Monday, August 28, 2006

JIHAD AGAINST THE WEST

Will you attend this conference in Boston?

The Jihad Against the West: The Real Threat and the Right Response.

The list of the featured speakers:

LEE SANDSTEAD IN GOTHENBURG

I learned plenty of things from Lee Sandstead's lectures on art. They gave me great inspiration to explore more works of art in the future. We are already planning for next year's event. It will be on art works displayed at the Fürstenberg Gallery at the Gothenburg Museum of Art.


Camilla H. took a picture of Lee Sandstead standing close to Masthugget Church, looking out at the harbor.

I look forward to Lee's book on Evelyn Beatrice Longman.


Photo by Ego. (Taken with a Qtek 9100 smartphone.) Print of Genius of Telegraphy.

UPDATE 09/05/06:

Lee Sandstead is interested to know more about the story behind the following poem:



The plaque is belonging to the Water Lily (Nymfea Alba in Latin, "Näckrosen" in Swedish) / Sleeping Nymph by Christian Eriksson / Per Hasselberg. From Alles Kunst Net:

Hasselbergs most original works were for the gallery of the private palace of the patron and art collector, Pontus Furstenberg in Göteborg; he sculpted six allegorical groups of life-size figures in plaster (1884; Göteborg, Kstmus.) representing the technical exploitation of the forces of nature. Hasselberg was probably inspired by French models such as Emile Arthur Soldiss reliefs Photography and Electricity (1882) on the Hotel de Ville in Paris, and by Michelangelos Medici tombs in the New Sacristy in S Lorenzo, Florence, but the allegories are completely his own. In 1886 he sculpted the Grandfather, an aged sleeping philosopher with a naked slumbering boy on his knee. Considered indecent, it caused a lively press debate in 1895 when it was posthumously erected in Humlegorden, Stockholm. The Frog (1890) and Water Lily (1892; both Göteborg, Kstmus.) are sensually modelled in white marble. They represent girls unaware of the power of their physical beauty. The latter was sculpted from Hasselbergs plaster model by Christian Eriksson (1858/1935). Hasselberg broke with the dry post-classical style of Swedish sculpture. His work shows the influence of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux and French Salon sculptors of the 1880s, but also expresses a romantic natural lyricism. (www.ProArts.at)


LEE SANDSTEAD AT BLUE CHIP CAFÉ
Lee Sandstead in action. Photo by Avinesh K Ghai.

UPDATE 09/24/06:

Check out Lee Sandstead's galleries from Gothenburg.

Thursday, August 24, 2006

INTERVIEW WITH ED CLINE

You could now listen to my interview with Ed Cline. Please go to Egoist at ThinkerToThinker.com and leave your comments.

I am planning to interview the following individuals in the near future:

Sunday, August 20, 2006

ELECTION ON SEPTEMBER 17 IN SWEDEN

I will help Pajamas Media (Politics Central) in doing some coverage of the parliament election in Sweden. [Editor's note and full disclosure: I haven't voted for an established party for a very long time. I voted in the Swedish election to the European Parliament.]

In 2002, the Social Democrats won the elections together with the Left (former Communist party) and support from the Green Party. This time you could pick between plenty of pressure groups, e.g., Feminist Initiative, Health Care Party and the Pirate Party. Here is an expert from Quinn Norton's article, A Nation Divided Over Piracy:

But it was the spike in the Pirate Party's numbers after the raid that might have the most lasting consequences for Sweden. Membership shot past the nation's Green Party, which holds 17 seats in the Riksdag, Sweden's parliament. There's no guarantee that membership will translate into votes, but the pirates have raised enough funds to print 3 million ballots for next month's election, and they have enough volunteers to get them out to all the polling places. (Wired News, 08/17/06.)


For a guide to the Swedish Election, go the The Local. [Editor's comment: I am not one of the undecided voters. I have decided not to vote at all...]

Related: My post, OPEN THREAD POST: ELECTIONS.

BLOG FATIGUE

I am feeling a bit down after all terrible news regarding the war on terror. [Hat tip to M.G.] It is hard to write posts at the moment, but I will try to recover from the writer's block. Maybe I should follow Laurence Simon's dress code.

Instead of writing about world politics (e.g., mullahs and other terrorists in the Middle East, dying dictators, etc.), I will talk more about my business and hobbies.

Today I made chile pepper poppers.



This time I made the dish with Sweet Wrinkled Old Man and Sweet Banana Pepper.



I will continue with catblogging.

Thursday, August 17, 2006

AROUND THE WEB ON 8-17-06

Cross-posted from Gus Van Horn

Bad AC yesterday and a lousy Internet connection today force me to rush. Since I'm writing this in a hurry, I'll excuse myself now for its being shorter than usual and perhaps somewhat disjointed, just in case....

Word of the Day

mechanical placebo n. A device or object that appears to perform a specific function, but in fact does nothing at all.

Follow the link, and you will find that my suspicions about pedestrian signal buttons have been right on the money.

Curves Permitted Again (for Now) in Hollywood

This sounds too good to be true for this curve junky, but according to Rachel at Politburo Diktat, what Hollywood calls "fat" is "back", baby!

Out like gout!In like Flynn!

She ends, "I'm not even going to get into the fact that the cover of the story is illustrated with a pig in high heels. Rebecca Traister has already done that. I'll take being a pig over being this [picture at left --ed] any day." Good for you, Rachel! (And I'll stop there so my wife won't make me sleep on the couch when she reads this!)

My personal taste aside, I wouldn't read too much into what I think is only a temporary fashion, rather than the more permanent adoption of an aesthetic that glorifies the human body.

Hee hee!

I see that Isaac Schrodinger thinks I was too hard on the Mafia the other day. I think he may have a point!

Congratulations!

Via Bubblehead, I have learned that Rob Schumacher, whose writing on submarines is very good, has become one of the rotating columnists for The Navy Times. Congratulations, Rob!

Fascist California

Amit Ghate links to a WSJ editorial.
[T]he State of California is trying out fascist tactics rather than the socialist ones so prevalent during the previous administration. The WSJ has a good editorial detailing the proposed new "voluntary" prescription drug plan that our masters in Sacramento have unveiled to rob pharmaceutical companies.
My wife and I have to look for places for my her residency soon. Being a two-career couple makes this hard enough. We already have ruled out California due to cost-of-living considerations since we might start a family soon. I see that we won't have to give it a second look any time soon.

Drat! I lived in the Bay Area near the end of my naval service. Beautiful weather. Gorgeous scenery. Nice climate -- but only meteorologically speaking!

It's not just a blog, ...

... it's an (unwanted) adventure. Andrew Dalton notes that Mahmood Ahmadinejad has his own blog. I haven't time to look at this in any detail, but I have heard that you visit that bastard's site at your own peril.
As noted below in the comments to this post, navigate through Ahmadinejad's blog at your own risk. There appears to be some sort of attempt to "backdoor" your computer if you click on any of the links.
You have been advised.

The Self-Inflicted Agony

Nick Provenzo and Yaron Brook sum up the situation in Lebanon. Says Brook:
A U.N. resolution calling for the disarming of Hezbollah in Lebanon is not the same thing as the actual disarming of Hezbollah in Lebanon -- let alone the defeat of Hezbollah throughout the Middle East. And by urging Israel to end its military offensive, the administration has ended any possibility that Hezbollah will actually be destroyed.

The only way to end the threat from Islamic totalitarian groups like Hezbollah and their state sponsors is to inflict crushing devastation upon them by aggressive military action.
Via TIA Daily, I recall reading that Israel's Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, used the IDF merely to achieve the resulting "deal" at the United Nations, which is to say, he sold out his country's security for the political advantage of the moment. If this recollection is true, he should be tried for war crimes. Israeli soldiers died for that.

And Jim Woods has more thoughts.

The Silver Lining

Via TIA Daily, I have learned that there is a silver lining to the recent, prematurely-ended hostilities: an intel coup for the West:
From the Iranian viewpoint, Israel succeeded in seriously degrading Hizballah's capabilities. It was also able to throw the Lebanese Shiite militia to the wolves; the West is now in a position to force Nasrallah and his men to quit southern Lebanon and disarm. The West shut its eyes when he flouted the Resolution 1559 order for the disarmament of all Lebanese militias. But that game is over. The Americans will use Resolution 1701 as an effect weapon to squeeze Iran, denied of its second-front deterrence, on its nuclear program. [Bombings would "squeeze" Iran better. --ed.]

Tehran hopes to pre-empt the American move by torpedoing the Lebanon ceasefire and preventing the termination of hostilities at all costs.
An intel bonanza is useful only, of course, if it is used. The key question in the short term is this: Is Israel's leadership more weak-kneed than Iran's is aggressive?

The Siege Mentality

Via Thrutch is this good posting by Andrew Medworth on the siege mentality of the West in the current war.
We are retreating, reacting, and gradually accepting these threats, these inconvenient counter-measures, and the loss of our liberty as an inevitable facet of the state of the modern world.

It does not have to be this way. We know how to defeat ideologically-driven fanatics who do not care about their own lives and are committed to our destruction. Just sixty years ago, we won a world war against such people. Back then, we recognised the states who were sponsoring the aggression against us: Germany, Italy, Japan and their allies. We did everything possible to defeat those nations and refute and humiliate the ideologies which fuelled them, including mounting massive attacks on their civilian populations, to bring home to those who were (either actively or passively) supporting the enemy war machine the consequences of their governments' aggression. The result was that all the fascist nations are now peaceful, semi-free countries who threaten no-one.

What Germany was to twentieth-century fascism, Iran is to Islamic totalitarianism today. We can destroy today's threat by defeating Iran and its co-sponsors of terrorism, turning Islamic totalitarianism into a humiliated and discredited ideology for which no-one is prepared to risk his life, let alone give it in order to kill others. There is no way this vicious movement can survive without some measure of state support: if we end this, we end the movement. [bold added]
This in part echoes a point I made recently about "creeping dhimmitude".

The World's Shortest Philosophy Books

Via Christian Beenfeldt, comes a link to this very humorous list. Here's a sample:
  • Coping with Change by Parmenides
  • A Rational Account of the Physical World by Plato
  • The Role of Sexual Passion in the Christian Marriage by St. Augustine
  • A Complete Inventory of Everything that Exists by Benedict Spinoza ...
  • How We Can Make this a Better World by Gottfried Leibniz
There is also at least one actual book I can recall on the list. And, if you're more clever than I am, you can write to its maintainer with your own ideas!

-- CAV

Thursday, August 10, 2006

AROUND THE WEB ON 8-10-06

Cross-posted from Gus Van Horn

Wikipedia Founder Influenced by Ayn Rand

The blog of the PSU Objectivist Club notes that, according to Wikipedia, Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is "a passionate adherent of the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand, which Encyclopaedia Britannica describes as 'essentially reversing the traditional Judeo-Christian ethic.'"

This is interesting news, but then again, according to Wikipedia -- whose entry on "Objectivists" is careful to relegate "Former Objectivists" like Nathaniel and Barbara Branden to their own list -- so are David Kelley and Robert Bidinotto.

Who is Ned Lamont?

By the looks of it, he is a messenger of sorts. What he says is boring and unoriginal, but what he (or at least his Connecticut primary win) means is: "There is no room in my party for debate."

Glenn Reynolds notes that some Democrats, like Brendan Loy and his "radical feminist '60s flower-child" mother -- both lifetime Democrats -- have heard this message loud and clear. From another Brendan Loy post:
... I've continued to cling to the label of Democrat, and to the hope that the party would somehow save itself from the tired orthodoxies of its interest groups and the execrable excesses of its far-left wing. I've shaken my head at the irrational policies and irresponsible rhetoric coming from so many corners of the party, comforting myself with the thought that while Dennis Kucinich may be a nutjob and Al Sharpton may be a charlatan and Howard Dean may be an idiot and Dick Durbin may be, well, a dick, at least there's still Joe Lieberman.
In the sense that this primary result has been a shot across the bow for -- How shall I put this? -- the sane fringe of the Democratic Party, this may have been a good thing.

The Stimulus

I can't recall the local television news being so thoroughly dominated by terrorism since the atrocities of September 11, 2001, as it has been this morning -- by the news of an airline plot thwarted in Britain. Here is a brief list of news links.

BBC: "'Airlines terror plot' disrupted"
Metropolitan Police Deputy Commissioner Paul Stephenson said ... "We believe that the terrorists' aim was to smuggle explosives on to aeroplanes in hand luggage and to detonate these in flight. We also believe that the intended targets were flights from the United Kingdom to the United States of America."
From television, I surmise that the men, who by some bizarre coincidence are all Moslems, were smuggling liquids onto the planes that were harmless alone, but would become explosive when mixed.

Reuters: "UK police hold 21 over foiled plot to bomb planes"

Michelle Malkin: She is, of course, all over this, and notes that she was already covering two other terrorism-related stories when this broke.
I went to bed last night after blogging about the Dearbornistan terror arrests and the still missing 8 Egyptians. Twenty minutes after I went to sleep, the news broke about a massive terrorist plot to blow up several aircraft mid-flight between the United States and Britain using explosives smuggled in hand luggage.
In her post on the missing Egyptians, she correctly notes that "Michael Chertoff is an idiot." She quotes Investor's Business Daily:
Less than a year before 9-11, 17 national Muslim and Arab groups marched on Washington to protest support for Israel. The rally attracted more than 10,000 Muslims, who denounced Jews and, for the first time, openly supported Hamas and Hezbollah. Some of their leaders ominously warned America it would suffer a terrible fate if it did not divorce Israel.

Many who attend such rallies are here illegally from the Middle East, yet the feds don't pick them up because their bosses are handcuffed by political correctness and don't want to look racist.

Sensitivity toward Muslims is so raw that Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff this week felt compelled to express disappointment that the FBI put out an alert for 11 Egyptian students who failed to show up at Montana State University. They entered the country on visas, then vanished. Chertoff said not to worry, just a bunch of kids cutting class. No threat here.
And oh yeah. The arrests in Dearborn, Michigan, involve cell phones, which rang a bell for me, too, so to speak.

Isaac Schrodinger: My favorite ex-Moslem blogger posts a good roundup on the bombing plot.

Little Green Footballs: LGF also report on the bomb plot, but update another story my readers might find eerily familiar. Once again, we hear about "humanitarian aid" workers in Lebanon providing military aid to Hezbollah! This time, though, it isn't the UN giving Hezbollah terrorists free rides in ambulances, but Red Cross workers helping combatants disguised as civilians cross the Litani.

All this reminds me of a quote I found on Muslihoon, the next blog in this week's roundup:
"Is it just me, or is your first reaction after turning on the news and hearing someone say 'We must try harder to understand Islam' to wonder, 'Oh God, what did they blow up now?'" Courtesy of Ace, Ace of Spades HQ.
And: Earth calling Mr. Chertoff!

Until and unless world domination ceases to be an integral part of the Moslem faith, I have no need to understand any other part of it.

The (Needed) Response

Via Muslihoon, comes a superb piece about how Israel should deal with Hezbollah. Think of it as the "barroom brawl" version of John Lewis's outstanding essay on how America won World War II.
Finally the Marine's pleading turned to screams.... a high, almost womanly shriek. And still the punches continued relentlessly. Several people in the bar took a few tentative steps as though they wanted to try to break it up at that point, but hands reached out from the crowd and held them tight. I'm not ashamed to say that mine were two of the hands that held someone back.

You see, in between each blow the sailor had begun chanting a soft cadence: "Say [punch] you [punch] give [punch] up [punch]... say [punch] you [punch]were [punch] wrong [punch]". He had been repeating it to the Marine almost from the start but we only became aware of it when the typical barroom cheers had died down and we began to be sickened by the sight and sound of the carnage.

This Marine stood there shrieking in the corner of the bar trying futilely to block the carefully timed punches that were cutting his head to tatters... right down to the skull in places. But he refused to say that he gave up... or that he was wrong.

Even in the delirium of his beating he believed in his heart that someone would stop the fight before he had to admit defeat. I'm sure this strategy had served him well in the past and had allowed him to continue on his career as a barroom bully. Finally, in a wail of agony the Marine shrieked "I give up", and we gently backed the sailor away from him. [bold added]
By extension, this is how the West should deal with the Islamic world until it unequivocally renounces the notion that it is entitled to rule the entire world.

Congratulations!

Mike N's got a new grandson!

He's back!

Alex Nunez has resumed blogging at The Noonz Wire.

He's blogging!

Apollo, an occasional commenter here, has a blog! I knew this, but the last time I checked, he had a single post from ages before, and was apparently using his blog more as a set of bookmarks than as an actual journal. Now, he's blogging, and after reading this review of The Tiger's Way, I've added him to the blogroll.

John Stark, too.

Find Fidel, Get Cash

Via Babalu Blog: There is a "Where's Castro?"-themed photo-shopping contest being held over at Brain Shavings.
Apply your creativity to come up with Fake-But-Accurate™ photographic proof of Fidel's current location, and you could win fabulous prizes! Vacations! Cruises! Cuban cigars! Universal health care! Rusting 1950s-vintage sedans with huge tailfins!
First prize is a $150.00 gift certificate to Amazon! If I can come up with a good idea in time, my wife is a whiz at Photoshop!

-- CAV

Wednesday, August 9, 2006

TRACKING THE NEWS BUZZ

From the About page on BuzzTracker.org:

Buzztracker is software that visualizes frequencies and relationships between locations in the Google world news directory.

Buzztracker tries to show you how interconnected the world is: big events in one area ripple to other areas across the globe. Connections between cities thousands of miles apart become apparent at a glance.


Buzztracker daily image

Newstex has added a sample story from my blog to its site.

Thursday, August 3, 2006

INTERLINGUA IS NOT NEWSPEAK

I have joined the Societate Svedese pro Interlingua. Here is an excerpt from Answers.com:

Ultimate credit for Interlingua must go to the American heiress Alice Vanderbilt Morris (1874–1950), who became interested in linguistics and the international auxiliary language movement in the early 1920s. (Answers.com)


If you wonder about the title, check out newspeak.

HEZBOLLAH AND IRAN

In the news: Ahmadinejad: Destroy Israel, End Crisis - Washington Post / AP.

Hezbollah: Coming Soon To Your Hometown


Changement de Rythme

AROUND THE WEB ON 8-3-06

Cross-posted from Gus Van Horn

Castroectomy

I hem and haw, coming up with the phrase, "Death by Iron Fist", which I like less and less every time I read it. Cox and Forkum come up with a single word.


They also seem to have unearthed what could be the best eulogy for Castro in print. They quote CBS News:
Cuba is the isolated Communist island that has never squeezed itself out from under the thumb of the West, focusing most of its energy on weathering the U.S. trade embargo. Though Castro survived U.S. attempts on his life, like the CIA's famous exploding seashell, his famous tumble down the stairs in old age was a metaphor for his regime. Cuba became the floating prison from which thousands of influential American immigrant businesspeople, politicians, etc., hailed, and never has ceased to be the island from which citizens risk life and limb to escape. Whereas Castro envisioned that his Communist utopia would set the gold standard for the world, he has been handily upstaged by dissidents and exiles who have, over the decades, become poster children for the fundamental thirst for liberty. [bold added]
Cuba could stand to benefit greatly from a Castroectomy.

Hezbollah in Sweden?

Martin Lindeskog shows images from a pro-terrorist rally in Gothenburg. (Alas, terrorist sympathizers are everywhere.) "The Zionists are the real terrorists," eh? That's funny, because, according to the UN, which donates human shields to Hezbollah, the ...

... "Terrorist Label" is not "Helpful".

Via LGF comes this quote from Mark Malloch Brown, the UN's "#2 man".
What is troubling to me is the US and UK now carry with them a particular set of baggage in the Middle East. The challenge for them is to recognise that ultimately they have to allow others to share the lead in this effort diplomatically and (in putting together) a stabilisation force.

It's not helpful for it again to appear to be the team that led on Iraq or even on Afghanistan. It's not helpful to couch this war in the language of international terrorism. Hizbollah employs terrorist tactics, it is an organisation however whose roots historically are completely separate and different from Al Qaeda.
Quick! Someone tell the Swedish chapter of Hezbollah that they're playing straight into the hands of the American imperialists and their British lap dogs!

Useful Labels for Useful Idiots

It is somewhat fascinating how transfixed the left is by language. They assign so much power to it that they twist it beyond recognition in an effort to transmute reality. When they're not trying to control what others say (as above), they're busy using words in the opposite sense they're intended. Isaac Schrodinger provides us with an example, taken from a post at another blog titled "When Jews Behave Like Nazis, They Become Nazis":
Today, in light of Israel's criminal aggressions in Lebanon and Gaza, there is no doubt that Israel is thinking, behaving and acting like the Third Reich. And when Jews, or some Jews, think, behave and act like the Nazis, they become Nazis themselves.

Zionists are behaving like Nazis because they are murdering innocent civilians en mass to avenge the death of a few Israeli soldiers killed by resistance fighters in Lebanon or Palestine.

...

Needless to say, these fighters, whether you call them Hamas or Hizbullah, are struggling to rid their countries of a brutal Israeli occupation, very much like European resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied Poland, France, Greece, and other countries fought to get rid of the brutal Nazi occupation of their countries. [bold added]
Talk about some "useless labels"....

The left is trying to do to language what they did to currency long ago: Outlaw the real thing, then manufacture tons of what looks like the real thing, but is in fact worthless. I call it "word inflation".

Tell me how we're supposed to discuss this war intelligently if we can't call a terrorist a terrorist, and yet we do call a nation defending itself from terrorists (called "freedom fighters") "Nazis"? The obvious result of all this would be for us to simply accept anything Hezbollah does without any resistance.

Unfortunately, just as fiat currency can't magically create goods and services out of thin air, fiat verbiage can't magically create peace or freedom. Israel would not defend itself, and Hezbollah's true nature would not change if only it were allowed to have (even just a part of) what it wants without a fight. But only the latter will happen if we continue having any part of this fraudulent "intellectual economy" set up by the frenetic printing presses of the left.

Some Hard Currency

And speaking of discussing the war in terms that mean something, if currency must be backed by some kind of objective value (e.g., gold), then words must be backed by actions. I suspect that if we were to show the Islamic axis that we were willing to back up our tough talk from time to time, we'd have far less trouble from them.

Perhaps, if we sent one (or a few, or many -- whatever it takes) of these to Iran (See this video.), rather than Condi Rice to Israel, Iran would no longer pose a problem and the Arab states would try to avoid being "next".....

(HT: Bothenook. And wow! What a blast from the past! As I watched the launch video, I saw someone and thought, "Hmmm. That sure looks like [one of my nuke school classmates]." Lo and behold, his name was in the credits.)

The Passion of the Mel

Andy has this to say about The Passion of the Christ, which I did not see and have no plans to see:
Gibson did little but show the transformation of a man into a bloodied piece of meat. Whose decision was it to turn the man into meat? The movie clearly puts the blame on the Jews.

The movie completely lacks ideas, history, or explanations. It was about as concrete-based as you could get in a movie -- it was like porn. The portrayed message: "Look what the Jews did to our God, our hero".
In Mel's "honor" last night, I watched The Passion of the Jew on DVD. (BTW, It will air on Comedy Central next week.) One of the characters likened the movie to a "snuff film".

The Force of Reason

If you were thinking of reading this Oriana Fallaci book, Jennifer Snow might save you some trouble.
The Force of Reason is a follow-up to The Rage and the Pride and is ... a tirade against the Muslim takeover of Europe, a phenomenon that Oriana refers to as "Eurabia" (a term she did not invent). I'm sorry to say that there really wasn't much to the book; it very much left me asking "what reason?"

This is because Ms. Fallaci's writing is extremely emotionalistic and overwrought, precisely what you would not expect in a book purporting to be about reason. She dwells lengthily on issues such as the method of preparing halal meat.... [I]f you can't stand the sight of blood, have the grace to faint in private. Don't pretend that it adds weight to your argument.

Her self-translation to English from Italian is awkward at best, making the book difficult and sometimes unpleasant to read.... The errors of usage make her seem hurried, unprofessional, and too hysterical to be taken seriously.

While she does make some interesting points about such issues as the collusion of the Catholic Church with the Muslim invasion, her points are detached from any underlying principles. Why is Islam bad? They kill people! They castrate women! They defame Oriana in the press! They don't allow free speech! They bomb stuff!
Or she will perhaps pique your interest, but at least spare your expectations.

An Analysis of Hezbollah

Christian Beenfeldt over at Principles in Practice points to and critiques an analysis of Hezbollah by Daniel Byman.
To understand the nature of the enemy Israel is facing, it is helpful to find a reliable and well-researched document that presents important facts about Hezbollah and its supporters. In 2003, Foreign Affairs published such a document, "Should Hezbollah Be Next?" by Professor Daniel Byman.

Unfortunately, the work is marred by an anemic proposal for concrete action. Byman's proposal amounts to the pragmatic "solution" of talking tougher to Hezbollah-supporter Syria. This is a tried and true method of guaranteed failure. Such tactics, along with similar toothless diplomatic maneuvers, have obviously done nothing to sway either Syria or Iran from their terror-supporting ways in the three years that have passed since the article was published -- or, for that matter, in the twenty-some years of failed diplomacy that preceded it.

Yet, the very quality of Byman's analysis makes the illogic of his pragmatic proposal clear. ... [link dropped]
See what I think about "tough talk" unbacked by action above.

Socialized Journalism

Ooh! Based on these blog entries, it looks like City Journal might be working on a feature about the biased Beeb! From the second piece, "Subsidized Stupidity", by Theodore Dalrymple:
For a license to receive television broadcasts in their homes, British households must pay an annual fee of about $200 (soon to rise), which subsidizes the once famous but now increasingly infamous BBC. This broadcasting system exemplifies two of the guiding principles of contemporary British public life: the active promotion of vulgarity and the shameless looting of the public purse.

Conservative Party head David Cameron recently sat down for an interview on the BBC with Jonathan Ross, whom the organization values for his extreme crudity. He asked Cameron whether, as a youth, he had ever masturbated (he used a more demotic expression) while fantasizing about Margaret Thatcher.

...

We have returned to the eighteenth-century days of state patronage, with this difference: that the men who exercised it back then were at least men of taste and discrimination. They knew a Dr. Johnson when they saw one. From Dr. Johnson to Jonathan Ross: what a falling-off was there!
And don't miss the Denis Boyles piece, which he ends by asking, "[W]hat's the "benefit" [i.e, justification of government sponsorship] of having such unhappy, hostile journalists wandering through a theater of war -- especially when they become weapons used against the coalition and the Iraqis themselves?"

Maddox Returns

Via The Primacy of Awesome comes this very funny upbraiding of the latest loony left conspiracy video concerning the terrorist attacks of 2001.
The fact that this man is alive... [image deleted] ...is proof that "Loose Change" is bullshit.

Here's why:

1. The man in the picture ... is Dylan Avery. [H]e's claiming that the US government, for whatever ends, killed nearly 3,000 innocent Americans, and tens if not hundreds of thousands of more lives in the conflicts that ensued because of it.

2. Since Dylan's arguing that the government has no problem killing 3,000 innocent people, this raises the question: if his documentary is true, and we've established that the government has no ethical qualms about killing thousands of its own people, then why wouldn't the government kill Avery and his friends as well? What's a few more lives to them to ensure the success of this conspiracy?
That's a actually a good point. For the laughs, including some fiat currency origami, visit the page.

-- CAV