The suspected murderer of Lindsay Hawker has been arrested. (Apparently, he was actually discovered, after more than two years of hiding out, last month when I wasn’t paying very good attention to the news.

Tatsuya Ichihashi, who was rearrested Wednesday on suspicion of killing Lindsay Hawker, studied French by himself during his 2-1/2 years on the run from police and participated in an overseas language study program at a French university when he was a student, The Yomiuri Shimbun has learned.

As Ichihashi had a private English conversation lesson with Hawker, the investigation headquarters is trying to determine what happened between the two, who seemed to be on friendly terms with each other shortly before Hawker was murdered.

“We’re always told to try to feel other people’s pain, but we can’t, can we.” A 28-year-old woman who went on the study tour of France as part of Ichihashi’s group clearly remembers this remark that Ichihashi made at that time.

Hawker was an inexperienced English teacher and apparently agreed to give a private lesson to the wrong person. As nearly as police can tell, she went back to Ishihashi’s apartment with him and was murdered there. Her body was discovered on his balcony the day after she went missing.

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The leader of the Social Democratic Party, which is now the DPJ’s partner in the ruling coalition, is threatening mutiny if the current Futenma relocation plans go through:

Speaking at a party meeting on Thursday morning, Fukushima said that if a decision was made to relocate the base in Ginowan, Okinawa Prefecture, to coastal portions of the U.S. Marines’ Camp Schwab in the Okinawa Prefecture city of Nago, then the party would have to make a “grave decision.”

“It is an extremely important issue which reaches the foundations of the party,” Fukushima told reporters following the meeting. “We are alarmed about the current agreement being rushed after the ministerial-level meeting between Japan and the U.S.”

The decision’s been in the works for half a decade, of course, but it keeps getting fussed over then dropped.

Today, you can’t read any blog anywhere, it seems, without running into a discussion of LGF’s Charles Johnson and his recent climactic statement that he was finally forced to break with the Right. I wasn’t going to post about it—I heard enough conversion stories during my religious upbringing to last me a lifetime, and this one isn’t particularly revealing—but the Unreligious Right has a very well done point-by-point response. His introduction, in part, goes like this:

Lest any LGF defenders think this is a typical knee-jerk right-wing response, let’s quickly run down some of my positions. I probably agree with Johnson on many issues. For anyone new here, aside from being an atheist, I’m pro-choice, pro-gay marriage & strongly pro-gay rights in general, pro-immigration and in favor of some sort of amnesty for illegals, and pro-legalization of drugs & prostitution. With that out of the way, let’s consider Johnson’s points, and why I laugh at them.

And then he does. What I most agree with is what I take to be the UNRR’s central point: that even Johnson’s complaints that are legitimate involve nothing whatsoever that’s substantively a new development, so it’s absurd for him to declare now that he feels morally obliged to ditch the right without explaining what’s changed about his own thinking. Seriously, I realize it’s easy for me to say this, being a libertarian who’s alienated from both major parties and ideological poles and all, but in blogosphere terms, the right has been very good to Charles Johnson. If his change of heart is really the product of genuine soul-searching, he’d be doing a service to readers by explaining exactly what he now believes and why it’s different from before. As it stands, he just sounds like an attention-whore.

Is there any topic a true classical liberal/libertarian can’t use as a point of departure for criticizing centralized government control? Of course not! Virginia Postrel has posted at both Dynamist.com and Deep Glamour about the problem of figuring out which present would best suit each person on your list, even those you know intimately. In the Dynamist post, she ends this way:

The problem of buying good presents for other people, even people you supposedly know well, illustrates that old familiar Hayekian concept, the knowledge problem. If you can’t even give your loved ones the right presents, how likely is it that a central authority could make the right decisions for everyone?

That’s especially true of goods such as health care, in connection with which the criteria for satisfaction vary so widely from person to person. Some people go to the doctor for every case of the sniffles. Others get a general physical every year, see the dentist whenever prompted by a reminder card, and otherwise don’t bother with doctors. Still others never see the inside of a doctor’s office unless a limb is turning blue and hanging at a strange angle.

None of those practices is the correct one in any objective sense; people make their own trade-offs based on expense, time, peace of mind, and what they know of their own constitutions. People can also be more or less picky about what they eat, how they dress, and where they live based on similar criteria, and we let them. Health care is an industry with a long and deep history of quackery and fraud, so legal standards for minimum quality make sense. One of the government’s primary functions is protecting citizens from threats, including those from other citizens. But the idea that any policy program dictated from on high is going to help improve health care for a country of 300 million vociferously free people is highly suspect. As with a present that suits the giver’s tastes and not yours, it implies that you need to be told what you ought to prefer. Thankfully, while it would be rude to tell Grandma you don’t care for the wool socks she put under the tree for you, you can still tell your elected representatives that you don’t care to be told what your health-care priorities are.

Added on 2 December: Thanks to Eric for the link. Glad I was able to help him get into the Christmas spirit.