Deja Moo: The feeling that you've heard this bull before.
The False Comfort of Appeasement
Bush addresses Israel's Knesset and made the following remarks.
Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is—the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history
It is sad that President Bush would use a speech to the Knesset on the 60th anniversary of Israel's independence to launch a false political attack. George Bush knows that I have never supported engagement with terrorists, and the president's extraordinary politicization of foreign policy and the politics of fear do nothing to secure the American people or our stalwart ally Israel.
Maybe Bush was talking about Code Pink? Or someone else? Does it have to be about Barack? Or, perhaps, Barack is just a tad sensitive about this because he knows that sitting down to talk to some states without preconditions is a bad idea? I think President Bush struck a nerve.
If you want to know about how important preconditions are, read Hot Airhere. There are ways to talk before coming “to the table” to negotiate, and one would expect some concessions towards civility in advance. I never negotiate with anyone that is not willing to come to some mutually beneficial agreement, for example, as it is a waste of time.
In a fundraiser this week, Barack Obama makes a bold statement that rural Americans cling to guns, religion, and xenophobia in response to their dislike of a government that doesn't tax, spend, or regulate enough:
So, it depends on where you are, but I think it's fair to say that the places where we are going to have to do the most work are the places where people feel most cynical about government. The people are mis-appre… I think they're misunderstanding why the demographics in our, in this contest have broken out as they are. Because everybody just ascribes it to “white working-class don't wanna work—don't wanna vote for the black guy.” That's… there were intimations of that in an article in the Sunday New York Times today—kind of implies that it's sort of a race thing.
Here's how it is: in a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long, and they feel so betrayed by government, and when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn't buy it. And when it's delivered by—it's true that when it's delivered by a 46-year-old black man named Barack Obama (laugh[t]er), then that adds another layer of skepticism (laughter).
But—so the questions you're most likely to get about me, “Well, what is this guy going to do for me? What's the concrete thing?” What they wanna hear is—so, we'll give you talking points about what we're proposing—close tax loopholes, roll back, you know, the tax cuts for the top 1 percent. Obama's gonna give tax breaks to middle-class folks and we're gonna provide health care for every American. So we'll go down a series of talking points.
But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Um, now these are in some communities, you know. I think what you'll find is, is that people of every background—there are gonna be a mix of people, you can go in the toughest neighborhoods, you know working-class lunch-pail folks, you'll find Obama enthusiasts. And you can go into places where you think I'd be very strong and people will just be skeptical. The important thing is that you show up and you're doing what you're doing.
In my opinion people don't cling to freedoms (and if self-defense, faith, and distrust of strangers aren't freedoms, what are they?) because of a lack of government intrusions on their lives, but in response to all the things big city liberals try to force on people with government programs. People distrust (and perhaps are bitter about it, since that's the spinning point on this point on this topic) government because no matter who they vote for the juggernaut gets bigger and involves itself in some new aspect of our lives. It loves complexity and nuance and sheer size. It's connection to the “common man” is tenuous or laughable depending on what's going on that day.
Barack Obama just insulted a huge swath of voters, and it's not going to be explained away as overstepping the characterization of “bitterness.”
The Science Board's most important, and distressing, finding is that the FDA bureaucracy “cannot even keep up with the advances in science”—and not solely due to a lack of funding. While “the world of drug discovery and development has undergone revolutionary change,” the authors write, the FDA's “evaluation methods have remained largely unchanged over the last half-century.” (Our emphasis.)
Think about that: We live amid a revolution in biology, but the FDA still thinks like it did when Sputnik launched.
Having had a glimpse of the FDA approval process when I worked on my Capstone project for my MS degree from OGI, I can only imagine how painful it is to improve the FDA. We were bringing to market a non-invasive product that could revolutionize disease testing, but the expense to do so was crushing to a start-up. Survive 7 years on limited revenues with your investors hounding you? Ouch!
I was suspicious when we had 3 underwater cables cut adversely affecting Internet connectivity for several Middle East countries but now we're up to five cables with India, Pakistan, Egypt, UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and especially Iran with moderate to severely curtailed Internet connectivity. Seems very suspicious to have so many problems on these systems simultaneously, but it's possible that the original perfect storm of anchor accidents led to load on the rest of the system exposing reliability problems with the rest of the infrastructure. Noted security expert Bruce Schneier is watching this too…
I won't add the “terrorism” tag to this article until our suspicions are confirmed. The first break is supposed to repaired in the next few days. We'll see what they find.
J. Michael McConnell, the US Director of National Intelligence has released his Annual Threat Assessment to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. John Bolton wrote in the Wall Street Journal today that McConnell would need to explain the highly politicized National Intelligence Estimate from a few months ago. In fact, Bolton calls on him to repair the damage that NIE caused to the intelligence process let alone Bush's foreign policy.
I'll give the 47-page report a read when I get a spare moment, right now I don't have one.
Update:
Some important quotes:
Al-Qa’ida and its terrorist affiliates continue to pose significant threats to the United States at home and abroad, and al-Qa’ida’s central leadership based in the border area of Pakistan is its most dangerous component.
The summary:
We assess that al-Qa’ida’s Homeland plotting is likely to continue to focus on prominent political, economic, and infrastructure targets designed to produce mass casualties, visually dramatic destruction, significant economic aftershocks, and/or fear among the population.
Iran, and the NIE:
We assess in our recent NIE on this subject that warhead design and weaponization were halted, along with covert military uranium conversion- and enrichment-related activities. Declared uranium enrichment efforts, which will enable the production of fissile material, continue. This is the most
difficult challenge in nuclear production. Iran’s efforts to perfect ballistic missiles that can reach North Africa and Europe also continue.
That doesn't seem so rosy to me.
When it comes to our technology infrastructure:
Our information infrastructure—including the internet, telecommunications networks, computer systems, and embedded processors and controllers in critical industries—increasingly is being targeted for exploitation and potentially for disruption or destruction, by a growing array of state and non-state adversaries. Over the past year, cyber exploitation activity has grown more sophisticated, more targeted, and more serious. The Intelligence Community expects these trends to continue in the coming year.
Energy:
Access to stable and affordably priced energy supplies has long been a critical element of national security. Sustained increases in global demand and the interactive effects of energy with other issues have both magnified and broadened the significance of developments in the global energy system. Oil prices in late 2007 were near record levels and global spare production capacity is below the market’s preferred cushion of 3 to 4 million barrels per day (b/d).
To go with yesterday's M&A news, Microsoft has bid $44.6B for Yahoo! That's a pretty big threat to Google, and already Yahoo! shares are up 50% and Google is down nearly 10%. Of course, one wonders what it would be like to integrate the diverse offerings of Microsoft and it's Live strategy and Yahoo! with it's zillions of other acquisitions over the years. It's not just about M&A cash, it's about executing on the integration afterward that really counts.
I admit I haven't written in a while, but here's a more interesting story than the political cess that's been depressing me lately. Amazon is buying out Audible.com for $300M. I've been an Audible.com subscriber for years and I've been buying from Amazon.com since the mid-90's, so this is an interesting merger to me. Amazon's recommendation engine and related electronic materials will be a welcome addition to the always-good-quality Audible books and podcasts.
Warner has decided to go exclusively to the Blu-Ray camp. Since I bought Playstation 3 systems for Blu-Ray movie support, I'm hoping this signals the coming end of the high-definition disc format war.
Now we need Paramount and Universal to come over to the Blu side, and we want New Line to put The Lord of the Rings out.
At last—a government term that means exactly what it says. Official United States documents were once bound with red twill tape that had to be “cut through” to gain access. This encased bit of “red tape” is from Civil War documents found in the records of the Union Army, by volunteers of the Civil War Records Conservation Corp at the National Archives…
But as the old saying goes, “it's not the crime that gets you, it's the cover-up.” By allowing these shills to make it through the screening process, CNN allowed the post-debate coverage to focus on who they were and not what they asked, and made themselves—and their sheer ineptitude, partisan agenda, or both—the center point of the discussion. And whenever the media becomes part of the story, especially to the point of becoming the most important part of the story, then they have betrayed their duty to report the news—not make it.
I have generally been avoiding the debates as I don't really want to know more about any of the candidates fielded by either major party. I have found warts on all of them and I'm just using the process of elimination to make my choice… and they have all done a great job of eliminating themselves. This debate, however, and the “plant” debacle before it, have drawn so much attention away from the candidates and towards the media that I just have to comment on it.
I despise the way political media is handled. It's simply unprofessional, oversimplified, and clearly biased towards the cult of the omnipotent state. I hate it.
Paging SG-1—Colonel O'Neil, we need to you kill Apophis again!
An 690-1080 foot wide asteroid named 99942 Apophis will narrowly miss the Earth in 2029 but could collide with our planet in 2036, according to this science article I found on Fox News. We won't know the chance of Apophis hitting us in 2036 until we fully understand the orbital effects of the near miss in 2029. With how little we know about Apophis and exact measurements of its size and mass, let alone the margin of error in understanding the size, mass, and velocity of Earth and the other planets, we'll have a hard time of judging anything but probabilities for many years to come.
Why the Stargate SG-1 reference? Because Apophis is also the name of the Goa'uld the SG-1 team fought (off and on) from the pilot episode to the first episode of Season 5.
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