Month: January 2011

Over my break, Goldblog considered the possibility:

Let’s just say, as a hypothetical, that one day in the near future, Prime Minister Lieberman’s government (don’t laugh, it’s not funny) proposes a bill that echoes the recent call by some rabbis to discourage Jews from selling their homes to Arabs. Or let’s say that Lieberman’s government annexes swaths of the West Bank in order to take in Jewish settlements, but announces summarily that the Arabs in the annexed territory are in fact citizens of Jordan, and can vote there if they want to, but they won’t be voting in Israel. What happens then? Do the courts come to the rescue? I hope so. Do the Israeli people come to the rescue? I’m not entirely sure. There are many Israelis who value democracy, but they might not possess the strength to fight. Does American Jewry come to the rescue? Well, most of American Jewry would be so disgusted by Israel’s abandonment of democratic principles that I think the majority would simply write off Israel as a tragic, failed experiment. 

Am I being apocalyptic? Yes. Am I exaggerating the depth of the problem? I certainly hope so. Israel is still a remarkably vibrant democracy, with a free press and an independent judiciary.  But on the other hand, the Israel that I see today is not the Israel I was introduced to more than twenty years ago.

What panics me is that the Israel that I see today is not the Israel I thought I knew only two years ago. Avigdor Lieberman is the de facto leader of the country, commanding its foreign policy, defying its prime minister, enraging allies, forswearing any peace.

Last week, in an important event in global consciousness, Tyler Cowen highlighted a fasinating study:

Intriguingly, across the world the main social groups which practice polygyny do not consume alcohol. We investigate whether there is a correlation between alcohol consumption and polygynous/monogamous arrangements, both over time and across cultures. Historically, we find a correlation between the shift from polygyny to monogamy and the growth of alcohol consumption. Cross-culturally we also find that monogamous societies consume more alcohol than polygynous societies in the preindustrial world. We provide a series of possible explanations to explain the positive correlation between monogamy and alcohol consumption over time and across societies.

Pretty average blah blah boilerplate from Professor Reynolds:

… The country is on the verge of bankruptcy, the federal government is at a low point in terms of popular legitimacy, and not just Congress, but the entire political class, is on probation. "Don't blow it" is fairly unspecific advice, but it's important here. Don't be distracted by the many, many things that seem important in Washington but that don't really matter …

And then:

…ignore the press. The establishment media still have their power, but they've never been weaker, and they're perceived by an ever-greater percentage of Americans as simply an arm of the political-class Democratic Party. If you pay attention, they have power over you. If you do what you think is right, they don't.

I've been banging around the blogosphere about as long as Insta and I think the entire endeavor has been a terrific rocket up the ass of a complacent, insular press corps. But the point, as far as I was concerned, was improving the press, not abolishing it.

The key to that is an awareness of one's own bias, a fanaticism for fact, and a curiosity that is not pack-led. Some of this will come from the blogosphere or from new sources or from Wikileaks or a new writer or expert who can suddenly blaze a Silver trail. But the core function of the press remains – and it is a vital conservative function. It's designed to puncture pretension, expose lies, challenge lazy arguments, provide new perspectives, tell untold stories – and without a solid press corps able to do this, democracy is threatened.

There is a kind of nihilism to some aspects of the current right that really does seem deeply suspicious of institutions. This is an odd place for a conservative to be. What matters for a conservative is a reformation of institutions, not a destruction of them. And that includes the press. Which, of course, Professor Reynolds honors in the breach. How many links to the MSM on his front page? I stopped counting.

A reader writes:

Those bulldogs are a bad example of non-monogamous behavior. Try though they may, they are really being celibate. Breeders have made bulldogs so deformed that they rarely mate without human assistance, and they rarely give birth without C-sections. (They also have trouble breathing and are prone to many genetic diseases and disorders.) Here's some more info:

"Bulldogs in general are not able to mate naturally by themselves and it is common practice among Bulldog breeders to provide assistance to the bitch and the stud during matings by means of various methods and innovations. Novice breeders who want to do assisted matings with their own Bulldogs are advised to first get some practical experience with the help of an established breeder before trying it on their own."

"Selective breeding in the Bulldog for big heads and narrow hindquarters (pelvises), as prescribed by the Official Bulldog Standard, effectively means that Bulldog puppies with their big heads must pass through a narrow birth canal, which is the result of the bitch’s narrow hindquarters. To add to this potential birth hazard, Bulldog bitches in general tend to have inadequate uterus contraction, which is needed to expel puppies during the birth process. The combination of these factors is the reason why purebred Bulldog bitches can very seldom give birth naturally and requires that caesarians be done as a rule rather than an exception."

In his latest, George Will argues for more federal spending on science, and higher state spending on university education:

America has been consuming its seed corn: From 1970 to 1995, federal support for research in the physical sciences, as a fraction of gross domestic product, declined 54 percent; in engineering, 51 percent. On a per-student basis, state support of public universities has declined for more than two decades and was at the lowest level in a quarter-century before the current economic unpleasantness. Annual federal spending on mathematics, the physical sciences and engineering now equals only the increase in health-care costs every nine weeks.

Republicans are rightly determined to be economizers. They must, however, make distinctions. Congressional conservatives can demonstrate that skill by defending research spending that sustains collaboration among complex institutions – corporations' research entities and research universities. Research, including in the biological sciences, that yields epoch-making advances requires time horizons that often are impossible for businesses, with their inescapable attention to quarterly results.

He even muses that conservatives may hurt America by targeting academia:

The last Congress's misbegotten stimulus legislation – an indulgent and incoherent jumble of pent-up political appetites – may have done large and lasting damage by provoking a comparably indiscriminate reaction against federal spending. This will be doubly dangerous if a curdled populism, eager to humble elites, targets a sphere of American supremacy and a basis of its revival – its premier research universities.

Fine on the last point – but, seriously, is Will retroactively proposing a better stimulus or none at all? Was he against the third of it that was tax cuts?

My alarm didn't go off. Seriously.

A reader writes:

Just a guess on why Will and Krauthammer would have changed their minds about Palin between 2008 and now. Could it be that, while it was clear she was unqualified, it wasn't so clear that she was uninterested?

It's one thing to consider an unknown for VP – yes, limited political history and a lot of small town baggage – but a reasonably intelligent person with ambition and passion and drive could learn quite a lot if she applied herself. Obama figured it out and he had the added burden of actually being president.

It's quite another thing to view Palin now – to measure her choices, to see how she's kept to her corner of the world, only interested in celebrity and the adulation of her followers. We don't see her learning anything new or traveling in public policy circles or hobnobbing with people of experience who can give her insight, we don't see her communicating with people whose opinions are different from hers or trying to persuade people who disagree with her. In short, we don't see her doing any of the things which anyone, right or left, would expect from a person with the ambition to be president.

I don't think there's any doubt that she's a woman of energy and ambition, but she's had 2 years to gain experience and she's chosen not to.

Ross:

In every era, there’s been a tragic contrast between the burden of unwanted pregnancies and the burden of infertility. But this gap used to be bridged by adoption far more frequently than it is today. Prior to 1973, 20 percent of births to white, unmarried women (and 9 percent of unwed births over all) led to an adoption. Today, just 1 percent of babies born to unwed mothers are adopted, and would-be adoptive parents face a waiting list that has lengthened beyond reason.

His conclusion:

This is the paradox of America’s unborn. No life is so desperately sought after, so hungrily desired, so carefully nurtured. And yet no life is so legally unprotected, and so frequently destroyed.

The great gulf between those who desire children and cannot have them biologically and those who conceive children but do not want them may vary over time and place. But what marks a civilization, in my view, is how we handle this chasm. Do we simply throw the unwanted away? Do we make every effort to find them homes? How do we practically facilitate this?

If the pro-life movement dedicated its every moment not to criminalizing abortion but to expanding adoption opportunities, it would win many more converts.

(Photo: A fetus in its 19th week of gestation is displayed at the opening of the new exhibition 'Bodyworlds: The Mirror of Time' at the O2 bubble in London, on October 23, 2008. The exhibition focuses on the life cycle and features over 200 plastinates. The plastination process was invented by Dr von Hagens in the 1970's and has since been used in Bodyworks exhibitions around the world. By Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images.)

Hard to top Dave Barry, innit?

North Korea continued to show why it is known as "the international equivalent of Charlie Sheen." The entire nation of Greece went into foreclosure and had to move out; it is now living with relatives in Bulgaria. Iran continued to develop nuclear weapons, all the while insisting that they would be used only for peaceful scientific research, such as — to quote President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — "seeing what happens when you drop one on Israel."