Did my matzos come?

Theodore Dalrymple:

Recently in London a correspondent of a left-liberal Dutch newspaper interviewed me, a decent, civilized sort—one of us, in short. I am sure that he brought up his children to say please and thank you, probably in several languages. . . .

The correspondent asked me: what was wrong with tattooing, if that was how people wanted to adorn themselves?

I asked him whether he would have himself tattooed—whether he would be happy if his teenaged children had themselves tattooed—and if not, why not? After all, if he would not like it, he must have some inner objection to tattooing.

True, he said, but tattooing was not illegal. And since even I, who deprecated it, did not think that it should be illegal, there was nothing further to say about it. If tattooing was legal, it was thus of no social, moral, or cultural significance. . . .

[T]he correspondent’s premise that the legality of an act was the sole criterion by which one could or should judge it chilled me. It is a sinister premise. It makes the legislature the complete arbiter of manners and morals, and thus accords to the state quasi-totalitarian powers without the state’s ever having claimed them. The state alone decides what we have or lack permission to do: we have to make no moral decisions for ourselves, for what we have legal permission to do is also, by definition, morally acceptable.

Even worse than the correspondent’s implicitly totalitarian assumption was his lack of awareness of how societies cohere, and how social existence becomes tolerable, let alone pleasant. After all, the law does not prohibit rudeness, boorishness, and an infinity of unpleasant habits. But it is clear that if, for example, the prevalence of boorishness increases, life in society becomes more filled with friction and danger.

What I found so odd about the correspondent were his perfect manners and refined tastes. But so little confidence did he have in the value of the things that he valued that he seemed indifferent to the mechanism of their disappearance or destruction. This is the way a civilization ends: not with a bang but a whimper.

James. S. Robbins:

So how do the revelations in the Times help the terrorists? Think it through — if you were a terrorist and you believed (as most people seem to) that the NSA would ignore your communications if they crossed U.S. borders, your best move would be to set up communications relay stations inside the U.S. Terrorists are well known for their ability to find and exploit loopholes in our laws, and this would be a natural. For all we know our intelligence agencies have been exploiting these types of communications for years without the terrorists knowing it. Now they will fall silent, because now the bad guys know better. So New York Times writer James Risen will sell his book, the Times will increase circulation, politicians will beat their breasts and send out fundraising letters, and who will pay in the end?

You can answer that one.

Bernard Lewis:

If Churchill and his team had to face the same sort of opposition as does President Bush, Hitler might well have won the war[.]

The whole piece is worth reading. (Via Jay Nordlinger, who also recommends this sub.-req. interview with Lewis.)

Jonah Goldberg:

Among the proud recipients of Time magazine's fluffy end-of-year "People Who Mattered" feature is Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Here's how his blurb begins: "He is an unlikely firebrand: the soft-spoken son of a blacksmith who still sometimes drives a 30-year-old Peugeot. But Iran's new President doesn't shrink from controversy. After winning a disputed election, he said . . ." Now, before I finish that sentence, let's at least note that so far Time is using the same tone it might use to talk about John McCain, Joe Wilson, George Clooney, or some other "soft-spoken" "unlikely firebrand" beloved by the media. (Time has referred to both Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sen. Joe Lieberman as "unlikely firebrands"as well. To date neither has proposed genocide.)

. . . "After winning a disputed election," Time reports, "he said he would continue Iran's nuclear program, called the Holocaust a 'myth' and pledged to destroy Israel. Even some of the nation's ruling clerics are nervous about what he will do next." So even some of Iran's terrorism-supporting theocratic dictators are "nervous" about this guy.

What, one wonders, would it take for the editors to get really rough? Perhaps if Ahmadinejad offered a deeply negative review of Brokeback Mountain?

(Told you.)

[T]his isn't a jab at liberal media bias — though we can have that argument if you like. Rather, this points to something deeper: the resurgence of American isolationism. . . .

In the 1930s, isolationism was respectable across the ideological spectrum. Norman Thomas — the president of the American Socialist party — was an isolationist. Oswald Garrison Villard (former editor of the Nation), Charles Beard, John Dewey, Bernard Baruch, and countless other liberal luminaries were isolationists of varying intensity. . . .

But the problem, as [John F.] Kennedy learned, is that evil men and dangerous forces don't take a timeout until we're ready to pay attention. And that's where Iran comes in. Seriously challenging Iran just strikes a lot of people as too much to fit on the American plate right now, so we prefer to call Ahmadinejad an "unlikely firebrand" instead of a murderous fanatic.

But whatever we call him, it won't change the fact that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons and that Ahmadinejad is a particularly kooky religious fanatic. . . . In response to Ahmadinejad's comments, the world has responded with only slightly more outrage than it would if he'd called for trade barriers on pistachios. It's time to wake up.
 

Anthropologist Lionel Tiger on a report from the New Hampshire Commission on the Status of Men:

[T]he publicly financed educational system is at least 20% better at producing successful female students than male, yet hardly anyone sees this as remarkable gender discrimination. While there is a vigorous national program to equalize male and female rates of success in science and math, there is not a shred of equivalent attention to the far more central practical impact of the sharp deficit males face in reading and writing. . . . There is scant acknowledgment that we face a generation of young men increasingly failing in a school system seemingly calibrated to female rhythms. . . .

While there remain grating sources of unfairness to women, the community is in the process of steadily creating a new legal and educational structure that generates new gender unfairness: 90% of the victims of Ritalin and similar drugs prescribed for schoolkids are boys; but even drugged they perform less well than girls. A 2005 study at Yale found nationally that even in prekindergarten boys are nearly five times as likely to be expelled as girls.

What is going on in this country?

Of course those who can do the work should receive the rewards. However, the broader question is: Who defines the work and evaluates it? . . . Were females the victims of such apparent sex-based unfairness, the legal paper attacking the matter would cloud the air like flakes of New Hampshire snow. But since it's only males . . .
 

Merry Christmas. Happy Chanukah. Kwanzaa celebrants, you're on your own.
 

As Caroline Glick sees it, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has sacrificed Israel's interests to his desire for power. Emphasis added:

Since he took office, Sharon and his advisers have portrayed the status of Israel's relations with the US as one of unprecedented harmony. On a superficial level, this is in fact the case. But this surface tranquility masks its problematic cause. The appearance of smooth sailing in Israel's relations with Washington is the result of the unprecedented weakness of Israel's position in Washington.

This week [the Tel Aviv newspaper] Ma'ariv reported that IDF commanders are becoming increasingly disturbed by the Bush administration's meddling in the minutiae of the operation of Israel's passages with Gaza. The State Department consistently brushes off Israel's growing security concerns and intervenes on the Palestinians' behalf. This American interference not only constitutes a political blow to Israel's sovereignty, it also manifests a military blow to Israel's national security.

But there is nothing new here. Since taking office five years ago, Sharon has received Washington's support - such as it is - by abandoning Israel's national interests every time that they are challenged by the institutionally anti-Israel State Department. In every single dispute that has arisen over the past five years - from the Mitchell Report in 2001 to the road map in 2003 to the passages agreement Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice rammed down our throats last month - Sharon has abandoned Israel's national security interests at every turn in exchange for public declarations of support for him personally by central Bush administration figures.

Sharon has succeeded in the domestic political arena by presenting the support he has received on a personal level to the public as if it were a national achievement. Israelis have been duped into believing that the trust Sharon demands of them has actually conferred some advantage on the nation when in fact, Israel has never been weaker than it has become under his leadership.

And as with the Americans, so too with the Palestinians. Sharon's success in basing his political fortunes on consolidating his image as a strongman has made it impossible for anyone to impugn his withdrawal from Gaza in spite of the fact that it has been a colossal disaster for Israel's national security. The Kassam missiles that now fall on Ashkelon meet with what can effectively be considered no Israeli response. The seeding of al-Qaida cells in Gaza has been strenuously ignored. And the Hamas takeover of key Palestinian institutions has been greeted by yawns all around.

Public sentiment, which Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been instrumental in directing, is marked by defeatism. As recently noted by Daniel Pipes, in a speech before the leftist Israel Policy Forum in New York last June, Olmert described the sentiment of the Israeli public thus: "We are tired of fighting, we are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies." The thinking behind this stunning statement and the public malaise it describes apparently is based on the view that since Sharon is a strongman and he's preaching surrender, it goes without saying that the public ought to behave in a cowardly and defeatist manner. This psychology goes a long way towards explaining the results of a Truman Institute poll published this week which found that half of Israelis support negotiating with Hamas.

Again, it should be emphasized that defeatism as a national strategy has worked for Sharon to date because the public trusts him.

In its election campaign, the Likud must focus its attacks on exposing the image of strength that Sharon and his political advisers have sold the public for the lie it is. For the sad truth is that during Sharon's tenure Israel's international standing has sunk to previously unknown depths. >From a tactical threat at the beginning of Sharon's premiership, in the aftermath of the withdrawal from Gaza, Palestinian terror has morphed into an existential challenge for Israel.
 

Glick is rooting for Likud, the party Sharon recently left in order to form a new party, to triumph in the next round of elections.
 

First I'd show him The Client. Then I'd show him this.
 

Mark Steyn from last year:

Philip Roth famously observed that, with “Easter Parade” and “White Christmas”, Irving Berlin had taken the two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ and “de-Christed” them both, turning Easter “into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow.” But Berlin found an angle on Christmas that anyone can get into. The new school of “de-Christers” seems to deny the possibility of any common culture, so that the holiday concert winds up a celebration of hermetically sealed cultural ghettos. . . .

The elevation of the right not to be offended into the bedrock principle of democratic society will, in the end, tear it apart. That goes for atheists threatening suits against New Jersey schools and for Muslim lobby groups demanding bans on ham sandwiches in Britain and Australia. On which cheery note, Merry Christmas to all.
 

On Wednesday the Washington Post, um, posted an op-ed by, and then an online chat with, U.S. Appeals Court Judge Richard Posner. In the op-ed Posner discusses intelligence programs such as the one described in the now-famous New York Times piece by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau. In the chat Posner answers questions prompted by the op-ed.

Each is worth reading in its entirety, but I want to highlight part of the chat. Here are two quotes from Posner's side of the conversation:

I think it would be highly desirable to explain to the public the tradeoffs between security and privacy. Effective counterterrorism does entail some reduction in privacy.

* * * * *

Why are you more concerned with your privacy than with your safety?

Posner isn't arguing that privacy should be completely sacrificed for the sake of security. I fail to see how anyone of even moderate intelligence could interpret him as making that argument. Yet a bit later he's asked this:

Your comment to the question from Arlington deals in absolutes, much like Bush and his administration does, by saying "Either you're for your safety or for your privacy." You seem to lack the capacity, like this administration, to admit that a balance between to two is possible, and in fact most desirable. Why do you see this in terms of absolutes?

This question demonstrates the kind of nonsense that we on the right who don't move in highly intellectual circles have to endure. (Who knows, maybe it's as common in highly intellectual circles.) It reminds me of the whole "imminent" business, which in a reasonable world would've (but hasn't) been settled finally by Norman Podhoretz's latest piece. How do we communicate with people who refuse to understand what's explained clearly? Posner doesn't bother responding that he wrote nothing of the sort; he just answers the question and continues to the next. That approach doesn't work in conversation.
 

Tim Blair has several link-worthy posts up. I especially like this:

Leading environmental author Ethan Matsuda contemplates current events:

Ethan Matsuda, 7, is worried about the future of Santa Claus.

His eyes light up, his voice rises with urgency as he describes what he says is the “dilemma. That means problem,” he clarifies.

The Yorba Linda, Calif., second-grader isn’t shy about talking to readers, reporters—even a congresswoman—about his children’s book that he hopes will help save Santa’s home.

It’s called “The North Pole Is Sinking!"

Please; can anyone quickly bring me up to speed on the legal ramifications of a 32nd trimester abortion?
 

Rod Dreher, in a post (warning: unpleasant sexual content) titled "THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD!":

That would be Brokeback Mountain, or so it would seem from the slobbery, but entirely predictable, press coverage. (My favorite comment so far: New York magazine critic Ken Tucker's declaration that, "You either buy into this tale of men in love or you join the ranks of those who've been snickering during the movie's prerelease trailers, and who can be divided into the insecure, the idiots, or the insecure idiots.")
 
  . . . I predict "Brokeback" will be a box office flop, and we'll see a long, pearls-clutching round of media bashing of Red America for being insecure and idiotic. But really, film critics are insanely insular. I was one for seven or eight years, and they are almost to a man quite liberal. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but it's clear to me why so many people distrust film critics, and are mostly right to do so.

You know, it's not only liberal cultural politics that separate most critics from the mass audience, but something harder to pin down. It has to do with experience. Critics live in such a rarefied and aestheticized world, seeing five to 10 movies a week, that they quickly grow bored with the sameness of movies. Without quite realizing it--this happened to me as a conservative--critics become suckers for novelty, especially of the transgressive sort. At its worst, you end up with a theater full of the most important film critics in North America at the 1998 Toronto Film Festival, roaring their approval of the creepy and misanthropic Todd Solondz's film "Happiness," which featured, among other transgressive delights, a comic set piece showing a suburban dad trying to drug his son's little playmate so he could anally rape him (he succeeded). It was one of the sickest movies I've ever had to sit through, but it received rave reviews--and, unsurprisingly, flopped at the box office.
 

Ira Stoll, New York Sun:

Saddam Hussein moved his chemical weapons to Syria six weeks before the war started, Israel's top general during Operation Iraqi Freedom says.

The assertion comes as President Bush said yesterday that much of the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was incorrect.

The Israeli officer, Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon, asserted that Saddam spirited his chemical weapons out of the country on the eve of the war. "He transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria," General Yaalon told The New York Sun over dinner in New York on Tuesday night. "No one went to Syria to find it."

From July 2002 to June 2005, when he retired, General Yaalon was chief of staff of the Israel Defense Force, the top job in the Israeli military, analogous to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the American military. He is now a military fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He made similar, but more speculative, remarks in April 2004 that attracted little notice in America; at that time he was quoted as saying of the Iraqi weapons, "Perhaps they transferred them to another country, such as Syria."
 

(Via The Corner.)
 

From a post by Rod Dreher, who's been traveling:

1. The Sunni Arabs are worried about Shiite Iran. Really, really worried.

2. A lot of Arab investment capital is rushing to China and India, and away from the West.

3. The Assad regime in Syria is not going to fall anytime soon. As fed up as the Syrian people are with their government, they fear the chaos and violence of Lebanon and Iraq, which bookend their country. Americans don't pay nearly enough attention to the fear of anarchy as a force driving Arab politics.

* * * * *

9. If you want to make people in Louisiana laugh, ask them what they think about Gov. Kathleen Blanco running for re-election.

10. Post-Katrina Louisiana is in a much bigger mess than most Americans realize. Nobody seems to know what the hell is going on.
 

Rich Lowry:

Democrats complain of a “culture of corruption” in the Republican-controlled Congress, and they are right in one respect: The spending process has been so twisted by the Republican majority that it has become inherently dirty.

The instruments of this perversion are “earmarks,” special provisions attached to spending bills that direct federal money to specific projects. Earmarks are how Congress diverts spending to pork-barrel local priorities and to other special interests. This practice has long existed, but Republicans have made it part of the fabric of their governing.

In 1994, there were 4,126 earmarks in the 13 appropriations bills. In 2004, there were 14,040. This year’s highway bill alone had 6,371 earmarks. An industry has grown up around this specially designated money. . . .

It is hard to imagine a practice or culture more inimical to the spirit of the Republicans who took over Congress in 1994. A decade later, the GOP has embraced the tactics of the corrupt, free-spending Democrats they overthrew. Meet the new appropriator, same as the old appropriator.

Now it is the minority Democrats who are talking reform. One bill sponsored by liberal Reps. David Obey (D., Wis.) and Barney Frank (D., Mass.), features an attempt to tamp down on earmarks. Republicans would do well to run with that idea, and clean up the House before someone else does it for them.
 

May turn out to be the jokes it elicits from conservative columnists. I already posted one from Ralph Peters, and now comes Mark Steyn:

Heigh-ho. The Iraq election's over, the media did their best to ignore it, and, judging from the rippling torsos I saw every time I switched on the TV, the press seem to reckon that gay cowboy movie was the big geopolitical event of last week, if not of all time. Yes, yes, I know: They're not, technically, cowboys, they're gay shepherds, but even Hollywood isn't crazy enough to think it can sell gay shepherds to the world.
 

There's more to Steyn's column, of course:

George Clooney, the matinee idol, made an interesting point the other day. He said "liberal" had become a dirty word and he would like to change that. Fair enough. So I hope he won't mind if I make a suggestion. The best way to reclaim "liberal" for the angels is to get on the right side of history -- the side the Iraqi people are on. The word "liberal" has no meaning if those who wear the label refuse to celebrate the birth of a new democracy after 40 years of tyranny. Yet, if you wandered the Internet on Thursday, you came across far too many "liberals" who watched the election, shrugged and went straight back to Valerie Plame, weapons of mass destruction, George Bush lied. . . .

A party that winds up cheerleading for a deranged loser death cult is the very definition of pointless self-defeating sour oppositionism. So, as Zarqawi flails, Messrs. Dean and Murtha and Kerry flail ever more pathetically, too. Just wait till the WMD turn up.
 

Michael Rubin:

The greatest impediment to progress in the Arab world is not terrorism or Islamism; both are recent phenomena. Rather, it is lack of accountability. Instead of accepting responsibility for lack of progress, many Arab regimes blame outsiders. In 2002, the U.N.'s Arab Development Report found that the Arab region has the lowest value of all regions of the world for "voice and accountability." In his seminal article "Why Arabs Lose Wars," Col. Norvell De Atkine, an observer of Arab military training, found that "taking responsibility . . . rarely occurs." Arab soldiers seldom admit, let alone learn from, mistakes.
 

Peggy Noonan:

[T]here seems to me a thing that is blindingly obvious, and yet I've never seen it remarked upon. It is that an administration that would coldly lie us into Iraq is an administration that would lie about what was found there. And yet the soldiers, searchers and investigators who looked high and low throughout Iraq made it clear they had found nothing, an outcome the administration did not dispute and came to admit. But an administration that would lie about reasons would lie about results, wouldn't it? Or try to? Yet they were candid.
 

At The American Thinker, James Chen describes a new kind of white flight:
 

Despite living in safe and desirable areas where diversity and tolerance are preached as gospel, white parents in the Bay Area are apparently avoiding many high-performing public school systems for the simple reason that they have too many Asians. . . .

According to parents and students of both races, what white parents fear most is their children being marginalized in the college admission process by the academic achievements of their Asian-American peers. . . . Stated bluntly, white liberals will object strenuously to school choice and racial segregation as long as their children are in the majority and among the top performers in school. However, when their children are fewer in number and relegated to the lower tiers of academic performance, they will happily embrace school choice and voluntarily segregate the public schools by moving to whiter school districts or sending their children to private schools.
 

(Via Craig Newmark.)
 

At The Corner, Iain Murray points to an obituary of the 4th Earl of Kimberley. I can't decide whether this is supposed to make me laugh, but it does:

There was a serious side to him too: he played championship tiddlywinks
 

The academic position he favored was the "distinguished visiting professor" variety, usually created for him, duration of visit a year or two at most, perhaps because it's hard to remain distinguished among people who know you.

Richard Russo, Straight Man
 

"We are not going to die so that the world will speak well of us." -- Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (1898-1978), quoted by Mona Charen
 

Ralph Peters:

WHERE were the "Pull our troops out now!" protesters yesterday, as 15 million voters from every ethnic and religious group in Iraq went to the polls to shape their country's future?

Surely, the anti-war crowd couldn't all have gone to the movies to see "Brokeback Mountain"?
 

The first of these questions is why it is so hard for friends who disagree about large and apparently impersonal subjects like politics or literature to remain friends. To this my answer is that they can—but only provided the things they disagree about are not all that important to them. Such, I think, is the situation with most people. They go from day to day, trying to earn a living and to raise their kids as best they can in accordance with the morals, customs, and traditions they have inherited from their own parents or have absorbed almost unknowingly from the culture around them. The ideas that underlie their way of life are mostly taken for granted and remain unexamined—luckily for them, since the biggest lie ever propagated by a philosopher was Socrates' self-aggrandizing assertion that the unexamined life is not worth living.
 

Norman Podhoretz, Ex-Friends
 

This is the conclusion of a thread on classical music (first, third and fourth posts are here, here and here—I managed to lose the second in a blog-host switch) I began almost exactly a year ago. I'm going to quote the parts of the above-referenced posts that I like, and then try to wrap up my argument:

Esteemed and worthy arts critic Terry Teachout and I disagree on a matter that may seem specific to classical music, but that in fact has broader applications.

This is Teachout's position:

[I]f you're going to express a personal prejudice in a review, one that causes you to dissent decisively from a long-standing verdict of posterity, do it ruefully, in full awareness that your inability to appreciate an obviously great artist is a failure of taste that separates you from the communion of truth. [*See update.]

He also quotes approvingly art critic Clement Greenberg:

One of the wonderful things about art is that everybody has to discover the criteria of quality by himself. . . . Yet they are objective. . . . And the people who try hardest and look hardest end up, over the ages, by agreeing with one another in the main. That I call the consensus of taste.

This is my response:

If generations or centuries of knowledgeable people can be wrong about politics—and inevitably some of us, on either the Right or the Left, have been deeply wrong for a very long time—can't generations or centuries of knowledgeable people be wrong about art, including music? I think they can, and not simply because I find Haydn, for example, boring. It makes no sense to me that history can err about everything except art.

For my own iconoclastic purposes, let me restate Teachout's argument, using Haydn as the subject of dispute because I've already unmasked myself as less than a fan:

If knowlegeable people have reached a consensus over centuries that Haydn is great, then he's great.

If you believe that Haydn isn't great, then it's very likely that you aren't knowledgeable.

If you aren't knowledgeable, then you may not contribute to the consensus on Haydn.

If you are knowledgeable and you believe that Haydn isn't great, then whenever you express that belief you must accompany it with an acknowledgment that you're wrong about Haydn.

I think that's a fair paraphrase. What it describes is a closed system, self-perpetuating, immune to criticism.

* * * * *

I'm asserting this: that Haydn's greatness is not questioned by influential classical-music critics, only analyzed and described; that a critic who did question it, no matter how thoughtfully and knowledgeably, would be marginalized; and that such a situation is objectionable, and even harmful to the vitality of classical music. . . .

One can dislike Haydn without denying his centrality. An artist's worth must remain open to intelligent dispute no matter how long he's been revered. Vigorous disagreement among experts, including on the deepest matters, helps keep art living. A critical consensus that seals itself against dissent is likely to produce an art whose greatest works are past and whose audience steadily diminishes. An art, that is, like classical music today.
 

(By "broader applications" I was referring to politics and the war. I shouldn't have introduced, even by implication, a different and huge subject. Let me stay focused on the central topic.)

I love classical music—some of it—but because I know I'd likely hear Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven or some other composer who bores me, I rarely turn on classical radio. And I'm sure there are many other people interested in classical music who feel as I do. It's as if every movie theater in the country spent half its year showing Chaplin, Bergman and Kurosawa, over and over. A preposterous thought, but that's how classical-music programming strikes us, or at least me.

One could argue in reply that nothing prevents radio stations from playing whatever they choose. They could eschew the usual in favor of music lesser known and more intriguing.

I tend to disagree; in practice, critical opinion is so deeply established that classical radio without heavy doses of Haydn et al. is unthinkable. But even if true, the argument is irrelevant, because classical radio is only a symptom, albeit one with its own negative effects.

The real problem with classical music is the lack, for a long time, of exciting new composers. Critics, and even musicians, only help keep classical music vital; composers do the most important work. Maybe I'm showing my ignorance here, and there are dozens of contemporary talents creating just the kind of music I've been looking for. But in that case my point is made. If I, with time to search and eagerness to find, haven't heard of them, something must be seriously wrong with classical-music criticism.

Classical music needs a big, loud, glorious donnybrook about the relentless reverence done to work that was old a century ago. It needs a major critic, someone of Teachout's stature but not of his views, to start a scrap in some prominent space and blow out the cobwebs and dust that have turned the field of classical music into a museum. Maybe the art that resulted wouldn't be to my liking, but at least it would be alive.
 

*Update: I should've noted, as I did in the third installment, that Teachout probably intended some irony in the flowery end of this paragraph.
 

Another update: I've made a few small changes in phrasing, and removed one distracting passage.

Washington Times:

"Polygamy rights is the next civil rights battle." So goes the motto of a Christian pro-polygamy organization that has been watching the battle over homosexual "marriage" rights with keen interest.

"We're coming. We are next. There's no doubt about it, we are next," says Mark Henkel, founder of www.TruthBearer.org. . . .

Liberals and feminists have to be pro-polygamy because of their tolerance doctrine and belief in a woman's right to choose, which certainly includes "the right to choose polygamy," Mr. Henkel says.

The goal, therefore, is to convince conservatives, especially Christians, that "consenting adult" polygamy is biblical and valuable, both to society and to individual men and women.

Once the conservatives come around, Mr. Henkel says confidently, opposition to polygamy "will come crashing down ... like a house of cards."
 

Ralph Peters:

Consider this: Not one of us would consider looking over a neurosurgeon's shoulder and directing an operation. Yet a colonel in our military has more years of formal education — and far more varied hands-on experience — than any surgeon. Nonetheless, every political hustler and rambling pundit is now a military expert.
 

StrategyPage:

Chechnya is no longer considered a real threat to Russia, but rather an expensive training area for security forces and special operations troops. The Islamic terrorist groups are spreading into other parts of the Caucasus, but not to the extent that the local police cannot handle it.
 

Agam Shah at PCWorld.com (emphasis mine):

Of all tea contraptions yet, the wackiest may be "ReadyWhenUR," an electric kettle that starts boiling water when a cell phone user sends it an SMS message with the words "SWITCH ON." The kettle has a receiver containing a person's cell phone information, and when the receiver gets the SMS, it starts heating water. British tea maker PG Tips, a division of Unilever, came up with this product, inspired by the animated characters Wallace and Gromit.

Dueling essays on climate change by Brad DeLong and Bjorn Lomborg. I find Lomborg far more persuasive—for instance, DeLong's suggestion that "the world's industrial core . . . create incentives for the developing world to industrialize along an environmentally-friendly, C02- and CH4-light, path" strikes me as highly impractical—but read them and decide for yourself.
 

"Test Your Bon Jovi Brainpower at E! Online"
 

John Fund in today's Political Diary (sub. req.) from OpinionJournal:

It's gift-giving season so the conservative newspaper Human Events asked its favorite members of Congress what book (other than the Bible) had most influenced their lives and that they would give to friends. . . .

Human Events wasn't looking for Democrats to ask about their favorite books, but its reporter couldn't resist when she bumped into Hillary Clinton in the Capitol. "Oh, I can't answer that question on the fly like this," she said. "Why don't you call my office and we'll get back to you." No word yet on whether Ms. Clinton has taken a poll on which book she should cite as having had the most impact on her.
 

UPI:

Obese patients no longer are entitled to knee and hip replacements at government expense under cost-saving rules for East Suffolk, England, a report said.
 

As Dani Garavelli comments in Scotland on Sunday,

[I]t is important for primary care trusts to remember that fat people pay taxes too. After all, it is one thing to insist everyone should be required to give a portion of their income to fund services they may not use (such as education or improved transport networks), it is quite another to demand people pay for a service they will be denied when they need it.
 

(Via Amy Ridenour, via NCPA.)