Groovy

For a moment I didn’t think this was a joke. I mean, the Baby Boomers really are getting pretty old.

And in so many ways they’ve become the insufferable old squares they originally were rebelling against. Their distinctively bizarre music and inscrutable fashion sense are now as permanent and unyielding as that of the folks in Lawrence Welkworld.

This is what mainstream looks like. And there’s nothing more harmlessly mainstream today than Sixties nostalgia.

Farewell Tony Blair

As well as being enormously more eloquent than our own beloved leader, Tony Blair is a good sport with what seems to be a well grounded ego if this clip is to be believed:



Speaking of eloquence, Blair shared some important thoughts on leadership and the burden of making decisions, not simply taking expedient poses.

On the Long War: "The terrorists who threaten . . . us will never give up, if we give up. It is a test of will and of belief, and we cannot fail it."



UPDATE: Apologies to Slugger O'Toole but I have no insight, no knowledge and no opinion about Tony Blair's influence on Northern Ireland. I certainly welcome what appears to be a peaceful reconciliation between the Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland which, if successful, would be yet another vital Irish contribution to civilization. But I suspect that it was the Irish themselves that brought this about regardless of actions and intentions of the British PM.

Palestinians Manage to Fall Short of Our Lowest Expectations

Over the weekend, a U.N.-sponsored elementary school in Gaza held a gymnastics show that included a parade with boys and girls. This was clearly against God’s will so a crowd of Islamists did what any concerned group of parents would do . . . they attacked the school with grenades.

In response, Palestinian “security personnel” opened fire on the crowd and managed to kill one of their own guys and wound two schoolchildren and a teacher.

The chief of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Gaza, John Ging, was attending the show despite death threats trumpeted over loudspeakers the “parents” had set up outside the school. Asked why he ignored the warnings, Ging diplomatically replied, “We have warnings about anything and everything, and people here demonstrate against anything and everything,”

All jolly good fun, wot?

What he means to say is, “these people are fanatic death cultists who will lob grenades about anything and everything.”

Here is a typical Palestinian “policeman:”




Why are they fighting? The rote response is because they are oppressed by Zionist occupiers and their American sponsors. But wait a second, Israel no longer occupies Gaza. They withdrew in 2005.

And what have the Palestinians managed to create in the past two years? A stable and efficient government would be far too much to ask. Even a government that can protect an elementary school from attack seems a bit too ambitious. How about a government that can train security personnel not to shoot each other and whatever children happen to be standing nearby?

The problem with the Palestinians is not Israel. It’s other Palestinians. But most of the world – as typified by the U.N. rep quoted above – would rather pretend that barbaric violence is just some local custom, part of the colorful mosaic of traditions in the Arab world, and not symptomatic of some larger pathology.

It’s the “soft bigotry of low expectations” writ globally. And as usual, this bigotry threatens the very people the bigots are supposed to be concerned about.

Une Charge a Garder



Looks like Bush has not only outlasted his “Old Europe” adversaries but he’s managed to improve ties with our allies without compromising his principles.

Not that you’d ever hear that in the mainstream media.

E-nough has video of Sarko's victory speech in which he addresses "our American friends." This line has been reported widely but I didn't know until seeing the video that the crowd erupts in cheers when he says it.

Thank goodness, it's safe to love France again!

Meanwhile, the vanguard of the people, once again betrayed by the people themselves, expressed their dissatisfaction in the usual fashion . . . they trashed their own neighborhoods.







Violence and the threat of it has always been the fascist’s way of achieving political goals. Now it’s the “progressives” who break the windows.

Video via the incroyable No Pasaran!

Is he as tough as his critics say? Well, remember that in 1993, he volunteered to negotiate with a guy called "The Human Bomb" who was holding an elementary school hostage. Not only did Sarko get the children out safely, but the Human Bomb got iced in the process. Win-Win!

And what would a French election be without an address by the British Prime Minister? I'm looking for W's French language message.

Tony Blair felicite Sarkozy en français

UPDATE: Allow me to be the first of many to compare Sarkozy to Squidward:

How Do You Make Steel Anyway?

I’m fascinated by 9/11 “Truthers” the same way I’m fascinated by grisly highway accidents. How the heck did those people find themselves in the fix they’re in?

Accident victims deserve our compassion, but the Truthers are another story. They may very well need treatment of some sort. And for people like Rosie O’Donnell, that treatment could begin with completing her high school education.



Steel cannot be melted by fire? How does she think steel got to be steel in the first place? Do the words crucible, Bessemer, or blast furnace sound at all familiar? Nope.

How about some visuals? Here’s what a steel mill looks like. (Care of "Deer Hunter," a heartwarming film about friendship and homecoming). You can barely see anything but fire.



And of course, within a week or two of Rosie's revelation on national television, (she's since been forced off the air by government censors), there was that big fire on Interstate 80 in Oakland that caused the steel supports to buckle and on overpass to collapse.



A closer look reveals perhaps the second time in Rosie history that fire has melted steel. Although it's more likely that this was a controlled detonation designed to intimidate Rosie and people like her (and I don't mean portly outspoken highschool dropouts, although God knows, I wish the governmnet would lock them up.)



Why doesn’t this obvious empirical evidence make any sense to the Truthers? I don’t know, but I suspect that it’s because the actual truth may be even more difficult for them to deal with than the fantasy truth they’ve conjured for themselves.

In any case, no harm done. Unless you’re Rosie’s agent.

Surrender Now and Then What?

I didn't really pay much attention to the official talking points that went along with the Democrats’ Iraqi surrender legislation so this little clip of Pelosi and Reid was a bit confusing to me.



In a span of less than 40 seconds, Nancy Pelosi conflates three demi-truths into one amalgamated twist of logic that seems preposterous on its face. It makes me wonder, what are these guys (and ladies) thinking?

First she says the legislation “respects the wishes of the American people to end the Iraq war.” She must be talking about opinion polls showing that the majority of Americans who take surveys are dissatisfied with the course of the conflict in Iraq. I would count myself as part of that majority. But I want to succeed in Iraq, not surrender unilaterally as this legislation intends.

I wasn’t asked for my opinion by the pollsters Pelosi must have in mind. If fact the last time I registered a political preference was on Election Day 2006. On that day, as I recall, the most prominent antiwar Democrat in the nation, Ned Lamont, lost his bid for the Senate to perhaps the most pro-victory Democrat in the nation, Joe Lieberman. Iraq was one of many issues in 2006, the most prominent one being ethics. And on ethics the Democrats have yet to respect the wishes of the American people since that guy with $100,000 in cash cooling in his refridgerator is still a Member is good standing as far as I know.

Second, Pelosi claims the dead-and-decayed-on-arrival legislation she is signing was passed with bi-partisan support. Actually, the House version squeaked by with support from 216 Democrats and 2 Republicans. Hardly bipartisan. Indeed the opponents of the bill displayed more bipartisanaity (198 Republicans and 14 Democrats). The rest was basically a party line vote which is why it narrowly passed and why a veto of it cannot be overrided, or overridden, or overridieded

And lastly, Pelosi says that by signing the bill and withdrawing our troops from Iraq, we will be able to “refocus on fighting terrorists.” But surely even the Democrats are aware that Al Qaeda is active in Iraq.

How would surrendering in Iraq possibly help us fight terrorists in Iraq? Are we guaranteeing that we will never under any circumstances fight in Iraq ever? That might be taken by the Islamofascist organizations we've been chasing in the Middle East, South Asia, and the Horn of Africa as an invitation to set up shop, kick back and relax.

For months I’ve been hearing that Iraq has become a magnet for terrorists. Even the New York Times is reporting that Al Qaeda leaders are being killed in Iraq and I don’t think they were there for Spring Break vacation.

At the very least, Nancy Pelosi needs to remind these Al Qaeda knuckleheads that Iraq has nothing to do with the global war on terror.

Interestingly, today’s Times has a long story on how Sunni extremists in Jordan are literally dying to fight the infidels in Iraq. Where will they go when we withdraw from Iraq? Will they go back home and put aside their homicidal fervor and refocus on making the best damn chicken shawarma the world has ever tasted? Or will they follow our troops home and pursue martyrdom until we help them achieve it?

I wonder, what exactly is the Democrats’ policy on this issue? I suspect the foundation of it is whatever embarrasses and weakens Bush is good. Even though Bush is the President and Commander in Chief . . . offices that, for better or worse represent the United States at home and abroad to people who don't know the difference between a Democrat and a Republican. And even though George Bush will no longer be president in a little more than two years. What then?

If the Bush haters really wanted to refocus on fighting terrorists, how would they do it? They could begin by fighting the terrorists where they are right now . . . in Iraq.

And it wouldn't hurt if the Democrats took some of that hatred they reserve for their partisan rivals and refocus it on our actual enemies.

Au Revoir Sego

Sego and Sarko slugged it out last night in a debate that was apparently watched by every voter in France.

From a great distance it seems that the most notable event in the 2 ½ hour discourse was Segolene going postale on Sarkozy over the issue of disabled children.

Sego, who is supposed to be the more serene and composed of the two candidates, let loose a torrent of syllables at the tail end of which Sarkozy, who is supposed to be the hot head, doused the flames with a provocative suggestion that Sego calm down.

It had the desired effect.



At minute 4:30 on the video above she begins to self-immolate.

“No, je ne calmerai pas” – “No I will not calm down” she says at least three times before Sarko puts the fork in her, “You must be calm to be president of the republic.”

Oh yeah, she’s done.

But, damn, she looks great even when she's yelling at you. That's my kind of woman. Oh wait, I'm already married to that kind of woman.

Media Bias or Outright Opposition?

The hot-blooded heroines at E-nough report that anti-Sarko insurgents editorialized in a closed captioned translaton of a Sarkozy speech broadcast in the U.S. by France 2 TV.

More about this latest attat contra L'Homme, and blow by blow French election coverage at E-nough!

J'aime Sego

The most unpredictable of French presidential campaigns (as some have called it) is winding down to a very predictable conclusion. After eliminating all secondary candidates, Nicolas Sarkozy and Segolene Royal will sprint to win a run-off election in two weeks. And Sarko is almost certain to win since the sum of the French leftist, Socialist, Communist, neo-lefto-righto-crypto-islamo-anti-syndicalist-trotskyite-anti-semitic and environmental vote is still less than 50% of the total electorate.

That’s good news for France, but sad news for me because I really like Segolene. I think she’s incredibly attractive.

I’m sure some will cringe because the only nice things I have to say about the female candidate in this race have to do with her physical appearance. But I’m not being sexist. I don’t like her politics and I don’t understand what she’s saying.

I have no doubt that what her critics say is true . . . she’s inarticulate, unprepared, unimaginative, and an unreconstructed lefty. The only thing she has going for her are her looks and that’s saying a heck of lot in her case . . . Sego’s got it going on!

Look at her in this TV interview in 1992. Don’t listen to her blab on about some environmental ruse for expanding the nanny state . . . just look at her wrap her lips around those hard to pronounce French words with her summer tan and rich “royal” blue get-up.



She’s wonderful. She reminds me of all the things I like about the French. First of all, they don’t hide behind irony like Americans do. When they run a woman for President it’s a real woman! She’s not trying to act like a man. And if she is, she’s entirely unconvincing.

She may be trying to rally the working class aganist moneyed interests but she looks like a million bucks while she's doing it.

Plus, the French have more authentic unselfconscious sense of style than Americans will ever have. Just look at this studio set up for a candidate interview on television. This is from the En Aparte program on Canal+



Can you imagine some slob like Dennis Kucinich delivering a coherent sentence on a set like that? He’d be sitting there with a salesman’s grin looking around for the camera with the little red light on it and scratching himself through the shiny fabric of his cheap suit.

Stick Sego on that couch and she looks terrific from every angle.

Again, I don’t care what she’s saying. She’s probably proposing diplomatic pressure against the Taliban regime in Kabul or a guaranteed income for middle-aged university students but she says it with extraordinary loveliness.

And loveliness is a quality entirely lacking in American politics (with the exception of John Edwards).

I was lucky to be in Paris in 1981 when Francois Mitterrand was elected President of the Republic and saw many spontaneous displays of un-ironic style and patriotic loveliless.

On election night crowds overwhelmed the Metro and commandeered the trains to Place de le Bastille chanting “Voila Gagne!”

A few days later Mitterrand rode stone-faced up the Champs Elysees past cheering crowds while standing in the back of a modified Citroen DS with a chrome handhold for processional occasions. (This was a few weeks before the attempted assassinations of President Reagan and Pope John Paul II and so probably the last time that presidential DS was used.)

After laying a wreath at the Arc de Triumph, Mitterand paid his respects to famous Frogs of the past in the Pantheon. He roamed the halls alone with fixed television cameras broadcasting his progress simultaneously to the nation.

Effortlessly stylish. Emotionally patriotic without cheap sentimentality. It allmost makes me want to dig into a pate sandwich and a Kronenbourg right now.

Sego is bound to lose this next round but she and her innate Frenchiness has certainly brightened my springtime.

Join the Navy and See Asia!

Seems harmless enough.

Spiffy Japanese sailors manning destroyers and submarines under a rising sun battle flag. Don’t worry, that’s not a dive bomber . . . just a rescue aircraft. And that jaunty scarf? Pretty sure it doesn’t say Divine Wind or anything like that. It’s all about a threatening as a Power Rangers preview (and possible directed by the same regie du cinema).

Still, why does the sight of Japanese people in military uniforms give me the willies?

Inexplicable Tuesday Video

What's Become of England?

John Darbyshire writes in the New English Review about Britain’s Iranian hostage crisis and laments the passing of English patriotism. He reminds us of a very different time when a young private, John Moyse, was captured in China during the Opium Wars around 1850. His captors demanded that “kowtow” or submit to their authority. He refused saying he would never bow to any Chinaman and was promptly hacked to pieces.

The incident was celebrated in the poem, “The Private of the Buffs,”

Yes, honor calls!—with strength like steel
He put the vision by.
Let dusky Indians whine and kneel;
An English lad must die.
And thus, with eyes that would not shrink,
With knee to man unbent,
Unfaltering on its dreadful brink,
To his red grave he went.

Vain, mightiest fleets, of iron fram’d;
Vain, those all-shattering guns;
Unless proud England keep, untam’d,
The strong heart of her sons.
So, let his name through Europe ring—
A man of mean estate,
Who died, as firm as Sparta’s king,
Because his soul was great.

Back then, it was a soldier’s duty to die for his country. Today, the Iranians are going to have to launch a dedicated TV channel to keep up with all the confessions they’ve coaxed out of the British sailors and Marines they’ve captured.

What did the Iranians do to persuade Seaman Faye Turney to pose with a headscarf while captive? Not much probably. And imagine the outrage if a Western country had captured a female Muslim and broadcast her image on Al Jazeera while wearing a low cut blouse. Of course, a Western country would never do such a thing nor, for that matter, have Westerners be all that outraged at the sight of one of their own submitting to a headscarf.

The British captives all too accurately reflect the values of their civilian cohorts. Rather than defend Britain’s honor to the death – which is why one used to join the military – these soldiers are hoping to get home with their lives and nothing more. Will they be shamed when they return? It doesn’t seem to matter to them.

Is there anything worth dying for anymore? Our enemies understand this better than we do. How often does some Islamist fanatic boast about loving death more than infidels love life? Invariably, this death-loving jihadist is alive and kicking when he says this which should undercut his argument significantly. What I think he means is that, as fanatic as he is, at least there’s something in his world worth dying for. And I for one am all in favor of helping him on his way.

But for the non-fanatics, there seems little worth risking your neck. This line of reasoning quickly translates into action with self-fulfilling consequences. When you enter a conflict with an exit strategy you will end up executing that strategy. When you enter a conflict with defeat on your mind, you will be defeated.

The British/Iranian incident is a perfect example of this. The division between territorial waters is ambiguous business on the high seas. And when there is a war taking place, you’d be wise to build in an extra measure of safety. So isn’t it a little reckless to intervene in a war and capture military personnel if the border you’re honoring is literally fluid? And wouldn’t then the Iranians be as much at fault as the British, if not more so?

Then why is the benefit of the doubt awarded to the Iranians and not the British? Because the West is desperately looking for a way to lose.

And why, as Mark Steyn points out, if the British are part of a U.N. sanctioned coalition prosecuting a U.N. operation . . . why isn’t the U.N. demanding the release of the British captives?

Most importantly, the British did not resist capture presumably out of fear of provoking an international incident. Why weren’t the Iranians inhibited by this same fear? What will instill in them a healthy fear of future international incidents?

Sadly, an English lad must die one way or another if this episode is to conclude honorably. Fifteen now or perhaps fifteen hundred later. Because as the poem says, the mightiest fleets and those all shattering guns are all in vain unless proud England keeps untamed the strong hearts of her sons.



UPDATE: War Is an Ugly Thing. But Not the Ugliest of Things.

Saturday Random Video

Paul Rudolph’s Designs of Doom

OK, let’s just say it. Paul Rudolph may have been the worst architect in America (which, of course, includes the world).

And as if to second the nomination, The New York Times has published two fawning articles recently about his dark genius and the fact that everyone wants to demolish his unsightly work.

On Friday the Times ran a long and profusely illustrated article by some sap who took a road trip to see as many Rudolph buildings as he could in a weekend. Sadly, there are many still standing.

The writer, a Times apparatchik named Fred Bernstein, marvels at the ploddingly dismal insanity that characterizes Rudolph’s buildings.

In describing one monstrosity, Bernstein writes admiringly that “a trip from one room to another can take you up and down six different stairways.” At another he writes, “Some of the exterior features – like stairs to nowhere – are confounding, but a Rudolph wouldn’t be a Rudolph without puzzle pieces that don’t quite fit.” If I owned such a defective puzzle I would throw it away. Unfortunately, Rudolph worked in raw poured concrete and throwing away one of his buildings would involve explosive force measured in megatons and a dozen landfills.

Rudolph’s modernist credentials, like his buildings, are bulletproof. He studied with Gropius at Harvard. He was Dean of the Yale School of Architecture and famously designed the bunker which houses the School. It’s notable that before the concrete had cured on their new home, the students attempted to burn the building down. They failed although you can hardly tell by looking at the place.

Funny how Rudolph buildings are always in danger of destruction by popular demand.

Perhaps the most perfect expression of Rudolph’s dreary brilliance is the sprawling Boston Government Service Center (BGSC), a mental health facility that is part of Boston’s dispiriting Government Center.

Say what you want about Boston’s brutalist City Hall (and I have), but that craptacular pile of concrete never killed anyone. BGSC has.

According to Metropolis magazine, Rudolph wanted to express mental illness in his building and so paid special attention to dank corridors and stairs leading to blank walls. As a result, Rudolph created a mental hospital that actually inflames patients’ emotional disorder. “The building programs disabled behavior,” says wrote Matthew Dumont, a Boston psychiatrist and author of the book, Treating the Poor. The building’s “chapel” was sealed shut after a patient ignited himself there and a catwalk over the lobby had to be glazed over after it invited too many suicide attempts.


Faced with heaps of empirical and intuitive evidence, our dogged Timesman Bernstein felt compelled to trot out reason number one for the unpopularity of modern architecture (Paul Rudolph variant) right up front.

“If Rudolph’s buildings aren’t as highly valued as those of some of his
contemporaries, that’s in part because they aren’t understood.”

Of course, the masses can’t stand architecture for the masses because they’re too massively schtoopid to understand it. What’s new about this statement is that Bernstein is suggesting that Rudolph’s buildings are hated even by the depressed standards of his hated contemporaries.

Interestingly, Bernstein’s tragical history tour brings him into contact with lots of people who understand all too well what it means to live and work all day in one of Rudolph’s reveries. And guess what . . . they hate it.

At the Orange County Government Center, which vandalizes the otherwise charming town of Goshen, New York, we meet Edward Diana, the County Executive who marvels at the building’s 87 separate roofs . . . “all of which leak.”

Is the building highly valued? “If I took a poll in town,” Diana says, “it would be demolished tomorrow.”



Rudolph’s inability to shelter occupants is a complaint at UMass Dartmouth, which may be the foulest college campus in New England.

According to Alan Bates, a chemistry professor (who starred in the earth-toned 70s classic "Unmarried Woman" if I’m not mistaken) no matter how much the school spends on roofing repairs, “we’ll have puddles in the hallway tomorrow if it rains.”

By the way, did you know that UMass students love the campus so much that many believe Rudolph was a Satanist? Fancy that.

The second article in the Times ad hoc tribute to Rudolph, “Another Building by a Noted Modernist Comes Under Threat,” is about the 1960 Blue Cross/Blue Shield Building in downtown Boston. According to the Times, this was the first Modernist office tower to rise in downtown Boston. Am I the only one to read that line and imagine the first smallpox pustule to disfigure a distinguished face?

Says David Fixler of DoCoMoMo, a snooty group of modernist preservationists, the wholly undistinguished pile of concrete is, “a very significant piece of Boston’s architectural heritage.” Perhaps, but its significance has nothing to do with its beauty or utility.

The wise men at 2 Blowhards have ruefully noted that preservationist organizations that were established to protect architectural heritage from the ravages of modernism are now circling the wagons around the offending modernist buildings themselves in a sort of institutional Stockholm Syndrome. The ultimate irony will be when the National Trust for Historic Preservation attempts to stop demolition of Pennsylvania Station in 2010.

The DoCoMoMo folks are furiously spinning the dials and pulling the levers in the hope of preserving this beast of a building. But time is running out and it, like the other Rudolph monstrosities, are doomed. That's fine with me since it's architecture like this that injected the desperate "kill or be killed" ethos into the downtowns of our once beautiful cities.

And as might be fitting for the master architect of doom, exposure to his own buildings ultimately doomed Rudolph. He died in 1997 of mesothelioma.


UPDATE: for a lovely tour of the world's ugliest buildings, do viist the Skyscraper Page.

Religion of Peace (and anthropomorphic animals)

Egyptian television pre-empted its regularly scheduled broadcast of SpongeBob to tell kids a charming story about Muhammad, the Jewess and an unusually rare lamb chop.



The Prophet was wise. He took the sheep’s word for it.

“56”

“Trigger-Happy Cops Fire 56 Bullets in Neighborhood Shootout,” the headlines did not scream this morning.

The day after a disturbed gunman murdered three unarmed men, two of whom were auxiliary police officers, The New York Times did not dwell on the possibility of police overreaction even though officers felled the gunman in a tremendous fusillade of bullets.

“They shot him. And after he went down they kept shooting,” the Times quotes an eyewitness in the 29th paragraph of a 2000+ word story deep in the Metro Section of the paper. “I could see the sparks off the sidewalk. Then they kicked him a couple of times.”

The perp’s lifelong struggle with issues of race, gender, or class did not figure at all in the Times’ obligatory profile of the victim of the police shooting. Although he had worked as a journalist and showed promise as a screenwriter and had even produced a film several years ago, the Times profile did not explore the possibilities of a life cut short by the actions of hyper-aggressive white cops with testosterone coursing through their young inexperienced veins.

But just a few months ago, in November, the story was quite different.

Back then, when police officers confronted and killed Sean Bell who they believed was armed and posing them a mortal threat, the Times headline read “50 Bullets and a Death in Queens.”

Coverage included charges of excessive police force and racism (even though the target and most of the officers involved were black). Mayor Bloomberg felt compelled to express his grave concern. After meeting with Rev. Al Sharpton and Rep. Charlie Rangel, the Mayor announced, “It is to me unacceptable or inexplicable how you can have 50-odd shots fired.”

And in 1999, when Amadou Diallo appeared to pose a threat to police, he was shot dead in a 41-bullet barrage and similar outrage filled the pages of local newspapers for months.

What is the difference between then and now? Why are we unlikely to see people marching on City Hall with placards baring the number “56” in blood red ink? Because David Gavin, the civilian on the receiving end of the police bullets is manifestly guilty of cold blooded murder and the police acted appropriately in subduing him.

What we learn from the Greenwich Village shootout, and the Sean Bell shootout, and the Diallo shootout, is that when the New York City Police believe you pose a mortal threat to them, you are going to get shot . . . a lot. And they’re going to kick you to make sure you’re dead.



This has nothing to do with brutality or deeply help racial prejudices or untrained trigger-happy, machismo in uniform. This is human nature. It’s also the reality of life and death in a city.

Pull a gun on a cop and you get popped. That’s both explicable and acceptable to me.

But, Of Course, They Support the Troops

Watch this scene from "The Best Years of Our Lives" and notice the things that have changed.

For one thing, people dressed sharper than today. The first aid kits were a bit more primative. And there seems to be a distinct shortage of personal injury lawyers.

What hasn't changed? There's the same self-rightious truthiness about war, its causes, and its justification.

And this was World War II.

I thought we all agreed on that one, right?



FDR Lied and People Died!

Not enough of them for my taste, soldier.

Peaceful Non-Existence Watch



My take on the Holy Land is that while Israel would settle for peaceful coexistence with a Palestinian state, the Palestinians and the Islamofacists who support them will settle for nothing less than Israel's peaceful non-existence. Can there be any compromise with actors who want genocide? Will they compromise at demi-genocide?

I'm sure this is all taken out of context and that there's a reasonable explanation for what would appear to be widespread Nazi-like antisemitism in Saudi Arabia.

It's Not Pretty Being Green

The latest craze in architecture, after fizzled experiments in Modernism, Post Modernism, Brutalism, Deconstructionism, and Post-Brutal-Deconstructed-Neo-Modernism, is a genuflection to environmental consciousness called “Green Building” or “Sustainable Architecture.”

For the most part, building green means cloaking an intrinsically inefficient high rise building in an ecological hair shirt that makes owners feel good and tenants feel miserable.

The latest example of Green Building has risen in San Francisco where the lunatics by the Bay have ripped apart one of the grittier parts of their foggy asylum to construct what is surely the most ridiculous building of our still young century, the poetically named Federal Building.

A unique combination of crackpot environmentalism and elaborate ugliness, when it finally opens its doors (or flaps, or airlocks, or orifices, or something) this month, the Federal Building will become the first terrorist target that even al Qaeda would have to admit could only be improved by explosive charges.

It’s as if the Feds decided that instead of risking the destruction of beautiful new office building, they’ll just blow it up themselves right now and get it over with.

Indeed the design of the Federal Building seems to be directly inspired by the Alfred Murrugh Building in Oklahoma City and the Khobar Towers in Infidelphia, Saudi Arabia.

How bad is this building? It’s hard to quantify but keep in mind that it is an office tower tall enough to disrupt the skyline of the city yet its elevators only stop on every third floor to conserve precious energy.

And after trudging up and down the stairs on a blazing summer afternoon the unfortunate tenants soak in their own sweat because the building has no air conditioning . . . again to save energy.

Who could have conceived of such a manifestly bad idea? Well, imagine a hip West Coast architect who surrounds himself with turtle necked young designers and calls his firm Morphosis and you have Thom Mayne.

Did I mention Thom Mayne wears Corbu glasses? Of course he does. Corbu glasses are to pompous architects what waacka waacka guitar licks are to late 70s porno movie soundtracks. I’m beginning to think these glasses themselves might actually be the root cause of bad architecture.

A profile of Mayne in the San Francisco Chronicle includes this telling insight:

“Mayne doesn't see his work as ugly, for starters. He also seems honestly baffled by the Bay Area notion that new buildings should mimic the architectural character of their surroundings -- or, as Mayne puts it, indulge in ‘the anachronistic illusion of some other time.’”

Does anyone begin an interview with a statement about how ugly your work is not unless it is truly and demonstrably ugly? And secondly, if you’re baffled by 3,000 years of esthetic wisdom you probably have no business designing real buildings that people might actually see.

Hopefully, the Mayne event in San Francisco will be so notoriously bad that it will do for enviro-fundementalism what the Tweed Courthouse did for corrupt government . . . that is, give it unmistakable form that provokes people corrective action.

Until then, federal employees by the Bay will have plenty of time to contemplate the consequences of global climate change while working in their very own greenhouse.


UPDATE: Christopher Hawthorne of the Los Angeles Times suggests that Mayne's latest gift to humankind may not even qualify for Silver LEED certification. Translation: It's ugly and it's not even "green."

Hope in Iraq

Has there ever been a smooth transformation of a society? The Christian Reformation was notably bloody. And the spread of Republicanism in Europe and the Americas was preceded by violence sufficient to persuade old powers to relinguish their authority.

Can reform be imposed by force? It certainly worked in Japan but only after years of war capped by two nuclear attacks.

Is the transformation to a pluralistic, liberal democracy worth it? For the grateful generations that follow, the answer seems self evident.

So as appalling as the violence in Iraq is right now, shouldn’t we all feel a measure of optimism when a Muslim cleric can go on national television and discuss a separation between religious and civil authority?

Listen to Iraqi MP Iyad Al-Din explain the role of religion in the lives of individuals and the corrupting influence of politics on religion:



This is exciting thinking because separating "church and state" is not an intuitive idea. After all, if you believe in a transcendant religious authority, why wouldn't you believe that authority should have political expression on earth? We in the West are comfortable with this division only because it took hundreds of years and countless lives to deliver us to this point.

Perhaps the same sort of reformation is taking shape in Iraq.

If the outcome of the violence in Iraq is a transformed Arab/Islamic society, then every one of the people who have died thus far will have given their lives to bring about one of the most profoundly beneficial outcomes in recent history.

Oh, and by the way, George W. Bush was the first to suggest this outcome was possible.