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Instapundit shows us Michael Yon’s new great photo.

Belmont Club likes the photo too.

The Guardian reminds us the Berlin wall fell 18 years ago tomorrow.

Remember, remember the 9th of November. But who does? If you had not seen the headline to this column, would you instantly have known that I refer to the day the Berlin wall came down, 18 years ago tomorrow? Dates age faster than we do, said the poet Robert Lowell, and most of the time that is true.

For an older generation of central Europeans, November 9 meant the Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass” in 1938, when Nazi thugs left the streets of this city strewn with the smashed glass of Jewish shopkeepers’ windows. For those still older, it recalled Hitler’s attempted putsch on November 8-9 1923. Each November 9 supplants the last. Perhaps – heaven forbid – in a few years’ time there will be an attempted terrorist attack in Berlin (foiled, let us hope) on a November 9 and Germans will have to work out whether to call it 9/11, European style, or 11/9, American style. …

Jonah Goldberg leads the way for Mark Steyn’s review of a book published 20 years ago.

So, here’s Steyn marking 20 years of “The Closing of the American Mind.”

I don’t really like the expression “popular culture.” It’s just “culture” now: there is no other. “High culture” is high mainly in the sense we keep it in the attic and dust it off and bring it downstairs every now and then. But don’t worry, not too often. “Classical music,” wrote Bloom, “is now a special taste, like Greek language or pre-Columbian archaeology. Thirty years ago [i.e., now fifty years ago], most middle-class families made some of the old European music a part of the home, partly because they liked it, partly because they thought it was good for the kids.” Not anymore. If you’d switched on TV at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1999 you’d have seen President and Mrs. Clinton and the massed ranks of American dignitaries ushering in the so-called new millennium to the strains of Tom Jones singing “I’m gonna wait till the midnight hour/ That’s when my love comes tumblin’ down.” Say what you like about JFK, but at least Mrs. Kennedy would have booked a cellist.

“Popular culture” is more accurately a “present-tense culture”: You’re celebrating the millennium but you can barely conceive of anything before the mid-1960s. We’re at school longer than any society in human history, entering kindergarten at four or five and leaving college the best part of a quarter-century later—or thirty years later in Germany. Yet in all those decades we exist in the din of the present. A classical education considers society as a kind of iceberg, and teaches you the seven-eighths below the surface. Today, we live on the top eighth bobbing around in the flotsam and jetsam of the here and now. And, without the seven-eighths under the water, what’s left on the surface gets thinner and thinner. …

Maimon Schwarzschild in Right Coast gives a précis of a Melanie Phillips City Journal article on anti-Semitism in Britain. Happy to have this synopsis. Wanted to include this, but it was too long. There’s a link for download.

Melanie Phillips gives a chilling, detailed, and all too convincing report on the spread of anti-Semitism in Britain. Overt anti-Semitism is rife in Britain’s large Muslim community. But it’s not only among Muslims by any means:

[A]nti-Semitism has also become respectable in mainstream British society. “Anti-Jewish themes and remarks are gaining acceptability in some quarters in public and private discourse in Britain and there is a danger that this trend will become more and more mainstream,” reported a Parliamentary inquiry last year. “It is this phenomenon that has contributed to an atmosphere where Jews have become more anxious and more vulnerable to abuse and attack than at any other time for a generation or longer.”

At the heart of this ugly development is a new variety of anti-Semitism, aimed primarily not at the Jewish religion, and not at a purported Jewish race, but at the Jewish state. Zionism is now a dirty word in Britain, and opposition to Israel has become a fig leaf for a resurgence of the oldest hatred. …

 

Samizdata finds some of the good news in the election this week.

John Stossel doesn’t think the government is capable of doing anything about global warming.

Larry Elder doesn’t think much of the guv either.

The story you are about to read is true. The names have been changed to protect the bureaucrats.

A few months ago, I met a contractor in a bar. He told me about his business, and I asked him how many people he employed. He said, “Forty-nine. If I have one more, then the federal Family Medical Leave Act and the California Family Rights Act kick in. Then if somebody goes out, I have to hold his job open for months, whether I can afford to keep him or not. That’s bull—-.” So here we are. A man that wants to hire more people refuses to do so, because an additional hiree takes a hammer to his profit margins.

I recently visited a friend who lives in the Bay Area. I got through security at Los Angeles International Airport, even through my carry-on toiletry bag included hair paste, toothpaste and deodorant. All went through the security screening, no problem.

On my return flight through San Francisco Airport, however, security made me open my toiletry bag, and I received stern instructions to — in the future — place stuff like shampoo, hair paste, toothpaste, sunblock and deodorant in a zip-lock plastic bag. “No one told me to do that on the way up here,” I said. The security screener said, “Those are the rules. Somebody simply didn’t follow them.” …