Schoolfellows who know John Kerry from the old days in the Political Union will find awfully recognizable the spotlight-grabbing behavior featured in the incident of today described by Dean Barnett on Soxblog, who writes:

I know we’re never going to see the day where we all agree on the quality of George W. Bush as both a president and a man. But can we not at least agree that this country is fortunate to not have John Kerry as its president?

We were busy with other things, and fell behind on PJM coverage. A good summary which brings things pretty nicely up-to-date has been written by Mister Snitch.

Any undertaking on this scale, involving significant numbers of creative and temperamental people, was bound to feature conflict, drama, break-ups, and feuding. The newly launched site did prove surprisingly unfinished, and functionality, content, and organization were all initially wanting, but it’s easy to see that, bit-by-bit, improvements are occuring. I suppose the fundamental problem has been that producing one blog is very time-consuming, and the PJM principals have all continued to run their own renowned, popular, and important blogs, and have been consequently only left-handedly developing PJM. Skeptics need to remember that the PJM organization does include a very major share of the best talent existing in blogging. Those betting negatively over on PJM Death Pool may well wind up disappointed.

The London Times is reporting that a Belgian woman, who had married a Morrocan and converted to “the religion of Peace,” travelled to Iraq and last month blew herself up in a suicidal act of terrorism.

MIREILLE, who was born in Belgium to a white, middle-class Christian family, blew herself to pieces last month in a suicide attack against American troops near Baghdad.

In one of the most extraordinary tales of Islamic radicalisation, she is thought to be the first white Western woman to carry out a suicide bombing.

Belgian investigators, who arrested 14 people associated with her, are keeping the 38-year-old woman’s true identity secret, but details have started to emerge. She was from the southern Belgian town of Charleroi, married to a Moroccan and converted to an extreme form of Islam.

The New York Times reports that at the University of the South (recently renamed as “Sewanee: The University of the South”), as at numerous other Southern colleges and universities these days, traditions and symbols pertaining to history and Southern regionalism, especially those associated with the Lost Confederate Cause, are being bowdlerized out of existence.

Submission to contemporary prejudice and political correctness is seen by many college executives as necessary for achieving so-called “diverse” enrollments, i.e. student bodies featuring significant percentages of members of designated victims’ groups, and national reputation.

The flags from Southern states disappeared from the chapel. The ceremonial baton dedicated to a Confederate general who helped found the Ku Klux Klan vanished. The very name of the University of the South was tweaked, becoming Sewanee: The University of the South, with decided emphasis on Sewanee…

Across the country, colleges are trying to reposition themselves to attract more high-quality students and raise their national profiles. But perhaps nowhere is this more challenging than in the South, where university officials often find themselves struggling to temper Confederate imagery without alienating alumni and donors determined to uphold their heritage.

Reports the Arizona Conservative:

Congressman John P. Murtha (D-PA) widened his call for a strategic withdrawal to include Washington, D.C.“Let’s face it,” Murtha said. “The capitol has led the nation in crime for more than a decade. There is nothing more than can be accomplished by staying. It’s time to pull out.”

A snap poll conducted by NBC showed a majority of Americans agree with Murtha’s latest proposal.

“Congress has been looting and pillaging taxpayers for generations,” said pollee John Smith of Anytown, U.S.A. “Shutting down the capitol sounds like a pretty good idea.”

Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) asserted that Murtha’s words have been misconstrued. “Congressman Murtha was referring to a Republican pull-out,” said Pelosi. “He’s saying everything would be fine if we could get the Republicans to pull out of Washington.”

Congressman J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.) said his office has been inundated by citizens calling for a “sense of congress” resolution calling for the immediate withdrawal of all members of congress and the redeployment of resources back to the taxpayers. “Murtha may have awakened the proverbial ‘sleeping dog,’“ said Hayworth. “There’s no telling where this may lead now.”

Some poltroon lawyers nixed airing it, but this ad is a hoot. (Warning: Politically Incorrect imaginary violence!)

Right Reason’s Maxwell Goss interviews with Roger Scruton on the occasion of the 25th Anniversary of the publication of his book The Meaning of Conservatism.

John Hinderaker of Power-Line discusses in the Daily Standard damaging intelligence leaks by active CIA officer members of the anti-Bush Administration Intelligence Community cabal.

THE CIA’S WAR against the Bush administration is one of the great untold stories of the past three years. It is, perhaps, the agency’s most successful covert action of recent times. The CIA has used its budget to fund criticism of the administration by former Democratic officeholders. The agency allowed an employee, Michael Scheuer, to publish and promote a book containing classified information, as long as, in Scheuer’s words, “the book was being used to bash the president.” However, the agency’s preferred weapon has been the leak. In one leak after another, generally to the New York Times or the Washington Post, CIA officials have sought to undermine America’s foreign policy. Usually this is done by leaking reports or memos critical of administration policies or skeptical of their prospects. Through it all, our principal news outlets, which share the agency’s agenda and profit from its torrent of leaks, have maintained a discreet silence about what should be a major scandal. Recent events indicate that the CIA might even be willing to compromise the effectiveness of its own covert operations, if by doing so it can damage the Bush administration

“We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.”

—- actual source unknown, generally attributed to George Orwell

Charles Krauthammer has a thoughtful article in The Weekly Standard, which constitutes an unusual contribution to the debates within the American commentariat on terrorist interrogation by virtue of saying sensible things. I found the article being chewed over, like a rubber dog toy tossed to a pack of terriers, by a consistery of conservatives on NRO.

I believe myself that attempting to have a publicly-discussed, publicly-disclosed policy of what happens to terrorists is a fundamental and profound mistake.

It is also my opinion that members of the American intelligentsia, a pampered lot, whose personal experience of violence, by and large, tends to have been confined to a certain number of viewings of the films of Quentin Tarrantino, whose worst experience of physical suffering inflicted by another human being took place in a dental chair, the kinds of people who believe there need to be rules about this sort of thing and theories about that sort of thing, are just not qualified to sit in safety and comfort in offices and studies in the United States, telling rough men, charged with maintaining their safety, how to do their job.

The American intelligentsia should simply be grateful that their society includes men who can do for them what they could not possibly do for themselves, shut up, and let it go at that. There are always things which happen in the course of wars which it is better not to think about, better not to talk about. That’s what war is.

Another must-read posting from Wretchard, who takes the occasion of Representative Cunningham’s resignation to recall another very different day:

Whatever Randy Cunningham did in later life, it remains true that on the tenth of May, 1972 ShowTime 100 would shoot down two MIGs, then a third. ...

The Guardian reports in tomorrow’s edition:

Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to secretary of state Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005, singled out Mr Cheney in a wide-ranging political assault on the BBC’s Today programme.

Mr Wilkerson said that in an internal administration debate over whether to abide by the Geneva conventions in the treatment of detainees, Mr Cheney led the argument “that essentially wanted to do away with all restrictions”. Asked whether the vice-president was guilty of a war crime, Mr Wilkerson replied: “Well, that’s an interesting question – it was certainly a domestic crime to advocate terror and I would suspect that it is … an international crime as well.”

Colonel Wilkerson has been unleashing a series of attacks on the administration in recent weeks, making the same kinds of arguments made by known and acknowledged members of the VIPS cabal of State Department and Intelligence Community doves operating in opposition to the current administration since well before the 2003 Invasion of Iraq.

PREVIOUS REPORT 1

PREVIOUS REPORT 2

Terrorist mouthpiece Aljazeera, with its customary pose of journalistic impartiality, aired today a videotape showing four Western moonbat hostages captured in Iraq by a previously unknown group, calling itself “the Swords of Righteousness Brigade. ”

DebkaFile reports today that:

Interrogations of al Qaeda adherents captured in 9 countries in November have finally exploded the myth of Osama bin Laden as a semi-retired inspirational figurehead. (DebkaNet)’s intelligence and counter-terror sources reveal that bin Laden has emerged as a vitally active planner of all al Qaeda’s terrorist operations up to the present.

Meanwhile, the ever-perspicacious democrat Majority Leader Nevada Senator Harry Reid of Nevada said this week he thinks Osama Bin Laden was killed in last month’s earthquake in Pakistan.

Kevin Spacey plays Christopher Walken as Han Solo and the late Walter Mattau as Obi-Wan Kenobi. Darrell Hammond plays Richard Dreyfuss as C3PO. Classic sketch from SNL spoofing behind the scenes footage of “Star Wars, the 20th Anniversary Home Video”.

WorldNetDaily reports that developments in deep-drilling for natural gas present serious challenges to those who still maintain “Fossil-Fuel” theories as to the origin of complex hydrocarbon fuels. The Oklahoma GHK Company has found Natural Gas in two wells drilled to depths greater than 30,000 feet (approximately 5.7 miles), too deep for the remains of dinosaurs to be found. A Japanese Company, Teikoku Oil, produces equipment specifically for use in Japan’s Nagaoka and Niigata fields which are producing natural gas from bedrock that is volcanic in origin.

(Some) might stretch to argue that even if no dinosaurs ever died in sedimentary rock that today lies 30,000 feet below the surface… those levels (may) contain some type of biological debris that has transformed into natural gas. That argument, a stretch at 30,000 feet down, is almost impossible to make for basement structure bedrock. Japan’s Nagaoka and Niigata fields produce natural gas from bedrock that is volcanic in nature. What dinosaur debris could possibly be trapped in volcanic rock found at deep-earth levels? Deep-earth natural gas strongly supports the theory that the origin of oil (also) is abiotic, not organic in nature.

The growing evidence of the possibility of an abiotic, geological origin of so-called “fossil fuels” would be a very serious blow to leftist critics of modern industrial civilization. Predictions of the impending exhaustion of allegedly limited supplies of precious natural resources are a staple of leftist critiques of Capitalism and the American way of life.
———
Mr. David Nix, a classmate of mine at college, has thoughtfully passed along this link to an article on the American Association of Petroleum Geologists web site.
——-
California blogger Gahrie supplies some links to materials on the abiogenic theory.

Selectpersons of long-time Cape Cod artist colony Provincetown have decided they don’t want to continue to have to look at a painting depitcting the signing of the Mayflower Compact. The Pilgrim Fathers were sexists, you see, and did not include Indians in their ballotings.

Selectwoman Sarah Peake spun her chair around near the end of the Nov. 14 meeting, gazed up at an oversized oil painting depicting the Pilgrims voting on the Mayflower Compact when they first landed in Provincetown, and declared that she wanted it removed.

Mind you, it’s not that she didn’t like the look or the colors or the style. It’s not that she thought it was too big or too small for the Judge Welsh Hearing Room. It’s not that it clashed with anything around it.

No, what Peake didn’t like was that the painting didn’t include any women. That and the fact that the painting’s only Indian—Native American, I’d better call him—wasn’t holding a ballot like everyone else…

The selectmen took a vote, and three of the four supported removal of the painting.

Responding to recent humiliating demotions in Ecosytem Rankings, many much-lower-on-the evolutionary-ladder bloggers are probably feeling that TTLB is really lower than themselves, that TTLB ought to be saying of itself, as Julianne (played by Julia Roberts) said in My Best Friend’s Wedding:

JULIANNE I am pond scum. No… Actually. Lower. I am the fungus that feeds on pond scum. Lower. The layer of mucous that cruds up the fung…

MICHAEL

Lower.

JULIANNE

(agreeing) Lower.

MICHAEL

The pus that infects the mucous that cruds up the fungus that feeds on the pond scum. (Trace of a smile)

Kidding around aside, the big change, as far as is visible, seems to have amounted simply to a renumbering of how many links make a blog a this instead of a that. My Top Posts has always not worked, and still doesn’t. My link count has gone up, rather than than down, the opposite of my location on the food chain, but some links (including prominent ones like NRO (which produced 6K hits in one day) have never apparently been listed or counted, but TTLB’s count is still higher than Technorati’s. Go figure.

MeaninglessHotAir (must be John Cole’s cousin) at YARGB has compiled a terrific collection of Google links, including a link to a disgruntled Google employees’ blog. Those of us with lives connected to the Tech Industry love this kind of stuff.

Right now in Times Square.

Michael Massing in the last New York Review of Books contemplates with alarm, in the first of a projected two-part chin-stroking series, the continuing assault on the credibility of the MSM by a spectrum of alternative Conservative information sources, including AM talk radio, Fox News, and the Conservative Blogosphere, and laments the ever-diminishing readership of major newspapers:

while more than 70 percent of older Americans read a newspaper every day, fewer than 20 percent of young Americans do. As a result, he writes, “America is facing the greatest exodus of informed citizenship in its history.”

All this is very bad, you see, because:

If the leading newspapers lose their capacity to report and conduct inquiries, the American public will become even more susceptible to the manipulations and deceptions of those in power.

Frankly, old boy, complacent Establishment organs like the NY Times, the NYRB, CBS News, and the rest of the MSM look an awful lot like those in power to me. I’m strongly tempted to insert an MP3 at this point of Bob Dylan singing “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”

Hat tip to Eugene Volokh who wryly responds to the NYRB’s lamentations by noting mistakes typical of MSM-reporting in the same article.

LeeBert at ApognosiS provides a useful reference collection on Iraqi WMD evidence.

Photoshop contest.

Catherine Seipp, who blogs on Cathy’s World, discusses the mysterious unfairness of the progress of the world by which some past authors remain famous and abundantly in-print, while other, like Ruth McKenney, Peg Bracken, Ernie Pyle, and others, are undeservedly discarded from the publishers’ lists and forgotten. Even today, it can be impossible to find, with all the book search utilities there are, titles which not necessarily rare, but which have merely escaped the antiquarian book dealers’ radar screens, usually simply as the result of not having been identified as desirable within a recognized category of book-collecting.

If any book dealer out there has a copy for sale, for example, of Heather Mixture by “Klaxon,” not listed anywhere as the result of not being understood to be a Game Shooting title, the owner of this blog is eager to purchase it.

The Truth Laid Bear bit the Blogosphere today, when its proprietor began implementing plans to eliminate counts of open trackbacks, and other forms of blogger cooperation in raising the status of individual blogs, toward ecosystem ratings and top posts. TTLB results are in complete shambles at present.

Glenn Reynolds, eat your heart out. Higher Beings are currently being reported to be:

1.Cold Fury (62) details
2.Caterina.net (62) details
3.http://www.ospolitics.org/ (62) details
4.Inter Alia (62) details
5.Times & Seasons (62) details
6.Writing for the Web (62) details
7.Go Dubya! (62) details
8.Freedom Nation (62) details
9. Cor ad cor loquitur (62) details
10.Hypocrisy and Hypotheses… an acute angle in an obtuse world (62) details

Three out of ten of which are dead links.

But what do we know? We’ve regressed to Multicellar Microorganism.

We were warned this was coming yesterday by James Joyner. Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Irate bloggers can be found starting with Don Surber.

reviewed by David Lipsky:

[Kaplan] chastises the ‘elite’ for casting Vietnam in a bad light; the soldiers consider that war ‘every bit as sanctified as the nation’s others.’.. we’ve been too thrifty with our troops; to prevail in the war on terror, he advises, we ought to become more tolerant of American casualties. So what’s the holdup? It was the elites that had a more difficult time with the deaths of soldiers and marines. ‘Their concern is misplaced. The grunts have an ‘unpretentious willingness to die,’ which is in part ‘the product of their working-class origins. The working classes had always been accustomed to rough, unfair lives and turns.’..

The elites, having become global citizens, represent a threat to ‘the age-old ability of individual democracies to persevere in a sustained and difficult war.’ For Kaplan, it comes down to interests and allegiances: ‘Journalists were global cosmopolitans. If they themselves did not own European and other foreign passports, their spouses or friends . . . did. Contrarily, the American troops I met saw themselves belonging to one country and one society only: that of the United States.’

Wretchard proposes a provocative way of looking at current events:

The fundamental issue… is whether nation-states are in some sense being replaced by distributed networks of people…

That Islam traditionally had no fixed hierarchy helped it adapt more readily to networked war. For the Jihadi the requirements of public policy and international law not only proved no hindrance, in a fundamental sense they did not apply: things like the Geneva Convention were the impedimenta of nation-states. Holy warriors were accountable only to Allah, which in practice meant they answered to no one but themselves. This circumstance exculpated the Jihadists from a multitude of sins in the eyes of a Western media capable of recognizing only state actors. Attacks against hospitals, schools, churches; and the use of children as combatants excited no opprobrium because these were understood to be acts of individuals; unfortunate to be sure, but ultimately insubstantial. Only states could commit war crimes, so that Jihadi atrocities, even on the scale of September 11, were only the subject of police action…

The key challenge is whether America, in the sense of a shared idea, can be expansive enough to permit subordinate threads which can truly “take on a life of their own”, and so become agile enough to engage the Jihadis at the lowest level.

The unaussprechlichen FrankJ is waging war on Glenn Reynolds, you see. The origins and history of this terrible conflict are described here:

Blogging is a hobby of pure ego, whose purpose is to 1) see your words in print, and 2) have other people read them. Currently, one blogger, Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) gets far more page views and links than any other, and deservedly so. Glen updates MANY times per day, and his links are usually well worth clicking. However, he normally offers very little of his own commentary. Sometimes just a cursory “indeed” or “hmmm”.

Because he has so many readers, if he links to your site you get a LOT of hits, which is very gratifying. His links are highly prized by bloggers.

Frank J., of IMAO, is an up-and-coming blogger who occasionally mocks Glenn as a way to gain attention. His first method was making up outrageous lies: Glenn puts puppies in blenders and drinks them; Glenn murders hobos for fun; Glenn worships Satan; Glenn is a communist spy who does the robot dance; Glenn punched Frank J.

Later, Frank attempted to get Google to bring up Glenn’s site if the terms “liberal assclown” were entered. Results were mixed.

His latest attempt was to “declare war” on Glenn and asking bloggers to choose sides. Frank’s side is the Blogging Alliance, Glenn’s supporters are the Axis of Naughty. It’s all in good fun, and much entertaining mockery and gratuitous linkage will ensue as a result.

One of FrankJ’s allies, Harvey, has composed an indictment not to be missed by connoisseurs of Blogospheric humor.

The irrepressible FrankJ posts an amusing collection of “Amazing Beliefs” about Guns, compiled by Michael Z. Williamson :

(excerpt)

That incidents where people shoot criminals in self defense are very rare, and shouldn’t be used as excuses to own guns, just as incidents where presidential press secretaries are shot are very rare, and shouldn’t be used as excuses to ban guns.

That guns are the real cause of crime, but we will blame and jail the owner of said gun for the crime, even if the owner wasn’t the person involved.

That a mugger will kill you in the half-second it takes to draw from the holster, but won’t harm you while you dial 911 on your cell phone, talk to the dispatcher and wait half an hour for the cops to arrive.

That gun control works, which is why there are no illegal weapons in Northern Ireland or Beirut.

That the Second Amendment only applies to flintlocks, just as the First Amendment only applies to quills and lead type.

The Telegraph reports:

Poland’s newly elected government threw open its top secret Warsaw Pact military archives – including a 1979 map revealing the Soviet bloc’s vision of a seven-day atomic holocaust between Nato and Warsaw Pact forces.

The defence minister, Radek Sikorski, showed off the map at an emotional press conference.

He described it as a “personally shattering experience”, pointing to a long line of nuclear mushroom clouds neatly stamped along the Vistula, where Soviet bloc commanders assumed that Nato tactical nuclear weapons would rain down to block reinforcements arriving from Russia.

About two million Polish civilians would die in such a war, and the country would be all but wiped off the face of the Earth, he said.

On the map, western Europe lay beneath a chilling overlay of large red mushroom clouds: Warsaw Pact nuclear strikes, using giant warheads to compensate for their relative lack of precision.

Soviet bombs rain down on cities from northern Denmark down to Brussels, the political headquarters of Nato. Large red clouds blot out cities such as Hamburg, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Munich and Baden Baden, Haarlem, Antwerp and Charleroi, above the Franco-Belgian border.

In 1979, the town I was living in, Redding, Connecticut, was debating, and ultimately passed—despite some speeches of mine—a Nuclear Freeze resolution, promoted by the American Left throughout much of the United States, opposing the deployment of medium range missles in Europe by NATO. The Soviet Union was no threat, we were told. One does not like to think about what might have happened had Ronald Reagan not been elected president in 1980.

(click on picture for more images)

Simply astonishing.

Other works

How many movies have we seen with villainous Gestapo men, attired in leather-trenchcoats, marching down train corridors, demanding “Your papers, please!”? The ever-escalating securitization of America, fueled simultaneously by liberal Nanny-ism and by war-time security concerns, produces a thousand stories of nincompoopery and Jack-in-Office excess monthly. One irrational demand for personal ID on a bus in Denver seems to have inspired a web-site erected to do something about all this.

Despite the presence of a banner on that web-site from the Colorado branch of a loathsome organization, I’m inclined to sympathize with the lady’s position. I’ve come pretty close to taking a poke at courthouse rent-a-cops more than once myself.
————-

Story picked up Sunday, November 27th, Denver Post.
————-

A disagreeable example of just where this kind of thing can lead is provided by Malaysia, where a cellphone-captured video of a Chinese female suspect stripped and forced to perform “ear squats,” hands-free deep knee bends performed holding hands to ears, has produced a scandal being reported all over South-east Asia: Sydney Herald and BBC.

American Enterprise Online notes and debunks Urban Legends originated by the Left about the war.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds and Rand Simberg.

(Apologies to our readers. The blogging software has difficulties with exceptionally long postings, so I divided the original into two.)

The altered scene reads in the original:

TAMBURLAINE. Now, Casane, where’s the Turkish Alcoran,
And all the heaps of superstitious books
Found in the temples of that Mahomet
Whom I have thought a god? they shall be burnt.

USUMCASANE. Here they are, my lord.

TAMBURLAINE. Well said! let there be a fire presently.

[They light a fire.]
In vain, I see, men worship Mahomet:
My sword hath sent millions of Turks to hell,
Slew all his priests, his kinsmen, and his friends,
And yet I live untouch’d by Mahomet.
There is a God, full of revenging wrath,
From whom the thunder and the lightning breaks,
Whose scourge I am, and him will I obey.
So, Casane; fling them in the fire.— [They burn the books.]
Now, Mahomet, if thou have any power,
Come down thyself and work a miracle:
Thou art not worthy to be worshipped
That suffer’st flames of fire to burn the writ
Wherein the sum of thy religion rests:
Why send’st thou not a furious whirlwind down,
To blow thy Alcoran up to thy throne,
Where men report thou sitt’st by God himself?
Or vengeance on the head of Tamburlaine
That shakes his sword against thy majesty,
And spurns the abstracts of thy foolish laws?—Well, soldiers, Mahomet remains in hell;
He cannot hear the voice of Tamburlaine:
Seek out another godhead to adore;
The God that sits in heaven, if any god,
For he is God alone, and none but he.

Churchill and Wellington, Shakespeare and Milton, and all the other heroes of English history and English letters must be revolving in their graves at a speed of 78 rpm-s today at news of Christopher Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine the Great being presented on the London stage in censored form, the famous scene in which Tamburlaine burns the Alcoran rewritten in deference to Muslim sensitivities at a time when British military forces are in the field fighting Islamo-fascism.

Can one even begin to imagine imagine London stage performances removing (rather than adding by the barge-load) uncomplimentary references to Nazis during the time of Churchill? or scenes offensive to French sensibilities being excised during the Napoleonic wars? or the London theatre grovelling to Spain in the time of the Armada?

IT WAS the surprise hit of the autumn season, selling out for its entire run and inspiring rave reviews… (but) audiences at the Barbican in London did not see the Koran being burnt, as Marlowe intended, because David Farr, who directed and adapted the classic play, feared that it would inflame passions in the light of the London bombings. Simon Reade, artistic director of the Bristol Old Vic, said that if they had not altered the original it “would have unnecessarily raised the hackles of a significant proportion of one of the world’s great religions”.

The burning of the Koran was “smoothed over”, he said, so that it became just the destruction of “a load of books” relating to any culture or religion. That made it more powerful, they claimed.

aj-Jazeera gets some women and a kid right up front for their “manipulate the dumb Americans” shot in an insolent new blog titled “Don’t Bomb Us,” devoted to cynically exploiting the recent British press story and otherwise influencing Western public opinion.

Reuters is reporting that Boston has officially renamed the giant tree erected this year in a city park a “holiday tree” instead of a “Christmas tree.”

The Nova Scotia logger who cut down the 48-foot (14-meter) tree was indignant and said he would not have donated the tree if he had known of the name change.

“I’d have cut it down and put it through the chipper,” Donnie Hatt told a Canadian newspaper. “If they decide it should be a holiday tree, I’ll tell them to send it back. If it was a holiday tree, you might as well put it up at Easter.”

Canadian response to PC in Boston.

Depkafile is following up on its earlier report, stating that

Syria claims US forces suffered 11 casualties in a Syrian-US clash Thursday night, Nov. 24 without clarifying whether they meant dead or wounded.

Internal Syrian communications channels report Syrian “Desert Guards” border units fought US Marines who crossed into Syria at a point west of al Qaim. They also claimed 30 Syrian casualties.

DEBKAfile’s military sources report the battle took place at the Syrian-Iraqi border town of Abu Kemal. US forces were in hot pursuit of a group of al Qaeda operatives who fled across to Syria in escape an American attack pinning them down in Mosul. The US military delivered Syria an ultimatum to hand the terrorists over. The American pursuit continued Friday when Syria failed to respond.

Hammorabi, a pro-democracy Iraqi blog, has heard locally a version of the same story:

There are news of at least 12 American soldiers have been killed and wounded near the Al-Bo-Kamal area when they followed insurgents escaped to Syria. Fighting then broke down with the Syrians who had at least 3 casualties.

EARLIER REPORT

Pharyngula will be much linked for the video, and much quoted for this awe-inspiring description of gastropod love:

Oh, my. This video from the BBC of slugs mating is spectacular—it’s got mucus ropes, everting male organs, entwining penises, and penises forming a translucent flower-like globe. It made me feel rather homely and inadequate, truth to tell, but wow…appreciative at the same time.

He’s right. It’s a lot like what a friend of mine always used to say about lesbian sex: “really sort of poetic, and interesting to watch.”

Hat tip to John Cole and to Obsidian Wings.

Paul Hellyer, former Canadian Minister of Defence and Deputy Prime Minister under Pierre Trudeau, speaking September 25th at the University of Toronto, told an undoubtedly-surprised audience that “UFOs, are as real as the airplanes that fly over your head,” and procceed to expose US preparations for interstellar aggression.

“I’m so concerned about what the consequences might be of starting an intergalactic war, that I just think I had to say something.”

Hellyer revealed, “The secrecy involved in all matters pertaining to the Roswell incident was unparalled. The classification was, from the outset, above top secret, so the vast majority of U.S. officials and politicians, let alone a mere allied minister of defence, were never in-the-loop.”

Hellyer warned, “The United States military are preparing weapons which could be used against the aliens, and they could get us into an intergalactic war without us ever having any warning. He stated, “The Bush administration has finally agreed to let the military build a forward base on the moon, which will put them in a better position to keep track of the goings and comings of the visitors from space, and to shoot at them, if they so decide.”

Hellyer’s speech ended with a standing ovation. He said, “The time has come to lift the veil of secrecy, and let the truth emerge, so there can be a real and informed debate, about one of the most important problems facing our planet today.”

Scott Johnson at Power-Line discusses a very sensible editorial in the New York Sun: “Should Bush and Blair Consider Bombing Al-Jazeera? ” observing that the vehemence of the British government’s response [to recent press reports] alone suggests that this matter is being taken seriously both in London and in Washington.

What interests me about the conversation in dispute is why anybody… should be surprised by it. Indeed, I would be surprised if Messrs. Bush and Blair had not discussed ways of limiting the damage done by Islamist propaganda, whose main conduit is indeed Al Jazeera TV. It may well be that the thought of silencing the Arab network crossed their minds, only to be dismissed as too risky. If so, were the two leaders wrong to consider that option?

I don’t think so. That shutting down Al Jazeera would be desirable from the Anglo-American point of view is obviously true. And if Qatar, a Gulf state that is nominally an ally of America (on which it relies for its independence), has allowed its capital to become Al Qaeda’s principal propaganda base, it has no right to expect America automatically to refrain from punitive action on its territory.

The wider issues raised by the Bush-Blair Al Jazeera exchange are two. First, how far can the West tolerate the dissemination of Islamist propaganda intended to poison the minds of Muslims against Jews and “Crusaders”? Second, how much information are Western governments obliged to give about their internal decision-making process, and are they justified in suppressing sensitive information, even if this means penalizing the press, to protect Western interests?

Little Green Footballs and Bare Knuckle Politics (hat tip: Michelle Malkin) cover attacks on two liquor stores in West Oakland by “about a dozen African-American men wearing suits, white-collared shirts and bow ties — a trademark of the Nation of Islam.” Television news reports have studiously avoided mentioning the Islamic aspect of the attacks.

The not-always-reliable Debkafile, an Internet publication devoted to reporting and analysis on terrorism, intelligence, Islam, military affairs, & security issues, published in English and in Hebrew, is reporting:

US Marines are locked in battle with Syrian troops after crossing the border from Iraq into Syria at a point west of al Qaim

November 25, 2005, 12:27 AM (GMT+02:00)

Both sides have suffered casualties. US soldiers crossed over after Damascus was given an ultimatum Thursday, Nov. 24, to hand over a group of senior commanders belonging to Abu Musab al Zarqawi’s al Qaeda force. According to US intelligence, the group had fled to Syria to escape an American attack in Mosul. Syrian border guards opened fire on the American force.

——Pravda is meanwhile corroboratively reporting that:

The Iraqi government on Thursday called on Syria to detain “dangerous” insurgents who fled across the border to escape a joint U.S.-Iraqi military operation in the area this month. Government spokesman Laith Kubba also said that insurgent attacks are expected to rise before the Dec. 15 general elections. He said attacks by “Muslim extremists and Saddam (Hussein’s) criminals” will be their last stand.

John Hinderaker at Power-Line today posted these Pew Poll results, noting the differences in levels of support between what he refers to as “leaders” and ordinary Americans. I think myself that, over the lifetime of the post-WWII Baby Boom generation, an unprecedented cultural cleavage has grown up between members of the aspirative, educated upper middle class, the community of fashion; and ordinary Americans, what used to be thought of as the lower middle class.

Just as it is necessary for the self esteem of most upper middle class Americans to distinguish themselves from the commonality of mankind by attending elite schools, pursuing prestigious careers, driving foreign-made luxury cars, and applying keen discrimination to every possible kind of consumer good right up to, and including, the groceries, it has also over time become increasingly vital for members of the American community of fashion to distinguish themselves politically from the other species of lesser mortals making up the general population. Just as one needs to have German or Japanese automobiles and French cheese to lead the good life, one also needs to have a European socialist (revolutionary, while at school) view of domestic policy, and an anti-American perspective on world affairs. Alas! sound judgement on the best consumables, personal ambition, and enough ability to get ahead in life these days are no guarantee of the accompanying possession of an iota of common sense.

Today’s American elite lives in a dreamworld of its own, insulated by comfort and privilege from reality, and intellectually hypnotized by its own self-constructed cultural echo-chamber playing loop tapes of the cliches of long-out-dated leftist ideology.

Landing on Plymouth Rock

Partrick Spero last year supplied some accounts of the first Thanksgiving.

Other Thanksgiving history web-sites are here and here.

The First Thanksgiving
Kevin on The Liberty Papers contrasts the perspective of Leftist author and University of Texas Professor Robert Jensen of Thanksgiving as:

...the day when the dominant white culture (and, sadly, most of the rest of the non-white but non-indigenous population) celebrates the beginning of a genocide that was, in fact, blessed by the men we hold up as our heroic founding fathers.

...an American in revolt. I am revolted by the holiday known as Thanksgiving. I have been accused of wanting to go backwards in time, of being against progress. To those charges, I plead guilty. I want to go back in time to when people lived communally, before the colonists’ Christian god was brought to these shores to sanctify their terrorism, their slavery, their hatred of children, their oppression of women, their holocausts.

Writing in his diary of the dire economic straits and self-destructive behavior that consumed his fellow Puritans shortly after their arrival, Governor William Bradford painted a picture of destitute settlers selling their clothes and bed coverings for food while others “became servants to the Indians,” cutting wood and fetching water in exchange for “a capful of corn.” The most desperate among them starved, with Bradford recounting how one settler, in gathering shellfish along the shore, “was so weak … he stuck fast in the mud and was found dead in the place.”

The colony’s leaders identified the source of their problem as a particularly vile form of what Bradford called “communism.” Property in Plymouth Colony, he observed, was communally owned and cultivated. This system (“taking away of property and bringing [it] into a commonwealth”) bred “confusion and discontent” and “retarded much employment that would have been to [the settlers’] benefit and comfort.”

Just how did the Pilgrims solve the problem of famine? In addition to receiving help from the local Indians in farming, they decided allow the private ownership of individual plots of land.

On the brink of extermination, the Colony’s leaders changed course and allotted a parcel of land to each settler, hoping the private ownership of farmland would encourage self-sufficiency and lead to the cultivation of more corn and other foodstuffs.

As Adam Smith would have predicted, this new system worked famously. “This had very good success,” Bradford reported, “for it made all hands very industrious.” In fact, “much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been” and productivity increased. “Women,” for example, “went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn.”

The famine that nearly wiped out the Pilgrims in 1623 gave way to a period of agricultural abundance that enabled the Massachusetts settlers to set down permanent roots in the New World, prosper, and play an indispensable role in the ultimate success of the American experiment.

A profoundly religious man, Bradford saw the hand of God in the Pilgrims’ economic recovery. Their success, he observed, “may well evince the vanity of that conceit…that the taking away of property… would make [men] happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God.” Bradford surmised, “God in his wisdom saw another course fitter for them.”

The real story of Thanksgiving is the triumph of capitalism and individualism over collectivism and socialism, which is the summation of the story of America.

I’ve heard a lot about Tom Delay, but I hadn’t heard there was another campaign finance case underway. JayTea at Wizbang points to a story by Bullwinkle at Random Numbers highlighting MSM’s hypocritical double-standards in the case of Hillary Clinton’s potential campaign finance scandal.

Seneca the Younger over at YARGB Flares Into Darkness recently could not resist quoting this one in its entirety, and neither can I:

The Liberals’ Creed
Robert Alt

We believe in the United Nations, and Kofi Annan, the maker of international legitimacy.

We believe that the UN inspections worked.
We believe that SCUD missiles fired at U.S. troops minutes after the war began don’t change anything;
We believe that 3 liters of sarin gas used against U.S. troops doesn’t change anything;
We believe that finding evidence of mustard gas doesn’t change anything.

We believe that the war in Iraq conducted by a Republican president was unjustified because it lacked UN approval;
We believe that the “military action” in Kosovo conducted by a Democratic president was justified without UN approval.

We believe that the Iraq war was unilateral.
We believe that the participation of Albania, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Estonia, Georgia, Honduras, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, South Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Thailand, United Kingdom, and Ukraine does not change the fact that the war was unilateral;
We believe that multilateralism can only be achieved with the participation of France and Germany;
We believe in multilateralism.

We believe that this war was motivated by greed and oil;
We believe that when France, Germany, and Russia opposed the war, they were motivated by principle, and not by sweetheart oil deals or Oil-For-Food kickbacks;
We believe that US oil prices are too high, and that the administration failed in its responsibility to do something about it.

We believe that the U.S. may only legitimately use force for humanitarian ends in one place if it does so in all places where aid might be needed;
We believe that the U.S. may not quell threats in places where the cost is relatively low unless it is willing to use force in places like North Korea, where the cost in lives would likely be very high;
We believe that a humanitarian action is only truly humanitarian if there are no strategic interests to muddle the altruism.

We believe that President Bush lied.
We believe that Prime Minister Blair lied.
We believe that when Hillary Clinton and Dick Gephardt voted for the war based on the same intelligence relied upon by Bush and Blair, they made reasonable decisions based on the intelligence available at the time.

We believe that the administration did not make the case for war;
We believe that the administration offered many different reasons but could not offer a coherent message explaining the need to go to war;
We believe that the administration made perfectly clear that the only reason we were going to war was because of the threat from WMDs.

We believe that there were no WMDs.
We believe that finding sarin gas is 14th page news;
We believe that if the sarin gas is old, then it really isn’t a WMD we were looking for;
We believe that it wasn’t really sarin gas;
We believe that sarin gas isn’t necessarily a WMD.

We believe that there was no terrorist connection to, or threat from, Iraq.
We believe that members of Abu Nidal in Iraq would not have committed terrorist acts if we had not invaded;
We believe that al Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi would not have committed terrorist acts if we had not invaded;
We believe that Saddam’s terrorist training camp at Salman Pak—complete with a Boeing 707 plane used for hijacking drills—did not exist or posed no real threat;
We believe that it was merely a coincidence that the pharmaceutical factory bombed by President Clinton in Sudan was using al Qaeda funds and a uniquely Iraqi formula to produce VX gas;
We believe that we are responsible for bringing terror on ourselves.

We believe that the prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib is widespread and is probably the tip of the iceberg;
We believe that Abu Ghraib proves that the America’s occupation is no different than Saddam’s tyranny;
We believe that any attempt to suggest that there is a moral difference between a regime which systematically killed 300,000 people and tortured countless others and a regime which punished the acts of Abu Ghraib is illegitimate.

We believe that soldiers deliberately target women and children;
We believe that the soldiers abuse and kill Iraqis because they are racists;
We support our troops.

We believe that no one should question our statement that we “support our troops;”
We believe that the best thing that could happen for this country would be for Bush to lose in November;
We believe that the best way for Bush to lose in November is for the Iraq effort to go poorly, even if that means that more Iraqis and troops will die;
We believe that most of the troops are minorities and the poor;
We believe that when the word “heroes” is used to describe our troops, it should always be enclosed in scare quotes.

We believe in quagmire.
We believe that when fringe Iraqi groups attack hard targets and are soundly defeated with relatively low Coalition casualties, that this is inescapable evidence of crisis;
We believe that Iraq is Bush’s Vietnam.

We believe that Vietnam is the lens through which all wars should be viewed.
We believe that soldiers in Vietnam were baby killers;
We believe that John Kerry is a hero for his service in Vietnam.

We believe that because John Kerry is a hero, he necessarily has the national security expertise necessary to be commander-in-chief.
We believe that any attempt to question his national security expertise based on his voting record, including his decision to vote against a supplemental bill used to buy the soldiers body armor, is an unfair attack on the patriotism of a hero, who by virtue of this honorific has the expertise to be commander-in-chief.

We believe in the trinity: NPR, CNN, and the New York Times. We believe in Ted Kennedy, Tom Harkin, John Kerry, and all the DNC, and we look for President Clinton yet to come. Amen.

The shocking-but-false story of America’s Blackstronauts.

Mockumentary satirizing Ken Burns history programs. Funny, and politically incorrect.

Jack Cashill reports in WorldNetDaily that Valerie Plame Wilson may have broken the law in May 2003, revealing her own identity, and role in the Joe Wilson Trip to Niger, to reporter Nicholas Kristof.

Wilson makes a stunning admission to Vanity Fair magazine reporter, Vick Ward, who reported it in the January 2004 edition of the magazine. It has been heretofore overlooked. The wording of the relevant paragraph needs to be repeated in full since it is clumsy enough to allow misinterpretation:

In early May, Wilson and Plame attended a conference sponsored by the Senate Democratic Policy Committee, at which Wilson spoke about Iraq; one of the other panelists was the New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof. Over breakfast the next morning with Kristof and his wife, Wilson told about his trip to Niger and said Kristof could write about it, but not name him.

If “his wife” refers not to Kristof’s wife but to Plame, which it almost assuredly does, Wilson has implicated Plame in a serious transgression. “As an employee of the CIA,” he writes in the preface to the paperback version of his book, “The Politics of Truth,” “she could have no contact with the press without prior approval.”

Christopher Hitchens observes that in the War on Islamo-Fascist Terrorism there is no safety in withdrawal: Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.

Withdraw to where, exactly? When Jeanette Rankin was speaking so powerfully on Capitol Hill against U.S. entry into World War I, or Sen. W.E. Borah and Charles Lindbergh were making the same earnest case about the remoteness from American concern of the tussles in Central and Eastern Europe in 1936 and 1940, it was possible to believe in the difference between “over here” and “over there.” There is not now—as we have good reason to know from the London Underground to the Palestinian diaspora murdered in Amman to the no-go suburbs of France—any such distinction. Has the ludicrous and sinister President Jacques Chirac yet designed his “exit strategy” from the outskirts of Paris? Even Rep. Murtha glimpses his own double-standard futility, however dimly, when he calls for U.S. forces to be based just “over the horizon” in case of need. And what horizon, my dear congressman, might that be?

The atom bomb, observed Albert Einstein, “altered everything except the way we think.” A globe-spanning war, declared and prosecuted against all Americans, all apostates, all Christians, all secularists, all Jews, all Hindus, and most Shiites, is not to be fought by first ceding Iraq and then seeing what happens “over the horizon.” But to name the powerful enemies of jihad I have just mentioned is also to spell out some of the reasons why the barbarians will—and must—be defeated. If you prefer, of course, you can be bound in a nutshell and count yourself a king of infinite space and reduce this to the historic struggle between Lewis Libby and—was it Valerie Plame? The word “isolationist” at least used to describe something real, even “realistic.” The current exit babble is illusory and comprehends neither of the above.

It may not be a good sign that a PJM Death Pool is up and running. Hat tip to Ann Althouse.

Gordon Smith analyses whether Roger L. Simon actually formed a partnership with Dennis the Peasant. By some curious coincidence, hat tip to Ann Althouse.

More than we needed to know department: the frazzled Dennis spills his urine jar.

There is very lame satire to be had from a link supplied by left-wing stalkers of LGF, and slightly more amusing material here.

Better humor: It’s alive! Hat tip to Charles Johnson.——-

As to PJM itself, it’s been a week now, and apart from the name change, little seems to be happening. There is a site, whose organization leaves much to be desired, and whose content is very disappointing. Images of one not-very-enthusiastic web programming temp worker in an incubator office in Cleveland come to mind when one tries to imagine who is really running it all.

Best of the Blogs remains a wildly over-optimistic claim. I even tried to help this morning by tipping them off to one of my own more amusing posts, and the result was:

This site encountered an error trying to fulfill your request. The errors were:

Error Type
ValueError
Error Value
invalid literal for int(): 1?tip_confirm=Thanks for the tip?tip_confirm=Thanks for the tip
Request made at
2005/11/23 07:33:01 US/Pacific

I keep hoping somebody is going to start kicking butts and getting things into gear over there.
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