The President of the United States couldn’t get the UN to recognize the problem in Darfur, or do anything about it. Perhaps an actor can.

It’s been said that Hollywood’s hottest marriage is the one between actors and Africa. That’ll be true Thursday when Oscar winner George Clooney is scheduled to address the United Nations Security Council on the crisis in Darfur. That’s right, not some small media conference, but the actual Security Council. Hosted by John Bolton, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, the briefing is organized by The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity (EWF), which recently established a Darfur Commission of Nobel Laureates. Clooney visited Darfuri refugees last April to use his celebrity clout to raise awareness of the plight of refugees in the war-torn region, considered the 3rd biggest humanitarian crisis in the history of the UN. According to the Oscar-winning actor, the US, the UN and the world’s policies on Sudan is failing. “If we turn our heads and look away and hope that it will disappear then they will-all of them, an entire generation of people. And we will only have history left to judge us,” Clooney has said about the tragedy.

Hey, don’t blame the US, George. We’ve been trying to get the UN to recognize genocide when it sees it. And you wouldn’t want us doing anything unilaterally, would you? That is “why they hate us”, isn’t it?

All kidding aside, it’s good to see Clooney working with John Bolton and trying to get the UN–paragon of virtue that it is–to wake up and smell the Kofi coffee. It’s sad that it has to come to this (and sadder yet if this is the main reason things start happening), but it’s better than nothing.

Technorati Tags: United Nations, George Clooney, Darfur, genocide, Elie Wiesel

With a hat tip to James Taranto, it’s time to bust the myth that we had all this store of goodwill built up because of what Muslim terrorists did to us on 9/11, but Bush squandered it when he went to war. From the London Telegraph, Anne Applebaum writes:

But it’s also true that this initial wave of goodwill hardly outlasted the news cycle. Within a couple of days a Guardian columnist wrote of the “unabashed national egotism and arrogance that drives anti-Americanism among swaths of the world’s population”. A Daily Mail columnist denounced the “self-sought imperial role” of the United States, which he said had “made it enemies of every sort across the globe”.

That week’s edition of Question Time featured a sustained attack on Phil Lader, the former US ambassador to Britain – and a man who had lost colleagues in the World Trade Centre – who seemed near to tears as he was asked questions about the “millions and millions of people around the world despising the American nation”. At least some Britons, like many other Europeans, were already secretly or openly pleased by the 9/11 attacks.

And all of this was before Afghanistan, before Tony Blair was tainted by his friendship with George Bush, and before anyone knew the word “neo-con”, let alone felt the need to claim not to be one.

There was outpouring of sympathy, to be sure. But to confuse that with some sort of policy shift is just wrong.

The dislike of America, the hatred for what it was believed to stand for – capitalism, globalisation, militarism, Zionism, Hollywood or McDonald’s, depending on your point of view – was well entrenched. To put it differently, the scorn now widely felt in Britain and across Europe for America’s “war on terrorism” actually preceded the “war on terrorism” itself. It was already there on September 12 and 13, right out in the open for everyone to see.

And really, was the breaking of the UN sanctions by the likes of France and Russia really a result mostly–even partially–of some sort of lost love for the US? Please. It was selfish interest, plain and simple, by economies that couldn’t handle the loss of a trading partner very well.

Anne does note that American may have turned folks off with our “go it alone” mentality (although a coalition of 20 groups in Afghanistan and a few dozen that have or had participated in Iraq doesn’t sound too much like we’ve “spurned traditional alliances”), but faults Europe as well for already being “disinclined for their own reasons to sympathise with any American tragedy”.

Frankly, Democrats are blaming Bush for losing something we never really had.

Technorati Tags: Anne Applebaum, goodwill, anti-Americanism

Drudge’s big headline this afternoon is that gas is down to $2.05/gallon in Iowa. Did I not catch the news story proclaiming that the federal government had moved in and enforced price controls?

No, I (and you) missed nothing of the sort. Instead, as the Captain notes, market forces (remember those things?) are at work.

A number of factors play into this drop in price. First, as the article notes, the summer driving season has passed. Gas prices normally drop after Labor Day as children go back to school and family vacations make their way to the scrapbook. Also, this season has seen much lower levels of violent weather, and while we’re not out of hurricane season yet, the chances of a really damaging storm in the Gulf of Mexico gets less likely with each passing day. Traders buy oil on futures, which means their speculation now extends past the hurricane window — and since they had built bad weather into previous pricing, it makes sense that we would see a sharp drop now.

It seems that, just as Al-Qaeda has, the market, the weather, and American families have conspired to give the Democrats one less campaign issue. In the same way as leftist paranoids looked with suspicion on the release of terrorist videos, prepare for more hand-wringing over the “curious timing” of this news.

Yes, the market has been allowed to work and prices are now coming down. Understand, however, that I loved high gas prices. My wallet didn’t all that much, but I can telecommute 3 or 4 days a week, so it didn’t complain too loudly. But there were so many upsides to high prices, most of which liberals purport to love. There was the encouragement to conserve or telecommute or car pool. The higher prices increased the demand and the funding for research into alternative energy sources. They helped pay for college tuition (people in the middle class work for oil companies, too, y’know). There was so much good that came from them, yet liberals wailed and whined about it. Truth is, they’d rather the prices go up due to a tax increase so the government gets the money rather than R&D departments of the evil “Big Oil”. Then they could siphon it off, pad their wallets, and be magnanimous with the scraps as grants to R&D departments of the evil “Big Oil”.

By the way, will all the Democrats who wanted to blame Bush for the high gas prices now turn around and credit him for lowering them? Hold not thy breath.

Technorati Tags: gas prices, oil, free market, Democrats, paranoia

Captain Ed participated in a forum at Macalester College on the Iraq War last night. He posted his opening remarks on his blog, and I think it’s a great overall view of why the war was the right thing to do in general, even if, as happens in most wars, the execution wasn’t and isn’t letter-perfect.

He has a follow-up post this morning on how it all went.

by Michael W. Smith.

[youtube]P8Xm5Za_QU4[/youtube]

Five years later, I fear we’ve forgotten the reason we came together those weeks and months after 9/11. It’s not the flag, but the flag reminds us of the reason. We are a diverse nation that can come together as we have done so many times in the past. It can still happen, if we remember why we fight and what’s at stake.

The first response to the attacks in September, 2001 was on Flight 93 over Pennsylvania. It would be a pity if we’ve already forgotten why they fought. They had a clarity we’re losing. They had a purpose that’s getting foggy in the minds of too many Americans.

We were united. We can still be. Remember why.

Previous 9/11 posts:

Remember

What did they know and when did they know it? Mark Tapscott would like to know.

Saddam Hussein had a very trusted source inside AP, according to the translation of another of the thousands of documents captured by U.S. forces that are only slowing being made public. In this particular document, the source inside AP tells Hussein about the formation of UNMOVIC, the UN weapons inspection team.

So if Hussein had a credible source working for him within AP, was it a stringer in a Middle Eastern nation, an Iraqi “dissident” who had become a full-time employee or consultant to AP or a regular AP employee whose decades of agreement with the “Blame America First” school of foreign policy led to a decision to aid one of America’s enemies?

Is this individual still employed by AP? Has this individual gone on to work for another U.S. media organization like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, etc.?

And I would add my own questions. Is this a one-off, an isolated incident, or could there be more? Do the well-documented politics of journalists make this sort of thing easier for those who can blend in with those sympathies? This should become a top priority in media circles, to root out this sort of infiltration. Reuters may have a contribution to make in this area. Certainly they should have learned a little bit on how to discover a fauxtographer.

For a counter-point, check with the Captain. Given the timing of the memo, he doesn’t see this as being a big deal, and the memo doesn’t describe the nature of the source. This is all well and good, but effort should still go into finding out whether it was a reporter or just a desk clerk. It matters.
This, as well as other documents, have uncovered a lot of information about what was really going on in Iraq, including knowledge of weapons programs. Given what’s still untranslated, Mark notes:

And one more thought: There remain thousands of untranslated documents. We still do not know with any certainty whether in fact Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Emphasis his, and rightly so. We do know that we’ve recovered approximately 700 shells that contained or were designed to contain chemical weapons. Before people consider our current level of knowledge settled, understand that the fat lady hasn’t sung just yet.

Technorati Tags: Associated Press, Saddam Hussein, Iraq, media

“noah takes a photo of himself” [#4 on MyWebSearch]

The really odd thing is that, while MyWebSearch’s excerpt alleges that this phrase exists as shown, it’s nowhere at all in the archives. Only one post uses the word “Noah”, and it doesn’t have the phrase.

Moral of the story: Don’t use MyWebSearch.

Technorati Tags: MyWebSearch

Or ever have.

Biologists have uncovered a deep link between lifespan and cancer in the form of a gene that switches off stem cells as a person ages.

The critical gene, already well known for its role in suppressing tumors, seems to mediate a profound balance between life and death. It weighs the generation of new replacement cells, required for continued life, against the risk of death from cancer, which is the inevitable outcome of letting cells divide. To offset the increasing risk of cancer as a person ages, the gene gradually reduces the ability of stem cells to proliferate.

The new finding, reported by three groups of researchers online Wednesday in Nature, was made in a special breed of mice that lack the pivotal gene, but is thought likely to apply to people as well.

The finding indicates that many of the degenerative diseases of aging are caused by an active shutting down of the stem cells that renew the body’s various tissues, and are not just a passive disintegration of tissues under life’s daily wear and tear, as is often assumed.

“I don’t think aging is a random process – it’s a program, an anti-cancer program,” said Dr. Norman E. Sharpless of the University of North Carolina, senior author of one of the three reports.

I find this article interesting on a number of levels. Let’s start with the idea that this scientist says that aging is not a “random process”, rather that it is “an anti-cancer program”. This, to me, really stretches the credulity with which one must view evolution. Somehow, over the years of random changes, a program emerged through natural selection. But since the vast majority of mutations result in a degradation of the organism, the odds of such a program being written are astronomical, on top of all the other odds-beating events like the formation of life itself. (Talk about having faith in your religion.)
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Who wishes she had a time machine so she could go back and kill George W. Bush as a child? Why, the “peace” mom, of course! Tammy Bruce ponders, if Cindy Sheehan was going to go back in time and kill someone, why she wouldn’t choose another target.

Oddly, she focuses on the infant Bush, as opposed to, let’s say, bin Laden when he was a playboy making the rounds of American nightclubs. That would have stopped all of this from happening, including the need to invade Iraq. But it seems stopping 9/11 isn’t much on the top of our Time Traveler Mom’s list.

Yup, Bush is the real terrorist in the mind of the 21st century peaceniks. If he wasn’t alive, 9/11 would’ve never happened.

Yeah. Right. Peace, dude.

Technorati Tags: war, peace, Cindy Sheehan, George W. Bush

Want a good look at a member of the super-rich? Take a look in a mirror. Most likely, by historical standards, the person you will see is extremely wealthy.

So says Donald Boudreaux at TCS Daily. He ticks off a short list of things that show how truly wealthy we are (e.g. longer life expectancy, indoor plumbing, no smallpox). However, his answer to the question as to why we have all this advancement isn’t the typical answer of “technology”. While that’s a big reason, there’s a deeper answer which, among other things, allows that technology to be invented.

Technorati Tags: rich, Donald Boudreaux, technology, free market