Dec 22, 2002 | Dollars & Crosses
Readers probably already heard about this story from a few days ago that received national coverage. As reported in the Seattle Times:At an appearance before a high school honors class, [Senator Patty] Murray, D-Wash., offered what her spokesman called an intentionally provocative challenge for students to ponder.
"We've got to ask, why is this man (bin Laden) so popular around the world?" Murray asked during an appearance Wednesday at Columbia River High School. "Why are people so supportive of him in many countries that are riddled with poverty?"
The answers may be uncomfortable, but are important for Americans to ponder - particularly students, Murray said.
"He's been out in these countries for decades, building schools, building roads, building infrastructure, building day-care facilities, building health-care facilities, and the people are extremely grateful. We haven't done that," Murray said.
"How would they look at us today if we had been there helping them with some of that rather than just being the people who are going to bomb in Iraq and go to Afghanistan?"
Murray is implying that Americans deserved to be punished for not sacrificing our wealth to placate backward populations. This is morally reprehensible: Americans are not slave labor to feed and house the rest of the world. We have no moral obligation to help other countries.
Rather what Americans should do is to understand what makes some countries wealthy and others poor.
Countries are impoverished to the degree that they lack political and economic freedom. (Some countries, like Saudi Arabia and Iraq, are wealthy despite their horrible governments because they expropriated oil industries that Western countries developed. Before American, British, and Dutch companies discovered the oil and created a market for it, the indigenous people were impoverished and backward.) Bin Laden's "gifts" to Islamic countries are his means to promote a radical, death-worshipping sect of Islam.
In the same newspaper article an expert on Bin Laden said that "Mostly he did underwrite - and so did many Arab charities - several fundamentalist Muslim schools throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan that teach a very, very, fundamentalist, right-wing version of Islam that preaches hatred for the West."
The fact is that Bin Laden offers impoverished people a philosophy of suffering on this earth, of hatred, and of death. Whereas America offers the world a model for escaping their earthly misery in this lifetime.
America was founded on the principle of individual rights and its corollary politico-economic system of capitalism, where the government's powers are limited to protect people's rights to economic, political, and religious freedom. That is the key to happiness on earth, and the means by which impoverished peoples could rise up from their filthy and miserable existence. Millions of such Muslims have already escaped their oppressed and poor countries and immigrated to America to enjoy a life they would otherwise be deprived, because of the evil ideas of men like Bin Laden.
Senator Murray performed a grave injustice against America, and it is appalling that a woman such as she can hold public office. A Senator, of all people, should know that it is Americans who give the impoverished and backward countries hope; it is America that should be loved. It is not Bin Laden, and if people are swayed by his hatred and death-worship instead of the American dream, they deserve their misery.
Dec 21, 2002 | Dollars & Crosses
IRVINE, CA--By waiting for U.N. approval to attack terrorist regimes, President Bush is violating his sworn oath to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States," said David Holcberg, senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute.
"The U.S. Constitution," noted Holcberg, "was created to protect the individual and his rights from power-lusters at home and tyrants abroad. It does the latter by providing 'for the common defense,' which means: the executive branch of the government is charged with defending America from foreign threats. But by surrendering to the United Nations the responsibility to judge whether or not Iraq is a threat that warrants going to war--by placing our self-defense at the mercy of an international body full of appeasers and dictators--President Bush has undermined America's security.
"He, like his father in the Gulf War, is helping to establish the most dangerous of precedents: he is substituting the U.N. Charter for the U.S. Constitution--as the supreme law of our nation.
"While the Iraqis play shell games with the U.N. weapons inspectors, the danger of evil regimes arming terrorists with nuclear, chemical and biological weapons increases. We should, therefore, demand that President Bush uphold his sworn oath to the U.S. Constitution. Our lives depend upon it."Dec 21, 2002 | Dollars & Crosses
The citizens of still democratic South Korea recently voted into office a candidate who advocates open appeasement of North Korea -- after the truth came out that Communist North Korea is actively developing nuclear weapons.Imagine if Canada was run by a violent dictator who was openly developing nuclear weapons. Would American voters, soon after discovering this information, vote into office a presidential candidate who favors appeasing Canada? Would Americans vote into office a candidate who openly favored appeasing Osama bin Laden?
Clearly something is deeply wrong with most South Koreans. It's sad. However, it's not our problem. When the time comes for us to confront North Korea, as we now seek to disarm Saddam Hussein, we will then (as now) hear cries that war is wrong because it risks the lives of "innocents." How innocent are people who make mistakes such as the one South Koreans just did? Just because they want to commit suicide does not obligate us to go down with them.
Dec 20, 2002 | Dollars & Crosses
Apparently the Iraq Daily misquoted Sean Penn:
Penn's flack howled in protest, claiming her boss was the victim of terrorist misquotes. "Oh, please! I don't know where those statements are being fabricated from," said spokeswoman Mara Buxbaum. "This is specifically propaganda. It's a twisted interpretation of what he said. They are twisting his words." According to Buxbaum, Penn never even spoke with the Iraq Daily. [New York Post, 12/18/02]
Dec 19, 2002 | Dollars & Crosses
Some places to view the new proposals for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center:Also, detailed plans are available at a few of the architects' sites:
What a relief that seven of the nine proposals call for towers taller than the original WTC! Just the fact that they were proposed makes me feel like we're not living in a nation of cowards and compromisers without vision or ambition.
James Gardner comments on the World Trade Center proposals, in today's New York Sun:
What is so striking about most of these projects is that, beyond their individual infelicities of style, incommodities of structure, and illogicalities of thesis, they partake in almost equal measure of the two besetting sins of architecture in our time: indifference to beauty and an excessive attachment to meaning....The newest generation, however, creates a single form, or at best a sequence of forms, that has been twisted, facetted, knotted and distressed in slavish obedience to the Deconstructivist style that, for the moment at least, dominates "quality" architectural discourse....[C]ould it be that architecture that departs radically from symmetry and a circumscribed number of basic forms--most atrociously the hulking clusters of towers put forward yesterday by SOM and United Architects--is simply and irredeemably obnoxious to the human eye...?
One is reminded of adolescents trying to express their individuality, whether through Afros, Quiana shirts, or piercings, in such a way that, absurdly, they all end up looking the same....The team led by Richard Meier claimed that its five joined towers were supposed to suggest clasped hands, which would be goofy enough. What they really resembled were five Gumbys in a chorus line. Buildings should not look like Gumby.
Just about the only firm that managed not to follow fashion slavishly was Peterson/Littenberg. And while there was something almost consoling about the rectilinearity of their plan, the two lofty towers at its center seem poorly conceived....Probably the best project is the first of three submitted by Think, led by Raphael Viñoly. It appears to be the most coherent and the least irritating, even though it feels completely contemporary.
Dec 18, 2002 | Dollars & Crosses
Colin Powell continues to erode administration policy on Iraq with his completely unprincipled approach to foreign affairs:Secretary of State Colin Powell is assuring the Arab world the Bush administration's demand for regime change in Iraq aims at disarmament, not ousting President Saddam Hussein. "If he cooperates, then the basis of changed-regime policy has shifted because his regime has, in fact, changed its policy to one of cooperation," Powell said...
Powell said the policy of regime change in Baghdad was inherited from the Clinton administration by the Bush administration. [Associated Press, 12/16/02]
In other words: We're not trying to change the regime, and if we are, it's not our fault--it's the Clinton Administration's. And then there's the fantasy that Hussein suddenly becomes legitimate because he knuckles under when threatened by force! The lead editorial in today's New York Sun notes that Powell's interview effectively drops three of the conditions President Bush had set out for Iraq.
Dec 17, 2002 | Dollars & Crosses
Today's Drudge Report links readers to a December 16th article titled, "Sean Penn condemns US threats against Iraq" in the Iraq Daily newspaper, Baghdad's official paper:The American movie star, Sean Penn has condemned the US-British threats to wage war against Iraq. He told press conference that there is no legitimate justification for the brutal campaign against an authentic state like Iraq. He confirmed that Iraq is completely clear of weapons of mass destruction and the United Nations must adopt a positive stance towards Iraq. He also condemned the US misleading claims arguing that it is the US and not Iraq who is practicing such illegal behavior.
Mr. Penn went on saying that he would convey to the public opinion in US the real situation that the Americans should force the US administration to stop such aggressive campaign. Finally, Mr. Penn passed a written communiqué in which he declared that his visit to Iraq is to evaluate the humanitarian situation of Iraqis and to reject the crippling sanctions on Iraq since 1991.
Dec 17, 2002 | Dollars & Crosses
The Bush Administration is generally timid and appeasing of countries that are threatening America. However, the President and his Administration should be commended for initiating a missile defense system to protect Americans. This is a major improvement in this country's foreign policy, made possible only by the Administration's earlier abandonment of the ABM Treaty. Every American should be grateful for this monumentally important decision--and condemn anyone who dares to criticize this rational policy.Dec 13, 2002 | Dollars & Crosses
The actor and director Sean Penn arrived in Baghdad on Friday morning at the start of a three-day visit to Iraq. He said of his trip:By the invitation of the Institute for Public Accuracy, I have the privileged opportunity to pursue a deeper understanding of this frightening conflict," Penn said in a statement released in Washington and Baghdad on Friday. "I would hope that all Americans will embrace information available to them outside conventional channels. As a father, an actor, a filmmaker, and a patriot, my visit to Iraq is for me a natural extension of my obligation (at least attempt) to find my own voice on matters of conscience.
Penn's visit to Iraq has been organized by the Institute for Public Accuracy, "a national U.S. organization of policy analysts with offices in San Francisco and Washington, D.C." The founder, Norman Solomon, endorsed--and indeed participated in--the visit of three Democratic Congressmen to Iraq earlier this Fall. In an article he wrote for the Baltimore Sun, Solomon quoted his fellow traveler Congressmen David Bonior: "It seems to me that if we are going to deal with this in a real and honest way, we have got to create dialogue.""Dialogue" is what Neville Chamberlain offered to Hitler. It is a euphemism for appeasement, which is a euphemism for capitulation. There is nothing to gain from dialogue with a totalitarian dictator. Such an act is, to use Ayn Rand's phrase, "the sanction of the victim." It is acts of appeasement like this that make the Saddam Husseins of the world possible. Otherwise, Saddam would be a street thug.Now a note on Sean Penn: what a moron. Regardless of whether he thinks there should be "dialogue," why does he think that he, a movie actor, is the one to do it? He will be nothing more than a stooge for the Iraqi regime, another photoshoot opportunity for Saddam to shove in the faces of the terrorized, and terrified, Iraqi people. Penn will surely smile and shake hands and tell the whole world how nice the country of Iraq is, and how Saddam cares about his people.Having the excellent fortune of living in America, like Mr. Penn, I do not know how demoralizing such a story of his visit would be to victims of Iraqi totalitarianism. Maybe they are cynical enough not to believe anything from their government. Or maybe, on some level, it crushes, even more, their hope for justice in the world--which they have never once seen. Mr. Penn should have thought about that.Dec 11, 2002 | Dollars & Crosses
"Nobel laureate Jimmy Carter warns that war only leads to more war," reports the Associated Press:"For powerful countries to adopt a principle of preventative war may well set an example that can have catastrophic consequences," he said.
Carter cited another American Nobel peace laureate, Ralph Bunche, winner of the 1950 prize.
"To suggest that war can prevent war is a base play on words and a despicable form of warmongering...."
In his Nobel address, Carter urged respect for the United Nations as an international forum for solving disputes.
Why the respect for statements that are so clearly intellectually deficient? Because Carter rationalizes the desire to avoid the responsibility of passing moral judgment and of standing behind that judgment. Hence the blanket condemnation of preventive war--even in the face of a real, objective threat--the treatment of all parties as morally equal, the call to abdicate judgment in favor of the UN. Meanwhile...
A group of exiled Iranians ... shouted "Shame on the Nobel Committee" and "Shame on Carter" as they demonstrated outside Norway's National Theater. The theater is located near the Oslo City Hall, where Carter was awarded the Peace Prize in a traditional annual ceremony.
The demonstrators claimed that both the US and Jimmy Carter, as a former US president, share responsibility for the revolution in Iran in 1979 that unseated the shah and allowed the Ayatollah Khomeini to seize power. [Aftenposten]
Every American ought to have joined them in denouncing Carter.
Dec 11, 2002 | Dollars & Crosses
Good news comes from the Washington Post on December 11. "Preemptive Strikes Part of Strategy, Official Say 'All Options' Open for Countering Unconventional Arms":A Bush administration strategy announced yesterday calls for the preemptive use of military and covert force before an enemy unleashes weapons of mass destruction, and underscores the United States's willingness to retaliate with nuclear weapons for chemical or biological attacks on U.S. soil or against American troops overseas.The strategy introduces a more aggressive approach to combating weapons of mass destruction, and it comes as the nation prepares for a possible war with Iraq.A version of the strategy that was released by the White House said the United States will "respond with overwhelming force," including "all options," to the use of biological, chemical, radiological or nuclear weapons on the nation, its troops or its allies.However, a classified version of the strategy goes even further: It breaks with 50 years of U.S. counterproliferation efforts by authorizing preemptive strikes on states and terrorist groups that are close to acquiring weapons of mass destruction or the long-range missiles capable of delivering them. The policy aims to prevent the transfer of weapons components or to destroy them before they can be assembled.
Dec 11, 2002 | Dollars & Crosses
According to former President Jimmy Carter, on accepting the so-called Nobel Peace Prize: "War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good."First of all, there are no necessary evils. If something is truly evil, there's no way it can be necessary. And if it is truly necessary to the well-being of a rational man's life -- then it's not evil, but good. Secondly, there is such a thing as a good war. A war against Adolph Hitler was good. A war to decimate the likes of Osama bin Laden and others of his ilk is equally necessary and good.
Given the premise that evil exists, and that certain people will act in an evil and violent manner, a rational and just war is synonymous with self-defense. Self-defense is good. Only someone like Jimmy Carter -- whose policies nearly lost the Cold War against the Soviet Union and contributed to the establishment of the number one sponsor of terror in the world today (Iran) -- could utter such a statement. To honor him with this prize shows that the true motives of the award are neither noble nor peaceful.
Dec 10, 2002 | Dollars & Crosses
Jimmy Carter is the most culpable U.S. official with regard to terrorism. He did nothing when the Ayatollah took power and kidnapped Americans in Tehran. Iran immediately became the premier sponsor of terrorism against the U.S. and set the tone that America is afraid to defend itself. If anyone event caused 9/11 this is it.That being said today President Carter accepted the blood-soaked Nobel Peace Prize and his acceptance speech was typical of him:Citizens of the 10 wealthiest countries are now 75 times richer than those who live in the 10 poorest ones, and the separation is increasing every year, not only between nations but also within them. The results of this disparity are root causes of most of the world's unresolved problems, including starvation, illiteracy, environmental degradation, violent conflict and unnecessary illnesses that range from Guinea worm to HIV/AIDS.
The existence of such a disparity causes nothing of the sort. What does cause problems are bad ideologies such as collectivism, socialism, and theocratic and other forms of dictatorships: they cause poverty, ignorance, and war. Individualist, free, secular, wealthy countries are not to blame for other countries being backward--indeed they are often victimized by them.Then Carter said,But tragically, in the industrialized world there is a terrible absence of understanding or concern about those who are enduring lives of despair and hopelessness. We have not yet made the commitment to share with others an appreciable part of our excessive wealth. This is a potentially rewarding burden that we should all be willing to assume.
After enduring the twentieth century and the deaths of literally hundreds of millions--if not billions--of people as the direct result of socialist wealth redistribution policies (the USSR, Red China, and Nazi Germany as the big examples); a forty-year "war on poverty" in America that has redistributed hundreds of billions of dollars for naught; probably a trillion dollars of US taxpayer money expropriated and given to "developing countries" that despise America, some being fountainheads of terrorism, and seeing without exception how socialist schemes fail 100% of the time they are tried, how dare President Carter dig up this rot.Not only is Carter blameworthy of laying the ground on which terrorism spawned, to this day he is prescribing the same poison that made so much of the work sick in the first place, and he calls it a cure. He deserves the Nobel Peace Prize because it's become a symbol of death--especially since Arafat won it.Dec 10, 2002 | Dollars & Crosses
Newport Beach, California--As the health care reform debate gains renewed focus in Washington, Americans for Free Choice in Medicine (AFCM), a non-profit patient education organization, has designated a new executive director. AFCM, founded in 1993, is America's only grass-roots educational organization based on individual rights, personal responsibility and free market ideas in medicine.AFCM has named Richard E. Ralston its executive director. Ralston, who served on active duty in the United States Army for 7 years, has a comprehensive background in media. Mr. Ralston, a supporter since AFCM was founded in 1994, was editor of books published in 1991, Communism: Its Rise and Fall in the 20th Century, and in 1999, Why Businessmen Need Philosophy.
"Every day physicians and their patients continue to be confronted with constraints on their ability to make free decisions about medicine," Ralston said. "I think the time has come to take a stand against the heavy hand of government in the medical profession."
"We must give voice to the rights of the individual patient and of each physician to make his or her own decisions regarding their health or medical practice," he said.
Dec 9, 2002 | Dollars & Crosses
In Canada's National Post, "The UN's foray into Saddamasochism," a very amusing article making fun the U.N. weapons inspector who was "outted" for his sadomasochistic diversions:Indeed, in their kinky UNphilia and Kofi Annanism, the West's liberal elites have come up with the weirdest masochistic fetish of all, demanding that the role of global dominatrix be given to an organization that can't wait to prostrate itself. On Saturday, Mr. Blix's team admitted that the Iraqis had in fact been given advance warning of what are supposed to be "surprise" site inspections. One should never underestimate the UN's capacity to abase and degrade itself before the strongman's even had a chance to get his bullwhip out.
Dec 9, 2002 | Dollars & Crosses
You heard it here first.
This year in Venezuela, the currency has collapsed, the economy has contracted, while inflation and unemployment has soared. Our global economics and financial markets contributor Andrew West predicted all of this over two years ago in Capitalism Magazine. The good news is that in Venezuela, the most productive people have gone on strike, refusing to exist as Hugo Chavez' revolutionary slaves. According to the BBC,Oil production in Venezuela - the world's fifth largest oil exporter - is nearing a standstill, as the national strike against President Hugo Chavez enters its second week. Many petrol stations are running out of fuel, and exports are being severely hit, hiking up prices on the international oil market.
Opposition leaders vowed on Sunday to continue their strike against Mr Chavez indefinitely. Many schools and businesses in Caracas and other major cities remain closed, and domestic airline pilots and aluminium workers are the latest to join the stoppage...
... During his weekly Alo Presidente television programme, Mr Chavez launched into a lengthy diatribe in which he dubbed the opposition "coup-mongers". "They won't rob Venezuela of its happiness," he shouted, grabbing a plastic model of the baby Jesus from a crib on his desk and kissing it.
Comments Andrew West, "[Chavez's diatribe and grabbing of a the baby Jesus is] as good a comic scene as any in Atlas Shrugged. Even Mr. Thompson wouldn't stoop that low."
Dec 7, 2002 | Dollars & Crosses
Here's a good one: The Washington Post ran a letter criticizing Catherine Reynolds' recent $100 million donation to the Kennedy Center by Mark Weadon."The Dec. 7 front-page story…said that Ms. Reynolds made her fortune "in the student loan business." Am I alone in finding this disturbing? At a time when college students and their parents and universities are struggling to make ends meet, how is it possible for one person to amass this kind of wealth from the sale of education loans?
Something is deeply flawed when so much money can be siphoned out of a system in which both students and colleges operate on razor-thin margins. Perhaps students, universities and the nation would have been better served if even a portion of Ms. Reynolds's vast income had gone toward lowering student loan interest rates."
Heck, why not eliminate all interest, because after all, wouldn't the nation be better served if no one had to pay to borrow money? Never mind that Ms. Reynolds' wealth came from loaning people money to get an education that supposedly would allow them to be self-sufficient. Never mind that Ms. Reynolds pays a large percentage of her wealth in taxes. And never mind that Ms. Reynolds is now using her wealth to support the arts. Apparently, the only people who should make money in life are whiners like Mr. Weadon. People like Ms. Reynolds should just work for free putting people like him through school. After all, rich people should sacrifice more.
Dec 6, 2002 | Dollars & Crosses
"The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser's intellectual abdication that invites them to take over. When a culture's dominant trend is geared toward irrationality, the thugs win over the appeasers. When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes."-- Ayn Rand, in "Altruism and Appeasement," published in The Objectivist newsletter, January 1966.
