The Dish

Here’s an idea for July 4. In the next two days, please send me any favorite quote, YouTube video or photograph that sums up for you the best of America. I’ll post the most original entries all day on July 4. Think different. Passages from favorite novels or poems, YouTube comedy sketches or flash videos, or just a simple photographic image – if they sum up the best of America for you, send them in. Put "July 4" in the subject line of your email and a very brief description. All I have so far is Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock "Star-Spangled Banner." But Jimmy Stewart is just as welcome. Special priority goes to anything that will piss off Jihadists. Bottom line: The best of America, in your opinion. One day of celebration. Raid YouTube. Raid your book shelves. Check your photo-album. No schlock please. Unless it’s so bad it’s good.

7-11 transforms a few stores into Kwik-E-Marts for the Simpsons movie.

"Our members just wish this thing would be over. People are tired of him. There’s nobody there who can stand up to him and tell him, ‘Mr. President, you’ve got to do this. You’re wrong on this.’ There’s no adult supervision. It’s like he’s oblivious. Maybe that’s a defense mechanism." – a senior House Republican, in the Washington Post.

It’s really about Pakistan and the countless connections between Britain and its former colony:

Despite the efforts of Pervez Musharraf, the president of Pakistan, to clamp down on Islamic extremists, scores of young British Muslims are known to have received terrorist training at Taliban-controlled madrassas in Pakistan.

An estimated 60,000 youngsters travel from Britain to visit relatives in the country every year, and it is a monumental security challenge to identify the dozen or so who might be susceptible to radicalisation.

All you need is a handful. And Bush’s inept occupation of Iraq has only made matters worse, providing a critical training base for mass murder.

Darwin Dating needs to know the answer to this question: Why Doesn’t Evolution Get Rid of Ugly People? Scientists have a few new theories.

It’s not their image but new research is showing a Hayekian bent to the little buggers:

"One key to an ant colony, for example, is that no one’s in charge. No generals command ant warriors. No managers boss ant workers. The queen plays no role except to lay eggs. Even with half a million ants, a colony functions just fine with no management at all—at least none that we would recognize. It relies instead upon countless interactions between individual ants, each of which is following simple rules of thumb. Scientists describe such a system as self-organizing."

It’s called "swarm theory." Spontaneous order, anyone?

Johann Hari makes a persuasive case that both Ron Paul and Rudy Giuliani are right – and that the only effective strategy against Jihadist terror is a fusion of the two explanations, blowback and totalitarianism. Money quote:

This is a reminder the bombers are not only reacting against the worst in our system of government: the torture and the use of chemical weapons in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, support for Arab dictators. They oppose the best in our system of government too: the intellectual freedom to write novels that question religion, the sexual freedom of women to pick their own partners. When I receive my own tedious drizzle of jihadi death-threats, they always mention my homosexuality long before they get to my views on foreign policy. In his "Address to the American People" in October 2002, Osama Bin Laden said "the worst kind of event" committed by America was not a foreign policy atrocity – of which there are many – but "your President Clinton’s immoral acts committed in the official Oval Office" with Monica Lewinsky. To them, this is a war against blowjobs and novellists as much as a war against occupation.

So what can we do to defuse the ticking bomb of British jihadism? On all fronts, the solution lies not in abandoning the values of liberal democracy, but in adhering to them much more scrupulously. If we restrain our leaders whenever they try to violate our values by using torture, or chemical weapons, or arming tyrants – indeed, if we put them on trial for it – we will choke off the more obvious blowback. But that’s not enough. We also need to unpick the totalitarian ideology of jihadism by democratically opening up Islamic theology, so that over a generation, fewer and fewer young men can convince themselves they are "good Muslims" when they murder innocents.

Both require a long, generational slog. It will not be without casualties. But we can win, if we do not sacrifice our core values and confront without illusions the pathologies that now infest Islam.

They’re not alienated youth, or poverty-stricken Arabs. They’re educated, professional religious fanatics. The report is from the Daily Mail, one of the more hysterical and less reliable British papers, so treat with some caution (but the doctor factoid has been reported elsewhere as well):

Two doctors were among five people being held as terror suspects last night after the bomb plots in London and Glasgow. One was one of two men who tried to drive a blazing Jeep packed with petrol, gas canisters and nails into Glasgow Airport on Saturday…

Both doctors were working at UK hospitals and were apparently here legally… "These are highly-educated, articulate and intelligent people," one security source said. "They are men trained to heal but they were planning unbelievable atrocities." …

One of the doctors, the man arrested on the M6, was said to be a Jordanian-born doctor at the North Staffordshire Hospital in Stoke-on-Trent. He lived with his wife and baby in a rented house in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, where forensic officers were carrying out a detailed search last night. ..

The doctor involved in the Glasgow attack is an Iraqi who is thought to have been granted asylum in the UK while a third suspect comes from Lebanon.

In Britain’s socialized medical system, of course, doctors aren’t as well-paid as in the US. But they’re not poor either. What we’re seeing here is what we’ve seen for years. Al Qaeda is composed mainly of prosperous middle-class types, consumed with resentment of the West’s freedoms, and determined to kill as many in the name of Allah. Yes, there’s no doubt that the occupation of Iraq has made us more vulnerable to these religious nutters. But they were there before Iraq, and they will be here for a long time. And they are not all illegal immigrants. Many are legal, professional and devoutly murderous.

Since we mentioned it, here’s the classic rendition of the Muppets classic from the British version of "The Office." Gervais is a genius. Maybe a one-trick genius, but a genius none the less: