Category: Politics

There are an amazing number of mis-conceptions about the Constitution and what it says. This post by U.S. Constitution.net has a pretty good rundown of some of the most famous. Some of the mis-quotes I hear most often are “separation of church and state”, “right to privacy”, and “Judicial Review.” One that is not in the list is right for the press to protect their sources identity in court.

However, it is important to remember that the constitution DOES say (in the 10th Amendment) that

Thus we have rights regardless of their explicit existance in the constiution.

TCS has a story that discusses some of the broader facts of the AP “Glaciers Shrinking” stories that were popular on last weeks Earth Day. The article accurately portrays the intent of many news agencies who reported on the AP story (with titles like “Scientists Say Antarctic Glaciers Shrinking.” its hard to miss the intent.) He also points out some little known facts concerning the Antarctic Continent. Most people who are not climatologists have the mistaken belief that Antarctica is getting warmer; while in fact the opposite is true.

While the planet may very well be getting warmer; human catalyst global warming theories generally have, as one of their primary indicators, the prediction of Antarctic warming. Antarctica (or at least the vast majority of it) has been getting cooler for almost 35 years as has been documented a number of times by outside sources. The good news is that some organizations actually presented the AP story in the light it was intended; not as the scare tactic that Earth Day advocates wanted it to be.

You can check out the original text of the AP story here.

Ralph Peters in this position paper, originally posted in 2001 by Parameters magazine, discusses the role that stability plays in our foreign policy over the last 110 years. His point is that sense the Spanish-American war we have spend enormous resources propping up hopeless regimes in the futile attempt to contain the status quo; even at the expense of our shared national values. What’s more, Peters argues that our country’s success is a product of the overthrow of old-world paradigms. As such, the very stability we pursue works against our own long term best interests. The article is a though provoking piece but one paragraph stood out to me. While discussing the role of terrorism in his primary thesis, he makes one of the clearest observations about the nature of Middle Eastern terrorism I have ever read.

Another good part is the section discussing the relationship between Islamic governments in the Middle East and the Palestinians. Not exactly light reading, but well worth the time.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has a superb article by Robert Kagan discussing the growing divide between Europe and the United States in how we handle international affairs. Kagan argues that a combination of Europe’s loss of international influence, combined with the relative safety provided by the umbrella of American military force have allow it to pursue its post Enlightenment Kantian ideal of “Perpetual Peace.”

The article was like a breath of fresh air in as much as it was an international policy evaluation that lacked almost all the red/blue, conservative/liberal, religious/secular bias that seems to be the norm for this kind of analysis nowadays. I believe Kagan undervalues the role that American individuality has played in our historically isolationistic world view. Specifically as it pertains to the UN and the role of international law. However I find its impossible to ignore the overall strength of his argument. I also disagree with the assessment that,  “Americans apparently feel no resentment at not being able to enter a postmodern utopia.”  I find that, increasingly, America’s “Ivory Tower” elite feel a great deal of resentment for the position soldered to the US and, to an even greater extend, that such a position even be necessary. Yet I suppose that such resentment has always been part of the La Trahison des clercs and is not to be unexpected.

Its a very long article (TTS is a god-sent at work!) but well worth the read. Especially if you are interested in the changing nature of America’s relationship with Europe and the long term ramifications thereof.

The most interesting piece of news I have read concerning the Valerie Plame case concerns the protected status of media sources.  Evidently there is none!  What is more interesting, according the historical Court rulings, there has never been such protection.  Newspapers, TV news, and print media organizations have argued for years that they can protect their sources via the First Amendments “free speech” clause.  However, this has simply been a matter of wishful thinking.  The U.S. Supreme Court has yet to ever rule in favor of the protected status of media sources.

This is totally counter to what I was taught in school.  I had always believed that media sources could not be forcible taken from reporters except in the event of national security.

One of the concerns I have about the state of democracy and the direction of democratic reform throughout the world is the sudden rise of sudo-democratic organizations (organizations created by democracies that are not democratic themselves.) Organizations like the EU, UN, WTO, and World Bank have huge influence over the state of world affairs, going so far as to try and set policy for individual nations, and yet have no democratic influence on their direction.

In that vein, author John Fonte has written an article discussing the proliferation of these groups, as well as the dramatic influence non-governmental organizations are having on shaping their policies. Democracy may not be the evolutionary end of history; but it is vital that we remember than any organization which creates laws without the representation by those whom the law governs, is a form of tyranny. Ultimately, failure to pay attention to the state of our liberties will result in the slow erosion of our freedoms. If we are not awake at the wheel of our own destiny, we will eventually discover that someone else is driving.

In preparation for a policy paper I am reading, I found this article. The paper, titled “The End of History?”, is a fairly well known article by Francis Fukuyama for The National Interest in 1989. In it he basically describes western style liberal democracy as the final cumulative result of the evolution of the political process; going so far as to declare the modern democratic state as the “end of political history.” Something approaching the god-state of politics.

While I don’t necessarily subscribe to the overall tenants of Mr. Fukuyama’s work; it is an interesting political discussion in the time immediately preceding the fall of the USSR. The question that Mr. Fukuyama brings up is simply, does democracy basically answer all of the contradictions brought about by previous socio-political systems in a way that changes future “improvement” from exponential to linear in their scope?

FYI, I grabbed the web page from a Google search for reference purposes.

Those of you who did get a chance to read my commentary on the justification, with respect to terrorism, for the invasion of Iraq; I thought I would take this opportunity to say it looks like I was right. Now I am not trying to say that it was a particularly good election (i.e. males only, municipal authority only, only half the positions are elected, and its only happening in one area) but the simple fact that Saudi Arabia felt the pressure to actually have these elections is a huge step.

The New Criterion has a wonderful article discussing Julien Benda’s work, “La Trahison des clercs” (The treason of the intellectuals), and an extension of Benda’s work by Alain Finkielkraut titled, “La Défaite de la pensée” (The Undoing of Thought.)  I had heard of the term La Trahison des clercs, a kind of yuppie insult to post modern leaning college professors, but I was not actually familiar with the contents of the work.

I found the article incredible interesting and will probably comment more on it at some other time, but what is most interesting to me is how this concept ties in with the idea of natural law (for example the destruction of diversity without a fundamental concept of the “universality of humanity”) and the effect that these concepts have on the implementation of free will.  I many ways this article acts like a philosophical discussion of the ideas presented in C.S. Lewis’s “The Abolition of Man.”