Hat tip to Rich Duff.

The New York Post reports that Current TV’s left-wing employees, in the aftermath of the network’s sale to the Saracens, are not too happy with their former boss.

Just call him Al Gorezeera.

Yesterday morning, the still shell shocked staff at Current TV was called to an all hands staff meeting at its San Francisco headquarters, which was teleconferenced to their offices in LA and NYC, to meet their new bosses.

That would be two of Al Jazeera’s top guys: Ehab Al Shihabi, executive director of international operations, and Muftah AlSuwaidan, general manager of the London bureau.

Ominously missing was the creator of Current, the self proclaimed inventor of the Internet and savior of clean energy, Al Gore, although his partner, Joel Hyatt, stood proudly with the Al Jazeera honchos.

“Of course Al didn’t show up,” said one high placed Current staffer. “He has no credibility.

“He’s supposed to be the face of clean energy and just sold [the channel] to very big oil, the emir of Qatar! Current never even took big oil advertising—and Al Gore, that bulls***ter sells to the emir?”

The meeting, while not contentious, was, according to staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity, miserable.

The mostly left-leaning group—some still in denial —weren’t buying what Al Jazeera was selling.

And what are they selling? Al Jazeera’s image of —are you ready?— “inform, inspire and entertain!”

The “new” American Al Jazeera will, according to Shihabi, appeal to the American audience with a mixture of national and international news—and, of course, entertainment.

But you won’t be getting that Middle East merriment until April, which is when the network says it will be ready to take over.

“Sometime within three months—no more, no less—we were told,” said the Current staffer.

One person at the meeting, who has already announced that she’s leaving, former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, tried to ask about severance packages for those who wouldn’t be staying.

“This isn’t the place to discuss this!” Hyatt barked at her.

“After that, everyone kept their questions pretty much to themselves,” according to the staff member.

How do they feel about Gore the savior of green energy now?

The displeasure with Gore among the staff was thick enough to cut with a scimitar.

“We all know now that Al Gore is nothing but a bulls***ter,” said the staffer bluntly.

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Dan Greenfield really puts Albert Gore’s career into perspective.

The Gore lost the election, went into the wilderness of Belle Meade and came out with the revelation that it’s time to drop all the little lies and stick to one big one. Forget claiming that you invented the comma and the cocoa bean while on a conference call with Isaac Newton and just focus on warning everyone that the planet is about to explode. A lie as big as a planet. A lie that was too big to fail.

Gore monetized that lie, he took it to every bank on the planet and then he took it to every cable company and convinced them to give him access to 40 million American homes so that he could tell them that the planet was about to blow up. And just as he had at the White House, Al Gore cashed out that access and sold it to an enemy nation.

There are idealists who sell out and become hollow men, and there are hollow men who pretend to be idealists. Gore is a hollow man selling someone else’s alarmist hollow earth theory so he can make it to the next stage of a career that has no meaning or purpose. Like most professional idealists, Al Gore cares for nothing except money. Having sold out so many times, his only idea is to keep doing it again and again.

The professional idealist is a hollow man. A soulless man who is tasked with convincing everyone of the existence of the thing that he does not have. The left has created an endless number of professional openings for such soulless men, for paid liars and faithless tricksters, who live only to convince the world that they believe just long enough for them to sell out one more time.

Common gull (Larus canis) attacks White-tailed Sea Eagle (Haliaeetus albicilla) in Norway. Photo: Markus Varesvuo.

Daily Mail.

An animated film made by Irina Litmanovich as a SHAR studio school Director’s course project in 2005.

“A mournful celebration of the fact that life’s problems never end.”

Hat tip to Viktorija Ruškulienė.

William G. Zincavage (my father) fulfilling his top-of-the-food-chain responsibilities in 1947.

Last month, NYM linked an article on Slate reporting that hunting was catching on among left-wing, bicycle-riding hipsters as a sort of an extension of back-to-the-land locavore fashion. The hippie berry-pickers and mushroom-gatherers have been slowly evolving into hunters.

Today, we find, on the eminently leftist blog Obsidian Wings, an article by an anti-gun suburbanista from New Jersey styling herself “Doctor Science,” who has suddenly discovered that hunters have an important role to play in wildlife population management.

The way I see it, humans are the top predator around here[6], and we have an ecological obligation to act like it. Which means killing deer[7], especially the young ones and the does. In other words, for food. The reason the venison we had last week was so exceptionally scrumptious was because it came from a 2-year-old antlerless animal, just the kind you’d select if they were farm-raised.

What I’m seeing in NJ is that hunters and birders (and other conservationists) are working together more than used to be the case. …

I don’t know if there will be a shift in hunting culture, if hunters in places like NJ come to see themselves as ecological agents who don’t just “harvest” or exploit wild animals, they use their skills to perform crucial tasks of population control and management.

“Doctor Science” (I keep struggling to suppress a derisive snort every time I read her self-application of that undoubtedly grossly exaggerated appelative) attributes her enlightenment on the unfashionable subject of hunting to her being a bird watcher.

We spend time outside, cultivating patience, observational skills, and learning to keep our feet warm. Birding definitely taps into part of the ancient hunting impulse, to chase things down and find them out. I can definitely understand hunting on a gut level and see the appeal, even though I’d be a pretty terrible hunter.

I think she’s probably right about the last, since she is obviously pretty lousy at finding things out.

If she was much of a hunter of information, about birding, for instance, she’d know that wildlife in North America generally was saved from extinction, parks and gamelands created, habitat preserved, commercial hunting suppressed, and bird and animal species successfully managed (and sometimes dramatically restored) by hunters.

She would know that John James Audubon invariably reduced to possession with a gun the Birds of America he recorded in his paintings.

She would know that the Conservation Movement of the late 19th century that preserved from extinction, and brought back only too successfully, those white-tailed deer she finds delicious was created entirely by prominent sportsmen, by men like Theodore Roosevelt, George Bird Grinnell, Charles Sheldon, William T. Hornaday, John C. Phillips, Aldo Leopold, and others. All of those gentlemen wrote books which the lady could hunt up and read. There is also a general survey of the history of the conservation movement in this country, published in 1975, and titled An American Crusade for Wildlife.

“Doctor Science” is sufficiently self-enamored to suggest that hunters ought to become more like left-wing suburban bird watchers, give up their NRA memberships, quit liking and collecting guns, and use firearms guiltily, reluctantly, and only when thinking of them as food harvesting implements. Aesthetic, historical, technological, and associative sentimental appreciation of firearms would be wrong. Just as hunting for sport, for the personal pleasure of participatory experience of the active role in the natural contest of predator and prey, for the aesthetic awareness of the ritual of the chase, and for the sense of self-identification with a rich, immemorial tradition would be wrong. It is only right, she tells us, to hunt in order to acquire “healthy, clean meat to feed my family.”

It is typical of self-congratulatory liberal narcissism to think that one’s own provincial and Philistine outlook and motivations represent the supreme moral ideal that the rest of mankind needs to be taught to emulate.

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.

Aeneas carries Anchises, with Ascanius and his wife. Amphora from a Greek workshop in Etruria around 470 BC, Deutsche Staatliche Antikensammlungen

I cannot resist sharing the absolutely delightful descriptions of the eccentricity and profound learning of “Dr. Meleager” from Shane Leslie‘s 1926 portrait of undergraduate life at King’s College, Cambridge The Cantab.

“Dr. Meleager” constitutes an admiring portrait of the great Æschylean scholar Walter George Headlam (1866-1908), who was also depicted as William Rodney in Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day (1919) and as William Banks in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927).

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The charming variety of the College lecturers enabled Edward to dispense with lectures outside. It was the pride of King’s that outsiders trooped into her lecture-rooms, while only Kingsmen who had an hour to kill in the mornings went to the vaunted lecturers of Trinity. Edward made trial of Dr. Verum, who had achieved fame by the exchange of vituperative pamphlets on the editing of Æschylus with Dr. Meleager of King’s ; and the fastidious editor of Sophocles, Sir Dominick Webbe, whose Greek accents, however, were always corrected in the University Press, to the admiration of Europe. There was also Webbe’s bitter rival in literature and politics, Dr. Henry Johnson. Between Webbe and Johnson lay the bitter gulfs betwixt poet and philosopher, Tory and Whig, dandy and Bohemian, while alas ! there was only one Regius Chair of Greek to contain them both. As this was occupied by Webbe, it was obvious that until Webbe had himself been translated, Johnson could not be happy. King’s was indifferent to the Greek Chair, knowing that in the eyes of Germany Cambridge scholarship was blazoned with the name of Dr. Meleager.

Most of the party were weary Examiners or examinees and were content to lie in the thick dry sedge, King’s forgetting and by King’s forgot. It was a day not richly dight in experiences, but moulded to beautiful tones. Only when the launch turned slowly homeward did the ripple of to-morrow’s Greek ruffle Edward’s peace. Dr. Meleager sat absorbed in the sunset. The colourless moon interested him as the source and symbol of so much Greek poetry and Mediterranean religion. Edward had a curious feeling that he should not miss a last opportunity to pump Dr. Meleager’s wits, and broached shop. ‘There is a good deal of difference, sir, between the Cam in winter and summer, as much almost as there is between prose and poetry in Greek.’ ‘Without prose we should never realise poetry,’ answered Dr. Meleager. ‘The study of late prose helps me weed the glosses out of the great plays. You can read the Greek poets for ever. Simonides was Pheidias in verse, pure Parian. All the great poets were prototyped in Greek. Milton is Æschylus, Wordsworth is Callimachus, and Heine is the Spirit or Puck of the Greek Anthology. When a Greek poet was not imitating the musician, he was copying the painter. Ionic words patch oriental colouring into the Persians of Æschylus. His metaphors make the effects of impressionism almost like coloured transfers. You must read the whole of Greek not to miss one point in Æschylus. Grammars are only museums, collections of freaks. Lexicons are the dead burying the dead. But a scholar should keep his own lexicon as a gentleman keeps his own cellar. Liddell and Scott, however, is the most useful collection of errors ever published. I think I could make ten corrections on every page.’ And he looked upward with a shrug as though he expected nothing of Academies, and then, swerving his thought: ‘What’s your idea of an angel? Something like an Athanasian hospital nurse? I dreamt of one last night standing over me, something between a fairy and policeman. Anyhow, Angel is the loveliest Greek word in the English language.’

—Tom Weller, Cvltvre Made Stvpid

Hat tip to Karen L. Myres.

Typical hired assassin.

The Next Web describes an ingenious solution adopted by a Chinese father to a widespread parental problem.

What would you do if your adult son was playing video games all day instead of looking for work? Well, one Chinese father resorted to desperate measures when he reportedly hired in-game hitmen to attack his son whenever he logged on to his favorite game, according to the People’s Daily.

After being killed repeatedly in an online game, 23-year-old Xiao Feng figured out that the high-level griefers had been put up to the task by his dad, who says he hoped the trick would cause his son to lose interest in the game. Xiao Feng maintains that he’s not going to settle for just any job and that he hasn’t found the right fit yet.

Hat tip to Rob Long.

What we call moose, Europeans call elk.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Can you spot the impala?

The Daily Mail recently published a feature on the “Vanishing Act” Nature photography of Art Wolfe.

Definitely worth a look.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Elizabeth Wurtzel grew up in the New York projects, but got herself a scholarship to private school and went on to graduate from Harvard. She later attended Yale Law School, graduating at age 40, apparently having been admitted on the basis of her writing career, despite atrocious Law Board scores.

Wurtzel had earlier “made a career of her emotions” quite successfully, writing Rock criticism and publishing an autobiographical novel of addiction that became a bestseller and was made into a movie starring Christina Ricci. All that ought to get anybody into Yale Law.

She shared connoisseurship of depression with the late David Foster Wallace and worked for left-wing superlawyer David Boies.

2012 apparently did not go so well for the poor girl, and that bad year prompted her to pen this highly amusing rant about her own “one night stand of life.”

I had found myself vulnerable to the worst of New York City, because at 44 my life was not so different from the way it was at 24. Stubbornly and proudly, emphatically and pathetically, I had refused to grow up, and so I was becoming one of those people who refuses to grow up—one of the city’s Lost Boys. I was still subletting in Greenwich Village, instead of owning in Brooklyn Heights. I had loved everything about Yale Law School—especially the part where I graduated at 40—but I spent my life savings on an abiding interest, which is a lot to invest in curiosity. By never marrying, I ended up never divorcing, but I also failed to accumulate that brocade of civility and padlock of security—kids you do or don’t want, Tiffany silver you never use—that makes life complete. Convention serves a purpose: It gives life meaning, and without it, one is in a constant existential crisis. If you don’t have the imposition of family to remind you of what is at stake, something else will. I was alone in a lonely apartment with only a stalker to show for my accomplishments and my years.

I was amazed to discover that, according to The Atlantic, women still can’t have it all. Bah! Humbug! Women who have it all should try having nothing: I have no husband, no children, no real estate, no stocks, no bonds, no investments, no 401(k), no CDs, no IRAs, no emergency fund—I don’t even have a savings account. It’s not that I have not planned for the future; I have not planned for the present. I do have a royalty account, some decent skills, and, apparently, a lot of human capital. But because of choices I have made, wisely and idiotically, because I had principles or because I was crazy, I have no assets and no family. I have had the same friends since college, although as time has gone on, the daily nature of those relationships has changed, such that it is not daily at all. But then how many lost connections make up a life? There is my best friend from law school, too busy with her toddler; the people with whom I spent New Year’s in a Negril bungalow not so long ago, all lost to me now; every man who was the love of my life, just for today; roommates, officemates, classmates: For everyone who is near, there are others who are far gone.

Please understand: I live specifically, with intent. The intent is, I know now, not at all specific, except that I have no ability to compromise. Most people say that as a statement of principle, but in my case, it is about feeling trapped when I am doing something I don’t like, and it is probably more childish than anything else. I likely do the right things for the wrong reasons. But it has also meant that I have not disciplined myself into the kinds of commitments that make life beyond the wild of youth into a haven of calm. I am proud that I have never so much as kissed a man for any reason besides absolute desire, and I am more pleased that I only write what I feel like and it has been lucrative since I got out of college in 1989. I had the great and unexpected success of Prozac Nation in 1994, and that bought me freedom. And I have spent that freedom carelessly, and with great gratitude. Why would I do anything else? I did not expect, not ever, to be scared to death.

I was born with a mind that is compromised by preternatural unhappiness, and I might have died very young or done very little. Instead, I made a career out of my emotions. And now I am just quarreling with normal. I believe in true love and artistic integrity—the kinds of things that should be mentioned between quotation marks—as absolutely now as I did in ninth grade. But even I know that functional love includes a fair amount of falsity, or no one would get through morning coffee, and integrity is mostly a heroic excuse to avoid the negotiating table. But I can’t let go. I live in the chaos of adolescence, even wearing the same pair of 501s. As time goes by.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Walter Olson (via Facebook).

Lt. Gen. Bernard E. Trainor USMC (ret.)

Michael Yon has a classic example of the spectacular-stupidity-and-inflexibility-of-the-TSA genre.

A note [from retired Marine and 3-star General Mick Trainor recently] appeared on a private message board. This private group includes many current and former generals, and just about anyone you see on television or in books as a national security specialist, ranging from CIA to all the top war correspondents, special operations types galore, and high-level policy makers. There is significant education value in just reading their traffic. …

“Did you use hand cream this morning?”

“Yes,” I replied, “Why do you ask?”

“Because there is a trace of nitrate on your hands. That is not uncommon with some hand lotions. Nitrate is an element of explosives.”

“OK,”.I thought. “I have soft hands, but not a bomb.” Notwithstanding such logic, I was informed that I would have to have a full body search. With that two agents escorted me to a private room while other agents began to tear apart my luggage.

“Is this really necessary?” I enquired. “I’m an eighty four year old, native born American citizen who spent forty years in the Marines and fought in two wars and retired as a general.”

“Oh, you were a Marine.” said one agent. “My father-in-law is a retired Marine colonel of about your vintage. His name is Webster. Did you know him?”

“I knew a Charlie Webster, who went as ‘Chuck.’ We went through Quantico together as new lieutenants.”

“That’s him.” replied my interrogator ….. as he proceeded with the full body search.

Not quite as bad as the 2002 shakedown of 86-year-old WWII hero and former South Dakota governor Joe Foss, during which TSA personnel failed to recognize and tried to confiscate his Medal of Honor, but very bad. Story here.

Anybody know the name of that “private message board?”