Ny Times @ MindSay

I had a bad day last Friday, but it was an all-too-typical day for America.

It actually started well, on Kau Sai Chau, an island off Hong Kong, where I stood on a rocky hilltop overlooking the South China Sea and talked to my wife back in Maryland, static-free, using a friend's Chinese cellphone. A few hours later, I took off from Hong Kong's ultramodern airport after riding out there from downtown on a sleek high-speed train - with wireless connectivity that was so good I was able to surf the Web the whole way on my laptop.

Landing at Kennedy Airport from Hong Kong was, as I've argued before, like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. The ugly, low-ceilinged arrival hall was cramped, and using a luggage cart cost $3. (Couldn't we Americans at least supply foreign visitors with a free luggage cart, like other major airports in the world?) As I looked around at this dingy room, it reminded of somewhere I had been before. Then I remembered: It was the luggage hall in the old Hong Kong Kai Tak Airport. It closed in 1998.

The next day I went to Penn Station, where the escalators down to the tracks are so narrow that they seem to have been designed before suitcases were invented. The disgusting track-side platforms apparently have not been cleaned since World War II. I took the Acela, America's sorry excuse for a bullet train, from New York to Washington. Along the way, I tried to use my cellphone to conduct an interview and my conversation was interrupted by three dropped calls within one 15-minute span.

All I could think to myself was: If we're so smart, why are other people living so much better than us? What has become of our infrastructure, which is so crucial to productivity? Back home, I was greeted by the news that General Motors was being bailed out - that's the GM that Fortune magazine just noted "lost more than $72 billion in the past four years, and yet you can count on one hand the number of executives who have been reassigned or lost their job."

We can't continue in this mode of "Dumb as we wanna be." We've indulged ourselves for too long with tax cuts that we can't afford, bailouts of auto companies that have become giant wealth-destruction machines, energy prices that do not encourage investment in 21st-century renewable power systems or efficient cars, public schools with no national standards to prevent illiterates from graduating and immigration policies that have our colleges educating the world's best scientists and engineers and then, when these foreigners graduate, instead of stapling green cards to their diplomas, we order them to go home and start companies to compete against ours.

To top it off, we've fallen into a trend of diverting and rewarding the best of our collective IQ to people doing financial engineering rather than real engineering. These rocket scientists and engineers were designing complex financial instruments to make money out of money - rather than designing cars, phones, computers, teaching tools, Internet programs and medical equipment that could improve the lives and productivity of millions.

For all these reasons, the present crisis is not just a financial meltdown crying out for a cash injection. We are in much deeper trouble. In fact, we as a country have become General Motors - as a result of our national drift. Look in the mirror: GM is us.

That's why we don't just need a bailout. We need a reboot. We need a build out. We need a buildup. We need a national makeover. That is why the next few months are among the most important in U.S. history. Because of the financial crisis, Barack Obama has the bipartisan support to spend $1 trillion in stimulus. But we must make certain that every bailout dollar, which we're borrowing from our kids' future, is spent wisely.

It has to go into training teachers, educating scientists and engineers, paying for research and building the most productivity-enhancing infrastructure - without building white elephants. Generally, I'd like to see fewer government dollars shoveled out and more creative tax incentives to stimulate the private sector to catalyze new industries and new markets. If we allow this money to be spent on pork, it will be the end of us.

America still has the right stuff to thrive. We still have the most creative, diverse, innovative culture and open society - in a world where the ability to imagine and generate new ideas with speed and to implement them through global collaboration is the most important competitive advantage. China may have great airports, but last week it went back to censoring The New York Times and other Western news sites. Censorship restricts your people's imaginations. That's really, really dumb. And that's why for all our missteps, the 21st century is still up for grabs.

John Kennedy led us on a journey to discover the Moon. Obama needs to lead us on a journey to rediscover, rebuild and reinvent our own backyard.

More nuclear hypocrisy

In today’s NY Times, op ed contributors George Perkovich, ‘director of the nonproliferation program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’, and Pierre Goldschmidt, ‘former deputy director of the International Atomic Energy Agency’, opine.

The vital security objective all along has been to prevent Iran from acquiring the capacity to make nuclear weapons fuel. ..Thus, Iran’s interlocutors should clarify now that the positive incentives the world wishes to negotiate with Iran will be withdrawn if it does not immediately accede to the binding Security Council demand for suspension.

It’s embarrassing for me even to have to make obvious points like this, but clearly the editors over at the NY Times need reminding.

1. So far, Iran’s reward for ratifying and complying with the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty has been baseless accusations and sabre rattling from the US.
2. The US is the one country that has actually used nuclear weapons.  It has used them on exclusively civilian targets.  Not once, but twice.
3. The US has articulated an intention to crush any country it perceives as threatening its military ‘full spectrum dominance’.
4. The US is itself in violation of its NNPT commitments to reduce its arsenal and has not suffered so much as a harsh word as punishment.
5. The US has withdrawn from or violated other significant treaties intended (or at least purported to intend) to reduce threats from WMD.
6. Iran borders on a rogue nuclear armed state, Pakistan, that has not signed the NNPT.
7. Another non NNPT and nuclear armed state, Israel, is also explicitly threatening attacks on Iran.
8. Yet a third non NNPT and nuclear armed state, India, has recently entered into favourable nuclear cooperation arrangements with the US.
9. North Korea has enjoyed a significant reduction in threats from the US since it became clear that it was close to testing its own nuclear weapons.
10. With so many obvious benefits accruing to the world’s nuclear outlaws and so few to compliance with treaty commitments, it’d take a lot of carrots to convince me to go along with the US’s completely unreasonable demands, if I was Iran.

That said, fission is a dead end.  All the ordinary people in the world need to band together and get the nuclear bullies to disarm and safely dispose of their nuclear toys immediately and cooperate on developing the cold fusion and other sustainable energy technologies that can provide our energy without exacerbating global warming…

In a humorous but disturbing piece in yesterday’s NY Times, Tom Wolfe chronicles the decline and fall of NY City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission and the cockiness the commission’s impotence has imparted to developers like Aby Rosen.

Apparently without realizing it, he has actually found the solution to the whole dilemma in reporting the sad fate of 2 Columbus Circle,

By this time last year unionized elves with air hammers had reduced 2 Columbus Circle’s white marble to rubble and set about gutting the interior.

It would seem that news of the Green Bans that saved so much of inner Sydney’s architectural heritage in the early 1970s has not yet reached the Big Apple.

And speaking of Sydney, to avoid any further confusion, when I write of ‘the Emerald City’, no, I don’t mean the one in either the fictional or actual Land of Oz.  I have been following the convention apparently established by Andy Martin in 2003, which I probably picked up from Lind in 2004.

Thank goodness there’s a ceasefire at last.  Today’s NY Times carries an article by Dina Kraft, datelined Sderot.  To put the event in context, she reports,

at least 1,100 rockets have been fired into Israel itself. With the escalation of the fighting in June, about 400 Palestinians have been killed, a number of them militants, along with three Israeli soldiers. Four Israelis have been killed by rocket fire in the past 14 months

Ms Kraft has decided not to trouble her audience with a count of the projectiles fired into the Gaza strip, including, perhaps the 11 155mm shells used in the Beit Hanoun massacre less than a fortnight ago, an incident already consigned to the memory hole.  She wants readers to believe the ‘escalation’ was somehow mutual rather than an invasion by the world’s fourth most powerful military.

Mr. Olmert said the re-entry was to win the release of the captured soldier, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, but many Israelis said they viewed the move as a chance to quash the rocket fire.

Ms Kraft reports this as if either of those pretexts made any sense in political or military terms, as if five months of experience haven’t decisively proven that ‘re-entry’, so much more pleasant for those enjoying entry than military invasion, was entirely ineffective in retrieving the hostage and quite predictably provoked further rocket firing in retaliation.

Parents in both southern Israel and Gaza reported anxious and fearful children, many showing signs of trauma and regression like bed-wetting and nightmares after the long months of back and forth fighting, rockets, shelling and airstrikes.

This kind of conflict is so evenhanded in how it traumatizes children.  The two evenly matched antagonists clearly launch airstrikes against each other.  And there is no mention of the sonic boom attacks Israeli warplanes have been carrying out many times nightly for months.  Indeed, it is not clear whether these, which impact most on children and may in fact be intended specifically to target children, come within the terms of the ceasefire.

In any case, four paragraphs sympathetically tell the tale of Daniel Gigi, who is leaving Sderot with his family of six after a Qassam rocket hit their house.  Another quotes an 11 year old Sderot boy treated for shock last week.  There are no sympathetic stories of Palestinian parents fleeing the ‘conflict’, because of course departure is not an option for them.  There are no quotes from shocked Palestinian children, either.

A unity government could end the economic and political embargo imposed by Western countries after Hamas was elected in January.

Ms Kraft clearly wants the reader to join her in thinking a few things here.  One of them is that the Palestine Authority is a government.  In reality, as everyone knows, it was set up as part of the Oslo ‘peace process’ with the principal objective of transferring responsibility for policing Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza from the Israeli military to a more acceptable looking indigenous surrogate.  Another is that there is nothing unusual about imposing an airtight ‘economic and political embargo’ in retaliation for an undesireable election result.  It might be worth mentioning, if you believe in such things, as the NY Times often makes a show of doing, that such a blockade would be a clear violation of Article 2.4 of the UN Charter, ‘All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state,’ except, conveniently, Palestine is not a state, undermining the initial assertion about a ‘unity government’.  It might be worth mentioning how quickly the blockade was imposed after the purported provocation or how comprehensive its provisions.  Some might think that it was somewhat cynical to place a paragraph of this kind into a report without fleshing it out with a few words describing the devastating impact the embargo has had on the ordinary Palestinians who comprise its principal target. 

On the whole, this report, like others every day or nearly every day, in the NY Times and many other western media outlets, as I often point out in this blog, would appear to provide evidence of a pro Israeli stance.  But if that is the impression you get, I fear you, like me, are mistaken.

Isi Leibler, identified as chair of ‘the Diaspora-Israel relations committee of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs’, writing in yesterday’s Jerusalem Post, warns, in the wake of the imminent launch of al-Jazeera’s English service,

There is no disputing that at every level we are losing the global war of ideas. Despite clear evidence that fanatical Islamic fundamentalism threatens the basic fabric of Western civilization, Israel, and by extension the Jewish people, are now generally perceived as pariahs.

The English version of Al Jazeera thus has the potential of evolving into one of the most effective weapons against the Jewish people, already reeling from the onslaught of massive waves of anti-Semitism. It may further marginalize Israel and create more animus against Diaspora Jews.

I’ll leave it to the reader to pick apart all the propaganda tricks Mr Leibler deploys in his article – ‘already reeling from the onslaught of massive waves of anti-Semitism’, indeed!  But I do want to draw attention to how comfortable this champion of diaspora Jewry is drawing the diaspora into the crimes of the Zionist state, seamlessly weaving the first person plural personal pronoun through his narrative.  Zionists correctly deplore this as anti-Semitic when their perceived enemies do it, but it is a fundamental part of their own rhetorical arsenal.  As a Jew resident in ‘the Muslim world’, it is still Zionism that makes me most uneasy and I find more anti-Semitism on the Jerusalem Post’s website than on al-Jazeera’s.  So go figure.