Did my matzos come?

NCPA:

Observers have documented the refusal of cab drivers to pick up minority passengers, implying that drivers racially discriminate. However, a new study suggests that cab drivers' preferences may have more to do with economics than race.

In a study involving 1,000 cab drivers in New Haven, Conn., Yale Law School professor Ian Ayres and coauthors found:

• Overall, African-American and Hispanic passengers tipped 50 percent less than white passengers.
• African-American passengers tipped black drivers about one-third less than they did white drivers.
• Cab drivers can expect about 9 percent less revenue when picking up African-American passengers relative to white passengers.
   

The study (.pdf) is here.
 

How can I have learned to accept both "Puff Daddy" and "P. Diddy," yet find the names "Puff Diddy" and "P. Daddy" ridiculous?
 

Michael Graham:

I just spent a week in Iraq and Kuwait cultivating a skill that I, as a talk-show host, have found nearly impossible to master: shutting up.

Turns out, it was easier than I thought, at least in Iraq. When you're listening to a 20-year-old kid from Indiana tell how he earned his second Purple Heart, speechlessness is the natural reaction.

* * *

Again and again, from "white-collar" soldiers working in the relative safety of Camp Victory at the Baghdad airport to the "real" soldiers patrolling Route Irish (a.k.a the "Highway of Death"), I heard that America and their Iraqi-army allies are winning the war against the insurgents. I was told again and again by the soldiers themselves that their (our) cause is just, the strategy is working, and the enemy they fight represents evil itself.

In other words, I heard things seldom heard on CBS or read in the pages of the New York Times.

* * *

Isn't it at least significant that not one in 100 thought invading Iraq was a mistake? Was it mere coincidence that a random selection of 100 soldiers all believe their mission is worthwhile? Should we detect the hand of the Vast, Right-Wing Conspiracy in the fact that the vast majority of the troops find the media coverage of the war ignorant, harmful, or both?

I'm proud to say that, for a week, the soldiers had their say. If I were the editor of a major daily newspaper or a national network, I would be concerned that what they said is so contrary to what I am printing or broadcasting.
 

BBC:

Liechtenstein milk farmers have been stirred up by a government ban on their feeding hemp to their cattle.

They are the most chilled-out, laid-back, carefree cattle in the world, and happy cows produce better milk.

What is it that keeps the cash cows calm? Hemp, which is related to cannabis. And that's why Liechtenstein has banned its use.

This has in turn enraged the country's dairy farmers, who say that the hemp relaxes those jangly bovine nerves.

Hemp farmers are less then mellow about the new law.

"Hemp is good for cows because it is serves as a very small tranquiliser," says hemp farmer Jean-Pierre Egger.

"Many of the cows are stressed nowadays. If they eat hemp, they calm down. Now, a milk cow which is calm produces better milk. That is a fact."
 

A report from Jed Babbin:

Last Tuesday, in the company of Gen. Jay Hood, the Gitmo Joint Task Force commander, I and several other military analysts spent the day inside the terrorist detention camps and interrogation facilities, talked to a lot of intel people and soldiers, and saw about all there is to see at Gitmo.

What I saw made me proud and disgusted: proud at how our guys and gals are dealing with some of the world's worst; disgusted at the Fonda-Durbins of the world who want the world to believe that Gitmo is Auschwitz and terrorists are some oppressed minority. . . .

With only a few exceptions -- notably those who reside in Gitmo's equivalent of a psycho ward -- they [the prisoners] are cold, hard cases well trained in murder and in resisting interrogation. Mostly Afghani, Saudi, and Yemeni, they average in age at about 32, are fit, strong men who are proud to dedicate their lives to terrorism and look forward to the day they can go back to their chosen work. While observing one interrogation of a typical detainee -- a Saudi man in his mid-thirties -- some of the intel people who deal with him nearly every day told me how he contemptuously, and frequently, proclaims his eagerness to get back to killing Westerners.

* * *

I DON'T KNOW THE NAMES of the soldiers: I didn't ask, and they didn't volunteer. No one -- other than the few top guys, including General Hood, his deputy, and the command sergeant major -- wears nametags. If the others' names were visible to inmates, they and their families would be at risk. That goes double for the intel crew. . . .

They tried to do what every soldier is expected to do: shrug off the political floggings inflicted on them and their commanders every day. They meant well, but they couldn't b.s. this old b.s.'er. When someone compares Gitmo to a Nazi death camp, they take it personally. They know it's idiocy, but it still hurts. Their motto is, "honor bound to defend freedom," and they take that personally, too. There are no prisoner abuses at Gitmo. It's a matter of pride among them. The chow is okay, they said, but mail is really slow. It takes almost three weeks for mail to get to them. The Texan -- who is assigned to the psycho ward -- had another concern. "These guys have hepatitis, TB and who knows what other diseases. When they throw feces on us they can give us a disease we can't get over." The medical crew looks after them, and the terrorists, very well.

* * *

Who should be blamed for failing to prevent the next terrorist attack? Not the guys and gals of Gitmo who are working tirelessly, under awful conditions and politically correct constraints, to get information from hard-core terrorists. Every American should be proud of them, and grateful for what they're doing to defend us.

There are terrorists here in the United States and, along with many others overseas, they are planning to kill more Americans in more attacks. What will the intellectual whores of the left say after the next 9-11? Will they say that we were right to forgo interrogation methods that used sexual taunting and the use of psychotropic drugs? Or will they say that we should have done more to protect America?

The whole piece is worth reading.
 

Thomas Sowell has two columns (here and here) on "The Tragedy of Africa." Some excerpts:

Years ago, a courageous economist in India pointed out that, however helpful it was to receive food from abroad during India's famines, the long-run policy of continually giving wheat to India was just reducing the ability of Indian farmers to grow wheat and sell it for a price that would cover their costs.

Eventually the policy of continually dumping wheat into India was stopped and today India produces so much wheat that it has been able to send some to Africa to deal with African famines.

* * *

During the first two decades after African nations gained their independence in the 1960s, one sub-Saharan nation that stood out with its economic prosperity and political stability amid economic disasters and social catastrophes among its neighbors was the Ivory Coast under President Felix Houphouet-Boigny.

Yet neither the Ivory Coast nor its leader attracted nearly as much attention, much less adulation, as was showered on Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, or other big-name African leaders who led their countries into ruin.

The Ivory Coast in those days relied on markets instead of the kind of policies and rhetoric that the intelligentsia favored. When its policies changed, it became just another African basket case.

* * *

The great French historian Fernand Braudel said, "In understanding Black Africa, geography is more important than history." Much of Africa's history was in fact shaped by its geography.

Almost every great city in the world has arisen on navigable waterways -- and such waterways are more scarce in Africa than in any other continent. An aircraft carrier can dock on the Hudson River in midtown Manhattan but there is not a single river where that is possible on the vast continent of Africa, which is larger than Europe or North America.

Even smaller boats can travel only a limited distance on most African rivers because of cascades and waterfalls. Most of the continent is more than 1,000 feet above sea level and more than half of Africa is more than 2,000 feet above sea level. That means its rivers and stream must plunge down from those heights on their way to the sea.

* * *

If cultural diversity was all that the multiculturalists claim, Africa would be a heaven on earth. Too often and in too many places it has been a hell on earth.

Recently installed: AutoSizer. It's a free PC program that causes email messages to open maximized, rather than almost-maximized. I still feel inappropriately pleased each time it does its magic.

I'm sure this Gerard Baker column is going to be widely quoted, but I haven't seen it quoted yet, so here's my favorite section:

Imagine this. Suppose we’d never invaded Iraq, and terrorists had blown up London in pursuit of their cause, what would the apologists have said about last week’s attacks? In fact we know exactly what they would have said because many of them did say it after al-Qaeda attacked the US on September 11 — long before any American or British soldier set foot in Afghanistan or Iraq.

They said it was because of our support for Israel and its “brutal occupation of Palestinian territory”, our complicity in the victimisation of Arabs from the Balfour Declaration to the ascent of the Jewish lobby in America.

But what if there had never been an Israel and instead a Palestinian state existed peaceably in the heart of the Middle East, and the terrorists had still attacked us? What would the apologists have said then? They would have said, of course, that we were to blame for having abused the Arabs and Muslims generally for decades through our colonial ambitions and economic exploitation of Arabia and the broader Middle East.

And what if there had never been a British Empire and British occupation of Arab lands, and terrorists had still attacked us? Then it would have been the Crusades, and the long-standing ill-treatment of Muslims at the hands of deplorable Christian warriors.

And what if there had never been a crusade, and they’d still attacked us? I’m stumped at this point to confect an answer, but I can guarantee that whatever it was that would have been said it would have been Britain’s fault. . . .

[T]he most painful irony of all in this English self-loathing is this simple truth. The beauty of human freedom that so many in the world now enjoy, the wonder of so much prosperity, the legacy of the Enlightenment, the very principles of cultural and political tolerance and free inquiry, owe more to Britain, and latterly our Anglo-Saxon allies who have taken on the baton in the past century, than to any other country on Earth.

One on Peter Ostrum, who played Charlie in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the other on Ellen Albertini Dow, who gave a memorable performance of "Rapper's Delight" in The Wedding Singer.

UPDATE: Via a commenter at Katie Newmark's site, this story from 2000 on Peter Ostrum, and via Katie herself some quotes from Ostrum at IMDB. He seems content with his choices and his life, which I would say makes him a lucky man.

From a piece in today's Daily Telegraph about how "Hollywood is rediscovering raunchy adult comedy":

The three American Pie films have, largely due to the sales of "unrated" versions, become the best-selling video title in Universal Studios' history.

If true, good news for recording engineers and roadies:

A new plastic material will change the way drummers mike up their kits.

The material has been used to make a pickup - a device that acts as a detector and captures mechanical vibrations - which can be permanently installed on drums allowing drummers to plug in and play just like guitar players.

The pickups, the first on the market for drums, will be launched in the UK this summer by Finnish company B-Band.

Pickups detect mechanical vibrations and convert them into an electronic signal that can be amplified and recorded. Traditional pickups, which are made of sensitive crystals, are not suitable for drums.

Miking up a drum kit is complicated and time consuming, as each drum must be miked separately.

The microphones must be positioned so that each picks up the sound from the drum to which it is assigned, with the minimum possible bleed from adjacent drums, and where they are not likely to be hit by a stray drumstick. . . .

The new pickups are permanently attached to the drums. After one installation, there is no further set-up required, no stands to set up and no microphones to position. And they only pick up the sound of the drum to which they are attached.

"Microphones take the sound from the air," says Heikki Raisanen, CEO of B-band. "The pickups take the sound directly from the body of the drum, solving the problem of leakage from the other drums.

"The sound is more natural than that obtained using microphones."

An absolutely great interview in Der Spiegel with James Shikwati, a Kenyan economist. Of several strong contenders, this line, about foreign aid to Africa, is my favorite: "Unfortunately, the Europeans' devastating urge to do good can no longer be countered with reason." Please, please, I beseech you, read it all.

(If I remember whose link led me to the piece I'll update this post with it.)

First, the usual (and accurate) disclaimers: Robert Samuelson is smarter than I, and much more knowledgeable and experienced in analyzing foreign affairs.

But I don't understand this:

[I]f we reflexively treat the Chinese as a threat, we will answer our own question: They will become a threat.

Actually, I think they've already qualified:

China is building its military forces faster than U.S. intelligence and military analysts expected, prompting fears that Beijing will attack Taiwan in the next two years, according to Pentagon officials.

U.S. defense and intelligence officials say all the signs point in one troubling direction: Beijing then will be forced to go to war with the United States, which has vowed to defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack.

I'll leave the strategizing to those skilled in it, but just as al-Qaeda was a threat before 9/11, China's a threat now. It's silly to pretend otherwise. Maybe the tensions between us will dissipate—I hope so—but facts are facts.

Here's a band I have no interest in trying.

Suburban Kids With Biblical Names? Not I. (Samples on this page near the bottom.)