Did my matzos come?

Here.

Most people in my Address Book wouldn't get it, which I guess means I'm old enough that it applies to me. Alas.

(Via Steve Bass.)
 

I refer, of course, to Dave Barry:

Q Dave, during your first Presidential term, the world will witness the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver and the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. Do you plan to attend events of either of these Olympics?
Bob Costas, New York City, New York 10/25/07

A I will attend Women's Beach Volleyball, and Women's Downhill Beach Volleyball.
Dave Barry 10/26/07

Q Few loyal Americans can personally relate to Bald Eagles. Many fear heights, and many do not want to even discuss "bald." How about replacing that balding eagle with a big over-stuffed friendly Florida Manatee as our national symbol?
Christine, Lynnfield, MA 10/22/07

A The manatee is, indeed, a noble animal. If you've ever seen one soaring gracefully across the sky, you were definitely ingesting narcotics. I know I was.
Dave Barry 10/26/07

There are many more.
 

At FrontPage, Laurie Morrow has a long analysis of Eastern Michigan University's disgraceful performance following (and preceding) the rape and murder of an EMU student, Laura Dickinson. The piece isn't flawless—it needed better proofreading, and Morrow's bias shows too strongly—but it's interesting. Morrow makes a persuasive case that John Fallon, president of the university when the crimes occurred, showed unforgivable incompetence.

I found this timing by EMU remarkable for its crassness:

February 23, 2007 was the first day that the university told EMU students the truth about how the safety of the campus. It was the first day they knew that a rape and murder had taken place in Hill Hall. It was the first day they knew that no one had cared enough to warn them, and that they had been needlessly exposed to danger and lied to, by university officials who knew, or should have known, that a murderer might be roaming the campus.

February 23rd was also, coincidentally, the first day that students who decided to withdraw from Eastern Michigan University, would not receive a refund.

And this passage on campus politics rings true:

Once a university president is officially informed about a problem, the responsibility for resolving that problem transfers immediately to him. Unfortunately, for today’s campus head, making decisions can be a process fraught with peril, as our campuses are peopled almost entirely by moral relativists—by people who do not believe in transcendent absolutes, and for whom moral norms are mere cultural constructs. If you’re just a professor, this isn’t much of a problem, and it can [make] your life a lot of fun; moral relativism allows you to pretend you’re an edgy, danger-seeking revolutionary, while holding the most secure job on earth, in the world’s most conformist profession.

Where moral relativism becomes problematic is when one finds oneself in the more grown-up position of academic administrator, particularly university president, where you have to make serious decisions about big things under considerable public scrutiny. Just making the decision isn’t hard for the moral relativist (which the university president almost certainly is). The problem is making decisions that don’t cause him trouble with the power bases in the campus community.

This concern is not new—campus leaders have always had to keep the opinions of the key players in mind—but what is new is that virtually none of these constituencies are traditionalists whose moral beliefs are clear and fixed.

Via Carol Iannone, who notes that the trial of Orange Amir Taylor, III, the man accused of Dickinson's murder, ended with a deadlocked jury. (Taylor's retrial is scheduled to begin January 28.) Iannone writes that the mistrial

seems pretty clearly to be a case of O.J.[-]Simpson-style jury nullification by at least one, possibly two jurors. Juror Lauretta Codrington has spoken to the media and has made clear that she obviously and irrationally and blithely discounted all the evidence as inadequate, including the fact that Taylor's semen was found on the victim. She says that she did not believe the prosecution had proven that Taylor was even in Laura's room that day, although the defense had actually conceded that fact. Codrington is so full of some kind of politicized self-regard that she does not realize how stupid she sounds.

There seems to be a great deal of shame to go around.
 

Once the Boomers' influence has faded, people are going to wonder what the big deal was about Bob Dylan. (The Beatles will continue to earn new admirers.)
 

James S. Robbins, who describes the saga as "a case study of how not to conduct damage control":

The bright side . . . is in illustrating the power of the web to police reporting — to act as a watchdog over the watchdogs. In particular it reconfirms the critical role of the milbloggers. A prescient, award-winning essay by Army Major Elizabeth Robbins (relation by marriage) pointed out that if members of the military were prevented from blogging, this corner of the information domain would be left to the Beauchamps of the world, where they could indulge their biases unchecked. “To silence the most credible voices — those at the spear’s edge — and to deny them this function is to handicap the Army on a vital, very real battlefield,” Robbins writes. “The Army’s reputation is maintained on many fronts, and no one fights harder on its behalf than our young Soldiers. We must allow them access to this fight.” Had milbloggers not intervened, who knows what absurd, fantastic, vicious and wholly contrived events Beauchamp’s fourth and fifth “diary” entries would have contained? And how many people would have believed them?
 

AP:

Turkey will wait until the prime minister visits Washington in early November before deciding on a cross-border offensive into northern Iraq, the country's military chief has said.

Walid Phares:

[T]here is more to this problem than Turkey's frustration with PKK cross-border activities. According to well-informed sources, an intelligence campaign sponsored by the Iranian and Syrian regimes has so-far been successful in dragging Turkey into their present position. In fact, the PKK has been penetrated by the intelligence services since the 1990's when they were based inside Syria and the Bekaa valley of Lebanon. Tehran and Damascus have perhaps manipulated their previous influences to trigger this brewing conflict.

Victor Davis Hanson:

[M]uch of Turkish anti-Americanism is ill-founded and derives from their own ongoing fights between Islamists and [Ataturk] Secularists and has nothing to do with anything the United States has done. Recent polls reveal that Turks are among the most anti-American and anti-Christian peoples in the world. . . .

I believe we need to cool the resolutions, continue to talk nicely to Turkey, send out diplomatic peace-feelers, assuage Turkish wounded pride, hope for the best—and start making immediate contingency plans for a possible dramatic break from this erstwhile critical Nato ally.

And that would mean backup plans should it become necessary to abandon facilities inside Turkey, and seek closer relations with Armenia, Kurdistan, Greece, Cyprus, and other regional neighbors. Perhaps both sides have been clumsy, but there are developments going on in Turkey that are far larger than inept diplomacy, and we should quit denying the danger, or despair that without the old Turkey we are adrift in the Eastern Mediterranean. We are not.

Ralph Peters:

If a referendum on independence were held today, Turkey's Kurds, who make up about 20% of its 73 million people, would vote overwhelmingly to secede from the shrunken empire Ankara inherited from the Ottomans. That's part of what Turkish saber-rattling on the border with northern Iraq is about — the fear that even an autonomous Kurdistan-in-Iraq threatens Turkey's territorial integrity because the region's Kurds might view it as the core of a Kurdish state. . . .

Turkey's generals are desperate to revitalize their image at home. . . . The generals view a foray into Iraq as a double win — a body blow to Kurdish aspirations and a chance to rally Turks around the flag. . . .

Over the years, I've personally found Turkish generals and diplomats irrational on two subjects: The Armenian genocide (as we saw again in the recent fuss about the House resolution) and the rights of Kurds anywhere to enjoy independence. . . .

[A] move into northern Iraq might not go as smoothly as the generals intend. . . . A military disappointment — it needn't be a debacle — in Iraqi Kurdistan would profoundly alter Turkey's internal balance of power. The army has thrived on the perception of its invincibility. . . .

On the other hand, should a Turkish military operation succeed, it could excite a land-grab mentality that could draw in Iran, further destabilizing the region. And a Turkish attack on Iraqi Kurdistan — a remarkably successful experiment in self-government — would incite waves of anti-Turkish terrorism, rather than reduce the terrorist threat.

For their parts, Iraq's Kurdish leaders seek to build good relations with Ankara, by policing the PKK and granting concessionary terms to Turkish businessmen in the hope that shared profits will reveal shared interests. Nobody — not the PKK, other Kurds, the Iraqi government or the United States — wants to see a Turkish military adventure.

(Peters link via, I think, NRO.)
 

Jonah Goldberg on how Democrats came to nominate John Kerry in 2004:

Once Howard Dean, the conviction candidate, experienced the political equivalent of spontaneous human combustion, Democrats immediately cast about not for another principled politician but one they deemed electable. Bizarrely, they settled on the left-wing senator from Massachusetts who synthesized Ted Kennedy's politics with Michael Dukakis' charisma while bragging about his service in a war he built a career denouncing.

(Via RCP.)
 

Daniel Pipes, in a piece explaining that Rudy Giuliani's foreign-policy approach (Pipes is one of Giuliani's advisors) would differ from Bush's:

Consider my own divergence from Bush administration policy. My writings and spoken statements over the past seven years have criticized the handling of Iraq, the war on terror, democratization, and (especially) the Arab-Israeli conflict. . . .

Despite these differences, I twice voted enthusiastically for George W. Bush, am proud to have been his nominee in 2003, and predict historians will rate his presidency a success.

Bush ran not against ideal statesmen, but against Al Gore and John Kerry, two horrendous candidates. Bush has serious failings, but I'm glad to have voted for him. He's worlds better than either of the other guys would've been.
 

W. Thomas Smith Jr. on yesterday's Republican debate:

It was comforting to me to listen to these candidates — most of whom (with the exception of Ron Paul) spoke with an authoritative grasp of strategy, the application of military force, even an understanding of weapons systems. These men stood in stark relief tonight to the chilling prospect of Hillary or Obama as commander-in-chief.

I'll vote for the major-party nominee who looks to be the better leader in the war against the jihadists. By that criterion, any of the top Republicans (again excepting Paul) towers over any of the top Democrats.
 

In the New York Times, Alexei Barrionuevo reports on South America's energy problems:

During one of the coldest South American winters here in decades, neighboring Argentina cut at least 90 percent of the natural gas it sends to Chile 79 times along pipelines that connect the two countries. . . . Across the region, concerns about energy are roiling national politics, generating tensions between neighbors and emerging as one of the biggest brakes to growth and integration.

Via Henry Payne, who comments, "'Waiting for miracles to happen' might be Nobel laureate Gore’s preference, but it’s an empty promise for a growing world."
 

But a mediocre amount of intelligence is sometimes most dangerous. It does not take one far enough.

Agatha Christie, "Death by Drowning" (included here)
 

Mark Steyn reposts a column from five years ago. Sadly, it's still instructive:

The slaughter of hundreds is, relative to population, an Australian 9/11, with the same heart-rending details of people clawing desperately through the rubble in search of husbands, wives, children. When Osama’s boys hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the root-cause crowd, after some pro forma regret about the loss of life, could barely conceal their admiration for the exquisite symbolism of the targets, the glittering monuments to American militarism and capitalism. The New Statesman dismissed the victims as Wall Street types who made the mistake of voting for Bush rather than Ralph Nader.

If you had to pick anywhere on the planet where Bush voters are thin on the ground, Bali’s hard to beat. Lots of Aussie beach bums, Scandinavian backpackers, German stoners, braying English public-school types taking a year off to find themselves, but not many registered Republicans. This mass murder was clearly going to be harder to excuse, but the root-causers gamely rose to the occasion. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Margo Kingston fretted over ‘whether we’ve respected and nurtured the place we love to visit or colonised it with our wants.... Maybe part of it is the lack of services for locals. A completely inadequate hospital, for instance, so graphically exposed in the aftermath of the horror. Some people — foreigners like us, elite big-city Indonesians — make their fortunes. Have residents lost their place, their power to define it? Did the big money fail to give enough back to the people who belong there, whose home it is?’, etc., etc. Well, if the insensitivity of Western tourism is the root cause, Margo can relax: it’s not gonna be a problem any more. Whether or not, as Margo would say, poverty breeds terrorism, in Indonesia last weekend’s terrorism will certainly breed poverty.

While we’re singing the old favourites, here’s Bruce Haigh with a timeless classic. Mr Haigh was an Australian diplomat in Indonesia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and he’s in no doubt as to why hundreds of his compatriots were blown up in Bali. As he told Australia’s Nine Network, ‘The root cause of this issue has been America’s backing of Israel on Palestine.’ You don’t say. It may well be true that, for certain Muslims ‘frustrated’ by Washington’s support for Israeli ‘intransigence’, blowing up Australians in Bali makes perfect sense. But, if even this most elastic of root causes can be stretched halfway around the globe to a place conspicuously lacking either Jews or Americans, then clearly it can apply to anyone or anything: my advice to Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness is to put down the Omagh bombing as an understandable reaction to decades of frustration at Washington’s indulgence of the Zionist oppression of the Palestinian people. As the likes of Mr Haigh demonstrate every day, the more you insist the Islamist psychosis is a rational phenomenon to be accommodated, the more you risk sounding just as nutty as the terrorists.

* * * * *

The French were supportive for about ten minutes after 11 September, but for most of the last year have been famously and publicly non-supportive: throughout the spring, their foreign minister, M. Védrine, was deploring American ‘simplisme’ on a daily basis. The French veto is still Saddam’s best shot at torpedoing any meaningful UN action on Iraq. If you were to pick only one Western nation not to blow up the oil tankers of, the French would be it.

But they got blown up anyway. And afterwards a spokesman for the Islamic Army of Aden said, ‘We would have preferred to hit a US frigate, but no problem because they are all infidels.’

No problem. They are all infidels. . . .

As Hussein Massawi, former leader of Hezbollah, neatly put it, ‘We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you.’

* * * * *

If, as some of us maintain, the real ‘root cause’ of Islamofascism is Islam’s difficulty coexisting with modernity, we shouldn’t be surprised that an infidel-friendly, pluralist enclave in the world’s largest Muslim country would be an abomination to the Islamists, and the perfect target. . . .

[T]he challenge now is for the Wahhabists to co-opt the Asian Muslims as they have the Arab and European. They’ve had some success. Lee Kuan Yew has spoken of the change in Singapore’s Muslims in recent decades: once relatively integrated, they now keep themselves to themselves, are stricter in their observances than they’ve ever been, and dress their womenfolk more severely. They’ve embarked on the same process observers have spotted from the Balkans to Pakistan: the radicalisation of traditional Muslim communities. If Islamofascists were to gain control of Indonesia, it wouldn’t be a parochial, self-absorbed dictatorship like Suharto’s, but a launch-pad for an Islamic superstate in the region.

* * * * *

I began with a Churchill quote, so let me end with one: ‘Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.’ That’s what happened after 11 September: the brief glimpse of the reality of the Islamist scheme was too much, and so we dusted ourselves off and retreated back to all the illusions, like the Oslo ‘peace process’. That can’t save us, and it certainly can’t save Indonesia.
 

Mark Steyn:

A couple of weeks ago, the Democrats put up a 12-year old S-CHIP beneficiary from Baltimore called Graeme Frost to deliver their official response to the president’s Saturday-morning radio address. . . . Mr. and Mrs. Frost say their income’s about $45,000 a year — she works “part-time” as a medical receptionist and he works “intermittently” as a self-employed woodworker. They have a 3,000 square foot home plus a second commercial property with a combined value of over $400,000, and three vehicles — a new Suburban, a Volvo SUV, and a Ford F250 pick-up.

How they make that arithmetic add up is between them and their accountant. But here’s the point: The Frosts are not emblematic of the health care needs of America so much as they are of the delusion of the broader western world. They expect to be able to work “part-time” and “intermittently” but own two properties and three premium vehicles and have the state pick up health-care costs. Who do you stick the bill to? Four-car owners? . . .

[N]othing makes a citizen more selfish than socially equitable communitarianism: once a fellow’s enjoying the fruits of Euro-style entitlements, he couldn’t give a hoot about the general societal interest; he’s got his, and who cares if it’s going to bankrupt the state a generation hence?

That’s the real “war on children”: In Europe, it’s killing their future. Don’t make the same mistake here.

David Warren:

“Modernization” and “Islamization” are alternative courses. You can't have both. And one country after another, across the Islamic world, is being wrenched, hideously, in the conflict between these two incompatible aspirations — the natural ground for civil war. I would go farther and say that the soul of every sincere Muslim, trying to make a way in the world for himself and his family, is wrenched between these competing aspirations.
 

A lovely post by Tony Woodlief.
 

David Frum:

I think we are entitled to ask: When will we hear voices in the European Muslim community speak out to denounce the threats against Ayaan? In a free society, we will all hear things said that we dislike or condemn. We are not entitled to use violence to silence those voices. Yet here we have an individual woman, living under the shadow of two previous murders, against whom imams throughout Europe have incited murder - and where are the fatwas condemning the threats?

Western Muslims often ask in frustration, what exactly do you expect of us? Let's start here: What is expected is that Muslims, as individuals and collectively, repeat the foundational words of Western civil society: "I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

I appeal to NRO readers, in the US and Europe: If you hear of any prominent figure in the Muslim world who has defended Ayaan, please let me know.
 

Byron York reports that Texas Governor Rick Perry, who possesses "unquestionable pro-life credentials," has endorsed Rudy Giuliani for president. York comments, "Look for Giuliani to cite Perry's support when he's asked social-issue questions in the future."
 

He watch her like a coonhound watch a tree.
What might explain the metamorphosis
he underwent when she paraded by
with tea-cakes, in her fresh and shabby dress?
(As one would carry water from a well —
straight-backed, high-headed, like a diadem,
with careful grace so that no drop would spill —
she balanced, almost brimming, her one name.)

She think she something, stuck-up island bitch.
Chopping wood, hanging laundry on the line,
and tantalizingly within his reach,
she honed his body's yearning to a keen,
sharp point. And on that point she balanced life.
That hoe Diverne think she Marse Tyler's wife.
 

Marilyn Nelson, "Balance" (quoted here)
 

John Derbyshire:

I have been voted off the New English Review site for being insufficiently Islamophobic. Fair enough. NER has now settled down as a definitely and strongly Islamophobic vehicle, and I'm a poor fit for it, being Islamophobophobic. In matters editorial I am anyway a believer in totalitarian despotism. I've seen enough of magazine and newspaper editors tearing their hair to know that it's a wellnigh impossible job—"herding cats" is the merest approximation—and am content to leave them to it, so long as they don't grossly infringe on my rights as a contributor.

And the more exposure I get to the Islamophobia phenomenon, the more I dislike it. It is now quite an industry. Huge numbers of Americans, people who would not have been able to spell the word "Islam" seven years ago, now spend their leisure hours poring over the Koran and its supplements looking for evidence that Islam is root-and-branch evil. Some of them have gone to the trouble to learn Arabic, or at any rate enough Arabic to be able to discourse confidently on the difference between a mawla and a halif. There's something unpleasantly autoerotic about the whole enterprise—something of seeking for glee in the contemplation of other people's misbehavior. Something defensive, too, as I said in my Islamophobophobia column: some fear (in my opinion justified) that the Islamo-crazies are giving all religion a bad name and thereby fortifying the ranks of unbelievers—who, in the minds of many Islamophobes, are the real enemy.

On the other hand, Islamophobes, though I think unintentionally in some cases, are making a contribution to the much larger cause of undermining the multiculturalist myth: i.e. that peoples from any place, in any numbers, can be settled in a Western society without causing dramatic changes to that society in directions likely to be undesirable. To that degree I think they are doing useful work. I therefore part company with them with goodwill and a cheery wave, and, while I continue to think that they are a bunch of crankish obsessives, remain ready to join with them in matters of common interest.

I'm disappointed in New English Review. Derbyshire was an asset, as he is everywhere he contributes.
 

Jay Nordlinger:

A word about Rush Limbaugh: What Majority Leader Harry Reid and those other senators did to him was extraordinary. Is there precedent for a Senate attack on a private citizen — even a very prominent one? It is, of course, a kind of honor for Rush. Years ago, National Review had him on our cover with the words, “Leader of the Opposition.” And I guess he still is. Reid et al. prove it.

But what a silly avenue to take, if you want to defame Rush. Rush as an opponent of the U.S. military? Rush as an enemy of soldiers? No one can buy it — no sane person. . . .

To use an old cliché, Rush should wear all this as a “badge of honor.” And I bet he does.

What a great, graceful, decent, informed, talented man this is. We in the Reaganite camp are lucky to have Rush — and so is the country at large. I hope he talks into that microphone unto eternity. As he says, he is the alternative.

And there are some people who are simply monopolists at heart. They have to be guarded against, and opposed, at every turn.

(Background here.)
 

Thomas Sowell:

With all the problems facing this country, both in Iraq and at home, why is Congress spending time trying to pass a resolution condemning the massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire nearly a century ago? . . .

The short answer is irresponsible politics. . . .

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this resolution is just the latest in a series of congressional efforts to sabotage the conduct of that war.

Large numbers of American troops and vast amounts of military equipment go to Iraq through Turkey, one of the few nations in the Islamic Middle East that has long been an American ally.

Turkey has also thus far refrained from retaliating against guerrilla attacks from the Kurdish regions of Iraq onto Turkish soil. But the Turks could retaliate big time if they chose.

There are more Turkish troops on the border of Iraq than there are American troops within Iraq.

Turkey has already recalled its ambassador from Washington to show its displeasure over Congress’ raising this issue. The Turks may or may not stop at that. . . .

Too many Democrats in Congress have gotten into the habit of treating the Iraq war as President Bush’s war — and therefore fair game for political tactics making it harder for him to conduct that war. . . .

Unwilling to take responsibility for ending the war by cutting off the money to fight it, as many of their supporters want them to, congressional Democrats have instead tried to sabotage the prospects of victory by seeking to micro-manage the deployment of troops, delaying the passing of appropriations — and now this genocide resolution that is the latest, and perhaps lowest, of these tactics.
 

From an interview of Oliver Sacks, at Wired.com*:

[Wired:] Can playing music alter the structure of the brain?

[Sacks:] Very strikingly. In musicians, parts of the corpus callosum — the bridge between the two hemispheres — are enlarged, and there's more gray matter in the cerebellum. While you can't tell by a glance at someone's brain if they're a writer or a mathematician, you can tell if they're a musician.

Extremely interesting stuff. Among other details: nearly half of those born blind, musicians or not, possess absolute pitch (second definition).

*For some reason this exchange, which appears in the print copy of the interview, is missing from the Web version, so I posted it in a comment here.
 

NCPA summarizes a Wall Street Journal editorial (sub. req.):

Heavily subsidized and absurdly inefficient, corn-based ethanol has already driven up food prices. But the Senate's plan to increase production to 36 billion gallons by 2022, will place even greater pressure on farm-belt aquifers. . . .

For instance, according to Cornell University ecology professor David Pimentel,

[W]hen you count the water needed to grow the corn, one gallon of ethanol requires a staggering 1,700 gallons of H2O.

And

Kansas is threatening to sue neighboring Nebraska for consuming more than its share of the Republican River.

Congress needs to stop meddling in the energy market.
 

StrategyPage:

The most powerful Internet weapon on the planet is hiding in plain sight, and no one can do anything about it. At least not yet, or not that anyone is talking about. The weapon in question is the Storm botnet. This is the largest botnet ever seen, and it is acting like something out of a science fiction story. The Storm network is now believed capable [of] shutting down any military or commercial site on the planet. Or, Storm could cripple hundreds of related sites temporarily. Or, Storm could do some major damage in ways that have not yet been experienced. There's never been anything quite like Storm. . . . The Storm is the Internet equivalent of a nuclear weapon, and no one is sure who controls it, or for what purposes.
 

Microsoft's free Malicious Software Removal Tool can eliminate Storm from PCs. Get it and use it, and each time Microsoft updates it to fight new versions of the botnet, get it and use it again.

And if your PC lacks a firewall, antivirus and/or antispyware, install whatever you're missing. I recommend Comodo, AVG and Windows Defender, all free for home users.
 

Rob Long in the current issue of National Review:

LARRY KING: “Tomorrow night! Ryan Seacrest hosts! From Key West, Florida, hello!”
CALLER: “Hi, Larry, hello, Mr. President.”
LARRY KING: “Is that right? Are you still president?”
MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD: “Oh, no, Larry. I resigned months ago.”
LARRY KING: “Before the book came out?”
AHMADINEJAD: “Yes, yes. Of course.”
LARRY KING: “Caller, what’s your question?”
CALLER: “I just wanted to know when Mr. Ahma . . .”
AHMADINEJAD: “. . . dinejad. It’s really not so difficult.”
LARRY KING: “Have you thought about changing it?”
AHMADINEJAD: “Honestly? Yeah, I’ve thought about it. But part of the journey I’ve been on for the past year has been all about being myself, you know? Being who I really am.”
LARRY KING: “Hardest person to know is yourself. I could sing a few bars of that! Garlique™! Garlic for your health!”
AHMADINEJAD: “Also, the whole changing-your-name-to-fit-in thing is sort of . . .”
LARRY KING: “Jewish?”
AHMADINEJAD: “Don’t go there, Larry! Do NOT go there! No, no, but seriously, what I was going to say was it’s kind of retro, you know? And Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is all about looking forward.”
LARRY KING: “Got it. Not about the Jew stuff. About the future. Tuesday night! The whole hour with the Project Runway gang!”
 

There's much more, all great. I wish I could link, but it's subscriber-only.
 

Jihadists hate all things non-Islamic. StrategyPage reports on Algeria:

In the last ten days, operations against terrorists have left about three dozen dead, most of them terrorists. There were also several dozen arrests, as police continued to track down those responsible for recent bombings and attacks. One of those attacks was on foreigners working in Algeria. In response to that, and al Qaeda threats to concentrate on going after foreigners, the French company Michelin has ordered the families, of its French executives and technicians, back to France. This is only about a hundred people, but the places where the families live would be difficult to guard, given the al Qaeda willingness to use suicide bombers. The Michelin factory will remain open. This plant provides jobs to nearly a thousand Algerians and is an important economic symbol. Michelin shut down its Algerian operations in 1993, when the war with Islamic terrorists was getting underway. Four years ago, the Michelin plant re-opened, and more foreign firms are coming in. Al Qaeda is trying to keep them out.
 

I think I may die without god,
my single comic integrity

that I have remained
an atheist in the foxhole,
though I am ready

to roar through the gates
if there are gates.
 

From "This Summer," by Liam Rector (1949-2007)
 

WeeklyStandard.com has posted a disturbing piece (disturbing because it makes sense) by Matthias Küntzel on a central tenet of radical Islam. I'll quote from it at length, but this passage contains two crucial ideas:

As in the 1930s and 1940s, the sheer absurdity of the claims makes it difficult for educated people to believe that anyone could take them seriously. Nonetheless, this notion of Jews as the root of all evil continues to inspire the mass murder of civilians in Israel and to motivate the joy with which Islamists greet those murders.

(Via Daniel Johnson.)

Ralph Peters:

THE fighting in Pakistan this week has been more intense than any current operations across the border in Afghanistan. President Musharraf is paying, with interest, for trying to cut a deal with Islamist fanatics. . . .

Last year, the generals believed they had an agreement with the truculent tribals on the Northwest Frontier: The tribesmen would behave, and the army would leave them alone.

Well, the army left them alone. And Taliban and al Qaeda fanatics, allied with the most extreme local leaders, took over vast tracts of land in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), creating a safe haven for terrorists. . . . Instead of containing the threat in the wild FATA mountains, Pakistan's security forces found that the Islamist terrorists used their sanctuary to inject extremists into the country's cities. . . .

Our Western cult of negotiations produces no lasting successes for the simple reason that those ablaze with lethal faith never hesitate to break deals with unbelievers the moment they find it useful to do so. . . . Religious fanaticism, with its apocalyptic currents, can never be contented. The appetite for blood only increases. . . .

Musharraf is hardly alone in his dilemma. The worst thing that the United States could do would be to imagine that, if we quit the fight, we could find an accommodation with Islamist terrorists.

Appeasement has never worked, and it never will. This is a war to the death.
 

(Via NRO.)

Charles Krauthammer:

She has no principles. Her liberalism is redeemed by her ambition; her ideology subordinate to her political needs.

I could never vote for her, but I (and others of my ideological ilk) could live with her — precisely because she is so liberated from principle. Her liberalism, like her husband's — flexible, disciplined, calculated, triangulated — always leaves open the possibility that she would do the right thing for the blessedly wrong (i.e., self-interested, ambition-serving, politically expedient) reason.
 

Thomas Sowell makes simple, sensible points that call her accusations into question. I admire Clarence Thomas, but I think that even if I didn't, I'd find Sowell persuasive.
 

StrategyPage:

Email, video conferencing and cheap phone access do something never before experienced in a combat zone. The troops remain involved with the lives of their families. . . .

At first, it was thought that all this contact with back home would make things worse for the soldier. You know, after a hard day of fighting, you come back to base and get a bunch of emails about a leaky roof and kids misbehaving at school. But when surveys were taken, it was found that the hassles on the home front tended to displace worries about the combat right outside the wire. . . .

Given a choice between worrying about a child's illness, or that IED that nearly blew up your truck today, the soldier will concentrate on the kid's well being. No one expected this, and the phenomenon will be studied for some time to come.
 

Theodore Dalrymple quotes from an article in The Lancet (no free access):

More than 70 million people in Bangladesh are estimated to be exposed to toxic levels of arsenic from their drinking water in what WHO has called the "largest mass poisoning of a population in history". . . .

The symptoms of long-term exposure [to] arsenic begin with the blackening of the hands and feet, progressing to nodular growths, and later to open sores and gangrene. Eventually, it can lead to cardiovascular and reproductive damage and to virulent cancers of the bladder, skin, lungs and liver. In children, the exposure is also thought to lead to learning difficulties and other neurological effects. . . .

The sad irony is that the problem is the unintended consequence of a campaign in the 1970s and 1980s by international development organisations, including UNICEF, to get villagers to stop drinking dirty surface water.

Dalrymple writes,

Let us perform a small thought experiment. Let us suppose that a commercial mining company had, in the course of its operations, poisoned the water supply of 70,000,000 people in this quite specific way. Would that have been regarded as "a sad irony", an unintended consequence of its search for profit, or perhaps as something rather more sinister and indeed typical of the way such companies operate? Would there not have been large demonstrations, probably turning soon to violence, against that company by those in the developed world who habitually express their solidarity with the impoverished victims of exploitation by their own nations' multinationals? It is unlikely that we would ever hear the end of the matter - in such a case, quite rightly.

I've seen this story nowhere else. A Google News search for the past month turns up just two mentions, in minor (no offense intended) publications.

All you fervent supporters of "international development organizations" and the UN: look at what such groups have wrought here. If the toxic poisoning of seventy million people doesn't make you question your assumptions, what would?
 

This is an impressive list of advisors. I may have to change my mind.
 

John Lott, Jr.:

Recent research that I did examining juvenile accidental gun deaths for all U.S. states from 1977 to 1998, found that sixteen states mandating that guns be locked up had no impact [on the rate of juvenile accidental gun deaths]. What did happen, however, was that criminals were emboldened to attack people in their homes and crimes were more successful; 300 more murders and 4,000 more rapes occurred each year in these states. Burglaries also rose dramatically. The evidence also indicates that states with the biggest increases in gun ownership have had the biggest drops in violent crime.

Clark Whelton on the ideas of economist and sociologist Gunnar Heinsohn:

"My point," Heinsohn continued, "is that the strength of a nation's military is affected by the size of a nation's families. Falling birth rates in Western countries mean that even light casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan bring cries of pain in Europe and America. But Iraq and Afghanistan are growing rapidly. Their populations are swollen by youth bulges. Their average family has five or six children. They are in what I call 'extreme demographic armament.'"

. . . "And a youth bulge is?"

"A result of rapid population growth. A youth bulge happens when thirty to forty percent of a nation's males are between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine. Even if these young men are well nourished and have good housing and education, their numbers grow much faster than the economy can provide them with career opportunities. Many don't have jobs, and don't have places in society. When so many young men compete for the few places available, they become frustrated, angry, and violent. They are enlisted quite easily into radical groups and terror organizations."

Still,

["T]here are also demographic reasons to be optimistic. The combined population of just three democracies--India, Brazil, and Mexico--is 1.43 billion, compared with 1.33 billion Muslims worldwide, 150 million of whom live in India. Demographically both groups are nearly equal in size, but there are significantly more Muslims under 29 because total fertility in Islam is much higher. In another twenty years most of the Islamic youth bulges will have run their course--as they already have in Algeria, Iran, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey. Therefore, defending against the aggression of the youth bulges that have hijacked Islam is not an insurmountable obstacle. An alliance of India with the Anglo-World may be all we need to safely travel the bumpy road ahead."

My idea: We locate the foreigners who made Sudanese penises vanish, and send them (the foreigners, not the penises) among our enemies. These youth bulges must be stopped.

(First link via John O'Sullivan.)

I sometimes get emails offering me free magazines. Today:

Michael, Enjoy Men in Nursing Purchased on Your Behalf
 

Jay Nordlinger:

I remember working at golf courses, making minimum wage, and being told by wealthy liberal customers that I belonged to the party of the rich. They had no self-awareness whatsoever.
 

In the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate for economics in 2001, supplies a gentle review of leftist Naomi Klein's new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism*. David Frum, describing Klein's argument as "combin[ing] economic nonsense with an attack on democratic liberties," draws a lesson:

The point is not one about Naomi Klein. As has been said, we have seen her kind before. The point is about Joe Stiglitz. The liberalism of the 1950s and 1960s was discredited and destroyed by its inability to resist anti-democratic radicalism at home and abroad. His generation of Democrats worked through the 1990s to try to overcome that deadly legacy. And yet now again, they are succumbing to their old weakness. I suspect that in the privacy of his room, Stiglitz reacted to Klein's work with intellectual disdain and moral revulsion. And yet in the publicity of his column, he could summon up only gurgles of reservation.

This is not a spirit that a democracy can count upon in an hour of trial. It is as if there is something in the very makeup of modern liberalism that lacks antibodies to resist those who would destroy everything modern liberals in fact hold dear. From one point of view, that's a great tragedy. From another, however, it suggests why, despite all their disappointments with the Bush administration, Americans do not and will not trust liberals and Democrats to defend them.
 

*From Klein's website:

"A REVELATION!"
- Tim Robbins

Jim Geraghty at the Americans for Prosperity Conference:

I can see why some folks – gah, I’m saying ‘folks,’ this folksiness is contagious – don’t like Fred Thompson’s style on the stump. It’s vague, general, casual and conversational. He meanders to his points, it’s not fiery, charged up. He’s rarely angry, more head-shaking exasperation with the flawed ways of Washington. But I think it works for him, and it works for people who don’t need the wonkish policy brief.

Jeri Thompson went up on stage as Fred was introduced, and it prompted the thought that it is a searing indictment of the sneering, smug perpetual adolescents of our national media that when a Republican candidate comes along with a wife with the glamour of Angelina Jolie, the press keeps hitting her as a “trophy wife.” Were Jeri Thompson a Democrat, she would be getting endless soft-focus profiles.
 

John Derbyshire (writing 7/06):

Since demographic collapse seems as inevitable a feature of the 21st century as industrialization was of the 19th, it may be that the nation that dominates the coming era will be the one that gets through that inevitable demographic transformation first, and comes out the other side. Which nation will that be?

Japan was the first important nation to go over the fertility-rate cliff, passing downward through replacement level—2.1 children per woman—in 1960, to a present 1.3. The actual population of Japan began to decline last year. The Japanese are falling into the demographic black hole ahead of the rest of us. . . .

However, if it is really the case that every other nation will face this issue in the coming decades, then the Japanese are, in a sense, ahead of the game. . . .

Immigration into Japan and South Korea is essentially nil. This is not because nobody wants to go and live in those countries—several hundred million Chinese, Filipinos, and Indonesians would love to—but because the Japanese and Koreans don’t think immigration would be good for their countries. They prefer robots over helots.

We might ask ourselves whether that preference might not, in the long run, prove to be a wise one. Our fathers mowed their own lawns. We hire gangs of helots—illegal immigrants—to mow our lawns. Since the demographic crunch will dry up the supply of helot labor everywhere, our children, in their middle age, will likely have their lawns mowed by some descendant of Robomow.

The East Asians, however, with their aversion to cheap immigrant labor, and their fascination with robotics, will have got there long before us. With the demographic transition behind them, and, one assumes, their economic inefficiencies long since corrected, they will be sailing under clear skies through the mid-21st century, while we are still fighting our way through demographic gales.
 

Radical Muslims are incapable of compromise, and Muslim moderates are no help; as Theodore Dalrymple has said, "A moderate person can always be outflanked by someone who claims to be more Islamic than he is." Times of London:

Some Muslim medical students are refusing to attend lectures or answer exam questions on alcohol-related or sexually transmitted diseases because they claim it offends their religious beliefs.

Some trainee doctors say learning to treat the diseases conflicts with their faith, which states that Muslims should not drink alcohol and rejects sexual promiscuity.

A small number of Muslim medical students have even refused to treat patients of the opposite sex. One male student was prepared to fail his final exams rather than carry out a basic examination of a female patient.

(Via Harry's Place.)
 

By choosing the right running mate. Jim Geraghty:

Earlier today I spoke with a Republican political strategist intimately familiar with the ins and outs of the religious conservative community. . . . This strategist believed that if Rudy Giuliani gets the nomination, he could defuse a lot of the tension on this issue if he picked a staunch conservative with serious street cred in the pro-life community.

The strategist mentioned a conversation with a figure he described as ‘one of the largest Catholic pro-life donors in the country’. “He said, ‘I can’t support Rudy, and I won’t vote for him.’ I asked him, ‘What if he picks Rick Santorum as his running mate?’ Then he said, ‘well, that’s a different story!’”

“If a Rick Santorum or a Mike Huckabee goes to James Dobson and says, ‘look, before I accepted the offer to be his running mate, I looked this man in the eye. I sized him up, and I know he’ll be a help to us. He gets us. And if you sink him, you sink me,’ then how can he go on?”

Then, he noted, religious conservatives weren’t huge fans of George H. W. Bush… until he picked Dan Quayle as his running mate. He pointed out that Bush did himself a world of good not just when he picked Quayle, but when he took on the media’s criticism of Quayle. This strategist said he could easily see a similar scenario, where Giuliani picks a Santorum or Huckabee-type figure; the Katie Courics and Keith Olbermanns of the world rip the nominee, and Giuliani comes out swinging in defense of his pick.
 

Stephen Pollard has it right.
 

James Lewis blames "the death fears of the Boomer Left":

When people confront their own mortality, their finiteness, they tend to project their personal fears onto the world. So we have Global Warming panic, Flesh-Eating Germs panic, Nuclear Power panic and scores of other imaginary fears. For anxious people the world is full of scary things, all because of their need to escape the prospect of personal end. The PC world is as full of superstitious phobias as the Mayan world of a thousand years ago. . . . Oddly enough, this omni-panic goes along with omni-denial, as liberal Boomers turn a blind eye to real dangers, like the looming nuclear proliferation threat coming from Ahmadi-Nejad, the Syrians and the NoKos.

(Via Craig Newmark, who made a similar diagnosis last year.)
 

James Dunnigan:

While there's been no invasion of Iran, there has been a lot of Information War type operations against them. For example, all the leaks and punditry over imagined plans to invade Iran have had an impact on the Iranians. Not just the published remarks by Iranian leaders and journalists, but the private, often coded (and decrypted), messages by Iranian officials that get captured by the NSA or CIA. This kind of "information operation" is an ancient tactic, and it's getting more blatant, and interesting with regard to Iran. The best example of that are the recent interviews of U.S. Air Force planners about work being done on, well, how best to attack Iran. These interviews brought attention to an organization within the air force called Operation Checkmate. This was a Cold War era creation, whose job was to, as they like to say in the military, "think outside the box." If you can do that, you can gain the element of surprise. That often is a decisive edge in battle.

On the other hand, surprise is best obtained by keeping your plans secret from the enemy. You want to hit your foe unexpectedly. Discussing openly that you are working on radical new techniques for attacking is giving the game away. Or is it? Maybe someone in the Pentagon has been paying close attention to what's going on inside Iran. The ruling clerical junta is composed of some very smart, and very insecure, people. There are also a lot of paranoid types. So bringing up Operation Checkmate, and its legendary capacity for creating unexpected tactics, is meant to freak out the easily frightened among the Iranian clerical establishment.
 

Melanie Phillips:

So much for the ‘war on terror’. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a heroine of our times. The behaviour of both the Dutch and the Americans towards her is a disgrace.
 

Fjordman lists some of the forces threatening to destroy the country from within. One example:

In 2005 the Norwegian parliament – with the support of 85% of MPs – passed a new Discrimination Act, prepared by then Minister of Integration from the Conservative Party, Erna Solberg, who had earlier called for the establishment of a sharia council in Norway. A spokesman for the right-wing Progress Party, Per Sandberg, feared that the law would jeopardize the rights of law-abiding citizens. Reverse burden of proof is combined with liability to pay compensation, which means that innocent persons risk having to pay huge sums for things they didn't do. If a Muslim immigrant claims that a native has somehow discriminated against him or made a discriminatory remark, the native non-Muslim has to mount proof of his own innocence. I have later discovered that similar laws have been passed across much of Western Europe, encouraged by the EU.

There was absolutely no public debate about this law, which was passed in relative silence before the national elections that year. I was the first one to criticize it at my blog. The only journalist to criticize it was an American ex-pat, Bruce Bawer, and Hans Rustad at Document.no, the country's largest independent weblog. Not a single Norwegian journalist criticized the proposed law, and most barely mentioned it at all before it was passed.
 

Hamas and Fatah, say Palestinian Arabs.
 

John Derbyshire:

The conventional wisdom of our age, so far as human nature is concerned, is nurturism. The human person, nurturism tells us, emerges from the womb—or at any rate from the early stages of ontogeny—as a blank slate, on which subsequent manipulators of that person’s environment can write anything at all.

Of course there is something to be said for nurturism. . . . Pure nurturism, though—the notion that the individual human personality is infinitely malleable, and in particular infinitely improvable—is scientifically untenable. It is contradicted by every solid, replicable result out of the human sciences, and confirmed by none. The general trend of discovery over the past decade or two, in fact, has been to shrink the zone in which nurture is known to be determinative. . . .

Nurturism is now a sort of state cult in the U.S.A. Contradict it too loudly and persistently, or from too prominent a perch, and you will be shut out of polite society. . . .

It is to the current President’s great advantage in performing his pontifical duties that he is himself a fervent believer in the state cult. . . . This is a pity. Worse than a pity, in fact: A wrong-headed theory in the hands of a vigorously practical man can do great harm. It can destroy a U.S. presidency. It might even destroy a country. We are watching the first of those things happen right now, before our eyes. God forbid we should see the second, but I don’t think the danger is a negligible one.
 

Noah Pollak praises Ehud Barak's performance as Minister of Defense:

According to many reports, Barak’s first priority upon returning to the government was planning Israel’s recent strike on Syria, a sophisticated and daring mission that appears to have been a perfect success on many levels—not least of which is a demonstration to Syria and Iran that the Israeli air force can easily defeat their new Russian air defense systems, and is not afraid of trying. Barak has warned Hamas that it faces a large-scale ground operation in Gaza in response to continued rocket fire, and has declared the implementation of comprehensive missile defense to be a central precondition of any IDF withdrawal from the West Bank.

Meanwhile, the IDF has stepped up the intensity of its training. . . . The IDF is also developing sophisticated countermeasures for installation on its Merkava tanks to defend against the kind of advanced anti-tank missiles that proved so deadly in southern Lebanon last summer. And Barak has pursued all of these operations and goals with an uncharacteristic sense of quiet determination, bluntly warning the Israeli public in one of his few public appearances against being “deceived by the illusion of a bogus calm.”

Barak has even attempted to rescue Gilad Shalit from captivity in Gaza, with a recent mission in which the Hamas chief who was in charge of the Gaza territory from which terrorists tunneled into Israel to abduct Shalit was himself abducted by IDF special operators, apparently dressed as members of Hamas’s Executive Force. The reemergence of Ehud Barak is emblematic of one of Israel’s greatest strengths: its ability to evaluate failure, assign blame, and quickly take corrective action. During the past three months, Israel has significantly renewed the deterrence and credibility of its armed forces. And Israel’s enemies surely have noticed.
 

Carl Horowitz, "director of the Organized Labor Accountability Project of the National Legal and Policy Center," has a column at Townhall on music-plagiarism suits. His starting point is the similarity between "Radio Nowhere," the new single from Bruce Springsteen, and "867-5309/Jenny," an '80s hit by Tommy Tutone. Horowitz writes that "the main melody [sic] of the two songs share an Em-C-G-D chord sequence." In fact, they don't. While Springsteen uses that progression (more precisely, Em-C-G-D/F#), Tommy Tutone uses Em-C-G-A, a much more distinctive pattern (loads of songs feature the chords Springsteen used). Had Springsteen aped the earlier song's chords, the writers of "867-5309/Jenny" would have a real case against him. As it is, though, Horowitz is right: a lawsuit would be inappropriate.

Incidentally, "Radio Nowhere" is a massively tedious track. Jenny's still got my number.
 

I'm generalizing—Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin are two prominent counterexamples—but most women I know would find this, from StrategyPage, incomprehensible:

"Extreme" (very dangerous) sports have become much more popular in the last few decades, and for many young men, modern combat is in that league, plus you get to kill people. Most reporters have forgotten how teenage males think. The recruiters haven't, and the U.S. Marine Corps consistently exceeds [its] recruiting goals by emphasizing the danger and challenges. The end result is that it's more difficult to recruit for support jobs, than for the combat ones.

Most men, on the other hand, know the truth in that passage. We understand the enemy—unfeminized men—because at some level that's who we are, too, even when we seem polite and gentle. I love women, and their social equality is both cause and proof of America's greatness; but in the fight against a ruthless, primitive enemy, women's influence often hinders us.
 

Walter Williams:

School violence, including assaults on teachers and staff, is not restricted to inner city schools but occurs also in suburban and rural schools. However, the bulk of the violence is at schools with large black populations.

One has to ask: What happened? I graduated from Benjamin Franklin High School in 1954. Franklin had just about the lowest academic rating of all Philadelphia high schools and probably the city's lowest income students. But what goes on today in Philadelphia high schools would have been inconceivable back then. There were no policemen in or around the schools, there wasn't wanton property destruction, profanities weren't heard up and down the hallways, and the farthest thought from a student's mind was to curse or assault a teacher.

Much of what's seen today is a result of harebrained ideas and a tolerance for barbaric behavior. . . . People with such a tolerant mindset are in effect saying that blacks are not to be held to civilized standards of conduct and academic expectations that might be enforced for others. That's a disgusting and debilitating notion. I guarantee you that years ago, such nonsense would not have been tolerated, and a person making excuses for barbaric behavior by black students would have been considered a lunatic.

What has been allowed in predominantly black schools is nothing less than a betrayal of the struggle paid with blood, sweat and tears by previous generations to make possible the educational opportunities so long denied blacks that are being routinely squandered today. Blacks who lived through that struggle and are no longer with us wouldn't have believed such a betrayal possible.
 

Paul Belien:

Belgium is a country with 10.5 million inhabitants, of whom 6 million live in Dutch-speaking Flanders, 3 million in French-speaking Wallonia and 1 million in the officially bilingual, but predominantly French-speaking, capital Brussels, which is an enclave within Flanders.

Free-market oriented Flanders, though 60% of the population, generates 70% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) and is squeezed to subsidize socialist Wallonia. Belgium’s Constitution stipulates that no major decisions can be taken without a majority in both parts of the country and that the government should consist of 50% Flemings and 50% Walloons. In practice this means that 20% of the population (i.e. half of the Walloons) can veto every decision. This has made the Parti Socialiste (PS), the dominant party in Wallonia, the power broker in the country.

In 2005, I published my book “A Throne in Brussels: Britain, the Saxe-Coburgs and the Belgianisation of Europe,” which . . . predicts that Belgium will “fall apart in the next ten years.” Barely two years later the last episode of Belgium’s history seems to have begun. “A praline divorce is in order,” the Economist headlined on 6 Sept. 2007. “Even in a Europe riven by secessionist movements, Belgium takes the prize for the most fissiparous country of them all,” the New York Sun wrote on 11 Sept. 2007. . . .

What next? A breakup into two independent states might be achievable, or Flanders might join the Netherlands and Wallonia fall apart with one piece going to France and another to Luxemburg. Brussels could join Flanders, be shared between two countries or become an independent city state, perhaps the last remnant of the Saxe-Coburg kingdom. In the latter case it would also become the first state in Western Europe with a Muslim majority.
 
No matter what happens, however, a Belgian divorce will leave the European Union with a headache. The thrones of the Brussels Eurocrats are trembling, too, because Belgium, the EU’s host country, is also the EU prototype. If the Flemings and the Walloons are unable to live together in their federal Kingdom, how can anyone expect the European Union, with its 27 member states, to develop into one federal European state? As The Independent wrote on 11 Sept. 2007 “It is a great irony – beloved of Europhobes – that Belgium, one of the greatest advocates of a federal Europe, cannot make sense of its own federal system.” What an irony indeed. It indicates that the ‘Europhile’ dream of Europe as a single state is doomed from the start.
 

Mark Steyn on some recent Canadian news:

Let's say you arrest a bunch of guys plotting to blow up Parliament and behead the Prime Minister. Wow! Who would do such a thing? Who are these guys?

"They're all residents of Canada and for the most part, they're all citizens," said Mitch McDonell, assistant commissioner of the RCMP.

So all these people plotting to wreak havoc on Canada's Parliament were living in Canada? Anything else that might narrow it down a little more?

Assistant Commissioner McDonnell didn't think so: "They represent the broad strata of our community," he continued. "Some are students, some are employed, some are unemployed."

A remarkable case. The more you look at these guys - Mohammed Dirie, Amin Mohamed Durrani, Yasim Abdi Mohamed, etc - the less they seem to have in common. Some are students, some are employed, some are unemployed, some spell "Mohammed" with two "m"s, some with one, some have it as a first name, some have it as a last name, some have it as a middle name. The strata don't come any broader than that.

The bulk of Steyn's piece concerns crime by ethnic Jamaicans in Canada and, to a lesser extent, Britain:

Innocent Madowo, "a former Zimbabwean journalist living in Toronto", wrote a column the other day headlined "Our Community's Scourge" - "our" meaning "black". But he does his community an injustice. It would be truer to say violent crime is the West Indian community's scourge, and truer still to say it's the Jamaican community's. . . . In Britain, as in Toronto, gun crime is largely a Jamaican gang problem--"Yardies", as they call them. The only difference is that the United Kingdom has implemented to the nth degree all the policies Michael Bryant wants enacted here, and with the predictable result that the coppers would rather hassle the cranky farmer with the unlicensed shotgun than take on the rather more demanding task of going after Yardies with Uzis.
 

In National Review last year, Ramesh Ponnuru argued (free version here) for an expansion of the tax credit for children from $1,000 to $5,000 per child. At the time, I read a few paragraphs and moved on. Any tax increase struck me as a bad idea, and I was leery of a proposal that would increase government's involvement in family life.

Now, though, Ponnuru's recommendation seems to me not just reasonable, but actually brilliant. This passage answers my initial objections:

[U]nhappy conservatives would make three basic charges: It's a waste of money; it's social engineering; and it takes too many people off the tax rolls. . . .

These are the criticisms that many economic conservatives have been making about the child credit since Republicans started pushing for the current, puny one a dozen years ago. At that time, I overheard one supply-sider complaining to another that if having children deserved a tax break, so did her favorite hobby: skiing.

But the critics are wrong. Economically speaking, children are not just a consumption good, like skiing. The costs of raising children, including forgone income, represent investments in human capital--investments that are currently overtaxed. The way our old-age entitlements are set up levies a large implicit tax on child-rearing. Parents pay the costs of raising the children who will one day pay for everyone's Medicare and Social Security. Childless people thus free-ride on parents' financial sacrifices. A large child credit is a way of offsetting the federal government's bias against having children. It's a move toward governmental neutrality, not social engineering.

Ponnuru's idea is simple and powerful, and would do our country enormous good. I hope the Republican nominee gives it a serious look.
 

StrategyPage (edits mine):

The North Korean government is cracking down on corruption, and other "anti-state" behavior. This includes the emergence of some bizarre children's games. In one of them, the kids imitate funerals. It is believed this arose during the 1990s, when so many people were dying of starvation, and there were so many funerals, that kids, as kids are wont to do, adopted the funeral practices of their elders as a form of play. Kids could also be seen playing "firing squad." This apparently developed from kids getting to see frequent public executions of "enemies of the people." The government wants to stamp out these morbid, and unnerving, practices, and has threatened parents with punishment if they do not maintain better control over their kids. More serious sanctions have been administered to those who run trading companies that deal with China. The North Korean trading officials had been keeping two sets of books[;] the one the government was shown listed much lower prices for North Korean goods sold to China. The bureaucrats running the [government-approved] trading companies kept [i.e., pocketed] the difference between the low price and the real price. But many of these guys could [not] resist spending their profits, building mansions and buying foreign cars. This attracted the attention of the police. At first, the cops were put off with bribes. But this year, a new bunch of anti-corruption police arrived in the towns along the Chinese border. Investigations and executions (of police and trading officials) followed.

This crackdown has also shut down a lot of traffic from China, including food. The border guards tell Chinese traders that the government will have to relent, because the lack of Chinese food entering North Korea has meant rising prices and growing discontent. The government risks violent resistance if the crackdown on smuggling and corruption along the border continues. At least that's the way the North Korean border guards see it. The Chinese merchants shrug their shoulders, having long since given up trying to understand what is going on in North Korea. The Chinese regard the North Koreans as nuts, although most North Koreans believe the accusation of madness only applies to their government and the armed thugs that keep it in power.
 

Theodore Dalrymple, prompted by a history of Jews in Algeria:

[T]here is a conflict between Islam and modernity, at least if one of the important components of modernity is equality under the law. Such equality means that Moslems would have to accept that, even in polities where they were in the immense majority, Islam would have no special claim to consideration, and that (for example) apostasy would have to become a normal and acceptable part of life. Whether, under these circumstances, Islam would remain truly Islamic is a question for scholars, not for scribblers such as I. . . .

In other words, the moral of Professor Stora’s book is that Islam, whatever its past glories, achievements, strengths and even tolerance by comparison with extremely low standards prevailing at different times elsewhere, has no means as yet of dealing with the modern world in a constructive fashion, and perhaps (though here it is impossible to be dogmatic) never can have such a means without falling apart entirely. I leave it to the experts to decide.

StrategyPage:

For decades, it's been accepted that the most successful recruits are those who have graduated from high school, and have no police record. But the army has long known that many high school drop outs, or young people with police records, can make excellent soldiers. The problem has always been determining which of the drop outs and juvenile delinquents were worth letting in. The problem with these potential recruits is that they are more expensive to train (because of disciplinary problems, or difficulty learning) and are more likely to be tossed out (thus wasting all that was invested in their training.) In the last decade, the army has made a lot of progress in improving how accurately it screens risky candidates. It's not just the improved selection process, but improved training methods as well. A lot of high school drop outs were poorly served by bad urban schools. Similarly, many of those with criminal records had already put that sort of thing behind them, and were looking to the army for a new beginning.

Until recently, less than ten percent of army recruits had been high school dropouts. But in the last decade, that has grown to 24 percent, with no noticeable decline in the quality of troops. Same thing with those receiving "moral waivers" (for having a police record). That has gone from 4.6 percent four years ago, to 6.2 percent. The more accurate recruitment and training methods are also widely used in the civilian sector, where employers don't want to miss out on any potentially good workers.
 

Michelle Malkin:

I am getting a lot of e-mail from people I’ve never heard from before about an apparent ethnic joke about Filipino medical professionals ["Can I check those diplomas because I want to make sure that they're not from some med school in the Philippines?"] on the shlocky ABC show, “Desperate Houswives.”

. . . Some Filipinos have seen fit to dismiss my ethnic heritage entirely and consider me “white” because of my politics and past criticism of the Philippines’ reckless decision to pay ransom for hostages taken by jihadis. Now, after a stupid TV show insults Filipinos, they expect me to jump on the protest bandwagon with them automatically in ethnic solidarity.

Question: Where were you when far worse Filipino insults were being leveled? Just wondering.

National Review Online, my favorite site, is doing its annual fundraising. Much of the material I post here comes direct from NRO, and much of what I post from other sites I find through NRO. If you like what you see here, please consider contributing to the source.
 

W. Thomas Smith Jr. has been posting at The Tank. Brief excerpts:

9/29: "Hezbollah is rehearsing for something big here. Not sure what or when. But a few days ago, between 4,000 and 5,000 HezB gunmen deployed to the Christian areas of Beirut in an unsettling 'show of force,' positioning themselves at road intersections and other key points throughout the city. Two additional objectives were achieved: First, the operation served as a probing action to determine local reaction. Second, it served as an exercise to gauge the time required (speed, synchronization, etc.) to achieve the key points and intersections."

9/30: "Lebanon is one of the most crucial fronts – perhaps the most crucial in its strategic sphere – in the war on terror. Yet a majority of the current Lebanese parliament is under siege, literally. . . . Lebanon is crawling with Syrian and Iranian-supported — and Al Qaeda-affiliated — terrorists. Most are operating covertly. Many are actually in the streets, controlling sectors (where the legitimate army and police do not enter) and they are armed."

10/03: "Lt. Col. Marwan Issa tells me, 'Our soldiers — because they come from the mountains — are tougher in many ways than other countries' special forces soldiers.' . . . Issa tells me only 30 men out of 300 will become Lebanese Rangers or Marine Commandos. But of those 30, every man will fight to the death if necessary. 'Without a doubt, even if he knows he will probably die, he will fight,' says1st Lt. Nizam Bou Fakereddine, who fought against Fatah al Islam at Nahr al-Bared."

Gripping, important stuff, very much worth reading.
 

If "good" means "deceptively difficult and increasingly irritating": Bloxorz.

(Via Steve Bass.)
 

From the Tehran Times, "Iran's Leading International Daily" (yesterday's front-page headline: "Iran ready to work with U.S. on Iraq"):

Qods Day provides a good opportunity to support the Palestinian people and inform the world about the injustice committed against the Palestinian nation and the brutality of the Zionist regime, Judiciary Chief Ayatollah Mahmud Hashemi Shahrudi said here on Monday.

Meanwhile, from the AFP:

Thousands of Palestinian refugees in Iraq have been ill-treated, with many of them abducted, tortured and murdered by armed Shiite Muslim groups, Amnesty International said in a report published Monday. . . .

"Palestinian refugees in Iraq have been subjected to gross human rights abuses including abduction, hostage-taking, unlawful killing, torture and other ill-treatment at the hands of armed militia groups," it said. . . .

Palestinians are targeted, it said, because they are seen to have received "preferential treatment" from the ousted dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni like most of them, or they are suspected to support Sunni insurgents.

AFP report via Mike at The Monkey Tennis Centre, who comments, "If anyone still needs convincing that the problems of the Middle East aren't about borders, or oil, but about ancient religious hatreds, perhaps this story will help to set them straight."