It is a good thing to be out of the loop; that’s what a vacation is for. Recently I attended an invitational croquet tournament in the New York area. Between playing and running off to various social activities, there was no time left to think about the problems of the wider world. It helped that I did not have a television in my room. In fact, the wider world, as well as all issues related to health and personal finances, receded to virtual invisibility. Is that why so many business and retired people play golf? For me, there is croquet … 
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A polyglot Croatian scholar, Tomislav Sunic, provides in his newest book, Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age, reasons that a good European should distrust the US. These reasons are significantly different from those that one might encounter in the Euro-American leftist and mainstream press, e.g., that President Bush is a Christian maniac who is unleashing an anti-Muslim crusade against a Middle Eastern people or that Americans have taken an inexcusably long time to introduce homosexual marriage or, most ominously, that we treat illegals from across our Southern border with xenophobic brutality. Sunic gives the proper reasons that Europeans should despise … 
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From Hillary Clinton’s speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars: “That begins with ensuring that America does have the world’s strongest and smartest military force. We’ve begun to change tactics in Iraq, and in some areas, particularly in Al Anbar province, it’s working.” “We’re just years too late changing our tactics. We can’t ever let that happen again. We can’t be fighting the last war. We have to be preparing to fight the new war.” Yes—the new war. You know, the one with Iran. Hillary, the War Goddess, and in thrall to the Lobby, is no more “antiwar” than Norman Podhoretz. … 
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In a previous article, we analyzed the function of supposedly nonpartisan think tanks as propaganda mills for government policies, particularly those that aggrandize the warmaking state. It is worth elaborating with a fresh example.   In the Aug. 16, 2007, edition of the New York Times, Anthony Cordesman of Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) tells us why it is a terrific idea for the United States to variously sell and give away more than $50 billion in weaponry to several Middle Eastern states.   His argument boils down to this: the Middle East is a rough neighborhood, and … 
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Elie de Rothschild, who died couple of weeks ago while on a shooting trip in Austria aged 91, once told me the story of a young Arab kebab seller who always parked his stand across la Banque Rothschild on Rue Lafitte.  The Arab was asked for a loan from an acquaintance of his. “Look here,” he told the man, “I have a deal with the bank across the street. I will not lend money and the Rothschilds will not sell kebabs.”  End of story, as they say. I thought of Elie, with whom I used to play polo, when the you-know-what … 
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A truly spirited commentary by Jewcy-webmaster Joey Kurtzman entitled Fire Foxman may be the most devastating and pointed attack I have seen on Abe Foxman, who has been National Director of the Anti-Defamation League for the last twenty years. According to Kurtzman, Foxman, a Polish Jew who was saved from the Holocaust by a courageous Catholic nanny, has been a morally outrageous representative of the Jewish community. Most recently he has worked to block congressional action to condemn the mass murder of one million Armenians in 1915 by Turkish military divisions, because such an action would supposedly not have been in … 
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While I was away, I missed a Mac developers’ conference right in my backyard.  While I’m not a programmer myself, I enjoy such events, because most independent Mac developers (as well as those who cover the platform) are very bright, literate people who are a blast to be around.  Little did I know that this conference would stir up a debate more appropriate to a John Randolph Club meeting. A blogger who goes by the name of Drunkenbatman (who organized his own successful Mac conference a few years back) chaired a panel on Saturday night which has variously been described as … 
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Of late, many of the nation’s literati have preoccupied themselves with a mendacious New York Times op-ed column by a couple of think tank hacks named Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, the burden of which is that, by golly, the glorious Surge really is working. Of course, the whole thing was a put-up job, sold on the man-bites-dog pretence that the two authors were longtime critics of the Bush administration who had gone to Iraq and seen the light. Their performance is deftly skewered here. But as edifying as it might be for us to wallow in the discrediting of Messrs. … 
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In case anyone out there is wondering what the Avatar—that scary sculpture headlining this blog—is suppose to signify, I can tell you. It is a photo which I took of a plaque affixed to a wall on the second floor of the inner courtyard of the Ducal Palace in Venice. The purpose of the plaque—a Bocca de Leone, the lion’s mouth—was to receive denunciations regarding crimes, especially high crimes of treason and corruption, against La Serenissima, the Republic of Venice, which endured for more than a thousand years. Its decline commenced with Columbus’ discovery of America. Its demise was overseen by … 
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An op Ed piece in the Washington Post (August 14, 2007) prepared by Grover G. Norquist about why we should admire Karl Rove irritated the hell out of me. A tribute to the retiring presidential advisor by someone who is supposed to speak for the American Right, the text praises a man of deeds who “worked to create a conservative Republican majority in Congress.” In Texas, we are told, Rove helped to put the statehouse under the control of “Reagan Republicans,” and then he moved on to bring his “vision” up to the federal level, building up the “modern Republican Party … 
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