Five Years On...

I find it astounding, that five years down the road 36% of the population takes seriously 9/11 conspiracy theories.

As astounding as it may be, conspiracy theorists are not necessarily crazy. As Eric Rauchway points out on his TNR blog:

Conspiracy theory is not, Hofstadter and McLemee note, crazy: It's
super-rational. In conspiracy theory, someone is in charge--someone meant for
things to be this way. This is obviously, if oddly comforting to lots of people:
Maybe it's a wicked world full of snares for the unwary, but at least there's a
spider at the center of the web.

The alternative metaphor is harder to accept: This bad world is like an onion whose layers you peel back, weeping, only to find there's nothing at the center.

Popular Mechanics went to great lengths to debunk all of the 9/11 conspiracy theories that existed over a year ago. Yet there are those who still maintain it was an inside job.

Today, the editor of Popular Mechanics, James Meigs, had this to say :

Conspiracy theories alleging that 9/11 was a U.S. government operation are
rapidly infiltrating the mainstream. These notions are advanced by hundreds of
books, over a million Web pages and even in some college classrooms. The movie
"Loose Change," a slick roundup of popular conspiracy claims, has become an
Internet sensation.
Worse, these fantasies are gaining influence on the international stage. French author Thierry Meyssan's "The Big Lie," which argues that the U.S. military orchestrated the attacks, was a bestseller in France, and his claims have been widely repeated in European and Middle Eastern media. And recent surveys reveal that, even in moderate Muslim countries such as Turkey and Jordan, majorities of the public believe that no Arab terrorists were involved in the attacks.

The real conspiracy is the conspiracy that states there's a conspiracy.

The Governator's Good Sense

Last year Gov. Schwarzenegger called a special election in an attempt to pass a number of reform measures. In my opinion, they were well-intentioned, yet all four propositions were soundly defeated. Having picked a fight with California's powerful unions, the unions spent a lot of resources to defeat the measures. Aside from the massive push the unions made, one of the reasons he lost was that voters felt fatigued; I know I did. While all the issues were important, none were so urgent that they could not wait until the next general election to be voted on. There's also a feeling among California voters that politicans should be able to solve problems amongst themselves without calling on the voters so often. It is, afterall, why we send them to Sacramento and Washington D.C.
The day after the proposition results came in, the Governor said something along the lines of, "you (voters) have spoken, and I have listened." Those are unusually humble words from a politican. Having been handed a big slice of humble pie, Gov. Schwarzenegger has embarked on a new course. Rather than threats and "Terminator" talk, he's building consensus. In a word, he's become a diplomat.
Congressional redistricting, or gerrymandering as it is known, was one of the issues that was on the ballot for reform and defeated last year. In a previous post I talked about why gerrymandering should have no place in our democracy.
Today the L.A. Times has an article with the headline: Gov. Seeks Deal That Would Ease Term Limits.
Bloomberg Newswire does a good job of summarizing:

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger says he would support a measure to extend term limits if lawmakers agree to change how the state draws
voting districts, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Schwarzenegger said a new way to determine districts would increase competition in California elections, the Times said. He supports a measure sponsored by Senator Alan Lowenthal, a Democrat, that would give political map-making authority to an 11-citizen panel selected by a bipartisan group of lawmakers and judges, to take effect after the next Census, the Times said. Voters defeated a plan that would have given the job to three retired judges appointed by the Legislature from a group chosen by the state's Judicial Council, the Times said. Schwarzenegger will try to gain support for the plan in August and have an initiative California residents can vote on in November, the Times said. Schwarzenegger said term limits haven't improved the political culture in Sacramento and letting legislators remain in office longer would be worthwhile if it persuades them to support a proposal that takes away their power to set political boundaries, where some see a conflict of interest, the Times said, citing a former governor's aide.

Here's a revolutionary thought brought to you by the Governor: Term limits would not be necessary if congressional districts were drawn in a way that did not create "safe seats" and instead fostered competition. This is what he seems to be negotiating. You may stay in office as long as the voters in your district will have you, but you'll have to please a district that you didn't create exclusively from your supporters.
Though a case can be made for them, I was never really a fan of term limits in the first place. I think ultimately they give too much influence to lobbyists who are apt to game new legislators who are not familiar with the way things work.

The Governor is listening.

From the 4th of July Archives

Though the piece is two years old now, James Lilek's thorough fisking of Michael Moore's editorial in the L.A. Times about the meaning of the 4th of July remains one of my favorites.

Enjoy the long weekend!

Naked Short Selling is not as Sexy as it Sounds

In the stock market, short selling is the practice of borrowing, then selling shares of a stock that you do not own with the intention of profiting by buying them back at a lower price at a later point in time. Shorts sellers get a lot of unnecessary negative publicity in my mind. They're really just part of the stock market eco-system. Often times they're the first ones to sniff out corporate malfeasance, and they add liquidity to the market overall.
Naked short selling is an altogether different story. Naked shorting involves selling short shares that you did not borrow, which means that when it comes time to settle the trade, you have no shares to deliver to the buyer.
To illustrate: imagine you saw a house in a neighborhood that you thought was overvalued and was going to get cheaper in the future, so you sold it without the owner's permission, and at the close of escrow you did not deliver the house to the buyer because not only was it not your house, you never asked the owner if you could sell it in the first place! Aside from being dishonest, think of the problems it would cause to you, the buyer and the escrow company.

In an earlier post I talked about the class-action lawsuit brought against Vonage regarding the debacle surrounding their recent IPO. The class-action suit seeks to bring charges against the company and recover damages for all the investors that were "mislead" into investing in the company and subsequently lost money on the deal. On June 9th the NYSE decided to investigate whether or not naked short selling was at least partly to blame for the poor performance on it's first day of trading. The investigation is on going at this time.

Today the Wall Street Journal (subscription only) announced a pair of civil-antitrust lawsuits being brought against 11 of the largest prime-brokerage operations (they are responsible for making sure shares are "borrowable" and delivered upon settlement)-- including Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Bear Stearns--over the role they play in the practice of "naked short selling."

One of the lawsuits, by Electronic Trading Group LLC, which was filed in federal court in Manhattan, says the prime-brokerage services collusively condone "chronic failures to deliver by which clients are charged for
'borrowing' when in fact no borrowing actually takes place."
The lawsuits say the brokers charge fees of as much as 25% annually for hard-to-borrow stocks to which they mightn't be entitled. The prime-brokerage firms act reciprocally to avoid forcing delivery for each other's trades, the lawsuits maintain, adding that the firms instead operate a system of "phantom," book-entry transactions.

The lawsuits highlight the obscure mechanics of short selling, which are under scrutiny by regulators, including the New York Stock Exchange, in the decline of Vonage Holdings Corp., an Internet telephone-service provider whose stock price has tumbled 48% since its initial public offering May 24.

The SEC has been chronically understaffed which makes it difficult to carry out the tasks for which they've been charged. Regardless, I believe that short sellers who engage in naked shorting should be severely fined and their licenses revoked after repeated violations. The same thing applies to the prime-brokerage firms that tacitly allow it to happen. The only instance when it should be allowed is when a registered market maker is acting as the contra-party when facilitating a trade on behalf of a customer, and only then when there is a "reasonable" expectation the shares will be readily borrowable.

The class-action firm going after Vonage seems to be barking up the wrong tree.

Quantifying Political Correctness

In a previous post I talked about how Larry Summers was being forced from his post as President of Harvard University by the faculty of the Arts & Sciences department for some "controversial" comments he made regarding innate gender differences and their possible correlation to the lack of women in the upper eschelons of science.

Last year, as part of a sentence handed down for insider trading in his own company's stock in 2001, Larry Ellison of Oracle was required to donate $100 million to the charity of his choice. He chose to donate $115 million to the Harvard University Global Health Initiative. One year later, the money has been slow to come, and no deal had yet been signed outside of his pledge. Now we know why:

Sources familiar with the deal claim Ellison delayed the project because of controversy embroiling economist and then-Harvard President Lawrence Summers.
The sources, who asked to remain anonymous because they feared losing their
jobs, said only Summers had the international clout needed to roll out such an
ambitious project, which involved tracking how health care dollars are spent and
what impact they have in the developed and developing worlds.
Summers resigned in February, amid faculty uproar over comments suggesting that differences in "intrinsic aptitude" may explain why fewer women than men succeed in math and science.

Mr. Ellison said he plans to give the money that would have gone to Harvard to a charity that trains teachers and educates impoverished children in the developing world. He didn't identify the institution or elaborate further.

I wonder how the Arts & Sciences Department feels about this?

World Cup Pride

Futbol, football, soccer. Regardless of what one chooses to call it, it is widely regarded as the most popular sport the world over. It is not difficult to see why; all that is required to play is a ball, a field and some sort of goal marker. When those things are not available, any round object, a street and a little imagination will do. Even the poorest African village can supply these items.

Many nations take their football very seriously. Though hooliganism has become a catch-all word for sport-related violence and mischief, it has its roots in football. In many cases football games seem to act as a proxy for national pride. It was considered the final proximate cause of the Football War in 1969 between El Salvador and Honduras. The sport also exacerbated tensions at the beginning of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s when a Red Star Belgrade at Dinamo Zagreb match devolved into rioting in March of 1990. I will add my own anecdote and say that when the USA beat Mexico in the 2002 World Cup my Mexican girlfriend and I broke up for almost 3 weeks. Fortunately we were able to reconcile and get married 2 years later.

This past weeks Lexington column in the Economist has an article titled, "The odd man out--America's coolness towards football is another example of American exceptionalism".

Amid this global fervour the United States will stand out like a temperance
preacher at a Bierfest. Football is not quite the non-sport that it once was.
The American team is not bad. There are a few pockets of football enthusiasts,
mostly in posh suburbs and Latino-crowded inner cities. Fans will be able to
follow the game without resorting to Spanish-language channels. But football
still remains a distant also-ran behind American sports such as baseball,
basketball, hockey and American football (in 2002 only 3.9m Americans watched
the World Cup final, compared with 95m who watched this year's Super Bowl). The country that dominates the world's popular culture is hopelessly marginal when it comes to the world's most popular sport.

We're hopelessly marginal at soccer, yet despite this we've fielded a "not bad" team that managed to qualify for the World Cup. It must be made up exclusively of kids from posh suburbs and Latinos from crowded inner cities since those are the only people who seem to care about the sport.

America's marginality is underlined by its failure to export its own sports. Baseball is popular in Japan and Central America, and basketball has recently become a craze in China; but that is a pretty poor record compared with the
British Empire's success in exporting one of the world's most idiosyncratic
games, cricket.

Who knew it was a foreign policy goal to export our sports around the world? Surely those entities with a vested interest in US-owned and dominated sports would like to see it, but I am pretty sure there's no Secretary of Sports at the cabinet level. And only if we had an empire as successful as the British Empire once was, the Sun would Never Set on the Baseball Stadium.

America is perhaps the only country that greets the World Cup with an orgy of football-bashing. In 1986 Jack Kemp took to the floor of Congress to contrast “European socialist” soccer with “democratic” and “capitalist” American
football. In 2003 a blogger even pointed out that a leading al-Qaeda terrorist
had been a European soccer player: “You don't see any former NFL players or
Major League baseball players joining al-Qaeda, do you?”

The author had to go back 20 years to dig up a quote by an ex-football player turned-marginally successful politician to prove how America greets the World Cup with an "orgy of football-bashing." Just in case you did not get the point, even a blogger on the internet thinks soccer is for terrorists!

Yankee hostility to football draws on deep wells of both patriotism and populism. The history of assimilation has been one of abandoning foreign sports(primarily football) in favour of American pastimes. The sons of football-playing parents knew that they had become good Americans when they could quote the batting average of left-handed Yankee players in losing seasons.
More recently, football has become embroiled in the culture wars. The most
prominent supporters of football, apart from new immigrants, are overclass
parents who want their little darlings to play a civilised foreign game rather
than the lumbering American performance that bears the same name.

Now that the author has proven that America is hostile to football, he explains that it's only natural due to the fact that patriotism and populism demand that new immigrants foreswear their old world sports in favor of becoming statistical machines.
I played soccer for 8 years in my youth. Although there were kids on my teams that could be described as coming from both "overclass" and "new immigrant" families (note the author's mutual-exclusiveness), both were far from the most prominent supporters. Amazingly, when I arrived at high school I began to play the "lumbering" American version as well. My life could have taken a number of paths beginning in high school. The fact that I am by traditional measures a well adjusted, dues-paying citizen I attribute to the discipline, commitment, tenacity, fairness and structure that American football taught me. Soccer was about fun, but football was about life.

Behind all this lies a bigger debate about America's cultural
idiosyncrasy. Americans like to think of themselves as global trendsetters and
standard-makers. But a raft of opinion polls since the Iraq war have
demonstrated that America is not so much a trendsetter as an outlier—more
individualistic, more religious, more nationalistic, more anti-government and
more gung-ho about the use of force than other countries.

When Americans are not completely self-absorbed in their populist, patriotic rhetoric, they're very busy worrying about setting global trends. As you'll recall, America was loved the world over--especially in Europe--before President YEE-HAW ruined our image by invading the kite flying, peace-loving nation of Iraq. All the people from virtually every nation on earth who are literally dying to get to our shores are outliers, too.

This evidence of American exceptionalism has provoked a fierce debate within the United States between “red” Americans, who are proud of their country's oddness, and “blue” Americans (mostly Democrats), who think that America should pay more attention to the rest of the world. It has also provoked an even fiercer backlash in other countries against America's “weird” values, such as its support for the death penalty and its predilection for unilateral action.

IF you are a "red" American you are proud of your oddness as defined by the fact that you may or may not believe that people who commit the most heinous of crimes may deserve to die. Heaven forbid you believe a nation has the right to act unilaterally. If you are a "blue" American you are superior (a Democrat!) because you pay attention to what(Europe)the(Europe)Rest(Europe)of the(Europe)World is saying because they obviously have your best interests at heart. Their track record proves it, too. I forgot, what's this have to do with football?

It is possible that American exceptionalism may wane in the next few years, particularly if the Democrats can recapture the presidency. Unilateral action is out of fashion, thanks to the Iraq mess. But when it comes to sport, American exceptionalism looks more enduring. It is hard to imagine America's indigenous sports being forced to cede much ground to soccer, short of a dramatic victory by the national team in July; and it is impossible to imagine the rest of the world abandoning their beloved footballs for pigskins or baseball bats.

The Democrats will surely flog this nation back into their rightful, supine place in the world if only enough people will open their eyes and see that Iraq is a total, broken, unsalvagable mess and will always remain so. Oh yeah, back to football. America, quit trying to cram pigskinned-wrapped baseball bats up the world's behind. They just won't go for it. Maybe if your "not bad" team can pull off a miracle upset, your nation will see the virtue that the rest of the world sees in football.

I am usually a big fan of the Economist, especially the Lexington column. I'm going to try to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that the regular authors of the column are all on holiday--maybe even in Germany for the World Cup--because this piece could have been written by an intern for The Nation.

Clear Leftist Thinking is Not Always an Oxymoron

In politics, there is a big difference between loyal opposition and subversive obstruction. There seems to be much more of the latter than the former lately. Political lines have been so clearly defined that there are not many examples of people from either end of the political spectrum breaking free from their dogmatic, ossified thought patterns in order to open their minds to consider new thoughts that may contradict their core beliefs. That is why it is encouraging to know that documents such as the Euston Manifesto exist.

A. Preamble
We are democrats and progressives. We propose here a
fresh political alignment. Many of us belong to the Left, but the principles
that we set out are not exclusive. We reach out, rather, beyond the socialist
Left towards egalitarian liberals and others of unambiguous democratic
commitment. Indeed, the reconfiguration of progressive opinion that we aim for
involves drawing a line between the forces of the Left that remain true to its
authentic values, and currents that have lately shown themselves rather too
flexible about these values. It involves making common cause with genuine
democrats, whether socialist or not.
The present initiative has its roots in and has found a constituency through the Internet, especially the "blogosphere".
It is our perception, however, that this constituency is under-represented
elsewhere — in much of the media and the other forums of contemporary political
life. The broad statement of principles that follows is a declaration of
intent. It inaugurates a new Website, which will serve as a resource for the
current of opinion it hopes to represent and the several foundation blogs and
other sites that are behind this call for a progressive realignment.

Whenever I see "socialist", "progressive" and "liberal" used in the same paragraph I usually recoil, but it is a small price to pay for an example of loyal opposition in this case. Besides, not all forms of socialism are equal. For example, one should not confuse the socialism of Hugo Chavez's Venezuela with that of Michelle Bachelet's Chile, or even Lula de Silva's Brazil.

B. Statement of principles (Each of these is expanded upon
within the Manifesto)

1) For democracy
2) No apology for tyranny
3) Human rights for all
4) Equality
5) Development for freedom
6) Opposing Anti-Americanism
7) For a two-state solution (re: Israel/Palestine)
8) Against racism
9) United against terror
10) A new internationalism
11) A critical openness
12) Historical truth
13) Freedom of ideas
14) Open source
15) A precious heritage

No apology for terrorism, against Anti-Americanism, against terror, in favor of historical truth, in favor of democracy. One could be forgiven for thinking that much if it came from the Neocon playbook!

C. Elaborations (See website for details)

D. Conclusion
It is vitally important for the future of progressive
politics that people of liberal, egalitarian and internationalist outlook should
now speak clearly. We must define ourselves against those for whom the entire
progressive-democratic agenda has been subordinated to a blanket and simplistic
"anti-imperialism" and/or hostility to the current US administration. The values
and goals which properly make up that agenda — the values of democracy, human rights, the continuing battle against unjustified privilege and power,
solidarity with peoples fighting against tyranny and oppression — are what most
enduringly define the shape of any Left worth belonging to.

I find it hard to argue with this document when taken in its totality.

I wonder what the subervise obstructionists that claim to speak for the entire Left have to say about this?

Even more telling than the prominent Leftists who have signed the Euston Manifesto, are the prominent Leftists who have not.

Class Action Lawsuits

Homer Simpson once said of beer: "...the cause of and answer to all of life's problems." One could substitute "lawyers" for "beer" and the phrase would still ring true. Of course not all lawyers cause as many problems as they solve. Many are upstanding members of the community; professional, smart and ever-so-helpful when we need them. But there does exist in the litigation-ecosystem a certain breed of lawyers who often put their own interests ahead of both their clients and society in general; and they seem to congregate in the realms of personal injury and class-action.

Vonage is a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) company that recently went public with much fanfare. The underwriters; Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and UBS put their collective heads together and determined that they should price 31.25mil shares at $17. Admittedly, pricing an IPO is tricky. One must factor in market sentiment, institutional, hedge fund and retail investor demand, the "hotness" of the sector at the time of the offering and a host of other components. Generally the syndicate of underwriters is responsible for allocating the entire deal to investors. This deal was unique in that Vonage gave its customers an opportunity to purchase IPO shares through the company rather than through the traditional method of indicating interest to one of the investment banks that is a member of the syndicate. In theory, it gives the loyal customer a chance to get in on the "ground floor" of a deal they'd otherwise have to buy in the open market at whatever price the IPO is trading--presumably higher than the issue price. In practice, Vonage traded as high as $17.25 for a brief moment on it's first day of trading, and has done nothing but head south since. Understandably, many of the Vonage customers who bought stock at the IPO price are upset that the stock is hovering around $12 these days.

Enter the class-action do-gooders. Motley Rice announced they were filing a lawsuit on behalf of the people who lost money on the IPO.

"We don't know yet exactly what happened in this IPO," Herb Teitelbaum, a partner in securities litigation practice group Bryan Cave, said Monday. "The fact that the stock dropped off 30 percent is not a violation."

He doesn't yet know what happened, but rest assured whatever it was, Vonage is going to pay for it. He'll see to that--and collect a handsome fee in the meantime.

If the underwriters would have done their job properly and there wasn't the amount of demand for the deal that they first thought, they could have taken a number of steps to ensure that the deal would not trade underwater right out of the gate. For example, they could have lowered the price of the IPO, scaled back the size of the deal, or postponed the deal until a later date when the market conditions were better. Their job (for which they are very well-compensated by the way) is to find the equilibrium point at which the company is happy with the proceeds raised from the IPO, and the institutions, hedge funds and small investors who bought the stock are happy with the price and the way it trades in the aftermarket.

Vonage did not set the price of the IPO, the underwriters set the price of the IPO. The market told the world that the price was too high. If anybody should be held responsible, it seems to me it should be the underwriters.

But wait a second, there's no guarantee that an IPO will trade higher right out of the gate. Markets can be brutal--it's proven time and time again everyday. Surely Vonage fulfilled their obligations per the SEC in fully disclosing to their customers the risks associated with the purchase of their IPO. A big dose of Caveat Emptor seems to be in order. Maybe they did somehow mislead their investors, who knows? I guess Motley Rice LLC will get to the bottom of it--for the good of the little guy of course.

Milberg Weiss Bershad & Schulman is another class-action law firm that specializes in securities fraud cases. Unfortunately for them, they are in the midst of some serious turmoil surrounding allegations that they paid illegal kickbacks to name plaintiffs and went through extraordinary lengths to cover it up.

All of this is not to say that there is no place in litigation for class-action lawsuits. They serve the public well in many cases. However, if somebody can point me to an area of litigation that is fraught with more fraud, exploitation and corporate blackmail--as has been exemplified in the billions of dollars wasted in asbestos and tobacco class-action litigation--please do.

Appeasement is a Dead End

It appears that Canada's high-minded opposition to the invasion of Iraq has not been enough to offset the damage caused by participating in NATO's efforts in Afghanistan--at least that seems to be the case in the eyes of their own homegrown Jihadis.

TORONTO - Police said Monday more arrests are likely in an alleged plot to bomb buildings in Canada, while intelligence officers sought ties between the 17 suspects and Islamic terror cells in the United States and five other nations.

A court said authorities had charged all 12 adults arrested over the weekend with participating in a terrorist group. Other charges included importing weapons and planning a bombing. The charges against five minors were not made public.

A Muslim prayer leader who knew the oldest suspect, 43-year-old Qayyum Abdul Jamal, told The Associated Press on Monday that Jamal's sermons at a storefront mosque were "filled with hate" against Canada.

Always, ALWAYS the shock!

Some people who know the suspects said they were astonished by the arrests.

But Faheem Bukhari, a director of the Mississauga Muslim Community Center, said Jamal, the oldest suspect, had taken to giving hateful sermons and preaching intolerance to young Muslims at a small storefront mosque in Mississauga, a city near Toronto where six of the suspects lived.

"These youth were very fun-loving guys, soccer-loving guys, and then all of sudden they were not associating with guys they used to," Bukhari told AP, referring to some of the younger suspects.

He said Jamal once told "the audience that the Canadian Forces were going to Afghanistan to rape women."

I do believe I saw a similiar storyline in the better-than-expected Showtime series Sleeper Cell once.

Stop the World and Let Off All the Fools...

It's unfortunate that myths about Iraq continually need to be debunked, but when you are up against the Enemies Within who are unmoored from the Reality Bouy, have absolutely no shame and recognize no boundaries to the things they're willing to do to in order to bring others into their World of Delusion; it's necessary.

Ray Bradbury, the Poet

I enjoyed reading Ray Bradbury immensely in my younger days. I did not know he was a poet, too.

America
By RAY BRADBURY

We are the dream that other people dream.
The land where other people land
When late at night
They think on flight
And, flying, here arrive
Where we fools dumbly thrive ourselves.

Refuse to see
We be what all the world would like to be.
Because we hive within this scheme
The obvious dream is blind to us.
We do not mind the miracle we are,
So stop our mouths with curses.
While all the world rehearses
Coming here to stay.
We busily make plans to go away.

How dumb! newcomers cry, arrived from Chad.
You're mad! Iraqis shout,
We'd sell our souls if we could be you.
How come you cannot see the way we see you?
You tread a freedom forest as you please.
But, damn! you miss the forest for the trees.
Ten thousand wanderers a week
Engulf your shore,
You wonder what their shouting's for,
And why so glad?

Run warm those souls: America is bad?
Sit down, stare in their faces, see!
You be the hoped-for thing a hopeless world would be.
In tides of immigrants that this year flow
You still remain the beckoning hearth they'd know.
In midnight beds with blueprint, plan and scheme
You are the dream that other people dream.

I thought it was deplorable when Michael Moore appropriated and tweaked--without consent--the title of Mr. Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 as a means to his self-serving ends. In his plea to Mr. Moore to find another title for his movie, Mr. Bradbury said his personal politics were of no matter regarding his objection. He was simply upset that Mr. Moore did not ask permission.

This poem illustrates to me that Mr. Bradbury and Mr. Moore's politics couldn't be further from eachother, thankfully.

Sierra Springtime

The first mate--skilled at spotting ducks, beavers and floating sticks when he's not napping

What I love about Springtime in the Sierra: sunshine, blue skies, light afternoon breezes, long days, mild nights, corn snow, and no crowds.
My wife, BAXTER and I launched the kayak this weekend on Lake Tahoe and did a big paddle to King's Beach and back for a picnic on Saturday. A nice headwind on the return ensured a better than expected workout!
Sunday we went for a morning paddle when the WHOLE lake was like a sheet of glass. We paddled past Tahoe City and found a couple of nice hidden beaches. Then we came back and took a jacuzzi, made a picnic lunch, loaded up the skis and went up to Tahoe Meadows. At the trailhead ( elev. 8,300 ft) there's about 6 feet of base snow remaining. That's pretty extraordinary for this time of year! I had a good laugh as I was brushing the sand off my feet to put on my ski touring boots. Where else, but Lake Tahoe?
It was hot and sunny, so we donned shorts and t-shirts and did a great tour out and around some peak I don't know the name of. We found a hot rock with a spectacular view of the entire lake, hopped around like lizards, had our lunch and a nap. Bliss--it was a very special day! Don't get too many of those in a lifetime. We'll be back up over Memorial Day, except this time, in addition to the skis and the kayak which are already up there--I'm taking my mountain bike so we can hit some of the lower elevation trails.

That's MY kinda triathlon!

Dictator's Dividend

Max Boot nails it in the LA Times today:

Of the top 14 oil exporters, only one is a well-established liberal democracy — Norway. Two others have recently made a transition to democracy — Mexico and Nigeria. Iraq is trying to follow in their footsteps. That's it. Every other major oil exporter is a dictatorship — and the run-up in oil prices has been a tremendous boon to them.
My associate at the Council on Foreign Relations, Ian Cornwall, calculates that if oil averages $71 a barrel this year, 10 autocracies stand to make about $500 billion more than in 2003, when oil was at $27. This windfall helps to squelch liberal forces and entrench noxious dictators in such oil producers as Russia (which stands to make $115 billion more this year than in 2003) and Venezuela ($36 billion). Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chavez can buy off their publics with generous subsidies and ignore Western pressure while sabotaging democratic developments from Central America to Central Asia.
The "dictatorship dividend" also subsidizes Sudan's ethnic cleansing (it stands to earn $4.7 billion more this year than in 2003), Iran's development of nuclear weapons ($45 billion) and Saudi Arabia's proselytization for Wahhabi fundamentalism ($149 billion). Even in such close American allies as Kuwait ($35 billion) and the United Arab Emirates ($36 billion), odds are that some of the extra lucre will find its way into the pockets of terrorists.

As Instapundit correctly points out; practicalities aside:

Of course, if we seized the Saudi and Iranian oil fields and ran the pumps full speed, oil prices would plummet, dictators would be broke, and poor nations would benefit from cheap energy. But we'd be called imperialist oppressors, then.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

Oh, and May the 4th be with you...

Left at Albuquerque, wherever that is...

Can you find Iraq on a map?

After more than three years of combat and nearly 2,400 U.S. military deaths in Iraq, nearly two-thirds of Americans aged 18 to 24 still cannot find Iraq on a map, a study released Tuesday showed.

I suppose I can forgive an 18 year old for being less than skilled at world geography. Afterall, you're supposed to be stupid when you're 18. I also must consider that a certain number of high school students may have had somebody like Jay Bennish as one of their teachers; somebody who would rather teach leftist dogma than actual relevant course content. Surely he's not the only one out there.
I do find it unforgivable that anybody that's about 23 or 24--that would encompass a large number of college graduates--would fall into that 2/3rds category of ignorance. I shouldn't be surprised though. The great thing about the multicultural movement that has taken hold within our education system is that it does not require you to know anything about other cultures. It only requires that you to feel good about other cultures.
It certainly does not require that you know where they originate, let alone be able to point it out on a map.

Earth Day

Say what you will about President Bush, but you have to respect the man for his mountain biking abilities.

The president spent Saturday morning with a small pack of riders in a foggy redwood forest about 90 minutes north of San Francisco. He relished the swampy conditions on parts of the trail in this remote state-owned tract, leading his partners repeatedly through huge puddles and streams running high after weeks of heavy rain.

The ride started at an elevation of about 1,700 feet above sea level and dropped steeply for several miles, prompting a bit of anxiety in the president. He is not accustomed to the sustained drops and climbs of California's mountains, having ridden mostly in the Washington, D.C., area and on his ranch near Crawford, Texas.

Riding Mountain Bike One — a blue and white Trek Fuel bicycle emblazoned with the presidential seal — he glided confidently over loose rocks and deep gullies carved by rain runoff. Bush recovered from a near spill on a fast downhill, but four riders behind him went down in a Tour de France-style pileup, leaving them caked with dirt.

I'm not one to donate to political warchests, but if President Bush ever held a mountain bike fundraiser where we got to ride some singletrack with him, I'd pay up for the privilege.

For those of you that spent your Earth Day filling up the gas tank and complaining about the current price of gas, the daughter of the founder of Earth Day doesn't think current prices are too high.

I agree with her actually. Every time the price of gas rises, it infuriates me to hear talk about windfall oil profit taxes and other forms of political pandering, as well as ad nauseum news interviews "live from the pumps" about people's outrage over the price of gas. I know there'd be lots of consequences (both intended and unintended, positive and negative) but it really wouldn't bother me if gas doubled in price from here.

It's interesting how one seemingly cannot be both conservative and pro-environment/conservation. Approach the typical pachouli dipped earth-day celebrator and tell them you are conservative and an environmentalist and watch their head explode.

I'll wager I care more about the environment than the typical earth dancer does. Eventhough--as a friend put it--I don't smell like it.

Tones of Home

Imagine for a moment if each year hundreds of thousands of our poorest, least educated citizens illegally crossed the border into Canada in search of economic opportunity without ever having the intention of learning French, the lyrics to "Oh Canada", or how to make a killer poutine. How relieved would our government be that they were no longer obligated to try to provide basic services and welfare programs to many of our lower class citizens? How would Canada react to the increasing strain on their civic infrastructure and their humanitarian obligation to care of the new arrivals from south of the border?
Earlier this week protests were scheduled around the nation to coincide with the debate in congress over what to do about illegal immigration. Historical-revisionists such as MEChA and Aztlan, which are Latino organizations that promote anti-Americanism and civil disobedience with the dream of reconquering all of the lands "stolen" during the Mexican-American War, took the opportunity to rally the ignorant around their cause. If they would take the time to learn history as fact rather than history as relative to one's interpretation, they would realize that:
a) the U.S Government paid Mexico ~$630,000,000 (today's dollars) for the land gained in the war
b) there were only approximately 10,000 to 15,000 Mexicans living in "Aztlan" at the end of the war--hardly what one could call "critical mass"
c) Under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, those Mexicans living in the new U.S. territory were granted full U.S. citizenship while retaining rights to all of their land. If they wished to return to Mexico, the U.S. government purchased their land from them.

Where does it end? Should MEChA and Aztlan then return all of Mexico to the Aztecs and the other indigenous tribes of history? Surely that is not their motive. My Huguenot ancestors were driven from France over 400 years ago by the Catholic church. Should I start a movement to reclaim our lost land?
I am not sure what those individuals who have legitimate concerns about our immigration policies think they have to gain by belligerently displaying the Mexican flag and shouting anti-American slogans, but they are not convincing me they want to become law-abiding citizens of the USA. I realize many of these agitators are misguided students, but they've appropriated a serious cause and claim to speak for those that have no voice. It seems to me that they should have taken the opportunity to express their solidarity with the country they chose to enter (legally or illegally) rather than participate as street theater puppet-pawns. It appears to me they yearn for the "good old days" that never existed in a land they left for a reason it seems they've forgotten.
Everybody on both sides of the aisle in Congress agree that we have an illegal immigration problem. However, the solution remains elusive. One thing is certain though; until Mexico--and Latin America in general--addresses the fundamental structural problems of a ruling elite, the arbitrary enforcement of the rule of law, and the extensive corruption that exists at all levels of government, neither 200,000 troops on the border, or a wall 3,000 miles long and 50 ft high is going to stem the flow of people simply trying to make a better life for themselves.

Those that do make it here should pay attention to the company they keep.

An Issue of Trust

When I lived in New York City, I had a very good friend I worked with who had emigrated from Russia about 5 years before I met him. The day he was granted full U.S. citizenship he literally cried tears of joy. Aside from the day he left Russia it was one of the happiest days of his life. I learned a lot about Russia from him--usually over a glass of vodka. Culture, politics, curse words, proper toasts and most importantly, how to drink vodka all night without ending up in the gutter. When he spoke of home and his childhood, he seldom if ever had kind words to say. One thing he used to repeat ad nauseum was to never trust a Russian, ever. Surely he had his reasons for this, but I would usually chalk his rantings up as slightly hyperbolic.
I have a feeling he would read this story regarding newly exposed evidence of Russia's role in pre-OIF operations; shake his head, take a long drag on his cigarette, exhale, appear pensive for a moment and say something along the lines of, "well what did you expect?"

Thankless Pacifists

This morning I woke to the following headline: U.S., British Troops Rescue Iraq Hostages

BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. and British troops Thursday freed three Christian peace activists in a rural area of Iraq without firing a shot, ending a four-month hostage drama in which an American among the group was shot to death and dumped on a Baghdad street.

Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the U.S. military spokesman, said the hostages were being held by a "kidnapping cell" in a house, and the operation to free the captives was based on information from a man captured by U.S. forces only three hours earlier.
(Proof that when we torture poor sheep farmers with underpants and barking dogs they can yield useful information.)

As the article states, these were the comrades of the recently murdered American Tom Fox, all members of the Christian Peacemakers Team based in Chicago. From the heading on their website, "What would happen if Christians devoted the same discipline and self-sacrifice to nonviolent peacemaking that armies devote to war?" I gather that they are pacifists in practice and at heart.
Doug Pritchard, the group's co-director speaking from Toronto, had this to say about the rescue operation:

"They knew that their only protection was in the power of the love of God and of their Iraqi and international co-workers," Pritchard said.

He also called for coalition forces to leave the country.

"We believe that the illegal occupation of Iraq by Multinational Forces is the root cause of the insecurity which led to this kidnapping and so much pain and suffering in Iraq," Pritchard said.

Commentary

Pacifism is a fine strategy when the stakes are low. It's easy to make enlightened claims about the virtues of non-violence when the wolves are not knocking at the door. Probably the most famous pacifist of the 20th century was Mahatma Gandhi. He and his followers famously stood down the mighty British Empire, paving the way for an independent India. I can't help but wonder how India would have fared using such a strategy against Chairman Mao, Stalin, or Hitler rather than the largely benevolent British?
Gandhi had this to say regarding the Jews and the Holocaust: "The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs." He believed that the Jews should commit mass suicide in order to make the Third Reich introspectively realize that maybe the Aryan race was not really the master race afterall, and should instead live peacefully with their neighbors as equals. Regardless of whether or not you believe in reincarnation as Gandhi did, recommending mass suicide hardly seems like the recipe for living peacefully on this earth in this moment.

The lack of gratitude that Doug Pritchard and CPT have shown for the brave troops that rescued the hostages is inexcusable. Instead of for a moment setting aside his dogmatic belief "... that their only protection was in the power of the love of God and of their Iraqi and international co-workers" and thanking the actual people that rescued his helpless pacifists, he instead took the opportunity to call for the coalition forces to leave the country. Surely he would argue that they would have never been harmed had we never invaded Iraq etc... A chicken or the egg argument if there ever was one. It seems the power and the love of God was a little slow to the rescue. Fortunately for the CPT, our brave Armed Forces were up to the thankless task.
Pacifism is not only immoral, it's suicidal.

UPDATE:
In my recent post, "Weapons of Mass Destruction Revisited" I mentioned the boxes of documents and hours of audio tapes that we've found in Iraq leftover from Saddam's reign. Some enterprising members of Pajamas Media have taken to translating some of the documents themselves and then cross-checking the translations for accuracy. The following link provides evidence that members of Saddam's regime were in contact with Osama Bin Laden via Sudan as early as 1995.
Also, Mark Steyn has written an excellent article that explores the costs of maintaining the U.N. mandated sanctions against Iraq had we continued with the status quo.

Proof That People Have Too Much Free Time

And to think I wasted last weekend enjoying good company, fresh snow and abundant sunshine in the Sierras when I could have stuck around town and participated in this.

Bad News for People Who Like Bad News

Shocking, I know, but there actually IS good news from Iraq from time to time.

It's easy to be a pessimist. All that is required of you is to give up.