Still MIssing

Michelle Malkin: Missing Fox News crew: Blogburst: "If you have the time and inclination, please join me in posting a blog post today (doesn't need to be long, even a quick 'Still Missing' will do) in support of our fellow American, Steve Centanni, and New Zealand-based cameraman Olaf Wiig. Let their families know that they are not forgotten."

Gas guru -- The Washington Times

Gas guru -- The Washington Times: "Watching the oil industry has led Ms. Lundberg to some interesting conclusions.

She condemns the 'overzealous meddling' of the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies, and said government-mandated reformulation of unleaded gas and engine modifications aimed at curtailing emissions are more to blame for gas price increases than the worldwide Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

Ms. Lundberg has strong opinions on other issues.

For instance, she has said that global warming is a 'boogeyman for political opportunism.'

Those who promote the theory are trying to create a power base and 'believe global warming is a reason to hike taxes and hike prices,' she said. "

But this isn't what MSNBC told me

Iraq security adviser says violence levels falling: "TOKYO (Reuters) - The level of violence in Baghdad has fallen sharply since July thanks to troop reinforcements and the new government's efforts to reconcile warring Shi'ites and Sunnis, Iraq's national security adviser said on Tuesday.

Mowaffaq al-Rubaie insisted that the sectarian and insurgent bloodshed that has seized Iraq was not a civil war, a description U.S. President George W. Bush's administration has strenuously avoided in the face of mounting casualties.

'This is absolutely not a civil war,' Rubaie told Reuters in an interview during a visit to Japan. 'Al Qaeda tried for that for three years and failed miserably. But it has created a crack between Shias and Sunnis.'"

The Benign Indifference of the Universe

The Anchoress does what she does best and calls like she sees it.

And The New Yorker is pettiness defined as it struggles to come to grips with the fact that President Bush is reading Camus - so taken aback are they by the president’s climbing gall in reading Camus that they feel they must lecture him about it.

Nonetheless, it is hard not to brood, in old-fashioned Kremlinological style, on the meanings of George W. Bush’s syllabus for this particular summer. Where in summers past he has read fiction by Tom Wolfe, or a comprehensive history of salt—both very good things in the right seasonal doses—this summer, perhaps under the pressure of events, he has embarked on a more strenuous list. An amazingly strenuous list, actually. It includes Albert Camus’s novel “The Stranger”; Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s book about Robert Oppenheimer and the invention of the atomic bomb; and Richard Carwardine’s new biography of Abraham Lincoln.

Already, it seems, the President has polished off the Camus and had a debate with his new press secretary, Tony Snow, on the origins of existentialism. Now, it’s possible to feel misgivings about the President’s ranch reading…But it is the sunny optimism of humanism to imagine that books change lives, and that no one can come away from “The Stranger” entirely unaffected, particularly one who is, as he reminds us, a wartime President.

The writer, Adam Gopnik, does manage to toss a small and almost-not-condescending dono toward Dubya: It sounds almost like the beginnings of wisdom, or, at least, a compulsory fall reading list for us all.

What a foppish snot. What disagreeable, nauseating snobs. These folk don’t take themselves too, too seriously, do they? I wonder how they can reproduce with their noses so high in the air?

Last year, of course, it was that self-revealingly prejudiced snob Mark Kurlansky who couldn’t believe that moron Bush was reading his book:

In fairness, Kurlansky does admit: “What I find fascinating, and it’s probably a positive thing about the White House, is they don’t seem to do any research about the writers when they pick the books.”

Think about that for a second. Basically what Kurlansky, the “liberal” is saying is that he is suprised and fascinated that the guy he hates is…umm…not prejudiced…as he himself apparently is. Sounds like projection to me, anyway. Like Kurlansky is admitting that he would research someone before he deigned to read their book.

Such sophisticates, they are. They know and understand all things. And all that they hate, they are become.


Why did I choose that title? Showing off. I read it in a Camus novel at the age of 18. But then again I had been reading Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Camus, Kafka, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bronte, Jules Verne, Bradbury, HG Wells, Dickens, DH Lawrence, Steinbeck, Tennessee Williams, Shakespeare, Austin, Poe, Hersey, Orwell, and Faulkner to mention a few since I was 15 years old. Fancy that. A hick kid from Oklahoma who could read.

A Trend?

Bush's numbers are up with an RCP average of 40.8.


AJ notes the following:

The verdict is coming in and it is the Democrats are confused, paranoid, sometimes delusional and not worthy of being taken seriously on national security. The latest Gallup Poll tells the story:

In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday, support for an unnamed Democratic congressional candidate over a Republican one narrowed to 2 percentage points, 47%-45%, among registered voters. Over the past year, Democrats have led by wider margins that ranged up to 16 points.

Now 42% of Americans say they approve of the job Bush is doing as president, up 5 points since early this month. His approval rating on handling terrorism is 55%, the highest in more than a year.

The boost may prove to be temporary, but it was evidence of the continuing political power of terrorism.

It’s not the power of terrorism, it is the stupidity of the Democrats spending 2 years claiming the entire terrorism issue was being overblown and Bush was spying on Americans. You cannot make these kinds of wild accusations and then be proven wrong. Mature, serious people are going to rightfully conclude anyone who believed this nonsense is a waste of time to listen to. The more serious the issue the harder the response will be. And terrorism is serious. People die if we get it wrong. there is no amount of message that will correct the mistakes the liberals have made the last two years in their rantings. The moderate democrats like Leiberman have been shown the door by the far left and they will take that door. If this election is going to be a choice between fighting terrorism or impeaching Bush, then we will fight terrorism.

Like my Daddy always said, give em enough rope and they will hang themselves. Notice how little news coverage there has been of Cindy Sheehan this year?

Smoke Angels

Created by flares from a jet...copyright USAF, click for full size image and explanation from NASA.

Ah. Made my day.

Best hook lede in the world.

Arts & Letters Daily - ideas, criticism, debate: "Robert Hughes’s wife, Danne, gave him a strain of the clap that she’d likely picked up from Jimi Hendrix. It was so antibiotic resistant, it almost outlived Hendrix himself..."

What the Heck!

Sorry for the swearing, but it is the end of the world!

LONDON - Turner Broadcasting is scouring more than 1,500 classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons, including old favorites Tom and Jerry, The Flintstones and Scooby-Doo, to edit out scenes that glamorize smoking.
...
The regulator’s latest news bulletin stated that a viewer, who was not identified, had complained about two smoking scenes on Tom and Jerry, saying they “were not appropriate in a cartoon aimed at children.”
...

I swear, these guys would burn the Library of Alexandria all over again if they had the chance. And probably Hypatia along with it. Can't they do something useful, like put trousers on naked piano legs? Despise the whole thing.

Dark Matter Exists!

Many people have heard that at the end of the 19th century there were small anomalies in the observed location of the planet Mercury. It was apparently not quite where it should have been, had Newton's theories of gravitation been entirely correct. Einstein proceeded to modify Newton'ts laws somewhat and it was discovered that with these modifications the observed locations of Mercury were now spot on. Score one for Einstein.

Toward the end of the 20th century, small gravitational anomalies have been once again observed, this time in the behavior of very large objects in space. Rotating galaxies, for example, are not quite rotating as they should if the Newton-Einstein formulas are entirely correct. Likewise, orbital velocities of galaxies in clusters are not as they should be. Two possible explanations have been proposed, either that there is a better theory of gravity to be had (though nobody seems to have a good idea of what this might be) or that there is a lot of matter, type unknown, out there which would account for the anomalies observed without any change in the (extremely accurate and well-tested) Theory of Relativity. This is the so-called dark matter, the idea being that there's some sort of unknown stuff out there which we can only observe at the cosmic scale, because for reasons unknown it doesn't show up in anything around us we know of.

Now the evidence is apparently in, as a collection of astronomers using a constellation of our most advanced telescopes has announced direct observation of dark matter. Your tax dollars at work.

Don't worry, there's still the even more perplexing mystery of dark energy to ponder....

Covert Enemies

Michael Barone's Town Hall column was so good that I am going to post the whole thing.

In our war against Islamo-fascist terrorism, we face enemies both overt and covert. The overt enemies are, of course, the terrorists themselves. Their motives are clear: They hate our society because of its freedoms and liberties, and want to make us all submit to their totalitarian form of Islam. They are busy trying to wreak harm on us in any way they can. Against them we can fight back, as we did when British authorities arrested the men and women who were plotting to blow up a dozen airliners over the Atlantic.

Our covert enemies are harder to identify, for they live in large numbers within our midst. And in terms of intentions, they are not enemies in the sense that they consciously wish to destroy our society. On the contrary, they enjoy our freedoms and often call for their expansion. But they have also been working, over many years, to undermine faith in our society and confidence in its goodness. These covert enemies are those among our elites who have promoted the ideas labeled as multiculturalism, moral relativism and (the term is Professor Samuel Huntington's) transnationalism.

At the center of their thinking is a notion of moral relativism. No idea is morally superior to another. Hitler had his way, we have ours -- who's to say who is right? No ideas should be "privileged," especially those that have been the guiding forces in the development and improvement of Western civilization. Rich white men have imposed their ideas because of their wealth and through the use of force. Rich white nations imposed their rule on benighted people of color around the world. For this sin of imperialism they must forever be regarded as morally stained and presumptively wrong. Our covert enemies go quickly from the notion that all societies are morally equal to the notion that all societies are morally equal except ours, which is worse.

These are the ideas that have been transmitted over a long generation by the elites who run our universities and our schools, and who dominate our mainstream media. They teach an American history with the good parts left out and the bad parts emphasized. We are taught that some of the Founding Fathers were slaveholders -- and are left ignorant of their proclamations of universal liberties and human rights. We are taught that Japanese-Americans were interned in World War II -- and not that American military forces liberated millions from tyranny. To be sure, the great mass of Americans tend to resist these teachings. By the millions they buy and read serious biographies of the Founders and accounts of the Greatest Generation. But the teachings of our covert enemies have their effect.

Of course, this distorts history. We are taught that American slavery was the most evil institution in human history. But every society in history has had slavery. Only one society set out to and did abolish it. The movement to abolish first the slave trade and then slavery was not started by the reason-guided philosophies of 18th century France. It was started, as Adam Hochschild documents in his admirable book "Bury the Chains," by Quakers and Evangelical Christians in Britain, followed in time by similar men and women in America. The slave trade was ended not by Africans, but by the Royal Navy, with aid from the U.S. Navy even before the Civil War.

Nevertheless, the default assumption of our covert enemies is that in any conflict between the West and the Rest, the West is wrong. That assumption can be rebutted by overwhelming fact: Few argued for the Taliban after Sept. 11. But in our continuing struggles, our covert enemies portray our work in Iraq through the lens of Abu Ghraib and consider Israel's self-defense against Hezbollah as the oppression of virtuous victims by evil men. In World War II, our elites understood that we were the forces of good and that victory was essential. Today, many of our elites subject our military and intelligence actions to fine-tooth-comb analysis and find that they are morally repugnant.

We have always had our covert enemies, but their numbers were few until the 1960s. But then the elite young men who declined to serve in the military during the Vietnam War set out to write a narrative in which they, rather than those who obeyed the call to duty, were the heroes. They have propagated their ideas through the universities, the schools and mainstream media to the point that they are the default assumptions of millions. Our covert enemies don't want the Islamo-fascists to win. But in some corner of their hearts, they would like us to lose.

Humbled?

I keep hearing that Bush has been humbled. Somehow I don't get that impression myself.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The attitude of many Democrats on Iraq -- a quick pullout of U.S. troops -- shows a lack of understanding of world politics and increases the threat of attacks in the United States, President Bush said Monday.

With the midterm congressional election just over two months away, the Republican president said while he doesn't question the patriotism of his Democratic opponents, he strongly disagrees with their opinions on Iraq.

"There are a lot of people in the Democratic Party who believe that the best course of action is to leave Iraq before the job is done. Period. And they're wrong," Bush said at a Washington news conference.

"I will never question the patriotism of somebody who disagrees with me," Bush said. "This has nothing to do with patriotism. It has everything to do with understanding the world in which we live."

Leaving Iraq before a stable democracy is established increases the risk of a domestic attack, Bush said.

"I repeat what our ... our leading general said in the region. He said: 'If we withdraw before the job is done, the enemy will follow us here.' I strongly agree with that," the president said.

Bush criticized political opponents who applauded a federal judge's ruling last week blocking the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping program. The program continues while the administration appeals the ruling.

"Those who heralded the decision not to give law enforcement the tools necessary to protect the American people just simply don't see the world the way we do," he said.

And he chided political opponents for not sharing his vision of how domestic security should be ensured.

"They say, on the one hand, you can't have the tools necessary and herald the fact that you won't have the tools necessary to defend the people and, sure enough, attack would occur, and [they'd] say, 'How come you don't have the tools necessary to defend the people?' "

Voters expect politicians to cooperate in Washington, something he hasn't seen in his time in the Oval Office, Bush said.

"People expect us to come here to solve problems. And thus far, the attitude has been: Let's just kind of ignore what the president has said and just hope somebody else comes and solves it for us," he said.

The president said if he were running now, he would focus on the economy and national security issues.

"I'd be telling people that the Democrats will raise your taxes. That's what they said. I'd be reminding people that tax cuts have worked in terms of stimulating the economy," Bush said.

Bush said the Iraq war has helped improve national security by showing the U.S. is committed to fighting the lack of hope and the resentment that breed terrorism.

And the best way to give people hope is by establishing democracy, he said.

"You don't succeed by leaving before the mission is complete, like some in this political process are suggesting," he said.

Sometimes I wonder if people are making this demand knowing that as long as Bush is around it will not happen. I can not imagine the chaos that would ensue if these people had their way. I think they know that too, deep down.

Are We Still Here?

Dawn has broken on the 22nd of August (in Australia, to be sure) and the West seems to still exist. At least insofar as its existence might be embodied in my own. Ah, but will we be here when the earth completes its revolution and the dawn of the 23rd breaks upon Australia?

Yep.

And my reasoned wager is that the West will be here when the sun sets for the last time on the death of a 7th century theology fit only for maintaining the relationship between master and slave. Not because of the inherent strength of the West, because that strength is not truly inherent, derived as it is from a mixture of adherence to dogma and the allowance a degree of latitude in the exploration of deviation from dogma which might (by some) be described as progress. The West will prevail because of the muslims blind adherence to islamic dogma without allowance for the potential for progress (which lies at the center of islamic theology). islam has produced nothing for a very long time. Even the potential breach of the gates of Vienna was only theoretically possible due to the willingness of French whores to peddle to the islamists the cannon necessary for the assault. (Why does that sound so familiar?)

The outcome of the contest is not in doubt. The decisive action may require a brief set aside of Westphalian convention in order to apply certain tactical applications of strategic necessities in order to conform Western objectives to the simplicity of the chessboard but that is a small matter. The West's opponent is still tied to his chessboard and necessity dictates adherence to his minimal understanding of his undertaking.

Investment Advice: Under no circumstance be lured into putting money into "Mullah Life and Casualty of Teheran". It just isn't a reasonable investment.

Kevin Drum gets a whuppin'

JunkYardBlog: August 13, 2006 - August 19, 2006 Archives: "[H]owever, the larger point is obvious and gabberflasting: he’d rather let Iran stand unrebuked than give W an excuse to do something about it. If I accused the Left of thinking like this, even though I suspected it, I’d feel kind of sheepish and get written off as a nut; but here’s black and white confirmation of some of my worst suspicions. Some of them.

This is a journalist, by the way; someone who—though he may be biased—is supposed to have some passing acquaintance with telling the truth. Even if it helps the other party. But his conscience is troubled more by possibly helping Bush with his super-important, oracular, weighty-smart words than it is by his helping the Mullahs—the antithesis of everything he believes, and who want to kill us all—through his dishonest silence."

LILEKS (James) :: the Bleat

LILEKS (James) :: the Bleat: "It's just interesting how Westerners think that that Red Scare was a historical event of such towering proportions it trumps the tales of the Soviet Union in the same period. US version: communist sympathizers frozen out of screenwriting jobs, justly or unjustly. USSR version: actual communists killed in ghastly numbers by a parody of a legal system underwritten by brute force and an industrialized penal system built on slave labor. Why is the latter ignored, and the former celebrated?

Because a herd of frozen zeks dying in the snows of Wherdifugistan doesn’t really connect, you know? Whereas six guys sitting around the Carnegie Deli bitching about cowardly sponsors, that strikes a chord. "

Politics Central: The Dominion of Opinion and How to Know When You're In It

Politics Central: The Dominion of Opinion and How to Know When You're In It: "Last year, in the wake of the news about publisher Judith Regan moving to L.A., I wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed about literary life in this city. This brought an email from some woman who remembered me from my Buzz magazine years, and wanted me to know my piece had “distressed” her because I described L.A. culture “in such a limited way… It’s upsetting to me to see a writer who has lived here for so long ignore all that the city and its residents have to offer.” Then she went on to list the L.A. writers she would have mentioned that I didn’t.

What I always think, when I get these kinds of letters, is: “Then write your own f***ing 1,100-word piece.”

Oh, actually I only think that when I’m in a bad mood. On happier days I think, Well, that’s the hazard, if you’re a sensitive soul, of reading the opinion section. Eventually you’re going to come across an opinion you don’t like. That can be distressing. Even upsetting! Maybe these pieces should all be prefaced by a little warning: Read at your own risk."

Townhall.com::Truth, even if clandestine, is still truth.::By Val Prieto

Townhall.com::Truth, even if clandestine, is still truth.::By Val Prieto: "His article won’t get Xeroxed or faxed. It won’t get typeset and printed. His article will be read, by him, over the phone a dozen times, perhaps more, with the hopes that the person on the other end of the line in Miami or New Jersey will do justice to his work. Each call is made hoping that the person in charge of monitoring his conversation from some government office in Havana won’t cut the transmission, and turn him in for a pound of rice as reward."

Good question

Law Blog » Considering Forum Shopping: "A debate about forum shopping — and any implication that different judges decide cases differently — raises a sticky question, writes Glater: “If the same facts, presented to different judges in different courts can lead to different outcomes, then can anyone maintain confidence that a particular outcome was just?”"

Poincare Conjecture True, Perelman Missing in Action?

When I started as a graduate student in mathematics lo these many moons ago, there were maybe four open questions which were then considered to be the pinnacle of mathematics, analogous to scaling Everest or running a sub-four-minute mile. All of them had been unsolved for decades or even centuries, despite the best efforts of the strongest minds. Since then two or the four (the Bieberbach Conjuecture and the Shimura-Taniyama Conjecture (Fermat's Last Theorem)) have been solved by stunning and surprising approaches. Of the two remaining, the Poincare Conjecture and the Riemann Hypothesis, it would appear that the Poincare Conjecure has fallen. It is odd that we are living in the abolute golden age of mathematics and yet almost no one knows it or even has the merest awareness of what that means.

This ignorance occurs for good, rather than nefarious, reasons. Mathematics has basically become too abstract and too sophisticated to be able to be explained any more. It takes years of arduous study just to learn what the terms mean. Yet it has been shown in the last quarter century or so that even the most abstruse and recondite piece of pure mathematics is likely to have important consequences or applications in the physical world, so it seems to me incumbent upon us as citizens of a democracy to try to understand something about the froth of activity going on surreptitiously around us. Continued....

Allow me then to take a crack at explaining the Poincare Conjecture: the only 3-dimensional object that has the shape of a sphere is a sphere. That's deceptively simple, because I'm not talking about the ordinary sphere (called the 2-sphere in mathematics because if you live on one, say the surface of the Earth, your movements are constrained to only 2 dimensions), but rather its analog in 4-space (the set of all points in Euclidean 4-space whose distance is one from the origin is the unit 3-sphere). And by having the "shape" of the sphere I mean that its shape as measured by a very important mathematical yardstick called the "fundamental group" as well as by the "homology groups" is that of a sphere. What this Conjecture does is validate our ordinary intuition in the strongest way. That the Conjecture is true there has been very little doubt for a long time; that we found ourselves unable to prove it has been a huge embarassment to the species. The Conjuecture means that this yardstick really captures the topological essence of a sphere, which is really good news because the fundamental group is far simpler than a sphere and easier to work with.

The proof itself has an interesting human interest story behind it. Like many such intellectual feats (think chessmasters) it emanates not from the Anglo-Saxon world but from Russia, with its Orthodox, Greek-based culture. The author, Perelman, of this alleged proof wrote a couple of short papers claiming to have a proof. He wasn't quite believed because the papers were too short and surprising to be convincing. He went on a whirlwind tour of the US to make his case; American mathematicians have been working hard for three years now to fill in the numerous gaps in Perelman's ideas, and Perelman has apparently completely disappeared. There's a large prize of a million dollars to be had should he reappear, together with (probably) a Fields Medal, the mathematical equivalent of the Nobel Prize. “He came once, he explained things, and that was it,” Dr. Anderson said. “Anything else was superfluous.”

He came, he conquered, he disappeared. Was he an alien?

Lepers

I used this word in a comment when discussing the reaction to certain Muslims that many in the world seem to be having. More and more people treat them like the leper of old. They are to be shunned, avoided and kept apart. People are getting tired of the age old temper tantrum of the Middle East.

Victor Hanson had some observations on the changes in attitudes. He makes note of the ongoing problems and then he adds:

Yet, all is not lost, since lunacy cuts both ways. Iran and Syria unleashed Hezbollah because they were both facing global scrutiny, one over nuclear acquisition and the other over the assassination of Lebanese reformer Rafik Hariri. Those problems won’t go away for either of them — nor, if we persist, will the democratic fervor in Afghanistan and Iraq on their borders.

We still don’t know the extent of the damage that Hezbollah suffered, but it perhaps took casualties ten times the Israelis’ — losses — not to be dismissed even in the asymmetrical laws of postmodern warfare. Hezbollah’s leaders were hiding in embassies and bunkers; Israel ’s were not. For all the newfound magnetism of Nasrallah, he brought ruin to his flock, and fright to the Arab establishment around Israel .

A surprised Israel now has a good glimpse of the terrorists’ new way of war, and probably next time will attack the supplier, not the launcher, of the rocketry. And when the Reuters stringers go away, the “civilians” of southern Lebanon, off-camera, might not be so eager to see more real fireworks lighting up their skies — or far-off, pristine Syria and Iran in safety praising the courage of the ruined amid the rubble. Note how Hezbollah already is desperately racing around the craters to assure its homeless constituency that it has enough Iranian cash to buy back lost sympathies.

Even the ceasefire can come back to bite the Islamists and their supporters. Hezbollah won’t be disarmed as promised, much less stay out of Katyusha range of the border. And that defiance will only reveal the impotence of the Lebanese and the U.N., reminding both that they have talked themselves into a corner and now are responsible to keep caged their own pet 7th-century vipers. This can only work to Israel ’s favor when the next rockets go off, since no one then will be proposing an “international” solution — although it will be interesting to see whether Jacques Chirac talks of the “nuclear” option once his soldiers begin to be picked off by Hezbollah.

In a larger sense, the foiled London terrorist plot won’t endear either Islamists or their appeasers to millions in the world who face travel delays, cancelled flights, and body searches — on top of paying billions more to the Arab oil producers who in response whine even more in their victimhood.

As the cliché goes: the Middle East needs to wake up and disown Islamic fascism. Otherwise, insidiously the entire world is turning against it, as radical Islam proves to be every bit as frightening an ideology as German Nazism or Soviet Communism — whether this is ascertained from the use of human shields, tribal lynchings and beheadings, Joseph Goebbels-like propaganda, Holocaust-denial, racist rants, or primordial hatred of Jews.

Three years ago no one was talking about profiling at airports. Now the British are exploring how best to do it. Indeed, one of the stranger developments in recent memory is now taking place the world over: Young, Middle-Eastern, Muslim men are eyed and studied by passengers at every airport — even as governments still lecture about the evils of the very profiling that their own millions are doing daily. Muslims can thank al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and an entire culture that won’t condemn terrorism for such ostracism, which only increases with each suicide bomber, human shield, hijacking, kidnapping, and macabre reference to genocide and Jew-killing.

In an amorphous war of self-induced Western restraint, like the present one, truth and moral clarity are as important as military force. This past month, the world of the fascist jihadist and those who tolerate him was once again on display for civilization to fathom. Even the most timid and prone to appeasement in the West are beginning to see that it is becoming a question of “the Islamists or us.”

In this eleventh hour, that is a sort of progress after all.

Read it all.

Durham-in-Wonderland

Durham-in-Wonderland: "Nifong’s misconduct, while massive, is hardly unprecedented—though the public’s learning of this type of misconduct at this stage of the process is unprecedented, at least in the last 20-25 years. In terms of “teachable moments,” it’s worth examining what Nifong’s misconduct (and the silence about it by all other North Carolina district attorneys save one) says about the state’s legal process in cases that receive little or no media attention—and also what kind of “process” would allow such a procedurally dubious case to lurch forward."