No Vote on California Proposition 8 is Anti-Feminist
by Wayne Lusvardi
As a former court protective services worker for abused and neglected children and a “community organizer,” I strongly oppose the superficial position of those against Proposition 8; and although I am in favor of the Prop 8 ban on same-sex marriage I am not persuaded by all the conservative and religious arguments for it.
The arguments in favor of the Prop 8 are overly defensive, conjectural, seemingly discriminatory and wrongly moralistic. The conservative Christian scriptural position of opposing same sex marriage for the harm that it will bring to children as the weakest members of society is important but does not answer whether “the state has the power to take away anyone’s right to marry the partner of his or her choice.” Concern over a speculative future harm to children will not likely overcome the perception of actual discrimination against gays today in the eyes of much of the modern public.
Conversely, the arguments against Prop 8 on the basis of injustice and unfairness and the unhappiness and social stigma inflicted on gays by denying them the sanction of marriage equally miss the mark. The social status of gay couples is no different than that of anyone else who lives in an unmarried status, including widows.
And the utopian notion that progressive “change” will overcome the “centuries long struggle for civil rights” for gays is historically myopic. The past Progressive reforms of busing in our public schools (“white flight”) and recent reform of affordable housing credit as a civil right (“sub-prime” loan foreclosures and investor wipe-outs) are tragic cases of the unintended consequences of the misguided quest for “civil rights.”
The word “marriage” comes from the Latin word “mater” for mother. And “mater” is what matters in marriage. Marriage is unavoidably built around female sexuality and procreation. Marriage can only concern a relationship to a woman for procreation. It is the opposite of concubinage, which is an involuntary relationship with a man of higher status in a traditional society.
A social order that doesn’t protect a woman from rape or incest or concubinage can’t give women freedom to control who the father(s) of their children are, or their own bodies, or even their own health. Marriage is the structure of this freedom of choice for women in a modern society. Women’s freedom to control access to their body is what marriage is all about. Without that there is no societal basis for laws to protect marriage, including gay marriage. Feminists are essentially right about marriage but not same-sex marriage.
Defining marriage down to a mere contract between companions or non-procreative sex partners will only end up harming all women, for if everyone can marry, no one needs to and it becomes meaningless. Women and children will ultimately suffer most. Gay marriage robs something that belongs exclusively to women. Man-woman marriage is not anti-gay, it is pro-feminine. Same sex marriage is anti-feminist
Recently, a friend told me the story of a male priest who had married a wealthy male divorcee parishioner who had previously had a heterosexual marriage including a male child. Ironically, his former wife attended the gay wedding ceremony reportedly out of “tolerance” and “love.” Without man-woman marriage it is women themselves who will be left out and eventually relegated to quasi-concubine status. The absurdity of the above story is perhaps why the poet Byron wrote "all comedies are ended by marriage."
Marriage isn’t a conspiracy of patriarchs or the respectable capitalistic bourgeoisie class. It is part of the divine order – only through marriage can the world persist. Procreative marriage is the transcendent link back to the Creator and our origins and to the future beyond our lifespan. It is as old as the story in the Hebrew Bible Book of Genesis about Sarah, who could not conceive, and thus offered her maidservant Hagar as a second married wife to her husband Abraham.
It is more important to preserve freedom for most women than to elevate the status of a few famous elite gays. This transcends the politics and religion of Left and Right. Even though I am disappointed with the arguments of the proponents for Prop 8, I nonetheless urge you to Vote Yes on Prop 8.
See: Sam Shulman, "Gay Marriage-And Marriage," Orthodoxy Today, Nov. 2003.
Wayne Lusvardi, MSW, is a Pasadena resident and blogs at PasadenaSubRosa.typepad.com/
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Sarah Palin alarms the intellectuals because she is a rare voice from the workers whom the intellectuals parasitize
by Wayne Lusvardi
Recently, New York Times columnist and pop sociologist David Brooks has called Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin a “cancer to the Republican Party” for her alleged “anti-intellectualism.”. Brooks may have a point (up to a point) but opens up a line of argument that can be turned on its head.
To wit, the “professional” class no longer fights our wars, rescue people trapped in burning high rise buildings, build our infrastructure, aspire to be a middle manager at Wal-Mart, risk failure as business entrepreneurs, or start new voluntary associations such as churches. And they bear, rear, adopt or foster children much less than the working class, having given up or delayed parenthood for a professional career. In the main they are not doers. They are whiners, talkers, techies, coddlers, evaluators, lobbyists, and media spinners who largely depend on government regulations, licenses, or monopolies for their livelihoods. They hold many prestigious public or private offices like the character the Grand Pooh-Bah in Gilbert and Sullivan's opera The Mikado who bears the title “Lord-High-Of-Everything-Else.” They are the Pooh-Bah class not the doing class.
A prosecutor-attorney friend of mine has perhaps come up with an apt tag game analogy for Sarah Palin’s appeal to the business and working middle class – her directness and keen perception of the mostly un-verbalized resentment of the working class to the intrusions of the professional class acting in tandem with big government.
In the children’s game of tag, a person is selected as “it.” The other players stand in a circle a short distance away. The tagger yells “go” and the players try to avoid being tagged “it.” Even young children quickly learn strategies to dodge, hide behind others, run on angles, feign moves and re-direct the focus of the tagger on others to avoid from being “it.” But when a new kid shows up who doesn’t fall for all the fakes and feigns he or she can often walk right up to someone and surprisingly tag them “it.”
Sarah Palin is like that new kid in school in a child’s game of tag. She’s the outsider whose working class directness and common sense is a signal to the working class that she “gets it” (i.e., understands their situation). And obviously the “it” that Palin “gets” isn’t the same “it” of the dodging President Bill Clinton – (“it depends on what the meaning of ‘it’ is”). This is apparently a threat to professional journalists such as David Brooks.
Is Palin’s so-called “anti-intellectualism” a Republican problem which alienates the professional classes as Brooks contends? Maybe it is. But given that the professional class is so dependent on the government regulatory system is it any wonder that Republicans may consider them a lost constituency, investment bankers included. To the contrary, isn’t the real problem the resentment of the “doing class” to the attack on them by the professions and government?
All the current political campaign rhetoric about the “racism without racists” and the “Bradley effect”on Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama and the “class warfare card” of Sarah Palin only confuses and twists the issue of the attack on the working class with the false issues of racism, discrimination and mob populism.
The public issues of immediate concern to the “doing class” currently being re-framed as hidden racism, discrimination and intellectual regression are: sub-prime mortgages to lower income minorities and immigrants which now threaten retirement investments, the vote on same-sex marriage laws in California which threaten working class family values, and the qualifications of a Black presidential candidate who is perceived to have a track record of doing little to nothing but has been advanced to where he is largely due to affirmative action, transgressing the old work ethic of the working class.
To mischaracterize these issues in terms of race as another New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof, does; or as anti-intellectualism as David Brooks does, is to misunderstand what is going on. To use an intellectual’s term it is “false consciousness.”
Underlying all of the above issues is the premise that parents are entitled to hand on to their children the benefits of their class position and social mobility, including their property wealth, investments, and religious values. It is a concern about achieved social status versus ascribed social status by “accident of birth.” Modern American society has traditionally been modeled around achievement and merit; individualism over collectivism.
But counter-modernizing social and legal movements have created a “soft” society of automatic promoting schools, union jobs and affirmative action as quasi property rights, and affordable housing via sub-prime loans to combat the “hardness” of competitive capitalism. The state, not the market, is the redemptive dispenser of this “American dream” of feeling “at home” in all areas of social involvement (“it takes a village”). Conversely, President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind Act” is an attempt to inject competition back into public schools where the professional culture is antagonistic to its harshness. Obviously, a pre-emptive war of choice does not fit in to this utopian welfare vision of the American Dream; thus, the “unpopulism” of the Iraq War.
This shift from achievement to ascription and social privilege challenges the social class opportunity system that has made the U.S. unique and enviable to all, despite its flaws. The reforms of the New Deal, however imperfect, were never intended to undermine the class system but to provide a “floor” to it. The put down of Sarah Palin as a racist or anti-intellectual signals the call for a minimizing, if not ending, the “open society” of prosperity and entrepreneurial opportunity that have been a part of the class system of American society.
Under the newer welfare system based on ascribed rather than achieved status the life chances of the individual are tied to whatever collectivity to which they are defined as primarily belonging. Under such a system it will matter less what individuals do than what they are; or what somebody officially attributes them to be (e.g., underprivileged, gay, homeless, union member, victim, etc). This begs the question: who will do the allocating of such status? It will be professionals together with government. It is thus little wonder then that professionals, such as David Brooks and Nicholas Kristof, see Sarah Palin as a backward threat to the reforms of racial equality brought about by the Progressive intellectual establishment and liberal religion. It is also why Indian-British novelist and intellectual Salman Rushdie has called the pick of Sarah Palin for Vice-President “a joke.” Such utterances are a reflection of social class contempt and one-up-manship of the elite professional class at the doing class.
What is at stake with the upcoming election is not that Sarah Palin is racist or anti-intellectual but whether we want to end or marginalize our highly successful, albeit imperfect, open social class system. To do this would ultimately entail total control over each person’s life chances (e.g., their place of living, housing affordability, their investments, their value system, their health habits, etc.). The prospect of benign totalitarianism that such a shift would entail is not very appealing, especially to the doing class. That is why class warfare rhetoric has found fertile ground in the current national Presidential race; not because of racism, backward thinking, or mob populism. And that is why Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin has tagged David Brooks “it” without him even realizing it.
See Peter L. Berger and Brigitte Berger, "The Assault on Class", Worldview (July, 1972).
by Wayne Lusvardi
Recently, New York Times columnist and pop sociologist David Brooks has called Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin a “cancer to the Republican Party” for her alleged “anti-intellectualism.”. Brooks may have a point (up to a point) but opens up a line of argument that can be turned on its head.
To wit, the “professional” class no longer fights our wars, rescue people trapped in burning high rise buildings, build our infrastructure, aspire to be a middle manager at Wal-Mart, risk failure as business entrepreneurs, or start new voluntary associations such as churches. And they bear, rear, adopt or foster children much less than the working class, having given up or delayed parenthood for a professional career. In the main they are not doers. They are whiners, talkers, techies, coddlers, evaluators, lobbyists, and media spinners who largely depend on government regulations, licenses, or monopolies for their livelihoods. They hold many prestigious public or private offices like the character the Grand Pooh-Bah in Gilbert and Sullivan's opera The Mikado who bears the title “Lord-High-Of-Everything-Else.” They are the Pooh-Bah class not the doing class.
A prosecutor-attorney friend of mine has perhaps come up with an apt tag game analogy for Sarah Palin’s appeal to the business and working middle class – her directness and keen perception of the mostly un-verbalized resentment of the working class to the intrusions of the professional class acting in tandem with big government.
In the children’s game of tag, a person is selected as “it.” The other players stand in a circle a short distance away. The tagger yells “go” and the players try to avoid being tagged “it.” Even young children quickly learn strategies to dodge, hide behind others, run on angles, feign moves and re-direct the focus of the tagger on others to avoid from being “it.” But when a new kid shows up who doesn’t fall for all the fakes and feigns he or she can often walk right up to someone and surprisingly tag them “it.”
Sarah Palin is like that new kid in school in a child’s game of tag. She’s the outsider whose working class directness and common sense is a signal to the working class that she “gets it” (i.e., understands their situation). And obviously the “it” that Palin “gets” isn’t the same “it” of the dodging President Bill Clinton – (“it depends on what the meaning of ‘it’ is”). This is apparently a threat to professional journalists such as David Brooks.
Is Palin’s so-called “anti-intellectualism” a Republican problem which alienates the professional classes as Brooks contends? Maybe it is. But given that the professional class is so dependent on the government regulatory system is it any wonder that Republicans may consider them a lost constituency, investment bankers included. To the contrary, isn’t the real problem the resentment of the “doing class” to the attack on them by the professions and government?
All the current political campaign rhetoric about the “racism without racists” and the “Bradley effect”on Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama and the “class warfare card” of Sarah Palin only confuses and twists the issue of the attack on the working class with the false issues of racism, discrimination and mob populism.
The public issues of immediate concern to the “doing class” currently being re-framed as hidden racism, discrimination and intellectual regression are: sub-prime mortgages to lower income minorities and immigrants which now threaten retirement investments, the vote on same-sex marriage laws in California which threaten working class family values, and the qualifications of a Black presidential candidate who is perceived to have a track record of doing little to nothing but has been advanced to where he is largely due to affirmative action, transgressing the old work ethic of the working class.
To mischaracterize these issues in terms of race as another New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof, does; or as anti-intellectualism as David Brooks does, is to misunderstand what is going on. To use an intellectual’s term it is “false consciousness.”
Underlying all of the above issues is the premise that parents are entitled to hand on to their children the benefits of their class position and social mobility, including their property wealth, investments, and religious values. It is a concern about achieved social status versus ascribed social status by “accident of birth.” Modern American society has traditionally been modeled around achievement and merit; individualism over collectivism.
But counter-modernizing social and legal movements have created a “soft” society of automatic promoting schools, union jobs and affirmative action as quasi property rights, and affordable housing via sub-prime loans to combat the “hardness” of competitive capitalism. The state, not the market, is the redemptive dispenser of this “American dream” of feeling “at home” in all areas of social involvement (“it takes a village”). Conversely, President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind Act” is an attempt to inject competition back into public schools where the professional culture is antagonistic to its harshness. Obviously, a pre-emptive war of choice does not fit in to this utopian welfare vision of the American Dream; thus, the “unpopulism” of the Iraq War.
This shift from achievement to ascription and social privilege challenges the social class opportunity system that has made the U.S. unique and enviable to all, despite its flaws. The reforms of the New Deal, however imperfect, were never intended to undermine the class system but to provide a “floor” to it. The put down of Sarah Palin as a racist or anti-intellectual signals the call for a minimizing, if not ending, the “open society” of prosperity and entrepreneurial opportunity that have been a part of the class system of American society.
Under the newer welfare system based on ascribed rather than achieved status the life chances of the individual are tied to whatever collectivity to which they are defined as primarily belonging. Under such a system it will matter less what individuals do than what they are; or what somebody officially attributes them to be (e.g., underprivileged, gay, homeless, union member, victim, etc). This begs the question: who will do the allocating of such status? It will be professionals together with government. It is thus little wonder then that professionals, such as David Brooks and Nicholas Kristof, see Sarah Palin as a backward threat to the reforms of racial equality brought about by the Progressive intellectual establishment and liberal religion. It is also why Indian-British novelist and intellectual Salman Rushdie has called the pick of Sarah Palin for Vice-President “a joke.” Such utterances are a reflection of social class contempt and one-up-manship of the elite professional class at the doing class.
What is at stake with the upcoming election is not that Sarah Palin is racist or anti-intellectual but whether we want to end or marginalize our highly successful, albeit imperfect, open social class system. To do this would ultimately entail total control over each person’s life chances (e.g., their place of living, housing affordability, their investments, their value system, their health habits, etc.). The prospect of benign totalitarianism that such a shift would entail is not very appealing, especially to the doing class. That is why class warfare rhetoric has found fertile ground in the current national Presidential race; not because of racism, backward thinking, or mob populism. And that is why Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin has tagged David Brooks “it” without him even realizing it.
See Peter L. Berger and Brigitte Berger, "The Assault on Class", Worldview (July, 1972).
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Colusa defends boys who drew caricatures
Colusa County has come to the defense of the youths who created the controversial "Waldo Watermelon Seed" caricature for the county's State Fair exhibit. The character was removed Wednesday after a local African American couple said the image evoked negative stereotypes of African Americans.
The exhibit was created by wards at Fout Springs Boys Correctional Facility – "roughly 40 percent Latino and 40 percent African American" – said Senior Deputy County Counsel Margaret Kemp-Williams.
The youths "faced the challenge of creating a display to celebrate the strengths of Colusa County's agriculture industry while paying homage to the State Fair's theme, 'The State Fair Goes Hollywood,' " Kemp-Williams said in a statement.
Colusa County's seed-producing crops generate $30 million a year, so the young men, under the guidance of teacher Ralph Minto, "decided to create a display honoring the world-traveling seed stars of the county: watermelon, cucumber, pumpkin and tomato," Kemp-Williams said.
"The boys were assigned the task of drawing caricatures of the seeds – characteristic of their ages and this era, they drew sharp images worthy of video game or Cartoon Network debut," Kemp-Williams explained. Their images were enlarged, drawn on Styrofoam and colored. "Each seed is depicted true to its color in real life," Kemp-Williams said. "Once completed, the Colusa County traveling stars were aptly named 'Diamond Crested Cucumber Seed,' a rapper; 'Patrick Pumpkin Seed,' a rough, tough guy; 'Rocky Tomato Seed,' a boxer; and 'Waldo Watermelon Seed,' a happy guy – why? Because who can be unhappy when eating watermelon? "We are saddened that the fine work of these young men is now cast under a cloud of unintended racism," she said. "We ask that you applaud their hard work and know that they were working to honor Colusa County with their artistic depiction of a genre of 'ag' products produced in stellar quantities by the county: seeds."
Veronica Hannon Thrasher, who objected to the caricature along with her husband, said, "I applaud these students' efforts. But they probably never had the benefit of a black history class" that showed images depicting African Americans "as a happy black slave eating watermelon. If the students were presented with that history, they might have drawn 'Waldo Watermelon Seed' a little differently."
Source
Colusa County has come to the defense of the youths who created the controversial "Waldo Watermelon Seed" caricature for the county's State Fair exhibit. The character was removed Wednesday after a local African American couple said the image evoked negative stereotypes of African Americans.
The exhibit was created by wards at Fout Springs Boys Correctional Facility – "roughly 40 percent Latino and 40 percent African American" – said Senior Deputy County Counsel Margaret Kemp-Williams.
The youths "faced the challenge of creating a display to celebrate the strengths of Colusa County's agriculture industry while paying homage to the State Fair's theme, 'The State Fair Goes Hollywood,' " Kemp-Williams said in a statement.
Colusa County's seed-producing crops generate $30 million a year, so the young men, under the guidance of teacher Ralph Minto, "decided to create a display honoring the world-traveling seed stars of the county: watermelon, cucumber, pumpkin and tomato," Kemp-Williams said.
"The boys were assigned the task of drawing caricatures of the seeds – characteristic of their ages and this era, they drew sharp images worthy of video game or Cartoon Network debut," Kemp-Williams explained. Their images were enlarged, drawn on Styrofoam and colored. "Each seed is depicted true to its color in real life," Kemp-Williams said. "Once completed, the Colusa County traveling stars were aptly named 'Diamond Crested Cucumber Seed,' a rapper; 'Patrick Pumpkin Seed,' a rough, tough guy; 'Rocky Tomato Seed,' a boxer; and 'Waldo Watermelon Seed,' a happy guy – why? Because who can be unhappy when eating watermelon? "We are saddened that the fine work of these young men is now cast under a cloud of unintended racism," she said. "We ask that you applaud their hard work and know that they were working to honor Colusa County with their artistic depiction of a genre of 'ag' products produced in stellar quantities by the county: seeds."
Veronica Hannon Thrasher, who objected to the caricature along with her husband, said, "I applaud these students' efforts. But they probably never had the benefit of a black history class" that showed images depicting African Americans "as a happy black slave eating watermelon. If the students were presented with that history, they might have drawn 'Waldo Watermelon Seed' a little differently."
Source
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Gore's surprise visit highlights Netroots conference
Former vice president speaks at Austin convention for liberal bloggers
By Patrick Beach
Name-dropping Al Gore and his call for a switch to clean, renewable energy within 10 years was enough to pull whoops of approval from the 2,000 or 3,000 marauding liberals gathered for Netroots Nation at the Austin Convention Center on Saturday morning. So when the former vice president and Nobel Prize co-winner made a surprise — and cleverly scripted — appearance during U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's talk, it looked like the conference might turn into a faint-in.
Talk that Pelosi (who is arguably so left-leaning that her parenthetical should be D-Beijing) would have a Very Special Guest had been buzzing about the conference of liberal bloggers, pols and media types since it began Thursday (it concludes today). But it wasn't clear to attendees that something was afoot until a schedule change handed out Saturday morning indicated the speaker's talk would last 45 minutes longer than previously indicated.
Not that Gore's appearance was necessary to whip up the troops. From the beginning, it was clear these people were convinced the electoral map would be repainted with a brush sopping with blue paint come November. The believers will tell you it's morning, that they smell the napalm. And it smells like, oh, yes, victory.
It didn't seem to matter that the conservative and much smaller Defending the American Dream Summit — featuring syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin and Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr — was going on in Austin at the same time. That was miles from downtown, so there was little chance for a rumble.
With the current administration's low approval rating, a charismatic presumptive Democratic nominee and a Republican opponent some in the GOP have been reluctant to even air-kiss, the energy was palpable and, like the political blogosphere, terribly self-confirming.
They went to panels about how the presidential election would be won house by house, block by block. They staged mock media interviews and critiqued themselves, and showed films ("Crawford") and Internet videos ("Harry Potter and Dark Lord Waldemart"). They attended panels on the war, health care, online social networks, volunteer organizing and expanding the networking power of something called an "Internet."
There was even one panel Friday featuring Princeton economics professor and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (wearing, as if to galvanize stereotype, what appeared to be Birkenstocks) that was essentially about how the media weren't liberal enough. As they say, only in Austin.
Filmmaker Paul Stekler, who teaches film production and politics at the University of Texas, said:"As you have greater democratization (through the use of technology to distribute one's message), you also have a greater degree of what's called confirmation bias. We live in a very different and weird world in terms of dissemination of information right now."
Indeed, you couldn't find anybody who disagreed that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were "two ignoramuses," a label hurled by Parag Mehta, the Democratic National Committee's director of training.
Big names? Got 'em. There was Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, founder of the Daily Kos political blog, who hatched the idea a few years ago to get his like-minded pals together and who, in a Friday lunchtime keynote with Harold Ford Jr., chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, seemed amazed at what the notion had unleashed. "We're going to keep growing; we're going to keep pushing for an unapologetic Democratic Party," Moulitsas said.
Then there was John Dean, the former Nixon White House counsel who has made a second career of railing against what he considers right-wing excesses the way recovering alcoholics preach against strong drink. "I have deep fear of my former tribe, and what they might do particularly in the law," Dean said, before going on to refer to former Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani as "Richard Nixon on crystal meth."
It's plinking bass in a barrel to paint liberals as overly intellectual types incapable of having fun unless reading Noam Chomsky counts, and it sure does for them. And there were a handful of colorful characters, including some men from Cedar Creek who looked like bikers and represented the Warrior Wolf Society, which they described as "a group of pagan warriors with wolf totem spirit," and a guy in a Bush mask and clothing with prison stripes.
But for the most part, these were serious-minded people, and decorum prevailed. When a few people had the temerity to shout at Pelosi and Gore, they got shushed as mercilessly as they would have at a Nanci Griffith concert.
The no fun thing? Maybe it's because, as Democrats, they're not used to having it. The incredible imploding presidential campaigns of Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis and John Kerry were used as textbook examples of what not to do. As political ad man John Rowley put it, he's been in the business for 15 years and only the last two have been good in terms of the political tide. Still, he said, "We've got to get ready for the day when we're not swimming downstream."
In other words, what a pendulum does is swing. But technology is power, and the left has been quicker to adopt it. As Gore put it Saturday morning: "You are at the cutting edge of a new era of history. You will look back many years from now and tell your grandchildren about coming here to Austin, Texas, and about the first two meetings of Netroots Nation, and you will tell them that this was the beginning of an effort that was the start to reclaim the integrity of American democracy."
That is exactly what Joe Trippi had in mind. It was the one-time Howard Dean campaign aide who saw, perhaps a little too early and a little too enthusiastically, the transformative power of the Web. As he walked from one place to another Friday afternoon, he got stopped every 20 feet or so by people who knew him or at least knew of his ideas. And this is what they had wrought; this is what he had predicted. "It's amazing," Trippi said. "I knew it was going to happen, but I'm still blown away that it happened."
The above mocking article appeared in the AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN on Sunday, July 20, 2008 but was swiftly taken down in response to Leftist outrage
Former vice president speaks at Austin convention for liberal bloggers
By Patrick Beach
Name-dropping Al Gore and his call for a switch to clean, renewable energy within 10 years was enough to pull whoops of approval from the 2,000 or 3,000 marauding liberals gathered for Netroots Nation at the Austin Convention Center on Saturday morning. So when the former vice president and Nobel Prize co-winner made a surprise — and cleverly scripted — appearance during U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's talk, it looked like the conference might turn into a faint-in.
Talk that Pelosi (who is arguably so left-leaning that her parenthetical should be D-Beijing) would have a Very Special Guest had been buzzing about the conference of liberal bloggers, pols and media types since it began Thursday (it concludes today). But it wasn't clear to attendees that something was afoot until a schedule change handed out Saturday morning indicated the speaker's talk would last 45 minutes longer than previously indicated.
Not that Gore's appearance was necessary to whip up the troops. From the beginning, it was clear these people were convinced the electoral map would be repainted with a brush sopping with blue paint come November. The believers will tell you it's morning, that they smell the napalm. And it smells like, oh, yes, victory.
It didn't seem to matter that the conservative and much smaller Defending the American Dream Summit — featuring syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin and Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr — was going on in Austin at the same time. That was miles from downtown, so there was little chance for a rumble.
With the current administration's low approval rating, a charismatic presumptive Democratic nominee and a Republican opponent some in the GOP have been reluctant to even air-kiss, the energy was palpable and, like the political blogosphere, terribly self-confirming.
They went to panels about how the presidential election would be won house by house, block by block. They staged mock media interviews and critiqued themselves, and showed films ("Crawford") and Internet videos ("Harry Potter and Dark Lord Waldemart"). They attended panels on the war, health care, online social networks, volunteer organizing and expanding the networking power of something called an "Internet."
There was even one panel Friday featuring Princeton economics professor and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (wearing, as if to galvanize stereotype, what appeared to be Birkenstocks) that was essentially about how the media weren't liberal enough. As they say, only in Austin.
Filmmaker Paul Stekler, who teaches film production and politics at the University of Texas, said:"As you have greater democratization (through the use of technology to distribute one's message), you also have a greater degree of what's called confirmation bias. We live in a very different and weird world in terms of dissemination of information right now."
Indeed, you couldn't find anybody who disagreed that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were "two ignoramuses," a label hurled by Parag Mehta, the Democratic National Committee's director of training.
Big names? Got 'em. There was Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, founder of the Daily Kos political blog, who hatched the idea a few years ago to get his like-minded pals together and who, in a Friday lunchtime keynote with Harold Ford Jr., chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, seemed amazed at what the notion had unleashed. "We're going to keep growing; we're going to keep pushing for an unapologetic Democratic Party," Moulitsas said.
Then there was John Dean, the former Nixon White House counsel who has made a second career of railing against what he considers right-wing excesses the way recovering alcoholics preach against strong drink. "I have deep fear of my former tribe, and what they might do particularly in the law," Dean said, before going on to refer to former Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani as "Richard Nixon on crystal meth."
It's plinking bass in a barrel to paint liberals as overly intellectual types incapable of having fun unless reading Noam Chomsky counts, and it sure does for them. And there were a handful of colorful characters, including some men from Cedar Creek who looked like bikers and represented the Warrior Wolf Society, which they described as "a group of pagan warriors with wolf totem spirit," and a guy in a Bush mask and clothing with prison stripes.
But for the most part, these were serious-minded people, and decorum prevailed. When a few people had the temerity to shout at Pelosi and Gore, they got shushed as mercilessly as they would have at a Nanci Griffith concert.
The no fun thing? Maybe it's because, as Democrats, they're not used to having it. The incredible imploding presidential campaigns of Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis and John Kerry were used as textbook examples of what not to do. As political ad man John Rowley put it, he's been in the business for 15 years and only the last two have been good in terms of the political tide. Still, he said, "We've got to get ready for the day when we're not swimming downstream."
In other words, what a pendulum does is swing. But technology is power, and the left has been quicker to adopt it. As Gore put it Saturday morning: "You are at the cutting edge of a new era of history. You will look back many years from now and tell your grandchildren about coming here to Austin, Texas, and about the first two meetings of Netroots Nation, and you will tell them that this was the beginning of an effort that was the start to reclaim the integrity of American democracy."
That is exactly what Joe Trippi had in mind. It was the one-time Howard Dean campaign aide who saw, perhaps a little too early and a little too enthusiastically, the transformative power of the Web. As he walked from one place to another Friday afternoon, he got stopped every 20 feet or so by people who knew him or at least knew of his ideas. And this is what they had wrought; this is what he had predicted. "It's amazing," Trippi said. "I knew it was going to happen, but I'm still blown away that it happened."
The above mocking article appeared in the AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN on Sunday, July 20, 2008 but was swiftly taken down in response to Leftist outrage
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Sorry, No
By DAVID PRYCE-JONES
Patrick J. Buchanan is evidently an unhappy and angry man. He wants to bang the table, and shout that the West and its Christian civilization are over and done with. And this did not happen through any consequential process of evolution and change. No, indeed. Loss and decay are directly attributable to the wretched politicians, so-called statesmen, who have led us astray for the past hundred years. And the most wretched of all these is — wait for it — Winston Churchill.
Churchill was at the forefront of British public life for about 60 years, at one time or another holding all the great offices of state. As might be expected, his judgments were often at fault, sometimes grievously, as when he broke a miners’ strike with force or agreed to the 1922 partition of Transjordan. Although Buchanan does not mention these specific incidents, or others of the same kind on the home front, for the first 200 or so pages of this diatribe he does his level best to blacken Churchill in the context of foreign affairs — as a warmonger in 1914; vindictive towards Germany over the Treaty of Versailles; wrong over the size and role of the British navy; blind to the need to keep Japan and Italy as allies; dangerous in advocating war when Hitler invaded the Rhineland; and finally complicit in the guarantee actually given in March 1939 by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain that if Poland were attacked Britain would go to war in its defense. For Buchanan, this guarantee was the blunder of all blunders, from which came nothing but disaster.
In the 1930s, democracy everywhere was imploding under the challenge posed by Hitler and Nazism. Churchill was the one contemporary statesman who spelled out the reality that a totalitarian future was engulfing the world. Becoming prime minister at a moment when Hitler had won seemingly irreversible military victories, Churchill committed Britain to fight Nazism to the death. The general public in the Anglosphere and far beyond has long held that even if resistance to Nazism was a gamble for the highest stakes, Churchill was right to take it. Whatever mistakes he may have made over other, lesser issues, this determination to destroy Hitler earned him an honored place in history.
Buchanan will have none of that. If Churchill was the great man he is reputed to be in this popular characterization, so it seems to Buchanan, his was the kind of greatness that did untold and everlasting damage. Buchanan makes the particularly grave charges that defiance of Hitler quite pointlessly cost millions of lives, put paid to the British Empire, and condemned half of Europe to live under Communism for some 40 ghastly years. These horrors all stemmed from adventures abroad that a real statesman would have perceived were not in the national interest.
Buchanan seems never to have heard of the all-important Law of Unintended Consequences that governs so much human endeavor and complicates judgment. As often as not, and unpredictably as well, decisions that are right and justified nonetheless may have harmful and unjustified outcomes. This is the case here. The surrender of half of Europe to Stalinism turned out unexpectedly to be part of the price that had to be paid to keep the other half free. In a further unexpected consequence, possession of that conquered bloc eventually helped to destroy Communism from within.
Hitler and Stalin are directly responsible for the crimes committed in their names. To shift onto Churchill the ultimate responsibility for the crimes of others is to confuse the agent and the victim, and further draws a wholly misleading moral equivalence between totalitarian aggression and democratic self-defense.
Much of Buchanan’s mystification depends either on deprecating or exaggerating the role of the individual in history, according to whatever polemical point he is out to make. In the first instance, then, he fails to credit the willpower and imagination shown by Churchill on taking office as prime minister in May 1940. Without Churchill, the British elite might well have chosen a course that betrayed the nation and forfeited its independence. After the Dunkirk debacle, his own foreign minister, Lord Halifax, was recommending an approach via the Italians to discover what terms Hitler might offer. Many prominent people — including dukes and other aristocrats, and senior civil servants — were forming a peace party. More threatening still, a quisling-type regime under the former King Edward VIII, now Duke of Windsor, and the British Union of Fascists, led by Oswald Mosley, was waiting in the wings. If this peace party had prevailed, Nazism might then have been established indefinitely, and the suffering would have been that much the greater.
Hitler duly made a peace offer. Germany was to have sole control of the continent of Europe, with the power to redraw boundaries, and the British were to retain their empire. Confident that they were speaking as representatives of one master race to another, Hitler and his propagandist Goebbels assumed the British would surely appreciate that this proposed division of the spoils was in their interest. They could not understand that Churchill saw Nazism as an absolute evil with which there could be no compromise. Churchill’s flat rejection surprised and then infuriated them. Churchill, they declared and may even have believed, was nothing but a warmonger who thus brought destruction on his country and its empire, a fate which they themselves claimed to regret.
In addition to echoing Hitler and Goebbels with astonishing faithfulness, Buchanan supposes that their promises should have been trusted. But once they were undisputed rulers of a Nazi Europe the balance of power would have been in their favor, creating the temptation to subjugate Britain as well.
If the loss of the empire was also included in the price of victory over Nazism, the British people have proved these past 50 years that they were willing to pay it. What was famously acquired in a fit of absent-mindedness was given up without regret or even nostalgia. War or no war, the British Empire could not have survived the 20th century. The Treasury had always begrudged the expense of it; the armed forces resented the dispersal of resources. Bernard Shaw, J. A. Hobson and the Marxists, Fabians and influential socialist professors such as N. H. Brailsford and R. H. Tawney and G. D. H. Cole, the Bloomsbury coterie, the universities, even the patriotic Orwell formed a chorus passionately turning public opinion against colonialism and imperialism. The Boers, Gandhi and the Indian Congress, Zaghlul Pasha and the Egyptian nationalists, had learnt from their English peers to launch protest movements. They had only to mobilize mobs on the streets in the name of nationalism, and self-rule would be theirs. In this second instance, Churchill was in the grip of historic forces far too powerful to be at the command of any individual, even, or perhaps especially, one as imperialist as he.
To mount this attack on Churchill, Buchanan employs a strange technique all his own of making some statement and backing it up by one or more quotations from a secondary source, as though reliance on others must prove that he is in the right. Some pages carry three or four such quotations, almost in the manner of an anthology. The huge majority of these sources, needless to say, are British writers with axes to grind, and some of them are crackpots or closet admirers of Nazism. A. J. P. Taylor, for one, seems to have been a major influence on Buchanan; Taylor was the first to put forward the demonstrably silly proposition that Hitler was a politician like any other, and a reasonable man who could have been accommodated by other reasonable men.
As the book unfolds, the puzzled reader is driven to ask himself more and more insistently what Buchanan’s intention is. What is the point of trying to twist Churchill’s wartime role inside out? Does he seriously believe there is no such thing as a just war? He can’t want to denigrate democracy, can he? Nor can he really want to rehabilitate Hitler, can he? He can’t think Stalin might have been a sincere ally, can he? Whatever is an American doing bewailing the end of the British Empire and criticizing his own country for picking up as many of the pieces as possible? Why the superficiality of the argument? Why the aggressively politicized tone?
After hundreds of pages, the final sentence of the book suddenly illuminates these questions: “And to show the world he means business, President Bush has had placed in his Oval Office a bust of Winston Churchill.” So here’s another wretched so-called statesman repeating old mistakes by setting off in search of adventures abroad that are not in the national interest, indeed unnecessary. So Churchill had to be knocked down in order to scotch any notion that President Bush in his foreign policy might have been following a good and brave example.
Oh well.
(From a review of Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World by Patrick J. Buchanan in National Review)
By DAVID PRYCE-JONES
Patrick J. Buchanan is evidently an unhappy and angry man. He wants to bang the table, and shout that the West and its Christian civilization are over and done with. And this did not happen through any consequential process of evolution and change. No, indeed. Loss and decay are directly attributable to the wretched politicians, so-called statesmen, who have led us astray for the past hundred years. And the most wretched of all these is — wait for it — Winston Churchill.
Churchill was at the forefront of British public life for about 60 years, at one time or another holding all the great offices of state. As might be expected, his judgments were often at fault, sometimes grievously, as when he broke a miners’ strike with force or agreed to the 1922 partition of Transjordan. Although Buchanan does not mention these specific incidents, or others of the same kind on the home front, for the first 200 or so pages of this diatribe he does his level best to blacken Churchill in the context of foreign affairs — as a warmonger in 1914; vindictive towards Germany over the Treaty of Versailles; wrong over the size and role of the British navy; blind to the need to keep Japan and Italy as allies; dangerous in advocating war when Hitler invaded the Rhineland; and finally complicit in the guarantee actually given in March 1939 by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain that if Poland were attacked Britain would go to war in its defense. For Buchanan, this guarantee was the blunder of all blunders, from which came nothing but disaster.
In the 1930s, democracy everywhere was imploding under the challenge posed by Hitler and Nazism. Churchill was the one contemporary statesman who spelled out the reality that a totalitarian future was engulfing the world. Becoming prime minister at a moment when Hitler had won seemingly irreversible military victories, Churchill committed Britain to fight Nazism to the death. The general public in the Anglosphere and far beyond has long held that even if resistance to Nazism was a gamble for the highest stakes, Churchill was right to take it. Whatever mistakes he may have made over other, lesser issues, this determination to destroy Hitler earned him an honored place in history.
Buchanan will have none of that. If Churchill was the great man he is reputed to be in this popular characterization, so it seems to Buchanan, his was the kind of greatness that did untold and everlasting damage. Buchanan makes the particularly grave charges that defiance of Hitler quite pointlessly cost millions of lives, put paid to the British Empire, and condemned half of Europe to live under Communism for some 40 ghastly years. These horrors all stemmed from adventures abroad that a real statesman would have perceived were not in the national interest.
Buchanan seems never to have heard of the all-important Law of Unintended Consequences that governs so much human endeavor and complicates judgment. As often as not, and unpredictably as well, decisions that are right and justified nonetheless may have harmful and unjustified outcomes. This is the case here. The surrender of half of Europe to Stalinism turned out unexpectedly to be part of the price that had to be paid to keep the other half free. In a further unexpected consequence, possession of that conquered bloc eventually helped to destroy Communism from within.
Hitler and Stalin are directly responsible for the crimes committed in their names. To shift onto Churchill the ultimate responsibility for the crimes of others is to confuse the agent and the victim, and further draws a wholly misleading moral equivalence between totalitarian aggression and democratic self-defense.
Much of Buchanan’s mystification depends either on deprecating or exaggerating the role of the individual in history, according to whatever polemical point he is out to make. In the first instance, then, he fails to credit the willpower and imagination shown by Churchill on taking office as prime minister in May 1940. Without Churchill, the British elite might well have chosen a course that betrayed the nation and forfeited its independence. After the Dunkirk debacle, his own foreign minister, Lord Halifax, was recommending an approach via the Italians to discover what terms Hitler might offer. Many prominent people — including dukes and other aristocrats, and senior civil servants — were forming a peace party. More threatening still, a quisling-type regime under the former King Edward VIII, now Duke of Windsor, and the British Union of Fascists, led by Oswald Mosley, was waiting in the wings. If this peace party had prevailed, Nazism might then have been established indefinitely, and the suffering would have been that much the greater.
Hitler duly made a peace offer. Germany was to have sole control of the continent of Europe, with the power to redraw boundaries, and the British were to retain their empire. Confident that they were speaking as representatives of one master race to another, Hitler and his propagandist Goebbels assumed the British would surely appreciate that this proposed division of the spoils was in their interest. They could not understand that Churchill saw Nazism as an absolute evil with which there could be no compromise. Churchill’s flat rejection surprised and then infuriated them. Churchill, they declared and may even have believed, was nothing but a warmonger who thus brought destruction on his country and its empire, a fate which they themselves claimed to regret.
In addition to echoing Hitler and Goebbels with astonishing faithfulness, Buchanan supposes that their promises should have been trusted. But once they were undisputed rulers of a Nazi Europe the balance of power would have been in their favor, creating the temptation to subjugate Britain as well.
If the loss of the empire was also included in the price of victory over Nazism, the British people have proved these past 50 years that they were willing to pay it. What was famously acquired in a fit of absent-mindedness was given up without regret or even nostalgia. War or no war, the British Empire could not have survived the 20th century. The Treasury had always begrudged the expense of it; the armed forces resented the dispersal of resources. Bernard Shaw, J. A. Hobson and the Marxists, Fabians and influential socialist professors such as N. H. Brailsford and R. H. Tawney and G. D. H. Cole, the Bloomsbury coterie, the universities, even the patriotic Orwell formed a chorus passionately turning public opinion against colonialism and imperialism. The Boers, Gandhi and the Indian Congress, Zaghlul Pasha and the Egyptian nationalists, had learnt from their English peers to launch protest movements. They had only to mobilize mobs on the streets in the name of nationalism, and self-rule would be theirs. In this second instance, Churchill was in the grip of historic forces far too powerful to be at the command of any individual, even, or perhaps especially, one as imperialist as he.
To mount this attack on Churchill, Buchanan employs a strange technique all his own of making some statement and backing it up by one or more quotations from a secondary source, as though reliance on others must prove that he is in the right. Some pages carry three or four such quotations, almost in the manner of an anthology. The huge majority of these sources, needless to say, are British writers with axes to grind, and some of them are crackpots or closet admirers of Nazism. A. J. P. Taylor, for one, seems to have been a major influence on Buchanan; Taylor was the first to put forward the demonstrably silly proposition that Hitler was a politician like any other, and a reasonable man who could have been accommodated by other reasonable men.
As the book unfolds, the puzzled reader is driven to ask himself more and more insistently what Buchanan’s intention is. What is the point of trying to twist Churchill’s wartime role inside out? Does he seriously believe there is no such thing as a just war? He can’t want to denigrate democracy, can he? Nor can he really want to rehabilitate Hitler, can he? He can’t think Stalin might have been a sincere ally, can he? Whatever is an American doing bewailing the end of the British Empire and criticizing his own country for picking up as many of the pieces as possible? Why the superficiality of the argument? Why the aggressively politicized tone?
After hundreds of pages, the final sentence of the book suddenly illuminates these questions: “And to show the world he means business, President Bush has had placed in his Oval Office a bust of Winston Churchill.” So here’s another wretched so-called statesman repeating old mistakes by setting off in search of adventures abroad that are not in the national interest, indeed unnecessary. So Churchill had to be knocked down in order to scotch any notion that President Bush in his foreign policy might have been following a good and brave example.
Oh well.
(From a review of Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World by Patrick J. Buchanan in National Review)
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
The Irrelevance of the Status of Oughts
Scott Scheule
What I'm about to say strikes me as obvious, but no less illustrious a personage as a coblogger had to have the point explained to him, so I'll spell it out. [To be fair, we merely misunderstood each other: upon explanation he agreed with me.]
Much is made of whether morality is objective or subjective. While it's an interesting ontological question, when it comes down to the question of which moral system is right or preferable, the question is entirely irrelevant.
To wit, some seem to think that if they can prove morality subjective, then utilitarianism wins over rights theories. This is bullshit. If morality is subjective, then even the basic axioms of utilitarianism are subjective. There is no objective command: Thou shalt increase utility. Rather, there is only the preference of the individual for a world with more utility, which is just as subjective as the preference of an individual for a world with strong property rights, or no capital punishment, etc. By the same token, if morality is objective, then one can equally well believe that it is objectively right to increase utility or that it is objectively right to respect deontological rights.
Some also seem to think that believing morality subjective leads to moral relativism. This is just as wrong. To be sure, my subjective moral preference may be for a world where right or wrong is decided by community standards. But my subjective preference may just as well be otherwise. And by the same token, moral relativism could easily be true, if morality is objective. It would be a fact of the matter that whatever the community standards are, they fix right and wrong. Or not.
There is a tendency for some to pass off a particular morality as objective, while others are just baseless opinions. Economists love this. It gives one side a rhetorical punch--they can claim to be the one who doesn't believe in spooky disembodied moral commands. Rather they believe in cold hard scientific fact--that is, of course, they believe in their personal moral preferences. This leads to the same conversation again and again, where the other side has to point out that the ontological status of morality cuts both ways. But there's no winner in this game of More Materialist Than Thou.
It goes like this:
HALL: Hey, Oates, you stole my bag of M&Ms.
OATES: Shut up, Daryl, they make me happier than you.
HALL: You have no right to my bag of M&Ms! I do!
OATES: There are no such thing as rights.
HALL: Why not?
OATES: It's all just a matter of personal preference. You prefer to keep your M&Ms. Instead, we should just decide things on what makes people happier.
HALL: But isn't saying that we should make people happy a personal preference, too?
OATES: No, it's not. Here, let me draw you the Supply-Demand Graph.
HALL: Nice work. I'm glad we bitched and moaned until they gave us an easel. But I don't get the point of your graph.
OATES: Well, look, it clearly says that if I get the M&Ms, there's a net increase in efficiency.
HALL: So?
OATES: So that's good!
HALL: But what's good is just a personal preference!
OATES: Hmm. Well maybe what's good isn't a personal preference. Maybe morality is real, and the idea that you should give me the M&Ms is real too.
HALL: But maybe the idea that I should keep the M&Ms is real, too!
OATES: We're on.
Exit Oates.
HALL: Hey! Bring back my damn M&Ms!
In sum, the question of whether morality is subjective or objective, like the blogosphere, has theoretical but no practical import.
http://distributedrepublic.net/archives/2008/06/06/the-irrelevance-status-oughts
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Scientists find corals flourishing on Bikini Atoll
A mushroom cloud rises after the detonation of the 11-megaton nuclear device bomb 'Romeo' over Bikini Atoll in March 1954.
SOME corals are again flourishing on Bikini Atoll, the Pacific site of the largest American atom bomb ever exploded, but other species have disappeared.
A team of international scientists, including Australians, recently dived on the atoll, more than half a century after the stunning blast, to examine its marine life.
Zoe Richards from Queensland's James Cook University, along with other scientists from Germany, Italy, Hawaii and the Marshall Islands, said the team had dived into the vast Bravo Crater left by the 1954 atom bomb.
The 15 mega-tonne bomb was a thousand times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima in Japan in WWII.
It vapourised three islands, raised water temperatures to 55,000 degrees, shook islands 200km away and left a crater 2km wide and 73m deep.
Ms Richards said she did not know what to expect when she dived on the crater but was surprised to find huge matrices of branching Porites coral - up to eight metres high - had established, creating thriving coral reef habitat.
"Throughout other parts of the lagoon it was awesome to see coral cover as high as 80 per cent and large tree-like branching coral formations with trunks 30cm thick.
"It was fascinating - I've never seen corals growing like trees outside of the Marshall Islands.''
The healthy condition of the coral at Bikini today was proof of the atoll's resilience and ability to bounce back from massive disturbances if the reef was left undisturbed and there were healthy nearby reefs to source the recovery.''
But Ms Richards said the research also revealed a disturbingly high level of loss of coral species from the atoll.
"Compared with a famous study made before the atomic tests were carried out, the team established that 42 species were missing compared to the early 1950s.
"At least 28 of these species losses appear to be genuine local extinctions probably due to the 23 bombs that were exploded there from 1946-58, or the resulting radioactivity, increased nutrient levels and smothering from fine sediments.''
The coral survey was carried out at the request of the atoll's local government.
For comparison the team also dived on neighbouring Rongelap Atoll, where no atomic tests were carried out directly although the atoll was contaminated by radioactive ash from the Bravo Bomb.
Local inhabitants were also evacuated and, for the most part, have not returned.
The marine environment at this atoll was found to be in a pristine condition.
"The team thinks that Rongelap Atoll is potentially seeding Bikini's recovery because it is the second-largest atoll in the world with a huge amount of coral reef diversity and biomass and lies upstream from Bikini,'' Ms Richards said.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/world/corals-flourish-on-bikini-atoll/story-e6frf7mx-1111116066596
A mushroom cloud rises after the detonation of the 11-megaton nuclear device bomb 'Romeo' over Bikini Atoll in March 1954.
SOME corals are again flourishing on Bikini Atoll, the Pacific site of the largest American atom bomb ever exploded, but other species have disappeared.
A team of international scientists, including Australians, recently dived on the atoll, more than half a century after the stunning blast, to examine its marine life.
Zoe Richards from Queensland's James Cook University, along with other scientists from Germany, Italy, Hawaii and the Marshall Islands, said the team had dived into the vast Bravo Crater left by the 1954 atom bomb.
The 15 mega-tonne bomb was a thousand times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima in Japan in WWII.
It vapourised three islands, raised water temperatures to 55,000 degrees, shook islands 200km away and left a crater 2km wide and 73m deep.
Ms Richards said she did not know what to expect when she dived on the crater but was surprised to find huge matrices of branching Porites coral - up to eight metres high - had established, creating thriving coral reef habitat.
"Throughout other parts of the lagoon it was awesome to see coral cover as high as 80 per cent and large tree-like branching coral formations with trunks 30cm thick.
"It was fascinating - I've never seen corals growing like trees outside of the Marshall Islands.''
The healthy condition of the coral at Bikini today was proof of the atoll's resilience and ability to bounce back from massive disturbances if the reef was left undisturbed and there were healthy nearby reefs to source the recovery.''
But Ms Richards said the research also revealed a disturbingly high level of loss of coral species from the atoll.
"Compared with a famous study made before the atomic tests were carried out, the team established that 42 species were missing compared to the early 1950s.
"At least 28 of these species losses appear to be genuine local extinctions probably due to the 23 bombs that were exploded there from 1946-58, or the resulting radioactivity, increased nutrient levels and smothering from fine sediments.''
The coral survey was carried out at the request of the atoll's local government.
For comparison the team also dived on neighbouring Rongelap Atoll, where no atomic tests were carried out directly although the atoll was contaminated by radioactive ash from the Bravo Bomb.
Local inhabitants were also evacuated and, for the most part, have not returned.
The marine environment at this atoll was found to be in a pristine condition.
"The team thinks that Rongelap Atoll is potentially seeding Bikini's recovery because it is the second-largest atoll in the world with a huge amount of coral reef diversity and biomass and lies upstream from Bikini,'' Ms Richards said.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/world/corals-flourish-on-bikini-atoll/story-e6frf7mx-1111116066596
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Swim star Nick D'Arcy 'drunkenly big-noting himself'
By Ben English, Jim Wilson and Rebecca Williams
MOMENTS before allegedly launching the king-hit that is likely to end his Olympic dream, it is claimed swim star Nick D'Arcy was drunkenly big-noting himself at a Sydney nightclub.
Fuelled by up to 12 drinks, D'Arcy allegedly reacted with a single blow when former swim champ Simon Cowley told him to tone down his bragging.
The blow floored Cowley, leaving the 27 year old with a broken jaw and nose, a fractured eye socket and palate, and a crushed cheekbone.
Related story Perkins says bar D'Arcy from Beijing
Yesterday, Cowley told from his hospital bed in Sydney of his shock at being smashed in the face while celebrating the announcement of the Australian Olympic swim team.
"I'm feeling pretty ordinary, as you can see," he said.
"I haven't spoken to the police yet so I don't really want to talk about what happened between us."
Asked if he knew D'Arcy, Cowley said: "I've never met him. My main priority right now is to get better."
Cowley, who returned to St George Hospital yesterday, will undergo major surgery on Thursday. He faces the prospect of losing his teeth.
Police have charged D'Arcy, 20, with assault and grievous bodily harm - which carry a maximum penalty of 10 years' jail.
Yesterday, the national butterfly record holder was granted conditional bail and ordered to appear at the Downing Centre Local Court on April 21.
The incident happened at Sydney's King St wharf area about 2.30am on Sunday.
Cowley and world record holder Eamon Sullivan had joined swimming great Ian Thorpe at the Loft bar late on Saturday night. Thorpe was a training partner of Cowley's.
"Everyone was in great spirits but D'Arcy was creating problems before the incident took place," a source said. "He was acting like a goose and mouthing off, and it was becoming a bit full-on."
It is understood Thorpe left the bar about 12.30am but Cowley, Sullivan and D'Arcy decided to stay on.
Witnesses said D'Arcy began bragging about the credentials of the team - and himself in particular.
"It would be fair to say Nick was going down hill and was mouthing off at a few people and just being a smart a*** basically," a witness said.
It is claimed Cowley told D'Arcy to tone down his behaviour and gave him a gentle slap on his face. It was claimed D'Arcy struck back with his elbow, leaving Cowley bleeding on the floor.
It is understood D'Arcy intends to fight the charges.
D'Arcy's position on the Australian Olympic swimming team will now be decided by the Australian Olympic Committee.
But last night there was increasing speculation his Olympic campaign was over.
"It would be fair to say he's in a lot of trouble and I think he'll struggle to get to the Games," an official said.
Swim legend Dawn Fraser said D'Arcy would have to live with the incident.
"I feel sorry for him, he's always going to be known as the brawler now, and it's something he's got to deal with," she said.
Swimming Australia chief executive Glenn Tasker said he was extremely disappointed a member of the national team had put himself in such a situation.
D'Arcy earned a trip to Beijing when he won the 200m butterfly in a Commonwealth record time at the Games selection trials last week.
His mother, Susan, last night said her son was struggling to cope. "He's not real well, he stayed in his room yesterday and wouldn't eat or drink, he wouldn't come out and we started getting worried about him."
She said husband Justin had flown from the Gold Coast to be with their son in Sydney.
Mrs D'Arcy said the alleged attack was out of character for her son.
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23464830-2,00.html
By Ben English, Jim Wilson and Rebecca Williams
MOMENTS before allegedly launching the king-hit that is likely to end his Olympic dream, it is claimed swim star Nick D'Arcy was drunkenly big-noting himself at a Sydney nightclub.
Fuelled by up to 12 drinks, D'Arcy allegedly reacted with a single blow when former swim champ Simon Cowley told him to tone down his bragging.
The blow floored Cowley, leaving the 27 year old with a broken jaw and nose, a fractured eye socket and palate, and a crushed cheekbone.
Related story Perkins says bar D'Arcy from Beijing
Yesterday, Cowley told from his hospital bed in Sydney of his shock at being smashed in the face while celebrating the announcement of the Australian Olympic swim team.
"I'm feeling pretty ordinary, as you can see," he said.
"I haven't spoken to the police yet so I don't really want to talk about what happened between us."
Asked if he knew D'Arcy, Cowley said: "I've never met him. My main priority right now is to get better."
Cowley, who returned to St George Hospital yesterday, will undergo major surgery on Thursday. He faces the prospect of losing his teeth.
Police have charged D'Arcy, 20, with assault and grievous bodily harm - which carry a maximum penalty of 10 years' jail.
Yesterday, the national butterfly record holder was granted conditional bail and ordered to appear at the Downing Centre Local Court on April 21.
The incident happened at Sydney's King St wharf area about 2.30am on Sunday.
Cowley and world record holder Eamon Sullivan had joined swimming great Ian Thorpe at the Loft bar late on Saturday night. Thorpe was a training partner of Cowley's.
"Everyone was in great spirits but D'Arcy was creating problems before the incident took place," a source said. "He was acting like a goose and mouthing off, and it was becoming a bit full-on."
It is understood Thorpe left the bar about 12.30am but Cowley, Sullivan and D'Arcy decided to stay on.
Witnesses said D'Arcy began bragging about the credentials of the team - and himself in particular.
"It would be fair to say Nick was going down hill and was mouthing off at a few people and just being a smart a*** basically," a witness said.
It is claimed Cowley told D'Arcy to tone down his behaviour and gave him a gentle slap on his face. It was claimed D'Arcy struck back with his elbow, leaving Cowley bleeding on the floor.
It is understood D'Arcy intends to fight the charges.
D'Arcy's position on the Australian Olympic swimming team will now be decided by the Australian Olympic Committee.
But last night there was increasing speculation his Olympic campaign was over.
"It would be fair to say he's in a lot of trouble and I think he'll struggle to get to the Games," an official said.
Swim legend Dawn Fraser said D'Arcy would have to live with the incident.
"I feel sorry for him, he's always going to be known as the brawler now, and it's something he's got to deal with," she said.
Swimming Australia chief executive Glenn Tasker said he was extremely disappointed a member of the national team had put himself in such a situation.
D'Arcy earned a trip to Beijing when he won the 200m butterfly in a Commonwealth record time at the Games selection trials last week.
His mother, Susan, last night said her son was struggling to cope. "He's not real well, he stayed in his room yesterday and wouldn't eat or drink, he wouldn't come out and we started getting worried about him."
She said husband Justin had flown from the Gold Coast to be with their son in Sydney.
Mrs D'Arcy said the alleged attack was out of character for her son.
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23464830-2,00.html
