Did my matzos come?

"Orbitz owner to split into four companies"

Jay Nordlinger:

I was very much comforted by a talk I had with a federal-judge friend. I thought he would be mortified, as so many of us have been. And I was shocked to find that he was delighted with the choice — and thought the general conservative criticism was bunk.

Since sociology — the awful matter of class — has played a role in the Miers brouhaha, I might give you this judge’s credentials: He went to the very fanciest schools in the country (starting with prep school). He was a partner at just about the fanciest firm in the country. And he was a federal judge pretty early. In other words, he is at the top of the elite heap.

And he thinks Miers is superbly qualified — loves her background, loves what she has done. Loves what he thinks he knows about her character, and her work habits. Thinks she would be terrific on the Court. “The Supreme Court is packed with former Court of Appeals judges,” he said. “We don’t need any more. And, you know? They’re not necessarily all that impressive, trust me.” He went on to describe one of the judges presumed to have been on the president’s short list as “frightening”: frightening as in, not too swift.

I also like this item from Nordlinger:

There is just about no national property more important than the Lincoln Memorial, our country’s shrine. So why should the Park Service allow part of the words above the man to be faded? (The speeches to the sides look okay.)

We’re always arguing about what is a federal responsibility, and what is not. Conservatives are sometimes accused — ridiculously — of not wanting the federal government to do anything.

Well, here’s something I hope we can all agree on: The feds should keep the Lincoln Memorial perfect. I mean Japanese, white-glove perfect. And if they can’t, let’s privatize the mother.

And this one, on National Review's founder William F. Buckley, Jr.:

Then Sir Alistair Horne took the podium. . . . Sir Alistair remarked that Bill has always been outstanding at everything — except for painting. “He is a really bad painter. Once, Marc Chagall saw a painting of Bill’s, and said, ‘Oh, the poor paint.’”

Buy.com is underselling Amazon on books by ten percent and offering the same "Free Shipping on book orders over $25" deal. Here are the details. I've found Buy.com reliable and about as quick as Amazon, though less elaborate as to packaging.

Julia Gorin has a harrowing piece at OpinionJournal in which she describes her mother's experiences giving birth in the Soviet Union. Even worse is this:

The glimpse we have into North Korea's delivery rooms is into those at detention centers for political prisoners, as described to Marie Claire magazine in 2002 by Lee Young Suk, a 65-year-old grandmother who was deported back to North Korea after she defected to China. At a detention center in South Sinuiju province, Lee Young was assigned to help deliver babies of other prisoners. When she delivered the baby of the first woman under her care and reached for a blanket, a guard stopped her: "You crazy hag, are you out of your mind? What are you doing with the baby? Just put it in the box!" He grabbed the baby by a leg and dumped him into a wooden box that was sitting on the floor. He hit Lee Young's arm with a leather strap.

"North Korea is short of food already," the chief medical officer explained. "Why do we have to feed the offspring of foreign fathers? Since China is an open country, they could even be babies of American sperm, so then we'd be feeding Americans."

The procedure was as follows: Once the box was filled with infants, it would be taken to the mountains and buried. Most of the babies would die within four days, but Lee Young recalled two particularly healthy ones who took longer, moving their heads left to right, opening and closing their eyes and making froglike croaks. Their skin turned yellow and their lips blue until the medical officer finally stabbed them through the skull. Lee Young was reassigned when her heart weakened from what she was witnessing. She eventually bribed her way out of prison and into South Korea.

Gorin ends,

We share the planet with North Korea and its ilk. As many intellectuals, academics and literary and Hollywood luminaries commented soon after 9/11--with some vindication in their tone--we do not live in a vacuum. Yet for the most part they, along with the isolationist right, seem indifferent to the suffering of tyranny's victims. They blithely champion the status quo, or in the case of Iraq the status quo ante, repeating only that Saddam Hussein wasn't a threat to us.

James S. Robbins:

The ideal world that the radical Islamists seek to construct seems fantastic to people accustomed to the benefits of freedom. Why would anyone want to live that way, in a society without choice, without dissent, without art, music or literature? In which women are chattel, prayers compulsory, and theocratic dogma the only law? The idea seems so otherworldly, so inhumane and regressive, that some are tempted not to believe it. Surely, they argue, this is for internal consumption in their movement. Surely, this is only to motivate their extremist followers. A society that backward and bizarre cannot be the true objective of their movement. But do not doubt it; al Qaeda's vision has been consistent for over a decade. The Taliban put these same ideas into practice in Afghanistan. Hamas has a similar plan for Gaza.

We second-guess the radical program at our peril; it would not be the first time that evil hid in plain sight. Hannah Arendt wrote that the Nazis were as frank as they were mendacious; they stated their objectives clearly years before taking power, and anyone who was surprised by the Holocaust had not been paying attention. Likewise Khmer Rouge military leader Khieu Samphan's 1959 doctoral thesis identified the urban bourgeoisie as a parasite class that had to be removed to the countryside. When Pol Pot took power 16 years later, the thesis formed the blueprint for the killing fields. There is no reason to believe that the radical Islamists once in power anywhere would not seek to erect their utopia as expeditiously and comprehensively as possible.

. . . We are fighting a war against terrorism because unconventional conflict is the best the enemy can do right now. However, the terrorists do not wish to remain terrorists. They seek to conquer lands, to consolidate forces, to build armies, and carry the fight to us in ways that now seem well beyond their reach. The extremists have a vision, and they are not content to live with their limitations. This is what is at stake in Iraq, Afghanistan, and across the greater Middle East. The failure now to defend the concept of democracy, to rally the people of the world to the banner of freedom and the potentials of the human spirit, will establish the conditions for a much more terrible conflict in the near future. It is a battle we can win; we just periodically have to be reminded that not everyone in the world holds the same truths to be self-evident.

Charles Krauthammer:

It was announced last week that American scientists have just created a living, killing copy of the 1918 ``Spanish'' flu.

. . . Beyond the brilliance lies the sheer terror. We have quite literally brought back to life an agent of near-biblical destruction. It killed more people in six months than were killed in the four years of the First World War. It killed more humans than any other disease of similar duration in the history of the world, says Alfred W. Crosby, who wrote a history of the 1918 pandemic. And, notes The New Scientist, when the re-created virus was given to mice in heavily quarantined laboratories in Atlanta, it killed the mice more quickly than any other flu virus ever tested.

. . . What to do with this knowledge? Not only has the virus been physically re-created. But its entire genome has now been published for the whole world, good people and very bad, to see.

. . . One batch of 1918 flu has the capacity for mass destruction that no Bond villain could ever dream of. Why try to steal loose nukes in Russia? A nuke can only destroy a city. The flu virus, properly evolved, is potentially a destroyer of civilizations.

We might have just given it to our enemies.

Have a nice day.

Someone please tell the Singularity to hurry up and arrive so that it can find a vaccine against this thing.
 

This interview with Ralph Peters has convinced me to buy his book. Some quotes:

As far as the inhuman, inhumane--and stupid--treatment of women in the Middle East, yep, Islam is scared of the girls. I wish Freud were alive--he'd really get a look at a civilization's discontents. If you're not terrified of female sexuality, you don't lock women up, insist on covering them up from scalp to toenail and stone them to death for their "sins." Every single Muslim culture in the greater Middle East is sexually infantile--to use the Freudian term. For all their macho posturing, the men are terrified of their feared inadequacy. It's like one big junior high school dance, with the boys on one side of the gym and the girls on the other--except the boys have Kalashnikovs.

* * * * *

In the collective culture of the Middle East, we're dealing with a deeply neurotic, if not outright psychotic civilization. I wish I could be more positive. But the average Middle Eastern male just has snakes in his head. And, by the way, the place isn't much fun, either. A mega-mall or two does not make a civilization.

* * * * *

They don't talk about it, of course--it's supposed to be anathema--but very few Middle Eastern mothers would trust their good-looking young sons around many adult males. This has deep roots, right back to the celebrations of the Emperor Babur's fixation on a pretty boy in the Baburnama. And the related dread of the female as literal femme fatale, as vixen, as betrayer, appears in much of the major literature--especially the "Thousand and One Arabian Nights," which, in its unabridged, unexpurgated version, is one long chronicle of supposed female wantonness and insatiability (the men are always innocent victims of Eve).

* * * * *

Nothing about our civilization so threatens the males of the Middle East as the North American career woman making her own money and her own decisions. We don't think of it this way, but from one perspective the best symbols of the War on Terror would be the Islamic veil versus the two-piece woman's business suit.

* * * * *

[T]he number one deadly and galvanizing strategic impulse in the world today is jealousy. And it's jealousy of the West in general, but specifically of the United States. The failed civilization of the Middle East--where not one of the treasured local values is functional in the globalized world--is morbidly jealous of us. They've succumbed to a culture of--and addiction to--blame. Instead of facing up to the need to change and rolling up their sleeves, they want the world to conform to their terms. . . .

I've been out there. And while anti-Americanism is really much exaggerated, where it does exist among the terrorists and their supporters, jealousy is a prime motivating factor. You've heard it before, but it's all too true: They do hate us for our success.

The populations of the Middle East blew it. They've failed. Thirteen hundred years of effort came down to an entire civilization that can't design and build an automobile. And thanks to the wonders of the media age, it's daily rubbed in their faces how badly they've failed.

Oil wealth? A tragedy for the Arabs, since it gave the wealth to the most backward. The Middle East still does not have a single world-class university outside of Israel. Not one. The oil money has been thrown away--it's been a drug, not a tool.

The terrorists don't want progress. They want revenge. At the risk of punning on the title of the book, they don't want new glory--they want their old (largely imagined) glory back. They want to turn back the clock to an imagined world. The terrorists are the deadly siblings of Westerners who believe in Atlantis.

* * * * *

I love France and Germany. They're two of my favorite museums. And what's not to like about two grotesquely hypocritical societies who are, between them, responsible for the worst savagery in and beyond Europe over the past several centuries?

* * * * *

There are plentiful reasons to be hopeful about parts--parts--of Africa. But much of the continent is every bit as disastrous as the popular image has it. My complaint is that we treat that vast, various continent as one big, failed commune. Well, Congo or Sierra Leone certainly aren't inspiring...but in the course of several, recent, lengthy trips to Africa, I was just astonished at the vigor, vision and strategic potential of South Africa. South Africa is well on the way to becoming the first true sub-Saharan great power--and it's another natural ally for us. . . . [I]n the long-term, I expect great things from South Africa, that they'll control (economically and culturally) southern Africa at least as far north as the Rovuma River. The one qualifier is this: Their next presidential election will be the turning point, either way. If they elect a demagogue, South Africa could still turn into another failing African state. But if they elect a technocrat, get out of the way, because the South Africans are coming.

* * * * *

Most Americans still do not realize the intensity or the dimensions of the struggle with Islamist terror. Despite 9-11, they just don't have a sense that we're at war. And I'm afraid I have to fault the Bush administration on that count: Good Lord, we're at war with the most implacable enemies we've ever faced (men who regard death as a promotion), and what was our president's priority this year? The reform of Social Security. While I continue to support the administration's overall intent and efforts in Iraq and around the world, I believe the president has failed us badly by not driving home to the people that we're at war.

The Bush administration has done great and necessary things--but all too often they've done those things badly. And only the valor and blood of our troops has redeemed the situation, time after time, from Fallujah to the struggles of the future.

UPDATE: Here, the dopey blogger adds three days later, is Peters's book.
 

Here's a list of terrorist attacks by radical Muslims since 9/11/01.
 

David Frum:

More talking over the weekend to more conservative lawyers in Washington. It is hard to convey how unanimously they not only reject, but disdain, the choice of Miers.

Will Senate Democrats vote to confirm someone personally opposed to abortion (as Peggy Noonan wrote, "Abortion is now the glue that holds the Democratic Party together") but perhaps not firmly originalist?

Very interesting times.
 

The Times of India:

Terrorists killed 10 people at three places in Rajouri district of Jammu and Kashmir on Sunday night, showing no change of heart despite a devastating earthquake having hit the state on Saturday.

While terrorists massacred five members of two Hindu families in Rajnagar in the Budhal area, four Hindus were killed in Gabbar village and one Muslim in Kulhar village.

Caitlin Moran on "Schadenblogging":

I have a friend whose vile ex-husband would post his own, thrillingly bad, poetry on his blog. At dinner parties she would print off copies, and after pudding everyone would solemnly recite the most awful ones in unison.

 

Glenn Reynolds rounds up comments on pork and unresponsive legislators. He expects "a significant move to do something" about congressional spending.

The problem is that many people believe consider it a politician's job to bring pork home. As Walter Williams wrote last October, using Louisiana's sugar industry as an example:

Mary Landrieu and John Breaux represent Louisiana in the Senate. What do you think Louisianians would do to them if they did not lobby and vote for government sugar subsidies and restrictions on sugar imports? With the help of the sugar industry, they'd be run out of town on a rail. Louisianians want their goodies.

And they'll vote accordingly, as will most citizens of every other state. Sacrifice finds few volunteers. No, I don't expect much change anytime soon.
 

This post by Todd Zywicki is worth reading.
 

One of John Batchelor's guests tonight was Yossef Bodansky, "Director of the Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare of the U. S. Congress, as well as the World Terrorism Analyst with the Freeman Center for Strategic Studies." (I think that description may be slightly out of date, but you get the idea: he studies terrorism.) Bodansky said that Iraq's neighbors plan to attack Iraq after the US and Britain withdraw. In other words, it isn't only that Iran, Syria et al. fear the example and influence of a free or somewhat-free state in their region. They're trying to drive our forces out so that they can carve up Iraq for themselves. Obvious now that I think about it. Thank goodness there are people in the world smarter than I.
 

A poster named zombie left this comment at Little Green Footballs:

Look, folks, I know plenty of people in the media. Even two NY Times reporters. And I can't even begin to describe to you the completely insular and self-defined world they ALL live in. It's not like they sit around scheming ways to slant their coverage toward the Left. It happens automatically and unconsciously — like a ball rolling downhill. In fact, they don't even know they're doing it, for the most part. For 98% of journalists under a certain age, they've never even been cognizant of the concept of "even-handedness." For them, writing = promoting paleoliberalism. Even if they were to read this very post, they would not understand.

. . . This all happens at the subconscious level. They are on autopilot, and no longer have an individual will. They think they do, but they don't.

Almost everyone I know is part of this hive-mind. And they think I'm part of it too.

The stories I could tell.

As House would say, "It's perfect. It explains everything."

Above all else, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, Reuters, CBS, NBC, ABC, etc., want a Democrat in the White House in 2008. Thus their coverage of the issues:

• Good news in Iraq is bad news because it makes a Democratic victory less likely.
• Bad news in Iraq is good news because it makes a Democratic victory more likely.
• Good economic news is bad news because it makes a Democratic victory less likely.
• Bad economic news is good news because it makes a Democratic victory more likely.

And so on.

This doesn't mean that the outlets listed above never report news that could be interpreted in Bush's favor. It means that they do so reluctantly, grudgingly, under intellectual and emotional protest.

Of course, let a Democrat win in 2008 and good news will become good news and bad news will be hidden.

I know that this was clear long ago to millions of people, but for me the light bulb only just went on, and I'm savoring my realization.

(Revised slightly 5:52 AM 10/7/05)
 

A couple of months ago I read in The Wall Street Journal about Plumpy'nut, a sweet paste that's bringing back thousands of African children from the brink of death. The story I read is subscriber-only, but here's one datelined Maradi, Niger, that appeared in the New York Times on August 8:

In the crowd of riotously dressed mothers clasping wailing, naked infants at a Médecins Sans Frontières feeding center just west of here, Taorey Asama, at 27 months old, stands out for a heart-rending reason: She looks like a normal baby.

Many of the others have the skeletal frames and baggy skin of children with severe malnutrition. The good news is that a month ago, so did Taorey.

"When she came here, she was all small and curled up," said her mother, Henda, 30. "It's Plumpy'nut that's made her like this. She's immense!"

Never heard of Plumpy'nut? Come to Maradi, a bustling crossroads where the number of malnourished children exceeds even the flocks of motor scooters flitting down its dirt streets. At this epicenter of Niger's latest hunger crisis, Plumpy'nut is saving lives.

Plumpy'nut, which comes in a silvery foil package the size of two grasping baby-size hands, is 500 calories of fortified peanut butter, a beige paste about as thick as mashed potatoes and stuffed with milk, vitamins and minerals.

Since the packets came into the hands of relief organizations during the Darfur crisis in Sudan, they have been revolutionizing emergency care for severely malnourished children who are old enough to take solid food by taking care out of crowded field hospitals and straight into mothers' homes.

. . . Milton Tectonidis, a nutrition specialist for Médecins Sans Frontières, said this about Plumpy'nut in an interview here: "This product, it's beyond opinion; it's documented; it's scientific fact. We've seen it working. With this one product, we can treat three-quarters of children on an outpatient basis."

Traditional malnutrition therapy hospitalizes children, nursing them to health with steady infusions of vitamin-laced milk. Then they are sent home with powdered milk formula to complete their recovery. It works well, but milk is costly, must be mixed with water and is prone to spoil. And when mothers prepare the formula with the dirty water all too common in impoverished villages, babies get sick. In comparison, Plumpy'nut - the name melds the words "plump" and "peanut" - costs less than the milk formula, has a two-year shelf life and need not be mixed with anything.

Perhaps most revolutionary is that mothers, not doctors, can give it to their toddlers. That not only reduces costs but also frees the doctors to attend to the sickest children, who often suffer from malnutrition as well as diseases like malaria or dysentery. The usual course of treatment is four weeks of Plumpy'nut, costing about $20, along with grain-based food like Unimix, a vitamin-packed flour that can be made into the porridge many Africans eat. But some children return to health in as little as two weeks.

The product is the brainchild of a French scientist, André Briend, who had labored in vain for years to concoct a ready-to-eat nutrition supplement until serendipity - a bottle of the popular breakfast spread Nutella on his kitchen table - led him to try a paste instead of candy bars and other forms of food. Later a French company that specializes in making food supplements for relief work, Nutriset, began packaging the formula under the name Plumpy'nut.

. . . "As soon as I got him home, he started eating it - every day, aggressively," Idrissa, 24, who has no last name, said of her 2-year-old son. "And after three days, I could see a big difference. The change was abrupt."

The son, who refused to open his eyes before starting the diet regimen a week earlier, has added fat under his sagging skin and cries when his packet is finished for another. "I don't know how to express it," Idrissa said. "I'm so happy."

A group of British bishops has called for a "public act of repentance" for the war in Iraq. British journalist Stephen Pollard comments:

In a passage of breathtakingly blinkered bigotry, we are told that "what distinguishes it (the US) from many other empires in history is its strong sense of moral righteousness".

No. What distinguishes America is that when it fights it does so not to impose tyranny but to promote freedom and the stable democracy of which the bishops are so contemptuous. Without America sending its sons to fight for liberty, we would be speaking German. But in the minds of the clergy, when the choice is between tyranny and freedom, the latter does not even deserve a thought.

With friends like Pollard, we should be all right.
 

Karl Zinsmeister surveys Europe:

Unlike some forms of bigotry, anti-Americanism is most virulent among Europe's elites. Everyday Germans and Brits and Italians tend to be more appreciative of American culture, economic achievement, and government than their political lords. But ordinary Europeans have relatively little influence on the direction of their societies. The thing about European governance most striking to American eyes today is its comparatively undemocratic nature. In much of the continent, elections mean little, unaccountable bureaucracies and elites commandeer the most important decisions, the same people hang onto power endlessly, and policies that would not survive the test of popular opinion are simply instituted by administrative fiat. To cite just one example, direct election of mayors has been blocked in many localities, with national authorities insisting on appointing local leaders themselves.

. . . This Europe manipulated from above has failed to keep pace with the mushrooming achievements of less heavily bridled American and Asian competitors. The continent's ruling class is thus in a foul humor. In a June column [available here—mg], Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal perfectly captured the angry condescension now often directed by European authorities at American representatives. He describes being ambushed at a Sunday brunch by a German diplomat:

“Apropos of nothing, he said he had recently made a study of U.S. tax laws and concluded that practices here were inferior to those in Germany. Given recent rates of German economic growth, I found this comment odd. But I offered no rejoinder... Bad as U.S. economic policy was, it was as nothing next to our human-rights record... The gulag was better than Guantanamo, since at least the Stalinist system offered its victims a trial of sorts... Civil rights in the U.S., he said, were on a par with those of North Korea and rather behind what they had been in Europe in the Middle Ages... My wife and I made abortive attempts at ordinary conversation. We were met with non sequiturs: ‘The only people who appreciate American foreign policy are poodles.’”

. . . This kind of bilious grandstanding now dominates European diplomacy. Indeed, Europe no longer even attempts a serious and constructive foreign policy in many important areas.

. . . Europe’s economic trauma can be seen most clearly in Germany, which has performed miserably since edging away from the American free-market model and toward the French socialized-market alternative. Unemployment in Germany has reached the potentially destabilizing level of 12 percent. More shockingly, about a third of those unemployed have been jobless for more than a year. This is not some recessionary blip; over the last decade and a half, economic growth in Germany has averaged only a little over 1 percent. This miserable performance has allowed the people of other nations to pass the Germans in standard of living.

As Europe’s locomotive runs out of fuel, the whole train slows. French unemployment rates are nearly as high as in Germany. Across the 15 nations of the European Union, the proportion of the jobless who have been unemployed for more than a year now exceeds 40 percent. . . . Europe has created just 4 million net new jobs since the 1970s. And most of those were in government, not the private sector. During that same period, the U.S. created 57 million new jobs—which is why it has become the magnet for the globe’s most economically ambitious people.

Shrinking economic opportunity has particularly harsh effects on newcomers like immigrants and the young. In France, Italy, Germany, and Belgium, approximately a quarter of all workers under 25 are currently unemployed. Many young Euros now begin their productive years with a stint on the dole. This is a formula not just for economic mediocrity, but for personal heartache and social unrest.

And the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that economic growth will slacken even further in the countries employing the Euro as currency. From an anemic growth rate of 1.3 percent per year between 2010 and 2020, OECD economists forecast a decline to under 1 percent annual growth during the decade following. Those little gray numbers are more than marks on paper—over time they will translate into notably pinched lives. Already, higher U.S. growth over the last generation has given average Americans a standard of living about 40 percent richer than average continental Europeans. Continue that a few more decades and we will no longer be peers, but two very different cultures.

. . . Unfortunately, a combination of ideological stubbornness and blind anti-Americanism makes many Europeans resist the economic modernizations they desperately need. . . . The irony is that for all their insistence on portraying the U.S. as a land of fired workers, poverty, and economic insecurity, it is now Europe where unemployment is twice as high and four times as deep, where immigrants and the young have far fewer openings, where the ladder of upward mobility has fallen to pieces. In terms of spending power, homeownership, educational opportunities, and so forth, even relatively low income Americans are now demonstrably better off than typical Europeans. . . .

There are now even deeper divergences which separate Europe from the U.S. Commenting on the collapse of the European birthrate (which will leave a majority of residents in many cities with no siblings, cousins, aunts or uncles), George Weigel observes that “when an entire continent, healthier, wealthier, and more secure than ever before, fails to create the human future in the most elemental sense—by creating the next generation— something very serious is afoot.” He concludes that “Europe is dying. The wasting disease that has beset this once greatest of civilizations is not physical, however. It is a disease in the realm of the human spirit.”

Look upon the suicide clinic in Switzerland that administers a glass of schnapps and then a peaceful death by injection. Note the German laws that legalized prostitution two years ago, theoretically exposing laid-off waitresses and secretaries to the risk of having to entertain job offers from the sex industry or face the loss ofunemployment benefits. Realize that 31 percent of pediatricians in the Netherlands have euthanized an infant, and that a fifth of these took place without the knowledge or consent of parents. And suddenly one is inclined to share the observation of Britain-dweller [and Anglican minister] Dwight Longenecker that “beneath it all, the growing divide between Europe and America is a divide between theism and atheism. This simple divide is cosmic in its importance, and affects simply everything.”
 

The most meaningful observation, regardless of what happens next, comes from David Frum:

This is the moment for which the conservative legal movement has been waiting for two decades--two decades in which a generation of conservative legal intellects of the highest ability have moved to the most distinguished heights in the legal profession. On the nation's appellate courts, in legal academia, in private practice, there are dozens and dozens of principled conservative jurists in their 40s and 50s unassailably qualified for the nation's highest court.

And Miers isn't among them.

Autoblog:

Amerityre Corporation announced today that production quality prototypes of its “zero pressure” (no air) space saver spare tire are being delivered to auto companies for testing and evaluation.

The polyurethane tire is manufactured directly onto the car wheel, and never needs inflating and can never go flat. The company claims an operating range of over 2,000 miles at 50 mph. The tires (tyres?) can carry loads of up to 2,000 lbs, making them suitable for SUV-class vehicles.

(Via Craig Newmark.)

Like Ramesh Ponnuru, but much less insightfully, I find the following point from Steven Levitt unpersuasive:

7) There is one thing I would take Bennett to task for: first saying that he doesn't believe our abortion-crime hypothesis but then revealing that he does believe it with his comments about black babies. You can't have it both ways.

Levitt says that the abortion rate is related to the crime rate. Fine, that's plausible, though I don't know that it's true. Bennett says that if you abort an enormous number of babies you'll reduce the crime rate significantly. That's more than plausible; it's just about undeniable. Bennett doesn't have to subscribe to the Levitt-Dubner abortion-crime theory to believe what he said. If statistics showed that, contrary to Levitt-Dubner, the more abortions the more crime, Bennett's remark would still be reasonable, because at some high level of abortion the crime rate will drop. To take it to its preposterous extreme, if all babies are aborted, crime will eventually disappear.

Levitt has this one wrong.

(I guess this is my week for criticizing my intellectual betters.)