Afghan’s top Taliban head captured in Pakistan

The fellow doubtless has a tale to tell but surely interrogation won’t start until the ACLU arrives to represent him. Anything else would be, well, Cheneyesque. Well, it will be interesting to see whether Obama and his ilk’s love and flowers approach to war actually works. Our soldiers can’t fire at anyone preemptively, our interrogators can only ask questions of prisoners who have been lawyered and thus clammed, up, and we will never ever do anything mean against Iran.

All of that is supposed to produce the new world order of peace and love but so far, Iran isn’t responding – the Saudi’s say we don’t have time to wait for sanctions to work, years down the line, just as a for instance, and those pesky Taliban aren’t  reciprocating our love and gentle affection in the way we obviously expected. But no doubt all this will come around, the Olympics will come to Chicago after all and the French will finally learn to love and respect us. I believe in the hopey change thing, and so should you; unless you’re one of those cynical spoil sport deniers, dude.

Would ya get rid of the friggin’ harelips, please??!!

Greenwich Time has done a creditable job of redesigning its website but, after all that effort, insists on adorning it with pictures of poor little ugly harelips – on the top of the page, the side of the page and no doubt coming soon, as pop-ups. I’m sorry for the poor bastards, but they are off-putting and just down-right ugly and I won’t go on the site anymore. Awful and incredibly stupid from a business standpoint. Whoever is running this site from corporate is either desperate for pennies or truly wants the web site to fail because he’s kept it cluttered with horrendous shots of yellowed, diseased teeth, fat “Moms from Greenwich” and now, harelips. These ads can’t pay much, if anything, so why are they there?

Silent films at Tarrytown Music Hall

It’s a German silent film festival in Tarrytown, with music composed by Donald Sosin. I met, and heard Donald in Pordenone, Italy when I was there last fall. Wonderful musician and a terrific, guy, even if not nearly  so comely as Maud Nelissen. $10 buck tickets, easy to get to; go discover an old – new art form.

SILENT FILM TREASURES – LIVE MUSIC BY DONALD SOSIN
PRESENTED BY THE MUSIC HALL
The 1920s, the golden days of the Weimar Republic, saw a cultural revolution that included the rise of German Expressionist Cinema. Great filmmakers, including F.W. Murnau, G.W. Pabst, and Lotte Reininger, created visually lavish, stylized film masterpieces that have stood the test of time. Four of the greatest films from this period will be shown, all in recently restored, visually magnificent 35mm prints, and all with live music by Donald Sosin, one of the world’s leading silent film accompanists. Films selected, and introduced, by David Schwartz, Chief Curator, Museum of the Moving Image. Series is made possible by The Westchester Community Foundation and The Village Of Tarrytown.
PROGRAM: (Click film titles for more info & YouTube clips.) 3/21: Nosferatu | 3/24: Last Laugh | 4/18: The Adventures Of Prince Achmed (Family film) | 4/24: Pandora’s Box

TICKETS & INFO

We report, you decide

No, not the ugly guy in the middle!

If only it worked like this in D.C.

Reader Ex-Pat sends along this story about the cold winter killing off Florida’s invasive species.

Something’s not kosher at the Washington Post

In this entertaining article about Hillary Clinton’s visit with the King of Saudi Arabia I noticed this paragraph:

The 86-year-old monarch slowly led the way to the banquet room. The food selection would qualify as the ultimate bar mitzvah party. Arrayed along the side, at least four dozen types of meat, fish and chicken dishes, including huge platters of lobster, awaited the guests. The tables were groaning with even more food and dishes, too numerous to count, let alone eat. The hand fresheners were scented by Bulgari.

Are lobsters invited to bar mitzvahs?

Back when Democrats thought weather proved global warming

Full audio here, but here are samples:

BYRD 2002: We need a climate change strategy badly. Look at the kind of winter we’ve had here in Washington. One snow, three inches? What can we expect for the spring and summer seasons? What’s going to happen to our crops, our livestock, our economy? This is serious. I’ve lived a long time, 84 years. Something’s going wrong out there. I don’t need a scientist to tell me that. We had better do something about it.

BOXER 2007: The potential consequences will be devastating for our families in the future and for the world. Now we’re seeing the early warning signs. People can come down to this floor and say whatever they want. We’ve seen melting of snow, we have seen melting of permafrost, increased temperatures, warming of lakes, rivers, oceans, changes in the seasons

The old guard exits, stage left

Bye Bayh

The revolution is warming up

Unionized Rhode Island teachers at failing high school refuse to work 25 minutes more per day so Supervisor fires every one of them. Cool.

Boy, that Hitler gets around!

Opining on climate change now.

National media – global warming causes snow!

You get back in here!

NPR has just broadcast yet another story in support of global warming – the snows of this winter must have got our media and their science pals in a tizzy – they’re losing the war! A week or so ago, they were arguing that local weather isn’t evidence of climate change which of course is true but, after twenty years of charlatans like Al Gore blaming everything from earthquakes to hurricanes to tsunamis on global warming, they have obviously found that they’ve done their job too well and the public is convinced that snow outside the window must be evidence, one way or the other, of the state of the climate.

So they’ve gone back to the Al Gore technique, as NPR’s story demonstrates, and are trying to scare us all back into the fold of “settled science”. Frankly, I think the sheep have escaped.

Away from the U.S., the media is beginning to tell the truth, like this article quoting the British father of global warming admitting that there’s been no warming since 1995. But not so here. As this blogger asks, “If the tree of global warming fell in the American Press’s living rooms, would it make a sound?” Not so far.

UPDATE: WaPo has now mentioned the topic, defensively. But not The New York Times:

I am not sure how long the reputation of a great newspaper can withstand the consequences of this kind of news judgment; the steady (and to me, painful and unwelcome) erosion of the Times‘ influence and prestige is unlikely to end until its pages regain the reputation as the first, best place to learn about the vital events of the day. At some point, the Times will simply have to break down and let its readers in on the Climategate story.  When that happens, it will be interesting to see how it explains why it chose not to inform its readers, many of whom care passionately about this issue, of a series of vital developments unfolding one after the other on a matter of great concern. Was the newspaper so blinded by entrenched bias and assumptions that it was simply unable to see what was news?  Or did pro-environmentalist staffers actively work to block the paper’s ability to cover a major news story because they didn’t think publication would benefit an agenda they held was of enormous global importance?

I wonder how you fight a war like this?

In an attempt to win over civilians, our troops are forced to fight with water pistols. Perhaps that’s the only way to win – I sure wouldn’t want to be one of the kids on the ground trying to make this policy work.

Marines said their ability to fight back has been tightly constrained by strict new rules of engagement that make their job more difficult and dangerous. Under the rules, troops cannot fire at people unless they commit a hostile act or show hostile intent.

“I understand the reason behind it, but it’s so hard to fight a war like this,” said Lance Corp. Travis Anderson, 20, from Altoona, Iowa. “They’re using our rules of engagement against us,” he said, stating that his platoon had repeatedly seen men dropping their guns into ditches before walking away to melt among civilians.