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Jeff Jacoby on a hero in Cuba.

AT A White House ceremony tomorrow President Bush will honor eight distinguished men and women with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civil award. Among the recipients will be the longtime civil rights activist Benjamin Hooks; Harper Lee, author of the much-loved novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird”; and C-SPAN’s founder and president, Brian Lamb.

One of the honorees, however, will not be there. Instead of joining the president amid the pomp and finery of the White House, Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet will spend the day locked in a fetid cell in the Combinado del Este prison in Havana, where he is serving a 25-year prison sentence for speaking out against Fidel Castro’s dictatorship. …

Mark Steyn comments on crime in England.

… Americans who’ve taken a job for a year or two in Britain often express to me — after the usual appreciation for the castles and the Royal Shakespeare Company — their amazement at the relentlessness of the criminal assault. You rent a home in a leafy upscale suburb, have a pleasant supper on the patio your first evening, and wake up the following morning to find your garden furniture’s missing. The coppers are unsympathetic: They’ll sigh at your naivety for leaving your lawn furniture on the lawn. …

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

Jonathan Last on Bernard Lewis leading Islamic scholar in the US.

Bernard Lewis was in Washington recently, courtesy of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He put on quite a show. Lewis, 91, spoke for nearly 40 minutes, without notes, before taking questions. Google a few TV chat-show transcripts, and you’ll see that, even among people who talk for a living, it is rare to find someone who speaks in complete sentences. It has famously been observed that Lewis – did I mention he’s 91? – speaks in complete paragraphs.

Lewis is the last, and perhaps greatest, of a breed of intellectual the world no longer makes. An expert on the Near East, Lewis possesses all of the requisite characteristics of a great cultural thinker: a preternatural facility with languages; an impish sense of adventure; intellectual modesty; and a love of the foreign that springs from genuine admiration, rather than repulsion.

If Islam is the most important cultural subject of our time, then Lewis may be our most important intellectual. His deep affinity for Islam is what allows him to be such a penetrating, clear-eyed, thinker on the subject. He intuits the nuances, and understands their importance. During his talk, for instance, he noted that: …

Editors of the Examiner don’t think much of planners.

Centralized government planning is almost always a disaster, says Cato Institute Senior Fellow Randal O’Toole, who warns of the dangers of letting government bureaucrats take more and more control over Americans’ lives. A generation ago, we laughed at the hilariously predictable failures of the Soviet Union’s five-year plans. Now we’re allowing our own public planners, two-thirds of whom work for state and local governments, to design our communities, manage our land and natural resources, design our transportation and energy grids, run our health care system and oversee much else. …

John Fund with a short on Brian Lamb.

Shorts from National Review.

Emmett Tyrrell celebrates four decades of conservative journalism.

Forty years ago this autumn, riled up by the impudence of the era’s left-wing student protesters and by the idiotic profusion of their complaints, I started an off-campus magazine at Indiana University to protest the protesters. Neither they nor my magazine has disappeared, and we remain at each other’s throats. Yet to my satisfaction The American Spectator’s beliefs remain unchanged.

As for the 1960s protesters, they have had to cool their rancors to remain on the national scene, and sidle toward “centrism” — a centrism shaped more by my libertarian and conservative mentors than by their Saul Alinskys and Herbert Marcuses. Equally to my satisfaction, the inchoate conservative journalism of 40 years ago has grown in mass and in variety. We are in print, broadcast, and in media unimaginable in 1967: talk radio and the Internet. …

Slate posts on Iran’s importing of gasoline. Seems to Pickerhead if there were rational people running the country they’d invest in a refinery rather than nukes.

Two weeks ago, Iran’s parliament approved legislation aimed at controlling the ballooning cost of the country’s gasoline imports by getting Iranians to drive less. This may seem odd, given that Iran has the world’s third-largest oil reserves and used to give gasoline away for pennies per gallon. Why are they now importing fuel?

The country’s aging and inefficient refineries can’t meet its swelling demand for gasoline. Iran may be brimming with crude oil, but it can’t convert enough of the raw product into refined fuels like diesel, kerosene, or gasoline. International sanctions and political pressure from the United States and other countries have discouraged multinational energy companies from making large-scale investments in Iran’s infrastructure. Meanwhile, Iranian domestic energy policy—including heavy subsidies for gasoline—has encouraged waste and increased domestic demand. …

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Max Boot says we can’t call the French “cheese eating surrender monkeys” anymore.

Reuel Marc Gerecht and Gary Schmitt of the American Enterprise Institute have published a fascinating new paper based on their recent talks with counterterrorism officials in Europe. Their findings contrast with the crude stereotype that so many American conservatives have of the French as “surrender monkeys.” Gerecht and Schmitt write: “France has become the most accomplished counterterrorism practitioner in Europe.”

France, they note, has been facing the threat of Middle Eastern terrorism since the 1980’s and has done an impressive job of marshaling its resources to defend itself. What’s the secret of French success? Gerecht and Schmitt point to the fact that the French “grant highly intrusive powers to their internal security service, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), and to their counterterrorist investigative magistrates (judges d’instruction).” …

Peter Wehner continues with good news from Iraq.

… The fact that AQI no longer operates in large numbers in any neighborhood in Baghdad is accepted in many quarters as almost commonplace (the story appeared on page A17 of the Washington Post). Yet this development is in reality staggering, especially if you consider where we were in December 2006, an awful month that was the capstone of an awful year. That this achievement occurred in only ten months ranks among the more impressive military operations we have ever seen. Even those who strongly supported the surge could not have imagined that it would do so much, so fast.

General Petraeus’ qualifications on the progress we’ve made are wise. We need to be vigilant and purposeful, since the task before us is still enormously difficult. Iraq remains a fragile, traumatized land, with between 1,000 and 2,000 Iraqis still fleeing their homes each day. The lives of Iraqis are still filled with daily hardships. The ethnic divisions remain real and deep. And the Iraqis must take greater responsibility for rebuilding and uniting their society. But we can now say, with some certainty, that the surge, rather than a failure (as Majority Leader Harry Reid recklessly declared months ago), has been hugely successful, and other good things (including efforts at ethnic reconciliation) are coming to pass. …

John Fund says of course Hillary likes Spitzer’s policy of licenses for illegal aliens.

… Despite her muddled comments this week, there’s no doubt where Mrs. Clinton stands on ballot integrity. She opposes photo ID laws, even though they enjoy over 80% support in the polls. She has also introduced a bill to force every state to offer no-excuse absentee voting as well as Election Day registration — easy avenues for election chicanery. The bill requires that every state restore voting rights to all criminals who have completed their prison terms, parole or probation.

Pollster Scott Rasmussen notes that Mrs. Clinton is such a polarizing figure that she attracts between 46% and 49% support no matter which Republican candidate she’s pitted against — even libertarian Ron Paul. She knows she may have trouble winning next year. Maybe that’s why she’s thrown herself in with those who will look the other way as a new electoral majority is formed — even if that includes non-citizens, felons and those who suddenly cross a state line on Election Day and decide they want to vote someplace new.

A German, Gabor Steingart, with a pretty good analysis of the dilemma of a Dem running for the White House.

Both John Edwards and Barack Obama want to move the Democrats to the left. But that’s a sure way to lose the election. Many voters may live their lives on the left, but their hopes and dreams are well to the right.

News Flash. IBD Editorial reports on Harvard study that says the media is biased.

The debate is over. A consensus has been reached. On global warming? No, on how Democrats are favored on television, radio and in the newspapers.

Just like so many reports before it, a joint survey by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy — hardly a bastion of conservative orthodoxy — found that in covering the current presidential race, the media are sympathetic to Democrats and hostile to Republicans. …

The Captain posts on that study too.

Instapundit calls this a dog-bites-man story, but it does have a twist. Instead of the Media Research Center issuing a report on media bias, today’s study comes from another bastion of conservative thought: Harvard University. Not only did the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy find that the media treats Democrats better than Republicans, it also finds that the media gives more air time to the Democrats as well: …

John Fund embarrasses State by telling the truth about the Dept.

It’s a cliché that our State Department is often deaf, dumb and blind when it comes to analyzing what’s really happening in other countries. Evidence keeps cropping up demonstrating just how depressingly true the cliché can be.

Take the recently declassified briefing papers from the 1970s dismissing Margaret Thatcher as a potential British leader while extolling the pro-American virtues of future French President Jacques Chirac, who wound up heading the worldwide “coalition of the unwilling” that opposed U.S. foreign policy in Iraq.

The London Times recently dove into the declassified files now available at the National Archives in Washington and came up with an instructive document entitled “Margaret Thatcher: first impressions,” in which a U.S. Embassy analyst identified only as “Spiers” wrote that the future prime minister, after becoming Conservative Party leader in 1975, possessed “the genuine voice of a beleaguered bourgeoisie” but not the stuff to make the political big time. …

Ron Rosenbaum’s blog post deals in some gossip. Pickings normally passes on stuff like this, but the post and then attached comments are interesting.

Tech Central Station tells what the Erie Canal might look like today.

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Last week, Pickings selected a post from the English blog Samizdata that argues our countries are in the grip of soft totalitarians;

And so we have force backed regulations setting out the minutia of a parent’s interactions with their own children, vast reams on what sort of speech or expression is and is not permitted in a workplace, rules forbidding a property owner allowing consenting adults from smoking in a place of business, what sorts of insults are permitted, rules covering almost every significant aspect of how you can or cannot build or modify your own house on your own property, moves to restrict what sort of foods can be sold, what kind of light bulbs are allowed, and the latest one, a move to require smokers to have a ‘license to smoke‘. Every aspect of self-ownership is being removed and non-compliance criminalised and/or pathologised.

The same evening a Corner post from one of National Review Online’s blogs reported an example in Pickerhead’s back yard; William & Mary’s anonymous “bias” patrol.

East Germany Hits Virginia [Stanley Kurtz]

I’ve heard of speech codes, but I’ve never heard of anything quite like this: a mechanism to anonymously report “bias related to race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or other protected conditions” to the university administration, for possible action against the perpetrator. This system has been set up at William and Mary, and a website protesting it can be found here. Is this something new, or at least rare, or is it perhaps more common than I realize?

Now, just one week later, another perfect local example of soft fascism is in the lead article in the Virginia Gazette.

Almost 40 years ago John Fleet Jr. sold his first combine in Toano. Now he needs special permission to move back. Fleet Brothers tractor sales and repair shop on Airport Road has purchased the empty Basketville store on Route 60 to relocate in the heart of the county’s farming belt. The match seems ideal. The old Basketville site is near the last working farms in the county. The farmers would have the greatest need for what Fleet offers: zero-turn lawn mowers and medium-sized tractors.

Not so fast.

The Basketville site is zoned General Business. Ironically, Fleet must plow through a series of requirements to prove that his farming business will suit a farming community. The case illustrates the counterintuitive labyrinth of county planning. …

An innocent business person makes an investment in an improvement and ends up in the snares of the modern world’s version of scribes and Pharisees – the keepers of the PLAN. You can rail all you want about federal and state governments, but you haven’t seen thoughtless incompetence until you meet the malevolent folks who have settled for jobs in local and county governments.

“The sale of medium-size agricultural vehicles does not fit the description of a ‘neighborhood-scale commercial establishment,’” planner Jose-Ricardo Ribeiro wrote … in a memo this month.

Now the unwary must make obsequious suppliance hiring planners and attorneys.

(They) will have to provide a traffic study of trips generated and prove substantial landscape buffers. He has retained AES Consulting Engineers to design the site.

Sad thing is, nobody seems to know anything is amiss. We are in the midst of elections for county board. Candidates should be thundering up and down the county in outrage over the snares in the paths of the people who provide goods and services, and create jobs. But nobody says a word. All three board candidates for the district say they will support the application. They do not understand (or perhaps they do). The problem is the requirement there be an application at all. This story made the front page and will be fixed. What about “applications” that are below the radar? Care to think the county minions are handling those transactions well?

There is only so much energy in an enterprise, and all of us are diminished when it is needlessly diverted to begging before the PLAN.

George Will takes up the Utah school choice vote John Stossel reported yesterday.

In today’s political taxonomy, “progressives” are rebranded liberals dodging the damage they did to their old label. Perhaps their most injurious idea — injurious to themselves and public schools — was the forced busing of (mostly other people’s) children to engineer “racial balance” in public schools. Soon, liberals will need a third label if people notice what “progressives” are up to in Utah.

There, teachers unions, whose idea of progress is preservation of the status quo, are waging an expensive and meretricious campaign to overturn the right of parents to choose among competing schools, public and private, for the best education for their children.

In balloting more important to the nation than most of next year’s elections will be, Utahans next week will decide by referendum whether to retain or jettison the nation’s broadest school choice program. Passed last February, the Parent Choice in Education Act would make a voucher available to any public school child who transfers to a private school, and to current private school children from low-income families. Opponents of school choice reflexively rushed to force a referendum on the new law, which is suspended pending the vote. …

John Fund has the first comments on the last debate.

Democrats who are nervous about having Hillary Clinton as their nominee had their fears confirmed last night. Mrs. Clinton finally stumbled in her seventh Democratic debate once the other candidates decided to chew on her.

Mrs. Clinton responded to the criticism by retreating to her briefing books, giving rehearsed answers to questions in a too loud, slightly shrill voice. She was pummeled for not releasing White House records kept by the National Archives that would shine light on her claim to be the most experienced candidate based on her service as First Lady. …

The Captain is next.

… Voters have never seen a candidate contradict themselves in one 120-second period on national television, and thanks to YouTube, the experience has gone viral. Only somewhat less damaging was the answer on her records, in which she blamed George Bush for a seal request made by her own husband — a request she claims she can’t affect.

Not even her own supporters buy that explanation. It has grown so ugly that Mark Penn, her political sherpa, told callers that Hillary’s problem was essentially that Tim Russert was unfair by asking the questions. He told callers that female voters should be outraged that men were ganging up on her “six to one” to defeat her — as if they should give her a pass because of her gender, or not ask tough questions of the frontrunner. …

Roger Simon in The Politico rates Hillary’s performance.

We now know something that we did not know before: When Hillary Clinton has a bad night, she really has a bad night. In a debate against six Democratic opponents at Drexel University here Tuesday, Clinton gave the worst performance of her entire campaign.

It was not just that her answer about whether illegal immigrants should be issued driver’s licenses was at best incomprehensible and at worst misleading. It was that for two hours she dodged and weaved, parsed and stonewalled. And when it was over, both the Barack Obama and John Edwards campaigns signaled that in the weeks ahead they intend to hammer home a simple message: Hillary Clinton does not say what she means or mean what she says.

And she gave them plenty of ammunition Tuesday night. …

Yes Virginia, there’s still a war. Michael Yon with his latest report. The media will report less and less on the war since -

“Al Qaeda in Iraq is defeated,” according to Sheik Omar Jabouri, spokesman for the Iraqi Islamic Party and a member of the widespread and influential Jabouri Tribe. Speaking through an interpreter at a 31 October meeting at the Iraqi Islamic Party headquarters in downtown Baghdad, Sheik Omar said that al Qaeda had been “defeated mentally, and therefore is defeated physically,” referring to how clear it has become that the terrorist group’s tactics have backfired. Operatives who could once disappear back into the crowd after committing an increasingly atrocious attack no longer find safe haven among the Iraqis who live in the southern part of Baghdad. They are being hunted down and killed. Or, if they are lucky, captured by Americans. …

John Tierney posts on his wager over cheaper oil.

Since I’ve made a $5,000 bet that oil prices won’t hit $200 per barrel in 2010, I’m glad to see a prophet who doesn’t the share the current angst over rising energy prices. In an article in Foreign Policy, the journalist Vijay Vaitheeswaran debunks predictions that oil prices will keep soaring. …

Forbes, as if on cue, forecasts $60 a barrel oil.

War in Iraq, destabilization from Turkey, unquenchable thirst for energy in Asia, millions of fuel-slurping SUVs still cruising American highways. No wonder oil prices have jumped above $90 a barrel on the new York Mercantile Exchange, on their way to $100.

Not so fast. According to some longtime observers, we will soon see $60 oil. Their argument is that the main driver of price spikes is something hardly mentioned these days: a miscalculation by the world’s most important supplier, Saudi Arabia. And within the next two months that miscalculation will be corrected and oil prices will drop. “It’s sure getting set up for a hard fall,” says George Littell, partner at Groppe, Long & Littell, a Houston firm that advises oil drillers and investors on the outlook for crude prices since 1955. …

VDH on the farm bill.

Agribusiness lobbyists fund politicians’ campaigns. In return, grateful politicians promise donors someone else’s federal dollars. Then both groups think up creative ways to keep the money rolling in.

The $280 billion-plus farm bill is not the largest waste of federal funds, but it is the most unnecessary — and dishonest. We are running federal budget deficits — this year’s is about the size of the proposed multiyear farm bill — engaged in two costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and spending billions in anti-terrorist security at home.

So why also give away more billions to the affluent of an industry that, overall, is doing quite well?

The shameful thing is not that the farm bill will probably pass, but that it was even introduced.

Pickerhead doesn’t know which is the bigger surprise. An NY Times editorial in Pickings, or an editorial from them that complements George W. Bush. The subject was sugar subsidies.

… Big Sugar is not the only beneficiary of this corporate welfare. The farm bill is larded with subsidies and other rewards for agricultural producers. The eagerness of members of Congress to please their sugar daddies is not surprising. Campaign donations from the sugar industry have topped $3 million in each of the last four political cycles. American consumers and taxpayers, as well as poor farmers overseas, shouldn’t have to pay the price.

President Bush has been on the right side of the debate over farm subsidies. Big Sugar’s sweet deal gave him another good reason to veto the farm bill if it doesn’t cut back on all the goodies.

Walter Williams says most people in the world wish to be as poor as the poor in the US.

People who want more government income redistribution programs often sell their agenda with the lament, “The poor are getting poorer and the rich are getting richer,” but how about some evidence and you decide? I think the rich are getting richer, and so are the poor.

According to the most recent census, about 35 million Americans live in poverty. Heritage Foundation scholar Robert Rector, using several government reports, gives us some insights about these people in his paper: “Understanding Poverty and Economic Inequality in the United States”.

In 1971, only about 32 percent of all Americans enjoyed air conditioning in their homes. By 2001, 76 percent of poor people had air conditioning. In 1971, only 43 percent of Americans owned a color television; in 2001, 97 percent of poor people owned at least one. In 1971, 1 percent of American homes had a microwave oven; in 2001, 73 percent of poor people had one. Forty-six percent of poor households own their homes. Only about 6 percent of poor households are overcrowded. The average poor American has more living space than the average non-poor individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens and other European cities. …

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David Brooks thinks the 2008 election will be decided by the happiness gap.

Some elections are defined by the gap between the rich and the poor. Others are defined by the gap between the left and the right. But this election will be shaped by the gap within individual voters themselves — the gap between their private optimism and their public gloom.

American voters are generally happy with their own lives. Eighty-six percent of Americans say they are content with their jobs, according to the General Social Survey. Seventy-six percent of Americans say they are satisfied with their family income, according to a Pew Research Center survey. Sixty-two percent of Americans expect their personal situation to get better over the next five years, according to a Harris Poll, compared with only 7 percent who expect it to get worse.

Researchers from Pew found that 65 percent of Americans are satisfied over all with their own lives — one of the highest rates of personal satisfaction in the world today. …

… In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt could launch the New Deal because voters wanted to change the country and their own lives. But today, people want the government to change so their own lives can stay the same. Voters don’t want to be transformed; they want to be defended.

Roger Simon reports the Dems are being sued by Ralph Nader.

What happens to old pols when time has passed them by? They sue each other:

Consumer advocate and 2004 independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader sued the Democratic Party on Tuesday, contending officials conspired to keep him from taking votes away from nominee John Kerry.

John Stossel says Utah has historic vote soon on school choice.

Next Tuesday, Utah voters go to the polls to decide if their state will become the first in the nation to offer school vouchers statewide. Referendum 1 would make all public-school kids eligible for vouchers worth from $500 to $3,000 a year, depending on family income. Parents could then use the vouchers to send their children to private schools.

What a great idea. Finally, parents will have choices that wealthy parents have always had. The resulting competition would create better private schools and even improve the government schools.

But wait. Arrayed against the vouchers are the usual opponents. They call themselves Utahns for Public Schools [http://tinyurl.com/25sbtu]. They include, predictably, the Utah Education Association (the teachers union), Utah School Boards Association, Utah School Employees Union, Utah School Superintendents Association, the elementary and secondary school principals associations, and the PTA. No to vouchers! they protest. Trust us. We know what’s best for your kids. …

… For over a century, American children have been in the hands of education bureaucrats. For over 40 years, the government’s system has been dominated by a protectionist teachers’ union that puts itself ahead of the children entrusted to its members. The results are what we should expect from a monopoly financed with money extracted from taxpayers: poor quality, lack of innovation and bored children.

The parents of Utah should be the envy of the rest of the country because on Tuesday, they have a chance to take back control of their children’s education.

Amir Taheri sticks up for the Saudi royals.

The decision by Vince Cable, the acting leader of the Liberal Democrats, to boycott the state visit of King Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz al Saud may win plaudits from the supporters of gesture politics. But gesture politics will not alter the fact that Saudi Arabia is Britain’s largest trading partner in the Middle East and the single biggest customer of its arms.

Nor would it change the strategic reality that the kingdom sits atop a quarter of the world’s oil reserves or that the West needs Saudi co-operation to uproot the Islamist terror, a monster they both created before becoming its joint victims. The truth is that we need to maintain close ties with the country while encouraging its still tentative, fragile attempts to reform itself. …

The Captain with some great posts. John Murtha, the GOP version of a Murtha pig -Ted Stevens, speaking of slimes, what we might learn from John Edwards, and Hillary’s problems in last night’s debate.

Rich Lowry dances on Obama.

When it comes to self-reflection, Barack Obama is an overachiever. At age 46, he has already written two memoirs when most people in public life — sometime at the end of their career — will be lucky to write one.

So far, what Obama seems set to get out of his presidential campaign is yet another memoir — this one an agonized, deeply personal account of how his campaign went nowhere despite all the media hoopla, crowds, and fundraising. It turns out that voters aren’t as interested in Barack Obama as Barack Obama is.

Like Jacob grappling with the angel, Obama, Obama has been wrestling with his own conscience the entire campaign and has come up lame. He has engaged in a running commentary on whether the tactics of his own campaign — down to specific press releases — live up to his standard of audacious hopefulness. Left unclear is why anyone else besides Barack Obama should care.

The insular, self-obsessed campaign of her chief rival is one of the reasons Hillary Clinton has had as good a 90-day run as anyone in presidential politics in recent memory. …

Orin Kerr of Volokh wants to know why a supreme court justice is lobbying congress.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently gave an address on the role of dissenting opinions that included a remarkable explanation for her dissent last term in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber. That case involved a statute regulating when discrimination claims must be filed; the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the lawsuit in that case was filed too late. Justice Ginsburg dissented, and she took the unusual step of reading her dissent from the bench.

In her address, Justice Ginsburg explains that the purpose of her dissent was “to attract immediate public attention and to propel legislative change.” …

James Taranto with a nice example of media bias when reporting the war.

One of the ways in which the media bolster their anti-Iraq narrative is by maximizing the number of U.S. casualties. The figures you hear for the number of deaths–currently approaching 4,000–almost always include noncombat deaths. Roughly 20% of “Iraq war” deaths are from illness, accident, suicide or other “nonhostile” causes.

By this standard, of course, every serviceman in Iraq is doomed, and so are the rest of us. Even for those who perish in combat, war is only the proximate cause of death.

A striking example of “Iraq war” deaths that weren’t appeared last week in the New York Times: …

Thomas Sowell writes on driving while black.

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Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal answers the new crop of atheists – “To regret religion is to regret Western civilization.” (This is a little dense, but Dalrymple is one of our favorites and entitled to our forbearance)

The British parliament’s first avowedly atheist member, Charles Bradlaugh, would stride into public meetings in the 1880s, take out his pocket watch, and challenge God to strike him dead in 60 seconds. God bided his time, but got Bradlaugh in the end. A slightly later atheist, Bertrand Russell, was once asked what he would do if it proved that he was mistaken and if he met his maker in the hereafter. He would demand to know, Russell replied with all the high-pitched fervor of his pedantry, why God had not made the evidence of his existence plainer and more irrefutable. And Jean-Paul Sartre came up with a memorable line: “God doesn’t exist—the bastard!”

Sartre’s wonderful outburst of disappointed rage suggests that it is not as easy as one might suppose to rid oneself of the notion of God. …

… The search for the pure guiding light of reason, uncontaminated by human passion or metaphysical principles that go beyond all possible evidence, continues, however; and recently, an epidemic rash of books has declared success, at least if success consists of having slain the inveterate enemy of reason, namely religion. The philosophers Daniel Dennett, A. C. Grayling, Michel Onfray, and Sam Harris, biologist Richard Dawkins, and journalist and critic Christopher Hitchens have all written books roundly condemning religion and its works. Evidently, there is a tide in the affairs, if not of men, at least of authors.

The curious thing about these books is that the authors often appear to think that they are saying something new and brave. …

… Lying not far beneath the surface of all the neo-atheist books is the kind of historiography that many of us adopted in our hormone-disturbed adolescence, furious at the discovery that our parents sometimes told lies and violated their own precepts and rules. It can be summed up in Christopher Hitchens’s drumbeat in God Is Not Great: “Religion spoils everything.”

What? The Saint Matthew Passion? The Cathedral of Chartres? The emblematic religious person in these books seems to be a Glasgow Airport bomber—a type unrepresentative of Muslims, let alone communicants of the poor old Church of England. It is surely not news, except to someone so ignorant that he probably wouldn’t be interested in these books in the first place, that religious conflict has often been murderous and that religious people have committed hideous atrocities. But so have secularists and atheists, and though they have had less time to prove their mettle in this area, they have proved it amply. If religious belief is not synonymous with good behavior, neither is absence of belief, to put it mildly. ..

Christopher Hitchens helps us make sense of the Kurds and the Turks.

In the past century, the principal victims of genocide or attempted genocide have been, or at least have prominently included, the Armenians, the Jews, and the Kurds. During most of the month of October, events and politicians both conspired to set these three peoples at one another’s throats. What is there to be learned from this fiasco for humanity?

To recapitulate: At the very suggestion that the U.S. House of Representatives might finally pass a long-proposed resolution recognizing the 1915 massacres in Armenia as a planned act of “race murder” (that was U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau’s term for it at a time when the word genocide had not yet been coined), the Turkish authorities redoubled their threat to invade the autonomous Kurdish-run provinces of northern Iraq. And many American Jews found themselves divided between their sympathy for the oppressed and the slaughtered and their commitment to the state interest of Israel, which maintains a strategic partnership with Turkey, and in particular with Turkey’s highly politicized armed forces.

To illuminate this depressing picture, one might begin by offering a few distinctions. In 1991, in northern Iraq, where you could still see and smell the gassed and poisoned towns and villages of Kurdistan, I heard Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan say that Kurds ought to apologize to the Armenians for the role they had played as enforcers for the Ottomans during the time of the genocide. Talabani, who has often repeated that statement, is now president of Iraq. (I would regard his unforced statement as evidence in itself, by the way, in that proud peoples do not generally offer to apologize for revolting crimes that they did not, in fact, commit.) So, of course, it was upon him, both as an Iraqi and as a Kurd, that Turkish guns and missiles were trained last month. …

WSJ reports the story behind the posthumous Medal of Honor award to Navy Lt. Michael Murphy.

At the White House last week, the parents of Navy Lt. Michael Murphy received the Medal of Honor posthumously awarded to their son. One of his former SEAL teammates, Marcus Luttrell, was on hand in the East Room but not entirely there. As a military aide read the citation extolling Lt. Murphy for his “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life” during a ferocious firefight in Afghanistan in 2005, Mr. Luttrell’s mind was firmly back in the mountains of the Hindu Kush on the day that Lt. Murphy died.

“Somebody had to tap me on the shoulder to bring me back. I kind of zoned out,” Mr. Luttrell recalled in an interview two days after the ceremony. As he spoke, his thoughts seemed to drift back to the battle again. “I remember how loud it was. And I remember our lungs being on fire”–but here he paused, then added: “I was thinking that nobody can have any idea what the hell happened up on that mountain that day.”

The bare outlines are harrowing enough. A four-man contingent of Navy SEALs were inserted by helicopter at night on June 28, 2005, in the desolate mountain region near the border with Pakistan. …

Gabriel Schoenfeld writing in the Weekly Standard brings a grown-up view to the torture debate.

THE INTERROGATION TECHNIQUES used by the Bush administration in the war on terror, says the editorial page of the New York Times, have “dishonored” our history. Have we, the paper asks while wagging its finger, become “a nation that tortures human beings and then concocts legal sophistries to confuse the world”? Even if one does not share the accusatory purposes of the Times, millions of thinking Americans are wondering if the use of torture in our battle with al Qaeda is ever legitimate.

But what exactly is torture? International treaties in force, including the Torture Convention, ban its use. But torture itself remains difficult to define. This was a point driven home in the testimony given in his confirmation hearings by Michael Mukasey, President Bush’s nominee for the position of Attorney General. …

Thomas Sowell points to the bad laws that originate many of today’s problems.

It is remarkable how many political “solutions” today are dealing with problems created by previous political “solutions.” Three examples that come to mind immediately are the housing market crisis, the wildfires in southern California, and the water shortages in the west.

Congress and the Bush administration are currently vying with each other to come up with a solution to the housing crisis, brought on by widespread defaults on home mortgage loans — especially defaults by those who took out risky “subprime” loans.

Why were borrowers taking out risky loans in the first place? And why were lenders willing to lend to risky borrowers? In both cases, the government was a prime factor in “subprime” loans. …

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Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post provides on overview of the Iranian nuclear crisis touched on yesterday by Gerard Baker of the London Times.

It goes without saying that if and when a decision is made in Jerusalem or Washington to carry out an attack against Iran’s nuclear installations the public will only learn of the decision in retrospect. All the same, over the last few weeks, it has been impossible to miss the fact that the Iranian nuclear program has become the subject of intense and ever increasing international scrutiny. This naturally gives rise to the impression that something is afoot.

Take for example the head of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency Muhammad elBaradei’s recent remarks on the subject. Speaking to ,Le Monde on Monday, elBaradei asserted that it will take Iran between three to eight years to acquire a nuclear arsenal. Consequently, he argued, there is no reason to consider conducting a military strike against Teheran’s program. There is still plenty of time for diplomacy, or sanctions or even incentives for the ayatollahs, he said.

ElBaradei’s statement is only interesting when it is compared to a statement he made in December 2005 to the Independent. Back then Baradei’s view was that Iran was just “a few months” away from producing atomic bombs. But then too he saw no reason to attack. As he put it when he warned that Iran was on the precipice of nuclear weapons, using force would just “open Pandora’s box.” “There would be efforts to isolate Iran; Iran would retaliate, and at the end of the day, you have to go back to the negotiation table to find the solution,” elBaradei warned.

Given that the IAEA’s Egyptian chief has been unstinting in his view that no obstacle should be placed in Iran’s path to nuclear bombs, what makes his statements from 2005 and today interesting is what they tell us about his changing perception of the West’s intentions. At the end of 2005, he was fairly certain that the West – led by the US – lacked the will to attack Iran. By making the statement he made at the time, he sought to demoralize the West and so convince it that there was nothing to be done to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Now, when faced with a real possibility that the US or Israel or a combination of states are ready and willing to attack Iran’s nuclear installations, elBaradei seeks to undermine them by questioning the salience of the threat. …

Couple of good posts from VDH’s blog.

Rosett Report. Kofi’s knighthood kreates Klaudia komments.

Yes, in the giddy afterlife of his departure from the UN Executive Suite, Kofi Annan has now received an honorary knighthood. In a private ceremony at Buckingham Palace, he was made an honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St. Michael and St. George. We are at least spared the prospect of referring to him as “Sir Kofi.” Unlike Annan’s former deputy, Mark Malloch Brown, who is now both “Sir” and “Lord,” it seems that Annan, not being British, is not entitled to be a “Sir.”

But honestly, who can keep up? Regardless of performance, UN high officials — past and present — seem to move these days through an endless shower of prizes and awards, Nobels and knighthoods, accolades and directorships (Annan has also just joined the board of Ted Turner’s UN Foundation). …

John Fund covers the battle over the fairness doctrine.

It wasn’t that hard for Indiana’s Rep. Mike Pence to build media and congressional support for his Free Flow of Information Act, which would protect the confidentiality of contacts between reporters and sources. It passed the House this month by an overwhelming vote of 398-21. His next battle will be a lot harder–to permanently ban the Fairness Doctrine, the regulation many liberals are now actively trying to revive in an effort to silence their critics.

Until the FCC scrapped the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, it required broadcasters to provide equal time to all sides of “controversial” issues. In practice, this led to what Bill Monroe, a former host of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” called “timid, don’t-rock-the-boat coverage.” On radio, Newsweek’s Howard Fineman notes, it “effectively kept partisan shows off the airwaves,” so that in 1980 there were a mere 75 talk radio stations. Today there are 1,800. …

Alvaro Vargas Llosa in Tech Central on free markets contribution to alleviating poverty.

… The fact that 20 percent of the world’s population is extremely poor should not make us forget that millions of lives have improved dramatically in the last three decades. Illiteracy has dropped from 44 percent to 18 percent, and only three countries out of a total of 102 included in the U.N.’s Human Development Index have seen their socioeconomic conditions deteriorate. China’s economy used to represent one-26th of the average economy of the countries that comprise the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; today it represents one-sixth.

These are not arcane facts. They are widely available and easy to understand. Publications such as Indur Goklany’s “The Improving State of the World,” David Dollar and Aart Kraay’s report on the global economy, and Francois Bourguignon and Christian Morrisson’s “Inequality Among World Citizens” — to mention but three among many recent studies — provide overwhelming evidence that the world is better off thanks to the increased flow of capital, goods, services and ideas. …

Rod Dreher, Louisiana ex-pat, exalts on Jindal win.

Alas for me, I didn’t get to cast a vote for Bobby Jindal, the winner of last weekend’s Louisiana governor’s race. It’s been 15 years since I left the Bayou.

The last time I voted in a gubernatorial contest there, it felt less like a civic duty than an occasion of sin. I pulled the lever for Democrat Edwin W. Edwards — instead of my fellow Republican, David Duke — following the instruction of the bumper sticker on my car: “Vote for the Crook. It’s Important.” …

List Universe has the top 30 failed predictions in technology. One “expert” showed up twice. “The experts don’t know jack” – Pckrhd

“Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.” — Lord Kelvin, British mathematician and physicist, president of the British Royal Society, 1895.

 

“X-rays will prove to be a hoax.” — Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, 1883.

John Tierney shows how NY’s trans fat ban is a cascade.

… The American Council on Science and Health, a private advocacy group, encountered similar fears, as Elizabeth Whelan, the president of ACSH, told me:

It is extremely obvious to us that the biggest recent cascade of all is trans fat mania. What a gift that was for the food industry. They know that the majority of people who see “no trans fats” on a label think it means reduced in calories–or in some way is just healthier. We at ACSH interviewed 10 top lipid specialists about trans fats and “artery clogging” effects—and all of them agreed with the ACSH position (that the trans fat mania is based on hype). But none of them wanted to be quoted. Amazing.

How many deaths from heart disease will be prevented by the restaurant ban on trans fat? Our best guess is zero. …

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Returning to the war zone, US soldier posts on the US portion of his trip.

Gerard Baker of London Times wonders why we might need to outfit B2 stealth bombers so they can carry 30,000 lb. bombs.

… The only real question about the next phase in this war is whether an escalation by the US, in a pre-emptive strike against Iranian nuclear facilities, would further American – and Western – objectives, or impede them. The evidence is increasingly suggesting that the costs of not acting are equal to or larger than the costs of acting.

Military action is not inevitable; yesterday the US again emphasised the diplomatic option with a strengthening of economic sanctions. And it’s still possible that someone will prevail on the Iranians to ditch their menacing and destructive aims. But it is starting to look as though, with not much more than a year left in his term, President Bush has decided, as he surveys the unedifying global territory of ideological and state-backed terror, that he needs to clean house.

And a 30,000lb MOP might be just the job.

Mark Steyn takes exception to a Newsweek column claiming the movie “Deliverance” as a metaphor for the war in Iraq.

… That’s the real flaw in Christopher Dickey’s “Deliverance” metaphor: If Cheney is Burt Reynolds, and the rest of America is Jon Voight, and the river is Iraq, who are the hillbillies? Well, presumably (for he doesn’t spell it out) they’re the dark forces you make yourself vulnerable to when you blunder into somewhere you shouldn’t be. When the quartet returns to Atlanta a man short, they may understand how thin the veneer of civilization is, but they don’t have to worry that their suburban cul-de-sacs will be overrun and reduced to the same state of nature as the backwoods.

That’s the flaw in the thesis: Robert D. Kaplan, a shrewd observer of global affairs, has referred to the jihadist redoubts and other lawless fringes of the map as “Indian territory.” It’s a cute joke but a misleading one. The difference between the old Indian territory and the new is this: No one had to worry about the Sioux riding down Fifth Avenue, just as Burt Reynolds never had to worry about the mountain man breaking into his rec room. But Iran has put bounties on London novelists, assassinated dissidents in Paris, blown up community centers in Buenos Aires, seeded proxy terror groups in Lebanon and Palestine, radicalized Muslim populations throughout Central Asia – and it’s now going nuclear. The leaders of North Korea, Sudan and Syria are not stump-toothed Appalachian losers: Their emissaries wear suits and dine in Manhattan restaurants every night.

Life is not a movie, especially when your enemies don’t watch the same movies, and don’t buy into the same tired narratives. To return to that 1996 presidential race, Bob Dole, apropos Pat Buchanan’s experience hosting a CNN talk-show, muttered testily at one point, “I was in the real crossfire. It wasn’t on television. It was over in Italy somewhere, a long time ago.” Happy the land for whom crossfire is purely televisual and metaphorical. But, when it turns real, it’s important to know the difference.

Charles Krauthammer answers complaints about the GOP field.

Major grumbling among conservatives about the Republican field. So many candidates, so many flaws. Rudy Giuliani, abortion apostate. Mitt Romney, flip-flopper. John McCain, Mr. Amnesty. Fred Thompson, lazy boy. Where is the paragon? Where is Ronald Reagan?

Well, what about Reagan? This president, renowned for his naps, granted amnesty to 3 million illegal immigrants in the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli bill. As governor of California, he signed the most liberal abortion legalization bill in America, then flip-flopped and became an abortion opponent. What did he do about it as president? Gave us Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy, the two swing votes that upheld and enshrined Roe v. Wade for the last quarter-century.

The point is not to denigrate Reagan but to bring a little realism to the gauzy idol worship that fuels today’s discontent. And to argue that in 2007 we have, by any reasonable historical standard, a fine Republican field: …

Bill Kristol has similar thoughts about GOP prospects.

“In case you missed it, a few days ago Senator Clinton tried to spend $1 million on the Woodstock concert museum. Now, my friends, I wasn’t there. I’m sure it was a cultural and pharmaceutical event. I was tied up at the time.” This jab by John McCain at Hillary Clinton at the most recent Republican presidential debate received the evening’s only standing ovation. Admittedly, those standing were partisan Florida Republicans. Still, it was a moment–in its combination of high-spirited playfulness and polemical sharpness–that made me think happier days may lie ahead for the GOP.

The first two years of George W. Bush’s second term were rough: the situation in Iraq worsened, and his key domestic proposals–Social Security and immigration reform–flopped. The big Republican losses last November followed. Since then, it’s been conventional wisdom (including among many Republicans) that 2008 is likely to be a replay of 2006–this time leading to the loss of the White House too. But this conventional wisdom could well be wrong. …

Roger Simon has his election thoughts.

Adam Smith responds to latest sky is falling environmental report.

Yesterday the UN released another ‘doom and gloom’ report about the world’s environment, claiming that humanity could face extinction if it doesn’t change its wicked ways.

The report will undoubtedly be used by environmentalists to justify all manner of government interference in our lives. The thing they’re missing, however, is that property rights and a properly functioning free market would solve almost all of the problems the UN report details. The exhaustion of fish stocks, for instance, is a classic tragedy of the commons situation. In Norway, where fishing policies are based on private property rights, fish stocks are thriving. …

The Economist reviews a book on the human cost of Stalin’s Soviet Union.

ONE of Russia’s most popular television shows is “Wait For Me”, a true-life tear-jerker that finds and reunites separated couples and families. Sometimes the stories it tells are run-of-the-mill melodramas that could have happened anywhere. But often they are tragically Russian, combining huge distances, lavish and indiscriminate cruelty and impenetrable bureaucracy: siblings separated 70 years ago when their parents were executed; lovers who lost one another in prison camps. …

 

… There are incredible reunions in this book, achieved through impossible stamina and ingenuity. But there are also homecomings as terrible in their way as exile: parents who finally reclaim children from orphanages, but live out their relationships in stigma and silence, for ever hoarding food and quailing before policemen. Husbands and wives remarry, thinking their spouses are dead. Sometimes those left behind remain true believers; sometimes it is the returnees who still are. Some hide their pasts from families for decades, as the authorities obfuscate and lie to cover up the extent of their crimes.

It is perhaps a failing—though a fitting one—that people sometimes get lost in this book, disconcertingly reappearing after long gaps, just as they reappeared in reality after alienating absences. Some of Mr Figes’s judgments are cursory. But this is a humbling monument to the evil and endurance of Russia’s Soviet past and, implicitly, a guide to its present.

He writes of the “genetic fear” that percolates through generations, and the need to believe in bad rulers because the alternative, believing in nothing, could be worse. “Either they were guilty”, Simonov says of Stalin’s victims, “or it was impossible to understand.” The terror, Mr Figes notes, “tore apart the moral ties that hold together a society.” It is still recovering.

Talk about a contrarian, WSJ op-ed by middle-age man who starts smoking.

To all the other superlatives used to describe China we may now add the fact that it has the tastiest cigarettes. I don’t pretend to be a connoisseur, having only begun smoking a couple weeks ago, but then again I’ve been inhaling the smoke of Chinese cigarettes for years.

The country consumes about one-third of the world’s cigarettes. As a student, I often carried a pack just to offer to others. Want to start a conversation on a train in China? Shake the pack. Asking directions? Hold out a stick and say, “chou yi ger.” If the guy is already smoking, he’ll tuck it behind his ear for later. …

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Jeff Jacoby reports on a Federalist Society debate.

… “This notion that presidents in our system of government don’t have to carry out laws authorized by Congress is absolutely preposterous,” the speaker said. “If that were the case — if Congress’s laws are merely advisory — why would you need a veto?” A president who disapproves of a bill should say so in a veto message — that’s why the Constitution gives him veto power in the first place. Bush’s hundreds of signing statements are an “open power grab” that Americans should find intolerable. “We ought to be adamantly opposed to any claim that the president doesn’t have to abide by laws that Congress has passed and he has signed.”

That may sound like Senator Hillary Clinton, who denounces the Bush administration’s “concerted effort . . . to create a more powerful executive at the expense of both branches of government and of the American people” and promises to sharply roll back the use of signing statements if she becomes president.

But the speaker wasn’t Clinton, nor any other liberal or Democrat. It was former Georgia congressman Bob Barr, a staunch conservative best known for his leading role in the 1999 impeachment of Bill Clinton. An outspoken defender of privacy rights and other civil liberties, Barr has long decried what he calls the “frightening erosion” of constitutional protections under Bush. At a forum hosted by the Boston chapter of the Federalist Society, he was debating another staunch conservative: John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and a former Justice Department official whose thinking strongly influenced the administration’s claims of presidential power after Sept. 11. …

… These debates began long before Bush arrived; they’ll continue after he leaves. We should welcome them as signs not just of factiousness, but of strength: Americans argue about fundamental freedoms because Americans are fundamentally free.

Claudia Rosett picks up on the idea, retailed in Canada, the UN should move to Montreal. She likes it. We do too.

David Warren likes the confrontation of Islamo-Fascist week.

This is “Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week” in the USA. To Canadian eyes that will sound a little confrontational — we’ve always been better at walking the walk, than talking the talk. But let me assure my reader, that even if our media are not much reporting it, the thing is happening. On more than 100 university campuses across the United States, from U.C. Berkeley to George Washington in D.C., a large roster of speakers are directly confronting crowds of very loud and angry campus Leftists and Islamists, to make politically incorrect points about radical Islam, backed by a range of panel discussions, book stalls, and supporting exhibits. …

The Captain posts on the proposed mob move to whack Giuliani 20 years ago. And on the gambler stiffed by an Indian casino.

Samizdata post on the anti-war folks who make our warriors better.

Over the summer I reread one of my favourite books of the century so far, How The West Has Won: Carnage and Culture From Salamis to Vietnam by Victor Davis Hanson (which was published in October 2001). In this, Hanson makes much of the Western habit of what he calls “civilian audit” of military affairs. Armchair complaining and grilling of often quite successful generals for often rather minor failures in the course of what often eventually turn into major victories. Sidelining Patton for winning some battles but then slapping a soldier. Denouncing Douglas Haig forever for winning too nastily on the Western Front. Votes of Confidence in the Commons during the dark days of World War 2. Most recently, General Petraeus being grilled on TV. That kind of thing.

Another Samizdata post on how softly insidious is the totalitarian state.

I have argued in the past that violent repression, gulags and mass murder are not in fact the defining characteristics for a state to be ‘totalitarian’. …

… my view is that we in the west are already well on the way to a new form of post-modern totalitarian state (what Guy Herbert calls ‘soft fascism’) in which behaviour and opinions which are disapproved of by the political class are pathologised and then regulated by violence backed laws “for your own good” or “for the children” or “for the environment”.

And so we have force backed regulations setting out the minutia of a parent’s interactions with their own children, vast reams on what sort of speech or expression is and is not permitted in a workplace, rules forbidding a property owner allowing consenting adults from smoking in a place of business, what sorts of insults are permitted, rules covering almost every significant aspect of how you can or cannot build or modify your own house on your own property, moves to restrict what sort of foods can be sold, what kind of light bulbs are allowed, and the latest one, a move to require smokers to have a ‘license to smoke‘. Every aspect of self-ownership is being removed and non-compliance criminalised and/or pathologised. …

A Corner post shows how William and Mary is helping soft totalitarianism get started.

If you find The Corner hard to believe, here’s the William & Mary site. Look at the last sentence below; “Confidentiality will be honored unless reporting individual provides contact information.”

In order to promote a diverse and respectful campus community, the College considers acts of hate and bias unacceptable and adversative to our commitment to a welcoming and inclusive community. The College’s diversity statement reads “the College of William and Mary strives to be a place where people of all backgrounds feel at home, where diversity is actively embraced, and where each individual takes responsibility for upholding the dignity of all members of the community.”

The Bias Reporting System was established to assist members of the William and Mary community who have been affected by incidents involving bias related to race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or other protected conditions. The system provides multiple modes of reporting to include personal contact, online form, or faxed form. Confidentiality will be honored unless reporting individual provides contact information.

There is hope. Students are anonymously operating a blog titled Free America’s Alma Mater.org.

Let’s Disband William and Mary’s new Schoolyard Tattletale System before the Lawsuits Commence and William and Mary again becomes the subject of national jokes …

Slate has interesting details from the new Howard Kurtz book.

Stunning book review from Contentions.

In God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World, Walter Russell Mead coyly claims that the originality of his interpretation of the roots of Anglo-Saxon primacy rests in its focus on the meaning, as opposed to the mere dimensions, of American power. This is too modest: Mead’s achievement is larger than that. His real accomplishment is to restore religion to its rightful place in the history of Great Britain and the United States, and their roles in the world. This no small feat. It’s hard enough to explain why Britain—a small island in the North Sea lacking all natural resources except coal, potatoes, and herring—rose to be the first of the great powers by 1815, and equally hard to explain how the United States inherited and adapted the British system in the 20th century. Factoring the influence of religion into this dynamic is vastly more difficult, but Mead does an admirable job of it.

The historic grand strategy of Great Britain and the United States, as Mead understands it, is simply told: Britain was the world’s first enduringly liberal modern society, and the first practitioner of an open and dynamic economic system that traded throughout the world, relying on its navy to defend its trade routes. This system provided Britain the resources to fight and win its wars, and the power and self-confidence to promote liberal values and institutions. In the 20th century, the United States, shaped by its British inheritance, took over the role of protector of this maritime order from the totalitarian empires and enemies of modernity that continued to threaten it, of whom al Qaeda is merely the latest example. But the rise of Britain as a liberal capitalist power is only the better known half of the story. While capitalism generates resources and tax revenues on a scale unimaginable to early modern empires, it poses a big problem: the vast expansion of state power. Once the revenues begin to flow, in other words, the challenge becomes limiting the power of the state.

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Power Line introduces us to French philosopher André Glucksmann whose City Journal essay is a major part of Pickings tonight.

Dutch blogger Michael van der Galiën says Holland has received the ultimate insult – accused of cowardice by French philosophers. Beside the amusement, this is a back door way to tout André Glucksmann and to give an update on Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Pickerhead does understand French jokes may not be in good taste now, but he can’t help himself.

Things have gotten so bad in the Netherlands that even French intellectuals are now accusing us of “unacceptable cowardice” because of the way Ayaan Hirsi Ali was treated recently. Several intellectuals wrote an open letter, which was published in the French newspaper Libération. In it, Pascal Bruckner, Luc Ferry, Alain Finkielkraut, André Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri Levy don’t just accuse the Dutch of cowardly behavior, they also call on their own government to offer Ayaan Hirsi Ali the French nationality.

Here is Monsieur Glucksmann as he tries to explain his thoughts about why “Modern terrorism seeks to combine the annihilating power of Hiroshima with the nihilistic gospel of Auschwitz.”

With what measureless naivety has the twenty-first-century democratic citizen managed to be surprised when hate breaks down his door? He has—along with his father and his father’s father—witnessed, directly or indirectly, wars, murderous revolutions, and the genocides that were the last century’s specialty. How could he believe himself immune? “Not here, not me,” he told himself. But then, on September 11, 2001, Americans saw several thousand of their own assassinated, for no reason. There they were, unsuspecting, in their usual places, at work or at a café, white, black, and yellow, housewife and banker, when they suddenly realized that they were targets of an indiscriminate, merciless will to kill. …

 

 

… What threatens Iraqi society is not Vietnamization but Somalization. Recall Operation Restore Hope, in which an international force, led by Americans, disembarked in Mogadishu in 1993, seeking to ensure the survival of a population that was starving and being massacred by rival clans. After losing 19 in a horrific trap, the GIs left. The rest is well known. An angry President Clinton swore “never again,” and a year later refused to intervene in Rwanda, where 5,000 blue helmets would have been enough to interrupt the genocide that wiped out as many as 1 million Tutsi in three months.

The Somalian model has spread across the planet, from the Congo to chaotic East Timor to Afghanistan, where the Taliban have violently resurfaced, to Iraq. Populations are taken hostage, terrorized, and sacrificed, the spoils of wars by local gangsters. Under various pretexts—religion, ethnicity, makeshift racist or nationalist ideology—commandos contend for power at the point of AK-47s. They fight against unarmed populations; most of their victims are women and children. Terrorism is not the prerogative of Islamists alone: the targeting of civilians has been used by a regular army and by militias under the command of the Kremlin in Chechnya, where the capital city of Grozny was razed to the ground. Where the killers appeal to the Koran, it is still primarily Muslim passersby who suffer. Algeria, Somalia, and Darfur (at least 200,000 dead and millions of refugees in just a few years, with the Sudanese government, protected by China and Russia, acting with impunity) are live laboratories of the abomination of abominations: war against civilians. …

… Astrophysicists have found, wandering in the starry expanse, certain black holes. When faraway stars come into contact with them, the stars disappear, along with their planets, swallowed by bottomless darkness. From the beginning, human civilizations have existed alongside analogous moral abysses, which foreshadow an end of all things. According to tradition, such annihilation suggests a jealous and vengeful divinity, or malevolent demons.

In their endeavor to understand the black holes that threaten societies, the inventors of Western philosophy, comparing them to natural cataclysms, earthquakes, volcanoes, and epidemics, refused to see in them a supernatural sanction or to deny the responsibility of mortals. If God is not a cause, the darkness that threatens to overtake humanity is human, irreducible to an impersonal fate. The destructive principle inheres in us, whether we know it or not—this is the persistent message of the tragedians. Hate moves like Thucydides’s plague, not a purely physiological condition but an essentially mental disorder, which takes over bodies, minds, and society. The idea of a contagion of hatred must be taken literally: hatred spreads hatred, an outbreak that inoculates itself against all who oppose it.

Maybe one day, we will view the last century with nostalgia, even if it was dealt Auschwitz and Hiroshima. For today’s terrorism strives to mix these two ingredients into new cocktails of horror. During the cold war, the threat to man was dual: one, between two blocs, involved reciprocal annihilation; the other, terrorist, confined the savage extermination of civilian populations to the interior of each camp. Today, global terrorism eliminates geostrategic borders and traditional taboos. The last seconds of the condemned of Manhattan, of Atocha, and of the London Underground sent us two messages: “Here abandon all hope,” the Dantesque injunction carried by a bomb that wipes the slate clean; and “Here there is no reason why,” the nihilist gospel of SS officers. Hiroshima signified the technical possibility of a desert that approaches closer and closer to the absolute; Auschwitz represented the deliberate and lucid pursuit of total annihilation. The conjunction of these two forms of the will to nothingness looms in the black holes of modern hatred. …

John Stossel says the global warming debate is not over.

First he won the Oscar — then the Nobel Peace Prize. He’s being called a “prophet.”

Impressive, considering that one of former Vice President Al Gore’s chief contributions has been to call the debate over global warming “over” and to marginalize anyone who disagrees. Although he favors major government intervention to stop global warming, he says, “the climate crisis is not a political issue. It is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity”.

Give me a break.

If you must declare a debate over, then maybe it’s not. And if you have to gussy up your agenda as “our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level,” then it deserves some skeptical examination. …

The Captain has the end game in Jena, LA. Would you be surprised to learn the MSM story is mostly BS?

Over the past month, the press and a good deal of the blogosphere has thundered over the racial motivations of the town of Jena, Louisiana, after a series of incidents supposedly showed the bigotry of its people and its government. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton called Jena the new Selma of the civil-rights movement. Activists pressured presidential candidates into making appearances in Jena and statements regarding the allegedly harsher punishments given to black students for assault and battery. The nation assumed that the South still couldn’t give justice equally regardless of race.

Craig Franklin of the Christian Science Monitor says that assumption comes from a national media too lazy to do any reporting on its own. He should know; he lives in Jena and his wife teaches at the high school at the center of the controversy. The media failed to learn anything from the Duke non-rape case and swallowed myths whole rather than investigate and report facts: …

Don Boudreaux has the ultimate “dirty job” – running for office.

… You confidently insist that no issue is beyond your comprehension and no problem beyond your ability to solve. You pretend to be simultaneously a master of foreign policy, military strategy, economics, law, political horse-trading and even environmental science. If elected, you will publicly swear to uphold the Constitution and then immediately proceed to violate it in ways too numerous to count.

In short, in this job you must soil your honor and sell your soul by behaving foolishly and by saying things that you know to be false. Without question it is the dirtiest and most repellent job that anyone with a conscience can possibly try his or her hand at.

H.L. Mencken saw clearly the nature of this dirty job. About the politician, Baltimore’s Bard wrote:

He is willing to embrace any issue, however idiotic, that will get him votes, and he is willing to sacrifice any principle, however sound, that will lose them for him. I do not describe the democratic politician at his inordinate worst; I describe him as he is encountered in the full sunshine of normalcy.

To Mike Rowe I say: If you want really to get dirty, to soil yourself so deeply that soap will never wash away the grime, run successfully for political office.

That’s the ultimate dirty job.

Cafe Hayek has more of ethanol’s bad news.

The public panic caused by climate change alarmists is actually worsening our supply of natural resources, as predicted by some skeptics. This is certainly the case with bio-fuels, which have dramatically increased food prices, causing severe problems for import dependant developing countries. Now it is even threatening our water supply, as demonstrated by Cornell University professor David Pimentel.

The production of corn-based ethanol, a heavily subsidized source of bio-fuel, consumes roughly four gallons of water per gallon of fuel. However this does not include all the water needed for growing the corn in the first place. That amount adds up to the incredible figure of 1,700 gallons of water per gallon ethanol. …

Christian Science Monitor says dittos.

… the problems of mass- producing this type of ethanol are beginning to crop up. …

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Debra Saunders on the Stark raving mad congressman from CA and how his remarks might play out for the Dems in ’08.

… In 2008, Democratic hopefuls are twice as likely to have been in law school than in boot camp. …

 

… Three years ago, Democrats shamelessly donned a military mantle. In a display of craven opportunism, they embraced an argument that seemed phony then, and now has vanished. They argued their candidate was better because he was a combat vet. Today, none of the Dems’ top three candidates has a military record.

Here are three words you won’t hear from the nominee at the 2008 Democratic National Convention: Reporting for duty.

WaPo editorial on Clinton fund raising.

DONORS WHOSE addresses turn out to be tenements. Dishwashers and waiters who write $1,000 checks. Immigrants who ante up because they have been instructed to by powerful neighborhood associations, or, as one said, “They informed us to go, so I went.” Others who say they never made the contributions listed in their names or who were not eligible to give because they are not legal residents of the United States. This is the disturbingly familiar picture of Hillary Rodham Clinton‘s presidential campaign presented last week in a report by the Los Angeles Times about questionable fundraising by the New York senator in New York City‘s Chinese community. …

Which leads to Jonah Goldberg’s LA Times column; Candidate Hillary: the GOP’s dream A campaign against Sen. Clinton may give Republicans the best shot at running as the party of change.

The Captain posts on another prize pick.

The Nobel committee has certainly fallen on desperate times, and especially so this year. First they award a peace prize to Al Gore for his global-warming hysterics, apparently because the science committee understood the extent of his exaggerations in An Inconvenient Truth. They awarded the literature prize to British author Doris Lessing, who disqualified herself for the peace prize by claiming that Americans were just too sensitive about having 3,000 murdered by terrorists on 9/11 …

He also posts on a couple of anniversaries, Beirut and Bork.

Rob Bluey analyzes the close congressional race in MA and shows how GOP tech wizards are catching up to the netroots. One of the wizards is David All who designed Pickerhead’s web site.

The Republican money machine seemed unstoppable just two years ago. The GOP consistently outperformed the Democratic Party, extending years of dominance in fundraising. But two years is an eternity in politics, and the situation today, particularly among presidential candidates, illustrates just how far Republicans have fallen.

There’s little doubt Republicans are paying the price for an unpopular war in Iraq, reckless spending when they controlled Congress, and embarrassing scandals that continue to tarnish their own. Conservatives have gone to great lengths to create a new brand for the party, but such endeavors won’t change minds overnight or even in this election cycle.

Then along came Jim Ogonowski, an anti-establishment and anti-Washington crusader from liberal Massachusetts. Ogonowski ran a remarkably close race (for being a Republican) in the Bay State’s 5th District, losing last week by just 6 percentage points against Democrat Niki Tsongas, the widow of former Democratic presidential candidate and Sen. Paul Tsongas. A loss is a loss, but to come that close in state without a single Republican congressman means he must have done something right. …

Hugh Hewitt posts on an exchange he had with Howard Kurtz on MSM bias and the end of network news.

Thomas Sowell with advice for the college bound.

High school seniors who want to go to a selective college in the fall of 2008 should already be making arrangements to take the tests they will need before they apply ahead of the deadlines for such schools, which are usually in January or February.

One of the consequences of taking these tests is that, if you do well, you may be deluged with literature from colleges and universities all across the country.

Some students may feel flattered that Harvard, Yale or M.I.T. seems to be dying to have them apply. But the brutal reality is that the reason for wanting so many youngsters to apply is so that they can be rejected.

Why? Because the prestige ranking of a college or university as a “selective” institution is measured by how small a percentage of its applicants are accepted. So they have to get thousands of young people to apply, so that they can be rejected. …

Neal Boortz posts on news of amazing health care fraud in FL.

Medical fraud in south Florida is rearing its ugly, expensive head … again. Let’s start with this. A Miami-area medical equipment supplier somehow managed to bill the U.S. taxpayers so often for one wheelchair that it ended up costing taxpayers $5 million.

Here’s another example. A south Florida company billed Medicare for millions of dollars worth of special asthma medication. The owner claimed it was for his local pharmacy. The only problem was the man was not a pharmacist, he was an air conditioner repairman.

It gets even better. Last year south Florida accounted for 80 percent of the drugs billed for Medicare beneficiaries with HIV/AIDS. That figure again? Eighty percent. That’s 80 percent of the total money spent on HIV drugs across the entire country. And yet south Florida only has one in ten of eligible HIV/AIDS patients. …

Volokh post on ethanol foolishness.

Dilbert’s here.