Month: April 2007

A reader tries to talk me into one, after this post:

I’m going to put this to you plainly and I hope you listen close (it’s for your own good). America’s romance with cars has nothing to do with commuting to work or one-upping your yuppie neighbor, it has everything to do with the sensation of a perfect drive. Here is a sporting conquest, an affirmation of skill, a moment of oneness and bliss, even a religious experience waiting for anyone with the right car and a driver’s license. I hope you can apply the same sensibility that led you to post the dressage video a few weeks ago to the world of automobiles. It will open your eyes.

I’d recommend taking the keys right out of your boyfriend’s hands, especially if the car is rear wheel drive and light weight, and heading at least two hours north of NYC. Anything north of New Paltz in mountainous terrain is essentially police free, without posted speed limits, and without traffic. Just look for mountain passes, reservoir roads, really anything that refuses to stay straight for more than 200 yards. No need to plan anything else (food, lodgings, amusement), trust me, it will all fall into place.

Well, I watched the video. Maybe you have to be there.

As I expected, the honorable member from National Review did very well. An Oxford reader writes of Jonah’s speech:

Very amusing: a joke every line, house often in stitches. Hammered home the line that to regret America is to regret Britain, and that is a shameful, ludicrous act of self-loathing. Quite stirring. Excellent cracks about the Communist guy (who failed to turn up): "Was Dr. Doom not available? Did you not approach the most penetrating pundits in the Klingon galaxy?" etc. It fell to Matt Frei (of the BBC) to bark "Nein Danke!" at the proposition bench, when one clambered to make a ‘point of information’, to prolonged laughter.

Proposition was, shall we say, sinister – particularly UK Islamic Party guy, who talked darkly about "Corporations and control of money by small, dangerous groups", but stopped short of mentionining the Jews by name. One or two Muslims in the audience applauded them at points, but few else. Oddly they were combined with a Canadian feminist (producing, as the first proposition speaker put it, "the first ever Canadian-Islamist alliance against a Neoconservative-Matt Frei alliance"). Nearly everyone poured out the Noes door (save Matt Frei, interestingly, who nipped out for a loo break through the Ayes).

All in all it was a pretty good Union night, though the Islamists became quickly tedious, depriving it of those moments when the place zips with the tension and excitement of real and dramatised intellectual swordplay.

Now back to revising for finals.

A reader dissents from part of this post:

Prohibitionists love to trot out the stale old "this isn’t the harmless marijuana you remember from your youth" chestnut. Two points: 1) if the marijuana from their youths was harmless (and I tend to agree it was), then why was it illegal back then? 2) to the extent that marijuana is more potent today than, say, thirty or forty years ago, that means that less of it needs to be ingested to produce the same effect, which, if the method of ingestion is smoking means that less byproduct needs to be inhaled in order to administer the same amount of THC. In plain English, people back in the day smoked until they were stoned, and they still do so today – the only difference is that these days they don’t need to smoke as much…

Of course, some might claim that people today will simply continue to smoke until they reach altogether unacceptable levels of pleasure (since smoking to the point of toxicity is physically impossible), but some basic economics help out on that point: in addition to being more potent, today’s "super potent" marijuana is also much, much more expensive, even adjusted for inflation, than the marijuana of decades past.

The point is, people who attempt to change the debate by claiming that marijuana is somehow "not the same drug" as it used to be are basically just blowing smoke.

Iraq’s parliament prepares to take the summer off. I wonder if anyone will be able to tell the difference. Everyone agrees that the surge is only even viable in Baghdad if critical political steps are being taken in the government and parliament, to complement mildly better security in some parts of the capital. We’ve just been told how serious Maliki is about that. He’s not.

An illuminating exchange of views.

Riverbend blogger makes her call. Sad, sad post. Money quote:

I always hear the Iraqi pro-war crowd interviewed on television from foreign capitals (they can only appear on television from the safety of foreign capitals because I defy anyone to be publicly pro-war in Iraq). They refuse to believe that their religiously inclined, sectarian political parties fueled this whole Sunni/Shia conflict. They refuse to acknowledge that this situation is a direct result of the war and occupation. They go on and on about Iraq’s history and how Sunnis and Shia were always in conflict and I hate that. I hate that a handful of expats who haven’t been to the country in decades pretend to know more about it than people actually living there.

I remember Baghdad before the war- one could live anywhere. We didn’t know what our neighbors were- we didn’t care. No one asked about religion or sect. No one bothered with what was considered a trivial topic: are you Sunni or Shia? You only asked something like that if you were uncouth and backward. Our lives revolve around it now. Our existence depends on hiding it or highlighting it- depending on the group of masked men who stop you or raid your home in the middle of the night.

On a personal note, we’ve finally decided to leave. I guess I’ve known we would be leaving for a while now.

Vienna, Austria, 8.12 am.

Big whoop. Actually, I find Tenet’s description of the real context of his "slam dunk" remark more incriminating – both of him and the administration. It suggests that the main concern at that time was selling the war with selected intelligence, not ensuring that the intelligence was correct and fairly presented – with all the caveats – to the American people.

I linked recently to John Tierney’s important report on the fight for patients to get adequate pain relief from doctors suffering from "opiophobia." Virginia Postrel, who has had her own experiences with such pain, points to this superb piece on the subject by Jacob Sullum.

A beaut from the WaPo.