One of the more absurd aspects of multiculturalism is the way that we are in the West are now meant to revere the ‘authentic’ wisdom of those parts of the world still mired in the backward traditions of the past. We swoon at the feet of shamans – basically conmen dressed in twigs. We look for enlightenment from the cults and superstitions of societies that are tens of thousands of years late in escaping the Stone Age.

Well, from the Independent, here’s a contemporary reminder of the barbarism from which the West has emerged (warning: the full text makes very unpleasant reading), albeit imperfectly:

"The practice of muti provides a disconcerting counterpoint to the contemporary image of the new South Africa. Dr Gerard Lubschagne, who heads the investigative psychology unit of the South African police service, conservatively estimates lives lost to ritual murders at between 50 to 300 every year."

Time, I think, to dust off once again my copy of Lord of the Flies, to my mind one of the finest summaries of human nature ever written. And then there’s wise old Tom Hobbes…

One of the more bizarre aspects of the Left these days is the way that it has aligned itself with defenders of hard-line Islam. The motives for this vary – from sheer political devilry, to reflexive hatred of the West, to blind faith in multiculturalism.

Well, this disgusting piece of legislation is a reminder of the company in which today’s ‘progressives’ find themselves:

“A law banning gay sex has come into effect in Zanzibar, with homosexual men threatened with 25-year jail terms and lesbians facing seven-year sentences. "This is what we have been aspiring for. If the government takes such steps, the country will really move ahead," said Sheikh Muhammed Said, a local Islamic leader. The law was brought into effect by President Amani Karume's signature last week, the attorney general's office said. Parliament passed the bill in April. The islands, a semi-autonomous part of Tanzania, are largely Muslim.”

This (according to MEMRI) is from a “journal titled "Al-Jundi Al-Muslim" (The Muslim Soldier), which is published by the Religious Affairs Department of the Saudi armed forces, published an antisemitic article in its "Know Your Enemy" section. The article was written by Ma'ashu Muhammad and was titled "The Jews in the Modern Era."

Read it if you have the stomach.

Know your enemy indeed.

Hat-tip Radley Balko, who also has a great post on what sounds like a terrific example of the finest form of country, bluegrass. Some of the most enjoyable performances of any type of music I’ve ever attended were back in the 1980s in a glorified concrete shack in downtown Nashville called the Bluegrass Inn. Sheer magic.

Hubert Davis (Davies?) and the Seasoned Travelers, if I recall.

There is one exception to the horror that is the Olympics: the delight that is beach volleyball. Who wins, who cares, just watch.

Here’s Sarah Sands in the Daily Telegraph:

”What is political genius is Blair's intuitive championing of an obscure sport that has been the darling of the Olympic Games. Early reports of the Prime Minister's interest in beach volleyball were assumed to be malicious. But volleyball has captured everyone's hearts with its good natured, youthful silliness. I arrived at the crowded port stadium just as the grinning Greek army were being bused in to watch. Beach volleyball is a combination of Club Med and MTV. Cheerleaders in orange bikinis surround the pitch and between games – sometimes between points – there are bursts of rock music (Sweet Home Alabama, Should I Stay or Should I Go etc). The Australians and Canadians in the audience were dancing on their seats. Tony Blair has spent two years as a Prime Minister of war and terror. It is inspired of him to want to bring a little beach volleyball into our lives.”

As I said, the man’s a genius.

As Athens, and other unfortunate cities, have discovered, inviting the Olympic Games to come to town makes about as much sense as praying for a plague of locusts to descend on your back garden.

London, like New York and other lemming cities, is a leader in the race to host this pestilence in 2012. Tony Blair, a shrewd politician if nothing else, is obviously coming to realize that this could mean electoral trouble.

How do I know this? From this story, that’s how:

“Cherie Blair will support London's 2012 Olympic Bid by becoming an ambassador for the project.”

Now Cherie Blair combines the charm of Lady Macbeth, the politics of Nadezhada Krupskaya, the PR skills of Leona Helmsley, the warmth of Hillary Rodham and, to wrap it up in one crystal-draped incanting package, the spiritual insight of Shirley Maclaine.

London’s bid is, therefore, now doomed.

Brilliant, Tony.

I have to confess that, like the Derb, I feel a sense of profound unease about this constant harping on what Kerry did or not do in Vietnam and, um, Cambodia. Has Kerry brought much of this on his head – and his hat – by the emphasis he himself has placed on those four months in his political resume? You bet, but even so…

That said, can we expect the New York Times to follow up its expose of the Swift Boat’s ‘connections’ to the Bush campaign with similar efforts directed at MoveOn and the other 527s on the Left and their possible connections with the Kerry campaign?

Look, I detest MoveOn.org, but I hate campaign finance 'reform' far, far more. So far as can be made out from this remarkably confusing set of comments (via Volokh) the administration seems to have been provoked by the success of the 527s into contemplating yet more restrictions on the right of voters to express themselves. Eugene Volokh is not impressed:

"I certainly hope that the Administration is not indeed calling for "an end" — a legal end, via an extension to the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act — to people pooling resources to express their political views, including their views about candidates. You can call it "soft money," but it's speech, of the sort that political movements such as the antislavery movement, the temperance movement, the civil rights movement, and many other movements (good and bad) have engaged in. Without such speech, who gets to speak effectively, in the large traditional media? The media itself; the parties; and the politicians who have the infrastructure to raise hard money in $2000 chunks; and a few super-rich people (unless they're shut up, too). People who care deeply about a subject, enough to pool even tens of thousands of their dollars with others who care equally strongly, would be shut out."

He's quite right. And that would be wrong.

Of course, the irony of this whole mess is that the 527s were given their big break by McCain-Feingold, a disgraceful piece of legislation signed into law by the President because, we were told, it was a good thing - except where it was unconstitutional, and where it was unconstitutional, we were told, not to worry, the Supreme Court would throw it out, except the court didn't. Intellectually incoherent? Yes. Not really, um, presidential? Yup, that too. Should George Bush have vetoed it? Of course.

Some have argued that, veto power or not, Mr. Bush had no choice other than to sign this law, an argument that ignores the fact that at the time he did so, six months after 9/11, the President remained enormously popular. Others have turned to a different theory. According to this article from MSNBC, Bush's decision to sign was part of a cunning plan: "The increase in the hard money limits on donations to specific candidates was a major reason Bush signed BCRA into law. Republicans knew they had a bigger universe of hard money donors and they figured the doubling of the limits would help them more than it would the Democrats."

Well, if that really was the cunning plan, it was worthy of Baldrick.

The result of Mr. Bush's failure to stick to the rather basic principle that free speech is not something to be rationed by politicians is the mess in which he now finds himself.. Rather than restrict the 527s (something the FEC now appears to be trying to do), the President should call on Congress to repeal, or at least substantially modify, McCain-Feingold. Embarrassing? You bet. Difficult, certainly.

But that's what you get from not having done the right thing in the first place.

It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit, the emotions in the room, the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam, but they did, they relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.

They told their stories. At times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

A correspondent takes issue with my post earlier this week on the subject. (I see Rich Lowry has written a related article.) I'll print it here in quotes, with my responses in brackets:

"Your comments about John Edwards and malpractice are, for you, unusually
uniformed. [Thanks for the qualifier.] You cite a 2003 study as evidence that Edwards did something wrong in the early 1990's. This is wrong for three reasons:

"First, the study appears to be conducted by people with a motive to protect
their field. And even they, according to the Washington Times' description, could only 'cast doubt' on Edwards' winning theory."

[The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists may well have a motive to keep its members in business, unharassed by trial lawyers. They did, however, get the American Academy of Pediatrics to collaborate with them on the report. The report was endorsed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and Australian and Canadian associations of obstetricians and gynecologists.

The study, meanwhile, does more than "cast doubt" on the theory that cerebral palsy is commonly caused by asphyxia due to obstetricians' failures to perform c-sections. It says, "Purely dyskenetic or ataxic cerebral palsy, especially where there is an associated learning difficulty, commonly has a genetic origin and is not caused by intrapartum or peripartum asphyxia." Dr. Murray Goldstein, medical director of the United Cerebral Palsy Research and Educational Foundation, has said that brain damage occurring at the time of delivery is "really quite unusual."

Also worth noting is the fact that the proportion of deliveries done by c-section has risen over the last 35 years, while cerebral-palsy rates have not fallen.]

My correspondent again: "Second, the doctors and their insurers had the opportunity to prove Edwards' science was inaccurate, but they lost. Could it be that Edwards had the better scientific argument? The Washington Times article gives no information about the relative strengths of each side's scientific argument. The readers have no idea how to weigh Edwards' science against the 2003 study."

[Edwards brags about these cases in his book Four Trials. The principal evidence of medical wrongdoing on which he relied came from fetal monitoring readings. The ACOG study's verdict on this kind of evidence: "use of nonreassuring fetal heart rate patterns to predict subsequent cerebral palsy had a 99% false-positive rate." Anyway, Edwards famously won a trial less by presenting scientific evidence than by channeling "messages" from the dead baby for the jury. "Weighing" the evidence from science vs. a seance is unlikely to be fruitful.]

"Third, how can Edwards be faulted in 1995 for failing to anticipate a study
announced in 2003? The legal system must resolve disputes and reach
judgments based on the best evidence available at the time. Litigants and their lawyers don't have the scientist's luxury of postponing a decision for decades for more research."

[Hey, it's not as though the doctor was suing Edwards. The burden of proof was on Edwards to prove that the doctor did wrong, not on the doctor to prove the negative. Many courtrooms would not allow Edwards' quack science and seances to be put forward--they would require that theories of causation to be generally accepted in the relevant professional community, or at least to have been peer-reviewed. The trial bar hates this kind of test, of course, and it may be that judges appointed in a Kerry-Edwards administration would seek to undermine them.]

"I look forward to watching people publicly debate Edwards' cases. If the Right makes them an issue, Edwards will probably be as persuasive with the voters and with the jurors."

[Maybe you're right. Who knows? Here's my bottom line: Edwards shook down North Carolina obstetricians for tens of millions of dollars over diseases that they did not cause and could not have caused. Those millions contributed to higher health-insurance premiums. And the lawsuits drove good doctors out of North Carolina. That Washington Times article suggests that people have died because these suits drove specialists away. In a just world, this man would be--well, let's just say that he would not be vice president of the United States.]

Here's news about an exciting new development - a machine that allows drinkers to inhale liquor instead of drinking it. And why not? I remember once (courtesy of a Finnish company that was celebrating some anniversary or other) ingesting vodka via an aerosol can. You sprayed the vodka onto the roof of your mouth. The results were good, and the knowledge that the aerosol was tearing the ozone to shreds only added to the merriment.

But for those who want to inhale their alcohol, there is a threat on the horizon, one Andrew Spano, 'county executive' of Westchester County, NY, a Democrat. He wants a ban on this technology. The rationale (oh, come on, you know what it's going to be) for this grotesque bit of nannying?

"He worries it will attract underage drinkers."

Yup, yet again, 'The Children".

--Jill McGivering: Well obviously not everyone is trying to migrate but I suppose it also brings in a philosophical question and we did have one question essentially saying basically isn't this a human right, if the quality of your life is to a major extent determined by where you're born isn't economic migration a basic human right?

--Mark Krikorian: Well if it were then the logical conclusion would be that nations are not - there is no concept of a nation state, they're not sovereign and people are free to move wherever they want and that the economic standards in the developed world need to be lowered until they reach the standards of everywhere else in the world. You can take that position, I reject it and I'd have to say that the overwhelming majority of the citizens of the developed world reject that. So it's really a question more of democracy - do the people of the United States or the EU or Japan get to decide what happens to themselves or does someone else decide what happens to their societies? And I vote for democracy, people may vote in a different way.

================================= MEMORANDUM

To: 2L and 3L Students

Re: Offered this Fall - Critical Race Theory: Race, Gender and Sexuality

Professors Mutua and Phillips

This course will explore the distinct but interrelated structures of gender and sexuality through the lens of race. It will also examine the ways in which law defines, shapes and regulates these structures.

Topics include: masculinity, gay marriage, abortion, sexuality and desire, equality and cultural/religious paradigms in the struggle for women's rights, violence, and intersectional, transsexual and transgendered identities.

Course work includes short written assignments.

=================================

I haven't taken many pictures and those I've taken aren't very good.  But here are a few to give you a sense of things. For the first couple weeks we stayed at my sister-in-law's awesome place. Here's the basic view, though picture's can't do it justice because it's so wide and I don't have the skills to do it right.

ME AND LUCY

Here's a picture of me and the wee-one. She's obscured in shadow and I've got my Frankenstein smile going. But she's having a grand time.

COSMO SAYS RELAX

And last, here's Cosmo, who's staying at the big house (the rest of us moved into a very nice cabin  -- which doesn't allow dogs. Grrrr -- after Jess and Lucy returned from Alaska). We see him every day for long walks, deer chasing etc. But it vexes us he can't stay with us. But that's a topic for another day.

Jonah, in your piece today, you talk about the chaos if the color scheme for traffic lights was changed (yes, I focussed on the big issues). In fact, during the Cultural Revolution, this was suggested by some of the more enthusiastic Red Guards. Red as the color of revolution should mean 'go', they said. Chou en Lai talked them out of it. Cunningly, he argued that stopping at red lights indicated respect for the revolutionary order. Who could disagree with that?

Just thought I would pass this on.

There has, remarkably, been a campaign for a few years now to beatify Robert Schuman, one of the two people who can be described as a founding father of what was to become the EU. Noted theologian Jacques Chirac has been pushing this idea, which now seems to have run into opposition from the Vatican. The Daily Telegraph has more, but the most interesting detail is the sinister, and, one hopes, disqualifying fact that Schuman "lived on eggs and lettuce."

For a different view of the religious significance of the EU, go here. It turns out that Brussels is "preparing the base for the prince that shall come", our old friend the Antichrist.

I knew it.

A Bush-Cheney '04 ad released Aug. 13 accuses Kerry of being absent for 76% of the Senate Intelligence Committee's public hearings during the time he served there. The Kerry campaign calls the ad "misleading," so we checked, and Bush is right.

Official records show Kerry not present for at least 76% of public hearings held during his eight years on the panel, and possibly 78% (the record of one hearing is ambiguous).

Kerry points out that most meetings of the Intelligence Committee are closed and attendance records of those meetings aren't public, hinting that his attendance might have been better at the non-public proceedings. But Kerry could ask that his attendance records be made public, and hasn't.

Aides also claimed repeatedly that Kerry had been vice chairman of the intelligence committee, but that was Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, not John Kerry.

From a great piece by Amir Taheri:

The anti-Bush sentiment of the ruling elites in the Middle East is reflected in efforts to screen "Fahrenheit 9/11," Michael Moore's celluloid attack on the U.S. president. Last week, the mullahs running the Farabi Cinema complex in Tehran scrapped the season's program to screen Moore's "documentary."

"This film unmasks the Great Satan America," a spokesman said. "It tells Muslim people why they are right in hating America. It is the duty of every believer to see [this film] and learn the truth."

With the exception of Kuwait, which has banned it, Moore's film is shown or sold in pirated cassette form throughout the Arab world. Anti-American Arab television stations, including one owned by the Lebanese branch of the Hezbollah, have broadcast chunks of Moore's attack on Bush with commentaries more virulent than the original.

The accomplished composer of "The Ten Commandments" and "The Man with the Golden Arm" article has died. This paragraph strikes me as a shame though:

In addition, he scored such movie classics as "The Ten Commandments," "The Magnificent Seven," "To Kill a Mockingbird," "The Great Escape" and "True Grit." Other credits included "National Lampoon's Animal House," "Airplane!," "Stripes," "Meatballs," "Ghostbusters," "Trading Places" and "The Rainmaker."

Clarification: Some readers seem to have missed my point. I think it's a shame Animal House, Stripes and Meatballs don't count as "classics."

"Just over two weeks ago, Senator Kerry talked about the merits of troop realignment in Europe and Asia. 'There are great possibilities open to us,' he said. Yesterday he said it was a bad idea. The one consistency we have seen from Senator Kerry is that he is willing to take any position on any issue if he thinks it will benefit him politically. As we saw yesterday, these political calculations even include his positions on our national security."

Finally, I want to say something about the plan that the President announced on Monday to withdraw 70,000 troops from Asia and Europe. Nobody wants to bring troops home more than those of us who have fought in foreign wars. But it needs to be done at the right time and in a sensible way. This is not that time or that way.

"The overall effort of a president right now ought to be really to try to find ways to reduce the overexposure, in a sense, of America's commitments," Kerry said then. "A proper approach to the Korean peninsula, for instance, should include the deployment of troops, the unresolved issues of the 1950s and ultimately, hopefully, could result in the reduction of American presence, ultimately."

That was the title of the spoof sequel to Soylent Green from Saturday Night Live.

I watched the original Soylent Green last night and I came to a dissapointing conclusion: it's really just a terrible movie. I always loved Soylent Green growing up, but it's really dumb in every significant way. And, as a prediction of the future it couldn't be sillier. I've been reading about the obesity wars lately and to watch a movie dedicated to the notion that --supposedly around the time we are living right now -- few adults will ever have seen an apple is too funny. By the way, it's important to keep in the mind that many of the people who are today policymakers and whatnot grew up believing some of these silly Malthusian horror shows. After all, Paul Ehrlich had predicted in the early 1970s that over 65 million Americans were going to starve to death as part of the global "Great Die Off" which was going to claim over 4 billion people worldwide.

Anyway, I just thought I'd at least like Soylent Green for the campiness of it, instead it mostly just ticked me off.

NAJAF (CNN) -- Intense fighting raged Thursday afternoon around the Imam Ali Mosque, and two of the mosque's minarets have been damaged, according to a CNN producer inside the compound.

But it is unclear if the fighting signaled the start of an Iraq-U.S. offensive against the fighters aligned with Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr -- who is refusing to negotiate on the latest Iraqi government ultimatum because, an aide said, he and his forces want to deal with the Iraqi National Conference delegation and not the interim government.

Iraqi officials have threatened to "liberate" the mosque in a military offensive if al-Sadr and his forces don't leave and disarm.

The interim government said Thursday that al-Sadr must publicly and personally say he is disarming and will stand down, or Iraqi and U.S. forces will take military action against him.

This comes a day after al-Sadr issued a conciliatory statement read at the Iraqi National Conference indicating that he is willing to have his forces disarm and withdraw from the compound.

CNN Producer Kianne Sadeq, who had been inside the mosque compound with other journalists at the invitation of al-Sadr's militia, reported persistent sounds of mortars and gunfire and many explosions. There was a great deal of sniper fire as well, she said

ARE YOU FRUSTRATED THAT THE REPUBLICANS HAVE PAINTED YOU MORE THE PROTESTER THAN THE WARRIOR?

I think they’re pathetic. If George Bush wants to have a debate about what he did versus what I did, I’ll meet him anywhere in the country and we can talk about opposition to the war and fighting in the war.