Did my matzos come?

George Will:

Bush, in an address central to America's political liturgy, has now spoken of character as something that is, to a very limited but very important extent, constructed. Public policy participates in the building of it. This is a doctrine of architectonic government -- government concerned with shaping the structure of the citizenry's soul. . . . His agenda's aim is to continue, in the language of his inaugural address, ``preparing our people for the challenges of life in a free society.''

That is the crux of modern conservatism -- government taking strong measures to foster in the citizenry the attitudes and aptitudes necessary for increased individual independence.

Thomas Sowell:

What are these "demonstrations" demonstrating -- other than adolescent self-indulgence and contempt for the rights of other people to go about their lives without finding their streets clogged with hooligans and the air filled with obscenities? . . . We are seeing the ugly face of intolerance under the idealistic pretense of protest. We need to recognize it for what it is, even if the media refuse to do so. Above all, we need to see it as a warning of where our society is headed. Whether at home or abroad, if political conflicts are reduced to contests between the wimps and the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.

Paul Johnson:

My grandfather used to say, `Learn to like art, music and literature deeply and passionately. They will be your friends when things are bad.' It is true: at this time of year, when days are short and dark, and one hardly dares to open the newspapers, I turn, not vainly either, to the great creators of the past for distraction, solace and help.

He goes on to discuss Parmigianino (new to me), Dickens and Schubert.

Mark Steyn:

If you want a good example of excessive deference to the established order, look no further than Iraq. I'm often asked about the scale of the insurgency and doesn't this prove we armchair warriors vastly underestimated things, etc. I usually reply that, if you rummage through the archives, you'll find that I wanted the liberation of Iraq to occur before the end of August 2002. The bulk of the military were already in place, sitting in the Kuwaiti desert twiddling their thumbs. But Bush was prevailed upon to go ''the extra mile'' at the United Nations mainly for the sake of Tony Blair, and thanks to the machinations of Chirac, Schroeder and Co., the extra mile wound up being the scenic route through six months of diplomatic gridlock while Washington gamely auditioned any casus belli that might win the favor of the president of Guinea's witch doctor.

. . . The result is not only an insurgency far more virulent than it would have been had Washington followed my advice rather than Tony's and gone in in August 2002, but also a broader range of enemies that learned a lot about how ''world'' -- i.e., European -- opinion could be played off against Washington.

I don't believe Bush would make that mistake again.

Theodore Dalrymple:

"Have you ever been to a trial before?" she said.

"Yes, many times."

"Can you tell me, will they be nasty to me?"

At this point, I felt a deep pang of sorrow: for her question was a child's question. For all the precocity forced upon her, for all the street credibility she had no doubt assumed for the sake of survival in the brutal urban environment in which she found herself, for all the pseudo-independence thrust upon her by her feckless mother and Social Services, she was still a child, not an adult.

. . . This murder, exceptional in some characteristics as it undoubtedly was, took place in a social universe that liberals have wrought, and whose realities they are too guilty or cowardly to acknowledge. It is a universe that has no place for children or childhood in it. Believing that man is the product of his environment, they have nevertheless set about creating an environment from which it is truly difficult to escape, by closing off all the avenues and bolt-holes as far as possible. They have destroyed the family and any notion of progress or improvement. They have made a world in which the only freedom is self-indulgence, a world from which—most terrible of all—prison can sometimes be a liberation.

(Via Occam's Razor Toothbrush.)

Leo McKinstry in the Sunday Telegraph:

To European intellectuals, the term "American democracy" is probably an oxymoron. Though such sophisticated cynicism is contradicted by events in Iraq, where - just like in France 60 years ago - US soldiers have been sacrificing their lives to liberate a people from tyranny, anti-Americanism is now written into the European psyche, the last acceptable prejudice in a culture that makes a fetish of racial equality. Indeed, as I walked through the cemetery, my sense of gratitude at Bill's service was accompanied by deep, almost visceral, anger at my fellow Europeans for their constant sneering at America and their gloating over the body count in Iraq, despite all that the USA has done to free Europe in the past from totalitarian dictatorships, whether they be Nazi or communist.

I'm glad to see Joel Mowbray pick up on the study that Caroline Glick discussed:

Although Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has now disavowed peace talks with new Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, it is a sure bet that the "international community" will pressure Israel by raising the specter of surging Palestinian population figures that will soon leave Jews outnumbered between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

But a new demographic study released this week could change all that.

An eight-person team has found that the actual number of residents in Gaza and the West Bank is nearly one and a half million fewer than the published population of 3.8 million—and they derived much of that number from Palestinian figures.

David Brooks on Bush's Second Inaugural:

With that speech, President Bush's foreign policy doctrine transcended the war on terror. He laid down a standard against which everything he and his successors do will be judged.

When he goes to China, he will not be able to ignore the political prisoners there, because he called them the future leaders of their free nation. When he meets with dictators around the world, as in this flawed world he must, he will not be able to have warm relations with them, because he said no relations with tyrants can be successful.

His words will be thrown back at him and at future presidents.

. . . Because of that speech, it will be harder for the U.S. government to do what we did to Latin Americans for so many decades - support strongmen to rule over them because they happened to be our strongmen. It will be harder to frustrate the dreams of a captive people, the way in the early 1990's we tried to frustrate the independence dreams of Ukraine.

It will be harder for future diplomats to sit on couches flattering dictators, the way we used to flatter Hafez al-Assad of Syria decade after decade.

. . . The speech does not mean that Bush will always live up to his standard. But the bias in American foreign policy will shift away from stability and toward reform. It will be harder to cozy up to Arab dictators because they can supposedly help us in the war on terror.

. . . Bush's inaugural ideals will also be real in the way they motivate our troops in Iraq. Military Times magazine asked its readers if they think the war in Iraq is worth it. Over 60 percent - and two-thirds of Iraq combat vets - said it was.

. . . Americans are, as George Santayana observed, "idealists working on matter." On Thursday in Washington, the ideal and the material were on ample display.

Jonah Goldberg:

Kids going to college this fall were born the year I graduated from high school. Which means that I was going to bars three years before they were born. It also means that they have no real memory of the Soviet Union's existence. It means the scar on my left thumb from the old "Defender" video game is older than they are. It means the first president they were conscious of was Bill Clinton. They don't remember apartheid. They don't remember when Jesse Jackson wasn't a joke. Or when China took Marxism even remotely seriously. Star Wars was an old movie by the time they saw it and they can't remember when Pat Buchanan was a loyal Republican. Big Brother refers to a TV show first and a book by some dead guy second. Most of them have never used a typewriter, never been in a world where the broadcast-news anchors weren't hemorrhaging viewers to cable, never really did school work without the aid of the Internet, and never knew a time when people didn't have cell phones.

. . . This is a very old theme of mine — that technological changes pose a constant threat to the conservative project even as conservatives shouldn't be ideologically anti-technology. Cars, the birth control pill, the Internet, and television have all done more to dissolve the iron chains of community and tradition than most of the acidic ideas of dangerous philosophers.

What can conservatives do about this? Well, a lot and nothing. We cannot and should not adopt some sort of anti-change platform. . . . After all, William F. Buckley has spent his entire life yelling stop so he could change things, not so that he could freeze them. What we can do is what we've always done. Recognize and point out that change and progress are not synonymous, that materialistic advances are often merely a changing of the garb of humanity and not a change of humanity itself and, of course, that anyone who thinks Old School is superior to Animal House needs his head flushed.

Robert Spencer:

It is reasonable for any state to base its foreign policy on its overall goals and interests. In fact, I recommend that the United States do the same thing. In regard to the global jihad, this would involve a serious re-evaluation of the American posture around the globe.

. . . A State Department that really had America's interests at heart would immediately terminate all aid to Egypt, Indonesia, the Palestinians, Jordan, Somalia, Algeria, Sudan, Pakistan, Kosovo, Albania -- and even Iraq and Afghanistan, and any other state -- until each demonstrably ends all support -- material, educational, religious -- for jihad warfare, and grants full equality of rights to any non-Muslim citizens.

It should also reconfigure our global alliances on the same basis. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the rest should be put on notice that continued friendly relations with the United States absolutely depend on an immediate and comprehensive renunciation of the jihad, including a reformation of their schools to end the teaching of jihad warfare.

. . . To be a friend of the United States, each must renounce entirely any intention to make good on the Islamic goals and responsibilities enunciated by the Pakistani Islamic leader Syed Abul Ala Maududi, who declared that non-Muslims have "absolutely no right to seize the reins of power in any part of God's earth nor to direct the collective affairs of human beings according to their own misconceived doctrines." If they do, "the believers would be under an obligation to do their utmost to dislodge them from political power and to make them live in subservience to the Islamic way of life."

His comments were in full accord with Islamic theology and history, as well as with the Koran as it has been read and understood by Muslims for centuries. This is the goal of the jihadists today; it should be the fundamental defining point of U.S. alliances with Muslim states. . . .

But does anyone in the State Department have the will to advocate these and other measures? Or is it only regimes like the bloody mullahocracy in Tehran that are allowed to speak openly about their principles and goals, and take all the necessary measures for their own defense?

(Via LGF.)

According to a recent study (pdf), summarized by NCPA:

• For every 10 percent decline in pharmaceutical prices, R&D investment will fall by 5.8 percent.
• With lower investment breeding fewer breakthrough drugs, it is estimated that a 10 percent decline in drug prices would result in 40.1 million life-years lost.
• Assuming a year of life is worth $100,000, a 10 percent reduction in drug prices would cost $4 trillion over the long-run.

Peter W. Huber and Mark P. Mills in City Journal:

A bundle of enriched-uranium fuel-rods that could fit into a two-bedroom apartment in Hell's Kitchen would power the city for a year: furnaces, espresso machines, subways, streetlights, stock tickers, Times Square, everything—even our cars and taxis, if we could conveniently plug them into the grid. True, you don't want to stack fuel rods in midtown Manhattan; you don't in fact want to stack them casually on top of one another anywhere. But in suitable reactors, situated, say, 50 miles from the city on a few hundred acres of suitably fortified and well-guarded real estate, two rooms' worth of fuel could electrify it all. . . .

New York City consumes so much energy that you'd need, at a minimum, to cover two cities with solar cells to power a single city (see "How Cities Green the Planet," Winter 2000). No conceivable mix of solar and wind could come close to supplying the trillions of additional kilowatt-hours of power we'll soon need.

Nuclear power could do it—easily. In all key technical respects, it is the antithesis of solar power. A quad's worth of solar-powered wood is a huge forest—beautiful to behold, but bulky and heavy. Pound for pound, coal stores about twice as much heat. Oil beats coal by about twice as much again. And an ounce of enriched-uranium fuel equals about 4 tons of coal, or 15 barrels of oil. That's why minuscule quantities contained in relatively tiny reactors can power a metropolis. . . .

How worried should we really be in 2005 that accidents or attacks might release and disperse a nuclear power plant's radioactive fuel? Not very. Our civilian nuclear industry has dramatically improved its procedures and safety-related hardware since 1979. Several thousand reactor-years of statistics since Three Mile Island clearly show that these power plants are extraordinarily reliable in normal operation.

And uranium's combination of power and super-density makes the fuel less of a terror risk, not more, at least from an engineering standpoint. It's easy to "overbuild" the protective walls and containment systems of nuclear facilities, since—like the pyramids—the payload they're built to shield is so small. Protecting skyscrapers is hard; no builder can afford to erect a hundred times more wall than usable space. Guaranteeing the integrity of a jumbo jet's fuel tanks is impossible; the tanks have to fly. Shielding a nuclear plant's tiny payload is easy—just erect more steel, pour more concrete, and build tougher perimeters.

In fact, it's a safety challenge that we have already met. Today's plants split atoms behind super-thick layers of steel and concrete; future plants would boast thicker protection still. All the numbers, and the strong consensus in the technical community, reinforce the projections made two decades ago: it is extremely unlikely that there will ever be a serious release of nuclear materials from a U.S. reactor.

Fascinating and, to me, persuasive piece.

When I read this piece by Tony Blankley I found it persuasive, and therefore infuriating:

This week in the New Yorker magazine Seymour Hersh wrote the following words: "The administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran ... Much of the focus is on accumulation of intelligence and targeting information on Iranian nuclear, chemical and missile sites ... [The] American commando task force has been set up in South Asia and is now working closely with a group of Pakistani scientists and technicians who had dealt with Iranian counterparts ... The American task force ... has been penetrating eastern Iran from Afghanistan in a hunt for underground installations ... The task force members, or their locally recruited agents, secreted remote detection devices."

. . . I was shocked when I read Mr. Hersh's article. . . . Mr. Hersh is revealing to all the world, including the Iranian government, that our commandos are currently behind enemy lines in Iran on a dangerous and vital military assignment.

But Michael Ledeen has eased my mind and blood pressure:

I have usually ignored Hersh's articles and books over the years, because there were so many errors in them that I could never figure out what, if anything, was true. Better to ignore him altogether than get sucked into a morass of confusion. And of course, Hersh has long specialized in stories that are severely damaging to the American mission. He almost never seems to think we have real enemies, he invariably takes the side of anti-American critics, and it never seems to occur to him that there are people in the government who are desperately trying to do the right thing. . . .

I entirely agree with Tony Blankley that any journalist who reveals details of our quest for that information should be relegated to the lowest levels of Hell, whether the real thing or the legalistic equivalent. . . . But I don't think we need worry too much about Hersh's revealing the darkest secrets of American intelligence, because he doesn't have them. He can't even write a logically consistent paragraph.

If Caroline Glick's analysis is right, a crucial element of the Israeli-Palestinian debate should change:

[I]t could be said in retrospect that the greatest single victory the PLO has scored in its 46-year-old war with Israel was the publication of a single report in 1997. That report . . . projects that the Arab population west of the Jordan River will by 2015 outnumber the Jewish population. . . .

Largely in reaction to these statistics, which were bandied about by everyone from politicians to diplomats to defense officials, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided a year ago to adopt the left wing Labor Party's campaign platform and withdraw the IDF from Gaza and the northern West Bank and forcibly remove the Jews living in those areas from their homes. . . . Vice Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said: "Above all hovers the cloud of demographics. [. . .]"

But what if the numbers are wrong? What if the doomsday scenarios Israelis hear on a daily basis, arguing that Israel is about to be overrun by the Arab womb, are all based on fraudulent data - part of an ingenious Palestinian plan to psychologically manipulate Israel into capitulating?

This week a team of American and Israeli researchers presented a study of the Palestinian population statistics at the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation in Washington. . . . All of the team's comparative analyses led to the conclusion that the Palestinian population forecasts upon which Israel is basing its current policy of withdrawal and uprooting of Israeli communities in the territories are faulty in the extreme. . . .

The study, which has been accepted by prominent American demographers Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt and Murray Feshbach, shows that contrary to common wisdom, the Jewish majority west of the Jordan River has remained stable since 1967. In 1967 Jews made up 64.1 percent of the overall population and in 2004 they made up 59.5 percent. Inside Israel proper, including Jerusalem, Jews make up 80 percent of the population.

While reading the report, the inescapable sense is that something has gone very wrong within Israeli society. The numbers are so clear. The data have always been readily available. And yet, like bats attracted to the darkness of a cave, Israelis preferred the manipulative lies of the PA to the truth.

Don't click here.

(Via Judi at Dave Barry's blog.)

Larry Elder on Social Security reform:

No matter what the president proposes, expect Democrats to object. For example, the White House recently floated the notion of indexing Social Security benefits to inflation, rather than wages. (By indexing to inflation, the expected so-called guaranteed benefit decreases, but the worker would more than make it up through expected greater returns with money put into a personal account.)

Foul, cried House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. " . . . Recent press reports suggest that your administration favors a privatization plan that includes 'price indexing,'" said Pelosi, "which would reduce Social Security's progressive benefits by up to 46 percent for future retirees. These benefit cuts are the equivalent of asking today's seniors to live at a 1940s standard of living."

Are these the same guys who tell us that workers keep falling further and further behind consumer prices?

Former Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said that many Americans are being "squeezed" as wage gains fail to keep pace with a rising cost of living. Then-vice-presidential candidate John Edwards said last year, "It made the front page of the paper today, but it's not news to many Americans that wages are not keeping up with inflation." But if inflation outpaces wages, as Sens. Edwards and Kerry argued -- why not index the benefits to the higher number, inflation? Historically, wages outpace inflation, and Democrats -- despite their whining about the "Bush economy" -- know this.

It's gonna be a long four years.

And indeed I endeavoured mightily to put her out of my mind and not to love her at all except that she offered several provocations to my doing so, such as giving me a book of her favourite poems she had copied out in her own hand, and nicknaming me Tom because she said I reminded her of a cat of that name she had once owned, which was most pleasingly familiar; and once, presenting me with a lock of her hair which I kept in a little box by my bed. So that very soon thereafter she was in my head a thousand times each day.

And for the first time in a long time I was happy. For love is mostly optimism.

Jim Geraghty considers "whether many of the mainstream media's problems stem from having too many outlets competing for the same readers/viewers."

Michelle Malkin on some significant misreporting:

If you watched the evening news a week ago, you may recall the sensational story of a distraught Marine who died in a murderous shootout with police. Anti-war writers and Latino activists have turned the cop-killer, Lance Cpl. Andres Raya, into a martyr. Don't believe the hype.

. . . [C]ontrary to the impression left by initial media reports, Raya had never seen combat. And he was not headed back to Iraq. He had been transferred to a new unit scheduled for deployment to Okinawa. . . . Raya was high on cocaine at the time of the ambush, according to police reports. He was reportedly affiliated with the prison gang Nuestra Familia. Investigators found photos of Raya wearing gang colors and a shopping list in his bedroom safe that included body armor, assault rifles and ammunition.

From The Diplomad. Here's the first:

There's some magic "Third Way." Even one of our best allies in the world, Tony Blair, believes in this. This is a shame, because we like Blair. It was much worse when Bill Clinton was president because he believed in it, too (well, to the extent that Clinton believed in anything.) He and Blair held hands, sang Kumbaya, and preached "Third Way" to others. There's no third way that works. Communism is an obvious failure; prosperity is directly proportional to free markets. More capitalism equals more prosperity. (Note: Please remember this "Wrong Idea" as in a subsequent post we review some new UN UNsanity.)

BBC News:

Failing to make your bed in the morning may actually help keep you healthy, scientists believe.

Research suggests that while an unmade bed may look scruffy it is also unappealing to house dust mites thought to cause asthma and other allergies.

A Kingston University study discovered the bugs cannot survive in the warm, dry conditions found in an unmade bed.

Ralph Peters:

How will Indonesians interpret the disaster that has befallen Aceh?

Earthquakes, plagues and famines can either drag a population backward into superstition — or thrust it forward into a new spirit of inventiveness and creativity. . . . Given Aceh's fundamentalist tradition, the response from local mullahs (whose authority is threatened) is apt to be the age-old claim that Allah punished Aceh because it had already become too liberal.

. . . On Java or Sulawesi, the lesson is that Aceh's oppressive religion didn't protect it; on the contrary, Allah struck those who were most prideful about their faith. The earthquake and tsunami may have drowned Saudi-funded extremism as surely as it did the Sumatran countryside.

. . . Any assistance we can give Jakarta in making the national government appear effective in its relief efforts is money and sweat well-spent. Aceh may be where humane Islam can turn the tide against extremist hatred.

Paul Johnson walks a fine line:

The true theological or philosophical point to be made about the Indian Ocean wave — if, indeed, there is one — is that it is a timely reminder of the fragility of our existence in this world, the ease with which life on a sunny holiday beach can be snuffed out in a few torrential seconds, and the awesome power which nature still wields, and will always wield, in a world where science and engineering make such boastful strides in subduing her. And any reminder of the ultimate and total powerlessness of human beings, made always necessary by our arrogance and boasting, must be an act of God, and a very sensible and benevolent one too.

Jonathan Rauch on Social Security reform:

[N]either creating private Social Security accounts nor ratcheting down the growth of future benefits would be an economic milestone. Conservatives need to frame Social Security reform as a dollars-and-cents issue, but that is not really why they are excited. What they really hope to change is not the American economy but the American psyche.

. . . Tanner argues that people who own assets behave differently and see their place in society in a different light. Private accounts, he says, would encourage a culture of saving and personal responsibility; they would discourage political class warfare; they may, he argues, improve work habits, and even reduce crime and other social pathologies. Create private Social Security accounts, and millions of low-income Americans will be stockholders and bondholders. Republican political activists look at the way portfolio investors vote—and salivate at the prospect of millions more of them.

Mark Steyn on the Harry-in-Nazi-dress commotion:

It's a good rule of thumb that, no matter how big an idiot someone is, he can never compete with the political class's response to his idiocy. Thus, whatever feelings of unease I might have had about Prince Hitler were swept away the moment the rent-a-quote humbugs started lining up to denounce him.

I say to Harry: you go, girlfriend, you Reichstone Cowboy you.

. . . [W]orrying about a minor Royal schoolboy's alleged Nazi bent seems something of an indulgence at a time when the neo-Nazis get as many votes in Saxony's elections as Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democratic Party; when from Marseilles to Paris, Jews are being attacked and their homes, schools, kosher butchers, synagogues and cemeteries burnt and desecrated in a low-level intifada that's been going on so long the political establishment now accepts it as a normal feature of French life; and when the Berlin police advise Jews not to go out in public wearing any identifying marks of their faith. It's not just Nazi insignia you don't see in Germany these days; Nazi wise, the uniforms are the least of it.

An interview with Andrew Breitbart, coauthor of Hollywood, Interrupted:

NRO: Is it possible to raise normal kids in Hollywood?

Breitbart: The verdict is still out. I sure hope so. However, I've given up trying to stop the environmental indoctrination. It's simply everywhere out here.

The first day of kindergarten for my son started with an admonition about bringing lunch to school with anything that can be thrown away as trash.

On the second day he was told that we shouldn't eat Chilean sea bass. Guess what we had for dinner that night?

What drives me the craziest is watching "regular" parents go to great lengths to get their kids in the same school or extracurricular class with the kids of celebrities. I've wracked my brain and I can't see the benefit of being in the same "Gymboree" as Ethan Hawke. I'm less worried about the kids than I am the adults. Seriously.

Robert Samuelson:

It makes no sense to separate Social Security from Medicare. . . . [I]t is the total cost of these programs that matters for the budget, taxpayers and the economy. By itself, Social Security is almost irrelevant. Indeed, the big increases in future spending occur in health care. The actuaries of Social Security and Medicare project that Medicare's costs will exceed Social Security's in 2024 -- and then the gap only widens. . . . From 2004 to 2030, the combined spending on Social Security and Medicare is expected to rise from 7 percent of national income (gross domestic product) to 13 percent. Two-thirds of the increase occurs in Medicare.

Bruce Bartlett:

It is not clear what is driving the urgency of Social Security reform. It is desirable, to be sure, but nothing will happen to anyone's benefits for some time to come if nothing is done. By contrast, the Medicare system is on the verge of collapse, according to a new government report. . . . Yet instead of reforming Medicare, which is hemorrhaging money, we are talking only about Social Security, which is in sterling financial shape by comparison.

Indeed, not only are we not talking about reining in Medicare's exploding costs, we are preparing to make them much worse.

Walter Willams explores some health-care misconceptions:

The fact of business is, pharmaceutical spending actually lowers total health-care spending. It often replaces expensive and invasive surgical procedures and the time spent in the hospital. For example, in a yearlong disease-management program, Humana Hospitals studied 1,100 congestive heart failure patients. While pharmaceutical costs increased by 60 percent, the medications reduced hospital costs by 78 percent -- a net savings of $9 million.

The construction and importance of the Erie Canal:

Almost certainly it is no exaggeration to say that the United States wouldn't be what it is today had it not been for the Erie Canal; it was the Interstate Highway System of the 19th century, and its impact was comparable if not even greater.

What's remarkable, in hindsight, is that the idea of the canal stirred so much opposition and was so long in coming to fruition.

(Via Newmark's Door.)

This week's News of the Weird has some items I'd post if my mom didn't read me.

Thomas Sowell:

Disagreements are inevitable whenever there are human beings but we seem to be in an era when the art of disagreeing is vanishing. That is a huge loss because out of disagreements have often come deeper understandings than either side had before confronting each other's arguments. . . .

Even wacko ideas have led to progress, when dealt with critically, in terms of logic and evidence. Astrology led to astronomy. The medieval notion of turning lead into gold -- alchemy -- led to chemistry, from which have come everything from a wide range of industrial products and consumer goods to more productive agriculture and life-saving drugs.

Where an argument starts is far less important than where it finishes because the logic and evidence in between is crucial.

Robert J. Samuelson:

The United States is the world's leading economic power—but perhaps no longer the world's economic leader. There's a difference. No one doubts the singular wealth or position of the American economy. . . . But leadership is the ability to set and achieve goals, either by imposing your will or by getting others to follow. Time was when the United States could do this easily. . . . Times have changed.

. . . There's a lesson and a warning here. The lesson is that global markets do not always operate well by themselves. They require some broad political framework to provide stability, quell uncertainty and cope with crises. For a half century, the United States provided the framework. The warning is this: as much as American leadership has often been resent-ed, it might be regretted if it's no longer there. The globalized economy is a work in progress, and if it disintegrates into a melee of unsupervised markets and contentious nations, people may recall nostalgically the days when they nosily complained about Washington's overbearing leadership.

Mark Steyn:

At the Senate confirmation hearings for the new attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, Democrats seem to have decided that the very concept of an "enemy" is dubious, cheerfully cranking up their sanctimonious preening for CNN and berating Judge Gonzales for declining to extend the Geneva Conventions to captured terrorists. . . . It's depressing that after three years the Democrats seem incapable of any kind of characterization of the enemy that approximates to reality. But it's not surprising. In the landscape of modern progressive pieties, there are no enemies, just friends whose grievances we haven't yet accommodated.

Amity Shlaes argues against lifting the Social Security earnings ceiling:

Relatively few Americans earn more than $90,000 a year - about 7 per cent of the workforce.

Still, cutting such a deal would be crazy. For while the marginal tax increase involved sounds minor, it would affect not only households but also engines of small growth such as the "S corporation", a common format for many small companies. Senator Robert Bennett of Utah, an avid cap defender, . . . believes much of its very strong growth was connected with the low marginal income tax rate of 28 per cent set in 1986 by Congress and President Reagan. "Everyone assumes this is about taxing Michael Jordan or Warren Buffett," he tells me. "But really it is a massive hidden tax on small business." Massive is the accurate word. Lifting the cap represents a 12.4 per cent increase in the marginal tax rate overall (employer side plus employee side). This dwarfs the scale of Mr Bush's top income tax rate reductions, commonly derided as "massive".

. . . The best plan for Republicans therefore is to privatise as much as they can get away with. It would be fine to accept increases in the retirement age and to peg the base pension formula to inflation - which more or less takes care of the worry that, as things stand, Social Security is projected to go into deficit around the middle of the century. But Congress must not allow an increase in the share of income subject to pension tax.

Natan Sharansky:

Oslo failed because it was based on the premise that a strong dictator would make a strong peace. What Oslo's architects did not understand was that dictators need external enemies to justify the repression necessary to keep their societies under control. In contrast, democratic leaders, dependent on popular support, have a powerful incentive to deliver peace and prosperity to their citizens. In order to avoid the mistakes of the past, the focus this time must be less on summits and envoys and more on helping the Palestinians build a free society.

If Abu Mazen is a willing partner in this effort, his government should receive legitimacy, financial aid, territory and support for statehood. But if he is unwilling to do so, all support for his regime should be withheld.

Peggy Noonan on the decline of the MSM:

[T]he MSM will not disappear. But it will evolve. Some media organs--Newsweek, Time, the New York Times--will likely use the changing environment as license to be what they are: liberal, only more so. Interestingly they have begun to use Fox News Channel as their rationale. We used to be unbiased but then Fox came along with its conservative propaganda so now just to be fair and compete we're going liberal.

I don't see why anyone should mind this. A world where National Review is defined as conservative and Newsweek defined as liberal would be a better world, for it would be a more truthful one. Everyone gets labeled, tagged and defined, no one hides an agenda, the audience gets to listen, consider, weigh and allow for biases. A journalistic world where people declare where they stand is a better one.

Networks, on the other hand, may try harder to play it down the middle, and that would be wise. The days when they could sell a one-party point of view is over. No one is buying now because no one is forced to buy. But everyone will buy the networks when they sell what they're really good at, which is covering real news as it happens. Tsunamis, speeches, trials--events. Real and actual news. They are really good at that. And there is a market for it. And that market isn't over.

Donald Luskin:

Right now the Social Security program collects more in taxes — both FICA taxes from current workers and income taxes on benefits from current retirees — than it pays out in benefits to retirees. . . . The surplus will keep getting bigger and bigger through 2008, when it will reach $108 billion. Each year, that's more and more money that the federal government won't have to raise from the world capital markets. . . . But in 2009, just 5 years from now, the surplus will start to shrink. In 2009 it will fall to $103.7 billion, and in that year the federal government will have to go to the capital markets to raise $4.3 billion that it didn't have to raise the year before. That's not a lot of money in the grand governmental scheme of things. But it's an important turning point for Social Security — it's the year the crisis begins.

John Derbyshire:

I'll confess I am a Sosec reform skeptic, on the grounds that:

(a) It will make my life even more complicated, at an age when I'd be looking to simplify it. More of my life, of the national life, will be in the hands of lawyers and accountants, for a net loss of self-reliance. . . .

(b) Govt will end up being involved MORE in my affairs, not less. The current system is simple, straightforward, and needs about 8 bureaucrats to run it. With the political necessities of privatized Sosec (i.e. you can't let people invest any fool way they please), there will be govt bureaucrats crawling all over the mutual-fund business -- yeah, yeah, but even more than there already are. It will end with some crisis and a complete govt takeover of the securities markets -- "To protect your investments..."

. . . Sure, sure, I know all the counter-arguments -- I've been hearing them (and making them!) all my life. I'm starting to think, though, that we are being marched off towards a newer, more oppressive, more liberty-denying kind of socialism; and the banners we are marching under read: PRIVATIZATION! LIBERATION! PERSONAL CHOICE!.....

George Will:

The argument about Social Security reform has highly technical facets, but it also has this easily comprehended dimension: The age cohort that is least receptive to reform that enlarges individual choice is the elderly—a cohort composed of people who, all their lives, when they wanted coffee they ordered a cup of ... coffee. The cohort most receptive to reform, those ages 18 to 29, is composed of people who, when they want coffee, take a deep breath and order something like this: a venti decaf nonfat extra-hot no foam with whip [whipped cream] three-pump vanilla [three shots of vanilla syrup] latte.

(Via A Constrained Vision.)

*There seems to be some debate whether it's "that children are our future" or "the children are our future." I have no opinion. The line's idiotic either way.

At Reason, an instructive interview with Bruce Caldwell, author of an "intellectual biography" of economist Friedrich Hayek. (A somewhat critical review of Caldwell's book is here.)

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Ulysses"

In light of the bombing at the Gaza crossing Thursday, this column by Charles Krauthammer, published before the Palestinian elections, is worth revisiting:

On Sept. 13, 1993, I was on the White House lawn watching the signing of the Oslo accords. I also watched the intellectual collapse of the entire Middle East intelligentsia — journalists, politicians, ``experts'' — as they swooned at the famous handshake between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin and refused, that day and for years to come, to recognize what was obvious: that Arafat was embarking not on peace but on the next stage of his perpetual war against Israel, this one to be launched far more advantageously from a base of Palestinian territory that Israel had just suicidally granted him.

Why was this so obvious? Because Arafat said so — that very night (in an Arabic broadcast to his own people on Jordanian television) and many times afterward. The Middle East experts refused to believe it. They did not want to hear it. Then came the intifada. Thousands of dead later, they now believe it. The more honest ones among them even admit they were wrong.

Now Arafat is dead, Mahmoud Abbas is poised to succeed him, and the world is swooning again. Abbas, we are told, is the great hope, the moderate, the opponent of violence, the man who has said the intifada was counterproductive.

The peacemaker cometh. Once again, euphoria is in the air. Once again, no one wants to listen to what is being said.

Jeff Jacoby shared Krauthammer's pessimism:

Again and again, Abbas has expressed his solidarity with violent extremists. . . . Abbas's "foreign minister," Nabil Sha'ath, declared that between the Palestinian Authority and the other groups, "there are no differences over the objectives."

And what are those objectives? About that, Abbas has been explicit. In recent weeks he has promised to shelter terrorists from Israeli arrest and vowed that there will be no PA crackdown on Palestinian terrorism. He hews unswervingly to Yasser Arafat's hardline positions — an Israeli retreat to the 1949 armistice lines, Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital, the elimination of every Jewish settlement, the dismantling of Israel's security fence, and no limit on the "right of return" — code for the abolition of Israel as a Jewish state.

Abbas is no moderate. His election is not a step toward peace. What was true in Afghanistan and Iraq is true in the Palestinian Authority as well: Without regime change, freedom and democracy are impossible. . . . President Bush got it right in 2002: The Palestinians need "new leaders . . . not compromised by terror." They still do.

I find myself agreeing more and more strongly with Caroline Glick's opposition to an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the West Bank:

The only issue that interests the Israeli media today is the threat manifested by a tiny number of Israeli opponents to Sharon's withdrawal and expulsion plan . . . , who may use violence against soldiers sent to throw them out of their homes and communities in Gaza and the northern West Bank. . . . On the radio and television, there has been saturation coverage of the prospect that thousands of soldiers may refuse to participate in the expulsion of Jews from their homes, while the strategic implications of the program have been systematically ignored by everyone. . . . Old-guard military establishment types like Labor parliamentarian and (res.) Brig.-Gen. Ephraim Sneh are openly calling for a civil war.

. . . If Israelis can be brought to believe that the dangers that Sharon's plans manifest relate only to the pesky, overwhelmingly religious Israelis who live in the areas he wishes to empty of Jews, rather than to the country as a whole, then there can be little doubt that there will be bloody confrontations (provoked mainly by the Left) between Jew and Jew. On the other hand, if Israelis are willing to recognize that the dangers inherent in his plans relate to the entire state, then not only would such internecine violence be consummately avoidable, the people of Israel would also be able to craft policies that would ensure the wellbeing and security of Israeli society as a whole for decades to come.

Update: I should've included this from Glick's piece:

In his recent jaunt through Syria and Lebanon, PLO chairman and soon to be "elected" PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas vowed that there will be no peace until millions of foreign Arabs (referred to as"Palestinian refugees"), who have been forced to live in UN internment camps (referred to as "refugee camps") for the past 56 years, are allowed to move to Israel. US President George W. Bush announced last April that the US would not support a Palestinian demand to have these people enter into Israel as part of a peace deal. So Israelis can assume relatively safely that in the initial period of statehood, these Arabs in Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere will instead move to the Palestinian state.

. . . Given Abbas's statements in recent days and weeks in praise of terrorism and in condemnation of "the Zionist enemy," as well as his deep involvement in Palestinian corruption and terror financing, it strains credulity to believe that he will oversee a process of reform over PA budgets and militias. Rather, it is safe to assume that, under his leadership, Palestinian society will continue to be characterized by destitution and rage.

If this situation is further exacerbated by the entry of millions of destitute Arab immigrants into the rump Palestinian state, what does Israel think will happen? Since Abbas, and the rest of the PA leadership, not to mention Hamas and Islamic Jihad, have all proclaimed consistently that their demand is for these Arabs to move to Israel, can there be any doubt that they will point to their economic desolation and blame it on Israel's "obstinate refusal" to allow these hostile foreigners to live inside its borders? And what does Israel''s leadership think that Europe's response to this demand will be, given the European view, passively supported by the US, that the current terror war is Israel's fault?

Larry Elder gives several examples. I especially like this one:

Samuel L. Jackson is a respected black actor who appeared in more American films than anyone during the 1990s. In April 2000, he appeared on the cover of Architectural Digest, along with Clark Gable, Natalie Wood, William H. Macy, Hedy Lamarr, Marilyn Monroe, Bing Crosby, Doris Day and Claire Danes. Surely the Jackson family celebrated the actor's appearance on the cover, and the glowing inside piece on their lovely home. Wrong. Because Jackson shared the cover with other celebrities, his wife, LaTanya Richardson Jackson, wrote to the magazine and accused it of racism:

"It is with sincere regret that I write to tell you how disappointing it is to see my husband, Samuel L. Jackson, featured in the lower left-hand corner on the cover of your April 2000 issue," wrote Mrs. Jackson. "It seems a very odd and racist placement. In the magazine racks of most establishments you don't see him at all; perhaps that was the point. I hardly think anyone is really more interested in all of the dead people you chose to prominently display . . . ."

John Lott responds to the recent report critical of his work (I posted briefly on the report and reactions to it here and here):

While the panel dealt with a broad range of gun control issues, only one issue has received attention on different blogs: right-to-carry laws. . . . It is hard to look through the NAS panel's tables on right-to-carry laws and not find overwhelming evidence that right-to-carry laws reduce violent crime. . . . Overall, the panel's own evidence from the latest data up through 2000 shows significant benefits and no costs from these laws.

In the Times of London. Some interesting bits:

Two developments persuaded Crichton to abandon his Californian liberal world view. One was in 2002 having a gun held to his head by burglars, who tied up Taylor, his daughter, then aged 13. "They told me not to move and I figured it was best not to argue," he says. It convinced him we must be tougher on bad guys, be they cat burglars or Saddam Hussein.

His second awakening was seeing that scientists had become so cowed by environmental activists and the media that they dared not proclaim what their research showed: that, so far, it appears global warming is hardly happening.

. . . "I have done a lot of reading, and the economics seem clear: you are better off waiting to see if it does become a real problem and then catching up. It may never happen.

"California passed a law 20 years ago decreeing a proportion of cars would have to be electric powered. My town, the People's Republic of Santa Monica, built these electrical facilities on the sides of the road — and there they sit, unused, just tripping people up so they can sue the city." He pauses. "If it does turn out we need to do something, we could probably do it in 10 years, certainly less than a century. False preparation is always a disaster — in anticipation of entering he first world war the United States bought 20,000 horses, for cavalry charges. Then they had to work out what to do with all these damn horses because there was something called tanks."

From an NCPA summary of a piece by Kenneth Todd of the Cato Institute:

[U]sing more roundabouts and more all-way stops will cut down on lost time, taxpayer expense and accidents. According to the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA):

• Roundabouts are far safer than traffic signals, cause less delay, and have more vehicle capacity; where used they have reduced serious-injury and fatal accidents by 60 to 90 percent.

• All-stop intersections have the best safety record, with half as many accidents as those controlled by two-way stops or signals; serious accidents are extremely rare.

• Yield signs have a safety record as good as the stop sign, cause less delay and allow a 50 percent higher rate of traffic flow.

John Derbyshire responds to critics of his posts on intelligent design:

Some readers have chid me for referring to ID as "flapdoodle." This was, they say, ill-mannered of me. Heaven forbid I should be thought ill-mannered! Me! I therefore beg you to strike out the word "flapdoodle" and replace it with one of the following, according to taste: balderdash, baloney, blather, bunkum, bushwa, claptrap, gobbledygook, hocus-pocus, hogwash, hokum, hooey, humbug, mumbo-jumbo, piffle, rigmarole, tripe, twaddle.

Rich Lowry on Sgt. Rafael Peralta, who died saving fellow Marines in Fallujah November 15:

Peralta's sacrifice should be a legend in the making. But somehow heroism doesn't get the same traction in our media environment as being a victim or villain, categories that encompass the truly famous Jessica Lynch and Lynndie England respectively. . . . Scandalously, the "heroism" of Spc. Thomas Wilson — the national guardsman who asked a tough question of Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld that had been planted with him by a reporter — has been more celebrated in the press than that of Peralta.

Kaemmerer recounts how later on the night of Nov. 15, a friend approached him and said: "You're still here; don't forget that. Tell your kids, your grandkids, what Sgt. Peralta did for you and the other Marines today." Don't forget. Good advice for all of us.

Oliver North's piece on Peralta is also worth reading.

Evidently Malcolm Gladwell's piece "The Talent Myth" is famous. It was new to me, though (always late), and I enjoyed it. Two excerpts:

Dweck gave a class of preadolescent students a test filled with challenging problems. After they were finished, one group was praised for its effort and another group was praised for its intelligence. Those praised for their intelligence were reluctant to tackle difficult tasks, and their performance on subsequent tests soon began to suffer. Then Dweck asked the children to write a letter to students at another school, describing their experience in the study. She discovered something remarkable: forty per cent of those students who were praised for their intelligence lied about how they had scored on the test, adjusting their grade upward. They weren't naturally deceptive people, and they weren't any less intelligent or self-confident than anyone else. They simply did what people do when they are immersed in an environment that celebrates them solely for their innate "talent." They begin to define themselves by that description, and when times get tough and that self-image is threatened they have difficulty with the consequences.

* * * * *

"When we would hire them, it wouldn't just be for a week," one former Enron manager recalls, of the brilliant young men and women from McKinsey who wandered the hallways at the company's headquarters. "It would be for two to four months. They were always around." They were there looking for people who had the talent to think outside the box. It never occurred to them that, if everyone had to think outside the box, maybe it was the box that needed fixing.

(Via, indirectly, Marginal Revolution.)

At The American Enterprise Online. It's all worth reading, but here are some excerpts:

The two most controversial pieces I've written were in the Washington Post in 1981, called "Blacker Than Thou" and "Blacker Than Thou II." Oh, the fury. An entire page of the Post was devoted to letters attacking me. Patricia Roberts Harris said something like, "People like Sowell and Williams are middle class. They don't know what it is to be poor." So I proceeded to point out that not only was Patricia Roberts Harris not poor, but that I never saw Patricia Roberts Harris at Howard University when we were there at the same time because she was in a sorority that would not admit dark-skinned girls.

* * * * *

There's something Eric Hoffer said: "Intellectuals cannot operate at room temperature." There always has to be a crisis--some terrible reason why their superior wisdom and virtue must be imposed on the unthinking masses. It doesn't matter what the crisis is. A hundred years ago it was eugenics. At the time of the first Earth Day a generation ago, the big scare was global cooling, a big ice age. They go from one to the other. It meets their psychological needs and gives them a reason for exercising their power. Many intellectuals' preoccupation with the poor is very much the same thing. The thing that gives it all away is that after they say, "We must have this program because the poor can't afford medicine, or can't afford housing," they will splutter if you say, "OK, let's have a means test so it really goes to the poor." If they were really concerned primarily about the poor, they would agree to it. But they are bitterly opposed to that, because the poor are a lever to reach other, political, goals.

* * * * *

The tragedy is that the Left has never understood the importance of incentives in general or power in particular. That power is the only thing that deters power. . . . I remember a highly educated man in San Francisco who didn't think police really had any effect on crime, that he would be just as safe without them. He never felt the need for police to defend him--no one bothered him! That's a vision that pervades a large section of the intelligentsia.

(Via A Constrained Vision.)

David John of the Heritage Foundation:

There are only three ways to avoid the impending Social Security crisis: (1) raise taxes and borrow massive amounts of money, or make massive cuts in other federal programs; (2) reduce benefits promised to younger workers; or (3) make payroll taxes work harder and bring greater returns by allowing workers to invest all (or a part) of them through PRAs. While the first two options would make Social Security returns even lower than they are today, PRAs would not only address the impending insolvency of the system, but also improve retirement incomes and help to close the gap between what the current system has prom­ised and what it will be able to pay. It would also allow workers of all income levels to build a nest egg for the future. Simply put, PRAs can give workers a much more secure retirement income than the current Social Security system.

Now that a few people have linked to it, I'd like to flesh out my post on defanging Michael Moore.

I once asked someone who'd just seen the movie Grosse Pointe Blank whether he'd enjoyed it. He said no, because he'd seen Fargo a few days earlier. (Both movies involve hired criminals and murder.) In other words, though Fargo is in no sense a refutation of Grosse Pointe Blank, after seeing the former he couldn't take the latter seriously.

That's the kind of effect I have in mind. A fair-minded, substantive movie could inoculate viewers against Moore's distortions, or at least help viewers perceive them. Even without debunking Moore's specific scenes and narration, it could give a side of the argument that Moore chooses not to show. (Moore tends not to admit that there is another side.)

If this piece is correct and drug companies are among Moore's next targets, I'd expect him to make these three claims at some point in his film. I've followed each with a rebuttal:

• Moore: Drug companies charge outrageous prices, so we need price controls like those in Europe. Rebuttal: Prices may seem high, but developing a drug is expensive, few drugs reach the market, and drug companies have to recoup where they can. If drug companies are forced to lower prices, their profits will fall, and research to create new drugs will decrease. (See here and here.)
• Moore: The FDA is in the pocket of the pharmaceutical companies, as shown by drugs that received FDA approval but were discovered to be harmful. Rebuttal: Some approved drugs have caused harm, but the FDA approval process is in fact extremely long and often causes harm by keeping drugs from people who need them. (See here and here.)
• Moore: People are dying in poor countries because of drug companies' greed. Rebuttal: People in other countries are dying who could be helped by existing medicines, but drug companies donate a great deal of medicine, sometimes billions of dollars' worth per year, to poor countries. (See here.)

You may find my responses unpersuasive, but they aren't corrupt or unreasonable, and they'd be a revelation to many who've never heard them. Put them in a compelling, honest movie, especially one available when Moore's comes out, and Moore might be seen as he is: not a courageous and witty documentarian, but a vehement partisan using his populist art for political ends.

And I think that's it for my discussion of Michael Moore. I really can't stand the guy.

(Updated 2:52 AM)

Why you need to have one
is not much more mysterious than
why you don't say what you think
at the birth of an ugly baby.
Or, you've just made love
and feel you'd rather have been
in a dark booth where your partner
was nodding, whispering yes, yes,
you're brilliant. The secret life
begins early, is kept alive
by all that's unpopular
in you, all that you know
a Baptist, say, or some other
accountant would object to.
It becomes what you'd most protect
if the government said you can protect
one thing, all else is ours.
When you write late at night
it's like a small fire
in a clearing, it's what
radiates and what can hurt
if you get too close to it.
It's why your silence is a kind of truth.
Even when you speak to your best friend,
the one who'll never betray you,
you always leave out one thing;
a secret life is that important.

Stephen Dunn, "A Secret Life"

(Updated 1/12 7:51 PM)

An article by Benedict Carey in today's New York Times:

[F]or more than 10 years, he ruthlessly kept his two identities apart: one lived in a Westchester hamlet and worked in a New York office, and the other operated mainly in clubs, airport bars and brothels. One warmly greeted clients and waved to neighbors, sometimes only hours after the other had stumbled back from a "work" meeting with prostitutes or cocaine dealers.

In the end, it was a harmless computer pop-up advertisement for security software, claiming that his online life was being "continually monitored," that sent this New York real estate developer into a panic and to a therapist. . . .

"Contrary to what many people assume," Dr. Kwawer said, "quite often a secret life can bring a more lively, more intimate, more energized part of themselves out of the dark."

I read about them here. In more happy news, Windows Update seems to be down at the moment.

Mark Steyn:

[L]ast week the Guardian forced itself to consider the awkward fact that many young black males are "homophobic". . . . Don't blame Jamaican men, though.

After all, who made them homophobic? The "vilification of Jamaican homophobia", says Decca Aitkenhead, is just an attempt to distract from the real culprit: "It's a failure to recognise 400 years of Jamaican history, starting with the sodomy of male slaves by their white owners as a means of humiliation. [. . .] Jamaicans weren't the architects of their ideas about homosexuality; we were."

. . . How heartening to know that, at a time when so many quaint old British traditions are being abolished - foxhunting, free speech, national sovereignty - the traditional British Leftist colonial guilt complex is alive and well. Even with hardly any colonies.

David Brooks has suggestions for Bush:

This is the moment for the White House to seize the Reagan Rule - you can get a lot done in Washington as long as you don't get credit. The president should follow Senator Chuck Grassley's advice and let Congress take the lead in drafting a bill. That would go a long way to depolarizing the issue.

Next, it would be useful to broaden the frame of discussion. All the talk so far revolves around Option 2 from the president's 2001 commission. Why limit ourselves? There are dozens of creative reform ideas out there.

There's much more.

Thomas Sowell:

Now that President Bush has twice gotten himself to the White House, the question is whether he wants to try for Mount Rushmore. One of the luxuries of a second term is an opportunity to think about the long run, not simply for one's own "legacy," but for the future of the nation as a whole. . . .

Too often Republicans have been willing to make backroom compromises with the Democrats, instead of going to the public, as Ronald Reagan did. With the Democrats becoming ever more obstructionist, it is long past time for Republicans to try Plan B.

The Diplomad on an article in the New York Times:

[W]hat comes across is how often even effective relief aid is wasted in the sense that once the initial crisis passes, lives of misery return to being lives of misery. . . .

Perhaps in the long run, it was a shame that America's extraordinarily generous Marshall Plan was so successful. It set a model we have tried to replicate throughout the world. The crisis facing Europe immediately after WWII was genuinely one of money; Europe needed cash to buy tools, clear the rubble and rebuild. In many other parts of the world, that's not the problem.

NCPA:

An ordinary toad successfully provided more accurate responses to Medicare policy questions than Medicare customer service representatives (CSRs), according to a new study by L.R. Huntoon, a practicing neurologist and editor-in-chief of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.

• A 2004 Government Accountability Office (formerly the General Accounting Office) study reveals that 96 percent of the time CSRs gave the wrong answer to physicians questioning the appropriate way to bill Medicare.

• In comparison, Huntoon asked a toad a series of rephrased GAO Medicare policy questions; by jumping right for "yes" and left for "no," the toad crushed the competition, answering correctly 50 percent of the time.

Some infuriating details in this report "regarding violence in the town of Al-Kut" last year:

Many of the problems that we faced at our compound were directly related to the Governorate Coordinator's decisions. The GC, Marc Etherington, hampered and denied implementation of several defensive measures which would have greatly enhanced our defensive posture. One specific example was the treatment of our southern flank (the river). No less than three security entities (Triple Canopy, KBR and Global Security) recommended the implementation of T-walls along the length of the southern flank. The GC specifically denied that implementation as it would have obstructed the view of the river from the office building. ... The GC compromised our security for aesthetic view. He said on numerous occasions that there was no threat from the river.

During the assault, we took numerous RPG rounds from across the river. Additionally, we took heavy machine gun fire from that direction as well.

("T-wall": "Perimeter defense (e.g. of observation posts); prefabricated, T-shaped, cement wall sections (T-blocks) are set up side to side to build a defense wall.")

Theodore Dalrymple:

Personally, I have never been an enthusiastic proponent of unrestricted patient autonomy: like all such principles, it has its limitations, at least for sensible people who are aware of the messiness of the real world.

But it is interesting to speculate as to why, in the case of alosetron, what is normally and officially now regarded as a keystone of medical ethics should have been so precipitately jettisoned.

Mark Steyn:

Muslim leaders divide the world into the Dar al-Islam and everybody else. Yet the deaths of 100,000 members of the club in Banda Aceh alone isn't enough to catch the eye of the big shots in the Arab world. The Arab world's principal contribution these past two weeks has been the usual paranoia: "Was it caused by American, Israeli and Indian nuclear testing?" wondered Mahmoud Bakri in the Egyptian weekly Al Usbu. "The three most recent tests appeared to be genuine American and Israeli preparations to act together with India to test a way to liquidate humanity."

Colin Powell was foolish to suggest that, in its response to this crisis, the Muslim world would come to appreciate the true nature of the US. Fat chance. "It's OK that aid from the US is here," said Hilmy Bakar Almascaty, spokesman for the Islamic Defender Front. "But if they open bars, sell alcohol or open prostitution centres, then we will fight them." Almascaty also warned the Australian charity Youth Off the Streets that its plan to open homes for 35,000 Indonesian orphans was all very well, but on no account was it to try converting Muslim children. Jeez, man, would it kill you once in a while just to send a box of chocolates and a card saying "Thank you, you infidel sons of whores and pigs", and leave it at that?

Heather Mac Donald:

To succeed in the war on terror, interrogators must be allowed to use carefully controlled stress techniques against unlawful combatants. Stress works, say interrogators. The techniques that the military has used to date come nowhere near torture; the advocates can only be posturing in calling them such. These self-professed guardians of humanitarianism need to come back to earth. Our terrorist enemies have declared themselves enemies of the civilized order. In fighting them, we must hold ourselves to our own high moral standards--without succumbing to the utopian illusion that we can prevail while immaculately observing every precept of the Sermon on the Mount.

Jonah Goldberg:

As for the Geneva Convention and al Qaeda, you'd have to be higher than a moonbat to treat them as signatories to it. Everything they do is a violation of the convention. It may be fun to mug for the cameras and criticize Gonzales for saying that the Geneva Convention is "outdated" when it comes to al Qaeda. But unless you think Khaleed Sheikh Mohammed deserves an allowance in Swiss francs that he can spend at the local canteen, you have to concede Gonzales is right.

Andrew C. McCarthy:

[T]he critics should do us all a favor: If you're going to talk the talk of righteous indignation, be ready to walk the walk. Be ready to tell Americans exactly what protections you want to give to the terrorists. Be ready to tell Americans that you would prohibit coercive interrogation even if it were the only way of saving a hundred thousand of them.

If you're not ready to do that — because you full well understand that your position is not one even you can defend when the questions get hard — then don't waste our time. Get out of the way of serious people like Judge Gonzales. People who don't pretend to be perfect, who don't claim to have all the answers, and who are not so smug that they think they can afford to take life-and-death options off the table — even as they pray they will never have to use them.

Rich Lowry:

In the Gonzales fight, Democrats make, once again, their lack of seriousness in the war on terror plain. The Bush administration should relish waging the battle for its nominee.

And a roundup of opinions by Editor & Publisher:

An E&P survey of editorials during the past few days in 19 leading newspapers finds strong doubts about Gonzales' fitness to be U.S. attorney general. Eight newspapers in that group have called on the U.S. Senate to reject his nomination. Seven others expressed serious reservations, and four others endorse him strongly.

George Will:

One hundred years ago a minor Swiss civil servant, having traveled home in a streetcar from his job in the Bern patent office, wondered: What would the city's clock tower look like if observed from a streetcar racing away from the tower at the speed of light? The clock, he decided, would appear stopped because light could not catch up to the streetcar, but his own watch would tick normally.

``A storm broke loose in my mind,'' Albert Einstein later remembered. He produced five papers in 1905 and for physicists, the world has never been the same. For lay people, it has never felt the same.

Thomas Sowell:

In recent years, the liberal media have at least added some token conservatives, but our colleges and universities are content with whole departments consisting solely of people ranging from the left to the far left. In academia, "diversity" in practice too often means simply white leftists, black leftists, female leftists and Hispanic leftists.

Rich Lowry, 1/4/05:

According to Social Security expert David John of the Heritage Foundation, one-fifth of white males die between the ages of 50 and 70. But one-third of black males die between those ages. If you die before you reach the age of 62, you have no chance of collecting benefits, and if you die shortly thereafter, you will not recoup the payroll taxes you paid into the system.

John ran the numbers for persons roughly age 20 to 25 living in the ZIP code for liberal New York Rep. Charlie Rangel's district office. The average rate of return from Social Security for these young people will be negative 8 percent. If young blacks were being fleeced in this way by, say, "predatory lenders," the likes of Rangel would scream racism and demand change.

The conclusion of a 2002 piece by Deroy Murdock comes to mind:

Herman Cain . . . is a prominent black business executive and one of Social Security modernization's most persuasive and entertaining advocates. Cain says that at age 56, he already has paid $161,000 into Social Security. In the next 10 years, he expects to add another $74,000 to the system.

"If that's going to be a transfer from me to white people," Herman Cain wonders, "can't I at least give it to white people I like?"

David M. Walker, Comptroller General of the United States, 12/6/04:

The federal government's gross debt as of September 2004 was about $7.4 trillion, or about $25,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country. But that number excludes such items as the gap between promised and funded Social Security and Medicare benefits, veterans' health care, and a range of other unfunded commitments and contingencies that the federal government has pledged to support. If these items are factored in, the current dollar burden for every American rises to about $145,000 per person, or about $350,000 per full-time worker. . . .

[T]he fiscal policies in place today -- absent substantive entitlement reform or unprecedented changes in tax and/or spending policies -- will result in large, escalating, and persistent deficits that are economically unsustainable over the long term. Without reform, known demographic trends, rising health care costs, and projected growth in federal spending for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid will result in massive fiscal pressures that, if not effectively addressed, could cripple the economy, threaten our national security, and adversely affect the quality of life of Americans in the future.

(Via The Federalist Patriot.)

On skiing:

Ski experts recommend that you start by taking a group lesson because otherwise they would have to get real jobs. To start the lesson your instructor, who is always a smiling 19-year-old named "Chip," will take you to the top of the mountain and explain basic ski safety procedures until he feels that the cold has killed enough of your brain cells that you will cheerfully follow whatever lunatic command he gives you. Then he'll ski a short distance down the mountain, just to the point where it gets very steep, and swoosh to a graceful stop, making it look absurdly easy. It IS absurdly easy for Chip, because underneath his outfit he's wearing an antigravity device. All the expert skiers wear them. You don't actually believe that "ski jumpers" can leap off those ridiculously high ramps and just float to the ground unassisted without breaking into walnut-sized pieces, do you? Like Tinkerbell or something? Don't be a cretin.

David Frum:

As Ms Short complained in The Independent on January 1: "At a time when the world faces terrible challenges, of poverty, disorder and environmental degradation, there is a real danger that the US government is consistently undermining the only legitimate system of international co-operation that we have." In a world that contains - among others - the EU, Nato, the World Trade Organisation, and literally hundreds of regional and global governmental and non-governmental associations, it seems bizarre to describe the UN as the sole legitimate international actor.

But of course the UN is the only one of these actors consistently to come into conflict with the United States. It is this bias of the UN system - and not any of the UN's meagre list of achievements - that causes so many on the global Left to regard it as legitimate in a way that they do not regard, say, international treaties for the protection of patents.

Interesting piece by Tunku Varadarajan on the tsunami's aftermath:

In communitarian societies, one might argue, the victim is felt to be not so much the individual as the community that sustains individuals and gives them their identity.

Such communities, often dependent on the impersonal caprices of nature, are too busy surviving as a group; and deaths are ultimately seen as the group's loss. . . .

Many coastal people also tend to have a cosmology in which the individual is a part of nature. Here Hindu beliefs (and perhaps also aspects of Buddhist thought) may help survivors to regard the deaths of their loved ones--once the first tremors of lamentation have passed--as an elevation into the great anonymity of nature. Death is, in effect, a release from the prison of individuality--its dissolution, in fact.

Does this mean that a fisherman from Madras suffers less than Americans? Certainly not. But it may help him cope with grief--even unimaginable grief--in ways that are beyond most of us.

Mark Steyn:

What happens on Election Day is that the Democrats lose and then decide it was because of ''unusually long lines'' in ''minority neighborhoods.'' What ''minority neighborhoods'' means is electoral districts run by Democrats. In Ohio in 2004 as in Florida in 2000, the ''problems'' all occur in counties where the Dems run the system. Sometimes, as in King County in Washington, they get lucky and find sufficient votes from the ''disenfranchised'' accidentally filed in the icebox at Democratic headquarters. But in Ohio, Bush managed to win not just beyond the margin of error but beyond the margin of lawyer. If there'd been anything to sue and resue and re-resue over, you can bet those 5,000 shysters the Kerry campaign flew in would be doing it. Instead, Boxer and Conyers & Co. are using a kind of parliamentary privilege to taint Bush's victory without even the flimsiest pretext.

Peggy Noonan:

The Bush administration has stood for cutting taxes, allowing high spending, and being tough in the world. The Democrats stand for raising taxes, high spending, and being weak in the world. Should the Democrats become more like Republicans? Yes, they should. Then, in the next big contest, they can agree on the big points with the Republicans and win on three other things. First, on small points, as Mr. Clinton did with such key issues as The Campaign for the Right Child-Carrying Seatbelts. Second, on campaign expertise. Third, on the personality and character of the candidate.

On all of these points they can be truly competitive. If they choose to get serious.

Michael Rubin:

Anonymous American and British diplomats increasingly suggest that elections cannot be held in the deteriorating security situation, but it is the worsening atmosphere that is driving the Iraqi desire to vote. . . . Insurgents and terrorists may kill Iraqis lining up to vote. They may assassinate winning candidates. But only through voting, can Iraqis choose their own government, one that will have the moral authority to undertake remedies forbidden by professional diplomats and intelligence operatives who have had trouble letting go of the old order.