Back to the phish story

As you may recall but probably prefer not to, on Monday March 24 my Skype account was phished, and subsequently so was my old faustaw@yahoo.com email account.

Skype resolved the problem within three days.

Yahoo, however, never did, because the account is so old the security information AND the second email address I used when I registered have disappeared, so I changed my email accounts - one Yahoo, one Gmail. I also changed every password of basically every account that I could remember having used that faustaw@yahoo.

The problem remains that my account at MyBlogLog can only be accessed through the old Yahoo account. I used MyBlogLog to see information on my blog traffic. It served me well in at least two occasions where I had to re verify my stats for business purposes.

So yesterday I was talking to my friend Richard Fernandez, who suggested that I email the following:

Hello,
Last month my old yahoo email account, faustaw@yahoo.com was phished and I have not been able to use it. Since my MyBlogLog account for my blog, http://faustasblog.com is tied to that address, I can't access the account.

I now have this new yahoo email address and would like to continue your service.

Therefore, I am going to post this number [random 12-digit number out of a book] at http://faustasblog.com as soon as you acknowledge receipt of this email. That way you can verify that I am the owner of that blog.

If you agree, I will email you the link to the post so you can easily find it.
Thank you,
Fausta Wertz
http://faustasblog.com

As soon as they acknowledged receiving my request, of course I posted the number, much to the amusement of several readers. A couple of them left humorous comments. Another one Skyped called me to ask if her dog looked sick, while reading that post.

About an hour or two later I get the first form letter I received on March 24. I removed the post with the 12-digit number. Then I called Yahoo's service number, 866-562-7219, which I received from my other friend Mamacita, and that was a waste of an otherwise perfectly good half hour.

If any of you have any suggestions for straightening this out, please let me know. For the foreseeable future, I give up.

Thank you for your forbearance.
PS, yes, you can call this a rant.



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Death by Blogging

The NYT and most journalists can't figure out what's hit them, so now they're coming up with any which way to discredit the competition.

Allison just sent me this:
In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop

Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create a global media outlet without a major up-front investment. At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Diet, smoking habits, lifestyle, genetic predisposition? Heck, no! Blogging kills, says the Times.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

Where does the NYT find this people?

Robert's clamoring, BLOGGERS of the WORLD UNITE! You have nothing to lose . . . but your pajamas!

Well, indeed: Last year some idiots were asking for a bloggers' union. We had a good laugh over that during that day's podcast.

Meanwhile, last night some of the fatally opressed were eating and drinking like there is no tomorrow before going back to the blogging salt mines:


Welcome, Instapundit readers. You'll enjoy reading about how the slaves bloggers spent their furlough here in Princeton last night. Nonstop strain, Indeed!

UPDATE
Whew! What a night!


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Announcing: Forbes.com Business and Finance Blog Network

I'm proud to announce that I'm now a member of the Forbes Business and Finance Blog Network.

Lies, damn lies, and NYT's statistics

The NYT comes up with a charade of an article where they try to work up a Deer Hunter narrative: Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles.

Luckily Winds of Change is there to look at numbers, critically.

UPDATE, Monday 14 January
Entire NYT’s To Blame For Defaming Vets
More from Matt Sanchez

1.5 Million troops have cycled in and out of Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001. Crunching the numbers and controlling for the fact that over 90% of those deployed overseas are male. The average civilian population is 5 times more likely to commit a homicide than the veteran population, including those who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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More Congo, Kos quotes, murder on the border, speeding, and tonight's podcast

My article on the latest in the Congo the Dog Saga is now up at The Star Ledger's NJ Voices
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John Hawkins came up with The 2nd Annual Worst Quotes From The Daily Kos (2007 Edition). Number 10:

10) "I wrote a diary a short time ago about how the Bush administration helped ruin my marriage. It wasn't because my husband was a Bush supporter or anything...it was because of all the stresses from job loses, living without health insurance and getting sick, to my husband being forced to take a job where he wasn't home much that helped ruin my marriage." -- angrybird

Trust me, they go down from there.
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Like something out of a Robert Rodriguez movie:
Singer shot to death after surgery in Matamoros ER

Apart from the police and narco-gangsters, few groups of people have suffered more in Mexico's brutal drug wars than the singers whose music often chronicles the carnage.

The latest casualty appears to be Zayda Peña, 28, a singer who was shot dead Saturday in a hospital emergency room in the city of Matamoros, across the Rio Grande from Brownsville.

Prairie Pundit:

Whatever the reason, the persons responsible were determined to not let her survive her hospital visit caused by the first attempt.

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Gerard always has a great post. Take a look at Night Road to Mesa: 219 MPH in a Lamborghini. And Busted by the Web.
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More blogging later, but remember tonight's podcast at 9PM Eastern. My guests will be Joyce Vennis, author of Postpartum Depression Demystified, and ShrinkWrapped, a psychoanalyst.

We will be discussing relationships. It'll be a fun podcast, indeed. The call in number is (646) 652-2639, and there will also be live chat, too. Join us!

I may not be...

... the world's most popular blogger, but at least I'm not a fake.

More blogging tomorrow.

Memes, women and terror

Jeremayakovka replied to last week's tag before I asked, but today he has Eight Theses On Being Jeremayakovka

In terror, time and language collapse. What remains in the mind (if anything) is the will -- yet even that is often displaced. Tossed in that surf, my body became a vivid, constricted concert of heart, lungs, throat, nostrils, a concert bellowing in stunning, perfect pitch: Confront terror with every fiber of your being. If you don't, it will seize you and make off with you. Fight it NOW or succumb forever.

Go read the rest.

Obi's Sister makes her own jewlery, Alice the Camel listens to my podcasts (Thank You, Alice!!), Spanish Pundit loves tea, and Lady Godiva (in Spanish) likes people who don't talk a lot, tell the truth and don't beat around the bush.

Great news: Media Mythbusters Wiki Page!

Media Mythbusters Blog has inagurated their Media Mythbusters Wiki Page

This is great news, and I'll be visiting often.

Darren moves to California

While I was on vacation in North Carolina, Darren was moving from Richmond, VA to Los Angeles, CA.

It took my family and me 12 hours to drive back from Durham, NC to Princeton, NJ. We avoided the Rte 95 Richmond/Washington/Baltimore/Philadelphia corridor and went up the DelMarVa peninsula to New Jersey because of the holiday traffic, and traffic was pretty light that way
BUT
by the time we got home my back was in such a state of pain that I actually asked a man I've never met to lock me up somewhere if I ever think of driving anywhere for twelve hours.

Knowning what I know now, if I had started from Richmond to LA by car or truck, I fully expect that I would have gone missing somewhere near Lynchbugh, Tennessee.

So it is with great admiration that I recommend Darren's posts,
California, Here We Come
Bottle Up and Explode
We Got a Little Ol' Convoy

Wishing Darren, Heather, and Rufus great joy and continued success in their new home.
----------------------------------------------------------------
In other moving news, Beth has started packing.

More blogging later.

Planck's Constant's Mosaic

Bernie of Planck's Constant dedicated one of his beautiful mosaics to my blog
Thank you, Bernie.

I was Bernie and Layla's podcast guest last week (May 16).

(And no, that's not me in any of the pictures. Thanks for asking anyway.)

The disquieting creeping-up of European censorship

Last March I posted that the French Constitutional Council had approved a law that could lead to creation of a parallel judicial system controlling the publication of information on the Internet, effectively banning journalists from reporting violence. At that time, the French government proposed

a certification system for Web sites, blog hosters, mobile-phone operators and Internet service providers, identifying them as government-approved sources of information if they adhere to certain rules.

One of the reasons I post on France is that, where France leads, Europe follows.

Well, today Baron Bodissey posts about censorship in Finland, The proposed law, however, is much more far-reaching and included IM and IRC, and includes the hiring of moderators censors to monitor it all.

The items in italics are the replies by Finnish State Prosecutor Mika Illman on the proposed law:

Hiring an adequate number of moderators would become mandatory, as it already is mandatory for a network publication to have an editor, who is responsible for controlling the journalistic work.
...
3. How does your suggestion take IRC and instant messages into account?

The principle is the same. The administrator would have a duty to monitor the discussion and in due time to take action against clearly illegal material. This is no stronger obligation than the one TV or radio broadcaster has in the case of live broadcast.

Who would pay for all this and how it would be done two of the many unasked questions.

Couldn't happen here, you say? Here in the USA, broadcast radio is trying to censor internet radio. Little Miss Attila explains why you should support H.R. 2060.

Update: And then, there's using the Fairness Doctrine As Political Intimidation

In preparation for the 2008 elections, Democrats in Congress are trying to intimidate radio and TV broadcasters into including more Democrat views into their programs.

They are trying to resurrect an antiquated Federal Communications Commission regulation, the Fairness Doctrine, to require that opposing sides be presented to arguments. The Fairness Doctrine emerged at a time of very few radio, then TV, stations. Although in 1969 the Supreme Court upheld its constitutionality, in 1974 the Supreme Court did conclude the Doctrine "inescapably dampens the vigor and limits the variety of public debate", and in 1984 that a scarcity of airwaves argument was by then flawed as a multitude of stations emerged and were expected. In 1985 the FCC ceased to support a Fairness Doctrine, and formally scrapped it in 1987. The number of radio stations has doubled since 1970, the former three networks’ TV stations are now challenged by over 500 alternatives, and the Internet carries a wide-diversity of views.

At root of the current push by Democrats is, as conservative columnist Geoge Will observed, "The illiberals' transparent, and often proclaimed, objective is to silence talk radio." Why? "By trying to again empower the government to regulate broadcasting, illiberals reveal their lack of confidence in their ability to compete in the marketplace of ideas, and their disdain for consumer sovereignty - and hence for the public."

Read evert word.

Apres le deluge

or as we say in Joisy, after the farookin' flood.
If you recall my April 16 post, we had a lot of flooding in the area.

These are the steps to the small stone bridge in Kingston. This is what they looked like then:
And this is what they look like now. The car hidden by the trees would have been entirely under water.

This is what the stone bridge looked like on April 16; as you can see the entire ground floor and foundations of the house were submerged:


Yesterday I took this picture standing on that very bridge:

On April 16, the Millstone River, the Raritan and Delaware Canal and Carnegie Lake overflowed to the point where they became one torrent:

and Route 27 was closed because the bridge to Kingston was under water;

This is how far the waters have receeded; they are still slightly higher than usual but you can appreciate the difference by looking at the cars going over the bridge:


On April 16 Siggy helped me out with the podcast, which you can still listen to here. As I was telling him the other day, the Siggy has the fans. While at the podcast page, don't miss my latest Blog Talk Radio podcast.

Gates of Vienna on free speech in Finland, and here in the USA

Dymphna at Gates of Vienna sent these two must-read posts:
Muzzled in Finland

One of the foremost Finnish immigration and islam critical bloggers Mikko Ellilä is facing a police investigation concerning his blog posts.

Please read the posts in full; Dymphna and the Baron are suggesting we take action: Finland Cracks Down

1. If you are a blogger, publicize this on your blog. If you are Finnish, and have additional information on Mikko Ellilä, send it in to us or to other blogs to add to the publicity. In particular, a photo would help — I couldn’t find one.
2. Contact the Finnish authorities. For our American readers, the Finnish embassy has a handy US map with state-by-state contact information here.
Here’s the main contact info for their embassy in Washington:

Embassy of Finland
3301 Massachusetts Avenue N.W.
Washington D.C. 20008
U.S.A

Tel. 1-202-298 5800
Fax: 1-202-298 6030
E-mail: sanomat.was@formin.fi
Homepage: www.finland.org

As a follow-up,follow-up,

The Finnish government is apparently trying to impose Chinese-style totalitarian censorship on the internet. Since the parliament would not approve of any new censorship laws, the government is trying to impose censorship ILLEGALLY by abusing existing laws against hate speech. Such laws were originally obviously meant to be used against Nazi-style "kill all Jews" rhetoric, but since the Muslims use that kind of rhetoric all the time, and THEY are not being interrogated by the police, whereas people who say things like "Islam is a totalitarian ideology" ARE interrogated, the hate speech laws are obviously being used AGAINST their original purpose.

Again, this is an extremely important issue. Do not give in.

I emailed today.

You believe something like this can't happen here?
Well, think again.

More on the "hate crime" legislation here (PDF file)
Update No Law Abridging, 2007 Edition

Any number of groups eager to force their views upon their opponents and their opponents' audiences would swarm aboard any such enterprise. Imagine a law that would require Robert Spencer's Jihad Watch to permit "rebuttal" entries from CAIR, ISNA, or the Muslim Brotherhood. Consider the prospect of environmentalists and global warming flacksters being legally entitled to "equal time" on contrary Websites. Or imagine, if you can, giving Al Sharpton or Louis Farrakhan the legal privilege of forcing a "rebuttal" into this document, in the name of "fairness."

Combine "fairness doctrine" legislation with "hate speech" legislation, some of which is already pending before several state legislatures, and what would anyone be allowed to say without fear of prosecution or a crippling legal action?

Two great posts from Friends I Haven't Met Yet

Here are recent posts from two of the best bloggers around:
Statistics 101 from Scheiss Weekly, where Mamacita's homework assignment to her college students was,

Topic: "The Perfect Spouse/Partner"

Each of 56 students (ages 18-64) (average age: 36) (31 women, 25 men) made a list of the top 12 attributes of the perfect spouse/partner. Here are the results, averaged, and ranked in order of importance.

Over at Eternity Road, yesterday Francis Porretto posted one of his excellent Sunday Ruminations, Intimacy, Inference, and Identity

My main point here is that each of us has an identity to himself based on incomplete knowledge or comprehension. Such a reflexive identity -- the psychological term for it is "self-concept" -- is composed partly of fiction far more often than not. The fiction helps us to paper over those flaws and shortcomings in ourselves we can't bear to face.

Empirical substantiation is easily available. Virtually everyone believes himself to be above average in most of the measures that people prize. It's so easy to evade objective assessment of oneself that nearly everyone believes himself to be more moral than average, more congenial than average, smarter than average, a better athlete than average, and (of course) a better driver than average. That's not possible even in Lake Wobegon, but study after study indicates that it's the way we view ourselves -- consciously.

Why? Because we need to have a good opinion of ourselves if we're going to face others, and the challenges of life, with any confidence. Apparently, a "good opinion of oneself" seems to demand the belief that others aren't quite as good in the ways that "matter." In other words, we deceive ourselves about our failings because in this instance, deception, by making our self-concepts palatable, improves our survival prospects. In other words, it enhances our security.

Read both - and bookmark their blogs.

Update Make that three posts from Friends I Haven't Met Yet - St. Catherine and Manly Men

Catherine was a woman who was all that she was born to be. She advocated that in everyone and said, “If you are what you should be, you will set the world on fire,” so it makes sense that she would like manly men who had not lost their birth-gifts to fear of the world's regard.

If you are not being what and who you were born to be, you're going through life unfulfilled - and the world is missing whatever it was you were supposed to contribute.

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Don't forget to listen to today's podcast at noon.

More blogging later.

Michael Fumento's in Afghanistan

And he's been writing excellent articles,
A Blog on Warblogging

When you make a decision to go to a war zone and leave behind the comforts of home, you do just that. There are true pleasures to being out there with guys defending our country and there are true deprivations. Of course, there are war zones and there are war zones. In Iraq's International Zone (Green Zone) or in Baghdad hotels or even a major base like Camp Fallujah and Camp Ramadi, you have a real degree of comfort and ease in going about your work. Likewise for Bagram Air Base or Kandahar Air Base in Afghanistan. But join the troops at a Forward Operating Base (FOB) and comfort and ease of work plummets. Those are the places I go to and I only have two real concerns when I get there.

First, I want every chance to see combat, and hence be in a dangerous area and go on every patrol. We need reporters who work out of safe areas; I'm just not one of them. That's why I refused to go to Tikrit in Iraq when the Combined Press Information Center (CPIC) tried to send me there. There was virtually no chance of combat and, as it happens, during the time I would have been there was none. Now CPIC is mad at me for not shelling out my own money for airfare and war insurance to spend 12 days where I knew nothing would happen and where nothing did happen.

Second, since while I do write articles when I get back but blog while here I need a degree of internet access. And a degree is all you to get. Connections are almost always mind-numbingly slow. You can wait literally 10 minutes or more just for a website to come up. Some will never come up because they're too loaded with graphics.

A Stick in the Mud
Welcome to Mizan!
Go read all his articles.

Michael was my BLog Talk Radio guest last month, and I hope to have him back as a guest after he returns from Afghanistan.

Tonight, you couldn't get there from here

After 36 hours of torrential rain and high winds, we've had substantial flooding unlike any I've seen in 18 years of living in Princeton. Not even when Hurricane Floyd went through the area has there been as much flooding.

After spending the morning drying my basement, I thought I'd go check out what the evening commute was looking like in the area near my house. The governor had declared a state of emergency this morning so traffic was much lighter than usual.

The parking lot at church at the corner of River Road and Route 27 (Princeton-Kingston Rd) was flooded, except for a small section where a few cars were able to park:

Carnegie Lake (the scenic lake shown during the titles of House) overflowed its banks:

The first floor of the house in Kingston which I believe was formerly a mill at the end of Carnegie Lake is totally flooded:


This canoe and its dock (the black triangle in the center of the photo) were carried all the way here and are now stuck in front of the patio doors. Whoever tied the canoe knows what they're doing: the knot held.

Normally these steps go down to a small stone bridge from which you can walk from Route 27 to the Canal:

This is what the stone bridge looks like right now:


The Millstone River, the Raritan and Delaware Canal and Carnegie Lake overflowed to the point where they are one torrent:

Route 27 is closed because the bridge to Kingston is under water:



I then headed to Route 1 via Harrison Street. Harrison Street is closed from the corner of Faculty Road all the way to Route 1. [Note, Tues April 12: The Harrison St bridge over the lake was dry; the problem is the area between the bridge and Rte 1, which routinely floods]. Harrison Street traffic heading out of town was being detoured to Washington Road. It wasn't moving.


Last night the wind was howling so loud it kept waking me up; when I headed to Starbucks this morning we had hail; this afternoon, snow flurries. We're expected to have more rain for the next 24 hours.

Tonight I'll follow my advice, have some sugar-free hot chocolate, light up the fireplace, and watch 24.

Update: Meanwhile, in New Hampshire...

Second bloggers' conference call with Sen. John McCain

Sen. John McCain's speech at the Virginia Military Institute explains his position on the war:

"I just returned from my fifth visit to Iraq. Unlike the veterans here today, I risked nothing more threatening than a hostile press corps. And my only mission was to inform my opinions with facts. We still face many difficult challenges in Iraq. That is undeniable. But we have also made, in recent weeks, measurable progress in establishing security in Baghdad and fighting al Qaeda in Anbar province. To deny the difficulties and uncertainties ahead is an egregious disservice to the public. But as General Petraeus implements his plan to correct the flawed strategy we followed in the past, and attempts to spare the United States and the world the catastrophe of an American defeat, it is an equal disservice to dismiss early signs of progress. And now we confront a choice as historically important as any we have faced in a long while. Will this nation's elected leaders make the politically hard but strategically vital decision to give General Petraeus our full support and do what is necessary to succeed in Iraq? Or will we decide to take advantage of the public's frustration, accept defeat, and hope that whatever the cost to our security the politics of defeat will work out better for us than our opponents? For my part, I would rather lose a campaign than a war.

"However it ends, the war in Iraq will have a profound influence on the future of the Middle East, global stability, and the security of the United States, which will remain, for the foreseeable future, directly affected by events in that dangerous part of the world. The war is part of a broader struggle in the Arab and Muslim world, the struggle between violent extremists and the forces of modernity and moderation."
...
"It is impossible to separate sectarian violence from the war against al Qaeda. Al Qaeda is following an explicit strategy to foment civil war in Iraq. The only way to reduce and finally end sectarian violence is to provide greater security to the population than we have in the past, as we are doing now in Baghdad; to encourage Iraqis to abandon their reliance on local militias, and to destroy al Qaeda and other truly irreconcilable enemies of the United States and the Iraqi people.

"Our defeat in Iraq would constitute a defeat in the war against terror and extremism and would make the world a much more dangerous place.

Among the members of the Senate, Sen. McCain has a sense of urgency. He also understands the connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq, while the Democrats in the House want to banish the term terror.

During the bloggers' conference call he discussed progress in Iraq, the real possibility of ensuing chaos if the US leaves Iraq, and the role of bloggers

James Joyner was able to ask the first question:

I managed to get in first and put the above questions to him. Essentially, he says that he'll continue to give as many speeches as he can to convince the public. If he were president, he’d go on C-SPAN regularly and give specifics about our progress and work to change public opinion.

In follow-up, I noted that he's not president and that the guy who currently holds the post has not shown much aptitude for either specifics or public speaking. McCain responded that Bush is decent in the right setting and that he should probably hold a lot of small, informal meetings with reporters where he has a map and points out various spots on the map where we're having success.

David All took detailed notes on all the questions. David asked the last question, on the role of bloggers; Sen. McCain replies

"I feel strongly that bloggers are a vital part of the information technology infrastructure in the world. I freely admit to you that in 2000, I don’t know and didn't know if bloggers even existed. I can tell you that I would do two things: 1. Every two weeks I would have a regular briefing on C-SPAN about the good news that we’re seeing on the ground. The second thing would be a call with bloggers every two weeks about the same issue. Now sure, we wouldn't have time for every question, so maybe we would have to hold a raffle where we take the first 15 names out of the hat to ask their question. If I can make one editorial comment, I think the bloggers have a lot of maturing to do in a lot of areas. But just look at how far they've come. I believe historians will look back and note that bloggers have changed the way people communicate with each other and the entire world."

The call was only 1/2 hour long and I wasn't able to ask a question, but I am very encouraged to see that there's at least one Senator who's earnest on winning.

Jeremayakovka, and the reality of draconian climate change policy

Jeremayakovka sent this article about what the impacts of draconian climate change policy mean to people: A CEO With A Spine

"Some wealthy elitists in our country," he told the audience, "who cannot tell fact from fiction, can afford an Olympian detachment from the impacts of draconian climate change policy. For them, the jobs and dreams destroyed as a result will be nothing more than statistics and the cares of other people. These consequences are abstractions to them, but they are not to me, as I can name many of the thousands of the American citizens whose lives will be destroyed by these elitists' ill-conceived ‘global goofiness' campaigns."

Mr. Murray was a coal miner in Ohio who survived two mining accidents and built funds from a mortgaged house into a private coal mining company with more than 3,000 employees. He expresses concern about the proposals in Congress that will ration the use of coal, warning of much worse adverse consequences to Americans than those experienced after the 1990 amendment of the Clean Air Act.

Mr. Murray told me that he had seen the effect of the drastic reductions in coal production, and the wrenching impact on hundreds of communities, as a result of that legislation. In Ohio alone, from 1990 to 2005, about 118 mines were shut down, costing more than 36,000 primary and secondary jobs. These impacted areas have spent years recovering, and some never will. He spoke of the families that broke up, many lost homes, and some were impoverished, because of legislation that the environmentalists call a "success."

"I don't need a computer graphic like in Gore's movie, to learn about this havoc," he told me, "I lived it and saw it firsthand."

Global Warming's Gray Area

Climate Change: Drowned out by an official prophecy of doom, one of our top hurricane forecasters says Al Gore "doesn't know what he's talking about." And he was being charitable.

Jeremayakovka also has a terrific post about how he became an ex-Liberal, When In Sparta Do As A Spartan.

He comes out swinging. Go read it.

Britain, not great, and today's items

Britain Was Once Great Britain

But today, the sun not only literally sets on an extinct British empire; it is figuratively setting on Britain itself.

Two recent examples provide evidence:

One is the way Britain handled the recent act of war against it by Iran. Everything about the British reaction revealed a civilization in decline.

Whether the British sailors and marines should have put up more resistance -- i.e., any resistance -- to the unprovoked Iranian military attack is something for military and other experts to decide. Whether the captured sailors and marines offered more information and more cooperation, and more smiles than was necessary to the leader of their kidnappers, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, will also be determined in ongoing investigations. Whether the British government engaged in appeasement of Iran or ineffective diplomacy will also have to be judged.

What does seem clear, however, is that the British government did not confront the Iranians in any way reminiscent of a great country, let alone of Britain's great past. If we judge the British government's reaction alone -- without any reference to the behavior of the British sailors and marines -- Iran was the feared power, not Great Britain, which acted like the supplicant.

But what really makes one weep for Britain's lost greatness is what has happened since the sailors and marines were released.

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The NY Sun has an interesting series of editorials on Antiquities and Patrimony; The New Yorker has more.
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There's a fatwa against the Jawa Report.
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News Flash: People Get Nasty on the Blogosphere!
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Last Fall Harrods was throwing out soldiers in uniform on Veteran's Day. Now the trend's crossed the Atlantic and we have Marines in Dress Uniforms Kicked Out of Target Store
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Obama doesn't know that Congressional ethics rules forbid the use of federal office space for political and campaign activity.

Thank you, Larwyn.
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In a lighter mode, after last Friday's item on bamboo and kudzu - where Siggy said that bamboo is polically correct kudzu - Obi's Sister sent a link to this:

from the author of

I'm sure Ms Balwin will never run out of kudzu to write about, but if she does, she can move North and write about bamboo.

It turns out there are TWO more books on kudzu cooking:

I don't think that even my friend who loves spinach would go for the kudzu.

Send the Elephant to Baghdad!

It's been a busy day here at Fausta's blog, but I have a request for my readers,

RedState has been invited by the Pentagon to go to Iraq, and they are raising funds to send Jeff and Academic Elephant. Long-term readers of Fausta's blog know that Elephants in Academia has been a most valuable source of information and insightful commentary on Venezuela. I regard her as one of my friends I haven't met yet.

Go support their trip, and if you're a blogger, ask your readers, too.