The week

* If you're going to public school in San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. The city's school board has voted to banish the Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC) from its high schools. As an assembly of tearful cadets looked on, opponents of the program broke into loud applause. Against JROTC, they had made two chief arguments: first, that the military unjustly discriminates against gays, thereby forfeiting its right to participate in public schooling; and second, that the program deceptively lures unsuspecting children into a career of military service. But the cheering was inspired by a much deeper conviction. As a former teacher in the audience explained, "We need to teach a curriculum of peace." San Francisco is a city of pacifists who feel animosity toward America and are wholly ignorant of the means by which peace is secured. Their banning of JROTC is as shameful as it is unsurprising.

* Even before Katrina's floodwaters peaked last August, the finger-wagging had begun. A smattering of environmentalists set about blaming the hurricane on capitalism, oil, and President Bush--the three horsemen of the global-warming apocalypse. We were told that Katrina's destructive power had been fed by an overheated atmosphere, and that things would only get worse as the planet got hotter. One prominent study out of Colorado State University predicted that a whopping 17 named storms would make for a turbulent 2006. But now, as the year draws to a close, we see that the hurricane season has been the most tranquil of the last decade: There have been nine named storms, only five of which were hurricanes, and none of which were more powerful than a Category 3. Of course, this doesn't really tell us anything conclusive: It is folly to suppose that a single hurricane or even a single season can tell us anything about global climatic trends. In the name of forcing us to confront an "inconvenient truth," global-warming activists sure seem to be pushing a lot of convenient fictions.

* The technical details of the nuclear deal with India that the Senate just approved are not all that important. Mostly, we are formally acknowledging that India is developing the nuclear technology that India was going to develop whether or not we acknowledged it. The significance of the deal is that it moves us closer to an alliance with a rising power that shares many of our interests with respect to China and to the Middle East--a power that is also the world's largest democracy. The large margin for the deal in the House and Senate shows that even in these times, some foreign-policy issues are simple enough for both parties to understand.

* President Bush visited Vietnam for an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, and the press covered many angles: Russia's bid to join the World Trade Organization; America's efforts to engineer consensus on North Korea; memories of the Vietnam War, won by the press and the Communists, lost by the United States and the Vietnamese people. Most important was the underlying geopolitics. Vietnam is the backdoor neighbor of its historic overlord and enemy, China. Though Vietnam is prospering now, years of Communist misrule have left it lagging behind its East Asian peers. Vietnam needs trade, and powerful non-Chinese friends; the United States needs to keep its hand in regionally, however it can. "History has a long march to it," as Bush observed in Hanoi.