"Rogue elements" are a nice way to say "We suspect it's Putin, but we can't afford to level such accusations against a nuclear-armed state."

A little preview of what happens when Iran goes nuclear. There will be a lot of "rogue elements" of the Iranian government conducting attacks against America.

British intelligence sources increasingly suspect that Alexander Litvinenko, the former spy killed with a radioactive poison, was the victim of a plot involving "rogue elements" within the Russian state, the Guardian has learned.

While ruling out any official involvement by Vladimir Putin's government, investigators believe that only those with access to state nuclear laboratories could have mounted such a sophisticated plot.

Police were last night closing in on a group of men who entered the UK among a large crowd of Muscovite football fans. The group of five or more arrived shortly before Mr Litvinenko fell ill and attended the CSK Moscow match against Arsenal at the Emirates stadium on November 1. They flew back shortly afterwards. While describing them only as witnesses, police believe their presence could hold the key to the former spy's death.

Last night, the Irish government said it was launching a separate investigation focussing on the former Russian prime minister Yegor Gaidar, who fell ill during a visit to Ireland a week ago. At first Mr Gaidar's entourage thought he was suffering from something he had eaten. But yesterday one of his aides said doctors suspected he had been poisoned.

The Gardaí said it would question everyone Mr Gaidar had been in contact with, but there was no immediate link to the Litvinenko case.

In London the number of locations searched by police for traces of radioactive material rose to 24 yesterday, with polonium-210 found at 12. John Reid, the home secretary, told the Commons there was a "high level" of contamination at some of the locations but the risk to the public was low.

It was reported that the levels of radiation were highest in the toilets of the Millennium Hotel in London, where Mr Litvinenko had a meeting shortly before falling ill. These levels were above the safe public dose limit, according to Channel 4 News. There were also traces at the Itsu sushi bar, where he went later, but they were far lower.

...

Explaining the increasing belief that Mr Litvinenko's death involved Russian state elements, one official said yesterday: "Only the state would have access to that material".

Posted by: Ace at 06:23 PM | Comments (25)
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Deja vu all over again?

Former Russian prime minister Yegor Gaidar was the victim of an "unnatural" poisoning, his spokesman told AFP, citing doctors.

"This was an unnatural poisoning. The doctors can't say what the substance is yet. We are expecting an official diagnosis at the beginning of next week," Valery Natarov said.

Natarov said Russian doctors had to compare their results with those of Irish doctors after Gaidar fell ill on November 24 during a trip to Ireland.

Gaidar suddenly fell unconscious and started vomiting blood after eating fruit salad and drinking a cup of tea.

Natarov and Gaidar's daughter, Maria, said earlier Thursday that Gaidar, who is recovering in a hospital in Moscow, is feeling better.

Maria Gaidar told the Kommersant daily that, based on her conversations with doctors, she expected the diagnosis to point to "a poison unknown to civilian medicine."

Posted by: Ace at 06:17 PM | Comments (10)
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Fun little piece on what drives people to spy against their own country.

Preserved in the permafrost of the Cold War is a piece of advice given by Pavel Sudoplatov, StalinÂ’s master spy, to an apprentice agent. SudoplatovÂ’s career in the Soviet secret service spanned three decades of Stalinism, and few understood better the brutal and complex psychology of spying.

When seeking to recruit a spy, Sudoplatov advised his underling that one should “search for people who are hurt by fate or nature — the ugly, those craving power or influence but defeated by unfavourable circumstances. In co-operation with us, all these find a peculiar compensation. The sense of belonging to an influential, powerful organisation will give them a feeling of superiority over the handsome and prosperous people around them.”

...

For decades, the KGB operated its spy networks on principles represented by the acronym MICE: money, ideology, compromise (as in blackmail) and ego. By far the most important was ego. Spymasters on both sides of the Iron Curtain awarded their spies exotic codenames, the better to flatter their self-esteem. Ideological belief is a useful attribute in a spy; but belief in oneÂ’s own importance is essential.

Alongside the arrogance of the spy lies a remarkable capacity for self-delusion. The espionage world has always drawn people with a tenuous grip on reality: fantasists, paranoiacs, conspiracy theorists, fraudsters and fakers. The British secret service, in particular, seems to have attracted a disproportionate number of people who were at best eccentric, and at worst entirely mad. Yet an overactive imagination is not unique to the British spy.

I think he's referring to actual spies rather than case-officers or spymasters (i.e., CIA or KGB operatives), though the writer of the piece then goes on to apply this idea to Litvinenko, who was actually, I think, just a defector. Not a spy remaining in place to transmit secrets to the west.

Posted by: Ace at 04:46 PM | Comments (27)
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A documentary called "Zoo" about the guy who had sex with a horse. Or, more accurately, the guy who made a horse had sex with him, and died hours later from, ahem, internal trauma.

Robert Redford has optioned the story for use in a theatrical film tenatively titled, The Horse Whisperer II: Sweet Nothings.

Thanks to Andrew and rcl.

Posted by: Ace at 04:39 PM | Comments (30)
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Interesting: Borat goes searching for anti-semitism in America. Hasn't he heard he can see a lot more of it, without the travel costs, in England or France?

With anti-Semitism reemerging in Europe and rampant in the Islamic world; with Iran acquiring the ultimate weapon of genocide and proclaiming its intention to wipe out the world's largest Jewish community (Israel); with America and, in particular, its Christian evangelicals the only remaining Gentile constituency anywhere willing to defend that besieged Jewish outpost -- is the American heartland really the locus of anti-Semitism? Is this the one place to go to find it?

In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez says that the "descendants of the same ones that crucified Christ" have "taken possession of all the wealth in the world." Just this month, Tehran hosted an international festival of Holocaust cartoons featuring enough hooked noses and horns to give Goebbels a posthumous smile. Throughout the Islamic world, newspapers and television, schoolbooks and sermons are filled with the most vile anti-Semitism.

Baron Cohen could easily have found what he seeks closer to home. He is, after all, from Europe, where synagogues are torched and cemeteries desecrated in a revival of anti-Semitism -- not "indifference" to but active -- unseen since the Holocaust. Where a Jew is singled out for torture and death by French-African thugs. Where a leading Norwegian intellectual -- et tu, Norway? -- mocks "God's Chosen People" ("We laugh at this people's capriciousness and weep at its misdeeds") and calls for the destruction of Israel, the "state founded . . . on the ruins of an archaic national and warlike religion."

Yet, amid this gathering darkness, an alarming number of liberal Jews are seized with the notion that the real threat lurks deep in the hearts of American Protestants, most specifically Southern evangelicals. Some fear that their children are going to be converted; others, that below the surface lies a pogrom waiting to happen; still others, that the evangelicals will take power in Washington and enact their own sharia law.

This is all quite crazy. America is the most welcoming, religiously tolerant, philo-Semitic country in the world. No nation since Cyrus the Great's Persia has done more for the Jews. And its reward is to be exposed as latently anti-Semitic by an itinerant Jew looking for laughs and, he solemnly assures us, for the path to the Holocaust?

...

It is very hard to be a Jew today, particularly in Baron Cohen's Europe, where Jew-baiting is once again becoming acceptable. But it is a sign of the disorientation of a distressed and confused people that we should find it so difficult to distinguish our friends from our enemies.

I suppose Cohen goes to America for the anti-semitism because, were he to expose it in Britain, he wouldn't be popular or beloved. He'd be reviled for exposing what his audience really believes.

Thanks to yls.

Posted by: Ace at 04:29 PM | Comments (93)
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"Bulging trousers:"

The first-time author won for descriptions like this one, contained in Twentysomething: "everything is pure white as we're lost in a commotion of grunts and squeaks, flashing unconnected images and explosions of a million little particles."

He's obviously never had sex. He completely misses the awkwardness, embarrassment, nauseau, chagrin, etc., so central to the sexual act.

Hollingshead, the underdog, clinched the title with his description "bulging trousers," judges told the Associated Press.

"Now in its 14th year, the Bad Sex award was won last year by Giles Coren for an unpunctuated 138-word description of coitus, followed by the two-word sentence, 'Like Zorro,'" according to the Guardian.

Like Zorro? That's freakin' good. How do they call that bad sex writing?

Posted by: Ace at 03:09 PM | Comments (56)
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The baby-talk "code." She claims the language is reflexive. "Neh," for example, mimics the sound a baby makes when he's feeding, so "neh" means "I'm hungry."

After a nurse told her not to worry about her baby’s constant colicky crying, Priscilla Dunstan, now 32, decided that there must be a better answer. As a professional musician in Australia with a “photographic” memory for sound, she began to keep notes on her newborn son’s wails, and, sure enough, detected a pattern — five specific sounds that he would make when he was hungry, tired, needed to burp, was uncomfortable, or had gas.

“These words are created when sound is added to a baby’s natural reflexes,” explains Dunstan, whose research on over 1,000 babies has led her to believe that these words are universal among infants during the first three months of life. “This system is about helping the mother to believe in her own intuition,” she says.

...

Here are two words to get you started.

“I’m hungry!”

The word: Neh

Where it comes from: The noise made when a baby pushes his tongue to the roof of his mouth because he wants to eat, “neh,” is an infant’s sucking reflex with sound added to it.

“I need to burp!”

The word: Eh

Where it comes from: When a big bubble of air is caught in your baby’s chest, the sound you hear is “eh,” as your baby tries to get the burp out.

I suppose it's possible. Her explanation is plausible enough. Not that that makes it true.

But What Does "Heh" Mean? Ghengis (or as I call him, Jenjis) writes to say he thinks he knows.

"Heh" is baby-talk for "I needs me some of those puppies."

Posted by: Ace at 02:56 PM | Comments (60)
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It's not just bias anymore. It's a flawed methodology, reporting on the cheap from far away from the actual incidents, relying on often biased and ethically-challenged local stringers to do the actual "reporting" which Western reporters merely type up from the comfort of their rooms at the Hotel Intercontinental.

Confederate Yankee quotes a good piece by embedded real reporter Michael Fumento, and adds his own commentary:

Vietnam was the first war to give us reporting in virtually real time. Iraq is the first to give us virtual reporting. That doesnÂ’t necessarily make it biased against the war; it does make it biased against the truth.

Virtual reporting. A meme is born.

Confederate Yankee notes:

The overwhelming majority of international journalists "reporting" from Iraq have never ventured out of their hotels in the Green Zone, a small area in Baghdad, and yet try to convince us they are reporting facts from around the entire nation. Based upon what, precisely? They are only reporting what stringers—local Iraqi and other Arab reporters, with sectarian, regional, and in some cases suspected insurgency-related biases—tell them.

These Baghdad reporters have no way of knowing if these stringers are reporting facts or are relaying propaganda, if the witnesses quoted are reliable or coached, or if the photos submitted to them are an accurate visual account of the events discussed in a story.

Fumento again:

The London Independent's Robert Fisk has written of "hotel journalism," while former Washington Post Bureau Chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran has called it "journalism by remote control." More damningly, Maggie OÂ’Kane of the British newspaper The Guardian said: "We no longer know what is going on, but we are pretending we do." Ultimately, they canÂ’t even cover Baghdad yet they pretend they can cover Ramadi.

Kathleen Carroll gave the game away in her defense of AP's reporting. She denigrated the importance of whether the Sunni-men-set-on-fire story was actually true; the bigger story, she said, is that things are getting worse and worse. That's the story, and AP's story-- true or not -- fits in with that narrative.

Well, it may fit in, but if it's not true, it has no business being reported as such.

But reporters simply aren't reporting anymore, by and large. They have nothing except such "big picture," "gestalt" sort of impressions. They have impressions, attitude, and an overarching narrative, and such things come to them easily; actual facts are hard to get, and so thus are denigrated in importance.

It's of a piece with NBCNew's much-hyped decision to start referring to Iraq as in a state of "civil war." They may not have many on-the-ground, near-the-action reportial assets to get at the facts of Iraq. But what they can do, very easily, is give you the "Big Picture" decision made by New York City liberals in air-conditioned offices. And without real news reportage from Iraq, they're forced to elevate such silliness into "major news."

What else have they got?

Almost nothing.

Basically, reporters are becoming bloggers, passing over the difficult, expensive, time-consuming, and often-dangerous collection of actual news in favor of glib "impressions" and commentary on the news.

Except, with reporters having decided by and large to no longer do any actual reportage, such news is harder and harder to come by.

Posted by: Ace at 02:18 PM | Comments (13)
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NTTAWWT.

I've often wondered how many straight Catholics fully appreciate how gay their church has always been. Especially in the old days. High Mass was, in its heyday, more elaborate and choreographed than a very melodramatic Broadway musical. Do people really believe that gay priests and religious had nothing to do with it? They had everything to do with it.

The first time I walked into a gay disco, with all those lights, music, ritual and smoke, my immediate thought was: church! Madonna gets this, whatever Jonah says. Because she's a born-and-bred Catholic, which Jonah isn't. It's theater, sweetie, theater. And the Church once understood that - which was part of its beautiful Catholicity. Gone, now, alas. But Benedict is helping nudge it back. And although I tease him about it, it's a wonderful thing. More incense, please. And lace.

There's nothing sadder than an aging homosexualist.

Is there now any difference at all between the "conservative" Andrew Sullivan and the various queer-magazine provocateurs of the left? For precisely how long will the media insist on calling a pro-tax-raising, pro-abortion, pro-gun-law, anti-war, anti-american, pro-drug, gay-marriage-above-all-else gay leftie a "conservative"?

Yes, he does agitate for a smaller government. But generally one contrarian position is not enough to define someone as a "conservative." There are pro-death-penalty liberals, too; that single policy stance doesn't make them non-liberal. It just makes them liberals with one contrarian position.

And his agitation for "small government" is chiefly about gay marriage, too. His idea of "small government" is only secondarily animated by a desire to have the government spend less; what he really wants is a government that "stays out of the gay marriage issue," i.e., allows the courts (another branch of government, although an undemocratic one) to decide the issue.

I have a few positions that don't really fit the conservative orthodoxy. Does that make me a liberal, I wonder?

Thanks to Slublog.

Posted by: Ace at 01:59 PM | Comments (64)
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It's about time:

Regal Theaters, the nation's largest theater chain, has begun testing devices in 25 of its locations that allow patrons to summon ushers if audience members use cell phones or become unruly. Regal Chief Executive Michael Campbell told the Reuters Media Summit in New York Wednesday that a second button will notify management of faulty projection, a third about uncomfortable room temperature, and a fourth about any other problem.

...

He said that he expects the device to be available nationwide next year and that it will be given to "mature" audience members, who will receive free popcorn for their efforts.

Projection problems are big, too. What do you do when a film is being shown out of focus, or if it is mis-aimed at the screen? You can either get up and try to find the manager and miss ten minutes of the movie (as I've done) or start yelling "Focus!," which other people don't like and which is unlikely to have any effect, as I doubt there's a person in the projection booth most of the time anyway.

Theaters really have to be aggressive about making going to the movies a more enjoyable experience. Especially for big, splashy, spectacular movies, most (I think) would prefer the big-screen experience... if not for the constant problems, the huge lines, the yappers right behind you, etc. With HD DVD now promising something approaching the big-screen experience, it might be just about over for the theaters anyway; but they might as well go down fighting.

Thanks again to PetiteDov.

Posted by: Ace at 01:51 PM | Comments (30)
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