Brazil is going to fingerprint US visitors to get back at us for fingerprinting their citizens, by order of one judge who compared the act to the worst Nazi horrors.

I just don’t even know what to say… of course, on the one hand, I don’t care in the slightest whether or not Brazil fingerprints me if I ever go there (no plans right now), but are people really that ridiculous? Does this judge actually think that us fingerprinting Brazilians is the moral equivalent of us torturing millions of Brazilians to death?

Hard to imagine.

This is interesting.

A shift in tactics indeed- but it proves the weakness of the terrorists. If they are unable to go after hard targets and start bombing civilians, well, I’m very sorry for the civilians, but it proves that we’re winning. They’re losing firepower and manpower and money, so they have to go after easier targets. It seems like that’s the only way to read this.

This will turn the Iraqi people more and more against Islamofascism, and more and more in favor of the Americans who are protecting them. That will make it harder for the insurgents to operate, who have to depend on locals to hide and support them.

You can look at how Israel has turned over the last three years from being willing to give up almost anything for peace with the Palestinians, to being highly supportive of more and more aggressive tactics to contain and destroy the terrorists who were bombing them, as a model for what’s going to happen now with the Iraqis, to the extent it hasn’t happened already.

But naturally, the media that is committed to our failure will highlight the human sufferring that this causes. And it is, in fact, very sad, but they were sufferring far more before we got there.

Pop over at Basket of Figs has a post on the fragility of life, and how it’s not quite as fragile as many would have us believe.

Yep, it’s a wonder any of us is alive. Some of us aren’t. I remember a boy I went to school with who burned himself up about 50 years ago while stealing gasoline from a farm vehicle. Another boy drank himself to death. They didn’t listen to their mothers or fathers, but that generation seemed to surrender without a struggle to the Nanny State, buying into the propaganda that bureaucrats know what is best. They hated their mothers and fathers and surrendered liberty without a peep to governments. After all, they were an enlightened bunch who were assured that they were the first to walk the earth who knew what was wrong with the world and that they would fix it up to be safe for everyone, especially for those who didn’t seem to care much about the Ten Commandments.

Read the whole thing.

Well, we’ve gotten through yet another major event with no terrorist attacks. My wife flew recently, and she said she was so impressed with the security people. They were thorough, efficient and polite, and made her feel very safe. Instapundit quotes Brian Doherty saying that teenagers armed with Soldier of Fortune magazine could do more damage to us than we’ve seen since the big one, making one think that Al Qaeda really has been mostly rounded up in this country and the ones that haven’t are in deep deep cover. Everyone thought there would be another attack by now.

It’s kind of a new experience for me, to observe my government doing something really tricky and complex, and apparently succeeding brilliantly, beyond all expectations.

Haha, take That, arrogant Apple evangelists! Take that, Lileks! Pay twice as much just to make sure your case is cool-looking, and see what you get!

So, last night, Andrea and I watched a movie (Confidence). I had a little Scotch (Cutty Sark) and Andrea drank her tea. Then Andrea put Katie to bed. I played a few games of Age of Mythology and then I went to bed too. In other words, it was almost exactly like every other night. No Champagne at midnight, no dropping ball or Dick Clark or Times Square.

I didn’t miss it even a little bit. Life’s just too good right now to wish anything was different.

Confidence wasn’t very good. Too much totally gratuitous nudity, too little interesting character development, totally predictable plot twists. Dustin Hoffman was very creepy, Andy Garcia was interesting, Ed Burns was fine, but they’re just fiddling while Rome burns. It’s impossible to care about anyone in this movie, or about what happens. Even the surprise plot twists come exactly where they’re supposed to come, surprising no one. So I’d recommend it only if you’re big fans of the grifter genre, have no children and no delicate Christian sensibilities, have seen all the other much better movies of this genre like The Grifters and House of Games, and are really bored. On second thought, skip it anyway.

Blogger was down for a big part of the day. It made me mad and I wanted to blog about it, but I couldn’t because… Blogger was down.

Discoshaman posted a mention of a review of the book Wild At Heart over at Le Sabot Post-Moderne (no, I don’t really know what that’s about). I read that book about a year ago, and kept meaning to write a review of it but never got around to it. Modern Reformation does a great job anyway, so it saved me some time.

Instapundit has an uncharacteristically long article summing up various aspects of the Iraq war. Sounds like there’s cause to be cautiously optimistic. It sounds to me like there’s not much of a local resistance left- the violence is mostly coming from foreign sources, which will be very difficult to maintain over time, with the locals increasingly against them and their money drying up.

People keep looking for a single storyline here, but there’s a lot going on. The ultimate storyline, of course, is that if we don’t chicken out, things are likely to turn out well — and if we do chicken out, things are certain to turn out very, very badly.

Our biggest potential enemy here is ourselves.

Lileks has some thoughts on the Iranian earthquake, and on US aid.

I wonder if this disaster might be the Iranian Chernobyl. (Or the 21st century equivalent of the Lisbon earthquake, if you remember your Voltaire.) Just as that catastrophe laid bare the lies and the failures of the Soviet system, so might a horrible earthquake call into question the Mullahs’ claim to rule at the behest of the Almighty. It’s hard to insist that Allah wants Israel destroyed but never gets around to leveling Tel Aviv with natural disasters.

He didn’t do a very good job of taking the month off. But I won’t complain.