Liberty & Power: Group Blog
Monday, May 31, 2004
Predicting Bad Predictions
Having read several new books on climate change, New York Times Book Review reviewer Verlyn Klinkenborg advises readers to be frightened (“Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid,” May 30th). I’ll resist.
How is it possible to review the updated Limits to Growth book and Paul Ehrlich’s latest tome without showing even a trace of recognition that these authors’ predictions are infamous for being consistently and dazzlingly wrong? In The Population Bomb (1968), for example, Ehrlich predicted that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” Erhlich later lost his bet with Julian Simon that resource scarcity would intensify during the 1980s.
Suppose that a glib and frantic free-market ideologue had written a book thirty years ago predicting that continued regulation and taxation would wreak catastrophic destruction on society by 1985. Further suppose that when that specific prediction proved false, the same ideologue wrote another book advancing the same thesis, with only the year of reckoning changed. That prediction, too, failed. Now the ideologue offers yet another book with the same thesis. Would this "scholar's" book be reviewed in the New York Times? Would Mr. Klinkenborg, or anyone with half a brain, take it seriously? If not, what’s with the respect accorded to a Limits to Growth update and yet another prediction from Paul Ehrlich?
Bobbleheads, buttons, and buttonholing reporters
David's and Charles' posts are insightful. Distraction has gone on here at SCSU for a long time, including a button offered one year at convocation by President Roy Saigo that read "We're All In This Together", except of course for all the administrators he's fired. Our interim dean upped the ante to t-shirts with a college logo -- this while we had no equipment budget.
One point I made in my crosspost to SCSU Scholars is that academics concerned about their university's administration need to reach out to the local newspaper themselves. Reporters find the ivory tower to have few entry points, and leaving that to your school's public relations people is not going to help get out stories of ineptitude or malfeasance by their bosses. Indeed, in the case of the firing of a dean here at SCSU, even the campus paper printed a story it had to retract which looks to all the world like a story planted by somebody outside the newspaper. And now that the university is being sued for libel over the article, it is engaging in more distraction in part by using a different reporter than the usual higher education reporter, who knows who to call for more information.
The Campus Beat and "Bobblehead Journalism"
On Saturday, Charles W. Nuckolls pointed out how university administrators often use "distraction studies" to deflect embarrasing questions from professors and the public.
Distraction studies can only flourish, however, when reporters covering the campus beat also fail to examine the hard questions. Instead of investigative journalism, their main sources seem to be press releases from campus public relations offices and/or friendly interviews with administrators. Such reporters appear to be more interested in "feel good" articles rather than exploring the possible underside of campus administration including grade inflation, allegations of administrative mismanagement and waste, and officially sanctioned censorship of dissenting points of view. When given possible leads on such stories, they respond with silence.
Unfortunately, Gilbert Cruz, the campus beat reporter of the Tuscaloosa News, is almost a textbook example of such a journalist. One of Cruz's earliest articles for the Tuscaloosa News foreshadowed what was to follow. It was a front-page story describing the upcoming sale of "Bear" Bryant bobblehead dolls.
In a hilarious series of pieces, Nuckolls has examined the subsequent history of Mr. Cruz's not so peculiar brand of "bobblehead journalism." Look forward to more installments in the next few weeks.
Like Roderick Long I too watched the Libertarian Convention mainly too see old friends on television. Lately I have been much less involved with Libertarian politics than previously, so I had never seen or heard Michael Badnarik before and must say he greatly impressed me. Listening to him during the candidate’s debate and to his speech at the very end I thought an approach that uses detailed knowledge of the Constitution presented in an engaging manner could be a very effective tool for the promotion of liberty, it is too bad far too few people will ever get to see it. The media is going to treat him as if he does not even exist.
I could imagine Aaron Russo getting himself on the Tonight Show, Oprah Winfrey, or at least the Daily Show. I do not think Michael Badnarik will ever get within a hundred miles of those programs. Mind you it is not his fault. He has done an outstanding job to get this far, he will make good use of whatever opportunities he garners in the future, and he would make an infinitely better President than the one we are going to get. However, the mainstream media in the past has treated Libertarian candidates as though they were invisible and this practice will not change unless the candidate goes around it and forces the media to cover him with his own fame. Now, I am not saying that Russo has the requisite fame to compete in a meaningful way with Bush and Kerry but I do say he had a lot more potential to acquire that necessary fame than Badnarik does. I like Michael Badnarik a lot and will be very proud to vote for him; yet, I cannot help but think the Libertarian Party made a big mistake today.
I sincerely hope Badnarik proves me wrong because we really need someone to turn this country around. If anyone still does not believe that we are moving step-by-step along a path that ends with us living in a totalitarian hellhole they should read this article by Beverly Eakman (thanks to Jeff Schaler) on the growing practice of declaring mentally ill those who hold “wrong” opinions.
As the nation remembers its dead from wars past and present on this Memorial Day weekend, and as special attention is being focused on the opening of a National World War II Memorial, I wanted to take a moment to tell you about a man who, not unlike others of his generation, served his country abroad. His name was Salvatore "Sam" Sclafani, first cousin to my Dad, married to my mother's sister, and forever etched in the minds of our family as "Uncle Sam." Born in 1915, Uncle Sam left us ten years ago, having succumbed to prostate cancer. But it was this man who was my earliest inspiration in all matters political; he nourished in me a love of history and politics, and was the guy to whom I dedicated Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical.
My Uncle Sam was, without doubt, one of the funniest and most benevolent souls to ever grace this planet. And when you got him to talk about politics, it was like a veritable ride aboard the Coney Island Cyclone, that landmark splintery wooden rollercoaster. He was the most opinionated and outspoken critic of politicians, left, right and center, whom I've ever had the privilege to know and love.
Back in 1976, I interviewed Uncle Sam for a special project I'd done on the veterans of World War II. His comments are as precious today, as they were back then.
He remembered that "day of infamy" in December 1941. His mother labored by the stove, preparing the traditional Sunday home-cooked Italian meal. In the background, the radio played the sounds of a Swing band ... and then, a news flash came that the Japanese had attacked the US military base in Hawaii.
My Uncle had been classified in the army for the draft, but after years of working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, he decided to enlist in the navy instead. Several days after his enlistment, he was shipped out to the
Great Lakes Military Installation in Waukegan, Illinois, outside Chicago. Like a tale out of a storybook, he married his girlfriend, my Aunt Georgia, the day before he left.
From his hair-scalping at the installation to the strenuous marching, walking, running, rifle and rope exercises, boot-training was a test of his endurance. Even learning to sleep in a hammock—or as Uncle Sam reminisced, "trying to get into them, and involuntarily getting out of them"—was a chore. From Illinois, he was sent to Norfolk, Virginia for further training. He eventually became a part of the Seabees, a relatively new branch of the navy that was similar to the army corps of engineers. In learning the arts of naval engineering, these Seabees were taught everything "from building bridges and laying down airfields in record time, to advanced techniques of camouflage."
From Norfolk, Uncle Sam went on to Pleasantville, California, and then on to the Bremerton Navy Yard in Puget Sound, Washington state, where he participated in the salvage work on the USS Nevada, damaged in the Pearl Harbor raid. As they awaited orders on their next assignment, Uncle Sam's group was split into two: Group 1 was headed south—to Guadalcanal. By the mere accident of being part of Group 2, Uncle Sam ended up in the North Pacific. "We then realized," he recalled: "This is it. This isn't playing anymore. We're not training. From here on, everything is real."
Morale was remarkably good on the trip. But there was a common expression on everyone's face, he told me: an expression of suppressed horror, worry, and uncertainty. There was that constant alert for possible enemy aerial or submarine bombardment. While he remained remarkably calm, many of his newfound pals were desperately ill. "My comrades wished they had died. Men were throwing-up against bulkheads and walls and fainting on decks. They lost their appetites from terrible fear and severe seasickness."
Ten days after rough riding, the ship neared its destination. A heavy fog descended. And when the land mass came into focus, it looked like the cold, barren surface of a distant planet: no trees, no vegetation, immense mountains of stone and volcanic rock. Uncle Sam wasn't a few minutes on land before an alert signaled an imminent Japanese air attack. An earlier attack that day had destroyed the boats that lay docked around a makeshift pier. Running to take cover, the men passed an enormous hill of greenish-white pine boxes ... coffins waiting for new inhabitants. It was the kind of greeting that sobered the most stubborn among them. "A morbid, depressing and unsettling sensation came over me," Uncle Sam said. "We were finally aware that we had been sent to the notorious Dutch Harbor in the Alaskan Aleutian Islands, the closest US military base to Japan, only 600 miles away." This was a place where temperatures ranged from 12 below to 60 above. At times, many feet of snow would fall. Certain seasons brought 18-hour days, while others brought 18-hour nights. But always, there was a damp, musty fog; for the two years that Uncle Sam was stationed in the Aleutians, he never saw the sun.
Within the first week of their arrival, the new troops faced air attacks, volcanic eruptions, storms, earthquakes, and "horizontal rain," due to "winds that could blow a building across the Hudson River." Those winds, dubbed "Williwaws," were sudden and severe, up to 200 mph. Ironically, it was the difficult climactic conditions that saved Aleutian Island residents from both constant Japanese aerial bombardment and the typical diseases that infected troops stationed in the South Pacific. "American pilots remarked that there were better odds in flying 50 missions over Berlin," Uncle Sam would say, "than even one mission over the Aleutian Islands."
He remembered walking along a dirt road, when a light breeze had suddenly transformed into one of those Williwaws. By the time he had hit the deck, the wind had uprooted steel cables, boulders, and a 13-ton patrol bomber on the beach—smacking it up against a mountain. The Seabees' efforts to camouflage their work were not very successful because of these winds. "We were forced to build revetments for planes to try to camouflage them with heavy steel-cabled nets. After the first storm, all the nets went flying across the Pacific Ocean and days of work went down the drain."
But the Seabees transformed the rough Alaskan terrain, by literally leveling mountains. After laying down many miles of airfields with heavy metal stripping, the Seabees paved the way for an Aleutian air-force, since land-based bombers were now able to land.
By this time, Uncle Sam had become a Second Class Petty Officer. His days began at 5 am. His meals consisted of passable substitutes, since there were no eggs or milk. Remarkably, he gained 30 lbs. while living in Dutch Harbor. It was weight he desperately needed, as he worked hard on airfield and submarine installations. (He remembered going into one of those primitive subs: "I was qualified for submarine duty," he said, "but they were out of their minds: it was like staying in a narrow coffin, cluttered with levers, wheels, and machinery. I would never have survived!")
When his day of rigorous work was complete, he'd go back to the bunkhouses, which had been built to withstand the wind, the rain, and the war. Fighting his solitude and isolation, he found comfort with his comrades, smoking cigarettes, reminiscing of home, listening to their "Pacific sweetheart" on the radio: Tokyo Rose. Whoever she actually was, Uncle Sam had vivid memories of all the things she told them on the radio. "She'd tell us how our girls were cheating on us back home. She would say that we were very stupid to be fighting ... we were going to lose anyway. So we might as well rebel, destroy our superiors, and go home." It gave them a lot of laughs, he said, but it was hard to avoid sobbing, silently, as you listened to the Swing music she played. From the crackling of the radio speaker, came the Big Band sounds of Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and Tommy Dorsey; more than anything "Tokyo Rose" had actually said, the use of this great music constituted a form of psychological warfare that infected everyone with homesickness, he said. "It would place us in a very depressing state. Some men cried openly."
The men of Dutch Harbor served as a diversionary force in the Battle of Midway. They prepared munitions for the bloody US invasions of Amchitka, Adak, and Attu. They played an active part in the isolation of Kiska, even though they failed to prevent the evacuation of 5100 Japanese troops, who departed in the middle of a fog-heavy July night to return to Paramishiro Harbor.
During his two-year tour of duty, Uncle Sam experienced about six Japanese air bombardments; though the attacks were only seven to eight minutes in duration, they felt like seven to eight hours. A two-hour alert would usually precede an attack, as men would frantically prepare their anti-aircraft positions. "We were told to run off the ships and scatter into the hills, where there were fox holes." Men clung to their own hopes for survival, some praying and giving substance to the old adage "there are no atheists in foxholes." You just didn't know if "that next bullet would have your name on it. Then you'd hear the incoming planes." Within seconds, bombs would be dropping, destroying installations, oil tanks, gasoline storage facilities, and piers. Raging infernos and thick, black smoke would engulf the camp. "Things flashed quickly through my head," he painfully recalled. He had fears of invading parachutests, naval bombardment, "the end of the world. In one attack, our ship, the Northwestern, was blown into a million pieces as a bomb was dropped down the smokestack. Shrapnel and other fragments went flying, as the explosion echoed through the hills and canyons."
Uncle Sam learned a few things about wars, even "good" wars. He thought it was a joke when some said that the Americans would sell you the noose with which to hang them ... until he realized that scrap metal from Manhattan Els (elevated trains) had been sold to the Japanese and used by them to create their machinery of war. He even remembered going over to a downed Japanese Zero. "And on the engine was labeled 'Pratt-Whitney Motors, USA.'"
While he wouldn't have thought twice about shooting another human being in order to survive—
"quite frankly," he'd say, "it was either them or us"—he never accepted the notion that he should hate his enemy. "We had been taught to hate the enemy for their bombardment of Pearl Harbor, for their cruel and inhumane treatment of our men." But when prisoners were caught, "you'd look at these men, 'our enemy,' and see a reflection of yourself. I felt sorry for them."
In 1944, Company C was reorganized and sent back to San Francisco. As his ship neared the Golden Gate Bridge, Uncle Sam cried "like a baby. It was the most fabulous sight I had ever seen. To be on American soil again, a feeling you can't imagine unless you had been in that situation. And there, on the dock was the American Red Cross—with gallons and gallons of ice-cold milk."
The climactic changes were not friendly to Uncle Sam. He developed a mysterious illness in which his legs swelled, as he lay nearly paralyzed in pain. When it was apparent that he would be in a military hospital for months, he was given an honorable discharge. In May 1944, he finally came home to New York. For months, he had difficulty adjusting. He was immensely uptight and shuddery. He developed a fear of passing overhead planes, a fear that some New Yorkers still have for reasons that my Uncle could never have dreamed. The war had split homes and families, had taken away friends and relatives, and had damaged relationships. "You never know if you're going to come back during a war," he stated. "But if you have that luck, you can really appreciate what you left behind."
A bolder and more patriotic American you'd be hard pressed to find. But Uncle Sam had had enough with politicians. He had voted for FDR because he was convinced that the President would preserve the peace. "The President had said that American boys would not fight on foreign soil. He forgot to add: 'They'd be buried in it.'" For thirty years thereafter, Uncle Sam refused to go into a voting booth.
I come from a family of servicemen. Uncle Sam was fortunate enough to come home and to live a wonderful life, becoming a second father to me, as my own father had passed away when I was 12. But other relatives were not as lucky. My Uncle Frank was killed in the Battle of the Bulge. My Uncle Charlie survived, but was unable to talk about his war experiences for the rest of his life, having lived for years in a German POW camp. Fortunately, my Uncle Al and Uncle Georgie lived to talk about their experiences in the European theater. And my Uncle Tony remained in the army for the rest of his life.
The human cost of war is usually calculated by raw data on battle deaths, casualties, and medical evacuations. But whatever your position on the current war, it is important to remember not only those who died on the battlefield. It is important to remember, to tribute, those who survived as well, those who lived to tell us about the horrors of war, and who did the most patriotic thing imaginable: Building and sustaining their own lives in the aftermath, drawing strength from their love of family, of friends, and for life itself.
I honor their memory. [cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Perhaps there already is such a field of interest. If not, there should be. "Distraction Studies" means all the things university administrators do to distract faculty from the political economy of their institutions.
Want to distract a professor from examining health care fraud or financial wrongdoing in the Administration? Just start talking about affirmative action, diversity training, or multiculturalism. Left and right will oblige by dropping everything as they fill the trenches for another repeat-performance of their carefully scripted battle scenario.
Administrators love it when faculty do that. It keeps them from sniffing around the accounting books.
Again, I don't know if "Distraction Studies" already exists, but if it does, I suspect most of the administrators I know have already been granted higher level degrees.
Don't know about others, but I'm refusing, on principle, to see the eco-disaster
flick The Day After Tomorrow. I'm not in the mood to drop money in the
hands of folks who are clearly trying to score political points with highly dubious
science. Same reason I've never watched a minute of Bowling for Columbine
(although Moore is worse for not acknowledging his film is fictional). Were I to say to friends that I'm not seeing the movie on principle, I can
already hear them saying "Oh come on, it's just a movie." That response just
drives me crazy. No it's not "just" a movie; it's ideas in the form of a narrative,
and those ideas matter. Perhaps it's the old Randian in me, but whatever the
cause, I just cannot abide supporting forms of art that project ideas that
I find fundamentally in error, or morally wrong. To think that I could somehow
shut off the "ideas" part of my brain and just "enjoy the action" strikes me
as so anti-rational and anti-intellectual that I don't know where to begin
to respond to it. It's the same way I feel when I'm in class and talking about
serious, if abstract, ideas, and the students give me the "roll of the eyes"
look like "here he goes again...". I guess I expect more from adults, but having
had the "oh, it's just a movie" reaction before, I'm sure I'll get it again. My former colleague Robert J. Norrell has written a thoughtful piece on Booker T. Washington for the Heartland Institute.
Norrell's book Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee also has many new things to say about the Wizard of Tuskegee. Norrell persuasively argues that Washington's self-help strategy helped to set the stage for later civil rights protests in Tuskegee.
More specifically, Norrell asserts that Washington's careful nurturing of a black middle class served to create the necessary leadership base for civil rights activism to flourish in the post World War II period. I often assign this book in my courses. It is not only well-written but offers one of the best challenge to the conventional wisdom in the field.
On closer examination, a good case can be made that Washington has a better claim than DuBois to be considered as the father of the modern civil rights movement.
The Libertarian Party will nominate its candidate on Sunday. The best chance for the party to have an impact in this election is to draft a candidate who can not only articulate the issues in an intelligent way but who has instant name recognition.
Who fits this profile better than Penn of Penn and Teller? He is the kind of vigorous, dynamic, thoughtful and witty standbearer that could shake up this election. He might have money too! Of course, I am assuming that Penn is reasonably good on critical issues of war and peace. I summarize.
And in defeating the terrorists, we must rid ourselves of this badly misplaced aversion to torture. Of course, we are better than the terrorists, so we should only use "harsh" interrogation techniques when the danger is "imminent." The government will define what "imminent" means after consulting with me.
We want history to note the crucial lesson of this period: the United States gloriously carried on the traditions left to us by Genghis Khan, and thus made the world a better place.
P.S. A divided America cannot win this conflict. I guess that means we'll have to do something about eradicating any form of dissent. I'll deal with that some other time. I am serenely optimistic about the war and its eventual outcome. And, no, I don't give a damn what the Arabs think about us, not any of them. We're only liberating them and giving them the gift of freedom, so who the hell cares what they think? Many people do not have my refined sensibilities.
And even if this war was not required for our national defense, it has had some wonderful benefits. A military is meant to be used, and soldiers want to fight. They're doing that now, so they're a lot better at killing and blowing things up than they would have been just carrying out those namby-pamby "peace-keeping" missions. One other thing: this war has shown how incredibly stupid it is to have men and women serving in the same unit, especially in combat zones. Pfc. England conclusively demonstrates that.
Abuse and torture? What abuse and torture? Of Arabs? I told you, I don't care about them. If only everyone had my broad, philosophical outlook. Then you wouldn't get bogged down in these ridiculous details. History will realize how sound and wise our policies today were. By history, and since I am a deep thinker and a historian with the long view, I mean a decade from now. To be certain that our nobility is appreciated, though, we have to be much more serious about killing a lot of people and leveling places like Fallujah. We have to show them we mean it. This does not constitute approval of "mere force." It's simply the recognition that empty words or good intentions don't count for anything. The only thing that matters is action and the will to win. That means killing lots of people and blowing a bunch of things up.
We must stay true to our values. But since most people "think reptilian" and will only join us if they see us winning (how superficial can you be?), we have to beat the crap out of the bastards, any bastards. Then people will see how noble and wise we are. And since I am a profound thinker and a noted historian, I will close with these words from that unusually enlightened and noble political philosopher, Al Davis: "Just win, baby."
Libertarian Convention
Sunday, May 30, 2004
A Memorial Day Weekend Tribute to Uncle Sam
Convention Newsflash
I've just finished watching C-span's coverage of the Libertarian Party convention. The three-way race for the top spot was the closest I've seen; most observers had been predicting a final showdown between Aaron Russo and Gary Nolan, but in a last-minute upset, Michael Badnarik squeaked through with the nomination. (A vice-presidential candidate had not yet been chosen when C-span's coverage ended.)
While none of the three contenders has the glibness or the gravitas of Harry Browne, I had grown increasingly disenchanted with Russo, and Badnarik seems fine (a bit weak on abortion -- perhaps he needs to read today’s post from Charles Johnson -- but acceptable), so I am reasonably content with the outcome.
Badnarik for President!
The VP choice has now been announced: existentialist guru and liberhawk Richard Campagna. Oh well.
Saturday, May 29, 2004
New Field: "Distraction Studies"
Just a Movie?
Booker T. Washington Reconsidered
Friday, May 28, 2004
Last Chance for Libertarians? Penn for President!
The Noble Warriors Speak
If the United States is going to defeat the terrorists, we need to have a total commitment to crushing the bastards. My study of history indicates that the role model we ought to adopt is that provided by one of the most noted liberators of the oppressed and a noble exemplar of freedom and individual rights. I speak, of course, of Genghis Khan.
John Derbyshire:
Don't believe anything you've been reading over the last month or so. This administration is filled with individuals who are decent, intelligent and patriotic Americans, doing their honest best for the country. Anyone who says otherwise is a Bush-hater, and the only kind of criticism they have ever offered is that the Bushies are stupid, venal or crazy. These detestable Lefties and Paleo-Righties are obviously stupid and crazy themselves (and probably venal, too), so you can safely ignore them.
Victor Davis Hanson:
Most people have reptilian brains. They just want to win. How pathetically superficial. They're not idealists and profound thinkers like me. I and a very few other special people understand how crucial it is to have a "strong particular ideology" that keeps you resolute, no matter what the hell the facts might show about how completely wrong your policies are. You shouldn't listen to any of the critics of our noble, valiant war plans, especially people like that loudmouth critic Michael Moore, or ex-generals. Ex-generals, I ask you. What the hell do they know compared to people like me and my friends?
(Cross-posted at The Light of Reason.)
Michael Moore's Interview with Nicholas Berg
Michael Moore filmed a 20 minute interview with Berg. Bizzare.
Libertarian Jackass on the Blog Roll
Liberty and Power has exchanged links with Libertarian Jackass, a lively blog which is the brainchild of an anonymous graduate student in "politics and economics in sunny Southern California." Check it out.
Of Bats and Rats, Pigeons and Poles
"Blowback" is not restricted solely to the area of foreign policy. Even municipalities must deal with the ancient principle that intentional human action will, by necessity, create unintended consequences in a social setting. Especially when that social setting is extended outward to encompass other species ...
Take the New York Rat. Please. The City of New York has forever been unable to control the endless copulating and populating of this rodent. It's gotten so bad in some sections of Manhattan that a gent named Manny Rodriguez, has taken to whacking some of these unlucky critters with his home-made bat. Upper West Siders are cheering this victorious vigilante, nicknamed "M-Rod," for his bat-to-rat alternative to the teams of exterminators and inspectors that are finally responding to neighborhood calls for pest control.
Another New York neighborhood has been trying to deal with what many residents term, "rats with wings." The New York Pigeon. Dubbed "Public Enemy No. 2," literally, the pigeons in the Manhattan Bryant Park area have been dropping their droppings on people for years. The City tried to control this, at first, by drugging the poor birds. When pigeons, rather than pigeon-poop, started dropping on people's heads, the City decided to stop its bird-brained narcotics program. Then, the City introduced Fake Owls into Bryant Park, which were supposed to frighten the pigeons away. But these are New York pigeons. They simply started depositing their droppings on the Fake Owls, mocking them, as if to say: "You talkin' to me?"
Then, the City came up with a really brilliant plan: They introduced hawks into Bryant Park. Yes. Real, live hawks. But the hawks didn't touch the pigeons. Instead, one of them swooped down and attacked a helpless Chihuahua, attempting to lift it into the air as it frolicked on the green. People were scurrying and screaming, and dog lovers protested.
So the City has now come up with a Bold New Initiative. City workers are now wrapping Slinkys around tree branches, which hang over sitting areas in Bryant Park. This will, apparently, stop the pigeons from sitting on the branches because it will, apparently, make them "dizzy." They will therefore have to go elsewhere to take care of their lavatory needs. Perhaps the City will install Public Poopers for Pigeons that are as well kept as the People Potties.
Meanwhile, another war looms in the outer boroughs. This one is coming to my Brooklyn neighborhood, which is home to thousands of Green Monk Parakeets. These natives of South America, like other immigrant groups, have settled in my beloved Brooklyn. Don't let their delicate, pretty appearance fool you. They are hard-working and productive, building nests on telephone poles and street lamps. But the phone company is now starting to grumble, and it is only a matter of time before it tries to remove the South American Squatters from their utility poles. Let's just hope they don't introduce Slinkies, Fake Owls, or, to the eternal fear of my dog Blondie, Chihuahua-Hunting Hawks. These Brooklyn Birds are tough; they will make the Manhattan Pigeons look like Chickens. Not to be confused with Chicken-Hawks.
US Army Intelligence Chief in Iraq Unscathed
The General who is head of US Intelligence in Iraq remains untouched, as yet, by the growing prisoner abuse scandal -- but, she's a woman and has been one of the "Stars" of the "new" Army. To read the story, click here.
Thursday, May 27, 2004
DFL busted for LWI
That is, Legislating While Intoxicated. The Democrats (Democrat-Farm-Labor, or DFL for those of you from out of state) of the Minnesota Legislature were exposed by a local television station drinking during the waning days of the last legislative session. The Northern Alliance is having a blast with this one. Says the Elder:
If the DFL is looking for a new theme song for this year's election I might suggest a BTO classic. They're taking what they're given, 'cause they're Drinking For a Livin'.and Saint Paul
[State Rep. Steve] Wasiluk issued a statement to the station saying: "I sincerely apologize for my recent behavior. If the public feels additional laws should be passed to improve public confidence in the work of legislators, I would vote for it."and Captain EdPlease pass a state law, prevent me from drinking on the job again!
Actually it might not be such a bad idea to outlaw legislating while drunk. It seems only fair since the government has already outlawed the citizens from voting while drunk. Seems to me if we can't ease the pain of Minnesota government by drinking ourselves numb, they shouldn't be able to either.
Now the DFL wants Governor Tim Pawlenty to call a special session in order to pass a bonding bill, which would allow them to add pork to the booze. Pawlenty should instead close down Animal House/Senate and consider some way to put Otter, Bluto, and the rest of the Senate boozehounds on double-secret probation. While he's at it, he should check into a special prosecutor to look into all that free booze -- and anything else -- supplied by the lobbyists to the DFL.. I was going to check PowerLine's reportage, but I can't seem to get past Miss Sweden.
It's not at all uncommon to find bottles of vodka in government offices in the former Soviet Union, and I can tell you of a wild International Woman's Day passing out champagne and chocolates at the National Bank of Ukraine. (It ended with a broken wrist; long story.) But the all-night party-till-you-puke bash at the Senate ended with a Borking, a far worse way to spend good booze than we did handing out flowers to all the women in the Monetary Control department.
Perhaps we should not be too critical however. The Legislature did nothing but drink and bork. Not nearly as much damage as they might have done.
(Crossposted from SCSU Scholars.)
Read the Constitution
I hope this won’t make me sound like a fan of George W. Bush, but here goes anyway. I am sick of columnists and others reminding us that Al Gore won the "popular vote.” It’s irrelevant! (See Maureen Dowd for an example.) If the national popular vote had mattered, Bush could have run up his margins in Texas and his other safe states. But he didn’t because it would have been wasted time and money. Why? Because the Constitution set up the Electoral College. For the benefit of the Gore fans, what counts is how many state electoral votes a candidate wins, not how many votes cast by citizens. You get a state’s electoral votes even if you win the state’s popular vote by a margin of one. The Gore fans’ nattering is equivalent to claiming your team really won the World Series because although it lost four games, it scored more runs overall than the other team. Give it up, Gore fans. You’re only showing your ignorance.
Downsizing Expectations
An interesting editorial in yesterday's New York Times by Fouad Ajami on the national perception of the Iraq adventure. He was an early supporter of the war, and to his credit admits what many of us have been saying throughout - nation building doesn't work when a nation doesn't want to be built.
It's going to be interesting to watch how the Bush administration spins Iraq in its second term (which I strongly suspect is inevitable). Bush's right wing chorus will continue to talk about how horrible the old regime was and proclaim lies about Saddam's ties to terror. But we are clearly not going to get anything approaching "liberty" or "freedom" as we think of it there, and we may in fact get an antagnostic government once we pull out. Of course by then Bush jr. will be giving talks in Japan and watching his brother run for president from his ranch in Texas. Jon Bean stresses the negative black response to Bill Cosby's comments. Earlier, I predicted that Cosby might be "Clarenced." Perhaps, as King Banaian's post also indicates, it is not quite as bad as it seems. Articles by Stanley Crouch, Hugh Pearson and others show that Cosby have drawn surprising, though sometimes highly qualified, support from leading black intellectuals. Is the tide turning? Once and a while, he got it right Conservatives are mad that the news media and Iraq-war critics focus on the bad news—abuse of detainees, bombings of wedding parties, and the like—while overlooking the good news—U.S. troops' building schools and hospitals. I get it: the good news is the extension of the welfare state to Iraq. Whoopee! Never mind the silly attempt to resurrect the Soviet-style planned economy (Jesus, is the body even cold yet?). That's a different post.
What if instead of this, Matthew Yglesias, at the end of a post commenting on Hilter's notable highway construction and punctual public transportation, "conceded" that, "on the other hand, millions of Jews got themselves killed in Hitler's various schemes."
Yeah. We'd be revolted. Awfully creative with sentence structure, that Matthew Yglesias.
But I suppose it's okay to not only brush off the deaths of millions of halocaust victims, but to actually implicate them in their own deaths, so long as you do so en route to defending an anti-capitalist philosophy. I have a forthcoming article in The Free Radical entitled "Bush Wins!," which I'll be delighted to share with my L&P audience after it is published. The gist of the article is expressed in its conclusion:
Yes, I know: This could be one of those "Dewey Defeats Truman" moments, as I say in my article. But I do find it interesting that in today's NY Times, people from various parts of the political spectrum conclude, as I do, that Bush and Kerry have much more in common than either camp would have you believe. Check out this news item, this Nicholas Kristof Op-Ed piece, and this William Safire essay, all of which point to what Safire calls "the Bush-Kerry Nondebate." If not the father, he certainly qualifies as a founding father:
"In 1949, the FCC had formally articulated a Fairness Doctrine....The commission said in the Fairness Doctrine that stations could editorialize on the air, as long as their overall coverage provided 'reasonably balanced presentations' of current issues. McCarthy interpreted this to mean that anytime anyone on television took a stand on a controversial issue, an equal and opposing opinion had to be presented. He sold the public on this view and cajoled the individual stations and networks into accepting it, giving him free access to television on the flimsiest of reasons. In November 1953, after much huffing and puffing, McCarthy even received 'equal time' to reply to a TV speech by former President Harry Truman." Harry Castleman and Walter J. Podrazik, Watching TV: Six Decades of Television (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 87. Two additional thoughts worth noting on Jonathan's post below. First, Clarence Page refers to the reaction to Cosby's speech as BPC -- black political correctness. Page notes that it's nothing new for Cosby. In those politically polarized times, I was disappointed by his traditionalist attitude. But I appreciate its wisdom today with new eyes, the eyes of a parent. Second, the gap between black and white academic achievement can be overcome, even in majority-black areas. Five years later, the passing rate for black students had jumped to 61 percent.
Bill Cosby: Part III (Hopeful Signs)
Daniel Webster versus the Draft
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
Now I Get It
Damning With Grammar
Kush and Berry
Other things being equal, voters are not going to choose Kerry, when they’ve already got in Bush a Republican dedicated to all the conventional Democratic planks: an expanding welfare state, budget deficits, and a war abroad. A long and potentially nasty campaign beckons; the race may center on 17 battleground states that are not yet claimed by either candidate and so much can happen between now and Election Day. But, as of this moment, I still think Bush wins.
Joe McCarthy: Father of the Fairness Doctrine?
Cos history and causality
Cosby was saying the same thing backstage when I interviewed him during my college days. It was 1968, but he didn't want to talk about black power, Black Panthers or cultural revolutions. He wanted to complain about why so many young blacks of my generation were wasting the great opportunities that hard-won civil rights victories had brought us.
You can also see his essay on "Igno-Ebonics" during the debate in Oakland over teaching teachers how to use Ebonics to teach children.Schools in Norfolk, Virginia are closing the achievement gap between black and white students, reports the St. Pete Times. Overall, the district is two-thirds black; 60 percent of students come from low-income families.
It's not all parenting, and it's not all teaching, but those must be the major part of it.
In 1998, 67 percent of Norfolk's white third-graders passed the state English exam. Only 41 percent of the district's black third-graders met that standard.
Tuesday, May 25, 2004
Mechanized writing
Crossposted to SCSU Scholars.
An essay on how silly our teaching of writing has become.
In Indiana this year, the junior-year English essay will be graded by computer, and similar experiments have been tried in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Oregon. The SAT and the ACT are planning to test the new computer-grading software as well. That is a reductio ad absurdum of the entire idea of learning. If this is knowledge, then truth and beauty reside only in ignorance.The storyline includes a shot at NCLB as inducing computer grading of writing. And that certainly is a danger. But frankly writing at our university has fallen into such abuse that simple sentence structure has been lost. Creativity would be nourished by reading creative literature, great works handed down through the ages. As I've argued several times, good writing for me has four ingredients: learn how a sentence works (by which I mean, you should be able to diagram them -- after all, isn't that what the Intellimetric data is checking?); read great books; practice; and rewrite what you wrote.Vantage Learning, which makes the writing-assessment software called Intellimetric, claims that it "shows more reliable and more consistent results across samples than human expert scorers." Of course "reliable" entails "accurate," and I daresay there is no way to establish that without begging all possible questions.
More to the point, perhaps, machines are cheaper: It costs perhaps $5 for a human being to evaluate an essay, $1 for a machine. And while it takes five to 10 minutes for a human to score an essay, the computer can apparently do it in two seconds.
The actual procedures that the software employs are presumably proprietary. But the dimensions that Intellimetric evaluates are these: (1) focus and unity; (2) development and elaboration; (3) organization and structure; (4) sentence structure; (5) mechanics and conventions.
...
The only real argument for the quality of the software is that it is "more reliable and accurate" than human evaluators. But the human evaluators have already transformed themselves into Intellimetric software: These are the military sheep — their minds both rigid and woolly — who invented and enforce the mind-numbing five-paragraph essay form.
Every child in the United States, more or less, is being taught to write and to think in this way. I teach these kids when they reach college. I try to tell them that the idea that there is some specifiable way to write an essay is just hoo-ha made up by some bureaucrat in 1987. This makes them nervous.
I am not particularly concerned about the youth of today; if the world goes to hell I don't really care. But I do care about coming to the middle of a semester and being forced, in order to make a living, to read 35 five-page papers written by thoroughly fried lamb chops whose writing style has been nurtured over the years by a computer.
Stephen says "We just started offering a capstone paper course to our students, and discovered that we have to do a lot more to develop basic expository and research skills." We do the same thing here. Sartwell would probably call us formulaic as well, but we're trying to teach how to write research, and just as we don't have young violinists imitate Jean-Luc Ponty or Isaac Stern, neither do we believe young economists will start out writing like, say, Russell Roberts. Making economics simple is the hardest part.
Don't Destroy Abu(se) Ghraib
President Bush should not authorize the U.S. military to destroy Abu Ghraib prison, site of U.S. abuses against Iraqi detainees (that we know). Why not? Because it is not Bush's to destroy. Let the Iraqis decide what to do with it. And then let them do it. Maybe someone will buy it and convert it into a museum of state horrors for all to see. At any rate, it's not "our" decision, even if the Iraqi "government" the UN creates says it is. What should the U.S. do? Give the keys to some Iraqi on the way out—of the country.
Bill Cosby and the Problem of Black Dissent
As many blog subscribers may have read, Bill Cosby addressed a NAACP dinner and took the African American community and its so-called leaders to task for failing to speak out against the ghettoization of language, schooling, and the general deterioration of bourgeois values once considered valuable in the "uplift" of black individuals. The response to his comments--clearly within the mainstream of African American opinion judging by polls--was fierce. How DARE he say such things in a public forum? Well, Mr. Cosby did not back down and reiterated his points at Stanford University commencement speech this past week. See the editorial page of the _Wall Street Journal_ for his main points, 25 May 2004: http://tinyurl.com/27hqf
For an excellent discussion of the problem of the black dissenter in this post-Civil Rights era, I highly recommend Stephen Carter's Part II, "On Being a Black Dissenter," in _Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby_. Written by a Yale Law professors who is NOT a conservative or libertarian, Carter finds it distressing that intellectual discussion is so circumscribed by the "party line." This is NOT what the original civil rights movement was all about, needless to say.
"A mind is a terrible thing to waste," indeed...
The President's Speech
Last night, George W. Bush’s speech on Iraq at the Army War College was designed to show that the president has a definite plan for Iraq’s future. But the lack of details provided about the imminent transfer of “full sovereignty” to the Iraqis indicates quite the opposite and that the word “full” should be changed to “minimal.” The only new detail provided was the symbolic fluff of pledging to destroy the Abu Ghraib prison, which will do little to repair the monumental damage to the coalition war effort by U.S. torture perpetrated there. Like a deer caught in the headlights, the Bush administration is paralyzed in the face of imminent danger. In the face of growing Iraqi hostility toward the U.S. occupation and eroding popularity of the war and president at home, Bush’s speech indicates that he will merely try to muddle through. On the ground, the Bush administration has given up the risky goal of disarming the numerous Iraqi militias and is now attempting to co-opt them in order to hold down U.S. casualties until the U.S. presidential election. In a unified Iraq, this strategy is recipe for eventual civil war. Instead the president needs a bold plan of genuine Iraqi self-determination—what would probably amount to a loose confederation of Iraqi ethnic/religious groups or even three or more independent states—and withdrawal of U.S. forces.
Tom Clancy: "Peacenik" on Iraq
I guess now I've seen everything. Tom Clancy, the favorite novelist of conservative hawks, is against the Iraq war.
Monday, May 24, 2004
Aggressive tactics will get the U.S. Nowhere
In guerrilla warfare, more so than set piece battles among conventional armies, winning popular support in the target country and retaining it at home is vital.
Agressive tactics, such as those noted by Keith, are not only immoral, but ineffective. The U.S. government would be better off if it said: "Yes, we screwed up and hit a wedding party. We're very sorry and we'll compensate the victims." But in government, used to dealing with people on the basis of coercion, the hope that it would take this approach is a fantasy
The British have much experience in fighting guerilla warfare against the IRA and should be listened to.
But too late now, the war is over. The Bush administration has failed to gain the support of Iraqis and lost support at home.
Let's allow true Iraqi self-determination (which will probably end up in a loose confederation or a partition, declare victory and leave. It's Bush's only hope for reelection (not that I want this dude reelected).
Marshalling Resources
Okay, so here's a hypothetical scenario. Let's say you live in a state that's been through hard times. The federal government comes to you and tells you, "Price no object." They're going to send you whatever you need to get yourself back on track. For the first three months, the government doles out $8.2 billion in contracts. An additional $10.5 billion is coming this summer. It's the biggest news in urban renewal since LBJ's War on Poverty. And the whole thing is going to be paid by the taxpayers. You don't have to put in one dime! Unless of course you are a taxpayer.
Actually, because your particular state has been subject to really hard times, it's not HUD (the Department of Housing and Urban Development)—with its mere $2.3 billion in available "funding opportunities" for "affordable housing"—that's assisting you. It's not even the State Department. Nah. This is for a really big job, something for which only the Department of Defense does the actual contracting, with its "emphasis on big corporations producing quality results subject to bureaucratic auditing," as Jim Dobbins ("recently retired ... US envoy to postwar Afghanistan") puts it.
So what can your state look forward to? Here's just a sampling: 7000 vehicles (a mix of SUVs, four-wheel drives, and passenger sedans). 459 Color TVs. 359 VCR/DVD players. 13,000 firefighter outfits. Hundreds of firefighter vehicles. And small things, like: 185,000 thumbtacks, 71,222 metal whistles, 9,620 desk chairs, 5,400 traffic cones, and so forth. And let's not forget $5.6 billion for electric generators, $4.3 billion for water and sewer projects, and $1 billion for roads and transportation networks.
Oh, and, since we don't want to leave the State Department out of the loop, it too will have a role to play. It's going to send you another $50 million to teach the residents of your state how to run elections (hopefully this will not entail any leftover hanging chads).
There is so much more information now available on all these wonderful Marshall Plan-like projects for your state. Montana? New York? No.
Iraq.
As Bob Port tells us in the NY Daily News, however, there has been a "lack of full transparency" on this wonderful crony capitalist project, which
breeds trouble and favors political influence, according to the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington watchdog group. Last year, the center had to file 73 Freedom of Information Act requests to unearth a list of Afghanistan and Iraqi contractors. The effort revealed confusion about what the government was buying, discrepancies in numbers and a general lack of accountability, said Bill Allison, the center's managing editor.
Who needs accountability when you're not a fiscal conservative? But if you were one, like a good Small Government Republican, you'd be opposed to all this, right!? It's only Big Government Democrats who favor Big Government Initiatives. Right?
Let's ask the Republican administration of George W. Bush.
Oh, and for those who believe that the only way to Marshall Resources for Big Forward Looking Projects like this is with Big Government Initiatives, well... it just ain't so.
What is a Wedding Singer Doing at a Safe House?
This Sunday once again marked an extremely bad day for those who support the war in Iraq. Yet another 60 Minutes interview, this time with retired General Anthony Zinni, highlighted the total incompetence with which the Bush Administration has pursued Woodrow Wilson’s dream of a world made safe for democracy. The last time we did this the world got Hitler and Stalin, what will it get this time?
Also, a videotape of the wedding the US Army has said never took place turned up along with the inconveniently dead body of a famous Iraqi wedding singer. A military spokesman said “There was no evidence of a wedding: no decorations, no musical instruments found, no large quantities of food or leftover servings (the attack took place at 3AM maybe someone cleaned up before they went to bed) one would expect from a wedding celebration," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said Saturday. "There may have been some kind of celebration. Bad people have celebrations, too." So, I guess those little children on slabs in the morgue and beds in the hospital must have been bad people.
I do not know about the rest of you but I for one am getting sick and tired of my government continually lying to me. And, it depresses me no end that the people who rule over me, with an increasingly iron fist, are so stupid that they actually think they will get away with a lie like this.
And if the above was not enough, a story in the British media indicates that the American policy of shoot first ask questions later has made British military officers very reluctant to serve under American command. The story quotes a British Army source: “Seeking to adopt normal low-profile British tactics in the wake of American aggressiveness would be difficult enough," said the military source, "but to have to go in under US operational command would be a disaster." Now if we could only get our own soldiers out from being under US operational command.
Sunday, May 23, 2004
A Tale of Two History Conferences
I just returned from the annual Policy History Conference in St. Louis. The sponsors were the Institute for Political History and the Journal of Policy History. It was the first time I attended this conference but it will not be the last.
I can't think of a time when I so thoroughly enjoyed a history gathering. Paper after paper revealed a highly level of intellectual curiousity, enthusiasm, wit, mental dexterity, and creativity. More than once, brilliance (I do not exaggerate) was on display. Nearly everyone concerned seemed to truly enjoy and be fully engaged in what they were doing. The quality of many of the questions and comments from the floor was at the highest level. It was great fun to watch the free wheeling give and take between speakers, discussants, and the audience.
Readers of Liberty and Power may remember that I had a much more negative assessment of the recent annual conference of the Organization of American Historians in Boston.
All too often, the papers, comments, and discussion at the OAH seemed unable to break free from the iron triangle of race, class, gender or were constrained by stale quasi post-modernist jargon and priorities. As a result, much of the "discourse" had a formulaic and lifeless quality. As I mentioned, the result was often a strange disconnect with the "real world" and its concerns.
Why the difference? Part of the answer is that the participants at the Policy History Conference came from a variety of fields including political science and economics. This created an incentive for people to check their discipline's jargon at the door.
Frankly, the research into primary documents and thoughtul analysis by some of the "untrained" and younger political scientists would outclass the work of many experienced historians. A case in point was Ann-Marie Szymanski's wonderful paper on the history of private policing (more on this later for L and P readers).
Another reason the comparative superiority of the Policy History Conference was that the focus was on policy history. This served out to screen out possible participants who were inclined to the arcane and trendy.
Most of the credit, however, is due to the careful planning of the organizers, most especially Don Critchlow. They seem to have made an extra effort to seek out panelists who are pushing back intellectual frontiers but, thankfully, have not yet been cowed or constrained by academic fads or code words.
In the comments section of my prior post there is supposed to be a link to a
NYT
Magazine article. The article in question is a piece by Susan Sontag on the
Abu Ghraib pictures. Normally, Sontag is too over the top for me, but this piece
is about right. What's most interesting is her discussion of the way in which
digital technology and the net has changed the kinds of things soldiers can do.
They are, as she says, as much tourists as warriors. Combined with a culture
of "shamelessness" and an internet to spread them and the green light from above,
you get these pictures. And they won't go away. There will be more of them, speaking
the reality of what's happening there. This seems a particularly appropriate example of where Orwell got it so wrong.
Rather than technology leading to the centralization and monopolization of
information, particularly during war, it has led to the precise opposite. Technology
has been democratized by being so cheap, and as a result, information flows
from thousands and millions of points. The role of blogs in circumventing the
major media, for both the left and the right, is one example, and the Abu Ghraib
pictures are another. Though Sontag doesn't go quite this far, one way to view
this whole sequence of events is fairly positive - the truth is coming out
and the pressure of those pictures on our involvement there cannot be put back
in the tube. Technology will continue to put limits on what the state can do
and will continue to force open that which has been closed. The pictures of
Saddam's torture have long existed, and now it's "our" turn. Maybe next we'll see what goes on inside prisons in the US too. They could
use some sunlight.
I haven't blogged much about the war here because my opposition to it is less
strong than most of my co-bloggers. I described myself as "marginally opposed"
to the War in Iraq from the start, with the "marginally" mostly due to not
wanting to be associated with the variety of other questionable causes of the
anti-war
movement. I did and still do share the skepticism of many of you about the
ability of the US gov't to rebuild a nation when it can't even deliver the
mail. However,
I also believe that the demise of Saddam Hussein, taken in isolation, was a
significant step forward for human freedom, and was willing to be convinced
it might be worth it. I also have more sympathy for the plight
of Israel in the turmoil of the mid-east than perhaps others here do (obligatory
note: that does not let Israel off the hook for its many wrongdoings). In the last few weeks, however, I find myself becoming increasingly radicalized
in my opposition to the war. It's not just that the costs of the activity that
deposed a dictator are rapidly increasing, especially the body counts of both
American soldiers and innocent Iraqis, nor prison abuses in and of themselves,
nasty as they are. It's more a sense that this whole operation was done on
the fly, with no framing ethical or philosophical concerns (of course why I
or anyone should expect war to have such concerns is a good question, as I
awake from my slumbers...). Now, as more prison abuse stories come out (see
especially
this one on
the treatment of women prisoners), I'm more and more convinced that we don't,
and never did, know what we're doing there, and the result of that ignorance,
as it frequently is with state action, is that the "worst get on top" to paraphrase
a chapter title from Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. In the absence of
the requisite knowledge to do what is "right," those with a comparative advantage
in the making of war without concern about what's "right" will rise to the
top. When agents of the US government begin to use the same sorts of justification
for
the inhumane
treatment of prisoners that totalitarian regimes do, even if it's only a small
fraction of the military as a whole, then it's time to step back and ask just
what it's all about. If this is the road away from serfdom... no thanks. To quote one of the great
philosophers of the 20th century: I'll tip my hat to the new constitution .... Meet the new boss
Sontag on the Abu Ghraib Pictures
Me and the War in Iraq
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
Don't get fooled again
No, no!
Same as the old boss
Saturday, May 22, 2004
Stuff We Already Knew
I posted a few weeks ago on an MIT study which found that, surprise, smoking is cool. Now, a study from the Journal of Bioeconomics states in academese another rather intuitive truth. The name of the paper -- I'm not kidding -- is, "Surrender Value of Capital Assets: The Economics of Strategic Virginity Loss."
And here's the executive summary:
This paper provides the first econometric analysis of rationalizations of virginity loss in terms of love. Data from the UK National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles are used to estimate logit equations to predict the claim that virginity loss was occasioned by being in love. The sample consists of 2,269 males and 1,476 females between the ages of 16 and 59. In economic terms, a dichotomy is found in terms of male and female virginity loss, such that to a degree it is possible to infer that sex is for males more of a consumption good, whilst for females it is more of a capital good.Well yeah.
Hat tip: Mahalanobis.
Friday, May 21, 2004
Chortle
"George Bush starts sentences the way he starts wars, without any idea of how they will end."
--Eric Kenning, in Liberty.
US Foreign Policy: Biting the Hand that Feeds You
Chalabi, Chalabi, Chalabi. All Chalabi, All the Time. It's all over the news and even here.
I have to admit that I simply collapsed with laughter when I read this passage from today's NY Times editorial, entitled "Friends Like This":
Before the war, Ahmad Chalabi told Washington hawks exactly what they wanted to hear about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and the warm welcome American troops could expect from liberated Iraqis. They responded in kind, picturing Mr. Chalabi — who has lived most of his life outside Iraq and who was convicted in absentia in Jordan for bank fraud — as exactly the kind of secular Shiite to lead a new, democratic Iraq. Now reality has come crashing down on both sides, and the friendship has crumbled along with self-delusion. ... Lately, Mr. Chalabi — who has no genuine political base — has concluded that anti-Americanism is the key to political popularity. ... Many people in the Bush administration have been growing angry at the way Mr. Chalabi keeps biting the hand that fed him so well for so long.
"Biting the hand that fed him." HA! That is, quite possibly, an encapsulation of the whole history of US foreign policy: Putting money and material in the hands of people who come back to bite the hand, and several other aspects of the American anatomy, that feeds them. From Hussein himself to the mujahideen in Afghanistan ... this country has a remarkable track record. Let's see what new "friend" the US will climb into bed with in the coming months.
Why the Focus on Hitler?
Every time I've taught my Comparative Economic Institutions course, my favorite class day is the one where I ask precisely the question William does below: if Stalin's (and Mao's) crimes were worse than those of Hitler (at least the body count was several times higher), why are we so fascinated and stuck on Hitler as the symbol of totalitarian, murderous evil? I have my own set of 3 or 4 not mutually exclusive answers to that question, some obvious, some maybe not. The students always have interesting ideas, but what's more interesting is how they've never even considered the question before, nor really knew how bad Stalin really was. The latter point is the most troubling.
Why Does Nazism Still Fascinate Us?
More books and movies about Hitler, while the crimes of Stalin, far greater, are relatively ignored by the media.
Check out "The Nazi Seduction".
Thursday, May 20, 2004
What Doom Will Look Like This Time Around
Ron Bailey, the Science Editor of Reason Magazine, has an excellent review of Paul Ehrlich's new book, written with his wife, Anne, One With Ninevah in the May 20th Wall Street Journal, entitled "What Doom Will Look Like This Time Around."'
Ehrlich has an unbroken record since 1968 of being wrong about all of his predictions of "Doom and Gloom," He is, of course, a hero of the Environmetnalist movement and has received numerous awards including a MacArthur "genius" Prize. He predicted, for example, famine in the 1970s, while world food production has tripled since then. In the 1990s he lost a famous bet with the geographer Julian Simon since the world was not running out of a number of natural resources and minerals as preidicted by Ehrlich.
To read the article click here.
"Congress Must Curb A Runaway Executive"
Leon Fuerth, a former national security adviser to vice-president Al Gore, and a research professor of international affairs at the George Washington University, has an interesting article in the Financial Times May 19th.
He points out that the prisoner abuses in Iraq are not a mere anomoly, but, like much of the actions of the Bush administration, an example of the growig power of the Executive branch of government. Fuerth calls for the Congress to once agin reassert itself into the separation of powers, even as more judges are appointed sympathetic to the executive point of view.
"When Greenspan Really Gets Going"
Gerard Baker has a satirical pice in the Financial Times of May 19th. It is listed as an article dated March 27th, 2026, in which Alan Greenspan celebrates his 100th birthday and appoinment to an 11th term as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.
A quote attributed to Greenspan is indicative of how the Chairman can appear to be all things to all people, and remains the great obfuscator:
"There is proliferating evidence that centenarian policymaking is producing markedly salutary benefits on the long-run performance of the global economy. This transformation in the work-leisure balance of the superannuated is occurring without serious impairment to productivity levels and is significantly enhancing the prospects for intergenerational knowledge transfers,"
Human Intelligence
For two days, I sat, riveted, watching the 9/11 Commission hearings that took place in the auditorium of the New School, in Greenwich Village, NYC. These hearings were not broadcast on any of the networks nationwide, but there wasn't a single major network in this city that wasn't carrying it.
For all that has been said about yesterday's appearance by former NY Mayor Rudy Giuliani, one thing that has not been noted was Giuliani's insistence that the intelligence community needs to depend more on actual human beings to do the work of interpreting the mounds of information collected by a vast technological apparatus.
The problem, he said, was that too much of the government's efforts have gone into the technology of intelligence, but that there is no substitute for human intelligence: actual people who might infiltrate potential terrorist organizations to get the information that enables better, more accurate and effective interpretation of disparate bits of data.
When the debate centers around imminent threat or illusion, truth or lies, accurate intelligence can make all the difference between war and peace.
From Smarty Jones to Dumb Yankees
Gays are getting married legally in Massachusetts, and the dreaded apocalypse didn't happen. Three cheers for the stability of the republic, through social change, war, high oil prices, and presidential politics. We may even have a Triple Crown winner if the never-defeated Smarty Jones wins the Belmont Stakes in New York on the 5th of June! Go Smarty Jones!
Some things, however, speak to the very core of the social fabric. And so, though it pains me as a Yankees fan, I must speak out about the newest sacrilege to affect the Great American Pastime. Forget Spider-Man Logos on the Bases or the reversal thereof.
Recall the first stanza to that memorable American song, forever etched in the minds of seventh-inning-stretching fans across the nation, from L.A. to Chicago to Da Bronx:
Take me out to the Ballgame
Take me out with the crowd
Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack
I don't care if I never get back
Well. It seems that the High Priests in that Holy Cathedral of Baseball, Yankee Stadium, have ended their long-time affiliation with Cracker Jacks. Now, Crunch 'n Munch will be sold in place of Cracker Jacks. It seems that Crunch 'n Munch, produced by ConAgra, passed a taste test (I'll admit that Crunch 'n Munch is richer, though not necessarily better than Cracker Jacks). It also appears that Frito Lay, the producers of Cracker Jacks, moved to bags, rather than the much-preferred boxes. A ConAgra spokesman said: "We'd have no heartburn if Yankee fans started standing up in the seventh inning and singing 'Buy me some peanuts and Crunch 'n Munch'."
Well, we'd have to alter the lyrical line right after that one too, no? How about: "I don't care if I never get lunch." Or: "I don't care if I ever get punched." Or: "I don't care if I don't have a hunch!!!!!!!!!!!"
Cracker Jacks and baseball belong together. It is an internal relationship that constitutes an organic unity! What is wrong with these people!!???
U.S. Troops Raid Chalabi's House
The tragi-comedy of Ahmed Chalabi, former poster boy of the neo-cons, continues. Please remind me again: what benefits do we get by "staying the course in Iraq?"
Wednesday, May 19, 2004
The Designated Demolisher of USM
Shelby Thames, the tyrannical chief executive of the University of Southern Mississippi, indulges in the comically grandiose rhetoric we have come to expect from university presidents. He never stops talking about "growing" research; he likes to proclaim that USM is a "world class" institution. The cold fact is that most outside observers would rank USM third among the universities in Mississippi.
Thames may believe his own pronouncements; a few of his more gullible supporters may participate in the delusion. But he could not have become President of USM in 2002 , or remain in the job today, without the sponsorship of a majority on the Mississippi Institution of Higher Learning Board of Trustees. (Insiders say that this is a narrow majority, perhaps just 7 of the 12 trustees.) And a world-class University of Southern Mississippi is decidedly not what his sponsors on the Board want. What would be more to their liking is no USM at all.
Demographically and economically, the center of Mississippi has been shifting southward over the past century. Politically, power is still concentrated in northern and central portions of the state. In the state university system, which has been controlled by the present IHL Board since 1932, the University of Mississippi has always come first, Mississippi State (the land-grant, or A and M institution) has come second, then there have been all the rest. For years, in fact, the College Board carried a 13th trustee, who was there merely to vote on matters affecting the University of Mississippi. A lawsuit finally eliminated this particular way of signaling institutional priorities, and cut the number of trustees to the current 12.
Another source of pressure on USM has developed more recently, as community colleges and 2-year tech schools have grown in power in virtually every state. Just four years ago, a major conflict erupted over USM's plans to offer 4-year programs at its Gulf Park campus; this was turf that the community colleges on the Gulf Coast wanted to keep for themselves. Although USM won, the fight was bloody enough that it may have hastened the departure of Horace Fleming, USM's president from 1996 to 2001, and helped to pave the way for Thames' accession.
USM, which grew slowly from a teachers' college into a regular 4-year institution and finally into a university, has a blighted history even by Mississippi standards. As late as the early 1970s, the College Board was under the firm control of M. M. Roberts, an unrepentant White supremacist who blocked campus appearances by speakers affiliated with the Civil Rights movement long after the universities had been compelled to integrate. (USM's football stadium is named after him.) From 1955 to 1975, USM was under the iron control of General William McCain. While USM expanded during the McCain years, its faculty, staff, and students lived under a bizarre autocracy vividly commemorated in a 1982 book titled Exit 13, whose author, Monte Piliawsky, had the misfortune to be a junior faculty member at USM from 1970 to 1972.
Thames likes to pose as a forward-looking thinker, but when he is driven by anything besides sheer narcissism, it is a hankering for the USM of two generations past: a place with narrow horizons, no longer a college but not truly a university. He longs for an institution whose inmates will resign themselves to his tyranny because they are scarcely cognizant of better working conditions anywhere else. Thames learned from General McCain how to suppress dissent and run the faculty through a revolving door. He has fond memories of the day when there was no Faculty Senate, professors so foolish as to think they had academic freedom were quickly made to take their foolishness somewhere else, and the President censored the student newspaper or dissolved a Student Government that displeased him. Amidst the hullabaloo about his Vice-President's inflated resume, Thames no doubt remembers how McCain was caught plagiarizing two Master's theses nearly word-for-word in a journal article on Mississippi history, and got away scot-free.
Roy Klumb (and Carl Nicholson, a die-hard Thames supporter whose term on the Board recently ended) often come across like reactionaries pining for the Southern Miss of the McCain era. When Klumb proclaims, as he did on TV two weeks ago, that Thames was appointed to "clean house" at USM, he reminds the listener of M. M. Roberts longing to "clean house," so no outsiders would be allowed to speak on Mississippi state campuses, and African-American students couldn't write for student newspapers and criticize the administration. But we shouldn't be so hasty... For Klumb is a graduate of Mississippi State. And as two stories in today's newspapers indicate, he insists on the urgent need to get rid of the Athletic Director at his alma mater (over the wishes of Miss State's president), while denying any need to remedy the devastation that Shelby Thames has visited on USM.
Wherever Klumb and Nicholson stand, there can be little doubt about the other 5 (or more) trustees who supported Thames, and have yet to waver. They are not committed to the success of USM. Quite the contrary; they sense a threat to the hegemony of Ole Miss and Miss State. Thames is their best shot at neutralizing that threat: removing it from the scene entirely, or preparing a few interesting remnants for takeover by a favored institution. For instance, Miss State, which fervently resisted certifying Thames' treasured Polymer Science as an Engineering program, might be prevailed on to scoop that fragment up from the wreckage, once Thames is done smashing.
The Board would not have included anyone with Thames' atrocious management record on the short list for the Presidency of Ole Miss or Miss State. McCain allowed Thames to start his Polymer Science unit at USM after he had so thoroughly antagonized his colleagues in Chemistry that they voted unanimously to expel him from the department. Yet Thames was later elevated to a Vice President position, which he was allowed to retain after all but one of the administrators who reported to him gave President Aubrey Lucas their frank judgment that he was incapable of ever becoming a good manager. In 1986, after they had suffered under his yoke for two or three more years, Lucas finally fired him from an Executive Vice President position, on account of a scandal that has always been hushed up. When the Board turned to Thames in 2002, he had not held an upper administrative post for 16 years, and virtually no one at USM considered him fit for one.
Nor would members of the College Board be encouraging letter writers to denounce the faculty of Ole Miss or Miss State as lazy, unproductive, good-for-nothing whiners (as can be seen here, or in the letter by Williamson here). Indeed, the average USM faculty member teaches more Student Credit Hours, for less pay, than the average professor at Ole Miss or Miss State. Yet Shelby Thames has put out an appeal for such letters to the editor through the USM Alumni Association, whose official stand is neutrality on the major controversies of his Presidency. Roy Klumb has further encouraged such activity with his remarks in the media about "cleaning house" and his derogatory references to the "tenure club."
The Board members who favor Thames would not be installing presidents at Ole Miss or Miss State to purge the administration, faculty, and staff, and bark edicts at those they hadn't fired or run off. That is because they want Ole Miss and Miss State to prosper--and they want USM to fail.
Governing Boards of state universities inevitably make decisions on a political basis. Some believe that with 8 component insitutions, the state university system is overbuilt, in relation to the population and wealth of Mississippi. This may be true--but the only way to know for sure whether a state university system is overbuilt is to spin off the institutions and see how well they function, and how they change, after they become private. There is, however, no talk on the Board about letting USM sink or swim on its own, without either state appropriations or Board control. And the Board can't tear USM down unless it maintains control. It is clear, in any event, that the real agenda of the pro-Thames majority will not go over especially well in the southern third of Mississippi. I doubt it would go over well with Shelby Thames, if he could step out of his egomania long enough to appreciate the true nature of his political support.
The Mississippi College Board is meeting today; when its meeting continues tomorrow, it will be hearing a report from Shelby Thames about the "progress" that he is bringing to the University of Southern Mississippi. I will follow, in a day or two, with a report on the Board's response (and other significant events for USM during the week). Till then, check the USM AAUP Web site for the latest news.
Update--Thursday May 20, 9:03 PM. After the College Board heard Thames' report in a lengthy closed session, Roy Klumb, its President, announced this afternoon that the Board was continuing to support him. At this point the damage that Thames has done is clear and frank, and the divisions between him and the USM faculty are irreparable. Apaprently, though, the Board believes that Thames can carry on the rest of his demolition work without drawing too much unfavorable attention from the media. That remains to be seen. I predict that Southern Mississippi is in for a long, hot summer.
Will Bill Cosby be "Clarenced?"
A story in the Washington Post today indicates that Bill Cosby will soon be "Borked" (or should that be "Clarenced?"). At a ceremony at Constitution Hall marking Brown v. Board, he shocked the crowd by saying (among other things):
"Ladies and Gentleman, the lower economic people are not holding up their end of the deal. These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids -- $500 sneakers for what? And won't spend $200 for 'Hooked on Phonics.'....They're standing on the corner and they can't speak English."
Our Atlanta-Journal Constitution Op-Ed (Emmett Till)
Our op-ed arguing that the Emmett Till case is unlikely to be solved has appeared this morning in the Atlanta-Journal Constitution:
"The federal government’s decision to reopen the Emmett Till murder case has prompted much hope that justice will finally be served. While this optimism is understandable, our three-year investigation has led us to be skeptical about solving the mystery. We found and interviewed several key witnesses, two of whom were later interviewed by filmmaker Keith A. Beauchamp.
The theory that more than two people took part in the crime is not new. The two white defendants at the trial, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, later confessed after they were acquitted. In his testimony at the trial, Willie Reed, a black high school student, stated that he saw Milam and two or three other whites and three blacks (including Till) in a pickup truck in Drew, Mississippi several hours after the kidnapping. Reed stated that the truck pulled in an equipment shed in Drew, Mississippi and that he then heard sounds of a beating." Read the rest here.
Kristof's "Nuts with Nukes"
As my L&P readers are well aware, I've been recommending Nicholas D. Kristof's interesting NY Times series on Iran. Today's installment, "Nuts With Nukes," asserts in its very first line that there is only "one force that could rescue Iran's hard-line ayatollahs from the dustbin of history: us." Kristof argues that a confrontational position on Iran could embolden the mullahs by creating "a nationalistic backlash ... that will keep hard-liners in power indefinitely. Our sanctions and isolation have kept dinosaurs in power in Cuba, North Korea and Burma, and my fear is that we'll do the same in Iran." For Kristof, "regime change in Tehran" is a worthwhile goal, but a confrontational policy will "fail to get rid of either the nuclear program or this regime." He continues:
The only alternative is engagement — the precise opposite of the sanctions and isolation that have been U.S. policy under both Presidents Clinton and Bush. Sanctions are even less effective against Iran than against, say, North Korea, because Iran oozes petroleum and is independently wealthy. Isolation by the U.S. has accomplished even less in Iran than it has in Cuba. So we should vigorously pursue a "grand bargain" in which, among other elements, Iran maintains its freeze on uranium enrichment and we establish diplomatic relations and encourage business investment, tourism and education exchanges.
Kristof argues that a "money flood" of US investment would seriously undermine the theocratic stranglehold on the country. Quoting Hooshang Amirahmadi, the president of the American Iranian Council: "In just a few years, the conservatives would be finished."
All this remains to be seen. But there is something to be said about the intimate connection between free minds and free markets; the spread of the latter both reflects and reinforces the triumph of the former.
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
How India Funds Bush's Campaign
Asian Times May 19, 2004
How India funds Bush's campaign
By Siddharth Srivastava
NEW DELHI - There is more than one reason US President George W Bush should thank Indians, whether in the United States or India, as the buildup to elections in the US slated for November gathers steam. Indians are contributing handsomely to Bush's campaign funds while, until recently, there was a band of more than 100 dedicated call-center executives who were handling Bush's fundraising and vote-seeking campaign for the Republican Party from the outsourcing hubs of Noida and Gurgaon, which adjoin the national capital Delhi.
While the Internet provides fertile ground for spoofs on Bush's job being outsourced to India, his task is certainly being made a lot easier by Indians. Until recently, HCL eServe, the business process outsourcing (BPO) arm of Shiv Nadar-promoted HCL Technologies, handled Bush's nationwide fundraising campaign over the telephone.
HCL has been very reluctant to provide information about the project, but now that it is over it is more forthcoming, though strictly off the record. According to reports, for 14 months between May 16, 2002, and July 22, 2003, HCL eServe had more than 100 agents working in seven teams soliciting financial contributions for the Republican Party. A report that appeared in the Hindustan Times this Sunday says the task was to mobilize support for President Bush and solicit political contributions ranging between US$5 and $3,000 from legions of registered Republican voters. The report further adds that the voters' database was provided by the Republican National Committee (RNC), the party's premier political organization. The contract for running the campaigns was originally awarded by RNC to Washington-based Capital Communications Group, which provides consulting services to government and private clients for cultural and political networking. For cost and efficiency gains, the company outsourced the work to HCL Technologies, which in turn sent it offshore.
Nobody from HCL BPO Services is willing to go on record to talk about the deal, but sources in the company told Asia Times Online that such a project was under way for a long time, with more than 10 million registered Republican voters contacted for pledging funds. Estimates put the extent of funds pledged due to efforts from India at more than $10 million, with the retrieval of the money being followed up by the RNC. According to the sources, the calling process involved a high degree of automation in order to limit human intervention, with voice recording and recognition technology. In this way the US respondents would not have any idea where the calls were coming from, with foreign-accented instead of Indian voices being used.
HCL eServe also ran at least seven other campaigns to gauge voter moods, including simple yes-or-no polls on such issues as abortion rights. Though HCL executives are tight-lipped, there is a possibility that there are still some projects on hand, with respondents being asked about their views on the war in Iraq.
While it seems that the fundraising contract was called off because most Republican voters had been covered, sources also say that the backlash against outsourcing in the United States as well as pressure from the anti-outsourcing lobby within the Republican Party might have also contributed to the cancellation. It may be recalled that the Indian BPO sector has seen exponential growth over the past few years, with estimates that the information-technology-enabled sector will exceed $20 billion by 2008.
Bush's India connection, however, does not end with the call centers. There's also a lot of money being contributed by Indian-Americans.
It was former US president Bill Clinton who actively sought to build bridges as well as cultivate the Indian community in the United States, recognizing their numbers - more than 2 million - as well as their immense money-power as global information-technology (IT) pioneers. The 2004 US elections are witnessing Indian-Americans reaching out to Republican Bush as a reaction to the virulent anti-outsourcing campaign being orchestrated by Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. Further, given the strides that Indo-US relations have taken under Bush, politically, economically and militarily, the Indian community feels much more comfortable in maintaining this continuity. Bush has himself indicated his pro-India proclivities by promising that he will visit the country next year if he wins re-election. Although India has been unhappy with some of the recent steps taken by the Bush administration, including the granting of special non-NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) status to Pakistan, India's relations with the United States have been by and large on the ascent.
In an interview to the Economic Times before the results of the elections in India were declared, Sharad Lakhanpal of Texas, a doctor and president of the American Association of the Physicians of Indian Origin who is one of the biggest fundraisers for Bush, said: "Indo-US relations are at an all-time high under the current administration. There has been good chemistry between President Bush and the [Atal Bihari] Vajpayee government. President Bush told me himself that [Prime Minister] Vajpayee has been a good friend and is a good man.
"The current administration has appointed several Indian-Americans to high positions. The fundraising will pay dividends for the Indian-American community and for Indo-US relations if the president wins ... re-election. Indians are increasingly recognized in the mainstream US politics," Lakhanpal added.
Although business has reacted with alarm at the Sonia Gandhi Congress-Left combination taking over from the Vajpayee dispensation, there isn't likely to be much of a rollback in the economic reforms program in India. After all, the man tipped to be finance minister, Manmohan Singh, is the original architect of India's liberalization agenda.
Though Indian-Americans have been seen as close to the Democrats, it is estimated that the community has already raised more than $500,000 for the Bush campaign. Bobby Jindal, Republican candidate for Congress, raised more than $800,000 in the first quarter ending March 31, and has $760,000 cash on hand. More than $575,000 of the contributions came from Louisiana donors. A Republican rally in that state that raised more than $1 million for the 2004 Bush-Cheney presidential ticket late last year had several prominent Indians in attendance.
In a speech widely quoted in India, Congressman Joe Wilson recently praised Lakhanpal and Narender Reddy, a doctor from Georgia, for raising more than $100,000 each for the president and categorized them as Bush pioneers. He said longtime Bush supporters Zach Zachariah and Raghavendra Vijayanagar from Florida each raised more than $200,000, calling them the "Bush rangers". "These leaders have rallied the Indian-American community behind Bush," Wilson said.
Dr Vijaynagar serves as chair of the Indian American Republican Council, while Mammen Zachariah, a cardiologist at Holy Cross Hospital in Florida and Zach's brother, is a big fundraiser. Zach co-chairs Bush's Florida re-election campaign and his connection to the family dates back to George Bush Sr, for whom he organized several successful fundraisers. Zachariah also raised more money for Bush's 1992 campaign than any other individual. Florida Governor Jeb Bush appointed Mammen to the Florida campaign, while Zach helped found the Indian American Policy Institute, a think-tank to promote Indian-American interests, and chairs the Florida Council on Economic Education.
While praising the Indian community, Wilson, who co-chairs the Congressional Caucus on India and Indian Americans, said: "I am proud of the Indian-American community for their loyal support to President Bush."
It all augurs well for India if Bush is re-elected. If he is not, there will remain a bunch of call-center executives who will always be informed about the Republican way of electioneering.
Siddharth Srivastava is a New Delhi-based journalist.
Imminence and Intelligence
New York City television is currently blanketed with wall-to-wall coverage of the 9/11 commission hearings, which are taking place today in Manhattan. Seeing these images again of the attack on the World Trade Center, listening to a re-creation of the time-line of the events as they unfolded ... well. It's still painful, especially for those of us who lost colleagues, friends, and neighbors. Kudos to the commission chair, Tom Kean, for asking for a moment of silence. All the more reason, today, to continue our discussion of the nature of the current Iraq war, which, in my view, has little to do with the Al Qaeda attack on the United States.
Replying to an essay, "Lesser Evils," written by Michael Ignatieff, Irfan Khawaja asks: "Do We Have to Get Our Hands Dirty to Win the War on Terrorism? And What Does that Mean Exactly?" Khawaja, who is currently participating in a provocative discussion with Gene Healy and Keith Halderman, raises some troubling issues about ends and means, while defending the view that there is and should be no trade-off between "liberty" and "security."
Khawaja, however, is disturbed by those who use "imminent threat" as a litmus test for military action. He thinks that "imminence" remains either undefined or too loosely defined. He writes:
One difficulty here is that it’s not clear that the concept of imminence can consistently be applied before an event as opposed to after it. It is much easier to say that something was imminent than to say that it is—a serious liability for a concept with the strategic importance that “imminence” has now come to acquire.
The issue of "imminence" is, indeed, an epistemic one. That's why the accuracy and reliability of intelligence and the effectiveness of the intelligence community are so crucially important to our assessment of any risk as a clear and present danger to the lives and liberties of American citizens. In the context of Iraq, the US had to assess the probable existence of weapons of mass destruction, the ability of Hussein's regime to deliver such weapons in a first-strike against "US interests" (something that is, in this day and age, far more difficult to define than the doctrine of "imminence"), and the ties between Hussein's regime and other groups or states that have targeted US interests in the past, specifically the ties (or lack thereof) between Hussein and Al Qaeda.
Part of that assessment would have included Hussein's own testimony, which, as Khawaja argues, could not be trusted. While I agree that Hussein was a "liar" and a "serial miscalculator," as Khawaja observes, one thing seems certain: He put a high priority on his own survival, and boasted that because he survived the first Gulf War, he was actually the victor. It is for that reason that containment under threat of assured destruction works, even with the most irrational of people. Josef Stalin was, by all measures, a paranoid liar, and a more prolific murderer than Hussein, but he was "rational" enough to know that a strike against the US would have been met with massive and catastrophic retaliation.
In the end, however, the US did not have to rely on the rationality or believability of Hussein's claims; it needed to evaluate, as Gene Healy has done, Hussein's track record and the countervailing interests at work in the region, to assess the threat level. Considering the testimony of a parade of disgruntled former Bush administration employees, who have argued that the neoconservative policy-makers were hell-bent on going to war in Iraq, knowing full well that there was no connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attack, one must wonder if claims of "imminent threat" or "grave and gathering threat" were a mere cover for a predetermined course of action.
The US government had information at its disposal, in the days leading up to the invasion, which undermined its own case for invasion. But the administration chose not to place any priority on that information, selecting only those claims that bolstered its favored conclusions, in order to justify the commitment of tens of thousands of US troops to this nation-building folly. Even Colin Powell has said that the intelligence, which drew from Iraqi defectors who had a political agenda of their own, was "inaccurate and wrong and, in some cases, deliberately misleading."
Tragically, the US government disregarded accurate information or acted on misleading information in the Iraq war, while it ignored or failed to coordinate lots of information about explicit warnings that might have prevented the September 11th attack. That attack represents one of the greatest failures of government—to preserve, protect, and defend—in US history.
Free Speech at UA-Birmingham Post-Herald
Luke Connell of the Birmingham Post-Herald has written a concise account (scroll down on link) of the latest assault on free speech by the administration at the University of Alabama.
As the article indicates, the first reflex of UA's president and provost, on issues ranging from window displays to the Alabama Observer, is to ban and restrict any dissenting voice.
Fortunately, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has intervened on the side of the Alabama Scholars Association in this case. WMD found: Sarin gas causes mass destruction in Baghdad! Well, no, actually. A roadside bomb rigged with a sarin gas shell went off, and two U.S. soldiers were treated for "minor exposure." No casualties.
Warhawk triumphalism aside, this development hurts, rather than helps, the case for war. It underscores the point that, in the main, "WMD" is a misnomer as applied to chem/bio. Moreover, it shows that, if you are worried about so-called WMD, it would have been much smarter to leave them in the hands of the dictator who had repeatedly, exhaustively, despite every opportunity, demonstrated that he had no intention of using them on Americans. Like I've been saying. [cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Great care must be taken when drawing inferences about reality from works of fiction. But Ernest Hemingway offered a few lines near the end of For Whom the Bell Tolls that, when I read them, brought to mind the events in Iraq.
He mentions "the despair from the sorrow that soldiers turn to hatred in order that they may continue to be soldiers." And then, even more powerfully, Hemingway insists that a soldier in battle must "get rid" of himself: "the always ridding of self that you had to do in war. Where there could be no self. Where yourself is only to be lost."
....
Hawks can interpret Hemingway's insight as supplying an excuse for behavior such as that in the Abu Ghraib prison. Soldiers, after all, are human and such loss of self -- such loss of a self's humanity -- is one of the regrettable costs of war. In stark contrast, doves might respond that any experience that so surely and so severely sucks humanity out of individuals is one that should be embarked upon only as an utterly final resort.
I’m with the doves.
There is a really provocative discussion of Islamic philosophy going on at SOLO HQ, featuring our very own Roderick Long. Check out the dialogue here, here, and here, especially.
Meanwhile, in response to the charges of those who argue that Al Qaeda is in Iraq, as if this were proof of a link between the Hussein regime and Bin Laden, I posted the following comments:
Monday, May 17, 2004
WMD Found.... Not to Be WMD
Fogbound
The latest issue (Summer 2004) of the Laissez Faire Books catalogue carries, on p. 46, a condensed version of my article "Roads to Fascism: Sixty Years Later." For the complete version, see here or here.
Lew Rockwell reminds us that while attention focuses on the Iraqi prisoners mistreated at Abu Ghraib, the thousands of Iraqi civilians slaughtered by U. S. troops pass unremarked in the press.
I'm off to London tomorrow -- back in a week!
Hemingway on War
The Spread of Al Qaeda-ism
There is no doubt that Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda-aligned groups are now in Iraq. But there was no evidence of any formal relationship between Hussein and Al Qaeda; those Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda-aligned terrorist groups that did exist in Hussein's Iraq, were centered not in the Sunni triangle or the Shi'ite dominated South; they were found mostly in the Kurd-dominated Northern sections of the country. It is only now, in the chaotic aftermath of the invasion, that Al Qaeda-aligned groups are becoming more prevalent in Iraq. With the Al Qaeda-described "infidel," Saddam Hussein, now in US custody, a power-and-ideological vacuum exists, attracting all sorts of savagery.
But this is not an illustration of the simplistic "magnet theory": that by stationing thousands of US forces in Iraq, Iraq will become a "magnet" for terrorists, and the US will have simply brought the war to them, rather than being the battleground itself. Al Qaeda is not in one place at one time. And there is something far more insidious than the existence of Al Qaeda or an Al Qaeda-aligned network, and that is: the spread of Al Qaeda-ism. And therein lies the horrific scope of the problem: as this particular shade of militant fundamentalism takes root throughout the Muslim world (which has virtually no geographic limitations, since it stretches from the Middle East to the Asian Pacific to North America), Osama Bin Laden will matter less and less, except, perhaps, as a symbolic "leader" of this maniacal sect. The decentralized cells of a poisonous ideological movement will be more self-motivated to undertake localized strikes against the Great Satan.
We will never live in a risk-free world. All the more reason to embrace long-run policies that minimize the points of political and military contact, while maximizing the points of cultural and social contact, with the Muslim world. Nothing less than an ideological and cultural revolution abroad (and at home) will do.
Sunday, May 16, 2004
Emmett Till Investigation (Continuing Doubts)
A story in today's Chicago Sun-Times by Debra Pickett quotes my views on the Emmett Till investigation . I address the question of whether it will produce any satisfactory results.
As we (David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito) said in our longer piece for HNN which describes our investigation of the case, we doubt that it will. At the University of Southern Mississippi an uneasy stalemate now prevails,
as just a few days remain until the next meeting of the Mississippi College Board.
On May 19th and 20th the Board is slated to review the performance of President Shelby Thames. Thames has sustained a series of losses over the past two and a half weeks: The good news for Thames over that period was twofold: Over the past week Thames has been cranking out press releases, in order to produce
the impression of
remaining in control. On Monday May 10 he issued a challenge to the USM Faculty Senate, which
he had stopped talking to altogether after it first voted no confidence in him back in March.
Thames sent FS President Myron Henry the following memo: This is a truly remarkable request. University presidents far less autocratic than
Thames jealously reserve
strategic planning to themselves and their upper administrators. And the mere thought of
the Faculty Senate making plans to lobby the state legislature, or presenting proposals to a
system Board of
Trustees, makes a state university president reach for the sleeping pills.
Presidents also prefer to withhold the data
that would be needed to make well-informed decisions about such matters. It is a safe bet
Shelby Thames has no genuine interest in any strategic plans that might emanate from the Faculty
Senate.
Apparently he crafted the memo to project a semblance of cooperation where none is truly
intended. Perhaps,
too, he expects to be able to denounce the Faculty Senate for failure to produce a strategic
plan, when it comes time for him to disband that body. Yet the memo affords major opportunities to the USM Faculty Senate, which can now
plausibly demand large amounts of additional data from
Thames and his administrators, on the grounds that they are needed to do the planning.
The Senate can also produce concrete plans to cut administration, targeting specific
positions for elimination and showing how much money will be saved by doing so. For instance,
they can now propose eliminating the Director of Risk Management position, which has been
vacated by Jack Hanbury, and redirecting the $140,000 expended on Hanbury's salary
into three faculty positions. A well
thought-out response will make Thames regret dreaming up his memo. On Wednesday May 12, Thames convened the first meeting of his President's University Council,
which consists of 18 faculty, student, and staff representatives hastily chosen by the deans.
The much-ballyhooed council consumed an agenda-less hour, which was taken up with communication
workshop exercises,
directed by a functionary from Human Resources,and films about the need to accept
organizational change. Here is how a visitor to the meeting described
it on the
Fire Shelby message board: Attempts by a couple of the representatives to bring up real concerns were deflected by
a Thames supporter as "rehashing old issues." The best
one-sentence summary came from another message board contributor: "This meeting sounds like
something fit for Saturday Night Live." It is possible that USM's genuine problems will get discussed at a subsequent PUC meeting,
but no one ought to bank on it. Seen purely as a public relations move, it was a mixed success.
The Biloxi Sun Herald published a
credulous treatment; the Hattiesurg American countered with a
skeptical editorial. On Thursday May 13, the Thames administration
announced the formation of
Noetic Technologies, a private company under exclusive contract to the university
to market patented inventions
developed at USM or given to it by corporate donors. The venture is described
as the "marketing arm" of the USM Research Foundation, which in turn is
controlled by Angie Dvorak. The issues raised when universities get
into the intellectual property business are serious and complex, and really need an extended
discussion of their own. So do the conflicts of interest that arise when full-time, permanent
employees
of a university open profit-making businesses that market products related to their work for the
university. But what makes Noetic Technologies stand out is that its principals are not
researchers. All
three are full-time administrators, hired since Thames took over. Les Goff, the
President and CEO of Noetic Technologies, is also the Director of Innovation and Business
Ventures at USM, reporting to Vice President for Research Angie Dvorak; Goff's wife,
Sarah Morgan, is an Assistant Professor of Polymer Science, also
recently hired under the Thames regime. Kelli Booth, another principal in Noetic,
is the Coordinator for Marketing Development in Polymer Science; her husband, Ken Malone,
holds multiple offices under Thames, mostly prominently as "Chief Operating Officer" at
the Gulf Park satellite campus and Chair of the Department of Economic Development. The third
principal in Noetic is Vance Flosenzier, the recently hired Director of Process Technology in
the Department of
Economic Development; his wife Diana Flosenzier is a Grant Proposal Specialist in
Polymer Science. Vance Flosenzier is also
one of several administrators whose salary and source of funding Thames recently refused
to disclose to the Faculty Senate. Friday May 14 was
graduation day at USM. Protests weren't loud, but they did take place. Some students
refused to shake Shelby Thames' hand after receiving their diplomas. One of the
many faculty members now leaving USM unfurled a "No Quarter" banner; derived from a statement
by William Lloyd Garrison, this has become
the leading anti-Thames slogan. In my next entry, I'll try to answer a question that brings sorrow to nearly everyone in the
USM community, and puzzlement to outside observers:
Given his long track record of alienating colleagues, and
performing disastrously in upper administrative
positions, why did the Mississippi College Board pick Thames as President in 2002?
And why is a slim majority on
the Board still supporting him, despite the pounding he is now taking in the media, and
the major damage he has inflicted on the university? In the meantime, follow the breaking news on the Web site of the
USM chapter of the American Association of University Professors.
Uneasy Stalemate at USM
Dear Dr. Henry:
With the end of the spring semester nearing, I know the Faculty Senate is
making plans for the upcoming academic year. As you make those plans, I am
requesting that you develop and provide me your mission, vision, goals, and
strategies for the upcoming year. Please include with your goals and strategies
how you plan to assist the University in working with the Board of Trustees of the State
Institutions of Higher Learning and the Legislature to increase salaries of University employees,
to implement a more equitable funding formula and to maximize our student recruitment efforts.
Knowing the Faculty Senate's goals and objectives as well as plans to reach
them will allow us to pool our resources and enhance our effectiveness, thereby
enabling timely and improved results in the execution of our University mission.
Please have this information to me no later than Monday, July 5, 2004.
As the new fiscal year begins, I ask that the new president provide me with a
written monthly update regarding the Faculty Senate's progress in meeting their goals.
Additionally, the Faculty Senate representative will be asked to give an update at all
Cabinet meetings so that the entire University community can be informed of your successes.
If you have any questions or need any clarifications regarding my request, please
feel free to call me at 266-5001.
Shelby F. Thames
PresidentHer talk was about - you guessed it - communicating. She promptly asked for two
volunteers from
the mostly stone-faced membership of PUC. After some hesitation and additional nudging -
yes, just like in the kindergarten - two people stepped forward and received brief
whispered instructions on what to do. One volunteer left the room and the second started
approximately like this: "Turn your notepad to an empty page. Now take a pencil and draw a
horizontal rectangle about 1.5" by 2.5" in the middle of the page, a little to the
left. Now connect the upper left corner with the lower right corner and then do the same
with the other two corners. So you will have a kind of X sign in the rectangle. Now draw a
vertical rectangle, about 1 by 3, on the left side of the horizontal one, so that they touch."
It would be too draining to go through the details. At the end we were supposed to have about
4 or 5 rectangular shapes in some kind of pattern. My guess is that this was supposed to show
the importance and - at the same time - lability of verbal communication
(the volunteer was not allowed to use hands, just words).
Imperialism Loses, Again!
Yesterday in the Preakness, "Smarty Jones" blew away the field winning by 11 and a half lengths, a new record. "Imperialism" finished out of the money.
Now the Question of the Day is, did Bush, Rummy, Wolfie, Condi & all the Neocon tooters for Empire bet on their nag Imperialism, or even go out to Maryland to see him run?
Saturday, May 15, 2004
More Kristof, More Iran
As a follow-up to my posts on important changes in Iran, take a look at Nicholas Kristof's ongoing series in today's NY Times. In "Velvet Hand, Iron Glove," Kristof inadvertently makes a Hayekian-friendly point about how the radical dispersal of knowledge and information is contributing to the unraveling of a repressive regime. As people get information from sources other than the regime, that regime becomes more unstable. The Iranian press may not be "free," but the proliferation of the Internet, blogs, and satellite TV is having an insidious effect on the regime's legitimacy.
As Kristof puts it, if the Iranian theocracy constituted
an efficient police state, it might survive. But it's not. It cracks down episodically, tossing dissidents in prison and occasionally even murdering them (like a Canadian-Iranian journalist last year). But Iran doesn't control information—partly because satellite television is ubiquitous, if illegal—and people mostly get away with scathing criticism as long as they do not organize against the government.
Kristof continues to maintain
that the Iranian regime is destined for the ash heap of history. An unpopular regime can survive if it is repressive enough, but Iran's hard-liners don't imprison their critics consistently enough to instill terror. ... In the end, I find Iran a hopeful place. Ordinary people are proving themselves irrepressible, and they will triumph someday and forge a glistening example of a Muslim country that is a pro-American democracy in the Middle East.
TOC's Hudgins Gets it Right
As many of my L&P readers know, I have been extremely critical of a number of Randian commentators who have not shown enough sensitivity to the enormously complex issue of bringing "freedom" to the Islamic-dominated countries of the Middle East.
So it is only fair that I highlight an essay with which I do agree, in large measure. Edward Hudgins of The Objectivist Center has written an insightful essay that asks the following question: "Are the People of the Middle East Fit for Freedom?."
While Hudgins addresses the horrors and scandal of Abu Ghraibgate in fine fashion, he also argues that the "governments of most Middle East countries to varying degrees abuse and repress their own citizens, and have few mechanisms to redress abuses. Citizens of those countries who act to reform their governments often find themselves censored, jailed or worse." Hudgins sees, quite correctly, that politics is an expression of culture:
These governments reflect the values and cultures in those countries. ... The most active opponents of repressive governments often are radical Islamists who want to establish even more repressive dictatorships. Many individuals in those countries give their first loyalty to a tribe, ethnic group or religion, not to universal principles that apply to all people and at all times. Outsiders are viewed at best with suspicion and at worst as worthy of nothing but painful death.
Hudgins goes on to cite a number of surveys regarding attitudes toward arbitrary violence in the Middle East; an overwhelming majority of those surveyed in even "moderate" Arab countries believe that suicide bombings against Americans and Israelis are justified; and over 63 per cent favored Saudi Arabian, Syrian or Egyptian dictatorial models of government, rather than a US model.
Bush has argued that those who believe that the people of Iraq are unfit for freedom are a bit elitist, or maybe, even "racist," in their assumptions. (Arthur Silber demolishes "The Racist Smear," as part of his continuing examination of "The Roots of Horror," here.) While Hudgins applauds Bush's view that each individual deserves freedom, he asks, quite directly: "Are the people of Iraq and other countries in the region fit for freedom?"
For Hudgins, this is not an issue of race. It is an issue of culture, precisely what I and others have been arguing now for over a year. Hudgins writes: "Any given Iraqi, Arab or Muslim might well want to live in peace with his or her neighbors, foreign and domestic. But can we really expect limited governments that respect individual liberty and ban arbitrary force to be established in countries in which those principles are not written in the hearts and minds of ... enough of their citizens?" While Hudgins applauds those seeking to establish free societies in these countries, "we must understand," he explains, "that the people of these countries ultimately must create for themselves modern, civil societies and governments in their own cultural and historical contexts. If we fail to appreciate the limits of the ability of we Americans—the outsiders—to transform dysfunctional countries, we will only slow rather than hasten the day of those countries' true liberation."
To which I must add: Amen.
Thomas Sowell Now One of the Anointed
Apparently, one of the casualties of the war in Iraq has been the intellect of Thomas Sowell. On Thursday the Washington Times published a column by Sowell which argued that the messenger deserved the blame for the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. He wrote, “What the media did, irresponsibly, was send inflammatory photographs around the world.”
Sowell goes on to suggest that it would have been better to wait until after those responsible had been punished before making the pictures freely available. He asks the question, ”If a colonel is conducting a court martial and the generals over him are publicly denouncing those on trial, will that be considered a fair trial whose verdicts will stand up on appeal?”
In the first place, it is extremely doubtful that anyone would have had a court marital without the release of the photos. There may have been some low level non-judicial punishment done quietly but those responsible, those who gave the orders, would have had nothing to fear. Because these photographs have garnered so much attention it will be much more difficult to summarily penalize the enlisted personnel and stop there. After all, the media is talking about over 1800 photographs and that is not the work of a few rogue guards that is the work of a system. Also, while we are worrying about fair trials for the guards let us take a moment to remember that none of the Iraqi participants in the naked pyramids had any kind of trial, impartial or otherwise.
Sowell asserts, ”it is not too much to ask of the rest of us back home to act like adults and put things in perspective.” Well, what about the perspective of the nude Iraqi prisoner attached to a leash in the hands of a female guard? And, I would venture to say that a large percentage of the people being held at Abu Ghraib prison are there for one of four reasons: they were a government employee, they had the wrong associate, they angered an American soldier at a checkpoint, or they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Consider the possibility that the reason the military had to go to such lengths to get information out of these detainees is because many of them do not really know anything.
It saddens me to read such partisan drivel coming from the pen of Thomas Sowell. As a corrective, I am going to recommend that he go back and reread one of his own works, the brilliant and very insightful The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy. On page 8 of the hardback edition Sowell talks about patterns of failure and he maintains that, ”A very distinct pattern has emerged repeatedly when policies favored by the anointed turn out to fail.” He lists four stages the crisis, the solution, the results, and the response.
In the case before us, Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction provided the crisis. Sowell argues that ”a situation is routinely characterized as a ‘crisis’ even though all human situations have negative aspects, and even though evidence is seldom asked or given to show how the situation at hand is either uniquely bad or threatening to get worse” During the entire build up to the war I never heard one reporter or public official ask the anointed George Bush why would Saddam Hussein, a man obsessed with his own personal survival, attack the most powerful nation on earth? In addition, when we consider the weapons Hussein had at his disposal in 1990 and the absence of WMDs found during the current occupation we must conclude that the situation, called a crisis, was actually improving.
As far as the solution and results stages go, the anointed promised us happy grateful Iraqis peacefully working with us on their new democratic paradise. Instead, we got 700 plus and counting dead American soldiers, a beheaded American civilian and no end to the violence in sight.
In the response stage the critics of the policies have their arguments dismissed out of hand, they retain the burden of proof. However, as Sowell points out, ”No burden of proof whatever is put on those who had so confidently predicted improvement.” The anointed imperialists who argued that the country’s safety hung in the balance, have never had to prove that their invasion has somehow made America safer. It is a good thing for them too, because they could not do that.
Friday, May 14, 2004
"Exterminate All the Brutes"
Apropos of the war-and-human-nature discussion going on these past weeks, here's the Toledo Blade's four-part series on war crimes by "Tiger Force," an elite U.S. Army unit in the Vietnam War. (The series earned the Blade a Pulitzer this year). Links to the whole thing can be found here. There's so much in it that's horrific, it's hard to figure out what to excerpt. But here's the broad outline of the story, followed by some details:
The platoon - a small, highly trained unit of 45 paratroopers created to spy on enemy forces - violently lost control between May and November, 1967.
For seven months, Tiger Force soldiers moved across the Central Highlands, killing scores of unarmed civilians - in some cases torturing and mutilating them - in a spate of violence never revealed to the American public.
They dropped grenades into underground bunkers where women and children were hiding - creating mass graves - and shot unarmed civilians, in some cases as they begged for their lives.
They frequently tortured and shot prisoners, severing ears and scalps for souvenirs.
... William Doyle, a former Tiger Force sergeant now living in Missouri, said he killed so many civilians he lost count.
"We were living day to day. We didn't expect to live. Nobody out there with any brains expected to live," he said in a recent interview. "So you did any goddamn thing you felt like doing - especially to stay alive. The way to live is to kill because you don't have to worry about anybody who's dead."
Time and again, Tiger Force soldiers talked about the executions of captured soldiers - so many, investigators were hard pressed to place a number on the toll.
In June, Pvt. Sam Ybarra slit the throat of a prisoner with a hunting knife before scalping him - placing the scalp on the end of a rifle, soldiers said in sworn statements. Ybarra refused to talk to Army investigators about the case.
...
Former platoon medic Larry Cottingham told investigators: "There was a period when just about everyone had a necklace of ears."
Records show soldiers began another gruesome practice: Kicking out the teeth of dead civilians for their gold fillings.
As the Blade establishes, much of this was known--and known at the highest levels. The Army undertook a 4 1/2 year investigation--an investigation that the White House, including John Dean, received briefings on. But the Army purposely squelched any attempt at disciplinary action.
I keep hearing about what a disloyal jackass John Kerry is for telling lurid tales of wartime atrocities when he returned from Vietnam. But for all the tall tales and amplified rumors he traded in, it's worth remembering that things like this went on. If what we've seen so far at Abu Ghraib is the worst prisoner-abuse to emerge from this war, we can count ourselves and the Iraqis lucky.
I don't mean to wax Chomskyite. There's no military force on the planet I'd feel safer surrendering to in wartime. We are and have nearly always been better than our wartime enemies. But at bottom, we're made of the same raw material.
Nick Berg
The Nick Berg story gets weirder by the minute. 9/11 connections, his parents are members of ANSWER, and his father apparently said he was a "friend" of al-Qaeda and Iraq.
Read here, here, here, and here.
At first, I thought this was the stuff of your usual nutso conspiracy theorists. But it's looking more and more like there are some decidedly weird angles to this story.
UPDATE: In the comments section of my website, "Dave" points to this bizarre bit from a CNN story on one of the court martialled soldiers in Abu Ghraib:
Paul Bergrin, attorney for Davis, said his client was ordered to do what he did, but denied Davis "committed any criminal acts."I guess that might lend some support to the circulating conspiracy theories....Davis' superiors, Bergrin said, told the specialist it was important to "break the prisoners" in order to "save the lives of innocent soldiers on the outside and civilians and individuals like Nicholas Berg."
Berg was the Pennsylvania businessman whose beheading was posted on a Web page this week. The Abu Ghraib abuses depicted in the photographs took place last fall.
Of course, it could also mean that Davis should get himself a competent lawyer.
They're Coming for Your Beer
Here comes the first big wave of lawsuits:
Consumers' attorneys across the nation have begun to target the alcoholic beverage industry, filing lawsuits that claim that some leading brewers and distillers are using slick advertising to sell products to underage drinkers.The CAMY and CASA studies the anti-alcohol lawyers are basing their suits on are complete bosh, and I discussed and debunked both in my neoprohibition paper.Lawsuits filed since November in Ohio, California, North Carolina, Colorado and Washington, D.C., appear modeled after cases that were brought against the tobacco industry beginning in the mid-1980s. Those suits focused on youth-oriented ads and sought huge damages for tens of thousands of underage smokers and their parents. The tobacco lawsuits led to a settlement in 1998 in which tobacco companies agreed to pay $246 billion to state governments to cover health care costs and other smoking-related expenses.
Secondhand Blowback
Since 9/11, any mention of violence against Americans as "blowback" from our foreign policy has triggered cries from the conservative crowd of treachery. Merely suggesting that we ought not needlessly provoke militant Muslims into further wanting to killing us has always been met with words like "appeasement," "capitulation," and "kowtowing."
Funny how attitudes change when the provocation comes from the news media instead of Republican foreign policy.
The latest meme from the pro-war side says that the media -- 60 Minutes in particular -- should have sat on the Abu Ghraib pictures because airing them has inflamed the Muslim world, and will likely spark retribution against U.S. troops and American citizens -- see Nick Berg.
Jonah Goldberg's latest column contains this sentence:
"Well, CBS' scoop has gotten someone killed and there will be more deaths, on both sides, as a result of this story before it becomes history.Goldberg and others have suggested that a simple description of the pictures and abuses would have been sufficient, without airing the photos. I disagree.
Human rights groups have been reporting abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo for months. The military has known about Abu Ghraib since January. We heard nothing of any courts martial between then and now. Then, less than a week after 60 Minutes broke the story, the Pentagon announces the first round of charges. I doubt that's mere coincidence.
These charges against the press are all the odder considering that conservatives were quick to point out after the abuses came to light that we're different from Iraq and much of the rest of the Middle East in that we expose these kinds of things, we throw light on them, and we then hold responsible those who were accountible (I agree, by the way). You can't make that point, then follow up with an argument against releasing the photos to the public in the first place.
The pictures were needed to get our attention, which was necessary for us to demand accountability from our government and our military.
I don't doubt that those pictures will further inflame Muslim ire. I don't doubt that they'll get plenty more Americans killed. But that abuse -- even filmed and taped abuse -- would crop up somewhere in a fighting force of some 130,000 troops was inevitable. Just the law of averages that you'll get some bad eggs. Our military and political leaders should have anticipated and calculated that risk into the original decision to invade Iraq. War is ugly. It spawns ugly pictures. Ugly pictures don't win us friends. Which is (merely one reason) why we ought to be awfully selective about when and where we go to war in the first place.
It's looking more and more like the abuses at Abu Ghraib were far more widespread than we'd like to believe. Reports of the latest round of pictures suggest that the abuse wasn't the result of expressed or implied military policy, but of massive, wholesale dereliction of duty and lack of supervision from commanding officers. We had truck drivers, restaurant managers, and auto mechanics supervising POWs and captured combatants -- folks with little or no training whatsoever in what they were being asked to do. Anyone who's taken a 100-level psych course has read about the Stanford Prison Experiment. Why were these people assigned to guard the prison? Are we stretched that thin?
But I digress.
My point here is that actions either have consequences, or they don't. If CBS should have considered anti-American blowback when deciding whether or not to air those photos, our elected leaders ought to keep the same thing in mind when deciding to what extent we should fund/support Israel, what Arab country we ought to invade next, and when and where to position our troops in the Middle East.
It's unfathomable to me that considering how our actions might resonate with people who don't much like us should factor into whether news executives decide to hold our military accountable, but not into how, when, and where we use that same military in the first place.
FIRE Opposes University of Alabama Censorship
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, headed by Alan Kors, has launched a full-scale campaign against the University of Alabama's violation of the free speech rights of the Alabama Scholars Association.
I am a member of that organization as is my fellow L and P blogger Charles W. Nuckolls. We greatly appreciate the help from FIRE. The campus administration here is worse than most. Lest we forget our history this is not the first time that the U.S. government has made indefensible moral decisions under some half-baked rationalization to defend American interests. As bad as beating and abusing Iraqi prisoners is, it's nothing compared to the choices U.S. intelligence made after World War II when we knowingly allowed Nazi war criminals to emigrate to the U.S. Of course we've known some of this for a while, but a new collection entitled U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis reveals the full scope of American activities on the behalf of Nazi war criminals who were deemed as "useful" in our fight against the Soviets.
The face of the American intelligence apparatus can change over time from J. Edgar Hoover to George "Slam Dunk" Tenet. However the disturbing indifference to simple moral rules should give us all tremendous reluctance to believe just about anything that comes out of the mouths of the American "Intelligence" community. Just a brief note to mention the brilliant cover of this month's Reason magazine.
The cover of my issue says "STEVE HORWITZ: They know where you are!" above
that is a satellite shot of Canton with my street circled in red. You can pick
out my house. Inside the front cover is a customized intro letter from Nick
with all kinds of data about Canton. They did this for all 40,000 subscribers
as part of a feature on databases and privacy etc..
It is very, very cool, and just a tad scary.
Hat tip to David
Post at Volokh, whose post caused me to actually look at the cover after
I threw it on the coffee table with the rest of the mail.
One unfortunate byproduct of recent disasters in Iraq is that it some of the worst qualities of many conservatives have come to the surface.
For a recent example, see John Derbyshire's cynical vent on Abu Ghraib at The Corner on National Review Online: "Good. Kick one for me. But bad discipline in the military (taking the pictures, I mean). Let's have a couple of courts martial for appearance's sake. Maximum sentence: 30 days CB." Here's a group of people who probably never thought that free trade would harm them - Czech prostitutes. How long before we see them protesting with the anti-globalization luddities because they can't ply their trade because of open borders. Labor unions, watermelon environmentalists and hookers all part of the anti-globalization forces. Sounds like the group is at least getting potentially more fun after the rallies. It's P.T. Barnum time on Capitol Hill. The famous circus entrepreneur was once quoted as saying that "there's a sucker born every minute," and that's the only way to justify the bizarre justifications given my members of Congress defending the administration's decision to not release any of the additional photos of prisoner abuse in Iraq. Among the better excuses mentioned, the prisoner's civil rights (?????) and inciting the enemy (as if that hasn't already happened).
All of this reminds me, strangely, of a book Sam Smith wrote about the Chicago Bulls in the early 1990's with Michael Jordan. In The Jordan Rules Smith recalled an incident at Bulls practice in which Jordan punched out a teammate prompting the Bulls to close practices for "privacy" reasons. His explanation "we can't let people see this stuff."
People have a right to know what government employees are doing to Iraqis we are supposedly trying to help. Failure to release those photos violates the most fundamental duty of an elected government - to be responsible to us, their alleged bosses. This latest Washington Post poll of Iraqis is perhaps the best response to the person who argues that "I opposed the war but we have to stay until we create a more stable Iraq." Sticking around actually makes this goal less likely to achieve. How can we create a more stable Iraq if the presence of our troops leads more Iraqis hate us all the time?
As I have said, sometimes when digging a hole, it is best to climb out rather than keep digging. I saw the 1998 movie "The Siege" on USA network last night. Pre-9/11, it's just another "Peacemaker" or "Sum of All Fears"--distinguished principally by the filmmakers' politically incorrect decision to cast terrorists that aren't some variety of Slav. Post-9/11, it's as close to prescient as Hollywood gets.
* Terrorism that's mostly low-tech, yet nonetheless terrifying; bus bombings, buildings levelled (including FBI counterterrorism headquarters) and no supervillain WMD;
* Terrorism that's decentralized and cellular, and that feeds off of military attempts to neutralize it: "Is this the last cell?" "There is no last cell!!"
* Terrorists that make no demands for concessions and no attempt to negotiate, but simply seek to kill as many Americans as possible, as visibly as possible;
* Calls to repeal the Posse Comitatus Act--opposed, but nonetheless acquiesced to, by the military establishment;
* Annette Bening protesting to bad guy Samir that "Islam is a religion of peace!" and getting punched in the face for her trouble;
By the time they show the Army interrogating a jihadist and having the Dershowitz debate with considerably less moral agonizing, I'd have been floored if I wasn't already couched. The guy's tied to a chair, naked.
Sure, the notion of the FBI as the guarantor of our liberties and the American way of life was tough to credit. But otherwise, I can't think of another major motion picture that got so many predictions so right.
One wrong note: In contrast with the events of 9/11, many of the terrorists are Iraqis, enraged by U.S. foreign policy. But here again, it may be prescient. As W. S. Gilbert put it in Ruddigore:
So here goes: A page of links to my writings on psychiatric and medical issues has been added to the Thomas S. Szasz Cybercenter for Liberty and Responsibility website. The specific page is here. I know these have been an extraordinarily difficult couple of weeks for you, and I'm very sorry about that. The unending fighting in Iraq after we've been there for over a year, the accelerating race to the June 30 deadline -- even though we don't seem to have the slightest idea who or what it is we're going to be turning "sovereignty" over to or what the hell that "sovereignty" might consist of, the inability of our Secretary of Defense to figure out even what the military chain of command might be (you'd think he'd at least know that, right, since he is the Secretary of Defense and all? -- but maybe he doesn't want to go into it too much, since it appears that chain might lead to, whaddya know, General "Satan Is Our Enemy" Boykin), and then those pictures from Abu Ghraib. And we're told there are much worse photos to come: of rape, and perhaps even of murder.
Into this very demoralizing mix came the video of the beheading of Nick Berg. And in an odd, disturbing way, while you proclaimed the horror and revulsion that we all feel at this particularly barbaric death, it almost seemed that this stomach-churning snuff video provided a much-needed sense of justification for the policies you support. As White House press secretary Scott McClellan said, " It shows the true nature of the enemies of freedom. They have no regard for the lives of innocent men, women and children. We will pursue those who are responsible and bring them to justice." (Some people, meanwhile, had a somewhat more clinical and even self-admittedly cold view of Mr. Berg's fate. Whatever one might think of that perspective, at least it is grounded in facts, which seems to be more than can be asked of many others at this particular moment.)
And our philosopher-king President says that, "[t]here is no justification for the brutal execution of Nicholas Berg, no justification whatsoever," as if we might not realize that on our own.
Mr. Bush, Mr. McClellan and many other warhawks seem to offer such statements as if to remind us, and themselves, of how savage and brutal "the enemies of freedom" actually are. Um, excuse me. We knew that, didn't we? We knew that on 9/11, when they flew airplanes into buildings, and killed almost 3,000 of us, correct? That's why they're our enemies and why we're at war with them, right?
But, as unspeakably uncivilized as it may be for me to name this (although perhaps not as uncivilized as the fact itself), from the point of view of the public debate about where we are at this moment in our foreign adventures, Mr. Berg's horrifying death seemed almost propitious. While most people were properly and justifiably horrified at the abuses of prisoners in Iraq, you now proclaim with moral righteousness: "See? See? Rush Limbaugh is right! Compared to beheadings, those prison abuses really are just like frat house hazing incidents! Our guys were just blowing off steam and having a good time! But those people are really, really bad! We're not bad like them!"
Is this truly where you have arrived? Is this genuinely the moral argument you are now reduced to? We proclaim war on the terrorists precisely because they are murderous savages, who want nothing more than to kill as many of us as they can, in the most brutal ways imaginable, and now we justify our own mistakes, miscalculations and disastrous lack of planning and accountability by noting that we're not as bad as the people we proclaimed war on to begin with?
I think you need to reconsider this. If we are actually fighting for freedom and the value of human life, I think you need to offer a moral perspective which is a bit more inspiring than that represented by this kind of argument. The fact that we're not as bad as barbaric savages doesn't quite cut it.
And perhaps you ought to rethink just what the hell it is we're actually doing in Iraq -- not what you might hope we're doing, but what we're actually doing. There is a difference, and that difference becomes more apparent to much of the rest of the world every day. We aren't exactly winning friends by insisting on pursuing our present course to the bitter end. And this time, the end could be very bitter indeed.
I don't think that's what you really want, is it? I certainly hope not.
You might want to rethink as well your adoption of all those arguments you used to reject: cultural determinism and moral relativism, to name just two. It doesn't fill the rest of us with confidence to see you so desperate to cling to the moral high ground by your fingernails that you use the arguments of the people you used to ridicule and condemn every single day. It makes us think that maybe your moral center has been temporarily misplaced.
Anyway, these are just a few thoughts I thought I'd pass along on this morning filled with very depressing news. I don't expect any of you to adopt these suggestions, but I wanted to offer them anyway.
And I truly am glad that we're not as bad as Al Qaeda. That clears up a lot of things for me, and I'm sure I'll sleep much better tonight as a result. Thanks for that.
Cordially,
Arthur Silber
(Cross-posted at The Light of Reason.) Don Boudreaux is rejoining Liberty and Power. He has a distinguished record both in law and economics at George Mason University. He is also blogging at Cafe Hayek.
Welcome Back! As a follow-up to my posts here and here, take a look at the continuing Nicholas Kristoff series on Iran. His newest article, "Overdosing on Islam" is a worthwhile read. Kristoff tells us how the younger generation is disgusted with the reign of mullahs. As one young man puts it: "America is only Baby Satan. We have Big Satan right here at home."
The youth have even revolted against beards in a way that is reminiscent of the generation of Peter the Great (who, in his quest to Westernize Russia, actually imposed taxes and license fees on the unshaven in his war on orthodox religion). Well, at least this generation's fight is against any government intrusions of this sort.
Kristoff concludes:
I've made countless references to World War I and Wilsonianism in my blogging at L&P. Today's parallel comes via the Mises Economics Blog (thanks Jeff Tucker) and FEE. Check out a fine article on the "War Boom," which appeared in Monday's Washington Post. Of particular interest is this reality:
I'm so happy that Bush campaigned last time as a "fiscal conservative." Let's see what new euphemisms the administration can invent for "fiscal irresponsibility" as the 2004 campaign takes shape. During L'affaire Lewinsky, conservatives said that it took Bill Clinton to make sex a staple of the nightly news. At least that was consensual sex. Inspired by a recent thread on SOLO HQ, which included a tangential discussion on the purpose of criminal justice, I recalled some of Ayn Rand's comments on the subject and I'm now wondering aloud how these comments might apply to the illusory neoconservative goal of "nation-building."
In a letter to philosopher John Hospers, dated 29 April 1961, Ayn Rand wrote the following:
Here, Rand has endorsed ideas of restitution, retribution (or restraint), and proportionality in her general view of criminal justice. But she goes further:
Then, in a passage that would make Thomas Szasz proud for its indictment of the nexus of state and psychiatry, Rand argues:
Rand, like Isabel Paterson, fears the humanitarian who would use the guillotine to affect change:
Now, I've not worked out any theory by any stretch of the imagination, but I do wonder how Rand's comments might apply to the international sphere. Consider these thoughts pure musing on my part.
Rand once drew an analogy between a nation and an individual. In her essay, "Don't Let it Go," she argues that nations exhibit a "life style" equivalent to an individual's sense of life, and that a nation's culture is equivalent to an individual's conscious convictions. Rand writes that just as a man's course of action is determined by both tacit and articulated factors (his sense of life and his conscious convictions), so too, "a nation's political trends are the equivalent of a man's course of action and are determined by its culture."
So here is an interesting parallel: Just as the future prevention of an individual's crimes is ultimately a psychological issue, rooted in fundamental changes to a criminal's psychology (his or her premises and values), so too the future prevention of a foreign regime's crimes is ultimately a cultural issue, rooted in fundamental changes to a nation's culture. Just as a person's course of action is dependent on his sense of life and conscious convictions, so too a nation's political trends are dependent on its lifestyle and culture. That's why any fundamental change to the political trends must ultimately be rooted in cultural change. Any "rehabilitation" of a nation, like any "rehabilitation" of a criminal, cannot be imposed by writ. One can aim for "regime change," but unless one alters the culture that allowed such a regime to gain and maintain power in the first place, nothing has been changed fundamentally.
Note here: Even ruthless dictatorial regimes that do not depend upon the democratic "consent of the governed" still depend upon certain tacit cultural sanctions to maintain power. (On these points, see Etienne de La Boetie's Discourse of Voluntary Servitude.)
Note too that the above points do not prevent either (a) the punishment of criminals so that they bear the costs of their actions, or the seeking of restitution for their victims or (b) the punishment of criminal governments so that they bear the costs of their political or military actions, or the seeking of restitution for their victims (foreign and domestic). (I leave aside, for now, the anarchistic question of whether all governments are criminal, as such.)
The legal and political focus therefore is on action; it is not on a criminal's feelings, thoughts, or ideas (one of the reasons hate crimes legislation is so problematic). Seeking criminal or international justice, the focus is not on psychology or culture—even though such are the spheres wherein the fundamental power for change resides. Those spheres can and must be changed, but their alteration should not be the guiding principle of legal, political, or military policy.
Any attempt to "nation-build" without the appropriate cultural prerequisites is bound to generate the same kinds of "unspeakable atrocities" that appalled Rand in her critique of criminal "rehabilitation."
I fear that the stories coming out of Iraq are only the tip of a similarly monstrous iceberg. [cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
My friend Jacob T. Levy is continuing to express his second thoughts about the Iraq war. Perhaps some of our other friends a Volokh will join him.
Hopefully, it is a sign that pro-war conservatives and libertarians are beginning to rediscover the insights offered by the libertarian and classical liberal antiwar tradition (which many of them once advocated). It is especially a good time to gain a a renewed appreciation on how Hayek's insights about the "fatal conceit" and unintended consequences can be applied equally (if not more so) to social planning by the state in foreign policy via efforts such as nation building.
However, Levy's proposal to respond by sending even more troops strikes me as totally misguided and counterprouductive. It is akin to the common rationale put forward by defenders of the Great Society e.g. "we would have won the war on poverty if we had spent more money."
Sometimes, it makes more sense to climb out of the hole rather than keep digging. If the current deployment of of 135K troops (which Levy deems to be inadequate) has only coincided with worsening problems in Iraq, it certainly does not follow that things will improve if we send even more troops. In fact, given the past record, it would be more plausible to conclude that a policy of throwing more money and troops at the problem will worsen the situation.
Isn't it, after all, a fundamental insight of libertarians on most issues that responding with more intervention to cure the mistakes caused by previous interventions will probably backfire?
On Thursday May 6, the embattled President of the University of Southern Mississippi emailed an apologia for his regime to the university's faculty and staff. Shelby Thames' letter apparently did not reach all USM students, but it was sent to every newspaper in the region, and published in the Biloxi Sun Herald. The letter actually came out the same day that Thames' Chief Hatchet Man, Jack Hanbury, was compelled to resign, and another significant player on his henchcrew, Director of Human Resources Mark Dvorak, went missing in action (four days later, his fate remains a mystery). Just three days earlier, Thames had ordained the establishment of a President's University Council, consisting of 18 professors, staff members, and students handpicked by his deans, in order to make it appear that he was "improving communication" (and, according to many observers, to have a replacement ready when he decided to dissolve the Faculty Senate). I'm reproducing the full text of Thames' letter, in bold. My comments appear in between paragraphs. Dear students, faculty, staff, supporters and friends of Southern Miss, The University of Southern Mississippi has experienced some difficult times
recently. I regret that some of the changes made since I've become
President of this fine university have generated controversy. However, I have
been associated with Southern Miss for more than 40 years, and I assure you it
has never been my intention to cause our university harm or unrest. Actually,
quite the opposite. Thames fails to mention a single one of his actions that "generated controversy." Not a solitary word about : When I became president of Southern Miss, our university was financially
strapped. It was imperative that we resolve our financial challenges in order
to ensure our status as a Carnegie Research Extensive University and to keep
jobs from being lost. I have responded to these issues. Jim Hollandsworth, who knows the history of USM extremely well, has pointed out that the three years preceding Thames' ascension to the presidency, in May 2002, were marked by cuts in state appropriations and belt-tightening at USM. The fiscal pressures have actually diminished since Thames became president, but that doesn't prevent him from claiming credit for the accomplishments of the previous administration, or exaggerating the depth of the financial problems now. As president, I have enacted decisions and strategic moves to ensure, not only
that we would not regress, but that we would actually gain ground in the
academic and financial arenas. My first move was to reorganize our academic
structure so that the majority of our assets were being utilized in the
classrooms and the laboratories rather than on administrative costs. The
plans for reorganization took more than six months and were well thought out,
and thoroughly researched. The reorganization, though not popular to some,
allowed the reallocation of more than $2 million from administrative costs to
the classrooms.
Supposedly, Thames once boasted that his reorganization was worked out in 30 to 40 hours by himself and members of his kitchen cabinet. In any event, reorganizing colleges at a university can bring some benefits, but it also imposes considerable short-run expenses. There is zero evidence that academic programs at USM have benefited from the reorg; indeed, some are notably worse off. The Nursing program, once one of USM's best, is reeling; many think it is on the verge of collapse. Legitimate Business programs are losing faculty, while an Economic Development program of dubious academic quality has been rapildy expanding under the direction of multiple office holder Ken Malone and allied members of the henchcrew. While we continued to strengthen our financial status, we also developed
incentive pay programs to reward faculty and staff. Furthermore, we
established additional excellence in teaching and research awards totaling
more than $60,000. Additionally, mid-year raises were awarded for two
consecutive years, and though this process came under criticism and scrutiny,
I am proud that we were able to reserve sufficient monies in these difficult
financial times to reward many of our faculty members. I brag on our faculty
and staff at every opportunity. I promise that we will make every effort to
continue to reward faculty and staff for their hard work and will make our
case for additional legislative funding for salary increases. Sources at USM tell me that no one outside of Polymer Science, the privileged unit that is Thames' home base, has received any of the aforementioned "incentive pay." Meanwhile the process for awarding midyear raises was conducted in secrecy and obvoiously tainted with political favoritism (the biggest percentage raise went to Thames' own daughter Dana, who is Chair of one of the Education departments). It was in a last-ditch effort to keep deans from reporting to the Faculty Senate which faculty members were initially recommended for merit raises that Jack Hanbury ordered them to violate state law. In any case, the "sufficient monies" have been generated by leaving faculty positions unfilled. USM has at least 112 open vacancies on its faculty (compared to the approximately 540 faculty members who currently work there), and the total is bound to rise, as more professors flee Thames' mismanagement and outsiders are deterred from applying for openings. As for the supposed redirection of $2 million to the classroom (some way or other, this grew from the previously announced figure of $1.8 million), keep in mind that Thames first practiced his firing ritual when he locked out the entire Institutional Research staff, and that he has also run off the senior managers in Financial Affairs. Apparently he was feeling confined by the rather lax standards of institutional reporting that prevail at state universities. Since Thames has been busily inventing new high-salaried positions in his upper administration, some of them supposedly converted from faculty positions, and his administrative hires have been busy expanding their staffs, there are unlikely to have been any net savings from the reorganization, even if we don't count the one-time expenses of moving, changing stationery, and the like. And if Thames is truly inclined to "brag on" the faculty of USM, why has he publicly accused two senior professors of committing crimes? Why do his supporters write letters to the editor and make public pronouncements decrying the entire faculty as lazy, no-good whiners? I have been accused of focusing too much of our university's efforts on
economic development and research. I am sorry that some don't see the
necessity in this focus, but it is the wave of the future, and Southern Miss
must be positioned to remain at the forefront of higher education. In a
national trend, the day of "fully funded state support" for our universities
is gone forever. State funding is becoming more and more scarce, and we must
identify new ways to become self-sufficient. We can no longer rely on the
state to keep Southern Miss financially sound. It is imperative that we pursue
new and novel support venues and forge through uncharted territory. This
tenet may appear to be a different approach to the management of higher
education institutions, but it is taking place at all progressive thinking
universities in the nation. We simply have no choice but to continue to
aggressively seek grants, private funding sources and commercialize our
research assets, partnering them with business and industry. There are those
who don't agree with the approach we are taking, but I ask them to give it a
chance to work. Our efforts are already achieving success. While the pros and cons of promoting more grant-funded research need a thorough discussion of their own, lots of university presidents are doing the same thing these days. If you want more grant and contract-funded research, you hire more professors who are doing more of it, and reward those already at the university for doing more of it. There is no need to bully the faculty, or lie to everyone in sight, or hire a manifestly unqualified Vice President for Research. Besides, Thames' conception of research is so egocentric that he gives special attention to grant-funded work only if it emanates from Polymer Science (whose building on campus is named after him). See the first two bullets on his list that follows: Something that any state university president would be expected to mention these days, but is entirely absent from Thames' apologia, is contributions from private donors. As higher education sinks down the list of legislative priorities, state universities are now emulating private universities: seeking to build endowments, and cultivating relationships with wealthy alumni. But Thames has no discernible skill at persuading people to donate to USM. What's more, he has put an inexperienced manager in charge of the Development Office, whose bullying has induced Development Officers to flee in droves. As a consequence, USM's Capital Campaign, which aimed to raise $100 million, and exceeded the original expectations for it, has stalled out around $85 million since Thames became president. Thames presumably has little interest in supporting a campaign that was initiated by his predecessor, Horace Fleming, and that counts another former president of USM, Aubrey Lucas (who once fired Thames from a Vice-Presidential position), as its honorary chair. Considering how governing boards often hire Presidents who are poor managers, or downright rascals, as long as they have a proven track record of getting donors to give money, Thames' neglect of fund-raising has to be the most remarkable of all of his irresponsibilities. We are growing our academic programs, too. In the past year alone, the Board
of Trustees approved four new programs at Southern Miss. In this little afterthought, the academic programs do not even merit naming. It is further worth noting that Thames apparently does not consider tuition a source of revenue. As legislative appropriations continue to decline, tuition is becoming an increasingly important source of income to state universities across the United States. But again Thames apparently identifies USM's fortunes with that of his own program. And at a Polymer State or a Thames Tech, undergraduates would be an unnecessary burden. As a member of the Southern Miss family, I want you to know that our
university is growing and developing in a healthy way. I will be the first to
acknowledge that we've experienced growing pains along the way. We all learn
from our challenges, and Southern Miss will be a better institution for
weathering change in these difficult times. Once again, there is no admission of bad acts or poor decisions, either by Thames or by anyone in his administration. Learning is a process of correcting some errors, and coming up with ways to avoid others. If you can't anticipate errors, or respond to them, you can't learn. I am honored to serve as president of The University of Southern Mississippi. I hope you will keep in mind that, in this role, I am frequently faced with the responsibility to make and execute difficult decisions that are not viewed by everyone as popular. I can assure you, that with every decision I make, I listen carefully to input from the university community, and I give great consideration to the issue before I make a decision. I have committed my life to advancing our university, and as your president, I will continue to devote my full attention to working with you while Southern Miss becomes firmly established as a world-class institution. This stupendously self-absorbed conclusion (to fully understand it, the reader must realize that, in his own mind, Thames is USM) incorporates two outright lies. First, that Thames "listen[s] carefully to input from the university community." On the contrary, he is exclusively interested in making the university community listen to him. Second, that Thames "give[s] great consideration to the issue" before making a decision. Decisions of such impact as firing Frank Glamser and Gary Stringer on March 5 give every impression of having been made in fits of fury, without any regard for their likely consequences. Most Sincerely, If Shelby Thames were genuinely attending to input from the university community, the only thing he could be doing now would be announcing his immediate return to the Polymer Science lab, and inviting the remaining members of his henchcrew to pack their trunks and roam. The Student Printz isn't accepting this purported olive branch: the May 7 issue of the USM student newspaper is full of powerful criticisms of the Thames regime. The Faculty Senate's response to the letter, which FS President Myron Henry was pressed to read aloud at the body's Friday meeting, was a 39-1 vote in favor of a resolution asking Thames to resign. Such veterans on the USM scene as former Dean of the Graduate School Jim Hollandsworth and Professor of English Noel Polk aren't buying any of it either. I've been fortunate to be able to borrow from their responses and those of several pseudonymous contributors, which can be read in full on the Fire Shelby message board. The Department of Justice has just reopened the investigation of the Emmett Till murder in 1955.
For my take on this, see our article (co-authored with Linda Royster Beito), "Why It's Unlikely the Emmett Till Murder Mystery Will Ever be Solved" at HNN. Also, see our article, "Investigating the Emmett Till Conspiracy" at Hugh Pearson's new website . My last post on L&P raises one significant question: Why should we care? Why should any of us care whether our libertarian or classical liberal heroes are used to justify the folly that is Iraq?
It all comes down to preserving a legacy, more specifically a radical legacy: a legacy that questions fundamentals and that attempts to go to the roots of social problems. The great liberal and libertarian thinkers have long recognized the inseparable link between free minds and free markets, and between peace and freedom. In defending the profound insights of Herbert Spencer or Friedrich Hayek or Ludwig von Mises or Murray Rothbard or Ayn Rand, as they apply to the current situation abroad, I am self-consciously defending the radical legacy that they have bestowed, one that has been distorted by too many who now provide a "libertarian" veneer or apologia for an otherwise reactionary policy abroad. Such commentators, who claim to be disciples of Spencer or Hayek or Mises or Rothbard or Rand, are no different from the neoconservative Court Intellectuals guiding so much of today's foreign policy. Their legitimation of that policy makes them Court Jesters, for they have made a mockery of the liberal ideal.
I am not saying that there can be no reasonable differences among rational men and women on the subject of Iraq. I'm simply saying that those "libertarians" who have supported this insanity in Iraq have not fully appreciated or even understood the ideas to which they claim allegiance. Those of us who are libertarians should care what happens to the legacy we have been left by our intellectual fathers and mothers. Not because we owe blind loyalty to our ideological parents. But because they were right about so much.
The war we face is a philosophical and cultural war. If we sell off our intellectual armaments, we will have lost before even embarking on our mission.
And that's why we should care. As readers of L&P know, I acknowledge a great intellectual debt to thinkers such as Ayn Rand, F. A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and others. For the longest time, I identified on a personal level with Rand's "Objectivism," with its celebration of reason, purpose, and self-esteem, and of the heroic human potential, and with its emphasis on the integration of mind and body, reason and emotion, morality and prudence, theory and practice. Those ideas still inform my personal and professional life. But because of my great differences with some of the current advocates of "Objectivism," so many of whom have advocated the war in Iraq, I do not wish to be called an "Objectivist." (See, especially, Arthur Silber's superb post on The Fatal Contradiction—and the Detestable Disgrace that is "Objectivism" Today.) If this is what "Objectivism" consists of, these advocates can have it with my blessing.
But as I have argued here and here, and in all the discussions here, here, and here, these advocates have no right to the radical legacy that Ayn Rand left behind, especially with regard to her analysis of the welfare-warfare state, and of the organic relationship between domestic and foreign policy.
That legacy has been the subject of an ongoing debate on the SOLO HQ list. Today, I made a few comments there, which I'd like to share with my HNN audience. Here are excerpts from this most recent post:
Some "Objectivists" have taken Rand's maxim that a free country has a right (though not an obligation) to liberate a dictatorship as some kind of rationalistic abstraction, from which to derive the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Rand, however, said the following:
Rand never argued that a relatively free US should liberate other countries. She was adamantly opposed to any invasion of the Soviet Union, the country of her birth, which she loathed, and was equally opposed to US entry into World War I and World War II, Korea and Vietnam. She believed that the nature and purpose of government was the protection of individual rights, and that the police, the military, and the law courts were essential functions: to protect individuals from domestic criminals, and foreign invaders, and to adjudicate disputes.
Once one adopts any criterion of humanitarian "liberation" as the goal of foreign policy, there is nothing to distinguish between the "liberation" of Iraq, or the Sudan, or Rwanda, or Bosnia. Using such a criterion simply gives license to the US to become the humanitarian "liberator" of the rest of the world, with all the consequent effects that such a role would have on citizens' lives, liberties, and properties. Rand herself cites the superb work of historian Arthur Ekrich in her essay, "The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age":
Commenting on this passage in my SOLO HQ post, I wrote:
For recent writings on this subject, and others, check my Not a Blog. In his new book Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History 1585-1828, Walter McDougall describes Washington D.C. 200 years ago:
It is hard to imagine today, but in 1802 the entire federal headquarters numbered 291 people, of whom 138 comprised Congress itself. The executive branch totaled 132. The State Department had ten employees, the war and navy departments thirty, and the attorney general's office one: the attorney general. The government played no part in law enforcement, justice, agriculture, business, transportation, health, education, and welfare. Aside from 6,500 military personnel, the federal bureaucracy nationwide amounted to 2,875 people, and the only way it affected the lives of the vast majority of Americans was by delivering mail.
That sounds wonderful. Except for the delivering the mail part. Leading government contractor looking for POW interrogators in Iraq.
"Minimal supervision." Last weekend, the Washington Post ran a profile of Susan Cheever, author of a new biography on Acoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson. Read the following passage from the piece, and take note of your own reaction upon reading it: He was quite upset when he didn't get them, Cheever writes.
Wilson asked for booze again about a week later, on Jan. 2, 1971.
And on Jan. 8.
And on Jan. 14.
"My blood ran cold," Cheever said recently of the discovery. "I was shocked and horrified." With time to ponder, though, she found herself thinking, "Of course he wanted a drink. He was the one who talked about sobriety being 'a daily remission.' I realized that this was a story about the power of alcohol: that even Bill Wilson, the man who invented sobriety, who had 30-plus years sober, still wanted a drink." That's because they've been brainwashed. I found it rather abhorrent that Bill Wilson couldn't get a taste of the one thing that may have made him feel a bit better on his deathbed. That allegiance to some stupid code of an earthly recovery group made one man's descent into death much more difficult than it needed to be.
I'm not horrified that Billl Wilson asked for alcohol as he was dying. I'm horrified that he didn't get it.
There are a couple of different ways of looking at alcoholism. One way says that it's the condition of needing alcohol, and that it becomes a problem only when the need for alcohol and the effects of consuming alcohol take a toll on the alcoholic's personal and professional life, or that he becomes a threat, a danger, or a burden on those around him. We need lots of things to help us get through life. If, for some of us, a few drinks a day are among those things, and we can remain functional and cordial and unassuming while taking those drinks, is the fact that we crave them really all that bad?
The other way is to look at alcoholism as this looming demon that needs to be defeated not because of the ill-effects it can cast on some people and those around them, but because alcoholism itself is an evil to be erradicated at all costs, and that every instance of its defeat somehow effects a greater good in the world. For these people, defeating alcoholism is an ends unto itself. They'd support overcoming a craving for drink even if overcoming the craving caused more damage to the alcoholic and his family than the drinking itself.
You can probably guess which view I take.
People who enter programs like Alcoholics Anonymous put themselves through a good amount of suffering. They do so because they conclude that the amount of suffering they'll need to endure to overcome alcoholism is less than the suffering they'll inflict on themselves and those they care about should they continue to drink. That's it. That's the only reason to enter AA. You don't enter AA if you crave a couple of drinks every night before bed (some people probably do, but there's no reason for them too). Even if you really, really crave them. Why not? Because those drinks and that craving aren't disrupting your life.
So what ill effects were those deathbed shots of whiskey going to have on Bill Wilson's life? They certainly weren't going to wreck his liver. They weren't going to make him beat his wife or his kids. Seems to me the only thing those shots would have done would have been to make Bill Wilson feel a little better. Does anyone think that the millions of people Bill Wilson's program helped off of alcohol would go back to drinking upon hearing that he "gave in" once he was within inches of dying? Would it somehow have invalidated AA's track record?
Was the symbolic value of keeping Bill Wilson alcohol-free until the moment of his death really worth denying Bill Wilson some relief from the pain of terminal illness? If Bill Wilson himself asked for some whiskey, he had obviously calculated that the pleasure it would give him was worth more to him at the time than any "damage" to his reputation as the guy who started AA might suffer if he consumed it. Or perhaps he didn't care. But it doesn't matter. What right did the people around him have to not respect his request?
And what kind of puritanical sadists have the rest of us become in that we relish the thought of a sick man being made to unnecessarily suffer against his will so as to preserve some sort of saintly example for today's alcholics to follow, or to make the rest of us feel more "pure" about Bill Wilson's legacy?
You can probably see where this is going. People who revel in the fact that Bill Wilson was made to suffer out of allegiance to keeping his anti-alcohol egacy pure suffer from the same delusions as the people who think we ought to make cancer, AIDS, and other sick people suffer out of allegiance to the war on drugs. Kids who choose to smoke pot today don't do so because California lets its AIDS patients light up at medical clinics. And kids who choose not to smoke pot don't base that decision on the fact that federal agents now raid convalescent centers and handcuff senior citizens to their beds.
Likewise, nobody stops or starts drinking, enters or gives up on AA because Bill Wilson wanted whiskey on his deathbed.
Hat tip: David Boaz. Previously during the crisis at the University of Southern Mississippi, President Shelby
Thames and his personal spokesflack Lisa Mader have been extremely voluble. Again and
again they have made statements to the press that have come back to bite them. Suddenly a pall of silence has descended over the Dome (as the central administration building
at USM is called). With the help of his remaining backers on the state College
Board, Thames has staved off being fired until at least May 20 (when the next regularly scheduled
Board meeting takes place). But
the sudden removal of his Chief Hatchet Man, Jack Hanbury, who had
personally investigated the two professors Thames tried to fire on March 5, has shown Thames
just how vulnerable he has become. Officially, Hanbury, who is not talking to the press, is on "administrative leave" till
June 30, after which his contract will not be renewed. On Thursday, Mader refused to say
whether Hanbury's infamous April 30 email to the deans, ordering them to violate the Mississippi
Public Records Act, had anything to do with his sudden decision to resign. On Friday,
Mader further claimed that the faculty,
staff, and students of USM have no grounds for complaint about Thames' continued leadership,
in light of "administrative changes that have occurred". In fact, Hanbury reported directly to Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood at the time,
so Hood
fired him, not Thames. But Thames cannot publicly admit that he lacks the power to protect his
chief enforcer, nor can he assert that he fired Hanbury himself without being
publicly contradicted by a top state official. Hence the purposely evasive language,
followed by silence. What's more, it has become clear that Hanbury, who has not been listed on the official budget
report that includes all USM employees whose salaries and benefits are paid out of state funds,
was actually being paid by the USM Research Foundation...which, in turn, is run by
the Vice-President for Research...who, in turn, is Angelina Dvorak.
So the conflict of interest in which Hanbury was embroiled, when he undertook to investigate
two professors who questioned Angie Dvorak's credentials, was even worse than observers realized
at the time. They knew that Hanbury was the former law partner of Mark Dvorak,
Angie's husband, but they didn't know that he was being paid out of a budget she controlled. Observers have also reported that at the hearing on April 28, the settlement papers were drawn up
by Lee Gore, the University Counsel whom Thames pushed aside when he hired Hanbury as "Director of Risk
Management." (Thames couldn't fire Gore, because in the Mississippi state system, the head
attorney at each state university reports to the Attorney General and not to the
institution's president or to the College Board.) Apparently the hearing officer, retired state Supreme Court Judge Reuben Anderson,
did not consider Hanbury competent to draw up the settlement papers and insisted that Gore take on
the reponsibility. Even denser silence surrounds the fate of Mark Dvorak. By all indications, the less powerful
Dvorak,
who according to informed sources was a completely
incompetent Director of Human Resources, has been removed from his job, but there has yet to
be any public statment about his status. Some sources claim that Attorney General Hood's
office was
investigating Human Resources at USM for violations of state laws, but there is no confirmation
of that either. Friday morning, a respected Professor of English named
David Berry, who has taught at USM for
30 years, made a public announcement that he was taking early retirement, because he
no longer wished to be associated
with a university that was under the control of Shelby Thames. Berry took three teaching award
plaques that he had received during his years at USM, and broke them over his knee. He also
stamped on his 30-year service pin. Friday afternoon, the USM Faculty Senate held its scheduled monthly meeting. Thames was
not on hand, and Senators were no doubt relieved that they no longer had to contend with Hanbury,
who had been sent to put a chill on every Senate meeting since he
was hired a year ago. But a Gulfport politician named Billy Hewes who vocally supports Thames
(and has been rewarded with a slot as commencement speaker at the upcoming graduation
ceremony for the Gulf Park satellite campus) was
on hand for the beginning of the meeting, and Faculty Senate President Myron Henry was asked to
read to the Senate the full text of
a
supposedly conciliatory letter from Thames. The letter, which Thames emailed to
faculty and staff, but not students, on Thursday, was a gross apologia for his presidency that
failed to admit a single bad act or error of judgment, by him or by any member of his henchcrew. It is
also replete
with false claims about Thames' purported accomplishments that would consume far too much space to
get into here (I will provide a detailed analysis of the Thames letter in my next post). The
Faculty Senate, which Thames has refused to speak to since it voted 40-0 in favor of a resolution
of no confidence in him, and which he is now trying to replace with a President's University Council
handpicked by compliant deans, was not swayed. It voted 39-1, with 1 abstention, in favor of a
resolution that detailed the failures of the Thames regime, pointedly
noted that his talents lay in research and teaching, and requested his immediate resignation. The
Senate also approved a letter to the College Board asking for an end to the
unrestrained
monitoring of campus email that the Thames regime has indulged in. Plus The Senate unanimously
approved a motion to ask the state Auditor, Phil Bryant,
to investigate the hiring of Vice-Presidents and other
upper administrators by the Thames regime, to determine whether national searches were conducted
and equal employment opportunity practices were followed. (As far as anyone knows, Jack Hanbury
and Mark Dvorak were hired without searches of any kind.) How much longer will be before Thames has to make a public announcement about Mark Dvorak? Before
Angie Dvorak is pushed out? Before Thames loses other key members of his henchcrew? Stay tuned, and keep following the breaking news at the
Fire Shelby site. As a follow-up to my post, Laissez Faire in Iran, take a look at Nicholas Kristoff's own follow-up article, "Those Sexy Iranians." Kristoff tells us more about a younger generation of Iranian baby boomers (60 percent of the country's population was born after the revolution) who declare: "We want fun ... There's no joy here." Kristoff states baldly: "Ayatollahs, look out." Indeed.
Also take a look at Jesse Walker's fine essay, "Iranians are Feistier than Iraqis." The following is my attempt to summarize a good deal of what Thomas Szasz has been writing and saying for nearly half a century.
If neuroscientists discovered that homosexuals had different brain chemistries from heterosexuals, far fewer people would accept this as evidence that they suffered from a MI/BD.
If neuroscientists discovered that nuns had different brain chemistries from everyone else, very few people would accept this as evidence that they suffered from a MI/BD.
If neuroscientists discovered that married men had different brain chemistries from bachelors, no one would accept this as evidence that they suffered from a MI/BD.
Clearly, a difference in brain chemistry per se is not enough to make people believe that someone has a MI/BD. It takes more. Why, then, would a difference in one case be taken as evidence of MI/BD, while a difference in another case would not be? The obvious answer is that people, including psychiatrists, are willing to attribute behavior to mental illness/brain disorder to the extent that they disapprove of that behavior, and are unwilling to do so to the extent they approve of, or at least are willing to tolerate, that behavior. (Psychiatry once held that homosexuality was a mental illness. That position was changed, but not on the basis of scientific findings. Science had nothing to do with the initial position either.)
In other words, the psychiatric worldview rests, not on science or medicine, as its practitioners would have us believe, but on ethics, politics, and religion. That would be objectionable only intellectually if that were as far as it went.
Unfortunately, it goes further, since the practitioners and the legal system they helped shape are empowered:
Second, to excuse certain people of responsibility for their actions (for example, via the insanity defense).
P.S.: Everyone interested in liberty should read Szasz’s forthcoming book, Faith in Freedom: Libertarian Principles and Psychiatric Practices, now available at Laissez Faire Books.
I've been busy engaging in a number of foreign policy debates on several lists, making many of the same points that I've made here at L&P. You might want to check out some of the more inflammatory aspects of that debate on a recent thread at SOLO HQ (see my posts, starting
here and extending through
here, thus far).
I should also note a first: Today, I found myself agreeing with many points made by Charles Krauthammer (!!!) on the Iraq Prison Abuse scandal... especially the stuff about sex. And for a whole lot of very interesting insights about the sexual dimensions of all this, let me also recommend to you various posts (just keep scrolling down) by Arthur Silber at The Light of Reason. David Brooks in today’s New York Times epitomizes what’s wrong with the dominant thinking about the fix we are in with respect to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the rest of the Middle East:
Inaction? It takes an amazing ignorance of the history of U.S. intervention in the Middle East to even think of that word in this context. (For a brief survey of that history, see my 1991 Cato Institute paper here.)
But at least Brooks sees the grave damage U.S. policy has done:
Not that he has really learned the appropriate lesson, however:
Sometimes you’ve just got to acknowledge that some people are hopeless. Let me be precise: my point about Moore was not specific to this particular incident.
From my reading of this one, Miramax agreed to funding but made no promise of
distribution, and Moore knew that. I'm not claiming that he did this all intentionally
as a publicity stunt, although that wouldn't be out of character for him. My
point was more general: given the man's past patterns of being very loose with
the truth, there's no reason to accept anything he says at face value. Ever. For those who haven't followed the controversy over whether Bowling at Columbine should
have been considered documentary or fiction, a good place to start is David Hardy's very
thorough page.
If you prefer something about Moore's more recent book, try Spinsanity.
I should also note that there are times I agree with Moore, but nothing serves
a good cause less than the sorts of intellectually dishonest and ethically
challenged things Moore does to make his points. He's welcome, of course,
to make whatever
books and movies he wants, but no one should ever treat them as nonfiction.
He's a damn fine saleman, but a really morally questionable human being. Before anyone condemns Michael Moore as a charlatan read the second comment on David Beito’s post directly below. Apparently, Moore's complaint about Disney's interference with his film was only a stunt on his part.
In light of the Bush's administration's glaring lack of respect for the rule of law, these immortal words from Robert Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons" are particularly apt:
Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!
[Sir Thomas] More: Yes. What would you do: Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you -- where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast -- man's laws, not God's -- and if you cut them all down -- and you're just the man to do it -- d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.
It’s amusing to see conservatives, whenever it’s convenient, reach for explanations that they routinely condemn when others employ them. Case in point: Yesterday Rush Limbaugh suggested that the soldiers who posed Iraqi prisoners in sexually humiliating positions may have been influenced by what they’ve seen over the years on pornographic websites. He cites this "great piece" in National Review Online that makes this case. See his remarks here.
In other words, it’s not their fault. The blame should be placed on their environment. When I read my e-mail today two items, both very profound in their own way, came to my attention. The first one, I believe, can be seen as a comment on the characteristic of government that is rapidly developing into its most oppressive aspect, its paternalism. It is a short (1:46) film titled Bitch in the Kitchen. I cannot help it, this little movie makes me think of Senator Clinton and federalized airport security.
The second piece, a short article, sent to me by Jeff Schaler and written by a British doctor goes a long way to explaining where this paternalism comes from and what could be done about it. It is one of the most eloquently written essays that I have read in quite some time.
It's getting near checkmate for the ruthless, tyrannical administration of Shelby F. Thames, President of the University of Southern Mississippi. A written order to deans to violate the Mississippi Public Records law, or be fired, was a step over the cliff for Thames' carefully selected Chief Hatchet Man (er, Director of Risk Management), Jack Hanbury. As of 3:30 this afternoon, Central time, newspapers were confirming that Hanbury has been compelled to resign. Here's the full text of the bulletin from the Hattiesburg American: Details remain unavailable, but as Hanbury began reporting to state Attorney General Jim Hood just last Friday, it follows logically that Hood fired him. And contributors to the Fire Shelby message board have visited the office of Mark Dvorak, the Director of Human Resources, and confirmed that his belongings are sitting there in boxes, ready to be taken away. Mark Dvorak is the husband of Angelina Dvorak, the Vice President for Research and Development, whose vita, and the representations it makes about being an Associate Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, have been at the center of the USM crisis since mid-January. Critics of the Thames administration have blasted the the decision to hire Mark Dvorak as flagrant nepotism. There is still no announcement whether the state College Board will meet to consider putting an end to the employment of Thames himself. But two members of the Board have now told the media that they want to convene such a meeting. Meanwhile, Angie Dvorak was still in her position, as of a meeting with the deans earlier today. Lisa Mader is apparently still in hers, though unavailable for comment. And Ken Malone, a Thames protégé who has accumulated multiple offices and become sub-dictator (er, Chief Operating Officer) of the Gulf Coast satellite campus, is apparently still on the job. But the king is rapidly losing his protection. More moves in the endgame as it becomes clear. In the meantime, keep track by checking the Fire Shelby site. Unfortunately, the effort to convene an emergency meeting of the state College Board failed. Informed sources suggest that when Thames was chosen to be President, in May 2002, the Board split 7-5 behind the scenes but took a "consensus" vote of 11-1 in public. (The single public dissenter in 2002, Virginia Shanteau Newton, continues to lead the opposition to Thames on the Board today). Apparently some people have slow learning curves, and the same 7-5 split appears to be in force as I write. So the matter will have to be taken up on May 20, with four new Board members and a new President, Roy Klumb, whose partisan efforts to flatten the recent settlement and keep Thames in office for two more years should deeply embarrass all 11 of the other Board members.
One news report, as yet unverified, also implicates Thames himself in the firing of his Chief Hatchet Man, on the grounds that the incriminating memo was "unauthorized." If the story is true, it means that any administrator who carries out Thames' dictates will be promptly thrown to the wolves if trouble ensues.
Tomorrow, the USM Faculty Senate meets, to consider resolutions asking Thames to resign and calling for an end to email surveillance. There will at least one demonstration against Thames on campus. Anti-Thames slogans are being written on campus walls and sidewalks by "Night Chalkers." To be continued. I used to think pretty highly of Colin Powell. Sure, he annoyed me with his self-righteous speechifying at the 2000 G.O.P. convention. But I always admired him as a military man who knew the cost of war and fought against cocktail-party Churchills of left and right. I loved the story about him reacting with horror when Madeline Albright demanded “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about, if we can’t use it?”
But his career is winding down on a note of disgrace. He's done his last stint in government watching the death of the eminently sensible Powell Doctrine. He knew what we were getting into in Iraq. And yet, according the latest Woodward, he never made a concerted effort to stop it. Instead, he allowed himself to be used at the UN to pitch a policy he suspected would lead to disaster. He never even demanded a one-on-one with the president to try to talk him out of it.
Now, he tries to clear his rep through repeated, passive-aggressive sniping to reporters via subordinates, as the Post reports today. The story quotes a GQ reporter:
"It was really weird," he said. "I didn't have a particular hunger to interview these guys," but the State Department press aide working with him kept setting up interviews and insisting he meet with more people, he said.
It's just sad. He should have done a William Jennings Bryan and publicly resigned. Instead, Powell, a man with much to be proud of, a man who might have stopped the worst foreign policy disaster in 30 years, is reduced to defending himself through surrogates in the thinking man's Maxim.
Andrew Sullivan writes:
BE AFRAID: Bio-chemical warfare from Islamist terrorists is, to my mind, inevitable.
and links this article from the Washington Post.
The article, about a sad-sack jihadi living with his Mom in France, and cooking up castor-bean poison in a coffee maker, is a good deal more pathetic than frightening:
Benchellali's mother, Hafsa, told police she became concerned after finding strange potions and liquids scattered around her sewing room following one of her son's all-night sessions. But when she confronted her son, he warned her to stay away. "He said it was dangerous," the woman said, according to the transcript, "and it was better if I didn't know what he was doing."
Mommm! I'm busy!!
Why is a smart guy like Sullivan buying into the sensationalistic and stupid notion that chem/bio agents are supervillain weapons that can "bring a day of horror like none we have ever known," to quote Bush? Such uncritical thinking is one reason we're subjected to the indignity of having the leader of the most powerful country in history whining at press conferences about Iraqi mustard gas shells.
Well, "be afraid" about this if you want to. I worry more about car bombs and other, conventional means of mayhem.
People like CNN’s Lou Dobbs who lose sleep over the “exporting” of jobs typically want the government to stop, or at least discourage, firms from seeking the lowest-cost labor consistent with their objectives. The protectionists never wonder if existing government interference in the marketplace is the very reason some so-called “outsourcing” is occurring in the first place. Jude Blanchette at the Foundation for Economic Education shows that this is indeed the case, with the help of an enlightening report from the National Association of Manufacturers. "Don't Protect Manufacturing—Deregulate! is here. FALLUJA, Iraq (Reuters) - The Iraqi former general entrusted with pacifying volatile Falluja said on Thursday U.S. Marines must withdraw quickly from around the troubled town and go home so stability can be restored.
"I want the American soldier to return to his camp. What I want more is that he returns to the United States," General Muhammad Latif told Reuters in an interview. You would think that if someone made the same mistake twice, with disastrous results both times, they would be hesitant to do it a third time, but not our President. He keeps attempting to silence those who criticize him, however, in each case he only amplifies and energizes their attacks.
First, he uses intimidation by the FCC and his cronies at Clear Channel Inc. to partially remove Howard Stern from the airwaves. Yet now, each and every weekday Stern spends a considerable amount of his five hours of airtime broadcasting his opinion, that Bush is a rightwing jerk unfit to be our leader, to his still more than eight million listeners. Also, he is doing this in a exceptionally engaging and intelligent way. And, there is growing evidence that Stern’s voice might even be a significant factor in tipping the election to Kerry.
Next, Bush closes the newspaper of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and now we are fighting his Shiite followers as well as the Sunni Moslems who had supported Hussein. Hardly anyone had ever heard of this guy before the Bush Administration tried to silence him.
Now, the Bush camp is trying to limit the distribution of Michael Moore’s new film Fahrenheit 911. The Disney Corporation is refusing to allow its subsidiary Mirimax to release the movie because it is afraid that Florida Governor Jeb Bush will take away important tax breaks if they do. Now, why would Disney think that unless they had already been warned?
This latest bit of censorship has worked just as well as this first two, in at least one instance. Before I read the story about Disney and Moore I had no intention of going to see the film, now I would not miss it. I am very curious to know what George Bush doesn’t want me to see.
Shelby Thames, the President of the University of Southern Mississippi, is losing no chance to keep his institution in crisis, or guarantee close media attention to its troubles. On Monday, May 3, Thames called a breakfast meeting with the 5 academic deans and the dean of the library. The announced agenda was to "improve communication" with faculty, staff, and students, in the wake of 2 years of conflict and the crisis that Thames ignited when he fired two senior professors on March 5. But there never has been any problem of communication under the Thames administration. Thames has no difficulty ensuring that everyone knows which arbitrary commands he wants them to follow. And he has no interest in anything they might wish to say back, unless it's "Yes, sir!" It's also characteristic that the Monday meeting did not include either the Hattiesburg-based Provost, Tim Hudson, or the Provost at the Gulf Coast satellite campus, Jay Grimes. Thames has no use for a Chief Academic Officer standing in the way of direct communication him and the deans. Presumably only issues of convenience prevent him from giving marching orders straight to 40 department chairs, or even to 540 professors. What Thames really did on Monday was ordain the formation of a President's University Council, whose 18 members would be selected by the deans. The deans, in turn, are frightened that they will be fired should they do the slightest thing to displease Thames. (Just last Friday they were reminded that they were being "grossly insubordinate" on account of their worries about violating the state Freedom of Information Act by failing to turn over information about merit raises to the Faculty Senate.) If the deans can find them, they will obligingly select people who will represent Shelby Thames to the faculty, staff, and students--not people who will represent the faculty, staff, or students to the upper administration. And if they can't find willing representatives of the Thames administration... no doubt their failure will also be taken as gross insubordination. Once he has his President's University Council in place, Thames will be able to pronounce the Faculty Senate, the Academic Council, the Graduate Council and other such faculty bodies superfluous, and either go around them or declare them disbanded. Since the PUC is also slated to include student "representatives," he can also be rid of the Student Government, should it ever be jolted out of its current placid compliance with his dictates. The Thames regime has now thoroughly antagonized the media in Mississippi. The Hattiesburg American (a newspaper in the Gannett chain, whose papers suck up notoriously to the local establishment in their respective markets) has filed a state Freedom of Information Act request for the names of everyone whose email the Thames administration has put under surveillance. Anything approaching a truthful answer to that question would further undermine Thames' credibilty. In his testimony during the hearing on April 28, Thames claimed that he had ordered the email of Professors Frank Glamser and Gary Stringer monitored starting on January 16, 2004, after TV station WDAM got wind that there was something irregular with the credentials of his Vice President for Research, Angie Dvorak. But during the hearing he produced printouts of Stringer's email going as far back as May 2003. And informed sources at USM have charged that at least Stringer's email was already being monitored as far back as the summer of 2003. Indeed, they say that Dvorak herself was in charge of the monitoring, which was carried out, not by the regular Information Technology staff at USM, but by employees at Pileum Corporation, an outfit to which some USM iTech functions have been contracted out. The President of Pileum, Jill Beneke, sat close by as Thames read aloud from intercepted emails during the hearing last week. Of course, credulous employees and students of USM might be reassured by the email that was broadcast to them today: That information technology use and security policy allows the administration to read anyone's email at any time for any reason--and does not require them to announce that they are doing it. What's more, newspapers in other parts of Mississippi are starting to weigh in. The Greenwood, MS paper ran an editorial today that questioned the leadership of Thames and his henchcrew. Meanwhile, according to records meticulously maintained by a contributor at the Fire Shelby message board, 43 members of the faculty have left USM during the past academic year, or will be leaving as it ends, 17 of them to retirement. Some of them have come out in public and cited the Thames adminstration as their prime motive for leaving. And 16 administrators are leaving, 4 to retirement; they include 3 key players in Financial Affairs, whom Thames is believed to have forced out. Will Thames fulfill the longings of his backers, and remain in office so he can fire more tenured faculty, and disband the Faculty Senate? Or has he already inflicted enough damage to weary the patience of the Mississippi College Board, to whom he reports? Last May, I wrote:
These religious reactionaries are, partially, the Frankenstein monsters of US foreign policy: during the Cold War, the U.S. propped up puppet dictators to do its global bidding, and its intervention was partially responsible for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism as an anti-American political force in Iran. The Iranians threw off the U.S.-backed Shah, and elevated Khomeini to a position of leadership. A hostage crisis followed, as did the US support for Iraq's Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran, and for the Afghan "freedom fighters" in their war with the Soviets, thereby empowering a group of mujahideen who were to become Al Qaeda and Taliban warriors. Such are the internal contradictions of US foreign policy that continue till this day.
While the war in Iraq dominates the headlines, with its predictably obscene by-products—e.g., the US torture of Iraqis in the very Abu Ghraib prison used by the murderous Hussein regime—the Pentagon admits that Iraq will require the presence of over 138,000 US troops "at least until the end of 2005."
But if the US wants to learn a bit about how to encourage "democracy" in Iraq, it ought to look toward "those friendly Iranians," as Nicholas D. Kristof puts it, who are fomenting a revolution in Iran, which is slowly becoming "a pro-American country." Not "pro-American" in the sense of wanting to see US troops on Iranian soil—more in terms of the culture wars, that is, the wars that matter. Kristof tells us that so many of the Iranians he interviewed have expressed a desire to come to America. They wear blue jeans, read Hillary Clinton, John Grisham, Sidney Sheldon, Danielle Steel, and, of course, Harry Potter. They watch American movies like "Titanic" and revel in such American TV shows as "Baywatch." And they have one message for the Islamic theocrats, who continue to denounce America as the Great Satan in their blitz of "propaganda": "To hell with the mullahs."
This is an important and continuing development, and a healthy one, considering the history of US intervention in Iran. As Kristof observes: "In the 1960's and 1970's, the U.S. spent millions backing a pro-Western modernizing shah—and the result was an outpouring of venom that led to our diplomats' being held hostage. Since then, Iran has been ruled by mullahs who despise everything we stand for ..." But as Kristof explains, among the younger generation, "being pro-American is a way to take a swipe at the Iranian regime."
And the regime knows it. Indeed, "[o]ne opinion poll showed that 74 percent of Iranians want a dialogue with the U.S.—and the finding so irritated the authorities that they arrested the pollster." But the mullahs couldn't arrest all of those Iranian citizens who had "responded to the 9/11 attacks with a spontaneous candlelight vigil as a show of sympathy."
The Bush administration, which has squandered much of the global good will of 9/11, needs to learn a new phrase if it wants to encourage dialogue with a younger generation of authentic "freedom fighters": Laissez Faire. Hands off! "Left to its own devices," says Kristof, "the Islamic revolution is headed for collapse, and there is a better chance of a strongly pro-American democratic government in Tehran in a decade than in Baghdad." If the administration decides to approach a looming crisis over Iran's nuclear program with the same "bring-it-on" approach that it pioneered in Iraq, Kristof states, it will only succeed in "inflaming Iranian nationalism and uniting the population behind the regime."
That's a form of "nation-building" at which the neocon interventionists might very well succeed. To the detriment of freedom. Walter Shapiro offers an unusually revealing account of the disparity between the stated goals of the plan to "transform the Middle East" and the realities of postwar Iraq:
To describe Feith as a controversial figure veers close to understatement. Bob Woodward, in his authoritative new book Plan of Attack, recounts that Gen. Tommy Franks described Feith to colleagues as "the (big-time expletive deleted) stupidest guy on the face of the earth."
This context helps explain the anticipation that surrounded Feith's speech Tuesday morning at an American Enterprise Institute conference on Iraq, a year after President Bush declared the end of major combat. ...
In his speech, Feith described postwar civilian life in glowing terms, stressing that "economically, Iraq is recovering" and that "health care spending is 30 times greater than its prewar levels." He contended that "more than half the Iraqi people are active in civic affairs," a claim that would be hard to make about America. Steven Metz, a faculty member at the U.S. Army War College, criticized the American commitment in Iraq for being predicated on untested theories. Despite the administration's assertions, Metz said, there is no guarantee that the United States can impose democracy on Iraq or that the geopolitical benefits from such a democracy would be worth the cost. Metz stressed that Iraqis are not necessarily beguiled by abstractions such as democracy. He said their outlook is based on the pragmatic question: "Who is likely to be here in five years and have a gun?"
Not the First Time
Thursday, May 13, 2004
This Month's Reason
Derbyshire at The Corner: "Kick one for me"
The Costs of Free Trade
P.T. Barnum Politics
82 Percent of Iraqis Against U.S. Occupation
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
The Siege
Shameless Self-Promotion
If you wish in the world to advance,
Your merits you're bound to enhance,
You must stir it and stump it,
And blow your own trumpet,
Or, trust me, you haven't a chance!
Dear Warhawks
Don Boudreaux Rejoins Liberty and Power
Iran: The Anti-Beard Revolution
There's a useful lesson here for George Bush's America as well as for the ayatollahs' Iran: when a religion is imposed on people, when a government tries too ostentatiously to put itself "under God," the effect is often not to prop up religious faith but to undermine it. Nothing is more lethal to religious faith than having self-righteous, intolerant politicians (who wince at nose studs) drag God into politics.
Iraq: Surpassing the Costs of World War I
In inflation-adjusted terms, the war's cost will surpass the United States' $199 billion share of World War I sometime next year. Coming on top of three major tax cuts, that spending will drive the federal budget deficit to more than $400 billion this year. That borrowing will eventually have to be repaid in higher taxes or reduced government services and benefits.
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
Longing for the Good Old Days
Nation-Building and Psychiatry
But you ask me what is the punishment deserved by criminal actions. This is a technical, legal issue, which has to be answered by the philosophy of law. The law has to be guided by moral principles, but their application to specific cases is a special field of study. I can only indicate in a general way what principles should be the base of legal justice in determining punishments. The law should: a. correct the consequences of the crime in regard to the victim, whenever possible (such as recovering stolen property and returning it to the owner); b. impose restraints on the criminal, such as a jail sentence, not in order to reform him, but in order to make him bear the painful consequences of his action (or their equivalent) which he inflicted on his victims; c. make the punishment proportionate to the crime in the full context of all the legally punishable crimes.
What punishment is deserved by the two extremes of the scale is open to disagreement and discussion—but the principle by which a specific argument has to be guided is retribution, not reform. The issue of attempting to "reform" criminals is an entirely separate issue and a highly dubious one, even in the case of juvenile delinquents. At best, it might be a carefully limited adjunct of the penal code (and I doubt even that), not its primary, determining factor. When I say "retribution," I mean the point above, namely: the imposition of painful consequences proportionate to the injury caused by the criminal act. The purpose of the law is not to prevent a future offense, but to punish the one actually committed. If there were a proved, demonstrated, scientific, objectively certain way of preventing future crimes (which does not exist), it would not justify the idea that the law should prevent future offenses and let the present one go unpunished. It would still be necessary to punish the actual crime.
Therefore, "psychiatric therapy" does not belong—on principle—among the alternatives that you list. And more: it is an enormously dangerous suggestion. A. Psychiatry is far from the stage of an exact science; in our present state of knowledge, it is not even a science—it is only in that preliminary, material-gathering stage from which a science will come. B. The law, which has the power to impose its decisions by force, cannot be guided by unproved, uncertain, controversial hypotheses or guesses—and the criminal cannot be treated as a guinea pig (I am saying this in defense of the criminal's rights). C. Since the prevention of crime is a psychological issue, since it involves a man's mind (his premises, values, choices, decisions), it would be monstrously evil to place a man's mind into the power of the law, to let the law prescribe and force upon him any course of treatment involving or affecting his mind. If "the prevention of crime" were accepted as the province and purpose of the law, it would permit and necessitate the most unspeakable atrocities: not merely psychological "brainwashing," but physical mutilations as well, such as electric shock therapy, prefrontal lobotomies and anything else that neurologists might discover. No moral premise—except total altruistic collectivism—could ever justify that sort of horror.
Observe that it is I, the unforgiving egoist, who am more considerate of the criminals (of their rights) than the alleged humanitarians who advocate psychiatric treatments out of an alleged compassion for criminals. A penal code has to treat men as adult, responsible human beings; it can deal only with their actions and with such motives as can be objectively demonstrated (such as intent vs. accident); it cannot assume jurisdiction over men's minds, brains, souls, values and moral premises—it cannot assume the right to change these by forcible means.
Are We All Consequentialists Now?
The current (June 2004) issue of Reason magazine carries the following letter to the editor. (I've restored my original formatting, plus a section -- marked in brackets -- that Reason deleted for space.)
To the Editor:
One clarification: while I agree with Kant’s indictment of the consequentialist conception of morality as an instrumental strategy for promoting human welfare, I disagree with his remedy. For Kant, the solution is to sever the connection between morality and human welfare entirely; I instead follow the classical Greek tradition in tying the two together more closely, making morality an essential component of human welfare rather than a mere external means to it. For details see my book Reason and Value: Aristotle versus Rand; my articles Egoism and Anarchy and Why Does Justice Have Good Consequences?; and my review of Leland Yeager's Ethics As Social Science.
In "Coercion vs. Consent" (March), Randy Barnett writes that "there are very few libertarians today for whom consequences are not ultimately the reason why they believe in liberty," while Richard Epstein cheerfully agrees that libertarians are "all consequentialists now."
Fortunately, it is not true that we libertarians are all consequentialists now. I say "fortunately," because consequentialism is philosophically indefensible as a normative theory.
The basic problem with consequentialism is that it recognizes no limit in principle on what can be done to people in order to promote good consequences.
Now consequentialists insist that in the vast majority of cases, killing, torturing, or enslaving innocent people is not the best way to get good results. And of course they are right about that. But by the logic of their position the consistent consequentialist (happily a rara avis) must always be open to the possibility that killing, torturing, or enslaving the innocent might be called for under special circumstances, and this recognition necessarily taints the character of even one's ordinary relations to other people.
[If the only reason I do not steal is that I'm afraid of being caught, then how am I morally superior to the thief? Likewise, if the only reason I don't slaughter my neighbors is that doing so happens not to maximize social utility at the moment, then how am I morally superior to a mass murderer?]
As Immanuel Kant pointed out more than two centuries ago, to subordinate -- or even to be prepared to subordinate -- one's fellow human beings to some end they do not share is to treat them as slaves, thereby denying both their inherent dignity and one's own.
Many consequentialists will say that they too can accommodate ironclad prohibitions on certain actions, on the grounds that utility will be maximized in the long run if people internalize such prohibitions. This is true, but it misses the point. Once one has internalized an ironclad prohibition, one is by definition no longer a consequentialist. One cannot treat certain values as absolute in practice and still meaningfully deny their absoluteness in theory; a belief that is not allowed to influence one's actions is no real belief. Most consequentialists are morally superior to their theory and, thankfully, pay it only lip service.
David Friedman is quite right to point out, in the same issue, that "concepts such as rights, property, and coercion" are complicated and not always susceptible to clear and easy rules. But this is not an argument for making consequences the sole test of right action. What it does mean is that non-consequentialist moral considerations establish only certain broad parameters, leaving it to consequences, custom, and context to make
them more specific.
The parameters are not infinitely broad, however; and I do not see how they could be broad enough to license one group of people, called the government, to reassign title to the fruits of another group's labor at the first group's sole discretion. Hence even if taxation and eminent domain had good results -- which in the long term they rarely do -- they would stand condemned on non-consequentialist grounds as slavery and plunder.
Roderick T. Long
Department of Philosophy
Auburn University
Auburn AL
Monday, May 10, 2004
Levy's Second Thoughts: A Return to Hayekian Fundamentals?
While USM's Troubles Deepen, Thames Takes Time to Congratulate Himself
Hattiesburg recently lured away Fountain Valley-based Hybrid Plastics,
Inc.the company's half a dozen Ph.D scientists also anticipate
longer-term returns from an alliance with The University of Southern
Mississippi.
Shelby Thames
Shelby F. Thames, Ph.D.
President
The University of Southern Mississippi
Emmett Till Murder Investigation Reopened (My Take)
Why Should We Care?
Debating Foreign Policy with "Objectivists"
Iraq lacks Western culture and a flourishing middle class and it is fractured by ethnic, cultural and tribal conflict. The British were never successful in Iraq (then, Mesopotmia), and, for similar reasons, the US will probably meet the same fate. In fact, the political culture in current-day Iraq has been so devastated by years of dictatorship that the masses are infused with an "entitlement" mentality, which is being nourished now by the dominant welfare state politics of the United States. ... Even though politics can influence culture, institutions do not change by simple writ; there has to be a predominating cultural change that drives and sustains the political one. This is what I've learned from Ayn Rand. Indeed, Rand argued that too many libertarians tried to play at politics without recognizing the necessity for a cultural foundation for freedom. Some Objectivists who accept Rand's argument with regard to the United States and the need to change American culture, suddenly go loopy when I try to apply that same argument to the situation in Iraq, where the culture is that much more hostile to individual responsibility, procedural democracy, and free institutions.
It is not a free nation's duty to liberate other nations at the price of self-sacrifice, but a free nation has the right to do it, when and if it so chooses. This right, however, is conditional. Just as the suppression of crimes does not give a policeman the right to engage in criminal activities, so the invasion and destruction of a dictatorship does not give the invader the right to establish another variant of a slave society in the conquered country. ... Since there is no fully free country today, since the so-called "Free World" consists of various "mixed economies," it might be asked whether every country on earth is morally open to invasion by every other. The answer is: No.
If you have accepted the Marxist doctrine that capitalism leads to wars, read Professor Ekirch's account of how Woodrow Wilson, the "liberal" reformer, pushed the United States into World War I. "He seemed to feel that the United States had a mission to spread its institutions—which he conceived as liberal and democratic—to the more benighted areas of the world." It was not the "selfish capitalists," or the "tycoons of big business,'' or the "greedy munitions-makers" who helped Wilson to whip up a reluctant, peace-loving nation into the hysteria of a military crusade—it was the altruistic "liberals" of the magazine The New Republic edited by ... Herbert Croly. What sort of arguments did they use? Here is a sample from Croly: "The American nation needs the tonic of a serious moral adventure."
If you still wonder about the singular recklessness with which alleged humanitarians treat such issues as force, violence, expropriation, enslavement, bloodshed—perhaps the following passage from Professor Ekirch's book will give you some clue to their motives: "Stuart Chase rushed into print late in 1932 with a popular work on economics entitled A New Deal. 'Why,' Chase asked with real envy at the close of the book, 'should Russia have all the fun of remaking a world ?'"
Is it any coincidence that the neoconservative progeny of Woodrow Wilson and Leon Trotsky should be advocating the same "humanitarian" wars "to make the world safe for democracy"? Leave those arguments to the neocons; they are most definitely not an implication of Rand's radical legacy.
Sunday, May 9, 2004
Heaven
Now Hiring
No Friends of Bill W.
Cheever came to the pages covering Christmas 1970. On the eve of the holiday, Bill Wilson passed a fitful night. A lifelong smoker, he had been fighting emphysema for years, and now he was losing the battle. Nurse James Dannenberg was on duty in the last hour before dawn. At 6:10 a.m. on Christmas morning, according to Dannenberg's notes, the man who sobered up millions "asked for three shots of whiskey."
So did your blood run cold? Were you shocked that Bill Wilson would ask for alcohol on his deathbed, but relieved to learn he didn't get it? I'd guess that a healthy majority of the people who read the article felt the same way.
Saturday, May 8, 2004
Pressure Continues to Build at USM
Iran Update
Szasz in One Lesson
If neuroscientists discovered that mass murderers and people who claim to be Jesus had different brain chemistries from other people, most everyone would accept this as evidence that they suffered from a mental illness/brain disorder (MI/BD).
First, to involuntarily “hospitalize” and drug people “diagnosed” as mentally ill and thought possibly to be dangerous to themselves or others, and
Foreign Policy Debates
The Dominant Paradigm
It was U.S. inaction against Al Qaeda that got us into this mess in the first place. It was our tolerance of Arab autocracies that contributed to the madness in the Middle East.
We've got to acknowledge first that the old debates are obsolete. I wish the U.S could still go off, after Iraq, at the head of "coalitions of the willing" to spread democracy around the world. But the brutal fact is that the events of the past year have discredited that approach.
We've got to reboot. We've got to come up with a global alliance of democracies to embody democratic ideals, harness U.S. military power and house a permanent nation-building apparatus, filled with people who actually possess expertise on how to do this job. [Emphasis added.]
More Moore
Michael Moore and Disney III
Friday, May 7, 2004
Michael Moore and Disney (Part II)
Bush, Rumsfeld, et al.: Men for No Seasons
How Convenient
Liberty and Power "Favorite Link" at Fire Shelby Thames Website
Thursday, May 6, 2004
Oppressive Paternalism
Beginning of the Endgame at USM
Jack Hanbury, risk manager at the University of Southern Mississippi, will be on administrative leave through June 30 after resigning, university spokeswoman Lisa Mader said in a prepared statement Thursday.
The official confirmation came about 24 hours after reports began circulating on campus that Hanbury was no longer employed by the university.
Hanbury, who came to USM a year ago from a private law practice in Kentucky, handled the investigation that resulted in an attempt to fire tenured professors Frank Glamser and Gary Stringer. The university reached a settlement with them April 28 that was accepted by the College Board Friday.
The Tragedy of Colin Powell
Going All Wobbly
Is Government the Source of Outsourcing?
"Our" Falluja General Says Yankees Go Home!
Michael Moore and Disney
Wednesday, May 5, 2004
At USM It Never Lets Up
The University of Southern Mississippi has more than 12,000 e-mails per day pass through our technology system. iTech, the university's technology support division, does not monitor e-mails. The e-mails monitored for the hearing were done so in accordance with university policy and state law. The monitoring was limited in its scope and time. No monitoring is occurring at this time. We encourage faculty, staff and students to review the university's information technology use and security policy, which can be accessed at http://www.usm.edu/infosec/policy.
Laissez Faire in Iran
The lunacy of nation-building and of imposed political settlements—which have been tried over and over again in the Middle East with no long-term success—does not mean that there is no hope for the Arab world. Former Reagan administration advisor Michael Ledeen speaks of a rising revolt against theocracy in Iran, for example, among a younger generation that is fed up with their oppressive government. They eat American foods, wear American jeans, and watch American TV shows. I don't see how a U.S. occupation in any part of the region will nourish this kind of revolt. If anything, the United States may be perceived as a new colonial administrator. Such a perception may only give impetus to the theocrats who may seek to preserve their rule by deflecting the dissatisfaction in their midst toward the "infidel occupiers." I can think of no better ad campaign for the recruitment of future Islamic terrorists.
The War of Ideas
Few administration insiders rival Douglas Feith as a passionate believer in America's ability to transform Iraq into a beacon of democracy in the Middle East. Feith, the undersecretary of Defense for policy and a protégé of Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, has played a lead role in what has turned out to be overly optimistic postwar planning.
Yet, several military experts had very different views:
Thomas Donnelly, a defense policy expert at AEI, faulted the Pentagon for not thinking broadly about the aftermath of ousting Saddam Hussein. "President Bush asked for regime change," Donnelly said, "but what he got was a plan for regime removal."
Metz echoes the precise concern enunciated by Barbara Tuchman, with regard to Vietnam:
Americans were always talking about freedom from Communism, whereas the freedom that the mass of Vietnamese wanted was freedom from their exploiters, both French and indigenous. The assumption that humanity at large shared the democratic Western idea of freedom was an American delusion. "The freedom we cherish and defend in Europe," stated President Eisenhower on taking office, "is no different than the freedom that is imperiled in Asia." He was mistaken. Humanity may have common ground, but needs and aspirations vary according to circumstances.But perhaps the most intriguing comment Shapiro mentions is this one:
An hour after the AEI conference ended, Rumsfeld faced the cameras for his first protracted public discussion of the chilling film accounts of the sadistic abuse of Iraqi prisoners. No single event has more dramatically undermined U.S. postwar aims. And yet when asked at his news conference for his thoughts about how this savage imagery might affect the Iraqi people, Rumsfeld responded lamely, "I haven't been focused on the war of ideas, to be honest with you, with respect to this issue."And, might I suggest, that is precisely the problem: no one in this administration has been "focused on the war of ideas" in any of the ways that matter.
As Shapiro points out, "nothing is more central to whether Americans in Iraq are perceived as liberators or conquerors." Shapiro here refers to the prisoner abuse story, and one has only to consult what Iraqis themselves are saying about this story to appreciate the truth of his statement. And this is where the administration's defenders make a profound mistake: it does not matter what they think about this and similar stories, and it does not matter how they seek to minimize its impact.
What matters is how Iraqis themselves view it -- and, therefore, how they view the United States. It is all very well for us to talk about how we are "liberating" Iraq, but when the actual, concrete reality of life in Iraq contains horrors such as those now being revealed, how likely is it that Iraqis will put much credit in such theories? This shows the problems in resting foreign policy on (and in justifying wars and occupations by) "untested theories" such as nation-building. (And once again, please don't make the usual appeal to Japan and Germany after World War II: they are not the same as Ken Jowitt explains, and if anything, only underscore why such a notion is not likely to succeed in the Middle East.)
In essence, it could accurately be said at this point that our current foreign policy rests on the error of rationalism: of purportedly interpreting complex social-political dynamics and making plans for future action on the basis of self-contained and self-referencing abstract theories divorced from the specifics of the reality which confronts us. When we disregard history, culture and all the other relevant factors, we should not be surprised when such theories do not work -- and when they lead to disaster, and to results which are exactly the opposite of what we had intended. In other words, when foreign policy (or policy in any area) is justified by recourse to theories which are purposely not tested by reference to specific facts and the details of any specific context, failure to one degree or another is the most likely result, and usually the only likely result, barring an unprecedented stream of miraculous lucky breaks.
We have been down this road before, and we failed to learn the appropriate lessons. All of us, and the Iraqis as well, are paying the price for those mistakes now. And we will all have to pay the price, in countless ways of which we are not even aware at this point, for decades to come.
(Cross-posted at The Light of Reason.)
Historians: In Denial About In Denial
Ralph E. Luker recounts how the history profession has continued to ignore the embarassing findings of a new book by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage.
Luker draws blood. This is well worth reading. Wednesday's edition of The Independent (London) carries a long obituary of Thomas Corbally, who is described as a "mysterious American businessman intimately involved in the Profumo affair." This is the Soviet spy scandal involving call girls and politicians that shook Britain in 1963 and hastened the resignation of Harold Macmillan as prime minister later that year. You have to hand it to the Brits: their Cold War spy scandals are in a class of their own. They're not just about espionage but also contain a generous dose of what passed for decadence in that bygone age.
And if you can't get enough of this particular spy scandal, you can read Michael Gillard's obituary of Corbally published in the Guardian last week. It is not surprising that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq and the continuing resistance that American forces are encountering has prompted comparisons with the British in Mesopotamia (Iraq) after the First World War, the French in Algeria after the Second World War, the Americans in Vietnam, and the Israelis in the Occupied Territories. It seems to me that there is some merit in each of these historical parallels but perhaps the most telling one for American readers is the U.S. invasion and occupation of the Philippines that began in 1898. This led to the Filipino insurrection that lasted for ten years and was brutally suppressed by U.S. troops. The Philippines was not granted complete independence until 1946. Last week saw the publication of two articles describing this squalid episode in American history. William Loren Katz’s “Splendid Little War; Long Bloody Occupation: Iraq, the US and an Old Lesson” was posted April 28 at the Counterpunch website edited by that acerbic anarchist Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. And William Niskanen’s “Filipino Lessons for America Strategy in Iraq” first appeared in the Financial Times for April 30 and is now republished at the Cato Institute website. During the crisis at the University of Southern Mississippi, President Shelby Thames and his cronies have done an excellent job of keeping an a major source of embarrassment alive. When a university administrator, or anyone who enjoys the sponsorship of administrators, is caught misrepresenting his or her background or accomplishments, the top administrators normally work feverishly to ensure that the charges of misrepresentation do not get press coverage. They do not bring the issue in front of the public, let alone strive to keep it there. Yet keep it there is precisely what Shelby Thames, the President of the University of Southern Mississippi, and his backers have done, in their ham-handed efforts to protect his Vice President for Research and Economic Development, Angelina Dvorak. The wall of containment was breached on January 16, 2004, when information about Angeline Dvorak's vita was released to local television station WDAM. On January 20, 2004, Shelby Thames and Angelina Dvorak called a press conference to proclaim that she had not made any misrepresentations on her vita. At the press conference Dvorak threatened to sue anyone who questioned her claim to have been an Associate Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, instead of President of Ashland Community College, with tenured Associate Professor status in the Kentucky Community and Technical College System. When the press conference took place, the USM chapter of the American Association of University Professors, led by Frank Glamser, had not even issued its report on Dvorak's credentials. By calling Frank Glamser and Gary Stringer into his office on March 5 and firing them for daring to check out claims made on Dvorak's vita, Thames ensured that questions about Dvorak's credentials would keep following her around. Even after the awkward settlement that was imposed during Glamser and Stringer's appeal hearing of April 28, Thames and his allies have repeatedly renewed the issue in front of the public. When Thames backer and soon-to-be state College Board President Roy Klumb went on a call-in show and tried to obliterate the settlement, he was keeping Dvorak's credentials in front of the public. When the Mississippi Business Journal published an interview with Dvorak under the headline, "In the middle of a storm, Dvorak credentials stand up," it put the issue back in front of the public. And the MBJ article was obviously Dvorak's idea: The opening paragraphs make the now-familiar false claim that the Vice President for Research at USM does not need to be a tenured faculty member--even though evaluating faculty members for tenure and promotion is part of the Vice President's job, and USM's Faculty Handbook requires that anyone who evaluates faculty members for tenure must be tenured, and anyone who evaluates faculty members for promotion must have attained the rank that the faculty member is being considered for promotion to. The actual interview questions are all softballs; the article's author, Lynne W. Jeter, not only wrote for Pointe Innovation magazine, which Dvorak says she founded, but published a book about WorldCom that managed to skate over the company's accounting scandal and ensuing bankruptcy. So the questions about Dvorak's vita are never going to go away. (If you have a subscription you can see, for instance, how they are treated in the Chronicle of Higher Education's recent update on the USM crisis.) Dvorak, Thames, his spokesflack Lisa Mader, and his backer Roy Klumb have done everything in their power to make sure that they won't. They have acted in flagant disregard of the administrator's prime imperative: Avoid Bad Publicity. Meanwhile: Thames met with the deans of the five colleges and the library yesterday morning. So far, they all still have their jobs, but well-informed sources indicate that at least two of them remain in imminent danger of being fired. Myron Henry, the President of the Faculty Senate, and several other vocal critics of Thames and his henchcrew are thought to be close in line behind them, should Thames remain in power. The Academic Council at USM met yesterday and passed a unanimous resolution demanding that the administration cease surveillance of faculty and student emails, and publicly reveal the names of those who have been spied on in the past. And today the student newspaper at USM hits the administration hard, regarding the settlement, the email spying, and the order to the deans to violate the state Freedom of Information Act. As always, for the latest news see the Fire Shelby Web site. Many of us who were openly critical of the war did so not only because of our general pre-dispostion against power, but also because we knew what the practical consequences of putting American troops into an Arab country under questionable pretenses meant. In the past few days the Bush administration has certainly felt the powerful consequences of that choice.
Iraqi prisoners being abused certainly has consequences in settling that dispute, but what impact does it have world-wide? Especially since our credibility is already shot among many in the Europe and the developing world because we haven't found any weapons of mass destruction. So when Sudan wins a seat on a UN committee to deal with human rights issues how much weight does our, correct, decision to walk out of the committee carry? Answer - none. We look no better than Sudan to many people, and frankly that's a shame. It's not because our government is some paradigm. It obviously isn't. But when a tyrannical, murderous regime thumbs their nose at us and points to our abuses in Iraq, and those accusations ring true with many folks in the Arab world things are out of whack.
The UN is not a useful forum, and this decision to elect Sudan has little real consequence for the world. However, we are obviously better than the Sudanese government. When the contrast between the U.S. and a country like Sudan can be obscured by the abuses we've committed in Iraq, it's a shame for freedom and our struggle for liberty. Sugamo Prison, in Tokyo, was the site where Japanese war criminals, like Tojo, were held -- some for as long as the Occupation continued, until 1952.
As part of a project, I examined the prison records and interviewed surviving American guards and their Japanese prisoners. Not one incident of cruelty to prisoners was reported. On the contrary, prison life was amazingly courteous, and both sides expressed a warmth and admiration for each other that is clearly the reverse of what we now find at the Baghdad prison under the command of American forces.
Iraq is not Japan, to be sure. But one finds, over and over again, the comparison being made. If there is any validity to it, then I suggest the main lesson to be learned is this: to convert an enemy into an ally cannot be done when prisoners are treated sadistically, and forced to perform sodomizing acts in front of their camera-toting American tormentors.
Richard Minear's 1971 book, "Victor's Justice," lambasted the American Occupation of Japan, and especially the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, for concealing a blood-lust for vengeance in the legal niceties of a courtroom charade. Yet in Iraq, what we see is not even the charade, nor any pretense of law and justice. In fact, it is not even the lust for vengeance. It is just stupid, blind cruelty.
We should remember that in 1945 Americans convicted and executed General Yamashita for less.
“Being steadfast in defense of carefully considered convictions is a virtue. Being blankly incapable of distinguishing cherished hopes from disappointing facts, or of reassessing comforting doctrines in face of contrary evidence, is a crippling political vice.”
This is one of the killer lines from George Will’s excellent column about George Bush today in the Washington Post. I recommend it. King Banaian describes his experience. Isn't anyone, like FIRE, willing to finance a law-suit to stop this travesty? Since I can't edit my previous article on the crisis at the University of Southern Mississippi (I get error messages each time I try), I will put three quick updates here: Julian Sanchez has an excellent piece at Reason today holding the left accountable for this insane talk of conscription.
Frankly, I'm more than a little dismayed that otherwise respectable lefties like Max Sawicky and Matthew Yglesias would climb on board with this, particulary given the very slim likelihood that if Congress were to approve a draft, it would come with the "rich kids are gonna' die too" stipulations that have motivated Charlie Rangel and company to start agitating for it in the first place.
The more likely outcome? We get a draft. Congress creates the holes for privileged kids to crawl through we've always allowed. We get more soldiers. Extra soldiers are to presidents what budget suprluses are to Congress. More men means future presidents find more wars to fight, without ever really needing to quit the old ones.
It doesn't surprise me that a McCain or a Kristol or a Hagel is on board with conscription. What's striking to me that alleged leftist, peace-loving, rights-loving people would think it's okay to send young men and women unwillingly to their deaths as pretext to a national debate on foreign policy.
I wrote a bit of satire on the topic called "Affirmative Casualties" back when Rangel first broached the idea in 2002. As with much of satire these days, it really doesn't seem so farfetched anymore. News is breaking thick and fast, in the crisis at the University of Southern Mississippi. As always, I am indebted to the Fire Shelby message board for the latest information. Last night, Roy Klumb, a member of the Mississippi College Board and a notorious partisan of USM President Shelby Thames, appeared on in a TV talk show on WLOX out of Biloxi. Questioned by a skeptical talk show host, Klumb insisted that Frank Glamser and Gary Stringer, the professors who were fired by Thames on March 5, and reinstated for 2 years in a settlement arrived at on April 28, had broken the law. He referred on three occasions to their having committed "crimes." As for the prospect of Thames being fired or pushed to resign, Klumb declared, "It's not gonna happen." A little background from the hearing last Wednesday, April 28, in which Glamser and Stringer appealed their dismissals: While investigating the claim of Angie Dvorak, Thames' Vice-President for Research, to have been an Associate Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, Stringer included her Social Security Number in a request for information about her credentials that he sent to an employee of the Kentucky community college system. Since Dvorak's Social Security Number has been included in a version of her vita that Thames' own public relations office provided to the media, it is hardly secret information. Moreover, Stringer represented himself, correctly, as a Professor of English at USM when he made the query. On the talk show, Klumb declared that Glamser and Stringer had obtained the Social Security Number illegally and used it illegally--neither of which is true. Actually, he insisted that the two professors had used USM computers to "commit a crime." (And for what it's worth, Glamser seems to have had nothing to do with obtaining or using the SSN at all.) Klumb went on to assert that if the USM faculty had known about this purported illegal use of the Social Security Number, there would never have been a faculty vote of 430-32 on a resolution of no confidence in Shelby Thames. Klumb also repeated the inflated student enrollment figure for which the Thames administration got into trouble last fall (16, 000) instead of the true figure (15, 000), and insisted that all of USM's problems would promptly cease, if only tenure were abolished. Klumb was seeking to nullify the settlement arrived at just last Wednesday (in which the hearing testimony did not support the charge and there was no finding of wrongdoing by the two professors), while exploiting the fact that Glamser and Stringer agreed in the settlement not to publicly criticize Shelby Thames and his administration. Klumb pointedly refused to attend the College Board meeting on Friday at which the settlement was announced. It is clear that the prospects of facing a College Board chaired by Klumb (who becomes Board President on May 8) helped to induce Glamser and Stringer to accept the settlement, for Klumb would have insisted on upholding Thames' decision to fire them. Klumb's performance almost certainly violated the code of ethics of the Mississippi College Board, which states that While Shelby Thames' allies drive to obliterate a settlement that conceded far too much to the Thames regime in the first place, the true nature of his administration can be seen from an email that went out recently to the deans of the 5 academic colleges and the library. In it, Thames' Chief Hatchet Man, Jack Hanbury, orders the deans to violate the Freedom of Information Act by refusing to provide information that the Faculty Senate had requested, concerning the process by which recent, highly controversial merit raises were awarded to faculty and administrators. (The email was not obtained the Thames way--with Spyware or from confiscated hard drives. It was provided to the Fire Shelby message board by a person who was given a copy by one of the recipients.) From: Jack Hanbury To: [deans] Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2004 I have been advised that a couple of you have consulted personal counsel and decided to give the FS [Faculty Senate] the requested information regardless of my legal opinion and Dr. Thames’ instructions. The last I heard, Dr. Thames was your boss, not some nebulous “outside counsel.” Quite simply, regardless of what you or your misguided personal counsel think, the law means you take your orders from Dr. Thames and it is not up to you to decide to do otherwise. You are insulated from personal liability for doing so. I have informed Dr. Thames of your grossly insubordinate action. Needless to say, if the USM administration got into trouble for non-compliance with the Freedom of Information Act, knowledgeable insiders are convinced that Thames would blame the deans--and fire them for refusing to comply with FOIA. So much for insulation from personal liability! And it is a virtual certainty that the outside lawyers the deans consulted know the law better than Hanbury does. Also needless to say, "a couple" of the deans at USM could be fired at any moment. Shelby Thames and his henchcrew are on a rapid course down the road to self-destruction. The real question is how much of the University of Southern Mississippi will still be standing, by the time their self-destruction is complete.Tuesday, May 4, 2004
A GOOD READ
HISTORICAL PARALLELS
USM Administration Keeps an Embarrassing Issue Alive
Credibility Coming Home to Roost
Sodomy and Sadism in Occupied Iraq
Good George Will Column
"Diversity Training" Torture at SCSU
Monday, May 3, 2004
Quick Addenda to Presidential Omnipotence Article
Draft Punk
Delusions of Presidential Omnipotence at USM
Board members will exercise professional judgment and respect confidentiality in personnel matters, legal matters, executive session matters, and other items of a clearly sensitive nature.
USM Settled? Hardly!
The announcement that the termination of two tenured professors at the University of Southern Mississippi has been "settled" should alarm and terrify everyone concerned with academic freedom.
The two professors agreed to accept two years' salary in return for never setting foot on campus again. A gag order was also imposed, specifiying that the professors could not reveal or discuss the nature of the charges against them or the negotiations that resulted in settlement. We will never know, then, what happened, since the parties to the disupte have been bought off.
I say, bad show! Scholars around the country rallied to the defense of colleagues whose academic freedom was violated. We said then, and we say now, that an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us. But we all know from bitter experience how these issues typically end. Money changes hands, silence is purchased like a commodity on the market place, and the principle of academic freedom is sold off to the highest bidder -- just another token in a complex exchange whose ultimate common denominator is cash.
Thames should be hounded from office, certainly. He is a cad and a bounder. But the two professors bear some responsibility here, too. They didn't just sell themselves out, they sold the rest of us. And I, for one, don't like it.
Tax Receipts are Higher in 2004
Despite all the complaints from the left about Dubya's "massive tax cuts for the rich," federal tax receipts were higher in the first half of 2004 compared to the first half of 2003. Those who want to find the cause of high deficits need to look elsewhere.
It's on the Wall
"In line with today's needs, the Selective Service System's structure, programs and activities should be re-engineered toward maintaining a national inventory of American men and, for the first time, women, ages 18 through 34, with an added focus on identifying individuals with critical skills."
That's from a proposal by the Selective Service System. See this.
Thanks to Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek.
No, Limbaugh Meant What He Said
Bill Marina may be right that when Rush Limbaugh said he favors having a war every 20 years, he was merely screwing up Jefferson's remark about revolution. But I doubt it. I think Limbaugh meant exactly what he said: that it is good to put each generation through war—just for the hell of it.
Making the Cut
Browsing in the La Guardia airport book store yesterday, I spotted 100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know by the editors of the American Heritage dictionaries. The first entry my eye fell on, with pleasant surprise, was laissez faire. Here's the entry: "An economic doctrine that opposes government regulation of or interference in commerce beyond the minimum necessary for a free enterprise system to operate according to its own economic laws. Noninterference in the affairs of others."
The first part isn't perfect—but all things considered, not bad. I didn't have time to see if socialism made the cut.
Torture & Civilian Deaths in Three Counterinsurgencies
Blog viewers who have been reading about the emerging atrocities issue in Iraq may find the following artcle of mine, just posted at The Independent Insitute web site, of interest. It deals also with the Philippines and Vietnam. To view it, Click Here.
Sunday, May 2, 2004
Anti- Fat Movement
My friend Jeff Schaler sent me an article from the New York Times on the current demonizing of fat. It gives a historical perspective to the issue and makes some good points.
However, the piece does show the Times characteristic bias in favor of government because it does not mention, even once, the enormous potential for tax revenue that is involved. Unless they are going to weigh people at the Giant Supermarket checkout counter everyone, including the emaciated, will pay the Twinkie Taxes. Also, think of the bad science, graft and corruption that will go into deciding which foods are bad and taxable versus which foods are good and non-taxable.
The anti-fat movement is just one more nail in the coffin of personal responsibility.
President of USM in Violation of Settlement
Friday afternoon the Mississippi College Board announced the settlement between Shelby Thames, the President of the University of Southern Mississippi, and the two professors he fired on March 5, Frank Glamser and Gary Stringer.
In return for 2 more years at USM, during which they will not be allowed to teach classes or have offices on campus, after which they will have to retire, Glamser and Stringer had to promise to refrain from further public criticism of the Thames administration.
They have kept their promise.
Fewer constraints were applied to Thames' post-settlement behavior, but he was required to refrain from derogatory comments about the two professors he had tried to fire. The following provision is numbered as it appears in the full text of the settlement:
"8. The parties agree to refrain from making public comments about this agreement until final approval by the Board. The parties agree not to make any public comments about this agreement designed to reflect negatively on the opposing party. The parties acknowledge and agree that the Hearing Officer will make certain detailed statements to the media regarding this agreement."
Scarcely was this settlement announced when Thames' personal spokesflack, Lisa Mader issued the following press release (courtesy of a contributor to the Fire Shelby message board):
Friday, April 30, 2004
For Immediate Release
Statement by President Shelby Thames
Regarding the Settlement Agreement with Drs. Glamser and Stringer
I appreciate the thoughtful consideration given to this difficult decision by Justice Anderson and the IHL Board. I wish this matter could have been resolved without going through this process, but the agreement reached Wednesday is in the best interest of Southern Miss.
I said from the beginning, that it was never my intention to cause financial harm to Drs. Glamser and Stringer, but the evidence provided to me warranted my initiating dismissal proceedings. This matter could not have been taken lightly because the issues in this case were very serious, as the settlement agreement confirms.
In the coming weeks and months, a debate need not occur to determine who "won" this matter. This was never about anyone "winning," but rather what was in the best interest of Southern Miss. We must keep in mind that Southern Miss is stronger than any one situation. We have the best students, the brightest faculty and staff, supportive alumni and the unlimited potential to make Southern Miss a world-class institution.
Cutting past the first and third paragraphs, which merely show that with staff assistance even Shelby Thames can work up some presidential blather, the second is obviously in violation of the settlement.
Thames further misrepresented the settlement to one newspaper:
"Under the terms of the agreement, the professors will not be reinstated or allowed to return to campus."
"I said from the beginning that it was never my intention to cause financial harm to Drs. Glamser and Stringer, but that it is in the best interest of the university that they be removed... Under the terms of the agreement, the professors will not be reinstated or allowed to return to campus."
Now it is up to the Mississippi College Board to notice the violations and penalize Thames for them. If the Board pretends nothing happened, everyone will know that the fix is in.
The majority of the College Board seems to have a time horizon measurable in nanoseconds. The Clintonesque speeches some of the Board members have made about "healing" at USM, while Thames and his henchcrew remain in power, and unresolved impasses abound, are ample proof of that. (The impasses are so deep that Thames will not even provide the USM Faculty Senate with an organizational chart of his own administration, or explain what money is being used to pay his Chief Hatchet Man, Jack Hanbury, who until his elevation to University Counsel last Friday was not listed as a state employee.) But even politicians who don't care a hoot whether an administrator is manifestly unable to manage, antagonizes nearly the entire faculty and large numbers of students, and routinely hires administrators with doubtful to no qualifications, still have some expectations:
At a minimum, the College Board must expect that Thames will not keep making them look bad. They must also expect not to have to keep intervening in USM affairs. The Board does not want to manage the day-to-day operations of USM; it sorely lacks the capability to do so, even if its other responsibilities didn't preclude taking that one on.
The problem for Thames and his supporters is that he cannot be expected to fulfill the Board's (woefully limited) expectations of him. He cannot bear to be seen as less than omnipotent. He will not refrain from shooting off his mouth, in front of reporters and editors who have stopped granting him the automatic deference that university presidents normally enjoy.
Thames has two years remaining on his contract. To people who are disappointed by the settlement, he may look bulletproof. But there is a way to stop him from putting every aspect of the university under the control of his cronies, from crushing the faculty, or from further alienating the students. The way to do it is to apply relentless pressure. For Thames will predictably respond to that pressure with ever more arbitrary actions and ever more foolish public statements. As the heat intensifies on Thames, conditions will get ugly. But if USM faculty, students, and sympathizers can keep Thames under pressure, he will become too great a load for the College Board to bear. The day will come when they give forth a great collective sigh and drop him.
And the prospects for both academic freedom and civilized standards of privacy on campus will be greatly enhanced if they do.
How the Worst Get on Top
This is neat: a video archive of 50 years of presidential TV ads. Here's a Stevenson ad from 1952 ("Adlai, Love You Madly") that seems every bit as idiotic as anything that's running in the current campaign. And look at this one linking Eisenhower and Robert Taft. It's on the intellectual level of the Teletubbies.
Here's Jackie-O speaking Spanish in what seems to be an appeal to hispanic voters in New York. And here's the famous little-girl-nuked ad that Johnson used to beat Goldwater in 1964. I've never understood why that ad was supposed to be so unfair. Goldwater did call for the use of tactical nukes in Vietnam. However, hearing an amoral wretch like Johnson piously intone, "We mus' luv eech other, oar we mus' die" is enough to turn your stomach.
Hat tip: Neat New Stuff.
Those Racist Peaceniks
Seems the Republicans have learned a thing or two from the Democrats' long-held habit of equating opposition to their own favored policies with racism. Here's President Bush last week:
"There's a lot of people in the world who don't believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern," Bush said.There are only a few folks I know of, Mr. President, who think that olive skin tones and Muslim faith are incompatible with freedom, and they tend to be rather bloodlusty and pro-war."I reject that. I reject that strongly. I believe that people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern. I believe that people whose skins aren't necessarily -- are a different color than white can self-govern."
The argument is not that Iraqis aren't capable of a free society because they're Arab or Muslim. The argument is:
Given that there's no recent history in the region of the kinds of sustainable institutions necessary to preserve and support a free society, it's foolish and arrogant to think we can force American-style democracy on Iraq or Iran or Syria at the point of a gun, and it's ever more foolish and arrogant to think our military and civilian planners can construct a liberal democracy from little more than piles of rubble, oil revenue, and volatile ethnic strife.
It has nothing to do with race. It's history.
Remember this when the Repubicans accuse the Democrats (most likely accurately, by the way) of demagoguing race in the coming November election.
On Rush Limbaugh
It is typical of Limbaugh's loose thinking that he was probably bastardizing Jefferson's observation about a "Revolution" every 20 years; that the Tree of Liberty must be Watered by the Blood of Patriots.
There is a great difference between a Revolution to advance Liberty and a War to keep the Status Quo, or even, in some cases, to move back toward a thoroughly Reactionary society.
Our move in Iraq to now put in place Saddam's old commanders and troops, tells you exactly the thoughts of American leadership on the subject. We helped put Saddam in power, and he proceeded to destroy virtually every vestige of Civil Society in Iraq.
It is a great tribute to the Iraqi people that they have withstood this onslaught to the extent that they have.
Saturday, May 1, 2004
Torture & Civilian Deaths in Three Counterinsurgencies
It was revealed this week, that on top of the indiscriminate bombardment of civilians in Iraqi urban areas, both US and British soldiers have become involved in torture as well. At the same time, comparing the three overall interventions, some writers have drawn attention to parallels with Vietnam a generation ago, and the Philippines a century earlier.
Massive civilian deaths and torture are characteristic of all three Imperial Interventions.
Our Philippine adventure resulted in the creation of The Anti-Imperialist League, in which a number of noted Americans, ranging from former General/Senator Carl Schurz to Mark Twain sought to draw attention to what the Army was doing in the Islands.
By 1902, the Senate, controlled by imperialists such as Henry Cabot Lodge, had initiated another of its often feckless investigations into the conduct of a war. The “antis,” developed a parallel investigation culminating in the publication of a small book, “Marked Severities”: Secretary [of War Elihu] Root’s Record in the Philippines. As it became clear the “antis” would focus on atrocities, some like Andrew Carnegie, withdrew the $5,000 he had promised to help with the investigation.
Calling attention to atrocities always causes the imperialists to drape themselves in the flag and denounce all such criticism as “unpatriotic.”
The estimates of civilians killed in the Philippines range from 200,000 to a high of perhaps 600,000 -- no one really knows. This writer has seen pictures smuggled out by American soldiers of pits filled with the bodies of dozens of Filipinos. One soldier wrote of troops killing a village of about a 1,000 after someone had fired upon them from there.
The “water cure” was the approved torture of the day. With the mouth held open by a knife, a water hose was thrust down the victim’s throat. Whether he talked or not, most often death came later from the infection of the stomach lesions caused by the water pressure. “Civilize ‘em with a Krag” [rifle] was our great battle cry of the era.
The massive burning and killing of Vietnamese -- including the whole village of My Lai -- was much more publicized, of course, in the counterinsurgency in Vietnam. Again, total deaths are hard to estimate, but were certainly well over a million Asians.
Less so was the torture. One of my former students, in American intelligence, refused to participate in it. The Koreans for centuries have been employed for torture by the Chinese, and the US often used them in that capacity in Vietnam. A common method was to jamb wire through the hands and wire them together. The person was then taken up in a helicopter, and pushed out the open door if he refused to talk. Of course, as with the "tiger cages," we often let our South Vietnamese ally do much of the nastier interrogation work.
Now, of course, in Iraq, we are repeating the "shock and awe," kill civilians-torture the enemy tactics of our earlier imperial interventions. It is unclear to me how this will ever result in “winning the hearts and minds” of the Iraqi people. I recall an interview in Vietnam where an American officer admitted our tactics had lost the present generation of Vietnamese, but we would win over the next one. I wondered who he thought would father this new generation? Even General William E. Odum acknowledges we have lost legitimacy in Iraq, and a number of our military professionals warned against the adventure in the first place.
Sy Hersh has an expose of our massive prison complex at AbuGhraib in the forthcomg issue of The New Yorker. It appears the worst Torture abuses were under the direction of the CIA, and other "private contractor" intelligence people. No wonder the people in Fallujah hated these contractors so.
One item that I have not seen discussed is that some contractors also use bullets outlawed under the Geneva Convention, which will literally cut you in half. Who will stand responsible for those kinds of atrocities?
One thing is certain, just as Elihu Root could concoct these policies for the Philippines, and good ‘ol “fog of war,” Robert MacNamara could do so for Vietnam, they would never personally be involved in such killings and torture -- leave that to the soldiers in the field! The same goes for Bush and Cheney today, both of whom appear in “plausible denial," and will blame it all on underlings.
What a century of this Imperialism has done to Americans is not apt to be mentioned by those who glorify Empire such as Niall Ferguson or William Kristol. Perhaps these are the people who ought to be trained to do the torturing for the greater glories of the Empire!
To talk about the Philippines as a “great aberration,” as once did the historian Samuel Flagg Bemis, is errant nonsense. Our Imperial policies, and especially the “national security” bureaucracies and military forces to carry them out, have been developing for at least a century now. They were not disbanded after Vietnam, and the frustrations of Iraq are not likely to cause them to be dismantled into the future.
Remember that the Dictator Julius Caesar was heavily backed by what one might today call the military-industrial complex of Ancient Rome. They used "private contractors," too, and the missile weapon of mass destruction was the catapult, as one sees in the opening scene of "The Gladiator." Someone had the contracts to supply all of that!
It will be interesting to see how this develops given George Bush’s fundamentalist fanaticism. Recall the definition of a fanatic, as someone who redoubles his effort when he has lost sight of his goal.
Rush: "I think wars every 20 years are good."
Yes, he really said it! Hat tip to Matthew Bargainer and Arthur Silber for calling attention to Rush's statement proudly posted on Rush's own website that "wars every 20 years are good."
May Day Memorial
Over at Catallarchy, Jonathan Wilde posts a fitting anti-tribute to May Day.
I'll pitch in a Fox column I wrote last year on why we need a memorial museum to communism.
Kudos to Campbell
Robert L. Campbell has provided a valuable service through his detailed and thoughtful updates on the USM situation. According to his latest report, this is turning into a victory for academic freedom and a humiliation for President Thames. It is unfortunate that more academics have not recognized the dangers presented by this case.
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