Required Reading

This piece, from the Claremont Review of Books, is well worth anyone's time. It's a story about a very special and enchanting man, who may not be what he seems.....

Why we have to stay

Just a short post linking to Michael Yon's latest dispatch. Awful.

Oslo

Breaking news out of Oslo -- a truck exploded outside of Parliament, killing 7 people; later on, a man dressed as a cop went into the summer camp for young Labor Party kids (the Prime Minister's Party) and opened fire. NYT has the details here. "Ansar al-Jihad al-Alami, or the Helpers of the Global Jihad, issued a statement claiming responsibility for the attack."

One interesting passage from the Times:

"Earlier this month, Norwegian prosecutors filed a terrorism charge against Mullah Krekar, the Iraqi-born founder of the Kurdish Islamist group Ansar al-Islam, who is accused of making death threats against the head of Norway's Conservative Party, Erna Solberg. Mr. Krekar co-founded Ansar al-Islam in 2001, but said a year later that he no longer led the group, which is listed as a terrorist organization by the United States and United Nations.

Norwegian authorities have previously ordered his expulsion from the country, but the process was suspended amid concerns that he would face the death penalty in his home country."
Probably because he's the kind of guy who would blow up government buildings and send people out to shoot kids in a swimming pool.


UPDATE: Turns out it's a white guy -- "More like Norway's Oklahoma City than its World Trade Center," as one cop said.

Another Hubble Discovery!

NASA keeps taking lots of pictures of crazy space stuff, and keeps discovering new things. For example, a fourth moon orbiting Pluto. As P.J. O'Rourke notes in the forthcoming issue of the Weekly Standard,

            Oh, maybe it's a waste of taxpayer money.
            But government wastes taxpayer money.
            This is what government does. It can't
            be changed. Our earliest evidence of
            government, in the ruins of Babylon and
            Egypt, shows nothing but ziggurats and
            pyramids of wasted taxpayer money, the
            TARP funds and shovel-ready stimulus
            programs of their day. Let's waste taxpayer
            money putting that look [of wonder] back
            on [my son's] face.

It's not bullet-proof logic, but he does have a point.

I'm no expert....

on the British media landscape, but Tim Montgomerie is, and his piece from Conservativehome earlier this week helps to put the British media scandal in perspective.

Requisite full disclosure, as they say: your humble correspondent is not in in the pay of Fox, or any News Inc. entity, though he would desperately love getting paid (lucratively!) by that firm (or any other) to write blog posts.

One thing that seems obvious is that the only thing journalists enjoy more than scandalizing and bringing down governments they don't like is scandalizing and bringing down their competitors. In a free media environment, this isn't particularly surprising, and is largely a benefit to society as a whole, as long as media pluralism continues to exist. A diversity of viewpoints and perspectives enables citizens to develop and craft their opinions based on what facts they find, and the relative importance of trade-offs, values, and conflicts that arise from these facts. Needless to say, if journalists are engaged in corrupting behavior, bribery, or blurring the line between the public and private, there are bound to be problems; however, free societies must judge for themselves the position at which this line is drawn, as well as what penalties society should mete out. (For example, in German newspapers, people accused of crimes as well as victims almost always given a pseudonym, unless they are already a public personality, such as Dominique Strauss-Kahn; in the UK, libel and slander laws are much stricter than those in the US.)

In light of this, two conclusions can be drawn: first off, News of the World had clearly overstepped the line which society had tacitly given it. The practices that it engaged in which were patently illegal must be punished; of this, Rupert Murdoch, as well as Rebekah Brooks certainly deserve a portion of the blame as higher-ups. The second conclusion, however, is more abstract, and concerns the role of the media in a free society. It is unsurprising for two companies to desire to destroy the other on the market; PCs and Apple will battle on every continent. Frequently, competition results in benefits for the consumers of that product, and information in particular is a product that can be easily and cheaply mined, refined, packaged, and sold. However, the BBC's extraordinarily comprehensive coverage of this seems more than a little unseemly. Clearly, Rupert Murdoch is a media threat to the established order, and particularly to the BBC, which represents a very different form of worldwide media empire. There can be little doubt of their natural antipathy. Nevertheless, the BBC, with 1) its market-dominating position in UK media, and more importantly 2) its level of state support gives it tools other news outlets simply do not and cannot possess. For the BBC, the UK is simply one battlefield in its war on Rupert Murdoch, who is a proxy for private media worldwide. And when private media, for all its faults, goes, what is left?

News of the World was a sleazy newspaper, obviously. It was sleazy even before it was corrupt, and unfortunately, that's also what made it so successful. But it certainly had no monopoly on sleaze in the UK, and indeed, many papers have long, proud histories of stalking the Royal Family, gruesomely describing the lurid details of murders, paying for photos of celebrities in compromising situations, slipping cash to the cops for tips, and ironically uncovering government waste and abuse using various unseemly tactics. (Perhaps MI6 will hire some of the out-of-work journalists from NotW that were smart enough to avoid getting caught!) Did Murdoch know the specifics? Probably not. Did he know the traditional formula for success in the UK newspaper industry? And if he did, who else does, and what are they going to cook up with that recipe?

Arizona

Apparently some crazy shit is developing in the Arizona town of Quartzsite (pop. 3,600), with a mayor investigating corruption in the city's books, and finding that every year, $250,000 of the town's budget is being going to paychecks of unidentified people. The cops have declared a sort of "martial law" (though they obviously don't characterize it as such) and have roughed up some local activist. The mayor, who campaigned on cleaning up the corruption, has been suspended by the city council, and they are trying to recall him. Should be interesting to see how this develops.....

USA! USA!

The USA women won a fantastic game against Brazil. Read about it here, and ignore the British use of funny pluralization and hyphenation.

Atlantis

Today on the way to the faculty I walked past a language school advertising one of the numerous "work and travel" programs that are offered to young Czech students. The deal is that you sign up with one of these language schools (travel agencies also do this), they arrange a job for the student in the US or Australia or the UK or wherever, and then you get a little time at the end to travel around the country you just worked in. Lots of times the work is not particularly glamorous, but it's good pay by Czech standards, and you get to practice your English, see a new country, the usual.

Anyway, while walking past this particular language school I saw their poster for traveling through the US, with the usual things our country is famous for, and the things that non-Americans think of when they think of the USA. There were of course, the Statue of Liberty, the Grand Canyon, the beautiful California beaches, Times Square, the Capitol, and the beautiful Florida beaches too -- complete with space shuttle.

Whether we like it or not, we must lead. Soft Power matters when people in other countries say "I want that for my country someday," or "Gosh, that country can really do some special stuff!" Space exploration is one of these things. It's all well and good to have a nice big welfare state where nobody cheats and everybody is one big happy family. But it's not what makes one's country truly special, or admired. You can't put a welfare plan on a poster and it doesn't make schoolchildren dream.

There are definitely problems with the space program -- its bureaucracy has become horribly ossified, it sometimes seems to lack a vision, and it's terribly wasteful. But at the same time, it serves a purpose greater than many of the other ridiculous things that ooze out of Washington. And it's something that people around the world notice. And they notice it closing down too.

The Women's World Cup

I'm writing this sitting in a bar (where else?) in the Vienna Airport watching Das Erste (how it's being beamed into Wien, I don't know) and waiting for the second half of the Australia-Norway game to start. The deal is that the Norwegian ladies (who have one star on their jerseys, from 1995, I believe) need a win to progress to the quarterfinals; the Aussies just need a tie. By the time I finish this post, the game will be over. [UPDATE: Australia won 2-1; they now face the Germans in the quarterfinals.]

In the five previous Women's World Cups, the USA has two titles, the Norwegians have the aforementioned one, and the deutsche Frauen have the last two, plus a home field advantage for this tournament. I was in the stadium for last night's Germany-France game; I gotta say I was impressed with how it went.

First off, they can play. At this level, it's a great show. It's definitely not as flashy as the Brazilian men with their crazy footwork or as rough as the athleticism of the US men's team, but it is also mercifully devoid of the diving and rolling that characterizes the World Cup in even years not divisible by four. I don't know if this is due to women's higher threshold of pain, their capacity for honesty, or their inability to exaggerate their emotions. In any case, it is a relief to watch a game without screaming "YOU PANSY!" at the TV.

If the play itself is comparable, it's like watching a men's game as though it was played on a slightly larger field -- beautiful passes and great timing are a greater advantage in the women's game, and the opportunity for breakaway counterattacks is higher. In this respect, it seems more like hockey or basketball, and it's truly exciting. Your writer and his entourage were treated to an evening with far more corner kicks and breakaways than was to be expected. (Indeed, the game also included a red card for the French goalkeeper, which was unusual in any circumstance, and that definitely spiced things up as well. But that was exceptional.)

So enough about the "Gee, can girls play?" question. Sure they can. What about the rest of it? Why is it that Norway, a country not known for its worldwide athletic prowess outside of curling and biathlon, is a perennial favorite? If we look at the sixteen teams, what does it say about those countries that are in, and those countries that aren't?

Obviously, there is a huge correlation between the "Westness" of a country and its likelihood of playing in this tournament, with the curious exception of North Korea -- a curious exception in many respects. But Japan is here, along with the Australians and the Kiwis, and NAFTA is here. France and Germany are representing Europe's southeast coast. There is actually an unusual correlation in that countries that have great women's soccer programs are also those that tend to do well in the Winter Olympics. Perhaps it's the old Weberian Protestantism, perhaps it's the cultural liberalism in which that flourishes, but to a large extent, cultural patterns seem to show a greater correlation for success than athletic tradition.

Perhaps the wild card in this respect is the traditional (men's) soccer powerhouse of Brazil. But it shouldn't really be surprising that a country of that size with that kind of history wouldn't have a few girls who tagged along with their big brothers and eventually (after no doubt being last picked!) earned some respect from the boys. And, boy, did they learn to play, too. [UPDATE: they play the USA in the next game. Should be interesting.]

So the tournament continues. Should be fun, and should be worth watching. And maybe even the US Ladies will add a third star to their jerseys.

George Ballas, RIP

Don Boudreaux at Café Hayek reflects on the death of George Ballas, distinctly American hero.

George Weigel.....

has an excellent column today. He writes in the context of New York's new gay-marriage law, but touches on many other aspects of the (sometimes antagonistic) relationship between the insatiable state and the rest of us. Allusions to Arendt, Kolakowski, and Revel doesn't hurt either.

For all the loyal readers out there, there will be a couple more posts soon, possibly even today. I have some thoughts on Fourth of July in exile, and the Women's World Cup, It's been a long week, and it's only Wednesday.