If the media’s got you down about our progress in Iraq, read this. Den Beste is right– The Belmont Club is great.

Sorry for the slow blogging this week. It’s been, well, interesting, this week.

Anyway, here’s a few things you might find worth looking at.

Christian Lowe thinks about Iraq strategy at the Weekly Standard.

Jonah Goldberg laments the current state of television, and pines for the good ol’ days (and he doesn’t mean “Happy Days”).

Want to know which historical lunatic you are? I’m Nicola Tesla, apparently.

Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.

Here’s an article about a church being taken over by homosexuals. It’s long, but well worth it. Thanks to John Derbyshire for the link from The Corner at NRO.

Steven Den Beste has a great post on why we need a victory strategy, not an exit strategy, here.

…. is eating drywall right now. Andrea said, ‘OK, OK, I’ll feed you!’

Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People (can you tell I’m reading that right now?) says something about the Jews’ early experience in America that I think is relevant to the issue of Canada’s adoption of an arbitration system for Muslims based on Sharia law. From p. 306:

Even in colonial times, Jews’ existence in America was fundamentally unlike the life they lived in Europe. There, they had their own legal status, ran their own courts, schools, shops, paid their own special, heavier taxes, and usually lived in ghettos. In America, where there was no religiously determined law, there was no reason why Jews should operate a separate legal system, except on matters which could be seen as merely internal religious discipline. Since in America all religious groups had equal rights, there was no point in constituting itself into a separate community. All could participate fully in a communal society. Hence from the start the Jews in America were organized not on communal but on congregational lines, like the other churches. … Hence a Jew went to ‘his’ synagogue just as a Protestant went to ‘his’ church. In other respects, Jews and Protestants were simply part of the general citizenry, in which they merged as secular units. Thus the Jews in America, without in any way renouncing their religion, began to experience integration for the first time.

The more I think about this, the more it worries me. One religious group opting out of some large portion of the common law in order to operate in a system exclusive to them seems to me a major step backward. The Muslims enjoy the same benefits as the Jews listed above, of being one with the general citizenry in matters of law, which seems to me to have huge advantages both for the minority and for the society at large. The fact that the Jews were treated differently under law in Europe made it easier for discriminatory and oppressive practices to be directed at them, and also denied the society as a whole many of their talents and contributions.

America has benefited immensely from the contributions of all its minorities, and even though our record is far from perfect, it’s a whole lot better than Europe’s. I’ll repeat my hope that we not follow Canada’s lead on this issue, or any other issue that springs readily to mind for that matter.

The Volokh Conspiracy has a post on a system in Canada which is being developed, to allow Muslims to opt in to a binding arbitration system for resolution of civil disputes, the decisions of which would be based on Sharia law and enforced by the Canadian courts.

Eugene is addressing the question of whether or not this would result in Nigeria-style stonings for adultery, and he thinks it’s pretty far-fetched. His reasoning on this seems sound.

But I have another concern. It seems that this system would accelerate the fragmentation of the society that adopted it. Different ethnic and religious groups, operating under different systems of law, even if those systems were under the larger umbrella, would be connected by one less common strand. I know that many countries in Europe already have major problems with large unassimilated minorities. I also know that the PC crowd in this country at least thinks that’s a good thing, but we can look to Bosnia for an easy reference on what happens when different ethnic groups get too cut off from each other, and view themselves as members of their ethnic group first, and members of a nation second.

We’ve begun to see this country dominated by factionalism and the grievance industry. I don’t know that much about what’s going on in Canada, but I hope we don’t encourage that sort of thing here. It seems like it would be a tacit admission that we can’t all get along; that unity is impossible; and that we just need to buy off some groups so they don’t cause us too much trouble. We’ve gone a fair way down that path already, and I don’t think there’s any end to it except the dissolution of the nation.

Some folks think that would be OK, I suppose, but I think it would be a great loss. An awful lot of the world, besides just this country, would be a lot worse off if America wasn’t around any more (think of Israel or Taiwan, for example). But if we’re going to be a nation, in public, civil and legal matters we’ve got to be united, somehow. I hope we don’t follow Canada’s example. Why we would, I’ve no idea, but stranger things have happened. The Supreme Court recently cited the constitution of the EU as a precedent in a decision (the Lawrence decision I believe) so it may not be so far off.

Hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving Day. I know I did. Family and friends, turkey and wine and X-Box, who can ask for more?

I am thankful for my family, my wife and my little girl Katie, who I think had a great time yesterday. She was all smiles and giggles until everyone left around ten, later than she’d normally be up. Katie’s a very social fifteen-month old. When people are around, she has to be part of it.

I am thankful for the rest of my family too. My dad was here, but not my mom. Mom’s in Oregon visiting her mother who likely is dying. But it was great to have dad here. My brother Joe was here too. Poor old Joe- he’s the only one that Katie’s still scared of. But I think he had a good time despite that. And my cousin Susanna and her husband Matt, minus their very well-behaved Rhodesian Ridgeback Lucian. I think they were being sensitive to my well-known aversion to dogs, although I really don’t mind other people’s dogs. Just like them with kids- they like other people’s kids, they just don’t want one of their own.

I am thankful for my new career as a pastor, and hope that the Lord blesses it. Although I am still an intern and not a full pastor, still I am beginning to live the life, and am finding it quite agreeable. I like working from home. My wife might feel differently though. She says she likes having me home, but she might just be being nice.

I am thankful for X-Box. I think it’s important to note that I put this item below all of my family and people-related thanksgiving, even though some might suspect that I’d put it first. But I do believe that all good things come from the Lord, and that includes X-Box. All things in moderation.

Today it’s back to work. I know many of my readers will have a day off and I’m glad for them. Enjoy, and give God thanks.

Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People has a fascinating account of the buyup of land in America in the first half of the 19th century, and how the US Government set it up. The book compares it to the efforts of Britain in Canada, South Africa and Australia. Johnson says that because the British government was worried about land speculators, they tightly regulated the purchase of land, and as a result those regions developed much more slowly than America did. And, ironically, it was the speculators that benefited in the British-run countries- the rules played right into their hands. And it was the settlers that benefited in America. The speculators in America were the ones who were able to get the land developed, get roads and schools built, so that the land they owned would be worth selling. The result was the huge expansion of the country in the 19th century.

Now I compare this to an article in the WSJ (subscriber only link) entitled “Back in the USSR” criticizing the Medicare-strangled state of health care in America:

The U.S. economy has boomed because brilliant entrepreneurs can enter it freely. If they succeed, they are appropriately lionized. A McKinsey report claims that the retailing industry was No. 1 in enhancing productivity, and credits Sam Walton’s Wal-Mart for much of that increase. No. 2 was the finance sector, whose productivity was greatly enhanced by John Bogle’s dogged insistence on the wisdom of indexed, consumer-driven mutual funds. Yet, had Messrs. Bogle and Walton been forced to rely on government approvals to start their businesses and on government-dictated products and prices to earn their revenues, we might not have benefited from the productivity-enhancing innovations they created. Indeed, they would have been chopped off at the knees if they were in the health-care sector: It prohibits physicians, the health-care equivalent of Messrs. Bogle and Walton, from owning their own facilities. The unattractiveness of these conditions explains why few of the 100 Harvard MBA students enrolled in my “Innovating Health Care” course plan to enter the trillion-dollar health-services sector.

Because government sets the price that Medicare will pay for things, which ends up being the standard that private insurers use, there is no motivation for health-care providers to decrease costs or improve services. Advocates of regulation say health care is too complex and too important to leave to the private sector. But how many complex and important markets have been handled so much more efficiently by the private sector? Land in the 19th century was, and remains today, very complex and extremely important.

It seems that one ought to say, health care is too complex and too important to leave in the hands of the state.

Lileks is taking a month off from blogging. He should feel ashamed of himself! How Dare He? People are depending on you, James!

How can it be right to just stop providing a product that people have come to depend on and have paid good … uh … oh yeah. Nevermind.

Enjoy your vacation, James.