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This is a good night. We have Mark Steyn, Gerard Baker, David Warren and Christopher Hitchens. Later, an extraordinary picture of an aurora borealis from the shuttle.
Mark Steyn was in National Review commenting on events in Gaza. He suggests Hamas should not have stolen Arafat’s Nobel Prize since…
…if Hamas had only waited a year or two, the Nobel wallahs would have been happy to give the lads a Peace Prize of their own. Sadly, Israel’s latest designated “partner in peace†was in too much of a hurry for their piece.
Gerard Baker, US Bureau chief for the London Times, visited the old sod. He’s concerned about the growth of government there.
… At root of this nonsense is, of course, the sheer scale of government. The reason you can’t be allowed to eat an egg is that, because of the lack of real choice in healthcare provision, you’re no longer responsible for the financial consequences of your own actions. If you get heart disease from too much cholesterol, the State, collectively known as the NHS, will have to treat you; and that costs the State more and more money so the State will have to stop you from doing it in the first place.
This is the self-perpetuating logic behind the unstoppable momentum of the expanding State. The bigger it grows, the more it intrudes into our lives, and the more it intrudes into our lives, the more dependent we become on it. Education is the same. Our great universities are struggling to compete in a global market because they are hamstrung by the State. They are dependent on central government for their funding; but that funding is insufficient to meet the needs of global competition. But because they need government money for what they do, they cannot break free.
Leviathan is now so large that, outside London, half the population is dependent – either through public sector jobs or benefits – on taxes. …
David Warren, another of our favorites, unfortunately sees Britain as the last bulwark against the EU bureaucracy.
… Democracy is not quite dead in Europe, but getting that way. The cumbersome, incompetent, ridiculously corrupt, incredibly arrogant, and unelected Euro-bureaucracy is already in a position to dictate trans-European policies that by-pass all national legislatures. There is nothing to stop, or even slow, the metastasis of micro-managing regulations that interfere with the daily lives and customs of half-a-billion souls.
While the European Parliament is nominally elected, it exists for show, and is effectively powerless against that bureaucracy, voting on only a tiny proportion of that bureaucracy’s diktats, and having no power whatever to initiate legislation.
An organization that began after the Second World War as a free-trade agreement has morphed into the world’s biggest nanny state. It has tremendous power, and no responsibilities: the prerogative of the harlot on a scale that is impossible for the citizen to imagine. …
Christopher Hitchens writes for Slate on our chances of pacifying “rage boy.”
If you follow the link, you will be treated to some scenes from the strenuous life of a professional Muslim protester in the Kashmiri city of Srinagar. Over the last few years, there have been innumerable opportunities for him to demonstrate his piety and his pissed-offness. And the cameras have been there for him every time. Is it a fatwah? Is it a copy of the Quran allegedly down the gurgler at Guantanamo? Is it some cartoon in Denmark? Time for Rage Boy to step in and for his visage to impress the rest of the world with the depth and strength of Islamist emotion. …
Nose On Your Face has a nifty “rage boy” riff.
John Lott writes for Tech Central about gas price legislation.
With gas prices around $3 a gallon, the Senate last week passed new energy legislation. It will ultimately go to conference with the House to work out differences between the Senate and House bills. But any bill that gets agreed upon seems certain to increase the swings in gas prices and leave the average American worse off. …
The New Editor says the jerk judge lost his case.
American Thinker with more NY Times news.
I have been covering the failure of Pinch Sulzberger’s business strategy, as documented in its latest earnings report, showing what the PR release called a “9.1% decline” in advertising revenue at the Times Media Group. But it now appears that this number might disguise as much as it shows, hiding a much more serious decline in print advertising revenue.
They also take off after the latest outrage from the Smithsonian.
There’s a cool picture going around the web of the aurora borealis seen from the shuttle.
Dilbert’s here with a post about his route to success.
And so it went, in ant-sized steps forward. Every pat on the back came with a kick in the nuts. I worked for ten years without a day off. During one particularly busy year, I held a full-time job at the phone company, wrote and drew Dilbert, and wrote a book called “The Dilbert Principle.†I didn’t sleep much that year. It was my first hard cover book. Yay!