On March 14 I reported finding it impossible for several days, since around March 10 or 11, to access the Volokh Conspiracy Blog at its conventional address: www.volokh.com.

Clearly, my experience with this problem is not unique, since Glenn Reynolds blogged about this yesterday (March 18).

Professor Reynolds kindly supplies a solution which saves all of us affected the necessity of logging into our computers in Safe Mode and searching the Registry for a corrupted Host file.

All one needs to do is use Volokh.Powerblogs.Com instead.

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

The Department of Defense’s Combatant Status Review Tribunal today released the transcript of the hearing of detainee Waleed Mohammed bin Attash, mastermind of the October 12, 2000 bomb attack on the American Destroyer USS Cole, which took the lives of seventeen US sailors and wounded 39.

ABC News

New York Times

DOD Transcript

RECORDER: ...the following facts support the determination that the detainee is an enemy combatant:

a. On 7 August 1998, near simultaneous truck bombs were detonated at the United States embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The explosion at the United States embassy in Nairobi resulted in the death of 213 people, including 12 Americans. More than 4,500 people were wounded,

b. Mohammad Rashed Daoud Al-Owhali Al-Owhali stated that in approximately June or July 1998, the detainee told him that his mission was a martyrdom mission, where he would be driving a vehicle filled with explosives into a target which would result in his death. The detainee told Al-Owhali the target was a United States embassy in East Africa, but he was not told the exact country,

c. In 1998, Mohamed Rashed Daoud Al-Owhali was indicted in the United States District Court, Southern District of New York, for his involvement in the 7 August 1998 bombing of the United States embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. Charges included conspiracy to kill United States nationals, conspiracy to murder, kidnap, and maim at places outside the United States, conspiracy to murder, conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction against nationals of the United States, conspiracy to destroy buildings and property of the United States, and conspiracy to attack defense utilities,

d During the latter part of 1999, the detainee facilitated and participated in close-combat training which was held in the Lowgar training camp in Afghanistan. The graduates of the class then met with Usama bin Laden who lectured about the operational details of the East Africa bombings,

e. On 12 October 2000, the USS Cole was attacked during refueling in the Yemeni port of Aden by operatives of the al Qaida network. Al Qaida claimed responsibility for the attack. Seventeen United States sailors were killed and 39 other sailors were wounded,

f. Stamps utilized on a forged Yemeni merchant’s registration card, which was utilized by the detainee, were forged by a suspect of the USS Cole bombing,

g. A participant in the USS Cole bombing identified the detainee as someone he knew from an al Qaida training camp. The participant in the USS Cole bombing that identified the detainee stated an individual approached him with a letter from the detainee requesting assistance in facilitation of the USS Cole bombing. The participant in the USS Cole bombing claimed the only reason he agreed to visit the individual was due to the letter from the detainee,

h. The detainee went to an al Qaida training camp in Afghanistan in December 2000.

i. An al Qaida cell associated with a senior al Qaida operative used the code name, father of the leg, which was a reference to the detainee and the fact that he was missing a leg.

j. A notebook that was seized during the capture of a senior al Qaida operative contained a phone number that was also found in the stored memory of a phone belonging to the detainee,

k. The detainee’s University of Islamic Studies identification card was found at an alleged al Qaida residence in Karachi, Pakistan.

l. The detainee was implicated in a notebook containing account ledgers for payments made to various al Qaida operatives which was found during a raid of anal Qaida safe house,

m. A source that met the detainee in Afghanistan stated he also saw the detainee at al Farouq training camp. The source stated the detainee worked for an important person in al Qaida and the detainee was a body guard for Usama bin Laden.

Sir, this concludes the summary of unclassified evidence…

PRESIDENT: Tribunal members, do you have any questions for the detainee?

TRIBUNAL: I do.

PRESIDENT: Proceed.

TRIBUNAL: What exactly was his role as the – both the USS Cole and the ah embassy thing?

DETAINEE: Many roles, I participated in the buying or purchasing of the explosives. I put together the plan for the operation a year and a half prior to the operation. Buying the boat and recruiting the members that did the operation. Buying the explosives.
...

PRESIDENT: Where were you, physically, at the time of the Cole attacks?

DETAINEE: He was with Sheik Usama bin Laden in Kandahar.

PRESIDENT: And at the time of the embassy attacks?

DETAINEE: I was in Karachi meeting the operator, the guy that basically did the operation a few hours before the operation took place. These are statements that are not in the evidence that you have. These are additions to the questions that you have asked.

PRESIDENT: What can you tell us about the ah item contained in paragraph, in item 3a? (US Embassy Bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, 7 August 1998 -JDZ)...

DETAINEE: I was the link between Usama bin Laden and his deputy Sheikh Abu Hafs Al Masri and the cell chief in Nairobi. I was the link that was available in Pakistan. I used to supply the cell with what ever documents they need from fake stamps to visas, whatever. Sending them from Afghanistan to Pakistan and individuals, cell members.

Why, I wonder, has it taken close to four years to undertake this simple process? And, now that it is perfectly clear that various persons in US custody are illegal combatants guilty of grave and horrible crimes, are we going to proceed promptly and without further ado to the delivery of justice, i.e., to the executions of these villains? Or are we going to dither, and shilly shally, and debate, and litigate some more?

Why you don’t tick off an engineer….

Michael Barone discusses the negative impact of higher education today. The better-educated, wealthier, and more privileged the American, the more likely he is to have a fundamentally negative view of his own country.

“They always blame America first.” That was Jeane Kirkpatrick, describing the “San Francisco Democrats” in 1984. But it could be said about a lot of Americans, especially highly educated Americans, today.

In their assessment of what is going on in the world, they seem to start off with a default assumption that we are in the wrong. The “we” can take different forms: the United States government, the vast mass of middle-class Americans, white people, affluent people, churchgoing people or the advanced English-speaking countries. Such people are seen as privileged and selfish, greedy and bigoted, rash and violent. If something bad happens, the default assumption is that it’s their fault. They always blame America—or the parts of America they don’t like—first.

Where does this default assumption come from? And why is it so prevalent among our affluent educated class (which, after all, would seem to overlap considerably with the people being complained about?). It comes, I think, from our schools and, especially, from our colleges and universities. The first are staffed by liberals long accustomed to see America as full of problems needing solving; the latter have been packed full of the people cultural critic Roger Kimball calls “tenured radicals,” people who see this country and its people as the source of all evil in the world.

On campuses, students are bombarded with denunciations of dead white males and urged to engage in the deconstruction of all past learning and scholarship.

Not all of this takes, of course. Most students have enough good sense to see that the campus radicals’ description of the world is wildly at odds with reality. But this battering away at ideas of truth and goodness does have some effect. Very many of our university graduates emerge with the default assumption thoroughly wired into their mental software. And, it seems, they carry it with them for most of their adult lives…

“There is something profoundly wrong when opposition to the war in Iraq seems to inspire greater passion than opposition to Islamist extremism,” Sen. Joseph Lieberman said in a speech last week. What is profoundly wrong is that too many of us are operating off the default assumption and have lost sight of who our real enemies are.

Bill Roggio reports that Pakistan has made another agreement conceding Bajaur, another portion of the Northwest Frontier territories, to Islamic extremists.

map
Red agencies are currently Taliban-controlled. Yellow are threatened.

The much anticipated Bajaur Accord – a peace agreement purportedly with the local tribal leaders of the Mamoond tribe and the government – has been signed in Pakistan’s lawless tribal agency. The details of the agreement are not yet available, however the Daily Times has described it as “a step towards a North Waziristan-like peace accord. Bajaur Agency.” Pakistan conveniently finished negotiations as international attention is on the crisis over the removal of Pakistan’s chief justice.

It appears, like in the North and South Waziristan deals, that the government has openly negotiated with the Taliban and al Qaeda. “We hope that a North Waziristan-like deal is also reached between the government and tribal militants, led by Faqir Mohammad,” sources told Dawnon condition of anonymity. Faqir Muhammad is a senior leader within the Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM, or Movement for the Implementation of Mohammad’s Sharia Law), the “Pakistani Taliban” who has sent over 10,000 foot soldiers to fight alongside the Taliban during the U.S. invasion in 2001.

Jack Cashill has two possible suggestions.

In the recent military tribunal hearing on his combatant status, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad owned up to 29 separate acts of terror in which he served, at the very least, as “responsible participant.” Some such acts, September 11 for instance, he claimed to have successfully masterminded and executed.

Others he helped plan but, happily, did not manage to pull off. These include schemes to destroy the Sears Tower in Chicago, the New York Stock Exchange and the Panama Canal as well as plots to assassinate Pope John Paul II and presidents Clinton and Carter.

It is likely that KSM has inflated his role in many of these events, but just as likely that he was at least involved.

The Department of Defense does not edit a word out of 28 of the 29 acts that KSM listed. But one act, number 3 in KSM’s line-up, the DOD originally redacted entirely.

The numerical placement seems critical here. In number 1, KSM assumes responsibility for the “1993 World Trade Center Operation,” and there is no reason to doubt him.

In number 2, he takes credit for “the 9/11 Operation, from A to Z.” Although KSM overstates his control of the operation, there is little reason to question his involvement.

In number 4, KSM admits his participation in the “Shoe Bomber operation to down two American airplanes.” Again, this seems like a credible claim.

Number 3, however, was originally posted as “REDACTED.” This was before the Internet started humming about its likely contents.

Given the placement of number 3 high among the provable acts of terror committed against Americans on American soil, I and others speculated that KSM may very well have been staking claim to one of two events.

One is the Oklahoma City bombing. As has been well enough documented, convicted conspirator Terry Nichols made multiple trips to the Philippines when KSM’s “nephew,” Ramzi Yousef, was living there. Yousef was constructing the bombs for the impending aviation attack that KSM refers to as “the Bojinka operation.”

According to a recent House report, Nichols traveled with the book, ‘’The Chemistry of Powder and Explosives,” and just happened to show up in Cebu City at the exact same time as master bomber Yousef.

This was November 1994, six months before the Oklahoma City bombing. Nichols changed his itinerary immediately after Yousef’s lab was busted by the Manila police in January 1995 and left the county in haste.

In “Against All Enemies,” Clinton anti-terror czar Richard Clarke has this to say about the visits of these two terrorists to the same city in the same country at the same time: “We do know that Nichols’ bombs did not work before his Philippine stay,” writes Clarke, “and were deadly when he returned.”

The second likely suspect for the redacted terror act was TWA Flight 800, the 747 blown out of the sky off the coast of Long Island on July 17, 1996, Saddam’s national liberation day.

According to two separate sources within the NSA, on the night the plane went down Yousef phoned KSM from his New York City prison and said—in their native Baluchi—“What had to be done has been done, TWA 800” (last two words unintelligible).”

The next day Yousef asked for a mistrial, arguing in high chutzpah that the environment had turned prejudicial in regard to accused airplane bombers like himself.

Cashill does seem right that the order of the redacted item makes it look like a very important terrorist act. I had wondered if it might have been referring to TWA Flight 800 myself, having read lots of speculation on the Net that Sandy Berger’s efforts at removing Clinton Administration documents from the National Archives may have been occasioned by the necessity to remove Flight 800 references. It’s certainly a good conspiracy theory.

I am obliged to admit it: I never covered it at all.

Clinton had Janet Reno fire all 93 US attorneys, so why should there be a problem with the Bush Administration replacing 8 of them? I thought personally.

But it’s clear that those of us blogging on the Right screwed up on this one, and allowed the left blogosphere to gin up a fabricated scandal as the result of inadequate defense. (Though, Lord knows, I’m tired of defending George W. Bush, who doesn’t do much that’s effective by way of defending himself.)

Terry McDermott, in the LA Times, explains how the big-time leftie blogs did it.

over the last two months, one of the biggest news stories in the country — the Bush administration’s firing of a group of U.S. attorneys — was pieced together by the reporters of the blog Talking Points Memo.

The bloggers used the usual tools of good journalists everywhere — determination, insight, ingenuity — plus a powerful new force that was not available to reporters until blogging came along: the ability to communicate almost instantaneously with readers via the Internet and to deputize those readers as editorial researchers, in effect multiplying the reporting power by an order of magnitude.

In December, Josh Marshall, who owns and runs TPM , posted a short item linking to a news report in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette about the firing of the U.S. attorney for that state. Marshall later followed up, adding that several U.S. attorneys were apparently being replaced and asked his 100,000 or so daily readers to write in if they knew anything about U.S. attorneys being fired in their areas.

For the two months that followed, Talking Points Memo and one of its sister sites, TPM Muckraker, accumulated evidence from around the country on who the axed prosecutors were, and why politics might be behind the firings. The cause was taken up among Democrats in Congress. One senior Justice Department official has resigned, and Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales is now in the media crosshairs.

Read the whole thing.

And the moral is that we on the Right need to put on our waders and gas masks, and go trudging through the left blogosphere’s sewers more regularly than we do, keeping an eye on their mischief, so that we can demolish these kinds of attack memes before they successfully root themselves in the public dialogue.

Hat tip to Karen Myers.

Daniel Clark observes. The whole business is just a part of the feminization of modern society.

He’s right, too.

If a guy is shown a picture of a sad-looking polar bear adrift on an ice floe, his first thought will be something like, “I’ve heard that bear steaks are tough, but maybe if you marinated them in beer, they’d turn out all right.” At that point, the alarmists’ emotional ploy is foiled. In a world without guy stuff, however, his vacant mind may be invaded by irrationalities like, “Who will take care of the polar bears’ children?”

In this chicken-and-the-egg scenario, the success of the global warming movement is both the cause and effect of our society’s emasculation. It would have never gotten this far if the “Nineties Man” hadn’t paved the way. When “I feel your pain” became a successful presidential campaign slogan, we should have known that charcoal-grilled steaks would soon be on the endangered list.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Karen Myers.

All the really cool blogs run ads. Capitalism is a good thing, and I don’t see any reason why a blog shouldn’t pay some of its own expenses via advertising. And, besides, I have an addiction to blog gadgets and counters and the like, and I’ve been hankering for some time to play with advertising tools and run amusing ads.

So I’ve established a relationship with Blogads, and created a space over in the right column for future advertising. Watch for further exciting developments.

He has some reservations about the film, of course, but Stephenson thinks it’s an acceptable assimilation of history to contemporary entertainment genre.

Many critics dislike “300” so intensely that they refused to do it the honor of criticizing it as if it were a real movie. Critics at a festival in Berlin walked out, and accused its director of being on the Bush payroll.

Thermopylae is a wedge issue!

Lefties can’t abide lionizing a bunch of militaristic slave-owners (even if they did happen to be long-haired supporters of women’s rights). So you might think that righties would love the film. But they’re nervous that Emperor Xerxes of Persia, not the freedom-loving Leonidas, might be George Bush.

Our so-called conservatives, who have cut all ties to their own intellectual moorings, now espouse policies and personalities that would get them laughed out of Periclean Athens. The few conservatives still able to hold up one end of a Socratic dialogue are those in the ostracized libertarian wing — interestingly enough, a group with a disproportionately high representation among fans of speculative fiction.

The less politicized majority, who perhaps would like to draw inspiration from this story without glossing over the crazy and defective aspects of Spartan society, have turned, in droves, to a film from the alternative cultural universe of fantasy and science fiction. Styled and informed by pulp novels, comic books, video games and Asian martial arts flicks, science fiction eats this kind of material up, and expresses it in ways that look impossibly weird to people who aren’t used to it…

When science fiction tackles classical themes, the results may look a bit odd to some, but the audience — which is increasingly the mainstream audience — is sufficiently hungry for this kind of material (and, perhaps, suspicious of anything that’s overly polished) that it is willing to overlook the occasional mistake, or make up for it by shouting hilarious things from the balcony. These people don’t need irony or campiness self-consciously pointed out to them, any more than they need a laugh track to enjoy “The Simpsons.”

The Spartan phalanx presents itself to foes as a wall of shields, bristling with spears, its members squatting behind their defenses, anonymous and unknowable, until they break formation and stand out alone, practically naked, soft, exposed and recognizable as individuals.

The audience members watching them play the same game: media-weary, hunkered down behind thick irony, flinging verbal jabs at the screen — until they see something that moves them. Then they’ll come out and feel. But at the first hint of politics, they’ll jump back behind their shield-wall, just like the Spartans when millions of Persian arrows blot out the sun, and wait until the noise stops.

Read the whole thing.

London Times:

Most Iraqis believe life is better for them now than it was under Saddam Hussein, according to a British opinion poll published today.

The survey of more than 5,000 Iraqis found the majority optimistic despite their suffering in sectarian violence since the American-led invasion four years ago this week.

One in four Iraqis has had a family member murdered, says the poll by Opinion Research Business. In Baghdad, the capital, one in four has had a relative kidnapped and one in three said members of their family had fled abroad. But when asked whether they preferred life under Saddam, the dictator who was executed last December, or under Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, most replied that things were better for them today.

Only 27% think there is a civil war in Iraq, compared with 61% who do not, according to the survey carried out last month.

By a majority of two to one, Iraqis believe military operations now under way will disarm all militias.More than half say security will improve after a withdrawal of multinational forces.

The SEC is proposing redefining the financial criteria for accredited investor status, needed to invest in hedge funds, limited partnership, and angel investments, dramatically upward.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has redefined what it means to be rich.

In looking for ways to better regulate hedge funds and other “private money” pools, the SEC in December proposed raising the net-worth requirement for people who are eligible to invest in the funds. Since the SEC has always taken a light regulatory approach to hedge funds, assuming they’re for rich people who can take care of themselves, the SEC’s definition of a hedge-fund investor has often been used a proxy for the government’s definition of “rich.”

And being rich today, it turns out, requires more than twice as much money as it did in the 1980s.

The SEC proposal says investors need to have investible assets of at least $2.5 million,excluding equity in any homes or businesses, to be eligible to sign on a hedge fund’s dotted line. That’s a huge jump from the current requirement, which says individuals have to have a net worth of at least $1 million, including the value of primary residences, or an annual income of $200,000 for the previous two years for individuals or $300,000 for couples.

The SEC says it’s just trying to keep up with inflation and the explosion in the number of millionaires in the U.S. The $1 million threshold was set in 1982, long before the stock-market boom of the 1990s and real-estate run-up of the past five years. The agency says so many people are now worth $1 million that they may not be financially savvy enough to understand the risks of investing in hedge funds.

According to the latest data from the Federal Reserve Surveys of Consumer Finance, households worth $1 million or more (including the value of their homes) represented more than 8% of total U.S. households in 2004. The new definition of rich would apply to only about 1% of the population, the SEC says.

Read the whole thing.

Michael Barone wrote a column in US News, contrasting the seriousness of the offenses committed by Sandy Berger with the discrepancy between Lewis Libby’s memory and those of Tim Russert and Matt Cooper and noting the irony of Libby facing far more serious penalties than Berger received.

Sandy Berger responded with this defensive email.

“Michael: I screwed up. There was nothing sinister about it. I was under serious pressure to digest the entire Clinton record on terrorism for eight years so that we could testify fully to the 9-11 commission. I spent several arduous days at the Archives looking through the files. This document was interesting to me because I had commissioned it in 2000–a look at what we learned from the millennium terror threats that were avoided. Tired, stressed, I made a very stupid decision–to take the documents home with me so that I could review them in more detail and so that I could compare the apparent differences among versions. Since this document had been widely circulated to all the relevant agencies (State, Defense, CIA, Justice, etc.), I felt certain the commission would get it from one or more of these agencies.

There were no handwritten markings on the documents (which were copies) or anything else unusual. I took no other documents–originals or copies–besides the ones specified in my plea agreement.

The DOJ has stated unequivocally that there is no evidence that I took other documents and that the commission received everything.

That’s the long and short of it. I made a very stupid mistake. I deeply regret it. Top-level career Justice Department prosecutors investigated it aggressively for two years. We reached a plea agreement that they believed was fair. That was two years ago. Now I wish this thing would go away.

Best, Sandy”

John Hinderaker expresses some very appropriate skepticism of Berger’s veracity.

I don’t buy it. Berger didn’t make an impulsive decision—”tired, stressed”—to smuggle documents out of the National Archives. He stole documents on multiple occasions. On one occasion, he sneaked them out of the archives, went to a nearby construction site and hid the documents under a construction trailer, so he could come back later and pick them up. I simply don’t believe that Berger engaged in this kind of cloak and dagger behavior just because he found the documents “interesting” and wanted to study them at home.

Most of all, I don’t see how Berger’s explanation can be reconciled with his own admission that he didn’t just take the documents home; he cut some of them to pieces with a pair of scissors. Why did he destroy the documents if he wasn’t trying to prevent them from coming to light?

Nor am I impressed by Berger’s claim that the Department of Justice “has stated unequivocally that there is no evidence that I took other documents and that the commission received everything.” There is no evidence as to what documents Berger took because the Archives staff let him walk off with them and didn’t try to monitor what he was doing until it was too late. That being the case, the only evidence as to what documents were taken is Berger’s own confession.

Steve Gilbert provides a very illuminating timeline of the Plamegame and explains exactly what Joe Wilson was up to.

June 2003: According to the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, the following interview with Richard Armitage at the State Department transpired about a month before Robert Novak’s column appeared on July 14, 2003.

Woodward: Well it was Joe Wilson who was sent by the agency, isn’t it?
Armitage: His wife works for the agency.
Woodward: Why doesn’t that come out? Why does that have to be a big secret?
Armitage: (over) Everybody knows it.
Woodward: Everyone knows?
Armitage: Yeah. And they know ’cause Joe Wilson’s been calling everybody. He’s pissed off ’cause he was designated as a low level guy went out to look at it. So he’s all pissed off.
Woodward: But why would they send him?
Armitage: Because his wife’s an analyst at the agency.
Woodward: It’s still weird.
Armitage: He — he’s perfect. She — she, this is what she does. She’s a WMD analyst out there.
Woodward: Oh, she is.
Armitage: (over) Yeah.
Woodward: Oh, I see. I didn’t think…
Armitage: (over) “I know who’ll look at it.” Yeah, see?
Woodward: Oh. She’s the chief WMD…?
Armitage: No. She’s not the…
Woodward: But high enough up that she could say, “oh, yeah, hubby will go.”
Armitage: Yeah. She knows [garbled].
Woodward: Was she out there with him, when he was…?
Armitage: (over) No, not to my knowledge. I don’t know if she was out there. But his wife’s in the agency as a WMD analyst. How about that?

Why would Richard Armitage have been talking about Wilson and Plame in June of 2003? This was still weeks before Joe Wilson wrote his New York Times editorial, and a month before Robert Novak published his column mentioning Valerie Plame.

Armitage brought this up because he is a gossip and it was already common knowledge because Joe Wilson had been calling all of the newspapers trying to get them to run his story about his mission to Niger.

Given the chronology and Mr. Armitage’s remarks, it seems quite obvious Mr. Wilson outed his wife when he spoke to the Senate Democratic Policy Committee and then to the subsequent reporters at the Times, the Post and elsewhere, when he was hawking his story about his trip to Niger.

Wilson’s motivation for bringing up his wife would have been exactly as Armitage suggested to Woodward. Wilson told the panelists and reporters about Plame’s work at the CIA to give his radically new and dangerous story more credibility.

It’s highly probable Wilson used his wife’s position as a WMD analyst at the CIA to bolster his outrageous (and we now know fallacious) claims against a then popular President in a time of war.

July 6, 2003: Frustrated that his trip to Niger story was still not getting enough attention, Mr. Wilson finally stepped out from behind the curtain and wrote his now notorious op-ed piece for the New York Times, What I Didn’t Find in Africa.

Sometime after July 6th and before July 8th 2003 Richard Armitage told Robert Novak about Wilson’s wife working at the CIA. Mr. Novak then published that information in his column on July 14, 2007.

But Valerie Plame’s work at the CIA had almost certainly long since been disclosed to anyone who would listen by Joe Wilson. And he probably disclosed this information to promote himself, his fantasy about his “mission to Niger,” and his new political career.

Remember, there was much talk within the Kerry camp that Joe Wilson might be the new administration’s Secretary Of State. The vainglorious Mr. Wilson surely had his eyes on that prize.

And any concern about the secrecy of his wife’s job at the CIA was a minor consideration compared to that lofty goal.

The disclosure of Valerie Wilson’s CIA employment by the Wilsons to Nicholas Kristof in early May of 2003 was previously reported here.

Melanie Phillips points out a Guardian book review by “Mike Hulme, professor in the school of environmental sciences at the University of East Anglia and the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research — a key figure in the promulgation of climate change theory,” which inadvertently spills the beans about which comes first from the eco-leftie point of view, the facts or ideology.

Too often with climate change, genuine and necessary debates about these wider social values – do we have confidence in technology; do we believe in collective action over private enterprise; do we believe we carry obligations to people invisible to us in geography and time? – masquerade as disputes about scientific truth and error…

The danger of a “normal” reading of science is that it assumes science can first find truth, then speak truth to power, and that truth-based policy will then follow…

If only climate change were such a phenomenon and if only science held such an ascendancy over our personal, social and political life and decisions. In fact, in order to make progress about how we manage climate change we have to take science off centre stage…

This is not a comfortable thing to say – either to those scientists who still hold an uncritical view of their privileged enterprise and who relish the status society affords them, or to politicians whose instinct is so often to hide behind the experts when confronted by difficult and genuine policy alternatives.

Self-evidently dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth seeking, although science will gain some insights into the question if it recognises the socially contingent dimensions of a post-normal science. But to proffer such insights, scientists – and politicians – must trade (normal) truth for influence. If scientists want to remain listened to, to bear influence on policy, they must recognise the social limits of their truth seeking and reveal fully the values and beliefs they bring to their scientific activity.

It is always hilarious when the mask starts to slip.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

3:17 video Impressive!

Hat tip to Karen Myers.

But it is infested with the same left-wing supercilious elite as all the other great cities are, Gerard Baker tells us. New York City, eat your heart out!

For someone who has not lived in the city for more than a decade, the occasional trip to London is a reminder of how richly it deserves its new reputation as the world’s capital.

As my colleague James Harding wrote in times2 this week, there’s a vibrancy about London these days that easily eclipses New York or Paris or Tokyo. To many residents, perhaps, life in London may be a struggle against rising crime and a crowded Tube and overpriced housing, but from an international perspective, it is truly the world’s preeminent urban locale.

In fact, in anything other than the most literal, geographic expression of the term, London is really no longer an English city at all. Its great economic dynamo, the City, powers corporations from Shanghai to Seattle. Its labour force, drawn to it by the opportunities of its free markets, is much more polyglot and multinational than any other urban concentration in the world.

But there’s salt to this strawberry. London’s political culture has been uprooted from its English heritage. It is run — if you can call it that — by a sort of postmodern communist Mayor, whose political voice — minus the annoying nasal whine — would sound right at home in Paris, Bologna or San Francisco. It hosts a metropolitan elite that loftily gazes three ways: outward, at the supposed superiority of anything not British; inward, at its own ineffable genius; and down its elegantly pampered nose, at the provincial trivialities that consume the dreary lives of the rest of the population.

Read the whole thing.

Reports, like MSNBC’s today, of Global Temps setting a record are pretty easy to refute. In the first place, there is no such thing as a uniform global temperature whose changes can be monitored, recorded, or modeled, as three scholars recently noted in a paper published in the Journal of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics.

UPI:

A Danish scientist said the idea of a “global temperature” and global warming is more political than scientific.

University of Copenhagen Professor Bjarne Andresen has analyzed the topic in collaboration with Canadian Professors Christopher Essex from the University of Western Ontario and Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph.

It is generally assumed the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans have grown warmer during the recent 50 years because of an upward trend in the so-called global temperature, which is the result of complex calculations and averaging of air temperature measurements taken around the world.

“It is impossible to talk about a single temperature for something as complicated as the climate of Earth,” said Andresen, an expert on thermodynamics. “A temperature can be defined only for a homogeneous system. Furthermore, the climate is not governed by a single temperature. Rather, differences of temperatures drive the processes and create the storms, sea currents, thunder, etc. which make up the climate”.

He says the currently used method of determining the global temperature—and any conclusion drawn from it—is more political than scientific.

The argument is presented in the Journal of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics.

Syun-Ichi Akasofu of the International Arctic Research Center takes issue with IPCC Report.

There seems to be a roughly linear increase of the temperature from about 1800, or even much earlier, to the present. This warming trend is likely to be a natural change; a rapid increase of CO2 began in about 1940. This trend should be subtracted from the temperature data during the last 100 years. Thus, there is a possibility that only a fraction of the present warming trend may be attributed to the greenhouse effect resulting from human activities. This conclusion is contrary to the IPCC (2007) Report, which states that
“most” of the present warming is due to the greenhouse effect. One possible cause of the linear increase may be that the Earth is still recovering from the Little Ice Age. It is urgent that natural changes be correctly identified and removed accurately from the presently on-going changes in order to find the contribution of the greenhouse effect.

KSM tells a story exculpating some Guantanamo detainees, which could conceivably be true.

I’m asking you to be fair with Afghanis and Pakistanis and many Arabs which been in Afghanistan. Many of them been unjustly. The funny story they been Sunni government they sent some spies to assassinate UBL then we arrested them sent them to Afghanistan/Taliban. Taliban put them into prison. Americans they came and arrest them as enemy combatant. They brought them here. So, even if they are my enemy but not fair to be there with me.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in pre-capture days

In addition to his confession (published below), the DOD transcript contains a final statement by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed amounting to an apologia and justification.

KSM (through translator):

In the name of God the most compassionate, the most merciful, and if any fail to retaliation by way of charity and. I apologize. I will start again. And if any fail to judge by the light of Allah has revealed, they are no better than wrong doers, unbelievers, and the unjust.

KSM:

For this verse, I not take the oath. Take an oath is a part of your Tribunal and I’ll not accept it. To be or accept the Tribunal as to be, I’ll accept it. That I’m accepting American constitution, American law or whatever you are doing here. This is why religiously I cannot accept anything you do. Just to explain for this one, does not mean I’m not saying that I’m lying. When I not take oath does not mean I’m lying. You know very well peoples take oath and they will lie. You know the President he did this before he just makes his oath and he lied. So sometimes when I’m not making oath does not mean I’m lying.

KSM:

What I wrote here, is not I’m making myself hero, when I said I was responsible for this or that. But your are military man. You know very well there are language for any war. So, there are, we are when I admitting these things. I’m not saying I’m not did it. I did it but this the language of any war. If America they want to invade Iraq they will not send for Saddam roses or kisses they send for a bombardment. This is the best way if I want. If I’m fighting for anybody admit to them I’m American enemies. For sure, I’m American enemies. Usama bin Laden, he did his best press conference in American media. Mr. John Miller he been there when he made declaration against Jihad, against America. And he said it is not no need for me now to make explanation of what he said but mostly he said about American military presence in Arabian peninsula and aiding Israel and many things. So when we made any war against America we are jackals fighting in the nights. I consider myself, for what you are doing, a religious thing as you consider us fundamentalist. So, we derive from religious leading that we consider we and George Washington doing same thing. As consider George Washington as hero. Muslims many of them are considering Usama bin Laden. He is doing same thing. He is just fighting. He needs his independence. Even we think that, or not me only. Many Muslims, that al Qaida or Taliban they are doing. They have been oppressed by America. This is the feeling of the prophet. So when we say we are enemy combatant, that right. We are….

The way of the war, you know, very well, any country waging war against their enemy the language of the war are killing. If man and woman they be together as a marriage that is up to the kids, children. But if you and me, two nations, will be together in war the others are victims. This is the way of the language. You know 40 million people were killed in World War One. Ten million kill in World War. You know that two million four hundred thousand be killed in the Korean War. So this language of the war. Any people who, when Usama bin Laden say I’m waging war because such such reason, now he declared it. But when you said I’m terrorist, I think it is deceiving peoples. Terrorists, enemy combatant. All these definitions as CIA you can make whatever you want. Now, you told me when I ask about the witnesses. I’m not convinced that this related to the matter. It is up to you. Maybe I’m convinced but your are head and he [gesturing to Personal Representative] is not responsible, the other, because your are head of the committee. So, finally it’s your war but the problem is no definitions of many words. It would be widely definite that many people be oppressed. Because war, for sure, there will be victims. When I said I’m not happy that three thousand been killed in America. I feel sorry even. I don’t like to kill children and the kids. Never Islam are, give me green light to kill peoples. Killing, as in the Christianity, Jews, and Islam, are prohibited. But there are exception of rule when you are killing people in Iraq. You said we have to do it. We don’t like Saddam. But this is the way to deal with Saddam. Same thing you are saying. Same language you use, I use. When you are invading two- thirds of Mexican, you call your war manifest destiny. It up to you to call it what you want. But other side are calling you oppressors. If now George Washington. If now we were living in the Revolutionary War and George Washington he being arrested through Britain. For sure he, they would consider him enemy combatant. But American they consider him as hero. This right the any Revolutionary War they will be as George Washington or Britain. So we are considered American Army bases which we have from seventies in Iraq. Also, in the Saudi Arabian, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain. This is kind of invasion, but I’m not here to convince you. Is not or not but mostly speech is ask you to be fair with people. I’m don’t have anything to say that I’m not enemy. This is why the language of any war in the world is killing. I mean the language of the war is victims. I don’t like to kill people. I feel very sorry they been killed kids in 9/11. What I will do? This is the language. Sometime I want to make great awakening between American to stop foreign policy in our land. I know American people are torturing us from seventies. [REDACTED] I know they talking about human rights. And I know it is against American Constitution, against American laws. But they said every law, they have exceptions, this is your bad luck you been part of the exception of our laws. They got have something to convince me but we are doing same language. But we are saying we have Sharia law, but we have Koran. What is enemy combatant in my language?

KSM:

Allah forbids you not with regards to those who fight you not for your faith nor drive you out of your homes from dealing kindly and justly with them. For Allah love those who are just. There is one more sentence. Allah only forbids you with regards to those who fight you for your faith and drive you out of your homes and support others in driving you out from turning to them for friendship and protection. It is such as turn to them in these circumstances that do wrong.

KSM:

So we are driving from whatever deed we do we ask about Koran or Hadith. We are not making up for us laws. When we need Fatwa from the religious we have to go back to see what they said scholar. To see what they said yes or not. Killing is prohibited in all what you call the people of the book, Jews, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. You know the Ten Commandments very well. The Ten Commandments are shared between all of us. We all are serving one God. Then now kill you know it very well. But war language also we have language for the war. You have to kill. But you have to care if unintentionally or intentionally target if I have if I’m not at the Pentagon. I consider it is okay. If I target now when we target in USA we choose them military target, economical, and political. So, war central victims mostly means economical target. So if now American they know UBL. He is in this house they don’t care about his kids and his. They will just bombard it. They will kill all of them and they did it. They kill wife of Dr. Ayrnan Zawahiri and his two daughters and his son in one bombardment. They receive a report that is his house be. He had not been there. They killed them. They arrested my kids intentionally. They are kids. They been arrested for four months they had been abused. So, for me I have patience. I know I’m not talk about what’s come to me. The American have human right. So. enemy combatant itself, it flexible word. So I think God knows that many who been arrested, they been unjustly arrested. Otherwise, military throughout history know very well. They don’t war will never stop. War start from Adam when Cain he killed Abel until now. It’s never gonna stop killing of people. This it the way of the language. American start the Revolutionary War then they starts the Mexican then Spanish War then World War One, World War Two. You read the history. You know never stopping war. This is life. But if who is enemy combatant and who is not? Finally, I finish statement. I’m asking you to be fair with other people.

PRESIDENT:

Does that conclude your statement, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad?

KSM:

Yes.

PRESIDENT:

Alright.

Defense Department Transcript:

REPRESENTATIVE: Mr. President, the Detainee has asked me to read his final statement to the Tribunal with the understanding he may interject or add statements if he needs to, to correct what I say. According to the Detainee:

“I hereby admit and affirm without duress to the following:

1.I swore Bay’aat (i.e., allegiance) to Sheikh Usama Bin Laden to conduct Jihad of self and money, and also Hijrah (i.e., expatriation to any location in the world where Jihad is required).

2.I was a member of the Al Qaida Council.

3.I was the Media Operations Director for Al-Sahab, or ‘The Clouds,’ under Dr. Ayman Al-Zawahiri. Al-Sahab is the media outlet that provided Al-Qaida-sponsored information to Al Jazeera…

4. I was the Operational Director for Sheikh Usama Bin Laden for the organizing, planning, follow-up, and execution of the 9/11 Operation under the Military Commander, Sheikh Abu Hafs Al-Masri Subhi Abu Sittah.

5.I was the Military Operational Commander for all foreign operations around the world under the direction of Sheikh Usama Bin Laden and Dr. Ayman Al-Zawahiri.

6.I was directly in charge, after the death of Sheikh Abu Hafs Al-Masri Subhi Abu Sittah, of managing and following up on the Cell for the Production of Biological Weapons, such as anthrax and others, and following up on Dirty Bomb Operations on American soil.

7.I was Emir (i.e., commander) of Beit Al Shuhada (i.e., the Martyrs, House) in the state of Kandahar, Afghanistan, which housed the 9/11 hijackers. There I was responsible for their training and readiness for the execution of the 9/11 Operation. Also, I hereby admit and affirm without duress that I was a responsible participant, principal planner, trainer, financier (via the Military Council Treasury), executor, and/or a personal participant in the following:

1.I was responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center Operation.

2.I was responsible for the 9/11 Operation, from A to Z.

3.[REDACTED]

4.I was responsible for the Shoe Bomber Operation to down two American airplanes.

5.I was responsible for the Filka Island Operation in Kuwait that killed two American soldiers.

6.I was responsible for the bombing of a nightclub in Bali, Indonesia, which was frequented by British and Australian nationals.

7.I was responsible for planning, training, surveying, and financing the New (or Second) Wave attacks against the following skyscrapers after 9/11:

a.Library Tower, California.
b.Sears Tower, Chicago,
c.Plaza Bank, Washington state.
d.The Empire State Building, New York City.

8.I was responsible for planning, financing, & follow-up of Operations to destroy American military vessels and oil tankers in the Straights of Hormuz, the Straights of Gibralter, and the Port of Singapore.

9.I was responsible for planning, training, surveying, and financing for the Operation to bomb and destroy the Panama Canal.

10. I was responsible for surveying and financing for the assassination of several former American Presidents, including President Carter.

11. I was responsible for surveying, planning, and financing for the bombing of suspension bridges in New York.

12. I was responsible for planning to destroy the Sears Tower by burning a few fuel or oil tanker trucks beneath it or around it.

13. I was responsible for planning, surveying, and financing for the operation to destroy Heathrow Airport, the Canary Wharf Building, and Big Ben on British soil.

14. I was responsible for planning, surveying, and financing for the destruction of many night clubs frequented by American and British citizens on Thailand soil.

15. I was responsible for surveying and financing for the destruction of the New York Stock Exchange and other financial targets after 9/11.

16. I was responsible for planning, financing, and surveying for the destruction of buildings in the Israeli city of Elat by using airplanes leaving from Saudi Arabia.

17. I was responsible for planning, surveying, and financing for the destruction of American embassies in Indonesia, Australia, and Japan.

18. I was responsible for surveying and financing for the destruction of the Israeli embassy in India, Azerbaijan, the Philippines, and Australia.

19. I was responsible for surveying and Financing for the destruction of an Israeli * El-Al* Airlines flight on Thailand soil departing from Bangkok Airport.

20. I was responsible for sending several Mujahadeen into Israel to conduct surveillance to hit several strategic targets deep in Israel.

21. I was responsible for the bombing of the hotel in Mombasa that is frequented by Jewish travelers via El-Al airlines.

22. I was responsible for launching a Russian-made SA-7 surface-to-air missile on El-Al or other Jewish airliner departing from Mombasa.

23. I was responsible for planning and surveying to hit American targets in South Korea, such as American military bases and a few night clubs frequented by American soldiers.

24. I was responsible for financial, excuse me, I was responsible for providing financial support to hit American, Jewish, and British targets in Turkey.

25. I was responsible for surveillance needed to hit nuclear power plants that generate electricity in several U.S. states.

26. I was responsible for planning, surveying, and financing to hit NATO Headquarters in Europe.

27. I was responsible for the planning and surveying needed to execute the Bojinka Operation, which was designed to down twelve American airplanes full of passengers. I personally monitored a round-trip, Manila-to-Seoul, Pan Am flight.

28. I was responsible for the assassination attempt against President Clinton during his visit to the Philippines in 1994 or 1995…

29. I shared responsibility for the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul the second while he was visiting the Philippines.

30. I was responsible for the training and financing for the assassination of Pakistan’s President Musharaf.

31. I was responsible for the attempt to destroy an American oil company owned by the Jewish former Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, on the Island of Sumatra, Indonesia.”

AP is reporting that DNA testing has established that the Borneo Clouded Leopard Neofelis nebulosa diardi should really be classified as a separate species from Neofelis nebulosa. It will probably be renamed simply Neofelis diardi.

A type of leopard found on the Southeast Asian island of Borneo and believed to be related to its mainland cousin is in fact a completely new cat species, WWF said Thursday.

The conservation group said American scientists compared the DNA of the clouded leopard with that of its mainland cousin and determined the two populations diverged some 1.4 million years ago.

“Genetic research results clearly indicate that the clouded leopard of Borneo should be considered a separate species,” WWF quoted Dr. Stephen O’Brien of the U.S. National Cancer Institute, which carried out the tests, as saying.

The clouded leopard is Borneo’s largest predator, has the longest canine teeth relative to its size of any cat, and can grow as large as a small panther.

There are estimated to be between 5,000 and 11,000 of these animals left in Borneo’s rain forests.

Wikipedia

Aiden Lassell Ripley, Woodcock Shooting

Antiques and the Arts announces a request for submissions of privately-owned works by the American sporting artist Aiden Lassell Ripley (1896-1969) for a major new book to be published next year.

Stephen B. O’Brien Jr Fine Arts, LLC is planning to publish the most comprehensive book to date on sporting artist Aiden Lassell Ripley (American, 1896–1969) and is seeking submissions. The book, which will be released in conjunction with the Aiden Lassell Ripley exhibition scheduled at the Cape Cod Museum of Art, Dennis, Mass., in August 2008, will showcase the painter’s large body of work in a hardbound volume comprising more than 160 pages and with more than 125 color illustrations.

Ripley is perhaps best known for his skill at capturing outdoor sporting scenes. He spent much of his career traveling to plantations to paint commissioned shooting scenes. Vanderbilt, Mellon, Marshall Field and Carnegie are among the prestigious names of families who commissioned Ripley’s work.

In this new survey of Ripley’s oeuvre, the authors will include watercolors, oils, drawings, magazine covers, portraits, commissions and public murals. Subject matter will cover not just the sporting paintings, but the artist’s wide range of talents — from early impressionistic landscapes of Europe and New England to later realist works depicting the outdoor life in places from the Deep South to Cape Cod.

Read the whole thing.

Aiden Lassell Ripley, Early Woodcock, etching

SciFi Weekly reports:

Alex Kurtzman and Robert Orci (sic), who are writing the 11th Star Trek movie, revealed a few key points about the top-secret script in an interview with MTV.com. Among the revelations: The movie will be titled, simply, Star Trek; it will take place aboard a starship; and they’re OK with Matt Damon playing Capt. James T. Kirk.

Not that the writers confirmed that Damon had been cast, as rumored. “I’m the hugest Matt Damon fan ever,” Kurtzman told the site. “If he became [Kirk], great.”

Jean Alexandre Joseph Falguière,
Le Vainqueur au Combat de Coqs
(Victor of the Cockfight), 1864
Musée d’Orsay

The sport of the cock fight is said to have been introduced into Ancient Greece by Themistocles. The latter, while advancing with his army against the invading Persians, observed two cocks fighting, and, stopping his troops, inspired them by calling their attention to the valor and obstinacy of the feathered warriors. In honor of the subsequent Greek victory, cockfights were thenceforth held annually at Athens, at first in a patriotic and religious spirit, but afterwards purely for the love of the sport.

In England, cockfighting rivaled horse racing in popularity. The prohibition of the sport by Cromwell during the Protectorate was traditionally viewed as a high water mark of Puritan tyranny.

Cockfighting has an extensive literature and sporting tradition, and its own technical language and ethos. Cockfighting was historically one of the few sporting activities where the different classes of society mingled. The ground on which matches between gamecocks were conducted was traditionally referred to as “the sod.” An old saying holds that: “On the turf and on the sod, all men are equal.” Implying that only there does such equality exist, of course.

Cockfighting was extremely popular in early America. The founding fathers, including Washington and Jefferson, were devoted to the sport. Andrew Jackson bred gamecocks. Even Abraham Lincoln refereed matches. But the spirit of Puritan intolerance has always struggled for the suppression of all of modes of the expression of humanity’s fighting instincts and natural love of sport.

Cockfighting was banned in Massachusetts in 1836, and the bluenosed bigots gradually got their way in every US state, with the exception of Louisiana and New Mexico where the sport remained protected as a highly prized cultural property of local non-English-speaking communities.

The sport now has been sacrificed in New Mexico, however, to the calculating political ambition of the current governor, Bill Richardson, who decided he needed to get in-line with the Puritan left on an “animal rights” issue, and who feared being identified in a campaign for national office as governor of a state so primitive and retarditaire as to tolerate the existence of a fighting sport. Richardson broke campaign promises to constituents that he would protect the sport as long as he remained governor.

Let’s hope that Richardson’s scheming treachery is not rewarded.

Jean-Léon Gérome, Jeunes Grecs Faisant Battre de Coqs (Young Greeks Conducting a Cockfight), 1846, Louvre

Petition to Legalize Cockfighting in the US

Last Saturday, I clicked on an Instapundit link to a Volokh posting, and got the traditional MS Explorer negative page-not-found response.

The page cannot be displayed

The page you are looking for is currently unavailable. The Web site might be experiencing technical difficulties, or you may need to adjust your browser settings.

Even important blogs have technical difficulties, so I simply shrugged and made a mental note to try again later.

But when the problem was still there on Monday, I concluded there was more to this than meets the eye.

About a year ago, my personal computer was infected by a Trojan, which exploited one of those only-too-numerous Microsoft vulnerabilities. It was the sort of thing which hijacks your computer to send out thousands of replications of itself covertly, degrading system performance significantly in the process.

I would never have known it was there, but for the fact that I could no longer log into Norton to update my antivirus software. The Trojan wrote to my Host file instructions directing all prominent antivirus website addresses to a dead address.

Wikipedia discusses this kind of hijacking technique in its Host file entry.

Further investigation established that my wife’s notebook was blocked from Volokh Conspiracy by the same malware. But a friend in California last night was not impacted by this problem.

I don’t recall exactly which file needs to be edited, but I can tell you that correcting this kind of problem is a lot of work. One has to turn off System Restore, reboot the computer in Safe mode, then edit the Registry to get rid of the illicit Host file entry. Entering Safe Mode is a bummer for me, because it will mess up all the icons on desk top, producing even more work sorting them all out again.

Would readers please check to see if they can link to Volokh Conspiracy, and tell me via email, or in Comments here, if they are also experiencing the same problem?

George W. Bush, who is not running for anything, neither blocked the Plamegame witch hunt nor pardoned its only victim, Lewis Libby. But Fred Thompson, who is considering running for the presidency in 2008, will be hosting fundraisers to help pay for Libby’s defense.

He’s definitely winning points in my book.

Charles McCarry, in his currently out-of-print 1991 thriller Second Sight describes the Washington ritual of trial by media.

In Late Twentieth Century Washington,.. a certain politicized segment of the news media exercised many of the functions belonging to the secret police in totalitarian countries. They maintained hidden networks of informers, carried out clandestine investigations, conducted interrogations on the basis of accusations made by anonymous witnesses and agents provocateurs, and staged dramatic show trials in which the guilt of the accused was assumed and no effective defense allowed. They had far greater powers of investigation than the government. The authority of the state to persecute the individual was defined and limited by the Constitution, whereas the media were restrained by nothing more than the rules of theater. Because their targets were usually thought by the best people to deserve the punishment they might otherwise have eluded, the media had no worry about the quality of its evidence; journalists were not concerned with truth in any case, only with “accuracy.” That consisted of verifying the existence of their sources and confirming that they had actually spoken the words quoted, or something close to those words; nothing beyond that was required. If one person denounced another, even if anonymously, that was reason enough to publish the charge. There was no requirement to question the evidence or the accuser’s motives, or even to identify the accuser; in fact the accuser usually spoke on the understanding that his anonymity would be preserved under all circumstances. Verdicts of “innocent” based on these rules of evidence were almost unknown. The sentence was degradation, shame, exile, and, usually a lifetime of impoverishment resulting from the attempt to pay lawyers’ fees incurred in the vain hope of self-defense. Conviction in the media was sometimes followed by conviction in the courts, but the punishment handed down by judges, a mere prison sentence or fine or condemnation to a stated number of hours of good works among the underclass, was regarded as the lesser penalty.”

Jean-Luc Cornec, Telefonschafe [Telephone Sheep],
Museum für Kommunikation, Frankfurt

more photos

Pat Toomey, whom Bush ought to have supported in a primary against Arlen Spector, explains why John McCain’s record makes him unacceptable as Republican nominee for the presidency.

The reduction of tax rates on income and investment is a cornerstone of limited-government philosophy and a powerful driver of economic growth. When the most important pro-growth tax cuts in a generation were proposed by President George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003, Sen. McCain vigorously opposed them. While he has more recently supported the extension of the Bush tax cuts and has previously proposed requiring a supermajority vote in Congress to raise taxes, the extent of his opposition in 2001 and 2003 supersedes any potentially redeeming votes.

Sen. McCain was one of only two Republican senators to oppose the 2001 tax cuts and one of only three GOP senators to oppose the 2003 reductions. Furthermore, his reason for opposing the cuts was taken straight from the playbook of the most radical left-wing Democrats. In 2001, Sen. McCain argued, “I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans who need tax relief.”

That statement is virtually indistinguishable from the class-warfare demagoguery used by Democrats like Ted Kennedy and John Kerry. More importantly, it was grossly inaccurate. The Bush tax cuts lowered income taxes, and other taxes, for every American who paid them. In percentage terms, lower-income workers enjoyed the greatest savings, and today, upper-income workers pay a larger share of total income taxes than they did before the Bush tax cuts.

Sen. McCain did much more than just criticize the Bush tax cuts—he also joined leading liberal senators in offering and voting for amendments designed to undermine them. All in all, he voted on the pro-tax side of 14 such amendments in 2001 and 2003. These included an amendment he co-sponsored with Sen. Tom Daschle to limit the rate reduction in the top tax bracket to one percentage point and an amendment sponsored by Sen. Russ Feingold against full repeal of the estate tax, aka the death tax. This latter vote is in keeping with Senator McCain’s 2002 vote against repealing the death tax…

Over the years, Sen. McCain has supported a number of other big-government bills, including an amendment that would authorize the government to set prices on prescription drugs under Medicare and an amendment to prohibit oil drilling in part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.

But of all his infringements on personal freedom, Sen. McCain’s persistent attacks on political speech are the most worrisome. The First Amendment is an important safeguard of pro-growth policies. When government strays from sound economic policies, citizens must be free to exercise their constitutional rights to petition and criticize those policies and the politicians responsible for them. The 2002 McCain-Feingold bill (or the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act), named in part for the Arizona senator who gave it life, seeks to squash political dissent by imposing grossly unconstitutional restrictions on citizen participation in political debate.

In defense of the bill’s provision severely limiting the freedom of private groups to run political TV ads, Sen. McCain argued in a Supreme Court brief, “These ads are direct, blatant attacks on the candidates. We don’t think that’s right.” He thus anointed himself the arbiter of appropriate political speech, worthy of deciphering which speech is “right” and which should be permitted in American political debate. His law constitutes the greatest modern infringement of the First Amendment right to political free speech. While bestowing significant advantages upon incumbent office holders, it has created neither a less corrupt political domain nor a more democratic one.

I would support Newt Gingrich, possibly Mitt Romney or Fred Thompson, but definitely not Giuliani or McCain.

Many older people like myself have no difficulty at all recalling that, back in the 1970s (when we were experiencing some colder winters), environmentalists were predicting a new Ice Age resulting from emissions produced by human industrial activity.

Al Gore, however, must be getting senile. A New York Times article, devoted to brushing away scientific criticism of Gore’s exaggerated claims of imminent doom (“...in terms of the big picture, he got it right.”), admiringly quotes Gore’s self-deprecatory assessment of his own performance:

He said that after 30 years of trying to communicate the dangers of global warming, “I think that I’m finally getting a little better at it.”

Actually, though the weather began getting milder after the late 1970s, awareness of a “Global Warming” crisis dates back only to 1988, when NASA scientist James Hansen testified to Congress of a “cause and effect” relationship between human emissions and a warming climate.

Of course, though Gore would have been working to avert Global Cooling, not Global Warming, 30 years ago, by a curious coincidence, he was undoubtedly advocating precisely the same solutions: bigger government, higher taxes, more regulation and restriction of energy consumption.

Hat tip to Frank Dobbs.

Elihu Yale with servant

Oh, Yale was begun back in Seventeen One
With a gift of books weighing nigh a ton.”

the old song inaccurately states.

In reality, it was in 1718 that the Welsh nabob Elihu Yale (1649-1721) responded affirmatively to a request from Cotton Mather, and bestowed 417 books, along with “nine bales of goods” worth over £560, and a portrait of King George I upon the then struggling Collegiate School of Connecticut. This bequest permitted the erection of a new building to house the college in New Haven, which was duly named for its benefactor.

The March/April issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine contains an article (not yet on-line) informing us that last month the University agreed to remove a portrait of Elihu Yale from the Corporation Room in Woodbridge Hall, in response to complaints.

The dark and antique portrait shows Yale sitting beside a window displaying his trading ships, attended by a dusky servant wearing a metal collar.

The forces of Political Correctness are long on outrage, and short on acumen, and have unhappily mistaken the dark-skinned Indian servant for an American Negro slave, and the servant’s ornamental silver collar as a yoke of bondage.

Yale may be an educational institution, but University Vice President and Secretary Linda Lorimer JD’77 has announced that the task of educating the offended is beyond Yale’s abilities. “Since the portrait is confusing without the explanation [that Elihu Yale did not own slaves], I have decided it would be prudent to exchange that portrait of Elihu to another one in the University’s collection,” Lorimer said.

Ah, the courage of our University officials!

Yale Daily News, February 7

Hartford Courant, February 8

In this video praising the M107 Barrett .50 rifle, Ronnie Barrett claims a place in the pantheon of immortal arms designers who have produced key weapons adopted by the US military, along with John Moses Browning, John Garand, and Eugene Stoner.

4:47 video

Hat tip to Karen Myers.

The Telegraph reports:

Scientists who questioned mankind’s impact on climate change have received death threats and claim to have been shunned by the scientific community.

They say the debate on global warming has been “hijacked” by a powerful alliance of politicians, scientists and environmentalists who have stifled all questioning about the true environmental impact of carbon dioxide emissions.

Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, has received five deaths threats by email since raising concerns about the degree to which man was affecting climate change.

One of the emails warned that, if he continued to speak out, he would not live to see further global warming.

“Western governments have pumped billions of dollars into careers and institutes and they feel threatened,” said the professor…

Richard Lindzen, the professor of Atmospheric Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology… recently claimed: “Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves labelled as industry stooges.

“Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science.”

The need to stifle debate indicates all too clearly the quality of the science behind Anthropogenic Global Warming theory.

From Scrappleface:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, said today that the Nevada State Democrat Party’s decision to pull out of a scheduled presidential debate co-hosted by Fox News is “actually a strategic redeployment, not a cut-and-run retreat.”

“There’s no reason to put our brave Democrat presidential candidates in harm’s way,” Sen. Reid said. “We were lured into this debate due to faulty intelligence, and the prudent thing to do is redeploy.”

The majority leader who initially backed the Fox News debate, said he began to question the intelligence that drew him to support the contest when he read the following joke made by Fox News Channel Chairman Roger Ailes at an industry awards ceremony:

“And it is true that Barack Obama is on the move. I don’t know if it’s true that President Bush called Musharraf and said, ‘Why can’t we catch this guy?’

Sen. Reid said, “I cannot condone mocking the intelligence of a sitting president in time of war.”

The Democrat presidential hopefuls will redeploy to a casino on the Las Vegas strip for a non-partisan debate co-hosted by MoveOn.org and The New York Times.

Every day there are news reports of more deaths.

We see images of death and destruction on TV every night.

We took this land by force. We occupied it. It causes us nothing but trouble.

Many of our children go there but never come back.

Murderers, Rapists, Pedophiles and Thugs enjoy celebrity status.

Their government is unstable.

Many of their people are uncivilized.

Their land is subject to natural disasters and we are obliged to come to their aid.

They have more than 1000 religious sects which we do not understand.

Their cultures, foods and diverse ways of life are unfathomable to most ordinary Americans.

They cannot secure their borders.

They are billions of dollars in debt and it will cost billions more to rebuild.

It is now quite clear!

Daredevil Richard Hammond, on British Television’s Top Gear, tests the effects of a lightning strike on an automobile and its occupant/driver.

video

The democrats are stuffing their military appropriations bill mandating withdrawal from Iraq with billions of dollars in pork to buy votes.

AP:

Democrats seeking votes for their Iraq-withdrawal plan have stuffed the bill it’s in with billions of dollars for farms, flu preparedness, New Orleans levees, home heating and other causes.

Some critics say the Democrats are simply being opportunistic — using a must-pass measure for funding U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to carry items that can’t advance as easily on their own.

At the same time, Democratic leaders are trying to increase support for setting deadlines for ending U.S. military combat in Iraq, which they’ve made part of the larger legislation.

It’s plain that Democrats are unwilling to approve the bill’s $100 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan without devoting considerable sums of money to the home front.

“The president wants to make sure we take care of Iraq, but I think we also have to make sure that we don’t lose sight of what we have to do here at home,” said Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill.

Already, money in the bill not directly related to the war exceeds $20 billion.

A must-see 2:48 video

web-site

Hat tip to David Larkin.

The full documentary is now available.

1:15:56 video

Peggy Noonan dispels all the politically correct posturing and moralizing cant with some simple wisdom.

Here is what has been said the past week or so that sparked argument: Bill Maher, on HBO, said a lot of lives would be saved if Vice President Cheney had died, and Ann Coulter, at a conservative political meeting, suggested John Edwards is a “faggot.”

She was trying to be funny and get a laugh. He was trying to startle and get applause.

What followed was the predictable kabuki in which politically active groups and individuals feigned dismay as opposed to what many of them really felt, which was grim delight. Conservatives said they were chilled by Mr. Maher’s comments, but I don’t think they were. They were delighted he revealed what they believe is at the heart of modern liberalism, which is hate.

Liberals amused themselves making believe they were chilled by Ms. Coulter’s remarks, but they were not. They were delighted she has revealed what they believe is at the heart of modern conservatism, which is hate.

The truth is many liberals were dismayed by Mr. Maher because he made them look bad, and many conservatives were mad at Ms. Coulter for the same reason…

One of the clearest statements ever about the implied limits of legitimate political discourse was made by the imprisoned Socrates in his first dialogue with Crito, when he said, “That’s not nice.” Actually, it was your grandmother who said “That’s not nice.” She’s the one who probably taught you the wince. It is her wisdom, encapsulated in those three simple words, that is missing from the current debate.

We tie ourselves in knots trying to explain why it is, or why it isn’t, always or occasionally, helpful or destructive to use various epithets, or give full voice to our resentments. But the simple wisdom of Grandma—“That’s not nice”—is a good guide. (I should say that when I was a kid, grandmas were older people who had common sense. They had observed something of people, had experienced life directly, not only through books or TV. Almost all of them had religious faith, and had absorbed the teachings of the Bible. Almost all of them sat quietly at the kitchen table, and even when I was a kid they were considered old fashioned. They were often ethnic and had accents. As a matter of fact, all of them were.)

I think that as America has grown more academic or aware of education, the wisdom of Grandma has been denigrated. Or ignored. Or stolen and dressed up as something else…

Part of the reason is that Grandma had more sway in the public sphere 50 years ago, which is to say common sense and a sense of decorum had more sway. Another part is that privately people felt they had more room to think or say whatever they wanted without being shamed or shunned. It let the steam out. We think of the 1950s as buttoned up, but in a way America had more give then. Men were understood not to be angels.

Our country now puts less of an emphasis on public decorum, courtliness, self-discipline, decency. America no longer says, “That’s not nice.” It doesn’t want to make value judgments on “good” and “bad.” We have come to rely on censorship to maintain decorum. We are very good at letting people know that if they say something we don’t like, we’ll shame them and shun them, even ruin them.

But censorship doesn’t make people improve themselves; it makes people want to rebel. It tells them to toe the line or pay a price. People who are urged in the right direction and taught in the right direction will usually try to discipline and improve themselves from within. But they do not enjoy censorship from without. They fight back. They are rude in order to show they are unbroken.

This is human. And Grandma would have understood this, too.

I think the atmosphere of political correctness is now experienced by normal people—not people who speak on TV, but normal people—as so oppressive, so demanding of constant self-policing, that when someone says something in public that is truly not nice, not nice at all, they can’t help but feel that they are witnessing a prison break.
As long as political correctness reigns, the more antic among us will try to break out with great streams of Tourette’s-like forbidden words and ideas.

We should forbid less and demand more. We should exert less pressure from without and encourage more discipline from within. We should ask people to be dignified, hope they’ll be generous, expect them to be fair. When they’re not, we should correct them. But we shouldn’t beat them to a pulp. Because that’s not nice.

Read the whole thing.

Dave of Garfield Ridge gets to visit the Vancouver set of the favorite current television show of many intellectuals, the Sci Fi channel’s Battlestar Gallatica.

Dave gets to tour the program’s sets, and even hobnobs with a number of members of the cast, including Edward James Olmos, who discloses that this season

the show was heading into a dark place, even going so far as to call series creator Ron Moore “a real sicko” for what he was doing.

AP:

The leader of the al-Qaida-affiliated Islamic State of Iraq has been captured in a raid west of Baghdad, an Iraqi military spokesman said Friday.

Abu Omar al-Baghdadi was captured Friday in a raid in Abu Ghraib on the western outskirts of Baghdad, said Brig. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi, spokesman of the Baghdad security operation. U.S. officials had no confirmation of the capture.

“One of the terrorists who was arrested with him confessed that the one in our hands is al-Baghdadi,” al-Moussawi said.

Al-Baghdadi has been identified in statements posted on Islamic extremist Web sites as the head of the Islamic State, which was proclaimed last year after the death of the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Al-Baghdadi was said to have headed the Mujahedeen Shura Council, an alliance of al-Qaida and other jihadist organizations, which was set up last year to downplay the role of foreigners in the Iraqi insurgency.

UPDATE 3/10

A more recent report from Iraqi authorities denies that the captured individual is A-Baghdadi, but asserts that he is “a senior Al Qaeda leader.”

Channel 4’s documentary was broadcast yesterday evening in Britain. Some excerpts have already been uploaded.

2:12 Part 1

3:14 Part 2

3:13 Part 3

2:56 Part 4

4:30 Part 5

4:11 Part 6

I expect that the entire program will soon be available.

Judge Laurence H. Silberman wrote the opinion striking down the District of Columbia’s ban on possession of operable handguns in private homes. The District law required privately owned pistols to be kept unloaded and disassembled or rendered inoperable by a trigger lock.

How Appealing reports and has links.

The Never Yet Melted blog is in the process of migrating from our previous hosting service to a new host. We believe that our new hosting service will prove more reliable, and that those mySQL 127 Errors will occur much less frequently.

However, there are currently a few problems involving inaccessible image links and special characters not displaying properly. It will take a little while to sort all this out. We apologize and request your patience.

The Management

Stale’s film critic Dana Stevens has already seen the film of Frank Miller’s 300, a comic-noir retelling of the fight to the death of the Spartans at Thermopylae.

The ineffable Ms. Stevens finds the film’s pro-Spartan partisanship unacceptable, and reads racist, lookist, free-ist prejudice into the unsympathetic treatment of the 300 Spartans’ 2,000,000 or so Persian adversaries.

If 300, the new battle epic based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, had been made in Germany in the mid-1930s, it would be studied today alongside The Eternal Jew as a textbook example of how race-baiting fantasy and nationalist myth can serve as an incitement to total war…

Here are just a few of the categories that are not-so-vaguely conflated with the “bad” (i.e., Persian) side in the movie: black people. Brown people. Disfigured people. Gay men (not gay in the buff, homoerotic Spartan fashion, but in the effeminate Persian style). Lesbians. Disfigured lesbians. Ten-foot-tall giants with filed teeth and lobster claws. Elephants and rhinos (filthy creatures both). The Persian commander, the god-king Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) is a towering, bald club fag with facial piercings, kohl-rimmed eyes, and a disturbing predilection for making people kneel before him.

This hilarious review was, alas! far too short, but it did remind me of the old-time bolshie Edmund’s Wilson’s animadversions on J.R.R. Tolkien’s systematically discriminatory perspective on orcs.

The lady’s grotesque attitudes toward the film, of course, are perfectly representative of the contemporary left’s Pavlovian rush to embrace anyone and anything inimical to their own civilization and its values. I expect I’ll have to run out and see this one.

trailers
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For more information on the educational history of America. Check out our site for a great article on education.

Rep. John Shadegg’s (R-AZ) office reports:

(On Wednesday), Congressman John Shadegg reintroduced the Enumerated Powers Act, a bill that highlights the importance of the Tenth Amendment and forces a continual reexamination of the role of the federal government.

“The Enumerated Powers Act would require Members of Congress to include an explicit statement of Constitutional authority into each bill that is introduced. It would hold Congress accountable for its actions,” said Shadegg.

The Tenth Amendment states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

“According to the Tenth Amendment, the national government cannot expand its legislative authority into areas reserved to the States or the people,” said Shadegg. “It is a well-known fact that the size and scope of the federal government has exploded since the New Deal. Congress continues to operate without Constitutional restraint, creating costly and ineffective programs and blatantly ignoring the principles of federalism.”

We should be running this guy in 2008.

J. Peter Mulhern suggests that, “more than halfway through his second term,” George W. Bush should give serious though to assuming control of his own government.

Scooter Libby is a convicted perjurer because the United States Department of Justice grossly abused its power and because politics short-circuited all the safeguards that are supposed to prevent such abuses. This is one of the most appalling perversions of a civilized judicial system since France sent Alfred Dreyfus to Devil’s Island because the ruling elite didn’t like Jews.

If the appellate and executive review processes fail as badly as the investigative and trial processes did in Libby’s case, Libby will go to a federal penitentiary because Democrats don’t like Republicans. There is enough shame in this outcome to go around.

Patrick Fitzgerald is a disgrace both to the legal profession and to the human race. His partisan allies, such as Senator Chuck Schumer and certain nameless bureaucrats at the CIA, are beneath contempt. The jury was unfit for its task, because it was apparently both prejudiced and intellectually incapable of noticing that the prosecution had no case. The trial judge lacked either the wit to see a gross miscarriage of justice unfolding before his eyes or the courage to stop it. But ultimate responsibility for Fitzgerald’s outrageous misconduct lies with his boss.

George W. Bush could have stopped Fitzgerald’s farce at any time. He could stop it today. He doesn’t even need to use the pardon power, at least not yet. Fitzgerald serves at the President’s pleasure Mr. Bush has every reason to be severely displeased. The President could simply fire him and, for good measure, order the DOJ to start an investigation into Fitzgerald’s misconduct in the Libby matter. President Bush could then instruct Fitzgerald’s replacement to join Libby’s defense in its motion for a new trial. If the court grants that motion the DOJ could then offer Libby its apologies and withdraw the prosecution. If it doesn’t the DOJ could join in Libby’s appeal. If that fails then the pardon power lies in reserve.

Of course, he won’t. He’ll just let the whole comedy proceed, then (at best) pardon Libby on the morning of Hillary’s inauguration.