berkeley and birds

Two links to close the day: first, the Berkeley city council has officially called for an end to the bombing of Afghanistan. No matter what happens to this country, it’s nice to know some things will never change: leftist enclaves will continue to make haughty, self-important declarations of Truth to the rest of the (less civilized) world. As council member Ying Lee Kelley put it, the body will “continue to honor Berkeley’s tradition of opposition to brute force to solve profoundly difficult social problems.” I was unaware Berkeley City Council had an official constitutional role in determining our foreign policy.
Highlight of the council meeting: only six of the nine council members were willing to support a resolution to “condemn the mass murder of thousands of people on September 11, 2001, and express our profound grief at the atrocities last month that killed thousands of innocent people in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, and acknowledge, honor, and support the heroic rescue efforts on the part of dedicated police and fire departments, and the city, state, and federal governments.” And actually, that language was a compromise; the original resolution expressed deepest sympathies for Afghan civilians, but not for those in the WTC.
It reminds me of what has always been the most absurd public body in America, the Cambridge Commission on Nuclear Disarmament and Peace Education, an official department of city government in Cambridge, Mass., Berkeley’s East Coast equivalent. I was visiting a friend at Harvard last year and saw a public notice of a special election they’d called — at significant public expense — to get Cambridge officially on the record against nuclear war. That’s what I look for in my local government: trash collection, pothole repair, and plans for ballistic missile reduction.
Oh, and the second link (a much happier one): pretty birds.