John Derbyshire

John Derbyshire writes a collumn at National Review Online and today's collumn is great.

There are two sections I want to share and encourage you to read the rest.

No-go areas We've been hearing a lot about no-go areas in Iraq. Well, just to put the matter into perspective, here is some data on no-go areas in France. (I'm obliged to Jerry Pournelle for pointing me to this.)

In Le Figaro daily dated Feb 1, 2002, Lucienne Bui Trong, a criminologist working for the French government's Renseignements Generaux (General Intelligence — a mix of FBI and secret service), complains that the survey system she had created for accurately denumbering the Muslim no-go zones was dismantled by the government. She wrote: 'From 106 hot points in 1991, we went to 818 sensitive areas in 1999. That's for the whole country. These data were not politically correct.' Since she comes from a Vietnamese background, Ms. Bui Trong cannot be suspected of racism, of course, otherwise she wouldn't have been able to start this survey in the first place.

The term she uses, 'sensitive area,' is the PC euphemism for these places where anything representing a Western institution (post office truck, firemen, even mail order delivery firms, and of course cops) is routinely ambushed with Molotov cocktails, and where war weapons imported from the Muslim part of Yugoslavia are routinely found. The number 818 is from 2002. I'd go out on a limb and venture that it hasn't decreased in two years.

Kerry vs. the Norks How does John Kerry plan to handle the very knotty problem of North Korea? By reinstating "direct U.S.-North Korea talks." This contrasts with the dogged insistence of the Bush administration that China, Russia, Japan, and South Korea also be at the table, since these are the nations most affected (and, in the case of Japan, most scared) by Kim Jong Il's misbehavior. Kerry, in other words, would prefer to go unilateral. And this, in spite of the obvious and persistent lack of good faith on the part of the Norks, and in spite also of their unbroken track record of cheating or reneging on every agreement they enter into, sometimes before the ink is dry.