Via Rantburg I learn that renowned scholar Bernard Lewis has given a substantial interview to the German newspaper Die Welt. While my German is rather rudimentary, I can see that Lewis called Saddam Hussein a Nazi, and he traced Nazi ideology in the Middle East to its implantation by Germany more than sixty years ago. He also predicted that Europe would have an Islamic majority by the end of this century. I suppose this was a case of telling truth to impotence. It's almost certainly too late to avert the next world tragedy emanating from Europe.

Recently my friend Steve expressed some jitters about Bush prospects for reelection. Though gay, Steve cares little for identity politics. A typical North Dakota Republican, he's distressed by Bush spending, but he regards defense and the anti-jihadist campaign as paramount issues, overriding all other considerations. I told Steve to ignore the polls and expect an easy Bush win, when the time came. My only uncertainty is the makeup of Congress. Though my reasoning for Steve was a lot less elaborate than Den Beste's masterstroke thesis, it followed the same general track. If you want to read a really thorough engineer's analysis of the political outlook, check out U.S.S. Clueless.

It's bad enough to put an actor in the White House (although it turned out better than I expected). It's far more dangerous to elevate a man who plays himself in real life.

While debating foreign policy with a reader of FB, I found myself addressing the subject of allies. Many Americans (including virtually all Democrats) have been misled by the media. They have been told that post-9/11 the US has engaged in "unilateral" action, together with Great Britain and several dozen other nations. If pressed about the silliness of this claim, true believers dismiss the other coalition members as piddly allies of convenience, purchased by blood money. For America's Europhiles, no action is multilateral unless it includes France. (As a logical corollary, France itself never engages in unilateral action, even when it does.) If this is nuance, give me simplisme! Here's part of my retort to the reader who thought I was proposing real unilateralism and surrender to Paris as the sole alternatives.

I never spoke of "going it alone." That's not what America is doing, and virtually no one proposes it. (Those who do are mostly isolationists who believe in a Fortress America.) But we have chosen our allies poorly. To defeat Islamism, we should work with Great Britain, Poland, other Eastern European countries, and the following non-Western powers: Nigeria, Israel, Turkey, India. We have been foolish to expect anything of France, Germany, or Russia, all of which are utterly complicit with Middle East dictators. We have been twice foolish to cultivate corrupt Islamic polities like Egypt and Pakistan. And thrice foolish to coddle our mortal but oh-so-generous enemies in Saudi Arabia.

To which the reader replied:

Alan, you're right. The discussion (perhaps not for this thread) ought to be on how to choose our allies and who our allies should be.

Let's at least come to an agreement that Bush hasn't chosen wisely every time, is not infallible, and then we might be able to consider whose poor choices in allies would lead to the worse outcome.

Amazing how many people seem to suppose that agreement with Bush on one subject necessarily implies agreement on every subject. Leftist media have been depressingly successful at spreading the slander that Republicans are theocratic racists who all think exactly alike. Anyway, I was planning to discuss criteria for principle-based alliance when I found that Claudia Rosett had already done so in today's Opinion Journal. Furthermore, she addressed the topic with such eloquence that I have nothing to add. Go there. Read. And weep for our feckless politicians.

In the course of a day, I foray far and wide on the internet, without stirring from my padded leather recliner. I would prefer to wander the phenomenal world, if I could. For the present, that is impossible. Yet even in my traveling days I only ranged one continent. I would never have seen Uzbekistan. Until recently I knew nothing of the place; the world had passed it by. Now it has become a crossroad between East and West again, as it was in the time of Marco Polo. And the ancient strife of Islam with the rest of the world has revived there as well.

Tolkien's imagined Middle Earth is also a battleground where competing powers strive for supremacy. Yesterday via Andrew Harris, the Twisted Spinster, I learned that the extended edition of ROTK is indeed not scheduled for release until late in the year. However, the studio has recently shown previews, knowing that spoilers would only whet the eagerness of the audience. While I wait for New Line's DVD, I'm rereading the Tolkien epic for the first time in about a decade. I thought it was time to administer some corrective for cinematic misimpressions. The books employ suspense to set up their action: for example, Frodo glimpses and evades the Black Riders repeatedly before he learns their true nature at Weathertop. He is not chased to the Buckleberry Ferry; the Riders arrive late, and the hobbits see only shadows on the quay. Director Peter Jackson Jackson could not spare the time to depict Frodo's growing dread, as cinema audiences have lost their taste for suspense since the days of Alfred Hitchcock. Now they want to see the horror straightaway, then launch into the chase.

Tolkien's slow-paced buildup is truer to life. Real horrors take time to unfold. All through the Nineties, with attack after attack, jihadist Islam reared further into view, yet most Americans tried to ignore what was stalking them. Now, three years after 9/11, many want to oust the president who dared to answer war with war. In a cowardly self-deceit, they blame the response for the acts that engendered it. And they ignore the sure signs of the next assaults, which they will excuse in turn as the consequence of previous self-defense. The Sandy Berger affair demonstrates how little we have learned. Most of the press obsesses over where the miscreant hid the booty on his ample anatomy, rather than what those documents said and why they were taken. Virtually no one observes that the true scandal is the fact that a principal in the policy failure was allowed such access, while another actually sat on the 9/11 Commission.

Beyond any doubt, the horror will come to our shores again. In fact it is already here, moving among us, and plotting its next atrocity. I share the fatalism of Astonished Head, whom I also discovered via Andrea Harris, and who deserves a place on my link list for his clever writing and blogged persistence. Trains, airplanes, cars: take your pick which will be the vehicles of death next time. Maybe all three in a single, coordinated strike. The nuke in the cargo container comes later, since we have done nothing (so far as I know) to secure the Pakistani nuclear program, despite its compromise by the sinister Doctor Khan; and less than nothing to stop the mullahs of Iran, who have pledged to use nuclear weapons against the West when their program is complete. Unless preempted by sterner action, these things will happen. Our enemies mean what they say; but too many Americans, being liars and prevaricators themselves, refuse to take the enemy at his word.

An avid cyclist, my friend Chip has forwarded me this report which is currently making the rounds of his brethren in the sport.

Italian police question Simeoni

Filippo Simeoni yesterday spent three hours in the company of investigators from the Italian drug squad answering questions about the incident in stage 18 of the Tour de France in which Lance Armstrong chased down an attack by Simeoni.

According to a report from AFP, the investigators are considering bringing charges against Armstrong for sporting fraud, violence, and intimidation of a witness.

Simeoni gave evidence in 2002 in the investigation and trial of Italian sports doctor Michele Ferrari, after himself being questioned by the Italian drug squad in 1999 after raids found substances in the houses of several Italian riders. After initially saying he had obtained "other medications" in Switzerland, Simeoni later claimed Ferrari had prescribed him EPO.

In an interview with Le Monde in April 2003, Lance Armstrong, who has consulted with Dr Ferrari, accused Simeoni of lying. Simeoni subsequently said he had initiated legal action for defamation against Armstrong.

In stage 18 of this year's Tour de France, Simeoni bridged across to the early break (which subsequently stayed away and contained the stage winner) but was chased down by Armstrong. When the other riders in the break asked Armstrong to return to the peloton so that they'd have a chance of staying away, he said he would only do so if Simeoni returned to the peloton as well. Both riders dropped back to the main bunch.

Dr Ferrari discussed the case at length in this Cyclingnews interview.

"Only in Europe," appended Chip, "can someone have criminal charges brought against him for being too intimidating in a sporting event."

I don't understand the nuances of the sport, with its interplay of team and individual performance, but I feared for Armstrong's safety on the continent. Americans are becoming the new Jews--targets of ever more virulent prejudice. But the Jews were never numerous and strong.

I wanted at least one close-up of a puppy, but it required some sleight-of-hand for me to keep one of the little beasts distracted, so it wouldn't lunge at my face and the camera.

Puppies watched other puppies dragging my cane around; the dam watched me, to make sure I didn't harm any puppies; and I was talking to Joan, the headmistress of Gun Dog Kennels.

Drudge has published the transcript of a 'debate' between Michael Moore and Bill O'Reilly. It looks like the fatman outwitted the fathead. No properly informed person would let Moore get away with the false premise that secures his argument. Here's a key passage midway:

O: Well we’re back to the weapons of mass destruction

M: But that was the reason

O: The weapons of mass destruction

M: That we were told we were under some sort of imminent threat

O: That’s right

M: And there was no threat, was there?

O: It was a mistake.

The mistake is to let Moore's lie fly by. In truth Bush said that Saddam was not an imminent threat, but that he should be ousted anyway. If Clinton hadn't left his cohones in Monica's mouth, and had acted as decisively as Bush did, Moore & Co. would have cheered. But they would rather have seen Saddam stay in power than watch him become a trophy for the winner of the disputed Y2K election. For too many Democrats, politics has become a kind of bloodless blood sport. What will they do if they lose again?

Life aboard can be difficult even for the most dedicated and experienced cruiser. People take to living on the water for odd and disparate reasons. Often they seek joy that has eluded them on land. They rarely find it. Kavafy's poem The City holds true in many contexts: "As you have destroyed your life here, in this small corner, you have ruined it in the whole world." (I really ought to spend a year collaborating on formal translation of Kavafy with Dave Mason or Alicia Stallings, who know Greek. Lineated-prose versions fail to convey the true extent of Kavafy's achievement.)

Yesterday I sent a note to my friend Steffen. I hadn't written him since May. Laid up with my broken foot, I found it too depressing to think of my winter in Florida and the boat I might never see again. This time Steffen replied at once with his own tale of woe. He has run out of money. Forced to borrow funds from his mother in Germany, he has given up on his voyage to Australia. Kathy has flown back to Brisbane. Next week Steffen intends to singlehand La Boheme to Havana, where he can finish the deck work more cheaply and be at least a bit more safe from hurricanes. In the fall he'll return his Hylas to Fort Lauderdale and put it up for sale. He says nothing about plans beyond that time, but he expects to be docked in Dania when I arrive. It's just possible that he may accompany me back from Summerfield to slip 57 at the end of October. If business prospects improve further, I may even find employment for him aboard Dreamweaver, where so many projects remain undone.

No, I'm not writing about the Coon Rapids household of my friend James, or recollecting happier times in my own riverside home, with the skipper, his two black labs, my cat, and our seven-year houseguest. My topic of the moment is Tim Hulsey's review of The Glass Menagerie, as performed in the Kennedy Center.

I saw the first film adaptations of Tennessee Williams' plays when I was a boy, and too young to understand the subtexts. Later I learned what motivated the author, and I greatly enjoyed the old rogue's autobiography. I also read the last, sketchy work he published in Christopher Street, a long-defunct gay magazine that provides a time-capsule view of the Seventies, for those too young (or too old) to remember. The skipper was placing his early verse there at the same time, and we kept all our back issues, though Tim M. may never authorize republication of those poems.

I always admired the pluck of the playwright, and Tim still likes to retell his favorite Williams anecdote from the autobiography. The occasion was a Hollywood luncheon in the 1950's, where Jack Warner's guest was a young author who'd made the Warner Brothers studio quite a bit of money. Williams brought a 'friend' along, whom the gruff old man regarded with suspicion.

"What do you do for a living, young man?"

Without batting an eyelid, Frank Merlo replied, "I sleep with Mr. Williams."

So began gay liberation. The Federal Marriage Amendment is truly a rearguard action, in every sense of the term.

Yesterday's discussion of the Single-Issue Blogger caused me to read Andrew Sullivan again this morning. Normally I only check that site once every week or so. But it's convention time, and the guy is one of the best-known, most prolific political bloggers, so what the heck. I found the Kerry convert in the full flush of his new enthusiasm. Yet I also noticed how carefully he qualified his praise of the "centrist" convention. Consider this passage:

Carter delivered an attack-speech that was all the more effective for being measured and often damning by mere inference. Less, someone has finally figured out, is more. (Of course, I'm leaving aside here the sheer chutzpah of Jimmy Carter giving anyone lessons on defending this country, or, for that matter, fighting the war on terror. My point is merely that Carter sketched exactly the centrist-conservative narrative that the campaign is obviously trying to portray. And it worked.)

How exactly did it work? The measure of efficacy will not be taken till November. Or does Sullivan know, via some instant poll in his head, exactly how the electorate is reacting to this charade? Will people really be snookered by pusillanimous veterans like Carter and Kerry? Or will they notice how Kerry tries to hide his post-Vietnam conduct with constant references to his 'service' in wartime? Sullivan thinks this predictable appeal to centrism is an attack plan against Bush; but it is equally a defense against charges of squishiness. The trouble is, most Democrats are squishy, and they may sound more ridiculous than credible to real centrists.

In another post Sullivan spoke with evident surprise of "party discipline," forgetting what such discipline signifies: a bald deceit (since the party is really anti-war and hates the military) enforced by a remorseless regimentation of self-styled dissenters, who normally squeal that they're being 'censored' if anyone dares even to criticize them. Yet when The Party says 'bend over' these loyal cadres are as plaint as a proctologist's patients.

If the electorate votes for Kerry, it will deserve the consequences--Hillary's national health boondoggle, economy-killing tax hikes, Kofi Annan and Jacques Chirac vetoes of US foreign policy, war over Taiwan, and more Islamist atrocities at home. All these are likely--even probable--if the feckless multilateralists and cultural relativists of the Democratic party enlarge their considerable power through a presidential victory.

If, on the other hand, the electorate chooses Bush for a second term, it will suffer less onerous encroachments of government, some modest entitlement and tort reforms, more dud initiatives like hydrogen subsidy or a Mars venture, and a stumbling, messy progress in the hyperwar. In a few weeks Republicans will be asked to bend over, too. I pity the poor proctologist.

The dam found a refuge from her ravening puppies.

Each summer I pay several puppy-socialization visits to Gun Dog Kennels. Dogs grow up more tractable if they get to play with people during the formative weeks when they begin exploring the world. Last week I brought the digital camera, and I'll be posting several photos over the next few days. This is Joan, the high priestess of puppydom.

Newsweek has published a fawning interview with Bernardo Bertolucci, whose ever-so-nuanced worldview can be distilled to the motto: sex good, war bad. What insight! What depth! Perhaps it's unfair for me to sneer, since I haven't actually seen The Dreamers, a tale that romanticizes incest and polymorphous perversity amid the 1968 student revolt in Paris. I gather the two triangulating lads are quite toothsome, but the hyper-hetero director couldn't quite bring himself to film the homoerotic side of the story, which was based on a more sexually-daring novel. Nicely timed to coincide with the Democratic Convention, the Bertolucci interview affords a glimpse into the delusional nostalgia that motivates antiwar Democrats in the United States. Here is a key passage, which I have interspersed with a few asides:

Are there instances in the film that remind you of your own experiences as a filmmaker in Paris in the 1960s?

Yes. That kind of love—that passionate love—for movies, I know it very, very well. What was great in 1968 was that you could conjugate that with lots of jazz and philosophy and politics and everything could go together.

Those weren't the only things going together.

The film re-enacts the Paris protests of 1968, which started with students demonstrating against the government’s closure of the Cinematheque Française, which showed films other theaters would not, but grew to include millions of disgruntled French workers. Do you see any similarities to current events?

I think that, for example, when [Henri] Langlois was fired [as director of the Cinematheque Française, setting off the protests], it is something that could happen today. And I would be very curious to see how the people reacted. I wonder if you would have a riot today….

Nothing like blood in the street to make a guy feel young again...

I'm not sure people feel so passionately about film anymore, but there have been massive protests around the globe over the past year against the war in Iraq.

Yes, it’s very encouraging. There are still young people in the world whose brains have not been atrophied by television. That is a good sign. But if you think of the majority, I don’t think you have the same kind of excitement in the youth today that there was in 1968—or in general in the 1960s.

I worry about the brains atrophied by Bertolucci movies.

Do you think the protests of 1968 were successful?

You know, people today tell me that the 1968 protests were a failure. I ask why? They say because it didn’t work and the revolution didn’t happen and there was no major change. But I think this is a complete historical injustice because I remember life before 1968, and I can see the incredible changes. Before 1968, our life was full of authority—all authoritarian figures. After 1968, you didn’t have that because people didn’t accept it. And the most important change was the relationship between men and women, the position [equality] between men and women. The people who weren’t there don’t know that a lot has been done. I feel it is a form of a reformist position now to say that 1968 doesn’t count. It had a great importance and resonance in our lives.

Listen to this pompous old authority on anti-authoritarianism, clinging in vain to his glorious sense of self-importance. How does he expect that hard-won equality to survive if no one will defend it? The liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq are defining events of an exciting and hopeful time, but Bertolucci can only whinge about insufficient appreciation for the importance of 1968.

All you John Weidner fans, make sure to order your Random Jottings coffee mug today. Rubbish that ugly old mug. Get an ugly new one! Now.

I rarely visit Andrew Sullivan's site nowadays, but I have been tracking his ideological evolution. After all, he is one of the few bloggers with enough following to influence the zeitgeist. He is both a sign and a symptom of the time. And he has all the ideological coherance of candle in a draft. After burning fiercely for the war in Iraq, he flickered just when the post-war prospect started to brighten. Now he's wavering in Kerry's direction. Here's a sample of his low candlepower reasoning.

The voters who will decide this election have already, I think, made up their minds that they could live without a second Bush term. This is not because they necessarily hate Bush (many don't, including me); nor because they believe that his war and economic policies have been failures (again, I think the record is mixed); but because his conduct of the war in the last year has been wracked with error and hubris, and his economic policy relies upon tax cuts that we simply cannot afford with the kind of spending levels Bush has also enacted. I think it's also clear that, in so far as some swing voters are libertarian in outlook, Bush has shown his authoritarian, anti-federalist colors. This administration is uninterested in restraining government power, in balancing the budget, in winning over opponents (as opposed to sliming them), and in allowing people to live their own lives free from government moralism. There is not even a sliver of daylight between the White House and the religious right in social policy.

Let's take this point by point. Sullivan begins by pronouncing the war a "failure." With Afghanistan and Iraq both headed by capable, friendly statesmen, with the populace of each country facing down terrorism and establishing a decent civil life (see Chrenkoff's good news from Afghanistan, reprinted in today's Opinion Journal), the cry of "failure" is unjustified. Ugly incidents are still occurring, and will continue, but the Bush geostrategy is working. The "error and hubris" are found among its detractors, who refuse to accept victory because they loathe the victor. I don't believe Sullivan's disclaimer for a moment.

Next Sullivan attacks economic policy, claiming America "cannot afford" the combination of tax cuts and spending. Here again Sullivan is simply wrong. Higher taxes could actually reduce revenue. The stimulus of tax cuts provides the only possibility for government to fund current and projected spending. Even so, it may not be enough. Spending is certainly too high. But Bush faces a pro-spending majority in Congress, since a substantial fraction of his own party will invariably support hikes in any given program. Like Reagan he is forced to spend, if he wishes to advance his other objectives. And he must set priorities as well. Victory is more important than a balanced budget.

Certainly I wish the Bush Administration were less "authoritarian," but the real abuses are not the Patriot Act or the disapproval of gay marriage. I am much more disturbed by the relentless erosion of property rights and the ever-increasing intrusion of government into medical care. (My two brief, broken-footed visits to a local clinic have cost nearly two thousand dollars--for two sets of x-rays, a few minutes of a specialist's time, and a cheap plastic boot. Ye Gods! When will people realize government is the problem, not the solution.) Bush cannot be blamed for these things, nor can he stop them, unless the public wants them stopped.

Two years ago Sullivan understood the political environment that constrains and compels this president, like any other. Now my namesake pretends to be a disillusioned centrist. Why? He seethes over the Marriage Amendment, that sop Bush threw to the social conservatives, knowing it would never pass. Sullivan has become a single-issue voter--the bane of political life. And he ties himself in Kerryesque knots, trying to explain away the truth.

Update: At least I ascribe Sullivan's shift to an honorable motive, however misguided. American Digest offers a much more cynical interpretation.

At the opening of the Democratic convention, John Fund has published a lengthy and link-rich article in Opinion Journal, surveying the political impact of weblogs. Mainstream media have been slow to acknowledge the significance of this new medium, but the Fund article represents the latest high-water mark of a rising tide.

Precinct 333 notes a New York Times story on an intriguing discrepancy in the British version of Bill Clinton's memoir. Certain key remarks about Ken Starr have been edited out. The British edition does not refer to Starr's investigation as a series of "efforts to coerce people into making false charges against Hillary and me, and to prosecute those who refused to lie for him." Of course the Republican blogger draws a somewhat different conclusion than most New York Times readers. Here is his take:

Our British brethren have strikingly different libel laws. Not only does the Sullivan test not apply (public figures required to prove actual malice to win a libel case) like it does in the US, in England the burden is on the author to prove that the published information is true. Clinton knows that he cannot meet that burden because his statements are untrue. Therefore he has removed his accusations against Ken Starr.

Actually, it seems to me that Clinton would have reason to fear an action under British law whether or not he told the truth. Besides, the man has spun himself in lies for so long that he could probably pass a polygraph test while asserting "I did not have sex with that woman." Whatever Clinton says at any given moment may seem whole and unvarnished truth to him, simply by virtue of his utterance. In any case his judicious editing proves him a careful (though disbarred) lawyer, not a perjurer. That has already been proven, by proceedings in the United States.

I drove back from Minneapolis yesterday afternoon, skipping the party that James had planned. With thirty queens in his backyard, he could scarcely have noticed my absence. After Friday's lavish Greek dinner at Christo's, a late evening with James, and Saturday brunch with (fred)Erik, I was too pooped to party. Back in sleepy Fargo, I rested well for the good sailing weather today. Tim and I headed for Detroit Lakes at midday. This time I spent a couple of hours on the catamaran, parking my broken foot between the lashes that secure the trampoline amidship. Winds were light and fickle, sometimes thrusting me agreeably for a couple of tacks, sometimes leaving me slack-sailed for ten or fifteen minutes while jet-skis buzzed by. During one of the puffs I easily outpaced an old blue sloop, so annoying its owner that he tacked away to get rid of me.

On the way back to Fargo, Tim spied the vegetable stand at Dilworth and pulled over. Summer produce has begun to emerge from the local gardens. A couple of hours later we enjoyed fresh sweet corn and newly-shelled peas with our jerked pork chops. Smoothies will follow as soon as I'm done blogging. This morning the dog-trainer's wife gave Tim a parcel of perfect raspberries. I prefer strawberries, which should be ripe next week, along with string beans and early tomatoes. Summer is too brief at this latitude, but it does have its rewards.

Al Hunt, resident Democrat of the Wall Street Journal, inhabits a parallel universe of Democratic Party comity. Reprinted in Opinion Journal, his pre-convention column seems downright comical to me. For any objective observer it is obvious that both parties are profoundly factionalized, which is the norm in American politics. The Democrats are split at least three ways: a see-no-evil cadre of "moderates" supports a corrupt Clintonite cabal, which in turn wars with a sizeable contingent of hard-core, leftist ideologues. I've read that dissidents are being physically excluded from the convention floor, though no agent of the central committee has assassinated Ralph Nader with an ice-pick--yet.

The Republican Party also includes three major factions: get-along, go-along big-business establishmentarians coexisit uneasily with more libertarian small-business types, while social and religious conservatives perpetually seek to increase their baneful sway over policy. It's a thankless prospect to vote for either party. No wonder election turnout has sagged in recent decades. But the ideological incoherance of Democrats is made more fit for mockery by the lengths to which the faithful take their denials. Consider the mini-scandal over the Rolls-Royce logo that adorned press passes at a Kerry appearance in Detroit. My first thought was "dirty trick," and a really clever one at that. But no, this was apparently a true faux pas by a team that might as well be campaigning for the presidency of France.

Asked about the press-pass logo, Kerry spokesman David Wade said it was unintentional error by a campaign volunteer and then criticized President Bush's economic policies.

"I could say that the Rolls-Royce is the perfect symbol of who got the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, but sometimes objects in the rearview mirror are closer than they appear," he said.

The best defense is a good offense, say sports aficionados, but Wade's retort is really a hoot. Some obtuse (i.e. upper class) volunteer has humiliated the Kerry campaign, and his spokesman attacks the opposition for the sin of---favoring the rich.

The suffix .ru denotes a Russian website. I've come to dread it as a sure sign of inferior porn and potential source for spyware infection, but there's a lot more to .ru than that. Tonight I encountered a fascinating discussion of emigre Russian folk music. Michael Blowhard has been lunching with a woman named Tatyana, who has told him a remarkable story. Her guest posting includes a number of links, including one of the oddest .ru sites I've ever seen.

The other day David Warren published an essay on aliteracy. Here is how he distinguished the term from illiteracy, and why he was fretting about it on this occasion.

It's an ugly word, "aliteracy". I don't like to have to use words like that, but there doesn't seem to be an alternative. For, "illiteracy" doesn't capture the predicament: we are dealing with people who can read, but don't. Nor does "functional illiteracy" quite cut it: most are fully functional, when it comes to deciphering road signs or dialling up e-mail. The issue for today is rather the sort of reading that is an end in itself, and which can only be done with the whole mind.

A large study commissioned stateside by the National Endowment for the Arts (around 17,000 human guinea pigs, interviewed through each of the last three U.S. censuses, against a background of other data) has established that there was a steady drop in "serious" or literary book reading through recent decades, which has accelerated in the last decade or so. This applies across all classes, races, genders, what have you -- though the drop in such reading among the young is quickest, and portends an even faster overall decline through the coming generation.

But is this really true? One could argue that a young person who knows The Lord of the Rings only from the Jackson films is not more ignorant of literature than the person who read the books, though I retain a preference for the tale as Tolkien wrote it. Cinema and television have long provided cribnotes for acculturation. Moreover I suspect the NEA and the Census Bureau were overlooking an even more significant phenomenon: the internet. Perhaps literacy is not really declining but changing. Young people read fewer books, but they may be reading--and writing--more than their predecessors. Are they ipso facto ignorant and incapable of critical thought merely because they don't read what David Warren thinks they ought to? Warren also decries a general decline in language ability, while I watch the rise of html and wonder whether this language of machines will become the Latin of a new clerisy. It is premature to pronounce the death of literacy.

Via Amygdala I read a fascinating account of a chemical process by which plankton promote cloud formation over the oceans to protect themselves from excess ultraviolet radiation. I'm reminded of the sentient sea that envelops Solaris in Stanislaw Lem's novel. This phenomenon suggests the true extent of the biological feedback system that sustains benign conditions on our own planet. Forests and grasslands have long been been recognized for local buffering effects, but most of the biosphere's living mass resides in the oceans. While it's conceivable this Gaian balance could collapse under sufficient pressure, the biosphere is probably more robust than science has yet discerned. Its various reactions might very well account for the relative lack of climate response to greenhouse gases that have already been combusted into the atmosphere by humanity.

Natural variations in climate are the norm. It stands to reason that the biosphere would resist them. We should also remember that the principal greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, promotes more rapid plant growth, removing carbon from the atmosphere as human activity adds it. Humans must learn a lot more about Gaia before they can make intelligent choices about future use of fossil fuels. Meanwhile there is no need to repauperize the poorest nations, which are now becoming the principal carbon releasers. Whether by imposing direct restrictions or by exempting them while crippling the economies of their wealthier trading partners, Kyoto-style regulations would hurt the world's poor disproportionately. Many Kyoto proponents imagine themselves as philanthropists, when in fact they care for nothing but the self-importance they derive from preaching their false gospel of a fragile Gaia.

Dusk in the garden. Carp nudge the surface of the little fishpond. Dance music thumps dimly inside the house. James has become a nester. He bought this suburban property three years ago, and he spends much of his free time gardening. The household includes a big friendly dog of indeterminate breed, a fluffy white cat, a partner, and sometimes the partner's two little girls, who live mostly with their mother across town. I wonder what the neighbors think of this menagerie. Coon Rapids is a very down-to-earth town.

Now I must go and be sociable. Steve just walked in, wrinkled his face, and asked "What's that horrible sound?" At a segue between songs, the instruments had dropped out, leaving only an electronic pulse.

I laughed. "That's music, Steve. You know you're getting old when you hear music and ask 'What's that horrible sound?'"

I found this useful information at A List Apart. I shall have to implement some safeguards against image link abuse. There are more images than ever in the new Fresh Bilge layout. By the way, the pre-MT monthly files are now posted, so all local links open in the new format. Only the individual archived essays remain to be updated, a task I never finished during my last redesign, six months ago.

Light blogging the rest of today. I'm driving alone to Minneapolis.

Today I note the passing of a composer with a craftsman's name: Goldsmith. Lately I've heard his music with increasing frequency on Minnesota Public Radio, which is attempting to boost its ratings by interspersing some lighter fare with the classics. Goldsmith's work often sounds a bit thin when shorn from its context; but film composers have existed primarily to fulfill Richard Wagner's concept of gesamkunstwerk--the all-encompassing artwork. Jerry Goldsmith put the aural sheen on many a movie. He will be missed.

Time for a little more shameless self-promotion: my selected poems are now on-line, completing the Fresh Bilge Library. Each of the library's archived books has a handsome new cover-set. Organized in three sections, the poetry collection was difficult to redesign, as I made significant structural changes, moving the respective indexes into the sidebar. Appropriate photographs and artwork adorn the title panels of each section. Now only the seablogger archive remains to be integrated: all my pre-MT essays. Once that's done, every link off the main page of Fresh Bilge will open into a matching format.

Speaking of self-promotion, Tim has received an invitation to read at the National Book Fair in Washington, DC this October. His sponsors know that Tim won't emulate Linda Ronstandt. He won't even issue an impromptu denunciation of the Marriage Amendment. Such puerile gestures seemed daring to us when we were twenty-five. I marvel that so many of our peers yearn to repeat their youthful protests. Don't they realize how ridiculous they look to everyone else?

Tim's reading will be broadcast nationally. I'll provide more details in due time. Meanwhile I'm contemplating the travel schedule. The Annapolis Boat Show begins a few days after the Fair. And we have friends in the Northeast, whose company we were forced to forego when our relocation coincided with the West Chester Poetry Conference. I'm disinclined to fly so close to the election, when terror-provoked disruptions seem all too likely. Most likely we'll drive East, and I'll continue to Florida at mid-October--if we haven't sold the boat. Tim can fly back, since it would matter less if his return were slowed.

The North Island of New Zealand has suffered a calamitous flood in recent days, as a great winter deluge dropped 250mm of water (nearly ten inches). A series of storm-triggered earthquakes added panic to the miseries of the populace. The biggest quake measured 5.4 on the Richter scale, and hundreds of smaller ones have occurred. The New Zealand Herald has run an exhaustive series of stories covering the disaster. Each individual story is linked with a running index on the right. I was grimly amused by the tale of a tree-loving conservationist whose tree-shattered house induced a swift change of heart.

Ardent conservationist Meg Collins is no longer an advocate of preserving pohutukawa trees at any cost.

She is seeing the catastrophe the mighty evergreens can cause when they become waterlogged - the evidence is on her own Eastern Bay of Plenty doorstep.

Mrs Collins and her husband Mike arrived home on Tuesday to find their bed and breakfast cabin poised atop a cliff, and their Ohiwa Harbour Rd house behind it also in a perilous position.

A giant mudslide on Saturday night took with it a pohutukawa and the bank on which it stood, pinning neighbour Colin Ratlidge, 74, and his elderly spaniel Chelsea under thick mud in the estuary for several hours.

"All our trees and bloody soil have gone across the road and into the harbour," an upset Mrs Collins said yesterday, amid talking to engineers, Earthquake Commission staff and insurers. "We're shattered."

In Wellington to celebrate her mother's 90th birthday at the weekend, the couple got a telephone call to say the bank had gone.

But they had "no concept" of the scale of the landslide until they stopped at Levin on Monday to get a newspaper. There, on the front page of the Herald, was the picture which has gone around the world - their home of three years and that of next door neighbours Jim and Pam Greenaway, both on the brink of disaster.

"It wasn't a good drive from there," said Mrs Collins.

A former Environment Bay of Plenty councillor, she has served on the Forest and Bird Protection Society and Project Crimson, the trust which has brought the pohutukawa back from serious decline.

"I think there should be another look at precarious pohutukawas that are hanging over people's properties and roads," she said. "We have got to be realistic."

There were tight restrictions on trimming or felling the trees, but the bulk needed to be removed from some because of the danger they posed in storms.

"We have all been too precious. They may be icons but we should make it easier for councils and property owners to prune them back when they are perched in populated areas."

"We have all been too precious." Indeed. Too bad it took a tragedy to knock some sense into this woman. A friend of hers was crushed to death by one of those trees. Will humanity be forced to learn this lesson on a global scale? If a tree fell on Al Gore, would anyone hear it?

Meanwhile I wonder about the great volcanic caldera on which some New Zealanders perch so precariously. Could those quakes have resulted from seepage reaching magma? Might something more serious than flood and tremors be in store for the Bay of Plenty? When Peter Jackson filmed The Lord of the Rings, he chose volcanic landscapes for a number of his more striking scenes. Remember Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli riding through a slit-canyon as they approached The Paths of the Dead? That riven dell was created by water slicing through soft young tuff in the wake of some immense eruption. The characteristic spires in such country are called hoodoos, and they are as spooky to behold as their name is to hear. There are some fine hoodoos in northern California, where the southernmost volcanoes of the Cascades have blown enough ash to leave tuff beds.

After reading the New Zealand Herald, I checked a map of the island's volcanoes to remind myself of the geography. Then I clicked on Rotorua, a 22km-wide volcanic caldera, now brimful with lake water, from which juts a squat lava-dome. The vast crater was blown open by a single eruption, 250,000 years ago, which buried much of the North Island under many meters of pyroclastic ash. An estimated 340 cu. km. of material was ejected by Rotorua's blowout, about 500 times the amount of the 1981 Mount Saint Helens eruption in the US. Sporadic extrusion built lava domes in the aftermath. An active geyser field gives evidence of heat still near the surface. The place is very beautiful, but also very dangerous. Even a modest eruption could swamp or smother the city of Rotorua, built on that lake shore before geologists fully understood the terrain.

I've always taken rogue waves seriously. As a boyhood reader of Alfred Lansing's adventure classic, Endurance, I knew that Shackleton had survived a rogue wave in a ship's lifeboat, as he made a desperate 800-mile journey over the world's most dangerous sea to save his stranded crew. Shackleton's testimony was good enough for me.

Rowing on Shinnecock Bay, I often encountered odd moires and other resonance effects of boat wakes on smooth water. These phenomena gave me an intuitive sense how waves could suppress or reinforce one another. I also saw that waves were profoundly affected by current and underwater topography. But land-bound scientists have been slow to acknowledge the existence of rogue waves, just as ground-bound ones were slow to accept pilot reports of the blue sprites and red jets sometimes seen above thunderstorms at night. Those are harmless phenomena, but rogue waves have broken and sunk many a big ship. In fact it seems reasonable to surmise that most ships vanishing in storms--such as the song-immortalized Edward Fitzgerald--succumbed not to the cumulative pounding but to a single, catastrophic event. Now with its MaxWave project, the European Space Agency has compiled physical evidence that supports the anecdotes every salt has heard. I found this obscure but fascinating account via the back page of WorldNet Daily.

Today's Amtrack train detention is another example of skittish authorities reacting to threats that the public is not permitted to hear. Little by little, Americans are losing their liberty to travel freely in their own country. Few seem disposed to question the wisdom of such reactive policy, while many attack any premptive action abroad. For terrorists, one measure of success is the extent of their impact on daily life for a target population. By that standard, al Qaeda has already achieved much, and it has excellent prospects to make further inroads.

I've hesitated to comment on the Sandy Berger affair. The timing of its emergence is clearly partisan, but so is the release of the 9/11 Commission's report. In the game of political poker, Republicans simply saw the Democrats and raised them. At first I wasn't sure what to make of the allegations against Berger, whom I always disliked. Why do such disagreeable people always seem to fill that particular chair? I used to call Bush the First's security adviser "Evilburger." His successor seemed a smaller man in every respect but girth. Thanks to Berger, the Clinton reek may now plague the Kerry campaign as it did Gore's.

Why did he do it? Frank Gaffney has some ideas, but I've been waiting to learn exactly what documents Berger abstracted. Initial reports suggested he had only mislaid "copies," but last evening I read that all six copies of the "millennium report" had vanished. (Unfortunately I have failed to relocate that source this morning.) As the details emerge, it seems safe to assume now that Berger engaged in systematic looting with definite objectives. The man has a lot of backside to cover, but I doubt he took such a risk solely on his own behalf. His prosecution should prove most illuminating, if Bush remains in office. Otherwise Berger will probably find some comfortable chair further to the rear of Kerry's "national security team" than he would wish.

Republican Christopher Cox asserts that the Commission has done a good job despite the partisan shennanigans. Moderate, cautious reform will result, he promises. The Gorelick wall will go. Is he correct? How can one take seriously a bipartisan report that blames "institutional failings" rather than individual office holders? If everyone is responsible, then no one is responsible. But a Berger prosecution may pierce this cloud of ink squirted by the institutional squid as they fled.

Much depends on the outcome of the election. A clear Bush mandate would force the Democrats to purge themselves of corrupt Clintonites and Moore moonbats. It will be a formidable task to recreate a principled opposition party. But if Kerry wins, the nation may someday need a new Ronald Reagan to stand outside the Justice Department and cry "Tear down this wall!"

The Pearls of Poritrin joins the roster of redesigned works in the Fresh Bilge Library. While seeking images fit for the title panels, I found a very attractive website run by a retailer of cultured pearls. Lovely things, they are. I was tempted to order a single, perfect black pearl like the one Zefir gives Lethlow in the book. With abundant supply, the cost of cultured pearls has fallen, and it's possible to imagine owning such a pendant, though I'd never wear it at the ear, the way my fictional character does.

Dick Morris has been contemplating the dynamics of a wartime election. But do his analogies really hold? If this is wartime (as I have glibly claimed myself), where is the mobilization, where are the mass casualties? The word "war" implies at least some symmetry between combatants. What we see now is not a war but a complex of interlinked conflicts within the West and within Islam. This hyperwar has no historical parallel that I can discern. It takes place in a context of unprecedented growth in global communications, and it is essentially a form of theater, staged for the audience of global media.

Military historians have implicitly recognized this shift in military objectives for some time. Swift and comprehensive communication meant that the morale of an entire adversary population could be manipulated from afar. In modern times the field of battle became the "theater of war," and it was inevitable that essentially symbolic acts--beheadings, for example--would increase in military importance.

Recognizing their opportunity, non-state organizations and affiliations have emerged to challange the nation-state, which is itself a recent and essentially European invention. Combatants include not only al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups, but also Luddite organizations in the West, which act independently while converging in tactics and objectives. Today our home-grown nihilists torch SUV dealerships; tomorrow they too may try to bring down the Capitol Dome.

In all cultural contexts, communications enhance the power of individuals. Both the environmentalist and Islamist movements demonstrate the radical convergence of technologically-driven individual empowerment with primitive religious-totalitarian ideology. Like communism, each movement is international in its scope and objectives, but neither has any Comintern--a central authority to be destroyed, coopted, or grudgingly recognized. Each can be defeated only on its own ground, by more powerful ideals.

This is the brilliance of the Bush response to 9/11. The U.S. president not only declared but acted upon America's founding ideals. He chose Baghdad as a geographic and cultural epicenter, took it, and raised an indigenous counterforce to promote self-rule and reformation throughout the region. That counterforce is the Allawi government. Its institutions are swiftly waxing in power. Al Sharqiya, the new Iraqi television network, openly challenges the corrupt Al Jazeera, as well as the coopted media of Shiite Iran. Its influence will soon reach far beyond the borders of Iraq.

After the 9/11 attack, German composer Karl Stockhausen called that dramatic act "the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos." It was a grotesquely insensitive remark, but it contained a truth. The attackers targeted the symbols as well as the substance of power. They knew very well that they would not break the American imperium that day; their intent was the creation of a spectacular recruitment poster, not a military victory. In response the Bush campaign has also produced artful events--some carefully staged, like the president's landing on an aircraft carrier--some spontaneous, like the joint Iraqi-American toppling of Saddam's statue. The contrast could not be starker: art that liberates versus art that destroys.

The American election will be the next theater of the hyperwar. Islamists will surely make some desperate bid against the enemy that has taken the war to their home ground. The planners of the 9/11 attack plainly failed to anticipate such a vigorous response. Now they hope that domestic backlash in the US will remove the stiff-necked Texan from the White House and substitute a spineless aristocrat. Even if the Islamists are blocked, their Luddite allies will perform street theater at both political conventions, though they probably lack the will and resources to stage a Madrid-style assault on the election itself.

In the past year it has become more apparent that the Democratic Party in the US has been captured by enemies of civilization. Most do not recognize themselves per se; many would repudiate their allegiance if they did. Nevertheless, the hyperwar has quickly pierced the facade of bipartisanship that prevailed for the first two decades of the Cold War, but only lasted the first two years of WWV. Here again we see the side-effects of mass communication--the breakdown of social cohesion, the simultaneous empowerment and delusion of individuals. Hyperwar is everywhere and nowhere, like the web of invisible electromagnetic energy that links more and more of humankind.

After generous guidance from Shelley Kauffmann of Six Apart, the firm that designed Moveable Type software, I have altered MT configuration in a way that doesn't conflict with my host's security settings. While I am not at this moment certain that Fresh Bilge will flow freely, I'm hopeful enough to resume posting this morning. Here are the links that I hand-coded during the past five days, in lieu of regular updates.

20 Jul: BVI Pirate: it's the islands, Mon.
20 Jul: Picasso sketch stolen from Florida yacht.
20 Jul: Redesign of Giants in the Earth is complete.
20 Jul: The Van Gogh Museum has a fine website.
20 Jul: Guard shot during probable terror reconnaisance.
20 Jul: Another reason to avoid elective surgery (via Drudge).
20 Jul: Defending the indefensible: a woman shills for al-Wahhab.
20 Jul: Redesign of Elixir is complete.
20 Jul: Deep space: photos by Michael Richmann.

19 Jul: Progress: yesterday I canoed; today I sailed.
19 Jul: More photos of Saturn from JPL.
19 Jul: Persistence rewarded: a stirring story of success.
19 Jul: Tornadic supercell near Fargo: 4th siren sounding in 9 days.
19 Jul: Libertarian linkage at Homespun Bloggers.
19 Jul: Good news from Iraq presented by Arthur Chrenkoff.

18 Jul: Glimpses of bygone time in Watertown, MA.
18 Jul: Vive la boulangerie: bread bounces back in France.
18 Jul: Sharks in the water: Edwards and the tort lobby.
18 Jul: Cruising with Catullus includes lots more photos.

17 Jul: Elton John thinks a product boycott is "censorship."
17 Jul: Everything you always wanted to know about derechos.
17 Jul: P. J. O'Rourke on war and pork.
17 Jul: Secretary of Education Rod Paige sounds off.
17 Jul: East Coast trough keeps rains coming.
17 Jul: Tim Hulsey makes a couple of dramatic suggestions.

16 Jul: Pattern Welding in Early Medieval swords.
16 Jul: The next attack has already been rehearsed.
16 Jul: Laurence Auster likens anti-racism seminars to EST.
16 Jul: Web Intellects: anyone know anything about this host?
16 Jul: Decline in literacy. As defined by NEA...
16 Jul: Obesity an illness? What's next? Weblogging?

In the time of Beowulf, it was customary for warriors to boast of their prowess with a mixture of grandiose exaggeration (hyperbole) and heroic understatement (litotes). In the language of jihad, there is only hyperbole. These people have not even arrived at the Dark Ages. Read and try to understand al Qaeda's defiant communique. There is a grand poetry and rhythm in this utterance, but it is altogether insane. Here is a small sample.

"Oh demonic rulers! According to what law do you want to bring us to justice? The law--regulations of the commercial courts--of the Chamber of Commerce, or the law which permits and protects usury, or the law which makes the land of the two holy places permissible to the harlots of Byzantium and the bisexual Jews and Christians? What law? The law that gives the imams of unbelief and error power over the monotheistic Mujahideen in the prisons of Al-Hayir and Al-Ruyis and 'Aleisha? According to what law do you establish a fraternal alliance between Jews and Christians and us?

I am neither Jew nor Christian nor bisexual, and I am certainly not a harlot of Byzantium; but I think this poet of putrescence sounds more than a little desperate. His cause is losing, and he knows it.

The sailing memoir is now reposted in the new format. If you've never cruised through its pages, at least check out the photographs. The oldest dates back to 1972, the last was taken as I bade farewell to catamaran Catullus in 1999. The photos are embedded in the chapters of prose. Don't be scared off by the poems that head each chapter!

While I await the extended DVD of ROTK, perhaps I'll reread The Lord of the Rings. It's been a decade or more since I last leafed through the hallowed text. Some years ago Tim's youngest sister gave us a hardbound, boxed set of the books, and I threw away my tattered paperbacks; but I've never touched the newer volumes. This noon I started reading the introduction. If I make it to Bree, I'll probably keep going. I need to renew my aquaintance with the source; Jackson's films have superceded it. I fear that I'll be bothered by his visualizations at times. How, for example, could anyone imagine the Balrog differently after seeing the extraordinary WETA creation? But the Balrog is far ahead. For the moment I must try not to hear Howard Shore's Hobbiton theme as I read of hobbits' habits. Here's an amusing bit:

The houses and holes of Shire-hobbits were often large, and inhabited by large families. Bilbo and Frodo Baggins were as bachelors very exceptional, as they were also in many other ways, such as their friendship with Elves.

Uncle Bilbo and his adopted heir Frodo were bachelors who hung out with elves. No wonder I warmed to these characters when I was twelve. They made me feel a bit less odd.

From the latest letter to my webhost:

Even after the repair, I'm getting constant server error messages on my site. They all say: "error: file is writable by others." That's not an error! My site is a weblog that allows readers to comment. I now have the impression that for some reason (security?) 100megs has recently installed software incompatible with weblogging. Unless something can be done promptly to restore my site functions, I shall have to seek another host.

If I must relocate, many complications will doubtless ensue, and site outages are possible. I shall do my utmost to keep the Bilge flowing (and fresh).

When the Plame story first flared up, I wrote a short commentary on the Plame Wars. It was obvious from the first that the affair was wholly political--an attempt to cripple the Bush Administration, conducted by Democratic partisans in the bureaucracy. Yes, contrary to popular impression, there are Democrats in the CIA. And one of them arranged for her State Department husband to "investigate" the reports that Saddam had tried to buy uranium illicitly in Niger. Now the whole imbroglio has been exposed in all its deceitful and nepotistic detail.

In Iran-Contra scandals, Democrats built a mountain from a molehill. This time they started with a dunghill. In both cases they were utterly heedless of the harm they were doing the nation by attacking a president with bogus claims while he was facing down implacable adversaries abroad. Yet if one questions the patriotism of the perpetrators, one hears squeals of outrage. At least this "scandal" has plamed out before the election. After reviewing the timeline and the players in this sordid melodrama, Opinion Journal concludes:

All of this matters because Mr. Wilson's disinformation became the vanguard of a year-long assault on Mr. Bush's credibility. The political goal was to portray the President as a "liar," regardless of the facts. Now that we know those facts, Americans can decide who the real liars are.

The trouble is, we know the facts, but most of the electorate will never be informed of them, thanks to the bias of reporters who regarded the Plame story as newsworthy, but now ignore the exposure of its deceitfulness.

Overnight my webhost ran a command that repaired the Fresh Bilge archive, but the Photo Journal is not yet fixed, and I haven't even explored some parts of the site yet to ascertain further effects. You should see my server's error log! I still have no idea how this happened, and my host has been mum on the subject. I'm pretty sure now that it must have some connection with security procedures that went awry. Sigh.

Although permissions are reset, I'm still seeing server error messages when I attempt to post a comment from an archive page, which is how I normally do it myself, so I can see the original entry. I think that's called a threaded page. Comments do get onto the site, however.