Category: The Dish

Are any developing nations? A new study punctures my own Iraq-influenced skepticism.

As so often he’s ahead of his critics. Those few memos he writes he has buried in new levels of secrecy. Future Americans will have as little right to know what their veep was up to as the rest of us. Hey – since when does he owe the American people an explanation?

The fight over male genital mutilation has reached a climax in the recent Oregon court case in which a convert to Judaism is fighting to subject his twelve-year-old son to the procedure. Religious groups are in the mix. The boy’s mother is objecting. Religious freedom or barbaric superfluity or both?

Niall worries about Giuliani’s 9/12 fixation, his staggering ignorance and incuriosity about the world outside the U.S., and his penchant for pure aggression as a foreign policy. Money quote:

The reality is that the threat posed by Islamist terrorism today is wholly different from the threat posed by the Axis powers in 1941-42. To judge by Osama bin Laden’s latest rant, he aims at mass conversion, not conquest (with low-interest loans as the latest inducement).

The Islamists have thousands rather than millions of trained warriors. Their most dangerous weapons are land mines and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, not aircraft carriers and guided missiles. The total number of American fatalities that can be attributed to this supposed world war is about 6,000 (adding together 9/11 victims with U.S. passports and the service personnel killed in action in Iraq). On average, the Axis powers killed about 20,000 Allied soldiers and civilians a day.

The threat is real, but it is different. The only people capable of winning this war understand this. Rudy doesn’t. And it seems he doesn’t want to. This is not the same as conservatism. Conservatism is not indistinguishable from the use of violence and raw state power to solve all problems.

Left-handed people, that is. There seems to be a strange decline in their prevalence toward the end of the nineteenth century, followed by a subsequent rise. Social engineering?

Check out the visual gimmicks publishing houses have used to piggyback on the success of Harris, Dawkins, Hitch et al.

NRO’s staff join Michael Ledeen at a Toby Keith concert. Heh.

One old trope was that we were spending far too much money on HIV research, compared with cancer, given its prevalence in the population. Understanding the science changes your perspective on this. Many of the techniques and insights acquired in the fight against HIV are extremely useful for understanding and mastering other diseases. And sometimes, the drugs developed worked for both. AZT was originally a cancer drug. In combination, it remains a tool against HIV. And now protease inhibitors are showing promise against cancer. It’s win-win.

Good news: it’s a lot less full than it was recently.

The mayor grows one. Kerfuffle! Fooferaw!