Posted 6/1/2002 09:52:12 AM by Edward Driscoll
WOBBLY WATCH PASSE? Matt Drudge has an article coming with the following snippet on his home page:

Bush told graduates at the U.S. Military Academy that Cold War doctrines of containment and deterrence were irrelevant in a world where the only strategy for defeating America's new enemies was to strike them first...

Click back there in a little while for the actual article. UPDATE: Here it is.

Posted 5/31/2002 09:55:23 AM by Edward Driscoll
YOU DON'T PULL ON THE MASK OF THE OL' LONE RANGER--but he's entitled to remove it himself. Sgt. Stryker reveals his secret identity--and has lots more good stuff on his site since I last linked to it, but you probably knew that already. Now, did you ever notice you never see Bruce Wayne and Superman together in the same room. Or Peter Parker and the Incredible Hulk. Hmmmm.....

Posted 5/31/2002 09:23:22 AM by Edward Driscoll
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, CONSERVATIVE? That's Orrin Judd's take, in this post from The Brothers Judd Web log.

Posted 5/31/2002 08:59:08 AM by Edward Driscoll
SAY THE SECRET WORD....Found on NRO's The Corner Web log today, this post by Andrew Stuttaford:

Nice comment from Putin earlier this week, while studying the names of delegates at a conference he was addressing on Monday: "I see the name of a Mr. Engels from Germany on the list. Thank God he came without Marx."

Posted 5/31/2002 08:16:57 AM by Edward Driscoll
SUCCESS GOES TO SPIDER-MAN'S HEAD, not to mention the rest of his body, according to Group Captain Mandrake. (Parents, don't let your kids look at the photos that accompany the good Group Captain's item. Trust me.) Darn--I was really counting on Spidey to protect me from the various super-villains prowling Manhattan. I'm sorry to see that he's taken to spending his merchandising royalties and film percentage points on many, many visits to the Four Seasons and 21.

Posted 5/31/2002 08:13:46 AM by Edward Driscoll
SANITY IN CALIFORNIA? The California Assembly rejects a ban on U.S. Indian Team Names. Good move, guys.

Posted 5/31/2002 08:11:13 AM by Edward Driscoll
BAD DAY FOR JOURNALISTS, especially of the newspaper kind. Very funny item on the Fox News Web site, found via Chronwatch:

These are not good days for journalists. When people would rather plow their pickups into your building than share with you the medical records of their sub-human companions, it is time for a little soul-searching, and perhaps even a little image-mending.

As to what that means, go check out the article--it's quite amusing.

Posted 5/31/2002 08:06:48 AM by Edward Driscoll
CHRONWATCH: Found via InstaPundit, there's a Web site devoted to monitoring the San Francisco Chronicle, or as I've heard it described from time to time, "the Comical". If you're in the Bay Area, stop by Chronwatch sometime.

Posted 5/31/2002 08:03:23 AM by Edward Driscoll
LIVE FROM NEW YORK, ITTTTTTTTTTT'S EDDRISCOLL.COM! After visiting my parents in New Jersey, I'm back online in Manhattan via my hotel room's DSL connection. (And yes, riding Amtrak into the city, I had my usual "there's something missing from the skyline" twinge after we passed the Newark station. Manhattan desperately needs a replacement for the World Trade Center. The skyline just doesn't look right without it.)

Posted 5/27/2002 11:24:06 PM by Edward Driscoll
ABSENT FROM KEYBOARD: I'll be travelling to the East Coast on Tuesday, and may be away from a computer for a few days. In the meantime, click on the links page at the left for lots of good content. Be back soon!

Posted 5/27/2002 09:35:11 PM by Edward Driscoll
SPEAKING OF HISTORY: Here's a history of Outrageous TV Commercials, complete with Real Video files. And now we finally know what killed off our hominid forefathers...

Posted 5/27/2002 06:58:51 PM by Edward Driscoll
HISTORY, THE BIG MYSTERY: Suzanne Fields says our children don't know much about American history:

It certainly doesn't help the situation that more than half the teachers teaching history to junior and senior high school students didn't major or minor in history in college. That is crucial because, as smart as they might be, they haven't a conceptual foundation in the subject and probably teach more from someone else's lesson plans than from deep knowledge - or even from shallow knowledge. The "Nation's Report Card" was issued just as a 125-page paperback, "9-11," by the leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky, became a surprise best-seller, selling over 160,000 copies in the first few weeks. If anyone takes advantage of historical ignorance in interpreting American history, Chomsky does, but lots of people are buying his book. A lot of them would probably have flunked the history test, too.

Posted 5/27/2002 06:19:32 PM by Edward Driscoll
SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION: This is a classic, found on Joanne Jacobs' Weblog:

So that's how it happens Palestinian gunmen sent to Italy in the Church of the Nativity deal are threatening to explode, Al Bawaba reports. They can't take the humiliation of being watched by the Italian police.

The three Palestinians granted exile in Italy after the Israeli army siege of Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity risk cracking under the strain of being so closely monitored, one of them told La Reppublica on Monday. "When we arrived in Italy I asked the head of the Italian security service responsible for us not to track us too closely. I told him, “at least give us some personal space and autonomy or we could just explode”, Khaled Abu Nejmeh told the daily. -- 5/27

If they're ever freed from their exile, these guys have a great future as potential drummers for Spinal Tap.

Posted 5/27/2002 02:00:10 PM by Edward Driscoll
THEY'RE COMING FOR YOUR FILLINGS: Dental Fillings Targeted in Multiple Lawsuits. First cigarettes, then fatty foods, then fillings. Fortunately, as the article states, unlike the tobacco industry, the ADA is fighting back.

Posted 5/27/2002 11:46:00 AM by Edward Driscoll
BIG BROTHER DOMINATES AIRSTRIP ONE: Ingsoc has taken over the country formally known as England. Group Captain Mandrake reports that his children are forced to watch broadcasts of Big Brother for up to 18 hours a day on their telescreens, for party indoctrination and propaganda purposes. Writing from his office in the Ministry of Information, Mandrake says:

They are all hooked on Big Brother. We have cable service here, so we get the e4 channel. That means Big Brother can be on the tv as much as 18 hours a day. Even some of the soap operas (hanging my head in shame at this further admission of failure) are forgotten if they interfere with Big Brother (as Emmerdale does, I am told).

Ooops, upon further research, I've discovered that apparently, this Big Brother isn't the head of a tyrannical socialist regime making permanent war with Eastasia, but an English game show. But I do think fluoridation in the water might behind both forms of Big Brother...

Posted 5/27/2002 11:36:31 AM by Edward Driscoll
CULTURE HAS CONSEQUENCES: Mona Charen on the ultimate consequences of America's fetish for "nonjudgementalism" and why it hamstrung the FBI when it discovered that numerous young Arab males were taking flight training lessons at American schools:

When your greatest source of pride is nonjudgmentalism, you will pretend not to see even what is patently obvious. In reality, it was perfectly legitimate and understandable for Americans to suppose, however briefly, that the perpetrators of Oklahoma City were Arab terrorists. Arabs had bombed the World Trade Center (the first time) only months before, and had attacked American officials in the Sudan, Lebanon and Egypt. They had brought down a Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, Scotland, and killed 241 American soldiers in their barracks in Lebanon. Truck bombs were a Middle East specialty. Culture has consequences. Before 9-11, our culture had elevated nonjudgmentalism to the level of civic religion. We've been told that "everything has changed" since then. But not everything has. Some continue to worship the old civic religion. The Department of Transportation under Norm Mineta (the lone Democrat in the Bush Cabinet) has declined to examine young Arab-looking males more carefully than other airline passengers and has refused to permit pilots to carry guns. Both decisions defy common sense.

Read the whole thing--it's quite good (as usual for Charen).

Posted 5/27/2002 11:17:41 AM by Edward Driscoll
JAPAN THEN, ISLAM NOW: Orrin Judd compares our current struggle with Islamic extremists with our view of Japan in the 1980s and early '90s:

In many ways, the current hysteria over our confrontation with Islam resembles the Japanophobia of the 1980s. Then, as now, the emotionally labile, those who live in the moment, took a current situation (things like the Japanese buying Radio City Music Hall) and projected it forward in a straight line, never pausing to consider the catastrophic internal weaknesses of the culture they perceived as a threat. Today, without our having done a thing, Japan is a nation on the verge of collapse. The problems that the rest of the West shares with Japan are a far greater threat than Islamic extremism.

Posted 5/27/2002 11:12:00 AM by Edward Driscoll
BUT WHAT DOES ADAM CLYMER THINK OF THIS? Bush Ridicules NBC Reporter.

Posted 5/27/2002 12:26:06 AM by Edward Driscoll
WAR & POPCORN: Looking for something to rent from Blockbusters? Several National Review Online writers pick the best war films of all time. I'd add "Full Metal Jacket", and "Apocalypse Now" to the list, and maybe "Black Hawk Down". But I think I need to see "Black Hawk" a couple of more times on DVD to make up my mind on it.

Posted 5/27/2002 12:07:20 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE SKIN TRADE: How much does the porn industry really make a year? Emmanuelle Richard runs the numbers, in an article called The Naked Untruth.

Posted 5/26/2002 10:33:39 AM by Edward Driscoll
TARGETING A MYTH: InstaPundit links to this article, which discusses gun control in England . "The evidence suggests that gun control has not made England a safer, fairer society," its subhead reads. No kidding--but as InstaPundit notes, this is a real breakthrough, being printed in the often very liberal Boston Globe, the same paper that banned Jeff Jacoby for several weeks for writing a pro-fourth of July column last year.

Posted 5/26/2002 10:27:46 AM by Edward Driscoll
"MR. YAMAHA DIES": Group Captain Mandrake links to this CNN.com story, which reports that Genichi Kawakami, who took over his father's business and made Japan's Yamaha into a household name around the world through a combination of musical instruments and motorbikes, died on Saturday at the age of 90. Having had my share of Yamaha musical equipment in the mid-1980s during my rock and roll days, I can attest to their high quality. And their synthesizer, the DX-7, was the sound of pop music during that period. it was heard on virtually every pop record, and its spin-offs are still popular to this day.