Kevin Williamson offers a clear, concise summary of life in the middle east:

The Jews mean to live, Hamas means to exterminate them, and there will be war until Hamas and its allies either weary of it or win it and the last Israeli Jew is dead or exiled. It is Hamas, not the Israelis, that stashes rockets and soldiers in schools and hospitals, but it is the Israelis the world expects to take account of that situation. Every creature on this Earth, from ant to gazelle, is entitled to - expected to - defend its life to the last: The Israeli Jews, practically alone among the world's living things, are expected to make allowances for the well-being of those who are trying to exterminate them. No one lectures the antelope on restraint when the jackals come, but the Jews in the Jewish state are in the world's judgment not entitled to what is granted every fish and insect as a matter of course.

Victor Davis Hanson notes the perverse nature of the current Israeli - Hamas conflict:

Once again neighboring enemies are warring in diametrically opposite ways.

Hamas sees the death of its civilians as an advantage; Israel sees the death of its civilians as a disaster. Defensive missiles explode to save civilians in Israel; in Gaza, civilians are placed at risk of death to protect offensive missiles.

Hamas wins by losing lots of its people; Israel loses by losing a few of its own. Hamas digs tunnels in premodern fashion; Israel uses postmodern high technology to detect them. Hamas's missiles usually prove ineffective; Israel's bombs and missiles almost always hit their targets. Quiet Israeli officers lead from the front; loud Hamas leaders flee to the rear. Incompetency wins sympathy; expertise, disdain.

The middle east is an upside down place, a bizarro world where good is evil and evil is good. Hanson thinks, though, that if Israel remains decisive and finishes the job the world, including even the Palestinians, will come to its senses:

In the supposedly lose/lose world of Middle Eastern warfare, Israel must ensure that Hamas nevertheless loses far more than Israel itself does, not because the world will publicly sympathize with the cause of the Jewish state, but because, for all its ideological chest-pounding, an amoral world still privately gravitates to the successful and distances itself from the failed. Only if Israel finishes its ongoing dismantling of Hamas will the current war end. In six months, long after MSNBC and CNN have gone on to their next psychodramatic stories, long after John Kerry has moved on to his next Nobel Prize quest, those in Gaza who now yell into cameras encouraging their leaders to kill the Jews will quietly agree not to try another such costly war with Israel - and that fact, and only that fact, will lead to a sort of peace, at least for a while.

We can only hope and pray at this point.

The left continually wrings its collective hands about the specter of "Peak Oil." They do so even as oil production keeps increasing.

Meanwhile, Charles C.W. Cooke notes that, in actuality, the left has itself achieved "Peak Nonsense" with Tracy Van Slyke's analysis of the Thomas the Tank Engine program:

Thomas and his friends, Van Slyke griped, "toil away endlessly on the Isle of Sodor - which seems to be forever caught in British colonial times"; they are overwhelmingly male, which sets "a bad example for girl wannabe train engineers"; and they are ruled by a fat, "imperious, little white" man called Sir Topham Hatt, who acts as the "Monopoly dictator of their funky little island." All in all, she deduced, the program is a hive of "classism," "sexism," and "anti-environmentalism bordering on racism," and "the constant bent of messages about friendship, work, class, gender and race" are all but guaranteed to send her "kid the absolute wrong message." "Look through the steam rising up from the coal-powered train stacks," Van Slyke opined, and you quickly "realize that the pretty puffs of smoke are concealing some pretty twisted, anachronistic messages." Okay then.

This sort of thing deserves relentless mockery.