parliament convenes and the executive government is formed and operates. If we leave now and a Lebanon follows, then, of course, the invasion was a costly mistake. If we secure the country for a constitutional government that brings freedom, order, and prosperity to its long-suffering people, then it will be the most welcomed global development since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Had the British and Americans quit in 1943 — after Pearl Harbor, the fall of Singapore and the Philippines, the Kasserine Pass, Tobruk, and other assorted disasters — then the carnage of 1939 to 1943 would have properly been seen as a tragedy that led not to emergence of a free Europe and a reborn Japan, but as needless sacrifice against the unstoppable juggernaut of Asian and German fascism.
As for the eighth complaint that we cannot win (or “the war is lost”), the verdict is still in the future and depends mostly on us.
Our military cannot be defeated by either the Islamists or their autocratic supporters. We have the right strategy of hunting down terrorists, securing the homeland, and insidiously, but carefully, promoting democratic reform in the Middle East (an impossible notion, by the way, with the sinister presence of an oil rich and genocidal Saddam Hussein, given his history of attacking four of his neighbors.)
We have even articulated, at last, an exegesis of the dangers of radical Islam — why it hates Western freedom and how it thrives on the oil, misery, and dictatorship of the Middle East.
There remains this last unknown — how well can a liberal democracy, in its greatest age of affluence, leisure, and self-critical reflection, still fight a distant war against emissaries of the Dark Ages who seek to behead apostates, blow up democrats, and silence with death writers, journalists, and cartoonists. It is not just our democratic values versus their IEDs, but whether our idealism still has the resilience to defeat their nihilism.
Or put more directly: Can Western enlightenment and power, embedded in deep cynicism, still prevail over ignorance and self-inflicted pathology energized by fanaticism?
— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author, most recently, of A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.


http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200603310745.asp