Did my matzos come?

ScienceDaily:

University of California, San Diego researchers have proven in animal studies that fibrosis in the liver can be not only stopped, but reversed. Their discovery, to be published in PLoS Online on December 26, opens the door to treating and curing conditions that lead to excessive tissue scarring such as viral hepatitis, fatty liver disease, cirrhosis, pulmonary fibrosis, scleroderma and burns.

Mansoor Ijaz:

Benazir Bhutto was a beautiful and idealistic woman when she came to Pakistan's rescue in 1988. Growing up as the scion of one of its most powerful political families imposed enormous responsibilities on her and created perhaps unrealistic expectations of what she could deliver to save her chaotic country from disintegration. Her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, reportedly encouraged her as an up-and-coming politician to study the lives of history's great women leaders, from Joan of Arc to Indira Ghandi, so she could prepare to lead Pakistan.

During her two terms in office as prime minister, Ms. Bhutto earned a reputation among many as an imperious, venal, and corrupt politician, bringing Pakistan to the brink of financial ruin on more than one occasion. Her assassination now brings this teeming, nuclear-armed nation to the brink of complete state failure, with inevitable accusations that President Pervez Musharraf's intelligence and security services – charged with protecting her welfare as she campaigned for a third stint as prime minister – were somehow complicit in her death. Civil war, or worse, an Islamist army coup in the ensuing political chaos that may engulf Pakistan in the coming days and weeks before the elections scheduled for Jan. 8, 2008, are now the two most likely scenarios if Mr. Musharraf does not re-impose martial law.

I knew Benazir well. I am often blamed by her supporters for having helped bring her government down in 1996 by exposing her hypocrisy and corruption in two Wall Street Journal Op-Ed pieces. We remained in touch over the years after she went into exile, even developing a begrudging respect for each other over time. She struck me as a terribly conflicted person who deep in her heart wanted to save Pakistan from its evils, but was unable to put her personal lifestyle choices aside in doing so. But I firmly believe that she loved Pakistan, and for all her faults, had returned there this time to turn a new page in its troubled political history. We should remember her for her courage to stand up in the face of incalculable odds to bring some semblance of sanity to the disaster that Pakistan has become.
 

Astonishing to me, anyway. Ramesh Ponnuru:

GOP pollster Tony Fabrizio estimates that half of Republican voters are evangelical or born again.

No doubt many of the rest are Christians of other denominations. With apologies to David Frum, I infer that a pro-abortion Republican can't defeat the Democrat nominee in 2008. I wish it weren't so, because I like Giuliani.

This, from Kathryn Jean Lopez, suggests to me that Romney can't win either:

[A]s much as it pains me, I can't help but think that there are some evangelicals who heard Romney talk about "Christians" who were seething that he won't say "I am not a Christian." I remember the first time it was explained to me at a Concerned Women for America conference that I am not a Christian because I am Catholic. At the time I wondered why we — my pro-life, conservative CWA friends and I — couldn't just strengthen our political alliance on issues we agreed on and go our own ways Sunday morning (or whenever).

I'm sorry about that too, because I like Romney.

My own inclinations (for the free market and a strong foreign policy) convince me that Huckabee would lose as well. If he's the nominee, I'll probably follow Glenn Reynolds's reasoning and vote Democrat.

By process of elimination, the only two Republican candidates* with a chance at winning the presidency are McCain and Thompson. Though I trust McCain on the issue that matters most to me—the war against the jihadists—I disagree with him on other matters, and I loathe his work for campaign finance "reform."

Thus, I'd opt for Thompson. As Mark Steyn wrote of him late last month,

[H]e seems to have by far the best ideas, and the necessary zeal for reform, on taxes, Social Security and much else.

Of course, Steyn added that

[E]very time you see him in these TV debates he has the listless air of a bored grandparent at a dreary school play.

But Thompson's apparent energy level (I doubt he was ever truly "listless") has risen. Of the most recent GOP debate, Kathryn Jean Lopez wrote,

Fred had his first great performance — if anyone watched this debate it should help him.

As Lopez indicates, that's a big "if," and it makes me regret that National Review chose not to endorse Thompson. The editors explained,

Our guiding principle has always been to select the most conservative viable candidate. In our judgment, that candidate is Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts. . . .

Fred Thompson is as conservative as Romney, and has distinguished himself with serious proposals on Social Security, immigration, and defense. But Thompson has never run any large enterprise — and he has not run his campaign well, either. Conservatives were excited this spring to hear that he might enter the race, but have been disappointed by the reality. He has been fading in crucial early states. He has not yet passed the threshold test of establishing for voters that he truly wants to be president.

An endorsement from NR might well have galvanized Thompson's campaign and prompted undecided Republican and Republican-sympathetic voters (I'm among the latter) to take Thompson more seriously. A shame they didn't give it to him. Still, he's very much in the race, and I hope the results of the Iowa caucus reflect his strong showing in that last debate.

*I'm omitting Paul and Keyes, neither of whom has a realistic shot at winning the nomination, much less the general election.
 

This is very clever.
 

Kay S. Hymowitz:

After my Lot Airlines flight from New York touched down at Warsaw’s Frédéric Chopin Airport a few months back, I watched a middle-aged passenger rush to embrace a waiting younger woman—clearly her daughter. Like many people on the plane, the older woman wore drab clothing and had the short, square physique of someone familiar with too many potatoes and too much manual labor. Her Poland-based daughter, by contrast, was tall and smartly outfitted in pointy-toed pumps, slim-cut jeans, a cropped jacket revealing a toned midriff (Yoga? Pilates? Or just a low-carb diet?), and a large, brass-studded leather bag, into which she dropped a silver cell phone.

Yes: Carrie Bradshaw is alive and well and living in Warsaw. Well, not just Warsaw. Conceived and raised in the United States, Carrie may still see New York as a spiritual home. But today you can find her in cities across Europe, Asia, and North America. Seek out the trendy shoe stores in Shanghai, Berlin, Singapore, Seoul, and Dublin, and you’ll see crowds of single young females (SYFs) in their twenties and thirties, who spend their hours working their abs and their careers, sipping cocktails, dancing at clubs, and (yawn) talking about relationships.

The whole piece is worth reading. Two snippets:

The New Girl Order may represent a disruptive transformation for a deeply traditional society, but Japanese women sure seem to be enjoying the single life. . . . And unlike their foreign counterparts in the New Girl Order, Japanese singles don’t seem to be worrying much about finding Mr. Right. A majority of Japanese single women between 25 and 54 say that they’d be just as happy never to marry. Peggy Orenstein, writing in the New York Times Magazine in 2001, noted that Japanese women find American-style sentimentality about marriage puzzling. Yoko Harruka, a television personality and author of a book called I Won’t Get Married—written after she realized that her then-fiancé expected her to quit her career and serve him tea—says that her countrymen propose with lines like, “I want you to cook miso soup for me for the rest of my life.”

* * * * *

Why are SYFs in the United States—the Rome of the New Girl Order—still so interested in marriage? By large margins, surveys suggest, American women want to marry and have kids. Indeed, our fertility rates, though lower than replacement level among college-educated women, are still healthier than those in most SYF countries (including Sweden and France). The answer may be that the family has always been essential ballast to the individualism, diversity, mobility, and sheer giddiness of American life. It helps that the U.S., like northwestern Europe, has a long tradition of “companionate marriage”—that is, marriage based not on strict roles but on common interests and mutual affection. Companionate marriage always rested on the assumption of female equality. Yet countries like Japan are joining the new order with no history of companionate relations, and when it comes to adapting to the new order, the cultural cupboard is bare.
 

Hugh Fitzgerald:

The word "Palestinians" and the invention of the "Palestinian people" was a deliberate construct. It was not the term used, ever since there were Arabs in what Western Christendom called "Palestine." The phrase was never used by the local Arabs until after their defeat in the Six-Day War. . . .

The most important thing was to redefine the conflict. No longer are all those Arabs against a tiny Jewish state. No. Now, by an act of optical illusion, the tiny Jewish state would be transformed into a vast empire, this Greater Israel (why, the same BBC newscasters who routinely refer to Lebanon as that "tiny country" and to Jordan as that "tiny country" -- I hear it all the time -- for some reason never use that epithet with Israel. Never. Not once) which, even if it came into being, would be all of the size of Massachusetts, and less than one-one-thousandth the size of the Arab states. . . .

The leader of As Saiqa, one terrorist group under the PLO umbrella, Zuhair Mohsen, is widely known for having made the following statement in a March 1977 interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw:

"The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct "Palestinian people" to oppose Zionism.["]

. . . And there are many other remarks like this, sometimes by Arabs, and sometimes even by those engaged in “Arab refugee” work before it was taken over completely by “Palestinians” and other Arabs.

See, for example, what Elfan Rees, the special advisor on refugees to the World Council of Churches, wrote in 1957 in The Refugee Problem Today and Tomorrow:

"I hold the view that, political issues aside, the Arab refugee problem is by far the easiest postwar refugee problem to solve by integration. By faith, by language, by race and by social organization, they are indistinguishable from their fellows of the host countries. There is room for them, and land for them, in Syria and in Iraq. There is a developing demand for the kind of manpower that they represent. More unusually still, there is the money to make this integration possible. The United Nations General Assembly, five years ago, voted a sum of 200 million dollars to provide 'homes and jobs' for the Arab refugees. That money remains unspent, not because these tragic people are strangers in a strange land, because they are not; not because there is no room for them to be established, because there is; but simply for political reasons."

Read the U.N. records, the records of what every Arab said, threatening or cajoling, from 1948 or well before 1948, right up to the Six-Day War, and even for a short period beyond, and it is only then that, out of the blue, comes this phrase “the Palestinian people.”