Did my matzos come?

Glenn Reynolds has been posting quite a bit on General Motors lately (start at the top and keep scrolling). Coincidentally I just read this passage in Michael Crichton's Disclosure, a 1993 novel I like a lot: "If there's anything that the last twenty years has shown us, it's that design and manufacturing are all one process. You start splitting off the design engineers from the manufacturing guys and you'll end up with bad design. You'll end up with General Motors." A few pages later there's this:

After watching these [business-school] graduates come and go, Sanders had finally concluded that there was a fundamental flaw in their education. They had been trained to believe that they were equipped to manage anything. But there was no such thing as general managerial skills and tools. In the end, there were only specific problems, involving specific industries and specific workers. To apply general tools to specific problems was to fail. You needed to know the market, you needed to know the customers, you needed to know the limits of manufacturing and the limits of your own creative people. . . . Yet time and again, Sanders had been shown a prototype and had asked the one significant question: It looks fine, but can you make it on a production line? Can you build it, reliably and quickly, for a price? Sometimes they could, and sometimes they couldn't. If you took away that question, you changed the entire organization. And not for the better.
 

John Derbyshire:

If I compare my own life to the lives of my parents, and to the prospects for my children, I am struck by my immense good fortune in having been born when and where I was. I was actually born early on a Sunday morning, in a nursing home behind St. Matthew's church in Northampton, England, three weeks after VE Day. The church bells were ringing. (A thing that had then only recently been re-permitted. During WW2, the ringing of church bells was to be a signal that the Germans had invaded, and was forbidden for other purposes.) The town's boy scout troop was marching up the Kettering Road to the church, with a band playing. It was some welcome into the universe, though my own recollection of it is naturally incomplete.

Subsequent events justified the joy. I have got through pretty much my entire life without ever having to work very hard, without ever having seen my country invaded, without enduring war or depression, without suffering any horrid illness, without ever going hungry or wanting for anything. What luck! Like Tom Utley writing in the Telegraph the other day I got a free education up to first degree level, with spending money thrown in, and have never had to carry any crushing, nor even inconveniencing, burden of debt. I bought my first house at age 24 and paid for it easily with an undemanding job that occupied me literally and exactly from 9 to 5, with an hour for lunch. (I am not making this up.) . . .

I can't believe my kids will have that kind of luck. The welfare state, which provided my education, no longer works — not for them, not for anybody. (I sometimes marvel at how well it did work to lift up the deserving poor in the years after WWII. Don't laugh; it really did.) I shall have to beggar myself to put the little Derbs through college, and they will likely still end up with huge debts. There will be no 9-to-5 jobs for them to go to after graduation, quite possibly no jobs at all other than in government work, which by that time will occupy a Soviet-sized slice of the national economy. . . .

To my kids I should like to say: I am sorry to have brought you into this mess. There were no bells ringing, no bands playing, at either of your births, and it would have been a travesty if there had been. Even the wisest of us — people like your Dad, I mean — live in part by instinct, and there is no instinct stronger than the one that prompts us to continue the species; so here you are. I am sorry, sorry. There was the Greatest Generation. Then there was ours, the Luckiest. Yours will be the Saddest. Quite possibly — so far as this civilization is concerned, at any rate — it will be the Last. I shall continue to do my best for you as long as I can, but... après moi le Deluge.
 

The rest of the piece is very much worth reading. I also like Utley's column and this one by Alice Thomson, who cites Utley's piece too.
 

Glenn Reynolds:

My colleague Tom Plank, who was leading a platoon in Vietnam while I was learning to ride a two-wheeler, emails:

I saw your post on Reverse Vietnam. I am deeply skeptical of the claim that the military misled the press or the American people about the Vietnam War. It may be that the top political leaders downplayed the costs of the war, and perhaps senior military officers went along with this, but I thought the reporting on the war was nevertheless much more negative than what was actually going on. The idea of the press reporting objectively on the war is I think another urban myth.

Two classic examples: the 1968 Tet Offensive, reported as a great defeat for the US, but which was a victory for the US and which was a devastating loss for the Viet Cong and NVA (essentially resulted in the destruction of the indigenous South Vietnamese Viet Cong).

The second example is the seige at Khe San. This was reported as a defeat for the US, with lots of comparisons to Dien Bien Phu, but the several month long seige at Khe San resulted in the destruction of several NVA divisions at the cost of several hundred US troops. By 1970, the US had defeated the NVA (the indigenous Viet Cong had long been pretty much out of the picture).

The real failure in Vietnam was not to invest in the development of a truly representative democratic government in the south and commit to protect that government from invasion from the north. Of course, then we were primarily interested in fighting communism instead of developing democracy and self determination. In Iraq, I think we have learned to foster self determination, local style.

Stephen Moore on John McCain:

[I]f I'm ever in a knife fight or in a foxhole, there is no one I'd rather have next to me than John McCain. Whether he's someone who should be steering the rudders of the American economy is a different issue altogether.
 

Paul Belien:

When conversations turn to health care, I am always reminded of my grandfather. He was 91 when he died. He had never been ill. He had never needed medical treatment in his whole life. Upon reaching his nineties, however, he required prostate surgery.

Like all Belgians, my grandfather had paid wage-related contributions to cover health insurance throughout his entire professional life. The Belgian health care system is a so-called pay-as-you-go system. Today’s young and healthy do not set money aside for their own future needs, but are compelled to pay for today’s sick and elderly. As my grandfather had never needed much health care, he had been a net contributor to the system. Now was the first time he was going to claim something back.

He had his operation in May. In November he was dead. The prostate operation had gone fine, but afterwards the hospital had given him an antibiotic drug that caused complete deafness. Though there were other, but costlier, drugs available, the hospital gave the old man the cheapest one. They knew about the side-effects, but it did not strike them as an unreasonable and unjust thing to do. Why should it? A man who has already had 90 healthy years of life surely has no right to complain about deafness when some people get more seriously ill or die at a far younger age. When my grandfather left the hospital he was completely deaf. He lost his will to live. Six months later, he was dead.
 

Belien goes on to discuss the condition and future of Europe's health-care systems: "The [Belgian] government wants to reduce pharmaceutical expenditure by limiting drugs. They reckon that by limiting supply, demand will go down. In the same way, European governments discourage young people from becoming doctors, dentists or nurses." He isn't optimistic, nor should he be; that plan reads like a guarantee of disaster.
 

Michael Ledeen, still making sense:

In 2002, I argued that our first move against the terror masters should be to give political and economic support to the Iranian people in their efforts to topple the mullahcracy. At that time, the streets of the country's major cities were filled with demonstrators almost every week. Had the democratic opposition received the same kind of help we gave to Solidarity in Poland, the anti-Milosevic forces in Yugoslavia, and the anti-Marcos movement in the Philippines, the mullahs might have been brought down then and there, thus making the war against Saddam, the Assads, and the pro-terrorist elements of the Saudi Royal Family much easier, and greatly reducing the requirement for military power. A strategy of actively supporting democratic revolution throughout the region was precisely what President Bush proposed, and it made good historical sense: It was of a piece with the dramatic spread of freedom in recent decades, including the defeat of the Soviet Empire.

It was objected that such a revolutionary mission was far too ambitious, and that prudence required us to move carefully, one case at a time, all the while mending our diplomatic fences with friends, allies, and undecideds. But, as so often happens, the "prudent" strategy proved more dangerous. Moving step by step — first Iraq, then we'll see — gave the surviving terror masters time to organize their counterattack before we liberated Iraq, and, as I predicted, the extra time was also used to develop the weapons of mass destruction that rightly concern us, and give urgency to our cause.

The long period of dawdling after the defeat of the Taliban, along with the failure of strategic vision that blinded us to the regional nature of the war, enabled the terror masters to develop a collective strategy, for which we were famously unprepared. Yet there was no excuse for us to be surprised, since, on the eve of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Syrian dictator Bashar Assad announced publicly that a terror war would be unleashed against us inside Iraq. That terror war would be modeled on the successful campaign against American forces in Lebanon in the mid-eighties. And so it was, including the Syrian-Iranian (Sunni-Shiite) alliance, often using Saudi jihadi volunteers.

Like it or not, we are in a regional war, and it cannot be effectively prosecuted within a narrow national boundary. There will never be decent security in Iraq so long as the tyrants in Tehran and Damascus remain in power. They know that the spread of freedom is a terrible threat to them, and that if there were a successful democratic Iraq, their power and authority would be at risk. That is why they are waging an existential war against us in Iraq. . . .

If we do not engage, we will soon find ourselves facing a nuclear Iran that will surely be emboldened to increase its sponsorship of al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Jamaah Islamiah, and Hamas, and will redouble its efforts to shatter Iraq's fragile democratic experiment. Which is the more prudent policy? Cautiously defending Iraq alone, or supporting the revolutionaries against the terror masters? Active support of the democratic forces in the Middle East would be the right policy, even if there were no terror war, and even if Iran were not a shallow breath away from atomic weapons. It is what America is all about.

Faster, confound it.
 

A few days ago I added Pejman Yousefzadeh's Chequer-Board to my blogroll. The reason: three great links I'd seen nowhere else. First, this quote on blogs from Samizdata's Perry de Havilland in the Guardian:

"We're not competing with newspapers," De Havilland interrupts. (This is a habit of his, though it may also be a beneficial quality in a blogger: he isn't willing to wait before sounding off.) "But I tell you who we are in competition with, 100% direct competition, and that's your op-ed writers. We don't have a reporter in Kandahar, and you might, it's true - although in time we might have a blogger in Kandahar. But for the moment, sure: if your guy in Kandahar says X blew up Y, then X blew up Y. But when your editorial guy says, 'This is what it means,' that's when we say, 'Excuse me! You're completely wrong!'"
 

Exactly. Second, this joke via Radley Balko:

Three guys are in a jail cell. They start to talking and find out that they're all gas station owners.

The first one says, "I set my prices at a couple of cents higher than my competitors. I'm in here for price-gouging."

The second one says "I set my prices at a couple of cents lower than my competitors. I'm in here for predatory practices."

The third one says "I set my prices at the same price as my competitors. I'm in here for collusion!"
 

And finally, a post from Michael Totten (profanity unedited):

When I first arrived in Beirut I thought Lebanese drivers must be among the worst in the world. They don’t stop at red lights. They drive the wrong way down one-ways. Seat belts are verboten, and the concept of lanes is utterly alien. Speed limits? No way. Traffic circles are unbelievable clusterfucks. Stop signs are suggestions that translate into “slow down just a tad if it’s not too much trouble.” The soundtrack of the city is an unending cacophony of blaring car horns and screeching tires. Busses take up two lanes by themselves, and trucks pass slow cars in oncoming traffic around blind corners. It’s terrifying at times and maddening the rest of the time. Driving on icy mountain roads in January must really be something.

Then something new happened. The whole system just clicked. Rent a car and drive these streets yourself for a while and all of a sudden you can predict what first seemed like deranged and psychotic behavior. Behind every seemingly-crazy driving maneuver is a purpose. The key to predicting what other drivers will do is to ask yourself what you would do if there weren’t any rules and you were guaranteed not to hit anybody. Then you can relax and play the game.
 

Excellent stuff.
 

Mark Goldblatt:
 

On an individual level, the solution to poverty is by now well established: 1) Finish high school; 2) Don't get married while you're a teenager; 3) Don't have a baby until you're married. If you follow these three steps, the odds that you'll wind up impoverished are less than 8%. If you don't follow them, your odds rise to 80%. . . .

The images of predominantly black victims of the Hurricane Katrina struggling to survive its aftermath tugged at our hearts, and we wanted to know why the government didn't do more to help them.

Maybe, however, our focus shouldn't have been on what the government didn't do for the poor black residents of New Orleans but on what the government couldn't do for the poor black residents of New Orleans: It couldn't make them more disciplined, or more resourceful, or more law-abiding. Bearing in mind the three steps an individual can take to avoid poverty, it must be noted that 68% of births to black women nationwide are out-of-wedlock. In Louisiana, that number is 76%. The rate among black women in New Orleans is still higher, perhaps as high as 85%. (By comparison, the out-of-wedlock birth rate among all American women now stands at 34%.) Which means that even if New Orleans is rebuilt better than before, even if every displaced resident is returned to a spanking new home, their daily lives will still be burdened with the pathologies -- street crime, substance abuse, gang violence, illiteracy, and promiscuity -- associated with poverty. . . . The main thing government cannot do for the poor, in other words, is this: It can't keep them from screwing up their lives. It can't separate them from the culture of dependency and the mindset of entitlement handed down through the Great Society programs of the 1960s -- the country's last concerted effort to reduce and eradicate poverty. (In 1965, the black illegitimacy rate was 26%.) What government can't do for the poor black residents of New Orleans is strip them of their personal autonomy and rescue them from the poverty of their life choices. . . .

The government has a definite interest in preventing kids from screwing up their lives, but it has no right to do so. That right belongs, initially, to the kids' parents. And it belongs, finally, to the kids themselves.

The solution to poverty, therefore, doesn't lie in a collective movement. It lies in the will and discipline of individual people who dedicate themselves to living moral lives, striving to improve their circumstances, and providing greater opportunities for their children.
 

I hope this isn't as serious as it looks:
 

Stop IE 'Active Scripting' for all computers in a domain
Posted by George Ou @ 4:26 am

A supercritical zero-day IE flaw has been released in to the wild by a reckless British company. There are no patches available as of 11/22/2005. Here is what you can do now to protect your organization at an Enterprise wide level. You must disable "Active Scripting" on all Windows computers running Internet Explorer 5.5 or 6.0 even if you have Windows XP SP2 installed. While this can be done on an individual PC basis, it is not very feasible on a large scale. Microsoft Active Directory (Windows 2000 or 2003 Active Directory) can allow you to set Internet Explorer security settings for all computers joined to an Active Directory domain. . . .
 

Thank goodness for Firefox.
 

UPDATE: Here's a page, with graphics, on how to disable Active Scripting.
 

Eugene Volokh yesterday posted on a word (surd) new to him. I was glad to learn it, so let me offer one I just read in a piece by John Keegan: apotropaic. Less useful for Boggle, though.
 

Jeff Jacoby on the Patriot Act:
 

For four years, in speeches, articles, letters to the editor, and public forums from sea to shining sea, Americans . . . have grappled with one of the central dilemmas of any liberal democracy: How far may the state go in repressing those who seek to abolish liberal democracy? The result of that national conversation -- for all the hyperventilation it sometimes engendered -- will almost surely be a shrewder and more thoughtful law.

And for those who insist that any expansion of police power at all is intolerable, a reminder: The greatest menace to civil liberties in America today is not the Patriot Act that was passed after 9/11. It is the Patriot Act that will be passed after the *next* 9/11. For if, God forbid, another such attack takes place, Americans by the tens of millions will demand a crackdown unlike anything we have experienced before. Then we might indeed find ourselves "afraid to read books, terrified into silence." For anyone who cherishes American freedom and due process, there can be no higher priority than preventing another slaughter like the one we experienced four years ago. The Patriot Act is one weapon in the war against a deadly enemy -- an enemy that will extinguish all our liberties if it gets the chance to do so.
 

Iain Murray:
 

An econometric study by a Johns Hopkins School of Public Health professor, Harvey Brenner, summarized in November's EM, journal of the Air & Waste Management Association, looks at how many people would die prematurely if US coal were replaced for power generation by higher-cost fuels. That would be the effect of such bills as the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act, which the Energy Information Administration estimated would displace 78% of US coal-based electricity generation. Dr. Brenner found that the reduction in household income and unemployment caused by the higher costs would result in 195,000 more premature deaths each year. This is because of the very clear link between income and health.

The media constantly bombards us with the estimate of 150,000 deaths globally each year caused by global warming. This is in itself a ludicrously inflated figure, as it ascribes far too many malaria deaths to global warming when the causes of increased malaria are much more complex. I wonder whether the press will pay any attention to the finding that just the tiniest step along the road to "solving" global warming would kill more Americans than global warming kills worldwide. I can hear the crickets chirp now.
 

My point, as with the previous item, is that everything has a cost. Too often advocates of a policy ignore its cost, even (especially?) when that cost exceeds the policy's benefit. (Thomas Sowell makes this point repeatedly.)
 

New Scientist:
 

THE drive for "green energy" in the developed world is having the perverse effect of encouraging the destruction of tropical rainforests. From the orang-utan reserves of Borneo to the Brazilian Amazon, virgin forest is being razed to grow palm oil and soybeans to fuel cars and power stations in Europe and North America. And surging prices are likely to accelerate the destruction[.]
 

(If I remember how I found this story I'll update.)

 
Michael Rubin:
 

Terrorism is tragic. A car bomb in Baghdad, Beirut or Basra can devastate dozens of lives. But corruption affects millions. Saddam Hussein's embezzlement condemned many thousands of children to death from preventable disease. The danger is not that the victims of corruption turn to terrorism. . . .

Rather, the danger is in disillusionment. Iraqi Kurds, stifled by the corruption of their leaders, are supporting Islamist parties. While former Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi describes himself as the great secularist hope, his administration's corruption drove even liberal Iraqis to vote for an Islamist alternative. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became Iran's president not because Iranians supported his hard-line views, but because of their disgust with Rafsanjani, who, to most Iranians, is regarded as corruption incarnate. The greatest political beneficiary of PA corruption has been Hamas. Likewise, Turks swept Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development Party to power not because they endorsed its religious vision, but because of anger with the endemic corruption of the mainstream parties.

When Islamists come to power, democracy takes a hit. So too do liberalism, women's rights and tolerance. Washington may preach democracy; Arab reformers may debate whether reform should be gradual, rapid, top-down or bottom-up. But until Arab citizens hold their leaders accountable, in the press, on the Internet, and on the street, the democracy debate will be moot.
 

 
 Hadn't heard about this:
 

An engineer who calls himself the father of the technology that protects the B-2 stealth bomber from heat-seeking missiles has been arrested and accused of selling U.S. military secrets involving the aircraft to a foreign country, the FBI said. Noshir S. Gowadia, 61, of Haiku was arrested Wednesday.

According to the FBI, Gowadia in 2002 faxed a document detailing infrared technology classified top secret by the Air Force to a foreign official. He also provided classified information to two other countries, the FBI said.

The government would not identify the countries or disclose how much he allegedly received.
 

(Via How This Old Brit Sees It—as one commenter wrote, "amazing that i hear about this about a u.s. spy case from an old brit - in the uk - vis hawaii. . . . all hail the internet!"—via Tim Worstall.)
 

 
 This is disturbing reading. From the Washington Times:
 

Among the thousands of women who will illegally cross into the United States this year from Mexico, some will be raped by the same men who demanded $1,500 to $2,000 for safe passage -- their underpants often hung on a border fence as a trophy.

"I thought the wailings we heard at night were the coyotes barking at the moon," said Tim Donnelly, who headed the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps border vigil here. "I didn't know until later that those sounds were the cries of women being raped in the Mexican desert, some less than a hundred yards away from the border.

"There was absolutely nothing anyone could do about it," said Mr. Donnelly, grimacing as he turned away to hide his emotions. "It's something you never forget."
 

 
Johan Norberg writes that Sweden's actual unemployment rate is 10.3%, nearly double the official rate of 5.4%. (Via Finland For Thought, via ¡No Pasarán!.)
 

 MSNBC.com:

These specialized forms of spyware, now being called by other names like crimeware, ratware, and even bankware, worm their way onto victims' computers in a number of ways. Some are inserted completely in silence, through an unpublished or unpatched software vulnerability. Others are hidden in Web sites on the Internet's darker side, such as pornography sites. Still others come in e-mail, disguised as electronic greeting cards.

But unlike familiar computer worms, these malicious programs do nothing to announce their presence — like send out copies of themselves to everyone in the victim's address book. Instead, they lie in wait for the user to visit a banking Web site. . . .

Once upon a time, viruses written by fame-seeking malcontents were designed to infect as many computers as possible. Now, viruses are designed to infect the right computers and to do so quietly — all with the aim of spiriting off valuable data that can be used to steal money.

Three-quarters of all virus-like programs released to the Internet this year have been designed to steal personal information, said Oliver Friedrichs, a spokesman for Symantec Corp. Last year, the rate was 36 percent.
 

PCWorld.com has a good roundup of antispyware programs, including comparison tests.
 

Joel Kotkin: "Even now, many Europeans dream fiercely of a better place. And for a surprising number of them, that place is still America." Unfortunately it's not far from a zero-sum game: the more attractive the U.S., the grimmer Europe's prospects.
 

Former military intelligence officer and UNSCOM inspector Bill Tierney recounts his experience in Iraq: "I believe the Iraqis had a WMD program, and I am not changing my story, no matter how many times Chris Matthews hyperventilates." No argument here, Mr. Tierney.
 

Anthony Browne in The Australian:
 

EUROPE'S official financial watchdog has refused to approve the EU's accounts for the 11th year in a row because they are so full of fraud and errors.

The European Court of Auditors refused to give a statement of assurance on the EU's E100billion ($160.3 billion) budget for 2004. "The vast majority of the payment budget was again materially affected by errors of legality and regularity," it said. . . .

The report is highly embarrassing for the European Commission, which said it was "sad" about the findings but insisted it had made progress on improving its account-keeping.
 

UPDATE: Then again, we in the US shouldn't be complacent:

In fiscal 1999, the time covered in the GAO audit, the IRS made $51 million in bookkeeping errors, and its accountants can’t even reconcile the agency’s own books. The GAO audit compared the agency to someone who can’t balance his or her checkbook and instead just adjusts it to agree with the bank statement.
 

Note to self: try very very hard not to earn Tim Blair's contempt.
 

From PCWorld.com, "11 top tips for the upkeep and protection of your system, peripherals, and data."
 

Andrew C. McCarthy today on a legislative compromise:
 

By a vote of 84-14, the [Senate] resolved Tuesday that the ultimate decision about who is properly considered an “enemy combatant,” should rest with federal judges, not our military commanders who actually confront the enemy in the life-and-death of the battlefield.

. . . Just imagine for a moment if the Senate decided that judicial decisions on, say, the admissibility of evidence at civilian trials or the constitutionality of restrictions on speech should henceforth be subject to second-guessing by a panel of soldiers. We’d of course think that was madness. But not this.

No, as with other vagaries of life that our obsessively-litigious society has delegated to the courts, who is an enemy combatant? is now a legal question, not a battlefield reality. And that’s going to make the battlefield a much more dangerous place for our troops — as judges, law professors, human rights activists and, yes, senators continue pretending it is a place somehow akin to the arena of domestic policing. . . .

The simple fact is: our military men and women are not cops. Theirs is not the job of the gumshoe. Their task is to advance aggressively on military objectives. If they capture the enemy, it is in the chaos of combat and in lieu of killing him — something they have not heretofore needed a judge’s permission to do (but stay tuned — perhaps the Senate will get around to that, too). . . .

They are not expected to stop along the way, to take notes, and to preserve evidence. They are not trained to think that when they grant quarter, when they capture an enemy rather than killing him, the fallout of that act of mercy will be courtroom litigation.
 

A few days ago The Mudville Gazette (link via Glenn R.) pointed to some Marine milbloggers who liked Jarhead. Mackubin Owens, also a former Marine, was less impressed.
 

Via Jonah Goldberg, the Sesame Street song translated into Klingon and then back into English.
 

John Derbyshire on Israel:
 

The mental map that I formed in my head quite early on in life -- after reading Wittfogel's ORIENTAL DESPOTISM in the mid-1970s, I think, though reading a lot of Chinese history contributed too -- is of a world divided into civilization and barbarism. There is a civilized zone, and a barbarous hinterland. I want to see the civilized zone defended, every damn inch. Israel is a civilized country; the Arabs are barbarous. There is nothing dogmatically biological about this, and I do think that civilized peoples can slip into barbarism, and vice versa. The Vikings were very barbarous; but they developed into the pale, hygienic Scandinavians of our own time. The Hungarians did the same thing very quickly, in a couple of generations, from the terrifying Magyar horde to the Christian kingdom of Stephen. The present state of the world is what we have to deal with, though, and I want the ramparts defended. It doesn't mean hating anyone. If the Arabs "got" civilization tomorrow, I'd be the first to rejoice. Don't see any sign of it, though.

The paleo response is that it is no skin off our nose what happens in the Levant, that we should mind our own business and look strictly to our own national interests. I am quite strongly sympathetic to that, as an instinctive nationalist, but I think it bespeaks civilizational overconfidence, and my sympathy is over-ridden by my affection for Western civilization at large. Civilization is, according to me, a very fragile thing, needing constant maintenance and unblinking, vigilant defense at every boundary. If forced to retreat to the borders of the USA, it would not survive.
 

John Fund in OpinionJournal's Political Diary, 11/14/05:
 

The riots in France are finally subsiding following the government's decision to impose widespread curfews. But almost every institution in the country has seen its reputation blackened by the worst civil unrest in France since the 1960s. That includes the media, which alternated between hand-wringing and calling for yet more social programs for the grim neighborhoods where most of the young Muslim rioters live.

Some media executives openly concede that their coverage was not driven by events but by fears as to whom the riots might benefit politically. Jean-Claude Dessier, head of the television news service LCI, told a conference in Amsterdam last week that he viewed the prominence given to the rioters on such international news services as CNN or Sky News as "excessive." For his part, he told the conference he had decided not to show footage of burning cars but denied he was doing so in "complicity" with authorities who wanted to minimize their failure to contain the violence. Instead, he made his reasoning crystal clear: "Politics in France is heading to the right, and I don't want right-wing politicians back in second or even first place because we showed burning cars."

Should violence on the scale of France break out in this country, don't think that U.S. media executives won't make similar decisions. After the 1992 riots in Los Angeles that were precipitated by the acquittal of police officers in the Rodney King police brutality case, an NBC executive told a Harvard seminar that his network's coverage was deliberately shaped to put the administration of President George H.W. Bush in the worst possible light. Some critics feel that some of the coverage of Hurricane Katrina this fall was similarly motivated. That's just another reason to be thankful for multiple U.S. news channels run by executives who — unlike those in France — don't all share the same worldview.
 

Rob Long chooses his five favorite books about tv.
 

Daniel Pipes: "The rioting by Muslim youth that began October 27 in France . . . may be a turning point in European history."
 

"A chemical compound in wine reduces levels of a harmful molecule linked to Alzheimer's disease"; and superthin graphite, or graphene, exhibits properties that may "lead to new applications in carbon-based electronic and magneto-electronic devices."
 

David Gelernter:
 

[Y]ou don't have to be "pro-torture" to oppose the McCain amendment. That naive misunderstanding summarizes the threat posed by this good-hearted, wrong-headed legislation. Those who oppose the amendment don't think the CIA should be permitted to use torture or other rough interrogation techniques. What they think is that sometimes the CIA should be required to squeeze the truth out of prisoners. Not because the CIA wants to torture people, but because it may be the only option we've got.

. . . Americans will never be permitted to use torture as punishment or vengeance. A criminal might deserve to be tortured; we refuse to torture him nonetheless, because to do so degrades us. But if torturing a terrorist (or carrying out some other form of rough interrogation) is the only way to save innocent lives, we have no right to refuse.

. . . McCain is a bona fide hero. But there's nothing courageous in standing firm with virtually the whole cultural leadership of this nation and the Western world, under any circumstances. It's too easy. To take a principled stand that you know will make people loathe and vilify you — that's what integrity, leadership and moral courage are all about. This time Cheney [who wants the CIA exempted from the ban] is the hero. McCain is taking the easy out.

. . . We do not torture [terrorists] to punish them. God forbid we should do as they do. But if torture (used with repugnance) can stop even one such atrocity, our duty is hideously plain.
 

Matthew Kaminski of The Wall Street Journal Europe:
 

The discontent of "youths" in their banlieues has been getting all the attention of late, and understandably so. But Paris itself is a city of frustrated people, fed up with a stagnant economy and discredited political class. Scratch the still beautiful exterior of Paris and an angry crowd comes to the surface.

"City of Light? Give me a break. This is the 'City of Losers,'" Pierre, a French colleague, told me with a straight face when I shared my misgivings about the place that everyone's supposed to love. Even as the rioting in the poor 'burbs seems to be waning, this sorry state of affairs looks unlikely to change.

Many a Francophile American reared on the myth of a Paris synonymous with romance, style and beauty--Adam Gopnik's "Paris to the Moon" is just the most recent gospel--will be horrified by this news. But it must be said: Paris is a has-been sailing on its past reputation.
 

No doubt zillions of people will be posting this excerpt from Mark Steyn's latest column, on Warren Beatty and Arnold Schwarzenegger, but I haven't seen it anywhere yet:
 

In 2003, you'll recall, the Los Angeles Times assigned a special team to look into Arnold's sexual background. If they do Warren in the same way, it'll be the biggest hiring bonanza in U.S. journalism for a century. Usually, when his magnificent track record of famous conquests is brought up, Beatty indignantly points out that he's had sex with a lot of very obscure women, too. This is true. He has dallied not just with Natalie Wood, but also with her less celebrated sister, Lana Wood.

Lana, who played Plenty O'Toole in the James Bond film ''Diamonds Are Forever,'' subsequently fell on hard times and found herself with little money and no work. Warren was touched by her predicament and considerately invited her to share his bed. As Miss Wood wrote in her memoirs: "Whatever his motives were, he gave me shelter and my self-esteem back -- and for that I was grateful."

Whether this hands-on approach to tackling the problems of the unemployed can be applied statewide is doubtful. No governor can have sex with every struggling woman in California, though, of course, Beatty does have the advantage of an impressive head start.

OK, enough about the sex, what about the issues? Well, Warren's a famous activist. He's made explicitly political films -- like, er, his last one, ''Bulworth,'' about a right-wing senator who learns to overcome his prejudice and racism by dating Halle Berry. Now that's what I call affirmative action. And speaking as an extreme right-wing bigot myself, I'd certainly be willing to volunteer for the test program.
 

I'm lifting this whole post from Tim Blair:
 

Guardian environment correspondent David Adam reveals some shocking environmental news ... in his third paragraph:

The UK risks losing its international authority on climate change because of its failure to cut greenhouse gas pollution, according to a leading scientist.

Bob May, president of the Royal Society, said new figures showing that UK emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases which contribute to global warming have risen for the last two years, made it difficult for British politicians to be taken seriously on the issue.

He said: “It is very difficult to criticise other countries such as the United States if we are unable to meet our commitments. Indeed, emissions by the United States have actually declined over the last two years ...”

Excuse me? The US has actually become cleaner under the rule of enviro-hater Bush? You’d think—although May also notes that US pollutant outputs are “still some 20% above 1990 levels”—that this might rate more highly as a news story. Then again, Bush apparently reduced industrial pollution by 11% during his governership of Texas, and nobody cared for that news, either ...
 

From StrategyPage (no direct link, but here's the main page):
 

The United States faces a lot of foreign enemies in Iraq. Most of these are individuals from other Moslem countries, come to oppose the "American war against Islam." These are usually the foot soldiers and suicide bombers for al Qaeda. But this year, another foreign foe has been showing up in larger numbers; Saudi Arabians opposed to democracy. Many religious Saudis believe democracy is un-Islamic. They tolerate a king, as long as he says that his primary job is to guard Islam's holy cities of Mecca and Medina, with running the kingdom just an incidental chore (done in consultation with Islamic clerics and scholars). But democracy implies that people rule themselves, which is blasphemy. God rules man, via the holy scriptures and the guidance of Islamic scholars and clerics. So many more (we're talking hundreds here) young Saudis are heading north to fight the democracy evil, and taking with them lots of money (we're talking millions of dollars here) from older, but wealthier, Saudis who agree on the evils of democracy. Most Saudis also despise the idea of Shia Arabs running Iraq, which is what is going on right now. To compound that sin, the Iraqi government was elected by majority votes. All very un-Islamic, and worthy of the most severe punishment.
 

David Warren:
 

On the average night in Iraq, there are no riots, and the background crime rate is, by any Western standard, extremely low. With a few dramatic exceptions, which the world’s TV cameras are eager to relay, terrorist strikes are shrinking in number, and happening in progressively more remote locations. If you study the sequence of named U.S. military operations against Iraqi insurgents over the last two years, you will see that their general movement is from around Baghdad towards places along the Syrian frontier.

. . . It took eleven nights of general violence in practically every Muslim enclave in France, before the French state was able to cajole a few French Muslim imams to utter ambiguous fatwas against street violence. The celebration of these fatwas in the French mainstream media betrayed too much relief. Nowhere in Iraq does the government currently have much trouble finding imams and mullahs to condemn violence.

. . . [T]he key difference between the two countries -- redounding to the credit of Iraq -- is in the public theatre. Iraqis are openly talking about their problems, and how they might be solved. The key problem of fanatical Islam, and its unquenchable thirst for human blood, is an open topic. You may see this wherever you look in Iraqi media -- the optimistic spirit of a young democracy.

Turning the pages of Le Monde, and Le Figaro, you will see the opposite. You will see, to often comical extreme, the “culture of taboo and avoidance”, in which the realities of Islam and demography are ignored, and euphemisms are uneasily employed to mask even the fact that the rioters are Muslim.
 

I've been finding the blog Brussels Journal useful for learning what the "youths" are up to in France and Belgium. Here's an excerpt from the latest post:
 

Yesterday, one policeman was jailed and four were suspended because they had beaten up a 19-year old “youth” in a Paris suburb. The “youth” had just been released from custody for involvement in riots and had returned to taunt the officers. The beating incident was filmed by the television channel France 2. The channel is one of the French media outlets that does not want to broadcast acts of violence committed by “youths” for fear of copycat actions. The media devote a lot of attention to the beating incident. Apparently there is no fear that this will lead to copycat behaviour by frustrated policemen.

There is also considerable media attention for two molotov cocktails thrown at a mosque in the southern town of Carpentras. Though there was no material damage the French authorities have strongly condemned the attack. “This act of agression is as undignified as it is unacceptable,” Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said. President Chirac and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, too, condemned the agression “with the greatest firmness” and expressed solidarity with the Muslim community of France.

Earlier this week two churches were set ablaze, but the French government did not express solidarity with the Christians of France. The Jewish community has also been advised to keep quiet about attacks on synagogues lest they attract the attention of copycats. After the attacks, the French authorities did not explicitly express solidarity with the Jews but advised them “not to publicize their fears, as such declarations could encourage rioters to attack Jews and Jewish community buildings.” Apparently, the media and the politicians are convinced that copycats are never Christians or Jews, but always Muslims. Doesn’t that attitude smack of racism?
 

I almost posted this:
 

My sense is that the relentless attacks by the MSM and the left side of the 'sphere are staggering the administration. I'm not a Republican (or a Democrat), so I don't feel that my team is losing (or winning), but I'm an American, and for my country's sake I'm troubled by the president's apparent loss of confidence in himself and his purpose. The problem isn't just that he and his spokesmen aren't defending their decisions and positions. It's that they seem unsure that their decisions and positions are defensible now. But the "Bush lied" claim is a crock, the economy is racing, and the war in Iraq, though hard work, is going well, at least according to certain intelligent and knowledgeable observers. Bush needs to remember that he has a case worth making, and make it. A weak president (see "Carter, Jimmy") endangers us, unnerves our allies and emboldens our enemies.
 

Then I realized I was doing exactly what I accused Bush of doing: believing his opponents' propaganda. The president has done a terrible job of explaining his policies, but that doesn't mean he's lost faith in them or that they're unsound. Common knowledge has it that the administration is adrift; common knowledge may be wrong.

This is from Mackubin Thomas Owens's stirring tribute today to the Marine Corps:
 

[T]he dysfunctional Vietnam vet has become a staple of American popular culture. As I observed on NRO not too long ago, the conventional wisdom portrays those who served in Vietnam as mostly young, poor, and non-white. Many, if not most, committed or observed atrocities (thank you John Kerry). The horrors of the war led them to turn to drugs and a life of crime. Vietnam veterans are disproportionately represented among the homeless and the incarcerated. The Vietnam veteran was and is a time-bomb waiting to go off.

But that is slander. Writing in The American Enterprise several years ago, Jim Webb observed:

The sizable portion of the Vietnam age group who declined to support the counter-cultural agenda, and especially the men and women who opted to serve in the military during the Vietnam War, are quite different from their peers who for decades have claimed to speak for them. In fact, they are much like the World War II generation itself. [. . .] Dropped onto the enemy's terrain 12,000 miles away from home, America's citizen-soldiers performed with a tenacity and quality that may never be truly understood. Those who believe the war was fought incompetently on a tactical level should consider Hanoi's recent admission that 1.4 million of its soldiers died on the battlefield, compared to 58,000 total U.S. dead.

Significantly, these sacrifices were being made at a time the United States was deeply divided over our effort in Vietnam.
 

I hope President Bush can similarly hold to his vision despite the political forces massed against him.

UPDATE 11/13: Bush's Veterans Day speech is a good sign and a good start.
 

Two items from StrategyPage yesterday:
 

The use of IEDs (improvised explosive devices - mostly roadside and car bombs) peaked in October, at something around 3,200, the highest number employed by the insurgents ever. This was higher, by something like 15-20 percent, than any previous month. This massive use of IEDs was intended to disrupt the referendum on the new Iraqi constitution. Didn't work, but caused a spike in American and Iraqi casualties.

In the past,. IED use has peaked during the elections for the Iraqi Transitional Government and the delegated to the constitutional convention. It is believed that there will be a significant drop in the use of IEDs during November, as the terrorists rebuild their IED inventory and prepare for an "offensive" to disrupt the parliamentary elections scheduled for mid-December. However, this time, the IED surge may be much less than in the past. American troops, and Iraqi forces, have been making large inroads on controlling "terrorist territory" (Sunni Arab areas), capturing many IED workshops and quantities of bomb materials. The terrorists do not have unlimited resources. The terrorists, particularly the Saddam and Baath Party supporters, have lots of money. But they need people willing to take the cash to build, plant and set off the bombs. You need safe areas for the workshops, and competent people willing to carry out the attacks. There are fewer safe areas each week, and being in the bomb business gets more dangerous as well. This can be seen by the higher rates paid to people in the IED business, and the lower rate of success for IED attacks. Thus while the number of IED attacks were up in October, the percentage of successful attacks was down, and the casualties among IED users was up. By December, the Iraqi government expects to hammer the IED crews, and their inventories, even more decisively.

* * * * *

While the media makes a big thing about American combat deaths in Iraq, there are a lot of other people getting hurt, and killed. Not all the Americans killed in Iraq are military. So far, in addition, to some 2,000 dead troops, about 150 American civilians have died as well. Most of these men were security personnel, as were most of the non-U.S. contractors killed since 2003. The vast majority of contractors work inside the heavily protected American bases. Aside from security jobs, driving a truck is the most dangerous thing a civilian contractor can do. So far, some 4,200 civilian contractors have been wounded in Iraq (about half the rate of American troops).

The war in Iraq has been harder on Iraqis, with about 9,000 security personnel, and some 20,000 civilians (including terrorists and anti-government fighters, who comprise about a third of the dead civilians.) It's difficult to get an accurate count of dead civilians, for a number of reasons. First, a lot of people are getting killed by criminals, or because of feuds. Now some of the feuds are, technically, part of the war, because they involve political disputes. But many of these deaths are simply criminal, not military, events. But you can see how this gets murky. Moreover, some of the killing is accompanied by hiding the bodies. This was a favorite Saddam trick, and since the 2003 invasion, the bodies of 200,000 Iraqis, killed before 2003 and buried in unidentified graves, have been found. There's also the Moslem custom of burying the dead within 24 hours, and families of bad guys wanting to hide the death, of someone who was participating in illegal acts. If the police knew who died, and why, they might came around looking for more guilty parties. Terrorism, and criminal activities, are often family based.

Iraq has always been a violent place. But most Iraqis would like to get the Sunni Arab rebels calmed down, or killed, so everyone can enjoy some long sought peace and quiet.
 

I remain impressed by the quality of StrategyPage's analysis, and I'm glad I became a subscriber.

Theodore Dalrymple:
 

A Martian observing France dispassionately, without ideological preconceptions, would come to the conclusion that the French had accepted with equanimity a kind of social settlement in which all those with jobs would enjoy various legally sanctioned perks and protections, while those without jobs would remain unemployed forever, though they would be tossed enough state charity to keep body and cellphone together. And since there are many more employed people than unemployed people in France, this is a settlement that suits most people, who will vote for it forever. It is therefore politically unassailable, either by the left or the right, which explains the paralysis of the French state in the present impasse.

. . . The French left, ever vigilant on behalf of the downtrodden privileged, won't consider a reform of the labor market that might just help to integrate the racaille into French society. The French right, by contrast, wants to deal with the problem first by ignoring it -- for, as the South African whites used to say about the rioting Africans, they are only fouling their own nest -- and then, if the worst comes to the worst and the violence spills over to where the decent people live, by repressing it with force. . . . If push were ever to come to shove, the trains to the townships could be turned off, assuming they were not wrecked first by the inhabitants themselves, and the roads to the center of Paris (and other towns and cities) could be blocked with a few armored cars or a couple of tanks. A state of emergency could be declared, after which the CRS could go about its business in all calmness and serenity. The left would squeal and protest a bit, but secretly be relieved that, thanks to the CRS, the labor laws protecting their voters did not have to be changed after all, with the consequent introduction of "savage liberalism" into France.

A few years later, there would be a spate of books about the violence of the repression, and everyone would express his shock and horror that such a thing could have happened in the land of les droits de l'homme, but then everyone would forget it all again until a further 20 years had elapsed, when there would be another spate of such books to arouse the tender conscience of the French intelligentsia.
 

Incidentally, the Wall Street Journal Online, where this piece appears, is offering free access this week.

This piece by Herbert Meyer, which because Glenn Reynolds linked to it you've probably seen (that's how I found it), reminded me of this one by Meyer from 2003:
 

[W]e need to acknowledge two points: First, intelligence is the riskiest, toughest business in the world. Compared with trying to project the future of world politics or discovering a country’s most closely guarded secrets, day trading in the stock market is child’s play and exploring for diamonds is a piece of cake. In the intelligence business, no one gets it right every time – or even most of the time – and it’s easy to take potshots at honorable people who are doing their best under difficult circumstances.

The second point is that the CIA employs some of the hardest working and most decent men and women I have ever known. They are absolutely wonderful; we are lucky to have them and we owe them our gratitude.

The problem with the CIA lies within its structure and culture. It doesn’t match the task, because the analytic side of intelligence is unlike any other function of government. It is unlike budget-making, diplomacy, or the setting of policy for trade or agriculture. Intelligence is like science, which means that success depends utterly on having the most brilliant people studying a problem. Only they will know how to go about finding the right answer – and how to communicate it clearly and early enough to make a difference.
 

He goes on to describe the culture of the CIA while he worked there, during the Reagan administration. Very interesting, somewhat disheartening stuff.
 

USA TODAY:

When he logged on to his Ameritrade account earlier this year, George Rodriguez caught a cybercrook in the act of cleaning out his retirement nest egg.

He watched, horrified, as the intruder in quick succession dumped $60,000 worth of shares in Disney, American Express, Starbucks and 11 other blue-chip stocks, then directed a deposit into the online account of a stranger in Austin.

"My entire portfolio was being sold out right before my eyes," recalls Rodriguez, 41, a commercial real estate broker who alerted Ameritrade in time to stop the trades.

Rodriguez had just experienced a tech-savvy consumer's worst nightmare. But it's the reality of the digital world we live in: Everyone is now at risk of becoming the victim of an Internet-based crime — even folks who stay offline. And, once victimized, you can face more trouble than you might imagine.