From LA Weekly:

The Fallaci Code
By BRENDAN BERNHARD

Oriana Fallaci asks: Is Muslim immigration to Europe a conspiracy?

In The Force of Reason, the controversial Italian journalist and novelist Oriana Fallaci illuminates one of the central enigmas of our time. How did Europe become home to an estimated 20 million Muslims in a mere three decades?

How did Islam go from being a virtual non-factor to a religion that threatens the preeminence of Christianity on the Continent? How could the most popular name for a baby boy in Brussels possibly be Mohammed? Can it really be true that Muslims plan to build a mosque in London that will hold 40,000 people? That Dutch cities like Amsterdam and Rotterdam are close to having Muslim majorities? How was Europe, which was saved by the U.S. in world wars I and II, and whose Muslim Bosnians were rescued by the U.S. as recently as 1999, transformed into a place in which, as Fallaci puts it, “if I hate Americans I go to Heaven and if I hate Muslims I go to Hell?”

In attempting to answer these questions, the author, who is stricken with cancer and has been hounded by death threats and charges of “Islamophobia” (she is due to go on trial in France this June), has combined history with episodes of riveting firsthand reportage into a form that reads like a real-life conspiracy thriller.

If The Force of Reason sells a lot of copies, which it almost certainly will (800,000 were sold in Italy alone, and the book is in the top 100 on Amazon ), it will be not only because of the heat generated by her topic, but also because Fallaci speaks for the ordinary reader. There is no one she despises more than the intellectual “cicadas,” as she calls them — “You see them every day on television; you read them every day in the newspapers” — who deny they are in the midst of a cultural, political and existential war with Islam, of which terrorism is the flashiest, but ultimately least important component. Nonetheless, to give the reader a taste of what Muslim conquest can be like, in her first chapter, Fallaci provides a brief tour of the religion’s bloodiest imperial episodes and later does an amusing job of debunking some of its more exaggerated claims to cultural and scientific greatness.

The book is also animated by a world-class journalist’s dismay that she could have missed the story of her lifetime for as long as she did. In the 1960s and ’70s, when she was a Vietnam War correspondent and a legendarily ferocious interviewer going mano a mano with the likes of Henry Kissinger and Yasser Arafat, Fallaci was simply too preoccupied with the events of the moment to notice that an entirely different narrative was rapidly taking shape — namely, the transformation of the West. There were clues, certainly. As when, in 1972, she interviewed the Palestinian terrorist George Habash, who told her (while a bodyguard aimed a submachine gun at her head) that the Palestinian problem was about far more than Israel. The Arab goal, Habash declared, was to wage war “against Europe and America” and to ensure that henceforth “there would be no peace for the West.” The Arabs, he informed her, would “advance step by step. Millimeter by millimeter. Year after year. Decade after decade. Determined, stubborn, patient. This is our strategy. A strategy that we shall expand throughout the whole planet.”

Fallaci thought he was referring simply to terrorism. Only later did she realize that he “also meant the cultural war, the demographic war, the religious war waged by stealing a country from its citizens … In short, the war waged through immigration, fertility, presumed pluriculturalism.” It is a low-level but deadly war that extends across the planet, as any newspaper reader can see.

Fallaci is not the first person to ponder the rapidity of the ongoing Muslim transformation of Europe. As the English travel writer Jonathan Raban wrote in Arabia: A Journey Through the Labyrinth (1979), in the mid-1970s Arabs seemed to arrive in London almost overnight. “One day Arabs were a remote people … camping out in tents with camels … the next, they were neighbors.” On the streets of West London appeared black-clad women adorned with beaked masks that made them look “like hooded falcons.” Dressed for the desert (and walking precisely four steps ahead of the women), Arab men bestrode the sidewalks “like a crew of escaped film extras, their headdresses aswirl on the wind of exhaust fumes.”

Writers far better acquainted with the Muslim world than Raban have been equally perplexed. In 1995, the late American novelist Paul Bowles, a longtime resident of Tangier, told me that he could not understand why the French had allowed millions of North African Muslims into their country. Bowles had chosen to live among Muslims for most of his life, yet he obviously considered it highly unlikely that so many of them could be successfully integrated into a modern, secular European state.

Perhaps Bowles would have been interested in this passage from Fallaci’s book: “In 1974 [Algerian President] Houari Boumedienne, the man who ousted Ben Bella three years after Algerian independence, spoke before the General Assembly of the United Nations. And without circumlocutions he said: ‘One day millions of men will leave the southern hemisphere of this planet to burst into the northern one. But not as friends. Because they will burst in to conquer, and they will conquer by populating it with their children. Victory will come to us from the wombs of our women.’”

Such a bald statement of purpose by a nation’s president before an international forum seems incredible. Yet even in British journalist Adam LeBor’s A Heart Turned East (1997), a work of profound, almost supine sympathy for the plight of Muslim immigrants in the West, a London-based mullah is quoted as saying, “We cannot conquer these people with tanks and troops, so we have got to overcome them by force of numbers.” In fact, such remarks are commonplace. Just this week, Mullah Krekar, a Muslim supremacist living in Oslo, informed the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten that Muslims would change Norway, not the other way around. “Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes,” he said. “By 2050, 30 percent of the population in Europe will be Muslim.”

In other words, Europe will be conquered by being turned into “Eurabia,” which is what Fallaci believes it is well on the way to becoming. Leaning heavily on the researches of Bat Ye’or, author of Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, Fallaci recounts in fascinating detail the actual origin of the word “Eurabia,” which has now entered the popular lexicon. Its first known use, it turns out, was in the mid-1970s, when a journal of that name was printed in Paris (naturally), written in French (naturally), and edited by one Lucien Bitterlin, then president of the Association of Franco-Arab Solidarity and currently the Chairman of the French-Syrian Friendship Association. Eurabia (price, five francs) was jointly published by Middle East International (London), France-Pays Arabes (Paris), the Groupe d’Etudes sur le Moyen-Orient (Geneva) and the European Coordinating Committee of the Associations for Friendship with the Arab World, which Fallaci describes as an arm of what was then the European Economic Community, now the European Union. These entities, Fallaci says, not mincing her words, were the official perpetrators “of the biggest conspiracy that modern history has created,” and Eurabia was their house organ.

Briefly put, the alleged plot was an arrangement between European and Arab governments according to which the Europeans, still reeling from the first acts of PLO terrorism and eager for precious Arabian oil made significantly more precious by the 1973 OPEC crisis, agreed to accept Arab “manpower” (i.e., immigrants) along with the oil. They also agreed to disseminate propaganda about the glories of Islamic civilization, provide Arab states with weaponry, side with them against Israel and generally toe the Arab line on all matters political and cultural. Hundreds of meetings and seminars were held as part of the “Euro-Arab Dialogue,” and all, according to the author, were marked by European acquiescence to Arab requests. Fallaci recounts a 1977 seminar in Venice, attended by delegates from 10 Arab nations and eight European ones, concluding with a unanimous resolution calling for “the diffusion of the Arabic language” and affirming “the superiority of Arab culture.”

While the Arabs demanded that Europeans respect the religious, political and human rights of Arabs in the West, not a peep came from the Europeans about the absence of freedom in the Arab world, not to mention the abhorrent treatment of women and other minorities in countries like Saudi Arabia. No demand was made that Muslims should learn about the glories of western civilization as Europeans were and are expected to learn about the greatness of Islamic civilization. In other words, according to Fallaci, a substantial portion of Europe’s cultural and political independence was sold off by a coalition of ex-communists and socialist politicians. Are we surprised? Fallaci isn’t. In 1979, she notes, “the Italian or rather European Left had fallen in love with Khomeini just as now it has fallen in love with Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and Arafat.”

Considerably less intemperate than her last book on the topic of radical Islam, the volcanically angry The Rage and the Pride, The Force of Reason is despairing, but often surprisingly funny. (“The rage and the pride have married and produced a sturdy son: the disdain,” she writes with characteristic wit.) And, Fallaci being Fallaci, it is occasionally over the top and will no doubt be deeply offensive to many, particularly when, in a postscript the book might have been better off without, she claims that there is no such thing as moderate Islam. Nonetheless, the voice and warmth and humor of the author light up its pages, particularly when she takes a leaf out of Saul Bellow’s Herzog by firing off impassioned letters to the famous both living and dead. She is savage about the Left, the “Peace” movement (war is a fundamental, if regrettable, condition of life, she states), the Catholic Church, the media and, of course, Islam itself, which she considers theological totalitarianism and a deadly threat to the world. She is much more optimistic about America than Europe, citing the bravery of New Yorkers who celebrated New Year’s Eve in Times Square despite widely publicized terrorism threats, but here one feels that she is clutching at straws. Though Fallaci now lives in New York, little amity has been extended to her by her peers since the post-9/11 publication of The Rage and the Pride, and she remains almost as much of a media pariah here as she does in Europe. The major difference is that we’re not putting her on trial.

As that Norwegian Mullah told Aftenposten, “Our way of thinking … will prove more powerful than yours.” One hopes he’s wrong, but if he is, it will be ordinary Americans and Europeans, including courageous Arab-Americans like L.A. resident Wafa Sultan and the Somali-born Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali (two women openly challenging Islamist supremacism), who prove him so, and not our intellectual classes (artists, pundits, filmmakers, actors, writers …). Many of the latter, consumed by Bush-hatred and cultural self-loathing, are perilously close to becoming today’s equivalent of the great Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, who so hated the British Empire that he sided with the Nazis in World War II, to his everlasting shame. The Force of Reason, at the very least, is a welcome and necessary antidote to the prevailing intellectual atmosphere.


Staff writer Brendan Bernhard is the author of White Muslim: From L.A. to New York to Jihad, a study of converts to Islam in the West (Melville House).

From Chapel Hill News:

Credit where overdue
By Eddy Landreth

The 2006-07 school year will mark the 50th anniversary of the University of North Carolina's 1957 national championship in men's basketball.

Unfortunately, Bobby Cunningham will not be here to celebrate with his former teammates. A starter on from that famous bunch of Tar Heels, Cunningham died recently.

Cunningham loved life and his school. He had a wonderful smile and a great sense of humor. He was a fun man to be around. The terrible shame is Cunningham died before seeing his old coach, Frank McGuire, receive the recognition from UNC that he deserves.

Please, James Moeser, please Dick Baddour, please Dean Smith, please Roy Williams, before we lose another of those men who helped create the tradition you have so richly enjoyed, honor Coach McGuire.

It doesn't matter that his name is on the coliseum in Columbia, S.C. And, yes, he was a difficult man, and he left Smith with the chore of restoring the program after probation.

He also gave UNC a precious national title, the only one in men's basketball in the Atlantic Coast Conference until N.C. State added another in 1974. When McGuire's team went undefeated at 32-0 and defeated Michigan State and Kansas in the Final Four to win the title (each game in triple overtime), he helped legitimize a young league and put Carolina's program on equal footing with N.C. State.

For all those who may not remember, Everett Case and the Wolfpack were the originators of big-time basketball in this state. UNC hired McGuire to match Case, and he did one better. He surpassed him, if only for a brief period.

McGuire also hired a young assistant named Smith, who, of course, went on to become the winningest coach in the history of college basketball. Smith left a legacy for how he ran his program and treated his players as much for the victories he earned.

Now Williams, who learned his craft from Smith, continues that rich tradition today, both in winning and the treatment of his players.

Yet none of this may ever have occurred were it not for McGuire, a crusty Yankee from New York who dressed impeccably and ran things his way. He would stroll toward the refs, pop the cuffs on his dress shirt and the crowd would go nuts.

He was also politically incorrect. He sat in the stands during practice with a megaphone and yelled cultural slurs at his players. They didn't worry about his language. They revered the man. Speak with the players still alive today, and you will quickly learn their feelings have never changed.

"He was a leader of men," said Smith, who also has said he is forever grateful to McGuire for bringing him to UNC.

Unfortunately, the school cannot seem to forget the issues that existed when McGuire left in 1961.

1961.

Get over it.

In this 50th anniversary season, if Carolina wishes to honor the men who gave it so much, honor their coach. You can be sure that is what they want. Cunningham wanted it. He told me so. It hurt him that UNC refused to honor the man who brought him to Chapel Hill and turned him into a man and a champion.

The time for Carolina to do the right thing is here.

Hang a banner from the rafters in the Smith Center with McGuire's name on it. Name the floor in Woollen Gym after him. Put a statue of him in front of Woollen, the site where he parked his Cadillac the alumni gave him when he won the title.

None of that would be overdoing it for one of the men responsible for making Carolina basketball what so many have come to love -- no, make that worship -- today.

Failing to do the right thing is disrespecting the men from that team who remain with us. Don't let another one go without seeing his alma mater honor the coach who recruited them all and taught them so much. He also gave the people of North Carolina something many of them have treasured for a lifetime -- McGuire's Miracle.

Frank Jr., the Unsung Sinatra
He's Got a Big Heart and His Pop's Voice, but Just A Shadow of His Success

By Wil Haygood

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, July 9, 2006

ATLANTIC CITY

He loves the ghosts.

They can be standing, or sitting. They can be tucked away in vaults. Sometimes he'll just veer off a road, and there he stands, surrounded. Green trees and clear air.

"I went to visit my father's grave when I was in Rancho Mirage recently," Frank Sinatra Jr. is saying. "And as I was stepping away, I noticed the grave of Jimmy Van Heusen, who was buried a couple graves away from Frederick Loewe. I met Loewe once. Caesars Palace. Vegas. I was over there watching Sinatra do his show."

That's how he talks sometimes. As if the father were a whole other entity. Which is kind of sweet. And kind of tangled.

"Jimmy Van Heusen was a top security test pilot in World War II as well as being a great songwriter. He was absolutely incredible. Van Heusen inspired me to write music."

His band members refer to the father as Big Frank.

Junior is Frank.

And between those two singers, those two men, father and son, lies a mountain. One on one side because he's unreachable, the other on a lifetime climb because all he wants to do is sing, be respected, get another gig.

And the man throwing the shadow is always there.

Big Frank's crowd still calls him Frank's boy even if he's 62 now. The more he sings -- and legions will tell you he's hugely gifted in his own right -- the more it seems as if the ghost is tiptoeing from around the mountain, out of the shadows in his patent leather slip-ons -- right toward him.

Big Frank's been dead since 1998, yet still he's everywhere -- weddings, cocktail soirees, movie soundtracks, TV commercials, elevators. All Frank is trying to do is carve a niche into the rock of legend and fame and history.

Maybe in a more just world this Frank would have a bigger audience. His new CD, titled "That Face" -- his first studio album in a decade -- might have been released with more noise.

"There is no demand for Frank Sinatra Jr. records," Frank himself is saying.

"There never has been. Rod Stewart is now doing the Great American Songbook. So is Harry Connick Jr. and Michael Bubl?. Well, Frank Sinatra Jr. has been doing it for 44 years."

His voice is without an ounce of self-pity.

He hunches his shoulders. He turns, on a dime, away. As if the world has become just too damn difficult for anyone -- much less a Sinatra -- to decipher such things anymore.

On the Boardwalk

He is here in Atlantic City for a two-night gig at the Hilton on the Boardwalk.

He comes through the back door, 20 minutes early for rehearsal. He's carrying his own bag. He's in a gray shirt, black slacks, and black shoes that rise above the ankle. He gives off the aura of a very serious man.

He opens his briefcase and takes out his song list and lays it on a table. He pours himself a diet soda. Andrea Kauffman, his manager, hands him some black-and-white photos to autograph and some payroll checks to sign.

The orchestra then rolls into several numbers. Lovely and vibrant. Frank makes little marks with a black pen in his notebook.

"Terry," Frank says to a band member, "that clarinet line on the end is beautiful. So simple. Like Bartok."

His talking voice sounds just like Big Frank's on all those old TV specials when it was Frank and Dean and Sammy and everyone wore bow ties and tuxes with skinny lapels and the cigarette smoke was thick as fog and Big Frank's only boy was at college in California.

He's been with many of these musicians for decades. Some played with Big Frank.

Frank blows out his version -- ghostly, sweet -- of "On a Clear Day."

"That's Nelson Riddle," he says at song's end, "but he must have had on his Duke Ellington hat that day."

He muses aloud about the legendary conductor as if dreaming: "Nelson Riddle was really something. Just something else."

The sky outside has darkened, and it's raining cats and more cats. Some musicians look up at the roof, where the rain is beating.

They're into another number, "The People That You Never Get to Love." Halfway through, Frank motions for quiet from the 38-piece orchestra, then walks over and leans on the piano. "Let's try that again," he says. "It has to be half that volume, everybody. This is a lullaby. That's what it is."

An old man - is helped from his wheelchair and led to the grand piano. Bill Miller, white-haired, beatnik glasses overpowering his face, leans over the keys.

"He's the greatest singer's pianist there ever was," Frank says, watching Miller as a father might watch his son walking across a log over a creek. Miller goes back decades with the Sinatra men. He played for Big Frank, served at one time as his musical director.

Miller never worried about the mountain or the shadows it cast. He's just the piano player.

"Take 10, everybody," Frank is soon saying.

Jim Fox, who looks like an aging surfer, sandy-haired and all, is Frank's guitarist. "He can sound exactly like his dad if he wants to," he says of Frank. "He can turn on the classic Sinatra sound anytime. It just depends on what kind of mood he's in. He has such high standards. He doesn't want to work unless he has his 38 band pieces. He knows every third trombone part, every cello part. You know, he conducted for his dad. So he knows the way Sinatra music is supposed to sound. He was at a lot of those original Capitol recording dates."

They live in an old world, this orchestra, a world of Ira Gershwin music and Johnny Mercer lyrics. Of Duke Ellington memories and Dinah Washington tributes.

"He's a great cat," Fox continues. "And he's really good to us. He takes us to dinner. Takes us to the best restaurants in town. He says it's the best thing for him -- to get us all out on the road, get us all together. Now, how sweet is that?"

After their break, Frank goes into "Come Rain or Come Shine." The ghost tugs at his memory. "You should have heard it the night it was recorded," he says of his father's version. "I shook."

Merrill Kelem sits in the auditorium. He was an Atlantic City police officer for three decades. Then he went to work security for Big Frank. "We didn't like using the word 'bodyguard,' " he says.

He works security for Frank now.

Kelem used to love being part of that squadron circling Big Frank. Leading Big Frank through the hallways, getting him to the limo.

Big Frank: There was the music -- years and years of it. But there were also headlines and scraps with newspapermen and marriages and divorces (Ava Gardner and Mia Farrow among them) and retirement and the legendary comeback. And more beautiful music for lonely, broken-hearted people. He was one Francis Albert Sinatra, and he knew how to wrap melancholy around a lyric, and he was a decent actor, and he had some tough and shady friends, and he was a great pal to his allies, and he even paid their hospital bills when they couldn't, and he gave hugely to charities, and he said Billie Holiday was one of his great influences. And when his shows opened and the musicians started wailing, you couldn't see him just yet. And then he'd rise from the half-hidden milk crate he had been sitting on with his back to the audience, without any formal introduction, and he'd turn to the audience and watch them go wild. And he had children: two daughters, and one son, Frank Jr., by his first wife, Nancy. And therein lies the history, and the shadowing, and the blue-lit ghost against the mountain.

The great Bill Miller, who had played all those years with him, went home after Big Frank died. There wasn't much work. Mostly, he was alone. Who knows what an old pianist sitting alone thinks about? The phone rang. It was Frank. Let's go, he said.

'He Was Good to Me'

The pianist was born in 1915. He's slim and the body is bent. The bent body looks almost courageous, as if he's been pummeling things mortals can't see. His fingers are long and pink and elegant. He likes a little vodka in the evenings. He likes Key lime pie. He's never done his own album. "It never came about," he says. "It's a little late now. But" -- and he lifts a hand like a bird's wing rising slowly up from a nest -- "who knows?"

His piano on the potent Sinatra number "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)" is considered classic. "That was an accident, really," Miller says. "We did the recording after two or three takes. You just hope for the best. I got lucky with that."

During a time of great romantic ballads, Bill Miller found love with a woman by the name of Aimee. They married, and sometimes she would join him on the road. Her love, his piano: Life was sweet. In 1964, they were living in California with their small daughter when a rain-soaked mountainside gave way, unleashing a torrent of mud and water. The family was separated. Miller's daughter somehow made it safely to the top of a hill. Bill was washed away in the debris, found clinging to a car at the end of a road.

They found Aimee the second night. Bill looked up from his hospital bed to see Big Frank standing over him. "Frank identified her body," he says. "Frank said, 'If it's any consolation, there wasn't a mark on her.' It wasn't any consolation."

Big Frank replaced everything for Bill. "The old man, he was good to me," Miller says.

'A Singer by Accident'

It's dinnertime. And there's a long table at this upscale steakhouse. And Frank's got most of the orchestra around him.

He's actually kind of shy.

Armchair music analysts wonder about his psyche, how he has coped -- with the image, the legend, the name. The rocks that built the mountain over the years.

"When I started as a kid, I wanted to be a piano player and songwriter. I only became a singer by accident," he says. "I was in college, playing in a little band. The lead singer got tanked one night. A guy in the band pointed at me and said, 'You sing.' I said, 'Me? Why me?' He said, 'You're a Sinatra, aren't you? Sing!' "

He really never saw much of his father in those days. "He was unreachable. He was traveling, or off making some movie. When I began in this business, it was only on rare occasions when we saw each other."

So he went on the road himself. Older musicians talked to him about life, love, women, their world.

"A lotta years I was out there on the road pulling one-nighters. Then I got hired to sing in Sam Donahue's band in 1963. I was 19 years old. Those days were so much more easier to work than it is today. There was no such thing as a $4 can of gasoline. And there were places to work. Now it's only rock music. Ask somebody who Gershwin is, who W.C. Handy is, they wouldn't have the slightest notion. I'm talking people up to 30."

He orders a charred ribeye.

"I was never a success," he says. "Never had a hit movie or hit TV show or hit record. I just had visions of doing the best quality of music. Now there is a place for me because Frank Sinatra is dead. They want me to play the music. If it wasn't for that, I wouldn't be noticed. The only satisfaction is that I do what I do well. That's the only lawful satisfaction. I was never a rock singer. I lost my job at RCA Victor in the '60s because I wouldn't sing protest songs like all those other groups were doing at the time."

Band members talk of his generosity. Not long ago, Frank bought every band member a fancy oxygen mask: He'd been caught in a hotel fire once. They talk of missed gigs and the check still arriving in the mail.

"In this town they used to have a place called the Steel Pier," Frank is saying. "At the Steel Pier, I used to alternate with a young boy I had never seen before. He was cleanshaven. It was Stevie Wonder. We used to alternate onstage with Duke Ellington. Duke took me under his wing. And I listened to the sounds he made."

He moved through the years, away from his father, Big Frank, and into his father and around his father, and into his father yet again.

He studies wartime bands with the intensity of a scholar. "The real powerful band era didn't come till after the war was over, around 1948. Then came the era of the vocalist. There was the Eddie Sauter and Bill Finegan Orchestra. The late '40s. They had a jazz band. They luxuriated in the French harp. A little bit of the symphonic touch. It was quite something to hear. Them and Stan Kenton's band. They made bands reach heights they had never reached before. More for listening than for dancing. That was the period I was interested in."

He's hardly touched his steak. He asks if everyone is happy with the food.

"When I started out I worked with Ziggy Elman, Charles Shavers, Louis Armstrong. I sang with Harry James's band -- with Harry. I sang with Woody Herman's band -- with Woody."

He'd like the world to know he was never a dilettante. That he works like a demon.

Once, on the road, he found himself in D.C. He had a gig someplace in town and afterward got himself over to Charlie's, a club. "I went over to Charlie's to listen to Al Hirt. In the bathroom there was this old man -- he ran the bathroom -- who gives me a towel. I look above the mirror and notice there's a picture of Sy Oliver's band. I said, 'What are you doing with a picture of Oliver's band?' He said, 'Boy, how you know that band?' I said, 'You play?' He pointed to the picture and said, 'That's Louis Armstrong. And that's me, second clarinet.' I went back outside. I said to Al, 'Al, there's a guy in the bathroom who played in Sy Oliver's band.' Al went and got him and pulled him up onstage. He must have been 85 years old. He still had his chops."

Frank Sinatra Jr. is single. He was married once but it didn't work out. He remains close to his two stepdaughters. He has a son, Mike, from another union. Mike attends the University of California at Santa Barbara. He doesn't sing. "Thank heavens," Frank says.

He wishes he himself could get more work. "The exhibitors see a show with 38 musicians, stage crew, and they get sticker shock. The show is expensive to put on."

This year, for the first time in five years, they've got a New Year's Eve gig. You wonder: Manhattan, maybe, Vegas?

They'll be going to Spokane.

He's grateful, though. "We used to work every New Year's Eve," he says. "Now they give people champagne, karaoke and confetti -- and the people are delighted."

It saddens him.

"Sinatra had this magnificent talent of picking the right stuff for him," he says about his father's endurance. "In those days, of course, there were a lot of songwriters to pick from. Today, whose left? Leslie Briscusse, Neil Sedaka, Rupert Holmes. Most of it has long since passed. But it's okay. You can always reach into the past."

The dinner bill for the orchestra arrives.

Frank pulls out a wad of cash. He came from that money-talks world. He leaves a heap of it on the table, including a generous tip. And he's gone.

Bill Miller, however, is not ready for bed. He sits stabbing a fork into a slice of Key lime pie. Johnny Pizza sits near him, full and happy. Frank hired Pizza mostly to help out Miller. Pizza wears an impressive diamond ring -- black center, diamonds circling the outer ring.

"When do we open?" Bill asks Johnny.

"Tomorrow, Bill," Johnny says.

"Tomorrow? Fair enough," Bill Miller says.

'Strangers in the Night'

They come from Cherry Hill and Philadelphia, from Manhattan and Newark and Trenton. "New Jersey is Sinatra country," Frank had said at dinner. "We always get a good reception here."

They come for him, and for his father. (Some come because of more recent intrigues: That was Frank a few years back appearing on an episode of "The Sopranos." Frank played a card sharp. He got a kick out of it.)

They come muscled and they come fragile, leaning on canes. The line at the Atlantic City Hilton starts forming two hours before show time.

They fill the house, 1,450 seats.

Eddie Stasny, 77, wouldn't miss it for the world. He arrives early from Cherry Hill. He's president of something called the Sinatra Social Society. Eddie's in a blue suit with a red hankie. Big Frank knew him personally. "I miss him terribly," he says. "I was his guest at Carnegie Hall, 1979, when the 'Trilogy' album came out. We were in the dressing room with him before the show."

Eddie has great admiration -- and some sympathy -- for the son, for Frank. "It's not easy to follow a giant like that," he says.

"I like the new album," he says about Frank's new release. "It came out on the 6th. I went to Tower Records the next day. The clerk didn't know nothing about it. They had five copies."

The Sinatra society he heads used to have upward of 200 people. "I got about 125 people left," he says. "We used to go everywhere. But it's dwindling down. The age factor. And a lot of people can't drive at night. I do okay myself."

It's 20 minutes till show time. Eddie pops up like a cork from his seat. Gotta get backstage -- again. Just remembered something else he's gotta tell Frank.

Rose Marcie used to go see Big Frank regularly in the '70s. "Junior does his own show, and he's wonderful," says Rose, who's come in from Philly wearing an eggshell white outfit. She goes on: "Close your eyes and give Junior his credit. I do it all the time. I look away -- to make sure I'm not looking at him to make it be his father."

The lights dim. There's no warm-up act, just an instrumental version of "Witchcraft."

Then Frank -- no announcement -- just saunters out onstage. As if he were trying to slip off someplace and got caught. They start clapping, and he stops cold. Grins, then mouths a "Who me?"

He opens with a song called "Lonesome Road."

He holds the mike like a martini glass.

"This is our first gig at the Hilton in five years," he says, pulling a stool close. "You can see they were dying to have us back."

He knows how to deliver a funny line. He used to work alongside the vaudevillian George Burns.

They do "Strangers in the Night" and "Summer Wind." They do "Luck Be a Lady," and Frank pantomimes throwing a pair of dice into the audience.

Rose looks away. Eddie Stasny pokes his wife.

Frank disappears backstage, and his voice, that Sinatra, calls into the velvet darkness from somewhere back in '52: "This man's music will be heard for centuries to come, ladies and gentlemen."

He introduces Bill Miller. A spear of light cuts the darkness and falls onto the old man at the piano and Frank, now standing near him. They slide into "One for the Road" like Ava Gardner slipping into mink.

He goes into "New York, New York": "C'mon," Frank says over the wild applause. "You know I had to do this one."

He takes them in and out of his world, and Big Frank's world. "That man," he says, "played this town for decades."

Afterward, the audience rises up. Some -- rush wouldn't be the right word, but they get there quick enough -- make their way to the stage.

"Let me by!" Eddie Stasny says to anyone in his way.

"He came to my high school in Trenton back in the '60s," a beefy man calls out, making his way toward Frank.

Frank accepts handshakes and congratulations. He cradles a bouquet of flowers.

Backstage, there are more hugs. Frank is smiling. He wipes beads of sweat from his brow with a handkerchief. He seems happy, not least with the height of the mountain. Miller sits a few feet away, behind a slip of velvet curtain.

"I'll see them all," Frank says about the folk lined up.

Miller listens to the hubbub. He's been hearing it for decades.

The old pianist never remarried. He met his Aimee back in 1942. Here, in Atlantic City. In a bar.

Bill Miller sips the last of his drink.

And one more for the road . . .

Then he and Frank leave through the blue smoke of all the ghosts. Headed to Canada for a gig.

Immigration and Terrorism
By Robert Novak

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- With their party sharply divided on immigration, House Republicans this week launched an effort to transform this political liability into an asset by tying it to the war against terrorism. The House GOP's summer of hearings on the emotional issue opened on the Mexican border by portraying the Senate-passed immigration bill as inhibiting local law enforcement officers from preventing terrorist attacks.

Rep. Edward R. Royce's International Relations subcommittee on terrorism started hearings Wednesday in San Diego and Friday in Laredo, Texas, on a "terrorist loophole" in the Senate measure. The subcommittee's testimony contends that a provision in the bill prohibiting local police officers from arresting illegal aliens for civil offenses deprives them of a law enforcement tool that might avert future terrorist assaults.

Democrats have been pummeling House Republican leaders for calling hearings instead of getting down to business in resolving differences between the border enforcement bill passed by the House in a mainly party-line vote and the bipartisan Senate measure providing for guest workers. This week's hearings make the point that the Senate bill is filled with details that have escaped wide attention.

The provision now under scrutiny certainly escaped careful consideration by the Senate in late May, when it hurriedly passed a 796-page bill. Details were handled by the American Immigration Lawyers Association and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's staff. But in recent weeks, the bill has been scrubbed by outside experts -- including Kris W. Kobach, who was Attorney General John Ashcroft's chief adviser on immigration law and now is professor of law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

In a Heritage Foundation paper published one day before the Senate bill passed, Kobach publicly exposed what he called the terrorist loophole. Section 240d would restrict local police from arresting aliens for civil violations, limiting them to apprehension for criminal offenses. That means a sheriff's officer on the border could not arrest someone whose papers showed he had overstayed his visa. "Afraid of arresting the wrong type of illegal alien -- and getting sued as a result -- many police departments will stop helping the federal government altogether," Kobach wrote.

Kobach and Royce point to the fact that four of the 9-11 terrorists, all of whom had violated immigration laws, were stopped for speeding before their attack. Had the police officers asked the right questions, terrorists could have been arrested under current law -- but not under the Senate bill. To Kobach, the "results would be disastrous."

The classic case is Ziad Jarrah, who was at the controls of United Flight 93 when passengers fought the terrorists and the plane crashed in the Pennsylvania countryside. Jarrah was an illegal alien from Lebanon who had violated U.S. immigration laws but had avoided apprehension by authorities until he was stopped on Sept. 9, 2001, for speeding in Maryland on his way from Baltimore to join his confederates in Newark.

Nawaf al-Hazmi, the 9-11 plot's second in command, also had been stopped for speeding April 1, 2001. The visa on his Saudi Arabian passport had expired eight-and-one-half months earlier, but the Oklahoma patrolman did not ask to see it.

Had these local police officers been as well briefed as law enforcement officers are now, Jarrah or Hazmi might well have been taken into custody. It is conceivable that the 9-11 conspiracy would have been uncovered and disaster averted. But that would not be possible under the Senate bill. In contrast, the House bill provides assistance to local police to encourage their help in immigration enforcement.

Kobach joined law enforcement officers to explain this situation at the San Diego hearing. In Laredo, the emphasis will switch to the Senate bill's restrictions on construction of a wall on the Mexican border. To Royce and the House Republican leadership, the entire Senate version is honeycombed with undigested provisions needing more debate.

This is a Senate bill co-sponsored by Sen. John McCain, who may be the next Republican presidential nominee, and endorsed by President Bush. But the polls show clear public preference for the House bill -- and make border protection a priority for most Republicans in Congress. The hearings in San Diego and Laredo only fortify that tendency.

From The Washington Post:

The Real Inconvenient Truth
By Robert Samuelson

WASHINGTON -- Al Gore calls global warming an "inconvenient truth,'' as if merely recognizing it could put us on a path to a solution. That's an illusion. The real truth is that we don't know enough to relieve global warming, and -- barring major technological breakthroughs -- we can't do much about it. This has long been obvious. Let me explain.

From 2003 to 2050, world population is projected to grow from 6.4 billion people to 9.1 billion, a 42 percent increase. If energy use per person and technology remain the same, total energy use and greenhouse gas emissions (mainly, carbon dioxide) will be 42 percent higher in 2050. But that's too low, because societies that grow richer use more energy. Unless we condemn the world's poor to their present poverty -- and freeze everyone else's living standards -- we need economic growth. With modest growth, energy use and greenhouse emissions more than double by 2050.

Just keeping annual greenhouse gas emissions constant means that the world must somehow offset these huge increases. There are two ways: improve energy efficiency; or shift to energy sources with lower (or no) greenhouse emissions. Intuitively, you sense this is tough. China, for example, builds about one coal-fired power plant a week. Now, a new report from the International Energy Agency in Paris shows all the difficulties (the population, economic growth and energy projections cited above come from the report).

The IEA report assumes that existing technologies are rapidly improved and deployed. Vehicle fuel efficiency increases by 40 percent. In electricity generation, the share for coal (the fuel with the most greenhouse gases) shrinks from about 40 percent to about 25 percent -- and much carbon dioxide is captured before going into the atmosphere. Little is captured today. Nuclear energy increases. So do "renewables'' (wind, solar, biomass, geothermal); their share of global electricity output rises from 2 percent now to about 15 percent.

Some of these changes seem heroic. They would require tough government regulation, continued technological gains and public acceptance of higher fuel prices. Never mind. Having postulated a crash energy diet, the IEA simulates five scenarios with differing rates of technological change. In each, greenhouse emissions in 2050 are higher than today. The increases vary from 6 percent to 27 percent.

Since 1800, there's been modest global warming. I'm unqualified to judge between those scientists (the majority) who blame man-made greenhouse gases and those (a small minority) who finger natural variations in the global weather system. But if the majority view is correct, the IEA report indicates we're now powerless. We can't end annual greenhouse emissions, and once in the atmosphere, the gases seem to linger for decades. So concentration levels rise. They're the villians; they presumably trap the world's heat. They're already about 36 percent higher than in 1800. Even with its program, the IEA says another 45 percent increase may be unavoidable. How much warming this might create is uncertain; so are the consequences.

I draw two conclusions -- one political, one practical.

No government will adopt the draconian restrictions on economic growth and personal freedom (limits on electricity usage, driving and travel) that might curb global warming. Still, politicians want to show they're "doing something.'' The result is grandstanding. Consider the Kyoto Protocol. It allowed countries that joined to castigate those that didn't. But it hasn't reduced carbon dioxide emissions (up about 25 percent since 1990), and many signatories didn't adopt tough enough policies to hit their 2008-2012 targets. By some estimates, Europe may overshoot by 15 percent and Japan by 25 percent.

Ambitious U.S. politicians also practice this self-serving hypocrisy. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has a global warming program. Gore counts 221 cities that have "ratified'' Kyoto. Some pledge to curb their greenhouse emissions. None of these programs will reduce global warming. They're public relations exercises and -- if they impose costs -- are undesirable. (Note: on national security grounds, I favor taxing oil; but the global warming effect would be trivial.)

The practical conclusion is that, if global warming is a potential calamity, the only salvation is new technology. I once received an e-mail from an engineer. Thorium, he said. I had never heard of thorium. It is, he argued, a nuclear fuel that is more plentiful and safer than uranium without waste disposal problems. It's an exit from the global warming trap. After reading many articles, I gave up trying to decide whether he is correct. But his larger point is correct: Only an aggressive research and development program might find ways of breaking our dependence on fossil fuels or dealing with it.

The trouble with the global warming debate is that it has become a moral crusade when it's really an engineering problem. The inconvenient truth is that if we don't solve the engineering problem, we're helpless.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Our enemies aren't drinking lattes
By Max Boot

July 5, 2006

'AMATEURS TALK strategy. Professionals talk logistics." That well-worn saying, sometimes attributed to Gen. Omar Bradley, contains an obvious element of wisdom. Modern militaries cannot fight without a lengthy supply chain, and the success or failure of major operations can turn on the work of anonymous logisticians.

Yet there is a danger of professional soldiers becoming so focused on supply lines that they lose sight of larger strategic imperatives. In Afghanistan and Iraq, we may already have crossed that threshold.

In the past few months, I have traveled across U.S. Central Command's area of operations — a vast domain stretching from the deserts of Arabia to the mountains of the Hindu Kush. Everywhere, I have found massive bases fortified with endless rows of concrete barriers and stocked with every convenience known to 21st century Americans.

Some front-line units continue to operate out of spartan outposts where a hot meal is a luxury and flush toilets unknown. But growing numbers of troops live on giant installations complete with Wal-Mart-style post exchanges, movie theaters, swimming pools, gyms, fast-food eateries (Subway, Burger King, Cinnabon) and vast chow halls offering fresh-baked pies and multiple flavors of ice cream. Troops increasingly live in dorm-style quarters (called "chews," for "containerized housing units") complete with TVs, mini-refrigerators, air conditioning/heating units and other luxuries unimaginable to previous generations of GIs.

No one would begrudge a few conveniences to those who have volunteered to defend us. But the military's logistics feats come with a high price tag that goes far beyond the $7.7 billion we spend every month on operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. U.S. troops in those countries consume 882,000 liters of water and 2.4 million gallons of fuel every day, plus tons of other supplies that have to be transported across dangerous war zones. Centcom has more than 3,000 trucks delivering supplies and another 2,400 moving fuel — each one a target that has to be protected.

Among the more surrealistic moments of my travels was pausing at a base near Baqubah — a far-from-pacified Iraqi city that was Abu Musab Zarqawi's last base of operations — to enjoy a fresh-brewed iced latte at a Green Beans coffee shop. It hit the spot, but when I later told a Marine captain about the experience, he took away some of my enjoyment by asking, "I wonder how many men had to die to get those coffee beans to Baqubah?"

Good question. Supply lines are indeed vulnerable. So are the bases themselves. Keeping everything running safely and smoothly eats up a lot of scarce manpower. According to Centcom, there are 20,000 combat service support troops in its area of operations and another 80,000 contracted civilians. (The U.S. has a total of 150,000 troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.) The latter figure no doubt includes many private security guards, but numerous soldiers are also needed to protect all of these logistics lines, and casualties are inevitable.

In large part for reasons of security and convenience — a few big installations are easier to defend and supply than a lot of small ones — more and more soldiers and support personnel are congregating in a handful of mega-bases, such as Logistics Support Area Anaconda in Iraq, which has about 30,000 inhabitants. When spending time on such installations, it's easy to forget where you are. The only reminder that you're not in Ft. Hood, Texas, comes in the form of occasional, inaccurate mortar rounds or rockets fired by insurgents.

Successful counterinsurgency operations require troops to go out among the people, gathering intelligence and building goodwill. But few Iraqis are allowed on these bases, and few Americans are allowed out — and then only in forbidding armored convoys.

Most of our resources aren't going to fight terrorists but to maintain a smattering of mini-Americas in the Middle East. As one Special Forces officer pungently put it to me: "The only function that thousands of people are performing out here is to turn food into [excrement]."

How to explain this seemingly counterproductive behavior? My theory is that any organization prefers to focus on what it does well. In the case of the Pentagon, that's logistics. Our ability to move supplies is unparalleled in military history. Fighting guerrillas, on the other hand, has never been a mission that has found much favor with the armed forces. So logistics trumps strategy. Which may help explain why we're not having greater success in Iraq and Afghanistan.

An Independent Republic Still?
By Patrick Buchanan

Two hundred thirty years have elapsed since Jefferson's document was signed in Philadelphia, declaring the 13 colonies to be independent forever of the England of George III.

In his Farewell Address, Washington defined independence in a single sentence: "It is our true policy to steer clear of any permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world."

Jefferson echoed the father of his country, declaring America's policy to be one of "Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none."

Adams thought his greatest achievement was that he prevented a naval war with France from degenerating into all out-war with Napoleon, and had severed America's 1778 alliance with Paris. Not for 150 years would the United States enter another permanent alliance, NATO, in the extraordinary situation that was the Cold War.

It was because America remained independent of the alliances of Europe -- the Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia, and Triple Alliance of Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Italy -- that Americans did not arrive on the battlefields of the Great War of 1914-1918 until six months before the Armistice. America lost 116,000 soldiers in that bloodbath, but avoided the horrendous casualties that killed the Austro-Hungarian, German, Russian and Ottoman empires, and forever wounded the British and French.

America emerged the most powerful nation and greatest creditor on earth, as a Senate wisely rejected both the Versailles Treaty and a League of Nations set up to enforce its dishonorable terms.

World War II began Sept. 3, 1939, when Britain declared war on Germany to honor a guarantee Neville Chamberlain had given to Poland. France fell in the late spring of 1940, as the British were hurled off the Continent. Stalin's prison house of nations was invaded in June of 1941. Untold millions in Central and Eastern Europe perished.

Free of alliances, the Americans did not even land in France until five years after the war began, only 11 months before its end in Europe.

No European empire survived these wars. No great European nation was left undiminished. These wars ended Europe's role as shaper of world history.

Thus it was that America emerged as first nation on earth, the most self-sufficient republic in history, undisputed leader of the West. For 40 years of Cold War against a Soviet Empire, America drew a red line across Europe and told Moscow not to cross it. Nor did we cross it the other way to liberate Eastern Europe, when the Hungarian Revolution broke out in 1956, the Prague Spring was crushed by Russian tanks in 1968, or Solidarity was smashed on Moscow's orders in 1981.

Unlike the British and French who declared war over Poland in 1939, Americans did not think Eastern Europe worth the risk of a new world war. We waited patiently for the evil empire to collapse, and collapse it did under steady pressure from Reagan's America. Patience paid off, for, as Reagan always believed, time was on our side, time was on the side of freedom. It still is.

Today, however, the independent foreign policy of Washington and Jefferson, the non-interventionist policy of Eisenhower and Reagan -- of peace through strength, of staying out of wars where U.S. interests are not imperiled, of keeping one's powder dry unless the United States were attacked -- is derided as cowardly isolationism.

So, with the end of the Cold War did not come the end of the Cold War alliances, but their permanent extension, and the addition of new allies, until it is probably not possible for a major war to break out anywhere on earth today without the United States being involved from Day One.

Alliances are transmission belts of war. Temporary ones, like the French alliance of 1778 and the NATO alliance of 1949, may be necessary, but a wise republic terminates those entanglements when the crisis is ended -- and restores its freedom of action to decide when, where and whether to go to war, and not have that decision made by some 50-year-old treaty.

That is what the Founding Fathers taught, and what America believed, to her benefit, for most of her history.

But if the Founding Fathers were to come back to life and to be asked, "Whom does the America of 2006 resemble more, the republic you created or the empire from which you broke away?" is there any doubt how they would have to answer?

America today is more dependent on foreign fuel, foreign goods, foreign loans and foreign allies than she has ever been. Her worldwide commitments have never been greater, nor has her global and national debt.

Yet her leaders still seek to embed America every more deeply in global institutions from the WTO to the United Nations to the North American Union.

This is not the road on which the Founding Fathers set out, but it is a familiar road, one taken before by every empire in history.

Thoughts on Independence Day, 2006.

'Teddy'and Time
by Thomas Sowell

Posted Jul 04, 2006

A special issue of Time magazine celebrates the historic career of Theodore Roosevelt and the implications of his presidency for the development of American society. In the phony familiarity of our times, where you call people by their first names when you have never even met them, the cover story in this issue is titled "Teddy."

Theodore Roosevelt was indeed a landmark figure in the development of American politics and government, but in a very different sense from the way he is portrayed in Time magazine. In fact, the way that Theodore Roosevelt has been celebrated by many in the media and among the intelligentsia tells us more about them than about the first President Roosevelt.

It also tells us something about what has gone wrong with American society.

Aside from questions of flamboyant style and rhetoric, what did Theodore Roosevelt actually accomplish that would justify putting him on Mount Rushmore, alongside Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln?

According to Time magazine, TR believed that "government had the right to moderate the excesses of free enterprise." Just what were these excesses? According to Time, "poverty, child labor, dreadful factory conditions."

All these things were attributed to the growth of industrial capitalism -- without the slightest evidence that any of them was better before the growth of industrial capitalism. Nothing is easier than to imagine some ideal past or future society or to imagine that the net result of government intervention is bound to be a plus.

Theodore Roosevelt's own ideas went no deeper than Time magazine's today or of much of the intelligentsia in the years in between. Maybe that is why TR has been lionized. Both his thinking and his lack of thinking was so much like that of later "progressives."

Among the things that have endeared TR to later generations of "progressives" has been "the breakup of monopolies" cited by Time magazine. Just what specifically caused particular companies to be called "monopolies"? What specifically did they do? Who specifically did the "robber barons" actually rob?

Such questions remain as unanswered today as in Theodore Roosevelt's time. Indeed, they remain unasked among many of the intelligentsia and in the media.

Monopolies are much harder to find in the real world than in the world of political rhetoric. Monopolies raise prices but, in the big industries supposedly dominated by monopolies -- oil, steel, railroads -- prices were falling for years before Theodore Roosevelt entered the White House and started saving the country from "monopoly."

The average price of steel rails fell from $68 to $32 before TR became president. Standard Oil, the most hated of the "monopolies," had in fact innumerable competitors and its oil prices were not only lower than those of most of its competitors, but was also falling over the years. It was much the same story in other industries called "monopolies."

The anti-trust laws which Theodore Roosevelt so fiercely applied did not protect consumers from high prices. They protected high-cost producers from being driven out of business by lower cost producers. That has largely remained true in the many years since TR was president.

The long list of low-price businesses targeted by anti-trust laws range from Sears department stores and the A&P grocery chain in the 20th century to Microsoft today, prosecuted not for raising the price of Windows but for including new features without raising prices. Much of the rhetoric of anti-trust remains the opposite of the reality.

Jim Powell's soon to be published book, "Bully Boy," goes in detail into the specifics of President Theodore Roosevelt's many crusades and their often disastrous consequences. But who cares about consequences these days?

TR was a "progressive" and denounced "malefactors of great wealth." What more could the intelligentsia and the media want?

From Fox News Online:

The Beatles 'Reunion': Exclusive Report

By Roger Friedman

There was only one major no-show on Friday night in Las Vegas for what turned out to be — as much as it could be — a Beatles reunion.

For the premiere of Cirque du Soleil’s stunning new Beatles show, “Love,” at the Mirage Hotel, a group of people came who have not been in the same room since — well, I don’t know — came together for one night only. Who would have thunk it?

Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and the widows of John Lennon and George Harrison — Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison — united for a moment in time to honor the group's historic accomplishments. They are without a doubt the First Dysfunctional Family of Rock and Roll.

That would have been extraordinary enough, but also present for the event were John’s first wife, Cynthia Lennon, their son, Julian, and Ravi Shankar, Harrison’s great musical influence and friend. For a time after the show was over, this entire gang — as well as Apple Records’ masterminds Neil Aspinall and Jonathan Clyde, plus Paul’s brother in-law/business partner John Eastman, and old friend record producer Peter Asher (there wife Wendy and Robin Williams’ wife Marcia) — filled a very small space set up as a “private” party within a humongous celebration for the 4,000 people who’d come to see the first two official presentations of “Love.”

They laughed together, ate together and reminisced. There was much picture taking. As on the stage when “Love” concluded to resounding thunderous applause, standing ovations and tears, McCartney actually kissed Ono. Time stopped. Hell froze over. Ono, who wore a bright white suit and a matching big white floppy hat which she wore all night, kissed him back. She took pictures with Cynthia and Julian, whose financial fate she’s held in her hands often.

As a Beatle fan and amateur expert on the lives of these people, I thought maybe I was hallucinating. The whole of them, arms around each other, took victory bows in each of the four corners of the Mirage Theater’s massive stage-in-the-round when the show was over. Paul, dressed in a black suit and white sneakers, looked thin and tired, maybe a little gaunt. This was not all due to flying in that day from London, but his recent marital difficulties were not the topic at hand.

Motioning frantically to the fawning, screaming crowd, McCartney quieted us down. “We have to have applause for John and George,” he said of his missing comrades, and the place went crazy. “To John and George!”

(Cirque du Soleil creator Guy Laliberte, by the way, dedicated the show at the start to performers Siegfried and Roy, who had a long run in the same theater until their tiger accident. It was a classy note, and the pair was on hand to accept kudos.)

Later, in this tricked-up private area for Apple family members, Paul took a corner seat on a white couch and introduced me to his two assistants — a pair of lovely young things. He was accompanied as well by an older looking couple whom he identified as “family.”

What did he think about this momentous occasion? “Love” is such a triumph for the Beatles and Cirque du Soleil its genius can barely be described (although I will try to do it justice below). After the show, McCartney was overheard saying to Ringo Starr, a little startled by the magnitude of the evening, “We were a pretty f——ing great group, weren’t we?” Then he cut himself short and said, in a typical McCartney revision, “We were a pretty great group!”

Sitting on the white couch, about to receive Shankar, his wife, Ringo and a clutch of well-wishers, Paul seemed wiped out. After all, one of his heroes, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, had been in the audience along with actress Helen Mirren and husband, director Taylor Hackford, plus Edgar Winter, Sheila E. and Colin Hay (all touring with Ringo in his band), Electric Light Orchestra guru Jeff Lynne, songwriter Stephen Bishop, producer Russ Titelman, Barbara Orbison (widow of Roy), Little Steven van Zandt with wife, Maureen, actor Jason Patric, director Gus van Sant, and, improbably, billionaire Ron Burkle.

The only person missing? John Lennon’s son with Ono, Sean. He’d been advertised but never showed. Ono arrived and walked the red carpet with her publicist. It was a bit reminiscent of last winter’s Grammy Heroes dinner in New York when Sean was conspicuously absent. On Friday night there was no explanation, which was odd considering that Sean has been photographed out on the town in New York a lot this past month.

So it was in front of all these people that McCartney — with Ono in the white hat and all the exhaustion of bearing up from a barrage of public, embarrassing “revelations” about his soon to be ex-wife, Heather — watched “Love” in its entirety for the first time. His voice and his songs constitute a good 75 percent of the show. It would have been an overwhelming experience for anyone.

“I thought it was wonderful,” he said, shaking his head, still taking it in. He’d kind of collapsed into the couch, eating vegetarian dishes that were only available in his section of the party. “It’s the first time I’ve seen it all the way through. I have to see it again.”

Within a second we were overcome by a wave of guests who wanted to find him, including Starr and wife, Barbara Bach. Across the way, maybe 20 feet at most, sitting on another couch, Ono plopped down next to Cynthia, the woman whose marriage she broke up some 40 years ago.

“Thank you for coming to my party,” Ono said incongruously. Cynthia just smiled for the photographers. Later, I said to her, “I saw you talking to Yoko.”

She replied, “You saw her talking to me.” She paused. “It’s not like she gave me her phone number and said let’s get together.” The first Mrs. John Lennon shook her head in disbelief. “I think they call that a photo op.”

Cynthia had just received bad news that afternoon: she’d lost a close friend in Spain to cancer. She told me, “Between that and the show, I was close to tears at the end. I mean, the show really moved me. I was just at that point where I was going to start crying.”

Director Hackford (“Ray,” “Officer and a Gentleman”) told me he’d felt the same way, too. “It’s our generation,” he said. “We know this music and what it means to us. It was very emotional.” Mirren concurred, as did everyone else including even the guys from EMI Music — Phil Quartararo, Dave Munns and Johnny Barbis — who rep the Beatles in all recordings.

Indeed, the Cirque du Soleil show is very emotional, especially as the almost too-short 90-minute spectacular starts heading toward its finale. I think that may be what did McCartney in, seeing video of the Beatles — really exceptionally well edited — contrasted with the entire cast of the show dancing to “All You Need Is Love.”

The show — which has a magical combination of acrobatics, ballet, video, and fanciful sets and costumes — suddenly gels disarmingly. Realizing the end is at hand is almost upsetting. You want this one last trip to the fantasy that was the Beatles never to end.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The real success of “Love” depends a lot on Sir George Martin, the Beatles’ producer. Watching the show, you can only think that none of this would be possible if the person who assembled the music didn’t know it inside and out. Martin and son Giles have literally taken the Beatles original recordings and, in many instances, turned them inside out.

Some songs are intact, but they are few. Instead, the Martins have pieces together unexpected medleys, woven in bits and pieces of the Beatles music with other fragments, and then stitched them like elements of a tapestry into a larger setting. There’s no song list, and I hope I actually caught all the little references. For example, one of the central pieces is a masterpiece rendering of "Octopus’s Garden." The Martins have configured it so that another Ringo song, “Good Night,” is playing behind it until the whole thing becomes a nursery rhyme. It’s just splendid.

Imagine that the show begins with the opening night of “A Hard Day’s Night” segued right into the drum solo from the end of “Abbey Road.” These two things ordinarily would have nothing to do with each other. They are followed by a snippet of “Because” and then “Get Back,” the song that sets the tone for the show. Suddenly we’re in London during the Blitz, when each of the Beatles was born. “Eleanor Rigby” depicts Liverpool in World War II, and “I Am the Walrus” takes on new significance. (Director Dominic Champagne told us he loves the lyric “I am he/As you are he/As you are me/And we are all together.”)

Then, quickly, it’s the Sixties, all Beatlemania and Carnaby Street: “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “Drive My Car,” “What You’re Doing” and “The Word” comprise a thrilling medley as the video projections and the actors recall an innocent time.

From then on, the plot — such as it is — doesn’t really matter. “Love” begins mixing and matching all the material from “Penny Lane” and the "Sgt. Pepper" album through the "White Album" and "Abbey Road." Each number is a self-contained little gem, almost like a Joseph Cornell box stuffed full of unusual artifacts.

Some favorites: George Harrison’s “Within You, Without You” features a bed that rises to the ceiling and unleashes a massive, billowing white sheet that covers all 2,000 audience members. “Lady Madonna” is a stomping percussive number depicted by many pairs of children’s slicker yellow boots dancing on tricycles. “Strawberry Fields” takes place inside Cirque du Soleil’s idea of a lava lamp.

With no exception, each number is its own little masterpiece. But there are bigger pieces, too, like a wild Dr. Seuss-type carnival that breaks out for “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite.” In “Help,” teams of extreme skaters, dressed in black and white like football refs, are choreographed on curved ramps. This is sure to be one of the most popular numbers, and one that we see on TV as a clip. As Ed Sullivan used to say, the kids are going to love it.

Sometimes less is more, as in a cool ballet solo number by Charlotte O’Dowd performed to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” And other times, it’s all about being awesome as when “A Day in the Life” becomes a multimedia event that culminates in a Volkswagen Beetle (get it — there are two of them, used as metaphors) suddenly breaks apart into pieces.

And there’s a longish medley — “Can You Take Me Back,” "Revolution” and “Back in the USSR” that finishes with a previously unreleased (no one could place it, and it’s not from a Beatles Anthology) acoustic version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” that is breathtaking.

There are plenty of other songs, too, don’t worry: “Hey Jude,” “Something,” “Come Together,” “Yesterday,” “Blackbird” and “Here Comes the Sun” — staged with remote-control miniature trains carrying little dishes of light — are all in there. There are bits of “Let it Be,” “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “Magical Mystery Tour.” And some that I thought were missing — like “In My Life” and “We Can Work It Out” — who knows? Maybe they’ll turn up in a sequel.

“Love” is just an exhilarating, phenomenal show; one that will not only revive the Beatles catalog but bring their music to a whole new generation. The fact that it works at all is due not only to the Martins, but to director Champagne (what a name) and his incredibly talented cast and crew. They mix video, light and sound in what seem like groundbreaking ways. That it all seems new and fresh and alive is a real achievement. (The huge theater is actually bifurcated four ways by see-through scrims that are also video screens.)

Now every rock group from The Stones and the Who to the Beach Boys and even Three Dog Night will want a show like this. But there’s only one Beatles, and with "Love," they’ve participated in yet another cultural milestone.

Don't Believe the Hype
Al Gore is wrong. There's no "consensus" on global warming.

BY RICHARD S. LINDZEN

Sunday, July 2, 2006

According to Al Gore's new film "An Inconvenient Truth," we're in for "a planetary emergency": melting ice sheets, huge increases in sea levels, more and stronger hurricanes, and invasions of tropical disease, among other cataclysms--unless we change the way we live now.

Bill Clinton has become the latest evangelist for Mr. Gore's gospel, proclaiming that current weather events show that he and Mr. Gore were right about global warming, and we are all suffering the consequences of President Bush's obtuseness on the matter. And why not? Mr. Gore assures us that "the debate in the scientific community is over."

That statement, which Mr. Gore made in an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC, ought to have been followed by an asterisk. What exactly is this debate that Mr. Gore is referring to? Is there really a scientific community that is debating all these issues and then somehow agreeing in unison? Far from such a thing being over, it has never been clear to me what this "debate" actually is in the first place.

The media rarely help, of course. When Newsweek featured global warming in a 1988 issue, it was claimed that all scientists agreed. Periodically thereafter it was revealed that although there had been lingering doubts beforehand, now all scientists did indeed agree. Even Mr. Gore qualified his statement on ABC only a few minutes after he made it, clarifying things in an important way. When Mr. Stephanopoulos confronted Mr. Gore with the fact that the best estimates of rising sea levels are far less dire than he suggests in his movie, Mr. Gore defended his claims by noting that scientists "don't have any models that give them a high level of confidence" one way or the other and went on to claim--in his defense--that scientists "don't know. . . . They just don't know."

So, presumably, those scientists do not belong to the "consensus." Yet their research is forced, whether the evidence supports it or not, into Mr. Gore's preferred global-warming template--namely, shrill alarmism. To believe it requires that one ignore the truly inconvenient facts. To take the issue of rising sea levels, these include: that the Arctic was as warm or warmer in 1940; that icebergs have been known since time immemorial; that the evidence so far suggests that the Greenland ice sheet is actually growing on average. A likely result of all this is increased pressure pushing ice off the coastal perimeter of that country, which is depicted so ominously in Mr. Gore's movie. In the absence of factual context, these images are perhaps dire or alarming.

They are less so otherwise. Alpine glaciers have been retreating since the early 19th century, and were advancing for several centuries before that. Since about 1970, many of the glaciers have stopped retreating and some are now advancing again. And, frankly, we don't know why.

The other elements of the global-warming scare scenario are predicated on similar oversights. Malaria, claimed as a byproduct of warming, was once common in Michigan and Siberia and remains common in Siberia--mosquitoes don't require tropical warmth. Hurricanes, too, vary on multidecadal time scales; sea-surface temperature is likely to be an important factor. This temperature, itself, varies on multidecadal time scales. However, questions concerning the origin of the relevant sea-surface temperatures and the nature of trends in hurricane intensity are being hotly argued within the profession.

Even among those arguing, there is general agreement that we can't attribute any particular hurricane to global warming. To be sure, there is one exception, Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who argues that it must be global warming because he can't think of anything else. While arguments like these, based on lassitude, are becoming rather common in climate assessments, such claims, given the primitive state of weather and climate science, are hardly compelling.

A general characteristic of Mr. Gore's approach is to assiduously ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is much worse. Regardless, these items are clearly not issues over which debate is ended--at least not in terms of the actual science.

A clearer claim as to what debate has ended is provided by the environmental journalist Gregg Easterbrook. He concludes that the scientific community now agrees that significant warming is occurring, and that there is clear evidence of human influences on the climate system. This is still a most peculiar claim. At some level, it has never been widely contested. Most of the climate community has agreed since 1988 that global mean temperatures have increased on the order of one degree Fahrenheit over the past century, having risen significantly from about 1919 to 1940, decreased between 1940 and the early '70s, increased again until the '90s, and remaining essentially flat since 1998.

There is also little disagreement that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have risen from about 280 parts per million by volume in the 19th century to about 387 ppmv today. Finally, there has been no question whatever that carbon dioxide is an infrared absorber (i.e., a greenhouse gas--albeit a minor one), and its increase should theoretically contribute to warming. Indeed, if all else were kept equal, the increase in carbon dioxide should have led to somewhat more warming than has been observed, assuming that the small observed increase was in fact due to increasing carbon dioxide rather than a natural fluctuation in the climate system. Although no cause for alarm rests on this issue, there has been an intense effort to claim that the theoretically expected contribution from additional carbon dioxide has actually been detected.

Given that we do not understand the natural internal variability of climate change, this task is currently impossible. Nevertheless there has been a persistent effort to suggest otherwise, and with surprising impact. Thus, although the conflicted state of the affair was accurately presented in the 1996 text of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the infamous "summary for policy makers" reported ambiguously that "The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate." This sufficed as the smoking gun for Kyoto.

The next IPCC report again described the problems surrounding what has become known as the attribution issue: that is, to explain what mechanisms are responsible for observed changes in climate. Some deployed the lassitude argument--e.g., we can't think of an alternative--to support human attribution. But the "summary for policy makers" claimed in a manner largely unrelated to the actual text of the report that "In the light of new evidence and taking into account the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations."

In a similar vein, the National Academy of Sciences issued a brief (15-page) report responding to questions from the White House. It again enumerated the difficulties with attribution, but again the report was preceded by a front end that ambiguously claimed that "The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability." This was sufficient for CNN's Michelle Mitchell to presciently declare that the report represented a "unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse and is due to man. There is no wiggle room." Well, no.

More recently, a study in the journal Science by the social scientist Nancy Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words "global climate change" produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what she referred to as the consensus view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the remaining 913 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view. Several actually opposed it.

Even more recently, the Climate Change Science Program, the Bush administration's coordinating agency for global-warming research, declared it had found "clear evidence of human influences on the climate system." This, for Mr. Easterbrook, meant: "Case closed." What exactly was this evidence? The models imply that greenhouse warming should impact atmospheric temperatures more than surface temperatures, and yet satellite data showed no warming in the atmosphere since 1979. The report showed that selective corrections to the atmospheric data could lead to some warming, thus reducing the conflict between observations and models descriptions of what greenhouse warming should look like. That, to me, means the case is still very much open.

So what, then, is one to make of this alleged debate? I would suggest at least three points.

First, nonscientists generally do not want to bother with understanding the science. Claims of consensus relieve policy types, environmental advocates and politicians of any need to do so. Such claims also serve to intimidate the public and even scientists--especially those outside the area of climate dynamics. Secondly, given that the question of human attribution largely cannot be resolved, its use in promoting visions of disaster constitutes nothing so much as a bait-and-switch scam. That is an inauspicious beginning to what Mr. Gore claims is not a political issue but a "moral" crusade.

Lastly, there is a clear attempt to establish truth not by scientific methods but by perpetual repetition. An earlier attempt at this was accompanied by tragedy. Perhaps Marx was right. This time around we may have farce--if we're lucky.

Mr. Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT.

Court finds a right to jihad in the Constitution
BY MARK STEYN

July 2, 2006

There are several ways to fight a war. On the one hand, you can put on a uniform, climb into a tank, rumble across a field and fire on the other fellows' tank. On the other, you can find a 12-year-old girl, persuade her to try on your new suicide-bomber belt and send her waddling off into the nearest pizza parlor.

The Geneva Conventions were designed to encourage the former and discourage the latter. The thinking behind them was that, if one had to have wars, it's best if they're fought by soldiers and armies. In return for having a rank and serial number and dressing the part, you'll be treated as a lawful combatant should you fall into the hands of the other side. There'll always be a bit of skulking around in street garb among civilian populations, but the idea was to ensure that it would not be rewarded --that there would, in fact, be a downside for going that route.

The U.S. Supreme Court has now blown a hole in the animating principle behind the Geneva Conventions by choosing to elevate an enemy that disdains the laws of war in order to facilitate the bombing of civilian targets and the beheading of individuals. The argument made by Justice John Paul Stevens is an Alice-In-Jihadland ruling that stands the Conventions on their head in order to give words the precise opposite of their plain meaning and intent. The same kind of inspired jurisprudence conjuring trick that detected in the emanations of the penumbra how the Framers of the U..S Constitution cannily anticipated a need for partial-birth abortion and gay marriage has now effectively found a right to jihad -- or, if you're a female suicide bomber about to board an Israeli bus, a woman's right to Jews.

The old-school wars were Britain vs. Germany, Japan vs. Russia, that sort of thing. But we don't hold those as often as we once did, so, for the new school of warfare, Justice Stevens and his chums took refuge in Geneva's Common Article Three, which begins as follows:

In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties . . .

The "High Contracting Parties" are nation states that are signatories to the treaties: America, Belgium, Fiji, Peru and so on. So what might an "armed conflict not of an international character" mean? Well, it refers mostly to civil wars and internal conflicts -- say, when the Northern Wackistani Liberation Army takes on the Southern Wackistani Patriotic Front. As a cursory glance at Rwanda, Sudan or the Balkans shows, these are some of the most depraved slaughterfests. But the aim of the article is the same as that for your full-scale France vs. Prussia fixture: to persuade the parties to wage war in a ''civilized'' manner.

And what did the Supreme Court do? They decided first that Afghanistan was a signatory to the Conventions and thus the various ructions were ''occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties.'' They then decided that it was an ''armed conflict'' and not only that -- here it comes, folks -- but it was an ''armed conflict not of an international character.''

Hang on a minute. At the time most of the Gitmo detainees were picked up, Afghanistan had more teams than the World Cup: There were Americans, Brits, Aussies, Saudis, Pakistanis, Yemenis, Iranians, Chechens, Uzbeks and all kinds of other fellows running around. Few ''armed conflicts'' have had so many ''international characters.'' The country was in the process of being bombed by the U.S. Air Force from bases on the British colony of Diego Garcia. It was being invaded by two permanent members of the U.N. Security Council.

Ah, but you're not a Supreme Court justice. The reason why this was an ''armed conflict not of an international character'' is that al-Qaida is not a nation. So an article designed to cover internal local conflicts in signatory states within a convention designed to exclude unlawful combatants has been extended to cover non-signatory unlawful combatants in a global jihad taking place on every continent -- and, in effect, read into U.S. law. Congratulations! Why not throw in a complimentary gay marriage for Osama and Mullah Omar while you're at it? Justice Stevens and his pals have now upgraded every terrorist to the rank of field marshal. Wherever you're picked up by the United States anywhere on the planet, chances are it's the ''territory of one of the High Contracting Parties'' -- Afghanistan, Brazil, Singapore, the world's your oyster -- and therefore, as you're a member of al-Qaida, by definition it's an "armed conflict not of an international character.''

And, of course, al-Qaida never need to sign the Conventions now, do they? As the ultimate beneficiaries of the progressive mindset, they get all the benefits with none of the obligations. We're bound, they're not. If you're captured with the severed head of a U.S. soldier in your knapsack, you're covered by Geneva -- and, as your victim learned a mile back up the road, it's too late for him to call his lawyer.

In the broader scheme, Justice Stevens and co, in torturing the language to explain why the international jihad is not "international," have paradoxically conferred quasi-sovereignty on al-Qaida and its affiliates. The obvious question then is: doesn't that also apply to every other "non-state actor" out there? When Hezbollah blew up that Jewish community center and killed 100 people in Buenos Aires in 1994, surely that too was (as Justice Stevens would see it) an "armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting States." In fact, under this definition, what isn't?

The immediate consequence of this is that America's friends in India, Australia, Singapore, Denmark and elsewhere will conclude that this country is simply not serious and its descent into moral narcissism too advanced. The long-term consequence will be the opposite of what the justices intended -- the sidelining and eventual discarding of Geneva, at least by nations that wish to survive the depredations of the jihad.

Oh, well. It wasn't all bad news this week. In Kuwait, women voted in parliamentary elections. In Afghanistan, the National Police opened a new regional command center in Kandahar.

I wish them well. It's good they seem to be getting the hang of this functioning society routine because in the long run they won't be getting much meaningful help from what's left of Western civilization.