Did my matzos come?

If I linked to every post there that I find compelling, I'd link to just about every post there. Go. It's worth your time.
 

In twenty-two words:

It is very difficult to make people improve.

It is very easy (and very cheap) to find out who does something best.

(Via Craig Newmark.)
 

Arnold Kling contrasts, very effectively, "the way the world might have appeared to a reasonable liberal in 1968 with the way events have unfolded since then."
 

Ralph Peters on Hamas's victory:

[T]he lesson we need to take from this election is one we should have learned years ago: Corruption is the greatest plague on the developing world, opening the door for fanatical movements insightful enough to offer children a semblance of education and to provide the neglected poor with running water.

In country after country, Islamic parties gained power by filling the vacuum left in urban slums by corrupt governments. Westerners made excuses as Turkish, Pakistani, Egyptian, Algerian, Palestinian and an array of African governments looted their national patrimonies, stole aid funds and behaved with utter disdain for their fellow citizens. The bills come due.
 

On John Batchelor's show Wednesday night, John Loftus described what he called "the find of the year" and "probably the most sensational historical find from the Iraqi era": recordings of Saddam Hussein discussing "how [he] fooled the United Nations about weapons of mass destruction." I've posted a lo-fi mp3 of the interview here (left-click to play, right-click to download).

If this pans out, what a lot of stance-shifting we shall see.

(I try to listen to Batchelor's show every weeknight, 10-1AM. You can stream him on the Web too.)
 

Rolling Stone describes the next project from the Wachowski brothers, who wrote and directed the Matrix trilogy:

Based on a well-known graphic novel [. . .] about vigilantism in a fascist state, the material is reportedly a searing indictment of Bush administration policies.

Fans of the Wachowskis' earlier work might enjoy the Matrix Code Emulator Screensaver.

Among "The Top 20 Touring Artists of 2005": The Rolling Stones (1), U2 (2), Paul McCartney (4), Eagles (5), Elton John (6), Neil Diamond (9), Jimmy Buffett (10), Mötley Crüe (11), Toby Keith (13), Bruce Springsteen (15), Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers (18), and Barry Manilow (19).
 

*"Old" defined in the only sensible way: "older than I am."
 

Inside Higher Ed reports (in a piece by my brother-in-law, one of IHE's founders and editors) on a difficult decision for administrators at Spokane Community College. Though the school, following state law, already makes "widely available" the names and crimes of sex offenders enrolled there, "officials at Spokane are contemplating going further, perhaps by telling all students in courses taken by sex offenders that a convicted criminal is in their midst."

Given the subject, I'd guess that Terri M. McKenzie, "vice president for student and instructional services," regrets the way she summarized the issue: "The question, for me and the college, is where should we stand on the principle of 'everybody comes'?"

But the quandary is meaningful. The rate of recidivism among sex offenders is apparently hard to quantify. How high does it have to be to justify announcing the criminals' names in class? Would announcing their names make it impossible in practical terms for them to stay at Spokane? If recidivism is frequent enough to warrant this level of concern, should the offenders have been kept in prison, or by some method (e.g. castration) rendered harmless? With online universities increasingly available as alternatives to conventional colleges and universities, is it reasonable now, where it might've been unreasonable even a decade ago, for Spokane to make life more difficult for sex offenders enrolled there? And if other Spokane students have committed other crimes, should their names be announced too?

I don't have any solid answers, and I don't envy the administrators their dilemma.
 

GAEL TURNBULL (1928-2004)

NATIONAL POETRY DAY

"Transform your life with poetry"
the card said, and briefly I fussed
that this overestimated the effect
until I remembered how it had thrust
several old friends,
plus near and dear,
into distress and penury,
how even I, without the dust
of its magic, might have achieved
peace of mind, even success,
so maybe the advice is just,
not to be ignored, a sort of timely
Health Warning from the Ministry
of Benevolence
at the Scottish Book Trust.
 

(Via August Kleinzahler in Poetry.)
 

Frank J. Gaffney:

[T]here is reason to believe the Iranian regime is working toward a capability that could destroy America as we know it. A blue-ribbon commission's report to the Congress last year (http://empcreport.ida.org/) found a single nuclear weapon detonated in space high above the United States could unleash an immensely powerful electromagnetic pulse (EMP). An EMP wave a million times stronger than the most powerful radio transmitter would damage or destroy the electrical grid and unshielded electronic devices upon which our society utterly depends. The effect (visualized in a short video available at www.WarFooting.com) could be "catastrophic" — possibly reducing America from a 21st century superpower to a pre-industrial society in the blink of an eye.

Iranian missile tests — including firing a Scud missile off a ship and flying the new Shahab 3 missile in a profile apparently designed to deliver a weapon into space — suggest the mullahs seek an EMP capability. The sort of death and destruction such an attack might precipitate seem consistent with the apocalyptic vision of Shi'ite extremists, who believe such conditions the prerequisite for a messianic age ushered in by the arrival of the "12th imam."

If this is, indeed, what the Iranian regime has in mind, would we wait to act? Would we continue to contract out to the Europeans or the United Nations the protection of our security interests? Would we allow the Israelis — who are under no illusion their country faces an existential threat from a nuclear-armed Iran — to act alone against a danger we may share?

(Via Stanley Kurtz.)
 

From Theodore Dalrymple:

Driving to the Netherlands, I was surprised by how much the political atmosphere there had changed. Not long ago, the Dutch seemed insufferably complacent, regarding the rest of the world de haut en bas, as if it had not yet reached Dutch levels of enlightenment and generosity. It is amazing what a couple of assassinations can do.
 

Inside Higher Ed (emphasis added):

A performance of The Vagina Monologues is usually associated with a celebration of feminism and a desire to stop violence against women. And on dozens of campuses, a return from winter break means organizing performances for February and March. But as a result of an idea from student directors and producers of this year’s production at the University of Michigan to focus on "women of color," that message has become much more murky.

This fall, four students — Lauren Whitehead, Jillian Steinhauer, Molly Raynor and Kelly Sheard — wanted to accomplish something deeper with their production than they felt had been done in past years. Their idea was to cast every role in the play with a minority woman, in an effort to rectify what some view as racial biases of the show. One reference to race in the script is a monologue based on an interview with "A Southern Woman of Color." Some professors who have read the main script and optional parts of the play say that Arab, Asian-American and Native American women fare particularly poorly in the play — being presented "from a reductive and troublingly narrow perspective."

"This play is very problematic," said Maria Cotera, a professor of Latino and women’s studies, who has been advising the students. "Basically, the implied center of the monologue is white women’s experiences with sexuality and violence. And then you have all these 'diversifying' pictures that are sort of marked and cast for black or other minority women. Those are the figures that are meant to bring in diversity, but the fact is, the central figures are white women."

Megan Sweeney, a professor of English and Afroamerican and African Studies, also has reservations. "The script itself tends to flatten and conflate a wide variety of women’s experiences into a homogenizing portrait of women’s victimization," she said. "In doing so, moreover, the script inadvertently contributes to a colonialist 'othering' of non-Western women and a silencing of these women by corralling historically, culturally, politically, and economically distinct situations of violence into one overarching portrait of non-Western women’s pain."

It gets, if possible, weirder: "[T]he national V-Day organization threatened to pull the script — in turn, ending the funds that would be distributed at area women’s shelters — unless white women were also allowed to be a part of the production." Many students also objected to the restrictive casting.

The controversy raises complex issues. Engineering student Jeffrey Kelley was asked, "Should men be allowed in the play?"

"From a strictly ideological viewpoint, I suppose the answer is yes, but on the other hand, men do not have vaginas, do not know what it is like to have a vagina, and will — for most men — never know what it is like to have a vagina," said Kelly. "Therefore, if a man were denied a part in the Vagina Monologues, while I would not be impressed with the group for denying someone membership, I would understand why they felt he didn’t belong."

The parties may reach a compromise:

In response to the V-Day threat to pull the production, which is currently scheduled for February 19, the students made their rules much more fluid. They let white women audition to perform, and bent the traditional meaning of “women of color” to also include “women who may identify as white ethnics,” such as Italian or Jewish women.

Cotera says that if the production ends up having a majority “women of color,” it will “reorientate the production” in a way she finds useful. Students have been reluctant to give a breakdown of the racial make-up of the cast because there is still concern that the play could be cancelled by the national V-Day committee.

The article closes with this thought from Prof. Sweeney:

"[U]nlearning white privilege necessarily causes discomfort, so the discomfort that some white women may feel in having their own experiences decentered, or in being pushed to relate to representations of women that do not immediately reflect their own senses of identity as women, can be an important step toward achieving the greater well-being of all women."
 

Posted by "The Washington Prowler" on American Spectator's blog:

Interesting that former President Bill Clinton eulogized former presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy earlier this week.

According to several people who used to see McCarthy regularly at The Palm restaurant in downtown Washington, D.C., McCarthy was no fan of Clinton as the years passed through his administration. By 2000, McCarthy was as disgusted by his party's leader as most other right-minded folk, and didn't hide it. To the end, he was a man who put integrity ahead of just about anything else.
 

On Iraq:

Terrorist attacks against certain types of targets get lots of media coverage, especially when, as there usually are, lots of attacks. What is less reported is the ultimate success, or failure, of those attacks. For example, there were several attacks on foreign diplomats, in an attempt to prevent those countries from establishing diplomatic relations with the new Iraqi government. That campaign failed, as there are over fifty countries that have reestablished their embassies in Iraq, or are in the process of doing so.

A major target of terrorist attacks has been the oil industry, which has prevented oil production from increasing. That has absorbed a lot of the terrorist effort, because there are 22 oil industry reconstruction projects. Because of the scope of the oil industry, and the number of construction efforts (22), the terrorists have switched from bombs, which are too frequently intercepted by the huge number of oil industry security personnel, and turned to more subtle terrorism. Threats are now made on oil industry workers, and sometimes their families. This had some success initially, but ultimately it mobilized oil workers, their families and tribes, to fight the terrorists face-to-face.

As large as it is, the oil industry is not the largest employer in Iraq, the government is, with 1.2 million employees. The government has always been a major employer in Iraq, and during the 1990s, it became the main employer because the embargo, imposed at the end of the 1991 war, shut down much of the economy. At that point, Saddam controlled the economy like never before, and this control helped keep him in power. The economy has been opened up enormously since 2003, with the government no longer the major employer. But controlling that many jobs, the people running the government have enormous clout. The Sunni Arabs are not getting many of those jobs, certainly not in proportion to the 20 percent of the population that are Sunni Arabs. Moreover, before 2003, the Sunni Arabs had the lowest unemployment rate in the country, because they got priority for those government jobs. That all changed in early 2003, and the Sunni Arabs want to get back to work. Right now, one of the easiest, if dangerous, ways to make money is to go to work with one of the many Sunni Arab terrorist or criminal gangs. You can make $50 as a lookout, or over $1,000 for murdering someone. IEDs have grown into a major industry, with each one generating hundreds of dollars of payments to build and emplace. The problem with the terror economy is that most of the people getting terrorized (killed and maimed) are Iraqis, many of them Sunni Arab Iraqis. This has caused a backlash against the terrorists. Moreover, the booming economy has made more jobs available even to Sunni Arabs. While Sunni Arab neighborhoods are considered dangerous, that doesn't stop companies from hiring Sunni Arab truck drivers to get through those dangerous areas, or Sunni Arab employees to run a branch in Sunni Arab neighborhoods. When terrorists attack these Sunni Arab workers, they make more enemies. The terrorists have so many enemies in some Sunni Arab areas that they have been completely driven out.

While Sunni Arabs believe, in general, that they should be running the country, they are more specifically concerned about having a job, and access to the rapidly rebuilding economy. The Sunni Arabs have access to the ten TV and 75 radio stations that have opened up since 2003, and know what's going on in the rest of the country. The Baghdad Stock Exchange opened in June of 2004, and has been going up as the unemployment rate is going down. The Sunni Arabs know they are losing out, and are not happy about it. The increasing number of gun battles going on in Sunni Arab neighborhoods indicates that the civil war among the Sunni Arabs is already underway. It's a low key and scattered affair, but keeps getting louder and more violent. Terror attacks have been declining, as the terrorists have had to spend more time defending themselves. This is not news, because it is not a single dramatic event, but it is a trend, and it has been a trend for some time now. It's a trend that dooms the terrorist cause, and that will eventually be big news.
 

On Afghanistan:

The Taliban in Afghanistan is apparently suffering from money problems, as a result of both bad PR and Western attacks on their sources of revenue from the outside world. One result of this is that the Taliban is reportedly restructuring its funding of operations. Hitherto, regional commanders in Afghanistan have been given blocks of money to use as they though most wisely. Apparently some of these regional commanders decided that the wisest course was to a goodly portion of the money away for a rainy day, rather than use it to fund operations against the government and the Coalition forces.

The new operational funding policy uses “performance based” criteria likely to warm to cockles of any fiscal conservative’s heart. In effect, regional commanders will now receive money on the basis of the number of attacks they make against government and Coalition forces. This may be one reason for the recent rise in attacks, particularly suicide attacks, in Afghanistan. It may also lead some of the less ardent Taliban commanders to decide that peace is preferable to continuing the struggle, since only in peace will they be able to enjoy the benefit of the money they’ve been stashing away for some time.
 

First it was the urban heat island effect. Now it's the damn trees:

Scientists in Germany have discovered that ordinary plants produce significant amounts of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas which helps trap the sun's energy in the atmosphere.

The findings, reported in the journal Nature, have been described as "startling", and may force a rethink of the role played by forests in holding back the pace of global warming.

And the BBC News Website has learned that the research, based on observations in the laboratory, appears to be corroborated by unpublished observations of methane levels in the Brazilian Amazon.
 

Mark Goldblatt reports from the 2005 MLA Convention:

Once the panelists had said their piece, the floor was opened for questions and comments from the audience. I was the first person the moderator called on, and I directed my question to the first speaker, the assistant professor from Kingsborough Community College. I asked her whether she'd have a problem if a colleague of hers suddenly decided to adopt a pro-war curriculum, and whether, more broadly, she'd have a problem hiring a new teacher who seemed likely to take such an approach.

She replied that she did not currently serve on hiring committees, so she had no control over who joined the faculty at KCC . . . but she would indeed have a major problem if a colleague of hers were to adopt a pro-war curriculum.

She left it at that.

Someone then asked a question about Derrida, whom one of the panelists had faulted for his lack of commitment to radical causes, and I thought, for a moment, my point would be lost. Apparently, however, the KCC prof's response did not sit well with several members of the audience — who felt compelled to answer me themselves. An older man was the next person called on; he turned in my direction and said that he'd served on many hiring committees and that he would never hire a teacher who seemed likely to adopt a pro-war curriculum . . . for the same reason he wouldn't hire a teacher who seemed likely to espouse creationism or intelligent design. The issue isn't political, he explained. It's that the theory is simply wrong. A pro-war curriculum would, by necessity, be rooted in falsehoods and false logic. The classroom, he insisted, is a place for truth.

The next comment was also addressed to me, by a young man sitting in the back. He said that, in theory, he would not be opposed to hiring a teacher who supported the war in Iraq . . . but that situation was unlikely to come up because people who teach in the humanities are trained in critical thinking, and no one who thinks critically could support the war in Iraq.

Several audience members nodded vigorously. Their reactions indicated that the matter was now settled.

I smiled and sank back in my chair; I'd gotten my laugh.

Except it's not really funny. [. . .] If you've come to equate support for the war in Iraq with creationism, then you're no longer capable of critical thinking on the subject; you've surrounded yourself with too many like-minded people. If the ideological bias of academia turns faculty minds into mush, imagine its effect on students.
 

Michael Ledeen sometimes uses the literary device of a Ouija-board conversation with the late James Jesus Angleton, who headed the CIA's counterintelligence division. (I'm not wild about the device, but any piece from Ledeen is welcome.) In his latest column, "The Great Counterintelligence Fiasco," Ledeen argues via Angleton that talk-of-the-town James Risen "doesn’t even notice the truly horrible aspects of his own story. He doesn’t have the wit or the energy to think half a step beyond the tale he’s been told." Sample:

ML: Okay, let’s take them in order. The first one dates back to Clinton. It’s about an operation called "Merlin," and consisted of feeding doctored information about the design of nuclear weapons to the mullahs via a Soviet scientist who had defected "years earlier" to the United States. [. . .] If we knew enough — in 2000, mind you — to be able to design an effective disinformation program, then...

JJA: Then (he started shouting in that gravelly voice of his) THEY KNEW THE IRANIANS HAD A NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM SIX YEARS AGO.
 

Omar of Iraq the Model, 1/5/06:

The general sense of the public opinion in Iraq is that our politicians who we trusted proved to be unqualified for the responsibility.
Everyone I meet says he feels betrayed by the politicians who keep frustrating us with their incompetence and internal fighting over power.
Iraqis expressed optimism before the election and you read that on opinion polls and we could feel it here in the streets but I’m sure that if those opinion polls are repeated, we’ll see that a great deal of that optimism is gone now.

1/7/06:

I think the next few days until the (unverified) final [election] results are announced will be a waiting phase for most political powers.
Politicians already know that neither the election commission nor the international investigators can change much of the results; they will pretend to be awaiting announcements from those two entities, basically to use this time to organize their lines, probe the pulse of other parties and prepare for the real negotiations that are yet to come.
 

The best rationale for falling behind in my Wired reading is that by the time I've finished a copy, it's already online. The 12/05 issue includes pieces on

automated parking garages ("In addition to holding more autos than a traditional parking structure, these garages occupy less real estate because they don't require in and out ramps");

a strategy for dealing with movie piracy ("When Steven Soderbergh releases his next film on January 27, it will have not only the critics squawking, but Hollywood studio execs, too. . . . The movie goes out to theaters, DVD, and high-definition cable TV - all on the same day");

"The Neopets Addiction" ("20 million kids can't get enough - and neither can advertisers. How a virtual animal kingdom became a product placement paradise");

Ray Kurzweil ("From one point of view, the complexity of the human brain is beyond imagination. But how complicated is the software that creates it, the genome? Six billion bits, 800 million bytes - not much, in information terms");

the future of the oil industry ("The skyrocketing cost of oil is sending pump prices soaring. But it's also subsidizing research into new technologies that can change the energy game");

and some intriguing sports-related statistics ("ER Visits to NYC Hospitals: Men: Weekly average: 45; During the World Series: 35;
Women: Weekly average: 45; During the World Series: 63").

And I haven't even gotten to my two favorite articles. In second place, Bruce Sterling explains how carbon is going to change the world:

Imagine lightweight, fireproof buildings that laugh merrily at Category 5s and Richter 8s. Imagine levees as thin as Saran Wrap but impervious to surges. Imagine 100 percent carbon computers running on 100 percent carbon solar cells. Buckytubes might serve the transformative role for the 21st century that steel did for the 19th and plastic for the 20th.

And at the top of the high-tech heap, the story of James Cawley and Jack Marshall, fans of the original Star Trek, who are trying to fix "the most glaring flaw in the history of science fiction":

As every geek in the galaxy knows, Captain Kirk and the crew of the USS Enterprise set out on a five-year mission to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before. But NBC canceled the show in 1969 after only three seasons. New Voyages aims to fill fans in on what they missed. In September, Cawley and Marshall assembled more than 50 Trek lovers from across the US (and the UK and Canada) to shoot the third episode of what should've been season four. . . .

Each New Voyages episode is produced with the help of a growing network of Star Trek professionals. The makeup supervisor for the new episode, for example, is Kevin Haney, who worked on one of the many Trek TV series spun off from the original (and won an Oscar for makeup in Driving Miss Daisy). The script is by D. C. Fontana, a story editor for the original Star Trek series and author of some of its most beloved episodes. . . . And it will star Walter Koenig, the actor who played navigator Pavel Chekov in the original series and seven of the 10 films. . . .

Paramount permits Trek-related fan projects, as long as the creators don't profit from them. So New Voyages is distributed for free. The fans in the cast and crew not only work gratis but also make cash donations to keep the project afloat. Cawley has sunk more than $100,000 into the bridge set (he stopped counting two years ago). The two-week shoot in September of episode three cost at least $40,000. . . .

The value of the labor donated to New Voyages by Star Trek professionals far exceeds any out-of-pocket expenses. Makeup supervisor Kevin Haney directed a team whose bill would have come to tens of thousands of dollars. The show's special effects are supplied by Cawley's friend Max Rem (the professional CG f/x creator uses a pseudonym to protect his day job). Rem worked on Star Trek for more than a decade, and he has worked on New Voyages since its inception in 2003. For the second New Voyages episode, Rem created more than 200 effects shots - from the Enterprise flying through space to backgrounds for greenscreen shots - all of which would have cost more than $1 million if he had billed New Voyages. . . .

The pros have become fans of their amateur counterparts. Manny Coto, formerly an executive producer for UPN's Enterprise and now an executive producer of 24, says of the latest New Voyages production, "I'll be downloading it." And earlier this year at a science fiction convention in Pasadena, California, Cawley positioned himself behind the table where William Shatner was signing autographs, hoping to get a picture with the Enterprise's original captain. As he stood there, astonished at how close he was to his childhood - OK, adulthood - hero, a voice behind him yelled, "Hey, Kirk!"

"I turned, and so did Bill," Cawley says. Their two heads rotated together to see a couple of staff writers for UPN's Enterprise. "And with God as my witness," says Cawley, raising his right hand into the air, "they said, 'Not you, Bill. We're talking to him.'"

I'm not a huge Trek fan (though I liked The Next Generation quite a lot), but at a time when irony seems inescapable, the sincere, unembarrassed affection that New Voyages's cast and crew show toward their work is inspiring. May the mission long continue.
 

Use The Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder, of course.
 

Stephen Pollard asks the right question.
 

From Daniel Pipes's blog:

The reality of non-Muslim life in country where Islamic law to any extent prevails can be grim. This entry provides an occasional glimpse into the problems that can arise.

_________

Claiming a corpse in Malaysia: M Moorthy, 36, was a national hero in Malaysia due to his mountaineering exploits, especially his being a member of his country's first expedition to the top of Mount Everest in May 1997. He was also a Hindu, the child of Hindu parents, married to a Hindu wife, who as recently as two months ago was interviewed on television about his preparations for the Hindu festival of Diwali. But he was paralyzed from the waist down due to a 1998 injury and a fall from his wheelchair on Nov. 11 led to his death on Nov. 20. His family, naturally, wanted to give him a Hindu funeral.

At that point, however, an Islamic court sided with Moorthy's former colleagues in the Malaysian Armed Forces who claimed that he had converted to Islam; the court would not even permit the family, non-Muslims, to appear before it to dispute the matter. A dreadful scene then occurred at the mortuary as family members jostled with state Islamic officials and former soldiers for the body. The family lost and applied to the country's Appellate and Special Powers High Court, which ruled that it could not override the Islamic courts in such a matter. Moorthy in the end was buried as a Muslim.

The president of the Malaysian Consultative Council of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism and Sikhism, Rev. Sri K. Dhammananda said the council was "very disturbed" by what happened and called this development "a crisis for non-Muslims because they can seek no legal remedy." He called for the repeal of a subsection of the Federal Constitution "to make it clear that the Syariah [Shari‘a] Court has no jurisdiction to hear matters involving non-Muslims." (December 29, 2005)

 

Levying the jizya tax in the Palestinian Authority: Jizya is a tax specified in the Koran (9:29) to be paid by non-Muslim males living in dar al-Islam, that is, under Muslim political rule. In theory, it is what non-Muslims pay extra for the privilege of being protected by the Muslim state, in whose military they may not serve. In fact, beyond the often penurious sums involved, it has a humiliating quality to it, reminding the kafirs that they are second-class subjects for refusing the Islamic truth. The tax was regularly collected through Islamic history, fading out only in the nineteenth century.

But Islamists, in keeping with other retrograde ideas, like reviving slavery, would like to re-impose the jizya. Hamas has long wanted non-Muslims in "Palestine" to pay it and as it approaches the corridors of power, this abstract wish takes on new vitality and importance. "We in Hamas intend to implement this tax someday," says a Bethlehem city council member, Hassan El-Masalmeh. "We say it openly—we welcome everyone to Palestine but only if they agree to live under our rules." (December 23, 2005)