No, it’s not a fat joke. It’s a comment on the deceit density of Fahrenheit 9/11.
When trying to start a nuclear chain reaction the trick is to cram enough fissile material into a small enough space--“fissile,” as in prone to falling apart. When you do, you’ve reached “critical mass” and the whole thing explodes.
Moore’s previous film, Bowling for Columbine, was criticized as a mendacious concoction of distortions and half-truths, but, after a while, it and the controversy surrounding it simply fizzled out (disappearing “not with a bang, but a whimper”).
With F. 9/11, however, Moore has clearly managed to squeeze enough facile, risible, fissile footage into a single film. A great flash of light emanated from the paparazzi, an orgiastic thunderclap ushured from the credulous and conspiracy-loving left, and both reason and truth were laid waste.
Now, as we pick our way through the epistemological wreckage he has created, we can begin to identify the exact type of fissile material he used to achieve his destructive aims. A catalogue of F. 9/11’s deceits has been compiled by Dave Kopel, and one of the frauds to which he draws attention is particularly audacious: Moore actually faked a newspaper page, taking a letter to the editor to The Pantagraph, changing the date on which it was published, and re-laying-out the page so to make it look like it was the front-page headline news story written by the paper’s staff.
In a recent edition, the paper writes “If (Moore) wants to 'edit' The Pantagraph, he should apply for a copy-editing job.”
Moore has finally packed so much mendacity into a single movie, played with the truth on issues of such incredible import, that he has undeniably reached critical mass.
Let’s all hope, for the sake of America and the world, that the masses soon become more critical of him.
I like to listen to NPR in the shower. No, not because it makes me feel dirty and in need of a shower--well, okay, sometimes it does--but mainly because of the incredible candor that their left-leaning guests often show. Today’s interview with Manchurian Candidate director Jonathan Demme was a special treat.
That link will take you to the audio clip of the interview, but to save you the trouble I've transcribed the thrust of it below, followed by a little logical analysis.
Michele Norris: Much as the 1962 original version plays on the fears of its time, the new version attempts to do the same. The communist villains from the original have been replaced by a politically ambitious global corporation, the dark force behind nefarious mind-altering technology….
Now that I’ve seen the film, and as I watch the trailer, which is in heavy rotation,… it seems that there was a conscious decision not to market the film as a political movie but more of a sci-fi thriller
Demme: Because the film is set against a political backdrop, specifically a presidential election, because absurdly coincidentally, Paramount got the movie made just as an election year comes up—
Norris: COINCIDENTALLY? That was a coincidence?…
Demme: As far as I’m concerned it’s a terrific coincidence…
Norris: Did you make a conscious effort to keep your politics out of the movie or was this a chance for you as a filmmaker to send a message.
[Here, Demme claims, at length, that though the film “inhabits a political world,” it’s not “about” politics. He then immediately says the following:]
Demme: I liked very much the idea, when I read the script, of a piece that brought this whole world of corporations that profit from war into the thriller terrain because just the very notion that there are corporations that get, you know, OBSCENLY rich off of WAR, is just, there’s something, uhnnn, unpleasant about that in the extreme and its extraordinary to me that we haven’t focused as a culture yet on: ‘Is this okay?’…
Norris: It would seem that this is, in listening to you, very much a message movie…. I was just wondering, as a filmmaker, if you were trying to encourage people to think more about that… corporate profiteering.
Demme: One of the things that [screenwriter] Richard Condin was concerned about when he wrote the Manchurian Candidate was a brainwashed population. Maybe we’re--I feel like I’m brainwashed. I pick up the paper, I hear something on the radio about Halliburton, and I go: ‘Oh, tsk tsk tsk, my God isn’t that awful’ but I’m not doing anything about it—Yes I am, I made a movie…. Yes, so I do hope the movie is thought provoking in that regard….
So, kids, the theme of this movie is that we need to stop Halliburton. Only, in real life, the thing is, Halliburton is not suspected of abducting Gulf War veterans and pumping them full of mind-altering chemicals so that they can take over the nation, and thence, the world. But if it’s not doing that, we are left to wonder, why do Hollywood (exemplified by Demme and Condin) and the media (exemplified by Norris and NPR) hate it so very, very much.
Do they think the services it provides are inherently evil, or do they think that those services are only evil when they are commissioned by the U.S. government? Or is it only when the U.S. government commissions those services to help out the recently emancipated people of a formerly totalitarian country? I know that Hollywood and much of the media hate Dick Cheney, and Dick Cheney used to work for Halliburton, but that can’t be it, because here they are focused, in Norris’ phrase, on corporate war “profiteers” more generally.
So really, no matter who is doing the work in question, it’s evil and must be stopped. But wait, surely they don’t think it’s inherently evil to help Iraq in its effort to become a free and prosperous nation? No, they only think it’s evil to PROFIT from the provision of that help. So if tens of thousands of people could be mobilized to do millions of man-hours of labor and supply billions of dollars worth of materials and equipment for free, then, THEN, they wouldn’t have a problem with it.
In other words, if we only had a communist utopia, we’d all love each other, hold hands, and sing that charming Coca-Cola song from the 1970s (except that Coke’s probably an evil corporation too. I’ll have to check on that. For that matter, I wonder if the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is an evil corporation? Should NPR really be associating with it? Shouldn’t they reestablish themselves as a Limited Liability Company (LLC) to avoid catching any of those corporate cooties?)
The problem, in case you haven’t seen it yet, is that communism didn’t perform as well as its advocates promised. When people don’t get justly compensated for their own labor, it tends to undermine their work ethic a tad. If nobody could have profited from rebuilding Japan, or Germany, or France, those nations would have languished in poverty and anarchy far longer than they did. So, too, with Iraq today. So to heed the message that Norris, Demme, and their fellow travelers suggest is to consign Iraq to indefinite squalor. They just haven’t thought through their anti-capitalist manifesto well enough to realize that.
To summarize, this remake of The Manchurian Candidate could more accurately have been titled The Halliburton Candidate. It is meant, if you listen to its director, to present a nonsensical diatribe against the profit-motive in the guise of a “sci-fi thriller” so that we will all “do something” to stop the free market from helping Iraq rise out of the rubble of Saddam’s dictatorship.
It looks like Demme and Condin had a little brainwashing of their own in mind.
Human rights groups have decried the religious/ethnic/racial cleansing going in in Darfur, Sudan as the worst humanitarian rights disaster in the world today.
The U.S. has been pressing hard for months for sanctions against the Sudanese government which has been backing the Arab Muslim Janjaweed militias responsible for this genocide (and the U.S. Congress has officially used the word genocide to describe it.)
The British government, yet again a paragon of reason on foreign policy issues, has backed the U.S. effrots and even offered troops to help avert a total catastrophe.
France, as I've already blogged previously, has been standing in the way, and speculation has it that this is because it's own TotalFinaElf has the largest oil concession in Sudan.
Now, press reports indicate that the U.S. was forced to drop the word sanctions from its proposed U.N. resolution because Arab countries on the Security Council want to give the Janjaweed--oops, sorry, the Sudanese government--more time to finish what they've started--oops, sorry, to implement their promises.
In what way is more toothless verbiage going to help the huge number of refugees created by the Janjaweed-Sudan government axis? In what way will it prevent more murders and rapes by the state-backed Janjaweed?
In what way is the U.N. useful?
What has it done for humanity, lately?
In what way is it even "United" at all? Certainly not in a desire to foster democracy and human liberty.
A revised version of my Mackinac Center op/ed on Detroit public schools was published today in the Detroit Free Press.
You can check it out here.
Note that the editorial page editor deleted a paragraph without consulting me--one that gave some additional figures on Detroit public school enrollment and employment from the state's point of view. I'm sure he meant well, but 'taint proper form, if you ask me.
It doesn't alter the basic message of the piece, but should anyone be interested in the missing numbers, drop me a message at "Andrew" @ this website (thegantelope.com).
So far, the response to the piece has been favorable, but I don't doubt that there are a few folks in the District's administration who weren't happy to see the op/ed page today. To those administrators I would just like to point out that our ultimate goal is the same: to ensure that all kids have access to good schools. Unfortunately, the evidence undeniably points to the fact that we will never achieve that goal within the confines of the existing state education monopoly.
After trying to make the best of a bad system for more than a century, it's time that we actually introduce a better system. Our kids, all kids, deserve that.
The New York Times had an interesting story this weekend on Norway’s labor predicament, reprinted on the front page of the Seattle Times. “On an average day,” writes Lizette Alvarez,
about 25 percent of Norway's workers are absent from work, either because they have called in sick, are undergoing physical rehabilitation or are on long-term disability…. Throw in vacation time (five weeks for most people), national paid holidays (11 per year) and weekends, and Norwegians take off nearly half the calendar year, about 170 days, a figure that does not include time off for disability and rehabilitation, according to Bergens Tidende, the newspaper that made the calculations.
Is Norway a plague-ridden, accident prone den of dysfunction?
Nope.
But it does have $32 billion worth of Oil exports per year, much of which is used to pay for all the disability time, etc.
Kinda sounds like Saudi-Arabia, in a way, where the citizens became so accustomed to oil wealth in the ‘70s and ‘80s that they are now either ill-equipped or disinclined to perform much of the country’s technical as well as menial work. For that, they import foreigners.
As oil eventually declines in importance over the course of this century, look for more trouble in Arabia (and Norway) if they haven’t gotten their acts together by then.
Seems like a good thing that the founding fathers of our fair nation didn’t decide to nationalize our natural resources.
So many infidel heads, so little time, seems to be the mantra of the modern Islamo-fascist terrorist.
But while they've cornered the contemporary market on decapitation, militant Islamists are following in the footsteps laid down by the 20th century's premier fascist, Adolf Hitler.
Consider the following article, caught by my better half in flagrante de lectio of a microfilm reel:
Seattle Post Intelligencer
Dec. 2, 1947
Wisconsin U. Girl Beheaded by Nazis
MADISON Wis., Dec 1.--(AP)-- The story of a Wisconsin girl who was beheaded on February 16, 1943, as a personal reprisal by Adolf Hitler is published in the current issue of the Wisconsin alumni T.W.A. magazine.
The magazine, which will appear this week, said it obtained from records of the United States office of the military government the full story of the death by guilloting [sic] at Brandenburg, Germany, of Mildred Fish Harnack. She was a 1925 graduate of the university....
Several weeks after Mrs. Harnack's trial, Hitler, going through the court records came across the woman's dossier and immediately ordered her trial reopened as she was the onlly American then in his power, the magazine reported.
Manfred Roeder, the Nazi chief judge who had decreed the original sentence, at Hiter's command, changed it to the death penalty and Mrs. Harnack was guillotined.
"Nationalist Socialist" fascists, Islamist fascists, same deal.
Under the much-maligned federal No Child Left Behind law, 494 students in Ocala, Florida requested transfers out of schools considered to be failing and into schools of their choice.
A district court ruling has just told 222 of those children: Tough luck, you're staying put.
Ocala, it turns out, is still under a 26 year-old court desegregation order and the denied school transfers would violate that order by allowing white students to move to whiter schools and black students to move to blacker schools.
It doesn't matter that the families involved want these moves. It makes no difference whether the kids would indeed be better off in their chosen (but forbidden) schools. All that matters is that black and white faces have to mix in the right proportions.
What a tragedy.
I long for an end to bigotry and descrimination, for a society that makes a reality of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream, but this isn't going to get us there.
African Americans will be able to close the academic and career gaps with whites when they have ready access to high-quality schools of their own choosing. Focusing on race at the expense of what is best academically just doesn't make sense--and it isn't supported by the evidence.
Research shows that African Americans in big cities are much more likely to complete high-school, attend college, and complete college if they attend private Catholic schools than if they attend public schools.
If we had a real market in education in this country, coupled with financial assistance to ensure universal access, we could do a lot more to close the education gap than we ever will by making the color of children's skin the ultimate determinant of the schools they attend.
Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms, its equivalent of the U.S. Bill of Rights, can be overridden by any provincial government at will. Majority French-speaking Quebec, for example, curtails the free-speech rights of English-speakers in an attempt to preserve the province's French character by force of law.
Disgusting.
That embarassingly cavalier treatment of civil rights is one reason I was delighted to move to the United States years ago, and delighted to take American citizenship more recently.
But just when I thought my birthplace could humiliate me no more, this happens:
When it comes to Canadian identity, Fox News Channel is apparently a threat. Al-Jazeera, on the other hand, is just another point of view enriching Canadian culture. That's the message sent last week when the Canadian Radio and Television Commission (CRTC) granted the Qatar-based, anti-American al-Jazeera a Canadian license. Fox has wanted into Canada since 1999 but has so far been shut out -- except in Ottawa, at the Canadian Parliament, which requested and got a Fox feed last August.
Fox News is ostensibly shut out because it carries insufficient Candian content, but CNN and Al-Jazeera are allowed in despite having no more Canadian content than Fox.
The purported reason for this unfair play is that CNN was around before Canada decided to enforce the Canadian content restrictions.
So what? What possible difference does that make?
Al-Jazeera supposedly gets a pass because it doesn't compete with any home-grown Canadian stations.
Uh, DUH! Given that Fox News carries virtually no Canadian content, except for Bill O'Reilly's periodic attacks on Canadian immigration policy, what domestic news source could it possibly be competing with? Its programming is totally different from that of the CBC, CTV, Radio Canada, etc.
A culture that tries to protect itself by trampling on the rights of its citizens to choose their own media sources is not worth protecting.
Here in the U.S.A., folks can watch all the CBC, BBC, and Al-Jazeera they want.
Ninety children are now reported to have died in the private school fire in Kumbakonam, India.
The government is vowing a regulatory crack-down on private schools to ensure that they meet fire and other safety codes. And so they should. As long as the codes are on the books, and citizens are assuming they're being enforced, it's unconscionable that schools, public or private, be allowed to flout them.
But if the best interests of Indian children are to be served, the government will stop there. Any further regulatory encroachment into the curriculum of private schools, particularly those that do not receive government subsidies, would be disastrous to children's futures.
India's public schools, whose curricula are designed and overseen by the state, are a shambles. Unregulated, parent-funded private schools have consistently been found to be academically superior despite far lower per-pupil expenditures.
As a NYTimes article on this story concludes: "residents said they would continue sending their children to private schools because they had no choice. They said a proper education was the one gift they could give that would make their children upwardly mobile."
Public policy, both in India and in America, should be designed to make that education readily accessible to all, while preserving the freedom and market incentives responsible for its superiority over state monopoly schooling.
[Here's my latest op/ed for the Mackinac Center. They seem to like it over at the National Review.]
Last November, the Detroit Public School District estimated it would suffer a $55 million budget shortfall for the 2003/2004 school year. They bumped the figure up to $78 million in March, and then it hit a whopping $250 million last month.
To balance this suddenly ballooning deficit, as required by law, 3,200 district employees will be laid off this summer.
How did it come to this?
Most of the media have tried to answer that question by looking through a microscope, identifying specific mistakes made by the current crop of public school administrators. They point out that district officials grossly overestimated enrollment, and that fewer kids have meant less revenue. They report that some school principals failed to cut positions in their schools, as they had been told to do, causing higher-than expected personnel expenses.
But let’s put away the microscope for a minute and grab a wide angle lens.
Back in 1996/97, Detroit Public Schools enrolled 183,447 students, and employed 22,077 staff. Enrollment has fallen every year since, averaging 147,808 during the 2003/04 school year. Employment in the District has not fallen. It has risen to 23,800. So the Detroit Public School system is now employing 1,723 more people to teach an estimated 35,000 fewer children.
That can get kind of expensive.
After adjusting for inflation, the District’s total spending is only fractionally higher today than it was back in 1996/97 ($1.63 billion now versus $1.62 billion then, in 2004 dollars), but this represents a startling increase per pupil. The District spent $8,830 on each student in 1996/97, but more than $11,000 in 2003/2004....
[Read the conclusion of this commentary on the Mackinac Center website]
The Saudi Institute, a seemingly reasonable bunch of well-connected experts on the Kingdom and its relations with the U.S., has just released a report on a current Saudi Arabian textbook.
Readers of this site (yes, both of you) may recall some of the hatred spewed by previous Saudi textbooks, as summarized in a paper I wrote earlier this year. Some original sources on the web include the AJC (not just my initials, it turns out) and MEMRI.
The press release on the current Saudi Institute report is titled “New Saudi Curriculum Disparages Christianity and Judaism.” The supporting evidence for this claim is the following quote from a textbook on Islamic religious doctrine (fiqh or figh, in Arabic):
“For the Teacher: Ensure to explain the following:… that all religions, other than Islam, are false, including that of the Jews, Christians, and all others.”
Huh.
Two comments to the folks at the S.I.:
1) Don’t most orthodox/evangelical Christians teach that all other religions are false, and that the only route to heaven involves acknowledging Jesus as the Savior and son of God? (In which case this textbook is no more offensive, in and of itself, than teachings which are already common in some Christian schools). And
2) Isn’t this a far cry from earlier Saudi textbooks which taught such things as that Judgment Day would not come until Muslims fought and killed Jews (see links above)? And called Jews and Christians "Apes" and "Pigs" (don't remember which was which).
There are many caveats here. It may just be, for instance, that this new textbook is somewhat sanitized while the actual classroom instruction remains essentially unaltered. But the S.I. report doesn’t prove that.
I’m not at all convinced that the Saudi education system has been substantially reformed, but until we see translations of more textbooks, and ideally some evidence of what is actually being said, right now, by classroom teachers, the current S.I. report seems a bit over-extended.
...ain't no way to make a bird.
Apparently seduced by the effectiveness of markets and the dismal record of monopolies, the Labour government in Britain now "promises school choice for all."
The trouble is, they haven't a clue as to why markets work, and their superficial and trivial "choice" reforms will do little if anything to improve education.
For example: The Telegraph reports that
Good schools will be allowed to expand and there will be a 12-week fast track process for processing applications.
"There is no surplus places rule that prevents schools from expanding. All successful and popular schools may propose to expand, and we strongly support them in doing so where they believe they can sustain their quality." Money has been put into a capital fund to encourage expansion...
Covering the expansion costs themselves is not enough to drive a popular school to expand. Most popular U.S. private schools respond to growing demand by increasing the size of their waiting lists rather than by expanding their operations. That's because they're almost all non-profit and hence have no incentive to undertake the risks of expansion. They could cover their basic costs with the new enrollment, but so what? The fact that they can afford to expand does not mean that they will chose to.
Around the world, the profit motive has been the single most reliable incentive for popular private schools to expand. Successful for-profit schools not only cover their own costs when they expand, they increase their profits. Without the lure of profit making, there is insufficient justification to run the risks of expansion.
Search this site for the terms "for-profit" and "education" for links to evidence and further argument on this point.
In this and a number of other key respects, the Labour gov't proposal is patently at odds with the evidence on how and why education markets work.
It's not a smorgasbord, folks. You can't just pick and choose the bits of competitive markets that you like, chuck the rest, and expect it to work.
Feathered bricks don't fly.
An Instapundit post drew my attention to the BBC story: "France says it does not support US plans for international sanctions on Sudan if violence continues in Darfur."
A recent update to that post points out that France has the single largest foreign oil concession in Sudan.
So, how are the French media covering their country's position on what the U.N. calls the most serious humanitarian crisis in the world today? Well, the two big French papers are Le Monde and Le Figaro. Le Figaro currently has no stories at all on its website concerning the ethnic cleansing in Sudan.
But it gets better. Le Monde has a story that ends with the following sentence: "L'Allemagne, la France, la Grande-Bretagne et la Roumanie soutiennent fermement le projet de texte américain." For "les maudits anglais" that translates to: "Germany, France, Great Britain and Romania firmly support the proposed U.S. language [for the U.N. resolution calling for sanctions against Sudan if the violence continues]."
Huh! The BBC says they're agin' it, but Le Monde says they're fer it.
So what's a dude (or, for that matter, a dudette) to think?
Well, the only published evidence on France's official position that I've been able to come across is a statement by Secretary of State for foreign affairs, Renaud Muselier. That statement, which the BBC article says he made to a French Radio station is as follows:
In Darfur, it would be better to help the Sudanese get over the crisis so their country is pacified rather than sanctions which would push them back to their misdeeds of old," junior Foreign Minister Renaud Muselier told French radio.
Looks to me like France plans to screw the black Africans of Sudan in order to protect its massive oil interests in the country, and that the French media's reaction to this nasty business ranges from ignoring it, to soft-peddling it, to categorically denying it.
Back in Americaland, presidential candidate John Kerry says he's keen to forge international consensus with regard to major foreign policy issues. That's code for getting the cooperation of France and Germany.
Do we really want to be in agreement with France on foreign policy?
Search this blog for the word "France" to find out some of the other positions France has staked out in the world.
Last night, Kay and I curled up in front of the TV-box to watch Gene Hackman in "The Package."
Released in 1989, this film was an unveiled, unnuanced tirade against the MAD doctrine (Mutually Assured Destruction) in particular and the concept of peace through strength more generally. It was a love letter to complete and immediate nuclear disarmament, suggesting that this was the only way to secure world peace and U.S. security (despite the inevitability that dictatorships around the world would eventually acquire nukes of their own). Advocates of a strong U.S. defense policy and the retention of a nuclear deterrent against the larger conventional war machine of the Soviet Union were presented as conspiratorial madmen.
Wait. Did I say 1989?
The same 1989 in which the Berlin wall fell? The same 1989 in which the totalitarian and expansionist Soviet Union began to crumble under the impossible pressure of matching U.S. defense spending? The same 1989 that followed eight years of a Reagan administration that, whatever its faults, unabashedly denounced Soviet communism as the evil empire it was (for which Reagan was derided and ridiculed by the Left)?
Yup. That 1989.
Some timing, huh?
Given his well-known positions on U.S. defense policy during the 1980s, I imagine John Kerry must have enjoyed this flick back in '89 almost as much as modern anti-warriors are enjoying Fahrenheit 9/11.
When the spread of SARS was being hushed up by Beijing's dictators a few years ago, Jiang Yanyong blew the whistle on them. A military doctor, Jiang put the public's safety ahead of his own, and his candor was initially frowned on by China's communist leaders. Eventually, they seem to have decided that Jiang wasn't enough of a threat to justify the public relations nightmare of imprisoning him.
Well, times have changed.
Apparently Jiang wrote a letter to the powers that be, asking them to stop treating the peaceful Tiananmen pro-democracy demonstration as a dangerous counter-revolutionary action and start treating it as a patriotic movement. Jiang, it turns out, had to treat the maimed demonstrators after they were brutalized by the "People's Liberation Army." His letter was leaked to the public.
For about the past month Jiang has been held in captivity by the state and is being "educated" (read brainwashed) by the authorities in an effort to make him recant his letter.
Mass protests are being staged around the world demanding that the Chinese government release Jiang and all other political prisoners. Oh, whoops, no. I just imagined that.
Years ago, in preparation for the writing of Market Education: The Unknown History, I did an informal survey of residents in the greater Seattle area. I asked them how much they thought we were spending on public education in Washington state, and how much they thought we should spend.
Then I'd tell them the actual figure.
For the most part, they were shocked by how much more the public schools spent per pupil than they imagined.
Well, the same is true nationwide according to a recent survey done by the Education Testing Service (the folks who administer the SAT).
Read all about it in my friend Jay Greene's op/ed today in the NY Post.