Well, I don’t know, Rod, but that doesn’t seem like too bad a way to check out.

Come to think of it, the millionaire’s death bears some resemblance to the last days of President Mitterrand. If I remember the story correctly, he abandoned treatment of the cancer that was killing him and went on a trip to Egypt with his wife (or was it his mistress?) and then returned to France to be with his mistress (or was it his wife?).

His last meal was, reputedly, with close friends. He dined on oysters and ortolan (a rare - and apparently tasty - bird from southwestern France that it is illegal to hunt, sell or eat).

Mitterrand was a ghastly man, but, whatever else you might say about him, his final days seem to have had a certain style.

I should have said that ortolan is known as bunting in English. Here’s a recipe and some tips as to how to eat it (which is, of course, illegal – NRO does not endorse bunting hunting or munching) that I found on the Web:

“Cooking l'ortolan is simplicity itself. Simply pop them in a high oven for six to eight minutes and serve. The secret is entirely in the eating. First you cover your head with a traditional embroidered cloth. Then place the entire four-ounce bird into your mouth. Only its head should dangle out from between your lips. Bite off the head and discard. L'ortolan should be served immediately; it is meant to be so hot that you must rest it on your tongue while inhaling rapidly through your mouth. This cools the bird, but its real purpose is to force you to allow its ambrosial fat to cascade freely down your throat.

When cool, begin to chew. It should take about 15 minutes to work your way through the breast and wings, the delicately crackling bones, and on to the inner organs. Devotees claim they can taste the bird's entire life as they chew in the darkness: the wheat of Morocco, the salt air of the Mediterranean, the lavender of Provence. The pea-sized lungs and heart, saturated with Armagnac from its drowning, are said to burst in a liqueur-scented flower on the diner's tongue. Enjoy with a good Bordeaux.”

There are two theories as to why the ortolan eater is expected to chew his bunting under a sort of gourmet burqa:

The first? Shame. To hide your gluttony from God.

The second? Good manners. Who wants to watch someone sitting there with a bird’s head sticking out of his mouth?

Mitterrand, an atheist, believed in getting a good meal in before he died. Others have been more optimistic about their chances of a reservation in that great restaurant in the sky. The nineteenth century clergyman, Sidney Smith, described an acquaintance whose “idea of heaven” was “eating pate de foie gras to the sound of trumpets.”

“Down below”, of course, they serve Dr Pepper.

One of the most frustrating aspects of the Western response to 9/11 has been the failure to articulate a secular case for rejecting the Wahhabi death cult. Instead, the administration’s emphasis (which almost certainly reflects its own PC reflexes and a certain tendency, shall we say, to piety) has been to stress moderate Islam as an alternative to al-Qaeda’s Cro-Magnon certainties. That’s all well and good – there are hundreds of millions of Muslims in the Arab world and elsewhere who need to know that the US is not their opponent and that the theological battle against Wahhabism is by no means lost - whatever Saudi-funded evangelists may claim.

However to regard Arabs as a people necessarily defined exclusively – or even primarily - by their religion is no more accurate than the all too often repeated suggestion that they are more comfortable in the embrace of an authoritarian state.

Contrary to the image created by all those pictures of the faithful rallying outside some mosque or other there is another alternative to the chant of the mullah – it’s secular, and, judging by this fascinating, and, I suspect, very important article by Charles Paul Freund, it may be being previewed on video. Here’s an extract:

“Can that be what is happening with Arabic videos? While they are entertaining and titillating viewers, they are also transmitting new ways of being to an apparently receptive audience, new and multiplying approaches to being an "Arab" that combine traditional forms of cultural self-presentation with forms borrowed from an array of other sources. The combinations that promise to emerge would not be mere copies of borrowed foreign models; they would be new and indigenous cultural creations, just as is the case in cultures around the world. This syncretism is already true of the music itself, which not only uses traditional Arabic instrumentation… in new ways but also borrows instruments and rhythms from the Caribbean, Europe, India, rock, rap… and numerous other sources.

What this low, "vulgar" genre is offering, in sum, is a glimpse of a latent Arab world that is both liberal and "modernized." Why? Because the foundation of cultural modernity is the freedom to achieve a self-fashioned and fluid identity, the freedom to imagine yourself on your own terms, and the videos offer a route to that process. By contrast, much of Arab culture remains a place of constricted, traditional, and narrowly defined identities, often subsumed in group identities that hinge on differences with, and antagonism toward, other groups.

For nearly a century, a series of utopian political systems has been advanced in the region to attempt to break this cycle of conflict and stagnation: Pan-Arabism, Ba’athism, Nasserism, Islamism, etc. These have all failed, sometimes disastrously. What may yet work in the region is what has worked elsewhere for centuries: commercialism that does not transmit a regime’s utopian dreams but addresses the personal dreams of the audience. “

Exactly. It’s time to stop appeasing the clerics.

Not for the first time, Orrin Hatch pops up as a member of this never very exclusive club.

Want to stop contraband cigarettes becoming too big a problem? Well, Orrin, sensible cigarette taxes are the answer – not intrusive legislation.

Reason has more.

The Daily Telegraph reports that there’s yet another edition (this time illustrated) of the Oxford English Dictionary, but that’s really just an excuse to mention today’s rainy day (and long put off) reading, The Surgeon of Crowthorne, a truly delightful work about one very intriguing aspect of the production of the OED’s first edition.

The book also records how James Murray, the editor of the first OED, described himself when he applied for a job with the British Museum back in 1867:

“I have to state that Philology, both Comparative and special, has been my favourite pursuit during the whole of my life, and I possess a general acquaintance with the languages & literature of the Aryan and Syro-Arabic classes – not indeed to say that I am familiar with all or nearly all of these, but that I possess that general lexical and structural knowledge which makes the intimate knowledge only a matter of a little application. With several I have a more intimate acquaintance as with the Romance tongues, Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, Latin & in a lesser degree Portuguese, Vaudois, Provencal, and various dialects. In the Teutonic branch, I am tolerably familiar with Dutch…Flemish, German, Danish. In Anglo-Saxon and Moeso-Gothic my studies have been much closer…I know a little of the Celtic, and am at present engaged with the Sclavonic, having obtained a useful knowledge of the Russian. In the Persian, Achaemenian Cuneiform, & Sanscrit branches, I know for the purposes of Comparative Philology. I have sufficient knowledge of Hebrew and Syriac to read at sight the Old Testament and Peshito; to a less degree I know Aramaic Arabic, Coptic and Phoenician to the point where it is left by Genesius.”

Naturally, he didn’t get the job.

Just how crooked is Diamond Giscard’s constitutional handiwork?

Very, it seems.

Yes, really. Annoying (to use the mildest of adjectives) though the EU is, the Poles should vote yes in this weekend’s referendum (any comment, Commissioner Patten?) whether to join the European Union. A yes vote will further underpin Poland’s long overdue return to the West and the Poles, unless their ruling elite becomes totally corrupted by Brussels – something that is far from impossible, unfortunately, – should be a welcome voice for Atlanticism in Brussels.

With a bit of luck, the arrival of the Poles (and the other East European applicants) should hasten that happy day when the federal model EU collapses (to borrow a phrase) under the weight of its own contradictions and becomes what it always should have been - a free trade zone.

European civil servant Chris Patten has a bizarre piece in this week’s issue of the London Spectator. It’s whiny, intellectually dishonest, over-stuffed and self-congratulatory, much like the man himself. A couple of points need highlighting:

“I hate referendums, which the late and great Julian Critchley used to call the form of plebiscitary democracy favoured by Hitler and Mussolini. Referendums on national issues are offered by governments out of weakness.”

That’s an interesting point, Commissioner Patten. Why don’t you go and make it in all those EU (or potential EU) countries that are holding referenda, either on Diamond Giscard’s ‘constitution’ or on the decision (Poland is voting this weekend) whether to join the EU?

Referenda are, Patten sneers, “popular with unelected newspaper editors.” Ah yes, unelected newspaper editors, a so much inferior species than, ahem, unelected EU Commissioners, eh, Chris?

Then Patten asks whether the UK wishes to “enjoy the notional independence of staying outside the eurozone and excluding [itself] from the decisions that will determine the development of [its] most important market? If anyone thinks that that represents a defence of real sovereignty, they should talk to the Norwegians.”

Indeed they should. The Norwegians seem quite happy with the existing state of arrangements (Norway has an association agreement – the EEA - with the EU, but is not a member). They should also chat to the Canadians. Our friends up North show few signs of wishing to adopt the currency used in their most important market. They must like that “notional” independence of theirs.

I don’t claim to know which party Patten really favors, but whichever it is – he disgraces it.

There’s a lengthy piece in today’s Guardian that, none too subtly, attempts to draw comparisons between the climate in today’s America and the McCarthy era. Among the highlights:

A description by that well-known Sovietophile, Vichy boulevardier and ‘philosopher’, Jean-Paul Sartre, of the execution of the Rosenbergs as:

“A legal lynching that has covered a whole nation in blood”.

Hmmm, Sartre. Could that be the same Sartre that said Khruschev’s denunciation of Stalin’s crimes should be kept secret lest it “discourage” the working class?

And then there’s this:

“Investigations and revelations since the end of the cold war have revealed that Julius Rosenberg probably did pass secrets to the Soviet Union, although nothing remotely as serious as those relating to the atomic bomb.”

Curiously, the article does not cite, for example, comments such as this (from papers summarized by former Soviet spy Vasili Mitrokhin):

“…David Greenglass was recruited through a group of S&T agents run by Julius Rosenberg (codenamed successively ANTENNA and LIBERAL…The members of the Rosenberg ring, who included his wife Ethel…were producing so many classified documents to be photographed …that the New York residency was running short of film. The residency reported that Rosenberg was receiving so much intelligence from his agents that he was finding it difficult to cope. “We are afraid of putting LIBERAL out of action with overwork.”

After hearing three days of testimony last week, Circuit Judge Janet C. Thorpe ruled that Sultaana Freeman's right to free exercise of religion would not be infringed by having to show her face on her license.

Freeman, 35, had obtained a license that showed her veiled with only her eyes visible through a slit. But the state revoked the license in 2001 when she refused to have her photo retaken with her face uncovered.

She sued the state of Florida, saying it would violate her Islamic beliefs to show her face publicly.

(Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.) APTV 06-06-03 1314EDT

Charlie Gibson: "Yeah, did she ever rationalize why there were these women in his life?"

Barbara Walters: "She, well, we asked her. Let me show you."

Gibson: "Okay."

[Interview clip]

Walters: "At one point you described what your husband had done as a sin of weakness."

Clinton: "It clearly was. You know, a friend who's something of a theologian said to me during this period that there were two kinds of sins -- sins of weakness and sins of malice -- and I think that, you know, my husband is such a fundamentally good person, this particular wrongdoing or sin was something that we could work through together."

The New York Times Company (NYSE: NYT - News), a leading media company with 2002 revenues of $3.1 billion, includes The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe, 16 other newspapers, eight network-affiliated television stations, two New York City radio stations and more than 40 Web sites, including NYTimes.com and Boston.com. For the third consecutive year, the Company was ranked No. 1 in the publishing industry in Fortune's 2002 list of America's Most Admired Companies. In 2003 the Company was named by Fortune as one of the 100 Best Companies to Work For. The Company's core purpose is to enhance society by creating, collecting and distributing high-quality news, information and entertainment.

For my semi-regular Friday morning gig. Should be on around 8:30.

I had a philosophy professor who told me that Heidegger's works were translated into French and then back into German all the time in the hope that a new insight or decipherable sentence might fall out and clank to the floor. I know there are lots of readers out there who quote Heidegger as if Being and Time was a Bazooka Joe comic. But I've got to tell you I thought it's like rolling an egg up the staicase of a skyscraper with your nose.

A true sign Jayson Blair has got mental problems: He gave his first television interview to WCBS in New York. He could have cried for Barbara Walters or Oprah. Instead, he gives his money interview to a local news station outside on the street. Weird.

There will be a G-File today. There's also my new syndicated column which actually includes some reporting a rarity -- unless you think breaking developments with my dog counts as reporting. But I will also be out of pocket for most of the day because I have to head out to the Hillsdale Academy to give the commencement address.

I couldn't resist: Jayson Blair's comment from English to French to German and back to English:

To hear I be true that into this operation sequence are pleased more persons, which I had released. I wish me the roll heads with mine continue.

Wow, I think this is babelfish translating and re-translating idea is the most fun I've had in long time! Thanks alot guys! I'm supposed to be writing essays for scholarship applications, but I'm sure I'll be on the Net all night translating my favorite Simpsons quotes.

K-Lo, John Derbyshire's translation of Ramesh P.'s sentence from English to Chinese and back to English seemed like such fun, I translated Jayson Blair's comment which you reported from English to Spanish, Spanish back to English, that to Chinese and back again and came up with: "I grieve hear, the more people whereabouts in has destraillado this event order. Longs for balanced head stops with me."

I like that MUCH better!

Blair responded to the resignations in a two-sentence e-mail to CNN: "I am sorry to hear that more people have fallen in this sequence of events that I had unleashed. I wish the rolling heads had stopped with mine."

I'm in 100% agreement with John. The only thing I'd add -- for now -- is that I think pro-GM food people are nuts for not emphasizing the fact that GM foods are more likely to save rain forests and the critters who live in them. Much of the world's rainforests are being cleared for shabby range and farm land. If we could grow all the world's food -- never mind wood -- out of a thimble, that would mean the economic incentives for the poor and the rich to clear rainforests would all but disappear. It's similar to why viagra helps save the rhino (no puns intended, required or solicited). The more Asian cultures don't need superstitious remedies -- e.g. ground rhino horn -- to do the voodoo they need done because they have that little blue pill, the better.

As I anticipated, Rich has declared that he who is without sin (or blegs) should cast the first stone. First, as I noted in my recent piece in National Review, hypocrisy in and of itself is not a sufficient argument. If I murder people that doesn't mean I am wrong when I say Rich shouldn't murder people. The same goes for blegging (the solicitation of help from readers in a blog). Indeed, I made that argument in the context of Bill Bennett's recent troubles. Which brings me to the second point. The issue is not whether blegging (like gambling) in and of itself is a sin. It isn't. No, the issue is whether or not Rich blegged too much. Is it causing him trouble in his daily life? Is he leaving the dinner table in order to ask readers how much he should tip? If he were Neo in the Matrix, would he bleg: "HELP - SHOULD I TAKE THE RED PILL OR THE BLUE PILL?"

Prof. Adler says that “Congress always has an affirmative obligation to identify the source of its authority whenever it enacts legislation.” Whence does that obligation derive? Is there a constitutional provision that says that Congress has to do this? Is there a provision that says that the Supreme Court should strike down any law that does not fulfill this supposed obligation? If Adler is not suggesting that the Court must strike down a law on this basis, then it appears that his argument does indeed depend on my argument’s being wrong. My argument, I should make it clear, was not that the Court should uphold a ban on partial-birth abortion because it “might” be constitutional but that it should uphold it because it is constitutional.

Adler claims that even within the terms of my equal-protection argument, a law against partial-birth abortion fails because it does not provide full equal protection to the unborn. I do believe that Congress would be within its constitutional rights to ban any method of killing embryonic and fetal human beings. But to have the power to ban a set of actions seems to me, at least in this case, to imply the power to ban any subset of them. All states would ban the puncturing of Adler’s skull and the sucking out of his “intra-cranial contents,” and the same protection should be given to the unborn, whether or not Congress is yet prepared to provide equal protection in other respects.

I'm off to CNN to discuss NYT and other stuff. Should either be at noon or 12:30.

Boyd and Raines are stepping (falling) down!

He says he is calm at work because he is doing God's work. "But there are many people who faint when they witness an execution. I don't know why they come and watch if they don't have the stomach for it.

"Me? I sleep very well," he adds.

Does he think people are afraid of him? "In this country we have a society that understands God's law," he says. "No one is afraid of me. I have a lot of relatives, and many friends at the mosque, and I live a normal life like everyone else. There are no drawbacks for my social life."

I guess I agree with Ramesh on the Con Law stuff. Though if Adler was able to persuade the federal government to be federalist on everything else, not just partial birth abortion, I could certainly live with that compromise. After all, I agree with Adler that a federal murder law is a bad idea so I'm sympathetic to the idea that a federal abortion law is a bad idea too. However, what I really want to say is that I applaud the testiness of this debate. We need more of it here. Twist the knives, heap the scorn, pour on the sarcasm, hit 'em in the torts. Faster federalists! Kill! Kill!

Bizarrely, quite a few readers seem to think that because I disagree with Rod I must be in favor of cruelty to livestock. I'm not and have said so in the past.

From a reader:

Sorry, Jonah, but I think you are way off base with your argument. Rather than addressing Rod’s true point, you are basically setting up a straw man by interpreting his word choice (“as God made it”) in the most extreme way possible. Yes, yes, cows and other farm animals have been selectively bred for millennia, and farmers have for many years tried to carefully control what these animals are fed – but I think most people see a big difference between such subtle tampering and injecting (or feeding) an animal massive quantities of chemicals. When you carefully breed chickens to obtain ones which lay very large, healthy eggs, you are using “God’s system” to obtain the favorable results you are looking for. When you splice fish genes into your chicken so that it will glow in the dark and make fish oil, then you have entered a completely different territory. Giving hormones to cows may not be quite in this category, but it is nevertheless troubling to many of us. And I’m NOT a crunchy con, by the way.

A Jewish reader notes that I stole a theological base by saying theology is on my side when I say that we are all born in sin. Jews do not believe in the doctrine of original sin, he notes. And he's right. We don't. Click here for the rundown on this point. But Jews do believe that man is born fallible and, in effect, flawed. Jews also believe that good conduct requires understanding God's will and that only comes through instruction and education. That's all I meant. But since I was the one who raised theology, I should have been more precise in my terminology.

I don't want to pick on Rod, but this whole "as God made it" thing has been bugging me. Yesterday, Rod said that he preferred his meat "As God made it," i.e. without hormones or other human tampering. Also, I've been reading The New Atlantis, a very interesting -- though a bit dry -- new journal on technology issues. So this stuff is just in my head.

Anyway, I don't like naturalism of the sort Rod is invoking. I think it buys into some of the biggest propaganda of the left. I say propaganda because much of the naturalism (by which I mean the view that things "unadulterated by man" are always better) is based on a series of lies and deliberate misunderstandings. Take the cows Rod prefers "as God made them." Well, in reality, the cows God made are very hard to find and probably taste terrible compared to what we find at Mortons. Cows have been genetically engineered for thousands of years, through selective breeding programs. The "organic" beef we buy at Whole Foods simply does not occur in nature. Ditto for chicken, pork and all the other tasty animals.

And that goes for even non-tastey animals -- like humans. When people arrive simply "as God made them" they are a mess, physically, emotionally, psychologically, politically and -- trust me on this -- literally. Moreover, I believe theology is on my side on this. We are born in sin after all. It is only through the acts of man that God-made humans improve. How that improvement takes place depends on your individual faith. But the point remains that without teaching, understanding, training and insight or revelation, we remain a mess. Sure God is the conductor directing this whole symphony, but without the very human musicians no one would ever get the tune right. Give a baby a violin without human instruction and you've got an expensive chew toy.

I do believe there is something hardwired into our genetic codes which makes such appeals to nature "as God made it" sound more authoritative than they really are -- and that alone should teach us something about the kind of world we want to live in. But if the choice is to live in any God-made world -- save Eden -- unimproved by man and technology or to live in a society with man's handiwork all around, I'll choose the latter every time.

For more on this you can see my whacky column about my hernia operation. You didn't this post was ending there did you?

There is perhaps no columnist or pundit whose views I have less respect for than Arianna Huffington. I can muster some respect even for the Scheers, Ivins and Conasons of the world whereas for Huffington I have nothing. Anyway, she's been emailing me her column for a while now and each time I've responded with a request -- very polite at first -- to be removed from her mailing list. I've never heard back and the drek kept coming. So today, I finally did the right thing and simply blocked her email from ever coming to my account. It felt good.

I'm a long-time reader of the Corner and NRO (I must admit I've let my NRODT sub. lapse...). I just saw your post on the Corner entitled "MAYBE WE SAW DIFFERENT MOVIES" (8:15pm, Jun 4th), in which you wrote "I always thought the villain in The Exorcist was satan."

Although AFI definitely dropped the ball either reporting the results of their survey or conducting it to begin with, didn't you yourself report Peter Blatty's claim that the villain in the Exorcist isn't "Satan" either, but rather, a "Demon" of sorts[here]?

So call me picky... :) In any event, thanks for keeping it real at NRO...

JonahEmail@aol.com is a dead address. I check it only rarely. My active email addresses are JonahNRO@aol.com and JonahsColumn@aol.com (For reax to my syndicated column) and JonahPorn@aol.com (for feedback on my film work).

I nominate Ramesh to identify everything wrong with Hendrik Hertzberg's staggeringly cheap column . Normally Hertzberg's a lot smarter than this. Here's a money paragraph from his deviation from smart liberalism:

In a way, Iraq has become a theme park of conservative policy nostrums. There are no burdensome government regulations. Health and safety inspectors and environmental busybodies are nowhere to be seen. The Ministry of Finance, Iraq’s equivalent of the Internal Revenue Service, is a scorched ruin. Museums and other cultural institutions, having been largely emptied of their contents, no longer have much use for public subsidies. Gun control is being kept within reasonable limits. (Although the occupying authorities are trying to discourage possession of heavy munitions, AK-47s and other assault weapons—guns of the type whose manufacture Tom DeLay and most of the House Republicans plan to re-legalize back home—have been given a pass.) And, in the absence of welfare programs and other free-lunch giveaways, faith-based initiatives are flourishing. The faith in question may be Iranian-style militant Shiism, but at least it’s fundamentalist.

Makes it possible to cram so much asininity into so little space. Not only is this Doonesbury cartoon shockingly offensive to both Palestinians and Israelis but it even has an ad banner which puts a cherry on top.

Tom Friedman writes:
"The 'real reason' for this war, which was never stated, was that after 9/11 America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world."

For the record, I made this point in my (epic) Baghdad Delenda Est columns. I wrote: "The United States needs to go to war with Iraq because it needs to go to war with someone in the region and Iraq makes the most sense."

This wasn't my only reason, but at the time I got considerable grief for espousing the "Ledeen Doctrine" as I called it.

Posted at Instapundit.

Had to run some errands over lunch and went home briefly. Turned on Linda Vester's program (i'm sure derb tapes the show), and saw Ramesh...talking with the audience about the junior U.S. Senator from NY's book. I missed the introductions but twice when I saw the caption below Ramesh's name had "New Republic." It's a vast conspiracy.

The "diversity candidate" listing has been changed. Instead of "diversity candidate" they now want an "experienced candidate."

A fair tweak from a reader:

What is your problem with Protestants?

"The average IQ at elite U.S. schools soared as the duller children of privilege were forced to compete with middle-class Jews, Catholics, and blacks in ways they never had before."

You forgot to mention middle-class Protestants. You know. The majority in this country. Was this because middle-class Protestants were too dumb to raise the level of competition? Or is it because we knew some secret handshake and could get into Harvard before the advent of the SAT?

For the record, can we at least agree that not everything God made tastes better without a dash of this and that from the hand of man? I'm agnostic on the issue of hormones, but my guess is that the kind of feed and the kind of cow have a lot more to do with how the cow tastes then whether it had hormones (never mind how it was prepared, how it was stored and the rest). God made grains and hops and all that. Man put it together to make beer and brown liquor. For my cocktail hour I would much prefer a Jamesons or a cold beer than a cup of barley. But that's just me.