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Remora Washington Post headlines the Italian strike that brought a million people into the street. NYT story about the Italian paralysis... No, just joking. Not that there wasn't a general strike -- a magical phrase to the IWW lefties among us -- in Italy. Not that it didn't paralyse Italy. Not that it didn't bring a million people into the street. But a fact like that is much too inconvenient for American papers. Liberation, yesterday, had the story (which has spilled into the French election, today -- Jospin accusing Chirac of being a French Berlusconi): Here's what it looks like in French : Contre le projet de r�forme gouvernemental de l'article 18 du statut des travailleurs, qui r�glemente les licenciements abusifs, plusieurs millions d'Italiens ont r�pondu hier � l'appel � la gr�ve g�n�rale lanc� par les syndicats. Selon les chiffres des trois grandes conf�d�rations italiennes (CGIL, CISL et UIL), plus de 13 millions de personnes on

Remora Hail Freedonia. The Washington Post piece on the failure to kill or capture Osama would make a nice script for a latter day Marx brothers film. You have the man directing the battle of Tora Bora from Tampa, Florida, no doubt operating on intelligence that Tampa was in imminent danger. You have Jethro Bodine as president. You have the escape of the Great Satan, Osama himself, from a redoubt of caves built in the 80s, no doubt with the aid of the always generous Freedonian Intelligence Agency. And you have an absence of suggestions as to where Satan flew to -- although perhaps we should check with our hundred percent ally in the war on terror, Pakistan, for that one: "Another change since Tora Bora, with no immediate prospect of finding bin Laden, is that President Bush has stopped proclaiming the goal of taking him "dead or alive" and now avoids previous references to the al Qaeda founder as public enemy number one. In an interview with The Washington

Remora King Gall According to the 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica, gall is a "secretion of the liver known as � bile,� the term being also used of the pear-shaped diverliculum of the bile-duct, which forms a reservoir for the bile, more generally known as the� gall-bladder �. From the extreme bitterness of the secretion, � gall,� like the Lat. fel, is used for anything extremely bitter, whether actually or metaphorically. From the idea that the gall-bladder was the dominating organ of a bitter, sharp temperament, �gall� was formerly used in English for such a spirit, and also for one very ready to resent injuries. It thus survives in American slang, with the meaning �impudence � or � assurance.�� The older use of gall -- to mean bitterness, not presumption -- is illustrated in this quote from Thoreau's letter on John Brown : "On the whole, my respect for my fellow-men, except as one may outweigh a million, is not being increased these days. I have noticed th

Remora "We are a humane army." "I have no party in this business, my dear Miss Palmer, but among a set of people, who have none of your lilies and roses in their faces; but who are the images of the great Pattern as well as you or I. I know what I am doing; whether the white people like it or not." -- Edmund Burke I've extracted this quote from a letter Edmund Burke wrote in defense of his prosecution of Warren Hastings to the painter Joshua Reynold's niece. She'd written Burke on behalf of a friend to ask him, politely, if he knew what he was doing. It's a nice example of the way pressure is exerted to destroy dissent -- you don't need a police force when there is a steady supply of Miss Palmers, generation after generation, to imply that, well, the dissenter is embarrassing himself among her sort. From the Guardian: The man in charge of the operation is Brigadier-General Eyal Shlein. Shlein, like Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, d