Did my matzos come?

Global warming, that is:

Human activities have little to do with the Earth's current warming trend, according to a study published by the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA). In fact, S. Fred Singer (University of Virginia) and Dennis Avery (Hudson Institute) conclude that global warming and cooling seem to be part of a 1,500-year cycle of moderate temperature swings.

Scientists got the first unequivocal evidence of a continuing moderate natural climate cycle in the 1980s, when Willi Dansgaard of Denmark and Hans Oeschger of Switzerland first saw two mile-long ice cores from Greenland representing 250,000 years of Earth's frozen, layered climate history. From their initial examination, Dansgaard and Oeschger estimated the smaller temperature cycles at 2,550 years. Subsequent research shortened the estimated length of the cycles to 1,500 years (plus or minus 500 years).

According to the authors:

• An ice core from the Antarctic's Vostok Glacier -- at the other end of the world from Greenland -- showed the same 1,500-year cycle through its 400,000-year length.
• The ice-core findings correlated with known glacier advances and retreats in northern Europe.
• Independent data in a seabed sediment core from the Atlantic Ocean west of Ireland, reported in 1997, showed nine of the 1,500-year cycles in the last 12,000 years.

Considered collectively, there is clear and convincing evidence of a 1,500-year climate cycle. And if the current warming trend is part of an entirely natural cycle, as Singer and Avery conclude, then actions to prevent further warming would be futile, could impose substantial costs upon the global economy and lessen the ability of the world's peoples to adapt to the impacts of climate change.

The paper, adapted from a forthcoming book by Singer and Avery, is here (pdf).
 

Not from me, from Todd Zywicki. While I've long liked Zywicki's posts, I had no idea he was so sound on web-based academia-related journalism.
 

Ralph Peters:

The Washington establishment would shrink from any such claim, but the Global War on Terror is a fight over the social, economic and cultural roles of women. . . . [T]his is a truly global struggle involving not only Islamist thugs terrified by female sexuality, but also reactionary forces in our own society. The Global War Against Women is still being waged on the home front, too.

Without questioning the integrity of those who believe that life begins at conception, the struggle to overturn Roe v. Wade can also be viewed as an attempt to turn back the clock on women's freedom. Opposing such a reversal isn't a matter of thinking abortion admirable, but of accepting the magnificent revolutionary principle that no man has a right to tell any woman what she can or cannot do with her body.

Attempts to interfere with another citizen's liberty are worthy of Osama bin Laden, not of Americans.
 

With apologies to Mr. Peters:

First, many of us, whether or not we "believe that life begins at conception," oppose Roe v. Wade because we feel it's badly reasoned. (See here, for instance.) One of Justice Blackmun's clerks (Blackmun wrote the majority opinion) is reported to have said, "As a practical matter, [Roe] was not a bad decision—but as a constitutional matter it was absurd." So flawed a verdict should be reversed, even if it reached the right conclusion, and even if the reversal risks causing harm.

Second, opponents of abortion, and hence of Roe, believe that the body of a pregnant woman isn't just "her body." If she wants to murder her child, does "no man have a right to tell any woman what she can or cannot do with her body"? Few of us would concede that. So the real question regarding abortion becomes, Is a fetus a child? Peters, like many other Roe supporters, doesn't address it, at least not in this piece. (My answer would be, "People disagree, and the science is ambiguous." Not very conclusive, I know.)

From my legally untrained reading of the decision as well as commentary by people more knowledgeable than I, I'd say that Roe should be reversed. Maybe some horrid people would enjoy seeing it overturned, and maybe overturning it would cause some women to suffer who wouldn't have suffered otherwise; but however regrettable or even tragic those consequences, as arguments against reversal they're insufficient.
 

I don't subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, so I haven't read Charles Murray's piece from yesterday. (Jonah Goldberg posted the first paragraph.) I did hear Murray interviewed by John Batchelor an hour or so ago. Two segments stood out for me.

First, Batchelor described a thirty-seven-year-old homeless man he'd met. The man said he'd been in prison twice for felonies, his mother was dead, he wasn't in contact with his father, and his cousins wanted no part of him. Batchelor asked him why he wasn't working, and he said he can't get a job without a residence, and he lives at a shelter. Batchelor asked him what plans he had for the future, because begging for money isn't a future, and the man had no answer. (I'm reminded of a passage from Kay Hymowitz's piece "Dads In The 'Hood": "One of the most striking things about talking to poor inner-city men is their sense of drift; life is something that happens to them. I asked several men where they would like to see themselves in ten years; all of them gave me a puzzled, I-never-really-thought-about-it look.")

Batchelor asked Murray whether this homeless man is a member of the underclass. Murray offered a simple test. Batchelor should send someone to the man to tell him, "We've found a job for you. It's something you're qualified for, and your lack of a residence won't be a problem. You just have to show up five days a week and do the work." If the man takes the job and stays with it, then he isn't part of the underclass. If he doesn't take the job, or if he takes it and after two or three days stops showing up, then he's part of the underclass.

Later, Murray talked about the effect that the absence of fathers has on inner-city kids, mostly black but increasingly white: All parents listening (I'm paraphrasing Murray now) should picture the way a little boy watches his father, and through watching learns how to behave. In the inner city it's not unusual to have a group of twenty boys only one of whom has contact with his father. Small boys look for role models, and without fathers around, they choose adolescent boys, and role models don't come any worse than that.

UPDATE: I just found Murray's article at AEI's site. Here's the conclusion:

Hurricane Katrina temporarily blew away the screens that we have erected to keep the underclass out of sight and out of mind. We are now to be treated to a flurry of government efforts from politicians who are shocked, shocked, by what they saw. What comes next is depressingly predictable. Five years from now, the official evaluations will report that there were no statistically significant differences between the subsequent lives of people who got the government help and the lives of people in a control group. Newspapers will not carry that story, because no one will be interested any longer. No one will be interested because we will have long since replaced the screens, and long since forgotten.
 

A fake trailer for The Shining edited to portray the movie as a sweet comedy. (Via Warren Bell.)
 

Probably not the message Parents magazine wants to convey.
 

Stanley Kurtz:

CMT is owned by Viacom, the same company that owns MTV and VH1. Up to now, they’ve been reasonably separate operations. But it’s beginning to look as though the cultural left has decided to use CMT to try to proselytize the South. They’re also trying to push the country audience closer to rock. Up to a point, I have no problem with the rock angle. I generally like the Crossroads series on CMT, which pairs country stars with rock stars. Even so CMT is getting pushed to the musical, cultural, and political left. . . .
 

StrategyPage on Iraq, 9/27:

Casualties, and terrorist attacks, continue to run at half the rate of the last few months. It is believed there is a connection between this and the growing number of patrols and raids in Sunni Arab towns, places that have not seen such activities for the last two years. These battles are a deliberate effort to break the power of the gangs (that provide the support that make the terror attacks possible). All of this is possible because of more Iraqi police and troops being available, and more information about the gangs. The increase in such information is no accident.

American intelligence efforts, a war-in-the-shadows that has been fought with great intensity for over two years, has revealed a lot of detail about how Iraqi society really works. It is not a pretty picture. Saddam left behind a culture of armed gangs that use on terror and intimidation to control populations. This is the system that kept Saddam in power, and it is a clever perversion of traditional Iraqi society. Saddam took advantage of family, clan and tribal loyalties to increase the power of tribes or clans that would cooperate with him. For the groups that remained hostile (mainly Kurds and Shia Arab, but some Sunni Arabs as well), he allowed loyal "gangs" to terrorize and exploit these hostile groups. Many of these loyal gangs were, literally, criminal enterprises that controlled illegal activities in an area. The most valuable of these scams was the smuggling, especially oil smuggling, where the gangs with official permission, kicked back to Saddam part of their profits.

When Saddam's government fell in early 2003, and his army and civil service were dismissed shortly there after, Saddam's gangs were largely unaffected. The gangs actually thrived in the aftermath of the invasion, often being responsible for much of the organized looting. Some of the gangs, especially the ones doing dirty work for Saddam in the Shia south, were destroyed by their armed, and vengeful, victims. Saddam had provided overpowering military force to back up the gangs, and this backup disappeared when Saddam was run out of office. But in the Sunni Arab areas, the gangs became the heirs to Saddam, and carried on in his tradition of rule-by-terror and large scale theft.

The decision of the gangs to join forces with al Qaeda was a practical one. Both groups were hostile to the foreign troops who had deposed Saddam, and al Qaeda had an endless supply of suicide bombers, and cash. It was a marriage made in hell, and it is coming to a bad end. Al Qaeda was about more than suicide bombings. Al Qaeda has a plan, and that plan includes imposing a theocracy on all Moslems. Many Iraqi Sunni Arabs are cut from the same cloth as the Saudi, Yemeni and Egyptian religious fanatics that founded al Qaeda, and enthusiastically joined forces with al Qaeda. But most Iraqis wanted nothing to do with another dictatorship, even a religious one. Over the past year, divorce has set in. The al Qaeda terror campaign, which stresses spectacular attacks that will play well in the media, have backfired for the less religious Sunni Arab gangs. Too many of the people getting killed in these gangs are Sunni Arabs. Even more Sunni Arabs are being killed by Kurdish and Shia Arab death squads, who are delivering traditional payback for terror attacks.

The terror campaign in Iraq has caused al Qaeda's popularity (which peaked in the months after September 11, 2001) to plummet. Those kind of numbers have consequences, the most visible one being growing hostility between al Qaeda groups and their Sunni Arab hosts. This has led to outright combat between Sunni Arabs and the (largely foreign) al Qaeda gunmen. Worse, it has led to the growth of a government informer network in the Sunni Arab community, and that has led to more and more al Qaeda big-shots getting ID'd and busted. Several senior al Qaeda people have been killed or arrested recently, because of this. The decline in terror attacks is partly the result al Qaeda being distracted by these arrests, and attacks by government forces, and Sunni Arab groups fed up with al Qaeda posturing and bullying.

Saddam may be out of business, but many of his ideas are not. The gang warfare he used to rule Iraq lives on.
 

PCWorld.com:

The music industry, shaken by decreasing CD sales, is turning to a high-tech and legal version of the old "bootleg" concept of concert recordings.

The Instant Live unit of Clear Channel Entertainment's Music Group, part of the Clear Channel Communications conglomerate, is one of the commercial ventures that have been experimenting with making instantly available CDs of live concerts, by mixing recordings on the spot and selling them to club-goers as they exit concerts. . . . Instant Live can burn about 1000 recordings a show, having the first CDs available just minutes after the last riff was heard from the stage, thanks to preprinted covers that leave out the set list.

I find this amazing:

Broadband access to the Internet, for example, allows for offsite, centralized studio editing and mixing, for higher-grade recordings than what can be done onsite. Prendergast plans to use broadband-transmission capability to get off-site mixes for the "instant albums" that are offered to concert goers.

"It's much easier for us to take a feed from Cleveland, instead of having a truck or any vehicle there, completing the mix in our studio in Los Angeles and then sending it back to Cleveland where it's burned on site."
 

Craig Newmark:

"Scientists fear that the Arctic has now entered an irreversible phase of warming . . ."

So if it's "irreversible" now, signing Kyoto would do no good, and we should just move on, right? Don't hold your breath.
 

PCWorld.com:

A new phishing method is targeting Yahoo users by recording their user name and password while logging them into a legitimate area of the portal, according to Websense, a Web security software firm.

Users receive an instant message or e-mail purporting to be from a friend wanting to show photos from a vacation or birthday party. The message has a link to the phishing site, which records the user's ID and password while forwarding the user to the real Yahoo Photos site.

"It would be difficult for the user to know they'd actually been phished," says Ross Paul, Websense product manager for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

. . . Not only are the phishers using a fake logo to trick users, but they are also forwarding the person to another site, a method that has been used before but not on such a large scale, Paul says. Websense's worldwide network, which monitors Internet traffic, detected the technique.

"That leads us to believe [the phishing attack] is fairly widespread," Paul says, adding, however, "It's difficult to quantify."

. . . The advice for users is similar to that issued in prior warnings: Be leery of unexpected e-mails and check with the sender to make sure an e-mail is authentic. Users can also always check with Yahoo to see if a specific e-mail is legitimate, Paul says.
 

Mark Steyn (reg. req.):

As my old chum Christie Blatchford memorably put it, Canadians too often mistake the sidelines for the moral high ground. For my own part, I'm more disturbed by the number of maple bigwigs still strutting the world stage. . . . [I]n Africa Stephen Lewis remains Kofi Annan's numero uno AIDS honcho, and the other day he turned up in a widely reported story, whose headline in The Daily Telegraph catches the general gist: "Bush 'Damaging The Fight Against Aids'."

Surely, even a chippy Canadian wouldn't put it quite so crudely. But, in fact, Ambassador Lewis did. He was concerned that PEPFAR--the president's AIDS initiative--was funding too many abstinence projects in Uganda and cutting back on condom supplies. "The condom crisis in Uganda is being driven and exacerbated by PEPFAR," said Mr. Lewis, "and by the extreme policies that the U.S. administration is now pursuing."

Why would he say such a thing? After all, the U.S. spends more money combatting global AIDS than the rest of the world combined. Alas, from Stephen Lewis's point of view, the U.S. is deplorably "unilateralist" and spends its billions of AIDS dollars directly in Africa rather than sluicing them through the UN, where now that the Oil-for-Fraud program is no longer "needed," many bureaucrats are itching to bring their humanitarian expertise and efficiency to bear on another great slab of cash. Once the usual UN administration fee had been deducted from Bush's pitifully adequate $15 billion, there could easily have been enough left over to buy, oh, twenty thousand bucks' worth of second-hand condoms from a rubber factory co-owned by a nephew of Kofi Annan and a cousin of Boutros Boutros-Ghali.

. . . [A]fter two decades, condom colonialism seems to have done nothing for southern Africa. The latest "conventional wisdom" among western do-gooders--that rapacious pharmaceutical companies should have their patents stolen in the interests of supplying cheap generic drugs to the continent--is also supported by Stephen Lewis and WHO. If condom worship is largely ineffectual, Big Pharma demonization has the potential to be utterly disastrous. Already, "pre-qualified" cheap AIDS drugs made in India have had to be "de-listed" by WHO, when they were subsequently revealed not to have met even WHO's minimal standards, by which time they were already widely circulated all around Africa. As things turned out, they weren't even cheaper--and the principal result seems likely to be not healthy Africans but Africans who develop strains of AIDS resistant to western drugs, while western pharmaceutical companies have less and less interest in developing drugs for those new strains if their patents are going to be stolen by the transnational establishment.

The Bush initiative, on the other hand, ensures African HIV sufferers will receive drugs that meet U.S. standards.

AIDS in Africa is, like most things these days, ultimately a national security issue. When HIV rates climb up over 40 per cent and life expectancy dips below 35, there's a real question over whether the state can generate enough manpower to sustain civic infrastructure. In a scenario of complete societal collapse, those Botswanans and Lesothans are going to go somewhere, creating pressures on their neighbours and one day even North Africa and Europe. Issuing condoms has proved to be ineffectual containment. The Bush administration understands that. How sad but unsurprising that Canadian transnationalists are yet again on the wrong side of a critical issue.

UPDATE: This piece from Steyn, more directly about national security, is also worth reading:

I support the Bush Doctrine on utilitarian grounds: Idealism is the new realism, mainly because realpolitik turns out to be totally unrealistic. . . . [O]ne reason to favour a policy of liberty-promotion is because there’s no downside. Even if it proved unsuccessful in the Middle East, oh, 40% or 70% or even 100% of the time, it would still be preferable to “stability”, which means another quarter-century of the Ayatollahs, another 40 years of the Syrian Baathists, another 70 years of Saudi Wahhabism.

But in a broader sense it’s simply unworthy of a great power not to use its moment to promote its values. . . .

Fifty million Muslims living in freedom is a great start to the Bush Doctrine. What worries me is that it doesn’t seem directly relevant enough to the American people to hold their interest. I’m not speaking of the decayed left, but of those on the right who support the warlike aspects of the war but think the nation-building stuff is wimpsville – as if, in the Second World War, we’d stopped to reconstruct the Solomon Islands before toppling Hitler and Tojo. They’re wrong. This “war” is really one manifestation of a broader civilisational struggle, and it’s the strategy for that that will prove decisive.
 

Michael Ledeen:

While most media attention has been devoted to the "diplomatic" United Nations visit of Iran’s brand new terrorist president, Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nezhad, the fascinating turmoil within Iran, both inside the mullahcracy and between the mullahs and the Iranian people, has gone largely unreported. There are three basic reasons for this silence:

• First, because no Western government — sadly including the Bush administration — has any intention of taking serious action against Iran, even though everyone knows that Iran is directly responsible for killing thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans, Brits, and other Coalition soldiers and civilians.
• Second, as a corollary to the first cause, because the whole question of Iran, which should be the central issue in the war against terrorism, has been reduced to a fatuous debate over the country’s nuclear program, and the attendant phony negotiations between the EU 3 (Britain, Germany, and France) and the mullahs. It was obvious from the outset that no good could come from these talks, because Iran will not abandon its nuclear program and neither the Europeans nor the Bush administration are prepared to do anything serious about it. The sham nuclear negotiations were in large part a way of avoiding what should be the central issue: Iran’s central role in the terror war against the West;
• Finally, Western reporters in Iran are rightly afraid to report things that are damaging to the regime. They know that they can be expelled, or, as in the case of a Canadian female journalist who dared to look into the dark labrynths of contemporary Iran, brutally killed.

. . . Our policymakers have thus far utterly failed to design anything worthy of the name of an Iran policy, even though it is arguably the single most important challenge we face. . . . [W]e can only judge the president and his aides by their actions, and there aren’t any, aside from the occasional speech or offhand remark at a press conference. The mullahs see that, and treat it with the contempt it deserves. We are currently indistinguishable from the Europeans, who run whenever the Iranians snarl at them.

This is not a war on terror, it is paralysis at best, and appeasement at worst. The hell of it is that it is costing thousands of lives, and will cost many more until the terror masters are destroyed, or we surrender. Those words were inconceivable for many years, but it is a sign of our present fecklessness that they are now entirely appropriate. We can still lose this war. And we cannot win it so long as we are blinded by our potentially fatal failure of strategic vision: we are in a regional war, but we have limited our actions to a single theater. Our most potent weapons are political and ideological, but our actions have been almost exclusively military.

Our main enemy, the single greatest engine in support of the terror war against us, whether Sunni or Shiite, jihadi, or secular, Arab or British or Italian or Spaniard, is Iran. There is no escape from this fact. The only questions are how long it will take us to face it, how effective we will be when we finally decide to act, and how terrible the price will be for our long delay.

I can't imagine how frustrated Ledeen must be, perceiving all this so clearly, explaining it so often and so well, yet seeing nothing done about it.
 

Olenka Frenkiel:

Like slavery, it’s all officially in the past, but one in ten Mauritanian girls are still force-fed according to independent estimates. Getting fat without Western food is long, hard work. A small child has to be forced to drink vast, unnatural quantities of milk — three or four litres of cow or camel milk — every night for years. The milk is mixed with couscous and water to swell the stomach. She is given marbles to play with to keep her still, she cannot play sports, ride a bike or run around, and older women supervise, ensuring the milk stays down. They clamp the child’s fingers and toes between sticks to stem the vomiting reflex by distracting the child with a little local pain. Often the girls vomit violently.

In a village near the Mali border I am invited to watch as Souadou, a ten-year-old girl, sits with her grandmother, her fingers in the wooden clamps. She smiles, embarrassed and delighted to be the centre of attention. This is her third year of force-feeding and she no longer struggles or resists. She’s been told it’s done out of love, that’s it’s for her own good so that she will be beautiful and marry well.

‘For us, a girl who has not been force-fed is ugly,’ explains one huge matron. ‘She is a source of shame to her family.’

The young girl wriggles her fingers free of the torture clamp to adjust her veil, then re-inserts the fingers between the sticks herself. Three years into her force-feeding she is apparently compliant. But then suddenly she runs from the tent, apparently to pee. Her grandmother frowns. ‘She is vomiting. She digs a hole in the ground to bury the food. She won’t admit it but her friends have told me. She is very stubborn.’

. . . It’s unusual to see girls outside in the desert so I stop when I spot one washing clothes at a well. ‘I have no maid,’ she says. Although her skin is light, she’s thin and must be poor. ‘Do you know girls who are force-fed?’ I ask. She looks doubtful. ‘The cattle only arrived back yesterday. There isn’t enough milk yet. But some are quite fat.’ A wistful look. ‘Would you like to be force-fed?’ I ask. ‘Oh yes. I would like to be fat. Everyone knows that to be fat is to be beautiful.’
 

Brendan Miniter in OpinionJournal's Political Diary, 9/23/05:

This is the moment Rep. Nancy Pelosi has been waiting for. The California Democrat and House minority leader senses a distrust and even anger across the country over the Republican-led Katrina spending splurge. Her party has been complaining about Halliburton's no-bid contracts in Iraq for years, but now the timing may finally be right for Democrats to gain popular support by claiming the mantle of fiscal responsibility. That's just how Sam Rayburn won back the House for Democrats in 1954 and handed the party 40 years of uninterrupted control.

Ms. Pelosi's actions over the past couple of days suggest she may have discovered Rayburn's playbook and is following every step. Looking back, 1952 should have been the start of a post-FDR Republican resurgence. Republicans controlled the Senate; Barry Goldwater won the seat that would later become the launching pad for his presidential run. Dwight Eisenhower had been elected president, and the GOP had won back control of the House. But Ike turned out to be a big spender -- Social Security, foreign aid and school funding were all expanded under his watch and he launched the largest domestic infrastructure program in history, the federal highway system. To pay for it all, Eisenhower shot down efforts in his own party to cut the high tax rates that lingered on from World War Two. He also declared that there would be no tax cut while there was a federal deficit.

Sensing an opportunity, Texas Rep. Sam Rayburn and fellow Democrats posed as stewards of fiscal responsibility and friends of the taxpayer, and proposed their own tax cut. In 1954, voters responded by handing Democrats control of the House and Senate. Ms. Pelosi, if she can convince her fellow Democrats to seize the moment, just might be able to make history repeat itself. This week, to help finance Katrina relief, she offered to give back pork-barrel money destined for California under the recent highway bill. She also announced legislation to create an "Anti-Fraud Commission" to make sure the Katrina money is properly spent. "We cannot allow the victims of Hurricane Katrina to be victimized again with waste, fraud and abuse in federal contracts," she declared at a press conference.

In the 1950s, Republicans were sent to Washington to shrink the government and reduce taxes. When they didn't, Democrats got a second wind. Republicans in Congress today were elected to tame the Great Society and roll back the power of liberal interest groups. If they're seen as committing the greatest expansion of government since LBJ, don't be surprised if Ms. Pelosi is soon calling herself "Madame Speaker." It's not too late for Republicans to put themselves on the side of fiscal discipline and cutting government spending to pay for Katrina relief, though the recent record isn't encouraging. President Bush could even call Ms. Pelosi over for a Rose Garden press conference to thank her for pledging to help fight "waste, fraud and abuse."
 

Tuesday 9/27 SciFi is showing ten hours of Firefly, which may be my favorite tv series ever. True, it was canceled before the end of its first season, so it didn't have time to stale, but it was great from first moment to all-too-quick-to-arrive last. The show is basically a Western set in space a few centuries from now. The dialogue is sharp, the plots are surprising and the acting is uniformly excellent. To fans and even mere tolerators of science fiction, I can't recommend it highly enough. The marathon starts at 11:58 AM EDT. Really, 11:58. And if you like it, you can go see Serenity, the movie that continues Firefly's story, when it opens in theaters three days later. You can go see Serenity even if you don't like it.
 

Here's the story. Here's the update, version 1.07. And here's a piece citing Symantec, maker of Norton Antivirus and other products, as stating that "the open-source Firefox Web browser had more confirmed vulnerabilities than Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer browser."
 

A 2000 column by my favorite political historian:

Recently, The Washington Post printed an article explaining how the appliance manufacturers plan to drive consumers insane.

Of course, they don't SAY they want to drive us insane. What they SAY they want to do is have us live in homes where ''all appliances are on the Internet, sharing information'' and appliances will be ''smarter than most of their owners.'' For example, the article states, you would have a home where the dishwasher ''can be turned on from the office'' and the refrigerator ''knows when it's out of milk'' and the bathroom scale ``transmits your weight to the gym.''

I frankly wonder whether the appliance manufacturers, with all due respect, have been smoking crack.

. . . Listen, appliance manufacturers: We don't NEED a dishwasher that we can communicate with from afar. If you want to improve our dishwashers, give us one that senses when people leave dirty dishes on the kitchen counter, and shouts at them: ``PUT THOSE DISHES IN THE DISHWASHER RIGHT NOW OR I'LL LEAK ALL OVER YOUR SHOES!''

Likewise, we don't need a refrigerator that knows when it's out of milk. We already have a foolproof system for determining if we're out of milk: We ask our wife. What we could use is a refrigerator that refuses to let us open its door when it senses that we are about to consume our fourth Jell-O Pudding Snack in two hours.
 

Writer and lawyer Douglas Kern explains "why the United States lacks [homegrown] engineers":

The United States contains a finite number of smart people, most of whom have options in life besides engineering. You will not produce thronging bevies of pocket-protector-wearing number-jockeys simply by handing out spiffy Space Shuttle patches at the local Science Fair. If you want more engineers in the United States, you must find a way for America's engineering programs to retain students like, well, me: people smart enough to do the math and motivated enough to at least take a bite at the engineering apple, but turned off by the overwhelming coursework, low grades, and abysmal teaching. Find a way to teach engineering to verbally oriented students who can't learn math by sense of smell. Demand from (and give to) students an actual mastery of the material, rather than relying on bogus on-the-curve pseudo-grades that hinge upon the amount of partial credit that bored T.A.s choose to dole out. Write textbooks that are more than just glorified problem set manuals. Give grades that will make engineering majors competitive in a grade-inflated environment. Don't let T.A.s teach unless they can actually teach.

None of these things will happen, of course. Engineering professors are perfectly happy weeding out undesirables with absurd boot-camp courses that conceal the inability of said professors to communicate with words. Fewer students will pursue science and engineering majors, and the United States will grow ever more reliant upon foreign brainpower to design its scientific and manufacturing endeavors. I did my part to fight this problem, and for my trouble I got four months of humiliation and a semester's worth of shabby grades that I had to explain to law schools and employers for years. Thousands of college students will have a similar experience this fall.

So engineering is suffering in this country? It deserves no better.
 

A frequently charming piece from City Journal's Autumn 2004 issue (I'm way behind in my reading) about the power that classic literature holds to move and inspire working- and lower-class minds. It's only "frequently charming" because the author, Jonathan Rose, has a didactic purpose. He marshals anecdotes to counter the assumption, as stated by the president of the Modern Language Association, "that Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare do not figure significantly in the personal economies of [underprivileged people who are] not classically educated, do not perform individual or social functions that gratify their interests, do not have value for them." Rose wants authors such as these taught throughout America's public schools, including those in the inner cities.

Though his argument makes sense to me, and I'd be glad to see his suggestions put into practice, I'm more interested in—enchanted by, really—the stories from Britain that he cites in support of his plan. For example, this:

Will Crooks (b. 1852), a cooper living in extreme poverty in East London, once spent tuppence on a secondhand Iliad, and was dazzled: "What a revelation it was to me! Pictures of romance and beauty I had never dreamed of suddenly opened up before my eyes. I was transported from the East End to an enchanted land. It was a rare luxury for a working lad like me just home from work to find myself suddenly among the heroes and nymphs of ancient Greece." Nancy Sharman (b. 1925) recalled that her mother, a Southampton charwoman, had no time to read until her last illness, at age 54. Then she devoured the complete works of Shakespeare, and "mentioned pointedly to me that if anything should happen to her, she wished to donate the cornea of her eyes to enable some other unfortunate to read." Margaret Perry (b. 1922) wrote of her mother, a Nottingham dressmaker: "The public library was her salvation. She read four or five books a week all her life but had no one to discuss them with. She had read all the classics several times over in her youth and again in later years, and the library had a job to keep her supplied with current publications. Married to a different man, she could have been an intelligent and interesting woman."

And this:

In the mining towns of South Wales, colliers had pennies deducted from their wages to support their own libraries, more than 100 of them by 1934. The miners themselves determined which books to buy. One such library, the Tredegar Workmen's Institute, devoted 20 percent of its acquisitions budget to philosophy. Another spent 45 pounds on the Oxford English Dictionary. (In the best of times, a miner could not earn much more than a pound a day.) There were sophisticated literary debates down in the pits, where one collier heard high praise for George Meredith. That evening, he tried to borrow Meredith's Love in the Valley from the local miners' library, only to find 12 names on the waiting list for a single copy. "Every miner has a hobby," explained one Welsh collier. "It may be a reaction from physical strain. The miner works in a dark, strange world. He comes up into light. It is a new world. It is stimulating. He wants to do something. . . . Think what reading means to an active mind that is locked away in the dark for hours every day!"

On company time, and a half-mile below the surface, Nottinghamshire collier G. A. W. Tomlinson (b. 1872) read The Canterbury Tales, Lamb's Essays, The Origin of Species, and Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Admittedly, that could be an occupational hazard: once, when he should have been minding a set of rail switches, he was so absorbed in Goldsmith's The Deserted Village that he allowed tubs full of coal to crash into empties. The foreman (quite rightly) clouted him and snatched the volume away. He returned it at the end of the shift and offered a few poetry books of his own—"BUT IF THA BRINGS 'EM DARN T'PIT I'LL KNOCK THI BLOCK OFF." Tomlinson tried to write his own verses and concealed them from his workmates, until one of them picked up a page he had dropped and read it: "No good, lad. Tha wants ter read Shelley's stuff. That's poetry!"

While studying Greek philosophy at night, Joseph Keating performed one of the toughest and worst-paid jobs in the mine: shoveling out tons of refuse. One day, he was stunned to hear a co-worker sigh, "Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate." "You are quoting Pope," Keating exclaimed. "Ayh," replied his companion, "me and Pope do agree very well." Keating had himself been reading Pope, Fielding, Smollett, Goldsmith, and Richardson in poorly printed paperbacks. Later he acquired a violin for 18 shillings, took lessons, and formed a chamber-music quartet, playing Mozart, Corelli, Beethoven, and Schubert—not an uncommon hobby in the coalfields. And he never forgot the electric thrill of pursuing books and music: "Reading of all sorts—philosophy, history, politics, poetry, and novels—was mixed up with my music and other amusements. I was tremendously alive at this period. Everything interested me. Every hour, every minute was crammed with my activities in one direction or another. New, mysterious emotions and passions seemed to be breaking out like little flames from all parts of my body. As soon as the morning sunlight touched my bedroom window, I woke. I did not rise. I leaped up. I flung the bedclothes away from me. They seemed to be burning my flesh. A glorious feeling within me, as I got out of bed, made me sing. My singing was never in tune, but my impulse of joy had to express itself."

And this:

No doubt Thomas Carlyle was a cranky male supremacist, but for Elizabeth Bryson (b. 1880), the daughter of an impoverished Dundee bookkeeper, he offered "the exciting experience of being kindled to the point of explosion by the fire of words." Carlyle's "gospel of work" so inspired her that she was driven to win a university degree and become a distinguished New Zealand physician. When Catherine McMullen (b. 1906), a workhouse laundress, came across a reference to the Letters Written by Lord Chesterfield to His Son, she visited a public library for the first time in her life and borrowed it. "And here began my education. With Lord Chesterfield I read my first mythology. I learned my first real history and geography. With Lord Chesterfield I went travelling the world. I would fall asleep reading the letters and awake around three o'clock in the morning my mind deep in the fascination of this new world, where people conversed, not just talked. Where the brilliance of words made your heart beat faster."

Chesterfield launched Catherine McMullen into a lifetime course of reading, beginning with Chaucer in Middle English, moving on to Erasmus, Donne, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and even Finnegans Wake. Ultimately, as Catherine Cookson, she became one of the best-selling authors of all time, producing more than 90 novels with total sales of more than 100 million copies, at one point responsible for one-third of all the books loaned by Britain's public libraries. "Dear, dear Lord Chesterfield," she sighed. "Snob or not I owe him so much."

Delightful stuff, though not without poignancy. First, because these people led hard lives, after all; and second, because their observations vivify for me the decline in intellectual aspiration, especially in Britain but here as well, that Theodore Dalrymple and others write about.
 

The ad-free version of my favorite browser, Opera, is now available free. It doesn't render properly on some sites, and there are pages that require IE or Mozilla, but I do the great majority of my surfing via Opera. It's especially useful when I have several browser windows open at once, which I seem to do most of the time.
 

Jed Babbin:

Though we have made great progress against individual enemies, we have made none against the enemy’s ideology. The American military is the greatest the world has ever seen. It can defeat any force on whichever battlefield a president sends it into. But it is not an ideological force. And an ideological fight is not, as we mistook it to be in Vietnam, a battle for peoples’ hearts and minds. It is a fight to make the enemy’s followers and supporters understand that their ideology is a failure, and it will only lead them to more suffering, more oppression, and more death. We defeated the Soviet ideology by proving – contrary to Leonid Breznev’s construct that communism was “inevitable and irreversible” - it was neither. . . .

Four years into this fight, a lot of Americans, led by the media and some hollow men and women we have elected to public office, have fought the ideological battle by small surrenders. They remind us, daily, that we aren’t better than anyone else, that our system of government sometimes fails to protect the rights of all, and that we should be more open and understanding of others’ religious beliefs no matter how twisted or irreligious they may be. Those people need to be reminded, again and again, that America has succeeded, and we enjoy the freedoms we do, only as long as we are willing to say certain truths. Among those truths is that our system of government, our values and our laws are superior, by every objective measure, to those our enemies impose on themselves and would impose on us.

We can ignore neither the founding principles of our nation nor the ideology they comprise. And sometimes we must look to others for the best statement of it. Late last month Peter Costello, treasurer of Australia, said it better than anyone has in a very long time. Saying that the only law in Australia were those made by its parliament, Costello said, “If those are not your values, if you want a country which has Shari’a law or a theocratic state, then Australia is not for you…I’d be saying to clerics who are teaching that there are two laws governing Australia, one the Australian law and the other the Islamic law, that that is false. There is only one law in Australia: it’s the law made by the parliament of Australia and enforced by our courts. There is no second law.”

If we start at Costello’s Australia, it’s only a short walk back to Jefferson’s America. There is a pride we must have, and show, in our freedoms. And that pride should be demonstrated every day to our enemies. It’s politically incorrect here, and a measure of American arrogance in Europe, to say what needs to be said over and over again. Our society is an immeasurable success because we enjoy freedom, and the terrorist nations that are our enemies are utter failures because their peoples do not. It has no bearing on our wealth. Many of our enemies are just as wealthy as we and, by the measure of their effortlessly obtained oil wealth, some are wealthier. Yet their peoples, with the exception of the despots that rule them, live under oppression, in constant fear and without hope. It is our ideology of freedom which makes us prosper, and their ideology of religious oppression that makes them poor.

The great French writer, Jean Francois Revel, wrote that, “"Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself." Our enemies count on us to be governed by that weakness. As we remember 9-11, we must re-dedicate ourselves to proving them wrong. By every objective standard, our values, our freedoms, and our system of government are better than theirs. One key to winning this ideological battle is to remind them – and ourselves -- of that fact every day.
 

Stephen Moore on legislators' resistance to post-Katrina cuts:

Congressman Todd Aiken of Missouri complains that Congress was forced to vote on the $62 billion first installment of funds "even though we knew a lot of the money may go to waste." Mr. Aiken and several dozen other House conservatives proposed an amendment to the $62 billion hurricane relief bill that would offset at least some of the emergency spending by cutting other government programs a meager 2.5 cents out of every dollar that federal agencies spend.

Was the amendment defeated? No. The Republican leadership would not even allow it to come to a vote, on the grounds that there was no waste which could be easily identified and cut.

Dozens of other reasonable proposals to offset Katrina's tidal wave of deficit spending have been similarly repelled. Mike Pence of Indiana suggested a one-year delay on the multitrillion dollar new prescription drug benefit for senior citizens. For 220 years, seniors have managed without this give-away; one more year of waiting would hardly be an act of cruelty. It would save $40 billion, but there were no takers. Then there was the well-publicized idea by Republicans and several Democrats in Congress to cut $25 billion for bike paths, train-station renovations, nature trails, parking garages, auto museums and 6,000 other such pork projects in the just-enacted highway law. It was torpedoed by the powerful committee chairmen who patched this abominable bill together in the first place. . . .

The Democrats are already forging their 2006 and 2008 message: We will spend just as many trillions of dollars as Republicans, but we will spend them better than they do. After witnessing the first few Republican misappropriations for Hurricane Katrina, the Democrats may very well be right.
 

This blogger and I evidently don't agree on much (she writes, "Really, if the Bush administration were working for Al Qaeda, they could hardly do a better job"), but she has one thing right: the combination of her pseudonym and the photo at the top of her site. It couldn't be improved.
 

Martin Waller in the Times of London:

In a study of investors’ behaviour, the team from three US universities . . . found that people with certain brain injuries which suppress their emotions could make the best stock market traders. They took a selection of 41 people of normal IQ, 15 of whom had suffered lesions on the areas of the brain that affect emotions, and made them play a simple investment game.

Those with brain damage significantly outperformed those without, the researchers from Stanford Graduate School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Iowa found.

The key was the fear that stopped those with “normal” brains from taking even the most sensible of risks.

Antoine Bechara, an associate Professor of Neurology at Iowa, suggested that successful investors in the stock market might plausibly be called “functional psychopaths”.

These are individuals either much better at controlling their emotions or, perhaps, not experiencing them with the same intensity as others.

Baba Shiv, of Stanford, added chillingly: “Many CEOs (chief executive officers) and many top lawyers might also share this trait.

“Being less emotional can help you in certain situations.”
 

StrategyPage:

The al Qaeda "war" against Iraqi Shia is now five days old. Some 250 Iraqis have been killed so far, most on the first day, and most of them civilians and Shia. But a growing number of the dead bodies found are Sunni Arabs, and it appears that some of the newly trained Shia police and soldiers are moonlighting as death squads. . . .

Al Qaeda's man in Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, is getting desperate. More and more of his key subordinates are being rounded up or killed. His bases in Sunni Arab areas are being captured or bombed (after their location is given up by locals angry with the continued terrorism). The war, however, is being fought in a traditional fashion. That means bloody raids by one tribe's warriors against each others populations, as well as attacks on the tribal leaders (both religious and civil.) . . . [T]he Sunni Arabs have lost most of their military edge. That was not so bad when most of the troops they faced were American. But the recent battles along the Syrian border saw the majority of the troops being Iraqi. While the Americans still did some of the most difficult fighting (because that was, in the end, easier and safer than letting the less capable Iraqis do it, and possibly get into big trouble), it was the Iraqis that went in and screened the civilian population, and battled any stray holdouts. . . . The Sunni Arabs knew that the Americans were not going to protect them from pre-dawn raids by off-duty Shia or Kurdish policemen, or a carload of Shia assassins looking to avenge a kinsman killed by a Sunni Arab working for Saddam in the past, or al Zarqawi today. . . .

[S]ome Sunni Arab tribes are determined to resist until the end. They do this believing that Sunni Arab majorities in neighboring countries like Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia will ultimately come to their aid. This is largely a false hope. . . .

Al Zarqawi is correct in viewing the struggle as one between the Shia Arab majority, and the Sunni Arab minority. Where al Zarqawi is wrong is in his belief that the Sunni Arabs cannot fail to win if they kill enough Shia Arabs. For al Zarqawi, this is a religious battle. The Sunni fanatics that run al Qaeda see all Shia as heretics, who do not have the support of God. That's not only bad theology, it's inaccurate. God sides with the Big Battalions. And in Iraq, those belong to the Shia.
 

Mark Steyn:

There’s nothing wrong with the hard-fought trade-offs of smoke-filled rooms: that’s what the US constitution is, and, come to that, Magna Carta. The flop constitutions, on the other hand, are those that reflect the modish unanimity of a homogeneous ruling class — like the European constitution. The Iraqi document is a very subtle instrument: it effectively uses Sunni intransigence to give the Shia majority an interest in Kurdish federalism — and, if in the end that doesn’t work, supplies the mechanism for 85 per cent of the Iraqi population not to get sucked down with the hold-outs. As the aerial TV shots of looters in New Orleans remind us, at defining moments not every citizen rises to the occasion. What matters is that enough do. The Iraqi constitution understands that.

The Western media would be doing us a favour if they did as those legislators in Baghdad have done and acknowledged the federal nature of Iraq. If the Shia are England and the Kurds are Scotland, the Sunni Triangle is Northern Ireland. Oh, and the Marsh Arabs are Wales, and their environmentally devastated marshlands, drained by Saddam in the early 1990s, are being ecologically restored — which you’d think might persuade at least the West’s enviro-lefties to support the liberation.

The point is that back when bombs were going off in Belfast and Derry, life was relatively pleasant in the rest of the United Kingdom except for the occasional sudden atrocity. Wednesday will not be the last terrible day Baghdad confronts, but the most savage eruptions will not, in the end, shift the country’s basic trajectory. I often say the glass in Iraq is two-thirds full, but that’s not quite right: it’s seven-ninths full. In 14 out of 18 provinces, life is as good as it’s ever been. The four provinces where stuff explodes are the ones with a significant Sunni presence — Anbar, Nineveh, Salah-ad-Din and Baghdad. That last is embarrassing, and it’s disgraceful that after two and a half years the greatest military power on the planet can’t secure the road from the Green Zone to the capital’s airport. On the other hand, Kurdistan has a brand-new international airport built in order to cope with its business and tourist boom.

In fact, let me go further than the glass being seven-ninths full: I think it’s very difficult now for Iraq to wind up with an unhappy ending. Whatever the ‘neocons’ got right or wrong, it’s not about the Americans any more, but the Iraqis, and they’re doing a pretty good job, even on the worst days, and one with great implications for Syria, Egypt and beyond. Amr Moussa is correct: the Iraqi constitution is a ‘recipe for chaos’ — not for the Iraqis but for the Assads, Mubaraks and the rest of the old guard.
 

Theodore Dalrymple:

Most of the looters looked bitter, angry, resentful and vengeful. The gangs reportedly used racial taunts during their crimes. The looters likely believe they are not so much stealing as performing acts of restitution or compensatory justice for wrongs received.

If this surmise is right, it is a terrible indictment of efforts undertaken in recent years by government welfare programs and institutions to ameliorate the condition of underclass blacks. It implies that the nihilistic alienation of the looters and gang members is as great as that in Soweto at the height of the apartheid regime. The billions spent on welfare programs and the intellectual ingenuity expended on justifying the unjustifiable in the form of affirmative action have seemingly resulted in a hatred that is bitter and widespread enough among those condescended to in this manner to result in the scenes for which New Orleans will now long be remembered.

If Hurricane Katrina had struck New Orleans in 1950, when the black population could justly have complained of severe oppression and injustice, would we have witnessed what we have witnessed there in recent days? I think the answer is no. And if this is the case, then we must ask ourselves what has lit the fire in the minds of men that they are prepared to shoot at their neighbors' saviors.
 

Peggy Noonan, 9/15/05:

This, from this week's Time magazine is, to old White House hands at least, not good news. " 'The first time I told him he was wrong, he started yelling at me,' the aide recalled about a session during the first term. 'Then I showed him where he was wrong, and he said, "All right, I understand. Good job." He patted me on the shoulder. I went and had dry heaves in the bathroom.' " One hopes this is hyperbole. If not, it's a bad sign. No president should have that effect on his aides, and no president should be surrounded by dry heavers.

Mr. Bush is famously flinty. I sometimes think of what a friend said of him years ago: There are two misconceptions about Mr. Bush; one is that he's dumb, and the other is that he's sweet. He puts great emphasis on personal loyalty, and personal loyalty is important. But when that preference becomes a governing ethos, you wind up surrounded only by loyalists. His father wound up surrounded by tennis players. This doesn't help you govern.

It's important, five years into a presidency, for a president to remember he's probably no longer fully surrounded by aides who knew him when he was first running for governor and walking around in his shorts practicing speeches. The people who work for him now first saw him as a Time magazine cover. This can be fun--it's a relief to awe someone when the rest of the world is beating your head in--but again, it doesn't help govern.

Mr. Bush probably needed a humbling experience. He just got one. May he absorb, understand, keep the helpful lessons, ignore the unhelpful ones, and waste no time being mad. And may he reach out to some old wise heads on the Democratic side who can give him a read on how his honest critics view him.
 

As the many* dedicated readers of this blog know, I'm no fan of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show. Thus it probably won't surprise anyone here that I'm baffled by the popularity of America (The Book). I don't even understand why fans of Stewart like it. It** just isn't funny.

On the other hand, I find Dave Barry Slept Here frequently hilarious. This is the start of Chapter 13 (page chosen at random):

The year 1908 saw the election of the first U.S. president to successfully weigh more than three hundred pounds, William Howard Taft, who ran on a platform of reinforced concrete and who, in a stirring inauguration speech, called for "a bacon cheeseburger and a side order of fries."

That sentence made me laugh twice, or twice more than did five pages of America (The Book). And here's the start of the section (also chosen at random) on the Teapot Dome Scandal:

The Teapot Dome Scandal involved a plot of federal land in Wyoming that derives its unusual name from the fact that, if viewed from a certain angle, it appears to be shaped like a scandal.

If you're in the mood for something funny and vaguely politics-related, I suggest that you skip the Stewart and buy the Barry. It should give you a few lighthearted hours.
_______________

* Defined as "A positive integer smaller than ten."

** Defined as "A bit of the excerpt at Amazon."
 

A nice story in USA Today:

To find female athletes who knew how to swing a bat or field a pop fly, Ismael [Ismael Khalil Ismael, founder of the Iraqi Baseball Union] put out ads and held trivia competitions on radio stations across Iraq. He was surprised at the positive response. "You cannot imagine the number of applications I got not only from Baghdad but from all over Iraq," Ismael says.

This detail suggests life before the invasion:

Ismael, a longtime baseball enthusiast, has worked for years to establish the sport in Iraq. In 1994, he submitted a request to the Iraqi Olympic Committee to establish a baseball team to compete against other countries. Committee members rejected the idea, saying it was "too American," he says. He spent three days in a Baghdad jail for even proposing the idea, he says.

And objections persist:

Although softball and baseball are associated with the USA, the players haven't received any threats, Ismael says.

He, however, recently received his first threat, which came via e-mail from someone in Saudi Arabia.

Ismael emailed him back. "We can't beat the U.S. with weapons," he told him. "Let's try with their sports."
 

Debra Saunders, commenting on reports that House Majority Leader Tom DeLay can find nothing to cut from the federal budget:

DeLay personifies the most ugly reality Republican voters must face: When a Democrat is in the White House, GOP members of Congress at least give lip service to the idea of watching taxpayers' pennies, and they'll oppose the president's pork barrel projects. But with a Republican president and Republicans in control of both houses of Congress, they become high rollers.

To paraphrase Katie Newmark, it's almost enough to make a boy vote Libertarian. (Guess where the paraphrasing came in.)

UPDATE: I should've included this quote, which appears in Katie's post, and which Andrew Stuttaford later noted:

"I have to be a little pessimistic," said Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), among the conservatives who want to curb spending. "There is no real stomach for fiscal discipline right now."

Flake said that at a recent closed-door meeting of House Republicans, he had tried to argue for paying for the relief with offsetting cuts in other federal programs, but was hooted down.
 

Interesting piece on improvements in concrete. Facts I didn't know:

"more than a ton of concrete is produced each year for every man, woman, and child on Earth"

the manufacture of concrete "produces between 7 and 10% of global carbon-dioxide emissions"

The article describes a new kind of concrete that doesn't require reinforcement with rebars and is "able to bend like a metal," and another "that actually scrubs carbon dioxide from the air."
 

StrategyPage has a concise and heartening analysis of the terrible bombings in Iraq these past few days. In short, the attacks reveal the terrorists' desperation, and are helping make al-Qaeda "the most hated organization in the country." It's worth reading in full.

Mohammed at Iraq the Model takes a similar view:

The Al-Qaeda called it the "battle for avenging Talafar" and this gives us a clue of the extent of the losses inflicted upon Al-Qaeda by Iraqi and American troops and the anger and frustration associated with these losses. . . .

Obviously the continuous American-Iraqi armies' operations in western Iraq have pushed Al-Qaeda to announce this "final battle" but actually this reminds me of Saddam when he felt that his end was nearing and called the battle "the hawasim" (the final or decisive) and it was indeed as it ended his reign.
Al-Qaeda has never won a war before and I don't expect things to be different this time, except that this time they want the battle to be final which means the terrorists will pour all their resources and power into this battle so their defeat this time will hopefully pave the way for ending their presence in Iraq.
 

Kevin Myers writing on "the Irish Troubles" in The Spectator (reg. req.):

Seven years ago the Prime Minister assumed he’d put the ghoul that was Northern Ireland into its box for all time. But the hammer that he used was deceit, and the nails were lies. Unionists were inveigled into an accord with Republicans on Blair’s promise that the IRA would never be allowed into government without full disarmament, even though he has as much power over IRA arsenals as he has over the aurora borealis. . . .

The IRA has not disarmed, and will not disarm. It will decommission some weapons, just the British army decommissioned its old SLR rifles and Chieftain tanks. But it will not go away. The IRA has not disarmed, and will not disarm. It will decommission some weapons, just the British army decommissioned its old SLR rifles and Chieftain tanks. But it will not go away. . . . [T]hrough the past seven years it has bamboozled, defrauded, misled and cheated both the Irish and the British governments, and the unionist people. It looted RUC Special Branch of its files. It launched major intelligence operations against its partners in government. It perpetrated the biggest cash robbery in UK history. It has hunted down former MI5 agents to murder them.

All these monumental crimes alternated with the IRA army council popping in and out of Chequers and Downing Street and for all I know, indulging in a spot of poolside sunbathing in Tuscany with the Blairs. . . .

This does not excuse the loyalist barbarism of last weekend; but however wicked it was — and the loyalists had come prepared to fight — it was not new. Violence has been going on for months; it’s just that you in Britain have scarcely noticed. . . . Murder has again become commonplace in Northern Ireland, and for a good reason. The peace process has robbed both states on the island of Ireland of the power to imprison for life. All such punishments are conditional upon future promises of good behaviour — so why not kill, if the maximum sentence you serve will be 18 months? . . .

So don’t expect to understand Northern Ireland, because you won’t: simply remember that you are manacled to this ranting, gibbering lunatic for ever.
 

Andrew Klavan on the "masturbatory barbarity" of the film Sin City:

[T]he translation of daydreams into art—even violent, sexy pop art—requires at least some minimal interaction between the raw material and a compassionate conception of the terror and dignity of being human. Sin City has no such conception.

. . . I like sex and violence in stories. But meaning has a moral weight. Here, as with the degraded photography of Robert Mapplethorpe and the hateful lyrics of Eminem, we’re being asked to applaud a show of undeniable artistic talent without passing judgment on the vision it conveys. It’s kind of like asking us to appreciate the excellent marksmanship of the boys at Columbine High.
 

And Howard Husock on the man who "may have been the most effective American communist ever":

Pete Seeger’s life mission first took shape as he toured the rural South with his father in the mid-thirties, listening to performances of traditional music and thrilling to their authenticity as perhaps only a Connecticut boarding-school product could.
 

Kay Ryan's piece on attending a writers conference, which I was hoping would find its way onto the Web, is up at Poetry's site. Here's a (big) taste:
 

Once, when I was about twenty-five and not yet entirely aware of the extremity of my unclubbability, I did try to go to a writers conference. Thirty minutes into the keynote address I had a migraine. It turns out I have an aversion to cooperative endeavors of all sorts. I couldn’t imagine making a play or movie, for instance; so many people involved. I don’t like orchestral music. I don’t like team sports. I love the solitary, the hermetic, the cranky self-taught. . . . How, then, one wonders, can it be that I have just come back from AWP’s annual conference in Vancouver, treading upon a lifetime of preferring not to?

* * * * *

I was invited to attend as an outsider, and to write a piece for Poetry. I could go but retain my alienation. This was so doable. Of course, in truth I could only do this now, when I am quite old. If I were young and hadn’t published anything, it would be different. Now, even if my sense of self is threatened, shouldn’t I already have used most of it up? How much more can there be left? Maybe I would never have been influenced, as I feared I would, but to this day I believe I needed to guard against something, even if that something was imaginary.

. . . The most important thing a beginning writer may have going for her is her bone-deep impulse to defend a self that at the time might not look all that worth getting worked up about. . . . One must truly HOLD A SPACE for oneself. All things conspire to close up this space. Everything about AWP has always struck me as closing the space.

* * * * *

The only way I’ve ever gotten along in this world is by staying away from it; I have had only enough character to keep myself out of situations that require character. Now here I am, going to AWP. How am I going to remember: these people are THE SPAWN OF THE DEVIL? They will seem like individuals, not deadly white threads of the great creative writing fungus.

* * * * *

Because this is only Wednesday, registration day, most of the tables in the big hall are still empty, but there are signs announcing the names of the presses and journals that will be occupying them. . . . Some of these journals I’ve had dealings with for decades. Slow dealings, sending off poems in the mail, waiting for a reply. By the time I’d get my poems back (usually all of them) they would look new to me. I could see them in a new way, maybe like children getting off the bus from their first day of school. They’d been somewhere where they had to fend for themselves. You could get a new respect for them, and also you could think to yourself, How could I have sent them off looking like that?

* * * * *

Lunch Break

I met up with Dorianne Laux at the sonnet panel. In spite of my abstract contempt for everyone in attendance here, I am on the functional level delighted as well as grateful to see this person whom I know and like, a warm human being, a strong poet, and the head of a writing program in Oregon. This is all so distressing. I knew it would be. . . . I am so happy to be tucked into this booth with these down-to-earth, generous people whose lives are writing, as mine is. Why have I kept myself from this camaraderie? There’s lots of relaxed book chat. Major talks about not yet feeling he has an arc for his new book. . . . Already it is coming to me why I don’t have more of this camaraderie; just the thought of vogue shapes for poetry books oppresses like cathedral tunes. Dorianne seems to be able to coexist with stuff like this, letting it wash over her. The more I think about it, the more oppressed I feel—so many of us writing books of poetry, with or without arc. How in the world can I feel really, really special? No, I think poets should take the lesson of the great aromatic eucalyptus tree and poison the soil beneath us.

It's all on that level. Highly recommended.
 

The phrase "Dallas Cowboys" interests me only when it's followed by the word "Cheerleaders."
 

Mark Steyn on the home front, where "a Carterian malaise hangs heavy":

My problem with the polls is that there’s a missing category. The assumption is that those “dissatisfied” with the war must necessarily be on the side of the Sheehans, Riches and Huffingtons. Au contraire, there’s a significant chunk of Americans who’ll support a war that hits our enemies hard and keeps them on the ropes, but are increasingly fed up with a tentative war effort that, militarily, won’t even smack Boy Assad around for his cross-border provocations from Syria. There are three forces at play on the domestic scene – the “Go, insurgents!” lobby, the Michael Ledeen “Faster, please!” crowd and the Administration’s approach somewhere in between - and that ought to be reflected in the polls.

Meanwhile, as the fourth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, consider Cindy Sheehan’s message: that neither Iraq nor Afghanistan nor (as she told a rally in Berkeley) America itself is worth the death of her son. Suppose that were true. Suppose the broader point is correct – that the first direct attack on the American mainland in two centuries is not worth a military campaign with an historically low rate of casualties. A superpower of 300 million that will bear any burden or pay any price as long as the death rate stays below four figures won’t be a superpower or any other kind of functioning polity for long. Goh Chok Tong, the Prime Minister of Singapore, was in Washington last year and summed it up better than anyone:

“The key issue is no longer WMD or even the role of the U.N. The central issue is America’s credibility and will to prevail.”
 

Take a look at the winners of Glamour magazine's "forty-eighth annual Top 10 College Women Competition." I'm having trouble choosing a favorite line, but this is a strong contender:

Wallin, sister of 2003 Top 10 College Women winner Ashley Amber Wallin, credits her Catawba Indian roots for her early interest in nature.

You know, I'm not bad at satire when I turn my hand to it, and there's no way I could've come up with anything that good. Not in a hundred years.
 

This is funny:

In any other industry, this would be called "collusion" and the Times and Post editorial pages would be in high dungeon[.]

I think he means "high dudgeon."

"High dungeon." Is that better or worse, do you think, than "low tower"?

(Link via Instapundit, who points to it for a much better reason than mine.)

UPDATE: I should explain that I like Tapscott's post very much and have forwarded the whole thing to friends. The malapropism was just too good to ignore.
 

Gas prices are way up in Europe, too:

While Americans grumble about paying $2.96 a gallon for gasoline, European fury comes at a higher cost. Prices have climbed to between $5 and $7 per gallon in Britain, France and Germany, and $7.50 in Turkey. It is $6.56 in the Netherlands, $5.66 in Sweden and $5.28 in Hungary.

. . . [T]he unease is growing across Europe in line with the cost of driving cars and trucks, and powering fishing boats and farm tractors as it scales record heights.

Desperate to avoid skyrocketing pump prices, some Germans were filling their tanks with cheaper home-heating fuel. Swedish motorists were jamming the roads to the small town of Trollhattan, where price wars have cut the price of gas by 30 percent.

Meanwhile, other Germans were motoring into Poland for cheaper gas, while Poles were driving into Ukraine, where gas remains cheaper.

. . . Although the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina to petroleum operations in the Gulf of Mexico has helped kick up fuel prices in Europe, these costs in fact have been on a steady and occasionally steep climb for much of this year.

Far more so than in the United States, fuel is heavily taxed in nearly every country in Europe. In Britain and France, 73 percent of the price of gasoline is tax. In Germany, the percentage is 71 percent; in Italy, 68 percent; and in Spain, 63 percent.
 

James Lileks:

Bush’s refusal to invade New Orleans tells everything you need to know about Republican racist perfidy. The local government’s incompetence tells you nothing whatsoever about Democrats ability to govern at the micro level.

(Via Craig Newmark.)
 

Ann Althouse quit watching The Daily Show last week, over its partisan coverage of Katrina. I quit watching it, along with all the other late-night comedy/talk shows (Leno, Letterman, etc.), during the Clinton-Lewinsky-Tripp fiasco. That's when I realized that the late-night guys mock only those who can't fight back: politicians who'd look petty responding (Clinton); citizens with no means to retaliate (Lewinsky and Tripp). In other words, they're cowards and bullies.

Whom should they attack? That's easy: one another. Material abounds; each host has weaknesses and frequently cracks bad jokes. But they'll never do it, because they're cowards and bullies. There's a Far Side cartoon that shows a bunch of enormous cowboys sitting in a saloon. Squeezed in among them are two little cowboys, one of whom is looking at the other and saying fiercely, "Yeah, you! I'm talking to you!" The joke is that if the speaker were genuinely tough he'd challenge one of the big guys rather than the only other small guy at the bar. Still, at least he has the guts to pick on someone who can answer. The late-night guys aren't so brave. What a waste of airtime. And what a bunch of pricks.

(Sorry, Mom.)

(Revised slightly 2:21 AM) (and again 4:50 AM—I have to start getting these posts right the first time)

Read about it and download it here.
 

StrategyPage, 9/10/05:

Troops in Iraq are increasingly using "smart cams" to guard their bases. Video cameras used for security is decades old. The new wrinkle is software that watches what the many cams see, analyses it, and alerts human operators if anything suspicious is spotted. A long-time problem with surveillance cameras was the large number of humans required to watch them. It's boring work, and one "watcher" can only monitor so many cameras. The smart video software, now entering the market, uses cheaper, and more powerful PC type systems to do the monitoring. The digital images seen by the vidcams, are compared to a library of images to watch out for (people with guns, items put down and left, and so on). Thus in Iraq, the troops can deploy hundreds of cameras, many of them sending their data back via a wireless link, and only have a few troops monitor the entire system (with other troops armed and ready to roll quickly if the system spots an intruder, and that is confirmed by the human operators.) Similar systems have been used by commercial organizations for several years.
 

Nice catch from Stuart Buck.
 

Nidra Poller's investigation (via David Frum) into the Muhammad al-Dura controversy is, or should be, a huge story. As Melanie Phillips writes, the accusation that Israeli soldiers murdered a Palestinian boy "might eventually come to be regarded as a racial libel on a par with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in both its malevolence and its contribution to the history of racial hatred."

For an indication of the lie's pervasiveness, see this piece in yesterday's Australian, which mentions "the famous footage of the televised death of a young boy, Mohammed al-Dura, caught and killed in crossfire, that has become a symbol of the Palestinian struggle for statehood."

If our mainstream media outlets ignore a revelation this big, if they fail to give it extensive, in-depth coverage, they're even more intellectually and morally corrupt than I've feared. So far, nothing.

UPDATE FOR LEFTISTS (revised) (twice): You know how some people believe that Bush and co. lied the US into war? Well, this is as significant as that would be if it were true.

UPDATE 9/13/05 2:25 AM EDT: Still nothing.

UPDATE 9/17/05 3:03 PM EDT: Columnists David Gelernter and Mona Charen have published pieces outlining Poller's report. Other than that, nothing. Meanwhile an article in two widely read Australian newspapers, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, repeats the lie in passing, as though it's a fact not in dispute: "It was here that 12-year-old Mohammed al-Dura was shot dead in a televised gunbattle at the beginning of the present uprising."

I'd say now that the penultimate sentence in my original post should've read, "If our mainstream media outlets ignore a revelation this big, if they fail to give it extensive, in-depth coverage, they're as intellectually and morally corrupt as I've feared." Score one for me.
 

Thomas Sowell:

They say time is money but a lot depends on whose time and whose money. For example, in California the San Mateo County Planning Commission has spent five years deciding what can and cannot be done with the site of an old racetrack that is no longer economically viable.

That is more time than it took to build the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge or the Manhattan Project that produced the first atomic bomb.

None of this delay has cost the members of the Planning Commission a dime. That is why the delay is still continuing. But whatever is finally done with the racetrack site will be vastly more expensive because five years of delay are not cheap.

. . . All sorts of lofty talk about "open space" or "saving the green foothills" is used to disguise the plain fact that those who already have theirs want to keep other people out, especially other people not as upscale as themselves.

Ugly as such selfishness may be, it is no worse than the zealotry of the nature cultists who join with them to make life miserable for thousands of other people in order to give themselves a cheap sense of importance that some confuse with idealism.
 

Melanie Phillips:

One of the many double standards employed by Europe to judge the Middle East conflict is that Israel’s military measures to defend itself against terror are condemned while similar measures taken by the west are upheld (targeted killings of Hamas leaders, say, get the big thumbs down while the coalition does its best to kill leaders of al Qaeda) on the grounds that Israel’s war is completely different from and has nothing to do with Islamic terror against the west; and yet in the next breath the same critics claim that Israel’s policies are the principal cause of the global jihad. The fact is that Israel is in the front line of the same war that we are all having to fight to defend the free world; that the demonisation of Israel and Sharon is simply a more extreme version of the demonisation of America and Bush, by the same ideological idiots; and that until and unless Britain and Europe stop gunning for America and Israel and start identifying the real enemy who threatens us all, we will not win this war.
 

Warren Bell, 8/7/05, in a post titled "NETANYAHU DISAPPOINTS AGAIN":

Benjamin Netanyahu has resigned his post as Israel's finance Minister over his opposition to the disengagement in Gaza. The move (and especially its timing) seems calculated, an attempt by Netanyahu to position himself to re-assume leadership of the conservative Likud party if Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan fails. The disengagement plan is bold, risky, and painful, and the last thing Israel needs right now is political gamesmanship.

John Podhoretz, 8/7/05, in a post titled "WHATEVER BIBI DOES THESE DAYS":

[H]e makes it look as though he's doing it solely and nakedly for political reasons and for advantage. Netanyahu's resignation has come too late to affect anything, which means he basically held on to power as Finance Minister for as long as he could and then decided to jump ship so he could be perceived to have clean hands if right-wing voters decide to turn on Ariel Sharon. He's not just an opportunist, or a craven opportunist. He's so patently and obviously an opportunist that it becomes impossible to respect him. For those who follow the ins and outs of Israeli politics, he's become — words I never thought I could write — the Shimon Peres of the Right.

Joel C. Rosenberg, 8/10/05:

Back in May, Israeli Cabinet Minister Natan Sharansky resigned from Ariel Sharon’s government. . . . For months, Israelis who shared Sharansky’s fears urged Netanyahu to follow Sharansky’s lead. . . . On Sunday, Netanyahu did just that.

. . . I believe Netanyahu did the right thing at the right time.

He has opposed the Gaza pullout plan from the beginning both in private and behind the scenes. But it was not as simple a matter to step down in May when Sharansky did. Netanyahu as finance minister has been deeply involved in trying to revive the Israeli economy which had been in recession for the past three years. He was steering badly needed tax cuts, privatization, deregulation and banking reforms through the Israeli parliament right up to the last minute in office. With the bulk of his sweeping free-market reform plan now in operation — and Israel’s economy and stock market steadily improving — Netanyahu finally had the freedom to step down from his governing responsibilities in a responsible fashion, and he did so.

John Podhoretz, 8/31/05:

I've known a lot of politicians who are disliked by other politicians, but I've never met any politician who is more hated by the people he has worked with, worked for and who have worked for him than Bibi Netanyahu. He is considered an unprincipled snake by those who ought to consider him a close ally. . . . In all likelihood, if he unseats Sharon, Israel will go through a period of unprecedented political chaos, with governments falling every three months since there is no figure on Left or Right at the moment who can unite anybody save for Sharon. Which is why, in the end, Bibi will probably fail.

Jeff Jacoby, 9/1/05:

For years, Israel has been told . . . by its critics: Since the "occupation" of Gaza and the West Bank is the cause of Arab terrorism, the way to end Palestinian terrorism is to end Israel's presence in the territories.

But far from reducing the terrorists' bloodlust, Israel's retreat from Gaza has only inflamed it. In just the past two weeks, a Palestinian knifed a Jewish student to death in Jerusalem's Old City, an Israeli policemen was stabbed in the throat by an Arab in Hebron, Kassam rockets were fired from Gaza into the southern Israeli town of Sderot, a suicide bomber blew himself up in Beersheba's crowded bus station, a Katyusha missile launched from Lebanon exploded in the Israeli village of Margaliot, a firebomb was thrown at an Israeli vehicle on a highway outside Jerusalem, and a 14-year-old boy from Nablus was caught with three bombs.

. . . In the war on terrorism, civilization has just suffered a defeat.

Caroline Glick, 9/1/05:

[I]n all the column space devoted in the papers to demonizing Netanyahu and his supporters, one thing was brazenly absent. No attention whatsoever was paid to the points he made in his presentation on Tuesday. Netanyahu spoke at length about the lack of public debate in Israel over the most pressing issues of our times. He spoke in detail about the need to restore responsibility for Israel's security to the army rather than to the Palestinian militias and the Egyptian military.

Perhaps most significantly, Netanyahu stated flatly, and for the first time since last week's expulsions, the truth that the monolithic Israeli press in its babbling leftist bubble and their champion Sharon has refused to admit: The State of Palestine was established last week in Gaza.

. . . The lies we are told today by the Left, in Israel and internationally, become more and more shrill as the reality of the world we live in and their own irrationality become increasingly difficult to sweep under the rug. . . . Netanyahu is an imperfect human being, but is also a leader with a rational approach to policy and politics and a healthy regard for democracy. And the Left, filled with hatred and blind faith in lies, must be exposed and defeated in the battlefield of ideas before its false prophets land us all in a new version of the gulag.
 

James Dunnigan:

The speed and effectiveness with which American military trucks were equipped with armor in Iraq had a lot to do with Israel’s war with Palestinian and Lebanese terrorists. For over a decade, Israeli troops have had to drive trucks through areas containing Islamic terrorists. The ambush methods of these terrorists were similar to those encountered in Iraq, and it was from this experience that Israeli firms developed kits for armoring trucks. These kits included 10mm steel plates, cut and shaped to fit a particular type of truck, plus bulletproof glass for the windshield and windows, and brackets and other hardware needed to attach the armor. Thus when thousands of American military trucks had to get armored in 2003, the Israeli firms had kits already designed. Thus many, if not most, of the American armored trucks in Iraq got that way because of Israeli designed, and often Israeli manufactured, armor kits.
 

Clocks, clocks, clocks. The writing-and-erasing one is my favorite, followed closely by the slide-rule-like one.

Via Steve Bass's (free) newsletter, which you should try if you like this kind of stuff.

UPDATE: Here's a tiny free program that makes it easy to enable/disable your screensaver, and to start it instantly.

Steven Malanga:

Take the employment picture, above all. Although securities firms added about 3,000 jobs last year (leaving the industry about 32,000 below its former peak), those gains mostly replace continuing losses throughout the rest of the city’s financial-services sectors, as industries like insurance and commercial banking continue to desert the city. Indeed, banking today employs only 39,000 people, down from a peak of 120,000, while the insurance sector, which once employed