From Russell Roberts at Cafe Hayek. First, on the harm caused by the Enron fiasco:

The regulatory environment that was the result of their misbehavior is the real damage done. And that regulatory envirnment has numerous costs with few if any benefits. Millions of people bear those costs in unseen ways.

Second, on "What determines wages":

Some say that a nation should strive to acquire high-paying jobs if it wants a high standard of living. In this view of the world, jobs are boxes that workers jump in and out of. Each box has a bar code that determines how much the job pays. The goal is to get a good box with a high wage attached to it.

An alternative view of the world is that the bar code is on the worker's forehead. The worker gets scanned not the job.The wage depends not on the job title but on the skills of the worker.

This sounds like an irrelevant semantic distinction—after all, workers with lots of skills are in high-paying jobs. But I think the distinction keeps you from making errors of reasoning about the source of prosperity.
 

John Derbyshire:

There is not actually a lot of point in doing so. The way the immigration rules are (and, on the Senate plan, will continue to be) structured, citizenship isn’t actually worth a damn unless you just have some irrational, sentimental desire to be an American. It is, in fact, a bit of a nuisance in one respect. Citizens have to do jury duty, but green-card holders don’t. The positive things that citizenship gets you are the right to vote, and the right to hold certain government jobs needing security clearance. Otherwise there isn’t a whole lot of difference between citizenship and green-card status. Both are liable for the same taxes; both have to register for the draft. Since only around half of U.S. citizens bother to vote in national elections, the other half would, for all practical purposes, be better off as green-card holders, in that they’d be excused jury duty. And in fact there is a campaign for giving voting rights to aliens—New York City Council has debated a bill on the subject—so even in the matter of voting, citizenship may not be a benefit for much longer.

The whole piece is excellent. It even has a Brangelina angle.
 

At The Corner, Kate O'Beirne sees Hastert's point, and Andy McCarthy offers new evidence in rebuttal.
 

ScienceDaily:

Eating fatty food does not appear to increase the risk of skin cancer. A study published today in the open access journal BMC Cancer contradicts previous research that showed a link between high fat intake and certain types of skin cancer. The results of this latest study suggest that high fat intake might even play a protective role in the development of non-melanoma skin cancer. . . .

This contradicts previous studies that suggested that high fat intake may enhance the cancer-promoting effects of ultraviolet radiation – the main cause of skin cancer.
 

Stanley Kurtz:

Marriage, as its ultramodern critics would like to say, is indeed about choosing one's partner, and about freedom in a society that values freedom. But that's not the only thing it is about. As the Supreme Court justices who unanimously decided Reynolds in 1878 understood, marriage is also about sustaining the conditions in which freedom can thrive. Polygamy in all its forms is a recipe for social structures that inhibit and ultimately undermine social freedom and democracy. A hard-won lesson of Western history is that genuine democratic self-rule begins at the hearth of the monogamous family.

That's Kurtz's conclusion. The piece includes a lot of details I didn't know, such as this:

While the broader battle with the Mormons was over democracy, both sides were largely driven by the polygamy controversy. We forget how big this issue was. Antipolygamy sentiment helped found the Republican party in 1854. Republicans called slavery and polygamy "twin relics of barbarism," and Lincoln attacked Douglas over both issues in the campaign of 1860. Today we watch polygamy on TV, but in the mid-1800s, antipolygamy novels were all the rage. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle rode the wave in 1887, when his first story about the detective Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet, featured an antipolygamy twist.
 

From Fortune, a nice piece on investor extraordinaire Charlie Munger.

(Via my dad.)
 

Robert Kagan:

The last time the Democrats were in office, the world seemed a comparatively manageable place. They have not yet had to deal with the post-Sept. 11 world. Since the only post-Sept. 11 foreign policy Americans know is Bush's, many believe — especially many Democrats — that if only Bush weren't president, the world would be manageable again. Allies could be easily summoned for the struggle against al-Qaeda or to bring pressure on Iran or to replace American troops in Iraq. Threats could be addressed without force, through skillful diplomacy and soft power. Maybe some of the threats would disappear.

This is fantasy. . . . [T]he realities of the world are what they are, and the imperatives of U.S. foreign policy are what they are. . . . If the Democrats did take office in 2009, their approach to the post-Sept. 11 world would be marginally different but not stunningly different from Bush's. And they would have to sell that not stunningly different set of policies to their own constituents.

I hope he's right about the necessary continuity of the next administration's policies with those of the current one.

Kagan's use of the word "fantasy" reminds me of something I've thought often when reading commentary on the war. I remember (sorry, no link—I didn't realize I was going to post on this) Kanan Makiya recently saying something like, "I cannot believe that the United States, with all its power, is incapable of securing the road to Baghdad Airport." My reaction was, We can secure the road in a few days, but to do so we'd probably have to bomb, killing many innocent Iraqis. Is that what you want? There's also John Lewis Gaddis's observation that President Bush "'failed miserably' in getting United Nations support for the invasion of Iraq." What, I wonder, makes anyone think the UN would ever have supported an invasion? France and Russia at least were set on doing all they could to prevent it. And on many subjects, not least the war, I find libertarians (I have libertarian leanings myself) arrogant as only those can be who know they're never going to carry true responsibility. (Think of loudmouthed baseball fans yelling insults at their preferred team. Except with perfect grammar.)

I agree with the substance of the criticisms. I wish we'd secured the airport road, that we'd obtained support from the Security Council, that we'd planned better for the war and its aftermath. It's the tone that bothers me. I realize that once again I'm challenging my intellectual betters, but I sense complacency in those criticisms, the certainty of the ineffectual.

Congressional Democrats, safe in opposition, bray boldest of all. Should they gain a majority, or one of them win the White House, I'll hope to see Kagan proved right, and that they learn humility.

(Via Clive Davis.)

In The Independent (UK). Simon's one of the few rock musicians whose thoughts on music I find interesting (Joni Mitchell and Pete Townsend are the other two I can think of). An error in the interview, maybe the result of faulty editing: Simon divorced his first wife, not his second wife Carrie Fisher, in 1975, around the time he made Still Crazy After All These Years (one of my favorite albums). He and Fisher divorced in 1984.

You can hear four full-length tracks on his new album Surprise, as well as samples of the remaining tracks, here.
 

After reading this story I was going to write something caustic about Muslims:

Model Michelle Leslie wore Islamic dress during her stay in a Balinese prison on drugs charges to avoid being raped, she says.

In an interview with New Idea, Leslie said she wore the traditional Muslim headdress to protect herself from men inside the prison she feared would rape her.

Then I realized how hypocritical I'd be to do so, considering the state of our own prisons:

A recent report by Human Rights Watch synthesized data and various perception surveys from around the United States and conservatively concluded that approximately 20 percent of all inmates are sexually assaulted in some way and at least 7 percent raped. A cautious inference is that nearly 200,000 current inmates have been raped and nearly 1 million have been sexually assaulted over the past 20 years. And, as HRW notes, prisoners with certain characteristics—first offenders, those with high voices and passive or intellectual personalities—face far higher probabilities. Moreover, the reports reveal that sexual slavery following rape is also an ordinary occurrence. Stories abound of prisoners who, once they are "turned out" (prison jargon for the initial rape) become the rapists' subordinates, forced to do menial jobs and sometimes "rented out" to other inmates to satisfy their sexual needs.

Our Constitution forbids "cruel and unusual punishment." If that term doesn't describe prison rape, I can't imagine what it would describe.

Prisoner-on-prisoner abuse is a national disgrace, inexcusable, unforgivable. I'm ashamed for my country whenever I think of it, and I wish I knew what I could do to help end it.

(First link via LGF, second via Ramesh Ponnuru.)
 

Mark Steyn:

[E]very time I pull up at the payphone in downtown Burlington, Vermont and read instructions in Spanish – in a jurisdiction with a statewide total of seven Latinos and where the only linguistic minority is French-Canadian – I marvel at a society so secure it’s voluntarily cooperating in the erection of what almost every other country on the planet knows to be one of the biggest obstacles to national cohesion.

No one should underestimate the tensions in bicultural societies with even relatively small differences. Never mind Rwanda or Bosnia, think Canada and the United Kingdom. To accede to the bilingualization of your country and to import a population that disputes your border would seem likely at the very minimum to set you up for the destabilizing tribalization that afflicts both Quebec and Ulster politics. If you’re lucky. That seems a high price to pay for a cheap pool boy. It may be an economic issue to Vincente Fox; this side of the border, it’s about sovereignty.
 

Another unpromising subject (at least to me), but Carl Zimmer makes it worthwhile. He has further thoughts at his blog.
 

AP:

Tempers are rising along with gas prices. Gas stations across the country report that drivers are taking out their gas rage against big oil by yelling at clerks and cashiers and sometimes driving off without paying.

(Via Drudge.)

By (what a surprise) Mark Steyn. His current "Song of the Week" is "Camelot," from Lerner and Loewe's musical of the same name. Steyn describes how the song came to be associated with John F. Kennedy, and how that association may have changed the course of the Democratic Party, and thus of American (and, I suppose, world) politics. Recommended even if you don't like musicals.

You can hear a representative bit of the song here.
 

From a commercial I just saw promoting an anti-cholesterol drug:

Cholesterol can come from fettucine alfredo . . . or your Grandpa Alfredo.

Okay, I understand: one's level of cholesterol is determined in part by heredity. But then:

It can come from barbecued ribs . . . or your Aunt Barbie.

How can my aunt's cholesterol level affect mine? It can't, unless . . . yecch.

I'm going to assume that the implication was accidental. Or that I hallucinated the commercial.
 

[I]n 1839, along came a man named Abner Doubleday, who as you can imagine took a lot of ribbing because his name could be rearranged to spell not only "A Barely Nude Bod" but also "Lure Dad By A Bone." Nevertheless, he invented a game that included virtually all of the elements of modern-day baseball, including Bob Costas and the song "Who Let The Dogs Out?" This led to the Civil War.

Dave Barry, Boogers Are My Beat
 

Michael Ledeen quotes Pope Benedict XVI, who spoke at Auschwitz Sunday:

"In a place like this, words fail. In the end, there can only be a dread silence, a silence which is a heartfelt cry to God — Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this?"

"Where was God in those days? Why was he silent? How could he permit this endless slaughter, this triumph of evil?"

Ledeen writes,

I think the question is more properly directed at man rather than the Almighty, who gave us the ability to distinguish between good and evil and the obligation to make our own choices. It is the question we should ask ourselves, and our leaders, every day. Why is the West once again silent, in the face of a monstrous evil? Why do even the few leaders who recognize our menace, content themselves with words rather than the decisive deeds required to rid this world of the threat of a new Shoah?

Popes are not supposed to say such things, I suppose, but we are. And we must.

Yes.
 

Ben Stein, addressing a seminar for survivors of lost servicemen:

[T]he media like to criticize [the military] because they know — in their hearts — that they will never have the guts that the man and woman in uniform have. I think media envy of your loved ones' courage has a lot do with media mockery of the war.

(Via Wlady Pleszczynski.)

Thomas Sowell has three columns on the subject, each like a series of linked bullet points. From the first:

The highest concentration of illegals is in agriculture, where they are 24 percent of the people employed. That means three-quarters of the people are not illegal aliens. But when will the glib phrase-mongers stop telling us that the illegals are simply taking "jobs that Americans won't do"?

From the second:

The only way to know whether fences, national guardsmen or anything else will work is to wait and see before issuing blanket amnesty to millions of illegal aliens, virtually guaranteeing that millions more will follow, as has happened in the past.

From the third:

Some people are worried that amnesty will give illegal aliens the same rights that American citizens have. In reality, it will give the illegals more rights than the average American citizen.

All worth reading.
 

That's Dixie Chicks' new album on first listen. (Its official title is "Taking The Long Way," which I admit is catchier.) What surprises me most is that the initial single, the statement of defiance "Not Ready To Make Nice," is such an accusatory drag. I thought they'd have enough sense to play it lighthearted.

The reviewers at Amazon sure like the album, but I think it's a real wrong turn. We'll see how my prediction holds up.

UPDATE: The first part's been borne out. Incidentally, I find "Accidents & Accusations" a ridiculous name for a pop-music tour. For $39.50-$89.50 (!) per ticket, I want entertainment, not self-justification.

 

From Mark Steyn's tribute to Alec Guinness, published after Guinness died (on 8/5/00):

Incidentally, for a classic Guinness performance, look up any old talk-show or interview where he’s asked if it’s true he gets 2¼ per cent of Star Wars plus additional points from the videos, sequels etc. There’s a beatific smile he nailed down early on, as he replies that, my word, yes, apparently, he does. Lots of British actors despise movie work, not least their own, but Guinness pulled off a deal that must have made him one of the wealthiest of English thespians: according to some accounts he made over £150 million from Star Wars.

Steyn observes,

The points-deal was worth it to [writer-director-executive-producer George] Lucas: he wanted Star Wars to be mythic and Guinness obliges; without him, it would be just a poor man’s 'Star Trek' — lame actors prancing around in crimplene jumpsuits like a Seventies TV dance troupe.

I hope Patrick Stewart made a lot of money from Star Trek: TNG. He earned it as thoroughly as Guinness earned his Star Wars take.
 

Peggy Noonan:

So here's to them. May they flourish and be safe. Here's to the heroes down the ages who did valorous, death-defying, death-ignoring things. And, this Monday, here's to someone else. Here's to the uncelebrated of the armies of the past, to all the men who went unlauded, who wanted to serve brilliantly, who didn't always quite make it or didn't quite get the call, who were replacement troops never sent to the front, whose service was comparatively undistinguished or unrecognized, but who were there, and did their job, and for us. And that's enough.
 

Cultural Heritage News Agency:

Iran-French joint archeology team at Bolaghi Gorge succeeded in discovering and identifying the remains of a gigantic palace, believed to be from the Achaemenid era (648 BC–330 BC), during their second season of excavations in the area. . . .

“After we started our excavations in the historic hill where this monument is located, we realized that it consisted of one historic layer only. Since no other layers were constructed on top of this layer, archeologists were hoping to unearth the entire palace intact. However, after they made their trenches they got to a number of wells which had been dug by illegal smugglers and also traces of bulldozers which had caused serious damage to this ancient Achaemenid palace,” said Ataee.

Plundering of archeological sites by the smugglers has become a common issue in archeology. However, according to Ataee, archeologists believe that illegal diggers cannot be held responsible for destroying of this palace by bulldozers, and it was a deliberate act by an unknown person or group of people who intended to devastate this place for a reason that is not clear for archeologists.

Via Robert Spencer, who observes,

Since some of the archeologists are apparently Muslims, they should not be so puzzled about this. They would find the mystery cleared up by the traditional Islamic idea that all artifacts of pre-Islamic civilization are manifestations of jahiliyya, the pre-Islamic period of ignorance, and as such are so much trash. They are not to be valued, venerated, respected in any way. It is likely that the people who did this damage in Iran believe these things.
 

Michael Novak:

What I do want to argue is that, after Washington and Lincoln, Bush is the bravest of our presidents. He has faced the most intense fire, hatred, contempt, heavily moneyed and bitterly acidic partisan opposition, underhandedness, betrayal, of any president in the last hundred years. He has faced hostility over a longer time, in possibly the most dangerous period of international warfare in our national history. He has remained constant, firm, decided, and generous (to a fault) with his opponents.

He has faced almost unbroken contempt from the academy, from the mainstream press, from Democratic elites, from Moveon and all the other holders of the Democratic-party purse strings, from the Democratic Congress, from his treacherous (if not treasonous) Central Intelligence Agency, and from many levels of the permanent State Department. Almost every day, he has been pummeled and undermined by powerful forces of American power. Still, he has stayed firm, with clear arguments, and an even clearer vision.
 

John O'Sullivan lists "the amendments passed, rejected or tabled" by the Senate on its way to approving the immigration bill. He omits Specter's "managers' amendment," which "requires local, state and federal governments to consult with Mexican counterpart authorities before commencing new construction." I'd guess it passed after the deadline for O'Sullivan's piece.
 

But it isn't: USC has a "Barbra Streisand Professor in Contemporary Gender Studies."

(Via Stanley Kurtz, who mentions the title in passing.)
 

At Reason.com, Ari Paul quotes "New York University professor and prominent Israel critic" Tony Judt:

British academics, says Judt (himself a British ex-pat), "have always been well to the left of the mainstream and live in a culture where that mainstream is much better informed—and more critical—about Israel than it is here in the U.S."

Is the average Briton more or less likely than the average American to know that the "murder" of Muhammad al-Dura never happened? I'd guess that they're equal in ignorance. The British academy, though, may outstrip its US counterpart in arrogance. Congrats.
 

With respect to John J. Miller, his list of "The 50 greatest conservative rock songs" could've been better. Here are a few that belonged on it. I'm confining myself to artists who didn't make Miller's cut, and one song from each:

Billy Joel, "Prelude/Angry Young Man"
The linked excerpt doesn't do justice to this smart track, about the idealist whom experience can't teach:

And there's always a place for the angry young man
With his fist in the air and his head in the sand
And he's never been able to learn from mistakes
So he can't understand why his heart always breaks
And his honor is pure and his courage as well
And he's fair and he's true and he's boring as hell
And he'll go to the grave as an angry old man

Randy Newman, "Memo To My Son"
Maybe too gentle for Miller, though he included "Stand By Your Man" and "Wouldn't It Be Nice," so it should qualify. The narrator addresses his small, troublesome child:

Maybe you don't know how to walk, baby
Maybe you can't talk none either
Maybe you never will, baby
But I'll always love you
I'll always love you

It's a lot less sappy than it reads.
 
 
Huey Lewis and the News, "Workin' For A Livin'"
No welfare queens here:

Hey I'm not complainin' 'cause I really need the work
But hittin' up my buddies got me feeling like a jerk
Hundred dollar car note, two hundred rent
I get a check on Friday, but it's already spent

Workin' for a livin' (workin')
Workin' for a livin' (workin')
Workin' for a livin', livin' and a-workin'
I'm takin' what they're givin' 'cause I'm workin' for a livin'

James Taylor, "Family Man"
A road warrior grows domestic:

The life I used to lead was a little too frantic
I guess I've just got eyes to grow old and grey
And if what I have in mind isn't super-romantic
I guess I always saw myself this way

I'm just a family man
Like it or not
Said I'm a family man
Holding onto what I've got
I'm a family man
Right by damn
I finally find out that what I am
Is a family man

Utopia, "Neck On Up"
No link, so you can't hear this catchy tune about a man maturing enough to appreciate more than the physical:

I can't determine why
But I'm a different guy
Your modus operandi
Turned me inside out
It's not that I don't care
About your fine hardware
But you've got something else there
I can't figure out
Maybe I just can't finish what I've started
Or maybe it's simply that I've been outsmarted

Now I've found my heaven
From the neck on up
You're a perfect eleven
From the neck on up

Mike and the Mechanics, "The Living Years"
The ties between generations, and the need to repair them if they break:

Every generation
Blames the one before
And all of their frustrations
Come beating on your door

I know that I'm a prisoner
To all my father held so dear
I know that I'm a hostage
To all his hopes and fears
I just wish I could have told him
In the living years

John Hiatt, "Slow Turning"
I have to assume Miller doesn't know this one, because it's a natural for his list, about the wisdom that comes with age and family. It also refers to the drummer of one of rock's most influential bands and quotes a rock classic, and what could be more conservative, in rock-music terms, than that?

Now I'm in my car
I got the radio down
And I'm yellin' at the kids in the back
'Cause they're bangin' like Charlie Watts
You think you've come so far
In this one horse town
Then she's laughin' that crazy laugh
'Cause you haven't left the parkin' lot

Time is short and here's the damn thing about it
You're gonna die, gonna die for sure
And you can learn to live with love or without it
But there ain't no cure

There's just a slow turnin'
From the inside out
A slow turnin'
But you come about
A slow turnin'
But you learn to sway
A slow turnin'
And not fade away
Not fade away

UPDATE: Two of these songs, "Angry Young Man" and "The Living Years," show up in Miller's second installment. And his criteria help explain why none of my others appears. I feel better.
 

Renwick McLean in the International Herald Tribune:

For the past month, Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands, which are just 110 kilometers off Morocco's southwestern coast, has been drawing boatloads of sub-Saharan migrants almost daily.

The Spanish government has vowed that all the migrants will be deported to their countries of origin. But Red Cross officials say there is usually no way to determine the nationalities of the migrants, and that makes deportation all but impossible. . . .

A study by the Royal Elcano Institute, a nonpartisan research organization in Madrid, concluded that Spain and the rest of Europe could be on the brink of a historic flood of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, where for the first time in years the working age population is beginning to expand while jobs are increasingly scarce.

"Both economic and demographic data provide evidence that this is only the beginning of an immigration phenomenon that could evolve into one of the largest in history," Rickard Sandell, chief investigator for demography and population studies at the institute, wrote in the report.

"The situation is so serious," he wrote, "that the possibility of a mass exodus if the African states fail to absorb their rapidly increasing working age population should not be ruled out."

(Via ¡No Pasarán!.)
 

Charles Hurt in The Washington Times:

As they prepared to vote [on the immigration bill], senators on both sides of the aisle tearfully congratulated one another and themselves for all their hard work in producing the legislation.

(Via Steve Sailer.)
 

I agree with Michael Crichton:

Before making expensive policy decisions on the basis of climate models, I think it is reasonable to require that those models predict future temperatures accurately for a period of ten years. Twenty would be better.

(State of Fear, p. 626)

Let's test all available scientifically reasonable climate models for a decade. If any of them proves valid, we can start using it.
 

Reuters (at CNN.com):

Chocolate lovers rejoice. A new study hints that eating milk chocolate may boost brain function. . . .

"Composite scores for verbal and visual memory were significantly higher for milk chocolate than the other conditions," Raudenbush told Reuters. And consumption of milk and dark chocolate was associated with improved impulse control and reaction time.

(Via Pejman Yousefzadeh—who titles his post "Best. News. Ever"—via Ann Althouse.)
 

Robert Spencer plans to write "a biography of the Prophet of Islam called The Truth About Muhammad" for Regnery Publishing:

I will work strictly from Islamic sources in order to provide a portrayal of Muhammad the way mainstream Muslims regard him today. Of course, there are many worthy biographies of Muhammad available today. I don't intend to duplicate or replace them. What I hope to do is address how the idea of the imitation of Muhammad affects Muslim behavior today, and what this reveals about the prospects for Islamic moderation and reform -- the hope for which guides so much public policy nowadays.

I also have decided to write the book, despite the obvious risk, precisely because of that risk. I don't want to live in a society in which people are afraid to state some obvious and simple truths for fear of violent retaliation.

Look for the book this fall.
 

Ann Coulter:

If you want to find the cool, anti-establishment rebels who don't answer to "The Man" on college campuses today, you have to go to a meeting of the College Republicans. They are rebelling against at least 99% of their professors. Even the original '60s anti-war protesters were rebelling against at least 5% of their professors. Today's college liberals ape the beliefs of 99% of their professors and then pretend they're on-the-edge radicals.
 

This site lists terrorist murders of Jews in Israel. It includes killings that occurred before Israel's founding in 1948.

(Via Judith Apter Klinghoffer.)

ScienceDaily:

When used indoors under certain conditions, many common household cleaners and air fresheners emit toxic pollutants at levels that may lead to health risks, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Exposure levels to some of the pollutants - and to the secondary pollutants formed when some of the products mix with ozone - may exceed regulatory guidelines when a large surface is cleaned in a small room or when the products are used regularly, resulting in chronic exposure, according to the study.

Excellent work, researchers. Keep the excuses coming.
 

At The Club For Growth, Andrew Roth praises Barney Frank; and at Cafe Hayek, Russell Roberts has kind words for George McGovern.

(Club For Growth link via Jesse Walker.)
 

Theodore Dalrymple on a simplistic portrait of Kurdish guerrillas.
 

Al Barger at BlogCritics kind of dislikes the first single from Dixie Chicks' new album:

"Not Ready to Make Nice" is the biggest bunch of whining, self-pitying s***lickin' I've heard on a record in a good while.

(No asterisks in original.)

I predict the album will hit Billboard's top five in its first week and fall out of the top ten by its fourth week.
 

In honor of Bob Dylan's 65th birthday (tomorrow), Mark Steyn reposts a column he wrote to commemorate Dylan's 60th:

"Without Bob the Beatles wouldn't have made 'Sergeant Pepper', the Beach Boys wouldn't have made 'Pet Sounds'," said Bruce Springsteen. "U2 wouldn't have done 'Pride in the Name of Love'," he continued, warming to his theme. "The Count Five would not have done 'Psychotic Reaction'. There never would have been a group named the Electric Prunes." But why hold all that against him?

Steyn's ignorance, perhaps the product of his distaste, shows: it's "Sgt. Pepper" (or better Sgt. Pepper) and "Pride (In the Name of Love)." Good line, though.
 

People worry that confronting Iran will bring retaliation within the US. They have reason:

The Hezbollah terror group - one of the most dangerous in the world - may be planning to activate sleeper cells in New York and other big cities to stage an attack as the nuclear showdown with Iran heats up, sources told The Post.

The FBI and Justice Department have launched urgent new probes in New York and other cities targeting members of the Lebanese terror group.

Law-enforcement and intelligence officials told The Post that about a dozen hard-core supporters of Hezbollah have been identified in recent weeks as operating in the New York area.

We should exploit Iran's internal strife before resorting to military action, or even the threat of military action. But we need to work fast. And posturing Democrats in Congress (the participle is nearly redundant) should let the NSA do its job.

(Via Andrew C. McCarthy.)
 

Here's another puzzle in the "Miscellaneous—Easy" section of Brain Puzzler's Delight, by E. R. Emmet. (The first one I posted from this book is here.)

The M.C.C. (Mathematicians' Cricket Club), to which I belong, always holds its annual dinner in January. I was trying to find the date of the next dinner from some fellow members, but they were being rather foolishly unhelpful. One of them told me that the date was an odd number, another that it was greater than 13. A third told me that it was not a perfect square and a fourth that it was a perfect cube. And finally Charles Computer, the captain of the club, told me that the date was less than my highest score last season. (This was in fact 17, and I thought it was rather nice of Computer to bring this in.)

I subsequently discovered that of all these five statements only one was true.

What was the date of the dinner?

Harold C. Hutchison at StrategyPage:

In a recent press conference, U.S. Congressman Jack Murtha claimed that U.S. Marines massacred Iraqi civilians in the wake of a bomb attack near Haditha this past November. The matter is currently under investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, who will determine the facts of the case, and make the decisions as to whether or not people need to answer to a court-martial. . . .

In this day and age, it doesn't take long for a story to spread. Torture allegations last July by Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois were promulgated across the world in a matter of hours, and al-Jazeera featured them prominently. The same was also true of Newsweek's story claiming a Koran had been flushed by guards at Guantanamo Bay. In both cases, the charges were investigated. In both cases, the claims proved to have little, if any, bearing to what really happened. . . .

The comments by Congressman Murtha, who has advocated withdrawing American forces from Iraq, are also already on their way around the world - while NCIS is still investigating the case. The worst thing about this is that the myth of the "Haditha massacre" will be used to by various terrorist groups for recruiting, and the new recruits means that there is a greater chance that troops will get killed.
 

ScienceDaily:

The world's smallest life forms could be the answer to one of today's biggest problems: providing sustainable, renewable energy for the future. Using a variety of natural food sources, bacteria can be used to create electricity, produce alternative fuels like ethanol and even boost the output of existing oil wells, according to research being presented this week at the 106th General Meeting of the (ASM) American Society for Microbiology in Orlando, Florida.
 

Caroline Glick adds context to analyses of the Palestinians' economic straits:

[F]or all of their shrieks and whines, there has never been a group of more self-sufficient people on the verge of a humanitarian disaster than the Palestinians. They're swimming in money. If the PA suffers from a "humanitarian disaster" it will be wholly and completely self-induced. Since its establishment in 1994, the PA has received more aid per capita than any other group of people in the world has ever received - more than the victims of genocide in Sudan or Rwanda, more that the victims of the tsunami in Asia, more than the Iraqis or the Afghans - more than anyone.

As the researcher Arlene Kushner pointed out in an article published this week by Ynet those miserable unpaid PA employees include some 4,000 Palestinian terrorists who Abbas placed on the PA payroll. Terrorists sitting in Israeli prisons get $4 million a month. Several million more go to paying the families of dead terrorists. Kushner quoted former PA and Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan admitting that of the $10 billion in international aid that the Palestinians have received over the past 12 years, some $5b. has gone missing.

Abbas, who politely warns against "explosions," himself controls up to $1b. that he prefers not to use to save his people from that "humanitarian disaster" he's so bent out of shape about. As Kushner reminds us, in 2002, Salam Fayyad, who then served as the PA's finance minister, set up the Palestinian Investment Fund (PIF) in an attempt to prevent Arafat from absconding with all the PA's money. At least $700m. should still be deposited in the PIF which had been valued at $1b. in recent months.

Abbas, who bemoans the poor Palestinian doctors and teachers that have not received their March salaries, decided last summer - against the expressed warnings of the International Monetary Fund - to give significant pay increases to the PA's employees. Civil servants were given raises of some 15-20 percent and militia members were given raises of 30%-40%. Kushner notes that at the time of Arafat's death in November 2004, his grieving widow Suha refused to unplug his respirator until Abbas and the PA prime minister Ahmed Qurei agreed to her demands for a significant cut of her husband's personal wealth which was assessed at some $3.1b. Apparently it hasn't occurred to anyone that Arafat might have liked to use that money to avert a "humanitarian disaster" among his beloved people.
 

Anne Bayefsky:

This month the U.N. Palestinian representative, Riyad Mansour, issued two letters to the U.N. Security Council. The first, dated May 5, contains the "names of martyrs killed by the Israeli occupying forces" (emphasis mine). Included in the list is Sami Salim Mohmed, the Palestinian suicide bomber that killed 11 people and wounded 66 at a food stand in Tel Aviv on April 17. Ten days later on May 15, the U.N. representative issued another letter listing as a “martyr” Elias Ashkar. The Israeli army had successfully targeted and killed Ashkar, the man responsible for constructing the Tel Aviv bomb and dispatching the bomber.

Mansour’s messages also found their mark. Following the Tel Aviv bombing, the U.N. Security Council engaged in negotiations over whether to condemn the attack. But an agreement could not be reached, even for a press statement. Council member Qatar refused the necessary consensus. Only a week later, however, the council had no difficulty adopting a presidential statement condemning "in the strongest terms," as "terrorist acts," the bombings at an Egyptian Red Sea resort.
 

Dave Barry:

[I]n my youth, baseball ruled. Almost all of us boys played in Little League, a character-building experience that helped me develop a personal relationship with God.

"God," I would say, when I was standing in deep right field -- the coach put me in right field only because it was against the rules to put me in Sweden, where I would have done less damage to the team -- "please, please, please don't let the ball come to me."
 

Rich Lowry:

Oddly, our country’s domestic statists tend to be national-security libertarians. They want more regulation, taxation, and spending—i.e., more state power—in every instance, unless it is an area involving protecting us from our enemies. Then, they suddenly think the government that governs least governs best.
 

Washington Times:

They are highly motivated, battle-hardened, mobile -- and therefore, dangerous. And the return of Europe's jihadists from Iraq is giving the Continent's intelligence services nightmares.

As far back as October, Iraqi Interior Minister Bayan Jabr warned that intercepted correspondence between Abu Musab Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, and other figures in the movement had revealed a decision to send large numbers of Islamist volunteers back to their countries of origin to wage holy war.

Mr. Jabr said several hundred militant fighters had left for home by last fall.

Sunday Times of London:

MORE than 230 foreigners identified by MI5 and Scotland Yard as suspected terrorists have been allowed to stay in Britain as asylum seekers.

(First link via ¡No Pasarán!, second via LGF.)
 

Jerry Taylor:

Having spoken at several conferences of the Society of Environmental Journalists, I can tell you without hesitation that enviro beat reporters are more often than not little more than PR vessels for organized environmental interest groups. Whether the bias is intentional or unintentional is irrelevent—critical thinking and healthy skepticism simply go out the window when your average enviro reporter talks to a credentialled Green lobbyist or activist. . . .

The one thing that might undermine corporate opposition to ”doing something” about global warming is the idea that emissions controls are inevitable. . . . In short, there’s a lot at stake regarding how the politics of this issue is spun.

Although few reporters seem to have figured this out, the environmentalists certainly have.
 

Stephen Pollard:

Just back from seeing The Da Vinci Code. Not having read the book, I wanted to see what the fuss is all about. I shouldn't have bothered. It's an absolute pile of crap. Save two and a half hours of your life and give it a miss.

Okay, I've been warned.
 

AP:

The Palestinian intelligence chief, an ally of moderate President Mahmoud Abbas, was seriously wounded by a bomb packed with metal pellets at his headquarters Saturday in what security officials called an assassination attempt.

The intelligence chief, Tareq Abu Rajab, is a top official in Abbas' Fatah movement. Fatah did not openly accuse Hamas, but Abu Rajab‘s deputy did not rule out the Islamic militant group‘s involvement. . . .

Abu Rajab underwent surgery at nearby Shifa Hospital in Gaza, where doctors stopped the bleeding and stabilized him before transferring him to Israel ‘s Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv.

Lying on a bloody sheet, he was rolled on a gurney from the Palestinian ambulance to the waiting Israeli vehicle. Israeli medical personnel immediately treated Abu Rajab before putting him in the ambulance and taking him to Ichilov.

Via Charles Johnson, who comments,

Good thing Abu Rajab and his pals haven’t succeeded in wiping out Israel yet. That Zionist entity sure comes in handy when you need emergency medical assistance.
 

Jed Babbin has an excellent piece at RealClearPolitics on the ways in which Bush continues to disappoint the Right, and the urgent need for Bush and his base to realign:

If we don't, the divorce court may award Nancy Pelosi one House, and Hillary may be able to grab the other.

Here's another good line:

Mexico would be less corrupt - and probably better-run - if its president were Tony Soprano.

The whole piece is worth reading for Babbin's analysis, which captures the frustration Bush provokes in those who want to support him.
 

On the immigration debate:

On Tuesday, 55 senators (including 18 Republicans) voted against an amendment by Senator Isakson of Georgia to delay the start of any legalization program until the border-security measures in the bill “have been fully completed and are fully operational.” This explicit rejection of Enforcement First removes all doubt: The bill is nothing but a rerun of the 1986 immigration fiasco, which featured amnesty for nearly 3 million illegals in exchange for the hollow promise of future enforcement.

On tax cuts and government spending:

[E]ven if it were the case that tax cuts do not, by themselves, make it easier to cut spending, that would hardly negate the economic case for cutting taxes that punish saving, investment, and work. It would only prove that there is no easy way to get a welfare state to reduce spending. And that is something that unhappy experience should already have taught us.

On relations with Libya:

It’s understandable . . . that some are upset about the U.S.’s restoration of diplomatic ties with Libya. But the thaw in relations doesn’t reflect approval of those acts. It is, rather, a response to Qaddafi’s decision to dismantle his nuclear-weapons program, which he feared would provoke American attack in the wake of Saddam Hussein’s downfall. Bush’s foreign policy has rightly been designed to prove that that there are penalties for seeking weapons of mass destruction and benefits for renouncing them. Normalizing ties with Libya is a necessary part of that strategy.
 

Phyllis Chesler:

Will [Aayan] Hirsi Ali find the support she deserves in America? I certainly hope so, but I am not overly optimistic. The Islamization of America is also well under way. The process is not the same as in Europe. Despite the myth of an all-powerful Zionist lobby, Islamists and their Western supporters have an increasing influence on American campuses and, to a large extent, the mainstream media. Here, Islamist hate speech and Big Lies are often protected as free speech and as worthy of academic freedom. Whereas in Europe, many stood in solidarity with the Danish cartoonsists and reprinted their work widely, the cartoons did not appear in the American mainstream media.
 

The Editors of NRO (bottom entry):

Only two people have ever been named honorary citizens of Paris. One was Pablo Picasso; do you know the other? Why, who other than that towering figure of our time, that standard-bearer of truth and justice in a corrupt age, that glorious symbol of resistance to the cruel tyranny of AmeriKKKa, that author, poet, and media star Mumia Abu-Jamal. Mr. Abu-Jamal, you may recall, was sentenced to death in 1982 for the murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Abu-Jamal shot Faulkner five times (the first time in the back) in front of four eyewitnesses. If you don’t think that is major-league heroism, you must not be a member of the international Left. The honorary citizenship came in 2003. Now the City of Light has celebrated our hero yet again. In an April 29 ceremony (which can be watched here), a street in the Paris suburb of St. Denis, leading off Human Rights Square and just a stone’s throw from Nelson Mandela stadium, has been named Rue Mumia Abu-Jamal. The great man himself, ever gracious, favored the assembled worshippers with a recorded speech. In the light of recent events in Paris, you might think Parisians would shy at heaping honors on a cop-killer; but as a Frenchman once said: Les imbéciles ont toujours été exploités.

UPDATE: According to an AP report posted at this page, Mumia received Parisian citizenship in 2001; and according to Michael Goldfarb in this week's newsletter from Weekly Standard, at least one other person, novelist Richard Wright, has been named honorary citizen of Paris. (The AP story notes that Picasso "was the last person to receive the title.")
 

Victor Davis Hanson:

It is the great distorter, one that punishes the hard-working poor states who need fuel to power their reforming economies while rewarding failed regimes for their mischief, by the simple accident that someone else discovered it, developed it, and then must purchase it from under their dictatorial feet. We must drill, conserve, invent, and substitute our way out of this crisis to ensure the integrity of our foreign policy, to stop the subsidy of crazies like Chavez and Ahmadinejad, and to lower the world price of petroleum that taxes those who can least afford it.
 

Mark Goldblatt looks back:

The U.S. did not oust Saddam only because we thought he had, or was developing, WMD. Rather, the U.S. ousted Saddam because we thought he had, or was developing, WMD, which, along with other violations, put him in breach of the 1991 cease-fire agreement. Critics of the war, including Democratic-party hacks and Hollywood mouth-breathers, continually omit that last clause. That omission lies behind their smirks as they inquire: “Well, if we’re going to topple Saddam because he’s a bad guy, why don’t we go after all the other bad guys?”

Answer: Because the other bad guys aren’t in breach of a cease-fire agreement.

He concludes:

The judgment of history on Bush-haters will not be kind.

Worth reading in full.
 

Tiscali UK, 3/16/06:

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, on Wednesday compared the threat from Iran’s nuclear programs to the September 11 terror attacks on the United States.

"Just like September 11, only with nuclear weapons this time, that’s the threat. I think that is the threat," Bolton told ABC News’ Nightline program.

"I think it’s just facing reality. It’s not a happy reality, but it’s reality and if you don’t deal with it, it will become even more unpleasant."

(Via the invaluable LGF.)
 

At dinner tonight my dad introduced me to a term from biology that I'd never heard. I'm very glad to know it, but I'm not comfortable typing it here. If you'd like to learn it, go to this interview with geneticist Steve Jones and search for sneaky f. Then read the rest of the interview, because it's extremely interesting. Sample:

We're different from other primates. Now, that may well be partly because there are rather few closely related primates to us; there are really only three of them. But I think what's much more important is that we, as Homo sapiens, are the only creature really that has stepped outside the Darwinian limits in every conceivable way. We don't behave like other primates. We're not, in a lot of important ways, like any other animals. For example, we, in terms of our body size, are about 10,000 times more abundant than we ought to be, which is simply a statement to me that we have stepped outside the ecological, evolutionary rules.
 

From Sarah Weinman, crime fiction columnist for the Baltimore Sun:

Over a three week period this summer (2005), the following sales numbers were recorded for a NYT bestselling thriller writer's most recent book:

B&N: 4,140
Waldenbooks: 4,888
Borders: 3,993
Anderson Merchandisers/Walmart: 47,671
Target: 16,341
Price/Costco: 17,291
Sam's: 14,108
Amazon: 320

Both Weinman and the author in question have comments.

(Via Terry Teachout.)
 

Mark Steyn:

Frank Gaffney's new book War Footing is subtitled 10 Steps America Must Take to Prevail in the War for the Free World, and includes, as one might expect, suggestions for the home front, the Middle East, the transnational agencies. But it's some of the other chapters that give you pause when it comes to the bigger picture — for example, he urges Washington to "counteract the re-emergence of totalitarianism in Latin America." . . . [A]s Gaffney writes, "Many Latin American countries are imploding rather than developing. The region's most influential leaders are thugs. It is a magnet for Islamist terrorists and a breeding ground for hostile political movements . . . The key leader is [Hugo] Chávez, the billionaire dictator of Venezuela who has declared a Latino jihad against the United States."

. . . At first glance, an Islamo-Chávismo alliance sounds like the bus-and-truck version of the Hitler-Stalin pact. But it's foolish to underestimate the damage it could do. As Gaffney points out, American taxpayers are in the onerous position of funding both sides in this war. The price of oil is US$50 per barrel higher than it was on 9/11. "Looking at it another way," writes Gaffney, "Saudi Arabia — which currently exports about 10 mbd — receives an extra half billion dollars every day." Where does it go? It goes on Saudi Arabia's real principal export: ideology — the radical imams and madrasas the Saudis fund in Pakistan, Central Asia, Africa, the Balkans, Indonesia, the tri-border region of Latin America, not to mention Oregon and Ontario. But, not content with funding the enemy in this great clash of civilizations, American taxpayers are also bankrolling various third parties, like Venezuela. And there's nothing like increasing oil wealth to drive powerful despots down ever crazier paths. . . .

After 9/11, Bush told the world: you're either with us or with the terrorists. But an America that for no reason other than its lack of will continues to finance its enemies' ideology has clearly checked the "both of the above" box.

Gaffney recommends, and Steyn agrees, that the US "switch over to FFVs (flexible fuel vehicles)." I'm fervently pro-free-market, but the free market is enriching our enemies and making possible their war against us. A few months ago I linked to an article in which Robert Zubrin argues that ethanol and methanol are now practical substitutes for gasoline. If Zubrin's right, then the time to mandate FFVs has come.
 

At FT.com, a report on the recent violence in São Paulo:

Life in São Paulo returned to something like normal by the middle of this week after prison riots and attacks on police and property orchestrated by organised crime left 132 people dead and 53 injured between Friday night and Tuesday morning. . . .

Reporter Dante Rodrigues made contact with Orlando Mota Junior, known as Macarrão, a leader of the Primeiro Comando da Capital (First Command of the Capital, or PCC), the criminal organisation that orchestrated the riots and attacks.

Two things were remarkable about the interview. First, Macarrão was speaking on a mobile telephone from inside prison. Second, he appeared to confirm what many feared: the attacks ended because the PCC called them off after reaching a deal with state authorities.

Via Robert Mayer at Publius, who comments,

For a second, imagine how these killings actually began. [The PCC's] leaders simply made a telephone call — from jail — and the gangsters went on a rampage. The story is that after the police went on their own crackdown, the violence finally stopped. This seems implausible, as not only are the police corrupt, but they are far outnumbered and outgunned.

Mayer also links to a report, by "Silverback" at Guerrilla News Network, on a favela (ghetto) outside Rio de Janeiro. Silverback spoke with members of the drug gang that controlled the area:

Every time we entered a new part of the favela, we had to be cleared to shoot photos. They killed a journalist a few years ago who went in without permission. I saw one of the bosses for a bit… he was so young looking, and had this amazingly casual way about him. When I asked how much killing and Machiavellian scheming he would have had to engineer to get to the top, my guide told me that it was all very casual.

"The factions don’t use hierarchies. When the bosses are killed or put in prison, the new ones just rise up naturally. It’s not like the mafia. This is Brazil. But most of them die before they reach 25."
 

Mark Steyn:

Suppose you're a savvy mid-level guy in Washington, you've just noticed a pattern, you think there might be something in it. But it requires enormous will to talk your bosses into agreeing to investigate further, and everyone up the chain is thinking, gee, if this gets out, will Pat Leahy haul me before the Senate and kill my promotion prospects? There was a lot of that before 9/11, and thousands died.

And five years on?

My contempt for Congress grows apace.

Expatica:

Four youths suspected of gang-raping a 16-year-old schoolgirl in a Berlin park last week have been released after briefly being detained by police in a move which has fuelled anger in the German capital.

The youths, aged 13 to 15, allegedly attacked their victim as she walked home from school in the Charlottenburg district which is generally seen as safe area with low crime rates. . . .

Justice Senator Schubert defended the city's justice officials in this case by saying that protecting victims was not a reason to keep suspects in detention before they had been convicted of a crime.

(Via LGF.)
 

Robert Roy Britt:

Previous work has slowed light to a crawl. But in the new research, a pulse of light is given a negative speed and—as if just to make your head spin—the researcher says the experiment made light appear to exceed its theoretical speed limit.

If you totally confused, don't worry. This reporter doesn't get it either. Nor do a lot of really smart scientists.

"I've had some of the world's experts scratching their heads over this one," says Robert Boyd, a professor of optics at the University of Rochester. "It's weird stuff."

The story includes a graphic and an animation to help explain the phenomenon. And I'm glad Britt noted this, which I'd have wondered about:

What about Einstein, who said nothing can exceed light-speed?

"Einstein said information can't travel faster than light, and in this case, as with all fast-light experiments, no information is truly moving faster than light," Boyd said.
 

Michael Ledeen posts on Mustafa Ozbilgin, a Turkish judge murdered Wednesday:

I knew Mustafa, back in the early eighties when I did some counter-terrorism work in the Pentagon. He was an extraordinary man. At that time, he presided over the most important terrorist cases, of which there were many. He had no security, and did not carry a gun. His salary was miniscule, even by the standards of an American worker, yet he took enormous pride in his work, as he should have. It always struck me as outrageous that such a fine man, with the ideal judicial temperament and a lot of wisdom, should be so grossly underpaid and underprotected. . . .

Mustafa was killed because he was a fine man and an outstanding judge. People of the sort that killed him do it precisely because they want such fine people dead or dominated.
But we're negotiating.

I wrote last year, "I can't imagine how frustrated Ledeen must be, perceiving all this so clearly, explaining it so often and so well, yet seeing nothing done about it." Ozbilgin's killing can't have improved his mood.

Later, Michael Rubin posted that Turkey is "boiling":

At the funeral today of Justice Ozbilgin, crowds booed Foreign Minister Gul. Prime Minister Erdogan was a no-show. They applauded President Sezer and the Generals who attended. The situation is tragic but the crisis has been a longtime coming. . . . Erdogan may not have pulled the trigger, but he certainly greased the gun. . . . [H]opefully this tragedy will be a wake-up call not only for Ankara, but also for Washington.

Rubin points to "a series of articles . . . which chart the evolution of the ruling party’s assault on secularism."
 

Clive Davis posts an excerpt from Albert Speer's prison diary.
 

Mark Steyn:

Do you remember that anthrax business just after September 11th? At the height of the scare, Tom Daschle came out and announced that 34 of his staffers had tested positive for anthrax. I was horrified: Tom Daschle has 34 staffers? Why? Presumably to read all that poorly drafted legislation the Senators themselves never have time to look at before voting on. . . .

Can you get small government from big legislators? I doubt it. Take this foot-of-page-37 item from the Associated Press:

"If barbers need a license to cut hair, there’s no reason the government cannot set requirements for tax preparation, said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa."

Good grief. That’s the "Republican" position? Isn’t the real question this: why do so many citizens need professional tax preparation that tiny towns that can’t support a gas station or general store nevertheless have an H & R Block office? Why? Because no reasonably well-informed citizen can understand – or even read – the tax code. So a minimum-wage waitress with a part-time housecleaning business requires professional assistance to file her taxes. That’s a disgrace to a free society.

Read it all.
 

James Thayer at WeeklyStandard.com (1/26/06):

"Every community recycling program in America today costs more than the revenue it generates," says Dr. Jay Lehr of the Heartland Institute.

A telling indicator is that cities often try to dump recycling programs when budgets are tight. . . .

Franklin Associates, which provides consulting services for solid waste management, estimates that curbside recycling is 55 percent more expensive, pound for pound, than conventional garbage disposal.

(Via Tim Worstall, via Clive Davis.)
 

A lot of people (including at least one skeptical about its accuracy) have already posted the following quote, but I only just read it, and I like it too much not to add to the pile. Tonight the Cato Institute presented the third biennial Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty to Mart Laar, former prime minister of Estonia. According to Brink Lindsey's description, Laar led the country's shift "from communism to a democratic market economy." Laar reportedly explained his actions thus:

I had read only one book on economics — Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose. I was so ignorant at the time that I thought that what Friedman wrote about the benefits of privatization, the flat tax and the abolition of all customs rights, was the result of economic reforms that had been put into practice in the West. It seemed common sense to me and, as I thought it had already been done everywhere, I simply introduced it in Estonia, despite warnings from Estonian economists that it could not be done. They said it was as impossible as walking on water. We did it: we just walked on the water because we did not know that it was impossible.

I hope it happened that way. And I concur with Pejman Yousefzadeh:

While I think all of us can agree that it is wonderful that Estonia and Russia are turning to free market economics and profiting as a result, shouldn't it rankle quite a bit that these pieces of the former Soviet Union should now be light years ahead of the United States when it comes to things like tax policy and the dismantling of the regulatory state?

I think it should rankle. I think it should rankle a great deal.
 

Jeff Jacoby on an anti-Wahhabist Muslim and the lawsuit he faces from the Islamic Society of Boston:

Ahmed Mansour . . . holds three degrees from Cairo's Al-Azhar, the foremost religious university in the Islamic world, where he was appointed a professor of Muslim history in 1980. He would probably be there still if his scholarship hadn't gotten in the way. The deeper Mansour delved into the history of Islam, the clearer it became to him that the faith had been perverted into a "false doctrine of hate" — a doctrine that has been spread across much of the Muslim world and that has fueled great cruelty and bloodshed. . . . Before fleeing for his life, he worked with Egypt's leading human-rights activists, promoting democratic values, funneling assistance to persecuted Christians, and advocating for the reform of religious education.
 
This is the Islamic Society of Boston's idea of an anti-Muslim conspirator? Then what, one wonders, is its idea of Islam?

This collection of six-month deadlines set by the New York Times columnist is rather amazing.

(Via John Podhoretz.)

UPDATE: Rich Lowry admits to sympathy with Friedman.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I have to think I'm doing something right when Glenn Reynolds and I keep finding the same items noteworthy.
 

Max Schulz has an excellent piece "separat[ing] fact from fiction." Sample:

The oil companies in today’s crosshairs are in no position to dictate world oil prices. Compared to government-owned oil companies like Saudi Aramco, "Big Oil" are small players. As the American Petroleum Institute’s Red Caveney said, "Nearly 80 percent of the world’s reserves are owned by these national oil companies and a mere 6 percent are controlled by investor-owned companies." Exxon and Chevron are big. But the industry in which they operate is truly gargantuan.
 

American Conservative Union chairman David Keene, quoted by Deroy Murdock:

"How large does the Republican majority need to be before Republicans start acting like the responsible stewards of taxpayers’ money we thought we were electing?"
 

John Derbyshire:

It was new and astonishing, to the degree that I was swept away by it. . . . I sucked [Nabokov’s prose] in, reading and re-reading, of course not getting a tenth of the allusions and effects, but knowing that there was something there to be got. I even started to talk like Humbert Humbert, the book’s first-person narrator, dropping words like "callypygean" and "phocine" into my conversation, to much derision from my peers. To this day I can recall the expression on the face of one of my schoolmasters—a rugged old RAF veteran with a clipped George Orwell mustache, who had slaughtered thousands in the great bombing raids on German cities—when I slipped the term "soi-disant" into an otherwise humdrum sentence. His expression was more amusement than amazement, and he started to say something, but checked himself and turned away, I suppose to hide his swelling mirth.

* * * * *

What would Vladimir Nabokov say if he could view our present scene? I think he would weep. Political Correctness was only embryonic in the mid-1950s, and Nabokov poked some gentle fun at it in Lolita:

…according to the rules of those American ads where schoolchildren are pictured in a subtle ratio of races, with one—only one, but as cute as they make them—chocolate-colored round-eyed little lad, almost in the very middle of the front row.

He would have been horrified to see [. . .] how these silly but harmless and well-intentioned courtesies have swollen into a monstrous dreary tyranny, shutting off whole territories of speech and thought, acting as a sheet anchor to hold back our commercial and intellectual progress, corrupting our constitutional jurisprudence, turning unscrupulous mountebank attorneys into billionaires, and making art like Nabokov’s incomprehensible to millions who, had they been born a few decades earlier, would have gotten from it such unexpected, unimagined delight as I got among the birdsong and bowlines in the Sea Cadets’ hut at Northampton School for Boys 44 years ago.
 

James S. Robbins thinks it may happen sooner than the experts predict:

It is hard to believe that today, with the widespread knowledge of nuclear theory; 60 years of experience with nuclear weapons in various countries around the world; the availability of former Soviet scientists and technology; the assistance of rogue states like North Korea; underground networks of the type put together by A. Q. Khan to build Pakistan’s nuclear weapon; the incredible surplus wealth being pumped into Iran daily due to inflated oil prices; and a highly motivated regime that seeks to develop nuclear capability as soon as possible—it is hard to believe that it would take Iran a decade to obtain a nuclear weapon.
 

Rich Lowry and Kate O'Beirne (sub. req. for full article):

Congressional Republican governance has gone through phases that can be roughly described as Revolution (1994–1996), Consolidation (1996–2002), and Deterioration (2002–present). The deterioration has steadily gotten worse. The Republican majority has lately been notable for its bungling, fecklessness, self-serving defensiveness, and hysteria — sometimes all at once. . . .

[O]nce Republicans have given away the premises of their governing philosophy — in this case, that prices and executive compensation are determined by the market — they have no foothold to resist Democratic initiatives. Try as they might, there is no way that Republicans can be more socialistic and economically populist than the Democrats. They have set up a bidding war that the GOP must, by definition, lose.
 

Catherine Seipp, in her favorable review of Joanne Jacobs's new book about a charter school:

Our School tells a moving and pretty amazing story, of determined students and teachers who really do transform D and F grades to passing and above—once the students put their minds to it and their parents understand that "F no es fabuloso" (as one actually assumed), and also that they really shouldn’t make their children miss school and finals for month-long trips visiting family in Mexico.

Just what the teachers are up against is revealed in a chapter about how the students learn to analyze and interpret a simple sentence: Why didn’t a star basketball player named Kisha play in the championship game? Some answers: "She found out she was pregnant." "She was run over the day before." "She was embarrassed to play in front of her boyfriend." "Her daughter graduated." "She punched the coach in the nose." "She forgot to shave her legs."

Jerry Taylor & Peter Van Doren:

For the most part, Republicans are a disgrace. They either don't know or don't care to know what they are talking about. The "moderates" sound like Ralph Nader; the conservatives, like Jimmy Carter. It’s as if Ronald Reagan never existed.
 

At YouTube: "Jedi Breakfast." Some profanity.

(Via Steve Bass.)
 

Bret Stephens:

Today, the international community is less intent on stopping Tehran from getting the bomb than it is on stopping Washington from stopping Tehran.

He offers four good suggestions. I hope someone in the Administration is thinking along these lines.
 

Dave Barry offers examples, such as that demonstrated by Warren Christopher, "who until his resignation held the high-level position of U.S. secretary of state despite looking like a severely depressed squirrel":

His secret? He had excellent table manners, which he used to influence powerful foreign leaders at state dinners.

CHRISTOPHER: May I offer you some dessert, Your Excellency?

FOREIGN LEADER: Sure ... But wait! This is your last Pez!

CHRISTOPHER: Take it! I insist! And keep the dispenser!

FOREIGN LEADER: Wow! The Papa Smurf model! I guess I'll allow a U.S. naval base in my country after all!
 

SubOne at Instapunk:

[W]hile the bloggers were fighting their various and diverse battles in the name of truth, justice, and common sense, the MSM ocean was harnessing its entire immensity on just one story, told an infinite number of times, in every possible inflection, from every direction, and with the deadly persistent accuracy of a dripping tap: George W. Bush is no good. . . .

It took the MSM three years to bring George W. Bush's approval ratings down from their post 9/11 high to 52 percent on election day 2004. It's taken them just 18 months [corr. per Tim] to bring him down another 20 to 25 points. They never forgot their mission. While the princeling bloggers pissed and moaned about Harriet Miers, and immigration, and federal spending, the MSM kept on dripping out its one story, and now they are within reach of their goal — Democrats restored to the majority in both houses of Congress and the stage set for the vengeful impeachment and dismissal from office of the most courageous president in modern times.

He's right.

(Via Glenn Reynolds.)

Greg Mankiw posts (posted, actually—May 1) a fascinating email from Phillip Swagel of AEI. China's path to prosperity is strewn with obstacles.

(Via Arnold Kling.)
 

I'm betting they won't, in any prominent way. AP:

King Abdullah has told Saudi editors to stop publishing pictures of women as they could make young men go astray, newspapers reported Tuesday.

. . . In recent months, newspapers have published pictures of women - always wearing the traditional Muslim headscarf - to illustrate stories with increasing regularity. Usually the stories have had to do with women's issues. The papers have also started publishing a range of views on causes that are not generally accepted in Saudi Arabia - such as women having the right to drive and vote.

The king told editors on Monday night that publishing a woman's picture for the world to see was inappropriate.

"One must think, do they want their daughter, their sister, or their wife to appear in this way. Of course, no one would accept this," the newspaper Okaz quoted Abdullah as saying.

Also,

The king also called on editors to stop printing stories that portray the country in a negative light.

"Don't write anything that can be harmful to the country. Some reporters, they want to stand out and they end up going too far and this should not be allowed to happen," Abdullah said according to Okaz. . . .

All media in Saudi Arabia are either state owned or state guided.

(Via Robert Spencer.)
 

Tuesday was the fortieth anniversary of the start of China's Cultural Revolution. Recollections at BBC News:

I myself didn't see my father being tortured. But I was told he was covered in a cotton duvet and beaten so that he couldn't see the people doing the beating. . . .

My father died in 1968. It was suicide, they said - hanging from a radiator. But we can't be certain.

And in The Guardian:

The Red Guards told me I came from a "black family". They took me and my two-year-old brother into their care. By the time they had finished even I started to believe that my grandfather used to drink Chinese people's blood as if it were red wine.

Both pieces are worth reading in full.

(Via Norm Geras.)
 

At OPFOR, Charlie welcomes the normalization of US-Libya relations:

The Libyan regime was supporting terrorists, pursuing WMD, and repressing their populace –they could have gone the way of Bashar Assad of Syria and Mahmoud A-Team of Iran, instead they have chosen a path of reconciliation, and recognizing their progress by normalizing their status was a good call.
 

I've been thinking a lot about this post by William Niskanen, chairman of the libertarian-oriented Cato Institute, in which he argues against the belief "that the best way to control federal spending is to 'Starve the Beast' by reducing federal tax revenue." (Jonathan Chait, who seems a nasty bit of work, recently cited Niskanen's research, as did Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby.)

Niskanen lists three problems he sees:

• As with any product, the lower the price (tax revenues), the more of it people will want (government);
• "[T]here was a strong negative relation between the federal spending percent of GDP and the federal revenue percent of GDP from 1981 through 2005";
• "An increased belief in the 'Starve the Beast' assertion has substantially reduced the traditional Republican concern for fiscal responsibility."

I'm sure the third of Niskanen's propositions is correct. "Starve the beast" gives politicians cover as they pander to their constituents. As to Niskanen's other two contentions, though, I find myself skeptical.

I have no doubt that Niskanen's second proposition is accurate as far as it goes. I'd like to know, though, whether the negative relation holds throughout US history.

My main objection is to Niskanen's first proposition. In the marketplace, when prices drop I buy more, whether of books, bananas or basketballs. But no change in the tax rate makes me or anyone else I know want more government. I just don't believe the cause-effect relationship exists. My sense is that until the twentieth century, tax revenues as a percentage of GDP were considerably lower than they are now, yet citizens didn't clamor for more government. I'm no historian, though, so I stand ready to be corrected on this.

Chait, Mallaby and Jonah Goldberg point to a piece by Jonathan Rauch on Niskanen's argument. Rauch's article is subscriber-only, and I don't subscribe, so I don't know whether he answers my questions.
 

In December I quoted Bernard Lewis to explain why I admire Bush:

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

Bush's strength of character leads him to pursue a goal even when it's politically costly. That strength served him well in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, but it hurt him during the Harriet Miers nomination, and it's hurting him on immigration.

Clinton (I?) was a weather vane. I'm much happier with Bush II, who's a tank. But I wish he were either getting better advice, or following whatever good advice he's getting.

UPDATE: Hmm. I guess the advice Bush took was good, in a way.
 

Andrew C. McCarthy on the "canard" that we must choose either "a guest worker program for illegal immigrants or mass deportations of 12 million people":

We should make it harder for illegals to get in, and be clear to those already here that staying is going to be more unpleasant – because employers are going to be prosecuted, immigrants who commit state and federal crimes are going to be jailed then deported, and all our sparse processing resources are going to be dedicated to those who are following the existing rules for legal immigration.

But whatever we decide to do, we do not have to deport anyone, much less everyone.
 

That's how Michael Grunwald portrays the Army Corps of Engineers in the Washington Post:

Somehow, America has concluded that the scandal of Katrina was the government's response to the disaster, not the government's contribution to the disaster. The Corps has eluded the public's outrage -- even though a useless Corps shipping canal intensified Katrina's surge, even though poorly designed Corps floodwalls collapsed just a few feet from an unnecessary $750 million Corps navigation project, even though the Corps had promoted development in dangerously low-lying New Orleans floodplains and had helped destroy the vast marshes that once provided the city's natural flood protection.

. . . [T]he Corps is an addiction for members of Congress, who use its water projects to steer jobs and money to their constituents and contributors. President Bush has opposed dozens of the most egregious boondoggles, but Congress has kept funding them and the Corps has refused to renounce them -- while New Orleans has remained vulnerable.

One anecdote:

The biggest Corps scandal of 2000 involved a $1.2 billion navigation project on the Mississippi River. The Corps economist studying it had concluded that the numbers didn't add up, so his bosses reassigned him and pressured his team to concoct a new economic justification. The Army inspector general later concluded not only that the Corps had skewed that analysis, but that it had a systemic bias in favor of big projects. Generals were reprimanded, the National Academy of Sciences urged more modest approaches and the Corps went back to the drawing board.

In December 2004, the Corps came back with its modest proposal: a $7.7 billion project.

(Via Jonah Goldberg.)
 

Reuters:

The Brazilian government offered on Monday to send troops to the business capital Sao Paulo to help combat a wave of gang attacks in which 81 people, many of them police, have died in four days.

Clifford May:

The story in brief as I’m getting it from Brazilian friends:

Organized crime is a huge problem, really out of control. The leaders of the biggest criminal gangs (in particular one that calls itself the Primeiro Comando da Capital, which translates as the First Capital Command) are in prison but they can order attacks by gangsters on the streets — and there are many of them, not least I’m told because of judges who are either leftist and lenient, or intimidated, or both.

The criminals have been killing policeman but also getting on buses and murdering innocents – in other words: terrorism. So today, public transportation is largely shut down.
 

ScienceDaily:

A Brisbane scientist has discovered that even small doses of ultra violet radiation during mild temperatures can be fatal for frogs.

See? That's all it takes. Go to it!
 

A lovely story by Katherine Kersten in the Star-Tribune:

Five-year-old Gong Lu has lived in a Chinese orphanage all her life. She's watched wistfully as her playmates have been adopted and carried away, one by one. Gong Lu longs for a family of her own. And she's a prime candidate -- cute as a peanut, a head-to-toe charmer with a sparkling personality.

But there's her nose. Gong Lu was born with a large hemangioma, a blood vessel birthmark, that dominates her face. The orphanage staff members, who adore her, have done all they can to build her confidence. But they haven't allowed her to go to school, afraid of the relentless teasing she might endure.

Fortunately, some people have love enough to see beyond noses.

In case it needs stating: what makes this story's happy ending possible is wealth, individual and national. And it's the free market, imperfectly enforced though it may be, that enables the creation of wealth. Love, empathy, generosity, effort: all those are necessary too. But don't forget wealth and the economic system that generates it.

Anyway, read the whole piece. (Via Scott at Powerline.)
 

Stephanie Rosenbloom, in an article in the New York Times about the housing ads at Craiglist:

People in their 20's often list their alma maters and request a roommate in their own age group. Cleanliness is a must, or at least "clean-ish," "decently clean" or "clean in public spaces." And spending life with a "professional" appears to be just as important to users of Craigslist's housing listings as it is to users of Match.com.

Katie Newmark comments,

Apparently, she doesn't understand that "professional" is polite shorthand for "you must have a job so that I won't get screwed on the rent."
 

I'm sure some will say these do. Dipesh Gadher in The Sunday Times of London:

Britain's most senior policeman Sir Ian Blair is facing a race relations dilemma after the release of figures that reveal almost half the number of people arrested in relation to car crime in London are black.

Blair, the Metropolitan police commissioner, has signed off a report by his force’s traffic unit which shows that black people account for 46% of all arrests generated by new automatic numberplate recognition (ANPR) cameras. . . .

The report tacitly appears to address concerns among ethnic minority communities who believe they are unfairly targeted by the police through stop and search powers. Black people are up to six times more likely to be stopped than whites.

The report says: “It is worth stating that out of all our activities, this is the one area where the officer has minimal discretion as they respond to an electronic matching process.”

(Via Steve Sailer.)
 

Terry Teachout:

You can’t like everything that’s good, and you shouldn’t pretend to like anything.
 

Kelvin Bissett and Angela Kamper in News.com (Australia):

Books of hate promoting suicide bombings, anti-Australian conspiracies and racism can be freely sold in the Muslim community after a ruling that they don't breach sedition laws. . . .

One of the books, Defence of the Muslim Lands, carried an endorsement from Osama bin Laden on its back cover and promoted "wiring up one's body" with explosives for "martyrdom or self-sacrifice operations".

The Criminal West, written by Australian Muslim Omar Hassan, claimed to be called Australian was something to be ashamed of and Western culture is the culture of wolves, injustice and racism.

It also claims Australian police are rapists who bash young boys and spoke of a conspiracy involving politicians to turn young Muslims into drug addicts.

Via Robert Spencer, who comments,

These books are written and distributed to the end of subverting Western states and aiding Muslim violence against them, with the ultimate goal of establishing Islamic states in their place. If that isn't sedition, I don't know is. . . .

Australia will be paying the price for this, as more and more young Muslims read these books and then act upon their teachings.
 

Sunday Mirror:

Terrorists from al-Qaeda have infiltrated Britain's security services, the Sunday Mirror can reveal.

Bosses at M15 believe they unwittingly recruited the Muslim extremists after the July 7 suicide bombings in London last year which killed 52 people.

They were signed up as part of a drive to find more Muslims and Arabic speakers to work as spies to help prevent future attacks by Osama bin Laden fantatics.

(Via Robert Spencer.)
 

Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee:

The Terrorist Surveillance Program . . . has been reviewed by executive branch attorneys, and congressional leaders from both parties — including my friend and colleague Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice) — have been regularly briefed. Democratic leaders in the House and Senate have been aware of this program for several years yet never expressed any concerns until it was illegally leaked.

(Via Betsy Newmark.)
 

Two thoughts on this piece about the series's farewell.

Reasoned thought: Alan Alda's wrong. There's no way, not the tiniest freaking outside chance, that John Wells and NBC were ever going to produce a show portraying a Republican president as a hero.

Instinctive thought: It figures that Bill Clinton would appear in several of the actors' reminiscences (inviting the cast to dinner; walking through Harlem with Richard Schiff the day Schiff was to receive an honorary degree). That's what Clinton loved: fame, pomp, association with glamor. Being lionized. Image triumphant.

(Via Katie Newmark.)
 

Robert Spencer points to this story of the murder of Mark Stetson, a devout Christian, by Benjamin Bell, a Muslim. According to the article, "Witnesses reported that Stetson was waving a Bible during the argument but police didn’t recover one at the scene." Spencer asks,

Was the killing accidental, or fuelled by a hot temper, and incidental to Bell's Islamic faith? Or was Bell acting in accord with what he believed to be the dictates of his religion, like Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar?

. . . In other words, are we witnessing, in incidents such as this one, an erosion of the American civil contract? . . . [W]hen a Muslim kills someone in the context of a religious argument, and Muslims around the world have made it plain in so many ways in the last year that they can and will respond with lethal force to challenges to their religion, it can and should be asked.
 

Michael Kinsley:

Poking around the Web, I stumbled across the official "Hijacking Survival Guidelines" for employees of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They say, "Stay calm and encourage others around you to do the same. Do not challenge the hijackers physically or verbally. Comply with their instructions. Do not struggle. … Blend in with the other airline passengers."

. . . So the U.S. government is kicking in millions of dollars for a memorial to the heroes of United 93. But meanwhile it is officially encouraging people not to do what these heroes did, should the occasion arise.

He concludes,

We celebrate the passengers who rebelled on United 93 for their choice, but we surely don't, or shouldn't, blame any of the folks on any of those planes for arriving at a different decision, or none at all.

He's right. They couldn't know what to expect. Now, though, I doubt I could forgive myself if I were on a hijacked plane and didn't resist.

Via Ilya Somin, who comments,

[I]t is deeply troubling that the homeland security bureaucracy can't get this relatively simple issue right. If they can't even learn the most obvious lessons of the last major terrorist attack, I highly doubt that they can effectively prepare for the next one.
 

Robert Roy Britt at LiveScience:

In a new study, two groups of mice were exposed to ultraviolet B (UVB) light, which is known to cause skin cancer. The group that had a running wheel developed 32 percent fewer tumors. The tumors developed more slowly and were smaller than in the group that did not have gym access.

But you might want to avoid the gym. From BestLife's May issue (no link):

A new study in the Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine found that 73 percent of gym weight-lifting equipment tested was infected with viruses despite being sprayed with a disinfectant. The aerobic machines weren't much cleaner. Half the treadmills also harbored germs.

There's my new excuse.
 

At OPFOR, Charlie has reservations about the House vote to permit use of the military for border security:

Having been to operations following Katrina in the Gulf Coast, I can say without any doubt that if the Guard is deployed, they will accomplish their mission. If that mission is to seal the border -consider it sealed. . . . This should be a temporary solution to hold the line until a civilian government agency can come in and do the job.

I'll close with this: The military shouldn't be viewed as the one-stop shop solution to all of the domestic problems in America.
 

AP writer Tarek Al-Issawi in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Tehran . . . is benefiting from the surge in oil prices, seeing its oil revenues rise nearly 50 percent to $45 billion during the 12 months that ended March 20.

Still, the economy staggers under the weight of high unemployment, double digit inflation and interest rates of 25 percent to 30 percent on personal loans. Prices for key consumer needs - food in particular - have risen recently by as much as 20 percent.

Via Pejman Yousefzadeh, who recalls this statement by Ayatollah Khomeini:

What is this talk about economic infrastructure anyway? Why is it important? Donkeys and camels need hay. That is economic infrastructure. But human beings need Islam.
 

In the Times of London, David T. Johnson, Deputy Chief of Mission at the US Embassy in London, counters Stephen Pollard's call for payment of hundreds of thousands of dollars in congestion charges:

[T]he US does not require foreign diplomats to pay US taxes. We cannot, as a matter of principle, volunteer to pay taxes such as the congestion charge, when four separate treaties, including the Vienna Conventions on Diplomatic and Consular Relations, prohibit the payment of taxes by diplomats assigned to a foreign mission. I assure you that British diplomats do not pay anything like the London congestion charge anywhere in the US. And that is as it should be.

That's a good argument.

(Via Clive Davis.)
 

Scott Fields at LiveScience:

Scientists . . . have developed a system in which a treated silicon chip is combined with a digital camera to identify E. coli instantly.

A good thing, no doubt. But LiveScience columnist Christopher Wanjek cautions against "the American consumer['s] . . . war with all bacteria":

A study published this month . . . finds that antibiotic exposure during infancy is associated with asthma. This follows a string of studies from the past few years . . . revealing that early exposure to harmful bacteria builds a healthy immune system. Kids exposed to endotoxin-releasing bacteria, for example, are less likely to be allergic to dogs and cats.

. . . Human skin contains many species of harmless bacteria. Their presence prevents harmful bacteria, what we commonly call germs, from gaining a foothold on your skin. Numerous studies show that antibacterial soap is no more effective than ordinary soap in cleaning your hands. Either kind lifts off germ-laden dirt. But antibacterial soap kills helpful bacteria on the skin, freeing up valuable real estate so that harmful bacteria can move in later.
 

Joris Evers, CNET News.com:

Serious flaws in Mac OS X and QuickTime software could put Macintosh and Windows systems at risk of cyberattack, Apple Computer has warned.

In a pair of security alerts released Thursday, Apple outlined 31 flaws that affect various versions of the operating system and a dozen vulnerabilities in its QuickTime media player software. Security experts have deemed the issues "critical," but Apple does not provide a severity rating. Fixes are available.

Windows users should go here for the QuickTime update, Mac users here for the QuickTime update and various Mac OS X updates.
 

StrategyPage:

In some towns . . . Sunni Arab anti-government ("bring back Saddam") groups are losing out to al Qaeda. While al Qaeda has been driven out of most Sunni Arab towns, in Ramadi, al Qaeda has concentrated its forces and is fighting the secular anti-government groups. The secular Sunni forces have been taking some heavy blows from Iraqi and Coalition forces, on the one hand, and al Qaeda on the other. Al Qaeda is trying to leverage Iraqi/Coalition success, to strengthen its own campaign to take over the anti-government activity in Ramadi, through assassinations, kidnapping, and intimidation of secular Sunni Arab anti-government leaders.

. . . The Coalition and the government wants to pacify these places, but these towns are full of dozens of family, clan, mosque, tribe and gang based armed groups that hate each other more than they hate Americans or a democratically elected government. There's a blood lust that has developed in these places, a war fever that will only go away once enough of the gunmen have killed each other off.
 

That's what A.M. Mora y Leon thinks:

A huge regional movement to oppose Hugo Chavez is beginning to form and take shape up and down two continents. They have never been bolder, something that probably signals that Chavez has never been weaker. Apparently, they all sense the same thing: the time to strike at this predator is right now.

Let's hope.
 

Stuart Buck has posted two brief excerpts from Linda Greenhouse's biography of Harry Blackmun. The second involves the friendship between Blackmun and Clarence Thomas, which developed though "the two occupied opposite ends of the Court's ideological spectrum," and a column by Thomas Sowell. Worth reading.
 

Anthony Dick has a wonderfully lucid piece.
 

Mark Steyn:

[I]t's routinely accepted in Canada and Europe that America gives less foreign aid than other wealthy countries. Americans are famously "stingy," to use the word chosen by Jan Egeland, the UN humanitarian honcho, in the wake of the tsunami. . . . The broad reality is that Americans provide their foreign aid privately and Canadians and Europeans leave it to the state, just as Americans provide their health care privately and Canadians and Europeans leave it to the state. My point is that Americans get no credit for this because in transnational-speak there is literally no way to express it. By transnational definition, "aid" is statist: only governments can do it. So, in the international league tables, no matter how generous Americans are their form of generosity is, by definition, inadmissible. Indeed, as Mr. Egeland sees it, "aid" is defined exclusively as cheques made payable to his office.

. . . [T]he U.S. has left its cultural imperialism, like its aid, mostly in private hands. All across the globe there are young men in Yankees caps and Star Wars T-shirts eating Big Macs and listening to Snoop Dogg--and many of them hate America. In the end, the world can do without American rap and American cheeseburgers. American ideas on individual liberty, federalism, capitalism and freedom of speech would be far more helpful.
 

Sara Goudarzi at LiveScience:

The Earth is like a magnet with two poles. Magnetic field lines travel between the North and South poles and are generated by the movement of molten iron in Earth's core.

This magnetic field has weakened by 5 percent each century since 1840, when the first accurate measurements were made. But a new study looking at the magnetic field strength between 1590 and 1840 finds the field was relatively stable during that time.
 

Examiner.com:

New White House Press Secretary Tony Snow is starting off in a combative mode against the press by issuing detailed rebuttals to what he considers unfair coverage of Bush.

. . . White House sources said Snow, who started on the job Monday and has yet to give his first public press briefing, is determined to aggressively counter what the administration considers unfair assertions in both news and editorials about Bush. At the same time, he is eager to make the notoriously secretive administration more accessible to the press.

I'll be interested to see how Snow does with (or against) the MSM. Good luck to him.

(Via Bruce Kesler, via Betsy Newmark.)
 

Send a Monk-e-mail.

(Via Angela Gunn.)

Ker Than at LiveScience:

In 1988, 20-year-old Lynette White was fatally stabbed in South Wales. The murder went unsolved for 15 years, until a fresh DNA sweep of her apartment in 2000 turned up spots of blood on a skirting board that had been missed the first time around.

British police ran the results through a national DNA database of known criminals but didn't turn up anyone with an exact match. They did, however, notice someone whose DNA profile was close: a 14-year-old boy who was not even alive when White was murdered but who had gotten into trouble with the cops.

DNA testing of the boy's family eventually led police to Jeffrey Gafoor, the boy's paternal uncle, whose DNA exactly matched that of the blood sample. When questioned, Gafoor admitted to murdering White.

The case was a dramatic example of "kinship analysis," which could become more common as the practice of collecting DNA for crimes increases and the technique becomes more systemized and efficient, researchers said today.

But widespread use of the technique raises issues about civil liberties violations, they caution.

UPDATE: Randall Parker isn't much troubled either, though he does expect ethical dilemmas to arise as DNA analysis advances.
 

Judith Apter Klinghoffer points to a study that places the US first in international competitiveness (article with some rankings here) and comments,

The US is competing with one hand tied behind its back. For various reasons, including nobless oblige, it has taken on the job of creating and maintaining the conditions which enable the world economy to thrive. . . . Sudan turns millions of its citizens to refugees, the US takes on the job of insuring they will be fed. The Palestians elect a terrorist government, the US insures their officials will be paid.

You wish to make the US more competitive? Start insisting that the rest of the world share the burden.

They won't. The deal they have is too good.
 

Robert Spencer gives an answer both terse and specific.
 

At The Corner:

RU486 [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
encounters some problems
Posted at 8:29 PM

TK421 [Jonah Goldberg]
Encountered some problems too. That's why he wasn't at his post.
Posted at 9:00 PM

(If you need an explanation, go here, scroll down about halfway, and congratulate yourself on your lack of geekiness.)
 

Howard Dean performs a quick reversal on gay marriage.
 

George Will paraphrases John McCain's defense of campaign-finance reform:

[T]he government is very much not "clean," but it is so clean it can be trusted to regulate speech about itself.
 

Douglas Farah on the "unsavory warlords" fighting Islamist militias in Somalia:

There are reports of U.S. support for the warlords, who have blood on their hands from years of brutal warfare but resent and fear the growing strength of the Islamist militias. The U.S. has not confirmed or denied the reports of support for the alliance, but Somalia presents another variation of the constant set of poor options available to U.S. counter-terrorism policy: support bad people who will fight the enemy to the death, or allow the Islamists to gain access to another safehaven with easy access and the multiple advantages of operating unfettered in a geographic region.

The question is not hard to answer. . . . This is the type of engagement, not through boots on the ground but aiding those who want to fight, that the United States should be doing on a larger scale. This will not topple a legitimate government or thwart a democratic process. It will simply keep the Islamists from taking root in a distant but vital battleground.

(Via Counterterrorism Blog.)
 

Are you racist?

No.

But as John Cook explains, New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones would disagree. After musician Stephin Merritt expressed his lack of interest in several performers, Frere-Jones wrote,

[N]ote how eager Merritt is to dismiss Beyoncé, OutKast, Britney [Spears], and Justin [Timberlake], not just as singers and songwriters but as bearers of meaning. That's a bias. Two women, three people of color and one white artist openly in love with black American music. That's who he's biased against. You could say there's no pattern here. … You would then, hopefully, let me get a taste of whatever has made you so HIGH.

Cook does a good job of analyzing this nonsense.

(Via Brian Doherty.)
 

ScienceDaily:

White blood cells from a strain of cancer-resistant mice cured advanced cancers in ordinary laboratory mice, researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine reported today.

"Even highly aggressive forms of malignancy with extremely large tumors were eradicated," Zheng Cui, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues reported in this week's on-line edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The transplanted white blood cells not only killed existing cancers, but also protected normal mice from what should have been lethal doses of highly aggressive new cancers.

(Via Phil Bowermaster.)
 

CNN.com:

There is no credible scientific evidence that drinking green tea reduces the risk of heart disease, federal regulators said Tuesday in rejecting a petition that sought to allow tea labels to make that claim.

Via Anthony Duignan-Cabrera, who's taking the news rather well:

Hallalujah! From the beginning I always thought this was nothing more than the hard sell from the tea industry to market quasi-Eastern mysticism in a bottle. Now, all those Guatemalan-drawstring-pants-wearin’- NPR-listenin’-tree-huggin’-Ben-’n'-Jerry’s-eatin’- Upper-West-Side-and-West-L.A.-livin’-health food fanatics will have to drink Liptons and like it.
 

That's the rating I deserve when it comes to assessing jurists, so I can't criticize the ABA for assigning it to Michael Wallace, a nominee for the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Quin Hillyer, however, doesn't hesitate:

Take a look at this man's resume. If he isn't Qualified, then Bart Starr wasn't a quarterback and Ray Charles wasn't a musician.

The Washington Prowler:

Wallace received a poorer rating than Brett Kavanaugh, and for the same reason that Kavanaugh has been suffering through delays: his role in the impeachment proceedings of President Bill Clinton.

The Clintons now exert a remarkable amount of influence, particularly during election cycles. The Democrats feel they can attack these Republican nominees with impunity.
 

LATER: John Hinderaker writes,

It's official: the American Bar Association is off the reservation. After several years of relatively good behavior, it has now drawn its knives and enlisted in the Democrats' 2006 campaign. . . .

With this nakedly political move, the American Bar Association has once again forfeited any claim to credibility.
 

Robert Spencer links to an article about the mistreatment of Bangladeshis in Jordanian sweatshops, and calls it "another example of the contempt with which Arab Muslims often regard non-Arab Muslims." He also comments:

But there is more to this story. . . . Why are these Jordanian sweatshops employing people from Bangladesh when there is a large number of unemployed Palestinians on their doorstep?

Because to employ those Palestinians, you see, would prevent them from carrying out their primary task: jihad against Israel. Better to keep them unemployed and "hopeless" rather give them gainful employment and thereby take away from time they could spend on the jihad.
 

Lee Harris:

The shrewd and realistic Florentine statesman and thinker, Guicciardini, once advised: "Never fight against religion...this concept has too much empire over the minds of men." And to the extent that socialism is a religion, then those who wish to fight it with mere reason and argument may well be in for a losing battle. Furthermore, as populism spreads, it is inevitable that the myth of socialism will gain in strength among the people who have the least cause to be happy with their place in the capitalist world-order, and who will naturally be overjoyed to put their faith in those who promise them a quick fix to their poverty and an end to their suffering.

. . . This is why socialism isn't dead, and why in our own century it may well spring back into life with a force and vigor shocking to those who have, with good reason, declared socialism to be no longer viable. . . . Men need myths -- and until capitalism can come up with a transformative myth of its own, it may well be that many men will prefer to find their myths in the same place they found them in the first part of the twentieth century -- the myth of revolutionary socialism.

This is the challenge that capitalism faces in the world today -- whether it will rise to the challenge is perhaps the most urgent question of our time, and those who refuse to confront this challenge are doing no service to reason or to human dignity and freedom. Bad myths can only be driven out by better myths, and unless capitalism can provide a better myth than socialism, the latter will again prevail.
 

Robert Spencer:

The twisting and perverting of Islam by terrorists is something that virtually everyone assumes, and no one has ever proven. As I have established again and again and again, the jihadists are the ones who use detailed arguments from the Qur'an and Sunnah to justify their positions, and the putative moderates have never refuted those arguments.

Why does this matter? Because we cannot win this great war if we fail to see the enemy realistically. If we deceive ourselves into thinking that we can count on tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of Muslim allies, we will be surprised and possibly dangerously compromised. Certainly hundreds of millions of Muslims are not waging the jihad today. But it has never been established even that a majority disapproves of it, or that there even exists any established form of Islam that teaches that non-Muslims and Muslims should live together as equals on an indefinite basis.

Until we come to grips with the implications of that fact, we will be much more vulnerable than we should be.

David Frum:

Jonathan Rauch trenchantly argues that the threat [posed to religious liberty by same-sex marriage] comes not so much from same-sex marriage as such, but from anti-discrimination laws in general. Much truth there: but that's a little like arguing that illegal immigration would be less a problem if the US did not have a welfare state. It does have a welfare state and it does have anti-discrimination laws, and since neither is going anywhere, it is urgent that Americans take care about inviting new groups of claimants to avail themselves of their costly and illiberal protections.

David French:

To the campus establishment, there is no functional or moral difference between an evangelical Christian proponent of traditional Judeo-Christian sexual morality and George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door. As a consequence, over the last five years, Christians have begun to experience an avalanche of persecution on campus.

Stanley Kurtz:

Scholars on the left and right agree that the gay marriage movement has raised the specter of a massive and protracted battle over religious liberty. . . . [I]n states with same-sex marriage, religiously affiliated schools, adoption agencies, psychological clinics, social workers, marital counselors, etc. will be forced to choose between going out of business and violating their own deeply held beliefs.

. . . There's a lot more at stake in the battle over same-sex marriage than the marriage issue itself, important as that is. The very ability of religiously affiliated organizations to exist and operate is under threat. Same-sex marriage will be used as a tool, not only to silence opposition, but to unstring religion itself as a force in American life.
 

John Derbyshire looks at legislation enacted in 1965 and 1986, and reaches a bleak conclusion:

Gentle reader, don’t be fooled a third time. Consult the historic evidence. . . . Then disagree, if you dare, with the following statement:

In the matter of immigration, every word, every single damn wretched word, from the mouths of the legislative and executive branches should, in the absence of overwhelming and irrefutable evidence to the contrary, be assumed to be a lie—including "and" and "the."
 

Claudia Rosett:

Cynthia Brzak [is] an American who has worked for the past 26 years at the U.N. refugee office in Geneva, Switzerland. Despairing of a U.N. system that operates immune to any normal jurisdiction of law, Brzak, who two years ago brought an in-house allegation of sexual harassment, is now going outside the institution to ask for a hearing at the U.S. Supreme Court. . . .

Running to 180 pages, the pleadings highlight the fundamental problem that senior U.N. officials enjoy the privileges of sovereign immunity, but because the U.N. is not a sovereign state, they are spared the accountability that tends to come—at least in democracies—with running a national government. . . .

"There’s no law applicable to these guys," says Brzak’s lawyer, Geneva-based Edward Flaherty, interviewed by telephone. The U.N. top brass, he adds, "have figured out that they can do anything they want. The difference is that they do it in business suits, instead of with drawn guns."
 

Bjorn Carey at LiveScience.com:

A team of researchers led by Vincent Janik of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland temporarily captured seven male and seven female bottlenose dolphins in Sarasota Bay in Florida. . . .

"Every dolphin has its own voice," Janik told LiveScience. "But we removed those features and showed that the animals are actually paying attention to the modulation and not the voice."

. . . "Their repertoire of calls probably numbers in the hundreds," Janik said. "Some of them are food calls, but for most of them we have no ideas what they're for."
 

I don't know enough to venture an answer, but David Frum cites "an important new book . . . [that] daringly points a finger at a normally blame-proof figure: the general who actually planned and led the Iraq campaign: General Tommy Franks, head of U.S. Central Command during both the Afghan and Iraq wars." Sample:

Franks wanted to race to Baghdad as rapidly as possible. To achieve his plan, he bypassed thousands of Iraqi Fedayeen fighters. These black-garbed guerillas ambushed and killed American soldiers--and then faded into the landscape. The Americans could not chase or identify them because Franks' determination to travel light had sent U.S. forces into battle with few or no interpreters.
 

Douglas Farah:

[I]t is almost impossible to overstate the feeling foreign intelligence officials, retired officers and others have when they deal with the agency that the agency is operating with little adult supervision.
 

Randolph E. Schmid at LiveScience.com:

Lesbians' brains react differently to sex hormones than those of heterosexual women, new research indicates. . . . Lesbians' brains reacted somewhat, though not completely, like those of heterosexual men, a team of Swedish researchers said in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A year ago, the same group reported findings for gay men that showed their brain response to hormones was similar to that of heterosexual women.
 

Ross Douthat:

Somehow, Nick Kristof manage$ to write an entire column about how much better Europe's approach to abortion is than ours - and Andrew Sullivan manages to echo his points - without once noting that European countries tend to have more restrictive abortion laws than we do. (Not to mention a stronger welfare state and a smaller underclass, both of which reduce the demand for abortion.) Nope - if you want to drive down the abortion rate, say Kristof and Andrew, you can only consider passing out more contraceptives. Them's the rules, folks.
 

Theodore Dalrymple, in a mildly negative review of the nonfiction book The Murderer Next Door:

[T]he murder rate in the United States was 1.5 per 100,000 in 1900 and 10 per 100,000 in 1990 (and the rate would have been 50 per 100,000 if not for improvements in the medical treatment of trauma).
 

Two of my favorite English bloggers are criticizing Americans' attitude toward Britain. First, Clive Davis:

Sadly, my impression is that too many US conservative commentators, in the mainstream and blogosphere alike, are locked into that tiresome and deeply parochial "Why don't they love us?" routine. Self-pity alternates with bursts of righteous anger and the irritating assumption that, in all known fields of human endeavour, the American model is the only one that works. Not forgetting that oh-so reassuring belief that, yawn, Europe will be going down the tubes in 30 years' time anyway, so why bother listening?

I'm about as pro-US as they come, but I have to say I'm beginning to run out of patience - and hope.

(Davis got some backup from Roger Simon and Austin Bay.) Then, Stephen Pollard:

The US Embassy . . . is refusing to pay at least £270,000 in congestion charges that its staff have racked up. The German and Swiss Embassies are similarly refusing. . . .

The US is the finest country on earth, a nation that has advanced the good of humanity more than any other in history. But those of us who defend it against the rising tide of anti-Americanism are too often reduced to tearing our hair out in frustration at its bone-headed diplomacy.

I find both these men credible, and if the story Pollard relates is true, then our embassy's behavior (sorry, behaviour*) is unacceptable. I hope the State Department is paying attention.
 
 
*Trying to do my bit for transatlantic amity.
 

Advice from a source worth listening to:

Bernard Lewis, famed Princeton professor of Islamic history, told a small press luncheon in Washington that the Iraq war hadn’t turned out the way he expected but "is still salvageable." Seen by many as an intellectual godfather of the Bush administration’s democracy drive in the Middle East, the 89-year-old Lewis was nonetheless gloomy about most of the administration’s policies in the region. The author of such works as "Islam and the West" and "What Went Wrong?" said that the current moment is more reminiscent of Neville Chamberlain in Munich in 1938 than Winston Churchill in London in 1940. "We are showing hesitancy and fear," he said.

Lewis had two words of advice for U.S. policy on Iran, Hamas and the insurgents in Iraq: “Get tough.”
 

A great column from Mark Steyn:

In 2003, you'll recall, the US was reviled as a unilateralist cowboy because it and its coalition of the poodles waged an illegal war unauthorised by the UN against a sovereign state run by a thug regime that was no threat to anyone apart from selected ethnocultural groups within its borders, which it killed in large numbers (Kurds and Shia).

Well, Washington learned its lesson. Faced with another thug regime that's no threat to anyone apart from selected ethnocultural groups within its borders which it kills in large numbers (African Muslims and southern Christians), the unilateralist cowboy decided to go by the book. No unlawful actions here. Instead, meetings at the UN. Consultations with allies. Possible referral to the Security Council. [. . .]

Several hundred thousand corpses later Clooney is now demanding a "stronger multinational force to protect the civilians of Darfur".

* * * * *

[[T]he only effective intervention around the world comes from ad hoc coalitions of the willing led by the doughty musketeers of the Anglosphere. Right now who's on the ground dragging the reluctant Sudanese through their negotiations with the African Union? America's Deputy Secretary of State Bob Zoellick and Britain's International Development Secretary Hilary Benn. Sorry, George, that's as "multinational" as it's gonna get.

* * * * *

At some point, the Left has to decide whether it stands for anything other than self-congratulatory passivity and the fetishisation of a failed and corrupt transnationalism.
 

Robert Spencer:

Anyone who thinks that God's greatness is established by such acts of barbaric cruelty must be resisted at all costs. Yet those who hold to the same ideology, and who think that God Himself will grant Paradise to those who "kill and are killed" for Him (Qur'an 9:111), are streaming into Western countries, by the design and forethought of Western leaders, with no attempt whatsoever made to determine whether or not they approve of such slaughters and the ideology that motivates them.

This is insane.

A piece on Bahjat's murder is here.

UPDATE: You probably already know this, but the victim in the video described in the Times piece wasn't Atwar Bahjat:

The video actually shows the gruesome murder of a Nepalese man by the Army of Ansar al-Sunna in Iraq from August of 2004. The man was one of 12 victims executed by the terrorist organization--the other 11 were shot[.]

What remains true is that terrorists executed Bahjat, and that her funeral procession was attacked twice. All that's changed is that we now have someone else to grieve for.

(CNN.com link via The Mudville Gazette.)

Hugh Fitzgerald:

Whatever [land] Israel gives up, it will still be required to give up more and more and more. Ultimately the entire world, by all that is right and all that is just, must be ruled by Islam and Muslims. . . .

What part of this don't the Israelis understand? The same part that is also misunderstood by all the other Infidels who cannot be bothered to investigate the tenets and history of Islam, or who are fearful of what they might find out and could no longer deny.

Fitzgerald also recommends two policies to Israel: "keep up the pressure that will encourage local Arabs ('Palestinians') to leave," and admit Middle Eastern Christians,

who have suffered most immediately from Islam, and who will not be inclined to forget it, and that could do wonders -- for Israel and for other Infidels, whether Christian or post-Christian, who need to understand why denying Muslim control of the Holy Land is so important to the survival of the West as an idea, as a reality.
 

Mark Steyn, in an interview by Hugh Hewitt:

[T]he CIA is becoming more and more of an obviously unreformable agency. And I think there really is a choice facing America here, whether it is worth trying to find people who are willing to go in and battle all these terrible people, who do nothing basically, 24/7. What they're mainly doing is subverting their own government. . . . I think it's a disgraceful agency. I've always said that other intelligence agencies get things wrong, but they get things wrong on a much smaller budget. This intelligence agency has the biggest budget in the world, and it does nothing with it, except play these kind of leaky desk jockeys all day long. I have every sympathy for anyone who would not want to do that job, and I think it's time to start thinking about whether you just need to shut it down, or marginalize it, and create something else as an effective intelligence agency.

* * * * *

I think America's enemies have calculated, and I'd use that term broadly, to include not just Assad in Syria and the crazy guy in Iran, but also the Belgians and the French and all the rest of them. I think they've concluded that it is 30 months to go, that the crazy cowboy will be gone, and all this will go away. And I think everybody who thinks like that is deluding themselves.
 

Mark Steyn:

For this to be a mortal struggle, as the cold war was, the question is: Are they a credible enemy to us?

For a projection of the likely outcome, the question is: Are we a credible enemy to them?

Four years into the “war on terror,” the Bush administration has begun promoting a new formulation: “the long war.” Not a reassuring name. In a short war, put your money on tanks and bombs—our strengths. In a long war, the better bet is will and manpower—their strengths, and our great weakness. Even a loser can win when he’s up against a defeatist.
 

"I am sorry, gentlemen," said Rearden, "that I will be obliged to save your goddamn necks along with mine."

Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
 

Most leftists believe that we must've done something to make jihadists hate us. I'd ask this: What did women do to jihadists?

Look at the murder of Atwar Bahjat in Iraq. According to leftist logic, she must've provoked her killers, as Scandinavian women must bring gang-rapes on themselves. Why do jihadists hate women so? What do women do to enrage them? What produces the vast difference between the way Western men treat women, and the way jihadists treat women, in the Middle East and elsewhere?

The answer, of course, is that women's behavior is irrelevant. Jihadism mandates that men oppress women, brutally and relentlessly. Nothing women do can appease them.

The same goes for jihadists' hatred of the West, and indeed of all that doesn't conform to shar'ia. What we've done to them doesn't matter. They hated the US centuries before it was founded. They hate the idea of us, they find our existence intolerable, and they won't stop working toward our destruction.

I'm not trying to persuade leftists here. With few exceptions, leftists are unpersuadable. I'm offering this question to those who might find it clarifying, as I do. It's also a quick way to end an argument with a Blame-America-First opponent. Use it freely.
 

I'll be adding sites to the blogroll over the next few days. I've started with CENTCOM (US Central Command), at the request of Army Reserve Spc. Claude Flowers of the 304th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment. For a loyal civilian such as I, to be able to do something specific in support of the military is a pleasure.
 

Wretchard provides extensive analysis of a report on Iraq by General Barry McCaffrey (ret.). According to Wretchard,

MSNBC described McCaffrey as skeptic on the war as early as 2003. The New Republic called General McCaffrey Secretary Rumsfeld's "most outspoken critic" in 2004. . . . And bear in mind that McCaffrey was no fan of the original OIF plan.

From McCaffrey's report:

The morale, fighting effectiveness, and confidence of U.S. combat forces continue to be simply awe-inspiring. In every sensing session and interaction - I probed for weakness and found courage, belief in the mission, enormous confidence in their sergeants and company grade officers, an understanding of the larger mission, a commitment to creating an effective Iraqi Army and Police, unabashed patriotism, and a sense of humor. All of these soldiers, NCOs and young officers were volunteers for combat. Many were on their second combat tour - several were on the third or fourth combat tour. Many had re-enlisted to stay with their unit on its return to a second Iraq deployment. Many planned to re-enlist regardless of how long the war went on.

* * * * *

The Iraqi Army is real, growing, and willing to fight. . . . This is simply a brilliant success story.

* * * * *

The Iraqi police are beginning to show marked improvement in capability since MG Joe Peterson took over the program. . . . The police are heavily infiltrated by both the AIF [anti-Iraq forces] and the Shia militia. They are widely distrusted by the Sunni population. They are incapable of confronting local armed groups. They inherited a culture of inaction, passivity, human rights abuses, and deep corruption. This will be a ten year project requiring patience, significant resources, and an international public face. This is a very, very tough challenge which is a prerequisite to the Iraqis winning the counter-insurgency struggle they will face in the coming decade. We absolutely can do this. But this police program is now inadequately resourced.

* * * * *

The creation of an Iraqi government of national unity is a central requirement. We must help create a legitimate government for which the Iraqi security forces will fight and die. . . . [I]n my view, the Iraqis are likely to successfully create a governing entity.

* * * * *

The foreign jihadist fighters have been defeated as a strategic and operational threat to the creation of an Iraqi government.

* * * *

The U.S. Inter-Agency Support for our strategy in Iraq is grossly inadequate. A handful of brilliant, courageous, and dedicated Foreign Service Officers have held together a large, constantly changing, marginally qualified, inadequately experienced U.S. mission. . . . The bottom line is that only the CIA and the U.S. Armed Forces are at war. This situation cries out for remedy.

* * * * *

The AIF are exploiting our overly restrictive procedures and are routinely defying the U.S. interrogators. It is widely believed that the US has a “14 day catch and release policy” and the AIF “suspect” will soon be back in action.

This is an overstatement of reality, however, we do have a problem. Many of the AIF detainees routinely accuse U.S. soldiers of abuse under the silliest factual situations knowing it will trigger an automatic investigation. In my view, we will need to move very rapidly to a policy of the Iraqis taking legal charge of the detainees in our Brigade Detention Centers--- with us serving a support not lead role.

* * * * *

There is a rapidly growing animosity in our deployed military forces toward the U.S. media. We need to bridge this gap. Armies do not fight wars - countries fight wars.

* * * * *

There is no reason why the U.S. cannot achieve our objectives in Iraq.

This piece strengthens my hope for success there, though I still worry what'll happen after we leave.

(Via Glenn Reynolds.)
 

AP:

A British military helicopter crashed in Basra on Saturday, and Iraqis hurled stones at British troops and set fire to three armored vehicles that rushed to the scene. Clashes broke out between British troops and Shiite militias, police and witnesses said.

Via Robert Spencer, who places the story in the "Tiny Minority of Extremists and They'll Welcome Us As Liberators" category.
 

First Craig Newmark and I independently linked to the same passage from Don Boudreaux. Now Robert Spencer's posted a cri de coeur from John Derbyshire (Spencer calls him "the formidable Derbyshire") that I noted yesterday.

Spencer adds,

[N]ot too long ago I was on a panel with Daniel Pipes, Phyllis Chesler and Steven Emerson. The topic we were given was, "Are we winning the war on terror?" All of us said no.

How can this be, when the enemy has nothing approaching our military might? Because far more important in the long run than the jihad of bombs and beheadings is the soft jihad of subversion of the West, which is succeeding magnificently while most citizens of Western countries are completely unaware that it is happening.

  *Theirs, not mine.
 

Tim Blair on Kos's hope for a Democratic challenger to Hillary:

(Kos) Of course, it’s still early. At this point in the last presidential cycle, the first hints of Howard Dean’s transformational campaign were barely emerging.

(Blair) That brief "emerging" phase was quickly following by the much more entertaining "vanishing" phase.

Clive Davis calls worries about Europe's survival (expressed in this post) "drivel":

Nostradamus is alive and well and clogging up bandwidth.

I hope he's right.
 

Also in The New York Times Magazine, a fascinating piece from Dubner and Levitt:

[E]xpert performers — whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming — are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect. These may be the sort of clichés that parents are fond of whispering to their children. But these particular clichés just happen to be true.

Ericsson's research suggests a third cliché as well: when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love — because if you don't love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good.

(This link and the previous one via my mom.)
 

In The New York Times Magazine, Deborah Solomon, whom I find consistently obnoxious, nevertheless has a good short interview with Cesar Millan of The Dog Whisperer.
 

Jim Geraghty:

This is what policy decisions will be in the future if politicians learn that there is no consequence for taking the easy, demagogic path. When a problem comes up, politicians will fall all over themselves to blame the scapegoated industry or company and use the stirred up public outrage as an excuse to seize financial assets through “windfall taxes” or “fairness taxes” or whatever they’ll want to call it. Political debates will be settled by who can shout the loudest and pound the table the hardest.
 

Jim Geraghty:

[I]n his new book, "The Good Fight", Peter Beinart, the former top editor of the New Republic has completely changed his opinion on the Iraq War. Where Beinart was once one of its most eloquent and persuasive supporters on the left, he now believes, as the Moose puts it [here], that there is "no moral nor strategic value in removing Saddam. He believes that the porous sanction regime could have been sustained."

A TKS reader responded to my post of a few days back by observing, "The New Republic supported the current Iraq War wholeheartedly. It lost them quite a few suscribers. A lot of the criticism you'll hear from them now is about the errors Bush and Rumsfeld made in executing it."

. . . If Beinart is singing this tune, then it's over; Lieberman is the last of the Mohicans, or the last of the Scoop Jackson Democrats. There are no hawks over there anymore. Every once in a while I have hopes for... for... well, you know, her. I figure it means something that she hasn't embraced the whole Dean-Murtha-Pelosi-Cindy Sheehan-Kerry line. But if Beinart — in a book audaciously entitled "The Good Fight"! — can't keep the New Republic as the voice of pugnacious hawkishness in the Democratic party, there's no way that she will pick a fight that enormous with her base.
 

Don Boudreaux:

While declaring "Let the government handle it" comes across as a solution, it's no such thing. Instead, it is merely a sign of a simple and baseless faith -- a simple and baseless faith that people invested with power will not abuse it; that political appointees possess or will find better answers than will millions of people pursuing solutions in their own ways, and staking their own resources and reputations on their efforts; that only those 'solutions' that are spelled out in statutes and regulations and that have officials paid to implement them are true solutions.

So yes, show me a problem and I'll likely respond "Let the market handle it." I'll respond this way because I know that not only is my own meager knowledge and effort never up to the task of solving big problems but that not even the Einsteins or Krugmans or Bushes amongst us can know the best solution to any social problem.

Solutions to complex social problems require as many creative minds as possible -- and this is precisely what the market delivers.

(Via Pejman Yousefzadeh.)

Stephen Pollard on England's local elections, in which Blair's Labor party fared much worse than expected (this Times of London article refers to the results as a "drubbing"):

There can be no greater proof that the writing is now on the wall for Tony Blair than the events of Thursday night and yesterday morning. Electorally bloodied, politically bankrupt and morally corrupted, his New Labour government is now clearly in its death throes. . . . The truth is that the government he presides over is now in meltdown. Mired by incompetence and sleaze, it is hard to see what is the point of it continuing in office.

. . . With every passing day, Labour’s internal wounds grow deeper, and the Conservatives grow stronger.
 

IPSNews.net:

The most sought-after film at hundreds of stands offering pirate DVDs and videos in the Venezuelan capital . . . depicts the lives of adults, youths and children caught up in a spiral of violence between two rival gangs in the poor district of Petare on the east side of Caracas, which encompasses dozens of slums perched precariously on the hills bordering the city.

The movie was made for less than $100 by a twenty-three-year-old barber, Jackson Gutiérrez, who decided to put on film the crime stories he heard every day at work.

The film turned out to be so vivid and real that many of the spectators thought they were watching a documentary, featuring real thieves, drug addicts and murderers.

A.M. Mora y Leon comments,

Since it’s pirate city, I don’t know how much money he made, but he got a point across: Crime is out of control in Venezuela and it’s the biggest thing on people’s minds. This is what could topple Hugo Chavez.
 

Instead of saying "Damn it!" or "Son of a bitch!" after suffering a reversal, Jack Bauer should yell "Oopsie!"
 

Theodore Dalrymple:

What a human catastrophe is the doctrine of human rights! Not only does it give officialdom an excuse to insinuate itself into the fabric of our lives but it has a profoundly corrupting effect on youth, who have been indoctrinated into believing that until such rights were granted (or is it discovered?) there was no freedom.

Worse still, it persuades each young person that they are uniquely precious, which is to say more precious than anyone else; and that, moreover, the world is a giant conspiracy to deprive them of their rightful entitlements. Once someone is convinced of their rights, it becomes impossible to reason with them; and thus the reason of the Enlightenment is swiftly transformed into the unreason of the psychopath.

He offers several illustrative anecdotes.
 

Charles Krauthammer:

With every year, as the Jewish population continues to rise in Israel and decline in America (and in the rest of the Diaspora), Israel increasingly becomes, as it was at the time of Jesus, the center of the Jewish world. . . .

When Iran's mullahs acquire their coveted nukes in the next few years, the number of Jews in Israel will just be reaching 6 million. Never again?

Glenn Reynolds comments, "Given the Iranians' words and actions, I think that Israel is legally and morally justified in launching whatever sort of preemptive strike it chooses." I agree, and I'd say the same about the Palestinians' words and actions.
 

Tim Graham makes a good case that network news deserves some credit/blame.
 

John Derbyshire:

Thank God the Moussaoui trial is over. I have never been so embarrassed for my country. . . . Does anyone, DOES ANYONE, think we're going to defeat Islamofascism by squirting clouds of this multicultural mush at it? The terrorists sure as hell don't.

Later he added,

The Moussaoui trial took me from everyday pessimism to black despair. I shall probably rally a bit, but I still say we are doomed. . . . We can't do what we have to do. We're not willing to.
 

IsraelNationalNews.com:

Yisrael Beiteinu Chairman MK Avigdor Lieberman managed to cause an uproar in the Knesset when he called for the execution of Knesset Members that collaborate and meet with terrorist groups.

Robert Spencer comments, "The fact that this would cause an uproar indicates a massive failure of will."
 

Dave Barry:

At one time I was a co-investor in a small aging apartment building with plumbing and electrical systems that were brought over on the Mayflower; my partner and I were regularly visited by the building inspector, who had the power to write us up for numerous minor building-code infractions, which is why we always pretended to be fascinated when he told us -- as he ALWAYS did -- about the time he re-plumbed his house. His account of this event was as long as The Iliad, but with more soldering.

* * * * *

The point is that you could easily be unaware that you're boring. This is why everybody should make a conscious effort to avoid boring topics. The problem here, of course, is that not everybody agrees on what "boring" means. For example, Person A might believe that collecting decorative plates is boring, whereas Person B might find this to be a fascinating hobby. Who's to say which person is correct?

I am. Person A is correct.
 

From an address by Serge Trifkovic:

There will be no grand synthesis, no civilizational cross-fertilization, between the West and Islam.

* * * * *

The war against jihad can and must be won. The first task is to start talking frankly about the identity and character of the enemy and the nature of the threat. It is essential to discard the taboos and to discuss Islam and the Muslims without fear or guilt, or the shackles of mandated thinking. The obligation to do so is dictated by morality no less than by the need for self-preservation.

* * * * *

The main problem is with ourselves, with those among us who have the power to make policy and shape opinions, and who will reject and condemn our diagnosis.

* * * * *

[T]he liberal world view [rejects] the notion that faith can be a prime motivating factor in human affairs, or that importing Muslim immigrants may be in any way disadvantageous for the host country.

* * * * *

[I]t is essential to refuse or rescind U.S. citizenship to Islamic activists. . . . New legislation should treat a resident alien’s or prospective visitor’s known or suspected adherence to an Islamic world outlook or affiliation with the propagators of Jihad, sharia, etc. as excludable – excludable, let us re-emphasize, on political, rather than "religious" grounds.

* * * * *

Conditio sine qua non all along is to accept and declare that the First Amendment does not protect Jihadists. . . . Legal regulators need to grasp that Islam itself is a radical, revolutionary ideology, inherently seditious and inimical to American values and institutions.

* * * * *

We are in a war of ideas and religion, whether we want that or not and however much we hate the fact. This war is being fought, on the Islamic side, with the deep conviction that the West is on its last legs.

* * * * *

Islamic beliefs, ideas and intentions as such pose a threat to our civilization and our way of life, and not some allegedly aberrant variety of Muhammad’s faith. The elite class rejects this diagnosis, of course, but among reasonable, patriotic, and well-informed citizens the debate on Islam’s nature should be long over.

* * * * *

The refusal of the elite class to protect Western nations from Islamic terrorism is the biggest betrayal in history.

* * * * *

Those Americans and Europeans who love their lands more than any others, and who put their families and their neighborhoods before all others, are normal people. Those who tell them that their attachments should be global and that their lands and neighborhoods belong to the whole world are sick and evil. They are our main enemies and jihad’s indispensable allies.

* * * * *

It is up to the millions of normal Americans and their European cousins to stop the madness.

(Via Robert Spencer.)
 

At The American Thinker, Richard Baehr analyzes Caroline Glick's paper on Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's plan for "withdrawal from most (90% or more) of the West Bank":

Glick argues . . . that the Gaza withdrawal has been a security disaster for Israel, and for its ostensibly pro-American neighbors (Egypt and Jordan, in particular). A terrorist final four of Al Qaeda, Hizbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad are now all operating freely in Gaza, and more advanced weaponry is pouring across the Egyptian/Gaza border crossing in Rafah. The same scenario would almost certainly play out after an Israeli withdrawal from most of the West Bank, putting major Israeli population centers and its international airport within range of enhanced Palestinian rocket capability.

Glick argues that this second Israeli disengagement, from an area almost 20 times the size of Gaza, would be viewed and broadcast by the jihadist forces as a huge victory over both Israel and the United States.

* * * * *

We are now almost 60 years since the founding of the modern state of Israel, and the Palestinians and their allies are no more reconciled to its existence today than they were at the beginning of the state. Those who speak of needing another generation to come of age before resolution to the conflict is possible, badly misread the younger generation of Palestinians, steeped in the constant incitement to destroy Israel, and kill the Jews, and defeat America and the fervent attachment to martyrdom.

The current younger generation of Palestinians, regrettably, is more irreconcilable with Israel than their elders.
 

Michael Wines in The New York Times:

For untold numbers of Zimbabweans, toilet paper — and bread, margarine, meat, even the once ubiquitous morning cup of tea — have become unimaginable luxuries. All are casualties of the hyperinflation that is roaring toward 1,000 percent a year, a rate usually seen only in war zones.

Zimbabwe has been tormented this entire decade by both deep recession and high inflation, but in recent months the economy seems to have abandoned whatever moorings it had left. The national budget for 2006 has already been largely spent. Government services have started to crumble.

(Via Norm Geras.)

Thomas Sowell:

Now, more than a dozen years since Clarence Thomas became a member of the High Court, there is at last a book about his day job -- interpreting and applying the law.

Sowell seems to think that this is the first book about Thomas's work on the bench. If so, he's—gulp—wrong. Scott Gerber's First Principles: The Jurisprudence of Clarence Thomas appeared in 1999. I know about it because I saw Gerber discuss it on C-SPAN. He was very impressive, and he made a persuasive case for Thomas as a serious legal thinker. In National Review, Daniel E. Troy described the book as "an excellent and balanced review of the justice's first five years on the [Supreme] Court."

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to hide.
 

George Will:

His book "The Affluent Society," published in 1958, was a milestone on liberalism's transformation into a doctrine of condescension. And into a minority persuasion.

* * * * *

Galbraith brought to the anti-conformity chorus a special verve in depicting Americans as pathetic, passive lumps, as manipulable as clay. . . . Advertising, Galbraith argued, was a leading cause of America's "private affluence and public squalor." By that he meant Americans' consumerism, which produced their deplorable reluctance to surrender more of their income to taxation, trusting government to spend it wisely.

* * * * *

"The Affluent Society" was the canonical text of modern liberalism's disparagement of the competence of the average American.

* * * * *

Of course if advertising really could manufacture consumer wants willy-nilly, few new products would fail. But many do. "The Affluent Society," postulating the awesome power of manufacturers to manufacture whatever demand they find it convenient to satisfy, was published nine months after Ford Motor Co. put all of its marketing muscle behind a new product, the Edsel.
 

From "Teachers and the Gender Gaps in Student Achievement" in The NBER Digest (.pdf), 5/06:

[Researcher Thomas] Dee finds that gender interactions between teachers and students have significant effects on [. . .] important educational outcomes. Assignment to a teacher of the opposite sex lowers student achievement by about 0.04 standard deviations. Other results imply that just "one year with a male English teacher would eliminate nearly a third of the gender gap in reading performance among 13 year olds…and would do so by improving the performance of boys and simultaneously harming that of girls. Similarly, a year with a female teacher would close the gender gap in science achievement among 13 year olds by half and eliminate entirely the smaller achievement gap in mathematics."

. . . Overall, the data suggest that, "a large fraction of boys' dramatic underperformance in reading reflects the classroom dynamics associated with the fact that their reading teachers are overwhelmingly female."

(Via Greg Mankiw, via Craig Newmark.)
 

Terry Teachout:

Needless to say, I hope and expect to be around for a very long time to come. But twice a day, just like clockwork, I open my medicine cabinet, take out my seven-day pillbox, and swallow the tablets that remind me, whether or not I care to be reminded at that particular moment, that my clock, just like yours, is running down. I know there will always be stretches of my life that I take for granted—that’s in our nature—but until I die there will also be those twice-daily visits to the medicine cabinet to warn me, if I care to listen, that the night cometh, when no man can work. Or listen to music, or take a walk in Central Park, or linger over dinner with a friend and talk idly and happily about nothing in particular.

That’s a good thing to keep in mind, if not exactly a comforting one.
 

Don Boudreaux:

If my eight-year-old son behaved as these people behave, I'd punish him severely and work with every sinew of my body and soul, day and night, to rehabilitate him. And if, at the end of his childhood, I discover that I failed -- say, if my son, when he's grown, aspires to political office -- I'll hang my head in shame knowing that I've unleashed on the world someone who is at best a leech.
 

Tyler Cowen looks at a study of football coaches, and asks a question.
 

Robert Spencer gives four reasons to regret that the jury didn't vote for execution.

 

Clive Davis, who owns the original manuscript of Nineteen Eighty-Four, posts a photo of the first page, complete with extensive corrections in Orwell's hand.
 

AP via Yahoo!:

An old dispute got a new airing this week, when the Iranian president and the emir of Qatar got into it over the name of the body of water that separates Iran from the Arabian peninsula.

Geographers have traditionally called it the Persian Gulf — after ancient Persia which is now called Iran. The Arabs would prefer to call it the Arabian Gulf.

John at OPFOR comments, "I, for one, support dubbing the gulf whichever name pisses off the Iranians the most."
 

James S. Robbins:

Centcom has released raw footage captured in Iraq from the recent Zarqawi video showing, among other things, that he could not operate his own weapon. This is highly useful in the battle to delegitimize the bad guys, showing that they aren't such a competent group of steely eyed killers after all. Sure, good at attacking helpless people and beheading captives, but when it comes to real warfighting they are basically chumps. Getting the world to laugh at them is the very best medicine in the War on Terrorism.
 

Jed Babbin:

It's a commonplace for WaPo columnists to oppose sensible national security measures but when they base their conclusions on utter falsehoods -- as Peter Beinart does today -- we have to answer.

Relying on studies by the Nixon Center and Syracuse University, Beinart argues it's absurd to talk about sealing the Mexican border because, "Not one terrorist has entered the United States from Mexico." In that he's wilfully ignorant of the facts. As I wrote a month ago, there's plenty of evidence that terrorists are coming across the Mexican border. My source? Not a think tank, but FBI Director Robert Muller who testified about an Hizballah cell that was caught.

Those such as Beinart who want to keep the borders open are committing willful falsehoods in proclaiming concern for national security. Let's talk plainly: any "immigration reform" bill that doesn't create border walls - on the north and south - visible with the naked eye from low earth orbit isn't worth a bucket of warm spit. And it shouldn't pass.
 

Lawrence Henry:

If I were to overhear someone plotting a murder which later took place exactly as plotted, I would not be legally culpable in any way for not reporting said plot to legal authorities -- so long as I am not a police officer or a lawyer. Moussaui was haled into civilian court on charges that could be called "trumped-up."

No mistake, he belongs behind bars. But he should have been an enemy combatant from the get-go.
 

R. Emmett Tyrell, Jr.:

In the late 1970s [Revel] was unsure about Ronald Reagan, but seeing the President's resolution against communism he came to admire him. . . . [H]e was slower to accept [Milton] Friedman than he was to accept Reagan. This was typical. For the intellectual of the left it was always easier to reject communism and accept anti-communism. To reject socialism was more difficult. In America Norman Podhoretz showed the same reluctance.

To my surprise at some point in the 1980s Revel found himself persuaded by Friedman. When I asked him why, he responded that the free-market economy had provided the "evidence" of its superiority. . . . I have always wondered why in the West . . . more intellectuals did not follow the path of Revel in France or of the neoconservatives in America, that is to say the small band of liberal Democrats who broke with liberalism when it slipped into its narcissistic fantasy world in the early 1970s.

I suppose the answer is that intellectuals are no more independent-minded or courageous than members of any other social group. They are as much conformists as members of Rotary -- notwithstanding all their boasts to independence and high intellect.
 

Phil Bowermaster:

We may have free will; we may not. But life without the presumption of free will is absurd.
 

A. Yasmine Rassam:

It's just three years after Saddam Hussein's ouster and some would have us believe the tyrant was in fact a protector of women's rights in Iraq. That Iraq under Saddam actually had progressive, pro-women policies that are now being "rolled back" thanks to the Bush administration.

. . . Much of the anti-war propagandists' defense of Saddam as a champion of women's rights rests on his willingness to allow women to vote (for him), drive cars, own property, get an education and work. What they choose to ignore, however, is the systematic rapes, torture, beheadings, honor killings, forced fertility programs, and declining literacy rates that also characterized Saddam's regime.

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

Gary Andres:

For years Democrats conspired with environmental special-interest groups in Washington to block a host of even modest proposals, ranging from expanded domestic drilling, to increased use of nuclear power, to common-sense rules allowing more adequate refining capacity — all factors that would increase supply and reduce prices. Now Democrats have the audacity to stand in front of gas stations and say prices are too high. That should move the outrage needle.

Gas prices are soaring today as a consequence of collusion — not among oil companies but between Democrats in Washington and their special-interest cohorts — creating an axis of obstruction. Ideas have consequences. And American consumers are now paying the price for a liberal agenda.

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

Now that I'm entertaining pessimism about our efforts in Iraq, I'm noticing much evidence of futility. Some examples in Michael Fumento's latest report from Fallujah:

When I was in Camp Fallujah a year ago for about a week, I heard no outgoing fire, and there was no incoming fire. Ramadi, the reputed headquarters of al Qaeda in Iraq, remained wracked with violence, but Fallujah was a tame pussycat.

Now it has sprouted long nails and sharp teeth. Before I left the city and its environs, I would hear outgoing artillery on all three nights I spent time at Camp Fallujah, withstand a mortar attack on one of the small outposts I stayed at, and hear more firefights in the distance, either from the outposts or out on patrol, than I could count.

* * * * *

How is the transition from U.S. forces to Iraqi Security Forces going in the Fallujah area? Judging by the amount of hostile activity, it might seem not very well. It's unfair to say there's constant fighting in the area, but when you hear several firefights in a day, you know it's busy.

* * * * *

I watched a video of an attack on a Fallujah police station with a surrounding wall. The tape had fallen into coalition hands when the cameraman dropped his equipment and ran. The "actors" in the film were no more competent. One fired an RPG while running, making the odds of hitting the target slightly less than zero. Another was too scared to take the safety off his RPG and just stood there looking like an idiot. Another fired his light machine gun at a wall directly in front of him, while yet another kept tripping over the ammo belt that dangled from his machine gun and dragged on the ground. Others would simply hold their weapons above their head and fire over the wall. Yet they appeared to be taking almost no return fire from the police. They could have safely aimed their weapons, but made no effort to do so. All they got for their efforts was that most were captured after being identified from the film.

* * * * *

On patrol with the IA [Iraqi army] in Fallujah, they repeatedly needed to be urged to fully perform their jobs, such as stopping suspicious cars and interrogating the passengers. (In Ramadi, where every daytime patrol is a matter of life and death, the IA performed considerably better and more autonomously.)

Fumento is hopeful:

Everyone understands that the IA will never be up to the level of American soldiers. On the other hand, judging by the even more woeful performance of the enemy, they'll hardly have to be. Further, there's absolutely no evidence the insurgency is growing, while the IP [Iraqi police] and IA in Fallujah clearly are. In Al Anbar, as well as in Iraq as a whole, while it's common to hear that time is on the side of the enemy, it's really not.

Even so,

[C]ivilians are fair game for shootings, bombings, and intimidation. New structures such as schools and hospitals are regularly targeted by mortar and rocket attacks. Cell phone towers are blasted so that civilians can't call in tips to American and Iraqi forces. In Ramadi, the bad guys waited until a hospital was 95 percent completed and then blew it up. Nobody had the heart to start over. As Col. [Thomas C.] Greenwood explains it, there are four phases to defeating the enemy. "You need security, then stability, then reconstruction, and finally prosperity in that order," he says. "We're still somewhat between the first and second. The insurgent knows if he can keep us from devoting resources to the last two, ultimately you can't win over the people – you're just using their neighborhoods as a battleground."

Throughout much of the country, not just in Al Anbar, ambitious American programs of electrification and building are often crippled, in part by attacks, but mostly by fear of attacks, causing inordinate expenditures on security. A couple of insurgents with a couple of mortar rounds that widely miss their mark can nonetheless scare off construction crews.

Read the piece for yourself and see what you think. More and more, though, I feel that no matter the condition of the country when we leave it, soon afterward Iraq will be a Shia-Sunni battleground.
 

At Counterterrorism Blog, Andrew Cochran on the Moussaoui verdict:

I invite everyone to carefully review the redacted jury verdict form (Acrobat file posted on the website of the U.S. Attorney for the case). The replies to the questions provide a roadmap to future terrorism planners to kill thousands of Americans but avoid the death penalty (at least in the Eastern District of Virginia). . . . I appreciate the service of the Moussaoui jurors, but their verdict is a miscarriage of justice and a dangerous precedent.
 

Don Boudreaux:

I wouldn't go to the mat in opposition to defining inflation as an increase in the price level. But there is a problem with this way of defining inflation — namely, it allows people to suppose that price controls really control inflation.

Inflation might better be defined as a loss of purchasing power of the currency unit, "usually expressed as a general rise in the prices of goods and services" (see here).

The link Boudreaux gives is to the definition of "inflation" in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, whose main page isn't working as I type this.

LATER: It's up now.
 

Robert Roy Britt at LiveScience.com:

If you can walk a quarter-mile, odds are you have at least six years of life left in you, scientists announced today.

And the faster you can do it, the longer you might live.

(Via The Speculist.)
 

Judith Apter Klinghoffer links to an extraordinary recording made in April 1945 at Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in Germany. On the recording, Jewish survivors of the camp sing the Zionist anthem "Hatikva" ("The Hope"), which would become Israel's national anthem. The introduction from Patrick Gordon Walker of the BBC includes this:

Around us lay the corpses that there had not been time to clear away even after five days. Forty thousand or more had been cleared, but there were still one or two thousand around, and people were still lying down and dying in broad daylight in front of our eyes.

Klinghoffer translates the lyrics:

As long as deep in the heart,
The soul of a Jew yearns,
And forward to the East
To Zion, an eye looks

Our hope will not be lost,
The hope of two thousand years,
To be a free nation in our land,
The land of Zion and Jerusalem.
 

Via Steve Bass's free PC World newsletter, clips of talking dogs, a selfish kitten, and a two-legged dog. The first two are funny, the third moving.
 

I'd definitely play Business Bingo. (One of the commenters gives it a more pungent name.)

(Via Craig Newmark.)
 

From the New York Sun online:

United Nations officials yesterday were adamant that no exchange of favors was involved in awarding an appointment to a top Turtle Bay position to a man who had just bestowed on Secretary-General Annan an international prize worth a half-million dollars.

"None whatsoever," the U.N. spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, told The New York Sun when asked about any possible connection between the March 15 naming of Achim Steiner to head the U.N. Environmental Program, and the fact that Mr. Steiner was a top judge on a panel that last December awarded Mr. Annan with Dubai's Zayed Prize for Global Environmental Leadership.

Claudia Rosett has a piece today on a different part of the story:

Less well known is that Annan was advised to take the prize money by another senior U.N. official, Mark Malloch Brown—according to Malloch Brown himself in an interview this past February.

Since then, Annan has promoted Malloch Brown from U.N. chief of staff to the U.N.’s number-two post of deputy secretary-general. With role models like these in the executive suite, small wonder the U.N. remains gridlocked over reform.

Are there people who read this sort of thing yet think well of Annan? I'd guess that their number is small, and that they and the others who defend him are hoping he'll send some funds their way.
 

WashingtonTimes.com:

Oil and gas executives said well-armed troops were guarding installations yesterday after the nationalization of hydrocarbon companies, and appeared to be preparing to seize sensitive corporate documents.

"They have dropped the big hammer. Soldiers have taken our control room, and we can't leave the building with anything except our clothes on. No one is allowed to take any documents or laptops out of the building," said Edwin Miller, an American executive of a major oil company based in Santa Cruz.

Bolivia's leftist government said yesterday it would extend control over mining, forestry and other sectors of the economy after President Evo Morales nationalized the country's huge natural gas industry. Foreign governments warned relations could be damaged.

In raising the ante, Mr. Morales said Monday that the gas decree "was just the beginning, because tomorrow it will be the mines, the forest resources and the land."
 

WashingtonTimes.com:

U.S. government officials are enthusiastically endorsing and funding the use of DDT in sub-Saharan Africa after years of resisting calls from scientists who said the insecticide would be the best weapon for fighting malaria, despite lingering objections by some environmentalists.
 

Arnold Kling has me convinced:

The specter of future entitlement shortfalls could be eliminated with the stroke of a pen. . . .

The solution, as I have argued for several years, is to raise the age of government dependency for workers now in their 30's and 40's. This is a painless solution, because (a) it does not affect anyone who currently receives our is counting on government entitlements and (b) it does not really affect people now in their 30's and 40's. . . .

[T]he most logical thing to do is to make promises to today's young workers that are consistent with what we expect to be able to afford, given conservative assumptions about economic growth. As the saying goes, it is better to under-promise and over-deliver than the other way around.

Of course, I want to be convinced. But his argument makes sense to me. Raise my government-dependency age, please!
 

Michael Yon has a profane eight-letter word for the optimistic piece by Ann Marlowe to which I linked yesterday:

I very much hope that Iraq and Afghanistan become self-sufficient, prosperous countries, but misleading people who might invest money, energy and blood into these areas is no way to make that happen. . . . In fact, the media is not up-playing the danger in Afghanistan but seems to be grossly missing it. Unfortunately, I predict NATO and other forces will lose increasing numbers of soldiers in Afghanistan. The place is bad. Really bad. And it’s getting worse.

The Editors of National Review, 4/28/06:

Reluctant though we are to flog the dead mule that is the United Nations, we can't resist commenting on its bestowal of a "Champion of the Earth" award to Massoumeh Ebtekar, Iran's erstwhile vice president and head of the department of environment. Miss Ebtekar was rewarded for her commitment "to protect life on earth," primarily by introducing clean production technologies into Iran's petrochemical industry. She is better known to Westerners as "Screaming Mary," the sobriquet she earned as main spokesman for the hostage-takers of 1979. Asked at that time whether she would be willing to shoot the captives herself, she responded, "Yes. When I've seen an American gun being lifted up and killing my brothers and sisters in the streets, of course." She remains an adamant defender of the mullahs' regime, which is furiously trying to build a nuclear arsenal. Ah, yes: There's nothing quite like a commitment "to protect life on earth."
 

John O'Sullivan:

[O]n Wednesday morning last week federal agents "swooped" on plants in 26 states belonging to IFCO, a U.S. subsidiary of a Dutch company supplying wood pallets and plastic containers to industry, and arrested 1187 illegal immigrant workers. Seven former and current IFCO managers were also charged with employing illegal aliens.

On the very next day Homeland Security Czar Michael Chertoff addressed a press conference to stress that such tough enforcement of immigration law, internally as well as at the border, would now be the rule. Having established its willingness to crack down on illegality, the administration's political machine crossed its fingers and hoped that this display would now help passage of the "Not an Amnesty" law.

All this was not only timely; it was powerfully symbolic. What it symbolized, however, was not the tough enforcement of immigration law but its colander-like leaky ineffectiveness.

For even before Chertoff had spoken (but not before the shrewd blogger, Michelle Malkin, had predicted it), four-fifths of the illegals arrested had been released. Two hundred and seventy-five of them were deported. The rest were sent away in return for a promise to return for a court hearing. Many, probably most, will now disappear. And since the government's computers were "down" at the time, their brush with immigration enforcement may not even be officially recorded. They are home dry—well, dry anyway. . . .

Porous borders are not only the cause of uncontrolled immigration; they are its result. You cannot control the borders, however many patrols you hire or fences you build, if you grant an effective pardon to anyone who gets a hundred miles inland. It's as simple as that.

Jay Nordlinger:

For many years, we have heard, "There was no excuse not to know what Hitler was about; he laid it all out, as early as Mein Kampf." Well, there's no excuse with regard to Ahmadinejad either: The man is not shy, and not cryptic. He's glad to tell you that Israel must be destroyed; that it must not be allowed "to continue to live."

Are we not to take him at his word? Is this merely Islamofascist bravado? It is Islamofascist bravado that must be taken with the utmost seriousness. And all but the most delusional elements of Israeli society do.

What about ours?

* * * * *

I don't believe the Left will cause [Hillary Clinton] much trouble when she runs for president in '08. I believe she can do as much rightward pretending as she wants to do, or needs to do. She can sound like Curtis LeMay—and the Left won't bat an eye, because they'll know it's just an act.

*(I'm being careful with my conjunctions and commas.)
 

Andrew C. McCarthy & Mark R. Levin:

We are former federal government attorneys. We’ve collectively spent decades in law enforcement and believe passionately in its professional, non-political, non-partisan mission. Thus, it’s with outrage that we note that, rather than quietly dropping this embarrassment of an investigation, the state attorney, Barry Krischer—a politically active liberal Democrat—has insisted on filing a charge which he well knows will never be tried. Insisting, that is, on further media churning of an allegation of doctor-shopping that he’ll never prove.

Rush is entering a plea of not guilty. The case will be dismissed in 18 months, when Rush completes the treatment he undertook on his own. There is no reason to file a charge that is without foundation and will never result in a judgment of conviction. But, under Florida procedures, this means a person is “processed.” That is, by this petty maneuver, Krischer has arranged for a mug shot of Rush Limbaugh.

Krischer ought to be ashamed of himself, and the people of Palm Beach County ought to be frightened by what passes for law enforcement in their neck of the woods.
 

Rich Lowry:

With the veto power that comes with its permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, China has been determined to block sanctions against Sudan. Most of Sudan’s oil goes to China, and the African nation is China’s fourth-largest supplier of oil. This trumps all other considerations for Beijing: Oil is thicker than blood, at least the blood of villagers who are the victims of the government-supported Janjaweed militias in Darfur.

. . . The Arab League held a meeting in late March in Sudan’s capital of Khartoum, providing a dose of legitimacy to the regime. Since the killing in Darfur is perpetrated by Arab Muslims against black Muslims, the Arab League is notably unexercised by these crimes and refuses to be distracted from the apparently much more pressing work of fomenting anger over Danish cartoons.

And this is worth remembering:

When activists argue that the U.S. should do even more, they are implicitly conceding that little that is important or controversial in the world gets done unless America leads the way.

 

Mark Steyn:

As English and Belgian and Scandinavian cities Islamify, their inhabitants will face a choice between living as a minority and joining the majority: Not all but many will opt for the latter. . . . I was startled in successive weeks to hear from both Dutch and English acquaintances that they’ve begun going out “covered”. The Dutch lady lives in a rough part of Amsterdam and says, when you’re on the street in Islamic garb, the Muslim men smile at you respectfully instead of jeering at you as an infidel whore. The English lady lives in a swank part of London but says pretty much the same thing. Both felt there was not just a physical but a psychological security in being dressed Muslim.
 

Shelby Steele's piece "White Guilt and the Western Past" got a lot of justified praise today. I'd like to register one objection: Steele writes that the idea of white supremacy "delivered the majority of the world's population into servitude and oppression." My sense is that people already lived in servitude and oppression. Whites just grabbed the reins.
 

Nina Shea:

[George] Clooney’s premise seems to be: if you find genocide, you are principally responsible for stopping it—and now—no matter what the obstacles. We all want genocide in Darfur to stop, and we should work for effective means to bring that about, but Clooney’s partisan approach to genocide in Darfur is a dangerous game. By heaping most of the blame on Bush for the intractability of the Darfur crisis—when he clearly deserves credit—Clooney deflects attention and opprobrium from [Sudan’s President Omar al] Bashir and those who do have the power to stop it immediately.
 

This post by Hugh Fitzgerald, and this reply to a commenter, make the most powerful case I've seen for a US withdrawal from Iraq. I hope you'll read all of each, but here are excerpts. From the post:

The Bandar Beacon (Washington Post) has recently published an extraordinarily revealing article: "In Iraqi Town, Trainees Are Also Suspects: U.S. Troops Wary After Incidents Suggest Betrayal." . . . Below are some excerpts from the full story, and commentary just below each.

* * * * *

3. “Horton said he gives Iraqi officers just minutes' notice when bringing them on a mission, and never tells them exactly where they will be going to prevent them from tipping off insurgents."

Comment: The American officer (Horton) doesn’t tell them because, based on previous betrayals of American forces, including information about the routes convoys will take to those setting I.E.D.’s, he doesn’t trust them. And he shouldn’t –- not now, not ever.

4. "‘I've seen them laughing when we come back in with a vehicle destroyed by a bomb,’ he said. ‘I've seen them stand 10 feet away and do nothing but watch when we are in the middle of a firefight.’

Comment: So these “Iraqi allies” laugh at the sight of a destroyed American vehicle, and no doubt find equally hilarious the dead American soldiers -– American soldiers who are being kept in Iraq to somehow make something of nothing for people who hate or at best dislike them.

* * * * *

5. “Over sweet tea in a grubby police station at the center of Hawijah last week, the station commander, Maj. Ghazey Ahmed Khalif, assured Horton and his team that things were quiet in town that day. But when Horton asked some Iraqi officers to accompany him on a drive through town, Khalif discreetly whispered something into a translator's ear."

"‘All of a sudden he remembers he got a tip about an IED,’ said Horton, using the military acronym for improvised explosive device, or roadside bomb. ‘If we hadn't asked his guys to come, put them at risk, no way he tells us about that.’"

Comment: Our Iraqi allies. Our loyal Iraqi allies. Our loyal and staunch Iraqi allies. The ones American soldiers are being asked to lay down their lives for.

* * * * *

"About an hour later, the patrol came across a white bag on the roadside that Tapalman suspected might contain a bomb. When he asked some Iraqi soldiers to move it off the road, their commander balked, saying it wasn't his job. "‘It is your job to protect the people,’ Tapalman said, increasingly exasperated. ‘I can go and move it myself, and you know what? I will, but don't you think your people should see you doing that kind of stuff. Someday we're not going to be here anymore.’ The Iraqi soldier declined again, apologetically, and drove away.”

Comment: Let the Americans risk their lives. The Americans said they were here to help us. Well, then they’re the ones who should risk their lives removing explosive devices. Why should we? Hell, it’s not our country, this Iraq. We’re Sunni Arabs and Shi’a Arabs and Kurds. We’re not risking our lives for “Iraq.” The Americans can do that.

Conclusion:

Remaining in Iraq squanders every kind of resource: men, money, material, military morale and civilian willingness to engage in measures necessary to check the Jihad to spread Islam. Furthermore, it distracts from other matters, not only Iran (where the presence of American troops as hostages to Iranian retaliation gets in the way), but most importantly, the subject of Europe's islamization, with the military, political, even civilizational catastrophe that that would bring.

From the comment, in which Fitzgerald explains what he'd like to see the US do:

4) make use of the weaknesses of the enemy. Was the Iran-Iraq War a good thing or a bad thing for Infidels? It was a very good thing. Would hostility between Sunni and Shi'a be a good thing for us in Iraq, or a bad thing? A very good thing. Would it be a good thing or a bad thing if the two greatest beneficiaries of the removal of Saddam Hussein — Saudi Arabia (in this corner, wearing black) and the Islamic Republic of Iran (in this other corner, also wearing black) — were to pour aid into their respective Sunni and Shi'a co-religionists in Iraq, aid that might include men, money, and materiel, and also would focus the attention of both on this matter, would that be a good thing or a bad thing for Infidels? A very good thing.

Would it be a good thing or a bad thing if bombs go off in Bahrain, set by Shi'a against their Sunni rulers? If in Kuwait and Pakistan and Yemen and Lebanon Shi'a and Sunni, taking sides in Iraq, also were whipped up locally? A good thing, or a bad thing?

5) in a similar vein, would an independent Kurdistan (what some Arabs have muttered darkly amounts to a "second Israel") be a good thing in attempting to divide and demoralize the camp of Islam, or a bad thing? Would not a free state of Kurdistan inspire Kurds in Syria and Iran to rise up,and cause difficulties for the Alwaite despots, and the Shi'a despots? And in the case of Iran, would not an independent Kurdistan inspire more than Kurds in Iran, but also Baluchis, Arabs in Khuzistan, and even possibly Azeris? And furthermore, would not an independent Kurdistan also inspire Berbers, and black African Muslims, and raise for all non-Arab Muslims the matter that needs to be put under the spotlight. To wit, Islam with its universalist pretentions has actually been a vehicle for Arab supremacism (the taking of Arab names, the bowing toward Arabia, the memorizing of texts in classical Arabic, the modelling oneself, for all time, on seventh-century Arab manners and customsm), the most successful imperialism in human history.

6) forcing American soldiers to risk their lives for an abstraction — "Iraq" — when the "Iraqis" themselves do not fight for "Iraq" because the "Iraqis" themselves do not exist, is cruel. It damages military morale. It causes some very good officers and men, confused or disheartened, to leave the service prematurely. It forces generals to perform all sorts of contortions as they keep pursuing the will-o'-the-wisp of a "stable Iraq" without really questioning the whole policy — apparently either because they take seriously this dangerous "theirs not to reason why" approach that rewards those who soldier on without questioning, or because they know so little about the nature and scope of the menace of Islam that they really believe in the solution of a Light Unto the Muslim Nations Project (Shi'a ruled Iraq becoming a "model" for Sunni Arab states — when it fact it will be, for them, a permanent outrage, to be undone as quickly as possible), which also requires that they not think too deeply about the islamization of Europe.

7) a story in today's New Duranty Times [I think he means this piece—mg] is all about new rules of engagement, whereby Americdan soldiers are now being asked to be extra-cautious in firing on suspicious targets, in order to "win minds and hearts" — unwinnable minds, steely hearts. Win them by risking their own lives. A policy based on a deep failure to understand that whatever kindnesses and solicitude the soldiers show — and they have already shown so much — it will do nothing to win friends. The population is, save for the handful of Christians, and for the Kurds whose Kurdish identity now outweighs Muslim solidarity (so that they are willing for now to make common cause with Americans, for those Infidels are a theoretical enemy, while the Arabs have been a real one), full of people who will always be hostile to Americans. Some will smile, and many will wnat the Americans to stay — they want the Americans to fight for them, to build for them, to do everything for them, and then, and only then, leave.

What nonsense. What hideous nonsense our government persists in.
 

That the troops want the US to keep fighting in Iraq has influenced me on the war. My reasoning has been, "They know far more than I do, and if they think we should stay, then we should stay." I've also worried that if we pull out, we may look weak to the jihadists, and the appearance of weakness emboldens them. And I hate to think of the suffering that innocent Iraqis, many of whom would be genuine allies to the US, will endure if we leave before the country's stable (I'm ignoring the question of whether stability is possible). But Fitzgerald's arguments here and others at Jihad Watch, as well as comments such as these from Daniel Pipes, are having an effect.

Robert Spencer highlights a couple of lines from a speech by Mu'ammar Al-Qadhafi:

There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe - without swords, without guns, without conquests.

* * * * *

Europe is in a predicament, and so is America. They should agree to become Islamic in the course of time, or else declare war on the Muslims.
 

Quin Hillyer, 5/2/06:

So now comes the new report that Medicare will go broke in 2018, two years earlier than projected just last year and 12 years earlier than had been projected in 2001. Social Security's day of reckoning, meanwhile, has been moved up from 2041 to 2040. All of this was announced yesterday by the trustees of the entitlement systems, who are required to issue annual reports on the programs' fiscal health. . . .

Back in 1995, when the GOP Congress first began talking seriously about addressing Medicare, the looming bankruptcy was still a quarter-century away. Now it is just 12 years away. Chalk up another failure of nerve, will, and seriousness to the ignoble, pathetic, embarrassing record of Congress since 1998.

Hillyer faults Bush as well, and calls the Medicare Act of 2003 "the single worst piece of federal legislation actually signed into law in my [i.e., Hillyer's] adult lifetime."
 

Thanks to Michelle Malkin's link, today I reread "Europe's Anti-American Obsession," by Jean-Francois Revel. If you haven't read it, or if like me you read it once years ago, take a look now. Some representative passages:

What picture of American society is likely to be imprinted on the consciousness of average Europeans? Given what they read or hear every day from intellectuals and politicians, they can hardly have any choice in the unpleasant particulars, especially if they happen to be French. The picture repeatedly sketched for them is as follows:

American society is entirely ruled by money. No other value, whether familial, moral, religious, civic, cultural, professional, or ethical has any potency in itself. Everything in America is a commodity, regarded and used exclusively for its material value. A person is judged solely by the worth of his bank account. Every U.S. President has been in the pockets of the oil companies, the military-industrial complex, the agricultural lobby, or the financial manipulators of Wall Street. America is the "jungle" par excellence of out-of-control, "savage" capitalism, where the rich are always becoming richer and fewer, while the poor are becoming poorer and more numerous. Poverty is the dominant social reality in America. Hordes of famished indigents are everywhere, while luxurious chauffeured limousines with darkened windows glide through the urban wilderness.

* * * * *

Americans are regularly reproached for wanting to "impose their economic and social model" on others. But whenever there is an economic slowdown, other countries anxiously await an American-led "recovery."

While the U.S. is vilified and blamed, its financial and military aid is universally desired. America is the sole power at once capable of saving Mexico from economic collapse (in 1995), dissuading communist China from attacking Taiwan (repeatedly), mediating between India and Pakistan in the matter of Kashmir, and working with some chance of success toward the reunification of the two Koreas under a democratic regime. When the European Union sent a delegation, headed by the Swedish prime minister, to Pyongyang in May 2001, the delegation could find nothing better to do than grovel before Kim Jong Il, the criminal chief of one of the last totalitarian jails on the planet.

* * * * *

Why is the USA casually accused of "fascism," when it is a land that has never known a dictator over the course of two centuries, while Europe has been busy making troops of them?

* * * * *

The American military operation in Afghanistan, the first major response to September 11, was derided as a specimen of aggressive unilateralism by global elites, as if no prior event could explain this "imperialistic" reflex. . . . A group of 113 French intellectuals launched an appeal against the "imperial crusade" in Afghanistan: "In the name of the law and morality of the jungle" (not because 3,000 people had been murdered), "the Western armada administers its divine justice." [. . .] In two months alone, several hundred Nigerian Christians were exterminated by Muslims. Our 113 intellectuals had nothing to say about it.

* * * * *

The real cause of September 11 unquestionably lies in the resentment against the United States, which grew apace after the collapse of the USSR, and America's emergence as the "sole global superpower." This resentment is particularly marked in the Islamic lands, where the existence of Israel, which is blamed on America, is an important motivator. But the resentment is also more quietly present over the entire planet. In some European capitals, the sense of grievance has been raised to the status of an idée fixe, virtually the guiding principle of foreign policy. Thus the U.S. is charged with all the evils, real or imagined, that afflict humanity, from the falling price of beef in France to AIDS in Africa and global warming everywhere. The result is a widespread refusal to accept responsibility for one's own actions.

* * * * *

In the two months after 9/11, the phobias and fallacies of traditional anti-Americanism massively intensified. The clumsiest of them was an attempt to justify Islamist terrorism by claiming that America has long been hostile to Islam. The United States' actions historically have been far less damaging to Muslims than those of Britain, France, or Russia. These European powers have conquered Muslim countries, occupied and indeed oppressed them over decades and even centuries. Americans have never colonized a Muslim nation.

* * * * *

One of the most dishonest objections raised against the campaign in Afghanistan was that Americans had made use of mujahedin during the Afghans' war of resistance against the USSR. What was so reprehensible about Ronald Reagan accepting the services of all those willing to oppose the Soviet Union? Was it necessary to wait until all Afghans and Saudis had read Montesquieu and converted to Christianity? Imagine what it would have meant for India, Pakistan, and the Gulf countries--for all of us--if the Soviets had been able to achieve a permanent takeover of Afghanistan. There would have been no Gorbachev, no glasnost, and no perestroika. Coming from the Europeans, who at the time of the Soviet Afghan invasion quivered with cowardice and debated only if they should or shouldn't participate in the Moscow Olympics, this critique has something, one might say, backward about it.
 

If not for this post from Cliff May, I probably wouldn't know about the protests there yesterday:

Thousands of Iranian workers on Monday protested the growing use of short-term employment contracts. It was the most vociferous May Day demonstration the Islamic state has seen in years.

. . . .Iran's government says 10.9 percent of the workforce is unemployed, but some economic analysts say the real figure could be nearer 25 percent.
 

Via Andrew Stuttaford, why capitulation over the cartoon riots set a disastrous precedent.

UPDATE: Curse you, Glenn Reynolds.
 

Peter Hitchens:

By shouting down the many thoughtful and civilised people who have tried to raise this issue in a responsible way, the liberal elite have left the field clear for real bigots and real Nazis to make political hay. Yet again, their actions have had the opposite consequences to the ones they intended. Will they ever learn?

(Via Clive Davis.)
 

Thomas Bray:

"From 1986 to 2003, using 2004 dollars, the real national annual average price for gasoline, including taxes, generally has been below $2 per gallon," noted the Federal Trade Commission in a 2005 report absolving the industry of collusion. "By contrast, between 1919 and 1985, real national annual average retail gasoline prices were above $2 per gallon more often than not."

In other words, gasoline prices were lower than at anytime since 1919 for much of recent history. Some conspiracy! Maybe somebody should have been investigating consumers for "gouging" the oil companies.

And just who is the profiteer here? While the average profit on the sale of a gallon of gasoline is nine cents, the average state and federal tax on that same gallon of gasoline is about 45 cents (and 52 cents in Michigan).

(If I remember how I found this piece, I'll post the link.)
 

From a symposium at FrontPage. Robert Spencer:

[T]he moderate Islam which is the object of so much confidence and hope in the West is at this point essentially a chimera, a fantasy. When George Bush, Tony Blair, and other Western leaders refer to a vast majority of law-abiding Muslims in the West, they are assuming that the major portion of Muslims in their countries accepts the principles of the societies in which they live. But if they accept the canons of traditional Islamic jurisprudence -- in other words, if they adhere to what has been mainstream Islam throughout the history of the religion -- they will not only approve of the execution of apostates, but will also accept many other notions that are fundamentally incompatible with core elements of Western pluralism and many Judeo-Christian principles enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Right now the public discourse is dominated by a dogmatic unreality that not only refuses to confront these unpleasant realities, but stigmatizes and marginalizes those who do so. But the implications of these facts will have to be confronted sooner or later -- particularly as the force of events, in the United States and Western Europe as well as elsewhere around the world, makes it ever more difficult for the prevailing fantasies to be maintained.

Serge Trifkovic:

At a personal level I may sympathize with the desire of moderate, decent and powerless Muslims to be "revisionists" without sliding into apostasy, but the effort is sadly doomed. It evokes the perpetual quest for a socialism with a Human Face east of the Iron Curtain. . . . The willingness of a few to become what are objectively bad Muslims, because they are willing to reject discriminatory and offensive tenets of historical Islam, may be laudable in human terms but it will do little to modify Islam as a doctrine. As Sir William Muir noted back in Huert's days, a reformed faith that should question the divine authority on which the institutions of Islam rest, or attempt by rationalistic selection or abatement to effect a change, would be Islam no longer.

* * * * *

Alas, the fruits of Muhammad's adage that "only Muslims' blood is equal" is the curse that cannot be eradicated, short of a breathtakingly radical reform from within -- a reform exceeding in boldness and scope those of Luther and Calvin -- that seems no more likely today than at any time in the past 14 centuries.

* * * * *

The alleged distinction between "extremists" and "moderates" reflects a Western mindset rooted in the liberal tradition alien to the Islamic world. The difference between them today may concern the methods to be applied but not the final objective: to rekindle the glory of Muhammad's early successors. . . . It is "objectively" less likely today than at any time over the past century that a reformed variety of Islam will emerge that would be capable of reflecting upon jihad, sharia, hadith etc.

This is so, let me repeat, for reasons political rather than philosophical. Only a major, painful, irreparable physical blow to the geopolitical ambitions and aspirations of the "traditionalists" could push the edifice some other way, including the wholesale expulsion of the jihadist fifth column from the West. Since I see no likelihood of any such scenario unfolding, the issue remains academic.
 

An optimistic report from Ann Marlowe:

[W]hile foreigners tend to stick close to the dozens of expat-oriented restaurants of Kabul, much of the real economic action takes place in the provinces, where land titles are less confused. Whereas Kabul is without power most of the day (businesses and foreigners have generators), the situation is much better in the secondary cities of Herat and Mazar. And while Afghans lack education and management skills, their culture values honor and honesty. First MicroFinance Bank has made 9,000 loans, and its plan is to double the number each year. "It is likely that some of these borrowers have died, in a country with a life expectancy of 45, but somehow every loan has been repaid," says FMB's Bruno de Goy.

UPDATE: Michael Yon disagrees strongly with Marlowe's assessment.
 

The world has no room for cowards. We must all be ready somehow to toil, to suffer, to die. And yours is not the less noble because no drum beats before you when you go out into your daily battlefields, and no crowds shout about your coming when you return from your daily victory or defeat.
        --Robert Louis Stevenson

(Via today's Patriot Post newsletter.)
 

Mark Steyn:

According to the Jefferson Library: "There are a number of quotes that we do not find in Thomas Jefferson's correspondence or other writings. . . . Among the most common of these spurious Jefferson quotes are: 'Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.'"

. . . It's truer to say that these days patriotism is the highest form of dissent -- against a culture where the media award each other Pulitzers for damaging national security, and the only way a soldier's mom can become a household name is if she's a Bush-is-the-real-terrorist kook like Cindy Sheehan, and our grade schools' claims to teach our children about America, "warts and all," has dwindled down into teaching them all the warts and nothing else.
 

In an interview (Real Audio) with BBC Radio 4, economist Meghnad Desai has but faint praise for the recently deceased John Kenneth Galbraith. Fascinating for Desai's bluntness—what a treat to hear someone unapologetically talking economic sense—and for the interviewer's repeated attempts to get Desai to say something favorable about Galbraith.

(Via James Waterton at Samizdata.)