I've got a lot of blogging ideas stored up but very little time to sit and bat out a few articles.   In the mean time, a few recent favorite articles  to keep you satiated:

David Brooks on our Iraq problem:

The shooting down of the Chinook helicopter near Fallujah over the weekend was a shock to the body politic. The fact is, we Americans do not like staring into the face of evil. It is in our progressive and optimistic nature to believe that human beings are basically good, or at least rational. When we stare into a cave of horrors, whether it is in Somalia, Beirut or Tikrit, we see a tangled morass we don't understand. Our instinct is to get out as quickly as possible.

Jonathan Rauch on Unilateralism:

Obviously much of the world opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, but to speak of America as isolated or Bush as unilateralist seems an exaggeration, to be charitable. The administration tried hard to get the Security Council to put teeth in its own resolutions against Saddam Hussein. It went to the council not once but twice, when unilateralists said the right number of times was zero. It received support from dozens of countries, including some European biggies (Britain, Spain, Italy, Poland). It sought and obtained the Security Council's blessing for the occupation. It received $13 billion in reconstruction pledges from many countries. It is getting help from 24,000 foreign troops in Iraq, most of them British and Polish, but with support from more than 30 countries. (More than 50 foreign soldiers have died in Iraq.)

And on other fronts? The administration is insisting on a multilateral approach to North Korea—not grudgingly, as NPR's Shuster would have it, but in the teeth of allies' reluctance to get involved. It is trying to mobilize the United Nations on Iran. It has set up a multilateral Proliferation Security Initiative to interdict weapons, with France and Germany among the eight European participants. It recently won a multilateral agreement with 20 Asian and Pacific countries to curb the trade in shoulder-fired missiles.

An oldish article from Arnold Kling about Intentions vs. Structural Effects -- something that I & many others consider to be the bedrock difference between "conservatives" and "liberals" (very loosely defined);   Kling calls these "Type C" and "Type M" arguments:

A hypothetical example of a Type C argument would be, "Well, Arnold, studies actually show that the minimum wage does not cost jobs. If you read the work of Krueger and Card, you would see that the minimum wage probably reduces poverty."

A hypothetical example of a Type M argument would be, "People who want to get rid of the minimum wage are just trying to help the corporate plutocrats."

And just for a dose of controversy, an article on Demography vs. Gun Control:

Sensational media reports of suburban school shootings give the impression that Main Street, USA is seething with potential violence. Yet Mike A. Males, a researcher for the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has calculated that the murder rate among white American teenagers in 1995 (that is, the rate at which white youth, ages twelve to seventeen, were killed) was "virtually identical" to that of Canadian youth. By contrast, the murder rate among non-white youth in the United States was eight times higher than among Canadian youth in 1998.

Gun control advocates frequently point to Canada as a model of strict firearms regulation. Yet, even with our looser laws, white American teenagers are hardly more inclined to engage in gun violence than Canadian youth. Writing in the leftwing journal In These Times, Males points out that, in California, "where white households are the most likely to harbor guns… the gun death rate among white teens (three per 100,000) is as low as Sweden’s or Canada’s."

And for some fun, someone who should *REALLY* feel like a little little man, this perv who got the crap kicked out of him by a troop of Catholic school girls:

PHILADELPHIA, Oct. 31 — A man described by authorities as a known sexual predator was chased through the streets of South Philadelphia by an angry crowd of Catholic high school girls, who kicked and punched him after he was tackled by neighbors, police said Friday.

This scum is about as low as low can go on SO many level's in Kim Du Toit's book of the Man.

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