I haven't read the book (I've ordered it), so I can't critique the prose and I can only infer the argument. But even without reading the book, I'm 100% sure it isn't "brave"--the favorite adjective of its reviewers.

I first noticed this annoying tic in David Gelernter's Wired review, which calls Bill McKibben's new book "brave and luminous." Not really a surprise from Gelernter, whose prejudices the book surely confirms. But what about Zack Lynch, who writes Corante's Brainwaves blog. Where did he get the braveness meme? (Braveness reference aside, Zack's post is worth reading.)

This is an abuse of language. McKibben's book may be sincere, forceful, impassioned. It may be well written. But it is not brave. It will offend absolutely no one who matters in Bill McKibben's world. To the contrary, it will reinforce the righteous self-image of those who promote his career. By writing this book, McKibben can count on attention and praise. That doesn't make him a coward. But neither does it make him brave--or the reviewers brave for praising him.

And if those who disagree with him won't do so loudly in public, because they're intimidated by his fame and style or want to placate his fans, well, "brave" isn't the word for them either.

Update: Here's an excerpt from the book. Here's an excerpt from a lecture McKibben gave at Tufts Here are blurbs (including predictable praise from Kirkus, Publisher's Weekly, and Michael Pollan, an editor at the NYT Magazine) and book tour info.

Here's a related article I wrote for Forbes about PBS. (It even has a sodomy angle, for those who can't get enough.)

Not to further complicate an already complicated discussion, but there is actually one more debate going on here than you or Hugh note. Hugh points out (1) the morality of same-sex relationships. You add (2) the political debate, which I'm sure Hugh does not disagree is an issue. He mentions the Supreme Court case, but that actually includes two issues, only one of which he mentions. He says the court ought not to strike down the Texas law based on the reasoning in Bowers v. Hardwick. But Hardwick dealt with a single issue -- how far the constitution's right to privacy went. As that case held, the liberty protected by the constitution had been interpreted to include privacy in certain sexual and family matters, and the majority held that however far that right went, it did not include consensual, adult, private homosexual sodomy. Issue one in the current case is whether that is still good law.

However, this case involves another issue that is far more important to lesbians and gay men -- the application of the constitution's explicit equal protection clause -- something Bowers did not address, and Hugh surprisingly leaves out of his discussion. The Georgia sodomy law in Bowers did not distinguish between homosexual sodomy and heterosexual sodomy. Thus, as one of the dissents pointed out, it was a mystery why the majority went off on homosexuals. While the plaintiff in that case was, in fact, gay, under the law at issue, it made no difference. It was as if the majority were to decide, given an Asian defendant in a murder case, that they would craft a rule for Asian murder, or Asian Miranda rights, or Asian due process.

The Texas law throws open that bizarre aspect of Hardwick. Texas permits heterosexuals to engage in all the sodomy they want, and prohibits it only for lesbians and gay men. This brings the equal protection clause into play. One of the fundamental aspects of our democracy is that a majority may not impose on a minority rules it does not impose on itself, unless there is a good reason. While the level of scrutiny a court will give to such laws varies, at the very least the majority must have a rational basis for imposing rules on minorities it does not choose to impose on its own members. Thus, the court may very well decide that, while states may continue to prohbit sodomy despite the liberty and privacy jurisprudence, they cannot prohibit it for one group and not for another -- a state sodomy law must apply to all citizens or none under the equal protection clause.

While the equal protection rationale would do, I prefer the court taking the first route and overturning Bowers v. Hardwick. If the constitution's protection of liberty does not include protecting citizens from the government's intrusion into the privacy in one's own bedroom, then it isn't a very meaningful sort of liberty in one of the most central spheres of a person's life. And that applies to heterosexuals as well as homosexuals. One of the things that was the most disturbing to me about Senator Santorum's remarks on sodomy was that, while the AP reporter included that very unusual parenthetical (gay), it is not clear to me that that is what the Senator actually said, something Andrew Sullivan has pointed out. The transcript of the remarks is as follows:

"And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything."

This suggests to me, as does the rest of the transcript, that the remarks apply to all forms of sodomy or non-procreational sex. The Senator said, after all, that he does not believe the right to privacy exists in the constitution at all. For some reason, whenever sodomy comes up, we immediately think homosexual sodomy, and somehow make heterosexual sodomy invisible. That's exactly what the majority did in Bowers v. Hardwick, never even mentioning heterosexual sodomy in a case about a law that made no distinctions. That made the Lawrence v. Texas case necessary -- to point out how distorted our legal discussion comes when homosexuality is involved.

I clearly disagree with Hugh as a legal matter on the privacy/libertyargument. But by leaving out the equal protection argument, he fails to say why, if Bowers v. Hardwick is upheld, it would not -- and should not -- also apply to him.

Among the questions he has explored are why strict churches -- those that in some way limit members' activities outside the church -- are strong, and how conservative churches adapt when social norms become more liberal....

Strictness can manifest itself in dietary restrictions, distinctive clothing, geographical separation or prohibitions on activities like dancing or drinking. It can also entail such requirements as sending one's children to the church school, observing unique holidays or attending Wednesday night services in addition to Sunday services.

Joining a strict group may sound irrational when there are less costly alternatives. "Why become a Mormon or a Seventh-day Adventist" -- let alone join a so-called cult -- "when the Methodists and Presbyterians wait with open arms?" Professor Iannaccone wrote in "Why Strict Churches Are Strong," a 1994 article in the American Journal of Sociology.

His answer is that high costs screen out "free riders," deadbeat members who would otherwise enjoy a church's benefits without contributing energy, time and money. If everyone in the group has to pay a visible price, free riders will not bother to join and a committed core will not end up doing all the work. The group may attract fewer members at first, but it will be stronger over time. Distinctiveness also gives people a reason for affiliation and a sense of camaraderie. Why join a religious group if it is identical to the rest of society?

Moral choices underlay every single statute in the land. The Constitution prohibits some of these choices from informing law-making, such as law that would seek to implement the moral vision of the first few of the Ten Commandments. But the Constitution is largely silent on the issue of sexual relations. One example of an exception: Laws prohibiting interracial marriage, for example, have been struck down as violating the 14th Amendment).

The State has no more power to criminalize consenting adult sexual conduct than it does to regulate what I make for dinner or what time I go to bed. It's hard to imagine a more stark example of invasive government power than the power to go into bedrooms and tell consenting adults which exact activities they may and may not engage in. We believe that government power is limited, and this case is one example of government stepping over--far over--the line of proper authority.

The balance between federalism and individual liberty is a difficult one. Some of the most interesting work on the subject (though not, to my knowledge, on "matters sexual") is done by Michael Greve's Federalism Project.

Advice: Don't make this switch unless you have plenty of time and hard disk space.

Warning: After soaking up all this weekend time fooling with my computer, I haven't had time for blogging. Sorry.

I think you may have missed my point, and many people are missing the fact that there are concurrent debates running here. The first is on the morality of same-sex relations. You accurately quoted my view on that. The second is on the Supreme Court case: The Court ought not to strike down the anti-sodomy statiute because it is clearly not unconstitutional, as Bowers demonstrated. Santorum's argument was that the logic of any such holding would have to be applied to other currently prohibited consensual sexual activity between adults. Eugene Volokh, for example, readily admits this and welcomes it. I don't. These are legislative decisions, made in a context of a federal system that demands respect from the court. Turning every debate into a fight over the morality of same-sex relations, while simplifying the debate into one of legislating against sin, overlooks the enormous dangers to liberty inherent in investing a majority of nine unelected judges with life tenure with re-write authority over any state law they disagree with. Cheers Hugh

My emailed reply to Hugh:

Actually, there are THREE debates going on. One is constitutional. One is moral. And the third, to which I addressed myself, is political: Assuming no constitutional limits, what ought the criminal law to be? You’re dodging that question, but Santorum isn’t. That’s the question that goes to the heart of the relation between religious teachings and the role of the state.

The policy question is also the one to which Andrew Sullivan has primarily addressed his remarks. It's far more interesting--and, in my view, much easier--than the constitutional question. But it's the question conservative pundits mostly want to dodge.

As for whether Jessica Lynch was tortured--the major source of referrals now that the "Is Rumsfeld Jewish?" (no) wave has subsided--the evidence increasingly suggests no, but nobody's saying for sure.

Another searcher wants to know if Fareed Zakaria is married. Yes, he is. I don't, however, know which eating club Donald Rumsfeld '54 belonged to at Princeton. A possibly unreliable Internet site says Cap & Gown.

Dynamist.com: a middle-aged female blog and your one-stop source of political celebrity info.

[H]is last few posts before being summoned were (in order) about Iranian newscaster’s inability to pronounce names properly, retirement of the "out of this world champion" Michael Jordan, his son's teething problems and a reprint of an already published statement by Kambiz Kaheh, a film critic arrested on bogus charges of distributing illegal videos. Hardly risky material.

The most comprehensive way to follow the story, at least in English, is at Hoder.

Like Santorum most Americans do not want gays persecuted or punished, and they have many gay men and lesbian women as their close friends or within their family. They are concerned not about the legality of these relationships but about the sinfulness of them, and they worry about God's judgment not on the country but on the individuals, and they pray for mercy and the forgiveness of sin. They do so, hopefully, with an awareness of the "log in their own eye" as well as the splinter in their neighbor's.

The problem with this line of reasoning is that neither Santorum's comments nor the current debate concern sin. They concern criminal law, which is to say the capacity of the state to "persecute and punish" certain actions. If you worry about the sinfulness of an action, you seek to persuade people not to commit it; that persuasion may include shunning such sinners in ways gay rights advocates would not approve of (such as refusing to hire them). A liberal society ought not to use criminal sanctions to punish actions merely because a particular religion, or even many religions, may deem them sinful. Eating live animals and shellfish--hence, eating oysters--is a sin in my religion, it's damned gross, and it can kill you. But I don't want to make eating oysters a crime.

Personally tolerant but theologically and politically conservative Christians like Hugh may profess not to be "concerned about the legality of these relationships," but their defense of the laws criminalizing those relationships belies that claim. They are quite concerned about keeping those relationships punishable by jail time. How many of those "logs" are similarly criminal?

Read it all here. (I will eventually post it in this site as well, but it's free for now at DMagazine.com, which also has some interesting articles on deadly oysters and what Dallas cops think.)

The news peg, of course, is my new car.

What I don't get is why sophisticated pundits imagine that Rick Santorum might think that the Constitution protects sexual privacy or that the government should stay out of people's sex lives.

Santorum is, first of all, from Pennsylvania, a highly traditional state with an aging population whose don't-make-waves politics is protective of the status quo and not the least suspicious of government power. I wouldn't expect a Pennsylvania politician to push for new sanctions to regulate sexual behavior, but neither would I expect one to push to get current laws overturned.

For a Pennsylvania pol, Santorum is actually quite the intellectual. And he's always been upfront about his political principles. Andrew Sullivan is being disingenuous when he writes, "Has Santorum heard of limited government? It was once a conservative idea, you know, Senator."

As Andrew well knows, limited government is a liberal idea. It only seems conservative in the Anglo-American context because we've had several hundred years of liberal tradition. But there are older, pre-liberal conservative traditions, including a rather prominent one to which Rich Santorum outspokenly adheres--a tradition that honors hierarchy, solidarity, and "natural law" and sees liberal individualism as a source of decay.

As a sample, here's what Santorum writes about the pedophilia scandals in the Catholic Church:

Like most American Catholics, I have followed the recent sex scandals in the Church with profound sympathy for victims, revulsion over priests who prey on minors and frustration at the absence of hierarchical leadership. Unlike most, I have been visited by the gift of hope; for I see in this fall an opportunity for ecclesial rebirth and a new evangelization of America. This "new evangelization," advocated strenuously by Pope John Paul II, has the potential for restoring confidence in the priesthood while empowering all American Catholics.

The most obvious change must occur within American seminaries, many of which demonstrate the same brand of cultural liberalism plaguing our secular universities. My hope was rekindled last week as our American Cardinals proposed from Rome an "apostolic visitation" of seminaries emphasizing "the need for fidelity to the Church's teaching, especially in the area of morality." It is an arduous task. However, the Pope made it clear last week that he expects the strong appeal of the Cardinals to be followed by decisive Episcopal action.

It is startling that those in the media and academia appear most disturbed by this aberrant behavior, since they have zealously promoted moral relativism by sanctioning "private" moral matters such as alternative lifestyles. Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture. When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm. [Emphasis added.--vp]

The cultural change needed cannot end with our seminaries. Most of the American Cardinals, while strong defenders of the faith , are from a different era with only a few responding to the new demands our decaying culture has place upon them. With God's grace, a new hierarchy must emerge that will be both faithful in thought and courageous in confronting all infidelity within the Church. Such Church leaders have a great example in Pope John Paul II's battle with communism's attempt to destroy the Church and human dignity. A new hierarchy must similarly fight against an array of "isms"--moral relativism, cultural liberalism--inside and outside of the Church.

Any religious tradition as rich and varied as Roman Catholicism obviously has its liberal strands; the history of classical liberalism includes notable Catholic thinkers; and, to the chagrin of much of the Church hierarchy, most American Catholics have thoroughly embraced Anglo-American liberal individualism. But the conservative Catholic tradition to which Rick Santorum owes his primary intellectual allegiance is not liberal. It recognizes no public-private distinction on matters of sexual morality. Stop pretending you're so shocked.

Seventy-eight years after the famous Scopes "monkey trial," Charles Darwin is stirring up trouble again.

Or, depending on your perspective, it's state Sen. Mike Fair who's stirring up the trouble.

The Republican from Greenville, irritated that a study done for the Fordham Foundation gave South Carolina an "A" for how well it teaches evolution, is challenging the premise of Darwin's widely accepted theory. He bases his argument on the fact that no one was there when life began to make a scientific observation about it.

Fair wants science books in South Carolina public schools to have the following statement posted in them: "The cause or causes of life are not scientifically verifiable. Therefore, empirical science cannot provide data about the beginning of life."

His argument is that no one can prove scientifically how life began, which makes the question a matter of faith, or philosophy. Darwin's theory that life evolved slowly over millions of years, he argues, is not science.

The article demonstrates what J-school-style ping-pong objectivity looks like when everybody's viewpoint is truly given equal legitimacy:

"Evolution is a unifying theme throughout science," said Linda Sinclair, state science consultant for the South Carolina Department of Education.

"While there are some scientists who support the idea that it wasn't natural selection and random events that led to humans, it was a creator's design, there's not any evidence to support that," Sinclair said. "And of course all of science rides on evidence."

Even if there's no direct evidence that the complexity of life's inner workings came about by something other than natural selection, a compelling case can be made that some intelligent force was behind it, according to the adherents of Intelligent Design.

Daniel Dix, a math professor at the University of South Carolina, said his studies of the structure of biological molecules lead him to be skeptical that natural selection and random mutation alone can account for the "sophisticated networks" of "complex molecular machines" he sees.

"These just look to me like the kind of things you see when you look in engineering systems," he said.

He is particularly amazed by the molecular "antennas" in the photosynthetic cells of plants, which can be tuned to receive light of different frequencies, and even disassemble and reassemble themselves if they need to be repaired.

Dix said he doesn't see any evidence that such sophisticated systems can "spontaneously arise."

"You start piling implausibility upon implausibility, and after a while the argument gets harder and harder to believe that all this happened without any kind of mind behind it," Dix said.

Dix's conclusion that order implies design goes way beyond biology or theology. You can say the same thing for any other spontaneous order. Perhaps the South Carolina schools should give equal time to conspiracy theories of history and central planning models of the economy. But I wouldn't want to give them any ideas.

Reporter Ron Barnett even conscientiously includes unchallenged "evidence" of the "young earth" belief that the earth is only a few thousand years old, no matter how much evidence to the contrary geology produces:

There's no scientific reason to throw out the biblical account of creation, though, according to Joseph Henson, chairman emeritus of Bob Jones University's division of natural science.

In fact, he points to numerous scientific reasons to doubt Darwin's theory that life evolved over millions of years.

For example, he says pieces of wood that have been dated at 5,000 years old have been found buried under rock that mainstream scientists say is 600 million years old. He says the worldwide flood described in the book of Genesis could have caused in a few months the geological formations that most scientists say took millions of years to form.

That's balance, but I don't know that I'd exactly call it fair.

Greenville is the flip side of San Francisco. The political/cultural spectrum is shifted so far right that normal conservatives seem like liberals and local liberals are an embattled minority convinced of their intrinsic righteousness and cultural superiority.

The current major controversy concerns whether county employees should get Martin Luther King Day as a holiday. Greenville County is one of only three counties in the state that don't honor the holiday.

As best I could tell from reading the papers, fiscal considerations are a relatively minor part of the story. Opponents just don't approve of Martin Luther King. (Jesse Jackson hasn't helped matters by sticking his publicity-seeking nose into the local controversy, though at least he's a Greenville native.) A leading moderate on the issue: Bob Jones III, president of the eponymous university. Here's the beginning of the op-ed he wrote backing an unsuccessful compromise:

Living by principle is the only honorable way to live. For a Christian, living by biblical principle is the honorable way. I would hope the "principialists" outnumber the pragmatists in our community. This much I do know, there are many good folks here who would rather die than do wrong. I would hope to be in that company.

For such people, commitment to doing the right thing is non-negotiable, but knowing what is the right thing becomes the problem. The Bible tells us to do what is right in God's eyes. For those who follow it, when the Bible speaks, doing what is right is easy. When it is a matter the Bible does not directly address, making right decisions can be gut-wrenching.

The current Martin Luther King holiday for county workers controversy is such an issue and is charged with emotion on both sides. I have tried to picture myself being in the hot seat of a County Council member. What would I do? I am not a racist, and neither are they.

To vote against a Martin Luther King holiday would cause some to brand me as a racist. Yet, knowing what I do about Martin Luther King the man--his well-known and undisputed marital infidelities, his leftist political philosophies, his theological irregularities--would, as a matter of principle, preclude my voting to honor him with a holiday. His race would have nothing to do with it. For the same reasons, I would be adamantly against a holiday to honor Bill Clinton.

But were I a councilman, I could have voted for the compromise resolution, because it took the focus away from Martin Luther King exclusively and placed it also upon the civil rights movement, which long ago removed the onus of being black and removed the institutionalized discriminations blacks suffered. With a glad heart, I could vote for a holiday that celebrates that.

That's progress, for sure. Bob Jones was no fan of the civil rights movement back in the day.

As an aside, I might note that Greenville County employees don't get Memorial Day as a holiday. It was, after all, established to honor Union soldiers.

Zakaria became a conservative, he says, from observing the Indian state. "People often say, 'How could you, living in India, end up a Reaganite?' Well, the answer is, live in India. There are two things that people don't understand. One is the degree to which a highly regulated economy produces masses of corruption because it empowers bureaucrats. It just has to be seen to be believed.

"The second," he continues, "is that you are very quickly inured to the charms of pre-industrial village life. Whenever someone says the word community, I want to reach for an oxygen mask."

Even this year, being a U.S. soldier is about as risky as being a police officer. Criminals kill about 60 officers each year in a force of 750,000 nationwide. If the 1.5 million members of the armed forces had a similar rate of loss, 120 soldiers a year would die in combat.

Previous work by [NIH pediatric dentist Songtao] Shi in 2000 had already shown that extracted adult wisdom teeth contain stem cells in the pulp at the centre of the tooth (PNAS, vol 97, p 13625). So when his six-year old daughter and her friends started losing their baby teeth, he decided to see if they also contained stem cells.

Whenever a tooth fell out, instead of putting it under the pillow, the parents stored the tooth in a glass of milk in the refrigerator overnight.

To isolate the stem cells, Shi extracted the pulp and cultured the cells for several days, then tested the survivors for markers of stem cell activity. About 12 to 20 cells from a typical incisor tooth turn out to be stem cells.

By culturing the cells in various growth factors, Shi could differentiate the cells into tooth-forming cells, fat cells or neural cells. The differentiated cells survived when implanted under the skin and in the brain of immunocompromised mice.

Shi also found that the cells promote the growth of bone. He suspects the stem cells may play a role in preparing the way for adult teeth. "We don't have evidence at the moment, but we think these stem cells do have a reason to be there."

The discovery of stem cells in baby teeth could give a big boost to oral surgery, says oral biologist Bjorn Reino Olsen, at Harvard Medical School. The cells, once differentiated into odontoblasts, could secrete dentine. This bone-like material could then replace the less biocompatible metal posts that are currently used to anchor implants to the jaw.

That is quite interesting. I have actually been running a series of posts on my blog on the spread of Starbucks around the world. Starbucks' international strategy involves something called "clusterbombing" (their expression). Essentially, they enter individual cities one at a time, and go from no stores in the city to a substantial number in a very short time. Thus there is really no middle ground. Either you have cities with no Starbucks, or cities with Starbucks seemingly on every street corner, but nothing in between. When I commented on this on my blog, I qualified my discussion by saying that this model might not apply in North America, because I simply didn't know. However, from your comments on Greenville, it looks like it might. (When you say that there are no "free standing" Starbucks, I assume you mean that you found one or more outlets in bookstores or at the airport or something like that). My most recent comment is here.

I think there may be an element of this "all or nothing" aspect in why Starbucks are such a favourite object of hatred for anti-globalisation types. Visit a few of the most commonly visited international cities (Hong Kong, Tokyo, London, Bangkok) and from the evidence of these you will likely think there is a Starbucks on every street corner throughout the world, when in fact they only have outlets in maybe 20 countries, and only in the very biggest cities in most of those. In terms of global penetration, they are nowhere near being in the same ballpark as McDonald's, say.

(Another interesting situation is what may be called "preemptive Starbucks cloning", in which someone else will create a chain of coffee shops that look very like Starbucks in a city or country. The first reason is that there is a market for that kind of coffee shop that Starbucks haven't yet filled. The second is that Starbucks entered the UK market by acquiring such a chain and the people who owned that chain got rich as a consequence. Other people doing the same thing hope to have the same thing happen to them).

Comments on this from me are here and here.

To clarify my "free-standing" remark, the Greenville Barnes & Noble store does have the usual Starbucks, and the Bi-Lo supermarkets also have them. But my Greenville relatives definitely feel Starbucks-deprived.

To calculate your own marriage penalty/bonus, use the marriage penalty calculator here.

Update: The link above has been fixed. Thanks to everyone who wrote in--and no thanks to Movable Type for getting it wrong in the first place!

Update II: A friend writes, "I got married last year. Just did my taxes. Wife and I were hit with a HUGE marriage penalty. Gov't promotes 'family values' my ass. It's outrageous." At our house, we know that all government tax policy is based on a single principle, "Tax the Postrels."

Phil Carter has some thoughtful comments on women warriors, and a link to a Slate discussion on the subject, between Debra Dickerson and Stephanie Gutmann.

I'm a pragmatist on this subject, which is why I like the tone and content of Phil's post. But it's important to remember that a truly pragmatic assessment includes remembering what women can do, which is a lot. The military needs their skills.

Pragmatism also means acknowledging, as Phil does, that women are not uniquely subject to brutalization and torture as POWs. Well-intended men may believe that women's suffering is worse than men's--evolution has probably programmed us to think that way--but it isn't. And those who worry about the fates of female POWs tend to forget that women have always been the victims and spoils of war (ever hear the phrase, "rape and pillage"?). Women warriors simply have a chance to fight back.

Adnan Shaker has a tiny passport picture of himself that he’s somehow managed to save during his three years in one of Saddam Hussein’s prisons. It shows a handsome man in his 20s, lean and fit, with a luxurious mustache and thick black hair. Today his own three children would probably not recognize him as the same person.

His hair is cropped short. Half his teeth have been knocked out, his face is battered and the eyes sunken and haunted-looking. His chest is covered with 50 separate cuts from a knife, his back has even more marks, which he says are cigarette burns. Two of his fingers were broken and deliberately bent into a permanent, contorted position and there’s a hole in the middle of his palm where his torturers stabbed him and twisted the blade.

Today, though, Adnan was a happy man, so happy that he could barely restrain his excitement. He was finally freed from a prison in downtown Basra, after British troops entered the city and drove the remaining defenders away. And as he took a small group of American journalists on a tour of the hospital, he enthusiastically led a crowd of fellow ex-prisoners, their families, friends and passersby in the first rendition of a pro-American chant that any of us have so far heard: “Nam nam Bush , Sad-Dam No” (“Yes, yes, Bush, Saddam No”). They chanted and danced, filling one of their former cells in a spontaneous celebration.

The prison was originally the School for Adult Reeducation, until the authorities converted it after the Shiite uprising against Saddam in 1991 and, perversely renaming it the Jail for Adult Reeducation, used it as a place to punish rebellious Shiites. The white walls outside are covered with blue-painted Baathist and pro-Saddam slogans, but nothing announces that it’s a prison. In the central courtyard, there’s a long-disused basketball hoop, under which are arrays of metal beds for prisoners who were lucky enough to sleep outside. Arrayed around that were groups of classrooms, now cells, which housed so many men that they had to lie down in shifts to sleep. Prisoners whose families had enough money to bribe the authorities at the prison went into Unit One, where they were only occasionally beaten; it cost at least three million Iraqi dinars for that privilege (about $1,000 at the current rate). Unit Two was worse, and so on. In Unit Four, where Adnan lived for his 10-year sentence, the prisoners say they were tortured daily, sometimes thrice daily. Only Unit Five was worse, in a sense. It was where they took them to die.

Here's my proposal, which is based on the TV show Survivor: We put the entire Congress on an island. All the food on this island is locked inside a vault, which can be opened only by an ordinary American taxpayer named Bob. Every day, the congresspersons are given a section of the Tax Code, which they must rewrite so that Bob can understand it. If he can, he lets them eat that day; if he can't, he doesn't.

Or, he can give them food either way. It doesn't matter. The main thing is, we never let them off the island.

From John Holton:

I think that the media have yet to realize that the enlisted people in the military are not conscripts, but there of their own free will, and that as such they're entitled to the same respect shown to the officers. I find it interesting that the retired officers that now act as commentators on Fox News and CNN are called "General So-and-so", whereas the same news organizations find it perfectly acceptable to refer to PFC Lynch as "Jessica". Maybe it's a carryover from Vietnam, where the enlisted forces were generally conscripts and not military professionals. One of the best things I've seen on early morning TV was on the "Today" show, when Matt Lauer was on board an aircraft carrier during the Afghanistan conflict. He was interviewing the woman who was in charge of the galleys, a Master Chief Petty Officer, and asked her if he could call her by her first name (I think it was Betty, but I'm not sure). She very pleasantly told him, "No. Please call me Master Chief." The look on his face was priceless.

From Scott Shields:

I just found your running commentary on the "Private Lynch" vs. "Jessica" thing via Howard Kurtz and the Washington Post. I'm so glad someone is bringing this up! The Diego Rincon case is interesting juxtaposition in terms of media fairness, but there's another side to it all. I was so annoyed when I read this in the Washington Post a few days ago:

"Talk about spunk!" said Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), whom military officials had briefed on the rescue.

At first, I couldn't really figure out why this bothered me. It seemed maybe that the comment didn't really fit the weight of the situation. And then I realized that it was the use of the word "spunk". That's a word you use to describe a high school cheerleader who stands up for the school nerd - not a rescued Prisoner of War.

Would you say that John McCain had "spunk"? How about "moxie"? I prefer words like "dedication", "bravery", or even "guts".

From Rod McFadden, Captain, USNR (for i.d. purposes only):

Thank you for making the "Jessica" point. Our Soldier, Sailors, Marines, Airmen, and Coast Guardsmen who happen to be women deserve the same public courtesy everyone else does.

It's a bit of a myth to call any baby-faced 19-year-old "Pfc.," regardless of sex. And it's an all-American trait to call people by their first names. (Everyone calls me Virginia, and I don't think that's only because nobody knows how to pronounce Postrel.) But the military is a guardian institution to whose members we owe the courtesy of acknowledging their status and their rank. (In addition to my Reason editorial on Jane Jacobs's ideas of guardian-vs.-commercial ethics, another related piece is here.)

You probably want me to comment on the war instead of this fluff. I'm glad it's going well. They're going to need a bunch of M.P.s (and local deputies ASAP) to restore order in Basra, Baghdad, and elsewhere. Read Command Post. I have deadlines.

I am not a thin woman, and I haven't lost any weight. In a normal-sized world (say, 20 years ago, when I was smaller), I'd be a size 10. In most stores today, I'm a size 6. The Gap is once again proving itself America's most generous and creative store when it comes to sizing. I pity the poor customers who really are size 2.

Why do I keep repeating this seemingly trivial message? To counter all the allegedly feminist propaganda denouncing the tyranny of apparel manufacturers who expect women to fit into size 0. What the zaftig propagandists never tell you is that as recently as 20 years ago, size 0 was called size 6. Check out my August 2001 posting; it even has a link to a Michael Kelly column.

Recently, the Co-Director of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics Richard Layard spelled out a fundamental challenge to mainstream economics. He argues that higher incomes do not lead to greater happiness. This in turn threatens much of the conventional wisdom among economists concerning policy issues.

To an economist, it is literally axiomatic that if people pursue higher incomes, then higher incomes make them happier. We do not believe that people do things that are contrary to their interests.

Layard argues instead that people pursue higher incomes even though collectively it is not in their interest to do so. He says that people are deluded into pursuing higher incomes by distortions in perception.

"First, I compare what I have with what I have become used to (through a process of habituation). As I ratchet up my standards, this reduces the enjoyment I get from any given standard of living. Second, I compare what I have with what other people have (through a process of rivalry). If others get better off, I need more in order to feel as good as before. So, we have two mechanisms which help to explain why all our efforts to become richer are so largely self-defeating in terms of the overall happiness of society."

According to Layard, we are on a happiness treadmill. Once we get used to air conditioning, having air conditioning no longer makes us happy. Once we get used to surfing the Internet, surfing the Internet no longer makes us happy. Once we get used to living longer because of modern medicine, our greater lifespan no longer makes us happy....

Going from the fact that brain activity changes when people say that they are happy to the conclusion that surveys can correctly identify the causes of happiness is not a valid logical leap.

More important, the fact that subjective happiness and measurable brain activity are correlated does not imply that we can make a meaningful comparison between the happiness reported by one person and the happiness reported by another person. In particular, if I do a survey and find that two people with incomes of $20,000 and $40,000 report happiness of X and Y, I cannot draw any conclusion based on the relative values of X and Y. Even if we are talking about one person, and X and Y represent their reports at two different points in their lives, it is not clear that we can make a meaningful comparison between X and Y. Thus, it is unlikely that survey research can shed light on the effect on happiness of a change in income from $20,000 to $40,000.

Read the whole thing, which includes relevant links.

Arnold's passing comment about the same person's assessment of his or her happiness at two different points in life is worth elaboration. As I learned long ago from reading Thomas Sowell, in assessing economic data, always correct for age. Younger people are generally poorer than older ones. But are younger people less happy?

Probably not, for reasons irrelevant to the dispute at hand. Youth has its own resources: all those options one's choices have not yet foreclosed, all those imagined futures that might come to pass. In middle age, most of us have more money, and hence more material choices, but simply living our lives has eliminated some of the possibilities we felt in our youth. Hence we may not be as happy as we once were. But we're still happier than we'd be without air conditioning--especially if we live in Texas.

On this subject, Richard Rodriguez's books, Hunger of Memory, a youthful work, and Days of Obligation, a middle-aged work (also influenced by the AIDS epidemic), offer an eloquent contrast. (My WSJ review of Days of Obligation is here.) I haven't yet read his new book, Brown; I bought it earlier today. Based on an excerpt and his speech at our second Dynamic Visions Conference, I expect it to be as good as, if not better, than the earlier ones.

At the local hospital, a dark-skinned man with deep-set eyes grimaced in pain in a hallway, an arm wrapped in layers of gauze. He said his brother had been decapitated by a British tank round as the two men were trying to drive out of town to escape the fighting at the start of the war. Though the hospital has been without electricity or water for more than a week, uneasy doctors and nurses evade reporters' questions, repeating that they are doing fine and are in need of nothing.

Later, a young intern named Mustafa caught up with a reporter outside the hospital to say that the hospital was running out of medicine and critical supplies but that the people there dare not tell the truth.

"The director of the hospital has orders from Basra not to accept any help from the allied forces or aid agencies and to tell anyone who asks that we have everything we need," he said.

He said that the director was following the orders out of fear that if he did not, the Baath Party would send someone to kill him.

The water engineer, in his home, offered a guest a frosty tumbler of ice water and explained that the town was still without electricity because the workers at the nearby power plant were afraid to turn it on for fear of Baathist retribution. He said that before the invasion, Baath Party officials warned everyone not to cooperate with the American and British armies in areas that fell under allied control.

The engineer said he was part of a team of about 20 from the local water bureau who have returned to work, using generators to run the water station that feeds the town. The generators allow them to supply about three-quarters of the town with water on alternating days, he said.

He said that he was doing it because without water "the number of people who will die from typhoid and cholera will be more than from any bombs," but that he lives without protection and worries that his work will cost him his life.

"I'm afraid they will knock on the door and kill me," he said. "No matter what we say, you have no idea how scared we are."

He pleaded with a reporter visiting his home to leave quickly and not to ask more questions. "When Basra falls," he said, "your newspaper will not be fat enough to hold all of the stories we have to tell."

"Princeton at the start of the nineteen-eighties was hardly a hotbed of political activism. Candidates for office included a 'Jihad Party,' made up of hard-partying frat boys who wore towels and face masks. 'It wasn't an office that I recall many people fighting for,' one of Spitzer's fellow-students said. 'Even without Jihad, the slate would have been pretty thin."

The descriptive facts are absurdly off--especially that self-serving line about "hard-partying frat boys." The Antarctica Liberation Front, whose then-dadaist slogan was Jihad (it's not so funny today), was a satirical party of--I say this in the most flattering and self-identifying way--nerds: brilliant, quirky, funny, intellectual guys who make Eliot Spitzer look like a frat boy.

Google turns up a brief reminscience in our class notes:

"WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE CAMPUS REVOLUTIONARIES? (PRINCETON STYLE, SORT OF)": On campus, he was a leader of the ever powerful Antarctica Liberation Front, the group that 18 years ago pulled off one of the most stunning upsets in USG election history by taking most of the top spots and, in one of the group's first official acts, declared war on The Hun School (reports were unsubstantiated that the ALF demanded a recount upon winning the election).

Another ALF platform plank was to annex all the spaces between the yellow lines on highways. After a year of Eliot Spitzer running student government, the ALF swept to electoral victory, dealing a humiliating rebuke to self-important would-be pols. No wonder Spitzer and his friends want to revise history.

The person mentioned above--the ALF's "spiritual leader," a.k.a. The Divine Bruce Yam--is my friend Keating Holland, now director of polling for CNN, who worked more than full-time as managing editor of The Daily Princetonian and still managed to graduate Phi Beta Kappa. Not a frat boy, and not what people picture when they hear the phrase. A former ALF candidate's current job description starts this way: "I am primarily interested in theories of strongly correlated quantum systems, particularly in low dimensions where quantum fluctuations can lead to interesting and exotic new states of matter." (Dan Arovas has "tenure in paradise," as Keating puts it, as a physics prof at UC-San Diego.)

Sorry, Eliot. I'm sure the New Yorker audience thinks it's just terrible the way the big, bad frat boys mocked your noble sense of public service. The truth--that a bunch of hyperintellectuals with a sense of humor incited a student revolt against Spitzer-style self-importance--is a lot more embarrassing.

How about that famous New Yorker fact checking!

I only met him once, when we were guests on C-SPAN's morning show, but I admired his work greatly. He was one of the best magazine editors, possibly the very best, of our generation, and a gifted and passionate writer. His book on the first Gulf War, which I read as dispatches in The New Republic, provided a gritty, sometimes wrenching, eyewitness account of that often-sanitized conflict. He will be missed.

Update: Here's what The Atlantic said. (Via InstaPundit.)

Mohammed was taking a chance, not only in defying Iraqi authorities but in approaching the Marines. Saddam's Fedayeen and their allies had been dressing in civilian clothes to get close to U.S. troops, sometimes even faking surrender, only to open fire at short range. U.S. troops have also fired on civilians at checkpoints.

But with the mention of a woman soldier, Mohammed got the Marines' attention, and he was quickly ushered in to talk with officers who began grilling him about the hospital and the soldier inside. At the same time, Mohammed instructed his wife to go stay with their family -- and none too soon. That night, friends told him later, the Fedayeen showed up at his house and ransacked the place, searching for something.

It was not enough to simply tell the Americans that one of their own was at Saddam Hospital. Twice over the next two days, he said, they sent him back to the hospital to gather more information.

Yesterday, blogger Brian Kelley took issue with my criticism of reporters' use of "Jessica" to refer to Lynch: "If PFC Lynch had come out of that firefight drenched in the blood of dead Iraqis, there would be a hell of a lot more people calling her Private Lynch rather than Jessica these days." Now, it appears that she did just that. (I've been waiting for the story to be shot down, but it seems to be holding.) Smiling for the camera doesn't mean you won't go down fighting.

Diego Rincon, an Army private from Conyers, was recently killed in Iraq, and all the local TV types keep referring to him as "Diego," not "Private Rincon. I think they just have trouble seeing people that young-looking as soldiers.

Come to think of it, if you're old enough to be a POW, shouldn't you be old enough to drink without a fake I.D.?

In his latest syndicated science column, Mike Fumento surveys the work biotech companies are doing to detect, prevent, and treat bioterrorism threats. A sample:

[T]he current anthrax vaccination requires six injections spread over 18 months to provide complete protection. But a gene-spliced vaccine under development by DVC of Reston, Va. would confer immunity with fewer injections, although that number has yet to be determined.

The third generation will be an oral vaccine from Avant Immunotherapeutics of Needham, Mass. It splices genes from anthrax and plague into a cholera vaccine already in advanced testing, thereby protecting against all three diseases. Theoretically, says Avant CEO Una Ryan, "We could keep adding in genes from other microbes that would protect against an even wider variety of bioterrorist threats."...

Devices for rapid detection of airborne and waterborne pathogens are also critical, and many such already exist. Called "biosensors," these devices usually use proteins to detect chemicals or other biological molecules. But the race is on to make them more portable, more accurate, and capable of detecting a broader spectrum of microbes.

One of the most promising is the EchoSensor from Echo Technologies of Alexandria, Virginia. It can detect and distinguish among groups of biological agents such as bacteria and bacterial spores, fungal spores, and toxins as well as measure the level of contamination. The detectors would be built into handheld devices or even worn as a "badge."

Echo Technologies says the detection system reduces the time required for biological analysis from hours or even days to only minutes.

"I frequently thought we were going to die," said Mr McAllester, 33, a London-born Scot raised in Edinburgh and now working for the New York Newsday newspaper.

Describing how Iraqi prisoners were in cells across a narrow corridor, Mr McAllester said that he had to turn his back to avoid watching other inmates being dragged away and tortured each night.

"We could hear screams, especially at night," he said. Unshaven, rib-thin and wearing a crumpled Thomas Pink shirt, he slowly detailed the conditions inside Abu Ghraib, where Amnesty International claims 23 political prisoners, mainly Shia Muslims, have been put to death.

Via Joanne Jacobs, a no-b.s. journalist who notes, "Peter Arnett said the Iraqi Ministry of Information treats reporters well. Well, the journalists weren't tortured themselves."

All I can do is assure Dan Drezner that the disappearance of his blog from my list isn a bug, not a feature.

Update: Problem solved.