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31 August 2002  

Atlas Plugged

A snippet from today's paper:

Alberta and industry groups believe [Canada's expected ratification of] the [Kyoto] treaty will have a devastating impact on jobs and on the oil and gas industry....

[Minister of the Environment David] Anderson said consultations with industry and the provinces will continue and be more intense once a decision to accept the Kyoto treaty is embraced by Canada.

"If we move to ratification, then of course everybody [the provinces and industry] takes up a new question, which is: 'How do we ratify and how do we do it cheapest, how do we do it with the least dislocation?' And that is when you are going to have people -- who have been quite negative -- suddenly unleashing the ingenuity of private enterprise to keep costs down and keep industry competitive," he said.

Yes, that's what you're counting on isn't it, Mr. Thompson? Oops, Mr. Anderson, I mean. You're counting on the fact that your holding a gun to their heads will always result in them finding a way to make things work. Some day, and I hope it's soon, you'll find there's a flaw in your plan.

09:48 AM |

30 August 2002  

New Sites of Note

I've stumbled upon several link-worthy sites lately. Check them out: Andrew Dalton, Aaron Haspel, Casey Fahy, and Sasha Castel.

10:38 AM |

28 August 2002  

I (Heart) Lileks

What in God's name are you doing here when you could be reading this?

08:21 AM |

I (Heart) Donald Rumsfeld

You know, I spent over 500 words arguing against the view that the US needs to pay more attention to the Europeans in conducting its foreign policy. And now Donald Rumsfeld comes along and delivers this single sentence:

It's less important to have unanimity than it is making the right decision and doing the right thing, even though at the outset it may seem lonesome.

07:58 AM |

26 August 2002  

More NS Pix

The NS vacation album has been updated with a few late entries from Mom. Be warned: I'm in all of them.

08:28 PM |

A Good Blair Day

Tim Blair is especially good today. Or is that tomorrow?

10:06 AM |

Electric Nightmares

In case you still thought that all environmentalists just want to clean up the air and water, and that charges of them being against progress were alarmist corporate propaganda, I give you this:

"There is a lot of quality to be had in poverty," and the introduction of electricity is "destroying" the cultures of the world's poor, according to a U.S. environmentalist, who commented on the eve of the United Nations Earth Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa....

According to [Gar] Smith [of the Earth Island Institute], electricity can wreak havoc on cultures. "I have seen villages in Africa that had vibrant culture and great communities that were disrupted and destroyed by the introduction of electricity," he said.

With the introduction of electricity, the African villagers spent too much time watching television and listening to the radio, allowing their more primitive traditional ways to fade away, according to Smith.

Smith lamented that "people who used to spend their days and evenings in the streets playing music on their own instruments and sewing clothing for their neighbors on foot peddle powered sewing machines" lost their culture with the advent of electricity.

"If there is going to be electricity, I would like it to be decentralized, small, solar-powered," Smith said.

Smith challenged Americans to give up their own modern conveniences.

"The real question is what personal conveniences and self indulgences are you willing to give up in order to stop destroying the planet?" he asked rhetorically.

08:39 AM |

The Links of Holy Matrimony

One more reason I look forward to the day I get an Instapundit link. Congrats to the future Mr. & Mrs. Spoons.

08:17 AM |

25 August 2002  

A Ploy Named Sue

Overweight? Stupid? Lonely? Here's a fun and easy way to get help figuring out who should pay for your misfortune.

04:03 PM |

24 August 2002  

The Need for Greed

Robert Fulford in the National Post:

I tend to agree with Gordon Gekko, the shiny-haired creep played by Michael Douglas in the 1987 film Wall Street: "Greed ... is good. Greed is right. Greed works." Without some level of greed, capitalism can't function; and without capitalism ...

Well, consider the response to Gekko's speech that David Remnick witnessed in Moscow a dozen or so years ago. He was at the Moscow Higher Party School, a place that trained the Soviet elite. Faculty and students believed that economic reforms were going too slowly. They saw Wall Street dubbed into Russian, and (as Remnick wrote in Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire) they did not sneer when Gekko uttered the speech that the scriptwriter had intended to be despicable. All to the contrary: "The Communists went wild. There were whoops of approval. Un-ironic whoops."

02:30 PM |

Crude Arguments

I see lots of people linking approvingly to both Lileks' excellent Bleat that ridicules the "no blood for oil" crowd and to this piece by John Hawkins arguing that the current us interest in the Middle East is not oil-related. But to me the two are saying quite different, if not opposite, things. Lileks is brief in his treatment of the subject but I take his derision to be expressing the view that fighting a war over oil is not an inherently evil thing. The Hawkins piece, on the other hand, argues that oil can have nothing to do with the us's current military involvement in the Persian Gulf because the oil there is an insignificant fraction of the us supply. I take issue with Hawkins' argument not mainly for its content (though I do find it very hard to believe that the oil in the area is insignificant to US interests), but for its choice of focus.

The anti-war people aren't saying that fighting for oil is ok as long as it's important to your economy. They're saying that fighting for such a base, material concern is immoral per se. Trying to show that the amount of oil is not enough for us to go to war over leaves the main premise unaddressed and allows the inference that it's valid. Imagine if someone were protesting that it is wrong to go to war in order to defend ourselves, that we don't deserve to live, and anyone who tries to kill us is fully justified. Would you answer that charge by pointing out that in this particular case we're not going to war against that principle, but to protect some other country that does deserve to live?

Oil is very important to the economy, its availability makes our lives better, and the Mid-East oil supply was made possible by American companies. Fighting to prevent loss of access to that oil and our current standard of living is moral and right. If you're going to argue with the "blood for oil" people, make sure you defend this principle. Or, take Lileks' equally valid approach: make fun of them.

11:26 AM |

19 August 2002  

Gay Lady

For once Mr. Raines has done something even Andrew Sullivan will applaud. The New York Times has deemed notices of same-sex unions fit to print.

10:24 PM |

A Penny for Your Thoughts

Damian is back from vacation after suffering through the brutal St. John's summer.

09:50 AM |

17 August 2002  

Judt Dud

Crude. Crass. Embarrassing.

That's how Tony Judt describes current us foreign policy in his New York Review of Books review of The Paradox of American Power: Why The World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone, by Joseph S. Nye Jr.

The gist of the piece is that the us should be a better international citizen and stop being so arrogant and obstinate. Judt believes the unilateralism of the "contemptuous and bellicose" Bush administration is harmful to us interests. The us needs other countries' assistance in fighting (for example) the war on terror, he says, and cannot afford to alienate its allies. "[T]he United States is utterly dependent on friends and allies in order to achieve its goals" and it is "perfectly obvious" that the us "is going to need the help and understanding of others" in achieving its foreign policy objectives, Judt writes. He agrees with Nye that:

The success of us primacy will depend not just on our military or economic might but also on the soft power of our culture and values and on policies that make others feel they have been consulted and their interests have been taken into account.

Even the mere appearance of taking the world seriously would enhance American influence immeasurably—from European intellectuals to Islamic fundamentalists, anti-Americanism feeds voraciously off the claim that the us is callously indifferent to the views and needs of others.

Judt and Nye's straight-faced advice that the us pretend to respect the opinions of others is not worthy of argument. But even ignoring the cynicism, it's plain that the disagreements European intellectuals and Islamic fundamentalists have with the us come from dramatically divergent ways of looking at the world, and are not trivial spats that will be resolved by token gestures of inclusion, sincere or otherwise.

As for the overall argument of the piece — that the us must pay more attention to what others think of it — I still disagree. Any self-respecting country must make its own well-being its primary goal and have its own judgment as the sole guide to how it acts. Just as confident people don't let peers, family, religious leaders, etc., control their lives, neither should a free, individual rights-respecting country let other nations — allies or not — sway it from acting decisively to protect its own interests. This isn't to deny that diplomacy and common courtesy call for listening to the views of others, as Andrew Sullivan recently expressed, but when it comes time to act, "because European intellectuals will be less antagonistic toward us" is as bad a justification for foreign policy decisions as "because the cool kids will like me" is a reason for personal behavior.

It's undoubtedly true that if the us agreed more with other countries, it would get their help more often and more easily. But the answer is for the us to either do a better job of convincing those countries that it's right or, more likely, to make sure it can manage threats from abroad without relying on "allies" that increasingly don't share its fundamental values. In the alternative scenario, in which the us starts caving to European ideas of how it should conduct itself in order to get their support, that support won't matter because the us will not be worth preserving.

(The article does make a valid criticism when it points out the hypocrisy of the administration's free trade rhetoric in light of its protectionist policies. I dare say, however, that Judt's advice there would be for the us to lay off the rhetoric, not change the policies.)

06:33 PM |

14 August 2002  

Jog Epilogue

Just in case you though I was making up that whole marathon thing, the results are finally available (see 9th place).

08:06 PM |

Who-ha

From For Who/Whom the Bell Tolls:

“Who is this package for?”
“Don’t you mean whom?”
“Sure, OK. Whom signs for it?”
“You mean who.”
“Pray there’s not a weapon in this package.”

02:40 PM |

Simon Says

Julian Simon, author of The Ultimate Resource:

As soon as one predicted disaster doesn't occur, the doomsayers skip to another. There's nothing wrong with worrying about new problems — we need problems so we can come up with solutions that leave us better off than if they'd never come up in the first place. But why don't the doomsayers see that, in the aggregate, things are getting better? Why do they always think we're at a turning point — or at the end of the road? They deny our creative powers for solutions. It's only because we used those powers so well in the past that we can afford to worry about things like losing species and wetlands. Until we got so rich and healthy and productive at agriculture, a wetland was a swamp with malarial mosquitoes that you had to drain so you could have cropland to feed your family.

02:09 PM |

Form, Function, and Falling Prices

Happy Fun Pundit, on the beauty of Wal-Mart:

Sure, a Wal-Mart could put some big Corinthian columns in front, and install a giant peaked facade. It could have wide aisles, a beautiful fountain, and underground parking. But these are in opposition to its basic function of providing goods efficiently, for they would drive up costs and force Wal-Mart to raise prices. Low income people would rather have the low prices. Like tailfins on a Buick, fountains don't belong in a Wal-Mart.

10:16 AM |

13 August 2002  

Oy, George

I knew there had to be a good reason I got up at 4 am to surf the web:

Most Americans can appreciate a funny, honest guy in a hassidic hat and a dowager's housecoat made up to look like a corpse in a Tokyo cat house.

04:42 AM |

12 August 2002  

Artists Toss Cookies, Standards

Lileks on why he thinks beauty in art is objective:

Let’s return to my favorite piece of modern art, glimpsed at a Whitney biennial - a chunk of chocolate with toothmarks, meant to symbolize the artist’s conflicted sense of body images in modern culture, next to a gout of laminated vomit on the floor, meant as a protest of Barbie-doll culture that leads women to bulimia.

When you throw out the old standards - draftsmanship, composition, ability to actually paint a landscape that looks like a landscape - you get, in the end, a pile of vomit on a museum floor. You get lots of other cool stuff on the way, of course. But when “beauty” is discredited, you get barf, and you have no words to explain why the barf is lousy art. And if beauty is a socially-constructed notion, then find me ten people from every culture on earth; place them before any piece of sculpture from the Greeks to the Romans to the Franks to the Renaissance to a pillowy stone creation of Canova, and next to this sculpture place a pile of vomit, and see which one draws the smiles and wide eyes, which one invites the eye to study its dozens of details. Go to any good museum, and you will see people put their hands to their heart when they stand before a great canvas; go back in time to that biennial I attended, and watch them put their hand on their stomach.

10:07 AM |

10 August 2002  

Today's Tonypandy

Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time (which I finished last night) is a unique mystery novel that has its detective investigating not a contemporary crime, but an historical one: the murder of Richard III's nephews, the "princes in the tower." History textbooks have traditionally taught that Richard was responsible, but the novel presents an alternative explanation (as many historians have done, too). In the process, Tey expounds upon the wider phenomenon of things that everyone believes to be true, but which are not. She gives this phenomenon a name: Tonypandy, after a fabled "massacre" in South Wales.

This morning's paper brought an article from Matt Welch debunking a modern Tonypandy: the claims of half a million children dead as a result of un sanctions against Iraq. Welch does a good job of showing how this bogus statistic has gained status as uncontroversial truth. (The explanation involves a left-wing "human rights" group, 60 Minutes, and Madeleine Albright.) I'd have liked the piece even better, though, if the following point had been made: Whatever the correct number of Iraqi deaths resulting from the sanctions may be, the responsibility for them lies solely with Saddam Hussein. When your dictatorial, anti-Western, expansionist regime goes to war with the United States and it not only lets you live but also remain in power, asking you only to prove that you're not gearing up to try something again, you'd damn well better do it.

05:03 PM |

7 August 2002  

The Monotony of Diversity

Mark Steyn unfortunately appears to be opposed to gay marriage, so much so that he puts the term in quotes in his latest column. Why, he doesn't say, but the point of the column is more to note that such an opinion is now regarded as beyond the pale of rational discourse. And on that score I have to agree wholeheartedly, especially when he puts it like this:

... the left has an hilarious bumper sticker: "Celebrate Diversity." In the newsrooms of America, they celebrate diversity of race, diversity of gender, diversity of orientation, diversity of everything except the only diversity that matters: diversity of thought. In Canada, the ruthless homogeneity of diversity is even more advanced.

10:55 PM |

5 August 2002  

Mararthon Report

All the details of my first marathon have now been posted to rec.running.

10:21 AM |

4 August 2002  

What I Did on My Summer Vacation

Back home from Nova Scotia. The marathon went well. The weather was overcast and cool for the whole race, there were lots of family members along the way to cheer me on and provide extra support (brother Quent was especially helpful with frequent Gatorade and Power Gel deliveries), and the course was free of dramatic hills. All this, plus the months of training, conspired to make the whole experience about as trouble-free as I could have imagined. There was no "wall" and no debilitating soreness afterward. I came in 9th (out of about 50) with a time of 3:19:52. Not quite a Boston qualifying time (I needed to get under 3:16:00 for that), but not bad for a first try. Still considering my next goal, but another marathon in the Fall isn't out of the question.

Here are a few pictures taken on the trip, including several of my adorable three-month-old niece, Abbey, who I got to meet for the first time.

02:15 PM |