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Our Man in Havana - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Rather than admit they were taken in by his invented sketch along with the fear the embarrassing story could not be classified from being published by discharging Wormold, the top officers of the service assign Wormold to headquarters and decorate him with an OBE. Wormold and Beatrice want to marry and Milly agrees.
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The last word on P.Z. Myers - Crunchy Con
Tags: religion, atheism, spirituality, cslewis on 2008-07-19 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromblog.beliefnet.com
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The absurd thing about Myers attempt to transmogrify his naked act of aggression, theft, vandalism and incitement into victim status is that he is basically saying that if we all are not going around the world desecrating whatever it is we don't believe in, we are ipso facto respecting and honoring same. So my failure to desecrate a Quran or the Satanic Bible means I am somehow respecting and honoring them.
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Op-Ed Contributor - If Israel Attacks Iran’s Nuclear Sites, Iranians Should Hope It Succeeds. - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com
Tags: israel, middle.east, iran, war on 2008-07-19 -All Annotations (0) -About
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ISRAEL will almost surely attack Iran’s nuclear sites in the next four to seven months — and the leaders in Washington and even Tehran should hope that the attack will be successful enough to cause at least a significant delay in the Iranian production schedule, if not complete destruction, of that country’s nuclear program. Because if the attack fails, the Middle East will almost certainly face a nuclear war — either through a subsequent pre-emptive Israeli nuclear strike or a nuclear exchange shortly after Iran gets the bomb.
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Toddlers who dislike spicy food racist, say report - Telegraph
Tags: political correctness, toddlers, political_correctness on 2008-07-18 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.telegraph.co.uk
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The National Children's Bureau, which receives £12 million a year, mainly from
Government funded organisations, has issued guidance to play leaders and
nursery teachers advising them to be alert for racist incidents among
youngsters in their care. -
This could include a child of as young as three who says "yuk" in
response to being served unfamiliar foreign food. -
Nurseries are encouraged to report as many incidents as possible to their
local council. The guide added: "Some people think that if a large
number of racist incidents are reported, this will reflect badly on the
institution. In fact, the opposite is the case."
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Religion News (RSS): Muslim clerics annul rape victim's marriage
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Lucknow: In a chilling reminder of the Imrana case, yet another young woman from Muzaffarnagar who allegedly fell victim to her father-in-law's sexual assault faces a bleak future after mullahs called for the annulment of her marriage.
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"A woman who has had a sexual liaison with her husband's father cannot be his consort anymore. A divorce is a must," Mufti Maulana Imran, senior cleric from Darul Uloom Deoband, said on Monday after his view was sought. The prescribed punishment in the case, he maintained, was 'sangsar' or public stoning of the victim and the culprit until death.
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Europe as a giant nursing home - Crunchy Con
Tags: demographics, europe, population, welfare on 2008-07-17 -All Annotations (0) -About
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That's the view Shorto says makes sense from all the data. Ross says he and Reihan believe there should be no necessary antagonism between feminists and social conservatives with regard to the desirability of policies that make for more workforce flexibility -- that is, the state should make it easier for companies to allow women to blend childraising with employment. Agreed.
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Still, the depth and magnitude of the fertility crisis in Europe (and elsewhere, though Europe's the only place I really care about) suggests that there's something mysterious and, to my mind, malevolent, working in the deepest currents of the postmodern psyche. Despite all the financial hardships having larger families -- and we're not talking five or six kids, but two or three -- brings to modern Europeans, the fact is Europe, as a whole, has never been more prosperous. In times of greater material poverty, Europeans still managed to have more than enough children to replace themselves.
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And today? As wealthy as they are, they're choosing civilizational suicide. Despite some attempt to see the sunny side of collapse, here's how Shorto's piece ends:
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Haub wasn't buying it. "Maybe tinkering with the retirement age and making other economic adjustments is good," he said. "But you can't go on forever with a total fertility rate of 1.2. If you compare the size of the 0-to-4 and 29-to-34 age groups in Spain and Italy right now, you see the younger is almost half the size of the older. You can't keep going with a completely upside-down age distribution, with the pyramid standing on its point. You can't have a country where everybody lives in a nursing home."
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Rule of law? Screw it, says US president - Crunchy Con
Tags: law, corruption, constitution, war-on-terror, bush on 2008-07-17 -All Annotations (0) -About
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Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency's interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes."
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A CIA analyst warned the Bush administration in 2002 that up to a third of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay may have been imprisoned by mistake, but White House officials ignored the finding and insisted that all were 'enemy combatants' subject to indefinite incarceration."
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"[T]he [CIA] analyst estimated that a full third of the camp's detainees were there by mistake. When told of those findings, the top military commander at Guantanamo at the time, Major Gen. Michael Dunlavey, not only agreed with the assessment but suggested that an even higher percentage of detentions -- up to half -- were in error. Later, an academic study by Seton Hall University Law School concluded that 55 percent of detainees had never engaged in hostile acts against the United States, and only 8 percent had any association with al-Qaeda."
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[T]he International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were 'categorically' torture, which is illegal under both American and international law".
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That's the inevitable outcome when a country's political establishment decrees itself exempt from the rule of law. If the rule of law doesn't constrain the actions of government officials, then nothing will. Continuous revelations of serious government lawbreaking have led not to investigations or punishment but to retroactive immunity and concealment of the crimes.
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Judicial findings of illegal government behavior have led to Congressional action to protect the lawbreakers. The Detainee Treatment Act. The Military Commissions Act. The Protect America Act. The FISA Amendments Act. They're all rooted in the same premise: that our highest government leaders have the power to ignore our laws with impunity, and when they're caught, they should be immunized and protected, not punished.
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Now, think about this. Not only did the White House condone torture, in contravention of law, but it did not care to discover if the men it had rounded up and put into prison actually deserved to be there. A CIA analyst believed one-third of Gitmo detainees didn't deserve to be there, and the then-commander of the camp believed that number was probably 50 percent. And the Commander in Chief didn't care.
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The progression of apologists for the state is always more or less the same: to suggest that the government is doing something flatly illegal and immoral is disloyal, and then once it has been proved that the government has been doing something flatly illegal and immoral it is only soft-headed idealists who think that such things are unjustifiable. "We have to be pragmatic!" they tell us. This is where the logic of wanting to "get things done" takes you.
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Since embarking upon its global war on terror, the United States has blatantly disregarded the Geneva Conventions. It has imprisoned suspects, including U.S. citizens, without charge, holding them indefinitely and denying them due process. It has created an American gulag in which thousands of detainees, including many innocent of any wrongdoing, have been subjected to ritual abuse and humiliation. It has delivered suspected terrorists into the hands of foreign torturers.
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Under the guise of "enhanced interrogation techniques," it has succeeded, in Mayer's words, in "making torture the official law of the land in all but name." Further, it has done all these things as a direct result of policy decisions made at the highest levels of government.
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To dismiss these as wild, anti-American ravings will not do. They are facts, which Mayer substantiates in persuasive detail, citing the testimony not of noted liberals like Noam Chomsky or Keith Olbermann but of military officers, intelligence professionals, "hard-line law-and-order stalwarts in the criminal justice system" and impeccably conservative Bush appointees who resisted the conspiracy from within the administration.
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The thing that gets to me is that it's possible, even probable, to make mistakes in a time of war. But in this case, the White House didn't even want to know if it had made mistakes, and innocents were suffering. That's not tragic; that's malicious.
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Why has two years of Democratic control of Congress failed to stop it or reverse it?
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L'Hôte: I am not you, atheism.
Tags: l'hôte, atheism, spirituality, religion on 2008-07-17 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromlhote.blogspot.com
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And yet Myers has unabashed contempt for every religious person, whatever the explanation. And ironically, he is himself quite ignorant of religion, philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, and epistemology, knowledge of which would enable him to make better arguments. And if he doesn't know he's ignorant, he's self-deceived. I'm sure if he read this, though, he would disparage it as the "courtier's reply". So I invite him to get into a public, taped debate with, say, Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, Peter van Inwagen, Michael Rea, Dean Zimmerman, Daniel Howard-Snyder, Eleonore Stump, Marilyn McCord Adams, or Robert Adams. I believe it would be quite illuminating.
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I honestly doubt Myers has given the status of his moral views, or any of his normative views at all, really, much thought. For instance, he would probably claim that moral beliefs are mere preferences for the world being one way rather than another, or expressions of emotions, etc. But when he's actually expressing them, I doubt very much they seem to him like other preferences, such as his preference for vanilla over chocolate ice cream. They probably seem to him to be 'objective'--not just the way he would like things, but the way things really ought to be, such that if you disagree with him you show yourself to be somehow deficient (whereas he wouldn't think that your disagreeing with him about ice cream preference shows you to be deficient).
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Atheist rejects neo-atheism - Crunchy Con
Tags: neoatheism, atheism, dawkins, spirituality, religion on 2008-07-17 -All Annotations (0) -About
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If someone was a political commentator, and operated the way Meyers, Richard Dawkins, or Christopher Hitchens did, would anyone listen to them? No. As much as the success of the Ann Coulters of the world suggests otherwise, we largely understand that a basic level of decorum, mutual respect, and the assumption of good faith should under gird our national dialogue. Indeed, without these assumptions, the dialogue is not worth having.
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But then there is atheism, where it is apparently the case that you can always come closer to righteousness by expressing still-greater contempt for those with which you don't agree. Now, this is all very strange; though growing, the atheist minority is stilled dwarfed in this country and in this world by the religious. And how can you possibly change people's minds if you're constantly ridiculing them? Doesn't make much sense.
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But I suspect that it makes perfect sense. It makes sense because the goal of the new atheism has never been to convert. It has never been to include. It has never been to change minds. The ridicule is the goal; the contempt is the end; the sheer fun of sanctimony, self-righteousness and loathing are the purpose.
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That is one thing you have to hand the Africans. They may not be producing a Richard Dawkins. But England is not producing a Peter Akinola. In the long run, I'd bet on the culture that produces an Akinola, not a Dawkins.
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The bear cometh. Where be the bullets? - Crunchy Con
Tags: politics, economics, corruption, risk on 2008-07-17 -All Annotations (0) -About
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He puts his finger on something that bothers me about all this "too big to fail" business, and it's namely this: that if investors come to believe that the government won't let something fail, then there's no reason for that something to take risks responsibly. The whole thing ends up being a confidence game. The other morning I was listening to an interview on the (excellent) public radio program Marketplace with Jim Rogers, a Singapore-based US investor, who was ripping the federal quasi-bailout of Fannie and Freddie. Here's an excerpt from the Rogers interview:
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Joe Klein’s dual-loyalty assertion for Jews | The God Blog | Jewish Journal
Tags: dualloyalty, israel, us, usa, middle.east, perle, middleeast on 2008-07-17 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.jewishjournal.com
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The notion that we could just waltz in and inject democracy into an extremely complicated, devout and ancient culture smacked--still smacks--of neocolonialist legerdemain. The fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives--people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary--plumped for this war, and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel. And then there is the question--made manifest by the no-bid contracts offered U.S. oil companies by the Iraqis--of two oil executives, Bush and Cheney, securing a new source of business for their Texas buddies.
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You want evidence of divided loyalties? How about the “benign domino theory” that so many Jewish neoconservatives talked to me about--off the record, of course--in the runup to the Iraq war, the idea that Israel’s security could be won by taking out Saddam, which would set off a cascade of disaster for Israel’s enemies in the region? As my grandmother would say, feh! Do you actually deny that the casus belli that dare not speak its name wasn’t, as I wrote in February 2003, a desire to make the world safe for Israel? Why the rush now to bomb Iran, a country that poses some threat to Israel but none--for the moment--to the United States…
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Amazon.co.uk: The Lost Literature of Socialism: George Watson: Books
Tags: socialism, hitler, germany on 2008-07-14 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.amazon.co.uk
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The most powerful indictment I've seen of contemporary historiography has got to be the studied ignorance in the West of the evidence brought to light in this slim little bombshell of a book. You will never be able to look at Marx, Hitler, socialism, fascism, National Socialism, or the Holocaust the same way again.
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Watson, a fellow in English at St. John's College, Cambridge, has been Sandars Reader in Bibliography and is editor of the New Cambridge Bibliography
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What Watson has quietly pointed out should shame an awful lot of history professors. What were you taught about Nazism? If you're like me, it was that Nazism was opposed to socialism. Indeed, it was socialism's "opposite": Nazism and Marxism constitute the two polar opposite ends of the spectrum of political thought. That they may sometimes seem to resemble each other is supposed to show only that opposite extremes may wrap around until they meet on the other side, or that fascism is a "confusing" ideology, too vague and elusive to explain or categorize. Hitler, as Ian Kearnshaw and many others claim, "was never a socialist." The Nazis' name: "National Socialist German Workers' Party", is supposed to be somehow a "misnomer"----some kind of "false advertising."
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In fact, Fascism and National Socialism were thoroughly socialist movements. They bitterly opposed the "bourgeois" ideology of capitalism: they bitterly opposed individualism, free trade, private property, free enterprise, limited government, and classical laissez-faire liberalism. Moreover, "almost the whole of National Socialism," as Hitler would freely admit (at least in private) was based on Marx. He explained in Mein Kampf: "As National Socialists we see our program in our flag. In the red we see the social idea of the movement."
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Watson's unjustly marginalized book provides a fine introduction to a subject on which much more needs to be written.
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Why Germans Supported Hitler, Part 1
Tags: nazi, hitler, germany, ww2, socialism on 2008-07-14 and saved by6 people -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.fff.org
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In fact, there is a remarkable similarity between the economic policies that Hitler implemented and those that Franklin Roosevelt enacted. Keep in mind, first of all, that the German National Socialists were strong believers in Social Security, which Roosevelt introduced to the United States as part of his New Deal. Keep in mind also that the Nazis were strong believers in such other socialist schemes as public (i.e., government) schooling and national health care. In fact, my hunch is that very few Americans realize that Social Security, public schooling, Medicare, and Medicaid have their ideological roots in German socialism.
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Hitler and Roosevelt also shared a common commitment to such programs as government-business partnerships. In fact, until the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional, Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which cartelized American industry, along with his “Blue Eagle” propaganda campaign, was the type of economic fascism that Hitler himself was embracing in Germany (as fascist ruler Benito Mussolini was also doing in Italy).
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As Srdja Trifkovic, foreign-affairs editor for Chronicles magazine, stated in his article “FDR and Mussolini: A Tale of Two Fascists”, Roosevelt and his ‘Brain Trust,’ the architects of the New Deal, were fascinated by Italy’s fascism — a term which was not pejorative at the time.
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Both Hitler and Roosevelt also believed in massive injections of government spending in both the social-welfare sector and the military-industrial sector as a way to bring economic prosperity to their respective nations.
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As the famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith put it,
Hitler also anticipated modern economic policy ... by recognizing that a rapid approach to full employment was only possible if it was combined with wage and price controls. That a nation oppressed by economic fear would respond to Hitler as Americans did to F.D.R. is not surprising.
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The wages of wealth - Crunchy Con
Tags: narcissism, success, wealth, uhnw on 2008-07-08 -All Annotations (0) -About
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To what extent do you think the narcissism of the super-rich can be said to exemplify the narcissism of 21st-century America -- which, compared to the rest of the world, is super-rich?
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The American Scholar - The Disadvantages of an Elite Education - By William Deresiewicz
Tags: education, academia, university, deresiewicz on 2008-07-08 and saved by36 people -All Annotations (0) -About
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They’ve been driven their whole lives by a fear of failure—often, in the first instance, by their parents’ fear of failure.
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Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas—and not just for the duration of a semester, for the sake of pleasing the teacher, or for getting a good grade. A friend who teaches at the University of Connecticut once complained to me that his students don’t think for themselves. Well, I said, Yale students think for themselves, but only because they know we want them to. I’ve had many wonderful students at Yale and Columbia, bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it’s been a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them have seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul. These few have tended to feel like freaks, not least because they get so little support from the university itself. Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers.
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The miseducation of American elites - Crunchy Con
Tags: miseducation, education, ivy-league, harvard on 2008-07-08 -All Annotations (0) -About
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My education taught me to believe that people who didn't go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren't worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were "the best and the brightest," as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright. I learned to give that little nod of understanding, that slightly sympathetic "Oh," when people told me they went to a less prestigious college. (If I'd gone to Harvard, I would have learned to say "in Boston" when I was asked where I went to school--the Cambridge version of noblesse oblige.) I never learned that there are smart people who don't go to elite colleges, often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are smart people who don't go to college at all.
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Religion News (RSS): Philanthropist Sir John Templeton dies at 95
Tags: business ethics, business-ethics, business:ethics, philanthropy, social entrepreneurship, templeton on 2008-07-08 -All Annotations (0) -About
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"Competitive business has reduced costs, has increased variety, has improved quality," he said in 1999, adding that it "has been a blessing to the poor. There has never been a better way to teach ethics than competitive business."
If a business is not ethical, "it will fail, perhaps not right away, but eventually," he said.
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Finance Jobs, Accountancy Jobs, & Insurance Jobs in London & the UK - Totally Financial
Tags: finance, jobs, london on 2008-07-03 -All Annotations (0) -About
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Nokia N95 blog - Find all information on the Nokia N95!
Tags: n95, nokia, blog, mobile on 2008-07-03 and saved by5 people -All Annotations (0) -About
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Operational Research | What is Operational Research?
In a nutshell, operational research (O.R.) is the discipline of applying appropriate analytical methods to help make better decisions.
By using techniques such as mathematical modelling to analyse complex situations, operational research gives executives the power to make more effective decisions and build more productive systems based on:
Tags: operational, decision-analysis, decision-making, decision-theory, decisions on 2008-07-03 -All Annotations (0) -About
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In a nutshell, operational research (O.R.) is the discipline
of applying appropriate analytical methods to help make better
decisions.
By using techniques such as mathematical modelling to analyse
complex situations, operational research gives executives the
power to make more effective decisions and build more productive
systems based on:
Notation: * = Private bookmark and comment|… = Clipping [?] | … = Public highlight [?]
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