Peter Wehner in the Washington Post notes some reasons for thinking things are not so bad after all.

By now Americans know the litany: The nation is engaged in a difficult and costly war in Iraq; Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon; gas prices are high; the costs of reconstructing the Gulf Coast region are huge; illegal immigration is a major problem — and more.

These issues are real and pressing. But they aren’t the whole story — and they ought not color the lens through which we see all other events. We hear a great deal about the problems we face. We hear hardly anything about the encouraging developments. Off-key as it may sound in the current environment, a strong case can be made that in a number of areas there are positive trends and considerable progress. Perhaps the place to begin is with an empirical assessment of where we are.

What happens when you combine 200 liters of Diet Coke and over 500 Mentos mints? Inquiring minds want to know.

video

The Boston Herald offers a checklist for municipalities in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to use for testing.

It used to be that there were only a handful of People’s Republics among the Commonwealth’s 351 cities and towns. You had Cambridge, Amherst, Lincoln, Brookline and a couple of others.

These are the la-de-da burgs that erect walls and speed bumps at the town line to keep out the city riffraff who make up that wonderful diversity the suburban swells claim to celebrate.

Only last week Brookline Town Meeting called for the impeachment of President Bush.

The problem is that the Brookline Syndrome appears to be spreading. As normal Americans flee Massachusetts by the tens of thousands, one town after another topples to the moonbat contagion.

Allowing illegal aliens to vote – what a great idea!

Just this week Wrentham, of all places, almost pulled a Cambridge. Local school administrators attempted to shun two graduating high school seniors who had gotten into West Point. As any NPR listener will tell you, these kids are nothing more than future war criminals. Remember Hidatha! The only way the Massachusetts Teachers Association supports two West Pointers is if they want to marry each other.

Perhaps you’ve been wondering if your community is in danger of “tipping.” Here are some of the telltale indicators of a town at risk:

You can’t remember the last time a Proposition 2 ? override was voted down.

Deval Patrick won 64 of 67 delgates in the city. (Somerville, this means you.)

Aging hippies hold candlelight vigils on the Common to protest (fill in the blank).

The population is 99 percent white, and the ballot is in 12 languages.

At least one obscure Globe columnist lives in the town.

At high school graduation, 30 flags are on display, one for each Third World hellhole the illegal aliens in the class of ’06 left behind.

Only one flag is banned, the one the kids no longer pledge allegiance to in the morning, lest they have to utter the proscribed words “under God.”

Two words: bike paths.

You may be living in a People’s Republic if the phrase “transgendered community” is increasingly heard at School Committee meetings.

Or if they no longer keep score in the youth soccer leagues, so as not to damage any child’s self-esteem. And if the next step is to make all games “silent,” with cheering banned to remove any pressure from the little tykes.

If the town’s Person of the Year is the librarian who refused to let FBI agents enter the main branch of the public library after a “patron” e-mailed a detailed terrorist threat to a nearby college.

If skateboarders have more rights than disabled veterans.

If the Unitarian-Universalist church has a female pastor with a crew cut who lives with her “wife” in the parsonage where the Rev. Loring once raised five children.

The last Republican state rep moved out of the town – and the state.

The new Democratic rep was born and raised in New York.

You may be living in a People’s Republic if the town fathers have banned not only Golden Arches, but also headstones in cemeteries.

Or if the town has a “sanctuary committee,” even though the median price of a home last year was $1.2 million.

The merchants on Main Street no longer put out American flags on Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, lest they be threatened with a boycott by the local Democratic Town Committee.

You may be living in a People’s Republic if you sadly realize that you were better off with Denis McKenna as your state senator than Pat Jehlen.

David Harsanyi of the Denver Post has a suggestion.

You’ll often hear the left lecture about the importance of dissent in a free society.

Why not give it a whirl?

Start by challenging global warming hysteria next time you’re at a LoDo [Lower Downtown Denver] cocktail party and see what happens..

..next time you’re with some progressive friends, dissent. Tell ’em you’re not sold on this global warming stuff.

Back away slowly. You’ll probably be called a fascist.

Don’t worry, you’re not. A true fascist is anyone who wants to take away my air conditioning or force me to ride a bike.

Charles Johnson notes a report from Ynet News, an Israeli news source:

Following warnings by extremist Islamic group al-Muhajiroun, in which the group said that the red cross in the England flag symbolizes the ‘blood thirsty crusaders’ and the occupation of Muslims, some of the largest companies in England have ordered their workers not to wave the flags.

The flag has recently appeared in England on everything from bikinis to cars, and sold in endless versions in stores.

But the Islamic protest forced some corporations, such as cable companies NTL, Heathrow airport in London, and even the Drivers and Vehicles Licensing Agency to ban the flag in every form due to fears from reactions of Muslims.

Agence France-Presse via Yahoo tells us that the UN is now warning us about “endangered deserts.”

The world’s deserts are being threatened “as never before”, particularly by climate change, but can still be used as a key resource if action is taken to protect them, according to a report released on Monday.

The study by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) highlights the problems facing desert areas but also their potential uses in vital sectors such as energy, food and medicine.

Shafqat Kakakhel, from UNEP, said: “Far from being barren wastelands, (deserts) emerge as biologically, economically and culturally dynamic while being increasingly subject to the impacts and pressures of the modern world.

“They also emerge as places of new economic and livelihood possibilities, underlining yet again that the environment is not a luxury but a key element in the fight against poverty and the delivery of internationally-agreed development goals.”

At least 25 percent of the Earth’s surface — 33.7 million square kilometres (13 million square miles) — has been defined as desert and is home to more than 500 million people, according to the report, “Global Deserts Outlook”.

But one of its authors, University College London geography professor Andrew Warren, said the unique landscapes, ancient cultures, flora and fauna in deserts were at risk of disappearing….

Kaveh Zahedi, deputy director of UNEP’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre based in Cambridge, eastern England, added that action was needed.

“These deserts are unique and dynamic eco-systems and, if sensitively treated, can provide the answers to many of the challenges that we face today, whether it’s for energy, for food or for medicine,” he said…

“The pharmaceutical potential of desert plants has yet to be tapped,” the report notes.

This, plus sustainable eco-tourism and conservation schemes, could benefit not just the local desert communities but the wider population, it added.

Isn’t it amazing how all the world’s most worthless real estate is unique and precious, and always (whatever the climate, no matter how barren) a treasure house of marvels just waiting to be found?

There seems be no hierarchy of desirability to any of this marvellous uniqueness.

Suppose we could convert some miserable arid, baking, rocky desert into a nice wet, fever-ridden swamp. Or, alternatively, we decided to change it into a hot, steaming and impenetrable jungle. Or we changed our minds again and froze the whole thing into the precise equivalent of Alaska’s North Slope (solid ice 10 months of the years; open water, soggy ground and a mind-boggling number of mosquitoes for two months — but fewer snakes). Or we waved our magic wand, and produced… New Jersey!

Exactly which of all these unique and marvellous alternatives would offer the most intellectually and aesthetically intriguing diversity of life? Which would offer the richest gifts to Science? I hate to admit it (since I loathe New Jersey and kind of enjoy a good snake), but, if you think about it, you know exactly what would win.

Byron York on NR’s The Corner posts an ECONOMICS QUIZ:

Q: Was U.S. economic growth higher during the time John Snow was Treasury Secretary, or during the time Robert Rubin was Treasury Secretary?

A: It was the same, 3.8 percent.

The Center for Disease Control is about to begin investigating a possibly imaginary disease called Morgellons, the first modern case of which was identified by a mother in a small town in Southwestern, Pennsylvania on the basis of a disease description in a 1690 monograph by Sir Thomas Browne.

Not altogether surprisingly, the San Francisco Bay Area is a hotbed of Morgellons affliction.

Morgellons Research Foundation

West Virginia breeds some pretty cool-headed pilots like Chuck Yaeger, and Monty Coles. FoxNews reports:

Monty Coles was 3,000 feet in the air when he discovered a stowaway peeking out at him from the plane’s instrument panel — a 4 1/2-foot black snake.

Coles had left Charleston earlier for a leisurely flight over the West Virginia countryside last Saturday in his Piper Cherokee and was preparing to land in Gallipolis, Ohio, when the snake revealed itself.

“Nothing in any of the manuals ever described anything like this,” the 62-year-old Cross Lanes resident said. But the advice given 25 years earlier from his flight instructor immediately came to mind: “No matter what happens, fly the plane.”

An attempt to swat the snake only resulted in it falling to Coles’ feet under the rudder pedals. It then darted to the other side of the cockpit.

While maintaining control of the single-engine plane with one hand, Coles grabbed the reptile behind its head with his other.

“There was no way I was letting that thing go. It coiled all around my arm, and its tail grabbed hold of a lever on the floor and started pulling,” Coles said.

My wife finally had a chance to see Andy Garcia’s new film The Lost City, and Karen complained to me today that she could not understand why so excellent, and unusual, a film (one that actually tells the truth about Communism) is not receiving greater attention and support from the right side of the media and the Blogosphere.

I reviewed it with discretion myself, not wanting to give away all the details of the plot, since I expected many readers would not yet have seen the film. I have, however, promised Karen that I would supply some links providing more commentary and appreciation.

Humberto Fontova, Movie Critics Aghast at Andy Garcia’s ‘The Lost City’

Ninoska Pérez Castellón, The Havana of my dreams was a city of lights.

Kathry Jean Lopes, Don’t Let This Movie Get Lost.

And, last but not least: Marc Masferrer, “Son-of-a-bitch, fucking communists.” (I normally avoid certain kinds of language here, but in this case, these are technical terms.)

Earlier posting here.

Trailer

LGF finds The Guardian, always quick to condemn the US on the basis of even rumors of coercive interrogation of captured terrorists, nodding approvingly at coerced (but persuasive!) confession extracted by terrorists themselves.

Blackmailed into a web of treason woven from their own deceit and sexual transgressions, Jefal and his lover faced the justice of the street this week when the 25-year-old Palestinian father was dragged blindfolded into the heart of Balata refugee camp in the West Bank and shot as the worst kind of traitor – a collaborator with Israel. At the execution the mother of one of those he betrayed handed out sweets.

An hour or so later Jefal’s mistress, Wedad Mustafa, a 27-year-old mother of four young children, was hauled from her home by her brothers and killed before a crowd in an act designed to restore the family’s honour.

Public killings of collaborators are not uncommon in the occupied territories. But behind the deaths of Jefal and Wedad lies a tale of both Israeli blackmail, in an operation to stalk one of the most wanted men in Balata, and of two lovers seeking to get rid of an unwanted husband.

Jefal, a member of a respected family in Balata, left an account – coerced but persuasive – of turning traitor. A “confession” video was recorded following interrogation by members of al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, the armed Palestinian group responsible for hundreds of deaths in suicide bombings and other attacks and which dominates the refugee camp next to Nablus.

Would that there were only some way to separate our entire treasonous liberal clerisy from the rest of the population of the Western democracies, step aside, and let the Islamofascists have them, to deal with as they choose.

Photo used by London Times to libel US Marines

Michelle Malkin today publicly identified a major case of fraud by one of the most prominent international members of the mainstream establishment media.

The Times (UK), on June 1st, ran a vitriolic anti-US news story, titled ‘Massacre Marines blinded by hate’, based entirely on selective quotation of an interview with Corporal James Crossan, a marine injured in the IED attack, which included a photo of supposed victims of American forces. The photo was actually taken six months earlier, and the bodies were the victims of a massacre by insurgents in a soccer stadium.

That lying bastard who wrote the smear story selectively quotes Crossan speculating, in a video interview with KING5 News in Seattle, on what might have happened after he had been evacuated by helicopter:

I think they were blinded by hate . . . and they just lost control.” Corporal Crossan, who passed out soon after being hit by the bomb in al-Haditha on November 19 last year, said that the unit had a lot of new members. “

They might have got scared or they were just p*****, really p***** off and did it.”

(Note: Crossan is only speculating on why marines might have shot civilians, if they actually had. He dd not witness any such thing personally.)

But he didn’t quote Crossan saying:

Crossan: We used to go out on patrols and have the little kids count the patrols and all that stuff and we couldn’t really do anything except grab them and throw them inside their houses…

KING 5 TV interviewer: Why would you do that? Because you were afraid that the kids were scouting for the insurgents or you thought they were in danger?

Crossan: There are little kids that scout for ‘em. ‘Cuz later that day we, along the main road there, we cut behind a few buildings and the next patrol that went out got hit. And that little kid that was just there and there was people all around. But the day that I got hit they were planning a major attack and it got spoiled, so, and there was like 20 some people, insurgents, that were gonna attack the cop that day.

Then we got hit by an IED and the cops sent out a squad of Marines, and the insurgents just started attacking then, just right off the bat and we just foiled it. We were just driving back from the cop. I remember taking a left and then a right, and then remember waking up from the ground for a split second. And then waking up in the helicopter and then finally knew what happened in the hospital.

KING 5: So after you were injured, also tell me, you lost one of your guys. What can you tell me about him?

Crossan: We lost Lance Col. Miguel Terrazas. He was a good guy. He was from El Paso, Texas. And he was my point man. He was pretty much the guy I went to if I needed anything.

Great work, Michelle Malkin.

The US Government really ought to deport leftwing London Times journalist Tim Reid for this one.