Category: The Dish

I don’t know why this fascinates me, but it does. Here’s Brendan Fraser getting hairier by the minute.

Victor Davis Hanson is quick off the draw:

The latest news from Iran about the supposed abandonment in 2003 of the effort to produce a Bomb — if even remotely accurate — presents somewhat of a dilemma for liberal Democrats.

Insta-echo:

I just got an email with this story under the subject line "Your Zionist lies exposed." But actually I think that’s a mistaken take, because I don’t think this story cuts that way at all. This story lets the Bush Administration take credit for pressuring Iran into stopping its weapons program by invading Iraq — meaning that the invasion really did end a major WMD threat — and also punt further serious action on the Iran issue to the next administration. Cui bono? I think it’s pretty obvious…

But why wait till now to let the world know, if we’ve known for a while?

A reader writes:

Am I missing something?  Isn’t a significant part of this story that the estimate is over a year old?  During that year, and certainly until very recently, the administration and its proxies have been pushing for military confrontation, stressing the urgency based upon the flawed 2005 intelligence estimate.  While acknowledging that saber rattling is a component of diplomacy, the deception (and isn’t it deception?) and the level of vigor (talk of World War III) would seem to hurt rather than help in actually advancing an agenda to stop Iranian nuclear ambitions.   Although our credibility in the world is probably not high, at some point this was going to come out, so what was the benefit of the deception?  Was there a belief that we could get sanctions or a war before it happened?  Haven’t we seen this before?

Did Gates have a hand in getting this out?

The art-work – or interactive light-work – of Anthony McCall, who has a new exhibit at the Serpentine in London, can be appreciated here. Another piece on him here; and here. McCall began in the "happening" movie and art scene in the 1970s. But new technology has enabled him to take a big step forward:

Line Describing a Cone was made as a simple stop-frame animation, the camera filming a white-on-black drawing, gradually revealed, rotated on a drawing pin. The recent ones are of course made on computer, which accounts for their phenomenal complexity, as well as their perfect clarity of line and plane, their total control of coordinated movement – and (a downside) the fact that, if you look closely, the whole image breaks up into grid of little squares.

Beer fridges. Now, they’re taking things way too far.

Pew does some polling on God’s influence on the 2008 election.

Matt makes what is, at least, a coherent case in defense of the wild-eyed, factually-challenged milblogger:

Some people will probably find K-Lo’s apology about how "NRO should have provided readers with more context and caveats in some posts from Lebanon this fall" to be a laughably inadequate response to having completely fabricated an invasion of East Beirut by thousands of Hezbollah fighters. To me, though, it seems like rank hypocrisy for NRO to hold a particular writer out to dry like this — Smith was just working to the long-established NRO standards.

A new era for fuel efficiency?

The world’s biggest – and now, most expensive – white truffle.

If you add it all up, around 80 percent of the vote:

Discomfort with the election is evident in wide swaths of Russian society, even including Russian security forces. The overwhelming majority of Russians, one survey puts it at 69 percent, suspected even before the election that the results would be manipulated. In a survey by Moscow’s Levada Institute, 94 percent of those polled said they had "absolutely no influence" on politics in their country.

David Hearst on Putin’s new options:

He has enough of a majority in parliament to change the constitution. But he could equally well decide to anoint a successor as president, confident in the knowledge that he is popular enough in the country to be able to dominate from whatever other position he chooses for himself. His aides have recently floated the idea of Putin leaving the presidency but remaining "a national leader" – whatever that is. But if there is a choice between putting a weak placeman in power as president (such as his current prime minister Viktor Zubkov) and a strong one (such as his hawkish defence minister Sergei Ivanov) this result paradoxically favours the latter. It means that Putin is so well-established in the national consciousness, that he can afford to put a stronger man in as president, paying slightly less heed to the risk of splitting the leadership of Russia.

(Photo: Supporters of pro-Kremlin Young Russia movement stand near a cage with piglets symbolising, according to them, mercenary Russian politicians, serving US national interests as they celebrate the overwhelming victory by President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party in parliamentary elections in central Moscow, 03 December 2007. Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday hailed his party’s landslide election victory, even as Western governments voiced concern and urged the Kremlin to investigate allegations of fraud. By Dmitry Kostyukov/AFP/Getty.)