Reuters reports:

The New York Times Co. plans to narrow the size of its flagship newspaper and close a printing plant, resulting in the loss of 250 jobs, the company said in a story posted on its Web site late on Monday.

The changes, set to take place in April 2008, include the closure of a printing plant in Edison, New Jersey. The company will sublet the plant and consolidate its regional printing facilities at a plant in Queens, the paper said.

The newspaper will be narrower by 1 1/2 inches. The redesign will result in the loss of 250 production jobs, the company said.

The New York Times said it expected the changes to result in savings of $42 million.

The narrower format, offset by some additional pages, will reduce the space the paper has for news by 5 percent, Executive Editor Bill Keller said in the article.

Heartbreaking news, isn’t it?

You’d think they could just adopt an Arabic-language format, and increase sales to their natural readership.

Mark Steyn inveighs against popular culture’s white-washed fantasies of peaceful primitives living in harmony with Nature.

In his shrewd book Civilization And Its Enemies, Lee Harris writes:

“Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe. . . . That, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary.”

It’s worse than Harris thinks. We’re not merely “forgetful.” We’ve constructed a fantasy past in which primitive societies lived in peace and security with nary a fear that their crops would be stolen or their children enslaved. War has been the natural condition of mankind for thousands of years, and our civilization is a very fragile exception to that. What does it say about us that so many of our elites believe exactly the opposite — that we are a monstrous violent rupture with our primitive pacifist ancestors? It’s never a good idea to put reality up for grabs.

Austin Bay notes the way in which Iran and Syria take advantage of illusory concepts of nation-state sovereignty to hide behind “Lebanon” while using surrogates to make war on Israel.

When fired from positions in southern Lebanon or Gaza, the extended-range Katyushas place roughly sixty percent of Israel’s population in range. (That’s my estimate.) All of Israel’s major cities and towns may soon be a bull’s eye— Hezbollah leaders boast of striking beyond Haifa and “beyond beyond Haifa.” Indeed, there are indications that longer range rockets are being employed. These rockets are “FROG-type” — free rocket over ground. They lack guidance systems but have more reach. They may be able to carry chemical warheads (the Russian series of FROGs could carry chemical warheads).

But now for the layer complexity: Hezbollah hides these weapons among apartment houses and in villages— other words, nests of rockets in neighborhoods.

These neighborhoods and villages are controlled by Hezbollah, not the Lebanese government.

Israel is being fired upon from a Lebanon that “is not quite Lebanon” in a truly sovereign sense.The rockets, of course, come from “somewhere,” but Hezbollah’s “somewhere” is a political limbo in terms of maps with definitive geo-political boundaries. Lebanon is a “failed state”— a peculiar failed state (its not Somalia), but nevertheless failed. It will continue to fail so long as the Lebanese government cannot control Hezbollah—and control means disarm.

So Hezbollah attacks Israel with ever more-powerful, longer-range rockets, then hides behind the diplomatic facade of the greater Lebanese nation state.

Thus terrorists and terror-empowering nations, like Iran and Syria, abuse the nation-state system— or exploit a “dangerous hole” in the system..

Iran and Syria then appeal to the United Nations (a product of the Westphalian “nation state” system) to condemn Israel for attacking Lebanon— when Israel is attacking Hezbollah, which “is and is not Lebanon.”

H/t to Glenn Reynolds.

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.

Fan site

It should hardly be surprising to anyone that, informally and in private, President Bush speaks like anybody else, using colloquial expressions and occasionally colorful language.

A press microphone, earlier today, accidentally caught a private conversation between Bush and Blair, in which the president said, (presumably referring to Kofi Annan and the UN) “what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this sh*t.”

(CNN story & video –If you actually care.)

Well, not since the day our second-grade nun banged her finger, and exclaimed “Darn!,” have I seen such a display of infantile astonishment at the descent of Olympian authority to the level of ordinary humanity.

This unutterably trivial event was dotingly recorded, memorialized, and pondered over from Manhattan to Timbuktoo today, proving once again (in case there was doubt in anybody’s mind) exactly how childish and inane the collective intelligence which identifies and comments on the day’s news events actually is.

Those new Intel-powered MacBooks apparently run rather hot. One owner demonstrates just how hot by cooking his egg on it.

Daniel W. Corson, an engineer, decided to try making his own watch, and documents the whole project on a web-site.

The work took him a year, but provided a great deal of amusement. Corson writes:

One of the joys of this work was the constant changes in skillset needed. From machinist to watchmaker to silversmith, etc.. As such the work is never boring, never repetitive, always new challenges and unknowns to be overcome.

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Hat tip to Cory Doctorow.

A letter to the Palestinians from Youseff M. Ibrahim, an Egyptian-born American reporter.

Dear Palestinian Arab brethren:

The war with Israel is over.

You have lost. Surrender and negotiate to secure a future for your children.

We, your Arab brothers, may say until we are blue in the face that we stand by you, but the wise among you and most of us know that we are moving on, away from the tired old idea of the Palestinian Arab cause and the “eternal struggle” with Israel.

Dear friends, you and your leaders have wasted three generations trying to fight for Palestine, but the truth is the Palestine you could have had in 1948 is much bigger than the one you could have had in 1967, which in turn is much bigger than what you may have to settle for now or in another 10 years. Struggle means less land and more misery and utter loneliness.

At the moment, brothers, you would be lucky to secure a semblance of a state in that Gaza Strip into which you have all crowded, and a small part of the West Bank of the Jordan. It isn’t going to get better. Time is running out even for this much land, so here are some facts, figures, and sound advice, friends.

You hold keys, which you drag out for television interviews, to houses that do not exist or are inhabited by Israelis who have no intention of leaving Jaffa, Haifa, Tel Aviv, or West Jerusalem. You shoot old guns at modern Israeli tanks and American-made fighter jets, doing virtually no harm to Israel while bringing the wrath of its mighty army down upon you. You fire ridiculously inept Kassam rockets that cause little destruction and delude yourselves into thinking this is a war of liberation. Your government, your social institutions, your schools, and your economy are all in ruins.

Your young people are growing up illiterate, ill, and bent on rites of death and suicide, while you, in effect, are living on the kindness of foreigners, including America and the United Nations. Every day your officials must beg for your daily bread, dependent on relief trucks that carry food and medicine into the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, while your criminal Muslim fundamentalist Hamas government continues to fan the flames of a war it can neither fight nor hope to win.

In other words, brothers, you are down, out, and alone in a burnt-out landscape that is shrinking by the day.

What kind of struggle is this? Is it worth waging at all? More important, what kind of miserable future does it portend for your children, the fourth or fifth generation of the Arab world’s have-nots?

We, your Arab brothers, have moved on.

Those of us who have oil money are busy accumulating wealth and building housing, luxury developments, state-of-the-art universities and schools, and new highways and byways. Those of us who share borders with Israel, such as Egypt and Jordan, have signed a peace treaty with it and are not going to war for you any time soon. Those of us who are far away, in places like North Africa and Iraq, frankly could not care less about what happens to you.

Only Syria continues to feed your fantasies that someday it will join you in liberating Palestine, even though a huge chunk of its territory, the entire Golan Heights, was taken by Israel in 1967 and annexed. The Syrians, my friends, will gladly fight down to the last Palestinian Arab.

Before you got stuck with this Hamas crowd, another cheating, conniving, leader of yours, Yasser Arafat, sold you a rotten bill of goods — more pain, greater corruption, and millions stolen by his relatives — while your children played in the sewers of Gaza.

The war is over. Why not let a new future begin?

Mr. Ibrahim’s advice is certain to be ignored, but its wisdom is obvious.

—————–

Hat tip to Jack Kelly.

Charles Johnson has a few choice words about the New York Times’ culture of disloyalty.

Can anyone imagine a photographer employed by an American newspaper happily collecting pictures of a Jap sniper firing at US forces in WWII? (There is even worse at the beginning of the slideshow.)

The Anthracite Coal Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania: (in red, clockwise from 9 o’clock, Northumberland County, (Montour County is not included, and is white) then Columbia County, Luzerne County, Lackawanna County, Carbon County, and Schuylkill County.

The community of fashion is largely unaware that a mere two and a quarter hours (111 miles) from midtown Manhattan, one may enter a startlingly different universe, a hardscrabble countryside dotted with working-class towns, falling into ruin after eight decades of decline.

Anthracite coal mining was the Region’s sole economic engine, and cheaper and more convenient forms of energy began challenging hard coal’s position in the American economy as early as 1920. The mineworker’s union unpatriotically broke its pledge to refrain from striking during WWII, and when the miners came back from the war, they found those war-time strikes had very effectively promoted large-scale domestic conversion to heating oil.

Modern environmental regulation in the 1950s was the final straw. By that time, the easy coal in veins close to the surface had been mined out, and it was necessary to dig deep for coal. Available remaining deposits lay below the water table, and the Federal Government would no longer permit collieries simply to pump mine water (thoroughly laden with sulphuric acid) out into local streams and rivers, heading for the Susquehanna and ultimately Chesapeake Bay. Maple Hill, the last colliery operating in my hometown, closed in 1954.

Populations have steadily declined for decades, and the only countervailing trend has been the arrival in the Region in the course of the last two decades of a rapidly increasing new population of Hispanics.

Welfare recipients from New York and Philadelphia first migrated outward in search of a cheaper cost of living (where a welfare income would go farther) to the Lehigh Valley cities of Allentown, Bethlehem, and Easton. But prisons, constructed during the prison-building boom of the War on Drugs atop the mountains of the Region as a sop to the regional economy persuaded the same element to cross the Blue Mountain. In some cases, they wanted to be able to visit relatives inside serving time.

The Anthracite Region is a backwater, preserving, as in amber, the culture, values, perspectives, and racial attitudes of a couple of generations back. Only the fact that a very substantial proportion of the local population is over 80 years old significantly diminishes the combustability of the mixture of a newly immigrated Hispanic population (often of less than ideal respectability) with a witches’ brew of belligerent white ethnics.

Even half a century ago, when I was a boy, life in the Region drifted along at its own pace, safely removed from the mainstream currents of news and fashion. But, this time, a part of the Region is at the forefront of national political developments.

The city of Hazleton, in Luzerne County, has responded to a one third growth in population by newly-arrived Hispanics post-2000 with drastic steps aimed at illegal immigrants, taking advantage of recent headlines to fuel radical political action in much the way Berkeley, California would. Even worse, Hazleton’s outbreak of Nativism is attracting press coverage, and inspiring the local Solons of other municipalities to emulation.

The LA Times reports:

Under the new law — which is a modified version of a ballot initiative proposed in San Bernardino — anyone seeking to rent a dwelling in the city will have to apply to the city for a residency license, and submit to an investigation of citizenship status. Landlords found renting to people without licenses will be fined $1,000 a day. Business owners found hiring, renting property to, or providing goods and services to illegal immigrants will lose their business permit for five years on a first offense and 10 years on a second.

There is a certain irony in the descendants of the Central European miners, shot down by nativist sheriff’s deputies in 1897 at Lattimer, keeping the old Luzerne County spirit of hospitality alive, just the same as it has always been. I really wonder who it’s going to be that the grandchildren of today’s Mexicans and Dominicans are going to be trying to kick out a hundred years hence.

————————————
UPDATE

Well, Hazleton’s moment as Immigration policy vanguard will soon be over.

A leftwing coalition of rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, is suing Hazleton.

There isn’t going to be a contest. I’m not really sure whether the ACLU’s latte budget exceeds the real estate tax revenues of the city of Hazleton, but you get the idea. Financially speaking, Coal Region communities are definite non-starters in modern litigation battles. The mayor of Hazleton will be waxing the Pennsylvania ACLU head guy’s car on Saturdays henceforward, if that’s what he requires. Experiments in Draconian local policy on illegal immigration will need to be conducted in places like California and Arizona, where cities have the wherewithal to fight.

I think myself that the case of the immigration of Roman Catholic Latin Americans of primarily European descent to the United States is a very different thing from the Islamization of Europe, but Fjordman‘s pessimistic essay attacking Third World immigration Trans-Atlantically is, as usual, an insightful contribution to the debate.

Imagine you have two such houses next to each other. In House A, the inhabitants have over a period of generations created a tidy and functioning household. They have limited their number of children because they wanted to give all of them a proper education. In House B, the inhabitants live in a dysfunctional household with too many children who have received little higher education. One day they decide to move to their neighbors’. Many of the inhabitants of House A are protesting, but some of them think this might be a good idea. There is room for more people in House A, they say. In addition to this, Amnesty International, the United Nations and others claim that it is “racist” and “against international law” for the inhabitants of House A to expel the intruders. Pretty soon, House A has been turned into an overpopulated and dysfunctional household just like House B.

This is what is happening to the West today.

link

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.