Lynn Cheney asks Wolf Blitzer why is CNN broadcasting terrorist propagada videos showing the shooting of Americans, and wonders if CNN wants the US to win. Blitzer responds by imitating the Times’ Byron Calame.

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British Police warned a jeweller not to distribute to neigboring jewellers pictures of a thief captured on the shop’s video camera, because doing so would infringe the woman’s human rights.

It seems to me that I’ve already linked and quoted, or at the very least already read, Michael Bywater’s jeremiad, in today’s Telegraph, about the infantilization of modern Britons, but I know people who will like it, so here it is again.

My grandfather was born in 1888 and he didn’t have a lifestyle. He didn’t need one: he had a life.

He had a hat and a car and a wife and two sons and a housekeeper and a maid and a nanny for the children, and the housekeeper had a dog and the dog had a canker and lived in a kennel.

My grandfather read Charles Dickens mostly. Sometimes they went on holiday. His house was furnished with furniture…

Dr Chand didn’t have a lifestyle either. Nobody had a lifestyle then, because there was nobody to tell them to, and anyway they were too busy having lives.

They were grown-ups. They went about their business. In my grandfather’s case, it was seeing patients and making them better, where possible…

I suspect that my grandfather’s life was real in a sense that my father’s life hasn’t quite been, and my life is not at all.

The comedian is alarmed at the prospect of Mrs. Pelosi occupying a position two heartbeats away from the Presidency. Miller seems to think Pelosi is just a trifle dim. I’d hate to hear what he’d say if he ever ran into Barbara Boxer.

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And, as a matter of fact, only today Nancy Pelosi declared: I have supported legislation, including H.Res.316, that would properly acknowledge the Armenian Genocide. It is imperative that the United States recognize this atrocity.

The Armenian Genocide is a term applied to deaths resulting from the forcible mass evacuation of Armenians by the Turkish government in 1915.

Armenians want to play the victim card and refer to genocide. Turks say Armenian deaths were inadvertent, and blame ethnic strife, disease, and WWI.

Fascinating as all this is, the precise relationship of Turkish massacres of Armenians in 1915 to the government of the United States in 2006 is less than obvious to me. All this ethnic pandering may get Cher to vote for Pelosi, but the rest of us are not impressed.

A West Indian manatee Trichechus manatus, for reasons which doubtless seemed good to him at the time, took a 700 mile (1127 kilometers) swim up the Mississippi to the vicinity of the city of Memphis.

Busybody do-gooders, experts, and officials of all kinds (as they always do these days whenever an unusual form of wildlife appears) hurried to the scene to “rescue,” i.e., to interfere with, shoot with tranquilizer guns, and typically kill-with-kindness, the hapless visitor. In this case, so far, however, the manatee has had the last laugh. He simply submerged, and vanished from view, leaving the experts up the river.

AP:

MEMPHIS, Tennessee A meandering manatee who took an unheard of swim 700 miles (1,100 kilometers) up the Mississippi River played hide and seek Thursday with a rescue team led by marine mammal specialists from Florida.

The manatee, believed to be 7 to 8 feet (2.10 to 2.40 meters) long and weighing 800 to 1,000 pounds (360 to 450 kilograms), has been hanging around since at least Sunday in a river chute along the downtown Memphis riverfront.

The rescue team, made up of marine biologists, wildlife agents, police officers and Coast Guard personnel, began searching the 3-mile (5-kilometer) chute, called the Wolf River Harbor, early Thursday but had not spotted the manatee by afternoon.

Pedro Ramos, a team leader from the marine amusement park SeaWorld of Orlando, Florida, said he was unsure how long the manatee could survive in the 60-degree (15 Celsius) water or how long the searchers would look for it.

“This is something very unique,” Ramos said. “It’s never been recorded before this far up the Mississippi.”

Manatees, an endangered species, are generally found along the southern U.S. coast, though they do stray farther north along the eastern seaboard during the summer. They are docile, warm water animals.

Ramos said his team would search through Friday and then re-evaluate its plans. The manatee was spotted late Wednesday afternoon floating near the bank in the he bank in the dark, brown water.

“We can’t just stay up here indefinitely,” he said. “As long as he’s eating he could probably survive for a few days. It will really depend on the water temperature.”

In early August, another manatee travelled up the Hudson as far as Westchester County.

Michelle Malkin asked that miserable prevaricating worm Byron Calame (who makes his living as a fraud, apologizing for, and defending, the New York Slimes’ lies, treason, and arrogance, while posing as a supposed in-house representative of public criticism) exactly what he meant by saying that he had allowed the vicious criticism of The Times by the Bush administration to trigger [his] instinctive affinity for responding as he did in the case of the Times-published SWIFT leak, last July. (What Calame did, of course, was kiss up to his employer, and dismiss all criticism from the outside public, as always.)

That pillar of journalistic integrity Calame took a few days to think about it and replied: “I was referring to criticism of the article that has been amply documented in a wide range of published reports.”

There is the New York Times in a nutshell: too cowardly and dishonest to try to defend what it publishes in an open dialogue, taking refuge behind its own pomposity and self-importance.

Reading Byron Calame makes me want to go out and buy a parakeet, so I could line the bottom of the bird cage with his column.

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The Daily Mail reports a story proving that old age and treachery really can overcome youth and inexperience.

A 70-year-old former British soldier who fought guerillas in Aden and Triad gangs in Hong Kong showed four muggers how it doesn’t pay to mess with the SAS.

Douglas O’Dell is past retirement age but the moves he learned as a volunteer in Britain’s toughest regiment half-a-century ago stood him in good stead when he was ambushed near his home in Bielefeld, Germany, by four local toughs.

The former Provost Sergeant put paid to the danger on the street like he once took out bandits in hotspots across the globe.

THWACK! The first mistake came when one of the teenagers grabbed him around the throat and said in German: “Give my your money, grandad, if you don’t want to get hurt.”

“Bad move,” said Douglas. “The only part he got right was grandad. If you’re gonna grab someone from behind take their arms and pin them to their waist.

“This joker, I was able to grab his elbow, crouch down and throw him over my shoulder. He landed on his back on a fence and squealed like a stuck pig.”

CRASH! As one went down another moved in and Douglas thought he saw him reaching for a knife. The Birmingham-born divorcee, who has a daughter and three grandchildren, said: “I had the measure of him but I slipped on some wet leaves as he came for me and bashed my face badly on the concrete.

“I saw his boot coming towards my face and I thought: ‘No you don’t, sunshine.’ I grabbed his leg and twisted it until he too was screaming out in agony.

“Then I got to my feet and kicked him in the chest.”

With two down the two remaining would-be muggers had enough. One peeled his groaning pal from the fence, the other picked up his crippled accomplice from the pavement.

“The last I saw of them they were limping down the pavement like a WW1 trench raiding party who got clobbered,” said Douglas.

Icelandic clown plays Beethoven, Boccherini, Vivaldi, &c. on squeeze horns attached to his clothing on a French broadcast.

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Hat tip to Karen Myers.

Frederick Turner, at TCS Daily, takes the optimistic view that much of the killing going on in Iraq these days is the product of informal justice, of necessary and prophylactic vigilantism.

It is something with which we have become quite familiar in Latin America: vigilanteism on a massive scale—murder squads and desaparacidos—the force of civil society itself in extremis.

When there is a significant fraction of the population that will not join in political compromise, whether because of ideological idealism, addiction to supernatural power, or the passion for revenge, civil society is faced with a diabolical paradox.

It wishes to form legal and political institutions that are transparent, correctable by debate, and under the control of the people (with protections for minorities), where people can make good money in the marketplace and raise families in peace. But the reality is that even after all possible compromises have been offered to the refuseniks, civil society is faced with a small but absolutely hostile minority that will be content with nothing but total victory.

What can civil society do? The only solution is the disappearance of that implacable moiety. Civil society cannot use the instruments of government to stamp out its mortal enemy—for that would be to invalidate and destroy the very principles and legitimacy of that government, and set in place a precedent by which normal political squabbles could in future be settled by genocide or the Gulag…

There are, from the point of view of Iraq’s nascent civil society, some thousands of people who, in the Texas phrase, need killing. Who is going to do it?

In the absence of government intervention, the answer is: ordinary people. Basically the killers are posses of self-organized vigilantes, who know their local area, who know who the bombers are, and who the bombers’ relatives are. The posses are expert in distinguishing those people who might be fair political enemies from those who will go on striking, like a snake, even when cut in two…

Death squads are distinctly better than suicide bombers.

Hat tip to John Brewer.

John Hinderaker, at Power Line, notes that the democrat choice of withdrawal and defeat is likely to prove more sanguinary than staying the course.

How many millions were slain in Indochina in the late 1970s after US withdrawal, after all?

The death rate in Baghdad these days, with the rival militias and insugents in full operation, isn’t really terrribly different, after all, from the death rate produced by gang warfare in such democrat strongholds as Oakland and the District of Columbia.

We haven’t lost in Iraq, and we probably won’t if we remain determined to prevail. The situation today is not good in some parts of Iraq, but the implicit suggestion that it can’t get worse is absurd. As I wrote here, the current murder rate in Baghdad is around four times the murder rate in Washington, D.C. in 1991. The murder rate for Iraq as a whole is not quite double the 1991 Washington D.C. rate. This is a high level of violence, to be sure. But it is nothing compared to an actual civil war. It is nothing compared to genocide. If the Democrats win in November, they are likely to have, before long, a great deal of blood on their hands.

The Von Mises Institute doesn’t think so. Mark Brandly observes

a hamburger that cost 60¢ in 1959 would have cost $4 in 2005. If the money supply had been fixed, however, that hamburger would only cost 12¢ today. Similarly, a $20,000 car in 2005 would have cost slightly less than $3,000 in 1959. Again, without the monetary effect on prices, that car would only cost $600 today. The price of a $45,000 house in 1959 would have increased to $300,000 in 2005. With a fixed money supply, that house would cost $9,000 today.

The first paragraph of the first article of the 1947 Constitution of New Jersey reads:

1. All persons are by nature free and independent, and have certain natural and unalienable rights, among which are those of enjoying and defending life and liberty, of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and of pursuing and obtaining safety and happiness.

The Supreme Court of the over-developed, mosquito-infested, and chemical-polluted wasteland of New Jersey ruled today that

Denying committed same-sex couples the financial and social benefits and privileges given to their married heterosexual counterparts bears no substantial relationship to a legitimate governmental purpose. The Court holds that under the equal protection guarantee of Article I, Paragraph 1 of the New Jersey Constitution, committed samesex couples must be afforded on equal terms the same rights and benefits enjoyed by opposite-sex couples under the civil marriage statutes. The name to be given to the statutory scheme that provides full rights and benefits to samesex couples, whether marriage or some other term, is a matter left to the democratic process.

Samesex? Interesting neologism.

When exactly did state constitutions start conferring rights on “couples” as opposed to individuals?

Individuals in (godforsaken) New Jersey obviously enjoy currently, each and every one, precisely the same right to matrimonial alliance as anyone else. True, the citizens of the armpit of the universe, like other Americans (residing outside the most lawless and demented communities of fashion) are restricted to marrying (one) only (of) persons of the opposite sex, of mature age, and of appropriate genetic remove, as is traditional. Victims of supposed oppression throughout America are not permitted to marry plurally, to marry inside conventional boundaries of consaguinity, to marry juveniles, nor to marry their labrador retriever Ralph, or the elm tree growing in their front yard.

As far as I can see, the only argument persons on the opposing side can reasonably make would be based upon the “pursuit of happiness” provision. But, if we do not grant polygamists, pedophiles, and other exotic seekers of happiness free pursuit of their objectives, why are we not entitled to deny complete equality with normalcy to one particular variation of perversity?

I feel obliged to note that I am a libertarian. I have always been a keen advocate of the abolition of laws penalizing private voluntary conduct among consenting adults. I have numerous Gay friends, and I do not think that I am overly censorious. I would defend the rights of Gays to do as they please privately to the death.

I think I was a relatively early supporter of civil union legislation, aimed at relieving various practical difficulties attendant upon unconventional domestic arrangements.

Still, even without religion, I do basically agree with the text of the older version of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, under whose phraseology my wife and I were married, which says:

Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this congregation, to join together this Man and this Woman in holy Matrimony; which is an honourable estate, instituted of God in the time of man’s innocency, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church; which holy estate Christ adorned and beautified with his presence, and first miracle that he wrought, in Cana of Galilee; and is commended of Saint Paul to be honourable among all men: and therefore is not by any to be enterprised, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly, to satisfy men’s carnal lusts and appetites, like brute beasts that have no understanding; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God; duly considering the causes for which Matrimony was ordained.