The Washington Post concludes that we now know that “the primary source of the newspaper column in which Ms. Plame’s cover as an agent was purportedly blown in 2003 was former deputy secretary of state Richard L. Armitage” the Plame Affair story is over and dead.

Mr. Armitage was one of the Bush administration officials who supported the invasion of Iraq only reluctantly. He was a political rival of the White House and Pentagon officials who championed the war and whom Mr. Wilson accused of twisting intelligence about Iraq and then plotting to destroy him. Unaware that Ms. Plame’s identity was classified information, Mr. Armitage reportedly passed it along to columnist Robert D. Novak “in an offhand manner, virtually as gossip,” according to a story this week by the Post’s R. Jeffrey Smith, who quoted a former colleague of Mr. Armitage.

It follows that one of the most sensational charges leveled against the Bush White House—that it orchestrated the leak of Ms. Plame’s identity to ruin her career and thus punish Mr. Wilson—is untrue. The partisan clamor that followed the raising of that allegation by Mr. Wilson in the summer of 2003 led to the appointment of a special prosecutor, a costly and prolonged investigation, and the indictment of Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, on charges of perjury. All of that might have been avoided had Mr. Armitage’s identity been known three years ago.

And the Post identifies the real culprit:

it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame’s CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming—falsely, as it turned out—that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush’s closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It’s unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.

The Washington Post has joined the United States Senate in identifying former Ambassador Joseph Wilson as a liar.

One possible Renovatio design

Motorcycle News reports:

Confederate motorcycles, the US makers of the amazing Hellcat and Wraith, has unveiled its latest prototype — and it looks just as mad as its predecessors.

The Renovatio is still in concept stage but the designs and specs look pretty far down the line considering the firm has had to recover from the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, which devastated the factory.

The minimalist design is centred around a GM based v-twin engine and not much else. The engine puts out 150bhp in standard trim but there’s a supercharger option that boosts that to 190bhp.

Confederate describe the concept as “Minimal; using the fewest pieces, moving parts and systems to accomplish her dynamic mission. She is uncompromised, light weight, possesses enormous torque, is capable of extreme performance, yet has maximum real world streetable active safety. She is graceful in motion, yet potentially brutal.”

So essentially you’ll be riding an engine and not much else.

The firm has also continued the use of its massive solid carbon fibre forks which is another thing that makes it look so out of the ordinary.

Confederate Motocycles homepage: What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.

My wife is definitely going to think I’m too old.

Jonah Goldberg suggests that criticism of Bush could be sometimes (just a trifle) exaggerated.

LORD KNOWS I have my problems with President Bush. He taps the federal coffers like a monkey smacking the bar for another cocaine pellet in an addiction study. Some of his sentences give me the same sensation as falling backward in one of those “trust” exercises, in which you just have to hope things work out. Yes, the Iraq invasion has gone badly, and to deny this is to suggest that Bush meant for things to turn out this way, which is even crueler than saying he failed to get it right.

But you know what? It’s time to cut the guy some slack.

Of course, I will get hippo-choking amounts of e-mail from Bush-haters telling me that all I ever do is cut Bush slack. But these folks grade on the curve. By their standards, anything short of demanding that a live, half-starved badger be sewn into his belly flunks.

Besides, the Bush-bashers have lost credibility. The most delicious example came this week when it was finally revealed that Colin Powell’s oak-necked major-domo Richard Armitage — and not some star chamber neocon — “outed” Valerie Plame, the spousal prop of Washington’s biggest ham, Joe Wilson. Now it turns out that instead of “Bush blows CIA agent’s cover to silence a brave dissenter” — as Wilson practices saying into the mirror every morning — the story is, “One Bush enemy inadvertently taken out by another’s friendly fire.”

And then there’s Hurricane Katrina. Yes, the federal government could have responded better. And of course there were real tragedies involved in that disaster. But you know what? Bad stuff happens during disasters, which is why we don’t call them tickle-parties.

The anti-Bush chorus, including enormous segments of the mainstream media, see Katrina as nothing more than a good stick for beating on piñata Bush’s “competence.” The hypocrisy is astounding because the media did such an abysmal job covering the reality of New Orleans (contrary to their reports, there were no bands of rapists, no disproportionate deaths of poor blacks, nothing close to 10,000 dead, etc.). It seems indisputable that Katrina highlighted the tragedy of New Orleans rather than create it. Long before Katrina, New Orleans was a dysfunctional city in a state with famously corrupt and incompetent leadership, many of whose residents think that it is the job of the federal government to make everyone whole.

The Mississippi coast was hit harder by Katrina than New Orleans was. And although New Orleans’ levee failure was a unique problem — one the local leadership ignored for decades — the devastation in Mississippi was in many respects more severe. And you know what? Mississippi has the same federal government as Louisiana, and reconstruction there is going gangbusters while, after more than $120 billion in federal spending, New Orleans remains a basket case. Here’s a wacky idea: Maybe it’s not all Bush’s fault.

Then, of course, there’s the war on terror. Democrats love to note that Bush hasn’t caught Osama bin Laden yet, as if this is the most vital metric for success. Yes, it’d be nice to catch Bin Laden — no doubt Ramsey Clark, the top legal gun for both LBJ and Saddam Hussein, will be looking for a new client soon. But even nicer than catching Bin Laden is not having thousands of dead Americans in New York, Washington and L.A. Contrary to all expert predictions, there hasn’t been a successful attack on the homeland since 9/11. Indeed, the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly contains a (typically) long, exhaustively reported cover story by James Fallows about how the U.S. is in fact winning the war on terror, thanks largely to Bush’s policies (though Fallows works hard not to credit Bush).

Political dissatisfaction with the president rests entirely on Iraq and overall Bush fatigue. The rest amounts to little more than Iraq-motivated brickbats gussied up to look like free-standing complaints. That’s how hate works: It looks for more excuses to hate in the same way that fire looks for more stuff to burn.

That’s why Bush’s Democratic critics flit about like bilious butterflies, exploiting each superficial or transient problem just long enough to score some points in the polls and then moving on. Bush’s Medicare plan was an egregious corporate giveaway, they cried, until seniors overwhelmingly reported that they like it. And the Patriot Act? Can anyone even remember what the Democrats were whining about? I think it had something to do with libraries that were never searched.

Look, things could obviously be a lot better. But they could be a lot worse too. John Kerry could be president.

Keith Olbermann put “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” on his stereo, turned the volume up on high, and proceeded to explain to MSNBC’s viewers that Donald Rumsfeld was being McCarthyite by criticizing defeatism, and that Rumsfeld’s urging courage and endurance made him like Neville Chamberlain, while persons outside government, demanding appeasement, retreat, and surrender in the face of militant Islam were really all courageous Churchills.

Rick Moran already has performed the obligatory task of shredding Olberman’s nonsense in detail.

I will just observe mself that Olberman’s rant was delivered in a tendentious and partisan tone, and included insolent rhetoric, absurd allegations and expressions of wildly subjective opinion utterly and completely incompatible with the role of a supposedly objective commentator.

For example:

Mr. Rumsfeld is also personally confused, morally or intellectually, about his own standing in this matter. From Iraq to Katrina, to flu vaccine shortages, to the entire “Fog of Fear” which continues to envelope this nation – he, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their cronies, have – inadvertently or intentionally – profited and benefited, both personally, and politically.

And yet he can stand up in public, and question the morality and the intellect of those of us who dare ask just for the receipt for the Emperor’s New Clothes.

The spectacle of another empty-suit talking head climbing atop his electronic soapbox, and striking heroic poses, while insulting a variety of individuals in the current administration who left seven figure jobs heading up major business organizations to work in government as “profiting and benefiting, both personally and politically” from a syntactically confused melange of leftwing paranoid fantasies was particularly contemptible.

Former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, no democrat, evaluates the Bush administration’s policies, accomplishments, and failures.

We are at war with jihadists motivated by a violent ideology based on an extremist interpretation of the Islamic faith. This enemy is decentralized and geographically dispersed around the world. Its organizations range from a fully functioning state such as Iran to small groups of individuals in American cities.

We are fighting this war on three distinct fronts: the home front, the operational front and the strategic-political front. Let us look first at the home front. The Bush administration deserves much credit for the fact that, despite determined efforts to carry them out, there have been no successful Islamist attacks within the United States since Sept. 11, 2001. This is a significant achievement, but there are growing dangers and continuing vulnerabilities…

One of the most deep-seated of these problems is the U.S. government’s tendency to treat this war as a law enforcement issue. Following a recommendation of the Sept. 11 commission, Congress sought to remedy this problem by creating a national security service within the FBI to focus on preventive intelligence rather than forensic evidence. This has proved to be a complete failure. As late as June of this year, Mark Mershon of the FBI testified that the bureau will not monitor or surveil any Islamist unless there is a “criminal predicate.” Thus the large Islamist support infrastructure that the commission identified here in the United States is free to operate until its members actually commit a crime.

Our attempt to reform the FBI has failed. What is needed now is a separate domestic intelligence service without police powers, like the British MI-5…

Turning to the operational front, our objectives are to destroy the capability of Islamist organizations to attack us and to deny them geographic sanctuaries in which they can recruit, train and operate.

The post-Sept. 11 threat demanded preemptive attack against Islamist bases, and this was done without delay in the invasion of Afghanistan to destroy al-Qaeda and remove the Taliban government, its ally and supporter. It was a brilliantly executed operation in which all our armed forces and CIA operatives combined in a ruthlessly efficient victory. In the succeeding years, however, the Taliban and al-Qaeda have been able to regroup, rebuild and re-attack because they enjoy a secure sanctuary largely free from attack within the border areas of Pakistan.

The next military operation of the war was, of course, the invasion of Iraq. Here again the combined military operations of the United States and Britain were brilliantly successful in defeating Iraqi forces and removing Saddam Hussein and his regime. But in the aftermath of that victory, grave blunders were made. There was a total misunderstanding of the requirements for successful occupation.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was proved right in his keeping the initial invasion force small and agile, but desperately wrong in disbanding all Iraqi security forces and civil service with no plan to fill the resulting vacuum. Certainly it is hard now to understand the logic of that decision.

The military occupation in Iraq is consuming practically the entire defense budget and stretching the Army to its operational limits. This is understood quite clearly by both our friends and our enemies, and as a result, our ability to deter enemies around the world is disintegrating.

This brings us to the third front, the strategic-political. The jihadist regime in Iran feels no reservation about flaunting its policy to go nuclear, and it unleashed Hezbollah, its client terrorist organization, to attack Israel. In Somalia a jihadist group has seized control of the government. In Pakistan, Islamists are becoming more powerful, and attacks within India are increasing. Governments in Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt, Algeria and Jordan are under increasing Islamist pressure. In the Pacific, North Korea now feels free to rattle its missile sabers, firing seven on America’s Independence Day. China is rapidly building its 600-ship navy to fill the military vacuum that we are creating in the Pacific as our fleet shrinks well below critical mass. Not one of these states believes that we can undertake any credible additional military operations while we are bogged down in Iraq.

The indoctrination and recruiting of jihadists from Indonesia, South Asia and the Middle East are carried out through religious establishments that are supported overwhelmingly by the Saudi and Iranian governments. Even in the United States, some 80 percent of Islamic mosques and schools are closely aligned with the Wahhabist sect and heavily dependent on Saudi funding. Five years after Sept. 11, nothing has been done to materially affect this root source of jihadism. The movement continues to grow, fueled by an ever-increasing flow of petrodollars from the Persian Gulf.

There is no evidence that the administration has ever raised this matter with the Saudi government as a high-level issue, and—just as damaging—it has never acknowledged it as an issue to the American people. Thus Rumsfeld’s question—are we killing, capturing or deterring jihadists faster than they are being produced?—must be answered with an emphatic no.

In reviewing progress on the three fronts of this war, even the most sanguine optimist cannot yet conclude that we are winning or that we can win without some significant changes of policy.

The Scream. 1893. Oil, tempera and pastel on cardboard. Nasjonalgalleriet.

Reuters reports that Edvard Munch’s best known painting, The Scream, stolen by armed robbers in 2004 has been recovered.

Ted Frank, at Overlawyered, demonstrates that you don’t have to go all the way to Lebanon to find the mainstream media failing to apply the slightest critical standards to news items originating from the kinds of sources to whom they are sympathetic. Hezbollah and liability lawyers have a friend in the MSM. Read the whole thing.

Gas-operated semi-automatic shotguns, like the renowned Remington 1100, have been much admired for their ability to reduce recoil. Beretta’s Xtrema 2 shotguns take recoil reduction up a notch, apparently to the point of virtual elimination, as is demonstrated in this wonderfully nostalgic video of old-fashioned trick shooting used to promote a new model shotgun.

That shotgun is not cheap, but it looks like a fine semi-auto. Kudos to Beretta for some excellent advertising.

Hat tip to Henry Bernatonis.

The Washington Post reports:

The three most prosperous large counties in the United States are in the Washington suburbs, according to census figures released yesterday, which show that the region has the second-highest income and the least poverty of any major metropolitan area in the country.

Rapidly growing Loudoun County has emerged as the wealthiest jurisdiction in the nation, with its households last year having a median income of more than $98,000. It is followed by Fairfax and Howard counties, with Montgomery County not far behind.

That accumulation of suburban wealth, local economists said, is a side effect of the enormous flow of federal money into the region through contracts for defense and homeland security work in the five years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, coming after the local technology boom of the 1990s. “When you put that together . . . you have a recipe for heightened prosperity,” said Anirban Basu, an economist at a Baltimore consulting firm.

The result is that the Washington area’s households rank second in income only to those in San Jose, eclipsing such well-heeled places as San Francisco and the bedroom suburbs of New York.

We came very close to moving to Loudoun County recently.

There is write-up on a tsuba (Japanese sword guard) for which we are temporary custodian on Rich Turner’s Tosogu.com. This one has a nautical motif. Tosogu means Japanese furniture in general.

Douglas R. Burgess Jr. makes the argument again that Islamic terrorists should be being viewed legally as a contemporary species of pirate.

More than 2,000 years ago, Marcus Tullius Cicero defined pirates in Roman law as hostis humani generis, “enemies of the human race.” From that day until now, pirates have held a unique status in the law as international criminals subject to universal jurisdiction—meaning that they may be captured wherever they are found, by any person who finds them. The ongoing war against pirates is the only known example of state vs. nonstate conflict until the advent of the war on terror, and its history is long and notable. More important, there are enormous potential benefits of applying this legal definition to contemporary terrorism…

Until 1856, international law recognized only two legal entities: people and states. People were subject to the laws of their own governments; states were subject to the laws made amongst themselves. The Declaration of Paris created a third entity: people who lacked both the individual rights and protections of law for citizens and the legitimacy and sovereignty of states. This understanding of pirates as a legally distinct category of international criminals persists to the present day, and was echoed in the 1958 and 1982 U.N. Conventions on the Law of the Sea. The latter defines the crime of piracy as “any illegal acts of violence or detention, or any act of depredation, committed for private ends.” This definition of piracy as private war for private ends may hold the crux of a new legal definition of international terrorists…

TO UNDERSTAND THE POTENTIAL OF DEFINING TERRORISM as a species of piracy, consider the words of the 16th-century jurist Alberico Gentili’s De jure belli: “Pirates are common enemies, and they are attacked with impunity by all, because they are without the pale of the law. They are scorners of the law of nations; hence they find no protection in that law.” Gentili, and many people who came after him, recognized piracy as a threat, not merely to the state but to the idea of statehood itself. All states were equally obligated to stamp out this menace, whether or not they had been a victim of piracy. This was codified explicitly in the 1856 Declaration of Paris, and it has been reiterated as a guiding principle of piracy law ever since. Ironically, it is the very effectiveness of this criminalization that has marginalized piracy and made it seem an arcane and almost romantic offense. Pirates no longer terrorize the seas because a concerted effort among the European states in the 19th century almost eradicated them. It is just such a concerted effort that all states must now undertake against terrorists, until the crime of terrorism becomes as remote and obsolete as piracy.

But we are still very far from such recognition for the present war on terror. President Bush and others persist in depicting this new form of state vs. nonstate warfare in traditional terms, as with the president’s declaration of June 2, 2004, that “like the Second World War, our present conflict began with a ruthless surprise attack on the United States.” He went on: “We will not forget that treachery and we will accept nothing less than victory over the enemy.” What constitutes ultimate victory against an enemy that lacks territorial boundaries and governmental structures, in a war without fields of battle or codes of conduct? We can’t capture the enemy’s capital and hoist our flag in triumph. The possibility of perpetual embattlement looms before us.

If the war on terror becomes akin to war against the pirates, however, the situation would change. First, the crime of terrorism would be defined and proscribed internationally, and terrorists would be properly understood as enemies of all states. This legal status carries significant advantages, chief among them the possibility of universal jurisdiction. Terrorists, as hostis humani generis, could be captured wherever they were found, by anyone who found them. Pirates are currently the only form of criminals subject to this special jurisdiction.

Second, this definition would deter states from harboring terrorists on the grounds that they are “freedom fighters” by providing an objective distinction in law between legitimate insurgency and outright terrorism. This same objective definition could, conversely, also deter states from cracking down on political dissidents as “terrorists,” as both Russia and China have done against their dissidents.

Recall the U.N. definition of piracy as acts of “depredation [committed] for private ends.” Just as international piracy is viewed as transcending domestic criminal law, so too must the crime of international terrorism be defined as distinct from domestic homicide or, alternately, revolutionary activities. If a group directs its attacks on military or civilian targets within its own state, it may still fall within domestic criminal law. Yet once it directs those attacks on property or civilians belonging to another state, it exceeds both domestic law and the traditional right of self-determination, and becomes akin to a pirate band.

We previously cited Mackubin Thomas Owens’ Detainees or POWs?, which identifies Sir Michael Howard as making the same point in 2001:

The real reason the detainees are not entitled to POW status is to be found in a distinction first made by the Romans and subsequently incorporated into international law by way of medieval European jurisprudence. As the eminent military historian, Sir Michael Howard, wrote in the October 2, 2001 edition of the Times of London, the Romans distinguished between bellum, war against legitimus hostis, a legitimate enemy, and guerra, war against latrunculi — pirates, robbers, brigands, and outlaws — “the common enemies of mankind.”

The present governments of Britain and the United States have vast military resources and enormously large cabinet departments filled with trained attorneys. It speaks eloquently of the decay of our educational system internationally that this fundamentally important aperçu needs to be advanced in the remoter reaches of the blogosphere five years after 9/11.

The irascible Spengler lambastes US popular culture, particularly Rock N’ Roll. One gets the feeling that Spengler missed Disco and Rap. Lucky guy!

No other nation rejects the notion of a high culture with such vehemence, or celebrates the mediocre with such giddiness. Americans prefer to identify with what is like them, rather than emulate what is better than them. The epitome of its popular culture is a national contest to choose from among random entrants a new singing star, the “American Idol”.

Three or four generations ago, US popular culture shared a porous boundary with classical culture. The most successful musical comedy of the 1920s, Jerome Kern’s Showboat, contained classical elements requiring operatic voices. George Gershwin, the 1930s’ most popular tunesmith, prided himself on an opera, Porgy and Bess. Benny Goodman, the decade’s top jazz musician, recorded Mozart. The most successful singer of the 1930s, Bing Crosby, had a voice of classical quality. Never mind that what he sang was insipid; his listeners knew very well that they could not sing like Bing Crosby.

Americans of earlier generations, in short, listened to music that they admired but could not hope to imitate, because they looked up to a higher plane of culture and technique. Today Americans favor performers with whom they can identify precisely because they have no more technique or culture than the average drunk bellowing into a karaoke machine. Taste descended by degrees. Frank Sinatra sounded more average than Bing Crosby; Elvis Presley more average than Sinatra; The Beatles more average than Elvis; and Bruce Springsteen (or Madonna) about as average as one can get, until American Idol came along to elevate what was certified to average.

The dominant popular style of the 1930s, Swing, required in essence the same skills as did classical music. By the early 1950s, every adolescent with a newly acquired guitar could hope to follow in the acne-pitted footsteps of Bill Haley or Buddy Holly. This was “a voice that came from you and me”, as Don McLean intoned in his mawkish ode to Holly, America Pie (1972). That was just the problem.

Stylistically, rock ‘n’ roll offered little novelty. It drew upon the music of rural resentment, the country and hillbilly music that appealed to failing farmers at county fairs and honky-tonks. Rural America began its Depression a decade before the rest of the country, and country music developed as a parallel culture before Hollywood adopted singing cowboys such as Gene Autrey and Roy Rogers during the 1930s. Hard-time country audiences preferred the hard edge of a Hank Williams to the mellifluous crooners who charmed the urban audience.

What requires explanation is how the whining, nasal, querulous style of country music came to dominate national taste with the rock ‘n’ roll of the 1950s. The species leap from the county fair to The Ed Sullivan Show occurred because the United States, for the first time in its history, had spawned a distinctive youth culture. That is, the postwar generation of American adolescents was the first with sufficient spending power to afford its own culture. Before World War I, adolescents went to work. The years after World War II produced an unprecedented level of affluence, and teenagers for the first time had money to spend on records, instruments and cars. Young people are as resentful as they are narcissistic, and the easily reproduced, droning complaint of country music satisfied both criteria.

The resentful country folk who formed the first audience for the now-dominant style in American music turn up in literature as noble, suffering peasants fighting for a traditional way of life, as in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Nothing could be further from the truth. American farmers were migratory entrepreneurs who did well during World War I, when agricultural exports surged, and very badly during the 1920s, when exports fell, and even worse during the 1930s. Country people were resentful because they were becoming poorer. That was unfortunate, but feeling sorry for one’s self is no excuse to inflict the likes of Hank Williams on the world. The object of high art is to lift the listener out of the misery of his personal circumstance by showing him a better world in which his petty troubles are beside the point. What is the point of music that assists the listener in wallowing in his troubles? Some country-music fanciers no doubt will find this callous, and I want to disclose that I do not care one way or another whether their wife left them, their dog died, or their truck broke down.

Word-play aside, what does this have to do with idolatry? Resentment is simply an expression of envy, the first and deadliest of sins. Adam and Eve envied God’s knowledge of good and evil, Cain envied Abel, Ishmael envied Isaac, Esau envied Jacob, Joseph’s brothers envied the favorite son, and the Gentiles envied the nation of Israel. Why reject what comes from on high to worship one’s own image, unless you resent the higher authority?

The culture of resentment runs so deep in the American character that the self-pitying drone of immiserated farmers, amplified by the petulant adolescents of the 1950s as a remonstration against parental authority, now dominates the musical life of American Christians. Not only Christian country, but Christian rock and Christian heavy metal have become mainstream commercial genre. I agree with the minority of Christians who eschew Christian rock as “the music of the devil”, although not for the same reasons: it is immaterial whether Christian rock substitutes “Jesus Christ” for “Peggy Sue”, permitting its listeners to associate putatively Christian music with secular music with implied sexual content. It is diabolical because the style itself is born of resentment.

He clearly likes Broadway musicals and Swing, which effectively impeaches Spengler’s taste in my own view. Not to overlook all the problems with using “Spengler” as a soubriquet for someone writing from a traditionalist perspective. Oswald Spengler was a seriously unsound thinker. He was an historicist, i.e. he believed history unfolded in predictable cycles, based on mystical principles. Worse yet, he was a socialist and an authoritarian.

I’m going to go put on Joan Jett doing I Love Rock N’ Roll.

1 Dead, 15 injured

There has been another case of Islamic murder by motor vehicle. The SF Chronicle reports:

As many as 14 people were injured this afternoon by a motorist who drove around San Francisco deliberately running them down before being arrested by police, who believe the same driver struck and killed a man earlier today in Fremont.

At least one hit-and-run victim remained in critical condition this evening.

Reports of the incidents began pouring in at 12:47 p.m., police said.

Within a half-hour, San Francisco police had cornered and arrested 29-year-old Omeed Aziz Popal, who has addresses in Ceres (Stanislaus County) and Fremont.

Authorities suspect Popal was the same driver who ran over and killed a 54-year-old man in Fremont around noon….

Mayor Gavin Newsom visited five of the victims at San Francisco General Hospital.

“This was so senseless and inexplicable,’’ the mayor said afterward.

Note how the Chronicle, in the case of this kind of story, carefully overlooks parallels, and fails to discern any possible religious motivation.

Gateway Pundit has a link collection.

videos

Yesterday evening, I caught a film, running on IFC, written and directed, by a more recent Yale graduate than most I know personally, Derek Simonds ‘94, titled Seven and a Match.

It was a rather depressing Gen X-ers’ version of Big Chill, in which late 20’s friends from Yale re-unite at one of their group’s family home in Maine.

The hostess Ellie (Tina Holmes) is in bad shape. Her parents were killed in a car crash, leaving Ellie nothing but the house, whose taxes alone she cannot cover from her own income. Ellie used to work at a camp for disabled children. Driven to desperation, Ellie has gone into a tail-spin, losing her job, selling her house’s furniture to get by, and scheming to burn it down for the insurance. Her college friends have been invited to supply cover for the intended arson.

It’s one of those weekends: renewing old friendships and animosities, status insecurities, fear of commitment, drinking, infidelities abound. Two girls cheat on their down-market boyfriends, but decide they want them after all, when the boyfriends start to walk out.

I was finding the film depressing, until there came a great moment.

After dinner, the gang retires to the living room to chat. Ellie reveals her problems and her plan, and the friends are not eager to participate, so Ellie sulks off to bed. Before long, struggling actor Sid (Eion Bailey) and bad blonde Whit (Heather Donahue, best known for the Blair Witch Project) are left alone, pouring down shots, and reminiscing about old times. “I had sex with Blair in that very chair,” boasts Sid, adding details about glassware broken during moments of passion. Whit rises, dims the lights, and pats the chair by way of invitation.

When he sits down, she climbs into his lap, then pauses, and observes: “There is something I like to say on occasions like this.” ...pause.. “It has become something of a tradition.” ....longer pause… and throwing back her head… “I’m really drunk!”

A line like that will make you forgive a lot in a movie.

There is now a web-site collecting those overheard moments of New York surrealism.

Non-Ivy-Leaguer: So where do you go to school?
Ivy-Leaguer: Princeton.
Non-Ivy-Leaguer: California? That’s awesome.
—5th Ave between 26th & 27th
Overheard by: Shocked Onlooker
———————————————————————————
The Widely-Shared Janet Reno Fantasy
Hipster #1: Man, she is so hot.
Hipster #2: Oh yeah.
Hipster #1: But sometimes she looks like a guy.
Hipster #2: True.
—Outside Shea Stadium
———————————————————————————
Grandpa: Honey, take off your shoes and put them on the belt.
5-Year-Old granddaughter: Me?!
Grandpa: Yes, everyone has to take off their shoes.
Granddaughter: But me?! Really?!
Grandpa: Yes, you too.
Granddaughter: What kind of airport is this?!
—JFK

Hat tip to Karen Myers.

J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, and John Irving read from their books, and answered audience questions, in two benefit performances for Doctors Without Borders and The Haven Foundation at Radio City Music Hall in New York City on August 1st and 2nd.

J.K. Rowling (note her shoes) reads from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

video

Rowling is very cute, but I would not have linked any of this, except for the Question & Answer session, in which her questioner proves to be Salman Rushdie, who asks a very good one.

video

This link arrived via my college class email list this morning.

video

Hat tip to Michael Lawler.

Amanda at Think Progress reports the current state of New Orleans on the eve of Katrina’s one year anniversary:

— Less than half of the city’s pre-storm population of 460,000 has returned, putting the population at roughly what it was in 1880.

— Nearly a third of the trash has yet to be picked up.

— Sixty percent of homes still lack electricity.

— Seventeen percent of the buses are operational.

— Half of the physicians have left, and there is a shortage of 1,000 nurses.

— Six of the nine hospitals remain closed.

— Sixty-six percent of public schools have reopened.

— A 40 percent hike in rental rates, disproportionately affecting black and low-income families.

— A 300 percent increase in the suicide rate.

Eighty-four percent of New Orleans residents rate the government’s recovery efforts negatively, , while 66 percent believe the recovery money has been “mostly wasted.”

Standing in Jackson Square on Sept. 15, President Bush stated, “This government will learn the lessons of Hurricane Katrina” and promised to “get the work done quickly.”

$117 billions in federal allocations for last years’ hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma is not enough. George W. Bush is somehow personally at fault for local inefficiency and corruption in the same New Orleans which re-elected clownish Mayor Ray Nagin.

One year, and billions upon billions of federal recovery assistance dollars later, a corrupt and dysfunctional city with incompetent pols sitting atop a corrupt one-party political system is still whining and blaming everybody but itself. And New Orleans has still got its hand out, looking for more pity and more other people’s dollars.

Galveston was far worse devastated in 1900 by a hurricane featuring 135 mph winds which killed as many as 12,000 people (out of 42,000), and which caused Galveston forever to cease to be a major port and a major city. But the people in Galveston didn’t blame the president and the federal government for their troubles. They didn’t look for free trailers and two thousand dollar ATM cards, and they did not expect the rest of the country to rebuild their uninsured property.

A lot of people in New Orleans, and on the left generally, are simply avoiding facing the obvious moral that the practice of shifting all responsibility for your fate onto the distant shoulders of a variety of complex and impersonal federal bureaucracies does not always produce a very desirable result, no matter how much money gets spent.

California Governor Schwarzenegger has signed a Republican-sponsored bill, acceding to the wishes of the Vietnamese community-in-exile in California, which will allow the flag of the fallen Republic of South Vietnam to be flown in California displays of the flags of world nations, instead of the Communist flag of North Vietnam.

California state buildings and parks now have the governor’s blessing to fly the former flag of South Vietnam during holidays and special occasions.

At an impromptu stop in Little Saigon on Saturday morning, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the long-awaited symbolic measure that gives the yellow flag with three red stripes the state’s official recognition.

About 10 states and over a dozen California cities and counties already have done so.

Schwarzenegger praised the Vietnamese immigrant community for its courage, vitality and cultural and economic contribution to the state.

Most Vietnamese immigrants fled their country after the communists’ victory and feel contempt for the country’s current red flag.

Vietnamese leaders have pushed for the traditional flag’s recognition for years, said Assemblyman Van Tran, R-Westminster.

The move gained momentum last month when Assemblywoman Lynn Daucher, R-Fullerton, who is running for state Senate in the district covering Little Saigon, appealed to the governor for help.

Both Schwarzenegger and Tran endorsed Daucher in her bid.

Among registered Vietnamese-born voters in Orange County, Republicans outnumber Democrats 2-to-1.

On Friday, the word spread that the move was final, and hundreds of Vietnamese gathered at the Rose Center in Westminster to cheer.

Wheel comes off race car, posing hazard to other drivers on the course.

video

Steve Bodio quotes the Norman chaplain Gace de la Buigne (from Roman des deduis written c.1359-1377):

De chiens, d’oyseaux, d’armes, d’amours,

Pour une joye, cent doulours.

[With hunting dogs, falcons, wars, and women

For every joy, a hundred pains.]

and a Randy Newman parody reflecting the fact that the same hierarchy of status of hunting hawks tends to prevail today as in Gace’s time.

Rod Liddle, in the Sunday London Times, reads the eulogy at the funeral service for multiculturalism in Britain.

Quick, somebody buy a wreath. Last week marked the passing of multiculturalism as official government doctrine. No longer will opponents of this corrosive and divisive creed be silenced simply by the massed Pavlovian ovine accusation: “Racist!” Better still, the very people who foisted multiculturalism upon the country are the ones who have decided that it has now outlived its usefulness — that is, the political left.

It is amazing how a few by-election shocks and some madmen with explosive backpacks can concentrate the mind. At any rate, British citizens, black and white, can move onwards together — towards a sunlit upland of monoculturalism, or maybe zeroculturalism, whatever takes your fancy…

Some 22 years ago Ray Honeyford, the previously obscure headmaster of Drummond middle school in Bradford, suggested, in the low-circulation right-wing periodical The Salisbury Review, that his Asian pupils should really be better integrated into British society.

They should learn English, for a start, and a bit of British history and a sense of what the country is about; further, Asian (Muslim) girls should be allowed to learn to swim despite the objections of their parents (who did not like them stripping down even in front of each other). Muslim kids should be treated like every other pupil, in other words.

For these mild contentions, Honeyford was investigated by the government, vilified as a racist by the press, ridiculed every day by leftie demonstrators outside his office and was eventually hounded from his job. He has not worked since.

Perhaps it will be a consolation to him, as he sits idly in his neat, small, semi-detached house in Bury, Lancashire, that he has now been comprehensively outflanked on the far right by a whole bunch of Labour politicians, including at least one minister, and indeed the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality. Then again, perhaps it won’t.

It is impossible to overstate the magnitude of this shift. To give you an example of the lunacy that prevailed back in Honeyford’s time: then, the Commission for Racial Equality was happy to instruct Britain’s journalists that Chinese people were henceforth to be described as “black” because that, objectively, was their subjective political experience at the hands of the oppressive white hegemony.

I don’t suppose they asked the Chinese if they minded this appellation or derogation — the question would not even have occurred.

By definition, people who were “not-white” — from Beijing to Barbados — were banded together in their oppression and implacable opposition to the prevailing white culture and thus united in their political aspirations. People from Baluchistan, Tobago and Bangladesh were defined solely by their lack of whiteness.

This was, when you think about it, a quintessentially racist assumption, as well as being authoritarian and — as the writer Kenan Malik puts it — “anti-human”.

We are not born with a gene that insists we become Muslim or Christian or Rastafarian. We are born, all of us, with a tabula rasa; we are not defined by the nationality or religion or cultural assumptions of our parents. But that was the mindset which, at that time, prevailed.

This is how far we have come in the past year or so. When an ICM poll of Britain’s Muslims in February this year revealed that some 40% (that is, about 800,000 people) wished to see Islamic law introduced in parts of Britain, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality responded by saying that they should therefore pack their bags and clear off. Sir Trevor Phillips’s exact words were these: “If you want to have laws decided in another way, you have to live somewhere else.”

My guess is this: if such a statement had been made by a member of the Tory party’s Monday Club in 1984 — or, for that matter, 1994 — he would have been excoriated and quite probably would have been kicked out of the party. “If you don’t like it here then go somewhere else” was once considered the apogee of “racism”. People who did not like it here were exhorted to exert their political muscle and change the status quo…

It has transpired that this was the final triumph of multiculturalism — to create within British society a sizeable body of people who have been assured that it is absolutely fine not to integrate because, if we’re honest, the prevailing culture is worthless: oppressive and decadent. People who are, as a result, perhaps terminally estranged and who have been relentlessly encouraged in their sense of alienation.

The news that the bombers of July 7 last year and those who allegedly plotted to blow up a whole bunch of aeroplanes were British born apparently came as a shock to the government. Well, it did not come as a shock to those of us who viewed multiculturalism as both dangerous and inherently racist.

It seemed, to people like Honeyford, a simple case of cause and effect. In the end, it is not the mad mullahs at whom we should direct our wrath, but the white liberals who enabled them to prosper. That the creed has now been binned should be a cause for celebration; but don’t for a moment expect an admission that they got it wrong in the first place.

Michael Issikoff himself reveals in Newsweek, that a forthcoming book he co-authored with the Nation’s Washington editor Davd Cornidentifies Robert Novak’s source for Valerie Plame’s employment as the long-suspected Richard Armitage.

In the early morning of Oct. 1, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell received an urgent phone call from his No. 2 at the State Department. Richard Armitage was clearly agitated. As recounted in a new book, “Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War,” Armitage had been at home reading the newspaper and had come across a column by journalist Robert Novak. Months earlier, Novak had caused a huge stir when he revealed that Valerie Plame, wife of Iraq-war critic Joseph Wilson, was a CIA officer. Ever since, Washington had been trying to find out who leaked the information to Novak. The columnist himself had kept quiet. But now, in a second column, Novak provided a tantalizing clue: his primary source, he wrote, was a “senior administration official” who was “not a partisan gunslinger.” Armitage was shaken. After reading the column, he knew immediately who the leaker was…

Armitage, a well-known gossip who loves to dish and receive juicy tidbits about Washington characters, apparently hadn’t thought through the possible implications of telling Novak about Plame’s identity. “I’m afraid I may be the guy that caused this whole thing,” he later told Carl Ford Jr., State’s intelligence chief. Ford says Armitage admitted to him that he had “slipped up” and told Novak more than he should have. “He was basically beside himself that he was the guy that f—-ed up. My sense from Rich is that it was just chitchat,” Ford recalls in “Hubris,” to be published next week by Crown and co-written by the author of this article and David Corn, Washington editor of The Nation magazine.

As it turned out, Novak wasn’t the only person Armitage talked to about Plame. Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward has also said he was told of Plame’s identity in June 2003. Woodward did not respond to requests for comment for this article, but, as late as last week, he referred reporters to his comments in November 2005 that he learned of her identity in a “casual and offhand” conversation with an administration official he declined to identify. According to three government officials, a lawyer familiar with the case and an Armitage confidant, all of whom would not be named discussing these details, Armitage told Woodward about Plame three weeks before talking to Novak. Armitage has consistently refused to discuss the case; through an assistant last week he declined to comment for this story. Novak would say only: “I don’t discuss my sources until they reveal themselves.”

The left has never really yearned for Armitage’s scalp. however, since:

Armitage was a member of the administration’s small moderate wing. Along with his boss and good friend, Powell, he had deep misgivings about President George W. Bush’s march to war. A barrel-chested Vietnam vet who had volunteered for combat, Armitage at times expressed disdain for Dick Cheney and other administration war hawks who had never served in the military. Armitage routinely returned from White House meetings shaking his head at the armchair warriors. “One day,” says Powell’s former chief of staff Larry Wilkerson, “we were walking into his office and Rich turned to me and said, ‘Larry, these guys never heard a bullet go by their ears in anger … None of them ever served. They’re a bunch of jerks’.”

Captain Ed puts all this into the proper perspective, which reflects abysmally on both Patrick Fitzgerald and Richard Armitage:

This means that the Department of Justice knew the source of the Plame leak within four months of its occurrence. It also knew that the leak had no malicious intent. Patrick Fitzgerald, who almost certainly knew of it within the first days of his investigation, never attempted to indict the man whom he knew leaked the information. Why, then, has Fitzgerald’s mandate continued after the first week of October?

Fitzgerald took the case on September 26. If this book is accurate about its dates, the DoJ and Fitzgerald would have known about Armitage’s role as the source of the leak five days later. Instead of either charging Armitage or closing down the investigation, Fitzgerald went on a witch hunt. He didn’t even talk to Scooter Libby until two weeks after Armitage’s confession. A year later, Fitzgerald had reporters Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper imprisoned for contempt of court for refusing to divulge a source about a leaker from whom Fitzgerald had already received a confession.

This shows the danger of independent investigators who answer to star chambers instead of the elected representatives that have electoral accountability. The entire Fitzgerald investigation is a massive waste of money and energy, an ego project for one man, a wild-goose chase without the goose. Up to now, we all thought that Armitage never came forward or did so much later in the process. This time line shows Fitzgerald as a dangerous Cotton Mather with a briefcase. What else should we think of a prosecutor who hauls people into court and jails them for contempt when his culprit confessed at the very beginning?

Addendum: The more I think about this, the angrier I get—and not just at Patrick Fitzgerald. Richard Armitage confessed to the DoJ in October 2003, and then sat on his ass for the next three years as the media and the Left play this into a paranoid fantasy of conspiracies and revenge. I know Armitage dislikes Rove, Libby, Cheney, and Bush, but what kind of man sits around while the world accuses people of a “crime” that he himself committed? Armitage did nothing while the nation spent years and millions of dollars chasing a series of red herrings, never speaking out to remove the mystery and end the witch hunt. Even three years later, Armitage hasn’t mustered the testicular fortitude to publicly admit that he leaked Plame’s identity and status; he has Isikoff and Corn do it for him.

Michelle Malkin provides (as usual) an excellent link collection, including video.

I find it rather depressing to live in a time in which everyone seems to think that it’s perfectly acceptable to change one’s convictions under duress.

Depkafile:

On the face of it, conversion to Islam would appear to provide a painless escape device for any hostage who happens to fall into fundamentalist terrorist hands. After all, once free, the hostage can always revert to his real faith or non-faith. It is hard to blame the two Fox News journalists, the American Steve Centanni, 60, and the New Zealander, Olaf Wiig, 36, for taking that path on to buy their way out of an uncertain fate at the hands of Palestinian terrorists — especially as they later reported they were forced to make the gesture at gunpoint.

and the poltroonery does not stop there. Depkafile reports:

Various Palestinian middlemen were used by British agents at the request of the US to bring the Fox journalists home. They worked out a convoluted deal which entailed their public conversion to Islam, an anti-American harangue on air and a six-figure cash ransom paid under the table to Dughmush to fund his terrorist militia’s operations in Gaza. While the first two parts of the ransom were publicly aired, the third part will no doubt be vehemently denied. But the face remains that a terrorist chief who freelances for at least three fundamentalist terrorist organizations walks free with a strong incentive to develop his profitable hostage-taking business.

For Israel, the fate of Gilead Shalit, whom Hamas kidnapped from sovereign Israel in a cross-border assault, is left up in the air. Israel did not link him to the two Fox journalists; Hamas did. The Americans, the New Zealanders and the British worked fast to separate the two abduction episodes. Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, who says he does not sleep at night for worrying about Shalit and the two Israelis in Hizballah hands, did not take advantage of the subsequent abductions of Centanni and Wiig to have him included in the package for their release. He must have known that the two journalists would not have been released without the say-so of the Hamas group holding the Israeli soldier. This was a card Olmert did not play.

All that remains to be found out now about this shabby episode is the size of the rake-off the Palestinian warlord Dughmush has handed over from his ransom to Shalit’s Hamas abductors.

No wonder the wogs have no respect for the West.

Zakaria Dughmush’s photo did not come from Google

Mossad-mouthpiece Depkafile is dishing out the dirt on the Fox News kidnapping. The not-always-reliable Israel-based source claims:

Palestinian warlord Zakaria Dughmush kidnapped the Fox News journalists on behalf of Hamas.

The Hamas team which abducted Israeli soldier Gilead Shalit on June 25 sought to ease the pressure for his release by staging a more spectacular snatch. For this reason, they hired Zakaria Dughmush and his masked men to capture the two Fox News journalists in Gaza City on Aug. 14.

Although their fates are intertwined, the American Steve Centanni, 60, and New Zealander Olaf Wiig, 36, are not being held in the same place as Gilead Shalit. The Fox journalists are thought to be hidden in Gaza City by the gang which kidnapped him, while Shalit is in a Hamas team’s hands, either in Rafah or Khan Younes in the southern Gaza Strip.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s exclusive sources on Aug. 25 identified the kidnapper as Dughmush, a former follower of the late Jemal Semhadana, head of the Palestinian Popular Resistance Committees who was killed in Rafah by rockets fired from an Israeli warplane on June 8, 2006.

Semhadana was the first Palestinian terrorist to attack Americans. He staged the bombing attack of October 15, 2003 on a US embassy convoy from Tel Aviv as it drove past Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip.

Three American security officers died in that attack.

After Semhadana’s death, his PRC fragmented into several small militias, one of them led by Dughmush, a rabid fundamentalist who set up base in Gaza City. He was adopted by Hamas, but also draws funds and weapons from al Qaeda and Hizballah elements working together in the Gaza Strip.

Our counter-terror sources reveal that Dughmush was handed the contract to kidnap one or more Americans by the abductors of the Israeli soldier when their efforts to negotiate a prisoner swap broke down. Hamas ended up refusing the quid pro quo of a promise by Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, already deposited with Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, to release 600 Palestinian prisoners. They held out for a simultaneous trade and then withdrew from the talks.

They turned to Dughmush when pressure built up to end the episode from many quarters, including the Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniya, the Egyptians and the head of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas.

Because neither set of abductors wanted Palestinians branded as kidnappers of Americans, they invented a group no one had heard of, calling it the Brigades of the Holy Jihad. This phantom group released a communiqué and videotape Wednesday, August 23, demanding the release within 72 hours of Muslim prisoners in American jails. The deadline was up Saturday noon with no word from the abductors.

Nothing had been said about the fate of the captives if the deadline was not met.

With three hostages in hand, the Palestinian terrorists expect a higher price for their release, such as a large number of Palestinians held in Israel and possibly the United States as well.

DEBKAfile adds:

Mahmoud Abbas and Ismail Haniya both know exactly who kidnapped Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig. They are embarrassed enough to go through the motions of protesting the abductions, but not enough to take real action to put a stop to the Hamas scheme of holding the two Fox journalists hostage to raise the ante for the Israeli soldier.

The British West Country Farmhouse Cheesemakers are convinced that cows pick up regional accents from their owners. Some of the farmers believe they can detect an echo of their own Somersetshire drawl in the voices of the British Friesians (what we call “Holsteins”).

Reuters

The Hindustan Times reports a Pakistani legislature from Chitral (the northernmost district in the North-West Frontier Province) protesting his province’s innocence in exactly the manner which arouses the most suspicion.

US intelligence agencies’ reports suggesting that Al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden was present in Chitral are “unauthentic and unjustified”, Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) legislator Maulana Abdul Akbar Chitrali has said.

“Neither have we sheltered anybody nor will we tolerate foreign interference in the area,” the Daily Times quoted Chitrali as saying.

Raising a point of order in the National Assembly on Friday, Chitrali said that the mountainous Chitral area shared a border with five countries, but “was completely peaceful”.

He said that the CIA and FBI had set up offices in Chitral, but had left the area after locals protested their presence.

A couple of days ago, a US official had said that Laden was living comfortably in a house, possibly with a family and no more than two bodyguards.

And here’s the US anonymous source rumor.

The spectacular scenery, a typically booming economy, and a climate which permits you to grow lemons and avocados in your backyard makes Californians seem rather spoiled to the rest of us. Californians typically express their appreciation for all their good fortune by the cultivation as a local art form of cloaking an unlimited sense of entitlement in the rhetoric of idealism.

How do you keep the other fellow (who actually owns the land) from doing anything with it that might deprive you of the pleasure of looking at it undeveloped? You just come up with an appropriate worthy cause: protecting some purportedly endangered amphibian, rodent or weed; avoiding sprawl; maintaining open space; and voila! You get to keep out the riff raff, and be spiritually enlightened too.

Today’s Wall Street Journal describes the plight of the Mexican immigrant worker in Monterey County renting out a room in the 1000 sq. ft. house that cost him half a million dollars, and still spending 70% of his income on his mortgage payment.

Meanwhile, Reuters describes the accelerating middle class exodus from idyllic coastal California to the baking hot interior Central Valley (renowned for its 110 degree temperatures) in search of affordable housing.

OAKLAND, California – Father Mark Wiesner has grown accustomed to wishing parishioners bon voyage as they flee the San Francisco area’s high housing costs for California’s Central Valley, where developers are increasingly transforming farms and ranches into a new suburbia.

“So many young couples I marry have to go to Modesto or Tracy to start their married lives,” said Wiesner, a Catholic priest in Oakland on the San Francisco Bay. “They simply can’t afford to stay here in the Bay area and to buy a single-family dwelling.”

Tracy and Modesto are 50 and 80 miles east of Oakland respectively. Both have seen blistering growth in recent years amid a middle-class exodus from California’s famed coastal urban centers in search of affordable housing.

Analysts say the middle-class flight will press on even if coastal home prices sag amid a national housing slowdown. Home prices near the state’s coastline would need to collapse to make buying a home there possible for many households.

Barring a collapse, ever more Californians will call the state’s Central Valley home because homes there are relatively affordable. July’s median home price in San Francisco was $771,000, compared with $438,000 in San Joaquin County roughly 60 miles to the east, according to real estate information service DataQuick Information Systems.

Southern California is seeing a similar exodus to Riverside and San Bernardino counties, known as the region’s Inland Empire, from Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties.

“Having been in the house market in Los Angeles, I can tell you a house with little bit of privacy and space to call your own is pretty hard to come by,” said economist Christopher Thornberg of the consulting firm Beacon Economics. “For many people getting out to that Inland Empire is the only way to really have a backyard for the kids.”

National Geographic has a video of American Everest climbing team leader Daniel Mazur discussing his May 26, 2006 rescue of 50 year old Australian author Lincoln Hall from a narrow ridge 28,000 feet high on Mount Everest.

Hall, disoriented and suffering from cerebral edema, was abandoned to die the previous day by Russian expedition 7 Summits Club leader Alexander Abramov. Thomas Weber, a partially blind climber with the same expedition, making the ascent to raise money for charity, died the same day.

BBC report.

Ten days earlier, David Sharp was left to die on the mountain by 40 climbers who passed by the striken climber in the course of their ascents.

James Lileks has some sardonic reflections on the contemporary art scene in the Age of Islamic Terror. Read the whole thing.

Sign of the times: Type “naked woman cuddling dead pig” into Google, and your first result is not one of those horrid pervy sites whose pictures make you want to bleach your eyeballs.

No, you get a review of a British performance artist. For four hours she hugged a porker while spectators filed past and thought: “There’s something you don’t see every day, a fact that might be conclusive evidence of a benevolent God.”

Naturally, she got a grant for the project; public pounds paid for the dead pig, which she stabbed with a knife in order to bond with the corpse. Bring the kids! And the next time you’re in the grocery store holding some bacon, consider taking off your clothes and selling tickets. You might make enough money to make bail…

It’s hard to convince Britain’s radicalized immigrants to assimilate if it means they must pay for some naked lady getting jiggy with piggy. These are the values of the West? We must pay for this, and you call it freedom?

Good question. What is Western culture all about these days, anyway? Little but narcissism, lassitude, sneers and muted despair, it seems. No, correct that; it’s European/U.S. elite culture that seems unmoored. Standard lowbrow American culture is quite clear about what it likes: snakes on planes, loud cars going around in circles with the occasional airborne detour into the stands, high-quality TV shows, mediocre pop music, naked people without the whole arty pig thing.

It’s generally confident and not particularly self-reflective, which leaves the “elite” stratum of the arts worlds to face the true hard issues of our times. Like pig-hugging and the threat to democracy posed by Joe McCarthy.

DEBKAfile reports that American experts are currently in Israel looking at the Israeli EW experience during the fighting with Hezbollah.

The American EW experts are interested in four areas. 1. The Israeli EW systems’ failure to block Hizballah’s command and communications and the links between the Lebanese command and the Syria-based Iranian headquarters. 2. How Iranian technicians helped Hizballah eavesdrop on Israel’s communications networks and mobile telephones, including Israeli soldiers’ conversations from inside Lebanon. 3. How Iranian EW installed in Lebanese army coastal radar stations blocked the Barak anti-missile missiles aboard Israeli warships, allowing Hizballah to hit the Israeli corvette Hanith. 4. Why Israeli EW was unable to jam the military systems at the Iranian embassy in Beirut, which hosted the underground war room out of which Hassan Nasrallah and his top commanders, including Imad Mughniyeh, functioned.

Until the watershed date of July 12, 2006, when the Hizballah triggered the Lebanon War, Israel was accounted an important world power in the development of electronic warfare systems — so much so that a symbiotic relationship evolved for the research and development of many US and Israeli electronic warfare systems, in which a mix of complementary American and Israeli devices and methods were invested.

In combat against Hizballah, both were not only found wanting, but had been actively neutralized, so that none performed the functions for which they were designed. This poses both the US and Israel with a serious problem in a further round of the Lebanon war and any military clash with Iran.

DEBKAfile’s military sources add: Both intelligence services underestimated the tremendous effort Iran invested in state of the art electronic warfare gadgetry designed to disable American military operations in Iraq and IDF functions in Israel and Lebanon. Israel’s electronic warfare units were taken by surprise by the sophisticated protective mechanisms attached to Hizballah’s communications networks, which were discovered to be connected by optical fibers which are not susceptible to electronic jamming.

American and Israeli experts realize now that they overlooked the key feature of the naval exercise Iran staged in the Persian Gulf last April: Iran’s leap ahead in electronic warfare. They dismissed most the weapons systems as old-fashioned. But among them were the C-802 cruise missile and several electronic warfare systems, both of which turned up in the Lebanon war with deadly effect.

Glaciers shrinking. Cause: Global Warming.

Glaciers growing. Cause: Global Warming.

India Defense reports very large scale Chinese military exercises.

The Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) personnel and 1,000 tanks were involved in a major military exercise recently to test their ability to engage in high-technology combat.

More than 20,000 personnel participated in the exercise code-named “North Sword—0607(S)”, organised by the PLA Beijing Area Command at a north China training base.

It was the first joint exercise involving troops from a PLA area command, the Air Force, the Second Artillery, and the Chinese People’s Armed Police, Xinhua news agency quoted military sources as saying.

A thousand tanks, armoured vehicles and troop carriers were involved in “fierce battles” on the site covering 1,000 square kilometres, it said.

The “Red Army” division was armed with information equipment and conducted a series of drills to test long-distance manoeuvrability under complicated conditions, while under assault from “Blue Army” troops, using “electromagnetic” equipment.

Thirty-five experts from the PLA’s National University of Defence were on hand to monitor and assess procedures.

Top Chinese leaders have repeatedly asked the PLA to be prepared to wage hi-tech future wars. The 2.5 million-strong PLA is concerned over Taiwan’s acquisition of high-tech weaponry, including F-16s and warships from the United States.

Victor David Hanson thinks Bush is doing the right thing, but faces some very serious problems in keeping the American public’s support while trying to fight a less-than-total war.

Only a reincarnated Chamberlain or Daladier could think that there is no Islamist commonality between the recent hostage-taking of Western telejournalists on the West Bank, Iranian threats to extinguish Israel and end the American presence in the Gulf, terrorist attacks on soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, plans of killing thousands in Britain and Germany, or plots to blow up American airliners in London — as if Japanese fascists, Italian fascists, and German fascists could not have made war in unison against the liberal democracies given their differing agendas and sects, and lack of coordination.

And even when the Islamists do not succeed, their threats and rhetoric cripple the West: when Mr. Ahmadinejihad rants about wiping Israel off the face of the map or sending gunboats into the Gulf, he garners a few billion extra in annual petrodollars due to the frenzy of oil speculators. A few foiled terrorists in London still managed to force millions of people into humiliating searches of their carry-on luggage, and cost the West untold millions in lost flights, delays, and inconvenience.

In fact, the current strategy of having removed the two most odious dictatorships — the Taliban and Saddam Hussein’s — and fostering democracies in their places remains the only sensible course. Far from winning this war for the future of the Middle East, Syria, and Iran are increasingly isolated, desperate to thwart democratization that surrounds their borders in Turkey, Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, and Lebanon, and facing world sanctions for their roguery. For all its messiness, the promotion of democratic reform infuriates the Islamists and paid-off Arab journalists and intellectual toadies alike, and ultimately works in our favor.

But right now the real problem has been the necessity of reversing the order of traditional postwar democratization. The old calculus was first the proverbial horse of defeating and vanquishing utterly the enemy; then the cart of showing magnanimity in rebuilding the country of a contrite loser. Only in that order would the Americans be willing to give millions to the former supporters of once murderous Nazis, Italian fascists, or imperial Japanese who had killed and maimed their sons.

In the Middle East, we reversed the sequence, on the idealistic — and I think correct — premise that the Afghan and Iraqi people were captive to their dictators, and that we wished to avoid an all-encompassing conflict along the lines of World War II. In other words, we trusted that the Taliban and Saddam Hussein explained the recent savagery of the Afghans and Iraqis, rather than the innate savagery of the Afghans and Iraqis themselves explaining the creation of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. The result of this confidence, despite the carnage of war, was that democracy was ushered in, the rogues were to be kept out, and peace was supposed to follow from a grateful, liberated people.

But why should it, when the hard hand of American war was not first completely felt — nor the jihadists utterly vanquished and discredited and any who supported them? Unless there is some element of fear, or at least the suggestion of consequences to come for recalcitrance, why should an Iraqi cease his easy support of Hezbollah, his anti-Semitism, or his cheap support for Islamist terrorists around the block? It would be as if we expected to end slavery outright in the Confederacy around 1862, or rid Germany of Nazis around 1943, or persuade the Japanese fascists to vote in 1944 — before such ideologies have been utterly defeated and the steep price for those who tolerated them paid in full.

So what Mr. Bush is faced with is this nearly impossible paradox of half war/half peace: at a time when most are getting fed up with abhorrent Middle Eastern jihadists who blow up, hijack, and behead in the name of their religion, he is attempting to convince the same American public and the Western world at large to spend their blood and treasure to help Muslim Afghans, Iraqis, and now Lebanese, who heretofore — whether out of shared anti-Americanism or psychological satisfaction in seeing the overdog take a hit — have not been much eager to separate themselves from the rhetoric of radical Islam.

In any case, the administration’s problem is not really its (sound) strategy, nor its increasingly improved implementation that we see in Baghdad, but simply an American public that so far understandably cannot easily differentiate millions of brave Iraqis and Afghans, who risk their lives daily to hunt terrorists and ensure reform, from the Islamists of the Muslim Street who broadcast their primordial hatred for Israel and the United States incessantly.

Remember the surreal Middle East: we freed Shiites from Saddam; so Shiite Iran in response tries to destroy Shiite democrats in Iraq, who, being constantly attacked by terrorists and militias, in turn sympathize with anti-democratic Hezbollah terrorists and militias in Lebanon. And at one point last month, the Lebanese, between slurs against America, were expecting the United States to send it cash, retrieve expatriates immediately, restrain Israel, do something about Hezbollah, and praise Lebanese critics — and all at once.

So how can one expect Americans to witness the barbarism of the jihadists, the creepy rhetoric of the imams and mullahs, the triangulation of Arab governments, and the puerility of the Muslim Street, pause, take a deep breath, and sigh, “Ah, they are frustrated because they are unfree and poor, and so in error blame us for their own autocracies’ failures. Therefore, we must be generous in our sacrifices to allow them the same opportunities for freedom that we enjoy.”

That contemplation and forbearance are both too complex and too much to ask of a post-September 11 public, and so end up as a piñata for political opportunists on both sides to smack to shreds.

On the Right the politicking works out with cynicism and disgust: “These ungrateful and hateful people aren’t worth the life of another American soldier or American dollar.”

Yet the Bush idealism wins no points from the Left either. Both for partisan purposes, and due to the wages of multiculturalism that oppose any Western effort to bring to the other the good life that they themselves so eagerly embrace, Leftists still harp about no blood for oil and assorted conspiracies in lieu of legitimate analysis and criticism.

What, then, is needed — aside from crushing the jihadists and securing Afghanistan and Iraq — is more articulation and explanation. The word “liberal” — as in promoting liberal values abroad, and reminding the world of the traditions of liberal tolerance — needs to be employed more often.

Some tough language is also helpful on occasion: any time the free democracies of Iraq or Afghanistan wish to vote to send American troops home, of course we will comply. Likewise, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon are under no compulsion to accept hated American aid or military help. And just as the American public needs reminding that millions of Middle Easterners are currently fighting jihadist terror in Afghanistan and Iraq — we wish we could say the same about our “allies” in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia — so too the Iraqi and Afghan governments should convey to the American people that their support is appreciated, and its continuance deemed vital.

How odd that the president must explain the pathologies of the Middle East to such a degree as to warn Americans of our mortal danger, but not to the point of excess so that we feel that there is no hope for such people. He must somehow suggest that jihadism could not imperil us were it not for the “moderates” who tolerate and appease it — while this is the very same group that we feel duty-bound to offer an alternative other than theocracy or dictatorship. And he must offer a postwar plan of reconstruction to the citizens of the Middle East at a time when many of them do not feel that their romantic jihadists have ever really been defeated at all.

Even the eloquence of a Lincoln or Churchill would find all that difficult.

MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute offers some interesting reading, providing plenty of food for thought.

On August 4, 2006, the Al-Hesbah website published instructions on “How to Kill a Crusader in the Arabian Peninsula.” The document was signed by Amer Al-Najdi, and dated June 15, 2006.

Al-Najdi instructs his readers in some possible ways to kill a Westerner, from choosing the victim through following him through the stage of the actual killing.

Hat tip to Dr. Sanity.

Agence France Presse quotes a US general at a Pentagon press conference telling us what we already know perfectly well.

A senior US military official said there is “clear evidence” that Iran is funding, training and arming Shiite extremists to destabilize Iraq.

“I think it is irrefutable that Iran is responsible for training, funding and equipping some of these Shia extremist groups, and also providing advanced IED technology,” said Brigadier General Michael Barbero, using the acronym for “improvised explosive devices.”

“And there is clear evidence of that,” he added at a Pentagon press conference.

His comments came the same day that Iran turned aside demands by the international community that it halt uranium enrichment as required by a UN Security Council resolution, offering “serious negotiations” instead.

We are unfortunately not characterizing Iran’s activities as the acts of war they are, and responding with invasion and regime change, but—at least—Coalition forces are evidently starting to do something serious about interrupting the flow of supplies.

The Telegraph reported today:

The soldiers of the Queen’s Royal Hussars will today board a fleet of stripped-down Land Rovers, festooned with weapons and equipment, bound for the depths of the Iraqi desert.

Their mission is to adopt tactics pioneered by the Long Range Desert Group, the forerunners of the SAS, more than six decades ago in the campaign against Rommel in North Africa. They will leave Camp Abu Naji, the only permanent base in Maysan province near the local capital of Amarah, and head into the remote region near the border with Iran.

Rather than staying in a fixed spot well known to enemy fighters in the most violent of all the Iraqi provinces under British control, they will live, camp and fight on the move. Roaming through the sparsely populated areas of Maysan, an area as large as Northern Ireland, they will travel without heavy armour that would become bogged down in the sand dunes and sleep under the stars.

Resupply will come from air drops or transport aircraft landing on temporary runways. Lt Col David Labouchere, the regiment’s commander, said that when they needed to act they would “surge” from the wilderness…

The adoption of tactics from an older era of British desert warfare would allow proper control of the border area for the first time, he said. America has frequently alleged that weapons and volunteers are being brought in by Iran. One of the first tasks of the Queen’s Royal Hussars will be to discover whether this is true.

Outdoor Life reports Wenger is offering the ultimate pocket knife: a nine inch, two pound, Swiss Army Knife including every single blade and tool, all 85 of them.

Who doesn’t need a cigar cutter next to a bicycle chain rivet setter next to a golf divot repair tool? Wenger is on to something with this everyman’s gadget. It wouldn’t be a knife, though, without a blade, so Wenger put seven in the line-up. And it wouldn’t be Swiss Army unless it came with tweezers and a toothpick. (They’re included, too.)

The mind frequently boggles at the mendacity of leftwing journalists. But Greg Mitchell, of Editor & Publisher, wins the blue ribbon first prize for the most insolently and shamelessly prevaricating column we’ve seen in a long time. Glenn Greenwald’s title, one is forced to observe, is in serious danger.

Mitchell has actually published an editorial in defense of the MSM and the Lebanon Fautographers. He calls the latter “brave.” (It is evidently dangerous to photograph people posing by burning garbage dumps or to use the Photoshop clone tool too much.) And he sneers at the bloggers who demonstrated many instances of fraud as “risk(ing) nothing but carpal tunnel syndrome.”

I was looking forward with interest to see if he had the unmitigated gall to try to defend any individual example of fauxtography. He wisely avoids trying in the case of Adnan Hajj; but, mirabile dictu! he does find cases he’s prepared to try to spin.

Here’s just one typical example of blog hysteria in their attacks on what some of them call “fauxtography.”

An image captured by one of The New York Times’ most acclaimed photographers, Tyler Hicks, that appeared in the paper and in a gallery at its Web site, showed a young man being pulled from the wreckage of a collapsed building after the Israeli attack on Qana that killed at least 28, including 16 or more children. Eagled-eyed bloggers soon found, on other news sites, images of the same man darting about the same disaster scene, trying to rescue people.

So, in their usual manner, they put 1 and 1 together and got 2 much: One blog after another charged that this man, after doing his rescue work, was planted on the pile, as a bomb victim, by Hezbollah, probably with the cooperation of Tyler Hicks, who then sent the manipulated photo around the world. The Times, as usual, was denounced by the rightwing bloggers for pro-terrorist and/or anti-American bias.

Even the popular, non-political site Gawker joined in, under the headline, “Times War Photos Artfully Staged, Directed.”

Well, there was, indeed, something wrong with the Times presentation. On the Web, though not in print, it suggested that the man had been blasted in the Israeli attack. In fact, the Times quickly found out—and corrected its Web caption—that the man fell down and got hurt in his rescue efforts. This simple explanation for the chronology was too much for some of the bloggers who continued questioning the incident, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Others in the mainstream keep citing it too. As recently as this past Sunday, a Boston Herald editorial still had the man in the Hicks photo posing for the camera, then getting up and running around. It said the Times had “issued a correction”—without mentioning that it related to the caption about how he got hurt, not about it being a bogus photo.

But all of this was inevitable. Many bloggers appear ignorant of time-stamping and the fact that photos are often posted on Web sites out of sequence.

The Model: Gangsta Hat Guy

Pieta of Gangsta Hat Guy

Is that so? The poor chap fell down and injured himself in the course of his heroic rescue activities, knocking himself unconscious, but managing to land completely surrounded by debris, and miraculously—while falling—taking off his gangsta hat, and tucking it carefully under his arm!

Be sure to watch this video discussing the techniques of Pallywood agitprop.

Now whom do you find credible, dear readers? Greg Mitchell or Gateway Pundit who wrote the original exposé?

It should get funnier. Mitchell promises a follow-up Part II. I can’t wait.

Deborah Frisch, the former instructor in Psychology at the University of Arizona, who resigned her position after posting a series of irrational and obscene comments on Jeff Goldstein’s Protein Wisdom blog-site (many including references to Goldstein’s children) was arrested, and arraigned on August 21, in Oregon on charges of stalking and telephone harassment.

WWB and Tim Dreier have the story, and lots of recent background.

Our own coverage of the original incidents may be found here, along with some subsequent blog humor here.

Yesterday evening, a mountain lion pushed his way through the screen door of Clifton Sanches’ home in El Paso County, Colorado, near Colorado Springs. The home owner declined to contest possession, and fled to a neighbor’s house to phone police. The local sheriff’s deputies adopted the New York City Police Deparment’s philosophy of declining to prosecute minor cases of burglary, and proposed waiting for the lion to leave on his own. Perhaps adverse possession laws are not so favorable in Colorado as they are in some other states, and the feline intruder, after an hour or so, got bored with things and made his exit, breaking through a window screen on the way out. Someone filmed his departure.

Story and video at CBS4 Denver.

How much force does it take to intimidate the American left into screaming for withdrawal and surrender?

General John Abizaid tells Hugh Hewitt the strength of the forces in Iraq confronting 133,000 American, 17,000 Coalition (source: Global Security, and (as General Abazid notes) an additional 275,000 lraqi troops amounts to “less than 20,000 active, and the Shiia militias that are actively confronting the coalition forces are less than about 5,000.”

That’s right, folks. Our side’s 425,000 cannot possibly hope to defeat under 25,000 insurgents, the liberals conclude fearfully. It’s hopeless. Better withdraw.

Hell, that’s 17 to 1. Even General Bernard Law Montgomery would have been willing to fight with 17 to 1 odds in his favor.

Ann Althouse, law professor and often acerbic blogger (who notoriously does not tolerate fools gladly), lowers the boom on Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in the Times.

As long as we’re appreciating irony, let’s consider the irony of emphasizing the importance of holding one branch of the federal government, the executive, to the strict limits of the rule of law while sitting in another branch of the federal government, the judiciary, and blithely ignoring your own obligations.

So often, we’ve heard complaints about “activist” judges. They’re suspected of deciding what outcome they want, based on their own personal or ideological preferences, and then writing a legalistic, neutral-sounding opinion to cover up what they’ve done. That carefully composed legal opinion makes it somewhat hard for a judge’s critics to convince people — especially anyone who likes the outcome — that the judge did not decide the case according to an unbiased legal method of analysis.

So perhaps the oddest thing about Judge Taylor’s opinion in the eavesdropping case is that she didn’t bother to come up with the verbiage that normally cushions us from these suspicions. Although the first half of the opinion, dealing with the state secrets doctrine and the first part of the standing doctrine, has the usual detail and structure one expects in a judicial opinion, the remainder of her text dispenses with the formalities.

Immensely difficult matters of First and Fourth Amendment law, separation of powers, and the relationship between the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Authorization for Use of Military Force are disposed of in short sections that jump from assorted quotations of old cases to conclusory assertions of illegality. Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington, told The Times that the section on the Fourth Amendment is “just a few pages of general ruminations … much of it incomplete and some of it simply incorrect.”

For those who approve of the outcome , the judge’s opinion is counterproductive. It will be harder to defend upon appeal than a more careful decision. It suggests that there are no good legal arguments against the program, just petulance and outrage and antipathy toward President Bush. It helps those who have been arguing for years about result-oriented, activist judges.

Laypeople consuming early news reports may well have thought, “What a courageous judge!” and “It’s a good thing someone finally said that the president is not above the law.” Look at that juicy quotation from Judge Taylor’s ruling: “There are no hereditary kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution.”

But this is sheer sophistry. The potential for the president to abuse his power has nothing to do with kings and heredity. (How much power do hereditary kings have these days, anyway?) And, indeed, the president is not claiming he has powers outside of the Constitution. He isn’t arguing that he’s above the law. He’s making an aggressive argument about the scope of his power under the law.

It is a serious argument, and judges need to take it seriously. If they do not, we ought to wonder why a court gets to decide what the law is and not the president. After all, the president has a sworn duty to uphold the Constitution; he has his advisers, and they’ve concluded that the program is legal. Why should the judicial view prevail over the president’s?

This, of course, is the most basic question in constitutional law, the one addressed in Marbury v. Madison. The public may have become so used to the notion that a judge’s word is what counts that it forgets why this is true. The judges have this constitutional power only because they operate by a judicial method that restricts them to resolving concrete controversies and requires them to interpret the relevant constitutional and statutory texts and to reason within the tradition of the case law.

This system works only if the judges suppress their personal and political willfulness and take on the momentous responsibility to embody the rule of law. They should not reach out for opportunities to make announcements of law, but handle the real cases that have been filed.

This means that the judge has a constitutional duty, under the doctrine of standing, to respond only to concretely injured plaintiffs who are suing the entity that caused their injury and for the purpose of remedying that injury. We trust the judge to say what the law is because the judge “must of necessity expound and interpret” in order to decide cases, as Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in Marbury. But Judge Taylor breezed through two of the three elements of standing doctrine — this constitutional limit on her power — in what looks like a headlong rush through a whole series of difficult legal questions to get to an outcome in her heart she knew was right.

If the words of the written opinion reveal that the judge did not follow the discipline of the judicial process, what sense does it make to take the judge’s word about what the law means over the word of the president? If the judge’s own writing does not support a belief that the rule of law has substance and depth, that law is something apart from political will, the significance of saying the president has gone beyond the limits of the law evaporates.

There’s irony for you.

Japan has absolutely appalling gun control. Basically, you can’t have one. Wealthy Japanese collect non-firing replica firearms. And apparently frustrated Japanese enthusiasts make guns out of paper.

Original Japanese language page link

Translated (sort of) by Google’s Beta Japanese translatorlink

Nekama (one of Little Green Football’s commenters) blew up at a liberal anti-Israel jibe, and delivered the rant quoted below.

It is a highly partisan rant, of course, but it does contain some not-sufficiently-often remembered facts.

1. Are you aware that the Disputed Territories never belonged to the “Palestinians” and only came into Israeli possession as a result of the 1967 six day war in which Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon all massed forces at Israel’s border in order to “push the Jews into the sea”. The Arabs lost and Israel took control of the land. Do you agree that if the Koranimals don’t want to lose territory to Israel, then they shouldn’t start wars? Do you agree that there is justice that Israel, who as far back as 1948 has always sought peace with her far larger neighbors, should live in prosperity – making the desert bloom – while the residents of 19 adjacent Arab countries who are blessed with far more land as well as oil wealth live in their own feces?

2. Did you know that the “Palestinians” could have had their own country as far back as 1948 had they accepted the UN sponsored partition plan which gave Israel AND the Palestinians a countries of their own on land which Jews had lived on for thousands of years before Mohammed ever had a wet dream about virgins? The Arabs rejected the UN offer and went to war with the infant Israeli nation. The Arabs lost and have been whining about it ever since. Do you agree this is like a murderer who kills his parents and asks for special treatment since he is now an orphan?

3. Can you tell us ANY Arab country which offers Jews the right to be citizens, vote, own property, businesses, be a part of the government or have ANY of the rights which Israeli Arabs enjoy? Any Arab country which gives those rights to Christians? How about to other Arabs? Wouldn’t you just LOVE to be a citizen of Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Iran, or Syria?

4. Since as many Jews (approximately 850,000) were kicked out of Arab countries as were Arabs who left present day Israel (despite being literally begged to stay), why should Arabs be permitted to return to Israel if Jews aren’t allowed to set foot in Arab countries? Can you explain why Arabs can worship freely in Israel but Jews would certainly be hung from street lamps after having their intestines devoured by an Arab mob if they so much as entered an Arab country?

5. Israel resettled and absorbed all of the Jews from Arab countries who wished to become Israelis. Why haven’t any Arab countries offered to resettle Arabs who were displaced from Israel, leaving them to rot for 60 years in squalid refugee camps? And why are those refugee camps still there? Could it be that the billions of dollars that the UNWRA has sent there goes to terrorist groups like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, El Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, or Hezbollah? How did Yassir Arafat achieve his $300 million in wealth? Why aren’t these funds distributed for humanitarian use?

6. Did you know that the Arabs in the disputed territories (conquered by Israel in the 1967 war which was started by Arabs) and who are not Israelis already have two countries right now? And that they are called Egypt and Jordan?

7. If your complaint is about the security fence which Israel is finally building in the Disputed Territories, are you aware that it is built solely to keep the “brave” Arab terrorists out so that they can no longer self detonate on busses, in dining halls or pizzerias and kill Jewish grandmothers and schoolchildren? Why are the Arabs so brave when they target unarmed civilians but even when they outnumber their opponents they get their sandy asses kicked all the way to Mecca when they are faced with Jewish soldiers? Why do Arab soldiers make the French look like super heroes?

8. Please explain why you are so concerned about Arabs, who possess 99% of the land in this region and are in control of the world’s greatest natural resource, which literally flows out of the ground? Can’t their brother muslims offer some of the surplus land and nature’s riches to the “Palestinians”? Or is it true that Arabs are willing to die right down to the last “Palestinian”?

9. Why do you not exhibit the same level of concern for say, people in Saudi Arabia who are beheaded, subject to amputation, stoning, honor killing etc.? What about women who are denied any semblance of basic civil rights, including the right not to be treated as property for the entertainment and abuse of her father, brothers, or husbands? What about the Muslims in Sudan and Egypt who are still enslaved, or the women there whose genitalia are barbarically cut off? How about the oppression of Shiites by Sunnis, the gassing of the Kurds by Iraq, or the massacre of “Palestinians” by Jordan (Black September)? Why doesn’t this concern you?

10. Did you ever stop to wonder how much better off everyone in the region would be if Arabs stopped trying to kill Jews and destroy Israel? What would happen if the Israelis gave up their weapons and disarmed? Would they live to see the next day? But what would happen if the Arabs completely disarmed? You know the answer: They would all be AT PEACE! And if there is no war to rile them up, the Arabs would be forced to look at their own repressive, pre-medieval societies. Why would they want to do that when there are Jews to kill?

11. Have you heard “People who define themselves primarily by what they hate, rather than who they love, are doomed to failure and misery”? Can you see the parallels to the Arabs, who are blessed with land and oil, but still gladly train their children to kill themselves in order to kill Jews? Have you heard Golda Meir’s words to the effect of “There will be peace when the Arabs love their children more than they hate ours”? Why do the Arabs hate so much?

Moller Skycar

Michael Anissimov, at Accelerating Future, has some better commuting ideas.

Personal blimps

or

275 mph skycars

Better reserve that blimp-sized parking space now.

If you collect tsuba, you’ll love these.

Titled When cloning goes wrong, this web-page offers some pretty imaginative combinations of critters. The alligator/macaw is particularly nice.

Bloomberg is reporting that:

Iran attacked and seized control of a Romanian oil rig working in its Persian Gulf waters this morning one week after the Iranian government accused the European drilling company of ``hijacking’’ another rig.

An Iranian naval vessel fired on the rig owned by Romania’s Grup Servicii Petroliere (GSP) in the Salman field and took control of its radio room at about 7:00 a.m. local time, Lulu Tabanesku, Grup’s representative in the United Arab Emirates said in a phone interview from Dubai today.

``The Iranians fired at the rig’s crane with machine guns,’’ Tabanesku said. ``They are in control now and we can’t contact the rig.’’ The Romanian company has 26 workers on the platform, he said.

AP adds:

GSP, also known as the Oil Services Group, is a private Romanian company established in 2004 which operates six offshore rigs that it bought from Romania’s largest oil company, Petrom.

Two of its rigs are operating near the Iranian coast in the Persian Gulf as part of a deal signed between Petrom, GSP and Dubai-based Oriental Oil Co.

The Romanian company was in Iranian courts earlier this year over a dispute involving another one of its oil rigs, Fortuna, the financial weekly Saptamana Financiara has reported. It was unclear whether Tuesday’s incident was related to legal issues.

The Orizont rig was built in 1987 and weighs 13,000 tons.

What is the European Union going to do about this, do you suppose?

Michael Barone discusses the reflexive treason of the American intellectual clerisy.

In our war against Islamo-fascist terrorism, we face enemies both overt and covert. The overt enemies are, of course, the terrorists themselves. Their motives are clear: They hate our society because of its freedoms and liberties, and want to make us all submit to their totalitarian form of Islam. They are busy trying to wreak harm on us in any way they can. Against them we can fight back, as we did when British authorities arrested the men and women who were plotting to blow up a dozen airliners over the Atlantic.

Our covert enemies are harder to identify, for they live in large numbers within our midst. And in terms of intentions, they are not enemies in the sense that they consciously wish to destroy our society. On the contrary, they enjoy our freedoms and often call for their expansion. But they have also been working, over many years, to undermine faith in our society and confidence in its goodness. These covert enemies are those among our elites who have promoted the ideas labeled as multiculturalism, moral relativism and (the term is Professor Samuel Huntington’s) transnationalism.

At the center of their thinking is a notion of moral relativism. No idea is morally superior to another. Hitler had his way, we have ours—who’s to say who is right? No ideas should be “privileged,” especially those that have been the guiding forces in the development and improvement of Western civilization. Rich white men have imposed their ideas because of their wealth and through the use of force. Rich white nations imposed their rule on benighted people of color around the world. For this sin of imperialism they must forever be regarded as morally stained and presumptively wrong. Our covert enemies go quickly from the notion that all societies are morally equal to the notion that all societies are morally equal except ours, which is worse.

These are the ideas that have been transmitted over a long generation by the elites who run our universities and our schools, and who dominate our mainstream media. They teach an American history with the good parts left out and the bad parts emphasized. We are taught that some of the Founding Fathers were slaveholders—and are left ignorant of their proclamations of universal liberties and human rights. We are taught that Japanese-Americans were interned in World War II —and not that American military forces liberated millions from tyranny. To be sure, the great mass of Americans tend to resist these teachings. By the millions they buy and read serious biographies of the Founders and accounts of the Greatest Generation. But the teachings of our covert enemies have their effect.

Of course, this distorts history. We are taught that American slavery was the most evil institution in human history. But every society in history has had slavery. Only one society set out to and did abolish it. The movement to abolish first the slave trade and then slavery was not started by the reason-guided philosophies of 18th century France. It was started, as Adam Hochschild documents in his admirable book “Bury the Chains,” by Quakers and Evangelical Christians in Britain, followed in time by similar men and women in America. The slave trade was ended not by Africans, but by the Royal Navy, with aid from the U.S. Navy even before the Civil War.

Nevertheless, the default assumption of our covert enemies is that in any conflict between the West and the Rest, the West is wrong. That assumption can be rebutted by overwhelming fact: Few argued for the Taliban after Sept. 11. But in our continuing struggles, our covert enemies portray our work in Iraq through the lens of Abu Ghraib and consider Israel’s self-defense against Hezbollah as the oppression of virtuous victims by evil men. In World War II, our elites understood that we were the forces of good and that victory was essential. Today, many of our elites subject our military and intelligence actions to fine-tooth-comb analysis and find that they are morally repugnant.

We have always had our covert enemies, but their numbers were few until the 1960s. But then the elite young men who declined to serve in the military during the Vietnam War set out to write a narrative in which they, rather than those who obeyed the call to duty, were the heroes. They have propagated their ideas through the universities, the schools and mainstream media to the point that they are the default assumptions of millions. Our covert enemies don’t want the Islamo-fascists to win. But in some corner of their hearts, they would like us to lose.

Reuters reports that some grand-scale Stalinesque historical airbrushing is about to take place on Turner Broadcasting.

Turner Broadcasting is scouring more than 1,500 classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons, including old favorites Tom and Jerry, The Flintstones and Scooby-Doo, to edit out scenes that glamorize smoking.

The review was triggered by a complaint to British media regulator Ofcom by one viewer who took offence to two episodes of Tom and Jerry shown on the Boomerang channel, part of Turner Broadcasting which itself belongs to Time Warner Inc.

“We are going through the entire catalogue,” Yinka Akindele, spokeswoman for Turner in Europe, said on Monday.

“This is a voluntary step we’ve taken in light of the changing times,” she said, adding the painstaking review had been prompted by the Ofcom complaint.

The regulator’s latest news bulletin stated that a viewer, who was not identified, had complained about two smoking scenes on Tom and Jerry, saying they “were not appropriate in a cartoon aimed at children.”

In the first, “Texas Tom”, the hapless cat Tom tries to impress a feline female by rolling a cigarette, lighting it and smoking it with one hand. In the second, “Tennis Chumps”, Tom’s opponent in a match smokes a large cigar.

“The licensee has … proposed editing any scenes or references in the series where smoking appeared to be condoned, acceptable, glamorized or where it might encourage imitation,” Ofcom said, adding that “Texas Tom” was one such example.

Akindele said cartoons would only be modified “where smoking could be deemed to be cool or glamorized”, and that scenes where a villain was featured with a cigarette or cigar would not necessarily be cut.

There must be a special place in hell for the kind of lickspittle corporate cowards who come up with this sort of disgraceful policy.