Comments on Casino Royale, from the discussion on my Class list.

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Sean Connery was the wrong physical type, too large, too hirsute, and the wrong-eye color, but was such an agreeable actor to watch working that no one much minded
the transformation of Bond into a somewhat hulking Glaswegian Geordie.

The Bond films long ago lost any real relationship to the original character or the books, becoming instead a strange, spectacularly vulgar, and American (in the worst sense) thing all their own: extended exercises in elaborate special effects, supplying PG-level sex and violence accompanied by comforting repetitions (with new elaborations and surprises) of the same cliches.

I thought Daniel Craig was less two-dimensional than any previous Bond, but he is even further removed from the original character than even the braw Scots Sean Connery or the Las Vegas lounge lizard Roger Moore. Bond was, after all, a thoroughgoing U Englishman, an orphan from an artistic sort of background perhaps, with languages and Continental education, but still –underneath it all– a sound public school chap (even if he was sent down, a one biographer contends), a gentleman, and (as Marlow would say) “one of us.”

Daniel Craig is no gentleman at all, only a half-civilized, arriviste thug, straight out of London gangland, if not Borstal itself. His motivation to rise in the ranks of MI6 to the point of becoming that organization’s most conspicuous and short-lived species of cannon fodder seems perfectly mysterious.

I thought it very strange indeed to have the long-abandoned skeleton of the first Ian Fleming novel disinterred, and used with the most insolent anachronism imaginable, yet still more accurately used as the movie’s framework than any of the original novels have been used in forty years. How Ian Fleming would have howled, if he were alive, to see Baccarat replaced by Texas Hold ‘Em as the locus of Bond’s battle of wits and nerve with Le Chiffre. The destruction of Venice would surely have proved comforting though.

Le Chiffre was commendably cast.

Watching the film, I could not help reflect that there must be very, very few, some absolutely tiny number of people in the world, who are capable of designing and choreographing those amazing and elaborate chase and fight sequences. They certainly deserve their millions.

But it was depressing to see, fifty years on, just how much the world has grown stupider, shorter of attention span, less critical, and more vulgar. The hero of the mass audience is less the gentleman than ever, and James Bond is now played as what Britons would call a yobbo. I sometimes think that if we could live another century, we would see mankind reduced still further in grandeur and dignity, perhaps to some sort of quadruped.

Shalom Auslander has a less-than-peaceful encounter with one of the peace-loving and enlightened inhabitants of Woodstock, New York, land of trust-fund bolshies, burned-out rockers, and navel-gazing whackos of every description, who are always organizing and demonstrating against something.

War makes us weak! Wage peace! War sucks!

And that was just his rear bumper. Green Subaru was doing 12 miles an hour in a 40; I had been stuck behind him for 15 miles and was now, thank you very much, officially late for work.

I hate war! Violence is not the answer! Coexist!

I wanted to kill him.

The Guardian reports that a British Channel 4 investigative report demonstrates that preaching of jihad, Wahabi extremism, and Islamic supremacism is still going on today in prominent mosques all over Britain. Is anyone really surprised?

An undercover investigation has revealed disturbing evidence of Islamic extremism at a number of Britain’s leading mosques and Muslim institutions, including an organisation praised by the Prime Minister.

Secret video footage reveals Muslim preachers exhorting followers to prepare for jihad, to hit girls for not wearing the hijab, and to create a ‘state within a state’. Many of the preachers are linked to the Wahhabi strain of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia, which funds a number of Britain’s leading Islamic institutions.

A forthcoming Channel 4 Dispatches programme paints an alarming picture of how preachers in some of Britain’s most moderate mosques are urging followers to reject British laws in favour of those of Islam. Leaders of the mosques have expressed concern at the preachers’ activities, saying they were unaware such views were being disseminated.
At the Sparkbrook mosque, run by UK Islamic Mission (UKIM), an organisation that maintains 45 mosques in Britain and which Tony Blair has said ‘is extremely valued by the government for its multi-faith and multicultural activities’, a preacher is captured on film praising the Taliban. In response to the news that a British Muslim solider was killed fighting the Taliban, the speaker declares: ‘The hero of Islam is the one who separated his head from his shoulders.’

Another speaker says Muslims cannot accept the rule of non-Muslims. ‘You cannot accept the rule of the kaffir [non-Muslim],’ a preacher, Dr Ijaz Mian, tells a meeting held within the mosque. ‘We have to rule ourselves and we have to rule the others.’

The 12-month investigation also recorded a deputy headmaster of an Islamic high school in Birmingham telling a conference at the Sparkbrook mosque that he disagrees with using the word democracy. ‘They should call it … kuffrocracy, that’s their plan. It’s the hidden cancerous aim of these people.’ The Darul Uloom school said it no longer employed the teacher and that one of the reasons he resigned ‘was the incompatibility of many of his opinions with the policies of the school’.

Andrew Sullivan must be pretty dense, it seems to me, if he doesn’t understand enough about his own personality, upbringing, and conversion experience to understand how he came to be a member of the contemporary subculture whose identity revolves around perverse sex.

I’m a fly fisherman myself, and I understand perfectly well what personality traits, what family circumstances, what sort of input from adults during childhood, what features of the activity itself, and what properties of the fly fishing subculture attracted me and caused me to become a member. If I were still in the Bay area, Andrew, I’d invite you to come over and recline on my couch and tell me your life story, and I feel nearly sure that I could clear it all up for you.

Your problem, old boy, is that, like virtually all contemporary gays, you have enthusiastically embraced the essentially bogus “mysterious, innate identity” model. The beauty of that model lies not in its scientific accuracy, but its moral and political utility. Once the homosexual identity is successfully portrayed as innate, it is thus inevitably established to be 1) natural, and 2) involuntary. The traditional religious and philosophical moral bases for condemnation are refuted, and the personal guilt associated with indulgence in what used to be called peccatum illud horribile inter christianos non nominandum, “the sin too horrible to be named among Christians,” is dispelled.

The epistemelogical difficulty you are experiencing is also very specifically connected to another conceptual fallacy, similarly contrived on essentially the same utilitarian basis. That being the systematic confusion of a (voluntary) behavior and cultural affiliation with an (involuntary) innate status.

One is no more born a homosexual than one is born a guitar player, stamp collector, or fly fisherman.

Life offers a myriad assortment of possible means of finding amusement, pleasure, and self expression, and more of less any avocation or pastime you select will be found to have a history, a body of previous devotees, a literature… a culture of its own. Not uncommonly, it is the culture, and the opportunity for the friendships and society of congenial persons of similar outlook and tastes which is more decisively attractive than the actual activity itself.

I am afraid, Andrew, that the inclination to your preferred avocation and cultural affiliation will always be found in a complex combination of personality, life experience, and the charms of that particular charismatic culture, in the mental and spiritual life of the individual, and not in the unconscious and involuntary interplay of material processes.

Alan Nathan compares the MSM’s coverage of Sandy Berger’s theft and destruction of documents from the National Archives to the media’s treatment of Watergate (which brought down a sitting president) and asks (not unreasonably):

Why is robbing national security documents less important than robbing campaign documents?

The London Times is leaking some strategic intelligence today.

ISRAEL has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons. Two Israeli air force squadrons are training to blow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear “bunker-busters”, according to several Israeli military sources.

The attack would be the first with nuclear weapons since 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Israeli weapons would each have a force equivalent to one-fifteenth of the Hiroshima bomb.

Under the plans, conventional laser-guided bombs would open “tunnels” into the targets. “Mini-nukes” would then immediately be fired into a plant at Natanz, exploding deep underground to reduce the risk of radioactive fallout.

“As soon as the green light is given, it will be one mission, one strike and the Iranian nuclear project will be demolished,” said one of the sources.

The plans, disclosed to The Sunday Times last week, have been prompted in part by the Israeli intelligence service Mossad’s assessment that Iran is on the verge of producing enough enriched uranium to make nuclear weapons within two years…

The Israelis believe that Iran’s retaliation would be constrained by fear of a second strike if it were to launch its Shehab-3 ballistic missiles at Israel.

One wonders if the information was supplied to the Times by Pouting American (or Israeli) Spooks whose pacifism has been offended, or whether Mossad is sending a final warning to the mullahs before the balloon really goes up.

Rare (less than ideal quality) 7:42 video of charity match held in Macao, 17 January 1954, between T’ai Chi Ch’uan grandmaster Wu Kung-I (å³åu2026Œu201eu20ac 1900-1970) and Tibetan White Crane stylist Ch’en K’e-fu (éu2122u02c6Ã¥u2026u2039夫 Chan Hak Fu, aged about 33).

There were numerous restrictions on forms of attack, but in under two rounds, the contestants grew heated, and contacts violating the rules were exchanged. It was thought too dangerous to proceed, and the match was declared “no winner, no loser, no draw.”

Muslims in Spain have already reasserted a right to conduct Saracenic prayers in the mosque in Cordoba. Osama bin Laden has expressed the recovery of the Islamic Kingdom of Andalusia as one of the goals of his jihad. Spanish bishops are justifiably alarmed by Islamic ambitions.

The Independent.

Spain’s bishops are alarmed by ambitious plans to recreate the city of Cordoba – once the heart of the ancient Islamic kingdom of al-Andalus – as a pilgrimage site for Muslims throughout Europe.

Plans include the construction of a half-size replica of Cordoba’s eighth century great mosque, according to the head of Cordoba’s Muslim Association. Funds for the project are being sought from the governments of the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, and Muslim organisations in Morocco and Egypt.Other big mosques are reportedly planned for Medina Azahara near Cordoba, Seville and Granada.

The bishops of those cities are alarmed at the construction of ostentatious mosques, fearing that the church’s waning influence may be further eclipsed by resurgent Islam financed from abroad. Up to one million Muslims are estimated to live in Spain. Many are drawn by a romantic nostalgia for the lost paradise of Al-Andalus, the caliphate that ruled Spain for more than five centuries.

Boomers can waste their lives and ruin their minds all over again perusing this complete run of Mad Magazine, 600 issues from 1952 to 2006, 17500 pages of drivel, on a single DVD.

Our parents would be truly horrified, if they were still here.

Hat tip to Mark Frauenfelder.

Information is completely lacking, but this :57 Google video shows a confrontation between a rabbit and what looks like a rattlesnake. The rabbit wins. If I had to guess, I would identify the locale as Texas.

Michael Ledeen says the war with Iran began in 1979.

There is no escape from the war Iran is waging against us, the war that started in 1979 and is intensifying with every passing hour. We will shortly learn more about the documents we found accompanying the high-level Iranian terrorist leader we briefly arrested in Hakim’s compound in Baghdad some days ago, and what we will learn—what many key American officials have already learned—is stunning. At least to those who thought that Iran was “meddling” in Iraq, but refused to believe that it was total war, on a vast scale.

Several good journalists are working on this story (see, for example, today’s article by Eli Like in the NY Sun), and the outlines are pretty clear. First, we had good information that terrorists were in Baghdad, and had gone to the compound. We did not know exactly who they were. We entered the compound and arrested everybody who looked like a usual suspect. One of them told us he was the #3 official of the al Quds unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, a particularly vicious group. He was carrying documents, one of which was in essence a wiring diagram of Iranian operations in Iraq. That wiring diagram included both Shi’ite and Sunni terrorist groups, and was of such magnitude that American officials were flabbergasted. It seems that our misnamed Intelligence Community had grossly underestimated the sophistication and the enormity of the Iranian war campaign.

I am told that this information has reached the president, and that it is part of the body of information he is digesting in order to formulate his strategy for Iraq. If he sees clearly what is going on, he must realize that there can be no winning strategy for Iraq alone, since a lot of ‘Iraqi’ activity—not just lethal materiel such as the latest generation of explosive devices, now powerful enough to penetrate the armor of most of our vehicles—is actually Iranian in origin. We cannot ‘solve’ the Iraqi problem without regime change in Iran.

Those of you who have borne with me for the last few years will not be surprised to hear this; what’s new is the apparently irrefutable evidence that has now providentially fallen into our hands. The policy makers will not like this evidence, because it drives them in a direction they do not wish to go. I am told that, at first, there was a concerted effort, primarily but by no means exclusively from the intel crowd, to sit on the evidence, to prevent it from reaching the highest levels. But the information was too explosive, and it is now circulating throughout the bureaucracy.

I have little sympathy for those who have avoided the obvious necessity of confronting Iran, however I do understand the concerns of military leaders, such as General Abizaid, who are doing everything in their considerable power to avoid a two-front war. But I do not think we need massive military power to bring down the mullahs, and in any event we now have a three-front war: within Iraq, and with both Iran and Syria. So General Abizaid’s objection is beside the point. We are in a big war, and we cannot fight it by playing defense in Iraq. That is a sucker’s game. And I hope the president realizes this at last, and that he finds himself some generals who also realize it, and finally demands a strategy for victory.

Arnold Kling, at TCSDaily, explains why truth plays so small a role in the public dialogue and the democratic process.

I am going to suggest that democratic politics is a very poor information-processing mechanism. The great mass of people form their political beliefs with little regard for facts or logic. However, the elites also have a strategy for avoiding truth. Elites form their political beliefs dogmatically, using their cleverness to organize facts to fit preconceived prejudices. The masses’ strategy for avoiding truth is to make a low investment in understanding; the elites’ strategy is to make a large investment in selectively choosing which facts and arguments to emphasize or ignore.