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Haute cuisine and extreme science collide at a Chicago restaurant:
A 20-course meal costs $240, but don’t expect lettuce in a Caesar salad.
“Please, eat this in one bite,” the server said.
It wasn’t tough to do. The bowl held a spoonful of green ice cream, with a solitary crouton on top and a dollop of dressing. Looking nervous, Dedes slipped the spoon into her mouth. The ice cream went down easily, coating her mouth with the fresh, crisp taste of romaine lettuce.
“That’s fantastic!” Dedes said. “What’s next?”
...Grant Achatz uses his Chicago kitchen-turned-laboratory at his restaurant Alinea to develop ways to capture concentrated flavors in gas form. For the virtual shrimp cocktail, diners at the recently opened restaurant are given a plastic atomizer and told to spritz their tongue to taste shrimp, horseradish and tomato-flavored air.
...In one corner, Cantu prepared a sauce for one of the evening’s desserts, a mixture of Mexican sweet potato and spiced chocolate.
Cantu gathered balloons to fill with the chocolate sauce. He inflated the balloons with nitrogen gas, then dropped them into the plastic foam container of liquid nitrogen. One by one, he carefully turned the balloons around and around in the liquid nitrogen, which froze the chocolate.
Indeed, throughout the entire history of the U.S. Senate, neither the minority-party members in that chamber nor senators of the party that did not occupy the White House had ever before engaged in such a coordinated, protracted filibustering campaign to frequently deny up-or-down votes for one judicial nominee after another. In fact, beyond the 10 appellate-court nominees who were actively filibustered in 2003 and 2004, it should further be noted that Democrats almost certainly would have filibustered additional circuit-court nominees—including Terrence Boyle, Brett Kavanaugh and Thomas Griffith—had they moved from the Judiciary Committee to the floor last year.
To underline the importance of this:
Today begins the fifth year of waiting for confirmation for some of President Bush’s nominees to the federal courts of appeals.
Condi Rice Quotes Instapundit.
French Schools Lurch Toward Islamization:
France’s educational system appears headed towards meltdown. An article by Olivier Guitta in the May 9th Weekly Standard reports that a leaked study conducted between October 2003 and May 2004 under the auspices of France’s inspector-general of education, Jean Pierre Obin, describes an educational system that is cracking under the strain of a growing, non-assimilating Muslim population.
Orbin sent ten inspectors to examine 61 schools in 24 school departments, most of which were located in ethnically segregated neighborhoods. The inspectors found two consistencies in these schools: an increase in Muslim religious expression and an across-the-board denial, from classroom to regional administration, that the incursion of Islam into the classroom is creating serious problems for students.
Orbin found that Muslim students regularly boycott classes that concern Voltaire, Rousseau and Moliere, whom the students accuse of being anti-Islamic. The students also protest the Crusades and frequently deny the Holocaust. Orbin’s report cites Muslim students’ refusal to use the “plus” sign in mathematics because it looks like a crucifix; Muslims boycotting class trips to churches, cathedrals and monasteries; and forcing wholesale changes in school lunch fare to accommodate their religious and cultural practices. The report mentions a teacher who keeps a copy of the Koran on her desk for reference when controversial historical issues arise. Obin’s investigators also found that most Muslim students refuse to participate in sports such as swimming, “the girls out of modesty, the boys because they do not want to swim in girls’ water or non-Muslim water.”
...Predictably, the biggest losers in the schools where Islam has made inroads, are women. Female students are intimidated by young Muslim men assuming the role of religious police who forbid them to play sports, wear skirts or makeup and force them to wear traditional Muslim headscarves, even though official French policy forbids the wearing of headscarves in public schools.
Interestingly enough, the investigators found that the schools most effective in dealing with the problem of Islamization were the ones that completely refused to tolerate it. Because of this finding, the Obin report recommends a policy of “no compromise with Islamist demands.”
That is exactly what will happen in this country if we don’t work hard to put an end to non-assimilation of Muslim immigrants to the U.S.
From NRO:
[Several judicial nominees are] known as “noncontroversial” nominees, meaning Democrats have not raised any substantive objections to them but are blocking them en masse in large part because Levin remains angry that his cousin’s wife, Helene White, who was nominated to the bench by Bill Clinton, was not confirmed by the Republican Senate. In addition, Reid offered to allow an up-or-down vote on one of President Bush’s “controversial” nominees like Priscilla Owen or Janice Rogers Brown. Frist rejected that offer, saying that all nominees deserve an up-or-down vote.
Aren’t the Dems always claiming that Conservatives are playing politics with an issue?
Historical records indicate that there was once a time when the comic strip Doonesbury was funny. Comments on the current status of the strip are here.
The views expressed by military author and analyst, retired retired Air Force Lt. Gen. McInerney would, if correct, be very good news. From the Washington Times:
The war in Iraq is increasingly looking more like a showdown with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda followers than a battle primarily against Saddam Hussein loyalists.
...”In the Muslim world and extremist world, this fight for Iraq is their key battle,” said Gen. McInerney. “If they lose it, they lose the war. And so the imams are inciting young people, not particular well-educated, to head to Iraq. Most are going through Syria via Damascus.
“This is why Iraq is such a fundamental part of the global war on terrorism. When we finally defeat Muslim extremists, it will be the battle in Iraq that defeats them.”
...Since the January elections of the new Iraqi parliament, Zarqawi’s suicide terrorists have unleashed more than 100 car bombings, killing hundreds.
On the plus side for the U.S., it is receiving a record number of intelligence tips from Iraqis that have resulted in scores of captures of Zarqawi’s terrorists.
It appears to me that the terrorists will eventually lose in Iraq. For that to mean the end of Al Qaeda as well, seems perhaps too good to be true.
However, it does support one of the reasons I cited in support of the war in Iraq:
The terrorists are tied up attacking our army there, rather than our civilians here.
A professor, Sami Al-Arian, is accused of supporting a terrorist organization. His attorneys wanted to “explain” his actions to the jury by presenting their views on the mideast. In other words, they wanted to argue that it was okay for Al-Arian to help terrorists kill civilians.
Judge Bars Discussion of Mideast Conflict
TAMPA, Fla. —Attorneys for a former college professor accused of raising money for a Palestinian terrorist group may not introduce the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as part of their defense at his upcoming trial, a judge ruled Tuesday.
Sami Al-Arian, 47, and three other men face a 53-count indictment charging them with support of a foreign terrorist organization, racketeering, conspiracy and extortion. They face life in prison if convicted.
Attorneys for the former University of South Florida professor had argued that jurors must understand the 50-year conflict to put Al-Arian’s public statements and some of his activities into context.
By refusing to permit this approach, the judge has shown that no excuse for the murder of civilians will be acceptable.
This is very good. The whole world has to move in this direction.
From FrontPage:
...just after the Islamic terrorist attacks of 9/11, the CAIR website contained a section entitled, “What you can do for the victims of the WTC and Pentagon attacks,” which solicited contributions to the “NY/DC Emergency Relief Fund.” The only problem was, this so-called “Relief Fund” never existed. The link provided by CAIR led the would-be contributor directly to the Holy Land Foundation website. The Holy Land Foundation, a government-designated terrorist front group, was also shut down by the U.S. government for funding terrorism overseas. The trial of its leadership is scheduled to begin next year.
It makes you wonder if CAIR could solicit money for 9-11 victims, receive it, and send it to terrorist groups.
The U.S. army is responding to the recent wave of suicide bombings in Iraq.
As many as 100 terrorists were killed in the first 48 hours of the offensive, which began late Saturday night, as U.S. troops cleared villages along the meandering Euphrates River, then crossed in rafts and on a pontoon bridge, the U.S. command said.
In one battle in Obeidi, an Iraqi town near the Syrian border, foreign fighters laid down in a narrow crawl space under a one-story house and fired their machine guns up through the concrete floor, according to a Washington Post journalist embedded with the U.S. Marines.
...”They came here to die,” it quoted Sgt. Chuck Hurley, one of the U.S. soldiers, as saying. “They were willing to stay in place and die with no hope. All they wanted was to take us with them.”
