The Dish

I linked to a BBC report here. Bill Roggio has an interesting discussion going.

Marc Ambinder thinks it’s a helpful assumption.

"The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power. The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the US Department of Defense. It is the West, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the universality of their culture and believe that their superior, if declining, power imposes on them the obligation to extend that culture throughout the world. These are the basis ingredients that fuel conflict between Islam and the West," – Sam Huntington in his increasingly prophetic book, "The Clash of Civilizations." Rod Dreher finds more in it to like than he expected.

George P. joins the Navy reserve.

It’s where they’re plotting the next 9/11, while the Bush administration looks on. There’s evidence of a new and brutal battle, but it’s unclear who’s fighting whom and for what. The hope is that local tribesmen are turning on al Qaeda. But it could also be just an internal power-struggle.

Pot-smoking as a religion? Money quote:

"I’m a Jewish kid from Beverly Hills who went to UCLA. I could have been a lawyer making $250 an hour like the rest of my friends, or a TV producer. Instead, I’m teaching the Bible, selling weed on Hollywood Boulevard, facing seven years in jail – of course I’m crazy."

(Hat tip: Slate.)

D’oh!

Prime-minister-in-waiting Gordon Brown leaves the Treasury for Buckingham Palace on March 20, 2007 in London. (Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

About the most irritating bunch of losers you’ll ever come across. A. A. Gill has them pegged:

Brits are rarely seen in New York without their magic cloaks of invisible irony—they think that, on a fundamental level, their calling here is as irony missionaries. They bless everything and everyone with the little flick quotation marks, that rabbit-ear genuflection of cool, ironic sterility. How often their mocking conversations about the natives return to the amusing truth that New Yorkers have an unbelievable, ridiculous irony deficiency, which ignores the fact that a city that produced Dorothy Parker, Robert Mapplethorpe, Abstract Expressionism, Woody Allen, and Woody Allen’s love life has quite enough irony to build the Brooklyn Bridge.

The whole piece is a treat.

You know times are changing when an ad like this airs on network TV.

Hat tip: Mark Simpson.