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Mark reacts to Al’s prize.
Apparently there are still one or two holdouts who decline to prostrate themselves before Al Gore. As ABC reporter David Wright fretted, “Even the Nobel Prize is not going to be enough to silence the naysayers . . .â€
Ah, so true. Say what you like about Al’s predecessor in the pantheon of glory, the late Yasser Arafat, but there was a guy who knew how to silence naysayers and, when he needed to, he didn’t leave it to the luster of his Nobel.
To escape the wall-to-wall Adulation I jumped in the truck and found myself going past a Vermont dairy farm I drive by every couple of years. Only this time the Holsteins were gone. The field was still there, well mown, but the soft low of cattle came there not. I asked a friend of mine in the dairying business and she told me the farm had gone under, but don’t worry, she added dryly, the folks who bought it put the land in “conservation easement.†And then she rolled her eyes, and we moved on to other subjects. The cows have gone, the farmers have gone, but the pasture will be preserved in perpetuity. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between “conservation†and the neutron bomb. …
Samizdata considers a freedom-fighter award.
John Fund with shorts on yesterday’s election.
Editors of National Review too.
It’s safe to say that liberals fared a bit better than conservatives in the mishmash of Tuesday’s elections: They turned back an important school-choice measure in Utah and applauded Democratic victories in the Kentucky gubernatorial race and the Virginia legislature. Pundits who search for a national meaning in these results, however, will search in vain, because local issues and factors dominated. …
Christopher Hitchens says the jihadists are not created by our foreign policy.
I call your attention to the front-page report in the Oct. 30 New York Times in which David Rohde, writing from the Afghan town of Gardez, tells of a new influx of especially vicious foreign fighters. Describing it as the largest such infiltration since 2001, Rohde goes on to say, “The foreign fighters are not only bolstering the ranks of the insurgency. They are more violent, uncontrollable and extreme than even their locally bred allies.” They also, it seems, favor those Taliban elements who are more explicitly allied with al-Qaida, and bring with them cash and resources with which to sabotage, for example, the opening of schools in the southern provinces around Kandahar.
Now, if this were a report from Iraq, we would be hearing that it was all our own fault and that the Bin Ladenists would not be in that country at all if it were not for the coalition presence. It’s practically an article of faith among liberals that only the folly of the intervention made Iraq into a magnet and a training or recruiting ground for our foes. One of the difficulties with this shallow and glib analysis is that it fails to explain Afghanistan and, in fact, fails to explain it twice.
We have fairly convincing evidence that a majority of Afghans do not, at the very least, oppose the presence of NATO forces on their soil. The signs of progress are slight but definite, having mainly to do with the return of millions of refugees and an improvement in the lives of women. There are some outstanding stupidities, such as the attempt to spray the opium poppies, but in general the West has behaved decently, and a huge number of Afghans resent the Taliban and its allies if only on the purely nationalist ground that it represents a renewed attempt to turn Afghanistan into a Pakistani colony, as it was before 2001. …
Duane Patterson in Hugh Hewitt wonders if the MSM can protect Dems from victory in Iraq.
Anne Applebaum explains the new form of radical chic.
Thomas Sowell looking at all the folks who want to save the world says, “Go make a difference someplace else.”
John Stossel says government money has strings.
Walter Williams reports a U of Delaware program that has since been cancelled. At least until we’re looking elsewhere.
In last month’s column “Academic Cesspools,” I wrote about “Indoctrinate U,” a recently released documentary exposing egregious university indoctrination of young people at prestigious and not-so-prestigious universities (www.onthefencefilms.com/movies.html). I said the documentary only captured the tip of a disgusting iceberg.
The Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a frontline organization in the battle against academic suppression of free speech and thought, released information about what’s going on at the University of Delaware, and probably at other universities as well, that should send chills up the spines of parents of college-age students. The following excerpts are taken from the University of Delaware’s Office of Residence Life Diversity Facilitation Training document. The full document is available at www.thefire.org.
Students living in the University’s housing, roughly 7,000, are taught: “A racist: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities or acts of discrimination. (This does not deny the existence of such prejudices, hostilities, acts of rage or discrimination.)” This gem of wisdom suggests that by virtue of birth alone, not conduct, if you’re white, you’re a racist.
Dilbert’s Scott Adams was in the WSJ.
I spend about a third of my workday blogging. Thanks to the miracle of online advertising, that increases my income by 1%. I balance that by hoping no one asks me why I do it.
As with most of my life decisions, my impulse to blog was a puzzling little soup of miscellaneous causes that bubbled and simmered until one day I noticed I was doing something. I figured I needed a rationalization in case anyone asked. My rationalization for blogging was especially hard to concoct. I was giving away my product for free and hoping something good came of it.
I did have a few “artist” reasons for blogging. After 18 years of writing “Dilbert” comics, I was itching to slip the leash and just once write “turd” without getting an email from my editor. It might not seem like a big deal to you, but when you aren’t allowed to write in the way you talk, it’s like using the wrong end of the shovel to pick up, for example, a turd.
Over time, I noticed something unexpected and wonderful was happening with the blog. I had an army of volunteer editors, and they never slept. The readers were changing the course of my writing in real time. I would post my thoughts on a topic, and the masses told me what they thought of the day’s offering without holding anything back. Often they’d correct my grammar or facts and I’d fix it in minutes. They were in turns brutal and encouraging. They wanted more posts on some topics and less of others. It was like the old marketing saying, “Your customers tell you what business you’re in.” …
WSJ celebrates Starbucks.
Starbucks, the Onion once reported, “continued its rapid expansion Tuesday, opening its newest location in the men’s room of an existing Starbucks.” In real life, it hasn’t come to that–yet. But Starbucks has seemingly caffeinated the U.S. and the world. There are now 10,000 stores spread across North America (more than 170 in Manhattan alone) and an additional 4,000 in more than 40 countries, stretching from Bahrain to Brazil. Starbucks stores have become a retail icon, a daily habit and a late-night punchline. “The only way the oil companies could make more money,” Jay Leno quipped a couple of years ago, “would be if they were drilling for oil and struck Starbucks coffee.” In “Starbucked,” Taylor Clark sets out to explain such scorching success. He offers, along the way, an entertaining, instructive and refreshingly even-handed account of the company’s life so far. …