Reticulator

Ultimate insult for journalists

 Bash the Messenger  No Responses »
Sep 212007
 

I’ve been campaigning for reform in newspaper journalism for years.  If a journalist receives an award from a group of fellow journalists, that should be grounds for instant dismissal.   These people should be writing and reporting for us, not for each other.

The incestuous nature of these journalism awards seems to be so much a given part of the profession that I had little hope my suggested reform would ever come about.  But now there is hope!

This is from the Best of the Web at OpinionJournal.com

Takes One to Know One
A very entertaining Washington Monthly story on New York Times columnist Bob Herbert brings this comment from Andrew Sullivan:

My two cents: once I know the topic of a Herbert column, I can predict every single self-satisfied, self-righteous platitude that is about to come. He’s also a terrible writer–there’s no character to his prose, never a felicitous turn of phrase. He’s the kind of columnist who gets journalism awards. Even when he’s right he’s so insufferably self-righteous and humorless it’s a pain to read him. So I don’t.

Aside from the bit about journalism awards, has there ever been a better example of the pot denigrating the kettle?

If a good way to insult a journalist is now to say, “He’s the kind of columnist who gets journalism awards,”  I’d say big progress is being made!

Why Hillary?

 Clinton scandals  No Responses »
Sep 212007
 

The WSJ continues to pursue the Hsu campaign finance scandal.   It now reports this about what Hsu was trying to accomplish.

Federal prosecutors said in a criminal complaint that Democratic fund-raiser Norman Hsu pressured investors to make campaign contributions through him in order to raise his public profile — then used his prominence to find more investors for illegal Ponzi schemes.

Link: Hsu is accused of Ponzi scheme

But why isn’t anybody asking the next question:  Why Hillary?

Contributors who are looking for some advantage usually hedge their bets by contributing to both parties.  Even a leftwing partisan like Steve Jobs tossed a $1000 bone to Republicans.   Bill Gates contributes to both parties.  So why did all of Hsu’s money go to Democrats, and such a large amount of it to Hillary?

It’s tempting to snark about the Ponzi aspects of Hillary’s ideas on social security or health care.  But really, what kind of reason would that be for Hsu to orchestrate so much money to be sent to her campaign.

If he’s looking for more investors, wouldn’t he want to find some rich Republicans to invest in his schemes?  And wouldn’t the way to do that be by donating money among Republican candidates, too?

Save the world on your own time

 Academic intolerance  No Responses »
Sep 192007
 

From the History News Network:

Tony Judt: Notes the downside to multicultural studies

The historian Tony Judt, a self-described “old leftist” and the director of the Remarque Institute at N.Y.U., which examines Europe and European-American relations, said undergraduates often arrive unprepared from high school and seeking courses “in what we might have thought of as the old-fashioned approach” — broad surveys. But many young professors aren’t interested in teaching outside their narrow specialties, nor are they generally prepared to do so. And colleges are loath to reinstate the core curriculums they abandoned in the ’60s. “Because we lack cultural self-confidence, we’ve lacked the ability to say, ‘This is a good book and should be taught, this isn’t and shouldn’t,’ ” said Judt, who was dean of the humanities at N.Y.U. in the early ’90s.

Judt also denounces the balkanization created by interdisciplinary ethnic studies programs. Multiculturalism “created lots and lots of microconstituencies, which universities didn’t have the courage to oppose,” he said. “It’s much more like a supermarket — kids can take pretty much any courses they like: Jewish kids take Jewish studies, gay students gay studies, black students African-American studies. You no longer have a university, but a series of identity constituencies all studying themselves.”

If he’s an “old leftist,” maybe it isn’t my imagination that there once was a time when the left was not intellectually bankrupt.

It’s bad enough that premature specialization takes place at the college level, but you see high schools trying to play college and do the same thing. That’s a subject for another day, though, because there is something else to mention — something that the HNN article didn’t say. The article is excerpted from a NYT article, “Revisiting the Canon Wars,” by Rachel Donadio. Here’s an item that caught my attention:

But Fish thinks humanities professors bear some blame for their diminished standing. He’s at work on a new book, “Save the World on Your Own Time,” which argues that academics should teach, not proselytize. In his view, “the invasion of political agendas” into the classroom in the ’60s and ’70s was “extremely dangerous,” since it meant classrooms could become battlegrounds for political demagoguery.

So on the one hand you have the National Association of Social Work saying you can’t become a professional unless you proselytize, and this Fish guy saying not while the kids are still in college, at least. I know which side of the argument I’m cheering for.

At this point

 Welfare-police state  No Responses »
Sep 182007
 

Is this supposed to be reassuring?

AP Interview: Clinton on health care

WASHINGTON – Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton said Tuesday that a mandate requiring every American to purchase health insurance was the only way to achieve universal health care but she rejected the notion of punitive measures to force individuals into the health care system.

“At this point, we don’t have anything punitive that we have proposed,” the presidential candidate said in an interview with The Associated Press.

“At this point”? That sounds ominous.

If she wanted to be reassuring, she’d explain how she’d institute safeguards that would keep such punitive measures from ever being enacted, no matter who sits in the Oval Office.

But there is a reason I find it impossible to say “welfare state” without also saying “police state.”

The Main Adversary

 Bash the Messenger, Russia  No Responses »
Sep 162007
 

I’ve added The Main Adversary to the blog list here.

It started with an item in The Weekly Standard that came in today’s mail. It’s a Scrapbook item titled, “Hsu’s on First“. The Washington Post says “Some fundraisers with legal issues slip through campaigns’ vetting.”

In another words, The WP morphs it from being another Clinton Scandal into something about campaign finance in general. Next thing you know, instead of going after the crooks they’ll say the thing to do is shut down the first amendment harder than McCain-Feingold so people like Hillary Clinton will not be forced to take illegal campaign contributions to finance attacks on those who criticize her.

That also got me to thinking about the general lack of curiosity in the major media about WHY Hsu and/or whoever was financing him was motivated to provide all this money. And that got me to thinking about other lack of curiosity items, such as the shooting of Paul Joyal back in March. That one sure dropped off the radar screen in a hurry, despite the super-lame explanations given by the local authorities.

So I looked to see if there was any recent news. The most recent mention I found was in the blog of a Mark Newgent, who is a conservative running for Baltimore City council. Newgent didn’t have any more news on Joyal, but there are some other things in his blog, including an insightful analysis of the foreign policy statements of Ron Paul. I’ll probably end up voting for Paul. He avoids a lot of the usual libertarian goofiness, but on foreign policy he’s not a lot of improvement. Here’s Newgent:

Paul believes that we should not have an interventionist foreign policy because it invites blowback. That is his position, ok fine, but he never offers an alternative to the historical examples or the present day issues that complicate his simplistic view. It is like the peaceniks during the Vietnam War who sang, “all we are saying is give peace a chance.” That’s right, that’s all they were saying. They did not offer any arguments as to why giving peace a chance would have benefited the United States in Southeast Asia, furthermore look at the human tragedy that happened when peace was given a chance. Ron Paul is doing the same thing. Instead of peace, it is isolationism. Paul never offers a solution other than empty platitudes about the intent of the founding fathers. That is all fine and good, but it is not an argument. Paul never, makes an argument past stating his position of preaching non-interventionism in foreign policy and urging the GOP to return to its isolationist past (look how that turned out). Paul and his supporters spout their nonsense then sit back as if saying they have ended the argument, when at best, all they’ve done is start one.

And there’s more good stuff over there, too.  A young politician who knows all about Whittaker Chambers can’t be all bad, even if he knows how to think and write.

Bush unilateralism

 Free markets  1 Response »
Sep 142007
 

Remember those people who kept criticizing Bush for his unilateralism, for going it alone when the rest of the world was going Kyoto, for going to war alone without making sure everyone loved us, first?   You can google “Bush unilateralism” to get your fill of examples.

Now we have a case where Bush didn’t go it alone, where he tried to cooperate with other countries:  (WSJ, Sep 13, “Mexican Roadblock”)  Clinton was the unilateralist on this one.

Under the 1993 Nafta accord, Mexican trucking companies should have been delivering their loads to U.S. destinations for more than a decade by now. But since the Clinton Administration banned Mexican trucks in 1995, they have had to offload their cargo at the border and transfer it to Teamster trucks, raising costs for U.S. consumers.

In 2001 a Nafta arbitration panel ruled the U.S. ban on Mexican trucks violated the treaty and granted Mexico the right to retaliate. The Bush Administration crafted the pilot program to open the market and at the same time address safety concerns. The program would allow limited cross-border trucking in both directions, with inspections required. The Teamsters sued, but even the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied their request for a stay. So the Teamsters turned to Congress, which is now obliging under the whip of North Dakota protectionist Byron Dorgan.

Now it’s the Bush-haters in Congress who want the U.S. to go unilateralist.

And next time the question is asked, “Why do they hate us?” we know where to look for an answer.

Telling doctors how to practice medicine

 Brave New World, Health care reform, Welfare-police state  No Responses »
Sep 142007
 

There’s nothing like the opportunity to do some death and dismemberment to bring out all sorts of libertarian-sounding talk from people who ordinarily would be quite the opposite.   We got a lot of this during the embryonic stem cell debates.

Here’s a different instance from Thursday’s WSJ, in an article titled, “New limits debated for organ donation: Transplant group proposes barring donors who have certain health problems; balancing risk vs. need.”

These two paragraphs are a decent summary of the conflict:

The debate reflects a tension between the need for organ donors and concerns that doctors may be lowering standards for living donors too far or failing to catch problems that could put the donor at unacceptable risk. Many transplant programs now allow people to donate who would have been screened out a few years ago, including those who are obese or have high blood pressure or diabetes.

Often marginally qualified donors demand to be approved, contending the choice is their own to accept the risk when someone they love needs a transplant. Transplant surgeons have also loosened standards for deceased donors, accepting, for instance, organs from much older dead donors than ever before.

I suppose it doesn’t help that I’ve read of allegations of organ harvesting from China, where unwilling victims have possibly been killed in order to harvest their organs to be sold to  wealthy foreigners.   Listening to how these U.S. transplant doctors are opposed to limits on what they do makes the possibility seem not so far fetched.  I don’t think I want to be caught alone in a dark alley with these guys.

Here is where it starts to get spooky:

But some surgeons worry that insurance companies or juries will use the guidelines to penalize doctors who don’t follow them. Moreover, critics say that UNOS shouldn’t be telling doctors how to practice medicine.

(UNOS is the United Network for Organ Sharing.)

As for telling doctors how to practice medicine, that’s not really an accurate way of describing what UNOS is doing.  UNOS is attempting to define limits.  It is telling doctors what NOT to do, not what should be done.

And is it so far-fetched to think that limits might be needed?   Do doctors always have others’ interests foremost?  How about this, from Wednesday’s WSJ:  

…Federal Medicare officials want to crack down on arrangements like the one that was planned in Gainesville, where doctors refer patients to businesses in which they have a financial stake.

In recent years, many physicians have become wealthy by investing in magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, facilities, surgery centers and diagnostic sites — and then sending their patients to them. A recent McKinsey & Co. study pegged doctors’ profits from this practice, known as self-referral, at $8 billion a year.

Bought and paid for

 Academic intolerance, First Amendment, Welfare-police state  No Responses »
Sep 132007
 

I had thought it would come to this eventually. I didn’t realize it was already here as a matter of official policy, and has been here for ten years already.

Here is John Leo in a column at townhall.com

In 1997, the National Association of Social Work (NASW) altered its ethics code, ruling that all social workers must promote social justice “from local to global level.” This call for mandatory advocacy raised the question: what kind of political action did the highly liberal field of social work have in mind? The answer wasn’t long in coming. The Council on Social Work Education, the national accreditor of social work education programs, says candidates must fight “oppression,” and sees American society as pervaded by the “global interconnections of oppression.” Now aspiring social workers must commit themselves, usually in writing, to a culturally left agenda, often including diversity programs, state-sponsored redistribution of income, and a readiness to combat heterosexism, ableism, and classism.

I’m somewhat sensitive to this issue, because I’ve occasionally had people of the left ask me why a person of my political views is working for a public university, on the public payroll.  (I have a support staff position.)    My standard response is that it’s a damning indictment of the system if giving me a paycheck is supposed to buy my political views as well.

But that’s the direction in which things are headed.  A personal observation is that young students and even faculty members are having increasing difficulty separating ecological science from environmental activism.     I wonder how many can still articulate the reasons for separating the two.   They seem to understand the difference between science and non-science when the topic of creationism comes up — but they don’t seem to be able to apply the principles generally.

Well, I don’t know if this National Association of Scholars (apparently the source of much of Leo’s information) is going to make much headway in protecting science and scholarship.

How about this:  NASW should add an amendment to its code of ethics, explaining that whenever its members engage in public discussion of political affairs, that they should add the disclaimer that their political views are bought and paid for.    Newspapers when printing letters to the editor from such persons, should point out that the political views of the writer have been bought and paid for, and are not the result of independent thought any more than those of a corporate PR flack are.

Disrecognized, discounted

 Welfare-police state  No Responses »
Sep 092007
 

Logging truck on Nate Shaw’s route

The above photo was taken on a bike ride in west-central Alabama in April 2006. Among other things, I wanted to see the places that had been described in All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw. Nate Shaw is a pseudonym, and most of the places named in the book were pseudonyms, but this is one of the very real places he had talked about.

Nate was a sharecropper who made a good bit of extra money for himself by hauling lumber with his mule team. This is one of the roads on which he hauled lumber. The area was pretty much logged out, but trees have grown back and now there is a lumber industry again. I encountered these logging trucks all the time when I was riding there.

Nate did pretty well for himself, but had some severe obstacles to overcome. In the end he accepted the help of the Communist Party in protecting his private property rights, and ended up going to prison for using a gun to defend his property. (The same day I took the above photo, I took photos of the courthouse building where the trial was held — at least I assume it isn’t a newer courthouse. A couple of days earlier I got photos of the prison where he did most of his time.)

What has provoked me to post this now is John Edwards statement about requiring people to get physical checkups under his plan. I’ve run into people who defend that. “What about mandatory seat belt laws?” they ask, as if back at the time those laws were introduced we didn’t object, saying it would lead to nannyism like this.

I don’t think these people understand how odious this is. Maybe it would help to see how Nate Shaw reacted to that kind of behavior from a Mr. Curtis, one of his least favorite landlords.

This is from page 109 in my paperback copy of the book:

Mr. Ames was a little better man than Mr. Curtis, and not sayin that altogether because he put me on better land–it weren’t much better. I didn’t just look at one angle or one point in the difference. I looked at it this way: Mr. Ames put me on a little better land than Mr. Curtis, but I had to go by his orders, too. Well, that cut my britches; he didn’t let me branch out like I wanted to. But I got along well with him. He never did cripple my cow and he never stood over me, tell me how to drive his mule of a Sunday–Mr. Curtis done that. When I’d go and get that plow mule to hitch him to the buggy that I bought from his brother-in-law, go where I wanted to, he’d tell me–well, I know that no man wants his stuff mistreated, but I never did treat his mules wrong; he had no cause to get at me about it. And I never was pleased to mistreat my mules after I got able to buy my own mules. Mr. Curtis laid his larceny to me: “Nate, when you get to where you goin, you’ll be thar. Give the mule his time, give the mule his time.”

Didn’t want me to drive him out of a slow gait. His way of speakin was “thar”; he didn’t say “be there,” he’d say, “be thar.” That was his mule, it weren’t mine, but he just disrecognized me, considered me not to know nothin. Know or not know I had to go by his orders to please him. He just considered me not to know nothin so he would have to tell me.

It’s stamped in me, in my mind, the way I been treated, the way I have seed other colored people treated–couldn’t never go by what you think or say, had to come up to the white man’s orders. “You aint got sense enough to know this, you aint got sense enough to know that, you aint got sense enough to know nothin–just let me tell you how to do what I want you to do.” Well, that’s disrecognizin me, and then he slippin around to see that I doin like he say do, and if I don’t he don’t think it’s on account of I got my own way of doin, but he calls it ignorant and disobeyin his orders. Just disrecognized, discounted in every walk of life. “Just do what I say, like I tell you. Don’t boot me.” Showin me plain he aint got no confidence in me. That’s the way they worked it, and there’s niggers in this country believed that shit.

Edited for niceness, 10-Sep-2007

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