Did my matzos come?

Trevor at the will to exist:

Lately I’ve been feeling overwhelmingly fatigued. My body has been demanding a lot of sleep but even when I sleep 12 hours, my sleep isn’t deep enough to leave me feeling refreshed. Life seems to be passing in a blur, and every day blends together.

The background harmonies here are always the same. In the distance, explosions make dull thumps. Nearby, sirens wail constantly. Helicopters fly low over our hooches, vibrating me in my bed and making the roof, floor and walls shake momentarily as two or three Blackhawks fly by a few feet overhead. When you add these noises to the karoake parties that are held outdoors at night, it’s sometimes still very surreal after three months in theater.

I sleep restlessly in this place. Something is always waking me back up as soon as I drop off. Even when I am wearing my noise canceling headphones, something always shakes the hooch as I’m dropping off or going into REM sleep and forces me back into alertness. The only thing that seems to help is working out to the point of exhaustion. Once I’m sufficently drained, my body shuts down and allows me the rest I need. Despite this, I feel tired all the time. I think I’m tired of living in a sea of concrete and metal surrounded by a city that seems to be filled with madmen. I can only imagine how much worse it must be for common Iraqis. [. . .]

It’s well past time for Iraqi leaders to put aside their real and petty differences and all start pulling together. It’s time to root out the evil sociopaths among the various factions so the sentences of life in Iraq will no longer have death and war as their punctuation marks. I’m ready to sleep soundly again, and I hope most Iraqis will be too in the near present future.
 

Columnist William F. Buckley says the war in Iraq is lost. . . .

I’d like to know what he proposes we do. Should we abandon the country like we did in Vietnam? Leave everyone who cooperated with the coalition to their fate? Let the country devolve and destabilize further? Let the evil men run the show?

If Iraq was a patient in a hospital and you were the doctor you certainly wouldn’t say, “We’ve lost,” and go play a round of golf, at least not if you were an ethical man. I think Iraq is a lot like a very sick and delirious patient who hasn’t been properly restrained and is banging his head against the wall repeatedly. Sure, the medical team can just give up and say “nothing we’ve tried has worked.” But that would be plain wrong and the patient would eventually severely injure or kill himself. What’s your prescription, Dr. Buckley? I am over here with 130,000 others, waiting to find out.
 

Eugene Volokh's posted a couple of Jewish jokes posing as Gentile jokes.
 

Dan Murphy in the Christian Science Monitor:

A deadline set by the captors of reporter Jill Carroll came and went on Sunday with no definitive news on her situation. But Iraq's interior minister, in conversations with the US ambassador and in an interview with ABC television, says he thinks Ms. Carroll is alive and will be recovered safely.

Interior Minister Bayan Jabr told ABC that his ministry knows who arranged Ms. Carroll's abduction. "We know his name and address, and we are following up on him as well as the Americans," he said. "I think she is still alive."

Jabr said in his ABC interview that his ministry does not know where Carroll is and that she may have recently been moved. His comments contradict an earlier interview US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad gave to Fox News saying that the Interior Ministry may "have information with regard to where she might be held."

On Saturday night, Iraqi forces said they raided homes looking for Carroll but without results. Wide-ranging efforts - by US and Iraqi officials, as well as local media - to secure her release continue. Iraqi politicians, press groups and some of the world's most prominent Muslim clerics have urged she be released unharmed.

"We will work as hard as we can to get her released,'' Ambassador Khalilzad said. "She clearly is in a dangerous situation, but we're working hard with the Iraqis and others to get her released."
 

David Warren:

Even after the experience of the Great War, and the Depression, people on the eve of the Hitler war could not appreciate what was coming. It is only in retrospect that we understand what happened as the 1930s progressed -- when a spineless political class, eager at any price to preserve a peace that was no longer available, performed endless demeaning acts of appeasement to the Nazis; while the Nazis created additional grievances to extract more.

This is precisely what is happening now, as we are confronted by the Islamist fanatics, whose views and demands are already being parroted by fearful “mainstream” Muslim politicians. We will do anything to preserve a peace that ceased to exist on 9/11. Not one of our prominent politicians dares even to name the enemy. . . .

Germany was full of moderate Germans, as Hitler rose; Stalin drove his oars through a sea of moderate Russians. While we must not forget that the Muslims are the first victims of “Islamism”, and may suffer most from its triumph, we are beyond the point where we can do more for them than destroy the tyranny by which they are enthralled.
 

Jonathan Rauch explains introverts:

Extroverts are energized by people, and wilt or fade when alone. They often seem bored by themselves, in both senses of the expression. Leave an extrovert alone for two minutes and he will reach for his cell phone. In contrast, after an hour or two of being socially "on," we introverts need to turn off and recharge. My own formula is roughly two hours alone for every hour of socializing. This isn't antisocial. It isn't a sign of depression. It does not call for medication. For introverts, to be alone with our thoughts is as restorative as sleeping, as nourishing as eating. Our motto: "I'm okay, you're okay—in small doses."

Highly recommended. I also like this follow-up interview with Rauch.

(Both links via Katie Newmark.)
 

Jay Garmon at TechRepublic:

Which mathematician mistakenly solved an "impossible" problem as a homework assignment, thereby inspiring a modern urban legend?

The mathematician in question is the late George Bernard Dantzig, who passed away in May 2005 at the age of 90. While studying for his doctorate in mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley in 1939, Dantzig enrolled in an advanced statistics course, wherein his legend was born. In Dantzig's own words, here's how it went down:

"During my first year at Berkeley I arrived late one day to one of [Jerzy Neyman's (Dantzig's mentor)] classes. On the blackboard were two problems which I assumed had been assigned for homework. I copied them down. A few days later I apologized to Neyman for taking so long to do the homework—the problems seemed to be a little harder to do than usual. I asked him if he still wanted the work. He told me to throw it on his desk. I did so reluctantly because his desk was covered with such a heap of papers that I feared my homework would be lost there forever.

"About six weeks later, one Sunday morning about eight o'clock, [my wife] and I were awakened by someone banging on our front door. It was Neyman. He rushed in with papers in hand, all excited: 'I've just written an introduction to one of your papers. Read it so I can send it out right away for publication.' For a minute I had no idea what he was talking about. To make a long story short, the problems on the blackboard which I had solved thinking they were homework were in fact two famous unsolved problems in statistics. That was the first inkling I had that there was anything special about them" (courtesy of School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St. Andrews, Scotland).
 

Betsy Newmark points to a column (accessible here) that shows a side of Jimmy Carter with which I was unfamiliar:

Carter . . . ran for governor of Georgia in 1970 at the height of the civil rights movement as an arch-segregationist. Veteran Georgia political observer Bill Shipp has written that Carter "ran a subliminal 'fergit, hell' campaign." Shipp said, "Carter promised to be the antithesis of his Democratic primary opponent, former Gov. Carl Sanders, an urbane Augusta lawyer who had served Georgia ably as governor from 1963 to 1967. Sanders promised a fair shake for African-Americans in state government. Carter promised to invite Alabama Gov. George Wallace into the state to speak, and he vowed to retain an old-time segregationist as chairman of the state Board of Regents."

During the campaign, Carter's minions aggressively promoted a photograph to the media showing a smiling Sanders with his arm around a (gasp!) black athlete, and Carter referred to the highly respected former governor as a "Hubert Humphrey Democrat." Jimmy Carter won the gubernatorial election in 1970, but with less than 10 percent of the black vote.

Funny, but I don't remember him discussing any of these facts at [Coretta Scott King's] funeral, nor do I remember him apologizing to the mostly black assemblage about running for office as a segregationist. Maybe he was pressed for time. After all, the funeral only ran six hours, and that's not near enough time to confess your sins and bash a sitting president all in the same self-serving eulogy.

Newmark notes, "[O]nce he was in office, he didn't govern as a segregationist, but he sure benefitted from tapping into that vote in order to get elected in the first place."
 

Little Green Footballs:

Insane anti-Israel bias—business as usual at Agence France Presse: Palestinians denounce roadblocks outside Jericho.

JERICHO, West Bank (AFP) - Palestinian officials denounced Israel for reimposing two roadblocks outside Jericho, saying the move violates a 2005 deal giving them security control over the West Bank city.

The Israeli army confirmed that the roadblocks, one on the route to Jerusalem and the other leading to Ramallah, had been reestablished because a number of wanted militants had been freed from jail in Jericho.

“As a result of the release of several dozen prisoners from the jail in Jericho, the (army) has decided to step up security checks around the city in order to ensure the safety of Israeli civilians,” the military said on Wednesday.

So why isn’t the headline, “Palestinians release terrorists from jail”? 

Paul Belien:

Every so often I travel to the U.S. to recharge my batteries, and I am not the only European Conservative to do so. From time to time one needs to breathe the air of freedom before submerging again in the stifling atmosphere of Europe.
 

People find lots of reasons to end relationships.

(Via Craig Newmark.)
 

Thomas Sowell:

California [has passed a law] saying that students would receive a diploma only if they could pass a standard test to show that they had some real knowledge, instead of just an acceptable attendance record.

. . . Attorney Arturo Gonzalez has filed a lawsuit to stop this graduation requirement from being enforced.

The requirement is not "fair," Mr. Gonzalez says. The schools where a high percentage of the students don't pass the test are predominantly low-income and minority schools.

. . . It certainly wasn't fair, in Mr. Gonzalez's sense of the word, for the schools I attended as a child to require me to take the same tests as children from families with more than twice as much education and several times as much income.

What would have happened if the schools had been "fair" to me in that sense? I would have learned less, had a much easier time in school -- and would have gone out into the world not even knowing enough to realize how little I knew.

By now, I might have been on welfare or in prison. But my teachers would have felt good about themselves for giving a poor boy from the ghetto a break.
 

Nonie Darwish:

In school in Gaza, I learned hate, vengeance and retaliation. Peace was never an option, as it was considered a sign of defeat and weakness. At school we sang songs with verses calling Jews "dogs" (in Arab culture, dogs are considered unclean).

Criticism and questioning were forbidden. When I did either of these, I was told: "Muslims cannot love the enemies of God, and those who do will get no mercy in hell." As a young woman, I visited a Christian friend in Cairo during Friday prayers, and we both heard the verbal attacks on Christians and Jews from the loudspeakers outside the mosque. They said: "May God destroy the infidels and the Jews, the enemies of God. We are not to befriend them or make treaties with them." We heard worshippers respond "Amen".

My friend looked scared; I was ashamed. That was when I first realised that something was very wrong in the way my religion was taught and practised. Sadly, the way I was raised was not unique. Hundreds of millions of other Muslims also have been raised with the same hatred of the West and Israel as a way to distract from the failings of their leaders. Things have not changed since I was a little girl in the 1950s.
 

Eugene Volokh:

Several seemingly reputable press accounts (NPR, New York Times, and The Observer (U.K.)) report that, when the 12 Danish cartoons depicting Mohammed were distributed in many Muslim countries, they were distributed alongside three other cartoons that were much more offensive. One of the extra cartoons showed Mohammed as a pedophile demon, another showing him with a pig snout, and a third apparently showing a praying Muslim being sexually mounted by a dog. The accounts report that the cartoons were in a packet distributed by some radical Danish Muslim imams, who are apparently not saying where they got the cartoons.

Now the first two cartoons, if they purport to be depictions of Mohammed, would presumably be at least as blasphemous as the original ones (if not more so). What's more, anyone who distributed them as the work of the Danish cartoonists, knowing that this wasn't so, is guilty of bearing false witness against others — potentially in a way that threatens others' lives. I take it that Islam takes a dim view of that.

Is there an attempt to bring this heinous blasphemer to Islamic justice? To punish him for his sins against Allah and his fellow man? If there is, please let me know about this.
 

For the benefit of the MSM. Brilliantly done.
 

Steve Sailer, 2/12/06:

One of the dominant myths of our age is that any hostility among people is caused by a lack of mutual familiarity. . . . [L]ast year the Supreme Court outlawed the state of California's prudent practice of segregating inmates by race during the first 60 days of their prison terms to provide time to check if they had tendencies toward racist violence. Sandra Day O'Connor wrote for the majority that this entirely reasonable attempt to prevent felons from maiming and raping fellow prisoners of other races might "breed further hostility among prisoners and reinforce racial and ethnic divisions."
 

Associated Press (in the Sacramento Union), 2/7/06:

About 400 inmates in Los Angeles County jails have been segregated because of weekend racial clashes that killed one inmate and injured more than 100 others, Sheriff Lee Baca said Monday.

The 21,000-inmate system was on partial lockdown Monday, and Baca said the inmates would remain segregated to keep black and Hispanic inmates from acting out on gang rivalries.
 

Stephen Spruiell has a very good post prompted by today's piece from Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. Spruiell's conclusion: "Even conservatives are criticizing Cheney for making a bad PR move. Wrong. There's absolutely nothing he could have done. The press would have found a way to shoehorn the incident into its "arrogance of power" storyline, no matter what." Yes.
 

That's Deroy Murdock's suggestion, and it's a good one. Most rightists will agree with his analysis:

America should turn the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, into an international terrorist depository. Any nation that decides its own Islamo-fascists would be more secure under Navy supervision should be invited to leave them at Gitmo. Since America is terrorist Enemy No. 1, it would be wise for the U.S. to house these killers at no expense to depositing countries. Indeed, Washington even might pay each arriving terrorist's home country a cash reward for letting the Navy isolate these anti-American butchers someplace where they can do no harm.

This reverse-rendition policy should begin at once. The problem of terrorist jailbreaks is even worse than it appears. The Center for Security Policy (CSP) helped me document a dozen instances since September 11, 2001, when at least 138 suspected or convicted Muslim terrorists have fled from behind bars in Afghanistan, Russia, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Yemen. Collectively, these killers have murdered at least 328 individuals and injured 518 others. . . .

The stakes are too high — and too many people could be killed — to risk more overseas terrorist escapes, just to save a few million dollars in Koranically correct meals and laundered uniforms. There is ample room in the $2.77 trillion 2007 federal budget to offset the expense of indefinitely detaining as many bloodthirsty terrorists as can be shoehorned into Guantanamo.

More than Sing Sing, Leavenworth, or even a re-opened Alcatraz, Guantanamo is a dream location for harboring terrorists. Detainees are guarded by well-armed, patriotic American GIs unencumbered by bottomless anti-Americanism. Any combatant who tried to walk out would face hundreds of unsympathetic sailors with machine guns at the ready. If he eluded them, he would have to evade snipers in watchtowers, leap twin rows of barbed-wire fences, then tiptoe through the landmines installed by Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. If he reached the beach, Haiti is only 110 miles southeast. Happy swimming, Hafez!

Of course, craftier enemy combatants could avoid these hazards by tunneling out. If they actually burrowed into the Caribbean, they are more than welcome to terrorize the sharks. As the CSP's Robert McLean says, "If there is a more secure location to detain these terrorists than Guantanamo, I would like to know."

Naturally, turning Guantanamo into a Yucca Mountain for terrorists will make Leftists wail. Let them. It's hard to believe, but the shrieks of liberals are easier on the ears than the blasts of bombs.
 

Leftists: You should support Murdock's suggestion too, for strategic reasons. Conditions at Gitmo are Edenic compared to those at terrorist prisons in other countries. For the prisoners' own sake you should want them here. Also, if they're at Gitmo you can work to improve their treatment, or even get them released. Leave them elsewhere and you have no chance.

I suspect that leftists will find my arguments unpersuasive.
 

Andrew C. McCarthy:

We all want to believe there is a vibrant "moderate Islam." Not just the State Department, the CIA, the Bush administration, the European Union, and the West, but all people of good will.

Nonetheless, the contemporary vision of "moderate Islam" as a meaningful force for good is a mirage. Certainly there are moderate Muslim individuals. Large pockets of them, there and there, who have assimilated to the modern world and want only to live in ecumenical peace. But many of the people we call "moderates" are flat-out phonies, the bag-men who rise on the shoulders of the leg-breakers.

The authentic moderates, meanwhile, tarry in muted resistance to the domineering strain of their faith. The strain we like to tell ourselves is a mere fringe. The strain that has just managed, yet again, to unleash untold thousands (not handfuls of militants, but transcontinental thousands) to maraud over a trifling affront. The moderates must carry on by pretending, much like the State Department pretends, that the commands of their scriptures — toward brutality, beheading, conquest, death to unbelievers, eternal damnation to apostates, the subjugation of women, the dehumanizing of non-Muslims, and so on — either do not exist or have somehow been superseded (even though the Koran is said to reflect the words of Allah Himself, and even though much in it of a threatening nature actually comes later in time than the passages bespeaking moderation and tolerance).

Meanwhile, as we prepare to spend yet another $120 billion on a novel brand of democracy building — one which establishes Islam as Iraq's state religion and enshrines the inequities of sharia as a source and measure of its fundamental law — our wildly premature birthing of the nascent Palestinian "democracy" has just resulted in the rise to power of Hamas, an entity the U.S. officially designates as a terrorist organization. (To be fair, its competition was Fatah, an entity successive U.S. administrations spent the last dozen or so years deluding themselves was not a terrorist organization. In the event, these legatees of Yasser Arafat were, of course, the "moderates.") This result means that if American citizens did what our government is right now continuing to do — namely, contributing funds we well know Hamas will soon be controlling — they could be indicted under our antiterrorism laws. There are, as we speak, several defendants under such indictments in this country.

All of this intellectual and moral confusion — the disintegration of the Bush Doctrine, the compromising of our conception of democracy, the strange deference to charlatans spewing seventh-century venom, the pressure on our government to violate the very laws it enacted to choke off the funding that underwrites our enemies' butchery — all of it is based on a single conceit: That there is a flourishing moderate Islam. One worth looking beyond all the menacing verses and countless atrocities to find.

Okay, where is it?
 

ScientificAmerican.com:

You might think the "best" songs would be the biggest hits. But the fickle tastes of music listeners continue to defy expert predictions--or objective measures of quality. According to new research, that may be largely because of peer pressure. . . .

The sociologists . . . found that a song's overall popularity or disfavor was generally higher or lower in the presence of peer information than without it. . . . The researchers argue that this means would-be impresarios (and sociologists) will continue to struggle to identify surefire hits. "Experts fail to predict success not because they are incompetent judges or misinformed about the preferences of others, but because when individual decisions are subject to social influence, markets do not simply aggregate pre-existing individual preferences," the team writes in the report detailing the findings in today's Science. "In such a world, there are inherent limits on the predictability of outcomes, irrespective of how much skill or information one has."
 

I've made, at least to myself, the arguments that Robert Spencer counters in this piece from 7/28/05. Spencer wins:

Will men who love death, who glorify suicide bombing and praise God for beheadings and massacres, fear the destruction of holy sites? It seems unlikely in the extreme — and that fact nullifies all the value this threat may have had as a deterrent. Nuke Mecca? Why bother? It wouldn’t work.

Others have argued, however, that the deterrent value of destroying Islamic holy sites would lie not in giving jihad terrorists pause, but in showing Islam itself to be false and thus removing the primary motivation of today’s jihad terrorists. If Allah is all-powerful and rewards those who believe in him while hating and punishing the disbelievers (the “vilest of creatures,” according to Qur’an 98:6), wouldn’t he protect his holy sites from these disbelievers?

However, Muslims have weathered such shocks to their system in the past. In 1924, the secular government of Turkey abolished the caliphate; the caliph was considered the successor of the Prophet Muhammad as the religious and political leader of the Islamic community. By abolishing the office, Turkish leader Kemal Ataturk hoped to strike at the heart of political Islam and create a context in which Islam could develop something akin to the Western idea of the separation of religion and state. Instead, his act provided the impetus for the establishment of the Muslim Brotherhood, the first modern Islamic terrorist organization, in Egypt in 1928. The Brotherhood and its offshoots (which include Hamas and Al-Qaeda), and indeed virtually all jihadist groups in the world today, date the misery of the Islamic world to the abolition of the caliphate. The ultimate goal of such groups is the restoration of this office, the reunification of the Islamic world under the caliph, and the establishment of the Sharia as the sole law in Muslim countries. Then the caliph would presumably take up one of his principal duties as stipulated by Islamic law: to wage offensive jihad against non-Muslim states in order to extend Sharia rule to them also.

The abolition of the caliphate, then, accomplished precisely the opposite of what Ataturk hoped it would: it gave the adherents of political Islam a cause around which to rally, recruit, and mobilize. In essence, it gave birth to the crisis that engulfs the world today. It is likely that a destruction of the Ka’aba or the Al-Aqsa Mosque would have the same effect: it would become source of spirit, not of dispirit. The jihadists would have yet another injury to add to their litany of grievances, which up to now have so effectively confused American leftists into thinking that the West is at fault in this present conflict. But the grievances always shift; the only constant is the jihad imperative. Let us not give that imperative even greater energy in the modern world by supplying such pretexts needlessly.
 

Dave Barry:

It's time once again for the Winter Olympics -- three magical weeks during which all of America will gather in front of the television set to watch American Idol.

. . . [T]he Winter Games are under way in the picturesque Italian city of Turin (or, as they call it in Italy, ``Vienna''). It's a truly international gathering of athletes from all over the world, except for those parts of the world located in Africa, South America, Central America, Australia and large sectors of Asia.

The games officially began Friday night with an unforgettable opening ceremony, climaxing with the lighting of the Olympic torch by Italy's greatest and most beloved ski champion, Wayne Gretzky. (Note to editor: Please check this; I nodded off during the second unforgettable hour.)

I wish I could be there to report on the Olympics in person, but my wife, Michelle, an actual sports reporter, is there, so I'm staying home with our daughter, Sophie. The other morning, as I was pouring Sophie a bowl of Lucky Charms, the phone rang; it was Michelle, urgently telling us to turn on the Today show. So we did, and we saw Katie Couric interviewing Scott Hamilton.

''I'm right behind Scott Hamilton!'' Michelle shouted into the phone. ``Can you see me?''

''Yes,'' I said.

Sure enough, there she was in the background, holding a cellphone in one hand and waving wildly at the camera with the other. Michelle and I have often made fun of people who do this on the Today show, because they all look like pathetic, no-life geek losers.

''Do I look like a pathetic, no-life geek loser?'' she said.

''No!'' I said, because I am not a complete idiot.
 

"Get Complimentary Pizza For A Year"
 

Let me put it this way: When the female Ampulex compressa wasp wants to lay an egg, cockroaches would be well advised to avoid her.
 

Let’s remember where we live, Kenner was saying. We live on the third planet from a medium-size sun. Our planet is five billion years old, and it has been changing constantly all during that time. The Earth is now on its third atmosphere.

The first atmosphere was helium and hydrogen. It dissipated early on, because the planet was so hot. Then, as the planet cooled, volcanic eruptions produced a second atmosphere of steam and carbon dioxide. Later the water vapor condensed, forming the oceans that cover most of the planet. Then, around three billion years ago, some bacteria evolved to consume carbon dioxide and excrete a highly toxic gas, oxygen. Other bacteria released nitrogen. The atmospheric concentration of these gases slowly increased. Organisms that could not adapt died out.

Meanwhile, the planet’s land masses, floating on huge tectonic plates, eventually came together in a configuration that interfered with the circulation of ocean currents. It began to get cold for the first time. The first ice appeared two billion years ago.

And for the last seven hundred thousand years, our planet has been in a geological ice age, characterized by advancing and retreating glacial ice. No one is entirely sure why, but ice now covers the planet every hundred thousand years, with smaller advances every twenty thousand or so. The last advance was twenty thousand years ago, so we’re due for the next one.

And even today, after five billion years, our planet remains amazingly active. We have five hundred volcanoes, and an eruption every two weeks. Earthquakes are continuous: a million and a half each year, a moderate Richter 5 quake every six hours, a big earthquake every ten days. Tsunamis race across the Pacific Ocean every three months.

Our atmosphere is as violent as the land beneath it. At any moment there are one thousand five hundred electrical storms across the planet. Eleven lightning bolts strike the ground each second. A tornado tears across the surface every six hours. And every four days, a giant cyclonic storm, hundreds of miles in diameter, spins over the ocean and wreaks havoc on the land.

The nasty little apes that call themselves human beings can do nothing except run and hide. For these same apes to imagine they can stabilize this atmosphere is arrogant beyond belief. They can’t control the climate.

The truth is, they run from the storms.

Michael Crichton, State of Fear
 

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds, I read this piece by Robert Zubrin arguing that ethanol and methanol are now viable alternatives to petroleum. Many people posted responses to Zubrin's essay, and I've found only a couple (here and here) that mention a crucial detail in it:

Two developments make a rapid transfer to high-alcohol fuels possible. One is the recent rise of gasoline prices, making methanol and ethanol economically attractive. The other is a technological innovation: the development by the Netherlands Research Institute for Road Vehicles of a sensor capable of continuously measuring the alcohol content in mixed alcohol/gasoline fuel, and using this information to regulate the engine. [Emphasis added.]

I still don't know whether the move to ethanol/methanol is viable. Like Reynolds, but much less knowledgeably, I've long been a skeptic, and I always incline against government intrusion into markets, which Zubrin's plan requires. Still, anyone disputing Zubrin's reasoning has explain why he's wrong about the importance of this new sensor.
 

On Tuesday Jim Geraghty wrote,

Maybe non-Muslims’ patience with the Muslim world, four years and change after 9/11, has run out. I’d hate to see this; I don’t want to believe that the world’s one billion Muslims are my enemy, irredeemable, incapable of coexisting with the values of the West. A significant chunk of the public is tired of half-measures. I hope our leaders are picking up on this, and can come up with some wise course of action.

Then yesterday he wrote,

I stand by my reaction of the past couple days. But I’ve also come to a depressing conclusion.

A significant chunk of the American public, including a number of prominent thinkers on the right, have concluded that the problem with Islam… is Islam.

Both posts are worth reading in full. Also, Rich Lowry posted this yesterday:

I'm guessing . . . we will begin to see the real emergence of the “to hell with them hawks” (patron saint: Derb [John Derbyshire]). They believe that it was right to invade Iraq, but wrong to try to make it better afterwards. They will support military action in Iran, but only if it doesn't involve any re-building or sticky involvement with Iranians. They will want, more or less, to give up on the “hearts and minds” element of the War of Terror, since the people whose minds and hearts are in question haven't been cooperating (so: “to hell with them”). In Walter Russell Mead's terms, they will detach Bush's Jacksonianism from his Wilsonianism. They will keep the Jacksonianism, but toss the Wilsonianism aside as fuzzy-headed and disproven by events, from the Iraq insurgency to the cartoon riots.
 

From Newsweek on the Web:

You talk about marketing to baby boomers. Why are they such a good target?
We're just this wonderful combination of traits. There are like a trazillion of us. We really all do the same thing all the time even though we're always talking about how absolutely renegade we are. We're about as renegade as all those orthodontists on their Harleys driving around all with the exact same Harley outfit, bought from the Harley store. What I like most about us, is that we cling to the idea that we're still rebels. And now we're getting kind of old and stupid, so I think we're easy prey. That's how I came up with the idea of charging people to tell them where their reading glasses are. You could make a fortune.

* * * * *

You're pretty pessimistic about the future of print journalism in the book. You say young people don't read newspapers.
I think we're kind of in desperate straits in the newspaper business. We keep thinking that the solution is if we print something different on the piece of paper that will help us. And we don't seem to get it that the piece of paper is the problem. Which is kind of sad, but I think it's true. I know that's not a funny answer.

You have a blog now. How is that different from your print column?
Let's just take a theoretical example. Let's say a toilet explodes somewhere in Wales. Now in the old days, if a toilet were to explode in Wales, it would run first in a Welsh newspaper, some reader there might see it, clip it out, mail it to his friend in Boston. His friend might say: "Oh, Dave Barry might be interested in this," and send it to me. And weeks could elapse before the world knew about that exploding toilet in Wales. Now thanks to the miracle of the Internet, everybody can read the Welsh newspaper story as soon as it's printed, and I get 6,000 links of it, and I put it up on my blog [blogs.herald.com/dave_barrys_blog] and the whole world is alerted to the danger of the exploding toilet in a matter of minutes sometimes. So if you don't think that's progress, then God help you.
 

Whenever I see the name of the head of the House Appropriations Committee, I recall this exchange from a cinematic classic:

Marty: "I'm tellin' the truth, Doc. You gotta believe me."
Doc: "Then tell me, Future Boy, who's President of the United States in 1985?"
Marty: "Ronald Reagan."
Doc: "Ronald Reagan? The actor? Ha! Then who's Vice President? Jerry Lewis?"
 

Unlikely but not unimaginable . . .
 

ScientificAmerican.com:

New study results bolster the controversial hypothesis that certain cases of obesity are contagious. . . .

Physiologist Leah Whigham of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her colleagues inoculated young male chickens with three strains of adenovirus--Ad-2, Ad-31 and Ad-37. . . . Though the infected chickens and noninfected controls consumed the same amount of food and were exposed to the same conditions, chickens carrying Ad-37 were found to have nearly three times as much fat in their guts and more than two times as much fat over their entire body at the end of the three-and-a-half week period. The other two virus strains appeared to have little effect on weight.
 

From The Heart of Mathematics, by Edward B. Burger and Michael Starbird (language streamlined somewhat):

1) You have a balance scale and nine stones identical in appearance. Eight of the stones are also identical in weight; the ninth weighs slightly more. Using the scale twice, find the heavy stone.

2) You have a balance scale and twelve stones identical in appearance. Eleven of the stones are also identical in weight; the twelfth weighs slightly more or less. Using the scale three times, find the unique stone and determine whether it's heavier or lighter than each of the others.

I hope these brainteasers give you as much frustration pleasure as they gave me.

  *If any part of this post—question, hint, answer—is unclear, please let me know. Ambiguity in puzzles is unforgivable.
 

Stephen Pollard:

The BBC's coverage of the cartoon row is up to its usual high standards. I had the same reaction to lats night's 10 O'Clock News as one of the Harry's Place commenters, who describes how it

showed the cover and inside pages of France Soir newspaper (where various cartoons of Mohammed are reproduced) but did so in a ludicrous, semi-blacked out style thereby preventing viewers seeing what the fuss is about. Treating satirical cartoons as if they were pornography is disgraceful. The BBC (rightly) wouldn't hesitate to show clips from Jerry Springer: the Opera - indeed they broadcast the whole thing. Tonight BBC News demonstrated cowardly, one-eyed pandering to an aggressive lobby group.

Is anyone surprised by this? I came across this despatch from Michael Buchanan on the BBC's website, with a conclusion which is so wrong that it beggars belief:

Denmark's reputation as an easy-going, consensual nation has been severely tarnished in recent days. All the Danes can do now is hope the repeated apologies for the offence caused, by both the government and the newspaper, will end this unseemly row.

Er, no. Denmark's reputation has not been tarnished but enhanced. Free speech prevails, with a government defending it to the hilt. It's not Denmark's reputation which has been tarnished, but that of those Muslim countries which have demanded censorship and an apology, and those Muslims who are burning the Danish flag.

As for the idea that, All the Danes can do now is hope the repeated apologies for the offence caused, by both the government and the newspaper, will end this unseemly row, has a sentence more indicative of the BBC world view ever been written? Take a running jump, Mr Buchanan. So much for the BBC as a stout defender of free speech.

All the Danes can and should do now is carry on standing up for the basic Western value of free speech, and hope that other nations do the same.
 

StrategyPage, 2/3/06:

As a government, Hamas has a lot more targets for the Israelis to go after. Hamas is a bigger target now, and a more vulnerable one.
 

Jonathan Last in today's Weekly Standard newsletter:

It's been barely 48 hours since Samuel Alito was sworn in as a justice of the Supreme Court and he has already embarrassed many of his Democratic foes. On Wednesday night, in his first official action as an associate justice, Alito voted to uphold the stay of execution granted earlier to a Missouri death-row inmate. Robert, Scalia, and Thomas voted to lift the stay of execution.

This is an amazing rebuke to Democrats and liberal interest groups which shamefully and unfairly attacked Alito as a crazed, radical extremist who would blindly follow the conservative line.

But now that they've been exposed, where are the Democratic groups lining up to apologize to Alito, to admit that they were wrong about him. Surprise! They're nowhere to be seen. Ted Kennedy didn't note the event. Lefty blogs such as Daily Kos made no mention of the Alito vote. It's as if it never happened. Contradictory evidence does not exist; past fights are flushed quickly down the memory hole.

It's not surprising, but it is shameful.
 

Omar, 2/3/06:

What caught my attention recently was a statement made by the national security advisor in the interim government Mowafaq al-Rubai'I and an response to this statement from Dhafir al-Aani the spokesman of the [Sunni] Accord Front.

Al-Rubai'i was speaking enthusiastically about a plan to coordinate the withdrawal of MNF [multinational force, I think -- mg] from Iraq with the leaders of the coalition. He said they're working on a plan to significantly reduce the number of foreign soldiers in the course of 2006 and said he expected all foreign troops to leave Iraq by the end of 2007 since "Iraqi security forces will be ready by then".

Al-Aani didn't like this statement and apparently feels that getting Iraqi troops trained and equipped isn't the main thing we need to do before the MNF can leave. He said that "we don't want the MNF to start leaving until all militias are disbanded…".

Here I see a great change in positions from what we used to see in the past two years. And especially on the Sunni side. None of the Shia leaders-except for the Sadr-were really interested in seeing the MNF leave soon and had been only talking about asking the MNF to leave because of pressures from the Sadrists and the Sunni Arabs.

But now we hear the same government happily announce that ending the presence of foreign troops in Iraq is near at the same time that Sunni Arab politicians began to change their tone and started to view the American military presence as a balancing factor!

What I see here is that Arab Sunni leaders have rearranged their priorities; except for a year or two after 2003 the Sunni never considered America their greatest enemy. Their greatest enemy had always been Iran and whoever allies with her while America ranked 2nd or 3rd (that's if not viewed as an ally) and I think this is how they view things right now.
 

Interesting exchange between Andrew C. McCarthy and John Derbyshire at The Corner:

MORE ON SPREADING DEMOCRACY [Andy McCarthy]
I’ve been following with great interest the discussion about the President’s belief in the innate yearning for liberty, which is one major premise of our ongoing democratizing project – a project on which I am, I suppose, a sympathetic skeptic. If I could broaden the subject, though, I want to take issue with another of the premises: the notion that a democratic world necessarily makes the United States safer from terrorism.

It may be true that democracies do not historically make war on one another. But if you accept that international terrorism – rather than the outbreak of a conventional war between sovereigns – is our biggest security challenge today, I’m not sure where democratizing gets you.

Terror networks are not only stateless, they are exceedingly good at converting the liberties available in democratic societies to their advantage. (It is in many ways easier to plan a terror attack in a free country than a police state – and there is nothing like the ACLU in, say, China.) The 9/11 hijackers plotted for two years in both Germany and here. London, Madrid, Paris, Amsterdam, etc. –they are all hotspots.

Also, as we know from experience past and present, democratizing is both expensive and exhausting. If, for example, the investment in Iraq sapped our resolve to deal earlier and more aggressively with, say, Iran and Syria, that is a cost that has to be weighed against whatever degree we are safer than we would be if we had toppled Saddam but not dug in to democratize the place.

Don’t get me wrong. This is not a paean to realism. I do believe spreading American values is something we should, even must, do. And if democracies don’t make war against each other, that is a huge upside – maybe even a dispositive one – even if democracies don’t necessarily reduce the amount of terrorism. I have just never found very persuasive the claim that more democracy necessarily means less terrorism.
 
RE: SPREADING DEMOCRACY [John Derbyshire]
Andy: You are of course right that open societies are fertile soil for terrorism. The War on Terror, though, is not really a war to stamp out terrorism, a thing that probably can't be done, as our leaders very likely know. It is a war on terrorists getting nukes. ("WMD" if you like, but that is really just a synonym for nukes. Chemical and biological terrorism, in the present state of the dark arts, are minor threats by comparison.) Nukes can only be made by biggish, stable--whether under dictatorship or law--well-organized nations. Any such nation friendly to terrorists, hostile to us, and looking as if it is on the way to getting nukes, demands action.

The question is: What action? My answer would be, has always been: Attack them, smash up their assets, kill their leaders if you can, cripple their military. Then leave them in rubble and chaos. They're not going to be making any nukes in that condition. Mission accomplished. That was what I hoped we would do to Iraq, and why I supported the war. It is what I believe we should now do to Iran. The reduced-to-rubble nation might indeed "breed terrorists"; but then, as you pointed out, so might New Zealand or Spain. Rubble nations are not a threat to us. Africa has a score of them; none threatens us.

The administration has taken another course, one of "spreading American values," "building democracy," and so on. This won't work. It will end in tears. Any leaders of Iraq installed under any system we set up will be lynched by ululating mobs within a month of our departure. We can't export our system, even to small, cheap, near places like Haiti (where we have been trying for nigh on a century).

This is bad news for the many people living in the sphere of barbarism who would like a quiet, middle-class, law-governed, Western style of life, but it's not especially bad news for **us**, if we can just acknowledge it frankly and act accordingly.

Incidentally, the best argument for the proposition that democracies don't make war on each other is Spencer Weart's Never at War. Weart patiently chronicles every counterexample you could come up with, trying to prove that proposition, mainly by slicing'n'dicing the definition of "democracy" to make it fit. I wasn't 100 percent convinced; but it is clear at any rate that free nations go to war with each other only grudgingly, under exceptional circumstances, and never with the annihilatory total-war mindset.
 
RE: RE: SPREADING DEMOCRACY [Andy McCarthy]
Derb, I’m not as pessimistic as you are about the outcome in Iraq – although I do think the worst-case scenario you lay out is not nearly as unlikely as is cheerily assumed by many of the war’s supporters (among whom I, like you, count myself). I also agree, completely, that the “war on terror” has never been a war on terrorism, but rather against militant Islam. I was delighted to hear the President say that expressly on Tuesday night (especially in the teeth of the interest group pressure K-Lo noted, here). But I wish we had been clearer on that from the beginning – mention of the enemy’s name was pretty much verboten until the last year or so.

It’s not possible to wipe out terrorism. It is, however, possible to decimate a particular terror network. We’ve done a good job on this with al Qaeda – far better than we did from 1993-2001 – but less good, I think, than we could have done if we had been more committed to what you identify as the top priority – stopping terrorists from getting nukes. That can be accomplished only by (a) killing and capturing terrorists, and (b) making rogue regimes understand that they will pay dearly for abetting terrorists. Which is to say, it can be accomplished only by actions that meet the rhetoric of the Bush Doctrine.

I am not convinced that the Bush Doctrine is helped much, if at all, by spreading democracy or American values. Pursuit of the latter cannot help but narrow options and drain energy from the goal of crushing a terror network and punishing its enabling regimes.

For example, in addition to building nukes and sponsoring Hezbollah, Iran has harbored and otherwise assisted al Qaeda leaders since our military operations in Afghanistan began. It has also been actively allied with the so-called “insurgency” throughout Iraq operations. There is no question that dealing militarily with Iran would be a far more complex proposition today than it would have been in, say, November 2001. (I am not suggesting that it would have been easy then.) But if your top priority becomes democratizing rather than enforcing the Bush Doctrine, then you have to stay your hand at times when you might otherwise act aggressively, for fear of what aggression might do to the political balance you’re trying to achieve. That may be a defensible choice, but I don’t think it gets you closer to stopping terrorists from getting nukes. Instead, it gives al Qaeda some soft places to land and it only encourages the Irans of the world.

The type of democratizing and value-spreading I’m talking about is a very long-term project – decades long. The election last week, for example, showed that the Palestinians – who have been weaned on hatred of, and dreams of annihilating, Israel – are at least a generation away from the culture and institutions that must antecede democracy. They do not even accept the civilized premise that blowing up innocents in sneak attacks is not legitimate warfare under any circumstances – they deem it heroic behavior. On the other hand, there is an urgency to keeping militant Islam away from nukes that cannot be over-stated. (As Judge Posner observed in this TNR piece a week ago, “Washington, D.C., … could be destroyed by an atomic bomb the size of a suitcase.”) Priorities …
 

Following The Speculist's example, I make the following offer:

If you are a Chinese user of Google, and you have received notice that your search has been censored, email me your request at mg615-at-yahoo-dot-com. I will forward the request to The Speculist, and the results will be posted there. One rule: The Speculist will not search for pornography.
 

John Derbyshire, 2/1/06:

I have lived and worked among unfree human beings, on fairly intimate terms with many, and I must say, I did not notice much yearning for liberty among them. There was considerable yearning for prosperity (this was post-Mao communist China), but that is not the same thing, and in the case of China is now largely satisfied.

Such yearning for liberty as I encountered was among a scattered few individuals, in whom the yearning really did seem to be instinctive. They chafed and groaned under the unfree system. They just couldn't "fit" into it. I would estimate the overall proportion of such people as about one male in ten, the proportion among females being negligible. All those individuals now live abroad.

Most of my colleagues of that time, however, were happy, or at worst not seriously unhappy, in unfreedom. They went along with the system and didn't see much wrong with it. If the desire for liberty is inborn in us, then it seems to me it is rather easily suppressed, except among an eccentric few. That few are, rightly, heros to us conservatives--I take Vladimir Bukovsky as their exemplar--but I'm afraid they are only a few. [. . .]
 

A new trailer for Sleepless In Seattle. I suspect that the less one liked the movie, the more one will like this.

If that link doesn't work for you, try this one or one of the mirrors.

As of now you can also download it (19MB, QuickTime) via this link (right-click, Save Target/Link As).

If none of those works, try going here and downloading.

Phew, that's a lot of typing for one clip. But it's worth it. (Via Warren Bell.)