1960s ALL OVER AGAIN!

I couldn't help but reminisce when I discovered this account of recent peace protests in our nation's capital. Where are the youth? --just a bunch of geezers from the sixties!

"A man could make a fortune selling Geritol to these people."

Well at least the capital police don't have to worry about marijuana.

"FACING THE ISLAMIST MENACE"

Christopher Hitchens on "Facing the Islamist Menace" -- he reviews Mark Steyn's book America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It.

AL-QAEDA IN THE 1990s

I finally finished The Looming Tower. Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright. Wright is a journalist, not a historian, and as a result there were a number of things I did not like about the book as he built his case. However, I would highly recommend this book for anyone wanting to get a feel for the events leading up to 9/11. During the Clinton administration there were a number of missteps and misjudgments. The FBI and the CIA (and even the State Department) do not come off well. So much pettiness prevailed. . .but this is government at work. It is not a book for idealists. Since Wright writes for the New Yorker and even has Dan Rather recommending the book, it cannot be labelled as a "right wing hatchet job." Wright even refers to the "sexual decadence of the Clinton administration" -- I haven't seen many liberal Democrats use this kind of description of Clinton's presidency.

SELECTIVE AMNESIA

I received an interesting email with a url sending me to the The American Conservative, "Selective Amnesia." This is Pat Buchanan's organization; a group I have noted in the past. Pat Buchanan is a conservative very much opposed to the war in Iraq. The author of "Selective Amnesia" attacks other conservatives who supported the war for now ignoring some of the pro-war statements they made in the past. The author focuses his attack on Michael Ledeen, a noted conservative. Ledeen in 2002 made a number of statements pushing to take Sadaam out. Krauthammer is also quoted and noted as reversing or maybe moderating his views as the war has gone badly.

I haven't seen how these men have defended themselves, but it did get me thinking about how pundits and politicians change their views over time. No one seems to have the historical memory to hold these individuals accountable for past statements and reversals in opinion. . .or at the very least make them justify why a position they advocated so fiercely several years ago is no longer advocated.

For me this was most apparent in the eulogies of the late President Gerald Ford. It seemed like liberal Democrats, including Senator Ted Kennedy, were eulogizing him as one of the great post-World War II presidents. I couldn't believe it! When Ford was in office, Kennedy, and many of his ilk, despised Ford--particularly for the Nixon pardon. Ford was attacked with the same vigor they now attack Bush. I wonder if 20 years from now we will be hearing how great a president Bush was. . . . . .from the mouths of some aged liberal Democrats?

MEDIA FAILURE

I have been bothered for some time by the news media, and probably it is more CNN and Foxnews, for not really covering the news. They tend to overwhelm us with the current car chase or some current news crisis in D.C. and ignore other major issues that might come crashing into our living rooms at a later date. But at the moment, I guess they feel no viewer would be interested in some event or trend that just does not seem to capture the theatrical vision for news they want. They seem to hop from crisis to crisis spending days talking about one issue.

Therefore it was with some surprise that I opened up the "Points" section of the January 7, 2007 Dallas Morning News. It contained an article on the "Top 10 Stories You Missed in 2006." However, I don't like the headline, because it is not the reader who missed the stories, it was the news media which failed to keep us informed because they just focus on only a few issues to somehow enlighten the public on. The interesting thing to me was that if a person were following a number of bloggers, the stories would not have been missed.

In case you interested the top ten were:

10. Hackable passports
9. The possible effects of Tamiflu (to counteract the bird flu)
8. Oil producers are investing in Euros, not just dollars
7. The gender gap is getting smaller
6. Iran and Israel held secret talks
5. The US is funding the Taliban
4. Russia is fueling an arms race in Latin America
3. Bush's post-Katrina power grab
2. China's African debt is increasing
1. India is helping Iran develop its nuclear program

As I look at the list, a number of these have far more significance for the future of America than what I see being discussed or reported.

UNDERSTANDING THE FRENCH

The French have been stereotyped in many ways by the right in America and especially since the Iraq invasion cutting jokes about the French have circulated, especially on the internet. For example: AP and UPI reported that the French Government announced yesterday that it has raised its terror alert level from "run" to "hide." The only two higher levels in France are "surrender" and "collaborate."

But the problem is that this kind of humor does not really help us understand the French. Rod Kedward's book France and the French: La Vie en Bleu since 1900 attempts to focus on finding or defining "Frenchness." There is a good review of it at H-France. I am not sure the study will resolve "what makes France tick," but it does get into the complex historical, social, and cultural issues of the last century or two.

QUOTE

"The far left doesn't feel a need to celebrate the birth of Jesus since it believes that there's no problem that can't be fixed by the welfare state."

Children's author Katharine DeBrecht

RAVI ZACHARIAS ON AMERICA, IRAQ, ETC.

Ravi Zacharias speaks on a variety of topics, including the situation in Iraq.

HOUSE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE?

Well, we have had a Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee who didn't know the difference between a Shiite and Sunni muslim, but the Democrats have gone one better. Now the incoming Democrat Chair of the House Intelligence Committee doesn't know if al Qaeda is a Sunni or Shiite organization. He also showed a lack of knowledge regarding Hezbollah. (This was a result of an interview by Congressional Quarterly).

This is discouraging--more than that even--it is depressing.

PRESIDENT CARTER'S NEW BOOK

I haven't read it (and am not sure I will if other scholars have similar problems with it), but it looks like President Carter's recent book, Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid, has sparked the resignation of a respected scholar from the Carter Center. He has a number of problems with the book from plagiarism to general historical incompetence.

IMMIGRATION DEBATE

One side of the immigration debate -- America needs highly skilled workers.

As I've argued in these pages, it is a disaster for the United States that we have so few H-1B visas available for high-skill foreign workers who want to become part of the American economy. We spend years educating foreigners, especially in technical fields, and then refuse their requests to work here. Instead we say "No, go back to Bangalore or Taipei and compete against us with what you've learned here."

It is truly insane from an economic point of view. America was made great by immigrants. The current nativist trends within both political parties, but especially the GOP, represents the worst of American narrow-mindedness and a complete lack of an understanding of history.

MY ACCENT

I am from Chicago!

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop."
Philadelphia
The Northeast
The Midland
The South
North Central
Boston
The West
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

SPAIN'S IMMIGRATION PROBLEM

Spain joins other European countries as it faces the challenge of immigration.

But in another sense, Spain's immigration problem is more severe than any other in Europe. Its population seems to have lost the appetite for procreation altogether. The average woman has 1.32 children, a figure that would have looked like a misprint to any social scientist before the 1980s. As a result, Spain's native-born population will begin contracting with shocking rapidity after 2014, and it is too late to do anything to stop it. Already Spain has gaping holes in its labor supply. The strawberry fields and clementine groves of Andalusia require tens of thousands of pickers every year. The tomato-growing greenhouses near Almería rely on Moroccan labor, and Eastern Europeans staff many tourist hotels. During the recent regional elections in Catalonia, when candidate Artur Mas urged that newcomers be held accountable to measurable assimilation criteria, the left-wing daily El País ran a picture of the Spanish factory that made Mas's campaign posters. It was manned by Pakistanis, of whom Barcelona has about 30,000. (In November, Pakistan announced it was opening a consulate there.) Naturally, sub-Saharan Africans would like their own piece of this economy.

SNIFFER BEES SNARE SUICIDE BOMBERS!

This research just has to get the Nobel Prize for Science. I am encouraging all biology majors to investigate the use of Texas cockroaches in the War on Terror.

Sniffer bees with a nose for explosives are set to make a major breakthrough in the war on terror. An extraordinary invention by a small British company is being praised by American scientists who have been testing it. Researchers at Inscentinel Ltd, which has just three employees at its Harpenden, Herts, HQ, have developed an amazing "sniffer box" to harness the bees' incredible sense of smell.

Bee sniffer squads could be on duty at airports, train stations and other terror targets within a year, say the scientists. Los Alamos sniffer squad trainer Tim Haartman, an entomologist - insect specialist - at the lab, said: "The technology is there. It's just a case of putting it into production."

SENATOR SCHUMER QUOTE

You gotta love this quote by Senator Schumer regarding his new Senate colleague fromVirginia, Jim Webb: "He's not a typical politician. He really has deep convictions."

NEW MAP OF MIDDLE EAST

Ralph Peters has proposed a new map for the Middle East. Some of it makes more sense than what we see today. Pajamas Media covers of the debate.

GLOBALIZATION

I managed to finish two books on globalization, each with a different emphasis. Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat focuses more on the economy and social issues. Thomas P.M. Barnett's The Pentagon's New Map analyzes the role of the U.S. military in adjusting to the new world most people see created by 9/11 (but it is clear trends were already moving toward 9/11 a decade or so earlier). Since Barnett dealt more with the political/military/diplomatic situation, I think it is a book anyone interested in history and political science would find plenty of food for thought. I am convinced that the world is in the midst of a major epochal change which is probably why I enjoyed each of these books.

Among the points I liked in Barnett's book (although I don't necessarily agree with all of them):

p. 3: “Amazingly, the U.S. military engaged in more crisis-response activity around the world in the 1990s than in an previous decade of the Cold War, yet no national vision arose to explain our expanding role.”

p. 4: “. . .the Pentagon spent the nineties buying a far different military—one best suited for a high-tech war against a large, very sophisticated military opponent. In short, our military strategists dreamed of an opponent that would not arise for a war that no longer existed.”

p. 19: “Until September 11, 2001, we basically had no reproducible strategic concepts to guide our use of military power.”

p. 20: on policymakers: “. . .most of those policymakers are neck-deep in day-to-day management issues and are rarely able to step back from their never-ending schedule of fifteen-minute office calls to actually contemplate the big-picture question of Why?”

p. 23: “The fewer the rules, the more war you have.” “Throughout the 1990s, the Pentagon lurched from Somalia to Haiti to Bosnia to Kosovo, and it did so without the slightest understanding why.”

p. 25: “Doesn’t it seem weird that the same senators who prattle on during Sunday news programs about the world is a chaotic, unpredictable place still always seem to show up on C-SPAN following some security disaster to decry yet another “intelligence failure”?”

p. 27: “I believe that history will judge the 1990s much like the Roaring Twenties—just a little too good to be true. Both decades threw the major rule sets out of whack: . . .”

p. 30: “. . .I prefer comparing George W. Bush to Harry Truman rather than Ronald Reagan.”

p. 32: “While the world’s population has doubled since 1960, the percentage living in poverty has been cut in half.”

p. 38: “. . .President Richard Nixon and eventual Secretary of State Henry Kissinger—looking at the Soviets more like a global mafia we could tolerate rather than Nazis we needed to exterminate.” “Cold War really ended in 1973 and not in 1989”

p. 40: “MAD was a stroke of sheer brilliance on McNamara’s part, . . .“

p. 44: “The eight-year period 1987-1994 saw 9,575 global casualties from terrorism, but over the next nine years (1995-2003), the total jumped to 27, 608.”

p. 49: disconnectedness is the problem, not Islam, etc. – disconnected nations need to be connected to globalization

p. 94: “Since we could not easily track down the individual terrorist spread across this global network, we did the one thing we know how to do well: we invaded a nation-state.”

p. 96: “. . .light leadership touch displayed by the Clinton Administration for eight years.” “Bush Administration felt that they had to reestablish civilian control over the military when they came into power in 2001.”

p. 140: “So I added up all the response days, and the results ere rather striking: the Middle East was already accounting for more than half of all the four services’ cumulative response days in the 1980s, with the percentage rising to 75 percent for the Navy and Marine Corps. More important, the cumulative number of response days for all four services was rising over time. There were not that many more individual operations in the 1980s than in the 1970s (an increase of only 20 percent). It was just that the responses in the 1980s were getting a lot longer, so the total number of response days increased by roughly 70 percent.”

p. 141: On defense budget: “If underequipped troops are sent overseas for crisis response, Congress does not catch the blame, the White House does. . .”

p. 178: “we are never leaving the Gap”

p. 200: “Growing economies generally beget happy societies. . .”


p. 217: Arab states would have had to invent an Israel if none existed

p. 218: “In 1980, the Middle East accounted for 13 percent of global exports. Today that share is 3 percent, with the overwhelming bulk being oil and natural gas. A generation ago, the Middle East attracted 5 percent of the global flow of foreign direct investment. Today that number is a mere 1.5 percent.”

p. 219: “When competing against countries that aggressively educate their populations, countries with large natural endowments will lose every time.”

p. 238: added up crisis response days: 1970s – 10,415 total days (not including Vietnam); 1980s – 17,382 days (increase of 66 percent); 1990s – 66,930 days

p. 239: “Of the thirty-seven major conflicts spread around the world in the 1990s, thirty-four occurred in countries with annual per capita GDP totals of less than $2,936.”

p. 244: “The share of total investment in the U.S. economy that is financed by foreign sources now reaches close to 20 percent, while in the 1970s that shre rarely rose above 5 percent.”

p. 298: America’s task – global bodyguard

p. 299: America accounts for about half of entire world’s state spending on defense

p. 309: “When America turned its back on the world following World War I, the globalization it inevitably helped destroy was largely of Europe’s creation. But the globalization of today is largely of America’s creation.”

p. 317: America’s military response to 9/11 “pathetic”; “Pentagon completely unprepared to fight in Afghanistan”

p. 347: “The general magnitude of global warfare has decreased by over fifty percent since peaking in the mid-1980s, falling by the end of 2002 to its lowest level since the early 1960s.” “today’s level is still 16 percent less than it was in the late 1980s”

p. 351: University of Maryland’s Peace and Conflict Ledger 2003 . p. 352: only 32 countries out of 161 with serious conflicts—U.S. is only involved in a “handful”

p. 358: “American nationalism is unique for its focus on past achievements linked to future triumphs. Most nationalism around the world expresses itself in past tragedies linked to current grievances.”

p. 364: “The Bush Administration seems top-heavy in bold decision makers and short on visionaries. . .”

p. 365: “Most Americans are constantly confronted with pointlessly hyperbolic media debates about tactics, but are exposed to almost no calm deliberations regarding strategy.”

p. 373: State Department in desperate need of transformation

p. 378: if world stops buying U.S. debt, America is in trouble

EUROPEAN FERTILITY

A great map. Will there be a Europe in 100 years?

CHARITABLE GIVING

See MSN -- poor people give me than wealthy people as a percentage: One thing that's long been known: The United States leads the world in levels of charitable activity. The pattern runs from the rich, steeped in long tradition of philanthropy, to the poor. Those making $20,000 or less a year give away more, as a share of their income, than do higher income groups.

RESPONSE TO DEMOCRAT VICTORY

Europeans are excited about the Democrat victory in the 2006 midterm elections, but Asians are fearful of what the Democrats will do.

The Democrats are being lauded in Europe and much of the Americas as the heroes of the hour, rescuing the USA from those mad neocons. But in most of Asia the perception is quite different -- of the Democrat majority as a threat, an enemy of trade, and a busybody across a broader range of issues than the Republican human rights campaigners with their predictable religious focus.