"this was an act of barbarism and war"

Kathryn Jean Lopez just noted that:

Ahmadineijad just called what happened on September 11 "a tragedy." Sorry, it was a helluva lot more that that.

Gosh, he sounds like our Governor...

Thought for the day

Watching those film clips and pictures of the Taliban kidnapping Afghans who were de-mining the countryside, and Iranian thuggish police in black hoods hanging a sort of slop bucket around the necks of free-speech dissidents, and the various semi-official and popular Iranian, Pakistani, and Middle Eastern new threats to Sir Rushdie — while a silent West worries instead that the meals for Guantanamo inmates cost only 2-3 times more than the soldiers who guard them — and wondering on a Saturday morning how a post-civilized West can marshal the will to win a war of ideas against pre-civilized Islamists.

- Victor Davis Hanson

But how do you REALLY feel?

I said last week that "the sun has officially set on the British Empire.". As this post in the Corner from Derb shows, my reaction was mild...

My Mum...in one of the last conversations I had with her, said: "I know I'm dying, but I don't mind. At least I knew England when she was England."

I discounted that at the time. Old people always grumble about the state of the world. Now I understand it, though. I even feel a bit the same way myself. I caught the tail-end of that old England—that bumptious, arrogant, self-confident old England, the England of complicated games, snobbery, irony, repression, and stoicism, the England of suet puddings, drafty houses, coal smoke and bad teeth, the England of throat-catching poetry and gardens and tweeds, the England that civilized the whole world and gave an example of adult behavior—the English Gentleman—that was admired from Peking (I can testify) to Peru.

It's all gone now, "dead as mutton," as English people used to say. Now there is nothing there but a flock of whimpering Eloi, giggling over their gadgets, whining for their handouts, crying for their Mummies, playing at soldiering for reasons they can no longer understand, from lingering habit. Lower the corpse down slowly, shovel in the earth. England is dead.

The sun has officially set on the British Empire...

If you weren't weeping for the Anglosphere yet, try this...

The only wry smile to be derived from the humiliating circumstances in which our 15 sailors and Royal Marines were captured by just six Iranians came from the comment by Patricia Hewitt. "It was deplorable," pronounced our tight-lipped Health Secretary, "that the woman hostage should be shown smoking. This sends completely the wrong message to our young people."

A people who are governed by such as these are not a free people, and will not retain the illusion of freedom for much longer.