Pondblog

Exit Pondblog, stage right (natch)

2007-02-08T08:29:00.000-04:00

Technical difficulties with Blogger, my host, have meant that my home page and archives are no longer easily accessible. Although others seem to have had the same problem, Blogger shows no interest in fixing it.

Crisis! I could migrate Pondblog to another host but, frankly, I'm getting bored with blogging. Quite apart from anything else, it takes a four-hour chunk out of every day - time, I think, that I could put to better use.

So, with some reluctance (becasuse I did enjoy it enormously), I am going to retire Pondblog. I'd like to thank those who encouraged me to get involved in blogging in the first place, those who have commented on what I have written and those who have suggested stories that might be included. I should particularly mention Brenda, in England, whose many suggestions have been much appreciated.

So long...and thanks for the ride.

Plame blame game develops

2007-02-07T10:05:00.000-04:00

I don't suppose it will have much effect on the outcome of the trial, because Scooter Libby is charged with lying to a grand jury, but it certainly adds to the weight of questions about the behaviour of Valerie Plame and her husband Joe Wilson. The National Review points out that "The accepted version of events is that Vice President Dick Cheney got things started when he asked for information about possible Iraqi attempts to purchase uranium in Africa.

"After that request, CIA employee Valerie Plame Wilson suggested sending her husband to look into the question, and after that, the CIA flew Joseph Wilson to Niger to investigate.

"But...new documents suggest that Mrs. Wilson suggested her husband for the trip before the vice president made his request. In other words, Joseph Wilson's visit to Niger, which everyone believes was undertaken at the behest of the vice president, was actually in the works before Dick Cheney asked his now-famous question. And if that is true, our current understanding of the chronology of events is wrong."

Inscrutability loss in the tropics?

2007-02-07T10:00:00.000-04:00

I didn't post anything about it at the time, but it is a very delicious little scandal of the Outposts-of-Empire type. There was a big parade in Granada on Saturday to mark the opening of a stadium paid for by the kind Republic of China. Lofty Chinese gentlemen were present. Come time to play the Chinese national anthem, and the Granada Police Band, bless their cotton socks and whiskers, played the Taiwanese National Anthem.

As you might imagine, a dry wind from the east began to blow.

Now the hapless Bandmaster, according to Caribbean Net News, has been relieved of his responsibilities, and the Deputy Commissioner is "spearheading" an investigation.

Lahdamercy.

Lebanon signs tribunal pact...at last

2007-02-07T09:52:00.000-04:00

I think some Mideast observers may not understand quite what the significance of this story is. The New York Sun says: "The United Nations is seeking to stay clear of Lebanese politics as it sets up an international court in Beirut to prosecute the suspected killers of a former prime minister, but Lebanon's pro-Syrian president says the tribunal will incite political unrest and lead to violence.

"A February 5 letter to Secretary-General Ban from President Lahoud, seen by The New York Sun yesterday, shows clearly that Syria's allies in Lebanon are set to fight the proposed international tribunal, which could further isolate and discredit the Syrian government.

"In a significant step toward establishing the international tribunal — designed to try suspects in the assassination of a former prime minister, Rafik Hariri — the United Nations's top legal counsel, Nicolas Michel, yesterday signed an agreement with the government of Prime Minister Siniora.

"The United Nations will not 'allow itself to be used as a political tool' in negotiating the establishment of the tribunal, Mr. Michel told reporters."

Confused? Don't blame you.

What has happened is that the Government of Prime Minister Siniora has finally summoned up the courage to sign an agreement with the UN to set up an international tribunal in Beirut to investigate the assassination of Rafik Hariri.

The office of President of Lebanon is, in the odd post-Civil War construction of that government, symbolic. Mr Lahoud doesn't, as the title President might suggest to an American, run the Government. He is, however, Syria's main man in Lebanon, and what he gets to run is his mouth. Which he is now doing, because this tribunal makes Syria uncomfortable, as well it should.

Curacao bank closure stems fraud

2007-02-07T09:39:00.000-04:00

Closing John Deuss's First Curacao International Bank has dealt "a hammer blow" to the alleged crime of carousel fraud, according to the UK Paymaster General, and losses in revenue as a result of it have since fallen by 90%. The Guardian's Business section carries those comments in a story suggesting that "customs officers arrested 10 people after raids across Britain and Europe and said they had frozen dozens of bank accounts in Dubai.

"Revenue & Customs said the arrests followed a five-year investigation into a systematic attack on the VAT system which is thought to have cost the taxpayer a quarter of a billion pounds. Ten men were being questioned in police stations in London last night after raids in south Wales, the West Midlands, Cheshire and Buckinghamshire. Four European warrants were issued for arrests in France and Spain...

"Carousel fraud occurs when someone imports small expensive items such as computer chips or mobile phones free of VAT, sells them on with the VAT added but pockets the VAT and disappears. The goods often pass through a chain of companies and are re-exported with the VAT reclaimed. They are then re-imported and spun round the so-called carousel again."

Was Valerie Plame an active spy?

2007-02-06T08:14:00.000-04:00

Byron York of National Review points to the soft underbelly (well, one part of it, anyway)of the Scooter Libby trial: "Whatever Judge Reggie Walton rules, the argument has exposed the underlying dilemma in the case, one that arose on the very first day of the trial, when Walton gave the jury this instruction: 'No evidence will be presented to you with regard to Valerie Plame Wilson's status. That is because what her actual status was, or whether any damage would result from disclosure of her status, are totally irrelevant to your decision of guilt or innocence. You must not consider these matters in your deliberations or speculate or guess about them.'

"Of course, Mrs. Wilson is the woman at the center of the CIA-leak affair. The case began with the allegation that the Bush White House illegally leaked her identity in an effort to get back at her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, for his high-profile criticism of the administration’s case for war in Iraq. Everything in the investigation grew from that seed, and ultimately Libby, the vice president's former chief of staff, was charged with lying to investigators who were trying to determine who had leaked Mrs. Wilson's job status. And yet, in his instructions, Judge Walton told jurors that they were not to consider - not even to think about - Mrs. Wilson's job status."

Syria cracking down on dissidents

2007-02-06T07:35:00.000-04:00

Syria is in the throes of one of its biggest crackdowns on dissidents in many years, according to an article in today's Guardian. "As many as 12 reformers and writers have been arrested this month in a new show of strength by the regime.

"It is a far cry from the mood a few months ago, when the Syrian regime was under considerable international pressure and faced the possibility of being unseated by a high-profile UN investigation into the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. The investigation continues - the UN team is due to issue its latest report in mid-June - but the latest arrests suggest the Syrian government is much more confident about its position than it has been for some time.

"The arrests began early in the new year, when several dissidents were called in for questioning after attending opposition conferences abroad. Then, earlier this month, around 500 political activists, reformers and intellectuals signed a new Beirut-Damascus declaration, in which they criticised the Syrian government and said Syria should mend its relations with Lebanon and grant the Lebanese real independence from Syrian tutelage. They called for democracy in both countries and a proper investigation into the murder of Hariri. The investigation is still sensitive because a preliminary UN assessment has blamed Syrian intelligence for the killing. Four pro-Syrian Lebanese security chiefs are already in jail charged in connection with the massive car bomb that killed Hariri and 20 others on the seafront in Beirut."

AN Wilson on Tolkien

2007-02-05T07:26:00.000-04:00

The Telegraph's curmudgeonly book guy, AN Wilson, is pretty conservative about who he praises. He complained recently, for example, that Seamus Heaney's "greatness is taken for granted by certain metropolitan pundits," despite never having "actually written anything to justify the reputation." But he may have a weak spot.

"That there was an old world that has now passed away, a heroic world, snatches of which we hear only in half-comprehended song, is an ever-present awareness in the works of JRR Tolkien. He is the only modern writer of what might be termed fantasy-literature who conveys this sense – which we find in Virgil and is also present in the Beowulf poet - of a heroic past that is slipping out of memory.

"As a Germanic philologist, he expounded the old Icelandic Eddaic verses that recount the doings and death, for example, of Atli or Attila the Hun: he died in 453, was celebrated in song for 500 years, and immortalised in Atlakvitha some time before the Viking settlement of Iceland in 985. Or those mythic beings, the dwarves, preserved in the Voluspa, a mythology of the North, perhaps written down in the 11th century, but keeping alive much older memories of, among others, 'Veigr, Gandalfr, Vindalfr, Thrainn...' - that is, the Potion-elf and the Sprite-elf...

"Tolkien soaked up all this stuff through his imaginative pores, just as he made it his pastime to learn the older languages of northern Europe - Irish, Welsh, Norse, Old English, Gothic. The fragmentary nature of these language survivals, especially Gothic, is itself something that, if meditated on intelligently, could only produce a Tolkienian world perspective. You feel all the time that something has been lost - it has been lost partly through the passage of time, partly through human malice and wickedness. Language and poetry alone keep its half-memory echoing."

Grand. No mere metropolitan pundit he.

Global warming Apocalypse? Relax!

2007-02-05T06:49:00.000-04:00

There is still a debate on global warming, despite claims to the contrary. The Wall Street Journal says the most recent report, the the fourth assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change "should be understood as one more contribution to the warming debate, not some definitive last word that justifies radical policy change. It can be hard to keep one's head when everyone else is predicting the Apocalypse, but that's all the more reason to keep cool and focus on the actual science."

The real news out of that report, the Journal says, may be how far it has backpedalled on some of the claims of the previous assessments.

Time to go, Tony - Sunday Times

2007-02-04T08:50:00.000-04:00

When the London Times publishes an editorial entitled Time to go, Tony, it's as well to believe that these are his last few days at Downing Street.

"The prime minister is damaged goods and whatever happens in the remaining weeks of his premiership, he will remain so. He is damaging the Labour party by his continued presence and, more importantly, he is damaging British politics. As a democrat and a patriot, he must recognise that, as he must recognise that the task of his successor will be to clean up British politics and restore its reputation. The sooner that task begins, the better."

Charles Moore is the author of a Telegraph piece published yesterday that explains Mr Blair's fall from grace in the eyes of the British people as well as any I've seen: "The Government that began looking the most moral has ended up looking the least; and that is not an accident. In its beginning was its end.

"Mr Blair reminds me of those medieval heretics, the Cathars. Their leaders were known as parfaits. Believing that they were already chosen by God for salvation, they could do no wrong, and were therefore not bound by the rules that bound everyone else.

"Tony the parfait thus thinks 'sleaze' in Parliament is a very terrible thing, and passes strict laws to control it, yet in practice exempts himself from them since he, by definition, cannot be sleazy. He must feel genuinely wounded that he is now, as they say, helping the police with their inquiries. By his very being, he believes, he cannot be guilty."

World meets Norman Mailer...again

2007-02-04T08:17:00.000-04:00

Norman Mailer's publicity machine is trotting him out all over the place at the moment, since his new book, The Castle in the Forest, has been on the shelves for a couple of weeks. Robert McCrum of The Observer has a piece in today's issue: Norman Mailer says people are 'going to have a shit fit' over his new novel, The Castle in the Forest, about the childhood of Adolph Hitler, narrated by a devil, inhabiting the body of an SS officer, Dieter.

"'At a given point,' he says, 'you snicker to yourself and you say, "Oh, they're going to be livid."' The writer seems unfazed by this inevitability. 'It's impossible not to identify to some small degree with the protagonist [Hitler], so the book is going to be offensive to a lot of Jews. They won't like it. The right wing will hate it. God not all-powerful? Not all-loving? I expect there'll be considerable resistance,' he goes on with glee. 'And a lot of radicals are not going to like it, because most radicals believe that to talk about God and the Devil is retrogressive.' Add up the Jews, the fundamentalists, the radicals and what he calls 'the Acumenarians', an especially low form of critical life in Mailer's world, and he's just about to alienate most of America. So why does he do it?

"That's a question people have been asking about Norman Mailer for more than half a century. Probably, we are still as far as ever from an answer. But in the process of a prolonged and often raucous public self-examination, Mailer has become a contemporary figure of myth, a great American icon who is venerated and reviled but impossible to ignore."

And Brenda from Britain sent me a link to another, this one in the Los Angeles Times. It's a first person piece from the man himself, with a headline that may be the best thing about it.

"What I've said about [The Castle in the Forest] is that I wanted to hit the longest ball, I wanted to hit it out of the yard. But I do think this book goes further in what it has to say than any other book I've ever written. And it has - what's the phrase I'm looking for - it has more profoundly disturbing ideas in it than any book I've written."

What's the phrase I'm looking for?

Is Tom Cruise The Messiah?

2007-02-04T07:37:00.000-04:00

It's a question one hates to hear asked, but Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle figures it's time: Is Tom Cruise the Messiah?

Take it away, Mr Morford.

"What if the astonishing proclamation made by top gooberhead Scientologist (and official Friend of Tom) David Miscavige is urgent and accurate and Tom Cruise really is that happy cult's personal Jesus, a true deity who may not be recognized in this lifetime for his divine contributions but who, in the future, will be 'worshipped like Jesus' for what he has done for humankind and therefore we have all been looking at Jerry McGuire and Days of Thunder and MI:III exactly wrong?

"Can you imagine? No? Me neither. Here, try this bottle of Ambien and this forced ingestion of 3,000 powdered copies of Us Weekly and this enthusiastic partial lobotomy. There. Can you imagine now? Excellent."

Whitney Balliett: New Yorker's jazz writer

2007-02-04T07:18:00.000-04:00

Whitney Balliett, one of the most skilful and graceful writers about jazz, has died at his home in New York City at the age of 80. He wrote for the New Yorker for four decades. The Los Angeles Times recalls that "Balliett began writing a regular jazz column for the New Yorker in 1957. To convey the essence of music and musicians, he avoided technical terms. He considered himself an 'impressionist' when he wrote about musicians because music is fleeting, so 'transparent and bodiless.' In his observations, he created portraits of entertainers in action.

"Jazz critic and poet Philip Larkin described Balliett as 'a writer who brings jazz journalism to the verge of poetry.'

"Whitney Lyon Balliett, the son of a businessman, was born April 17, 1926, in Manhattan. While attending the private Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, he began what he called his 'erratic noncareer as a drummer' after hearing a jam session on a Sunday afternoon at Jimmy Ryan's club on New York's West Side.

"One of Balliett's most-anthologized pieces was his 1962 profile of clarinetist Pee Wee Russell, titled Even His Feet Look Sad."

"As for Russell's music, Balliett wrote: 'No jazz musician has ever played with the same daring and nakedness and intuition. His solos didn't always arrive at their original destination. He took wild improvisational chances and when he found himself above the abyss, he simply turned in another direction, invariably hitting firm ground. His singular tone was never at rest…. Above all, he sounded cranky and querulous, but that was camouflage, for he was the most plaintive and lyrical of players.'"

Auden - gleaming from the darkness

2007-02-03T08:43:00.000-04:00

WH Auden is a dark man, as well as being an extraordinaily gifted one. I'm not really up for dark stuff this morning, so I'm focusing on the lightest quote I could find in this long, fascinating and well-worth-reading piece by James Fenton of the Guardian: "Auden once said to me: 'Every woman wants to play Hamlet, just as every man wants to play Lady Bracknell.' He often talked about Wilde, and clearly thought a lot about his fate. Ansen records him asking: 'Did you see The Importance of Being Earnest? It's an extraordinarily good play. It's about nothing at all, which is what makes it so good. Lady Windermere's Fan has some social references, which makes it not so good. But The Importance of Being Earnest isn't a bit dated. The trouble with Shaw's plays is that they're all brain and no body, which isn't good for the stage. There may not be any body in Earnest, but at least there are clothes. Obviously you have to see it - you can't just read it.' And in the next sentence he tells us that 'Lear won't do on the stage'. And in the one after that: 'Wilde, after all, isn't important as a writer - he couldn't write at all - but as a behaver.'"

Yates of the Yard takes his time

2007-02-03T08:31:00.000-04:00

Martin Kettle of the Guardian makes a hell of a good point: "If Scotland Yard can complete the complex and sensitive Litvinenko investigation in a little over two months, why is there as yet no end in sight to the police investigation into the loans-for-honours case which is now more than 10 months old and counting?"

The answer is, I think, that Assistant Commissioner John Yates, who is heading the honours enquiry, is running it like a man who is simultaneously writing his memoirs.

The guilty pleasures of great brains

2007-02-03T08:29:00.000-04:00

Terrific feature in the Guardian that has public figures confessing their guilty pleasures. There is a minimum of the kind of plonking nonsense you'd expect if the public figures quoted were of the normal run. There is one man who likes rap, which is a bit borderline, but John Berger compensates by managing to make bicycling sound almost the way I remember, long ago, de Saint Exupery made flying sound.

Here's a sample: Denis Healey, who is a very nice British politician (once described as the best Prime Minister Britain never had), confesses a fondness for French cabaret music: "Edith Piaf, of course, is the queen of the genre, but there are others: Yves Montand, Jean Sablon. The only one that came close to it in England is Vera Lynn. My favourite number is a Jacques Prevert song performed by Montand called Barbara. Rappelle-toi Barbara/N'oublie pas/Cette pluie sur la mer/Sur ton visage heureux. I heard it for the first time at the end of the war - I used to go to the cabaret cafes in Montmartre a lot back then. It's a song about the war, or about the emotions that people used to feel during the war: it's about being in love with someone you haven't even met. Songs like these are important: they keep you in touch with life. There is nothing remotely like it nowadays."

Making your day

2007-02-02T08:46:00.000-04:00

A little Friday morning present for you: The Times Literary Supplement has just republished this strikingly pretty poem by Paul Muldoon.

The Son of the King of Moy

after the Irish

Met this child on the Roxborough
Estate. Noblesse, she said, Noblesse
Oblige. And her tiny nipples
Were bruise-bluish, wild raspberries.

IMF's shoddy flat tax study

2007-02-02T08:29:00.000-04:00

Daniel Mitchell, former McKenna senior fellow in political economy at the Heritage Foundation, writes in the Washington Times that the International Monetary Fund has done a lousy job of studying flat tax reforms: "The IMF study actually reveals strong evidence that flat tax reforms have yielded Laffer Curve effects (The Laffer curve is used to illustrate the concept of the idea that governments can maximize tax revenue by setting tax rates at an optimum point). But the authors attempt to mislead readers by claiming that tax reform is successful only if the revenue feedback is at least 100 percent. Even more astonishing, they assume that this revenue feedback effect should happen within one year of reform. So even though taxable income climbed significantly in most flat-tax nations and income-tax revenue generally has exceeded expectations, readers are supposed to conclude that the flat tax is a failure.

"It's unclear why the IMF is hostile to pro-growth policy. Cynics point out that the international bureaucracy has an incentive to perpetuate poverty since that creates more pressure for a bigger IMF budget, but hopefully ignorance is the real reason.

"If nothing else, the IMF is a poor judge of global trends. The authors wrote that 'the question is not so much whether more countries will adopt a flat tax as whether those that have will move away from it.' This is a rather bizarre claim since Romania and Georgia adopted a flat tax last year, while Macedonia and Kyrgyzstan joined the flat tax club this year. Moreover, no nation with a flat tax has chosen to go back to a discriminatory tax regime. Even the new government in Slovakia, comprising socialists and nationalists, decided to preserve the flat tax rather than risk killing the goose that is laying golden eggs.

"It's unfortunate that socialist governments have a better understanding of tax reform than bureaucrats at the IMF."

An Historian-Soldier Bridges His Identities

2007-02-02T08:12:00.000-04:00

He wrote a fine book, The Six-Day War, which I'm proud to have on my shelves. He's just written a new one, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present, which will soon sit on my shelves. The books make him an historian, but he is also a soldier - a major in the Israeli Defence Force. He's an American, and an Israeli at the same time. And he seems to have little difficulty in slipping into the appropriate role at the appropriate time. Forward includes an excellent profile of Michael Oren in its current issue.

"Now 52, Oren was born in New Jersey, the son of a career officer in the United States Army. After 10 years of living on kibbutzim on and off from the age of 15, he decided to make aliya in 1979 at the age of 24. He has, as he says, 'gone through all the things Israelis are supposed to do.' This is a bit of an understatement. Oren's accomplished academic career - receiving degrees from Columbia and Princeton universities, and now acting as senior fellow at a renowned conservative Israeli think tank, the Shalem Center - has been interspersed with periods of fulfilling his duties as an 'unabashed, unapologetic Zionist', as he calls himself.

Not long after immigrating, he saw combat as a paratrooper in the 1982 Lebanon War. During the Gulf War, he served as the Israeli liaison officer to the US Sixth Fleet. He was then an adviser to Yitzhak Rabin in the '90s and the director of the Department of Inter-Religious Affairs in Rabin's government. As recently as last summer, now with the rank of major in the Israel Defense Forces, he was head spokesman for the northern command in the war with Hezbollah, dodging Katyusha rockets as he escorted journalists around the Lebanese border. Asked if he would ever consider entering politics, he responds with enough exaggerated protest to indicate that the thought has crossed his mind (he says he has a recurring nightmare where he wakes up and is the prime minister of Israel).

"Tall and imposing with a shock of gray hair and a pointy nose that makes him look a bit like the comedian Steve Martin, Oren said that it strikes him as strange that he has not been cornered more often about how he reconciles his identity as an historian and a sometimes official of the Israeli government. 'I understand it's problematic,' he admitted. 'But there’s no alternative to it...'

"Even though he was critical of certain aspects of the way the war in Lebanon was waged this past summer, Oren said he remained quiet about his opinions while he was in uniform. He insists he would refuse orders if ever asked to lie. He saw his job less as propaganda than as telling 'the Israeli Army side of the story', even when he was aware that there was another equally valid side. Oren said that though he felt the war was being won militarily, he also thought it was being lost politically. “I never talked about losing it politically, but when I came home on leave I wrote two scathing articles, one for The Wall Street Journal and the other for The New Republic,' he said. 'Next day, I put on my uniform and that was it. I'm a soldier.'"

Well spotted, Brenda.

Composer Gian Carlo Menotti dies

2007-02-02T07:49:00.000-04:00

Gian Carlo Menotti, who organized music festivals in Spoleto, Italy, and the U.S. and helped bring opera to the masses with his repeatedly televised Christmas work Amahl and the Night Visitors, died Thursday at a hospital in Monaco. He was 95, according to the Los Angeles Times: "'He died pretty peacefully and without any pain,' his adopted son, Francis Menotti, told the Associated Press.

"Menotti was sought after worldwide as a director of operas composed by others, and he wrote his own, including two that earned Pulitzer Prizes. 'I wish I'd never started staging operas. It has taken so much time away from my composing,' he told The Times in 1987, when he directed Puccini's La Boheme at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. 'I have wasted so much of my time directing other people's work.'

"Nevertheless, Menotti's own compositions were also much in demand, and he had been called the most-often-performed living composer of opera."

Radio gains in digital revolution

2007-02-02T07:28:00.000-04:00

The digital revolution has given a huge boost to one of the older and more traditional forms of electronic media - the radio.
Britain's Independent Newspaper says: "According to figures released yesterday, the digital age has created a new golden age of radio, with the number of listeners in Britain at a record high of more than 45 million every week.

"The figure for the last three months of 2006 is the highest since Radio Joint Audience Research (Rajar) began compiling records in 1992, and is attributed to growing numbers of people tuning in on the internet, digital television and mobile phones.

"Rajar said almost eight per cent of people aged 15 and above listen to the radio on their mobile phones, a 24 per cent increase over the same period of 2005. A quarter of 15- to 24-year-olds said they tuned in this way. Listening over the internet rose by 10 per cent and by nine per cent on digital television."

Eat your heart out, Alexandria

2007-02-01T08:54:00.000-04:00

The New Yorker explains Google's attempts to scan every book in the universe into their database.

"Every weekday, a truck pulls up to the Cecil H. Green Library, on the campus of Stanford University, and collects at least a thousand books, which are taken to an undisclosed location and scanned, page by page, into an enormous database being created by Google. The company is also retrieving books from libraries at several other leading universities, including Harvard and Oxford, as well as the New York Public Library. At the University of Michigan, Google's original partner in Google Book Search, tens of thousands of books are processed each week on the company's custom-made scanning equipment.

"Google intends to scan every book ever published, and to make the full texts searchable, in the same way that Web sites can be searched on the company's engine at google.com. At the books site, which is up and running in a beta (or testing) version, at books.google.com, you can enter a word or phrase - say, Ahab and whale - and the search returns a list of works in which the terms appear, in this case nearly eight hundred titles, including numerous editions of Herman Melville's novel. Clicking on Moby-Dick, or The Whale calls up Chapter 28, in which Ahab is introduced. You can scroll through the chapter, search for other terms that appear in the book, and compare it with other editions. Google won't say how many books are in its database, but the site's value as a research tool is apparent; on it you can find a history of Urdu newspapers, an 1892 edition of Jane Austen's letters, several guides to writing haiku, and a Harvard alumni directory from 1919.

"No one really knows how many books there are. The most volumes listed in any catalogue is thirty-two million, the number in WorldCat, a database of titles from more than twenty-five thousand libraries around the world. Google aims to scan at least that many. 'We think that we can do it all inside of ten years,' Marissa Mayer, a vice-president at Google who is in charge of the books project, said recently, at the company's headquarters, in Mountain View, California. 'It’s mind-boggling to me, how close it is. I think of Google Books as our moon shot.'"

Still at the oil-for-food tit

2007-02-01T08:11:00.000-04:00

Four years after the UN Security Council ordered the shutdown of the troubled oil-for-food program for Iraq, says Reuters news service, "some Iraqi officials still appear intent on using it for illegal gains...

"The United Nations has been trying to close down the $64 billion program since the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, which ousted Saddam Hussein from power. It stepped up its efforts after an outside investigation found evidence of mismanagement and corruption by UN officials, contractors and Saddam's government.

"But a few outstanding contract and payment disputes have kept the last remnants of the program alive, and the Security Council last year called on UN managers to resolve all outstanding issues so it could be ended definitively in 2007."

Daylight saving crisis shouldn't be

2007-02-01T07:53:00.000-04:00

Some of the media are doing their darndest to come up with a Doomsday necklace to hang around the neck of the new, earlier daylight saving time regime...but I think this unconvincing Washington Post story demonstrates how difficult that is. "The change takes effect this year - on March 11 - and it has angered airlines, delighted candy makers and sent thousands of technicians scrambling to make sure countless automated systems switch their clocks at the right moment. Unless changed by one method or another, many systems will remain programmed to read the calendar and start daylight saving time on its old date in April, not its new one in March.

"It's one thing to arrive an hour late for church on the first day of daylight saving. It's another for a security system to log the wrong time of crucial events, for pilots to misunderstand their takeoff times or international communications components to stop synchronizing. But such scenarios are possible without the fix to vast numbers of the nation's technical systems."

It just doesn't wash. There may be large numbers of devices to be changed, if you let yourself get baffled by the big picture, but no matter how big that number, each one of those devices is in the charge of a competent someone, there's only one change to be made, and it's a dead simple one.

Art centre shifts again - to Leipzig?

2007-02-01T07:28:00.000-04:00

The Guardian's thinking that when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, a chain of events began which has caused a shift of the world's art centre to, of all places, Leipzig. "Pupils of the old painters of the GDR were free to interpret the new world as it was revealed to them. Neo Rauch, a recent graduate of the Art Academy in Leipzig, in the heavily industrial far east of the former East Germany, started painting large canvases that hovered somewhere between socialist realism and pop art.

"Rauch's best-known works are peopled by semi-surreal figures from the 1950s performing enigmatic tasks of physical labour, reminiscent of Soviet-era instruction manuals and illustrations. They quickly earned Rauch a reputation as the next great German painter, following an earlier generation that includes Gerhard Richter, Georg Baselitz, Martin Kippenberger and Anselm Kiefer. The new Leipzig School - Rauch and some of his former pupils - became a collecting phenomenon: a Rauch painting called Losung (Password) sold at Sotheby's in London last June for £456,000. Leipzig - run-down, depressed, increasingly depopulated - has now acquired the art-world cachet of New York in the 1950s or London in the 1990s.

"The new Leipzig School has coalesced into what Joachim Pissarro of the Museum of Modern Art described to the New York Times as 'suddenly the hottest thing on earth'. Significantly, perhaps, having witnessed the failure of two bright new dawns - those of postwar communism and post-cold war capitalism - the Leipzig painters are seen as having an atmosphere of disillusionment in common; their work is imbued with a deep melancholy. They are also a reminder of bygone eras when most artists were painters, and most painters were men."

The Holy Ghost of the jazz trinity

2007-01-31T08:03:00.000-04:00

John Fordham of the Guardian refers to Albert Ayler's sound as "singing from a black hole". To me, it's more like pointless squeaking from a black hole, but then there was a time, many years ago, when I didn't get Henry Threadgill in a biggish sort of a way. That changed fairly quickly.

There's a story about Ayler, that Fordham mentions, to the effect that the reason he drowned himself in the East River in 1970 was that he felt the survival of his mother and his kid brother required a sacrifice. Also a bit squeaky, I thought. Wasn't a goat good enough for him? However, there does seem to be a principle involved, so I've kept the jury out on Ayler.

Fordham was writing about My Name Is Albert Ayler, a film going on general release early in February from the Swedish director Kasper Collin.

"Collin's film," he says, "throws open a door on the tumultuous world of a unique 20th-century musician. And the nine CDs of the Holy Ghost box set - with essays by Ayler experts Val Wilmer and Baraka, postcards, brochures, pressed flowers and generally irresistible memorabilia - offers further explanations as to how that sometimes inhospitable, yet strangely beautiful world formed.

"A British writer and photographer, Wilmer interviewed Ayler extensively. She has seen Collin's documentary several times, and says: 'Every time, it brings tears to my eyes. It's not just because I knew him. I've taken people to it who knew nothing about Ayler, and they've felt the same. I never met anybody like him. He was a very spiritual person, but also very attractive and charming. You could see his real nature though. He was somewhere else.'"

The rot infecting Duke University

2007-01-31T07:47:00.000-04:00

Thomas Sowell's right - "The haste and vehemence with which scores of Duke University professors publicly took sides against the students in this case (the Duke Lacrosse Team players accused of rape) is just one sign of how deep the moral dry rot goes, in even our most prestigious institutions."

Writing in National Review, he says: "The larger tragedy is what this case revealed about the degeneration of our times and the hollowness of so many people in “responsible” positions in the media, in academia, and among those blacks so consumed by racial resentments and thirst for revenge that they are prepared to lash out at individuals who have done nothing to them and are guilty of no crime against anybody."

Sowell refers to a story by Charlotte Allen published in the Weekly Standard a couple of days ago: "Mike Nifong's handling of the case was clearly outrageous. But he would probably not have gone so far, indeed would not have dared to go so far, had he not been egged on by two other groups that rushed just as quickly to judge the three accused young men guilty of gross and racially motivated carnal violence. Despite the repeated attempts by the three to clear themselves, a substantial and vocal percentage - about one-fifth - of the Duke University arts and sciences faculty and nearly all of the mainstream print media in America quickly organized themselves into a hanging party. Throughout the spring of 2006 and indeed well into the late summer, Nifong had the nearly unanimous backing of this country's (and especially Duke's) intellectual elite as he explored his lurid theories of sexual predation and racist stonewalling.

"'They fed off each other,' said Steven Baldwin, a Duke chemistry professor who finally broke his faculty colleagues' own wall of silence on October 24, publishing a letter in the Duke student newspaper, the Chronicle, denouncing his fellow professors for what he called their 'shameful' treatment of Seligmann and Finnerty and rebuking the Duke administration for having 'disowned its lacrosse-playing student athletes.' In April, Duke president and English professor Richard Brodhead had abruptly suspended not only Seligmann and Finnerty but also the remainder of the Duke lacrosse season, plus a third player, Ryan McFadyen (also recently reinstated), who had nothing to do with the alleged assault but had made the mistake of sending an email to his teammates on the early morning of March 14 describing a plan to 'kill' and 'skin' some 'strippers' in his dorm room (like the 'cotton shirt' remark, this was another tasteless joke, parodying Bret Easton Ellis's novel American Psycho). That same day, April 5, Brodhead told the lacrosse team's coach, Michael Pressler, that he had until the end of the day to leave campus for good.

"'The faculty enabled Nifong,' Baldwin said in an interview. 'He could say, 'Here's a significant portion of the arts and sciences faculty who feel this way, so I can go after these kids because these faculty agree with me.' It was a mutual attitude.'"

'Portrait of the Monster as a Young Artist'

2007-01-30T09:41:00.000-04:00

You can't say 'forget the book, read the review', but this New York Review of Books piece gets you close. It's Nobellist JM Coetzee reviewing Norman Mailer's new book, The Castle in the Forest, which is about Hitler's childhood.

In the end, Coetzee calls Mailer's book a "very considerable contribution to historical fiction", but his journey to that point is something special...a literary event in its own right, and worth savouring.

"According to his publishers, Mailer is planning a trilogy that will cover the whole of Hitler's earthly life. Mailer himself hints that the second volume will take us through the 1930s, and will center on Hitler's affair with his niece Angelika (Geli) Raubal. The affair with Geli happens already to have been covered by Ron Hansen in Hitler's Niece (1999), a novel that lists heavily under the weight of undigested historical research but contains one episode - on Hitler's (imagined) sexual proclivities - worthy of Mailer at his most scabrous.

"Mailer's second volume, if it comes to be written, will presumably take in not only Geli but also the years Hitler spent in pre-war Vienna, as well as his spell in the German army, when he underwent his political awakening. Nonetheless, the implication of The Castle in the Forest is that the malign kernel of the woe to be visited on the world was well developed by 1905, when Hitler was sixteen. If we are seeking the truth of Adolf Hitler, the poetic truth, Mailer would seem to say, the years from his conception and birth to the end of his schooling will provide material enough...

"'Most well-educated people,' writes Mailer through his unnamed mouthpiece, 'are ready to bridle at the notion of such an entity as the Devil...There need be no surprise, then, that the world has an impoverished understanding of Adolf Hitler's personality. Detestation, yes, but understanding of him, no - he is, after all, the most mysterious human being of the century.'

"The question When did evil enter Hitler's soul? thus has a most definite meaning to Mailer. His answer is At the instant of his conception, in much the same way that God, in Christian dogma, was present at, and entered into, the conception of Jesus. In Mailer's story, the devil had possession of Adolf Hitler from nine months before his birth in April 1889 until the day he died in 1945, to do his bidding in the world."

Is Nasrallah trying to change the subject?

2007-01-30T09:27:00.000-04:00

Naharnet News Desk says Hizbullah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah on Tuesday called for the formation of a multi-faction 'national resistance' movement to liberate the Israeli-occupied Shabaa Farms.

"In an address marking the Ashoura Anniversary, Nasrallah told the crowd: 'I call for the creation of a national resistance to liberate the Shabaa farms...whoever was prevented by us from liberating Shabaa Farms should step forward to liberate and we'll be with him.'"

I'd say it was about time he tried to move on to a different topic of conversation.

Chinese seek treasure lost abroad

2007-01-30T09:21:00.000-04:00

People's Daily is stamping its editorial foot in frustration over the difficulties China faces in trying to bring the country's lost cultural treasures back home: "More than 10 million pieces of invaluable and marvellous Chinese historical and cultural treasures have been 'sunk into oblivion' in Europe, the United States, Japan, and Southeast Asian nations and regions after the Opium War of 1840, and about 1 million pieces of them are ranked as the first and second class categories of Chinese archaeological objects, according to the Chinese Archaeological Society.

"Meanwhile, relevant statistics from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization note that more than 200 museums in 47 countries boast a total of 1.64 million Chinese relics and over 10 times more Chinese antiques are being stored by ordinary people worldwide today.

"A national treasure recovery project, initiated and launched in July 2003, was aimed at rescuing 'lost' Chinese cultural relics and protect the country's national heritages. The cultural relics disappeared in unusual or extraordinary conditions will be retrieved in three ways, buying back, demanding their return, or donating.

"To date, buying back constitutes a conventional method. The return of 'Pig-head Bronze Statue' from the Yuan Min Yuan (or named the Winter Palace then) provides a very good, successful example. The Pig-head Bronze Statue had been vanished in the wreckage of the Yuan Min Yuan Palace by the Anglo-French troops in 1860 and slipped overseas afterward. Almost one and a half centuries later, in the spring of 2003, Chinese cultural relics experts traced it to an American private collector. Through repeated, patient consultations and negotiations between the two sides, the collector finally agreed to transfer it back to China. Upon learning the information, Mr. Stanley Ho, a tycoon from Macao made a donation of 7 million yuan (some 880,000 US dollars) in Sept. 2003 to the Special Fund to Rescue Cultural Relics Overseas to get it back."

Young maestro wows in Davos closer

2007-01-30T09:04:00.000-04:00

Jay Nordlinger, music critic of the New York Sun, noticed some interesting stuff at the closing event of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland: "Are you ready for a 20-year-old conductor? You ought to be, because he's ready for you.

"His name is Lionel Bringuier, and he conducted the Basel Symphony Orchestra on Saturday night. This was a closing event of the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum, held in Davos, high up in the Swiss Alps.

"The meeting is known for its kings, presidents, and prime ministers, its CEOs, 'social entrepreneurs,' and writers. But there is usually a small arts contingent, as there was this year. Valery Gergiev, the famed Russian conductor, was present, although he did not perform. He didn't conduct, that is; he performed on panels. Also, Michael Hersch was present. He is a young American composer of increasing reputation."

What was that in the road?

2007-01-30T08:24:00.000-04:00

The Telegraph notices that we have just passed a small marker in our rush into the future: "Floppy, we hardly knew you. It was only in 1971 that the first commercial floppy disk went on sale; now PC World has decided to discontinue them. It's the end.

"So the floppy disk joins space hoppers, propelling pencils, the Stylophone, Robin starch, toasting forks, Party Sevens, gold top milk, Tizer, fly-buttons, blue twists of salt in packets of crisps, nylon shirts, Spangles, shove-halfpenny, Izal lavatory paper and the Pickwick, the Owl and the Waverley Pen.

"No, the future's not floppy. But, although a single memory stick can now hold 6,000 times the information on a floppy disk, we shall miss one glorious anomaly: floppy disks, despite their precise dimension of 9cm in diameter, were denominated all over the world according to imperial measure – 3.5in. That apart, the floppy disk has outlived its early promise and proved, well, a bit of a flop."

Muslims to overrun abdicating Europeans

2007-01-29T09:03:00.000-04:00

Middle East expert Bernard Lewis says Islam could soon be the dominant force in a Europe which, in the name of political correctness, has abdicated the battle for cultural and religious control.

"The Muslims 'seem to be about to take over Europe,' Lewis said at a special briefing with the editorial staff of The Jerusalem Post. Asked what this meant for the continent's Jews, he responded, 'The outlook for the Jewish communities of Europe is dim.'

"Soon, he warned, the only pertinent question regarding Europe's future would be, 'Will it be an Islamized Europe or Europeanized Islam?' The growing sway of Islam in Europe was of particular concern given the rising support within the Islamic world for extremist and terrorist movements, said Lewis.

"Lewis, whose numerous books include the recent What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East, and The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror, would set no timetable for this drastic shift in Europe, instead focusing on the process, which he said would be assisted by 'immigration and democracy'. Instead of fighting the threat, he elaborated, Europeans had given up."

Einstein was human - official

2007-01-29T08:27:00.000-04:00

One image of Albert Einstein that people carry in their heads is the gentle antiwar symbol whose fright-wigged visage smiled down from a thousand dorm rooms. The other is of Einstein the distracted genius too occupied with great thoughts to match his socks. In fact, according to Walter Isaacson, former managing editor of Time magazine and author of a forthcoming biography, Einstein in 1915 was 'awesomely human'.

The Los Angeles Times says: "The gem of this new collection, published by Caltech and Princeton University, is a treasure trove of personal letters that have been locked away for almost a century and are now shedding fresh light on the man and his work at this moment of transformation.

"Einstein's stepdaughter Margot donated 130 letters, written in German, from and to his closest friends and family members. Margot, who died in July 1986, had specified that they not be released to the public for 20 years after her death.

"These letters portray the greatest thinker of the 20th century at the height of his powers not as a triumphant genius but as a working man struggling to make ends meet while the world around him threatened to devolve into chaos."

Thanks, Brenda.

More disasters to come - John Reid

2007-01-29T07:54:00.000-04:00

British Home Secretary John Reid, writing in the Guardian after a staggering series of Home Office failures, predicts there's more to come. "If we weren't discovering more we wouldn't be reforming. Indeed I expect more problems. In each of the rooms of the Home Office are upcoming challenges like pay pressures, prison population pressures, counter-terror challenges and stubbornly high reoffending rates. There will also be problems I haven't discovered yet - and may well be unearthed by others. If we were not open about challenges as we discover them we would not be being serious about reform.

"Yet even the ground on which the Home Office is built - the Britain of the 21st century - is shifting. Mass migration, the information age and environmental change have changed the world. If we just fix the old structures we will not be prepared for challenges such as identity crime, people smuggling, and illegal migration. I was sent to the Home Office to do a job. Being home secretary is my biggest challenge. But it isn't mission impossible."

The 'Scariest Ideas in Science'

2007-01-28T08:41:00.000-04:00

Super-mean foxes? Merciless robot soldiers? They're among Popular Science's Scariest Ideas in Science (how close is that to the perfect weekend read?).

One I rather liked, as a retired person, was the 20-hour working day: "A new crop of 'wakefulness-promoting' drugs can improve alertness - with no real side effects. Last summer Darpa, the U.S. Department of Defense's advanced-research arm, tested the drug CX717 by exposing subjects to battle conditions for four consecutive 20-hour days. Sleeping only four daylight hours, they remained amped and alert. Meanwhile, prescription modafinil can keep civilians fresh for 48 hours. Its successor, armodafinil, poised for FDA approval, lasts even longer."

Wake me if there's anything I can do to help.

Cash-for-honours trail leads to Blair

2007-01-28T07:55:00.000-04:00

I may have spoken a little too soon when I said, yesterday, that last week was a bad one for the British Government. As the Telegraph suggests, this one promises to be even worse: "Detectives have discovered a hand-written note from Tony Blair among new evidence that has widened significantly the cash-for-honours investigation.

"It is the first time that the 'paper trail' uncovered by Scotland Yard has led directly to the Prime Minister. The note is understood to acknowledge the efforts of Labour's 12 secret lenders who provided 14 million pounds to help the party fight the 2005 election.

"The Prime Ministers's comments were among a batch of Downing Street papers obtained by detectives. He had written in ink on typed, internal government papers and initialled his views. Officers now believe that Downing Street intended to give working peerages to most of the lenders. Those in line included Sir Christopher Evans, the multi-millionaire entrepreneur, who is the only lender arrested as part of the 10-month inquiry."

Iranian nuclear programme 'in chaos'

2007-01-28T07:36:00.000-04:00

Peter Beaumont, the foreign affairs editor of Britain's Observer, is quoting Western diplomats and sources close to the Iranian nuclear programme as saying "Iran's efforts to produce highly enriched uranium, the material used to make nuclear bombs, are in chaos and the country is still years from mastering the required technology...

"Despite Iran being presented as an urgent threat to nuclear non-proliferation and regional and world peace - in particular by an increasingly bellicose Israel and its closest ally, the US - a number of Western diplomats and technical experts close to the Iranian programme have told The Observer it is archaic, prone to breakdown and lacks the materials for industrial-scale production.

"The disclosures come as Iran has told the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, that it plans to install a new 'cascade' of 3,000 high-speed centrifuges at its controversial underground facility at Natanz in central Iran next month. The centrifuges were supposed to have been installed almost a year ago and many experts are extremely doubtful that Iran has yet mastered the skills to install and run it. Instead, they argue, the 'installation' will more probably be about propaganda than reality."

Where's our damn food gone?

2007-01-28T07:19:00.000-04:00

Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, was chosen by the editors of The New York Times Book Review as one of the 10 best books of 2006. In today's Sunday Magazine, he argues that our preoccupation with eating what is good for us has slowly led to the disappearance of food from menus.

"It was in the 1980s that food began disappearing from the American supermarket, gradually to be replaced by 'nutrients', which are not the same thing. Where once the familiar names of recognizable comestibles - things like eggs or breakfast cereal or cookies - claimed pride of place on the brightly colored packages crowding the aisles, now new terms like 'fiber' and 'cholesterol' and 'saturated fat' rose to large-type prominence. More important than mere foods, the presence or absence of these invisible substances was now generally believed to confer health benefits on their eaters. Foods by comparison were coarse, old-fashioned and decidedly unscientific things - who could say what was in them, really? But nutrients - those chemical compounds and minerals in foods that nutritionists have deemed important to health - gleamed with the promise of scientific certainty; eat more of the right ones, fewer of the wrong, and you would live longer and avoid chronic diseases."

Gordon Brown's Islamic slip is showing

2007-01-27T09:57:00.000-04:00

Is Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, the economic giant people say he is? Alex Alexiev, the vice president for research at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, thinks he's a bit of a birdbrain. Writing in The Washington Times, he claims Brown's recent pledge to make Britain "a key hub for facilitating Islamic finance" and to turn London into "a major enabling and structuring center for global Islamic finance" is embarrassing codswallop.

"The apparent cluelessness of an otherwise economically literate person like Gordon Brown, regarding 'Islamic finance' is a case in point. To put it simply, there could no more be 'Islamic finance' or 'Islamic economics' than Christian physics or Buddhist biology. It is a completely bogus concept based on a misinterpretation of Quranic teaching and designed to advance radical Islam.

"It has everything to do with Islamic, indeed, Islamist, desiderata and very little with finance. The guiding principle of Islamic finance is built around the ostensible Quranic prohibition of charging interest. Except that the Quran bans usury, not interest. As the leading authority on the subject, Professor Timur Kuran, explains in his devastating critique of Islamic finance, 'What the Quran bans unambiguously is the pre-Islamic Arabian institution of 'riba', whereby a borrower saw his debt double following a default and redouble if he defaulted again.'

"And so, having foresworn interest, without which banking is virtually impossible, Islamic finance is little more than a hoax perpetrated on its clients through a series of deceitful ruses that amount to interest just the same."

Labour's crown of thorns

2007-01-27T09:21:00.000-04:00

The British Government has not had a good week. This London Times article explains: "John Reid endured a miserable end to the week today as the Home Office was hit by a succession of blows, this time on asylum and youth justice, adding to the pressure that has built up over the prison overcrowding crisis.

"The main crisis of the week, that of prison overcrowding, showed no signs of relenting this morning when the Government was to forced to deny putting pressure on judges to give non-custodial sentences because there is no room for more prisoners.

"Figures released by the Home Office today showed that there are only 383 places remaining out of the 80,114 available for prisoners in England and Wales. Mr Reid said yesterday that he was negotiating for the use of an RAF base and the purchase of two prison ships to ease the crisis.

"Hundreds of offenders who are supposed to be in permanent jails are currently being held in police stations and yesterday Judge John Rogers, QC, senior judge on the North Wales circuit, told a man found guilty of possessing child pornography that he was not going to give him a prison sentence because he had to consider 'the current sentencing climate'...

"Then the head of youth justice for England and Wales revealed that he was leaving his job and parted with a stinging attack on the Government's targets for prosecuting low-level crime, saying the criminal justice system was being 'swamped' with young people."

As soon as one crisis dies down a little, another springs up to take its place, like this one covered by the Telegraph today: "Home Secretary John Reid is facing more embarrassment after it was disclosed that his department had failed to enforce overseas travel banning orders imposed by the courts on 147 convicted drug traffickers.

"The beleaguered minister, who is at loggerheads with the judiciary over his plea for them only to jail the most dangerous and persistent offenders, will come under pressure to explain how the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) - an executive arm of the Home Office - made the error."

The Telegraph thinks Tony Blair should get himself off the scene, toot sweet.
"The past year has been the worst in his career: the police have been in Downing Street investigating corruption; his Cabinet has turned against him; his approval ratings, as we report today, are down to a record low of 21 per cent; and the machinery of the state is spluttering and smoking.

"That criminals should now be escaping incarceration because prisons are full illustrates in perfect miniature why this Government is falling apart. As Home secretary, Michael Howard had embarked on a huge prison-building programme, reasoning - correctly - that the incapacitation of villains was the surest way to cut crime. On taking office, Labour discontinued his policy and, in consequence, now finds itself damned by the procrastination of its early years.

"We see precisely the same story when it comes to welfare reform, nuclear power, the state pension age or road-building. Decisions that were shirked after 1997 now come hammering at the door for resolution."

Fierce debate on new US policy on Iran

2007-01-26T09:00:00.000-04:00

The Iraq-obsessed US media are missing a dimension of the new US policy on targeting Iranians that has great potential for raising sparks elsewhere in the Middle East. The new policy actually affects five 'theaters of interest', designed to target Iranian interests all around the region, including one that may affect the balance of power in Lebanon. The Washington Post says: "The White House has authorized a widening of what is known inside the intelligence community as the 'Blue Game Matrix' - a list of approved operations that can be carried out against the Iranian-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon.

"And U.S. officials are preparing international sanctions against Tehran for holding several dozen al-Qaeda fighters who fled across the Afghan border in late 2001. They plan more aggressive moves to disrupt Tehran's funding of the radical Palestinian group Hamas and to undermine Iranian interests among Shiites in western Afghanistan...

"'Our goal is to change the dynamic with the Iranians, to change the way the Iranians perceive us and perceive themselves. They need to understand that they cannot be a party to endangering US soldiers' lives and American interests, as they have before. That is going to end,' said one US official.

But there are serious differences within the US Government about the wisdom of a strategy that invites Iranian retaliation in the middle of the crisis-ridden Iraq campaign. One intelligence official told the Post: "This has little to do with Iraq. It's all about pushing Iran's buttons. It is purely political." The official expressed similar views about other new efforts aimed at Iran, suggesting that the United States is escalating toward an unnecessary conflict to shift attention away from Iraq and to blame Iran for the United States' increasing inability to stanch the violence there.

The New York Sun has more on the debate in the US Government, part of which has to do with "the extent to which operatives directed by Iran's security services have penetrated the Iraqi government.

"Several lists containing names of suspected moles have been circulating in the intelligence community since December, according to one American diplomat and two American intelligence officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. But the names of the suspected Iranian agents themselves are the focus of a heated dispute.

"This debate, among others concerning Iran's influence and control of Iraqi government institutions, is one key factor holding up the publication of a consensus intelligence finding on Iraq known as a National Intelligence Estimate. The dispute over Iranian power in Iraq's Interior Ministry, national military, customs office, Health Ministry, and Defense Ministry will determine how President Bush's troop surge is implemented, one intelligence official said. 'This could lead to disbanding whole units of the Iraqi military and affect how we embed our guys in their units,' the official said. 'If it's true, if some of this is true, it's very bad. But we don't know yet.'"

There is certainly no question that the Iranians have been playing an aggressive anti-US game in Iraq for some time. DEBKAfile has a piece on some of the allegations against them: "US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad and State department spokesman Sean McCormack said the US would soon present evidence of Iran's hand in the violence besetting Iraq...McCormack spoke of 'solid evidence' that Iranian agents sent by the Iranian government are working with individuals and groups in Iraq" that would soon be made public.

Among the pieces of information in the DEBKAfile report is this one: "A second US raid in Irbil uncovered a stockpile of Iranian weapons. It consisted of 40 tons of explosives, shoulder-borne anti-air missiles, anti-tank missiles, hundreds of automatic rifles and a pile of ordnance made in Iran....

"Inventories of the weapons and ammo supplied the Medhi Army in Baghdad and Kirkuk by Iran in the last two months were detailed on computer hard disks. Maps showed the locations of anti-air missile positions for shooting down American helicopters."

How much history did Berger erase?

2007-01-26T08:45:00.000-04:00

The Washington Times adds its voice to those who want Sandy Berger polygraphed over the extent of his thefts from the National Archive. Columnist R. Emmett Tyrrell writes: "There have been many distinguished former government officials who lived to write their version of the history they participated in. Sandy Berger is the rare government official who has lived to erase history. A polygraph test might reveal how much history he erased.

"Mr. Berger's lawyer, a veteran Clinton smog artist, Lanny Breuer, insists there is no 'evidence' his client did anything wrong. That is classic Clinton obfuscation. Mr. Berger was caught stealing classified documents from the National Archives. For a former national security adviser to do such a thing is without precedent. It now has been revealed that the Archives had not catalogued the materials it gave him. There is no precedent on the public record for that, either.

"Mr. Berger is also a proven liar. All this constitutes 'evidence' Mr. Berger has done something very wrong. A lie detector test may give us a sense of how much wrong he did. Moreover, taking the test was part of Mr. Berger's 2005 agreement. He should live up to his agreement and take the test. The Justice Department should enforce the rule of law and make him take the test.

"Yet as we have seen since the 1990s, there is a peculiar double standard in the country. One very lax and capricious rule obtains for the Clintons and their servitors, and another duly exacting rule for the rest of us. Former State Department Foreign Service officer Donald Keyser (sentenced a few days ago to a year in prison for taking secret documents home with him and lying about his relationship with a Taiwanese intelligence officer) is numbered among the rest of us. He was a top adviser to former Secretary of State Colin Powell. So off to the hoosegow with him. He is disgraced and Mr. Berger is standing gloriously among us in his stockinged feet."

Global warming's Napa Valley victims

2007-01-26T08:14:00.000-04:00

The weather in California's wine-growing regions is good for vintners...maybe too good. the Los Angeles Times suggests that since ideal weather for grapes is close to too hot: "Slight climate changes could be enough to push them over that edge.

"Meanwhile, in European wine regions that have struggled to ripen grapes for centuries, global warming is a cause for celebration. Each year in the last decade seems to have brought another 'vintage of the century'.

"No question, says London-based wine critic Jancis Robinson, global warming is changing wines. 'Dry German wines now are seriously delicious. English wines and Canadian wines have benefited.' On the other hand, she says, wines from warmer regions including Spain and Australia are suffering the rise in temperature.

"'With wine, we can taste climate change,' says Gregory V. Jones, a climatologist at Southern Oregon University who is a leading researcher in the burgeoning field of wine-region climate studies and the son of an Oregon vintner. 'You can honestly argue that Bordeaux is better off today. They can now consistently ripen their grapes.'"

Did Carter help Arafat scuttle Mideast peace?

2007-01-26T08:05:00.000-04:00

Alan Dershowitz regrets that Jimmy Carter's speech at Brandeis University this week was held under such stifling circumstances, and asks a key question. Writing in the Jerusalem Post, he says: "It should have been a real debate. Instead, it was a one-way dialogue with pre-screened questions and no rebuttals. Had Carter allowed the dialogue he says he wants to provoke, we all could have learned something...

"I favored a compromise peace based on the offer by President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 2000/2001. Carter, however, defends Yasser Arafat's refusal to accept these generous terms, or to make a counteroffer. In fact, Carter never mentions in his book that the Palestinians could have had a state in 1938, 1948, 1967 and on several other occasions. Their leaders cared more about destroying Israel than they did about creating Palestine.

"That is the core of the conflict. It is Palestinian terror, not Israeli policy, which prevents peace. Carter chooses to believe Arafat's story over that of Clinton, Barak and Saudi Prince Bandar, who called Arafat's refusal a 'crime'. Why?

"We know from Carter's biographer, Douglas Brinkley, that Carter and Arafat strategized together about how to improve the image of the PLO. It is highly likely, therefore, that Arafat sought Carter's advice on whether to accept or reject the Clinton/Barak offer.

"Did Carter advise Arafat to walk away from a Palestinian state? Did he contribute to the new intifada, which claimed thousands of lives on both sides? That is an important question-one I would have asked Carter had I been given the chance."

Task Force 16 hunting Iranians in Iraq

2007-01-25T08:43:00.000-04:00

The US military has launched a special operations task force to break up Iranian influence in Iraq, according to what US News and World Report calls 'US News sources'. "The special operations mission, known as Task Force 16, was created late last year to target Iranians trafficking arms and training Shiite militia forces. The operation is modeled on Task Force 15, a clandestine cadre of Navy SEALs, Army Delta Force soldiers, and CIA operatives with a mission to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives and Baathist insurgents in Iraq. Task Force 15 killed al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Abu Musab Zarqawi, last June.

"The new classified directive is part of an escalation of military countermeasures against Iran, authorized by President Bush, to strike back at what military officials describe as a widespread web of Iranian influence in Iraq that includes providing weapons, training, and money to Shiite militias."

Author sees scandal in Blackwater

2007-01-25T08:02:00.000-04:00

This guy's got a book to sell, so he's feeding on the scandalous side of the Blackwater story. His Los Angeles Times story is headlined 'Our mercenaries in Iraq'. It's written by Jeremy Scahill, a fellow at the Nation Institute and the author of the forthcoming Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.

They are, he says, "highly trained mercenaries deployed to Iraq by a secretive private military company based in North Carolina - Blackwater USA.

"Blackwater began in 1996 with a private military training camp "to fulfill the anticipated demand for government outsourcing...Today, its contacts run from deep inside the military and intelligence agencies to the upper echelons of the White House. It has secured a status as the elite Praetorian Guard for the global war on terror, with the largest private military base in the world, a fleet of 20 aircraft and 20,000 soldiers at the ready.

"From Iraq and Afghanistan to the hurricane-ravaged streets of New Orleans to meetings with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger about responding to disasters in California, Blackwater now envisions itself as the FedEx of defense and homeland security operations. Such power in the hands of one company, run by a neo-crusader bankroller of the president, embodies the 'military-industrial complex' President Eisenhower warned against in 1961.

"Further privatizing the country's war machine - or inventing new back doors for military expansion with fancy names like the Civilian Reserve Corps - will represent a devastating blow to the future of American democracy."

I'm sure there are cliches out there he hasn't used...but not for want of trying. What he doesn't explain in his story, though, is that because this is the type of conflict in which there is no front line, no safe rear area, there are a ton of civilians working in Iraq who need protection from the bad guys.

It really would be a scandal if some private contractor working on, say, Baghdad's electricity grid, got a section of active-duty marines as bodyguards. Then there'd be a fuss.

So firms like Blackwater, whose principal business is providing security, suddenly grow by leaps and bounds. Naturally, they use people with military-type experience. There are American security companies, there are similar Brit security companies, there are French security companies...etc, etc. When there's a scrap somewhere, qualified people who don't mind taking risks jump on the bandwagon, and make a ton of money. When it's peaceful, they go looking for money somewhere else, and the companies shrink in size until nobody notices them any more. That's been the way of things since bow and arrow days.

Thanks for the tip, Brenda.

New Brazilian field recordings CD set

2007-01-25T07:26:00.000-04:00

Tom Ze is a Brazilian musician and composer heavily influenced by the early music of the northeastern part of Brazil, the Nordeste as it's called. Interviewed by the New York Times about a new collection of music, recorded in the field the better part of a century ago, which has just been published, he said: "It gives me chills just to think of the similarities between American blues and the music of the northeast. It's like Mother Africa ended up with grandsons in Alabama and Pernambuco."

The Times says the six-CD set, called Musica Tradicional do Norte e Nordeste 1938, "consists of more than seven hours of music, drawn from the 1,299 tracks by 80 performers, totaling nearly 34 hours, that the folklore team recorded in five states in northern and northeastern Brazil during the first half of 1938.

"Early in 1938, Mário de Andrade, the municipal secretary of culture here, dispatched a four-member Folklore Research Mission to the northeastern hinterlands of Brazil on a similar mission. His intention was to record as much music as possible as quickly as possible, before encroaching influences like radio and cinema began transforming the region's distinctive culture.

"Traveling by truck, horse and donkey, they recorded whoever and whatever seemed to be interesting: piano carriers, cowboys, beggars, voodoo priests, quarry workers, fishermen, dance troupes and even children at play."

Grill Berger, Republicans demand

2007-01-24T08:33:00.000-04:00

The Justice Department is being urged by House Republicans to give Sandy Berger a lie detector test. The Washington Times quotes them as having said, in a letter: "'This may be the only way for anyone to know whether Mr. Berger denied the 9/11 commission and the public the complete account of the Clinton administration's actions or inactions during the lead-up to the terrorist attacks on the United States.'

The Times says that "...During sentencing, Mr. Berger agreed to a polygraph examination as part of a plea deal, but Justice never administered the test, according to two Justice officials closely connected to the case - John Dion, chief of the counterespionage section, and Bruce Swartz, deputy assistant attorney general for the Criminal Division...

"Lanny Breuer, Mr. Berger's attorney, has said the matter was thoroughly investigated by the Justice Department for more than two years and effectively closed for more than a year. He said the report's conclusions were based on 'pure conjecture'.

"'Sandy Berger made a mistake. But he has admitted that mistake, fully cooperated with the government's investigation, paid his debt to society, and moved on. It's time for the new congressional minority to do the same.'"

Supremes weigh NY's UN taxing rights

2007-01-24T08:25:00.000-04:00

The New York Sun suggests, a tad sarcastically, that "Mayor Bloomberg and Senator Schumer, big backers of the idea that the United Nations is good for New York, might set aside some time in April for the Supreme Court hearing in the case against the city the nine have just decided to review.

"The case is being brought by India and Mongolia over $18 million in taxes the city says it is owed in connection with non-tax-exempt uses to which their UN missions are being put. The two countries are asserting not simply that they don't owe the city taxes but that no court has the jurisdiction to rule on any lawsuit that the city brings against them. Or, to put it more broadly, the People's Republic of Mongolia is trying to jeopardize the authority of New York City to sue any foreign country over local taxes.

"Now it is true that the properties used by foreign missions to the United Nations. are generally exempt from taxation. But the exemption lasts only so long as a property is being used for diplomatic purposes or to house an ambassador. According to the city's tax assessors, Mongolia and India are using most of their buildings' square footage for other purposes. According to the city, the top 20 floors of the 26-floor Indian Mission at East 43rd Street are home to 16 diplomatic employees and their families, including a driver and security guards. A similar arrangement can be found at the Mongolian Mission at East 77th Street.

"The Supreme Court will not be deciding whether Mongolia and India must pay those taxes. It will be deciding whether local courts even have jurisdiction to hear such tax cases against foreign countries. Both Mongolia and India claim that they are protected against the city's tax collectors. That argument didn't find a receptive audience before the riders of the 2nd United States appeals circuit. The 'guiding principle,' its three-judge panel decided, is that 'when owning property here, a foreign state must follow the same rules as everyone else.'"

Hezbollah calls time...for now

2007-01-24T08:07:00.000-04:00

Hezbollah-led protesters called off a nationwide strike that touched off the worst violence yet in the pro-Iranian group's campaign to topple the US-backed prime minister, according to the Washington Post. "Three people were killed and dozens wounded Tuesday as government supporters and their adversaries battled each other around street barricades with stone-throwing and in some cases gunfire."

But don't get the impression that that's it. Hezbollah leader Nasrallah is obviously prepared to do it again, when it suits him, because using violence is the only way he's going to win his campaign to topple the government.

Jimmy Carter dodges the bullet

2007-01-24T03:50:00.000-04:00

Ex-President Jimmy Carter appeared at Brandeis University yesterday, although some kind of deal was made to avoid questions after his speech from people like Alan Dershowitz, who had threatened to let him have it with both barrels. According to this New York Times piece, Carter was well received: "In his first major public speech about his controversial book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, former President Jimmy Carter told an audience at Brandeis University on Tuesday that he stood by the book and its title, that he apologized for what he called an 'improper and stupid' sentence in the book and that he had been disturbed by accusations that he was anti-Semitic.

"'This is the first time that I've ever been called a liar and a bigot and an anti-Semite and a coward and a plagiarist,' Mr. Carter told the crowd of about 1,700 at Brandeis, a nonsectarian university founded by American Jews, where about half the students are Jewish. 'This is hurting me.'

"After Mr. Carter left, Mr. Dershowitz spoke in the same gymnasium, saying that the former president oversimplified the situation and that his conciliatory and sensible-sounding speech at Brandeis belied his words in some other interviews.

"'There are two different Jimmy Carters,' Mr. Dershowitz said. 'You heard the Brandeis Jimmy Carter today, and he was terrific. I support almost everything he said. But if you listen to the Al Jazeera Jimmy Carter, you'll hear a very different perspective.'"

In National Review, Claudia Rosett has done a little timely digging into the affairs of the Carter Center, and wonders if he might not have written the book he did write in order to gruntle his financial backers. "In recent weeks, a number of articles have noted that Carter's anti-Israeli views coincide with those of some of the center's prime financial backers, including the government of Saudi Arabia and the foundation of Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud, whose offer of $10 million to New York City just after Sept. 11 was rejected by then-mayor Rudy Giuliani because it came wrapped in the suggestion that America rethink its support of Israel.

"Other big donors listed in the Carter Center's annual reports include the Sultanate of Oman and the sultan himself; the government of the United Arab Emirates; and a brother of Osama bin Laden, Bakr BinLadin, 'for the Saudi BinLadin Group'. Of lesser heft, but still large, are contributions from assorted development funds of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, as well as of OPEC, whose membership includes oil-rich Arab states, Nigeria (whose government is also a big donor to the Carter Center), and Venezuela (whose anti-American strongman Hugo Chavez benefited in a 2004 election from the highly controversial monitoring efforts of the Carter Center).

"A recent editorial in Investor's Business Daily, headlined 'Jimmy Carter's Li'l Ol' Stink Tank,' listed a number of 'founders' of the Carter Center. The names were drawn from the annual reports, and included 'the king of Saudi Arabia, BCCI scandal banker Agha Hasan Abedi, and Arafat pal Hasib Sabbagh.' And, writing last month in the Washington Times, terror-funding expert Rachel Ehrenfeld described links going back to the 1970s between the Carter family peanut business and the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, whose Pakistani founder helped bankroll the Carter Center at least until BCCI went belly-up in 1991, busted as a global criminal enterprise."

Chavez riding Venezuela into the dirt?

2007-01-23T09:02:00.000-04:00

That madman Hugo Chavez has decided not to change his country's name to the Socialist Republic of Venezuela, leaving it as the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, according to Caribbean Net News. He's making a lot of other changes, though, as Richard W. Rahn, director general of the Center for Global Economic Growth, wrote yesterday in the Washington Times. The South American publication Petroleumworld reprinted the article today: "If Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez deliberately intended to sabotage his nation's economy, he would be hard-pressed to do anything different from what he is now doing to his country.

"It has been widely reported that Mr. Chavez has been increasingly taking control of the oil, telecommunications and energy sectors, as well as the media. What has not been reported is the full extent of the corruption in Venezuela and how this ultimately will destroy the economy.

"The financial scandal taking place is far bigger than Enron, and may ultimately even exceed the U.N. 'oil-for-food' scandal, the biggest financial disgrace of all time. Venezuela has had a rapidly growing economy for the last few years, due to high oil prices, but the house of cards is about to collapse. The former Venezuelan representative to Transparency International, Gustavo Coronel, has documented how much of this corruption has taken place in a report published by the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.

"Forty years ago, Venezuela had become a functioning democracy and was experiencing solid economic growth, but beginning in the mid-1970s corruption increased. Partially as a result, Hugo Chavez was elected president in December 1998 on an anti-corruption platform. In the years since, Mr. Chavez has been dismantling the independent political institutions and sharply reducing transparency. He has also stripped the Central Bank of its independence and misappropriated much of its reserves. Some of the funds have been used to buy billions of dollars of Argentine bonds, to buy influence in Argentina. That country has not been able to sell bonds in the international markets since its 2001 default because Argentina still has not come to an agreement with its private creditors, despite having extensive and growing foreign exchange reserves."

Hezbollah strikes cause Lebanese chaos

2007-01-23T07:45:00.000-04:00

Hezbollah made good on its promise to disrupt Lebanon yesterday, blocking roads and the airport in Beirut with burning tyres. When the army tried to intervene, they were confronted by rioting crowds. As darkness fell, 60 people were reported to have been hurt, 12 by gunfire, the rest in scuffles. The London Times has the latest, although the report it refers to of one pro-government supporter having been killed may not to have been correct.

This strike is going to be critical for Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah. His peaceful occupation of the huge main square in Beirut did not have the desired effect of forcing the Siniora government from power, as the Times confirms. It was obvious some time ago that if he stuck to that alone as a way of putting pressure on the government, he would fail. Meantime, a lot of his supporters have lost sympathy for him. He's counting on winning back their help to prevent the government from governing by keeping Lebanon paralysed. So far, most of the shooting seems to be coming from his side. If the army can keep its head, and if Siniora and Co can keep their supporters in check, I'd be surprised if Nasrallah can keep it going for very long.

Marxist BBC fails British public - Mail

2007-01-23T07:24:00.000-04:00

Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail, used a rare public speech last night to accuse the BBC of "a kind of cultural Marxism" that is harming political debate and failing to represent the views of millions of licence fee payers. The Guardian's report quotes him as having said "the BBC's tendency towards institutionally biased left-leaning views, part of what he dubbed 'the subsidariat' of newspapers and broadcasters that do not turn in a profit, was a factor in feeding political apathy.

"Delivering the Hugh Cudlipp lecture, Dacre said the BBC was not only expansionist, but guilty of subscribing to a singular world view. 'BBC journalism is reflected through a left-wing prism that affects everything - the choice of stories, the way they are angled, the choice of the interviews, the interviewees and, most pertinently, the way those interviewees are treated,' he said."

Britain worse than Greece?

2007-01-22T08:05:00.000-04:00

Defence spending in Britain hasn't been this low since the 1930s, the Telegraph says. NATO figures show that Britain is spending a smaller share of its national wealth on defence than countries like Greece, or Bulgaria, or Turkey.

"Ministers have ordered defence chiefs to stop the leaks about equipment shortages and cutbacks to front line capability which are hitting morale. The leaks have also infuriated the Chancellor Gordon Brown, who is being blamed for the squeeze as he prepares to take over as Prime Minister...

"Liam Fox, the shadow defence secretary, said: 'To drop to this level of our national wealth seems absolutely crazy. We have a smaller navy than the French and our ships are being mothballed. What a triumph for new Labour.'"

People's Daily silent on orbit kill

2007-01-22T07:43:00.000-04:00

I've been watching to see how People's Daily would deal with its government's use of a missile to destroy one of its satellites. There have been four issues since it happened, and not a word has appeared. Are they ashamed?

Ban gets Journal thumbs-up

2007-01-22T07:31:00.000-04:00

The Wall Street Journal is full of praise for the new UN Secretary-General this morning. "Ban Ki Moon has been on the job for less than a month, but with a 26-word announcement Friday he did more to reform that international body than anything ever attempted by predecessor Kofi Annan.

"'The Secretary-General will call for an urgent, system wide and external inquiry into all activities done around the globe by the UN funds and programs.' So said Mr. Ban's spokesman after the Secretary-General met with Ad Melkert, associate administrator of the United Nations Development Program. The key word here is 'external'. Concerns about corruption in the UN's Oil for Food program bubbled for years before Mr. Annan finally agreed to set up the independent Volcker Commission.

"The proximate cause for Friday's meeting between Messrs. Ban and Melkert, and for Mr. Ban's clean-house announcement, was Melanie Kirkpatrick's op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal on Friday detailing irregularities in the UNDP's programs in North Korea and citing U.S. concerns that tens of millions of dollars in hard currency have been funneled to dictator Kim Jong Il...

"We also couldn't help but notice the second-day story by the Washington Post's Colum Lynch, whose reporting is known to speak for the UN bureaucracy. He said some in the UN consider the US questions to be an attempt to discredit Mark Malloch Brown, who ran UNDP from before becoming Mr. Annan's chief of staff. We hadn't mentioned Mr. Malloch Brown in our Friday editorial, but now that Mr. Lynch does we agree his tenure at UNDP should also be looked at."

Norah Jones: no chops, but ...

2007-01-22T07:30:00.000-04:00

I fell, a few weeks ago, for one of those 'she sounds like Billie Holiday' lines, bought the album and found that that particular singer (I'm naming no names) sounded like what she was - a wholesome young woman who sings pretty well, but whose idea of strange fruit hasn't got much beyond babysham and boys.

So let's start on Norah Jones by saying there are no Billie Holiday claims - she is herself, but if you like people who can sing like angels, and who are without airs of any kind, that's quite enough. This worth-reading New York Times feature explains:

"At Marion's Marquee Lounge she wore no makeup and had no entourage: only her boyfriend and songwriting collaborator, Lee Alexander, with whom she traded grins through the evening. They had rushed over after a long day of rehearsals to hear the night's opening act: Jason Crigler, a guitarist and singer-songwriter recovering from a 2004 brain aneurysm. Ms. Jones had headlined a benefit concert for his medical expenses, and she watched his set with sisterly concern and increasing relief.

"Between sets she pointed out the other musicians in the room, offering praise and updates on their albums in progress. While she's by far the best-known musician from this circuit, she’s still immersed in it. Here she was just another working musician among peers, the exact opposite of a diva. She has little interest in high-profile celebrity, and the tabloids generally ignore her. 'I think I just never interested people that way in the beginning,' she said. 'I don't think I'm that boring, but I think, to an outsider 'OK, she's in a stable relationship, she's not a drug addict. She wears clothes, she wears underwear.'

"She shrugged. 'There's no facade,' she said. 'I wish there was sometimes'...

"Drawn to jazz, she majored in piano at the pioneering jazz studies department of the University of North Texas before dropping out and heading to New York City. 'I used to be a jazz snob, believe it or not,' she said. 'I sort of turned my nose up at anything more commercial.' She soaked up music theory and developed a limpid touch on piano, though not the sheer velocity of musicians she admires. 'I'm not lazy, but I've never been a lock-myself-in-the-practice-room kind of girl,' she said. 'I don't have chops. I can't play fast.'

"In New York she found herself at the intersection of two social and musical scenes: jazz musicians, who were fond of musical complexities and structural experiments, and singer-songwriters, aiming for concision and elegance. She regained respect for the basic three-chord songs of country, soul and folk.

"I'm admitting it: I don't make jazz really anymore, but I'm very heavily influenced by it,' she said. 'I had to reprogram myself. That's why I started writing more on guitar in the beginning, because I only knew three chords, and it was easier, it just made my life simpler. And on the piano it took me a long time to realize I could play a triad' - an unembellished major or minor chord - 'and it doesn't have to sound really simple. I finally learned how to do it.'"

Death of the book is much exaggerated

2007-01-21T07:17:00.000-04:00

The Sunday Times's reporter Bryan Appleyard is asking whether books are headed for extinction as a result of Internet advances. He writes about the "strange, complex and frequently obscure war that is being fought over the digitisation of the great libraries of the world. The details of this war may seem baffling, but there is nothing baffling about what is at stake. Intellectual property - intangibles like ideas, knowledge and information - is, in the globalised world, the most valuable of all assets. China may be booming on the basis of manufacturing, but, overwhelmingly, it makes things invented and designed in the West or Japan. Intellectual property is the big difference between the developing and developed worlds.

"But intellectual property rights and the internet are uneasy bedfellows. Google's stated mission is 'to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful'. The words 'universally accessible' carry the implicit threat that nobody can actually own or earn revenue from any information since it will all be just out there."

I think people are getting a bit carried away - Google and others are trapping information, which is only half of the equation. What's done with the information is the other half, and it is currently under no threat at all. You couldn't read a book under copyright on Google, even if you wanted to. The form of books may change in the future, but they will remain the primary method of storing argument (for lack of a better word) and the information that supports it, and for the delivery of reward to those who write, publish, sell and collect them. They are the simplest way of doing all that, and simple always wins.

Thanks for the tip, Patrick.

How Arafat got away with murder

2007-01-21T06:26:00.000-04:00

A disturbing Weekly Standard story accuses Yasser Arafat of the murder of a couple of American diplomats - and the American Government of covering it up: "Twenty years before he joined Bill Clinton and Yitzhak Rabin in Washington for that famous handshake - and then became Clinton's most frequent foreign guest at the White House - Yasser Arafat planned and directed the murder of an American ambassador and his deputy chief of mission. From the first moment of the deadly operation, which took place in Khartoum on March 1, 1973, the State Department possessed direct evidence of Arafat's responsibility, yet neither the State Department nor any other government agency made public its knowledge. Indeed, as recently as the summer of 2002, the State Department denied that such evidence existed. Across seven administrations, the State Department hewed to silence and denial.

"Until last spring. In June 2006, the department's Office of the Historian quietly posted an authoritative summary of the events dated June 1973. The source of the summary is not given, but the CIA had previously produced it in redacted form in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Prepared by the CIA on the basis of intercepted communications, it baldly states: 'The Khartoum operation was planned and carried out with the full knowledge and personal approval of Yasser Arafat.'"

Boatmaker takes his cue from spiders

2007-01-21T06:10:00.000-04:00

It's like a catamaran jiggered up to look like a spider, but the real difference in this avant-garde San Francisco yacht is that it's wiggly. Its designer, Ugo Conti, an engineer and inventor, calls it WAM-V - a Wave Adaptive Modular Vessel. There are pictures of it on the Chronicle's website: "Conti, a wiry man with a gray Van Dyke beard, thinning hair and a pony tail, said the idea for the WAM-V technology had come to him gradually, over many years of sailing. 'I liked flexible boats,' he said, 'so I decided to push it to the limit. It is very much experimental. You have to be crazy and old to do this. When you are old, you can risk more. You have nothing to lose."

Proteus, as the prototype is called, has twin hulls, like a catamaran, connected to each other and a control cabin by four metal legs. The legs ride on titanium springs - like shock absorbers - that allow the WAM-V to adjust to the surface of the water - to flex like knees.

UN cash for the mad and the bad?

2007-01-20T08:47:00.000-04:00

Another UN scandal's brewing over allegations that the UN Development Program has been handing over millions of dollars in cash to North Korea without taking the slightest notice of how it was spent. The Houston Chronicle (and many others) reports that "Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon responded quickly to US accusations that the UN development agency funneled millions of dollars in cash aid to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, calling on all UN funds and programs to conduct an urgent outside investigation into their operations. Ban's decision to press for outside audits not only of the UN Development Program's activities in North Korea, but of all UN programs, indicated he was determined to avoid a repetition of the scandal over the UN oil-for-food program in Iraq which bubbled for months before former Secretary-General Kofi Annan agreed to an independent investigation.

"US officials questioned whether funds intended to help the country's impoverished people had been used for other activities including nuclear weapons development."

Meantime, the Washington Times, reports that the UNDP has moved swiftly to limit damage by announcing new operating procedures.

"The UNDP said it will no longer pay North Korean suppliers and employees in hard currency after March 1, and will no longer allow the North Korean government to hire its in-country staff. It also said it will put into place improved monitoring and auditing of funds."

The whistle was blown by Mark Wallace, a management and budget analyst at the US Mission to the United Nations, who charged, in a recent letter to UNDP Administrator Kemal Dervis, that his agency had "for years operated in blatant violation of UN rules (and) served as a steady and large source of hard currency and other resources for the [North Korean] government with minimal or no assurance that UNDP funds and resources are utilized for legitimate development activities."

Nasrallah - all kaffiyeh, no cattle

2007-01-20T07:50:00.000-04:00

Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader in Lebanon, made a big mistake with his never-ending public protest on the square in Beirut. It hasn't worked.

The Siniora government continues to function, if a little irritably. Hezbollah supporters are getting bored. They're going home on weekends, leaving a largely empty tent city behind them. Few support his calls for strikes. The world's press is beginning to tire of it - even the BBC, which a couple of weekends ago cut down one of those 'exclusive film opportunities' to the shortest, most pointless, piece of news film I've ever seen. A threat by Nasrallah a couple of days ago to block roads seems to have been dropped, after the Lebanese security forces said they'd break up any road blocks.

But he keeps at it: The Globe and Mail (among others) reports on one of his recent threats: "Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah promised Friday that his opposition alliance would intensify its campaign to bring down the government, pledging to mount an 'effective' action in the coming days...

"'I believe this action will be effective, very important and very big,' he said. He would not divulge the plan but urged all Lebanese to support it."

And Naharnet News Desk carries another: "The Hizbullah-led opposition and the General Federation of Labor Unions called for a one-day general strike on Tuesday to keep up their pressure against Prime Minister Fouad Saniora's government.
However, sources told Naharnet that leaders of the Economic Committees will meet over the weekend to denounce the strike 'which will inflict damage and losses to the economy' and are likely to announce Tuesday 'a normal working day.'"

Makes it plain that the forces which won the Israeli invasion for Hezbollah were Israeli, doesn't it?

Gray Lady's anti-pest drills

2007-01-20T07:42:00.000-04:00

For American readers, this is a useful list, compiled by the New York Times, of ways of preventing a miscellany of pests from pestering: "A consumer can now opt out of the standard practice of their banks or loan companies selling their information to others. Other opt-outs stop credit card companies from soliciting consumers or end the flow of junk mail and catalogs. 'Over the years, it has gotten so much easier to opt out,' said Ari Schwartz, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a public interest group that lobbies Congress on privacy issues.'"

Must-have toy for eco-boys

2007-01-19T08:05:00.000-04:00

Now, this is a toy whose time has come. On the market soon (they say the price is going to be "less than $10,000") is a fuel-cell powered motorcycle, designed and built by a British firm, Intelligent Energy. Wired News says: "...Engineers had largely dismissed an environmentally friendly two-wheeler as impractical. That was until Britain's Intelligent Energy created the ENV, the first road-worthy hydrogen-powered motorcycle. The vehicle runs on a removable fuel cell, emits almost nothing, and will be street legal. The only drag? Top speed, for now, is 50 mph. Production versions go on sale later this year. Head out on the highway on this eco-machine."

It emits water instead of exhaust gas, has enough torque to make a Ferrari eat dust (OK, that may be me thinking wishfully) and weighs 178 pounds.

There's more here, but be warned that the sites aren't yet working perfectly.

Cuba - sick as feeble Fidel?

2007-01-19T07:45:00.000-04:00

Emmett Tyrell ruminates on the ailing Fidel Castro in the Washington Times this morning: "In these last months of Fidel Castro's moribundity, there is delicious irony in the film clip of him repeatedly shown on cable television. Wearing a clownishly incongruous jogging suit, the fabled maestro of revolution and progress is filmed shuffling metronomically, gray and feeble, blank-faced, and apparently going no place.

"Maybe he is on a treadmill that we cannot see. Maybe he is merely picking up his tired feet and putting them back down with no forward motion. Possibly this whole idiotic scene is a fabrication created by our CIA. Well, if so, it is a job well done. There is poetry here.

"The cadaverish dictator shuffling in place is a perfect metaphoric rendering of Mr. Castro's Cuba over these many decades. He took his country from prosperity and a place at the head of Latin America in material terms to the bottom. In practically every material measure his country is a slum. In terms of freedom, it is one vast jail."

Hitler's Jesse Owens snub a myth?

2007-01-19T07:15:00.000-04:00

In its review of sports journalist Jeremy Schaap's new book, Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics the Jewish Daily Forward says the story that Hitler snubbed Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics may well not be true. "American newspaper accounts filed by onsite journalists reported that Owens and Hitler exchanged waves after Owens won the 100-meter dash. Of course, the Nazi leader didn't welcome Owens in his box, as he did some of the early 'Aryan' winners. By the time Owens won the 100-meter, international Olympic officials had told Hitler not to honor any gold medalists that way, because Hitler left the Olympic stadium before greeting Cornelius Johnson, an earlier US black gold medalist. 'Hitler didn't receive Owens, but he did not snub him -at least, that's not how Hitler's actions were reported by eyewitnesses,' or by Owens at the time, Schaap writes."

Dropped enquiry earns OECD censure

2007-01-19T06:45:00.000-04:00

It's odd that there doesn't seem to be the outrage in Britain about Tony Blair preventing the police from investigating corruption at BAE that there is elsewhere in the world. Perhaps it's a question of becoming inured to sleazy behaviour from New Labour. But even the United States had a go at them when the OECD discussed it yesterday. The Guardian reports that the OECD, which enforces an international treaty to stamp out the payment of bribes to win contracts, severely criticised the British Government.

"The public expression of 'serious concern' came after Tony Blair claimed this week that Britain had done more than any other country in recent years to root out international corruption. He has taken responsibility for the controversial decision to terminate the Serious Fraud Office's inquiry into allegations that BAE paid bribes to Saudi royals...

"Britain has been given two months to provide further explanations before the group decides what to do. The other countries could "name and shame" Britain for breaking the convention. Officials from America and France were prominent in pressing for firm action against Britain. It is understood that Britain was able to rally only limited support from other countries during the closed meeting in Paris."

Gordon Brown - not just a pretty face?

2007-01-18T07:59:00.000-04:00

British chancellor of the exchequer Gordon Brown is often called a gifted economist - the best Britain's ever had in that office. But with the British press being what it is, all those not in the immediate vicinity ever hear about is his mistakes. So it's a treat to read coverage of a speech he made in India (this is the Guardian's version) that does sound as if it was made by someone with a little more on the ball than the average politician: "Urgent and far-reaching reform of the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the G7 is needed to make old-fashioned international institutions fit to cope with the 'seismic shifts' of globalisation, Gordon Brown said yesterday.

"The chancellor used a keynote speech in India to call for fast-growing developing countries to be given a far bigger role as he outlined what is likely to be a central theme of his premiership if, as expected, he replaces Tony Blair as prime minister. In his first major foray into foreign policy this year Mr Brown said the world had moved on since the UN, IMF and World Bank were created at the end of the second world war."

"The post-1945 system of international institutions, built for a world of sheltered economies and just 50 states, is not yet broken but - for a world of 200 states and an open globalisation - urgently in need of modernisation and reform."

The London Times certainly agrees with him - "Mr Brown made a forceful case for the deeply unfashionable cause of globalisation. He was right to be unambiguous in his defence of its vast capacity to alleviate human poverty throughout the planet. Critics of freer trade like to portray themselves as the protectors of those who have to live on the smallest incomes. Yet if they could abandon their instinctive hostility to capitalism and were to look at the transformation that is taking place in Asia, they might realise that for all their assumed sophistication they harbour ignorant prejudices on a scale not dissimilar to those fools currently featured on Celebrity Big Brother."

If you don't know about those fools (and Good Grief, etc etc) on Celebrity Big Brother, you can catch up by reading this Telegraph story. That's the darker side of globalisation.

Running with the big boys...

2007-01-18T07:56:00.000-04:00

"Last Wednesday, President Bush gave his address to the country about 'the new way forward' for Iraq, and lots of journalists - including me, of course - were in Washington to cover it. But before the Big Speech, there was the little-known Big Meeting.

"And yet, the meeting was a little disconcerting as well. As I was looking at my colleagues around the room - Charlie Gibson, George Stephanopoulos, Brian Williams, Tim Russert, Bob Schieffer, Wolf Blitzer, and Brit Hume - I couldn't help but notice, despite how far we've come, that I was still the only woman there. Well, there was some female support staff near the door. But of the people at the table, the 'principals' in the meeting, I was the only one wearing a skirt. Everyone was gracious, though the jocular atmosphere was palpable."

Surprise, surprise! That was not Nancy Drew channelling Squirrel Nutkin, it was Katie Couric as herself, writing for her CBS News page.

Little thumbs up for poet Daljit Nagra

2007-01-18T07:53:00.000-04:00

The Guardian's Patrick Barkham writes in praise of the fledgling British poet Daljit Nagra: "'Puts Keats to shame' and 'A wonder to behold' are not bad verdicts for the first ever review of your debut volume of poetry. And this five-star critique gets better. 'If you enjoy poetry, genius, or PURE UNRIVALLED QUALITY of any kind,' runs the customer review on Amazon, 'buy this 21st-century bible of poetry and bask in the teachings of The Nagrameister.'

"Sadly for Daljit Nagra, the reviewer is one of the sixth-form students at JFS school, where he works in north-west London."

"Nagra is that rare thing: an unknown poet whose debut collection is being published by Faber, Britain's leading poetry house. The English teacher's pupils are baffled by his continued presence in class. "They think, 'What are you doing in school if you are a poet and you've got a book coming out?' They assume you're going to earn millions because it's a book," he says. Nagra is still as penniless as any poet, though he could soon become better known than many."

Interesting. This is a poem of his that won the Best Single Poem award in 2004. given by the Forward Arts Foundation.

Look we have coming to Dover!

So various, so beautiful, so new ...
Arnold, Dover Beach

Stowed in the sea to invade
the lash alfresco of a diesel-breeze
ratcheting speed into the tide with brunt
gobfuls of surf phlegmed by the cushy
come-and-go tourists prow'd on the cruisers, lording the waves.

Seagull and shoal life bletching
vexed blarnies at our camouflage past
the vast crumble of scummed cliffs.
Thunder in its bluster unbladdering yobbish
rain and wind on our escape, hutched in a Bedford van.

Seasons or years we reap
inland, unclocked by the national eye
or a stab in the back, teemed for breathing
sweeps of grass through the whistling asthma
of parks, burdened, hushed, poling sparks across pylon and pylon.

Swarms of us, grafting
in the black within shot of the moon's spotlight,
banking on the miracle of sun to span
its rainbow, passport us to life. Only then
can it be human to bare-faced, hoick ourselves for the clear.

Imagine my love and I,
and our sundry others, blared in the cash
of our beeswax'd cars, our crash clothes,
free, as we sip from an unparasol'd table
babbling our lingoes, flecked by the chalk of Britannia.

Hmmm.

Reward, don't penalise intelligence - Murray

2007-01-18T07:30:00.000-04:00

"The top 10% of the intelligence distribution has a huge influence on whether our economy is vital or stagnant, our culture healthy or sick, our institutions secure or endangered. Of the simple truths about intelligence and its relationship to education, this is the most important and least acknowledged: Our future depends crucially on how we educate the next generation of people gifted with unusually high intelligence, says Charles Murray in the third and final part of his Wall Street Journal series on education.

Yet, "how assiduously does our federal government work to see that this precious raw material is properly developed? In 2006, the Department of Education spent about $84 billion. The only program to improve the education of the gifted got $9.6 million, one-hundredth of 1% of expenditures. In the 2007 budget, President Bush zeroed it out."

Murray says his articles are not intended to win an argument, but "to begin a discussion; not to present policy prescriptions, but to plead for greater realism in our outlook on education. Accept that some children will be left behind other children because of intellectual limitations, and think about what kind of education will give them the greatest chance for a fulfilling life nonetheless. Stop telling children that they need to go to college to be successful, and take advantage of the other, often better ways in which people can develop their talents. Acknowledge the existence and importance of high intellectual ability, and think about how best to nurture the children who possess it."

Chavez as dictator-in-making

2007-01-17T09:09:00.000-04:00

The Washington Times says Hugo Chavez is a tyrant-in-the-making: "It is not often we have the opportunity to watch a dictatorship being established. But few question this is now under way in Venezuela.

"Following his 2006 re-election, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has made no secret of his intention to remove whatever remaining restraints exist upon his power. Mr. Chavez has asked, for example, for constitutional changes eliminating term-limits on the presidency. He also wants to abolish the central bank's independence as part of his socialist Venezuela agenda.

"Mr. Chavez also intends to ask Venezuela's legislature - controlled by his allies - for the power to impose several 'revolutionary laws' by decree. This proposal will remind those conscious of historical analogies of the infamous 'Enabling Act' passed by Germany's Reichstag in 1933, establishing the legal foundations for the National Socialist dictatorship.

"No one seeking to build socialism, however, has ever been content with totally controlling the state apparatus. Invariably their attention turns to other spheres of society. For several years, Mr. Chavez has been reducing the size and independence of Venezuela's private sector, most recently by nationalizing power and telecommunications companies. He has also stated his intention to close private media outlets critical of his policies."

As Ban brandishes his broom, UN mess grows

2007-01-17T09:06:00.000-04:00

Ban-ki Moon is pledging to reform the UN - the Washington Times quotes him as having said yesterday: "The United Nations should change with much more efficiency and effectiveness and mobility, and highest level of ethical standard. I'm very much committed to carrying out this reform and I need strong support of all member states and staff of the United Nations in carrying these reform measures."

It's ironic, though, that on the same day, a close relative of a former secretary-general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the Geneva-based businessman Ephraim Nadler, was indicted by New York and federal authorities on charges related to the oil-for-food scandal, along with the program's director, Benon Sevan.

The New York Sun reported that "The indictments represent a new stage in an ongoing criminal probe in which 14 Turtle Bay officials and business associates have already been charged, convicted, or pleaded guilty, as prosecutors work to bring to justice those involved in the largest corruption scandal in Turtle Bay's history.

"However, it was not clear yesterday whether the two alleged coconspirators, who have stayed away from America since the Paul Volcker committee detailed their alleged wrongdoings in mid-2005, would even bother to put up a defense."

Exec pay crackdown to hit Bermuda companies?

2007-01-17T08:50:00.000-04:00

Legislation prepared by the Senate Finance Committee, bent on cracking down on executive pay, contains a provision that would impose penalties on companies that incorporated in Bermuda for tax-avoidance reasons between March 2002 and March 2003; it would also penalize Americans who renounce their citizenship for tax reasons, Bloomberg says.

The provision was included in a preliminary draft of legislation that was posted on the panel's Web site yesterday. Carol Guthrie, a committee spokeswoman, said the document was released 'prematurely' and that the bill could be changed before the committee met today.

Halutz down, Peretz to go?

2007-01-17T08:21:00.000-04:00

Senior Israeli Defence Force General Staff officers have welcomed Dan Halutz's decision to resign, saying it was necessary in view of what had come to light regarding the IDF's wartime functioning. One of the military inquiries into the IDF's conduct of the war made what is, in military terms, a damning accusation against him - that he had set no clear objective for troops who invaded Lebanon. In a sense, then, he had made the action impossible to win.

As Haaretz notes in its lead story this morning, Halutz's resignation has suddenly put pressure on both the Prime Minister and the Defence Minister to resign, as well: "As news of Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Dan Halutz's resignation emerged Wednesday, Knesset members from across the political spectrum called on Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz to step down from their positions as well.

"'The political echelon is not innocent of errors. There were failures, oversights by the political echelon,'" one member of Knesset said. That Halutz submitted his resignation to Ehud Olmert, instead of to his boss, the labour leader (and military amateur) Amir Peretz, is an indication that he thinks Peretz should be the next to go.

Halutz was appointed to the post by Ariel Sharon, to replace Lt. Gen Moshe Yaalon, who he had had to sack for opposing the summer 2005 evacuation of Israeli communities from the Gaza Strip. It may be that Sharon wanted someone at the head of the IDF who would carry out his instructions without question, and so chose an Air Force officer who was hardly likely to argue with him about strategy. That would have been convenient as long as Sharon was around, but when his illness took him from the fray, it became a fatally dangerous arrangement, because neither Olmert nor Peretz had a clue about strategy.

Thin out university populations - Murray

2007-01-17T07:33:00.000-04:00

In the second part of his series of three articles on what's wrong with education (see yesterday's posts for the first) author Charles Murray says there are too many people in universities who are not intellectually capable of absorbing a university education. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, he says: "There is no magic point at which a genuine college-level education becomes an option, but anything below an IQ of 110 is problematic. If you want to do well, you should have an IQ of 115 or higher. Put another way, it makes sense for only about 15% of the population, 25% if one stretches it, to get a college education. And yet more than 45% of recent high school graduates enroll in four-year colleges. Adjust that percentage to account for high-school dropouts, and more than 40% of all persons in their late teens are trying to go to a four-year college - enough people to absorb everyone down through an IQ of 104.

"No data that I have been able to find tell us what proportion of those students really want four years of college-level courses, but it is safe to say that few people who are intellectually unqualified yearn for the experience, any more than someone who is athletically unqualified for a college varsity wants to have his shortcomings exposed at practice every day. They are in college to improve their chances of making a good living. What they really need is vocational training. But nobody will say so, because 'vocational training' is second class. 'College' is first class."

A Government-busting issue in Britain?

2007-01-16T07:46:00.000-04:00

The decision of the British Government some weeks ago to stop a police enquiry into corruption allegations against the arms firm, BAE Systems, on the grounds that it was endangering Britain's national interest, was extraordinary. Britain's Attorney General said, at the time: "The prime minister and the foreign and defence secretaries have expressed the clear view that continuation of the investigation would cause serious damage to UK/Saudi security, intelligence and diplomatic cooperation, which is likely to have seriously negative consequences for the UK public interest in terms of both national security and our highest priority foreign policy objectives in the Middle East." Lord Goldsmith was at pains to say that it had nothing to do with commercial interests.

It seems he might have been badly briefed by Tony Blair and his Cabinet. The Guardian is reporting today that all that stuff about security was, essentially, codswollop.

The paper says: "The OECD has demanded an explanation of the government's decision to abruptly close down an inquiry which was investigating secret payments made to Saudi royals... As part of the government's preparations to provide a justification to the OECD, MI6 was asked to sign up to a dossier which made the claim that MI6 'endorsed' Mr Blair's national security claim, according to those who have seen it.

"When it was sent to MI6 headquarters last week, Mr Scarlett, refused. Officials made it clear there were 'differences' between the intelligence agencies and the government over the language used by Lord Goldsmith. A source said that Lord Goldsmith's claims to parliament in December 'contained quite a degree of conjecture'. One official said there was 'nothing to suggest' that the Saudis had actually warned 'if you continue with this inquiry, we will cut off intelligence'."

I'd say this has the power to bring Blair's Government down.

Political theater opens in Washington

2007-01-16T07:44:00.000-04:00

What the Los Angeles Times is already calling "one of the most remarkable trials in Washington in years" gets under way today, as White House aide Scooter Libby is charged with lying to a grand jury.

"Expected to last six weeks, the trial is likely to provide a glimpse into how the White House responded to critics of its Iraq war policies. It will also include testimony from (Vice-President Dick) Cheney, marking the first time that a vice president has appeared in a criminal trial."

If you're intending to follow it, The New York Sun's Josh Gerstein has written what he describes as "a comprehensive spectator's guide to a legal drama that involves the White House, the CIA, and the press."

T.S. Eliot reinterpreted

2007-01-16T07:24:00.000-04:00

A new book about TS Eliot by the British poet, Craig Raine, gives us, according to this New York Times review, "a new, more accessible Eliot, an Eliot he describes as a virtuosic fox in terms of style, and a single-minded hedgehog when it came to themes.

"The one great animating idea of Eliot's poetry, Mr. Raine persuasively argues in these pages, is the theme of the 'buried life, the idea of a life not fully lived,' a life of missed opportunities, repressed passions, forsaken loves...Locating thematic links between masterworks like The Waste Land” and lesser-known works like Animula, Mr. Raine does a dexterous job of showing how Eliot developed the idea of the buried life."

This is by all accounts a fine book, but critics on both sides of the Atlantic have suggested Mr Raine marred it by using, as his final chapter, a defence of Eliot against charges of anti-Semitism. That is, in the circustances, a very difficult thing to manage, since Eliot quite obviously felt Jews were unpleasant.

Perhaps the mistake being made is the application of our present-day rejection of anti-Semitism to people who lived in a time when it was almost as common as a liking for Pink Gins.

IQ's role in holding education back

2007-01-16T07:10:00.000-04:00

The Wall Street Journal has begun today a three-part series of articles which suggest that searches for the causes of failing education systems must take into account the underlying intellectual ability of those being educated. It's written by Charles Murray, who is described as the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, but who is probably better known as the author of the controversial book about IQ, The Bell Curve.

He writes: "This is not to say that American public schools cannot be improved. Many of them, especially in large cities, are dreadful. But even the best schools under the best conditions cannot repeal the limits on achievement set by limits on intelligence.

"To say that even a perfect education system is not going to make much difference in the performance of children in the lower half of the distribution understandably grates. But the easy retorts do not work. It's no use coming up with the example of a child who was getting Ds in school, met an inspiring teacher, and went on to become an astrophysicist. That is an underachievement story, not the story of someone at the 49th percentile of intelligence.

"It's no use to cite the differences in test scores between public schools and private ones - for students in the bottom half of the distribution, the differences are real but modest. It's no use to say that IQ scores can be wrong. I am not talking about scores on specific tests, but about a student's underlying intellectual ability, g, whether or not it has been measured with a test. And it's no use to say that there's no such thing as g...

"I am among the most emphatic of those who think that the importance of IQ in living a good life is vastly overrated. My point is just this: It is true that many social and economic problems are disproportionately found among people with little education, but the culprit for their educational deficit is often low intelligence. Refusing to come to grips with that reality has produced policies that have been ineffectual at best and damaging at worst."

Ban Ki-Moon's UN staffing moonbattery

2007-01-15T08:51:00.000-04:00

Turtle Bay watcher Benny Avni of the New York Sun says Ban Ki-moon is making little headway against the UN's "intractable bureaucratic machine" in the matter of which boy gets which job.

"Several insiders from Kofi Annan's heyday have already been named to key positions, while others are closing in on high-profile jobs. The former UN humanitarian coordinator, Jan Egeland of Norway, is being considered for an appointment as Mr Ban's wandering troubleshooter, mediating disputes in the world's hotspots.

"Mr. Egeland is an energetic, press-friendly, aggressive dogooder - a UN evangelist who strongly believes that Turtle Bay needs to reform the world, rather than the other way around.

"He is also a chartered member of Mr Annan's inner circle and has constantly butted heads with Washington. It was Mr. Egeland who called the American people 'stingy' at a time when 'oil for food' and 'graft' emerged as the top terms that most of them associated with the United Nations. The new UN chief, who has wanted to surround himself with 'team players', risks hiring a loose cannon who has never met a microphone that he did not like."

Saudi Clerics ban the letter X

2007-01-15T08:46:00.000-04:00

Forget the Spanish Inquisition, forget fundamentalists, forget creationists...here's some bird-brainery that puts the whole cacaphony of the world's nitwits to shame, in the shade. The New York Sun rips the veil (a thousand apologies) from the face of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the group of senior Islamic clergy that reigns supreme on all legal, civil, and governance matters in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

They are, in their wisdom, banning the use of the letter X, because it looks like a cross.

"The commission's damning of the letter 'X' came in response to a Ministry of Trade query about whether it should grant trademark protection to a Saudi businessman for a new service carrying the English name 'Explorer'...their experts who examined the English word 'explorer' were struck by how suspicious that "X" appeared. In a kingdom where Friday preachers routinely refer to Christians as pigs and infidel crusaders, even a twisted cross ranks as an abomination...

"Among the commission's deeds is the famed 1974 fatwa - issued by its blind leader at the time, Sheik Abdul Aziz Ben Baz - which declared that the Earth was flat and immobile. In a book issued by the Islamic University of Medina, the sheik argued: 'If the earth is rotating, as they claim, the countries, the mountains, the trees, the rivers, and the oceans will have no bottom.'

"Another bright light of the commission, Sheik Abdel-Aziz al-Sheikh, recently stopped a government reform proposal aimed at creating work for women by allowing them to replace male sales clerks in women's clothing stores. Sheik al-Sheikh damned the idea, saying it was a step 'towards immorality and hellfire'. The underlying logic is breathtaking: Women are more protected by buying their knickers from men! Over the years, the commission has rendered Saudi Arabia a true kingdom of darkness. Movie theaters are banned, as are sculptures, paintings, music, and the mixing of sexes in public."

The Gov LA learned to Love

2007-01-15T08:27:00.000-04:00

You have to hand it to Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was a pretty odd candidate for Governor of California in the first place, even in Ronald Reagan country. And he had the hardest of all political lessons to learn when he got his feet under the desk - being right ain't the half of it. But on the job, he learned really quickly. And now, even though the LA Times is really trying to make another point altogether, it is talking, without a hint of a giggle, about Schwarzenegger as president of the country: "The Governor of the nation's largest state was reelected in a landslide in November, even though his Republican Party is a minority in California. He works with Democrats in a way that offers the rest of the country a model of much-needed bipartisanship. To kick off his second term, he has proposed the most ambitious healthcare and environmental reforms in the country, and he is also committed to a massive reconstruction of the state's infrastructure.

"Yet, oddly enough, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is not on the list of potential presidential candidates in 2008.

"Why? Because the founders were worried in the 18th century that our fledgling nation might go the way of Poland and be overtaken by a foreign monarchy. Hence the constitutional qualifier that only 'natural-born citizens' are eligible for the presidency of the United States."

Nice turns 40

2007-01-14T08:52:00.000-04:00

Today's the 40th Anniversary of the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. The San Francisco Chronicle remembers: "There are a lot of myths about that day, and one truth: If you were there then, you are, like, old...The Be-In - unlike a teach-in, or a sit-in - was what Chronicle columnist Ralph J. Gleason called 'the greatest nonspecific mass meeting in years, perhaps ever.' There was no real point. It was a gathering of the tribes, the passing of the baton from the Beat Generation to the hippies. It was the winter before the Summer of Love. It just was."

And after the Rolling Stones sang Under My Thumb at Altamont in 1969, it wasn't any more.

Ban-Ki Moon's a breath of fresh air - Bolton

2007-01-14T08:31:00.000-04:00

John Bolton is making some acute observations about Ban-Ki Moon's first days in the driver's seat at Turtle Bay. Writing in the Washington Post, he says we've misunderstood what the Secretary General was up to when he declined to criticise the hanging of Saddam Hussein: "The real controversy here is not about the death penalty, but more fundamentally about the proper role of the United Nations itself, and especially of the secretary general. The United Nations as an institution cannot have a legitimate position on a domestic issue such as the death penalty when there is such fundamental disagreement among its sovereign members - and especially where democratically legitimate governments have different views. To say that the secretary general must mouth the position adopted by a majority of countries in some UN body, whether legitimately or not, is a prescription for endless trouble. Were earlier secretaries supposed to declare routinely that 'Zionism is a form of racism', as the General Assembly solemnly and overwhelmingly decided in 1975?

"According to the UN Charter, the secretary general is the institution's 'chief administrative officer' - not its chief moralizer. Those who complain that Ban's comment forfeited the role that Annan so ardently played should understand instead that Annan's proclivities were not ultimately helpful to the world body.

"If he had spent less time moralizing and more time doing his day job, the United Nations may have been spared the oil-for-food scandal, procurement fraud and widespread sexual exploitation and abuse by its peacekeepers."

SAS hunt fleeing Al-Qaeda in Somalia

2007-01-14T08:09:00.000-04:00

American and British special forces have spent more than a year reconnoitering in Somalia, with a view especially to hunting down Al Quaeda terror suspects as they tried to flee the country, according to the Times of London. "The dramatic victory by Ethiopian troops was the culmination of months of preparation inside and outside Somalia by American and British special forces, and US-hired mercenaries. The 'professional assistance' was recruited by officials based in the US embassy in Nairobi at the end of 2005 as part of a deniable operation, sources claimed.

"'The brief was to enter Somali territory with the objective of studying the terrain, mapping and analysing landing sites and regrouping areas, and reporting on suitable entry and exit points,' one source said...

"An SAS team is in Somalia now, "hunting down Al-Qaeda terror suspects as they try to flee war-torn Somalia after the crushing defeat of the country's Islamist forces last week. The suspects are trapped between invading Ethiopian troops - assisted by US special forces and American mercenaries - and the Kenyan army and SAS troops who are acting as 'training advisers' but have been leading operations along the border, providing a 'screen' to trap terrorists."

Telegraph, too, pans Gordon Brown's speech

2007-01-14T08:06:00.000-04:00

London's Telegraph didn't like what Gordon Brown said about secession either (see below): "Gordon Brown wrote some stirring words on Saturday about the need to preserve the United Kingdom. What he failed to mention was that his party has done more than even the Scottish National Party to break up the Union. By forcing through legislation giving Scotland and Wales devolved parliaments, Labour has left the English electorate angry and resentful that Scottish and Welsh MPs still sit in Westminster, determining what will become law in England. Furthermore, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Brown has handed Scotland far more than its fair share of the UK's tax receipts, thereby fuelling the suspicion that 'every Scot's first priority is to do down England'.

"Mr Brown's failure to acknowledge his and Labour's role in what he calls 'the dangerous drift in anti-Union sentiment today' was astonishing, since one of the first things he and his party did when elected in 1997 was to 'play fast and loose with the Union and abandon national purpose to focus on what divides' (his words for those who now point out the unresolved unfairnesses inherent in devolution).

"The inability of ministers to take responsibility for the consequences of their own policies is, however, the salient characteristic of the present Government. In a speech the day before Gordon Brown insisted on the importance of 'Britishness', Tony Blair lamented the low level of spending on the Armed Forces, which is to blame for British soldiers going to war without proper equipment, and he highlighted the problems inherent in the use of force to remove or transform foreign regimes. Mr Blair seemed to have forgotten that he was Prime Minister when all the relevant decisions were made. If those decisions have turned out disastrously, there is only one person Mr Blair can blame: himself. Yet there is never any hint of self-criticism, never the slightest acceptance of blame. The result is his pathetic search for other, imaginary scapegoats for his own failures of the past decade."

Bill Clinton's the real Tony Blair soulmate

2007-01-13T08:26:00.000-04:00

It seemed obvious when George Bush was new in office, but the impression has become very hazy in the meantime - Tony Blair is really much more a Bill Clinton kind of a guy than he's a Bushie. The Los Angeles Times makes a point which has become decidedly barbed with age: "Although he is yoked to President Bush in their common Iraq policy and lame-duck status, British Prime Minister Tony Blair has more in common with former President Clinton. The litany of likenesses includes a belief in a 'third way' between old-style liberalism and the free market, a fluency in public that critics dismiss as glibness, a wife who was a successful lawyer, a willingness to accept the hospitality of show-business celebrities and, finally, a reputation for running an ethically challenged administration.

"It's this last, and lowest, common denominator with Clinton that has lately bedeviled Blair. Last month, he was questioned by police about allegations that his Labor Party nominated supporters for seats in the House of Lords and other plum positions in exchange for campaign loans. The Scotsman newspaper put it this way: 'As Tony Blair approached his tenth anniversary in office, his ambition was to secure a place in history. And he's certainly done that by being the first serving prime minister to be interviewed in a criminal investigation whilst in office.'"

Brown's flabby plea for a united kingdom

2007-01-13T08:09:00.000-04:00

He may be a good finance minister, but Gordon Brown doesn't seem to be the best advocate in the world. Arguing against a variety of secessionist movements alive in Britain at the moment, his best idea seems to be to putting some documents he thinks constitute Britishness to be put on display. In a Telegraph op-ed, he writes: "In discussions with the British Museum, the British Library and the National Archive, we have agreed that there should be a permanent exhibition of historic documents that constitute the essence of our Britishness. And just as we should explore - perhaps with a national competition - what the country itself thinks should be included in this exhibition, we can and must also find better ways to show our national flag as a symbol of inclusion and national unity, taking it back from the BNP, which makes it a symbol of division.

"I am certain that the teaching of British history should be at the heart of the modern school curriculum, and the current review of the curriculum should root the teaching of citizenship more closely in British history. And just as America is strengthened by the institutes that encourage discussion on the very idea of America, an Institute for Britishness could encourage debate on our identity, and what documents from Magna Carta onwards mean for today.

"More so than in any other century, the 21st-century world will be characterised by peoples of different nationalities living closer to each other and having to find ways to live together. Other countries can learn from us getting the balance right between diversity and the strong common bonds that, at root, unify and bring us together. So, far from our Union being an anachronism or in its death throes, we can be a beacon for the world."

Sharon warned Bush about Iraq

2007-01-13T06:53:00.000-04:00

A former senior adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Barak and former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, Yossi Alpher, claims in an article in Forward that Ariel Sharon warned George Bush against invading Iraq. He writes: "Publicly, Sharon played the silent ally; he neither criticized nor supported the Iraq adventure. One reason for his relative silence was Washington's explicit request that Israel refrain from openly backing its invasion of an Arab country or in any way intervening, lest its blessing damn the United States in Arab eyes.

"But sometime prior to March 2003, Sharon told Bush privately in no uncertain terms what he thought about the Iraq plan. Sharon's words - revealed here for the first time - constituted a friendly but pointed warning to Bush. Sharon acknowledged that Saddam Hussein was an 'acute threat' to the Middle East and that he believed Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction.

"Yet according to one knowledgeable source, Sharon nevertheless advised Bush not to occupy Iraq. According to another source - Danny Ayalon, who was Israel's ambassador to the United States at the time of the Iraq invasion, and who sat in on the Bush-Sharon meetings - Sharon told Bush that Israel would not 'push one way or another' regarding the Iraq scheme.

"According to both sources, Sharon warned Bush that if he insisted on occupying Iraq, he should at least abandon his plan to implant democracy in this part of the world. 'In terms of culture and tradition, the Arab world is not built for democratization,' Ayalon recalls Sharon advising.

"Be sure, Sharon added, not to go into Iraq without a viable exit strategy. And ready a counter-insurgency strategy if you expect to rule Iraq, which will eventually have to be partitioned into its component parts. Finally, Sharon told Bush, please remember that you will conquer, occupy and leave, but we have to remain in this part of the world. Israel, he reminded the American president, does not wish to see its vital interests hurt by regional radicalization and the spillover of violence beyond Iraq's borders."

Thanks for the tip, Brenda.

2007-01-12T08:51:00.000-04:00

R Emmett Tyrell in the Washington Times says well what I said badly the day before yesterday, on the subject of exactly what Sandy Berger was up to when he stole documents from the US National Archive.

"Thanks to a congressional report released this week we now know Mr. Berger was allowed to look over (and quite likely filch) files of materials from the Clinton administration that had yet to be archived and were very germane to how historians will judge him and his boss.

"According to The Washington Post, the congressional report 'said Berger took a special interest during his early visits [to the Archives] in files from the office of former White House counterterrorism official Richard A. Clarke, which included uninventoried draft documents, memos, e-mail messages and hand-written notes.' 'Had Berger removed papers,' the report notes, '...it would be almost impossible for Archives staff to know.'

"In other words, the National Archives blundered badly when it gave Mr. Berger access to documents that were unrecorded and uncopied. Mr. Berger, an admitted liar, has almost certainly lied about what he did with these documents. And historians will probably never know what notations they contained or even major revelations about the Clinton administration's assessment and treatment of terrorists in the years before September 11.

"What we do know is that the Clinton sleuths now have still more evidence of the Clinton administration's abuse of power and fundamental lawlessness. That administration's public record is replete with the Clintons' obstructing investigations by withholding documents. Just recall Hillary's subpoenaed billing records from the Rose Law Firm that were kept for months from the independent counsel before they appeared magically in her living quarters. Or remember when her aides illegally entered the just deceased Vince Foster's White House office to carry off materials only law enforcement officials should have seen."

2007-01-12T08:04:00.000-04:00

Want to see what Dante Alighieri's schnoz looked like? The Telegraph's re-creation says. "Dante Alighieri did not, after all, have bulging eyes or a pointed chin - but his enormous nose was true to life, according to scientists who have created a replica of the poet's face by measuring the remains of his skull."

2007-01-12T07:28:00.000-04:00

Peggy Noonan, who was a White House speechwriter herself, calls Bush's speech "a jarring, furtive-seeming thing". In the Wall Street Journal, she writes: "There was something unnerving about the speech, from the jumpy beginning to the stumbles to the sound glitches. A jittery affair, and some dusk hung over it. At the end I suspected the president's aides had instructed him again and again not to strut or have an edge. He perhaps understood that as: Got it - don't be me. He couldn't do wounded wisdom, but he could repress cocky cowboy. The result was that he seemed not chastened but effaced, not there. It was odd. One couldn't find the personal geography of the speech."

Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, says the plan's no good. In the Washington Post, he writes: "The commitment of 21,500 more troops is a political gimmick of limited tactical significance and of no strategic benefit. It is insufficient to win the war militarily. It will engage US forces in bloody street fighting that will not resolve with finality the ongoing turmoil and the sectarian and ethnic strife, not to mention the anti-American insurgency."

Victor Davis Hansen agrees with Noonan - Writing in National Review Online, he said: "This was not Churchill, not FDR, and not JFK Wednesday night, and there was not quite enough about winning and victory - but the content was still good enough...

"...The increase - no one knows whether the 20,000 number is adequate - could make things far worse by offering more targets and creating more Iraqi dependency if we don't change our operations. But if the surge ups the ante by bringing a radical new approach on the battlefield as the president promises, then it is worth his gamble."

2007-01-12T04:41:00.000-04:00

Fourteen members of an advisory board to Jimmy Carter's human rights organization resigned on Thursday, to protest his new book, which criticizes Israeli policy in the Palestinian territories. It's an AP story carried by AccessNorthGa.com.

"The resignations from The Carter Center board are the latest backlash against the former president's book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, which has drawn fire from Jewish groups, been attacked by fellow Democrats and led to the resignation last month of Kenneth Stein, a center fellow and a longtime Carter adviser.

"'You have clearly abandoned your historic role of broker in favor of becoming an advocate for one side,' the departing members of the Center's Board of Councillors told Carter in their letter of resignation."

2007-01-11T08:44:00.000-04:00

So far, only a few of the mainstream media have followed up on the New York Sun's scoop yesterday, about leak investigations being stymied by a lack of cooperation from "intelligence agencies". It's a story which will take a little time to build, I think, because the Sun used a freedom of information request to get at the documents concerned, and answers to such requests take time. Most of the other media will want to see the documents for themselves.

But the Sun did carry a fairly blunt editorial on the subject this morning: "All this underscores the likelihood that we have had agencies of the American government breaking the law to defeat a military campaign into which the American Congress, by an overwhelming vote, sent our GIs.

"These implications were sensed immediately by the blogosphere, where Powerlineblog.com lit up on Mr. Gerstein's story at the crack of dawn, and on the airwaves, where Rush Limbaugh devoted part of his broadcast to Mr. Gerstein's story. Said Mr. Limbaugh, 'It's become more and more obvious that there is a symbiotic relationship between these agencies - we're talking about State, we're talking about the Pentagon, CIA - there's a symbiotic relationship between these agencies and the drive-by media now, and they're not going to let an election get in their way. They've got their own agendas. If they have to destroy the policies of a particular administration, they'll do it via leaks, and then when these criminal leaks are investigated, they don't participate.'"

2007-01-11T08:35:00.000-04:00

In his speech about Iraq last night, President Bush warned the Iranians that the US was going to start getting tough on their sending support to Iraq for attacks on American troops.

This morning, Bloomberg is reporting that: "US forces in Iraq raided Iran's consulate in the northern city of Arbil and detained five staff members, a state-run Iranian news service said. The US soldiers disarmed guards and broke open the consulate's gate before seizing documents and computers during the operation, which took place today at about 5 a.m. local time, the Islamic Republic News Agency said. There was no immediate information on whether any of those detained are diplomats."

And DEBKAfile is carrying a report of three loud explosions being heard in Khorramshahr, which faces the Iraqi town of Basra across the Shatt al Arb waterway. The agency says Khorramshahr "is one of the main towns from which Iran smuggles fighters, weapons and explosives into Iraq, for delivery to Iraqi Shiite supporters."

2007-01-11T08:27:00.000-04:00

Duncan Campbell of the Guardian has an update on a very old story: "Thirty years ago, Philip Agee, then a 41-year-old former CIA officer living in Cambridge, was told that he was to be deported from Britain as a threat to the security of the state. After a high-profile but unsuccessful attempt to fight the order, he and his young family left Britain for ever. But what happened to the man denounced as a traitor by George Bush Sr, threatened with death by his former colleagues and portrayed as a communist stooge by the British government?"

Thanks for the tip, Brenda.

2007-01-11T00:10:00.000-04:00

I guess this is kind of a second cousin of cargo cult-ism - people in...well, I'm not sure what these two places have in common, so let's say people a long way from here...who name their children after villains, celebreties and such. The BBC reports on a village in the nothern Indian state of Bihar, in which there are lots of Saddam Husseins. The latest little Saddam isn't the only kind on the block with that name, says the BBC "There are more than 20 other Saddam Husseins in Lakhanow alone. Local people say there are more than 100 Saddam Husseins in 27 adjoining villages dominated by mostly Sunni Muslims. There is even a family with one son called Saddam Hussein and a younger sibling called Osama Bin Laden."

And in Venezuela, something similar, reports The New York Times. "A glance through a phone book or the government's voter registry reveals names like Taj-Mahal Sanchez, Elvis Presley Gomez Morillo, Darwin Lenin Jimenez, even Hitler Eufemio Mayora. Other Venezuelan first names, which roll off the tongue about as easily in Spanish as in English, include Yusmairobis, Nefertitis, Yaxilany, Riubalkis, Debraska, as well as Yesaidu and Juan Jondre - transliterations of 'Yes, I do' and 'One hundred'."

Thanks for the tip, Comics Guy.