Also from the London Spectator, an interesting article on how, by narrowing the definition of what is considered ‘legitimate’ opinion, the BBC is contributing to the erosion of free debate within the UK. The article is, naturally, focused on Britain, but some of it will sound a little, well, familiar to viewers of CBS, ABC and NBC news programming, such as this comment, for example:

“The BBC’s world view starts in the liberal centre and condemns alternative perspectives as mad. The BBC… treats the rigid new orthodoxy of the militant centre as an absolute, not an average. More peculiarly, it characterises it as moderate and fails to perceive that this, too, is a form of intolerant extremism, shorn of ideology but not of menace. “

The New York Observer notes that ‘urban shaman’ Donna Henes will be hosting a ‘drumming circle’ in honor of the full moon tonight. Ms. Henes is quoted in the paper as explaining that, “the ceremony is about drumming up energy and our spirit for inner healing. We’ll drum and, of course, there will be howling at the moon. It’s a very charging experience. People fly out of the door when it’s over.”

Hmmm, well, I saw the moon over Manhattan myself the other night, a great white globe suspended, it seemed, between skyscrapers. It was nice, but, no, I didn’t want to howl.

There’s growing unease that New York City may be in danger of returning to its bad old ways. This report from the London Independent notes that Nurse Bloomberg is saying that he is staking his reputation on school reform, an important enough goal, the writer agrees, but then goes on to make the point that matters:

“It seems [Bloomberg] also needs to pay more attention…to rising crime or – correction – the perception of rising crime. Keeping up the number of cops might be a first step.”

Indeed it is.

In a recent speech Saddam Hussein has drawn comparisons between the US and the Mongol army that sacked Baghdad in 1258. Saddam is, of course, hoping for a different conclusion this time around, but he does us all a service in refreshing memories of the Mongol horde that once ravaged large portions of Eurasia. Western leaders are, these days, continually expected to apologize for the deeds of their country’s imperial pasts, so shouldn’t we expect the same from the heirs of the Horde?

End the shameful silence in Ulan Bator! The world needs an apology – or at least a few muttered words of remorse. Natsag Bagabandi, we’re waiting…

If there’s a political figure more irritating than a tobacco-banning clown from North Dakota, it’s a preachy left-wing windbag who has, it appears, been given delusions of grandeur by his role in a fading soap opera set in the White House.

The London Independent, needless to say, does not agree. In an oleaginous ‘profile’ of Martin Sheen, writer Andrew Gumbel notes the supposed irony of the “continuing success” of the West Wing and its fictional President ‘Bartlett’ (one t, actually, but never mind) in a country allegedly in the grip of "war fever and right-wing resurgence".

Gumbel tells us that Sheen, somebody who has always been predictably orthodox in his choice of liberal causes, is “a rebel, a non-conformist, a man who delights in challenging authority at the highest levels by standing four-square on his unshakeable moral sense.”

Oh, please…

Speaking of bossy public officials, over at Reason’s blog Jacob Sullum has a post on one Michael Grosz. He's the legislator from North Dakota responsible for introducing a bill that would criminalize the sale and possession of tobacco within the borders of that unfortunate state unless, it would seem, it is used for “religious purposes”.

Grosz is, distressingly, a Republican. He should be laughed out of office.

The Financial Times is reporting that a study by an ‘NGO’ ('the International Baby Food Action Network') has concluded that Nestle and Danone breached World Health Organization codes governing the promotion of their products in both Togo and Burkina Faso”. The FT notes claims in the NGO report that “the companies broke the rules by providing mothers with free samples of milk powder, contravening labeling standards, and distributing gifts such as pens, stethoscopes and notepads branded with company names.”

What arrogant and patronizing nonsense – and it’s not confined to Togo and Burkina Faso or powdered milk. WHO is, for example, also active in efforts to restrict tobacco advertising worldwide.

Message from international bureaucrats to the rest of humanity:

“You are all too stupid to think for yourselves”.

TYPEFACE EXHIBITION UNVEILED AT UN HEADQUARTERS IN NEW YORK New York, Jan 17 2003 6:00PM The 100 best typeface designs used in global written communication over the past five years are on display at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, the winners of a global competition organized as part of the UN Year of Dialogue among Civilizations in 2001.

I do read all of my email. Or to be more honest, I open all of my email. I do not owe it to hate-mailers, for example, to read every line of bile they send. And, by now I've become quite expert at skimming past arguments I've heard for the fiftieth time. Also, in terms of not responding to everybody, that's simply a necessity. It particularly pains me when readers send me brilliant but very long essays on a given subject, ofen interwoven with numerous complex and nuanced questions for me to answer. Responding thoughtfully to more than a tiny fraction of these would mean never writing anything for publication ever again. Also, some readers -- especially high school and college kids -- can make astoundingly onerous requests for help with research. Some of these kids are clearly smart and sincere, but I just can't spend an hour combing through my bookshelves to answer a question about Orwell or the warp drive. Nevertheless, I often feel guilty about not responding to those either. But my favorite is when people assume that the responses I do send are auto-responses or written by my "staff" -- as if Cosmo or the Couch could be trusted with that kind of responsibility. I could go on and on about this and I'm sure that other NRniks could as well. But the point is, everyone I know spends a great deal of time reading email and thinking about how to respond to it.

When I read this, I feel the need to smash their guitar against the wall of the Delta House.

A reader responding to my syndicated column on human shields:

Mr. Goldberg: The only comment I would make is that the reason that North Americans and Europeans make themselves human shields mostly against their own governments is that their governments profess to "have a conscience" and these human shields try to hold their governments to their own professed constitutions and agreements.

Most of the African, Chinese governments and Saddam Hussein's regime do not have a tradition of constitutional human rights. Besides, these last regimes have never acted in a vacuum anyway; they have all been colonized by "the west" at one time or another and have learned brutal ways from their western masters who committed genocide against them while at the same time preaching love. Start with the Spanish conquistadors who soon brought along the priests and the European colonists of our countries who massacred the people they found and then
stole their land.

And the human shields are not "objectively in favour" of Saddam Hussein. They are subjectively in favour of the civilians - innocent men, women and children who will be slaughtered (U.N. estimates are as high as .5 million) if the U.S. goes to war against Iraq. And you use the word "liberation" of Afghanistan in the same way it was used in Vietnam - to liberate a village was to destroy it and that's what your government did to up to 5 thousand innocent Afghanis who had never even heard of the World Trade Centre.

When will you consider that it is war itself that is our enemy? It matters little from where it comes. The Bush regime is making your country the most dangerous nation on the planet to the survival of our species. I am glad there are human shields coming from it.

Some of these are funny. Not all of them alas.

Interesting article.

Andrew Sullivan’s quote of the day, is a real whopper:

"There is on the one hand the America of the New Deal, of Jimmy Carter, and even, more or less, of George Herbert Bush [sic] ... But there exists today as well … a second America… a troubled and disturbing America, where pluralism is above all a mask for special interests, a Christian America (Ashcroft), bursting with revolvers (Cheney), arrogant (Rumsfeld), imperial (William Kristol), racist (Trent Lott), opportunist (Condi Rice), partisan (Karl Rove), the America of spying and denunciation (Poindexter), of conspiracy (Elliot Abrams) ... of a rotten Enron-style capitalism, of the unlimited death penalty — the America, in a word, of George W. Bush. This symbolically Texan and overweeningly aggressive America wants war, cheap oil, and, incidentally, the crushing and total humiliation of the Palestinians: in a word imperial domination in its purest form. A short-sighted nationalism and capitalism, which scorn the have-nots, are its raison d’être ... Europe, sooner or later, will have to separate itself from the new America ... The fact that America, the eldest daughter of the Enlightenment, has become 'a threat to itself and the entire world,' as Anatol Lieven explained a few weeks ago in an article for The London Review of Books, is a very worrisome reversal of affairs." - Patrice Higgonet, professor of French history at Harvard University, quoted in the French paper, Liberation, January 3.

It kind of reminds you that the most zealous ideologues often live far from the object of their devotions because they feel the need to prove their allegiance more acutely. It was true of Nazis in France or Romania and of Stalinists in America and just about everywhere else. And, it seems, it’s true of anti-American Euro-boobs.

A great story.

READER A:

Jonah,
I am not a dog person but I understand that some people are dog people the way that I understand some people are liberals - blind, deaf and uncritical of the destructive forces they embrace. The use of dogs in ads and in columns such as yours is weak, juvenile and a sign that you weren't really ready to do good work. I find it is a good indicator that trash will follow. Therefore, I usually ignore whatever content is being carried by the dogness of the piece (bush beans are boycotted by our house), but I have been conditioned by you to expect excellence and occasional brilliance in your writing and so overcame my usual principled reaction and read your article. Imagine my surprise, as the father of an adopted Korean daughter, to find that you had indeed provided trash. I think the piece was entirely tasteless and well beneath you and I can only attribute this to a chemical imbalance due to excessive soy consumption. In the future, please remember my dog rule, if you have to revert to using a dog to carry your message, it will be delivered as a wrecked, sodden mess that was not worth your effort to create and certainly not worth my effort to read.

Reader B:

As a person of Korean ancestry I must warn you of some of the emails you are going to get. Don't listen to them!! As always your files are informative and and hilarious.

From the North Koreans statement:

"the US loudmouthed supply of energy and food aid are like a painted cake pie in the sky, as they are possible only after [North Korea] is totally disarmed."

The New York Times profiles Glenn Reynolds AKA Instapundit. It's a well-deserved semi-suck-up piece. Turn away from the light Glenn!

The Washington Post continues to demonstrate.
that its editorial board is more serious than the Times'.

I hope this makes up for my reference to Waco yesterday, which seemed to bother a few people.

Paul Craig Roberts? Come on dude. What exactly is he saying? In one sentence or less what is his argument?

By the way, I've tackled the 10 guilty men thing too. Although I do not dispute that Volokh's piece is brilliant.

An NRO reader who followed the link below writes:

My blood boils when I read stories like this. It is certainly embarrassing and saddening to me as a Turk who truly believes and also knows the Turkish people and their desire to be part of the European community of nations. Stories like this give plenty of ammunition to groups who want nothing but to see Turkey sidelined and excluded from the block of civilized nations.

For all it's progressiveness in many areas, Turkey has a long way to go when it comes to respecting and enforcing religious freedoms.

A reader sends along the following story from the Onion:

Humane Society Worker Secretly Glad To See Nippy Dachshund Put Down

MARYSVILLE, OH-Union County Humane Society volunteer Catherine Moncrief, 23, admitted Monday that a small part of her was glad to see Oscar, a nippy, hyperactive dachshund, put to sleep. "I feel really guilty, but when they euthanized him, I was kind of like, 'Ha, ha-serves you right, you obnoxious little shit,'" Moncrief said. "I went through a whole bottle of hydrogen peroxide in two weeks from feeding and washing him." Moncrief then privately mused that the incessantly whimpering cocker in Cage 12 could go next for all she cares.

The reader added: "Replace 'nippy dachsund' with, say, 'Beltway Sniper,' and you pretty much get a sense of the self-contradictory (or ambivalent) feelings of this avowed 'anti-death penalty' Catholic." I hear you, man, I hear you.

Rod, I think you misconstrued my point, or maybe I miscommunicated it. When you say cops need guns because that is a matter of necessity, I agree with you. But it's still a matter of making choices. Police could use non-lethal weapons to stop criminals which would work 95% of the time. This would guarantee no suspects were accidentally killed or deliberately murdered by police. A good thing to be sure. The problem is that in a few cases more cops would die (and the numbers of dead cops would rise as more criminals learned that owning and using a gun was the best insurance against arrest). We decide to err on the side of allowing cops to protect themselves with lethal weapons for these and other reasons.

These sorts of cost-benefit analyses come up in every aspect of life. We spend only so much on hospitals or free drugs when we know that if we doubled that amount thousands of lives might be saved. We implement regulations which say a rollover rate of 1 in a million is acceptable, when we could say 1 in a billion is better, even though that might bankrupt the auto industry. It's not just budgetary economics, it's making choices about who lives and who dies. You might respond -- as many readers have -- that the government doesn't intentionally kill X person with AIDS or Y person who bought a Montero. That's true. But we also don't willingly kill any innocent people on death row either. In fact, we try very very very hard to make sure we only execute people who deserve it. We try so hard, in fact, that we don't know of a single innocent person who's ever been executed. And we have lots of names of real people who died because the government chose a rollover rate of one in a million versus one in a billion or who would have lived if a doctor made it to them quicker or if a hospital had been a little closer to home. You say it's a reasonable alternative to put murderers away for life. Well that takes money from saving more deserving lives too.

Lastly, I think people who make Ryan's "demon of error" argument against the death penalty make a fundamental mistake of logic. If I have a batch of cookies and I discover that a piece of broken glass ended up in the batter, I have to throw away the whole batch because I don't know which cookie the glass might be in. That's Ryan's argument against the death penalty. He says we don't know who might be innocent, therefor we have to let everyone off. Well, that's absurd. Just it's okay to eat a cookie if we know there's no glass in it, we can execute someone if we know he is guilty. We may not know for sure that everyone is guilty, but we know for damn sure that some of them are -- and those are the one we can execute with a clear conscience if we believe in the death penalty. The guy who was caught with a knife to the throat of a little girl after raping her sisters and murdering her brother was guilty. He even said so. But Ryan let him off because he wasn't sure whether other people on Death Row might have been innocent. If you believe in the death penalty, that's moronic. If you don't believe in the death penalty it doesn't matter what the guy did, you're against executing people period.

So, the ultimate test is a simple one: Are you in favor of executing the people we know are guilty or not? The rest is commentary.

Derb, you write:

(1): if GWB is willing to go to war without UN approval, why didn't he do so yesterday? or last month? or a year ago?

This strikes me as a pretty unpersuasive argument. I'm with you that things don't look as good or as certain as they did a few months ago. But it seems to me obvious that Bush is willing to go to war without UN approval given the right circumstances. After all if Saddam launched scuds on American bases in Saudi Arabia tomorrow, Bush wouldn't wait for UN approval. The question is where Bush's tipping point is. He threw the dice on getting UN approval and he may be regretting it now, I don't know. But it seems to me an odd argument to say that just because he hasn't gone to war yet without UN approval, he'll therefor never go to war without UN approval.

Sorry I'm late getting to this, Jonah. I think the "acceptable risk" analogy re: the death penalty doesn't persuade. We don't have a reasonable alternative to arming the police and giving them the authority to use deadly force. So we have to allow for the fact that mistakes will happen. Same with cars: the social good (by now a necessity) brought about by the existence of automobiles outweighs the inevitable deaths brought about by same. With the death penalty, we do have a reasonable alternative to putting convicted killers to death. We could incarcerate them for life, without benefit of parole, in a supermax prison (by the way, an NRO reader who has spent years doing lay prison ministry on death row at Angola tells me that most people don't realize how hard life on death row really is). Is the social good accomplished by executing convicted murderers that much better than imprisoning them for life? Is it so good that it's worth risking the state-sanctioned murder of an innocent man? I don't see that it is.

Ramesh's questions, though, are forcing me to examine my anti-d.p. thinking, and leading me to see that I probably buy more of the moral argument against the d.p. than I'd like to admit to myself. I think one reason I resist the argument made by the Pope and others [that the d.p. violates the sacredness of human life] is that I can't stand to see these people go on and on about the poor prisoner, but have very little evident concern for the pain their victim(s) and the victims' loved ones feel. That's not a reason, I admit, but it's what's in my gut, and I struggle with it.

Entertainment Weekly music writer Chris Willman has a pretty great list of what was wrong with the American Music Awards on Sunday night. The first one stood out:

1) Missy Elliott has a huge hit, ''Work It,'' that in more prudish times would've been classified as soft porn. Love it or hate it, the song is an unabashed celebration of sex, with its blatant lyrical references to oral sex, penis size, female genitalia, shaving pubic hair, sexual positions, and so forth. So how best to illustrate this raunchy number for millions of ABC viewers? Have some little girls come out and breakdance while Missy does her rap. On the very day that Pete Townshend was arrested, you'd think someone would have better sense than to associate prepubescents with the nasty.

Want to see what he's talking about? Check out the lyric sheet. I was particularly moved by Elliott's charming couplet linking The Little Drummer Boy to freaky sex. A music journalist friend of mine tells me that "Work It" is probably the most popular song with 11-year-old girls right now. Great, just great.

When my wife, the Fair Jessica, was having her background check for her DOJ job, the FBI talked to almost every person she ever made eye contact with. They interviewed friends, co-workers, dental hygienists; everyone. The only person they didn't talk to even once was, well, me. Now I understand that spouses are sometimes left out -- even though Jess and I were only engaged at the time -- because it's assumed we'll "cover" for our wives or husbands. But what if I spent my days polishing shotguns with my "Remember Waco" T-Shirt? You'd think the FBI would want to know that before okaying my wife to work in the top echelons of the Justice Department.

I asked Kellyanne Conway of the polling company what she makes of the latest presidential-poll news. Here’s her take:

The latest musings by non-pollsters about why the president's poll numbers, according to one survey, have dipped below 60% for the first time since 9/11 offers an important lesson to political observers.

It is tempting but dangerous to confuse causation with coincidence. Folks gaze at the results and offer their own biased view as to why this must be. "He's giving tax breaks to the rich"; "He's too conservative"; "He's not conservative enough"; "Americans don't want to go to war with Iraq"; "Americans wonder why we haven't already gone to war with Iraq" are among the formulaic comments uttered by the chattering class. Musings they are, since the classic approve/disapprove question is generic, asking nothing about policy, or anything particularly helpful for that matter.

The charge that these poll numbers reflect something more severe to the president's political fortunes than the relative unease about the economy and war felt by many Americans is as misplaced as the belief that approval ratings exceeding 70% insulates one from political or electoral vulnerability. Mr. Bush's father's approval rating were stratospheric during his confrontation with Saddam Hussein in 1991, only to have them cut in half as he lost reelection to Bill Clinton a short time later. Additionally, when Congress passed the president's first tax-reduction package (pre-9/11) the president's job performance was at 52%.

That same poll revealed more-specific, and therefore more-relevant, assessments of the public's opinion about President Bush, which have not received as much coverage as the approval rating. Americans told the pollsters at CNN/USA Today that they regard Mr. Bush as a strong and decisive leader (76%) who is willing to make hard decisions (83%) and who has a vision for the country's future (68%).

President Bush should lose no sleep over the latest ratings, but the parade of Democratic benchwarmers who seek to unseat him in '04, might. At 58%, Mr. Bush's approval rating is identical to that of President Reagan on the eve of his landslide reelection in 1984."

I'm off the soy.

I want to be as truthful as possible. But, when you look at the reasons behind why Christ came, why he was crucified, he died for all mankind and he suffered for all mankind, so that, really, anybody who transgresses has to look at their own part or look at their own culpability.
It's time to sort of get back to a basic message, the message that was given. At this time, the world has gone nuts, I think. And this film speaks -- well, Christ spoke of faith, hope, love and forgiveness. And these are things I think we need to be reminded of again. He forgave as he was tortured and killed. And we could do with a little of that behavior.

Every so often you read something that stops you in your tracks. A week ago, The Boston Globe ran a 10,000-word profile of Ted Kennedy by Charles Pierce. For the first gazillion paragraphs or so, it chugged along in familiar Boston Globe snoozefest mode, and then:
"If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age."

Because I believe that we should only be executing deserving people, I've long supported free DNA tests for anybody on death row who wants them. If they prove innocence, that's great news. But the fact is lots of people on death row don't want DNA tests -- because they would confirm guilt, not prove innocence. The media has been particularly bad when it comes to reporting about DNA exonerations because it would be so easy to point out that the people not exonerated deserve the death penalty. Anyway, Ron Bailey -- who originally convinced me on this point -- has written about DNA tests here: .

Okay, I've sent off my syndicated column. And, yes, I made those paragaphs less clunky. Now, assuming this isn't a private argument I'd like to make a quick point.

Rod, when you say the death penalty must be error free it seems to me you make yourself operationally anti-death penalty. I see a parallel with NR's position on the drug war. I've asked both Ramesh and Rich if NR would be in favor of the drug war if NR's editors thought the war was winnable. They both said, more or less, "I don't know, maybe." In other words, theirs is not so much a moral objection to the drug war as a practical one. The obviously high costs of prohibition, in their minds, exceed the benefits. (If I'm mischaracterizing their positions I await their clarifications).

If you think the cost of a single innocent life is too high to justify capital punishment, in other words if you think it must be perfect in every respect, then you might as well come out against the death penalty because otherwise you'll have to argue for a perfect government program and that is an untenable position.

But keep in mind government finds acceptable rates of accidental deaths in all sorts of areas. From friendly fire in the military to deaths on our highways to extremely rare and fatal drug side effects. Surely even one child's death is a tragedy, but we know for a fact that roughly 50 young children die every year from drowning in 5 gallon buckets, mostly in their back yards. But we don't ban buckets. And that's roughly the same number as the number of cases of accidental gun deaths among small children, and we do not require child-safe bucket locks (Note to parents: You can childproof your bucket by putting a hole in the bottom).

If you take it as a matter of principle that the death penalty is a social good, then you must be willing to accept some level of error to achieve that social good. It would be tragic if we executed an innocent man -- hasn't happened yet -- but I would still take a mend it don't end it approach in response (unless I was the one executed). There's nothing wrong with working very hard to keep that level as low as conceivably possible, but the only way to guarantee no errors is to abolish capital punishment entirely.

A reader writes:

"Mr. Dreher,

You missed Ramesh Ponnuru's rebuttle to his own pro-death penalty argument. In the Corner today, he argues that juries can't be trusted to decide personal injury cases:

"As Walter Olson notes in his new book The Rule of Lawyers, trial lawyers are forever talking about how representative the jury is--and then working hard to stack juries so they're as unrepresentative as possible. As Olson notes in an excerpt published in Reason, the same folks who say the jury box is like the ballot box are the most avid to keep out people who might vote the wrong way."

"Substitute 'prosecutor' for 'trial lawyer' and Ramesh has made the case against himself.

"I know it's a cliche, but if juries can't be trusted to set damages for medical malpractice and other personal injury cases, they can't be trusted to decide whether to impose the death penalty."

Ramesh, sorry I'm late to get to your post. You raise good questions. 1) Would any rate of error be so low as to think the death penalty worth keeping? For me, no, I don't think so. I'm not happy to have reached that conclusion, and maybe my squeamishness with the inherent morality of the d.p., as distinct from its practice in our country, plays a bigger role in my deliberation than I realize. Let me think about this some more. Maybe it's a Catholic thing, but I find the older I get, the more inclined I am to say if err we must, then let us err on the side of life -- even if it means suffering scumbags to draw breath until their natural deaths.

I'm getting off the subject here for a sec, but I want to mention something that really got to me. An old man to whom I was close died a few years ago, well into his 90s. On his deathbed, he confessed that he was haunted by his participation in an extrajudicial killing back in the 1930s. He was part of a lynching party organized by the sheriff, who for his own reasons didn't want to have to worry about the courts. He got the men together, and they hanged this criminal. Well, it came out shortly thereafter that the criminal they hanged was completely innocent. For various reasons, all the men had believed him unquestionably guilty; anyway, the sheriff had told them it was so, hadn't he? Nothing was ever done to the lynching party, and the incident was forgotten. Sixty some-odd years later, as he lay dying, with an entire lifetime of experience behind him, this is what tormented that old man.

Mind you, our modern prosecutorial and jury system is light years away from a rural lynch mob of the 1930s. Still, the potential for human error, swayed by prejudice, emotion, or plain old fallibility, is always present. Maybe one reason I fear the death penalty is I can too easily imagine myself as part of that lynch mob, trusting governmental authority and carried away by my own emotions, seeing only what I wanted to see, and not aware of my own capacity for error.

We -- as in the US Government -- are responsible for Pete Townsend's arrest. He was a part of "Operation Avalanche," a major Dallas-based internet kiddie porn take down the DOJ announced in August of 2001. The credit card numbers which couldn't be traced to U.S. card holders were given to Interpol and that's how
they tracked down Townsend. I still hope he's innocent, but it doesn't look good.

Derb -

I could have sworn you were about to coin a neologism for adding new meaning to an old word. But you skipped right by. How about neologify?

I'm with Ramesh on the death penalty. I'm crashing on my syndicated column on this stuff. Here are the first two grafs, they'll give you a sense of what crapweasel I think Ryan is:

In 1995, Fedell Caffey shot Debra Evans in her home and stabbed her 10 year old daughter. He then cut the full term baby from her womb and, along with her 7 year old son, kidnapped them. The 7-year-old’s body was later found. The child had been tortured. Departing Illinois Governor George Ryan let Caffey off Death Row, because he believes to do otherwise would be, "playing God."

Lenard Johnson, raped two girls, aged 11 and 13 and sexually assaulted a third, aged 7 while he was baby-sitting them. And, he murdered an 11 year old boy with a knife. He was caught holding the knife to one of the girl’s throats. Johnson never made any claim to being innocent of his crimes. George Ryan felt it was impossible to keep Johnson on death row because the "demon of error" made it impossible to tell who deserved to stay on death row and who didn't.

Derb, Is it a neologism if it’s only a new use for an already existing word? Anyway, I know you don’t watch the Simpsons, but your Mustache neologism reminds me of one my favorite scenes from the Simpsons. In the episode "Much Apu About Nothing," a bear sneaks into downtown Springfield and sits outside the Simpson and Flanders homes. Here’s an excerpt:

Maude Flanders: Oh, Marge... it was horrible! We were trapped in the house all afternoon... and, well... we had to drink toilet water! [sobs]

Marge Simpson: Well, things were bad everywhere.

Homer: I'm sick of these constant bear attacks. It's like a frickin' country bear jambaroo around here! -- Or jamboree even.

Ned reminds Homer that this is the only bear this town has seen, but Homer gets the whole town with him with a catchy chant...

Homer: We're here, we're queer, we don't want anymore bears.

Crowd: We're here, we're queer, we don't want anymore bears.

Lenny: Hey, that's a pretty catchy chant. Where did you hear it?

Homer: Oh, I heard it at the mustache parade they have every year.

Another reader writes:

That was a shocking piece. I live in a town of 2,500 folks in southern Utah and I would like to think that the actions mentioned in your article don't go on here but I wouldn't be surprised. Last week an official with the local National Guard unit was convicted of making porn videos with a couple of high school girls. It is depressing to a parent of teenagers.

I was most interested in the comments from your friend that taught in Appalachia about students ignoring their surroundings. That same scenario exists everywhere in rural and remote America. The best way to counter it is to do what we did in our family when we moved to a new house in 1996-eliminate TV. After a 90-day withdrawal, I can honestly say we don't miss it. In fact our lives are much richer for not having it. Our children are better informed on world affairs (because they read newspapers and news magazines), great students and well adjusted-I recommend it to anyone with the courage to try it.

The mail about my sex-toy party column is coming in. For the record, my column was agnostic on the propriety of sex toys in the bedroom; what I find objectionable is making the most intimate details of one's sex life fodder for happy-go-lucky social events. Here's a letter from a fellow New Yorker who thinks I'm a prude:

To the question of whether American's are better off for the past 40 years of self indulgence, I'd say on balance hell yes. And I also proudly call myself a conservative Republican of the libertarian variety. The fear of 'me' held by social conservatives strikes me as equally dangerous to the health of our modern society as the liberal's worship of complete moral relativism.

I don't know if you can easily and cleanly qualify whether the world is a better place when people do wild things in the bedroom or try drugs or whatever...but try putting it up to a vote and see if people want to return to 100 years ago when the only fun available was fishing in a stream. I'm sure even most self styled conservatives would have to admit that they like things just the way they are, for the most part , despite certain elements of tackiness and excess.

"Gentlemen, on the one hand we have Pearl Harbor in smoldering ruins, thousands of dead Americans. In Europe, we have a bloodthirsty tyrant seeking to rule the whole of the continent and murder millions. And on the other hand we face the risk of profound Karmic retribution for going to war. I ask you men, what shall we do?"

I've gotten more than a few polite, intelligent and quite lengthy emails from people telling me that I'm wrong about Lomborg. Quite a few others are just plain nasty. None of them make the statistical or scientific arguments themselves, but instead point me to Science magazine, or one review or another. That's fine. I'm hardly quipped to defend Lomborg on my own either. Rather, the people I trust have persuaded me that the attack on Lomborg is unfair. That is not to say he didn't make mistakes. I've yet to hear of a major book of this kind not having errors. Lomborg has addressed them. I guess the only thing I would point out is that when Paul Ehrlich, Lester Brown, Jeremy Rifkin, Carl Sagan and numerous other celebrity science types offered massive, collosal exaggerations or spine-bending lies, the scientific community didn't launch a witch hunt for them. Some may roll their eyes at Lester Brown, but they do it away from the cameras. Ehrlich is still respectfully quoted in the media and he's been wrong about pretty much everything (that is unless I missed the 60 or so million Americans who died from starvation in the 1980s that he predicted). It seems to me that a scientist can be sloppy, deceitful and grossly self-serving and get into almost no trouble if he confirms the conventional wisdom. But if he defies the conventional wisdom and fails to cross a "T" he's toast.

As a high school math teacher, I often hand out worksheets and instruc my students to show their work on a separate sheet of paper. The class will
then erupt with moans and groans and complaints that I'm wasting trees. I usually respond that trees are cheap or that I don't want any tree farmers to starve to death. One year this bad attitude of mine was reported to a science teacher down the hall and he decided to arm the students with some facts.

The next day I was informed by my students that if we continue to clear cut at the present rate, the rainforest would be gone within seven years. I said that I didn't believe it, that it was a lie. Riot in the classroom. Do the math I said. You are gonna end up believing a lot of stupid things if you don't do the math. The next day I got a note from the science teacher accusing me of listening to Rush Limbaugh.

Several years later the science teacher admitted he was lying- for all the good reasons you mention in your article.

Bob Novak’s column – linked by Drudge – about how Republican Senators are furious at the White House’s "arrogance" smells like a pork-protection racket and nothing more. Of course it’ll be hyped as a bigger deal in the coming days, but I’m sorry Ted Stevens doesn't get angry about anything but disruptions in the supply of pork. Bush could surrender to France and Stevens wouldn’t protest so long as he could keep his chairmanship and spending continued unabated.

I am a college professor (forgive me) who teaches environmental engineering. I got into this field in the early 70s because I am an environmentalist. I totally agree with the premise of your column on Lomborg and with most of the details. He is now my hero. I feel truly sorry for Lomborg because I am sure that he had no idea what he was getting into. The scientific community in the U. S. has been almost totally politicized, with severely detrimental effects on scientific progress and on those who question the litany. We have a modern word for those scientists who persecuted Gallileo and who are persecuting Lomborg: fascist. If I were him, I would hire a bodyguard. Seriously.

My own field, engineering, has been relatively free of this nonsense until recently. I now find that more and more of my students come from public schools to college brainwashed with these myths. Like a good engineer, I present them with the facts and expect them to react rationally like engineers. No. It is virtually impossible to change someone's mind when it has been shaped from the beginning with emotional
messages and brainwashing.

I despair.

Doing "Showdown Iraq" on CNN today around 12:30 EST. I'm on with someone from Pacifica Radio.

Wow, thanks for the high praise Derb. Another point on conservative science from Nisbet. He argues that for all of the ethics and rules of the scientific establishment, the most effective insurance against group-think is competition between scientists and scientific institutions. Arranging self-interest against self-interest is the most sure-fired way to keep scientists motivated to debunk the work of other scientists. I think this highlights what is so dangerous about the current global warming debate; the "mainstream" scientific community is so overwhelmingly encouraged to compete only in one direction. Scientists who question the assumptions of the whole endeavor are locked out of the process, ridiculed or censored through impoverishment.

In response to today's column:

Your column on Galileo and the Lomborg case was excellent and very enjoyable. As a practicing planetary scientist, I can certainly attest to your proposition that science is a very human (and often, a very ugly) business. Your point that L'Affaire Galileo is more complicated than a simple "bigoted-church-stifles-dissent" story is quite true. It will probably not surprise you to learn that your replacement concept of "bigoted-scientists-stiffle-innovation" is also not the full story.

The scientists of Galileo's day had good reason to embrace the Ptolemaic system of the universe - it worked. Ptolemy's Earth-centered universe, in which the sun, Moon, planets, and celestial sphere rotated around the Earth, with 'wheels within wheels," of cycles and epicycles, was used to navigate around the world for centuries. To a first order, it explained otherwise apparently inexplicable phenomena, such as the reversing ("retrograde motion") of Mars in the night sky. And, if it seems silly and ad hoc to modern minds, a solid crystalline celestial sphere is conceptually no sillier than our current ideas about superstrings and the nature of matter. Both are theoretical concepts, untestable by current technology.

Moreover, the Copernican system did NOT work. Planetary paths predicted by Copernicus were found to be in serious error. The system did not work for a very good reason: it's not the way the Solar System is put together. Copernicus said that Earth and the other planets orbited the sun in circular orbits. But they do not: they revolve in ELLIPTICAL orbits, with the sun at one focus. It took years of painstaking planetary observation by Tycho and years of menial number-crunching by Kepler to establish the laws of planetary motion, all well after Galileo published his astonishing findings. Finally, it took an Isaac Newton to take what were basically empirical "laws" and explain to everybody what they actually meant, with his Principia, published almost 100 years after Galileo lived.

The cartoon history that depicts centuries of the most brilliant of human minds stupidly embracing the "obvious idiocies" of Ptolemy's "wrong" model of the universe is itself oversimplified and slathered with retrospective. We all do the best we can. No doubt personal pique and jealousy motivated some of the animus against Galileo. And you yourself pointed out that he was not an easy guy to get along with (for starters, he was arrogantly convinced of his own intellectual superiority. Even if true, that's not an attitude that encourages friendship). But some of the "opposition" to the Copernican model of the universe had roots in a very different motivation - they were right about its being wrong. That they embraced an alternative that was equally wrong does not change the basic facts of the case.

Well, Andrew, you mucked up my weekend a bit with your anti-Dr Pepper rants. My Texan wife came to me yesterday afternoon, mad as a wet hen, saying, "You get on The Corner right now and give that Andrew Stuttaford what-for!"

"Huh?" said I.

"He's insulting Dr Pepper!"

So I read your entry, in which you testified, accurately, to its vileness. I told Julie: "Well...he's right, you know."

"What?! What?!"

Thanks, man. I was putting on my boots to go to mass this morning, and she was going on about the time she went to the Dr Pepper Museum in Waco. You don't mess with Texans and their Dr Pepper. You really don't.

Many, many, readers, many, many of them from Texas have written pointing out that there is no period after the ‘Dr’ in ‘Dr Pepper’. They are right. I was wrong - again. The explanation dates back to the 1950s. Your local Dr Pepper expert (who is probably from Texas) can furnish the necessary details. Otherwise just click here.

Grammar geeks with no remaining shreds of a life may be interested to know that the Pepper punctuation would also be perfectly proper in British English. In the land of Lucozade and Irn-Bru, a period (or full stop) is only appropriate for those abbreviations where the last letter of the abbreviation differs from the last letter of the word written in full, thus ‘Doctor’ becomes ‘Dr’, but it’s ‘inc.’ for ‘incorporated.’

Here are some of the many new things that I have learned from Corner readers about this Neanderthal nectar. It is best eaten with moon pie, the bottler in Dublin (Texas) uses real cane sugar and it is a breakfast treat when drunk warm and served with okra and hushpuppies.

A number of people have suggested that the true essence of evil is a drink known as Moxie, which is, apparently, popular in Maine, the home state, I note, of Stephen King.

And that’s all I have to say about Dr Pepper. Period.

From the 'Corrections' section in today’s New York Times Magazine:

“The picture in the … issue on Dec. 29 with an article about Uzi Gal, inventor of the submachine gun named for him, was printed in error. It shows Arnold Schwarzenegger, in the movie ''True Lies,'' holding MAC-10's, not Uzis.”

The chances of Bill Clinton becoming chancellor of Oxford University may be less than feared judging by this report from the Sunday Telegraph. On the other hand, look at his potential rivals: Baroness Williams helped destroy Britain’s secondary education system, Michael Heseltine played Brutus to Mrs Thatcher’s Caesar and Chris Patten needs no introduction...

Czech president Vaclav Havel is a one of the moral giants of our time. This report from the London Observer suggests that there’s a danger that he may be replaced by a moral pygmy – a former Communist. If that occurs, expect howls of protest from the EU, the organization that the Czech Republic is slated to join shortly.

Yes, I am being sarcastic.

There's a depressing piece in today’s London Observer about the nature of the terrorist threat. The writer makes the point that simply describing it all as ‘Al Qaeda’ is too simplistic an approach: he’s right, obviously. Islamic extremism is far more complex – and far more incoherent – than that.

It’s not all Communist dictators in the New York Times today: there’s an interesting piece by Thomas Friedman (writing from Cairo), which is well worth a look, not least for Friedman’s view on how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is complicating progress in the wider region.

Friedman doesn’t claim to have the answer as to how to resolve the current impasse (who does?) and it is clear that he sees how the conflict is often used as a device to enable the Arab world to avoid resolving its own massive and, all too frequently, self-imposed difficulties. Nevertheless, he concludes as follows:

“I am convinced that much of the anger over U.S. policy is really a cry of help from people who know what they have to do — to democratize, liberalize their economies — and who know that they will be lost for another 50 years if they don't, but can't do it because these ideas are promoted by a power they feel is indifferent to their deepest hurt."

"I am not talking about what is right, or what is fair, or even what is rational. I am talking about what is. And if we ignore it, if we dismiss it all as a fraud, we will never fully harvest the positive changes that could come from regime change in Iraq. The Egyptian playwright Ali Salem says: "We have an Egyptian proverb: `The drunk is in the care of the sober.' You are the sober. Don't forget that."”

Mao is not the only Communist dictator given gentle treatment in the New York Times this Sunday. Today’s ‘Editorial Observer’ by Adam Cohen is, predictably – and foolishly - enough, a call for an end to the US embargo, but this passage is worth a second look:

“Cubans view Castro’s revolution, which deposed the American-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista, as less about Marxism than about finally winning self-determination.”

Quite how anyone knows what those Cubans unable to escape communism are thinking is a mystery: freely expressed opinion is not a notable characteristic of Cuba under Castro. It is, however, true that the Cuban revolution was not initially explicitly Marxist. That it rapidly became so owed nothing to any American embargo (which didn’t yet exist) and everything to Castro’s search for a system that would offer him the philosophical ‘justification’ he needed to eliminate all potential opposition to his rule.

Communism provided Castro with the answer – and it still does. For Cubans, true self-determination remains elusive, and it will continue to be so until Castro’s regime finally collapses. The embargo can hasten that day. It should be kept in place.

There’s a touch of revisionist history in a piece in today’s New York Times on China’s new Communist Party boss, Hu Jintao. The gist of the article (at one point sub-headlined “Appealing to old-time Communist virtues”) is that Mr. Hu will attempt to appear more egalitarian than his predecessor.

“The writer, Erik Eckholm, tells us that Hu’s “early focus on such homespun virtues as modesty, struggle and helping the disadvantaged implicitly highlights the darker side of China’s rapid growth…even as it taps a deep nostalgia for the betrayed ideals of Chairman Mao.”

“Betrayed ideals”? What betrayed ideals?

As early as 1927 (in a report on the Hunan peasant movement) Mao, then a young revolutionary leader, was talking about the necessity of “a short reign of terror in all parts of the countryside.”

He lied. Maoism was a primitive cult of violence with bizarrely egalitarian millennial overtones, nothing more. The reign of terror was not ‘short’, nor was it ever intended to be. It endured for decades.

Eckholm also quotes a speech by Mao from 1949, the year in which he finally overthrew the old regime. Warning against complacency, Mao called on party members to practice “plain living and arduous struggle.” He then proceeded to spend the greater part of the next three decades living a life of ever more sybaritic excess, not that Eckholm's readers are ever told that.

The piece also includes remarks by the editor of a Party newspaper, who notes how much a recent speech by Hu had included references to Mao. This was designed, the editor said, to show that Hu’s “legitimacy comes ultimately from Mao, not Jiang or Deng.”

“Legitimacy”? Mao had power, not legitimacy, and his 'achievements' - economic stagnation, mass murder and tens of millions dead - speak for themselves.

Aye, Johnnie, haggis is a rare treat, described in today's New York Times in all its mouthwatering detail:

"For the uninitiated, haggis is chopped animal entrails - usually the heart, lungs and liver - mixed with congealed fat and spices and stuffed into a sheep's stomach. "

The only time I have been even slightly disappointed by haggis was in a restaurant near Loch Ness geared, shall we say, to the tourist trade. I was a tourist there myself so naturally I tucked into 'Highland Pizza' - pizza with haggis topping. Perfectly good, but, like those hybrid beings in alien abduction movies, it just didn't seem quite right.