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| 5/24 |
| 2004/5/10 [Politics/Domestic/President/Reagan] UID:30122 Activity:very high |
5/9 The Wages of Appeasement
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110004952
\_ Can't a freeper even tell that this guy is a looon?
\_ coherent rebuttal please. The WSJ is now a freeper
publication? Do you know anything about V. hanson?
\_ the editorial pages in the WSJ are pretty close to
freeper territory
\_ So the largest newspaper in the US is in freeper
\- i do not believe that is still true.
usa today climbed past WSJ, unless
that has been reversed. --psb
\_ USA Today is
a newspaper?
\_ Sure! Its the Cartoon News!
territory. What does that tell you about
your politics?
\_ That I can see blatant unrelenting partisanship
when I see it? The New York Times editorial
pages are just as bad, but anti-Bush. The WSJ
gave up any pretense of being anything other
than a partisan rag about six months ago. So
have most publications in the country.
http://www.lyinginponds.com/archive.200301.html#20030103
\_ The WSJ published the name of a juror in the Tyco trial
\_ Great. Another "wasn't Reagan soooo GOD-like?" article. Let's look
at the reverse angle. Reagan's cowboy "More Nukes" attitude began
the split in American-European relations. He appeased the Iranians
after the hostages were released, took sides in Lebanon (resulting
in 241 Marine deaths), and responded to that by invading Grenada.
Claiming "appeasement" has been of the great boogieman arguments.
ALL politics has meant weighing the options and every choice not
to attack or invade can be seen as "appeasement." The concept is
political oversimplification for the masses. Otherwise, the US and
USSR would have nuked each other in the 60s.
\_ Well, it turns out Reagan was right about trees causing pollution:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3700565.stm
I'm sure all his other kooky ideas will soon be vindicated as
well.
\_ Nice Red Herring. Stick to the topic, please.
\_ Next you'll have complaints about trees producing CO2 at
night. Oh, and catsup will qualify as a vegetable.
\_ If you've seen one vegetable, you've seen them all.
\_ Ironic isn't it that Reagan is now is a vegetable whose
only use it continuing to produce pollution.
only purpose is continuing to produce pollution. |
| 5/24 |
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| www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110004952 Shortly after Iranian terrorists storm the American Embassy and take some 90 American hostages, President Carter announces that Islamic fundamentalism is not a legitimate response to the excess of the shah but a new and dangerous fascism that threatens all that liberal society holds dear. And then he issues an ultimatum to Tehran's leaders: Release the captives or face a devastating military response. Carter orders an immediate blockade of the country, followed by promises to bomb, first, all of its major military assets, and then its main government buildings and residences of its ruling mullocracy. The Ayatollah Khomeini might well have called his bluff; And there might well have been the sort of chaos in Tehran that we now witness in Baghdad. But we would have seen it all in 1979--and not in 2001, after almost a quarter-century of continuous Middle East terrorism, culminating in the mass murder of 3,000 Americans and the leveling of the World Trade Center. The 20th century should have taught the citizens of liberal democracies the catastrophic consequences of placating tyrants. British and French restraint over the occupation of the Rhineland, the Anschluss, the absorption of the Czech Sudetenland, and the incorporation of Bohemia and Moravia did not win gratitude but rather Hitler's contempt for their weakness. What eventually contained Stalinism was the Truman Doctrine, NATO and nuclear deterrence--not the United Nations--and what destroyed its legacy was Ronald Reagan's assertiveness, not Jimmy Carter's accommodation or Richard Nixon's dtente. Thereafter, these historical lessons should have been clear to citizens of any liberal society: We must neither presume that comfort and security are our birthrights and are guaranteed without constant sacrifice and vigilance, nor expect that peoples outside the purview of bourgeois liberalism share our commitment to reason, tolerance and enlightened self-interest. Most important, military deterrence and the willingness to use force against evil in its infancy usually end up, in the terrible arithmetic of war, saving more lives than they cost. All this can be a hard lesson to relearn each generation, especially now that we contend with the sirens of the mall, Oprah and latte. Our affluence and leisure are as antithetical to the use of force as rural life and relative poverty once were catalysts for muscular action. What went wrong with the West--and with the United States in particular--when not just the classical but especially the recent antecedents to Sept. Though Americans in an election year, legitimately concerned about our war dead, may now be divided over the Iraqi occupation, polls nevertheless show a surprising consensus that the many precursors to the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings were acts of war, not police matters. Marine peacekeepers asleep in their Lebanese barracks that same year, and assorted kidnappings and gruesome murders of American citizens and diplomats (including TWA Flight 800, Pan Am 103, William R. Higgins, Leon Klinghoffer, Robert Dean Stethem and CIA operative William Francis Buckley), until we arrive at the Iranian hostage-taking of November 1979: That debacle is where we first saw the strange brew of Islamic fascism, autocracy and Middle East state terrorism--and failed to grasp its menace, condemn it and go to war against it. That lapse, worth meditating upon in this 25th anniversary year of Khomeinism, then set the precedent that such aggression against the United States was better adjudicated as a matter of law than settled by war. But if we know how we failed to respond in the last three decades, do we yet grasp why we were so afraid to act decisively at these earlier junctures, which might have stopped the chain of events that would lead to the al Qaeda terrorist acts of Sept/ 11? Our failure was never due to a lack of the necessary wealth or military resources, but rather to a deeply ingrained assumption that we should not retaliate--a hesitancy al Qaeda perceives and plays upon. Along that sad succession of provocations, we can look back and see particularly critical turning points that reflected this now-institutionalized state policy of worrying more about what the enemy was going to do to us than we to him, to paraphrase Grant's dictum: not hammering back after the murder of the Marines in Lebanon for fear of ending up like the Israelis in a Lebanese quagmire; Reagan's saber-rattling "You can run but not hide" did not preclude trading arms to the Iranian terrorists or abruptly abandoning Lebanon after the horrific Hezbollah attack. Our enemies and Middle Eastern "friends" alike sneered at our self-flagellation. In 1991, at great risk, the United States freed Kuwait from Iraq and ended its status as the 19th satrapy of Saddam Hussein--only to watch the restored kingdom ethnically cleanse over a third of a million Palestinians. But after the murder of 3,000 Americans in 2001, Kuwaitis, in a February 2002 Gallup poll (and while they lobbied OPEC to reduce output and jack up prices), revealed an overwhelming distaste for Americans--indeed the highest levels of anti-Americanism in the Arab world. And these ethnic cleansers of Palestinians cited America's purportedly unfair treatment of the Palestinians (recipients of accumulated billions in American aid) as a prime cause of their dislike of us. In the face of such visceral anti-Americanism, the problem may not be real differences over the West Bank, much less that "we are not getting the message out"; The autocratic Arab world neither respects nor fears a democratic United States, because it rightly senses that we often talk in principled terms but rarely are willing to invest the time, blood and treasure to match such rhetoric with concrete action. That's why it is crucial for us to stay in Iraq to finish the reconstruction and cement the achievement of our three-week victory over Saddam. It is easy to cite post-Vietnam guilt and shame as the likely culprit for our paralysis. After all, Jimmy Carter came in when memories of capsizing boat people and of American helicopters lifting swarms of panicked diplomats off the roof of the Saigon embassy were fresh. In 1981, he exited in greater shame: his effusive protestations that Soviet communism wasn't something to fear all that much won him the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, while his heralded "human rights" campaign was answered by the Ortegas in Nicaragua and the creation of a murderous theocracy in Iran. Yet perhaps President Carter was not taking the American people anywhere they didn't want to go. After over a decade of prior social unrest and national humiliation in Vietnam, many Americans believed that the United States either could not or should not do much about things beyond its shores. As time wore on and the nightmare of Vietnam began to fade, fear of the Soviet Union kept us from crushing the terrorists who killed our diplomats and blew up our citizens. These were no idle fears, given the Russians' record of butchering 30 million of their own, stationing 300 divisions on Europe's borders, and pointing 7,000 nukes at the United States. And fear of their malevolence made eminent sense in the volatile Middle East, where the Russians made direct threats to the Israelis in both the 1967 and 1973 wars, when the Syrian, Egyptian and Iraqi militaries--trained, supplied and advised by Russians--were on the verge of annihilation. Russian support for Nasser's Pan-Arabism and for Baathism in Iraq and Syria rightly worried Cold Warriors, who sensed that the Soviets had their geopolitical eyes on Middle East oil and a stranglehold over Persian Gulf commerce. Indeed, these twin pillars of the old American Middle East policy--worry over oil and fear of communists--reigned for nearly half a century, between 1945 and 1991. Such realism, however understandable, was counterproductive in the long run, since our tacit support for odious anticommunist governments in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and North Africa did not address the failure of such autocracies to provide prosperity and hope for exploding populations of increasingly poor and angry citizens... |
| www.lyinginponds.com/archive.200301.html#20030103 And 10 this from Andrew makes me ready to go back to college: A warning to students attending, or thinking of attending, Park University: If you take my rhetoric class, prepare to be challenged. You go some other direction, and I'll find its opposite and go that way. I will do all that I can to shake up your world view, to get you to question your values, your knowledge--everything you've been taught so far. That, dear student, is one huge part of what education is all about. That's also a big clue about why there are so many liberals in the humanities and social sciences. Shaking up world views, questioning authority and received wisdom, is not a (classically) conservative endeavor. ARIANNA OFFLINE: The Oregonian has 11 dropped syndicated columnist 12 Arianna Huffington from their Op-Ed page because "She has dragged herself across the line from being a commentator to being an activist . In today's column, she 19 breaks through: In the Ninth Circuit, Carter appointee Stephen Reinhardt returned to an earlier antigun opinion and deleted references to the work of Michael Bellesiles, the historian whose Bancroft Prize was revoked because of serious questions about the honesty of his scholarship. Levey commends the action of a judge who she identifies as a "Carter appointee". Levey into second place with a Democratic partisanship score. This just shows that the rankings don't mean much until a few months of columns have accumulated. As a result, I'm going to add a few additional columnists. So the Top Ten includes three of the pundits added this year -- 25 Robert Scheer, 26 Molly Ivins, and 27 Ann Coulter. The partisanship scores shouldn't be taken too seriously this early in the year -- the rankings can be expected to change dramatically over the next several months. Unfortunately, the Journal is often all too willing to dispense with such niceties. Spinsanity's critique was softened by their subsequent correction of "two major errors" in the original post. I had to chuckle when I read this paragraph: Krugman vows to be more careful, but adds: "I'm under much more scrutiny than any other opinion columnist. Krugman, but only because he has dominated the rankings and because so much of my e-mail concerns him (both pro and con). He's one of over 30 pundits being evaluated, and I'd frankly rather spend more time on some of the others. My general approach has been reluctance to add anything more than necessary to the lists of partisan names. I checked last year's columns for the use of "Dubya", but found that it was used by only three columnists, surprisingly most often by 41 Peggy Noonan (9 occurrences). If a columnist were to consistently use nicknames in either a negative or postive partisan way, it could affect the results. I'm not enthusiastic about cluttering up the lists with nicknames, but I would do it if convinced that it was necessary. Krugman to 49 Michael Kelly: Our point, obviously, is: In the pantheon of columnists who sometimes tend to the shrill, Krugman is a piker. He's not in the same league as the dozens of conservative columnists littering America's op-ed pages. And by Tapped's lights he's not even in the same galaxy as Kelly. Kelly is the 800-pound gorilla sitting in the corner of Kaus' Los Angeles living room whenever the Slate blogger is typing up another post about Krugman losing his cool. Why are Krugman's attacks on Bush worthy of ridicule, but Kelly's attacks on Al Gore not even worthy of mention? Having slogged through every single shrill, over-the-top Kelly and Krugman column in 2002, I feel qualified to add my two cents. Assuming that shrillness is somewhat correlated with partisanship, I could make a case that Mr. Krugman's 2002 50 one-note performances put him far ahead of Mr. But since I've said all along that Democratic partisans like Mr. Krugman will naturally have elevated partisanship scores during a controversial Republican administration, I don't think that one year of material is enough to decide which of the two 800-pound gorillas is more shrill or partisan. But I do think that they're unquestionably in the same league of shrillness. Kaus, I would gently suggest that the shrill voice across the ideological street somehow seems more irritating than the one in your own living room. In an article posted yesterday, Ben Fritz discusses the use of the phrase " 61 class warfare". Rich repeatedly as the example of a columnist who is sharply ideological and can regularly rake the other party over the coals while retaining the intellectual independence to vigorously criticize his own party when he deems it necessary. King in an article last week: I salute King not because he's the most artful writer in the business or even the brainiest, but because he possesses the most relentless voice I've encountered in a daily newspaper since alcohol dimmed Mike Royko's and death extinguished it. He's a winning example of what editors (and writers) could do with the op-ed form if they drew on their passion now and again. I dropped him from the active list for 2003 along with other local or international columnists, opting instead for an "apples and apples" comparison between a wider cross-section of columnists who focus on domestic issues and politics. First, he's concerned about methodology: Like most people, I've always had reservations about studies that are more interested in counting than context. That's how one media watchdog group managed to name Saving Private Ryan the most violent movie of 1998, and another wound up arguing that a popular sitcom was among television's most violent programs -- based almost entirely on a single fantasy episode in which the lead characters played the roles of The Three Stooges. These results were generated using essentially the same methodology as that employed by LIP, and demonstrate the weaknesses inherent in this type of study. I agree that the Lying in Ponds method is simple, and that the results should be viewed with caution. But the examples cited above seem to be a result of either a small sample size or an anomalous data point. I've previously noted those issues in connection with 74 Collin Levey and 75 Colbert King. I average together two different methods which combine the partisanship scores from individual columns into a final score to try to minimize those potential problems -- it was reassuring that the top three were identical with either method ( 76 Total PI and 77 Median PI). O'Toole argues that Paul Krugman's score is inflated because of his subject matter: Paul Krugman's column is about economics. He disagrees with the dominant wing of the Republican party on economic issues. As a result, he's inevitably going to "win" any simple numbers game like Lying in Ponds' -- just as, say, Pat Robertson would if he were hired by a major newspaper to write on abortion policy twice a week. Of course, Krugman could improve his scores dramatically by inserting the phrase Unlike high-minded Republicans such as John McCain from time to time, but that fact merely demonstrates just how flawed the LIP methodology really is. It's a plausible hypothesis, but one that doesn't hold up under inspection. Krugman wrote many columns on non-economic topics in 2002, and they're just as partisan as the economics columns. It's really necessary to go to the 84 Paul Krugman page and scroll down through the column statistics to get a feeling for the remarkable consistency. While it's right to have a healthy skepticism about counting methods such as this one, I believe that the basis for Mr. Krugman's 2002 partisanship score is extremely solid, suffering from neither small sample size (99 columns) nor by the effect of anomalous data points. Of course he only reviewed the The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New York Times. Not that conservatives like Andrew Sullivan will point this out when refering to the rankings. This implies that Krugman is somehow more partisan than columnists like Ann Coulter, Rich Lowry, or Cal Thomas, who don't write for those publications, but are syndicated. Coulter and Thomas, of course, are among the new pundits being evaluated this year. By the end of the month... |
| news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3700565.stm Conventional wisdom holds that plants will purify the air, helping to reduce concentrations of harmful gases. But experts at York University now say this effect can reverse itself in the UK during extremely hot conditions. When temperatures exceed a threshold, trees and other plants emit chemicals that encourage toxic ozone production. As the temperature increases, the emission rate increases almost exponentially Dr Alastair Lewis, York University The discovery was made when the team measured ozone levels in Chelmsford, Essex, during two weeks of last year's summer heatwave. When temperatures rose above about 35C, deciduous trees began emitting greatly increased amounts of the compound isoprene. This is usually produced only in relatively small amounts. But as the temperature increases, the emission rate increases almost exponentially," York team leader Dr Alastair Lewis told BBC News Online. Isoprene takes part in reactions that convert nitrogen oxide from car exhaust emissions into ozone. The more isoprene there is, the more ozone is produced from smaller amounts of nitrogen oxide. Dr Lewis said they found evidence the increased isoprene and terpene levels were contributing 30% to ozone levels at the height of the heatwave. Ozone is particularly dangerous for children, the elderly and asthmatics. European laws dictate that governments need to warn the public when hourly concentrations of ozone rise above 180 microgrammes per cubic metre. But Professor David Fowler, director of biogeochemical cycles at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Edinburgh, told the Daily Telegraph on Monday that most of the literature on health effects of ozone came from North American studies. |