For New Orleans residents, the plight of their football team is the absolute least of their worries. However, nationally, they'll receive quite a bit of attention this fall: as ambassadors for their devastated city, their presence on television this season could do quite a bit to keep the city in the spotlight--and additional relief funds coming in from both viewers at home, and those who attend their games in person. However, where the Saints will play their home games is still very much up in the air:

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Michelle Malkin writes that "The World Comes Around (Sort Of)" to helping rebuild the Gulf Coast, although England--with notable individual exceptions--sounds like it's taking its characteristic reserve and understatement just a little too seriously.

Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds has a list of charities you can contribute to.

In August of 2001, when I was writing pieces for the newly launched National Review Online Financial section, I naturally did an article on the state of the dot.com industry, which was then just recovering from a series of spectacular dot.busts. The consensus of the folks that I interviewed for the article was the obvious exception to the Silicon Valley wreckage was eBay, which looked like it had a strong future ahead of it.

Well, as the late George Allen was fond of saying when he coached the Washington Redskins, the future is now. So let's flash-forward four years to today: James Glassman writes that not only is eBay doing well itself, it's also become a haven for budding entrepreneurs:

A remarkable new survey by ACNielsen International Research finds that 724,000 Americans use eBay, the online auctioneer and general marketplace, for their primary or secondary income. That figure is up from 430,000 in a similar 2004 survey. In other words, about 300,000 people have started businesses on eBay in the past year. So eBay can properly be viewed as America's No. 1 generator of, not just businesses, but jobs.

As David Faber of CNBC said recently, "If eBay employed the . . . people who earn an income selling on its site, it would be the nation's No. 2 private employer, behind Wal-Mart."

But the point is that eBay doesn't employ them. They employ themselves. Their own cash and reputations are on the line. They innovate, they compete, they work hard. What eBay and other online sites provide is the platform: a storefront that's electronic, not brick and mortar; a market of 157 million registered users worldwide; plus help in expediting payments, shipping packages and detecting fraud.

Marketplace sites -- and eBay, with $83,000 worth of goods traded every minute, is the largest -- offer a simple way, not just to sell the occasional used tie or baseball trading card, but to start and maintain a small business, allowing the entrepreneurs themselves to concentrate on the important stuff: merchandizing and marketing.

Consider Sarah Davis of San Antonio, who graduated from the University of Maryland Law School and passed the Texas bar exam but then began having children (three now) and wanted to be with them. "I started selling on eBay about six years ago with one Louis Vuitton purse and a dream," she says.

Her business of selling high-end purses became so successful that she moved into office space and hired three employees.

Davis is a typical American entrepreneur. An extensive government study, released by the Census Bureau in July and covering 2002 data, found that small businesses owned by women rose 20 percent over five years while the number of all U.S. businesses rose by 10 percent. Black-owned businesses were up by 45 percent, Hispanic-owned by 31 percent.

Small businesses produce a little more than half of all U.S. employment and sales of goods and services. More important, these businesses now account for virtually all the net new jobs created by the economy and, says the White House, "are most likely to generate jobs for young workers, older workers and women." In addition, the Disabled Businessman's Association estimates that 40 percent of home-based businesses are operated by people with disabilities.

These trends can only intensify with the growth of the online marketplace and the spread of Internet connections throughout the world. The Federal Reserve reports that the majority of small businesses are based in the home. All you need is a desk, a computer, a connection to the greater wired world and a place to store your inventory.

Online entrepreneurship is so attractive that 14 percent of eBay sellers are people who retired early or quit their jobs to sell full-time on eBay, and another 12 percent are considering doing so.

eBay is also fueling a trend that Glenn Reynolds recently wrote about: new ruralism, rural gentrification, and homesourcing.

Jonah Goldberg looks 21st century Hollywood's moral relativism:

How’s this for a plot? There’s this international conspiracy to acquire nuclear weapons and kill millions of Americans. The conspirators act with the aid of various governments, some of which pretend to be our friends. Some of these governments are ruled by medieval tyrants who keep many wives (and even more concubines), rule by fiat, and crush, behead, hang, or otherwise mutilate dissidents, free thinkers, Christians, Jews, homosexuals, and other inconvenient souls. Other governments are ruled by fascist dictators who invade their neighbors, subvert democracy, fund terrorists, collude with Western powers in criminal schemes, illegally smuggle nuclear materials, and jail, starve, imprison, and murder children while living high on the hog.

All the while, these conspirators commit countless grievous acts of cruelty and barbarism. Though they may be savages, they’re not mindless ones. They hatch brilliantly audacious schemes to bring down skyscrapers with hijacked planes. They attack naval ships with speedboats. They manipulate the Internet, the international press, and various Western governments.

Now, call me crazy, but somewhere in there I think there’s enough material for Hollywood to “rip from the headlines” (as they say on Law and Order) some plausible bad guys and pretty good plot ideas.

Apparently I’m missing something.

Consider, for example, the last big movie of August: The Constant Gardener. Now, I haven’t seen it yet, so I’m not offering a review of the movie. Besides, from what I hear it’s a pretty good flick based on a pretty good novel by John Carré. The plot of both involves an elaborate conspiracy of Western governments and pharmaceutical companies that assassinate anyone who tries to uncover their fiendish plot to experiment on poor Africans for the benefit of rich Westerners. A trailer for the film declares that pharmaceutical companies are no better than arms dealers, preying on African poverty. The film’s director told National Public Radio that the drug companies are the “perfect bad guys.”

Now, notwithstanding the mistakes of major pharmaceutical companies, I think it’s fair to say, without fear of contradiction, “Are you on crack?!”

Nahh--just on the left. Speaking of Hollywood and moral relativism, the Libertas film blog looks at Sin City, recently issued on DVD, which Libertas describes as epitomizing "everything wrong with contemporary Hollywood":

Yes, yes, the city is a violent jungle of dripping alleys and sewers, yes, yes, human nature is bestial and sadistic, yes, yes, our social institutions are predatory and corrupt, yes, yes, the sun has been banished by perpetual symbolic darkness. There is a morality of sorts at work here, but it is so grimly existential that one can hardly tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys – they equally take for granted the meaninglessness of the universe; they are equally driven by instinct and impulse; they are equally capable of sadistic glee. All of this must seem pretty damn strange from the perspective of Des Moines or Salt Lake City or Biloxi, where the hours are not perpetually shrouded in a darkness and by no conceivable stretch of the imagination do human beings belly-creep through alleys like rats.

Too bad Hollywood seems to have given up on viewers in Des Moines, Salt Lake City, Biloxi and the rest of middle America.

It really is fascinating to compare Katrina with the December tsunami. In terms of media coverage, they've been disappointingly similar. But so far, in terms of corporate and celebrity relief, they've just been disappointing. Michelle Malkin wonders why Amazon.com hasn't posted any sort of announcement of support or relief:

Just saw this on Information Week. Amazon.com says it doesn't plan on helping with the Katrina relief efforts. The article notes that other tech companies are not jumping in to help:

[M]ainstream Web sites that had jumped to pull in money for the tsunami victims showed no evidence of repeating it here in the U.S. for Katrina's. Amazon.com, which raised more than $14 million for the American Red Cross in January via a donation link on its home page, didn't have one as of mid-day Monday. Nor did Google, Yahoo, MSN, or eBay, all of which hustled earlier in the year to put up donation links on their portals. (Google slapped up an "Information about Hurricane Katrina" link on its Spartan home page, but that led to news sources and stories.)

An Amazon spokesperson said that the online retailer had no plans to post a donation link on its site. "Each case is different," she said. "The Red Cross has essentially given over its entire site to donations. The tsunami came out of the blue, so it was an 'all hands on deck' situation, but the Red Cross has been getting ready for this and getting its message out there for several days."

2pm EDT update: Yahoo! posted this relief link. Reader/blogger Scott G. says Cisco is helping and passes along this info from the company's Intranet site...

"The recovery effort to aid communities devastated by Hurricane Katrina is growing and the response from Cisco started as news of the disaster began reaching employees. Volunteer teams in RTP and San Jose formed and will receive specialized training before they travel to the affected area. The volunteers will receive assignments and begin recovery work when they reach the site.

All donations from regular employees made to the American Red Cross in I-Give will be matched by the Cisco Systems Foundation up to US$10,000 per employee. The minimum individual employee gift is $50.00 in order to receive a match from the Cisco Foundation.Donation will be focused on immediate humanitarian relief efforts to assist local victims of the disaster."

Elsewhere, Michelle writes:

Question on many readers' minds:

Where are Hollywood and the Live Aid people?

Well, at least NBC is stepping up to the plate.

Update (5:08 PM PST): Amazon finally has a button on their homepage linking to the Red Cross.

Echoing the sentiments of one of our posts yesterday, James K. Glassman looks like the exploitation of Katrina by Gaia-worshipers:

Giant hurricanes are rare, but they are not new. And they are not increasing. To the contrary. Just go to the website of the National Hurricane Center and check out a table that lists hurricanes by category and decade. The peak for major hurricanes (categories 3,4,5) came in the decades of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, when such storms averaged 9 per year. In the 1960s, there were 6 such storms; in the 1970s, 4; in the 1980s, 5; in the 1990s, 5; and for 2001-04, there were 3. Category 4 and 5 storms were also more prevalent in the past than they are now. As for Category 5 storms, there have been only three since the 1850s: in the decades of the 1930s, 1960s and 1990s.

But that doesn't stop an enviro-predator like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from writing on the Huffingtonpost website: "Now we are all learning what it's like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence which Barbour and his cronies have encouraged. Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and - now -- Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children."

Or consider Jurgen Tritten, Germany's environmental minister, in an op-ed in the Frankfurter Rundschau. He wrote (according to a translation prepared for me): "By neglecting environmental protection, America's president shuts his eyes to the economic and human damage that natural catastrophes like Katrina inflect on his country and the world's economy."

The bright side of Katrina, concludes Tritten, is that it will force President Bush to face facts. "When reason finally pays a visit to climate-polluter headquarters, the international community has to be prepared to hand America a worked-out proposal for the future of international climate protection."

He goes on, "There is only one possible route of action. Greenhouse gases have to be radically reduced, and it has to happen worldwide." In other words, thanks to Katrina, we'll finally get Kyoto enforced. (He might start at home, by the way. Europe is not anywhere close to reducing CO2 to Kyoto standards. In fact, the U.S. is doing much better than many Kyoto ratifiers.)

Ross Gelbspan, in a particularly egregious, almost giddy piece in the Boston Globe that was reprinted in the International Herald Tribune, wrote that the hurricane was "nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service Katrina, [but] its real name was global warming." He also finds global warming responsible for droughts in the Midwest, strong winds in Scandinavia and heavy rain in Dubai. The reason for all this devastation, of course, is that the Bush Administration is controlled by coal and oil interests.

And the Independent, a widely read British newspaper, reported today that "Sir David King, the British Government's chief scientific adviser, has warned that global warming may be responsible for the devastation reaped by Hurricane Katrina." King contended that "the increased intensity of hurricanes is associated with global warming."

The Kyoto advocates point to warmer ocean temperatures, but they ought to read their own favorite newspaper, The New York Times, which reported yesterday:

"Because hurricanes form over warm ocean water, it is easy to assume that the recent rise in their number and ferocity is because of global warming. But that is not the case, scientists say. Instead, the severity of hurricane seasons changes with cycles of temperatures of several decades in the Atlantic Ocean. The recent onslaught 'is very much natural,' said William M. Gray, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University who issues forecasts for the hurricane season.'"

Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt writes that Katrina shouldn't be exploited by ratings-worshipers either.

Update: Geez, speaking of exploiting Katrina...

There's an absolutely horrific-sounding thread on Free Republic.com tonight, which begins with this post:

It is with heavy heart I write this...

I have finally reconnected with my best friend who is a paramedic who was sent from Georgia 2 days ago to Gulf Port, Mississippi before the hurricane hit.

He just reached me within the last 10 mins via emergency cell phone to tell me he was alive.

Thousands of bodies have been discovered throughout Mississippi in Gulf Port, Waveland,Hancock County,Bay of St.Louis.

They are hanging in trees and they are pulling them out 30 at a time. Entire families found drowned in their homes and washing up on shore.

The stories he could tell me were brief. National Guard is on the scene and arresting anyone seen on the streets.

The numbers are staggering and what I have been told tonight will shake people to their foundation as the numbers will be coming out in the next 24-hours of just how many people have actually perished in these and 3 other beach communities.

More to follow....

Hopefully, regular readers here know that I'm not someone who believes in Salinger's Law--"if it's on the Internet, it must be true!"--and that's one post I hope is as wrong as humanly possible.

Sadly though, that may not be the case. South Mississippi's Sun Herald reports, "Hundreds feared dead" in Biloxi. Haley Barbour, a man I've never noticed to be a big fan of hyperbole, had this to say:

After touring the destruction by air, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said it is not of case of homes being severely damaged, “they’re simply not there...I can only imagine that this is what Hiroshima looked like 60 years ago.”

Meanwhile, New Orleans' mayor is indirectly quoted as saying, ala this article's headline, "Entire City Will Soon Be Underwater".

Even allowing for the media's "Hurricane Porn"-style hype, this is terrible news coming out of the Gulf Coast.

Glenn Reynolds has a list of charities involved in Katrina-related relief efforts.

Give whatever you can.

James Glassman, Tech Central Station's publisher (and prior to that, The New Republic's), has a warts and all look at Jude Wanniski, who, as we noted earlier, died today:

Eventually, as Bloomberg.com noted in an obituary on Tuesday, Wanniski persuaded "then-California Gov. Reagan to make supply-side economics the centerpiece of his 1980 campaign for the presidency." Today, classical or supply-side ideas are taken for granted, even by economists and politicians on the left.

One of the reasons I was drawn to Wanniski was his faith in the innate intelligence of average citizens, both American and otherwise. Here too, he was ahead of his time. The left wing, which has turned more and more elitist, now rejects ideas like Social Security personal accounts because, it believes, most people won't be able to invest reasonably.

By contrast, Wanniski understood that common folks comprise an army of capitalists. He started Chapter 4 of his book [The Way The World Works] this way:

"The global electorate is, and always has been, striving toward an ideal system of political economics that can maximize welfare for all its component parts. More specifically, the driving force of civilization is a quest for a system that will maximize capital, for only when capital is maximized can welfare be maximized."

Another of Wanniski's accomplishments was to highlight the role played by the Smoot-Hawley Tariff in the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. Now, it is widely believed that the tariff, which touched off a trade war that throttled commerce among nations, at the very least prolonged the global Depression.

Read the rest, particularly the cautionary message that was Wanniski's later career.

Daniel Drezner looks at "Helicopter Parents"--sort of like show biz parents, except they hover close to their kids' academic careers.

The mainstream media are of course totally objective and without bias or ideology. Just ask Jack Cafferty of CNN, who had this snarky exchange with Wolf Blitzer:

WB: It's...what can I say. It's a horrible situation. Did you ever think in our lifetime a major American city like New Orleans, population a half a million, could be in a disaster situation like this?

JC: No, you don't think of it. But then, if you look back at the history, Wolf, I guess in a way, they were sort of were living on borrowed time. 1965 was the last big hurricane. The Army Corps of Engineers went in and built those levees to withstand a Category 3 storm. Apparently, that was all the technology and/or the budget would allow at the time. And Category is not as strong as it gets. And one day, two days ago, the unthinkable happened. And you know, like I said, they've been living on borrowed time. You have to wonder, watching these pictures and listening to these accounts, if we'll ever see the City of New Orleans as we all remember the Big Easy. And where's President Bush? Is he still on vacation?

WB: He's cut short his vacation. He's coming back to Washington tomorrow.

JC: Oh, that'd be a good idea. He was out in San Diego, I think at a Naval Air Station, giving a speech on Japan and the war in Iraq today. Based on his approval rating in the latest polls, my guess is getting back to work might not be a terrible idea. That's not the question of this hour, however.

Duane Peterson has an audio clip of the exchange, and comments:

What an insufferable jerk. First of all, today is also the 60th anniversary of V-J day. The speech obviously got upstaged today by events in the Gulf Coast, but the speech was a really important one, linking the resolve to re-build Japan with the resolve necessary to rebuild Iraq into its own version of a freedom-loving democracy. Bush wasn't on vacation today, and Cafferty knows it.

Second, when Bush is on "vacation," that doesn't mean it's like a vacation you or I take. He still gets briefings all through the day every day. He still has to make decisions every day. Cafferty either knows it and took a cheap political shot in the wake of a catastrophe, or he's an idiot.

Third, Bush had already declared the areas hit as disaster areas before the storm ever got there. Once it was determined that the storm was going to be a monster and strike near New Orleans, Bush made the decision so that the relief dollars and federal assistance, including FEMA, was in the pipeline by the time the storm was happening. Once again, Cafferty's cheap shot was really low, because Bush did as much as he could do, short of issuing an executive order outlawing the storm from arriving.

Fourth, if Bush was in Washington, would that make life any easier for the people affected by the storm? What if Bush came to down to see for himself. Would that help in the relief effort underway? Is Bush supposed to drop down the line of the Coast Guard helicopters and help pluck roof-bound refugees to safety himself?

Nice going, Jack. You're the first moron in the media that supposedly has credibility to inject politics into what could turn out to the be greatest natural disaster this country has faced, and you did it while the disaster is still unfolding.

Ironically, the media has the all-too-recent Indian Ocean tsumani as a template for their coverage. And once again, they're making the same mistakes they did nine months ago.

Incidentally, Matt Drudge is reporting that the Navy's been called into help. How long before there's a repeat of this classic groaner?

Update: Ed Morrissey observes Old Europe acting as equally reactionary as old media. Frank Martin's response?

Over the history of the United States our answer to the needs of the people of other countries as they face natural and man made disasters is “how can we help”.

The European answer is a shrug, the words "you deserve it" and a giggle.

And that my friends, is what makes us who we are and who they are.

Exactly.

The folks at JP Tools contacted me and asked if I'd be interested in reviewing their Journeyman Guitar Tool, a sort of Swiss Army Knife for guitarists, making it relatively painless to change a string during a gig. The result of that exchange is online at Blogcritics.org.

James Panero of The New Criterion writes that the New York Times is keeping their photo captions sleek, short and streamlined--lest they actually properly label a photo of a looter wading through the aftermath of Katrina.

"Top Scientists Warn: Fire Make Sea Gods Angry!" was the title of a satiric post by Iowahawk written shortly after the global warming ghouls came out to Monday morning quarterback the causes of the horrific Christmas tsunami last year. And James Taranto notes today that they're at it again with Katrina.

As Duane Patterson, Hugh Hewitt's Generalissimo wrote last December:

You'll forgive me if I and the family and friends of the victims of this disaster don't want to subscribe to agenda-driven eco-political junk science right now. If the Earth's temperature were one degree cooler at the poles, and the ice caps were a foot thicker, this earthquake would still have happened. The tsunami would still have been just as deadly.

These people need prayer, aid, and comfort right now. They don't need to hear about fluorocarbons and CO2 levels could possibly, maybe, if the trends continue, make the effects of something this catastrophic even worse.

I'm beginning to think these eco-freaks are not even human anymore. They're robotic. It doesn't matter who lives or who dies. Whatever happens in the world, they must spin it into a way that suits their agenda, which is Earth-worship.

Reuters, shame on you...Again.

This time it's the Boston Globe and the Huffington Post, but we certainly concur with the rest of Duane's sentiments.

Update: In a post titled, "The Reactionary Party", David Cohen writes:

The cold winter and spring of 2005-2005 was obviously problematic for global warming enthusiasts. The answer the crafted was that global warming causes cooling, too. So, if it's hot: global warming. If it's cold: global warming. The left has truly become the reactionary party: any change is bad. Of course, static weather over the long-term could only result from human interference in the environment, but that would be good interference.

I have to admit, though, that my weather-cynicism, finely honed by years of the local news spending days covering blizzards that never happen, let me down this time. New Orleans and Mississippi seem to have suffered a tragedy as bad as the worst projections of the tv weather ghouls. This Wiki page, found via Michelle Malkin, offers links to aid agencies and fundraising events.

Don Singleton has some related thoughts and links.

Jude Wanniski, a Wall Street Journal associate editor in the 1970s, who coined the phrase "Supply-Side Economics", and then wrote an eminently readable (and modestly-titled) book on the subject, The Way The World Works, died of a heart attack yesterday at age 69.

As the late Robert Bartley of the Journal (who released a very good book of his own on the subject) wrote in 1989:

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I have a short primer on blogs in the September/October issue of TechLiving magazine that you might enjoy--it should be arriving at your local Borders or Barnes & Noble shortly. I think the text is onnly available online to subscribers; if that changes, I'll let you know.

Will Collier has some thoughts on Hurricane Katrina's immediate aftermath, and the dangers of snap judgements:

As the storm moved north yesterday, a number of commentators, both online and in the major media, were already starting to yowl that the pre-storm predictions of mass destruction were overblown and unwarranted. After all, they said, the thing went through New Orleans, and look--the city's still there. There's no 'giant bowl of toxic gumbo' (to paraphrase many, many comments). Heck, I can see the Superdome on CNN, and it's beat up, but it's not an island or anything!

With one of the major levees failing this morning, several parishes under water (few of which could be reached by people with cameras yesterday), an entirely unknown death toll, hundreds of people trapped by flooding, and untold devestation on the Mississippi and Alabama Gulf coasts, it's starting to look like the instant post-storm criticism was itself premature.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune has, for the first time in its history, published an electronic-only edition today--a notably ironic achievement, since almost nobody in the city has electricity, much less internet access. It's in .pdf format, and it's heartbreaking.

He's got several links in his original post, so click over to read it.

Michelle Malkin has been doing an incredible job blogging Katrina. This post, which contains many links, has a gut-wrenching overhead view of an extremely flooded New Orleans. In its follow-up, Michelle explains that the military is stepping in to help.

Meanwhile, California Yankee has a list of ways you can help Katrina's victims.

Daniel Drezner and Michele Catalano each look at what happens when television news lets its emotions get the best of itself and substitutes hyperbole for serious coverage of hurricanes. TV of course, is built on such emotionalism, but as Glenn Reynolds writes, decades of hype has its price:

God supposedly looks after fools and drunkards, and after watching some of the coverage from Bourbon Street, I'd say He will have his hands full tomorrow. But though some people might want to, in the words of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, "think of it as evolution in action," I think there's another issue here: The wages of hurricane hype.

News outlets generally, and cable news channels in particular, tend to overhype hurricanes. But while I hope that this will just be another case of media hysteria, I can't help feel that the previous wolf-crying played a major role in people's complacency.

If things turn out as badly as feared, complacency won't be a problem for a while. But I hope that people in the press will remember the wages of crying wolf in other contexts. Too much hype, and people tune out.

That's a cautionary note for other media to remember as well, of course.

Update: Welcome, Daou Report readers.

As we've mentioned before, Hugh Hewitt has adopted quite an interesting strategy for interviews with the mainstream media--he plays the interviews on the air, and lets his audience hear the dialogue and read its transcript, which allows them to compare the initial conversation with the finished product.

Earlier today, Hugh ran his taped interview with L.A. Times columnist Tim Rutten, designed to coincide with the publication of Rutten's article. Of the interview, and Rutten's take on the media world, Carol Platt Liebau, a frequent guesthost of the show, writes:

What's most striking about the entire interview is Rutten's myopia. He reminds me of many of the people with whom I attended college and law school -- people who have lived so steeped in liberalism that they don't even realize that their world view is inevitably infected with it. Obviously, people like Rutten would believe that someone who was raised in the Bible Belt, attended Bob Jones or Liberty University, and then went to work for a religious publication would be biased, albeit perhaps unintentionally. Why can't he (and other journalists) acknowledge that, conversely, people who are raised in liberal strongholds, attend an Ivy League (or some other thoroughly secular) school, and then work for an a- or even anti-religious publication likewise are biased?

Here's a theory about why journalists are so deeply invested in the myth of complete objectivity: It's a marker of professionalism, in their eyes. Journalists believe they are smart, they believe they are performing a high order public service -- yet they're underpaid and underappreciated. And there is no particular degree or certification required to do their jobs. So the only way they can manifest their "professionalism" is through adhering to certain conventions.

But as soon as they admit that true "objectivity" doesn't exist, in their own minds, they've lost any claim to professional status -- because then they're just guys with opinions . . . like everyone else.

Even so, there's no disputing that the LA Times is infused with a liberal bias that's all the stronger for its refusal or inability to detect it. Exhibit A is this piece from last weekend's Magazine. It's a serious Q & A with a retired Claremont professor of theology who believes that the United States government perpetrated 9/11. What's the motivation? Global domination. Please. This is wing-nut weirdness.

If some retired professor believed that the government was placing fluoride in the water to facilitate mind control for nefarious left-wing purposes, surely The Times wouldn't give them the time of day. Yet they print this. But there's no bias. No, sireee.

Well, to be fair, these days, the fellow ranting about the evils of fluoride would probably be Ralph Nader--and him, they'd print.

Seriously though, what I find interesting is the split that's appeared in journalism since the Blogosphere took off: while the vast majority of newspaper and TV journalists still use the "we're not biased--we're totally objective!" cant, a growing number are now willing to admit to some form of bias, if it's safe for them to do so--in other words, if they're very secure in their jobs, or approaching retirement.

In a typically thought provoking post, Neo-Neocon begins by posting a question from one her readers:

I've always wondered why AIDS is such a "hip" and "cool" cause. Malaria kills 3 times as many and there are very effective ways to prevent and cure it. I hear nothing but crickets chirping when mentioned as number 4 on the list of "worlds deadliest killer". So pardon my skepticism at the tears shed for AIDS victims. It has nothing to do with caring. I guess Bono or Elizabeth Taylor don't have friends with malaria.

10,700,000 children died in the world last year and 57% were from causes incident to malaria. That's just the children.

She replies:

I haven't checked on anonymous's statistics, but it's my impression that the general point he/she is making is correct: fighting the scourge of malaria is not particularly chic or popular in this country as compared to combatting AIDS. So, what goes on here?

I'll take a stab at an answer. My take on it is that a new disease will always gets more attention than an old one because people are accustomed to the latter, and the new one grabs their interest at first merely because it is new. And I am in agreement that a disease that affects the US and western Europe instead of mainly Africa or other third-world countries (AIDS, as opposed to malaria) will definitely provoke more interest, because in the case of the former, "the bell tolls for thee." It is just human nature to be more upset about something that can potentially affect you and your loved ones rather than strangers in a far-off place.

I think there's something else going on as well. The idea of a disease spread by the type of sexual behavior that was championed during the sexual revolution of the 60s is particularly threatening to the generation that grew up during that time. There was supposed to be no downside to such liberation, and it's a bitter and difficult pill to swallow when the dreams of the 60s die (sometimes it seems as though there are no dreams of the 60s that haven't died). The fact that AIDS first appeared, at least in the western world, in the gay male population--which had so recently undergone its own liberation--was also highly ironic and difficult for those who had championed that cause. So it's no surprise that the anti-AIDS campaign would be especially well-supported among people who believe in those other causes.

Read the rest, as well as the comments, which are spot-on, including this one:

The sovereign treatment for malaria is DDT, which is worse than plutonium or something, according to the Silent Spring school of environmental wonderfulness.

Talking about malaria and the zillions of death since Rachel Carson wrote her book would point a finger at those who are, although impossible to embarrass, interested in avoiding blame.

I concur.

Ever since DVD took off as a format, the clock has been ticking on the lifespan of VHS, which is has been around for at least 25 years. The Digital Bits reports that it's just been dealt another blow--20th Century Fox will not be releasing Revenge of the Sith onto videotape:

Finally this morning (our last news item), there's confirmation from 20th Century Fox and Lucasfilm that the release of Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, certain to be one of the biggest sellers of the year, will be DVD only. There will be no VHS version released. You can read more at Video Business. It's just one more sign that VHS is soon to be an ex-format.

Considering what a wonderfully flexible format DVD is--both recordable DVD and its older, pre-recorded cousin--it can't happen quickly enough.

Last week, we linked to Mark Steyn's piece on Israel's pullout from Gaza, in which he wrote:

It was my National Review colleague David Frum who came up with the clearest assessment to date of the Israeli strategy: “Could it be that Sharon is calling the bluff of Western governments and the Arab states? By creating the very Palestinian state that those governments and those states pretend to want but actually dread Sharon is forcing them to end their pretense and acknowledge the truth.”

This week, Steyn posted a brilliant letter from one of his readers, Simon Brockwell, from Sydney, Australia, on the origins of the Palestinian movement:

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The California state government has misplaced a few of its vehicles: 30,000 of them, to be exact:

An examination of California's inventory has revealed that almost of half of the state's cars and trucks are unaccounted for.

The study concluded that 30,000 of the states 70,000 vehicles are missing -- everything from Caltrans trucks, to CHP cars, to fire rigs, to prison vehicles. The audit of state-owned property was ordered by Governor Schwarzenegger, and found state agencies had no idea what they owned.

"It was very bad," said Fred Aguiar, head of the State and Consumer Services Agency. "We were amazed at how inadequate the information was. The data coming from departments and agencies was terrible."

It was so terrible, in fact, the state found that one agency had recently purchased $4 million in new vehicles but had no record of where it bought them.

Assemblyman Joe Nation, D-San Rafael, thinks -- or hopes, we should say -- that the lost autos may be unaccounted for older cars and trucks.

"Caltrans probably has the largest fleet in the state," said Nation. "I would bet there are a lot of old Caltrans trucks sitting in yards that just aren't being used because they don't run well anymore. Still, not an excuse."

The state has since changed the rules on record-keeping, but for now California's missing cars and trucks may simply be a lost cause.

Via Betsy Newmark.

Via PoliPundit, the American Prowler notes that Warren Buffett bet against America--and it cost him:

Warren Buffett is bearish on the United States, and he's bullish on Europe. For the first time in his life, starting in 2002, Mr. Buffett entered the foreign exchange markets and shorted the dollar. This rare macro-economic bet was based on a belief that U.S. consumers and the U.S. government were spending beyond their means, and that the trade deficit was a sign of economic weakness.

While his short position was profitable in 2004, he has lost more than half a billion dollars so far in 2005. Some Wall Street sources suggest that his breakeven exchange rate is $1.22/euro, so with the euro trading near $1.21 in mid-June, his short position was seriously in the red.

Buffett's anti-American investment sentiment has cost Berkshire Hathaway shareholders dearly. During the 12 months ending in mid-June, his stock price was down roughly 7 percent, while the S&P 500 was up 5 percent. The stock market voted "non" on this Berkshire investment strategy, just like the French and Dutch voted against the European constitution.

And, of course, these two developments are inextricably linked. The French voted against the constitution because they are afraid it will force them to give up their 35-hour workweek and generous social welfare system. This system forces French taxpayers to support an unemployed contingent that has reached 10 percent of the labor force.

It's hard to figure out why Warren Buffett is so down on the U.S. economy and so enthusiastic about Europe's. But gloom and doom forecasts about the U.S. economy are a dime-a-dozen these days. It's as if we rolled back the clock 20 years and it's the early 1980s all over again.

Then, it was President Reagan's tough stance against Communism, large budget deficits, growing trade deficits, Germany, and Japan that were bothering so many pundits. Today, it is President Bush's tough stance against terrorism, trade and budget deficits, China, and India that stir fear in the hearts of the doomsters.

The gloom and doom of the early 1980s proved to be nonsense, just as the current pessimism will prove wrong as well. Corporate profits have climbed to an all-time record high, the U.S. stock market is more undervalued than it has ever been, and the unemployment rate has fallen back to 5.1 percent.

Incidentally, back in 2003, Andy Kessler of Tech Central Station had an interesting look at Buffett with the serene title of "Warren Buffett Hates Your Guts".

Charles Johnson writes:

Excuse me for a minute. Something seems to have happened to my LGF Irony Meter; the little needle is pegged up against the end pin and it’s not budging.

Oh! Never mind; I’ve discovered the reason: Che Guevara’s family to fight use of famed photo.

Who'd have thought that Latin American communism would eventually boil down to T-shirts and royality checks? (Oh, and movie rights, of course.)

(Well, probably these guys...)

Michelle Malkin has another post on Hurricane Katrina that's loaded with linkage. It's titled, "The Destruction Begins", but ends on a reassuring note:

Fox News Channel's Shep Smith reports from the scene that "The French Quarter looks very good...New Orleans got lucky again..."

But not that lucky--portions of the roof have blown off the Superdome.

Via Betsy Newmark, Peter Bronson of the Cincinnati Enquirer looks at the media's forcefield--something I observed on maximum strength last week, as I spent more time watching cable TV news (and consequently less time in the Blogosphere) at my parents' house than I had in ages:

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Will Collier updated his post on Hurricane Katrina (which we linked to earlier today) to include a National Weather Service forecast. I don't think I've ever read a more frightening forecast in my life--it sounds akin to waiting for an atomic bomb to drop. Will describes it as "very grim reading", which if anything, is an understatement:

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Pay no attention to the dozens of cameramen behind the curtain...

Update: Dave Kopel has some related thoughts.

Samizdata's blogger's glossary credits James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal for inventing the term "Dowdified":

Dowdification

Used as noun or verb. The willful omission of one or more words so the meaning of the statement is no longer understood but that the statement suits the needs of the writer in launching an ad hominem attack whether or not the construction is truthful or grammatically complete.

Named after Maureen Dowd, based on her manufacture of a quote attributed to President Bush in her May 14, 2003 column (as first reported by Robert Cox on TheNationalDebate.com).

The latest victim of the Times' Dowdification machine? Condoleeza Rice.

Makes you wonder how many quotes the media invented, distorted, and altered, prior to the Blogosphere, huh?

I'm happy to be back in California today. But Ilya Shapiro is still in the "New Jersey State of Mind", over at Tech Central Station.

When Nina and I visited New Orleans last year and drove around the surrounding Louisiana countryside (sampling the odd drive-through daiquiri bar along the way...), we noted several roads with signs indicating that they're Hurricane Escape Routes.

They're getting used this weekend, Will Collier writes:

If you're in the area, get out, and do it now. This is not just another hurricane that might turn away and hit Galveston or Mobile instead. You can't afford to take that chance this time.

For everybody else, get ready to help. I don't mean to be a harbinger of doom here, and I'm certainly hoping that Katrina fizzles out, a la Dennis, but there's a very real possibility that this could be our tsunami.

Glenn Reynolds has more; and these guys are probably getting a workout today as well.

The memory hole was George Orwell's negative image of a mid-20th century office building's pneumatic tube system in 1984. Documents with facts that no longer fit Oceania's meme of the day were simply tossed into it, where they would be instantly incinerated by scalding flames. It was based on the old adage, "In the Soviet Union, the future is known; it's the past which is always changing."

Since 9/11, the memory hole has gotten quite a workout by the mainstream media, as any connection between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and terrorism has gone up in smoke, but fortunately, the Blogosphere isn't quite as forgetful. We posted some examples last year of the press in the Clinton-era 1990s discussing Osama bin Laden's connections with Saddam Hussein, and Christopher Hitchens has noted two more terrorists that Saddam gleefully sponsored--one of whom was the architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Fritz Hollings, the recently retired Democrat senator from South Carolina, entered yet another example into the Congressional record on September 12, 2002. Didn't hear about it until Captain's Quarters rediscovered it today? You're not alone, despite its ready access via Google.

Update: Curt of Flopping Aces notes:

According those on the left Saddam never would have helped Osama. Here we have a editorial by Saddam's own newspaper, which you know would never have been printed if Saddam disapproved, telling the world about Osama's plan...and gleeful about it.<