Down at Newport Beach in the OC, the problem of anchored sail boats being swamped by an excess of pinniped avoirdupois has recurred this Sprng. A male California sea lion can weigh 600 lbs.

AP reports:

NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. – Authorities hope to deter sea lions from boarding boats by — get this — spraying them with water. The mischievous pinnipeds have returned to the bay after wreaking havoc last summer by trashing boat cabins and decks, swamping a vintage yacht and barking all night.

So far this spring, they’ve ransacked one craft and nearly scuttled a 20-foot sailboat, which was submerged to the rooftop before shipyard workers intervened, said Justin McCarthy, manager of Hill’s Boat Service.

“As soon as one is up, three jump on,” McCarthy said. “And it only takes four to tip one of these boats.”

Seeking to avoid a repeat of last year’s mayhem, harbor officials are testing a motion-activated sprinkler they hope will shoo the animals away from boat decks. Sea lions sunbathe to raise their body temperature and don’t like being squirted with cool water, said Chris Miller, the city’s harbor resources supervisor.

“It’s hard to control nature,” Miller said. “But we’re doing our best.”

The high-tech effort has one observer scratching his head.

“It’s funny because people don’t realize the old trick is you just put a little dishwashing soap (on the deck) and they slide right off,” said Hank Wiessner, co-owner of Fun Zone Boat Co.

My wife found the mental image of frustrated sea lions wallowing on board anchored boats, only to slip right off again, hilarious.

Oswaldo Payá

Columbia University, at its 2006 Commencement held yesterday, awarded an honorary doctorate degree to Cuban dissident Oswaldo Payá, organiser of the Varela Project, a Christian non-violent movement seeking the liberation of Cuba.

Columbia’s President Lee Bollinger mentioned Castro’s refusal to allow Osvaldo Payá to travel to New York to receive the award, and read the citation:

I am supposed to have the duty of presenting Oswaldo Payá, to whom the Trustees have awarded an honorary doctor of laws. Unfortunately, his chair here is empty. Mr. Payá could not join us on this occasion because the Government of Cuba has not granted him an exit visa to be here. We were prepared to confer the degree, but Mr. Payá has written us to ask that Columbia’s leadership allow him to receive the degree in person when he is free to travel. We all look forward to that day. For the present, this is what we would have read to you about him:

Engineer, journalist, activist, tireless campaigner for human rights and advocate for the people of Cuba, you represent the aspirations of millions around the world yearning for freedom and democracy. Based on the Cuban constitution itself, your Varela Project—a peaceful civic initiative to gather signatures across Cuba for the establishment of a free and democratic citizenry—is a model of civic activism. At great personal sacrifice and despite nearly constant surveillance and harassment, you have remained committed to nonviolent dissidence and political change. You embody a life of principle in practice and we are proud to celebrate your extraordinary dedication to peaceful, democratic values by conferring on you the degree of doctor of laws, honoris causa.

Good stuff.

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Skookumchuk, writing at YARGB, shares one of those personal moments of enlightenment.

A long time ago, during my freshman and sophomore years in college, I didn’t have a car. And for a good part of that time, I lived at home. So going home I would ride the bus. Number 88 began its route someplace in West LA and then wound around the east and north sides of the campus, picking up the few ostracized car-less students like me and the Hispanic maids and others who even then worked in the mansions of Brentwood. After that, it headed for the San Diego Freeway, lugging its way north up the hill and down the other side, where it exited and turned east on Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley.

Having grown up speaking Spanish and English at home, I had decided to take a Latin American history class. It was taught by some renowned Ivy League white guy Latin Americanist whose presence had attracted a sprinkling of Che wannabes and similar types. Pretty predictable in retrospect. Completely new to me then. Brown people good. White people bad. Brown people downtrodden. White people racist. Brown people authentic, spontaneous. White people soul-dead, industrialized. Well, I had never heard any of this before.

I left class with my books and walked to the bus stop. Once on the 88, I settled into a seat on the left hand side. At the next stop, three Hispanics got on the bus, two men and one woman who probably worked in one of the estates in the hills. The men sat across the aisle, and the young woman sat next to me. They chatted among themselves and I read my book as we wound our way over the hill and into the Valley.

At the corner of Ventura and Van Nuys, there used to be an open air newsstand. It always attracted people who thumbed through the magazines waiting for the bus. The bus turned left at Van Nuys and braked at the stop. It filled with people. As it pulled away, we could hear the sounds of a person running to catch the bus. The driver looked in his mirror and slowed to a crawl. Up the steps came an Orthodox Jew, conservatively dressed, yarmulke on his head. He plunked himself down across from the two Hispanic guys, red faced and winded.

Mirelo. Con su gorrito parece obispo. Look at him. With his little hat he looks like a bishop.

Cuanta plata tendra bajo de su cama. I wonder how much money he has under the bed.

Then they started in on the rest of the bus, including me, secure in their belief that they were among Martians unable to understand their language.

As I got to my transfer stop, I decided the opportunity was just too good to pass up. I reached for the cord above the window, stood up, looked my Hispanic seatmate in the eye, smiled and said con permiso. Her pupils turned into saucers as she quickly looked away and whispered Santo Dios. Holy God.

It was one of those times in young adulthood where in ten minutes you grow up a little bit. All of the sudden. Getting off the Number 88, I wasn’t quite the same kid as I had been when getting on.

Depkafile, presumed voice of Mossad, reports that new Iran-sponsored Shiite insurgent groups have begun operating in Iraq, and that Iran supplied the surface to air missiles used to shoot down a British helicopter at Basra and an American helicopter over Yussifiya. According to this report, Iran has supplied insurgents in Iraq with 1000 such missiles and a large number of newly developed, enhanced lethality roadside bombs.

In the past two weeks, Iran has been pumping into Iraq two types of extra-lethal weapons in very large quantities. They have already taken their toll in the shooting down of two military helicopters – one American and one British — and an estimated 19 deaths of US military personnel.

DEBKAfile’s military and intelligence sources estimate the delivery to Iraqi insurgents as consisting of around 1,000 SA-7 Strela ground-air missiles made in Iran, and a very large quantity of a newly-developed roadside bomb, loaded with compressed gas instead of ball bearings and cartridges, to magnify their blast and explosive power.

The supplies have been distributed across Iraq – Basra and Amara in the south, Baghdad and its environs, Haditha in the west, and Mosul in the north.

The new bombs, developed jointly by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and the Lebanese Hizballah, have already gone into service with the Shiite terrorists on the Lebanese border with Israel. Israeli military sources say it is only a matter of time before the deadly roadside bombs, already used in Iraq, will also reach Palestinian areas in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

If this Israeli-supplied information is correct, Iran has certainly committed acts of war. Of course, one expects that Israel would very much like the US to invade Iran, and Depkafile has not always been completely accurate, so….

Clive Crook remembers Galbraith:

‘In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.’ John Kenneth Galbraith, who died at the age of 97 on April 29, said that to Britain’s Guardian newspaper in 1989. Was any American economist of comparable esteem so wrong—so comfortably and contentedly wrong, and for so many years—as Galbraith himself? Verily, I cannot think of a rival.

Narrator demonstrates the principle of the electromagnetically-powered Gauss gun.

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(I had to let it load all the way, and run it again. On the first pass, it was choppy.)

Wikipedia

The Australian Herald Sun reports that DNA testing of postage stamp saliva, from taunting letters addressed to Scotland Yard, suggests the person responsibe for the 1888 series of murders of prostitutes in London’s East End may have been a woman.

Ripperology:

Metropolitan Police —Casebook—Wikipedia—the letters—Whitechapel Society

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The Millionaires’ Unit makes for ironic reading in an era when elite universities like Yale won’t even allow ROTC units on campus, dining hall offerings include vegan, and pampered students are tutored by a corps of bolshie profs in fashionable poses of anti-American sophistication and smug Pacifist moral superiority.

Publisher’s Weekly describes Marc Wortman’s new book on the history of the Yale Flying Club, an aviation unit formed by Yale undergraduates even before America’s entry into into WWI to train to fight, as harkening

back to a bygone era when campus regattas were the place to be seen, Harvard-Yale football games drew crowds 80,000 strong and, perhaps most jarringly, American isolationism placed the country’s air command not just behind Germany’s fearsome air service, but behind British and French forces as well. Preparing themselves for fire fights and bombing missions that generated harrowing casualty figures, these wealthy, elite Yale students saw it as their responsibility to fight on the front lines, and in the first wave. In a brief but important epilogue, Wortman spells out just how profoundly the times, and in particular the Yale campus, has changed in the past 90 years.

Poor Louis Auchincloss Y ‘39, in the Wall Street Journal, makes a gallant attempt to stand up for his own class:

I seemed to sense at the end of Mr. Wortman’s narrative—I may have been wrong—an implication that the heroic spirit of the Millionaires’ Unit has somewhat departed from our land. But that spirit, which existed in World War II as well, was inspired in both conflicts by the barbarous attacks on our nation by dangerous and mighty foes. The sons of the rich have not seemed tempted to leave Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley to enlist in wars in Korea, Vietnam or Iraq, where a good half of our youth, if not more, saw no real threat to the country. But if attacked, I believe, we would find the same spirit that the old unit so splendidly showed. I know some of the descendants of those men, and I am sure we could count on them.

But, unless you count the British-flagged Lusitania, whose sinking cost the lives of 128 Americans, Germany did not, in fact, attack the US prior to US entry into WWI. And if we substituted today’s American elites for the WWI-era’s, Ivy League undergraduates would have obviously been found demonstrating against the Wilson Administration and the War, not training to fly combat missions. Pace Mr. Auchincloss and his WSJ editor, some of us do actually think America was attacked this time.

Instapunk explains how the MSM did it.

while the bloggers were fighting their various and diverse battles in the name of truth, justice, and common sense, the MSM ocean was harnessing its entire immensity on just one story, told an infinite number of times, in every possible inflection, from every direction, and with the deadly persistent accuracy of a dripping tap: George W. Bush is no good.

It doesn’t have to be true, it doesn’t have to be fair, it doesn’t have to be consistent in its terms. All that matters is that it is repeated with uniform constancy: drip, drip, drip. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. Change the headlines, seem to change the subject. Abu Ghraib. European disdain. Tom Delay. Katrina. Deficits. Valerie Plame. Gas prices. Karl Rove. Death in Iraq. Angry mothers. NSA wiretaps. Drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, the lede is always the same. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. Forget the good news, bury the accomplishments or ignore them altogether. Drip, drip, George W. Bush is no good, George W. Bush is no good, George W. Bush is no good.

It took the MSM three years to bring George W. Bush’s approval ratings down from their post 9/11 high to 52 percent on election day 2004. It’s taken them just 18 months [corr. per Tim] to bring him down another 20 to 25 points.

He’s perfectly right. Bush survived well enough until the Hurricane Katrina gave the MSM what it needed, a spectacular disaster story, in which exaggerations and distortions could be disseminated day after day after day with no possibility of factual correction. Bush might have prevented their success with a better public relations campaign, but he doesn’t do very much of that sort of thing or do it all that well.

Differences among conservatives nationally on the Immigration issue are beginning to produce a genuine rift. We can see the impact of these tensions today on the right-side of the Blogosphere, where late last night Lori Byrd, a popular guest blogger on Polipundit, informed readers at her own site:

I received a lengthy email from Polipundit tonight alerting us to an editorial policy change that included the following: “From now on, every blogger at PoliPundit.com will either agree with me completely on the immigration issue, or not blog at PoliPundit.com.” I would provide additional context, but Polipundit has asked that the contents of our emails not be disclosed publicly and I think that is a fair request. There has been plenty written in the posts over the past week alone to let readers figure out what happened. Polipundit ended a later email with this: “It’s over. The group-blogging experiment was nice while it lasted, but we have different priorities now. It’s time to go our own separate ways.”

And Polipundit replied:

The blog has focused on various issues, but one issue on which I cannot give in to the elites is illegal immigration. On that, this blog’s position must be clear, not ambivalent. As a legal immigrant, I feel very, very, strongly about this. Back in 2004, I nearly withdrew my support for Bush’s re-election when he came out with his suicidal immigration “reform” plan.

So far, I’ve allowed the guest bloggers here to write pretty much what they pleased about all issues, including illegal immigration.

But on the illegal immigration issue, I now find myself having to contend with at least three out of four guest bloggers who will reflexively try to poke holes in any argument I make.

Suppose three out of four columnists at the Old York Times were pro-Republican. You can bet publisher “Pinch” Sulzberger would do something about that right quick.

Suppose a Bush administration official came out openly against amnesty. The Bushies would show him the door.

Similarly, the writers at PoliPundit.com need to respect the editorial position of PoliPundit.com on the most important issue to this blog, as the “publisher” sees it – illegal immigration.

I’d say that Polipundit and others deciding to make a fight over this are making a very serious mistake. A lot of people on the Right, myself included, have said very little about this issue to date, out of affection and respect for some of the people on the Right who have strong negative opinions on Immigration, combined with confidence in the Bush Administration’s unwillingness to acquiese to a Nativist crackdown.

If the anti-Immigration side of the Conservative Movement continues to try to operate under the erroneous impression that it has any prospect whatsoever of calling the shots on this issue, it is only going to succeed in underminding the respect of their readers for the good judgement of certain commentators. There is no prospect of the anti-Immigration Right compelling either the Administration, or the libertarian portion of the Conservative Movement, to join in opposition to naturalizing people already here.

And don’t give me any of Polipundit’s “I’m a legal immigrant, and I feel strongly” stuff; my grandparents were legal immigrants. It was obviously a lot easier for them to immigrate legally in the 1890s than it is for Hispanic immigrants today, but the basic circumstances are much the same. American needs cheap labor, and people living in unfavorable conditions abroad are willing to come here to do the jobs Americans don’t want to do in return for a better life. In the context of existing American labor market demand, there is no valid reason that it should be any more difficult for a Mexican or Salvadoran immigrant to come to the United States to work in 2006 than it was for a Pole or Italian in 1906.

Cecil B. De Mille’s The Ten Commandments as high school comedy: Ten Things I Hate About Commandments.

Even in Western states where lions are still hunted, mountain lion numbers are up, and the big cats are being forced to hunt more widely and more frequently by competition from (now completely protected) scavenger species. Dick Ray, a lion hunting outfiter, believes:

pressure from other predators and scavengers is causing the big cats to kill on a more frequent basis today than they have in the past. Dick and I have shared a number of lion chases together and it used to be, when you found a fresh lion kill it was generally a partially eaten deer carcass covered by raked up pine duff, sticks and leaves. In most cases the satiated cat would stay in the vicinity of the kill until the carcass was consumed, before hunting again. Such isn’t the case today.

With the proliferation of the protected scavenger birds such as ravens, crows and magpies, a fresh cougar kill is located by the keen eyed birds within a short time and their raucous racket soon attracts the attention of opportunistic coyotes that key on the boisterous birds to locate carrion or kills. (Every magpie may not have a lion or coyote following it, but you can bet every coyote or lion has a magpie.) The constant harassment by a few determined coyotes quickly drives the frustrated cat from its fresh kill. Under the onslaught from coyotes and flocks of voracious scavenger birds, within forty eight hours or less the only thing left at the site of the cougar kill is a few scraps of hide and scattered bones, forcing the cat to kill again.

This Sunday, a young mountain lion entered a North Boulder home through a pet door, killed and ate the family cat, then went back outside and curled up for a nap on the lawn.

Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine describes in yesterday’s New York Times magazine the impending electronic Universal Library:

The dream is an old one: to have in one place all knowledge, past and present. All books, all documents, all conceptual works, in all languages. It is a familiar hope, in part because long ago we briefly built such a library. The great library at Alexandria, constructed around 300 B.C., was designed to hold all the scrolls circulating in the known world. At one time or another, the library held about half a million scrolls, estimated to have been between 30 and 70 percent of all books in existence then. But even before this great library was lost, the moment when all knowledge could be housed in a single building had passed. Since then, the constant expansion of information has overwhelmed our capacity to contain it. For 2,000 years, the universal library, together with other perennial longings like invisibility cloaks, antigravity shoes and paperless offices, has been a mythical dream that kept receding further into the infinite future.

Until now…

..Scanning technology has been around for decades, but digitized books didn’t make much sense until recently, when search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN came along. When millions of books have been scanned and their texts are made available in a single database, search technology will enable us to grab and read any book ever written. Ideally, in such a complete library we should also be able to read any article ever written in any newspaper, magazine or journal. And why stop there? The universal library should include a copy of every painting, photograph, film and piece of music produced by all artists, present and past. Still more, it should include all radio and television broadcasts. Commercials too. And how can we forget the Web? The grand library naturally needs a copy of the billions of dead Web pages no longer online and the tens of millions of blog posts now gone — the ephemeral literature of our time. In short, the entire works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages, available to all people, all the time.

This is a very big library. But because of digital technology, you’ll be able to reach inside it from almost any device that sports a screen. From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have “published” at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows and short films and 100 billion public Web pages. All this material is currently contained in all the libraries and archives of the world. When fully digitized, the whole lot could be compressed (at current technological rates) onto 50 petabyte hard disks. Today you need a building about the size of a small-town library to house 50 petabytes. With tomorrow’s technology, it will all fit onto your iPod. When that happens, the library of all libraries will ride in your purse or wallet — if it doesn’t plug directly into your brain with thin white cords. Some people alive today are surely hoping that they die before such things happen, and others, mostly the young, want to know what’s taking so long. (Could we get it up and running by next week? They have a history project due.)

The only fly in the ointment of Kelly’s optimism is the enormous extension in recent years (in a series of concession to corporate interests) by Congress of the duration of copyright.

(Amazon-US is using the wrong book picture. This correct one is from Amazon-UK.)

Former Monty Python comedy troop member Terry Jones has developed a latter-day career producing popularizing history programs for British television. Jones is trying to offer an original and witty version of history, but the result (being representative of the contemporary leftwing demotic culture of which Jones himself is a product) inevitably proves fragmentary, misleading, and vulgar.

His latest (a sequel to an earlier series on the Middle Ages) focuses on the Roman Empire. Jones proposes to tell the story of Roman history as seen by the Britons, Gauls, Germans, Hellenes, Persians and Africans. His approach consists of serving up selected anecdotal details (typically obtained from recent academic papers) designed to support arguments for barbarian cultural equality, and moral superiority, to Roman Civilization.

A Times press release associated with the impending book pubication provides the central Jones thesis:

The Romans kept the Barbarians at bay for as long as they could, but finally they were engulfed and the savage hordes overran the empire, destroying the cultural achievements of centuries. The light of reason and civilisation was almost snuffed out by the Barbarians, who annihilated everything that the Romans had put in place, sacking Rome itself and consigning Europe to the Dark Ages. The Barbarians brought only chaos and ignorance, until the renaissance rekindled the fires of Roman learning and art.

It is a familiar story, and it’s codswallop.

The unique feature of Rome was not its arts or its science or its philosophical culture, not its attachment to law. The unique feature of Rome was that it had the world’s first professional army. Normal societies consisted of farmers, hunters, craftsmen and traders. When they needed to fight they relied not on training or on standardised weapons, but on psyching themselves up to acts of individual heroism.

Seen through the eyes of people who possessed trained soldiers to fight for them, they were easily portrayed as simple savages. But that was far from the truth.

The fact that we still think of the Celts, the Huns, the Vandals, the Goths and so on as “barbarians” means that we have all fallen hook, line and sinker for Roman propaganda. We actually owe far more to the so-called “barbarians” than we do to the men in togas.

In the past 30 years, however, the story has begun to change.

There you have it. Rome did not triumph over the barbarians by virtue of superior civilization. It was just that same evil Western militarism, overcoming peaceful (morally superior) agrarian societies. Why, the Britons, Jones contends, had better shield, helmets, and chariots than the Romans, built roads (alas, with wooden, not stone foundations, old boy), and (assuming somebody’s interpretation of a bas relief is correct) may have developed some sort of wooden harvesting contraption.

Jones overarching thesis rests on his ability to persuade his audience that the existence of some vestigial technology, in the Celtic case, establishes the equality of illiterate wooden-road-building Celtic barbarism to the Classical Civilization which read Homer and Virgil and built in marble and concrete.

Such is contemporary trans-Atlantic culture. A state-funded national television network provides a platform for an utterly unqualified celebrity to dispense competently-assembled, but factually dubious “histories” arriving at politically correct conclusions.

RevolutionSF chooses.

Varifrank has been following news reports and listening to Congressional democrats, and is able to sum up the rules.

Don’t fight before Ramadan as it interrupts the UN sponsored peace process.

Don’t fight during Ramadan because it shows disrespect to an honored people and a great religion.

Don’t fight after Ramadan since so many civilians will simply be caught in the potential crossfire.

And so on.

Eric Phillips writing at the Ludwig von Mises Institute wishes we were still a Republic, not a Democracy.

Suppose there existed a world democracy with one vote for each person in the population. Is it not obvious, as Hans-Hermann Hoppe points out, that the world would adopt a flagrantly favorable policy towards China and India at everyone else’s expense?

On the other hand, suppose two robbers break into a house and start ransacking the place. When the owner comes down to protest, the robbers, if abiding strictly by the rules of democracy, could simply hold an election to determine whose property the belongings actually are, and with their superior numbers, outvote the legitimate owner.

These examples may seem theoretical, but our government today abides by this exact philosophy. As Murray Rothbard said, “On the free market, everyone earns according to his productive value in satisfying consumer desires. Under statist distribution, everyone earns in proportion to the amount he can plunder from the producers.”

Indeed, it is not capitalism that leads to exploitation as the Left contends; it is democracy.

“Papa likes to know what a man is going to say to him before he starts to talk,” Cathy told Christopher. “If there’s no horse in the first sentence, he knows he’s in the wrong company.”—The Secret Lovers, 1977, p. 65.
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The male parent seldom spoke. On first meeting he had established that he and Christopher had been in the same regiment of Marines in different wars and in the same house at Harvard; he had never asked Christopher another question. “He knows everything about you, knowing those two things, that he needs to know,” Cathy said.
—The Secret Lovers, 1977, p. 103.
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“I come from the most anti-American country on earth.”

“Canada? Ah, no, America is the most anti-American country on earth. When you speak of public opinion, young man, you speak of the opinions of the intellectuals because they are the only ones who publish and broadcast. The masses are dumb. Intellectuals always hate their own country, but the United States has produced an intelligentsia which is positively bloodthirsty.”—The Secret Lovers, 1977, p. 127.
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In Spain the Germans tested aerial bombing tactics; the Soviets, propaganda. You see who won in the end. In 1945 there was no Luftwaffe. No one has yet found a way to shoot down the illusions of the Left.”—The Secret Lovers, 1977, p. 139.
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“This woman had the greatest private collection in Spain, portraits of her ancestors,” Rodegas said. “She was asked by a journalist if shec was not filled with awe, to possess the works of all those dead geniuses. ‘Awe?’ she replied, ‘Genius? Goya, Velázquez, Rembrandt, were simply the people my family hired before the invention of photography.’”—The Secret Lovers, 1977, p. 250.

Capital Online reports:

When a shabbily dressed man ran out of a Westfield Annapolis jewelry store followed by an employee screaming for help, Erik McInnis didn’t think twice.

“Anybody sprinting out of a store like that is guilty until proven innocent,” the 39-year-old Marine major said.

He immediately left his two children, ages 9 and 2, in the mall’s play area and chased Timothy A. Laboard, 40, of Baltimore, through the back corridors of the mall.

Jonathan Neff, another father in the play area, said Maj. McInnis “hurdled the row of seats and hit the ground at an all out sprint behind the thief … He was through the doors in hot pursuit before anyone else knew what was happening.”

Maj. McInnis followed Mr. Laboard back into the mall, grabbed his collar, and put him in a rear figure-four choke hold on the ground.

“It was kind of surreal. There I was laying on top of this guy and everyone just kept walking by like nothing had happened,” said the Naval Academy math instructor.

After a few moments, an off-duty FBI agent walked up and handcuffed Mr. Laboard.

Mr. Laboard was charged with theft over $500 after the incident on Monday. Police allege he snatched a $28,000 diamond ring out of a person’s hand inside the Helzberg Diamonds. After Mr. Laboard was arrested, police said he pulled the ring from his mouth and handed it over to an officer.

“I’m a drug addict and I need help,” Mr. Laboard said, according to a police report.

Officials at Helzberg Diamonds were not available for comment.

While Maj. McInnis might teach calculus during the day, he’s still a Marine. He said he also teaches martial arts at the academy and is the officer representative for the school’s Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu club. That, he said, is where he learned the submission and grappling moves he used at the mall.

“I’ve been teaching the stuff to midshipmen for years. I had a better than average chance to catch him,” said Maj. McInnis…

“As hokey as this sounds, I consider apprehending scum bags to be an unwritten statement in my general job description of being a Marine,” he said.

A new rock slab is growing at more than one meter a day on the Mt. St. Helens volcano in the state of Washington. You can actually see it grow in this very brief time-lapse photopgraphy video. Hit replay, and watch closely a few times.

Stephen Hayes thinks that Porter Goss’s resignation as CIA Director and the pending appointment of Stephen Kappes, a prominent member of William Safire’s “flock of pouting spooks” that exited Langley in the aftermath of George W. Bush’s defeat of John Kerry in November of 2004, as Deputy Director signals the Bush Administration’s defeat by liberal mandarins in the CIA establishment.

PORTER GOSS’S TENURE as director of central intelligence began with a public spat between the new reform-minded CIA leadership and an intransigent bureaucracy. Now, 18 months later, it is ending in a cloud of confusion. Goss is gone and so are his agents of change. Two of the CIA officials at the heart of that opening battle—Mary Margaret Graham and Stephen Kappes—have been promoted. And the old guard is happy.

“The move was seen as a direct repudiation of Goss’s leadership and as an olive branch to CIA veterans disaffected by his 18-month tenure,” wrote Peter Baker and Charles Babington in the Washington Post. Yet Goss had taken to the CIA the high expectations of many top Washington policymakers who work on intelligence issues.

“Porter Goss’s confirmation . . . represents perhaps the most important changing of the guard for our intelligence community since 1947,” the year the CIA was created, said Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who chairs the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, on the day Goss was confirmed. “He will be the first director of central intelligence in a new, and hopefully better, intelligence community.”

And now he’s gone. So what happened?...

The White House took on the Agency. And the Agency won.

I used to do this with Sodium and Potassium in high school too, but I never had… Cesium! Fun, fun, fun.

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The Never Yet Melted blog has been out of action since Thursday afternoon, when a SQL database error occurred.

Unfortunately, tools for repairing the SQL database at my host service are not accessible by customers, and are managed remotely by a subdivision or subcontractor of the hosting company, who is roughly as accessible as your average divinity. You can pray (i.e., send an email), but that doesn’t mean God answers.

I have learned a few things, and will try to avoid a recurrence. My apologies to readers who came here only to meet the dreaded SQL Error 127.

Red-backed Jumping Spider (Phidippus johnsoni) âu2122u20ac

Yesterday, I was working at my desk, when a large spider, sporting impressively bright-colored markings, descended down a filament of web, and landed with a noticeable thud on top of a television remote control, languishing unused at the far left corner of my monitor stand.

I debated for an instant between hand-to-hand combat, with me employing a handy ruler; or chemical warfare, involving a nearby can of Raid House and Garden. I decided to go for the high tech approach, and reached for the can of Raid. My alert opponent, however, cleverly divined my arachnocidal intentions, and dashed over the edge to the preferred refuge of all outlaws: the terra incognita between desk and wall. My hunting instincts were aroused. I had no intention of letting the quarry get away, but my search was unavailing.

I couldn’t nail the spider, so I figured I could at least entertain the wife a bit, so I sent the little woman (who is out of town on a business trip) an email, informing her that we had acquired a new roommate, and urging her to say hello for me, when she found the same spider on her desk some day(we share an office). My wife was not amused.

Well, Karen actually does get to come home, after all.

At pretty much the same time of day today, clearly the same uppity spider landed directly in the center of my desk with an even louder thump, erected its feelers, and advanced rapidly and purposefully in my direction. I could practically hear its thoughts: “Dare spraying bug spray at me, will you, villain? I see that can of Raid is out of reach, so let’s settle things here and now.” Further threats, and the arachnid’s further advance were prevented, however, by the rapid descent of a Paulownia wood Japanese box, containing a very nice Kaneiye sword guard.

I, of course, then proceeded to identify the specimen.

So perish all our enemies.

The Anti-Bush Intel Community captured today’s news lead with its latest leak in USA Today. Despite all the traction the story is getting in the Blogosphere, we are clearly really just dealing with a repackaging and reissue (“old wine in new bottes”) of the same old NSA communications data-mining story originally leaked to Eric Lichtblau and James Risen in the New York Times last December.

Today’s leak goes:

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews…

“It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world,” said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA’s activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency’s goal is “to create a database of every call ever made” within the nation’s borders, this person added.

Leslie Cauley, author of the USA Today article, adds (curiously overlooking the fact that she and her employers are also breaking the law, and her name is right there at the top of the article):

The sources would talk only under a guarantee of anonymity because the NSA program is secret.

The Mahablog, which styles itself (tin trumpet call) as “Home blog of the American Resistance,” grabs today’s headlined leak, and runs with it, demanding indignantly:Let’s See the “Libertarian” Righties Defend This One.

Why, sure, always glad to oblige a moonbat.

The United States is at war. Foreign enemies are actively engaged in efforts to carry out attacks on civilian population centers in the United States. Enemy agents are undoubtedly resident in the United States and operating off US soil. Can the president of the United States, in such circumstances, authorize the intelligence services of the United States to intercept and open mail addressed to, or sent by, US residents, including citizens? Of course, he can. As Justice Robert Jackson remarked, “The US Constitution is not a suicide pact.”

The caterwauling of the left over the NSA’s communications data-mining activity is nothing more than narcissistic fantasy. Are there any adults on the left? You people all read like adolescent teenagers. The world revolves around little you.

In reality, no one is actually listening to your phone calls, or reading your phone bills. Some very very large computers are crunching through databases which include your phone records, my phone records, and another few hundred million phone records mechanically and indifferently, searching for various kinds of incriminating clues. If you haven’t been placing a lot of calls to suspicious numbers in Waziristan, if your favorite phone buddy is not on a list of terrorists, there is absolutely nothing to be concerned about.

Speaking frankly, guys, if they haven’t arrested Dana Priest, Lichtblau and Risen, Leslie Cauley, and most of their informants yet, there isn’t a lot of chance that anybody is coming looking for you.

Newsmax, anticipating the democrat capture of the House in November, is warning that John Conyers will become Judiciary Committtee Chairman, and John Conyers is proposing a bill leading to the payment of reparations for pre-1865 Slavery to persons of Afro-American descent.

I agree with Rupert Birkin:

If,’ said Hermione at last, `we could only realise, that in the spirit we are all one, all equal in the spirit, all brothers there—the rest wouldn’t matter, there would be no more of this carping and envy and this struggle for power, which destroys, only destroys.’

This speech was received in silence, and almost immediately the party rose from the table. But when the others had gone, Birkin turned round in bitter declamation, saying:

`It is just the opposite, just the contrary, Hermione. We are all different and unequal in spirit—it is only the social differences that are based on accidental material conditions. We are all abstractly or mathematically equal, if you like. Every man has hunger and thirst, two eyes, one nose and two legs. We’re all the same in point of number. But spiritually, there is pure difference and neither equality nor inequality counts. It is upon these two bits of knowledge that you must found a state. Your democracy is an absolute lie—your brotherhood of man is a pure falsity, if you apply it further than the mathematical abstraction. We all drank milk first, we all eat bread and meat, we all want to ride in motor-cars—therein lies the beginning and the end of the brotherhood of man. But no equality.

`But I, myself, who am myself, what have I to do with equality with any other man or woman? In the spirit, I am as separate as one star is from another, as different in quality and quantity. Establish a state on that. One man isn’t any better than another, not because they are equal, but because they are intrinsically other, that there is no term of comparison. The minute you begin to compare, one man is seen to be far better than another, all the inequality you can imagine is there by nature. I want every man to have his share in the world’s goods, so that I am rid of his importunity, so that I can tell him: “Now you’ve got what you want—you’ve got your fair share of the world’s gear. Now, you one-mouthed fool, mind yourself and don’t obstruct me.’

Why not take Birkin’s suggestion?

Pay Slavery reparations. Whatever they want. $100,000 per person. $500,000 per person. But, along with it, we abolish welfare, repeal the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, and end Affirmative Action. Everyone is equal. No one any longer has anything to complain about. And everyone has full use of his property, the choice of whom to serve or not serve, hire or not hire, rent to or not rent to. Complete freedom of association, and the right of private persons to discriminate, is restored. The Civil Rights Era, the Cuture of Complaint, is over and done with forever.

China, Cuba, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan were elected yesterday to seats on the United Nations’ Human Rights Council.

Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said: “The good news is that we did better than expected in the voting because Iran and Venezuela both lost. Venezuela’s losing shows that bluster and anti-Americanism isn’t enough to get elected.”

Nations running for the council had to meet more demanding standards than in the past.

The previous commission was long a public embarrassment to the United Nations because countries like Sudan, Libya and Zimbabwe became members and thereby thwarted the investigation of their own human rights records.

Prominent Appeals Court Judge J. Michael Luttig has resigned his $171,800 per annum judicial position, and accepted the position of senior vice president and general counsel of Boeing.

Judge Luttig’s new job will probably feature compensation including both an annual salary in seven figures range and substantial stock options.

Some judges do willingly sacrifice their family’s financial well being in order to pursue public service, but the astonishing gap between what state and federal judges are paid in the United States and the kind of money attorneys of equivalent calibre can command in the private sector really ought to provoke reflection.

Do we want the best qualified people on the bench? Or is it more important to limit the compensation of public officials to figures easily defensible to the general public?

These days, one has only to enter an ordinary state court to see talented attorneys, the partners of major firms, and distinguished graduates of top national law schools, strugging to explain cases and the law to much less well-informed judges, the graduates of the humblest law schools, to whom the meagre judicial salaries are actually attractive. When lawyers are normally conspicuously better qualified than judges, we are clearly not paying judges enough.

video

Iranian mullahs in the city of Qum have invited Cuban dictator Fidel Castro to convert to Islam.

Why not? His Communism was only ever an opportunistic justification for him to operate as a brigand. And he’s already got the beard.

The New York Times reports one of the more dubious psychological studies I’ve heard about to date, purportedly demonstrating that merely handling a gun increased aggressiveness. It seems actually to show that people who handle guns wind up preferring spicy foods.

Eric wants to restore Western values, and he doesn’t mean Judeo-Christian values.

H/T to Glenn Reynolds.

William Saletan in Slate sees what’s coming.

The Crisper and Dr. Helen are opposed, and so am I, but you know how the people Don Corleone refers to as the pezzonovante are: relentless and implacable.

H/T again to PJM.

The health Nazis in suburban Connecticut who just banned soft drinks in public schools throughout the Nutmeg State do not take after anybody strange. They clearly really are the true descendants of the same bigoted Puritans, who chopped down the Glastonbury Thorn, banned the celebration of Christmas, and imposed Cromwell as Lord Protector.

The British Puritans, not to be outdone by colonials, are going the Connecticut variety one better. They will be banning ice-cream vans. The Times reports:

FOR 60 years the tinny jingle of Greensleeves that announced the arrival of the ice-cream van has been an indelible memory of childhood, but that sound may soon be removed from suburban streets. Health lobbyists have decided that ice-creams are too much of a danger to children’s health.

MPs and health officials are planning a series of measures across the country that are already forcing Mr Whippy and his helpers into meltdown.

Under an amendment to the Education and Inspection Bill to be put forward this week, local authorities will be given new powers to stop ice-cream vans from operating near school gates. The move comes as operators claim that they are already being forced out of business by an over-zealous health lobby.

Local authorities have in recent weeks banned ice-cream vans from using pay-and-display parking spaces and set up “ice-cream-free”exclusion zones around busy shopping streets. Newham council, in east London, informed vendors last month that it would fine van owners up to £80 if they used pay-and-display bays. Greenwich council, in southeast London, has banned the vans from its streets altogether, while in Scotland, West Dunbartonshire council has introduced an exclusion zone around schools for vans.

George W. Bush’s “best presidential moment” was quoted in translation from an interview with the German language weekly Bild am Sonntag.

“I would say the best moment of all was when I caught a 7.5 pound perch in my lake,” he told the newspaper in an interview published on Sunday.

Although the White House’s English language transcript correctly describes the president’s catch as a largemouth bass (Micropterus salmoides), a number of moonbat blogs are leaping (like hungry bass) after a rather unsurprising English-to-German-then-back-to-English translation error.
————————————————————-
Americablog started it:

Bush told the following to a German newspaper yesterday:

Bush told weekly Bild am Sonntag when asked about his high point since becoming president in January 2001. “I would say the best moment of all was when I caught a 7.5 pound perch in my lake.”

The only problem is that the world’s record for the largest freshwater perch caught is 4 pounds 3 ounces.

So Bush either doubled the world record, and didn’t report it, or he’s a liar.

(Major kudos to the Stacy Taylor Show on KLSD-AM in San Diego for catching this.)

So, naturally, Kos joined in:

Jesus. H. Christ. Is Bush even capable of telling the truth?...

Apparently, since Bush didn’t have any “best moments”, he had to invent one.

Upper Left:

Someplace along the translation line (the original story was published in German) the fish in question has mutated from a record setting freshwater perch to a stocked bass charitably described as, well, fair sized. The size and species of George’s finned prey isn’t what really struck me, though.

It was the way he tossed off “…my lake,” as though owning your own lake is the most natural thing in the world.

Of course, there’s nothing natural about Bush’s private man-made lake, or the fish, for that matter, which are planted for his private angling pleasure.

And there it is. After six years as “the most powerful man in the world,” the final Decider of all matters of national and international importance, George W. Bush’s best moment was the solitary pursuit of a private pleasure on his private lake playing what was, in essence, a game of shoot the fish in the barrel.

Doesn’t that seem a bit, I dunno, sociopathic to you?

Fact-Esque:

The story, as with all BushCo stories, was a lie…. In the meantime, the White House has scheduled a press conference with the 7.5-pound perch/bass/man-dressed-as-fish at which time he is expected to describe being caught by Dear Leader as the high point of his last five years. If the perch is unavailable, Harry Whittington is expected to stand in on his behalf.

In a letter to the Wall Street Journal, Mark Skousen notes that even Galbraith confessed recognizing the greater efficacy of freedom:

Mr. Henderson refers to one example where Galbraith changed his mind (about big business facing risk and competition). I can think of another: Which has helped the average person more—economic growth under free-market capitalism or redistribution of income via progressive taxation and the welfare state? In “The Affluent Society” (pp. 96-97), Galbraith wrote:

“Over the centuries those who have been blessed with wealth have developed many remarkably ingenious and persuasive justifications of their good fortune. The instinct of the liberal is to look at these explanations with a rather unyielding eye. Yet in this case the facts are inescapable. It is the increase in output in recent years, not the redistribution of income, which has brought the greatest material increase, the well-being of the average man. And, however suspiciously, the liberal has come to accept the fact.”

A Yale Senior Society Building

The Wall Street Journal today published a story (based on an article in the Yale Alumni Magazine) featuring just the kinds of themes illustrative of the arrogance and oppression of the ancien regime beloved by the hearts of liberal journalists.

Skull and Bones, the most prestigious of Yale’s senior societies, derives its public name from its use of that emblem, typical of the Freemasonry-inspired imagery adopted unversally by student fraternities founded in the 19th century Romantic era. Memento mori were characteristically exhibited to remind fraternity members that life is fleeting.

Skull and Bones, from the time of its foundation in 1832, has had a policy of deliberately encouraging wild rumors of its own dark secrets, influence, and power in order to enhance its prestige. One of the most popular legends, right up there with tales of guaranteed lifetime incomes, and Skull and Bones’ alleged control of governments and national economies, is the legend of the Bones collection of the skulls of famous individuals, including that of the famous Apache warrior, Geronimo.

The association of skulls with the society’s emblem supposedly makes their aquisition highly desirable to the society, so generations of enterprising and influential Yale men have spent their spare time bribing officials and excavating graveyards by moonlight in order to carry back prizes to be housed in the recesses of its High Street headquarters. The reality seems to be that the senior society does possess a human skull and pair of femurs, purchased as anatomical specimens back in the 19th century, which have been used emblematically since in annual photographs of class delegations.

A skull is a skull is a skull, and nothing has ever prevented dark hints that this particular skull is Geronimo’s, or Pancho Villa’s, or President van Buren’s. And like the legends of subsidized incomes, or the immense swimming pool supposedly in the club’s basement, the wilder the story, the more eagerly it was taken up and repeated as gossip in the college community. Bonesmen smiled behind the closed doors of their impressive clubhouse, as the hints they dropped, and the rumors they spread themselves, blossomed into wide acceptance, inspiring outsiders with awe.

The Geronimo skull legend made the news wires back about a generation ago, and in 1986 the Yale Society offered to return the supposed Geronimo relic to Indian possession, but Indian representatives were not satisfied with the skull they were offered and were unwilling to sign a receipt for its delivery.

Another account.

I don’t think this declaration is perfectly written or thought out, but the recent publication of the home address and phone number of a particularly prominent blogger on one side of the ideological divide by a number of her adversaries was an exceptionally outrageous violation of the blogosphere’s ethos, and of ordinary human common sense and civility.

Consequently, the Never Yet Melted blog does endorse the so-called Online Integrity Statement of Principles reading:

Private persons are entitled to respect for their privacy regardless of their activities online. This includes respect for the non-public nature of their personal contact information, the inviolability of their homes, and the safety of their families. No information which might lead others to invade these spaces should be posted. The separateness of private persons’ professional lives should also be respected as much as is reasonable. Public figures are entitled to respect for the non-public nature of their personal, non-professional contact information, and their privacy with regard to their homes and families. No information which might lead others to invade these spaces should be posted. Persons seeking anonymity or pseudonymity online should have their wishes in this regard respected as much as is reasonable. Exceptions include cases of criminal, misleading, or intentionally disruptive behavior. Violations of these principles should be met with a lack of positive publicity and traffic.

observes Seneca the Younger at YARGB. My cat agrees.

Connoisseurs of Theodore Dalrymple’s regular columns heaping scorn on contemporary demotic Britain will enjoy his latest: From stiff upper lip to clenched jaws, in which the good doctor examines the consequences of modern rights-inflation:

WHAT a human catastrophe is the doctrine of human rights! Not only does it give officialdom an excuse to insinuate itself into the fabric of our lives but it has a profoundly corrupting effect on youth, who have been indoctrinated into believing that until such rights were granted (or is it discovered?) there was no freedom.

Worse still, it persuades each young person that they are uniquely precious, which is to say more precious than anyone else; and that, moreover, the world is a giant conspiracy to deprive them of their rightful entitlements. Once someone is convinced of their rights, it becomes impossible to reason with them; and thus the reason of the Enlightenment is swiftly transformed into the unreason of the psychopath.

The doctrine of rights has borne putrid fruit.

Hamaseh Kianfar

Not far beneath the haute bourgeois facade of “America’s dystopian future” lurks the primeval savagery of the frontier West of the cannibal Bender family, combined with the latest form of decadent perversity the New Age can invent.

Thomas Lifson at American Thinker reports a criminal case illustrating the propinquity of the Californian Utopia of Good Living to the American Heart of Darkness

A 75 year old woman and her husband were walking along Euclid Avenue, where it runs between the Rose Garden and Codornices Park. It is one of the most spectacularly beautiful urban scenes in the world, with panoramic views of San Francisco, the Bay, and its bridges on one side, and a hillside of architectural landmark houses and public spaces, including Bernard Maybek’s classicist masterpiece Rose Walk and the modernist Greenwood Common.

The elderly couple were walking home from a continuing education class at the University of California. The North Gate to its campus stands at the foot of Euclid Avenue, (Berkeley) less than a mile away. They moved aside to make room on the sidewalk to allow a pair of girls to walk by them. Suddenly, one of the girls grabbed Kate around the neck and slashed her throat with an 8-inch butcher knife all the way to a bone in what police say was an apparently random attack. Kate struggled briefly with her attacker, who released her. Then she reached up to her neck. “It was spurting blood,” she said from a hospital bed Friday. “It was just astonishing.”

Fortunately, the knife narrowly missed the important veins and arteries in the victim’s neck, and she survived the brutal and senseless attack. The area usually has many people enjoying its parks and views, and witnesses were able to see the attackers drive off in a very expensive car, a BMW M-3 convertible. Unless the car was stolen, these were not underprivileged children. Police relied on tips and arrested a 16 year old Oakland girl.

So, over a year later, Lifson follows up:

The wheels of justice have been grinding very slowly. The alleged assailant, Marilyn Webster, was a juvenille at the time. She has been found to be severely mentally impaired, and authorities have not been able to find a facility adequate to house her.

The alleged accomplice, Hamaseh Kianfar, was a county-employed mental health worker who had worked with Webster in an official capacity. Following the attack, she drove Webster from the scene, allegedly lied to police about the crime, and now her attorney expresses herself to be “incredulous” that her client is to stand trial.

Kristin Bender of the Oakland Tribune has been providing the best coverage of the bizarrae and shocking case. Here is her account:

As the woman laid on the street “bleeding profusely,” Kianfar drove the girl away, bought her clothing to wear following the assault and did not notify police about the incident for roughly 15 hours, said prosecutor Carrie Panetta. The woman recovered from her wounds. Panetta said Kianfar also did not tell police where the girl was staying and later “warned” relatives there was a warrant out for the teen’s arrest. “She knew very well where the juvenile was,” Panetta said. “She gave statements to police, but they were untruthful statements.” Kianfar met Webster while the teenager was serving a sentence in Juvenile Hall. Kianfar’s supporters have said the mental health worker befriended the girl in an effort to help her. Judge Jon Rolefson ordered Kianfar to return to court May 18 to begin routine court proceedings for the trial. She remains free on $15,000 bail.

Several aspects of the case remain mysterious. In the early aftermath, there were reports of a ritualistic aspect the crime, supposedly involving an occult practice called “blood-feasting.” Kianfar’s precise relationship to the mentally-impaired young woman has also not been detailed for the public.

Kianfar is entitled to a fair trial with the presumption of innocence. But her alleged behavior disturbs me deeply, as does her attorney’s apparent belief that one can leave a victim to die, spirit away the alleged perpetrator, buy clothing to disguise the evidence and lie to police, all without being charged.

Pouting Spook mouthpiece, Dana Priest in today’s Washington Post exults over Porter Goss’s departure and mourns Goss’s purge of disloyal, disaffected officers (sharing some interesting gossip that gives a revealing glimpse of the other side’s perspective):

Porter J. Goss was brought into the CIA to quell what the White House viewed as a partisan insurgency against the administration and to re-energize a spy service that failed to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks or accurately assess Iraq’s weapons capability.

But as he walked out the glass doors of Langley headquarters yesterday, Goss left behind an agency that current and former intelligence officials say is weaker operationally, with a workforce demoralized by an exodus of senior officers and by uncertainty over its role in fighting terrorism and other intelligence priorities, said current and former intelligence officials…

.” Within headquarters, “he never bonded with the workforce,” said John O. Brennan, a former senior CIA official and interim director of the National Counterterrorism Center until last July.

“Now there’s a decline in morale, its capability has not been optimized and there’s a hemorrhaging of very good officers,” Brennan said. “Turf battles continue” with other parts of the recently reorganized U.S. intelligence community “because there’s a lack of clarity and he had no vision or strategy about the CIA’s future.” Brennan added: “Porter’s a dedicated public servant. He was ill-suited for the job.”...

Goss, then the Republican chairman of the House intelligence panel, was handpicked by the White House to purge what some in the administration viewed as a cabal of wily spies working to oppose administration policy in Iraq. “He came in to clean up without knowing what he was going to clean up,” one former intelligence official said.

Goss’s counterinsurgency campaign was so crudely executed by his top lieutenants, some of them former congressional staffers, that they drove out senior and mid-level civil servants who were unwilling to accept the accusation that their actions were politically motivated, some intelligence officers and outside experts said.

“The agency was never at war with the White House,” contended Gary Berntsen, a former operations officer and self-described Republican and Bush supporter who retired in June 2005. “Eighty-five percent of them are Republicans. The CIA was a convenient scapegoat.”

Less than two months after Goss took over, the much-respected deputy director of operations, Stephen R. Kappes, and his deputy, Michael Sulick, resigned in protest over a demand by Goss’s chief of staff, Patrick Murray, that Kappes fire Sulick for criticizing Murray.

Kappes “was the guy who a generation of us wanted to see as the DDO [operations chief]. Kappes’s leaving was a painful thing,” Berntsen said. “It made it difficult for [Goss] within the clandestine service. Unfortunately, this is something that dogged him during his tenure.”

The confrontation between Murray and the agency’s senior leadership continued throughout Goss’s tenure, exacerbated by the fact that Goss effectively allowed Murray and other close aides to run the agency, in the view of some current and former intelligence officials. Many agency officials felt the aides showed disdain for officers who had spent their careers in public service.

Four former deputy directors of operations once tried to offer Goss advice about changing the clandestine service without setting off a rebellion, but Goss declined to speak to any of them, said former CIA officials who are aware of the communications. The perception that Goss was conducting a partisan witch hunt grew, too, as staffers asked about the party affiliation of officers who sent in cables or analyses on Iraq that contradicted the Defense Department’s more optimistic scenarios.

“Unfortunately, Goss is going to be seen as the guy who oversaw the agency victimized by politics,” said Tyler Drumheller, a former chief of the European division. “His tenure saw the greatest loss of operational experience” in the operations division since congressional hearings on CIA domestic spying plunged the agency into crisis, he said.

Though the agency has grown considerably in size and budget in the past four years—the operations branch has reportedly grown in size by nearly 30 percent—dozens of officers with more than a decade of field experience each, those who would have been tapped as new staff chiefs or division heads, chose to leave.

Read from the opposite viewpoint from that of the Santa Cruz graduate I like to think of as: “Will-no-one-rid-me-of-this-turbulent?” Priest, it all sounds like awfully good news. Goss’s tenure may not have been long enough to settle Intelligence agency rivalries and turf wars, or to make the Agency as effective as it should be, but apparently Porter Goss did much toward accomplishing the absolutely necessary first step of cleaning out the self-important Mandarins pretending to a right to over-rule the policies of the elected government, along with the Peaceniks who somehow accidently wandered into the CIA’s Langley headquarters thinking they had arrived at Woodstock.

So the evening’s toast is: Hurrah for Porter Goss, and confusion (and long prison sentences) to Pouting Spooks and VIP-ers.

A lot of people (this blog included) laughed at poor little Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, just because he didn’t know how to work the FN M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW) machinegun, and C.J. Chivers at the New York Times thinks we were being unfair. He’s even found some experts he can quote defending Zarqawi.

(You know how it is: Whenever any enemy of the United States is under attack, you can count on the New York Times to come bustling to his defense.)

An effort by the American military to discredit the terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi by showing video outtakes of him fumbling with a machine gun — suggesting that he lacks real fighting skill — was questioned yesterday by retired and active American military officers…

But several veterans of wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, as well as active-duty officers, said in telephone interviews yesterday that the clips of Mr. Zarqawi’s supposed martial incompetence were unconvincing.

The weapon in question is complicated to master, and American soldiers and marines undergo many days of training to achieve the most basic competence with it. Moreover, the weapon in Mr. Zarqawi’s hands was an older variant, which makes its malfunctioning unsurprising. The veterans said Mr. Zarqawi, who had spent his years as a terrorist surrounded by simpler weapons of Soviet design, could hardly have been expected to know how to handle it…

An active-duty Special Forces colonel who served in Iraq also said that what the video showed actually had little relationship to Mr. Zarqawi’s level of terrorist skill. “Looking at the video, I enjoy it; I like that he looks kind of goofy,” said the Special Forces officer, who was granted anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on military matters. “But as a military guy, I shrug my shoulders and say: ‘Of course he doesn’t know how to use it. It’s our gun.’ He doesn’t look as stupid as they said he looks.”

Oh, is that so, now?

Well, even Zarqawi’s defenders in the Times admit that he looked awkward handling the M249 SAW, and was unfamiliar with its mechanism.

Experienced shooters undoubtedly also noticed that Zarqawi is holding that machinegun tucked under his arm, Hollywood gangster fashion, and is making no effort actually to use the gun’s sights.

“Many days of training” may be required to teach soldiers how to disassemble and reassemble such a weapon by feel in the dark, how to maintain it, repair it, and to inculcate intimate familiarity with its shooting characteristics and capabilities; but, on the other hand, all semi-automatic and full automatic weapons have in common the same kind of operating lever, used to pull back the bolt and chamber the first round, or to clear a misfed cartridge.

An “older variant” might have a greater tendency to jam, but there is no difference whatsoever in the way you clear the jam between that M248 SAW and the AK-47 or the M16, or even the Remington 1100 semi-auto shotgun you use for pheasant hunting or to shoot trap for that matter. You just do what Zarqawi’s jihadi helper did: you pull back the lever, ejecting the misfed round, and then release it to go forward and chamber another one. That is not a complicated procedure, and it works essentially identically on all semi- and full-auto weapons. Anyone basically familiar with guns could do it without assistance.

Zarqawi looked and behaved exactly like somebody who had never shot a gun in his life.
———————————-
And Times’ Reporter Quivers even finds another expert to make yet another point defending Zarqawi’s honor, and to warn us to watch out about whom we speak disrespectfully.

But the retired and active officers said the public presentation of the tape did not address elements that were disturbing, rather than amusing: the weapon was probably captured from American soldiers, indicating a tactical victory for the insurgents. And Mr. Zarqawi looked clean and plump.

“I see a guy who is getting a lot of groceries and local support,” said Nick Pratt, a Marine Corps veteran and professor of terrorism studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Germany. “You cannot say he is a bad operator.” He added, “People should be careful who they poke fun at.”

Captured in combat? Right! Zarqawi won how many engagements against American forces? That SAW was either pre-war Iraqi army stock, looted from some military arsenal, or it just “fell off the truck” in the course of being delivered to Iraqi army or police units.
————————-

UPDATE

Patricia, in a comment at Tim Bair:

Can you imagine the effort it took for reporters to locate and call sympathetic ex-military and solicit quotes about what a he-man Zarqawi is? Stunning, especially for a paper that is supposedly the gold standard of world news.

That sound you hear is their stock price hitting bottom…

Sister Toldjah: Zarqawi looks like a fool on camera, and MSM utilizes its excuse-making machine.

Confederate Yankee asks: Who do you choose to believe?

Jason at COUNTERCOLUMN goes into CNN’s echo of the Times story in detail.

Caspar David Friedrich exhibition, 5 May – 20 August 2006, Museum Folkwang Essen.
———————H/T to SIGNANDSIGHT.

Joe Katzman at Wind of Change reflects on “the self-administered lobotomy” of European culture and links a number of other postings on the same theme. Katzman places his hope for a renewal of Western self-esteem in a revival of a sense of the reality of Good and Evil, which he hopes to see effectuated by the Church of Rome and the current pope:

Can Benedict XVI be the “Miracle Max” of our age? G-d only knows. Yet the lessons of the late 20th century should teach us not to underestimate a determined Pope. Europe has many antibodies to Catholicism, but it also has many societal and cultural channels through which a Pope can exert significant influence. Not least of which may be his ability to grant to Europe the two things it cannot discuss and yet must have: a way to forgive itself, even as he and his church insist on and promulgate the reality and centrality of both morality and evil.

A happy ending? Not for everyone.

An Indecent Left that has sought to silence, or denigrate, or even to cheer on 9/11 may yet have good cause to fear such a man. An Indecent Left which has moved on to World War 2 Holocaust denial in Europe via relativism, and is embarked on the fetishization of Judas by the folks Gerard Van Der Leun refers to as “The Church of the Self” may yet have good cause to fear such a man. An Indecent Left that relies on unresolved shame as its primary source of energy and power, cannot imagine a hostile tyrant it will not shill for, or service, and increasingly finds itself cooperating and borrowing from Islamist and neo-fascists, may yet have good cause to fear such a man.

But he also believes in “the common thread of Western civilization, Enlightenment values, and the sense of human dignity” which he hopes may prove a basis for a wider consensus.

“(A) Lack of Geographical Knowledge and Low Support for War (is) No Coincidence,” concludes relievedebtor at a group blog I haven’t previously seen, titled Architecture and Morality.

If it is true that Iran has been a ticking time bomb for every administration since Carter’s, every president has likely been waiting for the opportunity and the justification to invade Iraq and Afghanistan, if for no other reason, to surround Iran. Forget “blood for oil,” WMDs, or even the truly good reasons to invade both struggling countries. Geography is enough justification as far as I’m concerned, given that Iran is the gravest threat out there, and 9/11 provided all the justification we needed to establish bases around Iran.

So why is support for the War on Terror waning? Well, it seems most American children, and I would imagine even more of their parents (since they haven’t even been to school in 2 decades) don’t understand that Iran is surrounded by Iraq and Afghanistan! If they don’t even know where these countries are, how they understand the very basic strategic advantage of having Iran surrounded?

In the clearest English I can muster, suppose you’re a psychic police captain, and you know at 4:00 today a bank will be robbed by a madman with a gun, who will kill every teller and customer without hesitation. Would you rather have the place surrounded by 3:00, or wait until the alarm sounds from the bank after everyone is already dead to respond? Of course, you (being the savvy police captain that you are) want to have the place surrounded clearly and loudly, so that the madman will never rob the bank to begin with, or if he does, he will be quickly overwhelmed. Iran is the bank robber, America is the police captain, and it doesn’t take a psychic to know that Ahmadinejad is spoiling to kill as many Israelites and Israelite sympathizers he can find. If we had moderate geography skills, this would be as plain to us as killing Jews is to Iran’s president, and support for the War on Terror would undoubtedly be higher.

Hat tip to Jose Miguel Guardia via PJM.

Collected comments on Stephen Colbert’s monologue at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner.

Richard Cohen:

Colbert was not just a failure as a comedian but rude. Rude is not the same as brash. It is not the same as brassy. It is not the same as gutsy or thinking outside the box. Rudeness means taking advantage of the other person’s sense of decorum or tradition or civility that keeps that other person from striking back or, worse, rising in a huff and leaving. The other night, that person was George W. Bush.

Colbert made jokes about Bush’s approval rating, which hovers in the middle 30s. He made jokes about Bush’s intelligence, mockingly comparing it to his own. “We’re not some brainiacs on nerd patrol,” he said. Boy, that’s funny.

Colbert took a swipe at Bush’s Iraq policy, at domestic eavesdropping, and he took a shot at the news corps for purportedly being nothing more than stenographers recording what the Bush White House said. He referred to the recent staff changes at the White House, chiding the media for supposedly repeating the cliche “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic” when he would have put it differently: “This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg.” A mixed metaphor, and lame as can be.

Why are you wasting my time with Colbert, I hear you ask. Because he is representative of what too often passes for political courage, not to mention wit, in this country. His defenders—and they are all over the blogosphere—will tell you he spoke truth to power. This is a tired phrase, as we all know, but when it was fresh and meaningful it suggested repercussions, consequences—maybe even death in some countries. When you spoke truth to power you took the distinct chance that power would smite you, toss you into a dungeon or—if you’re at work—take away your office.

But in this country, anyone can insult the president of the United States. Colbert just did it, and he will not suffer any consequence at all. He knew that going in. He also knew that Bush would have to sit there and pretend to laugh at Colbert’s lame and insulting jokes. Bush himself plays off his reputation as a dunce and his penchant for mangling English. Self-mockery can be funny. Mockery that is insulting is not. The sort of stuff that would get you punched in a bar can be said on a dais with impunity. This is why Colbert was more than rude. He was a bully.

Glenn Reynolds:

I call him brave when he mocks Mohammed on the air. Until then, he’s not even a bully. He’s just a comedian, only one who’s not being very funny.

Nathan Gardels:

For those of us in the smart political set who are right about Bush being wrong in Iraq and elsewhere, it was hard to swallow. At the White House Correspondent’s Association dinner Saturday night in Washington the President embarrassingly outironicized Stephen Colbert. If, as Kierkegaard long ago understood, the capacity for ironic self-reflection is a sign of deep intelligence, what did it mean?

I surprised myself by saying to Mort Zuckerman that “a man who is that funny can’t be all bad.” And his timing was better than Jerry Seinfeld’s…

Bush may not be able to beat the Iraqi insurgents or Osama bin Laden, but he surely put Steve Colbert’s performance afterward to shame. Has he disarmed Comedy Central by being funnier than they are? I certainly thought so.

Joshua Trevino sums it all up.

H/T to Glenn Reynolds.

Big bad Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is a tough guy when it comes to cutting off the heads of hog-tied and defenseless prisoners, but Al Qaeda’s leader in Iraq clearly doesn’t do all that much fighting against armed American crusaders personally.

A captured video, released by US Centcom, shows poor Zarqawi fumbling cluelessly with a Model 249 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW) Light Machine Gun.

Muttering in Arabic, Zarqawi hefts the M 249’s unfamiliar (over 20 lbs.—9.07 kg.) loaded weight. Zarqawi is trying to blast away at full-auto, but is only able to squeeze off tentative single shots, and promptly jams up the machine gun’s action. We then discover that the brave Islamic warrior doesn’t have a clue as to how to pull back the operating lever, clear the breech, and restore operating ability.

Zarqawi looks helpless, as an obsequious (fully hooded) jihadi materializes from stage-left, to pull the handle for him, and make the gun operable. Zarqawi by now just wants to get it over with, so he simply holds down the trigger, until he’s emptied the entire magazine. Boy, I bet that barrel was hot.

Major General Rick Lynch also had a laugh at Zarqawi’s expense at the press briefing covered by AP:

“It’s supposed to be automatic fire, he’s shooting single shots. Something is wrong with his machine gun, he looks down, can’t figure out, calls his friend to come unblock the stoppage and get the weapon firing again,” Lynch said.

“This piece you all see as he walks away, he’s wearing his black uniform and his New Balance tennis shoes as he moves to this white pickup. And, his close associates around him … do things like grab the hot barrel of the machine gun and burn themselves,” the military spokesman added.

Personally, I think Zarqawi is looking a bit like the late John Belushi.
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UPDATES

Confederate Yankee gives us another choice detail:

Just seconds after Zarqawi fired dozens of rounds through the gun, he puts one of his men at extreme risk as he sweeps the machine gun’s barrel around, momentarily pointing at the terrorist’s chest without apparently activating the weapon’s safety, or even taking his finger off the trigger. Shortly after that display of stupidity, another terrorist is shown grabbing the machine gun by the still-smoking barrel, burning his hand.

Spook86 thinks Zarqawi’s incompetence may explain why the insurgents in Iraq rely so heavily on roadside bombs to attack U.S. forces.