Poor little Nate. He had a piano recital and he couldn’t go, because he has strep. But wait! The internet to the rescue!

Sarah filmed Nate’s part, and put it up on Youtube. If you’d like to go over there and tell Nate what you think of his playing, I’m betting he’ll feel a lot better. (Of course you realize I will hunt you down and kill you if you are mean to my little guy.)

The piece is less than a minute all told.

Actually, the fever is finally gone. He’s going back to school tomorrow. But he’s been home sick all week, and is a bit mopey.

Here’s a look inside what Moussaoui’s life is going to be like for, well, the rest of his life:

He then will be placed in a 7-by-12-foot cell where he will be confined for 23 hours a day. Inside the cell is a concrete bed, stool and desk as well as a toilet and a shower. A small slatted window allows some natural light.

For one hour each day, he will have a “recreation” period but still will be in chains and isolated.

“These guys will never be out of their cells, much less in the yard or anywhere around here,” Russ Martin, the project manager for the Florence prison, told an interviewer.

Each cell is monitored by video surveillance and considered to provide a very isolated existence for anyone sentenced there. One convicted gang leader told a judge after being sentenced there: “You are sentencing me to die a little each day.”

[...] James Aiken, a former U.S. federal prison official and now a consultant, said during the Moussaoui trial that the convicted terrorist would “rot” at the Florence facility.

“They are in a security envelope, a security bubble. Their environment is sterile, they are isolated from the outside world and from the prison world,” said Aiken, who gave evidence for the defense’s case against the death penalty for the defendant.

“If a prisoner has a heart-attack, security protocol has to be followed before that lock may be opened and medical personnel can come in,” Aiken explained.

“He doesn’t know yet, but under such conditions,” Aiken warned, “as time goes by they rot.”

I really don’t think that he’s the one who won, after all.

Olmert’s final status plan has been leaked to the press. It calls for a divided Jerusalem, with Israel controlling the Old City.

Personally, I think he just wants to get his first no-confidence vote out of the way.

H.T. Roger Simon

UPDATE:

Wretchard has a deeper and broader analysis.

Tom’s been shaken out of bed again, it seems. A 6.0 aftershock hit Tonga.

You know, I’ve known him for a while now, and I think it’s safe to say that he’s going to be extremely grumpy about this.

The U.S. Geological Survey said at least six aftershocks occurred near Tonga, while others were recorded near Fiji and Vanuatu. The strongest aftershock occurred at 12:25 a.m. local time at a depth of almost 24 miles.

And here’s why the quake didn’t cause a dangerous tsunami:

Unlike the quake that triggered the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the 7.8-magnitude jolt off Tonga caused little more than a 20 to 40-centimetre wave surge.

The quake struck on the northern boundary of the Pacific and Australian plates, northeast of Tonga, at 3.27am yesterday (NZ time).

It was the same magnitude as the 1931 Napier quake – but GNS Science seismologist Warwick Smith said because it was centred 60 kilometres beneath the sea floor it produced only a small surge.

The Boxing Day tsunami was caused by a 12,000km underwater shelf being lifted 10 metres by a magnitude 9 earthquake off Indonesia.

Waves generated by yesterday’s quake took about three hours to reach New Zealand – and when they arrived were “a few centimetres” high.

Dr Smith said if the quake – felt as far away as Wellington and Wanganui – had generated a larger wave, it would have affected the North Island’s entire northeastern coastline, including Auckland.

Tony Judt is of the opinion that the “occupation” is the root of all anti-Israel.

Before 1967 the State of Israel may have been tiny and embattled, but it was not typically hated: certainly not in the West. Official Soviet-bloc communism was anti-Zionist of course, but for just that reason Israel was rather well regarded by everyone else, including the non-communist left. The romantic image of the kibbutz and the kibbutznik had a broad foreign appeal in the first two decades of Israel’s existence. Most admirers of Israel (Jews and non-Jews) knew little about the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948. They preferred to see in the Jewish state the last surviving incarnation of the 19th century idyll of agrarian socialism - or else a paragon of modernizing energy “making the desert bloom.”

Ah, to see the world through Tony Judt’s eyes. Ah, the days when Israel had legitimacy, and when the world actually liked her. Ah, for the days when the United Nations didn’t issue anti-Israel after anti-Israel resolutions.

Like in 1960, when the UN Security Council released this resolution, in protest of violating Argentina’s sovereignty. Why did Israel violate Argentina’s sovereignty? Because the Mossad found Adolf Eichmann hiding there, and kidnapped him, brought him to Israel, and tried and executed the Nazi war criminal.

(more…)

All of these are read-in-full recommendations.

Sidney Zion in the NY Daily News, a paper I used to devour on the long bus ride to school back in the days of my freshman year:

But I don’t include Kushner in that category. He’s no anti-Semite.

So what, I say? If you’re anti-Israel, you’re an enemy of the Jewish people. All this debate over anti-Semitism is nothing but a detour and, for that matter, a roundabout way to excuse anti-Israel propaganda.

Recently, a couple of academics from Harvard and the University of Chicago produced a long piece accusing the Israeli lobby of dictating American policy to the harm of the U.S. - even leading to 9/11.

This was without question an anti-Israeli attack. If believed, it would leave Israel alone against the Arab world, bereft of American help, in the name of “realism.”

The defense comes this way: they are not anti-Semites.

As if that makes it legit.

The Gathering Storm over Iran in the Boston Globe.

In Three myths about Christians, the myth of Islam’s religious tolerance:

In Egypt, for example, there are at least 10 million Christians, but under the constitution, only a Muslim can be president - and there are similar provisions in other Muslim republics. In Saudi Arabia - where no one can be elected president, since the entire state and all its oil are claimed as private property by the ruling family - there are millions of Christians, but they are not allowed to have a single church, and it is a criminal offense to hold a prayer service, however informal, anywhere else. In all Muslim lands, the penalty for assisting a Muslim to convert was and is death for all concerned - no small matter for believing Christians whose highest duty is to save other souls by conversion.

Spare the rod, spoil the peace:

Legally and morally, neither the U.S. nor Europe owes the Palestinians any assistance — much less hundreds of millions of dollars worth on a continuing basis. There are plenty of needy causes to which to devote the scarce humanitarian resources of our overburden governments: Darfurians subject to genocidal campaign by an Islamist government, Congolese trying to recover from “Africa’s World War,” Tibetans sitting in exile in India, etc. The only justification for our governments’ paying good money to the PA is our national interest in a stable Middle East — and we are hardly getting our money’s worth if the dividend is a casus belli against Israel.

Read them all.

The AP is entertaining us with some back-and-forth verbal volleys between the leaders of Qatar and Iran.

Arab diplomats said the emir - a U.S. ally - went to Iran this week on a delicate, diplomatic mission and with a private message: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad needed to cool his rhetoric and cooperate with the international community.

The hard-line Iranian leader showed his distaste for the message in a goodbye ceremony - pointedly reported Wednesday by Tehran radio - with a hard jab, suggesting the Qatari leader was a Western lackey.

Iran takes pride that the Gulf is widely known by the country’s ancient name, Persia, but Arabs bridle. They are eager to point out that six Arab countries but only one Persian land border the strategically important sea through which much of the world’s oil supply must pass.

Attempting diplomatic niceties as he was saying goodbye, the emir, Sheik Hamad bin-Khalifa al-Thani, congratulated his host on Iran’s fine soccer team and said he hoped it would bring pride to all the “Arab Persian Gulf” region during the 2006 World Cup in Germany.

Not missing a beat, Ahmadinejad shot back:

“I believe you called it the Persian Gulf when you studied in school,” he said in a pointed reference to the emir’s education at Sandhurst Military Academy in England, once the colonial ruler of much of the Arab world.

Seemingly unfazed, the emir fired Monday’s final volley: “By the way, the Gulf belongs to all.”

If you read the rest of the story, you will find a much deeper, more informative piece about Arab fears of a nuclear-armed Iran. But the AP chose to lead with the above. Still, I’d have paid money to see it. Okay, no, not really. But I’d pay money to have someone deliver some of my insults to Gorilla Boy.

Mahmoud Abbas, rendered completely lame by the electoral hijacking of the Palestinian Authority by Hamas, comes up with an all-new scheme to feign relevance:

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said in an interview published on Thursday that he intended to ask Palestinians to vote by referendum on any peace deal with Israel, sidestepping the Hamas-led government.

Speaking before the swearing-in of incoming Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s new government later on Thursday, Abbas told the Israeli daily Maariv that Israel should not be deterred from renewing peace talks despite Hamas’s control of the
Palestinian Authority.

“We should not miss this opportunity,” Abbas said.

“It is my intention to bring the results of the negotiations (with Israel), if and when they end, to the Palestinian people in the form of a referendum and to give the Palestinian people the right to decide,” he added.

Leave it to Arafat’s henchman to seek to thwart the will of the Palestinian people (elections) with the will of the Palestinian people (referenda).

In democracies, the only poll that matters is at the ballot box. The people have spoken, Mahmoud, and they want the other terrorists in charge.

Enjoy your working retirement. I’m sure you can fill the time with interviews with AP, Reuters, Guardian, BBC, and all sorts of people with microphones and briefcases full of cash to hand out to the layers of beurocracy to get time with you.

Tom Paine is having an interesting vacation. He’s in Tonga, site of yesterday’s 8.0 earthquake, and he learned something about Tonga’s earthquake preparedness: Er, there is none.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii, which issues the alerts, said Tonga - a 170-island archipelago about halfway between Australia and Tahiti - failed to receive the warnings because of a power failure. The cause wasn’t known. Gerard Fryer, the center’s acting director, said changes may be necessary.

Why did the warning never come? Well, according to an email Tom sent me — there’s no emergency backup generator.

But still, Tom’s safe, and I cannot wait to hear him riff on this in his next Shire Network News podcast.

Yourish.com: The number one search return for “What rhymes with gullible?”

I will be not going over the top saying that, like many others who spent their youth behind the Iron Curtain during the worst years of the cold war, I am used to think of BBC as a beacon of sanity and moderation.

During that time, when Voice of America and the various Soviet media outlets were competing in hailing their own “biggest in the world” (what is aptly called in US “dick wavin’”), be it a biggest missile or a biggest turkey, BBC tried (and succeeded) to provide a balanced and informed commentary. Not that there weren’t occasional foul-ups. There were some, but in general BBC has done a sterling job.

These days BBC is being the focus of a well-orchestrated campaign of complaints by both pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian sides of the conflict. And the endless stream of complaints has caused BBC to become a subject to an independent panel. Which panel was commissioned by the BBC Governors to “assess the impartiality of BBC news and current afairs coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with particular regard to accuracy, fairness, context, balance and bias.”

Not that I have expected much of that panel. Where it comes to the know-how of sweeping under the rug, Brits could teach the rest of the world without changing their stride. Again, not that I, personally, have had any serious problems with the said coverage (see why later).

But the panel report succeeded to surprise me at least once. See item 3 in the list of proposed remedies:

3. We say that the BBC should get the language right. We think they should call terrorist acts
“terrorism” because that term is clear and well understood. Equally, on this and other sensitive points of language, once they have decided the best answer they should ensure it is adopted consistently;

Does it mean that BBC will start calling a spade a spade? I am not at all sure, the recommendations of the panel are not automatically enforced, as far as I understand. In any case, it will be interesting.

Now about my coolness towards BBC coverage. The explanation is easily found in the panel report:

1.4 Audience research from Opinion Leader Research, commissioned by the Panel, shows that
the impartiality requirements are widely supported. It also suggests that, beyond those who
take a keen interest in the conflict from either perspective, the generality of viewers and
listeners are less than convinced by its importance to them, feel ignorant about it and have little sympathy with the protagonists. They want the BBC to be impartial and believe that it is.

See now? BBC is catering to a market that could care less about the subject. In fact, the “quality control” of the I/P conflict coverage by BBC is done by two comparatively small and opposed groups of BBC “clients”. Unlike the quality control of BBC coverage of, say, UK football… Whoever expects flawless coverage of the said conflict under these conditions, is going to keep waiting for a while. So chill out, folks.

Cross-posted on SimplyJews