Month: June 2004

Of Course Ronald Reagan Addressed AIDS Before March 1987

This post accuses me of perpetuating a myth about Ronald Reagan’s statement about AIDS. It basically accuses me of repeating Deroy Murdock’s error which was just mindblowing — he was off by two days on a statement that Reagan made about AIDS. Rather than the statement being part of the State of the Union address, it was made two days later on Feb. 6, 1986.

But when Reagan made that statement (or the pointless issue of whether or not he actually made the statement as a speech or just issued a written message) is really irrelevant, because he mentioned AIDS during a September 17, 1985 press conference. Here’s the relevant part from the transcript from the New York Times of the press conference,

AIDS Research

Q. Mr. President, the nation’s best-known AIDS scientist says the time has come now to boost existing research into what he called a minor moon shot program to attack this AIDS epidemic that has struck fear into the nation’s health workers and even in schoolchildren. Would you support a massive Government research program against AIDS like the one that President Nixon launched against cancer?

A. I have been supporting it for more than four years now. It’s been one of the top priorities with us, and over the last four years and including what we have in the budget for ’86 it will amount to over a half a billion dollars that we have provided for research on AIDS, in addition to what I’m sure other medical groups are doing.

And we have $100 billion, or $100 million in the budget this year; it’ll be $126 million next year. So this is a top priority with us. Yes, there’s no question about the seriousness of this, and the need to find an answer.

Q. If I could follow up, sir. The scientist who talked about this, who does work for the Government is in the National Cancer Institute, he was referring to your program and the increase that you propose as being not nearly enough at this stage to go forward and really attack the problem.

A. I think with our budgetary restraints and all it seems to me that $126 million in a single year for research has got to be something of a vital contribution.

Source:

Transcript of Ronald Reagan Press Conference. New York Times, September 18, 1985.

Obesity In the NBA: A Crisis Whose Time Has Come

The Center for Consumer Freedom points out that under definitions used by the U.S. government 75 percent of the players on the L.A. Lakers and Detroit Pistons are overweight or obese.

With all that junk food he’s been eating, Kobe Bryant’s just a heart attack waiting to happen.

KNOW Small Hypocrisy

The latest issue of the newsletter for local anti-war protesters Kalamazoo Non-Violent Opponents shows that the group has no problem speaking out of both sides of its collective mouth. Principles, apparently, are for right wing nutcases.

In its online newsletter, KNOW has suddenly discovered freedom of speech,

Dear friends,

THIS IS AN EMERGENCY CALL! PLEASE HELP! PLEASE TAKE THE TIME TO DO THIS!
THE RIGHT TO QUESTION AND DISSENT IS UNDER ASSAULT EVERYWHERE–INCLUDING HERE IN KALAMAZOO.

As most of you know, the Sisters of St. Joseph have cooperated with KNOW and PAX CHRISTI to put the “silhouettes” display on their property, atop the stone wall at the corner of Gull Road and Nazareth Road. The Sunday blessing of the sign and the ceremony–with songs, prayers, petitions, readings from the Bible and the Koran–was attended by about 150 people and was very moving. If you have not been out there to see the sign, take a trip. It’s very visible as you come into town on Gull Road, and very visible from Nazareth Road, particularly as you go east.

The aftermath has been unpleasant.

Here’s a Tuesday message from Sister Janet:

First of all, let me thank you for your participation in getting the sign up and for being here on Sunday. Second, as expected, we and Borgess are getting all negative phone calls regarding the sign and even a threat to burn it down. We need to change this around.

Obviously a threat to burn down the display is crossing the line and such threats should be prosecuted. Calling to ask the display to be taken down, however, is simply other people expressing their own right to free speech, not some grand conspiracy against dissent.

But what I really find amusing about this episode is KNOW’s sudden infatuation with preserving free speech. After all this is the same group that back in October urged people to “do all we can to re-elect Don Cooney” to the city commission. One of Don Cooney’s major goals as city commissioner is the shutting down of nude dancing within the city of Kalamazoo because that speech damages families and dehumanizes women.

Of course, KNOW is correct — free speech is under attack everywhere, including Kalamazoo. And KNOW is part of that attack with its wholehearted support of pro-censorship politicians in Kalamazoo.

Are Other People’s Ideas Worth Reading?

Robert Cringely has an meandering essay about blogging which includes the following,

I give credit to Dave Winer of Userland Software for inventing web logging, and I think the idea then was to publish, to share your thoughts with everyone else. But most people’s thoughts aren’t really worth sharing. Most web logs are little more than lists of annotated bookmarks and the value of those bookmarks can probably be best derived through a web aggregator, in which case people would be writing not to be read but to be counted, which isn’t nearly as much fun.

A lot of this comes down to production values, which is a subject those in the web log world tend to ignore because it is to their advantage to do so. There is a lot of bad television, but its packaging is such that we still seem to sit through the shows. Network TV spends perhaps $500,000 on an hour. How much do you spend on each web log entry? No wonder most web logs are so boring.

I disagree with Cringley both about blogging and about television.

I don’t know whether or not most people’s thoughts are worth reading, because most people frankly are not blogging. Most people still give me strange looks when I mention blogging.

Of the subset of technologically adept people who are blogging, I find most blogs to be pretty darn interesting. In fact the problem with blogging is the same as with television, IMO — the problem isn’t a dearth of quality content but rather so much quality content that it’s impossible to read or view even a small percentage of it. Aggregators help with the blog side, but since TV remains real time there will never be enough time to see all of the quality TV ever produced, even if you restrict viewing to pre-recorded network shows.

I imagine, for example, that Jim Roepcke’s weblog is the sort that I enjoy but that Cringley would probably find to be boring. Jim posts fairly regularly and mixes in occasional posts about current events, sports, his home rennovation project and his family. Jim and I are on opposite sides of most issues (including hockey which I never watch), but I find his blog and Jim’s ideas very interesting and worthwhile to consider.

I end up reading a lot of blogs published by friends, associates, co-workers and occasional enemies. One of the things that I think Cringely is wrong about is in assuming that great ideas only emerge from Great Thinkers (TM). As James Surowiecki notes in his book The Wisdom of Crowds, however, sometimes a group is much smarter than the smartest individual in that group.

I enjoy and tend to learn a lot more from the various and wide ranging opinions of what people write in their blogs than I do from reading elite opinion makers. I don’t understand at all Cringely’s trumpeting of the high production values of bad television — that’s precisely the problem. I much prefer to read the opinion of some blogger who may have poor grammar but an excellent take on some issue rather than the elite opinion columnist who is a wonderful wordsmith but whose opinion comes from some liberal or conservative template so predictable that I could have probably written the opinion piece for them based on their past views.

The Mainstreaming of Anti-Semitism

One of the more bizarre trends in America and Europe of late is the mainstreaming of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism, which had been widely discredited after the revelations of where it lead to in Nazi Germany, seems to be making a comeback in the West.

For example, Muslim extremist Fawaz Damra is currently on trial in Ohio accused of lying on his immigration forms in an effort to hide a past that includes ties to alleged terrorists. Prosecutors have videotapes of Damra giving fundraising speeches for the Islamic Jihad in the 1990s in which he apparently yells out calls for the destruction of the Jews.

In his defense, Damra is employing one Scott Alexander who is associate professor of Islam and director of the Catholic-Muslim Studies program at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. Alexander’s job is to convince the court that when Damra called for the destruction of the Jews, he didn’t really mean it. As the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported,

“The rhetoric is principally used by political and religious leaders to galvanize resistance to what Palestinian Arabs consider to be the patent persecution of their people by Jewish immigrants to the Middle East,” Alexander said in a report filed in federal court.

“As unquestionably hate-filled and thus morally reprehensible as such language is, when Palestinians refer to Jews as ‘descended from apes and swine’ or encourage support for those who ‘kill Jews,’ they do so with the reasonably justifiable self-image of victim and persecuted, not of victimizer and persecutor.”

What a disgusting line of reasoning which, of course, could easily be employed by a variety of racists extremists who generally view themselves as victims and persecuted by the groups they rail against.

The judge in the case still has to decide if a jury will hear Alexander’s twisted view on anti-Semitism, so there’s still hope this sort of nonsense won’t find its way into American courts.

Source:

Damra didn’t promote violence, defense expert says at hearing. John Caniglia, Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 8, 2004.