The last time I saw anything about purely hydrogen-driven cars, it required a flame-retardent vest when filling the tank. They say in this article that the problem of explosion has been dealt with, though they don’t address the “filling the tank” issue specifically. The guy quoted below seems awfully optimistic, but they do have a fully-functioning prototype, though it sounds like it would cost $1 million or more if you wanted one now:

GM, which has been slow to roll out hybrid products, is using the Sequel to try to win some of the attention for hydrogen, Brooke said."We're reaching out to show that this is truly doable," GM technology chief Lawrence D. Burns said. "We're talking about a real car. It's not affordable yet, but I can assure you it's doable."

In 2002, GM showed a fuel-cell concept car called the Hy-Wire that consisted of an 11-inch thick “skateboard” chassis that contained all the working parts—one-tenth as many as in a conventional car—with a body simply bolted on top. But the Hy-Wire was rickety to drive and could never have met federal highway standards, let alone satisfied demanding buyers.

The Sequel's biggest single advance, Burns said, is a compressed-hydrogen storage tank that can hold enough fuel to give the car a range of 300 miles. That is twice as far as the range of older versions of fuel-cell cars, and is considered the threshold distance to be marketable. With liquid hydrogen, the range could extend to 450 miles, Burns said. The Sequel also has a more powerful stack of fuel cells than previously possible, cutting 0-to-60 mph acceleration time to fewer than 10 seconds, comparable to most conventional cars.

GM is also working on the technology to produce and assemble the Sequel, hoping to be able to build 1 million a year by 2010, Burns said.

I generally don’t agree with The Guardian, but this piece (rather long) on the war on drugs seems about right:

Let’s be honest. People try drugs, whether in the form of alcohol or pills, because they are fun. Tens of thousands of UK citizens regularly consume cocaine; hundreds of thousands more use other illegal drugs, completely discrediting the law. In his book Cocaine, Dominic Streatfield quotes the monetarist Milton Friedman: ‘I do not think you can eradicate demand. The lesson we have failed to learn is that prohibition never works. It makes things worse not better.’

Streatfield quotes the extraordinary statistics involved in fighting cocaine and drugs. Here are a couple: over the past 15 years, the US has spent £150 billion trying to stop its people getting hold of drugs. In Britain and the US almost 20 per cent of the prison population is inside for drugs offences. So what is left? We can muddle on or we can legalise cocaine – and indeed all drugs.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not unsympathetic to the problems of addiction because I’ve experienced them first-hand. My ninth “AA birthday” is at the end of the month (I quit drinking at the tender age of 27) and I know how hard it is. I simply don’t think we are approaching the problem correctly and are creating more ancillary problems than we are solving.

Our effort would be better spent on legalizing drugs, taxing them, and focusing our effort on treatment.

Update: A reader -- also a recovering alcoholic -- emailed to agree with my position on the current war on drugs. My edited response is below:

Thanks for the comments as well.  I expect I will do a birthday post on the 27th when I hit the 9-year mark as well.  Getting dry was no small thing for me -- it involved staying in the hospital for a week with IVs attached to me, though no straps were involved -- but I came out of it a better person.

It’s nice to know that not all people who have addiction problems immediately react with horror at the notion of legalization.  The current prohibition of drugs is causing all of the problems of the original prohibition of alcohol and worse, but the violence is largely confined to inner cities and doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

Another update: Jeralyn has some remarks on the same article. We rarely agree, so it's worth pointing it out when we do.

SIR – According to critical theory, The Economist engages in a narrative designed to persuade its audience of the virtues of capitalism (“Capitalist, sexist pigs” December 18th). A consistent finding of social-psychological research is that people tend to read, watch and listen to things that reinforce their political predispositions. The Economist does just that for its affluent readers as they head out to work, confirming that free markets are more efficient, and, as an added bonus, telling them their profession helps the plight of the world's poor. That way, they believe their profession not only makes themselves better off but is saving the world's downtrodden from famine, disease and even war. That's a feel-good publication.

Dave Townsend
Washington, DC

I’m a little amused that Mr. Townsend thinks that people that work for a living aren’t improving the world. I would argue that they are; they’re improving their own little part of it and, in doing so, are adding to the well being of the world.

The article that the letter is about is here, and an excerpt follows:

In a newly fashionable effort to quantify claims about how power is transmitted through words and images, Yana van der Meulen Rodgers and JingYing Zhang, of the College of William & Mary in Virginia, have analysed The Economist’s photographs. Their paper, “A Content Analysis of Sex Bias in International News Magazines”, asks, first, how often are women portrayed compared with men? Second, how often are men and women depicted in a sexual way? For answers, they looked at all the issues of five news magazines, including The Economist, in 2000, and the photographs in The Economist in even-numbered years from 1982 to 2000.

All the magazines studied contained an over-representation of women depicted in sexual ways. But The Economist, apparently, had more frontal nudity in its photographs than all the other magazines combined. When it came to “partial breast exposure”, it was at the top of the league. Particularly curious to the authors was our use of sexual content to illustrate stories on topics such as finance and technology. A photograph of three bikini-clad beauty contestants, used to illustrate a story on financial regulation, with the caption “Pick your regulator”, was both emblematic and problematic.

Update: For a different view of The Economist, look here. I generally agree with Cass, but not this time. The Economist is a British magazine and they can toot their own horn a bit if they want. We do the same. They can similarly be critical of America and I won't be bothered by it up to a point. It's worth noting, on the article she quotes, that they have said many favorable things about the U.S. higher education system in the past and have used it to criticize the British system for relying on too much government funding.

George Will has a good column on the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s publication of his articles that changed physics (and the world):

Einstein’s theism, such as it was, was his faith that God does not play dice with the universe—that there are elegant, eventually discoverable laws, not randomness, at work. Saying “I’m not an atheist,” he explained:

“We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is.”

For this reason, physicists postulated the existence of the aether—a substance, otherwise undetectable, through which light travelled. But if the Earth was orbiting the sun, and so moving through space, it must be moving through the aether, too. Measure the speed of light in the direction of the Earth's motion, and perpendicular to it, and you would get different answers, the line of reasoning went. This is what Michelson and Morley did. But they found that the two speeds were, in fact, precisely the same.

The experiment was explained by Henrich Lorentz, a Dutch physicist, who came up with the mathematics required for the answer—that there was a contraction in the direction of the Earth’s movement, just enough to make the two speeds seem the same. Lorentz could not explain how this contraction occurred, though. He speculated that perhaps forces were at work inside molecules, which were, at the time, still hypothetical entities.

What Einstein realised, without adding any new mathematics, but in a profoundly new way nonetheless, was that there was no seem about it. Space really was contracting, and time was slowing down. It is just this that Pais was referring to when he said that Einstein was good at picking invariance principles. Everyone had thought that time was invariant. It is not. No one thought the speed of light was. It is.

Check here for recent FireFox extensions. Tested the Gmail extension and it works fine on a Mac.

We’re in a bit of a box with the Gitmo detainees. [Their ambiguous status is] [n]ot of our own making, to be sure, but we are left to deal with it. Jeralyn wants to see all of them released, though given the recidivism rates of the others that have been released, it seems like a bad idea. We release these guys, they perpetrate acts of terror and we send the military after them. These guys are a bunch of fucking skulkers to begin with—they don’t wear unforms and hide among civilians—which will result in further civilian deaths either from their acts or our response to their acts. Probably both. I doubt this is what Jeralyn really wants. And no, sitting back and taking it, or making excuses for future acts of violence, is not an option.

There could be a middle ground. We could simply concede that they are POWs—even though they are in violation of the Geneva Conventions—and tell them that they will be released when hostilities have ceased in Afghanistan. That alone will take a decade or more and, once the entire country has been secured, we can turn them over to the government of Afghanistan. Fewer civilians will die—ours and theirs—and we’ve stuck to the letter of the conventions, even if it ambiguous.

Apparently, the reason global warming has been all over the news is that Tony Blair will be heading the G8 for 2005, and he’s decided to make it an issue. The Financial Times has a pretty balanced write-up on the issue:

Polar bears could be extinct by the end of this century, scientists predict, if nothing is done to halt global climate change. Already, the Arctic ice sheet is half the thickness of 30 years ago and 10 per cent less extensive, according to the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, the work of more than 250 scientists over four years. They blame global warming, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, and warn of consequences all over the world if ice covering solid ground melts and sea levels rise.

Warnings such as these and fears that the heat waves, floods and hurricanes of last year could have been early consequences of global warming have prompted Tony Blair, the British prime minister, to make tackling climate change a priority for world leaders in the coming year.

“Our effect on the environment, and in particular on climate change, is large and growing . . . We cannot afford to ignore the warnings,” Mr Blair told business leaders in September when he announced plans to put climate change high on the agenda during Britain’s tenure as chair of the Group of Eight leading industrial nations from January. Mr Blair will also make the issue one of the main themes of the UK’s six-month presidency of the European Union from July 2005.

[....]

But the science behind predictions of global warming has come under fierce attack. Sceptical scientists have brought out their own reports to show that though some regions are warming, others appear to be cooling. They also argue that the world experienced many periods of warming in the past much greater than those we are witnessing today. Such warming allowed vineyards to flourish in England in the Middle Ages. Malaria affected northern Europe and cattle grazed in Viking settlements in Greenland that were subsequently abandoned as the “little ice age” took effect in the 14th century, lasting until the 19th. Any increase in global temperatures could therefore be the result of a natural variation in the earth’s climate, rather than the effect of any human activity. Sceptics also attack the scientists whose computer models predict dangerous levels of global warming. Others contend that although global warming is happening, and will be costly, there is little we can do about it and therefore we should concentrate our efforts instead on more pressing issues, such as the HIV epidemic and poverty. The champions of this view are the Copenhagen Consensus, a group of economists led by Bjorn Lomborg, professor of political science at Aarhus University in Denmark. He says: “We can only do very little about global warming, very far out into the future, and at a very high cost. If we spend a large amount of money on global warming, we are taking away money that could be spent elsewhere to do much more good.”

Methane isn’t the only substance to which global-warming policymakers should pay more attention. Hansen’s work suggests that strict regulation of a few rare industrial gases, whose emissions have no economic utility, would also be more cost-effective than carbon dioxide rules. Short-term reform, he also suggests, should focus on heat-absorbing industrial particulates, or “black soot,” which has been nearly eliminated in the West (which boomed during the elimination, evidence that economic growth and soot regulation are fully compatible), but which spews from the factories and power plants of developing nations by the millions of tons. The resulting pollution-caused diseases annually kill more children under age five in the developing world than all deaths from all causes at all ages in the United States and the European Union combined. Any money the West spends on global warming would be far better invested in reducing industrial soot in the developing world than in the carbon crash programs environmental orthodoxy demands.

I suspect that’s about the most Mr. Blair can hope for in the coming year. Joe Gandelman has more.

I’ve raised the issue of the power of treaties in the past, and it appears that at least one of our founders thought they were bound by the Constitution:

“I say… to the opinion of those who consider the grant of the treaty-making power as boundless: If it is, then we have no Constitution. If it has bounds, they can be no others than the definitions of the powers which that instrument gives.”—Thomas Jefferson to Wilson Nicholas, 1803. ME 10:419

I like the New Year’s resolutions for others over at IMAO, but I liked it even better when Spoons did it two years ago. For one thing, Spoons knows that bloggers are a self-regarding bunch (he included me, right?) and used it to great effect. After all, it’s two years later and I’m still talking about it. His entry this year is here.

And this is different than The Day After Tomorrow in what way?:

Killer hurricanes, towering tidal waves and destructive lightning storms are all meant to prove the scientists’ point about the deadly effects of global warming. The environmentalists are the villains. The corporate shills who have been paid big bucks to debunk the global warming community are the good guys. According to Crichton, global warming is a myth.

In today’s world of increasing corporate control of almost every facet of our public and private lives, Crichton’s screed against the environmental movement should come as no great surprise.

After all, the publisher of “State of Fear” is Harper Collins, a wholly owned subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., the same people who feed Americans and people around the world a daily dosage of right-wing propaganda billed as 24-hour news.

Murdoch can wave his big money around and always expect to find some novelist; screenwriter; movie director; journalist; left, center, or right-wing magazine editor; cartoonist; or research institute fellow to allow himself or herself to become human versions of coin-operated nickelodeons or Laundromats.

Crichton made a speech last year that addressed many of my concerns on politicizing science. The speech is referenced here, and here’s an excerpt from another column:

“Several thousand of the earth’s scientists,” it says at one point, “agree that global warming caused by greenhouse gas pollution from human activities represents a profoundly serious threat to human civilization and to even the most robust and insulated natural ecosystems. Their comments are echoed in the Draft Scientific Consensus Statement on the Likely Impact of Climate Change on the Pacific Northwest prepared by scientists at Oregon and Washington universities in the fall of 2004.”

The red flag is the reference to thousands of scientists and “consensus.”

The factual truth of anything never depends on how many people agree with it.

Michael Crichton, the author, made that point in a lecture last year.

“I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks,” he wrote. “Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.”

I’ve been pretty busy lately and haven’t had time to post much. If you’re looking for something to read, take a look at Vox Baby for discussion on Social Security and other economic matters. Also, you might be interested in reading Econ Journal Watch, which should be available off college campuses. Quite interesting.

In addition, you might want to take a look at this post by Kate at OTB. Oddly, I haven't been able to get her to add SN to her blogroll under "Blogs I Read Naked While Eating Cherry Ice Cream" over at Small Dead Animals. Apparently that spot is reserved for Jeff.

The Powerline guys are addressing the recent EU ascendancy meme; it’s still not persuasive. Europe is in decline, despite their posturing in recent years. I’ve discussed it elsewhere (here and here).

This post is a test.

I’ve been seeing Michael Scheuer, or Anonymous, author of Imperial Hubris, all over the place recently—apparently his resignation from the CIA has released the muzzle somewhat—and I don’t quite know what to make of him. I would venture to say that he’s one of the more inscrutable people in the news these days, with Kerry being in retirement and all.

Depending on who is quoting him—or if he’s doing the writing—he is either opposed to President Bush’s policy in the Middle East or thinks it needs to be ratcheted up; thinks we are losing our soft power or will have to resolve to do more of the dirty work ourselves. He’s referenced in the former capacity in an FT article that could have been written by Brad DeLong:

The self-serving fallacies of the they-hate-us-for-our-freedoms industry have been criticised in recent books from, for example, the former CIA official in charge of pursuing Osama bin Laden, Michael Scheuer (Imperial Hubris), and the Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi (Resurrecting Empire). Both argue it is the policies of the US and its allies that have ignited such rage in the Arab and Muslim world.

Simply put, the thinking that expects others to do our dirty — and very bloody — work should have died with the fall of the Berlin Wall. If America is to win its worldwide battle with Islamist insurgents and terrorists, it will have to do its own dirty work whenever it has a chance to do so, even at the cost of heavier human casualties than we have suffered to date. This is not to say we do not need allies, for we surely do. What we need, however, is a consistently commonsense perspective that sees that no two nations have identical national interests; that no country will ever do all we want; and that to survive we must act with U.S. military and CIA assets whenever a chance arises, even if supporting intelligence is not perfect. This modus operandi will take a steady application of moral courage at a level unseen in Washington for 15 years.

In weighing the foregoing, readers might ask themselves two questions: 1) How can it be that Pakistan’s military has suffered far more casualties than U.S. forces in the war on bin Laden?; and 2) Whatever happened to the “Major 2004 Afghan Spring Offensive” that the Pentagon’s multi-starred general-bureaucrats leaked news of to the media back in January 2004? At least one answer to each question is that our governing elites are still desperate to find others to do our dirty work.

Good article from the WaPo on the threat of nuclear terror. The first two paragraphs alone are infuriating:

Of all the clues that Osama bin Laden is after a nuclear weapon, perhaps the most significant came in intelligence reports indicating that he received fresh approval last year from a Saudi cleric for the use of a doomsday bomb against the United States.

For bin Laden, the religious ruling was a milestone in a long quest for an atomic weapon. For U.S. officials and others, it was a frightening reminder of what many consider the ultimate mass-casualty threat posed by modern terrorists. Even a small nuclear weapon detonated in a major American population center would be among history’s most lethal acts of war, potentially rivaling the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The closing paragraphs provide a good case for regime change in Saudi Arabia:

Al Qaeda has been on the run since the United States deprived it of a haven in Afghanistan, making it more difficult for the group to operate on such an ambitious scale.

“At this moment, they are less capable of carrying out an operation like this because it would require so many different experts and operatives,” Benjamin said. “But even a depleted group could do it if they got the right breaks.”

(þ: Winds of Change)

Another sentiment borrowed from Spoons, though he said it in relation to Muslim countries. I would say it applies to theocrats and other tyrants equally well, including Stalinists:

North Korea on Friday threatened to cut off diplomatic contact with Japan amid a controversy over the communist state’s abduction of Japanese citizens.

Tension between the two countries has increased since Japanese officials alleged that purported human remains of two kidnapping victims recently returned by the North were proven by DNA tests to belong to other people. Some Japanese politicians have called for sanctions against Pyongyang, a move that North Korea has warned would be tantamount to a declaration of war.

North Korea has insisted the remains are authentic and repeated its call Friday for their return, and has alleged the controversy was manufactured by right-wing Japanese politicians.

“Now that it has become clear that the Japanese government has openly joined the ultra-right forces in their moves against the DPRK it no longer feels that any DPRK-Japan inter-governmental contact is meaningful,” an unnamed spokesman from North Korea’s Foreign Ministry said, referring to the country by the abbreviation for its official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Title stolen shamelessly from Spoons. He objects to reserving positions for Sunnis, as does Kris. I’m not as concerned with it at the moment because it is just another interim government which will draft a permanent constitution.

Over the longer run, they have a point, though I suspect Kris would disagree with me; maybe Spoons too. Iraq seems like a country that screams out for federalism. In their case, establishing states (or provinces) to act as a counterbalance to the central government. If they created a Senate that represented these provinces it would insure de facto representation for the Shias, Sunnis and Kurds at the federal level.

As for permanently setting aside “Sunni” positions in the executive? Seems like a bad idea, though giving them equal representation in the Senate is a good idea—after they’ve ceased the violence and allowed elections to proceed in their area.

I’ve never understood the fascination with electing judges. I’m a political junkie and I usually leave the ballot space for judges blank simply because I don’t know enough about them to make an informed decision. More reason to have governors appoint judges ($):

Nine out of ten American judges stand for election. The theory is admirably democratic: if the people who make laws are elected, why shouldn’t those who interpret them be too? But that theory is increasingly coming into conflict with the idea that judges should be impartial.

Until recently, judicial candidates were usually prevented from saying much, on the basis that it could later raise questions about the courts’ independence. Conservatives have long fumed that such curbs have let “activist judges” hide their views on subjects such as abortion; the restrictions, they add, infringe free speech. In 2002 the Supreme Court agreed: in Republican Party of Minnesota v White, it struck down Minnesota’s “announce clause” prohibiting judicial candidates from airing their views on disputed issues.

We finally have a new title for the war on terror: The Long War. The term comes from General John Abizaid and is passed along via David Ignatius. Here’s a clip of Ignatius’s column:

Gen. John Abizaid probably commands the most potent military force in history. The troops of his Central Command are arrayed across the jagged crescent of the Middle East, from Egypt to Pakistan, in an overwhelming projection of U.S. power. He travels with his own mini-government: a top State Department officer to manage diplomacy; a senior CIA officer to oversee intelligence; a retinue of generals and admirals to supervise operations and logistics. If there is a modern Imperium Americanum, Abizaid is its field general.

I traveled this month with Abizaid as he visited Iraq and other areas of his command. Over several days, I heard him discuss his strategy for what he calls the “Long War” to contain Islamic extremism in Centcom’s turbulent theater of operations. We talked about the current front in Iraq, and the longer-term process of change in the Middle East, which Abizaid views as the ultimate strategic challenge.

“We control the air, the sea and the ground militarily,” Abizaid told one audience, and in conventional terms, he’s unquestionably right. From its headquarters near the huge new U.S. airbase in Qatar, Centcom’s military reach stretches in every direction: To the west, the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet has its base in Bahrain; to the north, the aircraft carrier USS Harry Truman and its task force are steaming on patrol in the Persian Gulf; to the east, more than 17,000 troops are working to stabilize postwar Afghanistan; to the south, about 1,000 troops are keeping a lid on the Horn of Africa. And to the northwest lies the bloody battlefield of Iraq, where nearly 150,000 of Abizaid’s soldiers are fighting a determined insurgency.

For all of America’s military might, the Long War that has begun in the Middle East poses some tough strategic questions. What is the nature of the enemy? If the United States is so powerful, why is it having such difficulty in Iraq? What will victory look like, in Iraq and elsewhere in the Islamic world? And how long will the conflict take?

Over the long term, what we are trying to do is alter a culture. To marginalize the radical Islamists, in the same way that Nazis have been marginalized, and show the moderate Muslims of the Middle East that they can practice their religion peacefully and that modernity isn’t something to be afraid of. As the earlier link explains, it won’t be easy. The Muslim culture in the Middle East doesn’t recognize the seperation of church and state and the only way the leaders in the Middle East have succeeded in the past is through despotism. Of course, this served their own ends as well, so I’m not convinced that despotism is the only way to govern in the ME.

A couple of years ago an economist, Alan Krueger of Princeton, ran a test to see if terrorism is tied to poverty, which is a fairly common claim. The answer he got was no. Instead, he found that it’s tied to political repression. Winning The Long War will require undoing the repression of the Middle East and convincing the people that they can live in an open society.

Not a small task, not one that will be won through the military alone and not one that will end any time soon.

I’ve mentioned this before, and I favor evolution over ID, but I thought I would address one of The Evangelical Outpost’s commenters, Mr. Ed:

Why is it that simple? It seems you are making ‘science’ an arbitrary label. What is it that makes ID antithetical to science. And what is so different about the set of deductions that leads to a theory of evolutions and the set of deductions that leads to a theory of ID?

You know, it occurs to me that there is a solution to the teaching of ID in schools: have school vouchers.

In spite of a good deal of trivial knowledge on other subjects, I went into The Aviator knowing almost nothing about Howard Hughes other than he was involved in both movies and airplanes, and little more. Knowing a good deal more now, having seen the movie and read a bit on him, he seems like a fascinating figure with most of the qualities one expects from someone that accomplished so much.

He was eccentric, to put it mildly. He had an apparent mental disorder and he’s remarkably like the typical Scorsese protagonist. He’s tormented, he treats women like objects—though he needs them horribly to stay balanced, and his life becomes increasingly unbearable as he distances himself from them—but he doesn’t descend into violence (at least in the movie), unlike Travis Bickle or Jake LaMotta.

I’m surprised to say that this movie is better than Gangs of New York, but not by much. It took me a while to forget that Leonardo DiCaprio was playing Hughes, but after thirty minutes or so I had accepted it. DiCaprio did a really good job, but it’s hard for him to age as a character. He still has a boyish quality. Oddly, though, in spite of this, he got better as the movie progressed because the movie works well. In spite of its length (almost three hours), I never looked at my watch, which I did about twenty minutes into Ocean’s Twelve.

It’s a fascinating movie and, if you like Scorsese movies, you will love this one. Surprisingly little violence, almost no nudity (typical) but some bizarre dementia, like obsessively peeing in bottles and becoming reclusive.

[I said I would see it a couple of weeks ago, but obviously didn't since it only went into wide release yesterday.]

What follows is a rather long excerpt and it is excellent, but the entire essay is worth a thorough read. David Brooks has done well on his first set of Hookies (to clarify, the column is linked to by Mr. Brooks and is written by Mr. Dalrymple of City Journal):

Anyone who lives in a city like mine and interests himself in the fate of the world cannot help wondering whether, deeper than this immediate cultural desperation, there is anything intrinsic to Islam—beyond the devout Muslim’s instinctive understanding that secularization, once it starts, is like an unstoppable chain reaction—that renders it unable to adapt itself comfortably to the modern world. Is there an essential element that condemns the Dar al-Islam to permanent backwardness with regard to the Dar al-Harb, a backwardness that is felt as a deep humiliation, and is exemplified, though not proved, by the fact that the whole of the Arab world, minus its oil, matters less to the rest of the world economically than the Nokia telephone company of Finland?

I think the answer is yes, and that the problem begins with Islam’s failure to make a distinction between church and state. Unlike Christianity, which had to spend its first centuries developing institutions clandestinely and so from the outset clearly had to separate church from state, Islam was from its inception both church and state, one and indivisible, with no possible distinction between temporal and religious authority. Muhammad’s power was seamlessly spiritual and secular (although the latter grew ultimately out of the former), and he bequeathed this model to his followers. Since he was, by Islamic definition, the last prophet of God upon earth, his was a political model whose perfection could not be challenged or questioned without the total abandonment of the pretensions of the entire religion.

But his model left Islam with two intractable problems. One was political. Muhammad unfortunately bequeathed no institutional arrangements by which his successors in the role of omnicompetent ruler could be chosen (and, of course, a schism occurred immediately after the Prophet’s death, with some—today’s Sunnites—following his father-in-law, and some—today’s Shi’ites—his son-in-law). Compounding this difficulty, the legitimacy of temporal power could always be challenged by those who, citing Muhammad’s spiritual role, claimed greater religious purity or authority; the fanatic in Islam is always at a moral advantage vis-à-vis the moderate. Moreover, Islam—in which the mosque is a meetinghouse, not an institutional church—has no established, anointed ecclesiastical hierarchy to decide such claims authoritatively. With political power constantly liable to challenge from the pious, or the allegedly pious, tyranny becomes the only guarantor of stability, and assassination the only means of reform. Hence the Saudi time bomb: sooner or later, religious revolt will depose a dynasty founded upon its supposed piety but long since corrupted by the ways of the world.

The second problem is intellectual. In the West, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, acting upon the space that had always existed, at least potentially, in Christianity between church and state, liberated individual men to think for themselves, and thus set in motion an unprecedented and still unstoppable material advancement. Islam, with no separate, secular sphere where inquiry could flourish free from the claims of religion, if only for technical purposes, was hopelessly left behind: as, several centuries later, it still is.

The indivisibility of any aspect of life from any other in Islam is a source of strength, but also of fragility and weakness, for individuals as well as for polities. Where all conduct, all custom, has a religious sanction and justification, any change is a threat to the whole system of belief. Certainty that their way of life is the right one thus coexists with fear that the whole edifice—intellectual and political—will come tumbling down if it is tampered with in any way. Intransigence is a defense against doubt and makes living on terms of true equality with others who do not share the creed impossible.

In my experience, devout Muslims expect and demand a freedom to criticize, often with perspicacity, the doctrines and customs of others, while demanding an exaggerated degree of respect and freedom from criticism for their own doctrines and customs.

Mr. Dalrymple has written an excellent essay. He points out, correctly in my estimation, that over the long run the radical Islamists will lose and modernity will win. Eventually they will have created so much misery, and will have fallen so far behind the rest of the world, that “winning” will be impossible. In the mean time, the people that are trapped by the radicals will live in misery and others will live less secure lives than they otherwise might.

At a time when multiculturalism is being touted as a virtue in and of itself, without regard to the nature of other cultures, I am thankful that we are not paralyzed to inaction. My hope is that our current actions in Iraq will make the long run much shorter.

Update: Brock makes a good point in the comments: Mr. Dalrymple is focusing on the broader Muslim culture and I'm conflating the broader culture with the radicals. See the comments for more discussion.

Tim Blair is doing the heavy lifting on Christmas and has compiled a number of quotes, broken down by month, from the past year. One of his commenters did a spin on the “I Have A Scream” speech by Howard Dean, which is hilarious:

And you know something? You know something? Not only are we going to Space Mountain, we’re going to the tea cups and Mr. Toads Wild Ride and the Pirates of the Carribbean and the Jungle Adventure and the Matterhorn! We’re going to the Haunted Mansion and Main Street and It’s a Small World! And we’re going to the Tiki Room and the Coutry Bear Jamboree and the Luau and a character breakfast! And then we’re going to the Electric Light Parade. To take back Cinderella’s Castle! YEEEAAARGH!!

If you begin your discourse with the notion that your political opponents are sociopaths, you’re not off to a good start. Apparently Barbara O’Brien does precisely that. Steven Taylor provides a good response to her claim that people on the right are “sociopaths” (I followed the link from Chris’s post that wonders whether we here at Signifying Nothing are indeed “right wing”).

Since Steven has already addressed her in some detail, I want to address a more narrow topic: her forgiveness of Lew Rockwell and his fetishists simply because they oppose the Iraqi war. This I find simply amazing. My disdain for Rockwell is known (look here) and I should add that I have a similar disdain for his contemporaries, Paul Craig Roberts and Jude Wanniski. They all fit under the labels “paleo-con” or “paleo-libertarian” and I find them all equally reprehensible. Each time one of them publishes, the sum of human knowledge is diminished.

I’ve gone into my own views with regard to natural liberty just recently and I don’t want to rehash it again. I do want to mention that, at a quick glance, my views might seem similar to those of Rockwell, et. al. They’re not.

The Rockwell fetishists are using their opposition to the Iraqi war as a means of giving greater exposure to some views—such as homophobia and xenophobia—that I find intolerable. They’ve been apologists for Jim Crow as well, which you won’t find me doing.

Why, when they throw the far left a bone, such as opposition to the Iraqi war, do purportedly rational and “reality-based” leftists overlook numerous flaws? Is it because they find America and its supposed “world hegemony” more appalling than the very real views of these idiots? I don’t know why, but it’s there for everyone to see:

Now, a rightie reading this might be saying, you are stereotyping righties. Well, no, I don’t think so. There are conservatives who write with reason and factual support, but they don’t tend to be part of the rightie pack. A good example is the libertarian Lew Rockwell site, which features a lot of articles with which I do not necessarily agree, but to which the authors have applied some independent reasoning and factual support.

But then, as Mr. Rockwell does think for himself and considers facts, he is not a big George Bush supporter.

The bald truth is that to be a Bush supporter means that you are (a) ignorant of what’s going on; (b) suffering massive cognitive dissonance; or© are a soulless sociopathic bastard.