The town council of Herouxville, Quebec in response to Islamic immigration passed for public information a declaration of local social norms, which among other things declares:

French version

English translation

nous considérons comme hors norme.., tels le fait de tuer les femmes par lapidation sur la place publique ou en les faisant brûler vives, les brûler avec de l’acide, les exciser etc.

Their English translation was slightly bowdlerized (doubtless to spare the tender sensibilities of liberal Anglophone Canadians) thusly:

we consider that killing women in public beatings, or burning them alive are not part of our standards of life.

But what it really says is:

we regard as contrary to conventional behavior, such activities as killing women by public stonings or by burning them alive, or burning them with acid, circumsizing them, and so on.

The BBC reports that Canadian Muslims are insulted. Of course they are. How do you suppose residents of Quebec can possibly imagine that anyone would do such atrocious things?

Personally, I think the George W. Bush in this commie peacenik protest video has exactly the right idea. Go, George.

video

AP:

Republican and Democratic senators warned Tuesday against a drift toward war with an emboldened Iran and suggested the Bush administration was missing a chance to engage its longtime adversary in potentially helpful talks over next-door Iraq.

“What I think many of us are concerned about is that we stumble into active hostilities with Iran without having aggressively pursued diplomatic approaches, without the American people understanding exactly what’s taking place,” Sen. Barack Obama (news, bio, voting record), D-Ill., told John Negroponte, who is in line to become the nation’s No. 2 diplomat as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s deputy.

In reality, we’ve been at war with Iran since 1979. Or, more properly,one should say: Iran has been at war with us since 1979. We have not bothered to notice.

$155 million. Ouch! And I thought we paid too much for our new house.

Appropriately named “The Pinnacle,” it’s yours for $155 million…

So what justifies the “most expensive” asking price?

To begin with, the 10-bedroom, 53,000-square-foot, yes—53,000-square-foot—home will sit on the most coveted piece of property in the resort. The 160 acres ought to provide ample elbow room for someone who has it all.

The home, which includes four guest cottages, will be built in the center of the ski resort and commands dramatic views in all directions…

Jerry Locati, the Bozeman, Mont., architect who heads up Locati Architects, spent the last year designing the home and gave ABCNEWS.com an exclusive interview about what he calls “an incredibly unique, one-of-a-kind house.”

“It’s an adult, well, actually family-oriented home, a sort of Disneyland scale home for someone who is not afraid to spend money,” he begins as he searches for superlatives. “It will have the usual home theater but will also include a bowling alley, an indoor-outdoor pool and an amazing wine cellar.”

The house, which has a rustic exterior crafted out of stone, hand-hewn beams and ample floor-to-ceiling glass, includes a huge underground garage.

“You’ll be able to park 30 or 40 cars,” Locati says. “Perfect for someone with a car collection and of course the ideal service entrance for caterers.”

Locati says he was encouraged to “think outside the box” by timber and real estate billionaire Tim Blixseth, who is developing the property.

Blixseth is also the developer of the Yellowstone Club resort.

One of those “outside-the-box” ideas is three elevators.

“You enter as you would a lodge. There will be lockers for ski equipment and clothing,” says Locati.

“Every aspect has been incredibly well thought out,” he says. “We’ll have hand-carved fireplace mantles, and we have succeeded in bringing the outdoors indoors while still maintaining a warm feeling.”

Perhaps one of the more unusual features is a private-covered gondola that will whisk skiers from a ski run to the home.

photos

Fox News:

A plan by the Bush administration to release detailed and possibly damning specific evidence linking the Iranian government to efforts to destabilize Iraq have been put on hold, U.S. officials told FOX News.

Officials had said a “dossier” against Iran compiled by the U.S. likely would be made public at a press conference this week in Baghdad, and that the evidence would contain specifics including shipping documents, serial numbers, maps and other evidence which officials say would irrefutably link Iran to weapons shipments to Iraq.

Now, U.S. military officials say the decision to go public with the findings has been put on hold for several reasons, including concerns over the reaction from Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — as well as inevitable follow-up questions that would be raised over what the U.S. should do about it.

Gerard Baker, in the London Times, contemplates the dreadful horror that is Hillary.

As you consider her career this past 15 years or so in the public spotlight, it is impossible not to be struck, and even impressed, by the sheer ruthless, unapologetic, unshameable way in which she has pursued this ambition, and confirmed that there is literally nothing she will not do, say, think or feel to achieve it. Here, finally, is someone who has taken the black arts of the politician’s trade, the dissembling, the trimming, the pandering, all the way to their logical conclusion.

Fifteen years ago there was once a principled, if somewhat rebarbative and unelectable politician called Hillary Rodham Clinton. A woman who aggressively preached abortion on demand and the right of children to sue their own parents, a committed believer in the power of government who tried to create a healthcare system of such bureaucratic complexity it would have made the Soviets blush; a militant feminist who scorned mothers who take time out from work to rear their children as “women who stay home and bake cookies”.

Today we have a different Hillary Rodham Clinton, all soft focus and expensively coiffed, exuding moderation and tolerance.

To grasp the scale of the transfiguration, it is necessary only to consider the very moment it began. The turning point in her political fortunes was the day her husband soiled his office and a certain blue dress. In that Monica Lewinsky moment, all the public outrage and contempt for the sheer tawdriness of it all was brilliantly rerouted and channelled to the direct benefit of Mrs Clinton, who immediately began a campaign for the Senate.

And so you had this irony, a woman who had carved out for herself a role as an icon of the feminist movement, launching her own political career, riding a wave of public sympathy over the fact that she had been treated horridly by her husband.

After that unsurpassed exercise in cynicism, nothing could be too expedient. Her first Senate campaign was one long exercise in political reconstructive surgery. It went from the cosmetic — the sudden discovery of her Jewish ancestry, useful in New York, especially when you’ve established a reputation as a friend of Palestinians— to the radical: her sudden message of tolerance for people who opposed abortion, gay marriage, gun control and everything else she had stood for.

Once in the Senate she published an absurd autobiography in which every single paragraph had been scrubbed clean of honest reflection to fit the campaign template. As a lawmaker she is remembered mostly, when confronted with a President who enjoyed 75 per cent approval ratings, for her infamous decision to support the Iraq war in October 2002. This one-time anti-war protester recast herself as a latter-day Boadicea, even castigating President Bush for not taking a tough enough line with the Iranians over their nuclear programme.

Now, you might say, hold on. Aren’t all politicians veined with an opportunistic streak? Why is she any different? The difference is that Mrs Clinton has raised that opportunism to an animating philosophy, a P. T. Barnum approach to the political marketplace.

All politicians, sadly, lie. We can often forgive the lies as the necessary price paid to win popularity for a noble cause. But the Clinton candidacy is a Grand Deceit, an entirely artificial construct built around a person who, stripped bare of the cynicism, manipulation and calculation, is nothing more than an enormous, overpowering and rather terrifying ego.

QUIZ

I got:

Jerry Pournelle

This old-fashioned writer may be the most unapologetic capitalist in the field. He has also been influential in many other fields, from space policy to the computer industry

??? Not Heinlein??? (Well, I’m not the perv that he was, but, still…)

Can you get Roger Zelazny as a result?

Hat tip to Seneca the Younger.

Microsoft announces the release of new versions of its flagship products.

Preston Galla of PC Word has 15 reasons to switch to Vista.

But Mike Elgan of Computerworld has some compelling arguments as to why you should wait to get Vista already installed on your next PC, or just switch to a MAC.

Kerry wipes an eye while speaking at Davos

Howie Carr, at the Boston Herald, pens a eulogy to a great American political career.

Do you suppose (John Kerry)’ll put in now for one final Purple Heart? He was wounded by Iraq, after all. It’s gotta hurt, knowing that he and Al Gore are in one of the world’s tiniest clubs: guys who blew an election to George W. Bush.

But here’s the difference. Al Gore has actually been nominated this year. For a couple of Academy Awards. And he may win. John Kerry, though, well, he’s about to find out whether or not the old saying is true: “Living well is the best revenge.”..

..for Kerry, this is a tragedy. He always knew he’d be president. He’s still only 63 – older than Bush, or Clinton, or even Al Gore – and it’s over.

He’ll never be president. America dodged another bullet.

And here’s the greatest irony of all: John Kerry was the absolute last person in the world to know it was all over…

A line comes to mind from F. Scott Fitzgerald, as John and Mama T leave the national scene like Tom and Daisy Buchanan at the end of “The Great Gatsby,” retreating “back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together . . . drift(ing) here and there unrestfully, wherever people played polo and were rich together.”

Good riddance.

Hat tip to Frank Dobbs.

Glenn Reynolds makes the communitarian case for compulsory arms bearing. Whatever will the editors of Tikkun say?

AP:

JUNEAU, Alaska: About 10,000 Juneau residents briefly lost power after a bald eagle lugging a deer head crashed into transmission lines.

“You have to live in Alaska to have this kind of outage scenario,” said Gayle Wood, an Alaska Electric Light & Power spokeswoman. “This is the story of the overly ambitious eagle who evidently found a deer head in the landfill.”

The bird, weighed down by the deer head, apparently failed to clear the transmission lines, she said. A repair crew found the eagle dead, the deer head nearby.

The power was out for less than 45 minutes Sunday.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

New York Sun:

New evidence of Iran’s role in Iraq will be made in Baghdad by the chief spokesman for the multinational forces in Iraq, Major General William Caldwell. The Directorate of National Intelligence worked over the weekend to clear new intelligence and information that sources inside the intelligence community said would implicate Iran in deliberately sending particularly lethal improvised explosives to terrorists to kill coalition soldiers.

The intelligence community is currently debating whether to make the new evidence, which it plans to declassify, available on the Internet.

The plan to present the evidence will coincide with a presentation this week by Ambassador Khalilzad to the press detailing the charges against Iranian operatives affiliated with the country’s Quds Force arrested in the last six weeks in three raids.

Andreas Helgstrand of Denmark riding the Danish Warmblood mare Blue Hors Matiné turned in a spectacular performance in Freestyle Dressage at the 2006 World Equestrian Games (WEG) at Aachen.

6:30 video

Marvellous as it was, this performance received a score of 81.5, good for only the Silver Medal.

The Gold was won by Anky van Grunsven of the Netherlands riding the Hanoverian gelding Keltec Salinero with a total score of 86.1.

Nancy Jaffer reports.

6:38 video

Hat tip to Marcye Britt.

Documentary on the One Inch Punch popularized by Bruce Lee , featuring martial arts film clips, demonstrations, and discussion by Jeet Kune Do and Wing Chun instructors.

7:16 video

Killing the enemy.

It’s about time somebody thought of trying it.

Gateway Pundit links an AP report which quotes the US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad confirming earlier reports of the capture of a Revolutionary Guards “Director of Operations.

Earlier reports stated that the figure captured was Revolutionary Guards Chief Strategist Hassan Abbasi.

video of Hassa Abbasi

The U.S. ambassador said Wednesday that one of the Iranians detained by U.S. forces in Iraq during two raids over the past month was the director of operations for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Quds faction, the organization responsible for funding and arming Iraqi militants.

Zalmay Khalilzad said the recent raids were part of a “new strategy” to “go after their networks that are active here.”

The United States is building up its troops in the region, beyond the additional 21,500 on their way to Iraq for a new security crackdown, in what U.S. officials say is a message to Iran. Khalilzad sought to reinforce Washington’s message that Tehran should keep its hands off Iraq, where it has enormous influence with the majority Shiite population.

Iran is ruled by a Shiite theocracy, which has confounded U.S. foreign policy for more than a quarter-century since the U.S.-allied shah was driven from power in the Islamic revolution.

At least eight Iranians have been detained in Iraq recently, including two diplomats in a Dec. 21 roundup of a group of 10 suspects. The diplomats were interrogated and released to Iranian officials eight days later.

Six others were captured Jan. 11 at an Iranian liaison office in the northern city of Irbil. One was released and five are still believed in U.S. custody.

“Some of those we’ve arrested are Quds Force operatives. One of them was director of operations for the Quds Force” who was in the country without the knowledge of Iraqi security officials, he said…

Khalilzad said Iranian agents were working with “a variety of groups, and there are groups that they fund and control, in my judgment, directly.”

The ambassador said U.S. officials soon would outline in detail the activities of the arrested Iranians, as demanded by Tehran’s ambassador in Baghdad.

Earlier report

But the New York Times reported on January 13th that this individual had been released.

A senior military official said last week that one of the Iranians seized in Baghdad late last month was the No. 3 Quds official. He said American forces uncovered maps of neighborhoods in Baghdad in which Sunnis could be evicted, and evidence of involvement in the war during the summer in Lebanon.

That Iranian official was ordered released, by Ms. Rice among others, after Iran claimed he had diplomatic status.

Earlier post

Hat tip to AJStrata.

Bill Roggio thinks the Karbala raid leading the kidnapping-murder of five US soldiers may very possibly have an Iranian operation performed in retaliation for recent US raids on Iranian embassies in Baghdad and Irbil.

This raid required specific intelligence, in depth training for the agents to pass as American troops, resources to provide for weapons, vehicles, uniforms, identification, radios and other items needed to successfully carry out the mission. Hezbollah’s Imad Mugniyah executed a similar attack against Israeli forces on the Lebanese border, which initiated the Hezbollah-Israeli war during the summer of 2006…

Mahawil (where abandoned vehicles & the victim’s bodies were found) is in Babil province, about 27 miles directly west of Karbala. While it is impossible to prove, the attackers may have been making a bee-line towards the Iranian border.

The Karbala raid makes sense in light of the U.S. raids on the Iranian diplomatic missions in Baghdad and Irbil, where Iranian Qods Force agents were captured, along with documentation that divulged Iran’s involvement with and support of Shia death squads, the Sunni insurgent, and al-Qaeda in Iraq and Ansar al-Sunnah. Five Iranians from the Irbil raid are still in U.S. custody, and captured U.S. soldiers would provide for excellent bargaining chips

IF it is confirmed that Iran’s Qods Force was responsible, the news that the United States has authorized the death or captured of Iranian agents inside Iraq, as well as in Afghanistan and Lebanon makes all the more sense.

Perhaps they were trying to carry the US soldies over the border to Iran, and abandoned the vehicles and killed their prisoners because their pursuers got too close, and they considered it too risky to try to reach the border.

Some classic television journalism hoplophobia.

These public-spirited reporters are supposedly alerting the police to “seemingly innocuous” objects modified into firearms… like, for instance, a knife.

CBS 2 managed to get hold of one (through the DEA) , though their local police haven’t seen any, and there is no evidence that any crime has actually yet been committed with one of these. But there may possibly be a new and different concealed weapon out there somewhere, panic!

CBS2 video

Ruth Wisse, in the Wall Street Journal, comments on the contemptible exclusion of ROTC programs at the most elite American universities.

Recent surveys confirm that university faculties have been tilting steadily leftward, but I think it is wrong to assume they have been tilting toward “liberalism” as is commonly assumed. Liberalism worthy of the name emphasizes freedom of the individual, democracy and the rule of law. Liberalism is prepared to fight for those freedoms through constitutional participatory government, and to protect those freedoms, in battle if necessary. What we see on the American campus is not liberalism, but a gutted and gutless “gliberalism,” that leaves to others the responsibility for governance, and arrogates to itself the right to criticize. It accepts money from the public purse without assuming reciprocal duties for the public good. Instead of debating public policy in the public arena, faculty says, “I quit,” but then continues to draw benefits from the system it will not protect.

Henryk M. Broder has some choice comments on the contemporary European response to militant Islam, particularly in the case of the Danish cartoon crisis in which Europrean embassies were burned by Islamic mobs.

In 1972, more than three decades ago, Danish lawyer and part-time politician Mogens Glistrup had an idea that brought him instant fame. To save taxes, he proposed that the Danish army be disbanded and an answering machine be set up in the defense ministry that would play the following message: “We capitulate!” Not only would it save money, Glistrup argued, but it would also save lives in an emergency. On the strength of this “program,” Glistrup’s Progress Party managed to become the second-most powerful political party in the Danish parliament in the 1973 elections.

Glistrup had the right idea, but he was a number of years premature. Now would be the right time to set up his answering machine.

Read the whole thing.

Pascal Bruckner has harsh words for the multiculturalism of elites.

After Heidegger, a whole run of thinkers from Gadamer to Derrida have contested the claims of the Enlightenment to embody a new age of self-conscious history. On the contrary, they say, all the evils of our epoch were spawned by this philosophical and literary episode: capitalism, colonialism, totalitarianism. For them, criticism of prejudices is nothing but a prejudice itself, proving that humanity is incapable of self-reflection. For them, the chimeras of certain men of letters who were keen to make a clean slate of God and revelation, were responsible for plunging Europe into darkness. In an abominable dialectic, the dawn of reason gave birth to nothing but monsters (Horkheimer, Adorno)...

The Enlightenment belongs to the entire human race, not just to a few privileged individuals in Europe or North America who have taken it upon themselves to kick it to bits like spoiled brats, to prevent others from having a go…

It is astonishing that 62 years after the fall of the Third Reich and 16 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, an important segment Europe’s intelligentsia is engaged in slandering the friends of democracy. They maintain it is best to cede and retreat, and pay mere lip-service to the ideals of the Enlightenment. Yet we are a long way off the dramatic circumstances of the 1930s, when the best minds threw themselves into the arms of Berlin or Moscow in the name of race, class or the Revolution. Today the threat is more diffuse and fragmented. There is nothing that resembles the formidable peril of the Third Reich. Even the government of Mullahs in Tehran is a paper tiger that could be brought to its knees with a minimum dose of rigour. Nevertheless the preachers of panic abound. Kant defined the Enlightenment with the motto: Sapere aude – dare to know. A culture of courage is perhaps what is most lacking among today’s directors of conscience. They are the symptoms of a fatigued, self-doubting Europe, one that is only too ready to acquiesce at the slightest alarm. Yet their good-willed rhetorical molasses covers a different tune: that of capitulation!

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Karen Myers.

Hugh Hewitt and NZ Bear have created a pledge promising that signatories will not support any Republican senator who votes against the troop increase in Iraq.

If the United States Senate passes a resolution, non-binding or otherwise, that criticizes the commitment of additional troops to Iraq that General Petraeus has asked for and that the president has pledged, and if the Senate does so after the testimony of General Petraeus on January 23 that such a resolution will be an encouragement to the enemy, I will not contribute to any Republican senator who voted for the resolution. Further, if any Republican senator who votes for such a resolution is a candidate for re-election in 2008, I will not contribute to the National Republican Senatorial Committee unless the Chairman of that Committee, Senator Ensign, commits in writing that none of the funds of the NRSC will go to support the re-election of any senator supporting the non-binding resolution.

Do please sign it. I have.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Daniel Feng had an alarming experience.

A short two months after getting my Chinese driver’s license, I was about to lose it again. I drove the Jetta into a garage with this insane Chinglish (Chinese-English) sign warning me about crafty slipperies: “TO TAKE NOTICE OF SAFE. THE SLIPPERY ARE VERY CRAFTY.” As I remarked, I nearly dented the car (and the sign), having nearly spontaneously combusted in the worst laughing fit ever.

And he has been on a crusade since to memorialize, and rebuke, public signs in Beijing featuring unsatisfactory English translations of Chinese idioms.

One of my classmates today quoted veteran New Yorker political commentator Elizabeth Drew writing in the New York Review of Books:

Almost everyone in Washington understands, even if they don’t say it, that there is no real solution to what now seems to be the most disastrous foreign policy decision in American history. It’s now a matter of how to bring America’s involvement to an end with the fewest bad consequences. Despite all the studies and reports and amendments, events in Iraq itself will likely define the outcome.

US deaths in Iraq have amounted to 3064 over nearly four years.

Grant’s attack at Cold Harbor, June 3, 1864, which cost the lives of 10,000 Union soldiers (from a population of 26 million) in twenty minutes was a disaster. The loss of three thousand citizens of a nation of 300 million, a country which loses 26,000 lives annually in traffic accidents, over the course of nearly four years is something very different from Cold Harbor.

Iraq has not been a military disaster. US forces have suffered no battlefield defeat. Our troops are not demoralized. And there is no possibility whatsoever of our enemies achieving victory by military means.

Their only hope for victory, for bringing about the disaster of US withdrawal which has not yet occurred, is via the cowardice, defeatism, and disloyalty of our own chattering class elite.

Roosevelt elk

Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer are trying to make sure that hundreds of healthy Roosevelt elk and Kaibab mule deer living on Santa Rosa Island are exterminated by the federal government.

The animals have been living there since the 1910s and 1920s when the island’s former owners imported them to provide hunting opportunities on the 52,794 acre off-shore property, then being operated as a cattle ranch. The introduction proved extremely successful, and the island became noted for the trophy animals it produced.

In March 1980, however, Congress established a Channel Islands National Park. In 1986, the Federal Government purchased Santa Rosa Island. The purchase agreement, however, granted the former owners the right to continue ranching and operating a hunting concession for 25 years.

In 1997. however, the National Park and Conservation Association, another litigious self-appointed group of busybodies, sued to end ranching and hunting immediately, claiming that they interfered with public access. The lawsuit resulted in a settlement agreement ending ranching, and stipulating the removal of the elk and deer by 2011.

Hunting is cruel, you see, but exterminating non-native species (who have lived there for a century) is good conservation, California-style.

The National Rifle Association has taken up the fight to save the 1100 animals.

Francis Fukuyama traces Radical Islam’s ideological roots to the irrational reaction within Europe itself (Rousseau, Herder & Hegel) to the Enlightenment, and identifies European collectivist traditions as a major cause of vulnerability on the part of European states to Muslim agitation and demands. Europe has a great deal to learn from the United States, Fukuyama suggests.

But the US needs to learn that Jihadism is caused not by the absence of democracy in the Islamic world, but by its arrival via Globalization.

Modern liberal societies have weak collective identities. Postmodern elites, especially in Europe, feel that they have evolved beyond identities defined by religion and nation. But if our societies cannot assert positive liberal values, they may be challenged by migrants who are more sure of who they are.

Modern identity politics springs from a hole in the political theory underlying liberal democracy. That hole is liberalism’s silence about the place and significance of groups. The line of modern political theory that begins with Machiavelli and continues through Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and the American founding fathers understands the issue of political freedom as one that pits the state against individuals rather than groups. Hobbes and Locke, for example, argue that human beings possess natural rights as individuals in the state of nature—rights that can only be secured through a social contract that prevents one individual’s pursuit of self-interest from harming others.

Modern liberalism arose in good measure in reaction to the wars of religion that raged in Europe following the Reformation. Liberalism established the principle of religious toleration—the idea that religious goals could not be pursued in the public sphere in a way that restricted the religious freedom of other sects or churches…

Johann Gottfried von Herder... argued that inner authenticity lay not just in individuals but in peoples…

.. modern identity is inherently political, because it demands recognition. The idea that modern politics is based on the principle of universal recognition comes from Hegel. Increasingly, however, it appears that universal recognition based on a shared individual humanity is not enough, particularly on the part of groups that have been discriminated against in the past. Hence modern identity politics revolves around demands for recognition of group identities—that is, public affirmations of the equal dignity of formerly marginalised groups, from the Québécois to African-Americans to women to indigenous peoples to homosexuals…

Multiculturalism—understood not just as tolerance of cultural diversity but as the demand for legal recognition of the rights of racial, religious or cultural groups—has now become established in virtually all modern liberal democracies. US politics over the past generation has been consumed with controversies over affirmative action for African-Americans, bilingualism and gay marriage, driven by formerly marginalised groups that demand recognition not just of their rights as individuals but of their rights as members of groups. And the US’s Lockean tradition of individual rights has meant that these efforts to assert group rights have been tremendously controversial—more so than in modern Europe.

The radical Islamist ideology that has motivated terror attacks over the past decade must be seen in large measure as a manifestation of modern identity politics rather than of traditional Muslim culture…

The old multicultural model was based on group recognition and group rights. Out of a misplaced sense of respect for cultural differences—and in some cases out of imperial guilt—it ceded too much authority to cultural communities to define rules of behaviour for their own members. Liberalism cannot ultimately be based on group rights, because not all groups uphold liberal values. The civilisation of the European Enlightenment, of which contemporary liberal democracy is the heir, cannot be culturally neutral, since liberal societies have their own values regarding the equal worth and dignity of individuals. Cultures that do not accept these premises do not deserve equal protection in a liberal democracy. Members of immigrant communities and their offspring deserve to be treated equally as individuals, not as members of cultural communities. There is no reason for a Muslim girl to be treated differently under the law from a Christian or Jewish one, whatever the feelings of her relatives.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Sharon Stone and The Barrister.

Ryszard KapuÅu203aciÅu201eski, Poland’s most distinguished journalist, died yesterday in Warsaw at the age of 74 of a heart attack.

According to Alfred A. Knopf, his American publisher, he wrote 19 books which were translated into more than 20 languages, was witness to 27 coups and revolutions, and was condemned to death four times. He was considered a serious candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005.

Michael Werbowski:

Kapuscinski, who came from behind the iron curtain, was a remarkable reporter in the sense that he documented the last days of rotten regimes. He was a prescient observer of things to come. At times he was there for the final fall. As well, he was one of the first reporters and correspondents to venture into conflict zones and parts of the world that were off limits to many of his mainstream colleagues both in the East and West. He covered, analyzed and described happenings few of us would know about in detail today if he had not been there to relate those events.

Born on March 4, 1932, Kapuscinski became, without doubt, one of Poland’s most famed reporters. His international reputation is now legendary. He was one of the only full-time “roving reporters” for the Polish Press Agency; hence, its “world correspondent,” so to say.

In the 1960s, he traveled the world, mostly to the developing regions. He covered wars, conflicts, uprisings and revolutions. He documented the African independent movements, and much later the process of the disintegration of the Soviet Empire (see his personal travelogue titled Imperium). He approached his assignments through meticulous reading and researching books on his subjects or the “target country.” His written works are a unique literary genre, blending “literary journalism” with visual and frequent historical references that “frame” the events within a specific period…

Kapuscinski in his dispatches, essays and articles decried and described the absurdity of absolute power in a tragicomic manner through the use of vivid, colorful language and narrative style.

Whether reporting from Russia or Africa or Latin America, Kapuscinski in his own words said he wrote for “people everywhere still young enough to be curious about the world.” His vivacity, brilliance and inquisitiveness about the world is a memorable legacy for all reporters—citizen or otherwise—to cherish.

Wikipedia entry.

Michael Gerson takes Virginia’s wordsmith Senator Jim Webb out behind the shed over his democrat rebuttal speech last night:

The Democratic response by Virginia Sen. James Webb was also memorable, in a different way. Whenever a politician puts out to the media that he has thrown away the speechwriters’ draft and written the remarks himself (as Webb did), it is often a sign of approaching mediocrity. This was worse. Senator Webb made liberal use of clichés: the middle class is “the backbone” of the country, which is losing its “place at the table.” I am not even sure there is a literary term for a mixed metaphor that crosses two clichés. And Senator Webb’s logic was as incoherent as his language (the two are often related). No “precipitous withdrawal”—but retreat “in short order.” Fight the war on terror vigorously—except where the terrorists have chosen to fight it. It is, perhaps, a good thing that James Webb earned a job as senator. As a speechwriter he would starve.

But Joshua Stanton supplies the rebuttal speech Jim Webb should have given.

My fellow Americans, We have have a long and glorious history that I join you in celebrating here tonight. Let me share with you this deguerrotype of my great great great great grandfather, a penniless drunkard and street-corner pugilist who sat in a Dublin jail, until he was paroled and came to Virginia in 1724, just in time to join in the massacre of the peaceful Massapequasimolie Indians. I would hope you draw strength from this tomorrow when you return to your janitorial duties, brooding about the hour when you will rise up against the robber barons of the beef trust, but none of you are likely to have understood those historical references anyway.

But let me get to the real reason we are here, besides your mandate to disband the Mark Foley Man-Boy Love Association: to change course in Iraq. I know a lot about changing course because I was the Navy Secretary in my young Republican days, when I was one of the people my most enthusiastic supporters would ordinarily revile.

Read the whole thing.

Another way of describing the problem with our contemporary elites would be to speak of excessive domestication. The modern elite world is preternaturally safe, materialistic and cooperative. Our educational system is designed to produce utterly non-violent, reliably subordinate and conforming persons skilled at the manipulation of words and symbols. Our intellectual system has become a variety of peculiar things, none of them serious. The academic world is, first of all, an elaborate baby-sitting and credentialing machine, which is allowed to operate as a wildlife refuge for cranks and mountebanks in charge of nothing more important than entertaining children. It is completely removed from reality. Education has become a perverse form of entertainment. Those who succeed best, like pop musicians, are the ones who strike the most colorful, bizarre, and hostile poses. The modern hyper-extended childhood of the elite represents the only opportunity future cogs will ever have to rebel, so rebellion is highly prized. But the rebellion is, of course, all in play. The revolution will always rise only to the level of putting Che Guevara on one’s t-shirt or dorm room wall, and following privileged and elite professors in demonstrating over the latest fashionable progressive cause, in ritualistically condemning one’s own society for failing to abolish history and reality, for failing to cause water to flow uphill.

A century ago, when England sent the youth of its urban clerical classes to fight the Boers, they were found generally to be unable to shoot a rifle, ride a horse, read a compass, make a fire, or survive in situations of deprivation in the out-of-doors. Baden-Powell created the Scouting Movement, and a host of late Victorians embraced “muscular Christianity,” in the hope of doing something to diminish the excessive impact of the domesticating impulses of modern urbanism and the modern bureaucratic corporate society. They obviously failed, disastrously.

Wick Sloane SOM ‘80 reading through his monthly issues of the Yale Alumni Magazine observed a conspicuous absence of attention to war-time service on the part of the University.

What is Yale doing to recognize those from Yale — graduates, staff, faculty — who have served in combat in the Persian Gulf or in Afghanistan or the other troubled areas of the world, either for the United States or for their own country? What about any working in humanitarian jobs in these places? More than once I’ve asked this of Joel Podolny, dean of the School of Management. I’ve asked University President Richard Levin and the Association of Yale Alumni. No replies.

U.S. Army Col. Rich Morales SOM ’99 is back just now from at least his third tour in the Gulf in combat, including the first Gulf War. His e-mails to friends are inspiring in their courage and dedication to his troops. Not a syllable of politics or criticism. Most humbling is that he wrote to us that he understood that the debate at home over the war is what he and his troops are fighting for. I’ve asked the School of Management who else is serving, military or otherwise. Has anyone died? Any Yale staff called up in the reserves? Why not an edition of the Alumni Magazine on these people? The SOM Alumni Leaders’ Web pages have color photos and write-ups for the captains of industry and many fine people. Rich is there in name only. No photo or write-up. I am embarrassed for Yale here.

The University could make a powerful gesture of support to her alumni serving overseas by ending Yale’s Vietnam era posture of hostility to the US military and permitting ROTC programs to return to the Yale campus, but it won’t. As in the case of Vietnam, Yale will eventually inscribe the names of those who died on a slab of marble in Woolsey Hall, and that will be that.

Hat tip to Memeorandom.

So artist Aron Falk is educating frogs to prepare them for survival.

3:20 video

Interview

2:21 video of car crashes on an icy hill in Portland, OR. Jan 16, 2007.

Victor Davis Hanson comments on Patrick Fitzgerald’s prosecutorial overreach in the Libby case.

I doubt the average American is in much danger from some out-of-control government sleuth sending him to the Gulag, or putting her in a camp, or even reading his email.

But there are things to be afraid of—out-of-control prosecutors who can trample all over jurisprudence if their cause is considered to be progressive and politically-correct. The prosecution of Scooter Libby is a travesty. If the federal prosecutor knew he had to select a jury in Omaha rather than Washington DC, he would never bring this non-case to trial.

There are at least four considerations that are troubling about Mr. Fitzgerald’s case: (1) We know that Ms. Plame was not, as originally alleged, a covert, or undercover CIA agent at the time in question, and thus had no secret identity to be exposed; (2) we know the source that leaked the nature of her employment—and it was not Mr. Libby, at least initially and most prominently, but Mr. Armitage who apparently is not to be charged with anything (why not?); (3) we know that Mr. Wilson, as Christopher Hitchens has pointed out, lied about a great deal in connection with his trip to Niger and so far has escaped most accountability and probably will thereby seek to avoid testifying at the trial he once so eagerly demanded; (4) Mr. Libby is therefore being charged with obstruction of justice and perjury—not the original mandate of the prosecutor. Why not shut down the inquiry since it has not fulfilled its mission; then turn over the transcripts and testimony to local prosecutors to see if any feel there is a perjury case to be made? From my limited experience with trials (my late mother was a California Superior and Appellate Court Judge), perjury seems a rare charge, and most DAs do not peruse the testimony of witnesses to find contradictions to establish grounds for such indictments.

Jules Crittenden offers George W. Bush the speech he ought to give tonight.

The State of the Union is a disaster. I did my best, but I made mistakes, and my best wasn’t good enough.

We went to war without building up our army, and now, I am trying to make up for that.

But that is not the disaster.

The disaster is that you, Congress and the American people, do not care to fight.

Faced with a fundamental challenge to our own security, to everything we believe in, to the world order to peace and security for which we and our parents fought so hard for so many years, you now want to pretend like none of these threats are real. You want to surrender to the evil I have been telling you about. An evil that, unchecked, can consume large parts of the world and threatens to usher in a dark age.

You didn’t like it when I talked about evil. Sounded too simple, too uncompromising, too moralistic. Too … biblical.

I don’t know what else you call people who fly passenger jets into office buildings; who rape women in front of their husbands and children, and execute their opponents in acid baths; who seek to spread tyrannical and archaic religious regimes that enslave women and stifle fundamental freedoms. Who want to dominate the world’s primary oil fields with nuclear weapons.

I call it evil. Works for me.

I’ve heard all the comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam. George Bush’s Vietnam. The myopia is astonishing, even for me, George Bush, who you all think just isn’t that smart. But I learned something in school: People who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Didn’t you learn anything from Vietnam? Didn’t you see what happened when your predecessors in Congress, disgruntled and responding to public opinion polls just like you are, voted repeatedly to undermine an ally that was fighting for its survival and making headway against evil? There, I’ve said it again. Millions of people were murdered or imprisoned.

And then, those who wished us ill … the evil-doers … evil, evil evil … took advantage of our weakness…

Where do you think this war we are now engaged in started, anyway? Just ask Osama bin Laden, veteran of the Afghan war against the Soviets, what lesson he learned from two decades of American appeasement and withdrawal in the face of provocation.

Now, you want to negotiate with two of the world’s primary sponsors of terrorism, who are directly involved in support of the terrorists who murder our soldiers. You want to make an arrangement by which we will exit Iraq, and leave it to them. To loot, to murder, to fight over, while the rest of the world’s evil regimes look on, see our weakness, and plot their own moves.

You can try that, with resolutions, by cutting spending for troops in the field, as you seek the short-term satisfaction of withdrawal. But I remain President of the United States, and as long as I am, I will be no lame duck in this fight.

I will engage evil directly where I find it, in Iraq and in Iran. With an aggressive and ruthless new strategy and a plan to build our army as we should have a long time ago, I will show the American people that we can fight and we can win. I expect that the American people, though misled by their press and many of their elected representatives, will see results and will get it. Because the American people are a people who in the end don’t give up, don’t stop fighting, refuse to lose, and will choose to win. I have faith in them.

Oh, there’s another one of those words you don’t like.

A nation that is not willing to fight for what it believes in, for its place in the world, is not worthy of its own ideals. But that is not America. I now intend to help America restore its faith in itself. By fighting this necessary fight that we cannot afford to lose.

Observer columnist Nick Cohen was a red-diaper baby, but the left’s behavior over Iraq has driven him to write a book, What’s Left:How Liberals Lost Their Way, denouncing the left’s double standards and hypocrisy.

First, they hated Saddam.

Saddam Hussein appalled the liberal left. At leftish meetings in the late Eighties, I heard that Iraq encapsulated all the loathsome hypocrisy of the supposedly ‘democratic’ West. Here was a blighted land ruled by a terrible regime that followed the example of the European dictatorships of the Thirties. And what did the supposed champions of democracy and human rights in Western governments do? Supported Saddam, that’s what they did; sold him arms and covered up his crimes. Fiery socialist MPs denounced Baathism, while playwrights and poets stained the pages of the liberal press with their tears for his victims. Many quoted the words of a brave Iraqi exile called Kanan Makiya. He became a hero of the left because he broke through the previously impenetrable secrecy that covered totalitarian Iraq and described in awful detail how an entire population was compelled to inform on their family and friends or face the consequences. All decent people who wanted to convict the West of subscribing to murderous double standards could justifi ably use his work as evidence for the prosecution.

The apparently sincere commitment to help Iraqis vanished the moment Saddam invaded Kuwait in August 1990 and became America’s enemy. At the time, I didn’t think about where the left was going. I could denounce the hypocrisy of a West which made excuses for Saddam one minute and called him a ‘new Hitler’ the next, but I didn’t dwell on the equal and opposite hypocrisy of a left which called Saddam a ‘new Hitler’ one minute and excused him the next.

And when America invaded Iraq in 2003:

Everyone I respected in public life was wildly anti-war, and I was struck by how their concern about Iraq didn’t extend to the common courtesy of talking to Iraqis. They seemed to have airbrushed from their memories all they had once known about Iraq and every principle of mutual respect they had once upheld.

I supposed their furious indifference was reasonable. They had many good arguments that I would have agreed with in other circumstances. I assumed that once the war was over they would back Iraqis trying to build a democracy, while continuing to pursue Bush and Blair to their graves for what they had done. I waited for a majority of the liberal left to off er qualified support for a new Iraq, and I kept on waiting, because it never happened – not just in Britain, but also in the United States, in Europe, in India, in South America, in South Africa … in every part of the world where there was a recognisable liberal left. They didn’t think again when thousands of Iraqis were slaughtered by ‘insurgents’ from the Baath party, which wanted to re-establish the dictatorship, and from al-Qaeda, which wanted a godly global empire to repress the rights of democrats, the independent-minded, women and homosexuals. They didn’t think again when Iraqis defi ed the death threats and went to vote on new constitutions and governments. Eventually, I grew tired of waiting for a change that was never going to come and resolved to find out what had happened to a left whose benevolence I had taken for granted.

Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival brings us the next cinematic breakthrough in defense of unpopular sexual minorities, following the example of Brokeback Mountain. This year’s cutting edge entry is titled: Zoo.

Zoo” is a documentary about what director Robinson Devor accurately characterizes as “the last taboo, on the boundary of something comprehensible.” But remarkably, an elegant, eerily lyrical film has resulted.

“Zoo,” premiering before a rapt audience Saturday night at Sundance, manages to be a poetic film about a forbidden subject, a perfect marriage between a cool and contemplative director (the little-seen “Police Beat”) and potentially incendiary subject matter: sex between men and animals. Not graphic in the least, this strange and strangely beautiful film combines audio interviews (two of the three men involved did not want to appear on camera) with elegiac visual re-creations intended to conjure up the mood and spirit of situations. The director himself puts it best: “I aestheticized the sleaze right out of it.”..

I was certainly asked many times, often with a wrinkled brow, ‘Why are you making this film?’ It was something I did resent; I thought artists had the opportunity to explore anything.”

In the end, Devor ended up agreeing with the Roman writer Terence, who said “I consider nothing human alien to me.”

“It happens,” the filmmaker said, “so it’s part of who we are.

Maybe of who you are, Devor.

As far as I’m concerned: “He may be a brother of Big Bill Taft, but he ain’t no brother of mine.”

Get ready for next year’s cinematic sensation, Funeral Parlor.

Says Boston herald columnist Howie Carr:

Who really wants to save a U.S. House seat for Massachusetts? You gotta be kidding. The best thing that could happen for America would be for the commonwealth to shed several districts, and it’s a damn shame we can’t cede one of our two Senate seats as well.

But if the hacks truly want to inflate the state’s plummeting population by rounding up thousands of illegal aliens, it shouldn’t be difficult. First place to check is the hospital emergency rooms. They’re the ones with translators, and a lot of them will be wearing neck braces from the phony auto accidents they’ve staged. But if this harebrained scheme to celebrate diversity doesn’t work, which Mass. congressman will lose out in this low-stakes game of musical chairs? Come 2011, redistricting will be in the hands of the Legislature, where nothing is on the level, everything is a deal and no deal is too small. Let’s work our way east from the New York state line. Probably No. 1 on the 2011 Hit Parade would be Rep. John Olver of Amherst. He’s old, an unrepentant Bulger hack, and I’m not saying Olver is slow, but he’s one of the few human beings in the at-risk category for contracting Dutch elm disease. Next is Richie Neal of Springfield, a former mayor. He can make a claim few other Hampden County pols can: He has never been indicted. Not once. Moving east, we find Jim McGovern, D-Havana. This guy is so far to the left he makes Barney Frank look reasonable. Talk about your impeccable moonbat credentials – he was the first prominent hack to endorse Deval Patrick, but only because Fidel was too sick to make the run. With a Worcester County base of close to 300,000 people, he’s as entrenched as the memory of Che Guevara. Now that the Democrats control the House again, Barney Frank is going nowhere. As a committee chairman, Dick Armey’s favorite Bay State rep hasn’t had this much fun since he responded to Hot Bottoms XXX-rated personal ad. In the Fifth District, Marty “Midas” Meehan has $5 million and a solid base in Lowell. Plus, his district bumps up against a neighboring state (New Hampshire), which is always a good thing in redistricting, because it means there’s only so much gerrymandering that can be done. Marty’s not terribly popular on Beacon Hill right now, but you can buy a lot of friends with 5 million dead presidents. Next door in Essex County, John Tierney won’t make waves. He also won’t make the All-Star team. Like Midas Meehan, this empty suit would have liked to run for the Senate, but with John Kerry hovering at 5 percent in New Hampshire, that ain’t in the cards. Which brings us to the Dean, Ed Markey of Malden. After 30-plus years in Congress, most of his constituents couldn’t pick him out of a lineup, nor would they want to. Fast Eddie has outlived his district, and now it makes no sense whatsoever. Framingham? Still, Markey always survives redistricting. When it comes to the legislature, he knows how to kiss butt and spread campaign loot around. No one knows who’ll be calling the shots at the State House in 2011, but it’s a sure bet kissing butt and spreading loot will still work very well indeed

Mike Capuano from Somerville is the guy who should have Markey’s heavily Italian, eastern Middlesex enclave. Instead he represents a Cambridge-Boston district that skews black and gay, neither of which Capuano is. But he’s tight with Speaker Pelosi, so he’s safe.

Steve Lynch is from South Boston, and his district is the answer to the question, Where did Southie go? He’s safe, but Bill Delahunt might have a problem down the road. Technically he’s from Quincy but that’s Lynch-land. Rep. Dilettante’s real base is Venezuela. But he’ll be 70, and by then may be ready to cash out his various public pensions and succeed Bob Dole as a spokesman for Viagra. So what do you call getting rid of one of these dolts? A good start.

Is it possible to locate a man given only his photograph and first name?

A UK-based game company is testing the theory of six degrees of separation. They have given us a photograph of a man, a name, and the Japanese characters that translate to “Find me”.

We are each only five to seven people away from any target in the world. Someone, somewhere, knows Satoshi. Help spread the word and track down this person!

Project site.

It was just occurring to me: presidents of the United States are a lot like cats, and adversaries of the United States are a lot like mice.

George W. Bush is like some cats I’ve had. The mice made a mess on 9/11, and Bush responded by desultorily playing with Afghanistan and Iraq in much the fashion some cats will enthusiastically start tackling a given mouse, but simply bat him around a bit, and then lose interest and go to sleep, while the mouse recovers and scuttles off to violate one’s domestic order another day.

In the case of Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and Venezuela and a growing list of leftwing dictatorships in Latin America, Bush is worse, more like an old, lazy, and utterly indifferent spoiled housecat, who does no mousing at all.

When one thinks about it, one realizes that in the last 50 years we’ve had good looking presidents and ugly presidents, presidents who had a lot of charm and presidents who made Americans go out and throw up in the street. We’ve had presidents who talked a good game, presidents who screwed up everything, and Ronald Reagan who had a special grace. Besides Reagan, though, we’ve hardly had a president, since the time of FDR, who was any kind of mouser at all. And by my standards, even including Reagan, we have not had a really serious mouser.

I used to have a small grey cat who’d nail one foreign enemy, at least, every night. Our cellar was full of corpses of mice, and voles, and shrews. She didn’t just play with them. After a short session of batting her victim around, she’d administer a lethal, leopard-like bite to the back of the neck, and that was that.

How can a US administration just sit there, and let some idiot like Chavez take over a nearby country, nationalize property (including the property of US corporations), denounce the United States and embark on a campaign of Hemispheric subversion in alliance with our enemies? One really wants to take one’s slipper, and whack that sleeping president a good one, and say: “Over there! Mouse. Go get him! Hunt him up. Kill, kill, kill.”

The BBC reports that Hugo Chavez, the tin-horn dictator of Venezuela, has followed Adolph Hitler’s example, and gotten his rubber-stamp parliament to start passing legislation permitting him to rule by decree, and remain in power forever.

Venezuela’s National Assembly has given initial approval to a bill granting the president the power to bypass congress and rule by decree for 18 months. President Hugo Chavez says he wants “revolutionary laws” to enact sweeping political, economic and social changes.

He has said he wants to nationalise key sectors of the economy and scrap limits on the terms a president can serve.

Mr Chavez began his third term in office last week after a landslide election victory in December.

The bill allowing him to enact laws by decree is expected to win final approval easily in the assembly on its second reading on Tuesday.

Venezuela’s political opposition has no representation in the National Assembly since it boycotted elections in 2005.

Chavez has been hosting Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and is doubtless plotting ways and means to extend the reach of our enemies into this hemisphere. The Bush Administration will be guilty of criminal negligence every bit as bad as Clinton’s, if it fails to remove this revolting communist thug from power before he does further violence to the rights of his own people, and before he creates a functioning base for terrorism in the Western Hemisphere.

Mouseguns has an anonymous humor item comparing the AK-47, the AR-15, and the Mosin-Nagant.

It reads to me like it was written from a Russian perspective. An American would use the Garand as the older comparison. A really sophisticated connoisseur (i.e., somebody old, like me) would compare the 1903 Springfield.

Hat tip to Steve Bodio.

Reuters has a story of a feral woman from Vietnam.

HANOI – A woman has been returned to her home in Vietnam’s Central Highlands 18 years after she went missing as an eight-year old girl tending cows near the Cambodian border, her father told a newspaper on Thursday.

Policeman Ksor Lu long believed that his daughter had been eaten by a wild animal until last Saturday when he was told that loggers had found “a forestman” at a village in Cambodia’s province of Ratanakiri.

Lu arrived and “recognized his daughter from the first sighting” even though her body was blackened and she had long hair down to her legs and could not speak, according to the account in the Vietnam Rural Today newspaper.

Lu said his daughter, Ro Cham H’pnhieng of the Jrai ethnic minority group, probably spent most of the time in the jungle in Cambodia since she went missing in 1989.

The loggers told Lu that they caught her after realizing that someone had sneaked up and taken their lunch.

Lu said that at first it was difficult bringing her back to normal life because she resisted showering, wearing clothes or using chopsticks, fending him off and shouting and crying.

Four days later she started cooperating, Lu said.

“It is not easy indeed but life is waiting ahead for her.”

Local government out of control and burdening residents with an ever-increasing array of pettyfogging rules and regulations?

The little village of Fago, located in the Spanish Pyrenees, found a solution to this overly common problem.

Mobius shoe

What should the up-to-date and sophisticated young lady wear?

How about Mobius shoes and a dissolving dress?

What every well-designed home needs.

New York Times story.

No picture of the stairs, alas!

Seven years ago, when Nader Tehrani and Monica Ponce de Leon, partners at Office dA, an architecture firm in Boston, were asked to renovate a five-story town house in the Back Bay neighborhood, they faced a singular design challenge. The house belonged to Elmar Seibel, now 54, a dealer in rare books on art and architecture, and his wife, Azita Bina-Seibel, 46, a chef and restaurateur.

Mr. Seibel’s personal collection includes at least 40,000 books on Persian and Iranian culture. He keeps many in a warehouse, but perhaps 14,000 or 15,000 are at home.

There is a 1491 copy of a medical book written by Avicenna, the 11th-century philosopher and physician also known as Ibn Sina. A 17th-century eyewitness account of the coronation of a shah, written by Jean Chardin, a French jeweler, is inscribed to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, then the finance minister of France. A 19th-century cookbook has 4,000 handwritten recipes of dishes made for the shah’s court.

The collection began with the birth of the couple’s son, Kian, now 13. Mr. Seibel, a West German native, and Ms. Bina, born in Iran, wanted to give him something from his mother’s family’s cultural heritage. “The original idea was to create something for him — but it takes on a life of its own,” Mr. Seibel said. (Kian, who is fluent in Farsi, has not yet read any of the books in the collection. But he says he will, soon.)

Where, then, were the 14,000 books to go?

“What holds the house together is a vertical staircase that wraps itself around a tower of books that goes up three floors,” Mr. Tehrani said. (The family lives on the top three floors, while Ms. Bina’s mother, Aghdas Zoka-Bina, and a tenant occupy apartments on the first and ground-floor levels.) The stairway ends just below a skylight. “The tower of books appears to pierce the skylight, though it doesn’t in reality,” Mr. Tehrani said.

“The staircase is the ‘it’ factor,” he added. The books are easily accessible from the staircase, just four inches away. Some shelves are designed to hold books upright, while others are wide and shallow, so that manuscripts or magazines can be left there, in an offhand way — and they are. Many of the shelves are backed in translucent glass to let natural light shine through, and recessed lighting in the ceiling makes it possible to grab a book, settle onto any step and read in perfect light. Squinting is not required.

We just bought 80 surplus library bookcases.

Jonah Goldberg’s mind is boggling at the results of a recent Fox News Poll.

News story:

63 percent of Americans say they want the plan to succeed, including 79 percent of Republicans, 63 percent of independents and 51 percent of Democrats.

Meaning 37% of Americans, 21% of Republicans, 37% of Independents, and 49% of democrats either desire its failure, or are not sure.

On the larger political front, more people think “most Democrats” want the Bush plan to fail and for him to have to withdraw troops in defeat (48 percent), than think Democrats want the plan to succeed and lead to a stable Iraq (32 percent).

Robert Edward Lee, the greatest American military commander of all time, was born January 19, 1807 at Stratford Hall Plantation, Westmoreland County, Virginia.

In reality, a man’s suit of good material and tailoring, which fits properly, is not only comfortable, but actively pleasurable.

And, moreover, not everyone subscribes to the supine viewpoint that comfort outranks all other possible considerations.

In Rostand’s play, the gallant Cyrano de Bergerac, for instance, compares his existential stance of personal independence favorably to his personal choice of a decidedly uncomfortable Spanish ruff collar.

Cyrano to Le Bret:

—Vous, la molle amitié dont vous vous entourez, Ressemble à ces grands cols d’Italie, ajourés Et flottants, dans lesquels votre cou s’effémine: On y est plus à l’aise. . .et de moins haute mine, Car le front n’ayant pas de maintien ni de loi, S’abandonne à pencher dans tous les sens. Mais moi, La Haine, chaque jour, me tuyaute et m’apprête La fraise dont l’empois force à lever la tête; Chaque ennemi de plus est un nouveau godron Qui m’ajoute une gêne, et m’ajoute un rayon: Car, pareille en tous points à la fraise espagnole, La Haine est un carcan, mais c’est une auréole !

(Brian Hooker translation:)

You—Good nature all around you, soft and warm—
You are like those Italians, in great cowls
Comfortable and loose—Your chin sinks down
Into the folds, your shoulders droop. But I—The Spanish ruff I wear around my throat
Is like a ring of enemies; hard, proud,
Each point another pride, another thorn—So that I hold myself erect perforce
Wearing the hatred of the common herd
Haughtily, the harsh collar of Old Spain,
At once a fetter and—a halo!

Al Gore, despite having Truth on his side, concluded Truth wasn’t enough and chickened out on meeting Björn Lomborg in an interview arranged by Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten.

The interview had been scheduled for months. Mr. Gore’s agent yesterday thought Gore-meets-Lomborg would be great. Yet an hour later, he came back to tell us that Bjorn Lomborg should be excluded from the interview because he’s been very critical of Mr. Gore’s message about global warming and has questioned Mr. Gore’s evenhandedness. According to the agent, Mr. Gore only wanted to have questions about his book and documentary, and only asked by a reporter. These conditions were immediately accepted by Jyllands-Posten. Yet an hour later we received an email from the agent saying that the interview was now cancelled. What happened?