The wind storms we’re having in Richmond have knocked out the power to my apartment. Thanks all for your kind words about Tig. The apartment feels really empty today, even though he was only a shadow of himself. But I sure liked having even half-Tig around.

I’ll tell you about it later. Suffice to say that he did purr more than once on his last day, and that picture below was taken less than an hour before he died.

I spent most of yesterday out. I couldn’t bear to be here. I may leave again this afternoon. There’s no electricity, and no Tig. One or the other is bad enough. Without both, this apartment kinda sucks.

Thanks for all the kind words.

I miss my boy. He was one-of-a-kind. But I kept my contract with him. He had a happy life, and he went easily.

There will be more pictures. I have a stock of many hundreds that you haven’t seen. Digital images don’t cost a dime ’til you print them.

Not.

And amid all this hype, Winehouse’s representatives said late Friday that she won’t attend tonight’s Grammys in Los Angeles. Although she resolved her visa issues with the U.S. Embassy, she’ll still appear via satellite from London. Winehouse apparently decided not to stray too far from the very place she sang about never entering: rehab.

The New York Times tells the story of
a new principal at a troubled high school. (h/t Shalom USA.)

On his first visit, in October 2004, he found a police officer arresting a student and calling for backup to handle the swelling crowd. Students roamed the hallways with abandon; in one class of 30, only 5 students had bothered to show up.

Who is he?

Junior High School 22, in the South Bronx, had run through six principals in just over two years when Shimon Waronker was named the seventh.. . . “It was chaos,” Mr. Waronker recalled. “I was like, this can’t be real.”

Teachers, parents and students at the school, which is mostly Hispanic and black, were equally taken aback by the sight of their new leader: A member of the Chabad-Lubavitch sect of Hasidic Judaism with a beard, a black hat and a velvet yarmulke.

“The talk was, ‘You’re not going to believe who’s running the show,’ ” said Lisa DeBonis, now an assistant principal.

Not surprisingly, not everyone has accepted him, though it seems that most of the critics are no longer with the school, so it might just be that they have an ax to grind.

When an etiquette expert, Lyudmila Bloch, first approached principals about training sessions she runs at a Manhattan restaurant, most declined to send students. Mr. Waronker, who happened to be reading her book, “The Golden Rules of Etiquette at the Plaza,” to his own children (he has six), has since dispatched most of the school for training at a cost of $40 a head.Flipper Bautista, 10, loved the trip, saying, “It’s this place where you go and eat, and they teach you how to be first-class.”

In a school where many children lack basic reading and math skills, though, such programs are not universally applauded. When Mr. Waronker spent $8,000 in school money to give students a copy of “The Code: The 5 Secrets of Teen Success” and to invite the writer to give a motivational speech, it outraged Marietta Synodis, a teacher who has since left.

“My kids could much better benefit from math workbooks,” Ms. Synodis said.

Mr. Waronker counters that key elements of his leadership are dreaming big and offering children a taste of worlds beyond their own. “Those experiences can be life-transforming,” he said.

One of the themes in the report is that Mr. Waronker has a personal touch. For example:

So when Emmanuel Bruntson, 14, a cut-up in whom Mr. Waronker saw potential, started getting into fights, he met with him daily and gave him a copy of Jane Austen’s “Emma.”“I wanted to get him out of his environment so he could see a different world,” Mr. Waronker said.

My guess is that despite the problems, Mr. Waronker is having some success. And it comes from his seeming religious commitment to the school.

Back in Crown Heights, Mr. Waronker says he occasionally finds himself on the other side of a quizzical look, with his Hasidic neighbors wondering why he is devoting himself to a Bronx public school instead of a Brooklyn yeshiva.“We’re all connected,” he responds.

Gesturing in his school at a class full of students, he said, “I feel the hand of the Lord here all the time.”

* Yiddishe Nachas could be translated as “Jewish Pride.” It’s something I get when I read of someone like Shimon Waronker, but not a spoiled, self-destructive pop-singer.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Last week the Archbishop of Canterbury said that it wouldn’t be a bad idea for Shari’a to be adopted in England. Martin Fletcher added his two cents:

As one who has been hauled in front of a Sharia court I would like to risk having my hand — or head — chopped off a second time by suggesting that the Archbishop of Canterbury just might have a point.

Fletcher thinks he’s being funny. He is actually saying that he considers those who disagree with him as extremists. But the main part of the story really is infuriating:

We waited in the yard of an old police station. An alleged drug dealer lay on the ground on his stomach, his hands and legs bound together behind his back. Several wretched faces stared out from the dark interiors of cells with barred windows. A bunch of women engaged in some sort of domestic dispute arrived and waited patiently behind us.Finally the drivers, still arguing furiously, were each told to make their case to a couple of religious elders. They had barely begun before the court adjourned to a nearby carpet for sunset prayers.

When it resumed, and both drivers had had their say, the court pronounced. The two men were ordered to apologise to each other and we were all dismissed.

The court performed its duty with admirable dispatch and minimal fuss and everyone went away happy. It was quicker, cheaper and just as effective as a British magistrates’ court.

After describing the “wretched faces,” he tells how his own encounter ended and “everyone went away happy.” Well not everyone. Not the “wretched faces” he saw when he arrived.

LGF was absolutely correct to highlight those lines. Fletcher’s self-centeredness is very much on display. What if the court had decided differently, would he still be so smug? Is he so certain that the episode couldn’t have ended worse for him and his entourage? Or even the other party?

The Belmont Club notes that Sharia law doesn’t always produce good (or consistent) outcomes in a post delightfully entitled “My sentence was reduced to beheading.” It’s the story of Sandy Mitchell, who was working in the desert kingdom.

He was held in prison for three years and tortured until he eventually signed a confession, which he later had to read out on Saudi television. A sharia court sentenced him to having his head partially severed, followed by public crucifixion.The sentence was later reduced to beheading, before the Saudi authorities finally conceded that al-Qa’eda terrorists had planted the bomb and let Mr Mitchell return home to Halifax, West Yorks. …

His torturers told him his wife and son were “involved” in the plot, even though his son was only a year old, and Mr Mitchell finally cracked when the jailers told him: “We will torture them. When you hear their screams, you will know they are suffering because you haven’t told us the truth.”

Judeopundit saw an article that casts even more doubts on the wisdom of Sharia courts

Commander Steve Allen, head of ACPO’s honour-based violence unit, says the true toll of people falling victim to brutal ancient customs is “massively unreported” and far worse than is traditionally accepted. “We work on a figure which suggests it is about 500 cases shared between us and the Forced Marriage Unit per year,” he said: “If the generally accepted statistic is that a victim will suffer 35 experiences of domestic violence before they report, then I suspect if you multiplied our reporting by 35 times you may be somewhere near where people’s experience is at.” His disturbing assessment, made to a committee of MPs last week, comes amid a series of gruesome murders and attacks on British women at the hands of their relatives. [...]

Think about that for a moment. If these practices are so prevalent now, what would happen if Sharia would become official? Couldn’t you expect that these practices would be perpetrated with even greater frequency once Sharia became official?

(via memeorandum)

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

(An open letter to Deborah Howell, ombudsman of the Washington Post.)Over the past two years, you defended the decision to publish op-eds by representatives of Hamas, a terrorist organization. It is a decision that cannot be justified. Still, you defended your position. In defense of your 2006 decision to publish Ismail Haniyeh’s op-ed you wrote:

Good editorial pages and commentators enlighten and provoke readers to broaden their thinking.

Except that, as James David Besser later reported, Ismail Haniyeh didn’t write the op-ed. It was written by American supporters of Hamas. So instead of publishing the undiluted views of the leader of Hamas, you published a slickly produced piece of propaganda.

The only possible justification for publishing the op-ed then, is that was the opinion page. It’s a very weak justification. Still, I suppose, it’s better than publishing propaganda for Hamas in your news pages. That is exactly what you did last week.

In her article “Israel to Intensify Strikes If Rocket Fire Continues, Ellen Knickmeyer reported:

Also, a 42-year-old Palestinian high school chemistry teacher was killed when a shell hit a school just before classes started in the morning, said Jamil Suleiman, director of the hospital in the Gaza village of Beit Hanoun. Three 16-year-old Palestinian boys, all students, were wounded, Suleiman said.Israel denied targeting the school, saying it was firing at rocket teams that use the border village as a base for attacks on Israel. On Thursday, fighters fired at least seven rockets at the southern Israeli town of Sderot, wounding one person, the Israeli military said.

The problem is that Israel didn’t just deny targeting the school. What happened is not a matter of dispute. Ms. Knickmeyer found a nice quote from the Egyptian foreign minister dismissing the significance of the Qassam attacks because they gave Israel an excuse to attack Gaza, but somehow she missed the AP report that it had actually photographed rocket launchers near the school.

(It’s possible that one of the AP reports available on the Washington Post website included this bit of information. However, according to my search of your website, Ms. Knickmeyer’s report was the most recent. Since it carried the byline of you reporter and it’s the one that appeared in your print edition it’s the most significant.)

There is no excuse for failing to report the presence of the rocket launchers near the school. As blogger Elder of Ziyon noted, placing armaments in close proximity to civilian institutions is a war crime.

Instead of presenting a “conflicting viewpoints” version of the news, your reporter had an obligation to present the evidence that the Israeli version was accurate. Failing to do that in the original news story, there should have been a followup with the relevant information omitted from the original story.

The New York Times mentioned the AP report, so the information was available to be reported.

In this case the Post failed in its obligation to provide undistorted news. You owe your readers a correction.
ps I am posting this on my blog in anticipation of a response, which I will publish (if I receive it) uncommented on afterwards.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.