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I'm not sure either party has had much of an advantage this time around with regard to their candidates. If you match up Huckabee with Obama, McCain with Clinton, and Romney with Edwards, it seems that the Democrats have the Republicans beat 2-1 on basic intelligence while the Republicans win at least 2-1 on character and 3-0 on experience. What the Democrats have going for them is that they have Obama, who's a media star, they're mostly in line with each other and their base on the issues, they don't have George Bush, and they seem to be getting rid of the constant direct presence of the Clintons. And of course they have the media behind them.

Who knows how it will turn out? Obama's presentable, people can read into him what they want, and he's black, which means critics have to pull their punches. On the other hand, fads pass and people might not want to step into the unknown. Not that McCain wouldn't be a wild card in the White House, but people are less likely to think of him that way.

On the whole, I think I'd rather have Obama than McCain. He seems less crazy, he's inexperienced and conflict-averse, and I like King Log more than King Stork. Also, having a black president might concentrate people's minds on racial issues a bit, rather than leaving them in the world of fantasy, and I suppose at some point that has to happen.

Not that I'd vote for the guy. I assume I'll do what I usually do, and vote for some third party candidate. It's a way of showing I'm not so pleased with what the major parties are offering. I recommend it.

Actually, of course, it's not such a bad thing that institutions like the EU are necessarily corrupt. If you take the things the EU is supposed to stand for seriously, you're an ideological fanatic who thinks it makes sense to bureaucratize equality, administer freedom, and force tolerance down people's throats. So isn't it better if they're all in it for themselves, with the talk about human rights and European values mostly a smokescreen? Then people can pay them off and get on with their lives.

It's hardly surprising that there's massive fraud among EU parliamentarians. Why shouldn't they steal? Is there a higher loyalty that's going to stop them? It's certainly not going to be the European public, since there is no such thing. The basic point of the EU is that it's a ruling-class union that gives people like MEPs job tenure and perks and lets them run things as they want without having to answer to anyone. So if one job perk is stealing on average $245,000/year, who's to complain?

Ada Louise Huxtable, Herbert Muschamp, Nicolai Ouroussoff. Isn't it obvious The New York Times hires its architecture critics mostly for their names?

An imperial legation has been torched in Belgrade, or at least part of it has. It seems the locals are annoyed that we bombed them and broke up their country a few years ago and then gave the equivalent of Jamestown, Plymouth Rock, Yorktown and Gettysburg to the Muslims.
Zalmay Khalilzad, the empire's ambassador to the imperial wannabes at the UN, says he's outraged by the incident. (He wasn't outraged by the bombing and breakup of Serbia.) I have nothing against Khalilzad or any other Pushtoon, and too bad one of the rioters got killed, but is there any earthly reason an actual American should care whether the legation gets burned or not?

It's evident that Mrs. Obama doesn't love or even much like America. Among politicians today, though, who does? So far as I can tell, Mr. Bush, Mrs. Clinton, and Mr. McCain mostly love winning and their careers. Any other kind of person wouldn't run for president or get engaged in something as unpleasantly partisan and money-grubbing as national politics today. Bush believes in open borders and global wars for democracy. McCain mostly goes along with that, maybe with less emphasis on democracy and more on America as a military concept. And Mrs. Clinton mostly identifies with a technocratic ruling class that knows no frontiers.

I suppose that's part of Mr. Obama's appeal, that he hasn't been in such bad company or chosen to live in such an amoral world for quite so long. People think that he might somehow actually represent them. What he mostly stands for though is the fantasy of somehow transcending the sordidness of the real. What does that have to do with loving anything that actually exists?

To love America is not to love its success and power, or the possibility that it might become different from what it is, or an abstract ideal that it's never lived up to and never will. It's to love the American people and their way of life, with all their good and bad points, just as they are and have been. It sits comfortably with a desire to make things better, but not with the view that the past, apart from past attempts to change things, is at bottom shameful, and that what America most needs is to import a bunch of replacement Americans.

I don't think it's possible for a legitimate figure in national politics to love America today. To love America is to love a particular people and place, and to love a particular people is exclusionary and racist, while to love one shopping mall over another and make that the basis of anything serious is rather silly. It should be obvious, though, that silly racists can't be legitimate participants in public life.

Women's suffrage has worked out badly. Women believe in the personal, but politics has to do with how groups operate when they're big and diverse and personal connections are less important. In those settings women's interest in the personal and their consequent lack of political comprehension play them false, and they end up supporting bad things like the nanny state. That's especially true when they don't have husbands and feel the need of someone else to look after them.

Why then do people feel so outraged when someone suggests limiting suffrage? Why shouldn't the choice of public officials be limited just like other public offices? The outrage shows that the right to vote is considered something that's necessary to full humanity. If you say it's better for just Xs to vote then you're saying non-Xs aren't really human, and you're looking for an unlimited right to exploit them.

At bottom, the view that there's something downright evil about questioning universal suffrage is really the view that government is based on human will, so if someone's will isn't counted that must mean he's not a human being. There's no common good that should guide politics. In that case the question would be how to discern that good and put it into effect, and it might work better to limit suffrage in some way. Instead, there's just a mass of conflicting wills, each looking out for itself and trying to get the better of every other will, so we can't trust or rely on each other even within families unless each of us has a gun at the other's head in the form of a share of government power.

That, of course, is the view pioneered by Hobbes and basic to modern government: "I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death." The problem is that you can't base a social order on such a view. If war is the fundamental reality there's no escape from it (Hobbes's theory of the beneficience of government terror to the contrary notwithstanding). You can try to establish mechanisms, representative government for example, to turn war into justice, but the mechanisms will be captured by one of the parties and become just another weapon. Your theoretical participation in government -- one vote out of scores of millions, in a setting in which elections and the electorate can be manipulated or overridden in any event -- won't do you any good.

So the understanding of politics on which the insistence on universal suffrage is based makes political hope -- and so political action -- absurd. If that's so, what good is it? Can't we talk about things on some other basis?

I can't say I care for the likely choices in the November election. McCain is given to outbursts of savagery and contemptuous of people who disagree with him. Obama is a Teflon leftist with a gift for playing to people's hopes and fantasies. He has star quality but no visible substance. He also has the biracial inability to figure out who he is, and the consequent terror of facing conflict. On the issues, McCain's an open-borders fanatic and I can't imagine Barack Hussein Obama would be that different. McCain might be marginally less socialistic, but he'd be inclined to go with whatever the trend happens to be, and it's unlikely Obama would be to able to push things ahead of the curve. Obama would no doubt be less bellicose, which matters, but there's no reason to think he'd be intelligent about foreign policy. That also matters.

It's hard to know what difference the racial factor would make if Obama were elected. He's supposed to "transcend race," but there's no transcending race because racial differences and resentments aren't going away and our rulers aren't going to give them up as the reason everything has to be controlled from the top instead of allowed to go its own way. Right now the rule is that criticizing a black, for example saying some story he tells is a "fairy tale," is automatically a racial attack. Having a black as president might conceivably change that, but more likely it would mean that any political problems or reverses the guy has are renewed proof of white America's ingrained racism. If people have strong reasons for being irrational about some issue, like for example the condition of America's blacks, they aren't going to become sensible when their view runs into problems. They're just going to get more irrational.

It's a New Gender Gap: more and more it's girls who populate educational institutions. As the linked article says, "Girls are better able to deliver in terms of what modern society requires of people -- paying attention, abiding by rules, being verbally competent, and dealing with interpersonal relationships in offices." To put it another way, men make things work, women make nice within a system someone else has set up. If the world is mostly organized and administered top-down, girls will do better, at least among the general run of drudges, and men will get disgusted and bored, and drop out or act up. A few of them will make it big, most won't, and the women will complain about the "glass ceiling" and wonder why they can't find reliable men.

How can this be, if racism, sexism, homophobia etc. are our Big Social Problems?

• Prestige universities admit white non-Jewish males at rates far below their presence in the population at large.
• High schoolers say that MLK, Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, and Susan B. Anthony are the four most famous Americans other than presidents.
• Blacks call black mass murderers "heroes" when it's whites who are killed.

There really is a problem with sex outside marriage. The problem is that you keep all your cards.

The experience tells you you're giving yourself. The fact is you're not, because it's up to you what it means and if you change your mind later there's nothing to tell you you're wrong. But giving yourself in your fevered momentary imagination is not the same as giving yourself, and by not giving yourself you're separating yourself from what your own body and feelings tell you.

That's not good when it's something that has a grip on us like sex does. It's especially not good for women, since they have such a hard time separating things anyway. The result is that they hate the situation and hold themselves in contempt, because they know they're not being true to their feelings or anything else. That spills over to contempt and hatred for the man, whom they nonetheless love and depend on. The natural upshot is fickleness, perversity and bitchiness. Why does anybody need that?

No-one seems to know, certainly not the women who pretend the question displays a supposed masculine cluelessness. Why claim it's just men who are ignorant ? The truth of the matter is that even women don't know what they want. They're notoriously good at disguising their own motives from themselves. It helps that there's so little definite to disguise.

What women want mostly seems to have to do with men, or some particular man -- in short, with "relationships." If everything is relational, though, so that everything depends on everything else, then things become so muddled by setting, mood, mixed feelings, and the habit of angling situations to fit shifting strategies of self-positioning that in the end there's really nothng definite enough to discuss.