— Please read Ken Layne’s report on FOXNews.com about Saddam Hussein’s payments to the families of the suicide bombers: Saddam Hussein is paying $25,000 to the relatives of Palestinian suicide bombers — a $15,000 raise much welcomed by the bombers’ families. And then ask yourself why you haven’t heard about this before. I’m pissed. He’s … Continue reading “Saddam’s terror nexus”
— Please read Ken Layne’s report on FOXNews.com about Saddam Hussein’s payments to the families of the suicide bombers:
Saddam Hussein is paying $25,000 to the relatives of Palestinian suicide bombers — a $15,000 raise much welcomed by the bombers’ families.
And then ask yourself why you haven’t heard about this before. I’m pissed. He’s spent $10 million encouraging these animals to blow up Israeli children, and it’s the best-kept-secret of the Middle East.
— Bias author Bernard Goldberg bites back at Frank Rich and his other critics in this interview in the New York Press And here’s the bulletin: the people I’m calling liberals aren’t real liberals. Real liberals are people I personally admire. I admire people who put it on the line for something they believe in. … Continue reading “Liberals of convenience”
— Bias author Bernard Goldberg bites back at Frank Rich and his other critics in this interview in the New York Press
And here’s the bulletin: the people I’m calling liberals aren’t real liberals. Real liberals are people I personally admire. I admire people who put it on the line for something they believe in. Lliberals in our history, in the 1960s for instance, put their lives on the line. I admire that.
He calls them “liberals of convenience” in the book.
Goldberg delves into the motivations for Frank Rich’s tawdry hit-piece against him as well.
— This statement by Nick Denton, and his search for Gentle Soul Blogs silenced by ruffians of the right has The Sarges hoppin’ mad: People like Doc Searls and Meg Hourihan are to the weblog as Oppenheimer and von Neumann were to the A-bomb. Gentle souls whose creation will be used by others more ruthless. … Continue reading “Blog Wars”
— This statement by Nick Denton, and his search for Gentle Soul Blogs silenced by ruffians of the right has The Sarges hoppin’ mad:
People like Doc Searls and Meg Hourihan are to the weblog as Oppenheimer and von Neumann were to the A-bomb. Gentle souls whose creation will be used by others more ruthless.
And it should. Not only does Denton display a massive arrogance about the delicacy of left wingers that flies in the face of your garden-variety WTO protest, he also displays an equally massive ignorance of the history of Web Logging. The first weblogs were run by people who didn’t have a political axe to grind, like Tim Berhners-Lee, and the first with political content were started by people like yours truly who are right-of-center, small-l libertarians. People like Searls and Hourihan didn’t stumble across web logging until it was already an advanced art, and in Hourihan’s case their contributions have been greatly exaggerated.
And as far as the hate-mail from “fundamentalists” goes, I have some from feminists that would curl Denton’s hair, but even that’s not as scary as the drive-by shootings they’ve done to people like Erin Pizzey who undermine left-feminist orthodoxy. Some people just can’t help being silly.
— Here’s a nice synopsis of where the parties stand (In the Political Party Ring, It’s Fearless Frodo vs. Pathetic Piggy) It’s not as tangible an asset as money or good poll numbers. But for a political party, confidence–in its message, its ideas, even its mission–is usually a critical ingredient of success in an election … Continue reading “Ron Brownstein column”
— Here’s a nice synopsis of where the parties stand (In the Political Party Ring, It’s Fearless Frodo vs. Pathetic Piggy)
It’s not as tangible an asset as money or good poll numbers. But for a political party, confidence–in its message, its ideas, even its mission–is usually a critical ingredient of success in an election year. Right now, the confidence gap may be the biggest difference between the parties. Just over seven months before the midterm elections, Republicans are swaggering. Democrats look lost.
There you have it.
— I’m not convinced the HP/Compaq merger is a bad idea, as Live from the WTC is. The founder of Compaq was an old boss of mine (who offered me a job as he was starting the company,) I worked as a consultant at HP, with both HP and Compaq as an OEM supplier, and … Continue reading “HP/Compaq merger”
— I’m not convinced the HP/Compaq merger is a bad idea, as Live from the WTC is. The founder of Compaq was an old boss of mine (who offered me a job as he was starting the company,) I worked as a consultant at HP, with both HP and Compaq as an OEM supplier, and also at Tandem, the HP spin-off that Compaq acquired to get Tandem’s T-Bus (and hasn’t figured out what to do with since the purchase,) so maybe I have some perspective. HP has a country-club culture that needs shaking-up, and Compaq is a good example of where it needs to go. HP has distribution channels and a knowledge of the Big System business that Compaq’s Tandem division needs for some strategic direction. And anything that reunites HP and Tandem has a certain poetic quality that’s pretty compelling, since the Tandem architecture was developed in the HP Labs but never marketed since it was feared that it would make the HP 3000 look too puny.
Some mergers replace weaknesses with strengths, and this one has the potential. They’re going to need a real CEO, however, like Ann Livermore who should have been made CEO when the board bypassed her for Fiorina. Even if HP’s motivation was simply to knock out a PC competitor, that’s not too shabby a reason on its own.
— Here’s the next thing on my reading list (Amazon.com): Traditionally, “The Enlightenment” has been associated with France, America, and Scotland rather than Britain, which, strangely enough, is thought not to have had an Enlightenment to speak of. Roy Porter effectively upsets this view in The Creation of the Modern World: The British Enlightenment. While … Continue reading “Book of the month”
— Here’s the next thing on my reading list (Amazon.com):
Traditionally, “The Enlightenment” has been associated with France, America, and Scotland rather than Britain, which, strangely enough, is thought not to have had an Enlightenment to speak of. Roy Porter effectively upsets this view in The Creation of the Modern World: The British Enlightenment.
While returning the Enlightenment to Britain, Porter also provides a persuasive general defense of the movement against its Foucauldian, feminist, and/or postmodern critics who still “paint it black.” It was perpetually dismissed as “anything from superficial and intellectually na?ve to a conspiracy of dead white men in periwigs [who] provide the intellectual foundation for Western imperialism,” and one of the book’s strengths is that after reading it, one finds it hard to understand how these “critiques” gained such influence in intellectual circles.
Porter is a serious scholar, not a cultural jingoist, and his view of the development of modernity out of the philosophical, political, scientific, and religious elements present in Britain in the 18th Century is inspired.
— As many others have noted, USS Clueless goes into an extended historical narrative about Japan, and then draws the following conclusion about Islam …before this war ends we shall have to make changes as radical to the majority of Islamic nations, especially the Arab ones. I fear that, because I don’t see how this … Continue reading “Breaking the back of Islam”
— As many others have noted, USS Clueless goes into an extended historical narrative about Japan, and then draws the following conclusion about Islam
…before this war ends we shall have to make changes as radical to the majority of Islamic nations, especially the Arab ones. I fear that, because I don’t see how this war can end if we don’t, unless we are defeated. We can’t merely defeat them militarily; I think we have to break their spirit.
I think the parallel to breaking the spirit of the Japanese must have been Hiroshima, but the Japan part sort of made my eyes glaze over (I studied East Asian history in college, so I already knew about the fits-and-starts flirtation with modernity the Japanese went through.) There are many ways in which Japan differs significantly from Islam: Japan’s an island-nation historically isolated from the rest of the world, with a uniform racial composition and social structure, while Islam is a religion practiced by over a billion people in dozens of countries around the world, with varying degrees of accomodation to non-Islamic elements. So right out of the chute, the parallels aren’t really striking.
That being said, the task at hand in the Terror War has to focus in the Arab Islamists who refuse to accomodate the modern world, and the ultimate solution, in my humble opinion, is to replace their theocracies with secular governments on the mold of Turkey. This doesn’t mean “breaking their spirit” as much as it means liberating it from the yoke of ignorance and backwardness. Mohammed, bless his little heart, was a reformer who dragged the Arabs kicking and screaming into the seventh century. In the spirit of Mohammed, it would be nice if another reformer emerged in the Arab World to take them on into the twenty-first. This will probably take another hundred years or so.
— The historic welfare reform of 1996 was a smashing success from the standpoint of taking welfare recipients capable of working off their couches and into the labor force, but there’s more to be done (Welfare reforms facing their toughest challenge) A new University of Michigan study shows that while the welfare population is shrinking, … Continue reading “Now for some heavy lifting”
— The historic welfare reform of 1996 was a smashing success from the standpoint of taking welfare recipients capable of working off their couches and into the labor force, but there’s more to be done (Welfare reforms facing their toughest challenge)
A new University of Michigan study shows that while the welfare population is shrinking, those who remain have a greater concentration of social problems. Its examination of 2,000 women found that those who had been on welfare longer were 41 percent more likely to have no job skills, 67 percent more likely to have no car or driver’s license, 56 percent more likely to have mental health problems, 53 percent more likely to have physical health problems, almost three times as likely to have children with health problems and 67 percent more likely to have substance abuse problems.
The debate in Washington over welfare re-authorization seems to be shaping up between a faction that wants to stay the course while adding some minor tune-ups on the marriage promotion side and a faction that wants to restore the old system that provided the Democratic Party with a steady stream of new voters dependent on hand-outs from the government.
The question that the old welfare system raised for me was why we insist that people who aren’t capable of holding down even a menial job should be raising children in the first place. Don’t we all believe that raising children is the hardest job there is, and don’t we all believe that doing it “for the children” is the essence of sound social policy? There needs to be a set of alternatives to biological mother-custody in cases where mom can’t perform basic self-maintenance tasks, and they need to be as kind as possible. But this debate was poisoned by Newt Gingrich prattling on about orphanages last time around, so we’ll only get there years from now. In the meantime, the administration’s marriage-boosting proposals are a step in the right direction.
— Do it now, and don’t make him practice the degrading art of salesmanship again (KEN LAYNE) If you’d be interested in a signed copy for … I don’t know, 15 or 20 bucks, and if you’d be willing to pay for it with PayPal, send an e-mail to [email protected] with YES in the subject … Continue reading “Buy Ken Layne’s book”
— Do it now, and don’t make him practice the degrading art of salesmanship again (KEN LAYNE)
If you’d be interested in a signed copy for … I don’t know, 15 or 20 bucks, and if you’d be willing to pay for it with PayPal, send an e-mail to [email protected] with YES in the subject line. I’ll add up the response in a few days, and then I’ll buy an appropriate amount from my publisher. As soon as they arrive, I’ll announce it, and then I will finally achieve my lifelong goal: selling mail-order crap.
I haven’t read the book myself, but I have had the pleasure of meeting Ken, which gives me the right to attest that he’s a gentleman and a scholar, a smart and witty lad, one very accomplished in the arts of dissipation and therefore worthy of your patronage.
