Roundup

Besides the rising fuel prices and the looting in the Big Easy, here are a few articles that caught my eye today:


David Limbaugh: Let's Quit Confusing the Issues
He is calling for people to stop allowing the anti-war left to propagate their lies and misrepresentations of recent history. I agree with the sentiment.




Registering to vote on the Iraqi Constitution
John Kerry thinks that standing in line is the same as disenfranchisement. Coming from someone who is used to walking from their limo to the front of the line, I'm sure it seems that way to him. However, what does he think about people, including a large number of women, standing in line in Iraq in order to vote on their Constitution in October?



Wretchard: True Believers
Comparing French Socialists' appeasement to Hitler to today's left appeasement to Islamic extremists. Based on Paul Berman's recent book Terror and Liberalism.




Charles Mann: America's pristine myth. Life in the Western Hemisphere before Columbus landed. This one retorts the "Indians lived with nature" meme. Sure they lived with nature; and most tribes farmed, set up game preserves, fished on a large scale, created man-made dams, islands, fortifications, burial mounds and other things to make the land serve man. Indians didn't have the same technology as Europeans as it relates to gunpowder and shipbuilding, but they would have gotten there. The handful of Native American Indians I've known get tired of people trying to ask them questions about life on the plains, living in a teepee, etc. The city-folk weren't willing to believe that their anscestors lived in adobe houses, farmed, and traded surplus with people hundreds of miles away. One of the side effects of poorly written Westerns in the 40's and 50's.


Here's another thing you might not know. The Europeans brought with them their diseases. The same diseases that wiped out 25-30% of Europe the century prior. Diseases like smallpox and plague, that, in some cases, wiped out Native American villages to where 25-30% of the village remained. It is because of this fact that early European settlers thought they had a "Manifest Destiny" to settle the continent. Wherever those early Europeans went, death followed, not by guns and violence, or even intent, but by a handshake, a sneeze and a cough.