140 paintballs rapid-fired right into the unprotected chest of a -- this adds to the humor -- foreign exchange student.

Thanks to Daniel.

Posted by: Ace at 08:57 AM | Comments (11)
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Who'd've imagined that Howard Stern's daughter would be mixed up in something like this, appearing (completely) naked in an off-Broadway farce?

Stern wasn't supportive of his daughter's foray into the family business:

After I cast her in late September, her father called her in for a meeting," [the show's producer] recounted. "She came back very shaken. She said, 'My father basically told me that if I take the role [which requires her to be on stage nude for the last 10 minutes], that his enemies would buy blocks of tickets, throw garbage at my vagina, take nude pictures of me and put them all over the Internet."

Throw garbage at her vagina? This struck him as a likely form of protest?

I guess I understand Stern. What father would be happy about his daughter appearing in this sort of production? Especially when it is very likely she was cast chiefly because she was Stern's daughter; hence, a case of double-exploitation.

I don't hate Stern, and I used to find him very funny, but let's face it, he's been a proponent of just this sort of entertainment for years, and has himself exploited lots of girls on his show who got naked for him just for a little attention and camera-time.

I also remember his numerous prayers to his "Lord Jesus Christ" that the sons of his various enemies would wind up "in gay porn."

Not quite the same... but maybe Jesus himself has a sense of humor, albeit a slightly cruel one.

Irony. It is nothing if not ironic.

Posted by: Ace at 08:46 AM | Comments (22)
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Considered a victory for the Bush Administration, which had sought the transfer in order to avoid a Supreme Court decision on the legality of its policies of military detention.

A lower court had blocked the transfer, reasoning that the Supreme Court had a right to make this determination. The Supreme Court, apparently, disagreed, perhaps out of respect for the notion that the courts do not involve themselves in political questions, except when absolutely necessary.

Posted by: Ace at 08:29 AM | Comments (3)
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Here's the absolute kicker: the police did not intervene while a gang-rape was in progress.

Dominque De Villepain, apparently, blocked a "unilateral action" by the police, hoping that "inspectors" would determine whether there was a mass-rape going on or not.

I used to hate the French. I no longer do. I pity them. They are dying in all ways -- morally, spiritually, nationally, culturally, demographically -- and their fits of nastiness and distemper are as excusable as those of an old man on life support.

H/t to The Divine Miss M.

Posted by: Ace at 08:26 AM | Comments (20)
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Yep.

"This word 'unconstitutional' you keep using. I do not think it means what you think it means." -- Thomas Jefferson, still searching for the six-fingered man

Posted by: Ace at 08:11 AM | Comments (20)
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Shouldn't a "memorial," you know, actually memorialize something?

Apparently the Flight 93 "Memorial" designer thought that was too passe:

Murdoch's design responded to a "Memorial Expression," directing that the plan should "allow freedom of personal interpretation" of the Battle Over Shanksville. In a brochure announcing the new design, Paul Murdoch's letter boasts that his memorial is "open to emotional experience, individual interpretation and personal contemplation."

...

Monuments are not neutral. They take a stand. They recognize virtue and heroism and they point out the good guys. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier leaves little ambiguity to interpret or misinterpret about the worth of those it represents. The new World War II memorial on the D.C. mall remembers American servicemen, and not Japanese or German veterans. There was a right side and a wrong side to that war, and the monument is not afraid to claim as much.

Would that the Shanksville memorial did so.

As Steyn's piece quoted, civilizations die by suicide, not murder.

Posted by: Ace at 08:01 AM | Comments (12)
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A peace that would fill me with optimism, were I not sure it was complete bunk.

My reaction to the article? I wish. Or rather, I previously wished. I previously wished that the people of Iran would rise up and finally take power from the mad mullahs and turn Iran into what they want it to be, and what it should be -- an economically robust, somewhat progressive democratic state.

It's not going to happen. At least it's not going to happen before the maniacs get the bomb, and we can't wait that long.

Note one of the writers is a member of some peacenik outfit, and the other is a member of some Iranian human-rights-watch organization. I think they're so optimistic about "people-power" because, well, they're on the left, and lefties like to speak in such absurdities, and also because they're trying to dissuade Bush of the need for a military strike.

I wish they were right. But they're not.

Nevertheless, worth reading, because it does provide concrete examples of Iranian resistance to and antipathy towards the tyranny of the Shari'a fascists.

All Praise Be To Allah. (APBTA)

Posted by: Ace at 07:54 AM | Comments (19)
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The positions of "hardliners" may be "enhanced," AP reports. "Enhanced"? All those multiple layers of painstaking editorial style-checking and they came up with that not-quite-right word? How about "the hardliners may emboldened"?

But the real sin, of course, is that the article dwells on the super-scary possibility that Israel's hardliners may be emboldened... not, say, that the Palestinian terrorists' hardliners may be emboldend. (A triple redundancy, I am aware.) Like, for example, this Palestinian terrorist announcing that Sharon's (presumably imminent) death is "God's gift." [H/t Allah.]

It seems that only as Sharon is dying is the leftist press willing to concede he was a "pragmatist" and, indeed, a moderate. When he was healthy and making policy, he was a roadblock to the roadmap to peace.

The Roadmap to Peace was a sham, but Ariel Sharon did undertake some truly brave and wise actions in making his own genuine roadmap to peace.

Let's review:

Sharon took the politically courageous -- and possbily politically disasterous -- step of evacuating hardcore Jewish settlers from lands that will almost certainly be forfeited entirely to the Palestinians. This decision could easily have brought him down, but it was quite necessary. First of all, these settlements were a huge barrier to peace -- well, not really, as the Palestinians will never accept peace -- so let me rephrase: these settlements were a huge barrier to what the Europeans and US left considered the pathway to peace.

Those nitwits aside, the settlements created military and security problems for the Israelis, as they created targets for the terrorists, requiring the military protecting them, and also the military putting itself in jeopardy to avenge their inevitable killings. Sharon took a brave step in making Israel more militarily defensible. The settlers were the equivalents of peasants setting up their farms right in the midst of the dragons' lairs, but demanding the king's knights protect them and hunt down the dragons whenever one snatched up a virgin. Sharon dragged them kicking and screaming back inside the castle's walls.

Sharon also took the gutsy move of building the very necessary New Berlin Wall Israeli Security Fence, a simple but controversial step that has resulted, controversially of course, in saving Israeli lives from terrorists, which is always seen as a net-negative to the European press.

And he took the prudent move of disentaglement with the Palestinians, retreating back to more defensible ground, giving up a number of security checkpoints within Palestinian areas in favor of more easily controlled checkpoints at the borders of Palestininan areas. Not only did removing some of these internal checkpoints please the Palestinains -- wait, no they didn't, but they should have, were the Palestinians rational -- by letting them travel more freely without constant police intervention, but they put fewer Israeli troops' lives at risk.

Sharon's basic idea was that he could never make peace by negotiation with the Palestinians, so he would make peace unilaterally, by simply making Israel into a more defensible fortress less exposed to the Palestinians' primary peace-negotiation tactic, i.e., murdering Jewish schoolchildren and Jewish pizza-shop customers. If your enemy can't kill you, it hardly matters whether you're at "peace" with him at all. Of course, the Israelis will never be immune from Palestinian terrorism, but they always will face that, whether there is "peace" or not. Reducing terrorism -- reducing mass-murder and mayhem down to manageable, and, ahem, liveable levels -- is the best that can be realistically hoped for, and Sharon moved to make that Israeli policy.

As much of a fan as I am of Benji Netanyahu, I fear that he will undo most of Sharon's smart strategic actions, in favor of making Israel more "aggressive" and expansionist and hence less defensible to terror. I hope that Sharon's legacy will prove difficult to reverse.

And, of course, that they keep building that Wall. Good fences make good neighbors, especially when your actual neighbors are a Murder-Cult whose appetite for blood can never be quenched.

11 Year Old Boy Celebrates Sharon's Impending Death: Quick, give these people a state. And lots of US money, too.

Thanks to someone.

Posted by: Ace at 07:23 AM | Comments (9)
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Steyn's piece is largely a synthesis of things he's written before, but it's convenient to have all his greatest hits combined on one no-filler album.

The overarching theme is the death of the West -- by low birth rates, governments dedicated to "secondary" priorities like time off for expectant mothers (while denigrating truly primary priorities like self-defense and encouraging the childbirth which makes the socialist state sustainable), and of course suicide-pact multiculturalism.

The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyperrationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a 21st-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could increase their numbers only by conversion. The problem is that secondary-impulse societies mistake their weaknesses for strengths--or, at any rate, virtues--and that's why they're proving so feeble at dealing with a primal force like Islam.

That hit #4 on the UK charts in 2002, and it's just as danceable now as it was then.

And who could forget this pop-confection, covered multiple times by Steyn himself in various formats (unplugged, rhythm-and-base, acid house)?

Shortly after September 11, Baroness Kennedy argued on a BBC show that it was too easy to disparage "Islamic fundamentalists." "We as Western liberals too often are fundamentalist ourselves," she complained. "We don't look at our own fundamentalisms."

Well, said the interviewer, what exactly would those Western liberal fundamentalisms be? "One of the things that we are too ready to insist upon is that we are the tolerant people and that the intolerance is something that belongs to other countries like Islam. And I'm not sure that's true."

Hmm. Lady Kennedy was arguing that our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people's intolerance, which is intolerable. And, unlikely as it sounds, this has now become the highest, most rarefied form of multiculturalism. So you're nice to gays and the Inuit? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of fellows like that, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti masochists.

And who could forget The Ballad of Canada's Supreme Al Qaeda Family of Murder?

For example, one day in 2004, a couple of Canadians returned home, to Lester B. Pearson International Airport in Toronto. They were the son and widow of a fellow called Ahmed Said Khadr, who back on the Pakistani-Afghan frontier was known as "al-Kanadi." Why? Because he was the highest-ranking Canadian in al Qaeda--plenty of other Canucks in al Qaeda, but he was the Numero Uno. In fact, one could argue that the Khadr family is Canada's principal contribution to the war on terror. Granted they're on the wrong side (if you'll forgive my being judgmental) but no one can argue that they aren't in the thick of things. One of Mr. Khadr's sons was captured in Afghanistan after killing a U.S. Special Forces medic. Another was captured and held at Guantanamo. A third blew himself up while killing a Canadian soldier in Kabul. Pa Khadr himself died in an al Qaeda shootout with Pakistani forces in early 2004. And they say we Canadians aren't doing our bit in this war!

In the course of the fatal shootout of al-Kanadi, his youngest son was paralyzed. And, not unreasonably, Junior didn't fancy a prison hospital in Peshawar. So Mrs. Khadr and her boy returned to Toronto so he could enjoy the benefits of Ontario government health care. "I'm Canadian, and I'm not begging for my rights," declared the widow Khadr. "I'm demanding my rights."

Listen to the whole album through. It's dispiriting, infuriating, and grim, but it's got a great beat and you can dance to it. At least until the new European Supreme Mullahs forbid that.

Lileks releases a companion album, sort of his Endless Summer to Steyn's Sgt. Pepper, also worth a spin.

If the Islamists were Christians, [the multiculturists would] be motivated. That threat they understand, because that threat sounds like Mom and Dad, and they would dimly comprehend that the threat to their liberties – their civilization, for that matter – is sorta like grounding and loss of TV privileges.

...

The telling line in Steyn's piece quotes that fine Gaul Jean-Francois Revel: "Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself." IÂ’ve read a lot of Revel; a great man and a profound, clear thinker. Lucky for him, he is old, and will not see his fears made manifest. Guilt is a problem, but itÂ’s not the entire enchilada. ItÂ’s guilt married to a peculiar belief that Western Civilization is unique only in its sins. The only thing Western Civ really gave the world was slavery, imperialism, war, and capitalism; the fact that we have eliminated or diminished or abbreviated those sins is due not to anything inherent in Western Civ but some overarching, free-floating Enlightenment unmoored from the cultures that produced it. The world began in 1968, and owes nothing to what came before; if we wish to combat the regrettable enthusiasms of some other cultures whose animus appears religious, we should deconsecrate the cathedrals in order to set an example and light the way. Religion is the enemy to the transnational progressives, because religion holds up laws and codes and rules the wise burghers of Belgium cannot amend.

Read 'em, especially the even darker, less funny second side of Steyn's greatist hits, where he makes the case -- hard to refute -- that European culture is essentially dead and they're just waiting to pull the plug.

Thanks to Allah, although, in fairness to my own internet-scouring skills, I've had that Steyn piece open for a day.

Update: Monty thinks our demographic dilemma is tied into a lack of hopefulness, which he thinks is caused by the lack of a frontier.

He doesn't suggest invading and colonizing France, which would have been my preference. Instead, he suggests America (and I suppose Europe) regain some of their cultural confidence by making space exploration a high priority.

I don't buy his precise prescription myself. It was the cultural confidence of the 1960's that propelled us to the Moon, not the race to the Moon that gave us cultural confidence. But there may be something to his diagnosis of the disease.

Posted by: Ace at 06:59 AM | Comments (21)
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That's the conclusion of what Dave calls a "well-reasoned" piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

But he suspects there's more to it. Such as the po-mo creed that there are no objective facts, thus making any kid with half a brain realize there's hadly any point to spending all that time learning these non-facts.

Posted by: Ace at 06:29 AM | Comments (5)
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