The Business

Let's guess!

It was close, but no cigar for former media baron and convicted felon Conrad Black at this year’s XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX Book Award ceremony in Toronto.

This year's what? Oh right, that's the guessing part.

Black, one of three nominees, was a candidate for the prize for penning A Matter of Principal, an autobiographical yarn about his conviction and 42-month jail sentence in the United States for fraud and obstruction of justice. The award, sponsored by XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX, was given out Monday at the Ritz-Carlton hotel.

Well done, Toronto Sun! I believe A Matter of Principal is Seymour Skinner's autobiography.

The 67-year-old Black, who returned to Canada on May 4 after serving time in a Florida prison, told the Toronto Sun he was “astounded” he had been nominated, and never expected to win.

“I’m not disappointed,” said Black, who lost to veteran XXXXXXXX and his book, XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX: XXXXX XXXXXX XX XXX XXXX XXX XXXX, XXXX XXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXX.

Whoa, that is a long title for a book competing with Mr. Black's no-doubt succinct boo-hoo for getting caught on video carting off evidence.

“I was astounded that I was nominated ... I didn’t expect to win. I don’t win an awful lot of CanLit awards, you know,” said Black.

Are you Canadian or something?

Also nominated was XXXXX XXXXXX for his book, XXX XXXX: XXX XX XXXXXXX XXX XXXXXX XX XXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX.

Last year’s winner was XXXX XXXXXX for his book, XXXXXXX XXX: XXX XXXX XXX XXXXXXXX XXX XXXXX.

All right then, three books with colons in the title and at least one written by an asshole can only mean Conrad Black was nominated for the National Business Book Award. I may have to borrow the Riddled Time Machine and steal the American Psycho manuscript for nomination at next year's ceremony.

ALSO:

Love! You don't love anybody! Me or anybody else! You want to be loved - that's all you want!

Black said he intends to apply for full citizenship in two years when "it is clear that I don't have cloven feet and wear horns."

He said he would reconsider applying to regain his citizenship if there were significant public backlash against his bid.

"I am not going to do anything that is going to lead to gratuitously antagonistic people making apparently plausible claims that I am morally unsuited to be a citizen of this country," Black said.

NDP leader Thomas Mulcair:

“Mr. Speaker, the member for Trinity-Spadina and I last year asked why Gary Freeman, who lived in this country peaceably for 40 years and had several children, was not being allowed back in the country. The answer was an event that happened in Chicago in the sixties and he had served a short jail time. They said that because he was not a Canadian he was not allowed back in,” the leader of the opposition recounted.

“We just learned that the British criminal Conrad Black will be allowed in despite serving a second term in a federal American penitentiary,” he reported. “Why the double standard?”

The New Democrats seated around him stood to applaud.

If that keeps Conrad Black out of the country Mulcair will win votes.

So Lonely

Conrad Black:

From my most recent NRO article, on a couple of stars in the conservative firmament: “There is nothing like Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham in other countries, nor much like them in this one. The packaging is leggy women with bright teeth and eyes and lots of blond hair, and they are charming, though not demure. The message is God, Christ, learning, and country. They are outstanding bearers of that timeless message that has reprehensibly few public champions, certainly not including the incumbent president.”

Conrad, you're not due back in stir until September. Barbara not putting out?

Hey, his son is a shithead too.

More Black humour:

When he first arrived in prison, Conrad Black befriended a Mafia don. ‘It was obvious from the way the prison officers stood back from him that he was an eminent figure,’ explains the disgraced peer.

‘He told me, “No one will bother you. If you catch a cold, we’ll find out who you got it from.”

‘Then he offered me whisky and a cell phone, both of which were banned in prison. I said: “I am at war with the U.S. government, but I want to do things through legal channels …”

Shrunken: Conrad Black seems a pale version of himself after spending time in prison, right, in comparison to 2007 when he's seen entering court, left

‘Despite frequent searches, there was constant stealing and smuggling. This is a great country, but when they’ve finished singing Sweet Land Of Liberty and eating apple pie, it’s a bit of a jungle — which is part of its attraction.’

[...]

Explaining how he helped fellow inmates, he adds: ‘I am not by nature a bleeding heart, but their stories were affecting and it was fulfilling to strategise what they needed to do to pass exams. If they couldn’t spell, I would get them Hemingway’s short stories from the library. I showed them simple sentences, such as “I shot the elephant …”.’

Black held English classes for prisoners during the day, insisting his pupils obeyed two simple rules: ‘Don’t interrupt the others; and don’t treat me like part of the prison regime, because I hate the regime, too.’

For some reason I will add more. Here's Black on News Corporation:

As I have written elsewhere, the most nauseating aspect of the News Corporation telephone- and email-hacking imbroglio, until recently, has been watching the self-righteous hypocrites in the British establishment who grovelled to Rupert Murdoch for decades now piously demanding that he pull up his ethical corporate socks. It has been no secret how News Corporation was operated for decades. It is a nasty, vulgar, cynical, dirty-laundry operation that has reduced standards of public taste and decency on at least four continents for decades. The only quality product it has ever touched that did not wither in its hands was The Wall Street Journal.

What a spectacular kook.

Proving the Point

Roger Kimball has questions:

I was away from my computer yesterday when I got the news that Conrad Black, former proprietor of the London Telegraph, The Spectator, and other plum media outlets, was sentenced by Judge Amy St. Eve in Chicago to another year in jail for . . . er, why was it that Conrad Black had been sent to jail? Back in 2007, federal prosecutors complied a laundry list of charges against Lord Black and spoke of seeking a sentence of “24 to 30” years for . . . again, what was it that Lord Black had done?

My dear Mr. Kimball, if you follow the link Mr. Kimball supplies you will find out that Black is still in jail for one count of fraud (two were reversed!) and you will also find a handy videotape of Mr. Black trying to hide evidence, which resulted in the obstruction charge.

You're welcome Roger Kimball. Thanks for the assist Roger Kimball.

The biographical information below could use some updating:



Et cetera:

Peters and the Rock

Run! Squawkslide down Mount Everblessed!

The new pope was scarcely installed, with a clear mandate to clean up whatever remains of the sex-abuse crisis, when the snipers who always surround the Holy See opened skirmishing on the subject of Pope Francis’s conduct 35 years ago when Argentina was governed by the heavy-handed military junta that evicted Juan Perón’s politically inept widow, a former nightclub dancer, in 1976. (The junta was sent packing by Margaret Thatcher, who evicted them from the Falkland Islands in 1982.) The sex-abuse crisis has been a horrible and shaming problem, but Catholicism’s enemies have amplified and exploited it to incite the inference that most of the Roman clergy are deviates compounding superstition with perversion. The most frequent and wishful version of these events is as a mighty coruscation before the great Christian scam expires in a Wagnerian inferno, an inadvertent Waco. It took the most antagonistic pundits, in their uncomprehending skepticism of the viability of what they regard as a medieval flimflam factory anyway, only one day to assimilate the election of a man none of them had mentioned, in their omniscience, as a contender, before pronouncing his papacy dead on arrival at the Sistine Chapel.

Yes of COURSE it's Conrad Black.

No one really has any idea what this new pope is going to do, but there seems no doubt that he has a mandate to impose a draconian screening and evaluation process to clear out sex offenders, prevent the admission of potential future offenders, and give everyone except the most rabid anti-papists a comfort level that this ghastly affair, which simmered and bubbled for centuries, has been finally lanced and ended and that the weaknesses that gave rise to it and tolerated it have been excised. Sensing that the Church may survive this wicked and psychotic conduct by 1 or 2 percent of its ordained personnel, the Church’s enemies have already moved on to Francis’s supposed lack of rebellious fervor toward the Argentinean military 35 years ago. It is reminiscent of the tempest in a thimble over Pope Benedict’s conscription as an “air-force child soldier” in an inactive German anti-aircraft battery in 1943. (He deserted at the first opportunity to do so without being executed.)

Black, though, is nothing if not a quixotic old queen-lover. Quoth he:

There must be a dogmatically respectable way to execute a dignified climb-down and declare the sexual act a consequential moral commitment appropriate to and generally reserved to marriage, but sometimes unexceptionable when undertaken with contraceptive precautions, and reprehensible only if entered into wantonly. By clinging to the objection to contraception, even among married couples, the Church conveys the false impression of wishing to make sex risky and inaccessible, of opposing useful science, and of putting its hostility to safe sex ahead of its mortal opposition to abortion, a much more defensible and important cause that would be directly assisted by ending the failed war on contraception. The Roman Catholic Church, with all respect to the long traditions involved, should not be in the business of appearing to be the party of joyless behavioral philistinism, and should not needlessly subject itself to unjust imputations of hypocrisy. The secondary controversy over an all-male clergy can probably be dealt with by laicizing more activities with equal opportunities for women.

Laicizing activities with women! I'm in! Plus contraceptives!

Reaction one from a fellow Cornerite:

[...] Also strange is the explicit reason he gives for wanting the Church to “accept” contraception: “The Church’s official position on contraception enables its enemies to portray it as an archaic society for the propagation of chaste humbug by an esoteric fraternity of superannuated clergymen in antiquarian costume.”

Black goes on to explain how important it is, for the whole world and not just Catholics, that the Church “be a mighty rampart against the outrageous gibe of Islam that the West is a completely profane and blasphemous society.” So, according to Black, it’s vital that the Church exist for the sake of Western culture, but it should fold on matters of sexuality so as not to be accused of irrelevance and hypocrisy. The organization that is so needed precisely because it has stood firm throughout the ages should buckle on contraception for the very important reason that people like to have sex just for fun and don’t want someone to tell them not to.

Reaction two from K-Lo:

Conrad Black’s piece today is bewildering. Just at a time when even some non-papal audiences have become sick of the bill of poisonous goods the feminist revolution made women and men sign up for in the name of faux freedom, he hopes Pope Francis not only abandons Catholic theology but good sense. It is surrender to the sexual revolution that has, in part, led to the catechetical and public-witness crisis we’re in. And while, of course, it is true that Catholics can tend to be just like everyone else when it comes to sex as “a mere extension of the pleasures of heterosexual affection,” it is meant to be something more. Don’t we want our children to see it as something more? Don’t we want something more? In her surveying, Mary Hasson of the Ethics and Public Policy Center has found even women who aren’t on board with all of Church teaching wanting to know more about it in Sunday homilies. At a time when we can see clearly in our midst so much of what Paul VI warned of in Humanae Vitae, why wouldn’t we want to repropose a beautiful understanding about men and women, the Sacrament of marriage, and God’s love for us? Why wouldn’t we want a further unpacking of the teachings of Pope John Paul II on human sexuality? We’d all lose out if the Church caved to critics who want it to “modernize.” The Church needs to communicate better, teach more, but not cave.

She also recommends Black read a book, which if he gives a shit should make him sputter.

K-Lo is right though: in the centuries since Vatican II the Church has stood firm.

Blowhards

Send him back to jail just to make me happy please:

TORONTO — Court documents filed by prison staff depicting Conrad Black as a less-than-model inmate are being dismissed by the former media baron as "lies," while an ex-prosecutor predicted the filings "will likely have no influence" on convincing a judge to send Black back to jail.

Two affidavits sworn by a unit manager and an education specialist at Coleman Federal Correctional prison, where Black spent 29 months, say the Canadian-born businessman demanded special treatment from prison staff, was an unenthusiastic tutor and had gathered a posse of followers who cooked, cleaned and ironed his shirts.

Here's one of Black's more recent columns:

By complete accident, I have seen this program a number of times in the last few weeks, and it is always the same: Eliot Spitzer is a loud, fast-talking, overbearing know-it-all, who has rehearsed his arguments and unleashes himself on guests, or directly at the camera, in a torrent of imperious blowhardism.

A non-blowhard might end there but the paragraph continues:

He is even more irritating than Bill O’Reilly, because he is just as strident and ear-splitting, but more sinister. He has more than a desire to win an argument, like O’Reilly has; Spitzer has a will to dominate, to bulldoze his interlocutor. O’Reilly is opinionated, but Spitzer is belligerent. I normally move to the classical-music channel after a few minutes of either of them. But this self-adjudicated moot court Spitzer conducted about his own fairness and balance put me in mind of other recent outrages of liberal-media partisanship.

Happily, I have never seen Spitzer. Unhappily, I have read Black.

The Green movement, which had been an informal bucolic confederation of Sierra lovers of the wilderness, Greenpeace opponents of nuclear testing, and amiable eccentrics in hiking boots and pith helmets, brandishing butterfly nets and festooned with binoculars, became a rampart of the Left. Like the rural Communist guerrillas of the Colombian FARC, overwhelmed by the influx of massively armed and armored drug lords, the old agitators for cleaner air and water and pretty lepidoptera were inundated by the advocates of deindustrialization, abandonment of the automobile, and Churchillian resolution in the face of untrammeled cow flatulence. The genuine environmentalists were a perfect front for the beaten army of malcontents, radicals, and dull foot-soldiers who crowded like the grim wreckage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Smolensk in 1812 into this incongruous political ecosystem.The Green movement, which had been an informal bucolic confederation of Sierra lovers of the wilderness, Greenpeace opponents of nuclear testing, and amiable eccentrics in hiking boots and pith helmets, brandishing butterfly nets and festooned with binoculars, became a rampart of the Left. Like the rural Communist guerrillas of the Colombian FARC, overwhelmed by the influx of massively armed and armored drug lords, the old agitators for cleaner air and water and pretty lepidoptera were inundated by the advocates of deindustrialization, abandonment of the automobile, and Churchillian resolution in the face of untrammeled cow flatulence. The genuine environmentalists were a perfect front for the beaten army of malcontents, radicals, and dull foot-soldiers who crowded like the grim wreckage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Smolensk in 1812 into this incongruous political ecosystem.The Green movement, which had been an informal bucolic confederation of Sierra lovers of the wilderness, Greenpeace opponents of nuclear testing, and amiable eccentrics in hiking boots and pith helmets, brandishing butterfly nets and festooned with binoculars, became a rampart of the Left. Like the rural Communist guerrillas of the Colombian FARC, overwhelmed by the influx of massively armed and armored drug lords, the old agitators for cleaner air and water and pretty lepidoptera were inundated by the advocates of deindustrialization, abandonment of the automobile, and Churchillian resolution in the face of untrammeled cow flatulence. The genuine environmentalists were a perfect front for the beaten army of malcontents, radicals, and dull foot-soldiers who crowded like the grim wreckage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Smolensk in 1812 into this incongruous political ecosystem.The Green movement, which had been an informal bucolic confederation of Sierra lovers of the wilderness, Greenpeace opponents of nuclear testing, and amiable eccentrics in hiking boots and pith helmets, brandishing butterfly nets and festooned with binoculars, became a rampart of the Left. Like the rural Communist guerrillas of the Colombian FARC, overwhelmed by the influx of massively armed and armored drug lords, the old agitators for cleaner air and water and pretty lepidoptera were inundated by the advocates of deindustrialization, abandonment of the automobile, and Churchillian resolution in the face of untrammeled cow flatulence. The genuine environmentalists were a perfect front for the beaten army of malcontents, radicals, and dull foot-soldiers who crowded like the grim wreckage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Smolensk in 1812 into this incongruous political ecosystem.The Green movement, which had been an informal bucolic confederation of Sierra lovers of the wilderness, Greenpeace opponents of nuclear testing, and amiable eccentrics in hiking boots and pith helmets, brandishing butterfly nets and festooned with binoculars, became a rampart of the Left. Like the rural Communist guerrillas of the Colombian FARC, overwhelmed by the influx of massively armed and armored drug lords, the old agitators for cleaner air and water and pretty lepidoptera were inundated by the advocates of deindustrialization, abandonment of the automobile, and Churchillian resolution in the face of untrammeled cow flatulence. The genuine environmentalists were a perfect front for the beaten army of malcontents, radicals, and dull foot-soldiers who crowded like the grim wreckage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Smolensk in 1812 into this incongruous political ecosystem.The Green movement, which had been an informal bucolic confederation of Sierra lovers of the wilderness, Greenpeace opponents of nuclear testing, and amiable eccentrics in hiking boots and pith helmets, brandishing butterfly nets and festooned with binoculars, became a rampart of the Left. Like the rural Communist guerrillas of the Colombian FARC, overwhelmed by the influx of massively armed and armored drug lords, the old agitators for cleaner air and water and pretty lepidoptera were inundated by the advocates of deindustrialization, abandonment of the automobile, and Churchillian resolution in the face of untrammeled cow flatulence. The genuine environmentalists were a perfect front for the beaten army of malcontents, radicals, and dull foot-soldiers who crowded like the grim wreckage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Smolensk in 1812 into this incongruous political ecosystem.The Green movement, which had been an informal bucolic confederation of Sierra lovers of the wilderness, Greenpeace opponents of nuclear testing, and amiable eccentrics in hiking boots and pith helmets, brandishing butterfly nets and festooned with binoculars, became a rampart of the Left. Like the rural Communist guerrillas of the Colombian FARC, overwhelmed by the influx of massively armed and armored drug lords, the old agitators for cleaner air and water and pretty lepidoptera were inundated by the advocates of deindustrialization, abandonment of the automobile, and Churchillian resolution in the face of untrammeled cow flatulence. The genuine environmentalists were a perfect front for the beaten army of malcontents, radicals, and dull foot-soldiers who crowded like the grim wreckage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Smolensk in 1812 into this incongruous political ecosystem.The Green movement, which had been an informal bucolic confederation of Sierra lovers of the wilderness, Greenpeace opponents of nuclear testing, and amiable eccentrics in hiking boots and pith helmets, brandishing butterfly nets and festooned with binoculars, became a rampart of the Left. Like the rural Communist guerrillas of the Colombian FARC, overwhelmed by the influx of massively armed and armored drug lords, the old agitators for cleaner air and water and pretty lepidoptera were inundated by the advocates of deindustrialization, abandonment of the automobile, and Churchillian resolution in the face of untrammeled cow flatulence. The genuine environmentalists were a perfect front for the beaten army of malcontents, radicals, and dull foot-soldiers who crowded like the grim wreckage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Smolensk in 1812 into this incongruous political ecosystem.The Green movement, which had been an informal bucolic confederation of Sierra lovers of the wilderness, Greenpeace opponents of nuclear testing, and amiable eccentrics in hiking boots and pith helmets, brandishing butterfly nets and festooned with binoculars, became a rampart of the Left. Like the rural Communist guerrillas of the Colombian FARC, overwhelmed by the influx of massively armed and armored drug lords, the old agitators for cleaner air and water and pretty lepidoptera were inundated by the advocates of deindustrialization, abandonment of the automobile, and Churchillian resolution in the face of untrammeled cow flatulence. The genuine environmentalists were a perfect front for the beaten army of malcontents, radicals, and dull foot-soldiers who crowded like the grim wreckage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Smolensk in 1812 into this incongruous political ecosystem.The Green movement, which had been an informal bucolic confederation of Sierra lovers of the wilderness, Greenpeace opponents of nuclear testing, and amiable eccentrics in hiking boots and pith helmets, brandishing butterfly nets and festooned with binoculars, became a rampart of the Left. Like the rural Communist guerrillas of the Colombian FARC, overwhelmed by the influx of massively armed and armored drug lords, the old agitators for cleaner air and water and pretty lepidoptera were inundated by the advocates of deindustrialization, abandonment of the automobile, and Churchillian resolution in the face of untrammeled cow flatulence. The genuine environmentalists were a perfect front for the beaten army of malcontents, radicals, and dull foot-soldiers who crowded like the grim wreckage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Smolensk in 1812 into this incongruous political ecosystem.

Infamy!

That other guy over there is to blame:

The Chicago Sun-Times reported Wednesday that the former media baron [Conrad Black] filed suit in the Cook County Circuit Court in Chicago, alleging Radler hurt the value of Black's stake in Horizon Publications Inc., a U.S.-based chain of small newspapers.

The suit claims Radler illegally added shareholders and debt to Horizon, which the suit refers to as the "Cain-like betrayal of Lord Black," according to the report. The suit also calls Radler "an infamous Canadian citizen."

It's Cain-like because Radler totally killed Black after the two took turns chatting with God. One Lord to another in Black's case.

He Lies Best Who Lies Last

Shorter Conrad Black:

This puffed-up self-important insider and so-called writer is a FRAUD. His name is Conrad Black Bob Woodward.

No seriously, for real now:

Gradually, inexorably, the great Watergate fraud is unraveling. The Knights of Revelation, 40 years onward, are being exposed, in the light of analysis unclouded by cant and emotionalism, as the myth-makers they always were. Bob Woodward, unable to resist the temptation to try again and again to be at the forefront of investigative journalism, is being steadily exposed as a chronically dishonest myth-maker. Carl Bernstein, his Watergate partner, is at least cautious enough not to tempt the fates with a regime of endless returns to the well of public gratitude for spurious and destructive exposés. Though there is no sign that he is conscious of the proportions of their original Mt. Rushmore–sized canard, he has been relatively uncontroversial these intervening decades, sheltering in the greasy slick Vanity Fair.

Myth-makers, said the pretend lord sheltering in the greasy slick National Review. Congratulations on your release from the pokey.

OFF-TOPIC UPDATE:

Introducting a new feature in the lobby at Substance Laboratories™, The Fountain of Adjectives, a crucial and necessary enhancement of the SL™ brand, the mind-boggling expense of which should have no impact at all on our investors. Ships with a premium of free caviar for board members!

Authentic Frenchmen

Conrad Black on Libya:

I have thought all along that the key to a satisfactory outcome lay with the French. France is a Mediterranean country; Algeria, Libya’s neighbor, was a French département (state or province) from 1830 until 1963, and there were more than a million authentic Frenchmen in Algeria, including the great writer Albert Camus. France, in all its feline self-indulgence, was happy to claim for decades its tolerance and vocation for absorption and fraternization with the Arabs, especially while de Gaulle could irritate the Americans by truckling to Arab anti-Semitism, and the French elites could sit in their cafes waving their smoldering Gitane or Gauloise cigarettes and snifters of cognac or absinthe about, extolling the virtues of French trans-Mediterranean Arabophilia (in refreshing contrast to America’s hypocrisy and bigotry vis-à-vis its black population). The whole charade was supported by feting James Baldwin and other American black intellectuals virtually with such open arms as those with which Americans embraced Antoine de St. Exupéry and Andre Gide during World War II; or those with which the French court welcomed Jacques Cartier’s representative Canadian Indian, Donnacona, in the 16th century. (Gide, an aggressive homosexual decades ahead of his time, was attracted to America chiefly by the relatively tight trousers of American GIs, who, as he put it, rolled their buttocks fetchingly along the great boulevards of the French cities they liberated (ultimately almost all of them).

I call JanusNode.

Just a smidge more:

President Sarkozy was elevated to the headship of the state in part because as interior minister he had denounced the unruly Paris Arabs as “riff-raff”; and he tried to stay at the crest of the wave of developing opinion. But longtime xenophobe and Arab-baiter Jean-Marie Le Pen’s daughter, more presentable than her father as she has dropped his anti-Semitism, and has a softer vocabulary and less strident and buffoonish style, moved up almost to level pegging in the polls with Sarkozy.

I rate for less strident and buffoonish styles, plus a good pegging.

At the link there is an audio version of this glossolalia.

Sequencing

The little black bits from the Conrad Black post were actually supposed to make a travelling line: the GIFs are really three layers, two transparent and one black layer in the middle, and I change the timing of the preceding and following layers while keeping the total timing the same. It seems most web browsers just won't load the fucking things in order though, and maybe can't keep them in sync anyway. You may put them in proper sequence if you wish.

You Are What You Pretend To Be

Conrad Black:

The Green movement, which had been an informal bucolic confederation of Sierra lovers of the wilderness, Greenpeace opponents of nuclear testing, and amiable eccentrics in hiking boots and pith helmets, brandishing butterfly nets and festooned with binoculars, became a rampart of the Left. Like the rural Communist guerrillas of the Colombian FARC, overwhelmed by the influx of massively armed and armored drug lords, the old agitators for cleaner air and water and pretty lepidoptera were inundated by the advocates of deindustrialization, abandonment of the automobile, and Churchillian resolution in the face of untrammeled cow flatulence. The genuine environmentalists were a perfect front for the beaten army of malcontents, radicals, and dull foot-soldiers who crowded like the grim wreckage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Smolensk in 1812 into this incongruous political ecosystem.

Readers wondering if the authenticity of their hippie-deriding entertainment is somehow tainted if it comes from someone pretending to be an upper-class English blowhard should take comfort in the fact that Black is indeed a pretend upper-class English blowhard.

The Green movement, which had been an informal bucolic confederation of Sierra lovers of the wilderness, Greenpeace opponents of nuclear testing, and amiable eccentrics in hiking boots and pith helmets, brandishing butterfly nets and festooned with binoculars, became a rampart of the Left. Like the rural Communist guerrillas of the Colombian FARC, overwhelmed by the influx of massively armed and armored drug lords, the old agitators for cleaner air and water and pretty lepidoptera were inundated by the advocates of deindustrialization, abandonment of the automobile, and Churchillian resolution in the face of untrammeled cow flatulence. The genuine environmentalists were a perfect front for the beaten army of malcontents, radicals, and dull foot-soldiers who crowded like the grim wreckage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Smolensk in 1812 into this incongruous political ecosystem.The Green movement, which had been an informal bucolic confederation of Sierra lovers of the wilderness, Greenpeace opponents of nuclear testing, and amiable eccentrics in hiking boots and pith helmets, brandishing butterfly nets and festooned with binoculars, became a rampart of the Left. Like the rural Communist guerrillas of the Colombian FARC, overwhelmed by the influx of massively armed and armored drug lords, the old agitators for cleaner air and water and pretty lepidoptera were inundated by the advocates of deindustrialization, abandonment of the automobile, and Churchillian resolution in the face of untrammeled cow flatulence. The genuine environmentalists were a perfect front for the beaten army of malcontents, radicals, and dull foot-soldiers who crowded like the grim wreckage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Smolensk in 1812 into this incongruous political ecosystem.The Green movement, which had been an informal bucolic confederation of Sierra lovers of the wilderness, Greenpeace opponents of nuclear testing, and amiable eccentrics in hiking boots and pith helmets, brandishing butterfly nets and festooned with binoculars, became a rampart of the Left. Like the rural Communist guerrillas of the Colombian FARC, overwhelmed by the influx of massively armed and armored drug lords, the old agitators for cleaner air and water and pretty lepidoptera were inundated by the advocates of deindustrialization, abandonment of the automobile, and Churchillian resolution in the face of untrammeled cow flatulence. The genuine environmentalists were a perfect front for the beaten army of malcontents, radicals, and dull foot-soldiers who crowded like the grim wreckage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Smolensk in 1812 into this incongruous political ecosystem.The Green movement, which had been an informal bucolic confederation of Sierra lovers of the wilderness, Greenpeace opponents of nuclear testing, and amiable eccentrics in hiking boots and pith helmets, brandishing butterfly nets and festooned with binoculars, became a rampart of the Left. Like the rural Communist guerrillas of the Colombian FARC, overwhelmed by the influx of massively armed and armored drug lords, the old agitators for cleaner air and water and pretty lepidoptera were inundated by the advocates of deindustrialization, abandonment of the automobile, and Churchillian resolution in the face of untrammeled cow flatulence. The genuine environmentalists were a perfect front for the beaten army of malcontents, radicals, and dull foot-soldiers who crowded like the grim wreckage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Smolensk in 1812 into this incongruous political ecosystem.The Green movement, which had been an informal bucolic confederation of Sierra lovers of the wilderness, Greenpeace opponents of nuclear testing, and amiable eccentrics in hiking boots and pith helmets, brandishing butterfly nets and festooned with binoculars, became a rampart of the Left. Like the rural Communist guerrillas of the Colombian FARC, overwhelmed by the influx of massively armed and armored drug lords, the old agitators for cleaner air and water and pretty lepidoptera were inundated by the advocates of deindustrialization, abandonment of the automobile, and Churchillian resolution in the face of untrammeled cow flatulence. The genuine environmentalists were a perfect front for the beaten army of malcontents, radicals, and dull foot-soldiers who crowded like the grim wreckage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Smolensk in 1812 into this incongruous political ecosystem.The Green movement, which had been an informal bucolic confederation of Sierra lovers of the wilderness, Greenpeace opponents of nuclear testing, and amiable eccentrics in hiking boots and pith helmets, brandishing butterfly nets and festooned with binoculars, became a rampart of the Left. Like the rural Communist guerrillas of the Colombian FARC, overwhelmed by the influx of massively armed and armored drug lords, the old agitators for cleaner air and water and pretty lepidoptera were inundated by the advocates of deindustrialization, abandonment of the automobile, and Churchillian resolution in the face of untrammeled cow flatulence. The genuine environmentalists were a perfect front for the beaten army of malcontents, radicals, and dull foot-soldiers who crowded like the grim wreckage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Smolensk in 1812 into this incongruous political ecosystem.The Green movement, which had been an informal bucolic confederation of Sierra lovers of the wilderness, Greenpeace opponents of nuclear testing, and amiable eccentrics in hiking boots and pith helmets, brandishing butterfly nets and festooned with binoculars, became a rampart of the Left. Like the rural Communist guerrillas of the Colombian FARC, overwhelmed by the influx of massively armed and armored drug lords, the old agitators for cleaner air and water and pretty lepidoptera were inundated by the advocates of deindustrialization, abandonment of the automobile, and Churchillian resolution in the face of untrammeled cow flatulence. The genuine environmentalists were a perfect front for the beaten army of malcontents, radicals, and dull foot-soldiers who crowded like the grim wreckage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Smolensk in 1812 into this incongruous political ecosystem.The Green movement, which had been an informal bucolic confederation of Sierra lovers of the wilderness, Greenpeace opponents of nuclear testing, and amiable eccentrics in hiking boots and pith helmets, brandishing butterfly nets and festooned with binoculars, became a rampart of the Left. Like the rural Communist guerrillas of the Colombian FARC, overwhelmed by the influx of massively armed and armored drug lords, the old agitators for cleaner air and water and pretty lepidoptera were inundated by the advocates of deindustrialization, abandonment of the automobile, and Churchillian resolution in the face of untrammeled cow flatulence. The genuine environmentalists were a perfect front for the beaten army of malcontents, radicals, and dull foot-soldiers who crowded like the grim wreckage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Smolensk in 1812 into this incongruous political ecosystem.The Green movement, which had been an informal bucolic confederation of Sierra lovers of the wilderness, Greenpeace opponents of nuclear testing, and amiable eccentrics in hiking boots and pith helmets, brandishing butterfly nets and festooned with binoculars, became a rampart of the Left. Like the rural Communist guerrillas of the Colombian FARC, overwhelmed by the influx of massively armed and armored drug lords, the old agitators for cleaner air and water and pretty lepidoptera were inundated by the advocates of deindustrialization, abandonment of the automobile, and Churchillian resolution in the face of untrammeled cow flatulence. The genuine environmentalists were a perfect front for the beaten army of malcontents, radicals, and dull foot-soldiers who crowded like the grim wreckage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Smolensk in 1812 into this incongruous political ecosystem.The Green movement, which had been an informal bucolic confederation of Sierra lovers of the wilderness, Greenpeace opponents of nuclear testing, and amiable eccentrics in hiking boots and pith helmets, brandishing butterfly nets and festooned with binoculars, became a rampart of the Left. Like the rural Communist guerrillas of the Colombian FARC, overwhelmed by the influx of massively armed and armored drug lords, the old agitators for cleaner air and water and pretty lepidoptera were inundated by the advocates of deindustrialization, abandonment of the automobile, and Churchillian resolution in the face of untrammeled cow flatulence. The genuine environmentalists were a perfect front for the beaten army of malcontents, radicals, and dull foot-soldiers who crowded like the grim wreckage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Smolensk in 1812 into this incongruous political ecosystem.

Good News Everyone!

Conrad Black:

By the time of the pope’s British trip, the swords of the worldwide Catholic-baiters had already been blunted by the sudden surge of alarm over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. For several months, War of the Worlds horrors of the destruction of the world’s oceans, the end of the shrimp industry, the irreversible sliming of the entire Gulf and Atlantic coastlines of America, had shouldered and bullied into the back of the public mind the cherished prospect of the exposure of the Roman Church as a racket of pedophiles and predatory Sodomites. Of course, the oil spill was a terribly serious problem too. But in the one case as in the other, there was a determined effort, halting at first, hampered by bumbling and by an urge to downplay and deny, but soon indomitably determined and focused, to address the causes of the problem and stop it, and then to put things right as much and as quickly as possible and prevent repetition. It is not obvious why the swift and dramatic progress in both crises came as such a surprise, and to many, even apparently, as a disappointment.

That's right friends, the priest abuse scandals are over.

I encourage you to read Black's full column because I'm mean that way.

I Owe the Gods

Sure would be terrible if her head hit the floor hard:

Barbara Amiel fainted after a judge ruled Friday afternoon that her husband, Conrad Black, will return to prison after he was resentenced in a Chicago courtroom.

Barbara Amiel link added by me, just to be mean. Well done, Lady Shitbag!

Special Treatment

Golly I am a terrible person:

Trial dates have been set for Conrad Black's eldest son, Jonathan, who says he has been singled out for special attention and will plead not guilty to charges of criminal harassment, uttering threats and breaching bail conditions.

It totally could be the case that he is completely innocent and that he is receiving special attention from police because of how totally awesome his horrible space-lizard family is.

100% Pure Polonium

Conrad Black:

At the best of times it is hazardous for the mental equilibrium of a rational person randomly to turn on the television set, and it is probably especially so in summer. Last week, in a cavalierly daredevil moment, I did so, and was almost reduced to the incommunicable state of Zechariah in the Temple as a result. First, I unluckily happened upon what purported to be a serious discussion of the supposed difference in public responses to men’s and women’s weeping. The party of vintage, quaveringly emotional feminism, twitching and squirming as they emitted the unimaginable frustrations of their benighted lot, apparently unmitigated by their license to inflict themselves on the silent armies of unsuspecting tele-spectators, complained that men who wept were deemed to be sensitive and that women who wept in public were deemed to be weak. Another grievous count was thus added to the long charge-sheet of male attitudinal atrocities.

It continues:

And these few precepts in thy memory see thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue, nor any unproportioned thought his act. Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar. Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel; but do not dull thy palm with entertainment of each new-hatch'd, unfledged comrade. Beware of entrance to a quarrel, but being in, bear't that the opposed may beware of thee. Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice; take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment. Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, but not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy; for the apparel oft proclaims the man, and they in france of the best rank and station are of a most select and generous chief in that. Neither a borrower nor a lender be; for loan oft loses both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. This above all: To thine ownself be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man. Farewell: My blessing season this in thee!

Word Salad

Conrad Black, writing (surprisingly) from a non-padded cell:

The Yalta Myth is no longer sufficiently credible to be flammable, and the argument that Roosevelt failed to end the Depression is too foamite-sodden for even so fiendishly persistent and endearing a pyromaniac as the delightful and otherwise rigorous Amity Shlaes to make any headway reigniting it. But, sensing the proximity of tinder with the feral olfactory acuity of a hob ferret detecting the invisible presence of a mate in heat, the Scorch Roosevelt Society has encroached, as softly as bats, on what the Republicans tried, without success, to sell 72 years ago as the “Roosevelt Recession.”

An agreeable sentiment, I suppose...