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Somebody made a table that looks like an iPod.
(via GorillaMask. )
“The firmly Communist nation has a flourishing economy”—that’s what the subhead of an article in today’s LA Times says.
War Is History for Vibrant Vietnam
Thirty years after the fall of Saigon, the firmly Communist nation has a flourishing economy, social freedom and deep ties with the U.S.
Wait a second—a Communist country with a flourishing economy? Is that possible? Or is the LA Times just trying to pull another fast one?
Hmmm…. As Patterico often points out, the LA Times likes to hide the facts on the back pages. Let’s turn to page A8, where the article continues.
Isn’t that interesting: the first thing you see on page A8 is a photo of a man with this caption: “INVESTOR: Henry Nguyen returned to Vietnam as a venture capitalist to develop businesses there.” Hey, investors and venture capitalists are illegal in Communist economies. What’s the Times mean by saying Vietnam is Communist?
Reading the article on page A8:
Its economy, a mix of Karl Marx and Adam Smith, has the highest growth rate in Southeast Asia.
Okay, so the Times is claiming there’s something Marxist about the economy. But what?
Private enterprise is flourishing, a middle class is growing, poverty rates are falling. The United States is a major trading partner, and Americans are welcomed with a warmth that belies the two countries’ history.
Private enterprise? In a Communist economy?
Urban youth have opportunities undreamed of in their parents’ time. Many are studying English — their grandparents learned French and their parents Russian or German — and flocking to colleges, generally indifferent to the Communist Party unless they want a government job.
The students are indifferent to the Communist Party in economic matters. Where’s the communism in the economy?
[The students] have the freedom to do just about anything they want except promote political change, and they don’t appear interested in that.”
The party that has given its people economic and social freedom has not yielded on political freedom. Ultimate authority still rests with the Communist Party’s Politburo in Hanoi. Its 15 members are not accountable to anyone but themselves, and criticizing their decisions would be considered a serious crime. No one expects significant political reform to come soon.
Okay, so there’s nothing Communist about the economy. The subhead of this Times article is a sham, an attack on our belief in our Capitalist economy, and an inaccurate praise of Communism. Once again the editors at the LA Times have tried to pull a fast one on their readers.
The author of the article doesn’t appear to be to blame at all. All the facts are well-reported. The editors appear to be responsible for this sham, by their phony subhead.
The subhead could just as well have been: “Capitalism Brings Vietnam Out of a Communist Dark Age.” The following is text quoted directly from the same LA Times article:
The so-called Dark Years of the postwar period ended in 1986. That’s when Hanoi’s aging leadership, facing famine, international isolation and national disillusionment, followed China’s lead and adopted, without great enthusiasm, a policy known as doi mo, or “renovation,” to move toward a more open economy. Some experts believe that nothing less than the survival of the Communist Party — perhaps of Vietnam itself — was at stake.
The results were dazzling. “It was as though the people knew just what to do without missing a step,” said Virginia Foote, president of the Washington-based U.S.-Vietnam Trade Council.
Thousands of shops and small businesses sprung up. Within a decade, Vietnam had become the world’s second-largest rice exporter, cut inflation from 700% a year to single digits, made plans for a stock exchange in Ho Chi Minh City and attracted investors from the United States, Australia and Taiwan.
The LA Times: read it for the sports, the weather, the movie section—but when you read its political coverage, remember it’s just an experiment in mind control.
Update: Welcome to readers of Patterico and Oh, That Liberal Media!
As I noted previously, the AUT, which is the leading British lecturer’s union, has approved a policy of boycotting Israeli universities. This blatant policy of intellectual repression has led to a revolt on the part of British academics. From Melanie Phillips:
The revolt against the Anglosphere’s jihad
Academics appalled at the AUT’s boycott of Israeli universities have hit upon an elegant and appropriate way to protest at this infamy. They are asking the AUT to add their names to those to be boycotted as a roll of honour. Thus Emanuele Ottolenghi of St Antony’s College, Oxford has sent a message to the AUT thus:
‘Regarding the AUT recent decision to boycott Haifa University and Bar Ilan University in Israel, I am shocked to learn that, in addition to a call for boycott, the AUT is ready to offer a waiver to scholars on condition that they publicly state their willingness to conform to the political orthodoxy espoused by the academics who sponsored your motion.
‘Oaths of political loyalty do not belong to academia. They belong to illiberal minds and repressive regimes. Based on this, the AUT’s definition of academic freedom is the freedom to agree with its views only. Given the circumstances, I wish to express in no uncertain terms my unconditional and undivided solidarity with both universities and their faculties. I know many people, both at Haifa University and at Bar Ilan University, of different political persuasion and from different walks of life. The diversity of those faculties reflects the authentic spirit of academia. The AUT invitation to boycott them betrays that spirit because it advocates a uniformity of views, under pain of boycott.
‘In solidarity with my colleagues and as a symbolic gesture to defend the spirit of a free academia, I wish to be added to the boycott blacklist. Please include me. I hope that other colleagues of all political persuasions will join me.’
This not only avoids the obvious ethical drawbacks of a counter-boycott, but if enough academics join in making such a request—particularly those with international reputations—this can seriously discommode the boycotters, along with exposing them to widening opprobrium and ridicule and creating a coalition of principled revulsion. Brilliant.
(Hat Tip to Georgette Gelbard.)
INTRODUCTION
The debate about religion has come to the forefront of national attention.
BACKGROUND
Faith ‘War’ Rages in U.S., Judge Says:
...California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown told an audience Sunday that people of faith were embroiled in a “war” against secular humanists who threatened to divorce America from its religious roots, according to a newspaper account of the speech.
Brown’s remarks come as a partisan battle over judges has evolved into a national debate over the proper mix of God and government and as Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) ponders changing the chamber’s rules to prevent Democrats from using procedural moves to block confirmation of conservative jurists such as Brown.
Her comments to a gathering of Roman Catholic legal professionals in Darien, Conn., came on the same day as “Justice Sunday: Stop the Filibuster Against People of Faith,” a program produced by evangelical leaders and simulcast on the Internet and in homes and churches around the country. It was designed to paint opponents of Bush’s judicial nominees as intolerant of believers.
Though unrelated to that program, Brown’s remarks sounded similar themes.
“There seems to have been no time since the Civil War that this country was so bitterly divided. It’s not a shooting war, but it is a war,” she said, according to a report published Monday in the Stamford Advocate.
“These are perilous times for people of faith,” she said, “not in the sense that we are going to lose our lives, but in the sense that it will cost you something if you are a person of faith who stands up for what you believe in and say those things out loud.”
At the LA Press Club event earlier this week, I was talking to a good friend, who has Liberal views on most subjects. She said she can have no respect for the intelligence of anyone who believes in God. It appears to me that she’s summed up the Liberal view on this subject.
MAIN IDEA
God exists.
DISCUSSION
The Liberal viewpoint makes a lot of sense. Surely there’s no big guy in a gold chair sitting up in the clouds.
But that to which the word God refers does exist. It refers to our emotions of worship, and to that which rightfully deserves our worship, namely, ourselves.
The Bible is the summed experience of mankind, at the time at which it was written, about how to live. It’s not right about everything, but there’s a lot of very valuable and meaningful advice in it. The ten commandments are a good example.
Science is not capable of worship because science addresses information, rather than emotion. Therefore God—that is, the emotion of worship, and that which rightfully deserves it—has, so far, been invisible to science.
Because science has not yet found a scientific name for that to which the word God refers, many Liberals incorrectly state that God does not exist, and inadvertently turn their backs on emotions of devotion, reverence and worship.
CONCLUSION
Devotion, reverence and worship are powerful, beautiful emotions, with which people seek to do good and even loving things for others. That which rightfully deserves those emotions does exist; it is ourselves. It is therefore essential to us as a nation to recognize the existence of these emotions, and to appreciate the powerful contribution they make to all of us.
In the comment section to a recent post here, Anti-American Violence Preached in a Mosque in a Small Town in America, reader Mavenette has been providing very insightful comments regarding her own personal experience at such a school.
Mavenette also has an excellent blog, Cynicistan, which I’ve been reading regularly.
Traffic here is unusually high today. Was this web site mentioned on the radio or in print somewhere? If so, please leave a comment.
A Soros-funded pro-filibuster ad campaign is airing:
THE DEBATE OVER CURTAILING UNPRECEDENTED DEMOCRATIC FILIBUSTERS of President George W. Bush’s judicial nominees exploded into open warfare this week. On Wednesday MoveOnPAC.org and its left comrades blitzed America with at least 192 rallies in 40+ states and saturated the nation’s airwaves with $500,000 worth of deceptive ads depicting Republicans as crazed rampaging elephants in an effort to intimidate Senators.
But the most surreal moment of this vicious propaganda onslaught by a coalition of far-Left groups (almost all of which are part of the Shadow Party funded by eccentric billionaire George Soros) was a Wednesday speech by former Vice President and failed 2000 Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore.
Gore used the topic as an opportunity to attack people of faith:
"This assault on the integrity of our constitutional design has been fueled by a small group claiming special knowledge of God’s will in American politics," said Gore.
Having just attacked people who love their religion, Gore immediately expresses outrage that anyone might claim he had done so:
"They even claim that those of us who disagree with their point of view are waging war against ‘people of faith.’ How dare they?"
It’s just hilarious.
Arguments against the filibuster: Rush points out that there’s no provision in the Constitution for filibustering judicial nominations.
And Ann Coulter advises that:
In one sentence Republicans should state that the so-called "nuclear option" means: "Majority vote wins." (This is as opposed to the Democrats’ mantra, which is "Our side always wins." )
I am sublimely confident that normal Americans will not be shocked to learn that a Republican Senate plans to confirm the judicial nominees of a Republican president
According to U.S. and U.N. investigators, the $60 billion program, which ran from 1996-2003 may have seen more than $6 billion directly skimmed and as much as $15 billion lost through oil smuggling overlooked by the U.N. and the Security Council itself.
IN RELATED NEWS, the former director of the Oil for Food program has issued an “or-else” threat to Kofi Annan. Annan Threatened: Pay My Bills Or I’ll Spill the Beans.
UNITED NATIONS – The embattled former director of the scandal ridden Iraq Oil for Food Program has sent a letter with an ultimatum to the office of Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
Benon Sevan, a veteran Cypriot diplomat, now the target of several U.S. and U.N. investigations, has sent Annan a “demand” that the world body pay his mounting legal bills “or else.”
According to Annan chief of staff Mark Malloch Brown, the letter, written by Sevan’s legal team, carried an implied threat of new public disclosures regarding embezzlement in the now defunct oil for food program.
From Variety (registration required):
According to a Dow Jones report Wednesday night, Marvel has already amassed a half-billion-dollar war chest to make a slate of movies with budgets as high as $180 million, drawing on its remaining 5,000 comic-book characters
Among the first of its superheroes headed for the silver screen: Captain America and Nick Fury, an American version of James Bond.
From Variety (registration required):
Lucas also revealed that the company is working on a spinoff live-action series that would focus on some supporting characters who’ve been introduced in the movies.
“We’re probably not going to start that for about a year,” he said. “Like on ‘The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles,’ we want to write all the stories for the entire first season all at once. I’m going to get it started and hire the showrunners and all of that, then I’ll probably step away.”
All the music from The Simpsons—from every episode—- is here, in MP3 format. One of my favorites is Springfield, Springfield.
(via GeekPress. )
Mallard Fillmore’s been running this great series, including these two recent strips:
So I thought I’d check out the article he’s talking about (look closely for the asterisk referencing the article). It’s from U.S. News and World Report, written by John Leo—and it’s got some fascinating data:
A new book, Why Men Earn More by Warren Farrell, goes further, examining a broad array of wage statistics. His conclusion: When reasonable adjustments are made, women earn just as much as men, and sometimes more.
Some of Farrell’s findings: Women are 15 times as likely as men to become top executives in major corporations before the age of 40. Never-married, college-educated males who work full time make only 85 percent of what comparable women earn. Female pay exceeds male pay in more than 80 different fields, 39 of them large fields that offer good jobs, like financial analyst, engineering manager, sales engineer, statistician, surveying and mapping technicians, agricultural and food scientists, and aerospace engineer. A female investment banker’s starting salary is 116 percent of a male’s. Part-time female workers make $1.10 for every $1 earned by part-time males.
Read the whole thing.
Welcome, Hugh Hewitt readers. It was great to meet Hugh at last night’s LA Press Club Event in his honor. I’ve got a post on the event here.
The loathsome Air America is again advocating political assassination:
The audio production came during the opening minutes of “The Randi Rhodes Show” Monday night, according to the Drudge Report.
The announcer said: “A spoiled child is telling us our Social Security isn’t safe anymore, so he is going to fix it for us. Well, here’s your answer, you ungrateful whelp: [audio sound of four gunshots being fired.] Just try it, you little bastard. [audio of gun being cocked].”
Randi Rhodes pretended to be surprised by the clip:
“What is with all the killing?” Rhodes said, laughing, after the clip aired.
But she’s busted, because the last time something like this happened at Air America, it was also on her show, as I noted in a previous post:
...Rock bottom came when [Randi Rhodes] compared Bush and his family to the Corleones in the “Godfather” saga. “Like Fredo, somebody ought to take him out fishing and phuw,” she said, imitating the sound of gunfire.
Note to Randi Rhodes: a) it’s not funny and b) it’s illegal.
But a government source told Drudge, “Even joking about shooting the president is a crime, let alone doing it on national radio … we are taking this very seriously.”
IN RELATED NEWS, Air America’s ratings are its lowest ever.
National Review Editor Rich Lowry: It is time to say it unequivocally: We are winning in Iraq.
