From the Associated Press:

JERUSALEM — Iran said Tuesday it would send a blockade-busting ship carrying aid and pro-Palestinian activists to Gaza, fueling concern in Israel, where commandos were training for another possible confrontation at sea.

There is no argument--none--that humanitarian supplies need to be delivered to Gaza by sea. Not when Israel has just loosened the blockade, permitting a wider array of materials to enter Gaza by land. Iran is instead engaging in a naked provocation. No doubt Teheran is happy enough to place pressure on Tel Aviv, but surely the mullah's principal target is Washington. President Obama has so far dedicated his administration to apologizing for American policy in the Middle East, pursuing utterly ineffectual diplomatic efforts to dissuade Iran from developing nuclear weapons, and placing increasing pressures on Israel. Now the mullahs have devised a neat probe. Just how far, they want to discover, will the Obama administration permit them to go?

Secretary of State Clinton should call an immediate press conference, reading a statement of forthright support for Israel, and stating, unambiguously, that the United States will refuse to tolerate this Iranian provocation. And then--what I hope is already happening--the Sixth Fleet should dispose of its forces so as to prove that we mean it.

Can poor foreigners save Detroit? It's a provocative question that Matt Yglesias poses, and there's a certain bent appeal to his logic:

There are clearly insurmountable logistical, legal, practical, constitutional, and political obstacles to doing this but I can’t help but think that with 165 million people around the world telling Gallup they’d like to permanently relocate to the United States that it would be possible to find 1.3 million people who’d be interested in permanently relocating to Detroit and bringing the city back up to its peak population level. Economic and governance opportunities in Detroit are poor by American standards (or even by Italian standards) but they’re great compared to what you’ll find in Haiti, Gaza, Myanmar, Chad, or Nicaragua.

Or Mexico! Of course, millions want to live in America forever but nobody wants to permanently relocate to Detroit. A more serious problem is that dreaming of the restoration of 'peak Detroit' is sort of like dreaming for the restoration of Greater Bulgaria -- perhaps even stranger, because there's no ethnonationalist rise to get out of a bigger Detroit. There's just a bigger Detroit. Presumably in Matt's mind the numbers would connect up with a restoration of Detroit's economic productivity and quality of life. But why? Maybe they'd head toward the level of Haiti's or Gaza's instead.

On the other hand, maybe America still offers the kind of opportunity that turns former residents of doomed regions into hardworking winners. The sad spectacle of Detroit suggests that's not the case. But Detroit is badly misleading, because Detroit has been captive to a crushing (liberal-approved) agenda of unearned government dollars and public-sector corruption for decades. That's not the only reason Detroit is on the skids. But it's a powerful, perhaps dominant, contributing factor. All the luck and pluck in the world won't make winners out of immigrants condemned to eke out an existence under that kind of yoke. Before we think about sending the foreigners in, it's time to think about rooting the government rot out.

We have a commander-in-chief whose judgment elicits no respect from his commander on the ground, and a commander on the ground whose judgment is so bad that he would gripe on the record in, of all places, Rolling Stone. But we're stuck with the one. And as for the other, I doubt the Pentagon could find any replacement who would elicit the same loyalty among our troops, or possess the same wealth of operational knowledge. When the two meet tomorrow, then, a suggestion:

General McChrystal should offer his resignation.

And President Obama should decline it.

From the lead editorial in the current issue of The Economist, "Obama v BP":

Mr. Obama said he was looking for arses to kick. After the macho rhetoric came the demands for cash. Mr. Obama decided to "inform" BP that it must put adequate funds to meet all compensation claims into an escrow account beyond its control, although he has no authority to do so....Corporate America, normally quick to resist government intrusion, has kept strangely silent....

Corporate America, "normally quick" to push back against government? Now "strangely silent?" This is silly.

Corporate America long ago--and I mean decades ago--figured out how to cozy up to the federal government, using the various regulatory agencies to its own advantage. In his 1988 book, The Power Game, Hedrick Smith dissected the interlocking relationship between regulatory agencies, the congressional committees that oversee them, and the industries they regulate. Later that same year, President Reagan addressed the same phenomenon. "Administrations come and go," he said just a few weeks before leaving office, "but the members of the iron triangle endure....[T]he iron triangle's power...comes from its ability to focus debate and overwhelming resources...on issues that don't command broad and intense national attention." Which is why virtually every corporation in America spends gobs on Washington lobbyists year in and year out.

The Obama administration was looking for arses to kick for a long time before the oil leak. It kicked the arses of bankers. Then it kicked the arses of automakers, particularly of GM. Then it kicked the arses of bankers again. The response of corporate America? Complete and utter supineness. Really, I've Googled all over, searching for a major banker or an auto executive who stood up to the Obama administration in public. I've been unable to find a single one. Not one. After decades of cozy relations with the federal government, corporate America is simply suffering the chief executive in silence, calculating that his tantrums will pass--but that the willingness of the federal government to enforce the corporate status quo, helping behemoths ward off upstarts and challengers, is a thing of underlying permanence.

As I say, Hedrick Smith and Ronald Reagan had this figured out more than two decades ago. You'd have thought The Economist would have twigged to it by now.

Take some time today to read the profile that has Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of US forces in Afghanistan, in so much trouble.

What disturbed me about the piece was not so much McChrystal's comments on the civilian leadership -- that conflict goes back to last summer -- but the signs that his strategy might not be counterinsurgency in the Iraq mold. I've heard from soldiers in Afghanistan that McChrystal's rules of engagement are hampering the coalition's ability to confront and defeat the enemy -- a criticism explored at length in the Rolling Stone article. And I've heard from foreign policy experts in D.C. that McChrystal may be too enthralled by his love of special forces to appreciate the importance population security plays in successful counterinsurgency operations -- a conjecture sustained by the profile's description of McChrystal's ever-changing plans for Kandahar.

So the profile is disturbing on several levels -- not least of which is the total absence of judgment displayed by McChrystal's cooperation with Rolling Stone in the first place.

That's the motto of North Carolina. To Be, Rather Than To Seem. I may get this as a tattoo. No, you may not laugh. Too often, the whole country seems to have the reverse tattooed on the inside of our national eyelids, or deep inside the national hippocampus. So I applaud Jason Horowitz and Matt Welch for taking our political obsession with "narrative," or what seems rather than what is, down a peg. Right now I'm reading Up From Liberalism, wherein Our Hero complains that liberalism is all about method at the expense of substance, because it holds that nothing really is, so all we can learn is how things seem. When Obama's critics adopt this approach to flogging the president, something rotten ensues. Horowitz:

The plume of crude rising from the seabed is not only the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, darkening the gulf and thousands of lives and pervading the nation with a sense of helplessness, it is a metaphor for Obama's loss of control, a revealing moment to study our protagonist. Will he feel the seafarer's pain? Will he shake with fury? Will he weep tears into the salty sea? Sing to me, Muse, of the wrath of Washington's Achilles.

Yep, there's that phrase again -- sense of helplessness, as opposed to really being helpless, which assuredly we are not. Our sense of helplessness, no doubt, is deepened by a federal bureaucracy which is actually counteracting the ability of proactive locals to help themselves. But at the same time, Horowitz is right that we are suckers for senses of things. They make us less accountable to ourselves: who cares what's really happening to me -- what matters is how we feel! Notice how both verb and subject undergo a metamorphosis. Welch remarks:

Narrative obsession is what happens when facts and public policies are too hard to sort through. Meta is an abdication of micro, and a perpetuator of lazy generalizations and outright falsehoods, for which we all suffer.

But careful: seeking solace in wonkitude -- in policy microanalysis, in data, in technical expertise -- steers us clear of one set of perils and plunges us into another. We make a huge mistake to imagine that there is no alternative to politics as theater other than politics as engineering. Rather than art or science ruling politics, we can turn to philosophy to educate politics. Philosophy, in fact, is dedicated -- or at least classical philosophy is -- to the task of separating out what is from what merely seems to be. Welch would pit postmodern narrative against modern science, championing the latter and pretending as if a third option, classical wisdom, did not exist. And Horowitz worsens matters by reducing the classical view -- bye bye Socrates -- to the pagan poetry of Homer.

The ultimate sense of helplessness, as Hamlet explained, was to no longer know what is and what isn't. To be, in such dire straits, is to be unsure whether to be. And the foundation of governance, including self-governance, is to say, as Hamlet said in one of his better moments:

Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not 'seems.'

In Hamlet, the grown-up scientific alternative to Hamlet's undergraduate narrative obsession was the courtroom and backroom politicking of Polonius and Claudius, more monstrous compartmentalizers than Clinton and more devoted micromanagers than Carter. They were experts at sorting through public as well as private policies which perpetuated outright falsehoods -- falsehoods from which all of Denmark suffered dearly. Neither Hamlet's histrionic politics nor the calculating politics of his uncle and his uncle's retainer cast light on what was most needful: a recovered recognition of the true order of things. That is where philosophy comes in. Without a philosophical education for our politics, we are doomed to exhaust ourselves obsessing over seeming and senses of things.

McChrystal Apologizes for Remarks

International Relations and Zombies

Nebraska Town Votes to Banish Illegal Immigration

Obama Increasingly Isolated On Economic Policy

California's Preposterous License Plate Ad Scheme

Invite Immigrants to Rebuild Detroit?

Conservatism and the Quest for Community

Why We Care More About Narrative Than Facts

Good Morning America reported this morning that Eric Holder was planning to sue AZ over their immigration bill, on the grounds that it had the appearance of discrimination. Hard to believe the Justice Department would think that was a legal standard, but if they do, can we go after Eric Holder for the appearance of political bias in the execution of his duties?

In an earlier comment thread, a contributor made a light-hearted comment about sending a "Free Kurdistan" flotilla to Turkey. I know it was a joke. But the PKK killed four people in Istanbul this morning with a roadside bomb. Could have been me, could have been anyone. They set off a sound bomb in my neighborhood, too. The PKK are terrorists -- Maoist lunatics seeking an "ethnically pure" Kurdish state; and believe me, if they get one, the first thing they'll do is turn the place into Cambodia circa 1975. They're the scum of the earth. Helping them in any way would be exactly as funny as helping Hamas, no matter what point someone's trying to prove.

They both really know how to use Facebook.

Admit it. You miss him.

At Volokh, Jonathan Adler comments on the weekend's annual convention of the American Constitution Society:

executive director Caroline Fredrickson reportedly characterized originalism as a “choking weed,” part of a “noxious brew” of ideology promoted by the Federalist Society.  Was this remark a categorical rejection of originalism, or simply a rejection of those modes of originalism employed by conservatives?

I was not at the ACS meeting, although to the credit of its organizers, I was invited to speak there, but had to bow out because of a prior commitment. Nonetheless, I think I would have plotzed if I had heard that remark, and for two reasons. First, the political impulse that lies behind the remark, which is a philosophy that has gotten us into so much trouble to begin with. Strong government that takes over the operation of the economy and then imposes restriction on political speech that is intended to prevent criticisms during electoral periods. Clearly Citizens United is the cause celebre that drives this analysis. 

Second is the utterly primitive view of what originalism actually means. The forms of interpretation at use at the time of the founding did not address solely the issue of what meaning should attach to particular words, although that is clearly part of the exercise. No one could with a straight face say that commerce includes manufacture, agriculture and mining, which is of course the basis of much of federal jurisdiction today. But interpretation for an originalist has to embrace more. There are questions in particular of the police power justifications for the limitations on individual liberty. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom to incite a riot, as we have said. 

We can try to parse the words, but in the end we need a robust theory of justifications for government actions, which drives us back to libertarian theory. The need to suppress force and fraud are only the most obvious limitations on speech that we can devise.  It is easy to caricature a theory if you do your level best to put it forward in its worst possible light.

It's happened. The World Cup has me hooked. I still feel the same odd ache of deprivation watching soccer that I feel watching ballet--during ballet, Why doesn't anybody ever say anything? And, during soccer, Why doesn't somebody just pick the ball up and run with it?--but now I've witnessed Argentina's Lionel Messi. At 5'6", Messi represents as amazing an athlete as you'll see. In any sport. Ever. Skill, determination, sheer joy in the game, the speed and unexpectedness of his moves. There he is, playing game after game with the best players in the world, and yet Messi demonstrates an effortless superiority over the field.

Just get a load of this:

This week at National Review, five new chapters of Uncommon Knowledge featuring Peter, Rob, and Mark.  The Ricochet Triumvirate listen to Ronald Reagan's 1964 speech, "A Time for Choosing," and discuss its relevance today.   

Jonah makes a vital point over at NRO:

Scientists are technicians, not moral philosophers. While they can provide facts that inform good decision-making, they can’t distill morality in a test tube. Politicians shouldn’t abdicate to the guys in white coats their responsibilities to answer moral questions the white-coats can’t answer.

We see a sort of Displaced Expertise Syndrome at play all over -- quick: how long since you've seen a talented actor holding forth in a quasi-official capacity on the details of, say, foreign affairs? -- but nowhere more than in the generalized deference to the Scientist; even when the scientist is out of his depth, speaking gobbledegook, or worse.

At Megan's, Courtney Knapp does a little internet research:

The soccer world is still buzzing about referee Koman Coulibaly's nullification of a USA goal in last week's match against Slovenia. [...] Coulibaly's decision has been discussed, dissected and derided. [...] I'd point you to relevant footage from the match, but FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) has blocked video of the nullified goal. If you try to watch on YouTube you receive the following message: "This video contains content from FIFA, who has blocked it on copyright grounds."

Over at his Serious Medicine Strategy blog, Jim Pinkerton -- who I hope will be a Ricochet contributor soon -- knits together two things we've been talking about here on Ricochet: America's declining position as the world's great entrepreneurial engine; and the small-time thinking of Obamacare:

Let the Democrats own the redistribution of health-care dollars and the management of scarcity; Republicans have a chance to own the much more powerful issue of solving health problems.

Rather than running up a $1 trillion bill, as Obamacare will do, such a strategy promises actually to add to the national wealth.... Already we have seen cost crashes in many health sectors: Treatment for heart attacks, for instance, was always expensive, as was open-heart surgery. Then came stents, statin drugs, and angioplasties. Now heart disease is cheaper to treat — but that treatment became cheaper only after lots of R&D investment was made in response to strong consumer demand. Which is to say, cardiac care became cheaper because we spent more on it, not less.

Along the way, health care has become a big business, giving profits and jobs to millions of Americans. In the United States today, health care provides 14.3 million jobs; ten of the 20 fastest-growing occupations are health-related. And the United States enjoys a major comparative advantage in health care: Already, we take in some $5 billion a year from medical tourism, as well-off foreigners visit us for access to the best medical care the world has to offer. Health care is what economists call a “superior good,” meaning that its consumption rises with income, or even faster than income. As new middle classes spring up in China and India, we have the opportunity to sell to the world ten times, or a hundred times, the $5 billion worth we already are selling.

Interesting idea.

I confess: I just ate an apple that came from Chile. It looked like this:

It was tart, crisp, with just a hint of carbon footprint to it. Actually, a couple years ago, there was a piece in Reason citing evidence that it takes less energy to import apples than it does to keep them in cold storage locally. Of course, the global warming mafia will argue that one just shouldn't eat fruit out of season, period. I say: what's the point of having an advanced economy if I can't eat apples year-round? Am I being too selfish here?

Pretty amazing:

One piece of good news from our Supreme Court, which has been one of the obstacles over the last five years to a a more effective counter-terrorism policy. Today, in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project (I love the case name), the Court declared that Congress and the President could make it a federal crime to provide "material support" or resources to a terrorist group -- here the plaintiffs claimed that they wanted to provide money, "legal training, and political advocacy" to Kurdish and Sri Lankan terrorist groups. The plaintiffs, of course, claimed that all of this was protected by the First Amendment -- under their theory, I suppose, Hitler could have set up a pro-Nazi lobbying group in the United States, or Saddam Hussein could have run a group out of DC to litigate against the Gulf War. An example of how the courts have run riot -- these kinds of arguments proved convincing in the federal appeals court in San Francisco.

The most important insight that the Court accepted was that terrorist groups do indeed benefit overall, even when people contribute for supposedly peaceful "wings" of the terrorist group that engage in non-violent activities, like running hospitals and schools. Terrorist groups don't segregate their activities as much as they would have us believe, and giving them money in one area simply frees up resources to go to their violent activities. Who knows? Next the Supreme Court may decide that it is OK to shoot missiles at al Qaeda leaders abroad.

To the Obama administration's (and Elena Kagan's) credit, it defended the constitutionality of the statute. I confess not to being a disinterested party -- I helped file an amicus brief in the Court on the side of the government, because I doubted whether they would fully defend the government's power to wage war.

Get me out of the gloom and doom. Are there any “positive developments” in the world today?

On Saturday night at the grocery store, (yes, that’s how Mommy rolls) I was in line behind a very impatient young man. When the woman ringing him up didn’t move fast enough, he huffed. When she handed him his receipt, he snatched it out of her hand and marched off. I was incensed! I stared with disbelief and sympathy at the hurt woman.

“Wow, he must be having a bad day,” I said, hoping to comfort her.

“Yeah. He’s a fa**ot!!” she said. “Somebody’s gonna get that fa**ot.”

Say what?!? I was so shocked, I nearly forgot the PIN for my debit card. I grabbed my groceries and dashed off without looking up.

Then, I come home and read this, about a traffic jam on a bridge in England. The jam was caused by the police response to a man threatening to jump. As they tried to convince him that his life was worth saving, angry and frustrated drivers screamed, “Jump, you ----er” and “Jump, you b-----.”

Alas, eventually, the man did. To his death.

Then, I read Claire’s piece in the Weekly Standard. The world’s going to pot. Right? Can someone cheer me up?

It took a week, but I'm finally finished with an analysis of the Tea Party for the new Weekly Standard. Check it out!

The article discusses (and critiques) Glenn Beck at some length. But I forgot to mention that Beck has done us all a favor by re-igniting the reading public's interest in Freidrich Hayek. Beck's endorsement of the Road to Serfdom has led this 60-plus-year-old book to become an Amazon.com bestseller.

Now, I would have preferred if Beck had endorsed Hayek's Constitution of Liberty or Fatal Conceit instead. But maybe Road to Serfdom will serve as a gateway to those other books. In any case, for those of you who don't have time to read the Road to Serfdom, check out the Road to Serfdom comic book. And here I thought the 9/11 Commission Report was the first "serious" political book to get the graphic novel treatment. ...

I was struck by something in Michael Barone's column this morning. Referring to the Obama Administration's six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf, Barone writes:

The justification offered was an Interior Department report supposedly "peer reviewed" by "experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering." But it turned out the drafts the experts saw didn't include any recommendation for a moratorium. Eight of the cited experts have said they oppose the moratorium....

From "there are no serious economists who oppose the stimulus" to the exaggeration of the stimulus results to "the GOP has no health care ideas" to switching from the-mandate-is-not-a-tax to well-yes-it-is-a-tax -- has there been any administration in memory that practiced petty deceit on matters of policy on such a consistent and extensive scale?

A federal court in Connecticut will take up the momentous question of whether cheerleading is a sport. Why? Because "Title IX" requires "equal opportunity" for males and females in school athletics. Quinnipiac University has cut its women's volleyball and instead wants to use competitive cheerleading to count towards its female-sports quota.

So the future of the cheerleading squad depends on whether it meets a federal definition of the word "sport." To which, one can only say, that is so not the right question. A better question might be: what activity attracts more student demand: volleyball or competitive cheerleading? (A question for the school's trustees, of course, not a federal court).

Title IX is, and always has been, a parody of egalitarianism. In a perfect Ayn-Rand-predicted-this trend, colleges and high schools have been cutting men's sports rather than adding women's sports in order to achieve "equality of opportunity." So if cheerleading is not a "sport," then Quinnipiac will probably have to cut yet more men's sports (they've already cut men's indoor and outdoor track to meet the Title IX numbers).

FT reports:

The US remained the world’s biggest manufacturing nation by output last year, but is poised to relinquish this slot in 2011 to China – thus ending a 110-year run as the number one country in factory production.

[...] Hal Sirkin, head of the global operations practice at Chicago-based Boston Consulting Group, said the US should not despair too much at the likelihood that it would lose the global crown in manufacturing to China.

“If you have a country with four times the population of the US and a tenth of the wages, it is fairly obvious they will pull ahead at some time in productive capabilities,“ he said.

Sure, Hal. That sounds about right. We shouldn't expect, or even want, to preserve the level of economic dominance we achieved at the end of World War Two, when the rest of the 'civilized' world was a ruin. But still. Our manufacturing went number one around the turn of the 20th century. This is something we've been very good at. Manufacturing has played to our comparative advantages. That China has perhaps an even greater natural advantage nowadays is no reason to give up the competition. As we're learning, an economy driven far more by consumption than by production is hardly a post-industrial paradise.

The Spill: What Would Coolidge Do?

GOP Stalwart Barbour Says Come, The Gulf's Fine

Military in Iran taking over, Clerics being set aside

Buffett and Gates: Billionaires, Give Away Half of Your Money!

The Case for Having More Children

Pot Dispensaries Resist LA Crackdown

Top GOP Leader: Kagan Filibuster Possible

The Vatican Blesses "Blues Brothers"

7-0 is a crushing blow to any national team, and North Korea is no ordinary national team. So this isn't a typical World Cup match. It's more reminiscent to me, honestly, of a Cold War Olympics clash. Except, here, the tone carries a wry irony that was never present in the '80s -- and a deeper underlying sadness that we could hardly muster for the proud, punishing Soviets of the Ivan Drago era.

Here, with North Korea, we see a regime so ruthlessly disciplined and fanatically controlled that it has become laughable -- the fake fans in the stands, the invisible phone line from Kim Jong-Il to the NoKo coach. But we remember what happened to the '66 team, and beneath the jokes about this year's team going back to the salt mines there's a glum recognition that North Korea is simply a tragedy.

Oftentimes, the commercial spectacle surrounding the World Cup overdramatizes the event, making regular men look like phony superheroes. But today, the World Cup dramatized the North Korean team in the most powerful and authoritative way possible -- it simply displayed their humanity. The same gasps of disbelief. The same grimaces of frustration. The same looks of exhaustion. For ninety minutes, the North Koreans looked more like people than like North Koreans. To see the moment when the Portuguese assault reduced them back to mere North Koreans -- people whose master would be very displeased -- well, I don't relish that moment at all. It's a humbling, sad reminder: not just of the what of freedom, but the why.

Hey, it's the middle of the day here in Istanbul and you're all sleeping. I don't see how I'm going to be able to perform my duties to Ricochet as a lively conversationalist unless you all get with the program. Turkey's seven hours ahead of EST. Please adjust your clocks accordingly.

Via Telegraph: 

Rahm Emanuel is expected to leave his job later this year after growing tired of the "idealism" of Barack Obama's inner circle...Washington insiders say he will quit within six to eight months in frustration at their unwillingness to "bang heads together" to get policy pushed through. 

Looks like an eager candidate has stepped forward to fill the vacancy. 

My piece about them is up at the Weekly Standard.

Its rise to international prominence represents a regional tactical development on the order of the PLO’s pioneering and inventive use of terrorism. To call them terrorists is to muddy the water; if you focus on looking for evidence of this you might fail to recognize what’s truly worrying about them. Although clearly they are Islamists, their chief weapon is not terror, but blackmail. They are indeed a charity, but their charitable works serve as financial and moral cover for a political goal, and that goal is repeatedly to force Israel into a hideous checkmate wherein it must choose between endangering itself and killing the IHH’s human shields.

Here in early 21st century America, the age of unadulterated childhood innocence, apparently, lasts about three and a half years. I observed this weekend that our son (who is three and a half) has started noticing -- and repeating -- random phrases he hears on the TV or radio. Up until now, this has all been just ambient noise to him. If the program isn't something he knows and is actively interested in (mostly Thomas the Tank Engine, SpongeBob, or a range of Nick Jr. characters), or the music isn't a song he knows, he pays no attention. At least, until now. And what I find so sad is the ubiquity of parental oversight and control that we are going to need to exercise over the next few years to preserve that pure childhood innocence just a little longer. There's practically nothing left on television that an adult would want to watch that doesn't include something I'd rather not have my pre-schooler going around repeating or asking about. The radio's not quite so bad, but I'm guessing I'll still find myself switching stations every six or seven songs. When I think back to my own childhood, when the radio was always on, and my sister and I watched whatever our parents watched on TV, I can't help feeling just a little sorry for my kids. Their lives in many ways will be better and richer than mine, but their memory, if they have one, of that blissful period of pure innocent childhood will be much shorter than mine. And I think that's a shame.