Challenging day today, capped by someone breaking the window in the van and stealing Tenacious G’s purse while we were at a party in Santa Monica; so while she’s on the phone to the credit card folks, I’m doing a little blogging…we’re both pissed off at the jerk who did this, and at ourselves because we know better.
The day was tough in no small part, because the boys seem to be a little more restless than usual. Under 6 soccer early, then home, and while we were doing chores (with the supposed help of the boys), Littlest Guy and Middle Guy were streaking around the house. I swear that they not only broke the sound barrier, but that once there were flashes of Cerenkov radiation as they went by.
We got the core chores done, with little help from them, and as I started to go into Wrath of God Mode and think about just putting them into their rooms and just nailing the doors shut for a few days, something clicked and I decided to back off and solve the problem in another way.
We were supposed to bring something to the party, and I’d planned on baking something; I thought about some tarts, but time and energy were short, so I decided to knock out some chocolate chip cookies (I make awesome chocolate chip cookies).
I got Littlest Guy into the kitchen, and we rounded up the ingredients. Brown sugar, white sugar, eggs, butter, flour, salt, baking soda, cinnamon, imitation vanilla (when you bake with it, you really can’t tell the difference).
We batched the ingredients into ‘wet stuff’ (sugars, eggs, vanilla) and ‘dry stuff’ (flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon), and started measuring everything out. I got him to scoop the ingredients into the measuring cup, and suddenly he wanted to taste everything; so we did. We took a small portion of every ingredient and tasted them as we put them into the bowls.
And suddenly, I wasn’t stressing, and he wasn’t acting out; we were just two guys standing in the kitchen cooking together.
His brother came in and helped get the Kitchenaid set up (he knows that those who don’t work don’t get batter), and we started mixing everything together. MG showed LG how to separate eggs (the recipe calls for one egg plus one yolk), and we only made a small mess while doing this…and when I didn’t get upset at that, all three of us knew that we’d managed to make it into a pretty good day.
Here’s the recipe: the core is from Cook’s Illustrated, hands down the best cooking magazine out there.
Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.
Melt 1 – ½ sticks of salted butter, and let cool until it is warm
Add 1 cup brown sugar, plus 2 Tbsp
Add ½ cup white sugar
Blend until smooth.
Add 1 egg, plus 1 yolk
Blend until smooth
Add 2 tsp vanilla
Mix in a bowl:
2-1/8 cups unsifted bleached flour (compress slightly when measuring)
½ Tsp baking soda
½ Tsp salt
2 Tsp cinnamon
Add dry mixture to wet and blend until uniform and smooth
Add 1-1/2 semi-sweet chocolate chips (quality counts here – I use Ghirardelli)
Mix until uniform
Cool in the refrigerator for 20 mins (makes it easier to handle the batter)
Flour your hands, and make 1-1/2” spheres; place them on an oiled cookie sheet – give about 1” of space between them.
Cook for 12 – 14 mins at 325. I usually have two sheets worth of cookies, and swap the sheets between oven racks at 7 minutes.
The cookies should be light-colored, slightly crackled, and very thick.
Take them off the sheet and cool on racks.
Try not to get sick on the batter.
Have your kids help you…

I’m stunned to see that William Burton and I disagree on something of substance. I’m actually going to spend the whole time at the party tonight drinking solemnly and thinking about this…
…but for now, I think he’s waaaay off base (sports pun!!) in this post in which he thinks that N. Korea is a bigger priority than the Middle East. I’m not sure if he’s just so torqued at the Bushies (yes, they are insanely corrupt) that he’s just being disagreeable…but here’s the deal:
The North Koreans probably have or will shortly have a Bomb. Pakistan has a Bomb. India has a Bomb. South Africa may well have a Bomb (or that could have been an Israeli bomb). There are too damn many Bombs out there for comfort (as I’ve noted). But at this point, I don’t see the pattern of behavior (in the last 40 years) that would lead me to believe that North Korea would use their bombs belligerently (as opposed to, maybe selling them to a terrorist organization). Without the backing of China, North Korea is pretty much a speed bump militarily (a big one, to be sure, and if I lived within 100 miles of the DMZ, I’d certainly have a different position).
The Islamists, OTOH, have established a pattern of aggressive action (c.f. Manhattan, Bali, East Timor, etc.), and while Saddam isn’t an Islamist, he sure is moving to their side as fast as his polished brogans will take him.
So this North Korea thing needs to be dealt with, and to be honest I may have to give this one to Bush…the only reason I can imagine for them to go public with this now is because they are worried that they’re on the dance card headed by Saddam right now.
But I wouldn’t be getting all panicky about it, Bill.
When the alcohol wears off tomorrow, I’ll revisit and see if I still feel this way.

We’ve had quite set of discussions about guns and gun control.
There’s been a lot of heated and often reasonable discussion around basic questions like: Is the U.S. less safe than Europe or Canada (and I’ll stipulate that in aggregate it is) because of the prevalence of guns? (I doubt that guns are the causal factor)
I actually asked two of the more frequent posters to prepare some brief arguments to bring up to the blog to try and trigger some more discussion; and then I realized:
It doesn’t matter.
First, it doesn’t matter if the U.S. is less safe because of the prevalence of guns. Because the cold reality is that the guns are here and they aren’t going away. Not even with a draconian ban, like those in the U.K. and Australia.
Second, it doesn’t matter if guns are in fact the causal variable, because both sides have made up their minds, and neither will accept evidence that soesn’t support their pre-determined position.
There is a very small ‘swing’ group that might care either way, but the reality is that we have two firmly entrenched interest groups here in the U.S. that have opinions that are at polar opposites.
Personally, in an environment that wasn’t so polarized, I’d be a moderate. If I wasn’t convinced by things I had read directly from the individuals driving the gun-control movement that their ultimate goal is gun prohibition, I’d probably be pretty open to reasonable governmental controls on firearms. But I’m a ‘slippery slope’ believer, and as a consequence often find myself on the side of people whose views are more absolutist than mine.
I could let the issue go, if it weren’t for the fact that we have real issues of criminal violence here in the U.S., and that people’s lives are torn apart by it every day, and that somehow controlling guns…the mechanism…has replaced looking at root causes. I attribute these to an underclass – white, black, and brown – that is culturally dysfunctional, and made more so by the lack of mobility, education, and effective community infrastructure; to an insane legal-correctional system; to our ineffective ‘war on drugs’; and even to elements in our national character which make ‘backing down’ difficult.
So let’s try a different approach. What measures, focusing for now on regulation on possession and sale of weapons and ammunition can all sides agree on?
Agreement is important. Both sides can’t agree, not only because their views of the world are radically different, but because each side is afraid of and has demonized the other. To the extent we can come up with some small steps in common, the possibility exists to build toward a more constructive discussion.
I’ll open: Children and convicted felons shouldn’t be able to buy guns. Children under 16 shouldn’t be able to possess guns except in the company of an adult. Convicted Felons shouldn’t be able to possess guns at all.
Next?

Instapundit joins the War on Bad Philosophy with his post about this article on Independant.uk about self-hating Jews and the tendency of the West to blame itself.
From the article:

Ditto those who blew apart the however many hundreds of kids dancing the last of their lives away in Bali. It behoves us to stay out of their motives. Utterly obscene, the narrative of guilty causation which now waits on every fresh atrocity – “What else are the dissatisfied to do but kill?” etc – as though dissatisfaction were an automatic detonator, as though Cain were the creation of Abel’s will. Obscene in its haste. Obscene in its self-righteousness, mentally permitting others to pay the price of our self-loathing. Obscene in its ignorance – for we should know now how Selbsthass operates, encouraging those who hate us only to hate us more, since we concur in their conviction of our detestableness.
Here is our decadence: not the nightclubs, not the beaches and the sex and the drugs, but our incapacity to believe we have been wronged. Our lack of self-worth.

Reynolds adds:

Why do they hate us? In part because so many Western intellectuals tell them they should.

No kidding.

Jeanne d’Arc is hosting a damn interesting discussion on a left-wing response to cultural imperialism, and the issues raised when our values clash with those of traditional societies.
It’s scattered all over the top of her blog, just go and check it out. It relates to my discussion on ‘Brittle Governments’, below, and given some time, I’ll try and tie them together.

But Tenacious G was laughing hysterically at this story in the LA Times:

A Modesto man has died after his wife held him down and bit him repeatedly when he refused to have sex with her, police said.

Do reporters live for ledes like that?
…sorry, better go, TG is calling…

Well, look at us…there’s still some decorating and cleanup to do, but the MT port seems to be working.
If you commented between about 2000 and 2200 Pacific time, please check to see if I got your comments moved over; apologies if we lost them!
Huge thanks to DJ and RR for all the help…

Bear with me…I’m having problems with archives and publishing. I’ve submitted a request, and am puttering around with it myself. I need to get the new site together…
BWAA-HA-HA!!!

One of the difficulties of dealing with matters in much of the Middle East and Third World in general is the ‘brittleness’ of the governments there.
This is raised in the questions raised by Chris Bertram a few days ago, in his commentary on the Thomas Pogge article (pdf file) on the legitimacy of authoritarian governments in resource-dependent countries. Bertram and Pogge start by pointing out that political power in a place like Nigeria is the path to wealth – by Western standards – for the individuals in power. They take this further, to suggest that the West is immiserating the populations of these countries by accepting the legitimacy of, and trading with, the kleptocrats.
And it is certainly the case that many of our problems in the Arab world are the result of our desire to have compliant trading partners – as we have in Saudi Arabia – whose interests may not intersect well with their population. The anger of the population, logically directed at their rulers, then is redirected by the rulers and cultural institutions that they explicitly support first at Israel and the United States, and then secondarily at modernity in general.
Having mounted this tiger, there is no safe way for these governments to dismount.
I don’t know how to respond to Bertram on the issue of ‘legitimate ownership’ and who should get to determine it; the sad reality is that for most of human history, the definition of property was ‘what I could keep others from taking’. They aren’t wrong about presenting the problem, but we’re short of the kind of enlightenment – as well as the kind of Enlightenment – that would enable justice to be done.
There are a whole slug of problems to be addressed here; I’ll start with the straightforward one.
We somehow continue to expect that cultures which have been in place for hundreds or thousands of years will suddenly, on contact with us, dissolve and allow their members to simply join ours.
Now the reality is that Western, market-based culture is corrosive of traditional cultures. But it itself has a cultural base; I’ll make the Weberian argument that can be seen in ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’, and suggests that capitalism, and the self-restraint necessary for a culture to succeed in capitalism, is different than the unselfrestrained accumulativeness in more ‘backward’ societies. Weber said:

The universal reign of absolute unscrupulousness in the pursuit of selfish interests by the making of money has been a specific characteristic of precisely those countries whose bourgeois-capitalistic development, measured according to Occidental standards, has re-mained backward.

Now I’ll skip over the (very big) issue of whether or not we should attempt to make other countries and other cultures look like us. But I will suggest that we keep operating with the expectation that they will, and that maybe, just maybe, that is going to be much harder than we think.

Rob Lyman pulls me back into the gun issue with a damn interesting philosophical piece.

Partly, this disagreement arises because the parties are talking about different things. I have no doubt that reducing gun ownership among drug dealers whould reduce urban violence. I just don’t see how bugging hunters and target shooters will accomplish that. The anti-gunners, on the other hand, don’t make a very clear distinction between me and an urban gang-banger. We both have handguns; we are both “potential” murderers.

Wait a minute…wasn’t I supposed to blogroll him??
…on the way.