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22. mai 2005
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Keith Thompson is leaving the left.
Eight-million Iraqi voters have finished risking their lives to endorse freedom and defy fascism. Three things happen in rapid succession. The right cheers. The left demurs. I walk away from a long-term intimate relationship. I'm separating not from a person but a cause: the political philosophy that for more than three decades has shaped my character and consciousness, my sense of self and community, even my sense of cosmos.
I'm leaving the left -- more precisely, the American cultural left and what it has become during our time together.
I choose this day for my departure because I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity with oppressed populations everywhere -- reciting all the ways Iraq's democratic experiment might yet implode.
Read the whole thing.
The article describes to some extent the development of my own thought, or, as I may say, how the left has slipped away its idealism. While this idealism was often put into disastrous projects, we could at least argue that the motives were good. Now the left seems reduced to preserving social welfare on the home front (which in itself can be good) and on the international stage, all that is left is hatred of Israel and the US. If this includes being cheerleaders for the worst thugs and theocrats, provided they don't have white skin, so be it. What Thompson calls the postmodern left has not merely lost its moral compass, it is turned upside down.
8:14:14 PM 
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This is a year of anniversaries. Two hundred years ago, Admiral Lord Nelson decisively defeated Napoleon's French-Spanish naval forces at the battle of Trafalgar. After that, Britannia ruled the waves for more than a century. The great admiral didn't survive the battle, but you'll find his statue at Trafalgar Square in London and his name in the history books.
You'd expect the British to celebrate this decisive victory, and you'd be at least half right. But political correctness and fear of offending the French has the mighty fleet sunk in parody.
Organisers of a re-enactment to mark the bicentenary of the battle next month have decided it should be between “a Red Fleet and a Blue Fleet” not British and French/Spanish forces.
Otherwise they fear visiting dignitaries, particularly the French, would be embarrassed at seeing their side routed.
Even the official literature has been toned down. It describes the re-enactment not as the battle of Trafalgar but simply as “an early 19th-century sea battle”.
A host of French dignitaries will attend the event, which will take place off Southsea near Portsmouth, the home of Nelson’s fleet.
The aim is to create a spectacular “son et lumière” re-enactment with pyrotechnics, lights and effects from barges in the Solent. Tall ships will create the illusion of a real battle.
But the organisers of the event confirmed last week that there would be no national “sides”, a fact that has surprised some of the event’s sponsors.
Et tu, Brit. When the British are afraid of offending the French, this world has become a very strange place.
5:12:08 PM
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It's a scientific fact that just about anything can give you cancer. But top of the list is sunshine and UV-rays. Especially back when the ozone-layer scare filled newspaper columns - it has since gone out of fashion - the advice was near-unanimous: stay indoor, use sunscreen factor black-sack-over-head whenever you need to go out. Now there is growing evidence that the sun, more precisely those dreaded UV-rays, prevents far more cancer than it causes.
The vitamin is D, nicknamed the "sunshine vitamin" because the skin makes it from ultraviolet rays. Sunscreen blocks its production, but dermatologists and health agencies have long preached that such lotions are needed to prevent skin cancer. Now some scientists are questioning that advice. The reason is that vitamin D increasingly seems important for preventing and even treating many types of cancer.
In the last three months alone, four separate studies found it helped protect against lymphoma and cancers of the prostate, lung and, ironically, the skin. The strongest evidence is for colon cancer.
Many people aren't getting enough vitamin D. It's hard to do from food and fortified milk alone, and supplements are problematic.
So the thinking is this: Even if too much sun leads to skin cancer, which is rarely deadly, too little sun may be worse.
No one is suggesting that people fry on a beach. But many scientists believe that "safe sun" - 15 minutes or so a few times a week without sunscreen - is not only possible but helpful to health.
One is Dr. Edward Giovannucci, a Harvard University professor of medicine and nutrition who laid out his case in a keynote lecture at a recent American Association for Cancer Research meeting in Anaheim, Calif.
His research suggests that vitamin D might help prevent 30 deaths for each one caused by skin cancer.
"I would challenge anyone to find an area or nutrient or any factor that has such consistent anti-cancer benefits as vitamin D," Giovannucci told the cancer scientists. "The data are really quite remarkable."
It's official: everything we thought we knew is false.
Too bad the sun will not cooperate and come out and shine on me today.
3:40:40 PM
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Even if the French should be able to win a surprise yes for the EU constitution, it looks very likely the normally pro-EU Dutch will vote it down.
A poll for RTL television indicated 54% would vote No, with 27% voting Yes.
The Dutch vote is purely consultative, but politicians have said they will take the result into consideration when it comes to a parliamentary vote.
The referendum comes only three days after one in France, where the No campaign has a slight lead.
A poll by Centerdata, also published on Thursday, showed 50.9% against the constitution and 28.6% for it.
It appears the ridiculous scare tactics of the governments have backfired:
Mr Van Bommel also said Dutch people were being pushed towards a No vote because of the "ghost stories" being told by the government.
"The justice minister has even said there is a chance of war in Europe if there is a No vote - referring to the break-up of the former republic of Yugoslavia.
"The people in this country sometimes are not completely informed about what is going on, but they are not stupid. They are angry at the government for the fact that they are insulting their intelligence."
The political elites and the EUrocrats have long been used to treating people that way.
The funny thing is that the most vocial continental no-side are far right and far left (more and more indistinguishable these days), and the typical argument is that the constitution is too anglo-saxon and market-liberalist. While in Britain, the anglo-saxon market-liberalists are strongly opposed to it, too.
1:02:18 AM
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Christopher Hitchens gives it to George Galloway.
This was exactly his demeanor when I ran into him last Tuesday on the sidewalk of Constitution Avenue, outside the Dirksen Senate Office Building, where he was due to testify before the subcommittee that has been uncovering the looting of the U.N. Oil-for-Food program. His short, cocky frame was enveloped in a thicket of recording equipment, and he was holding forth almost uninterrupted until I asked him about his endorsement of Saddam Hussein's payment for suicide-murderers in Israel and the occupied territories. He had evidently been admirably consistent in his attention to my humble work, because he changed tone and said that this was just what he'd expect from a "drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay." It takes a little more than this to wound your correspondent--I could still hold a martini without spilling it when I was "the greatest polemicist of our age" in 2001--but please note that the real thrust is contained in the word "Trotskyist." Galloway says that the worst day of his entire life was the day the Soviet Union fell. His existence since that dreadful event has involved the pathetic search for an alternative fatherland. He has recently written that, "just as Stalin industrialised the Soviet Union, so on a different scale Saddam plotted Iraq's own Great Leap Forward." I love the word "scale" in that sentence. I also admire the use of the word "plotted."
A must-read.
12:47:55 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.06.2005; 06:45:17.
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