Natural science: the last chapter, 'On the Origins of Humans', was banned.
The history of the 20th Century paints a very clear picture of how liberal orders collapse into authoritarian ones. Contrary to popular belief, liberal orders do not gradually evolve into authoritarian ones by the accumulation of state power. Instead, liberal orders fail suddenly when they cease to provide basic physical and economic security. The functional power of the state decays until conditions reach a degree of disorder that triggers a sudden collapse into an authoritarian order. Ineffectiveness kills the liberal state, not excessive powers.
Only the United States has extradited a genocide suspect to Rwanda. Last year, Enos Kagaba was deported from Minnesota after he was judged to have entered the United States illegally.
Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark and Switzerland have been pursuing genocide suspects through their own courts.
Sometimes he cries, sometimes he just sighs, but always he looks up into my face in panicked bewilderment and says, "Monsieur Ken, eh la, comment?" I don't know exactly what the eh la means, but it punctuates everything; he says it in exasperation and passionate disbelief, exhaling, a low growl. But I understand "Comment?" How, Mr. Ken? How did you people let it happen?
The UN was here when the massacres started, twenty-five hundred troops. UN Headquarters in New York knew it was being planned, they had files and faxes and informants and they sat in their offices, consulted each other, and ate long lunches.
Most UN forces ran to the airport, they couldn't get out fast enough. This is not a case in which the UN failed to send troops to stop genocide. An armed, predeployed UN force evacuated as soon as it started. All those signatures on the Genocide Convention, dozens of rapturously celebrated human rights treaties, a mountain of documents at UNHQ on the subject of genocide, law professors all over the world making a living talking about this, and we evacuated. Tanks and supply planes and helicopters and soldiers sat useless and stationary for six months in Somalia, two hours away by C-130, and then drunk peasants armed with machetes and lists of names killed 800,000 civilians in Rwanda. And we evacuated. Eh la, comment?
-- Kenneth Cain, _Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures: A True Story from Hell on Earth_, 2004
"When you are young enough, I thought, all sorts of unrevealed possibilities make you a person, but afterwards when there are no more possibilities you become a type."
-- John P. Marquand, Wickford Point
Fabianus Tibo, Dominggus “Domi” da Silva and Marinus Riwu were condemned to death because they were found guilty of masterminding the massacre of hundreds of Muslims in Poso in 2001, during an inter-faith conflict that shook the area between 1998 and 2001. So far, not one Muslim has been tried in relation to the clashes that claimed a high death toll among Christians too.
In his last words, Tibo hit out at the Indonesian legal system “that condemned three innocent peasants to death when all they did was offer help to Catholic victims of the violence in Poso. Why will those criminals who raped, killed and looted during those times be spared?”
He said the delay was due to letters by Pope Benedict XVI, the Bishops' Conference of Indonesia (KWI) and interfaith leaders, but the execution would be carried out after Aug. 17, Indonesia's Independence Day.
Robertus was in Palu, where his father was sentenced, together with his mother, wife and son, and da Silva's uncle. They await permission to meet with Tibo and his friends to ascertain their condition after the delay.
"We hope the government will not just postpone the execution but free them from the death sentence because they are innocent," said the farmer, who works to gather rattan to support his mother, wife and son. "They are not the masterminds of the Poso riots."
As for biologists' supposed agenda of godlessness -- how ridiculous! Yes, a lot of scientists are atheists, but most have better things to do than deliberately destroy people's faith. This goes doubly for the many scientists -- roughly a third of them -- who are religious. After all, one of the most vocal (and effective) opponents of ID is Ken Miller of Brown University, a devout Catholic.
"I would simply like to clarify that the tapes are not lost as such, which implies they were badly handled, misplaced and are now gone forever. That is not the case," John Sarkissian, operations scientist at the Parkes Radio Observatory in Parkes, Australia, told the Space.com Web site.
On Friday the news emerged: At age 78, the most eminent German writer of the age confessed that he served in wartime with the Waffen-SS, the embodiment of Nazi evil. [...]
He occupied a place that has no parallel in Canada, the U.S. or Britain. He was a national moralist-in-chief, often called "the conscience of the postwar generation." He hated the postwar government of Konrad Adenauer, whom he considered a puppet of Washington, and he was appalled by the consumerism that accompanied economic recovery in the 1950s. He thought Germans too eager to forget the crimes of the Nazis, especially the Holocaust. Rightly, he believed that wound should "be kept open," as he said when accepting the Nobel Prize.
Grass was no communist, but he looked benignly on communist East Germany and favoured appeasing the Soviets. He believed the U.S. started the Cold War. He was the kind of Western intellectual Lenin meant when he used the phrase "useful idiots."
His credibility shrank when the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 revealed East Germany as a prison. He was appalled to see East Germans pouring into West Berlin, seeking, of all things, fresh fruit. He was also dismayed by the apparent victory of capitalism: "Capitalism has never been more barbaric, beast-like than after the victory over the communist system." He opposed reunification, suggesting that because of their crimes the Germans didn't deserve to live as one nation.
His self-importance knew no bounds.
Modernity has supposed that the world "out there" is such that stories can be told that are true to it. And modernity has supposed that the reason narratives can be true to the world is that the world somehow "has" its own true story, antecedent to, and enabling of, the stories we tell about ourselves in it. [...]
Postmodernism is characterized by the loss of this supposition in all of its aspects. We can see this most vividly in literature. The paradigmatic fictional works of the twentieth century either present accounts that make dramatic sense in themselves, but tell of events or sequences that could not occur in the world outside the storytelling; or they meticulously describe events that could occur or perhaps actually have occurred in "the real world," but in such fashion as to display precisely their lack of dramatic coherence. Gunter Grass' The Tin Drum may serve as an example of the first mode, Sartre's Nausea as an example of the second, and Joyce's Ulysses of both at once.
Zivit Seri is a tiny woman, a mother, who speaks with clumsy, defenseless gestures as she guides me through the destroyed buildings of Bat Galim—literally “daughter of the waves,” the Haifa neighborhood that has suffered most from the shellings. The problem, she explains, is not just the people killed: Israel is used to that. It’s not even the fact that here the enemy is aiming not at military objectives but deliberately at civilian targets—that, too, is no surprise. No, the problem, the real one, is that these incoming rockets make us see what will happen on the day—not necessarily far off—when the rockets are ones with new capabilities: first, they will become more accurate and be able to threaten, for example, the petrochemical facilities you see there, on the harbor, down below; second, they may come equipped with chemical weapons that can create a desolation compared with which Chernobyl and Sept. 11 together will seem like a mild prelude.
For that, in fact, is the situation. As seen from Haifa, this is what is at stake in the operation in southern Lebanon. Israel did not go to war because its borders had been violated. It did not send its planes over southern Lebanon for the pleasure of punishing a country that permitted Hezbollah to construct its state-within-a-state. It reacted with such vigor because the Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s call for Israel to be wiped off the map and his drive for a nuclear weapon came simultaneously with the provocations of Hamas and Hezbollah. The conjunction, for the first time, of a clearly annihilating will with the weapons to go with it created a new situation. We should listen to the Israelis when they tell us they had no other choice anymore. We should listen to Zivit Seri tell us, in front of a crushed building whose concrete slabs are balancing on tips of twisted metal, that, for Israel, it was five minutes to midnight.
Every Arab child in Lebanon, in Gaza, and in the West Bank could sleep sweet, undisturbed slumber as soon as tomorrow night if the adults once-and-for-all gave up their long-standing project of driving the Jews out of the Middle East.
The day our fifteen year-old daughter was murdered by Palestinian Arab terrorists, everything changed for my wife and me. Malki died in an explosive massacre, targeted not at some military installation but at a fast-food restaurant full of holidaying children, teens and mothers. Immediately following the bombing, her cell phone did not answer and our insides started to churn. We searched the hospitals. We prayed, we cried, we hoped. When we finally found her in the early morning of the next day, Malki's body had already been lifeless for twelve hours. Our daughter was the last of the 15 victims to be identified and the last to be buried.
When a church doesn't take itself seriously, neither do its members.[...] When your religion says "whatever" on doctrinal matters, regardsJesus as just another wise teacher, refuses on principle to evangelize and lets you do pretty much what you want, it's a short step to deciding that one of the things you don't want to do is get up on Sunday morning and go to church. [...] So this is the liberal Christianity that was supposed to be the Christianity of the future: disarray, schism, rapidly falling numbers of adherents, a collapse of Christology and national meetings that rival those of the Modern Language Assn. for their potential for cheap laughs. And they keep telling the Catholic Church that it had better get with the liberal program - ordain women, bless gay unions and so forth - or die. Sure.
-- Charlotte Allen, "Liberal Christianity is paying for its sins", Los Angeles Times, July 10, 2006
HH: There are a number of very fascinating passages in Fiasco, which is why everyone should read this, and I want to get to them serially, Thomas Ricks. First, I want to get to the WMD question. Any doubt in your mind that George W. Bush and his team and the Pentagon career believed there were WMD there when the war began?
TR: No doubt whatsoever. I think they drank their Kool-Aid, and talked themselves into it, on the basis of no evidence. But yeah, they believed it.
HH: When you write that Operation Desert Fox was tremendously successful, you're concluding that those WMD were there in 1998? Or did Clinton drink the Kool-Aid as well?
TR: Yeah, there were WMD facilities in '98, and they were taken out pretty effectively by those raids. The most effective aspect of the Desert Fox raids, though, which we didn't recognize at the time, it's very difficult to pull out, was the psychological effect. The message sent to Iraqi weapons scientists was Uncle Sam is not going to let Saddam Hussein have this stuff. And their hard work of seven years, after the '91 war, was taken out. It was destroyed.
HH: Can it really be said to be, "drinking the Kool-Aid", as you just said, to conclude that that which had been destroyed in 1998 would immediately be begun to be rebuilt, even as Saddam had begun to rebuild after 1991. Or would it have been prudent, post-9/11, to conclude that Saddam then, as Saddam now, is Saddam always?
TR: Well, that would, but it would be untethered from the realities of Iraq, which was that the country was becoming increasingly poor, weaker, had a less strong military, and that in fact, the '98 Desert Fox raids had almost toppled Saddam Hussein.
LEFTIST NEWSPAPER columnists and television and radio commentators are arguing that the cause of the current war is Israel's refusal, to date, to surrender the Golan Heights to Syria, and Judea, Samaria and east Jerusalem to Fatah and Hamas. In their world the fact that global jihadists are explicit about their intention to destroy "the Zionist entity," whatever its territorial boundaries may be, is studiously denied. The fact that Palestinian society is a jihadist society and that the international Left increasingly rejects Israel's very right to exist remains either irrelevant, or a matter that can be appeased away by further territorial giveaways.
Additionally, leftist opinion-makers are now arguing that the main lesson of the war is that unilateral Israeli actions are the problem. Writing in Ma'ariv last Thursday, Nadav Eyal argued that the next step will be to use the multinational force that the UN, the Olmert government and the State Department wish to deploy to Lebanon as a model that will enable future Israeli withdrawals from Judea and Samaria (and presumably from the Golan Heights and Jerusalem). By this new logic we should continue to retreat, but next time, the French and the Turks will protect us.
You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life, but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud.
-- T. R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History, 1963
The bottom line is that Joe Lieberman, who is an expert on foreign policy and the Middle East, feels any withdrawal of troops that looks like a lack of will or staying power will embolden our enemies in a way that would be "disastrous" for the U.S. and our allies. For the senator, leaving "with the mission accomplished" is the only way to ensure a path to lasting peace. Who among us actually has the knowledge to declare that he is wrong?
The Iraq debate aside, Joe Lieberman is a senator who has accomplished tremendous good on almost every issue of importance-from civil and human rights to jobs, health care, the environment, education funding, defense spending and homeland security. He votes with Democrats 90 percent of the time, and when he does not it's because he feels his constituents would be better served.
Stand by Joe Lieberman. Our state, and the nation, need his leadership in the Senate.
I say to Osama and the boys bring it on, evaporate me. If it gets to the stage where these guys are dictating if we rock or not, then forget about it. If McCartney uses these guys as an excuse, he should give it away. Don't give them the power. I can't wait to tour Australia, even if they take out my plane on the way there.
The usual delusions are abundant. The progressives imagine they’re the vanguard shielding the last jot of human rights from the ever-gathering fascist storm. (Forget the executions in Somalia for the crime of watching the World Cup; there’s a rumor Wal-Mart won’t offer the usual new-release discount for DVDs of Al Gore’s eco-doc.) They imagine that conservatives support Israel because they want to convert Jews and usher in the last book in the “Left Behind” series. They have internalized the Palestinian narrative so deeply they blame the “occupation” for rocket attacks coming out of territory no longer occupied. They’re so convinced of their rectitude that the obscenity of an Israeli flag spattered with swastikas makes perfect sense: why, if they weren’t actually Nazis, the progressives wouldn’t oppose them. They marched with communists for Worker’s Rights, regardless of whether anyone in communist countries had a job or any rights. And now they march with Hezbollah supporters for Peace and Justice. [...]
Given the Left’s romance with revolution and guerillas, it’ll only be a matter of time before Hezbollah leader Nasrallah appears on T-shirts like Che, and his merry band are lionized as the new Viet Cong. Hezbollah builds schools, you know. Granted, they’re schools where the biology lesson consists of sawing off the heads of infidel frogs. But they build schools!
Imagine rallies in 1939 where brown-shirts taunted Jews, screamed NO BLOOD FOR BEER, blamed Pearl Harbor on the FDR, and called for the destruction of the French Entity while peace activists applauded. That’s what we have today. It’s like watching Nazis and Quakers ballroom dance.
Moderates must not be fooled into sitting on the laurels in the coming months. We must not allow ourselves to be satisfied by a narrow one-vote majority on the board. We need to go out, raise money and win both elections in November.
