Month: August 2008

Is anyone as unsurprised as I am that he’s a Leo?

Ptown’s resident v-jay, Tom Yaz, played this earlier this season at the weekly variety-drag show here and I forgot to post it. Dan Savage beat me to it. The lip-syncing is marvelous:

A reader writes:

Here’s a scary thought… I’m pushing 50, so even CDs still seem like pretty cool technology to me, but that picture of Cardinal Newman instantly made me think “he’s on his cellphone”.

After this ugly lie from two months ago?

Patrick Cockburn explains:

When the US and Britain invaded Iraq, they started three wars. The first is the insurgency in the Sunni community against the American occupation; the second the struggle by the Iraqi Shia, sixty per cent of the population, allied to the Kurds, to take control of the Iraqi state, previously controlled by the Sunni; and the third a proxy war between the US and Iran about which of them is to have predominant influence in Iraq.

None is over yet. The third has barely started.

No wonder the mullahs are so uptight.

The one showing big leads by Obama among the working poor. Some caveats here.

"I’m happy to be here to transmit a simple message: the United States is serious in our support of the offer [of cooperation] and of the Way Forward [freeze for freeze]. We are serious in the search for a diplomatic solution. Relations between our two countries have been based on a profound mistrust for thirty years. I hope my presence today is a step in the right direction, and that you will seize this opportunity," – Nicholas William Burns, at the Geneva talks on Iran, as pilfered by Le Monde. (Translated from the French translation of the original English.)

Judah Grunstein also notes that Le Monde opines:

Jalili’s presentation shows that Iran feels it is in a position of strength in the Middle East, with its diverse leverage points in the region’s crises (Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian dossier), as well as on energy issues, and  that it doesn’t feel any urgent need to cede anything to facilitate a negotiated settlement of the nuclear standoff.

For many of us passionate anti-communists, he remains an icon. Reading his books in my teens made a huge impression on me, convincing me of the evil of the Soviet Union and the hideousness of the collectivist ethos. In my fogeyish repressed adolescence, I was never a big fan of the United States – it took actually living here for me to fall head over heels for this country – but Solzhenitsyn (framed by Orwell) persuaded me that there was no comparison with the alternative. His accounts of what torture and dehumanization do to people – the enforcers and the victims – helped me better understand the utter incompatibility of freedom and torture of any kind, anywhere. If I had to point to one author who inspired my horror at what Cheney and Bush have done to America’s integrity these past few years, it would be Solzhenitsyn.

He was, of course, an inveterate reactionary, hostile to modernity, a paleocon to out-do every other paleocon. He was not just opposed to the Enlightenment but even to the Renaissance, calling the modern liberal world "the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness."

He wrote:

It has made man the measure of all things on earth—imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now paying for the mistakes which were not properly appraised at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.

In Russia, such feelings and instincts run deep and in Solzhenitsyn the depth was close to an abyss. But it was out of this love for country and its soul and out of this love of God that he found the strength to resist evil, even as it tried to destroy his body and his soul.

For that resistance, in hours darker than most of us will ever experience, he deserves our deepest honor and gratitude. And it was partly through this one man’s resistance that an entire evil empire fell.

Really stunning footage of Britain from satellites, tracking taxi routes in London and shipping in the channel.