Free Republic

<p>A statuette of a bird featured in the classic 1941 detective thriller "The Maltese Falcon" sold for more than $4 million at auction Monday.</p> <p>The final price on the 45-pound, 12-inch-tall prop was $4,085,000, according to Bonhams auction house. That includes Bonham's premium.</p>

To ignore history is reckless. To invert its lessons is suicide. As we continue to fight for our existence as a free people, we are crippled by two impulses that one would think are mutually exclusive. Regarding the thousand year continuing threat to Western Civilization, we display amnesia, incapable of integrating the present attacks into a much larger arc of action. Yet, when determining a response to our current enemies, our literal, overly precise concept of what constitutes a "crusade" precludes adding any overt spiritual/moral/religious component to our effort. Which is it? Confronting a remarkably patient enemy, how can we...

The most storied bird in cinema history, Dashiell Hammett's ``The Maltese Falcon,'' is winging its way back home to San Francisco to star in the 75th anniversary celebration of a book that helped create the ``hard-boiled'' American mystery genre. Getting the black bird -- or rather, the 50-pound lead prop used in the 1941 screen version -- from Southern California to San Francisco, where Hammett lived and wrote from 1921 to 1929, could very well make a Hammett-style pot boiler all its own. Now valued at $2 million, the statue Sam Spade so doggedly pursued will arrive with armed security....