#1
I'm having trouble believing Obama has actually done something That I approve of, we NEED nuke plants to free us from Mideast Oil.
I suggest all future Nuke power plants be on Military bases, using the military as (Somewhat) free security, and as uninterruptible base power
selling power to the surrounding civilians as a reduction of base overall costs, plus government Income and resultant tax reduction.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
02/13/2010 14:57 Comments ||
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#1
"Hate Speech" is a modern example of Newspeak, used to silence critics of social policies that have been poorly implemented in a rush to appear politically correct.
In the 1980s and 1990s, more than 350 public universities adopted "speech codes" regulating discriminatory speech by faculty and students. These codes have not fared well in the courts, where they are frequently overturned as violations of the First Amendment.
Debate over restriction of "hate speech" in public universities has resurfaced with the adoption of anti-harassment codes covering discriminatory speech.
Victor Davis Hanson
The problem with Obama's new hedging on taxing those who make below $250,000, or his administration's taking credit for victory in the Iraq War that they so once fervently tried to abort, or the flip-flop on renditions and tribunals, or the embarrassments over closing Guantanamo and trying KSM in New York or Mirandizing the Christmas Day bomber, or trashing/praising Wall Street grandees, is not that presidents cannot change their minds as circumstances warrant, or even that all politicians are at times hypocritical.
No, the rub is that Obama is not merely flipping and triangulating on issues in a desperate attempt to shadow the polls, but he is doing so on matters that he once swore were absolutely central to his entire candidacy and his signature hope-and-change agenda, critical to the future of the U.S., and proof of his opponents' either ignorance or dis-ingenuousness.
Serially he once screamed about taxing only the wealthy and airing health care on C-SPAN. He advocated taking out all combat troops from Iraq by March 2008 and asserted the surge was failing at a critical time when our soldiers were in a life-and-death struggle to make it work. Obama built an entire narrative about Bush the Constitution Shredder who presided over Guantanamo and renditions.There was no place in his promised new politics for lobbyists and Chicago tactics.
After a single year of governance, there is now scarcely a single issue that Obama & Co. have not backtracked on, flip-flopped, redefined, or quietly dropped mostly matters that were once demagogued to score political points.
At some point I think it was around mid-January the public collectively shrugged and concluded of Obama, I don't trust anything that this guy says.' And when that happens in American politics, it is almost impossible to restore any modicum of credibility.
All we are left with now is three more years of the president's Bush did it' mantra and a buffoonish Robert Gibbs, like some strutting carnival barker, showing off ink on his palm to a bored press corps.
Dalrymple is a pen name for Anthony Daniels (no relation to C-3PO), a British doctor who has chronicled the nightmarish results of people dependent on the dole. Here is one brief excerpt from the main article.
Humanity, according to Rand, is divided into heroes, creators, and geniuses on the one hand, and weaklings, parasites, and the feeble-minded on the other. Needless to say, the latter outnumber the former by a very wide margin, but only the former are truly human in the full sense of the word. But let us leave aside for a moment the empirical justification for such a sharp division of mankind into two categories: it never seems to occur to Rand that her classification does not provide a very strong rationale for the limited government and free market that she claims so strongly to admire. On the contrary, it would seem to justify the reign of philosopher-kings, though she claims also to hate Plato passionately.
#1
This has been said before by others, but not in two sentences:
America could take Rand out of Russia, but not Russia out of Rand. Her work properly belongs to the history of Russian, not American, literatureand nineteenth-century Russian literature at that.
#2
Most peoplr fall in love with the pristine and stark ideals of Rand in their youth. Then the real world hits, and they outgrow her hostile edges, and realize that helping your neighbor is sometimes needed, and that altruism is a good thing so long as its truly voluntary, and religion is not the enemy of reason.
Eh, its been said before and far better. Rand is necessary, but not sufficient.
#3
... altruism is a good thing so long as its truly voluntary ....
It's been some years since I've read her but I never did manage to glean a prohibition on purely voluntary altruism from Rand. My recollection is that her characters typically noted that purely voluntary altruistic acts were just fine and dandy but [insert long diatribe here] whatever act was at hand was not purely altruistic but was rather being forced upon the actor.
There's been an odd amount of criticism of Rand from both the left and right in recent months. She just seems to keep popping up which is rather odd if her ideas are as thoroughly flawed as her critics believe them to be.
#4
The author of the article seems like an empty windbag. The author tart words against Rand for being hardened and uppity, should take into account that "disclaiming against pride is not always a sign of humility" and that he probably never has never lived through some of the travails Rand did. Much like Machiavelli, Rand is both admired and despised, and thrown on the trash heap when convenient. She is epic and will remain so.
Posted by: Marilyn Thrineper8949 ||
02/13/2010 22:16 Comments ||
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FATA continues to be used and abused as a strategic space by the security establishment of Pakistan in violent pursuit of strategic depth in Afghanistan. In short, strategic depth means Pakistan must have a pro-Pakistan government in Afghanistan by any and all means. People of FATA have suffered more than people in any other part of Pakistan due to this policy. They dread and hate strategic depth'.
Some people of FATA drew my attention towards Zaid Hamid, who, they said, is a new charm offensive of the military establishment to popularise the notion of strategic depth among the youth from affluent families in the big cities of Pakistan. He is frequently given air time by the electronic media, also an evidence that the media, especially the Urdu media, is not free and has to toe the establishment's line in security matters. Show biz celebrities have joined him. Those who oppose the strategic depth, especially the Pakhtun, who are the biggest casualty of it, are never given so much media attention.
The main concern of the people of FATA vis-a-vis Zaid Hamid is his use of a particularly narrow interpretation of Islam that proposes a belligerent agenda for the Pakistan Army and drawing on controversial Islamic literature. Thus the authenticity of the hadiths sayings of Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) on Ghazwa-e-Hind that he often refers to in terms of the ultimate defeat of the Indians at the hands of the Pakistan Army is highly questionable.
Zaid Hamid claims in his speeches to young people that God determines the destiny of Pakistan. Pakistan will become a grand Caliphate. Pakistan army will cut India down to the size of Sri Lanka. Pakistan will lead the entire Muslim world and its army will be deployed in Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya and Afghanistan. The corrupt judicial system, consisting of the lawyers and the Supreme Court of Pakistan, will be replaced by an Islamic judicial system that would ensure Taliban style speedy and cheap justice. He claims that the current elected set up in Pakistan is implanted by the CIA and prophesies that the current rulers in Pakistan will have their dead bodies hanging on poles in Islamabad, an indirect appreciation of what the Taliban did in Afghanistan with the dead body of Dr Najibullah, the then Afghan president. He openly threatens the nationalists, especially the Pakhtun and Baloch nationalists, for their aspirations. The Taliban government in Afghanistan, he declares, was Pakistan-friendly and condemns its removal by the US in the post-9/11 attack on the country. He glorifies the biggest mass murderer of the Pakhtun General Zia, the former dictator of Pakistan.
Judging by the obscurantist message that he communicates, Zaid Hamid does not seem to be a new invention of the establishment. He is an addition to the long list of people who have been handpicked to promote an anti-people agenda in the name of religion and hate of India, like the people from the Jamaat-e-Islami. What seems to be new is his apparent tolerance' of the un-Islamic' lifestyle of the urban youth and in this context there are some interesting discussions about Zaid Hamid on some blogs and mailing lists. One blogger writes that Zaid Hamid is using a new strategy to communicate the same old conspiracy theories to young people. The strategy is that unlike classical Islamic scholars, joining Zaid Hamid's group does not necessarily require the youth to shed their sophisticated lifestyle and adjust to hijab, a ban on music and gender segregation. The only thing they have to do is to glorify the Pakistan Army, including its pursuit of strategic depth, and hate Jews, Americans and Indians.
A writer on one of the mailing lists argues that Zaid Hamid is a Pied Piper for our youth from the prosperous sections of Punjab who have no dreams to be proud of. Zaid Hamid sells the dreams of conquering the world, though they are nonsense, yet still work for the youth who are now caught up in an identity crisis, continues the writer. The writer understands that the fault lies with the leftist intellectuals who have lost direction by joining NGOs and leaving the anti-imperialist struggle open for people like Zaid Hamid or Imran Khan.
Zaid Hamid, in his show, sets a dangerous agenda for the youth of Pakistan; the very same youth who are living a comfortable life in poverty-stricken Pakistan. They lack any ambitions in life to give it some purpose. This lack of goals is rooted in the identity crisis being faced by the Pakistani youth. The crisis is expressed in questions like these: what are we first of all: Muslim or Pakistani? Is our ultimate commitment with Pakistani citizenship or a global Muslim brotherhood? What kind of Pakistan should we aim at: a progressive multi-ethnic social democracy or some kind of medieval caliphate?
Secondly, one has to strive very hard for ideals. If the ideal is the former (multi-ethnic social democratic Pakistan), the youth from affluent families will have to share their riches with the poor, downtrodden fellow citizens. This is very hard for this class of people, otherwise I would at least have seen them working for bringing normalcy in the shattered lives of the people of FATA, who have been living in deplorable conditions in refugee camps for over two years now. In the latter case (caliphate) they can placate their conscience by attaching themselves with the higher ideal without having to give up something from their comfortable lives. The only thing they have to do is to support the belligerent agenda of the military establishment and their poor fellow Pakistanis can go to hell. Zaid Hamid's campaign is like opium for the young that makes them run away from reality, i.e. Pakistan is a class-based multi-ethnic society that cannot be held together with mere Islamic rhetoric and military ambitions.
What is even more dangerous is the fact that Zaid Hamid is glorifying the same Taliban that the people of FATA hold responsible for their massacre at the behest of the military establishment of Pakistan. Case in point, Jalaluddin Haqqani who occupies North Waziristan. I would invite the young fans of Zaid Hamid to take a tour of FATA, or at least FATA IDP camps in various parts of the NWFP, to observe firsthand what the Taliban and the military did to these people. I would remind the youth that people all over FATA hold the generals of the Pakistan Army more than the Taliban responsible for the death and destruction in their area. They view the Taliban all Taliban, good, bad, Afghan or Pakistani as a creation of the intelligence agencies of our country. How much more do the people of FATA need to sacrifice for strategic depth in Afghanistan? The never-ending human sufferings in the area could transform into widespread anti-state sentiments. The youth around Zaid Hamid must know that the current pursuit of strategic depth may turn into as rightly described in this paper's editorial Strategic death'? (Daily Times, February 3, 2010) 'strategic death' for Pakistan rather than securing a friendly Afghanistan.
The writer is a research fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Research, University of Oslo, and a member of Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy
Posted by: john frum ||
02/13/2010 00:00 ||
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#1
As the old saying goes the problem with Afghanistan is Pakistan!
For years we have been fighting a proxy war against the Pakistani army!
Posted by: john frum ||
02/13/2010 9:59 Comments ||
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#3
Goodness, john, what a picture! Check out the tragic brow, the proudly jutting chin, the stern expression, the nobility of mien. That, my friends, looks to be truly a man among men.
By Amir Taheri
"When you find yourself in a corner, provoke the adversary to change the situation."
This piece of advice comes from Nechaev, the 19th century anarchist and ideological father of several generations of European anarchists and provocateurs.
His advice has been heeded by many politicians and activists who, with no credible program to offer, tried to hide their ideological nakedness behind a fig leaf of provocation.
The so-called developing world, including our own region has also seen a number of provocateurs, almost always ending in disaster.
There was Jamal Abdul-Nasser who provoked a war that he knew he could not win. We had General Yahya Khan of Pakistan who dragged his country into a war with India, knowing that the result would be tragic for his side. The Ugandan despot Idi Amin provoked a war with Tanzania just as the Khmer Rouge tyrants triggered a military conflict with Vietnam, both knowing full well that they were committing political suicide. The Serbian tin-pot despot Slobodan Milosevic proved equally suicidal when he refused to understand that Europe, indeed the world as a whole, had become a different place. Moe recently, we had the monster of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, who dug his own grave with a policy of deliberate provocation.
It now seems that Nechaev may have acquired an Iranian disciple in the person of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. From the start of his presidency less than five years ago, Ahmadinejad decided to dig himself a hole by scrapping an agreement that his predecessor Muhammad Khatami had reached with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) regarding a temporary suspension of Iran's programme for enriching low-grade uranium. Iran did not, and still does not, need such uranium. Most Iranian experts agree that spending vast sums of money and provoking conflict with the outside world to acquire a stockpile of enriched uranium makes no sense unless the regime's ultimate aim is to build an arsenal of nuclear weapons.
Thus the Khomeinist regime's latest decision to scrap the latest talks with the IAEA and start producing a stockpile of higher grade enriched uranium, up to 20 per cent, is nothing but a deliberate provocation. Having dug a hole for himself and the country, Ahmadinejad has decided to continue digging even deeper.
The latest provocation means that the United Nations' Security Council must ignore five of its own resolutions all passed unanimously, and surrender to Mr. Ahmadinejad or to meet Tehran's challenge with stronger measures that could ultimately lead to military action.
Tehran's latest move has drawn negative responses even from Russia and China, the only two of the permanent members of the Security Council that had so far tried to placate the Islamic Republic through diplomatic moves.
Tehran may have also lost the opportunity offered it by the advent of barrack Hussein Obama as President of the United States. Obama was the only high rank American politician prepared to bend backwards to accommodate the Khomeinist regime. Today, even he cannot continue peddling the illusion of a settlement with the Khomeinists without risking a Jimmy Carter-style fate. Thirty years ago, Carter ensured his own political destruction by trying to woo the Humanists right to the end. It is not certain that Obama would deliberately repeat that tragic-comic experience.
Ahmadinejad's claim that Iran needs the 20-per cent enriched uranium for peaceful domestic does not stand to close examination. Iran's only atomic plant is the 43-year old reactor at Amirabad in Tehran. Built by the Americans, the "safe lifespan" of the reactor ended in 2003. Gholam-Reza Aghazadeh, then head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Agency announced that the plant would be decommissioned by 2006, three years later than its "safe life-span".
Ahmadinejad decided to keep the reactor going until the end of this year, although many Iranian experts warn that it may break down in an accident and cause a catastrophe in the heart of the nation's capital.
In any case, the reactor has enough fuel for another four years. Thus, Iran does not need higher-grade uranium for that purpose.
Even supposing that Tehran decides to keep the dying reactor going for a few more years, the uranium being enriched at Natanz would still be useless for Amirabad. Iran does not have the technology and the industrial base needed to transform the enriched uranium into fuel rods. Te uranium enriched in Iran would still have to be shipped to one of the seven countries that could transform it into the needed fuel rods.
There is one more curious fact. Tehran has decided to enrich twice as much uranium up to 20 per cent as the Amirabad plant needs, at the rate of five kilograms a month.
Ahmadinejad's decision to reassert his reputation as a professional provocateur may have two other reasons unrelated to the nuclear issue itself.
First, he may have moved to pull the carpet from under the feet of those within the regime who have been trying desperately to negotiate a compromise with the IAEA by accepting the Russian-sponsored idea of exchanging Iran's low-grade uranium for higher grade material from Russia and France. Such a compromise would have defused the situation and silenced those who call for tougher sanctions or even military action against the Islamic Republic. In fact, at a Conference in Germany, Ahmadinejad's own Minister of Foreign Affairs, the hapless Manuchehr Mottaki had announced Iran's acceptance of the Russian formula less than 48 hours before being overruled by his boss in Tehran.
A second and more sinister reason for Ahmadinejad's provocative move may be related to his growing isolation within the Iranian political scene.
Starting this week and continuing until the Iranian New Year on 21March, the opposition intends to keep the pressure on by street demonstrations, workers' strikes and efforts to persuade the regime's coercive forces to change sides.
By provoking a more intense conflict with the outside world, Ahmadinejad may be hoping to provoke Iranian nationalistic sentiments and divert from the current domestic political crisis. If that is the case, Ahmadinejad has made yet another political miscalculation. The Iranians are not naive enough to abandon their democratic aspirations in the name of national unity behind a policy that could only lead to disaster for their country.
Rightly or wrongly and in my opinion the letter rather than the former, Ahmadinejad has lost the confidence of the Iranian people. He has dug himself two holes deep enough to bury a dozen political careers. The trouble is that he keeps digging.
Posted by: Fred ||
02/13/2010 00:00 ||
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A judge's race or gender makes for a dramatic difference in the outcome of cases they hearat least for cases in which race and gender allegedly play a role in the conduct of the parties, according to two recent studies.
The results were the focus of a program about Diversity on the Bench: Is the Wise Latina' a Myth?,' sponsored by the ABA Judicial Division at the ABA Midyear Meeting in Orlando on Saturday afternoon.
In federal racial harassment cases, one study (PDF) found that plaintiffs lost just 54 percent of the time when the judge handling the case was an African-American. Yet plaintiffs lost 81 percent of the time when the judge was Hispanic, 79 percent when the judge was white, and 67 percent of the time when the judge was Asian American.
The comprehensive study, by professors from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business, examined a random assortment of 40 percent of all reported racial harassment cases from six federal circuits between 1981 and 2003.
A second study (PDF), looked at 556 federal appellate cases involving allegations of sexual harassment or sex discrimination in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The finding: plaintiffs were at least twice as likely to win if a female judge was on the appellate panel.
University of Pittsburgh School of Law Professor Pat K. Chew, who co-authored the racial harassment study, said she found the rule of law is intact' in the cases she reviewed. Judgesno matter which side they ruled fortook the same procedural steps to reach their decisions, she said.
But judges of different races took different approaches on how to interpret the facts of the cases,' she said.
Pressed on whether the rule of law could actually be considered intact when outcomes varied so much depending on the race of the judge, she replied: "It's always made a difference who the judge was. We've long known, for instance, that a judge's political affiliation makes a difference."
Judge Carol E. Jackson of U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri said she was heartened that diversity has crept into the federal court system, where today 20 percent of judges are women and 15 percent are members of minority groups.
"It's important that different voices are being heard," she said.
The program took its title from a much-debated comment made years ago by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor : I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.'
The participants never answered the question of whether a Latina judge reaches better conclusions, but at least in some cases, it appears likely that she would reach a different conclusion from a white male jurist hearing the same evidence.
#1
University of Pittsburgh School of Law Professor Pat K. Chew, who co-authored the racial harassment study, said she found "the rule of law is intact" in the cases she reviewed. Judges--no matter which side they ruled for--took the same procedural steps to reach their decisions, she said.
It's just "intact" for some a bit more than others.
#3
You are certainly correct g(r)om. If the study is valid, it simply highlights the fact that in a land where justice was designed to be blind, judicial diversity impacts legal outcomes.
#4
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
"We don't need no stinking Constitution" - your diverse Federal judiciary.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
