History Abuse: Tony Blankley

Note: This post was written on July 5th and being automatically posted by WordPress. If I don’t mention a major happening in Iran since then, that’s why. As this as entry is being posted, I’m currently winging my way to the ALA conference in Chicago where I hope to be blogging from if I have connectivity.

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One of my favorite podcasts is a KCRW show called “Left, Right and Center.” A show that bills itself as a “Refreshing alternative to the screaming talking heads of most political commentary shows.” For the most part, they deliver and if you’re interested in politics, I’d recommend the podcast.

Awhile back I was listening to the June 19, 2009 show that featured discussion of Obama’s actions with regard to the Iran protests. After some praise by other commentators for Obama’s initial refuse to give the Iranian gov’t propaganda points by fully embracing the protesters, Tony Blankley of the Washington Times made a heavy sigh and said something like, “It’s a good thing that LaFayette didn’t feel like he needed to stay above the fray.” He then went on to offer two examples of where Presidents needed to be prodded into supporting opposition movements: President Reagan with the Phillipines and President Bush with Poland’s Solidarity movement.

For reasons I’ll get to in a moment, I don’t think any of these three situations are remotely appropriate to apply to Iran. In fact, I think it’s an abuse of history to say that since public support was provided in these instances, the public support of the US government should have been given to the Iranian protestors.

But first I’d like to say that overall, I respect Mr. Blankley. I strongly appreciate that he is willing to acknowledge when his party makes mistakes. He has also been known to concede that Democrats occaisionally do something right. This gives most of his statements more credibility with me than the legions in both parties whose chant is “We’re Right, They’re Wrong!” Most of the time even if I don’t agree with Mr. Blankley, I understand his reasoning and understand how a person of good will could hold that position.

In the current case though, I think he’s wrong. I don’t know if it is overreaching or bad analogies or something else entirely, but the pieces simply don’t fit in the way Mr. Blankley would like them to.

All three situations (American Colonies, Philipines, Poland) have one thing in common — all three opposition movements asked for outside help. Lafayette was only in America because the French government sent him there after we asked for help.  The Philipine opposition repeatedly asked us to support the democratic movement over Marcos, our gov’t funded dictator. I’m not as clear about whether Lech Walesa ever directly ask us specifically for assistance, but he did call on other Western countries for help and so did the Vatican and its Polish pope.

By contrast, official representatives of the Iranian opposition have not asked us for help and Mousavi’s statements as late as July 5th go out of their way to say that his movement is NOT supported by foreign elements of any kind. He and his allies clearly seem to view Western support as a hardship and a propaganda coup for the gov’t. President Obama understood this. The US House of Representatives did not.

There are more differences. In each of the cases cited by Mr. Blankley, the foreign power helping the opposition was well respected. While hard to believe now, the American Colonists admired France as a beacon of civilization and an important world counterbalance to the British Empire. The Filipino people have never forgotten MacArthur and had frequent interchange with the United States. While they didn’t like our support for Marcos, they appreciated us. Likewise, most of the Polish people were Western oriented and saw the US as possible saviors from Soviet occupation. In contrast, while many Iranians seem to appreciate Western culture, large majorities continue to view the US and UK with great suspicion and haven’t forgotten that we deposed their last democratic government and gave them the Shah. If that’s the kind of help they think we’ll offer, it’s not surprising they’re turning it down.

Finally, in all three situations, the foreign power had leverage and extra capability. France had a fleet to send to the colonies. Marcos could not survive without our vast economic and military assistance. NATO had massed troops on hair-trigger alert to run through flat country into Poland.

We don’t have any ties to Iran so we have no economic leverage. We cannot use our forces in Iraq to invade Iran for a number of reasons — geography (high mountains not good for tanks, as Saddam found out), the Status of Forces Agreement which prohibits Iraq from being used as a base for attacking other countries, and strong support for Iran’s shia from Iraq’s shia. What’s left is bombing Iran. And every aerial bombing campaign since WWII has indicated that death from the skies usually bonds people to their regime. They blame the bombers, not their own government. So, no leverage that I can see.

That’s why I think these three examples are an abuse of history. Do you see how any of these apply to Iran? Can you cite an example where the opposition didn’t want help and got it anyway? Did it go well?

Real Sovereignty for Iraq, at Last

As far as I can tell from news reports, the United States has kept its word in following the US-Iraqi Status of Forces Agreement and has pulled out of Iraqi cities as of June 30th except for a few instances where the government of Iraq asked them to stay. Again, from public reports, the requests for some units to stay in some places seems to be a genuine Iraqi request.

Although violence continues, most Iraqis celebrated June 30th. I think as well they should. If we were under foreign occupation, I’d want the occupiers to leave even if violence increased. I suspect most Americans would feel the same.

Congratulations to Iraq on their newfound sovereignty. What they do with their country is up to them. So far it isn’t looking that good to me, but it’s their choice and not ours.

We are not a people who fear the future

Happy 4th of July everyone! Earlier this week I started sketching out a blog posting about today about all the people we need to thank for our freedom and independence we first earned 233 years ago.

But I’m currently joining about 650,000 of my fellow Alaskans in processing the puzzling news of our Governor’s resignation and don’t have extra writing capacity at the moment.

Fortunately, President Obama’s Independence Day greeting celebrates many of the qualities of America I intended to highlight today. My favorite line from this speech was:

“We are not a people who fear the future. We are a people who make it.”

Speeches like this remind me of why I voted for President Obama. The proclamations that we should be fearful and rely on the government’s power have been replace with acknowledgment that our “can-do” spirit can overcome serious problems. And that the solutions to our problems will be a group effort with meaningful citizen participation.

Although I have posted the video, I encourage you to read the full transcript.

Happy Fourth of July everyone!

Resources on Past Alaska Fires

Every year Alaska seems to have at least one major fire.  Where can you turn to compare the current year to past years?

Alaska has two agencies that collect fire data for different purposes. The Division of Forestry within the Alaska Department of Natural Resources has the Fire and Aviation Program which collects information on wildfires. They collect statistics about acreage burned in wildfires and whether the fires occured on state, federal, municipal, tribal or private land.  Statistics from this program are currently available from 1990-2007 at http://forestry.alaska.gov/firestats/.

The other Alaska agency that collects fire statistics is the Division of Fire and Life Safety within the Alaska Department of Public Safety. Their home page tallies deaths for the current year. As of this writing, 14 Alaskans have lost their lives to fire. Historical statistics on fatalities, injuries types of fires can be found at http://www.dps.state.ak.us/fire/TEB/alaskafirestatistics.aspx. Statistics are available from 2004-2007.

VIDEO: Volcano From Space

ISS020 Saraychev Peak Eruption

A chance event captured by astronauts by photos and remixed by private citizens to make a video. They were able to do this because the ISS photos are public domain as the astronauts were taking pictures in the course of their official government duties.

But I didn’t post this because I think it’s a useful example of a positive use of public domain government information. I just think it’s cool.

Find Your Way with NOAA Charts

Alaska is a maritime state. We have more coastline than the rest of the United States put together.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has made it easy to examine the charts covering our coastlines, islands and channels with their Online Chart Viewer at http://www.nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/mcd/OnLineViewer.html.

Start by clicking on Alaska. If the chart names and numbers are not familar to you, then click on the zoomable Alaska Catalog chart. By using this map, I found the chart for my local area was chart 17315,
Gastineau Channel and Taku Inlet;Juneau Harbor. The charts show water depths and known features. As a bonus, it also provides topographic mapping of the land areas. The chart also tells me that the channel in back of my condo is approximately 16-18 fathoms deep (96′-108′).  This is shallower than I imagined the channel to be, but still plenty deep for the cruise ships that ply the channel past my window.

If you are a boater, NOAA instructs you NOT to use these online charts for navigation. They suggest buying a paper chart.

Groundtruthing on Douglas Island

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Gastineau Meadows trail and how I hoped it would provide an entry to a number of different trails on Douglas Island. One of the hikes I hoped to do was to start off on the Mt. Jumbo trail, hike up to the intersection with the Treadwell Ditch trail, take that north to the Gastineau Meadows trail and walk home from there.

Yesterday I decided it was some time for some groundtruthing. I walked from my condo to the Jumbo trail head. Then I headed up to the Treadwell Ditch trail. That was 40 mostly arduous minutes later, but it was fun. Then I turned north. About 15 minutes later, I discovered what appeared to be a washout or collapsed bridge. All I know is that I was on one side of a deep flowing creek with a tallish waterfall and thought I saw a trail on the other side through deep brush, but there was no obvious way to cross.

So I turned back and went back to the intersection. Then I took the Treadwell Ditch trail south because I heard that end deadended at the Glory Hole, the site of the Treadmill Mine collapse back in the early 1900s. I’d seen it from the Treadwell Historic trail and wanted to see it from the Ditch trail.  After about five minutes, the trail was blocked by Devil’s Club. If I was head to toe in Carhartts with leather gloves and a machete, I would have keep going.

Instead, I went back to the Jumbo/Treadwell intersection and spent some time exploring a large meadow before returning home. While I had not made either of my major objectives, I liked getting reacquainted with the Mt. Jumbo trail and realized it had more to offer than a summit opportunity or dehydration and misery. So I’ll be going back there again. Not in the next few days if the weather forecast holds up, but soon.

Unwelcome Results Pt. 2 – Postponed

Last weekend I shared some (to me) unexpected results about the correlation between abortion restrictions and country human rights reports. I invited comments about my methodology and conclusions and said I’d react to it the following weekend.

But I didn’t get comments on my methods or speculation on what it could mean to the pro-life movement. Additionally, from my real life friends I got two suggestions:

1) See if there is a corrleation between abortion rates and country human rights records.

2) See if there is a correlation between abortion laws and specific types of human rights.

Both of these ideas are intriguing, but will take awhile to carry out. So in the absence of community feedback, I’m putting off any more writing on abortion’s relationship to human rights until such time that I complete the above. I have no timetable as I’m usually juggling a number of intellectual projects.

On a completely separate topic, I hope you will join me in praying for the Iranian people who are living out the phrase “Freedom isn’t Free” and who MAY be on track to joining Yugoslavia, East Germany, Phillipines and India as nations who gained their freedom through the power of non-violent resistance.

Road to Ruin: Patriotic Retirement Plan

Part of why we’re in deep trouble in this country is that people aren’t numbers literate. This leads them to embrace quick feel good solutions that are quite frankly madness.

Case in point is an e-mail I received today:

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Subject: PLAN TO FIX THE ECONOMY

This is from an article in the St. Petersburg Times Newspaper on Sunday. The Business Section asked readers for ideas on “How Would You Fix the Economy?”

I think this guy nailed it!

Dear Mr. President:

Please find below my suggestion for fixing America ’s economy.
Instead of giving billions of dollars to companies that will squander the money on lavish parties and unearned bonuses, use the following plan.

You can call it the Patriotic Retirement Plan:

There are about 40 million people over 50 in the work force.

Pay them $1 million apiece severance for early retirement with the Following stipulations:

1) They MUST retire. Forty million job openings – Unemployment fixed.

2) They MUST buy a new American CAR. Forty million cars ordered – Auto Industry fixed.

3) They MUST either buy a house or pay off their mortgage – Housing Crisis fixed.

It can’t get any easier than that!

If more money is needed, have all members of Congress and their constituents pay their taxes…
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Beautiful in its simplicity and concrete in its effects. And very smug about the plans superiority. Even if it’s being offered in jest. Thanks to the lack of cues in print, I can’t tell. But assuming it’s sincerely offered as an idea, let’s do the math:

40,000,000 people x 1,000,000 dollars = $40,000,000,000,000

This is 40 Trillion dollars. For comparison, US Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is currently at 14.2 Trillion dollars according the US Bureau of Economic Analysis at http://www.bea.gov/national/index.htm#gdp.

The “Patriotic Retirement Plan” would take 2.8 times GDP to carry out. Maybe we could borrow it from China. But it doesn’t seem very patriotic to me to wipe out the entire US economy three times in the name of saving it.

I’m not a big fan of the bipartisan financial bailouts or of the bipartisan auto industry takeover. Particular since it seems like wealth transfers to the very same people who put us in our current troubles. But we should continue to fear very simplistic solutions.

Unwelcome Results: Part 1

If there is any common area of agreement between absolutist pro-choicers and absolutist pro-lifers, it is that the issue of abortion is absolutely key to human rights.

The pro-life argument is that the right to life is absolutely fundamental and trumps all others. To allow abortion is the first or early stop on the road to losing all rights in society. After all, if a society won’t uphold the right to life, what rights will it uphold?

The pro-choice argument is that control of one’s own body is absolutely fundamental and trumps all others. If one cannot do what one wishes with the products of one’s own body, then what other rights can you have? To the pro-choice people, restrictions on a woman’s ability to have an abortion is the first and early stop on the road to everyone losing their rights in society.

A few months ago, I decided this could be a testable proposition. If the pro-lifers were right, then countries that provided abortion on demand should have a higher proportion of poor human rights records. If the pro-choicers were right, then it would be the abortion-restrictive countries that would have a higher proportion of poor human rights records.

My own personal hypothesis was that neither side was right. As a frequent user of the US State Department’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, I was aware of both abortion on demand and abortion banning countries with gruesome human rights records. So I believed that the two extremes of abortion policy would yield similar proportions of poor human rights records.

To do this experiment, I needed a set of human rights reports and a list of countries grouped by abortion policy. While there are places where you can look up the abortion policies of individual countries, the latest list by level of abortion restriction was ”Sharing Responsibility: Women, Society and Abortion Worldwide (Alan Guttmacher Institute, (1999) at http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/sharing.pdf. This report gave abortion policies as of 1997. So for this work I used the the 1997 State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices which are available at http://www.state.gov/www/global/human_rights/1997_hrp_report/97hrp_report_toc.html.

The Guttmacher report grouped countries’ abortion policies into the following groups:

1. To save the woman’s life (includes countries that ban abortion all together)
2. Abortion for life or protect physical health
3. Abortion for 1&2 or protect mental health
4. Abortion for 1-3 or socioeconomic groups
5. Abortion without restriction as to reason. (i.e. Abortion on Demand)

Because I was looking for the sharpest differences, I focused on “abortion only for life of mother” AND “abortion on demand.” I found 53 countries in the first group and 47 countries in the second group.

Next, I classified each country’s human rights record as good, fair or poor. Here’s the method I used:
 

• Poor - State dept used that word OR several gruesome incidents were recorded in report OR report cited ongoing severe problems.
• Fair – State dept cited signs of progress but that significant problems remained.
• Good – State dept stated country generally respected human rights and did not cite serious ongoing problems.

Lastly, I compiled my results into a Google Spreadsheet that you can find at http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=rN6qdkHEsZTPBesFGqOtMIw&output=html. The spreadsheet lists the individual country findings plus my summary which was:

Abortion on Demand – 47 countries

Rights Record * Number * Percent
Good * 14 * 29.79%
Fair * 18 * 38.30%
Poor * 15 * 31.91%

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Save Life of Mother – 53 countries

Rights Record * Number * Percent
Good * 3 * 5.66%
Fair * 17 * 32.08%
Poor * 33 * 62.26%

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As you can see above, based on my measurements, nearly 2/3 of countries that essentially banned abortion in 1997 had poor human rights records. By contrast, less than 1/3 of countries that provided abortion on demand had poor human rights records. This was not a result I expected or desired, but it is the one I got. I thought about not publishing these findings, but I think it is better to share unpleasant facts (at least to me) than to hide them.

This post is called “Unwelcome Results: Part I.” That’s because next week I will – 1) summarize and respond to any feedback to this first part and 2) offer a few thoughts on the implications of these results for the pro-life movement.

For feedback, I’d welcome just about anything beside obvious spam and hatemail, but I’m really interested in comments in the following areas:

1) Is there a more recent grouping of countries by their abortion policies? If there is, I can re-run the experiment and see what, if anything has changed since 1997.

2) Look over the individual country rights-record determinations and let me know if you think a country’s designation should be changed. Include WHY you think the country deserves a higher or lower rating.

3) Your reactions either to my overall findings or to individual country’s abortion policies or human rights records. Especially on why the correlation is the way that it is.

If any pro-lifer out there wants me to declare all abortion-on-demand countries to have poor human rights records because they don’t respect the right to lfie, consider this — Even if I did so, we’d still be left with the result that 2/3 of countries that ban abortion have pretty bad human rights records. Eliminating abortion still would not be the royal road to improving human rights records.