Joseph Sobran has a good essay on the dangers of state power.

Yes, yes, I realize that Bill Gates is far richer than I am. It bothers me not at all, because he has no power over me. I can refuse to buy his products by exercising my own free will. But even the pettiest state official — a bullying policeman, for example — does have power to coerce me. I have no choice about doing business with the state. It can take my money without giving me anything in return. And after all, what can it give me? It produces nothing.

But can’t the rich use their money to buy power — by influencing elections? Certainly. But the problem is not the money, but the state. It’s usually corrupt and uses its power corruptly. If there were no state, or if it could be strictly limited to a few powers, it couldn’t become an instrument of the rich. “The way to get rid of corruption in high places,” the libertarian Frank Chodorov said, “is to get rid of high places.”
(via C&S)

Also in today's WSJ, Casper Weinberger addresses Reps. Rangel and Conyers call for a reinstutued draft.

The congressmen never mentioned that the burden of defending the country is resting on the shoulders, white, black, brown, etc., of those who want that "burden," and whose volunteering gives it to them.

If some statistical genius has computed that our all-volunteer force may have slightly more black and Hispanic volunteers than is "proportionate" -- (to what?) -- I would reply that that simply demonstrates that there is a higher degree of patriotism among black and Hispanic youths of draft age than among whites of draft age. That should be a matter of praise and gratification. But no! The congressmen simply ignore the fact that however "proportional," our military is what it is because it is made up of people who want to be there.

Daniel Henninger has a good editorial in the WSJ today about Medicare/Medicaid.

An article by Ivan G. Osorio in NRO, says that Hugo Chavez's former personal pilot claims that Chavez has been funneling money to Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. Who would've thought that Fidel Castro's dear friend Chavez would do such a thing. Like the miscellaneous other dictators around the world, Chavez has found that oppressing your own people and trashing your countries economy isn't satisfying enough anymore.

Victor Davis Hanson has an article on Iraq and North Korea up at NRO.

Blogroll
Just a maintenance note, I've updated our blogroll to the left to use blogroll.com. I've also cleaned out blogs that haven't posted in a few months or that have announced they are retiring.

Compare the idiocy cited below about the zero tolerance gun policy with Joanne Jacob's description of how actual bullying is handled by school officials.

More school idiocy, a 13 y/o student has been expelled for a year, under the schools zero-tolerance gun policy, for looking at a laser pointer his friend brought to school. The school declared the laser pointer was a gun facsimile. Soon the title of this blog will be the only place to find any common sense in this country.

Evan Thomas has a profile of N. Korea's resident psychopath-in-charge in Newsweek.

It is all a grotesque charade. His fantasyland is a charnel house. While he lives like a brandy-swilling 18th-century French nobleman, more than 2 million people have died of starvation in North Korea over the last decade. Political prisoners are beaten or left to die in Soviet-style gulags. Kim himself is the last Stalinist, a weird, vicious remnant of communist oppression that has collapsed everywhere else on the planet. Kim Jong Il’s North Korean horror movie would all be a remote tragedy to the out-side world, except that Kim’s props now include weapons of mass destruction—chemical and biological and, soon if not already, nuclear weapons.

Robert Samuelson on the 'American Spirit'.

Something gives the United States an edge. It may be national character. In “Our Times,” Sullivan asked what the country’s “distinctive characteristics” were. Here are some of his answers: “freedom of opportunity for the individual”; a “zeal for universal education”; “a determined faith in [representative democracy]”; “adaptiveness, a willingness ... to dismiss the old and try the new”; “a responsiveness to idealism”; “independence of spirit.” Similar phrases are used today.

Jeff Jacoby argues that Israel's restraint in the face of the Tel Aviv attacks will only increase the frequency of future terrorist acts.

For years now, violence has paid. In the 1970s, the PLO's hijackings and mass murders won it international recognition and attention. The mayhem of the first intifadah yielded the Oslo agreement, which legitimized the PLO and gave Arafat and his lieutenants a dictatorship in Gaza and the West Bank. The stepped-up terrorism of the Oslo years - the years of the grossly misnamed ''peace process'' - culminated in former Prime Minister Ehud Barak's astonishing offer of full sovereignty, dismantled settlements, and shared control of Jerusalem. The bloodshed inflicted by Hezbollah led to Israel's unilateral retreat from southern Lebanon.

Excellent piece on anti-Americanism by the Left by Michael Gove in the London Times.

Knocking America off its superpower pedestal has long supplanted taking control of the commanding heights of the economy as the idea which holds the Left together. Forget Clause Four. That was a dead red letter. It’s opposition to Uncle Sam which is the glue in the Left coalition, the brew which puts fire into bien-pensant bellies, the opium of radical intellectuals. And the crack in Osama bin Laden’s pipe.

Anti-Americanism provides the drumbeat for the protesters who march at every significant left-wing rally. Whether the protest is nominally against war, global capitalism or environmental degradation, the real enemy is Washington. Every significant Left intellectual, from Harold Pinter through Dario Fo to Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky has made criticism of the American imperium his defining belief. But Yankee-phobia now extends far beyond the protest march and the academy.
...
It is a myth that America is a trigger-happy cowboy state over-eager to throw its weight around, a myth that America seeks to use its undoubted military power to establish an exploitative empire, and a myth that America thrives by impoverishing and oppressing other nations.

A trigger-happy starter of wars and provoker of enemies? The truth is that the US has been painstakingly slow to involve itself in foreign conflicts. It hung back from involvement in Bosnia and Kosovo until it was clear that Europe could not manage alone. It refrained from dealing properly with al-Qaeda when that network attacked US embassies in 1998 and, even after 9/11, it waited until a huge international coalition had been assembled before striking back. In Iraq, it refrained from finishing off President Saddam Hussein in 1991 out of deference to its Arab allies. And with North Korea, it has practised diplomacy in the face of nuclear provocation since 1994, out of respect for its regional allies. Even now, in dealing with the dangers posed by Iraq and North Korea, the diplomatic route is followed out of deference to others.

An imperial exploiter? The truth is that America seeks to disentangle itself from anything which smacks of neocolonial occupation. It is anxious to bring the boys back home from the Balkans and Afghanistan. The real criticism of weight is that the US should do more on the ground to help failed states rebuild, as it did in Japan and Germany after the Second World War.

Which takes us to the myth of America the locust state, the predator on the poorest nations of the Earth. The truth, as the US writer Charles Krauthammer has pointed out, is that America’s influence for good in suffering states is directly measurable in three very different examples. After the Second World War three devastated nations were divided. In each case one part of a culturally unified nation fell under America’s political influence. And in each case — South Korea versus North, West Germany as against East, Taiwan as opposed to Communist China — the territory which took the American path enjoyed greater freedom and prosperity.

Rumor of a new character being added to 'Return of the King': Jar-Jaromir. :-)

A pair of British researchers said they had worked out a simple equation to quantify happiness that could put an exact figure on the emotional state.

P + 5E + 3H

Where P stands for Personal Characteristics (outlook on life, adaptability and resilience); E for Existence (health, friendships and financial stability) and H represents Higher Order (self-esteem, expectations and ambitions). The article doesn't mention how to assign values to these variables however.

I guess Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill are rolling in their graves right now after spending most of their lives trying to work this out.

With the tort vultures circling fast-food joints, Paul Campos has an interesting article in TNR about the actual health damage (or lack of it) done by being overweight.

...Perhaps the most comprehensive survey of the literature regarding the health risks of different weight levels is a 1996 study by scientists at the National Center for Health Statistics and Cornell University. This survey analyzed data from dozens of previous studies involving more than 600,000 subjects. It concluded that, for nonsmoking men, the lowest mortality rate was found among those with BMI figures between 23 and 29, meaning that a large majority of the healthiest men in the survey would be considered "overweight" by current government standards. For nonsmoking women, the results were even more striking: The authors concluded that, for such women, the BMI range correlating with the lowest mortality rate is extremely broad, from about 18 to 32, meaning that a woman of average height can weigh anywhere within an 80-pound range without seeing any statistically meaningful change in her risk of premature death.

Given the silcone implant trials, however, I doubt the lack of evidence of any actual harm inflicted will have any impact on trial outcomes. After all, personal responsibility has already been removed as an impediment to tort cases. This months Reason has a good piece by Walter Olson on the increasing ill-informed juries being carefully selected by trial lawyers.

Theodore Dalrymple is worried about the increasing control over everyone's lives the British bureaucracy has.

Despite years of unprecedented prosperity, a larger proportion than ever before of the population is dependent, or partly dependent, upon the state as provider. Only this week, an unmarried woman with three young children by the same man told me that when she asked him for money to buy them shoes that they needed, he told her to take a loan out from ‘the social’; that, he opined, was what it was there for. He had in any case made it abundantly clear that under no circumstances would he part with any money for the upkeep of his children, and so far had been as good as his word.
...
Not only are such people severely lacking in ethical standards, but they also live in permanent fear of the power that they have ceded to the state; and no one who has any dealings with the bureaucracy of welfare, child support, housing and so forth can be left in any doubt as to its power to grind people up and spit them out. Hedonistic egotism, fear and resentment form the character of a large proportion of our population, and it is a character that is ripe for exploitation. They have made themselves natural slaves.

Sorry if some of these items are a little old, I am still catching up on post-holiday reading. Michael Kelly has a fine piece from last week of news stories we might see next year if hell freezes over. My personal favorite:

PLAINS, Ga., March 17 -- In a move that stunned veteran narcissistic personality disorder observers, a smiling Jimmy Carter today announced that he had decided to return the coveted Peace Prize awarded to him last year by the Nobel Committee.

"I may be the most vainglorious, self-regarding, preachifying old coot since Henry Ward Beecher, but even I know when a joke has gone too far," said Carter. "Let's consider my contributions to world peace. In 1991, as the United States was on the very verge of war, I secretly lobbied the presidents of the United Nations Security Council nations, and also the heads of the Arab nations, to try to persuade them to scuttle my own country's efforts to build a coalition and defeat Iraq. Imagine if I had succeeded -- why, we now know Iraq was within months of building its first nuclear weapon when the war began!

"Then, I butted into Clinton's disaster in Somalia, to put together the surrender to that charmer Mohamed Farah Aideed after his boys killed 18 of our soldiers and dragged their beaten bodies through the streets. And we now know that the spectacle of the Great Satan knuckling under to a guy whose entire army consisted of 10 second-hand Jeeps directly encouraged Osama bin Laden to believe that America was ripe for capitulation on a much greater scale -- if you killed enough Americans.

"And the clincher -- Korea. Yep, I'm the boy who freelanced the 1994 agreement with the head-case of that horror show to stop his nuclear bomb program, in exchange for a whole bunch of aid from us. When reporters asked me then if it was really reasonable to expect Kim Il Sung to keep his word, given that he never had before, I said: 'This is something that's not for me to judge.' Well, of course, neither that nut-job nor his nut-job son honored the deal for one second. So now, eight years later, another American president has inherited another fine mess I got us in.

"Please, take it back, and stop me before I negotiate again."

For our readers who think this blog stinks, researcher Pamela Dalton has created what she claims is the foulest smell on Earth.

First up was a bottle that smelled vaguely like blue cheese. "It's actually a vomit smell," Dalton said.

"Vomit is a very ambiguous odor, because it has elements of food in it. There's a lot of variation in how people respond to it."

Then Dalton offered a whiff of the storied Who Me? It smelled like the repellent odor added to natural gas, with a heavy dose of spoiled mushrooms.

After a pleasant sniff of vanilla and orange - a palate cleanser, so to speak - Dalton pulled out a bottle marked Bathroom Malodor, mixed according to a government formula. The odor was invented so that makers of bathroom cleansers could test their products.

Pee-ew! That was bad.

Bathroom Malodor had a strongly fecal smell, with sharp notes of spoiled eggs and an undertone of rotting rodent. After a few whiffs, the stomach churned and an odd feeling gathered at the back of the throat.

In the tests with various ethnic groups, Bathroom Malodor was the hands-down winner as the most widely reviled smell. "We got cursed in a lot of different languages," Dalton said. "It was: `Get that out of here!' "

Combining the worst of Bathroom Malodor and Who Me?, Stench Soup is so distasteful that it chases all thoughts out of the mind. In informal tests, Dalton's colleagues have found it to be the most obnoxious odor of all.

In honor of the outgoing House Majority Leader, here is a selection of quotes by Dick Armey:

"I said, 'Ron [Dellims, D-CA] you know, you and I are alike, actually -- I spend that money like it's my money, and you spend that money like it's my money." (Apr 24, 1998)

"Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that it be the will of Congress that the bass bite early and often throughout the weekend in Texas." (May 28, 1996)

"The average politician, if he got run over by a train, would stand up and say, 'I got the best of that deal.' I don't believe anything politicians have to say." (Dec 4, 1995)

"The difference between the House and the Senate -- we can't pass anything unless everybody's here. They can't pass anything unless everybody's gone." (Jul 25, 2000)

"I'll have my regular press conference later -- and I can refuse to respond then." (Apr 21, 1998)

"They're like Al Capone dividing up Chicago -- Bugsy gets prostitution, gambling and loan sharking on the South Side, somebody else gets numbers in the North, and so on. It's the same thing in the [agriculture] committee, only they do it with peanuts, feed grains, milk, the Midwest, California, Texas, et cetera." (May 20, 1990)

"If I were in the President's place I would not have gotten a chance to resign. I would be laying in a pool of my own blood, hearing Mrs. Armey standing over me saying, "How do I reload this damn thing?" (Dec 1998)
- When asked by a reporter whether he would've resigned if caught in an affair with an intern

"Three groups spend other peoples money: children, thieves, and politicians. All three need supervision."

"If you want government to get off your back, you've got to get it's hands out of your pockets."

For any who think diplomacy is the preferred route to take with Iraq and believe negotiating with Saddam would be any more effective then negotiating with Kim Il-Sung was in 1994, read this superb profile of Hussein by Mark Bowden from the May 2002 Atlantic, which under Michael Kelly's editorship is quickly becoming the best monthly magazine in the country. It's a long piece, but take the time to read the whole thing.