To paraphrase Golda Meir, so-called human rights organizations will be useful when they learn to love human rights more than they hate the US and Israel. Or to paraphrase someone else–they’re not in favor of human rights, they’re just on the other side.
We need to either reform them (unlikely–it would require a housecleaning so thorough there would be little left) or form some new ones that could be more credible.
Given that some of the nations who have offered troops for the farce that is a ceasefire in Lebanon don’t recognize Israel’s right to exist (e.g., Malaysia and Indonesia), and the UN itself doesn’t seem to have a problem with this, what would they say at Turtle Bay if Iran offered up “peacekeeping troops” in south Lebanon? Since they don’t formally recognize Iran’s role in the war, how would they refuse? For that matter, why wouldn’t they accept an offer from Syria to help “police” its border with Lebanon?
National Hurricane Center director Max Mayfield is calling it quits at the end of the season. Certainly the last two years have to have been pretty rough on him. Here’s hoping that he’ll get a lighter season as a send off.
Lileks’ Newhouse column is a partial replay of his earlier screed, but still entertaining. I thought this line encapsulated the nuttiness of the people who worry about theocrats in the White House, but seem indifferent to the ones who actually havea theocracy, and would impose it on us if they could:
…one could make the case that the greatest threats to the freedoms of the West are posed by the head-choppers, plane-exploders, their many merry supporters, and the nuke-seeking state that supports them.
But don’t expect the artists to make the case. They saw what happened to that Theo Van Gogh fellow. Pay no attention to that imam behind the curtain. Here’s the ghost of Eisenhower. Booga-booga!
The artists seem more concerned with a culture that won’t let gays marry than one that won’t let them live.
And I got a dark chuckle over this:
They take the easy way out, these brave souls; they’ll perform “The Diary of Anne Frank,” but only because now some people think it has a happy ending.
Orson Scott Card isn’t very happy with his fellow Democrats. I’m sure that it’s very frustrating for him to have to defend George Bush, about whom there are a great deal of things worthy of criticism (if so, I certainly share it), but the lunacy of the continuing attacks on him make it necessary.
Jonah Goldberg talks about the Democrats’ latest amusing dementia. So does Rich Lowry.
Amir Taheri thinks not. Michael Young agrees.
Longer term, I suspect that the media is another loser, with continuing self-inflicted blows to its credibility in the wake of the fauxtography and willing (and even eager) acceptance of staged Hezbullah propaganda. I hope so, anyway.
So writeth Jane Galt (not the first time she’s clamored for this).
While undoubtedly the discovery that most of the tax burden falls on employees will be for some a strike against the tax, and for others a sign that we need some stiff laws to force those corporations to place the burden elsewhere, it seems to me that this piece of information makes the corporate income tax no less attractive than it was before–which is to say, not at all. Levying a corporate income tax is a very inefficient way to do what we want, which is to redistribute money from the company’s richer owners, customers, and managers to its poorer employees.
(All right, maybe we don’t all want to do this; no doubt many of my readers are even now cringing in horror at the thought. But let us posit, for the sake of discussion, that we do want to do this, because that is at heart of all the arguments I have ever heard in favour of the corporate income tax, and even assuming the ends, the means make no sense.)
I agree. The corporate income tax is nuts, and arguments for it are born purely of economic ignorance.
Jon Goff’s musings on essential spacefaring technologies was very useful, inasmuch as it seems to have kicked off a substantial discussion in the blogosphere. One wonders how many at NASA are reading.
[Friday morning update]
Jon has some further thoughts. I would add one technology to his list: routine EVA equipment and orbital assembly techniques.
Here’s an interesting strategy–Ford is considering taking the company private. That could help a lot, if they have the cash to do it.