Harvard Doesn't Get It

You gotta love those liberals at Harvard. Reality is staring them in the face and they don’t see it.

You can’t really blame them. We are all like that. We set up our model of reality, and we stick to it. Even as the model of reality is breaking up before our very eyes.

Carrie Lukas went to a class reunion at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, a place where they believe that government service is something special, something morally superior to business or the professions.

But they got to listen to a scholarship recipient from Africa. He was really glad to have his scholarship because he was not getting any income from his apartment in Chicago. Why? The renter stopped paying. Good luck getting the tenant evicted or getting a look in at any back rent.

All the laws, he said, favored the tenant over the property owner. So far he’s out more than $20,000 in foregone rent, with thousands more for legal bills and plane tickets from Boston to Chicago. Yet the tenant still was living in his home, rent-free, with no penalty.

The Harvard folks tut-tutted and sympathized with this worthy young man. But none of them connected the dots. It is their politics and their power that is denying this young man the income from his apartment.

Instead the Harvard alums contributed to the scholarship fund and patted “themselves on the back for helping a victim that they helped create.”

You gotta love ’em.

Archie Drake, Opera Singer

We celebrate and we fawn at the feet of the opera greats: the Pavarottis and the Domingos. But what about the also rans, the singers who never made it to the top but who toiled away as journeymen, grabbing the best roles they could find and somehow finding a living at the opera house?

One such was bass-baritone Archie Drake, who started out as a merchant seaman from Britain and ended up as the “soul of Seattle Opera.”

Archie Drake sang his last role last month. After singing a minor role in Seattle Opera's production of Verdi's Macbeth he was driven home after the last performace, and collapsed at his apartment door with a massive heart attack. He was 81.

Since joining Seattle Opera in 1968 he had sung over 109 roles including the Rocco in Fidelio, Wotan in Die Wälkure, and Dr Bartolo in Barber of Seville. In later years he sang minor bass parts, always turning up in some role or another. You'd say, by golly, there is Archie Drake. How does he do it at his age?

Last month Archie Drake must have known the end was coming. According to John Marshall he knew it was going to be tough to make it through Macbeth.

On several occasions, he expressed concern about whether he would "make it through" the production. On Friday, the next-to-last night of the run, Drake sat backstage and told fellow singer Byron Ellis that "all I need is 30 more hours."

He made it through, but only just.

Canadian Spy Agency Connects Some Dots

Of course, it could be just coincidence, or a dreadful case of mistaken identity. As Alvin Chand said to reporters
outside the Toronto courthouse where 17 terrorist suspects were making their first appearance in court, according to Beth Duff-Brown:

"The people that were arrested are good people, they go to the mosque, they go to school, go to college."

One suspect was a health sciences graduate, and another a computer programmer. And they are indeed innocent until proven guilty.

But officials reported that they had acquired over three tons of ammonium nitrate and other bomb-making materials. Aly Hindy, Toronto imam, knew nine of the suspects:

"It's not terrorism. It could be some criminal activity with a few guys, that's all," said Hindy. "We are the ones always accused. Somebody fakes a document and they are an international terrorist forging documents for al-Qaida."

Quite so. Couldn’t agree more, old chap. The authorities have only released the names of the adult suspects.

The adult suspects from Toronto are [Steven Vikash] Chand, alias Abdul Shakur, 25; Fahim Ahmad, 21; Jahmaal James, 23; and Asin Mohamed Durrani, 19. Those from Mississauga are Ghany; Abdelhaleen; Zakaria Amara, 20; Asad Ansari, 21; Saad Khalid, 19; and Qayyum Abdul Jamal, 43.



Mohammed Dirie, 22, and Yasim Abdi Mohamed, 24, are from Kingston.

As we said, these suspects are innocent until proven guilty under Canada’s Anglo-Saxon system of justice.

I wonder if any of these folks were overheard by the NSA’s evil “domestic-spying” program?

Cheer Up On Employment, MSM

Today’s employment report from the Department of Labor came in with a disappointing 75,000 increase in payroll employment. The MSM is shocked. “US Employment Growth Stalled in May” “Employment Growth Misses Estimates” are the headlines from Google News.

But a quick look at the Department of Labor press release shows a mixed story. The Establishment Survey of businesses shows the 75,000 number. But the Household Survey (from which the headline unemployment rate is obtained) shows a 288,000 gain in employment.

So come on fellahs. Just cool it why don’t you. Employment is growing briskly.

On the other hand government bonds soared as the 10 year US Treasury Note yield declined to 4.995 percent. But then the dollar declined to 0.774 to the Euro.

What do you make of that, you experts in the mainstream media? What should we do: Buy or sell?

Do We Need the CIA?

Over the years the CIA has provided a useful role. It has been the face of the US intelligence community, the symbol against which all good lefties rebelled.

In fact the CIA is just one of a constellation of intelligence agencies within and without the Department of Defense, and maybe not the most important.

And the CIA is infamous for its cloak-and-dagger arm: The spy-novel side of things.

According to Derek LeeBaert the CIA has always made a mess of this side of its business, the covert and clandestine operations like the Bay of Pigs.

The agency bloodily botched its airdrops into the occupied Baltic republics during the late 1940s. It impeded commando work during the Korean War. It parachuted Tibetan patriots smack among the brutal Chinese occupiers. It mismanaged the 1961 Bay of Pigs operation... And, as the Red Army crushed the Afghans during the early 1980s, CIA refused to deliver the Stinger shoulder-fired missiles that - after Congress overruled it - turned the war around.

Since 9/11 the Special Operations Command has started to move in on the CIAs covert/clandestine turf. The Special Operations Command includes the Green Berets, the SEALs, and those bearded guys that were pictured riding across Afghanistan on horses a few years ago.

Unlike the CIA, Special Operations Command has a culture of stern accountability and severe self-criticism, of focus and rapid adaptability - the culture of a profession that lives with death.

With the controversy surrounding the CIA recently, with the Plame affair and the leaking of secret anti-terrorist activities, comparison with the Special Operations guys is stark. The CIA exhibits a culture that is more interested in playing Washington power politics and Vanity Fair covers than sternness, accountability, and getting on with the job.

Not that that’s anything unusual. The failures of the federal government in everything from the War on Poverty to the combined governmental operations failure in Hurricane Katrina tell us something.

They tell us that bold, persistent, deep reform of the governmental structures in the US is long overdue.

But meanwhile the US economy throws off huge revenues and the governments at all levels feed hungrily off it.

But it would be nice if they did either something useful and productive with it—with sternness, accountability and severe self-criticism—or had the decency to give it back.

Bracing for Haditha

The left wants the alleged massacre of civilians at Haditha in Iraq’s Anbar province to become a new My Lai. They intend for it to discredit the American effort in Iraq just as the actions of troops under Lt Calley in a village in Vietnam nearly forty years ago undermined the war effort in Vietnam.

What actually happened in Haditha? So far we don’t know. So far we understand that Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, First Marines were hit by an improvised explosive device and then “went on an hours-long killing spree to revenge their comrade's death, leaving about twenty-four men, women and children dead.”
As Jed Babbin writes:

Navy and Marine Corps investigators are at work, and other reports indicate that at least three Marine officers, including the battalion and company commanders, have been relieved of duty. It's also reported that more than one enlisted man has been detained pending charges about to be brought.

Obviously liberals and Democrats, let alone Al Jazeera, want to exploit the incident for all it’s worth.

[Rep. John] Murtha, on ABC's "This Week," said, "Who covered it up, why did they cover it up, why did they wait so long?" He's not only ready to condemn the Marines, but all their leaders.

Democrats had better hope that this attack on our nation’s armed services pays off for them with coverups and massacres as far as the eye can see. Because if not it could taint them as enemies of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines for another generation.

What is Freedom For?

Up until recently girls were socialized to become wives and mothers, or in the words of the London Economist (sub):

provide comfort and sustenance for their menfolk and children... Any other activity was peripheral.

In Teta, Mother and Me: Three Generations of Arab Women the Christian Arab Jean Said Makdisi describes how she “extricated herself, but only partially” from this traditional culture.

And yes, she is the sister of the late Edward Said, author of Orientalism.

Grandmother Teta was educated in the mission schools of Syria, but

the aim of all this admirable teaching was not the guide the women towards freedom, only to turn them eventually into better wives and mothers.

A graduate of Vassar, Mrs Makdisi returned to Lebanon with her husband to teach at Beirut University College, and found that the Lebanese civil war gave her a “passport out of the isolation of middle-class domestic life.” Echoes of Betty Friedan.

Now she watches her daughters-in-law deftly “juggling family and career.”

The great innovation of modernity is freedom, that is, the release of substantial numbers of people from total immersion in work, principally the struggle of bearing children and supplying the food and shelter to bring one or two of them to maturity.

But the industrial revolution changed all that. Its vast outpouring of wealth eased the struggle of life, and of creating life. We see emerging in the nineteenth century the concept of “voluntary motherhood,” the idea of bearing children as a choice instead of dogged obedience to tradition and the way things are.

But then the question arises: what did you do with your freedom? What is so important and vital for you to do that you should neglect the bearing and raising of children?

It is not surprising that the notion of “overpopulation” appeared at about the same time that the prosperity of the industrial revolution allowed people to become less focused on children and more on their self realization. People could say that parenthood was problematical because more children just made the world more crowded.

But if everyone decides to do something else rather than have children then we get today’s Europe where people are not having enough children to replace themselves.

So the question returns: What is so important and vital for educated, liberal women to do that they should neglect the bearing and raising of children?

That is the question that conservative women writers like Carolyn Graglia in Domestic Tranquility and Jennifer Roback Morse in Smart Sex are raising.

And it is a question that is not going to go away. Because for the vast majority of men and women it turns out that there is nothing more important than having children. The other things that modern freedom affords usually turn out to be self-indulgence and vanity.

If you don’t have children, then you wonder if your life has any meaning.