Is Hell exothermic or endothermic?

Subject: Exothermic or endothermic?
The following is an actual question given on a University of
Washington Chemistry mid-term. The answer by one student was so "profound" that the professor shared it with colleagues, via the Internet, which is, of course, why we now have the pleasure of enjoying it as well:

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic
> (absorbs heat)?
>
> Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law
> (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some
> variant.
>
> One student, however, wrote the following:
>
> First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So
> we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the
> rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume
> that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls
> are leaving. As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at
> the different religions that exist in the world today. Most of these
> religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you
> will go to Hell.
>
> Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do
> not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls
> go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the
> number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially.
>
> Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because
> Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in
> Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand
> proportionately as souls are added.
>
> This gives two possibilities:
>
> 1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls
> enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase
> until all Hell breaks loose. 2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster
> than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure
> will drop until Hell freezes over.
>
> So which is it?
>
> If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman
> year that, "It will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you,"
> and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then
> number two must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic
> and has already frozen over. The corollary of this theory is that
> since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any
> more souls and is therefore, extinct......leaving only Heaven,
> thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why,
> last night, Teresa kept shouting "Oh my God!"
>
> THIS STUDENT RECEIVED THE ONLY "A"

Tom Snyder Dies at Age 71

Tom Snyder's Tomorrow Show was a staple of late-night TV in the not-so-distant-past, but I recall Tom as a disk jockey in the 1950's at WRIT AM when he was doing an intro into harder news. Tom was a Marquette High/Marquette U grad like myself & his radio station was adjacent to the Marquette High Sophomore football team's practice field. I recall going to the station once in the late '50s to see Tom, but don't recall any success. Perhaps he wasn't in. At any rate, he sort of erased his DJ stint from his resume & RIP, Tom, for some good teen memories way back in the Day.

Arab Conquests Revisited

The Economist has a review of a new book by Hugh Kennedy. Strangely, the theme of his book reflects the Introduction of T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which describes how the Semitic heartland of the Arabian peninsula has periodically over millenia welled over with an outpouring of military fanatics who conquered Mesopotamia and Syria. In 1800, the Saudi-led Ikhwan were at the gates of Baghdad and Damascus and were only defeated by Muhammed Ali who invaded Arabia and destroyed the Saudi capital of Riyadh in around 1811. In the 1920s, the Ikhwan led by Prince Faisal conquered Yemen and annexed most of Yemen in the Treaty of Taif in 1930. Ever since Sargon led his Semitic-speaking Akkadian hordes out of the peninsula in 2300 BC to conquer Sumerian city-states, the pattern has repeated itself again and again. Here is a summary of Hugh Kennedy's version:

An aggressive Bedouin horde, drunk on religion, sweeps out of the Arabian peninsula—on the way burning the great library of Alexandria—and, through wholesale massacre and forced conversion, imposes Islam on a vast area stretching from Spain to the fringes of China. If this is your mental picture of the rise of Islam, dimly remembered from some long-ago history lesson, take note: it is in almost every respect wrong.

Hugh Kennedy sets out to explain an historical puzzle. How could Arab forces, relatively small in number and with no particular superiority in weaponry, have pulled off such an apparently impossible feat? In the century that followed the death of the Prophet in 632, they challenged two established empires (the Byzantine and Sasanian). They conquered Syria in eight years, Iraq in seven, Egypt in a mere two and Spain and Portugal in five. At the same time, they pushed deep into Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent. How did they do it? Why did they not meet stronger and more sustained resistance? And, no less of a mystery, how did the empire they created endure?

By painstakingly reconstructing the series of Arab conquests, Mr Kennedy paints a picture strikingly at odds with the popular clichés. “The Muslim conquests”, he writes, “were far from being the outpouring of an unruly horde of nomads.” The Bedouin of Arabia were tough and highly mobile, fired by tribal honor and love of booty as well as by zeal for Islam. They were led by intelligent men from the Meccan elite who knew they had to channel the "frenetic military energies of the Bedouin" outwards, or else face a real risk of implosion.

These leaders also seem to have grasped that to have based their conquests on mass killings and conversion by the sword would have been a fatal mistake. There were massacres, but they were not the norm. If conquered peoples paid tribute and did not make trouble, they were largely left alone.

Local people were incorporated into the new administrative class. Existing religions—Christianity in Syria and Egypt, Zoroastrianism in Persian-ruled areas, Hinduism and Buddhism farther east—were not persecuted. Large-scale conversions came much later; at the time there was little or no pressure on the conquered people to convert. As for the sack of the Alexandrian library, that, says Mr Kennedy, is a discredited myth.

The Arabs were also lucky in their timing. Mr Kennedy speculates that, had they got going a generation earlier, success would probably have eluded them. As it was, disarray within the Byzantine and Sasanian empires helps to explain why the Arabs met little serious resistance there.

But this was not everywhere the case. The early Muslim armies met their fiercest opposition from the Turks of Central Asia. And, on the other side of their empire, they conquered the Berbers of North Africa but alienated them through the brutalities of the slave trade, which sparked the great Berber rebellion of 741.

Mr Kennedy tells a remarkable tale with skill and authority. Perhaps occasionally he is too much the conscientious professional historian. The general reader must get used to constant cautions (“As usual the actual course of the campaign is confused”). But there is an important point here. The historical sources are confused and contradictory, sometimes written long after the events they describe.

Besides, as so often, history is written by the victors. Arab accounts are full of self-serving bravado, eulogising the virtues of the simple, egalitarian Bedouin in contrast to their elitist and effeminate Persian foes. Mr Kennedy uses Arabic sources, but critically, and tries to balance them by giving voice to the conquered.

The book's subtitle (“How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In”) is not directly addressed. Perhaps Mr Kennedy and his publisher thought its truth to be self-evident. The Arab conquests dramatically transformed the world in which they took place. But for today the lesson is different. It is the loss of that early power that torments Muslim hearts and minds, producing anger, humiliation—and eventually the vengeance of al-Qaeda.

The most recent uprising was in the early '30s when the Ikhwan after their Yemeni victory began attacking Kuwait and the Al-Hasa oasis to cleanse the evil Shi'ites from the Holy Land of Arabia, but King Abdul-Aziz [known also as Ibn Saud] led his army in one last campaign to suppress the Ikhwan and institute the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Al Qaeda is a remnant of the 1930Saudi conquest of Yemen, the 9/11 "Saudi" component of 15 hijackers were about 75% Yemeni in heritage carrying Saudi passports. Osama bin Laden is distantly descended from Nebuchadnezzar's Babylonians after they were chased out of Babylon by Assyrian military might around 600 BC and settled in the southern part of Yemen, whence they parlayed their considerable merchant and other skills into the Himyaritic kingdoms and far-flung trade empires of Zanzibar and Indonesia. Julius Caesar was getting ready for a trip to Yanbu in 44BC to conquer Felix Arabia's rich Yemeni kingdoms when he was assassinated by Brutus and the gang.

I'm sure Hugh doesn't touch on these extraneous topics. The rich tapestry of Middle Eastern history is not confined to the Islamic world. The Jahaliyya that preceded it was most interesting, as Maxim Rodinson in his Marxist treatise on Mohammed displays with impressive scholarship and shaky ideology.

Pat Tillman Death Scoped out by Kossack Sleuth

The truth about Pat Tillman, the American NFL Ranger killed by "friendly fire" [one of the oxymorons most moronic of all] may not be clear to all, but the lunatics at the Kos site have no illusions---Pat was going to meet with Noam Chomsky and was offed for his prospective metanoia, it's oh so clear & pass the thorazine, nurse!

And, of course, this is even more lucidly defined by what Mark Steyn called "moral poseurs still congratulating themselves on their stance of three or four decades" who made sure that "millions of faraway peasants died in order that pampered parochial narcissist buffoons could preen as heroes in their commencement addresses?

Perhaps we are too harsh on our patronizing condescending moral intelligentsia. Pinch and his pilot-fish posse still shine Walter Lippmann's beacon through the fog of ignorance surrounding the US government and lesser mortals like ourselves.

We should be grateful instead of demonstrating our peevishness at "their stance of three or four decades" because we suspect them of autistic solecisms devoid of insight and sincerity.

Or should we bitch-slap them verbally at every opportunity? Can't make up my mind.

Suspicions Confirmed: French Petit fonctionnaire lacks brain

The French bureaucrat with a compressed brain syndrome reportedly had/has an IQ of 75, and as this link notes, the jokes more or less write themselves.

Judging from the TSA & FEMA morons in the recent press, the French fellow has more candlepower between his ears than most GS wage slaves here in Florida----a visit to Ft. Lauderdale International yesterday convinced me in person about TSA. I'm certain my readers have pretty much the same experiences, though occasionally my air travel is brightened by a thoughtful & compassionate TSA employee.

Sarkozy & Qaddafi Consort while Sarko's Wife Goes to Sofia

French President Sarkozy is now reaping the fruits of his victorious defeat, or is it vice versa? Here are a few money quotes about Sarko's visit to Libya to celebrate the recently-reformed madman Muammar's release of six medical hostages:

"You might think French president Nicolas Sarkozy would be hailed as a hero at home for facilitating the release of the embattled medical personnel in Libya. No one can deny that the hostages were released in short order as a direct result of a strategy devised by Sarkozy and implemented with the help of his wife Cecilia. But instead, Sarkozy is under fire from all sides.

From the left come outbursts of unashamed machismo alternate with outpourings of heretofore concealed truths about the likes of Ghadafi. Who does the First Lady think she is? And how come that cad Ghadafi is welcomed back into the concert of nations just because he released the prisoners?

Socialist Party chief François Hollande, ex-companion of ex-candidate Ségolène Royal, dismissed the operation as a mediocre PR stunt: the European Union has been negotiating the prisoners’ release for 8 years, now they’re free, what’s the big deal? Euro-green deputy & former May 68 revolutionary Cohn-Bendit is indignant and assorted French Socialists, fresh from their victorious presidential defeat, are outraged: Ghadafi is a despicable dictator, Libyan quasi-terrorists will enter France freely while decent illegals are kept out, Europe is paying blood money, Sarkozy is showing off, and to make matters worse he sent his WIFE to negotiate. What is this, a royal family? An op-ed in Le Monde trashes “Super-Cécilia, madone des Balkans. » The NY Times, in a typical indiscriminate rehash of French snob-gossip, says "Libya’s Release of 6 Prisoners Raises Criticism."

Until she moved back in with her hubby, Cecilia was disparaged as a distinct non-asset to the new POTROF [or POTFR which reminds one of Joseph's owner in the Bible, the Pharoah's chief eunuch Potiphar in Arabic/Hebrew scripts]. But as the rest of the article points out in detail, Sarko has committed the cardinal crime, which is treated in bold and capitals in the following long screed:

The same NY Times, via its International Herald Tribune, claims that Nicolas Sarkozy controls the French press with an iron fist. And the same gossipers who told you that Sarkozy would be a bachelor president because Cecilia had ditched him are now clucking about her undue influence and uppity ways. Madame does not restrict her conversation with the president to appropriate subjects—meals, servants, his choice of ties—but ventures into the forbidden sphere of politics. And now she’s indulging in extramarital international relations.

It’s as if nepotism, interlocking directorates, ambiguous liaisons, and other courtly abuses had never existed in pre-Sarkozy France.

And they did. Danielle Mitterand dabbled in private diplomacy with Fidel Castro during her husband’s presidency. Bernadette Chirac, a Poli Sci dropout, nudged into politics by her husband, holds a cushy provincial office. Wives and mistresses of political figures present prime time news. Ségolène Royal was boosted into her career on Mitterand’s shoulders. Chirac’s daughter Claude acted as his official advisor and the media never mentioned her son fathered by a Muslim judoka. Mitterand’s illegitimate daughter Mazarine Pingeot, whose coming-out party coincided with his funeral, is treated seriously as a novelist….

Why is the Libyan operation cause for scandal, when that urbane dilettantism is tolerated? Because Nicolas Sarkozy has made a clear break with French tradition: USING HIS POWER TO ACT CONCRETELY ON REALITY, he expedited the liberation of five nurses and one doctor, innocent victims of an Afro-Middle Eastern dictatorship.

The foregoing does not mention the serial infidelities of MMEs Mitterand & Chirac, whose lovers almost outnumbered their husbands' numerous paramours. But the novel breakthrough Sarko has made is the first real intrusion of France into the real world since DeGaulle. The mystification and symbolism of the French prestidigitators of the Mitterand/Chirac ilk [which enamoured Francophiliacs like Jimmy Carter & pseudo-event Democrats mimicked at their peril] may now be in the process of being replaced by a more strenuous, less devious and backhanded approach to the EU and Realpolitik. The excellent letter from Mme Nidra Poller continues:

[If] Nicolas Sarkozy is to be faulted for his theory and practice in this murky corner of international relations, what is to be said of the efforts of other western leaders, who are in a mad rush to shore up Mahmoud Abbas, hold talks with the North Koreans, negotiate an uneasy peace with Iran, pressure Israel to give the Golan Heights to Syria, force Bush to withdraw the troops from Iraq and, in general, surrender on a dime? It’s all part of the desperate search for solutions through dialogue and economic relations.

The real issue in this matter has been scrupulously avoided, and it is this - hostage-taking is part of the full jihad bag and western nations have been handling it like weak-kneed dhimmis. Public opinion is shaped and kneaded to respond to the demands of hostage takers as if they were reasonable political negotiations. A fuzzy video, a trembling victim stuffed into a Muslim outfit, jihadis with their heads wrapped in keffiehs, guns and scimitars, slogans, blood curdling music, imperious demands—withdraw your troops, release all of our prisoners, and give us millions or we’ll cut off his or her head. Roadside bombs in Iraq and London, great train massacres in London and Madrid, sleeper cells, mass murder airplane plots, incitement in mosques and Muslim media, 9/11 of course, the planned destruction of Israel… it all goes together and we should be fighting it with lucid determination. Instead, we pick it apart like finicky eaters, treat each morsel separately… and now we are all hostages.

Can’t we give Nicolas Sarkozy credit for making a dent in dhimmitude?

We can be sure that Sarkozy will continue to be bitch-slapped by the French and EU press for his sturdy straightforward position on dealing with terrorists and blackmailers and illegal immigration.

I'm just wondering how soon the US MSM will pick up on the NYT's negativity and like pilot fish following a Great White, nibble and nit-pick on the French president's strange possession of a functioning spinal column.

Diaper-Gate Leads to Bottle-to-Blastoff Row for National Alcoholic Spirits Association

Our local NASA facility here in Florida, as Jay Leno notes, is aptly named the Kennedy Space Center after a family known for both its sobriety and its aversion to space cadet substances [except for Robert Kennedy Jr.'s heroin conviction & a few untimely deaths]. I thought an interview on CNN with a character named after the Fielding novel scalawag was hilarious, as he noted that

"I didn't see any use of alcohol that infringed safety," said Tom Jones, who served on four shuttle missions before retiring in 2001. "I didn't see any flight surgeons who would have hesitated to blow the whistle."

Jones went on to say that there had been "no problems" with the Shuttle missions to the dead-head CNN interviewer, who nodded in agreement.

Am I having false-memory problems or did I just imagine two Shuttle trips exploding in mid-mission? Guess those don't count as problems, huh?

Richard Feynman, of "Cargo Cult Science" fame, noted that one out of fifty or so Shuttle missions would have catastrophic problems, as opposed to NASA's one of 100,000 missions. And in a possibly related development,

NASA Deputy Administrator Shana Dale said the space agency would implement the panel's recommendation for yearly psychological reviews of all astronauts. Prospective astronauts are screened for psychological problems when they apply. Only those later selected for missions aboard the space station receive further testing.

So no more stabbings by astronauts in diapers? Makes me feel my taxpayer dollars are at work. And in the private-sector space world, a slight hiccup occurred in man's ceaseless quest to surmount the surly bonds of gravity keeping us mere terrestrial animals. Although the sad incident above was an accident, some Luddite employed by a NASA sub-contractor threw another spanner into the works by sabotaging an on-flight computer.

To me, the real pleasure of this NASA drinking scandal is the launch of my favorite blogger, Dr. Sanity, into national newspace:

Dr. Patricia Santy, a psychiatrist at the University of Michigan who worked as a NASA flight surgeon from 1984 to 1992, said she often pushed for more extensive psychological reviews but was ignored. She said astronauts had an incentive to downplay any problems that would prevent them from flying.

"NASA management is in denial that any of their astronauts could behave badly," she said. Santy said she had never heard of any astronauts drinking during preflight hours. But she said the claims didn't surprise her. "These people are cowboys," she said. "They are hard-living. They take risks. They are ... exceptional."

Just like the Kennedys are exceptional, in more ways than one.

Syria on the Crawl---Silent & Sneaky

The army that doesn't fight well can always sneak a bit when it has the chance. The Wall Street Journal points out that the tricky smugglers and grifters in Damascus, namely President Bashar Assad and his intelligence agencies, have silently occupied around 4% of Lebanese border territory---the equivalent proportionately of the USA having Arizona annexed by an unseen, unheard army of guess which nationality?

In the meantime, no one except the WSJ and new UNSECGEN Ban ki-Moon points these border anomalies out. As the WSJ piece by Bret Stephans points out, hapless moron Kofi Annan had pleaded with President Stick-Insect last year and had received assurances of some sort, which he disingenuously passed on as a solution. Now this nincompoop is in South Africa trying to sort out the Zimbabwe mess. If his personal history holds true, look for another Rwanda in the near future.

TBack in Lebanon, the areas in question are sparsely populated and located in the anti-Lebanon mountains between Syria & Lebanon, but the occupiers include charming residents such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the ca-raaazy ultra-left Kossack-equivalent of the Fatah party now ruling the West Bank. Syria has to accommodate the PFLP as the Christian counterpart to Hamas, the Muslim ca-raaazies who now claim they have missiles that can reach Tel Aviv.

I only hope that Israel points out that missiles in Israel can reach Damascus, if another bout of nastiness occurs in the near future.

Will the NBA Surpass the WWE? And the NFL Shows Crime Doesn't Pay, at least for Vick. Pac-Man Still on Sidelines

Time and again, watching the NBA Heat games and then the playoffs, I wondered at how ONE-SIDED the refs often were in games that were otherwise evenly matched. A friend of ours was at the time dating a Knicks official with a condo down here in Boca, so I even remember the game cited here:

Donaghy was part of a crew working the Heat-Knicks game in New York in February when the Knicks shot 39 free throws to the Heat's eight, technical fouls were called on Heat coach Pat Riley and assistant Ron Rothstein, and the Knicks won by six. New York was favored by 4½.

as being particularly badly referee-ed and I mentioned to a couple of friends that I thought point-shaving was going on. And watching sports shows, the subject never came up even though I thought some games just cried out for closer examination.

NBA officials always stress that each game is watched afterwards by all the refs & critiqued for bad calls and rules interpretations. I would be very surprised if Donaghy was the only rotten apple in this motley crew of refs who to me often seem determined to get key players [especially Shaq] in foul trouble which greatly alters the whole course of a given game. That happens so often, with such spurious calls, that Stern should go deeper into the farce that is NBA reffing.

I still want to know why the Spurs beat the Suns because of the Spurs flagrant foul and subsequent sidelineing of two Suns who left the bench. HERE IS WHAT BILL SIMMONS OF ESPN SAYS ABOUT THAT GAME.

the Spurs were favored by four, with an over/under of 200.5 -- after San Antonio prevailed, 108-101, thanks to Amare Stoudemire playing just 21 minutes because of foul trouble:

Congratulations to Greg Willard, Tim Donaghy and Eddie F. Rush for giving us the most atrociously officiated game of the playoffs so far: Game 3 of the Suns-Spurs series. Bennett Salvatore, Tom Washington and Violet Palmer must have been outraged that they weren't involved in this mess. Good golly. Most of the calls favored the Spurs, but I don't even think the refs were biased -- they were so incompetent that there was no rhyme or reason to anything that was happening. Other than the latest call in NBA history (a shooting foul for Manu Ginobili whistled three seconds after the play, when everyone was already running in the other direction), my favorite moment happened near the end, when the game was already over and they called a cheap bump on Bruce Bowen against Nash, so the cameras caught Mike D'Antoni (the most entertaining coach in the league if he's not getting calls) screaming sarcastically, "Why start now? Why bother?" What a travesty. Not since the cocaine era from 1978-1986 has the league faced a bigger ongoing issue than crappy officiating.

Now ...

THE ZAPRUDER FILM

Follow-up note: A few hours after this column was posted on Sunday morning, an NBA fan posted "highlights" from Game 3 on YouTube that reveal Donaghy making a number of questionable calls during that Spurs-Suns game, including the three-seconds-too-late call on Ginobili that I mentioned in my column (and two months ago as well).

After the call is made, play-by-play announcer Mike Breen calls it a "late whistle" three different times, then a replay of the play shows that there was no contact, followed by Breen saying "doesn't look like there was much there" and partner Jon Barry adding, "I don't know what he saw!"

Collectively, it's a damning collection of anti-Phoenix calls, although not all of them were made by Donaghy. Expect the highlights of this game to eventually become the Zapruder Film of the Donaghy Scandal. Sorry, Phoenix fans.

Before the Donaghy scandal broke, if you told me there was a compromised official working a 2007 playoff game and made me guess the game, I would have selected Game 3 of the Spurs-Suns series. There were some jaw-dropping calls throughout, specifically, the aforementioned Ginobili call and Bowen hacking Nash on a no-call drive that ABC replayed from its basket camera (leading to a technical from D'Antoni). Both times, Mike Breen felt obligated to break the unwritten code that play-by-play announcers -- don't challenge calls and openly questioned what had happened. The whole game was strange. Something seemed off about it.

At the time, I assumed the league had given us another "coincidence" where three subpar refs (and calling that crew "subpar" is being kind) were assigned to a Game 3 in which, for the interest of a long series, everyone was better off having the home team prevail ... just like I anticipated another "coincidence" in which one of the best referees would work Game 4 to give Phoenix a fair shake in a game that, statistically, they were more likely to win. After all, it's easier to win Game 4 on the road than Game 3, when the fans are pumped up and the home team is happy to be home. (Which is exactly how it played out. Steve Javie worked Game 4, a guy who Jeff Van Gundy deemed "the best ref in the league" during the Finals. Hmmmm.) Look, this could have been an elaborate series of connected flukes. I'm just telling you that none of it surprised me. Which is part of the problem.

But here's what I didn't expect: That a potentially crooked ref was working that game.

Imagine being a Suns fan right now. You just spent the past two months believing that your team got screwed by the Stoudemire/Diaw suspensions, that you would have won Game 1 if Nash didn't get hurt, that you would have taken Game 3 if you hadn't been screwed by the officials, that you would have cruised in Game 5 if two of your best guys weren't suspended for running toward their best player as he lay in a crumpled heap. Now it looks like an allegedly compromised referee worked Game 3.

Well, how much did Donaghy affect the game? How many calls did he whistle on Stoudemire? How many of Bowen's potential fouls did he not call? Was he the seemingly incompetent schmuck who made that three-seconds-too-late call on Ginobili? Did Tim Donaghy cost you that game?

If David Stern wants to do right by the fans, then he should order NBA TV to rerun the tape of Game 3. We need answers. We need to know for sure. Hell, they can start a series called "NBA Hardwood Classics: The Tim Donaghy Collection" and we'll spend the rest of the summer combing through games and figuring out how many Donaghy could have fixed. Like Game 6 of the Raptors-Nets series, which New Jersey won by a point in the final seconds. Did he swing that one? What about Game 2 of the Orlando-Detroit series, when the Magic rallied for a late cover in the final seconds with Donaghy jogging around? What about the Heat-Knicks game from last February in which the Knicks were given a 39-8 free-throw advantage and covered a 4.5-point spread by 1.5 points? Did Donaghy call those two technical fouls on the Miami coaches? Is there footage of Pat Riley screaming at him?

Stern was oh so indignant and holier than thou. I want to see this PR jerk Stern actually do his job in searching out ref betting and point-shaving/game-throwing. Lowell in the NFL is leading the way. Where is David Stern's backbone?

Steyn Calls the Euro-Canucks Spineless Degenerates

And the USA doesn't come off much better in his latest jeremiad in the Orange County Register, the only newspaper worth reading in Southern California [personal note: my cousin Tim writes the music column for the OCR]. A few choice billets doux:

How do you feel about the American hostages in Iran?
No, not the guys back in the Seventies, the ones being held right now.
What? You haven't heard about them?
Odd that, isn't it? But they're there. For example, for two months now, Haleh Esfandiari has been detained in Evin prison in Tehran. Esfandiari is a U.S. citizen and had traveled to Iran to visit her sick mother. She is the director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, which is the kind of gig that would impress your fellow guests at a Washington dinner party. Unfortunately, the mullahs say it's an obvious cover for a Bush spy.

Among the other Zionist-neocon agents currently held in Iranian jails are an American journalist, an American sociologist for a George Soros-funded leftie group, and an American peace activist from Irvine, Ali Shakeri, whose capture became known shortly after the United States and Iran held their first direct talks since the original hostage crisis.

The laughable part of this tragedy, if there is one, is that the Woodrow Wilson Center is almost as fleshy pink as the George Soros groups who decry the projection of American power anywhere farther than the 12-mile international water border offshore. But to the Iranians, they are part of the phalanx of spies that remind them of the "nest of spies" that terrorist Ahmedinejad & his accomplices captured in 1979---he has been positively identified by several former American hostages. Those sturdy Democracy defenders to our north have experience with this situation:

Two months in an Iranian jail is no fun. Four years ago, a Montreal photo-journalist, Zahra Kazemi, was arrested by police in Tehran, taken to Evin prison, and wound up getting questioned to death. Upon her capture, the Canadian government had done as the State Department is apparently doing – kept things discreet, low-key, cards close to the chest, quiet word in the right ears. By the time Zahra Kazemi's son, frustrated by his government's ineffable equanimity, got the story out, it was too late for his mother.

Still, upon hearing of her death, then-Canadian Foreign Minister Bill Graham expressed his "sadness" and "regret," which are pretty strong words. But then, as Reuters put it, this sad regrettable incident had "marred previously harmonious relations between Iran and Canada." In his public pronouncements, Graham tended to give the impression that what he chiefly regretted and was sad about was that one of his compatriots had had the poor taste to get tortured and murdered onto the front pages of the newspapers.

With an apparently straight face, Graham passed on to reporters the official Iranian line that her death in jail was merely an "accident." The following year, Shahram Azam, a physician who'd examined Kazemi's body, fled Iran and said that she had broken fingers, a broken nose, a crushed toe, a skull fracture, severe abdominal bruising, and internal damage consistent with various forms of rape. Quite an accident.

The cream-pie bravo heroes of Ottawa like Graham are matched in cringing craven cowardly obeisance to the terrorist Iranian leadership by who else, but those Continentals who have twice last century called for American help in getting them through their own civil wars---called World Wars because back then, they were world powers. No more:

"the EU and all the other transnational arbiters of global order sent a strong message: "Whoa, you guys really need to tamp things down, de-escalate, defuse the confrontation." But, for some reason, they sent the strong message to the British government, not the Iranians. And, with the sailors' humiliation all over the media, the British public was inclined to agree. Almost to a man, they rose up and told Tony Blair: "This is all your fault for getting us into Iraq."

But outrage at Iran? There was none.

The ayatollahs figure that's how it usually goes with a plump, complacent Western world that just wants to be left alone and wishes these crazies would stop trying to catch its eye. Officially, Iran is "negotiating" with the European Union over its nuclear program. If this were a real negotiation, instead of a transnational pseudo-negotiation, the Iranians would be concerned to stop any complicating factors coming into play. Instead, every week they gaily toss new provocations into their EU chums' laps: In recent days, they've stoned to death various fellows for adultery and homosexuality, two activities to which Europeans are generally very partial.

As Europe allows itself to be parasitized by Muslim border jumpers, the EU becomes less and less the world power it once was. And the Iranians pulled off a great coup by capturing more espionage experts:

The week before, Iran captured 14 spies near the Iraqi border who it claimed were agents of American and British intelligence equipped with surveillance devices. The "spies" in question were squirrels – as in small furry animals very protective of their nuts (much like the Democratic Party regarding Mr. Soros). I'm prepared to believe that a crack team of rodents from NUTS (the Ninja Undercover Team of Squirrels) abseiled into key installations in Iran and garroted the Revolutionary Guards, but not that the U.S. and British governments had anything to do with it. If they have any CIA or MI6 training at all, they must be rogue squirrels from the Cold War days who've been laid off and gone feral.

Just when the Islamic world appears to exceed itself in making the West look silly, it reveals its own funny side:

Saudi scholars believe that Pokémon encourages gambling, which is forbidden in Islam, [and] it is apparently a front for Israel as well.

Perhaps the Israelis can tell us the real story behind those squirrels as well!

The Pendulum Returns to the Greatest Generation

The pathetic collection of leftardo human experimenters whom Astrologers call those cursed with having the awful birthmark of "Neptune in Libra." meaning those susceptible to every sort of light-headed whimsical vagary of mood and temperament taken seriously, were also cursed with being hailed as the vanguard of the Age of Aquarius. Seems these vacant degenerates actually believed their press and acted out a hilarious GENERATIONAL DEGENERATION because they were predisposed, if you believe their astrological Neptunian karma, to believe the shallow, spurious, specious silly folderol that passed as their specific destiny. Some resisted, most did not, leaving us with poop, I mean pop, heroes like Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Boob Dylan, and a whole panoply of early demisers worthy of being the yang to their parents' yin, or vice versa. Janis, and dozens of other early bloomers faded before noon of their life trajectories.

The Weekly Standard has a good run-down on just how good these young Gen-X and Gen Y are compared to their slacker drugged-out squalid forebears. The lotus rises from the fecal material is the Oriental way of comprehending how the new generation of winners has been spawned by a human-garbage sleaze-dump mound of self-serving narcissistic bio-mass which has given itself over to the most ridiculous autistic solipsistic self-referential solecisms since the age of Incroyable et Merveilleuse, back in the 1790s. Please google for the reference.

Luckily for the French, after that they found a leader who had a pair, and could keep their country from being overrun by silly bantamweights like the Islamist froth-mouth hysterics and their in-country fifth column at the NYT, WaPo, and broadcast networks.

Oh, that we in the USA should be so lucky two centuries later!

The BBC Slouches Toward Munich

Melanie Philips has a revealing blog showing that the regression toward mean-ness of the BBC proceeds apace.
The author of Londonistan noted a blog post to the BBC's comment-board [no link provided] that repeated one of the slurs that say the Talmud justifies telling gentiles lies if it protects the community or is otherwise sanctioned. Lots of protest notes to the offensive post were not posted, while the blog signed "Naz" remained and was even expanded. You have to read the link above, but the gist is:

...at the time of writing this column, therefore, the situation is that the BBC has deliberately republished an antisemitic libel — but censored all criticism of itself, blocked any further opportunity to post up fresh protests, and semi-concealed the whole discussion.

Now this would be "taqqiya" in Islamic hadith or jesuitical casuistry in the western version of religious dissimulation, but somehow the extensive use of the Nazi Germans in their propaganda had made this ample motive for the extermination of the entire Jewish religion, and extended to racial cleansing.

The BBC knows it has crossed several lines, including last summer's open support of Hamas and Hezbollah in the fighting along the Lebanon border and in Gaza following the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers. But there is no accountability and it appears that the Beeb, the Guardian, and the New York Times are all succumbing to appeasement as a method of holding off a determined offensive against Western values and culture.

Refinery Problems Hike Cost of Gas

The many regulations put up by the Department of Energy, EPA, FARC, and other US government agencies, as well as state and local enforcement rules & guidance, has caused new refineries and refinery expansion in the US to come to a complete standstill. This has true for three decades, ever since Jimmy Carter inserted meddlesome government regs with the applause of his Democratic House & Senate.
The New York Times has an article showing that the time has come for the reaping of what big intrusive government has sown: a total obsolescence of our refining capacity & a block on new drilling in offshore and ANWR acreage that is very prospective. Even the NYT deflects the loons who claim that this is a corporate conspiracy:

Some critics of the industry have theorized on Internet blogs that the squeeze on gasoline and other refined products points to a deliberate effort among oil companies to bolster profits by keeping supplies tight. But experts point out that the companies have little incentive right now to hold back on fuel supplies.

The NYT displays its usual unnewsworthy sense of news by ignoring a large petition in Chicago designed to block the expansion of the big BP/Amoco refinery in nearby Indiana:

In late March, for example, a fire at a large compressor at a BP refinery in Whiting, Ind., caused a hydrogen-treating unit that removes sulfur from some oil products to shut. That meant BP had to turn off a crude oil unit for early maintenance. Two weeks later, a brief power disruption damaged another distillation tower. And in July, a third crude oil tower was shut briefly so operators could fix a small leak. Since the first incident, the 405,000 barrels-a-day refinery has been running at about half its capacity.

Mayor Daley was waving his own petition begging Chicagoans to try to override an EPA exemption granted July 9th allowing BP/Amoco to expand, upgrade and retrofit its facilities while updating some of its procedures. Even the NYT, though it neglects to mention the political brouhaha, does point out the irony:

No refineries have been built in the United States in over three decades, because refiners say they are too costly. Instead, they have been expanding their existing refineries. All this is happening as the industry goes through another golden age. After 20 years in the doldrums, the refining business has never been so good for oil companies. Refining margins — the difference between the price of crude oil and the value of refined gasoline made from it — have shot up as much as $25 a barrel for some types of crude oil, compared with about $5 a barrel just a few years ago. But with a third summer of high gasoline prices, lawmakers are debating legislation they claim would punish oil companies for exploiting the tight supply situation and engaging in "price gouging." At the same time, they are pressing refiners to produce more fuel.

"Refiners want to keep running in today’s economic environment," said Mr. Drevna of the refiners association. "But when they shut down they are accused of gouging the system. When they don’t, they are criticized for overrunning their facilities."

Of course, Congress has only one crude instrument for handling complex economic situations, and as the adage has it, when you only own a hammer, every problem looks like a nail."

A takeover by Democrats in '08 would prolong and deepen the gas price crisis, although a sensible candidate like Bill Richardson, who comes from an oil state [yes, NM is an oil state] & was Secretary of Energy, might have the political smarts and sophistication to surmount temptatons to take the blunt-instrument approach the left wing normally applies to energy problems.

Even More NBA Suspicions Confirmed

Time and again, watching the NBA Heat games and then the playoffs, I wondered at how ONE-SIDED the refs often were in games that were otherwise evenly matched. A friend of ours was at the time dating a Knicks official with a condo down here in Boca, so I even remember the game cited here:

Donaghy was part of a crew working the Heat-Knicks game in New York in February when the Knicks shot 39 free throws to the Heat's eight, technical fouls were called on Heat coach Pat Riley and assistant Ron Rothstein, and the Knicks won by six. New York was favored by 4½.

as being particularly badly referee-ed and I mentioned to a couple of friends that I thought point-shaving was going on. And watching sports shows, the subject never came up even though I thought some games just cried out for closer examination.

NBA officials always stress that each game is watched afterwards by all the refs & critiqued for bad calls and rules interpretations. I would be very surprised if Donaghy was the only rotten apple in this motley crew of refs who to me often seem determined to get key players [especially Shaq] in foul trouble which greatly alters the whole course of a given game. That happens so often, with such spurious calls, that Stern should go deeper into the farce that is NBA reffing.

I still want to know why the Spurs beat the Suns because of the Spurs flagrant foul and subsequent sidelineing of two Suns who left the bench. HERE IS WHAT BILL SIMMONS OF ESPN SAYS ABOUT THAT GAME.

the Spurs were favored by four, with an over/under of 200.5 -- after San Antonio prevailed, 108-101, thanks to Amare Stoudemire playing just 21 minutes because of foul trouble:

Congratulations to Greg Willard, Tim Donaghy and Eddie F. Rush for giving us the most atrociously officiated game of the playoffs so far: Game 3 of the Suns-Spurs series. Bennett Salvatore, Tom Washington and Violet Palmer must have been outraged that they weren't involved in this mess. Good golly. Most of the calls favored the Spurs, but I don't even think the refs were biased -- they were so incompetent that there was no rhyme or reason to anything that was happening. Other than the latest call in NBA history (a shooting foul for Manu Ginobili whistled three seconds after the play, when everyone was already running in the other direction), my favorite moment happened near the end, when the game was already over and they called a cheap bump on Bruce Bowen against Nash, so the cameras caught Mike D'Antoni (the most entertaining coach in the league if he's not getting calls) screaming sarcastically, "Why start now? Why bother?" What a travesty. Not since the cocaine era from 1978-1986 has the league faced a bigger ongoing issue than crappy officiating.

Now ...

THE ZAPRUDER FILM

Follow-up note: A few hours after this column was posted on Sunday morning, an NBA fan posted "highlights" from Game 3 on YouTube that reveal Donaghy making a number of questionable calls during that Spurs-Suns game, including the three-seconds-too-late call on Ginobili that I mentioned in my column (and two months ago as well).

After the call is made, play-by-play announcer Mike Breen calls it a "late whistle" three different times, then a replay of the play shows that there was no contact, followed by Breen saying "doesn't look like there was much there" and partner Jon Barry adding, "I don't know what he saw!"

Collectively, it's a damning collection of anti-Phoenix calls, although not all of them were made by Donaghy. Expect the highlights of this game to eventually become the Zapruder Film of the Donaghy Scandal. Sorry, Phoenix fans.

Before the Donaghy scandal broke, if you told me there was a compromised official working a 2007 playoff game and made me guess the game, I would have selected Game 3 of the Spurs-Suns series. There were some jaw-dropping calls throughout, specifically, the aforementioned Ginobili call and Bowen hacking Nash on a no-call drive that ABC replayed from its basket camera (leading to a technical from D'Antoni). Both times, Mike Breen felt obligated to break the unwritten code that play-by-play announcers -- don't challenge calls and openly questioned what had happened. The whole game was strange. Something seemed off about it.

At the time, I assumed the league had given us another "coincidence" where three subpar refs (and calling that crew "subpar" is being kind) were assigned to a Game 3 in which, for the interest of a long series, everyone was better off having the home team prevail ... just like I anticipated another "coincidence" in which one of the best referees would work Game 4 to give Phoenix a fair shake in a game that, statistically, they were more likely to win. After all, it's easier to win Game 4 on the road than Game 3, when the fans are pumped up and the home team is happy to be home. (Which is exactly how it played out. Steve Javie worked Game 4, a guy who Jeff Van Gundy deemed "the best ref in the league" during the Finals. Hmmmm.) Look, this could have been an elaborate series of connected flukes. I'm just telling you that none of it surprised me. Which is part of the problem.

But here's what I didn't expect: That a potentially crooked ref was working that game.

Imagine being a Suns fan right now. You just spent the past two months believing that your team got screwed by the Stoudemire/Diaw suspensions, that you would have won Game 1 if Nash didn't get hurt, that you would have taken Game 3 if you hadn't been screwed by the officials, that you would have cruised in Game 5 if two of your best guys weren't suspended for running toward their best player as he lay in a crumpled heap. Now it looks like an allegedly compromised referee worked Game 3.

Well, how much did Donaghy affect the game? How many calls did he whistle on Stoudemire? How many of Bowen's potential fouls did he not call? Was he the seemingly incompetent schmuck who made that three-seconds-too-late call on Ginobili? Did Tim Donaghy cost you that game?

If David Stern wants to do right by the fans, then he should order NBA TV to rerun the tape of Game 3. We need answers. We need to know for sure. Hell, they can start a series called "NBA Hardwood Classics: The Tim Donaghy Collection" and we'll spend the rest of the summer combing through games and figuring out how many Donaghy could have fixed. Like Game 6 of the Raptors-Nets series, which New Jersey won by a point in the final seconds. Did he swing that one? What about Game 2 of the Orlando-Detroit series, when the Magic rallied for a late cover in the final seconds with Donaghy jogging around? What about the Heat-Knicks game from last February in which the Knicks were given a 39-8 free-throw advantage and covered a 4.5-point spread by 1.5 points? Did Donaghy call those two technical fouls on the Miami coaches? Is there footage of Pat Riley screaming at him?

Stern was oh so indignant and holier than thou. I want to see this PR jerk Stern actually do his job in searching out ref betting and point-shaving/game-throwing. Lowell in the NFL is leading the way. Where is David Stern's backbone?

Edwards' Wife Blasts Chillary

Besides a superficial grasp of issues and penchant for putting hair-and-makeup first John Edwards is going to have to demonstrate that his headstrong wife is not going to be another Martha Mitchell shout-out diva.

If Edwards was a real man, he'd keep his obnoxious wife from appointing religion-hating lesbians as his webmistresses and keep her from telling the press that she "hates" a neighbor who put a Giuliani sign across the street from the Edwards' SuperMcMansion in the hills of NC.

But John-Boy is a silk pony with one trick---looks & a sweet drawl that bowls over the airheads who make up a significant majority of the Democratic left. He's not a real man at all.

By a Two to One Ratio, Americans see Mass Media Biased Left

Another poll, this one by Rasmussen, comes up with results the MSM will be wary of publishing.

The fact that the MSM leans toward southpaw politicians should surprise no one. A famous three-year study by dozens of researchers combing over the last twenty years based its judgments on the ADA ratings, which demonstrate the true leftism of a given candidate, i.e., Teddy K is almost 100, Ted Stevens around 10 or less. The UCLA/U of Missouri conclusions were that the mass media, with the sole exception of FoxNews, is at at a minimum sixty on the ADA scale. This includes the Wall Street Journal and Drudgereport, which one would expect to be at midpoint or less. Indeed, FoxNews is NOT BIASED TO THE RIGHT, but planted right on the fifty-yard line, proving it truly is fair and balanced.

The UCLA/Missouri project finds that the rest of the media tilts left of center all the way to the far-left CBS News, no surprise, and the New York Times, both of which weigh in with an ADA rating of around seventy-plus! [The UCLA/Mizzou study is two years old, so the recent NBC "corrective movement" leftward under Brian Williams is not registered.]

The University of Missouri and UCLA are two institutions among the top half-dozen journalism schools in the country and the study covers decades.

Of course, the Rasmussen Poll itself is seen as suspect, as most polls tend to artfully contrive questions designed to elicit answers which will support a Democrat point of view. But even Pew & Zogby, two rather suspicious outfits leaning leftward, are having trouble recently with their polling, which keeps coming up with answers not conducive to the liberal self-perception. Both recently found that Americans by a ratio of five to two consider themselves conservative.

Of course, these surveys were not covered by the MSM, which lives in its carefully contrived cocoon which in turn it projects onto objective news agencies which deny its self-serving narcissism. Although even the NYT now admits it's not being read by young urban professionals or anyone else under thirty.

At the phalanx of the left in journalism, Columbia School of Journalism is a complete wormcan of ethical lapses, epitomized by its students recently getting caught cheating on an open-book ethics exam last year. These failures of housekeeping spill over into every area of its baleful influence on American journalism.

The Pulitzer Prize is administered by CSJ and journalists know that MOR or conservative takes on issues will rarely if ever get consideration by the panelists on the CSJ/Pulitzer committees. And thus we see questionable Pulitzers often awarded for illegal acts which expose US national security to harm.

The corrosive effect of newspapers, movies and network/cable TV paradoxically appears to result in a swift decline of subscribers and viewership. However, like the corner perv peddling dirty pictures and marijuana, the MSM aims at the young and the poor students caught in a public school educational system producing dropouts and second-rate grads. The US is now at or near the bottom in rankings of industrialized countries in education. This is due to organized teachers' unions avoiding the three R's to produce kids who are socialized automatons and fit consumers in a nanny-state big government planned by the social engineers of the academicide elites.

The last moral revival the US experienced was the Reagan resuscitation after Vietnam, Watergate and the Carter catastrophe. As things approach warp-speed in the Internet Age, we are already due for another Great Awakening.

Our national torpor proceeds apace.

The Arabs Never Miss an Opportunity to Miss.......

The Arab League has a tendency to take one step back before it takes two steps forward, aping the exiguous indecisiveness of Yasser Arafat, who Bill Clinton and his Israeli counterpart Barak discovered was hopelessly addicted to process, and faltered when it came to actually doing a final step. Here's why following the Middle East is fun:

...the 22-member Arab League decided on July 8 to send a delegation to Israel for discussions about peace prospects. Israelis could hardly contain their excitement. For decades the Arab League stood at the forefront of efforts to deny Israeli's right to exist. Starting in 1945, even before Israel's founding, the League ordered a boycott of goods produced by "Zionists," and later extended that boycott to any company, anywhere in the world, doing business with Israel. (The boycott, incidentally, still stands, although it has sprung many leaks.) On the day Israel was founded, the League coordinated an attack by several Arab armies designed to destroy the newborn state in its cradle.

So, when the League voted to send a delegation, Israelis found the move significant; a welcome sign of Arab acceptance. The Arab League, however, bristled at any suggestion that the decision to send the delegation -- made up of representatives from Jordan and Egypt, the two Arab countries that have relations with Israel -- meant very much at all.

We know what happened to Sadat and to King Abdullah of Jordan's grandfather when they compromised with Israel. But check the link and see how perhaps

...nearly six decades of rejecting Israel's right to exist have left a hard-to-erase imprint in the Arab public. Arab leaders, and now Muslim clerics, hammered the belief so hard into the minds of their people that it may have moved all the way into their DNA.

A recent Pew Survey of the Middle East came up with this result:

The disheartening response shows that a huge proportion of the Arab world is still not ready to accept Israel's survival. In Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Territories, for example, only 18, 17, and 16 percent of respondents, respectively, believe that Palestinian rights can be attained as long as Israel exists. In Israel, whose leaders have already accepted the creation of a Palestinian state, 61 percent of the people said the two sides can have their needs and rights met simultaneously. In every Arab country surveyed only small minorities agreed.

Anyone who has to some extent mastered Arabic and lived for a while in the Middle East knows that rhetoric and the "word" mean more than mere action and completion of complex processes. The story may be apocryphal, but Nasser's generals were reportedly celebrating their impending victory the night before June 6, 1967 when the Israelis made a preventive strike on their air force.

There is some hope in the very act of the Arab League agreeing to come to Israel to talk. They are accustomed to their own statist controlled media outlets, so they balk at the wide publicity the uncontrolled Israeli media will give the visit. So the very first step, to look at the Arab proposals agreed at Taif in 2002, should get priority over the shape or size of the table and the credentials of the visiting delegation.

Hopefully, this could be a step in the right direction in a region where wandering in the wilderness is the rule, not the exception.

Breaking News: Richard Cohen Makes Sense!

Proto-liberal Richard Cohen explains his thoughts on Palestinians cheering 9/11:

It just so happens that I have been to the Shatila camp. It's an integral part of Beirut and has existed since 1949, a situation that in a sane world would simply be out of the question. The blame for Shatila's persistence can be assigned all around: to the Lebanese for failing to assimilate the Palestinians; to the often homicidal factionalism of the Middle East; to the Arab states for continuing to expound the chimera of a return to what was once Palestine (but which is now Israel); and, of course, to Israel itself for, among other things, allegedly abetting the 1982 massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by Lebanese Christian forces. The Palestinians have been mistreated by just about everybody, including, of course, their own inept and often corrupt leadership.

But the US & Israel take the hit, and Cohen goes on to say that our enemies "honor us with their hatred."
Dr. Dalrymple has worked in UK Muslim ghettoes and has this to say:

One of the most sinister effects of the efforts of the bombers and would-be bombers is that they have undermined trust completely. This is because those under investigation turn out not to be cranks or marginals but people who are either well-integrated into society, superficially at least, or who have good career prospects. They are not the ignorant and uneducated; quite the reverse. Seven people detained in the latest plot worked in the medical profession.

The perpetrators do not bomb because of personal grievance but because they have allowed themselves to be gripped by a stupid, though apparently quite popular, ideology: radical Islam. Nor are they of one ethnic or national group only: We have had Somali, Pakistani, Arab, Jamaican, Algerian and British Muslim terrorists. This means, unfortunately, that no one can ever be quite sure whether a Muslim who appears polite and accommodating is not simultaneously contemplating mass murder. Deceit, after all, is one of the terrorists' deadliest weapons.

Taqqiya or religious dissimulation, disguising one's true beliefs or motives, has a long history in Islam and loosely used can describe the sort of hidden agenda Dr. Dalrymple means in the piece.

Turkey may be sliding into another Islamist form of taqqiya as its Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul inches towards being elected as President. Despite opposition from the secular military leadership, the article by Edward Luttwak argues that an Islamic Turkey, despite its irenic exterior, could be a Trojan Horse if allowed to be integrated into the EU.

Public Diplomacy? What About Muslim Moderates?

The Wall Street Journal has an opinion piece that begins with the sentence below:

To say public diplomacy hasn't been this administration's forte is a truism and an understatement. Still, it's hard to recall any presidential initiative as spectacularly misjudged and needless since Ronald Reagan paid tribute to Nazi soldiers at Bitburg.

And proceeds to get harsher at the flailing incompetence of Karen Hughes and her clueless boss in the Oval Office! However, in the UK:

Invitations to participate in the assembly were extended to the less-publicized, moderate groups, such as the Sufi Muslim Council, the British Muslim Foundation and Minhaj-ul-Quran. Notably absent from the program was the Muslim Council of Britain, a group that claims to represent that nation's Muslims but is preoccupied with its self-described struggle against "Islamophobia" -- a term it tries to use to shut down critical analysis of anything Islamic, whether legitimate or bigoted.

Also dropped from the speaking roster was the leading European Islamist Tariq Ramadan, who, while denied a visa by the United States, has been a fixture at official conferences on Muslims in Europe. The grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mr. Ramadan is fuzzy on where he stands on specific acts of terror -- and he infamously evaded a challenge by Nicolas Sarkozy to denounce stoning.

The difference between the US & British approaches to Muslim dialogue are examined in an article by James Woolsey and Nina Shea entitled "What About Muslim Moderates?.

Though Mr. Bush's remarks were intended for all American Muslims, the administration left the invitation list to Washington Islamic Center's authorities. Predictably, they excluded the truly moderate, who are not Saudi-founded or funded: the Islamic Supreme Council of America, the American Islamic Congress, the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, the Center for Eurasian Policy, the Center for Islamic Pluralism, the Islam and Democracy Project, the Institute for Gulf Affairs, the Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi Arabia and many others.

These organizations are frequently shut out of U.S. government events and appointments on the basis that they are considered insignificant or "controversial" by the petro-dollar-funded groups. The administration makes a terrible mistake by making such Wahhabi-influenced institutions as the Washington Islamic Center the gate keepers for all American Muslims.

The actual substance of Mr. Bush's mosque speech -- particularly good on religious freedom -- was overshadowed by the announcement of its single initiative: America is to send an envoy to the Organization of Islamic Conference. Based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the OIC was created explicitly to promote hostility to Israel, and its meetings largely consist of ritualistic Israel-bashing. At one last year, Iran's president called for the "elimination of the Zionist regime." It has no mechanism for discussing the human rights of its member states, and thus has never spoken out against Sudan's genocide of Darfuri Muslims. It is advancing an effort to universalize Islamic blasphemy laws, which are applied as often against speech critical of the governments of OIC member states as against profanities. Last month the OIC council of foreign ministers termed Islamophobia "the worst form of terrorism." Currently no Western power holds either member or observer status at the OIC.

Psychology Today & 10 Politically Incorrect Truths.

Steve Sailer called my attention to this list of truths that are true even if liberals hate the truth. Liberals are seldom ready for the truth, but here's a taste:

Most suicide bombers are Muslim

Suicide missions are not always religiously motivated, but according to Oxford University sociologist Diego Gambetta, editor of Making Sense of Suicide Missions, when religion is involved, the attackers are always Muslim. Why? The surprising answer is that Muslim suicide bombing has nothing to do with Islam or the Quran (except for two lines). It has a lot to do with sex, or, in this case, the absence of sex.

What distinguishes Islam from other major religions is that it tolerates polygyny. By allowing some men to monopolize all women and altogether excluding many men from reproductive opportunities, polygyny creates shortages of available women. If 50 percent of men have two wives each, then the other 50 percent don't get any wives at all.

So polygyny increases competitive pressure on men, especially young men of low status. It therefore increases the likelihood that young men resort to violent means to gain access to mates. By doing so, they have little to lose and much to gain compared with men who already have wives. Across all societies, polygyny makes men violent, increasing crimes such as murder and rape, even after controlling for such obvious factors as economic development, economic inequality, population density, the level of democracy, and political factors in the region.

This was just a snippet of the ten non-PC human nature truths---another thing liberals don't believe in is HUMAN NATURE as they are unnatural creatures almost by definition---and hit the link above for the other nine & the PUNCH LINE at the end of the Muslim suicide bomber piece [hint: it has something to do with unlimited sexual indulgence with a high number of previously untouched young ladies!]

Could Barack H. Obama face a Fatwa Charge for Apostasy?

B. Hussein Obama may never have been a practicing Muslim, but the interpretation of being a Muslim and abandoning the faith can be very strict. Back when I was Internal Affairs Officer in the Political Section at the American Embassy in Saudi Arabia, I was once handed a terrible judicial hot potato. An American Christian who worked for Northrop's F-5 program was arrested for having a spouse who was a Muslim woman. A Saudi friend had asked him if his Turkish wife was a Muslim and he answered in the negative. However, the religious police were informed and arrested him---luckily his spouse was out of country if I recall, for marrying a Muslim woman. The man was flabbergasted. He and she never talked about religion and she was raised in a completely secular family, had never practiced Islam, & indeed had never set foot in a mosque. Yet the Mutawwaeen considered her a Muslim by heritage and he an abductor of a Muslim woman causing her apostasy. It took all of the Embassy's considerable influence to get him released & he had to leave the country to placate the Wahhabi Religious police.

Now presidential candidate Barack H. Obama claims to be a Christian of an obscure denomination, although he has admitted in the past to have gone to a madrasa while living in Indonesia [or an Islamic School that is not a madrasa, though the Arabic word for "school" is "madrasa," so that distinction is lost on me. I believe Barry [Barack] Hussein Obama when he says that he was not a Muslim and did not practice Islam, but if he becomes a presidential candidate or even a VP nominee, will that placate mullahs, imams, ayatollahs or other religious figures like ObL from issuing, no matter from what authority, a fatwa declaring B.H. Obama an apostate? His father probably had an Islamic background in Kenya & he did attend a madrasa for a couple of years, so if the contretemps back in Saudi Arabia indicates some sort of mindset or precedent, that would be something the Democrats, so eager to assuage Muslim sensibilities, should be aware of.

My own guess is that if the matter of Obama's past religious beliefs or practices arises, mainstream Islamic clerics will say that there is no apostasy. However, but those clerics seem to be superseded in popular imagination, if not legitimate authority, by radical clerics of fiery temperament who sometimes vie for attention by making outrageous and even ridiculous accusations. How will Barack remain a symbol of international multicultural comity if some hothead in Cairo or Karachi or pick-an-Islamic-capital calls for the faithful to punish him for apostasy? With Rushie, Hirsan Ali, and others as precedents, wouldn't this be a major campaign diversion? Something for the Democrats to consider, perhaps?

I for one would like to see Tiger Woods eventually run as an ideal multiculti candidate! Maybe a few years of political seasoning and........?

Governnment vs. Culture

The latest NYT psychobabble gibberish on SCOTUS stimulates me to take up a rant mode.
Very good CATO presentation on C-Span had David Brooks making the cardinal point that "Conservatives believe that culture is the strongest point. Liberals think that the fact that government can change culture is the strongest point."

If the graphic lesson of Soviet Russia is not that government-mandated social engineering, no matter how well intentioned, is bogus and doomed to fail, please tell me why. After seventy-plus years of oppressive central government, the USSR imploded. This despite the fact that the intelligentsia and many world elites heralded Communism as "the Future that works."
Russell Kirk

There is a long philosophical tradition that has claimed that universality and abstractness have no legitimate basis in our experience of reality. This is usually called the "problem of universals" and it derives from the fact that we humans experience objects in the real world as discrete, concrete and individual. Yet, this is contrasted to our thoughts, which experience and know about objects in more general and abstract, or universal ways.

Two prominent philosophers who considered this problem and concluded that universals/generalities and abstractness were not legitimately derived from empirical experience were Hume and Kant. Over the next several hundred years, their positions were further refined and expanded on in this area.

Hah! I know what you are thinking--who cares about such an esoteric concept?

Well, let me tell you that this particular philosophical problem is not abstract at all, but one which pops up all the time in current discussions--even on this blog. How you deal with the concept of universals turns out to be extremely important, particularly in rational discourse, where objective reality and truth are necessary.

Consider this: if there is no way to account for generalizations or universals through empirical experience, then all such attributions may be considered subjective and hence, invalid.

How many times on this blog have you heard the trolls scream repeatedly about how I lump all people of a certain political belief into the category of "the left"; or how I generalize the behavior of a "small" group of deranged Muslims as "Islamic". No, no, no! they all cry--this is unfair; this is totally subjective on your part, Dr. Sanity; this is completely invalid!

Though a generalization, I think the above fairly sums up their attitude. The Kantians reading this will have to forgive me for making such a universal and rather abstract conclusion, I guess. But, my essential point is that not only is this the way I happen to think, it is the nature of human consciousness itself to perform this function. By trashing this aspect of human consciousness, the result is no more and no less than severing the human brain from reality.

Let me go one step further in my universalizing tendency. The underlying assumption of these trolls--another generalized concept, I admit, though I am sure that trolls that they are, they couldn't be bothered to consider it abstractly--happens to be one of the basic and crucial foundations of Postmodern thought (discussed here , here and here if you don't know what Postmodern philosophy is all about) : by making universals and generalizations completely subjective , they have successfully invalidated anyone's attempts to understand reality and truth.

As an example of the very different philosophical and moral universe the Postmodernists occupy; as well as the havoc they are wreaking in both the ability to engage in rational discourse and effectively deal with the real world, let's consider something written by Victor Davis Hanson a while back:

Maybe the rise of specialization in the university causes us to stress the exception rather than the rule. Or perhaps the rise of personal anecdote in lieu of analysis, common in our therapeutic society, explains why we shy away from generalization.

It is certainly true that the emergence of minority rights and grievances has chastised Americans from making generalizations that are valid in the majority of cases, but ridiculed because there are occasional exceptions. If one were to conclude that Swedes were dour, prone to drink, large, and sometimes moody, based on what I have seen of my family, I would tend to agree as a rule—with the qualifier I have met many who were sunny, tiny, and abstainers. But nevertheless that stereotyped portrait remains a good enough truism.

I raise this with exasperation since lately we are told that various radical Islamic groups—Hezbollah, Hamas, Al Qaeda, or the Muslim Brotherhood—are not all alike. But who is? And what does it matter if their generic hatred of the West and the United States in particular is predicated on the West Bank, Lebanon, Afghanistan, or our failure, according to Dr. Zawhiri, to sign the Kyoto accords? I’m sure our grandfathers did not resent the insensitive lumping together of Mussolini with Hitler and Tojo because there were undeniable differences between Bushido, National Socialism, and Fascism.

Indeed, this fear to generalize has gotten so bad that we cannot speak of “Arabs” as generic people, even though they themselves, in perfect Pan-Arabic fashion, do so, and, of course, speak of Americans as a predictable cadre. I have visited Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait Libya, Palestine, and Tunisia and most there I met seem to entertain real antipathy for Israel, express a strange simultaneous attraction for, and anger with, the United States, share certain ideas about the role of women, religious tolerance, Islam, Western culture, and the role of family patriarchs. And while there are obviously many who resent such a characterization, it is all the same a valid generalization.

Indeed, as Hanson suggests, it is extremely exasperating to live in a world that is held to be "all trees and no forest."

How is it surprising that rhetoric in today's world has decended into vicious ad hominem attacks--such attacks are inevitable when you can only talk about individual trees and not the forest in which they dwell. Why do you suppose that effective policies can never seem to be formulated or implemented to deal with pressing problems (no matter who is in charge) --when problems can only be conceptualized as inescapably subjective, and therefore limited in scope?

Even before Voltaire and Rousseau, Leibniz started the subjectivity race to the bottom with his theory of monads. But nowadays, we are all isolates in the postmodern context, and our only salvation appears in the destruction of points of view which oppose isolation and propose voluntary unions outside of big governments, which in the Hegelian worldview are the idealized substitute for God. For the liberal, government is God, and World Government is the ultimate God.

US Successes in Iraq

Although unheralded in the liberal American press, there are indications that the US is prevailing in parts of Anbar and other provinces.

John Burns of the NYT has the interesting take on this phenomenon, which shows that a determined show of strength will prevail. Of course, the left wing of the Democratic party is so heavily invested in an American defeat that no amount of good news will convince them to do the heavy lifting their stoned slacker adherents so abhor.

Elsewhere, the NYT serves as Liberal Death Star for the ostrich denial crew here and here

None of the consequences of a US withdrawal are really explored, and they would be catastrophic across the region, perhaps even igniting a region-wide war.

Memory Lane

This morning I was hardly awake and listening to Roger Federer spank his French opponent in the semi-finals at Wimbledon when two flashes from my distant past came into view.

First, I remember reading Moss Hart's "Act One" way back when it was a best-seller in 1959, when I was also reading Bennett Cerf's "As You Like It," and other anecdotal books on the edges of show-biz and high-brow art.

Then I picked up the new New Yorker and began reading about my favorite composer, and recalled the early sixties when I fell in love with Sibelius's Fifth Symphony whose elegaic strains still waft through my consciousness whenever I see a snowy scene on TV or at the cinema.

A photo-portrait of Sibelius by Karsh of Ottawa reminded me of my meeting Youssef Karsh in a Grande Hotel bar in Ottawa while being escorted by Amoco's man in Canada in the early '90s. Karsh sat with his spouse and accepted my compliments, then went back to his drink. I always thought it a bit strange that he would go to a hotel bar and drink in public, though he and his wife were seated at a table.

Now my 18-year-old daughter watches MTV & E! so often I'm afraid she's picked up the low-brow end of this gregariousness gene. I wish Moss Hart had come out with his second and third memoirs, and that Sibelius hadn't shut down for the last thirty years of his life---now I know what I'm experiencing, on a much smaller scale, with my own miserable cramp-outs while writing.

UPDATE as a memorandum to the files: Today on TV are two golf tournaments at places I played....Congressional just after a Kemper Open a dozen years ago and Whistling Straits, where I played Blackwolf Run in Kohler WI back in the day. I used to go up the gorgeous Wisconsin coast to Terre Andre Park and the brats in Sheboygan are the best in the world---better than Munich, where the weisswurst is nowhere near as good as the radishes and beer, which I sampled on numerous visits [the English Garden is my favorite spot in Europe except for the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris--and of course anywhere in Venice]

Christopher Hitchens liver matches his brain

Rummaging through the international blog of Gideon Rachman in the website of the
Financial Times, I found this little mini-memoir/vignette on Hitchens. Here's Rachman:

Last night I went to the London launch party for Christopher Hitchens’ new book, God is not Great – The Case Against Religion. The book seems to have hit a nerve. It is on the New York Times best-seller list – in fact it briefly got to number one.

Hitchens was my boss (or possibly just colleague, he’s not a very managerial type) in Washington in the early 1990s. We were both working for a now defunct British newspaper called The Sunday Correspondent – nicknamed “The Despondent” because of its irreversible downward spiral. I can still remember our first lunch. I would like to say that this is because of the sparkling nature of the conversation. In fact, it is because of the frightening amount that we drank. I staggered home afterwards and fell asleep for a few hours. At 5pm I got up and called Hitchens to discover that he had gone home and written a 2,000 word essay on WH Auden.

One of the reasons that Hitchens is so alarming is his ability to talk with apparent authority about an incredible range of topics – Middle Eastern politics, American foreign policy, English literature, European history, philosophy.

People find this intimidating and Hitchens is well aware of the fact. A friend of his once claimed to me that Hitchens' main way of gaining the upper-hand in an argument was to establish what subjects his opponent knows nothing about, and then to talk exclusively about them.

He did something similar to me last night (not that we were arguing) – suddenly chucking in an obscure Latin phrase into our conversation. Then, when he saw the look of panic in my eyes, patiently translating.

For many years, Hitchens was a hero of the left. Recently, he has become a hero of the right because of his vociferous support of the Iraq war. He claims, of course, that he has been absolutely consistent in his underlying principles.

But the company he keeps has certainly changed a little. When I went to dinner with him in Washington earlier this year, I was surprised to find that the fellow guests included Grover Norquist, one of the Republican Party’s most ruthless and conservative strategists. Another guest was a prominent Iraqi politician. Then, a little after midnight, and for no apparent reason, Lord Skidelsky, the biographer of Keynes, wandered into the dining room. I didn’t hear him knock or anything, he just sort of appeared and sat down.

At this point the conversation veered off onto the subject of a biography of Oswald Mosley that Skidelsky had once written and what Isaiah Berlin had thought of it. Hitchens revealed another unusual rightwing friend, during the course of the conversation. He is a fan of some of the work of David Irving, a historian who recently served time in an Austrian prison for Holocaust denial.

Some of what Hitchens had to say on the topic struck me as slightly naïve. He looked at me gravely and said: “Irving came round here a couple of times, but I had to drop our social contacts after he made a shocking anti-semitic remark.” David Irving – an anti-semitic remark? Well, I never.

At about two in the morning, at the Hitchens-Skidelsky-Norquist do, I was beginning to flag. Thinking that perhaps my host might want to go to bed, I turned to him and said: “Christopher,” (I refuse to call him “Hitch”) … I’m falling asleep I better go.”

He looked at me with apparent fury and said: “Well, if that’s your efffing attitude.” Then, seeing that I was a little taken aback, he added: “No, I do understand.” But I could see he didn’t. The thought that anybody might not want to stay up all night, drinking Johnny Walker and discussing Oswald Mosley was all but incomprehensible.

His physical and intellectual stamina was rather humbling. It was even more humbling to discover a few months later that, amidst all this hard-living, Hitchens had found time to write a best-selling book.

Back when I knew him in the mid-'80s, my long conversations with Hitchens watered with Scotch would be interminable, but Christopher had yet to hit his stride on the publishing front in the US, although his work at the New Statesman kept him busy. He was one of many Brit ink-stained wretches fleeing the Thatcher revolution, which had dried up many fonts of Bolshie journalistic prestidigitation. DC was flooded with TUC/Michael Foote acolytes and other offscourings of the margins of Fleet Street who had fetched up to monitor the Reagan analogue to Thatcherism and experience a career mid-course correction in a friendly environment. I had met many during a short 82-83 sojourn with IRIS, Tony Stout's start-up which tried to wed computer technology, conservative money [Ted Heath was one of the punt-money contributors] and round-the-planet journalism to put together a sort of intelligence service for hire.

A lot of Economist Intelligence Unit vets showed up, and I met literally dozens of great Commonwealth journalists during the IRIS tour. Tony Hodges, Hitchens' friend at Oxford, stayed with us at Boca a couple of summers ago on his way to Beijing to take over the job of UNICEF chief. My wife became close with Helena Cobbens, who we arranged to introduce to Bill Quandt, whom she eventually married. Joe Fitchett of the International Herald Tribune was my boss. And eventually, through a parallel connection, we met Christopher and his Cypriot wife.

I ended up introducing Hitch to the Mondale Campaign which I was working for in the last gasp of any attempt to cash in on my own and my wife's Democratic credentials. That didn't get Christopher into the Beltway game, but his preternatural writing skills were bound to get noticed and after his marriage deteriorated, he went to the Left Coast and began to hit his stride---as we all have taken notice.

Oops! The Live Earth Bubble Machine Running out of Hype

The Los Angeles Times notes that this Saturday's 7/7/07 extravaganzas around the planet may be over-hyped a bit. Not that this will deter the Gore-bot from his appointed mission.

...snags have developed. The Johannesburg concert has been scaled back after tepid ticket sales, and a show planned for Istanbul was canceled altogether in the face of financial and logistical snags.

In Rio de Janeiro, meanwhile, an anxious government official said the plan to pack a million people onto Copacabana beach for a free concert was too risky, but Thursday a judge lifted an injunction that would have halted that show, sparing Live Earth officials the embarrassment of losing their single largest event.

Among the big issues Live Earth organizers are up against are distinguishing it from the plethora of similar-sounding concerts in recent years and spreading the word in hopes of creating a sense of excitement that reaches around the globe.

Left unmentioned, of course, is the four-hundred pound baby elephant of Gore II's scion Gore III, nailed in his Prius with "prescription drugs" that weren't in his name [a fact unmentioned in the liberal MSM] and marijuana. That would be journalism, a metier outside the LAT's skillset.

The Who's Roger Daltrey represents a widespread view toward the Live Earth gig:

"The last thing the planet needs is a rock concert."

But it looks like the show will go on and we'll all get fooled again, to revert to the Who's finest album.

Waterloo was won on the Playing Fields of Eton

The French sometimes exceed themselves in presenting alternative points of view. For instance, today in the news, President Sarkozy was criticized for jogging, "a sport which emphasizes individualism and performance." French intellectuals would prefer automatons and failure, of course.

No Pasaran! has the outlook of the Communist daily, Liberation, which asks, "Is jogging a part of the right-wing life-style?"

More fundamentally, the polemic which is making a rage on the Internet on “running, is it right or left?” all started with comments surrounding the President’s running. Then on it’s the symbolism and further on its values. On the left, the author of a blog called “diner’s room” has a banner saying “No-jogging”. The reasons given are that “jogging is harmful for everything and in every way It harms your health, elegance, the way you walk, and the dignity of disabled ex-servicemen and prostitutes”

Quick to retort was Loïc Le Meur, a jogger, Sarkozy supporter, and adamant defender of successful young entrepreneurs who want to excel and take care of their bodies. Whether from the right or left, the argument makes [fitness writer] Odile Baudrier smile: “We went over this on our pages a few years ago. Jogging, of course, is associated with individualism, a values traditionally linked to the right. At the same time, in the research of the wellbeing, judgment is divided.” One could add that the contact you have with nature makes it something for the ecologically inclined. And that as a sport [tr.: form of exercise] accessible to those with any income, that it is straightforwardly Communist. “Traditionally, French intellectuals always had a certain contempt for exercise, Patrick Mignon points out. Only the head counts.
To the contrary, totalitarian ways always stressed the development of the body. Between the two, one too often forgets that humanists of the enlightenment preached for a completely balanced education including both the training of the body and the mind.”

No Pasaran's writer believes that the left prefers cycling, as more "French" than the muscularity of jogging and other American pursuits:

Never mind that they’re mimicking the jogging craze of the US in the 1970’s, they give rise to nutty tribalism about the cycling being proper exercise for good leftists. Of course they will find a bunch of nodding morons who will agree that his holiness François Mitterand’s name can be invoked here, as everywhere, along with some throwaway trash phrase about the fascism of anyone who hasn’t drunk from their tub of kool-ade. They always do.

And just to end up on a note of anti-American anger at our war movies, here's
Eric Svane on a Fourth of July riff:

When Black Hawk Down opened in France, Le Monde's Samuel Blumenfeld let off a broadside, and, for good measure, fired a couple of shots at Behind Enemy Lines as well. Why? Because the movies were badly filmed? No. Because the actors did a lousy job? No. Because the filmmakers took liberties with the truth? Hardly, since both were based on actual events (one showed a battle on the background of the Somalia famine and the other described the Serbs' mass graves in the former Yugoslavia).

No, the films were lambasted because they presented a "questionable ideology" and had "propaganda designs". Of what type? You better sit down and hold on to your seat when you hear this: to give "a valorous image of the patriotism and the endurance of American soldiers". Ohlala! Isn't that shocking?!

The film reviewer went on to bemoan the fact that warlord Aideed's soldiers are shown as "sadistic, cheating, vicious […] the alter egos of the savage Germanic tribes […] in Gladiator, by the same Ridley Scott." A director whom the critic castigates for leaving something out. Oh, what is that, pray tell? For not showing…"the ordinary racism of certain American soldiers or questioning the African policies of President Clinton".

(Apparently, Blumenfeld has not been informed that part of the reason for the movie's existence was to criticize the Clinton administration's policies in the 90s and that a notice explaining this at the end of the film was removed only because of the shock of September 11. Incidentally, it has never seemed to inconvenience the film critic much that films criticizing Paris's African policies, or Jacques Chirac in the manner of Fahrenheit 9/11, do not exactly abound in France. As to the hypothesis (which I happen to share, I don't know why) that the two Hollywood movies present "a valorous image of the patriotism and the endurance of American soldiers" simply because… that happens to be the truth, let's not get into that, shall we, I don't think Blumenfeld would understand…)

In other words, American patriotism, in today's world, is so ridiculous, and so insidious, that even among the worst atrocities in Europe since World War II and even among the mass killings of a famished population, it is that treacherous danger which the world must fear and fight and denounce by any means available. The danger is so terrible that it eclipses the war crimes of Somali warlords and of Yugoslav butchers. Yes, you heard that right: That the militias in fact did machine gun the Somali crowds, what importance compared to the fact that a G.I. or two may have uttered racist words! At least the people shot dead by their own people did not suffer from any type of racism. What a relief!

Who cares about the Bosnia mass graves! Who cares about the Mogadishu massacres! Compared with the simple fact that Hollywood distributes films that might be called patriotic, and the terrible danger their content (along with that of McDonald's, Coca-Cola, etc) represents, those atrocities evaporate into nothingness.

Of course, Rwanda was Clinton's fault as much as Katrina was Bush's fault. The Rwandans may have spoken French and New Orleans may have suffered under a hundred-fifty years of corrupt Democratic leadership which allowed the dikes to become dangerously susceptible to political bidding on the levee maintenance, but it's always the US president's fault whatever happens anywhere. Svane notes:

To leave the film world behind for the international stage per se, Le Monde once asked if one shouldn't "fear the implementation of a Pax Americana" in Yugoslavia. I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn't dreaming when I read that! The reason I find this accusation extremely offensive is that, for four years, Yugoslavia was beset by war, with murders, killings, and rape, with hideous crimes, mass graves, and genocide. Finally, the international community put an end to it. But because the Americans were the ones who were paramount in this undertaking, the French abstain from calling the end of the tragedy a positive event. The Serbs are the worst criminals to stage a war in Europe since 1945, and for now, at least, their killing is over. But what danger do some Europeans fret about? That peace came under the orders of Uncle Sam...

Svane uses the Fourth to put forward the following Vive L'Amerique statements:

As everyone here in Europe knows: any society which does not offer the type of guarantees, equality, and social protection that the European models do is not worth living in, or believing in, and any government that does not try to implement same is not worth keeping in power. And anybody, in turn, who might believe differently can only be under the spell of a smoke screen, which deserves only to be deplored, scorned, and mocked. So, America, with its "itch to fight" and its "excess of testosterone" which has "inflamed the country" (the French verb, enfiévrer [to make feverish], suggests a disease) can only be of an object of ridicule and scorn, as well as a danger without precedent.

Following 911, I expected French friends and acquaintances of mine who came back from visits to the U.S. to return with some sense of respect or admiration. Don't kid yourselves! Many shared the same tone of exasperation and disbelief in their voices: How can one be so patriotic (that is, so superstitious)?

It was a rhetorical question, and some were surprised that I answered it. My answer was that I didn't know what they are talking about. What happens when one goes to the United States? One sees a lot of flags and… That's about it. Ain't that right? One does not see hysterical demonstrations walking down the avenues. One does not see signs reading "Down with the Taliban" or "Death to Iraq". One does not hear the "cowboys" shout "Vive la guerre!" I have not seen many Americans set fire to Iraqi or Afghan (or Vietnamese) flags. I don't remember seeing any throw tomatoes or molotov cocktails on the Soviet or Chinese embassies.

When one points out that George W Bush made a speech in an American mosque, or that he observed Ramadan, or that he spoke of a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan, the reaction is only horse laughter or scorn, because of course — of course! — it can only be a sham. (As it happens, it is not in America that mosques [or synagogues] are burnt down at alarming rates.)

Svane finishes with a resounding crescendo and final denouement:

While many countries favor solemn military parades on their national holidays, or at least a predominant role for the military, the Fourth of July is, above all things, a party. Oh, of course there is the flag ceremony, with a handful of military people present from each service — army, navy, air force, marines — but it's above all a party, with barbecueing (hotdogs, burgers, spare ribs, etc), games, and fireworks.

And if the military — and veterans — have a special place at the festivities, whether on July Fourth or other holidays, they are only a piece of the puzzle which also includes bands, pompon girls, floats, ethnic pride groups, cowboys, Indians, and clowns — I've seen a parade where the marching soldiers were preceded, followed, and surrounded by dozens of clowns. (Try that on the Champs-Élysées, in Red Square, on at Tien An Men!)

As I write this — 4 juillet oblige — I am listening to the Jingle Cats sing The Star-Spangled Banner and Yankee Doodle Dandy. For some reason, I have trouble imagining a lucid Frenchman, a down-to-earth Russian, or a wise Chinese person setting their national anthems to cats' meows. Non, their wailing takes other, less enjoyable, directions.

Wailing Europeans and other Uncle Sam detractors ought to make sure they keep their droning continuous and never-ending. Because, if instead of endlessly lamenting the distressing state of Americans' patriotism, they were to shut up and try and study it a little more closely and a little more rationally, they might come to believe that Yankee patriotism is not so mystical, or frightening, or perilous, as is commonly believed. Then they would have less to wail about. Can you imagine that!? Wouldn't that be awful?!

As for me, for some reason, I prefer the laughter and the joy of the American spirit.

Happy Fourth of July, everybody!

Good post, and I might put Erik Svane on my bloglist.