Did my matzos come?

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.