Did my matzos come?

Unlike Jonah Goldberg, who considers the show "haughty drek," I'll miss it. The most recent episode was typical: one plot (cast member with clueless parents), well, haughty drek; a second (writer blacklisted in the '50s) too pat, but affecting; a third (black cast member wants a black writer) excellent; and two others, relatively minor, that I liked because I like the characters. Even one great storyline is enough to keep me tuning in. But I can't fault most of America for feeling differently.

(Incidentally, look at that FOXNews.com headline: "Iminent"? Is everyone who can spell on vacation? )

Update 11/5: It's fixed. Vacation must've ended.
 

For speeds lower than the speed of sound, the most aerodynamically efficient shape is the teardrop. The teardrop has a rounded nose that tapers as it moves backward, forming a narrow, yet rounded tail, which gradually brings the air around the object back together instead of creating eddy currents.

From The Handy Physics Answer Book
 

Jay Nordlinger:

“Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid has been using campaign donations instead of his personal money to pay Christmas bonuses for the support staff at the Ritz-Carlton, where he lives in an upscale condominium.”

. . . Can you imagine if a right-wing Senate leader used campaign funds to tip his doormen at the Ritz-Carlton? It would be Christmas morning for late-night comedians, cartoonists, and all the rest of them.

Don’t you think?
 

In his introduction to The Road To Serfdom (quoted here), Milton Friedman wrote,

The argument for collectivism is simple if false; it is an immediate emotional argument. The argument for individualism is subtle and sophisticated; it is an indirect rational argument.

That's why socialism finds wide support despite its universal failure: it's easier to understand than capitalism, and holds a more obvious appeal.

The Left has an even greater advantage when criticizing the war in Iraq, because it's correct in many of its points. Nearly three thousand of our soldiers dead and several times that number injured; direct responsibility for the deaths of many innocent Iraqis; hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars spent; and no clear end in sight—who couldn't make a case against the war?

I still think, though (with apologies to Goldberg, Derbyshire et al.), that we were right to remove Saddam. And a withdrawal that looks like retreat would be far worse than staying.
 

The Allied attacks on Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden didn't turn us into our enemies. It's much closer to the truth to say that those attacks helped turn our enemies into us, to their own betterment and that of the world.

I didn't realize that almost all those willing to fight for Iraq's future were religious zealots.

Jonah Goldberg writes, "I think in retrospect we called the wrong play. But simply because you called the wrong play doesn't mean you walk off the field." I think in retrospect we did the right thing in toppling Saddam and his regime, but instead of trying to create a democracy where there were few who'd defend it, we should've installed Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress and left the country. David Frum wrote about Chalabi a month before the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom:

In the 1990s, the Clinton administration organized a series of covert operations against Saddam's government. They all failed dismally, and many of the Iraqis who took part in them died gruesome deaths. The organizers of these operations felt shame, guilt — and a desperate desire to fix the blame for repeated disaster on somebody else.

The INC was an especially attractive target for the blame-shifters because Chalabi had repeatedly warned that the covert operations would fail — and in Washington, there are few sins quite so unforgivable as being right when everyone else is wrong. Actually, there is one worse sin: advocating bold action when everyone around you has shamefacedly decided that they would prefer to do nothing.

Chalabi kept arguing that the way to defeat Saddam was not with a plot, but with INC ground forces backed by U.S. airpower: the same tactic that would triumph in Afghanistan in 2001. The Clinton NSC team loathed this idea, and they fiercely resented Chalabi for pushing it.

The grudge endured into the Bush administration because, for reasons that remain very hard to understand, the Bush team kept much of the old Clinton national-security apparatus on the job for many months — in some cases more than a year — after Inauguration Day. And nowhere did change come more slowly than in those parts of the NSC that deal with the Middle East.

If only, if only.
  

Bret Stephens tells the story of journalist Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury of Bangladesh, "a country the State Department's Richard Boucher recently portrayed in congressional testimony as 'a traditionally moderate and tolerant country' that shares America's 'commitment to democracy, human rights and the rule of law.'" For attempting to visit Israel, Choudhury was arrested, beaten, held in solitary confinement for sixteen months, and denied medical treatment. Later the offices of his newspaper were bombed, and now the police want to arrest him. As a result, writes Stephens, "he's on the run, fearing torture or worse if he's taken into custody."

The Bush administration, which every year spends some $64 million on Bangladesh, has made a priority of identifying moderate Muslims and giving them the space and cover they need to spread their ideas. Mr. Choudhury has identified himself, at huge personal risk, as one such Muslim. Now that he is on the run, somewhere in the darkness of Dhaka, will someone in the administration pick up the phone and explain to the Bangladeshis just what America expects of its "moderate and tolerant" friends?
  

In Ohio, Republican gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell trails by double digits. In Florida, Republican gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist leads by double digits. Kimberly Strassel explains the disparity:

Their respective failure and success is not ideological: Messrs. Blackwell and Crist are both running on the same agenda of tax cuts, fiscal responsibility and broad government reform. This, instead, is a story of the state parties behind them. In Florida, Republicans have spent the past eight years keeping their promises to voters; in Ohio the GOP forgot what "promise" meant somewhere in the '90s. The tale of these two GOPs offers broader lessons for congressional Republicans, who are facing a rout this fall.

That this election is a referendum on the entire Republican philosophy is the standard line so far this year. Democrats from Nancy Pelosi to Chuck Schumer argue that voters who vote blue are sending a message that they are tired of Republicans' "extreme" views on national security, taxes or social policy.

Quite the opposite, really. If voters are unhappy with Republicans, it's because the party hasn't lived up to its own principles.
  

Jim Geraghty:

The traditional school of thought is that bad poll numbers depress a candidate's supporters, because people are less motivated to vote for a guy that they hear is going to lose. (If we hadn't heard that Bob Dole was down 20 points for most of 1996, would more voters have thought about voting for him?) . The Republican base is marked by a visceral distrust and suspicion of the media, and now pollsters as well. The reaction of, say, a decade ago among a chunk of the GOP base would be, "Dole's down 20? Oh, what's the point?" Now I suspect that a chunk of the GOP base hears, "Oh, no way Webb is tied with Allen. Those numbers are a bunch of [expletive deleted]!"

. . . The GOP get-out-the-vote effort in 2004 - and presumably, this year as well - relies on personal contact between neighbors, church members, coworkers, other parents of children's sports teams, etc. Last time out, it proved tremendously effective in breaking through "the noise" - the seemingly endless cacophony of radio attack ads, television attack ads, screaming headlines on newspapers, piles of direct mail, etc. Instead of some stranger knocking on your door, trying to persuade you that this guy is a guy worth voting for, it's Bob, your child's Little League coach, or Nancy, the woman who runs the church blood drives, or Ed across the street — and you're relieved he's not asking you to return his hedge trimmer you borrowed.

And Bob or Nancy or Ed are more likely to know whether your big issue is taxes, or schools, or the war on terror, or immigration, or the garbage that television programmers try to serve your kids, and so on.

Will that approach work in what is overall, a much, much tougher environment for the GOP this year? We will see.
 

From David Orr’s “Briefs” in Poetry’s “Humor Issue,” July/August 2006:

The Bogs of Xenu, by Seamus Heaney.
CAN Press. $19.95.

If there’s one thing we don’t need from Seamus Heaney, it’s another book about Scientology. When the poet first converted five years ago, most critics had only three questions: (1) How would it affect his poetry?; (2) Would he start dating a hot, young, weird celebrity?; and (3) Assuming the answer to the previous question was “Yes,” would the hot celebrity come to poetry events so we could hang out with her? His engagement to Jenna Elfman answered the second question and the third (Jenna! Kisses!), but the first was still an open issue. Not anymore. With The Bogs of Xenu, Heaney establishes himself as the most disappointing Scientologist poet since Richard Wilbur. To be fair, Heaney is still capable of solid, poised writing, as in the opening to “Free Stress Test”:

Some day I will go to Clearwater,
That town of stucco and wise men,
To don the believer’s epaulets
And free myself through Hubbard’s words
Like a rill escaped from some icy tarn.

Notice how he links Clearwater, Florida, the major North American center for Scientology, with the “clear water” in the high mountain lakes of Ireland. This is vintage Heaney. Elsewhere, however, the poet succumbs to repetitiveness that’s as obvious as it is disheartening. The Bogs of Xenu is now the third book in which Heaney has described L. Ron Hubbard as a fatherly figure with “his boot nestled on a spade’s staunch lug” and the second in which he’s called John Travolta “a harness rod of the inexorable.” Even more depressing is the book’s finale, a fifteen-page poem called “Thetan Peat,” which is simply a repackaging of the imagined dialogue between Tom Cruise and Wolfe Tone that closed his previous collection. While a man’s personal religious choices are no one’s business, maybe Heaney should consider that, as Helen Vendler once wrote, “The line between great poetry and intergalactic space aliens is admittedly fine, but it remains a line nonetheless.”

* * * * *

Hensonia, by Louise Glück.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $19.95.

Nobody works a myth like Louise Glück. In her early writing, she devoted poems to Achilles, the Gemini, and Hyacinth; in Meadowlands, she took up the story of Penelope and Odysseus; and in her last book, Averno, she channeled Persephone with unnerving ease. In this new collection, however, Glück undertakes an even greater task – engaging with what is arguably the great mythos of our own time; a story so complex, so resonant, so deeply ingrained in our collective imagination that . . . well, if it isn’t obvious already, it should be after the first poem in Hensonia, “Overture”:

It’s time to play the music,
it’s time to light the lights –

here, in the vast theater
that was home to us once,

before the song ended, and the curtain
swept down in a great wave
 
casting us forth
to make an end of desire
 
in the blossoming of desire.
Do you remember, Kermit –
 
A woman and frog lie on a white bed;
I look out over the sterile snow . . .
 
We were made fools of.
And this opening, this broken
 
surrender – this
is what we call the Muppet Show.

Yes, after years of preparation, Glück finally has given us her version of the magical puppet universe of Jim Henson (or as Glück calls it, “The Muppet-Fraggle-Dark Crystal Continuum”). In doing so, she joins a crowded field that includes, most recently, Albert Goldbarth (Pigs in Spaaace!) and Kevin Young (Rowlf’s Blues). Even in that distinguished group, however, Hensonia is an arresting achievement. The majority of the poems here focus on the tortured relationship between Kermit and Miss Piggy; they are uniformly searing (“It is no easier/to be green/than to be gripped by a love/itself unpossessed”). Yet Glück is equally adept with the minor figures in the Henson pantheon. Her “Statler” is not only an exacting portrait of weltschmerz, but a vivid rewriting of “Prufrock”:

On the stage, the souls arrive,
their antics childish,
their jokes unremarkable,

and from the balcony, my boxed isolation,
I can say only that I object;
I object to this sideshow.

It’s rare that a poet can shift with such deftness from grand tragedy (as in the Kermit/Piggy poems) to the minor, yet poignant example of a Statler, a Waldorf, or a Swedish Chef. With Hensonia, however, Glück somehow has gathered all hues and shades of this vast myth system and forged – it has to be said – a rainbow connection.
 

CNN.com, 8/11/06:

The U.N. Security Council on Friday unanimously approved a six-page proposal aimed at ending the monthlong conflict between Israel and Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon. . . .

Resolution 1701 calls for increasing the number of U.N. troops in the area from 2,000 to 15,000. They would be joined by 15,000 Lebanese troops and charged with ensuring Hezbollah could not operate anywhere between the Israel-Lebanon border and the Litani River.

The measure also calls for the unconditional release of two Israeli soldiers captured July 12 by Hezbollah. The action precipitated the conflict.
 

Yahoo! News, 8/12/06:

French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy made clear in an interview with Le Monde newspaper that the mission of the larger UNIFIL would not include disarming Hizbollah by force.

“We never thought a purely military solution could resolve the problem of Hizbollah,” he said. “We are agreed on the goal, the disarmament, but for us the means are purely political.”
 

New York Times, 9/25/06:

One month after a United Nations Security Council resolution ended a 34-day war between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia, members of the international force sent to help keep the peace say their mission is defined more by what they cannot do than by what they can.

They say they cannot set up checkpoints, search cars, homes or businesses or detain suspects. If they see a truck transporting missiles, for example, they say they can not stop it. They cannot do any of this, they say, because under their interpretation of the Security Council resolution that deployed them, they must first be authorized to take such action by the Lebanese Army.

The job of the United Nations force, and commanders in the field repeat this like a mantra, is to respect Lebanese sovereignty by supporting the Lebanese Army. They will only do what the Lebanese authorities ask.
 

Yahoo! News, 9/27/06:

Six weeks after the end of the Lebanon war, the militant Hezbollah group is facing little on-the-ground pressure to give up its weapons and disarm — despite a U.N. cease-fire resolution demanding just that.

The leaders of a U.N. peacekeeping force in south Lebanon say the job is not theirs. And Lebanon’s ill-equipped army, some of whose soldiers wear tin-pot helmets and carry outdated M-16 rifles, shows no signs of diving into a confrontation with battle-hardened Hezbollah fighters.

For now, all sides say it’s likely full disarmament will happen only in the future as part of a political solution — despite the U.N. resolution that ended the 34-day war on Aug. 14 and required disarmament.
 

Haaretz, 10/16/06:

Commanders of the French contingent of the United Nations force in Lebanon have warned that they might have to open fire if Israel Air Force warplanes continue their overflights in Lebanon, Defense Minister Amir Peretz told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Monday.

Peretz said that nevertheless, Israel would continue to patrol the skies over Lebanon as long as United Nations resolution 1701 remained unfilfilled, adding that such operations were critical for the country's security, especially as the abducted IDF soldiers remain in Hezbollah custody and the transfer of arms continue.

Over the past few days, Peretz said, Israel had gathered clear evidence that Syria was transfering arms and ammunition to Lebanon, meaning that the embargo imposed by UN Resolution 1701 was not being completely enforced.
 

(All links via LGF.)
 

Ann Coulter:

The belief that we can impress the enemy with our magnanimity is an idea that just won't die.
 

After reading this interview of Donald Rumsfeld, I had a thought I've had before: he's a remarkable man, and the Left's hatred for him is largely irrational. I lack expertise in military matters, so I'm unqualified to judge his performance as Secretary of Defense; but then so are almost all his critics. Rumsfeld's character, articulateness and intelligence are such that were he a Democrat, the Left would adore him.

(Post slightly revised 10/16/06 4:45 PM.)
 

Mark Steyn:

It's impossible not to feel there's been a toughening of the Canadian spine these last few months: whether or not they approve of the mission, people understand that what our troops are doing in Afghanistan is real and hard, and not just the sappy peacekeepy blue-helmet non-military soldiering to which we are allegedly partial. There's no evidence, by the way, that the fellows who wind up having to do it are in fact partial to it. Ineffectual peacekeeping is far more corrosive of a military than the most brutal war, and it's interesting to note that recruitment is up significantly since it emerged that our boys are on a proper combat mission over there: Not surprisingly, there aren't a lot of takers for multinational social work in war zones; if that's your bag, you're better off in Saskatchewan. But joining the army in order to do army-type stuff is much more popular.
  

Also:

In America, the Democrats have turned national security into a shell game: whichever war you're fighting is never the right one. Whenever they're mocked as soft on jihad, they say, oh no, that's not true, we think Iraq is a distraction from Afghanistan. They demand 200,000 troops in the Hindu Kush to go cave to cave to find Osama's remains. So they're not soft on the war. It's just that the pea isn't under the Iraq cup, it's under the Afghanistan cup. You get the distinct feeling, though, that if you took them at their word and said OK, 200,000 troops go in next Thursday, you'd suddenly discover that the pea was no longer under the Afghanistan cup but under the Sudanese one. That's certainly how it felt in the fall of 2001, when the Democrats were insisting, a week in, that it was an almighty quagmire and the Taliban could never be toppled. As a practical matter, no matter how frantically the left scramble the thimbles, whether you look under the Iraqi or Afghan or Sudanese one, you somehow never find the shrivelled pea of The Military Intervention We're Willing To Support.
 

David Frum, in his final post on Bob Woodward's book State of Denial (pp. 414-415):

Woodward is here confirming:

1) that Iran is providing the Iraqi insurgents with the deadliest weapons in their arsenal - a fact that is not exactly news to those who follow the story closely, but that is seldom much commented upon;

2) that Iran is not only providing weapons, but actually training insurgents in the use of the weapons through its proxy, Hezbollah;

and - most astounding of all - 3) that the Bush administration has consciously opted to ignore this "act of war" because if it acknowledged the truth, it would have to do something about it.

Aren't those arresting allegations? Don't they dwarf all the chatter about Rumsfeld and Rice and all the others? Iranians are killing American soldiers - and the US government does not want to know about it. Result: not only does Iran commit terrorism with impunity - but the US is now turning to Iran to negotiate the terms on which the US will be allowed to exit Iraq. That's pretty grim stuff. I'd like to hear an administration spokesman assure me that it's wrong. On the available evidence, however, it seems all too terribly true.
 

New English Review, which I've added to the blogroll, has posted a six-part journal (accessible here) by Theodore Dalrymple of his travels through Europe earlier this year. A few excerpts:

The only aspect of Islam that really interests the majority of les jeunes in the banlieues is the domination and abuse of women. They cannot be said to be religious in any other sense. They do not pray, they do not go to the mosque, they certainly do not give ten per cent of their income to the poor. Of course, there are a few among them, perhaps those of slightly above average intelligence, who will listen to the siren song of Islamism as the supposed solution to their existential impasse, for youth is always in search of complete answers: and, as the world has already seen, it takes only a relative handful of people to create an exceedingly dangerous mayhem. But for most, it is the justification of the oppression of women that keeps les jeunes so deeply attached to Islam. Indeed, the oppression of women is the only source of pride for them, since no other is available. At least they are kings of their own castle.

* * * * *

Entering Switzerland at Geneva to meet an old school friend, one enters a bourgeois paradise. One feels one lowers the tone just by entering it. The streets are spotlessly clean, the wealth is vast. Even the interiors of the elevators in public car parks are clad in marble and lit with crystal. In England, such luxury would invite, and call forth, immediate vandalism.

Of course, the Swiss are rigidly, almost morbidly and intimidatingly law-abiding. If you break a traffic regulation, even in a harmless fashion, ordinary citizens are likely to stare at or gesture to you in a hostile way, or reproach you in deep disapproval.

* * * * *

I was once, in the wake of some riots in the city in which I lived, on the radio with a woman who was to become a government minister under Mr Blair. ‘The tragedy of these riots,’ she said, ‘is that they are destroying the area in which the rioters themselves live’ - or what Afrikaners, in the days of apartheid, used to call, with regard to the blacks rioting in the townships, ‘fouling their own nest.’ ‘So you think it would be better I they came and rioted in your area, do you?’ I asked her. Needless to say, this was not a question deemed worthy of an answer. She had said what she said only to establish the depth of her own compassion, not to enunciate a truth.

* * * * *

It seems to me that the Germans have faced up to their past as well as they could have done, and better than many others. The history of Germany is not just a prelude to Hitler. In my experience, it is not true either that the Germans have no sense of humour: they mock themselves more than the French, for example. When they are serious, though, they are very serious.
 

Highly recommended.
 

Mark Steyn:

A lot of Americans, and not just their sorry excuse for a professional press corps, are in the mood for frivolity. It's like going to the theater. Do you really want to sit through that searing historical drama from the Royal Shakespeare Company? Or would you rather be at the sex comedy next door?

In the 1990s, Americans opted for the sex comedy -- or so they thought. But in reality the searing historical drama carried on; it was always there, way off in the background, behind the yuk-it-up narcissist trouser-dropper staggering around downstage. . . . Thanks in part to last decade's holiday from history, North Korea and Iran don't have to buy any more time. They've got all they need. Life isn't a night on Broadway where you can decide you're not in the mood for "Henry V" and everyone seems to be having a much better time at "La Cage Aux Foley." Forget the Republicans for a moment. In Connecticut, the contest is between a frivolous liberal running on myopic parochial platitudes and a serious liberal who has the measure of the times and has thus been cast out by the Democratic Party. His state's voters seem disinclined to endorse the official Dems' full-scale embrace of trivia and myopia. The broader electorate should do the same.
 

StrategyPage:

Old Russian (Soviet era) nuclear warheads aren't getting onto the black market because you may be able to steal them, but getting them to work is much more difficult. Russian nukes are more high maintenance than most, and after as little as six months without tinkering and replacement of worn parts, the bombs no longer work. . . .

Of course, if you could assemble a team of nuclear weapons engineers, you might be able to revive a "dead" nuke. It's this prospect that made counter-terrorism officials nervous when al Qaeda recently made a public appeal for scientists and engineers to join its ranks. It's known that some Pakistani nuclear weapons experts have a favorable opinion of Islamic radicalism, but these fellows are closely watched. Bottom line; it's not impossible for Islamic terrorists to get their hands on a Russian nuke, that is in working order. But it is very difficult.
  

After Palestinians elected Hamas to lead their government, the U.S. and the EU voted to reduce sharply the money they send there. Now, according to StrategyPage,

The violence in Gaza is increasing, with half a dozen, or more, Palestinians being killed each day by Israeli counter-terror forces. The Israeli intelligence system appears to be intact, and perhaps getting better, inside Gaza. There are plenty of Palestinian terrorists getting identified, and killed by missiles. This is probably because the money offered local agents is worth a lot more because of the cut-off of most foreign aid.
 

The Palestinian territories are becoming more chaotic. New groups, inspired by Arab media, are trying to "turn Gaza into Baghdad," One of them kidnapped a pro-Palestinian American volunteer aid worker, but was forced to give him up by Fatah gunmen. Fatah doesn't want to anger the few American allies it has left. Hamas is building up its armed militia, and mustering as much cash as it can from foreign donors (Iran and Sunni radical groups), to keep it's militias paid and loyal. Fatah is also preparing for war, with aid coming from less militant Arab governments, as well as the United States and Israel. While Fatah still backs terrorism, many in Fatah now believe that terrorism won't work. The Israelis have shut down the Palestinian terror campaign for over two years now, and nothing the terrorists can do seems to be able to turn that around. The recent Hizbollah "victory" in Lebanon has quickly turned to ashes, another Arab illusion that grabs headlines and little else.
 

ScienceDaily:

[A] groundbreaking study led by Florida State University . . . found that the marine biosphere ---- the chain of sea life anchored by phytoplankton ---- invests around one percent (1 terawatt) of its chemical power fortune in mechanical energy, which is manifested in the swimming motions of hungry ocean swimmers ranging from whales and fish to shrimp and krill. Those swimming motions mix the water much as cream is stirred into coffee by swiping a spoon through it.

And the sum of all that phytoplankton-fueled stirring may equal climate control.
 

Wait—isn't man somehow responsible for everything potentially harmful to the biosphere?

But along with the new calculations that point to the marine biosphere's bigger-than-expected role in ocean mixing and climate control, Dewar and his colleagues also suggest that human and environmental decimation of whale and big fish populations may have had a measurable impact on the total biomixing occurring in the world's oceans.
 

Phew.
 

Andrew C. McCarthy examines Sandy Berger's recent history, including Berger's theft of "a so-called 'after-action report' prepared by top Clinton counterterrorism officials . . . to assess the Clinton administration’s 1999 performance in connection with terrorist threats":

Imagine for a moment that Bush National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley or, say, Scooter Libby, had intentionally exploited his security clearance to steal top-secret documents out of the national archives. Is there any chance that would not be daily front-page fodder for the New York Times?

. . . Next year, when Scooter Libby starts trial on false-statement and obstruction-of-justice allegations that carry potential decades of jail time, Sandy Berger will be starting the second half of his two-year term of probation.

You see, for misconduct orders of magnitude more weighty than what Libby stands accused of, Berger was permitted by the Justice Department to plead guilty to misdemeanor mishandling of classified information. No jail time. He was fined $50,000 — and that was only because the outraged sentencing judge quintupled the $10,000 fine proposed by Berger and (astoundingly) the Justice Department.

. . . The Washington Times reported on Thursday that several top House Republicans are demanding a congressional investigation into the Berger caper. One can only wonder what on earth possessed them to wait so long — Berger having lifted the classified documents in autumn 2003 (i.e., around the same time Libby was first interviewed by the FBI) and having been sentenced on the single misdemeanor charge in autumn 2005 (i.e., around the same time Libby was indicted on five felony counts). In a letter to House Government Reform Committee Chairman Thomas M. Davis III (R., Va.), the members asserted that it was important “to determine what records were destroyed, removed or are missing.” No kidding.

In this campaign season, when not incanting raunchy instant messages and explaining how “transparent” Sen. Harry Reid’s finances are, Democrats are fond of prattling about the Republican “culture of corruption” and how incompetently the Bush administration has managed the war on terror.

Fine. Let’s talk competence. Let’s talk corruption. And let’s finally see the drafts of that after-action report.
 

And I'm wholly unqualified to say whether it is. John Tamny:

According to Lorraine Spurge, author of Portraits of the American Dream, Forbes 400 member Michael Milken was responsible for “nearly all the job growth in the decade of the 1980s.”
 

Jonah Goldberg:

The North Korea dilemma — much like the threat of Islamic fanaticism – is Aesopian. The frog in Aesop’s fable did not wish to be stung by the scorpion. The scorpion’s position? Wishing’s got nothing to do with it. Americans tend to think — and Europeans consider it gospel — that all differences can be negotiated. The truth is that only negotiable problems can be negotiated. Just ask Hamas if everything can be bargained for around a table. Their one non-negotiable principle is that Israel must cease to exist. Beyond that, they’re open to all sorts of creative proposals.
 

StrategyPage (no direct link yet) on the Muslim world:

The Arabs are the authors of their own misfortunes. Take their inability to govern themselves. While the vast majority of wealthy and technically advanced nations are democracies, the vast majority of poverty stricken and suffering Islamic states are dictatorships. While this inability to create responsible, efficient governments is often blamed on cultural factors, Islam is a major component of all those cultures. Remember, "Islam" means "submission," and it's not just a cliché that Moslems will respond to a challenge with, "if God wills it." This drives Western technical experts and teachers, brought in to Arab countries to train and educate, nuts. Students simply have a difficult time accepting the fact that things will not take care of themselves. Machines have to be maintained, difficult problems have to be solved, work must be done. If it isn't, you get the backwardness and poverty so frequently encountered in Moslem nations.

This "God wills it" lassitude is most apparent in Arab nations with lots of oil wealth. Rather than take all those billions in oil revenue and build an economy, most of it has just been spent on consumption, and avoiding any real attempts to deal with social and economic problems. And why not? Islam, strict Islam, forbids the use of basic economic tools like interest and risk management (which is often condemned as "gambling.") "God's will", indeed.

. . . Many Europeans believe that the Moslems are misunderstood innocents and that, if we just leave them alone, things will work themselves out. Many Americans were willing to go along with that, until September 11, 2001. Now many Americans understand that there is more than a simple misunderstanding going on here. But the truths of the situation have become too unpleasant to admit. History, and facts on the ground are being ignored. Moslems cannot control the religious fanatics among them. U.S. troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan see that first hand. Many people dismiss the testimony of troops coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. The troops know what they are seeing, and know that it is a war that must be, and can be, won. That's why the reenlistment rates are so much higher among troops who have been over there. The troops know that there are many Moslems who want to enter the 21st century. But those Moslems who are intolerant and bent on murder have to be dealt with first. You can't wish them away.
 

James Dunnigan at StrategyPage:

U.S. troops continue to be mystified at the odd reporting coming out of Iraq. . . . The troops see a very different Iraq from the one journalists are reporting. But the fact of the matter is that few of these journalists are reporting much. On any given day, fewer than a dozen reporters are embedded with combat units, and actually out there. A third or more of these are working for military oriented publications ("Stars and Stripes," Armed Forces Network). Most journalists are in the Green Zone, or some well-guarded hotel. There, they depend on Iraqi stringers to gather information, and take pictures for them. In reality, these reporters could do this from back home, and many more media organizations are doing just that. Nothing new about using local stringers in dangerous areas. It's common sense, given that the bad guys are in the habit of kidnapping, or just killing, foreign reporters. The problem is, the pool of available Iraqi talent is mostly Sunni Arab. Many of these folks side with the bad guys. And all Iraqi journalists, especially those working for foreigners, are subject to intimidation, or bribery. While some of the foreign reporters may be aware of all this, some aren't, and many of the rest don't care. The truth won't set them free, but supplying stories their editors are looking for, will. It wasn't always this way, but that's the way it is these days. And, sadly, about the only people to notice the problem are the many troops who have been in Iraq, and don't have an editor telling them what to think, and report.
 

Subscribe to StrategyPage here.
 

The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism:

Drinking 500 ml of water increased metabolic rate by 30%. The increase occurred within 10 min and reached a maximum after 30–40 min. The total thermogenic response was about 100 kJ. . . . In men, lipids mainly fueled the increase in metabolic rate. In contrast, in women carbohydrates were mainly used as the energy source. . . . Thus, drinking 2 liters of water per day would augment energy expenditure by approximately 400 kJ.
 

Bill Bennett at The Corner (this is the complete post):

Okay, look. Now is the time for all good men—and women—to come to the aid of the party.

In 1960, Barry Goldwater famously shouted, "Grow Up Conservatives." It took 20 years for that call to be heeded, and we got the expanded, entrenched Welfare State, a disastrous & humilitaing foreign policy in the meantime; and Ronald Reagan's presidency was about attempting to roll back those 20 years as much as moving forward on a positive agenda.

Look, if you want John Paul Stevens replaced on the Supreme Court with a carbon copy, pro-choice, pro-racial preferences Justice, stay home.

If you want Donald Rumsfeld hauled before Congress every week justifying the war rather than fighting it, stay home.

If you want spending to increase even above the levels you are unhappy with now, stay home.

If you want Henry Waxman holding hearings on every aspect of the administration's actions, stay home.

If you want to see the war in Iraq defunded to the point of withdrawal so that the worst elements in Iraq take over and a repeat of the helicopters-fleeing-Saigon-type-images come back all over again, signaling a decade-long disrespect and doubt of American power, stay home.

If you want to keep the border unsealed, stay home.

The stakes are large, we can't afford twenty years, we can't afford two years of this. If you want a change in your Congressional leadership, fine, wait until you have the election, then demand it, with a new GOP speaker and majority leader if you want...but let me tell you, a new minority leader and a new minority whip will not get you much, it won't get you anything.

Two years ago we sent a message by reelecting the President, have things fallen so hard since then that we can't muster those numbers again and see that the good should not be traded in for the bad? You want to rue a day? You will rue a day with John Conyers as head of the House Judiciary and Pat Leahy as head of the Senate Judiciary. Don't do it. Please don't do it.
  

The only way this could be better is if it were longer. Sample question/answer:

[Kathryn Jean] Lopez: Why is it significant that the median age in the Gaza Strip is 15.8?

Steyn: Because the best measure of how a state will behave is the people who comprise that state. For the last 30 years, the same bespoke figures have touted the Palestinian cause on the western TV networks — Saeb Erekat, Hanan Ashrawi — and they seem terribly urbane and reasonable. But they are not Palestine. The Gaza Strip has one of the highest birth rates in the world. It has an almost endless supply of teenage boys. If you say “Well, what would you rather have? An economy and a highway system a home in the suburbs? Or waste another three generations trying to take out the Zionist Entity?”, you can make that argument to a middle-aged fellow like Saeb Erekat, but it has no appeal to most 15-year old guys raised in a death-cult society like Gaza. Jihad is way cooler. It’s like a geopolitical version of gangsta pathologies, but with unlimited manpower.
 

Just one more:

Lopez: The war on terror is a civil war in Europe already? Is there any hope for our friends across the pond?

Steyn: Yes, to this extent. The first Western European nation to collapse into total civic breakdown over its fundamentally contradictory bicultural tensions will, I hope, concentrate the minds of others. The best sign that you’re about to go over the waterfall is if the canoe 200 yards ahead suddenly disappears. That gives you a chance at least to pull for shore.
 

Read it all.
 

Philip Stott describes the implications of an experiment at the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen. Here's how I understand them:

* The sun's magnetic field prevents some cosmic rays from reaching Earth's atmosphere; the stronger the field, the more rays it blocks.
* During the 20th century the sun's magnetic field more than doubled in strength.
* Thus, as the 20th century progressed the number of cosmic rays that reached Earth's atmosphere decreased.

* A new experiment demonstrates that cosmic rays help produce clouds in Earth's atmosphere.
* Low-altitude clouds cool Earth's surface.
* Because fewer cosmic rays reached Earth's atmosphere as the 20th century progressed, fewer low-altitude clouds developed.
* Because fewer low-altitude clouds developed, Earth's surface temperature rose.

* Thus, the cause of global warming could be a decrease in cosmic rays, rather than an increase in greenhouse-gas production.

Stott cites the work of scientists who've found "no correlation between temperature variation and the changing patterns of CO₂ in the atmosphere." Instead, their research "implicat[es] cosmic rays and water vapour, rather than carbon dioxide, as the main drivers of climate change. Indeed, they have put down 75% of climate change to these drivers." He comments,

One especially eminent science writer has already declared: "The implications for climate physics, solar-terrestrial physics and terrestrial-galactic physics are pretty gob-smacking....."

I say, watch this space. Slowly, but surely, this revelation could well open a can of wormholes in climate-change science.
 

(Via Melanie Phillips.)
 

Dave Barry:

Why is it important to have visible stomach muscles?

I grew up in an era (the Paleolithic) when people kept their stomach muscles discreetly out of sight. Most of us didn't even realize we had stomach muscles. . . . I'm not saying we weren't in shape; I'm just saying we had a different concept of what the shape should be. For example, our idea of a stud-muffin prototype male was somebody along the lines of George Reeves, who starred in the black-and-white TV version of ''Superman,'' playing the role of the mild-mannered newspaper reporter Clark Kent, whom nobody ever suspected of being Superman because he disguised himself by wearing glasses. (It is a known fact that if you put on glasses, even your closest friends will not recognize you.)

The TV Superman, who was more powerful than a locomotive, did not have visible stomach muscles. In fact, he didn't have much muscle definition at all; he pretty much looked like a middle-aged guy at a Halloween party wearing a Superman costume made from pajamas, a guy who had definitely put in some time around the onion dip. From certain angles, he looked as though he weighed more than a locomotive. But he got the job done. He was always flying to crime scenes faster than a speeding bullet in a horizontal position with his arms out in front of him.

Study question: Did he fly in this position because he had to? Or was it that the public would have been less impressed if he had flown in a sitting position, like an airline passenger, reading a magazine and eating honey-roasted peanuts?