In reality, a man’s suit of good material and tailoring, which fits properly, is not only comfortable, but actively pleasurable.

And, moreover, not everyone subscribes to the supine viewpoint that comfort outranks all other possible considerations.

In Rostand’s play, the gallant Cyrano de Bergerac, for instance, compares his existential stance of personal independence favorably to his personal choice of a decidedly uncomfortable Spanish ruff collar.

Cyrano to Le Bret:

–Vous, la molle amitié dont vous vous entourez,
Ressemble à ces grands cols d’Italie, ajourés
Et flottants, dans lesquels votre cou s’effémine:
On y est plus à l’aise. . .et de moins haute mine,
Car le front n’ayant pas de maintien ni de loi,
S’abandonne à pencher dans tous les sens. Mais moi,
La Haine, chaque jour, me tuyaute et m’apprête
La fraise dont l’empois force à lever la tête;
Chaque ennemi de plus est un nouveau godron
Qui m’ajoute une gêne, et m’ajoute un rayon:
Car, pareille en tous points à la fraise espagnole,
La Haine est un carcan, mais c’est une auréole !

(Brian Hooker translation:)

You —
Good nature all around you, soft and warm —

You are like those Italians, in great cowls
Comfortable and loose — Your chin sinks down
Into the folds, your shoulders droop. But I —
The Spanish ruff I wear around my throat
Is like a ring of enemies; hard, proud,
Each point another pride, another thorn —
So that I hold myself erect perforce
Wearing the hatred of the common herd
Haughtily, the harsh collar of Old Spain,
At once a fetter and — a halo!

–Edmund Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac, Act 2, Scene 2.

Al Gore, despite having Truth on his side, concluded Truth wasn’t enough and chickened out on meeting Björn Lomborg in an interview arranged by Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten.

The interview had been scheduled for months. Mr. Gore’s agent yesterday thought Gore-meets-Lomborg would be great. Yet an hour later, he came back to tell us that Bjorn Lomborg should be excluded from the interview because he’s been very critical of Mr. Gore’s message about global warming and has questioned Mr. Gore’s evenhandedness. According to the agent, Mr. Gore only wanted to have questions about his book and documentary, and only asked by a reporter. These conditions were immediately accepted by Jyllands-Posten. Yet an hour later we received an email from the agent saying that the interview was now cancelled. What happened?

Feeling paranoid?

Jack Cashill does an awfully good Mel Gibson-in-Conspiracy-Theory impression feverishly linking the Berger document removal job with a cover-up of Clinton Administration knowledge of Operation Bojinka, along with an assumed cover-up by that Administration of the shooting down of TWA Flight 800 by a terrorist missile.

Interesting reading, at least.

If not the most skillful of embezzlers, Samuel “Sandy” Berger is a far more formidable character than the media would have us believe. When he made his now storied sorties into the National Archives, he risked his career and his reputation in so doing, and he knew it. Rest assured, he would not have done so were the secrets to be preserved not worth the risk of pilfering them.

True to form, the major media refuse to even ask the most fundamental question: just what secrets would justify so much personal exposure. Having read the report on Berger by the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform, I am more confident than ever that I know the answer.

As the House Report makes clear, Berger did not exactly welcome this assignment. This confirms my suspicions. The archivists told the House Committee, in fact, that Berger “indicated some disgust with the burden and responsibility of conducting the document review.”

Apparently, he did not have much choice in the matter. Former President Bill Clinton had, according to the report, “designated Berger as his representative to review NSC documents.” Berger was Clinton’s go-to inside guy.

In his first term, Clinton had hired this millionaire trade lawyer and lobbyist to be deputy national security advisor, not because of Berger’s foreign policy experience, which was negligible, but because of his political instincts, which were keen and reliable. Clinton entrusted Berger with some very sensitive assignments, particularly in relationship to China, and rewarded him for his trust with the job of National Security Advisor in his second term. This job does not require Senate confirmation. It is unlikely that Berger could have gotten any job that did.

As we now know, Berger made four trips to the National Archives. He did so presumably to refresh his memory before testifying first to the Graham-Goss Commission and then to the 9/11 Commission. Berger made his first visit in May 2002, his last in October 2003.

As we now know too, he stole and destroyed an incalculable number of documents during these four visits. “The full extent of Berger’s document removal,” reports the House Committee, “is not known and never can be known.”

To understand what that “smoking gun” might have been and how it involved Clarke and Berger, let us turn to the fateful summer of 1996. At that time Col. Buzz Patterson carried the “nuclear football” for President Clinton. Given his security clearance, Patterson was entrusted with any number of high security assignments. One morning in “late-summer,” Patterson was returning a daily intelligence update from the Oval Office to the National Security Council when he noticed the heading “Operation Bojinka.”

As Patterson relates, “I keyed on a reference to a plot to use commercial airliners as weapons.” As a pilot, he had a keen interest in the same. “I can state for a fact that this information was circulated within the U.S. intelligence community,” Patterson writes, “and that in late 1996 the president was aware of it.” The President’s hand written comments on the documents verified the same.

The Philippine police had uncovered plans for aerial assaults as early as January 1995 and shared those plans with the FBI almost immediately. The man responsible for those plans was Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing and very possibly an Iraqi contract agent. His accomplice was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9-11 and allegedly Yousef’s uncle.

Understandably, the 9-11 Commission was very concerned about who knew what when in regards to the use of planes as bombs. Bush National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was asked on her first real question: “Did you ever see or hear from the FBI, from the CIA, from any other intelligence agency, any memos or discussions or anything else between the time you got into office and 9-11 that talked about using planes as bombs?”

Rice said no. She was likely telling the truth. Clarke had acknowledged as much during his earlier testimony. He admitted that the “knowledge about al-Qaeda having thought of using aircraft as weapons” was relatively old, “five-years, six-years old.” He asked that intelligence analysts “be forgiven for not thinking about it given the fact that they hadn’t seen a lot in the five or six years intervening about it.”

Before the summer Olympics of 1996, in fact, Clarke had warned security planners about the possibility of Islamic terrorists hijacking a 747 and flying it into Olympic Stadium. Two days before the start of those Olympics, on July 17, Saddam’s National Liberation day, with the U.S Navy on the highest state of alert since the Cuban missile crisis, TWA Flight 800 blew up inexplicably off the coast of Long Island.

The fact that the President was reviewing Bojinka plans soon after the destruction of TWA Flight 800 makes the versions of those plans with his hand written notes on them all the more critical. If found and revealed, they would, at the very least, acknowledge that the Clinton administration had a keen interest in the possible use of planes as bombs five years before September 11.

That interest obviously died, and Clarke served as chief assassin. Among other roles, it fell upon this Clinton sycophant to devise the “exit strategy” that transformed a seeming aeronautical assault on TWA Flight 800 into a “mechanical failure.” In his book Against All Enemies, he takes full credit for this bit of aviation alchemy.

Clarke was likely also responsible for getting the CIA and FBI to breach the storied “wall” and work together on the creation of the notorious “zoom-climb” animation. This animation showed a nose-less 747 rocketing vertically 3200 feet into space and confusing onlookers. The FBI used it to discredit all 270 of its eyewitnesses to an apparent missile strike.

The media swallowed the zoom-climb as uncritically as they had the “mechanical failure.” The New York Times did not bother to interview any of the 270 relevant eyewitnesses. Say what you will about former Timesman Jayson Blair, but he at least would have made one up.

Berger played a key role in the TWA Flight 800 sleight-of-mind as well. On the night of July 17, 1996, Berger was among the scores of staff summoned to the White House for an emergency meeting—a first for a domestic airplane crash. Col. Patterson was there as well but was kept fully out of the loop. When I asked Patterson if anyone was holed up in the family quarters with the president, he could tentatively identify only one person. And that person was Sandy Berger, then just the deputy national security advisor. Berger’s boss, the less “reliable” Tony Lake, was relegated to his own office.

A logical deduction from existing evidence is that Clarke put the “planes-as-bombs” talk on hold for the five or six years after the TWA Flight 800 disaster lest such talk evoke unanswered questions about that fateful crash. Berger’s task, I surmise, was to make sure all references to Bojinka, planes-as-bombs, and/or TWA Flight 800 were rooted from the Archives, especially any documents with hand-written notes that led back to co-conspirators Berger, Clarke, and Clinton.

Amazing!

Hat tip to José Guardia.

Michelle Malkin and Bryan Preston (who accompanied her) are back from Iraq, having spent four days patrolling with Army units from a forward operating base in Northern Baghdad.

He has a new post featuring news and analysis you won’t find in the MSM.

Mark Cuban (undoubtedly a resident of California) speaks out on behalf of the permanently infantilized.

When I started MicroSolutions I was 24 years old. I had just gotten fired from my job and was sleeping on the floor of a 3 bedroom apartment with 5 other guys living there. I didn’t have a closet or a bed, but I had 2 suits.

I bought both of those polyester wonders, one Grey pinstripe, the other blue pinstripe for a total of $99 dollars plus tax. To go with those fashion forward wonders, I had several white polo button downs that I had purchased used from a re-sale shop, and a couple ties that I had bought on sale or had gotten as hand me downs from friends.

I wore those babies when it was cold. I wore them when it was 100 degrees plus. I ironed them and when I could I got them dry cleaned…

Someone had once told me that you wear to work what your customers wear to work. That seemed to make sense to me, so I followed it, and expected those who worked for me to follow it as well.

After I sold MicroSolutions I decided that I never would wear a suit again…

With our new business, I decided that I would have to wear a suit, but would modify the rule so that I would only wear a suit when someone I was selling to was wearing a suit…

When Broadcast.com was sold, the suit went out the window completely.

The gentleman has obviously never owned a real suit, only hideous and inexpensive ersatz imitations thereof. Suits equal discomfort in his mind, because he has only worn cheap, ill-fitting articles of clothing made of intrinsically uncomfortable materials.

Beyond that, the gentleman fails to understand that dignity and formality are becoming to adults. And it is not simply a matter of convention and form; men wear suits fundamentally because any man looks better in a good suit.

T shirts and blue jeans or bermuda shorts have intrinsically limited capacities for both beauty and self expression. Adults wear adult clothing in order to express as fully as possible the possibilities of aesthetic expression in attire.

Suits have been de rigeur in business (outside the California playpen) since time immemorial, since it is impossible for most serious adults to imagine entering into a substantial relationship of trust or business with an individual too slovenly, too undignified, or too badly educated to know how to dress.

Obviously, people began making the rare exception for the eccentric scientific genius working in the most arcane outer reaches of technology, whose thoughts were so abstracted and unworldly that he couldn’t possibly understand how to live normally in the world, and the next thing you know every clod and lout in the Sunshine State of Self-Entitlement decides that he, too, is some kind of genius, operating at Olympian levels beyond normal civilization.

You Californians are wrong. You are operating far below the conventional levels of ordinary civilization, and you are not Einstein, you are Beavis and Butthead.

Marco Evaristti, edgy Chilean artist, at his latest exhibit in Santiago has served up meatballs made from his own fat.

Foxnews.com:

“Ladies and gentleman, bon appetit and may god bless,” said Marco Evaristti, a glass in his hand, to his dining companions seated last Thursday night around a table in Santiago’s Animal Gallery.

On the plates in front of them was a serving of agnolotti pasta and in the middle a meatball made with oil Evaristti removed from his body in a liposuction procedure last year.

“The question of whether or not to eat human flesh is more important than the result,” he said, explaining the point of his creation.

“You are not a cannibal if you eat art,” he added.

Evaristti produced 48 meatballs with his own fat, some of which would be canned and sold for $US4000 dollars for 10.

A veteran at shock-art, in an earlier work Evaristti invited people to kill fish by pressing the button on a blender the fish were held in.

In April 2004 he dyed an enormous iceberg in Greenland with red paint.

Santiago Times:

Six years ago, artist Marco Evaristti scandalized the Chilean art world when he displayed live fish in working blenders. The opening of his new exhibit at the Animal Gallery in Vitacura is likely to cause just as much sensation, hype and criticism when visitors are invited to eat meatballs made with Evaristti’s own fat.

The Chilean-Danish artist, who underwent liposuction for the work, describes it as a criticism of the plastic surgery market. The meatballs are canned and available for purchase; two cans have already been sold to collectors for US$23,200 each. Evaristti claims that the meatballs are not only delicious, but contain less fat than supermarket meatballs.

President Bachelet and poet Nicanor Parra were invited to enjoy the dish at the opening. Neither has given a response so far. The artist assured that he, if no one else, would enjoy the meal.

Another controversial piece consists of six fake faeces covered in gold taken from the teeth of Jewish holocaust victims…

Exhibit details:
Galería Animal
Alonso de Cordova 3105
Vitacura
M-F 10:00-8:00
Saturday 10:30-2:00
Until January 27th.

One couldn’t make this stuff up.

News 24.Com:

A wealthy Portuguese bachelor, who had no children, left his fortune to 70 strangers selected at random from a telephone book, a newspaper has reported.

Luis Carlos de Noronha Cabral da Camara drew up his unusual will in 1988 in front of two witnesses at a Lisbon registry office, 13 years before he died of natural causes at the age of 42, reported the weekly newspaper, Sol, on Saturday.

“I am sure he just wanted to create confusion by leaving his belongings to strangers. That amused him,” said one of the witnesses and one of the man’s few friends, Anibal Castro Vila.

The Age (Australia):

Luis Carlos de Noronha Cabral da Camara boasted of his noble Portuguese lineage, but was not a happy man.

As the illegitimate and unloved son of an aristocratic woman, he was rich but had few friends and no offspring of his own.

So when it came to writing out his will almost 20 years ago, he asked a Portuguese notary for a copy of the Lisbon phone book and plucked out names at random.

Now, with the unhappy man having drunk himself into the grave, his randomly chosen heirs are receiving lawyers’ letters telling them they can claim a share of his fortune.

“I thought it was some kind of cruel joke,” a 70-year-old woman called Helena told Portugal’s Sol newspaper. “I’d never heard of the man.”

Pensioner Vitor Mendes told the newspaper: “I rang the lawyer and he said the man just picked names out of the phone book. We can’t be due to get that much. He put down 70 names!”

But with a 12-room apartment in central Lisbon, a house near the northern town of Guimaraes, a couple of healthy bank accounts, a luxury car and two motorbikes to his name, Mr da Camara’s will means that his random heirs should walk away with several thousand euros each.

He was brought up by a nanny and inherited valuable real estate from his grandmother, which he slowly sold off to fund his great passions: motorbikes, shooting and drinking.

“He was determined that nothing should go to the state, which he thought had been robbing him of money all his life,” said Anibal Castro, a former friend who witnessed the will.

Anne Applebaum, writing at Slate, has the solution for ending the Taliban’s ability to fund itself, and gain Afghan rural support, via the covert trade in opium.

She’s perfectly right.

A Texas State legislator has introduced a bill challenging the traditional claim of New Haven, Connecticut’s Louis’ Lunch to the invention of the hamburger. Representative Betty Brown’s contention that the hamburger was invented in Athens, Texas by a local resident named Fletcher Davis at a luncheonette he operated in the late 1880s is based upon research by a local Texas historian and newspaper columnist named Frank X. Tolbert.

John E. Harmon

If Fletcher Davis invented the hamburger at a luncheonette in Athens, Texas, one might suppose that an invention so successful would have kept that luncheonette in operation.

Despite the passage of time, progress, and New Haven’s inexorable downtown development, Louis’ Lunch remains in business after more than a century. John Harmon’s dismissal of Louis’ clam is not well-reasoned, in my view. Since Louis’ has declined to switch from using their archaic vertical gas broilers, and has refused to switch from using toast to buns, and has refused even to countenance such innovations as ketchup, how can one possibly assume that Louis’s sandwich has ever changed from something else to ground beefsteak?

Allahpundit has the Channel 4 investigative program broadcast Monday, January 15, revealing the kind of Islamic extremism being preached today in British mosques.

The program has been divided into three 8-9 minute videos, which follow one after the other automatically.

link

A US Army unit evidently captured this in-production insurgent video near Dulab, Iraq, and supplied the soundtrack and a different ending from the one originally intended.

5:52 video

CAUTION: A bit gory.