Pirated Video Update

I watched a video this evening left by a former house guest. It's been sitting there a while because the title, Theice Harvest, didn't look inviting. I don't pay too much attention to movie releases or I would have known about the misprint on the cover. The actual movie title, The Ice Harvest, makes a little more sense.

It was better than I thought it would be, but what caught my attention what a plastic illuminated Santa face about three feet tall and two and a half in width. An old friend of mine from home purchased one at an estate sale several years ago and hangs it in his window at Christmas. Seeing this one in the movie was a bit surprising. He'll be glad to know that Hollywood thinks they're cool too.

How Unfortunate

Sympathies are in order today for President Chavez who proved his incompetence in rigging votes, something every other thug dictator mastered upon entering office.

President Hugo Chavez suffered a stunning defeat Monday in a referendum that would have let him run for re-election indefinitely and impose a socialist system in this major U.S. oil provider.

Voters defeated the sweeping measures Sunday by a vote of 51 percent to 49 percent, said Tibisay Lucena, chief of the National Electoral Council, with voter turnout at just 56 percent.

Time to Send in Carter

Vladimir Putin's party won a crushing victory in parliamentary elections Sunday, paving the way for the authoritarian leader to remain in control even after he steps down as president.

The vote followed a tense Kremlin campaign that relied on a combination of persuasion and intimidation to ensure victory for the United Russia party and for Putin, who has used a flood of oil revenues to move his country onto a more assertive position on the global stage.

The Bush administration Sunday called on Russia to investigate claims the vote was manipulated.

"In the runup to election day, we expressed our concern regarding the use of state administrative resources in support of United Russia, the bias of the state-owned or influenced media in favor of United Russia, intimidation of political opposition, and the lack of equal opportunity encountered by opposition candidates and parties," said Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for the National Security Council.

John Howard

Great tribute to John Howard by Mark Steyn.

First, the prime minister grasped the particular challenge posed by Islam. "I've heard those very silly remarks made about immigrants to this country since I was a child," said the Democrats' Lyn Allison. "If it wasn't the Greeks, it was the Italians ... or it was the Vietnamese." But those are races and nationalities. Islam is a religion, and a political project, and a globalised ideology. Unlike the birthplace of your grandfather, it's not something you leave behind in the old country.

Indeed, the pan-Islamic identity embraced by many second and third-generation Muslims in the West has very little to do with where their mums and dads happen to hail from. "You can't find any equivalent in Italian or Greek or Lebanese or Chinese or Baltic immigration to Australia. There is no equivalent of raving on about jihad," said Howard, stating the obvious in a way most of his fellow Western leaders could never quite bring themselves to do.

"Raving on about jihad" is a splendid line which meets what English law used to regard as the reasonable-man test. If you're a reasonable bloke slumped in front of the telly watching jihadists threatening to behead the Pope or Muslim members of Britain's National Health Service ploughing a blazing automobile through the check-in desk at Glasgow airport, "raving on about jihad" fits in a way that President George W. Bush's religion-of-peace pabulum doesn't. Bush and Tony Blair can be accused of the very opposite of the traditional politician's failing: they walked the walk but they didn't talk the talk. That's to say neither leader found a rhetoric for the present struggle that resonated. Howard did.

Likewise, Peter Costello. Sympathising with Muslims who wish to live under sharia law, he mused: "There are countries that apply religious or sharia law: Saudi Arabia and Iran come to mind. If a person wants to live under sharia law these are countries where they might feel at ease. But not Australia." It's a glum reflection on the times that such an observation should be controversial.

Yet it stands in marked contrast to, say, the Dutch Justice Minister Piet Hein Donner, who remarked that if the electors voted to bring in sharia he'd be OK with that, or the Swedish politician who said that Swedes should be "nice to Muslims while we are in the majority so that when they are in the majority they will be nice to us".

The whining about judging the religion of Islam by a few bad apples aggrieved by US policy doesn't hold water anymore. If 9/11 or 3/11 or another of the many Muslim efforts to devastate the west were isolated affairs it would be different. They are not.

Just as we judge Christians for the Crusades in the 12th and 13th centuries, we judge Muslims for the sum of their acts or their failures to act. Few look back on Ted Bundy's life and say, he was a great guy but for those murders he committed. At some point if you don't turn yourself or your religion around, you quite rightly become marked. Howard understood that and wasn't afraid to say it.

No Chopsticks Needed

Four years after retiring, illusionists Siegfried Fischbacher and Roy Horn say they may just reappear.

The German-born performers' long-running "Siegfried & Roy" production ended in October 2003 when Horn was critically injured on stage by a tiger.

Horn, 63, gets a boost from visits to his family of animals at The Mirage, including Montecore, the white tiger that attacked him.

Horn and Siegfried remain convinced that Montecore sensed Horn was having a mini-stroke and was dragging him to safety, rather than attacking him.

"I hang out with my lifesaver," Horn said.

Roy Horn's recovery is a wonderful thing and his lack of resentment attests to his positive outlook on life. However, I have a difficult time viewing Montecore as a savior. He was hungry and wanted a little snack. Horn was there.

More From Our Muslim Friends

Thousands of Sudanese, many armed with clubs and swords and beating drums, burned pictures of a British teacher Friday and demanded her execution for insulting Islam by letting her students name a teddy bear Muhammad.

Sudan's Islamic government, which has long whipped up anti-Western, Muslim hard-line sentiment at home, was balancing between fueling outrage over the case of Gillian Gibbons and containing it.

The government does not want to seriously damage ties with Britain, but the show of anger underlines its stance that Sudanese oppose Western interference, lawyers and political foes said. The uproar comes as the U.N. is accusing Sudan of dragging its feet on the deployment of peacekeepers in the war-torn Darfur region.

Many in the protesting crowd shouted "Kill her! Kill her by firing squad!"

Special koodoos to the British government for handling this crisis so well from the beginning.

Protesters dismissed Gibbons' claims that she didn't mean to insult the prophet.

"It is a premeditated action, and this unbeliever thinks that she can fool us?" said Yassin Mubarak, a young dreadlocked man swathed in green and carrying a sword. "What she did requires her life to be taken."

Anybody want to have a serious discussion about the "wicked" state of Israel at this point?

Algerian Experience Continues . . .

IN retrospect, it was not a good idea to have left his pistol at home. Called to the scene of a traffic accident in the Paris suburbs last Sunday, Jean-François Illy, a regional police chief, came face to face with a mob of immigrant youths armed with baseball bats, iron bars and shotguns.

What happened next has sickened the nation. As Illy tried to reassure the gang that there would be an investigation into the deaths of two teenagers whose motorbike had just collided with a police car, he heard a voice shouting: “Somebody must pay for this. Some pigs must die tonight!”

The 43-year-old commissaire realised it was time to leave, but that was not possible: they set his car ablaze. He stood as the mob closed in on him, parrying the first few baseball bat blows with his arms. An iron bar in the face knocked him down.

“I tried to roll myself into a ball on the ground,” said Illy from his hospital bed. He was breathing with difficulty because several of his ribs had been broken and one had punctured his lung.

His bruised and bloodied face signalled a worrying new level of barbarity in the mainly Muslim banlieues, where organised gangs of rioters used guns against police in a two-day rampage of looting and burning last week.

Not far from where Illy was lying was a policeman who lost his right eye after being hit by pellets from a shotgun. Another policeman displayed a hole the size of a 10p coin in his shoulder where a bullet had passed through his body armour.

Altogether 130 policemen were injured, dozens by shotgun pellets and shells packed with nails that were fired from a homemade bazooka. It prompted talk of urban “guerrilla warfare” being waged on French streets against the forces of law and order.

130 police injured. After France deployed it army, things began to settle down. I'll refrain from the jokes at this point.

Nearby were the charred remains of the local constabulary. The nursery school was burnt down. So was the library.

Rioting two years ago was widely regarded as a protest against poor housing, racial discrimination and unemployment of up to 40% in the grim housing estates surrounding most big French cities.

Good to hear they managed to torch a nursery school and library. They don't have much use for either one. France has created its own problems. It's nearly bankrupt; its policies discourage hiring; its tax rates discourage business; its people are, well, French. This doesn't leave a great deal of hope for the poor in the burbs. Having said that, its immigrants have a choice. They can leave.

“We shouldn’t try to excuse the inexcusable,” said the president in a television address to an anxious nation on Thursday, ridiculing the left’s vision of rioters as “victims of social injustice”. He pledged that those who fired at police would be tracked down, one by one, and tried on charges of attempted murder.

Lawlessness in the suburbs is an awkward issue for Sarkozy because he had promised to deal with it as interior minister, when he introduced “zero tolerance” policing, only to be accused of aggravating the problem by referring to trouble-makers as “thugs” and “scum”. Despite some successes, many of the suburban ghettoes remain a law unto their own and, like parts of New York in the bad old days, policemen do not like to set foot there.

“It felt like they were out to kill us,” said one of the officers in Villiers-le-Bel last week. “We knew that there were weapons in the suburbs, but they have never been turned against us like that. The kids were shooting at us at close range, loading and reloading their weapons. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Sarkozy is right. The troublemakers are thugs and scum. They may also be victims of social injustice, but there are plenty of victims who don't fire on police officers. And the naivete of the police officer is a bit unnerving. These same thugs rioted in 2005. He knew they had weapons. Was he under the impression that the well-armed "disaffected Muslim youth" who had never been reprimanded for torching the country in 2005 were suddenly going to fall in line, take marketing jobs in Paris and raise their integrated families in peace?