Did my matzos come?

New Scientist:

Desert ants have an internal system - like a pedometer - that keeps track of how many steps they take, according to a new study. The insects seem to rely on this system to find their way back to the nest after foraging. Other insects may also possess this pedometer-like system.

Some types of ant appear to use visual cues or leave scent trails to find their way home. But desert ants have a remarkable ability to retrace their steps from their nesting site even though they travel on flat terrain that is devoid of landmarks, and any odours quickly fade in the hot temperatures.

Previously, researchers have found evidence that ants use the position of the sun as a compass (see Nature, DOI: 10.1038/293731a0). But, as Harald Wolf at the University of Ulm, Germany, and his colleagues point out, for such a compass to be of use desert ants would need a way to track distance.
 

One could reasonably argue that with "51 murders and 151 rapes recorded daily," the people were better off under the old, repressive regime. Maybe freedom carried too high a price.

I refer to South Africa, of course, and its release from apartheid. Did you think I meant someplace else?
 

UPDATE: This piece by Christopher Hope, on a legal travesty there, is worth reading:

This is truly a world apart, a very strange society. It does not consider what is but what people say should be, and the race is to the swift and the well-armed.
 

Ralph Peters:

But the media aren't the worst of it, in the end. Who expects responsible, moral behavior from our media any more? No, the worst of it is the cowardice of our political and even military leaders. Four-star generals may be lions on the battlefield, but turn a camera on them and they're jellyfish. Want to send President Bush into a defensive crouch? Mention Guantanamo.

Our leaders need to stand up for those in uniform. While criminal actions must be investigated, when challenged with media exaggerations or outright lies our leaders need to fight back - and to hammer home that there is no such thing as an immaculate war.

Instead of blubbering that he, too, wants to close Guantanamo, our president should state manfully that, if necessary, we'll keep Gitmo open for the next hundred years.

The United States is history's most virtuous power. Our soldiers are valorous and decent. Our cause is just. Why don't our leaders have the guts to say that? How can they cower while our troops are crucified?
 

Philip Stott supplies the numbers, here and here.

(Via Clive Davis.)
 

Very funny post by Tim Blair.
 

Betsy Newmark:

One thing this case has brought home to so many of us is how terribly powerful a local prosecutor can be. There doesn't seem to be any check on an out-of-control prosecutor bringing baseless charges and ruining three men's lives.

The other tragedy is that women who were really raped will have a bigger hurdle to get over from now on in convincing people of what happened. If it's just the story of one woman against one man, people are going to be a lot more skeptical in light of this travesty of a case.
 

I'm surprised, but not displeased, that every contributor to this NRO symposium supports military action by Israel. (I expected that someone would counsel further strategic withdrawal.)
 

Don Boudreaux offers thoughts.
 

Arnold Kling:

Hamas and other rejectionist Palestinian factions are enjoying an exhilarating experience. Israeli airplanes, tanks, and artillery are putting on a show of force, without hitting anyone. In the process, the Israelis are humiliating themselves and strengthening their enemies.

I am going to argue in this essay that the current Israeli action in Gaza is blind and incoherent. . . .

If Israeli Prime Minister Olmert has a strategy in Gaza, I have not heard it articulated in public. Instead, he and his ministers have issued vague threats and general bluster. To me, sending planes to create sonic booms over Damascus or over Gaza looks like a sign of weakness and desperation, not confidence.

Watching events unfold in Gaza, I am glad to be living in America, with its peaceful neighbors and long distance from the Middle East. I am also glad to have a President who is clear about the goals of his actions, however difficult those goals may be to achieve.
 

Andrew C. McCarthy:

Superpower power is useless. What are you gonna do? Hit them where they live? Bomb Hamburg? Bomb London? Bomb New York?

Not an option. Your nukes, stealth fighters, carpet bombers … they’re largely irrelevant. This is not about killing an advancing brigade. It’s about killing cells. A handful of operatives here and there, nestled among millions of innocents.

The real challenge is not how to kill them — or at least capture them. It’s how to find them. How to identify them from among the hordes they dress like, sound like, and even act like … right up until the moment they board a plane. Or wave cheerily alongside a naval destroyer. Or park their nondescript van in the catacombs of a mighty skyscraper.

The only way to prevent terrorist attacks is to gather intelligence. It is to collect the information that reveals who the jihadists are, who is backing them with money and resources, and where they are likely to strike. There is nothing else.

(Via Betsy Newmark.)
 

Ben Wattenberg:

President Lyndon B. Johnson lost no opportunity to explain why we were in Vietnam: from major speeches to arrival and departure statements for important visitors. I was on his staff from mid-1966 to the end, and at parties and dinners in Washington I would repeat the president’s rationale with gusto. Many times, people would respond, “Gee, I wish LBJ would explain it that way.” Sound familiar? President George W. Bush always talks about Iraq — yet we keep hearing the same line: “Why doesn’t he explain the war?” With the exception of one paragraph (on the “ownership society”) Bush’s Second Inaugural was entirely devoted to the rationale for the war. It’s worth reading: a magnificent speech, right in the American grain, one that will be remembered for as long as liberty is an issue on this planet. And the rationale has not changed. . . .

The basic truth about our mission in Iraq is the same as that about Vietnam: We’re doing something important and positive in the world.

Be proud.

(Via Jay Nordlinger.)
 

I'm relieved to see, via this piece by Nick Schulz, that people besides me are skeptical of William Niskanen's argument that tax cuts increase government spending. And that I'm not the only one to find Jonathan Chait objectionable.
 

Thomas Galen Grove in Wired:

Özgen pulls up to Yilmaz Acar's house. Before he cuts the engine, Acar's wife ducks inside. She returns with glasses of ayran (chilled diluted yogurt) and then disappears, as is the custom, until her husband has finished his business. Acar's place doesn't have a roof or windows, but he's willing to put off the purchase of those to buy a satellite dish. He makes just $260 a month from his small grocery store; it will take about a year to pay Özgen's $180 fee on the installment plan. Before today, he plugged his TV into his neighbor's satellite system. But, he says, he's tired of watching his friend channel surf.
 

Imagine the following:

A benevolent but aloof foreign power with no desire for conquest enters the US, takes over, and maintains control for two years. In that time the occupying forces make a number of mistakes.

What would be the US's condition after the foreign power leaves?

Easy: We'd be fine. Imperfect as always, but mostly peaceful and prosperous.

That's not what happened in Iraq. And that fact should tell us a lot about where blame lies there.

I'm sure the Coalition Provisional Authority made mistakes. How could it not? Its mission was enormous and unprecedented; errors were inevitable. But Iraq's troubles today aren't the fault of the CPA or the coalition forces. No matter how we performed, Sunni-Shia enmity would be boiling, Iran would be making mischief, tribal ties would be competing with national loyalty, and Iraq's army and police would be unready to handle the country's security.

A 2003 Washington Post story (now archived) described how residents of Fallujah stole dirt from a makeshift soccer field. A soldier asked rhetorically, "What kind of people loot dirt?" George Will recently responded,

There are many answers to that question. Here is one: A kind of people who are hard to help.

By all means let's catalogue our mistakes in Iraq. Understanding them should benefit us in future. But let's not overestimate what we could've accomplished. The best we could do was remove Saddam's threat to us and give the Iraqi people a chance to make a success of their country. We did the first, and I'd say we're close to having done the second. We can't save them; they have to save themselves.

I hope they prove up to it. But I recall these thoughts from Healing Iraq's Zeyad, which he posted after the bombing of the Askariyyain shrine:

What kind of nation are we? What kind of nation kills its intellectuals and academics, its doctors and healers, its women and children, its clerics and preachers? What kind of nation blows up churches and mosques, hotels and schools, funerals and weddings? We have left nothing sacred. Yet we have the insolence to accuse others of offending us, of vilifying us. I announce today that we have proved ourselves worthy of that vilification. Ten years ago, I denounced religion and disavowed Islam. I do not want to be forced to disavow my country and nation today, but with every new day, I’m afraid I am getting closer to it.
 

In Wired, "The Rise of Crowdsourcing":

For the last decade or so, companies have been looking overseas, to India or China, for cheap labor. But now it doesn’t matter where the laborers are – they might be down the block, they might be in Indonesia – as long as they are connected to the network.

Technological advances in everything from product design software to digital video cameras are breaking down the cost barriers that once separated amateurs from professionals. Hobbyists, part-timers, and dabblers suddenly have a market for their efforts, as smart companies in industries as disparate as pharmaceuticals and television discover ways to tap the latent talent of the crowd. The labor isn’t always free, but it costs a lot less than paying traditional employees. It’s not outsourcing; it’s crowdsourcing.

One example:

Claudia Menashe needed pictures of sick people. A project director at the National Health Museum in Washington, DC, Menashe was putting together a series of interactive kiosks devoted to potential pandemics like the avian flu. . . . In October 2004, she ran across a stock photo collection by Mark Harmel, a freelance photographer living in Manhattan Beach, California. Harmel, whose wife is a doctor, specializes in images related to the health care industry. "Claudia wanted people sneezing, getting immunized, that sort of thing," recalls Harmel, a slight, soft-spoken 52-year-old. . . .

"They were on a tight budget, so I charged them my nonprofit rate," says Harmel, who works out of a cozy but crowded office in the back of the house he shares with his wife and stepson. He offered the museum a generous discount: $100 to $150 per photograph. "That’s about half of what a corporate client would pay," he says. Menashe was interested in about four shots, so for Harmel, this could be a sale worth $600.

After several weeks of back-and-forth, Menashe emailed Harmel to say that, regretfully, the deal was off. "I discovered a stock photo site called iStockphoto," she wrote, "which has images at very affordable prices." That was an understatement. The same day, Menashe licensed 56 pictures through iStockphoto – for about $1 each.

iStockphoto, which grew out of a free image-sharing exchange used by a group of graphic designers, had undercut Harmel by more than 99 percent. How? By creating a marketplace for the work of amateur photographers – homemakers, students, engineers, dancers. There are now about 22,000 contributors to the site, which charges between $1 and $5 per basic image. (Very large, high-resolution pictures can cost up to $40.) Unlike professionals, iStockers don’t need to clear $130,000 a year from their photos just to break even; an extra $130 does just fine. "I negotiate my rate all the time," Harmel says. "But how can I compete with a dollar?"

Related: "5 Rules of the New Labor Pool" and "Look Who's Crowdsourcing."
 

This looks promising:

Georgia Tech researchers have created a new combustor (combustion chamber where fuel is burned to power an engine or gas turbine) designed to burn fuel in a wide range of devices [. . .] with next to no emission of nitrogen oxide (NOx) and carbon monoxide (CO), two of the primary causes of air pollution. The device has a simpler design than existing state-of-the-art combustors and could be manufactured and maintained at a much lower cost, making it more affordable in everything from jet engines and power plants to home water heaters.
 

Mark Steyn:

Today, lots of experts crank out analyses positing China as the unstoppable hegemon of the 21st century. But the real threat is not the strengths of your enemies but their weaknesses. China is a weak power: Its population will get old before it gets rich. Russia is a weak power: If Africa has health crises, the Middle East has Islamists and North Korea has nukes, then Russia's got the lot: a dying population whose men have a lower life expectancy than Bangladeshis with a Muslim separatist movement sitting on top of the biggest pile of nukes on the planet. Europe is a weak power, remorselessly evolving month by month into Eurabia.

Islam is a weak power: In the words of Dr. Mahathir Mohammed, the former prime minister of Malaysia, one of the least worst Muslim nations in the world, "We produce practically nothing on our own, we can do almost nothing for ourselves, we cannot even manage our wealth." But in Iran they're working full-speed on nukes that will be able to hit every European city. . . .

The danger we face is not a Chinese superpower or an Islamist superpower: If it's a new boss, you learn the new rules and adjust as best you can. But the greater likelihood is of a world with no superpower at all in which unipolar geopolitics gives way to nonpolar geopolitics, a world without order in which pipsqueak thug states that can't feed their own people globalize their pathologies. . . .

Luxembourg can be Luxembourg. America doesn't have that option.
 

Denis Boyles on local coverage of Bush's visit:

The European press is obsessed with Bush, of course, as they are with all American presidents. But Bush is special. They cover the guy with adolescent frenzy, the way Teen Bag used to cover Ratt — except with less nuance and far less affection. They hate the guy and every day devote many thousands of column inches to explaining why. . . .

It’s interesting to compare the big Euro-shrug given to Iranian nukes, which over time will pose a greater and greater threat to Europe and is an issue which was clearly important to Bush, with the disapproval of a continent that cares more about the homicidal lunatics and terrorists in Guantanamo because it provides yet another opportunity for fashionably parading behind an anti-American banner.
 

Two items from Jay Nordlinger's latest "Impromptus":

When hearing about immigration policy — and I get an earful, particularly from conservatives — I often hear about “skilled immigrants” who “wait in line” and can’t gain citizenship, while “unskilled” masses waltz across our southern border, to be amnestied virtually on the spot.

Therefore, I was especially attuned to this story from the AP, titled “Skilled Immigrants Wait on Congress.” It’s worth reading a few paragraphs:

The latest fights over immigration have focused on who should get a place in line for a legal life in the United States. But the real agony, says Tien Bui, comes when you finally get in line.

Bui, who came to the U.S. as a Vietnamese refugee and is now an engineer for Boeing Co. (BA), can’t take the career-boosting position he’s been offered because his citizenship application is lodged somewhere inside the Department of Homeland Security. With green card in hand, Bui has waited patiently since 2003 for his fingerprints to clear background checks, a process that’s become more involved since Sept. 11.

But if Congress approves a new guest-worker program, the overall waiting period for Bui and the millions of legal immigrants like him could grow even longer, says a report by the Government Accountability Office.

No matter what your view on immigration policy, that is kind of bad — isn’t it?

* * * * *

I have a friend who attended an academic conference in Scandinavia, and I thought you’d enjoy — or at least be interested in — what she had to say:

“Over lunch, I asked one of the sharper guys about the problem of Islamic fascism in Scandinavian cities. He admitted that there are now no-go areas for police in certain cities. He said that no one in mainstream society will talk about it. They’re all too afraid. He said, ‘The only ones who are writing about what’s happening in European cities are American conservatives — so, please: Keep up the good work.’”

Isn’t that amazing? (Though not in the sense of surprising.)

If you like those, you should check out the rest of the column.
 

A few days ago I linked to a piece by Theodore Dalrymple in which he laments the cultural decline of North Wales. One passage that's stayed with me comes after Dalrymple recounts a brief conversation with "a small boy aged about six":

For some reason that I could not at first fathom, this slight exchange had a strong emotional impact upon me. It was as if a weight had fallen from my shoulders. What was it that had so moved me?

Then I realized: it was the little boy’s uninhibited innocence. In the city he would already have learned the shame of unsophistication that has both destroyed childhood and lengthened adolescence into a permanent condition: for precocity in the ways of popular culture and street life swiftly gives way to arrested development.

As Dalrymple's noted elsewhere,* city kids learn early to show surprise at nothing, to act as if they know it all already; eventually they lose the capacity for surprise, and without that capacity one can't learn. A profound observation, I think.
 

*I can't recall where; probably in Life At The Bottom, which I highly recommend.
 

Glenn Reynolds links to an editorial in Investor's Business Daily noting John Kerry's latest unacknowledged about-face, on withdrawing troops from Iraq. Reynolds comments, "This is one of many reasons why Democrats should be embarrassed that he was their nominee — and why Republicans should be embarrassed that he came so close to winning."

I beg to differ. Republicans needn't feel embarrassed, but the American people should, especially most of these guys, who really ought to have known better.
 

Nikki Finke:

Sony’s post ban-lifted attempts to screen the Da Vinci Code in one part of populated Andhra Pradesh state in India today were unsuccessful when protesters under the banner of the Christian United Front ransacked a Hyderabad multiplex and caused extensive property damage, forcing the management to suspend the film’s screening. The mob, carrying banners and placards describing the film as “Devil’s Code,” barged in to the multiplex located near the Hussain Sagar lake in the heart of the city even as hundreds of people eager to watch the movie were standing in queues for the tickets of the first show. The activists even broke the Prasad Imax’s box office window (as opposed to breaking the box office record), so the film could not be shown there.
 

When the Puzzle Alarm Clock goes off, it "fir[es] four pieces into the air," and the noise won't stop until the clock's reassembled. (Via Wired.)
 

Via Wired, I've found Tricks of the Trade, which offers free "Professional secrets from those in the know." An "esthetician" recommends baking soda as an exfoliant; a busboy explains how to separate two glasses stuck together; a bouncer gives his method for "cutting off a person who's had too much." Intelligent advice, concisely written.
 

I'm glad to see Mark Steyn defend Ann Coulter. Not that I'm a huge fan of hers, but I often find something to enjoy in her columns (this is my most recent quote). More important, I have the sense that some commentators on the Right disavow her in order to signify their integrity—I'm not unthinkingly partisan; for instance, I consider Ann Coulter an embarrassment. That sort of thing. No doubt some Rightists genuinely dislike her work, and not without reason (her description of Helen Thomas as "that old Arab" comes to mind), but she's a smart observer and a sharp writer, and she deserves somewhat better than she gets from the conservative/libertarian region of the 'sphere.

William Butler Yeats once asked socialist William Morris "what led up to his movement." Morris answered, "Oh, [critic John] Ruskin and [essayist Thomas] Carlyle, but somebody should have been beside Carlyle and punched his head every five minutes." That's pretty much my feeling about Coulter.
 

UPDATE: Hit and Run, Reason's blog, provides a nice example here of what I mean. Coulter and Hitler use "liberal" in two very different, nearly opposite, senses. To suggest a resemblance is idiotic.

I used to subscribe to Reason. Then Virginia Postrel stepped down as editor, and the magazine developed a style of which that post is typical. I let my subscription lapse.
 

Or pessimistic, if you like Dixie Chicks. I predicted that their new album would exit the top ten by its fourth week. Well, it's week four, and the disc's still ranked second. Guess I was wise to eschew the music-exec career path.
 

That's how Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University describes the arguments in Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth. Tom Harris, "mechanical engineer and Ottawa Director of High Park Group, a public affairs and public policy company," explains:

[W]hat Gore's "majority of scientists" think is immaterial when only a very small fraction of them actually work in the climate field.

Even among that fraction, many focus their studies on the impacts of climate change; biologists, for example, who study everything from insects to polar bears to poison ivy. "While many are highly skilled researchers, they generally do not have special knowledge about the causes of global climate change," explains former University of Winnipeg climatology professor Dr. Tim Ball. "They usually can tell us only about the effects of changes in the local environment where they conduct their studies."

This is highly valuable knowledge, but doesn't make them climate change cause experts, only climate impact experts.

So we have a smaller fraction.

But it becomes smaller still. Among experts who actually examine the causes of change on a global scale, many concentrate their research on designing and enhancing computer models of hypothetical futures. "These models have been consistently wrong in all their scenarios," asserts Ball. "Since modelers concede computer outputs are not "predictions" but are in fact merely scenarios, they are negligent in letting policy-makers and the public think they are actually making forecasts."

We should listen most to scientists who use real data to try to understand what nature is actually telling us about the causes and extent of global climate change. In this relatively small community, there is no consensus, despite what Gore and others would suggest.

(Via Pejman Yousefzadeh.)
 

Alan Reynolds:

We have a large capital surplus, otherwise known as a current account deficit.

What do countries with large capital account surpluses have in common? Economic growth over the past year was 3.1 percent in Australia, 3.5 percent in Spain and 3.6 percent in the United States. . . . By contrast, Germany has a perpetual current account surplus and a pathetic economic growth rate that has long been stuck close to 1 percent.

. . . One of the most persistent myths about semi-free trade or globalization is the idea that countries with trade deficits must be losing manufacturing jobs to countries that run trade surpluses. Japan and Germany have run chronic trade surpluses for many years, particularly in manufactured goods, making it easy to find out if this theory works.

From 1992 to 2005, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of manufacturing jobs fell by 16.3 percent in the United States, from 20.1 million to 16.3 million. But the number of manufacturing jobs fell by 24.1 percent in Germany (from 10.7 million to 8.1 million) and by 27.2 percent in Japan (from 15.7 million to 11.4 million).
 

A report by Justin Gillis in the Washington Post:

"If you think we're heading towards a future where oil prices are going to stay relatively high, $50-plus a barrel, then the energy cost delivered in plant biomass is much, much less than the energy cost delivered in oil," said Bruce E. Dale, head of the Biomass Conversion Research Laboratory at Michigan State University. "I'm completely convinced that this industry is going to happen on economic grounds alone. The demand for liquid fuels is so high and rising that we're going to convert an awful lot of stuff to liquid fuels."

Speculative investment capital and even money from some of the big oil companies is moving into the field. . . . Yet fundamental questions about the biomass alternative have yet to be answered. The economics of making ethanol from biomass remain unproven on a commercial scale. Simply collecting all the necessary straw, cornstalks, wood chips and other waste would be a vast logistical problem, and growing energy crops would require big changes in U.S. agriculture.

Nobody is even sure how to store most types of biomass — an elementary problem in producing a year-round fuel from a seasonal feedstock. That's the question the pile of cornstalks in Nebraska is meant to answer.

(Via Mike Boyer at Foreign Policy's blog.)
 

A lot of environmentalists are thrilled at the prospect of cellulosic technology. But picture countries with 10 or more times the population density of the United States (e.g. India) shifting heavily toward biomass to power a growing economy with eventually hundreds of millions of more cars. What would happen to the already shrinking habitats where animals live? They'd be converted into fields to grow plants for cellulose.

I prefer accelerating research and development of photovoltaics, batteries, and nuclear power. Advances on these fronts will enable a shift toward electric power for cars and reduce the ecological footprint of our methods for generating energy.
 

I hadn't heard about this. Amir Taheri in the Jerusalem Post:

Next week, Kuwaitis will go to the polls to elect a new National Assembly which will, in turn, approve a new prime minister and cabinet.

This is the first election in which women are allowed to vote, which means the size of the electorate has more than doubled. More importantly, and much to the chagrin of Islamists who insist that women are unfit to play any role in politics, a number of women are standing, often on a platform of radial social and economic reform. . . .

Days before the Kuwaitis were due to go to the polls, the United Arab Emirates announced that it, too, would opt for a parliamentary system based on elections. This means all but five of the Arab states are now committed to holding reasonably clean elections at the municipal and/or national level.

Some of this new interest in holding elections is due to the impact of Iraq on the broader Arab imagination. Many within the Arab ruling elites saw, with a mixture of admiration and terror, how Saddam Hussein's regime, regarded as the strongest of the Arab despotic structures in recent memory, collapsed within three weeks.

The message was clear: An Arab regime without some mandate from the people is never more than a house of cards.

Worth reading in full.
 

Walter Williams:

What most people don't know is that Marx was an out and out racist and anti-Semite. He didn't think much of Mexicans. Concerning the annexation of California after the Mexican-American War, Marx . . . asks, "Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?"

. . . Engels shared much of Marx's racial philosophy. In 1887, Paul Lafargue, who was Marx's son-in-law, was a candidate for a council seat in a Paris district that contained a zoo. Engels claimed that Paul had "one eighth or one twelfth nigger blood." In an April 1887 letter to Paul's wife, Engels wrote, "Being in his quality as a nigger, a degree nearer to the rest of the animal kingdom than the rest of us, he is undoubtedly the most appropriate representative of that district."

Most historical figures I admire did less-than-heroic things (Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, Martin Luther King frequented prostitutes, etc.). That Marx and Engels were typical nineteenth-century bigots wouldn't affect my respect for their arguments, if I respected them. Still, this is another instance in which the Left ignores traits it would condemn in Rightists.
 

Tim Worstall notes that in Britain, "your paid off, unmortgaged, fully owned property can be taken away from you without your even being paid for it"; and in Belgium,* Alexandra Colen and her husband, Paul Belien, face prosecution because they won't "promise to rear their children along the lines of the UN Convention on Children’s Rights" (the words of a government spokesman).

Outrageous.

*Remember:

[T]here is one word that is still beyond the pale. The concept it embodies is so revolting that the publication or broadcast of the word is utterly forbidden in all parts of the galaxy except one—where they don't know what it means. That word is "Belgium," and it is only ever used by loose-tongued people like Zaphod Beeblebrox in situations of dire provocation.

(Worstall link via Pejman Yousefzadeh, Colen link via Kathryn Jean Lopez.)
 

I thought she did brilliantly. I'd have lost my cool.

Whenever I see a dishonest Muslim apologist, I want to ask him this sort of question:

The following are recent statements by Islamic scholars and other public figures in the Muslim world. They all find in the Qur'an and the hadiths justification for violent jihad, which means they agree with Melanie Phillips.

Osama bin Laden's former mufti Saudi cleric Musa Al-Qarni: "Despite the difficulties and obstacles, the Saudi youth do not listen to any authority or to any call [to refrain from] jihad for the sake of Allah";

[Egyptian-born geologist Professor Dr. Zaghloul Al-Naggar (El-Naggar): "[T]he Holy Koran and to the traditions of Muhammad, peace be upon him, being the only source of enlightenment and the only source of truth within the hands of humanity today";

Saudi Islamist cleric Sheikh Dr. Nasser Al-'Omar: "The Islamic nation now faces a great phase of jihad. . . . There are places where jihad is proper - Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Chechnya, Kashmir, and the Philippines";

Jordanian MP Muhammad Abu Fares: "Our jurisprudence says that whoever fights to make the word of Allah supreme and for the sake of Allah is a mujahid, and if he dies while fighting the enemies of Allah he is a mujahid and a martyr";

Iraqi Ayatollah Ahmad Husseini Al-Baghdadi: "If the objective and subjective circumstances materialize, and there are soldiers, weapons, and money - even if this means using biological, chemical, and bacterial weapons - we will conquer the world, so that 'There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is the Prophet of Allah' will be triumphant over the domes of Moscow, Washington, and Paris."

Do you think they're wrong? If so, you think you know more about Islam than they. Is that your belief? If they aren't wrong, then Melanie Phillips is right, and you were wrong to criticize her. Would you like to amend your remarks?

Either you're right and they're wrong, or they're right and you're wrong. You can't all be right. What's your answer?

I'm sure he'd try to squirm out of giving one. He seemed a rather squirmy fellow.

I've bought a copy of Londonistan, and I look forward to reading it, though not to the frustration it'll inspire.

(Video link via LGF.)
 

It's an impossible task, but I'm trying. First stop: Pejman Yousefzadeh, whose blog you should visit right now if you haven't been there lately, or ever. I'd link to the posts I consider worth your time, but there are too many.
 

Theodore Dalrymple on Britain:

[T]he zeitgeist of the country is now one of sentimental moralizing combined with the utmost cynicism, where the government’s pretended concern for the public welfare coexists with the most elementary dereliction of duty. There is an absence of any kind of idealism that is a necessary precondition of probity, so that bad faith prevails almost everywhere. The government sees itself as an engineer of souls (to use the phrase so eloquently coined by Stalin with regard to writers who, of course, were expected to mold Homo Sovieticus by the power of their words). Government thus concerns itself with what people think, feel, and say—as well as with trying to change their freely chosen habits—rather than with performing its one inescapable duty: that of preserving the peace and ensuring that citizens may go about their lawful business in confidence and safety. It is more concerned that young men should not smoke cigarettes in prison or make silly jokes to policemen than that they should not attack and permanently maim their elders and betters.

In another piece, "Vanishing Decencies," he describes—mourns, really, with typical dispassion—the cultural decline of North Wales:

The chapels—Sinai, Bethel, Zion, and so on—are closing, converted into luxury homes or garden centers or even restaurants (I can recall when restaurants remained almost unknown in North Wales). And in the towns, despite the flourishing of the ancient Welsh language—the oldest in Europe with a continuous poetic tradition—the prevailing culture is the deliberately lumpen and grungy culture of modern Britain: pop music leaking out of the shops into the street like poisonous exhaust, young women, however fat and suety, exposing midriffs and pierced belly buttons to the appalled gaze of the middle-aged. After a certain age, you don’t go to the center of Welsh towns on a Saturday night any more than you would in English provincial cities. In Transylvania after dark, it was Dracula who kept you indoors; in Britain, it is the young who do so.
 

Following Michael Ledeen's recommendation, I started this interview with writer Paul Berman. A bit less than halfway through comes the following:

And there is an American version of this idea which is not Leninist at all. Rather it's a kind of Protestant idea. In this case what matters is our inner soul. If our inner soul is good our outer actions must, by definition, be good. This is a naïve idea in the extreme and the source of a certain kind of American nationalism. The person who expresses this idea with intuitive ease is George W. Bush. He said after the 7/7 bombings, while he was in Britain: 'If they could only see into our hearts they would know how good we are', and he honestly believes that. He looks into his own heart and believes he is a good man and therefore his policies must be good, and everything the US does must be good.

(Emphasis added.)

The usual disclaimers apply: Berman is brighter and more knowledgeable than I (as is Ledeen), and I may be unfair to pull one bit from a long interview. But that quick analysis of Bush's personality is worse than simplistic. It's silly. Only a fool would believe that "everything the US does must be good," and only a fool would believe that Bush is that foolish.

There's too much good stuff on the Web for me to bother with fools, no matter how learned. Perhaps I've misjudged Berman. If so, my loss. But I skipped the rest of the interview.
 

UPDATE: Stephen Pollard praises the interview. Ah well.
 

First, an other-than-neutral analysis (he lives in Florida) of the NBA championship:

Players: Here I again have to, in all objectivity, give the edge to the Heat. Our players are a group of plucky fellows, led by the veteran Shaquille O'Neal, who, at age 52, is still going strong, despite the fact that many of his free-throw attempts wind up on other planets. Also he is constantly being whistled for fouls that are not his fault. They are the fault of gravity. Because of his large mass, Shaquille creates a powerful force field that causes smaller objects -- toasters, motorcycles, opposing centers -- to be sucked into his orbit and slam into his body, as Shaquille watches helplessly.

And on each team's supporters:

Usually Miami has the edge in the number of female fans sporting large and flagrantly artificial upthrusting bazoomage, but Dallas also is very strong in this department.

Second, inventions America needs, including Richard Jeanne's "fine idea for improving the quality of the motoring experience":

You know those irritating drivers who leave their turn signals blinking, sometimes all the way from New York to Cleveland, slowly driving you insane? This irritation would be eliminated by Jeanne's idea for a new, improved turn signal: "After 15 seconds, the car will automatically turn in the direction indicated by the signal." Wouldn't that be great? It would remove at least 200,000 drivers from the road in Miami alone.

Finally, a plea for politeness:

I got to thinking about courtesy the other day when a woman hit me with her car. I want to stress that this was totally my fault. I was crossing a street in Miami, in a pedestrian crosswalk, and I saw the woman's car approaching, and like a total idiot I assumed she would stop. The reason I assumed this -- you are going to laugh and laugh -- is that there was a stop sign facing her, saying (this is a verbatim quote) "STOP."

I don't know what I was thinking. In Miami, it is not customary to stop for stop signs. The thinking in Miami is, if you stop for a stop sign, the other motorists will assume that you're a tourist and therefore unarmed, and they will help themselves to your money and medically valuable organs.
 

Mark Steyn, in his latest segment with Hugh Hewitt:

[U]nfortunately, Peter Beinart, I think, is really in the same situation as Joe Lieberman is. He's trying to articulate a sane policy for a party that is not in the mood for one. And there are no takers for it.
 

Thanks for the support:

US Vice President Dick Cheney said that the war in Iraq was "in part responsible" for the absence of terrorist attacks in the United States since the September 11, 2001 strikes. . . .

"Iraq was a safe haven for terrorists, it had a guy running it who had started two wars, who had produced and used weapons of mass destruction. Taking down Saddam Hussein was exactly the right thing to do," he said.

"It's also, I think, in part responsible for the fact that we haven't been hit again in nearly five years. That's no accident," Cheney said.

Now please stop reading my blog and get back to work.

(Via Drudge.)
 

Back this weekend.
 

"[A]bout as thorough a disaster as one can imagine short of an al Qaeda attack on the homeland," writes Andrew McCarthy in this symposium at NRO. I especially like Austin Bay's comment:

Here’s what too many of us find difficult to grasp: Wars you don’t win, you lose. If you don’t achieve victory, you suffer defeat. There are no other “exit strategies.” And when you are defeated, you will be perceived as weak. And weakness invites aggression. . . .

We will either defeat them or they will defeat us. There is no other option.

We sure have a lot on our plate.
 

Twice that I know of (here and here), Tyler Cowen has written that Mexico "has turned the corner" (toward stability and prosperity). Alex Alexiev doesn't share Cowen's optimism:

There is simply no way for Mexico to avoid an existential crisis if it does not fundamentally and urgently reform its ossified socio-economic system and put the country on the road to sustained economic development. Sitting back and clipping oil and remittances coupons won’t do it—unless, of course, its venal elites come to believe that they can shove their elderly population north of the border tomorrow, just like they’re doing with their young today.
 

Is there a connection between the invasion of Iraq and the absence of an attack in the US since 9/11? To ask it another way: If we hadn't led the invasion of Iraq, would we have suffered another attack by now?

I don't have a definitive answer, but I think it's more than luck that we've gone four-plus years without getting hit again.
 

Dave Barry:

Yes, medical emergencies can occur on even the best-planned family trip.

That's why, before you set out, you should familiarize yourself with the: OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT CLASSIFICATIONS OF BAD MEDICAL THINGS THAT COULD HAPPEN ON YOUR VACATION

I refer here to the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), which is the system used to report medical problems to U.S. government agencies. Alert reader Denise Martin sent me a copy of the ICD, which classifies every conceivable kind of medical problem, including the following, which I am not making up:

E845 -- Accident in spacecraft

E912 -- Bean in nose

E966 -- Beheaded by guillotine

E906.8 -- Butted by animal

E842 -- Glider fire

E915 -- Hairball

E908 -- Injured by cloudburst

E912 -- Marble in nose

E906.8 -- Pecked by bird

E844 -- Sucked into jet aircraft

Do not let this list alarm you. Statistics show that, on any given vacation trip, your family is likely to experience no more than four or five of these emergencies -- even fewer, if you exercise strict parental discipline (''Jason, you let your brother out of that guillotine RIGHT NOW, or we are NOT stopping at the Tastee Freeze'').
 

Theodore Dalrymple:

I hesitate to rush in where so many better-informed people have hesitated to tread, or have trodden before, but I would put it like this. The urge to domination is nearly a constant of human history. The specific (and baleful) contribution of Islam is that, by attributing sovereignty solely to God, and by pretending in a philosophically primitive way that God’s will is knowable independently of human interpretation, and therefore of human interest and desire—in short by allowing nothing to human as against divine nature—it tries to abolish politics. All compromises become mere truces; there is no virtue in compromise in itself. Thus Islam is inherently an unsettling and dangerous factor in world politics, independently of the actual conduct of many Muslims.
 

Claudia Rosett, in her commencement address at Keuka College, NY, 6/4/06:

One of the most poignant memories I have is of a North Korean, a dozen years ago, who when I met up with him had escaped his country’s totalitarian regime into the miserable but relatively freer environs of Russia. There, he was on the run from the North Korean secret police, who killed such defectors if they caught them. He was stateless and desperate, but still grateful to be in a place where he no longer had to march in lockstep to the orders of a tyrant. He sat, in hiding, marveling at what he perceived to be the liberties and luxuries of decrepit post-Soviet Russia, and asked me, wistfully, "Is it true that America is even better than this?"
 

If the precise definition of stardom remains elusive, there's a useful definition of whatever the opposite is: someone who plays a supporting role to Harvey Keitel.

That's from a piece by Mark Steyn called "The Nearly Men," about actors and actresses who didn't quite become major stars.
 

On the average American's scientific knowledge, or lack thereof.