Month: January 2008
Iowa Caucus Report
David Fleck was there and provides a characteristically thoughtful description of events from a participant’s perspective.
A Little Positive Reinforcement
Glenn links to a lengthy essay in The National Journal which calls into question the veracity of two studies. The studies in question were published in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet, and they supposedly showed that civilian casualties had soared since the US led invasion. In fact, the studies claimed that civilian deaths were ten times greater than anyone had thought!
Our own Shannon Love picked the first of these studies apart when it was first published, and he received a lot of abuse in the comments for it. I’m glad to see that my fellow Chicago Boy is getting some small measure of vindication for all of his hard work, even if The National Journal is incredibly slow out of the starting gate.
[From Jonathan: A list of links to Shannon’s Lancet posts is here.]
Ramblings about Democide & the Primaries
Once again, we think of the tragedy of war. Yesterday, NPR counted up the horrible death toll of WWII. The chill Tyouth describes we all feel. But Belmont Club charts deaths in Iraq; Gateway Pundit observes:
For the last three months of 2007, a Venezuelan was twice as likely to lose his life to violence as an Iraqi.
A pattern we’ve long seen (demagogic man of the people rises and, sure of his own virtues, finds himself driven to kill and torture his foes). In the twentieth century, in only one year did democide not claim more lives than war.
Those wearing Bushitler masks might contemplate that what they fear most is associated with a pattern we’ve seen over and over. Cheap populism not big business scares me. And it is voices like Chavez’s – like so many before – that unleash archetypal greed and violence. Edwards is no Chavez; he isn’t even a Huey Long. He’s simply a rather irritating trial lawyer who is never interested in the general but always the particular, never the reasoning but always the sentiment, less in good science than tender pathos. I wish he appealed to the minds of his listeners a lot more and their guts less, indeed, to their virtues rather than their vices. His rhetoric makes me uneasy but doesn’t, not really, scare me. Unlike those afraid of Bush, I am confident the system works. It can withstand Edwards – it can, actually, withstand a good deal. I just hope it doesn’t have to.
‘Tis the season… …to beat up on each other
Or since Christmas is over, it ‘Twas: Two men had to be evacuated from an Antarctic research facility after a Christmas brawl.
Polar medivac flights are rare occurrences, one of the most dramatic being a midwinter flight in 1999 for a woman doctor who developed breast cancer and needed urgent treatment.
And those two geniuses needed one because they couldn’t hold their liquor. Hard to live down, and it looks just great on the resume.