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Hitchens provides a welcome antidote to the Reagan tributes (via Hak Mao):

The fox, as has been pointed out by more than one philosopher, knows many small things, whereas the hedgehog knows one big thing. Ronald Reagan was neither a fox nor a hedgehog. He was as dumb as a stump. He could have had anyone in the world to dinner, any night of the week, but took most of his meals on a White House TV tray. He had no friends, only cronies. His children didn’t like him all that much. He met his second wife—the one that you remember—because she needed to get off a Hollywood blacklist and he was the man to see. Year in and year out in Washington, I could not believe that such a man had even been a poor governor of California in a bad year, let alone that such a smart country would put up with such an obvious phony and loon.

Oh yes, I got it! Nerdy brain-teaser via Secular Blasphemy.

the Ministry of Interior revealed that nine on a list of 26 most wanted terror suspects were IMSIU graduates.

Hugh Hewitt (via Lileks) quotes this from an article in the National Geographic:

“By mid-January of 2004, 270 mass graves had been reported. The Free Prisoners Society estimates that five to seven million people ‘disappeared’ in the past two decades, the majority of them Shiites.”

So in sixty years time will there be celebrations in Baghdad to commemorate Iraq’s liberation from Saddam, with doddery old octogenarians recalling those fateful days? With re-runs of Comical Ali’s rabid denials, and the toppling of the statue, and Saddam being pulled out of his spider-hole? If there are, the most significant questions will surely be: why was so much supposedly enlightened opinion in the West so vehemently against this liberation, and why did large sections of the Western media at the time portray it not merely as misguided, but as a criminal enterprise?

Yes, it’s bonuses all round to the fat controllers. I hope this provokes some outrage, but the general level of cynicism about our rail network is so pervasive that most will no doubt just shrug:

Network Rail awarded huge bonuses to its directors yesterday despite announcing that they had failed to meet any targets for train punctuality and had made an annual loss of £1.1 billion.

The company, which is subsidised by the taxpayer and is responsible for Britain’s tracks, signals and stations, said it had given its five executive directors bonuses equivalent to 24 per cent of their basic salaries. This was despite almost one in five trains running late.

John Armitt, the chief executive, will receive a bonus of £112,320 on top of his £468,000 basic pay. His deputy, Iain Coucher, gets £99,840 in addition to his £416,000 wage.

a gracefully sustained and peaceful democracy. […]

In all likelihood, the best way to prepare for a post-Saddam Iraq would have been to bust Saddam a lot sooner–giving Saddam himself a lot less time to prepare for a post-Saddam Iraq. Instead, U.S. effort and energy was absorbed by the immense effort to win allies in the U.N. Security Council–chiefly France, Russia and China–who were neck-deep in oil deals with Saddam, much of that via the U.N.’s own Oil for Food program.

The need was to introduce into the Middle East the revolutionary idea (in theory and practice) that a tyrant could fall and be replaced by something better. Setting this in motion was a risk; not to do it would have been a greater risk. And although it is beyond the power of any of us to predict with perfect accuracy all outcomes, there has been a force set in motion in Iraq that may yet, given time, bring the Middle East into better alignment […] with the Free World.

trem right jew pro likud writer try to get somes “scoops” about a Saddam Chirac deal! lol!
his arguments ares so phamtasma that even a 12 years old boy could see Timmerman as biased and liar a la O’reilly and Richard Perle line..
Realities ares that Iraq debts to USA, russia france and others was so big while 90’s, that they was ready to get promess on promess to remove it! the Total oil field was so undealing bid, because first they ares speculations, and that french oil compagnies + foreign ones can’t explore a midieval iraqie oil system alonne, why french compagnies didn’t had the lead if Saddam is chirac son, and same bid while iraq was USA friend!
Timmerman try to divert americans on francophobia, with lies or no arguments without proofs speculations about a country who fough in 1991 aggainst the dictator! ………………

Five people found that last review helpful. And who knew that France lost 2/3 of its adult male population in WW2?

Is it just me – as they say – or is most of the hatred and intolerance now coming from the left?
Here’s (via Western Front) a theatre review from the Village Voice:

No U.S. president, I expect, will ever appoint a Secretary of the Imagination. But if such a cabinet post ever were created, and Richard Foreman weren’t immediately appointed to it, you’d know that the Republicans were in power. Republicans don’t believe in the imagination, partly because so few of them have one, but mostly because it gets in the way of their chosen work, which is to destroy the human race and the planet. Human beings, who have imaginations, can see a recipe for disaster in the making; Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don’t give a hoot about human beings, either can’t or won’t. Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm.

This opinion is presumably not shared by Foreman; you can gauge the breadth of his imaginative compassion from his willingness to extend it even toward George W. Bush, idiot scion of a genetically criminal family that should have been sterilized three generations ago.

struction more than 20 years ago.

In June 1981, eight Israeli jets flew at 100 feet across Jordan and Saudi Arabia, evading detection to destroy the French nuclear reactor at Osirak, just outside Baghdad. The raid followed years of failed diplomacy: Saddam’s French, German and Belgian suppliers had refused to let anything disrupt their lucrative role in his oil-for-nukes program.

Until now, no one had told the full story of the extraordinary planning required for the raid and the derring-do of the pilots, who had calculated that there was a one-in-four chance of being shot out of the sky before reaching the target. Rodger Claire, a former magazine editor, has gained access to Israeli military records and to the pilots who handled the mission. In “Raid on the Sun,” he evokes the rigors and the risks of the plan.

Prime Minister Menachem Begin and his Likud allies, such as Ariel Sharon, had to stiffen the spines of Labor Party and intelligence officials who feared the repercussions of such a raid. “If I have a choice of being popular and dead or unpopular and alive,” Mr. Sharon told fellow cabinet members, “I choose being alive and unpopular.”

the way our minds work), the abduction encounters seem to provide a virtually unparalleled opportunity to bring about the transcendence that so many people seek.

“We are seeing the results of a war prosecuted by a leadership that appears to be singularly lacking in the capacity for doubt, self-questioning, or the acknowledgement of mistakes,” writes Mack in his Globe piece. “We have been plunged into a moral chaos that can only end when saner minds . . . can once more assume authority in this nation.”

Maybe the aliens can help.

eddah, Dammam, Makkah, Madinah, condemning this terrorism in all its manifestations, forget it, it’s not going to happen. We have other priorities. Hitler was obsessed with the racial purity of Greater Germany. We are obsessed with the religious purity of the Arabian Peninsula.