WHY IS AMERICA RICH? Great editorial in the Omaha World-Herald on the causes of Third World poverty. Listening to bin Laden's apologists would lead you to believe the US has become rich by robbing the developing world. Actually, our wealth stems from our being, well, developed. It is the lack of the rule of law and an open economy and society that causes poverty wherever it is tried.
Economic hardship in developing countries stems in large measure from the actions of Third World governments themselves - from their mismanagement and inefficiencies in many cases, from their corruption and greed in others.In what ways do these governments demonstrate such behavior? By clandestinely siphoning off millions of dollars in foreign aid and dispersing it among cronies. By keeping major segments of the national economy under government control and imposing heavy taxes on the remainder, stifling economic growth. By failing to ensure protection of property rights. By refusing to guarantee an independent judiciary. By demanding bribes. By keeping the government contracting process a secret so that citizens won't discover the bid-rigging. By denying women a full role in the national economy and persecuting members of other religions, steps whose negative effects include choking off opportunities for economic growth.
It is so much easier to blame America, though, than to change the developing world.
The Deep Intellectual Roots of Islamic Terror are examined in the Times today. Turns out bin Laden is "tapping into a minority Islamic tradition with a wide following and a deep history" that stretches back to medieval times:
Although many Muslims are horrified at the notion that their faith is being used to justify terrorism, Mr. bin Laden's advocacy of jihad, or holy war, against the West is a natural extension of what some radical Islamists have been saying and doing since the 1930's. These radicals were jailed, tortured and often executed in their home countries, particularly in Egypt during the 1950's and 60's, for their attacks on Western influences and their efforts to replace their own regime with an Islamic state.The Muslim extremists, members of Islamic Jihad, who assassinated the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981, for instance, left behind a 54-page document titled "The Neglected Duty" that provided an elaborate theological justification for what they had done. Addressed to other Muslims rather than to the West, the document drew on earlier thinkers in arguing that rebelling against one's rulers ‹ which is forbidden by most Islamic authorities ‹ is in fact a duty if those rulers have abandoned true Islam.
Doesn't this idea echo the Declaration of Independence where Jefferson says:
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.This was a dangerous idea in the 18th Century and it becomes even more dangerous when adopted in a culture that makes no distinction between religion and the state. Especially so, when these religious radicals are deciding for themselves what the Koran says-- as bin Laden has in his decision that "killing innocents or even Muslims is permitted if it serves the cause of jihad against the West." Will the Islamic world have religious wars like those that wracked Europe after the Reformation?
CHIPOTLE ALERT I think I promised recipes in the blurb which has not, in fact, ended up on this page. Here's what I did for dinner. I had these smoked pork chops on hand in case the Taliban came over for dinner. They come shrink-wrapped and keep for a month. I had suspected when I bought them that they would be similar in tenderness to the chops that Mister Dropscan likes from Castle Hill. These suspicions were completely borne out. I topped them with a little glaze made with a spoonful of honey and a spoonful of chipotle paste, with a chopped clove of garlic stirred in. They then spent maybe 20 minutes in a 350 degree oven which also contained some diced potato tossed with chopped green pepper and onions roasting on a flat pan. (The chipotle paste is made from a can of chipotles in adobo sauce processed with a can of tomato paste; this heavenly mixture never spoils under refrigeration and thus is always there when something calls out for chipotle, as things so often do.) Steamed broccoli rounded things out and it was a quick and quite good weeknight dinner.
$900 MILLION has been raised for the families of the 911 victims. That's a lot of money for 5,000 families. Many of these families, though, have not heard from any of the 140 charities managing these donations. Last week I saw a woman on O'Reilly whose husband worked for Cantor Fitzgerald. The firm's owner, Howard Lutnick, made the media rounds following the attacks, frequently weeping and promising to take care of all the families of his dead employees. Unfortunately, this woman on The Factor had not heard from Lutnick and no one from Cantor was returning her calls. It was a very disheartening story. I just wonder what else this money is going to end up getting spent on, because how could it all go to the families?
"IN THE NAME OF ALLAH, the merciful and the gracious, McDonald's Indonesia is owned by an indigenous Muslim Indonesian": so declares a poster next to the Golden Arches inside a Jakarta McDonalds. A KFC in Makassar was bombed yesterday but there was minimal damage, thanks be to Allah.
SHOOTING TO THE END Pictures taken by Bill Biggart, the only professional photographer to die while taking pictures of the World Trade Center.
BLOGS! Interesting article on web logs in USA Today featuring comments by University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds-- the InstaPundit! I discovered him through Virginia Postrel on 9/11 and he truly lives up to his name, posting fascinating information on a near constant basis. He's also a pundit outside of cyberspace, too-- he's been on Jim Lehrer and writes for FOXNews.com.
Massacre survivors of Rwanda and Srebrenica are protesting the award of the greatest of prizes to the Annan-helmed UN. You'd think the failure of UN "peacekeepers" to prevent atrocities occurring right in front of them would disqualify the organization from receiving a peace award just a few years later. This lack of actual recent UN peace successes leads me to believe that the Norwegians' decision for the Nobel Centenary is more about symbolism and politics than anything else (except perhaps some self-congratulation from the two former-UN delegates on the Committee). They like the idea of the UN and wish Bush was making more use of it.
National Review Online sends out its first volley against the Nobel Committee. Stay tuned, I'm sure more will follow. Leeden's ending is particularly nice:
All of us join in celebrating the selection, hoping that the war against terrorism will not deprive the committee of a rich supply of suitable candidates in future years.
IT'S AN ILL WIND that blows no one good. I can once again listen to NPR without cringing! The Left has halted its whinging about the Electoral College and criticizing every breath Bush takes and even the New York Times can now see what a lot of other people saw in W. last year. The New Republic is excellent this week, in particular Peter Beinart's TRB which examines whether certain Leftists are really concerned about a "chilling effect" on free speech or just using any excuse to oppose the war. I've already mentioned below how great Christopher Hitchens has been (here's a nice piece echoing Naipaul on the pursuit of happiness.) Even Jonathan Alter is worth reading these days!
Ken Layne thusly sums up our new found national unity:
Something weird is happening in this country, and it's not just Anthrax and suicide hijackers. The rational people on the Right and Left are finding -- surprise! -- that we have very much in common. We like it here, and we like the world. We like writing, we like stirring up some trouble, we like being alive and free to do what we want, even if that freedom can leave us unemployed now and then. We like to make stupid jokes, we like to insult public figures, and we like to bitch about our government and the cops and the IRS. But if some medieval nut sandwich wants to Tread On Me, I will gladly stand up with Joe Farah and Andrew Sullivan and Al Giordano and Tony Pierce and G.W. Bush and Amy Langfield and Matt Drudge and Matt Welch and Maureen Dowd and Chris Rock and Tom Petty and Kobe Bryant and Heather Havrilesky and Jeff Whalen and we will smite any motherfuckers who want to blow up the world.
IGNOBEL The Norwegian Nobel Institute has awarded the UN and Kofi Annan the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize for their work toward "a better organized and more peaceful world." Huh? The official press release also mentions Mr. Annan's rise to the challenge of international terrorism, which I think can be seen best by the election of Syria to the Security Council this week.
I'm glad I looked into who exactly was guilty of this sham before I smashed my spouse's Ericsson in protest. The Norwegians are undoubtedly having their say about how the war on terrorism should be administered. What is interesting is that they speculate on their website that Alfred Nobel originally designated them as Peace Prize-makers over the Swedes because he thought that innocent little Norway wouldn't use the Prize as a tool of power politics. Woops.
"SO FAR, SO GOOD. Way to go, military." I had to read it twice, but I think Molly Ivins is on the bandwagon.
TESTING LINKS Everything seems to work. Let me know if there are any problems with the site. There's now an email link above.
BRRR Aren't they worried about the "chilling effect" at Berkeley?
NOBEL NEWS The 2001 Nobel Prize has gone to the Trinidad-born British writer V.S. Naipaul. Here is an interview he gave to the New York Times in 1994. Also, the always fantastic Manhattan Institute has posted the 1990 Wriston Address given by Naipaul on "Our Universal Culture." This is definitely worth reading as much of it concerns the ways in which Islam conflicts with said universal culture. There is also a nice look near the end at the concept of the pursuit of happiness.
Naipaul has written two books on Islamic culture. In the most recent, Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples he examines the non-Arab converts to Islam of Pakistan, Malaysia, and Iran. These peoples were colonized first by the British and more recently by Muslims, with the latter doing more harm than the former in Naipaul's view. I haven't read it, but anything so horribly condemned by Edward Said is probably worth while. Said can't quite wrap his post-post-colonial mind around the idea of Muslim imperialism. Unable to see Third World Arabs as anything other than forever sanctified by their suffering under British colonialism, he declares Naipaul a traitor to the developing world:
He is a man of the Third World who sends back dispatches from the Third World to an implied audience of disenchanted Western liberals who can never hear bad enough things about all the Third World myths.Love that "implied audience" jab. Ouch. I'm sure Naipaul has been considering the audience implications of the Swedish Academy's decision all day.
CHILLING EFFECT Thomas Sowell has a characteristically great column that examines the "chilling effect" that certain people are worried will quash dissent. Sowell rightly points out that the First Amendment does not protect anyone from having their views criticized. Au contraire, mon frère! All of ones fellow citizens have the same Constitutional right to say just how wrong one is.
Last week John Podhoretz expressed this perfectly in an exchange he had with a glossy-magazine reporter doing a story on how difficult it has been for dissenters in the wake of unprecedented public support of Bush's military response to the 911 attacks. She called Podohetz to take him to task for his "vituperative" attack on Susan Sontag's anti-American remarks in the New Yorker. As he explained to the reporter:
My main objection to Sontag's screed was her comparison between the unity of America's politicians in the wake of the worst foreign attack on American soil since the War of 1812 and the unity expressed by Soviet officials in the darkest days of that totalitarian empire.Sontag's view was "hateful," I told the reporter. She recoiled at the word. Wasn't an opinion like mine going to produce a "chilling effect" that stifled opposing views?
I said I sure hoped so. I am concerned that Sontag's view of the United States will prevail, which would be very harmful to the United States. This is an argument I want to win, and I want her to lose. If, by subjecting her freely expressed views to an equally free expression of outrage, I might play a role in making the further expression of Sontag-style beliefs less acceptable in elite circles, I will have done my job.
The right to express views, which is a glory of the United States, does not shield anyone from the consequences of doing so. Those consequences include being attacked by other writers - and even being fired by a boss who is embarrassed by what you've said or worried that what you've said might cost him advertisers and readers.
That's part of the free market in ideas.
Now, death threats are not part of that currency, certainly. They are illegal - they represent the limit of free speech.
The comparison of an angry article taking issue with Susan Sontag's spurious and defamatory views of the United States to illegal death threats on Peter Jennings is itself an effort to introduce a "chilling effect" on public debate. It suggests there's no difference between taking someone to task for what he says and threatening his life.
WAITING FOR WORLDPEACE So far the Dropscan household has escaped the recorded phone messages of Texas gubernatorial candidate John WorldPeace announcing that opponent Tony Sanchez is "the worst possible choice for Democratic candidate for governor." Mr. WorldPeace, a.k.a. the attorney formerly known as Kenneth Edward Wolter, reportedly has an automated dialer telling answering machines statewide that Sanchez is a Mafia-connected dud. Sanchez would like to laugh him off as a crackpot, but the 90,000 calls a day WorldPeace has made (soon to increase to 250,000) have raised recognition of his already catchy name. I haven't gotten the call yet, but he might just be a good choice for the Democratic primary.
ANWR NOW Alaskan Senator Frank Murkowski says that there are enough votes in committee and on the floor to pass an energy bill that would allow drilling in certain parts of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but the Democratic Leadership has abruptly stopped Energy Committee work on the bill. Their friends in the Teamsters won't like that, and that will probably be sufficient for drilling in ANWR to prevail. It should. As the Washington Post said fifteen years ago (before its conversion to radical environmentalism) the refuge is "one of the bleakest, most remote places on this continent, and there is hardly any other where drilling would have less impact on surrounding lifeŠ."
BERT UPDATE Fox News has the latest word on the strange Muppet connection to Osama Bin Laden.
DROPSCAN'S MUM just sent an interesting report of Clinton's speech last night at Kennedy Center.
The answer he gave to the very last question he was asked was truly intriguing. When asked what further country he would like to be president of, he made note that were he to move to France & take up residence for but five short years he could then legally run for president. This would be legal because of the Louisiana Purchase.Since Bill was born in Arkansas, which was part of the Purchase from France to the US, he is eligible to run as long as he speaks French & has resided in France for the past five years. Interesting. Perhaps the EU would suit him better than the US--a fresh start!
THIS is a most interesting possibility. Let's see... we give France Clinton, whom they already love and have always understood far better than we, and in return well, we could just say forget about helping with this little campaign in Afghanistan and we're even for saving them in the last two World Wars.
PEACE UNDER ATTACK A story in the Wausau Daily Herald concerns protestors at the University of Wisconsin- Stevens Point whose peace camp "to promote alternatives to war in Afghanistan" has been driven underground -- into the University Center basement to be exact-- by egg pelting and Draino bombs. In a quote that could have been written by the nearby Onion guys, one activist declares bravely:
As a group, I think it¹s getting too dangerous. It seems like we¹re risking our lives, and our lives are worth more than the movement of peace. We need to be realistic with what we can do with everything else we have in our lives.In a Monday article in The Pointer the protestors had vowed to remain in the area between the Fine Arts building and the library "until there is world peace".
LEFT OUT Christopher Hitchens has been my favorite Nation columnist since a 1992 "Minority Report" pointed out exactly what was wrong with both the Clintons. Though I stopped subscribing to The Nation five years ago because I began to find it shrill and then dishonest, I've still admired Hitchens a very great deal. For a while now, I've thought of him as the most principled Marxist we have. His dogged post-911 attacks on Islamic fascism have only confirmed this, as has his recent war with Chomsky. Now I discover I was wrong about old Hitch. He was secretly rooting for Thatcher back when I was starting grade school! I had been wondering how such eloquent defenses of the American spirit could be written by a socialist. (See, for example, "American society can outlast or absorb practically anything") Now I know.
BERT IS EVIL My brother pointed me to this site years ago. Now my hero, the InstaPundit, learns that Bert has an Bangladeshi connection which can also be seen more obscurely here and here. Another case of the enemies of modernization using its tools?
IMPERMISSABLE THOUGHTS? Leon Wieseltier has a terrific "Washington Diarist" in this week's The New Republic in which he chastises Ari Fleischer for recently giving our brave American contrarians some much-desired oppression. Wieseltier also gives a damningly cogent summary of some of their more courageous ideas:
To wit: Osama bin Laden is a shy, enigmatic, and cruelly misunderstood individual. There is nothing more urgent in the world than the satisfaction of the Palestinians, and the attacks on New York and Washington would not have happened if Israeli tanks had not spent a few hours in Jenin last month. Capitalism and democracy are the cunning devices of imperialism. The United States has brought mainly misery upon the nations of the earth. Saddam Hussein is an innocent victim of America's surrender to Zionism. Terrorism is a form of political criticism. The use of force against terrorists is not different from the use of force by terrorists. A greater measure of vigilance in America is really a greater measure of racism in America.FORTUNATELY, facts and logic can counter the above opinions much better than Fleischer's quasi-official kibosh. Unfortunately, there are those who cannot tell the difference between being argued against and being oppressed.