Our residence in Stockholm was a hotel/boat, moored in the downtown tourist area. This is the masthead that guarded the entrance.

The hotel boat worked better as a concept than as an actual living place. We booked late, so we got smaller rooms, with bunk beds and permanently closed windows. I got the top bunk, and it was a little stuffy. If you do book these rooms, call early.

During our first (jet-lagged) night, we wandered around town.

The oddest thing we found was an American food store, with exotica like corn muffins and Doritos.

This may be a popular spot for expat American students. When I was in Germany, I would have paid lots for the rare pleasure of spiced corn chips.

The next day we took a long boat tour of Stockholm's archipelago, a place I wouldn’t have even known about if I hadn’t read Celia Farber’s post here. Thanks Celia.

The archipelago is a beautiful and fairly unspoiled vacation spot. Sailing a big or little boat is one of the most popular things to do there. The swimming was nice, not much colder than a lake in Maine.

We didn’t visit Celia’s favorite island, Runmaro, but we did get a chance to see the very remote and beautiful Bullero.

(one cool fact – Bullero is renewable-energy powered)

Our guide told us about how Peter the Great destroyed an ongoing "peace process" by burning down homes in the archipelago back in the early 1700's. If we hadn’t already heard about the horrors of Swedish imperialism from the Finns and the Russians, we might have believed her. (Did they even have peace processes in those days?)

The next day we searched for, and found, lots of clothes that fit tall women. We also visited the Modern Art Museum, and found a disappointing display of ‘art’ done by performance artist Paul McCarthy. It was so full of pornographic images that it was 'not recommended for children'. It was also unsuitable for adults. Creating props for porn shows must be this guy’s day job, and he should not quit it. Like most performance artists, he's obsessed with pop images and fecal matter, projecting his personal faults and obsessions onto the whole of western civilization. It's hard to be both disgusting and dully predictable, but McCarthy manages to do it.

The artists of our generation are so obsessed with shocking and/or horrifying the public, so obsessed with the past and the present, they never consider the future. Do they want museumgoers in 2050 to think that, say, McCarthy’s Spaghetti Man, a rabbit in a boy’s body with a 12-metre long, soft rubber penis that lies in coils on the floor, represents man’s hopes and dreams at the turn of the millennium? Do we want our descendants to think that this..

.. represents us?

While the artwork at the Museum was disappointing, the architecture displays were not. Like the Finns, the Swedes excel at design, at making modernism livable. I wonder if this focus on design, plus the influence of performance art, is making traditional forms of art irrelevant.

We only spent two days in Stockholm, and I wish we'd stayed longer. The food was better than I expected (but then again, I love pickled herring). The people were friendly - not the 'Germans without a sense of humor' our Danish friends had told us about. However, prices were very high. Next time, we'll stay as long as we can afford to.

We were staying in a B and B with access to more than 1 station yesterday morning, so we decided to check the news on the BBC.

Bad idea. According to the BBC "World News" report the top story of the day was a major, major cricket row. Apparently, Pakistan was accused of cheating, Britons were outraged, Pakistan was humiliated (they didn't show up for the post-tea match!) and the BBC put this at the top of their list of world news events. At least 3 announcers debated the results of this international incident.

Riding through Dublin today, we asked the taxi driver (always the best source of news) about the results of the cricket row.

"Cricket?" he said "Haven't heard about it, can't stand the game. I'd rather watch paint peel than see a cricket match".

Taxi driver 1, BBC World News 0

We spent our first few days abroad in Stockholm, sleeping in a boat/hotel. The weather was mostly sunny, the wine was light but nice and there was all the pickled herring you could eat. I love pickled herring (yes, it's an aquired taste). Swedes are a lot friendlier than they appear to be in the Bergman movies.

We were somewhere over the Atlantic when the terror scare gripped Britain, and we landed in Dublin airport, not Heathrow, so we missed the bag checks/liquid prohibitions. We'll see how the return trip goes. So far, the greatest danger has been learning to drive on the other side of the road. It's comparable to driving at high speeds, backwards. Any drive that we can walk away from is a good drive.

We're off to Ireland for a couple of weeks, so I'll be posting from the road..

Here are a few fun travelling blogs..

A chick and a pilot who just finished her flight-instructor training; like some people I know (congratulations Kyle)

My Diving Life, a collection of diving blogs, around the world, for my daughter, a chick and a diver.

Where in the Hell is Matt - Matt is from Connecticut, he travels around the world, he dances..and he doesn't like Thailand? strange fellow.

If you thought guns were completely forbidden in New York City, you'd be wrong. There is a genuine pistol/gun range, the West Side Pistol Range in the Flatiron district, at 20 West 20th street. Yesterday, a few members of our Liberal Hawks group visited and learned how to load and shoot.

Alcibiades first suggested it, and she and fellow LH Steve arrived in time for our 'New to Shooting' class. Like most New Yorkers, our experience with guns and target practice was limited to arcade games, water pistols and, in my case, darts.

If you're not a cop or in some such related field in the city you probably don't have a permit, and the only gun you can fire at the range is a beginner's rifle, a .22. Before you can shoot that, you need to learn how it's done, through an NRA certified instructor.

The basement range looked like something out of Hill Street Blues, kind of city/gritty. Our teacher, John, was used to dealing with novices. He patiently explained the mechanics of guns "this is a magazine, this is how the safety works", etc. We learned the three rules of gun safety:

1. ALWAYS keep the gun pointed in a safe direction.

2. ALWAYS keep your finger off the trigger until ready to shoot.

3. ALWAYS keep the gun unloaded until ready to use.

The fun comes from taking aim and hitting the thing you're aiming at. It was a lot like darts, with a lot more noise and less (actually, no) drinking. Safety glasses and protective headphones were essential. When you fire the rifle, hot shells pop out and land in unexpected places. Alcibiades and I were enjoying it so much we bought another box of bullets, but Steve was happy with one round, so he headed home.

I guess we should have celebrated our newfound macho prowess with beers and some steak, but the first place we found, Punch, offered delicate wines and a wide selection of light salads. We were back to being blue staters, and the tuna was delicious.

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A young Dutch architect has created a floating bed which hovers above the ground through magnetic force and comes with a price tag of 1.2 million euros ($1.54 million).

Janjaap Ruijssenaars took inspiration for the bed — a sleek black platform, which took six years to develop and can double as a dining table or a plinth — from the mysterious monolith in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 cult film "2001: A Space Odyssey."

Instapundit on Dive Tech

I don't want to give away the article, but although I found the rebreather dive interesting — you don't make bubbles, which means fish are less scared of you, and you can stay down for three or four hours — I don't think I'm ready to take the, er, plunge and do the full certification course. But from comparing the unit I used (two years old) to one of the newest cutting-edge units, I can say that the technology in this area is on a steep learning curve, and that might well make it a lot easier, safer and more user-friendly in the near future. Right now, the need to continuously monitor your oxygen levels via triply-redundant analyzers (one of which had to be replaced during the gear-up because it wasn't working right — see the gauges strapped to my arm in the photo below), and a variety of other necessary tasks makes this more trouble than I'm really willing to go to, especially with the cost of equipment running around ten grand. Happily, lots of tech-diving enthusiasts are driving the market here, and that should fix things.

French author and philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy Ponders the War in Israel and Lebanon.

The problem, she explains, is not just the people killed: Israel is used to that. It’s not even the fact that here the enemy is aiming not at military objectives but deliberately at civilian targets — that, too, is no surprise. No, the problem, the real one, is that these incoming rockets make us see what will happen on the day — not necessarily far off — when the rockets are ones with new capabilities: first, they will become more accurate and be able to threaten, for example, the petrochemical facilities you see there, on the harbor, down below; second, they may come equipped with chemical weapons that can create a desolation compared with which Chernobyl and Sept. 11 together will seem like a mild prelude. For that, in fact, is the situation. As seen from Haifa, this is what is at stake in the operation in southern Lebanon. Israel did not go to war because its borders had been violated. It did not send its planes over southern Lebanon for the pleasure of punishing a country that permitted Hezbollah to construct its state-within-a-state. It reacted with such vigor because the Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s call for Israel to be wiped off the map and his drive for a nuclear weapon came simultaneously with the provocations of Hamas and Hezbollah. The conjunction, for the first time, of a clearly annihilating will with the weapons to go with it created a new situation. We should listen to the Israelis when they tell us they had no other choice anymore...

The Bush Administration hadn’t publicly raised the possibility of invading Iraq, but in August, 2002, seven months before the war started, Cheney warned that Saddam would be able to seize control of the world’s economic lifeline if he acquired weapons of mass destruction: “Armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror, and seated atop ten per cent of the world’s oil reserves, Saddam Hussein could then be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of a great portion of the world’s energy supplies, directly threaten America’s friends throughout the region, and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail.”

We're seeing the results of our "headless chicken" strategy now. Our Wahhabi allies were pretty good at fooling our government, pretty bad at winning the respect of Muslims. Ahmadinejad and his ilk are ascendant, making the dream of stability in the Middle East less possible every day.

Maybe it always was an impossible dream. Sometimes, a perfect storm of events causes a region, and the majority of a population, to demand war. It happened in Europe during the early half of the last century. It happened in America during the civil war. That's what seems to be happening in the Middle East now. How can we inflict peace on a region when people don't seem to want it? As one Egyptian blogger said:

..we- the majority of us anyway- don't want peace with Israel, and are not interested in any real dialogue with them. We weren't then and we are not now. The Entire peace process has always been about getting the land back, not establishing better relations. Even when we do get the land back, it's not enough. People in Egypt lament daily the Camp David treaty that prevents us from fighting. In Gaza they never stopped trying to attack Israel. In Lebanon Hezbollah continued attacking even after the Israeli withdrawel. And the people- the majority of the arab population- support it. Very few of us are really interested in having any lasting Peace or co-existance. I mean, if our left is asking for war, what do you think the rest of the population is thinking?

I think that the Israeli want peace with us because they don't want their lives disrupted. They don't want to have the IDF soldiers fighting in Gaza, rockets coming into their towns from Hamas or having to go to wars against Hezbollah to get their soldiers back. I think they want peace because they want their peace of mind. They view us as if we were a headache. We view them as if they are a cancer.

...Up north again, near the Lebanese border, I travel from Avivim to Manara, where the Israelis have set up, in a crater 200 yards in diameter, an artillery field where two enormous batteries mounted on caterpillar treads bombard the command post and rocket launchers and arsenals in Marun al-Ras on the other side of the border. Three things here strike me. First, the extreme youth of the artillerymen: they are 20 years old, maybe 18. I notice their stunned look at each discharge, as if every time were the first time; their childlike teasing when their comrade hasn’t had time to block his ears and the detonation deafens him; and then at the same time their serious, earnest side, the sobriety of people who know they’re participating in an immense drama that surpasses them — and know, too, they may soon pay a steep price in blood and life. Second, I note the relaxed — I was about to say unrestrained and even carefree — aspect of the little troop. It reminds me of reading about the joyful scramble of those battalions of young republicans in Spain described, once again, by Malraux: an army that is more friendly than it is martial; more democratic than self-assured and dominating; an army that, here, in any case, in Manara, seems to me the exact opposite of those battalions of brutes or unprincipled pitiless terminators that are so often described in media portraits of Israel...

cool tech..

A bad idea from Chris Matthews: move the UN to the World Trade Center, so "if they hit us again, they're hitting everybody."

Let's ignore, for the moment, the fact that hitting people who live in a city where English is rarely the primary language is already "hitting everyone". Let's also ignore the fact that most New Yorkers would love to see the old UN building made into condos - a condo association where residents pay for the privilege of being there; where they also pay for their parking tickets.

Karol of Alarming News says:

I don't even want the UN in the same city, let alone on that site. Jayzussssss, way to work me up on a Wednesday afternoon, Chris Matthews, way to work me up.

If there is to be a UN, it should be in the world's greatest nation, the US of A. But why have it in New York? We need to have it in a real American city like Des Moines or Birmingham or Boise. That way we can ask the UN delegates if they are saved, what they think the Bronocos will do this year, if they think the Commodore gets it in the next Pirates film and make them spend Friday nights at Chili's and Walmart as opposed to tawdry Upper East Side restuarants and Lincoln Center. They'll either be thrown into the cement mixer and become more pro-America or never want to spend time at the UN. Either way, we win!

Way to solve a lot of problems at once.

By pointing guns at them. Tony Badran of Across the Bay and Caveman explain:

Update: In the interests of clarity, let me reiterate what I have already said: Hizbullah attempted to enter Mari not to defend it from attackers, but so they could fire rockets from the village toward Israel. Hizbullah's intention was to bring Israeli reprisals on the town, ostensibly to destroy or damage it significantly, and to cause greater civilian suffering. Hizbullah's MO and tactics are well-known in the south. However, Druse typically defend their own villages, and in the case of Mari (a place I have been to several times, many of whose residents I know personally), the residents have desperately tried to keep Hizbullah fighters out of their area.

Several suspected spies were shot dead in the southern Lebanese port of Tyre, witness said on Thursday.

Passengers on board an evacuation ship told medical doctor Boris Buck from the German city of Munich that they had seen members of the Lebanese Shi'ite Hezbollah group or their sympathisers killing 18 Lebanese people during the night.

The victims were suspected of helping the Israeli air force pick out targets.

As a frequent visitor to Ireland during the time of the 'troubles', I saw two ways that terrorists win support among the population. There's the traditional headshot or kneecapping, or there's the kinder, gentler appeal of street cred by association. Supporting or pretending to have connections with terrorist thugs gives life's omnipresent losers a way to feel like tough guys. These losers blindly cheer on their terrorist team, despite the fact that their team will eventually destroy their society. [See the Palestinians]. Of societies based on terrorism, Andre Glucksman says:

"…what do extremist ideologies like the communism or Nazism of yesteryear and the Islamism of today have in common? After all, they support ostensibly very different ideals – the superior race, mankind united in socialism, the community of Muslim believers (the Umma). Tomorrow, it could be altogether different ideals: some theological, some scientific, others racist. But the common characteristic is nihilism."

The root element is the attitude that anything goes, particularly when with regard to ordinary people: I can do whatever I want, without scruples. Goehring put it like this: my consciousness is Adolf Hitler. Bolsheviks said: man is made of iron. And the Islamists whom I visited in Algeria said that you have the right to kill little Muslim children, in order to save them."

Human civilization survives because most people are able to suppress their appetite for extreme, random violence (or belligerent hubris)

The Palestinians are among the most well-educated people in the Arab world, yet they can't survive without constant infusions of aid. They produce mostly hate and violence. Their society doesn't function. Terrorism can't physically destroy an entire society, but the Palestinians are proof that tolerating this hubris can ruin it all the same.

In related news, the New Republic reports on Nasrallah's cult of personality.

In his NY Times op-ed, Switched Off in Basra, Steven Vincent described how fear of appearing to be 'occupiers' allowed the British to make a mess of Basra.

"No one trusts the police," one Iraqi journalist told me. "If our new ayatollahs snap their fingers, thousands of police will jump." Mufeed al-Mushashaee, the leader of a liberal political organization called the Shabanea Rebellion, told me that he felt that "the entire force should be dissolved and replaced with people educated in human rights and democracy."

Unfortunately, this is precisely what the British aren't doing. Fearing to appear like colonial occupiers, they avoid any hint of ideological indoctrination: in my time with them, not once did I see an instructor explain such basics of democracy as the politically neutral role of the police in a civil society. Nor did I see anyone question the alarming number of religious posters on the walls of Basran police stations. When I asked British troops if the security sector reform strategy included measures to encourage cadets to identify with the national government rather than their neighborhood mosque, I received polite shrugs: not our job, mate.

The results are apparent. At the city's university, for example, self-appointed monitors patrol the campuses, ensuring that women's attire and makeup are properly Islamic. "I'd like to throw them off the grounds, but who will do it?" a university administrator asked me. "Most of our police belong to the same religious parties as the monitors."

In this moving tribute, Nick Gillespie described how Vincent's work transcended ideology:

Although he was an unapologetic and ardent supporter of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, he was never an uncritical one. His reporting transcended ideology, which is no small feat. In reality, that's a goddamned lonely place to be, out there way beyond the easy comfort of ideological certitude. It's a place bereft not of hope but of delusion, which is one of the reasons most of us filter the world, especially its darkest corners, through a soft-focus ideological lens. It lets us obscure and ignore all that we don't want to face. Steven's work didn't do that. He had in his mind, doubtless, a vision of the world, and of the Iraq, that he wanted to see become reality, but it didn't keep him from reporting on the misshapen horrors unfolding now in Baghdad, Basra, and beyond.

For journalists, his murder forces us to wonder what stories are worth dying for. His murder is somehow simultaneously an inspiration to us and a cautionary tale, a standing challenge and a tragic example to avoid. Will history vindicate his hopes for Iraq and the wider Middle East? The truthful answer is almost too horrific to admit: We won't know for a long time to come. In the meantime, we can only hope that his blood, and the blood of all the other innocent dead in Iraq, won't just disappear into the desert sand.

Mitchell Muncy posting on Vincent's Blog In the Red Zone, says

According to Aidan White, general secretary of the IFJ, “In more than 90 per cent of all cases there are few serious investigations by the authorities and only a handful of the killers are ever brought to trial. A combination of police corruption, judicial incompetence and political indifference has created a culture of neglect and indifference which makes every day hunting season for attacks on media staff.”

Writing on his blog Wednesday while reporting from southern Lebanon, freelance journalist and Time magazine contributor Christopher Allbritton, in what almost looked to be a throw-away line, relayed that "To the south, along the curve of the coast, Hezbollah is launching Katyushas, but I'm loathe to say too much about them. The Party of God has a copy of every journalist's passport, and they've already hassled a number of us and threatened one."...

..Just as disturbing, and so far flying under the radar, is Allbritton's report that Hezbollah has copies of reporters' passports, and may be using that as leverage over them. This in no way means that reporters are being swayed by the terrorist group, but it does bring the question of intimidation, and journalists' ability to report freely, into focus.

When Hezbollah says "We know where you live," it makes an impression that is hard to forget. Hezbollah, after all, famously kidnapped American journalist Terry Anderson in 1985 and held him for more than six years. It also kidnapped British journalist John McCarthy, Colorado State University Professor Tom Sutherland and some others. The U.S. accused Hezbollah of killing 241 Marines and sailors with a truck bomb that destroyed the Marines barracks in Beirut in 1983, although technically that was an act of guerrilla warfare rather than terrorism.

"I meant we know who you are." He sounded anything but convincing.

"You said you know where I live."

"I did not say that. I did not say that. If I did say that, I was just stressed out."

He didn’t know what he said.

"If I said that, yes, it would have been a threat," he added. At least he didn’t try to say "We know where you live" meant he wanted to send me a Christmas card.

"Honest to God," he said, "it is against our principles to threaten people."

We can get truthful reports from the almost irrationally brave, like Vincent, Michael Yon, Totten and Allbritton, but the unbiased view of the average reporter is also important. If our government made more of an effort to protect journalists, if the deaths of journalists were vigourously investigated and prosecuted, if we actually respected our laws and prosecuted those who make death threats, could America win the hearts and minds of the mass media? If we showed the average CNN journalist that we care about his/her life, would they return the favor by caring about ours? Could our reaction to deaths like Steven Vincent's be a cautionary tale for potential perpetrators, rather than for potential victims?

It couldn't hurt to try.

M. Simon offers more on strategy:

The Arab world is rising up behind behind Hizbollah. The Egyptians lost the Six Day War and here Hizbollah has been fighting for over two weeks and is still in the field. A moral victory if not a real one.

So there is the civilian morale factors. There are of course others which I intend to ignore for purposes of this analysis.

Next I'd like to state Israel's maximum war aims, followed by how the war in Lebanon started and evolved. What is the desired outcome for Israel? The defeat of Hizbollah, Syria, and Iran.How do you do that? Pin the Hizbollah. Take the Bekaa resupply area. Syria gets involved out of popular desire, and because the Bekaa Valley is on the Syrian border. Iran comes in to support Syria. America takes out Iran.

So those are the goals and grand strategy. What strategy and tactics are required to achieve those goals?

The first part of the strategy was to give Hizbollah 24 hours to respond to Israeli demands to return its soldiers or else. With no response Israel crossed the border but didn't get far. Raids. Reconisance in force. Day after day. Occasionally new troops are called up. Stupid Olmert insist that they be used to relieve front line troops. They rotate in and out of what amounts to a live fire exercise. Hizbollah is being attrited but no ground is being gained. The Israeli Army and government is looking more and more incompetent by the day. Israel defeated five armies in the Six Day War. It is now going on two weeks plus and 5,000 Hezbollah fighters are holding the mighty Israeli Army within a few miles of the border. The front is static. The hizzies are winning. This is no Six Day War. The Israeli forces are checked by what appears to be a force barely adequate to hold them for a day let alone several weeks. Things are not going well. Not going well at all. The Arab street is convinced of the ineptness Israeli generalship. The civilians in goverment from Olmert on down are giving the military bad advice. Who put those galoots in charge? The thing that is fooling most people is that Olmert, Peretz, and the rest look and sound like nebbishes. And they are mostly Labor. Not known for their warrior spirit. All the better. And all the reporting about cabinet meetings saying there is dissention in the cabinent and they are holding the troops back.

That is almost all deception. Its purpose is to entice Syria and Iran. If that doesn't work secondary pressure can be brought from an inflamed Arab street. And the Arab street is on fire. So much so that Saudi Arabia has been forced to change its "official position" on the war. And the troop rotations? Well when the big push comes you will have a lot of very well and recently trained troops to lead the way and teach others. Reducing casualties.

In any case Hizbollah is pinned. Its forces reduced and the axis of advance to the Bekka Valley has had the chance and intensity of flank attacks reduced.

This is what is called preparing the battlefield. Such artistry hasn't been seen since WW2.These folks will go down as some of the greatest warriors in this century or any other. The only thing that could hurt this plan is lack of time.

Let's see if they can do that....