Happy Halloween!

And no, sadly, that's not my Darth, err dog.

(Time permitting, watch for additional posts tonight underneath this one.)

Will Kerry's gaffe hurt him in 2008? And over at the temporarily reborn Kerry Spot, Jim Geraghty wonders how it impacts the competition on the other side of the aisle in the Senate:

But if this Kerry thing dominates the last week of the campaign, a big reason is going to because the Media's Favorite Republican refused to provide cover to Kerry. Instead, as Byron reports, he's body-slamming Kerry. Hard.

If 2006 turns out to be a not-that-bad year for Republicans, and this story is credited with being a crucial late factor, then McCain - who already has a lot of Republicans owing him favors for helping them out on the campaign trail - is probably going to get a lot more conservatives saying, "You know, McCain might not be such a bad party man after all..."

When Maximum Pajamahadeen Roger L. Simon last appeared on the "Blog Week In Review" podcast, he quipped that the 2008 presidential election begins the day after the midterms. In actuality, Kerry's blunder and McCain's response may signal the start of it right now.

Update: More 2008 impact: John J. Miller writes, "This year's campaign already has dashed the presidential hopes of George Allen. I suspect that he won't even run". Actually, if he wins next week, I think he still might run, but he'll probably be too damaged to win the nomination. But who knows? Nobody suspected that Kerry would be the last man standing in his party's presidential race, during the Dean-obsessed fall of 2003.

Mark Steyn once called Mickey Kaus "the thinking conservative's thinking liberal", and I'd nominate Tammy Bruce and Nat Hentoff to that list as well. They both have some thoughts on the current poor state of the ACLU, which John Stephenson would probably agree with.

Update: While this post is primarily about Hugh Hewitt's three hour interview with ABC's Mark Halperin, it dovetails remarkably well with the Hentoff and Tammy's thoughts above.

Handing a nice midterm bon-bon to the GOP, John Kerry steps in it. But then, he's an old hand at this stuff.

Over the weekend, I noted that Lynne Cheney and Bill O'Reilly each asked their interviewer the question; Kerry's major gaffe allows every Republican up for reelection a chance to ask it of the person he's running against.

Update: Charlie Rangel also lost it recently, but then that's nothing new, either.

Meanwhile, Dean Barnett puts all the pieces together:

Democrats must be cursing that damn Karl Rove. How does he do it? From where in the black depths of his soul did he conjure the idea of putting a microphone in front of John Kerry’s mouth during the last week of a campaign season? We all know the truth now, and it is incontrovertible: Karl Rove is one magnificent bastard!

In a more serious mode, Dean adds:

John Kerry thinks his service in Vietnam four decades ago means his every comment and action should be beyond reproach. It doesn’t work like that. Ask Duke Cunningham.

He's also still counting on the 1972-era media to cover for his gaffes. It doesn't work like that these days, either.

Update: Not surprisingly, retired Col. Austin Bay, whose weekly podcast I produce, isn't very happy with Kerry's remarks; read the whole thing.

Blogcritics has undergone a dramatic facelift. Click here for the new look; click here to peruse my occasional contributions to the site, which date back to its humble start back in 2002--a millennia in Blogosphere time!

I have an election preview with Jonah Goldberg, the editor-at-large of National Review Online, and Steve Hayward, the author of The Age of Reagan, over at TCS Daily.

(Only a handful of Klingons and Cylons were harmed in the making of this podcast.)

Fans of the original 1968 version of The Producers will remember Dick Shawn's classic turn as Lorenzo St. DuBois--"But my friends call me L.S.D.!" I can understand why Stanley Kubrick tossed this audition tape into the trash when he was prepping Full Metal Jacket...

... But man, if I was redoing The Producers, this is the man to do L.S.D.!

My TCS Daily piece on Hollywood's implosion was excerpted in the Washington Times' "Culture Briefs" section today.

And from the omega to the alpha: the electronic hobbyist magazine Nuts & Volts is running a "Tribute to the Tube" this month, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of the vacuum tube. As part of that, they asked me to write a profile of David Sarnoff, the man who launched commercial radio in the 1920s, before starting a television network of the same name a couple of decades later, called NBC. The article isn't online, but you can find it at your local Borders or Barnes & Noble.

Wolf Blitzer gets the same blackface treatment that Michael Steele and Joe Lieberman have already been tarred with. As Allah writes, "Not for any particular reason. It was just his turn":

I guess they’re speaking racism to power now.

It’ll happen again. What’s interesting is how the betrayed allegiances at which they direct this delightful little metaphor seem to grow broader each time they use it. Gilliard mocked Steele for betraying black liberal Democrats; Hamsher mocked Lieberman for betraying liberal Democrats; Billmon mocks Blitzer, as near as I can tell, for betraying liberals. You could do a Venn diagram of their logic here. But at this point, who’s left?

I don’t know, maybe it won’t happen again. Maybe they’ve simply run out of apostates.

Once you've set the bar for ideological purity high enough that even Bruce Jenner couldn't pole vault over it (or Joe Lieberman, and Wolf Blitzer, to bring this rather strained analogy back on target), there will always be apostates to be punished.

I agree with so much of what Judith Weiss of Kesher Talk has written in her post about an article in yesterday's New York Times titled, "The Elephant In The Room", that I'd end up quoting the entire piece. Instead, just click over, and read the whole thing.

Update: In a somewhat related post, Glenn Reynolds describes what happens when the concepts Judith discusses get ramped up to 11. Or maybe 111.

This article in the Denver Post (H/T: OJ) sounds much like the piece I wrote for TCS Daily last week, except that the screen size is quite a bit smaller. But, then, just like the movie industry, so is the content, these days:

They're not firing, they're "rightsizing." They're not cost-cutting, they're inventing fabulous user-generated programming.

In the euphemistic world of network TV, executives make cutbacks sound like boldly progressive new ventures. The fact is, nobody knows whether today's cutback will yield tomorrow's creative, fantastically successful breakthrough program.

Last week NBC slashed jobs and put an end to expensive early-evening dramas, alerting viewers that, in the future, we should expect "Deal or No Deal" rather than "Friday Night Lights" in the 7 p.m. time slot. Cheaper to produce and more reliable in the ratings, quiz shows are one economical answer to NBC's current woes.

Wait - it gets cheaper.

The networks are launching do-it-yourself video sites, inviting amateur filmmakers to contribute content. They hail these new ventures as the wave of the techno-future.

Fox's "On the Lot," due early next year from Mark Burnett and Steven Spielberg (online at thelot.com), offers would-be filmmakers the chance to work with the master. NBC-bound "It's Your Show," backed by Carson Daly (itsyourshowtv.com), offers cash prizes for the best homemade videos.

CBS is inviting user submissions to its "channel" on YouTube, hoping that partnership will strike gold. Eventually this may go beyond audition tapes for the next "Amazing Race."

Late-night host Daly recently talked about his online experiment, which eventually will be reshaped into a primetime show for NBC. Cashing in on the popularity of YouTube, Daly's "It's Your Show" is the viral video equivalent of "America's Funniest Home Videos," intended to entice amateur videomakers. Complete with a helpful production tool kit, it picks up where lonelygirl15 and lip-synching videos leave off.

"It's a sharing portal, but it does come with some structure," Daly said on a telephone conference call. The network provides a laugh track, for instance, sound effects, cartoon footage, music and a production framework. The tool kit can be applied to whatever mini-masterpiece contributors choose -from "Operation Grandma," where contenders teach a senior how to use new technology, to faux magic tricks pulled off with video editing.

Most appealing to the NBC brass is the fact that the content is practically free (not counting the weekly $1,000 award and a $100,000 challenge), because it's user-generated. The most expensive part of the whole enterprise must be the lawyers' fees for vetting copyright and clearance issues.

Fox's outlay is steeper: The winner gets a $1 million development deal at DreamWorks. Sixteen contestants will be split into teams and given resources to produce a short film. Each week they'll focus on a different genre (comedy, drama, romance, sci-fi) with a studio executive and a film critic among the judges, "American Idol"- style. The result could be a TV show rather than a movie, in which case 20th Century Fox TV has the rights.

Daly's gig is more modest. "The content will define the nature of the TV show," he said. Judging by the submissions online, that means a range from dumb to dumber.

The most popular challenge Daly's site has offered so far is called, "We shut up and you show us how it's done." Industry experts are convinced that air of turning over control to users is crucial. If you believe the hype, entertainment won't flow from a top-down hierarchy anymore; in the future, it will be up for grabs. Let a thousand stu- pid-pet-tricks bloom.

Just wait until audiences figure out that it takes more than a cellphone and a cute idea to create entertainment that can be sustained beyond two minutes.

Previously in this vein, NBC staged a contest for promotional spots for "The Office." The results were "genius," Daly said. In the same way, "It's Your Show" pushes tie-ins to various NBC Universal properties, to keep the corporate business in the forefront.

"Soon everybody's going to be videomaking," Daly predicted. He thinks viral video production will be a teenage rite of passage, like driving a car.

At least until Hollywood says, "You f***ed up--you trusted us", as Universal's lawyers recently said to viral fans of the cult series-turned-cult movie, Firefly.

But then that's far from the first time that the software producers in Southern California have been at war with the products created via the hardware and software producers in Northern California, of course.

Tim Blair wonders where have all the boaters gone, long time passing:

“This,” reports the Sydney Morning Herald, “is a picture of Sydney’s future. Rising sea levels will submerge or threaten billions of dollars worth of property, both public and private, by 2100.” Take a look at the Spit Bridge now, and as the SMH imagines it may appear following 94 years of global warming:

Where have all the boats gone? Isn’t it a quality of boats that they float, thereby making them invulnerable to rising sea levels? Is a rise of less than one metre, upon which the SMH’s projection is based, somehow capable of submerging all those sea craft? Did the owners of these vessels set sail for higher ground? Are yachts banned under our future Islamic government? We need answers!

Something tells me Tim's readers will have plenty of them. In the meantime, this is further proof that Fire Make Sea Gods Angry!

Apparently, as long as the nightly burning of Citroens and Peugeots by local "youths" remains at 200 cars or less, and only one woman receives burns covering 60 percent of her body when the bus she's traveling in is torched by a Molotov cocktail, France can be said to be “relatively calm"--at least by her interior minister. And the AP reporter who takes it all down blindly to write an article bursting with cognitive dissonance.

But then, so is France itself.

In a recent post, Tammy Bruce (whose radio show I visited on Friday) wrote, "If you're ever at a loss wondering what the Left has in store for the Western world, just look to our cousins across the pond". She was referring to England, but as long as French bureaucrats look at 100 to 200 cars a night going up in flames as the definition of “relatively calm", it's applicable there as well.

The dead have arisen--and they're still not voting Republican! (Sorry Bart.)

Maybe Harold Ford can chart the eschatological implications of this development...

Update: Or maybe we could ask Joel Stein of The L.A. Times for his take.

Two, two, two great pundits in one: Mark Steyn reprints a 2002 essay which elaborates on Mickey Kaus's thoughts on the relationship between welfare and terrorism:

The rise of the anti-immigrant parties in France, Belgium, et al. is supposedly due to crime. It's true there seems to be a lot of it over there. You're six times more likely to be mugged in London than in New York. The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea has a worse crime rate than Harlem. In the Los Angeles Times, Sebastian Rotella was perplexed: 'As crime has dropped in the United States in recent years, it has worsened in much of Europe, despite generous welfare states designed to prevent US-style inequality and social conflict.'

'Despite'? Try 'because of'. In December in this space, I lent my support to Mickey Kaus, the thinking conservative's thinking liberal, who advanced the theory that welfare causes terrorism. Among the examples I cited was Zacarias Moussaoui, the socalled '20th hijacker', who became an Islamofascist nutter while living on welfare in London. What else is there to do all day? Go down the pub? Lie on the floor listening to Capital FM? If you're putting in a ten-hour grease-monkey shift at Fat Dave's Auto Body, you're too wiped out to wipe America out. But in the fetid public housing of London, Paris, Frankfurt and Rotterdam the government will pay you to sit around the flat all day plotting world domination.

It's a scheme worthy of a Bond villain:flood high-unemployment Europe with unassimilated low-skilled young men, whom the state is obliged to put on welfare just to keep them from rioting, and hey presto, your enemies will be funding their own downfall - ON HER MAJESTY'S SOCIAL SERVICE. Say what you like about that so-called 'American Taleban', John Yoko Ashram Fonda Country Joe and the Fish Walker Lindh, but at least his loopy Marin County parents put him through terrorist training school on their own nickel and not at the taxpayers' expense. At the moment, alongside the ranks of Europe's terrorist welfare queens, Jihad Johnny has the distinction of being the West's only private-sector Islamabaddy.

It's gradually beginning to dawn on US Europhiles that the Continent has done everything the American Left has wanted for years and it doesn't seem to be working out.

Read the rest.

Lynne Cheney and Bill O'Reilly each ask their inquisitors (oh wait, that's Hugh Hewitt, never mind), err, their interviewers the same basic question: do you want us to win in Iraq? And that's a question that should be asked of every pundit. As much as Rush and other talk radio hosts beat up President Clinton for his seemingly annual foreign policy excursions (Somalia and Iraq, which he inherited, Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo, et al), I don't recall ever hearing Limbaugh say that he didn't want America to win these conflicts. Contrast that with Michael Moore and Cindy Sheehan's more infamous utterances, or Keith Olbermann's.

Letterman apparently waffled when O'Reilly asked him; Wolf Blitzer responded thusly to Lynne Cheney:

The answer, of course, is we want the United States to win. We are Americans. There’s no doubt about that. You think we want terrorists to win?

Good thing Ted Turner and Eason Jordan are no longer running CNN, or Wolf would be in hot water over every sentence in that short statement.

Incidentally, Wolf might run it by CNN's senior editor for Arab affairs, and see if she agrees with him.

In her latest op-ed, Peggy Noonan writes:

In the Republican base, that huge and amorphous thing, judgments are less tough, more forgiving. But there too things have changed.

There remains a broad, reflexive, and very Republican kind of loyalty to George Bush. He is a war president with troops in the field. You can see his heart. He led us in a very human way through 9/11, from the early missteps to the later surefootedness. He was literally surefooted on the rubble that day he threw his arm around the retired fireman and said the people who did this will hear from all of us soon.

Images like that fix themselves in the heart. They're why Mr. Bush's popularity is at 38%. Without them it wouldn't be so high.

But there's unease in the base too, again for many reasons. One is that it's clear now to everyone in the Republican Party that Mr. Bush has changed the modern governing definition of "conservative."

He did this without asking. He did it even without explaining. He didn't go to the people whose loyalty and support raised him high and say, "This is what I'm doing, this is why I'm changing things, here's my thinking, here are the implications."

He didn't? Maybe I'm not following the point that the nearly always astute Noonan is trying to make, but wasn't Compassionate Conservative pretty loudly discussed and debated during the 2000 election--and beyond?

Pontius Pilate: the original postmodernist. Great catch by Mark Judge, found via Instapundit.

This Michael Lewis profile of Bill Parcells is a throwback to the good old days of the New Journalism--it's the sort of detailed, live with the subject seven days a week meaty profile that Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe regularly cranked out in their heyday. And it's proof that the New York Times and its writers are still capable of doing good work during those increasingly rare instances when they don't have an ideological axe to grind.

Ian Schwartz on the Dixie Chicks:

They insult their audience, insult the President, blame Free Republic, and still wonder why people don’t like them. Emily Robison chimed in and blamed–*gasp*–corporate America for ordering local music stations to stop playing their music. When will these dolts understand that they caused their own downfall? Not Christian “fundamentalist” Christians, not Free Republic, not corporate America.

So they want to consider themselves "transgressive", and attack the same targets that everyone else in Hollywood and the rest of show biz have attacked since Calvin Coolidge was president, and yet whine when they face a backlash?

This is an interesting new trend though: when entertainers were attacking President Reagan back in the 1980s, I don't remember them slagging their audiences as well. Maybe because it's not exactly the best way to build sympathy for your cause. And maybe because audiences didn't have the tools to fight back then.

Just ask Mary Mapes.

Update: Mary Katharine Ham adds, "They're so oppressed that they're getting segments on primetime cable news shows! Man, it's rough being silenced".

Heh, indeed^TM.

Hey, no fair stealing my shtick! But still, he's got a point:

EMI Music Chairman and Chief Executive Alain Levy Friday told an audience at the London Business School that the CD is dead, saying music companies will no longer be able to sell CDs without offering "value-added" material.

"The CD as it is right now is dead," Levy said, adding that 60% of consumers put CDs into home computers in order to transfer material to digital music players.

EMI Music is part of EMI Group PLC (EMI.LN).

But there remains a place for physical media, Levy said.

"You're not going to offer your mother-in-law iTunes downloads for Christmas," he said. "But we have to be much more innovative in the way we sell physical content."

Record companies will need to make CDs more attractive to the consumer, he said.

"By the beginning of next year, none of our content will come without any additional material," Levy said.

Actually, let's flip that around: how 'bout packaging some content with your additional material? There's a reason why awards shows such as the Grammys are perrenial ratings losers.

Cathy Seipp has some ideas on how to resuscitate the moribund L.A. Times, none of which will be listened to, of course, guaranteeing its fish-wrapping status for years to come:

A TV writer and former magazine editor I know, for instance, once told me he cancelled his L.A. Times subscription to get USA Today instead, which really seems pretty crazy. He added that he just wants the following three questions answered when he reads his morning paper: 1) How are the Dodgers doing? 2) Rain today? 3) What’s on TV?

“Those are the only three answers I want from American journalism,” he noted. “USA Today is perfect.”

Another complaint I’ve heard about my favorite paper is that it’s a mere tabloid compared to the Gray Lady. A few days after the 2003 recall election, for instance, even some insiders complained (off-record, of course) that with its investigation into the Arnold Schwarzenegger groping stories, the paper had become a dirt-digging tabloid.

But actually, I’d say L.A. could use a real tabloid, like the honestly biased New York Post, especially during free-for-all media events like the recall. Stories would run sooner, and with snappier headlines. During the recall, for instance, Times headlines often managed to be both typically dull and remarkably condescending, what with their habit of regularly referring to Schwarzenegger as “Actor” — “Actor Names Economic Team,” “Actor’s Team Sprints…,” and (my favorite) “Davis, Actor Go Head to Head.” That the stories themselves dug up dirt wasn’t the problem.

Then there’s the constant hand-wringing about mainstream media objectivity, which always strikes me as beside the point as well as impossible. A few years ago, for a story on blogging, I interviewed Washington Post associate editor and senior correspondent Robert Kaiser, co-author of a ponderous book about the media called The News About the News.

“I read things I think I should know, not other people’s opinions about what I should know,” Kaiser harrumphed, explaining why he doesn’t read blogs. But every single thing we read in the paper, including hard news, is the product of other people’s opinions about what we should know. Problems happen when those in charge believe in their own objectivity so much that they no longer know even that one simple fact.

If you're an editor who can't grasp that fact, it's time to come out of the cocoon.

Update: Related thoughts, here.

Well, now that I have your attention, the latest Pajamas "Blog Week In Review" podcast discusses Kinky Friedman, and other third party Texas gubernatorial candidates, along with Joe Lieberman's third party run in Connecticut.

By now, you've probably seen this clip of Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney winning the battle of the soundbite with an absolute windbag of a reporter. If not, click on the YouTube window to watch:

Romney's being touted as a presidential candidate in 2008--and who knows who will still be standing by the time the Republican National Convention rolls around that summer. But Mitt's certainly taking a chip off the block of another former governor who ran for the White House in 2000...

Newsbusters has some thoughts on Howard Kurtz's profile of NBC Baghdad correspondent Richard Engel in the Washington Post:

First, NBC anchor Brian Williams claimed Engel "is the most agenda-less person I've met in our business." Then Engel declared "I think war should be illegal...I'm basically a pacifist." The story included no critics of Engel's reporting, but praise from Williams and CBS colleague Lara Logan, and Engel's mother.

Williams asserted that Engel's reporting was fearless against annoying media critics: "In an era of instant media criticism, he calls balls and strikes in the middle of a war zone," says NBC anchor Brian Williams. "He is completely unbothered by any Web site that may have problems with his reporting while he's over in Iraq dodging bullets....He is the most agenda-less person I've met in our business, I think, in the past 20 years."

Does it sound a little like Williams is saying Internet media critics should shut up and go fight in Iraq before they can have an authoritative opinion? It's certainly easy for Engel to seem unbothered by critics in a Post story that never asks a media critic of any stripe for an opinion. Here's the context for Engel's declaration of pacifism:

Why does he stay? When NBC made Engel its Middle East bureau chief over the summer, he agreed to a new contract and moved to the relative calm of Beirut. Days later he found himself covering a fierce war between Israel and Hezbollah -- and was suddenly reenergized. This, for better or worse, is what he does. Not that Engel necessarily approves of military conflict.

"I think war should be illegal," he says. "I'm basically a pacifist."

Remember when reporters weren't tripping over themselves to tell you their biases?

In an article titled, "Less dream, more factory" and subtitled, "H'w'd steels itself for a perfect storm", Variety reports:

Hollywood woke up last week to the fact that it has become Detroit.
Layoffs are rising as the global conglomerates demand higher returns. Contentious negotiations loom as guilds and unions feel they are being shut out of the growing world of digital distribution.

NBC Universal said it will cut operating expenses by $750 million this year and eliminate as many as 700 jobs. Those disclosures riveted attention on one ineluctable reality:

Having lived in its own economic cocoon for a generation, the media and entertainment community is facing the reality that it's just another industry [You don't say!--Ed] and that its artisans must expect to be treated accordingly.

It's worse than Detroit! And yes, that's a movie reference. I love movies, and I'm not at all happy to write stuff like this, but the industry largely brought their woes upon themselves.

UPI reports, "Communist Party eyes '08 Russian elections":

Moscow, Oct. 26 (UPI) — Russia's Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov wants to replace Vladimir Putin as president.

Although elections won't be until 2008 and the party has not selected its candidate, Zyuganov says he has 100 percent support in the party.

Zyuganov said the Communist Party was gearing up now because if support, and the political apparatus, weren't secured now, "it would be difficult to count on success in the presidential election," ITAR-Tass said.

The Communist Party said it hoped for 20 percent support in next year's parliamentary election, the Russian government news agency said. Zyuganov said party leaders hoped for results that would change "the voting configuration in parliament," ITAR-Tass said.

The Communists will rally and march in Moscow Nov. 7, ITAR-Tass said. That date marks the October Revolution (under the old calendar) that brought down the tsar in 1917. Officially it has been replaced by a Day of National Unity Nov. 4. The party also will participate in events marking the 100th anniversary of Leonid Brezhnev's birth on Dec. 19.

Hey, they only killed tens of million people the first time around. But they'll get it right this time!

Can't say I blame them: "South Koreans having 'terror sex' after NK nuke test".

"At every turn the chance to show contempt for the host trumped the desire to convince to the audience, and that made it 90 minutes of bone-saw grinding."--James Lileks' gobsmackingly accurate description of Andrew Sullivan's appearance on Hugh Hewitt's show on Wednesday.

Tune in here to listen!

Via a couple of recent quotes from George Lucas, I toll the funeral bell for the movie industry as we know it, in an article over at TCS Daily.

(Yes, an old school-style article from yours truly with words and everything at TCS, not one of them new-fangled podcasts that I've been specializing in over there as of late)

Well, actually, I still am disgusted, but I'm not at all surprised (or amused) by the details in this item on the main Pajamas page:

Melanie Phillips nicknames the BBC “The British Bigotry Corporation” as one of her readers sums up the BBC television show called Spooks: “The main plot involves a group of ruthless Mid-East hijackers who take over a London embassy and shoot people every hour. They turn out (of course) to be Jews in disguise.”

On her own blog, Phillips writes:

Only a few days ago, people were taken aback to read the brazen admissions of bias made by BBC bigwigs at their ‘impartiality’ seminar. But this is much more than political bias. This is deep, culturally embedded, venomous bigotry. Yet to my knowledge there has been no inquest at the BBC, no expressions of concern by staff, no sign of life from the Governors. Astounding.

Sadly, it really isn't, these days. But it is further proof that Europe is indeed partying like it's 1939.

Michelle Malkin interviews Mark Steyn on America Alone.

Google...what's that?

The Democrat former mayor of New York offers some advice on Iraq along with his election predictions for November. And speaking of which, sorry for not much posting on Tuesday--I'm puting together a podcast which also contains some election predictions from a couple of popular journalists/pundits whom I interviewed for TCS Daily; watch for this to go up fairly soon.

Paxety Pages notes an interesting--if possibly 100 percent coincidental--connection between the sniper in CNN's infamous video last week videotaped from his POV as he shot an American soldier, and John Muhammad and John Lee Malvo, the DC snipers of four years ago:

The general said during the CNN show that he had been called on to look at the video to see what could be learned about the terrorist tactics. He, like the original reporter, commented on the video, and the sniper round, being fired from a vehicle. The general said that the shooting was from a hole in the trunk of a vehicle.

We've heard of that tactic before - right here in the United States.

* * *

Large numbers of people in this country seem to be invested in the idea that the United States has not been attacked by Muslim terrorists since September 11, 2001. Conservative Republicans want to believe that the Bush administration is protecting us - liberal Democrats don't want to believe we are in danger at all. The DC Snipers show that we have been attacked, and that we can be in grave danger.

Now, American soldiers are being shot in the same manner as American civilians were being shot down four years ago. Is shooting from a hole in the trunk of a vehicle a common terrorist tactic? Or have Middle Eastern terrorists learned from American ones?

If they have, that's an uncomfortably literal definition of Tom Wolfe's "Media Ricochet" meme.

When Nancy Pelosi was quoted over the weekend as saying, "Impeachment is off the table", my immediate thought was: not if John Conyers is still in Congress. He and others on the left proposed impeaching President Reagan seemingly every year of his administration. Byron York writes:

At the very least, Conyers’s well-laid groundwork points to a potential conflict between him and Pelosi. She might say impeachment is off the table if Democrats are elected, but we haven’t heard any such declaration from Conyers himself. And what would he say? After all, impeachment is something he’s had in mind for a very long time.

Read the rest.

Here's a poser from James Taranto's latest Best of the Web column:

Who wrote the following passage?

"Bush's fellow Republicans applied a rubber stamp to much of his conservative agenda the past six years, including tax cuts that went largely to the rich."

A. Bob Herbert
B. Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman
C. John Kerry's speechwriter
D. Ayman al-Zawahiri

If you're a regular reader, you're already familiar with the trope: The answer is none of the above. It was written by Thomas Ferraro, a "reporter" for the Reuters "news" service.

Maybe this is further proof that they're virtually objective...

Last week, I linked to a Rich Galen essay on how November could see loads of Al Gore-style lawsuits launched to contest close elections. John Fund picks up the theme at Opinion Journal.

Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad helps sell more books for Mark Steyn--or at the least, provides him with endless material for his next article on global demographics.

Back in June, Carl Azuz, CNN's senior editor for Arab affairs said, " Well, I think for one, terrorism for one person is a freedom fight for another", echoing the famous quote of Stephen Jukes, global news editor for Reuters shortly after 9/11.

Michelle Malkin explains why CNN is terrorism's favorite PR contact in its Rolodex, in her latest Vent.

When you call The Left Bank, a Bay Area of chain of high end French restaurants, and they put you on hold (as I found out today when I made a reservation), a recording of a woman with a beautiful Gallic accent says, "Bonjour, and thank you for calling! In France, good food is a right. That's why here at the Left Bank..."

I'm not up on the current state of government benefits in France, so who knows--maybe truffles and foie gras really are the right of every Frenchman on the dole. (After all, you can work up quite an appetite after a hard day's night of torching Citroens.) But found via TCS, The Christian Science Monitor asks some great questions: If healthcare is a human right, as the average New York Times reader thinks it is, then why isn't food? And what would happen if it were?

Read the whole thing--but pour a nice glass of Lillet Blonde on the rocks before you do.

OK, I'm convinced--everyone is on Karl Rove's payroll. This quote by "Speaker Expect" Nancy Pelosi (as Mickey Kaus dubs her) is too much:

"The gavel of the speaker of the House is in the hands of special interests, and now it will be in the hands of America's children."

I couldn't have said it better. If Republicans are about to dip into their campaign funds and unleash a barrage of new TV ads, that's one quote that should be put into wide circulation.

Of the Senate, P.J. O'Rourke once famously wrote that "The founding fathers, in their wisdom, devised a method by which our republic can take 100 of its most prominent numskulls and keep them out of the private sector where they might do actual harm". But increasingly, that's becoming a quote with bicameral applications. And perhaps infintely more so in a few weeks.

Michelle Malkin asks, "Why is Ward Churchill smiling? Because he is still employed by the University of Colorado and collecting a publicly-subsidized paycheck." Read the rest here.

Gosh, what a shocker! While The New York Times can't stop telling people how biased to the left it is these days, who knew the BBC would feel the urge to come clean as well?

(Via LGF)

In his 2002 book titled Reagan's War, Peter Schweizer wrote:

On repeated occasions, according to numerous Soviet accounts, [Jimmy] Carter encouraged Moscow to influence American politics for his benefit or for the detriment of his enemies. Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin recounts in his memoirs how, in the waning days of the 1980 campaign, the Carter White House dispatched Armand Hammer to the Soviet embassy. Explaining to the Soviet Ambassador that Carter was "clearly alarmed" at the prospect of losing to Reagan, Hammer asked for help: Could the Kremlin expand Jewish emigration to bolster Carter's standing in the polls? "Carter won't forget that service if he is elected," Hammer told Dobrynin.

According to Georgii Kornienko, first deputy foreign minister at the time, something similar took place in 1976, when Carter sent Averell Harriman to Moscow. Harriman sought to assure the Soviets that Carter would be easier to deal with than Ford, clearly inviting Moscow to do what it could through public diplomacy to help his campaign.

Even when he was out of office, Carter still tried bitterly to encourage Moscow to do damage to his enemies during an election. As Dobrynin recounts, in January 1984 the former president dropped by his residence for a private meeting. Carter was concerned about Reagan's defense build-up and went on to explain that Moscow would be better off with someone else in the White House. If Reagan won, he warned, "There would not be a single agreement on arms control, especially on nuclear arms, as long as Reagan remained in power."

Did Ted Kennedy also try to throw a presidential election involving Reagan by going to the Soviets? Bryan of Hot Air writes:

There’s a new book on Ronald Reagan making the rounds, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism. Its author, Paul Kengor, unearthed a sensational document from the Soviet archives. That document is a memo regarding an offer made by Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts via former Senator John Tunney, both Democrats, to the General Secretary of the Communist Party, USSR, Yuri Andropov, in 1983. The offer was to help the Soviet leadership, military and civilian, conduct a PR campaign in the United States as President Ronald Reagan sought re-election. The goal of the PR campaign would be to cast President Reagan as a warmonger, the Soviets as willing to peacefully co-exist, and thereby turn the electorate away from Reagan. It was a plan to enlist Soviet help, and use the American press, in unseating an American president.

Think about that.

It certainly rings a bell. (In addition to Carter, it's also reminiscent of his fellow senator from Massachusetts' Winter Soldier moment. But that shouldn't be too surprising.)

Update: Our podcast with Kengor can be found here.

Interesting Newsbusters post by Tim Graham:

Cindy Sheehan became an instant liberal-media celebrity when she held a vigil outside President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas and demanded to meet with him (a second time) over the death of her son Casey in Iraq. But is the liberal media only about creating the legend and leaving the negative details out? MRC's Justin McCarthy reported that on Wednesday's "Fox and Friends," Melanie Morgan and Catherine Moy, authors of the book American Mourning, said they found Sheehan was paid by John Kerry's campaign in 2004 to speak out against President Bush. Said Morgan:

"We have Federal Election Commission documents. I mean we went to an extensive research, we followed the money, that's how you always figure out what's going on...We found that John Kerry and Michael Moore personally recruited Gold Star family members just within days and sometimes even at the funerals of their sons to come and work for the campaign in order to undermine the candidacy of George W. Bush at the time. It was shocking and, and really offensive behavior and that's exactly what happened to Cindy Sheehan who we tracked down. She went on the payroll of John Kerry's campaign within days after her son's death as well as her daughter Carly. Ultimately, there was a split between the two because she felt that John Kerry wasn't radical enough and didn't have an anti-war agenda that matched hers."

The authors also appeared on Tuesday's "Hannity & Colmes" to make their charge:

"It was John Kerry's political campaign, John Kerry personally, along with Michael Moore, went to Cindy Sheehan just days and a couple of weeks after the death of her son and asked her to make a commercial for him.And they did the same thing, political operatives, they asked the other families."

This is a pretty explosive charge for the rest of the Sheehan-promoting media to ignore.

But it's a safe bet that they will.

What would journalists do without Greg Packer, The Definitive Man In The Street^TM? Here's his latest sighting.

(Via Kaus Files.)

At least at first glance, this sounds like a sign of desperation, as Democrat Harold Ford Jr. crashed Republican Bob Corker's press conference this morning for an impromptu debate.

Update: No wonder Ford lost it today: "Big news in Tennessee: Instapundit voted for Corker".

Really fascinating interview with Lawrence Wright in this week's Blog Week In Review. Wright is the author of The Looming Tower, a detailed look at Al Qaeda's rise to power in the 1990s.

The Canadian edition of TV Guide's circulation has dwindled from a million copies a week in the 1980s to 243,695, today, as the magazine finally decides to jetison its dead tree edition to go all-Internet.

As for the future of television itself? Well, here's a report that speculates that broadband speeds will hit multiple gigabits per second within a couple of decades. No wonder some guy in a Robb Report magazine said this month that "TV is merging with the Internet", as IPTV slowly begins to roll out.

Update: "The main problem with the legacy media is they’ve yet to adjust to 21st century or even late 20th century economic realities", Dean Barnett writes. And technology is increasingly running further ahead of them.

TigerHawk catches a detail that I missed--today's date in which the Dow cracked 12,000 is also the anniversary of its crash in 1987:

As the Dow today closes at a new record high of 12,011+, I can't help but recall October 19, 1987, a very tough day in the market. It was a very big crash [508 points, or 22.6 percent of its value--Ed], with the market closing in the mid 1700s. Imagine that folks. I remember it all too well.

Me too. Given who occupied the White House at the time, the press was all-too-eager to portray that temporary correction as the onset of The New Depression. Obviously, it didn't quite happen, but then, the media has always demonstrated an enormous flexibility in how they report the economy based on who would get the credit for its success or failure.

Drop a crucifix into urine, and become the hit of the Manhattan art world, and hired by the New York Times. Drop a Koran into the toilet on the campus of NYU? Arrested for a hate crime.

So when will the NYPD start raiding MOMA and the Times' press room for displaying "art" such as this to even out the glaringly obvious double-standard?

Just about never is the timeframe that comes to mind, unless Catholics turn to suicide bombing. Or as I wrote last year when Newsweek manufactured the first Koran-in-the-can siting out of whole cloth:

If the media wants to claim that defacing the Koran in a POW camp full of captured terrorists is the crime of the century, then it needs to follow its own logic to its natural conclusion: no more claiming that "art" such as Piss Christ is a bold artistic statement. No more episodes like this on Law & Order and other TV shows, unless they're roundly condemned by the press. An article such as Rod Dreher's "The Godless Party" should be a multi-part investigative feature in the New York Times. There should be regular articles condemning the attacks of the ACLU against religious Christians or Christmas celebrations.

Because without a similar tone to coverage of religion in the US, Koran abuse stories at Gitmo looks exactly like it is: grandstanding hypocrisy of the worst order.

And it's even worse coming from government officials, rather than radical chic artists and journalists desparently trying to manufacture controvery.

Update: Here's a 1999 Salon article subtitled, "New Yorkers apparently do not support Mayor Giuliani's holy war on the Brooklyn Museum", the same museum that displayed the Virgin Mary covered in elephant dung that the Times used to illustrate its story about the Cartoons That Dare Not Be Shown early this year:

The public's overwhelming and sophisticated rejection of Giuliani's inquisition suggests that it ought to be possible for a defense of free expression to coexist with a more vigorous debate about the content of art. We can defend the NEA, defend the imperative for radical, taboo-bashing, experimental art-making, and still ask if the Whitney would so readily display a sculpture called "Piss Torah," with a scroll dropped in a jar of urine.

Nahh. That's one question that's been firmly settled in the interim.

The great Chuck Berry turned 80 years old yesterday. And like another veteran music pioneer, you can still see him in concert.

In addition to the bad news reported in this post (on a day when the Dow did indeed close over 12,000), Stephen Spruiell links to this Editor & Publisher story:

The New York Times Co. reported Thursday that its third-quarter 2006 profit from continuing operations plunged 39.2% on costs related to its job cuts and a loss on its sale of its 50% stake in the Discovery Times Channel.

Glad to see them paying a price for their arrogance.

While the American economy is roaring away (the Dow is just over 12,000 as I type this), the legacy media is seeing red in certain quarters. AP notes that "NBC Universal makes $750M in cuts by reducing staff, scripted shows, news budget".

And Pajamas' own Cathy Seipp looks at the L.A. Times' "Manhattan Project" (their name), which, paradoxically, is designed to dismantle a bomb of a newspaper. Good luck to that.

Elsewhere, Patterico writes, "You Read the Most Interesting Things Sometimes in the Business Section"--like the New York Times admitting, yet again, its liberal bias.

Update: Related thoughts from Betsy Newmark and George Will, and Jonah Goldberg.

Another Update: Wow that was fast--a reader with a GE email address writes in:

Amongst us GE engineers, we like to point out that what happened to NBC News is what happens to GE divisions that can't (or won't) follow our internal Six Sigma quality programs.

The moral is that if one can't deliver customer value with a quality product, one might lose one's job.

Do media elites generally believe they're doing a quality job? In one of Bernard Goldberg's books (I forget if it was Bias or Arrogance), he mentions that he's heard television producers make widely disparaging references to their audiences in Middle America. Are they equally cynical about the quality of the product they put out to them? Or do they naively think it's great stuff? I honestly don't know.

More: "Katie Couric quickly slips down news ratings slope"--to the point where she now trails a VH-1 music show starring rapper Flavor Fav.

InstaUpdate: Just to tie in with my title above, Glenn Reynolds writes, "No wonder the Big Media are acting as if the economy is in dreadful shape. For them, it is".

Rich Galen writes that November could be a long year:

I think it is very likely that we will not know whether Republicans or Democrats will organize the House until the vote for Speaker is taken sometime in the early afternoon of January 3, 2007.

As of today, the last three people this side of the planet formerly known as Pluto who think the GOP will maintain control of the Congress are Karl Rove, Mary Matalin and me.

Let us assume that one side or the other ends up with a three seat margin: The GOP holds its losses to 12 seats; or the Dems pick up 18 seats.

That assumes that every one of the 435 individual elections produce clear winners on election night.

Ain't gonna happen.

There will be a minimum of four and perhaps as many as 8 or 9 recounts. And because so much is at stake, every close election will be fought to the fourth corner of the last hanging chad of the final contested ballot.

In 1984 the recount of the election to determine a winner in southwest Indiana went well past the opening of Congress in 1985. Some years later, a recount in which I was involved, just west of St. Louis, went until just days before Christmas.

It is very possible that the number of recounts will exceed the margin either party has as we move through November and into December.

But wait! There's more!

Read on.

Wow--like the punchline at the end of the When Harry Met Sally parody we posted yesterday, I'll have what William Greider of The Nation (and formerly Rolling Stone and The Washington Post) is having:

When I heard the news flash that a plane had crashed into a Manhattan apartment tower, I didn't think, how horrible. I said to myself: those rotten bastards in the White House.

I was thinking the Bush regime had gone to new extremes in its search for a believable "red alert." That tactic is worn out, it's been used so many times in election seasons. Instead, why not blow up a chunk of New York City to remind folks how scary life can be in these United States? Okay, that thought is irrational (also slanderous). But office conversations the next day told me I was not alone.

Maybe the folks at the office were simply reading Ace of Spades, who, the same day as Cory Lidle's tragic accident, satirically got a jump on the conspiracies to come. But as Canadian blogger Kathy Seidle wrote back in July in response to 9/11 conspiracy freaks:

I wonder if the nuts even believe what they are saying. Because if something like 9/11 happened in Canada, and I believed with all my heart that, say, Stephen Harper was involved, I don't think I could still live here. I'm not sure I could stop myself from running screaming to another country.

How can you believe that your President killed 2,000 people and in between bitching about this, just carry on buying your vente latte and so forth? I would have to be literally locked up, as a danger to myself and others. That's why I think a lot of this is just adolescent style posturing on the part of conspirazoids.

Adolescent style posturing? At The Nation? Absurd!

Mary Katharine Ham goes video:

Funny, slickly produced, and an utterly charming hostess: how long before this gets slapped with a warning label by YouTube?

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote:

Last year, Mark Steyn wrote that Europe isn't multicultural, it's bicultural. And while you can witness the clash of its two cultures more or less nightly on the continent, you can see its future in Britain.

Forget the future (Europe largely has), but present day England isn't looking like much fun either: Muslims make up two percent of Britain’s population, but are responsible for 25% of its anti-gay hate crimes. As Charles Johnson writes, that staggering fact is buried in the fourth paragraph of this Reuters piece on a British advertisement that implies that Christians are responsible for a huge increase in anti-gay violence.

(Tim Blair has some related thoughts.)

Popular Mechanics editor James B. Meigs has a great look at how much flak his magazine has received when they dared to disprove the insanity that drives 9/11 conspiracy kooks "truthers". Meigs writes:

On February 7, 2005, I became a member of the Bush/Halliburton/Zionist/CIA/New World Order/ Illuminati conspiracy for global domination. It was on that day the March 2005 issue of Popular Mechanics, with its cover story debunking 9/11 conspiracy theories, hit newsstands. Within hours, the online community of 9/11 conspiracy buffs—which calls itself the “9/11 Truth Movement”—was aflame with wild fantasies about me and my staff, the magazine I edit, and the article we had published.

Near the end of his piece, Meigs observes:

Strange bedfellows, indeed. In truth, the worldviews of far-left- and far-right-wing conspiracists differ little. Both think that vast, malevolent forces have hijacked American democracy. And both believe that the press, our elected officials, and the American people—or “sheeple,” as today’s conspiracists like to call them—are too timid and ignorant to speak up. As Hofstadter shows, such sentiments have been around since the early days of the republic. But 9/11 gave modern conspiracists a huge historical tragedy to examine through their ideological lenses and to recast with their favorite villains.

Of course, it isn't just in conspracy theories, 9/11 or otherwise, where the fringe elements of the left and right converge.

Ever wonder what would happen if Hal 9000, the Terminator, the Borg, or the desktop computer you're currently staring into decided to finally go behind the cameras, and make movies geared towards their fellow members of the Cybernetic-American community? The results would look pretty much like this:

Hey, the Japanese dating industry is halfway to this point already--this video just takes things to their natural conclusion. By the way, if the filmmakers want to do a musical as a sequel, here are some casting tips they might want to take heed of.

Austin Bay, whose "Blog Week In Review" podcast I produce, has a great review of Mark Steyn's new book, America Alone, over at Town Hall.com:

Mark Steyn notes in his new book, "America Alone" (Regnery Publishing), "The end of the world's nighness isn't something you'd want to set your watch by. "

Steyn provides a collection of the dire predictions made by "Chicken Little's eminent successors."

Steyn's list includes:

-- 1968, in "The Population Bomb," distinguished scientist Paul Ehrlich declared, "In the 1970s the world will undergo famines -- hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death."

-- 1972, in "The Limits to Growth," the Club of Rome announced that the world would run out of gold by 1981, of mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead and gas by 1993.

-- 1976, Lowell Ponte published a huge bestseller called "The Cooling: Has the New Ice Age Already Begun? Can We Survive?"

-- 1977, Jimmy Carter confidently predicted that "we could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade."

"None of these things occurred," Steyn writes. "Contrary to the doom-mongers' predictions, millions didn't starve."

Steyn, however, isn't against gloomy prognostications, per se. In fact, "America Alone" is a doom book of a peculiar sort -- it's insistently witty and trenchantly written. Both are achievements, given the core subject matter: American demographic success and vitality (fecundity, folks) compared to the demographic decline of other democracies and modern, industrialized nations.

That's a topic that Steyn explores further on his own Website, in a timely excerpt from his new book, and if you haven't listened to it yet, click here for my own interview with Steyn over at TCS Daily.

Incidentally, this week's "Blog Week In Review" will have an interview with the author of another important book on the War On Terror, whose theme has a decidedly different slant than Steyn's. Watch for details here and the Pajamas mothersite.

Rick Santorum: Anti-Christ.

Found via PJM, which writes, "Just when you thought partisan politics couldn’t get any more extreme". Au contraire: politics always gets more extreme with each election cycle. It's an infinitely sleazier variation on Moore's Law.

Gee, maybe this should be dubbed Michael Moore's Law.

I don't know what else I can add to Dean Barnett and Jim Geraghty's comments, except to say that Alan Schlesinger is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.

Hillary Clinton and Michelle Malkin finally come clean about who they're named after. Or actually, whom they're not named after.

In contrast to Russia's absolutely appalling demographics, America has about 300,000,001 reasons to celebrate this week.

(Of course, not every one agrees--some actually prefer this scenario, found via James Lileks.)

World Class Philosopher Ben Affleck explains to Bill Maher exactly how President Bush's bellicose language made the Axis of Evil even more eviler by hurting its feelings:

In terms of the history of Iran, you had a fairly reform-minded guy who then was followed by Ahmadinejad because here, we’re a little afraid, we don’t know culturally how to reach out to the United States, and then you hear “Axis of Evil,” and that only emboldens the reactionary, the far-right within Iran (side chatter). In terms of North Korea, you know, they had their nuclear program, there were, you know, inspectors there, it was taped up, there were cameras, as soon as they heard “Axis of Evil,” boom, the inspectors were thrown out, the cameras were turned off, and they began resuming this program. And, I think it’s a sign of how this kind of bellicose, one-linerisms in politics have consequences.

Protein Wisdom has a brilliant post that examines the potential dangers when those bellicose one-linerisms ricochet:

From the very outset, the Left has been accusing Bush of being “selected, not elected,” a “thief” and a “dictator.” That he was an agent of dark forces like Halliburton. And now they have the gall to complain at how he acts? Clearly, the Left must accept a share of the blame for what their bellicose rhetoric has produced.

Heh, indeed--right Ben?

(I would be remiss in posting Affleck's quote without noting that in her response to it, Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute ran rings around both he and Maher. And yes, that's setting the bar awfully low, but don't miss this transcript and video clip.)

The Internet Movie Database writes that Martin Scorsese is the latest Hollywood filmmaker to jump on the Less-Is-More bandwagon:

Hoping to find greater creative freedom, Martin Scorsese says he plans to make several low-budget films. "When there are very big budgets, there is less risk that can be taken" by studios, Scorsese told a news conference at the Rome Film Festival. His last film, The Departed, cost $90 million to make. Although he praised Warner Bros. for being supportive -- he acknowledged that he put the finishing touches on the film only a week before it opened -- "I don't know how much longer that can hold out." He said his next film will be an adaptation of a Japanese novel, The Silence, a film, he noted, that he had been wanting to make for 15 years.

Hey, it's like The Era of Big Cinema Is Over, or something.

Speaking of Russia, while the Soviet Union has fortunately been tossed onto the ash heap of history, life there is still no picnic, as the Boston Globe notes in two separate articles. First up, Cathy Young explores "Russia's slow death of freedom":

For the past several years, the Russian state under Vladimir Putin has been steadily working to bring the media to heel. In this stifling and intimidating atmosphere, [Anna] Politkovskaya, a correspondent for the semiweekly Novaya Gazeta, remained an outspoken critic of the Putin government. Much of her reporting focused on the war in Chechnya and the atrocities committed by the Russian military and the Russian-backed puppet regime of Chechen premier Ramzan Kadyrov. She had won numerous awards for her journalism, including the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2001; her book, ``Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy," was published in 2004.

At the time of her death, Politkovskaya was about to file a story about torture practices by Kadyrov's security forces in Chechnya. It is unclear whether this article will ever see the light of day. It has been seized by the police along with her computer and her research materials.

Whoever was behind the murder (widely expected to remain unsolved, like the murders of more than a dozen other Russian journalists on Putin's watch), the government's reaction was revealing. Amidst an outpouring of grief from journalists, human-rights activists, and concerned citizens, no high-level government official attended Politkovskaya's funeral. Putin waited several days to speak about the murder -- and when he finally spoke, it was not to the Russian public or to the victim's family or her colleagues, but to foreign leaders whose friendship he wants to retain, promising President Bush a thorough investigation of the crime.

``That alone," human-rights activist Elena Bonner told Ekho Mosvky, Russia's only remaining independent radio station, ``is a slap in the face to all of Russia." A few days later, on a visit to Germany, apparently under pressure from chancellor Angela Merkel, Putin made another statement -- this time, a slap in the face to the dead woman herself. While he called her murder ``a dreadful and unacceptable crime," Putin also said that ``she had minimal influence on political life in Russia" and added, ``This murder does much more harm to Russia and Chechnya than any of her publications." Thus, in one breath, the Russian president not only dismissed Politkovskaya's work as insignificant but also branded it as harmful to her country.

Putin may worry about investigative journalists now conveniently deceased, but his nation has a surfeit of other crises--if not a surfeit of new births, as Kim Murphy notes:

Russia is the only major industrial nation that is losing population. Its people are succumbing to one of the world's fastest-growing AIDS epidemics, resurgent tuberculosis, rampant cardiovascular disease, alcohol and drug abuse, smoking, suicide, and the lethal effects of unchecked industrial pollution.

In addition, abortions outpaced births last year by more than 100,000. An estimated 10 million Russians of reproductive age are sterile because of botched abortions or poor health. The public healthcare system is collapsing. And many parents in more prosperous urban areas say they can't afford homes large enough for the number of children they would like to have.

The former Soviet Union, with about 300 million people, was the world's third-most populous country, behind China and India. Slightly more than half of its citizens lived in Russia. The country has lost the equivalent of a city of 700,000 people every year since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, only partially offset by an influx of people from other former Soviet republics. A country that sprawls across one-eighth of the globe is now home to 142 million people.

The losses have been disproportionately male. At the height of the power of the Soviet Union, its people lived almost as long as Americans. But now, the average Russian man can expect to live about 59 years, 16 years less than an American man and 14 less than a Russian woman.

As Mark Steyn wrote last year:

We are witnessing a remarkable event: the death of a great nation not through war or devastation but through its inability to rouse itself from its own suicidal tendencies.

And like North Korea, a nation that's even more of a basket case, It probably won't fade away quietly.

Newsbusters patiently explains to Reuters who ended the Cold War. And TCS Daily explores the decisive moment that marked its denouement.

Man on the moon: "Tyson Returns to Ring, May Fight Woman".

Libertas looks at the "Top Fifteen Conservative Horror Films" and notices a trend amongst Hollywood's scariest movies:

1. The Exorcist (1973): A Hollywood actress realizes there is a God. A Priest who doesn’t molest children finds his faith and sacrifices himself for another. And Jesus saves the day! How did this one slip through?

2. Frankenstein (1931): No metaphor for embryonic stem cell research or cloning here. No, you just keep defying God’s laws and destroying human life to live a few years longer.

* * *

6. Rosemary’s Baby (1968): This is probably the film that makes big hollywood stars hope there is a God. Because if God’s real that means there’s a Devil to sell their souls to and advance their careers. Hey, it worked for John Cassavetes.

Horror films almost invariably have to set the scene by creating a moral universe with God somewhere in the wings to work. I'd add Se7en and The Sixth Sense to this list as well, but in a way, all of these films show how conservative Hollywood screenwriters have to be, despite their best efforts otherwise. Even The Shining posits an afterlife, despite its director's best efforts towards atheism.

(Sorry for the lack of posts today; this was actually written this morning, but terrible connectivity issues prevented it from going up until now.)

Let's say for a moment that you're Reuters. (What? I know, I know, I don't blame you. But let me roll with this, huh?) Only a few months ago, you were caught red-handed manufacturing news, airbrushing the daylights (literally) out of a photo of Beirut. So if you can't get away with using computers to simulate news, why not became part of a computer simulation yourself? And then write a self-congratulating news article that's indistinguishable from a press release. Or is it vice-versa?

SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Reuters is opening a news bureau in the simulation game Second Life this week, joining a race by corporate name brands to take part in the hottest virtual world on the Internet.

Starting on Wednesday, Reuters plans to begin publishing text, photo and video news from the outside world for Second Life members and news of Second Life for real world readers who visit a Reuters news site at: http://secondlife.reuters.com/

Created by Linden Lab in San Francisco, Second Life is the closest thing to a parallel universe existing on the Internet.

Next to Reuters' own output, of course.

Update: Allah sees all:

We Kurzweil devotees know that “ubiquitous” virtual is coming within the next decade. Reuters is simply getting in on the ground floor.

The jokes are irresistible, though.

And virtual-ly unlimited!

James Lileks visits his young daughter's Minneapolis school and observes before him, in 2006, separate but equal education:

At one point the Hispanic students came by. The Hispanic students are not mainstreamed, but held in special separate classes until third grade, at which point I gather they are magically integrated into all the social relationships that have built up over the three previous years. It really was quite remarkable. The teacher led a line of brown-skinned students through the atrium, and of course they all looked at what we were doing. (“We” at this point included two white kids, an Asian kid, and an African-American kid.) I noted to the other parent: I never thought I’d see the days when schools were racially segregated again.

But that’s progress.

Unfortunately, schools across the country actually think it is.

Thus making the thesis of Michael Graham's Redneck Nation as current as ever.

Michael Combs dubs Senator Kerry a Pre-Googleian Liar.

Well, it's not like the Senator has ever demonstrated that he gets the rest of the Internet, of course.

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

The Great Cartoon Wars of 2006 open up a new front.

Update: But we can all breathe easier now--the UN is on the case!

There are some amazing statistics in this Jerusalem Post article:

Since the intifada broke out six years ago, the number of French Jews making aliya to Israel has tripled - from about 1,000 a year before the violence began to 3,000 a year now, the highest figure since the Six Day War. Another 20,000 or so French Jews have made the final decision to immigrate to Israel, and are expected to arrive here in the coming years, said Zana, citing polls conducted for the organization three years ago. France is home to 600,000 Jews, by far Europe's largest Jewish community.
"You can assume that more people are making the decision [to immigrate to Israel] as time goes on," Zana added.

They've made their presence felt in Ashdod's City and Yud Bet neighborhoods, in Jerusalem's Har Homa neighborhood, in Netanya and Ramat Beit Shemesh. Most are families headed by young professionals and businesspeople, while the older, richer French immigrants buy in Jerusalem's German Colony, Herzliya Pituah and Caesarea, and often divide their time between Israel and France. Some 80% of them are religiously observant, and at least that high a percentage are of North African background.

They are heartfelt Zionists, and typically thought of moving to Israel since their youth. But it was the growth of the Muslim population in France, combined with the rise of Islamic fanaticism among that country's Muslims and the anti-Semitism that intensified with the intifada, that changed aliya from being a radical proposal among French Jews to being a legitimate, even logical one.

Yosef Ben-Zion, 60, who left the largely-Muslim Parisian suburb of Noisy de Sec two years ago and who now lives in Ramat Beit Shemesh with his wife and two children, said, "I started to feel that there was a real problem about 10 years ago. I started hearing the Muslim youth say 'sale Juif' as I was on my way to the synagogue. They used to throw rocks over the wall into the synagogue garden, and the police did nothing about it."

The problems in Noisy de Sec didn't begin a year ago with the riots and car-torchings that engulfed the country; Ben-Zion's wife, Simcha, 50, recalls that in the years before they left the suburb, Muslim firebrands "would start preaching in the street - 'Beware of the modern ways, beware of the influence of the Jews.'"

* * *

IN HIS Jerusalem office, Zana explains that because of such communal memories as the Dreyfus Affair and the Vichy government of World War II - in which some 80,000 French Jews, or one-third of the community, were killed - the self-identifying Jews of France feel somewhat insecure, and traditionally have been reluctant to express opinions that might cast doubt on their national loyalty - such as the desire to immigrate to Israel.

"France is not like America," he noted. "To love Israel is okay, but to leave France for Israel is politically incorrect."

But between the rise in the Muslim population - now six million out of 60 million French citizens - the outbreak of Muslim animosity against Jews during the intifada, and the increasing religiosity and "communitarism and ghettoization," as Zana put it, of French Jews of North African background, aliya is no longer a taboo subject. "A growing number of people don't want to take a chance on what France is going to be like in another 20 years," he said.

Can't say I blame them.

(Via The Brothers Judd.)

Update: Things aren't all that rosy on the other side of the Channel, of course.

Last night, I tripped over a great quote by James Lileks from a few years ago, back when he was promoting his Gallery of Regrettable Food book. Needless to say, I'm in complete agreement with his assessment of the 1950s and '60s. First, here's the set-up question:

Besides skewering the pictures of the food, you also satirically deflate the political and cultural views of postwar America that underwrite these images: gender roles, Communism, xenophobia. Yet we still glorify the past; the '90s was a time of retro revisitation in which fashion, cars, slang, films, television all took inspiration from bygone eras. Why do we remain fascinated with the "good old days," despite it not really being so great?

This is a big question, and I'm going to give you a long, dull answer. I think the deflation to which you refer is actually my way of compensating for my love of this period. I'm fascinated by the post-war era--1946 to, say, 1964--and in many ways it was an absolute Golden Age. Not perfect; no era is. It's stupid to romanticize a period, but equally stupid to dismiss it for its failure to be as Perfect and Glorious and Wise as our enlightened time. It's easy to snicker at their fear of Communism, but in context I'd be scared too--the USSR was a heavily armed, expansionist totalitarian state, and its domestic apologists were not only wrong, but defending a system that equaled and bested the Nazis for prolonged brutality.

The '50s are sniffed at, I think, because the victors write the history, and in the cultural battles fought by the boomers, the '50s were the era of Mom and Dad, the era of rules, the era of oppression. To the boomers, the '60s are the Years of Glory, because that's when they got to go to college, live in dorms, stay out late and come home blitzed on ditchweed without answering a lot of questions. Being Boomers, they elevated this period to mythic status, and hence we've had to live with this incessant '60s worship ever since. Personally, I'm sick of it; I'm sick of their music, their fashions, their politics, their interminable self-satisfaction and narcissistic desire to regard their generation as the apogee of human endeavor. Yawn. It's been such a stultifying weight on society that we can't seem to come up with anything new--hence this never-ending cycle of nostalgia we're in. We must worship the '60s, be amused by the '70s, and loathe the '80s. Why loathe? Because that's when the boomers first started to feel out of touch, i.e., old.

These are all horrible overgeneralizations. That's the problem. Each era gets boiled down to a few pat symbols. The '50s are sock hops and tail fins. The '60s are protest and Woodstock. The '70s are shag and disco balls. The '80s mean greed and Izod. The '90s--well, who knows. It's all ridiculous; every era is much more than that, and at the same time no different than our own. People eat, work, raise kids, laugh, snore, worry about whether the sofa should go in that corner or over there.

All that said, I have only two points: I love living now, and wouldn't change this time for any other. Point #2: were it a choice between driving a minivan down a vacant suburb strip mall corridor eating a franchise hamburger and listening to some "Big Pimpin'" on the CD player, OR driving a turquoise BelAir around downtown Philly listening to Joe Niagara introduce Chuck Berry tunes on the AM radio--

Not even close.

(Joe Niagara?! I had no idea anybody who didn't grow up in the Philadelphia area as I did had ever heard of him!)

A friend gave me a copy of Taschen's iconic All-American Ads of the 60s (aka, The Bleat banner art sourcebook), for my birthday this year. It's a wonderful book with a depressing ending: flipping through its pages, you can actually see the swank of the JFK/Rat Pack era 1960s--the last remnants of the classic post-War era--give way to the still cool, but very different Mod-mid-1960s of Austin Powers and Blowup. And then make way for the brown shag-carpeted hellish polyester drek of the 1970s, which Lileks himself brilliantly skewered in his Interior Desecrations book two years ago.

No, the post-War era wasn't perfect. But as Lileks himself said, what era is?

Glenn Reynolds sounds the alarm; Ed Morrissey says not so fast. Hugh Hewitt invokes "The Cleveland Advantage".

Meanwhile, Big Lizards and Jim Geraghty both discuss the GOP GOTV machine--which will need to be working on all eight cylinders next month.

Or at least paraphrased, "the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe".

(Related item, here.)

The Anchoress gets it right, as usual:

How about if the Harry Reid (D- Phoney) story was about, ummmmm….Bill Frist (R - Snoresville), the second most boring Republican after George Pataki (R - RigorMortis)…do you think the press would then be reporting on the details of his land deals and wondering if his son was sitting on zoning boards while Frist was making his deals?

DingDingDING! We have a winner, let the sharkfeeding begin.

Honestly. Let’s be truthful, here. If Sandy Berger (D - PaperSox) worked for anyone with an R after his name, and destroyed documents spirited out of the National Archives via his pants…do you really think the press would have immediately yawned and put that story to bed?

There are many good people working in the mainstream media. But let’s not kid ourselves that we have a free and unencumbered press in this country. The press is not free and they are very encumbered…and they have sadly caged themselves by choice.

Just ask them. Or a former president.

Update: The Washington Post proves the Anchoress's point.

Ed Morrissey writes that two college kids "decided that planting fake bombs in the subway would be a humorous way to blow off some midterm steam. New York City officials are less than amused":

[The students] actually took pictures of their stunt and planned to make it part of an art project.

Its theme? The inability of officials to detect terrorist plots.

I think they just flunked.

Good.

At least for now, Gregg Tinti has the entire episode online.

Hollywood Reporter reports that when Cory Lidle's private plane "crashed into an Upper East Side apartment building on Wednesday, Fox News Channel delivered early live video to its viewers from the crash site using a hand-held mobile phone souped up with streaming video".

Around 2000, long before anyone heard of the Blogosphere, I actually did an article on the future of news gathering for a short-lived magazine for cell phone users in England. Click here for a reprint.

Peggy Noonan explores the current lack of free speech amongst the left. Robert Cox has a must-read article on its Web-based immediate future.

The great Theodore Dalrymple reviews three important new books on Europe's 21st century self-immolation.

Here's a fourth, in case you haven't picked up your copy yet.

Unlike ratings winners such as Tammy's show, Air America filed Chapter 11 today. Jonah Goldberg writes:

For several years now, the venture's boosters have insisted there is nothing wrong with the idea of Air America. Their problems all stemmed from obscure details of one kind or another. I have no doubt that all sorts of non-ideological mistakes were made. But the one important point is that if their programming were legitimately popular those mistakes wouldn't have mattered. All sorts of successful entrepreneurial ventures make countless mistakes getting up and running. But because their products are popular those mistakes don't really matter. If very large numbers of people wanted to listen to Air America, Air America wouldn't be bankrupt. Money would have rolled in and this keystone cops stuff would have remained invisible. But despite the best efforts of very serious Progressive types and ample up front investment and enormous free publicity and goodwill from the mainstream media, the thing still bombed. Air America was launched on the assumption that "if you build it, they will come." They didn't. And that's the moral of the story few on the left will ever admit or call attention to.

I am sure that I will get emailed all sorts of articles and blog posts pointing to the great numbers Air America had in Muncie or Austin. That's all nice and fine. But the thing died because the thing was doomed from the start. Deal with it.

Much more from Brian Maloney, the Radio Equalizer.

After putting the finishing touches on the weekly Blog Week In Review show for Pajamas last night, I just appeared on frequent BWIR-panelist Tammy Bruce's radio show to discuss IPTV, Godzilla, Mothra, Vanessa Williams, and Catwoman.

Or something like that! It's all a blur, but it was loads of fun.

I have a few articles online and on dead tree this month that you may enjoy.

Regarding the latter, I have a piece in the Robb Report's Home Entertainment magazine on IPTV, a technology being leveraged by phone companies to become players in the arena previously reserved for cable and satellite providers. Initially, it's being sold as a cheaper alternative to digital cable and satellite. But the format's long-range potential could lead to dramatic shifts in how we watch TV. For one, expect to start seeing downloadable YouTube-style TV, err, on your TV. As well as much more narrowcasting video, and... well, read the article for more.

For DIY recording enthusiasts, in the October issue of England's Computer Music magazine, I have an article on step sequencers, arpeggiators, and other electronic instruments that allow you to play one note and get ten. Or 100. Note that in the US, this issue probably streets next month. At least the Borders' chain seems to have a 30 day delay between the issues' cover dates and when they appear in stores.

At the moment, to the best of my knowledge, both of those are strictly "dead tree", but we'll let you know if that changes. As for online material, speaking of DIY music, my podcast interview with The Man From Izotope on audio mastering is also online at Blogcritics. Along with a piece that could be titled, "An Orchestra Of Davids". It's a review of an impressive self-published book on programming orchestral arrangements from MIDI synthesizers.

Sad to say, no Vanessa Williams sightings in any of these pieces, though.

Dean Barnett looks back on his time with former Miss America, Vanessa Williams.

(Unfortunately, Ms. Williams could not be reached for her thoughts on Mr. Barnett. Or if she has any.)

Surely this development is all Bush's fault, and no doubt, Kofi Annan is deeply concerned, as yet another player in the global arms race goes nuclear. Well, the Blogosphere's arms race, at least...

One stop shopping for the Art Bell/Olbermann/Michael Moore crowd, as Ace of Spades gets the ball rolling for the conspiracy theorists. No doubt, they're already going nuts on loads of Internet forums.

Update: The ultimate conspiracy gets unraveled--with clues. Lots and lots of clues!

Hot Air is reporting that New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle may have been at the controls of the plane that crashed into a Manhattan appartment building earlier today:

WNBC4 just mentioned that Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle apparently applied to buy the plane in July. Wait — hold the phone. Lidle did actually purchase the plane, they’re saying now.

Was Cory Lidle flying the plane? Trying to impress his date by doing a little acrobatics over Manhattan? Standby.

Update: Fox is reporting that Lidle was indeed flying the plane. CNN quotes first responders as saying the pilot might have made a distress call before the crash.

WNBC4 says an official has confirmed that a member of the Yankees was onboard the plane. Now sources are saying that Lidle’s passport was found on the street.

More as it develops.

Update: Wizbang writes:

From Fox News: we now have confirmation that Cory Lidle was on the plane and has been declared dead.

Wizbang also further details of the plane that Lidle was flying, and how uncontrollable it can be when in a spin.

Just got back from lunch when I saw an email from John Stephenson mentioning this. At first glance, it doesn't sound like terrorism--why would they hit an appartment on 72nd Street instead of say, the Empire State Building, or any one of a dozen or so higher profile targets in Manhattan?

The address listed in this report, 524 E. 72nd, is close to Roosevelt Island, which is too wooded to land in. And nearby FDR drive is waaay too busy to try to land on. But my wife, who grew up in Manhattan, says that 72nd street is wide enough, in theory, to land a small plane on, and thus the collision with an appartment could have been simply a pilot attempting to make an emergency landing, and missing his mark.

But that's all pure speculation at this point.

Someone send a thesaurus to Turtle Bay!

(To be fair though, he may simply be the world's greatest sufferer of BDS.)

It's safe to say that he's probably not Sidney Poitier's son, but there's a real Six Degrees Of Separation vibe from Alexey Vayner, aka, Alexey Garber. Junk Yard Blog writes:

This video is so freakin' great I loaded and watched the whole thing through a molasses-clogged dialup modem. You should too. Failure cannot be considered an option.

Not only is Alexey an amazing egomaniac, by the way--he's apparently a thoroughgoing fraud. According to that link, he plagiarized a book on the Holocaust for the text of his self-published book ("a gendered look at the Holocaust") and both the company he founded and the charity he started are, well, a little iffy.

It's kind of a pattern. Even his name is bogus: it used to be Alexey Garber until that name started showing up on Google's BS detector. From the Ivygate site above, here's a link to a profile about him (in .pdf) when he was first starting college as a pre-freshman, telling everyone the Dalai Lama was his bud, and he was Sarah Michelle Gellar's tennis coach. Funny how the lies sort of stay in the same ballpark--martial arts, tennis, entrepreneurship. He doesn't show a lot of range in his improvisations.

But you know what he does have? Confidence.

JYB believes that Alexey may be a perfect match for Jacqueleine Mackie Paisley Passey, but competition for Alexey's affection could be ensuing...

Update: Video pulled; details here.

Via its advertising and board of directors, Apple goes out of its way to be the computer for the politically correct crowd. So it should be fun to watch to watch the layers of P.C. insanity involved with this unravel and implode.

(The Mobius loop that Apple is about to enter very much reminds me of an incident Ikea faced last year, which Ed Morrissey described--accurately--as PC madness doubling in on itself.)

The Army is employing kinder and gentler drill sergeants these days.

Dean Barnett has uploaded another of his patented FAQs:

Q. I read somewhere that the low yield my be because North Korea tested a suitcase nuke. Hold me – I’m scared!

Oh gosh, not that suitcase nuke crap again. I’m pretty sure this theory came from Wretchard at the Belmont Club and considering he’s just about the best blogger ever not named den Beste, I should go easy here. But this is not a realistic concern. A suitcase nuke would represent the successful miniaturization of the technology. That would be a pretty stunning achievement for a country’s first shot out of the box. And even if it was supposed to be a suitcase nuke, the yield was still extremely low for a so-called suitcase nuke.

What’s more, suitcase nukes are much more myth than reality. If you want to feel better about this topic, read this Richard Miniter article on the subject. And for God’s sake, stop hiding under that desk! Man up!

Once you crawl out from your own desk, read the whole thing.

Ever wonder what would happen if you paired a random "Family Circus" cartoon with a random Friedrich Nietzsche quote?

Umm, me neither. But like New Shimmer, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, or some other even better pop culture analogy that escapes me right now, they're two tastes that taste great together!

(Via Jonah Goldberg, taking a time out from critiquing a TV series that once starred Lorne Greene.)

If you're conservative, they'd rather not have you in their audiences. In 2004, Linda Ronstadt famously admitted:

"It's a real conflict for me when I go to a concert and find out somebody in the audience is a Republican or fundamental Christian. It can cloud my enjoyment. I'd rather not know."

Barbra Streisand concurs:

Streisand effortlessly crooned through a select repertoire of the hits she's amassed during her four-decade-plus career. But night's most riveting moment came during what was perhaps the only unscripted _ and truly uncomfortable _ episode in the three-hour show.

There was Streisand, enduring a smattering of very loud jeers as she and "George Bush" _ a celebrity impersonator _ muddled through a skit that portrayed the president as a bumbling idiot.

Though most of the crowd offered polite applause during the slightly humorous routine, it got a bit too long, especially for a few in the audience who just wanted to hear Streisand sing like she had been doing for the past hour.

"Come on, be polite!" the well-known liberal implored during the sketch as she and "Bush" exchanged zingers. But one heckler wouldn't let up. And finally, Streisand let him have it.

"Shut the (expletive) up!" Streisand bellowed, drawing wild applause. "Shut up if you can't take a joke!"

With that one F-word, the jeers ended. And the message was delivered _ no one gets away with trying to upstage Barbra Streisand, especially not in her hometown.

Once the outburst (which Streisand later apologized for) was over, Streisand noted that "the artist's role is to disturb," [Gee, imagine Sinatra, Crosby, or Nat Cole ever saying that--Ed] and delivered a message of tolerance before launching into a serenely beautiful rendition of "Somewhere."

Of course, to be fair, if you to go to a show performed by an entertainer with as rampant and public a case of BDS as Barbra has, and are surprised at her polemics, you really only have yourself to blame.

As with the Cinema of Self-Congratulation that Roger L. Simon explored yesterday, and the wish-fulfillment TV that Steven Den Beste discussed today, it's not like artists feel any sort of need to bridge the gap between a polarized public these days. At least Ronstadt came clean about how segregated she'd prefer her ideal audience to be.

(And as with Ronstadt's 2004 profile in The San Diego Union-Tribune, note how the gushing AP columnist simply ignores all of the contradictions in Streisand's messages. And admired her use of the F-Bomb.)

Dan Rather, enjoying his long retirement on Mark Cuban's HDTV channel, reminds us he's still alive:

Dan Rather says he has found his new position as the producer/reporter of occasional documentaries for Mark Cuban's HDNet "liberating." In an interview with today's (Monday) Washington Post Rather said that coming into the new project, "there's no ratings pressure at all, none, zero. No demographic pressure, zero. Where else in television -- or, for that matter, radio or print -- can you say that?"

Umm, the Blogosphere, where the cost to set-up shop is free? You have heard of Weblogs, right, Dan?

Update: I wonder how much pressure Dan's replacement is feeling to increase her ratings? Mickey Kaus' theory regarding CBS's grand strategery behind Katie Couric's hiring is making more and more sense.

From the 1950s through the 1970s, when the Hollywood left released agitprop, it was sold to moviegoing audiences under the theory of telling America The Truth--the Dark Underbelly of Life As It Truly Is Today.

Ironically, the messages of these films were often buried deep within their subtext: if you listen to the commentary track of The Hustler, its filmmakers saw it as a parable on the Blacklist, one of the first of what would become a staple industry of Hollywood. But the vast majority of audience members simply took the movie for its surface plot, and saw it as a nifty flick about cutthroat pool sharks. Dr. Strangelove's nihilism and moral equivalence was buried under layers of blackout humor, brilliant dialogue, and incredible performances. And most anti-war movies like Apocalypse Now also deliver loads of hard-hitting action along the way.

Somehow though, Hollywood decided that it didn't care about burying a film's message of a movie in its subtext. Eventually, the industry decided to concentrate on films that are little more than fodder for a like-minded echo chamber. Roger L. Simon has the right name for these movies: "the growing trend of Cinema of Self-Congratulation":

These movies are not so much about art or even entertainment as they are about the audience and filmmakers feeling good about themselves, in the sense that both are right-thinking or of the "correct" sort. Great art abhors this of course. It is all about wildness and complexity - from Medea to The Godfather, nothing is simple ... or perhaps I should say "Nothing is written" (until, as Lawrence of Arabia tells us, it is).

The Oscar Awards this year seem to mark a tipping point of sorts for the industry, as it seems increasingly capable of producing little more than these sorts of films, a cycle which is only likely to increase, as moviegoing audiences continue to shrink. (And of course, thanks to political correctness, so do acceptable plot lines.)

George Lucas essentially believes that "The Era Of Big Cinema Is Over", to coin a blog post title. But does the industry understand how much its product has increasingly turned off those of us who still love movies, but don't dwell within the echo chamber?

This post screams out to be Lileks fodder: Life in the 21st century, as imagined--badly--by Popular Mechanics in 1950.

My podcast interview with Mark Steyn on his new book, America Alone, is online at Tech Central Station.

While I'm much less of an Anglophile these days than I used to be, it's safe to say that England is infinitely more advanced than America in one area: creating a nationwide culture of victims:

The vast majority of people in Britain are officially oppressed, according to a report that claims we have become a “nation of victims”.

The study calculates that 73 per cent of Britons are members of officially recognised “victim groups”, including the disabled, women, ethnic minorities and homosexuals. Each group is given government support, including protective legislation.

The report, We’re (Nearly) All Victims Now, by the socially conservative think- tank Civitas, gives warning that the rise of a “victimocracy” undermines democracy because people are no longer considered equal under law.

“We have become a nation of victims,” it says. “Victimhood today is a political status that is sought after because of the advantages it brings, including preferential treatment in the workplace, the possibility of using police power to silence unwelcome critics, and financial compensation. To be classified as a victim is to be given a special political status, which has no necessary connection with real hardship or oppression.”

In October next year the Government is setting up the Commission for Equality and Human Rights, which merges the disability, race and equal opportunities commissions.

Many people, such as black women, are victims of so-called multiple discrimination. The report uses official figures to strip out the overlapping groups to calculate that nearly three quarters of people belong to one category or other. The biggest oppressed group is women, who constitute 51 per cent of the population and are protected by a range of legislation covering discrimination, equal pay and domestic violence. Ethnic minority men amount to 4 per cent; white disabled men 11 per cent; white male pensioners 5 per cent; and white, gay, able-bodied men, 2 per cent.

The report attacks the increasing tendency to judge crimes as more serious if they are committed against official victims — so-called hate crimes. Police have been encouraged to give priority to such cases, which the Civitas report says is undermining equality under the law.

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

On the other hand, here's one area that America's left already explored, six decades ago: UK Metropolitan Police Commissioner Ian Blair suggests that a sufficiently large act of terror could lead to the British government considering “internment”.

Slim Pickens indeed, as this Photoshop pretty much says it all. Dr. Strangelove was Swiftian satire created in an era in which both primary nuclear powers understood the dangers of Mutual Assured Destruction, but as brilliant as the film is, the fall of the Soviet Union made it a period piece.

Black Five explores a world that is infinitely more dangerous than the Cold War era, as one by one, as assortment of lunatic petty tyrants will be adding The Bomb to their arsenals, and their neighbors (starting, ASAP, with Japan) will want to reciprocate.

On the other hand, this is somewhat reassuring: "NORK Nuclear Test: It's A Dud".

Update: The Professor writes, "I know that in the real world he's a nasty murderer. But no matter how hard Kim tries to act like a badass, he just comes across as a sort of Austin Powers villain".

Indeed.^TM

Flashback: A CNS News article from April of 2000 is titled, "U.S. Aid Helps N. Korea Build Nukes, Congress Told".

Say, who was president in 2000? Well, I guess it depends on who you ask...

Woody Allen's first editor once wrote a book about his craft titled, When The Shooting Stops...The Cutting Begins. In the recording world, mastering is what begins when the mixing ends. The goal is to provide to the final gloss, sparkle, and punch to a recording, and when making a CD, ensure that all of the tracks are of uniform consistency, so that the listener doesn't encounter one track that's very thin, brittle and trebly, followed by another with loads of bottom, but no mids or high-end.

In the professional recording world, mastering is typically done in studios dedicated to the task, and because it's as much an art as a science, mastering engineers who've, err, mastered their craft are highly sought after professionals, which is why if you check the liner notes of your CDs, names like Bob Ludwig and George Marino pop up so often.

A few years ago, the Cambridge, Mass-based Izotope company created a high-end mastering plug-in for the computer recording world called Ozone, which I reviewed for Blogcritics back in April of 2004. Recently, I stopped by their booth at the Audio Engineering Society convention in San Francisco this weekend, and spoke with Izotope's Mark Ethier via telephone. While part of the conversation is dedicated specifically to Ozone, there should be enough of an introduction to audio mastering in general for someone new to the subject.

And speaking of which, Mark mentioned some publications that are well worth reading to anyone interested in PC-based recording: Izotope's own 64-page introduction to mastering, an excellent primer on the topic, which is available in PDF format by clicking here. Once you've thoroughly digested it, pick up a copy of Mastering Audio: The Art and the Science by Bob Katz, and/or Mixing And Mastering Audio Recordings By Bill Gibson. They're the master class in mastering. So to speak.

Click here to listen to my interview with Mark; or stop by our Apple iTunes page. In either case, no iPod is required, virtually any computer with a broadband connection can stream an MP3.

(And for more DIY-madness, that's me on guitar, bass, synth, and a bunch of Acid loops on the intro and outro bumper music--which was mastered in Ozone, along with the rest of the podcast.)

Give me that old time religion! A few years ago, Jay Nordlinger wrote in National Review Online:

Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute tells a story about Julian Simon, the late and great economist.

He was at some environmental forum, and he said, “How many people here believe that the earth is increasingly polluted and that our natural resources are being exhausted?” Naturally, every hand shot up. He said, “Is there any evidence that could dissuade you?” Nothing. Again: “Is there any evidence I could give you — anything at all — that would lead you to reconsider these assumptions?” Not a stir. Simon then said, “Well, excuse me, I’m not dressed for church.”

I love that story, for what it says about the fixity of these beliefs, immune to evidence, reason, or anything else.

Last year, Jonah Goldberg explored the concept of liberalism as religion in depth; the whole article is very much worth your time, but here's a representative sample:

It was the philosopher Eric Voegelin who, in a phrase made famous by William F. Buckley Jr., decried the liberal impulse as an attempt to "immanentize the eschaton," or to create a heaven on earth. The often spiritual nature of the environmental movement; the quasi-messianic treatment of Martin Luther King Jr.; Bill Clinton's invocation of "covenants" with the American people; Hillary Clinton's hibernating "politics of meaning," which claimed to redefine what it meant to be a human being in the post-modern world--all of these are examples of what Voegelin would describe as the neo-Gnostic effort to make the hereafter simply here.

* * *

From Woodrow Wilson on, central to the new liberals' project was to create, in [Thurman] Arnold's words, a "religion of government," where the old dogma of a limited state with defined powers would be rendered obsolete in favor of an "organic" state and an oracular "living constitution." Perhaps Howard Dean should purchase some "Don't Immanentize the Eschaton!" buttons with the "Don't" crossed out.

Flashforward to today's announcement, which should therefore come as little surprise: Byron York writes that "the founder of DailyKos plans to move into the megachurch business. But the Church of Kos will be a little, well, different":

At what's arguably the top of his game, Moulitsas says he's "going offline" next year, taking his obvious knack for building online communities and applying it to that other great American pastime: sports. And once he gets his network of sports blogs ramped up, he'll turn to building communities in the real world, a chain of giant meeting places "replicating megachurches for the left" – complete with cafés and child care. Moulitsas has shown he can harness people's enthusiasm, but he says he doesn't want a leadership role in these "democracy centers"...

While working on the mechanics of the sports blogs, he plans to embark next year on building real-world destinations for progressives and liberals throughout the Midwest, "cultural outposts" designed to attract thousands of like-minded liberals. "Each one of these would have a vast left-wing conspiracy component," he says, like leadership training or discussions on progressive issues.

Well, at the least it should make for a fun interfaith rival with an even more supersized and eschaton-obsessed house of worship that's opening soon in England.

Fresh off her successful mission as the world's first female space tourist, first female Muslim, and first Iranian in space, pioneer Iranian-American astronaut Anousheh Ansari (a.k.a., the "Hot Interstellar Millionaire Iranian Babe In Space", as one clearly crazed blogger once described her), has updated the photo section of her Website. It now includes a slideshow featuring several photos of her firing an impressive looking rifle of some sort.

I wonder if the mullahs back home, and her fellow Iranian women are aware of these images, and the power of their symbolism.

Reponding to pressure from McCornthyism, Roger L. Simon comes clean...

Update: The Anchoress outs herself as well, using words that begin with F and--gasp!--even H--in the process!

But "youths" attacking French police isn't: Tim Blair writes that in France, car burnings are down, but the number of French police being attacked is up. He links to a Telegraph article which says:

Radical Muslims in France's housing estates are waging an undeclared "intifada" against the police, with violent clashes injuring an average of 14 officers each day.

As the interior ministry said that nearly 2,500 officers had been wounded this year, a police union declared that its members were "in a state of civil war" with Muslims in the most depressed "banlieue" estates which are heavily populated by unemployed youths of north African origin.

It said the situation was so grave that it had asked the government to provide police with armoured cars to protect officers in the estates, which are becoming no-go zones.

James Lileks writes that in Minneapolis, Islamic taxi drivers have created a no-go zone of their own at the local airport.

In several previous posts, I commented on a trend: while working journalists are loathe to admit it, these days, folks who are ultra-secure in their careers, or reporters who've retired after a long career, are, surprisingly often, willing to come clean that the media leans to the left.

Add former presidents to the list as well.

(But what does Clinton's admission do to his former veep's "Right Wing Media Bias" meme a few years ago?)

Man, oh Manischewitz: As Allah writes, "Let the word go forth: nothing has ever topped this, and nothing ever will."

Oh how I long for the simpler days when all it took to smear your opponent in an ultra-controversial TV commercial was a kid plucking a daisy.

Here's the teaser:

Sex, courtesy of the Foley scandal, is more interesting than nuclear threats issued by North Korea’s perennially threatening dictator Kim Jong-il, if both the Big Media and the New Media are any indication; Pajamas Media’s Gerard Van der Leun and Richard Fernandez discuss the reasons thereto. Additionally, the panelists take a look at Australia’s new initiatives to integrate Muslim immigrants into the country’s larger society, with the most notable program involving a new community board composed of 100 Australian imams. An example of moderate Islam in action?

Austin Bay moderates and Ed Driscoll [Who?--Ed] produces.

Click here to listen.

Orrin Judd, who's hosting the Love of Reading Online Bookfair today, sent me this recent interview on the Barnes & Noble Website with Alvin Toffler. It makes a nice follow-up to my podcast interview with Toffler at TCS Daily earlier this year, and my interview with an emphasis on his War And Anti-War book, from late September of 2001.

Don't trust anyone over 30, 60, 80: Charles Johnson explores the ancient left, permanently trapped, between nothingness and eternity, in 1968.

...Can Lucy pull the football away from Charlie Brown?

Right around this time three years ago, James Taranto looked at the October surprise, California-style:

Columnist George Will has lived up to his future-tense name. On Sept. 4, he made this prediction about the California governor's race:

Ken Khachigian, a veteran Republican strategist, warns that [Arnold] Schwarzenegger should brace himself for what has become the Democrats' trademark tactic. In football it is penalized as a "late hit," but in politics it is often rewarded with success. George W. Bush received such a hit in the final weekend of the 2000 campaign--the revelation of his drunk driving arrest 24 years earlier. That probably contributed to an unusual development: Late-deciding voters, who usually break against the incumbent party, broke for Vice President Gore in 2000.

California Republicans have experienced late hits three times in the past 11 years. In 1992 Bruce Herschensohn narrowly lost a Senate race against Barbara Boxer when it was revealed on the Friday before the election that he and his girlfriend and another couple had visited a strip club. In 1994 Michael Huffington narrowly lost a Senate race against Feinstein when, a few days before the election, it was revealed that he had hired an illegal immigrant as a nanny. In 1998 Darrell Issa--he is now a congressmen; his $1.6 million funding of the recall petition drive produced this recall election--lost a Senate primary when it was revealed that he had embellished his military record.

A late hit by the Davis campaign against Schwarzenegger cannot come so late that there is no time for another such hit, one against Davis's other problem, Bustamante. This could get even uglier.

Sure enough, the late hit came in a more than 3,500-word report in today's Los Angeles Times that Schwarzenegger has behaved like Davis supporter Bill Clinton.

Jim Geraghty checks in with his GOP guru to look at a decade of nationwide late hits:

Could there ever be a better time for the reassuring reappearance of the man who has been in Republican circles longer than I’ve been alive?

Ladies and gentlemen, my longtime sage source and mentor, Obi Wan Kenobi.

Obi gets straight to the point about the Foley scandal, breaking in the final weeks of the campaign.

“At some point, some Republican is going to come out and say, ‘Hey. We’ve seen this show before, every cycle for the past couple of cycles. Starting in September, there’s a bombshell every two or three days for the last six weeks of the campaign, from the AP, from the big three networks, from the New York Times and the Post and Bob Woodward, and it’s always in one direction. It’s always a bombshell of bad news for the Republicans.’”

Obi doesn’t list them, but a right-leaning voter can remember – the infamous fake memos used by Dan Rather, the New York Times’ brouhaha over the al-Qaqaa weapons depot, the L.A. Times’ story slamming Schwarzenegger, the Bush DUI…

Obi wonders if the voting public is getting inoculated; that late-breaking revelations of scandals about Republicans are becoming too transparent to move voters; that they see these stories as a sympathetic media hawking the wares of the Democrats.

You do have to wonder how many times the October surprise strategy can work. Does it still work in today's demassified media environment? Hugh Hewitt doesn't seem to think so:

All previous patterns are irrelevant given the existence of the new media and the reality of the war.

We'll see if he's right in a few--long--weeks, with, no doubt, many more October surprises to come.

Update: Related thoughts from Mary Katharine Ham and Dan Riehl.

Sorry for the lack of posts today--we recorded the Pajamas Blog Week In Review show early today, and I'm the process of assembling and mixing it down. Watch for it to go live tomorrow--and tune in for one lively show.

Just in time for Halloween, The Village Voice (who knew they had a sense of humor?!) has a tongue-in-cheek "harrowing look at Satanic motifs in the canon of Barbra Streisand".

This Chinatown through the postmodern bobo environmentalist looking glass headline has it all: "DNA May Implicate Malibu Stars' Toilets--Water-Pollution Investigation Could Lead Straight to the Toilets of Malibu's Rich and Famous".

That's the gist of this Variety profile of George Lucas:

Lucas said he believes Americans are abandoning the moviegoing habit for good.

"I don't think anything's going to be a habit anymore. I think people are going to be drawn to a certain medium in their leisure time and they're going to do it because there is a desire to do it at that particular moment in time. Everything is going to be a matter of choice. I think that's going to be a huge revolution in the industry."

Two of those sentences are tautologies of course. I've read dozens and dozens of books on Hollywood, and I guess I missed the chapters on the era when movie watching was forced upon the American people. As if in 1935 Irving Thalberg declared marshal law in the U.S. and ordered all moviegoers on a forced march to the Roxy.

Setting that aside, it's not like this is an entirely unforeseen development. When Jack Valenti retired in 2004, Michael Medved asked him a great question:

With all the gratitude and acclaim surrounding Jack Valenti's recently announced retirement, no one dares confront the long-time president of the Motion Picture Association of America over the chief mystery of his 38-year reign: What happened, Jack, to all those missing moviegoers?

Despite his unquestioned eloquence, elegance and charm, Mr. Valenti presided over history's most disastrous decline in the audience for feature films. In 1965, the year before he left the Johnson administration to assume his plush position as chief mouthpiece for the entertainment industry, 44 million Americans went out to the movies every week. A mere four years later, that number had collapsed to 17.5 million.

In other words, some potent, puzzling force drove more than half of the nation's film fans to break the habit of movie going. That same mystical power served to suppress attendance for the next 20 years, with figures on ticket sales remaining flat until they began to rise moderately in the 1990s, reflecting the construction of thousands of new movie screens at multiplex theaters. Most recent figures (from 2003) show weekly attendance today at just over 30 million. As a percentage of the nation's population, however, the numbers on movie attendance remain only slightly improved from the devastating trough of 1970 (10.3% vs. 8.6%) and still vastly lower than the robust box-office years of 1965 (44%) or 1960 (45%).

It's amazing how many movie professionals remain altogether unaware of this long-term decline in film going--or, when informed about the depressing but undeniable figures, wrongly attribute them to the advent of television. TV sets began appearing in living rooms in the late 1940s, of course, and by the time the audience for feature films started its sharpest slump in 1966, the tube had already arrived in nearly all American homes.

Medved blames the loss of viewers to the transition from the more rigorous Hays Code to Valenti's G/PG/R/X ratings system:

The resulting changes in the industry showed up with startling clarity at the Academy Awards. In 1965, with the Production Code still in force, "The Sound of Music" won Best Picture of the Year; in 1969, under the new rating system, an X-rated offering about a homeless male hustler, "Midnight Cowboy," earned the Oscar as the year's finest film. Most critics, then as now, welcomed the aesthetic shift and hailed the fresh latitude in cinematic expression, but the audience voted with its feet.

And of course, in the post-9/11 era, a similar shift has been occurring. While Chris Anderson's Long Tail of media choices is definitely a factor, so is Hollywood's hard-line doctrinaire liberalism, which flared up dramatically during the 2004 election season, and shows little sign of abating. The result is that while outspoken activists such as Sean Penn have enormous clout within Hollywood, 2005 became "A Big Year For Films Nobody Will See", as blogger Charlie Richards wrote. (So far, Penn's most recent film has grossed a miniscule $6,501,727 on a $55,000,000 budget).

As a result, during this year's Oscar season, Lucas claimed that Hollywood's future was a spate of small $15 million dollar movies, as opposed to a dozen or so $200 million summertime blockbusters. But it looks as though Lucas is thinking even smaller:

He gave $175 million -- $100 million for endowment and $75 million for buildings -- to his alma mater. But he said that kind of money is too much to put into a film.

Spending $100 million on production costs and another $100 million on P&A makes no sense, he said.

"For that same $200 million I can make 50-60 two-hour movies. That's 120 hours as opposed to two hours. In the future market, that's where it's going to land, because it's going to be all pay-per-view and downloadable.

$200 million divided by 50=$4 million. In other words, Lucas expects Hollywood films to eventually average four million dollars a pop, so that the industry survives on an excess of quantity, rather than pure excess itself. That's a far cry from films such as Titanic and Lucas's recent Star Wars prequels, all of which had gynormous, nine-figure budgets.

Fifty years ago, Norma Desmond had no idea how small the pictures were really going to get. Or that her industry would become just another niche market.

On August 28th, 2004 I contrasted how Kerry and the Swift Vets viewed the modern demassified media enviroment. First up, a look at the ol' Winter Soldier:

Kerry's massively invented narrative ("swashbuckling Swift Boat lieutenant"--as Steyn describes him--turned brave defender of soldiers' rights) was built to survive the glancing scrutiny (if you can call it that) of a 1972-era media that consisted of three TV networks with half hour evening news shows, and a few liberal big city newspapers, all of which were staffed with journalists more or less largely sympathetic to Kerry's leftist anti-American beliefs.

But between the Swift Boat Vets and the Blogosphere, there are far too many people examining Kerry's story, and his "reporting for duty" edifice has crumbled.

Is that fair? We'll, we're deciding if we want the man to have the key to the most powerful arsenal ever assembled. If he can't survive the scrutiny of the Blogosphere, who James Lileks recently described as an "obsessive sort with lots of time on their hands", is he someone who should be trusted with this power?

In contrast, while they were refighting the 1972-era Kerry's battles against America, the Swift Vets had an infinitely better command of the modern media world than the Senator's campaign team:

Ironically though, while the Swift Boat Vets have been fighting Kerry over the events of Vietnam and immediately afterwards, they've demonstrated that they understand how the new media works far better than his campaign does. The anonymous staffer that Charles quotes above is quite right: initially, the dino-media didn't have the nerve to go after their man with these charges. But they've lost their role as information gatekeepers. And the Swift Boat Vets seem to understand that intuitively.

"The Fix", The Washington Post's politics blog agrees that the Kerry Camp simply didn't understand today's decentralized media world:

While Kerry's foibles have been well-documented, Harris and Halperin propose that the man most responsible for the Massachusetts senator's defeat was not the candidate but rather Matt Drudge -- founder of the widely read Drudge Report.

Harris and Halperin call Drudge the "single most influential purveyor of information about American politics" and go on to add: "Drudge, with his droll Dickensian name, was not the only media or political agent whose actions led to John Kerry's defeat. But his role placed him at the center of the game -- a New Media World Order in which Drudge was the most potent player in the process and a personifications of the dynamic that did Kerry in."

How was Drudge so influential? By serving as the online platform for carefully planned leaks of damaging information -- some of it personal, some of it professional -- that effectively defined Kerry negatively in the eyes of the voting public.

Example: Kerry got his haircut at a pricey Washington salon? First reported by Drudge.

One more: Negative comments by Kerry about the city of Dubuque? First reported by Drudge two days before Kerry made his first visit to Iowa as a presidential candidate.

Harris and Halperin write: "Presidential campaigns are about storytelling. A winning presidential campaign presents the candidate's life story to voters. A losing campaign allows someone else to frame that story."

Wise words for any candidate considering the 2008 race.

While Drudge's role as a media hub shouldn't be undersold, Harris and Halperin themselves don't seem to grasp the Long Tail of the Blogosphere: between hundreds of bloggers, and the Swift Vets' ability to use the Internet to end-run the legacy media, Kerry suffered a death by a thousand cuts, because he was severely damaged goods long before he won the nomation. As I wrote earlier in August of 2004:

This isn't Bill Clinton's shadowy Whitewater dealings and other murkiness from his salad days as an Arkansas governor. Then-Naval lieutenant Kerry led a remarkably well documented--and even audio and videotaped life in the early 1970s. Didn't he think this material would surface if he chose to run for the presidency? And if so, why did he choose to run so much on his four months in Vietnam, and only spend 26 seconds(!) on his 20 years in the Senate in his acceptance speech at the DNC?

As Glenn Reynolds wrote yesterday about the swift boat vets' ad, "Kerry played right into this with all the stuff about Vietnam and medals".

To have been as high profile, inflamatory, and as well documented as Kerry was in the early 1970s, and not expect it to be used against you if you ran for the presidency seems like an astonishing lack of understanding of the New, New Journalism, to coin a phrase.

Update: Of course, it isn't just presidential candidates and their aides who don't get the Internet. Stephen Spriuell, who runs National Review Online's Media Blog, patiently explains to befuddled journalists assigned to cover the Foley scandal how the Internet works, a subject they haven't understood since, well, the early days of The Drudge Report. Spruiell writes:

I sympathize with reporters who have to explain complicated stories in a small amount of space or time. But seriously: How hard is it to explain the difference between an e-mail and an IM?

Ask Mary Mapes: she didn't even know who the players were on the Internet during the 2004 presidential election, let alone the difference between emails and IMs. And as Spruiell has witnessed firsthand, she's far from the only cyber-clueless member of the legacy media.

Back in February, at the peak of the Great Cartoon Riots of 2006, Glenn Reynolds wrote:

Once again, the message is that if you blow things up, or even look as if you might, we'll be nice to you. And once again, I note that this is a very unwise message to send.

In an article by Cathy Seipp celebrating the tenth anniversary of a show that's a riot of a cartoon, South Park's producers echo Glenn's instapoint:

Their philosophical position about the Mohammed cartoon is that a free society shouldn’t be cowed by threats from Islamofascists. “If you’re saying this is the one thing we can’t do — besides Tom Cruise — because they’re threatening violence,” said Parker, “Well, then, I guess that’s what everyone should do. If the Catholics don’t want us ripping on Jesus anymore, then they should just threaten violence. That’s why it’s such a slippery slope and such a dangerous path to go down.”

It looks like the dangerous path to the slippery slope is gradually being trodden: Back in 2004, Christianity Today headlined a story, "Nigerian Christians Attack Muslims, Kill Dozens". More recently in Indonesia, "Christians attack Muslims after executions". And in a complete Muggeridge's Law moment, the fellow who hijacked a Turkish Airlines 737 yesterday claims to be a Christian "seeking asylum because he fears persecution in his Muslim homeland after his conversion to Christianity", according to the AP.

On the infamous page 152 of Mark Steyn's new America Alone book, Steyn writes, "A world without order eventually liberates all restraints". He adds, "There will be plenty of non-state actors on the non-Islamic side. In the end, the victims of the Islamic contagion will include many, many Muslims".

If you observe carefully enough, that backlash may have already started.

Incidentally, I'll have a podcast interview with Steyn online soon. Watch this space for details.

Howard Kurtz actually writes that NPR is on the left--and no reports of spontaneous combustion have been issued by the Washington Post!

(He's still not sure about Keith Olbermann, though. But hey, give him time.)

Update: This also just in: Bob Woodward, once again accused of inventing quotes.

Another Update: Still, despite its faux-quotography, Woodward's book has apparently already led to a dramatic (and entirely satiric) shake-up of President Bush's cabinet!

Putting the P.C. back into PC video! Hey, remember all the talk from starry-eyed pundits who predicted Internet video would be free from the same deadly-dull uniformity that has crippled the television networks? Dream on, dream on...

(Incidentally, I wonder how many people in YouTube's management had to scramble for a dictionary or Google to figure out what the heck the word "dhimmi" means, after watching this video.)

Update: More video-dhimmitudery spotted here.

Densepack, The Feiler Faster Thesis, Mutual Assured Destruction, and the Wellstone Memorial Redux: click for an assortment of opinion regarding the fallout from the Foley fiasco.

Update: Speaking of the Densepack Theory, (but not Foley), here's one October surprise from the left that's been quickly debunked. As Charles Johnson writes:

Nick Denton and his “blogs” Gawker and Wonkette need to apologize for their part in promoting this nasty fraud, or just accept that their credibility (if they ever had any) is now completely in the trash.

Hey, we have computers. We can fact check your fauxtography.

Another Update: Is the Foley fallout running into the Feiler Faster Thesis that Kaus mentioned above? In addition to its having been written before the latest pushback efforts, Jim Geraghty (click here for interview) has a great round-up of where the Folley Fiasco stands. (Sorry Gerard, I'm not calling it Masturgate.)

Kesher Talk has a modest proposal for Ned Lamont, if he wishes to curry favor beyond his far left base of potential voters.

Could backfire with the media though...

Update: Employing this strategery would cause Ned to lose the sympathy of the women of the The View, thus ensuring that it will never happen.

Over at Tech Central Station, Donald J. Boudreaux has a great take on recycling: "market prices compel us to recycle when recycling is appropriate - and to not recycle when recycling is inappropriate."

Read the whole thing. Surely the New York Times would agree with Boudreaux...right?

No, that title's not an oxymoron: Arnold decides not to gut the Electoral College.

Update: More on California, here.

The last sentence of this is a classic:

Ten years after he created Fox News Channel, Roger Ailes says he still avoids mentioning his place of employment in certain circles.

"It's just not worth going through the hassle at an elite party," he says. And: "The only reason I know we're doing the right thing is that we're widely criticized." And: "I've never felt out of the mainstream in America. I've felt out of the mainstream at Le Cirque."

Via Stephen Spruiell, who has more thoughts on Fox's tenth anniversary, as does Betsy Newmark.

And incidentally, I think Jonah Goldberg had a great take on Fox a couple of years ago, when he wrote, "at least one of the things that has made Fox News successful isn't that it's right-wing, it is that it's populist." The channel openly roots for the U.S., which, frankly, is more than you can say about the other television news networks.

(At least at the moment.)

Reason unwittingly manages to combine the central theses of two of the more important books on the Internet and technology this year. Their Website features an essay that mashes together the recurring "small breweries empowered by modern technology" subtext of Glenn Reynolds' An Army Of Davids, along with the Long Tail of the Internet meme of Chris Anderson.

Just promise you'll drink something other than Bud when you read it. Unless you're Jonah Goldberg, of course--but that's a whole 'nother meme.

(Via Pajamas HQ.)

(That's a redundant title--Ed. Yeah, yeah...)

Last month, when I first heard that Paramount was updating the original 1966-era Star Trek with new digital effects, I was tempted to title my post, "No Good Can Come Of This". I probably should have. I finally remembered to program TiVo to record the new series, and watched my first episode ("The Naked Time") late last night.

I must say, I really disappointed by, well, how digital the digital effects look. If anything, they seem like a giant step backwards in how artificial and two-dimensional they appear. Just click through this Website and compare the new shots with the effects they replaced. The original Enterprise model (currently orbiting the Smithsonian) was 11-feet long, which allowed for excellent depth of field when photographed. And while the original Trek has gotten a reputation for its cheesy effects, the establishing miniature shots created for the show were pretty impressive stuff for 1966. But the show's producers had no idea that Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was just around the corner with its revolutionary approach to realistic special effects. (The "miniature" for 2001's Discovery spacecraft was over 50-feet long and hyperdetailed.)

I have no beef with CGI effects, but they should be more detailed than what they replace, not less. Of course, as I wrote in early September:

I'm afraid that we're witnessing the birth of a Hollywood equivalent of Andy & Bill's Law. Every time new chips and software are designed that allow more powerful special effects, both Lucas and Paramount will now feel obligated to airbrush their franchises. Sadly, the dilution of mass culture seems to compel Hollywood to mine its best-known commodities as frequently as possible, as no equivalent cash cows are on the immediate horizon.

So Paramount has many more opportunities to (a) churn the franchise and (b) hopefully, eventually, get its effects right in the process.

Update: Related thoughts, here.

Other than throwing the odd quarter into a slot machine in Vegas, I'm not at all a gambler. But I have to agree with this post by Libertas' Michael Kim, whose none-too-pleased with Sen. Bill Frist's tacking on an Internet gambling ban to an important port security bill.

Promising to end these sorts of last minute end-arounds and the culture of big government corruption that leads to them helped bring Republicans to Congress in 1994. That such a midnight maneuver could be attempted with a month to go before a close mid-term election seems like a surprisingly tone deaf stunt from Sen. Frist.

Albert Haynesworth, the Tennessee Titans' defensive tackle who brutally stomped and then kicked Dallas Cowboys center Andre Gurode in the head during yesterday's game has been suspended for five games without pay.

AP notes that this is the longest suspension for on-field behavior in NFL history, and that sounds appropriate to me--although I would have been tempted to disqualify him for the rest of the season. That was one of the worst cheap shots I've seen in the NFL: Haynesworth's first kick knocked the helmet off Gurode, leaving him totally defenseless for his second hit, which required stitches above his forehead and beneath his eye. As several sportscasters remarked yesterday, the game was played on a natural grass surface, and Haynesworth was wearing shoes with sharp metal cleats, not the low, blunt plastic cleats worn for Astroturf games. (Gurode returned to the sidelines, where he watched the rest of the game wearing an enormous bandage.)

Life (as always) imitates Iowahawk--In late December of 2004, the word's most famous squirrel smoker satirically wrote:

Washington, DC - Pointing to the devastating weekend Indian Ocean tsunami that left over 24,000 dead, an international blue ribbon committee of climatologists and ecoscientists today issued a stark warning that man-made pollutants have increasingly "make water spirits angry."

The blunt conclusion prefaced a 2300 page meta-analysis of hundreds of scientific studies and computer models detailing links between human industrial activity and wrathful eco-deities. Entitled "Fire Bad: Fire Very Bad," the report warns that the planet faces additional catastrophies unless drastic regulatory action is taken to appease Earthen-furies.

"Unclean money devils anger sacred water spirit Tai-Waku," explained Martin Knudson of Scripps Oceanic Institute. "He now call angry to son the whale, 'make slap with anger-tails! Bring vengeance-surf to villagers!'"

While most empirical evidence supports the theory of wrathful whale-tail slappings, some scientists are exploring alternative hypotheses for the weekend tsunami. Ecobiologist Jane Geary of UC Santa Cruz points to mounting evidence that the ocean spirit-world may have been driven to gastrointestinal rage by gas-guzzling SUVs.

"Thunder-wagon make smoke cloud of greenhouse gas," explained Geary. "hungry Tai-Waku eat smoke from thunder-wagon, pass giant wind with mighty fury."

Peter Novak, chief science officer of the Sierra Club, dismissed Geary's "Divine Fart" theory, arguing it was more likely that SUVs had triggered the tsunami via a spirit underword sexual encounter.

"Wheels of thunder-wagons wake up Big Earth Spirit-Mother, make to crazy tingle in hairy child-place. She now go to water lair of Tai-Waku, make big angry love on tectonic plate," said Novak. "Big Earth Spirit-Mother say, 'if ocean rocking, don't come a-knocking.'"

Although they disagree on the precise causes of the wrathful spirit world, scientists were largely unanimous in recommending immediate global regulatory action. Remedial steps suggested in the report include ratification of the Kyoto treaty, elimination of automobiles, volcanic altars for virgin sacrifices, creation of a sustainable urine-based economy, and improved faculty dental benefits.

"If not act now, it too late," said report editor Paul Erlich of Stanford University.

Erlich, whose 1978 best seller "Ice Time Come Soon" is widely credited with saving millions of lives by warning of the massive age of glaciation that threatened Earth during the 1980s, said inaction might anger the spirit world further.

"Me not know when Tai-Waku make wrath again," said Erlich. "Me need more grant money."

Seamus Heffernan, the senior policy executive of "ICE", England's Institution of Civil Engineers, emailed me a link to his review of An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's recent agitpropumentary, in which he spotted a similar "Fire Makes Sea Gods Angry" moment from the former vice president:

Lack of panache aside, Gore does outline his case clearly and powerfully. He explains the basics of the science around climate change (bare bones version: greenhouse gases trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere prevent the escape of the sun’s heat) and, in the film’s only real chuckle, drives this point home with an educational clip from Matt Groening’s Futurama.

Having now hooked his crowd, Gore goes to work outlining the real life examples to drive the reality of the situation home. The Darfur droughts, flooding in China, the melting ice caps, the baffling weather all are explained

Unfortunately, this is where Gore loses some of his credibility. He is most certainly safe on many of the examples he cites, but cannot resist going for the glamour shots. Standing before a giant photo of Mount Kilimanjaro, he laments its disappearing snow peaks. Unfortunately, Kilimanjaro has been losing snow for over a hundred years through a reduction in 19th century precipitation, not global warming. Ouch.

Gore goes one worse when he attempts to use Katrina (and accompanying gut-wrenching footage). It was easily the film’s most crass political moment. Katrina was a disaster, and even more crucially for Gore, an American disaster whose wounds have not yet come close to healing. In his rush to exploit this, he neglected homework from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which said that “No systematic changes in the frequency of tornadoes, thunder days, or hail events are evident in the limited areas analysed". In addition, the "challenges globally in tropical and extra-tropical storm intensity and frequency are dominated by inter-decadal and multi-decadal variations, with no significant trends evident over the 20th century." In other words, the jury is out on whether or not global warming made Katrina any worse.

By claiming Katrina was unquestionably caused by global warming, he deftly shifts the blame for its severity onto the current administration (after all, they’re hardly big fans of the global warming hypothesis). Gore lets himself down by both grossly misstating the facts about hurricanes and climate change, while clumsily making the other aim of this film clear: the 2008 elections. Perhaps we should expect no better from a man who was quoted in Grist Magazine as saying it is ‘appropriate’ to overstate the facts related to climate change.

Perhaps.

If I quoted the pertinent excerpts of this Michael Barone essay on "The Disappearing 'Us'", I'd end up pasting in the whole piece. So, as they say in the Blogosphere, read the whole thing.

Back in 1976, when the news was still a liberal mass media monolith, Bob Dole was widely (and I think appropriately) demonized excoriated by journalists for referring to America's 20th century conflicts as "Democrat Wars", based on who was in office when those wars were declared. The silence amongst today's media when politicians on the other side of the aisle make remarks as equally as egregious as Dole's is simply yet another example of The Dog That Didn't Bark.

About five minutes before Mark Foley became the latest Crisis Of The Century, Charles Krauthammer looked at the story it replaced in the media:

Strange doings in Virginia. George Allen, former governor, one-term senator, son of a famous football coach and in the midst of a heated battle for re-election, has just been outed as a Jew. An odd turn of events, given the fact that his having Jewish origins has nothing to do with anything in the campaign and that Allen himself was oblivious to the fact until his 83-year-old mother revealed to him last month the secret she had kept concealed for 60 years.

Apart from its political irrelevance, it seems improbable in the extreme that the cowboy-boot-wearing football scion of Southern manner and speech should turn out to be, at least by origins, a son of Israel. For Allen, as he quipped to me, it's the explanation for a lifelong affinity for Hebrew National hotdogs. For me, it is the ultimate confirmation of something I have been regaling friends with for 20 years and now, for the advancement of social science, feel compelled to publish.

I've had a fairly good run with this one. First, it turns out that John Kerry -- windsurfing, French-speaking, Beacon Hill aristocrat -- had two Jewish grandparents. Then Hillary Clinton -- methodical Methodist -- unearths a Jewish step-grandfather in time for her run as New York senator.

A less jaunty case was that of Madeleine Albright, three of whose Czech grandparents had perished in the Holocaust and who most improbably contended that she had no idea that they were Jewish. To which we can add the leading French presidential contender (Nicolas Sarkozy), a former supreme commander of NATO (Wesley Clark) and Russia's leading anti-Semite (Vladimir Zhirinovsky). One must have a sense of humor about these things. Even Fidel Castro claims he is from a family of Marranos.

For all its tongue-in-cheek irony, Krauthammer's Law works because when I say ``everyone,'' I don't mean everyone you know personally. Depending on the history and ethnicity of your neighborhood and social circles, there may be no one you know who is Jewish. But if ``everyone'' means anyone that you've heard of in public life, the law works for two reasons. Ever since the Jews were allowed out of the ghetto and into European society at the dawning of the Enlightenment, they have peopled the arts and sciences, politics and history in astonishing disproportion to their numbers.

There are 13 million Jews in the world, one-fifth of 1 percent of the world's population. Yet 20 percent of Nobel Prize winners are Jewish, a staggering hundredfold surplus of renown and genius. This is similarly true for a myriad of other ``everyones'' -- the household names in music, literature, mathematics, physics, finance, industry, design, comedy, film and, as the doors opened, even politics. But it is not just Jewish excellence at work here. There is a dark side to these past centuries of Jewish emancipation and achievement -- an unrelenting history of persecution. The result is the other more somber and poignant reason for the Jewishness of public figures being discovered late and with surprise: concealment.

Read the rest.

In Tech Central Station article titled, "Mediamorphosis", Alvaro Vargas Llosa looks at how poorly newspapers have handled their transition from a dead tree to a digital medium:

I remember sitting round a table in my capacity as op-ed page editor for one of the Knight-Ridder papers in the early 1990s, listening to Tony Ridder, the chief executive, explain that technology was rendering newspapers as we knew them obsolete. We needed to adapt to the coming revolution: digital, interactive, customized information flows. Twelve years later, Ridder is the victim of what he so eloquently predicted. Forced by Private Capital Management, an important shareholder, he had to agree to the sale of the empire after trying all the options -- cutting costs, buying back shares, dumping a few papers. And off went Knight-Ridder, with its 32 papers and a combined circulation of 3.7 million, to the McClatchy Co.

With exceptions such as China and India, the (slow) decline of the newspaper business is a worldwide trend. The big mistake that newspapers in America, Europe and Latin America have made in response to the new environment is to treat this trend as a financial and a technological challenge rather than a cultural phenomenon.

The newspaper industry's response over the past decade -- and Knight-Ridder is a good example, but not the only one -- has consisted mainly of two things: restructuring finances and providing online versions of print products. Everything else -- including the creation of new businesses under their famed brands or going into cable TV -- was intended to salvage the traditional way of providing news. The result is, well, the "whodunit" yell.

The cultural change taking place with regard to information amounts to a decentralization of power. Steve Greenhut of The Orange County Register in Southern California put it nicely when he wrote that "this is the equivalent of the Protestant Reformation for the media, where every man can become his own pope, or in this case his own publisher.''

Matt Drudge's debut instantly made dead-tree newspapers (and television news) a legacy medium. Which is why it wasn't at all coincidental how viciously dead-tree reporters attacked* the first of their successors. And even though Drudge's politics (more or less conservative) were very different from theirs, it's worth remembering that the media devoted very little--if any--space in their pages to discuss the long-term ramifications of what his debut signified.

* Note careful avoidance of the D-Word!

20 years ago, Arthur C. Clarke looked ahead to the 50th anniversary of man's landing on the Moon and wrote a "Letter From Clavius" dated July 20th, 2019:

It doesn’t seem like fifty years—but I cannot be sure which memories are false, and which are real.

Present and past are inextricably entangled. The monitor screen has just shown the ceremony at Tranquillity Base, culminating with the third hoisting of the American flag. It was blown down, of course, by the blast of Eagle’s ascent stage, and lay there on the trampled Moon soil for thirty-six years until the Apollo Historical Committee reerected it. Then the big quake of 2009 knocked it down again; this time, we’re assured, it would take a direct hit by a fair-sized meteor to lower it.

Now, immediately after the live transmission from Tranquillity, they’ve put on a grainy old tape—yes, tape, not vidule!—from exactly half a century ago. And there I am back in the CBS Studio on West 57th Street with dear old Walter Cronkite and. wise-cracking Wally Schirra, watching Neil Armstrong take that first step off the ladder.

For the hundredth time, I strain my ears. Neil Armstrong once told me (and by then he must have been heartily fed up with the whole subject), “What I intended to say was: ‘That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.’ And that’s what I thought I said."

Sorry, Neil—you fluffed! The “a” got short-circuited between brain and tongue. But it doesn’t matter; this time, at least, history has been correctly reedited.

--From Clarke's July 20, 2019: Life in the 21st Century, published in 1986.

Fast-forward to the present, and an article titled, "One small word is one giant sigh of relief for Armstrong" in England's Times Online, dated October 2nd:

Mr Armstrong has long insisted that he meant to say “one small step for a man . . .” — which would have been a more meaningful and grammatically correct version, free of tautology. But even the astronaut himself could not be sure.

“Damn, I really did it. I blew the first words on the Moon, didn’t I?” he is reported to have asked officials later, amid uncertainty as to whether he had blown the moment or simply been drowned out by static interference as his words were relayed 250,000 miles back to Earth.

Now, after almost four decades, the spaceman has been vindicated. Using high-tech sound analysis techniques, an Australian computer expert has rediscovered the missing “a” in Mr Armstrong’s famous quote. Peter Shann Ford ran the Nasa recording through sound-editing software and clearly picked up an acoustic wave from the word “a”, finding that Mr Armstrong spoke it at a rate of 35 milliseconds — ten times too fast for it to be audible.

Mr Ford’s findings have been presented to Nasa officials in Washington and to a relieved Mr Armstrong, who issued a statement saying: “I find the technology interesting and useful. I also find his conclusion persuasive.”

Now if we could just get that moonbase built on Clavius...

Mark Levin questions the timing of the Foley allegations--and notes that there will be many more "surprises" to come this month. Or as Jim Geraghty writes:

So - we've got campaigns against "Rape Gurney Joe" in Connecticut; the Washington press corps wants to know if George Allen is now, or has ever been, a Jew; in Maryland, a staffer posted on her blog about the "Jewish noses" of donors and Oreos...

Heck of a campaign season, huh?

October's going to be a long year.

Update: Paul Mirengoff of Power Line writes, "If this is Sunday, it must be another Washington Post front-page hit piece against the Bush administration", adding, "I guess we can expect the Post to lead with "drive-by" attacks in the Chandrasekaran, De Young, Woodward style every Sunday until the election."

Nahh--they'll expand to the rest of the week as November gets closer.

Another Update: "Real scandal, fake blog."