Glenn suggests something that I’ve thought for years–that the social nicety of handshaking should be strongly discouraged if not abolished. I’ve been in a position in the last few years to not have as many meetings with people in business situations as I used to, and I’ve noticed a huge drop in instances of colds (e.g., I can’t recall the last time I had one).
I’ll bet that we would see many billions of dollars per year in increased productivity, reduced medical expenses, and even, in the case of some older people, decreased mortality. It seems a very high price to pay for an archaic tradition meant to show that we’re unarmed, particularly when, with modern weaponry, we can pack concealed…
For those interested in linguistic and British history, there’s an interesting post over at Gene Expression today–why do the Scots speak English? (Well, to the degree that they actually do, as anyone (at least most Americans) who saw Trainspotting might be entitled to wonder).
I love Lileks’ Halloween-themed bleat this week (especially the link titles at the bottom).
And his review of a classic Disney animation film. He manages to wring new insights from it (though I have to confess, I’ve always liked “The Rites of Spring.”
Sorry for the slow weekend (though I’m not sure why I’m apologizing for not giving out free stuff…) Busy yesterday, and today I went up to the Edwards AFB open house, and saw lots of neat stuff, both on the ground and in the air. I hope that in a few years rocket planes will be a regular feature of the show.
If’s Friday, so that means it’s Victor Davis Hanson day. He describes the sickening and cynical double standard among our friends in old Europe.
Millions are slowly learning how different the United States is from its critics in Europe. France will threaten the awful regime in Libya but only about matters of monetary recompense, in the same manner that money led both it and Germany to trade with Saddam Hussein after 1991 and haggle over oil concessions for the next half century. Neither state would remove a dictator, much less pledge lives and nearly $90 billion to create a democracy in the Middle East. All that is too concrete, too absolute, too unsophisticated for the philosophes, who would always prefer slurring a democracy to castigating some third-world bloody ideologue. The Europeans, remember, are now grandstanding about the need for American “transparency” in the distribution of their paltry few millions in Iraq in a manner that they never demanded of their billions once dumped onto a corrupt Palestinian Authority.
There are bombings regularly in Spain; over 10,000 died in France due to either a defect in its socialist government or indeed in its very national character; and Russia obliterated Grosny. But a single death or bomb in Baghdad alone seems to merit condemnation from the Europeans, whose leaders seem incapable of using the words “victory” and “freedom,” much less “sacrifice” and “liberation.” They may lavish awards and money on a Jimmy Carter or Susan Sontag, who criticize their own country’s efforts in the midst of a deadly war; but the true moralists are those who risk taking on tyrants, not those who carp from the sidelines that such courageous efforts are sometimes messy…
…For some reason Paris and Berlin ? and their American admirers ? think that the reconstruction of Iraq should be perfect in six months, despite the fact that European and U.N. efforts in the Balkans are not perfect after a near decade. Yet it is likely that Saddam Hussein ? on the lam for six months ? will be found more quickly than the odious Radovan Karadzic or Ratko Mladic who, under very suspicious circumstances, are still in hiding inside Europe five years after their hideous regimes collapsed beneath American bombs. And will the Balkans under the U.N. ? 13 years so far since hostilities commenced ? achieve stability more quickly than Iraq under American auspices? Instead, when the post-9/11 war is all over, all of the dead ? Americans, Afghans, and Iraqis ? in the first two years of fighting will prove to be a fraction of those slaughtered in the former Yugoslavia during the decade of European non-fighting. We have seen the European new world order, and its pacifist and socialist utopia leads to Sbrenica and an August of mass death in France.
Arnold Kling has a very good article about non-linear thinking. Nothing new (at least to me) but a cogent way of explaining the implications to those for whom it is.