C'est Tout

Probably. Back Sat. Night / Sunday morn. Shabbat Shalom.

The Only Truck

I love the Chevy Suburban. I mean, I love it. It is, I think, my favourite vehicle of any type - at least, any type not devoted exclusively to military use. And maybe even then.

There's hardly any way to make the Suburban better. It's a huge honkin' truck chasis, it's roomy, it moves - I can't attest for the steering, but I imagine it's not all that bad. Throw a complete armouring job and a diesel engine in, and it's more-or-less perfect. I mean, what more could you want?

How about a .50-cal!

CORRECTION: Charles points out in the comments that the picture is in fact of a Yukon, not a Suburban, and that in any case Chevy has stopped producing Suburbans, which now carry only the GMC label. My ignorance; my apologies.

UPDATE: Okay, I give up. Chevy still makes the suburban, not GMC, and who makes the Yukon is entirely beyond me. Point of the post is this: a Suburban - any Suburban - with a mounted machine gun in the carriage is pretty %&$@#*& cool.

Euro-Small-Sausage

Oh, man, this is too good. LGF found some article written in a Swiss magazine, which talks about the weblog phenomenon. The original is here - but it's in German; run this URL (http://www.facts.ch/facts/factsArtikel?artikelid=208113&rubrikid=777) through Altavista's BabelFish and then read the result. It's hilarious. Skip on back to the LGF link and read the comments - the Usual Suspects have a great time with it.

They Must Know the Guys at BMW

BBC News Online has recently divided its website into British and International versions. Poking around on the regional pages of the internation version, I noticed that regional news is available in a number of local languages. For instance, the South Asia site is available in Urdu, Hindi, Pashto, Bengali, Tamil, Nepali and Sinhala. Swing on over to the Mid-East site, and you can get your news in Arabic, Persian, Pashto, Turkish, and French. Note the conspicuous absence - the language used in the country with the most computers in the region.

There are, of course, reasonable explanations. Being the most-educated populace, Israelis far more likely to speak english. This might also explain why the Asia-Pacific site offers Chinese, Vietnamese, Burmese, Thai and Indonesian - but not Japanese.

Why the European site doesn't offer French is harder to explain. Well, not really, I suppose - the BBC may be all sorts of things, but at least they're still British.

Alec Baldwin

Remember him? He's said to be an actor; more famously, he promised to leave the US if Dubya won the 2000 election. Unfortunately, he's still here.

So what's Alec been up to? Apparently, he's been trying to steal artwork. A real moral authority, this guy.

Perle Says Iraq Must Fall Soon

Writing in today's Telegraph, Richard Perle (CV) says that attempts by Iraq to split the Allied cause in order to avoid an attack are doomed - because the Americans would go it alone if they had to, and because they won't have to since Blair will be onside when the time comes. He also makes the point that it's somewhat silly to ask who knew what before September 11th -- everybody knew a whole lot before Sept. 1, 1939, and while we should have attacked earlier (as Churchill wanted), we didn't. If there's a lesson, it's that we've missed opportunity after opportunity - but that, proverbial Poland having been invaded, it's time to react before things get worse.

Iran Targetting Dissidents Abroad

The NY Sun's Adam Daifallah reports that Iran has apparently been engaging in cloak-and-dagger tactics - literally - in an attempt to assassinate dissidents and opponents of the Islamist regime in Tehran. The murders apparently denote an increased desperation on the part of the government to subdue the growing unrest in Iran.

Steyn Watch

Yesterday's Post column, which is in fact just a pared down version of this.

Whoa

The Group Captain draws our attention to a report that crows at a lab in England have managed to make their own tools (tool, really) to retrieve food down a hole. From the MSNBC story:

Two crows — Betty and Abel — were presented with a small bucket of food down inside a tube and two pieces of wire, one hooked and one straight. "Our surprise came when, in the fifth trial, the male stole the hooked wire from the female and took it away. Far from giving up, she then picked the remaining straight wire and bent it herself," [one researcher] explained. "To make sure of our observation we then offered repeatedly only the straight wire, and she unfailingly did the same trick over and over again," he went on.

GC Mandrake explains why this is a big deal: non-humans aren't supposed to be able to build their own tools - that's a human function. Granted, the tool in question wasn't particularly difficult to make - it was a bent piece of wire - and we're not likely going to see crows with powersaws anytime soon, but it's still, I think, something of a big deal.

Volokh on Liberty: Optimistic

Eugene Volokh says things are actually pretty good.

His approach underscores one of my complaints about some approaches to libertarianism - those that feel that until each and every egregious affront to liberty is corrected, we are doomed to live in a totalitarian cesspit. Certainly the United States isn't nearly a libertarian paradise; nonetheless, as Volokh points out, things are, on balance, pretty good.

Besides, as he says, "optimism is just more fun!"

Bavarian Motor Works

Is that the sound of goose-stepping?

Closing Bell Market Watch

Dow up 3.03%; Nasdaq up 2.77%; S&P up 3.27%.

Mid-Day (ok, afternoon) Market Watch

Dow up 1.69%; Nasdaq up 1.46%; S&P up 2.13%.

Steyn Watch

An expanded version of today's Post piece. Excellent.

Guns, Handguns, and Statistics

The Good Professor has a very interesting piece at FoxNews about guns, gun control and crime.

The more I learn about guns and gun-rights (and gun-control), the more I think that opposition to guns often coincides with an 'end-of-history' attitude. Not unusual, seeing as I'm a history student. But comments like that made by reader Charles - "as if the framer’s of the 2nd amendment intended it for a society like ours’ today" - suggest a particular view of 'a society like ours' within the greater stream of history, or rather suggest that the observer feels that our society is somehow not part of that stream.

Whoa - ok, now I'm going abstract. A little more coffee, a little more thought. But I'll come back to this. In the meantime, read Reynolds.

Steyn Watch

He's back again this morning, giving a country-by-country account of Arabia and the ramifications of a regime-change in Baghdad. Posted when available.

CORRECTION

Steven Den Beste of USS Clueless responds by e-mail to my earlier post and asks:

your comment suggests that you are not a civilian. Did you serve?

I must clarify that I am a civilian, and that I have not served in the armed forces. I was foolish to use such a term, not taking into account its consideration. I hold serving-men and -women in the highest regard, and I would never try and claim the respect that they deserve.

Thoughts

Thanks to my few readers for the discussion about Florida's adoption law. A lot of interesting veiws and good points were raised. I must say, however, that I think Josh Faust gets it right when he says:

Adoption is a great idea. Encouraging mothers who don't want their children to put them up for adoption is a great idea, and almost infinitely preferable to aborting the pregnancy. However, there are too many barriers to adoption in this country...

The bill in question is yet another barrier, and likely a prohibitive one in many cases. The law may be ok, but the spirit is off. This approach should, I think, be dropped.

Den Beste on War

This guy knows an awful lot for a civvie. Check it out.

Satellite Evidence of War Preparations(?)

Glenn links to this page of satellite photographs purporting to show improvements at an airbase in Qatar, suggesting preparations for a Qatar-based strike on Iraq.

Cool stuff, no doubt, but - and I must admit sattelite photos have always looked odd to me - does anybody else find these a little, well, suspicious? And by 'suspicious' I mean 'as if they were created in PhotoShop'.

Closing Bell Market Watch

Dow up 2.2%; Nasdaq up 1.7%; S&P up 2%.

After starting well up on positive news from Cisco, indeces fell in morning trading, flirting with market value most of the day. Yet a late surge brought significant gains, after a number of poor sessions.

Somewhere between Reason and National Review

A reader sends along this story and the comment: "I may be in favour of a paternalistic state, but this is actually revolting."

I've been pondering this story, hemming and hawing, mulling and considering, and the fact is I'm not sure where I stand. Believe it or not. I'm certainly not crazy about state intrusion into private lives. I'm also pretty sure that the 'right to privacy' is a judicial rather than constitutional right.

Anyway, my point is that a voice in my head is telling me the judge in the above-noted case made the right decision, at least where privacy is involved. But another part of me really really really doesn't want to listen to that voice. So I'm asking you, my few-and-far-between readers, to give me your input in my comments. Please, please, expound, pontificate and otherwise write your take on this story. The fact is, I'm confused, and I don't want to blog one way or the other until I can flush out a better position.

Fire away.

It's a Dog's Life

Topless Photo

... of Lech Walesa. Oooo baby, I can't wait to see the google hits off this one.

Power of the Blogosphere

Check out the comments thread to Charles Johnson's post on the death cult chat board. The diligent LGF readers have been poring over the contents of the message boards, as well as delving into the details of its server, ownership, and usership. This will definately be on Best of the Web; less likely is a mainstream media mention; very likely it will be gone within the business week; less likely is that the FBI and other law-enforcement and intelligence-gathering organizations are as on top of the situation as the LGFers are.

UPDATE: I was wrong; BotW doesn't have it.

Death Cult Meme

Tal G finds a discussion board with posts by Moslem teens discussing all sorts of happy subjects - decapitation of Jews, murder of infidels, even the dispatch of sexually-active siblings. Lileks notices; LGF notices; The Corner notices.

I haven't visited the page; I wouldn't from the office. I'm not going to link to them either - follow any of the links in this post, you're two steps away.

UPDATE: Glenn notices.

Aside

If you'd checked the blog in the past, oh, five minutes, you'd have seen a post about the resignation of Canadian third-party tory leader Joe Clark. It's now up as an aside.

(Meanwhile, Aside links are still, um, broken. Don't know why; can't figure it out. I'm going to try changing the Asides template; who knows, it may work.)

Red China Watch

Doublespeak: "peace will have to be safeguarded and won through the use of force." That's in the event that Taiwan, which has governed itself for more than fifty years, conducts a referendum to see whether the Taiwanese want to... govern themselves.

It's a wonderful paradox: can you imagine a similar referendum being held in China? The fact that Taiwan can consider allowing their people free expression illustrates why they are the true representatives of the Chinese nation.

Taiwan should not break in the face of absurd Chinese blustering. The Communists have no good claim to Taiwan, and their desire to 'reunite' it with the mainland is an unveiled desire to end a fifty-year old civil war. It is outrageous that the west allows Communist Beijing to entertain this fantasy. China should be told, in no uncertain terms, that their militaristic machinations towards Taiwan border on acts of war. Nobody wants war; not us; not the Chinese. But we mustn't let this reluctance translate into appeasement. China has no rights to Taiwan. It's time they stopped crying and got over it.

AP Conducts Weighted Voucher Poll

Honestly, if the AP is a news service, why conduct a scare-poll like this one?

Shout Out to My Girl Catherine

From this AP piece:

"We're not going to let them win. We're not going to let them scare us away," said Catherine Cochinov, who arrived from Ottawa on Tuesday. "I'm staying, I think all of us are staying," Cochinov said.

Catherine was on the March of the Living with me in 1998; she is, of course, a fellow Ottawan.

Mid-East Blogging

I've noticed that in the past two weeks, blogosphere focus has shifted heavily towards the Mid-East after a lull. In fact, some sites are so dedicated to that front that even without my reduced blogging schedule I'd be hard pressed to keep up. James Taranto's Best of the Web Today has become a daily roundup of terror-, war- and Mid-East-related goodies. For the same, but updated far more frequently, bookmark and repeatedly visit Charles Johnson's Little Green Footballs, which seems to have taken as its holy mission the collection and dissemination of uncut truth about the war.

Steyn Watch

Yesterday's Steyn.

NYC Prepares for Eleventh

The AP outlines plans for New York's commemoration of September 11th. Plans include the reading of the names of those killed at the WTC as well as the recital of the Gettysburg address.

This latter act, while well intentioned, is silly. The address is a very particular speech, memorializing a particular kind of event. This first anniversary of the Eleventh is in fact a perfect opportunity for a new Gettysburg address. As Lincoln showed, you don't have to be verbose, and you don't have to be a renowned orator. A simple man with a simple message can make a mark on the whole body politic.

Personally, I think that, starting at the time that the first plane struck the WTC, every church in the city - the whole city - should start ringing its bells, and should ring those bells 2,823 times, once for every person killed in the WTC that day. Imagine, nowhere in the greatest city on earth would you be able to escape that haunting memorial

The Greatest

Read this interview with Paul Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay.

Terror's Toll

CNN has been scrambling to stem the flood of people fed up with their terrible bias. This is a good start. And a haunting reminder of the depravity of the Palestinian 'cause'.

Whooo!

A big name in entertainment is thinking about running for governor. No, it's not Bruce Springsteen, or Arnold Schwarzenegger. This guy was a big name in 'sports entertainment'. No, not Jesse Ventura.

I'm talking Ric Flair. Whoooo!

Search Term of the Week

"I wonder if that judge would hold the Declaration of Independence unconstitutional he'll be blackballed I hope the Senate will waste no time in throwing this back in the face of this stupid judge. Stupid, that's what he is"

No kidding.

UPDATE: I realize I may not have been explicit enough. The above was a string of words entered as a search term at Yahoo.com. My site came up. I'm just glowing with pride.

Who Are You

The mayor of Hiroshima doesn't think much of American foreign policy. "The United States government has no right to force Pax Americana on the rest of us, or to unilaterally determine the fate of the world," he said. "As the only country in history to have experienced atomic bombings, I would like to underline Japan's unwavering commitment to its war-renouncing constitution..."

Japan shouldn't need reminding - but it tragically does - that there are many good reasons why Japan is the only country in history to have experienced atomic bombing. They are called Pearl Harbour, Malaya, Hong Kong, and Guam; they are called the Phillipine Islands, and Midway, and Nanking.

Japan shouldn't need reminding - but it tragically does - that its 'war-renouncing constitution' was crafted for it - nay, forced upon it - by the United States, which, with Britain and the Soviet Union, was 'determin[ing] the fate of the world'. They were doing so because Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany were themselves trying to 'determine the fate of the world' - a fate of damnation and tyranny, of suffering and slavery.

Being victims of an atomic attack affords the Japanese absolutely no moral authority on the subject. Yet even granting the mayor of Hiroshima his platform, his message is counter-intuitive. The United States has, for fifty years, been sole guardian of the free world. In that time it has never used atomic weapons in pursuit of its policies and goals. Certainly the risk of an atomic confrontation has increased in the past year. Yet the United States is not responsible for that increase; nor is the US the party most likely to employ a nuclear device. Rather, the forces of radical Islam - the Islamofascists who destroyed the World Trade Center - are demonstrably interested in obtaining, and using, an atomic weapon. If the mayor of Hiroshima were genuinely concerned over the potential of an atomic conflict, he would give his full support to the US-led effort to rid the world of those who would use such a terrible weapon.

The mayor's remarks on the anniversary of the dropping of Little Boy paradoxically illustrate the nature of the present conflict. His misguided comments aside, the mayor reminds us that once again the United States is engaged in a protracted struggle with an enemy that seeks to impose its terrible ideology on the world at large, and to eradicate those who stand in its way. Whereas, sixty years ago, the United States won the race to develop weapons of terrible power, today the tables are turned. Atomic weapons are of little use when the enemy is not concentrated in a particular area, and when a domestic populace prohibits the employment of such power. Our enemies are constrained by neither of these bonds. The only way to prohibit another Hiroshima is to prosecute with full force and determination the current war on terror.

Sun Rising

The NY Sun tells it like it is.

Calm Before the Storm

Severely reduced blogging for the next little while.

In the meantime, this morning's required reading is from David Warren, who echoes the analysis that the Israelis are waiting for the Big One, and are trying to avoid 'provocation'.

Also, there's yet another excellent Steyn piece in the Post this morning, wherein he berates the left for assuming the argument is won before it's evenm met, and manages to include a call for the reclamation of the term 'liberal'. Will post when available.

UPDATE: Steyn now up.

Archbishop becomes Honorary Pagan

Had your doubts about Archbishop-elect Rowan Williams? Well, add another one. Williams has participated in a ceremony of the Welsh 'White Druids', a group "which promotes Welsh language and culture".

One has a feeling that this guy just doesn't really get it.

Party Up

Looking for a rockin' good time? Well, there's a party going on in Gaza. The occasion? Why, dead Jews, of course.

Waiting Game

A very interesting analysis from Ha'aretz regarding the IDF's operational plan for the next six months to a year. Note their confidence in an imminent American attack on Iraq. Note also the lengths they're willing to go, and the casualties they're willing to bear, for peace -- not an expulsion of Palestinians, not even a removal of Arafat. Simply a waiting game until conditions are ready for stability.

Bush, AP fail to do their homework

At least, that's what I take out of this report on the spate of terrorist attacks this weekend in Israel.

Says Bush: "There are a few killers who want to stop the peace process." No, Dubya, no no no. You sound like Clinton. You know that that these people don't give a &%@$ about the 'peace process'. You know that. So don't go spouting stupid, vapid, and ultimately insulting soundbites everytime there's another murder, because we're hurting, and we're looking to you for leadership, and we notice. Bad call.

And the AP reports that Israel has stepped up its policy of destroying the homes of terrorists. "[T]he only tangible result to date," the report claims, "is that militant groups have stopped announcing the names of attackers and releasing their homemade videos." Wrong.

Yea, yea, I know, I'm being a crank. Sue me.

This Guy's No Good

Reports out of London that King Abdullah of Jordan is little more than an Iraqi stooge, cowtowing to Baghdad on a host of issues and activities in return for 'gifts'. When Abdullah poo-pooed the idea of Americans over-flying Jordan, I said it was a conundrum - that the West had no interest in seeing the tenuous Hashemite thrown come down. Now I'm not so sure. Jordan may become another instance of - would the alternative really be worse?

Bus Bombing Kills 9; Shooting Kills 2

Tal G. has coverage, and a tragically resigned outlook.

All Steyn, All the Time

From the Telegraph (link should work).