MMMMM-Mums

"She Who Must Not Be Named" and I spent a few days on the mountain. Here's some of what I saw.

Stubble and trees just a bit north of Cabelas. Leaves aren't peaking yet, but soon....


Stopped by a roadside stand to see some friends of ours. They had their mums out.


Mums up close and personal


Indian corn


"She" was looking for the perfect squash.


And while "She" stalked the wily squash I hung around inside, checking out the apples and chatting with the owner, an old friend of mine. Her sister just published her first book. Congratulations, Mary, welcome to the club.


Eventually "She" found some squash and other produce that suited her, other customers were swarming in, so we loaded up the rover and headed home.

We'll be back.

Haditha

The WSJ has an excellent piece on the incident at Haditha and the way in which the political left built it into yet another phony issue.

The incident at Haditha--or the massacre, as it is often called--is due for a wholesale rethinking. The allegations are that in 2005 U.S. Marines went on a killing spree and deliberately executed 24 Iraqi civilians. The casualties have drawn an extraordinary amount of political attention, becoming an emblem for everything critics say is wrong with the Iraq war--in the common telling, another My Lai.

Thus Congressman Jack Murtha, a decorated combat veteran, made accusations of war crimes and said the Marines had killed "in cold blood." These are serious charges; and military justice continues to deal with them seriously, though thankfully at a slower pace than politics. Now the prosecutions have mostly unraveled. It seems Haditha, though tragic, was exploited politically, and the allegations were exaggerated, if not unfounded.

....

At Haditha, did the Marines act reasonably and appropriately based on their training? They were in a hostile combat situation where deadly force was authorized against suspected triggermen for the IED, and were ordered to assault a suspected insurgent hideout. In retrospect, the men in the car had no weapons or explosives; in retrospect, the people in the house were not insurgents. No one knew at the time.

Innocents were killed at Haditha, as they inevitably are in all wars--though that does not excuse or justify wrongdoing. Yet neither was Haditha the atrocity or "massacre" that many assumed--though errors in judgment may well have been committed. And while some violent crimes have been visited on civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, overall the highly disciplined U.S. military has conducted itself in an exemplary fashion. When there have been aberrations, the services have typically held themselves accountable.

The same cannot be said of the political and media classes. Many, including Members of Congress, were looking for another moral bonfire to discredit the cause in Iraq, and they found a pretext in Haditha. The critics rushed to judgment; facts and evidence were discarded to fit the antiwar template.

Most despicably, they created and stoked a political atmosphere that exposes American soldiers in the line of duty, risking and often losing their lives, to criminal liability for the chaos of war. This is the deepest shame of Haditha, and the one for which apologies ought to be made.

Read it here.

"Despicable" is perhaps a much too kind way of characterizing the behavior of the Democat leadership over the past few years. Murtha, to his everlasting shame, has been one of the worst.

Stars in the Hollywood Firmament

David Denby, writing in the New Yorker [not available online] opines that we are running out of movie stars -- that the new movie production system is not today capable of throwing up onto the screen mythic figures like Coop and the Duke and Valentino and Monroe.

Isaac Chotiner over a the New Republic disagrees. He points out that today there is a plethora of genuine A-list stars. Moreover as a group they are far better actors than the mythic stars of the studio years.

Interesting. I tend to side with Chotiner -- even the least able of today's pantheon of stars -- I'm talking 'bout you, Brad -- is a better actor than Cooper or Wayne or Gable.

I seem to remember Robert Duvall saying that he doesn't watch old movies because the acting is so bad. He has a point. What drives me nuts is that, despite the amazing technological advances in film, and the indisputable skill and sheer craftsmanship of the workers in the field (even a mid-level director knows every trick Orson Welles employed at his peak and much, much more), the finished products are so damn mediocre so much of the time.

Inconvenient "Science"

Liberals like to portray themselves as defenders of science and religion against the irrational superstition of conservatives, especially religious conservatives. But, as James Taranto points out in the WSJ, their support of science is highly conditional. When scientific evidence contradicts their naive faith, liberals can be as anti-science as any bible-thumper.

Take for example the recent study published in the Stanford Law Review showing that affirmative action policies have resulted in a disproportionately high failure rate among Blacks admitted to law school. This study has instigated a major debate, involving the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the State Bar of California, over whether such research can be supported.

Read about it here.

Read Taranto's commentary here.

So, a substantial number of liberals think it is OK to obstruct scientific research into areas that threaten to contradict their cherished beliefs. Oh my!

Actually, this is nothing new. The major challenge to the thriving field of "sociobiology" [now re-conceived as "evolutionary psychology"] and the brand-new scientific field of study titled "human biodiversity" comes from the left. Their attitude has always been that the conclusions of evolutionary studies represent hard scientific truth except when they are applied to today's human populations. Then they must be repudiated.

Deborah Kerr Passes

Classy -- she practically defined the term. Deborah Kerr has passed away. The news saddens me and brings back so many memories -- the clinch with Burt Lancaster in the surf in "From Here to Eternity"; the missed meeting at the top of the Empire State Building in "An Affair to Remember"; the meeting with Yul Brynner's King of Siam in "The King and I" and so many more.

Say goodbye to a lady.

The Continuing Threat from Al-Qaeda

David Ignatius of the WaPo is a liberal, but an intelligent and often sensible one who fully appreciates the magnitude of the challenge facing the United States today. He warns us that the threat of a WMD, even a nuclear, attack on Americans is still a very real possibility.

Read his article here.

Hitch on the Future of the Anglosphere

Well, I finally got back to internet service, sort of. More, better, posting later when I get back to a high speed hookup.

For now, I note that Chistopher Hitchens has an interesting piece on the "Anglosphere" and its importance to the world.

First, he favors an expansive understanding of the scope of the Anglosphere, consisting essentially of all nations with English-speaking traditions and long experience with the Anglo-American civil traditions. This would include, for instance, India, the Philippines and South Africa as well as Canada, the US, Australia and other areas actually settled by the British.

He also notes that this broad coalition has stood together successfully against tyrannies in the past.

He also sees no realistic alternative for effective international cooperation.

In considering the future of the broader Anglosphere tradition, especially in the context of anti-jihadism, it may help to contrast it with the available alternatives. As a supranational body, the United Nations has obviously passed the point of diminishing returns. Inaugurated as an Anglo-American “coalition of the willing” against Hitler and his allies, the UN—in its failure to confront the genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur and in its abject refusal to enforce its own resolutions in the case of Iraq—is a prisoner of the “unilateralism” of France, Russia, and, to a lesser extent, China. NATO may have been somewhat serviceable in Kosovo (the first engagement in which it ever actually fought as an alliance), but it has performed raggedly in Afghanistan. The European Union has worked as an economic solvent on redundant dictatorships in Spain, Portugal, and Greece, and also on old irredentist squabbles in Ireland, Cyprus, and Eastern Europe. But it is about to reach, if it has not already, a membership saturation point that will disable any effective decision-making capacity. A glaring example of this disability is the EU’s utter failure to compose a viable constitution.

All in all, Hitchens sees the informal, and even contentious, familial relationship among the various nations of the Anglosphere as the best vehicle for combating the global challenge posed by Jihadism.

I am broadly sympathetic to this perspective, but would argue that President Bush's approach (forming ad-hoc coalitions of countries with similar interests -- sort of a voluntary association of interested countries -- to deal with specific situations like Iraq or North Korea) is superior. But I recognize that Hitch has a point in that such associations will necessarily have at their core, participation by Anglospheric nations.

Read the piece here.

Perry Crushes Clooney, Wahlberg, Blanchett

Once again the media moguls and the critical community are shocked to find that a faith-based film has buried the competition at the box office. This time it is Tyler Perry's "Why Did I Get Married" which took in more than 21 million dollars this weekend, beating out the Rock's inane comedy "The Game Plan" and doubling the take of George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg's heavily hyped "quality" productions that tied for third with about 11 million each.

Read it here.

Libertas notes that the people who make movies and those who review them are culturally and politically out of touch with the American public, and argues Perry's box 0ffice wins are an indication of that fact. [here] I'm not so sure of that. Films really don't tell us very much about American culture at all -- they are merely suggestive. The box office simply tells us that the market for rabid anti-capitalist, anti-American screeds is small and diminishing and the market for faith-based entertainment is not.

I blame Bush

More Good News From Iraq

Tom Ricks and Karen DeYoung report in the WaPo:

The U.S. military believes it has dealt devastating and perhaps irreversible blows to al-Qaeda in Iraq in recent months, leading some generals to advocate a declaration of victory over the group, which the Bush administration has long described as the most lethal U.S. adversary in Iraq.

But as the White House and its military commanders plan the next phase of the war, other officials have cautioned against taking what they see as a premature step that could create strategic and political difficulties for the United States. Such a declaration could fuel criticism that the Iraq conflict has become a civil war in which U.S. combat forces should not be involved. At the same time, the intelligence community, and some in the military itself, worry about underestimating an enemy that has shown great resilience in the past.

"I think it would be premature at this point," a senior intelligence official said of a victory declaration over AQI, as the group is known. Despite recent U.S. gains, he said, AQI retains "the ability for surprise and for catastrophic attacks." Earlier periods of optimism, such as immediately following the June 2006 death of AQI founder Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in a U.S. air raid, not only proved unfounded but were followed by expanded operations by the militant organization.

There is widespread agreement that AQI has suffered major blows over the past three months. Among the indicators cited is a sharp drop in suicide bombings, the group's signature attack, from more than 60 in January to around 30 a month since July. Captures and interrogations of AQI leaders over the summer had what a senior military intelligence official called a "cascade effect," leading to other killings and captures. The flow of foreign fighters through Syria into Iraq has also diminished, although officials are unsure of the reason and are concerned that the broader al-Qaeda network may be diverting new recruits to Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The deployment of more U.S. and Iraqi forces into AQI strongholds in Anbar province and the Baghdad area, as well as the recruitment of Sunni tribal fighters to combat AQI operatives in those locations, has helped to deprive the militants of a secure base of operations, U.S. military officials said. "They are less and less coordinated, more and more fragmented," Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the second-ranking U.S. commander in Iraq, said recently. Describing frayed support structures and supply lines, Odierno estimated that the group's capabilities have been "degraded" by 60 to 70 percent since the beginning of the year.

Read it here.

I blame Bush.

Of course the Democrats, rehearsing their lines on MSNBC right now, are saying -- "So what? Where's Bin Laden?"They claim that they were right all along, that we are caught in a civil war, not a war against al Qaeda, and that the administration is really in a bind because there is no longer any reason to stay in Iraq.

More Good News -- Cancer Deaths Decline

USA Today reports:

Deaths from cancer continue to drop, and the decline appears to be accelerating, federal health officials detail in a report out Monday.

The rate of cancer started falling in 1992 with improved treatment and Americans taking to heart the message that not smoking, eating better and seeking early detection would reduce their risks. But the new report shows cancer deaths declined on average 2.1% each year from 2002 to 2004, the most recent year for which detailed data are available. That rate was nearly twice the annual decrease from 1993 to 2002.

The decline was more pronounced in men, 2.6% a year, than women, 1.8% a year, according to the report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and others.

Read it here.

I blame Bush.

City Sights

It was a glorious day at the harbor. I took my camera and a good book [Walter Isaacson's biography of Benjamin Franklin] and wandered around for a while taking pictures.




I finally settled on Federal Hill where I had a great view of the harbor.



Don't ask!


Ol' Sam still stands guard.



I sat on a bench for a while, reading and enjoying the sun and a cool breeze, then wended my way back home along Montgomery Street.





And on the way I discovered that some of my neighbors are stranger than I thought.

A Remarkable Admission

The term "empire" is bandied about loosely, especially by leftist critics of the US, but does it really mean anything? Writing in the Times Literary Supplement Felipe Fernandez-Armesto makes a rather startling admission. Even the top experts on the subject don't know what they are talking about.

At a recent dinner in Cambridge, Massachusetts, four of the world’s leading historians of empire agreed on only one thing: that none of them knew what an empire is. It is a loose-fitting name, applied to states or political agglomerations of such diverse kinds that we should probably admit that entities we call empires have no more in common than girls we call Jane or garments we call coats.

The best that these experts could come up with was that empires tend to be larger than other contemporary states, they consist of more than one historically distinct community, there is one central focus of allegiance, and scholars have "more or less agreed" to designate the United States as an "empire." That's it and that's all, which leads me to wonder if the concept is all that useful. Fernandez-Armesto claims that it is, but the question must be asked, especially since use of the term allows critics of the US to mindlessly plug into all sorts of Marxist and anti-colonialist analytic categories and rhetoric, whether or not such associations are appropriate.

Read his review here.

Interesting

In the latest Le Nouvel Observateur, Bernard-Henri Levy asks whether it is still possible to be on the political Left and confesses his loathing for what he calls the "chauvinist Left".

Of course the Left doesn't take this deviationism sitting down.

Read about the debate here.

News from Iraq

MSM coverage of the encouraging news out of Iraq has for many months been so blatantly biased against the administration and the war effort that even the WaPo has finally noticed.

NEWS COVERAGE and debate about Iraq during the past couple of weeks have centered on the alleged abuses of private security firms like Blackwater USA. Getting such firms into a legal regime is vital, as we've said. But meanwhile, some seemingly important facts about the main subject of discussion last month -- whether there has been a decrease in violence in Iraq -- have gotten relatively little attention. A congressional study and several news stories in September questioned reports by the U.S. military that casualties were down. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), challenging the testimony of Gen. David H. Petraeus, asserted that "civilian deaths have risen" during this year's surge of American forces.

A month later, there isn't much room for such debate, at least about the latest figures. In September, Iraqi civilian deaths were down 52 percent from August and 77 percent from September 2006, according to the Web site icasualties.org. The Iraqi Health Ministry and the Associated Press reported similar results. U.S. soldiers killed in action numbered 43 -- down 43 percent from August and 64 percent from May, which had the highest monthly figure so far this year. The American combat death total was the lowest since July 2006 and was one of the five lowest monthly counts since the insurgency in Iraq took off in April 2004.

During the first 12 days of October the death rates of Iraqis and Americans fell still further.

And here's the key quote:

Al-Qaeda tried to step up attacks this year, U.S. commanders say -- so far, with stunningly little success.

Read it here.

And then there's this [complete with charts for the reading impaired]

And this.

And this.

And [lest we forget Afghanistan] this.

And on the subject of political reconciliation in Iraq there's this. Those ten-foot tall Mahdi's just don't seem to be what the MSM and the Democrats claimed they were.

And this.

And this.

Suddenly, and without warning, the MSM has decided that things are looking up in Iraq. Is it because they were shamed by Robin Wright's startling admission to Howard Kurtz that she and other leading journalists felt that good news on the war should be buried while negative news is routinely played up? [here]

Is it Gen. Sanchez' blistering condemnation of MSM bias, which they did not report, but could not have helped but notice? [here]

Is it that they just got tired of the old story-line?

Is it that Hillary has been moving away from an anti-war position?

What is notable is that, like a flock of birds or school of fish, they all turned on a dime to emphasize the new conventional wisdom.

Amazing!

This raises the vital questions -- have things really changed that much in Iraq, or is this just a change in how the story is reported? It is clear that things were never as bad as the MSM reported, but are they now improving as much as the new stories seem to indicate? Time will tell.

News You Can Use

Several friends of ours have decided to vacation in New Zealand in recent years. In a few cases people have actually moved there. I wondered why and vaguely attributed it to the popularity and grandeur of the Lord of the Rings films. Now I realize how naive I was.

The Times of India reports:

LONDON: A new survey has shown that Kiwi women are the most promiscuous in the world, with an average of 20.4 sexual partners.

The survey, by condom-maker Durex, questioned 26 thousand people in 26 countries, and found that New Zealand women’s promiscuity average was way above the global average of 7.3.

The poll showed that Kiwi women are up there with Austrian men, who have 29.3 sexual partners. New Zealand emerged as the only country where women have more sexual partners than their men.

Read it here.

And here I thought it was the sheep.

Painting from the Dawn of Civilization

An 11,000 year old wall painting found in Syria.

So cool! It looks very modern, not representational. The archaeologist who found it says it looks like the work of Paul Klee. He's right. It's a remarkable find.

The culture that produced it was pre-agricultural, hunters and gatherers who were already building permanent dwelling places and artwork. More and more we are beginning to appreciate the sophistication of pre-agricultural peoples and the complex communities they created.

Read about it here.

VDH on the Tragedy of War

Victor Davis Hansen writes

Almost no one senses that the tragedy of war is always error and costly error at that, the side winning who makes the fewest and learns the most from them—and then doesn't give up.

Read it here.

Failure to come to terms with the reality of warfare has poisoned the political debate in this country. We have come to expect the impossible -- war without error -- and cynical politicians have tried to capitalize on those unrealistic expectations. As both Prof. Hansen and I have pointed out on a number of occasions the current conflict, in comparison with those of the past, has been remarkably well conducted. Yes, there have been errors and casualties, but they pale in comparison with those incurred in other major military conflicts. Yes, Iraq is a costly mess, but all wars are messy and costly and this one is a lot less so than most.

There is a reason that SNAFU, TARFU and FUBAR are all military acronyms.

UPDATE:

The Military Dad writes to note that I left out:

FUBB, SDDS, and IDMN.

OK, for you civilians out there, these stand for:

Situation Normal All F***ed Up
Things Are Really F***ed Up
F***ed Up Beyond All Recognition
F***ed Up Beyond Belief
Same Day, Different S**t [We used DDSS, Different Day, Same S**t]
It Don't Mean Nothing (pronounded "IDum") [In my unit we said "Max Nix" (from the German, "es macht nichts" -- literally, "it does not make anything"]

A Novel Approach to Government

Mark Steyn points to a refreshing approach to the problem of big and intrusive government.

Meet:

the Tigwe of Vwuip, a northern Nigerian tribal chief who [ate] the local tax collector. The Tigwe had apparently been so impressed by the man's ability to acquire money on demand that he had — understandably — decided to try to assimilate his powers.

Now why didn't I think of that?

Read it here.

Blowout

The mighty Quaker warriors defeated the multi-culti wimps of Columbia 59 to 28. Our congratulations to the Penn men. As for the Columbia lions, that's what you get when you invite homicidal madmen to speak at your campus.

Go Quakes!

Lessing Said the Better

Doris Lessing's reaction to being informed that she had just won the Nobel Prize for Literature.




Hat Tip "papercuts" at the NYT.

Fall Comes To the Mountain

Just a few pictures from before the rains came and drove me inside.

Frontrunners

Argentina and the United States are holding presidential elections soon. In both countries the front-runner is a woman, a former first lady. In the US, the Clinton dynasty is represented by Hillary, in Argentina the Kirchner dynasty features Cristina.

Can we swap?

Books: Garry Wills' Head and Heart

I always look forward to reading what Garry Wills has to say. He is a smart guy who has the makings of a fine historian. Some of his early work was quite good. Unfortunately, after years as a "public intellectual" he has accumulated a lot of axes to grind and has become little more than a shrill polemicist.

His latest book, Head and Heart: American Christianities [read a review here] is a major disappointment. It mixes shrewd observation [he is quite good, for instance, on Madison and Jefferson] with political cant. He develops a simplistic dichotomy -- an opposition between "enlightenment" and "evangelism" -- into which he tries to shoehorn the immensely complex development of America's religious culture. In so doing he grotesquely exaggerates the influence of both religious and secular extremists, obscures important differences among major figures, and simply ignores the religious experience and faith of the vast majority of American Christians.

Why should a subtle and sophisticated thinker like Wills produce such a silly document? The answer is simple. He hates President Bush and he really, really hates Carl Rove, and he really, really, really loathes and despises the religious right and all those who would restrict a woman's right to choose death for her unborn children. His simplistic account of American religious history is little more than a prelude to his real concern, a sometimes hysterical screed against religious conservatives and their purported dominance in the current administration.

This is bad history and even worse political analysis. Wills has produced a grotesquely cartoonish vision of America, past and present, and in so doing illuminates the way in which the hyperbolic political disputation of our times has corrupted and distorted our intellectual enterprise in nearly all its aspects.

If you wish to learn about America's religious history, don't bother with Will's screed, but if you want to comprehend the disdain and alarm animating radical secularists today, this is a good example.

To purchase Wills' book click on the Amazon logos at the top of the page.

Winning the Nobel Peace Prize

Jesse Walker, managing editor at Reason magazine, takes a witty look at the roster of Nobel Prize winners and notes that very few of them had accomplishments that had much to do with "peace". The most important factor seems to be association with or serving as a front for a vast international agency [like the IPCC, with whom Al Gore shared this year's prize].

Read the whole thing here.

Steyn on Health Insurance

Mark Steyn gets it exactly right. He writes:

In most cases, "insurance" insures against unlikely events. Your house is highly unlikely to burn down, but, if it happens, it's life-changing, so you insure against it. Health care is all but certain, especially in a western world where longevity and falling birth rates are producing a society where a big chunk of the population will be nonagenarians requiring long-term Alzheimer's or other care for the last fifth of their life. I would prefer a system in which we distinguish between routine ailments and catastrophic medical needs. For the former, it would be cheaper (and healthier) to restore a direct doctor/patient financial relationship. For the latter, a more limited insurance system would be better.

Read it here.

This is precisely what President Bush tried to do with the prescription drug add-on to Medicare -- make the program voluntary and restrict it to compensation for catastrophic emergencies. Such a program would be far more affordable than blanket coverage and would provide citizens with some protection against the economic consequences of catastrophic illness.

It's an eminently sensible approach to the problem, but Washington's movers and shakers respond to reasonable and sensible ideas like vampires to crosses.

Lies of the Left -- Another Phony Whistleblower

The Democrats seem to have no trouble finding people who are willing to dish the dirt on Republican sins. The trouble is that a disturbing number of these are phonies. The political calculation behind it is obvious. These people come out, get headlines and lucrative book and speaking fees telling stories about how terrible the generals, the Bush administration, corporate leaders, etc. are. Then months later they are exposed as being liars. But by that time the damage has been done and nobody cares anymore.

The latest phony to get rich lying is Lynn Brewer who wrote Confessions of an Enron Executive. She's been piling up big loot in speaking fees ever since trotting the globe talking about the evils of corporate capitalism. She has even been hailed as a heroine of free speech by the Nobel Peace Prize Selection Committee -- the ones who just awarded Al Gore the prize for his pack of lies. The trouble is that she never was an "Enron executive." Rather she was a "back-office investigator" who has padded her resume.

She's a politically useful con artist funded by left-wing Bush haters and anti-capitalist ideologues.

Read about her here.

He Ain't Comin' Back Folks

Jonah Goldberg points out the obvious:

Ronald Reagan has left the building and he ain't comin' back. What is more, Reagan himself was not the Gipper of memory. He signed a liberal abortion bill, he raised taxes nearly as much as he cut them, he met with dictators, etc. His advice, quit chasing a mirage.

Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson and the rest of the pack all want to claim the Gipper-slipper fits them best. But the trick to being the Reagan of today is to be the Reagan of today. Reagan was the needed solution to the problems of a generation ago. The Reagan of today will do the same for today. He will likely agree with the Gipper on a lot of issues, but that agreement shouldn’t stem from play-acting.

Amen.

Read the whole thing here.

Consoler In Chief

Bloomberg reports:

Bush, 61, has so far met with more than 1,500 relatives of the 4,255 American troops who have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to White House officials. As he travels around the country, the president often makes the time to console them -- one family at a time, often including children -- in sessions that he calls ``one of the hardest things'' about his job.

In most of the meetings, the aides say, he hears support for his policies, hardening his resolve to stay the course in Afghanistan and Iraq. Little is otherwise known about the meetings, and the White House doesn't disclose the names of participants.

Read it here.

Bell Back In Jail

That poor little victim of prosecutorial injustice, Mychal Bell, (you remember him, the guy down in Jena who cold cocked a classmate and then he and his friends stood around kicking the unconscious boy in the head) is back in jail.

JENA, La. - A teenager at the center of a civil rights controversy is back in jail after a judge sentenced him on charges that were pending before the attack that put him in the national spotlight, his attorney said Thursday.

Mychal Bell, who along with five other black teenagers had been accused of beating a white classmate, went to juvenile court Thursday expecting another routine hearing, said Carol Powell Lexing, one of Bell's attorneys.

Instead, after a six-hour hearing, state District Judge J.P. Mauffrey Jr. sentenced him to 18 months on two counts of simple battery and two counts of criminal destruction of property, Lexing said.

He had been hit with those charges before the Dec. 4 attack on classmate Justin Barker.

"He's locked up again," Marcus Jones said of his 17-year-old son. "No bail has been set or nothing. He's a young man who's been thrown in jail again and again, and he just has to take it."

Read it here.

Think about it, this kid is only seventeen and already he's been in jail time and again. He has been in front of judges over and over. If you want to try to reignite the civil rights movement, you are going to have to come up with a better martyr than this creep.

The Bush Economic Miracle Continues

Larry Kudlow has the figures:

Attention all shoppers: Stocks are at an all-time high. Goldilocks lives. The economy could grow by 3 percent in Q3 after growing nearly 4 percent in Q2. Moreover, a highly competitive America is exporting at a 13 percent annual rate, including a 24 percent export gain to China, a 25 percent increase to South America, and a 15 percent export rise to Europe.

Meanwhile, at lower tax rates, the growing economy threw off $2.6 trillion of tax revenues, bringing the FY 2007 budget deficit to only 1.2 percent of GDP or $163 billion. Tax collections for 2007 are roughly $550 billion above the prior FY 2000 peak.

Even spending in 2007 was held to 2.8 percent growth, with domestic spending less entitlement and security actually falling by nearly 6 percent from last year.

So I’d like to thank all you pessimists out there. Your wall of worry is actually driving stocks higher. You have been completely wrong. To quote former Sen. Fred Thompson (who quoted me during the Republican debate), it’s still “the greatest story never told.”

Read it here.

And in another matter regarding the Bush legacy, Bartle Bull writing in the Prospect argues that the war in Iraq is already won. We have defeated the Baathist insurgency, we have defeated al Qaeda, and the Shiite militias are abandoning military actions for political maneuvering. What remains is more on the order of Iraqi police work than American war.

With most Sunni factions now seeking a deal, the big questions in Iraq have been resolved positively. The country remains one, it has embraced democracy and avoided all-out civil war. What violence remains is largely local and criminal.

Sounds like a win to me.

Read the whole thing here.

Understanding Scientific Consensus

The NYT has an interesting article on a recent scientific consensus that was wrong in nearly all of its particulars.

In 1988, the surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, proclaimed ice cream to a be public-health menace right up there with cigarettes. Alluding to his office’s famous 1964 report on the perils of smoking, Dr. Koop announced that the American diet was a problem of “comparable” magnitude, chiefly because of the high-fat foods that were causing coronary heart disease and other deadly ailments.

He introduced his report with these words: “The depth of the science base underlying its findings is even more impressive than that for tobacco and health in 1964.”

That was a ludicrous statement, as Gary Taubes demonstrates in his new book meticulously debunking diet myths, “Good Calories, Bad Calories” (Knopf, 2007). The notion that fatty foods shorten your life began as a hypothesis based on dubious assumptions and data; when scientists tried to confirm it they failed repeatedly. The evidence against Häagen-Dazs was nothing like the evidence against Marlboros.

It may seem bizarre that a surgeon general could go so wrong. After all, wasn’t it his job to express the scientific consensus? But that was the problem. Dr. Koop was expressing the consensus. He, like the architects of the federal “food pyramid” telling Americans what to eat, went wrong by listening to everyone else. He was caught in what social scientists call a cascade.

This idea of a "cascade" is important because it explains a lot of what is going on in contemporary science.

Because of this effect, groups are surprisingly prone to reach mistaken conclusions even when most of the people started out knowing better.... If, say, 60 percent of a group’s members have been given information pointing them to the right answer (while the rest have information pointing to the wrong answer), there is still about a one-in-three chance that the group will cascade to a mistaken consensus.

Cascades are especially common in medicine as doctors take their cues from others, leading them to overdiagnose some faddish ailments (called bandwagon diseases) and overprescribe certain treatments (like the tonsillectomies once popular for children). Unable to keep up with the volume of research, doctors look for guidance from an expert — or at least someone who sounds confident.

Read the whole thing here.

The article goes on to show the formation of the consensus, the ostracism of dissenting scientists, and the disastrous public policies based upon the false consensus, all of which is extremely reminiscent of what is happening today in environmental science and the global warming debate. We should remember that "science" is conducted by human beings with all the weakness and fallibility that entails, and that credentialed "experts" are often disastrously wrong. With that in mind we should recognize that expert opinion is a weak and shifting base on which to construct public policy.

Intangible Wealth

The World Bank recently undertook a major study into the wealth of nations -- the question of why some nations prosper and others don't. There is a rich literature on this subject that I intend to summarize someday here and there is a lively, and often acrimonious, debate among historians and economists as to just what factors drive development.

The World Bank study contributed an important piece of information to the debate. It showed that the same institutional factors applied in different cultural contexts produce different results. To put it simply, a Mexican worker who works in the United States is five times more productive than he would be doing exactly the same work in Mexico. In short, culture counts. In fact it counts far more than anything else.

The World Bank economists found:

If one simply adds up the current value of a country's natural resources and produced, or built, capital, there's no way that can account for that country's level of income.

The rest is the result of "intangible" factors—such as the trust among people in a society, an efficient judicial system, clear property rights and effective government. All this intangible capital also boosts the productivity of labor and results in higher total wealth. In fact, the World Bank finds, "Human capital and the value of institutions (as measured by rule of law) constitute the largest share of wealth in virtually all countries."

A commentary in Reason explains the implication of this finding:

The bottom line: "Rich countries are largely rich because of the skills of their populations and the quality of the institutions supporting economic activity."

What the World Bank economists have brilliantly done is quantify the intangible value of education and social institutions.

Read it here.

This places a number of disturbing recent trends in a new and unsettling context.

As Michael Barone points [here] our our academic institutions are more interested in indoctrinating students than in educating them.

Robert Putnam has charted the decline of trust in the American culture, not just mistrust of our public institutions, but also of each other. [here and here]

Vast portions of the permanent government, not just the intelligence services, are largely dysfunctional.

Anyone who reads the paper or watches TV understands the decline of our political institutions. Polling by the Gallup organization shows that the public has little or no trust in nearly all of our national institutions [here].

The courts have seriously eroded property rights in recent decades. [here]

Investors, not just in the U.S.] are increasingly losing faith in our financial institutions. [here]

I could go on and on, and you can probably add several more points just off the top of your head.
The key observation is that every one of our major organizing institutions -- political, cultural, religious, economic, educational..., all of them, is or is widely perceived as being thoroughly corrupt.

This is a very serious problem because our continued existence as a functioning society depends upon mutual trust, and that trust is rapidly disappearing.

Who to blame? The media, tenured radicals, corrupt politicians and other public figures, overweening government, lawyers, the list goes on and on and so will the debate. What is more important is that we begin to seek ways to overcome the adversarial approach we bring to all aspects of our public discourse and to identify areas of common concern and agreement. But in a time when we cannot even agree on matters of national security, is such a concord possible?

I sincerely hope so, but fear not.

This is Outrageous

For some time now it has been apparent that the American intelligence community has been incapable of keeping a secret, unless of course that secret is evidence of gross incompetence or nearly criminal behavior by intelligence personnel themselves. Everything else, no matter its importance to national security, is simply a tool to be implemented in support of various political, ideological or institutional agendas. Time and again vital information has been leaked in order to advance individual careers, agency agendas, or political causes. As a result not only the Bush administration but the nation's security as a whole has been severely damaged.

Now comes news of a particularly egregious leak that has once again imperiled us all.

The New York Sun reports:

WASHINGTON — Al Qaeda's Internet communications system has suddenly gone dark to American intelligence after the leak of Osama bin Laden's September 11 speech inadvertently disclosed the fact that we had penetrated the enemy's system.

The intelligence blunder started with what appeared at the time as an American intelligence victory, namely that the federal government had intercepted, a full four days before it was to be aired, a video of Osama bin Laden's first appearance in three years in a video address marking the sixth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001. On the morning of September 7, the Web site of ABC News posted excerpts from the speech.

But the disclosure from ABC and later other news organizations tipped off Qaeda's internal security division that the organization's Internet communications system, known among American intelligence analysts as Obelisk, was compromised.

[T]he intelligence community watched in real time the shutdown of the Obelisk system. America's Obelisk watchers even saw the order to shut down the system delivered from Qaeda's internal security to a team of technical workers in Malaysia. That was the last internal message America's intelligence community saw. "We saw the whole thing shut down because of this leak," the official said. "We lost an important keyhole into the enemy."

This is either incompetence that verges on the criminal or it is treason. Either way the leakers must be traced, identified, and apprehended. I don't care who the culprit is, Chertoff, Cheney, or some malicious VIP. This kind of thing is intolerable. Heads must roll.

UPDATE:

The WaPo is reporting that the leak came from an administration source. It should not be difficult to figure out who. The information, generated by a private company, was originally revealed to two officials. Within twenty minutes the intelligence services had the information. Within a matter of hours it was a matter of public record.

Everyone apparently knows who these high ranking officials are. They should by now be "formerly high-ranking officials" busy at home writing tell-all books and making appearances on cable TV. It makes no difference that the information was generated by a private rather than a public source -- this stuff should have been kept secret.

Heads must roll. But, unfortunately, they won't.

Outrageous.

UPDATE:

The responsible official has been identified. He was Deputy Director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), Michael Leiter. He received the video and apparently passed the information on immediately to various intelligence organizations. The leak apparently came from within the intelligence community. A former spook explains:

[The private company] made a fateful mistake by trusting an intelligence community that leaks like a sieve and is always looking for plausible cover to protect its own collection efforts. By providing the video to the government, she gave the spooks a chance to claim victory, without affecting the sources and methods that likely yielded the tape. Readers will note that various government spokesmen never confirmed that Ms. Katz and her firm were the first to discover the video. It's a given that the intel community was already aware of the production, and looking for a way to publicize their "coup" without compromising its collection techniques.

....

[B]e careful entrusting proprietary information to intel and security bureaucrats, who will gladly use private data to cover their own work, even if it means compromising your sources in the process.

Read the whole thing here.

So it was most likely the intelligence bureaucrats after all, not the administration, who were the source of the leak. The WaPo again got it wrong in a way that would undermine the administration. No surprise there.

More Good News

Amir Taheri notes the latest setback for al Qaeda.

UNKNOWN gunmen murdered Muhammad Gul Aghasi - one of the key "theologians" of al Qaeda - at a mosque in northern Syria last month. Candidates for the fiery preacher's killing include rivals within his own radical group, agents of the Americans - and his Syrian hosts. Whatever the truth, this is bad news for the already ailing al Qaeda.

....

Al Qaeda had hoped that the U.S. Congress would hand it a victory in Iraq by forcing the Bush administration to withdraw American forces before the Iraqis were ready to defend themselves. But that hope vanished last month when it became clear that the United States will retain its military presence in Iraq for at least another year.

Al Qaeda took another hit last week when Sheikh Abdul-Aziz Al-Sheikh, Saudi Arabia's grand mufti and the most prestigious cleric in the kingdom, issued a fatwa against "traveling abroad for the purpose of jihad." Hours after the fatwa was issued, Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki hailed it as a "major step toward defeating al Qaeda in Iraq."

Inside Iraq itself, a new force of more than 30,000 volunteers is getting ready to battle al Qaeda in the two predominantly Arab Sunni provinces of Anbar and Ninveh. Many of the volunteers are young men who had previously fought for Al Qaeda in Iraq. They decided to switch sides when Arab Sunni religious and tribal leaders realized that al Qaeda was merely using Iraq as a battlefield in its own war against the United States.

Even before Aghasi was gunned down, the flow of jihadists going to Iraq via Syria had slowed down. According to Iraqi official estimates, the number of foreign jihadists entering between January and July was down by almost 50 percent compared to the same period in 2006. This is, perhaps, one reason why the al Qaeda cyberspace is now full of desperate calls for more jihadists for Iraq. Despite the setbacks it has suffered, al Qaeda still sees Iraq as a make-or-break moment for its dream of world conquest.

Read it here.

Taheri notes that over time al Qaeda's reputation, which was at its peak right after 9/11, has fallen. Allies have drifted away or turned on them, casualties have mounted, fewer recruits are coming in. Organizationally al Qaeda has devolved from a coherent structure, to franchising, to freelance groups operating without any central direction. All in all it seems that the Bush administration's plan of not only destroying al Qaeda, but discrediting it, is working very well.

Lonborg Talks Sense

Bjorn Lonborg has a nice, rational piece on global warming in today's WaPo.

A few things that the media stories don't mention.

All eyes are on Greenland's melting glaciers as alarm about global warming spreads. This year, delegations of U.S. and European politicians have made pilgrimages to the fastest-moving glacier at Ilulissat, where they declare that they see climate change unfolding before their eyes.

Curiously, something that's rarely mentioned is that temperatures in Greenland were higher in 1941 than they are today. Or that melt rates around Ilulissat were faster in the early part of the past century, according to a new study. And while the delegations first fly into Kangerlussuaq, about 100 miles to the south, they all change planes to go straight to Ilulissat -- perhaps because the Kangerlussuaq glacier is inconveniently growing.

[Emphasis mine]

What is more, global warming might even save lives.

The IPCC tells us two things: If we focus on economic development and ignore global warming, we're likely to see a 13-inch rise in sea levels by 2100. If we focus instead on environmental concerns and, for instance, adopt the hefty cuts in carbon emissions many environmental groups promote, this could reduce the rise by about five inches. But cutting emissions comes at a cost: Everybody would be poorer in 2100. With less money around to protect land from the sea, cutting carbon emissions would mean that more dry land would be lost, especially in vulnerable regions such as Micronesia, Tuvalu, Vietnam, Bangladesh and the Maldives.

As sea levels rise, so will temperatures. It seems logical to expect more heat waves and therefore more deaths. But though this fact gets much less billing, rising temperatures will also reduce the number of cold spells. This is important because research shows that the cold is a much bigger killer than the heat. According to the first complete peer-reviewed survey of climate change's health effects, global warming will actually save lives. It's estimated that by 2050, global warming will cause almost 400,000 more heat-related deaths each year. But at the same time, 1.8 million fewer people will die from cold.

But..., but..., but what about Kyoto?

with its drastic emissions cuts, [the Kyoto Protocol] is not a sensible way to stop people from dying in future heat waves. At a much lower cost, urban designers and politicians could lower temperatures more effectively by planting trees, adding water features and reducing the amount of asphalt in at-risk cities. Estimates show that this could reduce the peak temperatures in cities by more than 20 degrees Fahrenheit.

Instead of the current hyperbolic confrontation between catastrophists and deniers Lonborg urges:

We have to rediscover the middle ground, where we can have a sensible conversation. We shouldn't ignore climate change or the policies that could attack it. But we should be honest about the shortcomings and costs of those policies, as well as the benefits.

Horray! Good advice, but will it be heeded? Not likely.

Read Lonborg's entire piece here.

Gee, I Wonder Why?

Gallup reports:

PRINCETON, NJ -- Republicans in America today remain deeply distrustful of the national news media -- in sharp contrast to Democrats, who have a great deal more trust in the media's accuracy. Overall, less than half of Americans, regardless of partisanship, have a great deal or a fair amount of trust in the mass media. Nearly half of Americans -- including over three-quarters of Republicans -- perceive the media as too liberal while fewer than one in five say the media are too conservative.

Read it here.

Maybe this has something to do with it.

As CNN's Howard Kurtz accurately pointed out on Sunday's "Reliable Sources," few media outlets seemed at all interested in giving much attention to the great news out of Iraq last week regarding September's sharp decline in casualties.

To Kurtz's obvious frustration, his guests - Robin Wright of the Washington Post and Barbara Starr of CNN - both supported the press burying this extremely positive announcement.

I kid you not.

Read it here.

The Hollywood War

Hollywood is currently churning out a seemingly endless stream of anti-war, anti-Bush films. Andrew Breitbart [conservative heterosexual] and David Ehrenstein [gay liberal] argue about the meaning of it all in the Los Angeles Times. Read their complete dialog here.

Lies Of the Left -- More on Wilson/Plame

The Hill reports:

Columnist Robert Novak said Saturday Ambassador Joe Wilson did not forcefully object to the naming of his CIA operative wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, when Novak spoke to him prior to the publication of a column that sparked a federal investigation and sent White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby to jail.

“He was not terribly exercised about it,” Novak said.

Instead, Wilson focused on not being portrayed as simply an opponent of the Iraq war. Wilson also stressed that his wife went by his last name, Wilson, rather than Plame, Novak said.

....

“It was an off-hand remark to a question I asked in an interview I requested,” Novak said. “This was not a conspiracy in the federal government to go after Valerie Plame Wilson.”

Emphasis mine.

Read it here.

I know this is old news, but we should never let this thing drop. It is a perfect example of the outrageous deceit employed by opponents of this administration.

This is Really Embarrassing

ABC reports:

The US intelligence services and the State Department screwed up "big time" in recent months.

In early July the Israeli government presented the U.S. with satellite imagery proving that Syria was developing a nuclear weapons capacity. It came as a shock to US intelligence which had not picked up on the facility's existence. Then action to take out the facility was delayed for months by US State Department objections voiced by Sec. of St. Condoleeza Rice. Finally Israel struck and destroyed the facility without US approval.

Read about it here.

The Bush Economic Miracle Continues

Well now, the Bush economy just keeps chugging along despite all the attempts on the part of critics to portray it as a disaster.

Bloomberg reports:

U.S. employment accelerated in September and revised figures for August showed an unexpected gain, easing recession concerns and making the Federal Reserve less likely to cut interest rates again.

Payrolls grew by 110,000 after an 89,000 increase in the previous month, the Labor Department said today in Washington. The change to the August figure wiped out what had been the first decline in four years, a drop that spurred predictions the six-year expansion would come to end amid the credit-market rout.

Treasury notes fell as traders speculated that the central bank, which reduced borrowing costs by half a point on Sept. 18, will resist lowering them at the next meeting. Analysts said more jobs and rising wages will help consumers weather falling home prices, sustaining the spending that accounts for more than two-thirds of the economy.

``It certainly doesn't look like an economy that's losing momentum,'' said John Ryding, chief U.S. economist at Bear Stearns Cos. in New York. `

Read it here.

No it doesn't, but with a chance to put a Democrat in the White House, don't count on seeing many headlines highlighting Bush's economic successes in the MSM.

Thanks Senator Specter

Steven Milloy notes that the new global warming legislation proposed by Sens. Specter and Bingaman will cost more than a trillion dollars in its first ten years and untold trillions after that while accomplishing next to nothing. Thanks senators, you are living up to our expectations.

Faugh!

Read it here.

Serenity sequel?

Will there be a Serenity sequel? We certainly hope so! A rumor is going around that Joss Whedon is planning one and Universal is willing.

I can't wait!

A Day on Hawk Mountain

"She Who Must Not Be Named" spent most of yesterday gallivanting around New York City. I headed up to Hawk Mountain. Here's some of what I saw.

A kettle of vultures


Hazy day at Donat's



Getting up-close and personal with a vulture



Birdwatcher



Another Turkey Vulture checking me out. What do they know that I don't? Do I look that bad?


Here's what I came to see. A sharpie hurtles by.



Osprey in a hurry.

Zimbabwe Update

Zimbabwe, Mad Bobby Mugabe's personal little racist, Maoist hell on earth, has now run out of bread. The Guardian reports:

Zimbabwe's bakeries have shut and supermarkets have warned there will be no bread for the foreseeable future as the government admitted that wheat production had collapsed following the seizure of white-owned farms.

The agricultural ministry announcement that the wheat harvest is only about a third of what is required, and that imports are held up by lack of hard currency, came as a deadline passed today for the last white farmers to leave their land or face prosecution for trespass.

Every time you think things just can't get worse, they do. Such are the fruits of anti-colonial ideological fervor. And the horror is, it is the poor people of Zimbabwe, not the hated Westerners, who pay the price.

Read about it here.

Mugabe is so monstrous that even the Chinese won't have anything to do with him. But he has made a new friend.

President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, whose countries were once designated "outposts of tyranny" by the U.S. administration, met Tuesday on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly and called for developing nations to unite against Western "domination."

Iranian state media said the two leaders discussed "the need for unity of the developing states against…U.S. and British neocolonialism." The Iranian report said President Mugabe lashed out at what he described as “the unilateralist approach and misuse of the U.N. Security Council by the bullying powers.”

Read it here.

The Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet

Last night "She Who Must Not Be Named" and I went with some friends to see the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet," arguably the finest chamber ensemble in the world. It was an impressive performance. They started with three short pieces by Jacques Ibert, moved on to works by Milhaud, Taffanel, and Sam Barber, then finished with the delightful "Quintet #1 in E Major" by Jean Francaix which left me chuckling as we wended our way back to the car for the trip home.

It was a lovely evening with some lovely people. We must do it again soon.

Oh, yeah, "She" informs me that we will, she's already made all the arrangements.

Bill Clinton's Selective Memory

From the WSJ:

Clinton says "We didn't have the terror threat" in 1992. Yet by the time he was elected, the following acts had already occurred:

• The November 1979 invasion of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the holding of hostages, who were not released until Inauguration Day 1981.
  
  
• Hezbollah's 1983 bombing of U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 241.
  
  
• The holding of American hostages, and murder of some, in Beirut throughout the 1980s.
  
  
• The 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait.
  
  
• The 1985 bombing of a Madrid restaurant frequented by American soldiers.
  
  
• The 1985 Hezbollah hijacking of TWA flight 847 and murder of a U.S. Navy flier on board.
  
  
• The 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship, in which an American passenger was murdered.
  
  
• The 1986 bombing of TWA flight 840, which killed four Americans.
  
  
• The 1986 bombing of a disco in Berlin, which prompted a retaliatory strike on Libyan targets.
  
  
• The 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103, which killed 270.

Clinton had been in office barely a month when terrorists first tried to destroy the World Trade Center, killing six. His term saw the following attacks on American interests overseas:

• The 1995 car bombing of U.S. military headquarters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing five servicemen.
  
  
• The 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, killing 19 Americans.
  
  
• The 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 224.
  
  
• The 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, less than a month before the election of Mr. Clinton's successor, killing 17 American sailors.

Then of course came 9/11, less than eight months after Mr. Clinton left office. How can anyone, looking back in 2007, claim "we didn't have the terror threat" in 1992?

It would be accurate to say that we, meaning most Americans, didn't understand the gravity of the terror threat back then. But this points to an inconvenient truth about Mr. Clinton--namely that this failure of understanding continued throughout his presidency.

Read it here.

Back in those naive days of the Twentieth Century we were horrified by George Orwell's suggestion that history was infinitely malleable -- that the powers that be could simply ignore manifest truth and create a counter-factual history to suit their own designs. Well, today all we have is spin ["contested" history], and in the hands of a master manipulator like Bill Clinton, it is completely divorced from reality.

Your Brains..., They Want Your Brains

For you afficionados, The Projection Booth is running a zombie blog-a-thon. Thirty-one days of zombie obsession on display.

Here's the intro. Go here for his links to zombie madness.

More Good News From Iraq You Probably Haven't Heard

Oxblog takes a look on the figures that Iraq Body Count [an anti-war activist group] has been sitting on. Why not publicize the information? Because they show that the surge is having a huge positive effect in Iraq, that not only Sunni but Shiite attacks on civilians are down, that suicide bombings spiked in the few days before Gen. Petraeus testified before Congress [an obvious attempt to influence American public opinion] and a host of other inconvenient facts.

Read the whole analysis here.

Yulia's Back On Top

BBC Reports:

Ukraine's opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko says she wants to form a new coalition government following Sunday's closely fought parliamentary election.

She aims to join forces with President Viktor Yushchenko's party - an old ally from the 2004 Orange Revolution.

Partial results show Mrs Tymoshenko's bloc is narrowly trailing arch-rival Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, who refuses to accept defeat in the poll.

But combined votes for the two Orange parties give them a slim advantage.

Read it here.

This is welcome news. It looks as though the Orange Revolution may be back on track. Sorry, Putin.

Fare Thee Well

Cox and Forkum are taking a last bow. They will no longer be producing editorial cartoons. Too bad, they were among the best.

Read about it here.

Reading Recommendation

Check out David Weaver-Zercher's Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy. It is an illuminating discussion of how Pennsylvania's Amish community dealt with the mass murder at Nickel Mines.

For a review of the book check here.

I was particularly struck by this passage [slightly modified].

[The Amish hold] a perspective that considers life to be short, eternity to be long, and heaven and hell to be real. [They] believe choices have eternal consequences, to fail to discipline would not only neglect their God-given responsibility, it would in fact be the unloving thing to do. It may not be as picturesque as a horse-drawn buggy, but this uniquely Amish view of spiritual care is one more example of how the Amish walk out of step with the culture around them.

Out of step indeed!

You can order Amish Grace by clicking on the Amazon links at the top of the page.

A Welcome Trend You May Not Have Heard About

In case you wondered why the Democrats have suddenly stopped their effort to end the war, this might have something to do with it:

AFP [the French news agency] reports:

US military losses in Iraq for September stood at 70 on Sunday, the lowest monthly figure since July last year, according to an AFP tally based on Pentagon figures.

The figure also marks the fourth consecutive drop in the monthly death toll following a high of 121 in May. June saw 93 deaths, July 82 and August 79. The monthly toll in July 2006 was 53.

Read the whole thing here.

Why isn't the American MSM recognizing the effectiveness of the surge? The French do.