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Hopefully someone will make more of John Conyers accidentally telling the truth about not reading the laws they pass. For now, we have Mark Steyn’s Corner post which we will put in first place.
… Thousand-page bills, unread and indeed unwritten at the time of passage, are the death of representative government. They also provide a clue as to why, in a country this large, national government should be minimal and constrained. …
Washington Times editors are on it.
… Mr. Conyers might think it’s an antiquated notion that congressmen actually read legislation, but it is the most fundamental responsibility of elected representatives to know and understand laws and how they will affect the lives of their constituents. …
… The notion is put to rest that government might cooperate with doctors and patients to work out what is best for providing care. The health care bill uses the assertive word “shall” 1,683 times. These passages are government mandates that force doctors, consumers and others in the health care profession to do what Congress orders. The word “penalty” is used 156 times for those who don’t follow orders. “Tax” is referred to 172 times. …
George Gilder writes in the American.com about the importance to the world, of Israel and its people.
… At the heart of anti-Semitism is resentment of Jewish achievement. Today that achievement is concentrated in Israel. Obscured by the usual media coverage of the “war-torn” Middle East, Israel has become one of the most important economies in the world, second only to the United States in its pioneering of technologies benefitting human life, prosperity, and peace.
But so it has always been. Israel, like the Jews throughout history, is hated not for her vices but her virtues. Israel is hated, as the United States is hated, because Israel is successful, because Israel is free, and because Israel is good.
As Maxim Gorky put it: “Whatever nonsense the anti-Semites may talk, they dislike the Jew only because he is obviously better, more adroit, and more capable of work than they are.” Whether driven by culture or genes—or like most behavior, an inextricable mix—the fact of Jewish genius is demonstrable. It can be gainsaid only by people who do not expect to be believed. …
… For all its special features and extreme manifestations, anti-Semitism is a reflection of the hatred toward successful middlemen, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, lenders, bankers, financiers, and other capitalists that is visible everywhere whenever an identifiable set of outsiders outperforms the rest of the population in the economy. This is true whether the offending excellence comes from the Kikuyu in Kenya; the Ibo and the Yoruba in Nigeria; the overseas Indians and whites in Uganda and Zimbabwe; the Lebanese in West Africa, South America, and around the world; the Parsis in India; the Indian Gujaratis in South and East Africa; the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire; and above all the more than 30 million overseas Chinese in Indonesia, Malaysia, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.
Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution reports that in Indonesia the Chinese were 5 percent of the population, but they controlled 70 percent of private domestic capital and ran three-quarters of the nation’s top 200 businesses. Their economic dominance—and their repeated victimization in ghastly massacres—prompts Sowell to comment: “Although the overseas Chinese have long been known as the ‘Jews of Southeast Asia,’ perhaps Jews might more aptly be called the overseas Chinese of Europe.”
As Sowell writes, these “middlemen minorities,” their “wealth inexplicable, their superiority intolerable,” typically arouse hatred from competing intellectuals. “It is not usually the masses of the people who most resent the more productive people in their midst. More commonly, it is the intelligentsia, who may with sufficiently sustained effort spread their own resentments to others.” …
With his eminent good sense and calm demeanor, Tunku Varadarajan writes on Gates. He gets his dates wrong, but that will serve as a “teachable moment” here. Actually, the arrest was July 16th. It received some notice, but interest had waned until the July 22nd presser. Makes Pickerhead think there’s a back story here. It would be interesting to know what communications existed in the interim between Gates and Obama… or Michelle.
… 8. A final word on how this episode, for all its sordidness, confirms the greatness of America. Where else could a humble cop–a Lilliputian sergeant–stand up so publicly to a president? And not just stand up but invite himself over for a beer with the president?
What theater it has been, what entertainment. And yes, a teachable moment–for Professor Gates, and for President Barack Obama. Sgt. Crowley may believe that he had nothing to learn, but I’m certain he has grasped a small truth or two as well.
Now for a Brit view of Gates gate, Melanie Phillips.
… As regular readers of this blog know, I have been banging on from the start of Obama’s rise to power about the astonishing discrepancy between how he was presented by the media on the issue of race and what he actually had said and done. His whole background from the earliest days onwards was steeped in anti-white grievance politics of the most bitter and corrosive kind. This was all ignored. His two-decade membership of an anti-white church was ignored, his early anti-white mentors such as Frank Marshall Davis were ignored, his participation on the Nation of Islam ‘Million Man march’ and his association with Nation of Islam cadres were ignored.
And as Krauthammer aptly observed – and as I wrote here – Obama’s major speech on race in March 2008 in which he finally ‘renounced’ his former pastor, the anti-white bigot Rev Jeremiah Wright, which was hailed as the greatest piece of oratory since the Gettysburg address and which supposedly transcended racial animosities to create the colour-blind Brotherhood of Man, was anything but. In this speech Obama actually said Wright should not be renounced, and that Wright’s racism was actually all the fault of white people. The fact that so many people failed to hear or read what Obama actually said and instead heard or read only what they wanted to hear was truly frightening. …
Mark Davis in the Dallas Morning News on Gates.
… Every shred of evidence points to this as a police officer following the rules and a citizen blowing his top. But clarity is the first casualty when there are cheap points to be scored in the arena of racial correctness, where all of this “teaching moment” drivel was hatched.
President Barack Obama wants to get in on the “teaching” with an absurd chunk of White House political theater tomorrow, as the properly arrested professor joins him in double-teaming an honorable police sergeant who merely did his job.
In a feeble attempt to appear a racial healer, the president who created this disaster by prematurely taking sides will establish a pernicious and phony moral equivalency between Sgt. James Crowley and the presidential buddy he arrested, a race-baiting professional hothead who saw an opportunity to concoct racial profiling where none existed.
Yet there was profiling at the Gates home that day – police profiling, the unjust presumption that a white cop is up to no good. …
And another liberal questions ObamaCare. This time, Susan Estrich.
The president is “not familiar” with the bill. No one can explain how it will work yet, as Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., told a contentious town meeting. There are various plans, and negotiations are still in the early stages.
But whatever it is, we should be for it.
Am I missing something? …
Three weeks before arrests in NJ over organ sales, Jeff Jacoby wrote a column on the subject.
… The result of our misguided altruism-only organ donation system is much the same: too few organs and too much death. More than 100,000 Americans are currently on the national organ waiting list. Last year, 28,000 transplants were performed, but 49,000 new patients were added to the queue. As the list grows longer, the wait grows deadlier, and the shortage of available organs grows more acute. Last year, 6,600 people died while awaiting the kidney or liver or heart that could have kept them alive. Another 18 people will die today. And another 18 tomorrow. And another 18 every day, until Congress fixes the law that causes so many valuable organs to be wasted, and so many lives to be needlessly lost.
In August last year, Pickings had a piece on the importance of cooking to human development. Salon.com has an article next month on the same subject.
Animals of the genus Homo are defined by their little mouths, large guts, big brains — and appetite for bratwurst. This, at least, is the provocative theory of evolution put forth by Dr. Richard Wrangham in his fascinating new book, “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.”
Wrangham, the Ruth B. Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, began his career studying chimpanzees alongside Jane Goodall, and rose to academic acclaim as a primatologist specializing in the roots of male aggression. Naturally, he tends to think of most scientific questions in relation to chimps. And so it was that a few years ago, while sitting in front of his fireplace preparing a lecture on human evolution, he wondered, “What would it take to turn a chimpanzee-like animal into a human?” The answer, he decided, was in front of him: fire to cook food.
For years, accepted wisdom has held that it was a transition to meat eating that prompted human evolution — which makes Wrangham’s hypothesis a radical departure. Yet, the more he tested his theory, the more he found the science to back it up: Cooked food is universally easier to process and more nutritionally dense than raw food, which means adopting a cooked diet would have given man a biological advantage. The energy he once spent consuming and digesting raw food could be diverted to other physiological functions, leading to the development of bigger bodies and brains. And Wrangham’s “cooking hypothesis” not only explains the physical changes that humans underwent but also the social ones: Cooking created a sexual division of labor that informs our ideas of gender, love, family and marriage even to this day. “Humans are adapted to eating cooked food in the same essential way as cows adapted to eating grass, or fleas to sucking blood,” Wrangham concludes. “And the results pervade our lives, from our bodies to our minds. We humans are the cooking apes, the creatures of the flame.” …
John Derbyshire at the Corner has a lot of fun with Pluto’s planet possibilities.
Of all the issues in the public forum right now, I’m hard put to think of one less important than the issue of whether or not we should call Pluto a planet.
Still, it’s a more relaxing topic to contemplate than whether illegal aliens will be able to get sex-change operations on the public fisc under Obamacare, whether our president is actually the offspring of Azerbaijani goat-herds, …