If you've ever wanted to create your own utopian state (or maybe a dystopia is more your style), you can do it online here.
(Someone please let me know if it's worth messing around with. I don't have time to try it right now.)
[Thanks to Chelsea McCollum for the tip.]
Joseph Cirincione makes a compelling case that the Bush Administration handled intelligence on North Korea's nuclear weapons program with the same disregard for inconvenient facts that it displayed with respect to Iraq. He writes:
What once appeared the exception now seems the rule. Officials in U.S. President George W. Bush’s administration are gingerly walking back from claims that North Korea was secretly building a factory to enrich uranium for dozens of atomic bombs. The intelligence, officials now say, was not as solid as they originally trumpeted. It does not seem that the North Korean program is as large or as advanced as claimed or that the country's leaders are as set on building weapons as officials depicted.
If this sounds familiar, it should. The original claims came during the same period officials were hyping stories of Iraq's weapons. Once again, the claims involve aluminum tubes. Once again, there was cherry-picking and exaggeration of intelligence. Once again, the policy shaped the intelligence, with enormous national security costs. The story of Iraq is well known; that unnecessary war has cost thousands of lives, billions of dollars, and an immeasurable loss of legitimacy. This time, the administration's decision to tear up a successful agreement--using a dubious intelligence "finding" as an excuse--propelled the tiny, isolated country to subsequently build and test nuclear weapons, threatening to trigger a new wave of proliferation.
This is just the introduction; Cirincione provides many specifics in the paragraphs that follow.
The charge of cherry-picking intelligence on the subject of North Korea's nuclear weapons program adds a new dimension to the consensus expressed by proliferation experts at a recent conference hosted by the Burkle Center for International Relations at UCLA: The Bush Administration has failed miserably in its handling of North Korea.
Consider this an advisory rather than an endorsement:
From the U.K. comes a board game based on the "war on terror." Seriously.
[Thanks to Kevin Iga for the tip.]
Today is International Women's Day, a day that commemorates a number of significant events in history that occurred in March, including several associated with the labor movement in the United States. (For example, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in which over 140 female workers were killed, occurred on March 25, 1911.) In honor of International Women's Day, I've decided to describe briefly the contributions of one woman associated with the American labor movement, Mary Harris Jones (1830-1930).
One of the most important labor advocates in American history, "Mother Jones" began as an organizer for the Chicago chapter of the Knights of Labor in 1871 soon after losing all her possessions in the Great Chicago Fire. (Just four years earlier, Jones had lost her husband and four young children in a yellow fever epidemic in Tennessee.) From 1871 until the end of her life almost sixty years later, Jones was a part of every significant strike in the United States.
Jones was especially concerned with conditions in which coal miners were forced to worked. In fact, her work with the United Mine Workers earned her the nickname "the Miners' Angel." In 1898, Jones founded the Social Democratic Party. Seven years later, she helped to established the Industrial Workers of the World.
Jones liked to tell audiences, "I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser." She was indeed a hell-raiser, but she raised hell on behalf of those who were victims of economic exploitation.
Happy Texas Independence Day to Texans and those who wish they were. (That latter category has no doubt decreased in number over the past six years, but, anyway . . .)
Here, for your historical enlightenment and reading pleasure is the Texas Declaration of Independence, signed on March 2, 1836.
"It is not power that corrupts, but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts."
--Aung San Suu Kyi
From 1937, when Japan invaded Manchuria, to the end of the Pacific War in 1945, somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 women were forced into prostitution by the Japanese Imperial Army. So-called "comfort houses" were established throughout Asia, from Sakhalin Island to the Dutch East Indies and beyond. Wherever the Japanese military went, "comfort women" were "recruited" to serve the sexual desires of soldiers. Toward the end of the war, when most Japanese forces were withdrawn to the home islands, even Japanese women were forced to become military base prostitutes.
In 1993, not long after official documents detailing the Japanese military's role in procuring "comfort women" were unearthed, Japan issued a formal apology to the women involved and established a victims' compensation fund supported by private donations. Today, however, Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe began to reverse his nation's progress toward the acceptance of responsibility for the terrible crimes perpetrated against tens of thousands of women. Abe said, "The fact is, there is no evidence to prove there was coercion."
Signs of the Japanese shift in policy were on display last month as government ministers reacted negatively to hearings in the U.S. House of Representatives on Japanese sex slavery during World War II. The nationalist tendencies of the Abe government seem destined to harm relations with Japan's East Asian neighbors and the United States as well.
[Note: Last week, Dan Caldwell and I wrote the essay below for publication in Pepperdine's campus newspaper, the Graphic, as a response to two presentations (with essentially the same content) on campus by Dinesh D'Souza. The editor of the Graphic chose not to publish the essay in the paper, so we offer it here instead. As needed, the essay has been updated to reflected the passage of a week since its intended publication.]
Two weeks ago, a court in Germany sentenced Ernst Zundel to five years in prison for his contributions to a web site that denies the Holocaust ever occurred. Here in the United States, the First Amendment would have protected the ignorant and offensive things Zundel has written. In fact, it did protect them for the two years that Zundel lived in Tennessee.
Although it was not always the case, the United States today places a higher value on freedom of speech than any other country in the world according to comparative law scholars. Because Americans recognize the importance of the free exchange of ideas in a democracy, our courts commonly give wide latitude to political speech. And we support that as a fundamental right guaranteed by the First Amendment.
Some of our national confidence in the value of free speech comes directly from Thomas Jefferson. In his first inaugural address, Jefferson said, "Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it."
We raise this point because Dinesh D'Souza, author of a recently published book with an ignorant and offensive premise, spoke on campus last week. In fact, his appearances at the School of Law and Seaver College one week ago were specifically designed to promote his book, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11.
D'Souza argues, in his own words, that "the cultural left in the country is responsible for causing 9/11." The "cultural left" is not everybody in the Democratic Party, but it includes an awful lot of people (almost all of them Democrats) who have a commonality that only D'Souza seems capable of intuiting. He specifically attacks, among others, President Jimmy Carter, Senator Robert Byrd, Senator Hillary Clinton, philanthropist George Soros, and journalist Bill Moyers.
D'Souza's false thesis, which is elaborated throughout the book, is ignorant and offensive enough, but there are others that are equally ludicrous. For example, we learn in chapter six that the cultural left was also responsible for the Abu Ghraib scandal. D'Souza writes, after pretending that Charles Graner and Lynndie England were the only soldiers involved in the torture and degradation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, "For many Muslims, Abu Ghraib demonstrated the casualness with which married Americans have affairs, walk out on their spouses, and produce children without bothering to take responsibility for the care of their offspring." Really?
Sadly, there's much more like this. Really.
The Jeffersonian--and, in fact, the quintessentially American--response to obnoxious views like the ones D'Souza is currently peddling is not censorship but reason. This, it seems to us, is where scholars have not only the right but the obligation to speak.
So, let us be among those to confront falsehoods with truth and reason. D'Souza's opinions about liberals, as with most prejudices, bear little relationship to reality.
He attributes motives and desires to liberals for which there is no evidence, thereby defaming many good people. He treats political differences, including those born of opposition to preventive war or to torture, as evidence of moral depravity. He engages, very freely, in ad hominem attacks.
He purports to know the mind of Osama bin Laden, but his conclusions are at odds with both expert analyses and many of bin Laden's own statements.
D'Souza's views about his fellow Americans are deeply offensive--and even libelous, according to a recent op-ed by his fellow neoconservative and Hoover Institution colleague Victor Davis Hanson. He has, sadly, abandoned even the pretense of civility. We say "sadly" because it is civility that allows those who disagree nevertheless to engage in conversation, as often occurs, thankfully, on this campus.
While we're willing to be among the first to challenge D'Souza's false and malicious ideas, we certainly hope we're not the last. On the contrary, we would like to know exactly what those who brought D'Souza to Pepperdine and gave him a platform to present his offensive beliefs think of his view that liberals--people like us--are responsible for 9/11 and for the Abu Ghraib scandal.
One of the most important philosophers of political conservatism, Edmund Burke, wrote, "It is necessary only for the good man to do nothing for evil to triumph." Offended by D'Souza's false and malicious claims, we choose to speak out. What about others?
[Update (3/1/07): The Graphic has now posted this piece online here.]
According to this story in the New York Times last week, the history department at Middlebury College has decided to prohibit students from using Wikipedia as a source for research papers submitted in history classes. Welcome to the club.
As I've noted before, Wikipedia is a remarkable web phenomenon. It has much to recommend it, especially for those who need a quick, online source of information to serve as a starting point for research. In this respect, it's like other encyclopedias. But there are problems with using any encyclopedia as a source for a research paper in college.
Professor Thomas Beyer of the Russian department at Middlebury could be speaking for me and most of my colleagues with whom I've discussed student research when he said, "I guess I am not terribly impressed by anyone citing an encyclopedia as a reference point, but I am not against using it as a starting point."
Students, take note.
In spite of an impressive recycling program, Santa Monica still contributes to one of the largest landfills in the world--the Puente Hills Landfill 35 miles east of LA.
[Via Foreign Policy Passport.]
A broad coalition of human rights organizations and religious groups has issued a document outlining ten steps the United States Congress must take to restore the moral authority of the United States.
The complete document is available here, but, briefly, the coalition is calling on Congress to
Among the organizations that are part of the coalition are Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Concerned Foreign Service Officers, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, the United Methodist Church, General Board of Church and Society, and even the conservative Rutherford Institute.
In Germany, Karneval reaches its peak each year on "Rose Monday" (Rosenmontag), the day before the Mardi Gras celebrations in other parts of the world. Parades with elaborate floats characterize Rosenmontag in the Rhineland.
Here, via Spiegel Online, is a float from this past Monday's parade in Mainz.
Continuing the George W. Bush theme, this float from the parade in Düsseldorf depicts W. getting a whiff of Ahmadinejad's "armpit [Achsel] of evil." [Via Wikipedia.]
"A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education he may steal the whole railroad."
--Theodore Roosevelt
It occurred to me recently that a blog called Swords Into Plowshares should, at some point, include a photograph of the sculpture in New York depicting that very activity. Here you have it.
The statue was created by Russian artist Evgeniy Vuchetich and presented by the Soviet Union to the United Nations in 1959. It stands on United Nations Plaza, just outside the Organization's headquarters.