To the barricades, Swedes! Day care is threatened!

Sweden is about to have an election, and it comes at a time of the state's greatest crisis since Queen Christina decided she preferred the theological and meteorological climate of Rome and went to live there after converting to Catholicism. The Australian's stringer in Stockholm writes, "Many conservatives have begun to wonder whether the Swedish welfare model isn't due for a makeover."

"There aren't enough daycare spots," complains Per-Ola Pettersson, a 35-year-old Stockholmer who says he expects more for his high taxes. "They're constantly making cuts in the healthcare system, and there are long queues at the hospitals. And the welfare state is expensive."

Sweden, which itself resembles a nationwide day care center, is clearly in pre-revolutionary mode when its welfare state is expensive. Benefits are supposed to be free! Every child, even at the age of 35, knows that.

The country also has a few problems with its immigrants, but you can safely assume they have not loomed large in the election rhetoric. For one thing, you can get into serious bother with the law in Sweden if you publicly question official dhimmitude. For another, Swedes' cultural self-defense muscles have atrophied under the welfare paradise to mere reminders of an earlier stage of evolution, like the appendix.

But a leak in day care — now, there's an issue to set blonde on blonde.

Flowers are optional

Tears are optional.

Prayers are optional.

Flowers are optional.

Whatever you do or don't do to commemorate that day five years ago, know this:

Victory is not optional. It is required of us:

By our ancestors, who fought and died to make us free and keep us free. By our descendants, whose liberty or subjugation depends on what we do now. By the ideas and ideals that are, ultimately, our great strength. By the tragic sense that men and women have always known, except in times when they grew complacent and hedonistic and materialist, that evil exists and must be confronted. Not by trying to wish it out of existence, not by relying on words or negotiation or understanding. But confronted, and if possible defeated.

That is a hard lesson to learn. Let us hope that we do not need another event to learn it, perhaps too late -- an event more horrible than September 11, or watching our institutions designed to protect free minds dismantled by those who fear free minds.

Plant in our souls determination and power and the spiritual illumination to guide us, bravery to carry us through what we must go through.

Then, add flowers if you wish.

The doctor won't see you now

A model shows off the new AllahMode™
line of hospital couture

Taking a fashion cue from Saudi Arabia, hospitals in northern England will issue gowns such as this to Muslim women patients, AP reports. The burqa-style attire will protect the patients from prying male eyes, such as their doctor's.

The hospitals are run by the Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which presumably means they are part of the National Health Service, funded by British taxpayers. It isn't clear from the story who will pay the extra cost for the "full service" gowns.

"I noticed a gap in the market and thought that it would be great if there was a gown that helped to preserve a patient's modesty," said Karen Jacob, linen services manager for the trust, who designed the product.

Hospitals in the United States, and I suspect those in Britain as well, do not seem unduly concerned about preserving the modesty, or at least dignity, of those of us who are not members of the Religion of Peace. Personally, I do not think I look at all my best in one of those l0w-fashion sack-like creations I have been issued on my thankfully infrequent hospital stays.

Meaning no disrespect, the woman in the photo above has quite ravishing eyes. Don't I know her from somewhere? Does she come there often? What's her sign?

Okay, calm down, everybody. How about "The War on Nuisance"?

On the same day that President Bush said, "Bin laden and his terrorists' allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them," the chief of strategic planning on the Pentagon's Joint Staff, Colonel Gary Cheek, said that what is needed is to recast terrorists as criminals, UPI reported.

"If we can change the name ... and find the right sequence of events that allows us to do that, that changes the dynamic of the conflict," said Cheek at the Defense Forum Washington, sponsored by the Marine Corps Association and the U.S. Naval Institute.

"It makes sense for us to find another name for the GWOT," said Cheek. "It merits rethinking. I know our European allies are more comfortable articulating issues of terrorism as criminal threats, rather than war ... It ought to be our goal to partner better with the European allies so we can migrate this from a war to something other than a war."

Why, Colonel Cheek, that's not far short of brilliant. The ... er ... criminals may have tens of thousands of volunteers for worldwide jihad, but we have the power of re-branding!

The "war" moniker elevates al-Qaida and other transnational terrorists, giving them legitimacy as an opposition force to the United States. It also tends to alienate Muslim populations in other countries, who see the war as a war on Islam, and feel they need to support al-Qaida as a matter of defending their faith.

On no account must we alienate anyone! In fact, if you'll forgive me for raising this point, Colonel, sir ... don't you think "criminal" is a bit, well, strong? After all, we're only up against a few misguided members of the Religion of Peace. Using the word "criminal" could tend to defame all Muslims, even when the offense is a mere misdemeanor, hardly worth the time it costs the district attorney's office to work out a plea bargain. As the UPI "analyst" who quoted you writes, "If the United States can recast it in the global public eye as what the Pentagon views it as now -- a struggle for the imposition of law and order and the establishment of a democracy -- al-Qaida can be drained of some of its power."

Provided we can disabuse our minds of emotion-laden words like "terrorist" and "attack," we can pass local ordinances against disturbing the establishment of democracy, which, when proven in a court of law, will subject the offender to fines and points against pilot licenses.

I'll feel safer tonight, Colonel, knowing that strategic thinkers like you are migrating this war into something other than a war, which has so upset our allies the Muslims, and that the Pentagon views it the same way now.

The five unwritten rules for blogging success

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It takes a village to raise your blood pressure

According to USA Today, the "libertarian Reason Foundation" tells us we can expect gridlock to extend its grip to "smaller communities" with fewer than half a million residents in the next quarter century, with rush hour delays more than doubling in some. Drivers there will "spend up to 150% more time in bumper-to-bumper traffic," the Reason Foundation's study says.

"Moving to small-town America is not going to solve your problem," says David Hartgen, lead author of the study, who is a professor of transportation at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. "The growth in congestion is going to be worse there." …

Population growth and commuters' preference for driving are key factors, the study says.

Anyone with common sense might suggest that the first thing we ought to do to counter an epidemic of hypertraffic is to reduce or eliminate population growth. But common sense has nothing to do with it, my dears. The authors of this study are, first, academics — which means they are unable to put together two sets of facts if one is outside their specialty. In this case, our social pathologists have nothing to say about the leading cause of runaway population growth, which is immigration, both legal and illegal. So instead of dealing with causes, they are left gasping for ways to fix effects.

Second, they are libertarians, which means they have only one tool in their workshop — money, or as they prefer to call it, market forces.

The solution? Hartgen and the other authors argue for building or widening roads and increasing traffic-management techniques such as signal timing and toll roads. To relieve congestion and save 7.7 billion driving hours a year by 2030, they say, 104,000 new lane miles will be needed at a cost of about $21 billion a year.

Inevitably, predictions like this study's bring out the public transportation lobbyists. If only people would stop being so selfish and agree to be force-fed into buses and subway cars, rather than insisting on the dignity and flexibility of driving themselves, why, we could cram a few hundred million more immigrants into the country.

Virginia Miller, a spokeswoman for the American Public Transportation Association, calls it "short-sighted" to ignore public transportation such as buses and subway systems. She cited a 2005 report by the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University that said public transportation saved 1.1 billion hours of travel time in 85 urban areas in 2003. "Public transportation has a proven record of helping reduce congestion that should not be ignored," Miller says.

No, Ms. Miller; public transportation does not reduce congestion. It transfers part of the congestion from highways to overburdened buses or some other form of cruel and unusual punishment. You want to see congestion? If you are ever in the mood to step outside your ivory tower, take a ride on the New York or Washington mass transit system during the rush hour. The very term mass transit tells you something, or would if you ever thought beyond your schemes for ridding people of that frightful individualism that is so annoying to social engineers like you.

All these reactive pseudo-solutions to advancing gridlock — building more roads, charging higher tolls to use them at peak hours, packing people into subways, etc. — are ways of avoiding the cause, population growth, while treating the effect. But acknowledging the cause would require confronting the United States's demented "come one, come all" immigration policy.