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First World War ammunition frozen in time for nearly a century has been found as glacier melts WWI ammunition frozen in time for nearly a century has been discovered in northern Italy. More than 200 pieces of the ammunition were revealed at an altitude of 3,200 metres by a melting glacier on the Ago de Nardis peak in Trentino. The 85-100mm caliber explosives weighed between seven and 10 kilos and explosives experts have been to the site to safely dispose of the weaponry. The once-perennial glacier began partially melted during a recent heat wave, allowing the Finance Police Alpine rescue...

Venetians have voted overwhelmingly for their own sovereign state in a ‘referendum’ on independence from Italy. Inspired by Scotland’s separatist ambitions, 89 per cent of the residents of the lagoon city and its surrounding area, opted to break away from Italy in an unofficial ballot. The proposed ‘Repubblica Veneta’ would include the five million inhabitants of the Veneto region and could later expand to include parts of Lombardy, Trentino and Friuli-Venezia Giulia. The floating city has only been part of Italy for 150 years. The 1000 year–old democratic Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia, was quashed by Napoleon and was subsumed into...

There is substantial agreement on the Left that Conservatives are stupid, deluded, or evil. Mr. Albert Gore, Jr. (the Kingmaker) is a member of the deluded camp. Bill Moyers, the PBS zillionaire who is a leader of the movement to take America back to 1910, is certain we are evil. Neil Starkman, Seattle wunderkind, subscribes to the common notion that Conservatives are stupid. The evidentiary basis for each of these conclusions is non-existent. On the contrary, "there's plenty of evidence that listeners to Conservative talk radio are more educated and better informed about public affairs than the generality of voters..."...

Last August, Dr. Howard Dean was among the recipients of a questionnaire sent out by the Quad-City Times of Davenport, Iowa, to all candidates for the Democratic nomination. One question was: "My closest living relative in the armed services is ....……" Fill in the blank was the idea, see. Not hard. Innocuous, really, irrelevant to a candidate's fitness for office. Carol Mosely-Braun had no trouble with it. She answered that hers was a small family and she had no relatives currently in the armed services. But Dr. Dean's answer was, "My brother is a POW/MIA in Laos, but is almost...

Dribble "I loathe America, and what it has done to the rest of the world ," the banner reads over a screed by Margaret Drabble, novelist. I knew that the wave of anti-Americanism that would swell up after the Iraq war would make me feel ill. And it has. It has made me much, much more ill than I had expected. America has made you sick. Ah, Maggie dear, buck up. Let us know what we can do to make you well. My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my...

Assistant Professor Nicholas De Genova, a glittering diamond in the intellectual crown that is Columbia University in the City Of New York is too scared to show up to teach his classes. He's received threats of violence, reports the New York Sun, and so have other professors who participated in the Saddam pep rally held last Wednesday in Low Memorial Library on the Columbia campus. I'm glad De Genova is scared. He probably didn't realize that declaring war on America isn't without risk. From all the evidence, besides being vicious, De Genova is enormously stupid. It's a wonder that he...

There are protesters everywhere, marching with signs and banners, shouting slogans, disrupting traffic, taunting the police, breaking things, and otherwise annoying the rest of us. There is a protest scheduled as I write this aimed "to shut this city down." Is there anything more pathetic than a Lefty scorned? It's not as though the rest of us haven't heard their arguments against the war in Iraq and against the Bush administration and against America. We've heard them. How could we miss hearing them? We aren't persuaded. We, the rest of us, that is, don't believe that their chaining themselves together,...

Trentino was reciting the second stanza of Donne's Go and Catch a Falling Star. Lovely stuff. "If thou be'st born to strange sights, Things invisible to see, Ride ten thousand days and nights, Till age snow white hairs on thee, Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me, All strange wonders that befell thee, And swear, No where Lives a woman true, and fair." "I remember the third stanza, too," said Trentino, smiling, "but it's far too bitter." ...more

"Knowing that Baku is the capital of Azerbaijan is trivial. But it's good to know. You certainly would want to know that London is the capital of England, Paris, of France, and so on. You want to know facts. You want to know as much as you can. How do you know things unless they're in your memory?" "I've heard you inveigh against John Dewey and Progressive education, Maestro," said Ian, "but I read in the Spectator that the U.K. Secretary of Education is bound and determined to sweep away the old pedagogy, teachers teaching facts and subjects. As near...

Let's start with what everyone knows about Ann Coulter. She is tall, blond, pretty, vigorous, lithe, and lissome. Each of these adjectives applies equally well to her prose. She is also wicked-smart and diligent, too. Look upon her works and you discover that Ann Coulter is not a dealer in slander. but rather relies on a barrage of facts or the single dispositive fact. For an instance of the mighty barrage, see how she reduces the windbag senator from West Virginia to a pile of rubble simply by listing the institutes and erections named for himself and dotting the landscape...

Nothing coherent. The dream of "progressivism," a new world of peace and plenty, has vanished, drowned in the blood of 100,000,000 casualties in the twentieth century--a failure everywhere it's been tried, and now stripped of any intellectual pretensions it commanded in former days. This doesn't mean that the Left has dissolved or is without power. It means that the Left is in disarray. The Left position on the Middle East since September 11, 2001 is illustrative...more.

When Henry Ford declared that his customers could have any color car they wanted "as long as it's black,"--Model T's were available only in black from 1914 to 1927–surely he was behaving like a commissar. When Ford, an abstemious and thrifty man, banned smoking in Ford factories, that was another commissar/coercive act. Old Henry was behaving like a commissar or a thug–Don Corleone comes to mind--wasn't he? Not quite. A black Model T was a deal which potential customers could refuse...more

I'm an American, a New Yorker, born and bred. I call on you to remember with grief, anger, and resolve this awful anniversary. Remember the bravery of this city's firemen and police. Remember our stalwart Mayor. Remember the host of volunteers who did the dig-out work, and all the people who fed them and helped them. Remember the dead here in this city and at the Pentagon and the valiant souls aboard Flight 93. Honor all of them...More

God bless America. I'm an American, a New Yorker, born and bred. I call on you to remember with grief, anger, and resolve this awful anniversary. Remember the bravery...more

John Powers, a Lefty columnist for a Lefty magazine on the Left coast discovered recently that "...over the last two decades, the joy has gone out of the left -- it now feels hedged in by shibboleths and defeatism -- while the right has been having a gas..." Powers also "...discovered that while unread copies of The Nation invariably rose in guilt-inducing stacks, [he] always read The Weekly Standard right away. Why? Because seen purely as a magazine, The Standard is incomparably more alluring..." More

John Powers, a Lefty columnist for a Lefty magazine on the Left coast discovered recently that "...over the last two decades, the joy has gone out of the left -- it now feels hedged in by shibboleths and defeatism -- while the right has been having a gas..." Powers also "...discovered that while unread copies of The Nation invariably rose in guilt-inducing stacks, [he] always read The Weekly Standard right away. Why? Because seen purely as a magazine, The Standard is incomparably more alluring..." MORE

(Excerpt) Q: District Attorney: You spent $50 million of your own money, about $49 a vote, to become Mayor of New York City, is that correct. Mr. Bloomberg. A: Yes. Q. You earned that money from various business enterprises? A: Yes. I earned that money. Q. You had a lifetime of successful business experience prior to taking office as Mayor. So you must be familiar with the "due diligence" rule, is that right?...more

If you think that the era of incantations ended in the Middle Ages, you're quite wrong. It's alive and flourishing. Let me alert you to some egregious instances. For over a year, and ending just about two months ago, Colon Powell, successor to Madeline ½bright as Secretary of State, penetrated to the depths of the Mideast conflict by repeatedly uttering the incantation, "cycle of violence." Mr. Powell was charmed by the curious sibillance of this incantation. It mesmerized him...more

If you think that the era of incantations ended in the Middle Ages, you're quite wrong. It's alive and flourishing. Let me alert you to some egregious instances. For over a year, and ending just about two months ago, Colon Powell, successor to Madeline ½bright as Secretary of State, penetrated to the depths of the Mideast conflict by repeatedly uttering the incantation, "cycle of violence." ...more

Readers of this blogsite know that Mark Steyn is one of our favorites. You're likely to find four or five links to Steyn's stuff on our Links page any time you look. Click on any of them and you're in for a treat. Steyn's public affairs articles appear in a variety of journals, Spectator (UK), Telegraph (UK), Chicago Sun-Times, the Jerusalem Post, the New York Sun, all associated with Conrad Black's Hollinger Group, and Canada's National Post, formerly so associated. Jewish World Review republishes some of them. Steyn writes London and New York theater reviews for New Criterion Magazine. Busy...