Did my matzos come?

Stanley Kurtz argues for Musharraf and against Musharraf's would-be successors Bhutto and (especially) Sharif:

Pakistan’s politicians and their followers are manipulating us at will. But mostly, with our hopes for easy escape from the terrors of the war on terror, we are manipulating ourselves. We want to be fooled. We want to believe that someday soon they’ll be “just like us,” that all will be well, that democracy provides a simple way to avoid the agonizing struggle ahead. Let’s stop playing all those nasty old tribal games (the rules of which we ill understand) and have all those far-away folks play our pleasant democratic game instead. The trouble is they’ve been pretending to play our game for the past sixty years and it hasn’t worked yet. Pakistan is not a democracy. Pakistan has never been a democracy. Woe to us if Nawaz Sharif and his “democratic” friends take power. And shame on us if, charmed by manipulators of that magical word “democracy,” we hand power to Nawaz Sharif and his Islamist allies on a silver platter.
 

John Derbyshire's posted three pieces answering "the kinds of questions" on the subject "that come up in conversations and emails." Worth reading if you're interested (I am): part one, part two, part three. In his introduction he cites James Malloy's livid post (Derbyshire calls it "withering") on the furor over James Watson's remarks about intelligence in sub-Saharan Africa. Malloy's piece is more technical and rather long, and great, not least for its utter lack of apology.
 

To me, she's always seemed preposterous. This exchange is typical.
 

Martin Walker summarizes the conclusions reached by Anthony Cordesman, "the top strategic guru at the Center for Strategic & International Studies," regarding an Iranian nuclear attack against Israel. Cordesman believes that Israel would respond by hitting not just Iran, but, "to ensure no other power [could] capitalize on [an] Iranian strike," Syria and Egypt as well. Thus,

[T]he real stakes in the crisis that is building over Iran's nuclear ambitions would certainly include the end of Persian civilization, quite probably the end of Egyptian civilization, and the end of the Oil Age. This would also mean the end of globalization and the extraordinary accretions in world trade and growth and prosperity that are hauling hundreds of millions of Chinese and Indians and others out of poverty.

Via Daniel Pipes, who asks, "Anyone still in favor of permitting the Iranians, who do have an apocalyptic leadership, to get nuclear weapons?"

I'm more pessimistic. I expect the UN, the worldwide MSM and their fellow travelers to work to prevent Israel from retaliating, while doing nothing to keep Iran from attacking.
 

Steve Schippert reports that Ayatollah Ali Sistani has instructed his followers to protect Sunni Iraqis.

I still think that within twenty years after most of our forces leave Iraq, a true Sunni-Shi'a civil war will erupt there. But I'd love to be wrong, and this edict from Sistani is good news.
 

I link below to the containing post, but this passage from Mark Steyn deserves highlighting:

[T]he U.S. is not a conventional imperial power. It garrisons not ramshackle colonies but some of the wealthiest nations of the planet. Absolved of the core responsibility of sovereign jurisdictions — defense of the realm — Europe decayed, almost inevitably, into a kind of semi-non-aligned status, and persuaded itself that it had developed a higher model of nationhood, not realizing that its lavish social programs were, in effect, subsidized by the Pentagon. This has been bad for Europe — and bad for America, too, in that most of the Democratic Party would like to introduce the European model here, apparently unaware that it depends on a strong America to render it viable.
 

An infuriating story via Theodore Dalrymple:

A recent incident—the assault of a 96-year-old man—has brought home to the British public just how little it can rely on the state for protection. The assailant, 44, was frustrated that the elderly man was in his way as he tried to board a train. Shouting “You bastard!,” he punched the man in the face, blinding him in one eye. The attack occurred in full view of many other passengers, and a closed-circuit television camera captured it as well.

Police subsequently apprehended the man, who claimed that the 96-year-old had attacked him first. It would be difficult to imagine a more brutally unfeeling and egotistical crime or more cynical self-justification. It is extremely unlikely that the guilty man is a model of kindness in his other human relations.

The judge in the case, however, said that sending the man to jail would “do nothing to protect the public,” and therefore sentenced him to just three years’ probation.

Dalrymple draws inferences worth reading (as always).
 

Nidra Poller on the al-Dura defamation trial:

In place of the unedited raw footage filmed that day, France 2 submitted a “certified copy” that lasted eighteen minutes. Instead of 27 minutes focused on Jamal al-Dura and his son Muhammad, the document consisted of miscellaneous scenes, three brief interviews, and less than one minute of the al Dura incident. The accusation that the “victims” were the “target of gunfire from the Israeli positions” is baseless; it does not appear. There is no crossfire, no hail of bullets, no wounds, no blood. In the final seconds that had been edited out of the France 2 broadcast, the boy whose death had just been dramatically announced lifts his elbow, shades his eyes, glances at the camera, and resumes the appropriate prone position. . . .

The screening of the raw footage proved that the al-Dura news report was baseless. For seven years, Charles Enderlin has claimed that the raw footage would prove, on the contrary, that the report was accurate, authentic, verified, and verifiable. . . .

Is it possible that no one remembered what was supposed to be contained in that cassette? Eighteen minutes or 27, that’s not the issue. This was supposed to be the raw footage of the al-Dura ordeal that, according to the cameraman and the boy’s father—sole living witnesses—lasted 45 minutes. Talal Abu Rahma declared under oath three days after the incident that he had been at Netzarim Junction since seven in the morning, that the incident began around 3 P.M., and that, filming intermittently “to conserve his battery,” he shot a total of 27 minutes of the terrible ordeal. . . .

In conclusion: nothing of what has been said about the incident can be seen in the 55-seconds of sole existing footage. No crossfire, no shots hitting the man or the boy, no duration of the ordeal. There is no footage to substantiate the report or the framing human interest narrative that accompanied it.

Background here.
 

John Podhoretz is smart, and I probably agree with him on most political matters, but I've long disliked his tendency to snideness and ad hominem attacks. This recent post at his new home exemplifies what bothers me. I wish he weren't contributing anywhere I visit, but I check The Corner more often than I do contentions, so I'm glad he made the move.

Later: Krikorian responds. Substance aside (on which see Mark Steyn's comments), I much prefer Krikorian's tone to Podhoretz's.
 

Daniel Pipes:

What's wrong with American liberalism? What happened to the self-assured, optimistic, and practical Democratic Party of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy? Why has Joe Lieberman, their closest contemporary incarnation, been run out of the party? How did anti-Americanism infect schools, the media, and Hollywood? And whence comes the liberal rage that conservatives like Ann Coulter, Jeff Jacoby, Michelle Malkin, and the Media Research Center have extensively documented?

In a tour de force, James Piereson of the Manhattan Institute offers an historical explanation both novel and convincing. His book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism (Encounter), traces liberalism's slide into anti-Americanism back to the seemingly minor fact that Lee Harvey Oswald was neither a segregationist nor a cold warrior but a communist. . . .

Kennedy's assassination profoundly affected liberalism, Piereson explains, because Oswald, a New Left-style communist, murdered Kennedy to protect Fidel Castro's rule in Cuba from the president who, during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, brandished America's military card. Kennedy, in brief, died because he was so tough in the cold war. Liberals resisted this fact because it contradicted their belief system and, instead, presented Kennedy as a victim of the radical right and a martyr for liberal causes. . . .

With Oswald nearly deleted from the narrative, or even turned into a scapegoat, the ruling establishment – Johnson, Jacqueline Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover, and many others – proceeded to take a second, astonishing step. They blamed the assassination not on Oswald the communist but on the American people, and the radical right in particular, accusing them of killing Kennedy for his being too soft in the cold war or too accommodating to civil rights for American blacks. . . .

In this "denial or disregard" of Oswald's motives and guilt, Piereson locates the rank origins of American liberalism's turn toward anti-American pessimism.
 

From Megan McArdle, on her visit to Vietnam and Cambodia. Click and scroll.
 

An instructive graphic courtesy of Max Boot. May the violence keep decreasing.

Michael Rowan and Douglas Schoen in the Los Angeles Times:

On Dec. 2, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez can tip the world into a recession.

On that day, if Venezuelan citizens pass the dozens of constitutional amendments on the ballot, Chavez will essentially be granted dictatorial powers -- an elected strongman reminiscent of Spain's Franco, Italy's Mussolini and Orwell's Big Brother. The day could easily deteriorate into one of violence, martial law and suspension of oil production, the latter calculated to inflict maximum damage on the U.S. economy.

With the price of oil hovering near $100 a barrel and markets skittish because of the sub-prime housing crisis (not to mention the stability of U.S. banks, the U.S. trade deficit, the weak dollar and deteriorating domestic consumer confidence), such a move on Chavez's part would go a long way in triggering a recession. An oil crisis during the Christmas season -- with its 40% share of annual retail sales -- would be especially detrimental in the U.S.

Rising oil prices have caused global recessions in the past. The Saudis and other oil-producing countries have tried to increase output to offset rising costs. But working against stability and for high oil prices are Chavez and Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who are in a strategic alliance to push up the price of oil.

Oil economists calculate that on a supply-and-demand basis alone, the price of oil would be about $50; the remaining $45 in the current price is a political premium caused by uncertainty in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Iran's suspected nuclear plans, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and social unrest in Pakistan, Nigeria and Venezuela. But where the world sees a threat, Ahmadinejad and Chavez see opportunity: Civil discord lines their pockets.

(Via Pejman Yousefzadeh.)
 

David Pryce-Jones:

Apparently there are 7,000 Muslims in or around the city of Padova – Padua to English speakers – and they have a mosque, but want another one. The so-called Northern League are opposed to this. In general terms, the League are either seen as local nationalists, or a bunch of semi-fascists. . . . Studying the issue for purposes of blocking it, some Leaguers teamed up with a nearby farmer to loose a pig over the ground marked out for the mosque, in the full knowledge that the animal and above all its droppings would make the area unclean for ever. So it proves – no mosque here. The act is unworthy of Padua, complains the mayor. A spokesman for the Muslims is quoted going further: “They must choose between the Prophet and prosciutto. Islam is very peaceful, but when we are insulted we will turn everyone into sausages.”
 

Randall Parker, in a post about a promising new solar-cell design:

Some people [believe?] that once we pass the peak in world oil production we are at risk of deindustrialization. I don't see it. Sure some parts of the world are going to be very hard [hit]. Some oil emirates and less advanced countries are at risk. For fully industrialized countries I expect some deep recessions and a period of stagnant or declining living standards. But I do not think that the industrialized countries are at risk for total collapse. We have too many sharp scientists and technologists and too many ways to solve the problem of dwindling reserves of liquid hydrocarbons.

Our current high oil prices and this period of a world oil production plateau are actually fortunate for our prospects in a post-peak world. The higher prices are providing incentives for the development of substitutes. The post peak decline hasn't come on so suddenly that we lack time to adjust. People who want to feel total doom and gloom about the future should look elsewhere. Energy shortages aren't going to bring down industrial civilization.
 

Yuval Levin at The Corner:

Rumors have been circulating for weeks that researchers have for the first time found real success with somatic cell reprogramming in humans, and that a couple of different teams (including some of the biggest names in embryonic stem cell research) will publish several different methods that have worked—producing the genuine equivalent of human embryonic stem cells, genetically matched to cell donors, and shown capable of being differentiated into the various cells of the body, without the need to use or harm embryos.

If it’s true—and the evidence is mounting that these publications are coming very soon, perhaps in the next few weeks—it will transform the field, and could mark a beginning of the end for the political debate over stem cells and cloning. It would also bring sweet validation for President Bush’s much-maligned approach to this subject: insisting that creative science could find a way around the ethical problems, and so encouraging the exploration of ethical alternatives, not the funding of embryo destruction.

If it’s true.
 

StrategyPage:

U.S. Predator UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] can stay in the air for about twenty hours at a time. Most of their missions are completed in less time than that. Seemed a waste to land the bird when it has 5-10 (or more) hours of fuel left. Some of the Predator ground crews noted that it would be real nice if someone could keep an eye on the places from which mortars and rockets are often fired at them. The bad buys tend to use the same firing locations again and again. So it was arranged to use the [UAVs'] leftover hours to run a stake-out on the usual firing locations. If someone was seen setting up a mortar or rockets, the Predator could either launch one of its Hellfire missiles, or call in artillery or mortar fire. Troops or police can be sent as well, to perhaps catch the crews. The guys who operate the Predators were glad to help out, as they were safe back in the United States. Only the ground crews were out in the combat zone. The Predator stakeout is run against locations that army intelligence has found to be most frequently used. Most times that mortars or rockets are fired, they are picked up on a radar that can calculate the firing position. But by then, the firing crews are on their way. To nail these guys, you have to spot them before they fire. The Predators are also sent to stakeout areas where roadside bombs are likely to be set up as well.
 

At In From The Cold, Spook86 analyzes a recent report (pdf) from the Congressional Research Service:

Describing the study as eye-opening would be an understatement. While the media (and war critics) have emphasized the growing number of military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, those figures obscure some very startling facts. Despite the toll of combat operations in the Middle East, the number of military fatalities since the Iraq invasion was actually lower than during the comparable period in the 1980s, when combat deployments were extremely limited. . . .

Military death totals from the mid-1980s may seem a bit surprising at first glance, but they actually underscore an inescapable fact: military duty is often hazardous, even in times of peace. Of the 2,465 military members that died in 1983, more than half (1,413) perished in accidents, many of them training-related. Operating high-performance aircraft, training with live ammunition or working on the deck of an aircraft carrier are but a few of the dangerous jobs performed by military personnel on a daily basis. Despite extensive safety precautions, accidents invariably occur, and claim the lives of service members. . . .

[C]ombat deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan comprise a tiny fraction of those who have served, despite intense combat in places like Fallujah, Ramidi and Baghdad. As we noted in a recent post, the losses of U.S. World War II bomber crews on a single raid (Ploesti, Schweinfurt) equalled months of fighting in Iraq, or years in Afghanistan. It's also worth noting that the CRS statistics do not include totals for 2007. Recently proclaimed as the "bloodiest year yet" for U.S. forces in Iraq, the final figures for this year will also reflect a sharp drop in combat deaths in recent months, another measure that the troop surge is working.

In offering any analysis of this type, we're always reminded of Mark Twain's famous maxim about "lie, damned lies and statistics." But it's hard to refute the numbers from that CRS study, or the trends now evident in Iraq.
 

Jonah Goldberg:

[V]oting voluptuaries think our democracy would be greatly improved if we got more reluctant voters to the polls. . . . These people think that if everybody voted, America would lurch to the left. . . . The liberal lion John Kenneth Galbraith summed up the attitude well 21 years ago when he declared, “If everybody in this country voted, the Democrats would be in for the next 100 years.”

There’s one hitch: It’s simply not true. The best studies on this question suggest that at the national level, the political differences between voters and nonvoters are minimal. As election analyst Stu Rothenberg put it a decade ago, “There is no compelling evidence that nonvoters are so distinct from voters that they constitute a bloc ready to alter the fundamental balance of power in this country.” If more liberals took this fact to heart, they might be more open to a better way to improve our civic health: make voting more difficult. I can already smell the hate mail.

. . . What would be so bad about discrimination, properly understood? Not based on race or income, but on knowledge and commitment. Every election year, the race comes down to “the undecideds,” many of whom are undecided because they don’t pay attention, don’t much care, and are still vexed by the task of discerning the difference between Republicans and Democrats. These are our kingmakers?

Would it be so awful if voters had to pass the same test of basic civic literacy that immigrants must pass to become citizens? What if we made the right to vote something to brag about? Something to aspire to?
 

A moving piece by Bob Greene about Paul Tibbets, who died November 1:

I was fortunate enough to spend time talking with him and traveling with him and writing about him. On the road, I would see him make up his hotel room or clear his plates in a restaurant. When I would tell him that other people would do that, he would say that no able-bodied man should expect another person to do this work for him.

Once — this was when some championship sports team or other had been invited to the White House for congratulations — I asked him if any president had ever invited him for a visit.

He said it only happened once — right after the war, when he got word that Harry Truman wanted to see him. “We met in an irregular-shaped room,” Mr. Tibbets said, almost certainly referring to the Oval Office. “It was short and quick. He offered me a cup of coffee. Truman asked me if anyone was giving me a hard time, saying unpleasant things to me because of the bomb. I said, ‘Oh, once in a while.’

“Truman said, ‘You tell them that if they have anything to say, they should call me. I’m the one who sent you.’”

. . . Of the quiet flight back from Hiroshima, he said he had two enduring recollections: “The memory of being so tired. And of believing that the war was finally over.”

It was reported that he claimed never to have lost a night’s sleep after the mission, and some saw this as a show of indifference. It was the opposite. He slept well, he told me, because “we stopped the killing.” He was at peace, he said, because “I know how many people got to live full lives because of what we did.”
 

Michael Fumento compares spending on the Ebola virus, SARS and avian flu H5N1—Fumento calls these "mass-hysteria diseases"—with that on MRSA, which in 2005 killed 19,000 people in the US:

The National Institutes of Health began a human clinical trial for the Ebola virus almost four years ago. Clinical trials for SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) began almost three years ago. Both vaccines were developed by and are being tested by the U.S. government. Your tax dollars also paid for the development of the first approved human avian flu vaccine that the government is stockpiling.

As to MRSA, federally-supported research is still at the mouse level. . . .

And just what threat do the three mass-hysteria diseases pose? Ebola is so hard to transmit that it’s killed nobody outside of two African countries. . . . SARS infected only 27 Americans, killing none. Worldwide, it killed 774 people between its discovery in late 2002 and mid-2003, when it simply disappeared. . . . As to avian flu, Congress has specifically allocated $5.6 billion for this disease. . . . Yet H5N1 has killed no Americans. Even worldwide so far this year H5N1 as of November 18 has caused only 72 infections and claimed 48 lives, isolated in seven countries where poultry farming involves regular exposure to bird intestines and feces. . . .

In fact, all of the recorded worldwide recorded deaths from Ebola, SARS, and avian flu to date combined — 2,621 — are fewer than the number of Americans who die of MRSA every two months. MRSA also annually kills more Americans than AIDS, yet the federal AIDS research budget is over 13 times larger than that for the whole field of antimicrobial resistance. . . .

We need a government that pays more attention to medical statistics than to headlines. The one we have now is killing us.
 

Walter E. Williams:

The fact that there are so many American earners who have little or no financial stake in our country poses a serious political problem. The Tax Foundation estimates that 41 percent of whites, 56 percent of blacks, 59 percent of American Indian and Aleut Eskimo and 40 percent Asian and Pacific Islanders had no 2004 federal income tax liability. The study concluded, "When all of the dependents of these income-producing households are counted, there are roughly 122 million Americans -- 44 percent of the U.S. population -- who are outside of the federal income tax system." These people represent a natural constituency for big-spending politicians. In other words, if you have little or no financial stake in America, what do you care about the cost of massive federal spending programs?
 

Mark Goldblatt offers the best explanation I've seen:

Ever since American forces invaded, overran and occupied Iraq in 2003, and discovered no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, the great lingering question about the war has been why Saddam Hussein would spend an entire decade acting as though he possessed WMDs when he didn't. Since the ceasefire agreement he'd signed in 1991, in order to remain in power after the first Gulf War, obligated him to get rid of them, why would Saddam intentionally endure crippling United Nations sanctions as he jerked around, and finally ejected, weapons inspectors? Why wouldn't he just come clean if he had nothing to hide?

The answer, according Ronald Kessler in his new book, The Terrorist Watch: Inside the Desperate Race to Stop the Next Attack, is that Saddam ultimately feared United Nations actions less than he feared an attack from Iran . . . which, he calculated, would be much more likely if the leaders of Iran knew he had no WMDs.

. . . What Saddam never counted on, of course, was September 11, 2001. Kessler's book should put to rest, once and for all, the notion that Saddam was somehow involved in Osama bin Laden's plot. The 9/11 attacks were Saddam's worst nightmare because they changed the risk equation for the United States. Suddenly, the prospect of Saddam hiding WMDs went from being an ongoing nuisance to a mortal dread. What was to stop him from handing them off to al Qaeda?

President Bush decided the risk was intolerable — and the rest, as the saying goes, is history.

It makes sense.
 

Ann Coulter:

You wouldn't know it to read the headlines, but Musharraf has not staged a military coup. In fact, he was re-elected easily just weeks ago under Pakistan's own parliamentary system.

But the Pakistani Supreme Court, like our own Supreme Court, believes it is above the president and refused to acknowledge Musharraf's election on the grounds that he is disqualified because he is still wearing a military uniform. That's when Musharraf sent them home.

Musharraf's election was certainly more legitimate than that of Syrian president Bashar Assad (with whom every leading Democrat has had a photo-op) or Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (adjunct professor at Columbia University) or Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez (loon).

Where were the headlines like this week's Economist's ("Time's up, Mr. Musharraf") about those lovable rogues? They hate America, so they can stay. . . .

Pakistan is a country where local Islamic courts order women to be raped as punishment for the crimes of their male relatives. Among the Islamists' bill of particulars against Musharraf is the fact that he has promoted the Women's Protection Bill, which would punish rape, rather than using it as a device for social control.

Pakistan doesn't need Adlai Stevenson right now. It needs Mustafa Kemal Ataturk to impose military rule and drag a country of Islamic savages into the 19th century, as Ataturk did in Turkey. Pakistan's Ataturk is Gen. Musharraf.

To try to force democracy on the differing "I hate America" factions in Pakistan at this stage would be worse than Jimmy Carter's abandonment of the Shah in 1979. It would result in what former assistant secretary of state Edward Djerejian called: "one man, one vote, one time."
 

"24: The Unaired 1994 Pilot"

(Note: loud audio.)

The actor playing Jack Bauer is very good.

(Via Steve Bass.)

From Philip Klein's review of John Bolton's memoir:

ONE OF THE KEY PROBLEMS Bolton identifies is that there is an entrenched bureaucracy within the State Department that often tries to set policy rather than implement the policy of the administration. The so-called careerists tend to be liberal, and suffer from a disorder Bolton calls "clientitus." That is, instead of seeing themselves as advocates for the U.S., they behave as if their job is to promote the interests of their given region. At the beginning of a conservative administration, political appointees may be able to keep the bureaucracy in check, but over time, as the hardliners begin to leave, the bureaucracy ends up in charge. Bolton compares the loss of the "hardliners" over the course of the Bush years to removing defensive players from a football team. "Eventually, even a bureaucratic offense could start scoring..."

This is interesting, too:

After his Herculean attempts to reform the UN mostly failed, Bolton came to the conclusion that incremental reform of the UN won't work. The only way to make a difference, he argues, is to change the funding method from one of assessed contributions to a system of voluntary contributions, which would force the world body to become more accountable.
 

This can happen:

One woman was seriously hurt and two dozen other people were given first aid after monkeys rampaged through a neighbourhood in east Delhi over the weekend. . . .

Along with an estimated 35,000 sacred cows and buffaloes that roam free in the capital, marauding monkeys have been longstanding pests.

They routinely scamper through government offices, courts and even police stations and hospitals as well as terrorise neighbourhoods.

Trouble boiled over in late October when the city's deputy mayor, Sawinder Singh Bajwa, 52, fell to his death driving away monkeys from his home.

He was on his balcony reading a newspaper when four monkeys appeared, his family said. As he waved a stick to scare them away, he tumbled over the edge and died in hospital from head injuries.

In the latest incident in Delhi's low-income Shastri Park area, residents reported the monkeys appeared late Saturday and rampaged for hours.

"I was talking to someone at my door at around 11 pm when a monkey appeared," Naseema, who goes by one name, told the Times of India. "As I moved inside, the monkey followed and sank its teeth in my baby's leg."

. . . Efforts to drive out the animals is complicated by the fact that devout Hindus view them as an incarnation of Hanuman, the monkey god who symbolises strength. Killing them is unacceptable.

Delhi's mayor has admitted authorities are fighting a losing battle.

"We've neither the expertise nor the infrastructure," said Mayor Aarti Mehra.

Once caught, "we're under pressure to release ... from animal activists and from people due to religious reasons."

Kartick Satyanarayanan, head of India's Wildlife SOS, said the invasion of natural habitats by mushrooming populations was at the root of the problem.

"Humans are taking all their space."
 

I don't read manga (Japanese and Japanese-style comics), but I found Daniel H. Pink's report, like much of Wired's material, extremely interesting:

[M]anga, unlike most American comics, isn't reserved for freaks, geeks, and pip-squeaks. Ride the Tokyo subway and you'll see passengers peering at their mobiles. But you'll also inevitably spot gray-haired businessmen, twentysomething hipsters, and Japanese schoolgirls alike paging through a manga weekly or a graphic novel. The city of Hiroshima even has a bustling public library devoted entirely to manga.

Yet the role of manga in the broader economic ecosystem is perhaps more important than its actual sales figures. Japan's vaunted pop culture apparatus, it turns out, is really a manga industrial complex. Nearly every aspect of cultural production — which is now Japan's most influential export — is rooted in manga.

What would alarm a US copyright attorney, Pink writes, is the proliferation of "nonprofessional self-published manga known as dojinshi." At a manga market hosting around 33,000 amateur artists,

About 90 percent of the material for sale — how to put this — borrows liberally from existing works. Actually, let me be blunter: The copyright violations are flagrant, shameless, and widespread. . . . [Creators of popular commercial works and their dojinshi counterparts] have an understanding . . . : anmoku no ryokai, meaning essentially "unspoken, implicit agreement."

Anmoku no ryokai offers significant benefits to the big manga publishers:

First, and most obviously, it's a customer care program. The dojinshi devotees are manga's fiercest fans. . . .

Second, as [manga market organizer Keiji] Takeda put it . . . , "this is the soil for new talent."

. . . Third, the anmoku no ryokai arrangement provides publishers with extremely cheap market research. . . .

Taking care of customers. Finding new talent. Getting free market research. That's a pretty potent trio of advantages for any business. Trouble is, to derive these advantages the manga industry must ignore the law. And this is where it gets weird. Unlike, say, an industrial company that might increase profits if it skirts environmental regulations imposed to safeguard the public interest, the manga industrial complex is ignoring a law designed to protect its own commercial interests.

This odd situation exposes the conflict between what Stanford law professor (and Wired contributor) Lawrence Lessig calls the "read only" culture and the "read/write" culture. Intellectual property laws were crafted for a read-only culture. They prohibit me from running an issue of Captain America through a Xerox DocuColor machine and selling copies on the street. The moral and business logic of this sort of restriction is unassailable. By merely photocopying someone else's work, I'm not creating anything new. And my cheap reproductions would be unfairly harming the commercial interests of Marvel Comics.

But as Lessig and others have argued, and as the dojinshi markets amply confirm, that same copyright regime can be inadequate, and even detrimental, in a read/write culture. Amateur manga remixers aren't merely replicating someone else's work. They're creating something original. And in doing so, they may well be helping, not hindering, the commercial interests of the copyright holders. Yet they're treated no differently from me and my hypothetical Captain America photocopies. The result is a misalignment between the emerging imperatives of smart business and the lagging sensibilities of old laws. . . .

In anmoku no ryokai, manga publishers might have found a tentative, imperfect, but ultimately more promising answer — a business model that could help media companies in both Japan and the US begin to navigate these potentially treacherous new waters.
 

William Tucker examines solar and geothermal power, and concludes that a better answer already exists:

The main source of the earth's heat is the radioactive breakdown of uranium and thorium atoms. A nuclear reactor simply brings this process to the surface and accelerates it under carefully controlled conditions. Drawing on this terrestrial heat isn't that much different from burning the stored solar energy in coal -- except that nuclear reactions produce 2 million times as much energy per ounce without any exhaust gases.

"Terrestrial energy" -- it's a "green" idea that didn't make U.S. News's "New Age of Energy." Somehow it hasn't yet made it into the environmentalists' playbook, either. But if we're going to solve any of our energy problems -- supply, pollution, global warming -- we're going to have to give it a more serious look.
 

Mark Goldblatt:

Waterboarding is an interrogation technique in which a prisoner is subjected to simulated drowning in order to extract information from him. By most common definitions, and by several treaties to which the United States is a signatory -- including the Geneva Conventions and the 1984 United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment -- the technique is indeed torture. . . .

The fact that waterboarding constitutes torture . . . merely tells us that the practice falls within a category of acts that can be described by the word. It doesn't tell us how broad the category is, or if it has become so broad as to encompass unlike things. . . .

[A]s squirmy as it is to think about, there are times when "torture," if the word describes acts such as waterboarding, seems utterly justifiable -- notwithstanding the treaties that currently outlaw it. The ticking bomb scenario reminds us of this. If we know a terrorist in our custody has planted a bomb on a plane in flight, not only is it moral to treat him roughly in order to discover the bomb's whereabouts, it is immoral not to do so. . . .

[O]nce we concede that the mere identification of an act as torture is not sufficient to reject it out of hand, we're compelled to judge the morality of each instance of torture on a case by case basis, asking questions like: Who is being tortured, and by whom? What method of torture is being used? To what end is the torture directed?

These are ugly questions. In a better world, they wouldn't be necessary. In our world, sadly, they are.
 

Mark Steyn in National Review (sub. req.; a version of the piece should show up at SteynOnline.com in a couple of weeks):

The other week, in Wednesbury in the English Midlands, an unusual crime occurred. A thief passed down a residential street and methodically stole every single front-door handle and house number. The victims discovered the burglary when they tried to leave their homes and found the door no longer opened. An Englishman’s home may be his castle but if you can’t let down the drawbridge it’s indistinguishable from a dungeon.

Trying to get a, er, handle on property crime in the United Kingdom is a problematic business. Why would anyone steal door knockers? Well, there’s a construction boom in India and China. Demand for lead is higher than at any time since 1980 and the price of copper has quadrupled in two years. And in a globalized marketplace, that hasn’t escaped the attention of Britain’s criminal gangs, for whom “scrap metal” has become a far more lucrative proposition than it might once have been. . . .

Today in the Western world, more and more things are illegal but we’re less and less clear what’s wrong. And everywhere but America, where any metal thief who attempts to steal a doorknob risks staggering away with at least as much metal lodged in his vital organs as in his swag bag, the state doesn’t trust its citizens to defend their property and in doing so uphold what’s right.

Britain’s metal crime is a telling image of social disintegration: The very infrastructure of society — the manhole covers, the pipes, the cables on the transportation system, the fittings of the courthouse — is being cannibalized and melted down. When there’s no longer a sufficiently strong moral consensus and when the state actively disapproves of a self-reliant citizenry, what’s left is the law. And law detached from any other social pillars is not enough, and never can be.
 

Thomas Sowell:

Looking back over a long life, I could think of a number of times that I had been pulled over by the police in a number of states, without any of the things happening that are supposed to happen when you are “driving while black.”

Nor could I recall any member of my family who had told me of any such experiences with the police. It was hard to believe that we had all just led charmed lives all these years.

Only about half the times that I was pulled over did I end up being given a ticket. Once a policeman who pulled me over and asked for my driver’s license said wearily, “Mr. Sowell, would you mind paying some attention to these stop signs, so that I don’t have to write you a ticket?”

Recently I pulled off to the side of a highway to take a picture of the beautiful bay below, in Pacifica, California. After I had finished and was starting to pack up my equipment, a police car pulled off to the side of the highway behind me.

“What’s going on here?” the policeman asked.

“Photography,” I said.

“You are not allowed to park here,” he said. “It’s dangerous.”

“All right,” I said, “I am packing to leave right now.”

“Incidentally,” he said as he turned to get back in his car, “You can get a better view of the bay from up on Roberts Road.”
 

Jay Nordlinger on John Bolton's new memoir:

Bolton’s father, Jack, was a firefighter — Baltimore — and his mother, Ginny, was a housewife. Neither had graduated from high school. But they were determined for John to succeed.

Bolton has something interesting to say about his father’s politics, and spirit:

[He] decided to register to vote, which he did, listing himself as a Republican. The City Hall clerk, reviewing the registration form, said there must be some mistake because Jack was a city employee, and yet he had registered Republican rather than Democrat. When my father said there was no mistake, the clerk explained to him again that city employees registered as Democrats, which my father was still not buying.

That city clerk is a familiar figure in American life, isn’t he/she? Even all these years later . . .

Bolton was admitted to Yale, on scholarship, and had to take a Trailways bus up — his father could not get the day off to take him there. When I read that, I found it poignant. Indeed, I was moved by it — not exactly sure why; just was.

Bolton was a “libertarian conservative” at Yale, and therefore, “given prevailing campus political attitudes,” a “space alien.” Student strikes were popular in those days, and you had to cut class — “boycott” class — or be an outcast. Bolton was never a bandwagoneer:

I didn’t understand or approve of students’ striking any more than my father had liked teachers’ striking, and I especially resented the sons and daughters of the wealthy, of whom there were many, telling me that I was supposed to, in effect, forfeit my scholarship. I had an education to get, and the protesters could damn well get out of my way as I walked to class.

I believe that last sentence is my favorite of this entire 486-page book.
 

Terry Teachout:

I have, alas, no children to take pictures of, but I do have a nineteen-year-old niece, and I wonder whether her offspring (assuming that she has children and that my life overlaps with theirs) will be no less bemused to recall that they once met a man who was born in the same year that Elvis Presley recorded "Heartbreak Hotel." Somehow I doubt it, and it's by no means certain that they'll remember anything about me at all. My mother's father, after all, died when I was six years old, and I have only the vaguest and most shadowy memories of him. He played the banjo, but I never saw him do so, nor do I remember the sound of his voice. I wish I did, for my mother loved him very much and still speaks of him with a warmth undiminished by the passage of time.

Philip Larkin wrote a poem called An Arundel Tomb that reflects on such memories, and its last line often comes to my mind now that I'm middle-aged: What will survive of us is love. That is all that survives of Albert Crosno, my banjo-playing maternal grandfather: love, three living children, and a few faded photographs. I can think of worse legacies.
 

Dave Barry:

When I was in college, during the '60s, there was no such thing as "quantum physics." Or, if there was, nobody told ME about it. Back then, when we stayed up all night, we were not trying to figure out the universe: We were trying to figure out how to operate the phone, so we could order pizza. (Note to young people: Phones were MUCH more complicated in the '60s.)

. . . This is not to say that I know nothing about physics. I studied physics for an ENTIRE YEAR in Pleasantville High School under the legendary Mr. Heideman. We learned that there are five simple machines: the lever, the pulley, the doorbell, the hammer and the toaster.
 

From an article at vanityfair.com:

But it was after [Paris's infamous sex tape with her older boyfriend Rick Salomon] that the money really began to roll in. Paris's showing up and waving became a major source of income. Hilton gets paid anywhere from $50,000 to upwards of $150,000 to appear at an opening, says an executive who books stars for events.

*A never-recurring feature of this blog.

(Via Arts & Letters Daily.)
 

A fierce essay by Hugh Fitzgerald:

The only result that constitutes "winning" in Iraq is that which will weaken the Camp of Islam. And the only way to obtain that result is to leave promptly. Forget all that stuff that the rulers of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan keep prating about (the oil! the oil!). Of course they want the Americans to stay, and to shore up the Sunnis. Of course many of the Shi'a still want the Americans to stay as long as staying means more tens of billions in aid, and the likelihood that the Americans will leave behind all kinds of military equipment to be inherited by the Shi'a-dominated government of "Iraq." And of course the Kurds want the Americans to stay as long as possible, because ever since 1991 the Americans have protected the Kurds, and allowed their incipient state, now an autonomous and successful region, to flourish. But what this or that group of Muslims want, for their own obvious purposes, is not what a sensible Administration should want. The interest of the American people should be its only concern.

It should be thinking, everyone should be thinking: how do we weaken the forces of Jihad? How do we halt and reverse the demographic conquest, slow but speeding up, and if nothing is done inexorable, of the countries of Western Europe? How do we constrain the use of the Money Weapon, by Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., Kuwait, Qatar, and other rich Arab oil states? How do we diminish the amounts available to be used to pay for Muslim propaganda, the buying-up of so many well-placed Western hirelings and apologists, the financing of so many Western academic "centers" like the infamous Esposito operation, the paying for mosques and madrasas everywhere, seen rightly as beachheads of conquest, as signs of increasing dominance, not merely as quiet places of private worship (the Western notion of "religion" does not fit Islam), the funding of lawyers to suppress or threaten or intimidate with lawsuits all who stand in the way of this well-financed Muslim effort, the campaigns of Da'wa that target the psychically and economically marginal, including the literally captive audiences of certain prison populations? . . .

[H]ere is Iraq, which offers on a platter two of the three great fissures in Islam: the Sectarian (Sunni and Shi'a), and the Ethnic (Arab and Non-Arab Muslim), and yet the Administration lacks the wit, and possibly the necessary intelligent ruthlessness, to see its opportunity and to take it. It need not do a thing for those fissures to grow and grow. It need only stop doing things, stop the squandering, stop the posturing, stop being so confused about Islam and the nature of this war.

I share Fitzgerald's view that if we're to fight in Iraq, it should be for our own benefit, not Iraqis'. I've written to that effect before (for instance here). And I feel that, for our own benefit, we have to stay in Iraq until 1) the Iraqi government, police and military can control the nation, and 2) we can plausibly claim victory. If we leave sooner we'll look 1) untrustworthy and 2) weak. But Fitzgerald knows far more than I about the MME, and his opinions are always worth considering.
 

Here are the closing paragraphs of an essay by Alvaro Vargas Llosa at TCS:

What has been the consequence of a century of collectivization of the land? In the 1990s, when trade policies became more liberal, Mexico's rural population found itself caught up in an extremely inefficient system that was undercapitalized, making it very difficult for Mexican peasants to compete with the outside world. When the government finally allowed the villagers to sell the ejidos, something they had been prevented from doing since 1917, many of them put their land on the market and left for Mexico's cities. When the urban areas did not offer improved conditions, they migrated to the United States. "If my grandfather came back," ponders Emiliano, "he would die of sadness."

. . . There is an ironic little coda to the story of the grandson, the landless Zapatista: A few years ago, some of his children tried to enter the United States in search of a better future — a topic Emiliano was reluctant to discuss.

The current Mexican government's best efforts notwithstanding, it will take decades for Mexico to undo the legacy of what became a crooked revolution. As I look at Zapata's tomb in Cuautla's Parque de la Revolucion, his grandson standing next to me — the same mustache, the same nose, the same mischievous eyes — I say to myself, "Indeed, he would die of sadness."

Here's the opening paragraph:

I wish my American friends who fret about Mexican immigrants could be here with me. Listening to Emiliano Zapata, a laborer who happens to be the grandson and namesake of the legendary Mexican revolutionary, they perhaps would get a clearer sense of how the migration of Mexicans originated a few decades ago and why it continues today.

We already understand why Mexicans come here, legally and illegally: to seek better lives. What puzzles many of us is why our opponents, so quick to criticize us, fail to place blame where we feel it belongs—on Mexico's government and people.
 

Ralph Peters on the increasingly repressive Georgia:

[W]e need to recognize an enduring pattern here - one we've seen throughout the developing world, as new states struggle to master the arts of independence and freedom.

From Latin American and Africa to the Middle East and the former USSR, the scenario goes like this:

* The people elect a charismatic leader who promises liberty, equality and better lives.

* At first, he tackles the state's problems with gusto. Then he collides with reality: The treasury won't cover all that must be done. Colleagues and relatives prove corrupt, robbing the state and peddling influence.

* A new class of criminals and entrepreneurs emerges (with no clear line between them), amassing flamboyant wealth by exploiting the state's shortcomings.

* Frustrated at intractable problems, the leader consolidates ever more power in his own hands. His patience wears out with the opposition and a legislature he views as obstructionist. Sycophants encircle him.

* The people demand what they were promised. The voices in the streets are no longer content with speeches. They want results.

* The leader sees enemies everywhere, while hardening in his conviction that he's the nation's best hope. He banishes "disloyal" comrades and relies increasingly on the security forces.

* The confrontation arrives. Initially, the security forces maintain the upper hand. But will they remain loyal to the leader - or flip to the side of the people? Whatever they choose, they're now the king-makers. The hollow forms may live on, but the democratic experiment is over.

The point? First, we need to stop imagining that democracy and unfamiliar freedoms are easy fits for long-repressed societies. Second, we need to focus on the specifics that push new democracies into failure. While there's a range of potential grievances and pitfalls, the one that's been at work in states such as Venezuela and Georgia is economic disparity. . . .

Democracy is a marvelous technique. But when we elevated it to an ideology, we forgot that democracy is for and of the people. As the Soviets did before us, we valued the system over flesh and blood.
 

(Via NRO.)
 

BBC:

A computer technician has claimed to have cracked a real Da Vinci code, by finding musical notes encoded in the masterpiece The Last Supper.

Leonardo Da Vinci left clues to a 40-second musical composition in his painting, Giovanni Maria Pala said. . . .

Mr Pala found that by drawing the five lines of a musical staff across the painting, the loaves of bread on the table and the hands of Jesus and the Apostles could each represent a musical note.

The notes make sense musically when the resulting score is read from right to left, following Da Vinci's own writing style, Mr Pala said in his book La Musica Celata (The Hidden Music).

The result is a 40-second "hymn to God" which Mr Pala described as "like a soundtrack that emphasises the passion of Jesus".

See a large image of the painting here.
 

Kathryn Lopez interviews Heather Mac Donald:

Lopez: What's the healthy long-term message for republicans on immigration? how can they comfortably pursue this issue with no fear of alienating Hispanics or George W. Bush?

Mac Donald: The United States continues to benefit from its immigrants, who bring an admirable work ethic and an entrepreneurial drive. Hard-working immigrants have revived flagging communities across the country. But the reason so many of the world’s peoples want to come to the United States is its respect for the rule of law. America’s economic dynamism and freedom rest on our culture of legality. Immigration does not stand outside of the law. There is nothing unfair about our neutral, color-blind immigration policy or about efforts to enforce it. What is unfair is when people who happen to live on the other side of a two thousand-mile border jump the queue ahead of the hundreds of thousands of law-abiding foreigners patiently waiting to enter the country legally. The United States has the most generous immigration policy on earth and will continue to do so, but it is a policy that can work fairly for all only when it is respected and enforced.
 

Martin Earnshaw, "a researcher and editor for the Future Cities Project" (no date given; sources listed at webpage):

[H]ouseholds only produce a small percentage of the total waste stream in the UK. The Commons Committee on Refuse Collection notes, ‘for all the political heat it generates, municipal refuse represents only nine per cent of the total national waste stream’ (this figure falls to seven per cent if you consider waste from households only) (3-5). It is incredible that so much effort has been put into reducing such a small percentage of waste. Although municipal recycling rates have quadrupled over the past decade, in practice this still accounts for just two per cent of the nation’s total waste stream (5).

(No idea how I found this—my guess is Planet Gore. Sorry.)
 

Gene Autry's Cowboy Code:

1. The Cowboy must never shoot first, hit a smaller man, or take unfair advantage.

2. He must never go back on his word, or a trust confided in him.

3. He must always tell the truth.

4. He must be gentle with children, the elderly, and animals.

5. He must not advocate or possess racially or religiously intolerant ideas.

6. He must help people in distress.

7. He must be a good worker.

8. He must keep himself clean in thought, speech, action, and personal habits.

9. He must respect women, parents, and his nation's laws.

10. The Cowboy is a patriot.
 

(Via Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing.)
 

A live recording of Eva Cassidy singing "Fields of Gold," free for listening on MySpace. (It's the second track listed.)
 

At The American Spectator's site, Jacob Laksin reports from a small African nation many non-Africans have likely never heard of:

There are, of course, countless other troubled regions in Africa; traveling around Tunisia recently, I saw no shortage of villages untouched by the trappings of modernity. But few wore their misfortune as openly as Djibouti.

THE EXPLANATION for some of this disrepair can be summed up in one word: khat. A green, leafy shoot common to East Africa and Yemen, the plant is supposed to act as a kind of African Viagra, speeding up blood pressure and generally boosting one's energy reserves. If so, it seems that Djibouti has acquired a particularly bad batch, because khat's effect on the locals, particularly the men, is anything but energizing. "After 12 o'clock the men are completely useless," one civil-affairs worker in Djibouti told me. She meant 12 o'clock in the afternoon.

Casual observation bears this out. Look around the capital city any time after midday, and you will see whole packs of men collapsed in restful torpor on roadsides and street corners. It's no surprise that many of the maintenance workers at the American military base in Djibouti, Camp Lemonier, hail from neighboring Ethiopia and Somalia. The locals are just not up to the job.

All of which prompts an uncomfortable conclusion. Because crushing poverty is such a famous fact of African life, it's sometimes assumed that Africans bear little to no responsibility for their plight. It's sobering to realize that, in Djibouti at least, one of the chief obstacles to progress and development is Djiboutians.
 

David Frum offers a concise, disheartening summary.
 

Bret Stephens:

Ecuador has a huge environmental problem courtesy of Big Oil. Since 1990, there have been at least 800 recorded oil spills in the country, including 117 in the first nine months of 2006 alone. Their cumulative volume easily exceeds three million gallons. Scores of spills have never been cleaned up, posing severe health risks for the local population. Rainfall in the area is said to smell like car exhaust. . . .

Only one problem: The supposed villain in the plot, Texaco--now merged with Chevron--ceased operations in Ecuador in 1990.

Yet such details are rarely allowed to get in the way of a noble cause--or a multibillion dollar class-action. The source of many, if not all, of the spills mentioned above is state-owned PetroEcuador, described by the Latin Business Chronicle as "widely seen as one of the most inefficient state oil companies in Latin America." In 2006, Miguel Muñoz, Ecuador's Energy Minister, admitted that "for over 30 years, PetroEcuador has done absolutely nothing to remediate those pits under its responsibility." He also acknowledged that the company's obsolete and underfunded pipeline system "is one of the most important causes of spills we face now."

So how come Chevron is in this picture? Plaintiffs lawyer Steven Donziger says it's because Texaco "made all the decisions about technologies and methods" and did "substandard work compared to what they were doing elsewhere." An alternative explanation, as bank robber Willie Sutton might have said, is because Chevron is where the money is.
 

Gordon G. Chang:

Today, in a Soviet-era margin of 418-0, the Duma [1] approved a law to end compliance with the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty. The legislation still has to go to the upper house. If passed there—which is most likely because the Russian political system is becoming more predictable by the day—the legislation will go to the desk of President Vladimir Putin for signature. The suspension is slated to take effect on December 12. . . .

The West considers the CFE, as the pact is known, the [2] cornerstone of security on the continent. The 1990 agreement limits the number of tanks, armored combat vehicles, artillery pieces, attack helicopters, and combat aircraft between the Atlantic and the Urals. No one expects a large set-piece battle on the European plains, so Russia’s suspension is seen as a sign of unhappiness about the treaty and a gambit to gain an edge in negotiations to change its terms. . . .

[I]t’s time for us to confront reality. Relations between the Atlantic partners and Russia are now approaching those of a failing marriage. Whether we blame the Russians or the West for the breakdown, . . . we need to begin building a new security architecture not based on cooperation with the Russians. As a first step, the first seven members of the G-8 should disinvite Moscow. After all, what is an angry mafia state doing in a group of free-market economies? Will Putin be upset? Undoubtedly. But what problems in the world is he helping to solve now?
 

John Derbyshire, responding (mostly supportively) to Theodore Dalrymple's recent essay on "the New Atheists":

[C]onservatives like TD and myself are inclined to defer to human nature in its generality, and there is no doubt that human beings are innately, instinctively religious. The Dennett-Dawkins-Hitchens program to sweep away all those musty old cobwebs of faith and deliver humanity into the pure clear light of reason just bears far too close a resemblance to every other millenarian project, from Spartacus's City of the Sun to New Soviet Man. No thanks. Human nature has its unappealing side, but grand projects to overhaul it invariably end with a mountain of corpses. We'll take humanity as it is, religion and all. This attitude is, it seems to me, the essence of a conservative outlook.

We irreligious are a minority—always have been, always will be. We are freaks and sports. A proper humility is in order.
 

Stephen Moore here; Art Laffer here (pdf).

Moore writes that "we can argue forever whether tax revenues would have been higher or lower without the Bush 2003 tax cuts." That's the key question, isn't it? I imagine that one factor is the length of time involved. Maybe cuts in tax rates increase tax revenues over a twenty-year (or fifty-year, or hundred-year . . .) period. Surowiecki and McArdle* (and many others) are sure they don't, Moore and Laffer (and many others) are sure they do.

I want government to burden the citizen as little as possible, so I favor lower tax rates, even if supply-side's critics are right about tax revenues. I'll be glad to let the pros duke it out on that subject.

(Laffer link via Larry Kudlow.)
 

*More precisely, McArdle argues that "the Laffer Curve [doesn't] apply at American levels of taxation."
 

Via David Freddoso, a Corner reader distinguishes between "Muslim cabbies who refuse to transport those with alcohol, and pharmacists who choose not to stock the morning-after pill":

If you get a cabbie license for the airport, there is one less license to give to someone else who will carry drunken slatterns eating pork rinds and their guide dog.

Drunken slatterns eating pork rinds and their guide dog? I think the taxi drivers win this one.
 

Vernon Smith, Professor of Economics at George Mason University and the 2002 Nobel Laureate in Economics, in a podcast with Russ Roberts (at about 4:15):

[B]uyers profit from exchange because they usually buy at much lower prices than the most they're willing to pay. . . . [B]uyers profit from exchange just as much as sellers, although we normally think of sellers only as profiting, because that's the way we think of accounting as working.
 

Harold C. Hutchison at StrategyPage:

As if fighting the Global War on Terror was not difficult enough, the troops are now facing a loss of freedom in their choice of reading material. This censorship effort is coming from a number of anti-pornography groups who are not happy with the results of a Pentagon policy [that] banned hard core porn, but allowed magazines like Playboy and Penthouse to stay in military exchanges. . . .

And so the troops find themselves fighting to protect the right of people to try to deny them the right to choose their own reading material.
 

Rush Limbaugh comments on Damon Wayans's appearance* as a guest on The View:

Okay, this is funny, this is great stuff, but, do you realize, he says this, there was not a peep. They're laughing about it. They're having a grand old time. Nobody was offended and so forth. You let somebody else go on that show and say these exact same things and their career might be over.

*Sample: "Women today, most women I run into, don't want to do the fundamentals. . . . They don't cook. . . . I make the money so she can make something to cook."
 

Arthur Herman on a book by Martin Gilbert:

A student of history, [Winston] Churchill came to feel that Judaism was the bedrock of traditional Western moral and political principles--and Churchill was of a generation that preferred to talk about principles instead of "values." For Europeans to turn against the Jew, he argued, was for them to strike at their own roots and reject an essential part of their civilization--"that corporate strength, that personal and special driving power" that Jews had brought for hundreds of years to Europe's arts, sciences and institutions.

To deny Jews a national homeland was therefore an act of ingratitude. Churchill became a keen backer of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which broached the idea of creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. As a friend to Zionist leader Chaim Weizman, and as colonial secretary after World War I, Churchill made establishing such a homeland a matter of urgency. "The hope of your race for so many centuries will be gradually realized here," Churchill told a Jewish audience in Jerusalem during his visit in March 1921, "not only for your own good, but for the good of all the world."
 

Daniel Pipes:

Just after occupying Iraq in April 2003, a report found that Mosul Dam's foundation was "leaking like a sieve and ready to collapse." A more recent, still-classified report from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers concludes that "The dam is judged to have an unacceptable annual failure probability." More explicitly, the corps finds the current probability of failure to be "exceptionally high." A senior aid worker calls the dam "a time bomb waiting to go off."

. . . [T]he dam's condition continues to deteriorate, raising the prospect of its complete collapse. Were this to happen with a reservoir full of water, predicts Engineering News-Record, "as much as 12.5 billion cubic meters of water pooled behind the 3.2-km-long earth-filled impoundment [would go] thundering down the Tigris River Valley toward Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq. The wave behind the 110-meter-high crest would take about two hours to reach the city of 1.7 million." In addition, parts of Baghdad (population 7 million) would come under 5 meters of water.

The Army Corps estimates the flood would kill a half-million people immediately, while the aftershocks, such as power outage and drought, would kill many more. (Not coincidentally, Iraq was the site of Noah's Ark.) It would likely be the largest human-induced single loss of life in history. . . .

[W]ho would be blamed for the unprecedented loss of life? Americans, of course. And understandably so, for the Bush administration took upon itself the overhauling of Iraqi life, including the Mosul Dam. . . .

A change of course is needed, and quickly. The Bush administration needs to hand back responsibility for Iraq's ills, including and especially the Mosul Dam. More broadly, it should abandon the deeply flawed and upside-down approach of "war as social work," whereby U.S. military efforts are judged primarily by the benefits they bring to the defeated enemy, rather than to Americans.
 

Paul Weyrich explains to Jim Geraghty:

“I felt it would come down to a contest between Giuliani and Romney,” Weyrich said. “I don’t want Giuliani as the nominee because a lot of our values voters will defect... I know the same argument is made about Romney, but eventually, I think those voters can be brought around. There is a hardcore group that absolutely will not vote for Giuliani… I don’t think they’ll go for a third party candidate, I think they’ll stay home. I think there’s no convincing them. I’ve talked to a number of these folks. Even though they recognize that Hillary is a real problem, they think that it’s better to have somebody bad like that than it is to have somebody halfway reasonable.”

On the other candidates, Weyrich said each one, ultimately, had flaws too large to earn his endorsement.

*By "smart," I don't mean "who thinks like I do." I just mean smart.

Melanie Phillips:

For over 60 years, a major tendency in European thought has sought to distance itself from moral responsibility for the Holocaust. The only way to do so, however, was somehow to blame the Jews for their own destruction; and that monstrous reasoning was inconceivable while the dominant narrative was of Jews as victims.

Now, however, the Palestinians have handed Europe a rival narrative. The misrepresentation of Israeli self-defense as belligerence, suggesting that Jews are not victims but aggressors, implicitly provides Europeans with the means to blame the destruction of European Jewry on its own misdeeds. As one influential left-wing editor said to me: “The Holocaust meant that for decades the Jews were untouchable. It’s such a relief that Israel means we don’t have to worry about that any more.”

(Via LGF.)

David Pryce-Jones:

It was never going to be easy. Pakistan is a country of some 165 million, well over half of them illiterate. Radical Islam has found it easy to fanaticise them. The Islamic Republic of Iran, and the Taliban in neighbouring Afghanistan, appeal to tribal instincts and to anti-Western prejudice. No doubt Musharraf’s worst error was to believe that he could make a treaty with al-Qaeda and the Taliban and trust them to respect it. In addition, Pakistani Sunnis and Shias murder each other. Suicide bombings are a daily occurrence. . . .

What is Musharraf to do in such circumstances? . . . [He] has declared a state of emergency, sacked the judicial activists and arrested about 500 opponents. Addressing his fellow Pakistanis in Urdu on television, he broke into English for the sake of Washington and London, pleading, “Please do not expect or demand your level of democracy which you learned over a number of centuries. Please give us time.”

. . . In reality, it is hard not to feel sympathy for his plight. He has proved to be neither a quitter nor a killer. If anything, his measures are too mild to protect his rule, and he may have to arrest more, and prevent street demonstrations sponsored and paid for by the several would-be one-man rulers striving to replace his person with theirs. The alternative is the continuation of the power struggle by force of arms, the certain talibanization of large parts of the population, and perhaps even the total break-down of the country. . . .

A sample of Islamic wisdom that goes back a thousand years is applicable to Musharraf at present: “Tyranny is better than anarchy.”
 

Megan McArdle:

One thing that strikes me about the arguments I've been having with voucher opponents is just how little they seem to understand how markets work. Markets don't work because they get it right the first time; they succeed because if at first they don't succeed, they try, try again. . . .

Failure, to put it bluntly, works. Failure is nature's way of telling you "Hey, that doesn't work!" The American economy is vastly strengthened by the fact that companies are allowed to fail--and also by the fact that our crazy culture encourages us to try things that don't work. . . .

At a conference last year, I saw an incredibly compelling presentation from the guy who does usability for Treo. He talked about design philosophy, and showed slides of a project he does where he goes into various institutions, divides people into groups, gives them spaghetti and some tape, and asks them to build the tallest self-supporting structure they can. The worst-performing group, you'll be unsurprised to hear, was MBA students; they spend all their time arguing about who will be boss. Engineers do okay. But the best performing group? Kindergarten students.

The students don't plan anything. They just try stuff, and if it doesn't work, they try something else. The presenter's argument was that if you want to do something quickly, and well, you need to have a lot of failure. Failure is the quickest way to learn.

But the way public schools are set up, they can't really fail--and so they don't succeed at the hardest task we've given them.

McArdle's post reminds me of this from Thomas Sowell:

We live in what is often called a profit system but, as Milton Friedman explained long ago, it is really a profit-and-loss system. The losses are just as important as the profits, though not nearly as popular.

Running up losses because you are using resources that are more valuable somewhere else is precisely what forces you to stop the waste. If you are too stubborn to stop, then you will get stopped by bankruptcy.

In other words, some enterprises should be forced out of existence[.]
 

Bill Clinton this week, on Tim Russert's question to Hillary about issuing driver's licenses (drivers' licenses?) to illegal immigrants:

"It's fine for Hillary and all the other Democrats to discuss Governor Spitzer's plan. But not in 30 seconds — yes, no, raise your hand," he said.

Bill Clinton in 1997, at a forum on race, to Abigail Thernstrom, an affirmative-action opponent in the audience:

Do you favor the United States Army abolishing the affirmative-action program that produced Colin Powell? Yes or no?

What a shameless hypocrite.

(First link via Jonah Goldberg.)
 

Theodore Dalrymple considers recent books by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and others:

It is surely not news, except to someone so ignorant that he probably wouldn’t be interested in these books in the first place, that religious conflict has often been murderous and that religious people have committed hideous atrocities. But so have secularists and atheists, and though they have had less time to prove their mettle in this area, they have proved it amply. If religious belief is not synonymous with good behavior, neither is absence of belief, to put it mildly. . . .

The thinness of the new atheism is evident in its approach to our civilization, which until recently was religious to its core. To regret religion is, in fact, to regret our civilization and its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy. And in my own view, the absence of religious faith, provided that such faith is not murderously intolerant, can have a deleterious effect upon human character and personality. If you empty the world of purpose, make it one of brute fact alone, you empty it (for many people, at any rate) of reasons for gratitude, and a sense of gratitude is necessary for both happiness and decency. For what can soon, and all too easily, replace gratitude is a sense of entitlement. Without gratitude, it is hard to appreciate, or be satisfied with, what you have: and life will become an existential shopping spree that no product satisfies.

A few years back, the National Gallery held an exhibition of Spanish still-life paintings. One of these paintings had a physical effect on the people who sauntered in, stopping them in their tracks; some even gasped. I have never seen an image have such an impact on people. The painting, by Juan Sánchez Cotán, now hangs in the San Diego Museum of Art. It showed four fruits and vegetables, two suspended by string, forming a parabola in a gray stone window.

Even if you did not know that Sánchez Cotán was a seventeenth-century Spanish priest, you could know that the painter was religious: for this picture is a visual testimony of gratitude for the beauty of those things that sustain us. Once you have seen it, and concentrated your attention on it, you will never take the existence of the humble cabbage—or of anything else—quite so much for granted, but will see its beauty and be thankful for it. The painting is a permanent call to contemplation of the meaning of human life, and as such it arrested people who ordinarily were not, I suspect, much given to quiet contemplation.

The same holds true with the work of the great Dutch still-life painters. On the neo-atheist view, the religious connection between Catholic Spain and Protestant Holland is one of conflict, war, and massacre only: and certainly one cannot deny this history. And yet something more exists. As with Sánchez Cotán, only a deep reverence, an ability not to take existence for granted, could turn a representation of a herring on a pewter plate into an object of transcendent beauty, worthy of serious reflection.
 

Stephen Spruiell takes apart an accusation the would-be first First Husband has hurled at Tim Russert.
 

I've long liked the idea that, as Pete du Pont puts it, "Tax rate reductions increase tax revenues." But James Surowiecki has me reluctantly coming around to just about believing that they don't. He answers an obvious objection:

[T]he absurd idea that tax cuts pay for themselves is based on an idea that is not at all absurd, which is that tax rates can have an impact on people’s behavior. . . . What supply-siders have done is start with that reasonable idea and extrapolate it to unreasonable lengths.

They’re aided in that extrapolation by the simple fact that the American economy grows over time. As a result, even if you cut taxes the federal government will eventually take in more tax revenue than it once did. And that allows supply-siders to fashion a spurious syllogism: taxes were cut in 2001, government revenues are higher in 2007 than they were in 2001, therefore the tax cuts increased revenue. The comparison that really matters in analyzing the impact of the tax cuts, of course, is not between government revenue in 2001 and government revenue in 2007. It’s the comparison between actual tax revenue in 2007 and what tax revenue would have been in 2007 had there been no tax cuts in 2001. And studies that make these types of comparisons—including one by Bush’s own Treasury Department that looked at the tax cuts’ impact on economic growth—find that government revenues would be greater had taxes not been cut.

I still don't think the idea's "absurd," but Surowiecki has Megan McArdle on his side, so I'll keep quiet.

(Du Pont link via Betsy Newmark; Surowiecki link via Tyler Cowen.)
 

Update: Perhaps I was too hasty.
 

StrategyPage:

In Iraq, the trends are going against the terrorists. Take IEDs (roadside bombs). There are fewer of them, and more of them are being detected before they can hurt anyone. Thus U.S. casualties from IEDs are down 80 percent compared to last Spring. Overall American casualties have not been this low since May, 2003, right after the fall of Saddam's government. Iraqi military and civilian casualties are also down over 70 percent, compared to last Spring. Most of this was due to so many Iraqis finally taking control of their own security. Iraqis, particularly Sunni Arabs, have basically said "enough!" Over 60,000 Iraqis have volunteered to help with security. This generally consists of manning checkpoints, and knowing who is who. Many more Iraqis are passing on information about terrorists. That has crippled terrorist operations, as can be seen in the sharp decline in IED and suicide bomb attacks.

But now the threat has shifted from the Sunni Arab minority to the Shia Arab majority. The Shia Arabs hate the Sunni Arabs. Shia Arab political parties and militias compete with each other in coming up with new ways to stick it to the Sunni Arabs. The depth of this hatred doesn't really get communicated accurately in the West. It is a "we will kill you all" level hatred that is restrained mainly by U.S. troops, and an Iraqi leadership that wants to avoid international condemnation for presiding over mass murder and large scale ethnic cleansing. . . .

[I]n Baghdad the decision has already been made to screw the Sunni Arabs, in as many ways as possible. No oil for those bastards, and not many government jobs either. It they are lucky, maybe we'll let them live.
 

PR specialist Mark Corallo, who used to represent Blackwater, corrects a New York Times story:

I told [reporter John] Broder stories of bravery from Blackwater employees in Iraq, who suffered injury and death to save the lives of the American civilians in their care. I told him about the standards to which Blackwater holds its employees — standards that exceed those of our armed forces. I told him of their dedication to the rule of law and the Constitution.

I told him of a cable from a State Department employee who literally watched Blackwater heroes die while rescuing her from enemy attack in Baghdad — how she owed her life to them and would never be able to repay them. I then told him that when Blackwater was being dragged before Henry Waxman’s oversight committee back in February in a blatant effort to help a civil lawsuit, the State Department would not allow them to even quote from that diplomat’s message in order to describe what Blackwater is really about. . . .

I told Broder that I stopped representing Blackwater for a number of reasons, chief among them my inability to help them under the State Department’s gag order. I told him of sitting in a meeting with the State Department’s contracting officer, who told the company’s representatives that if they so much as popped their heads up in the media, he would ruin them. . . .

A million people will tell me that I shouldn’t be surprised that the New York Times mischaracterized my comments and omitted 99.9 percent of what I said because it didn’t fit the story the Times wanted to tell. They’ll tell me that I should have expected it and that I should never have trusted a reporter from the country’s leading left-wing newspaper. But I did expect more, and still do.