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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. …