Check out the LOTR blogburst over at Meryl's place.

Wonderful Walter Williams column on multiculturalism.

For the multiculturalist/diversity crowd, culture, ideas, customs, arts and skills are a matter of racial membership where one has no more control over his culture than his race. That's a racist idea, but it's politically correct racism. It says that one's convictions, character and values are not determined by personal judgment and choices but genetically determined. In other words, as yesteryear's racists held: Race determines identity.

This is pretty sick and that's assuming it's a spoof site. (It is however, mildly amusing). (via C&S)

This made me laugh out loud so hard it brought tears to my eyes. (via The Church of the Blinding White Light of Stupidity)

Bruce Bartlett gives thanks for blogs.

Matthew Hoy delivers a fine fisking of Krugman's idiotic column in the NYT today.

Victor Davis Hanson has another superb column up, explaining "It's Not the Money, Stupid!".

It has only been a little more than a year since September 11 and already therapeutic voices are back, suggesting that we are somehow culpable for our own calamity because we did not give away enough money to the Middle East. Not long ago the well-meaning and sincere Senator Murray of Washington contrasted the purported civic philanthropy of Osama bin Laden with the supposed failure of the United States to help those impoverished in the Middle East. She was apparently perplexed over why so many Islamic countries hate us — and perhaps thinks that instead of warring with Iraq we should spend the projected billions in war costs on more foreign aid to convince the Arab masses to like us rather than him.

Would that the senator's trust in human nature be true! Then, armed with her logic of the Enlightenment and Christian notions of peace and goodwill, we might abandon deterrence, write big checks, and so make the world anew on more utopian and moral principles.

But unfortunately Senator Murray's musings are not merely infantile, but quite dangerous and for a variety of reasons — besides her very wrong inference that a few million dollars of bin Laden's cynical largess can be compared to the multibillions of past United States aid and private American philanthropy.

First of all, all dictators and thugs — compare Hitler's autobahns, Mussolini's trains, or Mao's anti-opium campaigns — invest in public works as useful social capital to be weighed against their more-nefarious acts. In the graveyard of post-Taliban Afghanistan, skeletons of Soviet dams, highways, tunnels, and schools loom everywhere — the legacy of manipulative Communists who sought to extend the carrot of material improvement even as they brandished the stick of tyrannical killing.

Like all cynical mass murderers, bin Laden did not run his public works by a Senate oversight committee. Instead he calculated his rent for terrorist camps and outlaw sanctuary with the vouchers of a few roads and madrassas.

Senator Murray also assumes that a hostile people's anger is either logical or justified. But just as frequently as genuine grievances over poverty, wars break out over perceived hurts. In the mindset of a Patty Murray, Hitler's Germans or Tojo's Japanese might have gone to war because Britain and the United States were stingy with their aid or praise, not because we appeared both affluent and weak, without will or power to stop initial aggression. The specter of the humiliation and defeat of supposed "decadent" democracies — if done on the cheap — is a powerful narcotic that offers thugs the conceit of status and a sense of national accomplishment.

True, the so-called masses of the Middle East have grounds for redress — who wouldn't without elections, free speech, sexual equality, religious tolerance, or the rule of law? But their want arises largely from self-created failures and runs the gamut of tribalism, corruption, fanaticism, and frequent apartheid of women and non-Muslims — not a lack of dollars and euros. The depressing ruins that are now a large part of Kabul, Beirut, and Cairo or the moral black holes of Teheran, Riyadh, Damascus, and Baghdad were the dividends of indigenous Middle Eastern genius, not of outside Western machinations. Promoting democracy, not handing out food, practicing appeasement, or tolerating suicide bombing, will do far more for the disenfranchised on the West Bank.

Charles Krauthammer has some different opinions on how to deal with N. Korea.

Jack Wheeler has some suggestions for playing Poker with the North Koreans.

The leading Iraqi newspaper, Babel (yes, that's the name of the paper, named after a word meaning confusion), owned by Saddam's son, is urging the Arab world to arm itself with nuclear weapons

Christopher Hitchens writes about Evil.

There is probably no easier way to beckon a smirk to the lips of a liberal intellectual than to mention President Bush's invocation of the notion of "evil." Such simple-mindedness! What better proof of a "cowboy" presidency than this crass resort to the language of good guys and bad guys, white hats and black hats? Doesn't everybody know that there are shades and nuances and subtleties to be considered, in which moral absolutism is of no help?

Hunger used as a political weapon in Zimbabwe.

But in today's Zimbabwe, politics has something to do with just about everything -- especially food. With more than half the nation's 12 million citizens at risk of starvation, there is strong evidence that President Robert Mugabe's ruling party has used food as an instrument of power -- to reward allies, punish opponents and attract new supporters.

The group Physicians for Human Rights concluded in a recent report that "the political abuse of food is the most serious and widespread human rights violation in Zimbabwe at this time." Officials in Mugabe's party -- the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) -- have been spotted distributing maize at party rallies, in party offices and sometimes out of their own back doors. And while most of the problems have involved food controlled by Mugabe's government -- which holds a strict monopoly on grain imports here -- at times politics has interfered with international food aid as well.

Ben Stein suggests that North Korea and Iraq may be collaboratiing. I think this is too complicated an explanation. I just thing Kim Jong-Il is taking advantage of US focus elsewhere to try and force us to renegotiate and pay him off for a few more years.

Most notable idiocies uttered by the media in 2002.

First Place
“For Castro, freedom starts with education. And if literacy alone were the yardstick, Cuba would rank as one of the freest nations on Earth. The literacy rate is 96 percent.”
– Barbara Walters narrating her interview with Fidel Castro on ABC’s 20/20, October 11.

Er, and Mussolini got the trains to run on time. Note that fulfilling her role as journalistic icon, Ms. Walters repeats this Cuban reported statistic without any verification. I'm sure she wouldn't repeat any statistic from the Bush administration without checking it with four other sources first. Ditto in regards to claims of Cuban healthcare quality. Aside from the irrelevance of literacy rates to freedom, it is amazing to me how main stream journalists don't seem to get that despotic dictatorships have a tendency to lie and repeat whatever they say as if it were from a reliable source.

An interesting short portrait of North Korean psychopath Kim Jong Il.

10 Predictions for 2003

It seems to be a pundit requirement to make predictions so that folks can pick them apart later and show you for the fool that you are. Despite this foreknowledge, here are some of my predictions for the next year.

1. We will go to war with Iraq sometime in the first quarter.
   
2. It will last less than 60 days.
   
3. The US will call for (and get) a UN led imbargo against N. Korea.
   
4. The stock market will be up over 15% in 2003.
   
5. Tech orders and capital spending will finally pick up strongly and Nasdaq will be up over 25% for 2003.
   
6. US GDP will be up over 4% in 2003.
   
7. Chavez will leave office in Venezuela and new elections will be held.
   
8. There will be a major famine in Zimbabwe thanks to Mugabe's policies. Deaths will number in the hundreds of thousands.
   
9. The price of oil will drop below $20/barrel.
   
10. The government of Iran will fall and a new democratic government will be put in place. Iran will become one of the US's closest allies in the Middle East.
    

Brushes with Venality

We saw "Two Towers" yesterday and then went to our favorite restaurant in Westchester afterwards. This is a fabulous small place, about 15 tables, with the great combination of the comfort and friendliness of a small neighborhood place with some of the best food in Westchester (if anyone lives in Westchester and would like the name of the place, email me). We go all the time and have done so since it opened so we are old regulars, very friendly with the owner. So who should invade our little oasis last night? The Clinton clan was there in full: Bill, Hillary, Chelsea and unnamed boyfriend, Secret service took up another table next to us. In their favor, I must say, they did their best not to disrupt the restaurant. They came in as unobtrusively as possible, shook hands with some of the folks at the bar and took their table. But they also came about a month ago and apparently liked the place (as I said there is much to like), so I just hope this is not going to be their regular haunt.

A fine piece by Victor Davis Hanson on the aftershocks from war with Iraq.

The results will have ramifications that make those in Afghanistan pale in comparison — and perhaps change both the complexion of the present war and the Middle East itself in ways we can now scarcely imagine. Current polls reflect widespread dislike of the United States in the Middle East. But what will such surveys reveal in six months, when an odious Saddam Hussein is removed and something follows far better than both him and the other autocrats in the region? Look at the change in Kabul for the answer.

In the post-Saddam chaos, a daily staple of news reports will be tours of Saddam's Ceausescu-like palaces and exposés of material excesses that would make Imelda Marcos blush — along with horrific tales from survivors of his gulag and glimpses into his labyrinth of torture. It won't be a pretty picture. Just as Venetian sailors used to stare aghast at what floated up when they deliberately sank their galleys right outside the harbor to cleanse the ballast of vermin, so too a post-Saddam Baghdad will disgorge especially foul residents that may well make the late Abu Nidal, Abu Abbas, and the Hussein progeny seem innocuous.

Most immediately, American relationships with the so-called moderate despots in the region, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, will be turned topsy-turvy — if they are not already. These regimes, lest we forget, are ruled by failed autocrats that receive either American largess or troops to protect their unpopular and unelected governments — and in thanks unleash their fanged state-controlled presses against us. Their faux ministers and bought intellectuals talk of anti-Americanism ad nauseam, failing to realize that the American people have had it with all of them.

So if a newly constituted Iraq emerges as a sane state, America will have no desire or need to protect Mr. Mubarak, King Hussein, or the Saudi royals from the wave of popular uprisings that we ourselves helped to let loose in Iraq. Their only long-term salvation, then, is right now to begin democratic reforms, open up their media, and hope for our forbearance.

Now that there are new reports that we make actually heading toward a new ice age, Brock Yates has decided to get his Hummer after all to do what he can to reverse this dangerous cooling trend.

My wife is an avid skier, I don't ski and to her dismay refuse to exhibit any interest in learning, though I do take her on ski vacations as long as I can stay at the ski house and read. This piece at C&S explains perfectly my view of skiing.