Take the Kossies Out to the Woodshed

Look, I don’t have a dog in this fight, but what exactly was the point of the bad-tempered Democratic filibuster over the Alito nomination?

Surely it wasn’t just so that Senator Kerry could remind us that he was very importantly attending a very important World Economic Forum in Davos? Surely it wasn’t just so that Senator Kennedy could make another stemwinder on the floor of the United States Senate so that he could remind us that he is not exactly the liberal lion of his prime?

Presumably the idea was to throw a bone to the Kossites of the Angry Left, to put on a show for them, to assuage their disappointment. So Senator Kennedy hauled out the old themes, as reported by Josh Gerstein.

"The one organization - the one institution that protects us is the Supreme Court of the United States," Mr. Kennedy said. "Too much blood has been shed in those battles, too much sweat, too many tears to put at risk that march towards progress and that is what we are doing with this nominee."

Well yes. That puts it rather well, Senator. It’s true that the Supreme Court has sat there like a progressive watchdog for the last generation doing the will of the progressive elite. And there is no doubt that with all these nominees from the Federalist Society, that situation is going to change—if not this year, then next year.

Of course, there are those of us that believe that the “march toward progress” has been, in many ways, a miserable retreat. It has taken many of a once proud self-governing people and made them into a fractious dependent class, a pack of dogs-in-the-manger demanding their “rights” and unwilling to slice their benefits according to their contributions. It has damaged the bourgeois family, and it has created vast entitlement promises that aren’t likely to be honored. For too many, it has turned a productive working class into a non-working underclass.

But the big question is, are you Democrats really doing the right thing by truckling to your Angry Left activists? Shouldn’t you experienced pols be taking some of these folks aside and giving them a few tips about how to win elections and how to understand the American people?

Throughout the rise of the conservative movement, we conservatives have always understood that the enthusiasm of the base is one thing and the winning of elections another. We have always understood that to enact our program we first needed to persuade the American people to let us have a turn at power. We have understood that the American people are rightly hesitant to agree to too much change too soon, and we have responded by not asking for too much too soon. It is the ordinary American, after all, who will be left holding the baby after the suits, conservative or liberal, have done the skedaddle.

Your Angry Left chappies just don’t seem to get this. Until they do, they are going to cost you Democrats big time.

God is Love says German Pope

First we had a Polish pope who told the people of Eastern Europe “Be Not Afraid.” Now we have a German pope, and the first words out of his mouth, in a papal encyclical, is “Deus Caritas Est” or God is Love.

And it is telling that the first thing he does, as he renews the Christian message for a new generation, is deal with the challenge of Nietzsche, the German philosopher who accused Christianity of having “poisoned eros” and the Church of turning “to bitterness the most precious thing in life.”

Benedict accepts the challenge and writes unflinchingly about the two forms of love, eros and agape. He admits that the distinction between the two forms of love, ascending love and descending love, have been “radicalized to the point of establishing a clear antithesis between them.”

But he protests that the Church Fathers saw a “connection between ascending and descending love, between eros which seeks God and agape which passes on the gift received.”

The point of the Christian reciprocity where the love of God is reciprocated by God’s love for mankind is symbolized, for the pope, in the purification of eros by agape.

Love of God and love of neighbour are thus inseparable, they form a single commandment. But both live from the love of God who has loved us first. No longer is it a question, then, of a “commandment” imposed from without and calling for the impossible, but rather of a freely-bestowed experience of love from within, a love which by its very nature must then be shared with others. Love grows through love. Love is “divine” because it comes from God and unites us to God.

We shall hear more from this German pope, and it may be that just as the rude courage of John Paul II transformed the world, the German scholarship of Benedict XVI will work a complementary if no less mysterious miracle.

Mozarts Geburtstag: Amateurs Playing Mozart

Everyone is doing their Mozart piece today, the 250th anniversary of his birth. The American philsopher Lee Harris wrote about Mozart’s music, epitomized by The Marriage of Figaro as the one thing we would want to save when aliens are about to vaporize the Earth.

As Harris imagines it, after watching him listen to his CD of Figaro the aliens ask him:

“Tell us about this world of Figaro you have been visiting?”

“It is, strange to say, very much like our human world. It is a world where men are jealous of women for no reason. Where adolescent boys throb with passions they cannot comprehend. It is a world where the strong try to take advantage of their positions of power, and their inferiors fight back with their cunning and wits. It is a world where good and virtuous women sigh because their husbands have inexplicably fallen out of love with them. It is a world where the noble-hearted ultimately forgive the errors of the lesser mortals with whom they are compelled to live.

That is all very well, and very elegantly put. But there is another side to Mozart, and that is that ordinary amateur musicians like you and me can play his music.

One of the great joys of my life has been to play Mozart string quartets. There are a bunch of them, usually published in two volumes as the Early Quartets and the Late Quartets.

To play a Mozart string quartet is to feel yourself participating, in a palpable way, in the very center of the western experience. First of all, you are playing a violin, the most perfect musical instrument ever conceived and executed. It demonstrates in its form and its sound both the male principle of tautness and tension and the female principle of lushness and pregnant beauty.
Then, of course, you are actually playing the music, this remarkable outpouring of a young genius. What music can compare with the power of the Quartet K.465 the “Dissonant,” the mystery of its opening measures, the bleakness of its second movement, the Andante Cantabile?

Next month, we are playing an early Mozart quartet at the concert of the string orchestra I play with, Hildman Strings. In addition to Mozart we’ll be playing Benda, C.P.E. Bach, and premiering a composition by composer Dell Wade.

You could play the violin, you know. You can start any time and any age, and in a couple of years find a sandbox orchestra in which to play, as I did. There are amateur orchestras all over the United States. One of them is waiting for you.

Chicago to Wal-Mart: We Dont Need Your Stinkin' Jobs

Everyone agrees that Democrats are on the side of the little guy. Without Democrats and their programs, why, people would starve, children would not go to school, and old people would lack health care.

That’s why the Chicago City Council voted against giving Wal-Mart a zoning change so they could build a store on the South Side. The local alderman, Howard Brookins Jr., tried.

Eighteen months ago, Brookins negotiated with Wal-Mart for a store at 83rd and Stewart, former site of the Ryerson steel plant. His plan fell apart when other South Side aldermen failed to support his request for a zoning change.

No problem. Wal-Mart want ahead and built their store outside Chicago city limits.

So why did did 24,500 Chicagoans apply for a job at the new Wal-Mart just outside city limits, as Leslie Baldacci reports?

And that is after 11,000 people applied for a job at a new Wal-Mart in Oakland, California.

What is wrong with these people? Don’t they understand that Wal-Mart is an evil influence that will snatch away their health benefits or force them onto Medicaid? And as for working them to the bone, well, you could read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickeled and Dimed to learn about that, if you haven’t already been forced to read it in freshman orientation at your local selective college.

Of course, old Rush Limbaugh had a field day with this story, because he loves nothing more than poking fun at the Democrat shibboleths and hypocrisies: that only they can represent the little guy. He envisions an army of Wal-Marts surrounding the Democratic bastion of Chicago.

It is interesting to look at the satellite map of the site of the new Wal-Mart just outside Chicago city limits in the village of Evergreen Park. You can see the north-south arterial just to the east of the Wal-Mart location. That’s Chicago city limits. It can’t be a coincidence that the local shopping mall in which Wal-Mart is located is just to the west of the intersection. Of course, the $1 million in property taxes from the new Wal-Mart will go to Evergreen Park and not to the City of Chicago.

But we don’t need Wal-Mart’s stinkin’ taxes, or their stinkin’ jobs, eh Dems?

Peggy Noonan Worries About the Short Term

In her regular Thursday column, Peggy Noonan reviews Bush’s speech at Kansas State University. She approves of his strategic, even romantic vision, but worries about the short term.

We want our president to love democracy and hold it high. But I would feel better if his preoccupations, and his public statements, had more to do with safety, homeland security and a heightened sense of the need for preparedness. I would like him to find Osama.

Actually, I would argue that the opposite is true. If you have the strategy right, you can always deal with the tactical issues, the friction and the fog of battle. But the way to win battles is to have your troops in the right place before the battle.

The notable thing about the Bush presidency has been its strategic sense. It has put in place the tax rate cuts that blasted the economy out of stasis. It has injected the United States in between the two radical foci in the Middle East, the Sunni radical Wahabis in Saudi Arabia and the Shia radicals in Iran. It has allowed Israel to advance to a unilateral division of Palestine.

The conseqence of these strategic moves will become evident in the future when the unexpected happens and battles in the War on Terror erupt. We will realize how convenient it is to have troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. We will observe the good fortune of having walled off the Palestinians into their own political and physical space.

But do not expect the world to thank President Bush for his strategic dispositions. Not now, and maybe not ever.

Boys and Books and Marriage and Abuse

In the past week we’ve seen The New Republic worry about Boys and Books, how boys just aren’t doing well in school, and how colleges are conducting an informal affirmative action program to favor unqualified boys because otherwise their male student percentage would go below 40 percent.

Then we have City Journal’s Kay S. Hymowitz observing how the only women who are sticking to marriage and children like glue are women who are college graduates, women devoted to “The Mission” of giving their children the best possible start in life.

Then we have Phyllis Schlafly observing that one effect of feminists insisting that Title IX be treated as a demand for exact equality of results in college sports is that boys don’t go to colleges that don’t have a good male athletic program.

Of course we should not forget the Nixzmary Brown story, the little girl beaten to death by her step-father, even though the government’s child protective services knew all about the abuse Nixzmary had suffered.

And we should certainly celebrate the amazing story of British barrister Constance Briscoe, cruelly abused by her mother as a girl, but taken in by a teacher in her school when a teenager, graduating out of high school top of her class and ending up a municipal judge.

What is all this telling us?

It is telling us that liberals are wrong. They told us that the big problem was that girls weren’t being properly served in school. They were wrong. Girls were doing fine. But boys were falling behind.

Liberals told us that the old traditional marriage was a thing of the past, that people were searching out new relationships, and this was healthy. But they are wrong. Now we know that homes without fathers are homes that will likely generate girls that have sex too early and boys that are violent and criminal. And more than that. Homes that do not contain their married mother and father are dangerous to children and other people.

Liberals told us that it was a terrible thing that girls were denied a chance to participate in sports. Now we are gutting youth sports to impose an artificial standard of participation.

Liberals told us that we needed government to come in and prevent abuse of children. Now we find out that government child protective services are hopeless.

There’s a pretty obvious lesson here, staring us in the face, isn’t there?

Of course. We need more funding for all those underfunded programs.

Joel Stein Doesn't Get It

Everybody is having a grand old time with young Joel Stein’s foolish oped in the LA Times.
“I don’t support our troops,” he writes. Still, when the troops come home, of course, he wants them to have the full use of the welfare state:

All I’m asking is that we give our returning soldiers what they need: hospitals, pensions, mental health and a safe, immediate return.

But please, no parades.

But Joel, you completely misunderstand the whole ethos of the nation state, you and all your liberal buddies. What those soldiers need, first of all, is to know that their nation honors their service. It doesn’t matter if they were sent off on a wild goose chase, if millions of them died for nothing. When they come back, we tell them that we honor them. Period. End of story.

Forget all the stupid welfare state nostrums of hospitals, pensions, and mental health counseling. These are men, old chum. What they need is a wife and a job. And they need to be honored.

The anti-war leaders understand this: that is why they put out those mendacious signs in the spring of 2003. “Support Our Troops: Bring Them Home.”

Guess why the Swift Boat issue was so powerful in 2004. Because it reminded a whole generation of American men why they cannot vote for Democrats. It reminded them, as if they had ever forgot, of what they experienced when they came home from Vietnam a generation ago.

But go ahead. Don’t support the troops. Go ahead and send another generation of young men into the only political party that honors them, the Republican Party.

You can gauge the depth of Joel Stein’s folly by reading the interview (or try here) he gave to Hugh Hewitt. Hewitt is turning into a ferocious interviewer. He just knows exactly how to make a liberal look like a fool. So he runs Stein through a bunch of military situations: Does he support our troops in Afghanistan? In Kosovo? He gets Stein to say that he only supports the troops in missions that he, Stein, personally supports.

But this is folly. Liberals have this fantasy that they are above the mere nation state and its patriotism, and dare one say, nationalism. Therefore they have the moral standing to pick and choose what they support.

Of course, liberals don’t extend such privileges to the rest of America. When it comes to the support of liberals and their initiatives, in the media, in the schools, in social services, and in the university, then there is no opting out. There is no right to pick and choose. Everyone must pay their taxes, and everyone must support the journalists, the teachers, the social workers, and the professors. Otherwise they are mean spirited and ultra-conservative. Or even racist, sexist, and homophobic.

Not Your Father's Economy

What is going on with the nation’s economy? Now that the era of motors and steel is going away, what does a healthy economy look like?

This question has been nagging away since about 1980 when it looked like smokestack America was finished, and the future was bleak. Instead, as we know, the economy thrived. But what was it thriving on? For the past generation we have been subjected to a neverending MSM drumbeat of layoffs and downsizings, but the economy is better than ever. We read that the median hourly wage hasn’t budged since 1973 but we see all around us the detritus of unashamed prosperity. What is going on?

That is what Mark Brown asks as Ford announces plans to lay off 30,000 workers in the next few years.

I don’t pretend to understand the economy any more.


I don’t understand how our economy can keep churning while all the good, blue-collar jobs keep disappearing, relegating more and more people to lives of earning less.

Says he:

I grew up in a railroad family in a community where the breadwinners for most of the other families worked in factories. The railroad moved the raw materials to the factories or the finished products to market. It was an easy economy to understand.

Now everything has changed.

Mark Brown is saying that the world is waiting for someone to write a book that will make the complex understandable, that will reduce our present economy down to a sound bite that politicians and media people can spout without really even understanding it.

In reality, the US economy has not changed since the industrial takeoff in the years after the Civil War. It has been continental, market driven, and always driving towards lower costs, wiping out industry after industry as new ideas and new processes appeared and undercut the old ways.

It’s just that up to now in spite of everything, you could pretend that the economy was all about sturdy workers making things and transporting them to market, rather than an abstract continental crapshoot of costs and profits and losses, of numbers and instant fortunes and terrifying bankrupties.

So, where is the genius who will peel the scales off our eyes?

NYT: Bush Reads Books! But...

We all know that President Bush is an ignoramus. So when it is reported that the First Lady gave him a copy of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s Mao: The Untold Story and that the president actually read it, what are we to think?

Have no fear, The New York Times’ own Elizabeth Bumiller is there to help us out.

Apparently, when Unions-bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel was visiting the White House conversation included reference to Chang and Halliday’s Mao which “has been embraced by the right as a searing indictment of Communism.”

Well, that is good, in a way. “But.” (You knew that was coming.)

But [Andrew J. Nathan, a specialist in Chinese politics at Columbia University], who last year in The London Review of Books criticized what he called the authors’ vague and inaccessible sourcing, said that the biography presented Mao as a “comic-book monster,” with little explanation of the psychological, sociological and historical forces that allowed him to rise.

Oh no! So the ill-educated and intellectually naive President Bush, lacking a proper understanding of the psychological, sociological and historical reality of Mao’s time, might get the wrong message out of the book. This, it must be admitted, is a real danger.

Although there is no real danger of, say, President Bush getting the eroneous idea that Mao was a chatty sort of chap who liked hanging out with students so much that he invited them all to come and visit him in Beijing one day in 1966.

No. The real danger is that President Bush might come to the conclusion that Mao was a fiend who starved millions of Chinese to death in the 1950s so he could export food and buy weapons and technology from the Soviets. And we can’t have that.

But not to worry, says everyone’s favorite historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin. The president probably was just reading for recreation.

"To be honest, I’m not sure that it’s so weird for him to be reading this," said Doris Kearns Goodwin... "partly why presidents read is the reason that we all read: to relax, to replenish our energy and to go into another era and another time."

Anyone else detecting an odor of nauseating condescension here?

We wouldn’t want to get boxed into admitting that President Bush was a serious man with a serious grasp of world history, would we?

Did Hillary Blunder on Race?

Hillary Clinton made a great gift to the nation when her absurd Hillarycare went down in flames in 1994 and helped elect a Republican Congress. Is she trying to do it again?

Shelby Steele thinks that maybe her “plantation” speech in Harlem on Martin Luther King Day could rank right up there in the blunder department. He writes that pandering is not just a question of going to a black church and playing the race card. It requires a certain finesse, of the kind possessed by Bill Clinton but not by Senator Clinton. Blacks might come away from her speech with the wrong message:

Does she really see us as she projects us--as a people so backward that our support can be won with a simple plantation reference, and the implication that Republicans are racist?

Steele has developed an important take on the race question in The Content of Our Character, A Dream Deferred and White Guilt. He presents the race issue as a dance between black shame and white guilt.

Yes, you cannot understand the race question merely as a matter of white guilt and the need for atonement. There is also the question of black shame. First there was the shame of enslavement itself, but after the Civil Rights revolution a new shame emerged, the shame of backwardness. Blacks were propelled into elite institutions by affirmative action and found that they were ashamed by their lack of preparation and savoir faire.

Every immigrant group feels this shame, but blacks felt it more keenly because of the peculiar nature of their entry into the public square. They responded to the experience by self-segregation, staying out of full participation in the middle-class experience, held back by the shame of backwardness.

Democrats have played this situation for all it is worth, but Steele wonders if the game is up. When blacks have got over their shame, then what will be the point of voting Democratic?

The politics of black uplift was once an idealism, but today it has become the work of hacks, tired apparatchiks and petty demagogues looking for power. And there, on TV last week, as if to illustrate this truth, was the specter of Mrs. Clinton and Al Sharpton embracing at the podium, mere captives of power making the tired charge--via an encrusted plantation metaphor--that Republicans are racists. What exhaustion! And what evil, to labor so hard at keeping blacks mired in grievance. Kind of reminds one of a plantation, though here the harvest is surely grievance rather than cotton.

Every immigrant group has arrived, exulting, in the promised land, and then sunk back in shame at their nakedness and lack of competence in the shining city on a hill. But every group has also, after a generation or two of gestation, been reborn into the full American experience of self-governing competence when they finally screwed up the courage to cast their shame aside.

Maybe, with the impetus of Hillary Clinton’s “plantation” speech, blacks will realize that it is time to accept their full citizenship in this great land, as it dawns on them that it been there in plain sight for a generation, waiting for them to summmon the confidence to pick it up.

Hybrid Tax Cuts for Rich Liberals

It isn’t enough that liberals make out like bandits working for the government earning 40 percent more than ordinary working stiffs earn in the private sector.

They also make out like bandits when it comes to buying cars.

When the Seattle liberal buys a new Toyota Prius hybrid, the federal government will kick in with $3,400 in tax credits.

Nothing quite like tax cuts for the rich, eh? According to Richard Burr,

The average household income of a Civic hybrid owner ranges between $65,000 to $85,000 a year; it’s more than $100,000 for the owner of an Accord. The median income of a Toyota Prius owner is $92,000; for a Highlander SUV owner $121,000; and for a luxury Lexus SUV owner it’s over $200,000.

The trouble is that the hybrids don’t really save that much gas. So people that buy them are not really saving that much in fuel. But they are making an important fashion statement. And since liberals make their livings spending your money on their liberal clients, they don’t really find it too hard to justify spending some more of your money on environmentally sustainable fashion statements for themselves.

By the way, who’s going to pay for disposing of all those toxic hybrid batteries?

Do Not Expect School Choice, Ever, From Left

The movement to roll back the government education monopoly has received a check recently with the decision of the Florida State Supreme Court, reported by Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters, that voucher programs are unconstitutional because they violate the requirement that the state provide

by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality education."

It is infuriating, because you know in your heart that a liberal court could easily find emanations and penumbras in such a sentence to justify any number of liberal initiatives in education that cut against the grain of popular will expressed by the state legislature. For instance, they could say that the founders never meant “public school” to mean government monopoly school but any school sponsored, funded, or run by approved liberal non-profit foundations.

The fact is that the left will oppose school choice to the last illiterate child. In Britain, this logic is in the process of destroying Prime Minister Tony Blair’s education reform bill, as David Green reports.

In Britain, the sticking point is “selection.” Britain’s Labour Party left cannot abide the notion of schools selecting their own students. In part, this instinct is justified. Britain used to have a selection test at age 11 which determined whether a child would go to a college prep “grammar school” or a vocational “secondary modern” school. Every one has a tale of an adult whose life was ruined by the failure to make it to grammar school.

But there is a worse evil than selection. And that is monopoly government bureaucratic schools, the kind of schools we have in Britain and in the United States, utterly dominated by producer interests and utterly free from responsibility for outcomes. School choice changes all that and forces the monopolists to start serving the consumers. David Green shows how school choice is working in Sweden:

The voucher system has resulted in an increase in independent providers. Before the reforms, independent schools in Sweden accounted for less than one per cent of pupils and few of those received any government funding. According to the Swedish National Agency for Education, there were 565 independent schools in 2004/05, accounting for 11 per cent of the 4,963 schools overall. An independent study found that competition from independent schools has improved results in state schools. Moreover, it has been found that new independent schools are more likely to be established in areas of under-performing state schools serving disadvantaged children.

Well now. You mean to say that these evil voucher financed schools are actually seeking out the tough areas serving disadvantaged children? How could that be?

Then he goes on to tell how school choice is working in the United States.

All this is fine, of course. It’s good that we are slowly making progress on the school choice front. But meanwhile, millions of poor children are being left behind, while we slowly and fairly roll up the power of the governmente school monopoly.

The question is: Where’s the outrage? Our liberal friends have always specialized in the expression of outrage about social injustice. Interesting, isn’t it how the liberal lions fail to roar when the injustice benefits their core supporters, the vast and powerful education establishment.

Remember the old Sherlock Holmes story about the dog that didn’t bark? He didn’t bark because he knew the murderer.

But never mind that. Let us remember this. On school choice, we will win. The secret to winning has always been and always will be to win the hearts and minds of the mothers of America. Some day, un bel di for you opera fans, the mothers of America will wake up and realize they have been had. They will discover that they are angry, and they will tell their friends. And then it will all be over bar the shouting.

The Next Generation of Fatherless Boys

It isn’t much fun, but someone has to report on the pestilence unleashed by the culture war, the plague of fatherless boys. So here’s a report from England by Shaun Bailey, a youth worker in London.

Bailey lives and works in a neighborhood where a lawyer, Thomas ap Rhys Price, was recently robbed and then brutally murdered.

The individuals concerned bear total moral responsibility for their crime. No one made them do it. But we should also look at the failure of our society. For I witness every day a generation of young people who live in a culture that celebrates violence openly. They - and many other young adults - have grown up in a world where there is little censure, where no one - no teacher, no parent, no friendly face in the community - tells them what is right and what is wrong.

What is wrong? Well, we conservatives already know. Single parenthood, for a start. A generation ago, Bailey writes, young women were positively encouraged to venture into single-parenthood. But of course, then they find out just how hard and discouraging it is to raise children on your own.

The government encourages it. Young girls know that if they get pregnant and have a baby, “they will get a flat.” So single motherhood is an opportunity. In the United States, the sixteenth birthday of a young woman, the day she could qualify for a government-subsidized apartment, was called “liberation day,” according to George Gilder in Men and Marriage. It was the day she could get liberation from the chaotic household of her mother and the dangerous young men there and get her own place, and her own baby.

It is the same with benefits. These people are not stupid. If the state offers them money for doing something, they will do it. It is as simple as that. I hear them talking about it, I hear them discussing how much they can get. And I see them change their behaviour. Why have the father move in with you if it means that you will get less from the Government?

You have to feel that people are not stupid. The people ensnared in the welfare trap are eventually going to do something to get out of it. And the people who have built the welfare system are going to realize that it was all a dreadful mistake.

Aren’t they?

The Index of Economic Freedom 2006

What’s the best way to turn a poor nation into a rich nation? Richard W. Rahn asks this rhetorical question. Is it:

(A) Insist the world’s rich nations transfer substantial wealth though massive foreign aid to the poor nations?

(B) Insist all nations adopt policies that would make them as economically free as the top 10 freest economies today?

We sexist, racist, classist, homophobic conservatives know the answer to that. The answer is (B).

Which are the 10 freest economies today? Here’s the answer from the Heritage Foundation’s executive summary.

1. Hong Kong

2. Singapore

3. Ireland

4. Luxembourg

5. Iceland

5. United Kingdom

7. Estonia

8. Denmark

9. Australia

9. New Zealand

9. United States

Interesting isn’t it? The big surprise is Ireland, which fifteen years ago suddenly deregulated its economy and scaled back government spending, becoming within five years a celtic tiger, so that its per capita income is now higher than the United Kingdom. And don’t forget Estonia. They call it e-tonia now, with its flat tax and its burgeoning high tech economy.

I don’t know about you. But I think that the position of the United States down at No. 9 with Australia and New Zealand is shameful.

Come on President Bush. Come on Republican Congress. Come on conservative activists. Let’s do something about this!

We’re No. 1. Aren’t we?

Birgit Nilsson Dies: End of an Era

She died on Christmas Day 2005, aged 87, in the village in southern Sweden where she was born in 1918. And it appears that the Swedes had her memorialized and put into the earth before the rest of the world knew what had happened.

Birgit Nilsson was the biggest star singer in the bright star-studded age of singers: the years after World War II when the world had Flagstad, Callas, and Nilsson all singing at once. And that was just the dramatic sopranos.

She wasn’t a very good actress, and she wasn’t a particularly expressive singer, but she had a huge golden voice, a really big golden voice. Writes Jay Nordlinger:

A few years ago I was talking to a famous opera singer about Nilsson, and this lady was waxing rhapsodic about that incredible sound. “It was so loud, it blew your hair back! It rattled your bones!”

One of today’s major sopranos is Seattle’s Jane Eaglen. She writes:

When I went to the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, England, to study singing, my background was as a pianist, so my knowledge of opera was limited. My teacher, Joseph Ward, told me he thought I would sing Wagner’s Brünnhilde one day, which meant nothing to me, so he told me to go to the library and listen to "The Ring" conducted by Georg Solti and with Nilsson singing Brünnhilde. It would be safe to say that within five minutes I was hooked and my life changed forever. To think, as an 18-year-old, that one day I would sing this amazing music that the most incredible human voice I had ever heard was singing didn’t seem possible.

To memorialize Nilsson in Seattle, opera director Speight Jenkins had Eaglen sing the Liebestod (love death) from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde—right in the middle of a performance of Die Fledermaus.

You can get The New York Times obituary here, and The Daily Telegraph obit here.

We young punks never got to hear her in the flesh. But we have the recordings, of which the centerpiece is the Solti Ring in which Nilsson sings Brünnhilde. I used to have it on vinyl. Now I have it on CD.

It should be on your iPod.

Abused Girl Doesn't Make Good: Government Child Protective Services AWOL

Sorry about that, old chap. Could have happened to anyone. Not our fault. That seems to be the attitude of the government’s child protective services after Nixzmary Brown was beaten to death in New York City by her stepfather.

Of course, the signs were all out there in the wind for anyone that cared. The government had a case file on the girl. The officials at the government school had attempted to get intervention to happen. Conservative columnist John Podhoretz has a quick recap.

You see, the problem was that the caseworker Roger Moore at the child protection agency in Bedford-Stuyvesant was overwhelmed, swamped with cases. Understaffed is the word they like to use.

"I didn’t drop any balls," Moore said last week as the city reeled from the Nixzmary’s murder. The thing was, Moore just had too much on his plate. "I couldn’t cover all the cases in my area," he said.

Podhoretz goes on in the traditionally outraged tone of your average ink stained wretch.

Roger Moore is 55 years old. I hope he leads a long life so that every night, Nixzmary Brown can enter his dreams and ask him why he didn’t save her from her torture chamber of a home.

But aren’t we missing the point here? Why should anyone, least of all a conservative columnist, expect a government to do any job right except the job of extracting taxes from the citizenry?

After all, if the bureaucratic method were so great then we wouldn’t have families and churches and the little platoons that make life civilized. We would have nice bureaucratic everything, just like Plato’s tremendously succesful Republic, and Aldous Huxley’s incomparable Brave New World.

Come on folks. Let’s admit it. Government can’t protect children. Never could. Never will. What protects children is their natural married parents. And when they fail, then you hope that the little platoons, the neighbors, the church members, will feel they have the authority to intervene and stop cruelty and abuse—to do something.

But don’t ever expect the welfare state to succeed at that sort of thing.

Abused Girl Makes Good Despite Failure of Child Protective Services

British barrister Constance Briscoe is a poster child for the meritocratic society. Daughter of Jamaican immigrants to Britain in the 1950s she went to college and became a barrister, a Queen’s Counsel, a level in the British legal hierarchy that poor old Rumpole of the Bailey could never quite rise to.

Only there is a little more to her story than that. One of six children, she was brutally abused by her mother, who did everything she could to abort her desire for education and advancement. The story is told by Briscoe in Ugly.

In an interview with Deirdre Fernand timed to coincide with the release of her book in Britain, Briscoe speaks in

measured, almost flat, tones recalling her troubled childhood. As she rehearses the violence, starvation and deprivation she endured, she could be reciting a shopping list...

When she asked her mother why she treated her so badly, she replied: “Oh, just the fact that you breathe...”

I thought all this child abuse was supposed to be a thing of the past, now that we have professional child protective services in every advanced nation. How could this abuse go on when there are squadrons of eager helping professionals organized into mighty bureaucratic armies intended precisely to seek out and put a stop to child abuse?

In the case of Constance Briscoe, she only got to escape from her mother when a teacher at her school informally took her in. For,

Eventually her mother attacked her so badly that her headmaster called her mother in. Briscoe refused to go back home with her but would not say why. A teacher, Miss K, agreed to take her in. Life proved sweet at Miss K’s flat in Streatham and her grades soared. She became prefect and captain of games.

And then she went on to university and qualified as a barrister. Now she is “Miss Recorder Briscoe”, a municipal judge.

Her son, now at university himself, could only get half way through her memoir.

But what should we do about this gross abuse? Can we say that the German bureaucratic method of credentialed experts has failed? Should we return to the Burkean “little platoons” of informal community to protect the least among us? What is to be done?

The End of the Bork Era

Nineteen years ago, Senator Edward Kennedy rushed onto the floor of the United States Senate and opened the Bork era. He said:

Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would have to sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police would break down citizen’s doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.

That was then. Nineteen years later, Senator Kennedy is just another ageing Democratic senator with a taste for bullying witnesses.

This is now. Despite the nastiness of Senator Kennedy’s questioning of Judge Alito, who cares? Who cares what white-haired liberal senators think and do? Their time is past. They are voices of the past, mumbling the ideas of the past. Liberal ideas have consequences, and liberals would rather not talk about it. Because

Ted Kennedy’s America is a land in which mourning women cannot forget how old their aborted baby would be if it were alive today, blacks have been taught to hate the nation that confessed and honestly atoned for its Original Sin, rogue gang-bangers make life a misery for poor people, schoolchildren are not taught much of anything, writers and artists are censored at the whim of the politically correct, and the doors of the federal courts are slammed shut on the fingers of ordinary people to avoid disturbing the latest elite séance channeling a new constitutional penumbra or emanation.

But with Ted Kennedy now a rutted bully rather than the rutting bull of his prime, we can see the Bork era coming to a close. Conservatives have learned how to beat the bork. You nominate a brilliant, mild-mannered appeals court judge who can talk for days and days about the law and about the nice legal issues in this case or that case, and with every word demonstrate that he knows more about the law and about judging than any senator past, present, or future.

And, of course, after being roundly borked, insulted, demeaned, and humiliated for a month or two, the new justice has been thoroughly vaccinated against the disease of Strange New Respect, that malady discovered by political epidemiologist Tom Bethell that often turns good conservative justices into blithering liberals, just so that they can say to the Washington social elite: “You like me! You really like me!”

Democrats Smear Alito: What's the Point?

Why do they do it? Why are national politicians like Senators Kennedy and Schumer descending to cheap attacks and witness baiting in the hearings to confirm Judge Samuel A. Alito to a seat on the United States Supreme Court? Are they crazy?

It is common in political controversy to represent the other side as idiots. Private people often call politicians they disagree with as fools.

But this is a mistake. Politicians are not fools, even if they often act like it. National politicians like Kennedy and Schumer, who led the attack on Judge Alito in the confirmation hearings this week, are not fools. They are highly successful national politicians who have won state-wide campaigns time and time again. These are smart, successful people.

So why do they turn the Alito confirmation hearings into a playground brawl?

Is it because it worked in the Bork hearings, and almost worked in the Thomas hearings? That’s what Rush Limbaugh suggests when he says that Democrats are calling plays out of a 30-year-old playbook. It worked in the past, and so the Democrats will keep using it until the Republicans intercept a couple of passes for touchdowns.

Is it because the Democrats want to keep their base on a permanent war footing? That seems to have been their tactics ever since the election of 2000. But you wonder whether that is really paying off for them. When you keep your base on a war footing, it also keeps the opposing base on a war footing. Democrats are enraging Republicans just as much as they are encouraging their Daily Kos and MoveOn.org enthusiasts.

Are they just going through the motions for the left-wing groups like People for the American Way and the Alliance for Justice? Ralph Neas and Nan Aron run these liberal activist groups for what appears to be the sole purpose of promoting liberal judges for the federal bench and opposing conservative judges. But surely the Democratic senators have the power to say to Neas and Aron: cool it.

You have to hope that the Democrats are looking at polls that show that their slash-and-burn tactics are backfiring.

You’d like the tactics to backfire because you’d like to live in an America where a judicial candidate could tell the Senate Judiciary Committee: “Yes, Senator. I’m a pretty conservative guy: Two kids, two cars. One wife. But I’m not going to go onto the Supreme Court and reverse every liberal court decision of the past 50 years. That’s just not the way the law works.”

Senator Biden complained this week that the confirmation hearings were turning into a sham where the nominee wouldn’t tell the senators anything about his views. Well, senator, that couldn’t be because Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, ever since the Bork hearing in 1987, have tried to lynch any nominee that expresses a political view that liberals dislike, could it?

The Global Problem of the Natural Resource States

There is a difference between a state like the United States and a state like Saudi Arabia. In the United States, the people are a resource. In Saudi Arabia, the people are a cost.

In other words, the leaders of the United States need us, the American people. Our energy, our wealth-producing activities, our knowledge, our patriotism are the foundation upon which the power of the political leaders is built.

But the same is not true of a state like Saudi Arabia, where national income and wealth comes from pumping oil out of the ground. In Saudi Arabia (and in other natural resource states) the people are an annoying cost that reduces the revenue of the political leaders.

This model can be applied globally. States like the United States, Japan, South Korea, India, and China are nations that depend upon their people for their wealth. States like Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Nigeria, and now even little Bolivia are natural resource states. They do not produce much of anything that the world wants except their oil or their natural gas.

So when Russia turns off the gas to Ukraine, writes Irwin M. Stelzer, maybe we ought to pay attention. Maybe Russian President Vladimir Putin is sending

a warning to major energy-consuming countries that their long-term prosperity is in the hands of very dangerous people.

The joke is that the natural resource states need us much more than we need them. In the long term, if they push prices above the market then the energy-consuming countries will find other ways of getting energy. In the short term, certainly, they can swing their weight around and cause inconvenience.

Of course, there is no reason why the natural resource countries and their tin-pot dictators should have the influence they do. There are plenty of ways we can reduce their influence. We can build out nuclear power. We can aggressively prospect for oil and natural gas in the mainland US and offshore. But we don’t. We don’t do it because significant portions of our educated elite in the United States and elsewhere in the developed world belong to a post-Christian religious cult that experiences the earth as an expression of the divine. They experience the land outside the cities as a sacred place that should be kept apart. Characteristically, they want to force their religious beliefs onto other Americans.

But that will change. Eventually the people states will deal with the natural resource states. The only question is, shall we do it now, when the cost is manageable? Or shall we let the natural resource states wax in strength and pride and in their ability to cause mischief before we deal with them?

Lefty Professors Don't Get It

While the pontificators are pontificating for the cameras at the Alito nomination hearings, David Horowitz and others are testifying to a select committee of the Pennsylvania state legislature about academic freedom. The legislature is taking up Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights that protects students from abuse from their teachers, particularly one-sided presentation of controversial subject matter. As Horowitz says: how can students get an education if they only get half of the story?

And of course to back him up Frontpagemag.com has a horror story about a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia who runs a cartoonish left-wing course on “Urban Society: ‘Race,’ Class, and Gender in the City.” Needless to say, all the readings are left-wing, and anyone that disagrees with the teacher, associate professor Melissa Gilbert, gets an earful, as this student reported on ratemyprofessors.com

“Racism and Sexism are only one side. She is one of the biggest feminists I know — Oh and if you’re a white male, you can’t ask her a question, she yelled at me after class for asking test structure. She’s hypocritical and a HUGE Feminist. Very bad teacher.”

You feel sorry for the kids being subjected to this abuse, but maybe it is good for them. Maybe they need a bit of abuse from the lefties. Who knows? Maybe left-wing teaching is the biggest factor creating conservatives here in the good old USA.

Sam Alito: Independent Jurist or Conservative Extremist?

It is Monday morning, and the Democrats are threatening filibuster, according to Charles Hurt. Says Senator Charles Schumer about Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito:

"If he continuously, given his previous record, refused to answer questions and hid behind ’I can’t answer this because it might come before me,’ it would increase the chances of a filibuster."

Notice the use of the passive voice here.

On the other hand, Alito supporter Senator John Cornyn voices support for President Bush’s Supreme Court nominee.

A 2004 study by two law professors found him to be the fourth most independent federal appeals-court judge in the United States.

But you can understand the passion of the liberal interest groups. They know that their mountain of progressive legislation and their pile of liberal court decisions are under attack. Their great liberal monuments are under attack because America has moved on from the polity and the economy of liberal clientage, except in the benighted liberal cities where schools rot and liberal activist groups entice troubled Americans into lifelong dependency.

All over the nation young families are moving from blue states to red states to get away from the expense and the tyranny of liberal government, to find the jobs they need and to find housing they can afford and schools they can trust. They know that they need to get away from liberals if they are going to be able to realize their dreams.

And liberals want to stop them.

No wonder liberals have sworn to stop the nomination of Samuel A. Alito to become associate justice on the United States Supreme Court. They feel their power slipping away, and they will do anything to keep it.

Naomi Wolf: She admits she was wrong

God bless Naomi Wolf. After a fine career of best-selling feminist titles like The Beauty Myth and the daring Promiscuities Naomi has decided at the grand old age of 40 that the patriarchy, in the person of her poet father Leonard Wolf, was right after all.

And now she has written a book about it, The Treehouse : Eccentric Wisdom from My Father on How to Live, Love, and See.

It’s delicious, isn’t it. Democrats are holding their heads in horror insisting that Samuel Alito completely blotted his copybook twenty years ago with a rather enthusiastically conservative job application. But it’s perfectly OK for liberal Naomi Wolf to confess the error of her ways. Yes, all those years wearing the “same straight-leg black jeans and black boots that every other young Marxist” was wearing and all those books railing against the patriarchy: that was then. Hey, anyone can make a mistake!

So Naomi determined that she wanted her poet father to teach her

formally, what he had taught his students for the decades during which he gave a famous class in poetry and creative writing at San Francisco State University.

I realised that when I had gone astray it was because I had deliberately ignored, or insisted on forgetting, as daughters do who are trying to forge their own identity in the world, one of those 12 lessons about literature — lessons that are really, or equally, about life.

Instead, Naomi now wondered:

What had I lost? Was it peace? Was it the need to get closer to a sense of God? Was it the longing to quit work in the public dog pit — where one must strive, compete, and produce the way men have traditionally produced — and to do more of the traditionally “female” work of planting seeds and watching children? ... I wanted to listen to a child, not a meeting. I wanted peace, not war. God, not Mammon. Family, not itineraries. Poetry, not polemic.

Well, good. I mean, what’s not to like? And a gentler, kinder Naomi Wolf can still indulge in the occasional rant against evil Republican neo-cons and corrupt Republican lawmakers and lying Republican presidents without it harming in the least her new role as a wise old crone.

Meanwhile, don’t forget to buy the book.

What is Our Mideast Strategy?

Democrats have been complaining for years that the US went into Iraq without a plan for peace. Sure, we overran the country in three weeks, but then what? Chaos and mistakes, that’s what. They have been suggesting that the Bush administration didn’t have a strategy.

Their criticism was damaging because the Bush administration couldn’t exactly say “we do too” and then spell out our plans exactly for the benefit of friends and foe. So when the administration released its National Strategy for Victory in Iraq we can be pretty sure that they are pretty sure that we already have victory in Iraq, bar shouting. The document talks about three tracks to victory—the Political Track, the Security Track, and the Economic Track—which must be glaringly obvious to anyone that hasn’t been asleep for the last three years.

The remarks of General Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at the National Defense University the day after the release of the stragegy document point all this up. He talks willingly about strategy in Iraq, referring his audience to the Iraq strategy document, but when asked why “four years after 9/11 we still don’t appear to have a comprehensive strategy to fight that global war” says of future strategy that

there’s a lot of this puzzle that we would need a classified forum to be able to talk about. You are correct that we are publicly and in most of our fora talking about the immediate center of gravity, but I can assure you that we also have an enormous amount of energy being put into the other, longer-term requirements of having a global capacity with our friends to be able to respond. And that’s about as good as I can do for you in an open forum.

It’s pretty obvious what that strategy is, but we just can’t talk about it because it probably involves long-term presence in Iraq, regime change in Syria, and covert activities in Iran. The point, after all, of invading Afghanistan and Iraq was to contain Iran to the east of Mesopotamia.

But what is our strategy with regards to Mark Steyn’s Eurabia? Good question, Senator. My guess would be that the plan is to remove our troops from Europe, so that the Euros wake up from their 60 year social-democratic dream and get with the program.

NYT Brides Stay Home with Babies

What do women want? It’s a question that men have puzzled over since the dawn of time. But we still worry about it because—well, you know why. What is utterly incomprehensible is to understand what feminist women want.

Fortunately, there’s an article by Linda Hirshman in The American Prospect all about women in the workplace. Kate O’Beirne provides a quick rundown in NRO so you don’t have to read the whole thing.

What is happening is that elite women, the kind of women who advertise their weddings in The New York Times “Sunday Styles” section, are choosing to staying home to raise their children. What do women want? “Not what they should.” You see,

The family -- with its repetitious, socially invisible, physical tasks -- is a necessary part of life, but it allows fewer opportunities for full human flourishing than public spheres like the market or the government. This less-flourishing sphere is not the natural or moral responsibility only of women. Therefore, assigning it to women is unjust. Women assigning it to themselves is equally unjust. To paraphrase, as Mark Twain said, “A man who chooses not to read is just as ignorant as a man who cannot read.”

We conservatives, who know that fashion moves from the top down, understand, with Linda Hirschman, that if the fashionable women in the New York Times Sunday Style section are staying home to have babies then the rest of American women can’t be far behind.

But let us return to Linda Hirschman. If the family is a “necessary part of life” shouldn’t it occupy some sort of central place in society, honored and fêted by everyone? One of the hardest things for society to do is to encourage people to stick to the necessary things and to stop going off at tangents and diverting themselves with the fun things, the pleasurable things, at the expense of the necessary things.

But of course, for feminist Linda Hirshman the important things are not the necessary things. What is important is for women to take their place in the political and business elite. If women opt out of the career track, then fewer of them will get to the top of the political and business elites. That means that the rulers will make decisions that benefit men. And women’s lives will be tarnished.

A good life for humans includes the classical standard of using one’s capacities for speech and reason in a prudent way, the liberal requirement of having enough autonomy to direct one’s own life, and the utilitarian test of doing more good than harm in the world.

So, what does that have to do with a career in the business and political elite?

The problem with Hirschman’s religious agenda—and it is a religious agenda as pointed as the religious agenda of The Purpose-driven Life, is that it flies in the face of what women want, or more cogently, what women clearly do not want. The fact is that women aren’t as interested in the rat-race of “career” (which comes from the French word for racetrack). One of the Times Sunday Style brides,

a female MBA, said she could never figure out why the men at her workplace, which fired her, were so excited about making deals. “It’s only money,” she mused.

That is the problem that the feminists will never solve. For many men, the race is everything. For many women, what’s the point?

Evangelicals are Different: They Give More Money

One of the reasons that Americans give so much to charity compared to others is that a lot of Americans go to church and the ones that do give to their churches. The same thing applies in Britain. American evangelicals give away about 10 percent of their income, but British evangelicals are even more generous. They give away 12 percent of their income, according to Ruth Gledhill and Joanna Sugden. They give “nine times as much to charity as the average householder” in Britain. And of course, they have much less debt and three times the average level of household savings.

The survey, conducted for Kingdom Bank by Christian Research found that evangelical Christians in Britain

give 7.5 per cent of their income to the church, 3 per cent to Christian charities and 1.5 per cent to secular charities, averaging £3,000 [$5,000] a year per household. The Rev Vaughan Roberts, Rector of St Ebbe’s Church, Oxford, where hundreds of students attend Sunday services and give a total of £00,000 [$1 million] a year, said: “It is not surprising that those who have understood God’s gift of grace to them should be generous in return.”

But what happens to all that money? Not all of it goes for megachurch buildings and services. According to Richard Bewes, at his church ”we were giving 30 per cent of our income to outside mission work.”

Success in 2005: an Iranian View

Whether or not Iran (the name means land of the Aryans) and the Iranian people are the eye of the hurricane we call the War on Terror, you always want to keep an eye on Iranian writer Amir Taheri. He probably represents the voice of the suffering city people of Iran, the ones who want to come into the world, the democratic capitalist world that we Anglospherists have spread across the planet. Only they live under a regime that is at war with the democratic capitalism.

Taheri is encouraged by the year just past. And why not? “27 nations advanced towards greater freedom — an all-time record.”

And in the nations that an Iranian would be particularly interested in, after his own, he notes that both Afghanistan and Iraq staged a bunch of elections and constitution ratifications in 2005.

He is even encouraged by the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran.

I also regard the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the new president of the Islamic Republic as good news. The reason is simple: Ahmadinejad has the courage, some might say recklessness, to cast aside the hypocritical mask worn by his two predecessors (both businessmen-mullahs) in a strategy of deception. He has eschewed taqiyah (dissimulation) and that, believe me, is welcome news. His presidency will force the people of Iran and the rest of the world either to come to terms with the Khomeinist revolution or to challenge it in a meaningful way.

Ahem. That is certainly an interesting way of putting it. But it makes an important point. Sooner or later, the rest of the world is going to have to confront the fact of an aggressive, expansionist Iran. Will we decide to confront it? Will we decide to contain it? Or will we decide to appease it? And what about the Iranian people themselves? Can we separate the Iranian regime from the Iranian people in the way that the peoples behind the iron curtain understood our policy during the Cold War?

A New Year: Why We Fight

Why not start out the new year with a good dose of Why We Fight from Roger Kimball at The New Criterion. In his article, he returns to the theme of James Burnham and his 1964 book The Suicide of the West.

Suicide is probably more frequent than murder as the end phase of a civilization.

Our modern Cassandra is the brilliant Mark Steyn. He has pointed out that Europe is on a path to suicide with its population crash.

It’s the demography, stupid... A society that has no children has no future.

The eerie thing is that the liberal ethos actually celebrates childlessness. It urges women to center their lives around career, a word derived from the French carrière, meaning race-track. It makes a sacrament out of abortion, and it frowns upon large families with three or more children.

The point is to build a society that “loves life.” That is not the same as loving pleasure. The measure of how much you love life is of what you are willing to die for, as in: I would die to save the lives of my children. As Burnham wrote,

Men become willing to endure, sacrifice, and die for God, for family, king, honor, country, from a sense of absolute duty or an exalted vision of the meaning of history — And it is precisely these ideas and institutions that liberalism has criticized, attacked, and in part overthrown as superstitious, archaic, reactionary, and irrational.

But who

is willing to sacrifice and die for progressive education, medicare, humanity in the abstract, the United Nations, and a ten percent rise in Social Security payments?

Liberals are rather horrified, one feels, by the dedication and spirit of our servicemen and servicewomen in the U.S. Armed Forces, who are willing to die for their country. Liberals have labored for a generation to delegitimize military service, and yet here comes a new generation obviously trained in the ethos of the modern army as devised by German General Hans von Seeckt. They are “self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility.”

It is an irony of history that the German General Staff built for the lead-from-the-top Nazis an army in which responsibility was delegated down as far as possible.

Meanwhile our American liberals, who bellow their devotion to freedom and civil liberties, are determined to control everything, down to the details of what Americans eat.

Why do we fight? Let me count the ways.