The Duke Lacrosse Case: Outrage To the Nth Power

My comments on the latest here.

You'd Be Sad and Cross, Too

the honeybee is sad and cross
and wicked as a weasel
and when he perches on you boss
he leaves a little measle

--archy the cockroach, according to don marquis

Really they are:

In 24 states throughout the country, beekeepers have gone through similar shocks as their bees have been disappearing inexplicably at an alarming rate, threatening not only their livelihoods but also the production of numerous crops, including California almonds, one of the nation’s most profitable.

As with barnyard animals like pigs and chickens, agribusiness has led to the creation of factories with organic parts. The bees are trucked from coast to coast, put to work earlier and earlier in the season, and it's getting harder to find places where the bees on their days off are permitted to forage.

It's no mystery, although the details are unknown. It's classic monoculture. Rather than local varieties of bees that adapt to the ecosystem, we are dealing with masses of bees, presumably genetically alike, on an industrial scale, fed strange concoctions developed in laboratories, and subject to maximal exploitation. Cost-effective enough when it works to drive the small guys out of the business, and fantastically vulnerable.

Old MacDonald is b.k., ee-i-ee-i-o, his chickens live in giant avian concentration camps. If one sneezes, they slaughter them all. Might be bird flu.

No wonder the bees have flown the coop. Wouldn't you, if you could?

Throwing the Steering Wheel Out the Window

A classic game theory example is that of two juvenile delinquents of my era playing "chicken." This was a contest in which two cars are driven at top speed toward each other. The driver who veers off first loses. He's the "chicken."

How do you maximize your chances of winning? Throw the steering wheel out the window where your opponent can see you do it. If he's not suicidal, he'll assume that you are, and veer off. You win. He loses.

Unless, of course, neither of you turns off, because he's as crazy as you are. Then you both lose.

Israeli nuclear policy has resembled this game, according to a fascinating paper by Lt. Col. Warner D. Farr, a medical doctor and counterproliferation expert. There are additional complications, because Israel's policies and those of its Arab opponents, especially Egypt, in turn affected the calculations of Israel's backer, the U.S., and Egypt's, the Soviet Union. The brief discussion here assumes that Farr's analysis is generally accurate; it's certainly amply footnoted, sober, and well-reasoned.

HT: The Ape Man, the Chieftain of Seir.

Col. Farr's paper is worth reading. In essence, he argues that U.S. support of Israel with conventional weapons was partly motivated by the fact that Israel possessed, and on several occasions appeared ready to use, a substantial arsenal of nuclear weapons. In an era of "mutual assured destruction," the U.S. feared the consequences of an Israeli first use of such weapons, especially a possible Soviet reaction.

Israel in its infancy was armed by Soviet-influenced Czechoslovakia and by smuggling. Then, as France battled to keep its control over Algeria against Egyptian-supported rebels, France supplied arms and technology to Israel. It was after Israel obtained the bomb, and seriously threatened, as its leaders believed, went on nuclear alert, the U.S. twice (in 1967 and 1973) airlifted conventional weapons to avert an Israeli military defeat and the consequent first use of nukes.

It follows that the vaunted "Israeli lobby," influential though it may be, does not offer the principal explanation for U.S. military support of that country. It is the Israeli sense of danger, exacerbated by its geographical position and post-Hitler anxieties, that motivated its nuclear armament and has triggered its nuclear alerts.

What are a few tanks and aircraft, compared to the risk of nuclear war, especially when the military defeat of Soviet clients represented points for our side? If Israel has unscrewed the steering wheel and has only to snap its wrist to toss it out the window and into the Mediterranean, their U.S. backers were highly motivated to encourage them not to make the toss, and instead to veer at the last minute. Weapons, technology and money offered this encouragement.

The threat of an Iranian nuclear bomb changes the game. Touchy and anxious as the Israelis are, the Iranians manage to appear fanatically irrational. At least President Ahmadinejad does so. The Israelis have some Dolphin-class submarines, presumably nuclear missile capable, but it's a small country with concentrated population centers. When the Iranians first get nukes, if they do, they will have only a small number.

When and if Iran gets nukes will be the time of maximum danger. The aggressor in a nuclear exchange between the two would enjoy substantial advantages, the second-strike capacities of each being limited.

As I've said before, I don't particularly like the Israelis, but they've fought for and won their sovereignty, and the reciprocal expulsion of the Palestinian Arabs and the Jews of the Arab World is different from many such events in the age of nationalism only because the Arab lands have refused to receive and integrate the Palestinian refugees.

Although it might have been greater at one time, the prospect that a Palestinian state created today would control its population enough to ensure a tranquil border is dim. A pragmatic Palestinian dictatorship with efficient and probably brutal police that saw stability as in its interest would be required, and none is on offer.

I don't favor an American attack on Iran, for reasons I've stated before, and question whether on present evidence an Israeli attack on Iran (which will be seen to be U.S,.-sponsored, even if it isn't) is either desirable or possible.

Israel and Iran are in their cars. Gentlemen, start your engines.

We are cursed to live in interesting times.

UPDATE: I'm told the Farr link above is to something other than Farr's paper, which appears to be true, although it's a relevant link. Here's the link to Farr's paper.

Is That All You Blighters Can Do?

The family played a few hands of gin rummy last night. Nancy clobbered us as usual. Considering she's not an autistic savant, she's able to keep lots of numbers in her head.

In my quasi-ADD way, I was ruminating on vocabulary, coming up with groups of four similar-but-not-identical words. Example:

booth
kiosk
cubicle
niche

lair
hideout
cache
cave

weir
fence
membrane
sieve

Etc. etc. and so forth.

Do we really need all these words? I.A. Richards and C.K. Ogden made up something called "Basic English" that had 850 words. They claimed that for many purposes, 850 was enough. I used to write high school essays in it without disclosing the fact. I got A's (go figure). I can't resist wondering if Basic English is the opposite of Acidic English, which I like as well.

To be sure, some of the words were like "get," which has innumerable meanings (obtain, impregnate, become, understand -- just for starters).

I enjoy these word games, but I fear it's an affectation, like goosing statues. NB: I originally typed "goosing statutes." That's what I do for a living, not as recreation; I'm a lawyer. That, in turn, could be because I lack manual dexterity (skill, finesse, precision).

¡Pinche Vida! No Es Posible

Marc Cooper laments Cuba's expulsion of 3 foreign journalists who were too nosy or too critical. Marc is one of those leftists who favors both democracy and socialism. He perorates:

For the umpteenth time I will repeat that the most effective and constructive criticism of Cuba's authoritarianism and curtailment of freedom would be that which comes from the Left not the Right. Too bad there is virtually none. We'll see if anyone except CPJ [Committee to Protect Journalists] hiccups over these expulsions. I doubt it.

Cooper combox regular Bunkerbuster says "There may well be a tiny handful of fringe leftists who support the Castro regime, but no mainstream liberals do."

Immediately thereafter a (not THE) Walter Lippman rushes in to explain away Cuba's dictatorship:

Cuba is the only country on the planet where military base belonging to a hostile foreign power which is publicly committed to the overthrow of Cuba’s government and the social system which it represents continues to illegally occupy national soil. This leads Cuba to sometimes have what I like to call a paranoid political style. But it is completely understandable under the circumstances.

This rationale is familiar. The Bolshevik Revolution was met with Western intervention, and therefore millions had to die. It doesn't matter that the intervention was brief and ineffectual, and the West then saved millions of Russians from famine.

The reality is that socialism and democracy aren't compatible. In fact, there's an inverse proportion--the more socialism, the less democracy. Friedrich von Hayek will explain it all for you.

Moreover, socialists (and liberals, who in their modern incarnation are socialists lite) think they are morally superior to and smarter than other people. Obviously they are entitled to deal harshly with their benighted inferiors.

So they do, while the Marc Coopers lament their cruelty and hope that the next socialist régime will be different. Combining democracy and socialism is to create a catdog or a pushmi-pullyu.

UPDATE: If you visit Walter Lippman's website you'll see the work of a classic Western apologist for socialist dictatorship. I don't think he'd deny that. See the happy faces of the children mir-and-druzhba-ing.

La Nostalgie de la Cigare

She [Hillary] is overproduced and overscripted. "It's not a very big thing to say, 'I made a mistake' on the war, and typical of Hillary Clinton that she can't," Geffen says. "She's so advised by so many smart advisers who are covering every base. I think that America was better served when the candidates were chosen in smoke-filled rooms."

--MoDo

HT: Mickey Kaus. Sometimes, it seems, a cigar is a pillar of the Republic.

The picture is of Congress big Joe Cannon.

Making the World Safe For Dem . . .er, Jihad

The Gallup poll (which surveyed 10,000 Muslims in 10 different countries) also revealed that the wealthier and better-educated Muslims are, the more likely they are to be politically radical. So if you ever believed that anti-Western sentiment was an expression of poverty and deprivation, think again. Even more perplexingly, Islamists are more supportive of democracy than Muslim moderates. Those who imagined that the Middle East could be stabilised with a mixture of economic and political reform could not have been more wrong. The richer these people get, the more they favour radical Islamism. And they see democracy as a way of putting the radicals into power.

--Niall Ferguson

Back to the drawing board, Sharansky. That's my purple middle finger, kaffir!

Who Is The Real Mitt Romney?

Larison has been gnawing on Romney like a bulldog on a letter carrier. So I suggested this poll:

Was Mitt Romney
	A fake moderate in Mass. and a real conservative now
	A real moderate in Mass. and a fake conservative now
	Converted to social conservatism by studying stem sell research
	Never had any convictions on social issues
pollcode.com free polls

College Merchandising

My 10th grader took the PSAT, the practice college entrance exam, aced the English and did well on the math. She hasn't thought much about colleges, and up to now hasn't wanted to do so, or even to visit campuses we come across in our travels.

Since the scores came out, it's like Christmas in our mailbox, except the mail's not from Land's End or L.L.Bean. Colleges great and small, ones I've heard of and ones I haven't, are deluging her with mail.

All this effort can't be cheap. Many of these outfits are located far from us, and they must send out hundreds of packages for each response. Some are sending emails instead, which is probably wise in our computer-obsessed age.

Many parents in our BoBo town obsess on the college entrance process, as if little Ashley and Todd will repine in ignorance and poverty if they don't get into the University of Wherever. It seems that in reality the colleges are afraid they'll die on the vine, or at least drop in the U.S. News ratings if they don't recruit students with high scores. We need to sharpen our bargaining skills and get them to offer major discounts (called scholarships) from their list prices (pretty much like those for appliances). We also need to turn on our beyessometers (just made that up) to cut through the pretty pictures and platitudes on the promotional literature.

Resort ads always show smiling people waving from golf courses or beaches. Sometimes the toilets are backed up, the food makes you sick, your room is next to an elevator, and the mosquitoes eat you alive. At some colleges, no doubt, the dorms are ratty, half the students are on suicide watch and the other half perpetually drunk, the professors are horny communist drug addicts, the classes in the semiotics of punk rock are taught by shy Chinese graduate students who speak no English, or all of the above. The problem is to figure out which ones.

I wonder if there's college equivalent of Priceline where you can make a last-minute deal, say in August just before freshman classes start, for four years all expenses paid, breakfast and greens fees included, plus use of a late-model car.

Probably.

Ignorant Sluts, But Thin?

DePauw University is located in rural Indiana and is one of those colleges where fraternities and sororities still reign supreme. The Delta Zeta sorority wasn't big enough to suit the national organization, which sent representatives of whatever the Politburo of a sorority might be.

The New York Times reports that they interviewed all the girls, and evicted all but twelve, apparently the skinniest and most conventionally attractive of the bunch. Six of the twelve quit in disgust. This part of the story is particularly funny-macabre:

A few days after the interviews, national representatives took over the house to hold a recruiting event. They asked most members to stay upstairs in their rooms. To welcome freshmen downstairs, they assembled a meet-and-greet team that included several of the women eventually asked to stay in the sorority, along with some slender women invited from the sorority’s chapter at Indiana University, Ms. Holloway said.

“They had these unassuming freshman girls downstairs with these plastic women from Indiana University, and 25 of my sisters hiding upstairs,” she said. “It was so fake, so completely dehumanized. I said, ‘This calls for a little joke.’ ”

Ms. Holloway put on a wig and some John Lennon rose-colored glasses, burst through the front door during the recruitment event, and skipped around singing “Ooooh! Delta Zeta!” and other chants.

The face of one of the national representatives, she recalled, “was like I’d run over her puppy with my car.”

I haven't posted this to debate the merits of the Greek system.

What I find disturbing is the emphasis on being skinny: ("The 23 members [evicted] included every woman who was overweight. They also included the only black, Korean and Vietnamese members. The dozen students allowed to stay were slender and popular with fraternity men — conventionally pretty women the sorority hoped could attract new recruits.") This is a ridiculous obsession fed both by the media and the medical profession. I've known plenty of women whose fathers rejected them saying they were too fat. Aside from the fact that some of these women weren't fat at all, this kind of behavior to a girl seems incredibly cruel.

Yes, obesity can be a problem. Lack of fitness is much worse, although I doubt the sorority enforcers cared about that. Be skinny, dress fashionably, attract the right boys. Forget about kindness, honor, brains, understanding, talent.

Erin Swisshelm, who quit, has an idea of what's important in young women:

“I had a sister I could go to a bar with if I had boy problems,” said Erin Swisshelm, a junior biochemistry major who withdrew from the sorority in October. “I had a sister I could talk about religion with. I had a sister I could be nerdy about science with. That’s why I liked Delta Zeta, because I had all these amazing women around me.”

I'm not at all a fan of feminism as it is expressed on most campuses or by its national figures, but as a father of girls I find this sequence of events sickening and outrageous.

The President of the University, Robert Bottoms, has expressed concern, according to the Times, in the predictable vague, cautious presidential manner. If my code is right, you can click on his name to email him. His email address is: bbottoms@depauw.edu. Be polite, or don't write.

Babel Resurgent

The big new thing in up-and-coming Asian economies is building absurdly tall office towers.

I don't get it. Are the economics there?

You Don't Have To Be a Catholic Priest . . .

to sexually abuse your parishoners, as this horrid story from Bible Girl shows. And here's an Orthodox Christian one.

You don't even have to be Christian.

HT: Rod Dreher.