Finally, A Brit Takes on the Israel Haters

Everyone has declared that actor Mel Gibson is a drunken anti-Semitic lout, after his little problem with the law last week.

But there are plenty of people who have been nipping at the same bottle, writes British politician and opinion writer Boris Johnson.

Come on, Blair! they write from their wisteria-clad redoubts... When are you all going to stop poodling and call a halt to Israeli murder?

Easy for you to say, he continues. They aren’t raining rockets on your leafy avenue.

This is a country responding, however incompetently, to direct aggression against its own people from a neighbouring failed state.

...
Whatever the hideous shambles of the past few days, it is still true, in principle, that when Israeli rockets kill civilians, they have missed their targets, and that when Hizbollah rockets kill civilians, they have scored a deliberate hit.

And that matters when you want to make an honest balance in the equation of moral equivalency.

Limbaugh Listeners No. 2 in News Knowledge

When the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released its latest Survey Report on news consumption, entitled Online Papers Modestly Boost Newspaper Readership, you couldn’t blame Rush Limbaugh for boosting it.

The Pew chappies rate Rush Limbaugh listeners most knowledgeable about news, right after readers of the Weekly Standard and The New Republic.

If you believe in Trust but Verify, here is the image direct from the Pew website.

So Rush Limbaugh listeners are not quite the yahoos that liberals imagine. As the Pew reports says:

Judged by their answers to three news knowledge questions, the most informed audiences belong to the political magazines, Rush Limbaugh's radio show, the O'Reilly Factor, news magazines, and online news sources.

But here is a worrying fact. Women are underrepresented as consumers of hard news. This is clearly a consequence of our patriarchal society, all fair-minded people will agree. All over America. little girls are taught not to worry their little heads about hard news. As a result, women clearly gravitate to soft news and feature magazines for their news, as the Pew table shows.

Men dominate the audience not only for sports news but also for news about science and technology, business and finance, and international affairs.



But women greatly outnumber men among those who closely follow news about religion, health, and entertainment.

This is a national problem that has been too long ignored.

What's Next for Conservatives?

In the autumn of the Bush years, conservatives are asking what worked and what comes next. It is clear that compassionate conservatism was a mixed blessing. It obtained tactical successes in winning the support of women and Hispanics, but it released the brakes on federal spending.

And, Andrew E. Busch writes, in issues like education and prescription drugs it conceded massive increases in spending without a corresponding advance in choice and ownership. When Republicans relax their devotion to limited government, they lose. Busch proposes a reinvigorated platform that includes:
— holding the fiscal line on both taxes and spending;


— re-energizing a public philosophy of constitutionalism and limited government;


— supporting a measured cultural traditionalism;


— incrementally introducing mechanisms for greater choice and accountability into existing public programs;


— concerted campaigning in the black and Hispanic communities on the basis of moral and religious standards, as well as entrepreneurship;


— continuing to promote the vitality of civil society

Perhaps the most important area where conservatives can win the support of women, blacks, and Hispanics is in the reform of education. Education is very important to women, especially, and yet they typically do not look at education beyond the immediate necessity of finding the best available option or program for their children within the existing structure.

Recent research on child-raising has strongly suggested that parenting doesn’t make much difference. The two big factors affecting child outcomes are genes and peers. In other words, after selecting their mate, the next biggest decision a parent makes is to select their children’s peer group.

A child’s peer group is the neighborhood children and the children at school.

This means that school choice is a huge issue for parents. If they have no choice in selecting a school for their children then they have no power to select their child’s peer group, and no way to influence this important influence on their child’s life.

This is a way to get the support of women.

Conservatives must advance the idea that, given the vital importance of controling a child’s peer group, it is wrong for the government to take this freedom away from parents. It doesn’t matter whether the school is public, private, religious, or home-school. Parents must have the right to send their child to the school of their choice.

A Dictator Hands Over Power, For Now

So finally General Pinochet, after 47 years as dictator of Chile, yielded power to his ageing brother in the wake of emergency intestinal surgery. It’s true that he ruled with an iron fist, allowed conservative spokesmen, but at least he made Chile the economic powerhouse of South America, made individual Chileans prosperous with his radical pension reform, and exported its wine to all the world.

Oh dear. Wrong dictator! And of course, Gen. Pinochet didn’t rule for half a century. After the coup in which he ended the chaotic rule of Salvador Allende, he put Chile on the road to prosperity and returned it to democracy.

Unlike Fidel Castro. On Monday night, he handed over power, temporarily, to his brother Raúl, as he underwent intestinal surgery. And he put off his 80th birthday celebration till December.

But today, everyone will be delighted to hear, he is feeling better.

Oh yes, he did wonders with education and health care (but how good is that education and health care really? Has anyone ever checked it out?).
But overall, economic growth in Cuba is estimated at minus 0.5 percent per year since 1959. Not that anyone is allowed to do an independent audit of Cuba’s economy.

But the way to think of Cuba’s half-century under dictatorship is to imagine how it would have been reported by our objective MSM if, instead of the lefty hero Castro, it had been ruled by a right-wing thug.

Forget about the extenuating circumstances, the education, the health care, the charm of Old Havana. Dictatorship would have been dictatorship, fascism, red with the blood of its victims: journalists and political human rights activists.

Reader Mail on Seattle's Cult of Victimhood

Things really are as bad as you think in Seattle. My article on the Seattle cult of victimhood inspired several alert readers to send me their thoughts, including these two horror stories.

One reader reports training employees at Seattle City Light in the use of some new equipment. It sounds like a comedy skit, only you are not allowed to laugh at such things.

Of the five City Light employees training on the new equipment, one was African American, one Native American, one Asian American, one woman, and one white male. The Native American wouldn’t use head sets, and needed special accommodation. The woman militantly said that several things in the equipment would have to be changed to accommodate her. The Asian American asked a few questions and quickly learned how to used the new equipment. The African American was “an old hand” who already knew the basics pretty well. The white male was the supervisor who said that he was fed up, but couldn’t walk away from the money.

Another exasperated reader sent me the definitions of Racism, Cultural Racism, and Institutional Racism that the staff of the Seattle School District’s equity and race relations staff had posted on the district’s website. It was the extreme left-wing victim-enabling stuff you would expect.

Since Cultural Racism on the part of whites includes an assumption of “future time orientation,” we can now understand why the Seattle School District lost about $34 million a year or so ago. Hey, obsessive planning and budgeting is so future-oriented and so racist!

Eventually all this stuff is going to fall down, but before it does a lot more people are going to have their lives ruined by Seattle’s victim-enabling culture.

It is going to get worse before it gets better.

A Pause for Optimism

What with TV screens filled with mayhem and panicked pundits screaming that all is lost, it is easy to throw up your hands and lose all hope.

But Michael Barone suggests that all is not lost yet. He uses the model of Thomas Barnett, “who divides the world into a functioning "Core" (North America, Europe, East Asia, rising China and India) and a nonfunctional "Gap" (the Middle East, most of Africa, part of the Andean chain in South America).”

Barnett’s Big Idea is that we should we working to expand the Core and shrink the Gap, expanding the realm of interconnected wealth creation and shrinking the world of thugs and terror.

From Barnett’s point of view things are not going too badly. Says he:

"Plenty of people look at the world today and see only decline and violence and chaos since September 11 [2001]. I am amazed at how little the Functioning Core of globalization has suffered since that date: no real violence or threats of same amidst our ranks, slow but steady political integration that's still not keeping up with the economic bonds that are booming, spotty but emerging sense of shared security values, and the usual pinpricks of harm inflicted by terror and God, but all in all, nothing really bad despite all this 'tumult' centered in the Middle East and the rising price of oil."

The point is that what Marx would call the “productive forces” all weigh in the advantage of the Functioning Core. And if you look at GDPs you will see that the troublemakers of the Gap are all puny players that for now are hitting way above their weight. And if, say, the price of oil fell by 50 percent they would really be in a world of hurt.

(A way to help that along would be to drill for oil in the Arctic and offshore. Just a thought.)

The difference between the Core nations and the Gap nations is the difference between the rule of law and the swing of power. In the Core nations an ordinary person can get ahead by following the rules. In the Gap nations you need a powerful patron.

As the Mexican immigrant said: In Mexico you need to know a politician if you want to get a job. In the US, in most areas of the economy, all you need is right between your ears.

The United States is the richest country in the world because it has the least amount of privilege weighing on its economy.

Eclipse 500 Gets Preliminary Certification

Even as the Mideast goes up in flames, Eclipse Aviation marked a big milestone as the FAA awarded them a preliminary certification on their Eclipse 500 Very Light Jet in a ceremony at Oshkosh, July 28, according to USAToday. For photos and videos of the Eclipse 500 go to their site. Said CEO Vern Rayburn:

"We have looked forward to this monumental accomplishment since Eclipse was founded nearly eight years ago."

The Eclipse 500 weighs in at 3,536 lbs. empty, and 5,920 lbs. maximum take off weight. Its two Pratt & Whitney Canada PW610F turbofans each deliver 900 lbs of takeoff thrust, and provide power to cruise at 375 knots at 41,000 feet.
Range is 1,125 nautical miles.

CEO Vern Rayburn is an ex-Microsoftie, and maybe it is just as well, since Rayburn needed an infusion of cash from Bill Gates when Eclipse’s initial engine contractor Williams International couldn’t deliver.

But Eclipse Aviation has 2,500 orders booked, and air taxi companies eager to offer the nation’s executives on-demand door-to-door service with fleets of the new VLJs.

Coming soon, of course, a HondaJet.

It could change the face of air transportation.