Remember this. And remember, too, that for long years these people were considered heroic patriots, defenders of the nation.

Haven’t quite figured out why this image produces some weird responses in me.  Partly, it seems connected to a nightmarish perception of the present.  A bad wind steers Gulliver to the shores of Consumdingnag but it’s real.

h/t Andrew Sullivan

No, this isn’t why I moved here to Portland

For this IDF Chief Rabbi, God’s version of the Nuremburg war crimes trials has those who hestitate to drop cluster bombs on innocents as the ungodly damned.

On the other hand, there are those who are not utterly insane.

Quite a few of them in England…Seven out of 10 Britons back The Independent on Sunday’s call for a phased withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan as a landmark report by Oxfam this week exposes the real human cost of the war.

Auto purchase alert: if you are down in Texas and see a blue/white 2 million dollar Veyron listed in the Auto Trader at a surprisingly low price, check for rust and rotting dove-scrotum leather upholstery…

Conservative purging of the impure continues apace.

The Weekly Standard crowd do one of those way-cool and way-logically-compelling Glenn Beck this-links-to-this charts…

Conservatives with intellectual integrity. We don’t need a lot of fingers to count them up presently. Bruce Bartlett is one.

I don’t mean to imply that Europeanization is unambiguously good; only that it’s not unambiguously bad, as virtually all conservatives believe. There are many ways I think we could learn from the Europeans and they from us. One way we can learn from them is how to have a tax system that raises considerably more revenue as a share of the economy than ours does without killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

At a minimum, I think it’s safe to say that Hayek was wrong about the inevitability of totalitarianism arising from growth in the size of government. The collapse of communism is proof enough of that.