London Times Sunday edition:

Speaking from the Clairvaux prison in northeast France last week (Carlos the Jackal) berated terrorist cells said to have targeted Britain, criticising them for plotting to kill ordinary people.

In his first telephone interview with a newspaper, the Venezuelan-born Vladimir Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, 57, said he was saddened by any loss of life in London, where he lived as a young man. He also attacked what he called a lack of professionalism in some cells linked to Al-Qaeda.

Sanchez is serving a life sentence for three murders in Paris in 1975. He will go on trial again in January over four bomb attacks in France in 1982 and 1983 that killed 12 people and wounded more than 100.

Sanchez, who is now overweight and diabetic, showed no remorse, laughing when asked about the number of his victims. ...

“Kensington and Chelsea were places where I spent my youth, so I’m not happy about people getting killed in the streets of London,” he said.

He condemned Al-Qaeda followers (for attacks) without specific targets, saying: “They are not professionals. They’re not organised. They don’t even know how to make proper explosives or proper detonators.”

The Senate Majority Leader ducks a hard question.

0:36 video

And Dennis Miller has some advice for Harry Reid:

2:22 video

Hat tip to MacRanger.

ABC News Australia reports:

The US military says its soldiers have found rocket launchers armed with dozens of Iranian-made missiles aimed at one of its bases south of Baghdad.

“After several rockets hit FOB [Forward Operating Base] Hammer on July 11, the Third Heavy Brigade Combat Team manoeuvred to find the source of the attack,” a military statement said.

The next morning an unmanned aerial vehicle located 46 rocket launchers in the northern section of Besmaya Range Complex aimed at FOB Hammer.

Thirty-four of the launchers were armed with Iranian 107 millimetre rockets.

The US army believes the other 12 rockets were launched at the base the day before, killing one US soldier.

These would be the B-12, known to have been previously supplied by Iran to Hezbollah, a 107mm, 42 pound (19 kg.), 33 inch (838mm) long, Russian designed rocket very popular with terrorists. This rocket has a range of about six kilometers and three pounds (1.4 kg) of explosives in its warhead. Normally fired, from a launcher, in salvoes of dozens at a time, when used individually, it is more accurate the closer it is to the target. This 107mm design has been copied by many nations, and is very popular with guerillas and terrorists because of its small size and portability.

Marine Corps Times:

The Marine Corps is revamping its weapons distribution among leathernecks, issuing the M4 carbine to career enlisted Marines and officers who previously carried the M9 pistol, according to a Corps-wide message released last Friday.

The new assignment policy, announced in MarAdmin 378/07 states that staff sergeants and up, along with second lieutenants through lieutenant colonels and chief warrant officers, will now be issued the M4, which is essentially a smaller version of the M16. Marines in those paygrades previously were issued the M9 pistol.

Colonels and up will continue to carry the M9. Privates through sergeants will still be issued the M16A4. Assignment of automatic rifles will not change.

Sailors E-5 and below who are with Marine units will be issued the M4. The remaining pay grades will still carry the pistol.

The policy change is the result of the Marine Corps Equipment Review Group, according to the message, which convened in 2005.

“The review … took into consideration lessons learned along with knowledge of new weapon technology being fielded,” the message states. “As a result, new individual weapons assignment policies were developed, validated and approved by the Marine Requirements Oversight Council for implementation.”

The message went on to say that the current fielding of the M16A4, which is replacing the M16A2, will not change, and directed units to maintain the older rifles until the newer ones arrive.

“Units will request disposition instructions for excess M16A2 rifles and M9 pistols upon being fully fielded all replacement weapons,” the message states.

ABC NEWS reports:

As senior intelligence and law enforcement officials met again today in the White House Situation Room to deal with the “summer terror threat,” a top terror commander said an attack was coming that would dwarf the failed bombings in London and Glasgow.

Taliban military commander Mansour Dadullah, in an interview broadcast on ABC News’ “World News With Charles Gibson,” said the London attacks were “not enough” and that bigger attacks were coming.

“You will, God willing, be witness to more attacks,” he told a Pakistani journalist in an interview conducted just four days ago.

The same news agency also is reporting on the possibility of Zawahiri’s latest tape containing the signal for an attack.

Fearing a possible coded signal to attack, U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials are studying an unusual pattern of words in the latest audiotape from al Qaeda’s No. 2 man, Ayman al Zawahri.

On the tape, posted on the Internet Wednesday, Zawahri repeats one phrase three times at the end of his message.

Have I not conveyed? Oh God be my witness.

Have I not conveyed? Oh God be my witness.

Have I not conveyed? Oh God be my witness.

A new FBI analysis of al Qaeda messages, obtained by the Blotter on ABCNews.com, warns that “continued messages that convey their strategic intent to strike the U.S. homeland and U.S. interests worldwide should not be discounted as merely deceptive noise.”

Intelligence analysts are also investigating technical clues that Zawahri’s most recent audio message was phoned in via computer phone, using voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP.

Samuel Blumenfield proposes indicting Patrick Fitzgerald for obstruction of justice.

In January 2004, the Justice Department chose prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to investigate the leak of Valerie Plame’s identity. He became aware that the leaker was Armitage, who resigned from the State Department in November 2004 but remained a subject of the inquiry until February 2006 when Fitzgerald told him in a letter that he would not be charged. ...

Why would the prosecutor keep this vital information from the president who had expressed concern over the outing of a CIA operative? Meanwhile, the liberal press hysterically speculated that it was Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney who most likely leaked Plame’s identity to the press.

Despite the fact Fitzgerald knew the source of the leak, he decided to go after reporters who refused to name their sources. Thus, Times reporter Judith Miller spent 85 days in jail for refusing to reveal her sources to the prosecutor. She was finally released when she agreed to testify before a grand jury.

So, why did Fitzgerald go after Scooter Libby, Vice President Cheney’s top aide? Apparently, Armitage had read a memorandum Libby had commissioned as part of an effort to rebut criticism of the White House by Joe Wilson. Who wrote the memorandum, and did it mention Valerie Plame? Was it the source of any leaks to the press? Apparently not, for it was Armitage who supposedly read the report and made the leak, not Libby.

Nevertheless, it was Libby who Fitzgerald decided to indict, and the jury found Libby guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice. But how could he have obstructed justice when it wasn’t Libby who outed Valerie Plame, but Armitage, who voluntarily admitted that he was the perpetrator of the so-called crime of outing a CIA covert agent?

If anyone has obstructed justice it is prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who told Armitage to keep his mouth shut or face prosecution, did not tell the president who the leaker was and spent the taxpayers’ money in a costly prosecution against an innocent man.

Is it not a crime for a U.S. government official to deliberately withhold vital information from the president of the United States? Is it not a crime for a federal prosecutor to threaten a suspect with prosecution if he dared to make public his guilt?

When is the government going to indict Patrick J. Fitzgerald?

Fred Burton and Scott Stewart, at Stratfor, take a hard look at Ayman al-Zawahiri’s recent 90 minute video released July 4.

Posted by NOTR.

Excerpt:

Al-Zawahiri notes that the battles of the “crusaders and their slaves” (referring to the Muslims who cooperate with the United States and its Western allies) have expanded to the “doctrinal and moral fronts.” He also says the “Ummah is currently facing a deceptive propaganda war from the Americans and their agents.” These are references to the ideological war Stratfor has discussed as the only way jihadism can ultimately be defeated.

Clearly, al Qaeda also sees the attacks against its ideology as a significant threat. In fact, al-Zawahiri says, “I would like to remind everyone that the most dangerous weapons in the Saudi-American system are not buying of loyalties, spying on behalf of the Americans or providing facilities to them. No, the most dangerous weapons of that system are those who outwardly profess advice, guidance and instruction …” In other words, al Qaeda fears fatwas more than 500-pound bombs or cruise missiles. Bombs can kill people; fatwas can kill the ideology that lies at the root of the problem.

Al-Zawahiri also laments specific fatwas issued by clerics declaring that the jihad in Iraq is not obligatory and who forbid young Muslim men from going to Iraq. To counter these fatwas, al-Zawahiri plays an audiotape of Azzam (while a photo of Azzam is shown), in which Azzam comments on how jihad is the individual duty of every Muslim. Al-Zawahiri then urges Muslims to ignore such fatwas and scholars: “O youth of Islam, don’t listen to them, and I convey to you the mujahideen’s commanders’ mobilization of you, so hurry to Afghanistan, hurry to Iraq, hurry to Somalia, hurry to Palestine and hurry to the towering Atlas Mountains.” He also rails against the “religion traders in Iraq and Afghanistan to deem as haram (forbidden) the jihad against the invaders.”

One reason the al Qaeda leadership is so threatened by these ideological attacks is that neither bin Laden nor al-Zawahiri has any Islamic scholarly credentials. Many Muslims do not believe they possess the training and authority to issue a fatwa. ...

Black Belt Magazine has made its first issue, published in 1961, available on-line.

It was 50¢ an issue, $3 for an annual subscription, way back then.

The US Senate had its first Hindu prayer yesterday, which remarkable expression of ecumenicism was disrupted by the protests of three Christians.

1:07 video
——————————————
How long do you think it will be before the Senate starts having Wiccan invocations?

There is a bloody brave little animal in Africa called the honey badger. It may be the meanest animal in the world. It kills for malice and for sport, and it does not go for the jugular—it goes straight for the groin.—Robert Ruark

0:52 video of Iraqi proudly holding up a specimen… a big specimen!

IRAQSlogger Zeyad Kasim tells a tale of nightime fear gripping the native villagers of Southern Iraq.

For over a month now, people in Basrah have been circulating rumors about a “strange,” bear-like deadly creature that attacks people at night with its strong claws. Locals in rural areas around Basrah claim it has killed three people and injured six others, and that it usually pounces on its victims as they are sleeping outdoors during hot summer nights, when electric power outages are common. Farmers at Garmat Ali, Abu Skheer, Jisr and Shikhatta were so alarmed, they assigned guarding duties at night to prevent its attacks, the Nahrain website and Radio Sawa reported last week.

Eventually, several animals were caught or killed – up to 28, locals claimed – and cell phone videos of them were published on Iraqi websites and forums. The dead creatures look like honey badgers, compact but vicious omnivores that typically consume insects and small animals. Honey badgers are more prevalent in Iran—their presence in Iraq dwindled after the destruction of the salt marsh habitat in the south.

Residents of Garmat Ali, north west of Basrah, hanged one of the killed badgers on the Garma bridge that connects the southern city to the main Baghdad-Basrah highway, according to Mudhar Nazar, a resident interviewed by the pan-Arab Al-Hayat daily. “It looks like a dog, but its head looks like that of a bear,” said Nazar. “It has short hands and 15-cm-long claws, long hair, a penis like a man’s, and it only moves around at night.”

The animal is known locally as the Garta or ‘the muncher,’ and mothers in Basrah used to tell scary stories about the Garta to their children so they would not wander out alone at night. Old families in Basrah believe the animal brings bad luck because it is mostly found in cemeteries at night. The unusual phenomenon, however, is their sudden appearance in large numbers near the city and their increasingly aggressive behavior.

The rumors led people to indulge in conspiracy theories, speculating that U.S. or British forces have dropped large numbers of this animal, or its “eggs,” around Basrah in order to spread chaos and instability, while others say the animal crossed over from neighboring Iran through the marshes.

The mysterious origin of the badgers has become the talk of the town and outlandish stories have proliferated in Basrah as a result, local Slogger sources say. People are now sharing stories about British troops unleashing stray dogs – which locals have described as German Shepherds, known in Iraq as “police dogs.” British troops often release military dogs, used to detect explosives, on the streets when they become too old to perform their duties, said Abbas Kadhim, an Iraqi policeman in Basrah, according to Al-Hayat.

In the orchards of Abu Al-Khasib (20 km south east of Basrah), locals are talking about huge 6-metre-long snakes in water creeks, with one fisherman even claiming a seal (sea lion) fell into his nets. Fisherman in Faw, near the Persian (Arabian) Gulf, also claimed to have caught two dolphins in the Shatt Al-Arab waterway.

Authorities in Basrah have not commented on the rumors, but Dr. Mishtaq Abdul Mahdi, director of the Basrah Veterinary Hospital, dismissed them as nonsense and revealed that the honey badger is actually an indigenous animal that has been present in the marshes of southern Iraq and rural areas around Basrah for decades, in an interview with WNA News.

Dr. Abdul Mahdi said the hospital has so far received three of the badgers killed by farmers in Garmat Ali, Shikhatta and Abu Sikheer.

The BBC reports:

British forces have denied rumours that they released a plague of ferocious badgers into the Iraqi city of Basra.

Word spread among the populace that UK troops had introduced strange man-eating, bear-like beasts into the area to sow panic.

But several of the creatures, caught and killed by local farmers, have been identified by experts as honey badgers.

The rumours spread because the animals had appeared near the British base at Basra airport.

UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer said: “We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area.

“We have been told these are indigenous nocturnal carnivores that don’t attack humans unless cornered.”

The director of Basra’s veterinary hospital, Mushtaq Abdul-Mahdi, has inspected several of the animals’ corpses.

He said: “These appeared before the fall of the regime in 1986. They are known locally as Al-Girta.

“Talk that this animal was brought by the British forces is incorrect and unscientific.”

London Times story:

British forces operating around the southern Iraqi city of Basra are being blamed for the arrival of a plague of vicious badgers that stalk the streets at night, attacking livestock and even humans.

Local farmers have caught and killed several of the beasts, but this has done nothing to dispel rumours of a bear-like monster that eats humans and was, according to the local rumour mill, released into the area by UK forces to spread panic.

Major David Gell, a British Army spokesman, said the animals were thought to be a kind of honey badger or ratel – melivora capensis – which can be fierce but are not usually dangerous to humans unless provoked.

The animals are indigenous to Africa and large parts of the Middle East and are about the same size as European European badgers but much more aggressive, with long claws and strong jaws. They have been described in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s most fearless animal.

“They are native to the region but rare in Iraq. They’re nocturnal carnivores with a fearsome reputation, but they don’t stalk humans and carry them back to their lair,” Major Gell said.

Iraqi scientists have attempted to calm the public but the story of the British badgers has spread like wildfire through Basra and the surrounding villages.

Mushtaq Abdul-Mahdi, director of Basra’s veterinary hospital, has inspected the corpses of several dead badgers and sought to reassure his fellow citizens that they are not new to the region but had been seen well before Saddam’s ouster in 2003.

“Talk that this animal was brought by the British forces is incorrect and unscientific,” Mr Abdul-Mahdi told AFP.

But their numbers are increasing, possibly, scientists say, because Iraqi authorities are trying to reflood marshlands north of Basra that were drained under Saddam Hussein.

So far neither the scientists nor the soldiers have been able to calm the populace’s fears.

The ferocious creature is none other than Bob Ruark’s brave, bloody Honey Badger, Mellivora capensis, native “throughout most of Africa and western and south Asian areas of Baluchistan (eastern Iran), southern Iraq, Pakistan and Rajasthan (western India).”

The New York Times has discovered that a lot of people are shopping for high end mattresses these days.

The Times’ article mentions the $24,000 Magniflex and $50,000 Hollandia International $60,000 Hästens mattresses.

We went through all this a couple of years ago, did our research and selected the favorite mattress of old-time residents of San Francisco: the comparatively inexpensive (only $4700 for King Size!) McRoskey. We’d give McRoskey mattresses a strong endorsement.

AP has leaked details of a US Intelligence assessment with alarming news of al Qaeda’s current strength and capabilities.

A new threat assessment from U.S. counterterrorism analysts says that al-Qaida has used its safe haven along the Afghan-Pakistan border to restore its operating capabilities to a level unseen since the months before Sept. 11, 2001.

A counterterrorism official familiar with a five-page summary of the document – titled “Al-Qaida better positioned to strike the West” – called it a stark appraisal. The analysis will be part of a broader meeting at the White House on Thursday about an upcoming National Intelligence Estimate.

The official and others spoke to The Associated Press on condition they not be identified because the report remains classified.

The findings suggests that the network that launched the most devastating terror attack on U.S. soil has been able to regroup despite nearly six years of bombings, war and other tactics aimed at dismantling it.

The threat assessment focuses on the terror group’s safe haven in Pakistan and makes a range of observations about the threat posed to the United States and its allies, officials said.

Counterterrorism officials have been increasingly concerned about al-Qaida’s recent operations. This week, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said he had a “gut feeling” that the United States faced a heightened risk of attack this summer.

Still, numerous government officials say they know of no specific, credible threat of a new attack on U.S. soil.

Al-Qaida is “considerably operationally stronger than a year ago” and has “regrouped to an extent not seen since 2001,” the counterterrorism official said, paraphrasing the report’s conclusions. “They are showing greater and greater ability to plan attacks in Europe and the United States.”

The group also has created “the most robust training program since 2001, with an interest in using European operatives,” the official quoted the report as saying.

At the same time, this official said, the report speaks of “significant gaps in intelligence” so U.S. authorities may be ignorant of potential or planned attacks.

John Kringen, who heads the CIA’s analysis directorate, echoed the concerns about al-Qaida’s resurgence during testimony and conversations with reporters at a House Armed Services Committee hearing on Wednesday.

“They seem to be fairly well settled into the safe haven and the ungoverned spaces of Pakistan,” Kringen testified. “We see more training. We see more money. We see more communications. We see that activity rising.”

The threat assessment comes as the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies prepare a National Intelligence Estimate focusing on threats to the United States. A senior intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity while the high-level analysis was being completed, said the document has been in the works for roughly two years.

Peter Zeihan, writing at Strategic Forcasting (www.stratfor.com), a subscription service provider of information and analysis relevant to geopolitics, security and public policy, thinks Pakistan’s recent increasing internal conflicts could make Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier the key theater of US military operations.

Access to articles at Stratfor’s web-site requires a subscription, but the 7/10 Zeihan article is quoted in full by NOTR and by center-right Indian blogger RS.

Excerpt:

Back in 2005, the United States believed it had credible intelligence about a planned meeting of the core al Qaeda leadership in northwestern Pakistan. A strike force of several hundred to several thousand was assembled in order to punch through the Pakistani tribes hiding and shielding bin Laden and his allies, but the strike was ultimately abandoned because then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld felt the operation could not be kept quiet. It is one thing when Pakistanis think there are a few Americans running over the border to do something tactical. It is quite another when Pakistanis know that several thousand Americans with heavy air support are surging across to do something strategic. The U.S. might have been able to take out its target, but probably not without losing a critical ally.

Details of this attack plan were leaked July 8 to The New York Times. For us at Stratfor, news of the plans was nothing new. It made perfect sense that this plan, and likely dozens of others like it, were at various times in the works stretching back as far as 2003 (and we have noted such on numerous occasions). What caught our attention was the timing of The New York Times article. The United States has been eyeing northwestern Pakistan for years. Why draw attention to that fact now?

The United States’ core fear in 2005 was that the Pakistani government would destabilize. Well, in 2007, the Pakistani government is horrendously unstable. On July 10, Islamabad launched a multi-hour raid replete with Branch Davidian overtones against the Red Mosque complex and a gathering of radical (some would say mentally unhinged) Islamists challenging the government’s writ. Be worried when the government of an Islamic republic feels it must take such action. Be doubly worried when the government taking the action already seems to be in its death throes.

Previous efforts by Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf to strengthen his political grip on the country by firing the chief justice rebounded on him so severely that he cannot even depend upon his oldest allies. Various political, military and cultural power centers are sniping at the president, making their own independent and often contradictory demands. There are also hints that Musharraf’s faculties are beginning to crack. The government—as well as the president—is now teetering on the edge of oblivion, facing an unsavory menu of crushing compromise with one force or another to stay in power in name, and risking the turbulent waters of emergency rule over an increasingly hostile population.

If the threat of a government fall was the only thing holding Washington back in 2005, and now that the fall is imminent through no action of the United States, what does Washington have to gain from restraining itself any further?

This is more than a rhetorical question. The relative inactivity of al Qaeda these past six years, as well as the political situation in Pakistan, has imposed a shaky equilibrium on the issue. Al Qaeda’s security protocols curtail al Qaeda’s threat level, and that has allowed the United States to shelve the issue for another day. Meanwhile, the instability of Musharraf’s government limits the United States’ ability to pressure Islamabad over the issue of al Qaeda. Consequently, al Qaeda has been more or less hiding in plain sight.

Alter any aspect of this scenario—in this case, drastically increase the tottering of the Musharraf government—and the “stability” of the other pieces immediately breaks and the United States is forced to surge assets into Pakistan.

Washington has to assume that an al Qaeda anywhere but Pakistan is an al Qaeda that will act with less conservatism. By the American logic, al Qaeda assets in Saudi Arabia, long drilled that security is paramount, would naturally doubt that a telegram from bin Laden ordering a new attack is genuine—but they would certainly believe bin Laden himself should he show up at their door. By al Qaeda’s logic, Musharraf’s fall would force al Qaeda to relocate from Pakistan because the group would have to assume that the Americans would be coming.

Which means the odd stasis in the war on terror these past six years could be about to loosen up, and a front that has proven oddly cold might be about to catch fire.

John Derbyshire contemplates Political Correctness, the modern species of cant, distinguishing what he chooses to call Weak PC, its “speech and manners” expression (which he is willing to endorse) from Strong PC, the ideology itself which controls our universities and which has what Derbyshire considers disastrous impact on contemporary policies pertaining to education, immigration, law enforcement, and war.

Derbyshire is optimistic that the pendulum will swing away from the worst excesses of today’s Strong PC:

You may drive Nature out with a pitchfork, said Horace, but she will come running back. So she will. I believe we can already hear the pattering sound of her feet coming up the path.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

At 50in high from head to paw and still growing, Samson, a Great Dane/Newfoundland cross is Britain’s biggest dog

Telegraph:

Standing 6ft 5in (1.956 meters) on its hind legs and tipping the scales at 19st 10lb (276 lbs. = 125.19 kg.), Samson is a giant in every sense of the word. ...

He boasts a 59in (1.499 meter) chest and a 29in (.737 meter) neck, meaning he has to wear pony coats when it rains and has had to have an extra large collar fitted. The dog’s paws are almost the size of dinner plates.

While Samson’s awesome build is impressive enough for a fully grown dog, this huge hound is only three years old and will grow even more.

Julie Woods, 54 and her husband Ray, 65, whose last dog was a small terrier, spend £60 a month on dried food and turkey legs for Samson and take him on four two-mile walks a day.

Mrs Woods, from Boston, Lincs, said: “He’s a lovely dog whose bark is definitely worse than his bite. People are often intimidated when they first see him because he’s about the size of a small horse and very quick.

slideshow

Read the whole article.

Ed Husain, author of a memoir The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside and Why I Left, explains the dynamic which turns Muslims with Western technical educations so frequently into terrorists.

Right from the very top of the terrorist hierarchy, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri downward(Bin Laden’s Egyptian deputy); the soldiers of extremism have all traveled a similar path: past membership of the Muslim Brotherhood, a secular education, rejection of mainstream Muslims, a hatred for the West and ultimately taking up arms against peoples and governments.

The rank-and-file of Islamist organizations, the precursors to terrorism, are filled with activists with a technical education. The instructor of my first secret cell in Hizb ut-Tahrir in London was a town planner; my second cell-leader was a medical doctor. Even today, medical doctors manage the British arm of Hizb ut-Tahrir-a global Islamist political party working for the re-establishment of an Islamic caliphate: doctors Nasim Ghani, Abdul Wahid, and Nazreen Nawaz. Globally, the central leader of Hizb ut-Tahrir is a Jordan-based engineer, Abu Rishta. The story of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood is similar. When Islamists graduate to jihadist terrorism the profile is equally chilling.

Osama bin Laden ran a construction company in Saudi Arabia and later, the Sudan. His deputy, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, is a Cairo-trained paediatrician. The mastermind behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, is a mechanical engineer who studied at North Carolina University. The lead hijacker, Mohammed Atta, was a student of urban planning in Hamburg.

In the Arab world, the parental and social pressures on young people to pursue medical and engineering careers only compounds the misery of creative young minds, forced to study subjects under duress. Thousands of undergraduates seek greater meaning in life, an experience beyond the mundane necessities of medicine, and a purpose that occupies their free time. Islamist networks neatly slot into this void.

As a teacher at the University of Damascus in Syria, I listened to the frustrations of my students who yearned to study subjects that interested them: literature, philosophy, theology, history, or art. But becoming a doctor was the only way to please their parents, attain high social status and in many cases escape the Arab world and live in the West. Sadly, often that “escape” radicalizes young Arabs.

When in Britain, for example, they become misfits among English cultural exclusivity and develop their own socio-religious networks. Suddenly there appears a need to display their being excessively Muslim: beards grow longer, trousers shorter, music condemned, confrontational politics advocated and the company of women shirked. The terror suspects arrested in Britain all manifested these traits. This turning to Wahhabi Islam, an austere form of Saudi religiosity, combined with political Islamism, has proven to be a lethal cocktail. What we call ‘Al Qaeda’ is only one manifestation of that mindset.

In the past, Muslims did not pronounce on religious matters without the endorsement of trained theologians, the ulama. The ulama were the bastion of religious knowledge that operated in an informal yet consensual method of intellectual plurality, interpretational elasticity, and maintained a centuries-old chain of transmission of sacred knowledge, known as the ijaza. Before modern-day terrorists turned to destroying buildings and killing innocents, they violently rejected this millennium-old Muslim tradition of learning. ...

Just as their bombing techniques are amateur and desperate, often destined to failure, so is their reading of scripture and warped justification for suicide bombings and killing humans. They approach the Qu’ran as though it were an engineering manual, with instructions for right and wrong conduct. Literalism and ignorance dominates their readings. This flaw is deepened by the haughty mindset of the engineer or medical doctor that academic achievement, a place at a university, now qualifies him to approach ancient scripture without the guidance of the ulama. To the Islamist engineer, centuries of context, nuance, history, grammar, lexicon, scholarship, and tradition are all lost and redundant. The do-it-yourself (DIY) attitude to religious texts, fostered by doctors and engineers of secular colleges, produces desperate, angry suicide bombers devoid of spiritual guidance.

The P-51 Mustang, the best fighter of WWII, has recently become a collector’s item and status symbol for the very rich. One owner calls flying it “somewhat of a religious experience.”

3:11 video

Senator Joseph Lieberman agrees with Never Yet Melted on the proposition that there is no possibility that US forces can be defeated by our adversaries on the ground in Iraq, and that if the war is lost, it will be lost in the domestic war for public opinion.

He said so on Bill Bennet’s radio program. And one of the Talking Points Memo crowd captured Senator Lieberman’s radio comment and packaged it as a YouTube 0:48 video for the left blogosphere to spit and hiss over today.

mcjoan at Daily Kos typically treats Lieberman’s observation as a gratuitous attack on Harry Reid, and (naturally) proceeds to play the left’s sad old tune about the sufferings of the American soldiers they are busily stabbing in the back.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told the Chicago Tribune that he “has a gut feeling” that al Qaeda is planning to attempt a major US attack this summer.

I believe we are entering a period this summer of increased risk,” Chertoff told the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board in an unusually blunt and frank assessment of America’s terror threat level.

“Summertime seems to be appealing to them,” he said of al-Qaeda. “We do worry that they are rebuilding their activities.”

Still, Chertoff said there are not enough indications of an imminent plot to raise the current threat levels nationwide. And he indicated that his remarks were based on “a gut feeling” formed by past seasonal patterns of terrorist attacks, recent al-Qaeda statements, and intelligence he did not disclose.

There is an assessment “not of a specific threat, but of increased vulnerability,” he added.

There have been reports already that suggest intelligence warnings at a similar level to the summer before Sept. 11, 2001 and that al-Qaeda may be mobilizing.

In recent days, ABC news reported that a secret law enforcement report prepared for homeland security warns that al-Qaeda is preparing a “spectacular” summer attack. On Tuesday, ABC News also reported that “new intelligence suggests a small al-Qaeda cell is on its way to the United States, or may already be here.”

Chertoff sternly echoed those sentiments at the Tribune.

“We’ve seen a lot more public statements from Al Qaeda,” he said. “There are a lot of reasons to speculate about that but one reason that occurs to me is that they’re feeling more comfortable and raising expectations.

“We could easily be attacked,” Chertoff added. “The intent to attack us remains as strong as it was on Sept. 10, 2001.”

And similar hints were made by unnamed officials to ABC News:

Senior U.S. intelligence officials tell ABC News new intelligence suggests a small al Qaeda cell is on its way to the United States, or may already be here.

The White House has convened an urgent multi-agency meeting for Thursday afternoon to deal with the new threat.

Top intelligence and law enforcement officials have been told to assemble in the Situation Room to report on:
—what steps can be taken to minimize or counter the threat,
—and what steps are being taken to harden security for government buildings and personnel.

“It suggests they have information that the cell or cells coming this direction want to attack a government facility,” Brad Garrett, a former FBI agent and ABC News consultant, said.

But John Amato, blogging on the left, knows better, and is demanding that Chertoff be fired for issuing warnings inconvenient to the left’s political agenda.

What gives Chertoff the right to tell the country that he has a “gut” feeling that we’re going to be hit with a terrorist attack this summer? ...

This is a calculated move to ratchet up the terror in this country to help Republican candidates—PERIOD. They are far behind in raising money and in all the polls. He should be fired, but of course since he’s being instructed to say these things (sounds like a Cheney/Rove play) he won’t be. What a tool…

His comments are priceless, too:

Jr says:

Chertoff will say anything to scare the mouth-breathers into giving their last few freedoms away

Alexander M. Haig Jr. pulls no punches in today’s Wall Street Journal.

Donald Rumsfeld’s departure and the decision to pursue counterinsurgency in Iraq required fresh commanders. But the administration overlooked a new source of military talent in, of all places, the U.S. Senate. The Senate Majority Leader, for example, asserts that the war is lost and that Gen. Petraeus is detached from reality in Baghdad. He and other equally qualified lay military experts are busily setting dates certain for troop withdrawal, oblivious of the consequences. Some have questioned the constitutionality of such Congressional resolutions. I question their wisdom. We need a debate on how to win, not how to lose. That would be a good topic for the presidential candidates. It’s certainly not what they’re talking about now.

John Quincy Adams warned us against going abroad “in search of monsters to destroy,” and some argue that the war on terror is just such a case. I disagree. On 9/11, the monster found us asleep at home and will continue to find us inadequately prepared unless we muster more strength and more wisdom. Unless we break with illusionary democracy mongering, inept handling of our military resources and self-defeating domestic political debates, we are in danger of becoming our own worst enemy.

And when domestic defeatism forces US withdrawal, and the religious fanatics spill oceans of innocent blood, the leftwing punditocracy will explain it is all the fault of George W. Bush for disturbing the peaceful idyll of Baathist dictatorship.

The Sun catches the New York Time editorial page engaging in characteristic hypocrisy.

The New York Times waited just hours after President Bush commuted the sentence of Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., before issuing an editorial condemning the president’s decision. It puts the paper in the position of favoring a judge’s decision to impose a 30-month prison sentence on a person whose main crime, if there was one, stems from his effort to protect his ability to serve as a source for a New York Times reporter. Does the New York Times think its readers have forgotten the tenacious legal and public relations battle the paper fought to prevent the special prosecutor in the case, Patrick Fitzgerald, from wringing from its reporter Libby’s name? Or the stream of top executives from the paper who visited the reporter in jail while she was refusing to give up her source? ...

The Times editorial made much of the supposed hypocrisy of the tough-on-crime right in supporting the decision to commute the sentence. It ran out its editorial under the headline “soft on crime,” though it has been soft on crime for years, save for when Republicans are in the dock. Its support for throwing a public official in jail for 30 months for the crime of trying to deflect attention from his having talked to a Times reporter, after going to the mat on behalf of the Times reporter’s right to keep the source’s name a secret — well, it’s a Times classic, one to make New Yorkers recognize that the hypocrisy in this case isn’t on the right wing.

They weren’t recorded, registered, taxed, or regulated. Naturally, urban-dwelling environmentalists hated the river shacks of rural South Carolina, and they recently succeeded in persuading the Palmetto State’s greasy pols to impose a permit system incorporating a sunset law completely eliminating these private refuges of individual freedom from South Carolina’s waters in five years. The state’s governor expressed regret at the death of a rural tradition, but he wouldn’t stick his neck out by vetoing the new law.

These days, Huck Finn would not be permitted to raft down the river to get away from Aunt Polly and her civilized regime of rules. Old ladies of both sexes have long since taken care to extend the jurisdiction of the Leviathan state right down every river’s main channel, and up every tributary and every backwater, lest some free American escape from civilization and its discontents, or evade its taxes and its rules.

New York Times:

For who knows how long, people have plopped these river shacks into watery coves and curves along the South Carolina coast. They permanently anchor their shacks miles from the nearest landing and use them to fish, hunt or just get off the grid for a while. Some contraptions are so modest that to call them shacks is too kind, while others are so well appointed that they all but cry out for granite countertops and potpourri.

It all sounds so innocent, so idyllic — so American, in a Huck Finn kind of way. That is, until you consider that the river shack owners are essentially laying claim to public property without paying license fees, taxes or, in some cases, even respect. A few people use the river as their personal toilet; others abandon their shacks, leaving the structures to rot amid the natural splendor.

But environmentalists who see these shacks as an affront to the concept of resource management recently succeeded in lobbying for their extinction. This spring the state passed a law requiring owners to seek permits for the structures — recent surveys counted at least 170 on several rivers and Lake Marion — with the stipulation that in five years all shacks must be removed from the water. ...

The issue even posed a dilemma for Gov. Mark Sanford, who ultimately decided to allow the river shack bill to pass into law without his signature. While he supports land preservation, he explained in a letter to legislators, he wonders about increasing gentrification, and “the idea that someone could tie a bunch of 55-gallon drums together and stake out a house on the waterway is representative of what I would consider the magic of ‘old time South Carolina.’ ”

But Patrick Moore, a lawyer working for the Coastal Conservation League, which led the legislative fight against river shacks, sees no dilemma. “The idea that these shacks are some sort of entitlement of our natural heritage is, frankly, an insult to that very heritage,” he says.

slideshow

A statue of the Mapinguari in Rio Branco, Brazil.

Sunday New York Times:

Perhaps it is nothing more than a legend, as skeptics say. Or maybe it is real, as those who claim to have seen it avow. But the mere mention of the mapinguary, the giant slothlike monster of the Amazon, is enough to send shivers down the spines of almost all who dwell in the world’s largest rain forest.

The folklore here is full of tales of encounters with the creature, and nearly every Indian tribe in the Amazon, including those that have had no contact with one another, have a word for the mapinguary (pronounced ma-ping-wahr-EE). The name is usually translated as “the roaring animal” or “the fetid beast.”

So widespread and so consistent are such accounts that in recent years a few scientists have organized expeditions to try to find the creature. They have not succeeded, but at least one says he can explain the beast and its origins.

“It is quite clear to me that the legend of the mapinguary is based on human contact with the last of the ground sloths,” thousands of years ago, said David Oren, a former director of research at the Goeldi Institute in Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon River. “We know that extinct species can survive as legends for hundreds of years. But whether such an animal still exists or not is another question, one we can’t answer yet.”

Dr. Oren said he had talked to “a couple of hundred people” who had said they had seen the mapinguary in the most remote parts of the Amazon and a handful who had said they had had direct contact.

In some areas, the creature is said to have two eyes, while in other accounts it has only one, like the Cyclops of Greek mythology. Some tell of a gaping, stinking mouth in the monster’s belly through which it consumes humans unfortunate enough to cross its path.

But all accounts agree that the creature is tall, seven feet or more when it stands on two legs, that it emits a strong, extremely disagreeable odor, and that it has thick, matted fur, which covers a carapace that makes it all but impervious to bullets and arrows.

“The only way you can kill a mapinguary is by shooting at its head,” said Domingos Parintintin, a tribal leader in Amazonas State. “But that is hard to do because it has the power to make you dizzy and turn day into night. So the best thing to do if you see one is climb a tree and hide.”

David Oren and his sloth theory also made Discover magazine in 1999.

Israel News:

Iraqi general, Ali Reza Asgari, who disappeared in Istanbul last February, has defected and is being held by the United States, Yedioth Ahronot published Sunday.

Asgari was considered by the US one of the top intelligence officials in Iran.

His defection was made possible thanks to an intricate CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) operation, climaxing in him joining Western intelligence officers in Istanbul, who than had him and his family transferred to the US.

Asgari, who according to reports is being held in a top-secret military installation, has been able to shed a new light on much of the Iranian regime’s most inner workings, especially regarding the Iranian nuclear development project.

Up until now, Iran – according to known intelligence – has been building two nuclear plants, in Arak and Bushehr, and has been using centrifuges to enrich uranium.

Iran, Asgari told his interrogator’s is working in another, stealth path, toward achieving its nuclear goal.

This third method involves attempts to enrich uranium by using laser beams along with certain chemicals designed to enhance the process. These trials are held in a special weapons facility in Natanz.

Iran, said Asgari, is making special efforts to hide this path from the West, keeping it as a fallback in case international sanctions or a military strike should shut down or destroy the existing plants. ...

The fact the Iranians are trying to find new ways to enrich uranium is not new onto itself, but the progress made, at least according to the information given by Asgari, is much greater than was suspected.

WorldNetDaily:

Across town from the site of the recent attempted car-bomb attacks, several thousand Muslims gathered in front of the London Central Mosque to applaud fiery preachers prophesying the overthrow of the British government – a future vision that encompasses an Islamic takeover of the White House and the rule of the Quran over America.

“One day my dear Muslims,” shouted Anjem Choudary, “Islam will govern Britain!”

Choudary was a co-founder of Al Muhajiroun, the now-banned group tied to suspects in the July 7, 2005, London transport bombings and a cheerleader of the 9/11 attacks.

“Democracy, hypocrisy,” Choudary chanted as the crowd echoed him. “Tony Blair, terrorist! Tony Blair, murderer! Queen Elizabeth, go to hell!” ...

Abu Saif is believed to be a member of the group Hizb ut-Tahrir, the Party of Liberation, which states its aim is to unify Muslims and establish Islamic rule over the world. The group’s Cambridge cell reportedly had tried to recruit the Iraqi doctor now suspected of mounting the attack on Glasgow’s airport June 30. The failed car-bomb assault followed two similar attempts in London the previous day.

Abu Saif spoke with disdain of Blair’s appointment as a special envoy to the Middle East, issuing an apparent threat.

“Inshallah,” meaning “Allah willing,” he told the crowd, Blair will “go to the Middle East as an envoy, and he’ll come back in a box. Inshallah. What box that is, we leave that up to you.”...

Humphries’ interview with Abu Saif underscored the radically different vision many of Britain’s citizens have for the country’s future.

The Muslim leader said he does not believe in democracy and insists there is no such thing as freedom of religion, “because freedom is an absolute term.”

“Are we to say that Muslims can fully practice religion in America,” he asked in an attempt to explain. “Say, for instance, I was a Muslim in America. Could I call for the destruction of the American government and establishment of an Islamic state in America? No. So where is the freedom of religion? There is none.”

Humphries asked: “Do you call for that?”

“Of course,” he replied, “we want Islam to be a source of governance for all of mankind. And we also believe that one day America will be ruled by Islam.”

Abu Saif explained Islam, like Christianity, has a prophetic tradition.

“One of the prophecies of the message of Muhammad was the hour will never come, i.e., the last day – which you also believe in – will never come until a group of the Muslims … will rise and conquer the white house.”

The first supersonic flight re-done using radio controlled planes. The B-29 is powered by four 80cc engines, has a wingspan of 21 feet and weighs only 98 lbs. It does loops, rolls, spins and flies inverted over the runway, drops an X-1 rocket plane from its wing.

7:23 video
—————————————-

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

John Smeaton recalls the fight at Glasgow Airport for the Press

Dr. Bilal Abdulla, a physician of Iraqi origin employed by a Glasgow-area Hospital, drove his flaming Jeep Cherokee, loaded with propane cylinders, into the main terminal of Glasgow Airport in a failed suicide bombimg attempt at mid-afternoon on Saturday June 30th.
—Bloomberg:—

(Abdulla) jumped from the Jeep after the crash, Stephen Clarkson, a witness, told the BBC.

“His whole body was on fire,’’ Clarkson said. ``Immediately after the airport official put him out with the extinguisher, he got up off the ground. He didn’t seem like he was distressed.’’

Police attempted to restrain the man, ``but the guy was quite strong and started fighting with the police,’’ Clarkson told the BBC.

At that point, John Smeaton, an airport baggage-handler, chose to intervene. In a later interview with reporters, Smeaton recalled thinking to himself indignantly:

You’re nae hitting the Polis mate, there’s nae chance.”

So Smeaton charged in and proceeded to deliver a flying kick to the struggling physician. Other bystanders also pitched in, including one Michael Kerr whose leg was broken when he was knocked flying by the terrorist. Soon, however, a number of irate locals has “put the boot in” and, as Smeaton recalled,”some guy banjoed him,” which terminated the affray successfully, placing the would-be terrorist on the ground in secure police possession.

In that later interview, Smeaton issued a warning to terrorists:

Glasgow doesnae accept this, if you come tae Glasgow, we’ll set about you.”

0:34 video

The 31-year-old baggage-handler has become a hero in Britain, as the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday.

He has a Wikipedia entry, featuring collected quotations.

A tribute web-site has been created, where visitors can buy Mr. Smeaton a beer. (Over 1400 pints are already on order.)

Posters are being sold featuring a disgruntled Osama bin Ladin saying “You Told Me John Smeaton Was Off on Saturday.” And they’re selling t shirts on Ebay with the motto “What Would John Smeaton Do?”

And some wag has composed a commemorative poem in the style of Burns, which can be found on various web-sites.

Twas doon by the inch o’ Abbots
Oor Johnny walked one day
When he saw a sicht that troubled him
Far more that he could say
A fanatic muslim b*****d
Wiz doin what he’d planned
And intae Glesca’s departure hall
A Cherokee he’d rammed.

A big Glaswegian polis
Came forward tae assist
He thocht “a wumman driver”
Or at least someone half-pi**ed
But to his shock nae drunken Jock
Emerged to grasp his hand
But a flamin Arab loony
Frae Al Qaeda’s band

The mad Islamist nut-case
Had set hissel’ on fire
And swung oot at the polis
GBH his clear desire
Now that’s no richt wur Johnny cried
And sallied tae the fray
A left hook and a heid butt
Required tae save the day.

Now listen up Bin Laden
Yir sort’s nae wanted here
For imported English radicals
Us Scoatsman huv nae fear
Oor hame grown Glesca Asians
Will have nae bluidy truck
So tak yer worldwide jihad
An get yersel tae f***

Ice core investigations by Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Copenhagen, demonstrate that Greenland was much warmer during the last Interglacial Period than at any time more recently.

This kind of information should not be altogether surprising, but it does demonstrate incontrovertably the fact that the Earth’s climate has been significantly warmer in the past than it is today as the result of natural processes completely unconnected to any possible human agency.

AP story:

Ice-covered Greenland really was green a half-million or so years ago, covered with forests in a climate much like that of Sweden and eastern Canada today.

An international team of researchers recovered ancient DNA from the bottom of an ice core that indicates the presence of pine, yew and alder trees as well as insects.

The researchers, led by Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, say the findings are the first direct proof that there was forest in southern Greenland.

Included were genetic traces of butterflies, moths, flies and beetles, they report in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

The material was recovered from cores drilled through ice 1.2 miles thick at a site called Dye 3 in south central Greenland.

Hat tip to Scott Drum.

They’re very good at partisanship, but they’re doing so much of it these days that they are in danger of the public seeing through the whole thing.

AP:

The White House on Thursday pushed back against congressional investigations of the Bush administration and said lawmakers should spend more time passing bills to solve domestic problems.

In a constitutional showdown with Congress, the administration claimed executive privilege and rejected demands for White House documents about the firings of eight U.S. attorneys.

The House and Senate Judiciary committees have set a deadline of 10 a.m. next Monday for the White House to explain its basis for the claim.

The administration has not said when or if it will respond. Spokesman Scott Stanzel said Thursday the White House has received a many requests for information since Democrats took control of Congress in January and has turned over 200,000 pages of documents.

“They’ve launched over 300 investigations, had over 350 requests for documents and interviews and they have had over 600 oversight hearings in just about 100 days,” Stanzel said.

Democrats were dubious of the figures but did not offer their own.

Unnamed officials made new charges against Iran to the Financial Times.

Evidence that Iranian territory is being used as a base by al-Qaeda to help in terrorist operations in Iraq and elsewhere is growing, say western officials.

It is not clear how much the al-Qaeda operation, described by one official as a money and communications hub, is being tolerated or encouraged by the Iranian government, they said.

The group’s operatives, who link the al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan with their disciples in Iraq, the Levant and North Africa, move with relative freedom in the country, they said.

The officials said the creation of some kind of al-Qaeda hub in Iran appears to be separate from the group of seven senior al-Qaeda figures, including Saad bin Laden, son of the group’s figurehead, that Iran is said to have detained since 2002.

Your monthly house payments exceed your monthly income.

You make over $300,000 and still can’t afford a house.

You take a bus and are shocked when two people carry on a conversation in English.

Your coworker has 8 body piercings and none are visible.

You speak Spanish, but you’re not Mexican.

Your child’s 3rd-grade teacher has purple hair, a nose ring, and is named Flower.

You don’t know anyone’s phone number unless you check your cell phone.

You’ve been to a baby shower that has two mothers and a sperm donor.

You have a very strong opinion about where your coffee beans are grown, and you can taste the difference between Sumatran and Ethiopian.

You begin to “lie” to your friends about how close you are when you know damn well that it’ll take you at least an hour to get there (see below).

Getting anywhere from point A to point B, no matter what the distance, takes about “twenty minutes.”

You drive to your neighborhood block party.

A really great parking space can totally move you to tears.

Gas is $1.00 per gallon more than anywhere else in the US

Unlike back home, the guy at 8:30 am at Starbucks wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses who looks like George Clooney really IS George Clooney.

You can’t remember … is pot illegal?

You pass an elementary school playground and the children are all busy with their cell phones or pagers.

It’s barely sprinkling rain outside, so you leave for work at least an hour early to avoid all the weather-related accidents.

Both you AND your dog have therapists, psychics, personal trainers and cosmetic surgeons.

You drive next to a Rolls Royce and don’t notice.

In the “winter,” you can go to the beach, ski at Big Bear, mow your lawn in your shorts and maybe get a sunburn all on the same day.

You eat a different ethnic food for every meal.

If your destination is more than 5 minutes away on foot, you’re definitely driving.

Calling your neighbors requires knowing their area code.

You know what “In-’N-Out” is and feel bad for the other states that don’t have any.

You don’t stop at a STOP sign, you do a California roll.

You’ve partied in Tijuana at least 3 times and you can’t remember at least 1 of them.

You go to a tanning salon before you go to the beach.

Your have a permanent impression on the side of your head from your cell phone.

You know that Venice is a beach.

The waitress asks if you want “carbs” in your meal.

You know who the tinsel underwear dude in Venice Beach is.

You classify new people you meet by their Area Code. An “818” would never date a “562” and so on…

You call 911 and they put you on hold.

You have a gym membership because it’s mandatory.

The gym is packed at 3pm … on a workday.

You think you are better than the people who live “Over the Hill.” It doesn’t matter which side of the hill your home is, you are just better than they are.

You know that if you drive two miles in any direction you will find a McDonald’s or a Starbucks.

You know what “sigalert,” “PCB,” and “five” mean.

You can’t remember . . . is pot illegal?

It’s barely sprinkling rain and there’s a report on every news station: “STORM WATCH.”

The Terminator is your governor.

You actually get these jokes and pass them on to other friends from California.

PS —If you drive here illegally, they’ll take away your driver’s license. If you’re an illegal alien, they want to give you one!
————————————
Hat tip to Robert Breedlove and Michael Pierson.

Terry Teachout pays tribute to Artur Schnabel (April 17, 1882 – August 15, 1951) in Commentary.

“You will never be a pianist,” Theodor Leschetizky (sic), Schnabel’s teacher, told him. “You are a musician.” Schnabel modestly claimed not to have known what that meant, but of course he knew perfectly well, repeating the bon mot on numerous occasions. (Nobody ever accused him of insufficient self-regard.) From childhood on, his musical instincts had led him away from the splashy virtuosity of late-19th-century composers. He played Chopin and Liszt early in his career—very well, too, by most accounts—but by the 20’s he had stopped programming their works. Instead, he played Mozart’s piano music at a time when it was generally thought to be suitable only for young children, and Schubert’s sonatas at a time when they were unknown to most pianists. As he later explained:

I am attracted only to music which I consider to be better than it can be performed. . . . Chopin’s studies are lovely pieces, perfect pieces, but I simply can’t spend time on them; I believe I know these pieces; but playing a Mozart sonata, I am not so sure that I do know it, inside and out. Therefore I can spend endless time on it.

...

The quality most immediately striking about Schnabel’s style—and the one recognized at once by his most perceptive contemporaries —is its rhythmic vitality. Leon Fleisher, his best-known pupil, described it as follows:

There would be this schwung, an irresistible swing to what he did, as though he were twirling you around in a dance. . . . The emphasis was that beats were never downward events, they were not like fence posts or the hammering of coffin nails—beats were upward springs that would spring you on to the next beat.

The impulsive forward momentum of Schnabel’s playing—it was so pronounced that he had a lifelong tendency to rush—helped ameliorate its other key feature. Like most Austro-German musicians of his generation, Schnabel used changes in tempo to delineate the structural features of the pieces he played, and his rhythmic flexibility was so pronounced that some musicians, Toscanini among them, felt that he slipped on occasion into outright exaggeration.

This latter quality is what Virgil Thomson had particularly in mind when he referred to the “late-19th-century romanticism” in Schnabel’s style.

Schnabel was the first to record Beethoven’s complete piano sonatas, a historic watershed for sound recordings. Later performances by other musicians are sometimes more perfectly polished, but Schnabel’s interpretations remain unsurpassed in warmth and musicality.

No performances of the Schubert piano sonatas come even close to Schnabel’s.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

Oleg Atbashian, at PJM, explains the alternative vision of history, the progressive version, which the left uses as the implicit basis for its view of the United States.

Prior to July 4, 1776, not a single person in the world starved, got sick, worked hard for a living, or experienced any pain nor anxiety. No one had ever been oppressed or unfairly exploited because the oppressive and unfair American system had not yet been created.

“Habeas Corpus was the law of the land, along with Exit Strategy and Geneva Conventions.”Since the beginning of time employment had been equally guaranteed to anyone who cared to work, along with an equal pay of exactly $1,000 a week regardless of outcome, occupation, or geographical area. All work was equally pleasant and enjoyable. Those who chose not to work also received $1,000 a week in unemployment compensation and union benefits. Other guaranteed rights of the people included the rights to housing and free universal health care, as well as the right to 100% literacy through federally funded public education.

People never heard of war, crime, corruption, slavery, torture, murder, cannibalism, and man-made hurricanes. Peace and harmony reigned supreme because the concepts of greed, selfishness, and private property had not yet been invented by the American corporate interests and maliciously spread around the world as part of the American cultural hegemony.

Each person in that ideal world practiced his or her own peaceful spirituality, worshipping Earth, Nature, and the Sacred Feminine, while honoring the spiritual traditions of everyone else. Benevolent chieftains dispensed benefits to each of their subjects according to their needs, taking care that ethnic and sexual minorities were equally and proportionally represented in all spheres of public life. Habeas Corpus was the law of the land, along with Exit Strategy and Geneva Conventions.

Family planning, effective birth control, and early sex education ensured that every family had exactly 2.2 children per household, which prevented overpopulation and famine. Commerce, travel, and international trade were uncommon; everyone lived and died within not more than a five-mile distance from their birthplace. People didn’t feel the need to migrate, set up colonies, take over other countries, create empires, settle in uninhabited areas, or fight one another over a creek in the desert.

All farming was organic and for subsistence purposes only. The environment was clean due to reliance on alternative fuels and invigorating manual labor. As a result, everybody lived in comfortable, carbon-neutral houses, eating plenty of good food on a regular basis, and driving fuel-efficient automobiles when they weren’t riding their 18-speed urban cruiser bicycles.

This was an amazing achievement of indigenous cultures considering that there had been no division of labor and most people lived on farms. In the free time that remained after toiling the soil and tending to the animals, the indigenous farmers discerned the laws of nature, developed vaccines for deadly illnesses, stretched out the average lifespan prodigiously, and fed the starving in far away places.

This Golden Age lasted from about 20,000 BC up until the American Revolution. After 1776 everything just went downhill.

Michael Goodwin, in the Daily News, takes the occasion of Hillary Clinton’s denunciation of George W. Bush commutation of the Libby prison sentence to do some remembering.

When President Bush commuted Libby’s prison sentence Monday, Sen. Clinton was quick to denounce him. Under Bush, she said, “cronyism and ideology trump competence and justice.” ...

But when I stumbled on a list of Bill Clinton’s pardons posted on the Drudge Report, I was instantly back on Jan. 20, 2001. That’s when Clinton, in his final hours as President, opened the floodgates, issuing 140 pardons and 36 commutations.

The list of people Clinton let off the hook was a rogue’s gallery of drug dealers, petty criminals and the politically well-connected. One was Bill Clinton’s brother Roger, one was a college friend and another was a former business partner. Their lawyers’ connections were key in others, including the lawyer for a man who laundered more than $100 million for the Cali cartel.

Some cases reeked of blatant corruption. Hillary’s brother, Hugh Rodham, collected $400,000 from two big-time criminals who got pardons. When the news of the payments broke, the Clintons claimed surprise and demanded Rodham give the money back.

But Bill Clinton never gave Denise Rich her money back. The former wife of disgraced financier Marc Rich gave $450,000 to Clinton’s presidential library and raised and contributed more than $1 million to campaigns of the Clintons and other Democrats. Her husband, who had fled the country rather than fight charges of massive tax fraud and trading with Iran during the 1979 hostage crisis, suddenly received a pardon. “Utterly false,” Bill Clinton later said about charges he sold the pardon. “There was absolutely no quid pro quo.”

A friend of mine suggested that the best rejoinder to Hillary would be for the White House to issue a pardon to Hillary and Bill for any of the crimes during his governorship in Arkansas or during the Clinton presidency for which prosecutable evidence may yet one day emerge.

IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776: The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. — And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

— John Hancock

New Hampshire:
Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton

Massachusetts:
John Hancock, Samuel Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry

Rhode Island:
Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery

Connecticut:
Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott

New York:
William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris

New Jersey:
Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark

Pennsylvania:
Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross

Delaware:
Caesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean

Maryland:
Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton

Virginia:
George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton

North Carolina:
William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn

South Carolina:
Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton

Georgia:
Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton

Classmate Scott Drum today (on the class email list today) wished our class’s lefties:

A Happy Dependence Day!

I think I should pass along those wishes to the American left as a whole.

The Yoshida Kyōdai (aka the Yoshido Brothers) perform Kodo on the shamisen, used by Nintendo as the theme music for its Wii game console.

Their style of music is called Tsugaru-jamisen, a shamisen style originating in Aomori prefecture in the northern end of the island of Honshū.　

3:46 video

The Guardian indicates that the recent bomb attacks in Britain were thwarted by means of surveillance of telephone and email traffic.

The plot to mount car bomb attacks in Britain was hatched outside the UK, with the doctors allegedly involved linked to a ringleader or mastermind abroad, counter-terrorism officials believe. One theory is that the alleged plot was orchestrated by one or two jihadists who infiltrated the NHS and indoctrinated others.

It emerged last night that investigators suspect that the two men caught at Glasgow airport trying to ram a Jeep into the terminal building were also behind the failed attempt to detonate two car bombs in central London last Friday.

Sources also suggested that all known members of the cell had been accounted for. “There is not a huge manhunt,” one well-placed official said. Though the terrorist threat level remains at “critical” there were indications that it would soon be downgraded to “severe”, meaning an attack is highly likely but not imminent.

All eight people arrested have links with the NHS - seven are doctors or medical students and one worked as a laboratory technician. All entered the UK legally.

Intelligence sources last night declined to say where the “guiding hand” or mastermind behind the plot was based. It is likely, given the dates on which some of the suspects entered Britain, that the plot was hatched a year ago, or even earlier.

Though MI5 insists none of the suspects arrested in connection with the plot were under surveillance, the mobile phones detectives recovered from the would-be car bombs contained details that matched material on the security service database. Counter-terrorism officials say data from the phones and email traffic was checked on the database used by MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre. Connections were found linking that information and communications abroad, which enabled the police and security services to speed up their investigations in Britain.

“This linkage allowed the police to move quickly,” said a source. The foreign intercepts included talk of jihad, an official added. Counter-terrorism officials say the links between members of the British-based cell were via the foreign intercepts. It is believed, for example, that Mohamed Haneef, the doctor arrested at Brisbane airport, had long conversations with one of the suspects arrested in Britain.

Rachel Neuwirth advises, at American Thinker, Don’t Be So Sure There Were No WMD in Iraq.

Before America went to war to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime it was widely believed that he possessed weapons of mass destruction. Today it is widely believed that there were no WMD in Iraq before the war. People of both political parties, the major media, and the intellectual community all appear in strong agreement on that point. Some even charge that the Bush Administration deliberately, and knowingly, misled the nation with false information as a pretext to justify going to war.

The Bush Administration is quietly acknowledging that they made a mistake, albeit not intentional. That admission seems to be the final confirmation that there were no WMD in Iraq. In police work when the accused confesses to making a mistake, it is then assumed that the accusation is true and people consider it to be ‘case closed’.

This widespread belief of no WMD in Iraq is seriously damaging our ability to deal with a growing nuclear threat from Iran. There are those who opposed our toppling mass murderer Saddam Hussein both in 1991 and again in 2003, even after he defied multiple U.N. resolutions and was generally believed to have WMD. Now the ‘peace at any price’ crowd is exploiting the widespread belief of ‘no WMD’ to undermine our war in Iraq. If we fail in Iraq it greatly weakens our ability to deal with Iran, which will become greatly emboldened and infinitely more dangerous as it eventually goes nuclear.

Orrin Kerr, at the Volokh Conspiracy, is puzzled by conservatives crying foul over the Plamegame prosecution.

..the claim, as I understand it, is that the Libby prosecution was the work of political enemies who were just trying to hurt the Bush Administration.

I find this claim bizarre. I’m open to arguments that parts of the case against Libby were unfair. But for the case to have been purely political, doesn’t that require the involvement of someone who was not a Bush political appointee? Who are the political opponents who brought the case? Is the idea that Fitzgerald is secretly a Democratic party operative? That Judge Walton is a double agent? Or is the idea that Fitzgerald and Walton were hypnotized by “the Mainstream Media” like Raymond Shaw in the Manchurian Candidate? Seriously, I don’t get it.

It’s simple enough. George W. Bush is an idiot.

Bush appointed Martha Stewart-prosecutor James Comey (no Republican, no conservative) Deputy Attorney General. Comey proved a thorn in the administration’s side on War on Terror policies, favoring kinder treatment for illegal combatants than he had for Martha, and making waves over the NSA’s Counter-Terrorism data-mining operation. Bush derisively referred to Comey’s liberalism with one of those nicknames he likes to confer, dubbing him “Cuomey.”

Bush then proceeded to mortally offend John Ashcroft by declining to keep him on as Attorney General in his second term. Ashcroft retaliated by recusing himself from appointing a prosecutor in L’Affaire Plame, placing thereby a loaded weapon in Mr. Comey’s eager hand.

Comey then gleefully appointed his pal Patrick Fitzgerald, a kindred spirit sharing every bit of Comey’s liberal politics and Inspector Javert-like lack of prosecutorial inhibitions, as special prosecutor.

If anyone has doubts that Fitzgerald is a thoroughgoing partisan, acting politically in service to the democrat party and the American left, one need only take note of the venues of release—Monday, July 2nd, 2007 at 5:32 pm, July 02, 2007 8:55 PM ET

We fully recognize that the Constitution provides that commutation decisions are a matter of presidential prerogative and we do not comment on the exercise of that prerogative.

We comment only on the statement in which the President termed the sentence imposed by the judge as “excessive.” The sentence in this case was imposed pursuant to the laws governing sentencings which occur every day throughout this country. In this case, an experienced federal judge considered extensive argument from the parties and then imposed a sentence consistent with the applicable laws. It is fundamental to the rule of law that all citizens stand before the bar of justice as equals. That principle guided the judge during both the trial and the sentencing.

Although the President’s decision eliminates Mr. Libby’s sentence of imprisonment, Mr. Libby remains convicted by a jury of serious felonies, and we will continue to seek to preserve those convictions through the appeals process.

And don’t forget that the unknown parties at the CIA who initiated a complaint with the Justice Department over the identification of the arranger of Ambassador Wilson’s junket to Niger starting the whole witch hunt also in theory work for President Bush.

It is precisely the combination of George W. Bush’s ill-advised appointments and complete failure to gain control of his own branch of government which made possible the creation of this contrived scandal in the first place.

Faced with the prospect of an innocent and decent man going to prison, George W. Bush did the right thing and commuted Lewis Libby’s sentence.

Evidently trying to conserve as much of that 27% public approval rating as he can, Bush allowed the fine and probation portions of the sentence to stand. Presumably he is counting on those of us who disapprove of L’Affaire Plame to step in with donations to spare the Libby family a quarter of a million dollar price tag for Mr. Libby’s public service. And, presumably also, come the morning of Hillary Clinton’s (or, I hope, Fred Thompson’s) Inauguration, while the Press is distracted, Bush will eliminate the conviction entirely with a pardon.

I would be happier if Bush had simply pardoned Libby, but I am willing to understand, and forgive, his caution. At least, Bush has proven that there is a fundamental residuum of humanity, decency, and loyalty in his character. He is not a complete shit.

Now, if he would only go over to the offensive and get us some revenge…

AP story.

I was in my barn today getting the bow saw to trim some dead branches, and found this lying around. The former owner did not seem to be present.

A classic American bête noire is the grasping rural village which makes a practice of enhancing its municipal revenues by officious enforcement of some exaggeratedly low speed limit on the portion of state highway passing through its jurisdiction.

As the Washington Times observes, the Virginia General Assembly has turned the whole Commonwealth into a speedtrap, aiming at vacuuming the wallets of its own residents.

Starting today, Virginia drivers are in for one of the region’s most egregious money grabs in a long time. Authorities are slated to begin imposing a jaw-dropping $1,050 “abuser fee” on drivers registered in-state who are caught speeding 20 or more mph over the limit. It was tucked into the state transportation bill and passed quietly by the General Assembly months ago, with very little notice.

Any Washington-area driver knows that in some stretches of the Beltway, it is quite common for motorists to cruise along at 70 -75 mph in 55 mph zones. In some cases, this is what it takes to keep up with traffic. Under Virginia state law, however, this is right on the cusp of a reckless driving charge. A absurd fee is now being imposed in the name of public safety and budgetary sense.

This is a colossal abuse of public trust well before it is either a safety boon or a budgetary salve. Certainly it will be a major financial hardship on low- and middle-income motorists. ...

But $1,050 for driving 20 mph over the speed limit is predatory, tax-and-spend government at its worst. For families in the middle or at the bottom of the economic ladder, this reaches 4 percent and 5 percent of annual take-home income. Government is supposed to serve the people, not fine and tax them toward the poor house for what amounts to ordinary behavior.

The story of how Virginia got here goes something like this: Downstate Republicans have repeatedly refused to compromise with Northern Virginia over transportation funding. This led Northern Virginia lawmakers to view fees as the only means of balancing revenue and spending. Not wanting to pass unpopular tax increases or cut rapidly growing but allegedly untouchable unrelated programs, lawmakers in Richmond quietly tucked this into a transportation bill. They now have the gall to complain that no one criticized the plan earlier. Meanwhile, some are calling this the “Lawyer Full Employment Act of 2007.”

And Radley Balko, at Reason Magazine, identifies who’s behind all this.

The self-described “chief architect” for this bill is Delegate David Albo. Albo boasts on his website that he’s worked for 20 months to bring this bill into law. What his website doesn’t mention is that when Albo isn’t legislating tough new laws aimed at Virginia’s motorists, he’s representing those same motorists in court.

That’s right. Albo’s a lawyer. And not just any lawyer. The firm that bears his name specializes in traffic law, particularly in representing people charged with DWI and reckless driving.

It’s time for a rebellion in Virginia.

Peter Baker, in the Washington Post, records the observations of some eyewitnessses that George W. Bush is taking his second term setbacks and low poll numbers with grace. The reporter’s glee at the depth of the president’s misfortunes is actually tempered by some grudging admiration.

Other presidents have been crushed by the pressure. Lyndon B. Johnson was tormented by Vietnam War protesters outside his window shouting, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” Nixon swam in self-pity during Watergate, talking to paintings and once asking Henry Kissinger to pray with him. Bill Clinton fumed against enemies and nursed deep grievances during his impeachment battle. ...

Kissinger, who advises Bush, said the president has never asked him to kneel down with him in the Oval Office. “I find him serene,” Kissinger said. “I know President Johnson was railing against his fate. That’s not the case with Bush. He feels he’s doing what he needs to do, and he seems to me at peace with himself.”

Bush has virtually given up on winning converts while in office and instead is counting on vindication after he is dead. “He almost has . . . a sense of fatalism,” said Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), who recently spent a day traveling with Bush. “All he can do is do his best, and 100 years from now people will decide if he was right or wrong. It doesn’t seem to be a false, macho pride or living in your own world. I find him to be amazingly calm.” ...

Horne, the British historian, found himself with Bush on another occasion after Kissinger gave the president “A Savage War of Peace,” Horne’s book on the French defeat in Algeria in the mid-20th century. Bush invited Horne to visit. They talked about the parallels and differences between Algeria and Iraq as Bush sought insight he could apply to his own situation.

Horne said he is not a Bush supporter but was nonetheless struck by the president’s tranquility. “He was very friendly, very relaxed,” Horne said. “My God, he looked well. He looked like he came off a cruise in the Caribbean. He looked like he hadn’t a care in the world. It was amazing.”

Bill Roggio discussed the reasons for believing that the January 20th Karbala attack was an Iranian operation a week after the event.

ِAn official US release of evidence against Iran was promised January 29, then put on hold two days later.

Now, six months later, the US military has finally decided to confirm Iran’s role.

AP:

Iran’s elite Quds force helped militants carry out a January attack in Karbala that killed five Americans, a U.S. general said Monday. U.S. military spokesman Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner also accused Tehran of using the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah as a “proxy” to arm Shiite militants in Iraq.

The claims were an escalation in U.S. accusations that Iran is fueling Iraq’s violence, which Tehran has denied, and were the first time the U.S. military has said Hezbollah has a direct role.

A senior Lebanese Hezbollah operative, Ali Mussa Dakdouk, was captured March 20 in southern Iraq, Bergner said. Dakdouk served for 24 years in Hezbollah and was “working in Iraq as a surrogate for the Iranian Quds Force,” Bergner said.

The general also said that Dakdouk was a liaison between the Iranians and a breakaway Shiite group led by Qais al-Kazaali, a former spokesman for cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Bergner said al-Kazaali’s group carried out the January attack against a provincial government building in Karbala and that the Iranians assisted in preparations. Al-Khazaali and his brother Ali al-Khazaali were captured with Dakdouk.

Dakdouk told U.S. interrogators that the Karbala attackers “could not have conducted this complex operation without the support and direction of the Quds force,” Bergner said.

Documents captured with al-Khazaali showed that the Quds Force had developed detailed information on the U.S. position at the government building, “regarding our soldiers’ activities, shift changes and defenses, and this information was shared with the attackers,” Bergner said.

The Karbala attack was one of the boldest and most sophisticated against U.S. forces in four years of fighting in Iraq, and U.S. officials at the time suggested Iran may have had a role in it.

In the assault, up to a dozen gunmen posed as an American security team, with U.S. military combat fatigues, allowing them to pass checkpoints into the government compound, where they launched the attack. One U.S. soldier was killed in the initial assault, and the militants abducted four others who were later found shot to death.

Brian Doherty, in the LA times, pays tribute on the occasion of Robert A. Heinlein’s upcoming 100th birthday.

The science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein was born in Missouri, and his fiction was mostly set in the future and on distant planets. But there’s no question that Heinlein — born 100 years ago this week — was one of Southern California’s great prophets.

He lived in Los Angeles in the 1930s and ‘40s, and first turned to writing because of looming mortgage payments after his failed campaign in 1938 to represent Hollywood in the Assembly. Though he would later become a great inspiration to libertarians, Heinlein was then an active member of novelist Upton Sinclair’s popular quasi-socialist “End Poverty in California” movement.

From the beginning of his career as a writer in 1939 (when he published his first story, “Life-Line,” in Astounding Science-Fiction magazine), Heinlein was one of the field’s masters. Before that, science fiction had been mostly either a heavy-handed and didactic genre or one concerned with unsophisticated fantastic adventure tales. Heinlein added sophistication and realism, creating a future world that seemed everyday and lived-in, not impossibly distant. He treated rockets and space travel as matter-of-fact details of human life — as Heinlein believed they would and must become.

From 1939 until his death in 1988, Heinlein was science fiction’s acknowledged leader, with 33 popular novels, most of them in print decades later
Heinlein’s novels were also powerful precursors of Southern California politics and culture, especially as they unfolded in the change-filled 1960s. ...

California, and specifically Southern California, was key to Barry Goldwater’s surprising 1964 GOP nomination victory. Goldwater’s rough-hewn combination of a crusty, antigovernment attitude and extreme bellicosity against communism — which he saw as an unacceptable threat to American individualism — resonated deeply in Southern California at the time.

But the Goldwater surge was preceded by a mini-movement Heinlein tried to create in 1958 with the “Patrick Henry League,” dedicated to the notion that the truest expression of U.S. liberty was preparing for a fight to the finish with international communism.

Heinlein laid some of these concepts out in his 1959 “Starship Troopers,” offering up the idea that American liberty and a relentless fight against the Soviets were inextricably linked — a science fiction version of Goldwater’s subsequent message. It presented a world of low taxes and few laws in which only veterans of public service could vote (not only military veterans, contrary to some Heinlein detractors who saw something fascist in the novel) and where brave young men gave the last full measure of devotion to defeat an insectoid alien menace that was a clear metaphor for communism. ...

Although science fiction’s visions and handling of character have become more complex and sophisticated in many ways since Heinlein’s day, his wide-ranging speculations about human futures created a still-valuable mix of ideas and entertainment. In his peculiar and unprecedented combination of rocket visions, a tough-minded individualism respectful of the military and iconoclastic free living, Heinlein is truly the bard of Southern California.

José Geraldo Reis Pfau is an advertising executive in Blumenau, Santa Catarina privince, Brazil, whose passion for motorcycles has led him to build a series of over 150 miniature cycles constructed from parts of broken watches and spectacles.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

If the United States withdraws from Iraq in defeat and dishonor, it will not be because American military forces became demoralized or failed to perform their mission. American forces will not have been defeated on the battlefield. Nor will American units have been surrounded, cut off from supply, or forced to retreat by superior military forces.

The defeat will not even have taken place in Iraq or the Middle East.

Our defeat will have occurred right here at home in the United States, and the adversary responsible will not be al Qaeda, Iraqi insurgents, or foreign jihadists fighting in Iraq.

When US defeat occurs, that defeat will be at the hands of the Mainstream Media.

One of its members, Tom Ricks, the Washington Post’s (ironical choice of) military correspondent, finds the same point being made in an unspecified recent issue of Armor magazine by Captain William Ault.

Ricks raises his pinky finger delicately in the air, sips his tea, and sneers at the very idea.

Captain Ault wrote:

The media assists insurgent forces by continually maintaining pressure on the supporting government and military establishment. . . . This battlefield is not new. It has gained popularity because it has continually worked against stronger forces. The eventual withdrawal of forces from Vietnam, Beirut, Somalia, and a host of other locations was from an active public opposition, not a decisive military defeat. Erosion of public support through a constant bombardment of media outlets that portray negativity induces a type of mass hysteria in the population that eventually leads to the vocal, and sometimes violent, opposition to the military forces being deployed.