The man who trained shoe-bomber Richard Reid, Zacharias Mousssaoui, hundreds of other terrorists, 52 year-old Midhat Mursi, also known as Abu Khabab al-Masri, was one of the Al Qaeda leaders present at last Friday’s meeting in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier tribal district, slain in a Predator-drone missile strike directed by US Intelligence operatives. The US government had been offering a $5 million reward for Mirsi’s capture.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s second-in-command, had been also been expected to be present at the targeted meeting, but is –so far– reported to have failed to attend.

ABC News report.

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Meanwhile, AP is offering a rather confusing story by Riaz Khan, describing Pakistani Intelligence searching for missing bodies of the terrorist victims of last Friday’s missile strike.

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Update

Reuters reports that Pakistani intelligence has identified two others of the slain terrorists. One was Abdul Rehman Al-Misri al Maghribi chief of al Qaeda’s media department, and a son-in-law of al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri. The other was Abu Obaidah al Misri, al Qaeda’s chief of operations in Kunar province, Afghanistan. The presence of Zawahiri’s son-in-law tends to suggest that he was indeed scheduled to be present. The fourth deceased terorist has allegedly not yet been identified.

Hat tip to John Hinderaker.

When we commented yesterday negatively on the Supreme Court decision in Gonzales, et. al. v. Oregon, we must confess that we had not yet gotten around to reading the actual decision. Nor were we familiar with the specifics of the Oregon law. Its title, the Oregon Death With Dignity Act (ODWDA), had precisely the ring of liberal double-speak to it, and we had leapt (understandably, we would argue) to the conclusion that the act basically encompassed oldsters going to the doctor’s office to be treated in the manner of the veterinarian putting to sleep the family cat. The reality was clearly quite different.

(The Supreme Court decision states:)

The Oregon Death With Dignity Act (ODWDA) exempts from civil or criminal liability state-licensed physicians who, in compliance with ODWDA’s specific safeguards, dispense or prescribe a lethal dose of drugs upon the request of a terminally ill patient.

Since our own position is really that any rational adult ought to be able to buy, and use, any medication or consciousness-altering item he desires without a prescription, it is clear that we failed to recognize initially the curious occurrence of the court’s liberal majority arriving at a perfectly correct decision.

Justice Scalia seems to have suffered from the same knee-jerk reaction we did initially, which was joined by Justices Roberts and Thomas. But Clarence Thomas additionally wrote a separate dissent, commenting sarcastically:

I agree with limiting the applications of the CSA [Controlled Substances Act] in a manner consistent with the principles of federalism and our constitutional structure. Raich, supra, at ___ (THOMAS, J., dissenting); cf. Whitman, supra, at 486—487 (THOMAS, J., concurring) (noting constitutional concerns with broad delegations of authority to administrative agencies). But that is now water over the dam. The relevance of such considerations was at its zenith in Raich, when we considered whether the CSA could be applied to the intrastate possession of a controlled substance consistent with the limited federal powers enumerated by the Constitution. Such considerations have little, if any, relevance where, as here, we are merely presented with a question of statutory interpretation, and not the extent of constitutionally permissible federal power. This is particularly true where, as here, we are interpreting broad, straightforward language within a statutory framework that a majority of this Court has concluded is so comprehensive that it necessarily nullifies the States’ “ ‘traditional . . . powers . . . to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens.’ ? Raich, supra, at ___, n. 38 (slip op., at 27, n. 38). The Court’s reliance upon the constitutional principles that it rejected in Raich—albeit under the guise of statutory interpretation—is perplexing to say the least. Accordingly, I respectfully dissent.

In other words, Thomas still thinks the Constitution ought to preclude such Federal intrusions, but the since the Court already decided otherwise in Raich, what can he do but dissent from the tortured reasoning used to achieve a different result this time?

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I was just telling my wife: I can remember being wrong once before. I think it was in 1954…

Wretchard notes how well H.G. Wells’ 1898 description, in his classic War of the Worlds , of mankind’s failure to detect signs, or conceive the possibility, of a Martian Invasion fits the failure of the Western democracies a century later to recognize a rising threat from closer to home, but very nearly as alien in its values and perspective (and indifference to the destruction of human life) as any Martians.

H.G. Wells described how complacent men could be in the presence of unseen but growing danger.

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most, terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.

With a few changes Wells’ paragraph could describe the mixture of smug amusement with which the Western intellectual elite watched the growing number of Wahabist mosques, the photography of landmarks, the application for flying lessons and the attendance at courses of nuclear physics by students from older worlds. They laughed, for nothing could threaten the dominion of Western Man, supreme in his socialized state at the End of History. Even after September 11 the only question for many was how soon history would return to normal after a temporary inconvenience. Little did they imagine that the expansion of the European Union, the Kyoto Agreements and Reproductive Rights — all the preoccupations of their unshakable world — might be the least of humanity’s concerns in the coming years.

Benjamin Franklin, born January 17, 1706 in Boston, is often referred to as “the first American.”

It was he who provided the classic model of the American self-made man (and autodidact), who first achieves personal independence by success in business, using it as his stepping-stone to worthier achievement in the realms of learning or of politics. And it was Franklin who first synthetized the characteristically American political blend of conservative skepticism with broadminded liberality, tempered by the businessman’s sense of practicality.

Franklin became rich as printer, publisher, and author, then with the leisure provided by the independence he had earned, turned his attention to experimental science. In the sciences, Franklin’s achievements were of international importance (he contributed greatly to the understanding of electricity), but probably even more important were the practical inventions which resulted from his experiments, or simply from his restless inclination toward problem-solving. We owe to Franklin: bifocal eyeglasses, the odometer, lightning rods, and the Franklin stove (among others), the last of which alone completely revolutionized the economy of domestic life.

In the struggle for American independence, Franklin, though the oldest, proved perhaps the most indispensable of the framers after Washington. He edited the draft of the Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson. To Franklin’s scientific prestige, to his diplomatic abilities, and to his personal savoir faire and charm, we owe the French Alliance which made Revolutionary victory possible.

Franklin’s carefully crafted mature persona, the grandfatherly amiability artfully cloaking the deep and crafty intelligence, still proves a serviceable model for worldly and successful men to use to disarm potential opponents today. And it is Franklin’s own characteristic combination of superb practical competence allied to modesty and deprecatory humor, which defined our national version of sprezzatura.

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Franklin’s Autobiography

Christopher Hitchens reflects on Franklin in today’s Wall Street Journal.

Wikipedia summary

Dudley R. Herschbach

Some of his inventions

Franklin and lightning rods

Niall of the Nine Hostages, a High King of Ireland who flourished early-to-mid 5th century A.D., and whose raids on the coastline of Britain are conventionally credited with bringing Saint Patrick to Ireland as a captive slave, is the most likely source of Y-chromosomal DNA found by scientists to be shared by one in twelve Irish males, and an estimated 3 million men world-wide.

Reuters report, and abstract of paper (subscribers only) in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

New York Times

Link

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Hat tip to Michelle Malkin.

The US Supreme Court upheld Oregon’s Physician Assisted Suicide Law by a 6-3 vote.

In his recent novel No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy has the old timey Texas Sheriff Bell reminisce:

Here a year or two back me and Loretta went to a conference in Corpus Christi and I got set next to this woman, she was the wife of somebody or other. And she kept talking about the right wing this and the right wing that… She kept on, kept on. Finally told me, said: I dont like the way this country is headed. I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion. And I said well mam I don’t think you got any worries about the way this country is headed. The way I see it goin I dont have much doubt but what she’ll be able to have an abortion. I’m goin to say that not only will she be able to have an abortion, she’ll be able to have you put to sleep. Which pretty much ended the conversation.

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The negative opinion ofthe Supreme Court’s ruling implied by the use of the quotation has been retracted.

Southeast Asia News quotes other, more recent sources, indicating that Depkafile and the certain portions of MSM may have been mistaken. Even if Zawahiri is ultimately firmly established not to have been present, the Friday gathering in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier tribal district clearly did constitute the proverbial target rich environment, and US forces on the scene were clearly justified in firing on them.

Islamabad – Authorities in the Pakistani tribal region of Bajaur on Tuesday claimed that a controversial U.S. missile strike on the region last Friday killed ‘at least four’ foreign militants.

‘There is no doubt that 10 to 12 extremists including foreigners had been invited to a dinner,’ said a statement from Mohammad Faheem Wazir, senior official in Khar, the administrative centre of the Bajaur agency.

Based on the findings of a joint investigation team, the statement regretted the loss of civilian lives in the strike but said at least a dozen extremists including two Pakistani clerics wanted by the authorities were also present.

Archaeologists working in Bosnia are coming to accept local descriptions of a two thousand foot high hill in the vicinity of Visoko, northwest of Sarajevo, as a Bronze Age pyramid.

Archaeologists working in Visoko, Bosnia-Herzegovina, about 20 miles northwest of Sarajevo, discovered what might prove to be a European pyramid four times taller that the Great Pyramid of Egypt.

Bosnian archaeologist Semir Osmanagic, in an interview with the Associated Press, cautioned against jumping to conclusions, but preliminary investigations suggest some ancient culture, perhaps the Bronze Age Illyrian people, carved a natural hill into a pyramidal shape. The hill is 2,120 feet high and, according to Osmanagic, has “all the elements” of an artificial structure: “four perfectly shaped slopes pointing toward the cardinal points, a flat top and an entrance complex.”

Once the hill was shaped, it appears to have been faced with concretelike blocks made from an “unnatural mixture of gravel.”

Local residents long have referred to the hill as a pyramid, but no archaeologist seriously seems to have considered the possibility that the hill was in any way artificial until recently.

BBC News reports:

A parrot owner was alerted to his girlfriend’s infidelity when his talkative pet let the cat out of the bag by squawking “I love you Gary”.

The Telegraph provides a report that reminds the reader of John Buchan’s classic Greenmantle (1916), a thriller on the theme of the threat to European civilization posed by a plot to rally the Muslim world to rise in Holy War on behalf of an Islamic messiah. The Telegraph story suggests that the Iranian regime’s quest to build nuclear weapons, and inclination to confront the West, are products of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s mystical belief in the return of the Twelfth Imam at the End of Days.

Kenji Yoshino, Deputy Dean for Intellectual Life (which very title provokes sarcasm) and Professor at Yale Law School, has made a staggering new breakthrough in the ever-burgeoning Academic industry of the study of victimization’s infinite forms. Writing in a New York Times Magazine feature article (promoting a new book on the same subject), Yoshino recalls his own unhappy experiences:

When I began teaching at Yale Law School in 1998, a friend spoke to me frankly. “You’ll have a better chance at tenure,” he said, “if you’re a homosexual professional than if you’re a professional homosexual.”

It wasn’t long before I found myself resisting the demand to conform. What bothered me was not that I had to engage in straight-acting behavior, much of which felt natural to me. What bothered me was the felt need to mute my passion for gay subjects, people, culture.

It may strike many readers as an enviable enough fate to be a tenured Professor at Yale Law School, not to mention, Deputy Dean for Intellectual Life, but what real satisfaction can a chap derive from such trifles, when the reactionary prejudices of a cruel society will not grant him the right to allow his inner screaming queen to emerge and swish proudly in public in full daylight?

Long after I came out, I still experienced the need to assimilate to straight norms. But I didn’t have a word for this demand to tone down my known gayness.

Then I found my word, in the sociologist Erving Goffman’s book “Stigma.” Written in 1963, the book describes how various groups – including the disabled, the elderly and the obese – manage their “spoiled” identities. After discussing passing, Goffman observes that “persons who are ready to admit possession of a stigma. . .may nonetheless make a great effort to keep the stigma from looming large.” He calls this behavior covering. He distinguishes passing from covering by noting that passing pertains to the visibility of a characteristic, while covering pertains to its obtrusiveness. He relates how F.D.R. stationed himself behind a desk before his advisers came in for meetings. Roosevelt was not passing, since everyone knew he used a wheelchair. He was covering, playing down his disability so people would focus on his more conventionally presidential qualities.

As is often the case when you learn a new idea, I began to perceive covering everywhere. Leafing through a magazine, I read that Helen Keller replaced her natural eyes (one of which protruded) with brilliant blue glass ones. On the radio, I heard that Margaret Thatcher went to a voice coach to lower the pitch of her voice. Friends began to send me e-mail. Did I know that Martin Sheen was Ramon Estevez on his birth certificate, that Ben Kingsley was Krishna Bhanji, that Kirk Douglas was Issur Danielovitch Demsky and that Jon Stewart was Jonathan Leibowitz?…

The new civil rights begins with the observation that everyone covers.

One might expect serious resistance to a startlingly dramatic new notion of Civil Rights, to a new progressive demand for something far beyond mere tolerance of the forms of minority status which are innate or unchosen, which persons cannot ( or are believed, at least, to be unable to) do anything about, but Yoshino has considered this, and believes he has the answer.

When I lecture on covering, I often encounter what I think of as the “angry straight white man” reaction. A member of the audience, almost invariably a white man, almost invariably angry, denies that covering is a civil rights issue. Why shouldn’t racial minorities or women or gays have to cover? These groups should receive legal protection against discrimination for things they cannot help. But why should they receive protection for behaviors within their control – wearing cornrows, acting “feminine” or flaunting their sexuality? After all, the questioner says, I have to cover all the time. I have to mute my depression, or my obesity, or my alcoholism, or my shyness, or my working-class background or my nameless anomie. I, too, am one of the mass of men leading lives of quiet desperation. Why should legally protected groups have a right to self-expression I do not? Why should my struggle for an authentic self matter less?

I surprise these individuals when I agree. Contemporary civil rights has erred in focusing solely on traditional civil rights groups – racial minorities, women, gays, religious minorities and people with disabilities. This assumes those in the so-called mainstream – those straight white men – do not also cover. They are understood only as obstacles, as people who prevent others from expressing themselves, rather than as individuals who are themselves struggling for self-definition. No wonder they often respond to civil rights advocates with hostility. They experience us as asking for an entitlement they themselves have been refused – an expression of their full humanity.

Civil rights must rise into a new, more inclusive register.

In the end, the School of Ressentiment proves universally inclusive. The answer to each and every individual id’s discontents with Civilization’s restraints is Universal Revolution. Everyone just needs to let his freak flag fly. For the Old Adam and the New Caliban alike, from the crudity of the lower classes to the depravity of the elite, all norms and standards must be swept aside, and any negative judgment of the self in any form or kind prohibited by the ideology of the new Enlightenment. A new liberated mankind will march forward into an idyllic future of self-realization and universal equality, just by each individual human being “being himself.” Koombayah!