Did my matzos come?

BBC News:

A fierce species of Amazonian ant has been seen building elaborate traps on which hapless prey are stretched like medieval torture victims, before being slowly hacked to pieces. . . .

The ants cut hairs to clear a path under the plant stem, while leaving some hairs standing to form "pillars" on top of which the lethal platform will sit.

Using the plant hairs they have harvested, the ants weave the platform itself, which is bound together and strengthened using a special fungus.

When the ants have completed the chamber they puncture holes all along its surface, each just big enough to poke their heads through.

Then, hundreds of worker ants climb into the chamber and wait for an unfortunate victim. . . .

Anything with legs slim enough to fit through the carefully constructed holes will meet a miserable fate if they are foolish enough to enter the trap.
 

From "FDR's Card Trick," by William Voegeli, 4/26/05:

Forty-five years ago William F. Buckley noted liberalism's penchant for turning "the skies black with criss-crossing dollars." Those dark skies serve a purpose. As more and more dollars fly around, the confusion about where all of them start out and end up increases. The dollars often arrive ostentatiously (Social Security checks in the mailbox) but depart surreptitiously (payroll withholding and employer "contributions" to Social Security). This contrast makes it easy for each household to regard itself as a net importer rather than a net exporter of the dollars that make up this green tornado. The ultimate goal is to leave people believing an impossibility: that an enormous but nevertheless finite number of dollars can be vacuumed up and airdropped in such a way that the vast majority of people wind up gaining more than they lose.

The confusion caused by the criss-crossing dollars is not the only inducement to support the welfare state. Liberalism depends, in addition, on the reliable psychological tendency to treat whatever we become accustomed to as something we are entitled to. No task in democratic politics is more difficult than taking things away. As a result, conservatives have won many electoral victories since 1964, but few domestic policy victories. (Ending Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1996 stands out as an exception; the rule is for government programs to endure and grow.) Ten years ago David Frum wrote, "Conservatives have lost their zeal for advocating minimal government not because they have decided that big government is desirable, but because they have wearily concluded that trying to reduce it is hopeless, and that even the task of preventing its further growth will probably exceed their strength."

* * * * *

We are led to believe that we get back only what we put in, and yet somehow we all get considerably more than we put in. The miracle of the loaves and fishes was a card trick by comparison. For 70 years Social Security has borne out FDR's prediction that no damn politician would ever scrap it. Never mind that for 70 years the government has systematically misled the damn voters.

* * * * *

Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria recently told an interviewer, "People often say, 'How could you, living in India, end up a Reaganite?' Well, the answer is, live in India. There are two things that people don't understand. One is the degree to which a highly regulated economy produces masses of corruption because it empowers bureaucrats. It just has to be seen to be believed. The second is that you are very quickly inured to the charms of preindustrial village life. Whenever someone says the word community, I want to reach for an oxygen mask."

* * * * *

President Bush is now endeavoring to redress the looming embarrassment of Social Security's obligation to pay more than it will take in. The semantic argument about whether this shortfall constitutes a crisis, a problem, or a banana daiquiri is pointless. The gap must be closed, either by reducing the program's obligations or increasing its revenues. The president's approach calls for restraining the growth of Social Security benefits, while compensating for that reduction by letting younger workers divert a portion of their taxes to build up their retirement savings. The logic is that while blackening the skies with criss-crossing dollars is a zero-sum game, participating in capital formation through investments is not. Wealth can be multiplied, not just divided.

Few Democrats or leftists of any stripe have come forward to applaud Bush's pragmatic, experimental social policy. Yet, they can't confess that their "principle," that government must always grow and never shrink, is something they pulled out of the air. Nor can they draw on the credibility they built up the last time a welfare state program was scaled back. In the Clinton-era debate over welfare reform, we were told (in The Nation) that Aid to Families with Dependent Children was crucial to "the fragile state of grace that suggests we are our sisters' and brothers' keepers. That is what community is fundamentally about." And we were warned that ending AFDC "will destroy that state of grace. In its place will come massive and deadly poverty, sickness, and all manner of violence. People will die, businesses will close, infant mortality will soar, everyone who can will move. Working- and middle-class communities all over America will become scary, violent wastelands."

Show us, please, all those hellish wastelands that have sprung up in the last nine years--and then tell us why we must not make any changes to Social Security.

Caroline Glick:

Both the Americans and the Israelis are concerned, deeply concerned that is, by the specter of the elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council that are scheduled to take place on July 17, just a few days before Sharon's planned expulsion of all Jews from their homes, farms, businesses, synagogues and graves in Gaza and northern Samaria.

According to the polls, Hamas, which won some 70 percent of the seats in the recent municipal elections in Gaza, will do quite well in these elections – winning at least a third of the legislative seats. Fatah sources acknowledge that, if anything, the polls have severely underestimated Hamas's support base. They believe that if the elections are held on schedule, Hamas will win a majority of seats in the PLC.

The Daily Telegraph on Iraq, 4/25:

The elections in January that the White House welcomed as the start of a new era of democracy in the Middle East have helped to entrench the strictures imposed on women. The winning coalition has close ties to conservative clerics, many of whom believe in the subservient role of women.

Mrs Mahmoud said: "The Americans came into Afghanistan and the women were able to take off their burkas and taste freedom. Here the Americans come in and we are forced to cover ourselves and become chattels. Democracy will crush the spirit of the Iraqi woman."
 

Interesting post by Clive Davis on the hazards of discussing immigration. (Via Tim Worstall.)

If you're interested in the subject of breast implants—and really, who isn't?—you should read Michael Fumento's column. His recommendation: lift the ban.

From a Daily Telegraph piece on Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

Adams wasn't the kind of man to stand in the way of his own success. When his American publisher objected to the use of the word "f***" in the novel, he obligingly changed it. From then on, the dirtiest word in all the universe, according to the book, is "Belgium".
 

Joseph Farah's piece on electromagnetic pulse weapons is deeply alarming, and thus welcome. We need to know these things so that we can work to counter them:

"EMP is one of a small number of threats that can hold our society at risk of catastrophic consequences," the report said. "EMP will cover the wide geographic region within line of sight to the nuclear weapon. It has the capability to produce significant damage to critical infrastructures and thus to the very fabric of U.S. society, as well as to the ability of the United States and Western nations to project influence and military power."

The major impact of EMP weapons is on electronics, "so pervasive in all aspects of our society and military, coupled through critical infrastructures," explained the report.

Still, at least one conservative commentator noted this vulnerability years ago. David Horowitz wrote in 1999:

In May, [Pennsylvania representative Curt] Weldon traveled to Russia, in company with ten other congressmen. On that trip, in his presence, a Russian General threatened the assembled congressman, warning that if the United States put ground troops in Kosovo, Russia "could" detonate a nuclear device in the lower atmosphere off the eastern United States. The resulting magnetic pulses would "fry" every computer chip in the country, shutting down phones, airplanes, electrical grids, and so on until the country was thrown into absolute chaos. This threat was not made during the Cold War by a ruler of the former Soviet Union. It was made by a Russian General, within the last month.

Perhaps Bill Clinton will soon inform the world that in addition to warning Bush about bin Laden, he told his successor of the danger posed by EMP weapons. Always working to protect the country, that man.
 

Steve Sailer:

Like Adam Smith, but unlike many economists who are doctrinaire free marketeers, Levitt trusts capitalism more than capitalists.

For example, he points out that you shouldn't rely upon the real estate salesperson you hire to sell your home for the best price. Realtors make more money by churning through sales quickly, so they consistently underprice their clients' homes and badger their clients into selling too early.

Levitt studied 100,000 home sales in Chicago and found that when selling their own homes, real estate agents held out on average for ten days more than their clients did and, all else being equal in terms of the quality of the house, got over three percent more for it, or $10,000 on a $300,000 home.

This is a useful but not terribly astounding finding. Indeed, the only thing remarkable about his realtor research is that, apparently, no economist ever published a study of this obvious phenomenon before Levitt.

In contrast, my wife, who majored in economics but is not a professional economist, pointed this out to me many years ago. It was why she decided to sell our condo herself. She obtained significantly more than our naive neighbors got for their identical units—even before they handed a three percent commission over to their realtors.

Similarly, Freakonomics is full of Levitt's studies showing other things I already knew but enjoyed seeing publicized.

The focus of Sailer's review, however, is Levitt's treatment of the subject of race and IQ, two "career-threatening topics." Very provocative stuff. Sailer's overall verdict:

In summary, Freakonomics is hardly a perfect book. But its huge success may expand, modestly, the perimeter of what is respectable to write about race and IQ here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
 

Ronald Brownstein in the LA Times today with a familiar error:

liberal Daily Kos or conservative InstaPundit [sic]

Doubtless it's been stated before and better, but: If liberalism and conservatism are religions, then the latter is a big tent, and the former is marked True Believers Only, with excommunication the penalty for heresy. Glenn Reynolds (no conservative) supports the War on Terror, so he's exiled to the cold, dark Right. Still, let him publicly repent his stance on the War, and his smaller sins, such as his skepticism toward gun control, would be ignored. With much rejoicing would the Left claim him as one of theirs. Even zealots can compromise when they have to. Just ask Joe Biden.
 

Patrick O'Brian's delightful "Author's Note" to his novel The Surgeon's Mate.

UPDATE: I've learned (from my mom) that the above link has expired. If you want to read the passage, go here, type "author's note" (including the quotation marks) in the search box, hit Enter, and click the "from Front Matter" link on the resulting page. A complicated procedure, I know, but worthwhile.
 

Ronald Bailey on Earth Day 2005:

Just in time for Earth Day, the American Enterprise Institute and the Pacific Research Institute released their annual Index of Leading Environmental Indicators 2005. . . . Some the best news is on air quality trends. The Index finds that "air pollution fell again in the United States to its lowest level ever recorded." The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reports that since 1976, when national measuring began, levels of ozone in the air have dropped 31 percent, sulfur dioxides are down 72 percent, nitrogen dioxide was cut by 42 percent, carbon dioxide plunged 76 percent, and particulates (smoke and dust) fell by 31 percent. Air quality in the 10 largest metropolitan areas (four of the five most improved are in California) has improved an average of 53 percent since 1980.

There's much more. The report isn't all rosy, but for the most part things are getting better.
 

Cover blurb for The Son's Room, an Italian drama:

"IT TOUCHES ON SOMETHING REAL!"
 

USA Today, 4/20/05:

Guan Yuru, 62, has been comfortably retired for more than a decade. Living in a light-filled apartment in the new Sun City retirement complex, she divides her time between gardening, reading and staging fashion shows for fellow residents.

Sun City offers an unusually plush retirement by Chinese standards, boasting amenities such as a supermarket, hospital and a planned four-star hotel for visiting relatives. Guan, who worked for 24 years in a provincial government office in western China, can afford such luxury thanks to her monthly pension of about $217.

“People of my age, we don't have to worry about that,” she says, sipping tea in her apartment. “We don't have to worry about not getting the pension.”

China's future retirees might not be so lucky. The country is hurtling toward a retirement crisis that makes financial problems with Social Security in America look tame. . . .

Unlike the USA and Europe, which prospered before their elderly populations expanded, China is in danger of growing old before it gets rich. “Today, we're using money from younger and middle-aged workers to pay for retirees' pensions. But when these younger people get old, there's no money for them,” says Tao Liqun, director of the social security division at the China Research Center on Aging.
 

The opening line

It happens every spring. High school seniors across the country anxiously grope in their mailboxes

makes me think of something Dorothy Sayers noted in the early 1930s: if people can interpret something lewdly, they will. Time and again I've found myself validating her thesis.

Still, Steve Sailer's column from which I quoted (and truncated) the above makes a plausible and wholly non-sexual argument:

[U]niversities are ranked primarily on the grades and SAT or ACT scores that their students achieved in high school. . . . So, why do employers care about which college applicants attended? Mostly because it's evidence of an applicant's SAT score — along with high school grades — which in turn is correlated with his IQ. What college you go to permanently signifies your position in the IQ strata.

This is why high school students and their parents are so frenzied over college admissions: it really does go on your Permanent Record.

The whole piece is worth reading.

UPDATE: Katie Newmark calls Sailer's analysis "almost a really good argument."
 

David Warren, 3/30/05:

The "butchers of Tiananmen" (never forget this) are indeed trying to divide and conquer their tiny, imaginary adversary. It is "state terrorism" in its most comprehensive form.

This, I still think, is the real aim of Chinese Communist policy: not to invade Taiwan but through intimidation to achieve a peaceful capitulation. And they count on the rest of the world to choose peaceful capitulation on Taiwan's behalf. Polls in Australia and elsewhere already show irritation not with Communist tyranny, but with the Bush administration, out of the suspicion that President Bush might stand his ground. . . .

[T]he U.S. cannot afford to abandon Taiwan; and neither can Japan, incidentally. This is because the consequences would be much greater than the loss of one little island. A China that has swallowed Taiwan has not only established its right to a chokehold on energy supplies for Korea and Japan, but has also imposed itself as the incontestable hegemon of Asia, and thus a superpower of the same rank with the United States itself.

I think the Bush administration grasps this. At the very least, I pray that they have grasped it.
 

Among many facts I didn't know about John Paul II is this:

[H]e believed that God's intervention in human history had sanctified time. That is why he was so determined to lead the Church into the millennium that takes its date from that intervention.

The whole piece by Charles Moore is worth reading, even for—John Paul might've said especially for—an unbeliever such as I.
 

New Scientist:

A ROBOT suit has been developed that could help older people or those with disabilities to walk or lift heavy objects. . . . HAL is the result of 10 years' work by Yoshiyuki Sankai of the University of Tsukuba in Japan, and integrates mechanics, electronics, bionics and robotics in a new field known as cybernics. The most fully developed prototype, HAL 3, is a motor-driven metal "exoskeleton" that you strap onto your legs to power-assist leg movements. A backpack holds a computer with a wireless network connection, and the batteries are on a belt. . . .

The HAL 4 and HAL 5 prototypes, which will also be demonstrated at Expo 2005, don't just help a person to walk. They have an upper part to assist the arms, and will help a person lift up to 40 kilograms more than they can manage unaided. The new HALs will also eliminate the need for a backpack. Instead, the computer and wireless connection have been shrunk to fit in a pouch attached to the suit's belt. HAL 5 also has smaller motor housings, making the suit much less bulky around the hips and knees.

*Make your own Steve Austin joke.
 

Indo-Asian News Service:

Biscuit developers at Marks and Spencer have developed a finger-shaped chocolate-topped biscuit with the perfect shape, ingredients and texture for dunking, reports Scotsman.

The "Dunking Cookies", which has taken the food researchers months to develop, test and package, will soon be selling at all Marks and Spencer outlets.

It can be dipped for up to 2.3 seconds and still keep their flavour and shape, they said.

Extensive testing has revealed that the ideal tea temperature for the best dunk was 70 degrees Celsius.

Wouldn't you love, when asked your profession, to be able to answer, "Biscuit development"?

(Via Fark.)
 

Can this be true?

Norway will shut companies that refuse to recruit at least 40 percent women to their boards by 2007 under an unprecedented equality drive, a cabinet minister said on Tuesday.

"Companies have been dragging their feet. They really have to recruit more women," Children and Family Affairs Minister Laila Daavoey told Reuters.

"In the very worst case, they will face closure."

* * * * *

"Since 2002 the percentage of women in boards has risen to only 11 percent from six," Daavoey said. "Yet there are thousands of qualified women out there — companies can choose from half the adult population."

. . . Daavoey, who oversees sex equality rules, said that all state-controlled firms including oil group Statoil and telecoms firm Telenor had already complied.

But many other firms are lagging, including energy and engineering group Aker Kvaerner or Internet search group Fast. Many business leaders say the rules will force them to recruit ill-qualified women as quota fillers.

"If we can recruit women to our state companies why can't private businesses do it too?" Daavoey said.

Scariest thought: no doubt many people consider the quota reasonable.

I'm hoping this is a late April Fool's joke.
 

ZDNet:

International bank HSBC is suffering thousands of virus attacks a day, a top executive at the company has revealed. . . .

HSBC holds more than a trillion dollars in assets, making it a tempting target for virus writers and hackers. But e-mail identity theft scams are posing a greater threat to the bank's 18.9 million online customers. . . . "The harder we make it for criminals to access accounts, the harder we make it for the public. But this is a game we cannot afford to lose," Jebson said.
 

Dave Barry:

Most men, I believe, think of themselves as average-looking. Men will think this even if their faces cause heart failure in cattle at a range of 300 yards. Being average does not bother them; average is fine, for men. This is why men never ask anybody how they look. Their primary form of beauty care is to shave themselves, which is essentially the same form of beauty care that they give to their lawns.

If, at the end of his four-minute daily beauty regimen, a man has managed to wipe most of the shaving cream out of his hair and is not bleeding too badly, he feels that he has done all he can, so he stops thinking about his appearance and devotes his mind to more critical issues, such as the Super Bowl.
 

Reading this post from Captain Ed, on Canadian response to his blogging on a Canadian scandal, I think of McCain-Feingold.

[D]espite the publication of the material in an American blog and its review by thousands of Canadians, the Gomery Commission insists that the information is not public. Perreault warns Canadians that any link to CQ or even a mention of the blog name in any Canadian publication could lead to prosecution[.]

So we can comment on Canadian politics, but Canadians can't. Absurd, isn't it? Except that the reverse might be true in 2008, or even 2006, if restrictions on political and politics-related speech are extended to cover bloggers. Eugene Volokh has studied a proposed San Francisco ordinance:

I've held off on blogging about this because I wanted to figure out just what the ordinance means, and it's been surprisingly hard. . . . [T]he bottom line is that I can't tell what the ordinance as currently drafted really means. Now some of the features I describe may well be unintentional, and perhaps they'll be clarified in future versions of the ordinance. But the version that I have seems to pose a serious risk of imposing nontrivial regulations on bloggers who mention San Francisco candidates before an election — and, I think, violates the First Amendment on vagueness grounds.

As I wrote before, I hope a Presidential candidate appears who's both strong on national security and an opponent of McCain-Feingold.

(Captain's Quarters link via Instapundit.)
 

Incidentally, I can't convey how strange it is to see my name at Instapundit. It's like switching on a favorite tv show and hearing the characters talk about me briefly before they turn to something far more interesting, i.e., just about anything else.
 

Knowing little about the subject, I hope this Wired piece, on "the first real innovation in [drug] treatment in 40 years," is accurate:

At 28, Joe has become something of an expert at heroin detox - he's tried it nine times. Between programs, he's attempted to quit on his own. Once, when the cravings got the best of him, he tried to knock himself out by hitting his head against a brick wall. So late last year, when Joe checked himself into a New York outpost of Phoenix House, the country's largest residential rehab program, he knew exactly what to expect: the plastic cups of methadone to wear down his dependence, the sedated days and sleepless nights, the chill of the toilet seat, the sickening sight of food. But then a doctor handed him a medication he'd never heard of. Something called buprenorphine - or simply, bupe. No way, Joe thought. No way this little orange pill is going to do the job.

That first day at Phoenix House, Joe remembers, his last heroin high was wearing off. He felt the familiar beads of sweat. Nausea began to creep to his throat. Perfect conditions, his doctor said; bupe works only when patients are in withdrawal. So Joe curled back his tongue, placed the little hexagonal tablet underneath, and waited. He felt it slowly soften to a gritty paste and disappear. It still amazes him how quickly it worked. He didn't feel high, didn't feel withdrawal symptoms, didn't even feel medicated; he just felt better. "It took away the pain," he says. "It even took away the craving. I had my strength back, and I was eating sooner than I ever had in detox. I got clarity when I took that first pill." The details of his addiction - kicked out of high school, stripped of a college basketball scholarship, and ultimately sent upstate to prison - already seem like stories from someone else's life. . . .

Patients on bupe do become physically dependent on the pill - as do people taking medication for most chronic conditions. Suboxone, though, has no strong side effects. Nor can users get high by taking a larger dose - in other words, no inching up from dependence to addiction. Bupe is also safer than methadone - which, like any strong opiate, suppresses breathing if too high a dose is taken - and easier to taper off. And instead of visiting a treatment center every morning or quitting cold turkey, addicts can get a bupe prescription from their regular doctor. This offers real appeal to addicts, particularly white-collar ones, who cringe at the stigma of methadone lines. "You're just taking medication," Solinda says. "You don't feel sick. You don't feel high. It makes you feel stronger as a person."