OPENING UP THE ORGAN MARKET: Jonah Goldberg makes the case for a free market solution to organ transplants. He writes:

The ethics committee of the American Society of Transplant Surgeons endorsed a pilot program that will permit the families of deceased donors to receive some small compensation for an organ donation.

The move was made reluctantly, in the face of a longstanding organ shortage in the United States. As of this February, 79,523 people were on the waiting list for major organs, which is worse than this time last year. Meanwhile, only 22,593 organs were transplanted in 2001.

A decade ago, there were only roughly 20,000 people on the waiting list. Meanwhile, experts agree that in the future, the demand for transplantable organs will only increase. In other words, it's a bad problem that promises only to get worse unless things change dramatically.

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF CLASSICAL MUSIC: I can't say I'm a dyed-in-the-wool classical music fan--there are numerous pieces that I like, and I admire immensely its harmonic development over the last three or four hundred years. But I'm definitely a "it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing" kind of guy. Which is why jazz is much more my forte, as its best stuff combines the harmonic and melodic complexity of classical, with much more interesting (not to mention swinging) rhythms. (Miles Davis' best material from the late 1950s and early 60s comes immediately to mind, especially the albums he recorded with Gil Evans arranging.)

But it's a bit painful, if not at all surprising, to read pieces such as James Bowman's article on NPR's "greatest hits" approach to programming its classical music, and Libertarian Samizdata's post about how classical advertising had become much more umm...babelicious in the last few years.

On the other hand, that Hilary Hahn that Samizdata refers to is a real cutie. Too bad Stravinsky, Philip Glass, and Mahler never bothered with image consultants--imagine where their careers would be today if they had!

AXIS OF EVIL, EASTERN BRANCH: AP is reporting that on the eve of President Bush's meeting with China's vice president and expected future leader, Hu Jintao, in Washington tomorrow, the Chinese police have detained Boston-based pro-democracy Chinese activist Yang Jianli, on his first visit back to China in 13 years.

LIVE FROM NEW YORK...IT'S THE CHEESE-EATING SURRENDER MONKEYS! Jonah Goldberg, (who probably did more to establish that Simpsons bon mot on the Internet than any other writer), posts in National Review's The Corner Weblog, a link to a hilarious Saturday Night Live parody commercial about France. It's online, and if you have broadband, you owe it to yourself to check it out.

SNL came on in the mid-1970s, when I was 10 or 11, and I was a fairly faithful viewer until the mid-1990s, when all of the members of the Hartman/Carvey/Miller/Lovitz team that Lorne Michaels assembled in the late-1980s finally left. But seeing that commercial makes me believe that there may be hope for the old show yet.

WHERE TO SEE STAR WARS EPISODE II IN DIGITAL: The Internet Movie Database is reporting in its Movie & TV News section that "despite George Lucas's best efforts to push digital projection, only 19 theaters will be showing his Star Wars: Episode II -- Attack of the Clones using digital projectors when it opens on May 16":

The 19 are: Harkins Arrowhead Cinemas 18 (Peoria, AZ); AMC Media Center 6 (Burbank, CA); Edwards Irvine Spectrum 21 Megaplex (Irvine, CA); El Capitan Theatre (Los Angeles, CA); Loews Century Plaza (Los Angeles, CA); AMC Mission Valley 20 (San Diego, CA); AMC 1000 Van Ness (San Francisco, CA); AMC Pleasure Island 24 (Lake Buena Vista, FL); AMC South Barrington 30 (South Barrington, IL); AMC Studio 30 (Olathe, KS); General Cinema Framingham 16 (Framingham, MA); Show Case Cinemas Randolph (Randolph, MA); Edgewater Multiplex Cinemas (Edgewater, NJ); AMC Empire 25 Theatres (New York); Clearview Ziegfeld Theatre (New York); Loews Cineplex E-Walk (New York); Cinemark at Valley View (Valley View, OH); Showcase Cinemas Springdale (Springdale, OH); Cinemark at Legacy (Plano, TX). Lucas has said that no theater will be allowed to show Episode III unless it is equipped with digital projectors.

I suspect I'll see it first at a local "analog" theater, but I wouldn't mind checking out the version at AMC 1000 Van Ness in San Francisco as a comparison. As I said a couple of days ago, I'm currently experimenting with digital recording (on Cakewalk's Sonar XL 2.0 system). I'd say one of these days I should branch out to digital video, but I'm afraid my efforts would make The Blair Witch Project look like...Star Wars!

Every once once in a while, a local government gets it right. Stephen Green links to an AP report, and says that a New York couple who had their baby girl on a strict vegetarian diet have been charged with child endangerment. The 16-month-old girl weighed only ten pounds. Green adds:

I have to go on a very old rant of mine now.

Forget that god fellow and his orders that we lord it over the animals. Please. Theological debate is a lot like masturbation -- fun but useless. Instead, let's look at the basic design of the human animal.

Our eyes are both in the front of our head, giving us stereoscopic vision. This is a feature found in predators -- animals who hunt and kill. Vegetarians, like cows, have eyes on the sides of their heads to give them a wider view, in order to better spot creatures like us coming.

The AP article says:

Authorities were alerted to the situation by an anonymous call in November, said Maris Campbell, a spokeswoman for the district attorney. She said the baby was "in grave risk of death."

"She weighed only 10 pounds, less than half the weight of an average 16-month-old female child, and appeared to be the size of a 2- to 3-month-old baby," District Attorney Richard Brown said Monday.

The child has been in foster care since November, and now 20 months old and doctors said she now weighs 20 pounds, still about the normal weight of a 10- to 12-month old baby. Campbell said the girl faces major developmental problems.

Why do I get the feeling Law & Order will do an episode on this?

WOODSON SIGNS WITH RAIDERS: AP is reporting that Hall of Fame bound safety Rod Woodson has signed with the Oakland Raiders. While he's 37, he's had some very good years (not to mention a Super Bowl ring) recently with the Baltimore Ravens, and could continue to be a force with the Silver and Black.

I don't know what their coaching will be like, it sounds like ol' Al is assembling a pretty good roster this year.

"IT ALL COMES DOWN TO RESSENTIMENT". Andrew Sullivan:

it all comes to down to ressentiment. It's true in the Middle East as well. How must those failed Arab polities feel when they look at tiny little Israel, a country that started from scratch, is minuscule in comparison in population and land-mass, and yet has left all its Arab neighbors in the dust. Talk about humiliating. And what more familiar panacea for humiliation than envy and violence? It was ever thus, and ever will be. But it doesn't make it any more defensible. Or any less pathetic.

INSTAPUNDIT HAVING FLASHBACKS: Apparently, someone has an archive of Glenn Reynolds' early stuff, in the Weblogs template he was then using (I had forgotten that he's changed designs). In August of 2001, he linked to my National Review article on Mountain View's Computer History Museum, which is where I found him, via a vanity search on Google (I think NRO had also listed him as their cool site of the day around this same time). But as I said in my Spintech article, like a lot of folks, it was only after 9/11 that I became a regular reader.

ONLY 127 SHOPPING DAYS UNTIL CHRISTMAS! When I'm in New York, I've shopped occasionally at Thomas Pink & Co., an English shirtmaker with a couple of Manhattan storefronts (I'm wearing one of their shirts in the photo that's accompanied several of my articles). So I can't call any emails I've received from them spam. But it's very, very strange to receive an email in April, for chrissakes, that reads:

If you are stuck for gift ideas this year, then visit our new "12 Gifts of Christmas" feature at www.thomaspink.co.uk and what is more, you can have any purchases gift wrapped for free in our signature pink and black boxes.

As a kid, I usually waited until school began to start collating my Christmas list--I guess, clearly, I was a procrastinator.

HERE COMES THE SPIDER-MAAAAAAN!!!! James Lileks has a sneak preview of what to expect from Spider-Man, The Movie, and a flashback to growing up in the Marvel universe. I was more of a DC kind of guy (Batman was my hero), but I'll definitely be looking forward to "Spider-man". However, I agree with Lileks when he says:

The movie looks good in previews. But: the idea that Spidey shoots webs out of his veins, rather than mechanical devices he built himself, is stupid and wrong. Peter Parker was a science geek. He was smart. Sure, he had a variety of arachnid-based powers, but without his own inventive skill, he would have been nothing. His ability to shoot webs and swing from parapet to flagpole was dependent on his intellectual prowess, and without that invention he would have had nothing more than the ability to know when the pizza guy was here before he rang the doorbell. My Spidey-sense tells me that Domino’s is here! Also, the barking dog, and the fact that it’s been 30 minutes.

I was going to say, I hate it when movies change things simply for the sake of changing them--even if it is "just a comic book", but Lileks mentions why, for kids, they're rarely just a comic book.

SOCIAL SECURITY: Donald Lambro of The Washington Times says that President Bush's plan to save Social Security by shifting to a new system of private investment retirement accounts is likely to be the hot political issue in this fall's congressional elections.

DIABETICS AND MOSH PITS: Roger Clegg has an article in National Review Online about a recent lawsuit by the U.S. Department of Justice's civil-rights division against Clear Channel Entertainment, because, as Clegg writes, "it prohibits anyone from taking a syringe into a rock concert. Huh? Well, the problem is that this policy makes no exception for insulin-using diabetics. In the Justice Department's view, this violates the Americans with Disabilities Act." Clegg continues:

There are two bad guys here. The major villain is Congress, which drafted an incredibly broad and vague statute begging to be abused, and which has turned a blind eye — so to speak — to the problems it has created. On Crossfire, former U.S. Representative and ADA sponsor Tony Coelho said of the law, "It was deliberately written vaguely." Now, as a consequence, everyone has his favorite story of a silly claim made under the ADA. We can add one more to the list, but don't hold your breath waiting for Congress to clean up its mess.

JUNK SCIENCE: InstaPundit.Com disses Scientific America for becoming a lousy magazine (which still praises Paul Ehrlich, the original junk scientist, while damning Bjorn Lomborg, the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist), while CBS finds a scientist who says global warming will lead to global cooling!

QUOTE OF THE DAY, from the Internet Movie Database's home page:

"I could eat a can of Kodak and puke a better movie."

From The Mirror Crack'd (1980)

Something to keep in mind this summer...

HUMILIATING TO WHOM? Saw this in an AP article about the U.S. regaining our Human Rights Seat at the the U.N..

The United States suffered a humiliating defeat last May when it lost the seat it had held since the commission was established in 1947. The ouster exacerbated U.S.-U.N. relations, caused an outcry in Washington and led to intensive behind-the-scenes lobbying by the Bush administration to get back on the panel.

That wasn't humiliating to the U.S. (And I suspect more and more Americans are beginning to realize what a joke the U.N. has become), it was humiliating to the United Nations, who took us off for nations that think human rights is a contradiction in terms.

ABBEY ROAD IN A BOX: One of the traits I share with Glenn Reynolds (the masterful InstaPundit, who just added me to his links list—thank you sir!) is an interest in making and recording my own music. On Thursday, I attended a seminar for Cakewalk’s Sonar XL 2.0, a program designed to turn a personal computer into a miniature version of Abbey Road studios.

There were at least 35 guys (no women that I saw) crammed into a back room at the San Jose Guitar Center—an interesting mix of teenagers through at least forty year olds, if not older—some longhairs, but also several folks with short hair, polo shirts, and khakis (like me). Evidently a lot of people want to record their own music!

It’s just astonishing the amount of personal power a PC can provide. If you’re reading this, there’s a very good chance that you also have a blog, or do some other sort of self-publishing on the Web. Home offices, personal investing, personal tax preparation, and much are made possible by the PC we often take for granted.

If you had told me in the early 1980s that for a few hundred dollars, I’d be able to record music on my PC, with more power than many commercial recording studios for under $500, I’d have laughed in your face. I’d like to think that in a few years the kids who have access to this technology will be producing some amazing music. Unfortunately, I’ve largely given up on what’s on today’s radio. I fear that I’ve become my father, stuck listening to the music of my youth over and over again. Or maybe the stuff on the radio really does stink. The poor ratings of the recent Grammy Awards may lend some credence to that.

Of course, the nice thing is, if you don’t like today’s music, you can always make your own!

"IT'S A B MURDER". Found on The Corner on National Review Online:

SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS: [Rod Dreher]
The Times' Alex Kuczynski turns in a deliciously sour piece about how the trashy Robert Blake murder case doesn't interest jaded Hollywood. It features an ice-cold noir quote from a Hollywood lawyer, who dismissed the killing of the low-rent Bonny Lee Bakley thus: "It's a B murder." God, I love that dirty town.

"BUSH ADMINISTRATION ISSUES STERN WARNING AS CNN REOCCUPIES WEST BANK" After a month long hiatus (hopefully spent telling Kofi Anan how to better run the UN--God knows he needs help), Uthant is back!

THE VETO PEN IS READY: The Washington Times says that President Bush has a veto pen, and he's not afraid to use it--and I hope they're right.

They quote him as saying:

"We must not repeat the mistake in the 1960s, when increased spending required by war was not balanced by slower spending in the rest of government," the president declared, adding, "I've got a tool, and that's called a veto."

That reason is simple enough. After he inherited a military that the previous administration had underfunded for years, Mr. Bush's job as commander in chief was further compounded less than eight months later by the September 11 terrorist attack. The inventory of the laser- and satellite-guided smart weapons barely lasted through the relatively low-level military response in Afghanistan. The depleted inventory of smart weapons isn't expected to be replenished before September, if by then. That would make any military decision involving Saddam Hussein or other member of the axis of evil essentially mute before then, irrespective of any further provocation. In itself that is a sad commentary on the military means of the world's only superpower.

CALIFORNIA AND SLAVE REPARATIONS: David Horowitz has an article called Gray Davis Joins the Race-Baiting Left:

California was a free territory and entered the Union as a free state in 1850, eleven years before the war on slavery. In this war Californians of course were on the side of freedom. Yet the governor of California now wants to punish California consumers for being on the right side of a battle against slavery that was won over 100 years ago. What is going on?

Read Horowitz's article to find out.

ISRAEL BANS UN MISSION: AP is reporting that "Israel's Cabinet decided Sunday not to allow a U.N. fact-finding team to come to the region to look into the battle in the Jenin refugee camp, a Cabinet minister said."

I can't say I blame them at all, if what Charles Krauthammer wrote is true:

Three people have been chosen by the United Nations to judge Israel's actions in Jenin. Two are sons of Europe, and one of those is Cornelio Sommaruga. As former head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Sommaruga spent 12 years ensuring that the only nation on earth to be refused admission to the International Red Cross is Israel. The problem, he said, was its symbol: "If we're going to have the Shield of David, why would we not have to accept the swastika?"

MEN ONLY UPDATE: Found on The Corner on National Review Online, Andrew Stuttaford has a suggestion for Prince Abdullah's flight back home tomorrow to Saudi Arabia:

Is there any chance that the male air traffic controllers in charge of his route could call in sick, leaving their female colleagues solely responsible for the job? If the Saudi despot doesn't think that women are up to this sort of work, he could always drive out of the country.

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!

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.

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.

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?"

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.

A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS? Orrin Judd runs the numbers.

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.

FRIGHTENING DEJA VU FROM THE 1920s and '30s: Victor David Hanson on The New Fascism, and John Podhoretz on return of The Big Lie.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

SHAKE 'EM ON DOWN: Jesse Jackson, courtesy of Bill Gates' wallet, comes to Silicon Valley.

TWENTY FACTS ABOUT ISRAEL AND THE MIDDLE EAST, from Empower America, via NRO's The Corner.

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.

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.

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.

JURY DUTY prevented me from posting anything today. Watch for more content tomorrow!

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.

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.

GORE ATTACKED BY ANGRY MUSCLE CARS: In honor of Earth Day, via Rand Simberg.

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.

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.

BE AFRAID. BE VERY AFRAID....

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.

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!)

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.

PATS TRADE BLEDSOE: Drew Bledsoe will be quarterbacking the Buffalo Bills this coming season.

JAPANESE SUPERCOMPUTER/HITCHHIKERS' GUIDE CONNECTION REVEALED: Group Captain Mandrake explains all.

THE REAL AXIS OF EVIL: AEI, HERITAGE, CATO, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: Patrick Ruffini explains the latest in rarified European intellectual thought.

Roger 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.

DRAFT UPDATE: ESPN says the Cowboys, as well as the Raiders, were the big winners in the draft.

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.

JIMI HENDRIX'S FATHER DIED. Although he died on Wednesday, I just stumbled across news of Al Hendrix's death today on a web site devoted to Les Paul electric guitars. I played guitar extensively in my late teens and early 20s, and ocassionally pick it up again from time to time. This past week has been one of those times I've played a bit more than usual (I have no idea why), but I'm sorry see to Jimi's father pass away.

NFL DRAFT: Today's the big day, and ESPN is tracking round one.

As expected, the expansion Houston Texans took QB David Carr as the first choice in the draft. Already, his jersey is for sale.

Yahoo is also tracking the draft, here.

MICHAEL JACKSON UPDATE: Steve Den Beste has his take on how the gloved one went from The King of Pop to The King of Pain.

THE MYSTERY IS FINALLY SOLVED: Orrin Judd has discovered just who the heck General Tso really was. And he really does make Colonel Sanders sound like a wimp! (Of course, I think the good colonel did better in the franchising department...)

SANCTIONS AGAINST ARAFAT:

Sens. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.), and Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) have introduced the bill, which would deny U.S. travel visas to Arafat and other senior PLO officials. It would also downgrade the status of the PLO's representative office in Washington and restrict the travel of the senior PLO official at the United Nations.

It would seize any United States assets of the PLO, the PA and Arafat and require the Bush administration to report to Congress on any acts of terrorism committed by the PLO or its "constituent elements."

"This act seeks to create conditions more conducive to stopping the senseless violence and flow of innocent blood in the Middle East," McConnell said on the Senate floor.

WAXMAN TRIES TO NIX PIX :

California Democratic Congresssman Henry Waxman tried unsuccessfully Thursday to have an accredited TV news photographer thrown out of a House subcommittee hearing. The hearing focused on whether to limit liability lawsuits against gun makers and Waxman, who favors gun control, insisted the cameraman was videotaping on behalf of the National Rifle Association.

GENDER BLACKMAIL AT THE WORLD BANK: Wendy McElroy says that the UN and the World Bank are engaged in "gender blackmail":

Two years ago, at the Beijing 5 U.N. Women 2000 Conference, European development agencies threatened to withhold funds from Nicaragua because Max Padilla, head of the Nicaraguan Ministry for the Family, insisted on defining gender by its common meaning of "male and female."

The European agencies defined "gender" as a social construct that included gays and the transgendered. Desperately poor and unable to risk losing foreign aid, Nicaragua fired Padilla.

This was not the first time world agencies had attempted to impose a politically correct gender agenda on a resisting nation, nor was it the last. Recent pronouncements by the World Bank — which lends over $17 billion annually to developing nations — suggest that the U.N.-aligned agency is currently engaged in gender blackmail: The World Bank has declared that "gender mainstreaming" (the demand for socio-economic and political equality between the genders), is key to "poverty reduction."

ZIPPY THE WONDER SERGEANT: Sgt. Stryker says he's got a whole trunk full of zip-ties, some of which have your name on them! (Hopefully I'm still on his good side...)

THE SALIERI STORY: Flak Magazine's take on the recent rerelease of Amadeus.

THE MICHAEL JACKSON WATCH WATCH: Fox News has an article on Michael Jackson's apparently grim finances these days. How bad is it for the gloved one?:

Last year he was forced to put up a $2 million diamond watch in order to borrow money from a bank.

This revelation comes at a crucial time in Jackson's roller-coaster career. It's already been acknowledged that he's used the Beatles song catalog to borrow $200 million from Sony Music. At the same time, Jackson is struggling with poor sales of his latest album, Invincible, and Internet rumors that Sony is ignoring the album in order to force Jackson's hand in turning over the catalog.

This column reported several weeks ago that Jackson was in constant touch with Richard Rowe, head of Sony Music Publishing, who wants to negotiate a settlement on the loan and take possession of the Beatles catalog. Sony issued a strangely worded denial at the time, saying it did not seek "to buy" ATV Music Publishing from Jackson. But, as a Sony business insider confirmed for me, "foreclose" would have been the appropriate word since Sony technically already owns the songs.

Now the news that Jackson, who lives on borrowed money, needed to pawn a diamond watch.

U.N.=MAFIA: Read Jonah Goldberg's essay on the United Nations as to why.

THE HONORABLE REVEREND DOCTOR AL SHARPTON?? Jay Nordlinger, in his Impromptus column on National Review Online mentioned that Al Sharpton has taken to having himself introduced on his radio show, as “The Honorable Reverend Doctor Al Sharpton.” That’s quite a mouthful! So how did this happen? Nordlinger says:

Well, we got the explanation from Sharpton’s spokeswoman, Rachel Noerdlinger (yes, you heard that right, Rachel Noerdlinger, and that makes for a fascinating story, which I may explore and relate sometime). Sharpton picked up the “Doctor” when he received an honorary degree from the A. P. Clay Bible College in Baton Rouge. He calls himself “the Honorable” because he is boss of the “National Action Network,” which, according to Miss Noerdlinger, is “a position of honor to people in the community.” (What community would that be?) And “the Reverend”? Who the hell knows?

Anyway, I feel I can’t do better than Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live, who said, “No matter how many titles he piles up before his name, if the last two words you hear are ‘Al Sharpton,’ he’s not fooling anybody.”

GEORGE WILL ON HAMBURGERS, CARS AND DEMOCRACIES: Sounding remarkably like my wife's post yesterday on hamburgers and freedom, George Will (by way of Stephen Green's VodkaPundit site) says:

Some Americans (let us avoid the term "liberals") hate fun, such as cheeseburgers, talk radio, guns, Las Vegas and cars that are larger than roller skates and that look more interesting than shoeboxes. They hated 1950s cars that looked -- as a sniffy critic said -- like jukeboxes on wheels. Such people love guilt, and want people to feel guilty about cars because cars have made possible suburbs, Wal-Mart, McDonald's and emancipation from public transportation.

Want a great example of liberal automobile guilt in action? Check out the thoughts of James Cromwell (aka Zefram Cochrane in "Star Trek: First Contact"), who played an 19th century automobile inventor in the anything-but-magnificent recent A&E remake of Orson Welles' legendary 1942 film of "The Magnificent Ambersons":

A&E: In your view, then, this story is as much about how America was changing as it is about a single family.

JC: I think it was the real end of innocence. The sense of being overwhelmed by technology; the automobile, of course, is one of the central images. The automobile, in some way, defines America and is a perfect example of what America is. I have an Alfa Romeo, so I love automobiles. '67, really nice ... they're gorgeous to look at, they're fun to drive, and they get you from one place to another. They also take something out of the earth that is irreplaceable and they spit poison into the air. They ultimately don't bring people together; they tend to isolate us, as Faulkner once said. We drive around in, like, Beetles, trapped in these shells. Ultimately, we will be living in that kind of shell. If you've ever been to Los Angeles, you can notice people on their computers have breakfast, fixing their hair and talking on the telephone while driving on the freeway. It's an interesting existence.

Well, again, I think it's very Shakespearean. It comes out of misplaced enthusiasm for the material things.

Wow, I don't know about you--but I can feel the guilt, the handwringing, the Bobo sense of "yes, I want my expensive vintage Italian sportscar, but dammit, I just gotta feel guilty about it! It wouldn't be right for me to enjoy the fruits of my labor! I moved to Hollywood, and had a decent career as a character actor and I make more than the average person, and I love the money and what it buys me, but I'd better not show it, or people will think me calm and unfashionably sane!"

OH AND SUG--DON'T FORGET TO SAY YOUR PRAYERS: I mentioned Dr. Strangelove recently to one of my editors, and she wondered why men love it so much, and that it did nothing for her. She thought “it must be a gender thing”.

Good question! It does nothing for my wife, either, and yet, I don’t know a guy who doesn’t like Dr. Strangelove. Why is that? Well, there are a host of reasons:

Guys spent their childhoods playing GI Joe, blowing things up, breaking things, fighting with each other, and generally expelling lots of energy, sweat and (later) testosterone. And in many respects, Kubrick’s American actors: Sterling Hayden, George C. Scott, and Keenan Wynn, are all playing variations on those childhood GI Joe/Sgt Rock/John Wayne images. As Patton once said (and Patton is probably as popular a guy film as Dr. Strangelove—it doesn’t hurt that both star George C. Scott in his two best roles):

Men, this stuff that some sources sling around about America wanting out of this war, not wanting to fight, is a crock of bulls***. Americans love to fight, traditionally. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle.

You are here today for three reasons. First, because you are here to defend your homes and your loved ones. Second, you are here for your own self respect, because you would not want to be anywhere else. Third, you are here because you are real men and all real men like to fight.

When you, here, everyone of you, were kids, you all admired the champion marble player, the fastest runner, the toughest boxer, the big league ball players, and the All-American football players. Americans love a winner. Americans will not tolerate a loser.

From everything I’ve read, nuclear combat, and the possibility of it escalating into world destruction properly terrified Stanley Kubrick, yet he was no pacifist or kneejerk left-winger. He understood war, and its importance to civilization. Which is why the most realistically photographed scenes in Dr. Strangelove are those on the B-52 and the fighting at Burpleson Air Force Base. Kubrick began his film career as a documentarian, and he brings this same approach to photographing these scenes. He and Ken Adam, his production designer, built their B-52 interior with no cooperation from the US military, and only a single photograph of the cockpit from an aviation magazine to guide them. And yet, it feel absolutely authentic. And that authenticity is the base that allows the film’s Swiftian satire to succeed. Any other director, handed the script for Dr. Strangelove, would have thrown realism out the window, and shot the film on wild psychedelic sets, such as those in 1960s camp such as Casino Royale or the Adam West Batman series.

Speaking of the script, as I said in March, when I watched Strangelove with 'Group Capt. Mandrake', I said to him, "I don't know if this is the best script ever written, but it's right up there. This is incredible writing." Peter George, an ex-RAF officer had the original concept of a nuclear thriller. Kubrick had the key idea of turning it into an over-the-top Swiftian satire of the Cold War. And Terry Southern and Peter Sellers helped to gin up the humor. (Between the two of us, The Group Captain and I have every line in the film memorized. What the freaks who saw Rocky Horror over and over again did to it in the late 1970s, we can do Strangelove. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Then of course, all the phallic and psychosexual references in the film, beginning with the opening “erotic” airborne refueling of a B-52, with “Try a Little Tenderness” playing in the background, probably add to why guys love Strangelove and women are turned off by it. (Insert obvious Tim Allen “cars are just an extension of your penis” routine here)

And then there’s the nuclear explosion as the ultimate orgasm reference. Of course, one reason why my wife doesn’t like Strangelove, is that it reminds her of the ultimate fear of nuclear war hanging over our heads, and the bad old days of the Cold War: “duck and cover” drills, air raid shelters, civil defense nightmares, and of course, the destruction of the planet. From my point of view, this is the awesome power of Strangelove: it allows us to see those fears, confront them, laugh at them, and therefore ease them. But I think for many people (and I suspect a big chunk of women), those fears are impossible to overcome—or merely dredging them to the surface is so painful, it’s not worth it. Better to keep them locked up in the subconscious than expose them to the light of day.

Without opening up a feminist can of worms, I think it’s reasonable to say that historically, men have had to wrestle with more demons--or at a minimum, very different demons--growing up than women—fear of failure, fear of losing one’s manhood, fear of death or dismemberment on the battlefield or on the job (which is frequently used as a Freudian symbol of castration in the movies—Barry Lyndon losing his leg, Luke Skywalker losing a hand, etc.—there’s those phallic references again!), fear of getting loved ones or family killed as a result of error or incompetence, etc., etc., These are ancient, primal fears, that have been with men since The Dawn of Man (oh wait, that’s from a different Stanley Kubrick movie—never mind). And overcoming those fears, or at least controlling them, is essential to functioning as a man. And Dr. Strangelove is all about all of those fears--and more.

All of which are my take, off the top of my head, as to a few of the reasons why Dr. Strangelove is one of the great guy films of all time.

IDI AMIN TO HEAD U.N. HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION: Given the recent insanity of the UN, my brain took a second or two longer than usual to process the fact that Happy Fun Pundit was tweaking my lower extremity.

Because with the UN, anything is possible.

GEORGE HAS MORE ON GORE IN OH-FOUR: Robert A. George on Al Gore & Democrats on National Review Online:

The best lack all conviction and the worst are filled with passionate intensity." That was one of the memorable lines in Al Gore's "comeback" speech last weekend at the Florida Democrats' state convention. The statement was made after Gore had unleashed a laundry list of particular Bush-administration offenses. It is an excerpt from Yeats's poem, "The Second Coming." Yeats, of course, was referring to the Messiah. Guess we have an idea of how Gore sees himself. Some hardworking speechwriter gets points for selecting that one.

George thinks that Gore has more of a shot than Patrick Ruffini does--in fact--he views him as both the "best" and the "worst" candidate the Democrats can muster up for 2004:

This is why Gore can also be the "worst" 2004 candidate. What do the "accomplishments" of the Clinton-Gore administration mean when it's clear that the nation was vulnerable to a horrific terrorist attack? The war on terror was barely mentioned by Al Gore last weekend. It was a rhetorical omission that ironically matched the Clinton administration's lack of focus on bin Laden: The attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993, U.S. military barracks in 1996, American embassies in Africa in 1998 and the USS Cole in 2000. Links to al Qaeda were evident in all these cases. Yet, Clinton only launched missiles when his political career seemed to be at stake.

This information — in the post-9/11 world — is now part of the known record. The "peace and prosperity" argument which Gore could have run on in 2000 is now longer operative. Instead, Gore could be in the position of answering for the failure to disrupt Osama bin Laden's terrorist network. This time Gore would have to defend Clinton-era policies — not scandals.

WHIZZER WHITE, JFK AND RFK: Bill Sulik says that most papers got it wrong in their descriptions of Byron "Whizzer" White, the recently deceased football star and Supreme Court judge:

You will see notes like this one in the AP: "Appointed by President Kennedy in 1962, White soon became a dissenter from many of the court's liberal rulings of the 1960s." Actually, I think the AP has it wrong. Byron White was the mirror image of Robert F. Kennedy: he was strongly pro-labor and as equally opposed to corruption and organized crime within the unions and without. See, for example, RFK's service on the McClellan Committee in the late 1950's.

What else will they say about Byron White -- he was one of two dissenters in Roe v. Wade. Guess what? Bobby Kennedy (and especially his wife, Ethel) was opposed to abortion on demand.

White was anti-communist. RFK started out working for Sen. Joe McCarthy, although was opposed to McCarthy's tactics (but not his anti-communist, pro-America stance) and resigned and wrote a tough critique of McCarthy's methods and conclusions.

White was pro-civil rights, especially in the areas of voting rights and education rights, as was RFK with his move to desegregate Ole Miss. Yet, White, like RFK and others of that generation, most notably Hubert H. Humphrey, were strongly opposed to the evolution of affirmative action into goals, quotas, and reverse discrimination.

As you might have guessed, I have long admired Byron White. Nevertheless, I think he made his share of mistakes. For example, while he was not a doctrinaire absolutist (siding with the state) in the church-state cases, he dissented in the Widmer v. Vincent case which held that religious speech was entitled to the same rights as non-religious speech.

Justice White, former football star, attorney, Judge; you had a good run. May you rest in peace.

Jonah Goldberg wrote a column a few years ago about the fact that Hubert Humphrey, known as "Mr. Liberal" back in the 1960s, assured his colleagues during debate on the 1964 Civil Rights Act that nothing in the bill could lead to quotas. Humphrey said:

“Title VII does not require an employer to achieve any sort of racial balance in his work force by giving preferential treatment to any individual or group.” He then said that if anyone could find language in the legislation that suggested an endorsement of racial preferences, “I will start eating the pages, one after the other, because it is not in there.” Well, today, because of that legislation, we live in the hot water of racial quotas - even though even Hubert Humphrey thought we shouldn’t.

And yet.

Anyone today who argues that we should simply go back to Hubert Humphrey’s vision is immediately called a radical right-winger. Isn’t that odd? If, in 1935, I said Social Security will turn into the biggest entitlement in American history, absorbing massive fractions of the total U.S. budget, I would have been a laughingstock. But more to the point, if I could have convinced them I was right, nobody would have supported Social Security in the first place -- not even the Communists, because they hated democratic-socialist half-measures that alleviated the appeal of real Communism.

Amazing how far to the left an ideology has gotten in the past 30 years that three of its biggest stars of the 1960s, JFK, RFK, and Humphrey, would probably be considered moderates these days. Heck, I remember when Rush Limbaugh made JFK an honorary Dittohead.

MOTOROLA'S SEMICONDUCTOR BUSINESS IN BIG TROUBLE, says Steven Den Beste:

Motorola's processor business, in particular, is a major disaster. They have two primary sets of customers: embedded and Apple. In the embedded business they're being eaten alive by ARM, and Apple is not a big enough customer to support the PPC architecture on its own. One way or another Motorola is going to have to substantially change their semiconductor business, and that's probably going to involve actual shutdowns of entire business sectors.

These losses happened after Motorola's fabled mass layoff. In the last two years, they've laid off one third of the total staff of the company, and by doing so seem to have made most of their businesses viable. But even though it sustained a disproportionate percentage of the layoffs, the semiconductor business is still the corporate problem and is still bleeding cash like a firehose. They can't go on like this, and with the new accounting rules they can no longer disguise where in the company the money is going. Motorola's stockholders are going to start asking very pointed questions, like "Why are we in this business at all? Wouldn't we save more money in the long run by biting the bullet and shutting the f***er down?"

Read the whole piece--other than the occasional R-rated word, this is terrific business reporting and analysis, as good as in any traditional media.

TESTING HOV NEGATIVE: You've read my commuter lanes rant. Insight runs the numbers that back it up.

DEMOCRACY THROUGH HAMBURGERS: My wife was so inspired by our dinner tonight, that she wanted to write a guest commentary on my Web log. Who am I to argue, especially when it's on the subject of freedom, democracy, capitalism, and really tasty hamburgers:

I went out for dinner with my husband. We had limited time and were passing a hamburger joint that a friend had recommended, so we decided to stop there. Since trying to lose weight, we haven’t been eating too many hamburgers.

Sitting in front of a fantastic juicy medium rare cheese burger with grilled onions and catsup oozing out from under the roll, I thought about Group Captain Lionel Mandrake and his desire to live in the US (in spite of dissing us every chance he gets). I thought, with hamburgers like this, no wonder everyone wants to live here.

When you order a hamburger at a real hamburger joint (not a mass produced fast food emporium) what are the first two things you are asked? “What do you want with that?” and “how do you want it cooked?” See - the hamburger epitomizes freedom of choice.

You can have your burger rare, medium rare, medium, medium well, well done - and everywhere in between. Then you have your choice of cheeses - Swiss, American, cheddar. Do you want grilled onions, mushrooms, bacon - all of them? Once you get your burger you go to the condiment table - with catsup, mayo, mustard, lettuce, tomato, peppers, relish, onions, BBQ sauce, pickles.

What other country has a national food that has so much variety. In France I’m sure they argue over the exact RIGHT way to make escargot, a coq au vin. In England there’s tea, which is just a drink, but there’s a “proper” tea which means it’s done right. But in the US - there just isn’t a right way to have a hamburger other than exactly and precisely how you want it.

God that was a great hamburger!!!

I'd also add to Nina's comments the obvious link between pockets of America that eschew the chewing of the hamburger for tofu, brussel sprouts, and other Vegan silliness to anti-freedom, anti-capitalist and totalitarian ideas (Santa Cruz, Berkeley, Ann Arbor, and lots of other college towns come immediately to mind).

CONSERVATIVES MORE SUPPORTIVE OF ISRAEL THAN LIBERALS: Christopher Cross links to a Gallup Poll that says "Republicans, Conservatives More Supportive of Israelis than Democrats, Liberals"--and as Cross says, "To repeat: Pat Buchanan is neither Republican nor Conservative."

This poll (a) isn't very surprising and (b) sort of reminds me of an article that ran a couple a years ago in National Review Online about how, despite the definitions implied in their names, liberalism has become a blocking force--seeking to do little more than consolidate and maintain the status quo of the New Deal and Great Society. Meanwhile conservatism has become much more dynamic and open to new ideas (like...protecting fellow democracies!).

It's been fascinating reading about the anti-Israel bias in the New York Times. My wife, whose mother lives in Manhattan and has the microchip implanted in her that makes her believe everything she reads in the Times (and the New Yorker) has told me that her mother occasionally regurgitates that stuff. Which is even more ironic considering her late husband knew David 'Mickey' Marcus when he was helping to found Israel.

DEFLATING THE EMPIRE: Salon has an article called "Galactic gasbag", which says "Beneath all the pseudo-mythic Joseph Campbell hogwash, the roots of George Lucas' empire lie not in "The Odyssey" but in classic and pulp 20th century sci-fi." I've also read that Lucas came up with "Star Wars" after he couldn't get the rights to do a remake of "Flash Gordon". But I do take exception to one thing in the Salon article:

why is Lucas' non-"Star Wars" résumé so dismal? Apart from conceiving the "Indiana Jones" films, which owe their box-office impact to the kinetic genius of director Steven Spielberg, Lucas has produced an unbroken series of flops. Anyone here remember "Howard the Duck"? Or "Tucker: The Man and His Dream"? "Radioland Murders," anybody? And let us not forget "Willow," which is a virtual textbook of Campbell's mix 'n' match approach to mythology.

I loved "Tucker". It's a wonderful movie about do-it-yourself inventiveness, and the exuberance of post-war America. And it's arguably Francis Ford Coppola's best post-"Apocalypse Now" movie.

SIMON SAYS CUT THE PORK. Bill Simon on Gray Davis:

it’s such a tragedy what Gray Davis has done. When you talk about letting the government grow by 37% in three years, at the same time as our population grew by 5% and inflation grew by 7%, so you’re talking about an underlying rate of growth of 12%—that should sustain some rate of growth in the government. But he grew expenses by 37%. I don’t know any households, any business, any charity, any entity, that could grow their expenses three times faster than their revenue. Do you? So if that’s the case, at some point, you’ve got to pay the piper. If you’ve allowed your government to grow that quickly, you can be sure that there are plenty of areas of fluff, plenty of areas you can honestly do without, plenty of areas of mismanagement and waste.

MURDEROUS CAPTOED THUG JOURNALISM: Stephen Green, aka the VodkaPundit, has a footwear analysis of leading journalists, as well as movers, and/or shakers of the right wing/libertarian variety:

NOTE: Bill Kristol has never, as far as I know, worn jack boots. Hence the "wing-tip thug" comment. Pat Buchanan is also a wing-tip thug, but he pretends he's wearing construction boots.

I hope to Whomever that I stop doing Footwear Political Analysis. Soon.

UPDATE: I'm still catching up on all I missed last week, so let me say it now: Virginia, I somehow knew you'd be wearing three-inch heels. That's all I'm going to say -- just in case Melissa is reading this.

In the efforts of lugubriously full disclosure, I do have a pair of black New & Lingwood captoes, which I bought at their Jermyn Street shop when I was in London in May of 2000, after Tom Wolfe rhapsodized so eloquently about them in Bonfire of the Vanities. I also have a pair of $800 Alan Flusser brown English-made captoes, and a pair of his suede wingtip slipons, which were each on sale for $150 at Saks in New York in February (I'm wearing the Flusser captoes in the Segway photos, on Litewheels' Web site, by the way. Flusser is apparently, hopefully temporarily, giving up the tailoring business and concentrating on his book writing, hence Saks was dumping his shoes in their President's day sale.)

Of course, on Monday, I bought a pair of $34.95 Florsheim deck shoes at the Milpitas Great Mall.

What my footwear choices say about me, I'll leave to Green, Tom Wolfe, and Dr. Freud. And they can probably also explain why on earth I'm telling you all this (not the least of which was the kick I got out of Green's post.)

DRUDGE HEADLINE (complete with Matt's patented flashing police gumball light):

ABC LEANING TOWARDS GEORGE
STEPHANOPOULOS AS SOLO ANCHOR FOR
'THIS WEEK'

Media bias? Don't be silly! Of course, I suppose it could be worse--they could have brought back Leonardo DiCaprio.

Say, I wonder if if Stephenopoulos will have Uthant on?

IS ARAFAT SENILE? Congressman John Cooksey, a practicing ophthalmologist, says yes.

Cooksey is a Louisiana Republican who is hoping to win the Senate seat of incumbent Democrat Mary Landrieu. Lloyd Grove's Reliable Source column in the Washington Post also quotes Cooksey as saying: "If I see someone come in that's got a diaper on his head and a fan belt wrapped around the diaper on his head, that guy needs to be pulled over."

Maybe if Cooksey looses his Senate race, Bush ought to nominate him to replace Norman Mineta. Cooksey sounds like he has the requisite common sense for the job of Transportation Secretary that Mineta lacks.

WOBBLY WATCH: Found on NRO's The Corner Weblog:

BUSH OFF HIS GAME [Jonah Goldberg]
The Wall Street Journal nails it this morning.

UNLESS... [Jonah Goldberg]
Michael Kelly is right.

UPDATE: NRO's official position is clearly in the former camp. They describe Bush's current policy as "disastrous".

MORE MCLUHAN ON WEBLOGS: "Weblogs make it possible to present instant recaps of ongoing events a sort of "story so far" that used to sit above serial publications. As in football instant replays, the recap or recorso draws attention to processes rather than product or even goal. The audience is involved in the game in a totally new way a way that changes the game itself. -- 1964" (From: "Essential McLuhan")

Like I did in my essay on Web logs, I just substituted "Weblogs" for "Xerox" and it's amazing how precient ol' McLuhan sounds!

ORRIN JUDD ON CITIES: "It remains unclear to me why we should expect that cities even have a future. With the demise of manufacturing, does anyone still have a job that they couldn't just as easily do out of their home with a computer and video-conferencing?"

Orrin was referring to my piece yesterday in Tech Central Station on the Segway and urban planning. And while I appreciate the link, I'm not sure if I entirely agree with him (and believe me, I know it's dangerous to disagree with anybody who is as well-read as Judd is). As much as my wife and I both love telecommuting, it's hard for me to imagine cities dispersing anytime in the next century or so. I think there's always going to be a need for centralized locations of commerce, financial markets, meeting and shopping places, etc., if only for symbolic purposes.

Of course, what cities are used for, could be change radically. In one of my favorite McLuhan quotes (from Tom Wolfe's magazine profile of him, reprinted in "The Pump House Gang"), McLuhan said, "Of course, a city like New York is obsolete. People will no longer concentrate in great urban centers for the purpose of work. New York will become a Disneyland, a pleasure dome..."

But that was almost 40 years ago, and yet while in many cases, New York is a pleasure zone (if not yet domed), its primary business (sorry Cal) is still business. And will probably remain so for at least the foreseeable future.

It's also possible that suburbs could become more urban as well, but I tend to doubt it. In the late 1990s, Reason magazine and Virginia Postrel's The Scene Web log frequently covered a trend among urban planners called "The New Urbanism", an attempt to increase the density of suburbs to more city-like conditions. Why this would make sense, any more than Curbusier's Radiant City concepts that banished sidewalks and put buildings in otherwise unpopulated greenbelts, is arguable (at best), but it does show that there are lots of forces working hard to keep the concept of cities alive, even as telecommuting becomes more and more viable and popular.

There's no doubt that telecommuting is a powerful trend, one that's been growing even before Alvin Toffler referred to it in "The Third Wave" 22 years ago, but my own feeling is that cities are going to be with us for a very long time to come.

Of course, as Kubrick and Spielberg's "A.I" showed with their image of Manhattan, circa 3000, who or what is going to live there is still up for grabs.

GORE IN '04: Patrick Ruffini says that Gore has got a lock on the Democratic nomination for president. Ruffini also has lots of thoughts as to what that means for Bush.

WE'RE BACK! Had a glorious weekend in Napa and Sonoma--including visits to the Coppola Winery (so-so wine, lots of Francis Ford Coppola memorabilia), the brilliantly designed Hess Gallery, and the Napa Valley Wine Train.

We'll be back with more news and links tomorrow.

THE SEGWAY MEETS THE RADIANT CITY: My essay on the city planning efforts of the builders of the Segway is up at Tech Central Station. It's a nifty piece (if I do say so myself), comparing their urban planning concepts with those of the french architect Le Corbusier in the 1930s.

GONE FISHIN': Friends are in town, and we're off to wine country in northern California for the weekend, so don't expect too much to be posted until Monday or Tuesday. In the meantime, check out the nice folks on the links page, and tell 'em we sent you!

USS CLUELESS TRANSMITTING INSTRUCTIONS TO UNKNOWN ENEMY IN SECRET CODE: What else to make of a post that includes paragraphs such as:

So there's users Alice and Betty and Charlie. Alice's Walsh code is 11110000. Betty's is 11001100. Charlie's is 10101010. 11110000 xor 11110000 is all zeros, a match. But 11110000 xor 11001100 is 00111100, and 11110000 xor 10101010 is 01011010. In each case, half ones and half zeros. (The pattern of 1's and 0's doesn't matter, as you'll see. What's important is how many of each there are.)

Alice's receiver runs an accumulator, and it adds for each match (each 0) and subtracts for each non-match (each 1). This requires us to differentiate between chips and bits. A chip is part of a bit. The cell system sends chips at a rate of 1.2288 MHz, but it takes a lot of chips to transmit one bit. Each chip contains a little piece of the information about each bit (hence the name). Right now in most CDMA systems the bit rate per phone is only 9600 per second in voice calls; the rest run 14400 per second. So there are a huge number of chips per bit.

And I'm sure the model playing Lara Croft that's posted further down on the same page has some secret microfilm hidden on her somewhere...

BIG APPLE BLOGGING BASH: (Try saying--or typing--that five times fast) For details, click on the link:

If anyone is planning a west coast counterpart, let me know!

BEAM ME UP: James Traficant was convicted of taking bribes in an Ohio trial. The Washington Post says:

The nine-term Democrat faced up to 63 years in prison if convicted of all 10 charges he faced, though he would probably receive a much shorter term under federal guidelines. He could be fined hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The sentencing date was not immediately set.

Traficant, 60, could also be expelled from the House by his colleagues, something that has happened only once since the Civil War.

ENRON 101, AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE US AND JAPAN: Good speech by James Glassman, delivered last month to an audience in Tokyo. It's both a quick primer on the Enron scandal (in case you landed here from Mars), and how US free markets are better than Japanese central planning.

CONDI RICE, CHEVRON, AND ANGOLA: Did you know Chevron named an oil tanker after Condoleezza Rice? I didn't. I'm not sure what to make of this article in Insight magazine, but I wouldn't be surprised to see several elements from this story resurface if Condi ends up running for VP--or P.

The Media Research Center profiles Ray Brady, Louis Rukeyser's replacement on PBS's Wall Street Week, and does not like what it sees. Here's what you'll be missing by tuning out Brady. (Incidentally, for what it's worth, CNBC is putting Rukeyser on opposite Brady.

ELIAN UPDATE: The Washington Post is reporting that "The head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service ordered the destruction of an e-mail that could have bolstered the request for asylum filed for Elian Gonzalez during the Cuban boy's stay in Miami, a watchdog group said Wednesday."

A handwritten notation at the bottom of an INS memo dated Dec. 29, 1999, said that Doris Meissner, then the INS commissioner, ordered the memo destroyed the next day.

Meissner on Wednesday said she didn't recall ordering that a specific document be destroyed but described a standing policy that no notes be taken or memos disseminated about the boy's case because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Err, wouldn't we want extra documentation because it's a sensitive issue, and one that history might look back upon with questions?

More Post:

A copy of the memo survived and was made public Wednesday by the conservative legal group, Judicial Watch. It discussed the possibility that Elian's father at one time sought a visa to move to the United States.

It also discussed allegations that the Cuban government had been coercing the father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez.

If coercion could be shown, the roughly drafted e-mail memo said, INS could "potentially accept the child's asylum's application and advise that there is no prohibition on age to child filing application. As such PA should proceed."

"PA" apparently refers to "political asylum."

Is anybody at all surprised by this?

HAWAII 5-0 (MPH): Back on January 28, Instapundit had the following entry:

FIGHT THE POWER: Hawaii has installed traffic cameras, and ignited a rebellion:

The response has been swift. Rebellious drivers have snapped up several thousand license covers that illegally obscure plates, owners of automobile-accessory shops say. They have sent angry letters to the local papers urging people not to pay their tickets. Cellphone brigades call morning radio shows to relay the vans' locations, and reports abound of drivers hurling obscene gestures, insults and even trash at the vans.

Some officials are even saying that the program may be working too well. "People are now driving too slow," said Carol Costa, a spokeswoman for the City of Honolulu "They're driving in packs so their plates can't be seen by the cameras. There are people who speed around the packs of cars. And the vans, of course, themselves are being targeted by drivers."

"Of course" is right. This is America. We're willing to pull together against terrorists, but not to be Good Germans. Keep that straight, pols, or forget it at your peril.

On Thursday, Matt Drudge linked to the following article, titled Hawaii Halts Use of Traffic Cameras:

HONOLULU - Gov. Ben Cayetano on Wednesday ordered a halt to the use of cameras to catch speeders, a safety measure many Hawaii motorists considered so underhanded they tried to subvert the system.

Cayetano said the Legislature was about to repeal the program anyway. "The traffic van cam law is the creation of the Legislature, and if they want to now cancel the program it will be canceled," he said in a statement.

The van-mounted cameras, introduced on Oahu two months ago and operated by a private company, were coupled with radar and automatically photographed a speeder's license plate. A ticket was then issued by mail to the car's owner.

Some drivers mockingly called them the "talivans."

The House late Tuesday tentatively decided to abandon the system, and Cayetano said he would allow the repeal bill to become law without his signature. He maintained, though, that the program's aims were good.

"Driving at faster speeds has become a habit for many drivers and explains, at least in part, why there was so much opposition to the traffic van cam," he said.

As I recall, from staying with friends on the big Island in November of 2000, most of the speeds on Hawaiian roads are set ridiculously low. Might that have led to an increase in the speeds of drivers? Nahh...

THE NEW, NEW JOURNALISM, REDUX: Catholic Exchange has run my essay on Web logs, which previously ran last month in SpinTech. (And no, that's not me on Thursday's Catholic Exchange home page, it's some other guy frantically yelling into his monitor (probably because Blogger was down). And that's also not me in the photo that accompanies the article, it's the same guy who was yelling into his monitor, who now appears to be very carefully examining the function keys on his keyboard.

Or perhaps he's frantically trying to get the Dorito crumbs out his keyboard. I'll never forget taking my old AT&T laptop through the metal detector at Philadelphia International Airport about five years ago, having to open it up, and being told by the rocket scientist of an inspector "Man, you really had a case of the munchies!" Hey, it's not my fault that the Dorito crumbs seem to propagate in the space between letters. Actually, it is. What can I tell you--I did have a serious case of the munchies back then. Fortunately, I eat slightly more sensibly these days. And I rarely have Doritos and Martinis, which I actually did once back in those days. But I digress.

I wonder if F. Scott Fitzgerald ever got crumbs in his Adler typewriter? Oops, I digressed again. Where was I?

Oh yeah--I do want to apologize for the relative lack of posting today. I spent the afternoon photographing vintage Atari 2600s and related equipment for a future article. (Thanks to Best Electronics in San Jose for the use of their facilities--and especially the use of their 2600s!) And then spent much of the evening cleaning up said photographs, and emailing them out to my editor.

DOES 'NET SHORT CIRCUIT ECONOMY? Reuters has an article with the headline:NetTrends: Is the Net Short-Circuiting the Economy?

Many might dismiss that notion, but an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, believes the Internet may be "one of the most important profit-killing innovations" in years -- undercutting business profits as the world's largest economy struggles to emerge from recession.

Edward Leamer, author of the widely watched Anderson economic forecast issued quarterly, said while the Internet definitely boosts productivity, it may also be the reason U.S. corporate earnings sank at the end of the 1990s.

"The fundamental question is: Where did the profits go?" Leamer said in a recent telephone interview. "My number one hypothesis is it has to do with New Economy tools, both the Internet and communication devices."

My answer to all of this is "so what?". The Internet isn't going away. People aren't going to stop using it. So it's up to businesses to adapt to it, rather than moaning that it's taking away their profits. And complaining that the Internet may be "the reason U.S. corporate earnings sank at the end of the 1990s," discounts the actions of the Federal Reserve in the late 1990s to tighten money supply to fight an imaginary inflation beast, the spike in oil prices during that time, as well as the Clinton-era Justice Department's suit against Microsoft, which sent the Nasdaq cratering.

NETANYAHU: "Israel should have expelled Yasser Arafat more than a year ago and now must "destroy" his regime and clean terrorism out of Palestinian-occupied land, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday." That and many more comments by the once and quite possibly future prime minister of Israel here.

UPDATE: Howard Feinberg, in his Kesher Talk blog, says that Netanyahu is in Washington today. Howard plans "on catching him at the American Enterprise Institute this evening. If any other DC bloggers are coming, do let me know". Info on Netanyahu's engagement there is on Howard's site.

Netanyahu spoke to the US Senate today. Here's a transcript of his speech, via NRO's The Corner Blog.

WANT POLITICAL DISCUSSION? AVOID NEWSGROUPS, READS BLOGS! Says this Reuters article. Besides ours, here are a few others to choose from.

BLANKLEY SAYS BUSH GETS IT: Tony Blankley, writing in The Washington Times says that Bush hasn't gone wobbly, he's adjusting his performance to play "To An Audience of Fools":

As I understand the last few weeks, Mr. Bush has been winking to us as much as he can. But here's the challenge he faces. Our European and Muslim friends became hysterical over Israel's march into the West Bank. Even though Mr. Bush knows the chance of negotiating a meaningful peace with Yasser Arafat and the suicide bombers is nil, those deluded and frantic friends think there is a chance and have insisted that Mr. Bush make the effort. To make the effort, he had to — temporarily — agree to work with Mr. Arafat and not call him what he is — a terrorist and a protector of terrorists.

He also has been compelled to insist that Israel pull back — even though he understands that once the suicide bombers start up again, Israel will have to go in again. If we are disgusted by this idiocy, imagine how the president must feel.

We got some sense of his true instincts when he talked to the press at his Crawford Ranch dressed in denim and slouched in his chair. He let Mr. Arafat have it with both barrels. Of course the highest ranking government official down there, other than the president, was a deputy press secretary. When his senior aides in Washington saw that performance they rushed to correctly remind him of his larger — if distasteful — duties. To wit, his Thursday White House remarks with Colin Powell stolidly by his side in which the president announced all the foolishness that is currently afoot with the Powell mission. I am told that Mr. Bush was so reluctant to have to utter those words, that his remarks went through 17 drafts.

Blankley was press secretary and general advisor to Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Before that, he worked six years for President Reagan in a variety of positions, including speechwriter, Senior Policy Analyst, and Deputy Director of Planning and Evaluation. So I'd like to think he knows from whence Bush is speaking. But I'd like to see our Texan in the White House speak and shoot a little straighter when it comes to Israel.

HAPPY FUN PUNDIT EXPOSES VAST BLOGGING CONSPIRACY: "Meet Garland Renault. Six months ago, he was a law school professor who dabbled in Internet publishing as a hobby. Today, his estimated net worth exceeds that of Bill Gates, and he's firmly in control of an information empire that unabashedly tells you what to think."

Lots of very funny stuff in a parody of a Web log written by someone who has accused several bloggers of "war profiteering" and being "flaks for the Republican party."

WHAT HATH GLENN WROUGHT? On Sunday night, Glenn Reynolds posted a list of all of the blogs of people who were inspired by his site, www.InstaPundit.com Yes, we're on there--and welcome to our second month on the 'Net! If you're new, click here for a very, very silly introduction to EdDriscoll.com here.

802.11 ON THE BUS: UC San Diego Unveils World’s First Bus With Mobile, High-Speed Internet Access. Cool!

NIXON VERSUS MCGOVERN, 2002: Patrick Ruffini shows that Richard Nixon really is tanned, rested and ready (not to mention alive) in 2002. Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds checks in with George McGovern.

Simultaneously, Orrin Judd updates the legacy of Ronald Reagan, which looks better and better every year compared to the boys from '72.

Appropos of nothing, while spell checking this post with Blogger Pro, the spellchecker says the correct spelling of "McGovern" is actually "Misgovern".

Smart spellchecker.

"THE ESSENTIAL BUSH" Lawrence Henry, writing The American Prowler, the online version 2.0 of the old American Spectator, thinks he knows why Bush appears to be wobbly at times. "Like Ronald Reagan, he keeps his eye on a couple of big things. For now, Bush has decided he can accomplish two of those big things. He can defeat terrorism abroad, while, at home, he can regain control of the Senate for Republicans. For the rest, he'll bob and weave, and do his best to avoid consuming conflicts with the Democrat-controlled Senate or the mainstream media."

So when the news turns troublesome, at home and abroad, and the President seems to playing it cute, a little understanding is called for. George W. Bush thinks he knows how to win. So far, it seems that he does. He also knows how not to lose. Contemporary political discourse is dominated by the delusional: campaign finance reform, racial profiling, global warming, second-hand smoke, and all the rest. For a Republican President, it's a Brer Rabbit play, a mug's game, to take on any of these issues without a Republican Senate as backstop. The press would tie him in knots, and the Democrats in the Senate would help.

George W. Bush will not kick those Tar Babies. Not now.

GRADING THE WAR: Daniel Pipes and Jonathan Schanzer ask Is America Winning? in the New York Post. Makes a good two-parter with Rowan Scarborough's "What's Next?" article in the Washington Times.

HOW THE STEELERS DRAFT: ESPN's magazine explains the secret to the Pittsburgh Steelers' success: draft smart, draft for character, don't waste time on guys who don't have their heads screwed on straight, even though they have blazing stats:

The teams that won that Super Bowl hardware were stocked through the draft. Or, some say, a draft. In 1974, the Steelers chose four future Hall of Famers with their first five picks: Lynn Swann, Jack Lambert, John Stallworth and Mike Webster. "There are a lot of ways to get to the finish line," says Buffalo director of football operations Tom Modrak. "But how do you argue with the Steelers' results? The '74 draft is the gold standard."

Until the mid-'60s, the Steelers were like everyone else -- picking guys based on press clippings and word of mouth. (This is the team that cut eventual Hall of Famers Johnny Unitas in 1955 and Len Dawson in 1959.) Then, owner Art Rooney put his son, Art Jr., in charge of creating a methodology to select talent. When future Hall of Fame coach Chuck Noll arrived in Pittsburgh in 1969, he gathered up the Steelers staff and succinctly put the philosophy into words: "I don't care what color, what religion, what school or what state these players are from -- just find me the best athletes. Find them. They have to be smart and they have to be good people."

"We really took off after that," says Art Jr., now a de facto VP for the team. "By now, the standard operating procedure we created may seem as boring and basic as breathing, but back then it was revolutionary."

Since 1970, the Steelers have drafted eight Hall of Famers, twice as many as any other NFL team.

Michael Kinsley once noted that a major gaffe only occurs in Washington when someone speaks the truth. So what to make of this AP story, with a headline that reads: "Tax Burden Falls on the Wealthy", and an opening paragraph that says "As a group, Americans whose incomes are in the top 5 percent are footing an increasing share of the national income tax burden. People in the bottom half, on the other hand, are paying only a fraction of the total take"?

When searching for the wording for Kinsley's quote, I came upon this article, in NRO's Financial section by Bruce Barlett. It contains an example of an Alan Greenspan "gaffe" that's very reminiscent of AP's:

Labor leader Jerry Wurf complained that Ford's policies favored the rich over the poor. Greenspan replied that, actually, the rich suffered more from stagflation than did the poor. "If you really wanted to examine who, percentage-wise, is hurt the most in their incomes, it is Wall Street brokers," he argued. "I mean, their incomes have gone down the most. So, if you want to get statistical, let's look at what the facts are."

The press, Congress, and just about the entire Washington establishment came down on Greenspan like a ton of bricks, and he was quickly forced to recant. "Obviously, the poor are suffering more," he abjured. With support from Ford and a swift apology, Greenspan survived the flap. Ever afterward, he has been much more circumspect in his public, and even private, comments.

COMMUTER LANES RANT: Catholic Exchange has republished the commuter lanes rant I wrote for the back page of Sport Z magazine last year. And yes, I really did try to give the appearance of busting a blood vessel when I wrote it. Picture Alec Baldwin in full "let's stone Henry Hyde!!!" mode, except hopefully slightly more literate.

Of course, to the average person, “government” in the U.S. means “elected officials”. But commuter lanes weren’t the result of elected officials. They were the result of faceless bureaucrats in Caltrans, the California Department of Transportation. As Joan Didion describes in her book The White Album, Caltrans introduced commuter lanes in the late 1970s to initially turn the 240,000 cars that traverse the Santa Monica freeway every day into 232,000. Naturally, after screwing up that freeway, Caltrans spent an initial 42 million dollars of taxpayer money to begin the initial screwing of the rest of the state’s freeways.

And for that money, what did we get? The main results from commuter lanes are to make the people driving in them feel oh so superior to the single drivers to their right; and to make the people driving alone feel like worthless worms, stuck in traffic thick with constipation, unable to move, while a handful of cars scream past them.

The blurb about the article on Catholic Exchange's home page, which should be up for most of Tuesday (it's changed daily), even has a golden retriever that looks quite a bit like my since-departed Willie (the definitive Wonderdog), who was mentioned in the article.

One of the things I tried to do when I wrote it, was to express a libertarian, less government, less bureaucracy point of view, without bludgeoning people over the head with a lecture as to why an over-regulated society is bad. It's not easy to write a piece on why ham-handed social engineering is bad for an automobile magazine, but hopefully my piece did the trick.

WHAT DOES PETA THINK? Richard Johnson, in The New York Post's Page Six says:

NUTSO actor Billy Bob Thornton wants to wipe the endangered komodo dragon off the face of the earth. "More than anything on this earth, more than any being that exists, they are the creature that represents evil," he says. The "Monster's Ball" star once woke up his wife Angelina Jolie in the middle of the night and insisted they go to a hotel because he'd dreamed their house was infested with the reptiles. "If it were up to me, I'd just go to that island and kill them all," he tells the London Daily Telegraph. "I would just . . . shoot those sons of bitches."

IN COLD BLOOD: Superb essay by Amy Standen in Salon on Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. For anybody who hasn't read the book, it's an excellent introduction to both its story, and Capote's then-novel (pun definitely intended) new journalism techniques to capture it.

Capote was a good listener. It's what earned him the confidence of the society ladies in Greenwich, Conn., and Manhattan, and it's what made him a good reporter. His accounts of Smith's small, paradoxical kindnesses to the doomed Clutters, like when he places a pillow under Kenyon's head before putting a gun to his temple, are a hundred times more effective in describing the tumult of emotions in a criminal's mind than an expert's analysis could ever have been.

Smith's divided conscience, what allows him to stop Hickock from raping Nancy Clutter, then go on to kill her anyway, and then, later, his infamous recollection of that night, "I really admired Mr. Clutter, right up until the moment I slit his throat," could be no starker from any mouth but Smith's own.

In Cold Blood was the peak of Capote's career--ego run amok, professional suicide, and dissipation would follow in the decade to come (as George Plimpton's exceptionally well edited collection of interviews from Capote's friends and associates explain), but to read In Cold Blood is to see a writer truly live up to the hype that surrounded him.

AND STEPHEN GREEN MAKES BETTER LISTS THAN ERIC ALTERMAN: Good list of "Things I Know But Cannot Prove" at VodkaPundit. I only have two items that I can quibble with:

1. Gin (at least decent Tanqueray-quality gin. Gordon's or Kassers gin is another story) is definitely better than Vodka, especially in Martinis. But this is one of those cats/dogs, DC/Marvel, Star Wars/Star Trek, Fender/Gibson arguments over which reasonable people can disagree.

2. I don't think "Glenn Reynolds brutalizes dozens of caffiene-addicted pre-law students into scouring the web for items of interest in some sort of bizarre Internet sweatshop", but given the amount of stuff he posts, you never know. But until proven otherwise, I'm sticking with the belief that he gets his content the old fashioned way--he types it himself.

DAN RATHER, IN UN-APPROVED TOGS: This photo, from the Media Research Center current homepage, speaks for itself. Captain Dan The Newsman looks like he just escaped from a UN-peacekeeping mission. At least back in the old days, anchormen in a foreign country wore smart-looking safari jackets, not Michael Dukakis in the tank helmets and flak jackets with TV painted on them in 32-inch high letters.

DEPRAVITY IN ACTION: This story about a deaf lesbian couple, who have admitted deliberately creating what one article called "the world's first designer handicapped babies" is making the rounds of "the Blogosphere".

The two women tracked down a deaf sperm donor to ensure that their daughter, who is now five, would inherit the same inherited hearing disability that they both share.

The couple were so pleased with the result that they have just had a second child, called Gauvin, using the same technique. Doctors who examined the boy say he is completely deaf in one ear and has only partial hearing in the other.

The words escape me to properly express how truly repelled I am at this concept--and how I can't help but thinking that in this age of celebrating victimization, that they will merely be the first of many "designer handicapped babies" to come.

ISRAELI PULLOUT WATCH: Breaking news on Israel's withdrawal:

DRUDGE: "Israel to begin limited withdrawal... Israeli army said to begin pulling out from two Palestinian cities within hours, CNN is reporting..."

REUTERS: "The radio said Sharon made the decision after consultations with top cabinet ministers and that Israel would announce that its forces were leaving the two cities after completing their mission there to round up militants and weapons."

UPDATE: AP says Israelis pullout from two West Bank cities as they launch a pre-dawn invasion of a new town "The movements early Tuesday might signal that Israel is trying to appease the United States, while forging ahead with the original plan to thoroughly search for militants and weapons involved in a recent series of suicide bombings in Israel."

MIDDLE EAST=TAMMANNY HALL: Great paragraph (in the middle of lots of other great paragraphs) by James Lileks in today's "Bleat":

It’s like the entire Middle East is one big Tammanny Hall, the individual nations mere boroughs dispensing patronage, favors, lies and haughty denials. When the corruption of a system outpaces the corruption of the people, however, you have a problem - which is why I believe it’s possible for some of these governments to fold like a Yugo in a parking garage collapse.

RUNNING THE NUMBERS: John Scalzi has some thoughts on the number of hits blogs get, and why. (Found via VodkaPundit, which also has an interesting debate (with contributions from yours truly) on when the rock group Genesis lost it.

AL SHARPTON IN 2004? There's a good article by Edward Blum on Al Sharpton on National Review Online. It mentions Sharpton's 1994 primary challenge to incumbent Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. "Although the popular Moynihan easily won, Sharpton garnered eighty percent of the black vote, resulting in 25 percent of all votes cast. This overwhelming black cohesiveness aligned against an icon of the Democratic-left must have stunned every political consultant in the state."

If Sharpton bled 80 percent of the black vote away from Moynihan, he could do the same against Tom Daschle, Joe Lieberman, John Kerry or any of the Democrat leading lights. Throw in a handful of Hispanic and white voters and Sharpton could win or be runner-up in most of the critical primary states. Since the Democrats are likely to frontload their primary-election schedule this cycle, it is not inconceivable for Sharpton to actually win New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Michigan, Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi. If he doesn't outright win these states, the racial arithmetic earns him a close second.

For anyone who's watched Sharpton's rise since the late 1980s, Tawana Brawley, and his appearances on the old Morton Downey Jr. Show (when I first saw him, back when I was in college), his accumulation of raw power has been impressive, and transformation into a required stop on the Democratic road to the White House has been nothing short of astonishing. Blum explains what he could do with it in 2004.

WAVE THE SWORD AND SCREAM: Steven Den Beste says that Saddam Hussein has been "waving his sword so hard that he's lopped off his own foot with it":

Saddam has been trying to get the Arab states to "use oil as a weapon", a forlorn hope, but about the only one he has. Now he's cut Iraqi oil production for 30 days or until Israel stops its attacks. He's trying to shame the other Arab nations into action by being holier-than-thou. And by so doing, he is waving his sword so hard that he's lopped off his own foot with it.

One of the reasons Turkey has been leery of a US invasion of Iraq is because of their concern that they'd lose access to Iraqi oil. But now they've lost it anyway. And this shows that even leaving Saddam in power won't guarantee continued access to Iraqi oil.

The most important effect of this action will be to make Turkey more likely to permit the US to use Turkish territory to attack Iraq.

APPROPRIATE JUXTAPOSITION: At the end of the AP story that Matt Drudge featured on "Two-Headed Snake Sensation in Spain" was a link that read "Next Story: Socialists Win First Hungarian Vote".

FAME, FORTUNE AND MARSHMALLOW MERINGUE: Matt Drudge has the skinny on Martha Inc., a new book about Martha Stewart.

GOOD QUESTION: Posted anonymously on The Corner on National Review Online:

Here's a story from San Diego about a local Arab-American/Muslim rally for the Palestinian cause. A 14-year-old Arab-American girl is quoted saying that she would consider strapping explosives to her body and becoming a suicide bomber. Others quoted talk about these kamikaze kids being the natural fruit of hopelessness. I'm still waiting for CAIR denouncing this kind of irresponsible talk. If a Christian pro-lifer speaks favorably about murdering others for the sake of saving unborn babies, every pro-life group and Christian church leader in the country quite rightly denounces that person -- and is expected to by the media, vigilant against fanaticism. So why do I get the feeling we are expected to understand when it comes from Muslims? Why do they get a pass?

A friend of ours invited Nina and I to see Kissing Jessica Stein today. What a fun movie--with the feeling of a hip Gen-X Annie Hall, the sort of film Woody Allen used to make in the 1970s before he went through his early 1980s Bergman phase, his early 1990s Antonioni phase, and his mid-1990s "comedic hooker" (Mighty Aphrodite, Deconstructing Harry, etc.) phase. Given the effortless feel of the movie, I was surprised to see this was only the second film its director has helmed, and that the two leads, Jennifer Westfeldt and Heather Juergensen wrote the screenplay, and this was one of their first writing efforts.

Early on while watching the film, as the story was being set-up, I kept contrasting it to "You've Got Mail", perhaps because "Mail" was the last New York romantic comedy I've seen, and I literally fell asleep watching it, due to "Mail's" distinct lack of energy, flat direction and boring characters. (There's something about Nora Ephron movies that just doesn't work for me. My wife liked "You've Got Mail". She loved "Michael". She may have liked "Sleepless in Seattle". They've all grossed boxcars worth of money. They've all worked faster than Sominex to put me out like a light.) In contrast, "Kissing Jessica Stein" crackled with energy, and was filled with characters that were both identifiable, likable, and funny.

Given the nature of the film, (cute, neurotic 20-something heterosexual Jewish girl fails in relationship after relationship until she meets an equally hetero, but more aggressively sexual girl who is talked into placing an ad in the lesbian personals section of The Village Voice by her gay friend) I was curious as to what a publication like National Review would think of the film. Michael Potemra loved it:

Kissing Jessica Stein works very well as a movie because it's not about a canned message; it's about realized, well-acted characters in a well-written story. Westfeldt and Juergensen wrote the script themselves, and deserve much credit for bringing this provocative, entertaining film to the screen. About sex, we have enough — indeed, too many — movies; this is an unusual one, about people and about love.

Unless the subject isn't your cup of tea, I highly recommend it--it's refreshingly free of hectoring or PC correctness, and pretty damn funny, to boot.

HOLOGRAPHIC DVDS: It sounds way cool, if not the same as the three-dimensional holograms of the 1970s (I seem to recall "Logan's Run" using holograms in one or two scenes), but according to this article on Yahoo! News, "InPhase Technologies, an offshoot of Lucent Technologies ' research arm Bell Labs, will be showing the first commercial holographic video recorder at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show on April 8 in Las Vegas."

The device uses the company's Tapestry technology to hold 100GB of data on a single CD-sized write-once disc as a succession of 1.3MB holograms. That's enough for 20 full-length movies, or 30 minutes of uncompressed high-resolution video.

The first product is aimed at professional video editing, effects and archival use, with initial production at the end of 2003 and full manufacturing in 2004.

ONLINE GROCERIES GO BACK TO THE FUTURE: With Peapod and Webvan having both gone bust (in one form or another), my wife has taken to shopping online via Albertsons.com, which has the order ready for us at our local Albertson's supermarket. A friendly clerk wheels it out, puts it in the trunk, and off we go, saving a good half hour or more of shopping, waiting in line, etc.

It put me in mind of Ike Godsey's General Store from The Waltons TV series, which of course, was set in the 1930s. In the old days, a customer would enter a store and the clerk would fill his or her order, bag it, and carry it out--or, I assume, have it ready for them when they arrived at the store.

Alvin Toffler wrote that many trends of The Third Wave are First Wave trends revitalized with high technology. Working at home and custom made goods instead of mass production are two of several examples he gave. This seems like another one.

Everything old is new again--or is that the other way around?

MULTIPLE MEANINGS ALERT: Punditwatch has this beauty from Cokie Roberts:

The Most Pedestrian, The Most Insightful Cokie Roberts said of the Secretary of State, "Powell has a really tough nut. This is not going to be easy." Later, responding to the Brookings Institution's Shibley Telhami's labeling of an oil embargo being irrational, she said, "Rationality is not the key word in the region."

ASTHMA UPDATE: A while back, we mentioned the story that ran in Reason last month about odious school bureaucrats confiscating asthma inhalers from kids. As a follow up, National Review Online has a good article with some possible reasons why asthma is on the rise in children.

FEDS SAY 70 PERCENT NOT EXERCISING. Other 30 percent wonder what business is this of the Federal Government?

As a follow up to our coverage of the recent "priceless" ANWR videotape, here's the Washington Post, which says:

Warnings On Drilling Reversed
One week after a U.S. Geological Survey study warned that caribou "may be particularly sensitive" to oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the agency has completed a quick follow-up report suggesting that the most likely drilling scenarios under consideration should have no impact on caribou.

Nice to see what a box of blank TDKs can accomplish!

INSTAPUNDIT, LOADED FOR BEAR: Lots of good stuff by the InstaPundit, including why Saudi Arabia is the key to the war, and "Israel, Iraq, Syria, Iran -- they're all sideshows." Antisemitism on the rise in Canada, French hypocrisy in action, a European donation to the Yassar Arafat Save My Hide--Pleeease Fund, and the latest nominee for the Darwin Award.

WHAT'S NEXT? Rowan Scarborough, in The Washington Times, paints the big picture. "President Bush has positioned troops in and around eight nations on three continents to directly take on international terrorists in a global war that will last at least until 2005, the end of his first term."

As to what happens next, read Scarborough's article--this is a very, very different battle than Desert Storm--and with much higher stakes for America.

LARRY KUDLOW ON THE ROPE-A-DOPE: Writing in The Washington Times, Kudlow keeps up the rope-a-dope theme, comparing Bush's at times seemingly incoherent foreign policy to not just Eisenhower's, but George Washington's as well:

While events swirled about him and the world, the first president of the fledgling republic seemed weak and uncertain, buffeted by contradictory opinions, but after the clouds and rhetoric parted, he looked masterful. It was clear he had kept his head and the peace.

When the dust settles in the Middle East, I certainly hope we'll say the same thing about Bush.

THE ROAD TO WAR: Jeff Jacoby says that 1993 was the year that Israel began trying to appease Arafat. As to why, and why it failed, read his article.

THE NFL's 3-4 DEFENSE AND THE DRAFT: Len Pasquarelli, who seems to write the majority of the copy these days for ESPN's NFL section, says that the return of 3-4 defense is good news for many teams:

The return of the 3-4 front, utilized only by the Pittsburgh Steelers as a base defense in 2001 but set to be incorporated in 2002 by at least four other teams, figures not only to create jobs but also to place some premium on locating hybrid outside defenders. All those "in between" players, the defenders not bulky enough to play regularly at end or quick enough to be a full-time linebacker, could see their draft profile enhanced a bit by the need to fill spots in the resurrected 3-4 scheme

HEY, THERE'S A SEGWAY BLOG! Check out Segway News.

EXCELLENT ARTICLE BY David Brooks, the author of Bobos in Paradise, called "Among the Bourgeoisophobes", which would make a very good double feature alongside with Tom Wolfe's "In the Land of the Rococo Marxists" essay. Brooks starts with 1830s French intellectuals, and their irrational hatred of the bourgeois, and takes them to their final destination: communists, Nazis and the Taliban. While he doesn't feel American bourgeoisophobia is as virulent a strain, he does note that it falls into several categories:

There is straightforward, left-wing bourgeoisophobia from writers who think commercial culture has ravaged our souls. Then there is the right-wing variant that says it has made us spiritually flat, and so turned us into comfort-loving Last Men. Then there is the conservative pessimism that purports to be a defense of the heroic bourgeois culture America embodies while actually showing little faith in it. Writers of this school argue that the solid capitalist values America once possessed have been corrupted by intellectual currents coming out of the universities--as if the meritocratic capitalist virtues were such delicate flowers that they could be dissolved by the acid influence of Paul de Man.

It all adds up to a lot of dark foreboding, and after September 11, it doesn't look that impressive. The events of the past several months have cast doubt on a century of mostly bourgeoisophobe cultural pessimism. Somehow the firemen in New York and the passengers on Flight 93 behaved like heroes even though they no doubt lived in bourgeois homes, liked Oprah, shopped at Wal-Mart, watched MTV, enjoyed their Barcaloungers, and occasionally glanced through Playboy. Even more than that, it has become abundantly clear since September 11 that America has ascended to unprecedented economic and military heights, and it really is not easy to explain how a country so corrupt to the core can remain for so long so apparently successful on the surface. If we're so rotten, how can we be so great?

It could be, as the bourgeoisophobes say, that America thrives because it is spiritually stunted. It's hard to know, since most of us lack the soul-o-meter by which the cultural pessimists apparently measure the depth of other people's souls. But we do know that despite the alleged savagery, decadence, and materialism of American life, Americans still continue to react to events in ways that suggest there is more to this country than "Survivor," Self magazine, and T.G.I. Friday's.

Confronted with the events of September 11, Americans have not sought to retreat as soon as possible to the easy comfort of their great-rooms (on the contrary, it's been others around the world who have sought to close the parenthesis on these events). President Bush, a man derided as a typical philistine cowboy, has framed the challenge in the most ambitious possible terms: as a moral confrontation with an Axis of Evil. He has chosen the most arduous course. And the American people have supported him, embraced his vision every step of the way--even the people who fiercely opposed his election.

It's a long article, but well worth reading. (Link found on InstaPundit.)

THE SMARTEST CD EVER MADE: Glenn Reynolds picks up the recent flap over the new Celine Dion CD, which will apparently crash any computer that tries to play it.

And when you reboot the computer it'll crash it again. And you won't be able to get it out of the CD drive -- without prying it out with a paperclip -- because, of course, it's crashed the computer!

They've shipped an intentionally defective product and it's causing lots of people problems with their computers. Not only will they be sued all over the place for this, and probably lose, but it occurs to me that there may be criminal liability under some of the antihacking and "computer sabotage" statutes. Anyone seen anything on that?

The normally extremely astute InstaPundit may be missing the big picture here. This may be a CD containing a computer program so intelligent that it makes the Turing Test look like something given to pre-schoolers. It's smart enough to not want to listen to Celine Dion. And it knows you don't want to listen to her, either!

Seriously, the ham-handed attempts by the record industry to prevent listeners from copying products that they already own (I have a CD burner, as well as a 300 CD carousel "jukebox"--I make copies to keep in my car, so that I don't have to go rummaging through the jukebox to have some music to play while I'm driving has to be ultimately hurting the record companies, in the form of lawsuits and bad press than it helps. And people are already paying royalties on blank media for the ability to copy the stuff. Back in early January, Reynolds said:

I think some enterprising class-action plaintiffs' lawyer should sue and demand that they disgorge all their blank-media royalties, or something equally rotten. Serves 'em right, as they're rather fond of baseless lawsuits themselves.

The other problem that the record companies are facing is their current product is pretty lousy. It's very rare for me to hear new music that I want to buy. And I suspect a lot of other people feel the same way. The poor ratings of this year's Grammy Awards tend to indicate that as well.

DOESN'T SOUND WOBBLY (at least to me): John J. Miller, writing on The Corner on National Review Online, has quotes from an interview President Bush did yesterday on Iraq, with Britain's ITV network:

Q I take your point about no immediate plans, but in a sense, have you
made up your mind that Iraq must be attacked?

THE PRESIDENT: I made up my mind that Saddam needs to go. That's about
all I'm willing to share with you.

Q And you would take action to make sure that happens? And, of course,
if the logic of the war on terror means anything -- which you have explained --
then Saddam must go?

THE PRESIDENT: That's what I just said. The policy of my government is
that he goes.

Q People think that Saddam Hussein has had no links with the al Qaeda
network, and I'm wondering why you have --

THE PRESIDENT: The worst thing that could happen would be to allow a
nation like Iraq, run by Saddam Hussein, to develop weapons of mass destruction and then team up with terrorist organizations so they can blackmail the world. I'm not going to let that happen.

Q So you're going to go after him?

THE PRESIDENT: As I told you, the policy of my government is that Saddam
Hussein not be in power.

Q And how are you going to achieve this, Mr. President?

THE PRESIDENT: Wait and see.

BUT WILL TK-421 BE THERE? The line up of fans outside of Grauman's Chinese Theatre to be the first in line to see Star Wars: Episode II: The Attack of the Clones has begun. They even have their own official site.

PALO ALTO: AN 802.11 HOTZONE. Just got off the phone with Arturo Pereyra, co-founder and general manager of WiFi Metro, which has recently created an 802.11 "HotZone" in Palo Alto, California (about a half hour from Ed HQ here in San Jose). According to Silicon Valley Business Ink:

The main area of coverage in Palo Alto runs along University Avenue from the CalTrain station on Alma Street to Ramona Street on the eastern end, extending at least one block deep on either side of University Avenue. Anyone with a WiFi Metro subscription and an 802.11b networking card plugged into his or her laptop can logon within those boundaries.

For a map of that area, check out this page from WiFi Metro's own site. Now, just about any restaurant, or the local Borders, can be a "third place", complete with Internet access.

Can't wait to try it out myself!

....THEN THE RAZZIES, THEN THE RINOS, NOW THE SAP AWARDS: Larry Elder says that with the Academy Awards behind us, he now turns his attention to the SAP Awards, honoring the biggest Second Amendment Phony. And the nominees are...

WELCOME NEWCOMERS FROM OPRAH! The Wall Street Journal is reporting that "talk-show hostess Oprah Winfrey is ending Oprah's Book Club, a monthly feature that provided a huge boost in sales to the authors lucky enough to be featured on the show."

Clearly, the viewers of Oprah now have a void in their leisure time. And we stand here, ready to fill it! (Actually, we're sitting down. Sometimes we don't wear socks. Other times, we don't wear pants. But then, on the Internet, nobody knows this. Unless you tell them, like I just did. Where was I? Oh yeah...)

For those of you who are here because you now have nothing to read, welcome! We're here to keep you up to date on the tastiest links on the Internet, on this page. For more to read, you'll find a list of articles and essays I've written on the left (when I'm not wearing pants, I'm also a freelance journalist for a variety of magazines), as well as links to numerous other sites on the Web.

If it's those old-school, dead tree style books you're in the mood for, click on the Amazon banner below. There you'll find an unlimited supply of material to chose from, from our friends at Amazon.com. Used books? Visit Bookfinder.com. Need some help choosing a title? Stop by the Brothers Judd, and search their hundreds of reviews of books, many often more intellectually stimulating than Oprah's choices!

And then stop back here. Because I know that losing a trusted source of book recommendations is difficult. But we'll get through this together.

Honest.

STEPHEN HAWKING, IMAGINARY TIME, AND THE DANGERS OF IMAGINARY REALITY: At Reason, there's a sharp profile of Stephen Hawking at Cambridge, talking of black holes, unified field theory, Marilyn Monroe, and imaginary time.

While meanwhile, over at National Review Online, Dave Kopel has an essay on the founders of postmodernism, and the dangers of imaginary reality.

ROPE-A-DOPE UPDATE: Stephen Green's VodkaPundit is back online after a quick server change, with lots of good content including an explanation of the term rope-a-dope. Apparently, there are people who don't know what the term means. People, where were you during the 1970s??

Encyclopedia Stevania

Some of you are apparently unfamiliar with "rope-a-dope."

Back in '74, Mohammed Ali fought George Foreman in the "Rumble in the Jungle" in Zaire. Ali was the underdog -- too old, too slow, too soft, to beat the young, brutal world champ. Most of the fight, Ali looked bad. He was up against the ropes, just fending off Foreman's punches. For round after round, Ali just stood there and took the beating.

By the ninth round (I think) Foreman was punched out. He'd thrown so many blows -- to little apparent effect -- that he was just plain tired. And Ali came back swinging. Dropped Foreman to the mat and won on a disputed count.

That is the rope-a-dope.

There's a brilliant documentary about that fight, which documents the term, Ali's incredible balls, magnetism, and (sadly) knuckleheaded politics (Ali thought Zaire would be paradise, only to discover that the ruler of Zaire was a brutal thug) released a few years ago called When We Were Kings. For those who only know Ali as a tired old man, or as somebody played by Will Smith, it's electrifying to see the real thing in action, in his prime.

By the way, as much as I like Vodka in a Pundit, I'm sticking with gin in my Martinis and Gibsons (mmm...Gibsons....), unless I'm mixing it with vodka and Lillet blonde in the form of a Vesper.

BOOKFINDER.COM is celebrating their fifth anniversary this year. I've purchased many a used book via their search engine, which searches the catalogs of a variety of new and used online booksellers. The result was that several books that I read as a teenager and then lost (for whatever the reason), as well as numerous out of print or had to constantly borrow through interlibrary loans I've since been able to own via Bookfinder's remarkable search engine.

Bookfinder began in January 30, 1997, when nineteen-year-old UC Berkeley bibliophile and college student Anirvan Chatterjee put his new search engine of online sellers of new and used books online. Chatterjee recently typed up the history of Bookfinder.com in a brief retrospective. Like the Brothers Judd book review site, or all of the blogs out there, it's a nifty example of how a business has grown successfully on the Internet, without a zillion dollars in VC funding, an IPO or bond offering.

I first heard about Bookfinder when a friend mentioned it to me (and warned me that she would not be responsible for my purchases there. If you've never tried it, I'll offer the same caveat--if you like used books, it can be a very addicting site.

ARTHUR ANDERSEN STARTING TO CRUMBLE IN THE US: In the very early Cro-Magnon days of this site, just when our pixels were beginning to walk upright (oh, about three weeks ago), we mentioned the rumors that the rapidly asphixiating accounting firm formally known as Arthur Andersen was about to be aquired by Deloitte & Touche.

A story on Yahoo! News says:

Paring down operations to raise revenue and trying to stay alive, Andersen announced a tentative agreement Thursday with Deloitte & Touche for a "significant" number of its U.S. tax partners and professionals to join the rival firm.

I'd say "advantage Ed", but this one could be seen coming a mile away, its sodium-vapor highbeam doublefront maximum headlines gleaming in the tunnel. When the Enron scandal first broke, Glenn Reynolds described Enron as a potential meta-scandal, infecting everybody. Here's one of the first suspects to get nuked from the fallout.

THE NEW WELFARE QUEENS: Thomas Sowell on the dangers of America being bilked by the International Monetary Fund:

Where it is simply a matter of allowing people to survive in the short run — as with the Marshall Plan in war-devastated Europe or emergency aid during famines in India in years past — then, of course, immediate help is urgently needed. But a distinguished Indian economist warned long ago that continued shipments of American wheat to his country inhibited the development of India's own agriculture.

Instead of continuing to rely on donations of wheat from America, India reformed its restrictive agricultural policies. Its own production of wheat then increased so much that today it has a surplus of wheat. Had we continued to supply India with wheat, no doubt the foreign aid bureaucrats could point to statistics on all the lives we "saved" in India with our food. But instead, those people have been kept alive with India's own food. Indeed, a few years ago, India was able to ship surplus wheat to Ethiopia to relieve a famine there.

THE ARGUMENT AGAINST ARAFAT: Jonah Goldberg says that the official tough question on every cable news show seems to be:

"How can you expect Yasser Arafat to stop suicide bombers when he can't even use his cell phone?" ask one interviewer after another of any Israeli official they can find.

I find this bizarre. When we put Mafia bosses in jail, we rarely pay them much heed when they complain that incarceration will make it difficult for them to stop their hit men from committing more crimes. When we catch Osama bin Laden, will the peaceniks who look so adoringly upon Arafat also nod sagely when bin Laden declares, "How can I stop more terrorist attacks from inside my prison cell?"

And yet, for some reason, Western diplomats, activists and journalists seem to believe that Arafat cannot be held accountable for anything he's done. He can only be supported because "Israel has to negotiate with somebody." That he did nothing to stop suicide bombers when he could, means nothing.

FCC URGES ADVANCES IN DIGITAL TV: CNET.com says that:

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell on Thursday proposed voluntary steps for the TV industry to advance the transition to digital, including setting deadlines, boosting available programming, and getting shows to run on cable.

The proposals are "intended to provide an immediate spur to the transition by giving consumers a reason to invest in digital technology today, while we continue to work on resolving the longer term issues," he said in a letter to Congress.

THE FORREST GUMP OF THE FAA? Writing in Slate, Joshua Green says that Bob Woodward made the secretary of transportation a false hero in Woodward and Dan Balz's six-part Washington Post epic, "10 Days in September":

Mineta's courageous performance has been widely praised, not least by Mineta himself in a Sept. 20 appearance before Congress, and again on 60 Minutes II a month later. Here's his congressional testimony:

I immediately called the FAA, told them to bring all the airplanes down right now. All that we have learned since that fateful morning leaves me convinced that this unusual command or order was the right thing to do.

For Mineta, the genuflection this tale has engendered has been a welcome distraction from less mythic performances, such as his department's problems getting the new airport security agency off the ground. Long considered a competent if unremarkable backbencher, Mineta has refashioned himself as a quick-thinking decision-maker with flawless instincts in an emergency.

He may be that, but he isn't the hero Woodward and Balz make him out to be. According to insiders, that honor belongs to Monte Belger, at the time the No. 2 official at the FAA. A precise, diligent career bureaucrat known among colleagues as "the Forrest Gump of the FAA," Belger was on a phone bridge with controllers at the David J. Hurley Air Traffic Control System Command Center in Herndon, Va., and ordered flights grounded 15 minutes before Mineta was even notified of the attacks. So, when the secretary issued his blunt order—"Monte, bring all the planes down!"—Monte had already done so.

Found via Reductio Ad Absurdum.

HERE'S A HEADLINE YOU DON'T SEE EVERYDAY: The BBC News says "Ozzy Osbourne invited to White House".

YET ANOTHER REASON TO LIKE WAL-MART: Like Jonah Goldberg, I used to be a real anti-Wal-Mart snob. I thought of it as being only for folks who drink Yoo-Hoo and Mountain Dew and buy clothes made of materials to be found nowhere in nature. And yet, the more I began to read about them, the more I began to like them--a lot. (I think it all changed when I was shopping with my wife for party supplies this fall, and found Citizen Kane on DVD there, about a day or two after it was released).

Shiloh Butcher, on her Dropscan Digest blog has another reason to like them:

Unlike many other large corporations, Wal-Mart no longer automatically settles to avoid the cost of further litigation. This strategy is one of the ways they keep their prices so low. Every year, thousands of people attempt to better their financial situation by suing their local Wal-Mart, often turning to lawyers who specialize in suing Sam. To combat this legal onslaught, the 'Mart aggressively fights those who would bleed them with torts and they usually win. If more corporations would follow their lead, there wouldn't be such a need for tort reform.

The USA Today article makes an interesting comparison in this paragraph:

Wal-Mart, which promotes itself as a down-home friendly business, is helping change the nature of corporate litigation by aggressively fighting many cases even when it would be cheaper for the company to settle, analysts say.

Why are the two incompatible? Isn't Wal-Mart also being friendly to its customers by keeping prices down by not knuckling under to lawsuits?

A PALESTINIAN HONG KONG: Not a bad suggestion by James D. Miller:

Israel should take over the Palestinian cities and run them as the British administered Hong Kong. If the Palestinians got richer they might be less likely to become suicide bombers. Israel and the U.S. could subsidize these cities and make them tax-free havens. Free from taxation and corruption, the Palestinians would undoubtedly transform their despair into wealth.

FRENCH "NO IT REALLY DIDN'T HAPPEN" CONSPIRACY UPDATE: Damian Penny has an update on L'effroyable Imposture, the book we mentioned on Sunday: the recent best seller in France claiming that a plane didn't crash into the Pentagon on 9/11 (I think they said it was sitting in the grassy knoll with Oliver Stone at the time--probably with Lyndon LaRouche at the controls).

MICHAEL JORDAN VERSUS FATHER TIME: Skip Bayless on Michael Jordan's comeback: "How great and sad it was to watch him play."

THE BIGGER, FASTER, STRONGER INTERNET: While the current Internet, running on a cable modem or 802.11 connection may seem fast, there's a reason why we're not watching TV on it, and downloading MP3s, as opposed to listening to them in real time. But that may change in a few years.

I just received a copy (for my files) of the March issue of TecHomeBuilder, a magazine for builders specializing in network-equipped "smart homes". Inside is my article on Internet2, a research and development consortium of more than 180 universities, about 70 companies and 40 other organizations that are using high-performance networks to test new technologies and deploy new applications. Specifically, an Internet backbone network fast enough to support HDTV and other applications. It also mentions Canarie, which is Canada's high-speed Internet project. They have a program that could take modem-bonding to an extreme degree, using multiple fiber optic cables linked together to support an enormous amount of bandwidth.

The text of my article is online, but unfortunately, it loses a little something in this translation, especially as it lacks graphics, bold headlines and subheads, etc. However, for more on Internet2, check out:

The Internet2 Website

Canarie's Website

MEDIA WATCH: Found on the Media Research Center's CyberAlert page, it speaks volumes about television news when a comedian asks better questions than anchormen:

The host of a comedy show posed tougher questions to conservative-basher David Brock on Tuesday night than did Today co-host Matt Lauer or CNN’s Aaron Brown back in mid-March.

On the April 2 Daily Show on the Comedy Central cable channel, a mock newscast, host Jon Stewart asked Brock: "Is the left-wing innocent in all this?" He wondered: "Don’t they have their own team of guys trying to dig up dirt on the right? Isn’t this a relatively balanced operation?" When Brock disagreed, Stewart pointed out: "Hustler, Larry Flint, offered millions of dollars to people for sexual material on right-wingers, on Gingrich and those folks. There is some balance to it."

Read the whole interview--it's surprisingly in depth, considering it was on a comedy show.

HOW TO TANK EUROPEAN ECONOMY, PART II: Found on Reason's Daily Brickbat page:

Norway has banned fat fishermen from plying their trade. Worried that hard work might harm obese men, the government hopes to force them to lose weight by threatening their jobs. Many don't meet the official body-mass standards, so instead of a lot of overweight fishermen, Norway may soon have a lot of overweight welfare recipients.

INSTAPUNDIT SAYS: AS BUSH WOBBLES, ED'S LOOKING BETTER. Oh wait, it's that damned Canadian sock puppet. Nevermind!

Seriously though, it's not easy watching Bush wobble on Israel.

UPDATE: The current consensus in "Blogistan" (thanks Alex!) is, ignore the headlines. Bush is playing rope-a-dope in the Middle East. Hope they're right.

WHY MICROSOFT PRESIDENT QUIT: Wired News has an update to the story on Microsoft president's resignation yesterday:

sources inside Microsoft said that Belluzzo's control over projects had been systematically pulled away from him, "a sure sign on the Microsoft campus that you should start drafting an announcement indicating a need to spend more time with your family," another Microsoft employee said.

Before being appointed amid much fanfare last year, Belluzzo focused on the company's consumer operations, including the Xbox game system, MSN Messenger instant messaging system and the Ultimate TV service. Belluzzo also was instrumental early on in the company's .NET initiative.

"Rick enjoyed coming up with new ideas for products and services, but the ones he focused most on weren't our big money-makers," the games programmer said. "I think he didn't want to be just a guy who signed off on paperwork, and that's essentially what his job became. He had been pulled off the brainstorming committees for all his big projects over the past four months."

Analysts also suspected that Belluzzo resigned in part due to loss of control over his pet projects.

"They gave him a fun job and then took away the fun stuff," speculated Rob Enderle of Giga Information Group.

UPDATE: Yahoo News also has more information on Belluzzo's resignation.

HOW TO HELP TANK THE EUROPEAN ECONOMY: Found on The Corner on National Review Online:

A NEW LOW [Andrew Stuttaford]
Just when you think that the EU has finally plumbed the depths of stupidity, Brussels comes up with something worse. The London Times is reporting that the European Commission is proposing to impose a new tax of up to $75 a ticket on airline travelers. Its excuse? The tax will contribute to the cost of each flight's supposed contribution to 'global warming'. The levy would also help Europe's established airlines against low cost competition, but that, of course, is only a coincidence. For those concerned by recent reports (mentioned on The Corner) that Europe is no warmer than it was one thousand years ago, don't worry. Brussels will shortly be introducing a tax on all trips by horse and cart.

And clearly, it's only a matter of time before NATO will start patrolling European waterways looking for riverboat gamblers.

802.11 UPDATE: Patrick Ruffini has a good essay on his blog regarding the implications of 802.11b wireless networking. Perhaps one of the most intriguing possibilities of 802.11 is a project that NTT Communications is planning in Tokyo, for 802.11 service over a range of several miles:

CNN.com - NTT unit looks at high-speed wireless access - April 2, 2002 TOKYO, Japan (Reuters) -- NTT Communications Corp, Japan's largest long-distance telephone and Internet services firm, said Wednesday it was seeking government approval to begin high-speed wireless Internet access services.

Later in the article, the range of the proposed network is mentioned:

Service providers and manufacturers see wireless LAN as an ideal technology for Japan because of the high cost of connecting its congested buildings.

NTT Communications would use a different wireless LAN technology from DoCoMo's that would allow signals to be sent and received over a much wider area, with a radius of about eight kilometers (five miles) instead of a radius of a few hundred meters.

It will be interesting to watch the range of 802.11 networks expand in size--as I've been saying, I think 802.11 is going to be one the technology trends in this decade.

MICROSOFT PRESIDENT RESIGNS: AP is reporting that Microsoft President Rick Belluzzo unexpectedly announced his resignation on Wednesday, after the markets had closed. Microsoft Corp. president and chief operating officer Belluzzo resigned after just over a year in the job, and Microsoft said it would eliminate his position.

COMPANIES SLOWLY STARTING TO HIRE: While this has been a flat week for the stock market (due to Middle East tensions), The Tampa Bay Online says that ever so slowly, help-wanted signs are starting to replace the layoff notices:

Nurses and teachers are in short supply. Home furnishing stores are hiring, as are hotels, amusement companies and other recreation-type businesses. And temporary employment agencies are being asked to fill more jobs.

The increased business at the nation's temp firms is significant as the country begins to recover from recession. Businesses, hesitant to hire new full-time employees, turn to temporary hires.

THE RISE AND RISE OF THE USS CLUELESS: Steven Den Beste has a very good essay on the care and feeding of a Web log. Glenn Reynolds responds with a similar (if shorter) essay of his own. Taken together, they're the anti-Beams. Not surprisingly, they also make far more sense.

D'OH! Joanne Jacobs, at readjacobs.com tells what's probably an ufortunately all-too-common Passover tale:

My daughter went to a second-night seder hosted by a UC-Santa Cruz friend whose parents have gone Jew-Bu (Jewish Buddhist); another guest is rebelling against her parents by rejecting her Hindu name for the original "Rachel.''

Then there's the half-Jewish guest who looked at the matzohs and asked, "What's that?'' No, he wasn't playing the "foolish son.'' He didn't know. Later, he asked, "So how does Easter tie in?'' Told that Easter was a Christian holiday, he said, "Really?''

SPEEDY GONZALES UPDATE (Gee, those are three words I never thought I'd type in a row): First Fox News reported that the Cartoon Network pulled Speedy Gonzales off the air because "The rapid rodent has been deemed an offensive ethnic stereotype of Mexicans, and has been off the air since the cable network became the sole U.S. broadcaster of old Warner Brothers cartoons in late 1999."

Then we found that "there is a place where Speedy can still be found zipping across TV screens — and, presumably, where the crude stereotypes he embodies don't touch a cultural nerve.

That place: The Cartoon Network Latin America, where, ironically enough, Speedy Gonzales is "hugely popular," [Cartoon Network spokeswoman Laurie] Goldberg said.

And now, CNSnews.com says that "the nation's oldest Hispanic-American civil rights organization has a message for the Cartoon Network: "I want my mouse back. Not Mickey, but Speedy."

The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) is calling on the cable channel to show Speedy Gonzales cartoons because "Speedy's a cultural icon. He's a good mouse," according to Gabriela Lemus, director of policy and legislation for LULAC.

I wonder what Pepe LePew thinks of all of this? Being the French intellectual he is, he probably views it all as an American byproduct of politically correct postmodern Looney Tunes desconstructionism.

A while back, I mentioned Black Hawk Down, and that it would be coming out on DVD. Here are the details, from The Digital Bits:

We've gotten details on Columbia TriStar's Black Hawk Down DVD (street date 6/11). The initial release will be basically a movie-only edition, including anamorphic widescreen video, Dolby Digital 5.1 audio, an On the Set featurette, theatrical trailers and filmographies (SRP $27.96). Fans of the film may want to hold off however, as a more elaborate special edition version of the film on DVD is already in the works for late in the year or early next year. You'll get audio commentaries and lots more if your patient. Just FYI.

Columbia TriStar's DVD release strategy these days seems to follow this pattern - a standard edition initial release, followed by a special edition later and eventually a SuperBit or SuperBit Deluxe release for some select titles. And that would be fine... if they told you they were doing it so you could wait for the version you want, rather than buying multiple versions of the same film on DVD. Is it driving anyone else crazy?

AMERICAN JOURNALISM IN PERIL: This Sunday's C-SPAN Booknotes guest will be Leonard Downie Jr., co-author along with Robert G. Kaiser of The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril. Both men are reporters and editors at the Washington Post for nearly four decades. C-SPAN's Booknotes page says that Downie will: "take us inside the American news media to reveal why the journalism we watch and read is so often so bad, and to explain what can be done about it." Of the book:

They demonstrate how the media’s preoccupation with celebrities, entertainment, sensationalism and profits can make a mockery of news. They remind us of the value of serious journalism with inside accounts of how great stories were reported and written a New York Times investigation of Scientology and the IRS, and a Washington Post exposé of police excesses. They recount a tense debate inside their own newsroom about whether to publicize a presidential candidate’s long-ago love affair.

I have my UltimateTV box set to record Booknotes every Sunday. This sounds like it could be a good one.

SUBMARINE RACES: Found on NRO's The Corner Blog:

YOU MUST CHECK THIS OUT [Jonah Goldberg]
The absolutely most brilliant and inspired law ever passed by a landlocked state.

And it is...

FALKLANDS, PART DEUX: Orrin Judd sent me a link to Treasaigh.com, a Web log written by Tracy Wilson, an ex-US Navy pilot and information systems officer now living in Argentia. Here are his thoughts on the Falklands:

"Patriotism," Samuel Johnson observed, "is the last refuge of a scoundrel." Yesterday marked the 20th anniversary of the invasion of the Falkland Islands (Malvinas) by Argentine forces. Duhalde insisted yesterday that Argentina would one day claim sovereignity over the islands - this time though diplomacy not war. It has been 169 years since the Argentine flag last flew over the islands (barring a brief interlude in 1982), the inhabitants of the island are mostly of English descent, they speak English and... most importantly... they want no part of Argentina. To quote Don Henley and Glenn Frey: GET OVER IT!

"WE WILL GET THEM BACK": Argentine President Duhalde says, "The Falklands are ours; we will get them back":

President Eduardo Duhalde reiterated Argentina's claim to the Falkland Islands in a ceremony paying tribute to the lives lost fighting Britain for control of the islands 20 years ago.

"The Malvinas (Falklands) are ours. We will get them back," Duhalde said Tuesday before a crowd of 3,000, many of whom fought in the war against the British, in the town of Ushuaia, 3,000 kilometers (1,900 miles) south of Buenos Aires.

Take it away, Group Captain Mandrake!

UPDATE: He has. In a post titled "You Just Might", the good Group Captain says:

Argentina is a troubled country – politically, socially and economically. Every time things come to a head, the reigning political twits make noises about the Falklands.

They seem to have forgotten their unsuccessful attempted take-over bid of our South Atlantic office in 1982.

I have been to the Falklands, while in the Air Force. They’re desolate, and have many more penguins and sheep than people. So whyinthehell, you might ask, are we trying to hold on to them.

I am sure it has nothing to do with the fact that they are sitting on top of what may be the biggest untapped oil fields in the world, has it?

Of course, with the Blair Brigade in power, the Argentine government should just try asking for the Falklands/Malvinas back – they might just get them without a fight.

SULLIVAN'S BALANCE SHEET: Andrew Sullivan's Web log appears to be in the black--or close to it:

If we stay completely still, and don't grow at all, I will be able to pay myself a salary more than comparable to my salary at The New Republic. It won't make me rich, but it sure will pay the rent and then some. This is your achievement, and I don't think it's an exaggeration to say it's a small milestone in e-journalism. We may not have made much yet - but this site has now made more profit than Slate and Salon combined. Thanks again - and please keep this success growing. You've proved the nay-sayers wrong. Which is why the anti-blog backlash from the established media is now underway. Methinks they're a little rattled. As well they might be.

AN AUSTRALIAN WHO GETS THE US: Christopher Cross links to a great essay by Owen Harries, founder of the Australian policy magazine, The National Interest. Harries' essay is titled "Understanding America." And he does--read the excerpt from it that Christopher posted, if not the whole article.

THE VAST SELF-REFERENTIAL BLOGISTAN: Big, big jump in traffic over the past couple of days, thanks to everybody who linked to us in a Beam-ian orgy of cloying self-referential links. Special kudos go to the InstaPundit and Overlawyered.com, which said:

Blogger Ed Driscoll reminds us that AGs also have another constituency that wants them to keep the pressure on Redmond, namely trial lawyers who stand to gain a fortune from the private suits against the company (Mar. 31; see Jeff Taylor, "Symposium: Microsoft Endgame?", National Review Online, Nov. 5, 2001).

SELF-TESTING AND THE AMA: In my midnight post about Luddite journalists and Web logs, I compared them to investment advisors and do-it-yourself investing, since the former was the field I worked in before becoming a pixel-stained wretch. Ronald Bailey, writing in Reason magazine, notes another field that's circling the wagons at the guild (sorry to put my metaphors through the Cuisinart): doctors, who don't want their patients being able to self-test themselves.

The AMA’s claim that test results are too complex for laypeople is also simply outdated. There is an enormous amount of good medical information on the Internet that can provide background for people with health concerns and help them understand their lab results. But clients must keep firmly in mind that the retail testing labs do not offer diagnoses. If a test is anomalous, all the labs advise clients to visit their physicians immediately.

But what about false positives (a test that suggests a person has a problem when he or she doesn’t) or false negatives (a test that indicates a person is healthy when he or she is not)? "Any lab, including any that a doctor refers his patients to, can have false positives and negatives," says Vaughan. "That’s a risk that is just an inherent part of all medical testing."

A more troubling reason for the AMA’s opposition to retail testing labs is a desire to make sure that licensed medicos get a piece of the action. Doctors have traditionally served as testing gatekeepers. In order to get a test, a patient would first have to see a doctor -- who of course charges for the visit. Good for the doctor, not necessarily good for the patient. With doctors acting as testing gatekeepers, doctors may feel constrained to recommend only tests that are covered by a patient’s health insurance. Retail lab testing allows clients to take immediate advantage of the scores of new tests that are emerging from biotech research companies, instead of waiting for insurance companies to agree to cover them. Since clients generally pay for tests out-of-pocket, they can order whatever they want or need.

MUGGERIDGE'S LAW IN ACTION: UPI says that Louis Farrakhan is planning to visit the Middle East:

Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan blasted Washington for foreign policies that single out Muslims for blame and said Tuesday he wants to travel to the Middle East to try to resolve the differences between Israelis and Muslims.

But will he fly in via the Mothership?

Last year, Jonah Goldberg wrote an article for National Review On Dead Tree (as he likes to call it), on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (with the cover of that issue of NRODT bearing that headline, as best as I can remember it.) He actually flew out and visited the ANWR, and quickly came to the conclusion that it is not the home of Bambi (as in the deer, not a rampantly overflowing denizen of Maxim magazine, as Jonah would probably be quick to inform), but rather, dozens of varieties of vicious mosquitos, and endless miles of swamp:

I suspect that the majority of Americans who oppose oil exploration in ANWR would agree with me if they saw it firsthand. Indeed, they would probably agree that if America had to be struck by an asteroid, this would be the ideal impact point. Of course, I am not talking about ANWR's beautiful mountain vistas, the ones cooed over by cable-news hostesses. Not only is that stuff legally protected from oil exploration, it is far, far away from anywhere the oil companies want to drill-i.e., the thousands of football fields' worth of bog and marsh.

Using a similar strategy, last week, Interior Secretary Gale Norton sent a letter to major news outlets around the country describing the president's initiative to allow "environmentally sensitive energy production" in the far north slope of ANWR, the Secretary's letter included a videotape of the region.

When Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) called Friday afternoon inquiring about how much the Interior Department had spent on the video, Mark Pfeifle, a spokesman for the Interior Department ran the numbers:

"ANWR videos: $95.81. Postage to send ANWR videos to network news anchors: $43.55. Informing Americans about what the real Alaska North Slope looks like in the dead of winter: Priceless."

Pfeifle says providing the video to major television outlets was necessary, because most had been using video provided by opponents of energy exploration in ANWR.

"Using footage from the anti-energy independence crowd is about reliable as having your fortune told by Miss Cleo on the Psychic Readers Network," he added.

UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg's own take on the videotape, Markey, and Pfeifle's response to him is now online.

JUST SO LONG AS IT ISN'T BAJA: From the Washington Post, Israel Proposes Exile for Arafat.

THE SECRET? IT'S THE PIGEONS! Found via "Mac's Temporary Blog", here's what powers Google technology.

WHY THE CONCERN? Sgt Stryker (back from his one day mission over Macho Grande) wants to know why European leaders are displaying such concern over Yasser Arafat:

So, why all this precious concern over a terrorist thug? Where are the human shields surrounding the delis, supermarkets and discoteques of Israel? Where are the pronouncements over the life of each and every Israeli threatened with death by suicide bombers?

It just strikes me as amazing that lunatic bastards can bomb and kill Israelis and fellow Arabs, and the world merely "denounces" the violence. Where's the world pressuring Arafat and his cronies? Where are the statements of concern over the Israelis? Why have we not seen press releases warning the Palestinian Authority to not "harm innocent civilians" lest there be dire and grave consequences?

Rod Dreher, on NRO's The Corner, has one possible answer.

BEST OF THE WEB: The Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal site always finds astonishing material for its Best of the Web page. Like this one:

Feminist Fantasyland
Rep. Marcy Kaptur, an Ohio Democrat, has a Middle East peace plan: "The women of all these countries should all go on strike, they should all sit down and refuse to do anything until their men agree to talk peace." The suggestion is ditzy enough, but she made it in an interview with the Arab News, a Saudi paper. We'd love to see Kaptur organize a strike by Saudi women, who for the most part are not permitted to work.

And then there's this one:

Stupidity Watch
Our critics have occasionally made fun of us for asking rhetorical question: Doesn't so-and-so know there's a war on? Fair enough. But we've found someone who actually doesn't know there's a war on. He's Dr. Sidney Wolfe, a co-founder of the Naderite group Public Citizen. He objects to President Bush's choice of Dr. Richard Carmona to be surgeon general, saying Carmona's "expertise in bioterrorism and his penchant for heroism" are irrelevant to the job. After all, Wolfe says, "It's not like there's an ongoing war in this country."

Alex Beam's essay is indeed out, and the InstaPundit links to it, and a variety of comments (including mine--thanks!) here and here. The best comment may be Glenn's own: "when you parachute in and try to do a story about something you don't understand overnight, you're going to look stupid. And you do."

BACK TO THE FUTURE: Victor Davis Hanson in National Review Online says that we should judge the current proposed solution to the crisis in the Middle East by how Israel was treated prior to 1967:

As the current conventional wisdom goes, our diplomatic efforts should be directed toward that single goal. Israel must give back conquered land. In return its Arab neighbors will promise to recognize its existence, make peace, and normalize relations.

One way of determining whether such an agreement would lead to peace would be to imagine what really might happen should Israel give up all of the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights. Fortunately, we need not be utopian about the future, but rather simply revisit the past before June 5, 1967. Then Israel possessed none of those territories. Yet there was no peace — but simply a series of pauses between wars not unlike the present predicament. A quick perusal of a number of general histories about the pre-1967 era — especially Michael Oren's forthcoming magisterial work Six Days of War — reveals a chilling similarity with the present calamity.

I had started an article on the backlash by reporters using traditional media against Web logs on Friday (when I had a few minutes to kill and the laptop was handy), but I didn’t have an ending. Fortunately, James Lileks has given me an ending, an introductory framing device, as well as great essay in and of itself (go read it, we’ll wait for you).

Back? OK, as you just read, Lileks has gotten a wonderfully tactful email from from Alex Beam of the Boston Globe:

James, weren't you once a talented humor writer? Why are you churning out this web dreck? I can't tell if these bleats about Rod Serling or the Palestinians are diluting your humor work, because I can't claim to know it well enough, but I certainly have my suspicions.

Feel free to respond: I am writing a column (deadline: Monday 11 am) on bloggers who might benefit from a less arduous writing schedule.

Alex Beam, Boston Globe

It’s been fascinating watching the backlash of reporters used to traditional media against Web logs. Part of it, of course, is their reaction to self-publishing, the same way that investment advisors were terrified by do-it-yourself investing, from Charles Schwab discount brokerages in the 1980s to E*Trade in 1998. But another part of it is simply knee-jerk cynicism. When Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Truman Capote and Norman Mailer invented the New Journalism of the 1960s, the reaction by traditional reporters and media critics was one of cynicism and disdain. Capote called In Cold Blood a “non-fiction novel”, because novels had class, and he didn’t want to get his new book lumped in with this bastard form that non-fiction journalists had invented.

It doesn’t help that much of the most successful existing online journalism has been slanted (in varying degrees) towards the right—Matt Drudge, Andrew Sullivan, and Jonah Goldberg all immediately come to mind. But almost anytime that something new comes along, such as Web logs in general, and this Instapundit guy specifically, reporters are by their very nature cynical. The irony of Web logs is that they allow people to build a following by bypassing the traditional avenues of publishing. So, as I said in my Spintech article, anybody can have a blog, and the more offbeat the topic or slant, the better. The very journalists, who claim they’re for “the little guy”, the individual over big business, are slanted against letting those individuals have a way to communicate their own viewpoints!

(And incidentally, Beam is bitching about a guy’s writing which damn near brought tears to my eyes (his piece comparing Israelis getting slaughtered by a Palastenian suicide bomber with day to day life in the US). If my wife wasn’t sitting next to me, while I was reading it, I would easily have started blubbering—it was that powerful. When the last time an old school newspaper columnist could generate that level of emotion?)

Speaking of losing it, where was I? Oh yeah, journalists, who claim they’re for “the little guy”, but slanted against individuals having a way to communicate their own viewpoints. Yes, it’s wonderful irony. But of course, it could just be that traditional newspaper reporters know that perhaps, just perhaps, the old ways of doing business are numbered. When I interviewed Kerry Northrup, an American who is the Executive Director for the German-based Ifra Centre for Advanced News Operations, he and his employer had a number of revolutionary ways for newspapers and reporters to do business, based on available, advanced technologies. But too many editors worship at the 1970s Watergate-era school of Ben Bradlee and Lou Grant, instead of Matt Drudge and other 21st century reporters. And yet, you can slow down progress and change, but you can't stop it--you simply go with it, or eventually get run over.

Unlike Woodward and Bernstein, Lileks says:

people on the web are not paid to be important. They usually aren’t paid at all, of course, but the point of putting up a blog isn’t to be Influential, or to Redefine the Dialogue, or any other of the hoary old clichés. People put up blogs because they have something to say. If they post six times a day and three posts blow chunks, so what? Better that than a columnist whose every piece is stooped with the awful weight of its author’s ego. (I’m not referring to any columnist in particular; choose your favorite.) In any case, the number of “amateurs” who warrant repeat business is amazing. Just found, via InstantMan, an Israeli blog. It’s on my list of daily visits. Took one click to put him in the bookmarks. For a newspaper to do this, several things would have to happen…

So what do newspapers have going for them? Physicality. Presence. Persistence. Raise your hands: who saved a newspaper from Sept. 12? And who printed off an archive of website from that day? Reading a website will never have the same solid satisfaction as reading a paper, which is the old medium’s great advantage. If only they didn’t feel as if their heft and institutional weight conferred credibility or ingenuity, because it doesn’t.

FINANCIAL FADS AND FASHIONS: Alan Reynolds explains how various economic fads get codified into law permanently by Washington.

XBOX A FAILURE? Christopher Cross links to an article that says the Microsoft Xbox videogame console has failed. While I wouldn't be surprised, there are no sales figures, no statistics, no nothing, except, "A Microsoft spokesman has told the paper there is "strong demand" in Europe but admits there have been no stock shortages." Err, how is it doing in America, guys? Finally, people forget that the sales of the Atari 2600 didn't take off until "Space Invaders was released as a cartridge in 1980, and the home videogame industry we know and love today was born.

On a similar note, I doubt UltimateTV has reached the initial sales figures that Microsoft set for it, but it's still a damn good product--even though it still doesn't have the broadband support Microsoft promised for it at CES in January of 2001. (Incidentally, didn't they also promise a broadband connection for the Xbox for multi-player games?)

RED LIGHT DISTRICT: Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, links to terrific article by Matt Labash in the Weekly Standard called Inside the District's Red Lights:

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, it must be noted, is one of the staunchest advocates of automated enforcement, and views the 72 percent figure as a triumph. To which any reasonable person might ask, what other law enforcement tool snags the wrong guy over one-fourth of the time, and is still considered a success?

Just to recap, consider: A private company is given police power to ticket citizens, has a monetary interest in generating as many tickets as possible, and, despite its low success rate, is often allowed to do so with minimal or no police supervision.

It would seem that a trip to Lockheed IMS's processing center was in order to watch its employees fulfill their constabulary duties. But when I ask D.C. police spokesman Kevin Morison for a tour, he must check with Lockheed, though the police are purportedly running the operation. A few days later, Morison regretfully informs me that Lockheed said no--"They had privacy concerns." Morison at least plays at being oblivious to the richness of a vendor's claiming to be concerned about your privacy after taking a picture of your car and in some instances whoever's in your car, tapping into your DMV records, levying a fine against you, then mailing the whole care package to your house (in Italy, a senator's marriage faltered when his wife spotted his mistress in a photo radar citation).

NO, IT’S NOT AN APRIL FOOLS JOKE: My article for Litewheels magazine about the Segway is now online. And yes, that’s me in the above photo, wearing a gray flannel double breasted ventless suit and looking quite silly being precariously balanced by the computers inside the Segway (and they’re so advanced, that I never once went splat.)

In case you’re wondering what a Segway is, it’s that strange scooter with two parallel wheels that was top-secret, but leaked in carefully controlled segments. Matt Drudge spent much of last year teasing us with it those leaks. What is it like to ride one? Here's an excerpt from my article:

I hopped onto the 24-inch wide platform. Then Cohen took his hand off the unit. For a few seconds, the Segway bucked back and forth, as he said, "you're trying to balance on it, and it's trying to balance you. Just relax." I did. The rest was incredibly intuitive. I was standing between the two wheels, balanced like I was a few antigravity inches off the ground. Cohen explained that if I leaned forward, the Segway would move forward. If I leaned backwards, the Segway would reverse. And he pointed out the switch on the left handlebar that could be flipped to turn the unit. He then let me ride the Segway through the halls, up ramps, on several surfaces, and even over his feet.

The Segway article, and my companion piece for Litewheels’ premiere issue have been quite interesting. See, I’m an internal combustion kind of guy. My dad owned a Chevrolet dealership in south Jersey for decades, and I acquired a similar love of cars from him. I’ve written numerous articles on Nissan Z cars for Sport Z magazine. I’ve interviewed Syd Mead, one of Detroit’s top car designers, before Hollywood beckoned in the late 1970s (he designed the flying Spinner police car for Blade Runner). And people who are into alternatives to automobiles tend to be really into them—to the point of wanting to ban cars, put limits on them, etc.

Not surprisingly, that's something I can't identify with. The Litewheels gig grew out of my parallel love for technology, specifically home theater. I’ve written numerous articles for Smart TV & Sound, published and edited by the same folks who produce Litewheels. I justified my writing for the magazine (yes, the money wasn’t bad either) by reminding myself that clearly, in a free-market economy, people have a right to own whatever vehicles they want to own. And the Segway is a remarkable piece of engineering, one I was eager to learn more about.

So it was a lot of fun, while I was visiting the east coast, to truck on down to Segway’s PR office in Manhattan and hop on the Segway. I certainly hope Litewheels keeps me around to write more pieces for them.

But my wife and I aren’t planning to trade in our Dodge Intrepid or Toyota Land Cruiser just yet….

UPDATE: Litewheels didn't give Art Puliafico, my friend and frequent article photographer a photo credit on their Web site, but he shot several of the photos that accompanied my article. He also took a spin on the Segway.

BOBBY BEATHARD TO FALCONS: AP says that Bobby Beathard, who served as general manager with Washington and San Diego and director of player personnel for Miami will serve as adviser to the Atlanta Falcons' new owner, Arthur Blank.

In his role as senior adviser, Beathard will advise and counsel on organizational structure, philosophy, systems and execution of football operations in the areas of college and pro player evaluation, athletic training and equipment, medical programs, information systems and salary cap management.

Even with Beathard on board, Blank will continue to search for a general manager for the Falcons.

MONGOLIAN CLUSTERBLOG: Christopher Cross is inventing new Wired jargon-like language for all things blog:

The first entry:
carpetblogging, (v.): a) a blogger who posts on a variety of issues on which he/she has no real knowledge or experience (see 'carpetbagging')
b)posting in rapid succession, either covering all aspects of a single issue or posting about an extremely wide swath of issues (see 'carpet bombing')

MONEY DRIVES MICROSOFT SETTLEMENT: Bob Novak's column today is all about the Benjamins. Specifically, the money donated to states' attorney generals from Microsoft competitors, including California's Bill Lockyer, which Novak says:

has his eyes on a future bid for governor. Heavily favored for re-election to a second term as attorney general this year, he has raised $5 million so far to make sure. His listed contributions from Microsoft competitors and their law firms, as of last December, totaled $75,500--with $50,000 from Oracle Corp.

Then there are the other dissenters:

The symbiotic relationship between state attorneys general and Microsoft's foes is shown in Utah. [Republican state AG Mark] Shurtleff, serving his first year as attorney general in 2001, waited until 15 minutes before the 11 a.m. deadline Nov. 6 before joining the anti-Microsoft group. But lawyers inherited from his Democratic predecessor long had collaborated with Novell.

In open court last week, Microsoft lawyers revealed an April 2000 e-mail from the Utah attorney general's office to Novell asking help in drafting language in a possible negotiated settlement that would benefit the company's products. Lawyer Wayne Klein asked for ''guidance--preferably without involving too many people seeing this language.''

Another example of how Microsoft's enemies seek to utilize political contributions was disclosed in federal court proceedings. James Barksdale, former head of Netscape and a longtime critic of Microsoft, revealed in a recent deposition that he asked Bush administration science adviser E. Floyd Kvamme for help last year in trying to scuttle a settlement.

I wrote about the Justice's Department's efforts to wrap up the Microsoft trial last fall for National Review Online's Financial section. Back then, I interviewed Jeff Taylor of Reason magazine. Taylor said:

The state AGs essentially have a political decision to make. Do their constituents — trial lawyers — want them to continue a high-profile fight the rest of world doesn't understand? Attacking Microsoft has already achieved the goal of creating plenty of work for lawyers in the tech field, and the prospect of at least five years of close supervision of Microsoft means full-employment for tech lawyers.

Evidently, the AGs want to keep the job security going for a little while longer.

In the spirit of Muggeridge's Law, check out John J. Miller on the Polly Awards in today's National Review Online. The Polly Awards are handed out by the Collegiate Network "to highlight the noxious tendencies of radical faculty and students at the nation's colleges." The University of California at Berkeley won two of five "Polly" awards today for outrageous political correctness.

Berkeley's first award came for a case of what the CN calls "multicultural hooliganism": In February, a group of left-wing students broke into the office of The Patriot, a conservative student newspaper, and stole its entire press run, valued at $2,000. Editors who filed a police report were then met with death threats. The incident apparently was occasioned by a Patriot article critical of a radical Hispanic group, MEChA, which calls for the revolutionary liberation of the "bronze continent for bronze people." The Berkeley chapter of MEChA receives $20,000 from the university.

Berkeley's other award was for its now-famous sex-education class, which featured "an orgy at a class party and [a visit to] a strip club, where [students] watched an instructor have sex onstage."

For the rest of the award "winners", read Miller's article.

When Malcolm Muggeridge was the editor of the British satirical magazine Punch in the early 1960s, Khrushchev had announced he was going to tour England alongside its prime minister. Muggeridge wrote up a list of the silliest tour stops he could think of, and then put the article to bed, ready for publication. When the actual tour list was drawn up, he had to massively rewrite the article. At least half the tour stops in his satirical piece were actually on Khrushchev and the British PM's agenda!

Which is why Muggeridge's Law is: there is no way that a writer of fiction can compete with real life for its pure absurdity. How else do you explain, orbiting around April Fools' Day, real headlines such as these?

CHART SHOCKER: ENRON MOVES UP 'FORTUNE 500' LIST

* * * ABCNEWS.com : Serial Killer Action Figures For Sale Murder Incorporated Denver Sculptor's Serial Killer Action Figures Bringing in Profits and Raising Ire * * * EdDriscoll.com Posted 8:16 PM by Edward Driscoll FRENCH CONSPIRACY UPDATE: Back on March 9th, we mentioned a French conspiracy Web site, which claimed the US faked the crash into the Pentagon of Flight 77. Orrin Judd says that now, it's not only a Web site, it's a book! Naturally, it's a best seller in France.... (shaking head). * * * TheSanDiegoChannel.com - State Senator Calls For Tax On Bullets * * * (washingtonpost.com) Upset by the sight of bumper-to-bumper cars, vans and pickups lined up in residential driveways or spilling over onto lawns, lawmakers in [the Washington DC suburbs of] Fairfax and Montgomery counties have had enough. "Vehicles are not lawn ornaments," said Fairfax Supervisor Penelope A. Gross (D-Mason). "We measure success by the number of cars we have outside the house, and in some cases, it's gotten out of hand." Their proposed remedy? Prohibit drivers from parking on anything but pavement, and limit how much of a residential front yard can be paved. Fairfax would draw the line at 25 percent, Montgomery at 50 percent.