Matthias Politycki, travelling as a Eurowuss intellectual in the Third World, experiences his own inferiority to the dusky brutes, and pines for a gentle counter-enlightenment. There is term for the condition in which the civilized man thinks himself into a condition of moral paralysis, envies the primitive his lack of thought, and yearns for the dark heat of the blood. The term is decadence.

While researching my new novel, I spent several months living in Cuba, in the predominantly Black south of the island, avoiding dollar tourism and operating with pesos wherever possible. It was an unforgettable time, in the course of which I had to rethink all the positions I had previously stood by unquestioningly. And a time that was so hard, both physically and spiritually, that I was often reduced almost to tears. The brutality of life, taking no notice of the moral (or aesthetic) standards of an Old European, this unfettered wildness of the will that not infrequently burst out in sheer violence — was it permissible for me to despise it as a lack of culture? Or was I supposed to admire it as a superabundance of vitality for which I was never going to be any match? Punching one’s way into a bakery after waiting in line for bread for one or two hours I could understand; but fisticuffs over a seat on a bus seemed to me to point to more than just the struggle for survival, at the very least an energy surplus that we here in sated Europe simply have no idea of.

At times I was so totally embarrassed by these eruptions of physical force that I tried to convince myself that I felt the epochal exhaustion of the entire Old World in my white skin. Faced with the facts, such attempts to camouflage sheer weakness as the superiority of refined powers of reason were no help whatsoever. On the contrary, I could soon feel the power of these people even when they observed me from the roadside. At times there was such a sense of being watched in the air that as a European, you had to really pull yourself together in order to keep your head held high as you went on your way.

observes James Lileks:

The Democrats have convinced most Americans that they’d have left Saddam chuckling in his palaces after 9/11, that they’d oppose any war against a sworn enemy of the United States unless Richard Clarke personally saw its president give a ticking nuke to terrorists and lead them in a stirring rendition of “New York, New York.”

Worst of all, they seem to want it to be 1973 again — as if the nation yearned to bob for horse-apples in the vat of shame.

Granted, the loss of Vietnam was great for the Democrats. But it really wasn’t very good for the rest of the country, to say nothing of the Vietnamese.

There’s a curious nostalgia for the ’70s among the old-guard institutional left; America had been humbled, which was good for humanity, and we were facing a future of scarcity and decline, which was good for the planet.

Beneath it all runs a rushing river of adolescent nihilism, roiling with contempt for that vast human stain known as Western Civilization. If it hasn’t given us universal health care, gay marriage and the replacement of Wal-Marts with local co-ops by 2007, well, to hell with it. And those co-ops had better offer reusable bags for our groceries. Hemp bags.

This strain of American defeatism never died; it just slank away and chewed its tongue until the time was right. And that’s now!

Senator Joe Lieberman called today for the creation of a bipartisan War Cabinet.

Lieberman, whom the Bush administration has praised repeatedly for his war stance, defended the president. “It’s time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge he’ll be commander-in-chief for three more years,” the senator said. “We undermine the president’s credibility at our nation’s peril.”

Lieberman’s responsible behavior is commendable, but where could we find other responsible democrats beyond himself and Zell Miller, short of contacting Scoop Jackson by Ouija board?

Rick Moran is critical of the CIA.

How many times can one agency be so wrong about so many things while at the same time selectively leaking classified data in order to put themselves in the best possible light and engage in partisan back stabbing?

The list of events and trends that the CIA has failed to either alert the government to or analyzed incorrectly in their capacity as the nation’s foreign watch dogs is astonishing. Over the past quarter century, they have proven themselves to be not just inept but also foolish, arrogant, corrupt, and incompetent as the forces of history and the machinations of evil men escaped their myopic gaze resulting in the injury and death of thousands of United States citizens. Their mistakes have also cost the US in the arena of diplomacy as faulty — sometimes ludicrous — analysis regarding both our friends and enemies has placed our diplomats and negotiators on unsound footing.

Even a Hippie Chick Journalist needs a gun.

Steve Zorn, a 22 year old rap performing resident of St. Paris, Ohio was drinking in celebration of an expected record deal (I celebrate my own expected record deals of an evening pretty frequently too), and finding his pen gun not working, naturally put the gun this head and triggered it, assuming this was perfectly safe. His equally-swift mother, Lisa McCoy-Horn, is reported to be lobbying lawmakers to outlaw pen guns, i.e. already pretty-universally-illegal small-caliber, single-shot weapons that resemble pens.

Those pouting spooks and their MSM friends have, in the opinion of this writer, gone too far this time. They’ve gotten carried away by breathing in too much of the oxygen-deprived atmosphere of high-mindedness prevailing within their rarified liberal elite circles, and have lost all touch with reality, specifically the reality of what normal people are going to think of all the recent “Gotcha! You are sooo mean to the poor widdle terrorists” stories.

ABC news informs the world, sternly wagging its finger under the nose of the Bush Administration, that though the wounded-in-capture

Abu Zubaydah was given proper care… Once healthy, he was slapped, grabbed, made to stand long hours in a cold cell, and finally handcuffed and strapped feet up to a water board until after 0.31 seconds he begged for mercy and began to cooperate.

Can you imagine? Not only grabbed, but actually slapped! And then the poor lamb had his face immersed in water for a soul-shattering 31 seconds before this brave soldier of the Prophet crumbled and began singing like a canary.

Face it, gentlemen. Abu Zubaydah was not really some bird-watching tourist erroneously scooped up in a random police sweep. He was a very major figure in Al Qaeda, its chief of military operations and its chief recruiter. Infoplease says:

Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Husayn Abu Zubaydah is a Palestinian long believed to be one of Osama bin Laden’s top lieutenants. Experts think Abu Zubaydah became al-Qaeda’s chief of military operations after Muhammed Atef was killed in a U.S. bombing raid on Afghanistan in Nov. 2001. Early in 2002, intelligence experts said Abu Zubaydah was reorganizing the far-flung remnants of the al-Qaeda network to plan further terrorist actions. He is suspected of helping plan a wave of incidents that was to have taken place after Sept. 11, 2001, including attacks on the American embassies in Paris and Sarajevo.

Abu Zubaydah has a long history of involvement with al-Qaeda. In 1999, a Jordanian military court sentenced Abu Zubaydah in absentia to death for plotting to attack tourist sites in Jordan around the millennium.

Abu Zubaydah also organized terrorist attacks on the millennium celebrations in the Los Angeles in Dec. 1999, according Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian convicted of involvement in that plan. During his trial Ressam also said Abu Zubaydah directed Afghan terrorist camps and recruitment for al-Qaeda. Ressam indicated that Abu Zubaydah told him to obtain Canadian passports so others could carry out attacks against the U.S.

There is reason to believe that grabbing Mr. Zubaydah, shaking him, and giving him a good slap, may very well have saved a great many innocent American lives by thwarting a project he had been working on in his spare time, involving the detonation of a dirty bomb somewhere in the United States:

AP 11 Jun 2002:

Jose Padilla, the alleged American al-Qaida operative, became a protege of top Osama bin Laden lieutenant Abu Zubaydah late last year, even as the war on terrorism raged around them in Afghanistan, U.S. officials said.

But Abu Zubaydah fell into U.S. hands in late March, before Padilla could carry out any attacks, officials said. The prisoner became one of several sources of information that led U.S. authorities to Padilla.

While left-wing members of the urban chattering classes may get their knickers in a twist over “secret renditions” and the occasional grabbing and slapping of terrorist fanatics plotting mass-murder attacks on innocent people, ordinary normal Americans are only too well aware that they themselves might just one day happen to be the very same innocent people targeted by these monsters for cruel and untimely death. Most Americans do not live in the same privileged dreamworld as our liberal elite, and consequently do not subscribe to the same kind of ultra-scrupulous moral philosophies dictating that one must love thine enemy and get him an ACLU attorney. Most Americans really wouldn’t mind one tiny bit, if rough men charged with protecting their lives found it desirable to chop the likes of Mr. Zubaydah into a fine minced pate, and proceeded to serve him on toast, if that is what it took to keep innocent people at home safe from Mr. Zubaydah’s friends’ murderous plots.

My guess is that the great majority of Americans are not going to like this kind of leaking, and they are not going to like the leakers or the MSM which irrresponsibly publishes information jeopardizing this country’s efforts in the War on Terror, and that the cries of indignation drawn from the American public by the publication of this improperly disclosed intelligence information, are not going to be cries demanding the heads of leading figures in the Bush Administration or that of the fellow who gave Mr. Zubaydah a good slap. What the American public is really going to want are the heads of the pouting-spook leakers and those of the reporters assisting them.

The headlines read:

Washington Post: DeLay’s Felony Charge Is Upheld

San Francisco Chronicle: DeLay can’t avoid trial over charges

Houston Chronicle: Ruling diminishes likelihood DeLay regains leader’s post

when what they should be saying is:

BBC: DeLay conspiracy charge dropped

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And I’m not the only one who noticed. Daniel J. Solove made precisely the same point today. Hat tip to Jonah Goldberg.

Ralph Peters writes:

Patriotism? Forget it.

After Watergate, patriotism became an embarrassment among journalists. They’re “citizens of the world.” CNN International has grown so casually anti-American that it rivals the BBC, while much of big media here at home gives terrorist atrocities a pass, while celebrating the slightest errors of our troops with front-page headlines.

ABC News is reporting that

Current and former CIA officers speaking to ABC News on the condition of confidentiality say the United States scrambled to get all the suspects off European soil before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived there today. The officers say 11 top al Qaeda suspects have now been moved to a new CIA facility in the North African desert.

The disgrunted intelligence officers even disclosed an actual list of 12 high-value targets allegedly held by the CIA, and ABC is reporting it :

Abu Zubaydah: Held first in Thailand then Poland

Abu Faraj al-Libbi: Held in Poland

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Category link to previous and later related articles.

The Sunday Times remembers Franz Jolowicz, owner 1976-1984 of Discophile, New York City’s most illustrious classical record store, who passed away November 8th.

It may seem peculiar to some who did not live there then that the Times published a major obituary of the one-time owner of a small basement shop on St. Mark’s Place, officially 26 West 8th Street, which closed its doors more than twenty years ago. But in its day Franz’ subteraenean sanctum was one of New York City musical culture’s best-known and most important landmarks.

Franz, assisted by his partner Dominic (looked like Lorre, sounded like Capote), operated as passionate recording importer, pirate, retailer, and connoisseur. His piercing dark eyes glaring forth indignantly from beneath formidable Mittel-Europan brows, Franz would sit chain-smoking behind his counter, purveying carefully-selected benchmark recordings of astonishingly diverse international origin, while –assisted by a loyal clientele– carrying on a scathing critique of the ignorance and bad taste of the classical recording industry, and of the critics writing in England’s Gramaphone Magazine, at whose absurd fondness for the likes of Klemperer, Solti, and Sutherland, he particularly loved to jeer.

Strange docecahedronal speakers, which Franz himself admitted weren’t any good, but which did look hi-tech and could be suspended from the ceiling leaving more room for LPs, usually played softly in the background, but Franz would crank the volume up and rattle the windows of his little shop to demonstrate particular favorites. I can remember Franz playing a 1944 Berlin Gieseking performance of the Emperor Concerto, gleefully pointing out the sound of anti-aircraft fire in the background, and then joking at an audible cough from the audience: “That was Goebbels!”

He knew his records. Franz sold us a marvellous set of Callas arias, many recorded at rehearsals, on the BJR label. Could BJR have been his own? He introduced us also to the extraordinary early performances of the Franco-Belgian Flonzaley Quartet, and it was Franz who prevailed on us to buy the Vienna Concerthaus Quartet’s unrivalled Schuberts, and the superb contemporary Tatrai Quartet Haydns. I could go on for pages. He will be missed.

I did not know that Franz was once a soldier, and served in La Legion Etrangere. I’ll have to find an appropriate version of Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden, and play it for Franz later. No Gerhard Husch unfortunately, I fear, no Schlussnuss. I might have Leo Slezak. Bleib du im ew’gen Leben, Franz.

The Wall Street Journal this morning published a sob story about the excessive difficulty of the California Bar Exam, which in 2004 was passed by only 44% of those taking the test. The WSJ does not tell its readers that the Japanese Bar Exam is passed by only 3% of aspiring attorneys. Lucky Japan! There must be considerably less unnecessary litigation in the Land of the Rising Sun.

But even the Japanese Bar Exam’s legendarily low pass rate looks like a piece of cake compared to the under 1% passing rate of the hardest test, the Japanese 8th dan Kendo examination (46:44 minute video).

There are more than two million practioners of the sport of Kendo, the art of Japanese fencing, in Japan. Since WWII, only 400 of these have successfully made it past the 8th dan examination. The Japanese Kendo Association actually distingushes ten levels (dan) of mastery of the sport, but the 8th dan, hachi dan, is the last level requiring a physical test, and the most difficult.