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

• This should put the fat in the fire: the apparent discovery of a set of genes that correlate with homosexuality (male) (hat tip: A Stitch in Time).
  If it pans out, this should strengthen the Equal Protection argument for homogamy which I’ve always found somewhat
  weak.
• And deliver us from evil. Amen. (hat tip: Amydala).
• Andrew Sullivan
  brings up a good point: what are the objective criteria for success for the election in Iraq?
• Is it just me or do you find the carping about fraud in the November election from both
  Left and Right undermine the electoral process? The time for oversight
  is before and during the election, folks.
• From Elizabeth Anderson of Left2Right: do you deserve your pre-tax income?
• DEBKA reports the results of the upcoming
  Iraqi elections (hat tip: Econopundit. Well,
  it’s a prediction but I like the way this version reads.
• The New Sisyphus writes something that I completely agree with and that explains
  my sense of urgency in the War on Terror:

  No President of the United States–no Democrat, no Republican–will stand quietly while a radical, terrorist-sponsoring nation that, as a matter of policy, holds rallies where it exhorts its citizens to suicide bombings while chanting “Death to America!” acquires nuclear capability.

• Words fail me: Man peed way out of avalanche (hat tip: Outside the Beltway). Behold the power of beer.

That’s the lot.

I’d meant yesterday to say some nice things about praktike’s guest post over on Dean Nation, the blog of the Dean movement. Here are prak’s ideas:

1. Support the growth of civil society in the Middle East.
2. Push for higher gas taxes.
3. Make connections with Muslims here in America and abroad.
4. Take the threat of terrorism seriously.
5. Educate yourself about the issues.

I agree with 100% of what praktike has to say in this post (and I do mean 100%) and I recommend the post to your attention.

I do have a few observations, however. I think it bears emphasis that while these five things are necessary they are not sufficient. I don’t think that anybody should be confused into thinking that if these five positions are adopted that the threat of terrorism will be abated and all the problems in the Middle East will be solved. I want to emphasize that praktike does not make this claim, either.

Support the growth of civil society in the Middle East

Does it seem to anyone else that there’s a reductio ad elections going on right now? Not everything bad in the Middle East will be solved by Iraqi (or any other) elections and not everything good will come from them. It’s more complex than that. We need to support the good in the Middle East with more than just words and oppose the bad in the Middle East—also with more than just words if need be. And that must be true of both our friends and our enemies in the region (if you can tell which is which).

Push for higher gas taxes

I’ve been in favor of this for more than thirty years so it would be odd if I opposed it now. Largely for strategic reasons (both foreign and domestic). But there is one area in which I’m not quite as sanguine as praktike is here. There’s a world market for oil and even if the United States didn’t import a drop of oil from the Middle East our erstwhile allies in Europe do. Eliminating our dependency on Middle Eastern oil would not reduce Saudi leverage much.

Make connections with Muslims here in America and abroad

I couldn’t agree more. ‘Nuff said.

Take the threat of terrorism seriously

With me you’re preaching to the choir on this one, praktike. Where I suspect we differ (and where I certainly differ from the Bush Administration) is that I think that the timeline is very, very short.

Educate yourself about the issues

Once again, I couldn’t agree more.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers. You might also be interested in my post from this morning: Five ideas from praktike (on how we should be dealing with the War on Terror). In this post I actually agree with commenter-to-the-blogosphere praktike who’s somewhat to the left of me.

I don’t want to appear to be picking on the
Arch-Blogger but I think he’s mistaken when he writes:

There was a time when the Left opposed fascism and supported democracy, when it wasn’t a seething-yet-shrinking mass of self-hatred and idiocy. That day is long past, and the moral and intellectual decay of the Left is far gone.

That would be nice, wouldn’t it? But I’m afraid it doesn’t conform to the actual historic record. The American Left did support the Communists against the Fascists in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. But they certainly did not support democracy during World War II.

When the Third Reich invaded democratic Poland in September of 1939 the American Left did not call for support of the Poles. Nor did they call for support of the Danes and Norwegians when Hitler invaded Denmark and Norway in April of 1940. They maintained solidarity with the isolationist America First Committee when the Germans invaded democratic France and the Low Countries in May of 1940. There also wasn’t a peep from them as the Soviet Union, in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, occupied parts of Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, etc.

In fact it wasn’t until Germany violated that pact and invaded the Soviet Union that a rift began to form between the isolationist Right and the Left. Three months after the invasion Norman Thomas, chairman of the American Socialist Party, announced his break with the America First Committee and threw his support behind intervention in the European war against Germany. I think the record here is clear: the Left wasn’t supporting democracy, it was supporting socialism. And, in my opinion, that was the beginning of the consensus that enabled the United States to enter the war.

So, Glenn, when was it that the American Left supported democracy? Or did you have some other Left in mind?

Is it just me or are there an abnormal number of “Gone Fishin’” signs up
in the blogosphere this weekend? How about an all-humor edition of the morning run-down?
Here’s what’s struck my funny-bone this morning:

• Programming director Beautiful Atrocities gives
  us a preview of the upcoming ABC series Desperate Liberals. Inspired tomfoolery.
• Fafnir
  has a handy guide to the Social Security crisis.
• My guilty pleasure, Go Fug Yourself, continues to explain the otherwise inexplicable
  in celebrity fashions:

  In a desperate attempt to outrun the paparazzi, Jennifer Lopez cut through neighbor Rue McClanahan’s back yard, becoming inextricably entangled in the older woman’s guest room curtains, which had been hung on her clothesline to dry:

  Judging from the picture, it’s the only explanation that fits.

• IMAO informs us that Wisconsin has been taken over by ninjas.
• Bill of INDC Journal has dredged up another installment in Sen. Barbara Boxer’s as-yet-unwritten romance novel.
• Join tour guide Iowahawk on a Chicago
  union members’ tour of the Badger State.
• Moloch applies for the now-available job of head of Planned Parenthood.
• Scott Ott reports Kennedy: U.S. Troops Restrict Al Qaeda Civil Rights
• I guess you had to be there from Wait ‘Til Next Year (hat tip: triticale).

And, judging by this website, some people have way too much time on their hands. That’s the lot.

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.