DENVER (AP) — Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo, whose forceful opposition to illegal immigration vaulted him to national prominence, plans to announce he is abandoning his long-shot bid for the presidency, a person close to Tancredo said Wednesday.

The five-term Colorado congressman planned to make the announcement at a news conference in Des Moines, Iowa, on Thursday, the person said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for Tancredo or his campaign.

Tancredo's campaign would only say he planned a "major announcement" Thursday.

Tancredo has consistently polled at the back of the nine-person GOP field. He has based his campaign on opposition to illegal immigration, a top issue in many areas of the country. He has run television ads that link lax border security to terrorist attacks, rape and other crimes.

Tancredo announced in October that he would not seek a sixth term in Congress, but hinted he would consider running for the Senate after his presidential bid.

Colorado will have an open Senate seat next year when Republican Wayne Allard retires...

Ezra Levant discusses the dangerous precedents set by human rights commissions in Canada in the National Post:

The Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC) is taking Maclean's magazine to a human rights commission. Its crime? Refusing the CIC's absurd demand that Maclean's print a five-page letter to the editor in response to an article the CIC didn't like.

It may shock those who do not follow human rights law in Canada, but Maclean's will probably lose...

You don't need to be a lawyer to know that a magazine article is not what the founders of human rights commissions had in mind. As Alan Borovoy, the general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association -- and one of the architects of modern Canadian human rights law -- wrote last year, "during the years when my colleagues and I were labouring to create such commissions, we never imagined that they might ultimately be used against freedom of speech." Censoring debates was "hardly the role we had envisioned for human rights commissions."

Borovoy's warning has gone unheeded. The opposite, actually -- it signalled to the CICs of the world that human rights commissions are the perfect instrument to pursue their agenda of censorship. At the federal Canadian Human Rights Commission, for example, one single activist -- a lawyer named Richard Warman, who used to work at the commission himself -- has filed 26 complaints, nearly 50% of all complaints under that commission's "hate messages" section. He's turned it into a part-time job, winning tens of thousands of dollars in "awards" from people he's complained about in the past few years. Warman is a liberal activist, who likes to complain against Web sites he calls racist or homophobic. He's had the common sense to stick to suing small, oddball bloggers who can't fight back. But surely the CIC has observed Warman's winning streak, and will use his precedents to go after Maclean's...

ANI (hat tip: DW): Washington, Dec 19: The US House of Representatives has passed a 785 million dollar aid package for Pakistan for the fiscal year 2008 despite its reservations over the state of emergency imposed on November 3.

The US Senate is also expected to approve the package, which includes 300 million dollar of military assistance. The other major item on the approved list is that of 350 million dollar for economic support fund.

The package for Pakistan includes 50.9 million dollar of development assistance, 39.8 million dollar for child survival and health, 10.3 million dollar for anti-terrorism activities, 32 million dollar for anti-narcotics efforts, and two million for training and education of military officers in the United States.

Several powerful lawmakers had suggested conditioning US aid to the return of democracy in the country. The House and the Senate are separately considering some resolutions on this issue.

One resolution calls for conditioning US military assistance to "demonstrable progress by the government of Pakistan in achieving certain objectives" towards the restoration of full democracy.

But the Bush Administration warned the lawmakers not to attach conditions to US assistance to Pakistan.

Could Bush be wavering in his assurance that promotion of democracy in the Muslim world is in America's best interest? With the evidence piling up, one would hope so. Now if he'd just take another look at Iraq and Afghanistan...

"If we would delete the ultimate objective of establishing a global system from the Haj rituals, the remainder would be deeds devoid of a soul." -- President Ahmadinejad

World Government. World Peace Through One-World Government where we will all Get Along, as the political philosopher Rodney King once suggested, because we will all be part of one great big beautiful One World Government, with no silly national histories, languages (Arabic is the Perfect Language of the Best of People which is why the Final Revelation, that in the Qur'an was revealed in Arabic to an Arab -- Allah said so in the Qur'an itself).

Yes. Isn't that where we are all headed, first with that splendid EU, doing what it can to efface national borders and hence consciousness of national histories, inside Europe, on behalf of the Big Market? Yes, World Federalism -- but not exactly in the way that the grenville-clark dreamers of the past had in mind -- leading then to One World, ruled by the most organized, the most single-minded, the most fanatical of Believers -- against whom we have only our pathetic "freedoms" to offer.

And everyone will live happily ever after under the benign rule of Islam. Just look at the magnificent polities in the Middle East today. Who doesn't envy them? Who doesn't wish to live in a land such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan, Pakistan -- the four countries where the Shari'a is most strictly observed? What American, Canadian, Englishman, Frenchman, Italian, would not give his eyeteeth to live in a place as virtuous and upright as those run by Ahmadinejad, or the benevolent and generous Al-Saud. How benevolent, and how generous? Well, one Saudi family donated $10 million was donated by just one Saudi family to the Clinton Presidential Library even though no one in the family had even met Bill Clinton.

Those who do not have the intelligence to get on the bandwagon of Islam, as so many did, over the centuries, pushed more at sometimes than at others, in the lands conquered by Islam, will be allowed to continue to exist alongside the rest of us. Yes, they can remain, and even practice their quaint religions. Just so long as, and not one minute more, they know their place.

Ein (Islamisches) Volk, Ein (Islamisches) Reich. Ein (Islamischer) Fuhrer.

What could be better?

Raymond. A, a 17-year-old Jewish man, who wears a skullcap, was waiting on Shabbat for someone to open the door of the building where he lives, on the rue Albert Camus, when around twenty young people described as being of North African and Black origin attacked him violently at the face and the body after pronouncing his name.

One of the aggressors, Raymond reported, was a raid-haired man who did not cease swearing on the Koran while beating his victim. --from this news article

The police will have to step up patrols in neighborhoods known to be Jewish, and to guard Jewish sites. They will more and more have to guard Christian churches, from those intent on vandalizing the statuary (as happened to a statue of the Virgin and Christ in a church in northern France) and paintings -- not only because of their Christian imagery but because they are paintings.

How much money does the French state spend now in protecting non-Muslim sites? How much will it have to spend in the future? How much money does the French state spend now on the free education, free health care (and obstetrical care), free or subsidized housing, for the millions of Muslim immigrants who fiddle the system for everything it is worth, and more, and whose male children spend their days vandalizing the property of non-Muslims (the usual thousand cars a day, or in moments of heightened tension, the figure goes up to many thousands)? How much damage is done to the educational system, once the pride of France, the product of careful thought by nineteenth-century pedagogues (every little town has a "Jules-Ferry" school, to honor the most famous one), because undisciplined and even violent Muslim students intimidate not only non-Muslim French students, but the teachers too, refusing to read about, inter alia, Voltaire, French Kings, the Holocaust, World War II, or anything that they think is purely a matter for Infidels, or might evoke sympathy for Jews, or might be associated with anti-Islamic attitudes (Voltaire is disliked because of his play "Mahomet"). How much has life in France been degraded, by the fact of large-scale Muslim immigration?

And what intelligent Frenchman, today, would or could disagree with the observation that

The large-scale presence of Muslims in European countries has led to a situation that is far more unpleasant, expensive, and physically dangerous for its Infidel indigenous inhabitants (and for non-indigenous immigrants who are not Muslims) than would be the case without such a large-scale presence?

Only those who are psychically marginal, that is on the maddened Far Left and on the antisemitic Far Right (their obsession with Jews prevents them from recognizing, or caring, about the threat from Islam) would disagree with that statement.

All others will agree -- some readily, and some, still, most reluctantly. But they will agree.

And so will those in Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden. But the councils -- and counsels -- of the ruling elites will continue to pretend otherwise. For if they did not do so, they would have to do two things.

First, they would have to admit that those same elites had made a terrible error during the past thirty years, when they allowed in so many Muslim immigrants, without adequately informing themselves -- the warnings were there, in France as elsewhere, from Western scholars of Islam, such as Charles-Emmanuel Dufourcq, and from such well-known intellectuals as Jacques Ellul -- on the unexamined theory that these were merely "economic immigrants" like any others, that they would either be Gastarbeiter (those Turks who were all going to move back to Turkey from Germany) or, in any case, would simply become upstanding loyal citizens, and their children and grandchildren to, to the Infidel nation-state, to its legal and political institutions, to its ideas about human freedom and individual autonomy. That has happened, but only among those who have either jettisoned Islam (sometimes openly, sometimes quietly) altogether, or -- not quite sure of themselves, and with the possibility open that they, or their descendants, may "get religion" once again -- have become "cultural Muslims" (a way of saying: I don't believe the religious stuff,, but I continue to identify with, and thus may even inadvertently promote, the "civilization of Islam") or "Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only" Muslims, again with the same problem, that the laic father, if he doesn't make a clean break as an apostate, may give rise to a reverting-to-full-fledged-Islam son.

Second, those same elites would have now to realize that they have a permanent and terrible problem on their hands. And they are trying not to do that, because they don't have any idea even as to how to begin to talk about this properly, or to lead those whom they presume to protect and instruct to see things rightly.

How, after all, since it is those elites -- political and media elites -- that have done the damage to those people they now must help to inform, and since those elites do not know how to start talking about the kind of measures, other than those of securing the sites most likely to be subject to Muslim attack, and to monitoring and interrupting the plots of Muslim terrorists (which is a gigantic effort, involving many man-hours of police, lawyers, judges), and cannot face the matter of Da'wa, or ending Muslim immigration, or removing all Muslim non-citizens without necessarily going after other non-citizens (an intelligent, but to some hard to explain selective enforcement), and making it impossible for outside Muslims to pay for mosques, madrasas, and campaigns of Da'wa (seizing money that comes from Saudis abroad if the Al-Saud fail to stop the practice), and finally, discussing rationally the rational behavior of the Czech government when it attempted, in 1946, to remove forever from its midst the security threat posed to it, as the evidence from 1938-1945 demonstrated, by three million Sudeten Germans, resulting in the Benes Decree that, at the very least, offers an example of a liberal, tolerant, wise democracy, led by two cultivated and civilized European statesmen, Benes and Masaryk, doing what they had to to protect their own people, their own nation, their own way of life.

The elites in the Western world do not impress. They failed, they are still failing, to recognize the urgency of anthropogenic global warming. They failed, they are still failing, to recognize the collapse of public education, one not to be rectified by such making-a-silk-purse-out-of-a-sow's-ears efforts such as that "no-child-left-behind" program that merely makes the best students into a persecuted minority, doomed to be kept back by the leveling tendencies apparent everywhere in American society (except, of course, when it comes to money, and then as far as differences go, the sky's the limit).

The day of recognition, the day that fateful anagnorisis comes, is being delayed by those elites. They prate. Sarkozy prates about "integration" and "government-funded mosques." Blair used to prate about "extremists" who "hijacked a peaceful religion" which he, Tony Blair, found truly inspirational (he kept a Qur'an in his pocket). They prate about this, they prate about that.

And so do our Presidential candidates. They prate and they blather. Meanwhile, Islam marches on.

"The project, which is worth 432.614 euro, will last for 17 months. The first phase of the project will involve comprehensive research and identification of the improvements for existing trade corridors into Egypt and Jordan."
--- from this news article

The very language smacks of some consulting firm's Proposal: "the first phase of the project...comprehensive research....identification...improvements...existing trade corridors.."

Yes, the Voice of the Consultant (European Division) is heard in the land. Eager for European dollars to pay for Arab futility and failure. Yet it all sounds so...so plausible, doesn't it? Think of our own versions of this. Think McKinsey, think Bain, think of them all as they jet about the world, from Home Office to succursales in London, Zurich, Paris, Milan, Frankfurt, and now, of course, Moscow and Dubai and even -- who knows? -- Almaty. Or think of the private lone-wolf consultant, the Business School professor allowed by his fabulously rich university to pocket many millions for his own operation. For god's sake, think of a certain Harvard Business School professor, merely as an example, impressing a Kazakh student or two, and then winning a fat contract from the government of Kazakhstan, whose tough, no-nonsense, ruthless rulers suddenly become like melting schoolgirls when "Western knowhow" and "Harvard Business School" are put together in a single sentence, and swoon at the site of those extremely glossy affairs, those Reports full of business barriers-to-entry banalities or "After The Oil Economy What?" Yea, verily, the Consultant from Harvard Business School arrives, with two aides, bearing the Magi's gifts of Western Consultant Insight, Western Consultant Vision, all the competitive-gilt-edged Wisdom of the West that Wharton, Harvard, Stanford, the Sloan School can provide.

But does it make sense?

Does it make sense, for the EU, whose economies are suffering from Chinese competition (competition that causes a race to the bottom for workers, and undoes the European guarantees for those workers, and Chinese competition from right inside Europe, as in Como or, especially, Prato -- now a Chinese economic city-state within a state), and which has to spend a fortune to monitor the Muslim millions now living deep inside the constituent countries of the EU, and which has to pay tens of billions more for its oil bought from Muslim countries --- to pay more than a half-billion dollars (the equivalent of those Euros) in order for some clever consultants to figure out how to make the "Palestinians" more able to integrate with fellow Arabs, and less dependent on the Israeli economy, which really means -- to deprive Israel of the only useful leverage it has over those same "Palestinians" who are merely the local shock troops of the Lesser Jihad, a Lesser Jihad which is supported by the other Muslim Arabs, who are indifferent to the actual lives (those are expendable, those are unnecessary) of the "Palestinians" but intent on Muslim possession of the land, the land on which the Infidel nation-state of Israel sits, and which Jews have the gall to insist that that land, constituting far less than one-one-thousandth of the land area already possessed by the Arabs, a people who deny to every other indigenous group, if non-Muslim like the Jews of Israel (see the Copts, the Assyrians, the Maronites) the right to a state or even to autonomy, or if Muslim but non-Arab -- see the Berbers of Algeria and elsewhere in North Africa, see the Tuareg, see the blacks of Darfur and the southern Sudan (in 1900 the Arabs made up only 10% of the population of what was then the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan -- but they have been steadily increasing their numbers and power ever since).

This is one more boondoggle. But look on the bright side. A lot of that money will be given to European fast-talkers, and not directly into the pockets of the Arab -- "Palestinian" -- warlords who, since last week's incredible bonanza when they all struck it rich at that Conference of Donors in Paris, have been making plans, already having agents checking out real estate not on the Edgeware Road, where the normal Arabs live, but in Belgravia, not to mention a villa or two in the South of France.

When you are one of the Infidel-supported "leaders" of the "Palestinian" "national" "movement" -- that is, the Slow Jihadists of Fatah, rather than the Fast Jihadists of Hamas --there are so many things to worry about. So many real estate catalogues to flip through, so many decisions to make.

Is St.-Jean Cap-Ferrat still as tony as it used to be in david-niven days of yore? And Cannes -- one of our boys used to own a nice place in Cannes, along the Croisette, until...well, you know. And Villefranche-sur-mer -- didn't Albert of Monaco buy that Togolese mother of his child a nice place there, so it must be fairly nice, and..."

London would be nice. Or perhaps something in the countryside. Nothing fancy mind you. Nothing like Bandar's restored Plantagenet hunting-lodge. I mean, he's got billions to play with. But remember we're not Saudis. Once we divide up the loot, we only have tens of millions apiece to play with. So perhaps we'll have to make do with a house and messuage in Virginia Water.

We're not greedy, we "Palestinians," you know. We leave some of the aid money for the "Palestinian people." Even Arafat did that.

Decisions, decisions. It's exhausting.

So, when the choir performs the song [Silver Bells] tomorrow at a singalong assembly, instead of singing the line "soon it will be Christmas day" they will say "soon it will be a festive day."
--from this news article

The argument is that unless all belief-systems called "religions" are given equal treatment, then it is impermissible for people who, until now, had no difficulty calling themselves Christians, and whose countries were founded by people who considered themselves to be Christians, countries with legal and political institutions that developed, over time, in Western Christendom, to celebrate a Christian holiday. The only change has been that in recent decades, it has been intelligently and widely recognized that the Old Testament has been an important cultural and political source for that same Christianity, and that it would be more accurate to use the term "Judeo-Christian civilization."

It is a fact that in what some call the "holiday season" there are two holidays: Christmas and Hanukkah. Neither Christian or Jewish texts mandate that Christians, or Jews, be in a state of permanent war (if not open warfare) with non-Christians, or non-Jews. Islamic texts, however, do insist that the "struggle" or Jihad to remove every obstacle to the spread of Islam -- from a laic French state, to the American Constitution's guarantees of individual rights -- and must continue until Islam not only spreads everywhere, but dominates everywhere, and Muslims rule, everywhere.

That is not something the innocent teachers of this school recognize. They do not realize that the Muslims -- for obviously this is about Muslims, and not Hindus and not Buddhists and not Jains and not Sikhs -- wish, as part of the removal of those obstacles to Islam, to steadily deny any public, and then private space, to Christianity, to Judaism, to anything that is not-Islam. The teachers who innocently thought they were merely making Muslim students feel more at home are doing something that will be regarded by Muslims, openly or silently, as a triumph -- a political triumph, and one to be followed by other such triumphs. It is not about "being made to feel welcome." It is about the transformation, sometimes aided by innocent Infidels themselves, of Infidel societies.

This is a much more serious incident than merely doing away with the Three Kings (I was one of them once, bearing myrrh, or possibly gold, or possibly frankincense -- slowly making my second-grade dignified way, right up onto the stage, during that memorable school-wide Assembly. Every Christmas, I now solemnly re-enact, for anyone who will watch, my performance as one of the Three Magi) or a menorah. It's part of a campaign. If the Infidels choose to further a Muslim campaign out of a misplaced sympathy, or a misunderstanding that if they really must be so keenly insistent on everyone-gets-to-participate-or-no-one-can, then they will simply have to invent some Muslim holiday that calendrically corresponds to the overlap of Christmas and Hanukkah (which, by the way, has been raised to a level of significance it does not possess in Judaism, precisely because of its celebratory proximity to Christmas).

After all, Eid is a most movable feast. And furthermore, decapitating a lamb on the school stage might be a little messy, and some of the first-graders might be unduly affected. The non-Muslim first-graders, that is -- the ones unused to such things.

Montaigne's was the first Raymond: "An Apology for Raymond Sebond."

If Sarkozy can disentangle himself from the embrace of Carla Bruni for a minute, possibly he can issue a formal apology for the inattentiveness of the French state in protecting French Jews by both providing better security, and by coming down very hard -- with long jail terms -- for all those who are caught. 

It's too late to bring back M. Guillotin's eponymous device for those hate-filled primitives who, over many weeks, slowly tortured and then murdered  the Jewish boy, Ilan Halimi, for example, But the death penalty should make a comeback, precisely for such cases. A change in the mental and emotional atmosphere, all over the Western world, is necessary. The refusal to put up with any nonsense would, or should, correspond to the reaction, just after the war (but not a half-year later) to Nazi war criminals and their collaborators. Unfortunately, that attitude too quickly dissipated before real justice could have been done. Too many got away with too much, and then, very quickly, it became too late.

About that apology. Make it a big deal, so that it enters French history. Give it a memorable title. I've just thought of one.

"No mistake in including atheists with muslims. They have been trying to get Christian references out of everything too."
-- from a reader

Really?

I'm a life-long atheist. Learned it at my mother's knee, when I looked up at her, and she refused to tell me if either she or my father believed in God, and I had to figure it all out for myself. And I've never "been trying to get ""Christian references out of everything." It's all I can do to get people to understand that the study, and appreciation, of Western art and music and literature cannot take place without a knowledge of both the Old and the New Testament. How else to understand Christian allusions in Shakespeare or Dickens, or Christian iconography without which Western art until the nineteenth century could not be deciphered, could not be understood, save purely from the painterly (malerisch) point of view of color, form, line.

Last evening I listened to music -- I'll discreetly refer to it as BWV 248, the only kind of German vehicle  I am likely to frequent -- which would have made little sense to me had I not been supplied with the English text of the German original, and had I not already, in my brain, known something about a certain child, "aus der Stadt Nazareth, in dis judische Land zur Stadt David, die da heisset Bethlehem; darum, dass er von dem Hause un Geschlechte David war" and so on. And I listened to words and music as a firm, contented atheist.

Not everyone takes as stolid and unimaginative a view of "religion" as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins do. Some atheists are perfectly relaxed and easygoing about the whole matter of others' beliefs, although sometimes one does run up against a hard case -- someone whose beliefs you can't quite believe, knowing that person as you do -- and can take pleasure in the artifacts created by those who used the imagery, relied on the texts, and in most cases shared the beliefs, of Christianity or, a bit more accurately inclusive, of both Old and New Testaments. Certainly at this point in our collectively grim history, and needing every non-Muslim to join with every other non-Muslim, this would not be a good time for atheists to go fight City Hall, nor for those who are non-atheists and non-Muslims, to fight with those same (relaxed, bemused, non-fanatical) atheists who can sit still in a Concertgebouw or Conservatory, for that Oratorio I mentioned above -- and applaud, and mean it, at the end.

(IsraelNN.com) Jewish worshippers Tuesday were stunned to find Arabs had desecrated the graves of the Biblical Joshua, Caleb and Nun (Joshua’s father).

Joshua served as the Jewish Nation's Prime Minister from the year 2488 until 2516 on the Hebrew calendar (1272 BCE - 1300 BCE).

Members of the One Shechem organization that organizes visits to the graves arrived in the village of Timnat (Kifl) Haress, near Ariel in Samaria, to prepare for a special prayer gathering, discovered that Arab vandals had desecrated the village’s Jewish tombs.  The tombs of Yehoshua (Joshua) ben Nun, Nun, and Calev (Caleb) ben Yefuneh were covered with garbage and feces – both human and animal, and anti-Semitic and Nazi slogans and symbols had been painted in the area.

Here is what happened to Joseph's tomb:

The Oslo Accords put the site under Israeli jurisdiction, but on Oct. 7, 2000, then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak ordered a unilateral retreat, based on a Palestinian agreement to protect the site.

But within hours, smoke was seen billowing from the tomb as a crowd burned Jewish prayer books and other articles. With pickaxes and hammers they began to tear apart the stone building. Two days later the dome of the tomb had been painted green and bulldozers were clearing the area.

The gun laws in France are unknown to me. But if private arms are not banned, but subject to strict police control, the police should not only make special dispensation for Jews (and many Christians) to be armed, because it is they who are threatened. And because they are threatened by Muslims, and not the other way round, Muslims can legitiimately be denied police permission to carry arms. Their attacks, in packs, are quite enough. Those they attack need what used to be called in American slang "an equalizer." No Jews are holding prisoner and torturing to death a Muslim boy, as happened to the Halimi boy. Twenty Jews are not surrounding and attempting to beat to death a Muslim boy, akin to what happened on Camus Street. Nor are French Christians, or post-Christians, or unbelievers, known to anywhere have as a group --- for for that matter as individuals, despite every conceivable provocation, and not merely during those "warm" (chauds) times, but day in and day out, in the banlieues -- have attacked individual Muslims. Not once. Not anywhere.

And the laws about gun ownership should reflect that. Unfair? Why? Who is being threatened? Whose legal and political institutions, whose schools, whose cars, whose forces of order, are being subject to attacks, attacks that sometimes do not involve violence, though they always involve threats, but most often, are violent?

Who is doing what to whom in France? And when will Sarkozy disentangle himself from all of his grand schemes about "integration" and possibly from the embraces of Carla Bruni, in order to deal intelligently, and not with that sentimentalism that caused him to make such a deal about Rachida Dati (akin to Bush with his child-of-privilege obvious sentimentalism about Rice), nor in that frenetic manner he has, the problem of Islam in France. It is a problem, and it will not be solved by "integration." It can be limited, it can be constrained, it can be ridimensionato. Sarkozy, some thought, would know what to do. His invitation to Qaddafy, and above all his enthusiastic contribution of vast sums to the "Palestinians," show that he does not know where to put his feet or hands. Except possibly --those hands that apparently are  all around Carla Bruni.

I don't think one should object to the selection of Putin as "Man of the Year." Stalin was, Hitler was, Khomeini was, Arafat was one of  four collectively considered as Men (or possibly Persons) Of The Year. All kinds of riff-raff make it, if not always to Man of the Year status, at least to the cover.of a regular issue.  Saddam Hussein. Hafez Al-Assad. Khaddafy. King Faisal. King Fahd. King Abdullah. King Hussein. God, what a world where we are expected to, or are forced to,  take such people seriously, to solemnly parse their remarks, to read about what they do, what they think, what they -- are. But there it is. The choice of  "Man of the Year" is not a moral judgment. After all, the people who write about men and events for Time, as reporters or pundificators, can hardly be judged by us, who are familiar with what they produce, as if they actually had the capacity to make moral judgments.

Is there something, one special thing, that the United States and the rest of the West could do to calm Russia's suspicions, or at least to calm those of its people who will listen to reason, but have been whipped up by non-stop KGB conspiracy theorists and propagandists?

Yes. That one thing is not to pressure Serbia to give up Kosovo. And then Serbia won't.

And if it won't, that will be a good thing, for the West vis-a-vis Islam. All things considered.

One concluding unscientific foot-tapping postscript.

If Medvedev manages to gain a little confidence, and even starts to have his own supporters to supplement, or possibly even replace, the support of Putin, then someday it is possible that Putin himself will be singing a different tune. Unlikely, but still possible.

That tune?

Oh, I almost forgot:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fv7E9O77Kkg&feature=related

Hugh Fitzgerald has certainly been prescient on this issue.

France24 (with thanks to Alan): France, Italy and Spain united behind a planned Mediterranean Union on Thursday, announcing a July summit in Paris of the countries bordering the sea.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced the July 13 summit at a joint news conference in Rome with the Italian and Spanish prime ministers, Romano Prodi and Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.

The three leaders earlier discussed the plan to establish an EU-type union of the zone in talks in the Italian capital.

"Convinced that the Mediterranean, crucible of culture and civilisation, should resume its role as a zone of peace, prosperity and tolerance," the three leaders said they had met to "think about the broad outlines of a planned union for the Mediterranean."

The bloc "would have a mission to reunite Europe and Africa around the countries along the Mediterranean rim and to set up a partnership on an equal footing between the countries" north and south of the sea, they said.

"The added value of the Mediterranean Union should reside first in the political boost it should give to cooperation around the Mediterranean and the mobilisation of civil societies, businesses, local communities, associations and NGOs (non-governmental organisations)," the statement said.

The Paris summit will precede by a day an EU summit on July 14 in Brussels.

The Mediterranean Union will focus on "peace, development and respect for the environment," Sarkozy said separately. "It's a great dream, a great vision, which I'm sure can be realised. We three have decided that this will be a united Mediterranean, a war against despair."

Sarkozy advocates the grouping partly as an alternative to Turkish membership of the European Union. Italy favours Ankara's entry into the EU.

The plan also comes against the backdrop of attacks in Algeria, and other north African states on the Mediterranean, by the group calling itself Al-Qaeda's Branch in the Islamic Maghreb (BAQMI).

It's been one of those weeks. Everything that could possibly go wrong has gone wrong. Nothing really important, but lots of things that I could just do without, and which prompt the reaction: "Oh bugger."

As I mentioned before, this is our busiest time at work, and I'm rushing around like mad trying to do a million and one things before Christmas. So naturally the spirit of Oh Bugger hit me with a stinking cold at the beginning of the week - not bad enough to get out of doing stuff and get sympathy, but enough to make me feel rotten, or "sub-optimal" in management speak. Next, the spirit of  Oh Bugger took a Luddite turn, maliciously attacking any gadget in my home (and car)  that contains a silicon chip. Perhaps there is a late Millennium Bug going around. Or a late Millennium Bugger.

Most sinister of all was the mysterious affair of the Christmas Tree. I spent a long time decorating my Christmas tree, trying not to break any balls in the process. I found I didn't have enough balls, so I popped out to get some more. In my absence, the lights went. Christmas tree lights are a pain, because if one goes the lot go, and you have to test all the bulbs to see which one it is. Life's too short, so I popped out again to get some more lights - they're only a couple of quid. When I came back, the Christmas tree had crashed to the floor, balls, tinsel and all, scattering needles - impossible to remove except one at a time - into the far corners of the room. Did it fall, or was it pushed? Whodunnit? And can't things just go right for a bit?

At least it is a Christmas tree and not a "Holiday Tree".  I was pleased to read Rebecca's post about "Merry Christmas" coming back in America - the "holidays" thing was absurd and probably used only by big companies and government. England has avoided the "holiday" nonsense, perhaps because to the English "holiday" often means a beach in Spain, or at least Blackpool. However, the bland "Season's Greetings" has been around for years. For a change, how about Seasonings Greet:

"Happy Holidays"

I'm pleased, too, that Christmas is merry, rather than happy. New Year is happy - and also "prosperous", according to the local shops, who wish "All [Their] Customers a Merry Christmas and a Happy and Prosperous New Year".

Tomorrow is another day. My cold is on the mend. Christmas is coming Perhaps the spirit of Oh Bugger will do me a favour and bugger off.

Nicole Kidman, Goodwill Ambassador for UNIFEM, on television tells the world that "one out of three women will suffer abuse during their lives" and that "we have to stop it."

Indeed.