Recommended reading for the day comes from IDF reservist Captain Dan Gordon. Dan is the writer of such films as The Hurricane, Murder in the First, Wyatt Earp, and The Assignment.

Here’s an extract dealing with the way the Western Media was manipulated by Hezbollah.

[..]

There was, of course one other indispensable element to their war plan; the centering of their offensive capability against Israel’s civilian population within Lebanon’s civilian population. Much has been made in the Western press of Hezballah’s benign social services function in Lebanon, of the hospitals and schools it has built. Almost no notice however has been paid to the large numbers of these hospitals and schools which were built over its military bunkers and rocket launching sites.

This was perhaps both the most cynical and barbaric disregard for innocent civilian lives of all of Hezballah’s and Iran’s strategic choices. It was also the most successful. It was predicated not on its knowledge of its enemy (Israel) but its true genius lay in its knowledge of the press. The calculus was simple: launch a rocket from within a civilian population; if you kill Jews that’s a victory. If the Jews hit back and in so doing kill Lebanese civilians, that’s a victory. If they don’t hit back because they’re afraid to hit civilians, that’s a victory. Now repeat the process until you kill so many Jews they have to hit back and in so doing kill more Lebanese civilians. That’s the ultimate victory, because they know that in striking just those chords exactly what music the press will play. The awful truth, which the Western Press was manipulated to ignore or downplay, was that Iran, through its terrorist operational arm Hezballah, had invaded Lebanon from within. Hezballah did not protect Lebanon, they occupied it and they used those Hezballah occupied territories to launch Iran’s offensive in response to the West’s ultimatum to cease development of nuclear weapons.

[..]

Just as the Spanish Civil War was a preview of what European Fascism had in store for the world, so do I believe, that Iran’s offensive against Israel carried out by its Terrorist Army operational arm, was a preview of what Islamo Facsism has in store not only for the West but for the moderate regimes of the Middle East, which in case anyone forgot to notice, controls the oil on which the West survives. What they failed to gain militarily they accomplished through the manipulation of the Western Media which were their willing dupes and through the ineptitude and weakness, if not down right appeasement of the political leadership of the International community which has all but guaranteed that this war will be but round one.

Read the whole thing.

Dan Gordon actually had not one but two articles published today. Here’s a extract from his second myth-dispelling piece:

[..]

It should be noted that Lieutenant Colonel Ishai’s brigade is made up not only of Jews but Druze and Bedouin Muslims. All of these fighters came from villages in the Galilee which had been hit by Hezb’allah’s constant barrages of katyusha rockets aimed at Israel’s civilian population. For them this fight was not a political struggle, nor even a national one, it was quite literally in defense of their homes.

Lieutenant Colonel Ishai has served for many years shoulder to shoulder with Muslim troops in the army of the Jewish state. Indeed I was privileged to meet Druze commanders, who commanded almost exclusively Jewish troops. The first one of those commanders was my own company commander when I was in basic training in 1973.

The soldiers who fight for the state of Israel are not only Jews they are Christian, Druze and Moslem as well. Far from the image of a barbaric Nazi-like military, the IDF takes great pains even in war time to respect the sensitivities not only of its own troops but of the Palestinian and Lebanese civilians caught up in the cross fire brought about by the Islamist terrorists who hide behind them.

Lieutenant Colonel Ishai decided that sending bomb sniffing dogs into a Moslem mosque would be offensive to members of that religion. He thus decided that rather than do that he would send in soldiers, knowing that he was risking their lives to do so.

He gave that order and his soldiers obeyed it in full knowledge of all the implications of their actions. They would risk their lives to respect the sanctity of another’s religion and the sensitivities of another people. Those were the actions of the Israeli army.

What they found in the mosque were anti-tank missiles of the kind that had just been used to try and kill them and katyusha rockets of the kind that quite literally had been aimed at their own homes and families. [..]

A somewhat related and highly recommended article from Sunday’s Washington Post: “In Israel, a Divisive Struggle Over Targeted Killing” (hat tip Hot Air)

On Saturday morning, Sept. 6, 2003, six F-16s were waiting off the coast of Gaza. Mofaz, the defense minister, sat in his office and changed the channel on his TV from CNN to live footage of Gaza from a reconnaissance drone. By noon, several Hamas leaders had arrived at the home of Marwan Abu Ras, a religion professor who was also a Hamas activist. The Israeli cameras zoomed in to catch the details.

“Some came on foot, some came by car, some parked far away and walked,” Mofaz recalled. “They covered their faces with kaffiyehs and wore flowing clothes so they’d be hard to track.”

A Shin Bet agent in the command center called out the identities of the men. “It was the ‘Who’s Who’ of Hamas,” said Gabi Ashkenazi, then Yaalon’s deputy. “People we’d been hunting for years.”

“It got intense,” Yaalon recalled. “The reports — ‘Here comes Mohammed Deif.’ ‘Here comes Adnan al-Ghoul.’ ‘Here comes Ismail Haniyeh.’ They said the names, I pictured each one, and I pictured blown-up buses and disco bombings, and shootings, murders of children, and kidnapped soldiers.”

Gallant, the prime minister’s adviser, called Sharon at his ranch and told him about the extraordinary gathering. “We’re talking about people responsible for killing hundreds of Israelis,” Gallant said. “They’re planning on killing hundreds more.”

Sharon was setting up for his grandson’s sixth birthday party. He asked, “Are the planes ready?”

In Gaza, the last Hamas member arrived in a white station wagon. Dichter himself had arrested him twice, “with these hands,” he said, holding up thick, calloused fingers. It was Sheik Ahmed Yassin, a paraplegic and Hamas spiritual leader. As his wheelchair disappeared into the house, an agent called the sheik by his code name: “the Carcass.”

Yaalon said to the air force chief: “Ready?”

[..]

Read what happened next.

All about the state of the war against Islamo-Fascism (or whatever it is called this week).

Sunday 27th of August:

• Mark Steyn, in the Chicago Sun Times: “Homeland security can’t get over the pump”. You’ll probably be as disturbed as I was to note that the term “penis pump” features no less than 8 times in Mark’s latest.

• David Warren: “Faint Hope for Lebanon”

• Shelby Steele in The Opinion Journal: “Life and Death”
  “Western guilt blinds us to the nature of Islamic extremism.”

  From nations on the verge of nuclear weapons to isolated individuals–take the recent Seattle shootings–Islamic militancy grounded in hatred of Israel and America has become the Muslim world’s most animating idea. Why?

  I don’t believe it is because of the reasons usually cited–Israeli and American “outrages.” No doubt Israel and America have made mistakes in the Middle East. Certainly, Israel was born at the price of considerable dislocation and suffering on the part of the Palestinians. And yes, there will never be a satisfying answer for this. Yet every Israeli land-for-peace gesture has been met with a return volley of suicide bombers and rockets. Palestinians have balked every time their longed-for nationhood has come within grasp. They have seemed to prefer the aggrieved dignity of their resentments to the challenges of nationhood. And Hezbollah launched the current war from territory Israel had relinquished six years earlier.

  If this war makes anything clear, it is that Israel can do nothing to appease the Muslim animus against her. And now much of the West is in a similar position, living in a state of ever-heightening security against the constant threat of violence from Islamic extremists. So here, from the Muslim world, comes an unappeasable hatred that seems to exist for its own sake, a hatred with very little actual reference to those it claims to hate. Even the fighting of Islamic terrorist groups is oddly self-referential, fighting not for territory or treasure but for the fighting itself. Standing today in the rubble of Lebanon, having not taken a single inch of Israeli territory, Hezbollah claims a galvanizing victory.
  ..

  White guilt in the West–especially in Europe and on the American left–confuses all this by seeing Islamic extremism as a response to oppression. The West is so terrified of being charged with its old sins of racism, imperialism and colonialism that it makes oppression an automatic prism on the non-Western world, a politeness. But Islamic extremists don’t hate the West because they are oppressed by it. They hate it precisely because the end of oppression and colonialism–not their continuance–forced the Muslim world to compete with the West. Less oppression, not more, opened this world to the sense of defeat that turned into extremism.
  ..
  Over and over, white guilt turns the disparity in development between Israel and her neighbors into a case of Western bigotry. This despite the fact that Islamic extremism is the most explicit and dangerous expression of human bigotry since the Nazi era. Israel’s historical contradiction, her torture, is to be a Western nation whose efforts to survive trap her in the moral mazes of white guilt. Its national defense will forever be white aggression.

  But white guilt’s most dangerous suppression is to keep from discussion the most conspicuous reality in the Middle East: that the Islamic world long ago fell out of history. Islamic extremism is the saber-rattling of an inferiority complex. America has done a good thing in launching democracy as a new ideal in this region. Here is the possibility–if still quite remote–for the Islamic world to seek power through contribution rather than through menace.

Saturday, August 26, 2006:

• Diana West on Townhall.com: What President Bush should say to us, part 2.
  Part 1 featured last week.

  [..] I am asking Congress to amend our laws to bar further Islamic immigration, beginning with immigration from sharia states. This, the most crucial domestic component of my anti-sharia program, will undoubtedly be regarded as the most controversial because it necessitates making a definitive judgment against the laws promulgated by Islam, a religion. This may appear to go against our cherished tradition of religious tolerance, not to mention good manners. But if the laws promulgated by Islam directly threaten freedom of conscience, freedom of expression and religion, women’s rights and key concepts of equality — and they do — it is a sign of intellectual rigor mortis not to say so. And I do say so, but, again, not to launch a transformative military or cultural offensive against Islam, but to initiate the mobilization of a defensive movement to prevent the Islamization of American law and liberty.[..]

• The Australian featured an extract from Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s book “The Caged Virgin: A Muslim Woman’s Cry for Reason”, under the title “Women the future of freedom”. “Ayaan Hirsi Ali says the liberation of Europe’s Muslim women is the best way to encourage assimilation into Western society but the opportunity is being wasted.”

Friday 25th of August:

• Oliver North on the Real Clear Politics website: “Stunningly Naïve”

• Nibras Kazimi: in the New York Sun: “Islam and the city”

• Caroline B. Glick: “The necessary accounting”
  “Is Israel’s current political and military leadership capable of drawing the proper lessons from the war?”
• Joel Mowbray in the Washington Times: “A professor’s Islamic ties”
  “Headline-grabbing stories about a British-based Muslim academic’s public support for “martyrdom” last weekend missed a key detail: His mentor and frequent collaborator is a high-profile scholar who has been consulted repeatedly by the FBI, Professor John Esposito of Georgetown University.”

• Pamela Bone in The Australian: Muslim sisters need our help
  “If she is dubbed right-wing for expressing solidarity with women in Islamic countries, the author doesn’t mind wearing the label.”

• Victor Davis Hanson: “Relearning lessons in the War on Terror”

• Fjordman: “First They Came For the Jews: The Story of Yet Another World War”

And because this is coming a day late, here’s the Monday Bonus:

• Mark Steyn in the NY Sun: “Achilles’ Heel”

  Our Thought For The Day comes from Steve Centanni, the Fox News reporter freed over the weekend by his captors in Gaza:

  “We were forced to convert to Islam at gunpoint. Don’t get me wrong here. I have the highest respect for Islam, and I learned a lot of good things about it.”

  ..

  But Centanni and Wiig’s brief interlude as practicing Muslims is revealing in a larger sense. Ever since 9/11, the western multicultural mindset has been desperately trying to swaddle Islam within the fluffy quilt of diversity. It’s “just” another religion, like the Congregationalists and Episcopalians. To be sure, it’s got a few hotheads, but haven’t we all? Sticking with this line requires an awful lot of brushing under the carpet and there’s so much under there by now it looks like a broadloomed Himalayas. For a start, you can’t help noticing the traffic is mostly one-way..

  ..

  Christians and Muslims are both “people of the book.” But there’s a difference: Christianity started out as a religion of the weak, held by the lowliest in society and advanced by conversion and example, independent of the state. A distinction between religion and temporal power is embedded in its founding narratives. Compare the final words of Jesus to his disciples, on the day of his ascension …

  “Ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.”

  … with the final words of Mohammed to his disciples:

  “I was ordered to fight all men until they say, ‘There is no god but Allah.’”

  ..

  The bad news is that Islam will soon be able to enforce submission-conversion at the point of a nuke. The good news is that any religion that needs to do that is, by definition, a weak one. More than that, the fierce faith of the 8th century Muslim warrior has been mostly replaced by a lot of hastily cobbled-together flimflam bought wholesale from clapped out European totalitarian pathologies. It would have struck almost any other ruler of Persia as absurd and unworthy to be as pitifully obsessed with Holocaust denial as President Ahmadinejad is: talk about a bad case of Europhile cultural cringe. But in today’s mosques and madrassahs there is almost as little contemplation of the divine as there is in the typical Anglican sermon. The great Canadian columnist David Warren argues that Islam is desperately weak, that it has been “idiotized” by these obsolescent imports of mid-20th century Fascism. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but, if Washington had half the psy-ops spooks the movies like to think we have, the spiritual neglect in latter-day Islam is a big Achilles’ heel just ripe for exploiting.

• Washington Times, Monday Editorial: “‘Peacekeeping’ farce in Lebanon”

• Stanley Kurtz in the National Review: “Our Fallout-Shelter Future”
  
  We’ll be back to duck and cover if we don’t stop Iran first…

• Frederick Grab in the Washington Times: “The current clash of civilizations”

• Nicholas Wapshott in the NY Sun: “Ahmadinejad’s Jaw-Jaw Play”

• Washington Times, Monday Editorial: One picture of ‘moderate’ Islam (that would be Indonesia)

Ah, what the hell, I am going to get right up to speed and throw in a couple of pieces from today too:

• Caroline B. Glick: “Terrorist theater tricks”

  The blogosphere, and particularly Little Green Footballs, Powerline, Zombietime, Michelle Malkin, and EU Referendum, have relentlessly exposed the systematic staging of news events, fabrication of attacks against relief workers, and doctoring of photographic images by Hizbullah with the active assistance of international organizations and the global media.

• Dennis Prager: “Just a Reminder About Who and Why We Are Fighting”

  [numerous examples of Islamo-Fascist immorality snipped]

  Does all this suggest that we are fighting a billion Muslims? Of course not.

  Does all this suggest that all or even most Muslims are bad people? Of course not.

  It does suggest, however, that the dominant forces within Islam are bad at this time; that Muslims who see this evil in their midst have not mobilized any counterforce either out of fear for their lives or for some other reason; and that decent men and women around the world — Hindu, Christian, Jewish, atheist, Buddhist and Muslim — are threatened by this powerful, death-loving force.

  Muslims who do not acknowledge the threat to civilization from within the Muslim world at least have two excuses — fear for their lives or group solidarity. What excuses do non-Muslims have who deny this threat?

I posted recently about the rapid growth of Pentecostal Churches in Developing countries. In fact sociologist of religion Philip Jenkins wrote in his book “The Next Christendom”, that Christianity will be the dominant idea of the 21st Century. He believes in the next 25 years the world population of Christians will grow to 2.6 billion, with half of these in Africa and Latin America.

But that is not the only way evangelicalism is set to shape the world – its influence in the First World is set to be no less profound. Walter Russell Mead, the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, has written in the September/October issue of Foreign Policy on how the rise of the Evengelicans in the US is set to influence American foreign policy in the years to come.

You can also read his article on a single page, (rather than over 7 in FR), over at Real Clear Politics.

(their) summary:

Religion has always been a major force in U.S. politics, but the recent surge in the number and the power of evangelicals is recasting the country’s political scene — with dramatic implications for foreign policy. This should not be cause for panic: evangelicals are passionately devoted to justice and improving the world, and eager to reach out across sectarian lines.

Extract:

The growing influence of evangelicals has affected U.S. foreign policy in several ways; two issues in particular illustrate the resultant changes. On the question of humanitarian and human rights policies, evangelical leadership is altering priorities and methods while increasing overall support for both foreign aid and the defense of human rights. And on the question of Israel, rising evangelical power has deepened U.S. support for the Jewish state, even as the liberal Christian establishment has distanced itself from Jerusalem.

In these cases as in others, evangelical political power today is not leading the United States in a completely new direction. We have seen at least parts of this film before: evangelicals were the dominant force in U.S. culture during much of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. But the country’s change in orientation in recent years has nonetheless been pronounced.

Evangelicals in the Anglo-American world have long supported humanitarian and human rights policies on a global basis. The British antislavery movement, for example, was led by an evangelical, William Wilberforce. Evangelicals were consistent supporters of nineteenth-century national liberation movements — often Christian minorities seeking to break from Ottoman rule. And evangelicals led a number of reform campaigns, often with feminist overtones: against suttee (the immolation of widows) in India, against foot binding in China, in support of female education throughout the developing world, and against human sexual trafficking (the “white slave trade”) everywhere. Evangelicals have also long been concerned with issues relating to Africa.

This certainly put a new light for me on the recent visit to several African countries by Illinois Senator Barrack Obama, who is seen by many to be drumming up evengelical support for the Democrats:

“And one of the reasons I am here today, I don’t come today, as was said, as a grandson of this community. I come here as a United States senator and a representative of the United States government,”

And his earlier statements from The Chicago Tribune:

“Unfortunately, our foreign policy seems to be focused on yesterday’s crises rather than anticipating the crises of the future,” Obama said. “Africa is not perceived as a direct threat to U.S. security at the moment, so the foreign policy apparatus tends to believe that it can be safely neglected. I think that’s a mistake.”…”It’s critically important to capture a sense of hopefulness,” Obama said, “to give people in Africa and people outside Africa a sense that for all the strife and hardship that the continent has been through, the spirit of the people remains resilient.”

An interesting side note: Obama converted from Islam to Christianity in his early twenties. He was brought up a Muslim by his Indonesian stepfather.

Point one, delivered by Charles Krauthammer:

North Korea went nuclear a long time ago. Our time to act was during the Bush 41 and Clinton administrations. Nothing was done. And nothing can be done now. Once a country has gone nuclear, there is no return. The nukes themselves act as a deterrent against military measures. And no diplomat, however mellifluous, is going to talk a nuclear North Korea into dismantling the one thing that gives it any significance in the world.
[..]
Even if we do get sanctions imposed on Iran, they will undoubtedly be weak. And even if they are strong, the mullahs will not give up the glory and dominion (especially over the Arabs) that come with the bomb in exchange for a mess of pottage.

Realistically speaking, the point of this multilateral exercise cannot be to stop Iran’s nuclear program by diplomacy. That has always been a fantasy. It will take military means. There would be terrible consequences from an attack. These must be weighed against the terrible consequences of allowing an openly apocalyptic Iranian leadership to acquire weapons of genocide.

Point 2 from Spiegel Online:

The most reliable predictions are those about petroleum supplies — thanks to the discoveries of geologist Hubbert. The picture that is emerging is worrying even to the sober-minded observers at Germany’s Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR), which is based in Hanover. “We’re closer to the peak of resource extraction than we would like,” warns geologists Peter Gerling, an expert on fossil fuels.

The so-called “depletion mid-point” will be reached within the next 10 to 20 years, according to Gerling’s most recent study. The depletion mid-point is the point at which half of the total quantity of petroleum has been used up.

Gerling is confident the results of his research are accurate. “The Earth has been explored in detail,” he says, adding that the layer of the planet’s crust that contains its roughly 600 petroleum sediments is known in some detail: “There won’t be any major surprises.” Gerling’s matter-of-fact statement has dramatic implications. Once the depletion mid-point has been reached, the end of the petroleum age will begin.

From that point on, when global resource extraction reaches its maximum, a physical supply gap opens up for the first time in history. From then on, petroleum production declines, whereas demand is likely to continue to rise. There’s no return to yesterday’s heights, and what’s worse: The peak is reached without warning.

Converging.

It looks like I am going to have to hurry right up if I am going to get a chance to experience that magnificently scenic new railway China has built to Tibet. Before the whole thing crumbles, that is.

WHEN the first cracks appeared in the concrete base and bridges of the Qinghai Tibet railway, just weeks after the carefully staged, triumphal opening on July 1 (the 85th birthday of the Chinese Communist Party), they were not the only sign that all is not well with China’s policies in Tibet.

The cracks seem to be the result of the unstable geology of the Tibetan plateau. Equally worrying to Beijing, shifts in Tibetan political geology have caused cracks in the official Chinese narrative of unity and harmony between Tibet and China.

There had been sporadic unrest for several months. In November last year, the monks of Drepung monastery, in central Tibet, staged a sit-down demonstration against “patriotic education” — the Government’s enforced propaganda campaign. The demonstration was echoed in other important monasteries in the region.

Then, in January, in a religious address delivered in India, the exiled Dalai Lama called on Tibetans to stop wearing wildlife skins, to save animals from extinction.

The results were dramatic: from Lhasa to Gansu, Tibetans gathered for public fur burnings.

Confronted with this evidence of his continuing influence, the Government accused the Dalai Lama of promoting “social disorder” and responded, bizarrely, with a pro-fur campaign in which TV presenters were ordered to wear fur on air.
[..]

Thats not bizarre. Thats insane.

Technorati Tags: Tibet, Dalai Lama

The Jihadist Mogadisushi Train is now operational. Would you like to wage Jihad here or take away?

MOGADISHU (Reuters) – Somalia’s powerful Islamist movement opened a militia training camp on Wednesday with trainers from Eritrea, Afghanistan and Pakistan, witnesses said.

The presence of foreign trainers points to what many fear is a growing internationalization of a crisis that has split the Horn of Africa nation and threatened the slim authority of its interim government.

The Islamists’ hardline leader, Shiekh Hassan Dahir Aweys, attended the opening of the camp for more than 600 Islamist militiamen at Hiilweyne, north of Mogadishu.

“You will study military tactics, because you will defend your country with Islamic morality,” Aweys told the recruits.

Witnesses identified foreign trainers from and Afghanistan at the camp.

Diplomats fear Somalia could become a proxy battleground for Ethiopia and Eritrea, and have said that more players like Libya, Iran and Egypt have quietly entered the fray.

“Every conquering temptation represents a new fund of moral energy. Every trial endured and weathered in the right spirit makes a soul nobler and stronger than it was before.” – William Butler Yeats

This of course has implications for success in many areas of life not just the academic. Like many a great venture, this one starts with an experiment (from the Australian, 14/6/06):

Psychologists Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman descended on the eighth grade of a large public school in the northeast of the US. As the autumn leaves fell, each of the 160-odd children took an IQ test, then they (and their parents and teachers) answered questionnaires that probed self-control. Are you good at resisting temptation, they were asked. Can you work effectively towards long-term goals? Or do pleasure and fun sometimes keep you from getting work done?

The children were also given a real-life test of their ability to delay gratification. Each was handed a dollar bill in an envelope. They could choose either to keep it or hand it back and get $2 a week later. Their decision was carefully recorded.

The researchers returned in spring. They took note of each child’s grades and then looked back to see both how clever, and how self-controlled, that student had been in autumn. What, they wanted to know, was the most important factor in school grades?

The psychologists discovered it was self-control, by a long shot. A child’s capacity for self-discipline was about twice as important as his or her IQ when it came to predicting academic success.

[#M_more|less|

A piece of advise for aspiring bloggers:

The science seems to back up the writer Kingsley Amis's well-known advice that "the art of writing is the art of applying the seat of one's trousers to the seat of one's chair". [..] Amis kept to an “unflinching schedule” of 500 words a day, according to The Guardian.

And advise for just about everyone:

So what can we do to strengthen self-discipline, to transform ourselves from impulsive dollar-snatchers to lofty long-term investors in future success?

Help lies in seeing willpower as a muscle, recent research suggests. The “moral muscle”, as it has been called, powers all of the difficult and taxing mental tasks that you set yourself. It is the moral muscle that is flexing and straining as you keep attention focused on a dry academic article, bite back an angry retort to your boss, or decline a helping of your favourite dessert. And herein lies the problem: these acts of restraint all drain the same pool of mental reserves.

Those lofty sciency people have a experiment to prove that also:

Take, for example, a group of hungry volunteers who were left alone in a room containing both a tempting platter of freshly baked chocolate chip biscuits and a plate piled high with radishes. Some of the volunteers were asked to sample only the radishes. These peckish volunteers manfully resisted the temptation of the biscuits and ate the prescribed number of radishes. Other, more fortunate, volunteers were asked to sample the biscuits.

In the next, supposedly unrelated, part of the experiment, the volunteers were asked to try to solve a difficult puzzle. The researchers weren’t interested in whether the volunteers solved it. (In fact, it was insoluble.) Rather, they wanted to know how long the volunteers would persist with it. Their self-control already depleted, volunteers forced to snack on radishes persisted for less than half as long as people who had eaten the biscuits or (in case you should think chocolate biscuits offer inner strength) other volunteers who had skipped the eating part of the experiment.

As this and many similar studies show, if you draw on your reserves to achieve one unappealing goal – going for a jog, say – your moral muscle will be ineffective when you then call on it to help you switch off the television and start essay-writing.

Ready for some moral muscle cross-training?

Evidence is starting to accumulate that the moral muscle, like its physical counterpart, can become taut and bulging from regular exercise. People asked by experimenters to be self-disciplined about their posture for two weeks were afterwards stronger willed when it came to a test of physical endurance, compared with other people allowed to slouch about in their usual comfortable way during the fortnight.

By regularly exercising self-restraint and virtue in all areas of life (moral muscle cross-training, we may call it), we will come to resist temptations with the same casual ease with which a world-class athlete sprints to catch a train. That, at least, is the idea.

_M#]

Ralph Peters nails an uncomfortable truth (New York Post):

As for the charge of racism leveled at skeptics of the Arab propensity for democracy, it would be true if the discussion were about individuals. Arabs in the United States are as capable of functioning within a democratic system as anyone else. They’re just as American as any other citizens – because their families escaped the Middle East.

Arab states are another story: Their social, political, economic and cultural structures leave them catastrophically uncompetitive with the developed world. Societies divided down the middle by religion, inhibited by tribal loyalties and conditioned to accept corruption can’t build healthy democracies.

Above all, societies and cultures that refuse to accept responsibility for their own failures can’t build democracies.

As difficult as it can be to discern in the hype-and-gripe Internet age, our own system works because we shoulder the burden of our errors, seek to understand what went wrong – and fix the problem (the same may be said of Israel, the only successful democracy in the Middle East).

A culture of blame prevents moral, social and political progress. This is a self-help universe. The nonsensical Arab insistence that all Arab problems are the fault of America and Israel (or the Crusades) ignores the fact that Arab civilization has been in decline for 700 years – and has been in utter disarray for the last 200.

This is a homemade failure. Through their own choices, cherished beliefs, values and norms, Arabs have condemned themselves to strategic incompetence. No society that oppresses women, denies advancement on merit even to men, indulges in fantastic hypocrisy, wallows in corruption, undervalues secular learning, reduces its god to a nasty disciplinarian and comforts itself with conspiracy theories will ever compete with us.

The question has been asked before: Despite the massive influx of petrodollars over a half-century, where are the great Arab universities, the research institutes, the cutting-edge industries, the efficient, humane governments, the enlightened societies? The Arab world has behaved as irresponsibly as a drunk who won the lottery, squandering vast wealth and creating nothing beyond a few urban theme parks.

Even the seeming bright spots, such as Lebanon, aren’t true democracies. The Lebanese voted for clans, tribes and faiths, not for policies and programs. The Gulf emirates are mere playgrounds for Saudi debauchees and face the rise of a nuclear Iran. In Saudi Arabia, religious hatred has long surpassed oil as the number one export.

Surely, if Arab societies were capable of producing and sustaining democracies, we would see at least one. Where are the massive rallies in favor of tolerance, that indispensable lubricant of democracy? Where are the militias fighting for constitutional government? Where are the insurgencies demanding female enfranchisement?

It would be racist to claim that Arabs are genetically inferior. It is simply the truth to admit that Arab societies are volatile disasters.

Arab terrorism isn’t about redressing wrongs. It’s about revenge on a successful civilization that left the dungeon-cultures of the Middle East in the dust.

Crazy John gives a lesson in sanity:

THE founder of Australian mobile phone giant Crazy John’s has attacked “self-appointed” Muslim leaders, accusing them of destroying his community’s progress, and questioning their allegiance to this country.

John Ilhan, one of the nation’s most successful Muslims, yesterday blamed many first-generation community members for being opposed to Western ideals and cultural diversity, and accused them of “conditioning” their children to follow in their footsteps.

“There’s a massive disconnection between what the young and the old think,” he told The Australian yesterday.

“They (first-generation Muslims) haven’t experienced life like we have in this society, yet they want to be our mouthpiece.”

The 41-year-old entrepreneur, who at the age of five migrated to Australia from Turkey with his parents, said he often distanced himself from community politics because he found the “older folk” difficult to deal with.

“I’ve always known that what we’ve lacked in Australia is leadership in our community and that’s why I don’t get involved much with them, because (their) egos tend to get in the way,” Mr Ilhan said.

“Australia is a very diverse country and the problem with Muslims in this country, most of them, especially the old folk, is they don’t believe in diversity. They say (they do) but they actually don’t get involved (in wider community activities).”

And another step forward:

And with the one-year term of the Prime Minister’s Muslim Community Reference Group ending next month, it is understood that mainstream Muslims such as Mr Ilhan, rugby league star Hazem El Masri and the Australian chief executive of the National Australia Bank, Ahmed Fahour, would be among the fresh faces likely to be approached to join.

Watch the “self-appointed Muslim leaders” buck at that one.

Gerard Henderson on the lack of “cradle to grave conservatives” in Australian public debate (a pet topic he returns to with some regularity):

THROUGHOUT the 1950s and ’60s, the Coalition won successive federal elections. However, this disguised the fact that the Left was winning the debate in its long march through institutions such as universities, schools, trade unions and the media (including the ABC).

Today this is reflected in the fact that there are so few home-grown political conservatives born before, say, 1960 who are prominent in the public debate. Many of Australia’s most influential contemporary political conservatives, of a certain age, have a background on the Left (Piers Akerman, David Barnett, Tim Blair, Ron Brunton, Jonathan King, P.P. McGuinness, Christopher Pearson, Imre Salusinszky, Max Teichmann, Keith Windschuttle) or within the social democratic tradition (Andrew Bolt, Bob Catley, David Flint, John Hirst, Ross Terrill).

[..]

Don’t get me wrong. It’s good to have one-time leftists and social democrats now standing up against the Left. Yet it says something about the relative failure of Australian conservatives in the culture wars that there are so few from cradle to grave conservatives in the public debate.

To which Andrew Bolt replied:

And yet meeting a teenage conservative is still kind of spooky. I can’t help but think that conservatism is something that you think yourself to, having watched long enough to see how people really are. I’m not sure there is a convincing short cut.

I have to agree with Andrew here. And Sir Winston Churchill:

Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains.

(and often quoted alternative is “if you’re not a liberal when your twenty you have no heart and if your still a liberal when your thirty you have no brain.”)

Intellectual conservatism is acquired in parallel with an understanding of human nature – a process that requires assimilation of the lessons of experience and observation. Shortcuts may leave your humanity shortchanged. It of course stems from this that the Right and Left sides of politics will always coexists, locked in their eternal tussle. Thats just another one of those things a conservative has to understand and accept. For all the brawling the two sides need each other and together make a whole. That is the paradox that makes democracy work in the long run.

UPDATE (28/8): I just noticed a commenter over at Tim Blair’s site pulled me up on that Winston Churchill quote. Apparently it is falsely attributed to Churchill, according to the website of The Churchill Centre. My source was one of the many sites that list the quote as one of his. I stand corrected!

I’ve tracked down a history of the misappropriation of that quote and its many variants. History ends thus:

“A definitive answer arose in the wonderful book “Nice Guys Finish Seventh: False Phrases, Spurious Sayings, and Familiar Misquotations” by Ralph Keyes, 1992. He writes:

“An orphan quote sometimes attributed to Georges Clemenceau is:

Any man who is not a socialist at age 20 has no heart. Any man who is still a socialist at age 40 has no head.

The most likely reason is that Bennet Cerf once reported Clemenceau’s response to a visitor’s alarm about his son being a communist:

If he had not become a Communist at 22, I would have disowned him. If he is still a Communist at 30, I will do it then.

George Seldes later quoted Lloyd George as having said:

A young man who isn’t a socialist hasn’t got a heart; an old man who is a socialist hasn’t got a head.

The earliest known version of this observation is attributed to mid-nineteenth century historian and statesman François Guizot:
Not to be a republican at 20 is proof of want of heart; to be one at 30 is proof of want of head.

Variations on this theme were later attributed to Disraeli, Shaw, Churchill, and Bertrand Russell.”

Must be one of ‘em learnin’ days.