NO THEY'RE SPITEFUL AND THEY'RE NO THEY'RE SPITEFUL AND THEY'RE HATEFUL. Balancing the checkbook and
listneing to an old Randy Newman CD. Wondering why some wag hasn't yet updated
the lyrics to "Political Science".

BLEAT WATCH. By now everybody BLEAT WATCH. By now everybody has probably enjoyed
a night at the Olive Garden with James Lileks and that Guardian columnist. But Lileks had another good bleat yesterday. Excerpt:

I spent 15 years in crappy small apartments and rooming houses; I spent seven years as a waiter, worked as a convenience store clerk, an itinerant seed salesman in the South, did data entry and - shame of shames - telemarketing. Hence I do not regard people who take those jobs in their 20s as necessarily oppressed, disadvantaged or the equivalent of disenfranchised 19th century factory workers doomed to a life of penury, dropsy, and burial in Potter's Field. If a lazy sod like me with no commercial skills can make it, then the promise of America remains intact.

Andrea Yates is back on Andrea Yates is back
on the front page, and I'm reminded of what I thought was a lot of premature
opinion that came out directly after she murdered her children. Thorny questions
of the nature of sanity and moral culpability were addressed as if they hinged
on NOW's making egregious statements and Anna Quindlen's being a jackass.
Any suggestion that the woman might be full-bore out of her mind was greeted
with derision as soppy liberal moral relativism, an appeal to corrupt legalistic
"insanity" pleas, and the denial of human moral agency. All that I read
left me with the questions, "Do these people sincerely believe that there
is no such thing as insanity, that everyone in the world can reasonably be
held to be a moral agent in the way that I can be so held? If they do believe
there is such a thing as insanity, and assuming that they have as much information
on Yates a s I do, why are they all so cocksure that she isn't insane?" I
recall Andrew Sullivan immediately going after Quindlen (a writer I detest),
and arguing that he knew
we could confidently condemn Yates as morally responsible, because his own
mother suffered savagely from post-partum depression and yet managed to be
a loving and devoted mother. But this in its way was as glib and self-referential
as Quindlen. Sullivan equated his mother's mental condition with Yates's,
something he could not possibly have had any real knowledge of. There
also seemed to be a tendency to make no distinction between depression or
post-partum depression, which afflicts the sane, and psychosis. The unacceptable
reasoning of "any mother who murders her children has
to be insane" was countered with the equally unsupportable "not to consider
a mother who murders her children a moral agent and a moral monster will
bring about the destruction of the entire moral order". As a society we
have to operate with the presumption of moral agency except in a very restricted
set of circumstances. Is Yates crazy? I don't know. But it's not a question
that can be answered by philosophical fiat.

WOULD YOU, COULD YOU IN WOULD YOU, COULD YOU IN A FOG? Would
you, could you, with a blog? Here's this week's Fox in socks. If you're a regular reader, you've already seen it in its unedited glory.

INS BLUES. I didn't really INS BLUES. I didn't really want to dignify Pat Robertson's most recent noisome chatter against immigrants, but Tunku Varadarajan had some sharp comments about the man today, including:

The Islamist terrorists who attacked us on Sept. 11 were not here because of a skewed immigration policy; they were in the U.S.--and undetectedly so--because of the Immigration and Naturalization Service's incompetence on procedures that govern the temporary admittance of students and visitors. In any case, our immigration policies are skewed not toward Muslims, but toward geographically contiguous Latin Americans--most of them proud Catholics, so probably devilish creatures in the evangelical Mr. Robertson's calculus of sanctity. [...] The real shame to all this, alas, is that Mr. Robertson, in his clumsy, ugly way, has done a disservice to us all: He has now made it doubly difficult to have a frank, unembarrassed discussion about the threat posed by fundamentalist Islam, both by Islamists abroad and by those Islamists (note: I didn't say Muslims) who reside in our midst. He helped lay the ground for a politically correct backlash, in which candor about Islam is prohibited, and a meaningful censure of the triumphalist practitioners of that faith is likely to be mistaken for racism, or xenophobia, or intolerance.

(Another INS-related story I'd like to see more on here.)

THE USUAL SUSPECTS. In a THE USUAL SUSPECTS. In a story that surely warrants a high Claude Rating, the Financial Times reports on a Gallup survey
of attitudes in the Muslim world toward the U.S. and the West that reveals
"Muslims at odds with the US". It was "shared with the State Department
and the White House, which was said to be shocked by the hostility displayed
towards the US." (The Claudes here would be not for the reporter but for
the shocked government officials.) According to the survey

[a]lthough there were variations across countries, respondents
displayed a "belief that western nations do not respect Arab or Islamic values,
do not support Arab causes, and do not exhibit fairness towards Arabs". In
their own words, they saw western lifestyles as undisciplined, irreligious
and immoral.

In other words, they do not respect our values or support our causes. And more reason to be shocked, shocked:

The polling group found strong majorities across Islamic countries - 67 per cent of respondents - saying that the September 11 attacks were morally unjustifiable. However most of those questioned reject the idea that Arabs, specifically Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, carried out the attacks. Significant numbers believe that Israel, or even the US itself, was responsible.

CONDI RICE IS IGNINT. Why? CONDI RICE IS IGNINT. Why? Cuz she comes from 'Bama. Dr. Frank has fun with one of the silliest pieces yet from the Guardian.

YOU IGNORANT LITTLE PISS-ANT. Reader YOU IGNORANT LITTLE PISS-ANT. Reader Carl Williams's thoughts on the "ignorants abroad":

Amen to your column about clueless Americans wandering the earth. And also to your point that it is dangerous because they will be unable to defend against ignorant and prejudiced opinions when they encounter them. I do not wish to offer any amusing anecdotes, but rather to address your offhand comment "Whether it is exaggerated relative to other nations', I couldn't say". I can tell you after 7 years of living in Tokyo that the ignorance of the equivalent demographic in Japan is at least as bad, and in my opinion much worse. Also, one point that must be made: In my experience (yes, I am guilty of some ignorance also, I am unfortunately not omniscient although I try to stay informed), the non-American is resentful that the American does not know his/her country and culture. However, the U.S. being what it currently is in the world today, it is quite understandable that vastly more non-Americans know vastly more about America than Americans know about other countries. (Not an excuse, just understandable). Any test of ignorance, in my opinion, cannot be limited to knowledge about America; the next time a Canadian or a European starts in on American ignorance, ask them to quickly name the current Prime Minister of Japan. Hey, it's the third largest economy in the world (after the US and China), as well as the second largest military power in the Far East (after the US), no pissant little country, right?

I know there are huge lacunae in my historical knowledge, but I like to think I have a pretty good idea of what's where and what's there. (My mother-in-law has an anecdote about her days as a Smithsonian docent, doing outreach in schools: a teacher was telling the children about the "teak forests of Sweden".) I suspect knowledge of history, like reading, depends a great deal on parents' attitudes. As a child I was beaten and starved for evincing historical ignorance. Well, not really. But I do remember my mother's exasperation when I, as an adolescent, asked her what the Death March of Bataan was. She rolled her eyes and said, "What do they teach you at that school? Don't they teach you anything?" Then we went to the library and she helped me pick out some good WWII books - a treat, not a punishment. The point is that she conveyed the attitude that learning history was not only a pleasure, but that it was important . (In the same way that, when I was an adult, she would call me up at the crack of dawn on election day to make sure I was up and heading for the polls.)

THE MAN FROM ASIA. Several THE MAN FROM ASIA. Several years ago, in a crowd leaving a meeting, a stranger
and I struck up a casual conversation. I guessed from his accent and appearance
that he was from somewhere in South Asia, and I asked him where he came from.
He replied, "Asia". I started laughing. "Mighty big place, Asia", I
said, and asked if his origins weren't a tad more localized. He answered,
"South Asia," at which point I dropped it, not wishing to be nosy about
something he had his own reasons for not wishing to reveal, however odd I
thought his answers were. But as the conversation progressed it transpired
that he was, after that seeming mysterious evasion, a Pakistani - from Karachi,
if I recall correctly. He spilled the beans only after he had touched on
his home town as the conversation wandered. He was flabbergasted that I'd
ever heard of it, knew where it was, and had some piddling enough amount
of knowledge to have the curiosity to question him about life in that city.
So it was not reticence that made him answer "Asia" , but experience -
so many of the Americans he met not only didn't know Karachi from Kinshasa,
but didn't know where or what Pakistan was. Just a week or so ago my husband
had a similar conversation with one of his co-workers, an immigrant from
China. I guess he gave my husband enough credit to narrow down "Asia" to
"Sichuan", but was surprised when the spouse queried ""Chengdu?" in reply
to the man's statement that he came from "a large city there". This
isn't anti-American twaddle - American ignorance of history and geography
is proverbial. Whether it is exaggerated relative to other nations', I couldn't
say. But it does come to mind when I read some of the mail I get on my blog.
While the majority of writers seem to like the idea of being apprised of
commentary in the foreign press, there're a few who say "Enough of the Eurotrash!",
or "write about American stuff". To the latter I say, nuts to you, gentle
reader. Not that I don't and won't write mainly about "American stuff".
But what the "Eurotrash" are saying, and what the mad mullahs think, and,
most importantly and horrifically within the last few weeks, what is going
on in the homeland of that man "from Asia" is
"American stuff". This is not some schoolmarmish plea for "understanding
the roots of terror" blah blah blah. Rather, I'm disturbed by the idea of
clueless young Americans wandering the earth, unaware of and unable to intelligently
debate or counter "evil U.S." arguments. Consider this Salon article
published shortly after 9/11, on the subject of American ignorance. It
has apt crtiticisms of the state of American education, but also some opinion
with which not only ignorant persons might disagree - for example:

"When you start asking questions," says Kelleher [a professor
of political science], "like Who are we going to bomb? Are we going to land
ground troops? What are the ramifications of these actions? Who do we alienate?
And the answer is the very people we need in order to effect an anti-terrorist
policy: Arabs -- to have to think through that is irritating because you
need to know something, and people do not like to be confronted with their
own ignorance."

But if you really do know nothing about what
"those foreigners think", how would you counter such an opinion, if you were
able to have doubts about it at all? Besides, there's a great deal more
than just knee-jerk anti-Americanism out there, including a lot of interesting
writers in blogland. There, you'll find guides to good stuff that doesn't
trickle through to the U.S. press - from righteous Canadians and right-thinking Englishmen to fearsome Vikings, and the latest from India via a tree stand in Illinois. That's the beauty of the Web - lots of good "trash", Euro and otherwise. Dig in, my fellow Americans.

RIP Chuck Jones, 1912-2002. RIP Chuck Jones, 1912-2002.

THIS fascinating story from Friday's THIS fascinating story from Friday's Miami Herald
surprised me - not as a tale of Florida racism, c. 1889, but that a black
county judge could have been elected at that time at all, against white opponents
for the office:

James Dean, the first black county judge elected in the South
after Reconstruction, died in disgrace, so broke his beloved law books were
auctioned to pay debts. In 1889, he was pulled from the Monroe County bench.
His misdeed: issuing a marriage license to a mixed-race couple -- illegal
in Florida at the time. Now, 113 years later, Gov. Jeb Bush will reinstate
Dean as a Monroe County judge, and in doing so cleanse a reputation stained
by racism and political spite.

HUH? I just heard this HUH? I just heard this from that guy who's been doing that Olympic feature thing:

"We might have thought that the meaning of success was relatively absolute."

OUR FRIENDS THE ISI. The OUR FRIENDS THE ISI. The Telegraph reports:

A crisis was looming in relations between America and Pakistan last night as it became clear that senior Pakistani intelligence officials intend to block American moves to extradite a key British-born suspect in the kidnapping and murder of the journalist Daniel Pearl. They fear that Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a former student at the London School of Economics who would face the death penalty if convicted in America, will implicate the ISI - Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence - in terrorist operations staged by Pakistan-based extremists.

(YOUR) DEATH BEFORE (MY) DISHONOR. (YOUR) DEATH BEFORE (MY) DISHONOR. National Geographic
has an article on "honor killings" of women. (I don't recommend viewing
the photo gallery.) It's a familiar litany of injustices and horrors perpetrated
when human beings are considered moral objects not moral agents:

Even victims of rape are vulnerable. In a widely reported case
in March of 1999, a 16-year-old mentally retarded girl who was raped in the
Northwest Frontier province of Pakistan was turned over to her tribe's judicial
council. Even though the crime was reported to the police and the perpetrator
was arrested, the Pathan tribesmen decided that she had brought shame to
her tribe and she was killed in front of a tribal gathering.

(Not as atrocious, but similar in attitude, is this recent story.)

The Geographic piece describes the efforts of rights groups to combat the problem,

[b]ut the politics of women's rights can be complex. Last year the [UN's Commission on Human Rights] special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions was criticized by a coalition of member countries for including honor killings in her report, and a resolution condemning honor killings failed to pass.

These attitudes are hardly limited to Islamic countries:

In countries where Islam is practiced, they're called honor killings, but dowry deaths and so-called crimes of passion have a similar dynamic in that the women are killed by male family members and the crimes are perceived as excusable or understandable," said Widney Brown, advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. The practice, she said, "goes across cultures and across religions."

This is true, in that the practice is not restricted to a single religion or culture. But it hardly cuts across all cultures or religions. Crimes of passion are a human universal but hundreds of millions of women live in cultures where they don't live in fear of mutilating or homicidal attacks from their families for real or perceived misbehavior. And if they are so attacked their cultures do not tolerate or support the perpetrators.

MY KENNEWICK JONES - UPDATE Good intentions, bad law, and dubious actions by a previous administration and its Secretary of the Interior still await resolution from the court of District Judge John Jelderks. The hearing on the disposition of the bones of Kennewick Man were completed in June of 2001, and the decision was to have been rendered within 6 weeks. I called the office of Judge Jelderks' clerk this afternoon and spoke to a very pleasant woman who informed me that she had no estimate on when the decision might be handed down. (Naturally, she was very pleasant - this is Portland. In the four years that I've lived here, I have never once encountered unpleasantness - not from a civil servant, not from a retail worker, not from passersby, not from anyone.) As she told me, the 20,000 pages of documentation were still being plowed through steadily. Sigh. More later.

(Links to Kennewick Man posts.)

FRIDAY RITUALS. Friday night is FRIDAY RITUALS. Friday night is silly night chez Inappropriate Response,
as the spouse and I share our ritual end-of-work-week bubbly. I keep pouring
glasses for him, and then steal all his best lines for future blogging.
He's had a great riff already on Robert Fisk as the love child of Geraldo
and Noam Chomsky, and we haven't even finished the first bottle.

HOW DID I MISS THIS? HOW DID I MISS THIS? A January 10 article from the New York Daily News Online about the drive to ban car alarms
, that is. 'Bout time. The article cites a survey that claims that fewer
than 1% of respondents would notify the police about a car alarm. That
many, huh? Have car alarms ever had a deterrent effect? I
wonder if anyone has conducted a study on whether car alarms contribute to
urban crime: how many sleep-deprived citizens in the metropoles of America
have committed vandalism on the cars, or violence against the owners of cars,
as a consequence of blaring car alarms? I, myself, have not. But I have
imagined the crimes in elaborate loving detail.

STATE POWER AND SCIENCE FICTION. STATE POWER AND SCIENCE FICTION.
A couple of readers sent in thoughts on ectogenesis
, which I, coward that I am, have not weighed in on. (I'm thinkin' about
it, I'm thinkin' about it.) Alan M. Carroll argues that it is the susceptibility
of a technology to "nationalization" that favors dystopias:

I think that an interesting point with regard to ectogenesis
and cloning is that I often see claims that cloning will lead to a "Brave
New World" type society, a causation that frankly I cannot fathom. What really
made that dystopia possible was ectogenesis because it permitted the nationalization of human reproduction
. Once you have that, cloning (while useful) is hardly essential. Yet I never
hear the "Brave New World" claim about ectogenesis.

I haven't
either, but then again, I haven't heard many comments about ectogenesis,
until alerted by Ed Bush. We'll no doubt be hearing a lot more about this
research soon. As for fictional dystopias, I am not familiar with it, but
had assumed that ectogenesis had a rich history in science fiction. Michael
Lonie writes:

In the question of "Yo mamma was an incubator" Lois McMaster
Bujold has addressed this in her science fiction Vorkosigin series. In this
series artifical wombs, called uterine replicators, are available. She postulates
they are safer than natural childbirth, and her point-of-view characters
regard them as preferable. So the question is being considered in fictional
form. The assumption that these means are safer than the natural is crucial,
and one I doubt would really be true. But then, Bujold's fictional galaxy
is 900 years in the future, time enough to perfect such a thing one presumes.

I DO WISH that blog-shirking I DO WISH that blog-shirking Natalie would get back from her "hols".

HAPPY-CLAPPY...crappy. Today's Wall Street Journal HAPPY-CLAPPY...crappy. Today's Wall Street Journal
identifies a Christy Nicolay as the jerk who runs around Salt Lake City
choreographing the obnoxious "happy-clappy" canned noise and audience-bullying
scripts at Olympic events. Um, don't people naturally whoop it up at competitive
sporting events? Yes, but apparently the natural reactions are not in line
with regulations:

Sweden's goalie makes a great save. A knot of Swedish fans
in yellow jerseys leap up, whistling and ringing cow bells, to be immediately
drowned out by the Mexican Hat Dance. Canada scores, setting off sirens
and frenetic drumming; only after the loudspeaker shuts down can the fans
from up north be heard chanting "Ca-na-da! Ca-na-da!"

It'll probably get worse, though. As one Chinese visitor remarked:

In Beijing 2008 it's going to be the same thing. We will make some noise, too.

Is it possible that Beijing could make the games even more annoying? Stay tuned. But I did like this shrug from a Russian visitor:

"We have our bull---, you have your bull---."

CHECK OUT Richard Bennett's "Impeach CHECK OUT Richard Bennett's "Impeach Jane Swift" post. He provides her email address. I intend to use it.

THANKS, BUT NO WELCOME. Bless THANKS, BUT NO WELCOME. Bless Grasshoppa's Canadian girlfriend, for pointing out a recently-evolved behavior that makes me want to box people's ears:

A pet peeve. Apparently, this is an American thing, since I didn't really notice it until my Canadian girlfriend pointed it out. And now, it annoys me to no end. It's when I say "Thank you", and someone can only find the energy to mutter "uh huh", or "yep", or "mm hmm". Is it so hard to say "You're welcome", or "No Problem", or "No Prob", or "Anytime?" Geez.

I don't know where this came from or when it started, but I first noticed it in Colorado in the early nineties. In my experience this maddening drone is in response to "Excuse me". Prior to that, when one experienced those little social clashes, such as colliding shopping carts in a grocery story aisle, there was always a no-fault settlement, such that both victim and perp exchanged a pleasant "excuse me", smiled, and went on their ways. Irksome enough is the grudging "uh huh" grunted out when I am the party of unintentional guilt. I bite my tongue to keep from snapping that next time - oh thou shambling sloth and thy algae-encrusted tongue - I will do it on purpose. But what maddens unto murder is the blank bovine "uh huh" from the mouth of the social transgressor. Jane the Oblivious, pushing her cart in one direction while looking in another, runs smack over my toe. I, with my cheery good-nature and ingrained social training, nimbly step aside, automatically pipe "excuse me", and smile forgivingly. J the O, in her imperial majesty, refuses to acknowledge any responsibility for my crushed toe, looks puzzled by this inexplicable barrier to her progress, and lets out a rolling, distracted "uuuuHUUHuh", in articulateness slightly below the lowing of ungulates. In the mid-nineties, when visiting Florida, I found that the pestilence had spread. And now Grasshoppa and his girlfriend warn that the speechless-cow virus has wiped temporal lobes clean of "de nada". As of yet I have no hard evidence to prove that slapping people silly when they grunt "uh-huh" or "mm hmm" will restore their powers of articulate speech, but I'm willing to go out and start collecting clinical data to test the hypothesis.

YO MAMA WAS AN INCUBATOR. YO MAMA WAS
AN INCUBATOR. Reader Ed Bush sent the following question:

Apparently lost in the clamor about cloning is the subject of ectogenesis, which appears to be a bit further along
. As a blogger of shining parts who happens to be female, what do you think
of having a baby without having a baby? Do you recoil in horror at the prospect?
Would you perhaps have the one for the experience and then farm out the
rest?

Enough of the bioethics, Ed. Tell me more about my shining parts. (I do
admire a man dedicated to the revival of rarely heard but wonderful usages
- a man of parts, indeed.) But seriously, I do have many ideas on this subject
- inchoate, uninformed, half-formed, arguably half-baked. I would like to
say I have a coherent position, but I haven't yet thought it all through
to my satisfaction. If someone would provide me with a private income and
a comfy dwelling within walking distance of a major research library, I promise
that I would deliver an opinion by the fall of 2022. In the meantime I note
that Oklahoma State University is sponsoring a conference on "The End of Natural Motherhood", even as I write.

IF EVER I WAS foxed IF EVER I WAS foxed
it's now. A belated welcome to visitors from FoxNews, and thanks for all
the mail, which I will labor to answer. I especially appreciated the batch
of good-humored (and sometimes hilarious) razzing from Brits taking me to
task for allegedly tarring all the righteous inhabaitants of their fair isles
with the same brush. (Special mention to correspondent Lisa Loftus-Otway,
who exposed me for the dense Yank that I am by pulling my leg with a splendid
rant. She really had me going.) I was justifiably beaten about the head
and neck by several writers for sloppily using "English" and "British" interchangeably.
I fully realize that this could get me killed in some places. Thank you
for refraining from death threats and limiting yourselves to mild scoldings
on this point. And if I did not know that Barbara Amiel is an expat Canuck,
I know now. Thanks all for the corrective. (Though I can't help but feel
that there's a fine opportunity to abuse Canadians in here somewhere.)

NORWAY - COWBOY NATION. It's NORWAY - COWBOY NATION. It's bad enough that war-mongering Norwegians have rattled sabers at Australia. Now they're looking to mix it up with Scotland
over a historic claim to the Western Isles. The residents of the Orkneys,
however, are not enthusiastic about the rule of the Norse men:

"The prospect of paying £8 a pint, which is what Norwegians are charged, would put most Orcadians off," said a spokesman.

EURO-SOPHISTICATE OF THE DAY. An EURO-SOPHISTICATE OF THE DAY. An Irish Times columnist explores the root causes of American insanity:

Now before you leap up and declare that Americans are isolationist ignorant blood-thirsty maniacs who anyway have been executing people in Texas for years - all of which is pretty true - please pause to consider the climate here.

DEFINE "XENOPHOBIA". The EU takes DEFINE "XENOPHOBIA". The EU takes on online racism:

The draft protocol is aimed at criminalising the dissemination of racist or xenophobic material via computer networks. [...] The new protocol will set out definitions of racist or xenophobic material and suggest a framework for law enforcement practice. [...] [T]he president of the Experts Committee...expects the protocol to be finalised by the summer.

Perhaps they're tryng to figure out how to word the legislation such that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, etc., can still fly around cyberspace without hindrance.

THE CLASSICAL IMAGINATION. Reader Fritz THE CLASSICAL IMAGINATION. Reader Fritz Anderson, explaining why one has kids, provides this anecdote:

My favorite memory of my #1 daughter was of reading to her from one of D'Aulaire's books of Greek and Teutonic myths. The tale was of yet another girl left in misery, having borne yet another bastard of yet another randy god. Kate's voice piped up from my lap, "And the gods took pity on her, and gave her a condo in Maui." She was seven.

Proof that the D'Aulaires are whetting the imaginations of yet another generation of children. I loved D'Aulaires' Greek Myths when I was a kid; my daughter's copy is held together with an industrial-strength clip, having fallen apart from use.

GLORY DAYS OF THE CCC. GLORY DAYS OF THE CCC. John Weidner, a man after my own heart (and obviously a man of distinguished literary taste), has a post (with diagrams!) on the joys of the architectural treasures of the National Parks.

CHINA, RELIGION, AND MODERNIZATION. Is CHINA, RELIGION, AND MODERNIZATION. Is China thawing a bit on major religions (not "cults", it insists) to fight corruption and improve crime stats? Another added benefit:

On the foreign front, a re-evaluation of religion also would help relations with the United States, and also with the Islamic world. The latter is extremely important. China wants to gain a free hand in dealing with its own terrorists without offending Islamic countries or its own influential domestic Islamic community.

DIVA WATCH. The Asia Times DIVA WATCH. The Asia Times take on the current players in Afghanistan concludes:

Against this backdrop, the emerging alliance between [Pashtun warlord Gulbuddin] Hekmatyar and [Tajik General Qasim Fahim] Fahim threatens to again drag Afghanistan into anarchy, which is the only environment in which the warlords can survive.

SANCTIONS AND REASON. Matt Welch SANCTIONS AND REASON. Matt Welch has a good new article in Reason reviewing the misinformation flogged by both left and right on the effect of sanctions on Iraq. He concludes:

Yet the basic argument against all economic sanctions remains: namely, that they tend to punish civilians more than governments and to provide dictators with a gift-wrapped propaganda tool. Any visitor to Cuba can see within 24 hours the futility of slapping an embargo on a sheltered population that is otherwise inclined to detest its government and embrace its yanqui neighbors. Sanctions give anti-American enclaves, whether in Cairo or Berkeley or Peshawar, one of their few half-convincing arguments about evil U.S. policy since the end of the Cold War. It seems awfully hard not to conclude that the embargo on Iraq has been ineffective (especially since 1998) and that it has, at the least, contributed to more than 100,000 deaths since 1990. With Bush set to go to war over Saddam’s noncompliance with the military goals of the sanctions, there has never been a more urgent time to confront the issue with clarity.

And check out his shaddup you kids rant on Franco-American squabbling.

UNE CHIENNE ANDALOUE. Reading of UNE CHIENNE ANDALOUE. Reading of the "Moors" demand
that Isabel and Ferdinand be dug up and repudiated, I pondered that I have
no idea who my ancestors were or what they were doing 500 years ago. But
surely (while they were picking lice out of their hair and vermin out of
their bedclothes like all the other peasants) they were being shoved around
by somebody somewhere in Europe, or points farther east. It would
take extensive genetic and genealogical research to precisely identify from
whom I should be demanding apologies. In the meantime I'm going to have
to settle for generalized historical consternation. I could get worked
up about the fact that Hagia Sophia has been in the hands of infidels since
slightly before the time of which the Moroccans complain, but frankly, I'm
still too cheesed about Canterbury Cathedral being run by heretics.

APROPOS OF NOTHING, I'm just APROPOS OF NOTHING,
I'm just linking to this because I think it's cool when someone I know gets mentioned in the New York Times, in a non-criminal context. Meet Dr. Peg Halloran, the Squirrel Goddess. (The link to Peg's site given in the NYT has a mistake - an extra space. My link should work.)

OF TEXAS AND MICROWAVE PIZZA. OF TEXAS AND MICROWAVE PIZZA. James Lileks has another fine bleat, this time on the philosophy of the take-out pizza. But I must differ with his dismissal of the microwaved version:

At the nadir of my life as a gustatory imbecile, I ate microwave pizza.

Not that my palate is so indifferent that I find nuked bread, cheese, and dubious sauce delicious, but for reasons of personal history, microwave pizza is my crumb of madeleine: In the years when the spouse and I were young and careless, we indulged our passion for driving far and wide across the landscape of the American West. Good health, a fuel-efficient car, and an endless open road across desert, mountain, basin and plain would be my 72 virgins. I even love driving I-10 across Texas -especially that landscape between San Antonio and the New Mexico border, where one dim dawn I saw a javelina rushing off the road into the brush. This was a wonderful brain-discombobulating expereience for me, as I had never heard of or seen a javelina, and from the sight my auroral neurons concocted a fabulous pig-deer chimera. It is a classic Western landscape, the kind I didn't really believe existed as I lived out my childhood years in the Karst topography of Florida. It does not offer the jaw-dropping spectacle of say, southern Utah - it is far more subtle, inhuman, heartbreaking. And it was in this sort of silent, empty landscape that we found ourselves, several years running, hungry on Christmas Day. And for several years running we had our Christmas feast at one or another Pizza Hut, that great outpost of civilization, and the only place in those parts ever open on Christmas Day. Until one fell year we made our way from Boulder, CO, through a a brilliant, bitterly cold New Mexico, down into the Davis Mountains of West Texas, where we had reserved a spot at the wonderful astronomical open house offered to the public by the University of Texas at the McDonald Observatory . We had admired the spendid starry sky above the Davis Mountains on earlier camping trips. This is not just our city-dwellers' opinion - the Observatory is there because the area boasts the clearest, darkest nights in the contiguous states. Reservations (at that time) had to be made six months in advance. And to our great disappointment, the night of our appointment was overcast. Ah well, there were other delights. In Davis Mountains State Park we stayed at its adobe hotel, whose interior decoration the connoisseur of such things will recognize as among the finest examples of Forest Service Gothic in the nation. From there, on Christmas Day, we headed down to Big Bend National Park, an imaginary land inhabited by mythical beasts and flora, stranger than the aforeseen pig-deer. At one point we came to the narrow, muddy Rio Grande and debated poling across to Mexico on a skiff, but thought of better uses for our limited time - such as finding a Pizza Hut somewhere in the wilderness to assuage our gnawing hunger. Pizza Hut had always been good to us. Once, hungry in the little town of Alpine, Texas, we sought food and shelter there, only to discover that a certain member of our duo had left our traveler's checks back in a motel room. The waitress, a kindly young lady, offered to take the personal check of total strangers, and pay for the meal herself. (See, yet another coarse, graceless Texan...) But not even a Pizza Hut could be found that late winter's night. Disconsolate, we drove back to the Davis Mountains, with no hope of eating. Then we saw a light in a convenience store in the tiny town of Ft. Davis, just outside the park, and thought that perhaps we could deaden our hunger with cracker-jacks and watery beer. But lo - the place sold frozen pizzas! And the proprietor kindly prepared the feast for us in the microwave behind the counter. And that is the story of one of the happiest Christmas feasts I have ever eaten - in the parking lot of a convenience store, with a can of beer that I would have found utterly tasteless under different circumstances, and a limp-crusted, processed-cheese pizza, under a sky of hallucinatory starriness.

CONFESSIONS OF A NON-ENGLISHMAN. In CONFESSIONS
OF A NON-ENGLISHMAN. In the Spectator, Times of London political correspondent Matthew Parris
continues to express his uneasy perception that his countrymen have become
as "yapping dogs" in support of America, and warns his Tory compatriots
that the Special Relationship will not prevent Washington from pursuing its
own interests should they ever clash with Britain's. The former, I think,
bears consideration by any proud and honest Englishman concerning his country's
relation to a stronger power; the latter is only sensible. But there's an
odd digression on class that has a time-warped quality, as if one could
make point-by-point analogies between the varieties of Englishmen and the
varieties of Americans. (Or, more plainly, Americans are like the English,
only they have more riff-raff and the riff-raff are more influential.)
He remarks that "it has in fact been true for the better part of a century
that a real American gent or a true American lady could make what passes
for the British upper crust look pretty provincial", and, for all I know,
he may be right - because what he is referring to specifically is a class
and a social milieu - that of the Eastern Seaboard WASP - of which I know
nothing. So if these are, as he suggests, the people the blinkered Tory
readers of the Spectator
are so entranced by, he may be wise to point out to them that, if they choose
to hang with the Americans, the party-list won't be what they expected.
But then he throws in this observation, remarkable and quaint:

And there is a graver reason not to crave too keenly the patronage
of well-born Wasps. Well-born Wasps are not the future of the United States.
The Eastern Seaboard is not the future of the United States. The future of
the United States will be guided by individuals and ideas of a coarser sort.
Texas and California, not Vermont and Massachusetts, are the template. Be
clear, Atlantic-leaning Tories, which America you are going to have to learn
to love and respect.

The author is writing this column in response
to a particular reader in a particular British newspaper, and I have no idea
what's really being addressed in this alien and closed social loop. Certainly
it's about the English and not the Americans, but read straight by an American,
it's hilarious. Since I have no real-life familiarity with either the English
snob or the "well-born Wasp", imagination veered immediately toward a cartoon
burlesque of the former sucking up to the latter. The rest I could laugh
at more seriously: "Well-born Wasps are not the future of the United States.
The Eastern Seaboard is not the future of the United States." Not the future,
indeed - and not the present, and not quite a few decades worth of the past,
my friend. And outside the ladies and gentlemen of New England? Alas,
outside East Coast Anglo-Saxondom there is only the "coarser sort"? One
is not persuaded that Parris, protesting too much these days his fondness
for America, doesn't share the purblind views for which he's twitting his
hypothetical Tories: America comprises the cultured anglophilic Anglo-Saxon
Brahmin, plus its great unwashed - loud, brash, Anglo-Saxon vulgar hordes.
A good chunk of a continent occupied by the wrong sort of Englishmen, or
Englishmen gone bad. But we're not a few English gentleman plus a lot of
English vulgarians. America, in law and governance, is the daughter of England,
but it is not inhabited by Englishmen. We are crass and boorish, some of
us, and some of us are fine and gallant and brave and true, yea, even some
of us from Texas or California are fine and gallant and gracious and solid
as iron - without bearing any resemblance at all to a Northeasterner, let
alone a Brit of a certain class. Do the Tories he's scolding really think
of America as an extension of a New England dinner party, or as some very
large version of New Zealand? I doubt it, if they've taken the trouble to
know the place and its people - most likely they love or loathe us for what
we really are. And what we are is far more accurately described in a Times of London
editorial (in which it is argued that the opposite of unilateralism for
the U.S. is not multilateralism but isolation - link has unfortunately gone
AWOL).

There are two extraordinary facets of American authority that
merit serious consideration. The first is that the United States is the only
such nation in history whose expansion has been based on drawing citizens
into its borders rather than pushing out its boundaries to conscript others
involuntarily within them.

Indeed. I once got into one of those
convoluted discussions one gets into when attempting to impart history and
culture while answering a small child's questions. My small daughter, asking
about her ethnic background, said "We're English, right?

Mother: No, not at all. Daughter: Then why do we speak English?
Mother: [insert history lesson here] Daughter (puzzled): So, your ancestors
came from England? Mother: No. Daugher: But Dad's ancestors came from England?
Mother: No. Daughter: [still a bit confused about why we are all speaking
English] Mother: All right, in a very important sense, your ancestors were
English. Our political ideas, our ideas of the sacred rights of the individual
against the state come from England, and, because of that, in a few years,
your parents are going to force a good deal of English history down your
maw, in addition to the American history we're going to drill you in. Daughter:
But we're not English. Mother: Correct. We are not English.

One day it will all be crystal clear to her.

CRUEL AND UNUSUAL CHILDHOOD. In CRUEL AND UNUSUAL CHILDHOOD. In a worthwhile article on the continuing debate over military tribunals, this line struck me:

U.S. military officials have drawn up blueprints for a 408-bed, air-conditioned prison building that would replace the clusters of temporary, open-air cells[...]

A fine example of how what once were wants have become needs? During my childhood in sub-tropical Florida, only the well-to-do had air-conditioned homes. (My book-wormishness was abetted by the neighborhood county library's being one of the few air-conditined buildings around. Ah, the sheer sensuous joy of entering that chilled sanctuary in the sweat-damp cotton top and dusty flip-flops of August.) Now, as far as I can tell, the entire state is climate-controlled. And what was good enough for my grade- and high-schools isn't good enough for al Qaeda. But I can take consolation in knowing that, though I will not be able pull "ten miles through the snow" rank on my grandchildren, I can impress and frighten them with tales of a childhood spent in a hot climate without air-conditioning, having nothing for my feet but the cobbler's answer to the iron maiden, flip-flops.

"POSTURING OF THE WORST FORM". "POSTURING OF THE WORST FORM". Védrine's plan, that is, according to today's Times of London leader:

It would probably be in the interests of every party, not least Israel, if the Palestinians were represented by people with popular appeal and the ability to implement a bargain. Mr Arafat is not such an individual. But despite this the European Union continues to insist that he is “central” to the peace process and must be subsidised, at vast expense, so that he can “subdue extremists”. The EU declared on Tuesday that it would like to recognise an independent Palestinian state as soon as possible. Hubert Védrine, the French Foreign Minister and architect of this plan, has declared that “Europeans think there is no solution in the current policies of Israel”. This is posturing of the worst form, with absolutely no prospect of success but every chance of driving a wedge between Washington and Europe. Mr Straw, on his return, needs to dissociate himself from this enterprise entirely.

The Euros are probably right in believing there is "no solution in current policies" - their problem is the blind restriction of the attached prepositional phrase to a single object.

LOVE IS HELL. I probably LOVE IS HELL. I probably shouldn't be remarking
Valentine's Day, as it is the ulitimate Hallmark Holiday; I hate Hallmark
holidays. I do not have anything against mad romance, mind you - but my
idea of a romantic gesture is a man doing something that indicates his willingness
to die for me. Not that he would have to actually get himself killed - it's
the thought that counts. Just close enough to indicate sincere intentions.
Flowers and diamonds? Pshaw. But I did get many passionate responses
to this romantic post
, so I thought I'd put a few up up in honor of "Love is Hell" day. Jonathan
Gewirtz focuses on deficiencies in understanding of reality:

The modern "liberal" is distinguished by his inability to understand
life's tradeoffs and willful ignorance of human nature. "Outside" magazine
runs occasional stories featuring men who leave their families to be full-time
mountain climbers, idiots who camp alone in Pakistan and are killed by bandits,
and so forth. These stories are typically accompanied by hand-wringing about
the human condition, and admiration for those self-centered free spirits
who can't quite decide between their families and careers as lone adventurers.
Of course the mature view of life is correct: you can't have it all; you
must choose; there are unique costs and benefits to each choice. But such
thinking is anathema to liberal sentimentalists, and therein lies the cause
of many individual and social problems.

Tom Roberts had some interesting comments on the nature of love, time, and memory:

What Kipnis seems to be missing is the relation between that experience of "rolling on the moonlit beach" decades ago and today's marriage. My submission is that a successful marriage encompasses both experiences on a daily basis: long term husbands think of their wives as the young things they rolled about with when they were young swains themselves. Children are remembered likewise as a collage of infant, toddler, and adolescent until the shattering experience of them getting married themselves and having their own families. Even then, I suspect I'll subconsciously think of my children as collages from a wide range of years. I don't think they'll mind such sentimentality, as its really just a way to dilute the often brutal facts of current reality in a milieu of past fondness.

(I loved that last bit - I'll keep this technique in mind when mine becomes a teenager. ) Bob Cavalli sees an indictment of Boomer-dom in the attitude of the author I was criticizing:

A point: I don't know if you're a baby boomer (it's probably none of my business), but I am; and I want to soothe your confusion as to how a rational person could possibly write such drivel. [yes, I'm technically a boomer , b. 1958 - mb ] She wrote it because it's ALL ABOUT HER (ME, US). Baby boomers have been coddled, kowtowed to, spoiled beyond comprehension, and convinced that life is about them and them alone. They want what they wanted as adolescents, and they want it now. They believe that the world awaits their wisdom, bows to their anointed opinions, is just dying to know how they "feel" (baby boomers feel, they don't think). I, for one, am sick of us, sick of hearing and reading the vacuous blather spewed by us, and sick of having to live with our mistakes. The author of that astonishing article simply cannot believe that there is a world beyond hers, much in the way that Bill and Hillary do. We got, in the Clintons, what we deserved, and will continue to do so until our children (my own son, and Marine, and teenage daughter, whose sense of the world is more mature and rational than the article writer's) put us in homes and begin the daunting task of cleaning up the horrendous mess we've made of things.

All the mail was more or less supportive of my position, which kind of disappoints me. I was hoping at least one person would write in to tell me I was an uptight prude. That would be fun. I feel so unloved.

TODAY'S TOP PICKS from referrals TODAY'S TOP PICKS from referrals to this site from google
searches: "Saudi Monster Truck" "self-mutilation government response" "Jesus
calls marriage bureau in Singapore"

TODAY'S RANDOM QUOTES on Morals TODAY'S RANDOM QUOTES on Morals and Manners:

Mr Patten and his continental colleagues are attempting to delineate
a new division between the “sophisticated” approach to foreign affairs of
the European Union that concentrates on “tackling the root causes of terror”
and the “simplistic” approach of the US which deals, in its crude way, only
with the symptoms. Which are you, sophisticated or simplistic, elegant or
crude, or, as Nancy Mitford might have put it, EU or non-EU? Beguiling as
this distinction is, it’s also quite spectacularly wrong-headed. What Messrs
Patten, Védrine and Jospin deride as simplistic is no more than plain truth.
And what they proffer by way of a “sophisticated” alternative is no more
than a sweet lie. [...] The first piece of Patten “sophistication” which
proves on examination to be no more than mere sophistry is the belief that
North Korea, Iraq and Iran do not deserve to be styled an “axis of evil”.
[...] But then what is truly evil in the exquisitely sophisticated mind
of a Balliol graduate? Having doubts about the Kyoto treaty? [...] ...[T]he
EU should not delude itself that its strategy of “tackling the causes of
terrorism” through aid is an effective substitute for more resolute action.
Indeed EU aid has proved to be, if anything, a sop to terror; tribute to
barbarians from a decadent Empire incapable of investing adequately in its
own defence. (Michael Gove, Times of London, February 13, 2002.)

The natural instinct of men like Simon, Hoare, Chamberlain, etc., was to come to an agreement with Hitler. but - and here the peculiar feature of English life that I have spoken of, the deep sense of national solidarity, comes in - they could only do so by breaking up the Empire and selling their own people into semi-slavery. A truly corrupt class would have done this without hesitation, as in France. But things had not gone that distance in England. Politicians who would make cringing speeches about "the duty of loyalty to our conquerors" are hardly to be found in English public life. Tossed to and from between their incomes and their principles, it was impossible that men like Chamberlain should do anything but make the worst of both worlds. (George Orwell, from "The Lion and the Unicorn", 1941.)

The time is past, Miss Manners dearly hopes, when Americans who wished to be thought sophisticated adopted English or French manners. The excuse for using European table manners, for example, is always that they are "more efficient" - as if we weren't getting our fast food fast enough. Nonsense. What they are is more European. (Miss Manners, sometime in the early '80s.)

ORWELL FOR PRIMARY SCHOOL. Like ORWELL
FOR PRIMARY SCHOOL. Like everyone else I find Olympic coverage exasperating,
and have watched very little of it. But I'm surprised not to have seen any
ranting on a piece of commentary that made me cringe and writhe: one of
the chirpies noted that the appearance of the tattered WTC flag was the most
"dramatic event" at the Olympics since Munich, 1972. The slaughter of the
Israeli athletes was a "dramatic event". A dramatic event! This is grotesque.
But it did provide an opportunity for the spouse to explain carefully to
the daughter why one calls an atrocity an atrocity and not a "dramatic event".
Never too young to start certain lessons.

PHANTOM LINKS. My apologies for PHANTOM LINKS. My apologies for sending
readers on wild link chases in the two previous posts. The Nature
article on macroevolution was available free on Friday, but has since been
sequestered. The piece by Laura Kipnis is lost in what appears to be a London
Times re-design. The Times search engine and archives appear
to be non-functional at the moment. I'll try to find it later. Sorry for
the inconvenience.

Newspaper Writer Awakens from Deep Sleep of Forty Years. This unintentionally comical article reads for all the world as if it were written by some dewy-eyed revolutionary of love, c. 1965. Or maybe 1830. To wit, the author has made the astonishing discovery that there is a conflict between enduring stable marriage and our natural wayward sexual desires - and that society is cruel, repressive, and ignorant of human nature for demanding that we grow up and make a choice in the inevitable conflict between duty and desire. Characteristically, perhaps, the writer's musings about marriage utterly ignore the existence of children - a visiting Martian, on reading this, would remain ignorant of the reason why humans bother to establish social institutions like marriage in the first place. Not that it's uncommon to encounter such attitudes as this author exhibits, but still, I find them deeply perplexing. I'm a standard-issue middle-class denizen of the West - and I furrow my brow and ask continually, what history do these people inhabit, what moral universe? How do they view the world, what did their parents teach them? In sum, how in great bloody hell can an ostensibly educated, intelligent human being reach adulthood and write a piece like this with a straight face?

Ever optimistic, heady with love’s utopianism, most of us eventually pledge ourselves to unions that will, if successful, far outlast the desire that impelled them into being.

This suggests that "most of us" start out ignorant of, and end up shocked by, the truth that one does not, 30 years on, feel about one's spouse exactly the way one felt about him that first night together rolling around under the stars on that moonlit beach.

This statement is not one of the author's absurdities - I think she's right that there are many people entering into marriage who are so deluded. But her answer to the follies of such soap-opera views is unreconstructed '60s cant.

The cultural wisdom is that even if sexual desire tends to be a short-lived phenomenon, “mature love” will kick in to save the day when desire flags.

I'm not familiar with any "cultural wisdom" that promises any ronco-matic kicking-in of "mature love". And it's obvious from the author's tone that she doesn't actually believe in the existence of a sexual love distinct from fleeting passion. The pursuit of "mature love" is not to her a positive choice one might make, after having compared its delights with the strong appeal of freeedom, variety, and the hope of experiencing the narcotic thrill of the early stages of passion repeatedly.

It is only a grim substitute, the wages of failed love. The only "cultural wisdom" regarding this issue I'm familiar with is the bit about surveying the field of sexually-attractive possibilities and choosing a mate based on shared views on marriage, family, ethics, life-goals, and compatible personality.

There are people who marry based soley on whom they happen to have the hots for when all their friends start getting married, but I'd classify that not under "cultural wisdom" but "anti-cultural stupidity".

The issue that remains unaddressed is whether cutting off other possibilities of romance and sexual attraction for the more muted pleasures of mature love isn’t similar to voluntarily amputating a healthy limb: a lot of anaesthesia is required and the phantom pain never entirely abates.

Jesus Christ woman, unaddressed by whom? What percentage of literature doesn't address illicit sexual passion? She seems to acknowledge this at the start of the article. What normally sensate person hasn't suffered from, and thought long and hard about, desire denied, thwarted, rejected, abjured? What an utterly bizarre suggestion, that this suffering exists because society won't "address" it.

But if it behoves a society to convince its citizenry that wanting change means personal failure, or wanting to start over is shameful, or simply wanting more satisfaction than what you have is an illicit thing, clearly grisly acts of self-mutilation will be required.

Peace love dove to you too, Star-shine. Now, could you turn down the volume on "Free Bird"? Thank you. A word here. Society really doesn't give a rat's ass about your satisfaction or mine one way or the other. What it wants you and me to do is turn the demon spawn our pursuit of satisfaction may produce into reasonably non-criminal members of society. Due to the dreadful fact that the universe does not exist to make us happy, and that strict fealty to the dictates of desire has a tendency to result in improperly cared for children, society will weigh in against our desires - sometimes with draconian measures, like stoning to death for adultery. I hope that puts things into perspective. Really, a passionate, right-thinking seeker of satisfaction like Kipnis ought to be able to stare down shaming and insinuations of personal failure with perfect nonchalance. "Grisly self-mutilation"? Well, uh, yes, sometimes choice is terribly painful. But I can't see what this has to do with our author, as she faces no terrible choice: on the one hand the wonderful, if fleeting state of intense sexual passion - an obvious good thing. On the other the - to her - endless grind and bore of an enduring faithful bond. Since she evinces no interest in the latter, there is no wrenching choice here - just a demand that she have not only freedom but universal approval. Sorry, but even Mrs. Reverend Lovejoy should be free to purse her lips in Ms. Kipnis's direction.

Or perhaps she does dimly perceive some benefit in loyalty and stability? If so she is railing against having to suck it up and choose. It's often remarked (see: John Walker) that the problem with people today is that they have "too many choices". But having a wealth of alternatives isn't the problem - the problem is incomprehension of the nature of choice. John Walker wanted to join a terrorist organization and now wants what comes to those who didn't take that path. Ms. Kipnis wants to live as an adolescent for the rest of her life (and no one will stop her), but stamps her foot at not being considered mature. Choice A leads to X. Choice B leads far in the other direction and ends at Y. This is unbearable to the foot-stampers.

In the end Kipnis shows some confusion about what "society" really believes about the nature of love; she doesn't notice the contradiction in maintaining that our mores are based on an unrealistic ideal of enduring romantic love, while at the same time condemning those rules and laws whose existence demonstrates that society recognizes quite clearly the instability of romantic love:

It is our culture alone that has dedicated itself to allying the turbulence of romance and the rationality of the long-term couple, convinced that both love and sex are obtainable from one person over the course of decades, that desire will sustain itself for 30 or 40 or 50 years and that the supposed fate of social stability is tied to sustaining a fleeting experience beyond its given life-span.

She does have a point here, in the sense that a glance through the last few decades does throw up a fair number of people who apparently believed that something was "wrong" with their marriages because their initial euphoric, exclusive desire proved temporary. But if a significant number of society's members were really so monstrously stupid as to believe that social stability could be based on "sustaining a fleeting experience", the vows and laws and sanctions of shame and failure Kipnis is decrying would never have been brought to bear in the first place. I also have to remark her lopsided anthropology - does she really believe that, unlike "our culture alone", everybody else considers or considered it acceptable for persons of the female persuasion to obtain love and sex outside the rational bonds of the long-term couple?

A "HOX ON CREATIONISTS". Scientists A "HOX ON CREATIONISTS". Scientists at UCSD begin to unravel the mechanisms for macroevolution:

[They] show how mutations in regulatory genes (genes that guide the embryonic development) of crustaceans and fruit flies allowed aquatic crustacean-like arthropods, with limbs on every segment of their bodies, to evolve 400 million years ago into a radically different body plan: the terrestrial six-legged insects. The achievement is a landmark in evolutionary biology, not only because it shows how new animal body plans could arise from a simple genetic mutation, but because it effectively answers one of the oldest criticisms of evolution from the creationist fringe; namely, what could be the genetic mechanism behind the introduction of really radical new body designs.

The paper (principal investigator William McGinnis) is published in Nature , to which I do not have a subscription, either on or offline. It was available online to subscribers from February 6. Hopefully it will be available next week at one of the local libraries, and I can find time to mosey over and read it. (I'll also look around for some earlier papers on this subject that are available online to non-subscribers.) UPDATE: My mistake - it is available online.

UPDATE PART DEUX: The article is now subscribers' only. Sorry.

THIS MONTH marks the 60th THIS MONTH marks the 60th aniversary of the fall of Singapore
(February 15).

STRANGE DAYS. Belief (or lack STRANGE DAYS. Belief (or lack thereof) in the reality of a terrorist
threat colors two interpretations of Bush's "axis of evil". The Telegraph quotes
Senator Jon Kyl's view on the Munich conference ("[a]ll of this hand-wringing
about how he said it is cover for 'we don't want to do anything'") and in
a related opinion piece avers that:

[...] Mr Bush has realised that seeking containment through coalitions, peacekeeping and diplomacy will not spare America in the post-September 11 world. [...] He was speaking as a wartime President who realised that history had given him a new mission. He knew that America was behind him. Europeans need to stop trying to explain his words away and realise that he means business.

On the other side, Anatole Kaletsky at the Times tut-tuts the notion of terrorist danger, argues that any emphasis on American military power "foster[s] the belief that America’s wealth and power are illegitimate and coercive", and, like Jack Straw, dismisses all Bush's rhetoric as political posturing for the November elections and increased defense spending. (Buried in the article is the good point that "For Saudi Arabia, which is increasingly recognised in America as the main wellspring of the fundamentalist poison seeping through all Islamic countries, it is convenient if America’s anger is deflected on to Iraq and Iran.") According to Kaletsky, the war is won, the danger has passed, the recession has been headed off, and there's nothing in it but to put a Freudian gloss on the sober and brooding mood he finds in New York at the WEF:

How have Americans responded to all this good news? Not since the early 1980s have I seen America’s business elite so lacking in confidence, not just about their immediate economic prospects, but about the long-term outlook for capitalism and the world. The arrogance of American politicians on the world stage is a natural reaction to this fundamental lack of economic and social self-confidence, as it was in the early Reagan years. [...] Yet the Bush Administration’s response to all these victories has been to terrify the American public with bloodcurdling rhetoric about the infinitely greater horrors of nuclear and biological terrorism that lie in wait.

He really needn't worry so about most Americans - whatever our opinion of the president's rhetoric, we are not so tender that our blood curdles at a bit of plain speech...unlike certain parties in Europe, who also, a few months ago, became hysterical over "wanted dead or alive" - a straightforward statement devoid of messianic overtones, and the simple truth. Yet contrast Kaletsky's cheery assertion, from paranoid America, of the world set right to the troubling stories, in the same newspaper, of "shaikhs" inciting citizens to the murder of Jews and infidels, and the outraged reaction in an editorial and from readers, including this frustrated Briton:

Sir, The Government is proposing to introduce identity cards (report, February 6). What is the point? We already know the identity of people based in this country who advocate terrorism, but don’t take any action against them.

Hearts at peace, obviously, under an English heaven.

ANOTHER ACCOUNTING SCANDAL - but ANOTHER ACCOUNTING SCANDAL - but this one a century in the making. Oregonian reporter Michael Milstein reports
on what he describes as "perhaps the greatest case of government financial
incompetence in history" - the disastrous mismanagement of trust funds by
the Department of Interior's Bureau of Indian Affairs:

The government held Indian allotments tax-free and leased them
to farmers, loggers, miners and, later, oil companies. Congress set up a
trust fund to hold the royalties and dole them out to Indian owners. But
a federal Indian agent despaired as early as 1828 that it looked as though
the government had handled Native American funds "with a pitchfork" -- and
it got worse. Not only did the government not balance the checkbook holding
Native American money, it barely even kept a checkbook.

Milstein's report gives a good summary of the problem, along with Samantha Levine's from U.S. News:

At issue is the Interior Department's mismanagement of the roughly $500 million that annually passes through the trust fund program, which was established in 1887 to pay the Indians royalties generated from mining, timber, oil, and farming on lands their ancestors were forced to cede to the U.S. government. Over the decades, the record is one of gross negligence by the Interior Department–many account files have been destroyed, and nearly 60 percent of all leases for trust lands were never recorded. The whole system is in such bad shape that the government doesn't have a full count of Indian beneficiaries or how much money they are owed, although [plaintiff Elouise] Cobell believes the sum is $10 billion or more. "There has never been any internal control," says Cobell's lead attorney, Dennis Gingold, "and no way to determine where the money is held and how it's distributed. That raises serious fraud issues."

I have to wonder if the program was run sloppily from the start because its administrators didn't really believe they would ever have to make an honest accounting to the Indians. As an aside, I couldn't resist this comment from Levine's report, concerning the judge's decision to shut down Interior's computers because of serious security problems:

Suspected faults in the Interior Department's online accounting system were confirmed when a court-appointed hacker broke in–twice–and set up a false account to illegally receive money.

"Court-appointed hacker". I wonder how you go about applying for that kind of work.

MISREMEMBER THE ALAMO! Gary Farber MISREMEMBER THE ALAMO! Gary Farber addresses the peculiar revisions of American history undertaken by Martin Thomas in the Guardian
. (Ah, give the guy a break, Gary. All those Roosevelts look alike.) To
his credit, the author does give witness to the vigorous debate and dissension
in this country concerning military tribunals. Perhaps Mr. Thomas could
inform other Guardian columnists about this, as they seem to believe
that we are all in a zombified state of unquestioning patriotic assent over
here.

THINGS CHANGE? Three interesting BBC THINGS CHANGE? Three interesting BBC articles: On the widening revolt of Israeli reservists against action in the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinian criticism of the tactics of the intifada, and a plan from France that appears to be more than the usual futile "peace processing":

The French plan envisages three main stages towards a peace settlement. First would be the declaration of an independent Palestinian state, swiftly followed by general elections under international supervision - the idea being to give the Palestinians a newly mandated and more democratic leadership. Only then would final status negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians take place. The French have presented their ideas to other European countries, but have yet to receive firm backing. [...] Arab states have been encouraging, although the French say some are concerned about the precedent that could be created by a truly democratic Palestinian leadership. The Palestinians have eagerly endorsed the proposals.

See also this UPI report from Thursday:

Maybe, just maybe, the glimmering of a third way is starting to emerge. A group of 52 Israeli reservists is vowing not to serve in the West Bank or Gaza, although they will loyally defend the Israeli homeland whenever called. Israeli journalists and politicians are complaining of the cruelty of an Israeli blockade system of Palestinian villages that have women in childbirth barred from reaching hospitals. And on the Palestinian side, a handful of intellectuals, backed up by some brave Members of the European Parliament and NGO activists, are trying to revive a non-violent peace movement. Dr Mustafa Barghouthi, president of the Palestinian Medical Relief Committees, who despises the corrupt autocracy of Arafat's foul little regime is trying to rally a democratic alternative through (his words) "the growth of public participation in a struggle for freedom from Israeli occupation which focuses on non-violent resistance.

You mean there is more than one arrogant unilateralist out there who doesn't believe that hanging with Arafat and the PA is "[t]he only way to go forward "?