A correspondent of mine on outdoor matters forwarded this email to me today:
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This picture was taken by a Lifeflight helicopter flying over Lake Istapoka, (For those of you who are not local, Lake Istapoka is near Sebring, Fl.) That has to be a HUGE gator to have a whole deer in its mouth! Are you ready to go fishing on Lake Istapoka ?! If you ski—try not to fall.

Date: Mon, 1 Aug, 2006 06:14:24 -0500

The alligator was found between Lake Istapoka and Pinedale estates… near a house, Game Wardens were forced to shoot the alligator- guess he wouldn’t cooperate. Jayne and Don Hobkirk could hear the bellowing in the night. Their neighbors had been telling them that they had seen a mammoth alligator in the Lake that runs behind their house, but they dismissed the stories as being exaggerations. “I didn’t believe it,” Don Hobkirk said. Friday they realized the stories were, if anything, understated. Florida Game and Parks game wardens had to shoot the beast… Joe Goff, 6’ 5” tall, a game warden with the Florida Game and Parks Commission, walks past the 23-foot, one inch alligator that he shot and killed in the back yard of Jayne & Don Hobkirk…

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Pretty impressive.

I like to mention storoes of this kind here, so I went looking for news stories. Surprise! I didn’t find any.

What I found was a number of links indicating that the giant alligator-with-deer and game-warden-named-Joe-Goff photos were from separate sources, and the email story was a hoax.

The alligator with deer photos were actually taken by Terri Jenkins of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from a helicopter flyong over Harris Neck National Wildlife Refuge, about 40 miles south of Savannah, Georgia, on March 4, 2004. The alligator in the photo was estimated to be at least 12-13 (3.6-4 meters) feet long.

The game-warden-walking-past-gator photo was taken by Val Horvath, and published in The Facts (Brazoria County, Texas) April 16, 2005.

The alligator was really 13-foot, 1-inch (4 meters) long. It was shot and killed in the back yard of a home in the Bar X Ranch on FM 521 near West Columbia, Texas by Joe Goff, a game warden with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.

Hoax emails are in circulation combing the Terri Jenkins photos with the Val Horvath photo, enlarging the alligator’s size to 23 feet (7 meters), and misattributing the location to several places in Florida and Texas.

Debunked at:

Snopes.com

HoaxSlayer.com

I still found all this interesting enough to pass along.

David Lai, at the Army’s Strategic Studies Institute, published a thought-provoking paper in 2004 comparing the differences between Chinese and Western Strategic thinking to the differences between the Chinese game of Go and such Western games as chess, poker, and football. Learning From the Stones is now available online, and makes for very interesting reading.

With over 2,000 years of inï¬u201auence from Sun Tzu’s teaching, along with the inï¬u201auence of other signiï¬cant philosophical and military writings, the Chinese are particularly comfortable with viewing war and diplomacy in comprehensive and dialectic ways and acting accordingly. Indeed, many of these observations have become proverbial components of the Chinese way of war and diplomacy. The most notable ones are bing yi zha li (war is based on deception), shang-bing fa-mou (supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s strategy), qi-zheng xiang-sheng (mutual reproduction of regular and extraordinary forces and tactics), chu-qi zhi-sheng (win through unexpected moves), yin-di zhi-sheng (gain victory by varying one’s strategy and tactics according to the enemy’s situation), yi-rou ke-gang (use the soft and gentle to overcome the hard and strong), bishi ji-xu (stay clear of the enemy’s main force and strike at his weak point), yi-yu wei-zhi (to make the devious route the most direct), hou-fa zhi-ren (ï¬ght back and gain the upper hand only after the enemy has initiated ï¬ghting), sheng-dong ji-xi (make a feint to the east but attack in the west), and so on. All of these special Chinese four-character proverbs are strategic and dialectic in nature. All bear some character of ï¬u201aowing water. This Chinese way of war and diplomacy is in striking difference to the Western way of war from ancient Greece to the United States today. In the Western tradition, there is a heavy emphasis on the use of force; the art of war is largely limited to the battleï¬elds; and the way to ï¬ght is force on force.

Mr. Joseph Rago, the assistant editorial features editor of the Wall Street Journal, yesterday attacked bloggers, putting the lot of us in our place with a quotation from Joseph Conrad written by fools to be read by imbeciles, originally intended by Conrad to apply to newspapers.

Our Ann definitely wins this particular girlfight.

New York Times theater critic Frank Rich made headlines on the Drudge Report last week by announcing: “We have lost in Iraq.” Of course, Rich was saying we had lost in Iraq more than six months before we went into Iraq.

In August 2002, he wrote that Bush did not have the support of the American people for war in Iraq and without that he would “mimic another hubristic Texan president who took a backdoor route into pre-emptive warfare.”

In April 2003, one month after we invaded, Rich said the looting of Iraqi museums by Iraqis showed “our worst instincts at the very dawn of our grandiose project to bring democratic values to the Middle East.”

About six months into the war he wrote a column about Iraq titled: “Why Are We Back in Vietnam?” You can imagine how writing those words must have brought back memories of Frank Rich’s own valiant service in Vietnam.

In January 2004, less than a year after the invasion, he wrote: “The greater debate has been over the degree to which the follies of Vietnam are now being re-enacted in Iraq.” Historians noted that this is the first time Rich ever panned something containing the word “follies.”

A month later, he was again comparing Iraq to Vietnam, saying Bush had forced the comparison “by wearing the fly boy uniform of his own disputed guard duty” when he landed on the aircraft carrier. Did Frank Rich win three purple hearts in combat, or was it four? I always forget.

In May 2004, Rich accused Bush of throwing “underprepared and underprotected” American troops in harm’s way in Iraq. OK, I was kidding before. The closest Frank Rich has come to serving in the military was reviewing a revival of “The Caine Mutiny.” Though he does know the words to “In the Navy” by heart.

Even after transitioning from musical reviewer to hard-bitten military analyst, Rich couldn’t resist tossing in a quick dance review. He gleefully described “pictures of Marines retreating from Fallujah and of that city’s citizens dancing in the streets to celebrate their victory over the American liberators.”

This too, reminded Rich of Vietnam. Right now I’m trying to think of something that doesn’t remind liberals of Vietnam … hmmm … drawing a blank…

Liberals are like people with stale breath talking into your face at a party. You try backing away from them or offering them gum, but then they just start whimpering. They’ve been using the exact same talking points about how we’re losing in Iraq since before we invaded.

It seems they’ve finally succeeded in exhausting Americans and, thereby, handing a victory to al-Qaida.

The weakest members of the herd are rapidly capitulating…

St. George, patron saint of England

The Telegraph reports that, in 2006, there were born in England and Wales 2,833 babies called Mohammed and 1,422 called Muhammad for a total of 4255, versus only 3386 named George.

The Church of Our Dear Lady in Dendermonde, Flanders (Belgium) features a late 17th century pulpit, sculpted in wood by Mattheus van Beveren, upheld by angels who are treading underfoot the false prophet Mohammed, who is leaning on the Al-Koran.

The London Times reports a New Zealand sky diver who had both parachutes fail to open fell 15,000 ft (4,000m) into a blackberry bush, and survived.

And a Japanese hiker lost on a remote mountain is said to have survived 23 days without water… by hibernation.

If the United States withdraws from Iraq in confusion and defeat, it will not be because our armed forces were outnumbered, out of supply, or faced by a better-armed or equipped enemy. It will not be because the enemy was braver, better organized, more disciplined or determined than our soldiers. It will not be because the enemy had better generals, or better tactics, or a better strategy. And it will not be because American forces were ever defeated on the battlefield. There will no great enemy victory like Blenheim or Yorktown or Waterloo, which decided the struggle.

American forces will retire again, undefeated by the enemy in the field, stabbed in the back by domestic traitors. The privileged American intelligentsia occupying the decisive high ground of communications, dominating the American media and academic communities, will for the second time in the lifetimes of many Americans misuse its power and prestige to destroy America’s confidence in the justice of her cause, and in the success of her arms.

American military power is more than adequate to deal with this country’s foreign enemies in open battle, but our military forces have no defense against the tactics and forces of domestic defeatism, against the New York Times and the Washington Post, against CBS and CNN, against The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, against Yale and against Harvard.

As the anti-war left’s victory, and America’s defeat, seems increasingly inevitable, there has been an unseemly scurry on the part of leading elements of the neocon, and even conservative, punditocracy in the direction of seats on the apparently winning side, the side of Defeatism.

Nobody wants to be found rooting for the losing side anymore. It hurts one’s own image in the community of fashion to be found in association with failure.

National Review’s Rich Lowry yesterday joined the stampede, and tells us we should have been listening to the New York Times all along.

The conservative campaign against the mainstream media has scored notable successes. It exposed Dan Rather’s forged National Guard memo and jumped all over Newsweek’s absurd report of a Koran-flushing incident at Guantanamo Bay. The mainstream media is biased, arrogant, prone to stultifying group-think and much more fallible than its exalted self-image allows it to admit. It also, however, can be right, and this is most confounding to conservatives.

In Iraq, the media’s biases happen to fit the circumstances. Being primed to consider any military conflict a quagmire and another Vietnam is a drawback when covering a successful U.S. military intervention, but not necessarily in Iraq. Most of the pessimistic warnings from the mainstream media have turned out to be right — that the initial invasion would be the easy part, that seeming turning points (the capture of Saddam, the elections, the killing of Zarqawi) were illusory, that the country was dissolving into a civil war…

In their distrust of the mainstream media, their defensiveness over President Bush and the war, and their understandable urge to buck up the nation’s will, many conservatives lost touch with reality on Iraq. They thought that they were contributing to our success, but they were only helping to forestall a cold look at conditions there and the change in strategy and tactics that would be dictated by it.

You wouldn’t find members of today’s chattering classes, left or right typically, remaining to die in the last ditch in any of history’s famous last stands, would you?

One can only too readily picture:

Unilateral Spartan Intervention at Thermopylae a Diplomatic and Strategic Gaffe

as the column title for an editiorial written by young Thersites, editor of the Hellenic Review.

Here’s a white feather for Mr. Lowry.

Prep rap commercial for Smirnoff vodka.

video

In Newsweek, Michael Gerson argues that the GOP needs to turn in the direction of statist paternalism.

My low point with the Republican Party came in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina…

Campaigning on the size of government in 2008, while opponents talk about health care, education and poverty, will seem, and be, procedural, small-minded, cold and uninspired. The moral stakes are even higher. What does antigovernment conservatism offer to inner-city neighborhoods where violence is common and families are rare? Nothing. What achievement would it contribute to racial healing and the unity of our country? No achievement at all. Anti-government conservatism turns out to be a strange kind of idealism—an idealism that strangles mercy.

But Jonah Goldberg retorts with perfect accuracy:

the social gospel and the state cannot be married because the government cannot love you. This is not a metaphysical point but a practical one. States cannot love individuals in much the same way deck furniture cannot write poetry: it is not in their nature. It cannot be done. And when people attempt otherwise, horrible folly ensues. Gerson thinks the victims of Katrina got that way because of the indifference of the State. I would argue that a more likely culprit (or at least accomplice) was a State that tried to love them and hurt them in the process.

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal featured a lead story about the Bush Administration’s failure to convict Omar Ahmed Khadr, a Toronto-born jihadi captured as an illegal combatant in Afghanistan in July of 2002, after he had thrown a grenade which fatally wounded Sgt. First Class Christopher Speer, a US medic.

Efforts to bring Mr. Khadr to trial via one of the Bush Administration’s controversial military tribunals has been dogged by litigation, and the prosecution has found it impossible to get intelligence agencies to open their secret files or to obtain testimony from the eyewitnesses, military personnel who are inaccessible because they’re serving during wartime at remote locations around the world.

The frustrated Army prosecutor Major Groharing nonetheless defended this preposterous and futile enterprize, arguing:

The difference between us and al Qaeda is that when we had him on the battlefield, we didn’t summarily execute him.

The Bush administration, and Major Groharing, are both crazy.

The attempt to deal, in peacetime and civilian fashion, via legal trials with attorneys, witnesses, and appeals to higher levels of the judiciary, is simply incompatible with the exigencies of war.

Mr. Khadr was an illegal combatant, bearing arms against the military forces of the United States. He violated the customs and usages of war by attacking a medic. He was never entitled to quarter. He should not have been made prisoner. He should not have received medical attention. He should merely have been summarily executed on the spot at the time.

Our cause being just, our conformity to the customs and usages of war, our not firing on medics are all quite sufficient to distinguish us from al Qaeda.”

2:23 video

0:43 video

Christmas has sweetened the temperaments of some famous movieland monsters in this (Spanish? language) Direct TV commercial.

Hat tip to Uber-Review.

A sampler from John Hawkins at Right Wing News:

25) “Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America.”—Rosie O’Donnell

24) “When I asked Gore Vidal at dinner why the White House seemed so serene and at ease about the vote, he replied that, this time around, the Bush-Cheney henchmen could simply call on martial law. He glumly noted that we are so far down the road toward totalitarianism that, even if Democrats do win back the Congress, it would take at least two generations before the last six years of damage to the nation could be reversed.”—Lyn Davis Lear at The Huffington Post

23) “I don’t take sides for or against Hezbollah or for or against Israel.”—Representative John Dingell

22) “We are living in terrorism as black people in America. And it has been that way since the dawning of slavery….If we are having problems with finding our own inner souls and dignity to live out a life that is honorable, what is it that has put us in this position? We didn’t volunteer for it. And those who have put us here and chosen to keep us here are people who deal in terror.”—Harry Belafonte

21) “(George Bush) is ten times the terrorist that Osama ever was.”—Cindy Sheehan

20) “It’s quite reasonable to conclude that Bush will harm the nation more—if not more than Bin Laden would like to, than more than he actually can.”—Johnathan Chait

19) “I think the news of the loss of any human being is a tragedy. I think al-Zarqawi’s death is a double tragedy. His death will incite a new wave of revenge.”—Michael Berg

As the American community of fashion calls Iraq “a disaster,” and pleads for American withdrawal, Newsweek reports that the Iraqi economy is actually very healthy, almost booming.

Civil war or not, Iraq has an economy, and—mother of all surprises—it’s doing remarkably well. Real estate is booming. Construction, retail and wholesale trade sectors are healthy, too, according to a report by Global Insight in London. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce reports 34,000 registered companies in Iraq, up from 8,000 three years ago. Sales of secondhand cars, televisions and mobile phones have all risen sharply. Estimates vary, but one from Global Insight puts GDP growth at 17 percent last year and projects 13 percent for 2006. The World Bank has it lower: at 4 percent this year. But, given all the attention paid to deteriorating security, the startling fact is that Iraq is growing at all.

How? Iraq is a crippled nation growing on the financial equivalent of steroids, with money pouring in from abroad. National oil revenues and foreign grants look set to total $41 billion this year, according to the IMF. With security improving in one key spot—the southern oilfields—that figure could go up…

there’s a vibrancy at the grass roots that is invisible in most international coverage of Iraq. Partly it’s the trickle-down effect. However it’s spent, whether on security or something else, money circulates. Nor are ordinary Iraqis themselves short on cash. After so many years of living under sanctions, with little to consume, many built up considerable nest eggs—which they are now spending. That’s boosted economic activity, particularly in retail. Imported goods have grown increasingly affordable, thanks to the elimination of tariffs and trade barriers. Salaries have gone up more than 100 percent since the fall of Saddam, and income-tax cuts (from 45 percent to just 15 percent) have put more cash in Iraqi pockets. “The U.S. wanted to create the conditions in which small-scale private enterprise could blossom,” says Jan Randolph, head of sovereign risk at Global Insight. “In a sense, they’ve succeeded.”

And what does Newsweek think is needed for economic growth to continue? Continued US presence.

The withdrawal of a certain great power could drastically reduce the foreign money flow, and knock the crippled economy flat.