Osama is a warmist. I guess that figures.

Bad news for literature. Patrician Louis Auchincloss dies at 92 (WaPo obit), and Zen recluse J.D. Salinger passed away at 91 (London Times obit).

Bad news for scholarship. King’s College London is planning to eliminate Britain’s only chair in paleography. No money in that, you see.

Why so few conservative or libertarian academics? Two researchers propose “path dependence” as the explanation.

Five stages of democrat grief over the health care reform bill.

And you a law professor!

Anne Althouse is at her best when she is cutting.
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Texian, commenting at Breitbart, remarks: The scary part is that four justices think that this does NOT violate the First Amendment. Hat tip to the Barrister.
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Bird Dog, at Maggie’s Farm, recommends going to Yale so you can use the Yale Club of New York City, conveniently located on Vanderbilt Avenue right across the street from Grand Central.

It’s easier than that. They even let people who went to Dartmouth and University of Virginia have memberships, and a fair number of clubs in other cities have reciprocal privileges.

It is the cheapest hotel you’d want to stay at in NYC. The second floor lounge is a peaceful refuge where you can read the paper, sip your drink, and watch traffic bustle busily around the PanAm Building out the window. The bar serves generous drinks. Harvard’s New York Club has a larger bar with good big game trophies, but it’s much farther away from the trains and it has a lot fewer rooms to stay in.

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In the latest, Jan/Feb 2010, issue of the Yale Alumni Mag, the same chap was eulogized by two classes.

1968:

Don Masters started with us in Woolsey Hall in September 1964, served with distinction as an officer in the 82nd Airborne in Vietnam, and completed his Yale degree in 1972. He practiced law in New York City and in Denver through his career, as well as serving in entrepreneurial and general counsel roles. He was particularly active in the recovery community in the Rocky Mountain region. He loved touring on his motorcycle, and died August 31 at a beautiful location near Salmon, Idaho, doing what he loved.

1972:

On a sad note, I received notification that Don Masters was killed some time ago in a motorcycle accident in a remote part of Idaho. His body was only recently found, and he was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, having served with distinction in Vietnam.

Sounds like someone I would have liked to have known.

Iowahawk pays a final tribute to a dynastic happy warrior.

“Lion of Leinenkugel” Norm Snitker, 62, Laid to Rest

La Crosse WI —Slowly filing past a green-and-gold casket festooned with cheese curds, lottery tickets, and bouquets of 6-pack rings, the city of La Crosse bid a tearful farewell this morning to Norman V. “Norm” Snitker, 62. Long heralded as the “Lion of Leinenkugel” for his relentless fight for free beer and shots at local taverns and supper clubs, Snitker succumbed to an exploding liver Tuesday evening during a late model modified heat at La Crosse Speedway’s $1 Jagermeister night.

“Norm left an amazing legacy, and an amazing bar tab,” said mourner Les Schreindl, 59. “La Crosse won’t see his likes again soon.”....

Like hundreds of other who came to pay their respects at First Presbyterian—some traveling from as far as Menomonie, Pewaukee, Ashwebenon, and Waunawacamapepee—Schreindl wiped a tear in remembrance of the fallen champion of universal alcohol rights. Many vowed to carry on his fight, but along with the heartfelt, staggering eulogies, there was a melancholy sense that the death of Norm Snitker marked the end of the Snitker welding supply dynasty that has for so long dominated public life in La Crosse County.

As tears and Jager shots flowed in the pews of First Presbyterian, there was a sense that Norman Snitker’s death brought to an end the long legacy of Snitker rule in La Crosse. Many La Crossians hold out hope that an heir apparent will emerge from the next generation of Snitkers, but the once white-hot inert gas flame of Snitker welding celebrity has seemingly flickered. LMS daughter Tiffani Snitker-Pflugelhoefer, the presumptive princess to the family barstool, cites career obligations at a Prairie du Chien Farm and Fleet, while other Snitker cousins cite obligations at local halfway houses and work-release programs.

“No matter how hard times were, me and my family have always had a Snitker to call on,” said grieving Clifford Albrechtson. “Now I’m worried where my next boilermaker is going to come from.”

Others vowed to carry on the fight, and said they would push the La Crosse city council to fund the planned $1.2 billion Norman V. Snitker memorial public Shnapps fountain.

At the packed memorial service, Pastor Ed Vos urged mourners to remember the full measure of their fallen friend.

“Whatever his endless shortcomings were as a human being, we cannot let a few DUIs, cheese entombments and arson episodes overshadow the many good things that Norm thought he did,” said Vos. “Let us all recognize that Norm stood up for what he thought was right. No matter whether it was really right or not, and no matter how blotto he was. I suppose we all have to respect a man who can maintain that kind of fierce moral clarity. And can hold his liquor like that.”

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Polish philosopher and intellectual historian Leszek Kolakowski passed away last Friday in Oxford where he had taught for many years.

Coming of age during the Nazi Occupation, Kolakowski became an autodidact who educated himself via the library of a local nobleman in his native Poland. He was a member of the Communist Party after WWII, obtained a degree at Warsaw, and taught logic and the history of Philosophy.

Though his writings were sometimes suppressed, and despite being denounced for revisionism, he was able to work and teach in Poland until the late 1960s, finally being expelled from the party in 1966 and from his university position in 1968.

He taught at several universities in the West, including Berkeley and Yale, but his permanent home became a senior researcher chair at All Souls College, Oxford.

In the West, Kolakowski became an astute and highly effective critic of Marxism from a Humanist perspective. His Main Currents of Marxism (1978) effectively summarized the history of the bacillus as well as describing the destructive progress of the consequent disease.

After the liberation of his native Poland, Kolakowski was awarded the Order of the White Eagle, and on Monday Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski announced that Kolakowski will be buried in Poland with military honors.

Telegraph published an admiring obituary:

Kolakowski’s primary academic interest was the history of philosophy since the 18th century, and he was the author of more than 30 books which combined history, theoretical analysis and pungent, witty writing. His most influential work was a three-volume history of Marxism – Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth and Dissolution (1978), published after he had taken refuge in the West.

It was a prophetic work, written at a time when Marxism still provided the ideological underpinning for a system that was thought to have an indefinite life expectancy. He provided an objective description of the main ideas and diverse currents of Marxist thinking, but at the same time characterised Marxism as “the greatest fantasy of our century… [which] began in a Promethean humanism and culminated in the monstrous tyranny of Stalin”. ...

In an article published in 1975, he observed that the experience of Communism had shown that “the only universal medicine (Marxists) have for social evils – State ownership of the means of production – is not only perfectly compatible with all the disasters of the capitalist world – with exploitation, imperialism, pollution, misery, economic waste, national hatred and national oppression, but it adds to them a series of disasters of its own: inefficiency, lack of economic incentives and above all the unrestricted rule of the omnipresent bureaucracy, a concentration of power never before known in human history”.

Kolakowski was particularly scathing about western apologists for Marxist regimes who suggested that economic progress in communist countries somehow justified a lack of political freedom: “This lack of freedom is presented as though it were a temporary shortage. Reports along these lines give the impression of being unprejudiced. In reality they are not simply false, they are utterly misleading. Not that nothing has changed in these countries, nor that there have been no improvements in economic efficiency, but because political slavery is built into the tissue of society in the Communist countries as its absolute condition of life.” He dismissed the idea of democratic socialism as “contradictory as a fried snowball”, and modern manifestations of Marxism as “merely a repertoire of slogans serving to organise various interests”.

Iowahawk records the obsequies for the late great Golden State.

Millions of fans from around the globe gathered along Sunset Boulevard to pay final respects to California today, as a slow moving funeral procession transported the eccentric superstar state’s remains to its final resting place in a Winchell’s Donuts dumpster in Van Nuys. The self-proclaimed ‘King of Pop Culture’ died last week at 160, in what coroners ruled an accidental case of financial autoerotic asphyxiation. The death sent shock waves across the world and sparked an outpouring of grief by rabid fans.

“I don’t care what the tabloids and the Wall Street Journal say,” said a weeping Illinois. “I still love you, Cali!” ...

“If it wasn’t for California, I wouldn’t be where I am today,” said Arizona of Westside 3, the popular sunbelt trio who recently benefited from the late state’s generous gift of fleeing taxpayers and businesses. As a tribute to their mentor, Arizona vowed the group would start spending money “like crack-addled hip hop stars.”

“California’s financial and musical legacy will never die,” said band mates Nevada and Oregon.

At the official funeral service at the LA Coliseum, a grief stricken Washington, who teamed with California on several hit software and wine projects, had to be physically restrained from climbing into the deceased’s gold plated casket.

Similar emotional outpourings were the rule of the day. Stories – apocryphal or not – of the late state’s bizarre self-destructive behavior and fondness for molesting children did little to dampen the the flood of tributes from fans who preferred to remember California as America’s Sweetheart.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Bill takes aim

David Carradine, beloved by fans of Quentin Tarrantino movies for his portrayal of the Zen villain slain by Uma Thurman in Kill Bill (2003-4), is dead in Bangkok in unusual circumstances which might not have been altogether out of character for the protagonist he portrayed in his most famous role.

The Telegraph reports:

Thai police told the BBC the 72-year-old was found by a hotel maid sitting in a wardrobe with a rope around his neck and genitals.

He was too young to leave us, and we’ll miss him now particularly badly.

LA Times:

Jack Kemp, a former Republican vice presidential nominee and professional football star who cut a path as a conservative purist and a fervent advocate of tax cuts, died Saturday. He was 73.

The longtime professional quarterback, who went on to become a New York congressman, presidential candidate, Cabinet secretary and vice presidential candidate, died at his home in Bethesda, Md.

Kemp was diagnosed with cancer in January, and his swift decline stunned friends and associates. A statement released by his family late Saturday said he died peacefully shortly after 6 p.m. “surrounded by the love of his family and pastor.”

“He was a bleeding-heart conservative,” said Edwin J. Feulner, a former campaign advisor and president of the Heritage Foundation who confirmed news of Kemp’s death. “He was a good friend and a real hero to a lot of us.”

Kemp first gained national prominence with the San Diego Chargers in the early 1960s and then went on to lead the Buffalo Bills to the American Football League championship in 1964 and 1965.

He used his popularity on the football field to win election from a Buffalo-area district to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served from 1971 to 1989.

As a congressman, Kemp was one of the few members of the House—along with Democratic Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill—to have national name recognition. With his Kennedyesque hairstyle, boyish good looks, unbounded enthusiasm and raspy voice, Kemp seemed a natural to bring new energy and interest to the Republican Party when he ran with Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas in 1996.

The congressman was the leading architect of the Kemp-Roth tax bill, first proposed in 1978 with Sen. William Roth of Delaware, that proposed a 30% cut in federal taxes over three years. Kemp’s 1979 book, “American Renaissance: A Strategy for the 1980s,” contained what became known as Reaganomics during Ronald Reagan’s presidency and helped redefine the GOP’s economic identity. ...

Kemp, as much as anybody, helped convince Reagan to embrace supply-side economics, designed to stimulate growth through tax reduction.

Kemp’s tax bill was defeated in the House, but a similar measure was approved two years later, offering a 25% cut in taxes.

Talk about the man who had everything.

Jacques Littlefield didn’t only own what every Silicon Valley executive wants: his own hilltop in Portola Valley. On his 430 acre Pony Tracks Ranch he kept and serviced his own collection of 230 tanks, missile launchers, armored cars, and personnel carriers.

SF Chronicle:

Jacques Littlefield, an unassuming multimillionaire who amassed the country’s largest private collection of tanks and other military armored vehicles, died Wednesday at his Portola Valley ranch. He was 59. ...

Mr. Littlefield owned about 200 tanks, self-propelled guns, armored personnel carriers, anti-aircraft vehicles and other heavy combat vehicles, ranging from an M1917 “Six-Ton Tractor” from World War I to a Russian T-72 used by Saddam Hussein’s forces in the Iraq war.

He painstakingly restored the vehicles and kept them in a football-field-size showroom on his ranch. In accordance with state and federal law, none of tanks had functioning firing apparatus, but he did occasionally drive them around his 470-acre property.

A jewel in his collection is the German Panzer V (Panzerkampfwagon V -JDZ) Panther tank that the German army sank in a Polish river during World War II to keep it from the advancing Russians. The Panther sat submerged for decades, and Mr. Littlefield acquired it five years ago and began restoring it.

“Restoration is very satisfying, especially with something like the Panther,” Mr. Littlefield said in a 2007 interview with The Chronicle. “People say: ‘You’ll never get that thing running again.’ Well, it was built once, and we can do it again.”

His collections extracted a personal cost. “It happens to a lot of guys,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 1992. “It happened to me. You get a tank, you get divorced. You get divorced, you lose the tank to pay the settlement.”

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Jacques Littlefield web-site

Lots of photos of his collection here

Driving restored (turret not yet mounted) Panther 5:00 video – not easy parking one of these in the garage.

Littlefield runs over a Mercedes with his tank 0:49 video

Patrick Joseph McGoohan was born in Queens of Irish parentage, but raised in Ireland and England, where he attended Ratcliffe College, a Roman Catholic public school boasting the architecture of Pugin, in Leicestershire, where, according to Wikipedia, he excelled at mathematics and boxing.

McGoohan was perfect for the role of British secret agent, having intellectual good looks, a natural aptitude for conveying the impression of competence and intensity of will, and possessing a distinctly U accent.

He might have been far more famous as an actor, but he turned down the roles of James Bond and the Saint back in the 1960s, just as he turned down the roles of Gandalf and Dumbledore more recently.

He will be remembered for The Prisoner (1967-68), which he produced, wrote, and starred in, and frequently directed. The series flopped in Britain, but proved in hit in France and the United States producing its own cult following. The Prisoner was revolutionary television, operating at a wholly unprecedented level of surrealism, metaphor, and sophistication, and scarcely equaled since as a vehicle of ideas.

2:58 video

Varifrank posted yesterday:

My favorite quote from “The Prisoner”, which seems rather timely right about now is this exchange with Leo McKern as “Number 2”.

Number 2: What in fact has been created? An international community. A perfect blueprint for world order. When the sides facing each other suddenly realize that they’re looking into a mirror, they’ll see that this is the pattern for the future.
Number 6: The whole earth as… ‘The Village’?
Number 2: That is my hope. What’s yours?
Number 6: I’d like to be the first man on the moon!

Reason quotes a reader of the French newspaper Le Monde: “Patrick McGoohan finally escaped.”

Llewellyn in 1979

The British Press pays admiring tribute to Sir Dai Lewellyn, who died younger than most, not from the years but the mileage.

Evening Standard:

One-time debs’ delight Sir Dai Llewellyn, who has died aged 62, never did anything remotely useful in his career. Defying every known rule of moderation, he simply lived life to the full – and that cheered up a lot of people.

The Telegraph:

The 4th Bt, who died on Tuesday aged 62, became famous as a playboy, bon viveur and darling of the gossip columns, his reputation reflected in soubriquets such as “Seducer of the Valleys”, “Conquistador of the Canapé Circuit”, “Dai ‘Lock Up Your Daughters’ Llewellyn” or simply “Dirty Dai”.

The son and heir of the gold-medal-winning equestrian baronet Sir Harry “Foxhunter” Llewellyn, and brother of Princess Margaret’s one-time paramour Roddy Llewellyn, Dai Llewellyn was celebrated for his serial seductions of “It” girls, models and actresses, his relentless appetite for partying and his outrageous indiscretions. ...

He never grew up. On a visit to South Africa aged 60, he claimed to have fallen through a bedroom floor into a cellar while “attempting to roger a girl called Nettie”, the girlfriend of a friend. “I wish I could tell you this was an isolated incident,” he told a journalist.

Daily Mail:

Sir Dai, wracked by cancer, cirrhosis of the liver and anaemia, died in a Kent hospital where he had been receiving treatment for several weeks.

His death leaves a gap in London society that will be hard, if not impossible, to fill. Sir Dai was defined by a recklessness that belongs to another age.

He was 62, a child of the post-war era, but he lived like an Edwardian rake, strutting the boulevards with a wicked smile, never too far from another drink or a beautiful woman. ...

As a young man, Sir Dai pursued a modelling career under the name David Savage.

Nicky Haslam, the interior designer and writer said: ‘When I first met Dai he was incredibly good-looking and well dressed. The girls fell for him like mad.’

Sir Dai assisted the process with relentless flattery and assiduous attention, but he always maintained that women loved a rascal, especially those who make them laugh.

But it didn’t work on one young beauty who, it is said, was the love of his life. ...

His modelling career flopped and when he arrived back in London, two years later, she had married someone else.

Sir Dai threw himself with even more enthusiasm into the life that came to characterise him: parties, drinking and seduction.

Some detected a Celtic self-destructive streak and he was indeed a child of the valleys.

In an interview at the hospice last November he said he once drank eight bottles of wine, a bottle of rum, a bottle of port and a bottle of vodka in one night, yet in the morning he was perfectly lucid.

It was a tale that will pursue him to the grave.

Hat tip to John Brewer.

The Grove and Rufford Hunt (amalgamated 1952) reports:

It is with great sadness that we report the death after a short illness of Lady Anne Bentinck. Lady Anne was aged 92 and was a great supporter of the hunt throughout her life, following the long tradition of the Dukes of Portland. She was Master of the Grove & Rufford after the amalgamation, and then formed her own pack, the Rufford Harriers, which hunted part of the GRH country. In recent years she invited us back to Welbeck, both to hunt and for the point to point, and was a regular follower, most recently from Carburton on 8th November. As a mark of respect, the meet planned for Saturday from the Fountian Welbeck has been cancelled.

The Telegraph

Daily Mail

Worksop Guardian
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Hat tip to Walter Olson.

Joe Hyams, novelist, screenwriter, biographer, and Hollywood columist (IMDB entry) and author of the much admired Zen in the Martial Arts passed away in Denver last Saturday at the age of 85.

Hyams was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts and attended Harvard. He served in the US Army during WWII, and was awarded the Purple Heart and Bronze Star. After the war, he became a nationally syndicated columnist, writing on Hollywood and the film industry.

He studied the martial arts for 50 years.

Alain Burrese describes Hyams’ MA career.

Joe Hyams took up fencing lessons in the 1950’s and through those classes he met film music composer Bronislau Kaper. In 1958, Kaper introduced him to Ed Parker, who was teaching Kenpo in the weight room in Beverly Hills Health Club. Mr. Hyams became one of Ed Parker’s first private students and also one of Mr. Parker’s first black belts.

Joe Hyams was the first person to introduce Bruce Lee into the Hollywood community. He helped Bruce Lee, with whom he trained privately get a foothold in Hollywood during Bruce’s struggling years. Mr. Hyams trained with Bruce Lee for two years, and when Bruce left for Hong Kong to pursue his film career, he suggested that Joe learn from Jim Lau, who trained him in Wing Chun.

LA Times obituary

MartialArtsInfo.com obituary

Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy-Trioson (1767-1824), L’apothéose des héros français morts pour la patrie pendant la guerre de la Liberté.
[Apotheosis of the French Heroes Who Died for their Fatherland During the War for Liberty]
1802. Oil on canvas, 192×184 cm
Musée National du Chateau de Malmaison, Rueil

Like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams before him, the contemporary patriot and former Senator Jesse Helms has died on Independence Day.

He was born in 1921, the son of a rural police chief. He served in the US Navy during WWII, and attended Wingate Junior College and Wake Forrest University.

In 1960, he began delivering conservative commentaries on WRAL television broadcasting from Raleigh. His editorials made him famous in North Carolina, and he successfully ran for the US Senate in 1972. He served until ill health forced his retirement in 2003.

Jesse Helms was colorful and articulate, and a fearless fighter for Conservatism. His willingness to crack politically incorrect jokes, to tackle highly-charged issues, and to fight for hopeless causes regardless of his prospects of winning absolutely infuriated the left, and he was unsuccessfully targeted for electoral defeat repeatedly by major national liberal organizations.

The Conservative Movement has lost another of its heroes.

Michael Farrin, huntsman for the Quorn from 1968 to 1998, has died after a long illness at the age of 66.

Hunting author Michael Clayton said of him:

He was the most stylish horseman across a natural country you would ever see. ...

Michael hunted hounds four times a week during long gruelling seasons and maintained a remarkably high standard at a time when the countryside was eroding and hunting was enduring growing political pressures.

Through it all, Michael remained a cool, calm figure riding Thoroughbreds, some off the racecourse, with extraordinary skill in front of hard-riding mounted fields.

Telegraph obituary.

Albert Hoffman – 100 Birthday Commemorative Blotter Acid by Wes Black

The Guardian reports the sad news.

Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who discovered the hallucinogenic drug LSD, has died aged 102.

Hofmann, known as the father of LSD, died yesterday at his home in Burg im Leimental, Basle, Switzerland.

His death was confirmed by Doris Stuker, a municipal clerk in the village where Hofmann lived following his retirement in 1971.

The California-based Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (Maps), which republished Hofmann’s book on LSD, said on its website that he had died from a heart attack.

Dieter A Hagenbach, a friend of 40 years, last spoke to Hofmann on Saturday. “He was in good spirits and enjoying the springtime,” said Hagenbach.

Born on January 11 1906, Hofmann discovered LSD - lysergic acid diethylamide, which later became the favoured drug of the 1960s counterculture – when a tiny quantity leaked on to his hand during a laboratory experiment in 1943.

He noted a “remarkable restlessness, combined with slight dizziness” that made him stop his work. “At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxication-like condition, characterised by an extremely stimulated imagination,” Hofmann wrote in his book LSD: My Problem Child.

“In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight too unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colours. After some two hours this condition faded away.”

A few days later, Hofmann intentionally took a dose of LSD and experienced the world’s first “bad trip”.

“On the way home, my condition began to assume threatening forms. Everything in my field of vision wavered and was distorted as if seen in a curved mirror,” he said.

“My surroundings had now transformed themselves in more terrifying ways. A demon had invaded me, had taken possession of my body, mind, and soul. I jumped up and screamed, trying to free myself from him, but then sank down again and lay helpless on the sofa. The substance, with which I had wanted to experiment, had vanquished me.” ...

Hofmann and his scientific colleagues hoped LSD would make an important contribution to psychiatric research. The drug exaggerated inner problems and conflicts and it was hoped it might be used to treat mental illnesses such as schizophrenia.

For a time, the laboratory where he worked, Sandoz, sold LSD 25 under the name Delysid, encouraging doctors to try it themselves. It was one of the strongest drugs in medicine, with just one gram enough to drug an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 people for 12 hours.

The US government banned LSD in 1966, following stories of heavy users suffering permanent psychological damage, and other countries followed suit.

The president of Maps, Rick Doblin, said he had spoken to Hofmann on the phone recently “and he was happy and fulfilled. He’d seen the renewal of LSD psychotherapy research with his own eyes.”

“Don’t Eat that Hot Dog!”—1960’s Anti-LSD Propaganda short

3:37 video

And he only lived to 102!

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Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

When Charlton Heston was elected president of the National Rifle Association in June of 1998, he posed holding a rifle, and delivered a jab at then-President Clinton, saying, “America doesn’t trust you with our 21-year-old daughters, and we sure, Lord, don’t trust you with our guns.”

Bloomberg has a nice tribute:

Heston stood 6-feet-3-inches, and his baritone voice, iron jaw, aquiline nose and rippling muscles lent masculine strength and sex appeal to many of his roles, any number of which he played bare-chested. He gained fame as Moses in the 1956 Cecil B. DeMille epic, ``The Ten Commandments’’ and owned the role ever after.

Heston also played Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Thomas More, John the Baptist, Cardinal Richelieu and Mark Anthony among dozens of others on stage, television and the movies. He made more than 70 films.

He was the “actor of choice for historical drama’’ in the 1950s and ‘60s, Robert Osborne, host of Turner Classic Movies on cable television and a columnist for the Hollywood Reporter, once said of him.

“Charlton Heston looked like he came from another era,’’ Osborne said in a June 2006 interview. ``He looked like he was kind of chiseled out of granite. He looked heroic.’’ ...

..his conversion to conservatism began in 1964, when he saw a billboard for Republican Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. It said: “In your heart, you know he’s right.’’ Concluded Heston: “He IS right.’’

Heston’s career surged in an era when “the difference between good and evil, and the eventual triumph of the good, the reward of the virtuous, of the heroic, was almost always recognized,’’ he said in a 1995 interview. “Yet, more and more, we see films made that diminish the American experience and example, and sometimes trash it completely.’’

Heston saw a cultural war “raging across our land, storming our values, assaulting our freedoms, killing our self confidence,’’ he said in speeches.

He decried affirmative action and feminism, complained of bloated government. And he changed his mind about gun control, becoming a vehement opponent of it.

Heston became president of the National Rifle Association in 1998, holding the job until 2003 and touring the country protesting efforts to restrict gun ownership. He developed a mantra dear to NRA crowds: Raising a rifle overhead he would shout that the only way gun-control advocates could take it would be to pry it “from my cold, dead hands.’’

In defiance of President Bill Clinton’s call for increased gun controls, NRA members sometimes put bumper stickers on their cars that read “Charlton Heston is My President.’’

Even the Washington Post printed an admiring tribute:

He was the hawk.

He soared. In fact, everything about him soared. His shoulders soared, his cheekbones soared, his brows soared. Even his hair soared.

And for a good two decades, Charlton Heston, who died Saturday at 84, was the ultimate American movie star. In a time when method actors and ethnic faces were gradually taking over, Heston remained the last of the ramrod straight, flinty, squinty, tough-as-old-hickory movie guys.

He and his producers and directors understood his appeal, and used it for maximum effect on the big technicolor screen. Rarely a doubter, never a coward, inconceivable as a shirker, he played men of granite virtue no matter the epoch. He played commanders, Biblical prophets, Jewish heroes, tough-as-nails cowpokes, calm aviators, last survivors, quarterbacks and a president or two.

Later in his life, he took that stance into politics, becoming president of the National Rifle Association just when anti-gun attitudes were reaching their peak. Pilloried and parodied, lampooned and bullied, he never relented, he never backed down, and in time it came to seem less an old star’s trick of vanity than an act of political heroism. He endured, like Moses. He aged, like Moses. And the stone tablet he carried only had one commandment: Thou shalt be armed. It can even be said that if the Supreme Court in June finds a meaning in the Second Amendment consistent with NRA policy, that he will have died just short of the Promised Land—like Moses.

I’ve had a link to the NRA membership page with a picture of Chuck Heston on it in the right hand column, since I started this blog.

Gary Gygax received a tribute from Brian Carney in the Wall Street journal.

And a very nice funeral bouquet in cartoon form from xkcd.

At a moment in history when things look black for Conservatism, the sad news arrives that the last of the giants who created the post-WWII Conservative Movement and fundamentally changed the direction of American politics, William F. Buckley, Jr. was found dead in his Stamford, Connecticut home today.

AP

Reading the numerous tributes to William F. Buckley this morning, I found the following by Mona Charen in the Washington Post.

Woody Allen is reputed to have said that it was better not to meet people you revere—the disappointment was always so crushing. But no one fortunate enough to meet or know William F. Buckley Jr., who passed away yesterday at the age of 82, could say that. A man of coruscating wit (he’d approve of that word), he was also, by universal acclamation, the most gracious man on the planet. Legend he was, but in a small group, it was always Bill who rushed to get a chair for the person left standing. It was always Bill who reached to fill your glass. It was always Bill who volunteered to give you a lift wherever you were going, insisting it was on his way.

I first met William Buckley as a freshman at college.

Only a few years earlier, Buckley had established a new visibility for conservative ideas, making himself into a national celebrity in the process, appearing regularly on television news programs and late night talk shows to deliver heretical viewpoints and analyses that sailed out far over the heads of his media interlocutors. I remember with fondness his first appearance on the Jack Paar program. Paar was reduced to playing the smiley, faux-modest Everyman, telling Buckley that he couldn’t understand Buckley’s political and philosophical concepts, but felt that Mr. Buckley must have no heart.

By my freshman year, Buckley had become a national celebrity and a major political figure. That year at the Yale Political Union, William F. Buckley returned to Yale to debate Yale University’s leftist chaplain William Sloane Coffin on the proposition: “Resolved: Government has an obligation to promote equality as well as preserve liberty.” Visiting Political Union speakers were normally dined at Mory’s by Political Union officials and table space was limited. Buckley was that year’s top YPU draw, and there was not the slightest possibility that a mere freshman could obtain seating at that highly-coveted table.

Nonetheless, I was very interested in seeing William F. Buckley perform at close range, and I was by no means lacking in initiative and determination as a young man. I simply proceeded to Mory’s without an invitation, and took up a standing position by the entrance to the private dining room where I could conveniently listen to the conversation and look on.

At age 17, it was not much of a burden to stand up to listen in on this particular dinner for an hour or two, but before very long Buckley looked up, noticed me standing there, and immediately rose from the table, summoned a waiter and demanded that an extra chair be provided. He took the chair out of the waiter’s hand, made room, and positioned it near the table himself. It was the kind of expansively generous display of courtesy, not terribly commonly encountered, but recognizably characteristic of native citizens of Olympian levels of the old-fashioned American boarding school/Ivy League aristocracy.

Buckley’s kindly gesture was even noticed by reporters, and a month later a feature on the debate gleefully described Buckley as personally seating at his dinner someone Esquire magazine described as looking like “a teen-age banker.”

The news had begun to circulate yesterday that George Maurer, proprietor of Sweetwater Bamboo Flyrods, had died suddenly of a heart attack.

Maurer had been the most renowned rod maker to work in Pennsylvania since the 19th century era of John Krieder and Samuel Phillippe. He built parabolic rods inspired by the tapers of Paul Young, and standard tapers based on the works of Jim Payne and Goodwin Granger.

Maurer was a friend of the angling writers Harry Middleton and John Gierach and built rods named after some of their books. I’ve never owned one myself, but I’ve often heard the model he called the “Old Philosopher,” a 7’ 5” for 5 wt., singled out for exceptional praise.

Maurer’s shop in recent years was located at a wide place in the road along the rural highway paralleling the Big Pine Creek in North Central Pennsylvania, where cities are far away, and newspapers are few. It will be a while before a full obituary appears.

Len Codella

Trout Underground

Edward J. Halliday, Sir Edmund Hillary, Auckland Museum, oil on canvas, 1955

Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mount Everest, (for whom the junior senator from New York was not named) has died at age 88. New Zealand plans a state funeral.

The Australian obituary & video.

AP story, slideshow, videos

Hat tip to Dominique Poirier.

Reuters:

Philip Agee, a former CIA agent who exposed its undercover operations in Latin America in a 1975 book, died in Havana, the Cuban Communist Party newspaper Granma said on Wednesday.

Agee, 72, died on Monday night, the newspaper said, calling him a “loyal friend of Cuba and staunch defender of the peoples’ struggle for a better world.”

His widow, German ballet dancer Giselle Roberge, told friends he had been in hospital since December 15 and did not survive surgery for perforated ulcers.

Agee worked for the CIA for 12 years in Washington, Ecuador, Uruguay and Mexico. He resigned in 1968 in disagreement with U.S. support for military dictatorships in Latin America and became one of the first to blow the whistle on the CIA’s activities around the world.

His expose “Inside the Company: CIA Diary” revealed the names of dozens of agents working undercover in Latin America and elsewhere in the world. ...

The U.S. government called Agee a traitor and said some of the agents he exposed were murdered, an allegation he rejected.

Agee’s disclosure of the identities of CIA agents, which led to several assassinations, resulted in the passage of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982.

He was 72 and died of perforated ulcers. So much for Cuban health care.

George McDonald Fraser, author of the Flashman novels, a series of comic historical novels typically revolving around one of the best-known military disasters of the Victorian era and featuring as their hero a later-in-life version of the cad and bully Flashman from Tom Brown’s Schooldays, has died at age 82 of cancer.

Fraser had resided on Man as a political (and tax) exile from socialist Britain for many years.

He served during WWII in the Border Regiment and, after being commissioned an officer, in the Gordon Highlanders. Upon leaving the Army, he worked as a journalist for the Glasgow Herald. In 1969, he published the first of the Flashman novels which soon became a lucrative success.

As the London Times observes:

He had hit on a deceptively simple idea that proved to be a bestselling formula at the end of the Swinging Sixties. The public still wanted to sit down with a good rip-roaring yarn — but did not want heroes. So why not make the central character a cad? A cad the reading public already knew about — Harry Flashman, the bounder of Tom Brown’s Schooldays?

What happened to Flashman after the good Doctor Arnold expelled him from Rugby? Fraser decided that he must have gone into the Army. Bully, liar and coward he may still have been, but the Victorian military authorities did not mind. Or perhaps they were simply too stupid to notice, as he whored and cheated his way around the British Empire. The resulting stories became one of the great tongue-in-cheek achievements of popular fiction.

The standing joke between Fraser and his readers was that these were genuine memoirs: they had been discovered, “wrapped in oilskin” and stuffed into a tea chest, during a house sale at Ashby, Leicestershire, in 1965. They described how, after a long, eventful life, loved by the ladies and lauded by the Establishment — Flashman was a brigadier-general, a VC, a Knight of the Bath, a Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur and, amusingly, holder of the San Serafino Order of Purity and Truth — the old scoundrel mused in old age about how he had got away with it: “The ideal time to be a hero,” he wrote, “is when the battle is over and the other fellows are dead, God rest ’em, and you take the credit.”

It was all rollicking nonsense; but it had a sterling quality that went to the heart of many sophisticated readers who like to relax with a rubbishy book provided it is well written rubbish.

The Guardian identifies another basis of the series’ success.

Fraser was intending amusing travesty, but, underneath it all, the author really believed in Britishness. When the chips are down (when sepoys, for example, are murdering women and children in the Indian Mutiny) Flashman is a gallant and decent fellow (and no racist). Flashy, not unflashy Tom, embodies what made the empire work.

The Flashman novels spoke eloquently to the British reader. They articulated that mixture of cynicism, shame, and pride that contemporary Britons felt about Victorian values and Great Britain.

James Oliver Rigney, Jr. was born in Charleston, South Carolina.

He served two tours in Vietnam 1968-1970, receiving multiple awards of both the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Bronze Star. After serving in the US Army, he attended the Military College of South Carolina (The Citadel) earning a degree in Physics.

Under the pen name Robert Jordan, he wrote an eleven volume fantasy series, incorporating a host of memorable characters, titled The Wheel of Time.

In this reader’s opinion, Robert Jordan was the most interesting and successful entrant into the genre of the numerous authors inspired by the works of J.R.R. Tolkein.

In a sad coincidence, the great Italian director Michaelangelo Antonioni also passed away on Monday, mere hours after Ingmar Bergman, in Rome.

Though best known for the playful photographic detective story Blowup (1966), a perfect fashion-piece mirroring the sensibilities of the then emerging long-hair, drugs, and Rock n’ Roll era, Antonioni’s reputation may rest more firmly on his grim trilogy of alienation and ennui L’Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961) and L’Eclisse (1962).

Antonioni films were typically less immediately pleasurable than they were intellectually stimulating. The typical Antonioni film featured spare dialogue and minimal and problematic plotting, brilliantly photographed in scenes triumphantly composed with the same assurance and monumentality as the frescos of Giotto or Mantegna.

The Rediff news service aptly observed: Cinema has been orphaned twice—in just 24 hours.

DW-World-DE obituary.

Ernst Ingmar Bergman, undoubtedly the greatest living film director, died earlier today at the age of 89, reportedly “peacefully at home,” presumably at his famous residence on the Island of Faroe in the Baltic.

Bergman directed 44 films in the course of a career lasting 57 years.

London Times

Wikipedia entry

The late G.E.P. How enjoyed great wines, opera, fishing, shooting, edged weapons, beekeeping, cricket, cars, and mastiffs.

On July 25, Bonham’s at its Knightsbridge branch will be auctioning Arms & Armour from the collections of the late G.E.P. How and others.

The London Times said in its obituary of Mrs. How:

Mrs G. E. P. How, silver expert, was born on January 2, 1915. She died on June 26, 2004, aged 89.

A legend in the art world almost as much for the startling trenchancy of her utterance as for her impeccable scholarship and taste, Mrs. G. E. P. How was perhaps the last surviving link to the heroic age of antique dealing before the war, when great discoveries were made and dealers were becoming more than mere merchants of curios. Mrs. How stood out from the first by her scholarly energy and integrity, and she became one of the most influential dealers of her time. ...

Jane Penrice Benson was born in 1915, the posthumous daughter of an officer killed in the war. The family had been based in South Wales, though she herself grew up in the Home Counties. Her early ambition was to be an archaeologist; it was accidentally transmuted into silver when a neighbour suggested that she would enjoy helping to catalogue his collection of early spoons. (The fascination of spoons is that they are the only form of silver to survive in any quantity from the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance; without them it would be impossible to map the early history of the craft.) The expert she was to assist was Commander G. E. P. How, RN (retd), who turned out to be a jovial gentleman dealer with some considerable knowledge and a not entirely unpiratical bent. It was not long before the young Miss Benson was enthralled by man and subject alike.

The Ellis catalogue on which they worked is still a useful reference book, and Miss Benson moved to work with George How, and eventually, after his divorce, to marry him. The Commander and the Commando, as they were soon known, threw themselves into new research, living, breathing and in some cases sleeping with their spoons. ...

As dealers, the Hows were a new breed, coming from a background very different from that of the traditional silver merchant, and they owed a lot to their contacts, to their social ease and an unquestionable sense of gentlemanly integrity. Their shops were fitted out to look like a collector’s drawing room, and indeed they held open house in the evenings for collectors to come to talk about silver. The Hows also offered more intellectually than much of the competition. They were among the first to persuade collectors to insist on the highest quality and untouched condition, however modest the piece. The greater importance this placed on the historical value of silver appealed to discerning customers, even of small means, and to museums here and in America. ...

(Her) pugnacity could make her seem a fearsome, if diminutive, figure, especially when encountered on the serious ground of silver. But though few were spared the rougher edge of her tongue, no one could be in doubt as to her enormous underlying generosity. No serious scholar was ever refused help, and her personal kindness was great, if discreetly performed.

And she could be compelling company, with a great sense of the pleasures of life. Her offices, particularly the Queen Anne houses in Pickering Place behind Berry’s in St James’s, were glamorous in a peculiarly Dickensian way, with a creaking cage staircase and an Ali Babaesque twinkle of precious metal. To see silver gilt cups gleaming against cherry-red velvet in the sombre drawing room was an irresistible invitation to any sensual collector, and the lucky were further treated to a view of her own collection of spoons and early rarities. Parties at Pickering Place were equally fulfilling, with Mrs. How uncorking bottles of champagne apparently larger than herself. Little else except smoked salmon or caviar would be on offer. Great wines, opera, fishing, shooting, edged weapons, beekeeping and cricket were all enjoyed to the full.

Cars were a passion “I wear a car,” she said — and well into her eighth decade she sold a beloved silverplated Jaguar SS100 to Alan Clark in order to buy the latest Bentley Turbo, with which she liked to burn off all-comers at the lights. Anyone overtaken by her was liable to a fright, since she was so small as to be almost invisible at the wheel. By way of balance the back of the car was usually occupied by terrifyingly outsize dogs. She helped to save the Old English mastiff from oblivion, and one of her proudest achievements was to have won best of breed at Crufts twice with her dog Don Juan. Characteristically, she refused to show him again, as she did not want to prevent others having a decent crack at the title.

A sample item:

Lot No: 123

A Viking Sword Of Petersen Type M And Wheeler Type I
9th/10th Century
In excavated condition, with broad pattern-welded double-edged blade, tapering flat pattern-welded tang, cruciform hilt comprising short flat ovoidal cross, and shorter pommel en suite surmounted by a flat rectangular button
76.3 cm. blade

Estimate: £10,000 – 15,000
Footnote:
See J. Petersen, De Norske Vikingesverd, Kristiania, 1919; R.E. Mortimer Wheeler, London and The Vikings, London Museum Catalogue: No.1, 1927, pp. 31-32, fig. 13, 1; and J.G. Peirce, Swords of the Viking Age, 2002, pp. 84-86

Tuesday’s Telegraph records the passing of Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Boileau,

a dashing cavalry officer and Arabist whose adventurous post-war career took him to a succession of remote outposts.

(He attended) Cranbrook School, Kent, whence, aged just 17, he enlisted in the Royal Armoured Corps.

His entry to Sandhurst having been delayed by ill health, Peter was commissioned into the 1st King’s Dragoon Guards in August 1945. He joined the regiment in Palestine, served there for 18 months during the Zionist disturbances, and then spent a further year at Cyrenaica, Libya, as regimental transport officer.

On his return to England Boileau discovered that service at home was beyond his means. He volunteered for the East African Independent Armoured Car Squadron, shifting for the next two years between Kenya and Somaliland.

Impressed by his flair for languages, Boileau’s commanding officer recommended him for the official Arabic course. A year’s instruction at Beirut qualified him as a second-class interpreter, and he was posted to HQ British Troops in the Canal Zone. As a GSO 3 (Intelligence), he was responsible for the interrogation of prisoners and for translating captured documents in a period of mounting tension.

There followed three months as Commander of the Libyan Army – he had been promoted to temporary major but was known by the native title of kaid (chief) – until he was relieved by a Turkish officer.

Still as a temporary major, Boileau came into his own with his appointment, in December 1952, as armoured car adviser to the Sheikh of Kuwait, a state newly enriched by oil. Relations with the Arabs deteriorated after Suez, and the Kuwaiti minister of defence delighted in making Boileau’s life difficult. Much to his relief he was transferred, after six years in Kuwait, to HQ Intelligence at Maresfield, Sussex, his services being recognised by his appointment as MBE in 1959.

In 1960 Boileau was appointed equerry to Crown Prince Mohammed of Jordan during an official visit. Bored and truculent, the young man showed little interest in military organisation. He was unaware that Boileau understood the dialect in which he conversed with his entourage, usually to plan some more agreeable distraction. Bewildered that he was constantly forestalled, the prince cut short his visit after only three weeks.

Later in the year Boileau was posted to Aden in an unglamorous intelligence role, and from July 1962 was military liaison officer to the Arab minister of defence in the Federation of South Arabia. In 1964 he was seconded as a political officer in the Radfan area. Back in Aden in 1965, he was upgraded to deputy permanent secretary in the ministry, in the temporary rank of lieutenant-colonel.

Boileau was a marked man with the terrorists, who made a last attempt to assassinate him before he left. A grenade was thrown on to his terrace while he was sitting there with his wife and some friends. Boileau miraculously escaped injury, though his wife was peppered with fragments and all their companions were more or less seriously wounded.

Boileau decided to retire, and joined a firm of overseas consultants, based in Beirut, with responsibility for its office in Rome. In 1971 he moved to Rhodesia, and later to Cyprus and Andorra, before settling at Mirande in the Gers, where he shed the anglicised pronunciation of his name (“Boylow”) in favour of the French one.

Tall, fine-featured and bookish, Boileau loved music, poetry and armoured cars in equal measure. His tolerant, philosophical view of life made him the most relaxing of companions and inspired a devoted following, which included cats and dogs, and children for whom he made up stories.

Always a nonconformist, he had no intention of retiring to Dorset like his father. He once astonished friends and fellow diners at a Chelsea restaurant by bursting into song in Italian. His marriage, in 1950, to Jean, daughter of Walter Fitzgerald Hill, whom he had met in Mogadishu, was in defiance of his commanding officer. He described her as the wittiest and kindest of women and they were a devoted couple until her death in 1999. There were no children.

Boileau’s daily routine at Mirande included collecting his reserved copy of The Daily Telegraph from beneath the town’s ancient arcades, and strolling across the square to greet French Muslim veterans, or harkis, in Arabic. In his final maison de retraite, he was curtly ordered by a newly-arrived nurse, of North African appearance, to undress and put on his pyjamas. He reproved her gently in Arabic: “Would you speak to your father like that?” The girl swiftly joined the ranks of his admirers, observing that he “spoke the Arabic of kings”.

Peter Boileau was an active member of the Anciens combatants at Mirande who provided a guard of honour at his funeral.

Norman Podhoretz is unkind enough to give Arthur Schlesinger the obituary he deserves.

There are three things to say about the work of Arthur Schlesinger, who has just died at the age of eighty-nine: (1) He was an exceptionally good writer, commanding a lucid, vivid, and often elegant prose style. (2) He was an exceptionally bad historian: incapable of doing justice to any idea with which he disagreed, and so tendentious that he invariably denigrated and/or vilified anyone who had ever espoused any such idea. Like the so-called “Whig interpretation of history” in England, Schlesinger’s voluminous work as a historian amounts to the proposition that the story of freedom in America is the story of the Democratic party, and specifically of its never-ending struggle against the sinister bastions of privilege, oppression, and ignorance represented by the Republicans of the modern era and their forebears. (3) This unshakable conviction not only made his wonderfully readable accounts of the past unreliable and in many cases even worthless; it also warped his political judgment in the present, leading him in the last forty years of his life to support the forces that were pushing the Democratic party to the Left. In becoming an apologist for these forces, he betrayed the liberalism that he himself, in The Vital Center, had earlier espoused and whose banishment from the Democratic party has been, and will continue to be, a calamity for this country.

A dead accurate summation, I’d say.

Ralph de Toledano, circa 1950

Ralph de Toledano, one of the most prominent figures of the Conservative Movement during the 1950s and 1960s, died in Washington on Saturday at 90 years of age. He wrote a major newspaper column, appeared on radio and television, was one of the founders of National Review, served for twenty years on the editorial board of Newsweek, and published 25 books.

Toledano was born in Tangier, Morocco to American parents of Shephardic Jewish descent. He attended Julliard, and graduated from Columbia University in 1938.

In the 1930s, he joined the Socialist Party of America, and was made youth leader of its anti-Communist “old guard” faction. He became editor of the old guard magazine New Leader in 1934. Under Toledano’s editorship, it became one of the most forceful and effective anti-Communist journals of that era.

He served in the US Army, and in the OSS during WWII.

Toledano was one of the most prominent of a very small number conservative voices in 1950s and 1960s America. He was an extremely prolific journalist and his nationally syndicated column was highly influential in the rise of the Conservative Movement. He deserves to be remembered with affection and respect for his passionate anti-Communism and devoted service to the cause of Liberty.

New York Times

Washington Times

Wikipedia

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

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

Michael Werbowski:

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

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

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

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

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

Wikipedia entry.

Born Leslie Lynch King, Jr. in Omaha, Nebraska, he was renamed for his stepfather, following his mother’s divorce and remarriage. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1935, having played center on undefeated football teams in 1932 and 1933. He graduated from Yale Law School in 1941, and served in the Navy in WWII.

Appointed to the Vice-Presidency under the terms of the 25th Amendment by Richard Nixon, following Spiro Agnew’s resignation, Ford is the only US President to have served in office without having been elected either President or Vice President. Having died at 93, he holds the record as longest-lived US President, having surpassed Ronald Reagan’s previous record by 6 weeks.

Gerald Ford served in office during a painful period in American history. His administration saw the US withdrawal from Vietnam. His greatest service to the United States was undoubtedly his pardon of Richard Nixon, which mercifully closed the Watergate affair, and spared the country the painful and extended spectacle of the trial of a former president.

The Watergate scandal made the 1976 election most likely unwinnable by a Republican. But Ford’s defeat by Jimmy Carter simply produced the most incompetent and disastrous administration in American history, making inevitable the election of Ronald Reagan.

General Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte, liberator of the Republic of Chile, died today of a heart attack in Santiago at the age of 91, eluding finally the vindictive efforts at persecution of the cowardly hound pack of the international left.

Most sensible people would regard the personal project of the British big game hunter hero of Geoffrey Household’s famous 1939 thriller Rogue Male, the stalking and assassination of Adolph Hitler, as a commendable effort to save the lives and liberty of millions from the depraved ambitions of a tyrant.

What Captain Thorndike (played by Walter Pidgeon in the 1941 film version by Fritz Lang, retitled as Man Hunt) tried to do fictionally for the European world of 1939, Augusto Pinochet really did in cold reality for the population of Chile in 1973.

The Communist Salvador Allende managed to gain power in 1970 by a plurality of 36.2 percent in a three-way election.

Immediately upon taking office, Allende began instituting La vía chilena al socialismo (“the Chilean Path to Socialism”), featuring the nationalization of all large industry, government takeover of the health care system and education, land seizure and redistribution of all property of more than eighty hectares (197 acres) of irrigated land. The Allende government defaulted on all foreign debt, and instituted a freeze on prices along with a government-dictated raise of all salaries.

Naturally, even basic commodities disappeared from supermarket shelves, and the necessities of life became only available via the black market. In 1971, Allende established diplomatic relations with Communist Cuba, and invited Fidel Castro for a month-long visit in which Castro participated actively in the government of Chile.

Hyperinflation (508%) and food shortages ensued. Allende proceeded to rule while disregarding the courts. Attempts at restriction of freedom of speech, and unauthorized seizures of farms and private busineses became commonplace.

On September 11, 1973, the Chilean military, led by General Pinochet, commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army, intervened to restore the rule of law. Defeated, and facing arrest and trial, Allende committed suicide with the same AK-47 Kalashnikov given to him as a gift by Fidel Castro.

General Pinochet ruled extra-constitutionally for 17 years, in the course of which a few thousand radical leftist extremists, bent upon violence and upon assaults upon the basic liberties and property rights of the people of the Republic of Chile, and guilty of revolutionary conspiracy and assassination attempts, were prophylactically eliminated by the security forces of the Republic.

Suppose Captain Thorndike had been able to shoot Hitler before the outbreak of WWII? Suppose he, and perhaps some big game hunter associates, had also eliminated Goebbels, Himmler, Bormann and another few thousand key Nazi lieutenants, in time to prevent the full establishment of the Nazi regime in Germany, saving thereby millions of innocent lives? Should Thorndike have subsequently been prosecuted by one European Union Jack-in-Office judiciar after another?

In 1980, General Pinochet promulgated a new constitution promising a return to civilian rule in 1990. In 1988, he sought the approval of a plebiscite for another 8 year term as president. Failing to win that vote, he proceeded to conduct a democratic election, and stepped down voluntarily on March 11, 1990 to an elected successor. He left power, having restored both freedom and prosperity to Chile.

Mr. Allende’s role model, Fidel Castro, seized power in 1959 and continues to rule tyrannically over a starving and impoverished population nearly 50 years later. Castro has executed many thousands of people, but curiously enough, not one single European Union judicial official has ever chosen to indict or prosecute him.

The general’s reputation, and personal freedom, were the objects during the later years of his life to an endless succession of manipulative and propagandistic attempts at judicial vengeance by the international left. With his death, he has moved beyond their reach to take his rightful place, along with Bolivar and O’Higgins, among the heroes and liberators of Latin American.

Viva Pinochet!

Renowned holster manufacturer (Seventrees Ltd.), and supplier of specialized covert arms (Armament Systems Procedures Corporation) for government agencies, Paris Theodore died on November 16 last of multiple sclerosis at St. Luke’s Hospital in New York.

In 1966, he founded Seventrees Ltd. a much-admired company producing holsters designed for convenience and concealment. His holster company led to the design and production of other products, including firearms, intended for the use of covert operatives in extreme situations.

Theodore’s best-known design was the ASP 9mm Parabellum pistol which introduced the “Guttersnipe” sight (beveled channel running down the top of the gun) clear grips (revealing magazine contents) and the forefinger grip (since widely adopted in many semi-automatic pistol designs). The ASP’s motto was “Unseen in the best places!”

He will be missed.

Marketwire

Wall Street Journal

NY Sun

The “Quest For Excellence” ASP Special Edition

ASP 2000 9mm Pistol A Tribute to Paris Theodore

Milton Friedman died today at the age of 94. There is an excellent obituary by Samuel Brittan in the Financial Times.

Milton Friedman played an exceptionally prominent role in the intellectual revolution which occurred in the later years of the last century, when the 19th century “Progressive” ideals of centralized economic planning, socialism, and collectivism were finally discredited.

It is almost impossible to imagine today the uniformity of leftwing opinion on politics and economics that prevailed in Europe and the United States right up until around 1980. Paul Samuelson’s orthodox Keynesian “neoclassicism” was the bible of Economics study at US universities. But, suddenly and unexpectedly, the consensus of professional economists was perceived virtually overnight to be both impotent and wrong.

No one played a more prominent role in articulating the case for the economic advantage of Freedom over Coercion, of spontaneous order over central planning, than Milton Friedman. In both the most rigorous learned academic publications and in popular books, Milton Friedman made an irrefutable case in favor of Freedom.

I remember when his 10-part television serious Free to Choose ran on PBS. It was in a time of national malaise, when recession and high unemployment was combined with double-digit inflation. Inflation had persisted for mre than a decade. From the conventional liberal point of view, the problem was intractable. In one of the episodes of Free to Choose, Milton Friedman walked through a government monetary printing plant. As he approached the gigantic press turning out US currency, Friedman reached out and hit the red emergency STOP button. The press’s operation instantly came to a halt. Milton Friedman twinkled at the camera, and announced: “I have just stopped Inflation.” And the viewing audience understood that he was perfectly right.

He died at age 94 covered with honors for a lifetime devoted to fighting for human liberty. There should be commissioned a painting after Girodet of the Spirit of Ayn Rand Welcoming Milton Friedman Into Valhalla.

Friedman Foundation announcement.

New York Times

Wikipedia entry

Ralph Kinney Bennett played tennis with Friedman.

A generative anthropologist (Eric Gans?) keyboards a deserved eulogy for what its author describes as “a courageous, novel, and, of course, risky strategy.”

We have just witnessed an epic battle between a courageous, novel, and, of course, risky strategy for transforming the very conditions that have made us powerless against victimary Islamist blackmail, on the one hand, and the forces of continuity with pre-9/11 policies (I would say “illusions,” but part of my argument here will be in favor of stepping back from these more immediate polemical stances), in particular foreign policy realism and transnational progressivism, the political form of White Guilt, on the other. The forces of continuity have won…

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to truepeers.

Jack Palance as Jack Wilson in Shane (1953)

Jack Palance was the son of an immigrant Ukrainian miner, born Volodymyr Palanyuk (Ðu2019олодимиÑu20ac Ðu0178аланÑu017dк) in the coal patch of Lattimer Mines (the site of the famous Lattimer Massacre of 1897).

He began his career as a professional heavyweight boxer, fighting as “Jack Brazzo.” He won 15 fights, 12 by knockout before losing a 4th round decision to Joe Baksi on Dec. 17, 1940.

Upon the outbreak of WWII, he enlisted in the Army Air Force. He sustained serious burns, and required facial reconstruction, after the B-24 bomber he was piloting crashed off the coast of California. Some of his distinctive leathery appearance was attributed to the surgery.

He graduated from Stanford University in 1947 with an AB in Drama. He survived as an aspiring actor via the usual sorts of short-term jobs as photographer’s model, lifeguard, and short-order cook.

He got his big break in 1947, when he was hired as Marlon Brando’s understudy for the Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire. The NNBD article reports that

Brando invited Palance to work out with him in the theater’s basement. The actors were pounding a punching bag when Palance missed the bag and splattered Brando’s nose. Brando was taken to a hospital for medical attention, while Palance took the stage in the lead, and his performance drew a contract offer from 20th Century Fox. Palance always maintained that making his own “big break” was an accident.

He appeared in more than 100 films. He received an Emmy award in 1957 for Playhouse 90’s production of Requiem for a Heavyweight. He won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and the Golden Globe in 1992 for City Slickers. Upon receiving his Oscar, at the age of 72, he performed a number of one-handed pushups to demonstrate his fitness.

He is most commonly remembered for his role as the villainous gunfighter Jack Wilson in Shane, but sophisticated critics are more likely to mention his performance as film producer Jeremy Prokosch in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris (Contempt – 1963).

Variety reports his death at age 87.

Wikipedia

Film Tribute site.

IMdb

Palance and Bardot in Godard’s Contempt

Tom Veal, a reprobate I knew at Yale, has penned an impressive elegy, occasioned by the passing of a chap who sounds like a particularly distinguished representative of Sci-Fi fandom. Well worth reading as a testament to the possibilities of American life in the last century.

The Telegraph reports:

George David Garforth-Bles was born on October 5 1909 at Knutsford, Cheshire. He was the grandson of Sir William Garforth, the inventor of the coal-cutter and a safety lamp and breathing apparatus for miners. David was educated at Rugby, where he played for the first XV and the hockey IX and was Master of the Rugby Rat Hounds (ferrets).

After going up to Jesus College, Cambridge, to read Military Studies and German, he served with The Guides Cavalry (10th Queen Victoria’s Own Frontier Force) on the North West Frontier Force from 1931 to 1939; in the latter year, he played in the regimental polo team which won the last Indian Cavalry Polo Tournament.

In the Second World War Garforth-Bles commanded the 4th Battalion, 3rd Madras Regiment, in fierce fighting against the Japanese in Burma. He was mentioned in dispatches.

In 1948 he retired from the Army and emigrated to Canada, where he took up the post of secretary at the Eglinton Hunt Club in Toronto.

On his return to England, he ran a small family business. In retirement, at Farnham, Surrey, he enjoyed fishing and gardening. He was co-author of Now or Never (1946), an account of his regiment’s experiences in the Burma Campaign.

David Garforth-Bles died on September 27. He married first (dissolved), in 1939, Susan Muir-Mackenzie. He married secondly, in 1948, Ann Deshon. She predeceased him, and he is survived by a son and a daughter from his first marriage and by three sons from his second

His sporting career in India provides one of the most remarkable pig-sticking stories:

Lieutenant-Colonel David Garforth-Bles, who has died aged 96, served in the Indian Cavalry on the North West Frontier and was the central figure in an episode which must rank highly even in the bizarre chronicles of oriental field sports.

In 1937 Garforth-Bles, a young officer in The Guides Cavalry, was attending a course at the Army Equitation School, Saugor, Central India, when he went pig-sticking with a colleague, Denis Voelker. As he wrote shortly afterwards to his parents: “A sounder [herd] of pig broke between us and the heat on the right.

There were three rideable boar amongst them and Denis and I were on the largest. Everyone else was chasing the other two and we were quite by ourselves. Denis had a very fast horse and was about ten yards in front of me and just going to spear the pig. Suddenly the pig and Denis and his horse vanished completely.”

Garforth-Bles at first assumed that his friend and his quarry had descended into a deep nullah (gully), but he could find no evidence of one. He turned his pony round, and came across a well, which was overgrown with long grass.

“I had a nasty moment wondering what I should find at the bottom,” he continued in his letter home, “as most of the wells here are very deep indeed, and some are dry at the bottom. Luckily this was a very wide well and the water was very deep and only about twenty-five feet down from the top, and there were large flat stones sticking out to form steps down to the water.”

When he peered down into the gloom Garforth-Bles made out Denis Voelker hanging on to the bottom step; his horse was plunging about in the water, while the pig was swimming round and round, occasionally rushing at the horse and at Voelker and trying to get on to the step.

Garforth-Bles descended into the well to find that his friend had broken his left arm and had a six-inch cut down to the bone of his elbow. He helped the injured man up the steps, then got hold of the horse’s bridle, trying to keep the animal’s head above water.

Garforth-Bles wrote: “It was rather difficult, as he was terrified of the pig, which kept swimming at him and trying to bite him. Then the horse would rear up in the water, beating with his fore legs, and turn over backwards and sink. I thought that he was certain to be drowned.

“By this time several village people had come up and one of them held the horse’s bridle, while I speared the pig several times until it sank. We then got a rope with a stone on the end and lowered it down one side of the horse and brought it up on the other side underneath its belly. I had to dive under the horse to get hold of the rope. We could now keep it from sinking, and there was nothing to do until the others came up. They had killed the two other pigs and arrived at last, seeing the village people round the well.”

While Voelker was taken to hospital, Garforth-Bles asked the nearby veterinary hospital to provide one of the slings used for supporting lame horses; when this arrived he returned to the water, and fitted it to his friend’s distressed horse.

“It was quite tricky work, as I had to dive underneath it several times and it plunged about a bit. However, in the end, the village people, directed by Griffiths, a Sapper officer on the course, got a strong beam across the top of the well, and hauled the horse out. It came out remarkably easily and was not much scratched, though very exhausted and cold, but recovered in the sun and walked home.”

Garforth-Bles added: “General Wardrop, the ultimate authority on pig-sticking, says that it has never been known for pig, horse and rider to fall down a well. Far from spoiling their drinking water, the villagers were delighted. They fished out the pig and ate it!”

Veniamin Yefremov

Russian News and Information Military Commentator Viktor Litovkin pays tribute to the technical skill and strategic cunning of Veniamin Yefremov, general designer of the Almaz-Antei Air Defense Concern, who passed away September 16th.

Working at R&D Institute No. 20 (NII-20), renamed the Electrical Mechanical R&D Institute (NIEMI) and (after 1983) known as NPO Antei, Efremov was the General Designer of a number of highly effective mobile surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems for the Sovet Army’s air-defense forces.

The list of such weapons includes the world-famous Osa-AKM SAM system with an effective horizontal range between 1,500 meters and 10 km. This system, which can hit targets at an altitude of 6 km, was supplied to 25 countries.

Yefremov also developed the self-contained army-level Tor-M1 SAM system with a horizontal range of 1-12 km and a vertical range from 100 meters to six km. Apart from Russia, the Tor-M1 system is used by China and Greece.

One should also mention the Krug medium-range SAM system and its modified versions with a horizontal range of four to 50 km and a vertical range from 150 meters to 25 km, the S-300V long-range SAM system (horizontal range: 7-100 km; vertical range: from 250 meters to 25 km).

Yefremov’s greatest achievement is the Antei-2500 theater-level anti-ballistic missile (ABM), which (as Litovkin takes great satisfaction in noting) far surpasses the capabilities of the US Raytheon-manufactured Patriot Missile System.

His latest invention was the little-known Antei-2500 theater-level anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system, which can destroy aircraft and ballistic missiles at a range of up to 200 km and 40 km, respectively. The system’s vertical range is 250 meters to 30 km.

Most importantly, the Antei-2500’s range considerably exceeds that of its predecessor. This is the world’s only defensive SAM system which can destroy aircraft and helicopters, including AWACS surveillance planes, Stealth-type fighters and bombers, as well as non-strategic medium-range and short-range ballistic missiles. The Antei-2500 has a horizontal and vertical range of 200 km and 30 km, while the corresponding ranges for the S-300V were only 100 and 25 km, respectively.

In addition, the Antei-2500 can destroy ballistic missiles with a range of up to 2,500 km flying at 4,500 meters per second, and this explains the system’s official name.

These missiles are China’s Dunfen-3, Dunfen-15 and Dunfen-25, the United States’ ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) and Pershing, France’s Ades, the Iraqi Scud-S and Israel’s Jericho-2. Incidentally, obsolete Scuds and Pershings are still in service all over the world.

The S-300V could destroy ballistic missiles with a range of 1,000 km and a speed of 3,000 meters per second, whereas the Patriot PAC-2 missile, which was widely advertised during both Gulf Wars, has a maximum horizontal and vertical range of just 40 km and 24 km. The defense company Raytheon estimates that the PAC-3 missile’s horizontal and vertical ranges were increased to 150 km and 25 km after an upgrade last year. The PAC-3 can destroy missiles with a 1,000-km range.

But it is unclear whether U.S. designers will manage to cope with the Patriot system’s main drawback. Patriot missiles usually hit enemy-missile bodies and sustainer engines, rather than their warheads, which usually reach preset targets. Ninety percent of the 65 Scud missiles launched by Iraq in the first Gulf War hit their targets. However, during the second Gulf War Iraqi air-defense units missed numerous U.S. missiles that were launched from the sea.

In addition, Patriot missiles are launched at a certain angle to the horizon and cannot therefore hit targets approaching from the opposite direction. Consequently, at least four Patriot launchers are needed to cover a 360-degree sector, whereas only one Antei-2500 system is needed to do the same. Its vertically launched missiles streak in the direction of the target at 60-100-meter altitudes.

Most importantly, the highly accurate Antei-2500 and S-300V warheads can hit any missile warhead with a 100% success rate. Each Antei-2500 system can simultaneously fire at 16 ballistic missiles, including even those with small Stealth-type echo areas. This makes it unique in the world.

Ironically, as Litovkin gloatingly recounts, Yefremov successfully overcame the Russian military’s bankrupty and inability to fund his development efforts in the aftermath of the collapse of Communism, with US funding (!). He managed to arrange the sale of a less-than-complete version of the S-300V system to Washington.

The S-300V system was officially removed from a factory in the presence of officials from the FSB, other export-control agencies and The S-300V system was officially removed from a factory in the presence of officials from the FSB, other export-control agencies and Rosvooruzheniye (State Company for the Export and Import of Armaments and Military Equipment) . The United States received only two batteries, including an all-round radar, a command center, two Gigant launchers and two Gladiator launchers with 23 missiles, rather than the standard 144-missile reserve, for $90 million.

True, NPO Antei received only $45 million because the Pentagon and Rosvooruzheniye were playing some mysterious game apparently involving the Russian and U.S. secret services.

Anyway, Rosvooruzheniye never sold the system’s core element, the sector-scanning radar, to Washington. But Yefremov did not care because he had received enough money to streamline the Antei-2500 system, which has now been tested and placed on combat duty.

May the earth lie lightly upon a worthy adversary.

Former Congressman (as she preferred to be titled) Helen Chenoweth-Hage died today in a one-car crash near Tonopah, Nev., 172 miles northwest of Las Vegas. She was 68.

Helen Chenoweth-Hage was born in Topeka, Kansas, grew up in Grant’s Pass, Oregon, and attended Whitworth College in Spokane, Washington. She married Nick Chenoweth of Orofino, Idaho in 1958. They had two children, and divorced in 1975. From 1975-1977, she was Executive Director of the Republican Party in Idaho. She was subsequently chief of staff and campaign manager for Steve Symms.

In 1994, she ran for Congress for the Idaho First District, pledging to occupy the office for no more than three terms. She defeated a two-term incumbent in a colorful campaign which saw Chenoweth hosting “endangered salmon bakes.”

She was an arch libertarian, and ranked as one of the most conservative members of Congress. I remember her with affection.

She was a defender of militia movements, and frequently attacked over-militarization of federal law enforcement. One can perceive just how sound she was by reading this commie attack piece identifying her as a “Poster Child of the Militia.”

She was a severe critic of William Jefferson Clinton, and was one of the first to call for his resignation. In return, her own private life was attacked by a sleazy Pacific Northwest leftist in a shameful hit piece in Salon.

In 1997, she introduced H. J. Res 83 in the 103rd Congress, a new version of the famous Bricker Bill attempting to place restrictions on treaties and executive agreements entered into by the United States. Unfortunately, that Congress neglected to pass this highly desirable measure.

Faithful to her word, despite being re-elected by comfortable margins, Helen Chenoweth declined to run for Congress again after her third term.

In today’s automobile accident, Helen Chenoweth-Hage was a passenger in the car driven by her daughter-in-law, and was holding her infant grandson in her lap. She was thrown from the car, but succeeded in protecting the infant while suffering fatal injuries herself.

Ed Head, Operations Manager of the American Pistol Institute (better known as Gunsite Academy), Paulden, Arizona, writes today via Free Republic:

At the request of the family it is my sad duty to report the passing of our founder, Jeff Cooper. Jeff died peacefully at home this afternoon while being cared for by his wife Janelle and daughter Lindy.
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John Dean “Jeff” Cooper was born in Los Angeles in 1920. He earned a B.A. in Political Science from Stanford., and an M.A. in History from the University of California. He served in the United States Marine Corps during WWII and the Korean War, retiring at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. After retiring from the service, Cooper worked as an author, lecturer, small arms trainer, security consultant, and arms designer.

He began writing while still in the service, ultimately producing 20 books, around 500 magazine articles and columns, and a dozen videos. Cooper produced books on rifles, big game hunting, and personal memoirs, but he was perhaps best-known for his writings on practical pistol shooting, and for his fondness for the Colt Model 1911 and its variations.

For many years now, Cooper’s Corner -Thoughts from the Gunner’s Guru has been the closing page column of Guns & Ammo Magazine, America’s leading firearms journal. Cooper’s Corner columns were an informal and colorful mixture of decidedly unmelted opinions, anecdotes, and firearms lore. The editors were regularly deluged with indignant letters from outraged readers to the political left of Colonel Cooper, but evidently concluded that the constant controversy was good for circulation. As the years went by, protests grew fewer. Jeff Cooper seems to have successfully functioned as a filter, screening out the element that should not have been reading Guns & Ammo in the first place. For the last few years, more of the letters arriving in response to some highly politically incorrect expression by the Colonel seemed to be viewing Jeff Cooper and his writings with rueful affection.

Despite his salty Marine Corps style of self-expression, Jeff Cooper was a deep and original thinker on his preferred subjects, and he had a gift for finding the better way of putting things. Over the years, he invented a number of very useful neologisms which became widely accepted.

To describe the alternative ways of carrying the Model 1911 pistol, Cooper invented the Condition system of describing the level of readiness of the handgun:

Condition One: a round in the chamber, hammer cocked, safety on.

Condition Four: the chamber empty, no magazine.

He was also the coiner of the invaluable term hoplophobia (from the Greek noun Îu201eoÏu20acλoν “arms” and the Greek verb Ïu2020oβεÏu2030 “to strike with fear”) to refer to the not-uncommon contemporary irrational aversion to weapons.

In 1976, he founded the American Pistol Institute (“Gunsite”), as a training facility for police and military personel, in order to promulgate his personal philosophy of shooting. Its programs soon proved popular with civilians seeking formal self defense training and with competition shooters.

Also in 1976, he founded the International Practical Shooting Confederation, an organization intended to promote and sponsor self-defense-style shooting as a competition sport

He became a member of the National Rifle Association Board of Directors in 1985, and was elected to the NRA’s Executive Council in 2002.

Guns & Ammo is never going to be the same without Jeff Cooper. He will be missed.
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NRA Board of Directors profile (at an anti-NRA site, no less)

Cooper’s Corner at Guns & Ammo

Wikipedia entry

Jeff Cooper bibliography project
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LATER POSTINGS (as of 9/27)

Lt. Col. P, at OPFOR, 9/26, quotes a classic Jeff Cooper line:

In 1492 we threw the Moors out of Spain. Apparently, we didn’t throw them far enough.

Who knew that Glenn Reynolds read Guns & Ammo and Jeff Cooper’s books? I thought he was just a law professor, but he’s probably packing a customized Model 1911 somewhere under his tweed jacket with the leather elbow patches. 9/27

Memeorandum 9/27

Armed Liberal 9/27

Samizdata 9/27

QandO 9/27

UPDATES, 9/30

Front Sight, Press 9/25

Jeff Cooper Quotations – Front Sight, Press 9/26

Owning a handgun doesn’t make you armed any more than owning a guitar makes you a musician.”

Front Sight, Press 9/30

Col. Jeff Cooper finally shot to slide lock on September 25, 2006…

Airborne Combat Engineer 9/30

Journalist and author Oriana Fallaci died yesterday at age 77 of cancer in Florence.

Washington Post

In the aftermath of 9/11, Fallaci wrote two best-selling books, The Rage and the Pride (2001) and The Force of Reason (2004), criticizing Islam in scathing terms.

Attempts were made in 2002 in Switzerland, and more recently in Italy (her pending trial had been postponed to December 18th), to prosecute her on the basis of her writings for such supposed crimes as “inciting racial hatred or discrimination” (Switzerland) and “making defamatory statements about a religion” (Italy).

I think the least we can do is to commemorate her passing by sharing some of her observations and opinions.

Tunku Varadarajan, in today’s Wall Street Journal, recalling just how eloquent she could be on the subject of Islam, quotes from a letter she wrote to him in March.

In the speech I gave at the Italian consulate in New York to accept one of the four golden medals I have received in the last two months, I told that I had drawn a cartoon on the Prophet and his nine wives including the 9 year old one and his sixteen concubines including the she-camel. But I had not published it because I had not been able to draw well the she-camel. (True). The author of the booklet which asks the Moslems to eliminate me in accord with four Suras of the Koran even sued me . . . Meaning now in Italy they even appeal to the Italian law to incriminate an Italian citizen for a ‘vilifying’ cartoon that nobody has seen.

Tunku finds Fallaci a little too high-proof, and remarks:

This is acid, bitter, marvelously funny. Oriana Fallaci was very brave. Perhaps a little too brave. But now is not the time to judge her by proportions.

Mark Steyn, on the other hand, is much more keen.

Racked by cancer, Oriana Fallaci spends most of her time in one of the few jurisdictions in the western world where she is not in legal jeopardy – New York City, whence she pens magnificent screeds in the hope of rousing Europe to save itself. Good luck with that. She writes in Italian, of course, but she translates them herself into what she calls “the oddities of Fallaci’s English”, and the result is a bravura improvised aria, impassioned and somewhat unpredictable. It’s full of facts, starting with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, when Mehmet II celebrated with beheading and sodomizing, and some lucky lads found themselves on the receiving end of both. This section is a lively read in an age when most westerners, consciously or otherwise, adopt the blithe incuriosity of Jimmy Kennedy’s marvelous couplet in his 1950s pop hit “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)”:

Why did Constantinople get the works?
That’s nobody’s business but the Turks.

Signora Fallaci then moves on to the livelier examples of contemporary Islam — for example, Ayatollah Khomeini’s “Blue Book” and its helpful advice on romantic matters: “If a man marries a minor who has reached the age of nine and if during the defloration he immediately breaks the hymen, he cannot enjoy her any longer.” I’ll say. I know it always ruins my evening. Also: “A man who has had sexual relations with an animal, such as a sheep, may not eat its meat. He would commit sin.” Indeed. A quiet cigarette afterwards as you listen to your favourite Johnny Mathis LP and then a promise to call her next week and swing by the pasture is by far the best way. It may also be a sin to roast your nine-year old wife, but the Ayatollah’s not clear on that.

Moliter ossa cubent. (“May the earth lay lightly on her bones.”)

Captain Rescorla in action at Ia Drang, Republic of Vietnam, 15 November 1965.
photograph: Peter Arnett/AP.

Born in Hayle, Cornwall, May 27, 1939, to a working-class family, Rescorla joined the British Army in 1957, serving three years in Cypress. Still eager for adventure, after army service, Rescorla enlisted in the Northern Rhodesia Police.

Ultimately finding few prospects for advancement in Britain or her few remaining colonies, Rescorla moved to the United States, and joined the US Army in 1963. After graduating from Officers’ Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia in 1964, he was assigned as a platoon leader to Bravo Company of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, Third Brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile). Rescorla’s serious approach to training and his commitment to excellence led to his men to apply to him the nickname “Hard Corps.”

The 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry was sent to Vietnam in 1965, where it soon engaged in the first major battle between American forces and the North Vietnamese Army at Ia Drang.

The photograph above was used on the cover of Colonel Harold Moore’s 1992 memoir We Were Soldiers Once… and Young, made into a film starring Mel Gibson in 2002. Rescorla was omitted from the cast of characters in the film, which nonetheless made prominent use of his actual exploits, including the capture of the French bugle and the elimination of a North Vietnamese machine gun using a grenade.

For his actions in Vietnam, Rescorla was awarded the Silver Star, the Bronze Star (twice), the Purple Heart, and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. After Vietnam, he continued to serve in the Army Reserve, rising to the rank of Colonel by the time of his retirement in 1990.

Rick Rescorla became a US citizen in 1967. He subsequently earned bachelor’s, master’s, and law degrees from the University of Oklahoma, and proceeded to teach criminal law at the University of South Carolina from 1972-1976, before he moved to Chicago to become Director of Security for Continental Illinois Bank and Trust.

In 1985, Rescorla moved to New York to become Director of Security for Dean Witter, supervising a staff of 200 protecting 40 floors in the South Tower of the World Trade Center. (Morgan Stanley and Dean Witter merged in 1997.) Rescorla produced a report addressed to New York’s Port Authority identifying the vulnerability of the Tower’s central load-bearing columns to attacks from the complex’s insecure underground levels, used for parking and deliveries. It was ignored.

On February 26, 1993, Islamic terrorists detonated a car bomb in the underground garage located below the North Tower. Six people were killed, and over a thousand injured. Rescorla took personal charge of the evacuation, and got everyone out of the building. After a final sweep to make certain that no one was left behind, Rick Rescorla was the last to step outside.
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Directing the evacuation on September 11th.
Security Guards Jorge Velasquez and Godwin Forde are on the right.
photograph: Eileen Mayer Hillock.

Rescorla was 62 years old, and suffering from prostate cancer on September 11, 2001. Nonetheless, he successfully evacuated all but 6 of Morgan Stanley’s 2800 employees. (Four of the six lost included Rescorla himself and three members of his own security staff, including both the two security guards who appear in the above photo and Vice President of Corporate Security Wesley Mercer, Rescorla’s deputy.) Rescorla travelled personally, bullhorn in hand, as low as the 10th floor and as high as the 78th floor, encouraging people to stay calm and make their way down the stairs in an orderly fashion. He is reported by many witnesses to have sung “God Bless America,” “Men of Harlech, ” and favorites from Gilbert & Sullivan operettas. “Today is a day to be proud to be an American,” he told evacuees.

A substantial portion of the South Tower’s workforce had already gotten out, thanks to Rescorla’s efforts, by the time the second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, struck the South Tower at 9:02:59 AM. Just under an hour later, as the stream of evacuees came to an end, Rescorla called his best friend Daniel Hill on his cell phone, and told him that he was going to make a final sweep. Then the South Tower collapsed.

Rescorla had observed a few months earlier to Hill, “Men like us shouldn’t go out like this.” (Referring to his cancer.) “We’re supposed to die in some desperate battle performing great deeds.” And he did.
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2,996 is a project put together by blogger Dale Roe to honor each victim of the September 11, 2001 attacks. 3,061 blogs are committed to posting tributes to each victim. Never Yet Melted’s tribute is to Rick Rescorla.

Leaving Port Douglas on Friday

Australian television animal show personality, Steve Irwin, “The Crocodile Hunter,” was killed instantly while filming a new documentary at Batt Reef off Northern Queensland. Irwin was swimming directy over a stingray, which struck upward. Its barb penetrated Irwin’s chest, puncturing his heart.

Sydney Morning Herald

Irwin’s death was evidently captured on film.

Smooth Stingray, aka Bull Ray Dasyatis brevicaudata Information sheet

UPDATE

Later reports say the film shows that Irwin pulled the stingray’s barb out of his chest before succumbing.

FATALLY injured by a stingray, Steve Irwin pulled its barb out of his chest before losing consciousness, dramatic footage of his last moments reveals.

Friend John Stainton said the footage of the stingray attack which took the life of the Crocodile Hunter on the Great Barrier Reef yesterday was “shocking”.

Mr Irwin, 44, died after the stingray barb punctured his chest while snorkelling off Port Douglas, in far north Queensland, yesterday.

A cameraman captured the incident during filming for Irwin’s new project with daughter Bindi, eight, that was to debut in the United States next year.

“I did see the footage and it’s shocking,” Mr Stainton said today in Cairns.

“It’s a very hard thing to watch because you’re actually witnessing somebody die … and it’s terrible.”

Mr Stainton, also a producer and director of Irwin’s popular television shows, said the footage showed Mr Irwin pulling the barb out of his chest before losing consciousness.

“It shows that Steve came over the top of the ray and the tail came up, and spiked him here (in the chest), and he pulled it out and the next minute he’s gone.

“That was it. The cameraman had to shut down.

Reuters reports:

A social networking Web site for Americans aged 50-plus went live on Monday—complete with an online obituary database that sends out alerts when someone you may know dies and that plans to set up a do-it-yourself funeral service.

Eons.com

What can I say, but Bummer!
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Hat tip to Karen Myers.

The Telegraph reports:

The 3rd Lord Kilbracken, who died yesterday aged 85, hit the headlines in 1957 when he succeeded in gatecrashing the Great Red Square parade in Moscow on the 40th anniversary of the October uprising, wearing a pink Leander tie and with his trousers turned inside out.

During the war Kilbracken had served in the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm as a Swordfish pilot, and had gone on to win a DSC in 1945 while commanding a Wildcat squadron. In 1972, however, he returned his medal and announced that he was renouncing British citizenship in protest at the shooting of 13 demonstrators during the so-called Bloody Sunday massacres in Londonderry…

At Eton he distinguished himself by rowing in the first VIII, taking flying lessons and setting himself up as the school bookie, thus inaugurating a life-long love of gambling of all kinds. The position earned him a certain amount of kudos with his peers, but was not appreciated by the beaks – or by his parents, who cut off funds for his flying lessons as a punishment.

He decided that the only way out of ignominy and poverty was to win the school’s Hervey verse prize, which came with a handsome cheque for £16. He duly did so with a poem about a storm which he described as “a masterpiece of 116 lines and a high moral tone”. The prize was presented to him by the same master who had given him a thrashing for his bookmaking activities, though John Godley knew from “a certain look in his eye” that the crime had not been forgotten.

He had already made up his mind that he wanted to be a writer, possibly a poet, though his father disapproved, suggesting that if he really wanted to be a Milton, he would be better off as a “mute, inglorious” one. Nonetheless, after going up to Balliol College, Oxford, he published a small volume of verse, Even for an Hour, and wrote for Isis and the Oxford Magazine.

War interrupted his studies, but when the conflict ended he returned to Balliol courtesy of the ex-servicemen’s grant scheme and rowed bow in the University’s second boat, Isis.

He had continued to take flying lessons at school, saving the money and defying his parents’ ban. When war broke out, he joined the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm and for the first two years flew at every opportunity, “perfectly convinced of my own immortality, despite a number of exciting prangs, a ditching in the Firth of Forth and quite a bit of tracer”.

In 1943-44 he served on convoy escort duty on merchant aircraft carriers in the North Atlantic, flying single-engined Fairey Swordfish biplanes, machines which “seemed to have been left in the war by mistake” and were affectionately known as “stringbags”. On one sortie his engine failed completely, and he had to ditch into the freezing waters of the Atlantic. All bar one of the aircraft’s dinghies failed to inflate, and, after several hours in the water, he and his crew were rescued in the nick of time by a Canadian fishing vessel.

Later Godley was posted lieutenant-commander in charge of 835 Squadron (then equipped with Wildcat fighters) on an escort carrier, Nairana; the squadron protected some of the last convoys to Russia, and also conducted night strikes on enemy shipping off the Norwegian coast. He was awarded his DSC for one of these attacks, on the night of January 29 1945.

By this time, though, he had begun to have serious doubts about his immortality. Just before VJ day a fault developed in the hydraulic system of his Fairey Barracuda, and he found himself being liberally sprayed with highly anaesthetic hydraulic fluid. Fortunately, he was almost directly over an airfield, and he managed to land the aircraft before passing out. That was the last time he flew as a pilot. Later he would write a vivid memoir of his time with the Fleet Air Arm, Bring Back my Stringbag: Swordfish Pilot at War 1940-45 (1979).

On coming down from Oxford, Godley joined the Daily Mirror and wrote human interest stories. On one assignment he met the daughter of Hans van Meergeren, the Dutch painter who made a fortune by forging Vermeers. Later he wrote van Meergeren’s biography.

After joining the Sunday Express in 1949, Godley embarked on an overland trip to New Zealand to join the celebrations marking the centenary of the founding of Christchurch by an ancestor, John Robert Godley. While he was there his father died, and the new Lord Kilbracken made his way back to England by sea.

His father had not lived on the family estate in Ireland for many years, and at the time of his death it was under offer to a man who intended to demolish the house and exploit the land for forestry. Although he knew he could not afford to maintain the house (he had inherited rather less than £1,000 from his father), Kilbracken could not bear to sell, and withdrew it from the market in the hope that he could somehow keep it in the family.

The house was damp and dilapidated and the estate neglected, its sole stock consisting of one aged cow. His best course, he decided, was to divide his time equally between Killegar and the rest of the world, trying to make a go of developing the estate while supporting the endeavour from his earnings as a writer.

He launched himself into a range of unsuccessful enterprises: growing Christmas trees, making cream cheese and selling square yards of Irish bog to Americans for a nickel apiece. He failed to make any money out of this last venture, since the cost of sending a receipt for each nickel was two nickels.

Meanwhile the Sunday Express had given Kilbracken the “Ephraim Hardcastle” column, of which the perquisites included cocktail parties, first nights, free dinners and a large expense account. But a few weeks into the job, while travelling to Fleet Street on his customary bus from Chelsea, he decided on a whim to get off at Victoria Station and board the boat train.

After a few weeks wandering around the Mediterranean, he fetched up in a dirty waterfront hotel at Ajaccio, Corsica, where he became fascinated by the mystery of Rommel’s treasure which had supposedly been dumped somewhere in the sea off Bastia. He returned to Corsica after a short spell in America, where he tried to restore his ailing finances by joining the books of a lecture agency. He never did find Rommel’s treasure.

Back in Ireland in 1953 Kilbracken met the film director John Huston, who invited him to do a screen test for the part of Ishmael for his forthcoming production of Moby Dick. Initially, Huston seemed highly impressed by his performance, so Kilbracken was surprised – and disappointed – to receive a letter a few days later informing him that “various other factors have finally persuaded me that you were not quite right for this particular part”. His hopes of getting a smaller part in the film, as Pequod sailor number 29 (whose only solo contribution involved walking up the gang plank carrying a live pig), also came to nothing. Huston eventually gave him a job as a supplementary script writer, for which he got no screen credit.

One day in 1957 the telephone rang and a suave American voice asked whether Kilbracken would like to spend the next four days in London with the Hollywood film actress Jayne Mansfield, who was there to attend the premiere of her new film Oh for a Man! The fee would be 100 guineas – enough to buy him “a couple of cows”. He knew little about Jayne Mansfield, other than that “her dimensions were apparently very unusual”, and found to his relief that his duties were mainly formal.

During her visit, he received a call from the Daily Express inviting him to write on “My Four Days with Jayne Mansfield”, for a fee of “two more cows”. A few weeks later, hoping to add to his herd, Kilbracken suggested to Charles Wintour, the Express’s editor, that he might go to Moscow to cover the 40th anniversary celebrations of the October 1917 revolution.

Travelling on a tourist visa, since it was not possible to gain a visa as a journalist, Kilbracken set himself two goals: to see the Great Red Square Parade and to interview Khrushchev. Unfortunately, though, there were no seats left for the parade, and as a “tourist” it would be impossible to arrange an interview with Khruschchev through official channels. Subterfuge was the only solution.

On the day of the parade Kilbracken rose early and dressed with particular care, hoping to slip out of the hotel and avoid his official minder, and then to pass himself off as a member of the Russian proletariat. With his trousers on inside out under his overcoat, wearing a pink Leander tie and a fur hat pulled down over his ears, he launched himself on to the Moscow streets.

By degrees he managed to work his way to the steps of the Moscow Hotel on Red Square, where he had a front row view of the military parade; later he insinuated himself into the civilian parade, marching past the rostrum with the other “comrades”.

That evening he received a telegram from Wintour which read: “Hail Hail Hail Ace Newsman stop Congratulations on wonderful story leading Daily Express tonight.” In the Irish edition the story was headlined “Only Irish peer in Moscow watches Biggest Military Show”. As Kilbracken wryly observed, he had been the only peer of any sort in Moscow, or anywhere else behind the Iron Curtain.

Kilbracken achieved his second goal by posing as a photographer and gatecrashing a reception at the Egyptian embassy which Khrushchev was attending. He managed to engage Khrushchev in conversation for nearly half an hour, and the crowd around them became so great at one point that they ended up crushed together, belly to belly.

With the money from Jayne Mansfield and Moscow, Kilbracken was able to buy several more cows. The best milker he christened Jayne.

Kilbracken had taken his seat in the House of Lords in 1952, but at first rarely attended debates. He joined the Liberal Party in 1960, but in 1966 switched his allegiance to Labour, arguing that he wanted to take “more positive responsibility” than the Liberals could provide. As the Troubles erupted in Northern Ireland, he found his loyalties coming under strain. He had long been opposed to partition, and, though not himself a Catholic, felt strongly about the discrimination endured by the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland.

In the wave of hysteria that followed the Bloody Sunday shootings in January 1972, Kilbracken announced that he was returning his six war medals in protest, that he was renouncing British citizenship and had become a citizen of the Irish Republic.

His announcement did not compromise his right to sit as a member of the upper House, of which he became an increasingly active member. Wildly bearded and vigorous, Kilbracken continued to appear, campaigning for, among other things, the rights of Kurds in Iraq and an end to partition in Ireland.

In 1988, as a member of a parliamentary group investigating Aids, he condemned government claims that people could catch Aids through normal heterosexual relations as “nonsense”, and called its publicity campaign “alarmist, wasteful and insane”.

Kilbracken continued to work as a freelance journalist, and, during the 1980s, wrote a series of guides to identifying plant and animal species. His first such guide, The Easy Way to Bird Recognition (1982) won the Times Educational Supplement book award and sold out at its first printing.

Kilbracken had got the idea for the book on a visit to a rebel Kurdish area of northern Iraq, where he had been frustrated by his inability to identify local birds. Other books in the series included guides to trees and wild flowers.

Lord Kilbracken married first, in 1943 (dissolved 1949), Penelope Reyne; they had two sons, one of whom predeceased him. He married secondly, in 1981 (dissolved 1989), Susan Heazlewood; they had a son. His eldest son, Christopher John Godley, who was born in 1945, succeeds to the peerage.

From Vengeance is Mine (1950):

I palmed that short nosed .32 and laid it across his cheek with a crack that split the flesh open. He rocked back into his chair with his mouth hanging, drooling blood and saliva over his chin. I sat there smiling, but nothing was funny. I said, “Rainey, you’ve forgotten something. You’ve forgotten that I’m not a guy that takes any crap. Not from anybody. You’ve forgotten I’ve been in business because I stayed alive longer than some guys who didn’t want me that way. You’ve forgotten that I’ve had some punks tougher than you’ll ever be on the end of a gun and I pulled the trigger just to watch their expressions change.” He was scared, but he tried to bluff it out anyway. He said, “Why don’tcha try it now, Hammer? Maybe it’s different when ya don’t have a license to use a rod. Go ahead, why don’tcha try it?” He started to laugh at me when I pulled the trigger of the .32 and shot him in the thigh. He said, “My God!” under his breath and grabbed his leg. I raised the muzzle of the gun until he was looking right into the little round hole that was his ticket to hell. “Dare me some more, Rainey.”

AP reports that Frank Michael Morrison Spillane passed away yesterday at the age of 88 at his home at Murrells Inlet, South Carolina.

He was born March 19, 1918 in Brooklyn, and grew up in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Spillane began writing for the pulp magazines in high school. He briefly attended Kansas State Teachers’ College, but dropped out of college before long, and returned to New York, where he worked briefly as a sales clerk at Gimbel’s, then tried his hand at writing comic books.

With the outbreak of WWII, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps, where he served principally as a fighter pilot instructor. He married for the first of three times in 1945. Returning to New York, after the war, he purchased a lot intending to build his own house. The first of the Mike Hammer mysteries, which made him world famous, was written to raise money for building material.

Spillane’s ultra-hard-boiled hero, his simple, no-nonsense prose carrying the flavor and cadences of the streets, and his readiness to push the contemporary limits of sexual description made his books ideal reading for the enormous potential market of working-class young men home from the war. He produced seven mystery novels between 1947 and 1952, which all sold in the millions of copies. Spillane quickly became one of the most financially successful writers of his day. He wrote seven of the top ten best-sellers of the 20th century.

The critical establishment thought little of Spillane’s prose style, and considered his lurid violence and inclination to celebrate vigilantism appalling, but he had one defender: Ayn Rand.

The Mike Hammer novels’ unvarnished patriotism, frankly expressed hatred of Communism, and utter lack of moral ambiguity endeared them to Rand. She probably didn’t mind the spectacular violence meted out by the tough detective to bad guys a bit either.

With Mickey Spillane we see the passing of one of the Last of the Mohicans, one of the last representatives of the WWII generation of genuinely masculine Americans, as a group, by and large much like Spillane’s own Mike Hammer: smart-mouthed and cynical, but equipped with an intransigent code of honor; quick with their fists, and always ready to come to the defense of women or the helpless; supremely competent, stoical, and strong; good men to have around in a fight or when a man’s work is needed to be done.

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SenecatheYounger quotes from the Richmond Times-Dispatch the sort of obituary we all hope to deserve (one day long from now).

Frederic Arthur (Fred) Clark, who had tired of reading obituaries noting other’s courageous battles with this or that disease, wanted it known that he lost his battle as a result of an automobile accident on June 18, 2006. True to Fred’s personal style, his final hours were spent joking with medical personnel while he whimpered, cussed, begged for narcotics and bargained with God to look over his wife and kids. He loved his family. His heart beat faster when his wife of 37 years Alice Rennie Clark entered the room and saddened a little when she left. His legacy was the good works performed by his sons, Frederic Arthur Clark III and Andrew Douglas Clark MD, PhD., along with Andy’s wife, Sara Morgan Clark. Fred’s back straightened and chest puffed out when he heard the Star Spangled Banner and his eyes teared when he heard Amazing Grace. He wouldn’t abide self important tight censored. Always an interested observer of politics, particularly what the process does to its participants, he was amused by politician’s outrage when we lie to them and amazed at what the voters would tolerate. His final wishes were “throw the bums out and don’t elect lawyers” (though it seems to make little difference). During his life he excelled at mediocrity. He loved to hear and tell jokes, especially short ones due to his limited attention span. He had a life long love affair with bacon, butter, cigars and bourbon. You always knew what Fred was thinking much to the dismay of his friend and family. His sons said of Fred, “he was often wrong, but never in doubt”. When his family was asked what they remembered about Fred, they fondly recalled how Fred never peed in the shower – on purpose. He died at MCV Hospital and sadly was deprived of his final wish which was to be run over by a beer truck on the way to the liquor store to buy booze for a double date to include his wife, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter to crash an ACLU cocktail party. In lieu of flowers, Fred asks that you make a sizable purchase at your local ABC store or Virginia winery (please, nothing French – the censored) and get rip roaring drunk at home with someone you love or hope to make love to. Word of caution though, don’t go out in public to drink because of the alcohol related laws our elected officials have passed due to their inexplicable terror at the sight of a MADD lobbyist and overwhelming compulsion to meddle in our lives. No funeral or service is planned. However, a party will be held to celebrate Fred’s life. It will be held in Midlothian, Va. Email fredsmemory@yahoo.com for more information. Fred’s ashes will be fired from his favorite cannon at a private party on the Great Wicomico River where he had a home for 25 years. Additionally, all of Fred’s friend (sic) will be asked to gather in a phone booth, to be designated in the future, to have a drink and wonder, “Fred who?”

Molliter ossa cubent. [May the earth lie lightly on his bones.]

The Blogosphere was filled today with howls of savage satisfaction at the sudden death of Ken Lay.

How can I not respond?

My wife is persuaded of Lay’s villainy, having read two of the books produced by journalists in the aftermath of Enron’s demise.

I wouldn’t read those books, but I remember reading the attack story spread across the front page of the Wall Street Journal by members of its leftwing news side, and I remember being unpersuaded that pushing the edge of the accounting practices envelope was necessarily either illegitimate or criminal.

In America, when the hound pack of the Press chases a conspicuously wealthy defendant, the prosecutor/huntsman always wins. The readily-provoked envy of the masses invariably ensures a guilty verdict. And such was Ken Lay’s unhappy fate.

The honest WSJ editorial side was skeptical of the prosecution’s case as well:

There is no doubt that Mr. Lay is guilty of bad management. He admitted Thursday that his trust in Mr. Fastow was misplaced, and there must have been other missteps. But Mr. Fastow had plenty of help in covering his tracks, both within Enron and from its outside accountants. In a criminal trial, it is not enough to say that Mr. Lay should have known. No CEO can know all that is going on in a large corporation, and the fraud at Enron was so complex that it took prosecutors more than two years to unravel.

The government’s Exhibit A will presumably be a videotape of Mr. Lay’s now-famous pep talk to employees in August 2001, telling them Enron was still “doing extremely well” and encouraging them to hold on to their stock. Many followed his advice and ended up losing much of their life savings. That aroused an understandable anger with the CEO, who was paid salary and bonuses in the millions.

But Mr. Lay was also putting his money where his mouth was. During the long slide of Enron’s share price, he continued to keep the vast majority of his personal wealth in the stock and even bought more shares, selling only when forced by margin calls. This is not consistent with the theory that he knew the company’s true situation and was out to defraud shareholders.

Mr. Lay’s co-defendant, former CEO Jeffrey Skilling, claimed that he resigned from the company for personal reasons and allegedly made $89 million in profits from selling Enron stock. By all accounts Mr. Lay came back to the company to replace Mr. Skilling as CEO because of his personal connection to it. He then did what captains are supposed to do, which is go down with his ship.

I’m not sure I believe the heart attack story, but I see no reason to inquire. The young boy from Tyrone, Missouri who delivered newspapers and mowed lawns made good, made a lot of money, lived the good life, and like many a good man was brought low. If he escaped prison and degradation by his own hand, good for him.

Perhaps Ken Lay behaved in extremis as the ancient Romans did, when Fate turned on them. Thinking of Ken Lay today, I remembered the end of Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurian:

For there remained also, for the old earthy creature still within him, that great blessedness of physical slumber. To sleep, to lose one’s self in sleep—that, as he had always recognised, was a good thing. And it was after a space of deep sleep that he awoke amid the murmuring voices of the people who had kept and tended him so carefully through his sickness, now kneeling around his bed: and what he heard confirmed, in the then perfect clearness of his soul, the inevitable suggestion of his own bodily feelings. He had often dreamt he was condemned to die, that the hour, with wild thoughts of escape, was arrived; and waking, with the sun all around him, in complete liberty of life, had been full of gratitude for his place there, alive still, in the land of the living. He read surely, now, in the manner, the doings, of these people, some of whom were passing out through the doorway, where the heavy sunlight in very deed lay, that his last morning was come, and turned to think once more of the beloved. Often had he fancied of old that not to die on a dark or rainy day might itself have a little alleviating grace or favour about it. The people around his bed were praying fervently—Abi! Abi! Anima Christiana! [“Depart! Depart! Christian Soul!”] In the moments of his extreme helplessness their mystic bread had been placed, had descended like a snow-flake from the sky, between his lips. Gentle fingers had applied to hands and feet, to all those old passage-ways of the senses, through which the world had come and gone for him, now so dim and obstructed, a medicinable oil. It was the same people who, in the gray, austere evening of that day, took up his remains, and buried them secretly, with their accustomed prayers; but with joy also, holding his death, according to their generous view in this matter, to have been of the nature of martyrdom; and martyrdom, as the church had always said, a kind of sacrament with plenary grace.

Author David Drake penned a fine tribute.

H/T to Glenn Reynolds.