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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The AP article says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From The Mirror Crack'd (1980)

Something to keep in mind this summer...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They quote him as saying:

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

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

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

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

Read Horowitz's article to find out.

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

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

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

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

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

YUCK! Found on The Corner on National Review Online:

Today's Financial Times reminds readers that Japanese marathon runner (and Olympic gold medallist) Naoko Takahashi uses an energy drink made from the stomach secretions of the larvae of giant hornets.

Suddenly I feel a lot better about my Diet Coke habit.

Me too!

SPEAKING OF M*A*S*H, although in this case, the TV series, not Altman's movie, Group Captain Mandrake says that the cast of M.A.S.H. are getting together for a two-hour reunion episode, to be aired in the US on May 17th.

My wife and a friend of ours and I saw Robert Altman's latest film, Gosford Park today. She liked it, I wasn't as crazy about it, but it was a reasonably pleasant couple of hours. The film, set in 1932, is nominally about a Hollywood producer and (English acting legend) Ivor Norvello, a spending a country weekend with a cast of snobs and servants almost all of whom are straight out of central casting.

Very good writing but, what's odd for an Altman film is how embalmed everyone seems to be. Altman takes a staggering assortment of British talent (Kristin Scott Thomas, Maggie Smith, Helen Mirren, Derek Jacobi, etc.) and pretty much wastes their acting skills buy having everyone underplay their parts so much that they seem underwater--their movements and gestures are that slow. This would have been a much more enjoyable film had it been made by Hollywood in the 1930s or 40s, with say, Cary Grant, David Niven, Leslie Howard, and other British actors being directed with some energy and speed by Michael Curtiz.

Of course, I'm probably biased. I listened to Altman's incredible whining about America on his M*A*S*H DVD commentary, and read James Bowman's review of Gosford Park:

I reckon that it has been at least 40 years since an aristocrat of the silver screen has been anything but a thorough rotter and a cad. You have only to call a character Lord something- or-other and your audience knows immediately what to think of him. Why don’t we get bored with this? Once again, it is a mystery. But one possible explanation is that we need the myth of the wicked upper classes to confirm us in our taste for vulgarity and sloppiness. If we thought that manners and what they used to call “breeding” were anything but a cover for the basest kind of behavior, we might have to cultivate them ourselves once again instead of letting it all hang out.

MEN ONLY NEED APPLY: The Dallas Morning News (by way of Matt Drudge) is reporting that representatives of Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah "asked that women be barred from air traffic control duties when he traveled Thursday to Central Texas for a summit with President Bush, several Texas aviation officials say."

As Rod Dreher says on National Review's "The Corner" Web log, "The Saudis and the US Government deny it, but angry ATCs are saying it's true. Whom do you believe? Why do we abase ourselves before the Saudis like this?"

KRAUTHAMMER ON EUROPEAN ANTI-SEMITISM:

In Europe, it is not very safe to be a Jew. How could this be?

The explanation is not that difficult to find. What we are seeing is pent-up anti-Semitism, the release -- with Israel as the trigger -- of a millennium-old urge that powerfully infected and shaped European history. What is odd is not the anti-Semitism of today but its relative absence during the past half-century. That was the historical anomaly. Holocaust shame kept the demon corked for that half-century. But now the atonement is passed. The genie is out again.
This time, however, it is more sophisticated. It is not a blanket hatred of Jews. Jews can be tolerated, even accepted, but they must know their place. Jews are fine so long as they are powerless, passive and picturesque. What is intolerable is Jewish assertiveness, the Jewish refusal to accept victimhood. And nothing so embodies that as the Jewish state.

What so offends Europeans is the armed Jew, the Jew who refuses to sustain seven suicide bombings in the seven days of Passover and strikes back. That Jew has been demonized in the European press as never before since, well . . . since the '30s. The liberal Italian daily La Stampa ran a cartoon of the baby Jesus, besieged by Israeli tanks, saying, "Don't tell me they want to kill me again."

Again. And this time the Christ-killers come in tanks. Just when Europe had reconciled itself to tolerance for the passive Jew -- the Holocaust survivor who could be pitied, lionized, perhaps awarded the occasional literary prize -- along comes the Jewish state, crude and vital and above all unwilling to apologize for its own existence.

Read the whole thing--and don't miss the last two paragraphs.

A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS? Orrin Judd runs the numbers.

NRO ON THE SCORPION KING, the latest "prequel" to The Mummy movies:

In terms of physical acting, The Scorpion King is roughly what Raiders of the Lost Ark would have been like if Indiana Jones had been played by Lou Ferrigno instead of Harrison Ford. This problem is made worse by director Chuck Russell, who is merely the latest action-movie director to have no idea how to stage action. He zeroes in so closely on his combatants it's like watching headless, armless, legless torsos battle it out.

Along with The Rock, Michael Clarke Duncan, the gigantic basso profundo from The Green Mile, appears as Balthazar, a "Nubian" warrior who joins forces with Mathayus against the tyrant Memnon. (Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that they're battling the tyrant Memnon, played by Stephen Brand, who has killed Mathayus's brother and who uses an enslaved sorceress to help him conquer his rivals. That's pretty much the story.) Duncan fares even less well than The Rock. The Nubian's huge face is supposed to be riven with ceremonial warrior scars, but it just looks like several fat pieces of pasta al dente got stuck to his cheeks and forehead during last night's sloppy bacchanal. And in one combat scene, he crashes through a wall wearing a clownish grimace that wouldn't have been out of place in some jungle movie from the 1950s. If he had then grunted "Ooga Booga," I wouldn't have been surprised.

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

TAKE IT AWAY, NOAM CHOMSKY: Jonah Goldberg on Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called "20th hijacker":

For those of us suffering from "terrorism fatigue," it would have been easy to miss or dismiss the latest news about Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called "20th hijacker." Moussaoui gave an eye-opening speech in federal court on April 23, in which he tried to fire his lawyers. It was eye-opening, that is, for people willing to open their eyes.

In his 50-minute peroration, Moussaoui explained that he prayed for the "destruction of the Jewish people and state." Note: that's both the destruction of the Jewish people and the destruction of the Jewish state.

But if you're saying, well at least I'm not Jewish, hold on a second. He also prays for "the destruction of Russia and ... the destruction of the United States of America" and for Muslims to regain control of Spain and Chechnya and to conquer India. In short, Moussaoui has a very comprehensive land-for-peace plan.

Read the whole piece--and then just shake your head and laugh when someone says "if only we understood them better", "give peace a chance" or other Kumbaya silliness.

Daniel Henninger, writing in the Wall Street Journal's free OpinionJournal section, looks at America's view on the Middle East, and likes what he sees. The article's subhead sums it all up: "On the Mideast, America is right and the rest of the world is wrong":

Sitting home at night, watching the news on U.S. television or C-SPAN's airing of the BBC, Americans who hold these views of the events in Israel must wonder if they're living in some alternative reality. This past week, amid the constant images of Jenin's rubble and elderly men and wailing women in scarves, came word that Amnesty International, the Red Cross and an arm of the U.N. were accusing the Israelis of "human rights abuses." The U.N. Security Council put through an Arab-sponsored resolution to investigate the fighting in Jenin, a place that in fact has been the West Bank's version of the Star Wars bar, the primary haunt and collection point for the most extreme Palestinian gunmen and suicide planners.

In the otherwordly moral calculus of post World War II Europe and much media--which these polls suggest is beyond the ken of most Americans--self-evident atrocities such as the Passover suicide bombing are mere stories in the wreckage of the news. But a military counter-strike is a human rights abuse. We have arrived at a point in international affairs at which the degraded concept of moral equivalence would be a step toward the sunshine.

It may well be true that Americans born after World War II lost their innocence about the world on September 11, but how fortunate that when this nation is attacked and finds itself in a long, grim war with an enemy dedicated to killing civilians, its people are not so easily diverted by the kind of casuistry, salami-slicing, needle-dancing, opportunism and moral myopia that has gripped the world's opinion-shaping institutions.

(Found via VodkaPundit.)

CHELSEA EXPLOSION UPDATE: The London Times (via Matt Drudge) says that New York went into "full disaster alert" after the explosion in the Chelsea district:

NEW YORK was seized by fears of a “dirty bomb” terrorist attack yesterday after an apparently accidental explosion ripped through a commercial building, injuring dozens, at least six critically.
Manhattan hospitals were put on full disaster alert and prepared to decontaminate incoming victims from radiation, with at least one scanning them with a Geiger counter.

Fearing a new terrorist attack, the FBI and the New York bomb squad swooped on the ten-storey building on West 19th Street in response to the blast shortly before noon. The surrounding streets were cordoned off and emergency crews and more than 100 firefighters set up a triage centre on the pavement for dozens of walking wounded.

St Vincent’s Hospital, which treated the injured from the World Trade Centre on September 11, declared its top “Code Three” disaster alert as its safety officer monitored arriving victims for radiation in a decontamination area. Federal officials gave warning recently that al-Qaeda may be trying to develop a radiological device, or “dirty bomb”, for attacks in the United States.

JACK KEMP ON THE MIDDLE EAST: Good overview of the history of Israel and how other countries in the Middle East have reacted to it:

Zuheir Muhsin, a member of the PLO's Executive Council, admitted to the Palestinian myth: "The existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes. The founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel." This fact was confirmed in 1970, when King Hussein killed thousands of Palestinians to prevent Arafat from establishing a Palestinian state in Jordan.

Peace will come to the Middle East only when the oppression and manipulation of the Palestinian people by Arab and Palestinian leaders ceases. All the states of the region must become imbued with the democratic values of individual liberty, equality of opportunity and religious tolerance. People must be given their fundamental rights of life, liberty, private property, equality under the law, religious freedom, free speech, freedom to organize politically and the right to emigrate at will.

COLIN AND CONDI: Found on Stephen Green's VodkaPundit Weblog:

This site believes Powell would be the perfect king for a mythical land where all is well and peaceful. The people could admire his sagacity and strength from afar, and there would be no messy international problems to soil his reputation. His background and bearing would bring peoples of all colors and creeds together in harmony.

Condi Rice is the kick-ass, take-charge charmer you want running the show in the sometimes brutal world we actually inhabit.

CHELSEA EXPLOSION: Thankfully, it appears that the blast in the Chelsea district of Manhattan appears to be mishap, not a terrorist act. Although the current explanation is slightly disquieting:

The explosion, according to the fire commissioner, involved volatile chemicals used in etching work by a company in one of the buildings, but few details about the nature of the explosion were available. Earlier, a police spokesman said a boiler in the basement was involved, but authorities later said that was not the case.

The commercial-residential building where the blast occurred houses lofts and businesses, including Kaltech Industries Group, an architectural sign company.

Until I here otherwise, I'm assuming it's just that--an explosion caused by chemicals used by a sign maker. As he has hopefully learned (and my hope is that he's pondering this somewhere in the ninth circle of Hell), as "Asparagirl" notes, Osama does not want to mess with New York again:

There's been an explosion and partial building collapse in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, gay (male) capital of NYC. Accident? Boiler explosion? Car bomb? Real bomb? Osama better watch out, because the last thing he needs right now is 100,000 pissed off gym-pumped gay guys getting on his case. It's a rare enemy who can piss off both drag queens and the Christian Right in one fell swoop.

Of course, if he were really suicidal, he'd try hitting Park Slope, Brooklyn, Lesbian capital of NYC.

Steven Den Beste of USS Clueless has a recent entry about how various blogging cells are formed, complete with illustrations which instantly reminded me of the sprawling, Spirograph-like interactive diagram on Casey Marshall's "A Picture of Weblogs" site.

Den Beste identifies several cells which have sprung up over time on the Web: the warbloggers, the E/N crowd ("everything and nothing", the day-in-the-life bloggers), the A-list, (the original bloggers, often obsessed with the Web and its possibilities), the Catacomb (religion and its influence on politics (and vice versa) the Gay Underground, and other blogging cliques.

Pretty much any collective interest which used to spawn a news group has probably spawned a blog cluster now. For example, I suspect that there's a Mac-lovers cluster out there, and probably one for dog-lovers, and I have no doubt at all there's a Jewish cluster, and bird-watcher clusters, and weaving clusters, and likely dozens or hundreds more. Some clusters will form simply because they're circles of friends, not because they necessarily have a subject in common. By the nature of this medium, there's a sort of blog gravitation that tends to make clusters form.

Perversely, this has two effects. If you find a member of such a cluster, it makes it easier to find others in it. But it also makes finding the cluster difficult in the first place because there's less cross-cluster linking going on. It never occurred to me until a couple of days ago that anything like The Catacomb even existed.

My wife Nina and I met a friend and his wife for dinner after my jury duty on Tuesday, and somehow, the conversation wandered towards the Middle East. He seemed genuinely surprised when I mentioned the growing anti-semitism in Europe. He emailed me earlier today to discuss whether it was purely anti-Zionism. The guy works very long hours at a real job, unlike myself, who writes, and can thus read lots of Web logs, news articles and essays and justify it as part of my "research". So I don't really blame him for not following everything that's been going on in Europe and the Middle East.

Here's my reponse, which also shows what a help blogs and Google can be in tracking news articles and essays down:

Dear _____,

Europe has been anti-Semitic in varying degrees for at least several hundred years--Hitler just ratcheted it up a couple of notches and made its institutionalism plain to see, rather than under the surface. All his complaining about "Jewish bankers"? Many Jews entered finance in Europe hundreds of years ago, because various labor and trade guilds prevented them from entering a wide variety of other trades. Austria, where Hitler was born was rife with anti-Semitism--it wasn't something he invented. Rather, it was in books, pamphlets, speeches, and rallies, where the Jew was described as strange, foreign, different, etc. Hitler, aided immensely by the German people, and eventually, people in numerous European nations, built on that feeling to exterminate the Jews. (Incidentally, David Brooks, the author Bobos in Paradise touches upon 19th and 20th century European anti-Semitism in his brilliant recent essay, "Among the Bourgeoisophobes", which is subtitled "Why the Europeans and Arabs, each in their own way, hate America and Israel".)

While the Allies had some success with their denazification programs in the post-war period, lately, it's become obvious just how impossible it is to wipe out anti-Semitic beliefs that go back hundreds of years. Want some very recent examples of how bad Europe is? Try these:

CBS has an article dated April 23, which begins "World Jewish leaders warned Tuesday that the level of anti-Semitic attacks in Europe is the worst since World War II." The article mentions a synagogue in Marseille in the south of France was burned to the ground March 31.

AP recently reported that "Right-wing extremists celebrating an anniversary of the birth of Adolf Hitler have set fire to a synagogue in the east German city of Erfurt, according to German police."

And then there's Ingmar Tveitt, whom the Wall Street Journal describes as "a friend of Norwegian Parliament member Jan Simonsen, who was ordered in early April by Parliament security guards to remove his jacket because a Star of David was displayed on the chest pocket. As Tveitt points out, 'People walk around [in Parliament] with Palestinian scarves and other pro-Palestinian symbols without any reaction.'"

Or, check out this headline, from AP: "Jewish soccer team attacked, one member seriously injured":

BONDY, France - Amid a spate of recent anti-Semitic attacks in France, a Jewish amateur soccer team was attacked during a training session in a Paris suburb and one of its members seriously hurt, French police said Thursday.

Around 15 hooded attackers wielding sticks and metal bars assaulted the team of teenagers from the Maccabi Bondy association, a Jewish group, late Wednesday after making anti-Semitic remarks.

One member of the team suffered a cut to the head and received hospital treatment but wasn't thought to be in danger.

French Sports Minister Marie-George Buffet issued a statement condemning the attack as "indescribable."

That last quote sums up the whole problem: It is describable. It's just doesn't appear to be stoppable. It's institutionalized, it goes back hundreds of years, at the very least, and it's systemic. All 9/11 and the latest Palestinian suicide bombers did was to notch it up.

Don't get me wrong--there is much, much, about Europe that I love: it truly is the cradle of modern civilization. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, language, writing, music, art, architecture, etc., were all raised to a fine pitch there. But along side of them, so were racism, anti-Semitism, totalitarianism and concentration camps.

Want an example of how institutionalized anti-Semitism is in Europe? Try to picture any member of Bush's staff (hell, even Clinton's staff) saying this:

In December, Daniel Bernard, the French ambassador to Britain, uttered an ugly anti-Semitic remark at a party hosted by newspaper publisher Conrad Black. He called Israel a "shitty little country" and then asked, "Why should the world be in danger of World War III because of those people?"

Look, I'll admit that I've become fairly instinctively reflexive when it comes to Israel--I read lots of conservative and small-l libertarian Web sites and books, I'm sympathetic towards democracies, very, very unsympathetic to totalitarianism and dictatorships on both sides of the aisle, and my wife is Jewish, and very pro-Israel. What's astonishing (and Nina and I had a conversation about this a few weeks ago, when Israeli / Palestinian conflicts really heated up), is how few people in the supposedly "liberal" and "Jewish dominated" media aren't. NPR has been admonished more than once for being biased towards Palestinians. As has Peter Jennings. As has ABC's Nightline (scroll up from link for more Nightline coverage). As has the New York Times. As has the L.A. Times.

It's a very, very interesting trend, as Orrin Judd recently wrote, that conservatives have been fairly consistently pro-Israel, whereas liberals have increasingly become pro-Palestinian (don't forget the big wet one Hillary planted on the cheek of Arafat's wife a couple of years ago after a speech). It's also been very interesting watching Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan turn blacks into anti-Semites, effectively erasing over a hundred years of friendly black/Jewish relations.

If you'd like a quick refresher on how we got here, you might want to read Jeff Jacoby's recent column on how 1993 was the decisive year in Israel/Palestinian relations, and what Yassar Arafat did to undermine things. Or David Horowitz's quick history of Israel and the Middle East. Also, check out Empower America's "Twenty facts about Israel and the Middle East"

Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee Law Professor, whom I've interviewed for several articles, and runs Instapundit.com, arguably the very best Web log on the Internet (can Web logs be anyplace else? [G]) sums it up perfectly:

My short answer: Sure, you can criticize Israel without being antisemitic. But when you criticize Israel for things you ignore in others, it raises certain doubts.

Let me leave you with some food for thought, from National Review's Jonah Goldberg:

WHAT IF ISRAELIS WERE GAY? [Jonah Goldberg]
I think the Corner is best when we get a little give and take among ourselves. So here’s a question for anybody interested. What do you think the reaction of, say, Mother Jones, Nation or the New York Times would be if Israel wasn’t a Jewish homeland, but a gay one. Gays have been persecuted for thousands of years. They’ve never had their own nation – though the quasi city-state of San Francisco is something of a gay Zion. Gays, like many Zionist Jews, feel a very strong need to prove they won’t be pushed around anymore. Homosexuals will never be safe from gay-bashing pogroms, they might argue, until they have a homeland of their own. Any takers?

Regards,

Ed

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

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

LAST NIGHT'S NIGHTLINE: Glenn Reynolds received an email from a reader, describing last night's edition of ABC's Nightline series. Apparently, the entire show was a profile of Bahman Farman Ara, an Iranian film director who lived in the US for a long time before returning to Iran a few years ago. "Well, interview is the wrong word", the email read, " there was no questioner and no question. Ara was allowed to speak for 30 minutes with no response. I can't imagine Nightline doing a similar show with an Israeli."

All in all, it was one hell of a half hour of unedited, unabashed pro-Iran propaganda, broadcast by the same company that brings you Mickey Mouse, the Stanley Cup playoffs, and the Anaheim Angels. I was dumbfounded.

Read the whole email, and see if you agree.

GEOPOLITICS IN THE MIDDLE EAST: An invasion of Iraq, and its implications, is online at StrategyPage.com:

These events would be immediately followed by an epidemic of bed wetting on the south side of the Persian Gulf. Once we've secured the oil production of Iraq (which necessarily means our control of Kuwait's) and obtained a friendly regime in Iran, the continued existence of the Saud regime will no longer be in America's interest. The Saud regime is the dominant source of funding for terrorism, especially terrorism against the United States. I expect loss of Saudi funding will cause Islamic terrorism outside Arab areas and Pakistan to tube, and that in Arab areas will be significantly reduced.

UPDATE: See also Rich Lowry's current piece at National Review Online.

SEGWAY UPDATE: While I was briefly on jury duty, several readers sent me Segway updates.

Here's an "Atlanta police are testing the Segway" article from CNN.com.

Here's a similar article, off the AP wire, from the Philadelphia Inquerier, courtesy of Group Captain Mandrake.

And here's the same article, from the New York Times courtesy of Christopher Cross.

As Gary Bridge of Segway explained to me for my LiteWheels article, a big part of Segway's initial marketing strategy is to get the units in the hands of civil officials, such as the police, before they begin offering it to the general public.

Regarding their government sales, Bridge says that the goal there is try to establish "the proper Segway etiquette: how you have to behave when you come to a crowded street."

Bridge says that Segway's fear is that if they initially sold the units to the mass market, "kids being kids, are going to do things with it that are bad, and then we're going to get blamed for it. So we won't sell to kids, until we have a very, very clear welcome on the sidewalks." Which is probably a good thing, as injury lawyers are already advertising their intentions to sue the pants and the deep pockets off of Segway when and if the inevitable accidents start to occur. By carefully educating the public, Segway may both reduce those risks, and their exposure to lawsuits.

And considering that sites such as this one already exist, I can't say I blame them.

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

LILEKS ON THE ANTI-GLOBAL MOB:

you have a movement that wants young people to blow themselves up at the Disney store in Times Square. Not that any of the people at the rally would do it, of course. Not that they would necessarily approve of it. But they would certainly understand it.

If they were struck dumb for a moment, their spirits would be lifted the moment someone reminded them that Davey Crockett = Genocide. Wow, that’s so true.

The irony, of course, is that someone blowing up the Disney store in Times Square to protest Israel and globalization would kill Japanese, Dutch, German, Swedish, Turkish, Mexican, French, Russian and Argentinean tourists, all of whom had willingly entered the store to buy toys for their children. Innocent? Not really. They’re bringing Ariel the Little Mermaid back home to Buenos Aires, and a Talking Buzz Lightyear back to Ankara. Collaborators in the act of cultural genocide. Sweatshop profiteers.

You have to see their deaths in the broader context.

You have to understand that no one is innocent anymore.

This is the apotheosis of the notion that the personal is the political: it gives the fascists a rationale for killing anyone.

Read the whole thing--there's lots of other dead-on stuff in this Bleat.

BROADBAND STATS: Reuters runs the numbers:

PALO ALTO, Calif. (Reuters) - Internet users are showing more willingness to pay for a high-speed broadband Internet connection, although large numbers remain happy with dial-up, a survey being released on Tuesday said.

Jupiter Media Metrix, which calculates just 16 percent of U.S. households currently have a broadband Internet connection, said that 8.6 percent of the country's dial-up subscribers say they are highly likely to sign up for such a service in the next year.

The survey found that an additional 15.4 percent of households were "somewhat interested" in getting broadband within the next year.

The remaining 76 percent of households were either neutral to the notion of paying for a higher speed Internet connection, or were decidedly uninterested.

I didn't realize the numbers were as high as they were. 16% of the country on broadband is a helluva base, and hopefully, as speeds increase, and killer apps grow, that number will continue to grow.

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

BACK IN ACTION: Sgt. Stryker says that the USS Cole is back in action. Adding, "Somehow I doubt Osama's gonna make a video about this," he links to a story that says:

The USS Cole was poised to return to the open seas, a year and a half after losing 17 sailors in a terrorist attack in Yemen.
The vessel was to set sail Friday after 14 months of repairs with many new features, including 17 stars laid in the hallway floor - one for each of the sailors killed when an explosion tore a hole in the ship's side.
The Cole returns to duty with 550 tons of new steel, improved security and a crew that includes about 40 sailors who survived the attack on the guided missile destroyer.

TAKE IT AWAY BILL SIMON... Matt Drudge links to an article that says the California State Supreme Court ruled today that counties and cities in California may ban gun shows on their fairgrounds and other government properties.

Living in New Jersey in the early 1990s, I remember liberal Republican Christie Todd Whitman narrowly squeaking by very liberal Democrat Jim Florio because he (a) raised taxes and (b) angered many, many gun owners (at the invitation of my then-boss, I attended a south Jersey gun show, whose parking lot had row after row after row of cars with red and white "DUMP FLORIO" bumperstickers). If Simon can't exploit this court ruling in his campaign, he's not much of a politician.

BE AFRAID. BE VERY AFRAID....

WHAT A SHOCKER: Matt Welch, writing in Reason magazine, reviews Ralph Nader's new book Crashing the Party: How to Tell the Truth and Still Run for President, and discovers that Ralph Nader lies like lots of other politicians!

When the filmmaker Michael Moore introduced Nader at campaign rallies, he was fond of saying that the candidate was "ready to rock this nation with the truth!" Since September 11, that’s been about backwards: The nation has shown it is more than ready to rock Michael Moore and his pals with its very own version of "the truth." Ralph Nader needs to learn that there are people who care as much about the issues as he, yet honestly arrive at very different conclusions. He needs to stop judging people’s virtue by whether they support him for president. And unless he wants to become the same kind of politician he claims to despise, he needs to stop treating facts like pastries in a buffet line.

THE BILL OF RANTS: James Barnett has linked to my site. Thanks Bill! (But geez, this story about a guy who took the meaning of a golf course's ball washer a little too literally (nudge nudge, wink wink, know what I mean? Know what I mean?) scared the bejesus out of me!)

APOCALYPSE NOW: Visited the Coppola Winery in Napa last Sunday, which is a spectacular operation selling so-so wine, and lots of memorabilia from Coppola’s movies. We watched Hearts of Darkness on laserdisc that night a documentary from the mid-1990s on the making of Apocalypse Now, which trigged a sudden Proustian rush of Apocalypse memories (and apologies to Woody Allen for that Stardust Memories allusion).

So here are some random, Apocalyptic thoughts:

1. If this film doesn’t have the greatest audio ever recorded (the eerie 20th century classical synthesized rumble in the jungle can’t separate the score from the sound effects soundtrack), it’s right up there. I take it back—this has to be the greatest soundtrack ever recorded—Walter Murch is one the great technicians in Hollywood.

2. It’s an astonishing looking film as well Vittorio Storaro is a brilliant cinematographer, and Coppola was wise to get out his way and give him his head.

3. Coppola was savaged by many critics for the film’s ending, but it’s actually pretty amazing that he got what he got. Nothing like trying to salvage the climax to your film when your star (Martin Sheen) is coming off a heart attack; your other star is a typically out-of-control Marlon Brando, who shows up grossly overweight to play the emaciated Kurtz, and hasn’t read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; and then you have Dennis Hopper, equally out-of-control, at the height of his drug, alcohol and who-knows-what-else addictions.

4. In some ways, Apocalypse can be seen as a negative image version of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both were long, Homeric journeys into the unknown. But 2001 asked weighty questions, and delivered on both the answers, and the research done by Kubrick and Clarke. In Hearts of Darkness, a documentary about Apocalypse Now that’s in many ways as good as its subject, Coppola is heard saying that for his films to not answer questions as to the meaning and outcome of the Vietnam War, it would have to be considered a failure.

In that respect, Apocalypse fails miserably, because it doesn’t ask any serious questions, and it provides no answers. The Godfather films were far better at explaining the origins and implications of organized crime than Apocalypse Now for Vietnam (but of course, Mario Puzo wrote the novel for the Godfather. John Milius, Coppola and to a lesser extent Michael Herr (author of the brilliant new journalism-style take on Vietnam, Dispatches, who would later go on to co-write Full Metal Jacket for Stanley Kubrick) all contributed to the screenplay for Apocalypse, trying to salvage a Vietnam-era story out of Heart of Darkness.

Apocalypse Now doesn’t make you think, it simply creates a powerful emotional state and allows you to become as spaced out as any of the soldiers on the boat. Not only that, but as James Bowman noted, not a single NVA soldier is shown. How do you make a war film—better yet, how do you set out to make the definitive film on a particular war, without showing its enemy?

In spite of all of that, though, Apocalypse Now is a brilliant achievement—a remarkably emotional film made under astonishing duress by one of America’s premiere filmmakers of the 1970s. And watching 1997’s The Rainmaker, with its flat, Hollywood-anonymous direction, reminds us just how far Coppola has fallen as a director—or perhaps just how timid Hollywood has become.

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

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

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

Roger Ebert buries The Last Waltz,which is being released to theaters as part of its 25th anniversary:

Drugs are possibly involved. Memoirs recalling the filming report that cocaine was everywhere backstage. The overall tenor of the documentary suggests survivors at the ends of their ropes. They dress in dark, cheerless clothes, hide behind beards, hats and shades, pound out rote performances of old hits, don't seem to smile much at their music or each other. There is the whole pointless road warrior mystique, of hard-living men whose daily duty it is to play music and get wasted. They look tired of it.

What's interesting is that some musicians seem to be able to handle touring, and take to it instinctively (The Stones in rock, and so many great jazz and blues musicians), whereas others, such as the Band, just seem to let it destroy them.

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

CORNEL WEST UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds, himself a university professor, has some good stuff on Cornel West, who is decamping from Harvard to Princeton, including this line:

when you're a University Professor at Harvard, there's apparently nobody to do that pointing-out except the President of the University. And when Larry Summers did point out that West wasn't carrying his weight, West responded that he had been "disrespected," -- though, really, telling someone that they're capable of better and more substantive work than they're doing, and trying to halt their descent into self-parody, is respect, not disrespect.

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

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

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

Yahoo is also tracking the draft, here.

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

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

SANCTIONS AGAINST ARAFAT:

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

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

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

WAXMAN TRIES TO NIX PIX :

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because with the UN, anything is possible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet.

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

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

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

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

These losses happened after Motorola's fabled mass layoff. In the last two years, they've laid off one third of the total staff of the company, and by doing so seem to have made most of their businesses viable. But even though it sustained a disproportionate percentage of the layoffs, the semiconductor business is still