Quickies

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A round-up of news items, columns, articles and blog posts that caught our eye this past week.






Glenn Reynolds presents his own Occupy cirriculum:

2) Bourgeois vs. Non-Bourgeois Revolutions: A Comparison and Contrast. The Occupy movement left its major sites—McPherson Square in D.C., Zuccotti Park in Manhattan, Dewey Square in Boston—filthy and disheveled. By contrast, the tea party protests famously left the Washington Mall and other locations cleaner than they found them, with members proudly performing cleanup duties.

This unit would note that social-protest movements are sometimes orderly and sometimes disorderly as a matter of approach, and it would compare the effectiveness and ultimate success of such relentlessly bourgeois movements as the tea party, the pre-1964 Civil Rights movement, Women's Suffrage activists, and the American Revolution, against such anti-Bourgeois movements as the post-1968 Black Power and New Left movements, and the French Revolution.

Which accomplished more lasting good? Is Max Weber's Protestant work ethic applicable to social movements?

Southern talk:

We have utilize a few, uhh, coloquialisms of our own but being native Southern Californians, we don't know if the following accounts for regional-speak:

Busy? "Busier than a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest."

See you tomorrow? "Lord willing and the river don't rise."

Someone forget or srew-up your name upon a subsequent meeting? "Call us what you want, just don't call us late for dinner."






Spinsters.com on capitalism and charity:

Capitalism, aka the free market, is the best assurance of individual and societal prosperity. Turns out, capitalism is also the best spur towards charity and generosity to the less fortunate. People are most generous to others when their own needs are secure. Capitalism provides the economic security necessary to inspire charity. The cold-hearted businessman is a tired Marxist myth.

B-Daddy has a round-up of news events himself and which includes this take-down of the faith-based global warming climate change community from the Wall Street Journal:

The Trenberth letter tells us that decarbonization of the world's economy would "drive decades of economic growth." This is not a scientific statement nor is there evidence it is true. A premature global-scale transition from hydrocarbon fuels would require massive government intervention to support the deployment of more expensive energy technology. If there were economic advantages to investing in technology that depends on taxpayer support, companies like Beacon Power, Evergreen Solar, Solar Millenium, SpectraWatt, Solyndra, Ener1 and the Renewable Energy Development Corporation would be prospering instead of filing for bankruptcy in only the past few months.

B-Daddy has long claimed that the warmers rejection of a carbon tax in return for dropping the income tax is proof of their purely statist intentions and we believe him.






Terrific: We're No. 1!...

... in per capita debt.

It's come to this: Asian American Journalists Association releases guidelines on Jeremy Lin media coverage.






Headline: Exclusive: State Department quietly warning region on Syrian WMDs

The State Department has begun coordinating with Syria's neighbors to prepare for the handling of President Bashar al-Assad's extensive weapons of mass destruction if and when his regime collapses, The Cable has learned.

This week, the State Department sent a diplomatic demarche to Syria's neighbors Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia, warning them about the possibility of Syria's WMDs crossing their borders and offering U.S. government help in dealing with the problem, three Obama administration officials confirmed to The Cable. For concerned parties both inside and outside the U.S. government, the demarche signifies that the United States is increasingly developing plans to deal with the dangers of a post-Assad Syria -- while simultaneously highlighting the lack of planning for how to directly bring about Assad's downfall.

Who wants to bet that we will find quite a bit of Hussein-era Iraqi WMDs should this come to pass? However, we're glad we are thinking this issue through ahead of time vs. supporting a completely haphazard and unauthorized kinetic military action in Libya to protect civilians take out military targets take out a foreign leader and which resulted in thousands of RPGs going unaccounted for. There has been pretty much zero media coverage of this circumstance in the past 4-6 months.




Gotta run... may be back with more fun later today.

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A "Victory" perhaps.... but for whom?

We’ve been scratching our heads the past couple of days trying to square the reaction to the latest National Intelligence Estimate report on Iran’s nuclear weapons program against our own perceptions of the same.

Perhaps best summing up how this is being spun is the front page of the Drudge Report today which has the caption of “Victory!” underneath a photo of the Iranian loon, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. As in, hooray for the madman for his geo-political PR coup over the dunder-headed American, President Bush.

Attached article here out of Reuters starts off by claiming the latest NIE estimates contradict the Bush administration’s assertion that Tehran was developing the bomb. “Contradict” is the money word that is used in about every article we’ve read regarding this subject but is it entirely correct or applicable?

The NIE contends that Iran halted their nuclear weapons program back in ’03 but also adds "We do not know whether (Iran) currently intends to develop nuclear weapons." This is important because the NIE doesn’t know…. there is no conclusive way to determine this given NIE’s means.

But here’s what we do know: it was indeed Mahmoud that was over here just a couple months back asserting his country's own right to develop and acquire nuclear technology. And applying the reasonable man theory, why wouldn’t a kook like Mahmoud intend on developing nuclear weapons? Guys like this remind us of the story of the Scorpion and the Frog. American standards of justice for determining guilt, innocence and intent don’t apply and shouldn’t apply here. We know who this guy is and we know what he would like to do regardless of the existence of any concrete material evidence.

Here’s some more from the article: “But the new assessment found Iran was continuing to develop technical means that could be used to build a bomb and it would likely be capable of producing enough enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon "sometime during the 2010-2015 time-frame."

And remember: The same NIE of whose report the President’s critics are agush, is the very same agency that botched pre-war estimates on Sadaam’s WMD program.

After taking this all in, are you left with the impression that Iran’s nuke program is as cold-iron as many are portraying it to be or would like it to be in order to score political points?

As far as the NIE claim that Iran halted its weapons program back in ’03, there has been considerable debate over what it was that caused this to happen. Again, applying the reasonable man theory, what significant action in the Gulf Region kicked-off in ’03 and how might that have possibly influenced this decision?

You see, sometimes the most effective “diplomacy” is that which is represented in the stock scene from mob flicks where the wise guy tells the shop owner, “Today is Tuesday and its just me who stopped by to pay you a friendly visit… I’ll be back here on Friday but I won’t be flying solo…. so please have the money you owe us.” Contrary to the beliefs of the well-intended but hopelessly naïve’ “diplomacy” crowd, this is just how things often work in the big bad world of geo-politics.

Please don’t misunderstand us - we really do hope that the NIE’s most optimistic contentions are 100% correct. Iran not having nukes and not having any intention of developing/obtaining nukes is a good thing. So if it is as the NIE says it is, we can’t help but think that Drudge, perhaps, just perhaps, had the wrong mug shot above his headline.