Feeling paranoid?

Jack Cashill does an awfully good Mel Gibson-in-Conspiracy-Theory impression feverishly linking the Berger document removal job with a cover-up of Clinton Administration knowledge of Operation Bojinka, along with an assumed cover-up by that Administration of the shooting down of TWA Flight 800 by a terrorist missile.

Interesting reading, at least.

If not the most skillful of embezzlers, Samuel “Sandy” Berger is a far more formidable character than the media would have us believe. When he made his now storied sorties into the National Archives, he risked his career and his reputation in so doing, and he knew it. Rest assured, he would not have done so were the secrets to be preserved not worth the risk of pilfering them.

True to form, the major media refuse to even ask the most fundamental question: just what secrets would justify so much personal exposure. Having read the report on Berger by the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform, I am more confident than ever that I know the answer.

As the House Report makes clear, Berger did not exactly welcome this assignment. This confirms my suspicions. The archivists told the House Committee, in fact, that Berger “indicated some disgust with the burden and responsibility of conducting the document review.”

Apparently, he did not have much choice in the matter. Former President Bill Clinton had, according to the report, “designated Berger as his representative to review NSC documents.” Berger was Clinton’s go-to inside guy.

In his first term, Clinton had hired this millionaire trade lawyer and lobbyist to be deputy national security advisor, not because of Berger’s foreign policy experience, which was negligible, but because of his political instincts, which were keen and reliable. Clinton entrusted Berger with some very sensitive assignments, particularly in relationship to China, and rewarded him for his trust with the job of National Security Advisor in his second term. This job does not require Senate confirmation. It is unlikely that Berger could have gotten any job that did.

As we now know, Berger made four trips to the National Archives. He did so presumably to refresh his memory before testifying first to the Graham-Goss Commission and then to the 9/11 Commission. Berger made his first visit in May 2002, his last in October 2003.

As we now know too, he stole and destroyed an incalculable number of documents during these four visits. “The full extent of Berger’s document removal,” reports the House Committee, “is not known and never can be known.”

To understand what that “smoking gun” might have been and how it involved Clarke and Berger, let us turn to the fateful summer of 1996. At that time Col. Buzz Patterson carried the “nuclear football” for President Clinton. Given his security clearance, Patterson was entrusted with any number of high security assignments. One morning in “late-summer,” Patterson was returning a daily intelligence update from the Oval Office to the National Security Council when he noticed the heading “Operation Bojinka.”

As Patterson relates, “I keyed on a reference to a plot to use commercial airliners as weapons.” As a pilot, he had a keen interest in the same. “I can state for a fact that this information was circulated within the U.S. intelligence community,” Patterson writes, “and that in late 1996 the president was aware of it.” The President’s hand written comments on the documents verified the same.

The Philippine police had uncovered plans for aerial assaults as early as January 1995 and shared those plans with the FBI almost immediately. The man responsible for those plans was Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing and very possibly an Iraqi contract agent. His accomplice was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9-11 and allegedly Yousef’s uncle.

Understandably, the 9-11 Commission was very concerned about who knew what when in regards to the use of planes as bombs. Bush National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was asked on her first real question: “Did you ever see or hear from the FBI, from the CIA, from any other intelligence agency, any memos or discussions or anything else between the time you got into office and 9-11 that talked about using planes as bombs?”

Rice said no. She was likely telling the truth. Clarke had acknowledged as much during his earlier testimony. He admitted that the “knowledge about al-Qaeda having thought of using aircraft as weapons” was relatively old, “five-years, six-years old.” He asked that intelligence analysts “be forgiven for not thinking about it given the fact that they hadn’t seen a lot in the five or six years intervening about it.”

Before the summer Olympics of 1996, in fact, Clarke had warned security planners about the possibility of Islamic terrorists hijacking a 747 and flying it into Olympic Stadium. Two days before the start of those Olympics, on July 17, Saddam’s National Liberation day, with the U.S Navy on the highest state of alert since the Cuban missile crisis, TWA Flight 800 blew up inexplicably off the coast of Long Island.

The fact that the President was reviewing Bojinka plans soon after the destruction of TWA Flight 800 makes the versions of those plans with his hand written notes on them all the more critical. If found and revealed, they would, at the very least, acknowledge that the Clinton administration had a keen interest in the possible use of planes as bombs five years before September 11.

That interest obviously died, and Clarke served as chief assassin. Among other roles, it fell upon this Clinton sycophant to devise the “exit strategy” that transformed a seeming aeronautical assault on TWA Flight 800 into a “mechanical failure.” In his book Against All Enemies, he takes full credit for this bit of aviation alchemy.

Clarke was likely also responsible for getting the CIA and FBI to breach the storied “wall” and work together on the creation of the notorious “zoom-climb” animation. This animation showed a nose-less 747 rocketing vertically 3200 feet into space and confusing onlookers. The FBI used it to discredit all 270 of its eyewitnesses to an apparent missile strike.

The media swallowed the zoom-climb as uncritically as they had the “mechanical failure.” The New York Times did not bother to interview any of the 270 relevant eyewitnesses. Say what you will about former Timesman Jayson Blair, but he at least would have made one up.

Berger played a key role in the TWA Flight 800 sleight-of-mind as well. On the night of July 17, 1996, Berger was among the scores of staff summoned to the White House for an emergency meeting—a first for a domestic airplane crash. Col. Patterson was there as well but was kept fully out of the loop. When I asked Patterson if anyone was holed up in the family quarters with the president, he could tentatively identify only one person. And that person was Sandy Berger, then just the deputy national security advisor. Berger’s boss, the less “reliable” Tony Lake, was relegated to his own office.

A logical deduction from existing evidence is that Clarke put the “planes-as-bombs” talk on hold for the five or six years after the TWA Flight 800 disaster lest such talk evoke unanswered questions about that fateful crash. Berger’s task, I surmise, was to make sure all references to Bojinka, planes-as-bombs, and/or TWA Flight 800 were rooted from the Archives, especially any documents with hand-written notes that led back to co-conspirators Berger, Clarke, and Clinton.

Amazing!

Hat tip to José Guardia.

Michelle Malkin and Bryan Preston (who accompanied her) are back from Iraq, having spent four days patrolling with Army units from a forward operating base in Northern Baghdad.

He has a new post featuring news and analysis you won’t find in the MSM.

Mark Cuban (undoubtedly a resident of California) speaks out on behalf of the permanently infantilized.

When I started MicroSolutions I was 24 years old. I had just gotten fired from my job and was sleeping on the floor of a 3 bedroom apartment with 5 other guys living there. I didn’t have a closet or a bed, but I had 2 suits.

I bought both of those polyester wonders, one Grey pinstripe, the other blue pinstripe for a total of $99 dollars plus tax. To go with those fashion forward wonders, I had several white polo button downs that I had purchased used from a re-sale shop, and a couple ties that I had bought on sale or had gotten as hand me downs from friends.

I wore those babies when it was cold. I wore them when it was 100 degrees plus. I ironed them and when I could I got them dry cleaned…

Someone had once told me that you wear to work what your customers wear to work. That seemed to make sense to me, so I followed it, and expected those who worked for me to follow it as well.

After I sold MicroSolutions I decided that I never would wear a suit again…

With our new business, I decided that I would have to wear a suit, but would modify the rule so that I would only wear a suit when someone I was selling to was wearing a suit…

When Broadcast.com was sold, the suit went out the window completely.

The gentleman has obviously never owned a real suit, only hideous and inexpensive ersatz imitations thereof. Suits equal discomfort in his mind, because he has only worn cheap, ill-fitting articles of clothing made of intrinsically uncomfortable materials.

Beyond that, the gentleman fails to understand that dignity and formality are becoming to adults. And it is not simply a matter of convention and form; men wear suits fundamentally because any man looks better in a good suit.

T shirts and blue jeans or bermuda shorts have intrinsically limited capacities for both beauty and self expression. Adults wear adult clothing in order to express as fully as possible the possibilities of aesthetic expression in attire.

Suits have been de rigeur in business (outside the California playpen) since time immemorial, since it is impossible for most serious adults to imagine entering into a substantial relationship of trust or business with an individual too slovenly, too undignified, or too badly educated to know how to dress.

Obviously, people began making the rare exception for the eccentric scientific genius working in the most arcane outer reaches of technology, whose thoughts were so abstracted and unworldly that he couldn’t possibly understand how to live normally in the world, and the next thing you know every clod and lout in the Sunshine State of Self-Entitlement decides that he, too, is some kind of genius, operating at Olympian levels beyond normal civilization.

You Californians are wrong. You are operating far below the conventional levels of ordinary civilization, and you are not Einstein, you are Beavis and Butthead.

Marco Evaristti, edgy Chilean artist, at his latest exhibit in Santiago has served up meatballs made from his own fat.

Foxnews.com:

“Ladies and gentleman, bon appetit and may god bless,” said Marco Evaristti, a glass in his hand, to his dining companions seated last Thursday night around a table in Santiago’s Animal Gallery.

On the plates in front of them was a serving of agnolotti pasta and in the middle a meatball made with oil Evaristti removed from his body in a liposuction procedure last year.

“The question of whether or not to eat human flesh is more important than the result,” he said, explaining the point of his creation.

“You are not a cannibal if you eat art,” he added.

Evaristti produced 48 meatballs with his own fat, some of which would be canned and sold for $US4000 dollars for 10.

A veteran at shock-art, in an earlier work Evaristti invited people to kill fish by pressing the button on a blender the fish were held in.

In April 2004 he dyed an enormous iceberg in Greenland with red paint.

Santiago Times:

Six years ago, artist Marco Evaristti scandalized the Chilean art world when he displayed live fish in working blenders. The opening of his new exhibit at the Animal Gallery in Vitacura is likely to cause just as much sensation, hype and criticism when visitors are invited to eat meatballs made with Evaristti’s own fat.

The Chilean-Danish artist, who underwent liposuction for the work, describes it as a criticism of the plastic surgery market. The meatballs are canned and available for purchase; two cans have already been sold to collectors for US$23,200 each. Evaristti claims that the meatballs are not only delicious, but contain less fat than supermarket meatballs.

President Bachelet and poet Nicanor Parra were invited to enjoy the dish at the opening. Neither has given a response so far. The artist assured that he, if no one else, would enjoy the meal.

Another controversial piece consists of six fake faeces covered in gold taken from the teeth of Jewish holocaust victims…

Exhibit details:
Galería Animal
Alonso de Cordova 3105
Vitacura
M-F 10:00-8:00
Saturday 10:30-2:00
Until January 27th.

One couldn’t make this stuff up.

News 24.Com:

A wealthy Portuguese bachelor, who had no children, left his fortune to 70 strangers selected at random from a telephone book, a newspaper has reported.

Luis Carlos de Noronha Cabral da Camara drew up his unusual will in 1988 in front of two witnesses at a Lisbon registry office, 13 years before he died of natural causes at the age of 42, reported the weekly newspaper, Sol, on Saturday.

“I am sure he just wanted to create confusion by leaving his belongings to strangers. That amused him,” said one of the witnesses and one of the man’s few friends, Anibal Castro Vila.

The Age (Australia):

Luis Carlos de Noronha Cabral da Camara boasted of his noble Portuguese lineage, but was not a happy man.

As the illegitimate and unloved son of an aristocratic woman, he was rich but had few friends and no offspring of his own.

So when it came to writing out his will almost 20 years ago, he asked a Portuguese notary for a copy of the Lisbon phone book and plucked out names at random.

Now, with the unhappy man having drunk himself into the grave, his randomly chosen heirs are receiving lawyers’ letters telling them they can claim a share of his fortune.

“I thought it was some kind of cruel joke,” a 70-year-old woman called Helena told Portugal’s Sol newspaper. “I’d never heard of the man.”

Pensioner Vitor Mendes told the newspaper: “I rang the lawyer and he said the man just picked names out of the phone book. We can’t be due to get that much. He put down 70 names!”

But with a 12-room apartment in central Lisbon, a house near the northern town of Guimaraes, a couple of healthy bank accounts, a luxury car and two motorbikes to his name, Mr da Camara’s will means that his random heirs should walk away with several thousand euros each.

He was brought up by a nanny and inherited valuable real estate from his grandmother, which he slowly sold off to fund his great passions: motorbikes, shooting and drinking.

“He was determined that nothing should go to the state, which he thought had been robbing him of money all his life,” said Anibal Castro, a former friend who witnessed the will.

Anne Applebaum, writing at Slate, has the solution for ending the Taliban’s ability to fund itself, and gain Afghan rural support, via the covert trade in opium.

She’s perfectly right.

A Texas State legislator has introduced a bill challenging the traditional claim of New Haven, Connecticut’s Louis’ Lunch to the invention of the hamburger. Representative Betty Brown’s contention that the hamburger was invented in Athens, Texas by a local resident named Fletcher Davis at a luncheonette he operated in the late 1880s is based upon research by a local Texas historian and newspaper columnist named Frank X. Tolbert.

John E. Harmon

If Fletcher Davis invented the hamburger at a luncheonette in Athens, Texas, one might suppose that an invention so successful would have kept that luncheonette in operation.

Despite the passage of time, progress, and New Haven’s inexorable downtown development, Louis’ Lunch remains in business after more than a century. John Harmon’s dismissal of Louis’ clam is not well-reasoned, in my view. Since Louis’ has declined to switch from using their archaic vertical gas broilers, and has refused to switch from using toast to buns, and has refused even to countenance such innovations as ketchup, how can one possibly assume that Louis’s sandwich has ever changed from something else to ground beefsteak?

Allahpundit has the Channel 4 investigative program broadcast Monday, January 15, revealing the kind of Islamic extremism being preached today in British mosques.

The program has been divided into three 8-9 minute videos, which follow one after the other automatically.

link

A US Army unit evidently captured this in-production insurgent video near Dulab, Iraq, and supplied the soundtrack and a different ending from the one originally intended.

5:52 video

CAUTION: A bit gory.

Ronald A. Cass, Chairman of the Center for the Rule of Law and Dean Emeritus of Boston University School of Law, explains why the press has a responsibility to get to the bottom of Sandy Berger’s thefts from the National Archives.

Mr. Berger’s willingness to risk everything to suppress the information goes well beyond ordinary concerns against excessive disclosure.

Bill Clinton obviously has great sensitivity to his place in history and to accusations that he did too little to respond to al-Qaeda, that he is to some degree responsible for failing to prevent 9/11’s tragedy. That is why he and his lieutenants made reckless and baseless accusations against the current Bush administration, attempting to portray them as having dropped the baton handed off by ever-vigilant Clintonistas (who, according to John Ashcroft’s testimony, withheld the MAAAR and its warnings about al-Qaeda’s operations in the US from the Bush transition team).

But maybe there is more to the story. Maybe there is something far worse than we can imagine that is worth having his chief security aide risk his reputation, his career, and his liberty to cover up…

Clinton’s excessive reaction – complete with hyperbole, finger-wagging, and scolding – to a simple question from Fox News’ Chris Wallace about his response to al-Qaeda is in the same vein. Something here touches a nerve.

That nerve is exposed in the Sandy Berger saga. This story at bottom is about the security of our nation, about what was – or was not – done to protect us from the most shocking and deadly attack on American citizens by foreign agents in our nation’s history. This story is critical not only to understanding our past but also to securing our future. It can help us understand what it is reasonable to expect can be done to keep us and our loved ones safe from harm. It is, in short, as important a story as there is.

It is a story the news media should be desperate to explore, not desperate to avoid.

Because it resembles the cross.

The New York Sun reports.

The letter “X” soon may be banned in Saudi Arabia because it resembles the mother of all banned religious symbols in the oil kingdom: the cross.

The new development came with the issuing of another mind-bending fatwa, or religious edict, by the infamous Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice — the group of senior Islamic clergy that reigns supreme on all legal, civil, and governance matters in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The commission’s damning of the letter “X” came in response to a Ministry of Trade query about whether it should grant trademark protection to a Saudi businessman for a new service carrying the English name “Explorer.”..

Congress passed Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments in an absent-minded moment of feel-good political correctness. Nobody, after all, wants little girls to be denied equal opportunities to participate in school athletic programs.

Of course, no one realized just where all this would eventually lead, or that the definition of “fairness” that wound up being applied would be that proposed by the craziest parent with the biggest chip on the shoulder.

NY Times:

Whitney Point is one of 14 high schools in the Binghamton area that began sending cheerleaders to girls’ games in late November, after the mother of a female basketball player in Johnson City, N.Y., filed a discrimination complaint with the United States Department of Education. She said the lack of official sideline support made the girls seem like second-string, and violated Title IX’s promise of equal playing fields for both sexes.

But the ruling has left many people here and across the New York region booing, as dozens of schools have chosen to stop sending cheerleaders to away games, as part of an effort to squeeze all the home girls’ games into the cheerleading schedule.

Boys’ basketball boosters say something is missing in the stands at away games, cheerleaders resent not being able to meet their rivals on the road, and even female basketball players being hurrahed are unhappy.

In Johnson City, students and parents say they have accepted the change even as they question the need for it.

Several cheerleaders there recalled a game two years ago, long before the complaint, when the squad decided at the last minute to cheer for the girls’ team because a boys’ game was canceled.

The cheers drowned out directions from the girls’ coach, frustrated the players, and created so much tension that the cheerleaders left before halftime.

“They asked, ‘Why are you here?’ ” recalled Joquina Spence, 18, a senior cheerleader. “We told them, ‘We’re here to support you,’ and it was a problem because they kept yelling at us.”

But, as the New York State Public High School Athletic Association warned in a letter to its 768 members in November, the education department determined that cheerleaders should be provided “regardless of whether the girls’ basketball teams wanted and/or asked for” them.

The ruling followed a similar one in September in the Philadelphia suburbs, and comes as high schools nationwide are redefining the role of cheerleaders in response to parental and legal pressures as well as growing sensitivity to sexism among athletic directors, especially as more women step into those roles.

Federal education officials would not specify how many Title IX complaints concerning cheerleading the Office for Civil Rights is investigating. But a spokesman said the department received 64 complaints nationwide last year concerning unequal levels of publicity given to girls’ and boys’ teams — which includes the issue of cheerleading — most from New York state. That compares with a total of 28 such complaints over the previous four years.

The Christian Science Monitorreports:

By the end of this year, the contents of all 1,800 courses taught at one of the world’s most prestigious universities will be available online to anyone in the world, anywhere in the world. Learners won’t have to register for the classes, and everyone is accepted.

The cost? It’s all free of charge.

The OpenCourseWare movement, begun at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2002 and now spread to some 120 other universities worldwide, aims to disperse knowledge far beyond the ivy-clad walls of elite campuses to anyone who has an Internet connection and a desire to learn.

Intended as an act of “intellectual philanthropy,” OpenCourseWare (OCW) provides free access to course materials such as syllabi, video or audio lectures, notes, homework assignments, illustrations, and so on. So far, by giving away their content, the universities aren’t discouraging students from enrolling as students. Instead, the online materials appear to be only whetting appetites for more.

Dagny Taggart?

The New York Times reports that Randall Wallace, screenwriter of Braveheart (1996) and We Were Soldiers (2002) is inching toward completion of a script for the filming of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

The challenge, Mr. Wallace said, was immediately tempting. As for how he is distilling Rand’s novel and its Castro-length monologues to a two-hour screenplay, Mr. Wallace insisted he had the material under control and was on course to deliver a finished draft this month.

“I can pretty much guarantee you that there won’t be a 30-page speech at the end of the movie,” he said. “I have two hours to try to express what Rand believed to an audience, and my responsibility is not only to Ayn Rand, but to the audience, that this be a compelling movie. More people will see the movie than will read ‘Atlas Shrugged.’ And the movie has to work.”

Of course, Randall, that has to mean that you outrank Rand.

A film production of Atlas Shrugged lacking John Galt’s speech would be like a performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony omitting the Ode to Joy. If you don’t think John Galt’s speech is a key part of the novel, if you don’t like John Galt’s speech or find it intrinsically boring, you don’t really connect with Ayn Rand, and have no business trying to do a screenplay version of her work.

No, I wouldn’t advocate a word-for-word performance, but Atlas Shrugged without the Speech would be like the New Testament without the Resurrection.

Not even Angelina Jolie as Dagny is going to save this turkey.

And can you imagine? The Times reports that they were able to buy full creative control from that worm Peikoff. Rand must be spinning at 78 rpms.

Earlier Story – 27 April 2006.

William Sidney Mount (1807-1868), Eel Spearing at Setauket, 1845
Oil on canvas; 28 1/2×36 in. (72.4×91.4 cm)
New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown

John Wilmerding, in the Wall Street Journal, rhapsodizes over a pleasant enough America genre painting, dragging in the Ancient Greeks, and homing in unerringly on the real subtext of the painting: the sublimely important themes of race and inequality.

Following a period of renovation and curatorial research, “Eel Spearing at Setauket” (1845) by the American genre painter William Sidney Mount (1807-1868) has gone back on view at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y. The star of the museum’s collection, the work is also generally acknowledged to be one of the classics in the history of American art. Why? Because it is both a beautiful and a significant painting. First is its formal beauty, the serene clarity of its composition, organized around its multiple pairings and reflections…

The structure is classical, consisting mainly of stable horizontals and verticals, along with the dominant triangle formed by paddle, boat and fishing spear, reminiscent of a Greek revival pediment dominant in American architecture at the time. The boat is centered in the nearground, parallel both to the picture plane and to the shoreline behind. In its solid volume and monumental stance the standing figure recalls the spirit of Greco-Roman statuary, such as that of the spearbearer. (Mount could have seen casts of ancient sculpture in his years of study in New York.) But the stillness, harmony and sense of equipoise are also an expression of nature’s hold on the American imagination in the mid-19th century, the country’s self-confident spirit, and Mount’s personal celebration of memory and meditation…

“Eel Spearing” appears to be apolitical, though its thoughtful mood and stable structure suit the sense of racial harmony. Mount achieves this by telling his story with characters marginalized in American society at the time—the child, the woman, the black. (Imagine how much more provocative his work would have been had the dominant figure been a black male.)

Wilmerding, astonishingly, overlooks the degree to which small dogs (not to mention: eels!) were not only marginalized in the wicked America of James K. Polk, but remain marginalized today.

Power to the pointy-eared terriers and the slimey anguilliformes!

The insensitive, of course, would say the painting merely represents a pleasant and nostalgic bucolic sporting idyll.

Good collection of Open-Source downloads.

link

Hat tip to John Murrell.

The latest report is that the US airstrike missed “three top al-Qaeda leaders” hiding in Somalia.

Earlier posting.

And apparently, when we do catch them, we’re still playing catch-and-release. It sounds like it was Hassan Abassi that Condeleezza Rice ordered released.

American officials say the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Quds Force is active in Iraq. 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.

video

Iraqi Jihadi Iinsurgents released a video on Wednesday showing the preparation, and launching, of missiles containing chemical weapons. Story at MEMRI.

The Salahaldin Al-Ayoubi Brigades, the military wing of JAMI, Al Jabha Al-Islamiyya l’il-Muqawama Al-’Iraqiyya, announced via Islamist websites that today, January 10, 2007, it had fired four missiles loaded with chemicals at a U.S. base near Samara, Iraq. The organization posted a film showing militants wearing gas masks and filling the missiles with a liquid which the organization claims are chemicals.

Hat tip to AJStrata.

Alan Peters tells us that Iran was really found with its hand in the cookie jar this time.

Reports from Tehran state that Iran’s top IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps) strategist, Hassan Abbasi, was captured in the recent raid on the Islamic Iran’s office in Erbil, Iraq.

Referred to inside Islamic Iran as the Regime’s version of Kissinger, Abbasi works directly as special advisor for the dead or dying Supreme Ruler in Iran – Ali Khamenei.

His attitude to the main competitor for the Supreme Leadership position, Hashemi Rafsanjani, as the telephone report elaborated, is “like a knife and cheese”, meaning he hates Rafsanjani.

Abbasi has in the past indicated he has already chosen and set up attack capability on a large number of targets inside the USA and said the Islamic regime would wipe out the Western culture – as a whole – and replace it with Islam.

He also runs the “Freedom Organizations” an umbrella group, coordinating and networking every “anti-imperialism” terror group around the globe. Be it the IRA in Ireland or Japanese cults or Puerto Rican gangs in the USA. Anyone who is ready to disrupt their country and governments through acts of terrorism.

As the Islamic Regime’s top tactician and strategist, his being found and caught in Iraq comes as little or no surprise when reorganization of the jihadists in Iraq has to be done to meet President Bush’s new initiative.

In the past Abbasi was closely linked to the Islamic Regime’s former MInister of Defense, Shamkhani and authored much of the plans to block the Persian Gulf as well as plans to insert the Ghods Brigades into Iraq via the Basra area and the Northern Kurdish borders.

He has long established ties to the Kurds, who cooperate with him as part of the Freedoms Organizations in their quest for a Kurdish homeland.

I should know better. Anonymity of the original source is always a dead giveaway that the item is a hoax.

Some alert classmates spotted yesterday’s “Denver vs. New Orleans” as hoax email which has appeared in several variant forms, and which is recorded on Snopes.

The moral is that one should always take the time to investigate these things, no matter how agreeable to one’s own prejudices and preconceptions a particular item may be. I get the dunce cap for today.

Hat tips, kudos, and thanks to Rodger Kamenetz and Stephen Frankel for the correction.

Jonah Goldberg has one, in a time when it is becoming a rare commodity.

The New York Post recently compiled a list of the things that the New York City Council tried to ban — not all successfully — just in 2006 alone.

The list: pit bulls; trans fats; aluminum baseball bats; the purchase of tobacco by 18- to 20-year-olds; foie gras; pedicabs in parks; new fast-food restaurants (but only in poor neighborhoods); lobbyists from the floor of council chambers; lobbying city agencies after working at the same agency; vehicles in Central and Prospect parks; cell phones in upscale restaurants; the sale of pork products made in a processing plant in Tar Heel, N.C., because of a unionization dispute; mail-order pharmaceutical plans; candy-flavored cigarettes; gas-station operators adjusting prices more than once daily; Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus; Wal-Mart.

On Jan. 2 in Washington, D.C., the city council’s smoking ban was extended to bars and nightclubs. Even private clubs, where members pay through the teeth to associate voluntarily, can’t allow smoking on their own property.

In some states, you can’t smoke in your car if young children are present — your own children, that is.

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville warns: “It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my own part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in great things than in little ones. …”

This is a typically penetrating insight, and one with new relevance these days. This country seems to have inverted de Tocqueville’s hierarchy. On countless fronts, the natural pastures of daily liberty have become circumscribed by dull-witted but well-meaning bureaucrats slapping down the paving stones of good intentions on the road to hell.

The rule of thumb for a free society should be that it infringes liberties rarely, but when it does so it is for important reasons. Today, that thumb has been cast down, Caesar-like, pointing in the opposite direction.

We have democratized the small assaults on freedom so that everyone must endure them, while we caterwaul about the tyranny of any real inconvenience that might fall “disproportionately” on the few.

We ban using trans fats for millions but flinch at the idea that some kid might have to endure the Pledge of Allegiance or a moment of silence in school if it conflicts with his conscience.

Everyone must surrender his shoes, his regular-size toothpaste and shampoo at the airport, but we man the barricades to protect a few young Muslim men from being inconvenienced for an extra five minutes at the airport.

Free speech is most restricted where it is most important — in political contests near Election Day — while it is maximized to an absurd level at the fringes of culture and decency.

Of course, there are legitimate objections to infringements of liberty or principle on what de Tocqueville would call the “great things.” What is so disturbing is how few legitimate objections are raised about the “little things.”

And I can’t help but shake the feeling that civilizations fall apart, or get plowed under by the wheels of history, when they fail to understand these distinctions.

One of my favorite sayings is that America can choke on a gnat, but it swallows tigers whole. These days, we seem to be choking on the tigers while our bellies fill with gnats.

Doug Hanson explains why.

Acting without the restraints imposed by nominal allies, Admiral Fallon and PACOM have been closing the gate on Iran from the east. India’s strategic partnership with the US should be recognized as PACOM’s singular achievement to date in the War on Terror. By the use of solid statesmanship, military exchanges and defense cooperation, the US has taken away the largest potential market for Persia’s vast energy resources. Not only that, but a sea change of geo-political alignments has taken place that will be effective in countering any new alliances composed of both old and new enemies with access to Central Asia and the Pacific Rim.

This is only the most visible example of PACOM’s successes. Steady progress has also been made on the direct action front against terror groups such as Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, where it was reported last month that Filipino forces had killed the group’s leader, Khadaffy Janjalani, in a firefight in September. US Special Forces advisors, and civilian support to Filipino law enforcement agencies and the court system are gradually paying off.

In short, Admiral Fallon has been masterful in executing both our long-range strategic goals and in conducting the close fight by rolling up terror groups in the Pacific.

Whether the Coalition does in fact, embark on extensive naval and air campaigns against Iran or another rogue state is a matter of conjecture. We can be reasonably sure however, that Admiral Fallon will bring a singular focus and vision to achieving victory in the Central Region, free of CENTCOM’s institutional inertia and bias.

And, doubtless, primary ground force reliance will be not on the Army, but on the USMC.

Hollywood Reporter:

FBI memo to Hollywood: If it’s not too much trouble, could you please portray our counterterrorism efforts with a bit more realism?

Hat tip to Michael Lawler.

Australian Grand Mufti Taj El-Din Hilaly thus recently described his adopted country.

Speaking in Arabic on Egyptian television Sheik al-Hilali said, according to a Seven Network translation, that white Australians arrived in the country shackled as convicts.

“We (Muslims) came as free people. We bought our own tickets. We are entitled to Australia more than they are,’’ he said.

The mufti was on the Egyptian chat show explaining the controversy last year over his comments likening immodestly-dressed women to uncovered meat.

But according to the translation, he said the controversy was a white conspiracy aimed at terrorising Australian Muslims…

But while the convict jibes might be forgiven by some, as they are when levelled by English cricket fans, the sheik’s comments are expected to cause outrage in some quarters – especially the claim that white Australians “are the biggest liars’‘.

The mufti told Egytpian television that outrage over his controversial meat sermon was “a calculated conspiracy’‘, that started with him, “in order to bring the Islamic community to its knees’‘.

He also said “Australian law guarantees freedoms up to a crazy level’‘, when reportedly referring to anti-Muslim courts and the harsh sentencing of a Muslim gang rapist in Sydney.

One game warden, at least, lives up to Iowa’s nickname: the Hawkeye State.

the bird appeared to have caught a single talon in a knothole in the branch when it landed. Apparently, the bird tried to take off, losing its balance. It hung from the talon, upside down.

Because the eagle was hanging over a cliff and high in the air, ropes and ladders seemed unlikely rescue tools, Sandholdt said. Many in the group thought a mercy killing was the best option.

Sandholdt said he asked for a chance to free the bird with his rifle, figuring at best the bird would fall into the lake and have to be rescued for rehabilitation at a clinic.

“It’s safe to say no one had any confidence that I could do that,” Sandholdt said of his proposed sharpshooting. “My buddies were waiting for a poof of feathers.”

Sandholdt bent a tree sapling over to use as a brace. He used the muzzleloader’s scope to take aim, and the bullet traveled 60 to 70 feet, cleanly through the edge of the knothole. Sandholdt figures he hit the talon, too.

The eagle flew away. Officers waited for it to collapse. Instead, the bird kept flying, disappearing over the horizon.

AP:

Members of an all-male singing group from Yale University say they were taunted with anti-gay slurs, attacked and beaten after singing “The Star Stangled Banner” at a New Year’s Eve party in San Francisco.

At least three members of the Baker’s Dozen a cappella group were hurt. One suffered a broken jaw.

No arrests have been made. Police said they are investigating.

The trouble started when a couple of partygoers began mocking the 16 student singers who wore sports jackets and ties as preppies, witnesses said.

“You’re not welcome here,” Sharyar Aziz Jr., an 18-year-old Baker’s Dozen member whose jaw was broken, quoted one partygoer as saying. “He called a few members of the group, whether it was fag or homo, very, I would say, juvenile taunting.”

Reno Rapagnani, a retired San Francisco police officer whose daughter hosted the event, shut down the party. As the singers headed back to a nearby home where they were staying, another group of young men got out of a van and jumped them, according to Rapagnani.

“They were surrounded, then tripped _ and when they were on the ground, they were kicked,” Rapagnani said.

Two other Yale students needed medical treatment following the fight, one for a concussion and the other for cuts and a swollen ankle.

Police said they arrived and found about 20 people fighting in the street. They interviewed some of the participants but let them go after taking their names.

KESQ:

There’s a growing sense of outrage among some in San Francisco over a New Year’s Eve fight in which members of a Yale University singing group was beaten and some ended up in the hospital.

As first reported by Dan Noyes of A-B-C affiliate K-G-O T-V, members of Yale’s all-male a capella group—The Baker’s Dozen—were reportedly jumped by a vehicle full of young men after they left a New Year’s Eve house party in San Francisco.

One Yale student—Sharyar Aziz—had his jaw broken in two places during the fracas. Others in the group were bloodied and bruised as well.

The party was being held at the home of Reno Rapagnani, a retired San Francisco Police Department lawyer. The trouble started at midnight after The Baker’s Dozen sang “The Star Spangled Banner.”

Witnesses say some of the local men didn’t appreciate the attention the Yale students were getting, called them derogatory names and made threats that they apparently followed up on.

The Yale Daily News has more details.

Donald Luskin posts a comparison, which has been making the rounds, between Denver (and its surrounding region)’s response to the current weather emergency and the behavior of New Orleans.

Up here, in the Northern Plains, we just recovered from a Historic event—- may I even say a “Weather Event” of “Biblical Proportions”—- with a historic blizzard of up to 44” inches of snow and winds to 90 MPH that broke trees in half, knocked down utility poles, stranded hundreds of motorists in lethal snow banks, closed ALL roads, isolated scores of communities and cut power to 10’s of thousands.

George Bush did not come.

FEMA did nothing.

No one howled for the government.

No one blamed the government.

No one even uttered an expletive on TV.

Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton did not visit.

Our Mayor did not blame Bush or anyone else.

Our Governor did not blame Bush or anyone else, either.

CNN, ABC, CBS, FOX or NBC did not visit – or report on this category 5 snowstorm. Nobody demanded $2,000 debit cards.

No one asked for a FEMA Trailer House.

No one looted.

Nobody – I mean Nobody demanded the government do something.

Nobody expected the government to do anything, either.

No Larry King, No Bill O’Rielly, No Oprah, No Chris Mathews and No Geraldo Rivera.

No Shaun Penn, No Barbara Striesand, No Hollywood types to be found.

Nope, we just melted the snow for water.

Sent out caravans of SUV’s to pluck people out of snow engulfed cars.

The truck drivers pulled people out of snow banks and didn’t ask for a penny.

Local restaurants made food and the police and fire departments delivered it to the snowbound families. Families took in the stranded people – total strangers.

We fired up wood stoves, broke out coal oil lanterns or Coleman lanterns.

We put on extra layers of clothes because up here it is “Work or Die”.

We did not wait for some affirmative action government to get us out of a mess created by being immobilized by a welfare program that trades votes for ‘sittin at home’ checks.

Even though a Category “5” blizzard of this scale has never fallen this early, we know it can happen and how to deal with it ourselves.

In my many travels, I have noticed that once one gets north of about 48 degrees North Latitude, 90% of the world’s social problems evaporate.

It does seem that way, at least to me.

I hope this gets passed on.

Hat tip to Maggie’s Farm and Seneca the Younger.

AP reports:

A senior al-Qaida suspect wanted for bombing American embassies in East Africa was killed in a U.S. airstrike, a Somali official said Wednesday, a report that if true would mean the end of an eight-year hunt for a top target of Washington’s war on terror.

There was no immediate confirmation from the U.S. In Washington, a U.S. intelligence official said the U.S. killed five to 10 people in an attack on an al-Qaida target in southern Somalia but did not say who was killed. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the operation’s sensitivity, said a small number of others present, perhaps four or five, were wounded.

The report came as U.S forces apparently launched a third day of airstrikes in southern Somalia. Witnesses said an AC-130 gunship attacked a suspected al-Qaida training camp. At least four separate strikes were reported Wednesday around Ras Kamboni, on the Somali coast and a few miles from the Kenyan border.

Also Wednesday, Somalia’s Deputy Prime Minister said American troops were needed on the ground to root extremists from his troubled country, and he expected the troops soon. It was the first indication that the U.S. military may expand its campaign.

Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, who allegedly planned the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, was killed in a U.S. airstrike early Monday morning local time, according to an American intelligence report passed on to the Somali authorities.

“I have received a report from the American side chronicling the targets and list of damage,” Abdirizak Hassan, the Somali president’s chief of staff, told The Associated Press. “One of the items they were claiming was that Fazul Abdullah Mohammed is dead.”

If confirmed Mohammed’s death would be a major victory for the U.S. in its hunt for the 1998 embassy bombers. The strike was part of the first U.S. offensive in the African country since 18 American soldiers were killed there in 1993.

The left side of the Blogosphere has been cackling with glee over apparent disproof of the recent John Kerry spurned by troops, eating alone in Iraq story.

Greg Sargent provided the refutation.

it turns out that Kerry was at that table to conduct an off-the-record breakfast discussion with two reporters, so there would have been no reason whatsover for troops to be sitting with them. In fact, Kerry and the reporters even sought out empty seats, I’m told.

The two reporters who met with Kerry that morning are Marc Santora of The New York Times and Mark Danner of The New York Review, The New Yorker and other publications. Both Santora and Danner confimed to me that they met with Kerry—on the morning of Dec. 17, according to Kerry’s office and to Danner. (The person who posted the photo also confirmed that it was taken that morning.)

Danner confirmed to me that he’s the guy with his back to the camera, saying his jacket and the back of his head looked the same as in the photo. He added that his position in relation to Kerry was the same as the photo showed. And here’s what Danner had to say to me about the empty seats: “If there were empty seats it’s because we sought them out. We wanted an empty table so we could talk. It’s that simple.”

The left’s joy is prompted by an opportunity to get the better of Glenn Reynolds, Charles Johnson, Michelle Malkin, John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson of Power-line, and an assortment of lesser right bloggers, including yours truly who took Scott Hennen’s correspondent’s word for its veracity.

This is a true story…..Check out this photo from our mess hall at the US Embassy yesterday morning. Sen. Kerry found himself all alone while he was over here. He cancelled his press conference because no one came, he worked out alone in the gym w/o any soldiers even going up to say hi or ask for an autograph (I was one of those who was in the gym at the same time), and he found himself eating breakfast with only a couple of folks who are obviously not troops.

Well, I certainly have no capability of investigating how well John Kerry was received by interviewing witnesses in Iraq, but common sense does suggest he would not be the most popular political figure in the heart of the typical serviceman.

Mr. Sargent’s refutation consists of a context supplied to that photograph by a couple of liberal journalists who work for liberal publications. These would be exactly the same sort of journalists who assisted Mr. Kerry in repackaging his “’If you study hard, you get ahead in this life, and if you don’t, you’re going to wind up in Iraq” comment as a failed anti-Bush joke. Why should anyone be willing to take their word about something like this?

A blog much worth visiting devoted to maps. Today’s lead entry is an 18th century German map of “the Empire of Love.”

Hat tip to Matthew MacLean.

A bit over a year ago (22 Nov 2005), the New York Sun was reporting on the spread of Naked Parties from Yale (and possibly Brown) to Columbia.

But the earliest public report probably appeared in the novel Chloe Does Yale published in March of 2004 by then Yale Senior (Timothy Dwight) Natalie Krinsky.

Today’s Times reports that the fad for naked parties was created in 1995 by the Yale Pundits, an undergraduate society which in earlier days contented itself with jokes and champagne-and-lobster lunches on the library steps.

The Pundits, founded in 1884 as a society of “campus wits,” have a history of rebelling against Yale tradition, often through elaborate pranks. They organize six to eight covert naked parties a year, which attract anywhere from 30 to 300 people to off-campus houses, neglected rooms in classroom buildings and even small libraries on campus.

“It’s one of those things people feel they need to do before they graduate,” says Megan Crandell, a senior who estimates that she has been to a half-dozen naked parties during her time at Yale. “The dynamic is completely different from a clothed party. People are so conscious of how they’re coming across that conversations end up being more sophisticated. You can’t talk about how hot that chick was the other night.”

News of Yale’s contribution to modern undergraduate social life has spread all the way to Scotland. The Scotsman.

While one campus source at Yale… says naked parties are “the No1” thing to do before graduation, students who attend the six to eight parties held each year say it can be a life-changing experience, far from the “frat-house” bawdiness portrayed in films such as Animal House…

Another Yale student, who did not want his name to become known by campus authorities – which do not try to stop the parties but do not encourage them – said: “Part of it is just the mystique of not knowing where you’re going. It’s become a hip thing to do.”

The events are magnets for social-climbers at other top academic institutions, including Columbia, MIT and Brown.

A better history, and a first person account from a Yale coed, appeared in the Yale Herald back in March of last year.

link

Comments on Casino Royale, from the discussion on my Class list.
———————————————————————————————-

Sean Connery was the wrong physical type, too large, too hirsute, and the wrong-eye color, but was such an agreeable actor to watch working that no one much minded
the transformation of Bond into a somewhat hulking Glaswegian Geordie.

The Bond films long ago lost any real relationship to the original character or the books, becoming instead a strange, spectacularly vulgar, and American (in the worst sense) thing all their own: extended exercises in elaborate special effects, supplying PG-level sex and violence accompanied by comforting repetitions (with new elaborations and surprises) of the same cliches.

I thought Daniel Craig was less two-dimensional than any previous Bond, but he is even further removed from the original character than even the braw Scots Sean Connery or the Las Vegas lounge lizard Roger Moore. Bond was, after all, a thoroughgoing U Englishman, an orphan from an artistic sort of background perhaps, with languages and Continental education, but still—underneath it all—a sound public school chap (even if he was sent down, a one biographer contends), a gentleman, and (as Marlow would say) “one of us.”

Daniel Craig is no gentleman at all, only a half-civilized, arriviste thug, straight out of London gangland, if not Borstal itself. His motivation to rise in the ranks of MI6 to the point of becoming that organization’s most conspicuous and short-lived species of cannon fodder seems perfectly mysterious.

I thought it very strange indeed to have the long-abandoned skeleton of the first Ian Fleming novel disinterred, and used with the most insolent anachronism imaginable, yet still more accurately used as the movie’s framework than any of the original novels have been used in forty years. How Ian Fleming would have howled, if he were alive, to see Baccarat replaced by Texas Hold ‘Em as the locus of Bond’s battle of wits and nerve with Le Chiffre. The destruction of Venice would surely have proved comforting though.

Le Chiffre was commendably cast.

Watching the film, I could not help reflect that there must be very, very few, some absolutely tiny number of people in the world, who are capable of designing and choreographing those amazing and elaborate chase and fight sequences. They certainly deserve their millions.

But it was depressing to see, fifty years on, just how much the world has grown stupider, shorter of attention span, less critical, and more vulgar. The hero of the mass audience is less the gentleman than ever, and James Bond is now played as what Britons would call a yobbo. I sometimes think that if we could live another century, we would see mankind reduced still further in grandeur and dignity, perhaps to some sort of quadruped.

Shalom Auslander has a less-than-peaceful encounter with one of the peace-loving and enlightened inhabitants of Woodstock, New York, land of trust-fund bolshies, burned-out rockers, and navel-gazing whackos of every description, who are always organizing and demonstrating against something.

War makes us weak! Wage peace! War sucks!

And that was just his rear bumper. Green Subaru was doing 12 miles an hour in a 40; I had been stuck behind him for 15 miles and was now, thank you very much, officially late for work.

I hate war! Violence is not the answer! Coexist!

I wanted to kill him.

The Guardian reports that a British Channel 4 investigative report demonstrates that preaching of jihad, Wahabi extremism, and Islamic supremacism is still going on today in prominent mosques all over Britain. Is anyone really surprised?

An undercover investigation has revealed disturbing evidence of Islamic extremism at a number of Britain’s leading mosques and Muslim institutions, including an organisation praised by the Prime Minister.

Secret video footage reveals Muslim preachers exhorting followers to prepare for jihad, to hit girls for not wearing the hijab, and to create a ‘state within a state’. Many of the preachers are linked to the Wahhabi strain of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia, which funds a number of Britain’s leading Islamic institutions.

A forthcoming Channel 4 Dispatches programme paints an alarming picture of how preachers in some of Britain’s most moderate mosques are urging followers to reject British laws in favour of those of Islam. Leaders of the mosques have expressed concern at the preachers’ activities, saying they were unaware such views were being disseminated.
At the Sparkbrook mosque, run by UK Islamic Mission (UKIM), an organisation that maintains 45 mosques in Britain and which Tony Blair has said ‘is extremely valued by the government for its multi-faith and multicultural activities’, a preacher is captured on film praising the Taliban. In response to the news that a British Muslim solider was killed fighting the Taliban, the speaker declares: ‘The hero of Islam is the one who separated his head from his shoulders.’

Another speaker says Muslims cannot accept the rule of non-Muslims. ‘You cannot accept the rule of the kaffir [non-Muslim],’ a preacher, Dr Ijaz Mian, tells a meeting held within the mosque. ‘We have to rule ourselves and we have to rule the others.’

The 12-month investigation also recorded a deputy headmaster of an Islamic high school in Birmingham telling a conference at the Sparkbrook mosque that he disagrees with using the word democracy. ‘They should call it … kuffrocracy, that’s their plan. It’s the hidden cancerous aim of these people.’ The Darul Uloom school said it no longer employed the teacher and that one of the reasons he resigned ‘was the incompatibility of many of his opinions with the policies of the school’.

Andrew Sullivan must be pretty dense, it seems to me, if he doesn’t understand enough about his own personality, upbringing, and conversion experience to understand how he came to be a member of the contemporary subculture whose identity revolves around perverse sex.

I’m a fly fisherman myself, and I understand perfectly well what personality traits, what family circumstances, what sort of input from adults during childhood, what features of the activity itself, and what properties of the fly fishing subculture attracted me and caused me to become a member. If I were still in the Bay area, Andrew, I’d invite you to come over and recline on my couch and tell me your life story, and I feel nearly sure that I could clear it all up for you.

Your problem, old boy, is that, like virtually all contemporary gays, you have enthusiastically embraced the essentially bogus “mysterious, innate identity” model. The beauty of that model lies not in its scientific accuracy, but its moral and political utility. Once the homosexual identity is successfully portrayed as innate, it is thus inevitably established to be 1) natural, and 2) involuntary. The traditional religious and philosophical moral bases for condemnation are refuted, and the personal guilt associated with indulgence in what used to be called peccatum illud horribile inter christianos non nominandum, “the sin too horrible to be named among Christians,” is dispelled.

The epistemelogical difficulty you are experiencing is also very specifically connected to another conceptual fallacy, similarly contrived on essentially the same utilitarian basis. That being the systematic confusion of a (voluntary) behavior and cultural affiliation with an (involuntary) innate status.

One is no more born a homosexual than one is born a guitar player, stamp collector, or fly fisherman.

Life offers a myriad assortment of possible means of finding amusement, pleasure, and self expression, and more of less any avocation or pastime you select will be found to have a history, a body of previous devotees, a literature… a culture of its own. Not uncommonly, it is the culture, and the opportunity for the friendships and society of congenial persons of similar outlook and tastes which is more decisively attractive than the actual activity itself.

I am afraid, Andrew, that the inclination to your preferred avocation and cultural affiliation will always be found in a complex combination of personality, life experience, and the charms of that particular charismatic culture, in the mental and spiritual life of the individual, and not in the unconscious and involuntary interplay of material processes.

Alan Nathan compares the MSM’s coverage of Sandy Berger’s theft and destruction of documents from the National Archives to the media’s treatment of Watergate (which brought down a sitting president) and asks (not unreasonably):

Why is robbing national security documents less important than robbing campaign documents?

The London Times is leaking some strategic intelligence today.

ISRAEL has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons. Two Israeli air force squadrons are training to blow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear “bunker-busters”, according to several Israeli military sources.

The attack would be the first with nuclear weapons since 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Israeli weapons would each have a force equivalent to one-fifteenth of the Hiroshima bomb.

Under the plans, conventional laser-guided bombs would open “tunnels” into the targets. “Mini-nukes” would then immediately be fired into a plant at Natanz, exploding deep underground to reduce the risk of radioactive fallout.

“As soon as the green light is given, it will be one mission, one strike and the Iranian nuclear project will be demolished,” said one of the sources.

The plans, disclosed to The Sunday Times last week, have been prompted in part by the Israeli intelligence service Mossad’s assessment that Iran is on the verge of producing enough enriched uranium to make nuclear weapons within two years…

The Israelis believe that Iran’s retaliation would be constrained by fear of a second strike if it were to launch its Shehab-3 ballistic missiles at Israel.

One wonders if the information was supplied to the Times by Pouting American (or Israeli) Spooks whose pacifism has been offended, or whether Mossad is sending a final warning to the mullahs before the balloon really goes up.

Rare (less than ideal quality) 7:42 video of charity match held in Macao, 17 January 1954, between T’ai Chi Ch’uan grandmaster Wu Kung-I (å³åu2026¬åu201eu20ac 1900-1970) and Tibetan White Crane stylist Ch’en K’e-fu (éu2122u02c6åu2026u2039夫 Chan Hak Fu, aged about 33).

There were numerous restrictions on forms of attack, but in under two rounds, the contestants grew heated, and contacts violating the rules were exchanged. It was thought too dangerous to proceed, and the match was declared “no winner, no loser, no draw.”

Muslims in Spain have already reasserted a right to conduct Saracenic prayers in the mosque in Cordoba. Osama bin Laden has expressed the recovery of the Islamic Kingdom of Andalusia as one of the goals of his jihad. Spanish bishops are justifiably alarmed by Islamic ambitions.

The Independent.

Spain’s bishops are alarmed by ambitious plans to recreate the city of Cordoba – once the heart of the ancient Islamic kingdom of al-Andalus – as a pilgrimage site for Muslims throughout Europe.

Plans include the construction of a half-size replica of Cordoba’s eighth century great mosque, according to the head of Cordoba’s Muslim Association. Funds for the project are being sought from the governments of the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, and Muslim organisations in Morocco and Egypt.Other big mosques are reportedly planned for Medina Azahara near Cordoba, Seville and Granada.

The bishops of those cities are alarmed at the construction of ostentatious mosques, fearing that the church’s waning influence may be further eclipsed by resurgent Islam financed from abroad. Up to one million Muslims are estimated to live in Spain. Many are drawn by a romantic nostalgia for the lost paradise of Al-Andalus, the caliphate that ruled Spain for more than five centuries.

Boomers can waste their lives and ruin their minds all over again perusing this complete run of Mad Magazine, 600 issues from 1952 to 2006, 17500 pages of drivel, on a single DVD.

Our parents would be truly horrified, if they were still here.

Hat tip to Mark Frauenfelder.

Information is completely lacking, but this :57 Google video shows a confrontation between a rabbit and what looks like a rattlesnake. The rabbit wins. If I had to guess, I would identify the locale as Texas.

Michael Ledeen says the war with Iran began in 1979.

There is no escape from the war Iran is waging against us, the war that started in 1979 and is intensifying with every passing hour. We will shortly learn more about the documents we found accompanying the high-level Iranian terrorist leader we briefly arrested in Hakim’s compound in Baghdad some days ago, and what we will learn—what many key American officials have already learned—is stunning. At least to those who thought that Iran was “meddling” in Iraq, but refused to believe that it was total war, on a vast scale.

Several good journalists are working on this story (see, for example, today’s article by Eli Like in the NY Sun), and the outlines are pretty clear. First, we had good information that terrorists were in Baghdad, and had gone to the compound. We did not know exactly who they were. We entered the compound and arrested everybody who looked like a usual suspect. One of them told us he was the #3 official of the al Quds unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, a particularly vicious group. He was carrying documents, one of which was in essence a wiring diagram of Iranian operations in Iraq. That wiring diagram included both Shi’ite and Sunni terrorist groups, and was of such magnitude that American officials were flabbergasted. It seems that our misnamed Intelligence Community had grossly underestimated the sophistication and the enormity of the Iranian war campaign.

I am told that this information has reached the president, and that it is part of the body of information he is digesting in order to formulate his strategy for Iraq. If he sees clearly what is going on, he must realize that there can be no winning strategy for Iraq alone, since a lot of ‘Iraqi’ activity—not just lethal materiel such as the latest generation of explosive devices, now powerful enough to penetrate the armor of most of our vehicles—is actually Iranian in origin. We cannot ‘solve’ the Iraqi problem without regime change in Iran.

Those of you who have borne with me for the last few years will not be surprised to hear this; what’s new is the apparently irrefutable evidence that has now providentially fallen into our hands. The policy makers will not like this evidence, because it drives them in a direction they do not wish to go. I am told that, at first, there was a concerted effort, primarily but by no means exclusively from the intel crowd, to sit on the evidence, to prevent it from reaching the highest levels. But the information was too explosive, and it is now circulating throughout the bureaucracy.

I have little sympathy for those who have avoided the obvious necessity of confronting Iran, however I do understand the concerns of military leaders, such as General Abizaid, who are doing everything in their considerable power to avoid a two-front war. But I do not think we need massive military power to bring down the mullahs, and in any event we now have a three-front war: within Iraq, and with both Iran and Syria. So General Abizaid’s objection is beside the point. We are in a big war, and we cannot fight it by playing defense in Iraq. That is a sucker’s game. And I hope the president realizes this at last, and that he finds himself some generals who also realize it, and finally demands a strategy for victory.

Arnold Kling, at TCSDaily, explains why truth plays so small a role in the public dialogue and the democratic process.

I am going to suggest that democratic politics is a very poor information-processing mechanism. The great mass of people form their political beliefs with little regard for facts or logic. However, the elites also have a strategy for avoiding truth. Elites form their political beliefs dogmatically, using their cleverness to organize facts to fit preconceived prejudices. The masses’ strategy for avoiding truth is to make a low investment in understanding; the elites’ strategy is to make a large investment in selectively choosing which facts and arguments to emphasize or ignore.

Now they say, “Yes, Virginia, there really is a Jamil Hussein!”

It’s too soon to reach any firm conclusions, I think, about the authenticity of the alleged source of more than 60 so-far-unconfirmed AP stories attributed to Jamil Hussein; but, in the meantime, Michelle Malkin (as usual) has the best collection of links to the blogosphere’s reaction to this bombshell.

Robert Tracinski thinks Bush needs to widen his approach beyond the insurgents in Iraq and go after their state sponsors.

Going wide means recognizing that Iraq is just one front in a regional war against an Islamist Axis centered in Iran—and we cannot win that war without confronting the enemy directly, outside of Iraq.

Going wide means recognizing that the conflict in Iraq is fueled and magnified by the intervention of Iran and Syria. One of the reasons the Iraq Study Group report flopped was that its key recommendation—its one unique idea—was for America to negotiate with Iran and Syria in order to convince these countries to aid in the “stabilization” of Iraq. This proposal wasn’t so much argued to death as it was laughed to death, because it is clear that Iran and Syria have done everything they can to de-stabilize Iraq, supporting both sides of the sectarian conflict there.

It is obvious that both regimes have a profound interest in an American failure and retreat in Iraq. After all, if America can successfully use force to replace a hostile dictatorship with a free society, then the Iranian and Syrian regimes are doomed. So as a matter of elementary self-preservation, they have done everything they can to plunge Iraq into chaos, supporting guerrillas and militias on all sides of the sectarian conflict. Just today, a US official confirmed new evidence “that Iran is working closely with both the Shiite militias and Sunni Jihadist groups.” Most ominously, Iran has brazenly provided training and weapons to the Shiite militias—who carry rifles straight off the assembly lines of Iranian weapons factories—and these militias have emerged in the last year as the greatest threat to US troops and to the Iraqi government.

How can we quell the conflict in Iraq, further suppress the Sunni insurgents, and begin to dismantle the Shiite militias—if we don’t to anything to stop those who are funding, training, and supporting these enemies? Just as we can’t eliminate terrorism without confronting the states who sponsor terrorism, so we can’t suppress the Sunni and Shiite insurgencies in Iraq without confronting the outside powers who support these insurgents.

Every day, we see the disastrous results of fighting this war narrowly inside Iraq while ignoring the external forces that are helping to drive it. To fight one Shiite militia tied to Iran—Sadr’s Mahdi Army—we have recently signaled our support for an Iraqi political coalition that includes another Shiite militia tied to Iran, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim’s Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and its Badr Brigades. And so it should be no surprise that a US military raid on Hakim’s headquarters last week netted two Iranian diplomats and members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards—the outfit responsible for supporting global terrorism. That’s what happens when we fight the symptoms in Iraq rather than fighting the disease.

Going wide also means recognizing that more is at stake in this war than just the fate of Iraq. This is a war to determine who and what will dominate the Middle East. Will this vital region be dominated by a nuclear-armed Iran, working to spread Islamic fascism? Or will America be able to exert its military influence and political ideals in the region?

He’s clearly right, but he isn’t going wide enough.

Behind Syria and Iran, you find China fishing in troubled waters in order to thwart American “hegemony.” China is Iran’s arms supplier (often via North Korea) and soon to be leading trading partner. But we are China’s number 1 trading partner.

We have a far more powerful weapon to use against China to force her to withdraw support from her surrogates operating against the US than arms. We can threaten to deny China our trade.

And John J. Miller, at the Wall Street Journal, agrees with us that the local public library has evolved in a direction which makes it a highly questionable use of public funds.

A software program developed by SirsiDynix, an Alabama-based library-technology company, informs librarians of which books are circulating and which ones aren’t. If titles remain untouched for two years, they may be discarded—permanently. “We’re being very ruthless,” boasts library director Sam Clay.

As it happens, the ruthlessness may not ultimately extend to Hemingway’s classic. “For Whom the Bell Tolls” could win a special reprieve, and, in the future, copies might remain available at certain branches. Yet lots of other volumes may not fare as well. Books by Charlotte Brontë, William Faulkner, Thomas Hardy, Marcel Proust and Alexander Solzhenitsyn have recently been pulled.

Library officials explain, not unreasonably, that their shelf space is limited and that they want to satisfy the demands of the public. Every unpopular book that’s removed from circulation, after all, creates room for a new page-turner by John Grisham, David Baldacci, or James Patterson—the authors of the three most checked-out books in Fairfax County last month.

But this raises a fundamental question: What are libraries for? Are they cultural storehouses that contain the best that has been thought and said? Or are they more like actual stores, responding to whatever fickle taste or Mitch Albom tearjerker is all the rage at this very moment?

If the answer is the latter, then why must we have government-run libraries at all? There’s a fine line between an institution that aims to edify the public and one that merely uses tax dollars to subsidize the recreational habits of bookworms.

Christopher Hitchens basically agrees with our own position on the disgraceful business, though he is a dreadful Euro-sissy on the subject of capital punishment in general.

Americans, unlike Europeans, typically understand that some people just need killing. There is a certain type of defective individual, in whose case it’s far better for all concerned if he is simply taken out behind the barn and shot.

The problem with hanging Saddam is the cowardly manner in which it was done, the turning over of a helpless wretch to an equally despicable mob to be done to death, and its timing: far too late, and during Christmas.

The disgusting video of Saddam Hussein’s last moments on the planet is more than a reminder of the inescapable barbarity of capital punishment and of the intelligible and conventional reasons why it should always be opposed. The zoolike scenes in that dank, filthy shed (it seems that those attending were not even asked to turn off their cell phones or forbidden to use them to record souvenir film) were more like a lynching than an execution. At one point, one of the attending magistrates can be heard appealing for decency and calm, but otherwise the fact must be faced: In spite of his mad invective against “the Persians” and other traitors, the only character with a rag of dignity in the whole scene is the father of all hangmen, Saddam Hussein himself.