Hmmm… Slightly uncomfortable reading.

I’ve just come across a lovely New Yorker cartoon by Alex Gregory.

One dog is saying to another: “I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking”.

Good to see that the crisis in Pakistan is occupying candidates for the Republican nomination for President. Mike Huckabee, for example, sees Pakistan as a reason for a border fence.

DES MOINES — Mike Huckabee used the volatile situation in Pakistan Friday to make an argument for building a fence on the American border with Mexico and found himself trying to explain a series of remarks about Pakistanis and their nation.

On Thursday night he told reporters in Orlando, Fla.: “We ought to have an immediate, very clear monitoring of our borders and particularly to make sure if there’s any unusual activity of Pakistanis coming into the country.”

On Friday, in Pella, Iowa, he expanded on those remarks.

“When I say single them out I am making the observation that we have more Pakistani illegals coming across our border than all other nationalities except those immediately south of the border,” he told reporters in Pella. “And in light of what is happening in Pakistan it ought to give us pause as to why are so many illegals coming across these borders.”

Fact: according to the Department of Homeland Security, far more illegal immigrants come from the Philippines, Korea, China and Vietnam.

Huckabee’s first response to the assassination, btw, was to express “our sincere concern and apologies for what has happened in Pakistan.”

Sombre New York Times assessment of the implications of Benazir Bhutto’s murder.

The assassination highlighted, in spectacular fashion, the failure of two of President Bush’s main objectives in the region: his quest to bring democracy to the Muslim world, and his drive to force out the Islamist militants who have hung on tenaciously in Pakistan, the nuclear-armed state considered ground zero in President Bush’s fight against terrorism, despite the administration’s long-running effort to root out Al Qaeda from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

The assassination has brutally highlighted the inability of the United States, despite its wealth and power, to manipulate the internal political affairs of a small but complex society.

“We are a player in the Pakistani political system,” said Wendy Chamberlin, a former United States ambassador to Pakistan, adding that as such, the United States was partly to blame for Mr. Musharraf’s dip in popularity. But, she added: “This is Pakistan. And Pakistan is a very dangerous and violent place.”

There’s a lovely quote later in the piece, referring to the US policy of trying to force an alliance between Musharraf and Bhutto as a way of pushing the former onto a ‘democratic’ path. Trying to get them to work together was, one Bush official acknowledged, “like putting two pythons in the same cage”.

So, now we’re one python down, and one to go. I can’t see Musharraf containing the crisis. Which means another military coup. What’s astonishing about the Bush administration is that it never seems to have a Plan B.

Stuart Jeffries has a nice piece about the public spat between Ted Honderich and Colin McGinn.

The feud is escalating into philosophy’s equivalent of a prize fight between two former colleagues who are both among the showiest brawlers in the philosophy dojo. In one corner is McGinn, 57, West Hartlepool-born professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, and the self-styled hard man of philosophy book reviewing. In the other corner is Honderich, 74, Ontario-born Grote Professor Emeritus of the philosophy of mind and logic at University College London, and a man once described by fellow philosopher Roger Scruton as the “thinking man’s unthinking man”. They are using all the modern weapons at their disposal – blogs, emails, demands for compensation from the academic journal that published the original review, an online counter-review, and an online counter-counter-review…

Walking down Magdalene Street this evening I was depressed to find that one of my favourite establishments — a lovely secondhand bookshop — had gone. I guess its lease was up and the landlord (Magdalene College in all probability) proposed a whopping increase. This is why Cambridge is increasingly being denuded of ‘real’ shops and is now crammed with the kind of ludicrous boutiques which are the only enterprises that can pay the exorbitant rents demanded by the colleges.

Giles Smith has been on the road again…

It’s a week since the new Lotus Europa S left me and I still bear the bruises. Specifically, I bear a bruise the size of a hubcap in the triceps area of my right arm – the legacy of my repeated attempts to get out of the car while retaining at least some degree of dignity.

It’s low, you see, the Europa S. Low and thin. You don’t so much climb into it as pull it on, the way you might pull on a pair of trousers or a sleeping bag. And once you’re in there, you are, technically, lying in the middle of the road, separated from the Tarmac by some leather upholstery, a sheet of metal and approximately two and a half centimetres of clear air.

The thing is to choose your location before exiting.

A crowded high street, for instance, may not be the best place to discover the full range of physical exertion involved. And if, at any point, both your palms are flat down on the pavement of that high street, with your legs still somewhere back in the car, as mine were in those tentative, trial stages, then you could end up wishing you had taken some private instruction first.

My advice: lean hard against the door-jamb. The catch will bruise your arm, but it will give you all the support you need. And take it one limb at a time. Another thing to master: a mock casual facial expression for use at the completion of the manoeuvre. It helps to mask the embarrassment and the pain.

And all because he wanted to drive “what is, in essence, a rocket-powered biscuit tin.”

That boy can write.