Did my matzos come?

Douglas McGray in Wired:

It all started more than 20 years ago. Cope, already an accomplished musician and programmer, sat at his piano, struggling to compose a piece. Desperate for inspiration, he imagined a computer program that could suggest a clever measure or two. So he compiled a database of his compositions and wrote some code that could detect patterns in his music and compose new riffs that follow the same rules. To his surprise, he says, the results "sounded like me."

Since then, Cope has unleashed Emmy on dozens of the great composers.

Now it's Vivaldi's turn:

The audience hushes, and the ensemble begins: A single, piercing violin races through Vivaldi-esque arpeggios while the rest of the strings measure out a deep, deliberate complement. The second movement is different – slower, sadder, carried along by mournful viola. During moments of quiet beauty or apparent emotion, it is jarring to consider what the music means to Emmy – numbers, built on patterns, built on a database of more numbers. . . .

After about 90 minutes, the performers take their bows to noisy applause. A small circle forms around Cope.

"Some of it sounded Vivaldi-ish," one woman admits, a bit grudgingly. An elderly woman calls it "wonderful."

I can't find samples of the Vivaldi, but this page includes excerpts of computer-generated pastiches of several other composers. None is thoroughly convincing, but they're all impressive, especially (in my opinion) the "Chopin."
 

The Boy Mechanic, Volume 1 (.pdf). I don't know when it was published; the inscription is dated August 1916.

(From this page, via the comments on this blog entry. The newer version offers only "225 THINGS TO BUILD," so the Gutenberg edition is more than three times as humiliating.)

*A lot of the projects involve building tools, so the true number is far higher than 700, because I wouldn't be able to do any of the things the tools are supposed to enable one to do.

Incidentally, this post was inspired by this column, which took its cue from this one. Pride, perverse or otherwise, played no role.
 

From the blogger at l i t w i t, after seeing the musical Company in Manhattan:

Stepping out into twilight and the lights and the smoke and the noise, the desperate push and pull of being alive. As with all things Sondheim, I am reminded: love something. Love something.

(Via Terry Teachout.)
 

Katie Newmark provides a good set of links.
 

David Sinclair:

The idea that a band or solo artist with any aspirations whatsoever would not have a page on MySpace is now virtually unthinkable. And it is the sheer universality of the experience that makes MySpace such a compulsive and exciting prospect. In his groundbreaking book, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson profiles the interests of a typical 16-year-old boy called Ben, brought up in the era of the internet. "From Ben's perspective, the cultural landscape is a seamless continuum from high to low, with commercial and amateur content competing equally for his attention. He simply doesn't distinguish between mainstream hits and underground niches..." - Anderson is writing about consumption in a more general sense, but this description matches the experience of a music fan flitting around the endlessly connected musical world of MySpace. The biggest bands on the planet will all have a MySpace page. And so will the kids that you heard last weekend hammering away in their dad's garage. And so will just about everyone in between.

Spencer Reiss in Wired:

Perched on the edge of a bright white power sofa on the supernaturally quiet eighth floor of the News Corporation’s global headquarters, the last thing Rupert Murdoch looks like is a fire-eyed revolutionary. . . . News Corp. culture is famously seat-of-the-pants; managers who can’t live by their wits quickly fall by the wayside. But more than that, Murdoch revels in spotting unfilled gaps and unmet needs. “Everything we’ve ever done is about giving people choices,” he says. “The Net has a billion people looking for news, sports, and entertainment. Another billion are on mobile phones, and another couple of billion are coming up behind those. That’s a hell of a lot more people making choices.”

Right, but how do you keep News Corp. at the center of their decisions? How do you produce planetary hits in a world of umpteen million YouTube videos? How do you find the next Bart Simpson if he’s being drawn in someone’s garage?

That’s where the Internet comes in, specifically MySpace and the millions of young trendsetters who make it the most disruptive force to hit pop culture since MTV. This nonstop global block party of music, video, and hookups is starting to look like the most powerful mass-media launching pad ever invented. To take advantage of that power, though, Murdoch’s crew faces two challenges. The most immediate is to avoid doing anything that might interfere with the runaway growth that has already made MySpace the biggest aggregation of people on the Web. But that’s just step one. Step two is to turn MySpace’s teeming masses into a wholly new kind of media entity, an advertising, marketing, and distribution vehicle that gives News Corp. a hand on the steering wheel of popular culture worldwide.

(Sinclair link via, indirectly, Clive Davis.)
 

At Argghhh!, John posts a message from "an officer now in Iraq, training the Iraqi Army":

No one in D.C. ever seems to ask guys like me what we think because they know that we would tell them that we have to stay until the job is done. If you want to win in Iraq, you have to take the gloves off like we did in OIF I and OIF II. We were aggressive and violently kinetic. It worked and the bad guys were deathly afraid of us and the people of Iraq respected us. Now we use kid gloves and the bad guys walk all over us and the people of Iraq don't think they should support us because we may pack up and leave and then they would be the object of reprisals. . . .

I think that the basic message that I would like to get out (and one that my soldiers heartily agree with) is that we can and will win this war if we take the gloves off and stomp the guts out of anyone that so much as says "boo" to us. The American soldier is trained and disciplined to the point that we should have no reservations as to their ability to discriminate between innocent people and legitimate targets. Massive firepower brought down on any transgressor is the answer. Sometimes you need to use a sledgehammer to crack a walnut if you want people to pay attention and learn the correct lessons in life. If an IED blows up outside someones house and the homeowners tell you that they don't know anything about, bulldoze the house and salt the ground. After you do that two or three times, Iraqis will shoot the terrorists themselves to protect their homes. I realize that this may not be totally in keeping with some people's concept of "the American way of war", but if we are in it to win it, we need to take all the steps required to totally destroy the terrorists ability to make war on us and turn the population against them. Right now, because of our kid glove approach, there is no threat to the average Iraqi that helps the terrorists or turns a blind eye. We have to make it painful to the point that the Iraqi people say, "These Americans are serious about winning and they won't stop until they have won." No Iraqi is worth the life of one American soldier. . . . War is an ugly business, but it is even uglier if you don't play to win.

(Via Jonah Goldberg.)

Australian journalist Jack Marx (includes a bit of profanity):

It is astonishing that nobody points out the hypocrisy of Bono demanding ASAP audiences with world leaders. I know very well - because I've been Coyote to the music industry Roadrunner for over a decade - that if I were to seek an immediate audience with Bono I'd be laughed at. He'd be "touring", as if playing rock shows is akin to being adrift in the Kuiper Belt. He'd be "very busy", as if a man with millions is any more busy than a guy struggling to pay the rent. Or a man who's running a country.

As for Eddie Vedder, his performance in Melbourne on Monday night, in which he "slammed" John Howard to the crowd, was about as courageous as a pantomime Batman at a 6-year-old's birthday party boasting of how he'll lick The Joker. There is perhaps no audience known to history more forgiving and pliable than a room full of ready-made, paid-up rock fans, who only need the words "Hello Melbourne!" to make them roar like they've seen the winning goal at Wembley. Politicians are the softest of targets for a man on stage in front of an adoring, traditionally left-wing rock and roll audience, and yet, somehow, Eddie's outburst is seen as an act of defiance and courage.

Courage is not eliciting the loudest possible cheer, but risking the ire of your converted audience with words that are likely to make them uncomfortable. If Vedder had been a truly heroic leftie, he might have said something like: "Will all you people with investment properties get the fuck out of my auditorium." That would have been brave.

(Via Tim Blair.)
 

Thomas Sowell:

European nations protesting Saddam Hussein's death sentence, as they protested against forcing secrets out of captured terrorists, should tell us all we need to know about the internal degeneration of western society, where so many confuse squeamishness with morality.

Two generations of being insulated from the reality of the international jungle, of not having to defend their own survival because they have been living under the protection of the American nuclear umbrella, have allowed too many Europeans to grow soft and indulge themselves in illusions about brutal realities and dangers. . . .

The famous Roman peace of ancient times did not come from negotiations, cease-fires, or pretty talk. It came from the Roman Empire's crushing defeat and annihilation of Carthage, which served as a warning to anyone else who might have had any bright ideas about messing with Rome. . . .

If and when we all succumb, will the epitaph of western civilization say that we had the power to annihilate our enemies but were so paralyzed by confusion that we ended up being annihilated ourselves?
 

In Johnny Nash's "I Can See Clearly Now," a song I'd heard a hundred times without noticing:

I can see clearly now, the rain is gone
I can see all obstacles in my way

Most lyricists, I think, would've written "no obstacles," meaning that every problem has vanished with the storm. Instead, Nash makes it "all obstacles," which keeps the song realistic, though still metaphorical: difficulties remain, but now the narrator is able to recognize them. Very intelligent choice.
 

Russian historian and Sovietologist Richard Pipes, interviewed by Paul Kengor:

[O]ne reason why intellectuals are so much more obsessed with Nazi crimes than Soviet crimes – even though in terms of human lives lost the Soviets way exceeded the Nazis – is that intellectuals, by the very nature of their professions, grant enormous attention to words and ideas. And they are attracted by socialist ideas. They find that the ideas of communism are praiseworthy and attractive; that, to them, is more important than the practice of communism. Now, Nazi ideals, on the other hand, were pure barbarism; nothing more could be said in favor of them. In the case of the Soviet Union, [intellectuals] could say, “Well, yes, the practice of Soviet communism was perhaps quite bad, but the ideas are wonderful; and if we did not disturb the Soviets and did not fight them or resist them but, instead, helped them, they might have realized these ideas.”

On Boris Yeltsin:

I think he was the right man at the right time. But, of course, that time has past. Overall, he was very good. However, I blame him for appointing [Vladimir] Putin, a KGB bureaucrat, to power. On the plus side, when it comes to internal Russia, Yeltsin was very good. By opening the [Soviet] archives, Yeltsin helped himself politically at the time by implicating the Russian Communist Party [his main competitor] in the crimes of the past. However, this was also helpful in that it halted the chances of the communists returning to power, by exposing their past crimes.

On "Putin and Russia’s prospects for a democratic future":

I had high hopes that after the dissolution of the communist regime, Russia would take the path of democracy – imperfect, but a democratic path nonetheless. Instead, they went right back to autocracy. I have no hopes now. There is a move right now in the parliament to amend the constitution to allow Putin to stay in office beyond his two-term limit. There are many Russian citizens, two-thirds in one recent poll, who favor dictatorship. Russia 10 to 20 years from now will be a kind of a mild dictatorship. . . .

Of course, Russia today is certainly better than it was under the communist regime. People can travel abroad, can read foreign publications, can listen to foreign broadcasts. But it is not a democracy. It’s not what we hoped for. It’s an autocracy. Not a tyranny. Not a totalitarian regime. An autocracy.

And on "modern Russia’s relationship with the United States":

Russia today is obsessed with the United States, just as it was in the Soviet days. They feel as if the United States would deprive them of the status of a great power, and would reduce them to the status of a Third World power. They would like in some way to counter us. They cannot do it themselves; they do not have the economic means, nor the military means. So they are seeking alliances with Europe. They have very good relations with Chancellor [Gerhard] Schroeder in Germany. And they hope that perhaps they can somehow attach themselves to the European Union and form a counterbalance to the United States. But they are also looking to the east, to China. With the Chinese, they have a sense of common interest.

(Via Walter Williams.)
 

John Podhoretz points out why "it all comes back to ideas":

The GOP has been remarkably innovative over the past decades in building its base and achieving some kind of parity. Those innovations, however, can be copied, and once they are copied, the advantage they gave the GOP disappears. . . .

The GOP system worked better. So Democrats have copied it. And therefore the GOP advantage in this area no longer exists.
 

Theodore Dalrymple describes two cases that seem to him "emblematic":

The first concerned a man with 102 convictions, many for violence including rape. (I should point out that 102 convictions means many more offences, since the conviction rate is never 100 per cent of the offending rate, and is sometimes only 5 or 10 per cent of it.)

This man nevertheless became eligible for parole. As conditions of parole, the board told him he must not drink, smoke cannabis or frequent certain places. The man told the board that he would abide by none of these conditions, but he was released on parole anyway. Within a short time, he had killed three people and so maimed a fourth that she will never recover.

The second case was of a man with many previous convictions, some for violence, who abducted and murdered a young woman aged 24. He was imprisoned and applied for bail. Three times he was turned down, but a fourth judge granted him bail. He was sent to live at a certain address, where he befriended his neighbours, who did not know that he was accused of murder. Eight months later, while babysitting their children, he killed one of them.

Perhaps the most extraordinary twist of this terrible tale is that the parents of the murdered child then had another baby, which the social services then removed from them on the grounds that they had previously entrusted a child to the care of a murderer and were therefore irresponsible parents. The state blames its citizens for the mistakes - if that is what they are - that it makes. . . .

[T]he judges and others in New Zealand ignored the most obvious considerations in their dealings with the criminals before them. Their own reputation for generosity of spirit and lack of vengefulness was more important to them than protection of the public. . . . One thing is evident, however: those who make the mistakes do not pay the price for them. They feel the warmth of generosity without feeling the cool current of responsibility.
 

Mark Steyn describes three monuments recently unveiled: in London, "[s]haring the heart of the capital with King George IV, General Sir Charles Napier and Major General Sir Henry Havelock these days is Alison Lapper, an armless woman heavily pregnant"; Arizona's 9/11 Memorial is "an almost parodic exercise in civilizational self-loathing, festooned in slogans that read like a brainstorming session for a Daily Kos publicity campaign"; and in France, "Clichy-sous-Bois has put up a monument to the unfortunate Zyed Benna and Bouna Traore," two "youths" who, fleeing from the police, "decided to hide out in an electrical sub-station" and were electrocuted.

America, Britain and France are not peripheral members of the developed world but its heart. They’re the west’s three permanent representatives on the Security Council, the three nuclear powers. But if these monuments truly represent the spirit of each nation as those monuments to Nelson and Napier did in their day then you would have to be an unusually optimistic sort to bet on the long-term prospects of all three countries. The poseur diversity of Trafalgar Square slips easily into the self-loathing of Arizona, and from there it’s but a short step to the open appeasement in Clichy-sous-Bois. If you seek our monument, look around: We cannot state who we are, what we believe, why we fight.
 

In the latest print edition (so no link) of National Review, Andrew Stuttaford reviews Ian Buruma's book on the killing of Theo van Gogh:

When it comes to describing the two protagonists in this terrible drama, Buruma rarely misses a trick. His vividly drawn portrait of Theo is made painful, not only by our knowledge of the slaughter to come, but also by the hideous irony that a man astute enough to realize that the old easygoing Holland was under lethal assault was too careless, too stubborn, and too confident to realize that he too was in danger. Nobody would harm him, said blithe, foolish Theo: He was just “the village idiot.” But that familiar comfortable village had been torn down, replaced by a multicultural shantytown, yet another miserable utopia in which there would be no room for rowdy jesters, rude pranksters, or free spirits of any kind.
 

Of the tributes and obituaries I've read, this post by Claudia Rosett is probably my favorite (so far).
 

David Frum:

Over the past 15 years, it is the Democrats, not the Republicans, who have emerged as the party of upper-income America. In 2000, Al Gore beat George Bush among the 4% of voters who described themselves to exit pollsters as "upper class." In 2004, John Kerry won nine of the 10 richest zip codes in the United States.

As for sex — well, it turns out that it's Republican (and especially Republican women) who have it more often and better.

And according to a book coming out next week,

By virtually every measure, political conservatives are demonstrably more generous, more honest and more public-spirited than political liberals.
 

David Frum:

So long as you are anti-war, you can be pro-gun, pro-life, and pro-crook.
 

Michael Ledeen:

The newspaper accounts are way behind the times in their description of the camorra, for they routinely list its primary activities as drugs, prostitution, extortion, and public works. Some of the better Italian journalists have pointed out that the mob runs at least one third of the security companies in town, including a big chunk of the armored trucks that carry money and financial documents. They don’t need to steal, they simply control the cash. And the old protection racket — forcing shop owners to pay a fixed amount each month to guarantee they won’t be robbed or mugged — is also old hat, since the camorra either directly or indirectly controls roughly half of all retail outlets in the city.

The traditional picture of organized crime also ignores some of their most lucrative criminal enterprises, as for example the billion-dollar clothing industry, described in detail in a recent Italian best-seller, Gomorra, written by a 28-year old Neapolitan journalist named Roberto Saviano. Camorra companies in and around Naples produce tens of thousands of high-end branded clothes, including labels like Armani and Versace. Just like the authentic products, these are hand-stitched by skilled tailors, and are in fact indistinguishable from those manufactured at the official factories. Same materials, same quality, same label. The knockoffs are sometimes added to legitimate shipments, sometimes simply delivered directly to buyers in and outside Italy. Customers have no way of knowing where the clothes were made, nor, in many cases, do the producers know where their products are going. Saviano tells a moving story about a camorra tailor whose talent was the equal of anyone in the great fashion houses. One night he was watching the Academy Awards on television, and saw Britney Spears dancing in a gown he had made.
 

Jack Dunphy reacts to the debate over this video of a violent arrest in Los Angeles:

Had video cameras been as ubiquitous years ago as they are now I might have found myself in a situation similar to the one faced by those two officers today. . . . There was a single witness to the incident [involving Dunphy], a woman sitting on her porch across the street. She had seen everything, she told our sergeant, and she said we had beaten the man “for no reason at all.” The sergeant asked her if she had seen the gun the man had dropped. She had not, and she agreed that this added information changed her interpretation of what she had witnessed.

Just as the woman failed to see the gun from across the street, if she had recorded the incident with a video camera the gun probably wouldn’t have been visible on the tape, either. I can envision such a tape being played, over and over and over, on the news and on the Internet, and I can imagine being pilloried in the media just as the two Hollywood officers in the current tape are being pilloried today. And I can imagine myself saying, just as the two Hollywood cops must be saying, just as cops all over the LAPD are saying, Why bother?
 

But I doubt it. Michael Ledeen:

The Baker/Hamilton Commission has a chance to dramatically reshape our thinking about American foreign policy. . . .

None of the various schemes put forward in our public debate to “solve” Iraq can work — although much can be done to improve conditions — because they all inevitably assume that Iraq can be “solved” by itself. That includes the call for more troops on the ground. Even if you believe that those troops will dramatically improve security, it still doesn’t address the central question: can the people of the region believe we are going to win? They won’t believe it until they see us waging war effectively, which means we have to be able to threaten Iran and Syria with defeat.

It requires an Iran/Syria policy. Iran declared war against us 27 years ago and has waged it relentlessly, but we have yet to respond. It is astonishing how many diplomats and spooks actually believe Syria is a friend, when Assad drinks our blood from the same glass as Khamenei. Serious policies must aim at regime change in Tehran and Damascus. This does not require a military invasion of either country, but it does require active support for anti-regime political groups, combined with an explicit declaration that we want an end to the tyrannies. As a starter, it would be nice to have the Justice Department indict the Iranian leaders, following the example of Argentina, which just issued arrest warrants for former president Rafsanjani and his henchmen, who presided over the Hezbollah bombing of the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires in 1996.

We do not have great intelligence on Iran, but we do know a lot about the sentiments of the overwhelming majority of Iranians, thanks to public-opinion polls conducted by the mullahs themselves. Those polls show upwards of seventy percent of Iranians — that would be 50 million people, mostly younger than 30 — who do not like the regime and want it changed. Those are terrific numbers for us and terrifying numbers for the mullahs, which is why they frantically arrest, torture and kill anyone who openly criticizes them, and why they have destroyed all remnants of free press, and why they are censoring Internet use, satellite-TV access, and cell phones. They, and their Syrian allies, know where their doom lies.

A free Iran would most likely become an instant ally in the war against terror, reversing the balance of power in the Middle East in a single, non-violent stroke. Hezbollah would be deprived of its source of money, materiel and guidance, and would shrivel up, awaiting last rites. Al Qaeda, many of whose leaders moved to Iran from Afghanistan in 2002, would be similarly damaged, as would Islamic Jihad and Hamas, two of Tehran’s major clients. And the information from Iranian intelligence files would turn over many rocks in many swamps, all over the world, probably including our shores.

We have many options in the war, so long as we decide we really want to win it. Baker/Hamilton can help us see the real war, and free us from the error of strategic vision that has blinkered our strategic debate ever since 2002. Let’s hope.
 

Going out tomorrow.

To whom it may concern:

I've read that "news" channel Al-Jazeera is seeking distribution by American cable and satellite companies. I'm writing now to inform you that should Cablevision agree to show Al-Jazeera, I'll cancel my account with you and find another provider.

Sincerely,
Michael Greenspan
 

Jonah Goldberg on the GOP's selection of Trent Lott as Minority Whip:

Recall, if you will, that Lott, the Mississippi Republican, was Senate majority leader in 2002 until he proclaimed that America would be better off if only Strom Thurmond — the Dixiecrat segregationist candidate in 1948 — had been elected president.

The gale-force winds of the subsequent political maelstrom were not only enough to blow Lott from his perch as majority leader, but some witnesses actually swear they saw his hair move.

. . . Yes, yes, Lott’s defenders are also right to say that most normal Americans don’t know who the whip is — or even that such a position exists. That’s not the point. The job is unknown; Lott isn’t. There are all sorts of obscure jobs out there, and not just in politics. But if you put famous people in them, they stop being obscure. If O.J. Simpson became recording secretary of the American Horticultural Society, you could hardly defuse the negative press by saying, “It’s a really inside job.”

The boys and girls in the clubhouse seem to think that what happened to Lott was unfair. “He apologized, and he paid a serious price for it,” Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe said. Maybe so. But so what? It’s not about him. Or at least it shouldn’t be. Lott is a bad face for the Republican party. Period. Full stop. If that’s unfair to Trent, boo hoo for Trent. Somebody buy him an ice-cream cone.

Besides, the idea that fairness to Lott should supersede what’s good for the Republican party is of a piece with precisely the sort of back-scratching, log-rolling mentality that got the GOP in trouble in the first place. It bespeaks a mind-set that says, “Well, Senator so-and-so voted for my pet project, so in fairness to him, I’ll vote for his.” Nowhere does this calculation figure in the good of the country.
 

I'm sure many people will link to today's StrategyPage analysis of the situation in Iraq, but I haven't seen it elsewhere yet. Here's the conclusion:

Iraqi Shia have seen what religious dictatorship has done for Iran, and most want no part of it. What Iraqi Shia do want is peace and prosperity. That is not a matter of religious rule, but of getting rid of the hated Sunni Arabs. In the West, there is an aversion to looking at Iraq in terms of religious war, and the expulsion of millions of losers. But that's what it is, and will continue be.

The Arab world sees the Democratic Party gains in the recent U.S. elections as a sign that Americans are getting tired of the violence in Iraq, and are ready to leave. The Arabs also see the Democrats are more pro-European, and thus more anti-Israel and more tolerant of Islamic terrorists and traditional forms of government (dictatorships and monarchies) in the Arab world. The elections also confirm, in the Arab mind, that the Americans cannot be trusted in the long run, have no stomach for bloodshed and can always be turned around by the more clever Arab tactics. For the Iraqi Shia Arabs, the departure of the Americans won't change anything. It was nice having them, their money, and their deadly soldiers around. But the Shia Arabs have enough guns, and people trained to use them, to deal with the Iraqi Sunni Arabs. The Americans have served their purpose, and it's time for them to go.

Worth reading in full.
 

In Canada's National Post, former jihadist Dr. Tawfik Hamid explains the conflict to writer Michael Coren:

"[. . .] I can tell you what it [Muslim imperialism] is not about. Not about Israel, not about Iraq, not about Afghanistan. They are mere excuses. Algerian Muslim fundamentalists murdered 150,000 other Algerian Muslims, sometimes slitting the throats of children in front of their parents. Are you seriously telling me that this was because of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians or American foreign policy?"

He's exasperated now, visibly angry at what he sees as a willful Western foolishness. "Stop asking what you have done wrong. Stop it! They're slaughtering you like sheep and you still look within. You criticize your history, your institutions, your churches. Why can't you realize that it has nothing to do with what you have done but with what they want."

(Via Andrew Stuttaford at The Corner.)
 

Selina Macaulay, 5/28/1813, to her son Thomas Babington Macaulay (then twelve):

I know you write with great ease to yourself, and would rather write ten poems than prune one; but remember that excellence is not attained at first. All your pieces are much mended after a little reflection, and therefore take some solitary walks, and think over each separate thing. Spare no time or trouble to render each piece as perfect as you can, and then leave the event without one anxious thought. I have always admired a saying of one of the old heathen philosophers. When a friend was condoling with him that he so well deserved of the gods, and yet that they did not shower their favours on him, as on some others less worthy, he answered, "I will, however, continue to deserve well of them."

(Via Jim Powell, via Don Boudreaux.)
 

Mark Steyn, interviewed by Hugh Hewitt, 11/9/06:

Well, well, I think this idea that there'll be...oh, Nancy Pelosi's going to be such a disaster that it'll be a Republican landslide in 2008, I think you'd be surprised. With a friendly media, and Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid biting their tongues when it suits their purpose, you'll be seeing a lot of stories about the change of tone in Washington in the New York Times and the Washington Post suddenly appearing. This idea that they'll fall flat on their face, and the Republicans will come sweeping back in, in 2008, that's a false comfort. That's almost as absurd as the other straws that were clutched at during the last couple of months.
 

I realized something today:

A bond forms between people who find they like the same movie.
A stronger bond forms between people who find they like the same line in a movie, especially if the line is funny without being obviously funny.

For certain readers, this blog's present title is one such line.
 

In Wired, Joshua Davis writes about a condition called prosopagnosia, or face blindness:

BILL CHOISSER WAS 48 when he first recognized himself. He was standing in his bathroom, looking in the mirror when it happened. A strand of hair fell down – he had been growing it out for the first time. The strand draped toward a nose. He understood that it was a nose, but then it hit him forcefully that it was his nose. He looked a little higher, stared into his own eyes, and saw … himself.

For most of his childhood, Choisser thought he was normal. He just assumed that nobody saw faces. But slowly, it dawned on him that he was different. Other people recognized their mothers on the street. He did not. During the 1970s, as a small-town lawyer in the Illinois Ozarks, he struggled to convince clients that he was competent even though he couldn't find them in court. He never greeted the judges when he passed them on the street – everyone looked similarly blank to him – and he developed a reputation for arrogance. His father, also a lawyer, told him to pay more attention. His mother grew distant from him. He felt like he lived in a ghost world. Not being able to see his own face left him feeling hollow.

One day in 1979, he quit, left town, and set out to find a better way of being in the world. At 32, he headed west and landed a job as a number cruncher at a construction firm in San Francisco. The job isolated him – he spent his days staring at formulas – but that was a good thing: He didn't have to talk to people much. With 1,500 miles between him and southern Illinois, he felt a measure of freedom. He started to wear colorful bandannas, and he let his hair grow. When it got long enough, he found that it helped him see himself. Before that, he'd had to deduce his presence: I'm the only one in the room, so that must be me in the mirror. Now that he had long hair and a wild-looking scarf on his head, he could recognize his image. He felt the beginnings of an identity.

It gave him the confidence to start seeing doctors. He wanted to know if there was something wrong with his brain. His vision was fine, they told him – 20/20. One doctor suggested he might have emotional problems and referred him to a psychiatrist. In the medical literature, there were a few reports of head-injury and stroke victims who'd lost their ability to recognize faces. No one, as far as the doctors knew, had ever been born with the condition.

Conventional medicine, in other words, got him nowhere. So Choisser posted a message about his experiences on a Usenet group devoted to people with neurological problems. His subject line was "Trouble Recognizing Faces." After a few months, in late 1996, he received a solitary reply. "Hello, Bill," the email began, "I read what you wrote, and I think I have what you have."
 

In the US, children lack rights that adults possess. Imagine that a ten-year-old boy goes to sleep one night and wakes the next morning twenty-one years old.¹ Suddenly he's allowed to do many things he wasn't the day before: drink, smoke, vote, have sex, join the military, learn to drive—many things. He possesses new rights.²

Imagine that a gay man goes to sleep one night and wakes the next morning straight. What rights will he have gained? None. He still won't be permitted to marry the man he loves;³ he can marry a woman, but he could've married a woman the day before. A gay man has rights identical—not equal, identical— to the rights of every other unmarried man.

Two obvious objections present themselves. First, "If he falls in love with a woman, he'll be able to marry her.⁴ That's a new right: the right to marry the person he loves." No: his rights haven't changed, his wishes have. He could've married this woman when he was gay, but he didn't want to. Now he does. There's no new right involved, just a new desire. In other words, it's not that he's now allowed to marry someone he loves; it's that he now loves someone he's allowed to marry. The love is new, not the right.

Second, "Critics say that legalizing gay marriage would give gays special rights. In fact, gays' and straights' rights would remain identical. Any man, gay or straight, would be free to marry another man, any woman another woman."⁵ True, and not at issue. To voice this objection is to concede that legalizing gay marriage isn't necessary to achieve equal rights for gays. Gays already possess equal, or rather identical, rights to those of straights.

None of this is to argue for or against gay marriage. I'm simply pointing out that gay-marriage advocates' frequent calls for "equal rights" are deceptive. Identical rights already exist.

I am, as I've written before, reluctantly opposed to gay marriage. If you want to persuade me to support gay marriage, you'll have to convince me that the creation of a new national right intended to benefit a small percentage of the population is good for America. (If it's bad for America, it can't be good for gays.) Dale Carpenter is sure. I'm not.
 
¹His bed is on a spaceship. While he sleeps the spaceship's speed approaches that of light.
 
²I'm sure there'd be legal complications, but I'm ignoring them. Feel free to imagine instead that he was in a coma for eleven years.
 
³Now in a platonic way, I suppose.
 
⁴Subject to the usual conditions (she's unmarried and not a close relative, and she wants to marry him).
 
⁵Same as the previous footnote, with additional male pronouns.
 

George Handlery of The Brussels Journal went to Hungary for a ceremony marking the anniversary of the 1956 uprising:

What I experienced proved to be a shocking transmission of the totalitarian past into the dictatorial present. . . .

Three cases of atrocities deserve special mention. An MP used a moment of calm between the police and the crowd. Waving his ID identifying him as a parliamentarian he went to the policemen. They looked at the ID and beat him up. A fractured bone, a bandaged head – he has a memory loss – and an arm in a cast were the price he paid. The second case is that of a priest. He tried to calm the parties. The police got an order to club him. One cop exclaimed “but he is a priest!” The more so, let him have it, was the answer. In at least one case a whole volley was fired on and into a Red Cross rescue van and its crew that was loading the injured. TV showed several scenes documenting atrocities. In a typical one a man holding a flag stands alone in a street. He is tackled by four men. Heaved over on the side walk a mass of police pounces to beat and kick him. Understandably TV crews got special attention manifested in the form of rubber bullets. A Polish crew located the beaten Jesuit and tried to interview him. Riot police ordered them to leave as they had no permit. The Poles meant that in an EU-country one does need a permit. Most revealingly the police retorted: “there is no EU here.” The statement of fact raises a good question: where is the EU, where is the otherwise so easily outrages international press? . . .

What I witnessed suggests that the substance of democracy has still not arrived.
 

Jonah Goldberg makes a plausible pick.

Update: Charles Krauthammer concurs:

[C]onsider who is the biggest winner of the night: Joe Lieberman. Just a few months ago, he was scorned by his party and left for dead. Now he returns to the Senate as the Democrats’ 51st seat — and holder of the balance of power. From casualty to kingmaker in three months. Not bad.
 

Andrew C. McCarthy on Michael Ratner and the Center for Constitutional Rights:

CCR has gone to Germany to sue the American Secretary of Defense, in wartime, for purported war crimes. That's what we've come to. . . . This is the enemy. I don't give a s*** that they say they are defending the U.S. Constitution. Their purpose in life is to undermine the Constitution and American national security ... on behalf of the barbarous murderers of thousands of innocent Americans.

A law license is not a treason license.

McCarthy recommends this 2002 piece by John Perazzo on the Center for Constitutional Rights.

(Out of deference to the real CCR, I refuse to abbreviate the name as McCarthy does.)
 

Byron York compares headlines from 1994 and this week.
 

In the essay I quote just below, William J. Stuntz makes a point (more eloquently than I could) that's occurred to me. Critics of the war, and maybe some designers of our strategy, seem to think we can calibrate our tactics so as to achieve victory without 1) wasting money and equipment, 2) killing innocent Iraqis, and 3) losing our own troops to injury and death. This is nonsense.

People want our military to apply just enough pressure, killing just enough people and scaring just enough others, to gain our enemy's surrender. They seek a perfect balance. But that kind of balance is rare in life and impossible in war. To make it our goal is worse than useless; it's epicene, rendering us foolish and weak.

The enemy is doing everything he can to win. We should be doing everything we can to win. Whether that means we pull out now, as Hugh Fitzgerald urges, or send in sixty thousand more troops, as Stuntz wants, I'm unqualified to say. Whichever is more effective, we should do it.

We should be doing everything we can to win.
 

As I've written before, I've come to feel that we should leave Iraq as soon as possible, so long as departure doesn't look like retreat. That belief—it's too tentative to qualify as conviction—arises from my much stronger belief that a Sunni-Shia fight there is inevitable, and that if we aren't prepared to rule the country, we should leave them to it. Lately I've seen some persuasive arguments against a quick withdrawal. Thomas Sowell:

Abandoning Iraqi allies to their fate would ensure that other nations would think twice before becoming or remaining our allies. With a nuclear Iran looming on the horizon, we are going to need all the allies we can get.

Frederick W. Kagan:

Advocates of withdrawal, either gradual or complete, rarely consider in any detail what that action would look like. It is worth painting a few mental images. First, U.S. troops would pull back to their forward operating bases, ending patrols in Iraq's towns and cities. . . . Death squads on both sides will become more active. Large-scale ethnic and sectarian cleansing will begin as each side attempts to establish homogeneous enclaves where there are now mixed communities. Atrocities will mount, as they always do in ethnic cleansing operations. Iraqis who have cooperated with the Americans will be targeted by radicals on both sides. Some of them will try to flee with the American units. American troops will watch helplessly as death squads execute women and children. Pictures of this will play constantly on Al Jazeera. Prominent "collaborators," with whom our soldiers and leaders worked, will be publicly executed. . . .

What will be the effect of all this on American soldiers? The result could be worse than what we suffered in Vietnam. There will be no "decent interval" here during which we withdraw in reasonably good order--the withdrawal itself is likely to occur in the midst of rising violence. Instead of pictures of Americans on the embassy roof in Saigon, we will see images of Iraqi death squads at work with U.S. troops staying on their bases nearby. . . . The overall result will be searing and scarring. The damage to the morale of the military could be far greater than what will result from burdening soldiers with longer or more frequent tours of duty in a stepped-up effort to achieve victory. Those who are concerned about the well-being of the Army should fear defeat of this type more than anything.

Both Sowell and Kagan agree with something I believe very strongly indeed: that what matters most long-term is not just that we win in Iraq, but that we also be seen to win there. I've been pessimistic that we can achieve that goal, but Kagan provides cause for hope:

The only question that matters is: Can we still do anything to improve the situation in Iraq? The answer is yes. We can and must restore basic security to Baghdad and to the key cities and towns of the Sunni Triangle. In the past, I have recommended beginning with the outlying areas along the upper Tigris, Euphrates, and Diyala river valleys, both because clearing and holding smaller towns is easier and in the hope that success upon success in the heart of the Sunni Arab areas would demoralize the remaining fighters in Baghdad. That approach is no longer feasible. The U.S. and Iraqi governments have made it clear that the war will be won or lost in Baghdad. . . .

Baghdad can still be pacified, but it will require a change of approach and more troops--probably on the order of 50,000, most of them deployed to the capital. The aim would be to clear and hold the Sunni Arab neighborhoods[.]

So does William J. Stuntz:

Warfare is not like investment banking. At precisely the moment an economist might say to stop throwing good money after bad, a wise military strategist might say to double the bet.

Why might that be so? For one thing, willingness to raise the stakes often wins the game. Why do insurgent gangs, who have vastly smaller resources and manpower than the American soldiers they fight, continue to try to kill those soldiers? The answer is, because they believe they only have to kill a few more, and the soldiers will leave. They need not inflict a military defeat (which would be impossible, given the strength of the American military)--all they need to do is survive until American voters decide to throw in the towel, which might happen at any moment.

The proper response to that calculation is to make emphatically clear that the fight will not end until one side or the other wins, decisively. . . .

There is another reason economic logic does not readily apply to the fighting of wars. When running a business, one aims to invest just as much as is necessary to make the sale or manufacture the product--no less, and no more. Profit equals revenue minus cost, so minimizing cost lies at the core of wise business management.

Warfare could not be more different. Send just enough soldiers and guns and tanks to do the job, and you may soon find you have sent too few. The enemy concludes that if it can raise the marginal cost of the conflict just a bit, if casualties are a little higher or the expense a tad greater than you imagined, you'll quit the field. On the other hand, send vastly more soldiers and materiel than required to the battlefield, and the enemy soon decides that the fight is hopeless--that, as Lincoln so elegantly put it, our resources are unexhausted and, as we believe, inexhaustible. . . .

The difficulties the Army has experienced in Iraq are due, in large measure, to the fact that the Defense Department forgot this historical lesson. Donald Rumsfeld tried to run a businesslike war. But warfare is not business; it is not fought at the margin. By striving to do just enough to win, we have done too little. The right strategy is to do too much.

After the Democrats' victory, though, I fear that Bush will lack the fortitude to send the necessary troops. He didn't show it when Republicans controlled both Houses; there's no reason to think he'll have gained it since Tuesday.

(Kagan and Stuntz links via Rich Lowry at The Corner.)
 

The jihadists can see that if they don't attack us directly the election goes the way they want. We may be safe for a while.
 

Caroline Glick:

Over the weekend, Egypt announced that it was deploying 5,000 troops (or "police" forces) along its border with the Gaza Strip in northern Sinai. The deployment was necessary, Egypt announced, to prevent Israel mounting a serious operation against the massive weapons smuggling that is quickly providing Palestinian terrorists with the means to transform Gaza into south Lebanon.

. . . Since 1993, Israel's leftist governments have consistently followed a strategy of transferring responsibility for our national security to our enemies. First it was Yasser Arafat who was supposed to fight Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Now it is his deputy Mahmoud Abbas, UNIFIL and Mubarak who are all supposed to fight Israel's enemies. Far from learning from our bloody experience that our enemies have no interest in protecting us, in recent months, the Olmert government has expanded tenfold our reliance on our enemies.

. . . It doesn't have to be this way. Although barring a major Hizbullah provocation, it isn't clear what Israel can do against the UNIFIL forces now enabling Hizbullah to rearm, Israel can still prevent the Egyptian deployment. If the government loudly protested the move and publicly requested the Bush administration order Egypt to remove its forces, Mubarak would do so. But in light of the Olmert government's mishandling of every military challenge Israel has faced since it came to power just six month ago, it is hard to imagine it will act responsibly.

But really, we don't have to worry. Olmert won't let Iran get nuclear weapons.
 

Michael Ledeen:

“We’ve got a lot of issues with Iran,” President Bush told a news conference last week. “The first is whether or not they will help this young democracy succeed,” he said, referring to Iraq. He said the “second issue” was whether Iran would help the Lebanese government, and that the “big issue” was “whether or not Iran will end up with a nuclear weapon.”

The heart sinks. Can anyone — let alone the president — possibly believe that the mullahs might help Iraq succeed? The only “success” they are interested in is the humiliation of America and the domination of Iraq. Can anyone possibly believe that Iran might help the Lebanese government? The only thing they care about is the destruction of that government, the slaughter or domination of the Maronite Christians, and the creation of an Islamic Republic under the thumb of Hizbollah. And finally, how can anyone possibly believe that the “big issue” is whether or not Iran will get nukes? The issue is American lives, now being taken in Iraq and Afghanistan by Iranian weapons, killers, and managers. This is not new; it has been going on for 27 years, and we have yet to respond.