Category: Old Dish

“How much money would you pay to see the makers of The Last Temptation of Christ make a similar film about the Prophet Muhammad? How long would they be alive? An hour? An hour and fifteen minutes?” – Jay Nordlinger, National Review

SPIN-FREE ZONE: It may be that the British commander of a naval ship that struck a rock in the South Pacific will be court-martialed. He clearly goofed badly. But I can’t help but admire his honesty and contrition. Here’s his account of what happened:

“It hazarded the lives of 250 men and women. We have done significant damage to a major British warship. This is not a good day for me.” Asked what caused the accident, he said: “A combination of unfortunate circumstances and human error. This is quite the worst thing that has ever happened, quite the worst. Character-building stuff.”

Wouldn’t it be great if a politician who screwed up royally would be as straight-forward about taking responsibility?

WAS HE A TERRORIST? Mark Steyn’s piece on Hadayat had me howling.

MORE RELIGIOUS CHILD ABUSE: This wasn’t sexual, but it strikes me as horrifying nonetheless. And all in the name of Christianity.

THE DEBATE ON C-SPAN: The gay debate between me, Richard Goldstein, Norah Vincent and Carmen Vasquez will apparently be shown on C-SPAN on Saturday July 13th at 3.50pm and Sunday July 14 at 1.35 am.

EUCLID UPDATE: The stray beagle, Euclid, that I found a couple months back had some rough heart-worm problems. She was treated with arsenic at the vet and slowly recovered. Here’s the latest missive from her new parents:

Euclid has gotten back some of her old spunk and zip. She has taken over the couch. But generously. Anyone else is permitted to sit there as long as they pay her adequate attention. She’s also turned into a somewhat finnicky eater — the only “treat” she’ll accept are bacon jerky strips from Giant. Forget plain biscuits, Sausages, or even the treats from the foofey Three Dog Bakery here in Bethesda. Ron and I are going out of town and leaving her for the first time next weekend. Euclid will be staying with my parents. My mother realizes that Euclid is about as close to a grandchild as she’ll ever get and is correspondingly doting. We’ll see if she can get even more spoiled.

Can’t wait to see her again when I get back to DC.

What’s the betting on when some Islamists will start arguing that the LAX shooting was actually a Jewish plot? Hadayat’s widow insists her dead husband had nothing to do with what happened.

GUNS DID IT: The Guardian frames the LAX shooting within the context of gun violence in America. I kid you not. Here’s Peter Preston’s view:

Two innocents killed at a ticket check-in are two too many. They are also mere drops in the ocean of blood which the US allows to flow daily – including on July 4 – through a society where guns and gun culture remain ubiquitous.

The lengths to which these appeasers will go to defend terrorism and attack the United States still take my breath away.

MORAL EQUIVALENCE WATCH: Nick Kristof, after yet another murder of Jews by a Muslim hater, worries about American religious bigotry. “If we want Saudi princes to confront their society’s hate-mongers, our own leaders should confront ours,” he preaches. Our bigotry is as bad as theirs’, he opines. Excuse me? When conservative Christians start murdering thousands of Muslim and Jewish civilians in the Middle East, it will be. Until then, there is simply no equivalence between anti-Muslim bigotry in the U.S. and anti-Western and anti-Semitic terrorism in the Arab world. One bigotry mouths off (often appallingly). The other murders thousands of civilians because of their religion and culture and glories in it. If Kristof cannot see that distinction, he should take a trip downtown and see the mass grave these evil fanatics created. They weren’t killed by the religious right.

HOW GERMS GET NICER: An archived article from the Atlantic provides some backing for my argument that some viruses mutate into less lethal forms as epidemics progress. Not necessarily true of HIV under drug regimens, but a hopeful possibility worth exploring.

RAINES WATCH: More checkable untruths in a New York Times editorial. Here’s what they wrote yesterday in another classic hack-liberal editorial about global warming:

Then came a more narrowly focused but equally disturbing report by The Times’s Timothy Egan about Alaska, where an astonishing seven-degree increase in average temperatures over 30 years has led to melting permafrost, sagging roads, dying forests, unexpected forest fires and disruption of marine life.

Here’s what the Alaska Climate Research Center has said about that Egan piece:

The article “Alaska, No Longer So Frigid, Starts to Crack, Burn, and Sag” written by Timothy Egan, stated that the average temperature has risen seven degrees in the last 30 years. This statement was repeated in an editorial by Bob Herbert of 24 June 2002. This statement is incorrect. The correct warming for Alaska is about 1/3 of the quoted amount for the last climatological mean 1971 to 2000 (see table below). It should be pointed out that the table presents data from first class weather stations, which are professionally maintained and generate high quality data. The three stations, Barrow, Fairbanks, and Anchorage, represent a cross section of Alaska from north to south. Further, Barrow, situated in Northern Alaska, which gave the largest temperature increase, is the only long-term first class meteorological weather station in Northern Alaska. All changes are based upon the time period 1971 to 2000 and are compiled from a linear trend.

Now this correction has been around since June 24. So has this chart which shows average temperatures in Alaska for the last century, in which the century-long rise has been around 2 degrees Fahrenheit. The Egan piece’s assertion of such a temperature rise has no basis in fact whatsoever. It’s made up. It’s a non-fact. It has expired in verifiability. It has gone to rest among the fjords of Alaska. It is an ex-fact. So when will the Times correct this mistake? And when will they stop broadcasting it as if it were something they should be proud of?

ME IN TIME OUT: Here’s a recent interview I gave to Time Out New York. I hope you like the picture. I was in a silly mood.

THE EGYPTIAN PROFESSOR: It turns out that professor Mona Baker of the University of Manchester, the woman who has blacklisted two Israelis from a scholarly journal because of their nationality, is actually Egyptian. She immigrated to Britain twenty years ago. But she didn’t leave all her background behind.

IN DEFENSE OF THE ECONOMIST: My friends over there tell me there will be a formal response to Bret Stephens’ article about anti-Israeli bias at the Economist later this week. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, a pro-Economist sends in this example of a long, recent piece on the Middle East from the Economist, which, he argues, is very well-balanced. It’s not free. But if you don’t mind paying, decide for yourself. UPDATE: Here’s a free version of the piece.

Here’s why I’m a bit of a skeptic with regard to CDC AIDS stats. Here are two consecutive paragraphs in Lawrence Altman’s report this morning from the AIDS conference in Spain:

Federal officials said they felt confident in reporting that the number of new H.I.V. infections has been stable in recent years, with an estimated 40,000 Americans becoming infected each year. Government officials estimate that 900,000 Americans are living with H.I.V. or AIDS. The number has increased by 50,000 since 1998, largely because advances in treatment have controlled the infection in many people, allowing some to go back to work and live longer.

If 40,000 are infected each year, shouldn’t over 120,000 new infections have been logged since 1998? So why only 50,000? No one at the CDC really answers that question ever. The 40,000 a year is plucked almost out of thin air, and used for funding purposes. (And factoring in deaths doesn’t help either. The total number of deaths for those three years is a decelerating 50,000. That still leaves 20,000 alleged infections unaccounted for.) Imagine the panic among the AIDS lobby if they had to report that the rate of infections were declining! And by the way, here’s the link to the actual JAMA study that shows the emergence of a “super-bug.” The boilerplate announced that “in 1996, only 2.5 percent of those tested were infected by a virus resistant to two different classes of drugs. That number rose to 13 percent by 2000.” How many were in the actual study? 225 people over all, but in the specific studies that gave the results cited by the press, less than 100. The number of people with actual resistant virus to one class of drugs? Twelve people. The number with resistance to protease inhibitors? Seven. And the conclusion of the study: “The frequency of primary resistance to NNRTIs is increasing, although resistance to all available classes of antiretroviral therapy remains rare.” How many stories focused on the fact that such resistance to all drugs is rare?

That’s the bumper sticker long affixed to Hesham Hadyat’s front door – put there again the day of the killing (and then removed). He was angry that Old Glory was being flown from the apartment window above him after September 11. Employees say he was virulently anti-Israel. He went to LAX with the intent of killing – and somehow he missed the Delta counter and ended up at El Al. And we’re supposed to think that “so far we have no indication of any type of prejudice against any particular organization or nationality.” What planet are these FBI denialists on? It’s irrelevant whether Hadyat was connected to official terrorist groups. In fact, if he is unconnected, his Jew-killing is more troubling. He is simply responding to the hate that the Arab and Muslim world has been stoking against Jews for decades. He needed no official instruction to tell him to kill Jews and Israelis. He wasn’t poor: he was a prosperous immigrant who drove a Mercedes. The only instruction he needed was affixed to his door: “Read Koran.” Why should we be surprised when, under the current circumstances and stoked by the new anti-Semitism from the Arab world and Europe, Hadyat took the Koran’s injunction to kill Jews literally? And when is our government and p.c. media going to recognize we have a problem here? Can you imagine if a white supremacist had shown up at an African airline counter and killed blacks? Would anyone be “puzzled” about the motive?

When I saw the headline in the New York Times – “Bush Slashing Aid For E.P.A. Clean-Up …” from Bush-hater Katharine Seelye, I barely read the article. I’m not alone in skipping through these Raines-sponsored DNC-written press releases recycled as news. I should have been more diligent. Slate’s Jack Shafer has the goods on Seelye’s distortions. Jack nails it cold. It’s yet more devastating evidence of why the Times simply cannot be trusted any more. (Correction. Too many July 4 cocktails: I first wrote that Elizabeth Bumiller wrote the story. I get my Bush-haters muddled up. Sorry.)

I’ll be writing a column. Yay! And it’s so frigging hot. But have a good one. I for one will celebrate one single thing: that since September 11, terrorists have been unable to attack any Americans on American soil. Just because the success is measured by what hasn’t happened rather than by what has, doesn’t mean it isn’t real. We have endured. We will prevail.

RAINES WATCH: Every single letter to the New York Times today on school vouchers was anti-voucher. Sure, they’re responding to Milton Friedman. But did no one agree with him? Many contain obvious fallacies.

THE TOLERANT FAR LEFT: When all else fails, vandalize.

IT’S NOT THE CRIME, IT’S THE COVER-UP: Open question to Chris Mooney of the American Prospect. When your magazine told the Columbia Journalism Review that your monthly unique visitors were 450,000, what month were you referring to? And what is your latest version of the traffic in that month? Meanwhile, Mickey piles on …

THE ARAB ON THE ISRAELI TEAM: Want a reminder of the difference between Israel and her Arab neighbors? How many Jews are on the national soccer teams of the Arab countries? Meet Walid Bder, the Arab on Israel’s. And it’s so unremarkable, no one really notices.

A DIFFERENT PLEDGE: This is the pledge of allegiance, a University of Texas professor thinks ought to replace the current one. If you don’t want to ruin your July 4, don’t read on:

I pledge allegiance to all the ordinary people around the world,
to the laid off Enron workers and the WorldCom workers
the maquiladora workers
and the sweatshop workers from New York to Indonesia,
who labor not under God but under the heel of multinational corporations; I pledge allegiance
to the people of Iraq,
Palestine and Afghanistan,
and to their struggles to survive and resist
slavery to corporate greed,
brutal wars against their families,
and the economic and environmental ruin wrought by global capitalism; I pledge allegiance
to building a better world
where human needs are met
and with real liberty, equality and justice for all.

Paid for by Texas tax-payers.

HOW EMBARRASSING IS BOB HERBERT? Today’s column is barely worthy of a high-school newspaper – the tired analogy (to Pig Pen, a Charlie Brown character! Our Bob is so hip!), the facile ideology, the false premise (that on most measurable indicators, the environment is getting much worse, rather than better), the lugubrious sanctimony. And someone with this level of argumentation is granted the most precious real estate in American journalism.

You’ve probably read lots of articles in the American Prospect, bemoaning big CEOs fiddling numbers, inflating profits, engaging in all sorts of creative accounting. Well, Bob Kuttner’s online magazine should know. In the Columbia Journalism Review, they claimed 450,000 unique visitors a month. Amazing traffic. Eric Alterman, always alert to factual accuracy, pointed out that this showed the hegemony of the Left on the web. Well, after the equivalent of a blogger SEC investigation, they’ve finally released their amended report. Their actual unique visitors for June was 161,025 – a little over a third of their previous claim. In classic fashion, they don’t admit their error; they don’t apologize; they barely explain; they release the news the day before July 4. More spin. And I thought Chris Mooney was a straight-up kind of guy. These guys fibbed about something as basic as their web stats. And you’re going to trust them on the economy?

Funny how this crops up all the time. A gay mafia has taken over the Church. A gay mafia has taken over Hollywood. A gay mafia – the “homocons” – have hijacked the gay movement. We may not have institutionalized anti-Semitism in the culture, but every aspect of the old anti-Semitism is being recycled – only this time, it’s about gays. Scapegoats for right, left and the merely paranoid. Who said homosexuals don’t perform a useful social function?

THE SURVEY: It’s back up. Don’t all go at once or you’ll crash it again. But let me know if you find anything interesting.

INSULARITY AND PSYCHOSIS: I hope you saw Barbara Crossette’s account of a new Arab study of Arab decline in the Times yesterday. To me the most staggering facts were: “The number of Arabs is expected to grow to between 410 million and 459 million by 2020 [from 280 million today].” And: “In the 1,000 years since the reign of the Caliph Mamoun, it concludes, the Arabs have translated as many books as Spain translates in just one year.” So we have a new, massive generation of people, largely sealed off from outside cultural forces and fed a steady stream of extremist, anti-Semitics and anti-Western hate literature. I have a feeling that our current war could be just the beginning.

THE PLEDGE: “Every pundit, politician and op-ed page in America has blasted the pledge decision, but they all (yourself included) ignore the salient point – is the pledge constitutional? The timing may be rotten and there may not be many interest groups out there to be appeased, but it’s hard to see how the words “under God”, intentionally added by to the original pledge by congress in the 50s, could not be unconstitutional. If we feel so strongly as a nation that the pledge should include those words, let’s pass an amendment – it only takes 2/3 of us. Why is it that Republicans (and Democrats running for cover) can’t be bothered to look beyond the emotional impact to the underlying facts and call a rose a rose? Don’t you agree that the ruling’s detractors couldn’t be bothered to examine the prima facie question before responding with their usual outrage over all things “un-American”? I continue, with each passing day, to lose a little bit more of my long-frayed faith in the American way.” – this, several gay debate reviews, dissent on corporate corruption, and much more on the best Letters Page on the web.

RAINES WATCH I: How weird is it that the CEO of the New York Times publishes an attack on McCain-Fengold – in the Washington Post? And his byline includes the caveat, “The views here are his own”? Is even the CEO of the place denied a platform in his own paper, if his views don’t coincide with Howell Raines’? Suddenly I don’t feel so bad.

ISLAM, CLASS, AND WOMEN: I don’t know where to begin with this story, about a Pakistani girl gang-raped as punishment for her brother’s flirtation with a girl not from his social class. But we might begin by reaffirming that Stanley Fish is wrong. There can be universal reasonable standards that say some things are wrong, period. This is one of them.

RAINES WATCH II: Check out the p.c. nonsense even in the New York Times’ sports pages. I noted yesterday the telling story of the Pakistani shunned by his own country’s authorities because he played with a Jew. The Times wants to tell us that Americans would behave just as appallingly: “It is no difficult task, then, to ridicule the complaining Pakistanis, but it is also fair to wonder if Americans who still prefer patriotic fervor to “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” would have cheered one of their own teaming with an Afghan last fall, or how the Israeli public, which has taken no issue this time, would respond to Hadad and a Palestinian of choice.” Excuse me. Weren’t we liberating the Afghans last fall? And I know of no evidence that Israelis would feel that way about a sporting event. This is just p.c. boilerplate to avoid criticism of a state and a culture that’s anti-Semitic to its core. And excusing or ignoring anti-Semitism is now, sadly, part of the New York Times’ ethos.

ANTI-SEMITISM WATCH: A new allegedly anti-Semitic novel from a Holocaust skeptic sells out in one day in Germany. It sold 50,000 copies. I don’t think they were all Muslim immigrants.

HER GAY CAT: Just one of those wacko websites I send your way every now and again.

HIS FISHY TOILET: And here’s another!