Venezuelistan

Pakistan has been a source of great unrest for sometime, but the problems have intensified since President Pervez Musharraf declared a state of emergency last week. The media has been following the story closely, which is appropriate given Pakistan's strategic importance and their status as an ally in the war on terror. Musharraf came to power via a military coup. His recent election may not have been free or fair. There is rightful concern about the decisions that he has made. I don't do dispute any of that.

What does concern me is the point addressed in this Investor's Business Daily editorial:

As Pakistan's tightening dictatorship draws global opprobrium, a curious double standard is emerging in Venezuela as democracy gasps its last and celebrities continue to file in. Where's the decency?
That's what was seen in the message sent by the latest visitor to Miraflores Palace, supermodel Naomi Campbell, who gushed "amazement" at the "love and encouragement" in the Venezuelan dictatorship as students battled riot police in the streets below.
...With a lousy record on holding free and fair elections, there's little doubt that by Dec. 2, the day of the vote, Chavez will have sealed his grip by permanently disenfranchising the opposition. There's also little doubt that if he doesn't get what he wants, he'll declare himself dictator.

Venezuela is not strictly related to the war on terror, but Hugo Chavez is a major potential source of instability in our hemisphere. He also continues a sad trend of oppressive leaders in Latin America, and that is unfortunate. Also unfortunate is the failure of luminaries to call Chavez out for who he is.

Strike

The Writers Guild of America is on strike. What does this mean? That the TV world may end in January, or even sooner.

For some background, Entertainment Weekly has a Hollywood blog that chronicles both the run-up to the strike and current happenings. Eric Snider has a nice run-down as well. He starts thusly:

You may have heard snippets of news items about an impending Hollywood writers strike and didn’t let the magnitude of the situation sink in. Perhaps you were in denial. But I’m here to tell you that it is real, and that it will probably be disastrous.
How does seven nights a week of nothing but “American Idol” and “Dateline NBC” sound?!!

Yikes. I probably watch too much television. Of the TV that I watch, most of it is drama, with a few comedies. I generally am not as attracted to reality shows (with a few exceptions). For me this means I will watch less TV, but possibly be more productive. That's not all that bad an outcome.

I mention above that the TV landscape seemed to be okay until January. That outlook is threatened somewhat by news like this:

"We’re trying to shut down ‘The Office,’” Mr. Daniels said. “We have the star of our show and the entire writing staff behind us."

Showrunners and cast leaving production to show support for writers may mean that even less new TV is on the horizon. The outlook is bleak for my favorites, like The Office, 30 Rock, The Unit, Lost, 24, and Battlestar Galactica. It is a shame that it has come to this.

Strikes are something that I have some difficulty sympathizing with, particularly in the entertainment and sports industries. There is a huge disparity between bankable stars, directors, and writers and the rank-and-file. They all hang together at a time like this, but I wonder what kind of financial impact this is having on those earning lower wages, especially those that had found success on newer shows. It's hard to say at this point who will suffer more from the strike. I don't think it will be the studios.

A Worthy Recipient

In this age of meaningless awards, it is gratifying to see someone receive praise for showing true courage. In today's Wall Street Journal, Mary Anastasia O'Grady writes about Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bush today, but could not attend because he is in a Cuban prison:

While practicing medicine in Cuban hospitals for more than a decade, Dr. Biscet became increasingly concerned about the government's abortion practices. In 1998, at a Havana hospital, he took the risk of engaging in a clandestine study on the administration of a drug called rivanol to abort advanced pregnancies. The drug was being widely used, particularly on girls as young as 12, who, having been forced to leave their parents and work in rural areas as part of their schooling, found themselves "in trouble."
The study concluded that rivanol resulted in viable fetuses being born alive. What often happened next horrified Dr. Biscet, who later wrote that, "the umbilical cord was cut and they were allowed to bleed to death or they were wrapped in paper and asphyxiated."
As a result of his vocal opposition to these abortion practices he lost his job, his family lost their home and Castro's goons were sent to beat him up. But the bullying didn't work. By now he was actively engaged in resistance against the regime and, as he has written, his conscience would not allow him to back down. Those familiar with Dr. Biscet's work say that he was instrumental in building -- at the grassroots level -- on the impact of Pope John Paul II's visit to Cuba in January 1998. The regime took notice. Dr. Biscet became one of the few dissidents that Castro has ever attacked by name in a speech to the nation. As a proponent of Cuban democracy told me, "It proves that Biscet really got under Castro's skin."

Few Americans will have heard of Dr. Biscet before today. Not many more will remember him tomorrow, yet we have Gore, Britney Spears, and other meaningless personalisites shoved down our throats.

We have to remember that freedom IS worth fighting for. Dr. Biscet is a great example of that.

We may have to cry for Argentina

From Rafael Rosen in TCSDaily:

The next president is the wife of a former president. Yes, their story is familiar by now. The couple met in law school. He became governor of a politically backwater state, before winning election to the nation's highest office on an unimpressive plurality. She then handily won the presidency from her post as the junior Senator from Buenos Aires.
Forgive yourself the confusion. For the law school is not Yale but La Plata. The governorship is not of Arkansas but of Santa Cruz. The president is not Clinton but Kirchner.

Latin America has been cursed with poor leadership for far too long. Populism and doomed socialist policites have crippled and continue to handicap its progress. Perhaps Kirchner will avoid that outcome. I'm not optimistic.

Awesome Video Saturday XXII

This is a pretty funny cheerleading mishap.



One of the all-time classic SNL bits:

Quejas for Cuba

The eventual death of Fidel Castro will likely mean that Raúl Castro, his brother, takes full and open control of the country. Most expect that Cuba might then enjoy some economic liberalization, without initial relaxation of dictatorial control over Cuba's politics. There are signs that the government may allow some of that economic change to occur even sooner than that, though rumblings do not a permanent change indicate. From last week's Economist:

“WE HAVE a system in which anything you do is either forbidden or compulsory,” complains Miguel, an academic and a member of Cuba's ruling Communist Party. “Perhaps we need to change that to become more efficient.” He notes angrily that what he earns in a month, a trainee waiter can pick up in tips in a day in the island's tourist hotels. It is a common complaint, and only one of many. But now it is Cuba's government that is encouraging everyone to grumble.
...How will Raúl Castro respond to all this? Unlike Fidel, he is thought to favour the course pursued by China and Vietnam, in which markets and private investment have been combined with Communist political control. Even before the debate began, government economists had been studying measures such as allowing more self-employment and private or co-operative ownership of small and medium-sized businesses, as well as reforming land tenure and freeing agricultural markets.

In both China and Vietnam, the relaxation of state economic control has led to to incremental improvements in political freedoms, though neither country is near to being called "free." This may be all we can hope for in the present. It's better than nothing.

Arrrrgh! It were Halloween!

Joseph loves coming to the office. Not for me, mind you, but for Bea and her cow full of jellybeans. You pull on the vaca's tail and out pop the jellybeans. As soon as he walks in the door he goes straight there.
He came by yesterday, dressed as a pirate for halloween. These are from my Q.


The hat doesn't stay on too long.


A mouth full of jellybean.

Making Fun

I posted something on In Rare Form. A little bit of satire.

A Good Read

This is an excellent article by John R. Christy. He is director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a participant in the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This is just the article that I have been waiting for.

I'm sure the majority (but not all) of my IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see. Rather, I see a reliance on climate models (useful but never "proof") and the coincidence that changes in carbon dioxide and global temperatures have loose similarity over time.
There are some of us who remain so humbled by the task of measuring and understanding the extraordinarily complex climate system that we are skeptical of our ability to know what it is doing and why. As we build climate data sets from scratch and look into the guts of the climate system, however, we don't find the alarmist theory matching observations. (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite data we analyze at the University of Alabama in Huntsville does show modest warming -- around 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit per century, if current warming trends of 0.25 degrees per decade continue.)
It is my turn to cringe when I hear overstated-confidence from those who describe the projected evolution of global weather patterns over the next 100 years, especially when I consider how difficult it is to accurately predict that system's behavior over the next five days.

The whole thing is fantastic.

North Korea U.

When I read this bit from John Leo, I was incredulous. He writes about a program for new students at the University of Delaware, the aim of which is to indoctrinate students toward a very specific way of thinking:

The training makes clear that white people are to be considered racists - at least those who have not yet undergone training and confessed their racism. The RAs have been taught that a "racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture, or sexuality."

This is shocking. A university should be a place that truly promotos intellectual freedom and diversity of thought. This program does just the opposite, in the name of tolerance. While it appears to be the particular brainchild of one administrator, that it has emerged at all is telling.

Fiction that Fits- A Follow-up

Having made this post the other day, I was especially interested in the dispatch from Michael Yon about Scott Beauchamp and The New Republic. Despite his fraudulent reporting from the Middle East, Beauchamp continues to serve in the Army and his commander is happy to have him:

Lapses of judgment are bound to happen, and accountability is critical, but that’s not the same thing as pulling out the hanging rope every time a soldier makes a mistake.
Beauchamp is young; under pressure he made a dumb mistake. In fact, he has not always been an ideal soldier. But to his credit, the young soldier decided to stay, and he is serving tonight in a dangerous part of Baghdad. He might well be seriously injured or killed here, and he knows it. He could have quit, but he did not. He faced his peers. I can only imagine the cold shoulders, and worse, he must have gotten. He could have left the unit, but LTC Glaze told me that Beauchamp wanted to stay and make it right. Whatever price he has to pay, he is paying it.

Having never served in the military, I'll defer to Beauchamp's commander as to the best course to pursue. Yon is less charitable towards Beauchamp's enablers at The New Republic:

As for The New Republic, some on the staff may feel like they’ve been hounded and treed, but it’s hard to feel the same sympathy for a group of cowards who won’t ’fess up and can’t face the scorn of American combat soldiers who were injured by their collective lapse of judgment. It’s up to their readers to decide the ultimate fate.

Somehow I don't think their readers will care too much. That's too bad.

La Familia

Lacy went with Joseph to a pumpkin patch the other day. I had to put these pictures up. The kid is growing so fast!

Awesome Video Saturday XXI

This is the trailer for the next season of 24. The change in setting from LA to New York is a welcome move. I think it's a good preview. It may have some spoilers.:

Fiction that fits the talking points

I have enjoyed Peggy Noonan's writing for a long time. Lately she has seemed to me a little too nostalgic. This week's column was very good. She writes about Scott Beauchamp, the second outright liar to have hoodwinked the leftist New Republic magazine:

Everyone in journalism thought first of Stephen Glass. I actually remember the day I read his New Republic piece on the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington in 1997, a profile of young Republicans as crude and ignorant pot-smoking alcoholics in search of an orgy. It, um, startled me. After years of observation, I was inclined toward the view that there's no such thing as a young Republican. More to the point, I'd been to the kind of convention Mr. Glass wrote about, and I thought it not remotely possible that the people he painted were real. I also thought: Man, this is way too convenient. The New Republic tends to think Republicans are hateful, and this reporter just happened to be welcomed into the private world of the most hateful Republicans in history.
On the Thomas stories, which I read not when they came out but when they began to come under scrutiny, I had a similar thought, or a variation of it. I thought: That's not Iraq, that's a Vietnam War movie. That's not life as it's being lived on the ground right now, that's life as an editor absorbed it through media. That's the dark world of Kubrick and Coppola and Oliver Stone, of the great Vietnam movies of the '70s and '80s.

Too many people see the war, and by extension the world, through lenses made decades ago. We are dealing with a more connected world and geopolitical dangers that are sharply different than those that were present in decades past.

The End of the World

According to the United Nations, it's coming soon:

The human population is living far beyond its means and inflicting damage on the environment that could pass points of no return, according to a major report issued Thursday by the United Nations.

The politics of fear continue:

The speed at which mankind has used the Earth’s resources over the past 20 years has put “humanity’s very survival” at risk, a study involving 1,400 scientists has concluded.

Remember, pointing out this kind of propaganda with some healthy skepticism doesn't mean I advocate acting without consideration for environmental impact. We need to examine the incentives behind different groups advocating radical measures that would be borne principally by the United States and our partners.

Good job, Bill!

From LiveLeak.com, Bill Clinton calls a spade, a spade:

Bill Clinton addressed a crowd in Minneapolis, Minnesota at a fundraiser for his wife's campaign on Tuesday.Clinton's 50-minute speech, which started about an hour behind schedule, was derailed briefly by several hecklers in the audience who shouted that the 2001 terrorist attacks were a fraud. Rather than ignoring them, Clinton seemed to relish a direct confrontation."A fraud? No, it wasn't a fraud," Clinton said, as the crowd cheered him on. "I'll be glad to talk to you if you shut up and let me talk."When another heckler shouted that the attacks were an "inside job," Clinton took even greater umbrage."An inside job? How dare you. How dare you. It was not an inside job," Clinton said.



You can't ignore fruitcakes like that. You have to speak truth. I'd like to seem them all rounded up and sent to Iran, free expression be darned.

Fuego

In our house we have had warming on the mind. Not this kind, but this kind. My wife's family is from San Diego. Her sister has talked about it on her blog. Fortunately Lacy's family has escaped any harm, but we know people who have lost their home. It is very disturbing.


Fire is so indiscriminate. After a hurricane there are some remedies. A house can survive, at least structurally, even in the face of severe water damage. There is no such repair after a fire. So many of the 1100+ houses that have burned are completely destroyed. It is tragic to think about it.

Sometimes Lacy laments the weather in Florida. I can't blame her, but I am grateful for that humidity in a time like this. I've often said that San Diego has the best weather. That it of course when it isn't on fire.

My thoughts and prayers are with the people dealing with this mess, especially the firefighters risking their lives.

Wit & Wisdom

From Harry Reid:

One reason why we have the fires in California is global warming.

Although he later backed away from this statement when asked to clarify, to have said it all tells us a lot about him.

Bahston

I am in Boston on business and wanted to post some photos. This is just a cool photo of the sun on some clouds behind a skyscraper.

Quincy Market has been in operation since the early 1800's. It is in the foreground. In the back is the Customs House, now a Marriott property. This is historic Fanueil Hall. Some breakdancers doing an improptu show near Fanueil.
I love this city. The mixture of history and modernity is fantastic.

SPOTD #132

Scroll down the SPOTD blog for excellent stuff.

Today's phrase:
Today's quote is from Hippocrates. It demonstrates that there have always been things to be pessimistic about. It shows that adults have always worried about the inclinations and acitivites of the young. Sometimes they have been right, sometimes not.

Actual:
Los jóvenes de hoy no parecen tener respeto alguno por el pasado ni esperanza alguna para el porvenir.

Phonetic with emphasis on bold syllable:
Lows ho-vay-nase day oy no pah-ray-sane tay-nare ray-spay-toe ahl-goo-no poor ell pah-sah-doe nee ace-pay-rahn-sah pa-rah ell pro-vane-ear.

Translation:
The youth of today do not appear to have any respect for the past nor any hope for the future.

The Wilhem Scream
This is a fun article, featuring common misquotes of classic movie lines. It also addresses the phenomenon of the Wilhelm Scream. You can see examples of it on the SPOTD blog.

Testaverde
Peter King writes for Sports Illustrated. He can be very longwinded, but I like this bit about Vinny Testaverde's return to the NFL. As a kid I was a big fan during his days at Miami.

Warming Warning
Al Gore's movie now requires a special warning before being shown to school kids in Great Britain.

Crazy Allergies
This kid is allergic to almost every food. Bummer.

Repairing Sports
Chuck Klosterman has some ideas about how to repair sports coverage. I agree.

Link of the Day
An interesting article about Hillary Clinton and her former cat Socks.If she discarded Socks upon leaving the White House, will she discard some of her supporters upon returning?