We'd never heard of Augsburg College, which turns out to be a Lutheran institution in Minneapolis, until we got wind that it plans a "Nobel Peace Prize Forum" next Friday and Saturday. On the program for Saturday is the following seminar (at bottom of page):
Fighting Terrorism with Empathy: a Model for Peace
Amy Nell Concordia College
The word terrorism strikes a deep nerve among Americans today--having sparked an entire nation to the defense of its country and the subjugation of those who stand in opposition. One of these men who stand in opposition is the man who planned the September 11 attacks. In November 2004, Osama Bin Laden released a tape giving his recipe for a healthy nation. This seminar would dissect his message and use audience participation in doing so. Discussion points would include counterterrorism methods, the possibility of peace, empathy etc. The aim of this seminar would be to help understand the position of Osama Bin Laden as presented in the video and explore in what ways the origins of terrorism are to be found, not in some foreign citizen, but in the actions we take out of fear, hate and retribution.
Notice that these idiots have "empathy" only for mass murderers, never for their victims. Anyway, who is this Amy Nell character who blames America for terrorism, and what are her academic credentials? There are several institutes of higher education called Concordia, including one in Montreal that is known for various anti-Semitic outrages, but Nell seems to be from the one in Moorhead, Minn., where she is--we kid you not--a photographer for the student newspaper.
We're of two minds about nonsense like this. On the one hand, the whole thing is silly and inconsequential. If America can survive "Fahrenheit 9/11," it can withstand the blatherings of Amy Nell. Indeed, one of the great benefits of free speech is that the very exposure of such flapdoodle discredits it--and, if you have a dark sense of humor like we do, often in quite entertaining ways.
On the other hand, higher education is at least arguably a serious and important institution, and inasmuch as a college degree is a necessary credential for many jobs, it is also a powerful institution. In some ways society would be better off if colleges and universities were run by serious people.
Posted by: tipper ||
02/05/2005 9:49:24 AM ||
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#1
"where she is--we kid you not--a photographer for the student newspaper." Hey if Ward Churchill can claim to be a Native American, Clinton was the first Black President, why can't a obscure student photographer lead a forum on fighting terrorism. Maybe she has an 'Honorary Terrorists Card" or some other 'Street Cred' that only she knows about.
#3
Heck, if that college is dumb enough to let her do a seminar & people are dumb enough to show up & take it serious then that's fine w/me. Never try to legislate stuipidity, it's too damned funny to watch.
(2005-02-01) -- Just hours after Islamic militants in Iraq threatened to behead a kidnapped U.S. soldier doll, the camouflaged action figure was rescued in a daring nighttime operation by a toy George W. Bush action figure.
The nine-inch-tall replica of the president left Andrews Air Force Base in a scale model of Air Force One within minutes after the Pentagon learned of the kidnapping from a picture on an Islamic website.
The top-secret flight was reminiscent of the life-size president's Thanksgiving visit to Baghdad in 2003. During the long trip, the presidential doll was programmed to say intimidating things in Arabic, and reportedly spent several hours practicing his kung-fu grip.
Even as the mission was secretly under way, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-MA, went before the Senate to call for the immediate withdrawal of 12,000 military action figures from Iraq.
Upon hearing of the Bush doll's successful mission, Sen. John Kerry, D-MA, warned against "overhyping" the significance of the apparently heroic deed.
Posted by: CrazyFool ||
02/05/2005 9:49:13 AM ||
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#1
I was expecting a picture, but the highlighted "ScrappleFace" immediately brought a smile to my face. The fact he tied in Kennedy and Kerry in this parody just nailed it!
... The terrorists had to do something to revive their plummeting prestige. That they resorted to clumsy frauds is not a sign of strength. "The captured toy story could be pretty significant," said the Web logger John Hinderaker (Power Line). "The terrorists need, more than anything else, to be seen as awesome, terrible figures. If they stop inspiring fear, they are finished. So the one thing they cannot stand is ridicule. Their pathetic effort to pass a doll off as a captured American soldier will [make] them laughingstocks throughout the Arab world."
It's also interesting that the terrorists turned to the news media to recover lost momentum. Journalists who fell for these hoaxes may merely be idiots, and their silence about the implications of the hoaxes may simply be the by-product of embarrassment. But more to the point, why are major media so quick to disseminate anything that a terrorist group, or purported terrorist group, releases? For the terrorist, it is like being given millions of dollars in free advertising.
The major media have from the beginning exaggerated the strength and popularity of those they mislabel "insurgents," to the disgust of American soldiers. "I'm tired of hearing the crap, the whole, well 'We are barely hanging on, we're losing, the insurgency is growing," Marine Sgt. Kevin Lewis told Dan Rather, in Iraq for the election. "It's just a small amount of people out there causing the problems. It's a small number, and we're killing them."
The scandalous remarks of Eason Jordan, CNN's top news executive, last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and the failure of the major media to report them suggest the distortions are deliberate. Mr. Jordan told a panel that the U.S. military had killed a dozen journalists in Iraq, and that they had been deliberately targeted. When challenged, Mr. Jordan could provide no evidence to support the charge, and subsequently lied about having made it, though the record shows he had made a similar charge a few months before, and also earlier had falsely accused the Israeli military of targeting journalists. Mr. Jordan's slander has created a firestorm in the blogosphere, but has yet to be mentioned in the "mainstream" media. Gee, I wonder why not.
Posted by: Mrs. Davis ||
02/05/2005 5:23:14 PM ||
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I keep posting these emails not simply because they obviously make me feel that four and a half years of daily work was well worth it, but because they give me hope in general about the future of discourse in this country. Here's one that is also testimony to what blogs have been able to do in dislodging some settled prejudices:
As I read the letter you posted today ("One more" February 3) I decided that I, too, must tell you about the difference your writing has made in my life. I hope I'm not too late--I've been thinking about writing to you for over a year, but I always talked myself out of it. Today I find myself compelled to tell you my own humble story.
While I was raised in a fairly conservative family, I came of age during the '60s. I met my husband while we were both campaigning for Eugene McCarthy for president. We were married the week of the Democratic convention in Chicago. I changed from being oblivious about politics to being a serious left-wing, anti-war, Republican-hating straight party-line Democrat. I believed every word that Noam Chomsky wrote. It was all so simple: Republicans wore black hats; Democrats wore white hats. All of my friends believed unquestioningly that peace, love, agnosticism, secularism, enlarged federal programs, and reduced military budgets would save the world form the evil American empire.
Continued on Page 49
#1
Depends on her answer to the only important question.
Posted by: Bruce ||
02/05/2005 12:55 Comments ||
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Sorry, Sully --- fanmail notwithstanding, I still think you're an egocentric ripoff artist. But then, the little peepuls who donated to your comfortable vacation fund weren't too smart so perhaps it's a fair market exchange.
Posted by: too true ||
02/05/2005 13:00 Comments ||
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Sullivan zigged when he shoulda zagged. I am happy for this writer that she found solace with conservatism, and I am torn she credits Sullivan for that, but I believe also she is blinded by the mangificence of Sullivan's brilliance.
#7
"...From that day forward, I started to read intelligent conservative writers to try and understand a world-view totally unlike anything I had learned in my politically correct â60s college education."
I think this has been happening much, MUCH more than the Democrats figured on.
By taking absurd positions with regard to the WoT, the Dems made a lot of people extremely uncomfortable; and those people started looking elsewhere for information and opinion. Some started liking what they heard from the conservative side. And some started asking, "if the Democrats have been bullshitting me about the war, what else have they been bullshitting me about?" And for some of those people, the answer has been, "damned near everything."
My own transformation occurred a long time ago, back during the Clinton years, and was not as extreme a transformation as this woman's; but I know the process.
The Dems are in a heap of trouble, I think, for they've only just begun to pay for their mindless, reactionary opposition to everything Bush does.
Posted by: Dave D. ||
02/05/2005 16:51 Comments ||
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From your keyboard to G*d's ear, Dave D.
Posted by: too true ||
02/05/2005 17:41 Comments ||
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I've had my moments of utter disgust when reading Andrew's hysterical panic. However, I don't think conservatives should waste their time scorning him for his 'betrayal.' There have been many bad news days, so many setbacks and tragedies. On those days, one must steel one's resolve, knowing that this is the nature of the world, how sh#t happens. Watching Sullivan lose his nerve and embrace Kerry and defeatism was an ugly sight and I wont forget it.
But ultimately we must remember that he is not the enemy and we shouldn't waste time excoriating him, or the other pathetic Democrat Hawks like Tom Friedman - annoying as they are. They are still in favor of Iraqi democracy and fighting to save Western Civ. from the barbarian hordes (inside and out), even if they have a distorted view about what it will take to do it. He has a big audience and reaches people like me when I was younger, i.e. potential conservative who have simply never been exposed to conservative views, except as ugly caracitures to be used as objects of derision in the Leftist morality play.
There are so many people with views far more worse than Sullivan's.
Posted by: Prince Abdullah ||
02/05/2005 19:36 Comments ||
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For me the key was not one person's blog (I started from the Wall Street Journal's site), but the links to other sites. And from there outward. After 9/11 the things I read on the conservative sites better fit the reality I was reading about in various non-U.S. newspapers (Arab News, Lebanon Daily Star, Jerusalem Post, Frankfuerter Allgemeine Zeitung -- which was slow reading for me! -- etc) than what I was reading in the New York Times and hearing on NPR. It gave me something to do while waiting to see if Mr. Wife would ever be able to come home from Switzerland, where he'd landed 9/9/01.
Am I still as idealistic as before? Don't bother to answer, we all know :-) But I've discovered that those who call themselves Liberal are not the white-hatted ones they told me they were. Like Churchill, it is not I that moved, but the Party.
And despite Mr. Sullivan's rejection of the whole anti-gay marriage thing, he spoke clearly of conservatism to that new audience when it counted, after 9/11. Those people, like the reader in the article, had already made the conversion when he went wobbly, and nothing he or the Democratic Party tries now is likely to change that. He did a great deal of good when it was needed, and I think very little harm afterward. I wonder if it is this realization that drives him to blogging hiatus...
(2005-02-05) -- A day after ruling that New York City must allow homosexual marriages, a state judge today declared traditional heterosexual marriage unconstitutional.
"Homosexual marriage rests on the bedrock of judicial opinion," wrote Justice Doris Ling-Cohan, "But heterosexual marriage finds justification in little more than religious myth, antiquated tradition and a few unconstitutional state and local laws. These are all hollow arguments when compared with the firm foundation provided by a growing number of judges."
In a 57-page ruling, Judge Ling-Cohan ordered the state of New York to "cease and desist issuing marriage licenses to counter-sex (man-woman) couples and to dissolve of all existing counter-sex marriages."
Barring an appeal, the ban takes effect in 30 days.
Posted by: Korora ||
02/05/2005 8:31:50 AM ||
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While the piece is satire, the point is accurate: The judiciary has created a theory which permits it to be able make any law which suits the fancy of the individual judge. The process is called "substantive due process", a phrase which encapsulates a contradiction: there is substantive law (a directive or prohibition) and procedural law (time limits for filing a response, the form of the pleading, et cetera). The phrase âdue processâ refers to the procedure by which the government acts: the procedure must be âdueâ, that is, fair or rational.
The Courts performed this rather silly trick: (1) âDue processâ means âfair processâ. (2) âProcessâ means âlawâ. (3) âDue processâ means âfair lawsâ. (4) âFairâ means whatever I happened to like. (5) Therefore, if I donât like the law, itâs not âfairâ. If itâs not âfairâ, than it is âunconstitutionalâ.
In short, a phrase that merely meant that the government canât take my property or life without some kind of a fair procedure now means the judge can make-up anything, literally out of the judgeâs own imagination. Thus, the decisions of the entire electorate, previous courts, the legislature, are irrelevant if the judge does not like the outcome. The judge merely needs to say, ânot fairâ, and the law is âunconstitutionalâ. This is called reading the constitution like a âliving documentâ.
#4
# 3 how correct you are - When I read the story I thought unconstitutional right away, but could not think of how to compose what I needed to say.
a whole new set of statutes needs to be written on
homosexual marriage. Am I correct??
Andrea Jackson
Posted by: Andrea ||
02/05/2005 13:23 Comments ||
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A âstatuteâ cannot resolve the issue, because there is a hierarchy of law: At the top is the US Constitution; next, the constitutions of the various states. If a provision in a state constitution conflicts with the federal constitution, the state constitution loses. A constitution always trumps a statute. Likewise, a state statute always loses to the federal constitution. (There is a bizarre California Supreme Court case which holds that a state statute must be âbalancedâ against the federal constitution in certain circumstances). There is a complicated set of issues involving the interaction between state and federal statutes and the potential for a federal statute which conflicts with a state constitution.
Statutes are much easier to pass into law than amendments to constitutions.
I have not read the decision, but it seems that the New York judge found that the state statute conflicted with her idea of âfairnessâ in the state constitution. The decision was most likely made under the state constitution, as opposed to the federal constitution, to avoid federal review of the question. (I am guessing on this point, but it is the typical technique to avoid a federal review.)
There is an additional problem: Appellate courts (those courts above the trial level) are well-known (among lawyers) to actually make-up facts to suit their decision. But that is a different issue . . .
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
We'd never heard of Augsburg College, which turns out to be a Lutheran institution in Minneapolis, until we got wind that it plans a "Nobel Peace Prize Forum" next Friday and Saturday. On the program for Saturday is the following seminar (at bottom of page):
