Mirengoff on Eurabia:

"In a certain kind of liberal universe, French Muslim rioters are victims who want nothing more than to enjoy the bourgeoise pleasures of secular France. Iraqi Muslims, by contrast, have little yearning for freedom, self-government, and prosperity, preferring civil war, a Saddam-style strong man, and/or a theocracy. They are victims of U.S. aggression, which denies them these things, at least temporarily. To me, however, it seems plausible that Iraqis Muslims will find satisfaction in their own democratic state before European Muslims will find satisfaction in a western-style democracy."

Read entire: Powerline 

In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily.

Charles, Count Talleyrand  (Need we say more about the French?)

WHO, World Bank, etc., convene on Avian Flu

Pandemic a matter of time: Story here.

A brand-new Congregational
Church in Connecticut, approaching completion, on yesterday's misty, foggy morning.

When have you last seen a new Congregational Church being built?

This congregation is not a member of the UCC, by the way, but a true independent congregation of the original Mayflower variety.

The story is that the original building burned down in 1920, and the congregation has been in "temporary" quarters since then. Not having had fire insurance, it's taken them a while to re-build  - and the costs have gone up a little over the past 85 years.

Dalrymple

There is a fine education in going to City Journal, and searching Dalrymple under "author". This Brit has been a prolific writer and thinker for years in that excellent journal, but our alert and intelligent readers have pointed me to one piece in particular of his, from 1995, Do Sties Make Pigs?, apropos of the French rioting. It's a case study of the law of unintended consequences, and of government's wealth, hubris, and lack of common sense. I quote here:

"But it is public housing that exemplifies most clearly the ideas of those who transformed the British urban landscape during the 1950s and 1960s. Here the new aesthetics combined with socialist reforming zeal to produce a multilayered disaster. 

After the war, bien pensants universally agreed that pre-war British society had been grossly unjust. The working class, it was said, had been shamelessly exploited, as was manifest principally in Britain's great inequalities of income and its overcrowded housing. A sharply progressive income tax (which at one point reached 95 percent) would redress the inequalities of income, while slum clearance and the construction of large- scale housing projects would alleviate the housing problem. 

The middle class reformers thought of poverty wholly in physical terms: an insufficiency of food and warmth, a lack of space. How, they asked, could people come to the finer things in life if their basic requirements were so inadequately met? What could freedom mean (I remember my father asking) in the absence of decent housing conditions? Since social problems such as crime and delinquency (which we were soon to discover were in their infancy) were attributable to physical deprivation—to the environment rather than the criminal or delinquent—the construction of decent housing would solve all problems at once.

But what was decent housing? A civil servant, Parker Morris, provided the answer: a certain number of cubic yards of living space per inhabitant. The Ministry of Housing adopted the Parker Morris standards for all public housing; they governed the size and number of rooms—and that was all."

Read entire.

Charlie Rich and the Democrats

I tend to assume that everyone who is online reads Powerline regularly, if not daily. However, this past week they have outdone themselves with quality of thought and writing. They keep getting better.

Scott somehow manages to combine the great Charlie Rich with the Dems' Behind Closed Doors antics, but their whole week sets an impossibly high standard for the rest of the blogosphere. These guys have jobs, too?

A Blog, and a Post

Just stumbled into a fine blog I hadn't seen before, Dinocrat, and, lo and behold, they had blogrolled Maggie's. That is a fine moment for a humble blogger. Here's another piece from Dinocrat: 32% of Dems believe the US is "a bad country." They are not on the planet that I inhabit. Can't help but wonder what a "good country" is to those folks.

France, more

From Dinocrat:

"A reporter who spent last weekend in Clichy and its neighboring towns of Bondy, Aulnay-sous-Bois and Bobigny heard a single overarching message: The French authorities should keep out.” All we demand is to be left alone,” said Mouloud Dahmani, one of the local “emirs” engaged in negotiations to persuade the French to withdraw the police and allow a committee of sheiks, mostly from the Muslim Brotherhood, to negotiate an end to the hostilities."

Read entire. 

Minor Details

France, via Yahoo News:

"The country has 751 neighbourhoods officially classed as severely disadvantaged, housing a total of five million people, around eight percent of the population.

Conditions are often dire with high-rise housing, unemployment at twice the national rate of 10 percent and per capita incomes 40 percent below the national average.

Many of France's estimated five million Muslims live in those suburbs."

Dare I ask what is wrong with "high-rise housing"?

Steyn on Moslem Riots in Europe

"This is a fuse that's been lit all across Europe." Read Steyn interview with HH, here. Thanks, Instapundit

GODDAMMO

For the unhappily divorced, keychain bullets made out of your wedding band. Reminds me of the old line: "I still miss her, but my aim's getting better."

Vermont Barbecue: Curtis'

Now I ask our Southern readers: Does this look real? It is.

Comments on Recent Postings

1. My thought about the piece on Wellies: A charming and useful post, but the problem with wellies is that you cannot eat them like leather boots when you run out of food, as Chaplin famously did in The Gold Rush: Click here: Film Listings Archive:

2. A comment on my piece about barbecue: There is a roadside barbecue pit in New England - in fact, in Putney, VT, which is excellent. Go about 1/2 mile or less west off the Putney Exit of Rte. 91, and it's on the right hand side. They run it out of old broken-down trailer homes, and the southern gent named Curtis who owns it is the real deal, with a pet pig. He's open until Oct., when he goes back to North Carolina for the winter. Definitely worth a stop, even if you think you aren't hungry.

3. Paxety had some thoughts about the piece on recorded vs. live music:

"Plus, folks get fewer and fewer places to learn to play - or to play after they've learned. Far too many school systems consider band and orchestra to be outside activities similar to sports. When I taught band many years ago, I had students whose only academic achievement was in music - it was the only thing they "got" and were successful in. Now, those kids aren't allowed to take part in what's now called extra-curricular activity.

Then there's the opportunity of performance. Even when I played professionally, I performed many times for free in local little theater productions and at churches. Now, these venues use recorded music rather than live.

I don't know where future musicians will come from. Perhaps that's why current pop music contains so little of what I would consider original music - it seems to be mostly samples, or chords that make the old rock 'n roll 3-chord turnover seem complex."

Migration Updates

from our friends at Lighthouse Point, New Haven - a south wind this week, so no migrating hawks:

10/31:  800+ Black-capped Chickadees, 1,500 Cedar Waxwings, 1,000 American Robins, 120 Eastern Bluebirds, 2,000 Red-winged Blackbirds, 350 House Finches

11/02: Migration flight from approx 7:00 AM thru 10 AM and then slowed  down... 5000+ BLACKBIRDS/ GRACKLES, 850+ CEDAR WAXWINGS, 75 COWBIRDS, 1200+ ROBINS, 45 BLUEBIRDS, 200+ BRANT

Flu pandemic hypothetical, from RRWH

Reid's foolishness: RWNH

A Swede encounters California education: Atlas

More on blogs, free speech, and the Dem's efforts to defeat political speech: Am. Princess

An interview with Alexander McCall Smith. Looks like he has moved past Mma Ramotswe - what a shame. Bookslut

The greater danger, for most of us, lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark... Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.

Michelangelo

Thanks, Chris

Our blog looks the same, but the guts have improved. We are not really a slick blog, but I think we will have gotten rid of those dang Texas Holdem spammers without having to resort to registration for comments, which I find to be a deterrent.

Euro-weenies

Short report at LGF. Afraid to speak out against Jihad? Pathetic, especially when rationalizing timidity as "sensitivity." How sensitive do you want to be towards people who want to kill you and turn your country into an extension of the caliphate? Do you imagine that those who have contempt for you will react warmly to your weakness? What would Winston say? How would Adolph react?

But if you don't care what they would say, hey, why not just give your country away to them, you sanctimonious Euro-weenies, and move to the US, where we try to have a little more self-respect and courage and appreciation of our heritage, and also appreciate the virtues of firearms?

And when you come, just wade across the Rio Grande via Mexico in your Le Chameau wellies. You'll get more sympathy and better benefits that way than if you try the whole silly legal paperwork visa hassle, and our immigration is tilted against Europeans anyway thanks to the bozo NJ Dem Peter Rodino years ago. And the guards won't be able to confiscate your stash of Cuban cigars. If you do stumble into some Immigration government folks with sidearms, just say "Jose Gonzales, no speaka Inglese." They will leave you alone. Or you can always try the reliable "These aren't the droids you're looking for," if The Force is with you. Which it isn't, obviously.

Clouds so swift
Rain won't lift
Gate won't close
Railing's froze
Get your mind off wintertime
You ain't goin nowhere
Whoo-eee, ride me high
Tomorrow's the day
My bride's gonna come
Oh, oh are we gonna fly
Down in the easy chair!

Bob Dylan, from You Ain't Goin' Nowhere on The Basement Tapes

More on The Religion of Peace, rioting, etc.

Denmark too. Missed that. LGF

That's Funny - You Don't Look Anti-Semitic

From the Foreward of Steve Cohen's 1984 book:

"Steve Cohen's little pale-blue book on left wing antisemitism caused a rumpus in the colleges when it first came out. Helped by the arresting title, which still raises a smile, That's Funny You Don't Look Anti-Semitic appeared in the coffee bars, Labour Clubs and Jewish Societies during the Miners Strike of 1984-85. Back then there were lots of Jewish lefties and the campus battles between Jewish students and the operational antisemites were starting to hot up again."

The book can now be read online, here.

Moslem riots in France continue to their sixth day: CBS.
How do we prevent ourselves from being guilty of schadenfreude with those arrogant and self-righteous French? And how does their pride and self-satisfaction in their culture coexist with an utter unwillingness to defend it?

Bird Flu, From Mr. Free Market:

Air Pollution and Second-hand Smoke

From Norm:

Every year, according to a paper published by the British Medical Journal, some 54 bar staff in the UK die as a result of their exposure to other people's cigarette smoke. And every year, according to the EU, some 39,000 deaths in this country are caused or hastened by air pollution, most of which comes from vehicles.

Read entire.

Cover-ups, when there is no "underlying" crime

We did a piece on this a week ago: this better piece from neo-neocon:

"Rothstein says to avoid this kind of trap, special prosecutors should use their prosecutorial discretion not to file coverup charges when there is no evidence related to the alleged underlying crime."

Read entire.

From Atlas, a piece on The David Project:

"Jewish students on American college campuses are facing an onslaught of anti-Israel campaigns and propaganda. 

We at The David Project have documented this in the now famous documentary film taking place at Columbia University, where students were harassed and intimidated in and outside of class by anti-Israel faculty. Clearly, Jewish college students need to be prepared for what they may face on their campuses.

columbiaunbecoming.com (WATCH THE VIDEO!)"