Hilzoy asks:

What’s the (European) work that is most inexplicably not in print in an English translation?

Let’s substitute regrettably for inexplicably, since the reason is not inexplicable at all, and mention the novels and stories of Catholic, Conservative Werner Bergengruen (1892-1964), particularly his trilogy: Der letze Rittmeister (1952), Die Rittmeisterin (1954), and Die dritte Kranz (1962).

Only the first of the trilogy, published in England as The Last Captain of Horse — a Portrait of Chivalry (Thames & Hudson, 1953), and Der Grosstyrann und das Gericht (1935), published as A Matter of Conscience (Thames & Hudson, 1952), have ever been translated, and both are long out of print.

Daniel Henniger in a well-worth reading editorial in today’s WSJ considers the possibilities of the motivations for the MSM’s obsessive coverage of L’Affaire Plame:

Two reasons emerge. The first is if Patrick Fitzgerald indicted Karl Rove for violating this law, Mr. Rove likely would resign and the Bush presidency would be significantly damaged. The alternative explanation is that the press is merely pursuing a possible violation of federal law and any damage to the presidency is therefore the self-inflicted wound of Ms. Plame’s outer. If it is the former, then the conservative paranoia about the press isn’t paranoia. If the latter, then the Beltway press has lost its mind; they are making the practice of journalism more litigious for all the rest of us.

Britain’s New Conservative Party Leader David Cameron stands bravely on both sides of every question.

had some good lines on the Laura Ingraham show. Quoted at Daisy Cutter.

A closer look at yesterday’s news story suggests ties between a humanitarian organization funded by vehemently-anti-Bush billionaire George Soros and the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity group, the early Iraq War era public face of the pouting spooks managing the Anti-Bush Administration Intelligence campaign.

Yesterday’s Intel leak alleging that Poland was the principal site of secret CIA detentions was provided by the Soros-funded Human Rights Watch:

Marc Garlasco, a senior military analyst with the rights organization, told Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza that Human Rights Watch had documents corroborating its case about Poland, and showing Romania was a transit point for moving prisoners.

“Poland was the main base of interrogating prisoners and Romania was more of a hub,” Garlasco told the newspaper in an interview in Geneva, Switzerland. “This is what our sources from the CIA tell us and what is shown from the documents we gathered.”

In an interview with The Washington Post on November 11, 2003, Soros said that removing Bush from office was the “central focus of my life” and “a matter of life and death” for which he would willingly sacrifice his entire fortune.

In a November 5, 2004 NPR interview asserting unacceptable levels of civilian casualties produced by US military operations in Iraq, Human Rights Watch spokesman, Marc Garlasco described his background:

MARC GARLASCO: Right before I took my job at Human Rights Watch, I was the chief of high value targeting working out of the Pentagon, and was pretty heavily involved in the war in Iraq. I think the most aim points I had going down in any one night was about 411 weapons. On the 11th of April of 2003, I left. I, I worked my last air strike. And so I’m intimately familiar with targeting and how bombs actually meet their targets.

Baghdad fell April 9th. Garlasco had been a civilian intelligence officer working in the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Ray McGovern, in an interview with Moonbat journal Mother Jones, states that VIPS was organized in January of 2003.

We established our group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, in January of last year. Before that several of us had been writing op-eds, and we had been giving each other sanity checks, because the conclusions we were coming up with were pretty far out — that the President and the Secretary of State were lying through their teeth.

According to McGovern, VIPS, at the time of the interview (March 2004), had 35 members consisting of retired and resigned officials from the FBI, Defense Intelligence, NSA, Army Intelligence, and the State Department, and also boasted of the existence of active members of the intelligence community working with VIPS, but “not as members.”

Reference 1

Reference 2

Not so very long ago, almost universally accepted common wisdom blamed the Great Depression on “the excesses of capitalism,” and believed that it was Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal which saved the capitalist system from itself by the addition of social welfare and more intense federal management of the economy. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the world has since turned upside down:

For decades, many economists and policy makers thought the Depression was the inevitable consequence of excess investment, flawed corporate governance and speculation in the 1920s, culminating in the 1929 stock-market crash. That view was reinforced by John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1955 book “The Great Crash, 1929.”

Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz upended that view in 1963. In “A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960,” they argued that the Depression was far from inevitable, but brought about by an “inept” Federal Reserve. First, they said, the Fed foolishly raised interest rates in 1928 to end speculation on Wall Street, causing a recession the next year that precipitated the crash. Then, it let thousands of banks fail and the money supply shrink. In part, it thought weak banks should be allowed to fail. It also feared that lower interest rates might lead foreigners to dump dollars, straining the currency’s link to gold.

Mr. Bernanke read the book as a graduate student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1970s. “I was hooked, and I have been a student of monetary economics and economic history ever since,” he recalled at a 2002 conference honoring Mr. Friedman’s 90th birthday. Mr. Bernanke, by then one of the Fed’s seven governors, told Mr. Friedman: “Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.”

Popular Mechanics has an interesting article on how US troops are improvising in order to win in Iraq. Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Harvard red crimson in tooth and claw department:

Does Harvard need its own glossy life-style magazine for the sophisticated coed? Two Harvard sophomores thought so, and each produced her own.

Scene — a would-be Vanity Fair for 02138 Ivies, founded by a no-nonsense art history major who interned at YM in ninth grade — hit the Harvard campus Thursday morning [12/1]. Freeze — a CosmoGIRL! for the Crimson coed, founded by a fast-talking government major who’s into romance novels and Audrey Hepburn — launches Dec. 9. Both mags are written, edited, photographed, and designed by Harvard undergraduates. Both are light reads, downtime diversions with columns on sex and clothes modeled by students.

Comparison:

WHY?

To readers from Scene co-editors Emily Washkowitz and Rebecca Kaden:
”We think of Scene as what is missing from the standard Harvard tour. It is not Harvard as reputation holds, but the Harvard as we, the students who make it, know it. It is an attempt to capture the detail — to portray the events, the people, the passions and the talents that make up the experience that we are all a part of.”

To readers from Freeze editor Thea Sebastian:
”I believe in escapism. I believe that world politics and micro-finance are important, sure. But sometimes, we all need to relax. . . . Fundamentally college kids need something their OWN. They need a periodical that specifically targets THEM — and bridges that crucial gap between Friday night football and 9-5 America.”

WHERE?

Scene’s New York chic: from ”Wearing Deco”

”The Chrysler Building is an icon of the Manhattan skyline. But for Lewis A. Remele ’06, an Art History concentrator, it’s an inspiration for a cocktail dress.”

Freeze’s Boston schtick: from ”10 Perfect Dates in Boston”

”The Mapparium: One of Boston’s most awe-inspiring sights, this is an absolute must for any winter date.”

WHO?

From Scene’s ”The 10 People on the Scene You Ought to Know”

”Jack McCambridge is probably the most widely known name on the Harvard campus. He seems to do everything — a leader on the Harvard Concert Commission, involved in the UC and the Harvard AIDS Coalition, President of the Fox, the list goes on.”

From Freeze’s ”10 Hot Harvard Men”

Peter Wood on his first kiss: ”I was in eighth grade at the time. I vividly recall spending about an hour the night before making out with my hand to practice.”

WHAT?

From Scene’s ”Ready for Takeoff”

”Where is a hipster to turn for some cerebral pop music? Chances are Sufjan Stevens didn’t come to mind for most people, but it’s about time that you make that adjustment.”

From Freeze’s ”Embarrassing Moments”

”One day, in the middle of the summer, my friend dared me to take off my entire bathing suit, while swimming at a horribly crowded public beach. . . . Well, to make a long story short, we searched for my bikini pants for about an hour.”

George Will exposes another spectacular waste of federal tax money: subsidized television upgrades:

Feeling, evidently, flush with (other people’s) cash, the Senate has concocted a novel way to spend $3 billion: create a new entitlement. The Senate has passed — and so has the House, with differences — an entitlement to digital television.

If this filigree on the welfare state becomes law, everyone who owns old analog television sets — everyone from your Aunt Emma in her wee apartment to the millionaire in the neighborhood McMansion who has such sets in the maid’s room and the guest house — will get subsidies to pay for making those sets capable of receiving digital signals….
Remember, although it is difficult to do so, that Republicans control Congress. And today’s up-to-date conservatism does not stand idly by expecting people to actually pursue happiness on their own. Hence the new entitlement from Congress to help all Americans acquire converter boxes to put on top of old analog sets, making the sets able to receive digital programming. All Americans — rich and poor; it is uncompassionate to discriminate on the basis of money when dispersing money — will be equally entitled to the help.

The $990 million House version of this entitlement — call it No Couch Potato Left Behind — is (relatively) parsimonious: Consumers would get vouchers worth only $40 and would be restricted to a measly two vouchers per household. The Senate’s more spacious entitlement would pay for most of the cost — $50 to $60 — of the converter boxes. But there is Republican rigor in this: Consumers would be required to pay $10. That is the conservatism in compassionate conservatism.

Norman Podhoretz views recent liberal panic over the War in Iraq in Washington and in the MSM, analyses the situation, and concludes:

In Iraq today, however, and in the Middle East as a whole, a successful outcome is staring us in the face. Clearly, then, the panic over Iraq—which expresses itself in increasingly frenzied calls for the withdrawal of our forces—cannot have been caused by the prospect of defeat. On the contrary, my twofold guess is that the real fear behind it is not that we are losing but that we are winning, and that what has catalyzed this fear into a genuine panic is the realization that the chances of pulling off the proverbial feat of snatching an American defeat from the jaws of victory are rapidly running out.

The Republican Party has a new video identifying the democrats’ strategy for the War on Terror, titled “Retreat and Defeat.” I particularly liked the old-fashioned line pointing out that “the enemy is watching too.”

Hat tip to Michelle Malkin.

The NY Times reports on Chinese workers paid for playing online multiplayer games in 12 hour shifts in order to accumulate early level advances in rank, wealth, skills, weapons, and artifacts for people in more affluent countries who prefer to skip the slow and laborious process of developing an advanced player persona. The practice is known as “gold-farming,” a name referring to the accumulation of imaginary on-line currency used for purchasing training and items within the universe of the game by repetitive tasks.

There have got to be worse jobs.