Did my matzos come?

Mary Anastasia O'Grady (video link):

[I]f you look at a chart on rice, what you notice is that the price began to spike last September. And it's no coincidence that that is about the time that the Federal Reserve began cutting fed funds rates very aggressively and the dollar began to weaken very dramatically. And if you look at the price of, for example, Louisiana long grain rice, and you adjust it for something that is a more stable medium of exchange, say for example gold, you'll notice that the price has barely budged. And I think a lot of this price movement is due to weakness in the dollar and inflation.
 

John Derbyshire on the new movie Expelled, starring Ben Stein:

One of the most-quoted remarks by one conservative writer about another was Evelyn Waugh's on Kipling. It bears quoting again.

[Kipling] was a conservative in the sense that he believed civilization to be something laboriously achieved which was only precariously defended. He wanted to see the defences fully manned and he hated the liberals because he thought them gullible and feeble, believing in the easy perfectibility of man and ready to abandon the work of centuries for sentimental qualms.

Western civilization has many glories. There are the legacies of the ancients, in literature and thought. There are the late-medieval cathedrals, those huge miracles of stone, statuary, and spiritual devotion. There is painting, music, the orderly cityscapes of Renaissance Italy, the peaceful, self-governed townships of old New England and the Frontier, the steel marvels of the early industrial revolution, our parliaments and courts of law, our great universities with their spirit of restless inquiry.

And there is science, perhaps the greatest of all our achievements, because nowhere else on earth did it appear. China, India, the Muslim world, all had fine cities and systems of law, architecture and painting, poetry and prose, religion and philosophy. None of them ever accomplished what began in northwest Europe in the later 17th century, though: a scientific revolution. Thoughtful men and women came together in learned societies to compare notes on their observations of the natural world, to test their ideas in experiments, and in reasoned argument against the ideas of others, and to publish their results in learned journals. A body of common knowledge gradually accumulated. Patterns were observed, laws discerned and stated.

If I write with more feeling than usual here it is because I have just shipped off a review to an editor (for another magazine) of Gino Segrè’s new book about the history of quantum mechanics. It’s a good, if not very remarkable, book giving pen-portraits of the great players in physics during the 1920s and 1930s, and of their meetings and disagreements. Segrè, a particle physicist himself, who has been around for a while, knew some of these people personally, and of course heard many anecdotes from their intellectual descendants. It's a “warm” book, full of feeling for the scientists and their magnificent enterprise, struggling with some of the most difficult problems the human intellect has ever confronted, striving with all their powers to understand what can barely be understood.

Gino Segrè’s book — and, of course, hundreds like it (I have, ahem, dabbled myself) brings to us a feeling for what the scientific endeavor is like, and how painfully its triumphs are won, with what sweat and tears. Our scientific theories are the crowning adornments of our civilization, towering monuments of intellectual effort, built from untold millions of hours of observation, measurement, classification, discussion, and deliberation. This is quite apart from their wonderful utility — from the light, heat, and mobility they give us, the drugs and the gadgets and the media. (A “thank you” wouldn’t go amiss.) Simply as intellectual constructs, our well-established scientific theories are awe-inspiring.

And now here is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world — that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he’s not chattering into his cell phone. Stein claims to be doing it in the name of an alternative theory of the origin of species: Yet no such alternative theory has ever been presented, nor is one presented in the movie, nor even hinted at. There is only a gaggle of fools and fraudsters, gaping and pointing like Apaches on seeing their first locomotive: “Look! It moves! There must be a ghost inside making it move!”

The “intelligent design” hoax is not merely non-science, nor even merely anti-science; it is anti-civilization. It is an appeal to barbarism, to the sensibilities of those Apaches, made by people who lack the imaginative power to know the horrors of true barbarism. (A thing that cannot be said of Darwin. See Chapter X of Voyage of the Beagle.)

And yes: When our greatest achievements are blamed for our greatest moral failures, that is a blood libel against Western civilization itself. . . .

For shame, Ben Stein, for shame. Stand up for your civilization, man! and all its glories. The barbarians are at the gate, as they always have been. Come man the defenses with us, leaving the liars and fools to their lies and folly.
 

Victor Davis Hanson:

One of the strangest things about the NAACP Wright pseudo-scientific speech on learning, and its enthusiastic CNN coverage and analysis, was the abject racialism of Wright. . . .

Wright's speech on black-right brainers, white-left brainers — replete with bogus stereotypes and crude voice imitations — was about as racist as they come and at one time antithetical to what the NAACP was once all about. . . . Just ten years ago, any candidate, black or white, would have rejected Wright making a speech about genetic differences in respective black and white brains. Now it's given to civil rights organizations by the possible next President's pastor and spiritual advisor — and done to wild applause for an organization founded on the idea that we are innately the same, while being gushed over by ignorant "commentators."

As I said before, between Wright's racism and hatred, and Obama's contextualization of what he has said, we have so lowered the bar that the next racist (and he won't necessarily be black) who evokes hatred of other races and then offers a mish-mash pop theory of genetic differences will have plenty of "context" to ward off public fury.
 

StrategyPage:

After a month of fighting, the Mahdi Army has disappeared from the streets of Basra, the largest city in the south. The army and police are everywhere, and people are providing information on where Mahdi Army personnel are hiding out, and the locations of their weapons caches. Up north, in the Sadr City section of east Baghdad, the Mahdi Army is still fighting hard. But the army and police have the upper hand, and are pushing the Shia militiamen back block by block. . . .

Meanwhile, Sunni Arab politicians have returned to the government. These Sunni Arab political parties had walked out of the government nine months ago, angry over the failure to guarantee their rights, safety and share of the oil revenue. Since then, the Sunni Arab terrorism effort has been shattered, with many of the Sunni Arab terror groups switched sides and joined the war against al Qaeda.

Iraq is trying to get its Arab neighbors to forgive some $65 billion in Saddam era debts, without much success. Most of the money was borrowed in the 1980s, when Iraq was at war with Iran. Iraq has already had some $65 billion in debts, mostly to Russia and European nations, forgiven. But the Arabs want their money. The other Arab states in the region see Shia dominated Iraq as a potential ally of Iran, and not "real" Arabs. Conservative Sunni Arab clerics regularly preach that Shia Moslems (like most Iraqis and nearly all Iranians) are heretics and not to be trusted.
 

That's how Larry Di Rita, who worked at the Dept. of Defense from 2001 to 2006, characterizes Douglas Feith's memoir of the administration's planning for and conduct of the Iraq war and its aftermath. He notes that this is "the first account by a Pentagon civilian — and not just any Pentagon civilian, but the top policy adviser," and thus "deserves particular attention." And he points to the War and Decision website, which includes links to hundreds of declassified documents Feith used as source material. I tend to avoid books about current affairs, but I might make an exception for this one.
 

A few minutes later: Glenn Reynolds already posted on this. A few days ago. I tell you, the man's a menace.
 

Stuart Koehl at WeeklyStandard.com:

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS RECENTLY reported that several congressmen and senators are looking into the renewal of Colt Defense's sole-source contract for the manufacture of the M4 Carbine, the most widely-used personal weapon in the U.S. Army. . . . As we reported earlier, there have been complaints from the field going back as far as the 1991 "Black Hawk Down" incident in Mogadishu that the M4 lacks "stopping power"--the ability to bring down a man with something other than a hit to the head or the heart--particularly when the enemy is hopped up on drugs (as is frequently the case in places like Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan). In addition, the gun is somewhat more prone to jamming than similar weapons due to its direct gas injection action, and requires frequent and scrupulous cleaning (which can be a problem in dusty climates like Iraq).

An instructive anecdote:

The U.S. Army's ordnance corps has always been extremely conservative--some might say hidebound--when it comes to technological innovation. Going back to the Civil War, the Union Army's Chief of Ordnance was steadfastly opposed to the adoption of breach-loading rifles on the grounds that they were too expensive and, with their higher rate of fire, would cause soldiers to waste their fire and risk running out of ammunition. Later in the war, he opposed the introduction of repeating rifles on the same ground. Only direct intervention by President Lincoln allowed the Army to acquire modern weapons such as the Sharps breachloader or the Spencer and Henry repeating rifles. After the war, in a return to type, the Army recalled all its repeating rifles and instead issued the troops with old Springfield muzzle-loading rifled muskets and carbines converted to breachloaders. To see how well this worked out, ask George Armstrong Custer's 7th U.S. Cavalry, which was seriously outgunned by the Sioux and Cheyenne at the Little Bighorn (where about a third of the Indians had Henry and Winchester repeaters).
 

Mark Tooley, director of the United Methodist committee (UMAction) of the Institute on Religion & Democracy:

Like the elites of other Mainline Protestant denominations, officials of the United Methodist Church have served as an amen corner for the secular left in America for more than 50 years. . . . But unlike the other Mainline Protestants, United Methodism has become an international denomination. Over 3 million United Methodists now live outside the United States, mostly in Africa, brining the church total global membership to over 11 million. Over 1 million live in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And the formerly British affiliated Methodist Church of the Ivory Coast, with over 600,000 members, has switched to U.S.-based United Methodism. . . .

The African United Methodists are strongly evangelical. While U.S. church elites are confused by their declining influence and give their attention to fading political causes of the left, the Africans are quietly assuming wide influence over what was once almost an entirely American institution. Thirty percent of the delegates at the General Conference will come from Africa, the Philippines or Europe. In coalition with another 30 percent of delegates who are U.S. evangelicals, mostly from the South, there is likely for the first time in modern Methodist history a conservative governing majority. . . .

American liberals still control most of the church bureaucracy, based in Washington, D.C., New York, or Nashville. But they realize time is running out. Many are basing their hopes on a proposal, supported by the bishops, which would partially divide the U.S. church into its own separate General Conference, making its own rules without interference from irksome, Bible-quoting Congolese or Nigerians. This proposal for a form of global segregation, requiring two thirds support from delegates because it involves changing the church's constitution, is unlikely to pass. . . .

The evangelical resurgence in United Methodism will not be as sudden or dramatic as the conservative victories in the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1980s. But the tide that is now carrying the denomination clearly flows from a conservative direction. The ramifications of a once liberal Mainline denomination returning to theological orthodoxy are potentially momentous.
 

This piece by William Tucker is important and right:

The great ethanol boom is a classic case of putting First World luxuries ahead of Third World necessities.

So how did we get into this mess? It's a matter of energy storage. The world is awash with energy. It is everywhere around us, mostly in the form of that dread word radiation. Radiation is the way energy travels in the universe. The radiation from the sun warms the earth and lights the day in quantities that make people say, "If only we could capture a small portion of that .  .  ." It has been almost the sole source of energy throughout the planet's history (remember that "almost"). . . .

Some early enthusiasts of photovoltaics thought solar technology would be like computer technology with efficiencies and power doubling every 18 months--in a replay of the exponential growth in computing power first described by Intel founder Gordon Moore and now known as Moore's Law. . . .

But electrons constitute only 0.001 percent of the mass of an atom. The remaining 99.999 percent is in the nucleus. The nucleus of the atom is the greatest storehouse of energy in the universe. The amount of energy released in the Hiroshima bomb was equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT. Yet the amount of matter transformed into energy at Hiroshima was about 3 grams. If we are ever going to access enough energy to run our industrial economy without overwhelming the environment in the process, we are going to have to find it in the nucleus of the atom.

I hope you'll read it all.
 

Let me be the first, as far as I know. Mark Steyn:

Corn-derived ethanol is not "eco-friendly" and simply designating it a "biofuel" doesn't change that fact. If it was that easy, they'd just rename the Hummer a Bio-Hummer.
 

Michael Goldfarb, in the Weekly Standard's (superb) blog:

I often wonder if Hillary really isn't the most likely of the three to launch a preemptive strike on Iran. . . . You'd expect any president that pulls troops out of Iraq to compensate by projecting power somewhere else--maybe Afghanistan, maybe elsewhere--and there's something about Hillary that makes me think she's more likely to overcompensate than most.
 

(This is my third consecutive post whose title starts with "I." I'm rarely so narcissistic in my blogging. Or at least so transparently narcissistic.)
 

Haaretz (emphasis added):

Armed Hezbollah militants warded off members of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) last month when the peacekeepers discovered a truck carrying weapons and ammunition belonging to the Lebanon-based guerilla group.

The incident was referred to briefly in a semi-yearly report submitted to the UN Security Council by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon. The incident was the first time that UNIFIL forces were confronted by armed Hezbollah men south of Lebanon's Litani River, an area which Security Council resolution 1701 prohibits Hezbollah from entering.

According to a government source in Jerusalem, the incident caused great embarrassment for UNIFIL. The source described the incident, explaining that UNIFIL troops on patrol discovered the truck and chased it down and pulled it over. When the UNIFIL troops approached the vehicle, the source said, armed Hezbollah men exited the truck and threatened the troops at gunpoint. The UNIFIL patrol then went back into their cars, according to the source, and returned to their base.

The report submitted to the Security Council said the incident occurred on the night between the 30 and 31 of March. "This serious violation of the UN resolution raises concerns," the report said.

The incident was not reported in the media at the time of its occurrence.

This confrontation "raises concerns"? Really? What will you do in response, Mr. Secretary?

Everyone knows the answer: nothing. The UN won't act against Hezbollah or its sponsors in Iran and Syria.

The UN is no friend to freedom. We should resign from it, kick it out of the country, and have as little to do with it as possible.

(Via LGF.)

Ever since John Derbyshire wrote a negative review of Ramesh Ponnuru's book Party of Death, Ponnuru's been sniping at Derbyshire in The Corner. (I'd have thought Ponnuru's response to the review sufficient retaliation, but evidently not.) Lately, Ponnuru's offered a few posts startling in their contempt. This one's the worst, I'd say. Later, Ponnuru referred to Derbyshire's "malice."

Derbyshire's well able to defend himself, but the charge of "malice" deserves an answer. First, Ponnuru's the one evincing that trait. Second, and more broadly, I've read enough of Derbyshire's work to be sure that, though no doubt capable of malice, he's rather less prone to it than is the typical person. In fact, he's possessed of a notably generous spirit, housed in a grouchy demeanor (search for it). As evidence, I offer the following, from the new National Review, in Derbyshire's account of his nephew's wedding in England:

After the ceremony we gather for dinner. The thing that we came for having been accomplished, everyone relaxes. The hotel wedding package includes rooms for many family members, so that designated drivers are few. Alcohol warms and softens everything. The deep native sentimentality of the English emerges, giving the dinner speeches a maudlin sheen. Declarations of adult affection flow freely, with many regrets at having for so long neglected to visit, write, phone, e-mail. The little ones, now relieving their boredom by playing raucous, high-velocity tag around the dining hall, are cooed over, when they can be caught and held for long enough. There is a round of applause for the uncle who has traveled all the way from New York to attend.

The emotions generated by an event like this have a fundamental, irreducible quality to them. What do we live for, but to witness and participate in all this joyful uniting and proliferating? What can compare with family as a source of satisfaction, personal or vicarious? Where do so many people meet in mutual affection and interest, with so many shared memories, but at a family event?

Second thoughts intrude. Mr. Fukuyama is surely right to tell us that where the “radius of trust” extends no farther than the family, a society is crippled. Family is the Mob; family is the Borgias; Family is the title of Ba Jin’s 1931 novel exposing the suffocating autocracy of the traditional Chinese multigenerational household; family is every Third World despot looting his nation’s public fisc — and not infrequently ours, too — to support battalions of relatives. In our civilization, the Anglo-Saxon civilization, we care for our families, but not too much. This works well, much better than any other arrangement, for both the individual and the larger society.

I am staying with my half-brother in a distant town, so we take our leave early to drive back: he, his older son named for my father, and I. I take a last fond look at the bride and groom, flushed now with dinner wine, celebrity, and happiness. May their happiness endure! I can’t sincerely call on God to bless them, having lost my faith — having in fact lost what interest I ever had in abstractions and grand systems intellectual, political, or spiritual. Theory is gray, says Goethe’s Mephistopheles, but green is the tree of life. So it is, so indeed it is; and here it is, the tree of life, thriving and branching, multiplying and spreading, laughing and celebrating and gushing and playing tag — re nao, as the Chinese say in happy approbation of gatherings like this one: “hot and noisy.”

Congratulations, Marcus and Nicola. Care for each other; help each other; speak the truth to each other. This world’s a darkling plain, no doubt; but if you stick close together and share the burdens, chances are you’ll make it to the other side, and be privileged to watch as seeds planted in bare earth grow into gardens of joy, as playmates become parents and uncles and great-uncles, as four and a half becomes 30. Green, green is the everlasting tree of life.

No, a malicious man couldn't have written that.
 

The start of a letter from Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine:

Dear Subscriber,

Renew now and save. Because we value your interest in POETRY, we would like to offer you an additional year for only $17.50. That's 40% off of the regular $35 subscription rate.

T. S. Eliot, whose first published poem appeared in POETRY in 1915 . . .
 

Stephen Spruiell, on how Jon Stewart treats Barack Obama when the latter appears on The Daily Show:

I've seen him ask Gwyneth Paltrow tougher questions.
 

Via Michael Ledeen, an email (I think; Ledeen calls it "a communication") from an Aussie soldier about the US troops the soldier's encountered in Iraq. Well worth your time.
 

This piece from Heather Mac Donald is worth reading in full, but here's its conclusion:

The traditional Army interrogation techniques for lawful prisoners of war weren’t working against the al-Qaeda operatives and Taliban fighters the military was picking up in the fall of 2001. Army lore held that 95 percent of lawful prisoners of war would divulge information upon direct questioning. In Afghanistan, this ratio was reversed: Almost none of the terror detainees was giving up information.

Tried-and-true approaches like appealing to a prisoner’s love of family often had little purchase. If an interrogator offered a Jihadist prisoner contact with his wife or children in exchange for information, the Jihadist might respond: “I’ve divorced this life; I don’t care about my family.” Some of the detainees had been trained in resistance techniques and knew the strict limits of American interrogation rules. Others quickly found those limits on their own.

So the interrogators began cautiously experimenting with stress techniques, such as lengthy questioning sessions that deprived a detainee of sleep, or aggressive, non-injurious behavior to put a detainee on edge. . . . The aim was to recreate the shock of capture, that vulnerable mental state in which a prisoner is most frightened, uncertain, and likely to respond to questioning.

An interrogator facing a resistant Taliban explosives maker, for example, might angrily hoist the prisoner up by his collar, and storm out of the interrogation booth. The detainee had previously understood that American interrogators couldn’t so much as lay a finger on him, so suddenly he doesn’t know what the interrogator’s limits were. That frightening uncertainty can change his calculations about whether to cooperate.

According to interrogators in Afghanistan and Guantanamo, stress worked. “The harsher methods we used . . . the better information we got and the sooner we got it,” writes Chris Mackey in The Interrogators, an account of his interrogation service in Afghanistan. Mackey testifies to how “ineffective schoolhouse methods were in getting prisoners to talk.” He warns that his team “failed to break prisoners who I have no doubt knew of terrorist plots or at least terrorist cells that may one day do us harm. Perhaps they would have talked if faced with harsher methods.”

The torture narrative has foreclosed any debate on whether marathon questioning, say, is an acceptable means of getting potentially life-saving information. The new rules for interrogation, issued in September 2006, are even stricter than the previous ones interrogators found so useless. If the country is attacked again on a large scale, however, the country will have to reopen these debates and answer some hard questions.
 

A report in the Wall Street Journal:

Less than two years ago, Italy's prison system faced a crisis: Built to hold 43,000 inmates, it was straining to contain more than 60,000.

So the government crafted an emergency plan. It swung open the prison doors and let more than a third of the inmates go free.

Within months, bank robberies jumped by 20%. Kidnappings and fraud also rose, as did computer crime, arson and purse-snatchings. . . .

The death penalty is considered abhorrent, and life sentences are rare. Defendants have the right to two appeals, and even traffic tickets can be appealed to the nation's highest court. Italy's courts are so clogged that the statute of limitations on most felonies expires before a final verdict can be reached.
 

Mark Krikorian explains (briefly) why "we need to cut our last major colony loose, pronto, whether they like it or not":

It's time we all acknowledged that we are two separate peoples, neither of whom has any business being involved in governing the other.
 

Anthony Daniels:

A friend of mine recently asked an Italian writer who had moved from Italy to the West Coast of Scotland why he had made this rather unusual move. “In Italy,” he replied, “silence is very expensive. In Scotland, it is very cheap.”

Not everyone, by any means, is willing or able to live in a wilderness, however beautiful and romantic, in order to escape noise; yet for those who are sensitive to it, noise is one of the torments of modern life.
 

An emailer to Norm Geras makes a pragmatic case for the study of "fanciful" and "impractical" subjects.
 

Here's something I thought would've happened by now: a blogger states his musical preferences and offers to listen free to tracks sent him by musicians, signed or unsigned. Anything he likes, he'll link to, or post on his site.

I've not found any site that serves this function. BlogCritics is interesting but too broad; MySpace is great when I already know the artist's name, but only then; "music discovery services" make for good listening, but point me nowhere new.

There must be music lovers who'd be glad to provide this service for nothing more than increased traffic and the pleasure of introducing other people to good music. Where are they?

(Prompted by this post, which has nothing to do with music, but got me thinking. And the reason I don't perform the gatekeeping service myself is that I'm a musician, and I can't spend much time listening to other people's stuff.)
 

It's not all sex scandals here. From a press release by the American Center for Democracy in Defense of Freedom, which Rachel Ehrenfeld directs:

The New York State Legislature today unanimously passed the “Libel Terrorism Protection Act” (S.6687/A.9652), sponsored by Assemblyman Rory Lancman (D-Queens) and Senate Deputy Majority Leader Dean G. Skelos (R-Rockville Centre).

When signed into law by Governor David Paterson, this legislation will protect American journalists and authors from foreign lawsuits that infringe on their First Amendment rights.

In Ehrenfeld v. Mahout, New York State’s highest court held that it would not protect Dr. Ehrenfeld from a British lawsuit filed by Saudi billionaire Khalid Salim Bin Mahfouz, where she was ordered to pay over $225,000 in damages and legal fees to Bin Mahfouz, as well as apologize and destroy existing copies of her books.

Dr. Ehrenfeld sought a court order in November of 2006 to protect her constitutional rights, but in a ruling with national First Amendment implications which sent legal shockwaves throughout newsrooms across America, as well as potentially undermining our ability to expose terrorism’s financial and logistical support networks, the New York Court of Appeals ruled that it does not have jurisdiction to protect Americans – on U.S. soil – from foreign defamation judgments, which contradict the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The Libel Terrorism Protection Act declares overseas defamation judgments unenforceable in New York unless the foreign defamation law provides, in substance and application, the same free speech protections guaranteed under our own constitution, and it gives New York residents and publishers the opportunity to have their day in court here in New York.

Good for them. I hope Paterson signs it into law soon.

(Via LGF.)

Later: Paterson signed it April 30. He has my appreciation and gratitude.