His CEO/Chairman of the Board/President/Director-ship

Borders has come in for just a little criticism in the Blogosphere.

And today Mr. Gregory P. Josefowicz, CEO/Chairman of the Board/President/Director, Borders Books responded:

to Charles Johnson, Director, Pajamas Media, CEO Little Green Foosballs, Rock ‘N’ Roller in the Free World, Stealth Cyclist.”

Dear Mr. Johnson (or may I call you “Charles”?),

How witty! how populist! actually kidding around, while artfully pointing out that Charles Johnson (and those other critical bloggers) are, after all, harumph! not “CEO/Chairman of the Board/President/Director” of anything in particular. Who are they to tell me? and so on, and so forth, etc…. Did any of them make $1,205,897 in 2005 (with a tidy $7,300,188 in options)?

It clearly takes the big brains to sell those books and lattes, and set those corporate policies. But, personally, I wouldn’t be particularly surprised to find big chain book outlets getting completely replaced by on-line shopping and mail delivery over the next few years, in exactly the same way that movie theatres are having their lunch eaten more and more already by satellite and cable delivery and DVD rental. I also wouldn’t be particularly surprised, a few years down the road, to find Charles Johnson, Director of Pajamas Media making more than you ever did, Herr CEO/Chairman of the Board/President/Director, old boy.

Some might consider CCPD Josefowicz’s rejoinder alarmist:

The last time I read the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States it seemed pretty clear that the government of these states is ordained and established to “Provide for the common defense,” not Borders Books…

I run a bookstore. A book store. I run a big bookstore. I’ve got 34,000 people, real people, working for me every day in lots of places around the US and in other countries too. Those people owe Borders, every day, one good day’s work. Borders owes the people who work for it a safe day’s work. I’ve got stockholders too, but let’s leave them aside for now, because as much as you may think so, this is not about money. (And yes I caught that business about the fact that we’re trying to open stores in Arab and Muslim countries, but as you may have noticed every country these days contains an Arab and Muslim country.)..

Now you and the other bloggers who are sitting around safe in your undisclosed locations may feel that I have a duty to carry the 46 copies of Free Inquiry magazine with those drawings of the Prophet (Peace be upon his raggedy ass.) in the name of being the last, best bastion of Free Speech in America. I feel your pain, but after due consideration I must respectfully instruct you all to just pound sand.

Who do you think we are up here in Ann Arbor, the 82nd Airborne?..

Having read this self-congratulatory poltroonery, I’d normally be commenting that Mohammed-in-Hell (hit the Danish cartoon link button in my right column) will be shovelling snow the next time I buy a book in Borders, but I might get swatted the way a fellow blogger did:

Bidinotto’s not buying anymore. Door. Ass. Bang.

Yeah, Borders under Josefowicz is a class act.

Yesterday, Borders and Waldenbooks surrendered to the savages, and announced that would not carry the April/May issue of Free Inquiry, containing a mere four of the cartoons featuring Mohammed published in Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten. (You can find all twelve right over in my right-hand column, all day, every day. And try clicking on them!)

In the true spirit of capitalists always willing to sell rope to those intending to hang them, the bookstore chain’s management attempted to justify capitulating to Islamic censorship of expression thusly:

“For us, the safety and security of our customers and employees is a top priority, and we believe that carrying this issue could challenge that priority,” Borders Group Inc. spokeswoman Beth Bingham said Wednesday…

..Bingham said the decision was made before the magazine arrived at the company’s stores. Borders Group, based in Ann Arbor, Mich., operates more than 475 Borders and 650 Waldenbooks stores in the United States, though not all regularly carry the magazine

Or, “Threaten us, and we’ll do essentially anything you want.”

Wretchard also puts the situation right now into its true perspective.

..look at the picture that is usually trumpeted in the popular press twenty four hours a day, which normally consists of the same stories—‘today two American soldiers died, bring the number of deaths to’ or ‘newly discovered memos show that in the days leading up to the war’ or ‘defects in body armor have shown that’—with variations for dates. It is almost intentionally repetitive, designed to convey a narrative that has no sense; no beginning; no end…

..Zarqawi understood that he would get nowhere trying to fight the USA, especially when the new Iraqi Army came on line. He knew that if he was to win he had to play a game where the odds were more in his favor. But Jill Carroll and the MSM pretend not to understand that the Sunni insurgency has lost the campaign. They think Zarqawi is still playing the same old game. The game he gave up. So they continue to say things like: “I think it makes it very clear, it makes very clear that the Mujahedeen are the ones who will win in the end in this war, I think it makes very clear that even with thousands of troops and airplanes and tanks and guns that that doesn’t mean anything here on the ground in Iraq as it shows over time, maybe how many months over time or however (sic) months are left in the occupation that it’s pretty clear that the Mujahedeen are the ones that will have the victory left at the end of the day.”

Does anyone actually think that the Mujahedeen (Sunni insurgency) is going to be able to expel the US Armed Forces and reimpose their former dominion over the Kurds and the Shi’as? No? but people say it all the time though they don’t stop to think what it means. Jill Carroll apparently believes it….

..A realistic assessment should include what has already been gained and what is left to gain. Some people think the Belmont Club is guilty of unwonted optimism simply because it is willing to accept what Zarqawi has practically admitted: that the Sunni insurgency is militarily beaten—and that the struggle for the political outcome is now underway. And some readers may believe that I’ve gone all “gloomy” because I think the political outcome still hangs in the balance. But that is nothing more than stating a fact. Yet the essential difference is this: it’s in context. Those who have done some rock climbing know that while it is important to grope for the next handhold along the line of climb it is equally important to remember the footholds you have already won. Forget where you are standing and you are lost. Unfortunately, much of the regular media coverage is almost designed to conceal where where we are standing and where we have to go. There is no context, as Bill Roggio once put it on a television interview. For most casual listeners of the news the US is trapped in a featureless and starchy soup, with no beginning or end. The War on Terror becomes portrayed as a shapeless shroud from which it is imperative to escape at all costs.

And that’s sad because as Baron von Richthofen said, “Those who are afraid to take the next step will have wasted their entire previous journey.”

Victor Davis Hansen casually refutes everything passing for received wisdom about the Iraq war in the cultural echo-chamber of the liberal elite.

Opponents of the war in Iraq, both original critics and the mea culpa recent converts, have made eight assumptions. The first six are wrong, the last two still unsettled.

1. Saddam was never connected to al Qaeda, the perpetrators of 9/11.

2. There was no real threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

3. The United Nations and our allies were justifiably opposed on principle to the invasion.

4. A small cabal of neoconservative (and mostly Jewish) intellectuals bullied the administration into a war that served Israel’s interest more than our own.

5. Saddam could not be easily deposed, or at least he could not be successfully replaced with a democratic government.

6. The architects of this war and the subsequent occupation are mostly inept (“dangerously incompetent”) — and are exposed daily as clueless by a professional cadre of disinterested journalists.

7. In realist terms, the benefits to be gained from the war will never justify the costs incurred.

8. We cannot win.

Streaming live video of nest, located Hornby Island, British Columbia. First egg laid, March 21st; second egg laid, March 24. Eggs due to hatch: April 26 and April 30.

link.

First they came for the child pornographers and sexual predators
and I did not speak out
because I was not a child pornographer or sexual predator.

Then they came for the terrorists (you knew it was out there!)
and I did not speak out
because I was not a terrorist.

Then they came for the dictators
and I did not speak out
because I was not a dictator.

Then they came for traitors and seditionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a traitor or seditionist

Then they came for rogues in the intelligence community
and I did not speak out
because I was not a rogue in the intelligence community.

Then they came for me (Ok, so they’re not here yet but you know its just a matter of time)
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.

The Amherst Times offers:

American flag: $25

Gasoline: $2

Cigarette Lighter: $2.50

Catching yourself on fire because you are a terrorist a__ hole: PRICELESS!

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Hat tip to YARGB.

Link.

From Ratty.

Opposition presidential candidate Alexander Kazulin is being charged (Soviet-style) with “hooliganism,” organizing group actions, and violating public order. He faces a possible six year prison term.

Poland’s Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz signed in Warsaw, along with Belarussian opposition leader Alexander Milinkiewicz, a Declaration creating a foundation to be named in honor of Konstanty Kalinowski, Belarussian commander of the January Insurrection of 1863-1864 in Lithuania, which will fund at least 300 places at Polish universities for Belarussian students currently jailed and facing university expulsion, starting in July.

Lukashenka has not been seen in public since election day, giving rise to variety of rumors, attributing his absence to: a serious illness, a drunken celebratory binge, or being tied up in negotiations with his Muscovite allies over the signing over Belarus’ major economic asset (the pipeline company Beltranzgas) in return for electoral support.

We’ve noticed, and remarked with displeasure on, the fact that out here in California everyone these days seems to want to go out in public dressed like an 8 year old. Apparently, this is a national trend. It’s those Gen Y-ers, who are even whinier and more messed up than the Gen X-ers.

Adam Sternbergh in New York Magazine (he’s probably one of them) has noticed, too.

It’s more interesting as evidence of the slow erosion of the long-held idea that in some fundamental way, you cross through a portal when you become an adult, a portal inscribed with the biblical imperative “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: But when I became a man, I put away childish things.” This cohort is not interested in putting away childish things. They are a generation or two of affluent, urban adults who are now happily sailing through their thirties and forties, and even fifties, clad in beat-up sneakers and cashmere hoodies, content that they can enjoy all the good parts of being a grown-up (a real paycheck, a family, the warm touch of cashmere) with none of the bad parts (Dockers, management seminars, indentured servitude at the local Gymboree). It’s about a brave new world whose citizens are radically rethinking what it means to be a grown-up and whether being a grown-up still requires, you know, actually growing up.

And it’s been a long time coming. It showed up in the early eighties as “the Peter Pan Syndrome,” then mutated to the yuppie, which, let’s face it, has had a pretty good run. Later, it took the form that David Brooks called “bourgeois bohemians,” or bobos (as in Bobos in Paradise). Over in England, they’re now calling them yindies (that’s yuppie plus indie), and here, the term yupster (you can figure that out) has been gaining some traction of late. And as this movement evolves, something pivotal is happening. This cascade of pioneering immaturity is no longer a case of a generation’s being stuck in its own youth. This generation is now, if you happen to be under 25, more interested in being stuck in your youth.

This article being what it is, I wanted to come up with my own term to describe them. But what? Dadsters? Sceniors? Dorian Graybeards? Over the course of my investigation, I started calling them Grups. It’s not the most elegant term, but it passes the field test of real-world utility. (Here a Grup, there a Grup, everywhere a Grup-Grup.) “Grups” is a nerdy reference to an old Star Trek episode in which Kirk and crew land on a planet run entirely by kids, who call grown-ups “grups.” All the adults have been killed off by a terrible virus, which also slows the natural aging process, so the kids are trapped in a state of extended prepubescence. They will never grow up. And they are running the show.

(Yes, sure they are! -JDZ)

Oh, and there’s one more thing I learned, in answer to my opening questions: If being a Grup means being 35, and having a job, and using a messenger bag instead of a briefcase, and staying out too late too often, and owning more pairs of sneakers (eleven) than suits (one), and downloading a Hot Hot Heat song from iTunes because it was on a playlist titled “Saturday Errands,” and generally being uneasy and slightly confused about just what it means to be an adult in these modern times—in short, if it means living your life in fundamentally the same way that you did when you were, say, 22—then, let’s face it, I’m a Grup. The people in the pictures accompanying this story? Grups. In fact, take a minute and look up from the magazine—if you’re in public, you’ll see them everywhere. If you’re in front of a mirror, you might see one there too.

The struggle of real New England Yankees against the cultural influence of lily-livered flatlanders continues. Put that motto on those signs!

link

Flagg Youngblood Y’97, and non-Yalies Jason Mattera and Jedediah Jones, have cooked up a satirical Application for Admission to Yale for the likes of Rahmatullah Hashemi.
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Hat tip to Scott Drum Y’70.

I find I get more of the little buggers, if I slow down a bit, and pick my angles carefully. link

(Allen Ginsburg’s HOWL updated)

by Gerard Allen Van der Ginsberg (aka Gerard Van der Leun)

For Karl Rove Solomon

I SAW the second-best minds of my not-so-Great Generation destroyed by Bush Derangement Syndrome, pasty, paunchy, tenured, unelectable, and not looking too sharp naked,

bullshitting themselves through the African-American streets at cocktail hour looking for a Prozac refill,

aging hair-plugged hipsters burning for their ancient political connection to the White House through the machinations of moonbats,

who warred on poverty and Halliburton’s Wal-Mart and bulbous-eyed and still high from some bad acid in 1968 set up no-smoking zones on tobacco farms in the unnatural darkness of Darwinistic delusions floating a few more half-baked secular notions like “Let’s all worship zero!”,

who bared their withered breasts and, he or she, bleated their vaginas’ mawkish monologues to John Kennedy’s ghost under the capitol dome and french-kissed Mohammedan agents in the gore-drenched redrum rooms of Guantanamo,

who passed gas and on into universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating President Al Gore and Vice-President Noam Chomsky envisioning world peace among the masters of war and stayed on and stayed on and stayed on sucking off the great teat of academe in upaid student loans and over-paid professorial positions the better to molest the minds of children for decades with every third year off for bad behavior,

who were embraced by the academies and hired by the New York Times for crazy & publishing obscene odes or anything else that trashed George W. Bush without regard for truth since there were no consequences for these posturing poseurs of puke,

who cowered in their marble-countered plasma screened media rooms in underwear which was no longer Victoria’s Secret, burning their money by donating it in carloads to every half-assed Democratic PAC that promised impeachment in a nano-second without the losing proposition of actually holding an election and listening to Rush Limbaugh through the wall,

who got bombed at public wine-tastings by chugging the slops bin and referencing Sideways, returning to their summer house in the Hamptons where they ate smoked salmon, smoked $200 marijuana, wore $250 denims, and bitched about how the economy was a mess but did not really, as they claimed, send their $36,000 tax cut back to the government, and continued to suffer the secret shame of Affluenza,

who breathed fire and bile about “that crooked administration” among their friends and shut up around people with real jobs and drank turpentine to get through “A Night with Gloria Steinem”, claimed bogus ego-death, and Ab-busted their torsos night after night,

with dreams of real electoral victory without elections, with seven different mood-soothing drugs, with waking Birkenstock nightmares of Bush, Bush, Bush, alcohol Jello shots and the soon to be sanctified Holy Matrimony of cock and endless balls,

who blathered continuously about the Florida “theft” for the entire ninety-six months of the two Bush terms while the Evil One put one, two, maybe three or even four justices on the Supreme Court, causing a million fatal air-embolisms during consenting acts of mutual humm-jobs,

a lost battalion of a multi-million man and mom marching platonic conversationalists jumping to conclusions about WMD off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon, yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering “BUSH LIEEEEEEEEED!” and moronic memories and false anecdotes and eyeball kicks and yearning for the electroshocks of hospitals and the briefness of jails and the endless Bush wars …. oh my sorry little schmos…. ,

who wandered around and around at midnight at the Democratic National Committee wondering where Howard Dean hid his dildos, got the address of his love nest in San Francisco and went there with fresh batteries, and found Barbra Striesand drooling in the alley set on leaving no child behind,

who had double-standard vision while their baby seals died, turned into a pair of mucklucks by Halliburton, Halliburton, Halliburton,

who thought they were only mad when Bush appeared in the clouds above their Iowa Caucuses proclaiming “Neener, neener, neener,”

who in humorless protest turned Cindy Sheehan into their personal hand-puppet, which she enjoyed, and complained that she looked far too much like the devil spawn of Howdy Doody and Alfred E. Newman,

who scribbled celebrity porn from scuffed kneepads in the offices of Vanity Fair and collected and shaved stray cats far into their barren Pecksniffian nights until that bleak dawn when, waking from their stupor, rolled over in bed and discovered they had slept, not with their sixth spouse, but with Ward Churchill, and thought, “Well, that’s an upgrade,”

who dreamt Hilary Clinton hectoring and shrieking in the White House until in galactic luminosity that crass and shabby woman stood revealed on “Fleece the Nation”in her SupportHose of pallid played-out policies, while being frisked by a thousand agents of Al Sharpton, avenging angel of the Democratic Party, now and forever recreating the syntax and measure of poor human prose and then all of them in their faded glory standing before you speechless and pseudo-intelligent and shaking with unshamed shame, a whole once proud party now unable to get elected to high-school treasurer, reduced to bribing judges with dinner parties and invitations to Hollywood “events,”rejected yet confessing to the rhythm of thought in its naked and endless head as it proclaimed its new positive program for “Mourning in America,” “Yes, yes, yes, like our patron saint Teresa Heinz Kerry ,we too have a two-inch political penis, give us your money, give us your votes, give us THE POWER, we and we alone can promise you appeasement, defeatism, pacifism, penury, and death!”,

and rose reincarnate in the tattered rags of bluster and blabber in the goldhorn shadow of the ballot box and blew the suffering of America’s lumbering liberals’ lust for unearned power into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone bleat still pandering for the Jewish vote, as the people, no fools they, shivered the elite and blew them off again and again right past the last bus stop of democracy

with the absolute loss of political significance butchered out of their own body politic good to lose a thousand years.

The man-eater of Fairfield

New record levels of suburban ninnyism have been achieved by residents of Fairfield, Connecticut who sought official protection from the depredations of Lewis, a local pussycat. Story and video. Didn’t anybody have a squirtgun or a rolled-up newspaper?

Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy-Trioson (1767-1824), L’apothéose des héros français morts pour la patrie pendant la guerre de la Liberté. [Apotheosis of the French Heroes Who Died for their Fatherland During the War for Liberty]
1802. Oil on canvas, 192×184 cm
Musée National du Château de Malmaison, Rueil

Franklin Curran Nofziger (born 1924 at Bakersfield, California), US Army WWII, spokesman and advisor to Ronald Reagan, in Falls Church, Virginia of cancer, age 81.

Peter Robinson writes: Tonight, I’d like to believe, they’re together once again.
———————————————-
Caspar Weinberger (born 1917 in San Francisco, Harvard ‘38, Harvard Law ‘41, US Army WWII, served as budget director and Secretary of HEW for Richard Nixon, and as Secretary of Defense for Ronald Reagan at Bangor, Maine of pneumonia, age 88.

Investor’s Business Daily writes: The hundreds of millions freed from Soviet tyranny owe their liberty to Ronald Reagan — and by extension to Cap and Lyn. R.I.P.

A mildly amusing little animation. Caution! Loud. Be sure to turn your volume down, before clicking on the link.

link

Your connection speed tested for downloading and uploading. Useful to know and amusing.

link

In the cultural echo-chamber of the liberal establishment, the justification for the US invasion of Iraq has been thoroughly exploded, its results labeled and inventoried in the lumber room of disaster, and a suitable location for the headmount of George W. Bush’s presidency selected on the wall above the foreign policy pundits’ bar.

The president’s poll numbers are decidedy unattractive, and Republican candidates are approaching the 2006 elections with the forlorn air of Emperor Valens’ legions advancing to meet the Gothic cavalry at Adrianople.

One of the highlights of last Sunday’s Times was Paul Berman’s oleaginous review of Francis Fukuyama’s America at the Crossroads, a coat-reversal-cum-grovel appearing in public with a dust jacket.

It looks so much better to place one’s moment of conversion at a period in the past when the fortunes of the side one is rejoining did not appear quite so propitious as they do at present, and Fukuyama takes care to supply a story of his gasping aloud at the deluded optimism of the Neoconservative company he found himself in at a speech delivered by Charles Krauthammer in 2004.

Unfortunately for Fukuyama, Krauthammer reads the Sunday Times Book Review, and is only too eager to decline the role of strawman and debunk Fukuyama’s convenient account of feckless and provocative Neocon bragging.

It was, as the hero tells it, his Road to Damascus moment. There he is, in a hall of 1,500 people he has long considered to be his allies, hearing the speaker treat the Iraq war, nearing the end of its first year, as “a virtually unqualified success.” He gasps as the audience enthusiastically applauds. Aghast to discover himself in a sea of comrades so deluded by ideology as to have lost touch with reality, he decides he can no longer be one of them.

And thus did Francis Fukuyama become the world’s most celebrated ex-neoconservative, a well-timed metamorphosis that has brought him a piece of the fame that he once enjoyed 15 years ago as the man who declared, a mite prematurely, that history had ended.

One can only advise members of the liberal foreign policy establishment to listen very carefully at all their upcoming speeches over the next few years. You never know, the tide may turn in favor of the Bush Administration, and the United States, and you might hear Francis Fukuyama gasping again.

The complex human eye harvests light. It perceives seven to ten million colors through a synaptic flash: one tenth of a second from retina to brain. Homo sapiens gangs up 70 percent of its sense perceptors solely for vision, to anticipate danger and recognize reward, but also — more so — for beauty. We use a predator’s eyes to marvel at the work of Titian or the Grand Canyon bathed in the copper light of a summer sunset.

Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise (2002).

Michael Pollan

An only-too-common journalistic meme today features the metrosexual hero dipping a sensitive toe into the dangerous (and profoundly alien) waters of manliness. Our sissified hero goes hunting or visits a shooting range. He actually handles (and fires) a gun. He finds that he is enjoying himself, and begins to understand why people hunt or shoot.

But, then, before it is too late (and he has to join the NRA and start voting Republican), in a final moment of clarity, lovingly depicted in purplest prose, the author regains politically correct control of himself. Unlike such insensitive clods as Samson and David, Odysseus and Achilles, Xenophon and Arrian, Balzac and Shakespeare, Ivan Turgenev and Ernest Hemingway, George Washington and Theodore Roosevelt, our modern urbanist is too morally sensitive, too sophisticated and intelligent, too ironic to condone guns or hunting.

The latest account from the field, in yesterday’s (26/March/2006) New York Times Magazine, is provided by Berkeley journalism professor Michael Pollan.

Walking with a loaded rifle in an unfamiliar forest bristling with the signs of your prey is thrilling. It embarrasses me to write that, but it is true. I am not by nature much of a noticer, yet here, now, my attention to everything around me, and deafness to everything else, is complete. Nothing in my experience has prepared me for the quality of this attention. I notice how the day’s first breezes comb the needles in the pines, producing a sotto voce whistle and an undulation in the pattern of light and shadow tattooing the tree trunks and the ground. I notice the specific density of the air. But this is not a passive or aesthetic attention; it is a hungry attention, reaching out into its surroundings like fingers, or nerves. My eyes venture deep into thickets my body could never penetrate, picking their way among the tangled branches, sliding over rocks and around stumps to bring back the slenderest hint of movement. In the places too deeply shadowed to admit my eyes, my ears roam at will, returning with the report of a branch cracking at the bottom of a ravine, or the snuffling of a. . .wait: what was that? Just a bird. Everything is amplified. Even my skin is alert, so that when the shadow launched by the sudden ascent of a turkey vulture passes overhead I swear I can feel the temperature momentarily fall. I am the alert man…

Since there’s nothing he can do to make the encounter happen, the hunter’s energy goes into readying himself for it, and trying, by the sheer force of his attention, to summon the animal into his presence. Searching for his prey, the hunter instinctively becomes more like the animal, straining to make himself less visible, less audible, more exquisitely alert. Predator and prey alike move according to their own maps of this ground, their own forms of attention and their own systems of instinct, systems that evolved expressly to hasten or avert precisely this encounter.. . .

wait a minute. Did I really write that last paragraph? Without irony? That’s embarrassing. Am I actually writing about the hunter’s “instinct,” suggesting that the hunt represents some sort of primordial encounter between two kinds of animals, one of which is me? This seems a bit much. I recognize this kind of prose: hunter porn. And whenever I’ve read it in the past, in Hemingway and Ortega y Gasset and all those hard-bitten, big-bearded American wilderness writers who still pine for the Pleistocene, it never failed to roll my eyes. I never could stomach the straight-faced reveling in primitivism, the barely concealed bloodlust, the whole macho conceit that the most authentic encounter with nature is the one that comes through the sight of a gun and ends with a large mammal dead on the ground — a killing that we are given to believe constitutes a gesture of respect. So it is for Ortega y Gasset, the Spanish philosopher, who writes in his “Meditations on Hunting” that “the greatest and most moral homage we can pay to certain animals on certain occasions is to kill them.. . .” Please

And yet here I find myself slipping into the hunter’s ecstatic purple, channeling Ortega y Gasset. It may be that we have no better language in which to describe the experience of hunting, so that all of us who would try sooner or later slide into this overheated prose ignorant of irony.

José Ortega y Gasset

Irony — the outside perspective — easily withers everything about hunting, shrinks it to the proportions of boy’s play or atavism. And yet at the same time I found that there is something about the experience of hunting that puts irony itself to rout. In general, experiences that banish irony are much better for living than for writing. But there it is: I enjoyed shooting a pig a whole lot more than I ever thought I should have…

In this, I decided, was one of the signal virtues of hunting: it puts large questions about who we and the animals are, and the nature of our respective deaths, squarely before the hunter, and while I’m sure there are many hunters who manage to avoid their gaze, that must take some doing…

..we are left standing there in the woods with our uneasiness and our disgust, and disgust’s boon companion, shame. I did not register any such emotion in the moments after shooting my pig, but eventually it dawned, or fell on me, like a great and unexpected weight. It happened late that evening, when, back at home, I opened my e-mail and saw that Angelo had sent me some digital pictures, under the subject heading “Look the great hunter!” I was eager to open them, excited to show my family my pig, since it hadn’t come home with me but was hanging in Angelo’s walk-in cooler.

The image that appeared on my computer screen hit me like an unexpected blow to the body. A hunter in an orange sweater was kneeling on the ground behind a pig the side of whose head has erupted in blood that is spreading like a river delta toward the bottom of the frame. The hunter’s rifle is angled just so across his chest; clearly he is observing some hoary convention of the hunter’s trophy portrait. One proprietary hand rests on the dead animal’s broad flank. The man is looking into the camera with an expression of unbounded pride, wearing an ear-to-ear grin that might have been winning, if perhaps incomprehensible, had the bloodied carcass sprawled beneath him been cropped out of the frame. But the bloodied carcass was right there, front and center, and it rendered that grin — there’s no other word for it — obscene. I felt as if I had stumbled on some stranger’s pornography. I hurried my mouse to the corner of the image and clicked, closing it as quickly as I could. No one should ever see this.

What could I possibly have been thinking? What was the man in that picture feeling? I can’t for the life of me explain what could have inspired such a mad grin, it seemed so distant and alien from me now. If I didn’t know better, I would have said that the man in the picture was drunk. And perhaps he was, seized in the throes of some sort of Dionysian intoxication, the bloodlust that Ortega says will sometimes overtake the successful hunter. And what was I so damned proud of, anyway? I’d killed a pig with a gun, big deal.

Like the image of the two filthy hunters I’d caught in the convenience-store mirror earlier that afternoon, Angelo’s digital photo had shown me the hunt, and the hunter, from the outside, subjecting it to a merciless gaze that hunting can’t withstand, at least not in the 21st century.

The pig got shot, and the prig went home to Berkeley to scribble and emote. Personally, I would say that Mr. Pullan’s merciless gaze of Modernity is as fatal to the truth as a properly aimed 130 grain .270 round is to California feral pig. Pullan thinks he speaks for the enlightened spirit of human progress. In reality, his irony is a only a fashionable pose, and his voice only the voice of conformity echoing the infernal spirit which denies:

(Faust I, Vers 1338ff. / Mephistopheles.)

Shooting victim

Clarice Feldman has a new article on American Thinker, in which she demonstrates a pattern of protecting the reputation of Patrick Fitzgerald by such representatives of the establishment media as the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.

Ms. Feldman also reviews the arguments in Lewis Libby’s Motion to Dismiss identifying the core argument:

The decision whether to continue the Special Counsel’s investigation long after the acts regarding the disclosure of Ms. Plame’s occupation were established required a careful balancing of the interests. On the one hand, there is a law enforcement interest in investigating potential false-statement and perjury offenses. On the other hand, there is a public interest in avoiding confrontations that Mr. Fitzgerald’s investigation and prosecution continue to entail. There is also a public interest in avoiding continued distraction of our nation’s highest officials well after it has become apparent that the alleged crime that was the intended focus of the investigation did not in fact occur. Those competing interests should have been weighed by properly appointed principal officers of the United States. Because the Special Counsel was given the power to operate without any supervision of direction in contravention of the Appointments Clause, that did not happen in this case.

On which basis, she concludes:

I think that Libby has made a persuasive hard-to-answer argument that the Prosecutor was improperly appointed and granted powers in a way that violates the Statute and the Constitution, and that the indictment should be dismissed.

There is a regular Intel source who publishes on Free Republic as “Fedora.” Fedora’s latest offering is a partial translation of one of the captured Iraqi documents, which amusingly testifies to the Baathist regime’s recognition of CNN as a sympathetic venue for the distribution of false information injurious to the US-led Coalition cause. Fedora writes:

In this Iraqi document ISGQ 2004-00224003 dated February 7 2001, there was a discussion in upper echelon of the Iraqi intelligence about mass graves in Southern Iraq and how to shift the blame to the Coalition forces and make it look like these mass graves as the results massacres committed by the Coalition forces back in 1991 during Desert Storm Operation. What is also interesting about this document is that it mentions how to give the priority of covering the story to CNN so it will have an effect on the international arena as the documents says.

I did a partial translation of the document highlight the statement related to CNN in bold letters in the body of the translation. The rest of this 3 pages document that I did not translate will go into further deception on how to make big military funerals for the people in the mass graves though out all the Iraq provinces and how high level state officials will participate in these funerals.

Beginning of the Partial Translation

The Republic of Iraq

The Intelligence Apparatus

Date: 7/2/2001

No 1687

In the Name of God the Merciful the Most Compassionate

Secret

To the respectful Mr. Director of the Fourth Directory

Your letter secret and immediate numbered B 264 on 2/4/2001

1. No information is available to us about the Mass Graves in the Southern Region.

2.We see to achieve the observation the following matters:

A. Inspect the graves to confirm the existence of Nuclear Radiations.

B. Were they buried alive or their death was by suffocation.

C. Are they military personnel or civilians.

D. Are there tombstones that carry the names of the martyrs

E. Identify accurate marks and proofs of the graves and the possibility to reach it quickly and identify it.

3. We do not agree that the declaration about it through a direct Iraqi media in the first stage at least and not to cause public and party reaction so that the subject will take as a priority an international interest, and we should work on the following direction during this stage:

A. Leak the news through reliable sources.. News agencies or Satellite stations.. and that there is confusion, and indications from the members of the Coalition forces about the existence of mass graves civilians and military personnel in the South of Iraq.

B. The attempt to search for soldiers from the Coalition forces in a serious way to mention these truth through the agencies.

(1-3)

C. Ask some of the friendly countries with good technology to find these graves and for sure it will be asked from some news agencies in these countries to humanly participate in this effort and in case it is discovered there will be media reactions internationally and foreign and this media must be given a big space to repeat it and leak it to take its natural form of influence on the countries that made this bad deed and give it to the international general opinion.

D. Not to dig these grave by the Iraqi side… and it is possible to make a dialogue with the CNN channel to give them a priority on this subject to have an influence over the international arena and it will be accepted more than the Iraqi media.

End of Partial Translation

Hundreds of people have placed lighted candles on Nyamiha Street in Minsk as a gesture of solidarity with those beaten and arrested yeserday.

Video of Interior Ministry Special Forces attacking peaceful demonstrators in Minsk yesterday, beating women and the elderly.

Alex Nunez details a sudden outbreak of MSM introspection:

Three years’ worth of negative stories from Iraq, filed without even a cursory attempt to show balance, have finally come back to haunt the MSM. The media people see this, and that’s why they’re trying to address the matter now by talking about the “perception” of bias on their part. That they’re talking about it at all shows just how worried they are.

The narcissists in the elite media are coming to realize, finally, that the average American no longer sees them as credible providers of information, and they can’t handle it. After all, what good are their monolithic soapboxes if people simply tune out what they’re saying from them?

Captured along with three other Italians working in Iraq as private security guards, then murdered by terrorists in April of 2004, Fabrizio Quattrocchi ruined the video his executioners were recording. Instead of allowing himself to be put to death cowering like a sheep, Quattrocchi pulled the hood from his face, faced the video camera, and said defiantly: Adesso (or ora) vi faccio vedere come muore un italiano! [Now I will show you how an Italian dies!].

He was shot in the back of the neck, but Al Jazeera never broadcast the video, claiming hypocritically that it was “too gruesome.” His fellow hostages were liberated by US forces.

Fabrizio Quattrocchi behaved in reality the way we only expect to see human beings today behave on stage, in plays like Lion in Winter:

Richard: He’ll get no satisfaction out of me. He isn’t going to see me beg.

Geoffrey: Why, you chivalric fool, as if the way one fell down mattered.

Richard: When the fall is all there is, it matters.

On March 20, 2006, Fabrizio Quattrochi was awarded posthumously the Medaglia d’Oro al Valor Civile [Gold Medal for Valor by a Civilian] by the Italian Govenment.————————————————Hat tip to Winds of Change via Pajamas Media.

Wearing the red beret is SOBR (Special Forces of the Ministry of the Interior) commander, Colonel Dmitry Vasilyevich Pavlichenko, arrested and accused November 2000 of “being the organiser and head of a criminal body engaged in the abduction and physical elimination of people.”

Over ten thousand demonstrators answered opposition candidate Alexander Milinkevich’s call to participate in a Saturday protest rally against the Lukashenko regime’s March 19th electoral fraud. The rally was timed also to commemorate the Independence Day of the first Belarussian Republic of 1918. Faced with police blocking access to the main square in Minsk, the demonstrators moved their rally to a nearby park.

Over the last few days, hundreds of arrests were made, including not only the protesters camped in tents in October Square, but also journalists, Pavel Mazejka (the press spokesman for opposition candidate Alexander Milinkevich), and today rival opposition leader Alexander Kozulin.

Kozulin had called for demonstrators to march on Okrestino prison to demand the release of political prisoners. The march had begun, when Colonel Pavlichenko’s Interior Ministry Special Forces units confronted the marchers, fired tear gas and stun grenades, and then proceeded to charge the protesters, swinging truncheons. photos

Casualties are not yet known. A number of people were hospitalized. At least one, Siarhey Atroshchanka, sustained a serious head injury.

GREG GUTFELD’s 29 AMAZING REASONS WHY AMERICA SUCKS!

1. If only our culture was as inferior as those of other countries, we could fly planes into their buildings.

2. We naively export globes with America on it, showing terrorists exactly where we live.

3. As long as we allow him to eat so many pies, Michael Moore will continue to hate crass consumption.

4. Not executing homosexuals or adulturers makes us a laughing stock in Islamic countries.

5. If we truly were a corrupt corporate pawn, we would have gotten oil for blood.

6. Our Christian leaders aren’t as intolerant as their Islamic counterparts, making stateside ridicule of religion seem cowardly.

7. Immigrants don’t believe we are racist. (Still, the least the maid could do is wear the Che Guevara shirt we bought her for Christmas.)

8. The relentless stress of tenure is causing scholars across the nation to crack under pressure.

9. Decent standards of living make it hard for young reporters to do those “My night as a homeless person” features.

10. Churchgoers continue to attend mass despite the added folk guitar.

11. We only “rule” over fifty states, making us appear as underachievers to the rest of the world.

12. Venezuela is just sitting there.

13. Americans are too generous. We let the French come here and wait our tables.

14. Winning the Cold War means George Clooney can tell us how meaningless the Cold War was.

15. Replacing a dictator with a democracy doesn’t sit well with my yoga instructor.

16. We need to reduce elections, so we can feel guilty about not voting less frequently.

17. By watching Fox News, you hurt Walter Cronkite’s feelings and exacerbate Norman Mailer’s dementia.

18. No large-scale rioting occured after the New Orleans disaster. There’s clearly not enough factional violence to undermine this whole melting pot thing.

19. Our constitution is simply too lenient and doesn’t allow for beheadings.

20. Abu Ghraib proves our military is totally okay with encouraging gay lifestyles.

21. Our army shows up early to everything, which is awkward.

22. Uniformly applied “right turn on red” traffic rule perpetuates a racist worldview instead a society that’s a beautiful cultural mosaic. Worse, faster traffic flow puts off the day when we all must return to sheep-drawn carriages.

23. Bereft activist Cindy Sheehan’s tears available for intravenous injection only to the very rich.

24. Alternative medicine relegated to crackpot status instead of funded by the state. This allows socialists like Deepak Chopra to rip off old ladies using free market principles.

25. Unending series of medical and pharmaceutical breakthroughs by private research undermines population control.

26. The death penalty raises the price of art created by recently deceased inmates, burdening hipsters like Johnny Depp.

27. We will probably solve global warming before anybody else, then use the solution to make more money.

28. Native Americans getting rich off casinos instead of staying dirt-poor does nothing to prove how bad colonialism was.

29. Democracy still an untested theory! 230 years not nearly long enough trial period to truly know if it’s safe for general use.

THAT’S ALL FOR NOW, FANS!

————————————————————Hat tip to FrancoAlemán.

In Belarus, people of all ages were beaten and arrested by police for demonstrating against tyranny. In France, rioters burned automobiles, looted shops, and mugged fellow demonstrators in the midst of demonstrations demanding secure jobs at somebody else’s expense.

Some people struggle for freedom; others passionately desire its opposite.

Harmee Sooden, Jim Loney, Norman Kember

The “Christian Peacemakers,” held captive since last November, rescued yesterday by Coalition forces, have declined to provide information on their captors, reports the Telegraph.

The three peace activists freed by an SAS-led coalition force after being held hostage in Iraq for four months refused to co-operate fully with an intelligence unit sent to debrief them, a security source claimed yesterday.

The claim has infuriated those searching for other hostages.

Neither the men nor the Canadian group that sent them to Iraq have thanked the people who saved them in any of their public statements.

It emerged that about 50 soldiers, led by the SAS, including men from 1 Bn the Parachute Regiment and the Royal Marines, as well as American and Canadian special forces, entered the kidnap building at dawn.

A deal had been struck with a man detained the previous night who was one of the leaders of the kidnappers. He was allowed a telephone call to warn his henchmen to leave the kidnap house. When the troops moved in and found the prisoners alive, they also let him go as promised.

I don’t know about you, but I certainly have to try this at home. It’s my duty to the cause of Science.

link

Reuters

The tent camp in October Square in Minsk was stormed by police at 3:30 A.M. local time last night. The remaining protestors, estimated as around 460 people, whose numbers had been systematically reduced by the covert arrest of individual protestors for days, were forced onto buses and carried away. One of the protestors detained was opposition leader Valancina Palevikova.

Former Polish ambassador Mariusz Maszkiewicz was badly beaten.

Twenty two independent journalists have also been arrested.

New York Times

Some of the arrested were lined up and forced to stand facing a wall all night.

The European Union has announced sanctions against Belarus.

In the course of discussing the likeliness of an attack on US soil involving WMD in years to come, J.R. Dunn proposes reliance in emergencies on ordinary people, as the Swiss already do, but recognizes that the direction of intellectual fashion opposes such a policy.

One of the few heartening things about 9/11 was watching people appear from all across the country to aid and assist the city of New York. Firemen, policemen, and ordinary people got into their cars and drove sometimes thousands of miles, simply to lend a hand. That is the response we’d be looking to harness. There is nothing more American than this, and the fact that no effort has been made to take advantage of it is difficult to fathom. Consider what the Katrina farce would have been like with such an organization in place. (A 4th-Generation Warfare enthusiast would call this a “network-centric solution”, by the way; which is fine.)

Of course, it won’t happen. It is straightforward, it’s workable, and it utilizes the American traditions of competence, community, and initiative. But it’s also against the spirit of the age, the rebirth of Big Government, the drift toward centralization and bureaucracy. In this paradigm, the U.S. citizenry is viewed not as a resource, as a reservoir of talent, ability, and good will, but as part of the problem, to be cajoled, hoodwinked, and manipulated into doing what the bureaucrats think is necessary. The results can be seen in Louisiana.

For the foreseeable future, we’ll be stuck with organizations that respond to disasters by sending truckloads of ice from one end of the country to the other. Perhaps at some point such an idea will be considered, after the monster bureaucracies have fumbled the ball another four or five times.

J.R. Dunn concludes pessimistically a must-read, and highly intelligent, article at the American Thinker:

The first point to understand concerning future Jihadi plans for the U.S. is that the Bush Doctrine is dead, insofar as it involves preemption of terrorist threats. It will remain in formal effect for the balance of Bush’s second term, and may be activated in a campaign against the Iranian nuclear program. But when George W. Bush leaves office, it will be a dead letter. Politics no longer ends at the water’s edge, and relentless attacks by the political opposition, along with unbridled media criticism, have rendered the concept radioactive. No candidate of either party will dare lay claim to it after the current administration leaves office.

The second point is that most of the defensive programs put into place following 9/11 are also under threat. Many of them, including the Patriot Act, telecommunications surveillance, and the domestic nuclear-detection program, will be abandoned by a new administration, and the rest will be emasculated.

That is all the opening that the Jihadis will need.

It’s necessary to point out — it never seems to arise in public debate – that the U.S. has been safe for the past five years solely because of active security efforts. There is no other reason — not laziness on the part of the Jihadis, not the bravery of New York Times reporters, not the guardianship of the UN. American efforts have been successful both overseas in disrupting Jihadi plans at the source (it’s difficult to put a bomb together when you’re being chased by a Predator drone) and here in the United States. Some of the stories — the Lackawanna, Portland, and Lodi cells, “dirty bomber” Jose Padilla, and the Republican convention bombers, are known to the public, and some of us have seen things that strongly suggest that others have been picked up in secret. Jihadi groups in the U.S. have either been broken up, forced underground, or have fled the country completely.

Yet at the same time, every security program introduced during the period was greeted with protest in the media, in Congress, and among the intelligentsia….

John Fund doesn’t get the Yale Alumni Magazine, which seems a pity. If John had looked into the latest issue today, he would have discovered that admitting young Rahmatullah as a special student is just the tip of the iceberg (excuse me! sand dune) in Yale’s latter day pilgrimage in the direction of Mecca.

The Alumni Mag reports that Yale these days has a student belly dancing society (founded 2003) with 30 members. O tempora, o mores!

(I was hoping the web-site offered a DVD, but no such luck.)

Jeff Jacoby quotes the late Michael Kelly:

The United States may not be able to stop every homicidal fascist on the planet, but that is hardly an argument for stopping none of them. If the Bush administration had listened to Kennedy and to the millions like him the world over who protested and marched raised their voices against invading Iraq, would the world be a better place today? Leaving Saddam and the Ba’athists in power—free to break and butcher their victims, to support international terrorists, to menace other countries—would have emboldened murderous dictators everywhere. The jihadists of Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas, celebrating the latest display of American irresolution, would have been spurred to new atrocities. The Arab world would have sunk a little deeper into its nightmare of cruelty and fear. And women’s heads would still be getting nailed to the front doors of Iraqi homes.

Three years into the war, with many Americans wondering if it was a mistake and the media coverage endlessly negative, one voice I miss more than ever is that of Michael Kelly. The first journalist to die while covering the war, Kelly was the editor of The Atlantic and a columnist for The Washington Post. He had covered the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, and in one of his last columns, filed from Kuwait City, he reflected on the coming liberation of Iraq: “Tyranny truly is a horror: an immense, endlessly bloody, endlessly painful, endlessly varied, endless crime against not humanity in the abstract but a lot of humans in the flesh. It is, as Orwell wrote, a jackboot forever stomping on a human face.

“I understand why some dislike the idea, and fear the ramifications, of America as a liberator. But I do not understand why they do not see that anything is better than life with your face under the boot. And that any rescue of a people under the boot (be they Afghan, Kuwaiti, or Iraqi) is something to be desired. Even if the rescue is less than perfectly realized. Even if the rescuer is a great, overmuscled, bossy, selfish oaf. Or would you, for yourself, choose the boot?”

There is a quotation of unidentifiable origin, usually attributed to George Orwell, one version of which goes:

We sleep safely in our beds at night because rough men stand ready to visit unspeakable violence on those who wish to do us harm.

Rough men from Canada and the United States broke into a house on the outskirts of Baghdad today, where they freed, from a “kidnapping cell,” one British and two Canadian members of a Chicago-based Christian Peacemaking Team, kidnapped last November 26. The body of a fourth peacemaker, the American Tom Fox, was found March 9th, discarded along a railway line. Fox had been tortured, and then shot.

Coalition forces had learned the location of the kidnap victims only a few hours earlier as the result of the interrogation of a prisoner captured last night. Is it possible, do you suppose, that someone may possibly have employed violence and coercive methods, thus violating his human rights?

Associated Press reports:

The Christian Peacemaker Teams volunteers have been in Iraq since October 2002, investigating allegations of abuse against Iraqi detainees by coalition forces.

And, see! They may actually have found just such a case.
—————————————————————-

One would think that the Moonbat Galactic Central Headquarters web-site would have a comment on the rescue, and so they do. One notes that it contains not single word of thanks for the men, who obviously at some personal hazard and inconvenience, went out and saved these bleating moonbat imbeciles from painful death at the hands of evil men. On the contrary, the statement actually condemns their efforts generally.

We believe that the illegal occupation of Iraq by Multinational Forces is the root cause of the insecurity which led to this kidnapping and so much pain and suffering in Iraq. The occupation must end… We pray that Christians throughout the world will, in the same spirit, call for justice and for respect for the human rights of the thousands of Iraqis who are being detained illegally by the U.S. and British forces occupying Iraq.

Michelle Malkin was pretty steamed over this one, and who can blame her?
———————————————-
Wretchard is eloquent as usual.

Sir Charles Napier

Even liberal Time Magazine sounds indignant:

When a Christian believer in a nation wholly dependent on U.S. support faces trial and possibly execution simply for embracing the same faith as the President of the United States, you’d think that country would be read the riot act. Instead, Washington’s response to the trial in Afghanistan of Abdul Rahman has been rather muted. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns has emphasized the U.S. commitment to freedom of worship, and urged the Afghan authorities to follow what he said was their own constitution’s commitment to the same principle. But, he added, the U.S. was not going to pressure the Afghan authorities on the matter. “This is a case that is not under the competence of the United States,” he said. “It is under the competence of the Afghan authorities. We hope that the Afghan constitution is going to be upheld, and in our view, if it is upheld, he will be found to be innocent.”

Mr. Bush said he was “deeply troubled.”

I’m troubled when I hear — deeply troubled when I hear that a person who has converted away from Islam may be held to account. That’s not the universal application of the values that I talked about.

So much for that Woodrow Wilson democracy stuff. If the primitive ragheads we liberated want to relapse into medieval barbarism, we need to revise our theories of political development.

Maybe the heathen Afghans, like the once primitive and blue-painted inhabitants of the British Isles, require a few centuries of closer intercourse with civilization under adult supervision, before they are, in fact, ready to assume their rightful place in the community of nations as a self-governing, independent, and democratic state. Democracy, pace Woodrow Wilson, contemporary expectations, and George W. Bush, is a system characteristic of intellectually advanced and comparatively enlightened states. Give some primitive savage the vote, and what he wants to vote for is liable to be precisely the kind of thing that ought to be illegal in the first place.

The United States ought to contact the government of Afghanistan, and quote what Sir Charles Napier, British commander-in-chief in India, told the Hindus regarding the practice of suttee (the burning of widows on their husband’s funeral pyres).

You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.

Mosnews reports:

Belarus opposition leader Alexander Kozulin and his campaign headquarters staff are currently working on the plan to set up an alternative government in the country, Gazeta.ru said Wednesday.

The “People’s Trust Government” project will then be introduced to the political council of Belarus democratic forces.

Alexander Kozulin previously called for an end to the demonstrations in October Square, and is suspected of functioning as an agent of Moscow or the Minsk regime. One wonders if he is about to be promoted internationally by Russian Intelligence as a purported democratic opposition successor to Lukashenko, but one who who would, in reality, continue to operate as a puppet of the Kremlin.

The German state of Hesse is starting to test immigrants who wish to become German citizens on their knowledge of German history, culture and politics. The test consists of 100 questions. Handelsblatt has on-line an 18 question excerpt (in German, natürlich).

test

On Sunday, the New York Times described the US invasion of Iraq as “a debacle.” To read the liberal MSM, you would think the occupation of Iraq was a bloodbath resembling in casualties the battle of Verdun. Proud Kaffir at Red State Diaries cites some illuminating statistics:

Take a look at the actual US Military Casualty figures since 1980. If you do the math, you will find quite a few surpises. First of all, let’s compare numbers of US Military personnel that died during the first term of the last four presidents.

George W. Bush . . . . . 5187 (2001-2004)
Bill Clinton . . . . . . . . . 4302 (1993-1996)
George H.W. Bush . . . . 6223 (1989-1992)
Ronald Reagan . . . . . . 9163 (1981-1984)

Even during the (per MSM) utopic peacetime of Bill Clinton’s term, we lost 4302 service personnel. H.W. Bush and Reagan actually lost significantly more personnel while never fighting an extensive war, much less a simulaltaneous war on two theaters (Iraq and Afghanistan). Even the dovish Carter lost more people duing his last year in office, in 1980 lost 2392, than W. has lost in any single year of his presidency. (2005 figures are not available but I would wager the numbers would be slightly higher than 2004.)

In 2004, more soldiers died outside of Iraq and Afghanistan than died inside these two war zones (900 in these zones, 987 outside these zones). The reason is that there are usually a fair number that die every year in training accidents, as well as a small number of illness and suicide. Yet the MSM would make you think that US soldiers are dying at a high number in these zones, and at a significantly higher number than in past years or under past presidents. This is all simlpy outright lies and distortion.

Taken all together, it is clear to see that the military is actually doing a fine job and suffering very low casualty rates. It also shows that our enemies are not quite as efficient as the MSM and world press would like them to be.

Duration – 1899-1913 (14 years) versus 2003-? (3 years so far)
US Forces Deployed- 126,000 versus 133,000
Insurgency- 80,000 versus est.12 to 20,000
US Deaths – 4324versus 2319

—————————————————Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Eugéne Delacroix (1798-1863), Attila suivi de ses hordes, foule aux pieds l’Italie et les arts (Attila followed by his Horde, Trampling under Foot Italy and the Arts), Bibliothèque, Palais Bourbon, Paris, 1843-47

The Sorbonne was occupied for twelve hours by rioters, before being retaken by French police.

“A sad assessment succeeded the forcible intervention of the police: at least six rooms sacked, five offices of the National School of Chartres looted, two lecture-halls and all the cafeterias destroyed, three other devastated rooms, and forty rare books mutilated or burned. Those who held out for reasonable dialogue were overtaken by events, observed someone from the Rector’s office. Everything degenerated because of a horde of savages.

RARE BOOKS STOLEN OR BURNED

Rare religious books of great value were burned or stolen at the time of the occupation of the Sorbonne on the night of March 10 to March 11. Not only were hundreds of tables and chairs destroyed in the Sorbonne. Some 300 people, some students, some not, who occupied the place also violated works of a great historical value. A preliminary list of books burned on the spot or stolen has been just transmitted to the vice-chancellor of Paris by the Director of Studies of the School of Chartres, Jerome Belmon.

An American commie web-site has a manifesto from the barbarians.

Bloggers wishing to register support for the efforts of the people of Belarus to free themselves from dictatorship and rejoin the community of civilized nations might choose to display on their blogs the 600 year old national arms of Belarus: the Ðu0178Ð°Ð³Ð¾Ð½Ñ [Pahonia – “the Pursuer”], linked to Belarus Elections 2006, or to any other website associated with the Belarussian Opposition. (A smaller version will be found in the lower portion of the right column.)

The Ðu0178Ð°Ð³Ð¾Ð½Ñ [Pahonia, Vytis in Lithuanian, Pogon in Polish] is the coat of arms of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, adopted in 1386 by Grand Duke Jagiello on the occasion of Lithuania’s conversion to Christianity and dynastic union with Poland.

link

link

Today, the forces of planetary political correctnesss are celebrating an “International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination,” but don’t suppose that is intended to mean white farmers should be permitted to own farms in Zimbabwe.

No, the poster reference is a Lego, the product of Denmark’s best-known company, and the form that racism is purportedly taking is colored red, like the Danish flag.

Sandmonkey gets it right.
———————————————————
The Blogosphere wins another one. The Lego poster was taken down.

Bird and Begonias, Koson Ohara (1877-1945) c.1910

Subject: A silhouetted bird flying through the driving rain, beneath it sprays of flowering Begonia.
——————————————————————The same essential image was recorded almost 1200 years earlier in Europe.

Venerable Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of England, Book II, Chapter 7:

The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door, and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant.

John Fund was eager to take his journalistic Jihad against former Taliban spokesman Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, now attending Yale as a special student, to young Rahmatullah’s current home ground in a Yale Political Union debate (to be held March 29th), featuring the indignant Mr. Fund and his presumptive ally, former Army Captain Flagg Youngblood, Y’97.

The members of the YPU’s Executive Board had the good taste, however, to decline to hold a debate on the question of whether another student at Yale ought to have been admitted in the first place. Debating such a question would be ungentlemanly, to say the least. And, frankly, if one started debating who really should have been admitted to Yale, and who should not have been, considering some of Yale’s graduates, it would only be too easy to debate nothing else. Good for the Union E-Board. They did the right thing.

NBC News reported this evening that Naji Sabri, Iraq’s Foreign minister under Saddam Hussein, served in the period leading up to the US invasion, as a paid informant to the CIA.

NBC News’ informants sound rather like the usual gang of leaking, pouting spooks endeavoring to inflict revenge on the Bush Administration for past policy differences. NBC’s informants are described as “Intelligence sources” speaking “on condition of anonymity.”

The goal of these revelations is apparently to make public information in the possession of US Intelligence prior to the invasion testifying to Saddam’s not possessing weapons of mass destruction.

For example, consider biological weapons, a key concern before the war. The CIA said Saddam had an “active” program for “R&D, production and weaponization” for biological agents such as anthrax. Intelligence sources say Sabri indicated Saddam had no significant, active biological weapons program. Sabri was right. After the war, it became clear that there was no program.

Another key issue was the nuclear question: How far away was Saddam from having a bomb? The CIA said if Saddam obtained enriched uranium, he could build a nuclear bomb in “several months to a year.” Sabri said Saddam desperately wanted a bomb, but would need much more time than that. Sabri was more accurate.

On the issue of chemical weapons, the CIA said Saddam had stockpiled as much as “500 metric tons of chemical warfare agents” and had “renewed” production of deadly agents. Sabri said Iraq had stockpiled weapons and had “poison gas” left over from the first Gulf War.

Both Sabri and the agency were wrong. NBC tells us. But, since NBC News has neglected to look in Syria, I’m afraid I’m not willing to take their word on that one.

It’s kind of sad when your own leak, even partially, supports your opponent’s case, and damages your own: Sabri said Iraq had stockpiled weapons and had “poison gas” left over from the first Gulf War.

But, at least, a poor pouting spook can count on his media allies to bang down the gavel, and declare him right in the end.

It might be the fact that NBC News was selected as the venue for the leak that is the most interesting detail here, really. It may indicate that some previously favored media allies are, at this point beginning to get the wind up, are thinking of possible legal consequences to themselves, and are currently less eager to cooperate than they have been in the past.