I'M AS CONSERVATIVE AS BOB DOLE? I scored a 35 on the political quiz to which Cut On the Bias linked. Not bad, as far as scores go, although I don't know where I lost those five points. But Bob Dole? I never thought he was all that conservative.

BOOBS V. BOOZE: Before last week's parlimentary election in the Czech Republic, the Christian Democrats in the Moravian town of Valasske Mezirici were handing out free shots of liquor. The Communists fought back by having topless women distribute their campaign literature. Now I read that the Communists won 19% of the vote, while the center-right coalition together won only 14%. This a sad time for the Czech Republic -- electing Communists can't be a good thing -- but what does the preference for breasts over booze say? Just pondering. UPDATE: Maybe breasts and booze symbolize what Europe is all about -- hedonism and socialism.

BLOGGING will probably be slow for the next few days. Justin is out-of-town, and I am busy chasing a toddler all by myself.

JUST ADDED a new blog to the left. Readjacobs.com is a really interesting blog mostly related to education.

BUT YOU ASSURED ME IT WAS A RELIGION OF PEACE! I got a kick out of this passage from a report on suspected terrorist Abdullah al-Muhajir (aka Jose Padilla) (via Instapundit):

... authorities have painted a picture of al-Muhajir as a former gang member who was born in Brooklyn but raised in Chicago, where he was convicted of various petty crimes as a teen. He apparently grew up a Catholic, but converted to Islam after moving to South Florida in the late 1980s. Despite this conversion, authorities say he developed a penchant for violence. ...

Imagine that: al-Muhajir became a violent sociopath despite his conversion to Islam. Rats. There goes my plan for bringing about world peace by forcibly converting everyone to Islam and killing anyone who won't....

OBNOXIOUS: Regarding newly proposed EPA regulations governing when and how energy companies must upgrade pollution controls when they repair or upgrade physical plant, "Earthjustice" executive director Buck Parker had this to say:

"With the release of this report, the administration dropped a dirty bomb and it's going to cost thousands of American lives."

Power plant pollution: it's like radioactive fallout from a terrorist "dirty bomb" intended to kill and sicken thousands of people. How clever, and so much more subtle than the usual "pollution is terrorism against the environment" analogy. I haven't formed an opinion as to whether the proposed regulations make sense, but over-the-top environmentalist idiocy like this confirms my gut instinct that they do. What a jerk.

INCORRIGIBLE UNTO DEATH: When lawyers speak in court on behalf of clients, they often hedge and speak in the hypothetical about facts unfavorable to their case. Lawyers don't make definite assertions about unfavorable facts because these assertions could be construed as admissions that legally establish the facts. Our legal system figures out facts by making two adversaries duke it out, so a party's self-serving hemming and hawing about unfavorable facts isn't actually a bad thing: it just makes the other side do its own work to establish the fact. But I can't see what purpose this kind of squishy-lawyer speech serves when it comes from the mouth of a man condemned to die for committing a heinous murder. I'm referring to Walter Mickens, a man who "sexually assaulted a ... teenager, stabbed him 143 times and left him to die on a dirty mattress" and was at last put to death for his crimes last night. Some of Mickens' final words were, "To whoever I may have hurt or caused harm, I pray that you can forgive me." Whoever he may have hurt or caused harm? Note first the lawyerly redundancy of "hurt or caused harm." Obviously this man had spent too much time with lawyers, which explains his odd, legal-sounding locutions as well as the fact that he'd cheated punishment for ten years. Note, second, the hypothetical or theoretical cast of the sentence: "whoever I may have hurt or caused harm." Does it gall you that a man who had been found guilty of stabbing a human being 143 times -- ignoring, or perhaps relishing, the victim's screams, the horrifying sound of metal puncturing tissue, the sight of dozens of bleeding wounds -- a man whose last legal claim was not that he was factually innocent, but merely that he didn't have a good enough lawyer -- does it gall you that this man, at the point of death, still wouldn't give up the role of beleagured criminal defendant and simply acknowledge his guilt? What issue was he preserving for appeal? Perhaps he thought God would remand for a new trial, and didn't want to waive the issue? No. He was simply in death, as in life, an incorrigible man-turned-monster, and that's just how they talk.

AT THE MOVIES: Michael Lewis's Dad Again column is once again an interesting read. He goes with his baby daughter to a parents-and-babies-only movie night. What a brilliant idea! I wish there were places like that across the country.

REVERSE DISCRIMINATION? I've been too busy using the internet to search for a house and a doula to pay much attention to the news, but I did notice an item in Jay Nordlinger's Impromptus about job advertisements. It seems that a travel agency in Great Britain wished to place an employment ad that described qualified candidates as "friendly." The job agency refused to run the ad for a "friendly" employee because "that would discriminate against applicants not lucky enough to have that sort of personality.” Judging from the large numbers of grumpy and surly clerks working in my favorite department stores, like WalMart, I don't think we need to worry about "personality discrimination" in the United States. In fact, I sometimes wonder if stores, not to mention government agencies, fast food restaurants, and my local medical clinic, are practicing reverse discrimination against employees lucky enough to be friendly and helpful.

WHY WE LOATHE THEM III: I struck "hate" from the headline for my original post on this subject and replaced it with "loathe" because "hate" sounds too intemperate, too harsh, and connotes malice, which I do not bear toward even the EU-nuchs. I merely "loathe" their "moral vanity," which means something like "hate," but lacks the connotation of malice. That which I hate, I may wish to harm. But that which I loathe, I find too disgusting to trouble myself with it; I simply wish that it would go away, like some foul odor. When European officials preach to Americans about European "ideals," I don't want to hurt them, I just want them to be quiet, just be quiet, and stop insulting my country with their self-righteous blather.

WHY WE LOATHE THEM II: Referring to Germany's non-cooperation in the prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui, about which I artlessly and intemperately vent below, Best of the Web describes opposition to capital punishment as "the central object of European Union moral vanity." "Moral vanity" -- how better to describe the flaunting of a simplistic moral position, by the continent that created tyrannies galore, to the nation that crushed them all? Besides "loathsome," of course.

WHY WE HATE LOATHE THEM (EU-NUCHS, THAT IS): Germany, fatherland of such civil libertarian innovations as the Gestapo, Kristallnacht, and Auschwitz, regrets that it cannot aid our prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui because the death penalty, which our government seeks against Moussaoui for the petty crime of murdering 3000 people, does not, according to a spokesman for the German Justice Ministry, "correspond to the ideals of our legal system." These cretins demand that our government "consult" with theirs? These moral Lilliputians lecture us on "international responsibility"? These only recently neutered progenitors of the monstrous Third Reich and Democratic Republic of Germany get prissy with us about the "ideals" of their "legal system"? O, how I loathe them. Not that the United States will hurt the European states the way they deserve, by purposely letting them take one big one to the chin. ("Hey, sorry about the whole terrorists-nuking-Paris thing. We meant to send an e-mail, but it was, like, a holiday weekend.") That would violate our ideals, which -- bless our simplistic little hearts -- actually mean something more than waxing pious about the lives of mass murderers. Besides, the EU-nuchs are so far gone, I doubt taking even a devastating blow would faze them.

NO TV NEWS FOR LEFTIES? The tail-end of today's Howard Kurtz column in the Post caught my eye:

Everyone knows Fox News Channel has a conservative audience, right? Actually, a Pew Research Center poll puts the viewership at 46 percent conservative, 32 percent moderate and 18 percent liberal -- not much different than the 44 percent conservative audience for CNBC or 40 percent conservative for CNN and MSNBC. The difference is more apparent on individual shows: Bill O'Reilly's Fox audience is 56 percent conservative and 5 percent liberal, while Larry King's CNN audience is 38 percent conservative and 19 percent liberal.

Judging from the small numbers for "liberal" viewers, one might think lefties didn't watch TV news. (Which means they must be listening to NPR and PBS, right? Wrong, says this Pew Center study (link via Kausfiles), finding that 36% of NPR listeners are self-described conservatives versus 20% self-described liberals.) No, the real reason is that the right has successfully turned "liberal" into a dirty word for most lefties (as this great Bloom County strip explains, along with another involving Opus's appearance before a Senate committee, which I can't find on the web), which explains the popularity of the obnoxiously self-righteous term "moderate" and the still more odious label "progressive."

EVEN MORE ON MCCLELLAN V. GRANT: JunkYard Blog compares the Civil War's McClellan to today's Pentagon brass much more artfully than I did a while back. He writes:

[A]rmies are built to be used, not admired. McClellan was in love with watching his grand army in its resplendent blue uniforms march up and down big parade squares in camp, and was in love with the attention and respect the commander of the Union army garnered. ... In battle, McClellan was hapless, not because he didn't understand the battle tactics of the day, but because simply lacked the decisiveness and courage a general needs. ... Today's Pentagon seems to be in love with its reputation as the world's greatest military, but if reports of its skiddishness about Iraq are true, it seems to want to be admired as a military force, not used as one where high casualties are possible. ... We'll need our military leadership to carry out the orders of President Bush in destroying the Islamofascist conspiracy and ending its threat of international terror. Let's hope President Bush doesn't have to weed out a few McClellans on his way to discovering a US Grant. Let's also hope that if he does encounter a McClellan or two, he'll have the nerve to sack them and promote competent leaders who will take the fight to the enemy.

MCCLELLAN, GRANT, ET AL. II: Alexander was "noted as much for his uncommon decency"? News to me; I thought he led a band of cutthroats who were motivated by loot and women and inflicted terrible cruelties against their conquered foes. Anyway, Sherman as a war criminal? Sorry, that dawg won't hunt. Nineteenth century armies depended on local foodstuffs to live and horses and railroads to move; the Southern economy depended on slavery and the rebel war effort was dedicated to preserving the same. Sherman burned the crops, seized the horses, "bow-tied" the railroads, and freed slaves. That's fair play. Members of Georgia's fairer sex screamed loudly about rapin' and pillagin' Yankees, but they screamed louder at their husbands and sons for being too cowardly to fight Sherman's army, forcing them to bear the brunt of his assault. Besides, while some of Sherman's soldiers raped and killed some civilians, as some undisciplined soldiers do in every war, claims that his Army of the West engaged in rape and civilian murder as a battle tactic are based on hyperventilating Southern newspaper editorials, not fact. The Confederacy was a democracy; its populace voted in favor of rebellion and supported war against the duly established government of the United States; its oldfolk and womenfolk screamed for war and sent off boys and young men to die by the thousands -- yet most Southerners, especially Southerners of the aristocratic planter class, had never tasted the war they demanded. Sherman made them taste it, and they didn't like it very much. Sherman's March to the Sea and his march through the Carolinas shortened the war by teaching the civilian population that the rebellion had failed and that the rebel armies could not protect them. Seems to me burnin' crops, plantation houses, and railroads was a sight more moral than grindin' up several thousand more Southern boys. I'm won't get into total war doctrine, and its justifications and flaws, because I gotta earn a living. But let me take three pot-shots: First, targeting civilian infrastructure when it supports the enemy's war effort makes sense; that's what Sherman did in Georgia and the Allies did in German and Japan. Second, international law recognizes the principle of retaliation: a breach of law can justify a retaliatory act that would otherwise violate the law. Since it was illegal for the Germans to blitz London, that breach arguably justified the Allies' blitzing German cities. If Iraq or Iran financed a terrorist nuclear attack on an American city, that illegal act would arguably justify nuclear retaliation against an Iraqi or Iranian city. Smarter people than I have and will debate whether some laws of war trump the right of retaliation, and in many cases, morality should restrain the retaliating state, but state practice will decide the question, if it hasn't already. Third, as my last two points indicate, warfare between industrialized states and against agressor states that lack any qualms about killing civilians raises moral and legal questions that warfare between early-nineteenth century armies clashing in set piece battles did not, and which cannot be answered by simple citations to Ghengis Khan, Hitler, Stalin, et al. Take that! (Exit, chased by Southern Civil War reenactor.)

McClellan, Grant, Sherman, Patton, Marshall, Ghengis Khan, et al.: While I have oft been accused by my devoted son-in-law of becoming too emotionally involved in a war that ended nearly 150 years ago, the mix and match comparisons of the fighting styles of Northern Generals in the War Between the States and those of Patton/Marshall in WWII seem misleading and inappropriate. While I grant that Marshall's (and perhaps McClellen's, as well) hesitant timidity contrasted with Patton's great skill and assertiveness offers important lessons and examples for the present conflict with Islamic extremists, the methods of Sherman do not. Let me explain. It is no secret that, well fortified by some good Kentucky rye and unburdened by any of McClellen's scruples, Grant got the results Lincoln wanted. However, debating whether Sherman, with his clever little flanking movements, was a more skilled tactician than Grant ignores the more sobering fact that all three proud "Sons of Ohio," Sherman, Grant, and Sheridan, could easily and properly have been tried and hanged as war criminals for their brutal and needless war against civilian populations in Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia, and elsewhere. The Nuremberg trials after WWII justifiably tried the Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goering as a war criminal, not for any role in Auschwitz, Dachau, or Bergen-Belsen, but for his deliberate bombing of civilian targets in Poland, Russia, England, and Scandinavia. If, God forbid, the Nazis had won WWII and thereby also won the privilege of writing the history, you can rest assured that there would be a pious chapter on the military necessity of demoralizing a stubbornly recalcitrant enemy by murdering and starving its civilian population. Pillage, rape and civilian deaths are always going to be a tragic part of the collateral damage of war, but they need not be the goal of the protagonists. Arguably, the greatest military genius of the pre-Christian, or possibly any, era was Alexander the Great of Macedonia. By his mid-thirties he had conquered an area comparable to what the Roman Legions would need centuries to acquire. In his day, however, Alexander was noted as much for his uncommon decency as his military genius. Brilliant and ruthless in war against opposing armies, Alexander was also willing to spare the civilian population of any city that did not openly fight him. As a stark contrast to Alexander, Ghengis Khan in the early 13th Century successfully spread terror and demoralizing despair across western and central Asia by systematically and deliberately slaughtering nearly all the civilian populations he encountered. Despite Ghengis's military successes, the centuries following him saw (at least in the West) fewer and fewer kings and generals willing to imitate his style of deliberately starving and slaughtering civilians. Today, except in Mongolian history, Ghengis's military brilliance fails to obscure the fact that he was a brutal murderous thug, barbaric even by the standards of his barbaric age. Over 50 years after the fact, I can admire the daring, brave, and brilliant Alexander-like military tactics of Patton's tank corps. In contrast to Patton, however, the passing of 150 years have not removed the stain of Lincoln's Ohio Generals' cowardly Ghengis-like legacy of pillage, rape and scorched earth warfare against women, children, and old men. It is eminently arguable, if not altogether certain, that Lincoln's political ambitions and desperation to win by any means the war against the South reintroduced to the world the "effectiveness" of systematic total war against civilians foreshadowing the even more brutal 20th Century genocides by Kemal Ataturk, Joe Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Hideki Tojo, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and Idi Amin.

LIFE IMITATES THE SIMPSONS: I've checked. This Washington Post op-ed, "Fighting Obesity And the Food Lobby" -- which notes "disturbing parallels" between the "food industry" and the "tobacco industry" and issues an ultimatum that the "food industry"

(1) suspend all food advertising and marketing campaigns directed at children; (2) remove sugar-sweetened soft drinks and snack foods from vending machines in schools; (3) end sponsorship of scholastic activities and professional nutrition organizations linked to product promotion; and (4) refrain from political contributions that might influence national nutritional policy

-- is not based on The Onion. It's based on The Simpsons (Episode 1308: after authorities "determine that Springfield is pound for pound the fattest town on earth, ... Marge ... hires a lawyer and wins a class-action lawsuit against big sugar. The Judge then decrees that sugar be banned from Springfield for life.") (Via Best of the Web) (See also Overlawyered here and here.)

DEPARTMENT OF KIDDIE PROPAGANDA: It's easy to scare kids. They have vivid imaginations, a loose grip on reality, and will believe anything they're told, especially if it comes from an authority figure. Which is why lefties love writing scary books for children on the horror de jure. Nowadays it's global warming. (See, e.g., Climate Crisis: Saving Our World, by Nigel Hawkes. Comes in library binding, naturally. Public schools and public libraries love this stuff.) But when I was an urchin, the lefties decreed that the Official Childhood Fear should be nuclear war. I remember reading a book back then (I've long since forgotten the title) about a boy who complained to his parents that they didn't spend enough time with him because they kept going to nuclear freeze rallies. "But honey," they replied, "We're just trying to make the world a better place for you." And the other day, when my wife and I were browsing the library's kid lit section for our son, I came across this blast from the past, published in 1986: Nobody Wants a Nuclear War, by Judith Vigna. Readers may remember Ms. Vigna as the author of such children's classics as My Two Uncles ("Sometimes a man loves another man in the way a married couple love each other"), Saying Goodbye to Daddy (Daddy's dying), I Wish Daddy Didn't Drink So Much, I Live with Daddy (Daddy's divorced), Mommy and Me by Ourselves Again (Mommy's boyfriend broke up with her; who knows where Daddy is). Nobody Wants a Nuclear War is classic kiddie propaganda. Here's how it goes. Arms control, MAD, the Cold War -- it would be hard for Vigna to explain all of that to little blighters. (But my dad did: "You see, son, we have to build bombs because the Russians keep building them. But if the Russians think we can blow them up before they blow us up, they won't bomb us.") So she doesn't mess around with details; she just scares the little blighters: "If there's a nuclear war ... the whole world will blow up. There'll be no more houses or trees or animals or parents. Only a dark, smoky desert like we saw on television," a little boy explains to his sister. An artless illustration depicts the little boy and his sister hiding beneath a bed, holding a magazine with a mushroom cloud on the cover. But it's not enough to scare kids; you have to move them to action, and more important, piety. The little urchins run outside, build themselves a fallout shelter, and fall asleep inside it wrapped up in "the big snuggly picnic blanket." "I felt safe," says the little girl. That's the title of a wretched book by Judith Vigna wrote for children back in the mid-1980s.

TEN MORE WORDS TO KILL FOR: A.C. Douglas lists ten words that "when written or uttered are cause sufficient for the murder of the writer or utterer, and the immediate establishment of a prima facie case of justifiable homicide with the consequent full exoneration of the murderer." I agree with all of his homicide-inducing words, and nominate a few more:

1. as a __ -- when used to imply that a speaker's opinion on a subject is dictated by the speaker's sex, race, or other status, and that persons of different status may not legitimately offer an opinion on the subject, as in "As a Tibetan bisexual woman, I find your opposition to liberal immigration policies, same-sex marriage, and abortion-on-demand deeply offensive."
2. feel -- when used as a synonym for "think," as in "I feel that your position is illogical."
3. deeply -- when used to modify "offensive" or "offended," as in "I was deeply offended by that remark," or when used to modify most any other word, for that matter.
4. diversity -- when used to mean "per capita skin melanin within a population," as in "This community lacks sufficient diversity" or "I am deeply offended by the lack of diversity at our university."
5. impact -- when used as a verb, as in "the poignancy of Alec Baldwin's latest public remarks impacted me deeply."
6. network -- as in "This conference will be a great opportunity to network with prospective employers."
7. offensive -- when used to describe almost anything besides an odor, as in "I find your position on affirmative action deeply offensive."
8. parent -- as in "No one can tell you how to parent your child."
9. progressive -- as in "Mother Jones takes really progressive positions, like confiscating private property."
10. synergy -- when used in any context, but especially offensive when used in wedding vows, as in "The synergy of our souls will last us through eternity." (If you can't believe that synergy gets used in wedding vows, you haven't been watching TLC's A Wedding Story.)

IF MY GRANDMA HAD WHEELS, SHE'D BE A BUS: A lot of the debate about what the FBI and CIA knew and whether they could've prevented September 11 reminds me of the wisecrack that "If my grandma has wheels, she'd be a bus." Yes, it's hackneyed, but it makes a good point: it's pointless to speculate what might be the outcome if you had circumstances completely (and impossibly) different from actual circumstances. If you could staff the FBI and the CIA with bureaucrats who are always selflessly dedicated to their mission, not selfishly devoted to personal advancement and prestige; who always think creatively, not regurgitate conventional wisdom; who always exercise reasoned judgment, take intelligent risks, and accept responsibility for their actions, not evade risk and responsibility by inaction; who never become complacement about potential threats, no matter how many wearying false alarms they endure, no matter how bewildering the array of intelligence sources they manage -- if you could staff a the FBI and CIA with people like that, you'd create effective intelligence agenices unlike any known to mankind -- but only because they'd be staffed by aliens!

I don't understand why some people think agency competition is bad and centralizing agency responsibility is good. Maybe they imagine that agencies work the way my middle school civics text described it: a flow chart tracing the devolution of executive power from the president to his cabinet secretaries and agency heads, then to their underlings, and so on, a neutral system of communicating and executing the will of the president. But the federal bureaucracy doesn't really work that way. Agencies aren't neutral presidential mouthpieces, but are political constituencies unto themselves. These constituencies have interests and agendas that transcend individual administrations: the State Department was an arms-controlling, Arab-appeasing, and UN-suck-upping institution under Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton, and continues to be so under Bush II. Civil service protection ensures that most agency personnel survive administration changes. And agencies develop agendas independent of Congress or the president because that's what we designed them to do; remember, one justification for creating and deferring to the administrative state is that career bureaucrats have "expertise" that transient, elected political hacks lack. To add to the confusion, Congress creates multiple agencies with overlapping jurisdiction, The result is that a new president comes into office facing legions of personnel who do not agree with his policy decisions and actively try to thwart them. None of this is as bad as it sounds. re: proposed new department -- don't think solution is centralization -- agency competition is good -- different approaches, info, ideas -- but key is to create incentives for useful competition. That means system of rewarding creative thinking and ideas; and firing ineffective people -- that means firing top people -- I also wonder whether the long-term solution is technological -- Director of Central Intelligence and National Security Advisor, I thought, were both designed to filter, synthesize info -- but how a President uses NSA, DCI, depends on President and whose in the positions. Bush seems to rely a lot on Condi Rice to manage competing agencies Discussion of eliminating turf-wars and such is fanciful -- bureaucracies compete for money, authority -- trick is to use what they want as reward and punishment system -- FBI blows it, cut its budget, CIA figures something out, reward it -- maybe it's too far-fetched, but long-term solution might be a congressionally-enacted budgetary scheme where President has more discretion to throw money around to agencies, kind of slush fund for good behavior. Lot of the discusison about intel failure and long-term solutions is kind of like arguing that if my grandma had wheels, she'd be a bus. If you could get bureaucrats who were selflessly dedicated to their mission rather than selfishly devoted to their own advancement, prestige, brownie points; if you could get bureaucrats who thought creatively and took intelligent risks based on reasoned judgment, instead of people who were too afraid of failure to do anything, who put their heads down and press on by the book, not wanting to tick anyone off; if you could get people who never become complacement, who never stop worrying about potential threats, despite wearying false alarms and bewildering array of intelligence sources -- in short, if you could create a bureaucracy unlike any every known to mankind, staffed with people unlike any ever created in the history of the human race -- because their aliens! -- then you'd have an intelligence system that worked. Oh.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE: The hostage situation in the Philippines ended horribly, but it ended the right way. It ended horribly because it left two hostages dead and one a widow. But it ended well because it ended with a military assault, not negotiations. Someone once argued, in National Review, I think, that the right way to deal with hostage situations is to treat the hostages as already dead. It's a horrifying thought, condemning fellow countrymen to almost certain death, and I couldn't advocate it if it my loved ones were the hostages. Most people can't approach difficult problems rationally if they're personally and emotionally involved. The government has to act in the best interests of society, and society's interests are served by making hostage-taking a futile, no-return investment. That means denying terrorists what they hope to gain from hostage taking -- publicity, ransom, and government paralysis -- by hunting them down and killing them, even at the risk of killing the hostages. We don't let the risk of collateral damage to the enemy paralyze our military operations. We can't let the risk of collateral damage to our own countrymen paralyze us either.

DON'T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ: This story proves the well rehearsed quip. Beijing's most popular newspaper reported as fact a story copied word-for-word from "The Onion," an internet satire tabloid. Apparently, if DC doesn't come through with updated accommodations, Congress is looking to make a strategic move to Memphis or Charlotte -- a town with a much better fan base and improved concessions. (Although I hear the beer is still outrageous!)

ANOTHER REASON TO HOMESCHOOL: Pregnancy rates for high school girls rise during the school year, the effect of putting a bunch of hormonal youths together without parental supervision. Pregnancy rates drop off during the summer. So much for summer romance.

SILLY RULE OF THE DAY: Exercise and I don't mix well. I'm not Jonah Goldberg -- my friends would believe I have and do go on hikes once in a while -- but I don't get out and exercise much. Which means I don't keep up with the world of sports bras. For example, I did not know until today that some sports actually regulate sports bras. The Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association disqualified the winning high school 800-meter relay team because one of the runners wore an illegal sports bra. Modest souls may wonder if her offense was wearing nothing on top but a sports bra. But no, it wasn't. Her offense was daring to wear a white and black sports bra. You see, the association's regulations specify that exposed sports bras be only one color -- white, black or grey.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS: I haven't thought much yet about the newly proposed "Department of Homeland Defense." I just instinctively hate the idea of creating a new federal department. But I also instinctively like anything Dan Schorr doesn't like -- and he doesn't like the proposed department. (He thinks it's an undeveloped and poorly thought out idea, like his NPR essays.) Now if the President wanted to trade Education for it -- maybe I could go along with that.

KUDOS: A while ago, I wrote about rude people. I was pleased this morning to read that one of my favorite bloggers, Tony Woodlief, is not only not a rude person, but indeed quite the gentleman. Not that I ever doubted that he would be.

CLUELESS CONYERS: Referring to the Justice Department's proposed regulation "requiring a new 'special registration' of thousands of people visiting the United States from Syria, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Sudan," Rep. Conyers spluttered:

"It is shocking that the [most free] nation on earth could engage in a system of racial and ethnic profiling," he said. "It is as though the equal protection clause had no meaning or context whatsoever to the authors of this Orwellian proposal." [Washington Post]

First, note the gratuitous use "Orwellian" to describe an immigration restriction on foreigners from hostile states that lets them into the country, just on the condition that they get fingerprinted and photographed, give contacts in the U.S. and in their own countries, and periodically report in to the INS. So passports and visas were just first steps on the path to 1984? Who knew? Second, and much more amusing, note that Rep. Conyers, ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee -- which means he supposedly knows something about our legal system -- is unaware that the equal protection clause has little if any bearing on which countries and under what conditions we grant the privilege of immigration to our country. I'm not advocating arbitrarily discriminatory immigration restrictions (although we arguably have such restrictions already), just that the constitution generally doesn't forbid substantively (as opposed to procedurally) discriminatory immigration rules. And it certainly doesn't forbid restricting immigration from hostile states in a time of war. Indeed, the federal government controls immigration not because the constitution specifically grants it that power, but because the Supreme Court found that power implied by the federal government's express powers to regulate foreign commerce, conduct foreign affairs, and make war. (One of the first things a country does in a war is restrict enemy nationals' access to its territory.) One legitimate criticism of the proposed regulation is that it doesn't discriminate against enough hostile states, because it exempts countries like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Yemen (although individual immigrants may be subjected to the restrictions on a case-by-case basis). I hate to say it -- I hate to see it -- but Conyers proves, yet again, that many politicians on the left simply will not engage in rationale debate about appropriate security measures in time of war. UPDATE: Volokh has a detailed discussion of the legal issues of discrimination in the immigration context.

NOW I CAN GET SOME SLEEP! Sometimes I'm so resistant to trendiness that I miss out on something good, but this time my husband kept pushing me until I finally read the Harry Potter books. They're great and awfully hard to put down; I gobbled up all four books in a week, and just in time, too: staying up reading until 1:30 a.m. every night (which is easy to do in Fairbanks, because the sun doesn't really set these days) was killing me.

THE RETURN TO NORMALCY:

12 Killed In Bombing
Of Bus In Israel Many Wounded in Blast During Rush Hour Washington Post Foreign Service Wednesday, June 5, 2002; Page A18 [link]

I wonder when it's our turn.

"TWO ZULUS BUGGERED MY CAT": No, this isn't a sordid attempt to increase readership by showing up on twisted Google searches. It's a mnemonic John Derbyshire claim English medical students use to memorize "the five branches of the facial nerve (temporal, zygomatic, buccal, mandibular, cervical)" in his essay on the educational benefits memorization. I ran across his essay, and one on the same subject by Claudia Winkler, in this post on The Corner. As Winkler and Derbyshire both point out, memorization and rote learning are practically taboo in modern education. But how educated can one be without them? I ran into this cultural resistance to memorization when I was a German TA for undergraduates. They couldn't accept that the best way for them to learn irregular verbs was to write them over and over again until they had them memorized, but since they were adults and weren't headed off for immersion in a German-speaking country, I really couldn't offer a better way. I know the benefits of memorization first hand. I wasn't homeschooled, technically, but got plenty of schooling at home from my mother, who came up with mnemonics for everything, including a poem for counting by threes (available upon request). In second grade, we had to memorize a poem, and I chose Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Swing." (Today, I can still recite it to my son every time I take him to the park.) Winkler notes that "rote memorization" means learning "by memory alone, without understanding or thought," which is why modern educational orthodoxy criticizes it. But what's so bad about learning something without understanding it? Memorization for its own sake is a great exercise of the brain. My husband (bless his heart) can't get the words right to any song, while I can sing the Kingston Trio tunes I learned at my father's knee without fudging the words. My husband's defense is that he doesn't want to clutter up his brain with pointless facts, but what's a brain for if not for getting cluttered? And the more we clutter our brains, the more space we'll find in them. More importantly, memorizing information without understanding it the first time around makes it easier to understand it later. Children quickly learn songs without understanding the lyrics or the music. My two-and-a-half-year old son, thanks to some ambitious Bible school teachers, informed me the other day that "The Bible was written by holy men inspired by God." (It doesn't quite sound that way when he says it, but then, I can understand toddlerese.) He doesn't know what that doctrine means, any more than he knows that "Big Rock Candy Mountain" is an old hobo song (sanitized, but only slightly, for children). But these presently meaningless words are the framework to which he will someday attach knowledge and understanding. And once he fixes words in his memory, and attaches ideas to those words, they will stay with him the rest of his days. In short, if they memorize it, understanding will come. Now if only I could think up a mnemonic for spelling "mnemonic."

PRODIGAL BLOGGER: We will, of course, be killing the fatted calf in honor of Ms. Frazier's long-awaited return to Curmudgeonry.

KILLIN' TEXANS: Without comment, the Supreme Court overruled Texas' appeal that death row inmate Calvin Burdine should be executed for (allegedly, of course) killing his gay lover, never mind that his lawyer slept through parts of his trial ... including questioning of the prosecution's witnesses and admission of evidence. It's an interesting question. Is sleeping in trial like the temporary absence of counsel from the trial, which would result in an automatic reversal of the conviction, or is it like impairment of counsel due to drugs, drink, or mental illness, in which case the convict has to show a likelihood that the outcome would be different if his counsel had been competent? I'm sure if it was important the lawyer would have awakened to object. And damn those prosecutors for whispering in court anyway. If his opening hadn't been such a lullabye ....

TAKE THIS TEST! The answers will shock and amaze you! (If you're Norman Mineta and the New York Times.) (Via The Corner).

THE ENORMITY OF"ENORMITY" IN MODERN USAGE: Go ahead, call me a pedantic twit, but this line from the Washington Post article I complain about below made me snicker:

The White House maintains that Bush has developed this vision throughout his candidacy and presidency by stressing the end of the armed conflicts among the world's great powers that characterized the past two centuries. "The war on terrorism and the enormity of that and the enormity of American leadership and the kind of earthquake that has produced in international politics puts us in a different place than we were two years ago," a senior administration official said. "But clearly, the elements were always there." (emphasis added)

While the terrorist attack that ignited the present conflagration is by any measure an "enormity," only the most repugnant appease-nik would characterize the "war on terrorism" or "American leadership" as an "enormity," i.e. "great wickedness, ... a monstrous or outrageous act; very wicked crime" (Webster's New World Dictionary, 3d College Edition, 1988). Snicker, snicker. But the snicker is on me: my Webster's also defines "enormity" as "enormous size or extent; vastness," albeit with this caveat: "in modern use, considered a loose usage by some." Meanwhile, Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary sneers that "some people insist [enormity] is improperly used to denote large size ... may not recognize the subtlety with which enormity is actually used. It regularly denotes a considerable departure from the expected or normal. When used to denote large size, either literal or figurative, it usually suggests something so large as to seem overwhelming and may even be used to suggest both great size and deviation from morality. It can also emphasize the momentousness of what has happened or of its consequences." When the walls fall down and the barbarians enter the citadel, I suppose even a curmudgeonly prescriptivist like me must bow in allegiance to his new masters.

SAY WHAT? The Washington Post's report on the President's West Point speech reads like an editorial -- sorry, "news analysis" -- but isn't labeled as such and has this bizarre take:

Bush's new description of his foreign policy ... sharply revised the positions he took as a candidate, when he emphasized the need to limit U.S. intervention to regions with immediate bearing on the nation's strategic interests. ... [T]he speech wove together a number of additional themes ... into what a senior administration official described as an "overall security framework" .... The framework places Bush in a far different position than the campaigner of two years ago who criticized President Bill Clinton for trying to be "the world's policeman," depending too much on the views of others to set American priorities and spending too much on foreign assistance with no direct U.S. benefit.

First, the Post piece misses the point of the speech, which isn't to update candidate Bush's foreign policy for the post-September 11 world, but to continue laying the rhetorical groundwork for what will be -- unless George W. Bush is a political suicide -- a revolution in American foreign policy and the international law of war, to wit, the right of preemptive war against terrorist-harboring or -sponsoring states. Second, it's absurd to imply, as the article does, that the intervention resulting from this policy revolution wouldn't have an "immediate bearing on the nation's strategic interests" or would allow the "views of others to set American priorities." The danger is that hostile states like Iraq will acquire weapons of mass destruction and either directly use them against the United States or give them to terrorists who will. The proposed solution is a mixture of diplomatic and military intervention to destroy such regimes. If that kind of intervention doesn't have an "immediate bearing" on our strategic interests, I don't know what does.

"THE WAR ON TERROR WILL NOT BE WON ON THE DEFENSIVE": That was the major theme of the President's West Point commencement speech on Saturday. He hit other key points, and hit them well. The nature of the threat: "shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend" and therefore immune to containment or nuclear deterrence. The justification for preemptive war: "We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge. In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act." The kinship between the war against communism and the war against Islamism: "Our struggle is similar to the Cold War. Now, as then, our enemies are totalitarians, holding a creed of power with no place for human dignity. Now, as then, they seek to impose a joyless conformity, to control every life and all of life." That moral clarity is indispensable (and did he ever hit this point hard):

Some worry that it is somehow undiplomatic or impolite to speak the language of right and wrong. I disagree. Different circumstances require different methods, but not different moralities. Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, and in every place. Targeting innocent civilians for murder is always and everywhere wrong. Brutality against women is always and everywhere wrong. There can be no neutrality between justice and cruelty, between the innocent and the guilty. We are in a conflict between good and evil, and America will call evil by its name. By confronting evil and lawless regimes, we do not create a problem, we reveal a problem. And we will lead the world in opposing it."

Words like these give me hope that, despite the ducking and weaving of the last few months, the President knows he must and intends to wage war against terrorist states, beginning with Iraq. It's not just that he's saying the rights words and making the right arguments. It's that by speaking so clearly, he continues to box himself in politically, so that if he does not instigate war against Iraq, and if he does not effect the revolution in international law that such a preemptive war entails, he will have committed political suicide. I can't believe this adept and pragmatic politician would unwittingly drive himself into such a corner. Which is kind of funny: I usually don't trust George W. Bush because he's a pragmatist; now I hope he'll do the right thing precisely because he is.

MORE ON MCCLELLAN V. GRANT: Tony Woodlief quibbles that my post should have pitted McClellan versus Sherman":

You are right that Grant was willing to engage the enemy, which is why he rose through the ranks of politicians who infested the Army of the Republic. I don't think there is great evidence that he was an especially skilled general, however; he ultimately required massive numerical superiority to finish off Lee's army. It seems that all of his great victories as a commanding general, in fact, required a combination of overwhelming firepower, a willingness to trade 2 of his own for every enemy's life, and the patience to sit out a siege. A better example, if you must stick with the Yankees, might be Sherman (don't tell my Southern friends I said so), who had all the qualities you mention of Grant, but who also evidenced, to this untrained historical observer, at least, a cunning and daring that Grant lacked.

I can't really disagree: as a strategist and tactician, Sherman beats Grant any day, just as Patton beats Marshall any day, too. (See Victor Hanson's The Soul of Battle, which argues that the Boetian general Epaminondus -- who humiliated Sparta -- Sherman, and Patton epitomize how generals of great democratic armies should fight, namely by driving massive armies deep into the enemy's territory, using constant, rapid movement to outflank his forces, and by freely romping in his heartland, humiliating his military and demoralizing his civilian population.) But I contrasted McClellan with Grant because they held analogous positions of authority -- both were generals in chief -- and were such polar opposites in temperment. McClellan wouldn't fight, because he was afraid to risk damage to his army; Grant would, even at a horrendous cost in lives. Grant shouldn't be celebrated for needlessly getting thousands of Union soldiers killed. Sherman's rapid movement and flanking maneuvers, which won battles at a much lower cost in lives than Grant's meat-grinder, victory-by-attrition approach, was much more humane and consistent with the value a democractic society places on individual lives. But Grant gets credit for putting the Union armies on the offensive, for giving generals like Sherman free rein, and for using his armies as weapons, not shields. (Would it be accurate to say, using modern terminology, that Grant was a good theater commander?) But it's too bad Grant didn't turn over the Virginia campaign to someone like Sherman. Another reader argues that the armies on both sides of World War I had McClellans too:

A recent book about World War I (The Myth of the Great War, by John Mosier) makes the same point. France and Britain were losing to Germany in 1917, which is why America decided it had to enter the war. Why were they losing? Both sides began the war with a load of McClellans, good desk generals who turned out to be totally unfit for wartime duty. But Britain and France couldn't find the will to replace these old boys, because they were politically well connected. Germany acted quickly to retire (or at least re-desk) any officers who couldn't handle the reality of war, and then moved younger leaders out into the field. The result was that Germany was well on the way to winning despite numerical disadvantages.

It figures that McClellan and Grant are characters that show up in every army. What's unnerving is that success depends on (a) someone finding a Grant and (b) putting him in charge. That's not inevitable.

GOOD BLOGS COME TO THOSE WHO WAIT: I knew if I waited long enough someone would write what I wanted to write about the whole teen you-know-what debate, saving me the trouble of translating my thoughts into coherent sentences. Read these posts by Jane Galt and Susanna Cornett.

DEATH, DISEASE, AND DESPAIR: THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF CHILDREN'S LITERATURE: : When I was a child reading juvenile literature, I ignored books about "reality," especially books meant to "teach lessons" about death, drugs, sex, racism, sexism, nuclear war, etc. I did read Judy Blume's Forever, about a girl losing her virginity, but not because it taught the consequences of premarital sex (actually, I think Blume's point was that there aren't any consequences), but because it seemed the shocking thing to do in junior high. I didn't want "reality," which involved pimples, gawkiness, and vicious adolescent girls; I wanted fantasy. Not "fantasy" as in "fantasy literature" (never understood A Wrinkle In Time, never got past The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, and to my brothers' disgust, never read Lord of the Rings), but books set in a "real" world that still allowed me to escape my reality and pretend to be some else. I could be an orphan, but a very happy orphan, in Anne of Green Gables; I could break and enter and snoop in Harriet the Spy without going to jail. I could even run away and live in a museum in The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Books like these were magic enough for me. (Now it's romance novels.) So I was taken aback when I read Moira Redmond's essay, "Tales of a Seventh-Grade Scare Tactic: The new Gothicism of children's books," on Slate, describing a new genre of juvenile "reality" literature she calls "Dreadlit" -- modern morality tales like those of the grim Victorian tradition in English literature or like Der Struwelpeter in German literature. In these stories, bad or just unwise actions always have CONSEQUENCES. Youth loses its innocence suddenly and tragically, assuming it starts out with any at all. Now, when I'm in parent-mode and my control-freak instincts begin to surface, I wonder whether books that teach the dire consequences of bad behavior might be a good idea. But then I remember that I would have hated books like these as a child, and no matter how many my mother brought home from the library, I wouldn't have read anymore of them than I read of the "good literature" she plied me with when I wanted to read the latest The Babysitter's Club book. Then, as now, I wanted to slip the bounds of reality and explore worlds in which the usual rules didn't apply. And I never had any trouble once I closed the book and slipped back into reality: no one had to tell me not to sneak into people's houses after reading Harriet the Spy, not to run away from home and live in the museum, or that life as an orphan, even a Canadian orphan, wouldn't be peachy. The funny thing about some of the examples of "realistic fiction" Redmond cites is how little they have to do with "reality": I certainly hope there isn't a large market of children drawn to Julius Lester's When Dad Killed Mom ("Jenna suspected her parents' marriage was in trouble") because it parallels their family life. Remond also notes that children in Dreadlit "have operatically unreliable parents: often only one and often with a substance-abuse problem" and that "there is a bizarrely high incidence of cancer in these books, and the death rate in general is surely higher than is found in real life." But as Redmond argues, the disasters wayward children suffer in Dreadlit are "real" in the sense that they're "just plain terrifying, with no entertainment or allegorical value." Of course, I don't have to worry about any of this, since Paul Bunyan is the longest book my two-and-a-half-year old has sat still for since he started objecting to Beowulf's lack of pictures (yes, his father is that twisted). But when his attention span extends beyond five seconds per page (and when he learns to read), I think I'll pass on Dreadlit. My kids will learn about actions and consequences from me and from experience. If they need reinforcement from literature, they can get it from some genre besides one with books like It Happened to Nancy ("Nancy was an innocent fourteen-year-old when she fell in love. ... Then he date-raped her and left her -- infected with the HIV virus).

A POST-SEPTEMBER 11 BABY-BOOM? I wonder if stories like this one about a supposed 9-11 baby boom (link via Leaning to the Right) are really about bored reporters looking for a story, any story, when there's not much else to report. The reporter admits that "At this point, evidence of an overall jump in post-Sept. 11 pregnancies -- even for the New York metropolitan area -- is anecdotal. That's because it takes demographers weeks or even months to collect and tally official birth data," but runs with the anecdotes anyway, including Chris Rock's admission on Oprah that Sept. 11 prompted him and his wife to conceive. The general theme is that "it's never going to be the right time. We should start now.''' Well, since anecdotes are all we have to go on, here's mine: I've belonged to an internet group of women who have been chatting about life and babies since we met on Babycenter.com when we were pregnant back in 1999. Some of us stopped with one child, but several others have kept going, and about a quarter of the women in my group are currently pregnant. Not one of those pregnancies was inspired by 9-11. In fact, the only woman I know in NYC is opting to wait a few more years before having another child. So I guess I could write a story with the headline, "September 11 Doesn't Trigger Baby Boom; but Women Still Having Babies for Other Reasons."

WHAT I DIDN'T LEARN IN GRADE SCHOOL: Readers will recall the generic chapter, usually entitled something like "Our Government," in their generic grade school social studies textbook. It had a flow chart, illustrating the devolution of executive power from the president to his cabinet secretaries and agency heads, then to their underlings, and so on. This flow chart, and the explanatory text, described the executive branch as basically a system of, well, executing the will of the president: he tells the secretary to do X, the secretary tells his underlings to do X, and so on; the president's subordinates are simply extensions of the president. But when readers turned from grade school civics texts to newspapers and magazines, they were perhaps surprised, as I was, that the theory of executive government varies wildly from practice. In theory, the President commands the Secretary of Defense to make war on Iraq, which command he conveys to the generals, who develop plans, marshal resources, and execute. But in practice, the generals balk, and worry, and actively try to dissuade the president, if not thwart him, and crow about their supposed success in leaks to the press. In theory, having failed to detect and prevent a devastating terrorist attack against American citizens, the Director of Central Intelligence should at minimum accept responsibility, set in motion reforms, and submit his resignation, which the President may or may not graciously decline to accept. But in practice, someone leaks to the press that the CIA prepared the President a memo before September 11, 2001 that hinted at an increased threat of hijacking, setting off a storm of criticism against the President and deflecting attention from the CIA, whose director has not, by the way, accepted responsibility, much less tendered his resignation. Link to TNR article re: CIA's motivation for leak Link to TNR editorial castigating president for not firing insubordinate generals

AIN'T THAT THE TRUTH: "The danger is not that Bush won't be educated by Colin Powell into being a more mellifluous and moderate statesman. The danger is that he will," Andrew Sullivan writes. Unfavorable comparisons in the press of President Bush to Powell usually bode well for the war; favorable comparisons do not.

What strikes me about Glenn Reynold's basic premise in "Teen [xeS] and Media Hype" -- that teenagers should be treated as and given opportunities to be adults-in-training -- is how it meshes with conservative arguments for trying and punishing some young criminals as adults.

MCCLELLAN V. GRANT: Our military has always had McClellans and Grants. McClellans carefully conserve their armies' strength, constantly worry about what their enemies will do to them, and bide their time, waiting for the perfect moment to strike, which never comes. Grants are the opposite: their enemies worry about what Grants will do to them. It's not that Grants don't conserve their armies' strength, or try to anticipate their enemies' reactions -- like any good generals, they do both. But to Grants, armies are weapons, which must be finely honed and lovingly maintained, but ultimately must be used to attack the enemy, rather than shield against him. Last week's Pentagon leaks claiming that top Pentagon brass don't think we can or should go to war against Iraq illustrate the ongoing tension between the military's McClellan and Grant wings. The Washington Post reported that some military officers oppose war on two grounds: that "Hussein, if faced with losing power and likely being killed, would no longer feel the constraints that during the Persian Gulf War apparently kept him from using his stores of chemical and biological weapons," and "the danger of becoming bogged down in bloody block-by-block urban warfare in Baghdad that could kill thousands of U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians." The Pentagon leakers fit the McClellan mold: having spent billions to build the world's most powerful army, equip it to resist chemical and biological attack, and arm it with nuclear weapons to deter the same, they worry about the contingencies of the enemy's strategy and tactics to the point of paralysis. These McClellans are so fearful of what Saddam might do to them that one wonders whether they'd prefer another Afghanistan ("Comes WMD-free and complete with a proxy army to do the ground fighting!"), as risky a military campaign every fought by American soldiers. By fearing the enemy's reaction to the point of inaction, these McClellans would let Hussein win without fighting: once you get WMDs, we won't touch you. How would Grant approach this situation? He wouldn't ignore the risk of chemical or biological attacks; no competent military or civilian planner would. But having assessed that risk, he would calculate the threat of force necessary to deter such an attack and communicate that threat to the enemy, and make the enemy worry about what we would do to him. Iraq is a dictatorship, but even dictators need aides and soldiers. Even if a clear and credible threat of nuclear annihilation wouldn't deter Hussein from ordering a chemical or biological attack, it would deter his aides and soldiers from launching the attack. Hussein's minions aren't automatons; they're human beings with families who have rationally calculated that they're better off serving Hussein than trying to kill him. The threat of national holocaust would change that calculation. Grant would approach the risk of urban warfare in the same way. He would avoid it altogether in the large swathes of the country populated by Shiites and Kurds hostile to Hussein and friendly to the United States. He would besiege cities, cutting off their water and electricity, and offering generous terms of surrender. But when necessary, Grant would order his soldiers to fight block by block and accept responsibility for the ensuing American and civilian casualties, because armies are weapons, not shields. Grant would know what Gen. John M. Keane told the 101st Airborne Division in Kandahar, Afghanistan: "We can't defend an open democratic society of 285 million people. The only way we can protect Americans is to kill those who would kill them." (AP, via Best of the Web.) Armies must be used as weapons because they can't be shields. Wars begin with McClellans in charge, because the peacetime military, like any bureaucracy, favors the cautious. They end, and end well, when Grants take charge. But the military won't make that transition on its own; it takes presidential leadership. As Rich Lowry argues, the civilian leadership must set military policy and either see that military commanders execute it, or promote commanders who will. The Civil War began with McClellan and ended with Grant because President Lincoln made it so. President Bush must do the same in this war.

SAVE YOUR MONEY AT THE POST OFFICE and don't send letters and packages by Priority Mail. A new study shows that regular first-class mail gets to its destination faster. The USPS -- still a government operation.

OFFICIAL COVERUP: It's summertime, which means more and more men and women will be running around with less and less on. My husband says he always looks forward to autumn, just because people put their clothes back on. Of course, how much clothing is too little is in the eye of the beholder. Earlier in May, Saudi officials confiscated 82,000 abayas that were considered too revealing, either because the fabric wasn't thick enough or they had decorations on them.

FAME! Links from InstaPundit won't cut it anymore, now that I've been linked by Warblogger Watch, the famous self-parody of lefty Vichyists, armchair Chamberlains, and would-be gad-flies of "laptop Clausewitzes."

FEMINISM COMES TO THE ITALIAN MAFIA: High-speed car chases and deadly shootouts have long been par for the course for male mafiosi, but this latest bout of mafia violence involved middle aged mamas and teenage girls. I'm glad to see that such women, a minority long repressed by the greater mafia community, are finally coming into their own.

YOU CAN'T GO HOME: Not if you're Iranian and want to stay out of prison. A U.S.-based Iranian dance instructor went home to Iran to attend his mother's funeral and was thrown in jail for corrupting the youth of Iran with his dance lessons.

HIP, HIP, HIP, HIPPOPOTAMUS! California fish and game officials just removed a 500 pound pygmy hippo from a San Diego man's home. What do you with a pet hippo anyway? It sounds less fun than a goldfish, which at least can't kill you if you make it mad.

BELATED THANKS to InstaPundit for the link to my post on Chief Justice Rehnquist's disinvitation to a school assembly at his old high school, and to Loco Parentis for the link to Jordana's post on namin' babies.

EVERYONE WANTS TO BE A PROFESSIONAL: Once there were just a few professions: medicine, law, the clergy (maybe soldiering too). Everything else was a trade. But as time went on tradesmen wanted to get in on the act and started calling their trades "professions." The latest tradesmen to make the move are nude art models, who have formed a union in Pennsylvania to collectively bargain for better working conditions and so that "we could become regarded more as professionals and not as unskilled people off the street," said model Tomas Dura. I wonder what their professional code of ethics will be?

"SON, WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH YOUR LIFE?" Readers may recall this story about the San Fernando Valley school district that won't let high school seniors participate in commencement exercises unless they "describe their plans for some kind of postsecondary education or training to school officials -- or at least explain their future career paths in detail." If Chris Portman had lived in the San Fernando Valley, instead of Mercer, PA, I wonder how school officials would have reacted to his after-high-school plan -- which he has fulfilled -- of becoming mayor of his town at age 19.

WHY TODDLERS ROCK: People malign the "Terrible Twos," but anyone who can run to his "office" under the table wearing a Superman shirt, a hooded towel over his head, and froggy rainboots on the wrong feet, while singing his personalized version of "Take Me Out To the Ball Game" (retitled "Take Me Out To the River"), without a moment of self-conciousness -- anyone who can do that rocks.

CIVICS 101 IS CANCELLED: What kind of high school principal won't make a few rotten teenagers keep their mouths shut at an assembly to honor the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court? That's right, Chief Justice Rehnquist's old high school in Wisconsin ("Ah, Wisconsin, it's already starting to make sense") wanted to honor him at a school assembly. But some adolescent imbeciles quickly organized (no doubt with encouragement from some Sixties left-over of a teacher or parent) to oppose the assembly "because they contend Rehnquist has a record of undermining civil rights and voting rights." So the school has cancelled the assembly and scheduled receptions in the Chief Justice's honor instead:

"We did not feel it would be appropriate to invite him to receive an honor and then embarrass him here," Shorewood High School principal Rick Monroe said. "We did not want to subject him to that sort of treatment."

Idiot teenagers don't bother me. I was one not too long ago. I remember the angst, the self-absorption, the self-righteousness. But the cowardice of these school officials is unforgivable. Remember, school officials readily kick kids out of school for writing scary creative writing projects, calling them "threats," so it's not like they give the First Amendment an expansive reading. Yet in one area where the Supreme Court has actually affirmed school officials' power to restrict student speech -- where it disrupts a school function, like a student assembly (See Bethel School District v. Fraser) -- this school principal didn't have the guts to use it. This "educator" won't even try to teach his students the difference between peaceable assembly and disorderly conduct. Pathetic.

WHY STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE ROCKS: From a recent James Lileks screed:

I’ve only seen about 8 or 9 Enterprises, but I’ve enjoyed them all. Best first season of any post TOS series, good characters, great soundtrack (except for that hideous theme) and innumerable nods to the purists & geeks in the audience. Trek has been delivering, one way or the other, for almost 30 years, because it grows and changes and bends.

* WARNING! GEEKY EXPOSITION AHEAD! * The Enterprise theme is wretched (like Bryan Adams on a good day), and some of the "nods to the purists" are dorky (e.g. Captain Archer -- and I'm creatively paraphrasing -- "What we need is some kind of rule, a directive, to tell us what to do when we encounter pre-warp alien cultures. Maybe we could call it the 'Prime Rule.' No, that doesn't sound right. Maybe the 'Prime Directive.' Yeah, that's the ticket"), but it still rocks. What I love most about Enterprise is how overtly American it is. Sure, there are the aliens, Sub. Com. T'pol and Dr. Phlox, who like obnoxious European tag-alongs insist on supplying the cultural relativism that plagues all Star Trek franchises. But there's also the obviously midwestern Captain Archer and the southern Commander Tucker -- whose southern drawl is the first I've heard in a Star Trek series -- keep kicking against the pricks, insisting on the superiority of human -- read "American" -- virtues. Ensign Mayweather, who grew up on a space freighter, is like a kid from a blue-collar family who makes it big, because he was smart and had some moxy. Ensign Hoshi is an All-American Girl who also happens to be capable of learning an alien language in 48 hours. Even the Brit, Lt. Reed, exudes a love for high-powered weaponry that only an American can understand. Even the basic theme of Enterprise is American. In Enterprise's time frame, humanity is like the young upstart United States, round about 1800. We've barely gotten our act together, but we've got big ideas and big appetites for trade, knowledge, and influence, and we chafe at the restraint that older, wiser, and less vigorous civilizations counsel. Americans feel that way now, even though we're bigger, richer, and stronger than the Framers could have imagined. Lileks is right: Star Trek has succeeded "because it grows and changes and bends" to fit the mood of American society. The parallel isn't complete: our mood today is in part created by the fear of unknowns unleashed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the rise of Islamic totalitarianism. But we're still excited by the prospect of reshaping the world -- once again -- by projecting our influence into the darkest and remotest regions of the world, by exerting our power on very alien cultures. That's the chord Enterprise strikes in me, and why I'll keep watching.

WHY I DON'T TRUST PRESIDENT BUSH -- EVEN THOUGH I DO: George W. Bush -- his enemies underestimate him, and his friends never quite trust him. Case in point: Andrew Sullivan's reaction ("IS BUSH SURRENDERING?") to this Washington Post report that military bureaucrats don't want war against Iraq and think they've persuaded the President to abandon plans for military action against the Hussein regime. Of course, Sullivan shoots from the hip on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, while the rest of the week he knows bureaucratic infighting is what makes the Executive Branch work and thinks President Bush masterfully balances competing advisors and interests. So by tomorrow, he may be arguing -- and finding ample support in the Post article -- that some top Pentagon brass have mistaken the lack of any final decision from the White House on Iraq for acquiesence, are over-playing their hand, and will get a good thrashing from SecDef Rummy in due course. The peacetime military has always been full of unimaginative, risk-averse senior officers; we can hope, maybe even expect, that war will weed them out. (See, e.g., McCellan v. Grant and Sherman; but see Eisenhower and Marshall v. Patton.) The problem is, I'm not sure I believe that argument, which brings me back to my original point: many friends of the President, one of which I count myself, just don't trust him. Where does this distrust come from? For me, it all goes back to candiate Bush's absurd campaign theme, "compassionate conservatism." It was just what his dad did, define himself not against his ideological opponents on the Left, but against the Left's caricature of the Right, as "mean-spirited," "greedy," and "uncompassionate" villains. By defining himself as a "compassionate conservative," Bush implied that some conservatives weren't, and turned them into a straw man to beat the crap out of for the benefit of an adoring press -- all the while expecting them to vote for him. It was cynical and opportunistic. But it worked. I distrusted George W. Bush in 2000 because he took conservatives' loyalty for granted so that he could try to win votes from moderates, but he squeaked by the incumbent vice-president in a popular administration in a time of economic plenty. I distrust him now because he sold out free trade for the long-shot of winning votes in the steel belt, because he refuses to explicitly embrace Israel's war against terror as our own, and because he hasn't come out and said we're going to overthrow Hussein, occupy Iraq,and rebuild it in our image. I doubt selling out on steel tariffs will matter one whit this Fall (although signing the odious farm bill probably will). But I do know that Arafat wet his pants with fury as Sharon demolished his plutocracy and killed and jailed his supporters -- as George Bush demanded immediate withdrawal from one side of his mouth, while praising Sharon's non-cooperation as cooperation from the other. It was cynical and opportunistic. But it worked. Now I don't trust President Bush to go to war with Iraq. Colin Powell, the man who advised Bush I how to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in 1991, has Bush II's ear. The military brass, too afraid of failure to risk victory, are bragging to reporters that the "Iraq hysteria" of some senior Bush administration officials has been "diffused" by their sobering predictions that war would require hundreds of thousands of men and entail great risk. Meanwhile, the EU-nuchs demand "consultation" (rhymes with "emasculation") and counsel appeasement and weapons inspectors over wary, and the President responds by saying "I have no war plans on my desk" ("He said it almost proudly," Andrew Sullivan complains). How could I trust the President to do the right thing? And yet, past performance indicates that George W. Bush will probably do the right thing. The State Department will take his indecision for "restraint," the brass for inertia, and the EU-nuchs for cowardice ("After all, that's why we're indecisive"). Then we'll collectively glance at the news ticker for the latest on Chandra Levy and look up to see live video of American G.I.s and their Iraqi rebel allies marching into Baghdad as a joyful mob hangs Saddam Hussein's bullet-riddled corpse from the nearest lamp post. (But I still won't trust the President to manage the occupation.) In a war that has induced a popular craving for principle and moral clarity, pragmatism looks cheap and cynical and engenders distrust. But as long as George W. Bush's "conservative pragmatism" wins the war, the occasional distrust of his friends will be a fair price to pay.

WHAT'S IN A NAME? My husband thinks I spend too much time thinking about names -- especially since I can hardly ever seem to hit on one I really love. I'm picky. I want something normal, traditional and not androgenous, but also uncommon and different. I'm amazed by women who name their babies as soon as they get an ultrasound and know the sex. What if the child didn't look like the name she'd picked out? I think about all sorts of things. What if a name I love becomes wildly popular a few years from now, so that half the kids on the block have it too? (I practically live in fear that the names I give my children will wind up in the top 100 names.) What if the initials spell out something naughty, or ridiculous, that I haven't noticed? OK, so that makes me a typical, neurotic pregnant lady. But as Virginia Postrel explains, I've got good reasons for being neurotic: predicting whether a name will be too fashionable, too frumpy, or just right is as hard as predicting any other fashion. In fact, it's harder, because the goal is to give your child a name that will sound good when he or she is two, 20, 50, and 80. That's like trying to pick out a dress that would look good over a 70 year period. So it's no wonder that names I thought were the coolest ten years ago I wouldn't give to my dog now.

INNOCENCE LOST: For the first time, a factual error has been discovered on the internet. I just hope we can all learn from this, and move on.

AS IF THERE WASN'T ENOUGH FOR ISRAELI TROOPS TO WORRY ABOUT: The Israeli military has announced that its troops will no longer be allowed to accept gift pizzas. And no, not because pizzas don't meet kosher standards. Realizing the uniquely frustrating mixture of tension and boredom that Israeli solders endure, sympathetic Europeans and Americans have been sending pizzas to (presumably) off-duty soldiers as morale boosters. While no actual incidents of booby trapped pizzas or explosive delivery boys have been reported, the potential for terrorists is grimly obvious. What a sick, cruel world when "Abdul, pass the plastique achovies," isn't simply the punch line to some bad joke.

CROSS-DRESSING EUNUCHS II: There's gotta be a Far Side on this somewhere....

CROSS-DRESSING EUNUCHS: Archeologists discovered the skeleton of a man dressed in lots of women's jewelry at an ancient Roman burial site in Britain. Their theory is that eunuch priests in the service of the fertility goddess Cybele liked to dress up as women. An alternate theory is that one ancient mortician nudged another and said, "Hey, let's dress Julius up like a woman before we bury him. Won't the people who dig him up be surprised? Heh, heh, heh."

NARAL CARES ABOUT THE MILITARY! Well, not really. But NARAL does care about servicewomen who can't get abortions in military hospitals while serving abroad, and it's lobbying Congress to make the military pay for abortions, or at least provide them at soldiers' expense. (See this post.) No surprise there: NARAL, like other pro-abortion groups, doesn't just believe that abortion-on-demand is a right, but that it's an entitlement. What is surprising is NARAL's attempt to saddle its pro-abortion agenda on the war effort:

At our nation's most critical hour, lawmakers have needlessly endangered the health of military servicewomen and dependents, preventing them from obtaining needed medical services and exercising their constitutional right to choose simply because they are stationed overseas. Women willing to sacrifice their lives for this country should not have to sacrifice their right to reproductive health care.

"At our nation's most critical hour"? Picture the scene: somewhere in Afghanistan, huddled on a mountainside as bullets fly overhead, G.I. Jane reaches inside her flak jacket and fingers the used pregnancy test dangling alongside her dogtags: it's positive. Exploding mortars shake the ground, heavy machinefire chews up the ground around her position. She fires a burst, and chomps her cigar with grim satisfaction as an al Qaeda soldier falls. But they keep coming. She's got her gun, her ammo, her grenades. But that's not enough. She needs more. She reaches for her radio, and shouts over the din: "Command, get me an abortion, ASAP!" Of course NARAL isn't really making the absurd argument that battlefield abortions are vital to the war effort. It's just that NARAL's real issue, getting government-funded abortions for servicewomen, is usually a loser, so NARAL is repackaging it in Old Glory. "For flag! For country! For abortion!" (Or maybe, "Praise God and pass the ammo! And the speculum!") Who knows, maybe that'll get some pro-abortionists, who tend to be feminists, who tend to view the military as a patriarchal, violent, and otherwise icky endeavor, behind our troops (at least the unwillingly preggo ones). But with the exception of rabid pro-abortionists, I figure most Americans who support the right to abortion see it as a necessary evil, something to be tolerated, not celebrated, and not paid for by the government. I doubt NARAL's flag-waving probably will appeal to this moderate, mainstream pro-abortion constituency. What most Americans see as a war of national survival, in which real soldiers are fighting and dying for their country, NARAL sees as an opportunity to hawk government-funded abortions. That should make any decent American sick -- whether or not he supports abortion. But then, all of NARAL's radical positions should have that effect.

G.I. JANE NEEDS AN ABORTION: NARAL has set up an e-mail form letter to lobby Congress to allow military hospitals abroad to provide abortions to servicewomen and their dependents.

Just when I begin to doubt the President's war leadership, I'm reminded again that George W. Bush is the most consistently underestimated president since Ronald Reagan. Today's reminder was a Washington Post report that critics of the President's decision to withdraw from the ABM treaty are admitting -- however grudgingly -- that the world didn't come to an end. Someone in the administration compiled a list of critics' quotations; it's a hilarious read, and makes a many prominent people, most Democrats, look foolish. (Sen. Daschle: "I believe it would be a grave mistake for the United States to unilaterally abrogate the ABM treaty in order to deploy a robust national defense system. Unilateral actions will trigger reactions all around the world. Those reactions themselves could make our nation less secure." Rep. Gephardt: "Europeans are worried," Gephardt said, saying the administration may "prevent us from seizing a historic opportunity for engagement with Russia.") Resurfacing Animosity Awaits Bush in Europe http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/article Democrats Shift Focus on Probe of Terror Warnings http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52981-2002May21.html The Way Out By George F. Will http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53390-2002May21.html President/Monsters http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53388-2002May21.html Why Europe Doubts By Madeleine Albright http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53386-2002May21.html Probe Deep, and Fairly By John McCain http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53389-2002May21.html Let Congress Do It WSJ Editorial http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110001746 Naked Writing -- Scary Thought http://www.nakedwriting.com/2002_05_19_archive.html#85109867 Making Reform A Reality By Dennis Ross http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60418-2002May22.html

I THINK I'll GO WATCH STAR TREK NOW: I'm an old school geek. How about you?

NAKED CHICKENS: That's right, these chickens have no feathers. Next step: boneless chickens. Who knew Gary Larson was a prophet?

A NEW FATHER'S LOVE -- AND LOATHING: I've seen my husband's reaction to being awakened by a screaming baby for the nth night in a row (murderous looks, dark mutterings), and I've heard him confess that it's not so difficult to imagine doing horrible things to little babies when he's being screamed at at two o'clock in the morning after many sleepless nights. So I read Michael Lewis' latest installment -- "Infanticide to Infatuation: Why daddies don't kill their babies" -- with a lot of interest and understanding. Lewis' point isn't that new fathers are dangerous to their children, just that they have to work harder -- and need the mother's help -- to overcome the screaming, puking, and pooping and love their babies. After all, fathers haven't formed the emotional bonds that develop from carrying a child for nine months in the womb, so they start off with a disadvantage. Sometimes parents, and especially fathers, just have to muddle through and do what needs to be done until those emotional bonds can form; in the meantime, the occasional thought of throttling that screaming bundle of angst crosses the mind, although it's quickly suppressed. I think Lewis perfectly captures the loathing and love many fathers have for their newborns.

SOY BABIES: The brochures OB-GYNs and pediatricians hand out to new mothers always start this way: "Breast is best, but...." The "but" is always followed by an attempt to persuade mothers who can't or choose not to breastfeed that formula is basically equivalent to breastmilk, and that soy-based formula is basically equivalent to milk-based formula. Some mothers choose formula over breastfeeding, then read about dairy allergies, decide that milk-based formulas are bad, and immediately put their babies on soy formula. Other mothers start out breastfeeding, but when their babies develop dairy allergies, stop breastfeeding and turn to soy formula, instead of dropping dairy from their own diets. The result is that almost 15% of babies in the U.S. eat soy-based formulas, even though the percentage of dairy allergies in babies is much smaller. What makes this over-use of soy troubling is that it's a pretty poor substitute for breastmilk. Formula-fed babies generally have more illnesses than breastfed babies, and now it looks like soy-based formulas may cause even more immune system problems. Of course, soy formula is a necessary alternative for women who can't or don't breastfeed and have babies with milk allergies (although five to 30 percent of babies who have dairy allergies also have allergies to soy). But mothers who can choose between breastfeeding and formula need to make an informed choice -- and that means knowing the trade-offs.

LOST IN THE SYSTEM: A prisoner escapes from his prison cell to "freedom" -- in the prison ductwork. I don't understand the criminal mind.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS WITH THE RUDE: The universe offers periodic reminders of why we must keep using those good manners our parents drilled into our heads, even after we grow up. My reminders come from encounters with rude people, from which I go away hoping no stranger ever remembers me that way. Today's close encounter with the rude came as I waited, pregnant belly prominently displayed and whining two-year-old attached, for the Sam's Club clerk to verify that I had paid for the one item I held in my hand -- when Mr. Rudesby jumps in front of me and hands the clerk his receipt. Had I not been trained to be polite, I would have made several choice remarks to him. But being a lady, I took the next turn, got in my car, and vented my wrath by politely letting a Suburban into traffic.

IS IT HARD TO BE THIS STUPID? Headline from the Detroit News (via The Corner):

Critics say 'Clones' has racial stereotypes ... Latino critics in particular charge his latest Star Wars epic, Episode II: Attack of the Clones, toys with American paranoia about Mexican immigration with its cloned army of swarthy lookalikes who march in lockstep by the tens of thousands, and ultimately end up serving as Darth Vader's white-suited warriors. ... Temuera Morrison, the actor who plays Jango, is a New Zealander of Maori descent. But that didn't get in the way of some members of an eight-person Detroit News panel assembled to review the film. "He looked totally Latino," says Martina Guzman, a Detroiter who's managing a State House election campaign. "And his kid," says Wayne State history professor Jose Cuello, referring to the young Boba Fett, "looked even more Latino." It reminds Cuello a little bit of "those Reagan ads in the 1980 campaign, that suggested if Nicaragua went communist, you'd have wild-eyed Mexicans with guns running across the California border."

This is not a parody, I repeat, this is not a parody.

SPACE COMPETITION: The BBC reports (link via InstaPundit) that China's space exploration program includes the goal of establishing a mining base on the Moon beginning in 2010. Two thoughts: (1) China obviously hopes to crown itself the reigning great power in east Asia, to America's exclusion. But little things, like China's ambitious space program, nuclear weapons build-up, and it's billion-strong population kind of make me doubt China will settle for just playing regional hegemon. Can anyone say "global strategic competitor"? (2) The space program that gave us the Apollo missions was driven by international competition, not the pure quest for knowledge; I've wondered before if it would take a new competition with a financially worthy competitor to get man back on the Moon and maybe to Mars. The pure quest for knowledge doesn't seem to be cutting it.

OH, NOW THAT'S AN IMPROVEMENT: The Bush administration, having been beaten about the ears by the Democrats and press for not publishing general intelligence it had in August 2001 of a possible hijacking plot, is now publishing general intelligence that -- you'll never guess -- another terrorist attack

is "almost certain" and "could happen tomorrow, it could happen next week, it could happen next year." (Washington Post)

This kind of general warning might be useful if given to remind us that we're at war, that it's just begun, and that the enemy will try to kill many more of us before we defeat him; in an unconventional war against a mostly hidden enemy, periodic reminders that we are indeed at war are probably necessary to maintain morale and political support. But as a warning per se, it's absurd and its repetition could be dangerous; creating a cycle of warnings followed by never-materializing threats, however sincerely, will dull the senses and create an illusion of improbability, and is no better than crying wolf.