Vasko Kohlmayer argues (not unpersuasively) that Leftism represents Western civilization’s death wish:

History unambiguously shows that all great civilizations collapsed as a result of internal weakness. Coming to their end by self-destructing, they in effect committed suicide. Sigmund Freud posited the existence of a death drive in individuals. It is my contention that a death drive also runs through whole civilizations.

Everything we see around us indicates that the Left is the West’s instrument of self-destruction and, in fact, the incarnation in our time of the deleterious force that ultimately brings down great civilizations. The Left is the material manifestation of the West’s death drive.

Even as individuals commit suicide by drowning or shooting or some other such means, so the West is in the process of committing suicide by the Left.

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald argued on Friday that he is really trying a perjury case, and the question of Valerie Plame’s covert status does not matter, i.e., it doesn’t matter if any crime was ever committed in the first place.

All a prosecutor has to be able to do, in Fitzgerald’s proposed Amerika, is to demonstrate that he can contradict details of the sworn testimony of the minutiae of the activities and conversations two years back of a senior government official intensely occupied with the affairs of state, and he is entitled to a conviction.

Convictions for the crime of obstructing investigations have become a popular prosecutorial fallback in cases like this where it is found to be impossible to prove that anyone ever committed the initially alleged crime. Martha Stewart was successfully imprisoned in just such a fashion, essentially for the crime of protesting her innocence of insider trading. No insider trading was ever proven, but Martha went to jail anyway.

By a curious coincidence, Mr. Fitzgerald owes his appointment to Martha’s prosecutor, Mr. James Comey.

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Last week’s Darwin award winner seemed to be Swedish executive Stefan Eriksson who lost control of a very very very expensive Ferrari Enzo, went airborne at some speed well in excess of 120 mph (current estimate is 162 mph), hitting an electric pole between five and ten feet off the ground, and dividing the exotic sports car into two parts.

But this week’s reports suggest that all this is part of some Raymond Chandler Southern California rich-guys-up-to-no-good mystery story, involving a clouded title, a mysterious driver who subsequently vanished, an increasingly illogical accident account, and the magazine from a pistol. Another news story.

Let’s hope this kid does not go into politics when he grows up. video
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Hat tip to Kathryn Jean Lopez.

Today marks the 13th anniversary of one of the worst days in the history of the United States. On a Sunday morning in 1993, agents of the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms attacked the headquarters of the Branch Davidian Seventh-day Adventists, a small Christian sect, in central Texas. The Branch Davidians were suspected of possessing illegal gun parts. The raid was timed to coincide with a newspaper exposé accusing the sect’s leader of weapons law violations and abuse of underage females.

Approximately 100 armed agents drove up in cattle trailers, shots rang out near the front door, and a gun battle ensued. The seige at Waco had begun. The Branch Davidians were surrounded by federal agents for 51 days and most died in a raging fire that started soon after military tank-like vehicles injected CS gas into the compound buildings. To this day, no federal agent has been found guilty of any wrongdoing.

In How to Slant a Poll 101, John Hawkins at Right Wing News explains how CBS gets its headline results:

The first thing you have to understand is that there are 3 different groups of voters the media may poll: adults, registered voters, and likely voters. Out of these 3 categories, “likely voters” is the group that almost always turns out to be closest to the actual election results while “adults” is the group that slants most heavily towards Democrats. Although it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly how much polling “adults” instead of “likely voters” slants the poll results to the left (when compared to election results), it’s probably somewhere between 5-10 points. So, let’s split the difference and say 7.5 points.

So, it seems likely that Bush’s approval would probably be somewhere around 41.5% if this had been a poll of likely voters. Still, pretty bad.

But, there’s another factor we haven’t adjusted for: the percentage of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents who participated in the poll. In the 2004 election, the breakdown by party was as follows:

Democrats: 37%
Republicans: 37%
Independents: 26%

While those numbers can change and do change over time and there’s no set rule that says for a poll to be fair those percentages should match up exactly with the breakdown from the last election, the numbers should be pretty close.

So, let’s look at the weighted party breakdown from the CBS poll: 1018

Democrats: 37.4% (381)
Republicans: 28.4% (289)
Independents: 34.2% (348)

So, they undersampled the number of Republicans by more than 8.5% and over sampled Independents by more than 8%. Let’s adjust for that (in a very general way). Add in 8 more Republicans and we’ll say Bush’s favorability goes up 8 points. Take out 8 Independents and we’ll figure Bush loses 4 points of support (Independents were roughly split between Bush and Kerry in 2004) and now Bush’s approval rating, after having 4 points added onto it, is at 45.5. Of course, it’s not quite as simple as I’ve made it look here, nor is this as accurate as simply polling likely voters with a correct breakdown of party affiliation, but it’s close enough for our purposes.

Then, we consider the polls margin of error, 3 points, and Bush’s real approval rating among voters who’ll actually be going to the polls in November is probably somewhere roughly between 42.5 – 48.5. That’s not great, but it doesn’t have exactly the same sort of zing that 34% has either, does it?

Hat tip to Memeorandum.

Paul Fitgerald, a San Francisco construction manager, claims that he is the descendant of an heir believed killed in the trenches in WWI, but who actually emigrated to North America. If he is able to establish his claim Paul Fitzgerald would become 9th Duke of Leinster, and first peer of Ireland.

The Sunday Times Magazine did a feature yesterday on Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, former ambassador-at-large for the Taliban, now attending Yale. “I’m the luckiest person in the world.” Rahmatullah told the Times, “I could have ended up in Guantanamo Bay. Instead I ended up at Yale,” where (not surprisingly) one of his recent courses was:”Terrorism-Past, Present and Future.”

Yale was equally delighted. Yale’s admissions office had once had another foreigner of Rahmatullah’s caliber apply for special-student status, Richard Shaw, Yale’s dean of undergraduate admissions, told the Times. “We lost him to Harvard. I didn’t want that to happen again.” The allegedly 27 year-old (who has a history of changing his reported age) former Taliban had visited Yale once before, speaking in March of 2001 as diplomatic representative of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. His diplomatic assignment came about as the idea of Mike Hoover, American adventurer, mountain-climber, and film-maker. In 1998, Rahmatullah was assigned by the Taliban government to guide Hoover and serve as his translator. Hoover became the young Afghan’s friend and benefactor, first suggesting the role of representing the Islamic regime abroad, then personally funding travel expenses and arranging speaking appearances and interviews.

The Rahmatullah of 2001 was turbaned, more hirsute, and a lot more combative than today’s Yale student. He vigorously criticized UN sanctions on the Afghan regime, and casuistically defended the dynamiting of the ancient buddhas and the segregated place of women in Taliban-ruled Afghan society.Rahmatullah was married and living in exile in Pakistan, after the fall of the Taliban regime, when in 2004 Hoover, his perennial benefactor, proposed sending him to college in the United States. Hoover consulted with an attorney friend from Jackson Hole, Bob Schuster Y’67, who helped him arrange for Rahmatullah to be interviewed for admission as a special student, a temporary status, reflecting his 4th grade education and high school equivalency diploma, convertable after a year of satisfactory academic performance to regular baccalaureate study.

Waiting to hear from Yale, Rahmatullah spent the holidays in Jackson Hole with Hoover. He met Bob Schuster and spoke to students at several local schools. The talks reprised the form if not the content of his lectures in America in 2001. After a talk to the young teenagers at the Jackson Hole Middle School, two boys approached Rahmatullah.

“Can we ask you a question? Have you ever been in a war?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell us about it? We want to be Army Rangers.”

He thought for a second. “Do you guys play video games?”

“Yeah,” they said, looking at him as if he had rocks for brains.

“I thought so,” he said. “Let me ask you, have either of you ever killed a chicken?”

They shook their heads. They didn’t know anyone who even had chickens.

“When was the last time you had to kill anything to eat?”

They were confused.

“I killed a goat before I came here,” Rahmatullah said. “I hated doing it. Go kill a chicken, and pluck it, and eat it,” he said softly. “And then maybe you will know a little bit about war.”

John Fund waxes pretty sarcastic about all this in the Wall Street Journal.  But it is true that there is a long-standing tradition of Ivy League schools reaching out to provide educational opportunities to promising representatives of non-traditional constituencies, and the appetite of such schools for candidates with good stories or colorful backgrounds could be predicted to assure a warm welcome for any plausible Pashtun.

2001 Interview

Cruel, very cruel.

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Those old bastards will die of the clap after all the orgies, and nobody will still do any dishes or take out any garbage. link
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Hat tip to Ben Slotznik.

Ms. Althouse demonstrates why random blog-reading can be rewarding.

Ben Shapiro listened to Al Gore’s wild accusations, made in a speech in Saudi Arabia, alleging that the US had comitted atrocities against Arabs, and wondered why, in time of war, this kind of activity is not prosecuted.

At some point, opposition must be considered disloyal. At some point, the American people must say “enough.” At some point, Republicans in Congress must stop delicately tiptoeing with regard to sedition and must pass legislation to prosecute such sedition.

“Freedom of speech!” the American Civil Liberties Union will protest. Before we buy into the slogan, we must remember our history. President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus and allowed governmental officials to arrest Rep. Clement Vallandigham after Vallandigham called the Civil War “cruel” and “wicked,” shut down hundreds of opposition newspapers, and had members of the Maryland legislature placed in prison to prevent Maryland’s secession. The Union won the Civil War.

Under the Espionage Act of 1917, opponents of World War I were routinely prosecuted, and the Supreme Court routinely upheld their convictions. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes rightly wrote, “When a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.” The Allies won World War I.

During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the internment of hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans, as well as allowing the prosecution and/or deportation of those who opposed the war. The Allies won World War II…

This is not to argue that every measure taken by the government to prosecute opponents of American wars is just or right or Constitutional. Some restrictions, however, are just and right and Constitutional—and necessary. No war can be won when members of a disloyal opposition are given free reign to undermine it.

John Hinderaker at Power Line discusses a recent variation on New Hampshire’s perennial conflict between liberal immigrant flatlanders who hate the Granite State’s noble motto and die hard Yankee aborigines who absolutely love it.

I’m with the natives. I’ve always wished I could find an excuse to move to, or even just get a vacation place in, New Hampshire, so I could register my cars there, and use those plates. Years ago, I was discussing this notion with one of my hippy friends from college days, who replied: “Now, if you could just get New Hampshire DEALER plates…”

The discovery of a new fossil in China, Castorocauda lutrasimilis, demonstrates that mammals appeared early, and in larger forms, than previously believed, living at the same time as dinosaurs.

The San Francisco Chronicle story reports:

The remarkable fossil bones of a fur-covered, swimming mammal that lived in the age of the dinosaurs 164 million years ago have been discovered in China, raising a wave of excitement among scientists whose timetable for mammalian evolution has just been pushed back by 100 million years.

The animal appears to have been more than a foot long and weighed nearly 2 pounds, with a tail remarkably like a beaver and seal-like teeth clearly adapted for catching and eating fish, its discoverers say…

..The furry mammal was found in a rich fossil bed in Inner Mongolia’s Ningcheng county, about 160 miles northeast of Beijing. Its nearly complete skeleton was extracted from a rock layer along with the bones of small, two-legged meat-eating dinosaurs, primitive winged reptiles and the abundant remains of long-extinct crustaceans.

The rocks encasing the fossil skeleton bore the clear imprint of the dense hairs that had covered its body when it died in the mud and the horny scales that covered its flattened tail, the scientists said. They named their animal Castorocauda lutrasimilis and said it must have resembled a modern river otter or the “duck-billed” platypus of Australia.

William Clemens, professor emeritus at UC Berkeley and a former director of the Museum of Paleontology there, said the discovery provides “really good evidence” that the animal was both a swimmer and a fish-eater.

Are you an Archconservative, Leftwing Wacko, Antigovernment Libertine or a Commie Sympathizer?

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An editorial by William F. Buckley, Jr., who turned 80 last November, appeared yesterday in which the author declared that the “American objective in Iraq has failed” and that there should be an “acknowledgement of defeat.” It is very sad that these sorts of embarassing statements were published, and those of us who have long been associated with Mr. Buckley in the conservative movement are terribly sorry to learn of his condition in this way. Our best wishes to Mr. Buckley and his family.

interior of 1936-1939 Panhard & Levassor Dynamic

Steve Bodio takes up the discussion of the wondrous eccentricity of French design begun by Donald (at 2Blowhards) focussing on the 1930s Panhard Dynamic, a French automobile featuring a central driver’s position and curved (“Panoramique”) windows, and turns to the subject of the Darne double-barreled shotgun with its remarkable sliding breech.

Described as circulating on the Internet by Le Devoir, a French Québécoise paper.

“A believer wounded by the unbelievers. An unbeliever wounded by the believers.”

It’s by Delize, and probably appeared in Le Monde or France Soir. The same Delize did the earlier “Relax, Mohammed” cartoon in France Soir.
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Hat tip to Matthias Storme.

At the University of Illinois:

CHICAGO—The editor in chief of a student-led newspaper serving the University of Illinois has been suspended after printing cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad that, when published in Europe, enraged Muslims and led to violent protests in the Middle East and Asia.

Editor in chief Acton Gorton and his opinion editor, Chuck Prochaska, were relieved of their duties at The Daily Illini on Tuesday while a task force investigates the internal decision-making and communication that led to the publishing of the cartoons, according to a statement by the newspaper’s publisher and general manager, Mary Cory.

Inside Hoover House, a scurrilous joking note about the Prophet Muhammad was taped to a dorm room door. A Muslim resident was outraged. It was the kind of incident that could have sparked serious trouble.

But a deputy dean at the University of Chicago says the culprit defused the situation by writing a note of apology.

“While his desire to make a statement was not intended to be directed at any one individual, that he had demonstrated insensitivity,” said Deputy Dean Cheryl Gutman.

The head of the University of Chicago’s Muslim Student Association says it was apparently an act of stupidity, not blind hatred.

“I think an apology is very important, just to say that he didn’t mean what he was doing, and like I said, it was an act of ignorance,” said Mohammed Hasan…

..Since the apology was made, and the Muslim student accepted it, the university chose not to punish or evict the other young man. The University of Chicago considers the incident closed.

Details remain unclear as to whether disciplinary action will be taken against a Hoover House resident who posted a homemade sketch of the Muslim prophet Muhammad on the door of his suite two weeks ago.

Accompanied by the caption “Mo’ Mohammed, Mo’ Problems,” the drawing prompted strong reactions from Muslim students on campus and, more recently, attracted the attention of free speech advocates.

Katie Callow-Wright, director of undergraduate student housing, said that although details on the status of the case could not be discussed, the process of addressing such complaints involves a series of discussions and careful review.

“When a resident reports an incident or concern to their resident staff or the Housing Office, the resident staff gather information by talking with students and, if necessary, other staff to understand all of the facts of the situation,” she said. “This is an informal process, and can sometimes entail several individual meetings or conversations.”

Callow-Wright added that the appropriate Resident Heads (RHs) would hold individual meetings with the student who allegedly violated community standards.

“Depending upon the situation, a meeting with a student or students might then take place in the Office of Undergraduate Student Housing,” she said.

Today’s Wall Street Journal features a story on Jonathan Amith, an American anthropologist who is recording, and attempting to preserve, Nahuatl, the language of the pre-Colombian Aztec Empire.

Word by word, Mr. Amith is creating an extensive archive of Nahuatl, the language spoken by the Aztecs at the time of the 16th century Spanish conquest and now the first language of 1.5 million Mexican Indians. He records fables and personal histories, collects plants and insects, and keeps up a nonstop patter with locals, searching for information to add to a Web site he is building that is part dictionary, part encyclopedia and part storybook.

His goal is both daring and quixotic: to preserve Nahuatl so that native speakers don’t discard their language as they turn to Spanish, which they need to compete in contemporary Mexico…

..Nahuatl strings together prefixes, word roots and suffixes, sometimes into very long words. One 18-syllable Nahuatl word used in towns near Cuernavaca is translated “you honorable people might have come along banging your noses so as to make them bleed, but in fact you didn’t,” according to SIL International, a religiously oriented linguistics group that is translating the Old Testament into Nahuatl. Others are simpler: the Nahuatl words chicolatl and tomatl gave English “chocolate” and “tomato.”

Mr. Amith recruited computational linguists to devise software to separate Nahuatl words into their component parts, which is vital for looking them up on his Web site.

How to Use the Nahuatl Dictionary

The web-site is password protected. The Journal supplies: USERNAME: oapan—PASSWORD: nahuatl

The BBC reports:

300 volunteers to donate DNA to trace the ancestors of modern-day East Anglians.

The team at the University of East Anglia wants volunteers who were born in the same place as their parents and four grandparents.

As part of the People of the British Isles project they want to trace the influence of invaders from the Celts and Romans to the Angles and Saxons.

Volunteers from Norfolk or Suffolk will be asked to give a small blood sample.

The DNA will be extracted from the sample and used by geneticists to build the Norfolk and Suffolk part of the map.

The only criteria are that volunteers must be over 18 and born in the same part of East Anglia as their parents and all four of their grandparents.

Researchers at the university’s School of Medicine hope a genetic map of the UK will improve understanding the causes and prevalence of inherited diseases such as cancer and heart disease.

Amusingly violent ad for Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks.

John Derbyshire discusses how press coverage of the Cheney hunting accident demonstrates the devastating impact of  suburbanization and economic change.

One of the more thoughtful takes on the Dick Cheney “Quailgate” incident was offered by The Economist. They looked at hunting from the class angle:

The proportion of the population that goes hunting has been shrinking for the past 20 years. The number of hunters fell by 7% in the decade ending in 2001; the number of small-game hunters fell by 29% .... The biggest decline in hunters is taking place among the working class — among the “Deer Hunter” crowd in the small towns of the north-east, the rednecks of the South, and the cowboys of the West.

Well, we all know what the cowboys of the West are up to nowadays, thanks to Brokeback Mountain and Willie Nelson. To judge from some recent public grumbling by Mike Helton, the president of NASCAR… well, let the man say it himself: “We believe strongly that the old Southeastern redneck heritage that we had is no longer in existence.” Northeastern deer hunters can still be found, but as The Economist’s numbers show, they are slowly fading away.

As an English small-town boy, I feel no surprise at hearing that hunting has a class aspect to it. I am old enough to recall seeing adult males from my street, railroad and brewery workers mostly, walking along in the direction of the local rookery with shotguns under their arms, with the intent to get some free game-pie fillings for their families. Meanwhile the local gentry would be gathering outside a nearby village pub, mounted and liveried, to enjoy a stirrup cup before setting out across the fields after some unlucky Reynard.

It all seems long ago and far away now. Those shotgun-bearing neighbors would not make it out of their front gates today before being clubbed to the ground by Tony Blair’s Compassion Police. The scarlet-clad upholders of England’s ancient fox-hunting tradition can similarly expect to be dragged from their mounts and kicked senseless by enforcers of Tony’s caring, classless society. (Supposing said enforcers can spare the time from more urgent crime-fighting tasks — handcuffing and booking perpetrators of anti-Muslim “hate speech,” for example.)

Here in the USA, the decline of hunting, or rather the transformation of hunting from a thing that working-class guys do in their spare time to one that fat old millionaires do to network and assert their status, has not been imposed from above by parliamentary virtuecrats, as in England, but has seeped up from beneath, driven by changes in habits, attitudes, and opinions about what constitutes a good life. It is in fact just one aspect of a much larger phenomenon, one that has yet to be properly documented: the decline of the American working class…

..I remember being a ten-year-old myself, spending hours watching my next-door neighbor, a butcher by trade but an amateur cabinet-maker by inclination, manipulating his saws, planes, chisels, and spokeshaves. My kids won’t even know what a spokeshave is, and won’t care. My neighbor was a keen gardener, too, and also a war veteran. There was nothing much unusual in 1955 about an ordinary working man of little education knowing the arts of soldiering, gardening, butchering, and cabinet-making. I suppose this man’s grandchildren occupy themselves with watching TV, day trading on their computers, and working out their income taxes. I suppose my kids will do likewise. Perhaps they will be happy, but it looks to me like lotus eating — a flight from humanity, from the basics of human existence.

An economist would of course pooh-pooh my doubts. Look (he would say), here’s how it goes. Once upon a time we were farmers. We ploughed fields, made wagons, shod horses, tended livestock, and had five or six kids per family. Then we were factory workers, putting things together, making and using machines, figuring out electrical circuits, having two or three kids. Now the world runs on information, so we’re all “symbol manipulators”, trading commodity futures, parsing laws, persuading each other to buy things made abroad, and having zero to one kids per family. That’s how it is. The world changes. Get over it.

Probably the economists have a point. Probably there are ineluctable forces at work here. Perhaps, as proponents of the “singularity” hypothesis, argue, human nature is about to be transformed by us human beings ourselves on a scale vastly greater than anything that stumbling, bumbling old Ma Nature has been able to accomplish this past 50,000 years, so that worries about us losing touch with our humanity will soon come to seem quaint, or perhaps just incomprehensible. Probably all that one can say about these developments is that one likes them, or not. All right. Put me down as a “not.”

Clarice Feldman is superb as always, and delivers a thoroughly devastating critique of Fitzgerald’s case. A must read.

A comparison illustrates the fatal flaw. Fitzgerald could not convict Scooter Libby for lying about what he had for lunch a year ago, if the investigation in which he made that statement had no relationship to his lunch that day. For exactly the same reason, he cannot win a conviction of Libby for lying to prosecutors while they are in effect on a fishing expedition, rather than pursuing evidence of an actual crime…

The details are a bit complex, so the antique media have not lavished much attention on the flawed nature of the prosecution. For most of them, Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff is far from a sympathetic figure, and they relish his indictment as symbolic of The Larger Truth — the imagined corruption of the Bush administration…

..I think it apparent that it is Fitzgerald who tried to throw sand in our eyes.

I doubt that he will be able to pull off this trick a second time in Court. Simply, Fitzgerald could not find a violation of the only relevant law because the necessary predicates for its application did not exist. And, even assuming for the sake of argument that the factual assertions he made in the indictment of Libby are true, they could not have impeded his inquiry, for it was always about conduct manifestly not covered by any federal criminal statute.

How can someone impede the due process of justice when the inquiry itself is a make-believe one? That is the key question in the Libby case. For it is clear that there was only one statute available to deal with the Plame situation; the facts of the case never fit it; and it was an error to proceed with a full bore investigation and grand jury when the prosecution knew or—with prudent inquiry- should have known that.

Meanwhile Byron York at National Review Online reports that Libby’s lawyers have delivered a potentially fatal brief challenging the constitutionality of Fitzgerald’s appointment.

Fitzgerald’s authority comes from a December 30, 2003 letter from Deputy Attorney General James Comey in which Comey—after the recusal of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft—“delegated to Mr. Fitzgerald all the authority of the Attorney General with respect to the Department’s investigation into the alleged unauthorized disclosure of a Central Intelligence Agency employee’s identity.” In that letter, Comey told Fitzgerald, “I direct you to exercise that authority as Special Counsel independent of the supervision or control of any officer of the Department.”

Libby’s motion to dismiss argues that that is a unique, and constitutionally unsupportable, grant of power:

Acting without any direction or supervision, Mr. Fitzgerald alone decides where the interests of the United States lie in an investigation that involves national security, the First Amendment, and important political questions. He alone decides which individuals to subject to investigation, what evidence will be obtained or not obtained, and whether or not continued investigation and prosecution are warranted. He is subject to no oversight and has no obligation to comply with Department of Justice policies and regulations that constrain the exercise of law enforcement powers in all other federal cases. Furthermore, he has unilateral authority to expand his jurisdiction and the power to say when, if ever, his office should be terminated. It was limitations on those powers that led the Supreme Court to uphold the independent counsel provisions of the Ethics in Government Act. It is the absence of such controls that violates the Appointments Clause in this case.

The Telegraph reports:

Iran’s hardline spiritual leaders have issued an unprecedented new fatwa, or holy order, sanctioning the use of atomic weapons against its enemies.

In yet another sign of Teheran’s stiffening resolve on the nuclear issue, influential Muslim clerics have for the first time questioned the theocracy’s traditional stance that Sharia law forbade the use of nuclear weapons.

One senior mullah has now said it is “only natural” to have nuclear bombs as a “countermeasure” against other nuclear powers, thought to be a reference to America and Israel.

The pronouncement is particularly worrying because it has come from Mohsen Gharavian, a disciple of the ultra-conservative Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi, who is widely regarded as the cleric closest to Iran’s new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Nicknamed “Professor Crocodile” because of his harsh conservatism, Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi’s group opposes virtually any kind of rapprochement with the West and is believed to have influenced President Ahmadinejad’s refusal to negotiate over Iran’s nuclear programme.

The comments, which are the first public statement by the Yazdi clerical cabal on the nuclear issue, will be seen as an attempt by the country’s religious hardliners to begin preparing a theological justification for the ownership – and if necessary the use – of atomic bombs…

(A) bus strike, which has led to the jailing of more than 1,000 drivers, was originally sparked by an industrial dispute over unpaid wages benefits. But the robustness of the state response has indicated the nervousness of the Ahmadinejad regime over any internal dissent.

Reports from Iran say that Massoud Osanlou, the leader of the bus drivers’ union, was arrested at his home by members of the Basij, the pro-regime militia, and had part of his tongue cut out as a warning to be quiet.

If Teddy Roosevelt was in the White House, he’d quote that fatwa after he used precisely those nonconventional weapons to eliminate the Iranian nuclear weapons development program.

John Dvorak is predicting it will. The Joy of Tech mocks, but I think the argument makes an awful lot of sense.

Apple has always said it was a hardware company, not a software company. Now with the cash cow iPod line, it can afford to drop expensive OS development and just make jazzy, high-margin Windows computers to finally get beyond that five-percent market share and compete directly with Dell, HP and the stodgy Chinese makers.

The Humboldt Current is back off the cost of Northern California again this winter, and with it vast numbers of Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas). The San Francisco Chronicle’s Tom Stienstra tries to scare us.

The most horrifying vision for a scuba diver is not the silent charge of a 20-foot great white shark.

No, it gets worse than that.

The ultimate nightmare of the deep is to encounter a pack of Humboldt squid and then face being devoured in a series of softball-chunk sized bites as they compete for each scrap.

These giant squid reach six feet and 180 pounds, armed with sucker discs with 25,000 to 60,000 teeth, as detailed in a Chronicle story a year ago (archived at sfgate.com). They have 10 tentacles, including two long tentacles they use to pull their prey in to their razor-sharp beaks. They school in roaming hordes and then gang up to swarm in feeding frenzies. When set off, they will even eat each other and anything else in their path.

They have returned for a second straight year off the Bay Area coast this winter, roaming the marine seamounts, often 400 to 2,000 feet deep.

A report has been confirmed that that a group called Seawolves Unlimited has not only led dives amid the Humboldt squid, but has filmed the encounters and attacks.

“In order to safely dive with the Humboldt squid, they use diver protection platforms and wear armored wet suits,” said Craig Buttner, who previewed the film.

At one point, you can see squid try to eat a scuba diver, but are repelled when they clasp onto the armor, Buttner said.

The 45-minute video now in post-production will be shown for the first time at a free seminar called “Dancing With The Demons.” The event is scheduled March 10 at 7:30 p.m. in Millbrae, 10 minutes south of the San Francisco Airport, at the New Vision United Methodist Church at 450 Chadbourne.

Buttner says it’s a clear, high resolution copy shot in the crystal waters in the Sea of Cortez. I’ll be getting a copy as soon as available to provide a synopsis.

The show is sponsored by the Northern California Underwater Photographic Society. video excerpt

Scott Cassel article Dancing with Demons.

Those yearning for close encounters of the cephalopoidal kind can book a trip here.

Time, Inc. yesterday launched a long-awaited humor web-site aimed at young men. The web site is called Office Pirates. (What is this Gen Y thing about pirates anyway?)

One video featuring an older boss who can’t cope with email was kind of fun. Leland Wire

Born February 22, 1732 – Died December 14, 1799

“Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair; the rest is in the hands of God.”

Boston Magazine attributes Summers’ demise to bad manners.

When visitors came to his office, Summers propped his feet up on a table, sometimes with his shoes off. He often appeared in public with a toothpick dangling from his mouth. He repeatedly mangled the names of people he was greeting or introducing. If someone said something he deemed uninteresting or foolish, he would conspicuously roll his eyes. Other times Summers would stare into space when being spoken to, as if no one else were in the room. “Larry’s always looking away,” says one junior professor. “At first you think he’s scanning the room for someone more important, but no, he’s just looking away.” And then there was the recurring problem of his eating and talking at the same time, during which Summers sometimes sprayed saliva on his audience….

The Harvard Crimson… repeatedly noted how Summers’s lack of social graces impeded his interaction with students and faculty. The new president’s manners, or lack thereof, were so widely discussed that student reporters were really just transcribing an omnipresent campus conversation.

Summers also had a bizarre habit of falling asleep in public. Eyewitnesses caught him dozing at a talk by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, a lecture by United Nations head Kofi Annan, a speech by Mikhail Gorbachev in Sanders Theatre, a service at Harvard Hillel, and a festival celebrating cultural diversity.

When he was more engaged by speakers, Summers often acted derisively toward them. At one fall 2001 meeting with the law-school faculty, a female professor asked a question that Summers didn’t think much of. “That’s a stupid question,” he responded. Later that autumn, he brusquely terminated an interview with a female journalist from the Financial Times after a disagreement over whether his remarks were on or off the record. Just as they had at Treasury, his aides insisted that Summers’s style was typical of the intellectual free-for-all that characterized economics seminars and that people shouldn’t take it personally. Inevitably, they did.

So great was the bewilderment over Summers’s lack of social skills that some in the Harvard community wondered if there might be a clinical reason for his behavior: a neurobiological disorder called Asperger’s syndrome.

According to people familiar with the situation, Mr. Summers also alienated Jack R. Meyer, who until last year was chief executive of Harvard Management Corp. The group oversees Harvard’s endowment and posted strong gains under Mr. Meyer’s tenure. He and about 29 others in the fixed-income group left the affiliate last year. Although it wasn’t the catalyst for his departure, Mr. Meyer was disappointed Mr. Summers didn’t stand up to alumni who criticized some employees’ pay, these people say. The controversy reached a head in 2003, when the top two HMC investment managers earned $35.1 million and $34.1 million, respectively.

Meyer’s mananagement team increased the portion of Harvard’s endowment they administered by an average of 16.1% per year over a decade, growing it by billions (from $4.8 to $22.6 billion over the period from 1990 to 2004), so Summers’ failure in this department was no simple symbolic culture wars’ defeat. Harvard stands to lose an incalculable amount of asset growth as the result of Summers’ cowed posture in response to personal damage sustained in previous quarrels with the left.

Christopher Hitchens demands (in a must-read editorial) that we stand up for Denmark.

The incredible thing about the ongoing Kristallnacht against Denmark (and in some places, against the embassies and citizens of any Scandinavian or even European Union nation) is that it has resulted in, not opprobrium for the religion that perpetrates and excuses it, but increased respectability! A small democratic country with an open society, a system of confessional pluralism, and a free press has been subjected to a fantastic, incredible, organized campaign of lies and hatred and violence, extending to one of the gravest imaginable breaches of international law and civility: the violation of diplomatic immunity. And nobody in authority can be found to state the obvious and the necessary—that we stand with the Danes against this defamation and blackmail and sabotage. Instead, all compassion and concern is apparently to be expended upon those who lit the powder trail, and who yell and scream for joy as the embassies of democracies are put to the torch in the capital cities of miserable, fly-blown dictatorships. Let’s be sure we haven’t hurt the vandals’ feelings.

Larry Summers is resigning (under faculty fire) as president of Harvard. He had been brought in by the Corporation, in the Spring of 2001, as a representative of Clintonian Democratic Party centrism, with the goal of wresting that university’s management and destiny out of the hands of representatives of the aberrant culture of leftwing radicalism which has flourished in post-1960s academic institutions the way kudzu flourishes beside Southern highways. Summers was given a vote of no confidence by the faculty of Arts and Sciences last March as punishment for a mild remark speculating on the possibility of intrinsic gender differences playing some partial role in the smaller numbers of females working as professionally as mathematicians, scientists, and engineers.

In the 18th century, tyrannical presidents of the great American colleges first ruthlessly purged faculties and student bodies of New Light deviationists from Congregationalist Orthodoxy, then later when the Great Awakening prospered, also purged the Old Light survivors of earlier efforts at uniformity.

Summers’ defeat deserves to be viewed as a modern repetition of the ancient struggles at Harvard and Yale over the fine points of theology. Summers represented the worldly and optimistic party of affirmative Democratic governance, adaptable to post-Reagan changes in the national agenda, reconciled to the necessities of the free market, and committed to technocratic pragmatism. He is being driven out by a consensus loyal to a culture of conformity in thrall to leftist extremism, committed to the politics of ressentiment, the apocalyptic condemnation of Euro-American history, and to the rejection of market capitalism.

When Summers dared to criticize Afro-American studies professor Cornell West and suggested that popular notions of feminine victimhood might possibly be exaggerated, the result was much as if one of his 17th century predecessors had ventured upon criticism of Predestination, and expressed doubts concerning some of the articles of the Augsburg Confession. Summers’ defeat represents indubitably the triumph of a reactionary orthodoxy at Harvard, and an explicit rejection of the idea of a reconciliation between the academic community and the diurnal political reality of America in the 21st Century.

My wife’s Thinkpad has expired, so I will have to let her borrow my computer for much of today.

We live in a country whose citizens contentedly surrender nail clippers and Swiss Army knives to board an airplane, and accept as standard operating procedure body searches of white-haired grannies in the name of flight security. Could anyone have predicted that the sale of Britain’s Peninsular & Orient Steam Navigation Company to Dubai Ports World giving authority over terminals in ports in New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia to an Islamic-controlled company might produce alarm?

The democrats astutely recognize an opportunity to score off the Bush Administration again, and even ultra-liberals like Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer are leaping aboard a rapidly accelerating juggernaut of opposition to the commercial surrender of US ports to the paynim.

But suppose the administration had played it the other way. Michael Chertoff, head of Homeland Security, holds a press conference denouncing the sale, and calls for Congressional action to overturn the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) rubberstamp approval of the British sale. The next day’s editorials in the Times and Washington Post denounce the anti-Islamic bigotry of the Bush Administration, noting that Dubai is, in fact, a US ally in the War on Terror, that the port terminals were previously foreign-owned, and that the only other bidder was a Singapore company. Democrat leaders in Congress attack the administration in press conferences held at mosques.

By acquiescing compliantly to the deal, Rove has put Crusading fire into the democrat opposition’s belly, and persuaded prominent leaders of the Congressional left to march in Michelle Malkin’s parade.

Any day now, Karl is going to get Bush to announce his intention to outlaw coercive interrogations of Islamic terrorists, and we are going to see Hillary Clinton acting like Jack Bauer, promising personally to make every single one of the rascals talk.

Jim Petersen in the Wall Street Journal explains how the Endangered Species Act made it possible for disappearing owls to function as surrogates for non-endangered trees.

Last month the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service published a call for proposals to develop a recovery plan for the northern spotted owl. It’s about time: The owl was added to the nation’s burgeoning list of threatened and endangered species nearly 16 years ago. That it took so long helps explain why only 10 of the 1,264 species listed under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA) have ever recovered.

If my gut reading is correct, the owl won’t be No. 11. It is already doomed across much of its range, and the reason is well known among field biologists who have been observing the bird for some 20 years. More aggressive barred owls are pushing them out of their 21-million-acre home range, or killing them, or both. In any case, spotted owls are fighting a losing battle, a fact that has me wondering if the Fish and Wildlife Service isn’t whistling past the graveyard.

Barred owls, not to be confused with common barn owls, migrated from their native East Coast environs a century or more ago. No one knows why, and until they started killing already-threatened spotted owls, no one cared. Now they do. Just how long it will take the barreds to finish off their brethren isn’t known, but the situation has become so precarious that a federal biologist recently opined that shooting barred owls might be the only way to save spotted owls.

How and why the government failed so miserably in its costly attempt to protect spotted owls is a sordid tale that illustrates what happens when science is politicized. Begin with the fact that protecting owls was never the objective: Saving old-growth forests from chainsaws was. The owl was simply a surrogate—a stand-in for forests that do not themselves qualify for ESA protection. But if a link could be established between harvesting in old-growth forests and declining spotted owl numbers, the bird might well qualify for listing—a line of thinking that in 1988 led Andy Stahl, then a resource analyst with the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, to famously declare, “Thank goodness the spotted owl evolved in the Northwest, for if it hadn’t, we’d have to genetically engineer it. It’s the perfect species for use as a surrogate.”

MeaninglessHotAir at YARGB reflects on the combined absence of experience and failure of imagination common in today’s America, and most prevalent here in California:

With each generation our world becomes a little safer, a little more controlled, a little more sterile, and a little blander. As Morgan has ably stated, we’re in a long-term boom right now, which means a whole generation has grown up without the merest whiff of economic adversity. This makes it harder and harder for Westerners to believe that there is such a thing as adversity. It’s just a myth, like the Easter Bunny. Since there is absolutely nothing to worry about—there is no Big Bad Wolf—why not dabble in exotic religions like Islam, anyway? How bad can it be? We are increasingly the victims of our own success: the richer we become, the softer and bluer we are.

Pretty much everyone today passes along by email some daily item of of news or amusement (a joke, disaster story, or just an anecdote offering a moment’s entertainment). People also commonly exchange stories of just how rudely people will sometimes behave in business these days in situations when no further profit is to be expected. The combination recently ran amok bringing 15 minutes of unwelcome fame to a naughty little Boston attorney.

Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly

Feb. 19) – Two weeks ago, newly minted young Boston attorney Dianna Abdala e-mailed a prospective employer, William Korman.

“The pay you are offering would neither fulfill me nor support the lifestyle I am living,” she wrote, turning down his job offer.

Korman was not happy.

“You had two interviews, were offered and accepted the job (indeed, you had a definite start date).”

He’d already ordered her stationery and business cards, and set up her office computer and was amazed she conveyed her second thoughts by e-mail.

“It smacks of immaturity and is quite unprofessional,” he wrote.

Abdala’s response? “A real lawyer would have put the contract into writing and not exercised any such reliance until he did so,” she wrote.

“This is a very small legal community,” Korman responded. “Do you really want to start pissing off more experienced lawyers at this early stage of your career?”

Abdala finally answered, “Bla bla bla.”

An ordinary office spat? Nope. Korman forwarded the exchange to a friend … and it spread throughout the Boston legal community—and then to the Boston Globe, to the International Herald Tribune, to ABC News’ “Nightline.”

It was the “bla bla bla” heard round the world—making Abdala the most famous, perhaps notorious, 24-year-old lawyer in America.

Max Boot concludes that it’s not just opportunistic leaders fanning the flames of Islamic hatred over the Danish cartoons:

Why are so many Muslims so enraged by a handful of cartoons published in an obscure Danish newspaper?

It’s not enough to point out how the governments of Egypt, Syria and Iran are stoking the protests in a cynical ploy to deflect Western pressure for democratic reform and to curry favor with Islamic radicals. Their strategy wouldn’t be so successful if it didn’t resonate with deeply ingrained attitudes among the Muslim multitudes.

I got an earful of those views last week in Kuala Lumpur while attending a conference sponsored by New York University and the Malaysian Institute of Diplomacy and Foreign Relations. The ostensible subject was: “Who Speaks for Islam? Who Speaks for the West?”

We never did answer those questions, but the infidel attendees did get a redhot blast of indignation from the Muslim participants, who hailed not only from East Asia but also from Europe, North America, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.

Even though all of the Muslim delegates were intellectuals, activists, politicians and other movers and shakers, they resonated with the rage of the dispossessed. With considerable justification, they fulminated against the backwardness of the Islamic world compared to the West. With considerably less justification, they blamed their frustrations on the West.

If only I had a ringgit [the basic unit of money in Malaysia] for every time some delegate complained that the plight of the Palestinians showed the world’s anti-Muslim bias. One attendee even had the gall to claim that Israel is allowed to violate U.N. resolutions while no Muslim state has that luxury—at the very moment Iran is thumbing its nose at the United Nations!

This was coupled with ritualistic denunciations of other anti-Muslim offenses—from the real (Russian repression in Chechnya) to the farcical (a Pakistani academic blamed the CIA for creating Islamic fundamentalism in his country).

Naturally the United States got scant credit (except from one Bosnian) for repeatedly waging war to free Muslims from oppression. Instead of being thanked for saving Muslims from genocide in places like Kosovo, the United States was denounced for committing genocide against them.

Other complaints abounded—the global financial system is biased against Muslim countries like Indonesia (which was hurt by the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis); the propagation of knowledge is dominated by American universities like Harvard and Yale; the U.N. Security Council has no permanent Islamic member ; and on and on.

Of course, blaming the United States for the world’s ills is not an exclusively Islamic phenomenon, as one non-Muslim attendee from Austria proved by complaining that Hollywood had destroyed the European film industry.

But such whininess is particularly pronounced among the large number of Muslims who have never come to grips with the subservient position they have occupied in world affairs since Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt.

In recent years, some Muslims, notably the authors of the 2002 U.N. Arab Human Development Report, have been acknowledging internal problems—a lack of freedom, honest government, gender equality, scientific research and education—that have turned their societies into global also-rans.

But in Kuala Lumpur there wasn’t much introspection in evidence. Most attendees—and I suspect their views are broadly representative of the Muslim world as a whole—preferred to rant against supposed Western oppression.

The cartoon brouhaha not only confirms this victimization legend, it assuages the shame many Muslims feel over the atrocities committed in their name by Osama bin Laden & Co. To hear many Muslim attendees talk, you would think there is no difference between a cartoonist who injured no one physically and terrorists who kill thousands of innocent people.

The trope of the conference seemed to be: “We have our extremists. . . and you have yours.” Former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami took this argument to its logical conclusion by equating American neoconservatives with al-Qaida. As if Paul Wolfowitz were plotting to crash hijacked aircraft into Tehran office buildings.

The most depressing aspect of the whole cartoon affair is not the intolerance for press freedom exhibited throughout Muslim lands. It is the willingness of so many Muslims to scapegoat the West for their own failures.

Muslim nations will never make any progress unless they stop focusing on the offenses, real or imagined, visited upon them by the outside world and start looking within for what ails them.

The famous London gunmaking firm of Jeffrey introduced a proprietary series of cartridges around the turn of the last century designed to be used in massive double-rifles on the largest and most-dangerous African big game. The climax of the series, the .600 Nitro Express, introduced in 1903, remained the largest rifle catridge ever commercially loaded until 1988. The Nitro Express designation was applied to recently developed (circa 1900) higher velocity (Express) cartridges, loaded with Nitro, i.e., nitrocellulose, i.e., smokeless powder.

The .600 Nitro Express was three inches long, and 6/10 of an inch in diameter. The factory loading was 120 grains of cordite, which propelled a 900 grain Full Metal Jacketed bullet at a muzzle velocity of 2050 feet per second. More recent loads are slightly reduced (cartridge companies fear those old rifles are getting on in years) to the equivalent of 100 or 110 grains of cordite, producing only 1950 or 1850 fps.

This gigantic round was designed for only one purpose: to stop a charging elephant at close range with a single shot. Needless to say, it was possible to accomplish the same desirable feat with smaller cartridges, featuring less recoil, and only a very small number of rifles were built in the original period chambered for the mighty .600 Nitro Express.

There was a very substantial revival of interest in collecting, and shooting, classic British double rifles over the last few decades, and some of the surviving companies like Holland & Holland began producing them again to custom order. Finally, in 1988, purely for the fun of surpassing the historical record, a .700 Nitro Express cartridge was created.

More recently, it seems some custom gunsmith was commissioned to produce a barrel for the interchangeable-barreled Thompson Contender chambered for the dreaded .600 Nitro Express cartridge. Picture installing a Ferrari engine in a go cart.

Steve Bodio reports that someone was actually mad enough to fire it, and supplies the video. Gosh, I hope that wasn’t an expensive scope.

asks the Liberator Online in the February issue.

Before you answer, consider:

In January, an Atlanta man was arrested and handcuffed for selling a subway token at face value. Donald Pirone observed another passenger having difficulty with a token vending machine, so he gave him a $1.75 token. After the man insisted on paying him, Pirone was cited by a transit officer for a misdemeanor, since state law prohibits selling tokens—even at face value. A MARTA spokesperson denied that handcuffing a customer for helping another customer was excessive. “There are customer service phones for people who are having trouble getting tokens out of the machine,” she said.

Meanwhile, in late 2005, an Ohio man spent three days in jail because he didn’t put identification tags on his family’s pet turtles and snakes. Terry Wilkins broke a state law requiring owners of native reptiles to tag them with a PIT (personal-integrated transponder). The tags, which are the size of a grain of rice and can be inserted under the animal’s skin, contain a bar code readable by a scanner. Wilkins refused to tag the animals because he said PIT tags cause health problems in small reptiles.

It goes on. In Kentucky, Larry Casteel was arrested for not attending a parenting class for divorcing parents, as mandated by state law. He spent the night in jail. In New Jersey, police are giving tickets to people who leave their cars running for more than three minutes in store parking lots. Stopwatch-wielding police hit the offenders with a $200 fine for violating the state’s anti-idling law. In northwest Georgia, 49 convenience store owners were arrested for selling legal products to customers. The owners—mostly of Indian background—sold cold medicine, baking soda, table salt, matches, and lantern fuel. Police said the ingredients could be used to make methamphetamine. In Burlington, Vermont, police are ticketing people for not removing keys from the ignition and locking their cars. Police said the state law prevents car thefts. Violators are fined $79.

So—are you still sure you can get through a day without violating a law? If so, don’t worry. Legislators are making more things illegal. In New York City, a city council member wants to make it a crime to ride a bike without a registration number tag. Violators would face up to 15 days imprisonment. In Illinois, a state senator wants to make it a crime not to have a carbon monoxide detector installed in your home. In Pennsylvania, a state senator filed a bill to allow police to fine drivers $75 if they don’t clean snow off their car. In Virginia, a state legislator wants to make it illegal to show your underwear in public. Girls (or boys) with low-rider pants would get hit with a $50 fine if their thongs show.

Novelist Ayn Rand once wrote: “There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible to live without breaking laws.”

Have we reached that point? Is it impossible to live without breaking laws? Before you answer, better check to make sure that your pets have transponder tags, that you didn’t leave the keys in your car, and that your underwear is not showing.

Time Magazine’s Walter Kirin remarks on the incapacity of professional journalists to discuss a hunting accident:

But maybe you’re… annoyed by the reporting. I know I’ve been. For a westerner who likes to hunt and knows about the pastime’s risks (I almost shot a friend once while stalking mule deer), watching the Washington press corps cover a story that hinges on a chaotic Texas quail shoot is like watching Prince Charles attempt a native dance. Because they’re so good at doing so many other things, the talking heads think they’re good at this thing too, even though many of them don’t know the difference between a twenty-eight gauge shotgun and an any-caliber rifle. The chief difference, of course (and the relevant one here) is that a shotgun of this modest size barely constitutes a serious weapon when loaded with birdshot of the type that Cheney used. Its hard enough for such pellets to pierce a quail’s heart, let alone penetrate a man’s, and the fact that one did so is a testament not to Cheney’s gross negligence (that question still needs more exploring)but to his supreme unluckiness.

What’s made this awkward reporting not merely annoying but socially and politically divisive is that it insults the intelligence of some people who already feel insulted in other ways by the very same class of urban journalists. Outside of DC, LA and NYC, the only time folks get to meet a correspondent from a major television network or a writer from a leading newspaper is when a storm has just destroyed their neighborhood. And when the big shots do vist the outland, they always dress wrong, covered in either condescending denim or some haughty blend of wool and silk. Then they call the tornado that struck the place a “cyclone,” even though the place is Minnesota and Minnesotans don’t use that word.

For me and for lots of westerners I’ve spoken to, the greatest failure of the accident coverage has been its inability to convey, let alone fathom in the first place, just what goes on when people are chasing birds out in the middle of nowhere, in the brush, with dogs and other hunters on every side and adrenaline pumping through everybody’s veins. It’s a jittery, fluid situation. The coveys erupt without warning and they don’t fly straight, meaning hunters don’t only have to be prepared to raise their barrels at any instant, they need an awareness of the potential arcs through which they can safely swing them before they fire. Or hold their fire, as the case may be.

In the field, there are hundreds of cases that may be — and a wide range of penalties for misjudging one, from the social embarrassment of missing a bird (quail hunting has an aristocratic tone that fosters a lot of ribbing about poor marksmanship) to the mortal anguish of hitting a human being. The sport is dangerous, which heightens its thrill, but it’s a civilized level of danger that’s usually manageable through good equipment, experienced companions, and traditional codes of conduct. The emotions behind these codes are old and fixed: pride and shame. Like a mountain climbing expedition, a hunting trip is an excuse-free zone. Once a person picks up his gun, he is that gun. And whatever that gun causes.

At Technorati, Dave Sifry evaluates the state of the blogosphere in February 2006, comparing MSM links to blog links. Although, with a handful of exceptions, Sifry finds that blogs are still lagging the MSM establishment by a huge order of magnitude, he identifies a beginning point of influence in the quantitative link curve:

This realm of publishing, which I call “The Magic Middle” of the attention curve, highlights some of the most interesting and influential bloggers… these are blogs that are interesting, topical, and influential, and in some cases are radically changing the economics of trade publishing.At Technorati, we define this to be the bloggers who have from 20-1000 other people linking to them… there are about 155,000 people who fit in this group. And what is so interesting to me is how interesting, exciting, informative, and witty these blogs often are.

Meanwhile, Trevor Butterworth at the Financial Times is skeptical:

But as with any revolution, we must ask whether we are being sold a naked emperor. Is blogging really an information revolution? Is it about to drive the mainstream news media into oblivion? Or is it just another crock of virtual gold – a meretricious equivalent of all those noisy internet start-ups that were going to build a brave “new economy” a few years ago?...

After talking to various people in the new media world, it’s possible to estimate an income of $1,000 to $2,000 a month in ad revenue from a typical blog getting 10,000 visitors a day and playing to a national audience with a popular topic such as politics.

The problem is that few blogs do even that much traffic. According to the monitoring done by thetruthlaidbear.com, only two blogs get more than 1 million visitors a day and the numbers drop quickly after that: the 10th ranked blog for traffic gets around 120,000 visits; the 50th around 28,000; the 100th around 9,700; the 500th only 1,400 and the 1000th under 600. By contrast, the online edition of The New York Times had an average of 1.7 million visitors per weekday last November, according to the Nielsen ratings, and the physical paper a reach of 5 million people per weekday, according to Scarborough research.

That is one reason why advertisers are still sticking with the mainstream media. The other has to do with the very basic selling point of blogging. “There is a certain loss of control when it comes to advertising on blogs,” said Mark Wnek, chairman and chief creative officer of Lowe New York. “The connection the most popular citizen journalists cultivate with their devotees is through an honest, uncensored, raw freedom of expression, and that can be quite uncomfortable territory for a traditional marketer.”

The dismal traffic numbers also point to another little trade secret of the blogosphere, and one missed by Judge Posner and all the other blog-evangelists when they extol the idea that blogging allows thousands of Tom Paines to bloom. As Ana Marie Cox says: “When people talk about the liberation of the armchair pajamas media, they tend to turn a blind eye to the fact that the voices with the loudest volume in the blogosphere definitely belong to people who have experience writing. They don’t have to be experienced journalists necessarily, but they write – part of their professional life is to communicate clearly in written words.”

And not every blogger can be a Tom Paine. “People may want a democratic media,” says Cox, “but they don’t want to be bored. They also want to be entertained and they want to feel like they’ve learned something. They want ideas expressed with some measure of clarity.”

Which brings us to the spectre haunting the blogosphere – tedium. If the pornography of opinion doesn’t leave you longing for an eroticism of fact, the vast wasteland of verbiage produced by the relentless nature of blogging is the single greatest impediment to its seriousness as a medium.

Ethel Fenig at the American Thinker quotes Rabbi Daniel Lapin’s analysis of the subtext of the MSM obsessive coverage of Dick Cheney’s accident. To the metrosexual journalists writing the stories:

...skiing is well, normal, while hunting is alien. Not only have most liberals never gone hunting, most don’t even know anyone who goes hunting. In fact most wouldn’t know a Browning A-Bolt long action Stalker from an office stapler. They simply cannot believe that someone who hunts actually made it to the White House. It reminds me of that New York matron talking to her friend in November 1984. Ronald Reagan had just won every state except his opponent’s home state of Minnesota and she said, “I can’t believe that man won. I don’t know a single soul who voted for him.”

Liberals regard people who own firearms and who go hunting as weird. Repeatedly telling the Cheney hunting story proves that Republicans are not fit to govern a civilized country. Liberal news media really believe that reminding Americans that they have a hunter for a vice president will bring a Democratic victory. . . .

Daniel Henninger identifies the cynical political game that’s being played in the MSM:

Have you ever noticed how on a scale of one to 10, every untoward event in the life of the Bush presidency goes straight to a 10?

The Abu Ghraib photos? A 10 forever. Dick Cheney catching a hunting buddy with some birdshot? An instant 10. The Bush National Guard story? Total 10. How can it be that each downside event in this presidency greets the public at this one, screeching level of outrage and denunciation by the out-of-power party and a perpetually outraged media?

There was a time when what’s been called news judgment would deem some stories a five or six and run them on page 14, or deeper in the newscast. Back then the Senate minority leader wouldn’t bother to look up from his desk. Not with this presidency. Every downside event—large, small, in between—plays above the fold on the front page now. And when Dick Cheney accidentally pops Harry Whittington, old Harry Reid jumps up from his Senate leader’s desk faster than a Nevada jack rabbit to announce, one more time, that this “is part of the secretive nature of this administration…

If it all seems more than a little tiresome, if you wish it would all just go away, well, maybe that’s the point—their point. Induce swing voters to seek respite from the Bush experience.

As the chart nearby indicates, the public’s allegiance to the two parties is remarkably tight. Thus, anything the Democrats can do to push up their number or push down the Republicans’ materially enhances their chances in this November’s elections and in 2008—and prevents the onset of a long majority for the GOP of the sort McKinley triggered in 1896. Yes, there will be no Bush-Cheney in 2008, but they’re useful as a wedge to redirect voter preferences.

Absent any fresh or positive message for voters, why not try winning by turning politics under the Republicans into an experience of unrelenting discomfort? The substance of any given issue falls in importance. Connecting Jack Abramoff to George Bush personally was always a stretch. So what?

The most telling evidence of a strategy of discomfiting the body politic was the January bonfire over terrorist wiretaps. Here the opposition shrieked for days about a “constitutional crisis” even as polls were indicating public support for the Bush program, including 28% who would OK tapping anyone’s phone “on a regular basis” to catch terrorists.

Parties don’t sail against the polling winds. Why this time? Because come November, the “wiretaps” will sit in many voters’ minds not as a debate over Article II but as part of what feels to them like endless “bad news.” The press’s supersizing of the Cheney shooting may look like excess. So what? No matter how voters feel on any one issue—terror, the courts, values—the Democrats, event after event, are building the feeling that the Bush-Cheney presidency and GOP Congress have somehow been 40 miles of bad road…

..collaborating with a willing media to market the opposition party as a haunted house is a cynical, wholly reductionist strategy, with nothing in it for the public good. It dumbs down our politics. As shown with Social Security reform, the system ceases to function. A major U.S. foreign-policy initiative like the Bush Doctrine has to be delegitimized with no serious opposition support at any level. This is the strategy of the phalanx, not politics. If it works, the other side will surely run the same tar-and-pitch strategy against a new Clinton presidency. It deserves to fail.

Guillermo Christenson replies with devastating results to Paul Pillar’s recent attack on the Bush Administration in Foreign Affairs:

CIA officers on the cusp of retirement often enroll in a seminar that is supposed to help them adjust to life after the agency—teaching them, for example, how to write a resumé. I’ve begun to wonder if part of that program now includes a writing seminar on how to beat up on the Bush administration. The latest such blast comes from Paul Pillar, who, over the course of his long career, was arguably a central player in the CIA’s analysis of the Middle East, in particular Iraq. But now Mr. Pillar has decided to disclose to the world, in a recent article in Foreign Affairs, that he thought all along that the war was a bad idea, and that the president and his advisers ignored his intelligence.

Why Mr. Pillar would even attempt to argue that the White House ignored the CIA’s intelligence is beyond me—as innumerable investigations have demonstrated, all of the “intelligence” within his responsibility was 100% in agreement that Iraq posed a serious danger and that it had an active program for acquiring WMD. Over the course of a decade and a half, and thousands of pages of intelligence analysis, it is hard to think of anyone in the government who was more directly involved in reaching the wrong conclusions about what was going on in Iraq than Mr. Pillar himself.

But let’s put all that aside for the moment and conjecture that Mr. Pillar actually did change his mind about all that work he’d done, and that he really did think the intelligence didn’t support the case for war. If that was truly so, no one was better positioned to make the case against war within the government than Mr. Pillar himself. He could have personally drafted a National Intelligence Estimate, or any number of other types of memoranda, for senior readers in government, recording for all in black and white what was really going on in Iraq. He could, furthermore, have shared that analysis with every single member of Congress by writing less-classified summaries of the conclusions, as is often done.

So why did Mr. Pillar fail to take these steps? Again, as the person in charge of assessing Iraq, if he really believed that Iraq posed no threat to the U.S., we’re owed an explanation of why none of the consequences of going to war—economic costs, military and civilian casualties—were important enough for him to do something about it when it mattered. According to Mr. Pillar, it was only a year into the war that such an analysis was even undertaken, and then only at the request of the administration. The other major intelligence estimate performed before the war was the 2002 NIE on WMD, “infamous,” as Mr. Pillar calls it, because it was so wrong.

The fact is, no other issue in the history of the CIA is as deserving of the title “Mother of all Intelligence Failures” as the debacle over the CIA’s analysis of Iraq. Take your pick of the many studies that have tried to understand why the intelligence was so inaccurate, but the basic conclusion underlying all of them is the same: The CIA’s analysis and collection on Iraq was flat-out wrong over the course of many years—first in missing the fact that Iraq had WMD before the Gulf War, and then, well, you know the rest.

Paul Pillar was right in the thick of the process and substance that reached those conclusions. Had he actually written a warning to the administration against going to war before the war, his conclusions could not have rested on any of the CIA’s intelligence analysis, but instead on his own political views against the administration—something which he has made no bones about in discussions with think-tank audiences long before he left the agency. This, incidentally, is prohibited behavior according to the professional practices of the CIA, the equivalent of betraying attorney-client confidentiality.

Not merely content to have played a leading role in the Iraq intelligence failure, Mr. Pillar is now following in the footsteps of others like Michael Scheuer, in undermining whatever credibility and access the CIA still may have with policymakers. By violating his confidences, Mr. Pillar is ensuring that those who succeed him—those who are, I hope, trying to fix the many problems facing the CIA —will be even less likely to see any real impact from their work because the president and his advisers will be loath to trust them.

For decades, there has been a common understanding that CIA analysts play a role roughly analogous, for policymakers, to experts whose opinions are sought in confidence, such as lawyers or accountants. Presidents and their advisers have felt comfortable in relying on analysts, in theory at least, for unbiased information and conclusions—and for keeping their mouths shut about what they learn. Presidents, secretaries of state, and others have given the CIA access into the inner sanctum of policymaking in the belief that the CIA would not use the media or leaks to influence the outcome.

For a CIA officer to discard this neutral role and to inject himself in the political realm is plain wrong. It will end up making the CIA even less relevant than it is today—if that is possible.

Earlier Post

This will put my wife out of action for hours. link

The Guardian reports that Peshawar Imam Mohammed Yousaf Qureshi announced a bounty of $25,000 and a car from the Mohabat Khan mosque for the death of an unspecified Danish cartoonist. The holy man (who probably can’t read and write) evidently did not understand that the cartoons were produced by twelve different cartoonists.

Qureshi said the mosque and his religious school would give $25,000 and a car, while a local jewelers’ association would give another $1 million. No representative of the association was available to confirm it had made the offer.

“This is a unanimous decision by all imams (prayer leaders) of Islam that whoever insults the prophet deserves to be killed and whoever will take this insulting man to his end, will get this prize,” Qureshi said.

What Europe and/or the United States (in the probable absence of European capability) ought to do in response to the sort of thing is what a 19th century British government would have done in response to insolent primitives stirring up native hostility. We should send troops into Peshawar to level the mosque offering this blood money, apprehend and hang Qureshi (with a pigskin rope), pillage and sack the Peshawar jewelers district, and then compel the government of Pakistan to pay for the costs of the expedition.

The newly elected Conservative government of Canada will be moving to abolish the Canadian registry of shotguns and rifles as quickly as possible. The new Public Security Minister Stockwell Day said the public would be shocked when the actual costs of Canada’s gun registry program are finally revealed.  Day said the public would have to wait for the Auditor genearal to release the figures, but said: “People are going to be upset and they’re going to have a right to be upset.”

When the Liberals added the registry to the federal gun control program in 1995, they said it would cost taxpayers no more than $2-million. But the most recent estimates put the figure in the hundreds of millions of dollars, bringing the total cost of the gun program to more than $1-billion.

The Conservatives have called the registry a waste of taxpayers money that targets duck hunters rather than criminals…

The gun program consumes about $90-million a year in direct costs while a single campaign promise to hire an additional 1,000 Mounties would add $50-million to the federal payroll.

Let’s hope that Australia, Britain, and the United States learn from the results of the Canadian experiment.

Theodore Dalrymple, who has moved to France, finds appalling the ever-increasing extinction of Liberty in Britain:

I have lived under a Latin American military dictatorship where daily life was freer than in Britain today. Of course, you couldn’t go out into the street and shout “Down with Señor Presidente”, at least not without dire consequences; on the other hand, you were considerably less surveyed, supervised and harried as you went about your business than you are in contemporary Britain.