You'll want to read this Christopher Hitchens piece in Slate disagreeing with Francis Fukuyama.

Here's Victor Davis Hanson in the Wall Street Journal on America's success in Iraq and the danger of losing the war on the home front. This is what reminds me of Vietnam: We're winning, but Big Media says we're not, and people believe Big Media, causing popular support for the war to erode. Slowly, but it's eroding. The brighter side: Thanks to the internet and communications technology, Big Media doesn't have the absolute control of the news it did thirty-five years ago when it was ABC, CBS, NBC, Time, Newsweek, the AP, and the New York Times, and nothing else at all but the local press, which in the United States is fairly crappy except for domestic issues, and especially state and local affairs, which even backward regional rags like the Kansas City Star can figure out how to report on properly. Note: The Kansas City Star has a daily circulation well above La Vanguardia's 200,000.

This is another piece from the WSJ on the history of eugenics. I love articles like this one.

Jonah Goldberg in the National Review comments on free speech and the bogosity of campaign-finance laws.

This is an article from the Weekly Standard on the left-wing Third World anti-Americanism of the World Council of Churches, which includes my parents' church, the United Methodists, which President Bush also belongs to. That's right, Europeans, the American Christians are such a bunch of right-wing crazy Jesus freaks that Bush's own church strongly opposes the Gulf War.

A&L Daily links to this very reasonable Boston Globe article on the future of oil. Don't worry, people, there's plenty of fossil fuels out there. We'll never run out. We will start using fossil fuel sources such as oil shale that are currently rather difficult and expensive to extract. And what we will do is continue using fossil fuels, probably in diminishing quantities as the cost of extraction goes higher, as we begin building nuclear plants again, build wind farms, make solar panels more efficient, develop hybrid cars, use alcohol as fuel, and develop other things we haven't thought of yet or that aren't efficient now. Here's Cecil Adams from the Straight Dope on the same subject. He's far too pessimistic on the future of oil, but makes some other valid points.

Barça fans might note that Jonah Freedman from Sports Illustrated has Barça back in the top spot in his World Soccer Power Rankings. Comment: Freedman's rankings were already written before Barça's 0-2 victory on Saturday. Comment #2: European soccer buffs might appreciate an American perspective on their sport. If nothing else, 99% of soccer sources on the Net in English are written by Brits, and they always have some kind of prejudice in favor of English footballing ways. Americans don't have that handicap.

I was surfing around the net and found this article in, of all places, an English poetry magazine. It's from 1961, just a couple of months before the Algerian War ended, and it is an excellent look at that conflict. I think it can also be applied to the current Middle East situation. You know, after that Vichy France thing, and then Vietnam, and then Algeria, I'm not sure that France has any status to lecture anyone else on morality. It's not that the Anglo-Americans are perfect or anything, but their post-1939 records are considerably less ugly than those of, say, France, Germany, and Russia. Incidentally, when will the deniers of Communist crimes be treated the same as deniers of Nazi crimes? Why doesn't Santiago Carrillo receive the same moral opprobrium as David Irving? Carrillo said the other day that Nicolae Ceaucescu hadn't killed anybody, not to mention his continual denials of his own guilt at the Paracuellos massacre of prisoners carried out by the Spanish Communists in 1937.

Here's Mark Steyn on the predictable lefty trendiness behind this year's Oscar nominees. I think the only conservative-themed film that got any nominations at all was the Johnny Cash biopic, and I only say conservative-themed because it mentioned Cash's religion, his marriage with June Carter, and his ambition to succeed. Cash was by no means a stereotypical conservative himself, as "Man in Black" shows; he was more complex than that. I mean, this guy did a duet cover version with Joe Strummer of "Redemption Songs." He played with Soundgarden and did one of their songs. He hung out with Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Bob Dylan, and Merle Haggard, none of whom are precisely stereotypical conservatives, either. He was into Indian causes way back before it was cool; look at "The Ballad of Ira Hayes." He played at prisons because he sympathized with the prisoners. Johnny Cash always sided with the underdog.

For country-music fans and sociologists, here's an article from Reason by Jesse Walker from a couple of months ago on how country's not as conservative as a lot of folks think it is.