Friday, December 9. 2005
Chile: Madame President?As reported here several weeks back, Michelle Bachelet, a divorced mother of three, an atheist and a member of the Socialist Party, looks to be elected as the next president of Chile. Read more about this interesting lady and nation as they are about to show us what real change is. Read further here: "How has this happened? Chile, more than ever, is proving itself to be the polar opposite of Lampedusa's Sicily: in order for things to change, they have to stay the same - or rather, they have to look as if they are staying the same."Señora Presidente? - New York Times. If your are interested in Sicily and curious about why Mr. Gamucio used it to compare Chile read here: From Best of Sicily - The Nobility "Giuseppe Di Lampedusa's book, The Leopard, described these events at some length. Nobody could have predicted that his novel, written almost a century after the unification war of 1860, would rise to the bestseller list on both sides of the Atlantic. If nothing else, the book's popularity indicates that there was still some interest in the Sicilian nobility long after its demise."
Right now, in southern New England. Dang point-and-shoot camera is too slow to catch the beauty of the flakes falling heavily this morning. The first good snowfall is always magical. If you don't have 4WD this morning, you'll have a bad day. Looks like about 8". If Danny doesn't show up to plow the driveway and the front of the barn in about ten minutes, I'll do it myself with the tractor, if I can get it started. I kind of hate to head off to Hartford without cleaning things up first. For the little wifie, you know? She has horses to care for. Not that a little snow slows her down. 
France hopes to improve image. Good idea. It needs it. And not just image - reality, too. For gun buffs and military fans: A letter from a soldier re Iraq weapons, tactics, etc., at Atlas. Gotta love that gun that shoots around corners, but gotta hate 9 mm for stopping bad guys. One quote: "Fun fact: Random autopsies on dead insurgents show a high level of opiate use." No surprise there: on the morning of Austerlitz, Napoleon gave the soldiers a triple shot of brandy - would have given them opiates if he had 'em. Dutch courage. I enjoyed his "thumbs up" for the Mossberg 12 ga - cheap, simple, low-tech gun for ducks or bad guys in close quarters. Low tech always best in bad conditions. For under the tree for someone: The new Sony R1 camera. My problem with such wonderful toys is that, by the time I learn how to use 1/20th of what they can do, they're obsolete. We all have favorite charities to whom we'd give lots of money, if we had it. Charity Navigator has all the info. An amusing Kerry verbal gaffe. Sensible Mom A book: Why do Men Have Nipples?: Hundreds of Questions You'd Only Ask Your Doctor After Your Third Martini Effects of economic growth and population growth in the Galapagos
More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly. Woody Allen
Thursday, December 8. 2005
Department of Media Bias Yet one more. Confederate Yank.
"Of war and peace the truth just twists
Its curfew gull just glides
Upon four-legged forest clouds
The cowboy angel rides
With his candle lit into the sun
Though its glow is waxed in black
All except when 'neath the trees of Eden The lamppost stands with folded arms
Its iron claws attached
To curbs 'neath holes where babies wail
Though it shadows metal badge
All and all can only fall
With a crashing but meaningless blow
No sound ever comes from the Gates of Eden With a time-rusted compass blade
Aladdin and his lamp
Sits with Utopian hermit monks
Side saddle on the Golden Calf
And on their promises of paradise
You will not hear a laugh
All except inside the Gates of Eden." From "Gates of Eden," from 1965's Bringing It All Back Home. Buy it if you don't have it.
 Campus Recruiting
The Solomon case reaches the Supreme Court. And the good punditry, here. Look, we all know this isn't really about gays - it's about anti-military and anti-America. Gays are just being used as a pawn in this game, which was going on way before gays were "gays." Indeed, gays are foolish to let themselves be exploited in this way by the anti-American crazies, who have always latched onto the most convenient or fashionable excuse for their America-bashing efforts. I want to see what would happen if gay-slaughtering Al Quaida recruiters handed out fliers in Harvard Yard. Nothing. Free speech, right? And multi-culturally sensitive. When will we see poorly-paid but devoted military recruiters given the same respect as the pin-striped fancy guys from Morgan Stanley, GE, and Shearman & Sterling - all of whom depend on our guys and gals in uniform for their freedom and prosperity?
Refresh your education, on line, at home in your spare time, for free! And no exams. This is an early Christmas gift to our readers, from me. Lectures on Modern European Intellectual History by Steven Kreis. It's really a survey, but with plenty of good links to dig deeper. It doesn't read the original sources for you, but it's highly enjoyable and informative, and it will bring back everything you once heard, or should have heard, in college, especially if you went to the great University of Chicago, or Columbia. Trouble is, they do the original sources but don't have the patience to tie it all together. That's why we appreciate real teacher guys like Kreis. I am doing one lecture per day, but I will have to do it twice because of my ADD and the distraction of our short-skirted young receptionist who is the current cause of my Adult ADD. (Billable hours? Well, you know how hard we barristers work when we aren't drinking, reading the papers, surfing online, jousting on eBay, sighting in our muskets and bows, hunting, dining, emailing, ordering books and movies and toys on Amazon, or looking at gals.) From Abelard to the certifiably insane Nietzsche, Kreis does an excellent job of putting everything in historical context. I hope his fortunate but doubtless oatmeal-and- Budweiser-brained students appreciate what he does - his enthusiasm and his thoughtfulness. It is a true delight, for which I am grateful.
Bolton at the UN: NY Sun Christmas book ideas: Hanson's book on The Peloponnesian War. And two ideas from RWN's list: Gates of Fire by Pressman and Basic Economics by Sowell. How many errors in Wikipedia? Some, for sure. Blogger News Network. Still, a great resource. I still prefer the Britannica. Hillary's flag trick. Newsmax. No, it didn't backfire. She wanted that negative comment from the NYT. NYT playing along? Well, consciously or unconsciously. Clever and devious? Yes. Wise? No. It's the Sistah Soljah triangulation that Dick Morris devised for Bill. Watch her follow Dick's old plan in every detail: you wink at your base and make a few meaningless centrist-sounding maneuvers. Simple to do, if you throw honesty out the window. But, what the heck...careers are at stake. More real hope for spinal cord injuries. Science Daily
 The pheasant was an early game bird introduction to America. A very handsome Asian native, it had already been a popular game bird in Europe when first brought to the US during colonial times by sportsmen (to Virginia, in fact, where it did not prosper). The hen pheasant comes in a plain brown wrapper with a shorter tail, but the roosters can appear in atypical colors due to hybridizing efforts. The pheasant is a rare example of an introduced bird which has no deleterious effects on existing ecosystems.
Pheasant prefers northern, open agricultural lands with areas of dense cover, and does not survive in the southern US. Pheasant is widely pen-bred and reared for hunting purposes, but few released birds in the US survive assaults from red-tailed hawks and coyotes, as they have not had the opportunity to become street-wise. The bulk of the wild, breeding populations are in the Dakotas, but they are found throughout the northern midwest and can even be found occasionally in the northeast. As agriculture has become more efficient, their numbers have slowly declined. In Europe, pen-raised birds are typically allowed to enter an area where they have the chance to become semi-wild, capable of strong flight, and independent, but are held by food until the day they are driven by beaters into high flight designed to be challenging for shooters. In the western US, pheasant are hunted with dogs, or driven to the ends of large fields where they are forced into flight. In the eastern US, typically, fat pheasants are hunted on the day of release, hence our pal L's expression "flying mattresses." Such birds are not particularly sporty but most of us have found ways to miss plenty of them, especially when given time to think. It is considered proper decorum to let them get well underway in flight before pulling the trigger since, unlike grouse, you usually have a fairly open shot and you don't want your pellets to turn them into ground hamburger meat. In the midwest and west, pen-raised birds are used to supplement wild populations for sportsmen. Fun to hunt? Definitely. Good for dog work? Yes. Good to eat? You bet. Cook to pink in the center. Read more about Ring Necked Pheasant at CLO. An organization called Pheasants Forever works on land management for pheasant. (Details of English pheasant rearing practices corrected thanks to our across-the-pond cousin Mr. FMFT)
You know you want this The Roku Soundbridge. There's a Wi-Fi music system and a Network Music Player which, among other things, will send a wireless signal from the PC to your good speaker system. Too bad they don't combine the two products into one. I think I "need" the Network Music Player. Hey, Santa - are you online?
 Duck Hunting Safety
Drowning and hypothermia kill duck hunters each fall and winter. It figures, because going out on the winter waters in small open boats in bad weather, wearing heavy layers of clothing, probably isn't the smartest thing to do. But it's in the nature of guys to do stupid and reckless things sometimes. This company sells inflatable hypothermia camo outerwear made by Mustang. It could save your life. No, we do not get paid for this advt. All of our advertising has been free, thus far, in support of Commerce, Capitalism, and Good Stuff!
But is it "Art"? 
"A distinction between art and entertainment isn't worth making."
George Balanchine Reading a short piece in the CSM (my favorite newspaper right now besides the New York Sun) about how comic books are being featured, and presented as serious high art, at LA's Museum of Contemporary Art, triggered an ill-formed thought that has been percolating in the back of my mind. And it's not the usual ranting about "That's not real Art." It's that the notion of "serious art" or "high art" is the real problem. I'd like to replace the word "art" with the word "pictures." Then we can start to talk.
Wednesday, December 7. 2005
John H. shows quantification of press bias: P'line. They do this to all Repubs, and they have done so for many years. And they always select one "good Repub", to seem fair. Once upon a time, it was Nelson Rockefeller. Now it's McCain. But if he runs - watch out. It's always the guy they want to run - and lose. Algeria vetoes condemnation of Netanya blombing. Blocking market forces in conservation of grazing lands. How can they block this? The Commons. There's a moral to this story. Tom Brewton takes on the anti-war people, the 60s counterculture, the culture of hedonism and the juvenocracy:
"The counter-cultural effect was certainly a long-lasting, industrial-strength one. Today, liberal/Progressives give lip service to “supporting our troops,” but their actions make clear that military personnel are for them objects of cynical disdain, while they have made entertainers and athletes the most glamorous and astronomically-highly-paid group in history. Hedonism, not patriotism, is the McLuhan TV ‘massage’ for liberal-Progressives." Read entire. It's an excellent thoughtful rant.
COLONEL DON CONROY'S EULOGY,
by his son Pat Conroy, 1998 The children of fighter pilots tell different stories than other kids do. None of our fathers can write a will or sell a life insurance policy or fill out a prescription or administer a flue shot or explain what a poet meant. We tell of fathers who land on aircraft carriers at pitch-black night with the wind howling out of the China Sea. Our fathers wiped out aircraft batteries in the Philippines and set Japanese soldiers on fire when they made the mistake of trying to overwhelm our troops on the ground.
Your Dads ran the barber shops and worked at the post office and delivered the packages on time and sold the cars, while our Dads were blowing up fuel depots near Seoul, were providing extraordinarily courageous close air support to the beleaguered Marines at the Chosin Reservoir, and who once turned the Naktong River red with blood of a retreating North Korean battalion. We tell of men who made widows of the wives of our nations' enemies and who made orphans out of all their children.
You don't like war or violence? Or napalm? Or rockets? Or cannons or death rained down from the sky? Then let's talk about your fathers, not ours. When we talk about the aviators who raised us and the Marines who loved us, we can look you in the eye and say "you would not like to have been American's enemies when our fathers passed overhead". We were raised by the men who made the United States of America the safest country on earth in the bloodiest century in all recorded history. Our fathers made sacred those strange, singing names of battlefields across the Pacific: Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, the Chosin Reservoir, Khe Sanh and a thousand more. We grew up attending the funerals of Marines slain in these battles. Your fathers made communities like Beaufort decent and prosperous and functional; our fathers made the world safe for democracy.
Continue reading "A Pearl Harbor Day Offering: The Great Santini - Eulogy for a Fighter Pilot"
Winning and Losing All credit to Pennywit-Multifaria for highlighting this quote by Ann Applebaum, arguing in the Washington Post that "Iraq may turn out to be a mixed bag": "[W]hat if all of this vocabulary -- winning, losing, victory, defeat -- is simply misplaced? There are, after all, wars that are not actually won or lost. There are wars that achieve some of their goals, that result only in partial solutions and that leave much business unfinished. There are wars that do not end with helicopters evacuating Americans from the embassy roof but that do not produce a victorious march into Berlin, either. There are wars that end ambivalently -- wars, for example, such as the one we fought in Korea."
Right. But what are our goals? 1. Get rid of Saddam. 2. Kill a bunch of terrorists. 3. Establish some political freedom in the middle east (hopefully friendly with the US). Three out of three ain't bad. Maybe we already "won," and just don't know it. Mad bombers breed like rats in the middle-east - you can never get rid of all of them - they are part of life. Witness Netanya.
Dems will go down on Iraq and Alito: Chapman. Wish they would learn - or glad they don't learn - that there would be lots more Dems if they didn't pander to their wackos. Hillary gets it. "Raise the white flag, boys." Morrissey on the Dem. approach to warfare, at Daily Standard What liberal media? Nice find, Lee. Israeli bomber? Leonard Wood and running empires: Max Boot in WSJ
So, so tired of the Jesus-haters How can anyone hate Jesus, whose message of love transformed, and challenged, the world? Every year we go through this, and it is wearing me out. But I guess that's what the ACLU and their ilk intend to do: to attack the culture on multiple fronts with their endless supply of lawyers, and wear us down, break our hearts, and fill us with despair. Instapundit found this open declaration of war on Christmas. Our Bird Dog did a gentle defense of Christmas the other day, which I appreciated. Do the haters know anything about Jesus, or what he preached to us all, Jews and gentiles alike? Why not find out? The American Princess has this to say: "If we want to show respect for other religions as a society, we need to acknowledge outrightly the traditions and honor of their cultures, not simply try to homogenize the society into an atheistic or secular banner. Give them their due, their 2%--don't force us into a conglomeration of non-descript individuals.
Of course, conformity is central to liberalism. The idea that we are all the same and should all be exactly the same is the foundational principle of the Workers movment. Its the second verse in Imagine, and its scary.
Time to take Christmas back."
Hear hear. But the strongest words come from Paul at Powerline, in a piece entitled Jewish Leaders Freak Out: "As Feder suggests, it is not the "religious right" that is seeking to transform this country. In the America to which Jews flocked, homosexuals could not marry one another, the Ten Commandments were publicly displayed, and our coins said "In God We Trust." If liberal Jews wish to reverse all of this, it's their right to try -- that's one of the things that makes our country great. But to demonize those who want to preserve the traditional social, moral, and religious arrangements strikes me as vicious and not very smart."
Paul didn't quite say "Love it or leave it," but almost. Would I move to Israel and tell them to remove their menorahs, and to shut up about Moses? Or to Uganda and tell them to get rid of their god and all of his strange minions so we aren't "offended"? Let's get a little "tolerant" and respectful here. As the Princess points out, Christian niceness and tolerance and accommodation makes Christians relatively easy to roll over, manipulate, and get the better of. We are taught to turn the other cheek. To all of you Jesus-phobics and Christian-haters, I beg you to find some other place to create an atheistic, tradition-killing paradise. Maybe Russia - woops, that didn't quite work out - maybe consider Saudi Arabia, Uganda, France or Mongolia. Or is the anglophone world the weakest in spine, the most tolerant, and thus the best target for your plans? And thank you heartless souls for leaving us alone in the future. We've had enough. The ankle-biting is just too intolerant and cruel, and just plain annoying. A push-back should not be necessary, but we have had it with lions in the Colosseum. Been there, done that. Enough with the lions. I have a better idea: learn about Christ and his message to the world, and understand and respect this powerful message, even if you don't accept it. If you have a better and more holy message, lucky you. Cling to it, but leave me alone. And, no - I don't care what Bush has on his Christmas card this year.
Remember Pearl Harbor - and remember this photo (as if you could forget it): The Enemy Press in the US: Horowitz Conspiracy theorists, from neoneocon: "What's the origin of the need to see a conspiracy behind every unpleasant event? One reason is the desire for order and control--even though, paradoxically, conspiracy theories posit a shadowy world out of the control of most of us. But, like children who want everything to have a reason and an explanation, conspiracy theorists can rest assured that at least someone (if only the conspirators) is in control and that there are few accidents, few random terrible and unpredictable events that we cannot control." For Christmas - The Bob Dylan Store Book for Christmas: The Martini and other tasty related subjects. Steyn rips into the eco-cultists. Telegraph The Birds of Baghdad: Michael Yon. Who knew he was a bird-watcher too?
One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be "happy" is not included in the plan of Creation. Sigmund Freud
Tuesday, December 6. 2005
A Note from Netanya An email from our pal Nathan in Netanya yesterday (author of our weekly - each Tuesday - Aliyah Diary): Bombing in Netanya yesterday. Quite terrible. The guard who was
killed, grabbed the fellow by the shoulder as he appeared suspicious.
At the same time, a policewoman driving by saw the same fellow and
shouted out to the guard to pull the man's hand from his bag. She
jumped out of her car and ran towards them. As the man blew himself
up, she fell to the ground four meters away.
One question asked here, is whether the guard should have simply shot
the man. But, there is also concern here that being too quick on the
draw (as happened with a soldier and a 15 year old a few weeks back)
can kill innocents. Not easy at all. I was in Netanya studying
Hebrew; quite safe from the bombing, but somber the mood afterwards.
Four killed on the spot; a half dozen critically wounded and some
dozens wounded. Life continues, but it dampens people's spirits. The
mall where it happened was splattered with blood for hours afterwards;
the tiles on the wall lifted away and pock-marked from shrapnel.
Too many are suffering. It does seem to me that the palestinians have
a talent mostly for destruction. Saul Bellow once wrote that the Germans
were good at two things: making cars and killing Jews. Seems that the
palestinians have only got the knack for half the job. Update from Nathan today: Those confirmed dead include Eliyah Rosen, a 39 year old mother of
three, a psychologist; Daniel Golani, 45 , who had come to the mall to
look at opening a store; Naim Amram, 26, the guard who apprehended the
bomber, but did not shoot him, a graduate from the air force;
Alexhandra Garmitzki, 65 , from Ukraine, whose only son is a doctor;
and Keinan Tzoami, 19, who requested delay in army service in order to
help his father's carpentry shop. Zichron L'vracha.
The policewoman, Shoshana Atiay-Deloya had drawn her gun as she ran
towards the bomber, but didn't shoot as there were too many people
around.
What Opie wants for Christmas: a Flybook. Got that, Santa?
Five types of people you meet in every office. Which Type are you?: Blogcritics EU OKs airline blacklist. A good idea, and it's about time. Travelwire Thornton at VDH, on Sowell: "The cause of this sorry state of affairs is the transformation of a once-noble Civil Rights movement into the Civil Rights industry, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party and the Social Welfare Plantation. This collection of academics, activists, pundits, bureaucrats, lupine lawyers, and all-around busybodies has reduced the discussion of race in America to a crude melodrama in which the prime mover is white racism, and black people are kept helpless victims in chronic need of rescue by big-hearted liberals and race-tribunes like Jesse Jackson. The economic and political gains made by black people are ignored, while the true sources of the problems and dysfunctions afflicting many black communities are obscured."
Read entire.
Polonius in Israel: Aliyah tales, 11-22-05
Polonius starts with my memory of a Mr. T. key fob I saw in Toy Boat
Ice Cream Parlor and Assorted Toys Shop on Clement in San Francisco.
Some will recall Mr. T. from the TV show which was a comic echo of
Mission Impossible. Mr. T., the black man with a Mohawk, laconic,
strong, of fierce mien. When he moved to Lake Park, Illinois, a tres
chic far north suburb of Chicago, known for its lots measured in
acres, its horse trails and its trees, and when he learned he was
allergic to pollen, T. got out his chain saw and cut down all the
trees on his multi-acred property.
But the key fob is one such that displays his mug and beneath it a
series of multicolored buttons, which when pressed, will growl at you
with Mr. T.-isms like, "Don't mess with me, Man!" or "The end of your
story is the start of my glory," and such.
Nu, what's this got to do with Polonius in Israel? Imagine a Mr.
Polonius key fob, which when pressed, spouted inanities. Inanities
that finally pressed Hamlet to silence Polonius hidden behind the
curtain. I generally picture this with a thrust of Hamlet's sword,
but once saw an updated version in which Hamlet uses a .22 caliber.
Not as moving. Something about the intimacy and immediacy of a fencing
move, a thrust, blade briefly buried in velvet curtain, a slow fall
and silence.
But this Polonius, the one in my ulpan, spouts, generally biblical
exhortations.
Continue reading "Guest Author: Aliyah Diary #7"
And more Botticelli Mystic Crucifixion, below, (c. 1500), is among Botticelli's latest paintings. The picture is, sadly, in very poor condition, but can be seen at the Fogg Museum in Cambridge. Worth a trip. Note c.1500 Florence in the background, with the walls of the city - it has not changed much. I'd enlarge the picture if I could. What a contrast with the popular and charming Primavera and Venus and Mars. With this amazing, pseudo-Medieval and almost Expressionistic picture, we will leave Botticelli for a while so as not to test the patience of our readers. 
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