After only 27 years, The New Criterion  has discovered Ortega y Gasset, whose power to disturb even the most placid of neoconservative minds is healthily evident in Dr.Anthony Daniels’ ( AKA Theodore Dalrymple) essay on cultural aggression.
Better a generation late than never- though I expect other writings on O.y G. must be lurking Grendel-Like in the magazine’s 1980’s archives, waiting to pounce on the new millennium.

Few have heard of Mustafa bin Abd al-Qadir Setmariam Nasar, yet the Syrian ranks as al-Qaeda’s most formidable strategist. He played a key role in establishing its European presence in Europe and securing the cooperation of Islamic radicals from North Africa and the Balkans and Chechenya to East Asia.

Sometime spokesman for the Groupe Islamique Armé Algerienne, OBL’s London press attaché  and an adviser to Mullah Omar in Kabul, he is the man behind thef aliases in books by foreign correspondents escorted to meet OBL in Tora Bora. Until captured in Quetta by Pakistani intelligence agents in 2005 and remanded to the CIA, he went wherever the jihad did.  All-Suri was the first jihadi to argue that al-Qaeda ‘s survival hinged on mobile, nomadic, flexible cells operating independently of one another though united by a common ideology – and a sense of shared grievances that the GWOT has alas amplified. The ‘leaderless jihad’, now in analytic vogue is largely al-Suri’s invention

The London Review Of Books features a lucid account of the career of this latter day Master Of Assassins
in Adam Schatz’s review of Architect of Global Jihad: The Life of al-Qaida Strategist Abu Musab al-Suri by Brynjar Lia

“The US Geological Survey says they are at historic highs” present Senate and past Rush Limbaugh staffer Marc Morano told the Heartland International Conference on Climate Change, an event S. Fred Singer told ABC news last Sunday was addressed by “a hundred distinguished climate scientists “

As there were 100 listed speakers,  I guess Marc, who has identified himself as ” a political scientist” in the New York Times must meet Singer’s demanding criteria, , for he was among the 90 odd survivors who actually spoke at it,  two having sadly died before the event.

For some strange reason, only two dozen or so of Singer’s hundred are recognized by Science Citations, which monitors over 7,500 science journals, as ever having published anything scientific, and somewhat anticlimacticly,  only 19 of the alleged hundred joined the 84 year former Department of Transportation Chief Scientist’s in a group photo, when any and all scientists present , distinguished, climatic, or otherwise, were asked to step forward for a photo-op at the free lunch climaxing the event.

Morano told the conference that he approached the climate wars with ” a brass knuckles attitude” adding that “We don’t want to get too deep into science debates.”  Citing such learned journals as Time and Newsweek,   he went on to praise talk radio , and came down strongly ( twice)  against ” huts made of dung,” observing :

“Cow emissions are actually more damaging to the planet, if you believe the UN,  than all the transportation sector. I don’t know why Time is going after the Model T, they should be going after the cow.”

This news of a polar bear population bomb is very grave.  Some of my colleagues as a Peabody Museum field director had to fill out a great deal of Canadian paperwork after one of the naughty creatures ate a graduate student who neglected to drag along her brass knuckles when visiting the Ungava Peninsula.

Expelled Executive Producer Logan Craft is deeply, deeply shocked that a movie critic has seen his Darwin For Zombies opus without signing a non-disclosure agreement , and that the cad has had the temerity to actually review it.

Craft denies involvement in the online “media alert”  from Media Marketing, shown below, but his film’s official movie site displays the Motive Marketing logo and the a firm was founded by Craft’s colleague, Promise Media executive Lauer , who writes :

  We already had our first security breech [sic] and are asking YOU now for your support to stand up for EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed. Hosted by Ben Stein, EXPELLED contains a critical message at a critical time. As an underdog in Hollywood right now, we need your support.

  Recently Robert Moore, a film critic from The Orlando Sentinel pretending to be a minister, snuck into a private screening, did not sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement, and criticized the film the next day in his article.

  Yesterday, the vigilant Producers expelled P.Z. Myers, a scientists who appears in the film from a preview !

He was yanked out of line despite having registered and reserved a seat,  but another person who appears in the film went unrecognized by Producer Mark Mathis, and was admitted.

It was Richard Dawkins of Oxford University

At the Q&A following , he protested the film’s cut and paste pseudo interviews , including scenes in which Stein is actually talking to an empty chair,  addressing rhetorical questions he never asked to people he has never met.

As this bizarre episode transpired on Maundy Thursday, some may think it evidences how, the well of mercy being infinitely deep, the charity of Providence embraces even atheists.

Dawkins may instead insist it shows God’s sense of humor to be so highly evolved as to prove that Darwin was right all along.

Many seem dazzled by the dawn of tactical reason in counterinsurgency in Iraq, but Josef Joffe,  the astute editor of Die Zeit,  has let his eyes adjust to the darkness at the end of the tunnel. Taking the long vu , he discerns a shift in the regional balance of power, drawing this post-Straussian conclusion :

” If you don’t will the means, don’t will the end. To this Kantianism, let us add pure homily: Look before you leap. The tragedy of American power in the Middle East, the most critical arena of world politics, is that the United States ended up working as the handmaiden of Iranian ambitions.

By destroying Saddam’s armies, the United States flattened the strongest bulwark against Iranian expansion. By empowering the Shiites, it opened the way to an ideological alliance between Najaf and Qum, the two centers of the faith on either side of the Iraq-Iran border. And by entangling itself in an open-ended war in Iraq, the United States squandered precisely those military assets that would have kept Iran in awe.

Would the Ahmadinejad regime grasp so boldly for nuclear weapons if U.S. power and credibility were still intact?”

Salon science journalist John Farrell has just discovered the February article here on “The Right’s Science Problem” and writes to remind me that he has established a blog devoted to cataloging Weird Science outbreaks in what he considers “the major conservative media.” Thus far I have been spared, but it’s early days. You can check out the competition at what is diplomatically styled the ‘Stupidity Index Of Conservative Science Journalism ‘

Before   devout readers dismiss Farrell as an avatar of the devil’s party,, they should consider his view of a journal that at least tries to be intellectually serious -

” First Things:  I have to say is also the most open about science qua science. Yes, they do publish the usual swill from the Discovery Institute fellows, but they also allow Edward T. Oakes, my favorite Jesuit, to neatly deconstruct them whenever they do. But perhaps FT’s true openness to both sides of the argument isn’t ironic, for the very reason that the editors take their religion with all of its tradition and history more seriously than the those of the other magazines…

... part of the problem…with regard to conservative journalists…is the narrow provincialism, born of the small social circle of people who make up the current conservative intellectual establishment….A friend of mine, who is also a longtime reader of National Review and the other conservative opinion journals, had some interesting comments… “The problem with NRO is that it’s intellectually incurious. It’s gotten to be dull and airless because it’s not really interested in exploring new ideas and rethinking old ones in light of experience, but instead serving as a political rallying point. There is so much more to conservatism—or to be more precise, what interests, or should interest, conservatives -.”

I envy the wrath aimed at lustful pols who sully New York’s Runyonesque reputation by draining its fleshpots into the hotels of DC.
To preserve it, City Journal should lobby City Hall to make the Seven Urban Sins as compulsory as recycling.

Hypocausty
Mirth at the sight of freezing smokers.

Sprawlth
Adding houses to existing suburbs or entablature to East Side garden walls.

Misotaxi
Obtaining cabs by outrunning women with strollers.
Cyclage
Opening car doors into the paths of foulmouthed bicycle messengers.
Zabary
Imposing a trans-fat fast on thy neighbor.

Slouche
Aiming pothole water at pedestrians while driving.

Tammany
Encouraging urban delinquency by voting for politicians.

Is $105 a barrel oil the President’s answer to Al Gore’s Nobel ?

This speculation arises from the writing of someone even Neocons ought to listen to—David Frum.

In his biography of his former speechwriting client, The Right Man , Frum reports:

I once made the mistake of suggesting to Bush that he use the phrase cheap energy to describe the aims of his energy policy.

He gave me a sharp, squinting look, as if he were trying to decide whether I was the stupidest person he’d heard from all day or only one of the top five.

Cheap energy, he answered, was how we had got into this mess. Every year from the early 1970s to the mid 1990s, American cars burned less and less oil per mile travelled. Then in about 1995 that progress stopped. Why?

He answered his own question: because of the gas-guzzling SUV. And what had made the SUV possible? This time I answered. ‘Um, cheap energy?’ He nodded at me.
Dismissed.

Thanks to John Lanchester,  for noting this exchange last March inThe London Review Of Books

I’m relieved we’ve been spared reviewing American Earth: Environmental Writing since Thoreau, as John Derbyshire has done an excellent job in The New Criterion.

Although it seems to contain a great deal of purple prose, including quotations from the little green book of Chairman Gore, and scandalously omits Ortega Y Gassett’s On Hunting, it does include this luminous passage from my favorite environmentalist-biological, the great E.O.Wilson :

“After the sun’s energy is captured by the green plants, it flows through chains of organisms dendritically, like blood spreading from the arteries into networks of microscopic capillaries…During the long span of evolution the species divided the environment among themselves…Through repeated genetic changes they side-stepped competitors and built elaborate defenses against the host of predator species that relentlessly tracked them through matching genetic counter-moves. The result was a splendid array of specialists, including moths that live in the fur of three-toed sloths.”

There’s more on E.O. Wilson in the archives of my blog, .Adamant

There were several surprises at the climate change conference I attended in New York. The seriously interesting scientific presentation by Roy Spencer contrasted with the belated revelation that the Discovery Institute, reincarnated as ” a think tank devoted to free market ideas” was among the sponsors of the event, whose organizers told the media it was convened to refute the contention of Jim Martin of the Colorado department of the Environment, who told The Denver Post that :

“You could have a convention of all the scientists who dispute climate change in a relatively small phone booth.”

Seeing the conference banquet fill a hotel ballroom, Heartland Institute chairman Jim Bast crowed:

” Hey Jim Martin, does this look like a phone booth to you?”

All scientists present were then asked to step forward for a group photo, in which The New York Times reports, 19 appear. 22 is the Guinness record for phone booth stuffing