Did my matzos come?

I subscribe to only a few print magazines, and Wired is one of them. The latest issue is typically good. Three pieces I especially like:

Scientist John Piña Craven wants to exploit the varying temperatures of the ocean for energy and drinking water;

Christian and scientist (not Christian Scientist) William Hurlbut is working to find "[a] solution to the stem cell dilemma that even the Vatican can love" (that's Wired's summary);

and the military's use of unarmed aerial vehicles [UAVs] is growing.

Still, I'm not an entirely satisfied customer. The bulk of an article (no link that I can find) called "The World of Terror" is a map from Aon Crisis Management "that ranks nations from the safest to the most dangerous, based on the number and severity of terrorist acts in those countries." According to this map, the only types of terrorist organizations on U.S. soil are "Far Right" and "Islamic Extremist." While we certainly have some of those chaps in residence, one segment that should've made the cut didn't:

Violent animal rights extremists and eco-terrorists now pose one of the most serious terrorism threats to the nation, top federal law enforcement officials said Wednesday.

Senior officials from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms (ATF) and Explosives told a Senate panel of their growing concern over these groups.

Of particular concern are the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF).

John Lewis, the FBI's deputy assistant director for counterterrorism, said animal and environmental rights extremists have claimed credit for more than 1,200 criminal incidents since 1990. The FBI has 150 pending investigations associated with animal rights or eco-terrorist activities, and ATF officials say they have opened 58 investigations in the past six years related to violence attributed to the ELF and ALF.

In the same period violence from groups like the Ku Klux Klan and anti-abortion extremists have declined, Lewis said.

(Link via Stanley Kurtz.)

I'm afraid I've begun automatically to suspect political bias, usually unconscious, for that kind of omission. Still, one can't really blame Wired for not commenting on it in its one-paragraph introduction. Right?
 

I just heard Pam Shriver describe tennis star Justine Henin-Hardenne's performance this year:

"Feisty and workwomanlike."
 

Bret Stephens:

But perhaps the apparent nonchalance of most Lebanese is warranted. Wherever I go here, the impression is of a people intent on making up for lost time, and determined never again to be dragged down by extremism. It is these Lebanese, one senses, and not Hezbollah, who are making the country anew, and who are doing so, at long last, in the absence of fear.
 

In simple fashion, Oliver Kamm illustrates George Galloway's hypocrisy. Very nicely done. (Via Tim Worstall, via Instapundit.)
 

Dave Barry played one in an opera:

The plot of ''Gianni Schicchi'' is that Buoso is dead, and a bunch of people sing very loudly about this in Italian for 45 minutes of opera time, which, for a normal human, works out to roughly a month. I spent most of this time lying still on the bed with my mouth open. This turns out to be very difficult. When you have to hold perfectly still in front of hundreds of people, you become a seething mass of primitive bodily needs. You develop overpowering urges to swallow, twitch, scratch, burp, emit vapors and — above all — lick your lips. ''YOU NEED TO LICK YOUR LIPS RIGHT NOW!'' is the urgent message your brain repeatedly sends to your tongue. You find yourself abandoning all concerns about personal hygiene and praying that Puccini was thoughtful enough to include a part in ''Gianni Schicchi'' where the singers decide, for whatever reason, to lick the corpse's lips.

. . . At times I also listened to the music, and I have to say that, although I am by no means an opera aficionado (literally, ''guy''), I was deeply moved by one part, which was when a stagehand, Doug Beebe, crept up behind my bed, unseen by the audience, and whispered, ''Dolphins 21, Chargers 8.'' He was updating me on an important NFL playoff game in which I had a strong artistic interest.
 

That's the question running through a recent column by Mike S. Adams, in which he discusses several off-limits topics, including black-on-white crime:

A couple of years ago, a student of mine was beaten within an inch of his life while walking alone after midnight in downtown Durham, North Carolina. At first, the police thought he had been a victim of a hit-and-run incident that crushed several of his bones and punctured his lungs. He barely survived.

Later, the police (realizing it was a bat that hit him, not a car) concluded (based on an outbreak of similar cases in the area) that he had probably been attacked by a minority gang that required the maiming or killing of a white person for initiation. What if the student, a criminal justice major, had been told the truth about inter-racial crime? What if his professors taught him that blacks-though outnumbered six-to-one in the population by whites-actually attack whites many times more often than whites attack them?

Would white students be more likely to avoid minority neighborhoods while walking alone and late at night? More importantly, would this information save lives?
 

Or a Star Trek episode:

Astronomers have spent five weeks studying a very strange star--one that is 10 times as massive as our sun and spews 100 trillion tons of gas into space each second--and have found a method to its mad behavior. Presenting their results yesterday at a meeting of the Canadian Astronomical Society in Montreal, the researchers report that the object, WR123, undergoes a stable variation that repeats every 10 hours.

Located about 19,000 light-years from Earth, WR123 belongs to a class of stars known as Wolf-Rayet stars, which are known for complex, irregular patterns in their brightness. An international team used the Microvariability & Oscillations of Stars (MOST) space telescope to observe the star continuously for five weeks. Instead of chaotic behavior, the scientists uncovered a pattern within the data. "Finding a clock in a star like WR123 is like finding the Rosetta stone for astronomers studying massive stars," says team member Laure Lefevre of the University of Montreal. "However, although WR123 may vary like clockwork, it must be a very strange mechanism indeed."
 

Ralph Peters on Old Europe:

Despite all the blather we've heard about the rise of a United Europe that would challenge America's supremacy, Europe is a continent in crisis — unsure of its identity, unable to reform its economies — and looking angrily for someone else to blame.

The myth of a great European supernation is dying of selfishness. Germans blame East Europeans for their unemployment rates. Everyone wants to pay Brussels less and take more home. And as we celebrate Memorial Day weekend, the French are going to vote against a European Union constitution their own leaders designed.

Sunday's defeat of Schroeder's SPD in Germany's key state doesn't suggest Europe is coming to its senses. It foretells a period of governmental instability on the continent as disgruntled populations shift their votes back and forth between equally unsatisfactory parties without the guts to pursue overdue reforms.

It'll be grand to say goodbye to Gerhard Schroeder. But Germany's tragedy — and Europe's — is that there's nobody better in the wings.
 

Mark Steyn:

Almost every act of the social democratic state says: don't worry, you're not responsible, leave it to us, we know best. The social democratic state is, in that sense, profoundly anti-social and ultimately anti-democratic. . . .

Why is it that a political culture that thinks nothing of radically liberating the citizen from so many traditional responsibilities reacts with surprise when so much of the other social capital accumulated over centuries turns out to have vanished? If you insist on treating free-born citizens as children incapable of taking responsibility for their own lives, it's hardly likely such people will inculcate ancient social norms in their own children.
 

Jemima Lewis:

One of the curious things about modern city life is the way that the criminal and the law-abiding sections of society have learnt to skirt around each other in this fashion. Inner city areas such as mine, where the property-hungry middle-classes have burrowed deep into underclass terrain, often contain within them two separate worlds, which orbit around each other and hardly ever collide. . . .

Occasionally, the police arrest someone, and a temporary peace descends on the street - but it is always temporary. So the rest of us nervous residents have no choice but to observe the protocol. We keep our eyes down, our curtains closed and our thoughts to ourselves - and in return, the crackheads don't do anything worse than hiss.

And Alasdair Palmer:

My mother was a private patient in an NHS hospital. The best decision we made was to take her out of that hospital and bring her home, where she was able to die in peace.

Here's an mp3 of Sean Hannity interviewing Thomas Sowell during Hannity's May 10 radio show. My favorite comment from Sowell, on a seventh-grade teacher who influenced him: "She was not the least bit concerned about my self-esteem, except when she thought I had too much of it."

Three notes: The file is 4 MB, so have patience, fellow dialup users; this is the first time I've posted at Geocities, so it's a bit of an experiment; and if someone owns the copyright and wants me to remove the clip, I will, alacritously.

UPDATE: Well, the file isn't downloading, though the URL's right. Not a promising start to my Geocities tryout.

ANOTHER UPDATE: New link. The clip should work now.
 

Jonah Goldberg makes a good, honest point:

[I]t's hardly as if defenders of the U.S. government's actions can be absolute purists. . . . The allegations about torture and whatnot reveal that it is not exactly uncommon for interrogators to use the religiosity of their prisoners against them. Flushing a Koran down a toilet -- and telling the press about it -- would certainly constitute a huge blunder. But how many of us were saying "there's no way that can be true!" when the story first broke?
 

Advice to black drivers: "How To Not Get Your A** Kicked By The Police" (about 3 MB). I'm not the biggest fan of Rock's, but I like this. (Via Schadenfreude.)
 

UPDATE: I should've noted that the clip includes some naughty language.

Steve Sailer's column today is a review of Thomas Sowell's new book Black Rednecks and White Liberals. After brief but genuine praise for the collection as a whole, Sailer examines the title essay, which he calls "the most questionable in the book." Though some of Sailer's criticisms fail to convince me, his discussion of "the relationship between African and African-American cultures" is very much worth reading. A typical bit:

Perhaps the worst social problem of African-Americans: the culture that African-Americans brought with them from Africa is one of low paternal investment. Traditionally, an African husband was not much expected to bring home the bacon for the wife and kids. Today, this is reflected in the very high American black illegitimacy rate—currently about two out of three children are born out of wedlock.

Anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy of UC Davis wrote in Mother Nature:

"Many fathers are only sporadically in residence with the mothers of their children; and fathers, when they are on the scene, may be unpredictable regarding which children they invest in, and how much. A substantial number of women conceive at a young age, often prior to marriage or formation of any stable relationship . . . relatively few fathers provide a great deal of care."

While this may sound like inner city black neighborhoods in the U.S., she's actually describing "large areas of sub-Saharan Africa." 

One more commercial: Man vs. treadmill (2.3 MB).
 

Jonathan Rauch:

The McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law (officially, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act) was signed into law in March 2002. The Supreme Court upheld and unleashed it in December 2003, only 18 months ago. Only one election cycle has passed since then. Yet Congress is already working on new restrictions. . . .

Can advocates of new restrictions name even one kind of person, organization, or political activity that they believe should be unconditionally off-limits to campaign finance regulators? If they are not required to answer that question now, chances are they never will be.
 

Car vs. bird (1.1 MB)

Papa spices up his life (3.3 MB)

(Via my dad. Maybe my close relatives should start their own damn blog.)

UPDATE: Evidently there were problems with the original links. I think the new ones work.
 

Mark Steyn on the British elections:

[S]uccessful conservatives don't move towards the 'political centre'. They move the political centre towards them. That's what Thatcher and Reagan both did. Whereas if you move towards the political centre, all you do is move the centre. If Labour is at 1 on the scale and the Tories are at 9, and their focus groups tell them to move to 5, they have ensured that henceforth the centre will be 3, and they'll be fighting entirely on the Left's terms and the Left's issues. . . .

Conservatives win when they champion ideas. They win in two ways: sometimes they get elected; but, even if they don't, their sheer creative energy forces an ever more intellectually bankrupt Left to grab whatever right-wing ideas they figure they can slip past their own base. In essence, that's how Tony Blair 'reformed' the Labour party. But contrast the Tories' paralysis in the face of Blair with the Republicans' response to Bill Clinton. Like Mr Blair with New Labour, Mr Clinton sold himself as a New Democrat: he was fiscally responsible and said things like 'the era of big government is over'. And instead of whining, like the Tories, that oh no, he's 'stolen our clothes', the Republicans moved further right — especially on cultural issues — and kept winning. During the 1990s they had weak candidates — Bob Dole — but strong ideas. And it was the strong ideas that won them the House and Senate and state legislatures and governors' mansions, and that by the end of Clinton's presidency left the Democrats with a weaker grip on elected office than at any time since the Twenties. The Dems kept destroying the party's leaders — Newt Gingrich, and the fellow who briefly succeeded him — and it made no difference. Conservative values are the real star. It's like Cats: sure, it's a nice plus if you've got Elaine Paige or Bonnie Langford, but it'll still run for 20 years even if no one's heard of anyone in it.
 

A guy leaving a message witnesses a minor traffic accident and its aftermath. Maybe you've heard it already. If not, you're in for a treat. (Found on this page. Props to my sister, who was sent the link by her sister-in-law.)

UPDATE: Snopes has a page on this. Its conclusion:

As to the questions of whether the account given above is an accurate explanation of the origins of this audio clip, and whether the traffic incident described actually took place, we have to leave them as "Undetermined" for now.

Mozilla has released a security update.
 

Col. David H. Hackworth died May 4. According to this obituary on Hackworth's website, "Gen. Creighton Abrams, the last American commander in that disastrous war [Vietnam], described him as 'the best battalion commander I ever saw in the United States Army.'"

Hackworth's passion was the well-being of the common soldier -- "the doughboy and dogface, ground-pounder and grunt," as the obituary puts it -- in whose defense he was relentless. An archive of Hackworth's columns is here. In what I think is his final piece, he urges a Marine General to investigate the dishonorable treatment of some Marines under the General's command. Typical Hackworth, in other words.

I'm no soldier or military scholar, so I'll leave it to others to write about Hackworth's career with the detail it deserves. In short, though: A good, brave man is gone.
 

Bruce Bartlett's May 3 column, in which he argued against a national sales tax ("a dopy idea"), made me wonder what kind of tax reform he'd favor. Now I know:

I have been a supporter of the flat tax ever since I read the first article about it by Hoover Institution scholars Robert Hall and Alvin Rabushka in The Wall Street Journal on Dec. 10, 1981. In fact, while on the staff of the Joint Economic Committee, I organized the first congressional hearing on the flat tax in 1982.

Over the years, my support for Hall-Rabushka has only grown. In particular, I think the way it defines the tax base is elegant and ingenious. It is far more important, in my view, to get the tax base straightened out — avoid double taxation, stop taxing things that ought not to be taxed, start taxing things that should be taxed but aren't — than it is to just have a single tax rate. . . .

Sadly, I have become very pessimistic about the possibility of fundamental tax reform — either the flat tax or any other plan that would completely uproot the current system and impose something entirely new from scratch.

The whole piece is worth reading. Also, Hall and Rabushka explain their plan here.
 

Great piece from Thomas Sowell:

Once you have ever had to go hungry, it is hard to get worked up over the fact that some people can only afford pizza while others can afford caviar. Once you have ever had to walk to work from Harlem to a factory south of the Brooklyn Bridge, the difference between driving a Honda and driving a Lexus seems kind of petty as well.

I'm tempted to excerpt more, but I wouldn't know where to stop. Read it all.
 

When smart people began arguing against personal retirement accounts, my thought was, Why not give people T-Bills rather than money? Recipients could be guaranteed a higher rate of return than that from Social Security, and they wouldn't need investment advisors.

I didn't post the suggestion because I'm not an economist, and if no one else was floating it, then it was probably stupid. Well, it still might be stupid, but John Fund seems to like it:

There are ways for Mr. Bush to turn the political tables on his opponents. . . . One . . . would be to create a true "lockbox" that allows people to put their share of the surplus into their own personal account to help fund their retirement. But the account would be limited to no-risk, but marketable, Treasury bills. Every taxpayer who voluntarily chose to create a T-Bill personal account would, in effect, own the key to his own lockbox, containing a significant chunk of their future benefits. The surpluses would become real assets owned by citizens rather than government IOUs--or, more accurate, "I owe me's"--piling up in a filing cabinet in a federal office in West Virginia.

If you don't believe that I thought of this earlier, I can't fault you. I'm surprised myself that I had what might be a viable economic-policy idea.
 

The Miracle League gives the disabled a way to play baseball:

Lauren Gunder, 15, has osteopetrosis, a rare genetic bone disease. She has had at least 20 broken bones and says she has broken every bone in both arms and legs. She also is legally blind and hearing impaired.

That's no impediment in the Miracle League. From her wheelchair, she swings at a large yellow ball. If she doesn't connect in five pitches, they put the ball on a tee. But her swing is pretty good and "95 percent of the time she hits a pitch," her mother said.

"She's a huge [baseball] fan and always wanted to play but couldn't because of her disabilities," Jennifer Gunder said. "When the opportunity came up, it changed everything."

Lauren has been listening to Atlanta Braves games on the radio since she was 3, and her bedroom is filled with Braves memorabilia.

Five years ago, the Conyers teen got a league of her own to play in. It gives her the pleasure of "just being on a team and getting to play sports that people always told me I couldn't do."

And a mother with two autistic sons says, "I think it's the highlight of their lives, I really do. Because that's all they talk about nonstop. It's great."
 

How viruses and worms earn their creators money. Very interesting.
 

New York Daily News, 5/6/05:

Three Westchester doctors - including one who allegedly joked of being the Gambino crime family's medical consigliere - were hauled into court in handcuffs yesterday, charged with supplying the mob with Viagra.
 

If you use a PC, you should consider picking up PC Annoyances, by Steve Bass. I've subscribed to Bass's free PC World newsletter, which I also recommend, for more than a year. I bought PC Annoyances mainly as a gesture of appreciation for the newsletter, and it's turned out to be a great purchase, with lots of helpful tips (finally I can delete old System Restore points) and pointers to mostly free software. Details, including a sample chapter, are available here. Really worth a look.
 

Ronald Bailey's rule of drug safety:

[I]f a remedy is as safe as aspirin, it should stay on the market.
 

Anne Bayefsky sums up the U.N. Human Rights Commission:

With no democratic pre-conditions for membership, the commission, like the general assembly, is a forum through which non-democracies can trump democracies. Furthermore, situating democracies in an organization where relationships with non-democracies provide leverage over other democracies divides democratic states rather than bringing them together. . . .

It is time to recognize the inherent limitations of the U.N. club, the majority of whose members are playing by rules incompatible with the American Constitution. Only then will the U.N.'s proper role become clear.