Dude, these kinds of maneuvers are why God invented skateboards.

Like fish meeting a barrel, the "Truthers" meet James Taranto:

Then there were the "truthers," members of a cult that believes 9/11 was a government conspiracy. They are easy to spot because they all wear black T-shirts with pictures of the twin towers and slogans like INVESTIGATE 9/11. (We encountered some of them near Ground Zero on Sept. 11, 2006.)

Two truthers, a man and a woman, were standing in line to ask questions. The man prefaced his by saying, "I'm not going to ask the 9/11 question again." (We don't remember what he did ask.) When it was the woman's turn, she went into a long disquisition about how FDR had advance warning of Pearl Harbor, and "buildings don't fall at 10 stories a second," and finally she asked, "Where is our Bob Woodward to bring the story out?"

Our answer: "Rosie O'Donnell."

Read the whole thing.

Update: The truthers meet Obama: "Until the major Democrat presidential candidates refute these Truther clowns, they’ll find themselves in photos like this one".

Vanity Fair, still suffering the after-effects of the mammoth case of BDS it displayed in the fall of 2004, and with a built-in anti-Republican bias that seemingly dates back to the Coolidge administration, charges that "Rudy Giuliani—former mayor, hero of 9/11, and now presidential candidate—is, quite literally, nuts".

Get ready for loads of articles with this sort of ad-hominem tone from the Manhattan-based publishing world, on whoever the GOP's front-runner candidate happens to be about three months before their publication date.

Speaking of the mayor, City Journal notes that "Broken Windows Turns 25" and that its crime prevention techniques have "worked wonders on both coasts", including, most importantly, Rudy's town.

You can find numerous examples of this sort of thing occurring throughout the MSM, particularly since 9/11, but Tim Blair specifically illustrates how one quote can take on a life of its own, morphing into something increasingly far removed from its original intent.

In June of 2004, after Christopher Hitchens demolished Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 9/11, James Lileks wrote:

Ever wondered if there’s a literary equivalent of someone attacking a hanging side of beef with a chain saw? Wonder no more.

Given that the subhead of Hitchens' newest article is "George Tenet's sniveling, self-justifying new book is a disgrace", I'd say that's also an apt description this time around.

Having only taken office in January, New York's Governor Elliot Spitzer has apparently already resolved every major issue facing the Empire State in record time. How else to explain this?

Normally it is Jersey fans who gripe that they don't get any respect from pro sports teams that play at the Meadowlands in East Rutherford but have "New York" in their names.

But three New York assemblymen recently sponsored a bill to stop football's Giants and Jets and soccer's Red Bulls from using the Empire State's name or abbreviation because they don't play their home games in New York.

"At the very least, the location of the place where a team plays should be accurate, and reflect where they actually play their home games," Assemblyman Ivan Lafayette, of Queens, writes in the bill, as reported by The Record of Bergen County in Saturday newspapers.

As Steven Den Beste writes:

How do you enforce this? If these teams are actually based in Joisey, then a New York State law can't be enforced in Joisey. And if the teams play in New York, then the law wouldn't apply. Besides which, wouldn't this be an infringement of the First Amendment?

And why would New York want to disassociate itself with two NFL teams with longstanding historic ties to the state?

Elsewhere, speaking of sports and naming rights, my wife has some thoughts on advertising and NASCAR over at her business law blog.

Still in Nothern Iraq, Michael Totten has a video interview with Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga Colonel Salahdin Ahmad Ameen in his office in Suleimaniya, Kurdistan:

He also told us about the notorious Abu Ghraib prison – where he was beaten and tortured by the agents of Saddam's regime – about the Peshmerga's doctrine of human rights during war time, Henry Kissinger's betrayal in 1974, why the Kurds have not yet declared independence from Baghdad, and what may happen if the United States withdraws its armed forces from his country. 'Eight times, eight times the American people have disappointed us. I ask the American people, not make it nine times," he says.

What say you, George Clooney?

Tim Blair tells all:

Here’s how blogging works. First you run a site for four or five years, then one day John Malkovich turns up at your house.

Click over for photos. Apparently, the Pope--or at least his personal haberdasher--visited Tim as well on the same day.

To borrow from the Apple campaign of a few years ago, Southwest proves that it's possible to "Think Different", even in a field as staid and heavily-regulated as domestic commercial aviation. They’re not only sympathetic to their core market’s Red State sensibilities; the airline understands the Blogosphere as well. And in an age of increasingly morose stewardesses, their flight crews are some the friendliest I've encountered.

As Hugh Hewitt suggests, perhaps a much older mass industry could learn something from Southwest's ability to prosper in a tightly competitive marketplace.

As Chris Anderson of Wired magazine and author of The Long Tail explains, there's sad news out of Cincinnati: station manager Arthur "Big Guy" Carlson of AM radio's WKRP has finally lost his long-running feud with his mother, the station's owner. After nearly 30 years of the Carlsons' station in the Top 40 rock & roll format, WKRP is reverting back to generic Muzak.

AP: "Newspaper Circulation Falls 2.1 Percent"

NY Post: "Network Execs Face Hard Sell After Dismal Year"

Some thoughts from NRO's Matthew Sheffield, from whose post our title derives, and Stephen Spruiell.

Meanwhile, based upon the old ioke about the Gray Lady, this New York Times piece could easily have been titled, "Hollywood Box Office Flat, Women Hardest Hit".

Update: Hugh Hewitt spots "The Los Angeles Times and The Minneapolis Star Tribune Bleeding Out".

Cinnamon Stillwell of the San Francisco Chronicle (whom I had the pleasure to meet earlier this month) has some thoughts on comedian Will Franken, a performance artist all too rare in San Francisco:

Lest Franken be labeled a conservative or, what's worse in today's parlance, a dreaded neoconservative, there's something in his show to offend just about anyone. Franken is that rare species -- an independent thinker with a healthy sense of the absurd and a complete and utter lack of political correctness. Not to mention being funny. Demonstrating the universality of good humor, his act has drawn praise from such quarters as The Chronicle, San Francisco Bay Guardian, SF Weekly and the Oakland Tribune.

She quotes Franken thusly:

... I try to make fun of all religions and all political parties. The problem is, it seems more and more like radical Islam is the exception to the rule in that it gets sort of a free pass. What we were told from our media during the cartoon fiasco was that our stance on not showing the cartoons was out of respect for all religions. Well, we know that to be a lie because Judaism, Christianity, even Hinduism (Apu from "The Simpsons") have all had their heads on the satirical chopping block.

... I don't approve of mistreatment of women, murder of homosexuals, suppression of free speech, hatred of Jews, theocratic governments, and a lack of sense of humor in anybody -- which is why I believe that Western society has a great weapon in its satirical tradition to ridicule fundamentalist Islam (as it's already done with fundamentalist Christianity a la Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Lenny Bruce) into a less volatile secular assimilation.

Good luck with that, but in the meantime, it's worth reviewing the thoughts of Orrin Judd and Australia's John Birmingham on the state of modern humor--and the frequent lack thereof.

It moves in mysterious ways, as James Lileks illustrates in his latest Bleat, first via two side-by-side photographs of sculptures at the Minneapolis Public Library, and then an astonishing--and astonishingly rare--moment of clarity regarding the 1950s from Garrison Keillor.

Dr. Sidney Theodore Freedman weighs in on the Randy Moss trade from Oakland to New England: "Ladies and gentlemen, take my advice, pull down your pants and slide on the ice".

This is interesting:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has now learned of a second, more stunning error in Tenet's book (which is due to appear in bookstores tomorrow). According to Michiko Kakutani's review in Saturday's Times,

On the day after 9/11, he [Tenet] adds, he ran into Richard Perle, a leading neoconservative and the head of the Defense Policy Board, coming out of the White House. He says Mr. Perle turned to him and said: "Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday. They bear responsibility."

Here's the problem: Richard Perle was in France on that day, unable to fly back after September 11. In fact Perle did not return to the United State until September 15. Did Tenet perhaps merely get the date of this encounter wrong? Well, the quote Tenet ascribes to Perle hinges on the encounter taking place September 12: "Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday." And Perle in any case categorically denies to THE WEEKLY STANDARD ever having said any such thing to Tenet, while coming out of the White House or anywhere else.

According to Kakutani, Tenet concludes by paraphrasing Daniel Patrick Moynihan's comment: "Policymakers are entitled to their own opinions--but not to their own set of facts." How many other facts has George Tenet invented?

Cue the refrains of "fake but accurate", and "emotional truth" that are sure to come.

Two stories that don't happen very often at the Gray Lady:

"NY Times Surprisingly Asks ‘Is the Carbon-Neutral Movement Just a Gimmick?’"

"New York Times(!): Turnaround in Al-Anbar"

Call Roger Waters and prepare the flying pig for launch!

Update: "Reuters got it right. No, really". Prepare the USS Swinetrek!

Watch the video, and read the whole thing, indeed.^TM

In a couple of his Bleats this past week, James Lileks focused on the immediate post-WWII emotional fortitude of what he dubbed "nerd culture", young men who longed for the technological future that sci-fi promised, when that genre was at its lowest ebb:

You can almost imagine the sighs from the readers, who were doubtlessly male, 20s or early 30s, and desperately interested in the future. If only I could live there now. If only I lived in an age of rockets and spacemen and ray guns and monsters. Of course, people still think this today. I thought this when I was growing up. The difference, however, is this: I had Star Trek. I’ve always had Star Trek. Someone who’s 12 today has a broad and satisfying range of sci-fi options. But what did someone in 1946 have?

If you watch any of the memorials for the original Trek, inevitably, they'll feature a cast or crew member who looks back wistfully and says, "What I liked about the show was that Gene Roddenberry had created a hopeful vision of the future; one that showed mankind prospering in space, and in the future".

Funny, I've always been pretty optimistic about the future, and judging by cultural touchstones like Star Trek, the 1939 World's Fair, and the sixties Space Race, historically, most Americans have been as well. For many though, that's no longer true.

One reason for the New Hopelessness might be the belief that America was founded in original sin:

This week saw a small and telling controversy involving a mural on the walls of Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles. The mural is big--400 feet long, 18 feet high at its peak--and eye-catching, as would be anything that "presents a colorful depiction of the rape, slaughter and enslavement of North America's indigenous people by genocidal Europeans." Those are the words of the Los Angeles Times's Bob Sipchen, who noted "the churning stream of skulls in the wake of Columbus's Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria."

What is telling is not that some are asking if the mural portrays the Conquistadors as bloodthirsty monsters, or if it is sufficiently respectful to the indigenous Indians of Mexico. What is telling is that those questions completely miss the point and ignore the obvious. Here is the obvious:

The mural is on the wall of a public school. It is on a public street. Children walk by.

Another reason to feel hopeless about the future is when you share a mindset that consistently seeks and derives pleasure in bad news:

Bad news might be good news when you've got no other news, but a perpetual search for bad news to the exclusion of all else would drive away readers and drive editors into psychiatric care . . . even faster than usual.

Which brings us to the anti-war, anti-West, anti-progress Left. Well, let's start a few generations prior, with old Karl Marx himself.

Marx believed bad news was good; that the "bad news" of capitalism's collapse - with associated societal dislocation, mass unemployment and misery across all classes - was good because it would lead to a glorious revolution. Or, as he put it: "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable."

Silly fellow. Silly but influential, obviously, right down to the lust for bad news we see from the present-day crazy Left, whose entire belief system is structured around sadness.

Consider this. Opponents of the war are encouraged in their opposition by disasters in Iraq. They feel validated by suicide attacks on coalition forces (including Iraqi forces, fighting to quell insurgents).

Imagine a month of reduced insurgent activity, with related reductions in coalition losses; imagine feeling disappointed by that, because it undermines your argument that the war is wrong. Imagine being a peacenik who craves an ever-higher body count.

Environmental activists thrill to claims that polar bears and other creatures are imperilled because it boosts their argument that urgent change is required.

Point out that polar bears are not endangered (there are so many surplus polar bears that indigenous hunters are still permitted to kill up to 700 every year) and they become defensive and annoyed.

If that seems like a rather toxic pair of mental bookends to operate from, add to it an elite that believes that technology must be rolled back--banned in several cases--and it's easy to see how such pessimism could become all-pervasive.

Almost 20 years ago, I remember buying an early version of the guide handed out to writers on the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation from the late 1980s. In order to prevent another round of episodes where Evil Computers Run Amok and the heroic captain of the Enterprise must destroy them, Roddenberry inserted a passage that reminded his writers that the crew of the Enterprise aren't Luddites: technology is what got them into space and keeps them there, so avoid writing anti-technology screeds.

Would that our current elites, who spread their message via television networks created in the 1940s for profit, and an Internet, created in the late 1960s by the eeeeevil US military (when this man was their commander-in-chief, no less) have a similar take.

Fire actually does melt steel!

Update: "Paging Dr. Rosie: Did Schwarzenegger Demolish Bay Bridge Interchange?"

As Steven Den Beste once wrote: "1984 -- A user manual for lefties; a warning for the rest of us".

(Note that this touch helps complete the Orwellian vision.)

Mark Steyn's latest column features this incandescent opening:

Everything's difficult, isn't it? In the Democratic presidential candidates' debate, Sen. Barack Obama was asked what he personally was doing to save the environment, and replied that his family was "working on" changing their light bulbs.

Is this the new version of the old joke? How many senators does it take to "work on" changing a light bulb? One to propose a bipartisan commission. One to threaten to de-fund the light bulbs. One to demand the impeachment of Bush and Cheney for keeping us all in the dark. One to vote to pull out the first of the light bulbs by fall of this year with a view to getting them all pulled out by the end of 2008.

In 1914, on the eve of the Great War, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey observed, "The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." Whether he was proposing a solution to global warming is unclear. But he would be impressed to hear that nine decades later the lights are going out all over Washington.

To understand what a topsy-turvy world our political class has entered due to its need for emotional displacement, check out the sign that a protestor in Turkey is holding, and note the two elements that make up the protestors' symbol for the ruling AK Party. Note which one the left in the US wants to ban, and which they want to promote.

Update: In a way, it's too bad this woman's headdress doesn't come in black and obscure her face. Then you'd have one story that truly ties together all of the elements of the modern (err, actually anti-modern, to be precise) political zietgiest.

Another Update: "And so as America slides ever closer to the 14th century in their pathetic bid to appease these uncivilized extremists, countries like Malaysia move decidedly toward the 21st century".

Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters interviews Day By Day impresario Chris Muir on Ed's Blog Talk Radio show.

For our profile of Chris a few years ago in Tech Central Station, click here.

John Hinderaker writes:

So al-Hadi, a former Iraqi soldier who became a top al Qaeda operative in Afghanistan and later supervised that organization's operations in Iraq was caught re-entering that country from Iran: three entities that, we are told, cannot possibly have anything to do with one another.

Meanwhile, Don Surber notes a curious omission from the legacy media:

The U.S. announced on Friday that it captured the mastermind behind the 7/7/2005 bombings in London.

But you would not know it by reading the New York Times, the Washington Post or the Associated Press.

None of them mentioned the London bombings in reporting on the capture of the man who organized that attack, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi (aka, Abu Abdallah).

Instead, reporters concentrated on where this major player in the war on terrorism was held after his capture.

Incredible.

No it's not.

Update:Needless to say, don't expect this meme to generate much MSM traction, either: Tom Joscelyn writes to Power Line that it's "amazing how many former members of Saddam's regime became al Qaeda bigwigs."

On his own blog, Joscelyn has some questions that should be asked of al-Hadi. Meanwhile, Dafydd ab Hugh explores the rococo measures the British feel they must employ to interrogate him, as al-Hadi's new permanent residence will be in a tropical council flat that's no longer UK approved.

Thoughtful progressive reader questions prominent libertarian blogger's lack of "Comments Sectino".

"At the Kennedy Library, just outside Boston, they went through all the files. They couldn't see much evidence Lloyd Bentsen knew John Kennedy very well. But it certainly was an effective campaign ploy for him".

Because no journalist at the time reported that it was a lie, much like they would immediately flip 180 degrees on the strength of the economy four years later in late 1992. To riff off of one of David Halberstam's lines, prior to the Blogosphere, the truth could be shrink-wrapped into whatever way elite journalists wanted it to appear.

Meanwhile, for yet another flashback to the era of Bush 41, Dan Quayle must be feeling a certain amount of closure after this.

"Manolo says, ayyyyyy! The Ellen DeGeneres is looking bad these days".

Making the rounds today in the Blogosphere is this editorial on "The Disarming of America" by one Dan Simpson, whom the Toledo Blade describes as "a retired diplomat, [and] a member of the editorial boards of The Blade and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette":

When people talk about doing something about guns in America, it often comes down to this: "How could America disarm even if it wanted to? There are so many guns out there."

Because I have little or no power to influence the "if" part of the issue, I will stick with the "how." And before anyone starts to hyperventilate and think I'm a crazed liberal zealot wanting to take his gun from his cold, dead hands, let me share my experience of guns.

As a child I played cowboys and Indians with cap guns. I had a Daisy Red Ryder B-B gun. My father had in his bedside table drawer an old pistol which I examined surreptitiously from time to time. When assigned to the American embassy in Beirut during the war in Lebanon, I sometimes carried a .357 Magnum, which I could fire accurately. I also learned to handle and fire a variety of weapons while I was there, including Uzis and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

I don't have any problem with hunting, although blowing away animals with high-powered weapons seems a pointless, no-contest affair to me. I suppose I would enjoy the fellowship of the experience with other friends who are hunters.

Now, how would one disarm the American population? First of all, federal or state laws would need to make it a crime punishable by a $1,000 fine and one year in prison per weapon to possess a firearm. The population would then be given three months to turn in their guns, without penalty.

Hunters would be able to deposit their hunting weapons in a centrally located arsenal, heavily guarded, from which they would be able to withdraw them each hunting season upon presentation of a valid hunting license. The weapons would be required to be redeposited at the end of the season on pain of arrest. When hunters submit a request for their weapons, federal, state, and local checks would be made to establish that they had not been convicted of a violent crime since the last time they withdrew their weapons. In the process, arsenal staff would take at least a quick look at each hunter to try to affirm that he was not obviously unhinged.

Time to pull out the Sheryl Crow Defense once the emails start arriving at the Blade--which should probably be renamed something far less aggressive sounding, after all.

Update: Since I linked to Ace of Spades' Sheryl Crow post, it's only to fair to also include a link to his thoughts on Simpson's gun-grab op-ed.

More: "But don't call Simpson a ‘liberal’ or a ‘zealot’. After all, he's fired an RPG".

Elsewhere: "Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?" First draft of Simpson's screed uncovered by--who else?--IowaHawk.

Reader Stephen Shields finds yet another great moment in Memeorandum synchronicity.

Related thoughts from James Lileks and Dean Barnett; details on the Al Qaeda operative captured at Hot Air.

A topic discussed on video:

And on blogs.

Because it won't be in the legacy media.

Speaking of which, Don Imus could not be reached for comment.

A Shatnerian look at the state of the presidential race.

A few years ago, Michael Medved asked Jack Valenti:

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?

The Internet Movie Database reports that Valenti has joined them today, at age 85.

Former screenwriter turned Maximum Pajamahadeen Roger Simon writes, "the movie industry, specifically film production, is one of the most ecologically-wasteful businesses around":

I can think of dozens of instances, many of which I was involved in, in which no one ever gave the slightest thought to the ecological consequences of what we were doing. There were only two questions ever asked: Was it right creatively and how much did it cost, not necessarily in that order.

Never once, I hasten to add, did I hear the word "cost" attached to the environment, only to the studio's pocketbook. I doubt that is changing in any real way. Maybe the studios are leading the charge on light bulbs and toilet paper these days, but you can bet you won't hear Jeff Katzenberg advising Steven Spielberg to cut his shooting schedule to save on energy or cut down on greenhouse gases. This same duo was involved some years back in the brouhaha surrounding their efforts to build Dreamworks on the Ballona wetlands in Venice. They seemed anything but green at that time - 1995 - when it came to their work.

There's a simple solution of course...

If, as Marvin Olasky wrote yesterday, the death of David Halberstam closes a chapter on the legacy media, La Shawn Barber explores how it's facing the future: "Newspapers Agonize Over Allowing Comments".

Can't say I blame them, actually.

Lawyer seeks $65 Million from dry cleaner for missing pants. Bill Clinton could not be reached for comment.

(Via Pajamas HQ.)

Reuters: "Palestinians attend a demonstration against violence in Gaza April 23, 2007".

(Via Tim Blair.)

Related: "Does Anyone Edit The AP?"

Or not.

Time magazine unwittingly provides further proof for Arnold Kling's thesis that there is no escape from 1968.

With the Dow topping 13,000 yesterday, Larry Kudlow writes:

We are in the midst of the longest uninterrupted bull market run in memory. We have record low tax rates on capital, a benign inflation rate, and recent economic releases suggesting the Goldilocks soft landing scenario remains very much in place.

But in the end, it all boils down to two simple things—two stock market locomotives that have created enormous, still untapped, value in equities. Viewers have heard talk about them night after night:

High earnings, low interest rates.

Mark my words, it ain't over yet.

Will George W. Bush ever get any credit for this?

I would tend to doubt it. At least, not while he's in office.

Marvin Olasky makes a great point, writing that the death of David Halberstam in a Bay Area traffic accident on Monday may be looked back upon as a chapter in journalism closing. Olasky compares it to Buddy Holly's death signifying the end of 1950s-era rock & roll, even if the echoes of that style of music would linger on until 1964:

These days, reporters regularly gather to bemoan the demise of old journalism and the rise of blogs. Future historians will peg Monday's death of David Halberstam, 73, in a California car crash, as a signpost of the old era's end.

Halberstam was the first big-time journalist with whom I ever had dinner, in 1969 or 1970 when I was a college student. My fellow leftists and I venerated him for winning a Pulitzer Prize on the back of anti-Vietnam War reporting that had gained the ire of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. As William Prochnau, author of "Once Upon a Distant War," later noted, Halberstam in his reporting of those he distrusted ''didn't say, 'You're not telling me the truth.' He said, 'You're lying.'"

Compare that with fellow Jurassic journalist Marvin Kalb, who wouldn't commit to saying on the air yesterday whether or not he thought Bill Moyers and George Soros are on the left. More from Olasky:

We loved that -- Halberstam wrote like a god -- but four decades later, the epigone of Halberstamism is found in books like Al Franken's "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right." Unlike some of his successors, Halberstam was a hardworking reporter who didn't grab for sneering laughs, but his 1965 book about Vietnam, "The Making of a Quagmire," has inspired journalists for four decades to look for a quagmire as soon as the first American soldiers set foot on sand. [Sometimes before they set foot on sand--Ed]

Halberstam's perceptiveness and blindness were both evident in an interview he gave to the San Jose Mercury News in 1993. He said he was worried about journalism's future because "The public perceives us as being too powerful and too arrogant." But he went on to state his version of the problem: "We give a jarring perception of reality to people." Journalists knew reality, and people weren't strong enough to handle the shrink-wrapped truth.

Cue Nicholson's nostril-flaring "You can't handle the truth" riff.

Halberstam was the best and brightest of the old journalistic era, which will not be resurrected. He elegantly wove tales of government and corporate mendacity. He orated brilliantly about oppression. He worked hard, gained disciples and received not only numerous honorary degrees but something more important -- articles upon his death with headlines like "Halberstam was my journalistic hero" and "Saying goodbye to a mentor."

According to song, the day Buddy Holly's plane crashed in 1959 was the day the music died. When a car broadsided the one Halberstam was riding in, he died almost instantly as a broken rib punctured his heart. The journalism he was the heart of, one where reporters claimed to possess gnostic wisdom, is also dying. We've entered an era of citizen journalism, where everyone has a camera and YouTube replaces You Believe What I Write.

I think it's safe to say that to a man, the Marxist and socialist elite journalists of Halberstam's era believed in Marx's 19th century smokestack-era theories that eventually, the workers would own the means of production and enjoy the full fruits of their labor.

When the information revolution finally came (surprisingly peacefully--we simply all went down to Best Buy and bought PCs and cable modems), the workers not only had an infinitely greater variety of news sources when compared to, say, Halberstam's 1965 quagmire mass media three TV network salad days. They could make their own news and opinion if they wanted to. And the men of Halberstam's era hate this new era--really, viscerally hate it.

It's the new reality. But I guess some legacy journalists just aren’t strong enough to handle the shrink-wrapped truth.

The five myths of Harry Reid; related thoughts here.

Claudia Rosett describes the hellish North Korean famine:

When the Soviet system imploded in 1991, there was great concern that in the immediate aftermath the populations of post-communist nations, suddenly cut loose from Big Brother, might starve. They didn't. Although life was hard, people used their newfound freedoms to cope. But in one of the Soviet-engendered communist states where the totalitarian regime survived — North Korea — the result was famine.

Perhaps because no TV cameras were allowed in, and far too little information was allowed out, the North Korean famine of the 1990s remains one of the most muffled horrors of modern times. By now, however, there have been enough studies, reports, and tales from defectors to confirm that the deprivation in North Korea was catastrophic: One million or more people died, and food shortages continue to this day.

Ted Turner and the editors at the L.A. Times should read Claudia's article--naturally, the odds that they actually will are virtually zero.

Andy McCarthy explains why in Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s "present hour of need, his only enthusiastic supporter appears to be the president":

Throughout her tumultuous tenure as attorney general, Janet Reno could always rely on Democrats and liberals to circle the wagons when critics ripped her judgment, competence, and forthrightness. They’d close ranks when the opposition claimed her Justice Department elevated political considerations over legal ones. By contrast, in Alberto Gonzales’s present hour of need, his only enthusiastic supporter appears to be the president. Why?

Because of politics. Not politicization, as in partisan obstruction of particular investigations. Rather, good, old-fashioned politics in the best sense of the word: namely, an administration’s accountability to its supporters and its fealty to the policies that induced their support.

The Reno Justice Department, whatever else you may think about it, cared passionately about signal “progressive” causes and backed them to the hilt, regardless of criticism. To the contrary, the Gonzales Justice Department and, indeed, the president, often turn spaghetti-spined when the priorities of their base are at stake. How surprising, then, that when friends are most sorely needed there are none to be found.

You can only tune out your base for so long before it reciprocates.

(Via Ed Morrissey, who reminds us to get used to the endless hearings. "We have two years to live in Subpoenaville".)

As Charles Johnson writes, "How could Reuters’ experienced editors miss a fake picture that was so bleeding obvious, at every step of the way toward publication? Answer: because they just didn’t care":

It’s interesting that in an age of obsessive media focus on scandals, no wire service or newspaper has ever followed up on that story in any real way. Adnan Hajj seemed to simply vanish off the face of the earth; no interviews, no photos of him, no investigations, nothing; just that one statement where he claimed his fakery was to “remove dust.”

For blowing the whistle on Hizballah’s manipulation of Reuters, LGF was smeared by numerous leftists; the diversionary tactics ranged from personal attacks to attempts to minimize the importance of the faked photos.

Now the Harvard Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, hardly a bastion of neocon wingnut thinking, has issued a paper that absolutely skewers the media for their outrageously biased and terrorist-enabling behavior. Maybe this will be a little harder for them to ignore: How the Media Partnered With Hezbollah: Harvard’s Cautionary Report.

Just add it to all of the evidence here.

Interesting posts by Neo-Neocon and Dr. Helen on matching patients and therapists, and the potential prejudices on both sides of the equation. Neo writes:

And, although this sounds like some sort of bad joke, I know quite a few therapists who say they would have difficulty treating a client whom they know to be a Republican. So it’s not just clients who want therapists who are as much like themselves as possible—some therapists return the favor.

Dr. Helen responds:

If therapists only want patients they deem to be "deserving" of empathy, how empathetic can they really be?

Read the rest.

Terms used to describe Iraq? Kosovo? No, quotes from a San Francisco Chronicle article about...San Francisco.

And so as she flies the blue lady of the skies into the sunset, we say "Aloha, 9 O'clock Rosie!" and return to our duties. Let me remind you the Weblog is open 24 hours for your dining and dancing pleasure.

Or not--it depends on whether or not The Most Important Story In Television History actually pans out tomorrow morning.

John Hinderaker of Power Line spots yet another candidate for the sequel to Unhinged:

Given the level of hysteria that is constantly being whipped up by the Party of Hate, we've worried for a while that someone is going to get hurt. Cases of voter intimidation and violence against Republican campaign headquarters were widely reported during the last election cycle. A Democratic poster whom we had to ban from the Power Line Forum recently went to the home of a Republican campus leader and assaulted him, resulting in criminal charges.

Most recently, a Democrat and former political candidate named Matthew Hunter Kramer has been arrested for threatening the executive director of the Republican Party of Nevada with a rifle, tearing photos of President Bush and Vice-President Cheney off the wall of the party's headquarters, threatening staffers at the Republican Party's office, and "warning that he would be back if President Bush vetoed an emergency war spending bill being considered by Congress."

It's no secret that Democrats are trying to bully their way back into power. But bullying with rifles--as well as "swords, knives, a flare gun, a shotgun and shells," which also were found in Kramer's car, ups the ante considerably.

Rifles, swords, knives, a flare gun, a shotgun and shells in Nevada? Yes, it's time for the obvious "Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good time in Vegas with all this stuff" line.

But more importantly, these incidents happen mainly around election time. Why the early start--and what does it foreshadow for the fall of 2008?

Over at the Pajamas' mother of the ship, The Manolo weighs in on the $400 a pop haircut of the John Edwards:

Southern politicians and televangelists know, the beautiful and important southern hair can make up for many sins of the flesh and spirit.

Don't miss it, even if you're one of "the Manolo’s internet friends who still go to the Super-Duper Cuts, or the Floyd the Barber", and not the Pink Sapphire.

This doesn't sound like a smart move on Speaker Pelosi's part:

WASHINGTON, Apr. 24, 2007- - As the House and Senate prepare to vote this week on the final conference report on the $124 billion troop funding bill -- which would also mandate that U.S. combat troops begin withdrawing from Iraq on October 1 at the latest -- Gen. David Petraeus is scheduled to come to the Hill tomorrow to brief lawmakers on the progress of the recent troop escalation.

ABC News has learned, however, that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., will not attend the briefing.

"She can't make the briefing tomorrow," a Democratic aide told ABC News Tuesday evening. "But she spoke with the General via phone today at some length."

A Pelosi aide said the speaker on Tuesday requested a 1-on-1 meeting with Petraeus but that could not be worked out. He said their phone conversation lasted 30 minutes.

Last week House Democratic leaders were criticized by their Republican counterparts when they initially declined an invitation from Petraeus to brief House members on the status of the war due to "scheduling conflicts."

House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, called the decision "irresponsible" and constituted a "dereliction of duty." But by the end of the day Pelosi's office changed course and scheduled a briefing for Members of the House for Wednesday, April 25.

The office of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., says the senator will attend the classified briefing with senators on Wednesday at 4 p.m.

But his mind is also already made up.

Robert Bidinotto, editor of the Objectivist New Individualist magazine agrees with my take from Saturday on Michael Bloomberg and (original inner circle member) Nathaniel Branden's "Stolen Concept" concept.

Speaking of Bloomberg, I was going to comment on his recent fashion faux pas, but the photo of Val Kilmer that Tammy Bruce found today makes Mayor Mike seem like the very definition of sybaritic elegance.

Update: City Journal's Nicole Gelinas has more on Bloomberg's public and private transportation woes.

...By insinuating that their general is a liar. Which is merely a repeat of this, writ large.

Update: Related thoughts from Jonah Goldberg.

More: CNN's headline writer lives out Kinsley's Law.

Sheryl Crow is taking the path of least resistance and declaring her toilet paper manifesto to be a joke. I think that’s a wise move on her part, though the damage to her rep has already been done. Part of the problem is that zealots tend not to have a wild-‘n’-crazy madcap, whacky sense of humor. (See also: Gore, Al. I don’t recall Rachel Carlson or Paul Ehrlich being a big hit at the Improv or the Café Wah in the 1960s, either.)

Lileks declared her Friday cri-de-Cottonelle a satire, but anyone who’s uttered a quote such as this one isn’t, in all likelihood, the second coming of Terry Southern. As Malcolm Muggeridge noted as far back as the early 1960s, real life is becoming increasingly hard to satirize, and Crow’s remarks certainly dovetail nicely with earlier comments from her partner in eco-zealotry, the high-flying Laurie David.

Like I said yesterday, Crow’s timing was wonderful, even if her humor was so subtle it flew under many people’s radars. And fortunately, it’s done inestimable harm to the anti-toilet paper movement (and oh how these people must hate her right now).

And to that, we can only give thanks.

Update: More from the "is it a parody or isn't it" file: Remember kids, "Ham is not a toy, and that there are consequences for being nonchalant about where you put your sandwich".

Linking to this Washington Times item on the deputy White House press secretary who's taking Tony Snow's place while he's recovering from cancer, Kathryn Jean Lopez describes her as "Dana Perino, American Hero":

One veteran reporter describes 5-foot-1-inch as "a little tiny thing," but the deputy White House press secretary brings to her job a big reputation for brains and the Wild West toughness of her native Wyoming.

Witness her recent exchange with Helen Thomas, who has covered every presidency since she followed the Kennedy campaign to Washington. When Mrs. Thomas, 86, kept firing questions at Mrs. Perino, 34, the presidential spokeswoman cut her off.

"Do you want me to answer the question, Helen, or do you want to ask questions? It's really hard to concentrate here. What's your question?" Mrs. Perino demanded.

Mrs. Thomas replied, "You repeat yourself so much that. "

"So do you," Mrs. Perino interrupted, then immediately called on another reporter.

Mrs. Perino is "the first press secretary to cut Helen Thomas no slack," said Ann Compton of ABC News, who has spent more than three decades as a White House correspondent.

Like I've said...

Or, Springtime For Mao Tse-Tung: James Lileks checks in with a report from Beijing, about as off-off-off-off-Broadway as theater can get.

Update: Speaking of China, over at TCS Daily, Nick Schulz has some (much less satiric) thoughts on its role in the global economy--"The Lego-fication of Heavy Industry".

Somehow, when it comes to Edwards, I don't think (the other) Roger Simon has much to worry about on either of those issues.

I don't think it was her original intent, but a nation recovering from of a week of darkness has found much-needed comic relief in Sheryl Crow's remarks on Friday. And that's really all you can ask of--or should expect from--a Hollywood entertainer.

Before Boris Yeltsin passed away, he would have been amused at how long the Soviet Union's existence seemed to linger on in the minds of nostalgic liberal journalists. Two weeks before MSNBC's very public meltdown in judgment last week, Frank Martin noticed this mental holiday from whoever writes its Website's headlines. But hey, fair is fair--the Internet headline writer over at Dan Rather's CBS believed that the Soviet Union was in existence less than three years ago!

The Pulitzer Prize winning author and journalist was killed today in a car crash near the Bay Area's Dumbarton Bridge, according to the San Jose Mercury News.

(Via Hugh Hewitt's radio show.)

Via Libertas, here's a 2006 look into the sanitary and dining habits of Sheryl Crow's partner in warming, forestry and BDS, Laurie David:

Comparing Americans' use of toilet paper with national security, Laurie David believes the paper industry is responsible for the destruction of the environment; she now only buys post-consumer waste products. (See my previous column about this subject, which, despite Ms. David's political rant, conclusively establishes that the paper industry is, in fact, a strong proponent of conservation, and was very early into the Green movement. More to the point, we have more protected forests today than at any other point in American history.)

Laurie states:

"I started reading about paper and toilet paper and cutting trees down to make toilet tissue for the country and I was doing a contest with myself to see which member of my family would complain about the toilet paper first."

For the curious, Ms. David's husband was the first to complain; he was apparently unable to sit without enduring pain because of the family's new toilet paper.

Even worse is David's chic but hypocritical environmentalism at her summer home in Martha's Vineyard. She was issued a "notice of apparent violations" for building a 26-foot-long barbecue station, stone-and-concrete bonfire pit, and outdoor theater on an environmentally sensitive patch of their 14-acre North Road property without the proper permits. They were also cited for tearing up protected vegetation to make way for a lush, sodded lawn, among other crimes against nature.

The commission has since ordered her to remove the offending structures and restore the area to its previous state. All these violations were allegedly done to prepare for a political fundraiser hosted by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (another faux Green). Alas, there's no such thing as cheap environmentalism on the Vineyard.

Laurie David has been labeled a "Gulfstream liberal" by Eric Alterman, himself a proud member of the Left and a regular columnist for the Nation. He recognizes that Ms. David's brand of environmentalism is nothing more than a facade, a distraction from the financially secure yet intellectually boring life of the fabulously wealthy. But this hobby has dire consequences for the rest of us. By transforming her politics into a religion, and by demonizing all who question her positions, including the author Michael Crichton, who actually is a Harvard trained scientist and physician, Laurie David makes the environmental movement seem bizarre and more than a bit ridiculous.

As Laura Ingraham put it today, "You know how liberals are always telling us to stay out of their bedrooms? Well, we should start telling them, 'Stay out of our bathrooms!'"

Not to mention our kitchens, hardware stores, etc., etc, along with meddling with the laws that control Ingraham's primary broadcast medium.

The Boston Globe claims today that "The 2008 election is the Democrats' to lose". And one of the easiest ways to lose it would be from a consumer backlash to all of the overreaching that's sure to continue during the next year and a half.

Byron York writes, "In light of the eyewitness' account, another way of saying it might be, how hardened and removed from reality must a person be to refuse to be jabbed in the chest by Sheryl Crow?"

I think after reading this, I'd want to run baby, run baby, run, myself. Possibly in one of these compact, economical, fuel-efficient hybrid vehicles.

Update: Don Surber has more fun with Crow's lyrics, and Jonah Goldberg ponders Sheryl's home cooking: "Who's up for some hand rolled sushi and then some steak tartare? I hear she makes it all herself".

Hey, if it makes you happy...

As Glenn Reynolds puts it, England's Telegraph reports that Britain is wasting away:

"A third of women graduates will never have children, research has concluded. The number of highly educated women who are starting families has plummeted in the past decade, according to findings that provide the most detailed insight yet into education and fertility. . . . A third of women graduates will never have children, research has concluded. The number of highly educated women who are starting families has plummeted in the past decade, according to findings that provide the most detailed insight yet into education and fertility."

It's the demography, stupid!

Yesterday, we linked to an Associated Press story titled, "Mass Shootings More Common Since 1960s". Newsbusters notes that the real story is buried nine paragraphs in:

"Duwe found that the prevalence of mass murders, defined as the killing of four or more people in a 24-hour period, tends to mirror that of homicide generally. The increase in mass killings during the 1960s was accompanied by a doubling in the overall murder rate after the relatively peaceful 1940s and '50s.

"In fact, Duwe found that mass murder was just as common during the 1920s and early 1930s as it is today."

As Newsbusters notes:

Unfortunately, as a Google search will reveal, hundreds of news outlets have carried this AP story. Only a handful of the readers will realize that paragraphs nine and ten of the article establish that the rest of the article is a fact-free recitation of false premises.

Just the way AP wants it.

And (just to keep our Quadrophenia riffs going) asks, "Is It Me, For A Moment?"

Modernism is virtually synonymous with the Helvetica Bold typeface: it's everywhere from Amtrak's trains to American Airlines' planes, to the headlines of virtually all IRS forms. So it's not surprising that New York's Museum of Modern Art is currently celebrating this ubiquitous font's 50th birthday.

Fascinating Canadian Broadcasting Corporation podcast with the great Theodore Dalyrmple on his 2006 book, Our Culture, What's Left of It.

Update: And speaking of civilization’s red queen’s race...

In a review of Faking It: The Quest For Authenticity In Popular Music by Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor appearing in England's self-proclaimed socialist New Statesman, Jeff Sharlet argues that "all pop musicians are fakes":

Leadbelly, Barker and Taylor reveal, was by necessity a master of "faking it", a sophisticated musician of cosmopolitan taste limited to a repertoire of "Negro" songs and told by his manager to perform in prison garb. That manager was John Lomax, one of the early 20th-century giants of what has come to be known as "roots music". "The music that was, for Lomax, the most authentic," write the authors, "the most black, the most free from 'white influence', was the most primitive." That doesn't mean Leadbelly was primitive, only that Lomax and, decades later, Cobain decided to believe that he was, the better to break the bonds of artificiality they felt modernity and celebrity imposed. Leadbelly was a tool. This shifty truth comes to us by way not of postmodernism, but of old-timey Marxist analysis. In 1937, the novelist Richard Wright, profiling Leadbelly for the Daily Worker, declared his coerced performances "one of the greatest cultural swindles in history".

But that's not quite right, either. Wright recognised Lomax's manipulation of Leadbelly (who later successfully sued Lomax), but he assumed there was a genuine Leadbelly behind the music, a real black expression minstrel-ised by the white man. In fact, many of Leadbelly's songs came from white folks, who'd learned them from black musicians, who'd composed them with African inflections as reinterpreted by white musicians eager to add "floating" rhythms to the marching beat of Scots-Irish reels. The strongest argument of Faking It is for the endless "miscegenation" of music. Great popular music is always a collage of cultures, while the quest for authenticity all too often functions as a means of policing racial boundaries.

Consider the case of Mississippi John Hurt, the subject of the book's longest and most powerful essay. First, there's his name: Mississippi was an add-on from the record company. Then there's his reputation as a patriarch of the Delta blues: Hurt wasn't from the Mississippi Delta and he insisted he wasn't a blues musician. And then there is the problem of his blackness, thought by the white fans who rediscovered him in the 1960s to be pure and profound ("Uncle Remus come to life," write the authors). When Hurt was "discovered" the first time, he was performing for black and white audiences backed by a white fiddler and a white guitar player who also happened to be the local sheriff. He recorded blues because the record company insisted he do so. Meanwhile, Jimmie Rodgers, a white musician who happened to be a bluesman, recorded what came to be known as "country" music because the blues were reserved by the market for black men. One more twist: when Harry Smith included two of Hurt's songs on his great Smithsonian Folk Anthology, most listeners mistook the black musician for a white hillbilly.

The term "folk" itself presents more problems. Until 1949, country music was simply "folk", as was much "black" music. Racism was the centrifuge that separated them: Henry Ford, for instance, poured money into a campaign to promote square-dancing as a form of authentic (read: white and Protestant) Americanism. One of the pioneering producers of "old-time" music in the early 20th century, Ralph Peer, later boasted: "I invented the hillbilly and n***** stuff."

The weakness of Faking It, otherwise a fascinating and nimble investigation of pop's paradoxes, is its failure to explore the political implications to which it so often points.

The leftwing readers of The New Statesman might not like the territory it explores, but that topic was covered extensively in this article on Pete Seeger by Howard Husock in a 2005 issue of City Journal, which dovetails surprisingly well with Sharlet's essay.

(Via Maggie's Farm.)

Glenn Reynolds contrasts half a century in academia, from 1957's Far Rockaway High School Rifle Team to this Zen moment of mental minimalism:

Meanwhile, in 2007 Yale is banning fake weapons on stage. And to think that universities hold themselves out as bastions of critical thinking where people can make fine distinctions . . . .

So the audiences at Yale will giggle at a production without realistic prop weapons. Then go home and watch The Sopranos, 24, reruns of Miami Vice, Gunsmoke, Full Metal Jacket, etc.

As one clinical psychologist noted last year:

The purpose of an elite university education is no longer to become educated -- to acquire a well-furnished mind and familiarize oneself with the best things that have been thought and said -- but to become stupid by elevating a means to an end. Thus, upon contact with his luckless students, Professor Taylor tells them “that if they are not more confused and uncertain at the end of the course than they were at the beginning, I will have failed.” In short, the goal of education is to make students as lost and confused as Professor Taylor, through the deification of man’s capacity to doubt anything.

Meanwhile, AP notes, "Mass Shootings More Common Since 1960s"

And all through those years, the same questions have been asked: What is it about modern-day America that provokes such random violence? Is it the decline of traditional morals? The depiction of violence in entertainment? The ready availability of lethal firepower?

For some reason though, this topic is never explored.

Update: A commenter on The Volokh Conspiracy notes:

"I wonder if Dean Trachtenberg realizes that elsewhere, the university encourages sword-wielding psychos to practice their craft." Let's make them use wooden swords, too.

For the sake of Yale's apparently fragile collective emotional health, why not cut to the chase (with dulled plastic-tipped kindergarten safety scissors, of course) and ban them outright on campus?

Steve Green of VodkaPundit has--appropriately enough--a new cocktail on his site today:

Freely adapted from Joe's Lemon Drop, available at Plate World Cuisine in Colorado Springs. Joe is a damn fine bartender, but my version is prettier -- Melissa made me practice making it. A lot. Sure, it's a girly drink, but it's also a great way to get my wife to drink something with a high proof.

Follow the link for the recipe. A similar drink that combines pretty aesthetics with a velvet punch would the Aviation cocktail, one of the few gin-based drinks my wife enjoys. (Its name dates back to the golden age of commercial flying, but its nom de booze also describes the effect that a couple of these will have on the imbiber.)

Astonishingly, they have it on the menu at the Olives Restaurant in the Bellagio in Vegas--and they make a pretty darn good version of it. Though anyone can, if you can find a bottle of maraschino liqueur. Apparently, in the late 1990s it was fairly scarce according to the late, lamented Hotwired "Cocktail" Website, but I believe it's now readily available at Beverages & More, and presumably, other well-stocked liquor stores.

Elsewhere in the booze blogging world, TigerHawk has some thoughts on the current state of the drinking age.

Here's the latest proposal to overtax New Yorkers from Nurse Mayor Bloomberg, who says he'll "fight like heck" to pass it before leaving office:

Mayor Bloomberg defended his plan to charge motorists $8 to enter the most congested parts of Manhattan - laying the groundwork yesterday for a fierce battle with Albany.

"You know, it sounds like a lot of money, but you go to a movie, it's $12," Bloomberg said on his weekly WABC-AM radio show. "So, let's, you know, put some of this stuff in perspective here."

[Gee, I'm not I'd want to compare the city I govern to an industry in longterm decline--Ed]

Bloomberg said motorists who drive into Manhattan tend to be the "people who can afford it," and he suggested he would "fight like heck" to get the Legislature to approve the plan before he leaves office in December 2009.

"Using economics to influence public behavior is something this country is built on," he declared. "It's called capitalism."

That last quote sounds like a textbook example of what Nathaniel Branden dubbed "The Stolen Concept" forty years ago: in this case using capitalism, which describes a voluntary exchange of money for goods and services in a wide-open free market. They'll be nothing voluntary for motorists who wish to enter the Big Apple if Mayor Bloomberg's proposal becomes law.

Back in February, I linked to a particularly hateful Bill Maher rant (on a topic that evidently is a theme of his), and wrote:

On Jay Leno last night, Bill Maher fired off a rant against President Bush that would have been well at home in many Internet forums and chatrooms, including this passage:

"When people say to me, 'You hate America,' I don't hate America. I love America. I am just embarrassed that it has been taken over by people like evangelicals, by people who do not believe in science and rationality. It is the 21st century. And I will tell you, my friend. The future does not belong to the evangelicals. The future does not belong to religion."

Maher couldn't be more wrong: the future does belong to religion. But it will come in a few different flavors.

CNN explores how one aggressively proselytizing religion handles its indulgences; related thoughts from Charles Krauthammer.

I wish Even Sayet had a link to this quote by Barbara Walters (such as a transcript or video clip at the MRC), but assuming it's accurate, this really does sum it all up, doesn't it?

When Peter Jennings, not long ago one of only three monolithic New York City newsmen charged with informing the public about the goings on around the globe, died recently, his colleague, Barbara Walters could think of no better way to eulogize him than to say “what made Peter great was that he knew there was no such thing as the truth.”

Ironically enough, the original postmodernist would agree.

Glenn Reynolds links to this piece by Melanie Phillips in England's Spectator titled, "I Found Saddam’s WMD Bunkers" and asks:

Er, wouldn't this be news if it were true?

Maybe not, these days. . . .

Indeed.^TM

As James Lileks told Hugh Hewitt yesterday when dicussing the media's handling of the VT massacre:

It’s as though sometimes, they’re incapable of realizing the distinction between the truth and the media narrative. Since [the media] presume themselves to be working objectively for the sake of uncovering truth, and therefore, what they put out must be truth. And often, it isn’t. Often, the first impressions are wrong, and that’s the impression that sticks, however, and therefore, everybody believes that the chaos that enveloped Katrina is actually what happened, regardless of what we learned afterward. If the media narrative says it, then they believe it has to be true, because if they don’t, then their own profession and their ability to do it is somewhat in question, isn’t it?

How else to explain the cognitive dissonance between news reports such as all of these items, and Saddam's own actual use of them, and the media's near monolithic belief that "Saddam didn't have WMDs".

Update: Unrelated to the above item, but The Anchoress has a post that spoils another media narrative.

In The New Criterion's Armavirumque blog, Roger Kimball has some thoughts on cable television's predictably wall-to-wall coverage of Cho Seung-Hui, the Virginia Tech killer. "Particularly grating", Kimball writes, is "the endless speculation about Cho's motives. He had no motives...what Cho had was a mirror, not a motive".

Kimball links to an exceptional essay in Time magazine by David von Drehle:

A generation ago, the social critic Christopher Lasch diagnosed narcissism as the signal disorder of contemporary American culture. The cult of celebrity, the marketing of instant gratification, skepticism toward moral codes and the politics of victimhood were signs of a society regressing toward the infant stage. You don't have to buy Freud's explanation or Lasch's indictment, however, to see an immediate danger in the way we examine the lives of mass killers. Earnestly and honestly, detectives and journalists dig up apparent clues and weave them into a sort of explanation. In the days after Columbine, for example, Harris and Klebold emerged as alienated misfits in the jock culture of their suburban high school. We learned about their morbid taste in music and their violent video games. Largely missing, though, was the proper frame around the picture: the extreme narcissism that licensed these boys, in their minds, to murder their teachers and classmates.

Something similar is now going on with Cho, whose florid writings and videos were an almanac of gripes. "I'm so lonely," he moped to a teacher, failing to mention that he often refused to answer even when people said hello. Of course he was lonely.

One minor quibble, and it's not aimed at von Drehle, nor meant to imply any sort of causality. But given the publisher of this essay, it does seem slightly disengenous to discuss extreme narcissism in a magazine whose recent publicity stunt was this.

The first cut of a roll of Charmin, I guess.

To paraphrase something that Mark Steyn wrote last year about Israel after Reuters' infamous "Picture Kill" scandal, here's a question for western news organizations: If global warming is such a deadly imminent threat, then why is it necessary to fake the evidence?

You will know Synchronicity! Reader Stephen Shields sends this amusing juxtaposition on Memeorandum earlier today.

Charles Johnson links to this Smithsonian profile of Sayyid Qutb, Osama bin Laden's chief mentor. You may remember Qutb from this January post, documenting his reaction to America's decadent show business strumpets. But the Smithsonian piece delves into the mindset that would cause such a reaction:

The core problem with the United States, for Qutb, was not something Americans did, but simply what America was—“the New World...is spellbinding.” It was more than a land of pleasures without limit. In America, unlike in Egypt, dreams could come true. Qutb understood the danger this posed: America’s dazzle had the power to blind people to the real zenith of civilization, which for Qutb began with Muhammad in the seventh century and reached its apex in the Middle Ages, carried triumphantly by Muslim armies.

Qutb rejected the idea that “new” was also “improved.” The Enlightenment, the Industrial Age—modernity itself—were not progress. “The true value of every civilization...lies not in the tools man has invented or in how much power he wields,” Qutb wrote. “The value of civilizations lay in what universal truths and worldviews they have attained.” The modern obsession with science and invention was a moral regression to the primitive condition of the first toolmakers.

As Mackubin Thomas Owens wrote a year after 9/11, that tragic day "revealed an emerging geopolitical reality: that the world's most important fault line is not between the rich and the poor, but between those who accept modernity and those who reject it."

Islamofascism is by far anti-modernism's most violent manifestation, but it's far from the only worldview that rejects the notion of modernity, of course: These fellows have much in common with Qutb's mindset--as would people as diverse as this gentleman and this gentlelady.

Or as David Brooks wrote in 2005:

In other words, the conflict between the jihadists and the West is a conflict within the modern, globalized world. The extremists are the sort of utopian rebels modern societies have long produced.

In his book "Globalized Islam," the French scholar Olivier Roy points out that today's jihadists have a lot in common with the left-wing extremists of the 1930's and 1960's. Ideologically, Islamic neofundamentalism occupies the same militant space that was once occupied by Marxism. It draws the same sorts of recruits (educated second-generation immigrants, for example), uses some of the same symbols and vilifies some of the same enemies (imperialism and capitalism).

Roy emphasizes that the jihadists are the products of globalization, and its enemies. They are detached from any specific country or culture, he says, and take up jihad because it attaches them to something. They are generally not politically active before they take up jihad. They are looking to strike a vague blow against the system and so give their lives (and deaths) shape and meaning.

In short, the Arab world is maintaining its nearly perfect record of absorbing every bad idea coming from the West. Western ideas infuse the radicals who flood into Iraq to blow up Muslims and Americans alike.

Read the rest of the Smithsonian piece for more insights into how such a worldview develops.

Somewhat akin to global warming advocates who hate seeing anything in print from someone who doesn't worship at the temple of Gaia, Greg Mitchell is still in search of a monolithic legacy media. Here's how Mitchell ends his Editor & Publisher piece on Bill Moyer's upcoming agitpropumentary:

The program closes on a sad note, with Moyers pointing out that "so many of the advocates and apologists for the war are still flourishing in the media." He then runs a pre-war clip of President Bush declaring, "We cannot wait for the final proof: the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." Then he explains: "The man who came up with it was Michael Gerson, President Bush's top speechwriter.

"He has left the White House and has been hired by the Washington Post as a columnist."

Shocking. But even worse: ABC has given a microphone to another former White House aide who recklessly called for the assassination of Saddam.

Jay Nordlinger wirtes, "If you have not seen The Lives of Others, I urge you to do so at the first opportunity":

This is the movie about the Stasi, the East German secret police. Since the dawn of film, there have been about two anti-Communist movies. And that’s because the people who make movies are — um, let’s just say not anti-Communist. At any rate, if you’re going to make one of the precious few anti-Communist movies, it had better be good. And this one is great.

I couldn’t help being amused at the information given at the beginning of the movie. We are told that the year is 1984, long before Gorbachev, when life in the Soviet bloc is dark, hopeless, and grim.

Well, I myself came of political age about this time, and East Germany was always portrayed to me as a quite benign state. Even an admirable one! You see, we in the West had “political rights,” such as those to speech and assembly; and those in the East had “economic rights,” such as those to food and shelter. And East Germany was something of a model: socialist but not Stalinist. Why, in Erich Honecker Land, a form of justice had been realized!

Do you remember, you old television-watchers, how Bob Novak used to tease Al Hunt about loving East Germany?

In any case, we’re all anti-Communists now, which is to be welcomed. Although some of us are lagging behind on Cuba, aren’t we?

You read (honest) materials about East Germany, you read (honest) materials about Cuba — very, very similar. The Germans shot would-be escapees on a wall; the Cubans shoot would-be escapees in the water. Once the Cuban people are allowed to see The Lives of Others, they will effortlessly recognize everything.

Nordlinger's thoughts on the universality of The Lives Of Others (and surely the 1984 time period of the movie is no accident) reminded me of something that Theodore Dalrymple recently wrote about George Orwell. The bulk of the article is now behind The New Criterion's pay-to-read firewall, but fortunately, this excerpt was quoted elsewhere:

Insofar as it is possible for an intellectual in a liberal democracy to be brave, Orwell was brave.

Perhaps the most genuine and moving encomia to him I ever heard were in Romania in the dark days just before the downfall of Ceausescu. Nineteen Eighty-Four circulated clandestinely, and several Romanians told me that they found it astonishing how an Englishman, who had never so much as set foot in a communist country, seemed to understand their own experience from the inside, as it were, and sometimes better than they understood it themselves, so that the meaning of their own experience became clearer to them as a result of reading him. And this they found immensely consoling, the very opposite of Primo Levi’s terrible nightmare that after he was released from Auschwitz no one would listen to him or believe him because what he had to say was so utterly at variance with all previous human experience. Orwell’s book reassured the Romanians to whom I spoke that, the Iron Curtain notwithstanding, they were not alone, and also that the political conditions under which they were living were highly abnormal and therefore, however apparently durable, historically temporary. Dismal and pessimistic as the book may have seemed to a reader in the west, it was read with immense joy in the east. Few authors have ever been loved and venerated as Orwell was loved and venerated by the people to whom I spoke in Romania.

I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that there are a few samizdat copies of 1984 floating around Fidel's island gulag; I wonder what his imprisoned citizens think of it.

Mickey Kaus links to up and coming tyro blogger "N. Ephron"; I appreciate his willingness to bring new and unknown talent to light in the Blogosphere. (Will you stop this riff?--Ed) Ephron thoroughly puts NBC and their airings of Imus and Cho into sharp perspective:

Another reason I didn't write about Imus, incidentally, is that by mid-week, the entry level into the Imus-commentary sweepstakes changed, and since I do not have two daughters, much less two beautiful black daughters, I was ineligible to comment on how Imus' remarks would deeply affect them (if they were old enough to read) or had already affected them so much that they would probably never recover. I might even have made the mistake of talking about Imus' "victims," when actually the victims were the only true winners of the week, and by the way, how bad can it be for the victims that they were insulted by a lunatic but then got to be on Oprah?

That's exactly right. We've defined the V-word down many, many notches when a championship basketball team can feel "scarred for life" over the ramblings of a shock jock with a salon for liberal Beltway elites. I wonder if any of the students (or their coach) have gained any perspective on their language after the Virginia Tech massacre, which left 32 real victims, plus hundreds of grieving relatives and friends.

Alec Baldwin, a decade of class: It was nine years ago that he ranted to Conan O'Brien and his audience that "We would stone Henry Hyde to death and we would go to their homes and we’d kill their wives and their children!" This month, as Ace notes, he goes Paul Anka on his 11-year old daughter, via her mom's answering machine:

After Ireland failed to answer her father's scheduled morning phone call from New York on April 11, Alec went berserk on her voice mail, saying "Once again, I have made an ass of myself trying to get to a phone," adding, "you have insulted me for the last time."

Switching his train of thought, Baldwin then exercised his incredible parenting skills and took a shot at his ex-wife, declaring, "I don't give a damn that you're 12-years-old or 11-years-old, or a child, or that your mother is a thoughtless pain in the ass who doesn't care about what you do." The irate Baldwin went on to say, "You've made me feel like s**t" and threatened to "straighten your ass out."

"This crap you pull on me with this goddamn phone situation that you would never dream of doing to your mother," screamed Baldwin, "and you do it to me constantly over and over again."

About three weeks ago, I linked to another Hollywood tirade and wrote that it's probably just another day amongst the calm, cool, peace-loving denizens of Hollywood.

I'd like to think that somewhere, Cathy Seipp is loving all of this.

The Donald's going to the mattresses--he just sent The View a Sicilian message. Or something.

Mickey Kaus has some thoughts on NBC's decision to run Cho Seung-Hui's material:

NBC's responsibility seems especially heavy since, as the sole recipient of Cho's posthumous publicity kit, they had the power to keep it bottled up and deny him the reward he sought, no? That's not usually the case--i.e., when a killer is still at large or communicates through multiple media outlets.**... P.S.: Who did more damage, Brian Williams or Don Imus? That seems like a no-brainer too.

The latter man has sort of gone down the memory hole temporarily, because of the horror of the Virginia Tech massacre followed by the debate over NBC's decision to air its instigator’s video only two days afterwards. But Jonah Goldberg, Victor Davis Hanson and Tony Blankley have essays on Imus and what his firing says about our culture (or our overculture, to be precise) that are each well worth your time.

Rush makes a great point here:

Let me make a comparison for you. Here is NBC playing this stuff over and over and over again. However, when terrorists dispatch and decapitate Iraqis or Americans, that can't be shown. "Oh, no, no, no! That's too graphic!" We can't look at the replays of the planes hitting the World Trade Center. "No, no, no, no! That's too emotionally draining. It's too soon!" Why, even when the movie United 93 came out people in New York said, "It's too soon. It's too traumatic! We can't watch this." But we can certainly watch video of snipers from Al-Qaeda in Iraq taking shots at American soldiers on CNN. But we cannot see terrorists decapitate Iraqis or Americans. That can't be shown. We can't see any of the horrors perpetrated by our enemies, ladies and gentlemen. "Oh, no, no, Mr. Limbaugh! That's just too traumatic. Why, the people can't handle that." That's not the real reason. Maybe it's because it might anger and make resolute the American public against vicious killers, who have no regard for human life. So while we can't watch that we are treated to this over and over again. This guy's gotten what he wanted. As I say, they played this stuff more times than this guy pulled the trigger, and you could look at this as an unpaid advertisement for the next crazy.

"Go ahead and come out and blaze away! Give us the scoop, and you'll get all kinds of coverage."

Immediately after 9/1, ABC News chief David Westin said:

"The question is, are we informing or titillating and causing unnecessary grief?" ABC News chief David Westin told the New York Times just days after the Sept. 11 attack. Explaining why his network decided not to show any pictures of people leaping to their deaths at the World Trade Center, he said, "Our responsibility is to inform the American public of what's going on, and, in going the next step, is it necessary to show people plunging to their death?"

If that's the standard (and as Rush points out above, the standard is eminently flexible, depending upon how the media wishes to exploit each crisis), then why on earth is NBC giving Cho Seung-Hui a national stage?

Rush Limbaugh tells his audience today:

Ladies and gentlemen, we are not going to play the audio of the Virginia Tech shooter on this program. It's airing constantly on cable. I think Fox News finally just suspended all video, both on their website and on the network. But the repeated replay of this stuff is literally nuts. You know, sports networks (well, the big networks that televise sports), refuse to televise some idiot that leaves the stands and runs around nude on the field or whatever. They don't do that because they don't want to encourage copycats.

Gosh, you don't say.

Nicole Gelinas has some thoughts on how Cho Seung-Hui "expertly manipulated NBC and its competitors":

Why did NBC News—as well as its competitors and print-media counterparts—show that video? Through the spectacular posthumous attention that the media have awarded him, Cho Seung-Hui has shown just how easy it is for an intelligent killer to manipulate sophisticated news organizations into serving as barely filtered propaganda pipelines.

Mass killers don’t operate in a vacuum, and Cho learned well from Columbine mass murderers Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. The Columbine killers made their own propaganda to accompany their attack, but they didn’t think to send it directly to the media before they killed 12 high school classmates and a teacher. Investigators kept most of the material that the two teens had created away from the public for years, until interest had waned (their major work, a video that they spent a year making, remains under government seal to this day). Klebold and Harris got famous, but they never planned well enough to use their mayhem as a platform to speak directly to the public.

I'm half surprised that Cho didn't upload his videos to YouTube in addition to snail-mailing them to NBC.

Webloggin has edited together a montage of NBC's promotional clips "to see how shamelessly they morphed the story about Cho into a story about Cho sending the video and manifesto to NBC. No wonder parents, relatives and friends are upset".

NBC's decision to air Cho's material has been the subject of virtually all of Hugh Hewitt's radio show today. Watch for transcripts and audio clips later tonight or tomorrow morning if you missed it.

Hugh's co-blogger Dean Barnett adds, "One wonders exactly how low the 21st century mainstream media can ultimately go".

It's a Red Queen's Race to the bottom.

As Glenn Reynolds recently wrote, "You know, for all the talk about bloggers not doing original reporting, it seems to me that lately the Blogosphere has had more people reporting from Iraq than all but a handful of MSM outlets".

One key example of that development is Michael Totten, whose latest dispatch from Iraq (Kirkuk to be specific) is online.

Over at the Pajamas mothership, of course:

This week’s podcast features Jeff Goldstein and Neo-neocon on the inexorable attraction of defeat in Iraq, America’s penchant for self-flagellation, and finding meaning in a chocolate Jesus. Why does doom sell, and why are we so susceptible to the pitch?

Hosted by Austin Bay, and produced by Ed Driscoll. Brought to you by Volvo USA.

Maybe Harry Reid should tune in.

Update: Found via Gateway Pundit, Ace explains to Reid the proper spin.

Kevin Maher of The Times of London is shocked--shocked!--that Grindhouse, directed by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez is about to be cut into millions of Fender Heavy guitar picks:

How, pundits asked, can a moronic sword’n’sandals romp such as 300 make $400 million at the box office, while a smart cine-literate action parody such as Grindhouse completely dies? The New York Times suggested that this wasn’t the end for the Weinsteins, just a bump in the road. But Business Week announced that it should be a lesson for Hollywood, and that dumb audience-friendly movies such as 300 and Ghost Rider were the way of the future.

Let's deconstruct that last sentence, shall we?

"Dumb"=Not dark and nihilistic. A film with easily recognized good guys and bad guys.

"Audience-friendly"=An escapist film designed to provide broad appeal to audiences, who will often in turn reward a film's makers with money and positive word of mouth--and sometimes even repeat business, all of which brings in more money.

"The way of the future"=The way that Hollywood has always worked, during times in which it's profitable. This just in: when Hollywood doesn't turn out "audience friendly" movies, the audience responds in kind, thus staying away, thus causing Hollywood to lose money.

And for more British cinematic cynicism, check out this line from the Times of London's review of the upcoming Spider-Man sequel:

Also disappointing is the inability of the director, Sam Raimi, to end the romp without a fleeting shot of the American flag. The Stars and Stripes just happens to be fluttering behind Spidey as he makes his triumphal return to honour, probity and good honest fist-fighting.

I think that counts as "audience-friendly".

At least in most of America.

In City Journal, Christopher Hitchens writes that "America’s first confrontation with the Islamic world helped forge a new nation’s character".

In ancient times, all roads led to Rome. Today, all roads for Democrats seeking the White House lead to Al Sharpton.

Malcolm Muggeridge's Law states that there is no way that a writer of fiction can compete with real life for its pure absurdity. Such as this example: "James E. McGreevey, who resigned the governorship under a cloud of scandal, has a new job teaching law, ethics and leadership at one of New Jersey’s public colleges".

McGreevey's course should run about 30 seconds. Ideally, it would consist of him instructing his students, "If you'd like to remain office, just do the opposite of everything I did, and you should be OK. Goodnight--drive safely!

(And speaking of driving--safely or otherwise--McGreevy's successor has some interesting ethics as well, of course.)

If you haven't heard it yet, don't miss my podcast from last year with Steve Malanga of City Journal on how New Jersey slowly succumbed to such perilous governmental ethics that John Fund dubbed it "Louisiana North".*

Read More »

On PBS, Dan Rather tells Bill Moyers that conservatives "have a slime machine and we know it."

This from a "journalist" who four years before ending his career with the disgrace of Ra^therGate was reading loaded copy like this on the air, all the while feigning objectivity.

"Just listen, if you can take Imus off the air, you can certainly keep [Cho] from having his own morning show."

--Michael Welner, ABC News consultant and forensic psychiatrist, during his appearance on Thursday’s Good Morning America.

Meanwhile, over at NBC's Today Show, this exchange:

MEREDITH VIEIRA: I will tell you that we had planned to speak to some family members of victims this morning but they cancelled their appearances because they were very upset with NBC for airing the images.

MATT LAUER: And let's be honest. There are some big differences of opinion right within this news division as to whether we should be airing this stuff at all, that we're taking the right course of action.

NBC's Brian Williams: “This was a sick business tonight, going on the air with this.”

As a follow-up to my thoughts earlier today on NBC's sensationalist, National Enquirer-style handling of the package of self-aggrandizing material sent to them from Cho Seung-Hui, don't miss Hugh Hewitt's comments. He asks, "The Single Worst Editorial Decision In The History Of Broadcast News?"

Two days ago I shared a stage with NBC News president Steve Capus. Earlier today I commented on what I considered to be his cluelessness about the contempt in which MSM is held as well as my amazement at Capus' pride in MSM's Katrina coverage. Tonight I am dumbfounded by his --and his colleagues'-- decision-making in this matter. Instantly their decision to air the video and publish the pictures revolted vast numbers of ordinary Americans of all political opinions. (My sister-in-law, a very, very liberal individual, just said to me that "I don't recall ever hearing of anything so irresponsible.") I heard an outraged clinical psychiatrist from NYU University denouncing the decision in the harshest terms on Los Angeles radio station KNX. The airing of the pictures and video is obviously a hurtful and destructive act, one that will prime many killing pumps in the years ahead, and one obviously made on the fly by individuals of almost no experience with or curiosity about the deranged mind. Would it have killed Capus et al to ask around a bit about what to do? Of course not, but their decision could indeed kill others down the road. They acted as their own guides, because that is the way the business works. In their very, very closed world, it made sense. To the vast majority of Americans it was an appalling, horrific decision, far worse than what Don Imus had to say last week.

Read the whole thing. Given that Imus was fired because he caused enormous discomfort to college-age students and their parents, hasn't NBC just repeated that same offense (minus the racist language) on an even larger scale?

As Hugh's producer asked on the air, "Will Capus fire himself for the offense he has given the families of the victims and the rest of the country as well?"

Update (11:52 PM PDT): Hugh's interview with Howard Kurtz is up:

I know I’m going to be very, very angry when I see these pictures, if they play any of this video, because in effect, it’s granting Cho’s final death wish.

HH: Yes.

HK: I don’t want to see him getting attention, either. At the same time, it’s this huge national tragedy, huge national story, and we do want to get some insight into what motivated this sick, twisted individual.

Read the rest. Kurtz seconds my immediate take from this afternoon that the Travis Bickle-style photos of Cho will be on the front page of every newspaper tomorrow. We'll soon see.

I wonder what someone whose worldview is similar to Ward "little Eichmanns" Churchill or Oliver Stone, who compared Al Qaeda terrorists to Einstein(!) shortly after 9/11 would think about the Virginia Tech massacre, given both men's sixties-minted love of terrorism and all things radical chic.

Chances are his thoughts would read very much like this.

Update: Just listening to the first few minutes of this week's Sanity Squad podcast, which touches upon some of these themes.

Mark Steyn describes America's burgeoning "Culture of Passivity":

I haven’t weighed in yet on Virginia Tech — mainly because, in a saner world, it would not be the kind of incident one needed to have a partisan opinion on. But I was giving a couple of speeches in Minnesota yesterday and I was asked about it and found myself more and more disturbed by the tone of the coverage. I’m not sure I’m ready to go the full Derb but I think he’s closer to the reality of the situation than most. On Monday night, Geraldo was all over Fox News saying we have to accept that, in this horrible world we live in, our “children” need to be “protected.”

Point one: They’re not “children.” The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and — if you’ll forgive the expression — men. They would be regarded as adults by any other society in the history of our planet. Granted, we live in a selectively infantilized culture where twentysomethings are “children” if they’re serving in the Third Infantry Division in Ramadi but grown-ups making rational choices if they drop to the broadloom in President Clinton’s Oval Office. Nonetheless, it’s deeply damaging to portray fit fully formed adults as children who need to be protected. We should be raising them to understand that there will be moments in life when you need to protect yourself — and, in a “horrible” world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself or others. It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act.

As I wrote back in 2005 during the birth of the Cindy Sheehan-mania on the left and its media:

According to Hollywood, [America's soldiers are] children. Check out the messages on the signs carried by Hollywood celebrities protesting in Crawford last week in these photos: "Bring Our Children Home" and "'Before One More Mother's Child Is Lost'--Cindy Sheehan".

To understand what a radical transformation this is for Hollywood, consider how the sixties, that most golden of decade for the left, fetishized youth culture. 1967's Wild In The Streets promulgated the notion of a 24-year old rock star millionaire who gets elected after first securing the vote for 15 year olds.

Well, 15 year olds still can't vote, but 18 year olds can, thanks to the 26th Amendment, signed into law in 1971. In 1966, Time magazine named those "25 And Under" as its "Man of the Year". "Don't Trust Anyone Over 30" was a cliché of the era, and heck, William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson's original 1967 novel of Logan's Run envisioned a whole society where the maximum age that could be reached was 21.

Glenn Reynolds and Dr. Helen recently interviewed Robert Epstein, Director Emeritus of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies in Massachusetts and author of The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen.

Liberal record executive (and former aide-de-camp to Led Zeppelin) Danny Goldberg wrote a book in 2003 titled, Dispatches from the Culture Wars: How the Left Lost Teen Spirit. We're I in my late teens or early 20s, I think I'd be pretty annoyed at how today's generation of leftists have sought to re-infantilize the same age group they once sought to empower--and perhaps I'd be equally surprised that conservatives seem to be defending the rights of young adults much more vigorously these days.

Update: Antidote to infantilization found: "Wanted: A culture of self-defense".

If it's not on there already, Stephen Spruiell notes that Cho's video will be all over YouTube in the coming hours, thanks to NBC's rush to broadcast it.

The Jawa Report notes:

If you've been reading the papers and you have spotty knowledge of history, you might be forgiven for thinking that the shootings this week were the "worst mass murder in U.S. history." If you're a journalist with a lot on your plate, you may have forgotten the mass murder of September 11, 2001, which left over 3,000 dead. Then again, that was nearly six years ago & all.

After reviewing all of the excerpted newspaper items that the Jawa Report links to, it appears that the media's decision to toss footage of 9/11 down the Memory Hole may have been a case of self-inflicted labotomy:

Truth is, the Virginia Tech shooting rampage, while tragic, was not "the worst mass murder in U.S. history." It wasn't the "second worst mass murder in U.S. history," or even the third, or the fourth.

The 9/11 attacks (2,998 deaths), the Oklahoma City bombing (168 deaths), the HappyLand arson (87 deaths) and the Bath, Michigan bombing (45 deaths) all claimed more victims than the Virginia Tech shootings (32 deaths).

But, as Vinnie noted yesterday, those events don't fit neatly into the anti-gun political agenda, so they need to go down the memory hole, thereby leaving the Virginia Tech shootings as "the worst mass murder in U.S. history," with Charles Whitman's shooting rampage taking a close second.

If you watch any football game (and presumably every other televised pro sport), if a liquored-up fan attempts to run onto the field, the television director in the control truck cuts as quickly as possible to another angle--any angle--to (a) not give some knucklehead his 15 seconds of fame and (b) to discourage others from attempting the same stunt. If the director of NBC's Sunday Night Football knows this instinctively, then why doesn't whoever runs MSNBC's Website? Or as Mona Charen writes:

NBC is doing something extremely stupid by running those photos the Virginia Tech shooter sent them. Are they crazy? This will encourage every publicity seeking loser in the world to do something similar to get himself on TV. Foolish.

I'd make one slight change to Charen's statement. The photos themselves are newsworthy, and should be released to the public. What I find discouraging is how they're used as part of the Webpage's graphic design, solely to build controversy and hits, to the MSNBC site. (Here's a screen grab of that page, before it's revised.)

But then, every newspaper across the country will have that photo on its frontpage tomorrow.

Update: "Think hard, NBC News. You only get one chance to do this right. Maybe the right decision is eventually to show parts of the tape. But perhaps this is something you should sleep on."

What? Sensitivity from the elite media?! Nahh. They're rushing full speed ahead.

Update (4:30 PM PDT): Ed Morrissey has more details and links regarding Cho's video and NBC's rapacious decision-making.

Update (6:50 PM PDT): Welcome Captain Ed's readers--Ed Morrissey links to this post, and has some thoughts on NBC's decision to run Cho's material:

NBC made the right decision to go public, and to work with law enforcement to determine which material to release at the time, as they apparently did. They unfortunately overshadowed that correct decision with the very incorrect decision on marketing the materials. They sensationalized material that absolutely required no such effort -- and degraded their credibility as a result.

Since NBC has only run a snippet of Cho's video, I agree with Dave Winer's take:

NBC should release all of the videos in Quicktime form as downloads. It's wrong to withhold them.

They're sifting through them and deciding what to release and what not to release.

It's 2007, and it's a decentralized world. We should all get a chance to see what's on those videos.

GIven enough time the focus will go on their process, much better to just let it all out now, with no editorial judgement.

NBC will only leave viewers wondering what they're covering up and why if they don't.

Hot Air has the details.

Dan Gilmour has some thoughts on what the coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre in both the Blogosphere and the legacy media says about the current states of each media:

The democratization of media is not just about creation, though that has been the most notable aspect so far. Putting the tools into everyone’s hands has produced an explosion of media creation, as blogs and sharing sites such as YouTube and Flickr show us.

Traditional media think of distribution: making journalism or movies or programs and sending them out to consumers. This is inverted in a democratized media world, where we all have access to what we want, as well as when and where.

I didn’t turn on my TV yesterday except in the evening, to watch a national network’s news report. I wanted to see a summary of what a serious journalism organization had to say about what it knew so far.

Instead, during the day, I used the online media — including the major news sites — to get the latest information, sifting it, making judgments about credibility and reliability as I read and watched and listened. That, too, is the future in many cases.

It’s also worth noting that the citizen media component of this terrible event is not a new to the digital era. When President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas back in 1963, Abraham Zapruder caught the gruesome killing on a home movie camera — footage that became an essential part of the historical record. But the difference between then and tomorrow is this:

In 1963, one man with a camera captured the event on film. In a very few years, a similar situation would be captured by thousands of people — all holding high-resolution video cameras — and all of those cameras would be connected to high-speed digital networks.

That is different.

Remember, too, that the passengers aboard the airplanes on Sept. 11, 2001, were making voice calls to loved ones and colleagues with mobile phones. What if they’d been sending videos to the world of what was happening inside those doomed aircraft?

We will still need journalists to help sort things out. But the “burning city” words from 2001 revealed something.

We used to say that journalists write the first draft of history. Not so, not any longer. The people on the ground at these events write the first draft. This is not a worrisome change, not if we are appropriately skeptical and to find sources we trust. We will need to retool media literacy for the new age, too.

Related thoughts here.

(Via Pajamas Media, which has been providing extensive coverage of the VT massacre.)

We do know Hillary's take on Circuit City.

Jim Geraghty writes, "Today's partial-birth abortion ruling complicates lives for the Democratic candidates. The GOP is probably 90some percent opposed to partial-birth abortion; for them it's a no-brainer":

Even Rudy liked it.

For pro-choice candidates, the interest groups (NARAL, etc.) are likely to declare this decision the first step on a slippery slope, the camel's nose in the tent, etc., and thus they will declare this decision disastrous.

Jim collects quotes from Edwards and Obama, but given the current name of his blog, one candidate's quotes are, at the moment, prominently missing, and are perhaps being formulated as we speak. Given that she'll probably want to run as the successor to her husband's policy that abortion should be "safe legal and rare", it should be interesting to watch her triangulate on this issue, and see which direction(s) she breaks towards.

Update: Jim has revised and extended his post to include Hillary's remarks, which are of a kind with Edwards and Obama. I think her husband's take would have been more artful under similar circumstances.

Alexander Konetzki explains why he left The American Conservative:

At this point, I should mention that I’m a progressive. I didn’t even know TAC existed until a former colleague encouraged me to apply for an assistant editor position at the magazine last November, suggesting that it might be a good first step toward a career in journalism.

This wasn’t as ludicrous a suggestion as it might sound; TAC is like no other publication in the conservative universe.

You don't say.

Update: Further thoughts from Jonah Goldberg.

"Further to Tim Blair's list of Life's Little Contradictions, here is a Self-Hater's Guide to Science".

(Via...Tim Blair.)

You've read the article--now watch the video:

In TCS Daily, Jerry Bowyer writes:

This morning I read that the Virginia Tech shooter died with the name Ismail Ax written in red ink on his arm. The mainstream press doesn't seem to have a clue as to what this might mean. To quote Indiana Jones, "Didn't any of you guys go to Sunday School?"

Read the whole thing.

Update: Jules Crittenden has several more VT-related links, including Glenn Reynolds' op-ed in the New York Daily News, titled, "People don't stop killers. People with guns do". Here's a sample:

"Gun-free zones" are premised on a fantasy: That murderers will follow rules, and that people like my student, or Bradford Wiles, are a greater danger to those around them than crazed killers like Cho Seung-hui. That's an insult. Sometimes, it's a deadly one.

See also: England.

In the latest edition of City Journal, Adam Thierer writes that this is "America’s Golden Age of Media"--and it could all be over soon:

Throughout most of history, humans lived in a state of extreme information poverty. News traveled slowly, field to field, village to village. Even with the printing press’s advent, information spread at a snail’s pace. Few knew how to find printed materials, assuming that they even knew how to read. Today, by contrast, we live in a world of unprecedented media abundance that once would have been the stuff of science-fiction novels. We can increasingly obtain and consume whatever media we want, wherever and whenever we want: television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and the bewildering variety of material available on the Internet.

This media cornucopia is a wonderful development for a free society—or so you’d think. But today’s media universe has fierce detractors, and nowhere more vehemently than on the left. Their criticisms seem contradictory. Some, such as Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich, contend that real media choices, information sources included, remain scarce, hindering citizens from fully participating in a deliberative democracy. Others argue that we have too many media choices, making it hard to share common thoughts or feelings; democracy, community itself, again loses out. Both liberal views get the story disastrously wrong. If either prevails, what’s shaping up to be America’s Golden Age of media could be over soon.

While the far left seems bent on knocking out talk radio because they can't otherwise establish a foothold there, it's worth noting that Democrats didn't need the medium to retake Congress in November.

Beyond radio, call me a Pollyanna, but I can't help but think it's going to be awfully difficult putting the genie back in the bottle. There are now RSS feeds to shape content and blogs and podcasts to publish it. (Technorati was tracking 60 million blogs last time I checked, a mammoth growth from about seven million blogs when I wrote this piece in 2004 for TCS.)

As I wrote last week:

In one sense, the current hyperventilating by Imus, Rosie, Sharpton, et al represent the death rumbles of an eighty year old mass electronic media in an era when everyone will eventually have his own blog--and heck, if they want it bad enough, their own TV station.

Napster in its original form was killed by the recording industry at the start of the 21st century, but the concept of file sharing and downloading individual tracks of music is the law of the land. Similarly, YouTube has demonstrated how millions want to get their TV.

It's certainly a far cry from the days when mass media meant three TV networks and one or two monolithic (usually institutionally liberal--and arguably worse, deadly dull) newspapers per city.

One downside to today's media cornucopia though: is our readers learning?

Prominent conservative presidential candidate expresses solidarity with recently disgraced conservative talk radio host.

Only one man--a former presidential candidate himself-- had the foresight, five long, lonely, years ago, to predict this moment.

In a comment to this post on Tim Blair's blog, James Lileks writes:

Imagine you’re an editor at the New York Times. It’s the apogee of the profession. You’re in a brand-new skyscraper, built at great expense. You’re editing a piece about clotheslines, which are good because they’re nicer to the earth, and you’re all about being good to the earth. (You don’t get on the elevator to go up to your 45th floor office unless there are at least eight others in the car.)

You read this line:

In the meantime, our electric bill has dropped to $576 in March from its high last summer, reflecting a series of efforts to cut energy. (That’s still too high, so we’re about to try fluorescent bulbs.)

You get on the phone. “Kathleen?” you say. “Reading your clothesline piece, and I love it. Just wondering, what was your electric bill before?”

“Before what,” she asks.

“You say your electric bill dropped to $576 in March from its high last summer. What was your high last summer, and do you have an air conditioner?”

“I don’t see how that’s important,” she snaps.

“You’re right!” you say, and you hang up.

Ah, time for lunch!

As The Volokh Conspiracy noted last month, the 1980s' age of conspicuous consumption has morphed just slightly into the age of conspicuous virtue. Or as David Brooks wrote in Bobos In Paradise during the early days of this attitudinal adjustment, "A person who follows these precepts can dispose of up to $4-$5 million annually in a manner that demonstrates how little he or she cares about material things."

A couple of years ago, the great Theodore Dalrymple wrote that "Collective pride is denied" the modern Germans, causing a painful sort of schizophrenia:

I went to dinner with a young businessman, born 20 years after the end of the war, who told me that the forestry company for which he worked, and which had interests in Britain, had decided that it needed a mission statement. A meeting ensued, and someone suggested Holz mit Stolz (“wood with pride”), whereupon a two-hour discussion erupted among the employees of the company as to whether pride in anything was permitted to the Germans, or whether it was the beginning of the slippery slope that led to . . . well, everyone knew where. The businessman found this all perfectly normal, part of being a contemporary German.

Collective pride is denied the Germans because, if pride is taken in the achievements of one’s national ancestors, it follows that shame for what they have done must also be accepted. And the shame of German history is greater than any cultural achievement, not because that achievement fails to balance the shame, but because it is more recent than any achievement, and furthermore was committed by a generation either still living or still existent well within living memory.

The moral impossibility of patriotism worries Germans of conservative instinct or temperament. Upon what in their historical tradition can they safely look back as a guide or a help? One young German conservative historian I met took refuge in Anglophilia—his England, of course, being an England of the past. He needed a refuge, because Hitler and Nazism had besmirched everything in his own land. The historiography that sees in German history nothing but a prelude to Hitler and Nazism may be intellectually unjustified, the product of the historian’s bogus authorial omniscience, but it has emotional and psychological force nonetheless, precisely because the willingness to take pride in the past implies a preparedness to accept the shame of it. Thus Bach and Beethoven can be celebrated, but not as Germans; otherwise they would be tainted. The young German historian worked for a publishing house with a history lasting almost four centuries, but its failure to go out of business during the 12 years of the Third Reich cast a shadow both forward and backward, like a spectral presence that haunts a great mansion.

Jules Crittenden agrees that the condition lingers on:

I heard that from a German woman whose father didn’t come back from Stalingrad, who had to flee the Russians as a little girl. So I didn’t say anything, though I had just come back from war myself, had friends who hadn’t managed to do that, and couldn’t believe the gall of this woman. I’m missing an uncle. Crashed and burned into the Belgian landscape at age 20. Compliments of one Helmut Baure, ME 110 pilot, Luftwaffe. Reader Corndog (an old friend, and yes, as big a dolt in person as he is in comments) is missing an uncle. Sucking chest wound at El Alamein. A guy I work with, down two uncles. A woman I used to work with, her father was the only one in his family who didn’t go up the chimney at Auschwitz. That’s all history now. War’s over. But, my coalbucket-helmeted friends, I don’t care to be lectured about war. Not by Germans.

It turns out we didn’t entirely scrub the stain out of the Krauts. We just turned them into PC racists. There is something pathetic, when the once mighty and feared Wehrmacht, now the declawed and idle Bundewehr, is reduced to swearing in English about imagined enemies they will never encounter … except maybe around the American bases that have protected them for the last 60-odd years … unlike the actual enemies they are ignoring at their own doorstep.

It’s got to be confusing to be a German today. Maybe we need to cut them a little slack. Maybe it is hard to understand that it is possible to fight for good causes. Liberating nations. Removing murderous dictators, giving millions of people the chance to vote freely for the first time in their lives. These things aren’t easy, and there are evil men who would subvert these efforts. I thought that should be relatively easy to grasp. But to understand these things, it may be necessary to advance farther in one’s thinking, and that last war hasn’t been over long enough. Maybe the Germans don’t understand war, because they haven’t suffered war. Not like we have.

Read the whole thing.

"Super-rich population surges in 2006: survey", Reuters reports:

The survey by Chicago-based Spectrem Group found that the number of U.S. households with more than $5 million rose from 930,000 in 2005. In 1996, there were only 250,000 U.S. households in the "ultra-rich" category, Spectrem said.

"The past few years have been nothing but astounding for wealthy Americans," said Catherine McBreen, managing director of Spectrem, a consulting group that researches the affluent and retirement markets.

McBreen said the surge in household growth is underpinned by economic growth in recent years, which has fueled both stock market gains and also the market for private companies. She also ascribed gains to rising real estate valuations and favorable tax policies.

"The wealthiest households are the business owners," said McBreen. She also said broader ownership of stocks has helped overall household wealth.

Shocka!* I need Reuters to tell me that broad stock and business ownership has helped to grow the economy?

Read More »

Dr. Helen has an interesting angle on Cho Seung-Hui's heinous crime yesterday:

It seems that everyone is blaming the "American gun culture" on what happened but perhaps Cho Seung-Hui took his cues from another infamous mass murderer, Woo Bum-Kon, also from Korea:

Bum-Kon had an argument with his live-in girlfriend in the afternoon of April 26, 1982. Enraged, he left the house and went to the police armory, where he began consuming large amounts of whiskey. He became moderately drunk, raided the police armory of its weapons and built a personal arsenal. Bum-Kon then stole a single high-powered rifle and some grenades and left the armory. It was by this point around dinner time. He walked from house to house, and abused his position as a police officer to make people feel safe and gain entry to the home. Then he shot the victims, or killed the entire family with a grenade. He continued this pattern for the next eight hours, and into the early morning hours of April 27.

Bum-Kon committed the worse mass murder in known history, killing 58 people--could the Virginia shooter have been trying to do the same?

Like I said, it's an interesting angle. It will also get near-zero-traction in the US media, for obvious reasons.

Betsy Newmark and Charles Johnson have some thoughts on Professor Liviu Librescu, a 76-year-old Holocaust survivor who sacrificed himself by throwing himself at the shooter, which also blocked the doorway to his classroom and allowed his students to flee through his classroom's windows.

Yesterday was Holocaust Remembrance Day, Betsy reminds us.

Details at Hot Air:

Seung Hui Cho, a permanent resident of the United States, a Korean national and a Virginia Tech student has been identified as the gunman in the shootings that left 33 people dead on the Virginia Tech campus Monday, ABC News has learned.

The student left a “disturbing note” before killing two people in a dorm room, returning to his own room to re-arm and entering a classroom building on the other side of campus to continue his rampage, sources said.

Cho’s identitiy has been confirmed with a positive fingerprint match on the guns used in the rampage and with immigration materials. It is believed that he was the shooter in both incidents yesterday. Sources say Cho was carrying a backpack that contained receipts for a March purchase of a Glock 9 mm pistol, sources said. Witnesses had also told authorities that the shooter was carrying a backpack. Sections of chain similar to those used to lock the main doors at Norris Hall, the site of the second shooting that left 31 dead, were found inside a Virginia Tech dormitory, sources confirmed to ABC News.

Elsewhere, some elements of ABC's coverage of Virginia Tech are recieving criticism. And speaking of media criticism, Glenn Reynolds reminds us that mass shootings at US schools are much less common than the media in general would lead us to believe.

Update: Not surprisingly, the PC police are already on clean-up patrol: "Asian American Journalists Association: Don't call shooter Asian!"

Your next NBC's tilting far to the left Talking Points Memo has just written itself. AP reports: "Olbermann to work football pre-game show for NBC".

Update: Scott Whitlock writes:

Readers may recall that, back in 2000, radio star Rush Limbaugh auditioned to join ABC’s "Monday Night Football" broadcast, an act that horrified the "Washington Post" and other liberal outlets. MRC President Brent Bozell discussed the Post’s outrage in a column dated June 6, 2000:

First was Thomas Boswell, who on May 24 wrote, "This week, our trend toward the celebrity-as-universal-expert may have reached a comic peak. ABC thinks maybe Rush Limbaugh can become the next Howard Cosell." Limbaugh, Boswell sneered verbally, "appeals to the right demographic: divorced, couch-potato, gun-worshiping, angry white guys. Sorry, I mean patriotic American males ages 25 to 34."

All that was just the buildup to Boswell’s big cheap-shot finish: "Could [ESPN’s baseball coverage] use another voice in the booth? If Al Michaels gets Rush Limbaugh, maybe, someday, Jon Miller could be lucky enough to team up with John Rocker."

Will the Post and other liberal media organizations decry Olbermann’s selection?

Good luck--heck, Howard Kurtz isn't even sure that Olbermann's on the left.

Mickey Kaus spots Paul Krugman's knees-a-jerking on the subject of religion amongst goverment staffers. Kaus writes, "I was ready to be alarmed, until Krugman began deploying his killer examples":

I'm not saying theocratic incompetents from the "700 Club" aren't fanning out through the government. Maybe they are. I'm saying Paul Krugman is not convincing on this issue. He doesn't even seem to be trying to be convincing. Why should he try? There's always been a market for anti-hick editorializing in the New York Times, especially anti-Southern-hick editorializing (see Steve Oney's account of the Times' counterproductive crusade in the Leo Frank case of 1913, which presaged its more recent counterproductive crusade against Augusta National). Krugman's select Times readers aren't exactly going to demand rigor when it comes to attacking Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell. ...

The New Orientalism is everywhere in the media, it seems.

"Report: At least 20 dead, 28 wounded", says Allahpundit, who has details here as they develop.

Glenn Reynolds adds, "reader John Lucas, who works with a Virginia law firm, emails that Va. Tech is a 'gun-free zone.' Well, for those who follow the law".

Spot-on, sadly.

Update: No link yet to a specific article, but Matt Drudge adds:

At least 25 people have been killed in shootings on Virginia Tech University campus. The number of fatalities are expected to rise...

In January of last year, "A bill that would have given college students and employees the right to carry handguns on campus"--and thus defend themselves during an incident such as today's--"died with nary a shot being fired in the General Assembly".

More: Allah links to this MSNBC article, adding, "According to NBC, the killer used two 9mm handguns and killed himself". Meanwhile, Mary Katharine Ham has many more details, noting that "Apparently, there's cell phone video of the attack. Heard they showed it on CNN".

Update (11:10 AM PDT): "Before Today's Massacre, Virginia Tech Received 2 Separate Bomb Threats", according to ABC News.

Update (11:42 AM PDT): Virginia bloggers comment on the VT massacre.

Update (2:10 PM PDT): Mary Katharine Ham writes, "Republicans Drop the Internet Ball on Va. Tech Shootings":

To be clear, I'm not saying that Obama, Hillary, and Edwards care any more about the suffering on the ground in Blacksburg, Va. today than Mitt, McCain, and Rudy.

But to look at their websites, you wouldn't know a thing about what Mitt, McCain, and Rudy think about this national tragedy. It's doesn't mean they're terrible, selfish men, as I'm sure the Left will infer. On the contrary, I'm sure all of their thoughts and prayers are with the kids of Blacksburg, just as all of ours are. But the fact is that the Big Six in the presidential race are huge, public figures who are required, for better or worse, to have a public position on every issue, ever. Today is certainly no exception.

Political web operatives on the Left understand that websites move with the news, and are sometimes the fastest way to move those messages. Today, the Dem candidates' sites reflect that and the Republicans' do not.

In a very-much related post, NRO's various blogs write that the spinning on the story has already begun from AP and ABC. Expect a lot of that during the week.

Update (3:50 PM PDT): Like this one.

Update (8:22 PM PDT): Jim Geraghty writes:

Right On Cue, Virginia Tech Shootings Spur Calls for Gun Control, Even Though Gun Control Ensured The Victims Couldn't Defend Themselves

Further thoughts from Michelle Malkin.

Leave it to Pravda to put all the pieces together on the Don Imus scandal--and then some...

Update: Allah notes that the Imus scandal may have caused someone else who thinks she's gotten a little too close to the truth to clam up, lest a similar fate befall her from the Bushitlerhallisharpton conspiracy, and asks:

Al Sharpton — unwitting pawn of Rove or deep cover PNAC operative of longstanding?

Given the amount of airtime that NBC gave Sharpton last week as the network’s official Torquemada-in-residence, maybe Al Gore was right about that whole conservative media conspiracy!

Related: On a more serious note, Tammy Bruce and Ann Althouse explore what Tammy calls "The Soros Industrial Complex".

And elsewhere, Mark Steyn writes, "Only in America: a team of champions who think they're victims, an old white fool who talks like a gangsta rapper and multi-millionaires grown rich on race-baiting who promote themselves as guardians of civility. Good thing there are no real problems to worry about". Meanwhile, Steyn's fellow Granite State resident Orrin Judd looks towards the scandal's unforeseen fallout, tersely noting, "Blowback's A Bitch".

Welcome Jules Crittenden readers clicking in through the blog's homepage! The post you're looking for on Rudy and Rosie is here; today's blogging will occur under this post.

Rob Long explores "Charity by Proxy":

When you think about all the exercise equipment, diet aids and thin, attractive people featured on television, it's amazing how many fat people there are walking around in real life. What's wrong with those people? Television is supposed to be a pretty powerful medium--actually, it's supposed to be the most powerful medium--so you'd think that they would get the message and stop it with the bread. But they don't: America keeps getting fatter while television keeps getting fitter.

Call it the "Thighmaster Paradox": Watching people do things on TV--fight it out on a desert island, say, or sweat themselves into shapelier thighs--often replaces the need to do those things ourselves. After a few hours vegetating in slack-jawed stupor in front of the Food Network, do we really end up in the kitchen, whipping up a wholesome meal? Or do we drag the family to Outback Steakhouse?

The mindset that drives "Charity By Proxy" also pushes feel-good gestures such as these, of course.

(Via Kathy Shaidle.)

Check out the graph that Bill Hobbs has posted of blogger Katherine Coble's traffic since she was sued by JL Kirk Associates. Mutual fund managers would kill to have a mountain chart that looked like that.

Betsy Newmark has a lengthy post on the background of Duke Lacrosse accuser Crystal Gail Mangum and wonders:

Since when is the penalty for stealing a car, drunken driving, and trying to run down a police deputy just two weekends in jail? I'd be interested in knowing if that was the standard sentence in Durham at the time for such crimes.

Read the whole thing.

Update: Related thoughts from Neo-Neocon.

Color me rather unsurprised: "British journalists officially vote to boycott Israeli goods":

With Britain as the base for influential international media such as the BBC, Financial Times, The Economist magazine, and Reuters news agency, British media lies about Israel and America have ramifications far beyond Britain.

For years, British journalists have denied they are biased, even though practically everyone else is aware of their prejudices.

But now, all of a sudden, we have an official admission from many British journalists of their antipathy towards Israel. For the first time, Britain's National Union of Journalists (NUJ) voted to boycott a country, and that country is Israel.

Like the man said...

Update: Welcome readers of Time magazine clicking in through Time's Sphere link!

BDS goes through the looking glass.

After Somalia and the Blackhawk Down incident, Osama bin Laden dismissed America as a paper tiger. And presumably, he must have thought continental Europe even weaker, since we supply virtually all of its defense.

Victor Davis Hanson explores the Postwest--"A civilization that has become just a dream"; this anecdote by Mark Steyn puts the feeble current state of the West into sharp contrast with its robust, confident past.

Update: Further thoughts here.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function".

Of course, "function" is a relative term; Tim Blair explores those who take Fitzgerald's dictum to its extreme in a handy list of 30 contradictory concepts.

Update: Glenn Reynolds spots doublethink pressed into action for headline-writing duties.

Hugh Hewitt interviews Rudy Giuliani on a wide range of issues, including Rosie O'Donnell's recent conspiratorial meltdown on The View:

HH: Let me play for you a little Rosie O’Donnell on 9/11 looking back.

RG: (laughing)

HH: Have you heard this clip yet, Mayor? Have you heard her talking…

RG: I don’t know.

HH: Let’s play Rosie O’Donnell from a couple of weeks ago.

RO’D: I do believe that for the first time in history, that fire has ever melted steel. I do believe that it defies physics for the World Trade Center Tower 7, Building 7, which collapsed in on itself, it is impossible for a building to fall the way it fell without explosives being involved. World Trade Center 7. World Trader 1 and 2 got hit by planes, 7 miraculously, the first time in history steel was melted by fire. It is physically impossible.

HH: What do you make of that, Mayor?

RG: I just never thought of her as like an engineering expert, but you’d have to go back to the people who studied that. And World Trade Center 7, if I recall correctly, came down around 4 or 5 o’clock in the afternoon. And my partner, Mike Hess, who was then my Corporation Counsel, was one of the last two people to get out of World Trade Center 7. He almost died there. And I was in a building that was pelted by…what really happened is World Trade Center 1 and 2 bombarded World Trade Center 7. And I was in a building next to World Trade Center 7, and we were trapped in that building for 20 minutes, and that building took a considerable amount of building.

HH: But what do you make of public people…

RG: It was a little further away, so…

HH: What do you make of public people firing up this nutter conspiracy theory? Does that injure our understanding of what we’re in?

RG: Well, I’ve always thought that conspiracy theories, and I’ve heard all the wild ones, you know, I’ve been subjected sometimes overseas, sometimes here, you know, kind of really wild ones. I won’t even repeat them, they’re so wild. I’ve always been very clear on September 11, and I don’t know why we have to have conspiracy theories, when we know who did it. (laughing) You know, we know that these 19 people took those airplanes and flew them into buildings in order to kill innocent people. They’re the ones responsible for it. None of this would have happened unless they did that. Everybody else, you know, everybody else involved, and it was doing the very best they could to save as many lives as possible. Some did it effectively, some didn’t do it as effectively, but they were all trying, you know? This idea of going back and trying to figure out what did the Bush administration know, what did the Clinton administration know in order to blame people is really unfortunate. If either anybody in the Bush administration or the Clinton administration had known about September 11, I think they would have done everything they could to stop it. What we do is, we just…when we do that, we displace the responsibility where it belongs.

HH: Yeah.

RG: It’s squarely in one place. It belongs with the Islamic terrorists who planned it over a long period of time, and carried it out. And everybody else, everybody else tried real hard to do the best they could to save lives. And as I said, some were successful and some weren’t, and some of the decisions were right and some were wrong, but the criminal, horrible, inhumane decision was the one made by those terrorists.

Bill Whittle has a tremendous essay online this week on the dangers of conspiracy theories, and why the displacement involved them has become increasingly attractive to so many people over the last 30 or 40 years. As usual with Bill it definitely qualifies as long-form blogging; this is merely a taste:

Now most normal people do not look at life from within a pit of failure and despair. Our lives are measured by small successes -- like raising children, serving in the military, doing volunteer work at your church – or just doing the right thing in a thousand small but important ways, like returning money if someone makes you too much change.

These are simply the small, ordinary milestones of a life of value. They give you a sense of identity.

But if I didn’t have that sense of identity rooted in my own small achievements, I wonder how likely it would have been for me to grab onto that sense of sudden empowerment, of being an initiate in some arcane club of hidden wisdom. I wonder what might have happened to me if being the Holder of Secret Knowledge had been my only source of self-esteem…the one redeeming landmark in a life of isolation and failure. Indeed, I wonder what power such a worldview would have over me if I could believe that behind the scenes lurked vast and unknowable dark forces – forces that could topple a president and perhaps even explain why a person of my deep, vast and bountiful talents was not doing a whole lot better in life?

I wonder what might have happened to me then.

Because I did not need to believe in Giant Wheels of Conspiracy grinding John F. Kennedy to dust, I was relieved and not a little embarrassed when I finally read Case Closed. It was – quite vividly – like opening a window in a musty, cluttered, book-filled room and feeling the cool breeze of reason and logic air out the mind.

This is not the place for me to debate whether or not Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin that day. That would take an entire book, exhaustively researched, with extensive footnoting and reference to primary sources. There is such a book, it is called Case Closed, and as I said it performs its function better than any book I have ever read.

I am more interested in the psychology of someone who believes in these conspiracy theories. I exempt people who have only heard one side of the story, as I did. Sadly, skepticism doesn’t sell as well as hysteria. With regards to The View, ABC and Disney would rather count their ad money than waste potential revenues placing the truth for sale. If this offends you as much as it does me, you may make your purchases and plan your vacations accordingly.

Intellectually honest people, people without a deep, vested emotional need to believe the worst, are usually relieved to hear the facts that demolish superstitions like the Bermuda Triangle and the Loch Ness Monster. While there may be disappointment at the loss of an unseen world, people who have chosen to live in reality find comfort in the fact that reality is, in fact, made up of the real and not the wished for.

As Umberto Eco wrote a couple of years ago:

G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything." Whoever said it - he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.

If this sounds like you, the first steps towards a cure are simple. To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, listen to the interview, read the essay, repeat the dosage as necessary.

John Berlau of OpenMarket.org writes, "It’s time that environmentalists be called on the carpet, like everyone else is, when they make these horrible remarks about disadvatanaged groups".

It's a great list, to which I can only add the fellows whom Alex Beam recently profiled.

A bunch of longform articles I've been working on over the past few months seemed to have reached simultaneous fruitition this week. So all of a sudden, like Visa, we're everywhere you want to be:

Home Electronics? The cover story of the May/June issue of The Robb Report's Home Entertainment magazine is my piece on "Eight Easy Ways To Update Your Home Theater

Music? I have a piece on electronic harmonizers in the April issue of Computer Music. It's out now in England, and will be available next month in the US. Here's the Blogcritics product review from last fall which inspired it, to hold you over.

High Fashion? In the latest issue of Classic Style, I have a piece on Apparel Arts, the 1930s and '40s menswear magazine that birthed not only Esquire but GQ, and continues to inspire designers such as Ralph Lauren and (especially) Alan Flusser to this day.

At the moment, those are all strictly "dead tree" articles. But here are a couple of online items:

Media Bias? Thanks to the InstaPundit, you've probably already seen this.

Podcasting? I produced the latest Blog Week In Review for Pajamas, in which Austin Bay interviews The Belmont Club's Richard Fernandez on the state of the hot war in Iraq and the increasingly heating up one against Iran.

Be on the look out for all of the above at your favorite newsseller and/or Internet. And tell 'em we sent you!

To wildly paraphrase Zero Mostel (yet again), they're the best possible actors. If you have any disagreement with them, you can always rip their heads off, and they won't utter a, umm, peep:

In other words, Mary Katharine Ham's latest HamNation is up.

Sorry for the outage this afternoon. I'm told by our Webhost that "a distribution switch died on a floor of the Los Angeles Datacenter", perhaps as a result of this, or perhaps it was caused by yet another attack by The American Beef Council. But in any case, as you can see, we're back.

(But for how long, Mr. Spock...For...How...Long? I don't know--and stop channeling Belushi as Shatner--Ed.)

Who are the winners and losers in the fallout of the Imus debacle? Glenn Reynolds links to an L.A. Times article that has some thoughts on the latter:

Imus gave Democrats a pipeline to a crucial voting bloc that was perennially hard for them to reach: politically independent white men.

With Imus' show canceled indefinitely because of his remarks about the Rutgers University women's basketball team, some Democratic strategists are worried about how to fill the void. For a national radio audience of white men, Democrats see few if any alternatives.

Don Surber suggests a replacement platform that's currently off the table (to the point where Leno is riffing on it):

"Here’s an idea: Go on Fox News. Oh, Daily Kos won’t let you."

Speaking of which, one big winner in all of this is Bill O'Reilly, who's been on an anti-NBC jag since William Arkin's attack on America's troops in late January. O'Reilly's claim is that NBC, one home of square shooters such as Chet Huntley and John Chancellor, and later Tom Brokaw (who usually kept his biases very much in control) has titled increasingly further to the left. At the time, NBC news president Steve Capus counterpunched that "I think it's really kind of sad and pathetic, some of the things that [O'Reilly's] been lobbing at us these days", even as Capus hired BDS-obsessed Keith Olbermann to provide commentary for NBC's flagship Nightly News, in addition to his regular low-rated gig at MSNBC.

MSNBC's longtime employment of Imus as a low rent PR tool, and the very visible appearances on NBC of Sharpton and Jesse Jackson when it was time for Imus to walk the plank this week provide O'Reilly with a huge "See, I Told You So" moment, which I'm sure he'll capitalize on.

Update: Amen to that.

Sort of the podcast equivalent of his hilarious Interior Desecrations book, James Lileks sticks a sonic shiv into the dark heart of the 1970s and its most clichéd music in his latest "Diner": "Ooga; Shakka"

Back in 2004, I linked to Jonah Goldberg in a post titled "The Atlantic Creeps Leftward":

The Atlantic is still a great magazine, but it seems to be inching urther and further into official Liberal Magazine Land. One can be a liberal magazine and still be a great magazine, The New Republic has proved that more than a few times. But what made the Kelly and post Kelly era Atlantic particularly special was its effort not to be predictably on one side of the political ledger.

As I added back then:

Goldberg writes the Atlantic's current pieces, "contribute to the continued Slateification of the magazine, by which I mean that 'post-partisan smart' is defined as a certain kind of enlightened liberalism which enlightened liberals see as simply correct, not liberal".

Hugh Hewitt writes that the era that the late Michael Kelly launched has officially concluded:

On my radio show moments ago I asked Mark Steyn about the current issue of The Atlantic which does not have one of Steyn's wonderful obituaries. (A collection of these magnificent send-offs, Passing Parade, is here.) Mark revealed that he and The Atlantic have parted ways after a disagreement.

So, no need for me to purchase The Atlantic anymore. Steyn's byline was for me the reason to always buy the magazine, especially when moving about the country through airports. Other interesting stuff was always there, but the purchase was automatic because Steyn's obit was a must read. Now he's not going to be in there, and I'm not going to be buying it.

The byline has become the brand as I have often argued over the past few years. Editors and publishers who haven't figured this out yet are really living in the past, and The Atlantic has definitely enrolled itself in the club of the clueless in this regard.

As Hugh notes above, Mark Steyn's Passing Parade is very much well worth your time. If America Alone is a darkly humorous preview of where the world might be headed, Passing Parade is a much lighter, wonderfully witty look back its most interesting movers and shakers, and I certainly hope that Steyn's monthly obit series continues with some publication, whether it's online or on dead tree.

Not surprisingly, Don Imus loses his CBS radio gig in addition to his MSNBC cable TV simulcast; veteran magazine editor Myrna Blyth has a piece in NRO today on the power to bully the legacy media grants to those it gives airtime:

I have never listened to Imus, and the only times I’ve seen him have been when I was flicking through channels in a hotel room, trying to find the morning news. But what struck me the few times I did watch him was his amazing arrogance. And, while I know we’re not supposed to criticize people for their appearance, this funny-looking guy in a funny-looking cowboy hat sure does get a lot of power when he’s sitting behind a microphone. David Frum in his Diary gives an example of Imus’s arrogance. For years, right up to this current fracas, he has been able to freely use his power to sneer at others and get the audience to laugh along. Imus, quite simply, is a bully, and he’s made that pay big. And like a bully about to lose a fight, he has started sniveling and proclaiming what a good and generous guy he really is.

The other great bully on TV right now is Rosie, who has her daily soapbox on The View. It’s her schoolyard bullying tactics, which she so effectively employs on that girlie show, much more than her crackpot conspiracy theories, that I find most objectionable. Day after day, like a true grade-school tyrant, she shouts down anyone who disagrees with her, steps on any applause another opinion might elicit, and, like Imus with his sidekicks, gets the other women on The View to agree with and support her.

Rosie is also an expert at playing the victim and making excuses for herself. As she constantly explains, she suffers from depression and her mother died when she was young — and she is very generous, too. Of course, Rosie, in true bully fashion, is afraid to have anyone on the show who might have the power to say, “Hey, Rosie, put up your dukes,” and then, through argument, win a fair fight with her.

Maybe the next media tempest will be when Rosie goes too far. Although she is very well protected, it probably will happen, and the pundits will once again have the chance to talk about the one thing they all agree upon — the enormous power those in media now have.

A couple of weeks ago, Libertas had a great post on A Face In The Crowd, Elia Kazan’s's seminal late 1950s movie about a populist figure given a national platform by television who quickly becomes a demagogue. When I saw the movie for the first time on TMC or AMC in the late 1990s, Andy Griffith's performance in the lead role (which instantly put him on the map in Hollywood) reminded me instantly of James Carville; some might instead see Rush or O'Reilly in it. But it really is a dramatic foreshadowing of how today's media both invents public figures, lets them run fast, loud, and out of control, usually until its too late, and then quickly pulls the plug on them, and is well worth your time on DVD or next time it's on cable.

In one sense, the current hyperventilating by Imus, Rosie, Sharpton, et al represent the death rumbles of an eighty year old mass electronic media in an era when everyone will eventually have his own blog--and heck, if they want it bad enough, their own TV station. But considering how well a fifty year old movie still depicts today's events, the medium may change, but not the urge to demagogue it.

Shades of the old days of Spy magazine.

More dispatches from World War II, as the Boston Globe's Alex Beam ponders how green could men in brown shirts actually be.

(Via Dean Barnett, who gives Beam bonus points for the title alone.)

Update: Responding to the ludicrous book that Beam lampoons in his article, Orrin Judd adds, "Note how easy it is to excuse Hitler when your idea of environmentalism matters more than the reality of Nazism".

In NRO's new Weblog, "The Tank" , devoted to all things military, W. Thomas Smith Jr. has a post on Kurt Vonnegut's days as a WWII soldier:

Kurt Vonnegut was a 22-year-old Army scout with the 106th Infantry Division near St. Vith, Belgium when the Germans launched a surprise attack through the Ardennes, beginning the Battle of the Bulge, December 1944.

Quickly separated from his unit, Vonnegut wandered for a few days behind enemy lines before being captured. He then was sent to Dresden as a POW.

The defining moment of Mr. Vonnegut’s life was the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces in 1945, an event he witnessed firsthand as a young prisoner of war. Thousands of civilians were killed in the raids, many of them burned to death or asphyxiated. “The firebombing of Dresden,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote, “was a work of art.” It was, he added, “a tower of smoke and flame to commemorate the rage and heartbreak of so many who had had their lives warped or ruined by the indescribable greed and vanity and cruelty of Germany.”

His experience in Dresden was the basis of “Slaughterhouse-Five,” which was published in 1969 against the backdrop of war in Vietnam, racial unrest and cultural and social upheaval.

Slaughterhouse-Five was but one book (along with its big-budget 1970s Hollywood movie version) that helped craft the modern image of Dresden. A couple of years ago, I wrote a lengthy post on some of the other factors that shaped Dresden's modern reputation, as well as a powerful recent book that redefines things a bit closer to what the reality probably was in WWII.

Kurt Vonnegut passed away at 84.

(Via Pajamas HQ.)

The essential Zombietime Website has new photo essay out, which tracks identical anti-Semitic hate speech (hate-literature, to be precise) on the left and the right. Two guesses though, as which side gets a pass from the media.

Dr. Helen writes:

Congratulations to the Duke Lacrosse players--this travesty should never have happened--but it is gratifying to see these innocent young men set free today.

One thing I did find puzzling was the following statement by the North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper:

However, Cooper said no charges will be brought against the accuser, saying she “may actually believe” the many different stories she told. “We believe it is in the best interest of justice not to bring charges,” he said.

So if you charge someone with a false crime and "believe" your false statements to be true, you're off the hook?

"Jerry, just remember, it's not a lie, if you believe it".

"MSNBC Cancelling Imus", according to Media Bistro.

Via Hot Air, which also linked earlier today to this terrific op-ed by Jason Whitlock in the Kansas City Star, "Instead of wasting time on irrelevant shock jock, black leaders need to be fighting a growing gangster culture".

Indeed. Hasn't Stanley Crouch been writing on this topic this for years?

Update: This was inevitable--I guess it's the 2007 Play-Doh Fun Factory remix version of Al Gore's "conservative media" mantra from November of 2002.

Not much, says Libertas, in their review of the new film starring Hillary Swank:

In the end, The Reaping is good for nothing more than yet another insight into how elite Hollywood views the South and religion. To them the South is filled with scary, pious, hypocritical fanatics, who are both unsophisticated and dumb. And naturally, religion has turned them ugly and worse. It’s okay for the Black Guy to be religious. For some reason Christianity isn’t threatening to Hollywood when the Christian is black. Maybe they find it cute and quaint.

Hollywood treats no other culture in the world as poorly and with such contempt as they do the Southern Christian. And yet, they probably don’t even see their own bigotry. They just believe that what they portray is fact. Of course, that’s the worst kind of prejudice. The most dangerous. The most ignorant.

Yet another sign of "Crimsonism", the New Orientalism in action.

According to an Aussie Website called Carbonplanet.com, "The Film Industry is one of the highest greenhouse emitting industries".

There's a simple solution, of course.

(Via Tim Blair.)

I actually do believe that she writes her own blog posts.

Between Don Imus's meltdown, and Katie Couric's plagiarism scandal (or her producer if you're charitable), a few more curtains have been pulled back on the MSM this week.

Ed Morrissey explores the latter incident:

Plagiarism is the secondary scandal here. CBS has apologized for lifting the material, and the Journal has graciously accepted it. The primary scandal is the marketing of Couric as a journalist, attempting to boost her credibility and her likability with these articles written by staffers. They want to prop her up as a replacement for Rather, who despite his many faults actually worked as a reporter for many years before the anchor gig.

The irony comes from the fact that even with all of these efforts to build Katie into a reporter, the public still finds Couric and CBS less than credible. Her ratings tanked shortly after joining CBS as the anchor as the Tiffany Network switched to softer news on her arrival. Now that the plagiarism has pulled back the green curtain, Couric is exposed as an empty suit -- emptier even than her colleagues on network news broadcasts. She's the new gold standard for phoniness.

Only now is Katie exposed as an empty suit? Maybe I'm misreading his post, but it seems like Ed is genuinely surprised that Katie doesn't write her own copy.

I think the Anchoress nailed the difference between Katie and her predecessors at the anchor desk in late February when she wrote:

I never thought I would say it, but I miss Dan Rather. I may not have agreed with him much of the time toward the end, but he had a curious mind, a willingness to ask questions and he possessed a voice and presence that conveyed…oh…gravitas.

I think that properly defines the role of an anchorperson--he or she, very much like an actor or actress, is paid to generate emotion and empathy, the byproduct of which is that feeling of gravitas that the Anchoress mentioned.

Walter Cronkite gave the game away inadvertendly in this article from last year, after the Ra^therGate scandal peaked:

Cronkite did not heavily fault Rather for his role in last September's discredited story about President Bush's military service. Rather anchored the "60 Minutes Wednesday" story.

"We all know he made a mistake by now," Cronkite said. "But would we have done much the same? I would not be sure that I wouldn't have followed my producers and accepted what they had to offer."

Or as Tom Wolfe said a quarter of a century ago:

Within the television news operations there’s such a premium put on not being a reporter. Everyone aspires to the man who never has to leave the building, the anchor man, who is a performer. The reporters are called researchers and are usually young women, and the correspondent on television is a substar, a supporting actor who prides himself on the fact that he doesn’t have to prepare the story. You talk to these guys and they’ll say, “Well, they sent me from Beirut to Teheran, and I had forty-five minutes to get briefed on the situation.” What they should say is, “I read the AP copy.” The idea is that as a performer you can pull together this news operation anywhere you go and the whole status structure is set up in such a way that you’re not going to get good reporters. Just try to think of the last major scoop, to use that old term, that was broken on television. I’m sure there have been some. But what story during Watergate? During Watergate there were new stories coming out every day. None were on television, except when television simply broadcast the hearings. The can do a set event. And that’s what television is actually best at. In fact, it’d be a service to the country if television news operations were shut down totally and they only broadcast hearings, press conferences and hockey games. That would be television news. At least the public would not have the false impression that it’s getting news coverage.

Like numerous Hollywood actresses, Katie looks great on camera and can generate emotion and empathy in her audience, which is why she gets the big bucks. Nobody should be surprised that she isn't the second coming of Edward R. Murrow.

Finally, regarding Imus, Betsy Newmark and Michelle Malkin note two of the hypocrisies remaining from the scandal: the same corporations on the level of NBC-owning General Electric who are willing to ignore "years of over-the-line racial, sexual and gender satire on the show and only popping up when the usual suspects demand blood" as Politico noted yesterday, have no problem shelling out fat (sorry, phat) recording contracts to rap stars who regularly use even worse language. (Forget the Tarantino double-standard. Hollywood certainly has.)

Similarly, NBC, and a whole host of politicians and journalists have looked the other way for years at Imus' antics, using his show as a promotional vehicle. (It may feel hip, but it's not exactly a ratings machine.) And as Jeff Greenfield says today, apparently, "To stay away from [Imus'] show when he gets in serious and deserved trouble, seems to me the ultimate act of hypocrisy and cowardice".

Hypocrisy and cowardice? They're selling that by the gallon in the media this week, as the Red Queen's Race to the bottom rolls on. Something tells me we haven't even come close to "the ultimate act" yet.

Update: Welcome Insta-Readers; brief Imus update here, including Media Bistro's scoop that MSNBC is apparently cutting Imus loose.

Glenn Reynolds writes that space is "the next frontier for advertising", linking to this Wall Street Journal report:

California Rep. Ken Calvert, ranking Republican on a House Science subcommittee overseeing NASA programs, surprised an industry conference in Colorado Springs, Colo., by announcing plans to introduce a bill that would make “NASA space assets available for commercial advertising and marketing opportunities.” If that ever becomes law, companies and universities might be able to market themselves by plastering logos on equipment or sponsoring equipment such as cameras on the International Space Station.

The revenues, ultimately reaching perhaps $100 million, would be used to build up a self-sustaining prize fund to honor space innovations by entrepreneurs. Calvert said his aim is to increase public awareness of manned space exploration programs without spending taxpayer money. The congressman suggested it could evolve into “an advertising system” similar to those used by public radio and the Smithsonian Institution “which have long-term, dedicated and tasteful sponsorship” arrangements.

Why worry about tasteful? Like the side of a stock car, there's plenty of room for advertising on the Space Shuttle's booster tank, and it's disposable.

Right from the start, Star Trek always has had plenty of commercials, hasn't it? And there were numerous brand names visible in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Jeff Jarvis writes:

The latest Gallup poll shows Hillary Clinton solidly ahead — and rising — in the Democratic race. Yet as Politico points out, if you listen to “the developing media storyline” it’s Obama who has the surging mo’. And if you listen to the self-declared net roots in blogs, you’d believe that Hillary is sinking fast.

Heck, I remember in 2000 when it was the wonkish Bill Bradley who was supposed to be a legit contender to Al Gore, the even-more-wonkish, but designated successor to a sitting president. Like Obama, Bradley's faux-surging allowed journalists to give the appearance of a horserace to what was otherwise a foregone conclusion.

But this year, with all of the campaigning beginning so early, and so many more outlets needing something to discuss, the Obama campaign likewise makes for a great story to a similarly likely outcome next summer.

While this is a unified conspiracy theory for the ages, Kesher Talk goes it one better: "Is Nancy Pelosi A Karl Rove Mole?"

"Duke Lacrosse Case Charges to Be Dropped".

For Mary Katharine Ham's video flashback to some of the things that never happened on the Duke Campus, click here.

AP reports:

CBS News producer was fired and the network apologized after a Katie Couric video essay on libraries was found to be plagiarized from The Wall Street Journal.

The essay was removed from the CBS Web site and an editor's note was posted saying the item should have credited Jeffrey Zaslow of the Journal, the network said Tuesday.

The essays are carried regularly on "Couric & Co.," the anchor's blog on the CBS News Web site. Couric and producers meet once a week to decide on topics and the producers write them for Couric to read on camera.

An editor for The Wall Street Journal called CBS News to point out the similarities of the April 4 notebook item to Zaslow's article, headlined "Of the Places You'll Go, Is the Library Still One of Them?" The pieces talk about how libraries are seen differently by children from their parents.

"We were horrified," CBS News spokeswoman Sandra Genelius said. "It was almost verbatim."

CBS would not identify the producer fired for the transgression.

Boy, can CBS pick 'em at the producer slot, or what?

Update: Austin Bay has some thoughts on this story.

Astonishingly, Meredith Vieira actually apologized on the latest edition of The Today Show to Jesse Jackson before asking him about his infamous anti-Semitic soundbite from 1984:

But people do say stupid things some times. And Reverend Jackson, I apologize, but some of your critics reminded me of 1984, and I remember it as well. You were running for president, and you referred to New York City as as "Hymietown."

At least she got it in there though, which is more than can be said towards the media's continuing amnesia concerning Al Sharpton's past.

Jackson has apparently uttered quite a number of anti-Semitic remarks over his life, according to this Salon piece by Jack Tapper from August, 2000:

It's tough to imagine this year's Republican National Convention featuring a prime-time speaker who once said that that "Zionism is a kind of poisonous weed that is choking Judaism." Or that he was "sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust." Or that traditional Democratic support for Israel is because of "the Jewish element in the party ... a kind of glorified form of bribery." And certainly not if he had ever referred to Jews as "Hymies" and New York as "Hymietown."

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, of course, has made all of these comments, and more. Jackson said those things in his 30s and 40s, and has since apologized for them. But his speech at the Democratic Convention Tuesday evening is at the very least an interesting example of the double standard that clearly exists in the media's -- and the Democratic Party's -- sensitivity to anti-Semitism.

This is even more resonant against the backdrop of Vice President Al Gore's selection of Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman as his running mate, the first Jew on a major party ticket.

There is a lot to admire about Jackson and his work, which at times are remarkable in their selflessness. And Jackson, as with all of us, should be taken at his word when it comes to his regret at the "Hymietown" comments.

But while Jackson has been forgiven by his party and the press, I wonder how forgiving anyone would be if Gov. George W. Bush had such a long history of questioning people's integrity because of their religion.

In 1973, for instance, Jackson condemned then President Richard Nixon as being insensitive to the poor, since "four out of five [of Nixon's top advisors] are German Jews and their priorities are on Europe and Asia." In 1979, Jackson said that he had "seen very few Jewish reporters that have the capacity to be objective about Arab affairs."

None of this has occurred in a vacuum. According to a 1998 Anti-Defamation League poll of Americans' attitudes about Jews, African-Americans are three times more likely to hold latently anti-Semitic views than whites. And, according to ADL director Abraham Foxman, these attitudes in the black community cut across age and economic and educational backgrounds. In the white community, such views are held chiefly by those who are older and less educated.

One certainly has to wonder whether Jackson, through his past comments, has in any way lent legitimacy to anti-Semitism in the black community. Jackson says that he has grown from the days of his anti-Semitic comments, and he has lauded the selection of Lieberman.

But only when it was strategically appropriate to do so: Jackson and Sharpton both very prominently campaigned against Lieberman last year, when they supported Ned Lamont's abortive run for the Senate.

Related: Betsy Newmark has some thoughts that are well worth reading on "Don Imus And Hypocrisy All Around".

More: The center-left Politico Website compares Imus' gaffe with Trent Lott's:

So, much like Lott, Imus has had to tee up the full-dress mea culpa in recent days, groveling before the very people that he would have nothing to do with were it not for the demand of the moment (Sharpton in Imus' case, BET's Bruce Gordon in Lott's). Because he lost the support of the White House and a few key Republicans in the Senate, Lott finally had to fall on his sword and resign. MSNBC and CBS, of course, can ultimately decide Imus' fate, but his survival may depend on another constituency -- the political and media elite who appear on his show. If, feeling the heat, this group bails on him by making noises about staying away from the show, the networks will more easily be able to cut ties. But don't count on it. Having been grounded for a couple of weeks, Imus is likely to come back on the air to stay, and his favorite guests will probably come back with him.

The losers in this affair are seemingly everybody involved: Imus, for making such an offensive statement and now making cringe-inducing comments about changing his ways. The networks, for only responding to their star's comments after it became clear that they had a firestorm on their hands. The journalists and politicians who frequent the show, for being quick to pounce on similarly inappropriate remarks when made by another, less chummy, public figure or a political opponent. Sharpton and Jackson, for shamelessly jockeying to appear on every possible show to get a piece of this story. And, lastly, the media as a whole for ignoring years of over-the-line racial, sexual and gender satire on the show and only popping up when the usual suspects demand blood.

Meanwhile, "For All the Fury, Imus Not Popular: 25th in DC's Morning Drive & 20th Talker Nationally".

Late Update: Wow--I didn't think NBC had it in them: kudos to David Gregory for actually using the words Tawana and Brawley in an interview with Sharpton.

Maybe, says Ace, who posts some thoughts on San Francisco State, which recently investigated College Republicans for flag desecration and blasphemy, two things which otherwise never occur on campus...

Update: Meanwhile, Jeff Goldstein explores conflicting on-campus identity politics.

Newsbusters' Justin McCarthy writes, "Rosie O’Donnell may be worried about her job after her recent extreme remarks":

After a week long vacation, "The View" co-hosts returned to discuss radio talk show host Don Imus’s recent inflammatory remarks. Elisabeth Hasselbeck came out strong against Imus and stated his punishment was not harsh enough.

ELISABETH HASSELBECK: I said he should have a time-out, and they gave him a time out.

ROSIE O’DONNELL: They did give a time out.

HASSELBECK: For two weeks, not long enough in my opinion, but they certainly did suspend him.

JOY BEHAR: How long should he stay- have time out?

HASSELBECK: I told you through February, until it’s black history month. I want him off until then.

Rosie O’Donnell, who came under fire for claiming radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam, anti-Asian remarks, and her September 11 conspiracy theories, made the issue about free speech. Through the course of the discussion, she did condemn Imus’s remarks, but she was concerned that MSNBC, a private enterprise, violated his freedom of speech.

"Listen, here's the thing. There's free speech in America. You can say anything that you want in this country, and to think that you could be penalized for it, by a corporation is kind of a strange- "

I guess I missed the memo. When did NBC become Congress?

James Lileks posts photos of one the great moments of fifties swank, the original automobile compact disc player. It probably skipped and popped a whole lot more than the real CD players of today, but the original gets bonus points for style and creative, if impractical thinking:

It’s the Highway Hi-Fi. It’s a record player for your car. I repeat: a record player for your car. More details can be found here. (Warning: BYO Paragraph Breaks.) Also here. Ah, but what music would you play on such a miraculous device? Well: this would be an excellent time to try out our new music-playing widget, and provide the following tune for your driving pleasure. It's a selection from a record provided to Kresge stores: this is what they played over the speakers in the ceiling.

It makes me feel six years old again. There's not a day I hear 60s and 70s pop in the grocery store, and wish they'd bring this stuff back. Heck, half the shoppers would think it was ironic, which would make it all okay.

Having spent my teen years toiling in the family retail store, where my father insisted on Easy-Listening Muzak over the frequent protestations of his rock & roll crazed son, I find it more than a little ironic that today’s Muzak is…rock & roll.

But for unintential irony, it's hard to beat the notion that singers like Madonna, and Sheryl Crow with her cover of Yusuf Islam’s “The First Cut (of the Palestinian suicide bomber) Is The Deepest” think of themselves as épatering les bourgeois when their music is now fit to be non-offensive background tunes. Here’s a tip: when your songs are being played on the Muzak speakers by the pool and cabanas of the Bellagio Hotel & Casino, you’re no longer avant-garde. You’re officially the garde.

Similarly, I’m old enough to remember when rock musicians actually were edgy and dangerous, and not entirely play acting at it. Now they’re puritanical nags, ordering their listeners to cut down on CO2 emissions, even as they organize tours around private jets, limousines, and tractor-trailers full of HiWatt amps, PA systems and more stage rigging than any Broadway play. (And buttering up to the husband of a woman they once, briefly, reviled.)

Maybe stores should return to the Muzak of the past. It can’t contain any more hidden irony than today’s rockers.

A month ago, I described the trailers that preceeded 300 thusly:

With the exception of Spider-Man 3, virtually all of the innumerable trailers yesterday before 300 highlighted Hollywood's current phase: dank, gross, low-budget nihilistic horror films, and, in a very similar genre, the latest effort by Quentin Tarantino, which featured the disgusting image of a buxom young woman whose leg is amputated and replaced with a machine gun, which she alternately walks on and fires at the baddies (baddies being a relative term in a Tarantino movie, of course) by crouching in some sort of kung fu-style pose spraying bullets upward. (No, really.)

In their latest issue, Newsweek writes:

Over the next few months, Hilary Swank, Halle Berry, Nicole Kidman and Renée Zellweger—all of them Oscar winners—will topline scary movies. "Grindhouse" features Bruce Willis ("Planet Terror") as well as Rosario Dawson ("Death Proof"). Luke Wilson, known for boyish comedies such as "Old School," will appear on April 20 in "Vacancy," a shocker about a couple marooned with a psycho at a backwater motel. Next month Ashley Judd will star in a movie about flesh-eating bugs. The title: "Bug." Horror has been the trend du jour for a while, but it was largely confined to the industry's fringe. Now Hollywood has turned into Horrorwood, and the reason is simple: money. "People want to be part of movies that are successful—sometimes it's as simple as that," says Joel Silver, producer of Swank's "The Reaping." "And lately these movies have been very lucrative."

In the late 1970s, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg saved a Hollywood bent on collectively auguring itself into the ground by dusting off the 1930s Republic serial, and spiffing it up with big budgets and cutting edge special effects. 20 years later, it appears that having nearly driven moviegoers away once again with a similar collection of dark, cynical highly politicized movies, Hollywood's latest attempt to save its collective keister involves dusting off the low rent spirit of Roger Corman and William Castle.

As I said last year...

Freeman Dyson tells Tech Central Station that "the western academic world is very much like Weimar Germany, finding itself in a situation of losing power and influence".

And the original certainly worked out well for all concerned, huh?

(Via Instapundit.)

Don Imus is suspended from broadcasting for two weeks, which, depending upon your perspective is either a bitter pill to swallow, or remarkably light punishment when compared to others who've uttered racial obscenities and seen their careers banished down the pop culture memory hole. (My money's on the latter, for what it's worth.)

Speaking of the memory hole, David Bernstein writes:

I am somewhat overwhelmed by the absurdity of someone apologizing to Al Sharpton for making a bigoted remark, and then Sharpton not accepting the apology. Talk about glass houses! Imus should certainly have apologized for his remark, but not to someone with Sharpton's history.

But to the media, Al Sharpton's history begins with his meeting Democratic presidential candidates Al Gore and Bill Bradley during the 2000 election. Like the Democrats' pre-2003 stance on Iraq, or more radically, John Kerry's Winter Soldier phase, and Robert Byrd's stint in the KKK, Al Sharpton's past doesn't exist.

In other words, if it's not mentioned on CNN or a recent issue of the New York Times, it simply hasn't happened, as far the legacy media--especially the television media--is concerned. Therefore, Al Sharpton, recent Democrat advisor and presidential candidate, is the perfect person for media celebrities who have transgressed, such as Michael Richards and Imus, to go for contrition. I wonder if even they know his background, or if they've somehow personally deleted it from their cranial wetware?

(This also explains the repeated usage in the MSM of the words Swift, Boat, and Vets as a pejorative. Since Kerry has no past prior to 2004, then any unauthorized discussion of that past must be a smear!)

This flowchart looks about right to me.

(Via Dr. Helen.)

Mark Finkelstein writes:

If George Allen turned up on Good Morning America to protest an incident of alleged anti-white bigotry, what are the odds the GMA host wouldn't mention Allen's macaca moment? I'd say they'd be a Dylanesqe "Love Minus Zero."

But when GMA aired a clip this morning of Al Sharpton expressing his outrage over Don Imus' recent comments about the Rutgers women basketball players, not a discouraging word was heard about Sharpton's history of racially-charged statements and actions that go far beyond the former senator's gaffe.

And it's certainly not the first time that's happened, a trend I described a couple of years ago in a piece titled, "M For Fake".

Update: Bryan Preston has video of Imus' appearance on Sharpton's radio show (where Michael Richards also appeared, immediately after his own racial meltdown last November) and writes:

Freddy’s Fashion Mart.

Tawana Brawley.

Go-to guy to apologize for making racist comments. What a world. Don Imus may well be and probably is a bigot, but Rev. Al Sharpton is worse no matter how you look at the situation. But now he gets to be Imus’ judge and jury. What a world.

Well, what a media world, at least.

Meanwhile, Greg Pollowitz spots the ozone layer of MSNBC management dramatically distancing themselves from Imus' show...

At MSNBC, where the radio program is simulcast on television, officials offered Imus no support.

"'Imus in the Morning' is not a production of the cable network and is produced by WFAN Radio," said a statement from the network. "As Imus makes clear every day, his views are not those of MSNBC. We regret that his remarks were aired on MSNBC and apologize for these offensive comments."

...despite his show frequently serving as a promotional launching point for other MSNBC talent, and having its own MSNBC website.

Another Update: Ed Morrissey places Imus' gaffe into context alongside career-enders from those in the Sports Industrial Broadcasting Complex.

This is a riot--deliberately trashy nihilistic movie rejected by audiences, who are in turn attacked for their lack of good taste! (See also: Basic Instinct 2, failure thereof.)

Related: "Shocking the bourgeoisie--it's nice work if you can get it":

There’s no denying that art has become more accessible. Even allowing for population growth, the rate of attendance at art museums has increased by 20 percent from 1982 to 2002, according to a RAND Corporation study. But contrary to Kammen’s thesis that controversy engages the public, it isn’t shock art that’s drawing the biggest crowds. The most popular exhibits offer more traditional fare. Art Newspaper maintains a list of the top 100 exhibits every year; they invariably include old European masters such as Monet, Degas, Van Gogh, and Cézanne (some of whom were shocking, to be sure, in their own day). The one surprise in last year’s list was also traditionalist: a traveling exhibit of the 19th-century Japanese painter Hokusai. There’s a giant market for “shocking” entertainment, from Jerry Springer to Howard Stern, but people who call their shocks “art” survive mainly off elite patronage and government subsidies.

(H/T: Jeff Goldstein)

Spot-on observation by Lead And Gold:

Julie Neidlinger has a good analysis of the follies that blue-staters commit when the become sociological tourists out here in the hinterlands.

I've had misgivings about this sort of thing ever since David Brooks wrote his famous piece in the Atlantic. The "reporters" approach us as The Other. They spend only a little time here so their reporting is superficial and they never get beyond the shallow prejudices they brought with them.

In short, they do to their fellow citizens what Edward Said accused Western scholars of doing to Islamic cultures in Orientalism.

The funny thing is, i bet many of the editors who publish this kind of story accept Said's analysis.

In the MSM, this creates all sort of double standards. They will defend the right of Muslim women to wear a veil, but they are suspicious of Christian churches where the women always wear dresses. The Muslim woman chooses her veil, but the Christian woman is forbidden to wear pants.

A mass shooting by a Muslim immigrant is instantly portrayed as the isolated act of a disturbed individual. In no way can Muslim culture be blamed. On the other hand, it is perfectly acceptable to opine about the "gun culture" of a rural area where a white, non-Muslim shoots down innocent people.

We've spotted several instances of this trend ourselves, particularly after the 2004 election, when the individual members of the left and even members of a media that once called itself "objective" really seemed to drop the mask, and let it all hang out. I'm glad to see that this condition has finally been named.

(Hat tip: Instapundit.)

Tim Blair links to Newsweek's interview with George Monbiot of England's leftwing house organ, The Guardian:

MONBIOT: It is becoming morally unacceptable now to fly to go on holiday. The carbon emissions per passenger mile are roughly the same from a plane as they are in a car, but while in a car you might travel 10,000 miles in a year, in a plane you travel 10,000 miles in a day. So individually, by taking a flight, you are doing more damage than you could possibly do by any other means, and your luxury is depriving other people of their necessities.

NEWSWEEK: Have you given up flying?

MONBIOT: The only reason for which I will fly is to campaign on climate change.

As Tim writes, "Planet Destroyed To Save Planet".

Having just returned from an up close and personal weekend inspection tour of several of Las Vegas' better casinos, restaurants and other sophisticated establishments proffering high quality adult beverages, I'll believe Harry Reid actually believes in global cooling-warming-climate change-whatever-it's-called-this-week, when he calls for Vegas and its airport to be closed down. Like Leo and John and the movie industry, Al Gore and Nascar, and Gore's own conspicuous energy consumption and private 767-200 jet usage of the company whose board Al sits on, it's a reminder that the goal isn't reducing a phantasmic climate change, but growing big government.

Clive Davis writes:

Until I dropped into Jackie Danicki's, I wasn't even aware that Web pioneer Dave Winer had just celebrated his tenth anniversary. This is what "the longest continuing running weblog on the Internet" looked like, more or less, in April 1997.

It's sort of along the lines of James Lileks' early Bleats in terms of first generation home-rolled HTML craftsmanship, though much more link-oriented than longform prose.

And incidentally, we celebrated five years worth of blatherifics ourselves last month. Here are some overly exuberant thoughts on the subject a few anniversaries ago.

Update: "The site sure was ugly back then. I think we've grown up a lot in ten years". Courtesy of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, here's what TownHall.com looked like a decade ago in version 1.0 mode.

While Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse tanked at the box office this weekend, it was a huge hit with critics:

It's hard to know whether the studio was thumbing its nose at religion, but the Weinstein Company has selected the Easter holiday weekend to resurrect the double bill at the nation's theaters. That Grindhouse, which features two separate movies from writer-directors Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino -- as well as some fake trailers -- also includes a prodigious amount of blood may be seen by some of the faithful as compounding the blasphemy. Critics, however, are generally greeting the film(s) with worshipful praise.

Gee, what a shocker.

Don Surber writes:

Irony alert. The Washington Examiner pointed out: Under Bush, unemployment dropped to numbers seldom seen — far below the Clinton years. Clinton’s people counter with well, the stock market took off when he was prez. Wait a second, aren’t Republicans supposed to be the Wall Street guys while Democrats are the blue collar guys?

Not necessarily; just ask John Kerry and Elizabeth Edwards.

"I'm not saying that you defend it. I'm just saying that it goes politely unnoticed a lot of the time."

--As Newsbusters notes, kudos go out to Mary Katharine Ham, "who went up against three liberals by herself"--not surprising on CNN--"and did quite well" discussing the topic of female blogger harrassment, (and specifically technology blogger Kathy Sierra) alongside Arianna Huffington, Joan Walsh of Salon, and Reliable Sources host Howard Kurtz himself.

(Back from Vegas, incidentally.)

Update: Here's video of MKH on CNN.

More: Jeff Jarvis has related thoughts on how the Blogosphere works--versus how some wished it did work--that are well worth reading in their entirety.

Elsewhere: Mary Katharine Ham comments on her CNN appearance.

I thought the trailer for Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse looked absolutely vile, so I can't say I'm dissapointed to read this post by Nikke Finke:

But today, major players in the movie capital were talking about the utter collapse at the box office of Grindhouse, that double-feature from celebrated directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. (I had wondered here if the movie could live up to the Weinsteins' hype.) Despite decent reviews, the hard "R"-rated pic filled with blood and violence took in just $12 million this weekend -- nowhere near even the lowest $20 mil opening predicted (or the $25 mil debut anticipated after midnight sneaks were arranged in major cities). The weekend take was far, far below the openings for, say, Rodriguez's Sin City ($29.1 mil) or Tarantino's Kill Bill 1 ($22 mil) and 2 ($25.1 mil). The Weinstein Co. has been plagued by bomb after bomb since its 2005 inception after Miramax founders Harvey and Bob couldn't come to terms with Disney. The new company had a lot riding on this pic in terms of reputation. (Not to mention money: I hear the real budget for Grindhouse is $67.5 mil though Harvey and Bob were spinning it as low $50s.) But the take of only $5 mil Friday, $4 mil Saturday, and an estimated $2.9 mil Sunday from the 2,624 theaters where the Planet Terror and Death Proof combo (complete with its block of fake movie trailers) is playing, was only good enough for 4th place among the Top 10 movies. Worse, the the box office dropped an unusually large 19% from Friday to Saturday. And its per screen average was anemic, meaning that the pic was playing in near empty venues.

As Nikke Finke concludes, "Instead, this weekend followed 2007's trend of making family films and PG-13 comedies the favorites at the box office". That's not going to be news to Michael Medved and Brent Bozell.

Tom McMahon flashes back to his 2005 post to remind us:

The logo above is from the year 2000, but for the past 4 years Google has snubbed Easter. While ignoring Easter this year, Google has had the time to celebrate such Major Holidays as World Water Day and International Women's Day.

Like Christmas, Easter is well on its way to becoming yet another Holiday That Dare Not Speak Its Name.

Update: Related thoughts here.

Johnny Hart, the artist behind the long-running cartoon "B.C." passed away today. Ed Morrissey has a warm encomium to Hart, whose cartoon was a favorite of mine, as well as my late father:

It seems especially fitting that Hart went to his Lord on Easter, and passed away at the storyboard. May the Lord accept Hart with open arms. Godspeed, Johnny, and thank you.

Incidentally, as I wrote in 2005, academia is working hard to ensure future generations won't know what the cartoon's initials stood for.

Pieter Dorsman writes:

The Dutch are leading the way in the new exodus from Europe. Last year’s number confirm that the Dutch are experiencing the largest net outflow of people since the post-war emigration boom of the 1950s.

Orrin Judd links to an article which tracks a similar trend in France:

The simple fact is that, in the past few years, young people have been leaving France in unprecedented numbers. More worrying still is that although depopulation was a worry in the French countryside in the Sixties, it now has become a specifically urban phenomenon. Nor is it confined to Paris: Lyon, Lille, Bordeaux and Marseille can all report an exodus of young people towards les pays Anglo-Saxons (the United States and the UK).

A similar pattern can be observed in America's Blue States, as well.

Update: And again. Something tells me the Samizdata gang won't be too surprised at this news.

As Confederate Yankee writes, this story about a US infantryman in Iraq carrying an iPod in his uniform's breast pocket that "saved the life of a soldier by slowing a bullet that hit him in the chest", is quite possibly an urban legend. As I wrote in the comments section under his blog post, it sounds remarkably like a high tech update of the story that the late James Doohan of Star Trek fame told of surviving D-Day.

Update And speaking of Doohan, like his old boss, he's finally made it to the final frontier.

Curious events in the Lone Star State recently.

(Safely in Vegas, by the way.)

Off to search for Austin Powers and Dr. Evil in Las Vegas. Posting will be light during the weekend.

Moby would surely approve, right?

Douglas Kern checks in with The "It" Bear Of The American Right and those who attempted to send him off to the great 100 Acre Wood In The Sky:

The real motivations for snuffing Knut have more to do with the ideological predilections of his would-be assassins than with any harm that Knut may suffer or inflict. Says Knut-knocker Ruediger Schmiedel: "They [the zoo] cannot domesticate a wild animal." The real problem for these people isn't the wild animal; it's the domestication. Isn't it odd that the same people who want to leave cuddly Knut to the tender ministrations of "nature" reject out of hand the possibility that "nature" plays any role in the domestication of the baby humans? How strange, that those who embrace natural law so energetically for animals reject it so completely for humans.

Nahh--religious rituals almost always seem strange and mystical to outsiders.

Update: New age and traditional religions attempt potentially risky interfaith communication.