New York City’s mayor has come out against giving voting rights to non-citizen legal immigrants, something that is, incredibly, being discussed at the moment. The mayor explained that “the essence of citizenship is the right to vote, and you should go about becoming a citizen before you get the right to vote.”

No vote for me, in other words.

Bloomberg’s right, of course, but what’s astonishing is that the debate has moved so far that such a statement of the blindingly obvious is, in fact, controversial.

Meanwhile, self-appointed Latino ‘advocacy’ group, ‘La Raza’, finds it ‘alarming’ that 88 passengers on a domestic flight that arrived in Newark on Thursday were detained as illegal immigrants. Needless to say, La Raza was alarmed by the arrests, not the number of the ‘undocumented’.

Harmless fun for a Saturday afternoon. Browse here. Here’s an extract:

”In GROW, readers can learn about the way forward to life fulfilment for all women. I call it the ‘Feminine Way,’ where women – and men – can live their lives based on feminine values of love, compassion, nurturing, relationship building and community.

”By women working in co-operation with their inner selves, each other, the environment, and all of society, I believe we can create a new kind of world based on love, not fear. And it doesn’t have to be too serious. In GROW you’ll find exercises and stories that contain fun and laughter; experiences that will introduce you to new kinds of wonder and magic; and tools that will guide you into living life to its full potential.

Enjoy.

So, how representative of Shia sentiment is al-Sadr’s army of thugs and fanatics? Obviously, the recent fighting may have radicalized some Shiites since this report was written, but here’s an interesting story from a week ago:

”Herded into lines by inexperienced police officers, hundreds of would-be Iraqi voters pushed into a sparsely equipped school at the weekend to cast their ballots for the local council of Tar.

”Deep in the marshlands of the Euphrates, the town of 15,000 people was the first to rise against Saddam Hussein in the abortive intifada of 1991. Now it was holding the first genuine election in its history.

”The poll was the latest in a series which this overwhelmingly Shia province has held in the past six weeks, and the results have been surprising. Seventeen towns have voted, and in almost every case secular independents and representatives of non-religious parties did better than the Islamists.”

Read the whole thing.

You all probably know this one already, but I came across this quote from Orwell yesterday. He was writing about England’s pro-Soviet intelligentsia. Their secret wish, he wrote, was “to destroy the old, egalitarian vision of socialism and usher in a hierarchical society where an intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip.”

Very true, and, alas, not just of historical interest. If you want to understand why so many on the intellectual Left seem so infatuated with authoritarianism, there it is.

Grim news from Mickey D’s. A report in today’s Financial Times includes this depressing news:

“In another sign of the importance McDonald’s now places on health issues, the fast-food giant will next week unveil a strategy for combating obesity and improving physical well-being in the US…The multi-year plan will promote the importance of a balanced lifestyle, with three “pillars” including helping people make better food choices, and promoting public education and physical activity.”

McDonald’s can take their three pillars and shove ‘em. If I want a sermon, I’ll go to church, or listen to NPR. McDonald’s should stick to selling food.

And no, if this is a strategy to head off litigation, it won’t work.

TAP: Do you think that Democrats will be able to attract Bible-believing Christians in a year that gay marriage will be used as a smokescreen to distract attention from those issues?

Carter: I think so. There isn’t a major candidate who has endorsed gay marriage; they are in favor of equal protection through a civil-union arrangement. I personally, in my Sunday-school lessons, don’t favor the religious endorsement of a gay marriage. But I do favor equal treatment under the law for people who differ from me in sexual orientation.

Well, here is a moment of true madness. Mo Mowlam, a former minister in Tony Blair’s government, is now suggesting that the British and American governments should start talks with al Qaeda. She’ll be, rightly, ignored, but her comments are still interesting for what they reveal about the views of certain sections of the European Left. Strip away its skilful use of modern technology, and Al Qaeda is, in essence, a psychotic millenarian sect, nothing more. Its ‘philosophy’ is primitive and malicious junk, a compendium of the ramblings of half-crazed ‘holy men’ and a debased Arab nationalism. Its ‘demands’ are for a world put back a thousand years. To believe that there is anything to ‘talk’ to it about is, quite simply, delusional.

Next time, Ms. Mowlam should aim for something a little more realistic.

‘Talks’ with Charles Manson might be a start.

Relentlessly, depressingly, appallingly, big law’s attack on ‘big food’ draws ever closer. The New York Times has more. Amongst the villains mentioned in the piece are John F. Banzhaf, the thug now disgracing George Washington University law school, and one Richard M. Daynard, a busybody who presides over the presumptuously and pompously named ‘Public Health Advocacy Institute’ of Northeastern University School of Law, a bullyboy collective dedicated to reminding Americans that “as we enter the 21st century, practitioners and policymakers are being confronted with problems where individualistic modes of analysis are simply inadequate.”

When “individualistic modes of analysis” are deemed “inadequate” expect a mention of ‘the children’.

Daynard, needless to say, does not disappoint:

"If I could choose what kind of case to begin with, it would have been that, under state consumer protection acts against somebody who was continuing to market heavily to kids…"

Of course he would.

It seems so.

Vote Res Publica

Civil Rights Commissioners Leave Meeting in Protest

Today, four commissioners of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights walked out of their monthly meeting in protest after Chairperson Mary Frances Berry refused to allow a discussion of the staff director’s unauthorized attempt to reorganize the agency.

The protesting commissioners issued the following statements:

"We were blind-sided by the staff director’s improper action," said Commissioner Peter N. Kirsanow.

"In leaving we missed an important discussion of voting rights and election reform. We meant no disrespect to the topic or the panelists. But, we could not tolerate chairperson Berry’s anti-democratic refusal to allow discussion of this vital policy and personnel matter. This is yet another example of the Commission’s dysfunction, which is well-documented by responsible entities such as the General Accounting Office as recently as October 2003," said Commissioner Abigail Thernstrom.

"In the last three months, in none of our detailed discussions about project plans and proposals, did the staff director ever hint at the need for a staff reduction or in any way suggest he was preparing a reorganization plan to submit to the Office of Personnel Management. His attempt at an unauthorized reorganization goes to the heart of the commission’s ability to fulfill its statutory as well as ethical obligations. It could adversely affect the hardworking career staff of the commission. Moreover, it could jeopardize the timely completion of key projects on topics such as the Evaluation of the Bush Administration’s Civil Rights Record, Education Accountability, and other future commission reports," added Commissioner Russell G. Redenbaugh.

"The Commission must be reformed, but today we have no confidence that it can reform itself," concluded Commissioner Jennifer C. Braceras.

Greg Easterbrook has a very good "what if?" scenario (with no mention of Uatu, the Watcher narrator of the Marvel Comics "What If?" series). He speculates on the consequences of George Bush launching a war against Afghanistan prior to 9/11.

He could just as easily do one on the nationwide freak-out if John Ashcroft had asked the country for the power to search email, use "sneak-and-peak" warrants on Muslim-Americans etc prior to 9/11. Look how the left and the Democrats -- and I do mean "the Democrats" given their nigh-upon unanimous fear-mongering on the Patriot Act -- reacted to similar requests after 9/11.

A few years ago a French fascist (oh yes, he claims to be a man of the Left, but a fascist is what he is), by the name of Jose Bove trashed a McDonalds somewhere in France. He, it appeared, had the right to tell others what they could, or could not, eat. The French establishment quivered, the Left cheered, and guess what happened?

He lost.

“McDonald's France reported 2003 revenue approaching $3 billion and is the most profitable subsidiary in Europe. It is opening 40 more restaurants in 2004, 10 percent of the chain's new outlets worldwide.”

Ha!

Lots of folks are raising the possibility that the Japanese hostages are faking it. One of them is an anti-war activist, another is an NGO type and the third is a reporter. I really hope that this is a hoax because, duh, I don't want to see innocent folks get burned alive. It would also highlight what tools Al Jazeera are of terrorists and what tools some anti-war activists are in general. If this is a hoax these guys should obviously go to jail for a very long time. But I tend to doubt it is a fabrication. The joke will certainly be on these guys at the end of three days if it is, because there will be a lot of terrorist types who will realize they have a lot to lose if they don't go through with it, which is all the more reason to salute the resolve of the Japanese government.

I was sitting in therapy describing an in-law I like, and quickly heading for a "but."

"He's a loving, caring, selfless man -- but his politics are all about hatred," I said. "He's not educated, and more significant, he's ignorant -- he actually listens to Rush Limbaugh."

Lots of readers make the perfectly legitimate point that al Jazeera is for all intents and purposes complicit in the crime of the Japanese kidnapping and, certainly, if these poor people are burned alive then al Jazeera are accomplices. One wonder if they would send a camera crew to the event.

From a reader:

Jonah:

First time, long time, etc…

Re: Really, really bad. What exactly is bad about it? Yes, it would be terrible for the innocents to suffer a horrible death, but I am convinced that such an act does nothing more than proclaim how utterly uncivilized the evildoers really are. The fact that they are even dangling the threat is evidence enough of the correctness of our policy. These people are complete wackos! It is self-evident that any policy other than extermination/reform is pointless. The terrorists can not be reasoned with. They can not be negotiated with. They can not be mollified.

Thankfully, unlike the Spanish, most Americans are [not] going to be bullied. Not after 9/11.

From an attendee:

Jonah, I wanted to pass on to you how much I thoroughly enjoyed your talk this evening. I have always respected your political persuasiveness, and now have to add to that a spectacular sense of humor. I haven't laughed so much since going to the Comedy Zone. Anyway, thanks again for your time this evening, and don't forget to scratch Cosmo's ears. My Labrador demands it of you (and he, too, is glad winter is over....those Jacobin squirrels are more active now). Come on back anytime.

This is really, really bad:

Iraqi militants are today threatening to burn three foreign hostages to death unless their country quits the US-led coalition.

Two Japanese men and one woman are being held by a previously unknown group which has vowed to kill them if Japanese soldiers do not leave Iraq. Elsewhere, seven South Koreans are being held hostage west of Baghdad by an unknown group, while a British man has been reported missing in the south.

The plight of the Japanese hostages - two aid workers and one journalist was revealed in dramatic video footage shown on al-Jazeera TV. It showed the three surrounded by masked gunmen, who claimed to be from Saraya al-Mujahideen, "the squadrons of holy warriors".

A written statement said: "Three of your sons have fallen in our hands. We offer you two choices: either pull out your forces, or we will burn them alive.

We give you three days starting the day this tape is broadcast."

Nineteen-five was also a great year for Mankind.... That winter, Frank Epperson, then 11 years old, accidentally invented the Popsicle when he left powdered soda pop mix and water outside overnight. It was originally called the "Epperson Icicle" and was patented in 1923.

Science is a beautiful thing.

From one my non-drinking buddies from last night:

I'm inclined to agree with the fellow who emailed you regarding this issue; there are a few students here who would gladly drink if they were legal, but alas, the government has intervened against such law-abiding citizens. The law hasn't convinced such people that drinking is wrong; they just respect the law too much to imbibe alcohol. And recall, the group of people who choose not to drink because of the law are far from representative of college students as a whole -- or even of Davidson College students. And I can personally assure Rod Dreher you're not lying.

I believe Chairman Tom Kean and Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton will lead our commission to write a bipartisan report that will provide Americans with the clearest picture yet of how this happened. I believe they will lead the commission to produce a report that will contain specific recommendations of what we need to do to make certain that nothing like the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, ever happens again.

As a member of the commission, authorized under federal law as a consequence of the persistence and perseverance of the families of the victims of that terrible day, I sincerely hope our efforts will meet their highest expectations.

Today's appearance of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice will test the commission's resilience to the partisan pressures which threaten to collapse the goodwill needed to achieve consensus. Among the most dangerous forces is the tendency in politics to become personal and question motives instead of confronting the substance of the argument made by any individual. If we yield to this tendency, all hope for an honest and constructive report is lost. We will most certainly fail.

One of the big problems with Einstein's General and Special Theories of Relativity has always been our ability to test them. In fact, Einstein won the Nobel Prize for his work on the photoelectric effect, not relativity, because nobody at the time could test such things (1905, by the way, was a good year for Einstein -- he published work on relativity, explained the photoelectric effect using the wave interpretation of light photons, and invented the theory of Brownian motion).

Subsequently, we've been slowly able to test some of the assumptions about relativity. These have included deflections of the positions of stars by the Sun's gravity, aberrations in the orbit of the planet Mercury, and gravatational lensing by extremely heavy objects. In fact, the GPS system wouldn't work without relativity -- all the positions and times would be off.

The fundamental problem with testing relativity lies in the fact that it deals with extreme situations -- high energy and large mass. These are conditions that are difficult to replicate, as we can't just whip up neutron stars in a test tube. To measure the effects of relativity on Earth, we need extremely precise measuring equipment, again not a trivial feat.

There are a lot of things that to date, we can't explain, which suggests that relativity may not be complete, or that our interpretations of it are not correct. For example, if you're familiar with the whole dark matter/energy debate, some suggest that our inability to explain things is primarily the fault of an incomplete understanding of relativity and gravitation (there are other explanations, too).

So, suffice it to say, there's more testing to do. Which, of course, seems to be a scientist's answer to anything. :)

From a reader:

Jonah,

I am disinclined to accept the cognitive realignment that you eschewed on
your morning reflections. I would propose that the phenomenon to which you
were a witness was not a manifestation of cultural changes duly caused by
the writ of legislative authority. Rather, you experienced a more profound
oddity: College students respecting said authority regardless of whether or
not it aligned with their worldview. If this is not the heart of
conservative values, what is?

I might write about this later when the transcripts are available, but from listening to this constant back-and-forth between the Democrats and Rice on the August 6 PDB it sounds like the Democrats want to assert that it said there was an imminent threat to the American homeland by al Qaeda. Rice, it seems, wants to claim that the PDB only laid out a general, non-specific, but definitely not imminent threat. Of course Bin Laden wanted to attack America, goes Rice's reading of the PDB, but the specific threats were vague and un-"actionable."

Again, I'd need to study this a bit more. But it sounds like the Democrats want a standard for imminence about the threat from pre-9/11 al Qaeda that they were unwilling to grant for post-9/11 Iraq. Do I have this right?

Afterwards, as is often my wont after a speech, I sought merriment and libation with the youth (note to campus conservatives groups: post-oratory drinks with Jonah is part of the standard Goldberg-speaker-package!). The gang from the College Republicans and other like-minded youth repaired to the guest house. While this was a standard chips-and-soda fete, one young man of courage and conviction was willing to search out the medicinal liquids I required. He had only recently had his cast removed from a wrestling injury and he was eager to muster his new locomotive power in the cause of responsible potation. I shall ever be in his debt.

Anyway, while I was imbibing my beverage(s) along with the few young scholars of legal drinking age, a couple of the guys brought an interesting cultural development to my attention. Several of the young squires under the age of 21 informed me that they don’t drink because it is against the law. One very bright fellow in particular assured me that when he’s 21 he will avail himself of legal inebriants, but until that time he did his very best to eschew the demon rum (and scotch and beer etc). He also assured me that he was not alone in this attitudinal forbearance of illegal imbibition.

Now, personally, I find this fascinating and completely beyond the scope of my experience. I’ve met all sorts of college kids (and others) who don’t drink because they don’t want to. I’ve met college kids who don’t drink due to religious considerations, academic priorities, medical or family history, preferences for certain ignitable greenery, whatever. I respect all of those choices.

Until last night, I had never met anybody who said that they don’t drink because the law says they shouldn’t. I’m trying hard not to mock or be condescending because these were good dudes and seemed pretty normal. And, there's really no reason on the merits to mock. Still, I am torn between two conflicting impulses. On the one hand the Bluto Blutarsky in me wanted to smash a beer can on my head and say, Have a beer, don’t cost nuthin.

On the other hand, on paper this is all perfectly reasonable and even, I suppose, admirable. It’s entirely plausible to me that I am in the wrong for having been so flabbergasted. But, I associate college so much with social drinking; I have such an ingrained and generalized contempt for the 21 drinking age; and I’ve simply never met anybody who used this explanation before, let alone heard that this is a fairly widely held attitude among college students. It makes me rethink the power of the law to shape culture in America.

The Iraqis, that’s who.

Usually, condescending leftists and liberals respond to pro-globalization conservatives and libertarians by saying that Third Worlders and the like are perfectly capable of deciding what is in their own interests. If they don’t want to give up their traditional lifestyles, they’ll say, who are we to say they should. It’s a fair argument, though I’m often stunned by their hypocrisy since these are usually the exact same people who advocate purging any hint of traditionalism in our own society. Living in misery and poverty is a cherished tradition in, say, Guatemala but holding a door open for a woman or, heaven forbid, mothers staying home to raise children is a sign of anarchic bigotry in our own culture.

Whatever.

But in the case of Iraq not even this condescending cognitive dissonance applies. The people seeking power through violence in Iraq, much like the government of Saddam Hussein before them, do not represent the popular desires of the majority of Iraqis. At least that’s what we’ve been lead to believe by countless polls and the testimonials of all sorts aid workers, soldiers, diplomats and lefty human rights groups. Moreover, whether most Iraqis agree with Moktada al-Sadr or not is almost beside the point. Any reasonable person, on the left or right, has to agree that civil war and chaos is not in the long term interests of the Iraqi people. The Americans are committed to reconstruction, democratization and prosperity of Iraq. Shooting Americans and each other doesn’t help that process – and it’s wrong, of course. In others words, you can make the case that it’s in America’s interests to bug out of Iraq, it’s virtually impossible to make a reasonable case that it’s in Iraq’s interests for America to bug out.

So, when we talk about how the US should have done this or that, or how the Bush administration has botched or blown one thing or another, let’s also keep in mind that according to literally any rational set of criteria, laid or by the left or the right, the Iraqi people are the ones who are blowing it the most – both the ones shooting in the streets and the ones hiding in their homes. Sure, they’ve got reasons and excuses, including having been brutalized, propagandized and badly educated, but those excuses don’t change the fact that “blaming the victim” in a sense is appropriate. The Iraqis, broadly speaking, are fools for doing what they’re doing right now. And the only way to see it otherwise, it seems to me, is if you do not subscribe to the view that Iraqis are rational people.

When Leonard Schiff was Chair of the Physics Department in 1960, three years after Sputnik, he suggested that it should be possible to make two new tests of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity by observations on gyroscopes in a satellite in orbit around the Earth....

Schiff calculated that, according to General Relativity, a gyroscope in a 650 km polar orbit, should experience two distinct relativistic precession effects: (1) in the orbital plane a geodetic precession of 6.6 arcsec/yr; (2) at right angles to the orbital plane a frame-dragging precession of 0.042 arcsec/yr due to the Earth's rotation. GP-B aims at measuring each of these effects in each of four independent gyroscopes to an accuracy of 0.0002 arcsec/yr per gyroscope. This minute number (0.0002 arcsec) corresponds to the width of a human hair seen at a distance of 15 miles.