On Legalization

I don't think any single writer has shaped my political philosophy as much as world traveler and prison doctor Anthony Daniels, better known pseudonymously as Theodore Dalrymple. It was Dalrymple in such books as Life at the Bottom; Our Culture, What's Left of It; and Not With A Bang But a Whimper who has meticulously proven to me that I am in no way a libertarian and encouraged me to embrace the label of "conservative", though he never labels himself such. The Skeptical Doctor blog provides a convenient portal to Dalrymple's writings in various journals, and this morning reposted his 1997 City Journal article against the legalization of drugs. If any single essay could present a microcosm of Dalrymple's political philosophy, this might be it:

The idea that freedom is merely the ability to act upon one’s whims is surely very thin and hardly begins to capture the complexities of human existence; a man whose appetite is his law strikes us not as liberated but enslaved. And when such a narrowly conceived freedom is made the touchstone of public policy, a dissolution of society is bound to follow. No culture that makes publicly sanctioned self-indulgence its highest good can long survive: a radical egotism is bound to ensue, in which any limitations upon personal behavior are experienced as infringements of basic rights. Distinctions between the important and the trivial, between the freedom to criticize received ideas and the freedom to take LSD, are precisely the standards that keep societies from barbarism.

It's 2009 Already...

... where's my... my... huh? Okay, if past visions of the future tell you more about the time they were made, then 1992 was a strange, strange time.

Good Good Good: Hizbullah Defeated in Lebanese Elections

The anti-Syrian March 14 coalition has secured 70 out of 128 seats in the Lebanese assembly, soundly defeating the Hizbullah-Communist-Socialist March 8 alliance. More importantly, the opposition has accepted the result (via Legal Insurrection):

"We have lost the election," said a senior politician close to the March 8 alliance. "We accept the result as the will of the people."

That's a phrase I'll never tire of hearing. Faster, please.

I Want One: Tata Nano

It's coming to the US. And I'm totally getting one.

UPDATE: Autocar.co.uk's got a test drive up on YouTube. They seem impressed:

We'll Call It "Amsterdam Syndrome"

I don't think we've talked about Geert Wilders on the blog. He's a Dutch parliamentarian who believes Western civilization is something worth preserving and that, therefore, current Dutch policy of allowing uncontrolled mass immigration of vocal and occasionally violent advocates of a pre-modern worldview might need a second look. This opinion, of course, has inevitably branded him "far-right" in the eyes of the global media, and gotten him banned from British soil as a hate-mongering racist.

The latest outrage has come after Wilders compared the mindset of Europe's elites to that of the Dutch journalist Joanie de Rijke, who has spoken repeatedly in defense of the Afghan Taliban fighters who abducted and serially raped her for six days. It's a dark, dark metaphor for the future of the West.

Do Take Some Time This Weekend

Take some time to read Bruce Gee's eclogue on orchard work in Wisconsin. It's more than worth your time.

On Working With Your Hands

I'm thankful to have come from part of the country and a family where nobody would have imagined the need to write a defense of craftsmanship. But for all my readers who've been raised and educated to be "knowledge workers" with no thought to the alternative, Matthew Crawford outlines "The Case for Working With Your Hands" in NYT Magazine, an abridgment of his philosophical treatise "Shop Class as Soulcraft" in The New Atlantis, which has now been expanded into a book.

American culture as a whole idealizes the thought of being one's own boss, and yet does not encourage promising young people to enter the only sector of the economy where this goal is not only realistic, but relatively commonplace: the skilled trades. Crawford's focus is on the mechanical trades, but the requirements of creativity and problem-solving and the rewards of concrete satisfaction and connection to the community are just as real for pastry chefs, florists, and cobblers (they still exist) as they are for plumbers, electricians, and auto mechanics.

My goal is nothing less than the "miracle" of small-scale self-employment.

Milwaukee School Choice Targeted for Destruction

Milwaukee's school choice program has been proving critics wrong for 20 years, and as a successful test case has inspired similar programs around the country. It must therefore be destroyed, as Madison is now seeking to do.

On Uniforms

There are some people whose sensitivities are offended by the presence of uniformed policemen or soldiers in public, because they've been raised to see uniforms as symbols of oppression and militarism. In reality, uniforms are a concession to the people, and the most terrifying representatives of state power are the ones who don't mark themselves as such:


What possible message can be meant by parading plainclothes officers, other than a reminder that the eyes and ears of the Party are everywhere? 20 years after the massacre of Tiananmen, China seems to be holding its breath.

On Settlement

The BBC Monitor publishes a digest of Israeli editorial reactions to President Obama's Cairo speech. I was most struck by this comment by settler Benny Katzover, published in Ma'ariv:

Obama reiterated his wish to establish two states for two peoples. Balance and equality between Jews and Arabs as it were. But Obama "forgot" that in the Jewish state there are more than a million [Israeli] Arabs who enjoy democratic rights unknown to their brothers in Arab countries. No one stops them from building… But for us Jews in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] it is forbidden to live, build or to buy land. Obama, who is supposed to be sensitive to racism, has turned himself into a racist.

I'd never really thought about that, but if an Israeli citizen of Arab ancestry were to buy land and build his home in the West Bank, nobody would think twice. But when a Israeli citizen of Jewish ancestry does the same, he is "expanding the settlements" and it is a source of international condemnation and handwringing. Someone explain to me why Katzover is wrong, how this is something other than rank racism? Does it bother anyone else that we've somehow all accepted the premise that a Palestinian state must rightly be judenrein?

Obama Visits the Pyramids

Of course, you can't go to Cairo without seeing the pyramids. Yawn. You've seen them already, I assure you. Only in the books and postcards, they make sure to take the pictures at an angle so you can't see the Pizza Hut and the rest of the sprawl that runs right up to them.

He took a tour of Sultan Hassan mosque, which is okay, I guess. By which I mean BOOOOORRRRING. He should have gone to Ibn Tulun, which is truly one of the great treasures of human endeavor. I suppose the location might have played a role. Security would be pretty tricky in the heart of Khan al-Khalili.

Cairo Quibbling

So, here are the notes and quibbles I had with specific points in President Obama's Cairo speech. My general thoughts are here.

This cycle of suspicion and discord must end... I've come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning.

Sigh, don't we all wish it were that easy? And when will the administration figure out how obnoxiously American this wipe-the-slate-clean mindset is? Sorry, folks, the rest of the world's got history. There is no "reset button".

Obama extols the "common principles" between America and Islam such as "justice, progress, tolerance, and the dignity of all human beings". Exactly how common are those principles?

He's got a good pronunciation on "holy Koran". If you're going to try it, get it right. I also appreciate that the White House press release uses the English spelling and doesn't mess around with all that "Qur'an" nonsense. Who knows how to pronounce a Q? or an apostrophe?

The interests we share as human beings are more powerful than the forces that drive us apart.

Again, it's a great thought. But is it true? I want it to be, certainly. But I'm not quite as confident.

Referencing his Muslim father and ancenstry is tricky, tricky ground. He is calling himself out as an apostate under the more extreme sharia jurisprudence, worse than an infidel. Even more moderate Arab Muslims will be very much discomfited by the idea of a son who does not follow his father's religion. This is an issue of Arab culture, whether Christian or Muslim. When Iraqi soldiers would ask me why I was not a Muslim, the simple answer "because my father is not a Muslim" was always a fully satisfactory explanation. Saying "I am not a Muslim, but my father was" will not score you any points with Muslims.

Throughout history Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of Religious tolerance and racial equality.

When and where, exactly? Yes, Jews were tolerated (and specially taxed) in al-Andalus, as Christians have been in Egypt, with only the occasional pogroms. But where is religious tolerance in Saudia Arabia, the beating heart of Islam, where I cannot hold a worship service, carry a Bible, or even pray silently in public? Where is it in Afghanistan, where conversion still carries the death sentence? And racial equality? Are you flippin' serious? The African slave trade exists still today, in Mauretania, Sudan, Eritrea, Yemen, and Saudia Arabia. The word 'abd -- slave -- remains the common term for Africans in much of the Arab world.

Partnership between America and Islam must be based on what Islam is, not what it isn't.

Unfortunately, this entire speech is based on what he wishes Islam to be, rather than what it is. That's not an indictment of the speech, setting high standards can shame someone who isn't meeting them. But it does make this line sound pretty dumb.

Just as Muslims do not fit a crude stereotype, America is not the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire. The United States has been one of the greatest sources of progress that the world has ever known. We were born out of revolution against an empire. We were founded upon the ideal that all are created equal, and we have shed blood and struggled for centuries to give meaning to those words -- within our borders, and around the world. We are shaped by every culture, drawn from every end of the Earth, and dedicated to a simple concept: E pluribus unum -- "Out of many, one."

It's a bolder defense of American principles than I had expected. Well done.

America's strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable. It is based upon cultural and historical ties, and the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.

That's a much bolder defense of Israel than I'd expected. Excellent.

Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and it does not succeed... It is a sign neither of courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That's not how moral authority is claimed; that's how it is surrendered.

Pull out the shame card. Good, good.

The Arab-Israeli conflict should no longer be used to distract the people of Arab nations from other problems. Instead, it must be a cause for action to help the Palestinian people develop the institutions that will sustain their state, to recognize Israel's legitimacy, and to choose progress over a self-defeating focus on the past.

He could have driven point a bit deeper, but I'm glad he brought it up at all. Unfortunately, the administration is still committed to a foreign policy based on the laughable assumption that a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict is the cornerstone of region-wide peace.

I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn't steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. These are not just American ideas; they are human rights. And that is why we will support them everywhere.

I'm glad the freedom agenda hasn't disappeared. I think this is actually a more realistic outline for internal reform than the Bush administration put forward with their overwhelming focus on voting as the cornerstone of democracy. Elections matter less than do rule of law, equal justice, and guaranteed freedoms. Elections without those things mean "one man, one vote, one time", as we've seen with HAMAS in Gaza.

Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition. I saw it firsthand as a child in Indonesia, where devout Christians worshiped freely in an overwhelmingly Muslim country.

Free to get their heads cut off, you mean.

I don't really begrudge him the whitewashing. It comes with the territory, and President Bush was at least as bad. It still galls me, though.

Reflections on Cairo

I've avoided any commentary on President Obama's speech to "the Muslim world" from Cairo this morning. I wanted a chance to watch and read the whole thing before I responded, so if I'm coming to completely different conclusions than all the pundits, it's because this is my genuine reaction. I've got plenty of line-by-line quibbling, but I'll post that separately, and keep this response on general principles.

I thought it was a great speech. If its goal was to raise America's approval rating, it will probably succeed, and it could very well cause many Arabs to rethink the reasons behind their knee-jerk anti-Americanism. Obama was more critical of Arab leaders than I expected, and more defensive of America and Israel, and for that I give him great credit. He addressed historical grievances without apology and demonstrated great respect for Islam without kowtowing. He didn't abandon the freedom agenda, but rather defined it more realistically than his predecessor. I got annoyed with his mannerisms and switched to the transcript, but everyone seems to love his style. I guess "robotic" is the "in" thing in rhetoric these days. Cicero would be appalled.

So far, so good. The problems come in the metanarrative. The issue is not his words, but the way he uses them; not the content of his speech, but rather the paradigms the speech concedes. This was billed as a speech to the "Muslim World", and he used the term throughout; he spoke repeatedly of Islam as if it were a country and Muslims its citizens. Insofar as there is a "Muslim World" it exists in the ideologies of militant Islamism, as Soner Cagaptay, a Turkish intellectual writes (via Inside the Asylum)

Islamist ideologues are the only group that strongly advocates the belief that all Muslims belong to a politically untied global community. These same ideologues advocate for the replacement of the modern nation state with a new Caliphate ruled by Sharia law. Why do we legitimize that view by repeating it ourselves? ...A Muslim World is Al Qaeda's conception.

There is a persistent philosophical struggle over Muslim identity between those who argue that Islam is and must be a global political entity and every Muslim's first loyalty must be to Islam, and those who believe that a Muslim can embrace a political identity and remain a faithful Muslim. In how he billed the speech and addressed his audience, Obama accepted the premises of the former. Even while condeming extremism, the very concept of his speech supported the Islamist paradigm.

The second issue is in the categorical confusion. For a speech about the issues of the "Muslim World", Obama focused overwhelmingly on issues of the Arab World, which is home to only a minority of the world's Muslims. Imagine a world leader declares he will address the "Christian World" from Rome, then focuses the entire speech on European issues, and at times even conflates the "Christian World" with Europe. Wouldn't Americans, Uruguayans, Zambians and South Koreans be a bit miffed? I'm quite sure they would be, so lets hope Bengalis, Malaysians, and Albanians are more forgiving.

Finally, by focusing on the Arab-Israeli conflict in a speech to the entire "Muslim World" President Obama acknowledged that the conflict with Israel is a fundamentally religious conflict. The Arab-Israeli conflict is an appropriate concern of the Arabs, the Israelis, and their partners and allies. On its geopolitical face, why should it be a central concern of American relations with Muslims in Indonesia or Pakistan? Again, insofar as Israel is a concern to non-Arab Muslims, it is so because of militant Islamist Jew-hatred that says Jews cannot be tolerated in Dar al-Islam, the realm of Islam. By accepting the premise that non-Arab Muslims have a dog in that fight, Obama tacitly recognized it as a religious conflict, even as he called for a peaceful 2-state solution.

Time will tell what effect this speech will have. I suspect it will blunt anti-Americanism to a degree. But Obama's tacit recognition of the Islamist paradigm will increase the burden on those Muslims struggling to argue philosophically and theologically against political Islam. In general, it confirms my inaguratory fears about Obama and foreign policy: Obama believes that foreign policy is easy, and that his predecessor was just doing it wrong. He is campaigning for America, which is quite welcome, but he also seems to conflate American popularity with America's interests. Warm feelings don't solve problems, however, and even cold allies are still allies. His inability to parse the interconnected webs of implications -- not just of his words but of how and where and to whom he says them -- smacks of cocky amateurism. Foreign policy is fiendishly difficult, and I really hope President Obama doesn't have to learn that the hard way.

He Had Them At Hello

Just catching up on the Cairo speech. Riotous applause for his al-salaam 'alaykum. Hehe, he truly had them at hello.

The Myth of Violence

Steven Pinker on "The Myth of Violence". Fascinating stuff.

Pre-Blogging the "Muslim World" Speech

The Israel-Palestine conflict is a 60 Years War that I genuinely doubt I will see solved in my lifetime. Tomorrow, our President visits Cairo to give his long-awaited speech to the "Muslim World" (on that poisonous term, see here and here). No doubt he will hold out hope for a 2-state solution. I suspect he will demand that the Israelis soften their position and make some concessions; I doubt he will demand anything of the Arabs. There's a good chance he'll buy into the Arab lunacy that argues that nothing can be improved anywhere in the greater Middle East until Palestine is free. And I know he won't remind Hosni Mubarak of his nation's complicity in creating the conflict. There were population displacements throughout the first half of the 20th century, and we've forgotten about most of them. Why does this one still fester? Oh, that's right:

Egypt's policy for the Strip was succinctly spelled out by the deputy governor, Muhammad Flafaga, in an interview appearing in the Danish newspaper Aktuelt on February 9, 1967:

Question: Why not send the refugees to other Arab countries? Syria would no doubt be able to absorb a vast number of them. Are you afraid that national bonds with Palestine will be loosened, that the hatred against Israel will vanish if they become ordinary citizens?

Answer: As a matter of fact, you are right. Syria could take all of them, and the problem would be solved. But we do not want that. They are to return to Palestine.

UNRWA reported in 1956: "One of the obstacles to the achievement of the General Assembly's goal of making the refugees self-supporting continues to be the opposition of the governments in the area."

Ralph Galloway, an UNRWA official who quit in frustration, observed bitterly: "The Arab states don't want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don't give a damn whether the refugees live or die."

Palestinians are despised and maltreated throughout the Arab world. Some are even starting to notice. But the Arab governments continue to feign concern and insist that no concern in the Middle East can possibly be addressed until there is a 2-state solution, because the Palestinians are their only effective weapon against Israel. And the US will swallow these ludicrous pretenses and play right along.

And the rest of President Obama's speech? Lots of feel-good hokum. Some riff on "religion of peace" will appear, along with references to the great achievements of the medieval Muslim world. He will mention his Muslim father, which will cause every listener to wonder "then why aren't you?". He will mention his childhood schooling in Indonesia, which will make as much sense to his listeners as if were visiting, say, Latvia, and brought up my childhood schooling in West Africa as if it gave me some special connection. Terrorists will not be mollified, authoritarians will not be challenged, and things will go on more or less as they have.

UPDATE: More on the folly of the "Muslim World" from Lee Smith at Slate:

Obama's speech to the "Muslim world" serves to erase the national borders of our Arab allies, and however questionable those allies are, their borders serve American interests, and erasing them serves Iranian ends.

UPDATE II: Asylum link-back. Thanks!

It's Called Soda

Dialect maps are fun. They're particularly interesting for American English, which has lots overlapping changes. The soda/pop/coke split is sharper than I would have imagined:

It's interesting to me that eastern Wisconsin and the St Louis area would be islands of soda in a sea of pop.

Video Games and War

Oh, BloggingheadsTV, what did we do without you? Other than, you know, not listening in on webcam conversations between stuffy academics and self-important policy wonks.

Here's a conversation between Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom and "philosopher of the mind" Tamar Szabo Gendler on the neuropsychology of video games, and the eternal question of whether video games are corrupting our morals: (note: a few times in the video they mention "alief", which is Gendler's term for conditioned responses, those things you know about the world without being conscious of believing them)

Gendler argues that in most cases, the physical actions portrayed in video games are so alien to the physical experience of playing the game itself that it's hard to see how they could effectively familiarize someone with the actual experience of firing a gun or throwing a punch. Bloom, a video game enthusiast playing devil's advocate, points out scenarios where the experience of playing a video game is very much like the real thing, such as firing a missile in a flight simulator game. Gendler takes the conversation in a completely different direction, so we don't get to hear them hash through what strikes me as a very valid point in this conversation: modern war is increasingly conducted by remote control. The control systems for a Reaper UAV or armed Talon robot look just like video games. They are video games, only with real people dying on the other end, and our video-game-raised youth are very, very good at them. I don't really have a conclusion. I just wish I could have heard their conversation on it. Thoughts?

Headline: Ambiguity Vanquished!

Closely related to the Science News Cycle is the policy research cycle. Consider this headline:

Study: Public Schools Just As

Good as Private Schools

Wow, thanks Research! Way to smack down all those voucher waving moonbats! Oh, wait it only studied math skills? Only through 5th grade? And only over several years? How many is several exactly? 5? 3? Well, we know it's valid, right, because it's fully corroborated by "other, yet-unpublished studies of the same data, which produced similar findings".

Bluuhhh. Of the small number of people who actually order a copy of this study, precisely 11 will have the statistical acumen to judge the researchers' techniques of "controlling for demographic differences". For that matter, what was the testing standard? People complain about "teaching to the test", here the danger is testing to what's been taught. The best private schools in the world would fare poorly if the test looks just like the public school's curriculum.

But none of that's worth blunting such a beautiful headline.

On Taxing Sin

A point from Splice Today, (via Reason Hit-and-Run), on the proposition to impose a national tax on "sugary" beverages:

Why stop at soda? How about a tax on every calorie-laden coffee drink served at Starbucks and its competitors? After all, a vanilla bean frappuccino with whipped cream is more than 500 calories, a beverage that health researcher Mike Adams calls “dessert in a cup.”

...I’m not attempting to be facetious here, but rather point out the gross inequities when new sin taxes are considered: it’s aimed at the déclassé products, such as soda and fast-food burgers, and protects—for the sake of general class description—the “Whole Foods” crowd from their gluttony.

...why not slap a heavy tax on country club memberships, restaurant meals that total more than $150 for a table of two, and increase the alcohol sin tax on pricey wines and premium brands of spirits?

Of course no politician could suggest something like that, because they'll hear no end of it at their next cocktail party. But taxing soda and fast food? The "Whole Foods" crowd can get behind that proposition, because they don't consume much of those things anyway.

AFTERTHOUGHT: And of course, many jurisdictions could save considerable amounts of money if they cut public funding for symphonies, opera companies, and the theater, which amount to a massive subsidy for the personal entertainments of the very wealthy. This is, of course, less likely than taxing Starbucks.

The Little Warbot That Could

I wrote last week about Ember, iRobot's prototype for DARPA's LANdroid contract. PopSci has a profile up today, "Meet Ember, the Littlest Warbot". Cutest robot name ever. Someone needs to publish the children's book.

Millenial Resonance

Not since the Navy's "Let the Journey Begin" ad campaign in the 90's made use of Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" has a recruitment campaign had such a powerful soundtrack as "Army Strong".



It's a stirring piece that seems to strike a particular chord with young men of my generation. And out of the blue, I realized why:



Man, those marketing guys are clever.

Solar Windbag

Huh. So solar scientists are having difficulty predicting solar weather (HT Inside the Asylum)

"It turns out that none of our models were totally correct," says Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA's lead representative on the panel. "The sun is behaving in an unexpected and very interesting way."

I mean, that's not really relevant at all, of course, since variability in solar activity has absolutely nothing at all to do with climate change on Earth. Riiiiiggght.

Boolean Logic

I've been seeing a lot of people post their email addresses on their blogs with something like "send me an email at username at domainname dot com", thinking that this will outsmart spambots.

Object lesson: ("email" OR "mail" OR "message") {adjacent 3 strings to} ([Username] AND ("@" OR "at" OR "a") AND [Domain] AND ("." OR "dot" OR "point" OR "period") AND [top-level domain]).

Thing is, spambots are programmed by people. The first spammer who saw the old "at domain dot com" trick wrote up a Boolean string to get past it in about 45 seconds, like I just did. Probably a lot better than mine. Just sayin'. Not saying there's no way to get past spambots, but you've got to be a bit more clever than that.

"At Ease"

A bit late for Memorial Day, but Maira Kalman shares a funny and beautiful tribute, "At Ease". Here's just a taste:

Chevy Volt Test Drive

Popular Mechanics is suitably impressed with the pre-production tester for the Chevy Volt plug-in "hybrid". I'm glad to hear it, because Volt-type "hybrids" (really just an all-electric car, but with an on-board gas generator to extend its range) really do make a lot more sense than true hybrid drivetrains like the Prius. I'm still hoping that Toyota or Honda will suddenly reveal the electric-powertrain hybrid they've developed in secret for half the price of a Volt, because it kinda turns my stomach to think that "Government Motors" will happily take the credit if the Volt is a success.

On Jihad

Fantastic interview from PajamasTV, with Walid Shoebat and Kamal Saleem, a pair of reformed terrorists. Please do watch the whole thing.

My first thought is a caveat: I do think these men overstate the immediate threat of terrorist attack. Recognize that they're coming from a very particular background, and even if they've rejected the ideologies of their upbringing, it's clear their default level of paranoia about the world is still set at "Palestinian". So while you take their predictions with a small grain of salt, their observations are pure gold (and you'll see by the end of my thoughts here why terrorist attack in and of itself isn't even the most serious issue).

The issue is at heart a conflict of culture, which is inextricably bound with the issue of religion. Both men blame the comparative decline of Christian chaplaincy in American prisons for the increasing radicalization of Muslim prison proselytes, such as those recently arrested plotting to attack synagogues in the Bronx. Shoebat is perfectly frank: the cure for terrorism is Christ.

"When I heard that, 'offer yourselves as a living sacrifice'... it is easy to die: you blow yourself up, you think you're going to go to Heaven. Now it's more difficult to live for the truth, and to live is to sacrifice... I spoke at the Air Force Academy, and I said that conversion to Christianity is one of the best methods that I've known to change terrorists, the media just went wild with articles that we're proselytizing at the Air Force Academy. We weren't proselytizing at the Air Force Academy, we were saying we need to proselytize to the Muslims."

That of course is an even more distressing proposition, from the mainstream media perspective.

I'm struck by the force of their argument that the "jihad" is about Jew-hatred above all else. It's just not part of the narrative, even though it's blindingly obvious when you look at it. Why did the "Newburgh Four" want to bomb Bronx synagogues, of all targets? Because of "Zionism"? Even if New York Jews did support "Zionism", why on Earth should that motivate American converts? And we should never forget how the butchers of Mumbai devoted a large part of their efforts to tracking down and torturing to death the sole rabbi in a city of 14 million.

All of this fits into the most important point Saleem and Shoebat make, which is to stress the centrality of the "cultural jihad". As the irreplaceable Oriana Fallaci never tired of pointing out, jihadist preachers boast openly that they will use the West's freedoms to destroy it. By claiming every right, demanding every entitlement, and litigating every grievance, they will make for Islam a preeminent position in the culture. And does anyone doubt that they have? As Shoebat points out, could Christopher Hitchens have published A||@h Is Not Great? The film Kingdom of Heaven portrayed the Church as genocidal and the Knights Templar as rapacious beasts, yet the likes of CAIR still claimed offense that the depiction of Salah al-Din was not quite saintly enough. And who could have ever thought that Britain would be mulling the merits of allowing a parallel legal system based on sharia? People have taken positions pro and contra, yet where's the "are you bloody serious?!?" that they're even having the discussion at all?

The cultural jihad is a totally different beast than counterterrorism. Successful terrorist attacks are a mixed blessing in the grand scheme of the jihad, after all, as they risk waking the infidels up to the threat. Many jihadist preachers have earned the coveted label "moderate" by renouncing terrorism not as a great evil, but as counterproductive to the cause. Preaching the cultural jihad, after all, breaks no laws, and if Islamists can breed, bribe, and bully their way to cultural dominance, what need is there for terror? And after sharia is enacted through the success of the cultural jihad, beheading nonbelievers will not be an act of jihad. It will simply be proper rule of law.

In this, as in so many metrics of the decline of the West, the United States is perhaps a generation behind Europe. Perhaps the declaration of the Salafi Emirate of the Netherlands or the Mamlakat al-Wahhabiyyah al-Britaniyyah will wake up the rest of those countries that still stand for Western civilization, but I'm not confident. Terrorism will never be an existential threat to the West. The worst imaginable terrorist scenario -- a mushroom cloud over Manhattan or London or Paris -- would do nothing but strengthen our resolve if we still had any. The success or failure of the cultural jihad will determine the future of the West, and if the jihad wins, we will have only ourselves to blame.

I Want One: Fluorescent Monkey Edition

Well, if fluorescent cats and dogs aren't your fancy, now you can get a glowing green monkey! A marmoset, to be specific.


This is all in the interests of serious medical research, of course.

UPDATE: Bonus: its creepy glowing monkey hands will haunt your nightmares?

Lifting Copy

Did they stop teaching attribution in journalism schools? First, the New York Times's Maureen Dowd goes and lifts pieces from a lefty blog called (heh) Talking Points, and now Newsweek's respected (nobody ever says by whom) Fareed Zakaria is lifting quotes from the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg. And these people continue to blame their industry's collapse on everyone but themselves.

Festival Tour

I daydream a lot about lazily traveling 'round the world (again). In one particular version of my daydream, I wander from country to country on the schedule of bizarre local festivals. Whenever I am ready to move on, I'll just see which nearby country is chasing wheels of cheese down hills,


breaking out into a city-wide tomato fight (but only after a ham has been retrieved from atop a greased flagpole),


dousing one another in bright pigments,


or parading toddlers affixed on top of 12-foot bamboo poles in front of multi-story towers covered in steamed buns.


Humanity is a fascinating thing.

Robot In My Pocket

Along with the Department of Defense's mad scientist division at DARPA, our nation's military contractors also do their part to ensure that our future is filled with unimaginable terror. Household robot maker and military contractor iRobot makes robots that variously vacuum your rugs, clean out your gutters, disarm your IEDs, and invade your enemies' homes to riddle them with bullets. For now these functions are carried out by four specialized robots, but I'm sure they're working on the convergence piece.

They're also working on a cheap networked minibot named Ember to meet DARPA's LANdroid specs, seeking to create fleet of robots to disperse itself through a neighborhood, setting up a wireless network to transmit the information collected by whatever suite of sensors the user might choose to have installed. Ember is small and light, and iRobot hopes to make them robust enough to be hurled into action and cheap enough to be treated as disposable. As if I didn't have enough stuff to carry around in my cargo pockets.

Euromerica? Not So Much

A lot of the conservative opposition to President Obama, such as it is, likes to paint him as someone who wants to push the US to be more like Canada or Europe. If only.

A Great American Story

David Tran is the man behind my favorite stand-by hot sauce, Sriracha, and his creation is profiled in the NYT Dining section.

"I wanted something that I could sell to more than just the Vietnamese. After I came to America, after I came to Los Angeles, I remember seeing Heinz 57 ketchup and thinking: ‘The 1984 Olympics are coming. How about I come up with a Tran 84, something I can sell to everyone?’"

Success is sweet. Or spicy, as the case may be.

Undermining the Narrative : St Francis of Assisi

Do penance, performing worthy fruits of penance, because we shall soon die … Blessed are those who die in penance for they shall be in the kingdom of heaven. Woe to those who do not die in penance, for they shall be children of the devil whose works they do and they shall go into everlasting fire.

--St Francis of Assisi

Oh, and that whole "preach the gospel at all times; when necessary, use words" line that makes such a great bumper sticker? Guess he didn't actually say that one.

A Study In Comparisons

Last week in Jordan, speaking to the World Economic Forum on the Middle East, Senator John Kerry portentously heralded the new "absence of arrogance" in American foreign policy.

Today in Belgrade, Vice President Joe Biden:

"The only real future is to join Europe. Right now you are off that path ... You can follow this path to Europe or you can take an alternative path. You have done it before," Biden said, referring to the 1992-95 war. "Failure to do so will ensure you remain among the poorest countries in Europe. At worst, you'll descend into ethnic chaos that defined your country for the better part of a decade."

As Foreign Policy puts it: "Biden essentially telling Bosnia to follow his recommendations or continue to be known as a violent, poverty-stricken hellhole is American arrogance of near-Rumsfeldian levels".

India's Election Results

Anyone who has a conversation with me about travels will quickly come to know that I'm a huge fan of India, personally and politically. So I find little to disagree with in Michael Barone's column on the significance of India's election result:

The election held over four weeks in April and May has produced a result very much to our advantage. The Congress party has been returned to power with a larger share of the vote than indicated by pre-election and exit polls, and will no longer need Communists and left-wingers for majorities in the Lok Sabha. The [Hindu nationalist opposition] BJP attacked Congress for being too close to the United States; voters evidently decided that this was not a minus but a plus.

[I]t would not hurt to show some solicitude for our friends in India, with whom we share strategic interests and moral principles. The 700 million voters of India have chosen to be our ally. We should take them up on it.

As I heard expressed in many different ways in India, the world's biggest democracy and her oldest democracy are natural partners.

The Panic That Wasn't

Jesse Walker writes in Reason Magazine about the media panic over the "panic":

The Time story offers thin gruel. It tells us that many Mexicans donned facemasks, as recommended by their government; that stores quickly sold out of masks and vitamin supplements; that schools in Mexico City shut down; that some people left the city and others stayed put. In other words, it tells us that ordinary Mexicans were taking ordinary precautions. The Bild report merely informs us that a few schools in New York had closed and that many children displaying flu-like symptoms were sent home. The Guardian timeline includes a series of links to Mexican photographs that allegedly "capture the sense of panic everywhere." Click through, and you'll see pictures of people calmly going about their business while wearing masks.

He quotes a "disaster researcher" who hints at the causes of the panic about panic, noting the perception driven by popular books and movies that any given group under stress is in grave danger of succumbing to blind panic. It's just not true, though. The sight of a planeload of travelers calmly filing out onto the wings of a jet slowly sinking into the Hudson a few months ago was a good reminder of how false that perception is.

Advice for Youth in These Times

As summarized by a biographer of the obscure early-20th century ideologue Albert Jay Nock:

Ransack the past for your values, establish a coherent worldview, depend neither on society nor on government insofar as circumstances permit, keep your tastes simple and inexpensive, and do what you have to do to remain true to yourself.

Sounds good to me.

Well, There's One Way to Look at Things

On the bright side, the end of civilization should be good for the Republicans.

So what do I propose for a Republican Party that will be relevant in the future? I’m thinking we need to work towards becoming a loose confederation of warlords. In the post-apocalyptic wasteland, resources will be scarce and the strong will crush the weak — and frankly, those are conditions in which Republicans should thrive. The Republican Party will need to cement its rule through force, destroy the weak, and take their resources. Back to basics for the party, really.

On Interchanges

Fascinating "Field Guide to Highway Interchanges" (and part II) from the Infrastructurist. Some pretty cool examples of the genre, though none quite as fun as Randall Monroe's imagination:

Huzzah For Bizarre Alliances

MAKE, CRAFT, and Etsy crowd, meet the libertarians. These days, you're going to want to be in touch.

Takeaway lesson? Big business loves regulation at least as much as big government does. Big business already has a legal department to jump through regulatory hoops, and inspection and compliance costs per facility or per product hit the smallest producers hardest. Bottom line, no CEO of a regulated industry ever missed his tee-time because some upstart competitor introduced a game-changing product.

It's Over, Maybe

The LTTE -- better known as the "Tamil Tigers" -- have admitted defeat. Only time will tell if this is truly the end of the conflict. If it is, it will stand both as proof that even a popular, well-funded insurgency can indeed be crushed with conventional brute force, and as a lesson in the human cost of such a victory.

UPDATE: The Christian Science Monitor is reporting that the LTTE leader Prabhakaran is dead. Having no leaders, in addition to holding no territory, reduces the chances that the LTTE will fight on, God willing.

Nordlinger in Jordan

Jay Nordlinger's posting his Impromptus from Jordan this week, sharing his comments from the World Economic Forum on the Middle East. There'll be a new column every day this week, so it's really as good a time as any to subscribe to Impromptus.

The Notre Dame Speech

What was our President's goal at Notre Dame? Certainly not merely to give an inspiring graduation speech, which he could have given at any of the nation's many prestigious non-Catholic universities. I'm quite sure they're not the only ones who've invited him, after all, though they are likely the only ones who did so in flagrant violation of their parent organization's policies. It's clear he's picking a fight with social conservatives, but why like this? Paul Mirengoff's got an explanation that I'm having trouble finding any cracks in:

Obama hopes to drive a wedge between the leaders of the Catholic Church and rank-and-file Catholics in order to substantially reduce Church leaders and their teachings as a moral force in the United States. Such a reduction, in turn, will remove a barrier to Obama's left-wing agenda, especially his left-wing social agenda, just as the steep decline in the authority of Catholic Church paved the way the leftist agenda in certain European countries.

Under these circumstances, it's difficult to blame Obama much for injecting himself into Notre Dame's graduation ceremony. It is entirely reasonable and proper for him to seek to undermine Catholic authority, in furtherance of his interests, through lawful activitiy such as giving a speech and accepting a degree. Nearly all of the blame surely lies with Notre Dame for partnering with Obama in his mission, and thereby violating the command of the U.S. Catholic Bishops not to honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles.

Yepp.

Don't Let Congress Hijack Healthcare

Cheryl at A Round Unvarnish'd Tale has shared an important proposal from The American Thinker on preventing the hijacking of American health care. Americans of all stripes need to tell Congress that health care reform is far too important to push through with majoritarian procedural tactics. If the Democratic Congress believes it has a plan worth implementing, they should have the confidence to to present it to the American people and subject it to the legislative process. There's no good argument for pushing through massive changes to 17% of the economy without public debate, so just bringing the issue into the light before it happens should be enough to force Congress to debate health care openly.

Satire is Obsolete: Swine Flu Edition

I really should have started the Satire is Obsolete thread with this story when it came out last week:

Afghanistan's only pig

quarantined in flu fear

Rambling About Trains

I love trains. Most people do, it seems. There's a sense of adventure and nostalgia to a journey by train, not to mention a degree of comfort unthinkable on a flight or road trip. It's not surprising then that high-speed passenger rail travel has attracted political attention in the Stimulus era, filling politicians' dreams with ribbon-cutting opportunities galore. But what precisely are we looking to achieve by boosting passenger rail, and will any of the current proposals get us there?

Let's pull off on a siding here for a minute before we get ahead of schedule: the politicians are talking about three significantly different systems when they say "high speed rail", and even full-time rail boosters (I'm looking at you, Infrastructurist) play fast-and-loose with the very real differences between them. Genuine high-speed rail, like Japan's Shinkansen, France's TGV, or Spain's AVE, operate at speeds upwards of 180mph but require extremely robust purpose-built track on broad rights-of-way with widely banked curves and very low grades, requiring lots of tunnels and trestles if they're to cross any kind of varied terrain. They are sources of national pride in every country that has them, but they are fiendishly expensive per mile of track laid.


A step down is service in the 110-150mph range on separated, dedicated rights-of-way over traditional rails, such as Amtrak's popular and profitable Acela Express along the Northeast Corridor. Due to frequent stops and right-of-way conflicts, however, actual speeds on the Acela Express average only 86mph. The lowest tier of proposed "high-speed" rail won't achieve the same degree of right-of-way separation that the Acela has gained (mostly through political pressure), making even that train's modest achievement unlikely to be widely matched.

As a result, when the politicians and rail boosters talk about "high-speed rail" links, disingenuously painting visions of bullet trains zooming at 200mph across the prairies, with few exceptions what they're really talking about is, at very best, 90-110mph service with more-or-less traditional rolling stock on slightly upgraded rights-of-way. In other words, they're talking about expanding an improved Amtrak, but for obvious reasons they can't let anyone to realize that.

Most of the talk of "high-speed rail" is really just trying to resurrect the express passenger service that was commonplace in the early 20th century. There's a great piece in Slate by Tom Vanderbilt on the miserable state of rail service today as compared to the golden age of rail in the 1920s. Of course, the relative decline of rail since that time has some pretty obvious causes, namely, the rise of air travel and the automobile. Vanderbilt's unspoken implication is that, forgetting dreams of bullet-train high-speed rail, if passenger rail even provided the service it did 90 years ago it might be competitive with other modes of transit.

I do suspect he's right: despite the miserable service, even Amtrak manages to turn a profit on the Acela. But in the course of making his point he mentions one cause of the decline without recognizing how much of a stumbling block it is to a rail renaissance: we now have less than half the rail miles we had on the eve of WWI. Half the rail is carrying more traffic than ever, at lower speeds. Modern signaling equipment allows any given right-of-way to carry a volume of traffic that would have been inconceivable to Dagny Taggart, but it's not very fast. There's also no wiggle room in the system to let faster trains through, even if the rail could handle the speed, and much of it can't without upgrades. Re-jiggering schedules to clear the right-of-way for a single passenger train at 90mph would cause massive delays for every slower train on the line.

The lower-order goal of expanding 90mph rail service on existing track is achievable, then, but at what cost? Environmental concerns are a major driver of rail boosterism (trains being a shockingly fuel-efficient way to move stuff around), but our network has a finite capacity that is currently dominated by freight carriers in tight competition with long-haul trucking. Expanding passenger rail on existing track would push a significant chunk of rail freight onto our interstates, burning a lot more fuel, greatly increasing highway maintainence costs, and making driving an automobile that much more unpleasant. In any rail policy, we need to ensure that freight continues to have priority. If we succeed merely in pushing people onto trains and freight onto our roads, we'll have taken several big steps backward in efficiency, environmental sensitivity, and convenience.

The answer to all this, of course, is that if we want convenient passenger rail service and efficient freight service, we ust need to start laying new rail. However, even restoring the WWI-era rail network will be far more expensive than boosters suggest. As we've pulled up half our rail, we've tripled our population, so purchasing new rights-of-way (or seizing them through eminent domain) will be exceedingly costly. Even of those defunct rights-of-way that weren't sold off privately, many have been turned into bike trails and such. I can only imagine the New Urbanist civil war that will break out the first time someone proposes laying high-speed rail over a bike trail.

I'd love to see ground broken on genuine high-speed in America, and there are a handful of routes that might be able to achieve it cost-effectively. Hint: they're not on this map:


The "Texas T-Bone" corridor connecting Dallas/Ft Worth to San Antonio and Killeen/Ft Hood to Houston is one of the more logistically viable proposals I've seen, taking into account the flatness and wide-openness of central Texas. The Gulf Coast Corridor is plausible for the same reasons, although I'm dubious how much demand exists for it. Conversely, despite the potentially huge market for it, a true high-speed corridor connecting Los Angeles to San Fransisco would face such massive engineering hurdles and endless environmental litigation obstacles as to be completely laughable. Ditto for the Cascades Corridor in the Pacific Northwest.

Inter-state transportation infrastructure is a proper project for the federal government, and if they were going to do it right, I'd happily starve the ravenous beasts of federal education and health care spending for the sake of shiny, speedy trains. But as long as politicians continue to push rails at the expense of roads while grossly understating their costs and tradeoffs, high-speed rail remains an expensive boondoggle.

Things Could Be Worse

When things seem a little overwhelming, just think, there was a time people had to deal with all the trials and tribulations of life, and they didn't have YouTube.

And so I present: a baby porcupine with hiccups eating a banana. Best YouTube video ever? Probably not (it's no dramatic chipmunk), but it's in the top tier.

Satire Is Obsolete: Forty-Three Tasered at Prisons' Take Your Kids to Work Day

Okay, I've been seeing too many of these headlines not to be sharing them. The real world is rapidly making satire obsolete. Today's example, in which life imitates Arrested Development, centers around an ill-conceived "Take Your Child to Work Day" event at three Florida prisons:

A total of 43 children were directly and indirectly shocked by electric stun guns during simultaneous ''Take Your Sons and Daughters to Work Day'' events gone wrong at three state prisons, according to new information provided Friday by the Florida Department of Corrections.

Also, a group of kids was exposed to tear gas during a demonstration at another lockup... So far this year, none of the devices have been used on the 100,000 prison inmates -- only the children of DOC workers.

Hooray for Nukes!

About time someone's gone out and said it. Thomas Barnett lays out the "Seven Reasons Why Obama's Nuke-Free Utopia Won't Work" in Esquire, and offers a defense of nuclear arsenals that goes far beyond "mutually assured destruction". A few thoughts:

Bartlett, like pretty much every serious proliferation scholar I've read recently, seems to think a nuclear Iran is inevitable at this point. I have to agree, and I even agree that a nuclear Iran in and of itself would be no less manageable than other nuclear enemies have historically been. It's very difficult to be certain of course, but I've become convinced that much of Ahmadinejad's "Crazy Tom" act is precisely that, a ruse to keep us worried and his people appeased. Bizarre heterodox Shia eschatologies aside, Khomeinist Iran hasn't actually done anything to live up to the impression of being dangerously unhinged that they find useful to present to the world. Consider the Iran-Iraq war, in which the radical theocracy's tactics were far more rational than those of the classical secular strongman Saddam Hussein.

But here's my main quibble: my concern in the region is not so much a nuclear Iran as the nuclear Bahrain, UAE, Saudia Arabia, and possibly Egypt that a nuclear Iran implies. Bartlett is right that nuclear powers have no interest in handing their safety umbrellas over to terrorists, but I think he's unduly influenced by the happy fact that nuclear weapons have historically been developed by stable and well-ordered nations. And that's not even so true these days, as there are legitimate concerns that Pakistan could collapse and her arsenal fall into the hands of the Taliban. For that matter, the legal legitimacy of Pakistan's nuclear program didn't keep AQ Khan from selling nuclear secrets far and wide. Where will we stand when half the Middle East has nukes? Offering to extend America's nuclear umbrella as far as the Gulf might possibly convince these states to forgoe nukes, but I wouldn't count on it.

I agree with Bartlett 100% that an American policy of eventual disarmament makes us less safe. I'm far less sanguine, however, that a continuation of current US nuclear hegemony won't still entail significant nuclear concerns.

Are Ya Serious: Minnesota Huh?

I'm fascinated by the text of a Facebook group calling on Minnesotans to lobby their governor against his proposed spending cuts. The text of the group's Facebook page:

A $6.4 billion deficit. The longest and deepest economic recession since WWII. A quarter of a million Minnesotans out of work. 1,000 more losing their jobs every week.

Governor Pawlenty's solution:

* Eliminate health care for 113,000 working Minnesotans, including 20,000 kids
* Cut $764 million from local hospitals, forcing many in Greater Minnesota to close
* Lay off 12,000 Minnesota teachers
* Put 16,000 health care professionals out of work
* Close nursing homes around the state
* Saddle the sick and disabled with higher fees and fewer services
* Fire police officers, fire fighters, and paramedics with deep cuts to Local Government Aid and County Program Aid
* Put the state $1.8 billion in debt for the next 20 years

Call Governor Pawlenty. Tell him he can't cut his way out of this recession. Fair and reasonable revenue is necessary to keep our state whole through this crisis.

I really sympathize with the staffers at the Governor's office who will be fielding the phone calls called for here. I'm having trouble parsing exactly what this group is saying and I'm looking right at it. They clearly understand that a massive budget deficit and projected long-term debt are bad things. Cutting back on government spending, however, is apparently also unacceptable. Clearly they would prefer he just wave his magic wand and fix the problem without having to make any difficult choices. And what on Earth do they mean by "fair and reasonable revenue"? Newsflash: revenue's going to drop in a downturn, and there's not much the governor can due about that. Unless is this cryptoprogressive code for "raise taxes", you know, because raising taxes in a downturn has always worked in the past. Sigh.

Also, what exactly are they getting at with that "Greater Minnesota" business? I may have studied in Minnesota, but I've got 'Sconnie in my blood, and if those lutefisk-eaters come lookin' for lebensraum in these parts they'll find me digging my foxhole on the St. Croix bluffs!

Bad Bad Bad: Nigeria's Ever-Worsening Oil War

The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) has threatened "all-out war" against Nigerian government forces in response to naval operations in their area. They've made these threats before, and nobody even really knows how much support they have, but they can still make things difficult for the already-shaky government of a very shaky country.

Curiouser and Curiouser

When the Obama White House terrified thousands of New Yorkers for a photo op, I figured it was just the sort of mistake that can happen in any new team: everyone figured someone else had thought it through. Then when they said they weren't going to release the photos, I was a bit confused, thinking it was silly to hold them back after the damage had already been done. When people demanded that the flight not be a complete waste, a photo was released, yet another Obot was thrown under the bus, and I didn't think any more about it. Until Ann Althouse encouraged me to look a little more closely at the picture:


I'm surprised more people haven't come to the same conclusion: the "photo op" story was pure hooey, just damage control. This supposed "publicity photo" is a poorly composed image of the jet against the majestic Jersey shore (when the Manhattan skyline is right on the other side), taken with a point-and-shoot camera from the cockpit of the escort fighter. Not even the White House is foolish enough to spend $328,835 on such a crappy photo. Now I understand why they initially weren't going to release the photos: there weren't any. Let's hope the fighter pilot got an attaboy for handing over his souvenier shot to save their butts.

I don't want to get all "show us the birth certificate" on you, but it really does make me wonder: who was on that plane?

It's possible of course that the real publicity shots, taken by a real camera mounted on the fighters wing, will emerge, which would totally rebut our entertaining little conspiracy theory. I won't hold my breath.

Creeping Totalitarianism Isn't Funny

There was a time not long ago when it was utterly beyond the pale in American politics to suggest, for example, that one's habitual claims of being one election away from emigration might not be the strongest evidence of a citizen's patriotism. Dissent is patriotic, we were incessantly lectured, even the sort of patriotism that only considers your country worth living in when your team is in charge. Well, that's all out the window now, as Wanda Sykes, in a "comedy" routine at the White House Press Correspondents' dinner, (in which the comedians traditionally roast the sitting president), blusters that Rush Limbaugh is a treasonous terrorist who ought to be tortured. Oh, and she wishes he would die. Painfully. All this because he has stated that he hopes Obama fails. I genuinely can't understand why the Obots have such a hard time understanding this: did these people spend eight years dutifully wishing success upon the policies of George W. Bush? Did any of us expect them to? Good grief! Sykes:

Rush Limbaugh said he hopes this administration fails. So you're saying, 'I hope America fails', you're, like, 'I don't care about people losing their homes, their jobs, our soldiers in Iraq'. He just wants the country to fail.

Leftists blithely equate one politician's ambitions with the entirety of the American enterprise, yet seem completely baffled when people suggest there's something creepily totalitarian about this. This is the definition of totalitarianism, after all, the idea that the entire nation is represented in this one man. I fear for the future.

Star Trek 2.0

The new Star Trek was far better than I expected. Far better than it had any right to be, really. I don't think the experience would be improved by reading reviews beforehand, but if you must, Peter Suderman's got a solid review over at Reason, and Jonah Goldberg's got a positive but somewhat curmudgeonly opinion at National Review (with spoilers!). Jonah's a stickler for internal consistency, and I'm not, so most of his negative comments didn't really bother me. One thing that does stay consistent throughout the Star Trek canon is the bizarro rank structure of Federation Starfleet, in which the top handful of ship's officers are regularly required to undertake away missions requiring hand-to-hand combat. Jonah comments:

I always wanted to write an SNL skit called “What if Gene Roddenberry Wrote World War II.” The whole war would involve Churchill and FDR karate chopping or neck-pinching their way across Europe, all the way to Hitler’s bunker, where FDR and Hitler would find it necessary to fight in a gladiatorial pit with long spears.

Best Thing Ever (Yet): Baby Sumo!

Baby Sumo!

John Stossel

Does America have a more entertaining libertarian iconoclast than John Stossel? I doubt it. He's been preaching common sense and personal responsibility to America's loneliest timeslot for 18 years. Check out last night's Stossel special "You Can't Even Talk About It", where he argues that anti-discrimination laws support discrimination, we should irradiate more of our food, emergency services should bill people for preventable rescues, we should eat more endangered animals, steroids should be permitted in sports, and we do too much for the elderly. He makes each of these arguments very convincingly and in classic Stossel style, the strongest points for his position generally come straight from the interviewees representing the opposing view. I'd elaborate on the arguments, but you'd be better off watching them yourselves. I'd particularly recommend the "Rescuing Risk-Takers" and "Elderly Rob the Younger Generation" segments. The unthinking sense of entitlement on display in both segments is illuminating.

On Digital Nomads

Mike Elgan is a digital nomad, aka an "extreme telecommuter", a person who has used the tools of the digital era to break the geographical constraints on his business and social lives. To his friends and colleagues, it's mostly irrelevant whether he's in California or Kathmandu. He's probably not the most extreme of them out there (he and his wife still maintain a studio apartment), but unlike others, he extends the invitation to join the nomads and regularly shares helpful tips. His advice on digitizing everything strikes me as a good idea for everyone from digital nomads to decidedly analog homesteaders. Most of these tools and tips are designed for the person who works at a one or a handful of places, but travels around a lot doing it, but they are equally powerful in enabling a person who lives wherever they prefer (say, on a homestead in the middle of nowhere), to work wherever they're needed.

On Wildfires

California's burning down. Again. Yawn. My apologies to Californians, but the rest of the country's got to be agreeing with me on this: shouldn't wildfires be part of the weather segment rather than a headline story? Don't peg me as a Midwestern chauvinist here, though. I get equally bored by "Flooding in Midwestern Floodplains!" headlines.

FuturePundit does share some interesting thoughts on the wildfires, and throws out some random thoughts on things we could be doing to stop them:

Last night a couple of guys were telling me exactly what I was thinking already: Extremely fast methods of spotting fires in early stages along with very fast reaction times for helicopter tankers could nip somem fires in the bud. Time is of the essence. Could cameras trained on hillsides with image processing software spot fires 10 minutes earlier on average? Then there is the effect of absolutely massive efforts. If 40 or 50 old jumbo jets were converted into water carriers could a fire get put out even after it has reached a couple of hundred acres?

Decline and fall quote of the day:

The America of the 1950s, given such tech, would have tried. The America of today - not so much.

On "Boycotts", Fascism, and the Israel Obsession

If liberal fascism is fascism with a smiley face, this is what liberal Kristallnacht looks like (via PowerLine):



French activists "boycott" Israeli products by clearing a supermarket's shelves of everything labeled "made in Israel". The French have redefined sabotage as a "workers' strike", and now they're redefining destruction of property as a "boycott".

I've got to admit, I don't really get the Israel obsession. Anti-Israel activists assiduously insist that it's the policies of the state of Israel they oppose, and their rage has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. But that argument is increasingly difficult to swallow. If it's the state they oppose, why do "pro-Palestinian" activists always seem to protest outside synagogues and Jewish cultural centers rather than Israeli embassies or consulates? Besides, even if we grant (and I don't!) every argument against the Jewish state, there are unconscionably oppressive regimes and persecuted stateless peoples all over the world. Pro-Tibet rallies aren't anywhere nearly as anti-Chinese as pro-Palestinian demonstrations are anti-Jewish (zombie has an interesting comparison here).

Most neglected of all, of course, are the world's unluckiest: those anonymous multitudes who have the misfortune of being oppressed by "leaders" from among their own number. I speak primarily of Africa, where colonialism never really ended, but was handed from reasonably competent foreign colonialists to incompetent local colonialists. It's crimespeak to say it of course, but even in the darkest days of Apartheid, black South Africans were better off than their northerly neighbors now are under Mugabe. World opinion rightly condemned the Apartheid regime; why are we so much more comfortable when the oppressors look like the oppressed?

Grumpy Old Brits on the Nanny State

The BBC's "Grumpy Old Men" share their dretful scorn regarding the British Nanny State (via Professor Bainbridge). Welcome to the future (PG-13 for language) :