Quote of the Day...

Mark Steyn, writing at NRO about Obama's planned intervention in Syria.  The lead:

I see the Obama “reset” is going so swimmingly that the president is now threatening to go to war against a dictator who gassed his own people. Don’t worry, this isn’t anything like the dictator who gassed his own people that the discredited warmonger Bush spent 2002 and early 2003 staggering ever more punchily around the country inveighing against. The 2003 dictator who gassed his own people was the leader of the Baath Party of Iraq. The 2013 dictator who gassed his own people is the leader of the Baath Party of Syria. Whole other ball of wax. The administration’s ingenious plan is to lose this war in far less time than we usually take. In the unimprovable formulation of an unnamed official speaking to the Los Angeles Times, the White House is carefully calibrating a military action “just muscular enough not to get mocked.”

Go read the whole thing.

My father had a semi-serious solution for all these problems in the Middle East: use our nuclear arsenal to turn the entire Middle East into glass.  Then start over.  There are days when I think my father may have been wiser – and perhaps more serious – than I thought at the time...

Big Brother...

Mark Steyn: Idiot Big Brother...

Quote of the Day...

Nobody beats Mark Steyn for provoking laughter, anger, and tears in the same piece, and sometimes even in the same sentence.  His current piece (Know Thine Enemy) at NRO is a great example of his art, this time on the trial of Major Hasan.  The quote:

“...you can’t get much more diverse than letting your military personnel pick which side of the war they want to be on.”

Do read the whole thing...

Pre-Emptive Cringing...

Yesterday, throughout the Muslim world, American embassies that are normally open on Sunday were closed because of a rise in the level of terrorist “chatter” picked up by the NSA and other intelligence-gathering organizations.

Mark Steyn finds this “pre-emptive cringing” to be unseemly for a great country.

I agree with that (though asymmetric war is full of awful choices that must be made), but wonder if we're still a “great country” in some ways that matter, at least to me.

I don't think there are easy answers for the challenges the Middle East poses for itself and other countries in the world.  I don't believe there is any one “right answer”, either.  But I do believe there must be a myriad of better paths than the one our country is currently embarked on, and this response to “chatter” is a great example.  The only messages this response sends to the terrorists are bad ones: that we can be cowed, that we respond to threats like little girls, that victory may be achieved over us very easily.

Want examples of responses that would have been preferable?  Ok, here are two:

In those countries where we had reason to believe our embassies were threatened, close those embassies, permanently.  Ban all travel by Americans to those countries.  Ban all business by Americans with those countries.  Stop all foreign aid to those countries.  And so on.  Make the threat have a cost.

In those countries where we had a reason to believe our embassies were threatened, station a significant contingent of U.S. Marines there, and deploy our significant intelligence resources in support of their mission.  Subtract the cost of this protection from our foreign aid to that country.  Make the threat have a cost.  Then, if we are attacked, retaliate with overwhelming asymmetric response (in crude terms, if they kill one American, kill a hundred of them).  Make the attack have a cost.

The response we have chosen has only good consequences for the terrorists.  Brilliant.  “Smart power” is hard at work...

Mark on Nigel...

Mark Steyn – one of my favorite political commentators – talks about Nigel Farage – one of my favorite politicians.  Read the whole thing.

Weird personal note: my father was a nurseryman and horticulturalist for many years.  In the '50s and '60s, he specialized in American Holly, and patented several varieties (as did his father before him).  One of his patented varieties was named “Farage”.  I have no idea why my dad chose that particular name, which at the time didn't appear in any English dictionary.

Update: my mom tells me that Farage was not one of my dad's varieties, but instead is attributed to Miss Elizabeth White (doesn't that sound very old fashioned now, saying “Miss”?), from the Pine Barrens of New Jersey...

The All-Seeing State...

Mark Steyn on the IRS scandal.  An excerpt:

If you don’t instinctively know it’s wrong to stay in $3,500-a-night hotel rooms at public expense, a revised conference-accommodations-guidelines manual isn’t going to fix the real problem.

So we know the IRS is corrupt. What happens then when an ambitious government understands it can yoke that corruption to its political needs? What’s striking as the revelations multiply and metastasize is that at no point does any IRS official appear to have raised objections. If any of them understood that what they were doing was wrong, they kept it to themselves. When Nixon tried to sic the IRS on a few powerful political enemies, the IRS told him to take a hike. When Obama’s courtiers tried to sic the IRS on thousands of ordinary American citizens, the agency went along, and very enthusiastically. This is a scale of depravity hitherto unknown to the tax authorities of the United States, and for that reason alone they should be disarmed and disbanded — and rebuilt from scratch with far more circumscribed powers.

Read the whole thing...

A Song for the Season...

Mark Steyn on the history of The Battle Hymn of the Republic...

Steyn on the London Beheading...

Here an angry Steyn is laying into the British lamestream media's refusal to identify militant Islamism as the root of this attack:

In London as in Boston, the politico-media class immediately lapsed into the pneumatic multiculti Tourette’s that seems to be a chronic side effect of excess diversity-celebrating: No Islam to see here, nothing to do with Islam, all these body parts in the street are a deplorable misinterpretation of Islam. The BBC’s Nick Robinson accidentally described the men as being “of Muslim appearance,” but quickly walked it back lest impressionable types get the idea that there’s anything “of Muslim appearance” about a guy waving a machete and saying “Allahu akbar.” A man is on TV dripping blood in front of a dead British soldier and swearing “by Almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you,” yet it’s the BBC reporter who’s apologizing for “causing offence.”

Read the whole thing...

Steyn on Scandals...

Just go read it...

Nuts to Them...

So says Mark Steyn, on the occasion of a particularly galling ruling by the Canadian Supreme Court.  Mr. Steyn has a short piece on the ruling, with this conclusion:

...In Canada, the law denies "the right to say his piece" to the likes of Bill Whatcott, a man who believes that homosexuals are sinners and in need of God's grace and forgiveness, but it has no objection to those who think homosexuals are evil and should be put to death. Mr. Philips need never fear the scrutiny of the "human rights" commission, or the cost of ten-year legal battles.

No homosexual needs the state's protection from Bill Whatcott. But all of us need protection from nitwit jurists blithely sacrificing core Western liberties to ideological compliance. It's not about Left vs. Right, gay vs. straight, religious vs. secular; it's about free vs. unfree. And on that most profound question, Canada's supreme court is on the wrong side. Nuts to them.

But do go read the whole thing...

Led by Giants...

The irreplaceable Mark Steyn on the fiscal cliff “deal” – ridiculous, unseemly, repulsive, and wicked.  Yup, that about sums it up.  An excerpt:

Around the world, the only interest of friends and enemies alike in this third-rate Beltway hokum is (to return to the theme of my book) the question of whether America is capable of serious course correction – and, from debt ceiling to supercommittee to fiscal cliff and now back to debt ceiling, the political class keeps sending back the answer: No, we're not. For a good example of how Washington drives even the greatest minds round the bend, consider Charles Krauthammer's analysis on Fox News the other night:

"I would actually commend Boehner and Paul Ryan, who in the end voted 'yes' for a bad deal. But they had to do it."

If courage is the willingness to take a stand and vote for a bad deal because you've been painted into a corner and want Obama to fly back to Hawaii at the cost of another $3 million in public funds that could have gone to algae subsidies so he'll stop tormenting you for a week or two, then truly we are led by giants.

But is that all there is? As the old song says: What's it all about – algae? Is it just for the moment we live? What's it all about when you sort it out – algae? Are we meant to take more than we give?

If you think politics is a make-work project for the otherwise unemployable, then the system worked just fine. And I don't mean only the numbers:

On Monday, 300 million Americans did not know what their tax rates would be on Tuesday. That's ridiculous.

Then, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell spent the night alone in a room with Joe Biden (which admittedly few of us would have the stomach for). And when they emerged they informed those 300 million Americans what their tax rates now were. That's unseemly.

Then, in the small hours of the morning, the legislature rubber-stamped it. That's repulsive.

There's a term for societies where power-brokers stitch up the people's business in back rooms and their pseudo-parliaments sign off on it at 3 a.m., and it isn't a "republic of limited government by citizen-representatives."

There are arguments to be made in favor of small government: My comrades and I have done our best over the years, with results that, alas, in November were plain to see. There are arguments to be made in favor of big government: The Scandinavians make them rather well. But there is absolutely nothing to be said for what is now the standard operating procedure of the Brokest Nation in History: a government that spends without limit and makes no good-faith effort even to attempt to balance the books. That's profoundly wicked. At a minimum, the opposition, to use a quaint term, should keep the people's business out in the sunlight and not holed up in a seedy motel room with Joe Biden all night.

But you'll definitely want to read the whole thing...

A Measured Response the Sandy Hook Shootings...

Excerpt from Mark Steyn's piece:

It would not be imprudent to expect that an ever-broker America, with more divorce, fewer fathers, the abolition of almost all social restraints and a revoltingly desensitized culture, will produce more young men who fall through the cracks. But, in the face of murder as extraordinarily wicked as that of Newtown, we should know enough to pause before reaching for our usual tired tropes. So I will save my own personal theories, no doubt as ignorant and irrelevant as everybody else's, until after Christmas – except to note that the media's stampede for meaning in massacre this past week overlooks the obvious: that the central meaning of these acts is that they are without meaning. Herod and the Pennsylvania Indians murdered children in pursuit of crude political goals; the infanticidal maniac of Sandy Hook was merely conscripting grade-school extras for a hollow act of public suicide. Like most mass shootings, his was an exercise in hyper-narcissism – 19th century technology in the service of a very contemporary sensibility.

Read the whole thing...

Pre-Election Steyn...

Mark Steyn says:

I don't know whether Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan can fix things, but I do know that Barack Obama and Joe Biden won't even try – and that therefore a vote for Obama is a vote for the certainty of national collapse. Look at Lower Manhattan in the dark, and try to imagine what America might look like after the rest of the planet decides it no longer needs the dollar as global reserve currency. For four years, we have had a president who can spend everything but build nothing. Nothing but debt, dependency, and decay. As I said at the beginning, in different ways the response to Hurricane Sandy and Benghazi exemplify the fundamental unseriousness of the superpower at twilight. Whether or not to get serious is the choice facing the electorate Tuesday.

Get serious, folks. Please...

It's Popcorn Time!

I don't actually like popcorn, but I just might take up the habit as I watch this one unfold.  Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann has gone where nobody thought he was actually stupid enough to go: he's filed a slander and defamation lawsuit against CEI and Mark Steyn.  Anthony Watts, we can be sure, will follow this diligently, with his own (very large) bag of popcorn.  Megan McArdle and Jonathan Adler have some thoughts as well.

Just like everyone else, I can scarcely wait until the discovery begins...

Steyn on Mann...

Mark Steyn takes Michael Mann to the woodshed, both for Mann's ludicrous lawsuit and for his absolutely absurd claim to have “won” the Nobel Peace Prize (as though that was desirable!)...

Steyn Takes the Obama Administration to the Woodshed...

The inimitable Mark Steyn weighs in on the debacle in the Middle East.  An excerpt:

But Hillary Clinton and Gen. Martin Dempsey are guilty of something worse, in the Secretary of State's weirdly obsessive remarks about an obscure film supposedly disrespectful of Mohammed and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs' telephone call to a private citizen, asking him if he could please ease up on the old Islamophobia.

Forget the free-speech arguments. In this case, as Secretary Clinton and Gen. Dempsey well know, the film has even less to do with anything than did the Danish cartoons or the schoolteacher's teddy bear or any of the other innumerable grievances of Islam. The 400-strong assault force in Benghazi showed up with RPGs and mortars: that's not a spontaneous movie protest; that's an act of war, and better planned and executed than the dying superpower's response to it. Secretary Clinton and Gen. Dempsey are, to put it mildly, misleading the American people when they suggest otherwise.

But do go read the whole thing...

Popcorn Time!

James Delingpole on Michael Mann vs. Mark Steyn.  What a combination!  How could this get any better?  Here's a little taste, but you really, really need to go read the whole thing:

From obscure beginnings and with little discernible talent, Michael Mann has risen to become arguably the best loved comedy figure in the entire field of climate science, like Fatty Arbuckle, Pee Wee Herman and Coco the Clown rolled into one.

He singlehandedly invented Mann-made global warming using his amazing Hockey Stick curve – the one programmed using the ingenious algorithm whereby, whatever information you fed into it – fudged paleoclimatological reconstructions, the latest football scores, tofu futures – it always came out in the same, scary-looking This Is The End Of The World And We've Got To Act Now By Pumping Gazillions More Money Into Climate Research shape.

Get Lost!

Not long ago, the inimitable Mark Steyn published a piece in National Review Online (NRO) in which he ripped apart Michael Mann (the originator of the infamous “hockey stick” graph that effectively started the global warming wackiness).  Dr. Mann didn't like being ripped apart, so he's now threatened to sue NRO and Mr. Steyn.  Rich Lowry (editor of NRO) responded publicly today.  The best part of his response?  The headline: Get Lost.  The whole piece is great, though.  An excerpt:

So why threaten to sue us? I rather suspect it is because the Steyn post was savagely witty and stung poor Michael.

Possessing not an ounce of Steyn’s wit or eloquence, poor Michael didn’t try to engage him in a debate. He sent a laughably threatening letter and proceeded to write pathetically lame chest-thumping posts on his Facebook page. (Is it too much to ask that world-renowned climate scientists spend less time on Facebook?)

Mr. Lowry goes on to say that this lawsuit (should it actually materialize) isn't the nuisance such lawsuits normally are.  In fact, because of one little word this lawsuit is a golden opportunity.  That word: “discovery”.

Read the whole thing!

Religion and Population Growth...

Here's an excellent TED talk about the influence of religions on population growth.  It's an excellent counterpoint to the theories of Mark Steyn et al, and also a great example of the intellectual dangers of trying to establish causation by correlation.  By that last comment, I don't mean that I think either this talk or Mark Steyn's theories are either right or wrong – I'm just observing that starting with essentially the same data, both parties have arrived at very different conclusions.  This is true even though both of them are inferring causes by observing correlations in basically the same data set.  This stuff is complicated and hard.  But even if one ignores their stated conclusions, their observations are very interesting indeed...

Fauxahontas...

That's Mark Steyn's styling in his take-down of Elizabeth Warren and Harvard University over the former's claiming to be Indian (as in “native American”) while employed at the latter.  Here's an excerpt:

So did the University of Texas, and the University of Pennsylvania. With the impertinent jackanapes of the press querying the bona fides of Harvard Lore School's first Native American female professor, the Warren campaign got to work and eventually turned up a great-great-great-grandmother designated as Cherokee in the online transcription of a marriage application of 1894.

Hallelujah! In the old racist America, we had quadroons and octoroons. But in the new post-racial America, we have – hang on, let me get out my calculator – duoettrigintaroons! Martin Luther King dreamed of a day when men would be judged not on the color of their skin but on the content of their great-great-great-grandmother's wedding license application. And now it's here! You can read all about it in Elizabeth Warren's memoir of her struggles to come to terms with her racial identity, Dreams From My Great-Great-Great-Grandmother.

Alas, the actual original marriage license does not list Great-Great-Great-Gran'ma as Cherokee, but let's cut Elizabeth Fauxcahontas Crockagawea Warren some slack here. She couldn't be black. She would if she could, but she couldn't. But she could be 1/32nd Cherokee, and maybe get invited to a luncheon with others of her kind – "people who are like I am," 31/32nds white – and they can all sit around celebrating their diversity together. She is a testament to America's melting pot, composite pot, composting pot, whatever.

Just in case you're having difficulty keeping up with all these Composite-Americans, George Zimmerman, the son of a Peruvian mestiza, is the embodiment of endemic white racism and the reincarnation of Bull Connor, but Elizabeth Warren, the great-great-great-granddaughter of someone who might possibly have been listed as Cherokee on an application for a marriage license, is a heartwarming testimony to how minorities are shattering the glass ceiling in Harvard Yard. George Zimmerman, redneck; Elizabeth Warren, redskin. Under the Third Reich's Nuremberg Laws, Ms. Warren would have been classified as Aryan and Mr. Zimmerman as non-Aryan. Now it's the other way round. Progress!

Do go read the whole thing...