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Tiny stars in a new film, "Now, Player"

Well, there is nothing to report

Did Alex Polier start out as a brunette? Only her hairdresser knows for sure.

"Well, there is nothing to report," Kerry told Imus yesterday, but reporting is what reporters do, whether or not they have the goods. Question: Where did the "UK's biggest selling newspaper," the Sun, get the idea that Alexandra Polier was a brunette? Everyone else, including her "Region's Home Page," Philly.com, says she's a blonde:

Several news trucks and assorted gawkers loitered outside the home of the parents of 27-year-old Alexandra Polier after her dad was quoted in a British tabloid that Kerry was "a sleazeball" who'd shown an interest in his daughter.

Polier, who was a cross-country star in high school and who has worked as a reporter for the Associated Press, is said to be on an assignment in Kenya . . .

A tall blonde known to friends as Alex, [she] went on from Malvern to Clark University in Worcester, Mass., where she earned a degree in 2000 with a double major in philosophy and government. She then studied journalism at the prestigious Columbia Journalism School in New York.

No word yet from Kerry's wife Teresa, who "famously told an interviewer that she threatened to 'maim' her first husband if he ever cheated on her."

Security blanket

Emmy's Bismarck is a happy customer.

Never on Sunday

Jasmine's "nasal magnificence"

Some ascetic types do it only on Friday. Here's Calpundit's "Friday Cat Blogging" offering.

[via Pejmanesque]

Call it what you like

Baby Cakes (left) and the Cheshire Cat both have "very long claws and a great many teeth" that ought to be treated with respect.

`Well, then,' the Cat went on, `you see, a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad.'

`I call it purring, not growling,' said Alice.

`Call it what you like,' said the Cat

The tree of life

Common Nitraria (Nitraria retusa*) is the Gharqad Tree or "tree of the Jews" mentioned in "The Promise of the Stone and the Tree," symbol of Islamists' war against the jews.

MEMRI examines contemporary Islamist sources advocating violent Jihad:

Islamism, also called "radical Islam" or "fundamentalist Islam," differs from mainstream Islam in its understanding of Jihad, or holy war against infidels – that is, all those who are not Muslims . . .Contemporary Islamism has made Jihad the single most important religious duty, both collective and individual, and does not accept any restrictions or limitations . . .

On the first day of the most important holiday in the Muslim year, 'Id al-Adhha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, in 2003, Al-Qa'ida leader Osama bin Laden delivered a sermon, saying: "The [Islamic] nation has also been promised victory over the Jews, as the Prophet Muhammad has told us: 'The Day of Judgment will not arrive until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, until the Jew hides behind the stones and the trees; and each stone or tree will say: Oh Muslim, Oh servant of God, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him; except from the gharqad, which is the tree of the Jews.' This Hadith [prophetic tradition] also teaches [us] that the conflict with the enemy will be settled by killing and warfare, and not by disabling the potential of the [Muslim] nation for decades by a variety of means such as the deception of democracy."

"The Promise of the Stone and the Tree" recurs frequently in Friday sermons as well.

[via Milt's File]

*Nitraria [F. nitre < L. nitrum, native soda < Gr] is a genus of thorny shrubs of the Bean Caper family (Zygophyllaceae) bearing edible berries and growing in the saline plains of Asia and Northern Africa.

Dear Mr. President

"Shame on those of my generation who are so mired in Bush hatred they would rather see a President fall than the population of Iran achieve freedom!" declares Roger L. Simon, quoting from an open Presidents' Day letter to George W. Bush from the Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran:

Dear Mr. President:

On behalf of the Iranian Student Movement and the Iranian Diaspora around the World, especially our oppressed countrymen, we extend our sincerest appreciation for your leadership and efforts to promote long term peace and democratic rule in the World. We also want to use this opportunity to express, once again, our deepest gratitude for your consistent and open support of our people in their quest for true freedom and democracy . . .

As one of the few world leaders that fully appreciates and openly supports the aspirations and goals of our subjugated country, we extend our thanks. Let us assure you, as you plan for the conquest of Mars, that you have already succeeded in conquering the hearts and souls of millions of Iranians . . .

Indeed, as you have clearly articulated in the past, "each problem has its' different answer," so too does the Iranian situation. In recognizing that Iranians want their country to dispose of the Islamic fascists, and not the U.S. Military, your deft management is obvious.

Amen.

The road not taken

Is natural history bound by deterministic laws of physics and biology, or could things have worked out differently? Nature has a form of choice, "what I call 'bifurcation,'" wrote the late Ilya Prigogine, father of "chaos theory," in the Winter 2004 issue of New Perspectives Quarterly:

In complex natural systems, just as in society, the future is not given. Within bounds, it can go this way or that. Events in nature correspond to novelties that we find at all levels from cosmology to microbiology. We may thus speak of the "creativity" of nature" . . .

Though the past may now seem to have been determined, it is actually one realization among many possibilities that could have occurred. Similarly, the future is not determined because there will be events, the outcome of which we cannot predict . . .

In large societies, we see collective motions. Accordingly, the role of individual activity is drastically reduced. Human societies could face the same evolution when tied together by networks.

Years ago I studied traffic flows. I found that when the flow of traffic was light, each driver behaved more or less as he wanted. I called that an "individual regime." But when the flow becomes more and more dense, the characteristics of a "collective regime" take over in which everybody is pushing the other and is pushed by the other . . .

The future is not given. Especially in this time of globalization and the network revolution, behavior at the individual level will be the key factor in shaping the evolution of the entire human species. Just as one particle can alter macroscopic organization in nature, so the role of individuals is more important now than ever in society.

The power of an individual to start a meme in the blogosphere comes to mind. Have you heard the one about John Kerry and a "statuestque blonde" twentysomething at the Beacon Hill townhouse while Teresa Heinz was out of town? Of course you have. It started February 6 with a blogger who works for Wesley Clark, and yesterday it hit the bigtime on Drudge. Andrew Sullivan reports it's on the front page of the London Times this morning.

There's nothing like the real thing

"The Washington Post reports that America is becoming more popular in Iran, for a surprising reason -- surprising to the Post, anyway," writes Powerline's Hindrocket:

In recent months, Iranians say, the appetite [for better relations with the U.S.] has grown for an unexpected reason: Iranian pilgrims returning from Iraq are spreading admiring stories of their encounters with American troops.

Leila Araki, waiting in the back of a Renault sedan as her husband peddled shoes, recalled that her mother-in-law somehow lost her money on the road to Karbala. She said a U.S. soldier reached into his pocket and handed her taxi fare back to Najaf.

"This is something quite contrary to what we have been told about Americans," said Araki . . . They were really surprised. I would never be this respected and well-treated even in my country, by my countrymen."

This is not the first time that American soldiers have been our country's most effective ambassadors. It is interesting to contrast the Iranians' experience of American soldiers with John Kerry's depiction of his Vietnam-era "brothers" as mass-murdering torturers and rapists. I suspect that this contrast is due more to Kerry's skewed perceptions (and political opportunism) than to any change in the character of young Americans.

Incentives for democracy

The Bush administration has launched a "Greater Middle East Initiative" to promote democracy, reports the Washington Post [registration required]:

Scheduled to be announced at the G-8 summit hosted by President Bush at Sea Island, Ga., in June, [the initiative] would call for Arab and South Asian governments to adopt major political reforms, be held accountable on human rights -- particularly women's empowerment -- and introduce economic reforms, U.S. and European officials said.

As incentives for the targeted countries to cooperate, Western nations would offer to expand political engagement, increase aid, facilitate membership in the World Trade Organization and foster security arrangements, possibly some equivalent of the Partnership for Peace with former Eastern Bloc countries.

The initiative is loosely modeled on the 1975 Helsinki accords signed by 35 nations and regarded by many as "one of the most influential international pacts signed after World War II, [that] sped the demise of Eastern Bloc communism":

Unlike Helsinki, however, the administration's master plan for the "greater Middle East" seeks to avoid creating committees and structures to strictly monitor progress and issue report cards, U.S. officials say. It also seeks to avoid appearing to dictate to the Islamic world.

[via Daniel W. Drezner]