View From The Top, 21 Oct 2008

-- I'll get the domestic-side of my comments out of the way first. Apropos of my post last night about Halberstam and the Powell endorsement, here's another man trying to seem cool by proxy to the impending Obama electoral victory: Mark Foley! That's right! He too is an Obama supporter! He is also apparently rockin' the Beverly Hills circuit now that he's out of "rehab" for "alcoholism."

-- Here's David Brooks being thoughtful and yet still writing something so unintentionally condescending and inaccurate as to make his readers doubt whether he's been anywhere west of Philadelphia and south of Alexandria, VA in twenty years. I've lived the past 9 years of my life in the Front Range of the Rockies, and I have no idea what on God's green earth he's talking about.

And here's an even better response to the Brooks column. Lt. Nixon, PBUH, nails it.

-- If this op-ed piece from Germany is any indication, it's no small wonder that the people and governments of Western Europe are enfeebled and morally vacuous. Allow me to summarize this column for you:

"Our troops are being attacked by very bad people who blow themselves up in front of civilians and NATO troops. They don't like us, and don't want us in Afghanistan. Perhaps we should leave. These Taliban people are so mean! Our troops are troubled!"

European equivocation and spineless fever! Catch it!

-- I found this through Michael Yon's latest post: the Free Range International blog has a heartbreakingly close look at a women's prison in the Nanagarhar Province. Note especially the stories of abuse that are everyday occurences in rural Afghanistan.

-- One of the more predictably inane trends in popular culture is this industry of "questioning the status quo" or taking on the "sacred" elements of American society. As Lileks put it once when discussing Lewis Black's Nothing's Sacred (which had a cover of Black laying in the lap of a statue of the Virgin Mary): "now mocking Islam, that is irreverent". My problem is similar to Lileks: there's no real iconoclasm, it's all posturing. Rare is the person who actually takes on an accepted tenet and fearlessly moves in a different direction.

I bring this up because, in the midst of my faux-rebel ennui, I was awaken from my stupor by one of the most deliciously transgressive theories I've read in a while: "Expert Says Nuclear Terrorism Is Not A Threat."

Say What?!

I don't know if I'll agree with Mr. Jenkins, but it's a stone-cold lock that I'm going to read his book Will Terrorist Go Nuclear?

Now that's irreverent.