Louise Brooks--Glamour to Spare

What a beauty!

God wants to get to know you better

A clever quiz.

Suicide Bomber Family Not Proud of Him

The family of Raed Banna denies their jubilation.

Apparently their son was a lover of the USA, something like Mohammed Atta:

Mr. Banna, the owner of a cement distribution company in Jordan, described his son as a great fan of the United States who fell in love with the country during an 18-month stay in Southern California, from 2000 to 2002. Mr. Banna showed a visitor a stack of photos taken in the United States, one of them showing his son straddling a Harley-Davidson, another showing him smiling in front of the World Trade Center before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

I think we just have to keep these people out of the US, particularly California. There must be something in the water that makes them crazy.

Courtesy of tinkerty tonk.

MSM is not biased

This article claims that there are more conservative bloggers than liberal ones.
That's because conservatives are better educated. They can count to eleven without taking their shoes off.

Celebration for an illustrious son

Al-Banna family in al-Salt received greetings for son Raed's martyrdom in an Iraqi resistance operation

Al-Banna family in al-Salt organized a martyr's wedding yesterday for their son Raed Mansur al-Banna who blew himself up in an explosive-laden car that he was driving in Baghdad in al-Hilla on March 1.

The father of the martyr proudly received the well-wishers in the tribe's reception hall in central Jada in the center of the city of Salt. The story of Raed is similar to that of many youth from the city that left for Jihad across the globe. Raed's appointment with martyrdom came on March 1, when he blew himself up inside an explosive-laden car that he was driving in al-Hilla in Baghdad that resulted in the killing of over 133 people, the majority of whom were Americans.

In our faith, we prefer our sons to become doctors. Via Natasha Hynes.

Tim Blair fisks Maureen Dowd

It's an unfair contest, really. Criticizing Dowd is like shooting fish in a barrel.

The last word on Hunter S. Thompson

Nothing more to be said.

Feeding the deserving rich

I went to the doctor for a checkup and inadvertently found out that the drug companies cater lucullan feasts for the physicians and staff.
Later, by coincidence, I had dinner with a doctor who brought a beautiful salad from work--she, too, apparently is enjoying a free lunch.

The irony of drug compamies feeding doctors, who can well afford to buy their own food, and then claiming that they spend most of their money on research somehow galls me. I'm fairly conservative, but I would respect Big Pharma more if they would give some of that food to soup kitchens.

To those who have many, more is given, and as for him who has nothing, what little he has is taken away.

Sorry for the sermonette.

Heather McDonald vs. Susan Estrich

Heather McDonald wipes the floor with Susan Estrich: Political pundit Susan Estrich has launched a venomous campaign ... against the Los Angeles Times’s op-ed editor, Michael Kinsley, for alleged discrimination against female writers.[]

Estrich’s insane ravings against the Times cap a month that left one wondering whether the entry of women into the intellectual and political arena has been an unqualified boon. In January, nearly the entire female professoriate at Harvard (and many of their feminized male colleagues) rose up in outrage at the mere suggestion of an open discussion about a scientific hypothesis. That hypothesis, of course, concerned the possibly unequal distribution of cognitive skills across the male and female populations. Harvard President Larry Summers had had the temerity to suggest that the continuing preponderance of men in scientific fields, despite decades of vigorous gender equity initiatives in schools and universities, may reflect something other than sexism. It might reflect the fact, Summers hypothesized, that the male population has a higher percentage of mathematical geniuses (and mathematical dolts) than the female population, in which mathematical reasoning skills may be more evenly distributed.

A feminist gadfly in the audience, MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins, infamously reported that she avoided fainting or vomiting at Summers’s remarks only by running from the room. And with that remarkable expression of science-phobia, a great feminist vendetta was launched. It has reduced Summers to a toadying appeaser who has promised to atone for his sins with ever more unforgiving diversity initiatives (read: gender quotas) in the sciences.[]

The Harvard rationality rout was a mere warm-up, however, to the spectacle unfolding in Los Angeles, brought to light by the upstart newspaper, the D.C. Examiner. USC law professor, Fox News commentator, and former Dukakis presidential campaign chairman Susan Estrich has come out as a snarling bitch in response to L.A. Times’s editor Michael Kinsley’s unwillingness to be blackmailed.

Read the whole thing.

Sinister organization encourages obesity

If you can't trust the Girl Scouts, who can you trust?

The IRA must go

The sooner the better.

Little girls want to be thinner

By Sarah Womack, Social Affairs Correspondent
(Filed: 08/03/2005) from the Telegraph, London


Girls as young as five are unhappy with their bodies and want to be thinner, according to a study which blames peer pressure in a child's early years at school.

Most girls thought that being slim would make them more popular, claimed the research in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology. They would also have no hesitation in dieting if they gained weight. The study was conducted among five- to eight-year-olds in South Australia, but experts said last night that British children felt "paranoid" about their weight - partly because of the Government's anti-obesity message.

Dr Andrew Hill, of Leeds University Medical School, said research among more than 200 eight-year-olds showed a high awareness of the campaign against obesity. "Children have absorbed anti-fat messages loud and clear", he said. "To get people to listen about a condition, you talk it up, and we have got obesity on the health agenda....


"We want people who are overweight to do something about it. We don't want to terrorise youngsters."

The UK Eating Disorders Association said it was known that children as young as eight had been diagnosed with eating disorders and there may have been instances in younger children....

The latest research was conducted by academics at Flinders University among 81 girls. They were asked what they thought about their peers' level of unhappiness with their bodies and if they discussed body shape.

Almost half (46.9 per cent) wanted to be thinner, and 45.7 per cent said they would go on a diet if they gained weight. Among five-year-olds, 28.6 per cent wished they were thinner. After being shown pictures of a girl before and after putting on weight, 35 per cent of the girls thought her eating habits were to blame, and 28.6 per cent said she should go on a diet. Around 71 per cent of girls aged seven said they wanted to be thinner.

The report's authors said: "Body dissatisfaction and dieting awareness develop over the first two years of schooling."

Most of the girls believed that being thin would make them more likeable.

Assad's disastrous career choice

Bashar Assad is actually a trained eye doctor:

Bashar Assad
The evil moron who's running Syria.
By Chris Suellentrop
Posted Wednesday, April 16, 2003, at 4:22 PM PT

Movies and comic books condition Americans to think in terms of the "evil genius," a dangerously insane but diabolically brilliant adversary who carefully and calculatingly plots to destroy the world. Think Lex Luthor attempting to obliterate the California coast, or the Joker scheming to poison Gotham, or the countless forgettable villains who have conspired to change the orbit of the moon in an effort to unleash destructive tidal waves that will destroy the Earth's major cities.

For better or worse, this archetype has spilled out of the realm of fantasy and into the real world, coloring how Americans view nonfiction villains as well as fictional ones. As David Plotz pointed out more than a year ago in Slate, "We always put a face to our misery. And every so often, we anoint some foreign malcontent as the arch-fiend responsible for all our global difficulties." Before Saddam, Osama. Before Osama, Saddam. And so on. But there's one problem with this worldview: In the real world, most evil men aren't geniuses. Instead, the real danger, more often than not, comes from evil morons.

Take Bashar Assad. Has there been a more disastrous geopolitical move in recent years than the 38-year-old Syrian president's decision to cast his lot with Saddam just prior to Iraq's stunning military defeat? Before the war, Syria had actually done quite a bit to improve its standing in the eyes of the United States.
...

Now it appears that Assad may have gambled all of that away. By foolishly providing moral and material support to Iraq during the war—and, the administration says, now by harboring high-ranking Iraqi officials—he's created an environment that makes it possible for a Democratic presidential candidate (Florida Sen. Bob Graham) to openly support war with Syria. Already some hawks are pointing to the tantalizing parallels between Saddam's Iraq and Assad's Syria. Weapons of mass destruction? Check. Support for terrorism? Check. Repressive domestic intelligence services? Check. The comparisons go further: Both countries were ruled by tyrannical men who are not members of the ethnic majority. (Saddam was a Sunni who ruled over a largely Shiite country, and Assad is an Alawite who rules over a Sunni majority.) To top things off, Syria even has a Baath Party and a Republican Guard. No one expects war anytime soon, but Assad's stupidity has put the subject on the table.

When Assad came to power in June 2000, one week after the death of his father, Hafez Assad, many hoped that his ties to the West—the two years in London he spent training to become an ophthalmologist, his facility with English, his British-born Syrian wife—would make him a different kind of dictator. (Quote from Slate.)

Why didn't Assad choose a career as a lasik surgeon? He's be making $75,000 a day without all this tsuris.

What about the rubber suit?

Edouard Stern
(Filed: 05/03/2005)

Edouard Stern, who was shot dead on Tuesday aged 50 while wearing a rubber suit in his Geneva apartment, was a financier with a reputation as an abrasive and uncompromising deal-maker.


For some years Stern was heir-apparent to his father-in-law, Michel David-Weill, chairman and controlling shareholder of the investment bank Lazard Freres. A great-grandson of one of the firm's founders, David-Weill had run the tripartite group - which has operations in Paris, London and New York - since 1977; and in 1992 he brought in Stern to be a senior partner in Paris and New York.

Stern also became a significant shareholder in Lazard's holding companies, and a power struggle swiftly ensued between the two men. It was reported that Stern's aggressive manner led to his being ejected from two of the bank's senior committees. He departed angrily in 1997 to run his own investment fund, leaving a vacuum that was filled by the arrival of the Wall Street veteran Bruce Wasserstein as David-Weill's eventual successor.
The French press labelled Stern le gendre incontrôlable (the uncontrollable son-in-law).

The circumstances of his death remain unexplained: Stern led a private and somewhat mysterious life in Geneva, and was said to have told friends recently that he felt threatened. Theories in financial circles include the possible involvement of the Russian mafia.

Edouard Stern ... joined his family's private investment house, Banque Stern, in 1977.

Two years later, he ousted his own father from control of the business, which he sold to a Swiss bank in the late 1980s, though he remained chairman until 1998. After his departure from Lazard, Stern deployed his Geneva-based €600 million investment fund, Investment Real Returns, to become one of the most controversial players in the European corporate scene.

Typical of his style as an active shareholder was his intervention at Rhodia, the troubled French chemicals company, where he was co-opted as a director and promptly called for the group to be broken up to maximise shareholder value. Rhodia's annual general meeting in 2003 rejected his proposal to oust the chairman, and instead ejected Stern himself from the board.

He was also involved in recent ructions with Suez, the industrial conglomerate, and the Vivendi media group. In Britain, his name was connected in 1999 with an attempt to gain control of the troubled textile group Coats Viyella, in combination with Lord Rothschild and the company's former chairman Sir David (now Lord) Alliance. ...

Edouard Stern's only known hobby was a passion for game shooting and collecting guns.


I still want to know about the rubber suit.

The obit is from the ">Telegraph, London. They give you a good sendoff.

How to get through the next four years

In passing, I read the headline of a New York magazine issue. As a librarian, I am ashamed to admit that I cannot find the exact reference--too long ago. But the headline was, "How to get through the next four years." I would guess this refers to the Bush victory and the ensuing trampling on our civil liberties.

My suggestion for getting through the next four years is to read this book.

Journey into the Whirlwind (Helen and Kurt Wolff Books)
by Eugenia Ginzburg "The year 1937 began, to all intents and purposes, at the end of 1934-to be exact, on the first of December..." (more)

woes of a small town library director

As one who dabbles in everything but specializes in nothing, this job suited me. Of course, there were times when I found myself fishing potato chip bags from the commode, but they were few.

The patrons were awfully grateful if you did the least little thing for them, like find a book on the shelf. I also couldn't walk down Main Street (yes, there was a Main Street)without seeing and saying hello to several people. When I left there, I left behind a lot of friends.

We had our share of nutcases, too. A man we called the Admiral, whose car was full of papers, used to come in and compalin to everyone who would listen about his doctors, his ungrateful family, etc. He claimed his family only wanted to see him because of his money. I sympathesized with them. I didn't want to see him either.

Then there was the patron who would corner you and explain that the US had never dropped a bomb on Hiroshima. He also had some theories about how babies were born which I will not detail here. The first time you talked to him he sounded plausible, until he wandered off to Hiroshima, babies, etc. You did not talk to him a second time.
He used to buy all our used books. All of them. He needed them for his project, which was either to prove the existence of God or vice a versa, I forget which. What good "Your Future as a Dental Technician" would do for this project was never explained.

When I said all, I meant all.He stored them in a warehouse in Secaucus, New Jersey. We had nightmares that he would die and leave them to us.

Then there was Mr and Mrs Grumpus. They never cared for the material on offer. Once Mr G told me, "You don't have the right books." I asked him what books he would like, and he replied, "I don't know, but these are not them."

Still, it was great fun. I had a great staff and a good board. The only thing lacking was enough to live on.

But that is a story for another day.

Terrorists are not having a good day.

Terrorists have their troubles, too,a> sarcaastic.

Sweden has troubles

Sweden is having problems with being open-minded, tolerant, and liberal:



Too bad!

Via Rant Wraith.

outworn words and phrases

I've got a little list of words and phrases that should be retired.

Political: Nazi, fascist, religious right, liberal (as an epithet), moral values, disenfranchise; and any mention whatever of Hitler in any way shape or form;

Slang of yesteryear: WHATEVER!!! Awful word, means nothing, belongs in the junkheap with 23 skidoo and rouged knees;

psychobabble: visioning; outside the box--hearing this one makes me want to crawl into the box and scream quietly; synergy; paradigm, especially new paradigm--if there are any old ones I've never heard of them, or any middle-aged ones either.

Friends, if you're out there, help me out here. Send me your own faves.

My mother the lawyer

I recently got a postcard reminding me that the anniversary of my mother's death is coming up. She's been gone more than 25 years now and I still miss her. She drove me crazy often while alive but her death left a hole that can't be filled. Still, we go on. I'm not saying I'm unhappy or anything; I just miss her.

Goldie Kanter Mayer was a combination of Yiddishe mama and firecracker lawyer. Sometimes she got the roles confused. She would mother her clients and fight for them. In return, they would mow her lawn or paint her house. They were hardbitten people, not a millionaire among them. Black people, and recent migrants (white)from West Virginia. They worshipped her, and she did not let them down. She loved, really loved, the law and being an attorney. She practiced law for at least forty years. She knew all the judges, court personnel and cops.

At her funeral, my uncle said, "They should have had Goldie's funeral at the first Baptist Church if they really wanted a big turnout."

She was honest and fearless. Any moral strengths I have can be attributed directly to her example.