Did my matzos come?

Robert Spencer:

A moderate Muslim, as far as I'm concerned, would be one who rejects jihad violence against non-Muslims; rejects the idea that Sharia law should be instituted in the Muslim and non-Muslim world; and teaches the idea that non-Muslims and Muslims should live together indefinitely as equals. A moderate Muslim would also teach that women should enjoy full equality of rights with men. An honest and forthright Muslim reformer will acknowledge that the Islamic mainstream has historically held just the opposite of these principles, and will reject the elements of the Qur'an and Sunnah that give rise to these imperatives to violence and subjugation.
 

Seems reasonable to me.
 

At NRO, a powerful piece by Leo W. Banks:

I got an e-mail today from somewhere in southern Arizona ranch country that captured the uncertainty, anger, and fear that illegal immigration brings to border residents every day.

The message told of a wildfire in the Chiricahua Mountains, probably started by illegals. It's common. A group busts the line, finds a secluded spot to cook a meal, and then, because they don't live here and have no stake in what they might destroy, they don't put the fire out when they continue trekking north.

My home state has had many such blazes over the years. Right now, after one of the driest winters on record and with fire season looming, everybody awaits the inevitable, hoping to get to the flames before they burn out of control.

This is what people elsewhere in the country don't understand. This is what politicians in Washington, presently in such an uproar over the issue, don't understand. On the ground in Arizona, illegal immigration isn't about long-term fixes like a guest worker program. It's about tomorrow.
 

Mexico desperately needs foreign investment in its energy industry, a rationalization of its tax system, and free-market reform of its labor laws. Vicente Fox has done none of these things, and has in fact barely tried. He has instead pinned all his country's hopes on the export of its population to the United States.

Today, almost one-fifth of all living Mexican-born people now make their homes in the United States. You have to go back to the Irish potato famine to find a parallel. But Mexico is not suffering famine: It is suffering from a comprehensive failure of political and economic leadership.
 

Gerard Baker on Condoleezza Rice's performance as Secretary of State: "It is hard to think of a single way in which US foreign policy would have been any different if John Kerry rather than George Bush had won the 2004 presidential election."
 

A laugh-out-loud post from Tim Blair.
 

Why didn't Bush seek warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Security Act before he authorized eavesdropping? Mark Goldblatt offers "a partial answer."
 

Three worthwhile items. Emanuele Ottolenghi:

While Israelis were busy voting (or not voting), a Katyusha rocket landed in southern Israel, killing two Beduin shepherds. No doubt, now commentators will bend over backward to say that it was not Hamas, but some "militant" group that "rejects" the "peace process." Whoever pulled the trigger, Gaza today is closer to Tel Aviv than ever before. And the presence of much more efficient, elusive, and sophisticated weaponry in Gaza seven months only after the disengagement shows how frail and fragile the Kadima vision was, how unreliable the international community who should be monitoring the borders is, and how ineffectual (not to say worse) are the Egyptians in Sinai when it comes to weapons' smuggling into Gaza. And that withdrawal does not a peace make.

With Israel now encircled by Iran's proxies and Islamist fanatics, the last thing the country needed was an inconclusive result. It got just that. It will reap the whirlwinds of its apathy.
 

Ilya Somin at The Volokh Conspiracy:

One of the major themes of my academic work is that modern democracies suffer from a serious problem of political ignorance. . . . Most voters are "rationally ignorant." Because there is so little chance that any one vote is going to be decisive in an election, individual voters have almost no incentive to learn about the competing parties and their policies, and as a result it is rational for them to devote very little effort to acquiring political knowledge. . . .

Yesterday's Israeli election is a good example of this. . . . Ironically, by voting for right-wing parties instead of Kadima, Israeli rightists may well have ensured a more left-wing government than would have resulted from their voting for Kadima instead! They "achieved" the opposite result from the one they probably intended.
 

Stephen Pollard:

The result - with Kadima doing less well than at one time seemed likely, Labour doing better and Likud collpasing - has been portrayed as showing that the Israeli electorate has moved to the centre-left.

The main sense in which Israel has turned left, however, has little to do with issues of security and foreign policy. Likud collapsed not because of its stance vis-a-vis the West Bank and the Palestinians, but because it was led by Bibi Netanyahu, who as finance minister was responsible for some hugely unpopular (but wholly necessaary and successful) reforms to the economy. Labour ran a campaign under Amir Peretz, the former Histradut Trade Union federation leader, almost wholly focussed on those reforms and the economy.

Israel, it must never be forgotten, was founded as a socialist country, and in its heart largely remains that.
 

Jonah Goldberg:

Many pro-immigration advocates say that Mexicans are no different than other immigrants, and that what critics of Mexican immigration — legal and illegal — say about Latinos is what they said about Germans, Poles, Italians, the Irish, and the Jews in the past.

Obviously, there's some truth to this. Many of the complaints do sound similar. But that doesn't mean the arguments have the same weight. . . .

[P]eople may have complained about the ability of legal immigrants from Italy to assimilate, or fretted that these Italian immigrants were taking jobs from Americans, but that doesn't mean illegal Mexican immigrants in the early 21st century are indistinguishable from legal Italian ones a century ago. The fact is that America has never shared an enormous border with Italy. Large chunks of U.S. soil never belonged to Italy or Ireland. You can be as romantic as you like about the glory and honor of America's noble tradition of accepting the "wretched refuse" of the world: It won't change this very basic fact.
 

John Derbyshire: "Respect for the military is a commendable thing, and in my opinion an essential component of good citizenship; but outside the zone of strictly military expertise, it should not be elevated to reverence."
 

According to Amir Taheri, the Muslim Middle East expects the US to lose resolve in the war once Bush leaves office. Taheri refers to "the increasingly bitter American debate on Iraq" as one factor in the MME's calculations.

Taheri is probably right that whoever succeeds Bush will continue the fight against radical Islam. The problem is that if Islamists perceive us as weak, they'll strike. Our shrill political discourse is creating that perception. And the shrillness comes from the Democrats.

It isn't that the Democrats and their fellow travelers among Republicans shouldn't criticize Bush. It's that, if Taheri's analysis is correct—and I think it is—then their criticism is insincere, motivated solely by political ambition. When the next successful terror attack on our soil occurs, they'll deserve all the obloquy the survivors can assign them. And if that next attack never comes, they'll deserve none of the credit for having prevented it.

(Link via LGF.)
 

I have something to add to a post at Marginal Revolution. The addition comes from a piece by someone else, but still.

Alex Tabarrok posted a quote about

the ancient employment system of the East. It's sometimes known as "living off Abdul's job." As soon as someone gets work, everyone else gives up their jobs and leeches off the employed member of the family. The longer you are employed, the more money you need, merely to support the hangers-on. Anyone with a nice home and full-time job has a vast cast of characters living off them.
 

That passage reminded me of something I'd read a few years ago from Theodore Dalrymple, about his experience as a doctor in Rhodesia:

Unlike in South Africa, where salaries were paid according to a racial hierarchy (whites first, Indians and "coloured" second, Africans last), salaries in Rhodesia were equal for blacks and whites doing the same job, so that a black junior doctor received the same salary as mine. But there remained a vast gulf in our standards of living, the significance of which at first escaped me; but it was crucial in explaining the disasters that befell the newly independent countries that enjoyed what Byron called, and eagerly anticipated as, the first dance of freedom.

The young black doctors who earned the same salary as we whites could not achieve the same standard of living for a very simple reason: They had an immense number of social obligations to fulfill. They were expected to provide for an ever expanding circle of family members (some of whom may have invested in their education) and people from their village, tribe and province. An income that allowed a white to live like a lord because of a lack of such obligations scarcely raised a black above the level of his family. Mere equality of salary, therefore, was quite insufficient to procure for them the standard of living that they saw the whites had and that it was only human nature for them to desire--and believe themselves entitled to, on account of the superior talent that had allowed them to raise themselves above their fellows. In fact, a salary a thousand times as great would hardly have been sufficient to procure it: for their social obligations increased pari passu with their incomes.

These obligations also explain the fact, often disdainfully remarked upon by former colonials, that when Africans moved into the beautiful and well-appointed villas of their former colonial masters, the houses swiftly degenerated into a species of superior, more spacious slum. Just as African doctors were perfectly equal to their medical tasks, technically speaking, so the degeneration of colonial villas had nothing to do with the intellectual inability of Africans to maintain them. Rather, the fortunate inheritor of such a villa was soon overwhelmed by relatives and others who had a social claim upon him. They brought even their goats with them; and one goat can undo in an afternoon what it has taken decades to establish.

It is easy to see why a civil service, controlled and manned in its upper reaches by whites, could remain efficient and uncorrupt but could not long do so when manned by Africans who were supposed to follow the same rules and procedures. The same is true, of course, for every other administrative activity, public or private. The thick network of social obligations explains why, while it would have been out of the question to bribe most Rhodesian bureaucrats, yet in only a few years it would have been out of the question not to try to bribe most Zimbabwean ones, whose relatives would have condemned them for failing to obtain on their behalf all the advantages their official opportunities might provide. Thus do the very same tasks in the very same offices carried out by people of different cultural and social backgrounds result in very different outcomes.
 

I found this while looking through some old files. David Letterman may be an idiot, but he and his writers can also be very funny. From The Late Show, 7/17/02:

Top Ten Alan Greenspan Euphemisms For Sex

10. "Depleting The Federal Reserve"

9. "Acquiring Some Assets"

8. "A Mid-Afternoon Rally"

7. "Opening An Account With Fannie Mae"

6. "Improving Your Long-Term Growth"

5. "Doing A Little Business On The Floor"

4. "Getting Yourself In The Red"

3. "Lump-Sum Distribution"

2. "Liquefying Your Holdings"

1. "Merging With Pfizer"
 

Tim Blair compares a cheery 2002 article with a couple of pieces from last week.

UPDATE: Blair also has a great post on the statement issued by one of the former hostages. As I've said, or at least thought, before: if I ever do anything idiotic, please don't let Tim Blair find out about it.
 

David Frum has a couple of scathing posts.
 

Michael Barone: "[H]alf of all immigrants in the world head to the United States."

From "Creation" by Michael Waters:

Vollard loved to tell his clients this story—

Degas, having arrived late for dinner,
paused with his host in the hushed, crowded parlor
—this host was a famous Parisian collector—
to view his painting recently hung there:
young ballerinas after rehearsal, sprawling backstage
or pivoted at the waist to untangle satin laces,
their hair cascading palest pinks and yellows,
exuding a weary, unself-conscious beauty.
Degas stared and stared till, without a word,
he lifted the picture in its gilt-edged frame
from its spot on the wall, the guests aghast,
then hefted it home under his arm
that he might retouch one dancer's limb.
He never returned the painting, never
passed near that gentleman's house again
while—here Vollard would clap his hands!—
all over Montmartre patrons of the arts
chained their Degas to their parlor walls.
 

An artist named Judith Zissman lost her camera in a Hawaii national park, and the Canadian family who found it decided to keep it:

Two weeks passed and nothing. Finally Zissman received a package. . . [A]ll she found were her pictures burned on a CD and a note: "We need the memory cards to operate the camera properly."

Furious, Zissman called the woman for an explanation.

"You're lucky we sent you anything at all," she had the nerve to tell her. "Most people wouldn't do that."

And after a few more exchanges, she hung up.
 

Eventually she got the camera back, but the cameranappers haven't been tarred and feathered, so the ending's not entirely happy.

(Via Mark Steyn.)
 

From (Australia's) Sunday Mail:

THE sun is getting brighter, increasing the pace of climate change and undermining claims that man alone is to blame.

A series of independent studies around the world show a significant rise in the amount of sunshine penetrating the atmosphere to be absorbed by the earth's surface and turned into heat.

. . . Measurements of sunshine levels between 1960 and 1990 have shown a decrease in the amount of sunshine reaching the earth, a phenomenon known as global dimming.

This was thought to have been caused by dust, smog and other pollutants, mainly from industrialised Western countries.

The pollutants, known as aerosols, reduced sunshine levels by absorbing and scattering solar radiation and promoting the formation of clouds that reflected radiation back into space.

In the past two decades, however, there have been huge decreases in such pollutants, partly due to industry becoming cleaner but largely because of the collapse of the Soviet Union and much of its heavy industry.
 

Damn Reagan.
 

CNN.com:

Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke says he turned down the chance to discuss climate change with Tony Blair because the British prime minister has "no environmental credentials."
 

(Via Jay Nordlinger.)
 

Michael T. Darda:

If federal spending had simply compounded by 3.1 percent per annum since 2001 — matching the 1993-2000 average — the fiscal budget would actually have been in surplus by $143 billion in February 2006. Similarly, if government expenditures had expanded at an average annual rate of 4.9 percent during the last five years (matching average growth of nominal GDP since 2001), the fiscal deficit would be a diminutive $52.8 billion, or about 0.4 percent of GDP.

In other words, we have a spending-restraint problem, not a shortage of tax receipts.
 

From beatles-discography.com (excerpt includes a bit of profanity):

Paul said: "I was sent a re-mixed version of my song with harps, horns, an orchestra and women's choir added. No one had asked me what I thought. I couldn't believe it. I would never have female voices on a Beatles record. The record came with a note from Allen Klein saying he thought the changes were necessary. I don't blame Phil Spector for doing it, but it just goes to show that it's no good me sitting here thinking I'm in control, because obviously I'm not." But Spector countered: "Paul had no problem picking up the Academy Award for the Let It Be movie soundtrack, nor did he have any problem in using my arrangement of the string and horn and choir parts when he performed it during 25 years of touring on his own. If Paul wants to get into a pissing contest about it, he's got me mixed up with someone who gives a shit."
 

I haven't seen this mentioned at the blogs I read, so:

Microsoft is investigating a security flaw that could let an attacker gain control over a vulnerable Windows computer, the company said Tuesday.

The flaw was reported to the company earlier this month by Jeffrey van der Stad, a 25-year-old Dutch programmer. The problem is related to the way the browser processes so-called HTA files, Microsoft said in an e-mailed statement. HTA files are associated with Web applications.

The vulnerability affects Internet Explorer 6 on Windows 98, Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server, according to van der Stad's Web site. "With this vulnerability it is possible to run an HTA file without the user's permission," he wrote.

. . . This is the second IE flaw within a week that Microsoft has said it is investigating and may issue a patch for. On Monday the company said it was looking into a bug that could cause the browser to crash.

Also on Wednesday, the Microsoft Security Response team on its blog said it is looking at a third IE big. The flaw has to do with the "createTextRange()" tag and could be exploited to gain control over a vulnerable PC, according to the blog posting.

"We're still investigating, but we have confirmed this vulnerability...We will address it in a security update," a Microsoft Security Response staffer wrote.
 

George Ou of ZDNet recommends that IE6 users disable Active Scripting, and points to these instructions.
 

Michael Ledeen:

In March, 2004, nearly two hundred people were killed and hundreds more wounded in suicide attacks on the occasion of the Ashurah, the holiest day in the Shi’ite calendar. The disaster led the news. last year Karbala was relatively calm, but there were bombings in Baghdad. Again, big news. This year, millions of people filled the streets of Karbala, and there was no violence. And Baghdad was also pretty calm. You might think this was newsworthy, but of course you’d be wrong. And you know why the MSM did not compare this year's celebration with those of the recent past: the comparison would have suggested progress, and that's taboo. Better to focus on Cheney's TV preferences.
 

(I'm not sure what "Cheney's TV preferences" refers to—maybe this.)
 

At TCS Daily, Ralph Kinney Bennett has a nice story about a company of Marines in Iraq.
 

I'm surprised that this passage from Jonah Goldberg hasn't received more attention:

A bunch of readers wanted to know what I meant when I said that my views on “libertarianism” have “evolved” since my earlier, full-throated, attacks. . . . [A]s I’ve watched compassionate conservatism, Buchananism, Crunchy Conservatism, and similar movements bubble-up since the end of the Cold War, I think it’s better for everybody concerned if we start from a foundation of libertarianism and build up from it. In public policy — as opposed to cultural politics — I think the default position should be libertarian and then arguments should be made for why we should deviate from libertarian dogma. I’m more sympathetic to arguments based on tradition and custom than your average libertarian. But I’m more hostile than I used to be to what you might call neo-traditionalism in the forms of “national greatness” conservatism, Buchananism, Crunchy Conservatism, and the rest. I am extremely susceptible to nostalgia, but intellectually I think it is more often than not a poison to clear thinking. Starting from libertarian assumptions puts you in a better place to identify nostalgic toxins. My problem with the so-called paleolibertarians is that they are often more nostalgic than the conservatives they denounce.
 

Despite the libertarian jokes he's made for years, Goldberg's often seemed at least as much a libertarian as a conservative. I'm thinking especially of the piece (posted 7/01) in which he imagines "Liberty City":

Assuming you are a good classical liberal type, what kind of country would you design from scratch? My guess, if you think about it, would be one with a profoundly small government with a clearly stated, nigh-upon absolute, respect for contracts and property rights. It would be colorblind and would not at all interfere in your business or personal dealings so long as you respected the rights of others and your contractual obligations. You know what I'm getting at. . . .

In a perfect world we would have open borders because in a perfect world America would be a lot more like Liberty City than it is today. Of course, we don't live in a perfect world where the ideas on the drawing board perfectly match the world outside our window.

But the ideal remains the same. Anyway, that's my theory.
 

It's nice to see him formally acknowledge his libertarian side. Now if only I understood why he likes Red Dawn so much . . .
 

Jay Cost at RealClearPolitics:

If you want to stop members of Congress from spending like drunken sailors, you cannot presume that leaders full of tough talk will not do anything except make people feel better. Cosmetic changes like this [eliminating earmarks] are not sufficient for change. You will have to get your hands dirty and start changing the way the system itself works. Limit the powers of Congress, stop members from returning to it, or change the local nature of the body. The first two seem obviously bad to me. The third implies major changes in the role of Congress in America. Is stopping pork barrel spending really worth such deep alterations? Is the "Bridge to Nowhere" really so noxious that we have to change the way our system works? I tend to think that the answer is no. After all, Congress was never meant to be a body that represented the interests of the nation as a whole. It was meant to be a meeting of the representatives of the different parts of the nation. Should we be surprised that it spends money in ways that benefit the parts but not the whole? Should we tinker around with the Madisonian system to change this? That does not seem very conservative to me.

So, as the title indicates, I am to be counted as one of the few defenders of pork. Is it a good in itself? No, of course not. It is, however, a consequence, an unfortunate side effect, of an otherwise very excellent system of government. As getting rid of pork requires one to tinker around with the system, I prefer pork.
 

Terry Teachout has a couple of excellent posts explaining his loss of interest in a specific type of artistic experience. From the first:

I’m writing these words immediately after having returned from a private concert held in the art-laden living room of a friend of mine who owns a wonderful old Bösendorfer grand. The performer was a serious amateur pianist who played two Beethoven sonatas, Opp. 109 and 111 (frivolous amateurs don’t play late Beethoven). I sat close enough to the keyboard to read the music over his shoulder. The audience consisted of twenty people, most of whom knew one another more or less well, and after Op. 111 we retired to the host’s dining room for a sit-down meal. That’s the way to hear classical music.

. . . I still love going to ballet and opera and plays and jazz clubs, mainly because they offer me something I can’t get at home. Hearing late Beethoven in my friend’s living room was a different kind of experience, to be sure, but it, too, was unique and irreplaceable. Hearing a decently played program of oft-recorded standard repertoire in the company of noisy strangers is not. Why should I come hear you play Op. 111 in Alice Tully Hall when I can stay home and listen to Artur Schnabel playing it?

. . . It may simply be, after all, that I’ve heard too many concerts in my lifetime. Anthony Powell remarks somewhere in A Dance to the Music of Time that intensive womanizing leads to specialized tastes. But I think it goes deeper than that. In fact, I have a sneaking feeling that the institution of the classical-music concert as we know it has just about run its course—and I won’t be sorry to see it go. It’s way past time for a change.
 

The second is (after some introductory paragraphs) a column Teachout wrote a decade ago on "how [he] was no longer interested in listening to new recordings of the standard repertoire":

It so happens that I have reached the time of life when you start wondering when you're going to die, and thinking about what you want to do between now and then. There is a great line about this in Cardinal Newman's Dream of Gerontius, the poem set to music so eloquently by Sir Edward Elgar: "And, ere afresh the ruin on me fall,/Use well the interval." Especially given the fact that we now live in an age when new music has finally gotten good again, I am less and less inclined to use that interval writing about new recordings of old warhorses. I'd much rather hear a piece of music I've never heard than a new recording of the Brandenburgs, no matter how good it is. This isn't to say I can't be surprised, even by baroque music—I still remember how much unexpected pleasure I got out of Gil Shaham's recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons—but there comes a time when the smart man starts following the odds, and in my experience, the odds are that there aren't going to be any more recordings of the Brandenburgs that I really, truly need to hear.

. . . I'm sure this decision will cause me to miss out on something good—probably even several hundred somethings—but I don't expect to lose any sleep over it. If God had meant me to spend the middle of my journey writing comparison reviews of two dozen different versions of the Eroica, He would have given me more patience, a bigger apartment, and a longer life.
 

Thomas Sowell:

People who today point to the flaws of "society" as the "root causes" of crime are echoing what was said in the 18th century by Condorcet in France and William Godwin in England, among others.

So are those who speak loftily of "alternatives to incarceration" or who continue to rely on hopes of "rehabilitation" or "prevention."

People with this mindset engage in much hand-wringing about what to do with sexual predators. While many ordinary people would say that they should be locked up -- and, if they are too dangerous to be at large, we should lock them up and throw away the key.

But those whose whole sense of themselves is based on their presumed superiority to ordinary people can never go along with such ideas. . . . Their thinking -- if it can be called that -- is that sexual predators who have been released from prison have "paid their debt to society" and so the slate should be wiped clean and these sadists allowed to hide their past.

It is amazing how many innocent young lives have been sacrificed for a half-baked phrase.

Going to jail doesn't repay anything. People are put behind bars as punishment and to keep them out of circulation. Child victims of rape and murder cannot be made whole. The debt can never be repaid.
 

John O'Sullivan:

Despite occasional brilliant speeches, like his defense of his government's Iraq policy yesterday, Blair has not been an effective spokesman for the Anglo-American alliance. He leaves it much weaker than he found it. It is very doubtful that Britain under any government would currently support another U.S. intervention like Iraq. The Tories, deeply feeble and appeasing towards New Labor's illusions before Cameron, are embracing those illusions even more thoroughly under Cameron at the very moment when greater realism on the economy, public services and much else is breaking through. And though whatever government follows Blair will doubtless be worse . . . , the man who has been in charge for eight years cannot entirely duck responsibility for that.
 

Query for John O’S and Andrew [Stuttaford]: If Blair was so bad, who’d have been better? I don’t mean that at all tendentiously. I’d really like to know which of the plausible alternatives—a continued Tory government under John Major? A Labour government under Gordon Brown? Some other alternative of which this layman is unaware?—would have been better, in the extremely well-informed opinion of my esteemed friends.

It is indeed a pity that Blair proved weaker in international affairs, much less pro-American, and much, much less an advocate of free markets than did Margaret Thatcher. But the Lady has been unavailable for close to 15 years now. Who’d have done better than Tony?

John writes, “[T]hough whatever government follows Blair will doubtless be worse.., the man who has been in charge for eight years cannot entirely duck responsibility for that.” But couldn’t one argue instead that Blair was making the best of a very bad British situation? With the Tories in such utter disarray—and while we’re allocating responsibility, can the Lady herself escape all such for failing to groom a worthy successor?—what right did anyone have to expect anything but a long period of Labour ascendancy? And, absent Blair, an ascendancy headed by a Kinnock-like figure? That is, someone a very great deal farther to the Left than Blair?

I’m even tempted to compare Blair with DeGaulle. Anti-American though DeGaulle may have proven, he saved France from the Left. Hasn’t Blair done at least as much for Britain?

I’m quite willing to be corrected. But I really do insist on hearing which likely alternative—that is, what actual political figure who might plausibly have been prime minister in Blair’s place—would have done any better.

Gentlemen?
 

W. Thomas Smith, Jr., has a good piece today:

Swarmer has thus far resulted in the seizing of numerous weapons caches – netting hundreds of mortar-rounds, rocket-propelled grenades, 130-mm artillery rounds, hand-grenades, machineguns, assault rifles, and nearly 2,000 rounds of armor-piercing rifle ammunition – as well as recovering terrorist training manuals and videos, stolen Iraqi military uniforms, and various triggers and devices used to detonate explosives.

Also, a substantial number of insurgents (at least one, as of this writing, is said to be a "ringleader" in the recent bombing of the Golden Dome shrine in Samarra) continue to be captured, and some will no doubt yield solid intelligence for future operations.

Yes, Swarmer is proving-out to be both a bloodless military operation – netting weapons, bad guys, and fresh intelligence – and a successful show of force aimed at energizing Iraqi soldiers and demoralizing insurgents: a tactic often employed by smart, successful armies. A triumph in any military commander’s book: Hardly "under-whelming" or a "media stunt."
 

William F. Buckley:

The point insufficiently pressed is this: Why does the United States need to shoulder the critical burden here? If Iran gets the bomb, probably a new set of strategic relationships would arise. Saudi Arabia and Egypt would clamor for the bomb, perhaps also Turkey. Regional internecine pressures would mount hugely. What it comes down to is that the United States would be critically affected, but other nations would be more directly affected, and the question repeats itself: Why do they not take on the responsibility of intervening in Iran?

Why should France not interrupt its August holiday to participate in a military mission? The interests of Germany and India are clearly affected. Where is U.S. diplomacy going with all of this? It's one thing that the United States is the ultimate deterrent power, but we act as though there were no others, and this is both emasculating and psychologically subversive.

Ideally, the initiative would be taken elsewhere, a forceful European or Middle Eastern leader mobilizing continental and Asian concern.

But failing that, the initiative would necessarily fall on us, and the question then becomes: Is it something Mr. Bush is going to handle before the end of his term in office?
 

George Will looks at Iraq:

Last Monday, the day the president again celebrated Iraq's progress from tyranny to December's ``elections for a fully constitutional government," this was life in Iraq, as reported by The New York Times:

``Shiite vigilantes seized four men suspected of terrorist attacks, interrogated them, beat them, killed them and left their bodies dangling from lampposts. ... In Sadr City, the Shiite slum in Baghdad where the terrorist suspects were executed, government forces have vanished. The streets are ruled by aggressive teenagers with shiny soccer jerseys and machine guns. They set up roadblocks and poke their heads into cars and detain whomever they want. ... 'This is our government now,' (a retired teacher) said, nodding toward Mr. Sadr's glowering face on television. ... "

Conditions in Iraq have worsened in the 94 days that have passed since Iraq's elections in December. And there still is no Iraqi government that can govern. By many measures conditions are worse than they were a year ago, when they were worse than they had been the year before.

Three years ago the administration had a theory: Democratic institutions do not just spring from a hospitable culture, they can also create such a culture. That theory has been a casualty of the war that began three years ago today.
 

At ZDNet, Christopher Dawson, a teacher and IT administrator in Massachusetts, considers the question:

Well, yes and no. Yes, it has a terrible interface. Yes, it is so loaded with ads that you can barely navigate. Yes, there's a fair amount of questionable content scattered throughout. Yes, I am now the proud owner of lots of spam in my inbox now that I created a myspace account (for research purposes only!). And yes, I certainly block it at my school.
 
However, and this is a big however, we as educators, adults, and parents need to recognize Myspace.com for the paradigm shift in communication technology that it represents. Approximately 70% of my students have a Myspace and all report checking and/or updating it daily. As I noted, I created my own Myspace to see what all of the excitement was about. It was easy enough to set up, but the most notable aspect of the process was the immediacy with which students began contacting me, thrilled that I had created a Myspace. Soon, my inbox was inundated with "friend requests," others wishing to be able to send me messages, subscribe to blogs, share bulletins, etc.
 

Worth reading in full.
 

I was in Trader Joe's a few months ago, paying little attention to the music the store had playing, when Gloria Gaynor's version of "I Will Survive" started, and just about every woman there began singing along. It was amazing and slightly disturbing to be the sole visible man among all these vocally self-affirming females. Now I relive that experience whenever I hear the track, which luckily isn't often. It came on the radio last week, though, and I noticed something I'd missed in my terror: the lines "Oh no, not I / I will survive."

Good grammar! If there's another popular song that uses the phrase "Not I" where it belongs, I don't know it. (Peter Gabriel's "Big Time," which I like, is more typical: "But not me / I'm smarter than that.") I've long felt that the Oscar Meyer jingle deserves some kind of award for making the past subjunctive ("Oh I wish I were an Oscar Meyer wiener / . . . 'Cause if I were an Oscar Meyer wiener") familiar to American ears. Maybe "I Will Survive" has earned a bit of recognition too. Just don't ask me to the ceremony.
 

Jonah Goldberg:

Majority coalitions have big internal arguments for the same reason that pirates fight over buried treasure after they find it and not when they're still looking for it: They have something to fight over. They have to govern, which means pleasing some constituencies and infuriating others. . . .

Liberals look at the infighting within the red-state coalition and think they see signs of collapse. But what they really see is just plain old American politics. . . .

As the center-right majority in this country expands, conservatives become just another constituency, to be placated when possible, snubbed when necessary. So movement conservatives are panicky because they are less important to Republican success than they once were. . . .

But liberals shouldn't be too giddy. After all, these are the problems that come from finding treasure. Liberals are still hunting for it in the wilderness.
 

Clifford D. May: "It's easy to say that if we had left Saddam alone, nothing bad would have happened. But how is that different from what was said for years about Osama bin Laden? We knew his intentions. We didn't take pre-emptive action. Don't you wish we had?"
 

America cannot afford to again embolden its enemies as it did in Beirut in 1983 and Somalia in 1993 and in other places at other times. American cannot afford to leave Iraq with Zarqawi in any condition to claim credit for the departure. The reality and the perception must be that American military and intelligence forces have mastered the skills necessary to defeat their 21st century enemies.
 

Dave Barry goes whale-watching:

I will admit that I was a teensy bit nervous about boating in whale-intensive waters, because of my memories of ''Moby Dick,'' which is about Captain Ahab, played in the movie by Gregory Peck, who looks just like Abraham Lincoln but with fewer legs. Ahab wants to kill this giant white whale, played in the movie by Marlon Brando, but in the end Marlon tips over the entire boat and everybody dies except the narrator. (In high school, when I had to read ''Moby Dick,'' which is 87 million pages long, I found myself wishing that the narrator had also died.)
 

Two posts: on the imprisonment of David Irving (she supports it); and on the destruction by the government of Tajikistan of that country's only active synagogue.

Phillips really is remarkably good.
 

Mark Steyn on our media's response to the furor over the Danish cartoons:

Many parties have behaved wretchedly in these last few weeks--European commissioners, the British foreign secretary, the U.S. State Department, significant chunks of the incoming Canadian cabinet, the dead-again Christians who lead the United Church of Canada--but the western media have managed to produce a uniquely creepy synthesis of craven capitulation and self-serving pomposity. As the great Australian wag Tim Blair observed, "Journalists can spend entire careers mouthing off about their commitment to free speech without ever having the chance to properly demonstrate it. [. . .]"

. . . [W]e prattle on about "moderate Muslims," telling ourselves that the "vast majority" of Muslims aren't terrorists, don't support terrorists, etc. Okay, why don't we hear from them then?

Because they live in communities where the ideological bullies set the pace, where the price of speaking out is too high, and so they find it easier to say nothing, keep their heads down. And why would we expect them to do any differently when the mighty BBC and CNN do the same?
 

At TCS Daily, scientist Roy Spencer has some comments:

A World Meteorological Organization (WMO) bulletin on Tuesday revealed some startling news: that greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere are at an all time high(!) From the press it received, you would think it was the kind of evidence that put the final nail in the coffin of skepticism over climate catastrophe. In reality, this earth-shaking announcement could have been made last year... or the year before... or really, just about any year out of the last 50. And I predict that it will also be true of each future year for decades to come. . . .

When will we see a story about increasing levels of manmade greenhouse gases being a sign of progress? A story that points out that our use of affordable sources of energy continue to spur increases in global productivity, health, longevity, and quality of life in general? A story about the fact that the wealth that is generated by access to fossil fuels is just what will be required to develop and refine alternative energy technologies in the future? Instead, we are constantly reminded that the U.S. did not sign on to the Kyoto treaty -- that wonderful plan to reduce global warming by an unmeasurable amount while having the additional benefit of hurting the poor, destroying jobs, and creating economic havoc in general.
 

Peter Nolan of The Freedom Institute and Sacha Kumaria of The Stockholm Network pretty much demolish the movie Syriana, for which George Clooney won an Oscar and on which he served as executive producer:

The movie’s slogan, "Everything is connected", belies the film’s main failing: that it is not at all reflective of the contents of [the book on which it's based], which describes how . . . the Clinton White House put out the welcome mat for the very dirtiest people in the oil business in return for campaign donations and fat payments to the president’s cronies.

. . . Imagine if the story of the journalists who investigated Richard Nixon’s cover-up of Watergate, All the President’s Men, had been filmed to show Jimmy Carter as the villain and you might get some idea of the liberties they take with the facts.

. . . In a sense [writer-director Stephen] Gaghan and Clooney are correct — everything is connected. The international energy markets, the war on terror, the spread of democracy and liberalism in the Middle East are all complex, interwoven issues, and no film can fully represent their interplay. But the film’s creators misconceive the true nature of corruption.

In the Middle East it is borne of dictatorship and it is political. With free markets in oil shut down in favour of grasping state monopolies, corruption is inevitable, facilitated by the secretive middlemen operating outside the regulations that govern American and European companies.

Neither, as the example of Osama Bin Laden and the well- educated middle-class pilots who led the 9/11 hijackings should show, does poverty directly drive terrorism. On the contrary, judging from Clooney’s example, if you want to drive a man to become a radical opponent of his government, just give him millions of dollars and a house in the Hollywood hills.
 

Lee Harris recounts a life-changing conversation on a train to Vienna:

Suddenly I realized that to my young Austrian companion, it made no difference whether I knew Bruckner's symphonies backwards and forwards; it mattered not in the slightest that I could appreciate the poetry of Grillparzer in the original German. I was an American, and, therefore, I had to be the kind of person who, when in a strange land, would make a bee-line to the closest McDonald's, out of fear of tasting the food of foreigners.

The piece's title is "The Night I Became An American."

Melanie Phillips posts a message from a reader:

I have no Jewish blood, no Israeli friends, and indeed, my Irish Catholic background predisposed me at one time to mistakenly find common cause with the Palestinian people. Nevertheless, I am horrifed – utterly horrified - by the endless demonisation of Israel which has become so prevalent in the British and European media, simply for defending itself against the mass murderers of Hamas and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.

I cannot recall a single other issue where black has endlessly been portrayed as white, and white as black; where a publicly-funded media with a duty to fairness and balance has so consistently told only half the story at best, while at worst telling outright lies, and openly admitting its bias by weeping for Arafat in his final illness. I cannot recall a more pernicious or more pervasive inversion of the truth than we are witnessing now in the British media's attitude to Israel and the defence of its citizens against religiously-driven murderers.
 

About a week later she posted comments from another reader:

Two of my relatives report that they recently walked out of social events in reaction to blatant antisemitic diatribes. In the second case, the offender explicitly stated that ‘the Jews rule America.’ In neither instance did anyone else object to the outburst; and in neither instance did the culprit understand that he/she had said anything objectionable.

Last night my mother was at a dinner party with a long-time friend, an academic she's known for 30 years. All of a sudden, this individual began expressing his respect for the ‘historian’ David Irving, questioned whether millions of Jews had really been murdered by the Nazis and added that the Holocaust is only discussed because Jewish groups such as the Board of Deputies see fit to exploit it for their own nefarious purposes.

What is interesting is that in none of these incidents was there any pretence of ‘criticism of Israeli government policy’; the targets, quite explicitly, were Jews as such. My mother believes that antisemitism has now become publicly acceptable in this country.
 

I understand bigotry—most people need someone to dislike—but this paranoid hatred bewilders me.
 

Molly Wood, executive editor at CNET.com, explains why it might be so.
 

Fjordman, posting at The Brussels Journal:

There are claims that immigration costs Sweden 40 to 50 billion Swedish kroner every year, perhaps even several hundred billions, and has greatly contributed to bringing the Swedish welfare state to the brink of bankruptcy. . . . [S]tatistics indicate that Scandinavians will become a minority in their own countries within a couple of generations, if the current trends continue. While their political elites insist that immigration is “good for the economy,” Scandinavians are in reality funding their own colonization.
 

Melanie Phillips has a superb and comprehensive post.
 

Canadian Jewish News reports on a speech in Toronto by Caroline Glick, deputy managing editor of the Jerusalem Post:

[Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon was warned that a unilateral withdrawal [from Gaza and several West Bank settlements] would be seen as a victory by the forces of global jihad, and that Ashkelon, just north of the Gaza border, as well as its power station and the Eilat/Ashkelon pipeline, would be put in jeopardy, and that Gaza would become a terror base like Afghanistan under the Taliban.

All these consequences have come to pass, Glick stated, with Gaza turned into a forward base for Hamas, Hezbollah (a client of Iran) and even Al Qaeda.

Heavy arms such as mortars, anti-aircraft missiles and anti-tank weapons are being smuggled in, and these will eventually find their way to the West Bank, placing Jerusalem and even Ben-Gurion International Airport within range of Palestinian fire, she said. . . .

In the face of these threats, the Israeli government under [Sharon's political party] Kadima has turned its focus not on Israel’s real enemies, but on the settlers, “demonizing and dehumanizing” them and religious Zionists. They have been called “messianics, fascists [who] incite violence and refuse to acknowledge the rule of law,” she said.

“This is the strategy of Kadima to win,” she added.
 

In a column dated 2/26/06, Glick criticized the Israeli government's failure to comment publicly on the torture and murder of Ilan Halimi by Muslims in France:

Although appalling, the absence of an official Israeli outcry against Halimi's murder is not the least surprising. Today, the unelected Kadima interim government, like the Israeli media, is doing everything in its power to lull the Israeli people into complacency towards the storm of war raging around us. Against the daily barrages of Kassam rockets on southern Israel; nervous reports of al-Qaida setting up shop in Judea, Samaria and Gaza; the ascension of Hamas to power in the Palestinian Authority; and Iran's threats of nuclear annihilation, Israel's citizenry, under the spell of Kadima and the media, appears intent on ignoring the dangers and pretending that what happens to Jews in France has nothing to do with us.

Israel's societal meekness accords well with Kadima's ideology. Its creed was best expressed by Foreign Minister, Justice Minister and Immigration Minister Tzipi Livni last month at the Herzliya Conference and is best characterized as "conditional Zionism." In her speech, Livni explained that Israel's international legitimacy is conditional. Unless a Palestinian state is established in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, she warned, Israel will lose its legitimacy as a Jewish state.

So for Livni, Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Shimon Peres and the rest of the Kadima gang, unlike every other people in the world, the Jewish people does not have an inherent, natural right to exist as a free, sovereign and independent people in its homeland. For Kadima, the Jewish people's right to self-determination in our land is conditional on our enemies' acceptance of our right to be here.
 

I have no doubt that the West will defeat the forces of radical Islam, but I fear that our victory won't come in time to save Israel from destruction.
 

Hope-inducing, that is, to those who want to see Iran's government fall, and who think the US should be doing more to bring that fall about. At WashingtonTimes.com:

Bush says Iran bombs used in Iraq

President Bush yesterday blamed Iran for helping kill American troops in Iraq, saying they are supplying some of the ever-more-lethal explosives that insurgents are using against coalition forces.
 

Tehran elite turning on extremist presidency

Iran's clerical and business establishments, deeply concerned by what they see as reckless spending and needlessly aggressive foreign policies, are increasingly turning against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
 

Richard Nadler at National Review Online:

"If Iraqis listened to American media," said Lt. Indyk, "they'd hear that their economy is wrecked and that their services are in shambles. They'd hear that they are less safe now than before the war, and that they are religious fanatics who demand a theocracy. But they don't get their news on Iraq through the Western media. They live there. And they say the opposite."
 

It looks like a joke, doesn't it? But in fact it's sensible advice to job applicants, from TechRepublic.
 

Tyler Cowen: "Each time I visit Mexico, the more I am convinced that country has turned the corner."
 

This is the first puzzle, slightly Americanized, in the "Miscellaneous—Easy" section of Brain Puzzler's Delight, by E. R. Emmet. I doubt I'll solve many in the "Miscellaneous—Hard" section.

George, John, Arthur and David are married, but not necessarily respectively, to Christine, Eve, Prudence and Rose. They remember that at a party years ago various predictions had been made. George had said that John would not marry Christine. John had said that Arthur would marry Prudence. Arthur had predicted that whoever David married it would not be Eve. David, who at that time was more interested in baseball than in matrimony, had predicted that the Yankees would win the World Series next year. The only one to predict correctly was the man who later married Prudence.

Who married whom? Did the Yankees win the World Series the next year?

Note to RSS subscribers: Sorry if you've received about a dozen versions of this post. I've been trying to get it right.

Katie Newmark quotes John Leo: "In 2003, only 1,877 African-American students scored higher than 1300 out of 1600 on the SAT." She concludes,

This is why I think folks who are concerned about diversity in higher education are wrong to focus so much energy on affirmative action in college admissions. 1800 students simply are not enough to make black students more than a small minority at top schools. If you want more black students in college, you need better K-12 education. You need to fix the inner-city school districts where three-quarters of black boys fail to graduate high school. Colleges may be able to soften their admission criteria to admit blacks with lower GPAs or SAT scores, as Wesleyan has done, but they can't relax their standards enough to admit high school dropouts.

WeeklyStandard.com has an enjoyable report from Max Boot, who recently returned from Iraq. His description of the troops' day-to-day lives includes details I haven't seen elsewhere: Wal-Mart-sized Post Exchanges, fast-food restaurants at some of the bases, "movie theaters, swimming pools, and vast chow halls where free, copious, and varied food is dished out by cheerful South Asian contract workers." Still, as one sergeant told him, "I've never worked as little as a 12-hour day yet." Recommended.

John Derbyshire:

The issue here is: What do we know about Iraq? About the people, their desires, their prospects, their capabilities? I have got into trouble with some readers, and even some colleagues, for aligning myself with George Will and Bill Buckley in a faction that believes the democratization of Iraq to be a hopeless enterprise, and a waste of America's attention and resources. . . .

I do believe that over the past generation or so, we in the West have sunk into some seriously false beliefs about human nature. This is perhaps truer in the USA than elsewhere in the West. Our national fondness for high-flown rhetoric about liberty, rights, and the brotherhood of Man, which we have inherited from our Founding Fathers, and which we have been applying with special diligence to our domestic affairs since the 1960s, has worked on us like a spell, enchanting us into folly. It has left us blind to some of the coarser, meatier realities of human nature, to the passions stirred by family, tribe, faith, race, and charisma, by the contemplation of imagined honor, glory, and transcendence. Having lost touch with those things, or having willfully blinded ourselves to them, a great deal of what goes on in the world is difficult for us to understand, and easy for us to misunderstand.
 

I agree with Derbyshire about our prospects in Iraq. Democratization is too grand a goal. Stabilization on the other hand I consider both desirable and feasible. Still, this passage from Max Boot, which seems to me good sense, hinders optimism:

[J]ust when the situation seems to be improving, a spectacular act of violence such as the mosque bombing will bring the country to the edge of the abyss. As [Col. Brian] Jones noted ruefully during a 30-minute ride between his base and the giant U.S. logistics hub near Balad, "You can go days without anything bad happening, and then you find 47 dead bodies." Which is more important — the signs of progress that mostly pass unheralded, or the continuing woes splashed across newspaper front pages? I left Iraq more uncertain than when I arrived.
 

I cheer the goal of a "free and democratic Iraq," but the time has come to acknowledge that the coalition's achievement will be limited to destroying tyranny, not sponsoring its replacement. There is nothing ignoble about this limited achievement, which remains a landmark of international sanitation. It would be especially unfortunate if aiming too high spoils that attainment and thereby renders future interventions less likely. The benefits of eliminating Saddam's rule must not be forgotten in the distress of not creating a successful new Iraq.

Fixing Iraq is neither the coalition's responsibility nor its burden. The damage done by Saddam will take many years to repair. Americans, Britons, and others cannot be tasked with resolving Sunni-Shiite differences, an abiding Iraqi problem that only Iraqis themselves can address.

The eruption of civil war in Iraq . . . would be a humanitarian tragedy but not a strategic one.
 

John Geirland in Wired's 2/06 issue:

In June 2002, [neuroscience professor Richard] Davidson's associate Antoine Lutz positioned 128 electrodes on the head of Mattieu Ricard. A French-born monk from the Shechen Monastery in Katmandu, Ricard had racked up more than of 10,000 hours of meditation.

Lutz asked Ricard to meditate on "unconditional loving-kindness and compassion." He immediately noticed powerful gamma activity - brain waves oscillating at roughly 40 cycles per second - indicating intensely focused thought. Gamma waves are usually weak and difficult to see. Those emanating from Ricard were easily visible, even in the raw EEG output. Moreover, oscillations from various parts of the cortex were synchronized - a phenomenon that sometimes occurs in patients under anesthesia.

The researchers had never seen anything like it. Worried that something might be wrong with their equipment or methods, they brought in more monks, as well as a control group of college students inexperienced in meditation. The monks produced gamma waves that were 30 times as strong as the students'. In addition, larger areas of the meditators' brains were active, particularly in the left prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for positive emotions.

Davidson realized that the results had important implications for ongoing research into the ability to change brain function through training. . . . The monks had responded to the request to meditate on compassion by generating remarkable brain waves. Perhaps these signals indicated that the meditators had attained an intensely compassionate state of mind. If so, then maybe compassion could be exercised like a muscle; with the right training, people could bulk up their empathy. And if meditation could enhance the brain's ability to produce "attention and affective processes" - emotions, in the technical language of Davidson's study - it might also be used to modify maladaptive emotional responses like depression.
 

Leon de Winter:

The European political establishment is too preoccupied with its internal problems to even contemplate problems beyond its shores. Its philosophy holds that "soft power" alone can be brought to bear in any conflict between power blocs or ideologies or civilizations. That explains Europe's inability or unwillingness to defend the freedom of speech in one of the smallest EU member states, Denmark, during the Cartoon War. That's why there is near silence in Europe about the daily anti-Semitic provocations from Iran, which says that it'll hit Jews worldwide if Israel tries to destroy the Iranian nuclear program.

The EU does not know why it should ever sacrifice its sons in military conflict. What sacred values are worth defending at such a high cost? The EU isn't prepared to enter a conflict with Iran, with all its potentially devastating human casualties and economic hardships. . . .

Europe could have suppressed the Iranian threat if it had convinced the mullahs two years ago that it was willing to contemplate military options. Only Europe lacks core values that it holds sacrosanct and that it's willing to defend at the highest cost. It will continue to operate on the diplomatic field and cling to soft power even though this is the path of certain defeat when confronted with power players burning with geopolitical and religious ambitions.

Thanks to European illusions about soft power, the free world has two options left on Iran: disaster or catastrophe. America and Israel will bleed for Europe's lack of conviction.
 

ScientificAmerican.com:

[B]iologists at the University College Dublin in Ireland have found that a strain of Pseudomonas putida can exist quite happily on a diet of pure styrene oil--the oil remnant of superheated Styrofoam--and, in the process, turn the environmental problem into a useful, biodegradable plastic. . . . [T]hough the biology-powered process results in some toxic byproducts such as toluene and requires significant energy to drive the pyrolysis, it fuels hopes that Styrofoam--and the polystyrene molecule that makes it--can become more environmentally friendly.
 

In his latest column, Jeff Jacoby remembers Harry Browne. I voted for Browne in 1996 and might've voted for him in 2000 had I requested my absentee ballot in time. I'd have regretted that second vote, though, after 9/11.
 

Thanks to Steve Bass's recommendation, I've started using Squeet, a free service that delivers blog posts via email. It was down inexplicably for several hours this weekend, but when it came back up it delivered all the posts I'd missed, and otherwise it's been flawless. Give it a try.
 

Two typically sharp pieces from Mark Goldblatt in the past week. First, on Jay Bennish:

With several teacher-education colleges now requiring their charges to express a commitment to "social justice" (read: knee-jerk leftism) as part of their curriculum, we should expect more and more refugees from Chomsky-World turning up in tweed suits in the next few years.

So what's to be done?

The Bennish fiasco provides one solution: Students should tape their teachers on a regular basis.
 

Second, on George Clooney and Hollywood:

Prior to and during Sunday night’s Academy Awards, Hollywood luminaries were busy patting themselves on the back for their courage in honoring films depicting two gay cowboys as star-crossed lovers, a gay writer as a soulful artist, a transsexual as a responsible parent, a Palestinian suicide bomber as a thoughtful, conscience-driven activist, greedy oil company executives as, well, greedy oil company executives, and Senator Joe McCarthy as (gasp) a threat to American civil liberties. As George Clooney, who had a hand in both the oil-industry-bashing Syriana and the McCarthy-bashing Good Night, and Good Luck, recently noted, “People in Hollywood do seem to be getting more comfortable with making these sorts of movies now. People are becoming braver."

No doubt about it. Hollywood is now ready to tackle any subject. With that in mind, I’d like to propose a handful of titles for next year.
 

Goldblatt's suggestions aren't satirical; they're real events that could make gripping films. But they don't conform to the leftist vision, and so they'll never see the inside of a Hollywood studio.
 

Ralph Peters's final report from Iraq is long (for him) and optimistic. He concludes:

The future remains undecided, but the last few weeks may have been a decisive turning point - against our enemies. Iraqis, military and civilian, stood up for their own country, for reason, for peace.

What more could we ask?
 

Are Iraqis who want freedom willing to fight, kill, die for it? I think we forget sometimes that the United States was born in violence and blood—that war, not documents and negotiation, created this country.

Freedom's enemies, Shia, Sunni and Wahhabist, yearn to fight and kill, and many yearn to die, for their cause. Are freedom's advocates ready to meet them in battle? If not, though Iraq may be free when we withdraw, it won't long remain that way.