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Mark Steyn writes an interesting column on Israel and the Muslim world.
…North Korea sinks a South Korean ship; hundreds of thousands of people die in the Sudan; millions die in the Congo. But 10 men die at the hands of Israeli commandos and it dominates the news day in, day out for weeks, with UN resolutions, international investigations, calls for boycotts, and every Western prime minister and foreign minister expected to rise in parliament and express the outrage of the international community. …
…The “Palestinian question” is a land dispute, but not in the sense of a boundary-line argument between two Ontario farmers. Rather, it represents the coming together of two psychoses. Islam is a one-way street. Once you’re in the Dar al-Islam, that’s it; there’s no checkout desk. They take land, they hold it, forever.
That’s why, in his first post-9/11 message to the troops, Osama droned on about the fall of Andalusia: it’s been half a millennium, but he still hasn’t gotten over it, and so, a couple of years ago, when I was at the Pentagon being shown some of the maps found in al-Qaeda safe houses, “the new caliphate” had Spain and India being re-incorporated within the Muslim world. If that’s how you think, no wonder a tiny little sliver of a Jewish state smack dab in the heart of the Dar al-Islam drives you nuts: to accept Israel’s “right to exist” would be as unthinkable as accepting a re-Christianized Constantinople. …
In the wake of the G20 summit, David Warren ponders leadership.
…This, to me, has been the most puzzling thing, as I have looked at genuine “leaders” in several walks of life. The most impressive were not famous, and did not seek fame. They had the habit of taking on responsibilities, but not the habit of seeking praise. They were recognized, instinctively, in their own circle — a team, with its natural “captain.” Yet often as not, this captain was awkward with a crowd.
I am trying to get at a quality of “charisma” that is almost the opposite of the demagogue quality. For the crowd worships straw men, until they fail and the crowd sets fire to them. It is very rare that we get a Churchill: a man who was extremely impressive both close up, and far away. There are anyway, fortunately, few occasions when they are needed. Too, he was “an exception to prove the rule” — a man larger than his office, because endowed with some self-knowledge, who from his first public statement as prime minister promised the very opposite of magic. …
In the Daily Beast, Charlie Gasparino thinks the finance reform bill won’t address the behaviors that led to the financial meltdown. There’s a quote by Chris Dodd towards the end of the article that sums up the economic stupidity of the legislative branch. But then again, Dodd’s salary and pension are a sure thing, so it doesn’t really affect him if the economy suffers.
…All of which is one reason why banking stocks, which have gotten hammered in recent months, staged a rally on Friday. To be sure, there’s a lot in the proposed legislation that the banks hate. One banking executive said he expected the legislation to carve at least $3 billion in profits from his firm each year. The Volcker Rule, proposed by President Obama’s senior economic adviser Paul Volcker, appeared to make it through the final cut, meaning, we are told, that firms can’t make risky market bets, which means lower profits. Banks will have to raise capital, which also depresses earnings. There will be limits on the firm’s business of selling derivatives to large clients; they will have to create a special unit with its own capital to sell the most complex of these products. Banks like JP Morgan will get hit because the bill will force them to cap, and thus lower, so-called interchange fees, or the fees they charge for credit card transactions. …
…On top of all that, a “Financial Stability Oversight Council” will make sure the banks don’t take the kinds of excessive risks that led to the 2008 meltdown.
Sounds great, right? Well, keep in mind that before there was such a council, there was the SEC, the Federal Reserve, and a bunch of other bureaucratic entities making sure Wall Street risk-taking wasn’t unusual. And guess what? They all failed miserably. And by the way, why should anyone expect some paper-pushers in Washington to prevent something as complicated as the next great financial meltdown when they couldn’t stop Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, the details of which were handed to the Securities and Exchange Commission numerous times on a silver platter before his fraud was exposed? …
In the NY Times, Joe Nocera reviews the good news on the oil drilling moratorium being overturned, and the real-world analysis that was involved.
…And Judge Feldman agreed … Concluding that the decision to impose the moratorium was “arbitrary and capricious,” he wrote, “An invalid agency decision to suspend drilling of wells in depths of over 500 feet simply cannot justify the immeasurable effect on the plaintiffs, the local economy, the gulf region, and the critical present-day aspect of the availability of domestic energy in this country.” …
…Which also leads to a great irony: importing more oil via tankers will actually create more risk, not less. Between the 1970s and the Deepwater Horizon accident, a grand total of 1,800 barrels of oil were lost from rig accidents — an average of 45 barrels a year. That is an astonishing record. Ken Arnold, an expert who consulted with the Interior Department right after the BP spill — and a big critic of the moratorium — told me that much more oil is spilled in tanker accidents annually than from drilling rig accidents.
What’s more, he added: “The oil in those tankers was produced somewhere — somewhere that most likely has less regulation and less oversight than we have. We are not lessening the chance of a spill; we’re just transferring that risk to Nigeria and Brazil. We are not helping the world. We are just saying, ‘Brazil, we prefer to despoil your beaches, but not ours.’ ” …
John Steele Gordon comments on how the current administration remains insulated from reality, making decisions based on politics. We quote the first part of the post, the political decision follows.
To the Obama administration, it seems that it’s the latter. According to Canada’s Financial Post (h/t Instapundit), the administration turned down an offer from the Dutch to send skimmer boats that are far better and more capable than the ones we have because the water they discharge back into the ocean doesn’t meet the regulatory requirement that it be 99.9985 percent pure. Skimmer boats in a disastrous oil spill, in other words, are subject to a rule intended for bilge pumps.
“Why does neither the U.S. government nor the U.S. energy companies have on hand the cleanup technology available in Europe? Ironically, the superior European technology runs afoul of U.S. environmental rules. The voracious Dutch vessels, for example, continuously suck up vast quantities of oily water, extract most of the oil, and then spit overboard vast quantities of nearly oil-free water. Nearly oil-free isn’t good enough for the U.S. regulators, who have a standard of 15 parts per million — if water isn’t at least 99.9985 percent pure, it may not be returned to the Gulf of Mexico.”
So thanks to a regulation that could have been waived in a second, rather than skim up most of the oil, the Obami chose to leave it all in the ocean. …
The Economist discusses the latest in tuna ranching and tuna farming.
DURING May and June, when the mighty bluefin tuna returns to the Mediterranean to spawn, fishermen arrive from all over the world to catch it (click here to watch a video). In days gone by, the fish were netted and killed on the spot. Now, in high-tech operations involving divers and video cameras, they are transferred from the nets into “farms”—arrays of cages anchored to the sea floor from Spain to Malta, to be fattened up. Then, come October, they are sold to Japanese boats, killed, frozen and shipped to Japan. …
…Things might be better for the bluefin if it were possible to breed them in captivity, as well as raising them there. Though they call it farming, what Mr Azzopardi and his competitors are engaged in is actually more like ranching. Real husbandry nurtures animals from birth to death rather than just fattening up wild-caught individuals. That could bring economic benefits. It would also, some people think, take the pressure off wild stocks. …
In the WSJ, Tom Perrotta reports on the Wimbledon marathon match.
…The longest match in history has mostly left people begging for seconds. As officials decided whether to send Messrs. Isner and Mahut off the court Wednesday, for the second time in two days, the crowd shouted, “We want more!”
Messrs. Isner and Mahut did more than play for days and delete pages and pages of records. They put Wimbledon at the top of the sporting world (even with a certain soccer tournament going on). On Thursday, these two men were no less a story than Queen Elizabeth II, who hadn’t paid a visit here in 33 years. …