Andrew Levy, alarmed by the recession, hopes to supplement his income by blogging for Huffington Post. Excerpt from sample editorial:

In the wake of the events of 1-15, in which a wedge of Geese brought down a US Airways aircraft, here’s what you won’t be hearing about from the so-called “Mainstream Media”: We brought this on ourselves.

After an event such as this one, it’s important to look at the root causes: Why did the Geese attack us? Well, the truth is, for years we have been oppressing the Geese, using them for the fuel they provide for our bodies.

Boneless Goose Breast, Brandied Roast Goose, Roast Goose with Cumberland Sauce and Apricot Stuffing. And of course, the Christmas Goose. In the name of religion, we have been engaged in what can only be called a Crusade against the Geese. Is it any wonder that a few brave suicide Geese would seek revenge?

Patrick Joseph McGoohan was born in Queens of Irish parentage, but raised in Ireland and England, where he attended Ratcliffe College, a Roman Catholic public school boasting the architecture of Pugin, in Leicestershire, where, according to Wikipedia, he excelled at mathematics and boxing.

McGoohan was perfect for the role of British secret agent, having intellectual good looks, a natural aptitude for conveying the impression of competence and intensity of will, and possessing a distinctly U accent.

He might have been far more famous as an actor, but he turned down the roles of James Bond and the Saint back in the 1960s, just as he turned down the roles of Gandalf and Dumbledore more recently.

He will be remembered for The Prisoner (1967-68), which he produced, wrote, and starred in, and frequently directed. The series flopped in Britain, but proved in hit in France and the United States producing its own cult following. The Prisoner was revolutionary television, operating at a wholly unprecedented level of surrealism, metaphor, and sophistication, and scarcely equaled since as a vehicle of ideas.

2:58 video

Varifrank posted yesterday:

My favorite quote from “The Prisoner”, which seems rather timely right about now is this exchange with Leo McKern as “Number 2”.

Number 2: What in fact has been created? An international community. A perfect blueprint for world order. When the sides facing each other suddenly realize that they’re looking into a mirror, they’ll see that this is the pattern for the future.
Number 6: The whole earth as… ‘The Village’?
Number 2: That is my hope. What’s yours?
Number 6: I’d like to be the first man on the moon!

Reason quotes a reader of the French newspaper Le Monde: “Patrick McGoohan finally escaped.”

FaceBook shut down Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice promotion, citing privacy concerns. I agree with Michael Arrington that the decision was the kind of triumph of corporate stodginess over creativity and humor that demonstrates that the people in charge, with the power, haven’t a clue.

Original posting

Everyone knew that Cass R. Sunstein was an extreme “progressive,” a socialist, and an adversary of the US Constitution as actually written, but one particularly dangerous aspect of Sunstein’s personal political philosophy is not particularly well known.

The Center for Consumer Freedom has issued a press release reminding Americans that Cass Sunstein is additionally an Animal Rights activist and extremist.

How extreme?

Well, in The Rights of Animals: A Very Short Primer, 2002, later recycled into the introduction to Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, an anthology he co-edited in 2004, he argues:

“Animals should be permitted to bring suit, with human beings as their representatives, to prevent violations of current law … Any animals that are entitled to bring suit would be represented by (human) counsel, who would owe guardian like obligations and make decisions, subject to those obligations, on their clients’ behalf.”

Sunstein, who is soon likely to be gifted with extensive powers as “regulatory Czar,” has argued in favor of bans on animal cosmetics testing, hunting, greyhound racing, and… meat eating!

Facing Animals 1:41:36 video – Sunstein’s keynote address begins around 39:00.

—————————–
Hat tip to Claude Sutton, MFH.

Lots of problems today.

1) My email account was hijacked by a spammer who mysteriously somehow acquired my password, so the hosting service closed it down. It’s back up and back under my control (with a new password), but if you received an email recently from me asking you to invest my $30 million dollars of ill-gotten Nigerian diamonds, I recommend passing up the deal.

2) NYM’s host server went down in a major way with every file corrupted (fortunately, backups did exist). Possibly a cyber attack from disgruntled overseas readers. There has not yet been time to identify the cause.

3) Xena, baddest of the Maine coon cats, who knows no fear, was found this morning perched in one of the 10′ ( 3m.) high little windows just below the gambrel ceiling of my third floor office. Her route included the top of some four drawer filing cabinets and the frame of my wife’s late mother’s oil portrait hanging high on the wall. She also knocked out the wireless modem on her way up. Take my advice: avoid owning coon cats!

A life of crime tires one out

Llewellyn in 1979

The British Press pays admiring tribute to Sir Dai Lewellyn, who died younger than most, not from the years but the mileage.

Evening Standard:

One-time debs’ delight Sir Dai Llewellyn, who has died aged 62, never did anything remotely useful in his career. Defying every known rule of moderation, he simply lived life to the full – and that cheered up a lot of people.

The Telegraph:

The 4th Bt, who died on Tuesday aged 62, became famous as a playboy, bon viveur and darling of the gossip columns, his reputation reflected in soubriquets such as “Seducer of the Valleys”, “Conquistador of the Canapé Circuit”, “Dai ‘Lock Up Your Daughters’ Llewellyn” or simply “Dirty Dai”.

The son and heir of the gold-medal-winning equestrian baronet Sir Harry “Foxhunter” Llewellyn, and brother of Princess Margaret’s one-time paramour Roddy Llewellyn, Dai Llewellyn was celebrated for his serial seductions of “It” girls, models and actresses, his relentless appetite for partying and his outrageous indiscretions. …

He never grew up. On a visit to South Africa aged 60, he claimed to have fallen through a bedroom floor into a cellar while “attempting to roger a girl called Nettie”, the girlfriend of a friend. “I wish I could tell you this was an isolated incident,” he told a journalist.

Daily Mail:

Sir Dai, wracked by cancer, cirrhosis of the liver and anaemia, died in a Kent hospital where he had been receiving treatment for several weeks.

His death leaves a gap in London society that will be hard, if not impossible, to fill. Sir Dai was defined by a recklessness that belongs to another age.

He was 62, a child of the post-war era, but he lived like an Edwardian rake, strutting the boulevards with a wicked smile, never too far from another drink or a beautiful woman. …

As a young man, Sir Dai pursued a modelling career under the name David Savage.

Nicky Haslam, the interior designer and writer said: ‘When I first met Dai he was incredibly good-looking and well dressed. The girls fell for him like mad.’

Sir Dai assisted the process with relentless flattery and assiduous attention, but he always maintained that women loved a rascal, especially those who make them laugh.

But it didn’t work on one young beauty who, it is said, was the love of his life. …

His modelling career flopped and when he arrived back in London, two years later, she had married someone else.

Sir Dai threw himself with even more enthusiasm into the life that came to characterise him: parties, drinking and seduction.

Some detected a Celtic self-destructive streak and he was indeed a child of the valleys.

In an interview at the hospice last November he said he once drank eight bottles of wine, a bottle of rum, a bottle of port and a bottle of vodka in one night, yet in the morning he was perfectly lucid.

It was a tale that will pursue him to the grave.

——————————-

Hat tip to John Brewer.

left:Ali al-Kurdi, Right: Mohammed el-Qahtani in Yemen jail

Susan J. Crawford, the convening authority for military commissions, Bob Woodward gleefully reports, has announced that she is unwilling to try Mohammed el-Qahtani (the intended 20th 9/11 hijacker who missed his flight) because interrogation techniques applied to him, including “sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold” impaired the poor chap’s health and thus amounted to torture.

Crawford . . . .said the combination of the interrogation techniques, their duration and the impact on Qahtani’s health led to her conclusion. “The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent. . . . You think of torture, you think of some horrendous physical act done to an individual. This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for. And coercive. Clearly coercive. It was that medical impact that pushed me over the edge” to call it torture, she said.

MacRanger is unsympathetic.

He says, if discomfort, embarrassment, and water poured on your face are torture, he was tortured himself.

Sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold I experienced in basic training. Waterboarding I experienced later during escape and invading training.

Here we have a Bush Administration official, with a long record of working for Dick Cheney, by the way, inhibited from prosecuting a principal participant in the worst attack on the United States in history costing the lives of 3000 innocent civilians
because she is willing to regard discomforts used in interrogation essentially identical to stresses endured by US military personnel in training as “torture.” Once Crawford is gone and some Obama appointee is in her place, we’ll have hairy Pathan mass murderers released because some corporal crushed their spirits with a cutting remark.

All this demonstrates that the Bush Administration approach of military commissions operating at Defense Department level in the full view of the domestic media and the humanitarian bien pensant left was always insane. The correct procedure was always minimum formality and drumhead courts martial for illegal combatants and captured terrorists under the immediate local US military authority followed by speedy dispatch to the Muslim Paradise at rope’s end.

Carol Marin, of the Chicago Sun Times, contrasts the MSM’s crusading zeal in dealing with Rod Blagojevich with its supine courtiership toward Barack Obama.

It was media deference and self-imposed restraint which made Obama’s electoral victory last November possible. A closer and more skeptical look at Obama’s mysterious life history, associations, and personal benefits connected with shady deals would have sunk his candidacy. Instead, the press operated as his personal fan club.

The honeymoon is still going on, but the day when all this changes will come.

As ferociously as we march like villagers with torches against Blagojevich, we have been, in the true spirit of the Bizarro universe, the polar opposite with the president-elect. Deferential, eager to please, prepared to keep a careful distance.

The Obama news conferences tell that story, making one yearn for the return of the always-irritating Sam Donaldson to awaken the slumbering press to the notion that decorum isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

The press corps, most of us, don’t even bother raising our hands any more to ask questions because Obama always has before him a list of correspondents who’ve been advised they will be called upon that day.

We reporters have earned our own membership in the Bizarro universe.

Who are we, after all? The ones rapid-firing at Rod Blagojevich with tough questions until we drive him from the room? Or the Miss Manners crowd, silent until called upon, quietly accepting that only a handful of questions will be taken at a time?

Karen will like this one!

link

Hat tip to NavySealDad.

Barack Obama is widely expected to fulfill his campaign promise to close the US detention center at Guantanamo, if not on Day One of his administration, as soon as can practically be arranged.

The prison at Guantanamo Bay has been made into a symbol of Bush Administration offenses by the left, and its closing will appropriately signal the left’s victory in the struggle with George W. Bush for public perception of reality. But, delightful as the consummating moment of wet liberal humanitarianism’s triumph ought to be, clever democrats like Obama can probably already predict the ultimate consequences.

Simply transferring jihadis to US federal prisons will amount to moving them to the US domestic justice system, with all of them armed and equipped with top flight representation right out of America’s best law schools and white shoe law firms. Renditioning Guantanamo inmates to remote foreign locations where leftwing reporters and attorneys from Shearman & Sterling are in shorter supply would be effective, but rendition has been made into a dirty word.

The Bush Administration, squirming and wriggling ineffectively under continual liberal attack, already released all the likely safe bets and questionable case prisoners.

Reuters reported yesterday on just how well that worked out.

The Pentagon said on Tuesday that 61 former detainees from its military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, appear to have returned to terrorism since their release from custody.

The Pentagon declined to give the names of the 61 released detainees, but at least one, Abdullah Saleh al-Ajmi, is pretty well known. He blew up seven Iraqi security force officers and himself in a suicide bombing last April 26th.

I’d say Barack Obama is in a no win situation.

P.J. O’Rourke asks the question of the hour: Is it too soon to talk about the failed Obama presidency just because Obama isn’t president yet?

Business Week’s Steve Hamm says the problem is greedy investors’ short term thinking and aversion to risk, and those stingy VCs should start funding “bold new directions” while waiting for Uncle Obama to open up the federal tap.

Hamm’s article lit the fuse of Michael S. Malone at Live from Silicon Valley.

Since Steve Hamm and Business Week aren’t willing to give you anything but their own big government/big business solutions to the perceived crisis, let me give you the real story – and real solutions – from somebody who has been on the ground here in Silicon Valley for 45 years:

Yes, Silicon Valley – and by extension, the U.S. high technology industry, is in something of a crisis right now. Part of it is the fact that, as the largest manufacturing sector in the US economy, electronics is not immune to the larger financial crisis currently impacting the world.

But there a lot of other problems as well. For one thing, the venture capital industry is in real trouble – not because of a lack of courage, but because government interference – most notably, Sarbanes-Oxley – has proven almost fatal to the new company creation process. With almost no potential for a big pay-out on the back end (because companies don’t ‘go public’ any more), VC’s are having to be much tighter on the front end. That’s good business, not gutlessness.

As for the entrepreneurs themselves, to charge them with a lack of courage or character is truly insulting. Instead of hob-nobbing with senior executives, Steve should have called me. I would have taken him to the little Peet’s Coffee shop in nearby Cupertino where I get my lattes twice per day. There, I would have shown him that on any given day you can see at least two entrepreneurial teams – a half-dozen guys huddled over a single laptop editing spreadsheets – almost always different, and all dreaming of starting the Next Big Company. There are hundreds of these start-up teams all over the Valley right now – indeed, I think there is more entrepreneurial fervor going on right now than just about any other time in Valley history.

Are these folks thinking small? Are they short on courage? No, what they are is pragmatic. That’s the essence of being an entrepreneur. They know what the business landscape is out there, and they are adjusting their plans to succeed in that new reality.

No, the problem is not that entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley and the rest of high tech aren’t thinking big, it’s that they aren’t being allowed to. If Business Week would just take off its ideological blinders, it would realize that if Washington really wanted to help a sick Silicon Valley, it would get out of the way, and strip away all of those worthless regulations that are inhibiting the imagination and the creativity of this town.