There are certain groups of opinions that end up in the same basket despite not being related conceptually. For example, those who complain most loudly about jobs moving offshore (usually without examining the replacements for those jobs) also generally express great concern about how much of the world hates the US. Now what would give other countries reason to hate the US? (hat tip: Winds of Change)

“I have inside knowledge of call centres, having worked in several. It’s crucial that the agents be efficient. Barraging them with 60-second calls will ruin their stats and also lower their morale. Eventually, they’ll start thinking ‘another damn rude American a******’ every time a call comes up. All of this will have a cumulative effect. If 100 people across the US would commit to spending 10 minutes a day, we could cripple them, and bring those jobs back to the US.”

As I’ve written before, I have a morning routine. Every morning I rise, take a 1-2 mile walk with Qila and Jenny, come home, prepare my breakfast, and then feed the dogs. While I’m preparing and eating my own breakfast I read Lileks’s Daily Bleat (there’s a link over in my blogroll). Then I take a quick look a Instapundit . There’s a link for Glenn in my blogroll, too.

I don’t want to birddog the poor old Arch-Blogger but I think he’s got the wrong end of the stick in two of his posts this morning.

In Glenn’s citing of Virginia Postrel’s NYT article he talks about the “surprisingly high benefits of free trade”. I certainly believe that’s true but there isn’t a great deal in Ms. Postrel’s article to support it. What she points to is significant one-sided benefits to Canada. And she ignores a significant point: there was a lot going on in the period being discussed besides free trade. For example, there was an unprecedented level of investment on both sides of the border in information technology and the growth of the Internet. Might that not have had just a little to do with the productivity increases that are being reported? That’s certainly the way they’re being explained over here. Sounds like the post hoc propter hoc fallacy to me. It also bears mentioning that we still have managed trade with Canada. Yes, it’s freer than it was but it’s still managed. Remember the flap not long ago about seniors buying Canadian pharmaceuticals? It was in all the papers. In an environment of really free trade that would have been a total non-issue. Or try sometime to exchange data with a Canadian firm electronically.

Glenn also links to this post from Iraqi blogger Hammorabi, which includes “the observation that the Iraqi example is already putting democratic pressure on its neighbors”. I think we should be little more careful to avoid a reductio ad elections. Not everything that happens in the Middle East happens as a result of Iraqi elections. As in the free trade piece there’s more than one thing going on. Compare, for example, Abu Aardvark’s observation from yesterday:

…shortly after Bush’s press conference, King Abdullah announced some vague plans to “introduce some limited democratic reforms in his kingdom.” His plans to establish elected councils to oversee development in Jordan – with unclear relations to the existing councils – sound nice enough. But a bit tangential to the whole crackdown on the press, tight control over public assembly, continued reliance on ‘temporary laws’ issued while Parliament was out of session, assault on the political role of the professional associations, gerrymandering a compliant Parliament, and so on and on.

Isn’t it just as fair a conclusion that Abdullah is responding to the unfavorable attention his crackdowns are receiving in the West as much or more than to the upcoming Iraqi election? Or that his crackdowns are his reponse to the upcoming Iraqi election? I’m not convinced that a hardening stance by monarchs and autocrats in the Middle East points to the kind of liberalization there we’d like to see in response to a democratic Iraq.

Wow! Jeff really hit the ground running. I found enough in his provocative first post here to feed at least a half dozen posts of my own and I’ll try to put keyboard to pixels over the next few days and get some of them out. But I want to concentrate here on his comments about the UN and NATO.

I don’t believe that NATO or the UN are broken so much as stillborn. The sad truth is that consensus is needed for government of any kind including world government and there just isn’t enough consensus about in the world right now for any incipient world government to be particularly useful. What may have appeared at one time as consensus was actually the absolute economic and political dominance of the United States in the West in the immediate aftermath of World War II and the bi-polar world that emerged thereafter. There was a consensus between the United States and the Soviet Union: each wanted to maintain its own power and neither one of us wanted to be blown to Kingdom Come.

So I won’t be sad if the two old organizations shrivel up into insignificance. What I suspect will replace them will be a kind of syndicalism—coalitions of the willing. That’s what’s been in Iraq and that’s what the United States, Australia, India, and Japan have formed in their disaster relief efforts in response to the Sumatran earthquake and tsunami. Why is there a need for a standing bureaucracy? Form, organize, deal with the problem, dissolve.

I keep finding evidence, as I read blogs and watch TV news, that people are really, seriously deluded about a number of things. As a public service, I’d like to break a few truths to you, should you be among the deluded:

1. The UN is not and will never be a force for peace, justice or progress. The UN is a collection of outsized bureaucracies searching for a way to perpetuate the problems they were formed to solve, so that they can keep their cushy jobs. The UN is largely staffed by fans (and employees) kleptocratic tyrannies; largely controlled by internationalists whose main uniting force (besides the cushy international travel part) is hatred of the West in general and Liberty in particular; and largely paid for by the US taxpayers. The UN isn’t even as dignified as the “debating society” put down would have it, because most of the “debate” is about how bad Israel is for existing, and how bad the US is for letting Israel exist. Depending on the UN for help is like depending on the jihadis for mercy. There’s a reason I used that comparison; figure it out.
2. NATO is broken. The NATO mission ended with the Cold War, and it was merely our lack of the courage to realize that that has prevented NATO from dissolving. Non-US NATO members maintain almost no effective power projection force, and use US defense guarantees to avoid military spending sufficient to defend their own interests. While France uses NATO as a means to try to contain America, NATO provides nothing to America that the individual NATO members would not provide in any case. Basing rights and the like could as easily (and more flexibly) be obtained with bilateral agreements.
3. The French government defines itself in opposition to America. They are not our allies; they’re not even neutrals. Instead, they are hostile and obstructionist. Effectively, France is as useful to us (and in much the same way) as is Syria. The French people see themselves as subjects of the French government, and do not get involved to change government policies (unless the government tries to make them work more than 35 hours per week), so this will not change any time soon.
4. The government schools operate as a socialized babysitting service. Their goal is not education, but compliance, social conformity, parroting of “right” opinions, and a total inability to think through the consequences of those opinions. To the extent that government schools do teach skills, they are essentially teaching students how to understand written instructions they are given. Most private schools are similar, though they tend to teach more skills. Things that kids will learn virtually nothing about in government schools include economics, philosophy, logic, history beyond a survey level, history more recent than WWI, psychology, responsibility, morality, ethics, classic literature, government theory, Western culture and how to communicate coherent thoughts in a convincing way. This is not likely to change, because it’s easier to warehouse children than to educate them, and we have collectively given up on cultural transmission of values and outright job training.
5. All Muslims do not hate the West, the US or Democracy. All Muslims are not jihadis, nor do all Muslims sympathize with the jihadis. But even if the number of jihadis is 1% of Muslims, and the number of sympathizers is 10%, that is respectively 12 million jihadis and 120 million sympathizers. Let’s hope that the numbers are much, much smaller than that, because we will have to eventually kill pretty much all the jihadis and many of their sympathizers: you don’t convince a religious zealot that they are wrong. We may be able to split the sympathizers from the jihadis, and thus destroy the jihadis capability to fight, by democratizing the Middle East and removing the grievances that feed the conspiracy theories that motivate the sympathizers. If we stop fighting the jihadis in the Middle East, they will come here to fight us. In other words, the only alternatives to President Bush’s expansive, optimistic and risky effort to democratize the Arab/Muslim world are surrender and decimation of the Muslim world.
6. “Never again” is a crock. No government cares enough about genocide to actually do anything about it. That pretty much includes the US, sadly enough.
7. Intellectuals are not very bright, as a rule. If you don’t believe me, try reading what they write. Most professors are pretty ignorant of everything other than their narrow area of study, and a surprising number of them are pretty ignorant of their own areas of study because they aren’t trained, as a rule, in logic. Indeed, many professors simply believe that logic is not meaningful as a way of understanding the world.
8. Leftists aren’t generally all that compassionate. Activists tend to be self-interested jerks rather than being interested in helping their communities or countries. Activism has become an occupation instead of a tool.
9. There is not a lot of difference between the far Left and the far Right. As Heinlein put it, there are two kinds of people: those who want to control others and those who don’t. Extremists at both ends of the spectrum want to control others. A surprising number of people who are not extremists are OK with that.
10. The Constitution is dead. To all intents and purposes, the Constitution is only meaningful to the extent that the Supreme Court says it is. The Court has found a remarkable number of government powers are constitutional even when they directly contradict the plain meaning of the words of the Constitution, and has found a remarkable number of rights (including pretty much everything in the Bill of Rights) are civil – that is, exercised at the pleasure of the government – rather that natural and inalienably part of all humans’ birthright.
11. The core rights that all people must have are Life, Liberty and Property – Locke was right all along. Where people are relatively secure in these rights, they are by and large prosperous, healthy, inventive and happy. Where these rights are non-existent, life is, as Hobbes put it, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. This holds throughout all times and all societies in history. Communism large failed because of the lack of strong private property protections. Most of the world that lives in poverty does so because of a lack of strong private property rights. Representative government is great and all, but if you want to bring freedom and prosperity, you’re more likely to make it stick with deeds than ballots.
12. By and large, the Left does not want the US to win the Terror Wars. Were we to do so, it would largely invalidate convictions held by the Leftists with religious fervor. These convictions most prominently include “war is not the answer” to any problem. See the above point about convincing religious zealots.
13. The government is not here to help you. The government exists specifically to limit freedoms. This is a good thing, so long as the government itself is strictly limited in its powers. The government today is not limited at all. (See the above point about the Constitution.)
14. Any people without a frontier will stagnate. Space and underwater are the only frontiers remaining to us. Fortunately, space is an infinite frontier, if we have the guts to grab it.

There’s more, but that’s enough ranting for now.

For some people, like Glenn Reynolds, Steven Den Beste (sadly no longer blogging) or Wretchard, their individual voice or style is so powerful or unique as to be able to carry a blog alone through just about any vicissitudes. (For a far more numerous group, their blogs are so personal and intimate as to make group blogging unsuitable.) In the middle, I think that there’s a lot of room for consolidation, and that a lot of bloggers will find themselves coming together in groups.

In part this is because there is a flaw with individual blogs: one person simply can’t post all the time. There are times when home life, work, mood or access simply don’t allow it, and there are times when a person just has to be out of touch with the news, which makes it difficult to blog topically. I don’t like to just leave people hanging waiting for content: it makes some people grumpy, and puts a pressure on me to write when I really can’t spare the time.

I have reached the point where I feel happier blogging with others than alone. If you’re coming here from my old blog, Caerdroia, welcome. If you’re seeing me here for the first time, hello.

As Dave noted in his introduction, our views are similar but not identical. I hope that this will be a reinforcing characteristic, and I will strive to keep up the standards that Dave has maintained here all along. (There’s a reason he’s been on my daily reads for a long time.)

And thank you, Dave, for having me over.

You may have noticed that my blogroll is pretty selective. When I first started The Glittering Eye I had a very few, top-of-the-line blogs in it. As my own blogging matured and as I read more and more blogs myself I made the conscious decision to limit my blogroll to blogs that I felt represented the very finest in the blogosphere and, especially, those that weren’t in the Top 100 Blogs and deserved additional recognition. There are lots and lots of blogs that I read every day that I don’t blogroll. And I don’t do reciprocal blogrolling. Perhaps someday I’ll do what other bloggers have done and set up a separate reciprocal blogroll.

You can see that one of the great blogs that I have put into my blogroll is Caerdroia. When Jeff Medcalf, the chief-cook-and-bottle-washer of Caerdroia recently posted that he was considering looking for a billet elsewhere I jumped at the chance and offered him the opportunity to post on The Glittering Eye any time he cared to. Writers as skilled and insightful as Jeff don’t wander by every day.

Jeff has been good enough to take me up on my offer and you’ll be reading his posts here whenever he feels like posting. Although I think that Jeff’s views and mine are pretty compatible they’re not identical. His interests and strengths are somewhat different from mine. Over on Caerdroia he’s posted on subjects including politics, foreign policy, technology, neo-paganism, home-schooling, and family. Every post had great sensitivity and perceptivity and I eagerly awaited the next one. I hope he’ll bring those same qualities here.

This is one of the simplest dishes I know. It’s absolutely delicious and incredibly easy: twenty minutes or less from stem to stern. This recipe is derived from Deborah Madison’s book The Savory Way. If you’re not familiar with Deborah Madison’s work, you’ve got a treat in store for you.

Pasta with Gorgonzola

Serves 2-4

½ lb. dried pasta
1 garlic clove, thinly sliced
6 oz. Gorgonzola cheese, broken into pieces
2 Tbsp. unsalted butter
salt
freshly ground pepper

1. Bring a large pot of water to the boil.
2. Set a bowl large enough to hold the pasta over the pot and add the sliced garlic, the cheese, and the butter.
3. When the water comes to a boil, remove the bowl and add salt to taste.
4. Add the pasta to the boiling water. Cook as per the directions 10-12 minutes.
5. Scoop the pasta out of the water and add it directly to the bowl with the melted cheese.
6. Toss everything together, season with pepper to taste, and serve.

James Joyner of Outside the Beltway has a post this morning on Thomas Friedman’s column today that I wanted to make a longer comment on than I typically do in my Catching my eye morning run-down. Dr. Joyner writes:

Having read The Lexus and The Olive Tree and dozens of his columns over the years, I have one small suggestion for Thomas L. Friedman. I suggest that he come up with some new material every once in a while. Instead of constantly complaining that President Bush isn’t working hard enough to win European support, he might ask why it is that the Europeans have done to shoulder their fair share of the burden for defending themselves during the past six decades, first against Communism and now against Jihadist terrorists.

Let me put this is bluntly as I can: George W. Bush was just re-elected by a majority of the American electorate, which is a much more important referendum on U.S. foreign policy than a handful of people a columnist meets on a ten day tour in Europe. Sure, some people may think Mr. Friedman more qualified to advise the president than Condoleeza Rice, but I haven’t met them yet.

Since its beginnings as a country the United States’s foreign policy has been Eurocentric. While the U. S. military presence in Iraq may be getting the most press right now, probably the most significant change in American foreign policy during the Bush Administration is that it’s not Eurocentric anymore. We’re actually paying some attention to other parts of the world and I suspect that as our policy evolves we’ll be devoting more time and attention to the various regions of the world in proportion to their actual significance in world affairs and that means that Europe will receive less attention as their relatively dwindling role and significance warrants.

Said another way, the good old days aren’t coming back anymore.

And, as I wrote in my recent post, Plan B, if Bush’s grand Wilsonian plan to democratize the Middle East fails, the foreign policy that emerges from the wreckage won’t be a return to the Hamiltonian Realpolitik that Henry Kissinger and George Shultz recently urged on us nor will we cleave unto our old buddies in the EU again. No, we’ll either return to another grand old American tradition—Jeffersonian isolationism—or a full Jacksonian response. And the EU won’t have much role in either one of them.

UPDATE: Porphyrogenitus has posted something that’s quite relevant to my central point: the coalition that the U. S. assembled for tsunami relief consisted of Australia, India, and Japan, the other big Pacific democracies. Will this be the direction of future U. S. policy? Stay tuned.

Here’s what’s caught my eye so far this morning:

• When the Geneva Food Crimes Tribunal meets, Beautiful Atrocities’s
  No-Bake Meatloaf is certain to be indicted.
• A dialogue with Socrates (although not precisely a Socratic dialogue) about Bush’s inauguration
  speech with guest appearances by William F. Buckley and John F. Kennedy from Glen Wishard of
  Canis Iratus.
• Crooked Timbers comments on self-esteem.
• The unpronounceable xrlq of Damnum Absque Injuria
  has a fine rant on male privilege.
• Patterico has uncovered another example of bias from the LA Times. One wonders how often these examples of grooming the results occur.
• South Knox Bubba has an excellent post on Phil Bredesen.

That’s the lot.