Posted 4/27/2002 10:53:31 PM by Edward Driscoll
YUCK! Found on The Corner on National Review Online:

Today's Financial Times reminds readers that Japanese marathon runner (and Olympic gold medallist) Naoko Takahashi uses an energy drink made from the stomach secretions of the larvae of giant hornets. Suddenly I feel a lot better about my Diet Coke habit.

Me too!

Posted 4/27/2002 10:50:59 PM by Edward Driscoll
SPEAKING OF M*A*S*H, although in this case, the TV series, not Altman's movie, Group Captain Mandrake says that the cast of M.A.S.H. are getting together for a two-hour reunion episode, to be aired in the US on May 17th.

Posted 4/27/2002 10:29:48 PM by Edward Driscoll
GOSFORD PARK: My wife and a friend of ours and I saw Robert Altman's latest film, Gosford Park today. She liked it, I wasn't as crazy about it, but it was a reasonably pleasant couple of hours. The film, set in 1932, is nominally about a Hollywood producer and (English acting legend) Ivor Norvello, a spending a country weekend with a cast of snobs and servants almost all of whom are straight out of central casting. Very good writing but, what's odd for an Altman film is how embalmed everyone seems to be. Altman takes a staggering assortment of British talent (Kristin Scott Thomas, Maggie Smith, Helen Mirren, Derek Jacobi, etc.) and pretty much wastes their acting skills buy having everyone underplay their parts so much that they seem underwater--their movements and gestures are that slow. This would have been a much more enjoyable film had it been made by Hollywood in the 1930s or 40s, with say, Cary Grant, David Niven, Leslie Howard, and other British actors being directed with some energy and speed by Michael Curtiz. Of course, I'm probably biased. I listened to Altman's incredible whining about America on his M*A*S*H DVD commentary, and read James Bowman's review of Gosford Park:

I reckon that it has been at least 40 years since an aristocrat of the silver screen has been anything but a thorough rotter and a cad. You have only to call a character Lord something- or-other and your audience knows immediately what to think of him. Why don’t we get bored with this? Once again, it is a mystery. But one possible explanation is that we need the myth of the wicked upper classes to confirm us in our taste for vulgarity and sloppiness. If we thought that manners and what they used to call “breeding” were anything but a cover for the basest kind of behavior, we might have to cultivate them ourselves once again instead of letting it all hang out.

Posted 4/27/2002 10:46:40 AM by Edward Driscoll
MEN ONLY NEED APPLY: The Dallas Morning News (by way of Matt Drudge) is reporting that representatives of Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah "asked that women be barred from air traffic control duties when he traveled Thursday to Central Texas for a summit with President Bush, several Texas aviation officials say." As Rod Dreher says on National Review's "The Corner" Web log, "The Saudis and the US Government deny it, but angry ATCs are saying it's true. Whom do you believe? Why do we abase ourselves before the Saudis like this?"

Posted 4/26/2002 01:01:24 PM by Edward Driscoll
KRAUTHAMMER ON EUROPEAN ANTI-SEMITISM:

In Europe, it is not very safe to be a Jew. How could this be? The explanation is not that difficult to find. What we are seeing is pent-up anti-Semitism, the release -- with Israel as the trigger -- of a millennium-old urge that powerfully infected and shaped European history. What is odd is not the anti-Semitism of today but its relative absence during the past half-century. That was the historical anomaly. Holocaust shame kept the demon corked for that half-century. But now the atonement is passed. The genie is out again. This time, however, it is more sophisticated. It is not a blanket hatred of Jews. Jews can be tolerated, even accepted, but they must know their place. Jews are fine so long as they are powerless, passive and picturesque. What is intolerable is Jewish assertiveness, the Jewish refusal to accept victimhood. And nothing so embodies that as the Jewish state. What so offends Europeans is the armed Jew, the Jew who refuses to sustain seven suicide bombings in the seven days of Passover and strikes back. That Jew has been demonized in the European press as never before since, well . . . since the '30s. The liberal Italian daily La Stampa ran a cartoon of the baby Jesus, besieged by Israeli tanks, saying, "Don't tell me they want to kill me again." Again. And this time the Christ-killers come in tanks. Just when Europe had reconciled itself to tolerance for the passive Jew -- the Holocaust survivor who could be pitied, lionized, perhaps awarded the occasional literary prize -- along comes the Jewish state, crude and vital and above all unwilling to apologize for its own existence.

Read the whole thing--and don't miss the last two paragraphs.

Posted 4/26/2002 12:49:25 PM by Edward Driscoll
A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS? Orrin Judd runs the numbers.

Posted 4/26/2002 11:12:43 AM by Edward Driscoll
NRO ON THE SCORPION KING, the latest "prequel" to The Mummy movies:

In terms of physical acting, The Scorpion King is roughly what Raiders of the Lost Ark would have been like if Indiana Jones had been played by Lou Ferrigno instead of Harrison Ford. This problem is made worse by director Chuck Russell, who is merely the latest action-movie director to have no idea how to stage action. He zeroes in so closely on his combatants it's like watching headless, armless, legless torsos battle it out. Along with The Rock, Michael Clarke Duncan, the gigantic basso profundo from The Green Mile, appears as Balthazar, a "Nubian" warrior who joins forces with Mathayus against the tyrant Memnon. (Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that they're battling the tyrant Memnon, played by Stephen Brand, who has killed Mathayus's brother and who uses an enslaved sorceress to help him conquer his rivals. That's pretty much the story.) Duncan fares even less well than The Rock. The Nubian's huge face is supposed to be riven with ceremonial warrior scars, but it just looks like several fat pieces of pasta al dente got stuck to his cheeks and forehead during last night's sloppy bacchanal. And in one combat scene, he crashes through a wall wearing a clownish grimace that wouldn't have been out of place in some jungle movie from the 1950s. If he had then grunted "Ooga Booga," I wouldn't have been surprised.

Posted 4/26/2002 10:36:43 AM by Edward Driscoll
FRIGHTENING DEJA VU FROM THE 1920s and '30s: Victor David Hanson on The New Fascism, and John Podhoretz on return of The Big Lie.

Posted 4/26/2002 12:58:01 AM by Edward Driscoll
TAKE IT AWAY, NOAM CHOMSKY: Jonah Goldberg on Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called "20th hijacker":

For those of us suffering from "terrorism fatigue," it would have been easy to miss or dismiss the latest news about Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called "20th hijacker." Moussaoui gave an eye-opening speech in federal court on April 23, in which he tried to fire his lawyers. It was eye-opening, that is, for people willing to open their eyes. In his 50-minute peroration, Moussaoui explained that he prayed for the "destruction of the Jewish people and state." Note: that's both the destruction of the Jewish people and the destruction of the Jewish state. But if you're saying, well at least I'm not Jewish, hold on a second. He also prays for "the destruction of Russia and ... the destruction of the United States of America" and for Muslims to regain control of Spain and Chechnya and to conquer India. In short, Moussaoui has a very comprehensive land-for-peace plan.

Read the whole piece--and then just shake your head and laugh when someone says "if only we understood them better", "give peace a chance" or other Kumbaya silliness.

Posted 4/26/2002 12:38:45 AM by Edward Driscoll
"POLLS TO BE PROUD OF": Daniel Henninger, writing in the Wall Street Journal's free OpinionJournal section, looks at America's view on the Middle East, and likes what he sees. The article's subhead sums it all up: "On the Mideast, America is right and the rest of the world is wrong":

Sitting home at night, watching the news on U.S. television or C-SPAN's airing of the BBC, Americans who hold these views of the events in Israel must wonder if they're living in some alternative reality. This past week, amid the constant images of Jenin's rubble and elderly men and wailing women in scarves, came word that Amnesty International, the Red Cross and an arm of the U.N. were accusing the Israelis of "human rights abuses." The U.N. Security Council put through an Arab-sponsored resolution to investigate the fighting in Jenin, a place that in fact has been the West Bank's version of the Star Wars bar, the primary haunt and collection point for the most extreme Palestinian gunmen and suicide planners. In the otherwordly moral calculus of post World War II Europe and much media--which these polls suggest is beyond the ken of most Americans--self-evident atrocities such as the Passover suicide bombing are mere stories in the wreckage of the news. But a military counter-strike is a human rights abuse. We have arrived at a point in international affairs at which the degraded concept of moral equivalence would be a step toward the sunshine. It may well be true that Americans born after World War II lost their innocence about the world on September 11, but how fortunate that when this nation is attacked and finds itself in a long, grim war with an enemy dedicated to killing civilians, its people are not so easily diverted by the kind of casuistry, salami-slicing, needle-dancing, opportunism and moral myopia that has gripped the world's opinion-shaping institutions.

(Found via VodkaPundit.)

Posted 4/25/2002 10:11:36 PM by Edward Driscoll
CHELSEA EXPLOSION UPDATE: The London Times (via Matt Drudge) says that New York went into "full disaster alert" after the explosion in the Chelsea district:

NEW YORK was seized by fears of a “dirty bomb” terrorist attack yesterday after an apparently accidental explosion ripped through a commercial building, injuring dozens, at least six critically. Manhattan hospitals were put on full disaster alert and prepared to decontaminate incoming victims from radiation, with at least one scanning them with a Geiger counter. Fearing a new terrorist attack, the FBI and the New York bomb squad swooped on the ten-storey building on West 19th Street in response to the blast shortly before noon. The surrounding streets were cordoned off and emergency crews and more than 100 firefighters set up a triage centre on the pavement for dozens of walking wounded. St Vincent’s Hospital, which treated the injured from the World Trade Centre on September 11, declared its top “Code Three” disaster alert as its safety officer monitored arriving victims for radiation in a decontamination area. Federal officials gave warning recently that al-Qaeda may be trying to develop a radiological device, or “dirty bomb”, for attacks in the United States.

Posted 4/25/2002 09:11:58 PM by Edward Driscoll
JACK KEMP ON THE MIDDLE EAST: Good overview of the history of Israel and how other countries in the Middle East have reacted to it:

Zuheir Muhsin, a member of the PLO's Executive Council, admitted to the Palestinian myth: "The existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes. The founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel." This fact was confirmed in 1970, when King Hussein killed thousands of Palestinians to prevent Arafat from establishing a Palestinian state in Jordan. Peace will come to the Middle East only when the oppression and manipulation of the Palestinian people by Arab and Palestinian leaders ceases. All the states of the region must become imbued with the democratic values of individual liberty, equality of opportunity and religious tolerance. People must be given their fundamental rights of life, liberty, private property, equality under the law, religious freedom, free speech, freedom to organize politically and the right to emigrate at will.

Posted 4/25/2002 05:46:28 PM by Edward Driscoll
COLIN AND CONDI: Found on Stephen Green's VodkaPundit Weblog:

This site believes Powell would be the perfect king for a mythical land where all is well and peaceful. The people could admire his sagacity and strength from afar, and there would be no messy international problems to soil his reputation. His background and bearing would bring peoples of all colors and creeds together in harmony. Condi Rice is the kick-ass, take-charge charmer you want running the show in the sometimes brutal world we actually inhabit.

Posted 4/25/2002 04:10:04 PM by Edward Driscoll
CHELSEA EXPLOSION: Thankfully, it appears that the blast in the Chelsea district of Manhattan appears to be mishap, not a terrorist act. Although the current explanation is slightly disquieting:

The explosion, according to the fire commissioner, involved volatile chemicals used in etching work by a company in one of the buildings, but few details about the nature of the explosion were available. Earlier, a police spokesman said a boiler in the basement was involved, but authorities later said that was not the case. The commercial-residential building where the blast occurred houses lofts and businesses, including Kaltech Industries Group, an architectural sign company.

Until I here otherwise, I'm assuming it's just that--an explosion caused by chemicals used by a sign maker. As he has hopefully learned (and my hope is that he's pondering this somewhere in the ninth circle of Hell), as "Asparagirl" notes, Osama does not want to mess with New York again:

There's been an explosion and partial building collapse in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, gay (male) capital of NYC. Accident? Boiler explosion? Car bomb? Real bomb? Osama better watch out, because the last thing he needs right now is 100,000 pissed off gym-pumped gay guys getting on his case. It's a rare enemy who can piss off both drag queens and the Christian Right in one fell swoop. Of course, if he were really suicidal, he'd try hitting Park Slope, Brooklyn, Lesbian capital of NYC.

Posted 4/25/2002 03:52:11 PM by Edward Driscoll
BLOGGING CELLS: Steven Den Beste of USS Clueless has a recent entry about how various blogging cells are formed, complete with illustrations which instantly reminded me of the sprawling, Spirograph-like interactive diagram on Casey Marshall's "A Picture of Weblogs" site. Den Beste identifies several cells which have sprung up over time on the Web: the warbloggers, the E/N crowd ("everything and nothing", the day-in-the-life bloggers), the A-list, (the original bloggers, often obsessed with the Web and its possibilities), the Catacomb (religion and its influence on politics (and vice versa) the Gay Underground, and other blogging cliques.

Pretty much any collective interest which used to spawn a news group has probably spawned a blog cluster now. For example, I suspect that there's a Mac-lovers cluster out there, and probably one for dog-lovers, and I have no doubt at all there's a Jewish cluster, and bird-watcher clusters, and weaving clusters, and likely dozens or hundreds more. Some clusters will form simply because they're circles of friends, not because they necessarily have a subject in common. By the nature of this medium, there's a sort of blog gravitation that tends to make clusters form. Perversely, this has two effects. If you find a member of such a cluster, it makes it easier to find others in it. But it also makes finding the cluster difficult in the first place because there's less cross-cluster linking going on. It never occurred to me until a couple of days ago that anything like The Catacomb even existed.

Posted 4/25/2002 02:52:58 PM by Edward Driscoll
MODERN EUROPE: My wife Nina and I met a friend and his wife for dinner after my jury duty on Tuesday, and somehow, the conversation wandered towards the Middle East. He seemed genuinely surprised when I mentioned the growing anti-semitism in Europe. He emailed me earlier today to discuss whether it was purely anti-Zionism. The guy works very long hours at a real job, unlike myself, who writes, and can thus read lots of Web logs, news articles and essays and justify it as part of my "research". So I don't really blame him for not following everything that's been going on in Europe and the Middle East. Here's my reponse, which also shows what a help blogs and Google can be in tracking news articles and essays down: Dear _____, Europe has been anti-Semitic in varying degrees for at least several hundred years--Hitler just ratcheted it up a couple of notches and made its institutionalism plain to see, rather than under the surface. All his complaining about "Jewish bankers"? Many Jews entered finance in Europe hundreds of years ago, because various labor and trade guilds prevented them from entering a wide variety of other trades. Austria, where Hitler was born was rife with anti-Semitism--it wasn't something he invented. Rather, it was in books, pamphlets, speeches, and rallies, where the Jew was described as strange, foreign, different, etc. Hitler, aided immensely by the German people, and eventually, people in numerous European nations, built on that feeling to exterminate the Jews. (Incidentally, David Brooks, the author Bobos in Paradise touches upon 19th and 20th century European anti-Semitism in his brilliant recent essay, "Among the Bourgeoisophobes", which is subtitled "Why the Europeans and Arabs, each in their own way, hate America and Israel".) While the Allies had some success with their denazification programs in the post-war period, lately, it's become obvious just how impossible it is to wipe out anti-Semitic beliefs that go back hundreds of years. Want some very recent examples of how bad Europe is? Try these: CBS has an article dated April 23, which begins "World Jewish leaders warned Tuesday that the level of anti-Semitic attacks in Europe is the worst since World War II." The article mentions a synagogue in Marseille in the south of France was burned to the ground March 31. AP recently reported that "Right-wing extremists celebrating an anniversary of the birth of Adolf Hitler have set fire to a synagogue in the east German city of Erfurt, according to German police." And then there's Ingmar Tveitt, whom the Wall Street Journal describes as "a friend of Norwegian Parliament member Jan Simonsen, who was ordered in early April by Parliament security guards to remove his jacket because a Star of David was displayed on the chest pocket. As Tveitt points out, 'People walk around [in Parliament] with Palestinian scarves and other pro-Palestinian symbols without any reaction.'" Or, check out this headline, from AP: "Jewish soccer team attacked, one member seriously injured":

BONDY, France - Amid a spate of recent anti-Semitic attacks in France, a Jewish amateur soccer team was attacked during a training session in a Paris suburb and one of its members seriously hurt, French police said Thursday. Around 15 hooded attackers wielding sticks and metal bars assaulted the team of teenagers from the Maccabi Bondy association, a Jewish group, late Wednesday after making anti-Semitic remarks. One member of the team suffered a cut to the head and received hospital treatment but wasn't thought to be in danger. French Sports Minister Marie-George Buffet issued a statement condemning the attack as "indescribable."

That last quote sums up the whole problem: It is describable. It's just doesn't appear to be stoppable. It's institutionalized, it goes back hundreds of years, at the very least, and it's systemic. All 9/11 and the latest Palestinian suicide bombers did was to notch it up. Don't get me wrong--there is much, much, about Europe that I love: it truly is the cradle of modern civilization. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, language, writing, music, art, architecture, etc., were all raised to a fine pitch there. But along side of them, so were racism, anti-Semitism, totalitarianism and concentration camps. Want an example of how institutionalized anti-Semitism is in Europe? Try to picture any member of Bush's staff (hell, even Clinton's staff) saying this: In December, Daniel Bernard, the French ambassador to Britain, uttered an ugly anti-Semitic remark at a party hosted by newspaper publisher Conrad Black. He called Israel a "shitty little country" and then asked, "Why should the world be in danger of World War III because of those people?" Look, I'll admit that I've become fairly instinctively reflexive when it comes to Israel--I read lots of conservative and small-l libertarian Web sites and books, I'm sympathetic towards democracies, very, very unsympathetic to totalitarianism and dictatorships on both sides of the aisle, and my wife is Jewish, and very pro-Israel. What's astonishing (and Nina and I had a conversation about this a few weeks ago, when Israeli / Palestinian conflicts really heated up), is how few people in the supposedly "liberal" and "Jewish dominated" media aren't. NPR has been admonished more than once for being biased towards Palestinians. As has Peter Jennings. As has ABC's Nightline (scroll up from link for more Nightline coverage). As has the New York Times. As has the L.A. Times. It's a very, very interesting trend, as Orrin Judd recently wrote, that conservatives have been fairly consistently pro-Israel, whereas liberals have increasingly become pro-Palestinian (don't forget the big wet one Hillary planted on the cheek of Arafat's wife a couple of years ago after a speech). It's also been very interesting watching Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan turn blacks into anti-Semites, effectively erasing over a hundred years of friendly black/Jewish relations. If you'd like a quick refresher on how we got here, you might want to read Jeff Jacoby's recent column on how 1993 was the decisive year in Israel/Palestinian relations, and what Yassar Arafat did to undermine things. Or David Horowitz's quick history of Israel and the Middle East. Also, check out Empower America's "Twenty facts about Israel and the Middle East" Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee Law Professor, whom I've interviewed for several articles, and runs Instapundit.com, arguably the very best Web log on the Internet (can Web logs be anyplace else? [G]) sums it up perfectly:

My short answer: Sure, you can criticize Israel without being antisemitic. But when you criticize Israel for things you ignore in others, it raises certain doubts.

Let me leave you with some food for thought, from National Review's Jonah Goldberg:

WHAT IF ISRAELIS WERE GAY? [Jonah Goldberg] I think the Corner is best when we get a little give and take among ourselves. So here’s a question for anybody interested. What do you think the reaction of, say, Mother Jones, Nation or the New York Times would be if Israel wasn’t a Jewish homeland, but a gay one. Gays have been persecuted for thousands of years. They’ve never had their own nation – though the quasi city-state of San Francisco is something of a gay Zion. Gays, like many Zionist Jews, feel a very strong need to prove they won’t be pushed around anymore. Homosexuals will never be safe from gay-bashing pogroms, they might argue, until they have a homeland of their own. Any takers?

Regards, Ed

Posted 4/24/2002 04:45:55 PM by Edward Driscoll
SHAKE 'EM ON DOWN: Jesse Jackson, courtesy of Bill Gates' wallet, comes to Silicon Valley.

Posted 4/24/2002 03:20:03 PM by Edward Driscoll
TWENTY FACTS ABOUT ISRAEL AND THE MIDDLE EAST, from Empower America, via NRO's The Corner.

Posted 4/24/2002 02:10:58 PM by Edward Driscoll
LAST NIGHT'S NIGHTLINE: Glenn Reynolds received an email from a reader, describing last night's edition of ABC's Nightline series. Apparently, the entire show was a profile of Bahman Farman Ara, an Iranian film director who lived in the US for a long time before returning to Iran a few years ago. "Well, interview is the wrong word", the email read, " there was no questioner and no question. Ara was allowed to speak for 30 minutes with no response. I can't imagine Nightline doing a similar show with an Israeli."

All in all, it was one hell of a half hour of unedited, unabashed pro-Iran propaganda, broadcast by the same company that brings you Mickey Mouse, the Stanley Cup playoffs, and the Anaheim Angels. I was dumbfounded.

Read the whole email, and see if you agree.

Posted 4/24/2002 12:05:11 PM by Edward Driscoll
GEOPOLITICS IN THE MIDDLE EAST: An invasion of Iraq, and its implications, is online at StrategyPage.com:

These events would be immediately followed by an epidemic of bed wetting on the south side of the Persian Gulf. Once we've secured the oil production of Iraq (which necessarily means our control of Kuwait's) and obtained a friendly regime in Iran, the continued existence of the Saud regime will no longer be in America's interest. The Saud regime is the dominant source of funding for terrorism, especially terrorism against the United States. I expect loss of Saudi funding will cause Islamic terrorism outside Arab areas and Pakistan to tube, and that in Arab areas will be significantly reduced.

UPDATE: See also Rich Lowry's current piece at National Review Online.

Posted 4/24/2002 10:57:12 AM by Edward Driscoll
SEGWAY UPDATE: While I was briefly on jury duty, several readers sent me Segway updates. Here's an "Atlanta police are testing the Segway" article from CNN.com. Here's a similar article, off the AP wire, from the Philadelphia Inquerier, courtesy of Group Captain Mandrake. And here's the same article, from the New York Times courtesy of Christopher Cross. As Gary Bridge of Segway explained to me for my LiteWheels article, a big part of Segway's initial marketing strategy is to get the units in the hands of civil officials, such as the police, before they begin offering it to the general public.

Regarding their government sales, Bridge says that the goal there is try to establish "the proper Segway etiquette: how you have to behave when you come to a crowded street." Bridge says that Segway's fear is that if they initially sold the units to the mass market, "kids being kids, are going to do things with it that are bad, and then we're going to get blamed for it. So we won't sell to kids, until we have a very, very clear welcome on the sidewalks." Which is probably a good thing, as injury lawyers are already advertising their intentions to sue the pants and the deep pockets off of Segway when and if the inevitable accidents start to occur. By carefully educating the public, Segway may both reduce those risks, and their exposure to lawsuits.

And considering that sites such as this one already exist, I can't say I blame them.

Posted 4/23/2002 09:10:34 PM by Edward Driscoll
JURY DUTY prevented me from posting anything today. Watch for more content tomorrow!

Posted 4/22/2002 10:28:03 PM by Edward Driscoll
LILEKS ON THE ANTI-GLOBAL MOB:

you have a movement that wants young people to blow themselves up at the Disney store in Times Square. Not that any of the people at the rally would do it, of course. Not that they would necessarily approve of it. But they would certainly understand it. If they were struck dumb for a moment, their spirits would be lifted the moment someone reminded them that Davey Crockett = Genocide. Wow, that’s so true. The irony, of course, is that someone blowing up the Disney store in Times Square to protest Israel and globalization would kill Japanese, Dutch, German, Swedish, Turkish, Mexican, French, Russian and Argentinean tourists, all of whom had willingly entered the store to buy toys for their children. Innocent? Not really. They’re bringing Ariel the Little Mermaid back home to Buenos Aires, and a Talking Buzz Lightyear back to Ankara. Collaborators in the act of cultural genocide. Sweatshop profiteers. You have to see their deaths in the broader context. You have to understand that no one is innocent anymore. This is the apotheosis of the notion that the personal is the political: it gives the fascists a rationale for killing anyone.

Read the whole thing--there's lots of other dead-on stuff in this Bleat.

Posted 4/22/2002 08:24:07 PM by Edward Driscoll
BROADBAND STATS: Reuters runs the numbers:

PALO ALTO, Calif. (Reuters) - Internet users are showing more willingness to pay for a high-speed broadband Internet connection, although large numbers remain happy with dial-up, a survey being released on Tuesday said. Jupiter Media Metrix, which calculates just 16 percent of U.S. households currently have a broadband Internet connection, said that 8.6 percent of the country's dial-up subscribers say they are highly likely to sign up for such a service in the next year. The survey found that an additional 15.4 percent of households were "somewhat interested" in getting broadband within the next year. The remaining 76 percent of households were either neutral to the notion of paying for a higher speed Internet connection, or were decidedly uninterested.

I didn't realize the numbers were as high as they were. 16% of the country on broadband is a helluva base, and hopefully, as speeds increase, and killer apps grow, that number will continue to grow.

Posted 4/22/2002 08:19:54 PM by Edward Driscoll
GORE ATTACKED BY ANGRY MUSCLE CARS: In honor of Earth Day, via Rand Simberg.

Posted 4/22/2002 03:44:47 PM by Edward Driscoll
BACK IN ACTION: Sgt. Stryker says that the USS Cole is back in action. Adding, "Somehow I doubt Osama's gonna make a video about this," he links to a story that says:

The USS Cole was poised to return to the open seas, a year and a half after losing 17 sailors in a terrorist attack in Yemen. The vessel was to set sail Friday after 14 months of repairs with many new features, including 17 stars laid in the hallway floor - one for each of the sailors killed when an explosion tore a hole in the ship's side. The Cole returns to duty with 550 tons of new steel, improved security and a crew that includes about 40 sailors who survived the attack on the guided missile destroyer.

Posted 4/22/2002 03:32:20 PM by Edward Driscoll
TAKE IT AWAY BILL SIMON... Matt Drudge links to an article that says the California State Supreme Court ruled today that counties and cities in California may ban gun shows on their fairgrounds and other government properties. Living in New Jersey in the early 1990s, I remember liberal Republican Christie Todd Whitman narrowly squeaking by very liberal Democrat Jim Florio because he (a) raised taxes and (b) angered many, many gun owners (at the invitation of my then-boss, I attended a south Jersey gun show, whose parking lot had row after row after row of cars with red and white "DUMP FLORIO" bumperstickers). If Simon can't exploit this court ruling in his campaign, he's not much of a politician.

Posted 4/21/2002 10:40:21 PM by Edward Driscoll
BE AFRAID. BE VERY AFRAID....

Posted 4/21/2002 08:35:37 PM by Edward Driscoll
WHAT A SHOCKER: Matt Welch, writing in Reason magazine, reviews Ralph Nader's new book Crashing the Party: How to Tell the Truth and Still Run for President, and discovers that Ralph Nader lies like lots of other politicians!

When the filmmaker Michael Moore introduced Nader at campaign rallies, he was fond of saying that the candidate was "ready to rock this nation with the truth!" Since September 11, that’s been about backwards: The nation has shown it is more than ready to rock Michael Moore and his pals with its very own version of "the truth." Ralph Nader needs to learn that there are people who care as much about the issues as he, yet honestly arrive at very different conclusions. He needs to stop judging people’s virtue by whether they support him for president. And unless he wants to become the same kind of politician he claims to despise, he needs to stop treating facts like pastries in a buffet line.

Posted 4/21/2002 08:09:37 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE BILL OF RANTS: James Barnett has linked to my site. Thanks Bill! (But geez, this story about a guy who took the meaning of a golf course's ball washer a little too literally (nudge nudge, wink wink, know what I mean? Know what I mean?) scared the bejesus out of me!)

Posted 4/21/2002 05:08:44 PM by Edward Driscoll
APOCALYPSE NOW: Visited the Coppola Winery in Napa last Sunday, which is a spectacular operation selling so-so wine, and lots of memorabilia from Coppola’s movies. We watched Hearts of Darkness on laserdisc that night a documentary from the mid-1990s on the making of Apocalypse Now, which trigged a sudden Proustian rush of Apocalypse memories (and apologies to Woody Allen for that Stardust Memories allusion). So here are some random, Apocalyptic thoughts:

1. If this film doesn’t have the greatest audio ever recorded (the eerie 20th century classical synthesized rumble in the jungle can’t separate the score from the sound effects soundtrack), it’s right up there. I take it back—this has to be the greatest soundtrack ever recorded—Walter Murch is one the great technicians in Hollywood. 2. It’s an astonishing looking film as well Vittorio Storaro is a brilliant cinematographer, and Coppola was wise to get out his way and give him his head. 3. Coppola was savaged by many critics for the film’s ending, but it’s actually pretty amazing that he got what he got. Nothing like trying to salvage the climax to your film when your star (Martin Sheen) is coming off a heart attack; your other star is a typically out-of-control Marlon Brando, who shows up grossly overweight to play the emaciated Kurtz, and hasn’t read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; and then you have Dennis Hopper, equally out-of-control, at the height of his drug, alcohol and who-knows-what-else addictions. 4. In some ways, Apocalypse can be seen as a negative image version of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both were long, Homeric journeys into the unknown. But 2001 asked weighty questions, and delivered on both the answers, and the research done by Kubrick and Clarke. In Hearts of Darkness, a documentary about Apocalypse Now that’s in many ways as good as its subject, Coppola is heard saying that for his films to not answer questions as to the meaning and outcome of the Vietnam War, it would have to be considered a failure. In that respect, Apocalypse fails miserably, because it doesn’t ask any serious questions, and it provides no answers. The Godfather films were far better at explaining the origins and implications of organized crime than Apocalypse Now for Vietnam (but of course, Mario Puzo wrote the novel for the Godfather. John Milius, Coppola and to a lesser extent Michael Herr (author of the brilliant new journalism-style take on Vietnam, Dispatches, who would later go on to co-write Full Metal Jacket for Stanley Kubrick) all contributed to the screenplay for Apocalypse, trying to salvage a Vietnam-era story out of Heart of Darkness.

Apocalypse Now doesn’t make you think, it simply creates a powerful emotional state and allows you to become as spaced out as any of the soldiers on the boat. Not only that, but as James Bowman noted, not a single NVA soldier is shown. How do you make a war film—better yet, how do you set out to make the definitive film on a particular war, without showing its enemy? In spite of all of that, though, Apocalypse Now is a brilliant achievement—a remarkably emotional film made under astonishing duress by one of America’s premiere filmmakers of the 1970s. And watching 1997’s The Rainmaker, with its flat, Hollywood-anonymous direction, reminds us just how far Coppola has fallen as a director—or perhaps just how timid Hollywood has become.

Posted 4/21/2002 02:31:08 PM by Edward Driscoll
PATS TRADE BLEDSOE: Drew Bledsoe will be quarterbacking the Buffalo Bills this coming season.

Posted 4/21/2002 11:28:22 AM by Edward Driscoll
JAPANESE SUPERCOMPUTER/HITCHHIKERS' GUIDE CONNECTION REVEALED: Group Captain Mandrake explains all.

Posted 4/21/2002 11:14:17 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE REAL AXIS OF EVIL: AEI, HERITAGE, CATO, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: Patrick Ruffini explains the latest in rarified European intellectual thought.

Posted 4/21/2002 11:09:58 AM by Edward Driscoll
EBERT BURIES THE LAST WALTZ, which is being released to theaters as part of its 25th anniversary:

Drugs are possibly involved. Memoirs recalling the filming report that cocaine was everywhere backstage. The overall tenor of the documentary suggests survivors at the ends of their ropes. They dress in dark, cheerless clothes, hide behind beards, hats and shades, pound out rote performances of old hits, don't seem to smile much at their music or each other. There is the whole pointless road warrior mystique, of hard-living men whose daily duty it is to play music and get wasted. They look tired of it.

What's interesting is that some musicians seem to be able to handle touring, and take to it instinctively (The Stones in rock, and so many great jazz and blues musicians), whereas others, such as the Band, just seem to let it destroy them.

Posted 4/21/2002 10:57:39 AM by Edward Driscoll
DRAFT UPDATE: ESPN says the Cowboys, as well as the Raiders, were the big winners in the draft.

Posted 4/21/2002 10:52:53 AM by Edward Driscoll
CORNEL WEST UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds, himself a university professor, has some good stuff on Cornel West, who is decamping from Harvard to Princeton, including this line:

when you're a University Professor at Harvard, there's apparently nobody to do that pointing-out except the President of the University. And when Larry Summers did point out that West wasn't carrying his weight, West responded that he had been "disrespected," -- though, really, telling someone that they're capable of better and more substantive work than they're doing, and trying to halt their descent into self-parody, is respect, not disrespect.